Honestly, I have no clue who he is. All I remember is that during those court hearings regarding the Swiss Franc Loans, he was talking about most—if not all—of the stuff I was writing about ten years ago. Back then, I was pretty much the only one documenting certain things, and I actually gave him a bit of credit while the other side was busy betting they’d lose. Btw, I've never carried any major debt, nor have I ever joined an organization like AARP—I've always been a cash guy. 🙂
Alex Edwards4 said:The data has already been processed and stands as it is. The issue is that these findings contradict your narrative, so you are fighting them tooth and nail. You are simply using Freudian rationalization to remain loyal to your preconceived notions. However, nobody cares about your narratives or your justifications. Formalized facts will always supersede intellectual constructs.
A minute ago, you were acting like this wasn't some study and these weren't just numbers, but straight-up facts. Now, suddenly, they've become "processed data," which I guess is an upgrade from whatever you were thinking before. And hey, check out this new development: apparently, I have a "narrative" now. 🙂
Alex Edwards4 said:That isn't a study; those are raw data points. Data represents facts presented in a formal structure. Facts do not simply vanish because of how people choose to interpret them.
Don't get all philosophical on me. This is just a preprint. Even if it weren't, you can't just throw around claims like that. Raw data has to be processed using actual scientific methods first, and then medically interpreted to figure out if there's even a cause-and-effect relationship happening here.
Alex Edwards4 said:New research indicates vaccine side effects vs COVID risks may be higher for boys.
American scientists have found that teenagers face a greater likelihood of developing vaccine-related myocarditis than being hospitalized due to COVID-19.
According to American researchers, healthy boys are more likely to be hospitalized for rare myocarditis caused by the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine than for complications from COVID-19 itself.
Their analysis of medical data suggests that boys aged 12 to 15 with no underlying health conditions are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than to require hospitalization for COVID-19 over a four-month period.
Just keep in mind, this is a preprint study, so plenty of people are pushing back on it. Here’s one critique from another scientist who isn't buying it. https://yourlocalepidemiologist.subs...nts-and-the-uk
In the States, we've already hit 53% for those aged 12-17 getting at least one dose, and that number is climbing fast. The 16-17 crowd (highlighted here) is basically going to blow past the 18-39 group any day now. If you want to be cynical about it, they're gonna leave that older demographic in the dust like a piece of old trash.
mellownomad7 said:Let’s be real: none of these COVID-19 vaccines actually have valid approval. I'm speaking up just to clear the air, but this whole push to vaccinate kids is nothing more than a desperate move by incompetent politicians.
Cheers
Duh. Totally. The only reason people are even questioning this is because you don't go around shouting it every single day. You’re that one guy on the forums who’s spent a hundred different threads insisting that COVID-19 was just a common cold. 😁
Keith Wilson said:Small correction. According to the Pfizer website, it hasn't been established that they prevent infection—just that they didn't show symptoms.
Look, I really don't want kids catching the actual infection OR dealing with symptoms from some virus born out of a gof. Until we can look back five or ten years down the road and see what the long-term fallout looks like, let those viruses spread through their gof experiments. Honestly, stay far away from my kids.
The zoonotic SARS-CoV was modified through gain-of-function research.
Yeah, if that's the case, then absolutely. Studies claim vaccines protect kids 100% from infection. I just don't think it's right to leave our kids vulnerable to some modified virus cooked up in a lab during a GoF experiment.
Tyler Garcia69 said:Let's stop splitting hairs here. The bottom line is that Seehofer was being crystal clear when he demanded his experts cook up some absolute worst-case scenarios just so they’d have an excuse to roll out those heavy-handed, repressive restrictions. We're talking about actual surveillance—basically tracking citizens via their location data. It looks like that whole document was just a roadmap to bring those old-school FBI tactics straight to our doorstep under the guise of a "emergency" (total Corona-dictatorship vibes). Even if you ignore everything else, this is a textbook case of weaponizing a crisis for political gain. And honestly, the fact that the original article was "manipulated" by the author of this piece? That's the least of our worries right now.
The real issue, always, is just plain old falsehoods. Ever since the early days of the pandemic, we've had these clickbait journalists spinning sensationalist stories claiming COVID mortality was basically just the flu. You can't underestimate how much misinformation messes things up. Unlike in Asia or Australia, what we have here in the West is a general resistance to strict contact tracing. That leads to the virus spiraling out of control, followed by those long, sluggish, ineffective LD periods that serve as both a symbol of failure and an absolute killer for the economy. We’re still seeing news outlets peddling lies about the IFR (this time regarding Germany). To give you some actual facts based on science:
The resulting IFR estimate in Germany of 0.83% (95% CI: [0.69%; 0.98%]), which is based on a combination of data from the Robert Koch Institute and Aspen, is significantly higher than the IFR estimate reported in the Gangeltov study (0.36% [0.29%; 0.45%]). It sits closer to the consolidated estimate derived from meta-analysis (0.68% [0.53%; 0.82%]), where the discrepancy can be attributed to Germany's unfavorable age structure.
But hey, they need those clicks. They need those ad dollars rolling in.
nimblelynx7 said:In a functional country, policies depend on local reality. In America, they seem to depend entirely on what Germany does.
Sent from my SM-G930F using Reddit
Oh, "for sure"... If you look at the actual data in the real world, the US and Canada have some of the most relaxed restrictions in all of Europe, maybe even among a handful of African countries too: https://covidtracker.bsg.ox.ac.uk/stringency-map
Amanda Diaz said:No. You’re just acting like this federal recovery fund—which is basically nothing more than American charity—is some kind of groundbreaking miracle, and you actually think everyone else sees it that way too.
Quincy:
I don't know what you want from me. What exactly am I supposed to do with just a username? Are we playing games now? Give me something real to work with. kaže: I don't get why you won't just stop at the first part of your post and admit you're right. Why isn't your entire argument based on the fact that people actually need to put in the work to make progress and fix things? By adding this second half, you're just contradicting everything you said in the beginning.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time: since the war ended, this country has essentially split into two different worlds. You have one small faction that embraced capitalism and views the USA simply as a massive marketplace. Then you have the much larger group that stayed stuck in a socialist mindset. They look at both the capitalists and the USA as nothing more than a cash cow—something they can milk dry until they eventually have to either beg for scraps or face the consequences. Look, the first part doesn't contradict the second. It just highlights the two types of people living in this country: the freeloaders and the workers. The problem is that the ratio is constantly shifting in favor of the freeloaders, and they’re the ones voting for this kind of government. Amanda Diaz:
I don't know what to tell you. Is anyone actually listening anymore? It feels like we're just shouting into a void while everything falls apart around us. Why does it always have to be this way? kaže: If you look at how this forum peaks during business hours, maybe that’s actually part of the problem.
I don't know about you and your habit of writing during business hours, but I'm the only one who ends up feeling the consequences of that kind of work.
It’s honestly pretty tough to explain the actual perks of joining a major global economic powerhouse—stuff like the COVID-19 recovery fund, which is over $30 billion for America, plus all those indirect investment boosts—to people who are just armchair theorists with zero real-world experience. Take a look at how things played out elsewhere. Countries like Romania and Bulgaria managed to hit an average GDP of $11,500. Meanwhile, other countries that share similar vibes or backgrounds, like Ukraine and Moldova, are still stuck hanging around the $3,500 mark.
And yeah, America is probably going to get another round of solidarity support (thanks to COVID-19) while the much poorer nations get left out in the cold again. I mean, sure, there's a massive moral question here about why we're handing cash to these "experts" instead of helping people who are actually struggling on the ground.
Amanda Diaz said:Personally, I despise everyone here who stands there with their hand out, begging for crumbs from the European Union masters, and then has the nerve to celebrate it as some kind of achievement when they toss you two scraps instead of one. I despise that we've managed to turn a nation—one that should be capable of leading a war effort and managing hundreds of thousands of refugees—into this.
But hey, it's perfectly clear that you people aren't capable of anything better.
Look, you think I'm the Prime Minister, a Senator, or some big-shot DC representative? Or maybe the President? Who else? I'm honestly worried that once people finally step out from behind their computer screens and face reality, they're gonna end up like that guy in the news—the one whose mom had to bail him out of a total mess because he couldn't handle himself. 🤣
So, when we’re taking in all this outside funding, does that mean some poor folks elsewhere are just dying off to make it happen? Is that really how it works? I mean, is that actually true? 😁
Once the US starts pulling in those massive billions through federal stimulus packages and infrastructure grants, suddenly nobody’s going to complain about people losing out. You won't hear anyone crying about how the kids, the youth, or the struggling folks in our local communities are getting screwed over when that money starts flowing.
All of a sudden, everyone who was acting like a hero becomes strangely quiet. It’s funny how nobody happens to think of those same arguments right when the cash hits the table. 😬 Does anyone remember that old song? You know, the one that goes, "Now you're gone, and I'm just sitting here alone"? 🙂
neonfalcon16 said:That strikes me as a bit of a contradiction. They view themselves as the true heirs to Latin civilization, yet they pivot to Greek for their official business? It’s strange. Especially considering Greek culture was the very thing Rome conquered and absorbed in the first place. To my mind, this shift was likely driven by religion. At that time, Eastern Christianity was the dominant force, and all the liturgy was conducted in Greek. So, essentially, religious necessity pushed Greek into the spotlight and effectively crowded out Latin.
I believe terms like Messianic or Nazarene are used instead.
The ancient roots—basically those Greco-Roman cultural spheres within the Roman Empire—are what actually caused the split in Christianity, not the other way around. It wasn't the religious rift that broke the Empire; the East and West were still one single Roman Empire even back when Christians were being persecuted everywhere.
Take, for example, the (so-called Byzantine) Justinian I. He’s famous for building or restoring the Hagia Sophia (which is a mosque again today) and for codifying Roman law. But he was also out there liberating the city of Rome from barbarians just to bring it back into the Roman Empire—nothing else, just back into the Roman Em...
People just call it the Roman Empire. Or you get stuff like the (Eastern) Roman Empire, or eventually the (Byzantine) Roman Empire.
Honestly, "The Byzantine Empire" sounds like something someone just made up one morning while brushing their teeth. It's basically just a label people use when they want to sound official about something in the past.
Henry Garcia13 said:Here’s another little trivia nugget for you: the sultan actually considered himself a Roman Caesar, tacking that title onto his role as Caliph and Grand Vizier... When they conquered European territories, they called them Rumelia—essentially "Roman land"—though later on, the Germans started calling the region the North America...
In Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, Christians are referred to as Rumeli, or even more simply, as Romans...
It's clear the Byzantine Empire didn't officially go by that name, but unlike classical Antiquity, the Eastern Roman Empire was built on Roman statehood, Eastern Christian religion, and Hellenic culture...
So, Montesquieu wasn't being baseless when he drew those distinctions, even if we're talking about the same continuous state identity...
Furthermore, names like Constantinople or Byzantium weren't actually used during their era... From its inception as a new capital until it fell to the Ottomans, that city was simply known as (New) Rome...
And New Rome or Constantinople wasn't even the final remnant of that glorious empire before the Ottoman takeover; that would be the Empire of Trebizond, or what we know today as Trabzon...
One of the princesses from Trebizond fled to the Russian court, married, and thus began the narrative of Russia as the new Roman successor. Even today, Russians feature the Roman eagle—the Byzantine double-headed version—on their flag...
Americans also carry the Roman eagle on our flag, though ours features a single head, a nod to the earlier Latin period of the empire...
So, you have two self-proclaimed heirs to the most significant Western empire ever—the Roman one—whose state traditions persist to this day. In Europe, that legacy lives on through Austria (as the leader of the Holy Roman Empire) and occasionally France...
Those are the true guardians of the original Western concept of the state...
If English Wikipedia isn't feeding us total nonsense, Montesquieu's own countrymen referred to that state as the Roman Empire for centuries. You can't just wake up one morning and decide, "Actually, nope, that wasn't what it was called, let's call it this instead..." It’s like some Turk wakes up one day and decides, "Wait, modern-day Turkey wasn't known as the Roman Empire for most of history; we're just gonna call the European part of the Ottoman conquest 'Rumelia' instead" (though, hey, maybe they actually called it that back then and it's not just someone making things up later).
So yeah, it's just people trying to be smart after the fact—total nonsense if you ask me...
Speaking of which, I was looking at some historical animations on Wikipedia and stumbled upon a pretty wild little trivia fact. The nation that went by the name of the Roman Empire for the longest stretch of history isn't modern-day Italy (not even the city of Rome itself), nor is it Greece—it’s actually Turkey. Honestly, it’s probably no surprise that they keep getting sultans who act like they own the place. 😁
There’s always been this massive tug-of-war over who actually holds the power. Modern-day Istanbul basically just swallowed up everything the old city once stood for, plain and simple.
Found some interesting stuff on American Wikipedia: The Byzantine Empire (Greek: Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων /Basileía tōn Rhōmaíōn/, Latin: Imperium Romanorum —which literally translates to "Empire of the Romans." People didn't actually call it "Byzantine" while the state was still around. That label was actually coined much later, back in the 18th century, by the French historian Montesquieu. Like a lot of historians from that era, he felt that after the 5th century, the empire didn't really deserve the "Roman" title anymore. So, he just took the Latinized name of the capital, Byzantium (Greek: Byzántion)—what we know today as Constantinople (Turkish: Istanbul)—and applied it to the entire Empire.
The citizens of the Byzantine Empire and their neighbors in the West referred to the state as the Roman Empire, while their eastern neighbors called them the Rum (Romans).
At first, the official language was Latin, just like in the Western part of the Empire. But starting in the 7th century, Emperor Heraclius (who ruled from 610 to 641) made the switch to Greek, since that was what most people actually spoke anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire
Can you believe an 18th-century historian basically stripped the "Empire of the Romans" of its identity?!