Base32

Hey you're a Marxist/Communist/Libtard/God Botherer/ Holy Joe. It cuts all ways unless your name is Tommy Robinson/ David Duke/Anjem Choudary etc, then the perjoratives tend to be fairly accurate

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/28/fiona-hill-explains-trump-musk-putin-00185820 The problem with calling Trumpf a "fascist" is that it suggests he is an adherant to a particular ideology. He doesn't. He's an adherant to a form of government; autocracy, because basically he thinks a President should have all thos power "to get things done". That's how he ran his companies. That's how Musk runs his companies. Thats how Putin thinks he runs his country. Industry's non-political view on this style of management: https://taskworld.com/blog/what-is-autocratic-leadership-and-when-is-it-effective/ Many of us work for or have worked for a company where there is the "Big Boss", maybe the owner, maybe the founder who is now a majority shareholder, micromanaging his baby. Jim Ratcliffe at Ineos is an example. Look what's happening at Man United. I suppose he knows jack all about football. Similarly cars and bike racing. We've all be frustrated by such management making crazy decisions. We are also aware of the acolytes who say "trust the boss". Jim Ratcliffe, who made a fortune in petrochemicals, is now peeing away his money on cod-Land Rovers which aren't selling, and now might see Man United get relegated (here's hoping). Putin is probably cleverer than Trump, Musk etc, and manipulates them, as Hill describes. A fascist spends years developing his ideology. Trump has none of that. He's a reactionary, shouting at the TV, and surrounded all his life by sychophants.

A very good interview, describing how America might be sliding into its own form of an oligarchy: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/28/fiona-hill-explains-trump-musk-putin-00185820 I think the actions of parts of the media in recent days (LA Times, Washington Post, and now USA Today) is illustrative of that. Luckily, Fiona Hill has gotten out of the US.

That they weren't the generals he wanted? Most of those executed were part of or aleged to part of the 20 July plot. Nearly 5000 people were executed as a result. The types of generals he wants ended up swinging from the end of a rope post-WW2; amoral men who had advanced through political patronage, not by ability.

Technically the Soviet people. Belarus and Ukraine gave much more than Russia fighting the Axis. Putin has always exaggerated Russian losses in WW2. In 2010, he claimed the USSR didn't need Ukraine to win WW2. It was a Ukrainian who raised the flag over a shatterted Reichstag. Ukraine supplied 70% of Soviet trains, 67% of mining equipment, 60% of coal, 70% of iron, 50% of steel, 59% of steel pipes. The Soviet Navy was constructed in Zaporizhzhia, Kerch, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa and Kherson. Aircraft were made in Dnipropetrovsk , Kharkiv , Kyiv and Kharkiv. Ukrainian losses accounted for 40% of total Soviet losses, according to the latest research.

It was a decision taken by the affected government. Perhaps you should read the NATO Treaty. The Treaty is willfully vague, for good reason. Article 5 only commits members to a response. This is largely because of the US Constitution. The power to wage war should, according to the Constitution, belong exclusively to Congress. And this also applies to other NATO members. In 2001, the US invoked Article 5. Spain was unable to send troops to Afghanistan, and Parliamentary Approval could not be obtained. If the United Kingdom had decided to invoke Article 5 in 2018, it is not necessarily the case that WW3 would have ensued. The Collective Action that could have been taken could have included sanctions. The UK would have sounded out allies, included Secretary Tilleson, before the statement to the Commons. What is striking is that it took the US 5 months to decide to impose sanctions on certain Russian banks and sanctions, triggered by the CBW Act. Even so, the Trump government never actually enforced those sanctions. Hindsight maybe, but a stronger response 6 years ago might have averted the events of today. Instead, a US President chose to believe the Russian government, rather than his own intelligence services, and the evidence provided by the US' closest ally. In the end, he was forced to impose sanctions because of the CBW Act, because the US could not demonstrate that Russia had ceased in the use of banned chemical weapons. In conversations with the Russian government at the time, the US President chose to discuss offering US aid to fight Siberian wildfires instead.

2018 is fairly recent. The official enquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess has just started. Russia had the same Head of State then as now. A police officer and another British civilian were also injured by the nerve agent. In 2006, the Russian Federation carried out a Polonium-210 attqck against properties in London, in order to assasinate a defector. We now know Russia had deployed Novichok to try and kill Emilian Gebrev in Bulgaria. Bulgaria has been a member of NATO since 2004. The resukting contamination of sites, and explosure, displays either complete incompetance by the GRU, or cynical disregard. Article V isn't automatically invoked when a NATO member is attacked. It has to be invoked by the member state. Prime Minister May chose not to invoke it. The incidents demonstrate that Russia, headed by Putin, is a country that is hostile and threatening to NATO. Russia basically justified its invasion of Ukraine from events during WW2, accusing Ukrainians of being Nazis, ie member of, or sympathetic to, a German political party dissolved in May 1945.

Or a response to increases in Russian troop numbers along the borders with the Baltic States; https://www.ft.com/content/1ec23623-31b3-446d-aa8b-b60684f44cc9 But its ebbed and flowed over the years, because a couple of months later, Russia dropped the numbers on the borders with NATO. Meaning they don't really think NATO is a threat to Russian sovereignty, and the Party Line is strictly for public consumption. Justification for increasing defensive posture; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-2-2024

Russia has made attacks using weapons of mass destruction on NATO territory in recent years, leading to deaths and injuries among civilians and uniformed services.

To be "sectioned" is to be detained under the Mental Health Act. It's nothing to do with dismemberment.

Both Austria and Germany were part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which was succeeded by the Deutscher Bund Russia and Ukraine were once part of the USSR. Russia is attempting its own Anschluss. You're right though, the motivation of the Russian government is entirely racist, as it's running out of Slavs, and its afraid of those non-Slavic minorities actually having a say. Putin is using Hitlerite language in his latest edict trying to implore slavic women to breed.

But Trumpf used 911 legislation to turn BORTAC, which started out an an anti-riot squad to be deployed at INS centres into a Federal Police Force, with an airforce and armour, and domestic surveillance powers, with a much shorter chain of command to the Secretary of thr DHS, and to the President. Trumpf deployed BORTAC to US Cities in 2020 in effectively a COIN capacity, to suppress domestic dissent. The powers notably weren't rolled back under Biden, and will likely be expanded if Trumpf wins, creating his own Praetorian Guard/SA. He doesn't need the US military/

Time for Cameroni to go to sleep.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44161-023-00336-5 Scientists should be wary of using the term "definitive" because it rarely is, and 5 year olds might misunderstand, and think all science is settled after a few months of study.

Not a theory at all, but sarcasm at your selective acceptance of medical advice. You merrily accept the tests, without a clue how they were produced or function, but shout about masks based on a hunch. As I indicated, people who thought cloth masks didn't work at the start didn't really understand how masks work. You get a similar misunderstanding in the whole car filter debate; there was a huge debate why K&N oiled cloth or HKS foam air filters didn't cause an engine to grenade itself (basically because some people think air filters work like a sieve, and filter based on particle size, not on particle charge). Kids found a way to effectively bunk off school rather quickly https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210705-how-children-are-spoofing-covid-19-tests-with-soft-drinks https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-53383-8 You obviously missed the theory that the throat swab included with the Chinese made rapid tests was coated with nanoparticles. The mass distrubution of rapid tests were, to an extent, part of the theatre conducted to attempt to control the outbreak. The masks had a filtering function, but their most powerful effect was through behaviour modification, lines on the floor in supermarkets, handwash stations, lockdowns. None of them would be fully adhered to, but the intention was really to limit admissions. Chinese hospitals were initially over whelmed. Subsequent Chinese control measures meant that the admissions to their temporary hospitals were relatively modest. Italian hospitals came close to being overwhelmed, but local innovation prevented that. In the UK, the Nightingale Hospitals were in the end redundant, because of a combination of control measures and improved standards of care. The RAF were pretty serious in their C130 touch and go drills at City Airport, and tere were efforts to do a full 40 minute turn around of ambulances through the MOD. The antigen tests met acceptable performance under idealised conditions, But that was never matched in the field. People didn't swab throats properly, or their nose. They put too much buffer on, or not enough. The people at th testing stations were barely trained, so accuracy was less than ideal, but the testing, en masse, was enough to give a sense of direction. Thats why usage fell off the edge of a cliff in April. Usage is limited right now to syndromic surveillance, where that tersting is more under idealised conditions, with properly trained nurses testing, and conducting controls. Interesting theory #2; Sars-Cov-2 was uncovered by itinerant Chinese potash miners. Another idea was that investments by overseas banks had pushed Chinese smallholders onto virgin land, and thus into contact with novel diseases. There is an immunological reason why bats tend to be the origins of viruses that can really do a number on the human body.

Sorry, I'm not the one posting rubbish. Only the bloke not from Catalonia is. The Spanish study was very speculative, given the nature of the lab, but there was very strong evidence reaching back to July 2019 that the virus was in circulation. You're clutching at Google straws.

It does nothing of the sort. You don't understand science. You just went and googled something to prove you were right and googled an article from a Catalan website published in 2021 that was AI translated into English. You don't even know who wrote that piece. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/14/5/545 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44161-023-00336-5 https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/eurjpc/zwae070/7611954 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332223011125 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/ATVBAHA.124.321085 https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacadv.2024.101070 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.3389/fmed.2024.1294432/full https://annals.edu.sg/cardiovascular-effects-of-covid-19-in-children/ etc

You don't understand the tests. The tests your refer to are a lateral flow test using gold-labeled antibodies to register the presence of viral particles in mucus. You combine the symptoms with a test result to determine if you have or had COVID-19. If you are asymptomatic, and carried out the test, and tested positive, you are likely infected with Sars-Cov-2. You disbelieved masks, basically because you didn't like to wear them. But you believed hook line and sinker about a dipstick test. You took their word for it that whatever the stripe meant. Its fairly easy to induce a fake positive, as well as to fake a negative. How do you know the test wasn't set up to generate a positive for Rhinovirus and Adenovirus. Faith I guess in very clever blokes and blokesses. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38198343/

It started before December 2019. A doctor in Wuhan apparently noticed unusual cases around about then. A French Algerian, who had never been out of France, was hospitalised in early December 2019. Varioius reports of European patients being retrospectively identified throughout 2019, with the March 2019 Spanish sewer samples remaining retrospective. Hpwever, disregarding all those reports, your assertion that the Pandemic started in December 2019 is wrong. If we take the Chinese reports as verbatim, then in December 2019, it was still a pandemic. The WHO declared the outbreak to have progressed to meet the criteria as a Pandemic by mid-March 2020. Based on WHO declarations, and they are really the only organisation to declare the start and finish of a pandemic, the bloke you are attacking is more correct that you.

I would not disagree with that. Except for the radiation bit. Entire careers will be built on it, but data science is seriously accelerating our understanding of a EID, paying dividends when the next one comes along.

You understand FA of what you just plagiarised. Plus you are not from Catalonia.

Ok, "I've never had COVID", is a bit like an untested HIV+ saying they never had AIDS. COVID, like AIDS, is the disease. A lot of people infected never developed recognised symptoms (recognised being the operative word). 33% of positive COVID cases will test negative by PCR. People misunderstand how masks work. They do not work like the colander you wash your vegetables in, ie pore size. They work exploiting Brownian motion and Van Der Waals forces. Viruses and other very small particles move by Brownian motion, which is easily overcome by other forces. Your tap/faucet stream of water isn't, otherwise the colander fills up. Van der Waals is, in simple terms, static charge. At a neutral pH, viruses have a negative charge, and they are attracted even by a weak positive charge. Hence its really hard to be infected by the Sars Virus by being near a surface, unless you apply forces to overcome that Van der Waals force, like heat (eg rubbing). Cotton has a charge, so a single layer can capture some viruses, but the weave is too regular. A double layer mask, where the weaves are at 45 degrees to each other, is a bit more effective. The question is how much knock down is there of the ID50. The single use blue masks use spun propylene; its no longer a regular cross hatch weave, but a random mass of fibers. The poor size is still the same (you can breath through just as well), but the effectiveness goes way up, to 95% of virus sized and above particles. A cloth mask is probably 25%(it will vary a bit). 2 people, X has a cloth mask, Y doesn't X receives 75% of whatever Y is coughing up. But if Y is also wearing a mask, then X is exposed to 56% of whatever Y is coughing up. Gaps at the side don't make that much difference, because, guess what, the force of the cough is overcoming Brownian motion, Those virus particles don't suddenly change direction.

Thing is it was originaly thought to be a respiratory disease, but it was actually a vascular disease. The cells infected were not confined to the respiratory tracts. Sars-Cov-2 had/has the potential to infect any cell bearing ACE2 Receptors, which, it turns out, are pretty much ubiquitous. The Angiotensin system, it turns out, was not that well understood, in its function beyond blood pressure control. The etiology is still emerging; the AHA for instance has concluded that COVID-19 is a vascular and neurologic infection. I said to taskforce colleagues back in February 2020 that this is a disease which will take a generation to understand, which is pretty par for the course for any emerging infectious disease agent. The difference is, previous EIDs took repeated infection events to really understood, whereas COVID-19 has amassed a literal unprecedented amount of data, which will take a generation to understand. You only havr to take a look at something such as Pubmed to understand the attention Sars-Cov-2 drew in just 2-3 years, compared to 80 years of influenza and 40 years of HIV. But even comparing Influenza to HIV tells you a lot. The flu was first recognised ~2000 years ago, I think in Greece. The causative virus wasn't discovered until 1933. Fears of another Spanish Flu (considered even then one of the side effects of the end of WW1) spurred Australian researchers to get a functioning vaccine ready by 1945. Strain identification was possible by 1957, allowing strain-specific vaccine production, but always too late to anticipate the coming season. By the 80s, multi-target effective vaccines were available. Literally just before COVID-19, there was success in developing tests to identify risk biomarkers in individuals that put them at risk of the flu virus killing them. For most people, a proper dose of the flu (which most of us rarely experience), is a fairly debilitating illness, but recoverable. For some, its a killer. Its not simply if you are old, fat, a smoker, a drinker that puts you at high risk. Its all those factors and more, and many of those factors are resulting from expression of some biomarkers that put some of us, more at risk from illness than others, leading to a changing risk profile as you age. Eg, someone could smoke 40 a day until a 100, and get by with a slice of orange in the beer for the vitamins. Many others can't. One of the early victims to COVID-19 I recall was a 95 year old gent who was recovering from lung cancer, down to one lung. He spent 2 days in hospital, an outlier. 80+ years of intense flu research has lead to vaccines that mostly work, and has lead to personalised medicine that can prevent death. 40 years of HIV research has changed a terminal disease into a chronic disease. 4 years of COVID-19 research has uncovered profound levels of knowledge about a virus type. There has been 100+ research to cure the common cold, caused by other coronavirus variants, without a shred of advancement. The scientific endeavour that has lead to ignoramuses pronounce COVID-19 nothing to worry about, was simply amazing. I was part of that, and? proud of my colleagues, despite the stick we took. Sars-Cov-2 might recede into the background, but we are going to know a damn lot more about infection, about strokes, about vascular disease, about dementia etc as a result. The Polio pandemics of the 1920s resulted in a whole new area of medicine. You probably didn't know Intensive Care Medicine only occurred because of Polio. Bfore that, you had dying rooms. Now you can go to hospital with a sudden impactful illness, and people are going to help make you survive. The Danes came up with the concept. This intense desire to save mostly middle class older children lead to the iron lung. Can you actually imagine that? Kids in their early teens, being suddenly struck down by an infection that caused them to choke to death. Can you imagine the sheer genius of the doctor who explained to the engineer how lungs work, and the lateral thinking, at pace, to develop a machine to keep children alive. This brought time, this allowed ventilators to be designed, and ventilators to be engineered. Ventilators have served us well, saving millions of people. Roll on to 2020, when people thought COVID-19 was a respiratory disease, a disease causing Acute Respiratory Disease Syndrome, or ARDS. People with ARDS are put on ventilators. ARDS leads to loss of elasticity of the lungs; your lungs can no longer expand, you can't breath. Lung scarification results. You die. Ventilators can help. Ventilators can also cause scarring, so they can just extend your life, because eventually you might need a lung transplant. COVID-19 was different. The lungs remained elastic, but the lungs were filled with cell debris. This was the unusual "shards of ice" features seen on lung CTs. This lead to a medical technological bit of genius, like the iron lung, which I think saved millions. A CPAP is a breathing device, often used by people with sleep apnea. It allows oxygen to be delivered to the lungs, unlike a ventilator with really is about a machine helping your lungs work better. But you can't use a CPAP on a COVID-19 patient, because they are going to exhale virus laden breath. University College literally dragged up an old CPAP device from the basement; it was no longer in production. They went to F1 Mercedes over at Brackley. F1 engineers are superb; they are very used to diagnosing engineering problems very quickly, and coming up with high quality solutions very quickly (Mclaren also got involved elsewhere during COVID-19). UCL wanted Mercedes to basiically reverse engineer this old Philips device, and make it suitable for a patient infected with a fairly poorly characterised biological threat agent. At speed, Mercedes, working with the doctors, came up with something that was mass produced cheaply. Ironically, the UK government, like many others, thought it was the military who could sort this out. The UK ventilator challenge was managed by Babcock, who are behind many MOD challenges, loads of companies engaged, genius designs came out, but they did not talk to the doctors. The military spec ventilators that were offered, none of the doctors wanted them, because no doctor had been involved in the design, and how the hell do they know they were safe. What they wanted was lots more of what they were already using, not some novelty that Dyson or whoever scribbled on a bit of paper (Ford came closest, applying mass production principles to some Philips devices). So the Pandemic changed how intensive care is delivered, its improved the outcomes of intensive care. If you go into intensive care now, your chances of coming out have improved.

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A bit behind. The Civil War kicked off in 2014. Ultra-nationalists on both sides, starting with Putin. Anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Russia can be traced to 1848, when the Ukrainian language was banned. But Peter the Great kicked it off 100 years earlier. I think you are heavily whitewashing generations of prejudice from the Russian state.