Bobref

Thank goodness!

By the way, that was not intended as a pro-Biden statement on my part, if that’s how you took it. Quite the opposite.

It’s more than embarrassing. It’s dangerous. This country has not been in such dire need of strong leadership since WW II. And regardless of the outcome of the election, we’re not going to get it.

Biden’s got only one thing going for him, as far as I can see. He’s not Trump.

Not even close. https://moneywise.com/a/the-most-dishonest-profession

The only whistle I ever used.

Was it a pealess Whistle, like a Fox 40? Or did you use a real football whistle, like the Acme Thunderer?

Like the poor, the jackasses will always be with us.

Couldn’t agree more about consistency, and if that’s the argument he’s trying to make, he’s done a poor job of it. It’s the part about riots and protests that strikes me as wrongheaded ... and makes me think his statement is more about politics than public health.

Try as I might, I cannot see the logic behind this. It reminds me of when I was a little kid, and one of my friends got to do something I wanted to do, but my parents wouldn’t let me because they thought it was unsafe. I would stamp my foot and wail about the unfairness of kids getting to do something that I couldn’t. I guess I’ve sort of answered my own question: it’s “little kids logic.”

If it heads in that direction, the IHSAA could cut the regular season to as little as 4 games. That’s the minimum # needed to qualify for the tournament under the current bylaws. But there will be a tournament. Economics dictates that.

In case there is any question about the power of the government to order masking, that’s been settled for over a hundred years. The SCOTUS case upholding a Massachusetts compulsory vaccination law is Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905): “The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States does not import an absolute right in each person to be at all times, and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint, nor is it an element in such liberty that one person, or a minority of persons residing in any community and enjoying the benefits of its local government, should have power to dominate the majority when supported in their action by the authority of the State. It is within the police power of a State to enact a compulsory vaccination law, and it is for the legislature, and not for the courts, to determine in the first instance whether vaccination is or is not the best mode for the prevention of smallpox and the protection of the public health.”

My question actually was whether you had kids that were vaccinated.

Russell Wilson

I will be interested to see what @DannEllenwood has to say on the subject. He’s the one to whom I posed the original question.

For those who don’t know. Tricky Situations All empty, as mentioned above you consider those who may enter after you, so you go for urinal 1 or 6. Here you have 2 inconsiderate assholes taking 2 middle urinals, leaving you the only option of urinal 6. Here you have a considerate Bro, ideally you want urinal 6, but urinal 5 is acceptable with good reason, like the urinal being next to the main door, or next to the sinks manned by an overly observational toilet attendant. In this situation you have 3 guys nicely spaced out, urinal 2 is being inconsiderate, but you take urinal 1 and turn your back slightly to gain more privacy. Some of you may look at this one and think "surely it's urinal 1", but you are mistaken. Urinal 1 and 3 couples you with the guy at urinal 2. You go for urinal 4 and stay with the pack. In this situation, you wait or use a cubicle. If you need a piss that badly, you'll just have to man up and take the pain.

It seems like there’s some out-of-the-box thinking going on at 9150, and I applaud it. If they’re ever going to try neutral sites, this is the perfect opportunity. If it turns out that it’s a push, as you suggested, no harm done.

In a nutshell.

Good to hear, but that’s not the question I asked.

Disappointing. Don’t like him. Never have. More to the point, his game always involved designed runs. That’s what made him so effective. With his recent injury history, I think those days are behind him. And without it, he’s just another guy.

Gov. Pritzker in Illinois issued an order making masking mandatory. Police were empowered to arrest for non-compliance, and charge offenders with a misdemeanor, although I don’t think anyone actually got arrested.

Statistics show that masking works to reduce the spread of the virus.

I think you’ve stated the issues very well. My only disagreement with what you said is the part about “I still think we let the parents, coaches, kids, and fans decide.“ As we have discussed in other contexts, the freedom to decide is largely a fable in kids that age. Peer pressure makes the notion of free choice illusory.

Check your math. According to your post “In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work.” That’s $3.7 million from 2019-2025. “The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019.” That’s 2 programs, $7.4 million, from 2014 to 2025. 11 years. As I said, chump change. And neither Dr. Fauci nor anyone else “developed” the corona virus. https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-lab.html. The coronavirus was not engineered in a lab. Here's how we know. By Jeanna Bryner - Live Science Editor-in-Chief March 21, 2020 The persistent myth can be put to bed. Editor's note: On April 16, news came out that the U.S. government said it was investigating the possibility that the novel coronavirus may have somehow escaped from a lab, though experts still think the possibility that it was engineered is unlikely. This Live Science report explores the origin of SARS-CoV-2. As the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 spreads across the globe, with cases surpassing 284,000 worldwide today (March 20), misinformation is spreading almost as fast. One persistent myth is that this virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was made by scientists and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. A new analysis of SARS-CoV-2 may finally put that latter idea to bed. A group of researchers compared the genome of this novel coronavirus with the seven other coronaviruses known to infect humans: SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2, which can cause severe disease; along with HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E, which typically cause just mild symptoms, the researchers wrote March 17 in the journal Nature Medicine. "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," they write in the journal article. Kristian Andersen, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, and his colleagues looked at the genetic template for the spike proteins that protrude from the surface of the virus. The coronavirus uses these spikes to grab the outer walls of its host's cells and then enter those cells. They specifically looked at the gene sequences responsible for two key features of these spike proteins: the grabber, called the receptor-binding domain, that hooks onto host cells; and the so-called cleavage site that allows the virus to open and enter those cells. That analysis showed that the "hook" part of the spike had evolved to target a receptor on the outside of human cells called ACE2, which is involved in blood pressure regulation. It is so effective at attaching to human cells that the researchers said the spike proteins were the result of natural selection and not genetic engineering. Here's why: SARS-CoV-2 is very closely related to the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which fanned across the globe nearly 20 years ago. Scientists have studied how SARS-CoV differs from SARS-CoV-2 — with several key letter changes in the genetic code. Yet in computer simulations, the mutations in SARS-CoV-2 don't seem to work very well at helping the virus bind to human cells. If scientists had deliberately engineered this virus, they wouldn't have chosen mutations that computer models suggest won't work. But it turns out, nature is smarter than scientists, and the novel coronavirus found a way to mutate that was better — and completely different— from anything scientists could have created, the study found. Another nail in the "escaped from evil lab" theory? The overall molecular structure of this virus is distinct from the known coronaviruses and instead most closely resembles viruses found in bats and pangolins that had been little studied and never known to cause humans any harm. "If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness," according to a statement from Scripps. Where did the virus come from? The research group came up with two possible scenarios for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. One scenario follows the origin stories for a few other recent coronaviruses that have wreaked havoc in human populations. In that scenario, we contracted the virus directly from an animal — civets in the case of SARS and camels in the case of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the researchers suggest that animal was a bat, which transmitted the virus to another intermediate animal (possibly a pangolin, some scientists have said) that brought the virus to humans. In that possible scenario, the genetic features that make the new coronavirus so effective at infecting human cells (its pathogenic powers) would have been in place before hopping to humans. In the other scenario, those pathogenic features would have evolved only after the virus jumped from its animal host to humans. Some coronaviruses that originated in pangolins have a "hook structure" (that receptor binding domain) similar to that of SARS-CoV-2. In that way, a pangolin either directly or indirectly passed its virus onto a human host. Then, once inside a human host, the virus could have evolved to have its other stealth feature — the cleavage site that lets it easily break into human cells. Once it developed that capacity, the researchers said, the coronavirus would be even more capable of spreading between people. All of this technical detail could help scientists forecast the future of this pandemic. If the virus did enter human cells in a pathogenic form, that raises the probability of future outbreaks. The virus could still be circulating in the animal population and might again jump to humans, ready to cause an outbreak. But the chances of such future outbreaks are lower if the virus must first enter the human population and then evolve the pathogenic properties, the researchers said.