Tax breaks for the vaccinated, or extra taxes for the un-. This could all be over if people weren't so childishly & egotistically deluded about biology and politics.

IN FAVOR ☑

OPPOSED ☐

We all secretly loath the Irish accent.

Snopes says this story is "unproven" but the argument against it is strong. (and it's old Snopes from 2005 - not the crap the new guy is dishing out now)

Sitting here, pants'd… Shoeless from the fakeout… I fell for it like a ton of bricks.

"Tax breaks for the vaccinated, or extra taxes for the un-. This could all be over if people weren't so childishly & egotistically deluded about biology and politics."

WTF? How many times have you been on here frothing because somebody insisted on government action?

So. Did you get Moderna's, Pfizer's or Johnson & Johnson's? Or somebody else's (they're not the ony ones). Did you get it overseas?

"I'm sorry, sir - that's the wrong one."

Don't pretend that this wouldn't result in mandated health care, by the same sort of personnel who would let veterans die to lower their workload.

"Are you sick? The clerk is not sick. Is the form filled out? Then the system is working perfectly. No sir, you're not being denied treatment, it's just not available. No sir, it's illegal for you to get treatment by unauthorized means. Thank you for your cooperation!"

I haven't a clue what your quotes mean:

> "I'm sorry, sir - that's
> the wrong one."

Who do you imagine is speaking, who are they speaking to, and of what principle is this little scenario illustrative?

Just get the fucking vaccine, and then the rest of us won't have to worry. We won't have to worry about you passing it on to anyone else without knowing that you have it. We won't have to worry about getting it from you ourselves. We won't have to worry about more power plays by illiterate politicians. We won't have to worry about 'free' Kamala money for layabouts, or broken supply chains, or the closure of delicate businesses or thousands of other things.

And after all those thousands, at the tail of the sequences, at the veryvery end of all imaginable outcomes, we won't have to worry about your inarticulate ass. For a guy who daydreams so often of sci-fi, you can't seem to pick a team when someone, specifically Moderna, offers you a motherfucking Phaser.

…for $8.72, or whatever the per-dose price is. You're getting thousands of dollars' worth of entertainment from watching this thing roll on.

For the record, I got mine at the Convention Center, 1.2 miles from the factory where it was probably made. It was really fresh! I choose Blueberry, but the Mango people seemed happy as well.

We all secretly loath the Irish accent. ~ Crid at July 25, 2021 2:18 AM

Me sainted grandmother came here from the auld sod and had the loveliest brogue.

She had the folksiest Irish sayings in her repertoire. She also played a mean game of poker and didn't tolerate fools lightly. I learned a lot from her, though I didn't always realize it at the time.

But yes, the ancient Irish were barbarians. For that matter, so were the ancient anybodies. Human civilization has been an arduous journey. And we're not quite there yet.

So after getting pissed at Raddy, I went out on my usual evening errand. There's a series of roundabouts in the new neighborhood, but some in the community haven't bothered to learn how they work. Which is bad, because roundabouts are both safer and faster than typical intersections when used by competent drivers. But tonight, the woman three cars ahead of mine looked at the customary signage and decided that the rule was 'come to a complete stop and wait for every car visible in every oncoming lane to get out of sight before proceeding.'

And of course, I thought again of Raddy, who wants to compose his intimately-customised daydreams of savage government and personal delicacy when considering Covid vaccines.

…As if his own needs had not been taken into account with sufficient granularity by the people who designed the drugs [safety!]; and as if government hadn't fast-tracked testing with remarkable alacrity and discipline [speed!]:

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States. By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial. This is — as the country and the world are rightly celebrating — the fastest timeline of development in the history of vaccines.

Some are so eager to be the QAnon Shaman that they don't mind putting the lives of others at risk in a tawdry pantomime of libertarian principle.

> the ancient Irish were barbarians

It wasn't historical attunement or anything, but for some reason that accent — especially when heard from young men, or even attractive young women — has always had a timbre threatening explosive anger to me… Worse than any patois of the American south or inner city. There was some element to it that said "These people have been pissed off for generations, by grotesque poverty, poisonous alcohol and corrupt Catholicism… They could flip out without warning...."

There's some Scot in this tree, which may be a factor… Don't know the big-picture history well enough to say.

These people have been pissed off for generations, by grotesque poverty, poisonous alcohol and corrupt Catholicism… They could flip out without warning.... ~ Crid at July 26, 2021 5:35 PM

There does seem to be a little bit of the psychotic in the Irish psyche, although my Irish grandfather was one of the gentlest souls you'd ever have met.

Thomas Sowell traces the origins of American ghetto culture to the emigration of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh "crackers" to the lawless hinterlands of the American colonial frontiers.

Slaves picked up this culture from plantation overseers and from the whites they lived near prior to and after manumission. He argues that it survives in the urban ghettos because white liberals in the civil rights era insisted it be preserved as a unique cultural marker.

Sowell points out that northern factory managers refused to hire Southern white "hillbillies," viewing them as lazy, shiftless, and violent.

Needless to say, the educated and erudite Sowell is neither an advocate of ghetto patois nor a fan of the victim mythology pedaled by the Left.

Thanks for the link to the fascinating little piece. I should read the book… Been saying that for a nearly a lifetime about Sowell.

Yesterday I listened to the Coleman Hughes podcast with Charles Murray. I can't really recommend listening to all of it, because Hughes speaks in a plodding and distracted way, like he's giving a deposition in murder case, so it seems to go on forever. (Murray does only a little better, having had a quarter-century of practice dancing through the minefield.) Given his apparent career arc, inviting Murray was a jaw-droppingingly courageous thing for Hughes to do. Here's a minute and a half which really hits the spot, and it comports with the difficult truths about intelligence which we hear from people like Jordan Peterson and Robert Plomin.

One wonders if Sowell and Murray ever dined.

Hughes' podcast with Amy Chua moves quite a bit faster, with fascinating thoughts about minority (Chinese) economic dominance in places like China and Indonesia. Much is explained, much.

Bungled the end of that comment, which should have read—

…minority (Chinese) economic dominance in places like Viet Nam and Indonesia.

Somebody said last week that India is now more populous than China, and more heterogeneous as well: India has more languages than Europe.

> So.

Raddibles, here's the thing. A friend in L.A. tweeted that tax thing the other day, and it seemed like a great way to express frustration with laggards.

A virus like SARS-CoV-2 is an attack on our species, in the most literal sense. You might think it's mundane since there are no hosehead Borg guys on Vulcan spaceships hammering our finest skylines with raygun rays (NYC - San Fran - Paris - And always, the harbor in front of the Sydney Opera House). But that's what it is.

Thus, the attack transcends identity in all respects. It doesn't give a fuck about your politics, diet, religion, sexuality, or favorite basic cable shows. It deserves an counterattack in kind. Human life is a fight with the law of nature, always. Eventually nature will win, but people can have wonderfully fulfilling lives until it does, as long as they struggle.

America threw the best punch in this ugly skirmish, indisputably: Fast, square and ruthless, backed by proper financial incentives and minimized regulation. Western Civ wins this round, sharing the victory with the rest of the planet…

…IF PEOPLE ARE SMART ENOUGH TO TAKE THE GODDAMN VACCINE.

Western Capitalist Democracy… There is no substitute.