Right now finishing up Mercenaries and Their Masters which is a bit dated but a great analysis of 14th and 15th centuries army compositions, contracts, supply lines, and other logistics, particularly as it pertains to Italian city states. I worked in the oil industry for a few years and it's pretty surprising how much an army of 10,000 pipeliners resembles an medieval army, straight down to the raping and pillaging.
I set it down for a while but I've picked up Capitol in the Twenty-First Century again. About halfway through. It's a very technical analysis of wealth disparity over the past few centuries, mostly from tax records. It's interesting, but as dense as it is it's still missing a lot of data and it never really seems to question whether wealth inequality is an actual moral hazard, and the author is far more concerned with inherited wealth than market actors colluding with government to protect their interests (the latter of which I think is the real hazard). Maybe he gets there, but I doubt it.
For exactly the reasons you cite I just don't know how to interpret any data at this point. I've got a lot of friends in the medical world who are already vaccinated and the best I can do is keep abreast of their experiences. Anecdotal evidence is, of course, only slightly better than useless, but that does make it more reliable than the CDC data at least.
I'm gonna sit this out for a couple years and wait for meta-analyses to paint a better picture.
Out of what? What are we at now, close to 200 million doses worldwide? 150 deaths doesn't seem like much out of that, and what complicating factors existed to create those deaths? What's an adverse reaction? Fever/chills? I know anaphylaxis has been observed, but that usually manifests within the brief monitoring period after a shot is administered.
I think it's going to be a long time before we get a fair assessment of the real vaccine risks but these numbers alone don't tell us much. The long-term unknowns like pregnancy/fertility impacts really need to be established, and of course the whole media says there's nothing to worry about there, even though there's absolutely no possible way they can assert that.
Whatever. I hope it's safe, I hope it's effective, those things just need to be proven. I get my flu shot every year, mostly because I don't like getting laid up with the flu for a week or two. If getting a COVID vaccine means I get laid up for a week anyway, it just doesn't seem worth it considering I'm not a 190 year old diabetic.
NY Post followed up with the employer. You don't have to read too far between the lines of their comments to at least partially verify the waitress' story.
It is odd to me that she's not suing. She clearly went straight to the media with this story so I'm not sure what her angle is.
From the NY Post article:
The restaurant said Wednesday it was still requiring workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19, but that it would change its policy for employees requesting an exemption.
“Once New York state allowed restaurant workers to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, we thought this was the perfect opportunity to put a plan in place to keep our team and guests safe,” owner Billy Durney said in a statement.
“No one has faced these challenges before and we made a decision that we thought would best protect everyone,” he said. “We now realize that we need to update our policy so it’s clear to our team how the process works and what we can do to support them. We’re making these changes immediately.”
Sounds to me like they're backpedaling because of the media heat.
USA Today's FACT CHECK deboonked this claim. Thank goodness our honest media is on top of this.
I am not. Going to be a beta tester for this. No way. I am, however, surrounded by people screeching to get the vaccine. When it comes up, I tell people that there are far too many vulnerable and elderly people across the globe who need it much more than I, and I cannot in good conscience deprive someone else when my risk profile is so low. I don't know how long this excuse is going to work, but it has successfully made other people feel selfish. Pretty happy with the results so far.
I fully empathize with what you're saying, agree with it in many parts, but unfortunately, this is a public forum! And I'm actually quite concerned about the potential for any statement I make to be misconstrued as an incitement to violence (nevermind that countless Dems made literal incitements to violence all of last year).
To say the least, I know a lot of people who are very, very tired of this shit. And I think there are encouraging - nonviolent - signs out there of pushback. Social media is fracturing, viable alternatives to the standard big tech offerings are now available, university enrollments are way, way down, gun ownership is at the highest level ever and even liberals are starting to realize that the second amendment has value. Even, of all the things, r/coronavirus has taken a massive shift in sentiment against government lockdowns, mask wearing, and started to realize they've been fed dogshit for the past year.
I do think Western societies are in decline, and I don't think it's reversible, but it won't occur without significant resistance.
I'm pro nuclear, but there are a zillion cost-drivers for a power plant, and lack of reprocessing isn't one of them. Reprocessing is more expensive than using fresh fuel, and it increases the footprint of total waste, ironically. Most of the fuel being used in commercial plants was mined up 30+ years ago and has just been sitting around. There's not much pressure to institute a reprocessing program.
NIMBY affects all wind projects like crazy, btw.
Trying to rewatch Gundam Wing but I’ve been working like a dog and don’t really have time. Book wise I just finished up Babylon by Joan Oates, which was sporadically interesting. Also in the last week finished up The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem. Not one of his better books but he's a great scifi author and I'd like to clear his bibliography. I'm aaalmost done with Vol 2 of Cerebus, High Society, getting ready to start Church and State Pt 1 next week. Amazing comic. The author famously went nuts and started hating women and blaming them for the downfall of society. So I can't wait to get to that part.
Just started reading Mercenaries and Their Masters, a history of warfare in medieval Italy. Pretty fascinating so far. I’m about halfway through Christianity, the First Three Thousand Years which is a long, long slog but I’m hoping to complete it by June. And another on my long slog stack is Capitol in the 21st Century, which is an interesting look at the economic mechanisms that drive wealthy inequality, though I disagree with the author’s policy views. I'm halfway through that and have stalled out, but hopefully when work slows down I'll pick it back up and muscle through the end. And I just ordered The White People which is a 19th century horror short story. Should be able to clear that one off my desk quickly.
It does matter. Beneath all of the bullshit there exists a base reality where things are either true or untrue. The left can claim that gravity doesn't exist for black people, but the reality is they'll still die if they jump off a cliff. I'm not a racist for saying black people can't fly, no matter what the left claims.
Critical Drinker's got a nice send-off for her.
And of course everyone in the Mandalorian sub is calling her a racist, transphobe, all the predictable libel. Seriously, who are these people? How are they this dense?
Edit: Jesus, it's not even just Reddit. How dispiriting. Twitter is ruining us.
I really recommend Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible for an accessible but scholarly attempt to reconstruct who the authors were of each book of the OT, along with a better contextualization of their political and historical settings.
There's so much in the Old Testament that escapes the reader because we're so far removed from the context in which it was written, and modern readers will always reinterpret texts through their own presentist biases.
Also, if you're looking for a great Bible with scholarly annotations, get the New Oxford Annotated Bible. Probably the last one you'll ever need.