That's because, per the Trib, among new Tex-ass laws taking effect over the next two months, you can get ivermectin without a scrip starting today.
That — unsurprisingly — isn't the most loony or wingnut law that will be taking effect over the next month or two.
We now have a second confirmed measles death in Texas, on top of the one in New Mexico; known Texas measles cases likely will be over 500 by the time you read this.
Related? The Trib profiles Lubbock's public health director, Dr. Katherine Wells, including her noting this has a feeling similar to COVID, including the nutters rebelling against public health measures.
Per the profile story, coming just ahead of Brainworm Bobby's visit on Sunday, he caused this:
A Lubbock’s children hospital is now treating children with severe measles who also suffer from vitamin A toxicity. This comes after Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update the measles guidance to promote the vitamin’s use, which most health experts object to. The Trump administration is eliminating pandemic-era grants that were used to boost the department’s response to the measles outbreak, including paying for employees. And Wells is navigating what could arguably be an even more delicate line than COVID — managing the outbreak of an eradicated, preventable disease, with a worn-out staff and a growing distrust from the public.
Geez o fucking Pete. Vitamin A overdoses can kill you.
Meanwhile, Wells had her hands full during the latter stages of COVID dealing with nutters not just in the general public but the mayor and one other member of the Lubbock City Council.
On Brainworm Bobby's visit, he said he has "developed bonds" with area Mennonites. Of course he has; antivaxxers of a feather flock together. It's also "interesting" that, while out in Gaines County, he did NOT attend a news conference being held by the CDC.
That said, he did shat on Shitter Sunday to support vaccination via his official account. To which I said:
If you really believe "the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine" then why are you pushing Vitamin A, which has sent multiple kids to the hospital with Vitamin A poisoning? You look like you're trying to straddle the "sides" of science & stupidity
He has since doubled down on his mix of pseudoscience and arrogance, claiming that his measles protocol should be a model for the world.
What else IS there to say?
Well, Brainworm Bobby, unless he resists, has been asked to say more by Louisiana U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, both on pushing vaccines and on talking to his Senate committee.
Or, as my Substack note said about Seymour Hersh's paywalled piece last week:
Does Sy Hersh have a live fish here, or did some winger bait his hook with a dead minnow, like with Butowsky (and people behind him) and Seth Rich, for which Sy remains largely unrepentant, AFAIK?
And, let's dive in, and I'll link to old Blogger pieces about Sy, too. The nutgraf, quoted in full, is the second paragraph and the last before the paywall:
I learned this week that a US intelligence asset at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where the Covid virus was first observed, is safe and out of danger. The asset, highly regarded within the CIA, was recruited while in graduate school in the United States and provided early warning of a laboratory accident at Wuhan that led to a series of infections that was quickly spreading and initially seemed immune to treatment. As is the case today, many senior US officials were reluctant to tell the president what he did not want to hear. But early studies dealing with how to mitigate the oncoming plague, based on information from the Chinese health ministry about the lethal new virus, were completed late in 2019 by experts from America’s National Institutes of Health and other research agencies. Despite their warnings, a series of preventative actions were not taken until the United States was flooded with cases of the virus. All of these studies, I have been told, have been expunged from the official internal records in Washington, including any mention of the CIA's source inside the Chinese laboratory. It was a cover-up to protect a president who did not do the right thing.
OK, more analysis, stemming from my note.
First, per the Butowsky link, there's a possibility that Hersh is a willing fellow traveler, and as part of that, there's some axes he has to grind, unbeknownst to me what they are. Or maybe this is firing a shot across Trump's bow in some way. (He's not paying attention to you, Sy.)
Let's start with Sy's first piece, after his "hello world" one, on Substack, about the Nord Stream pipeline demolition, and my take on it.
I said there that, even if the big picture was right, he got a lot of details wrong. I also added that, if nothing else, he may have gotten "Fisked." (That said, as with the late Robert Fisk, that happens more easily if the journalist is a willing dance partner.)
I also noted Mark Ames, and Bernhard at Moon of Alabama, as too willing to give Sy blank checks. In fact, since I've had run-ins with Bernard and MOA before, I wrote a separate brief call-out. Related to Ames? I noted that Sy's piece — and Mark's Radio War Nerd about it — had brought plenty of nutters out of the woodwork, many related to Julian Assange in general, and Seth Rich in particular.
Rather than being Fisked, as another option, I wondered back then if Sy was ax-grinding. Possible on this issue as well. (Trump ain't listening.)
As far as Sy's past? Yes, he got My Lai right. And other things. He was totally wrong about Obama's Abbottabad raid on Osama bin Laden, and perhaps in part either due to ax-grinding, being Fisked, or both.
And, long ago, Sy's "The Dark Side of Camelot," per my linked review, was as much, if not more, miss than hit, and some of the misses were straight-on laughable.
So, sorry, Sy and/or minders? No desire to "claim my free post" and be spammed or something. It's not worth it to figure out whether this is more a Fisking or more an ax-grinding piece, and I'm confident that it's NOT more a "reality" piece.
Since I wrote this, he's gotten worse. "Is Trump in Cognitive Decline," Oct. 7, paywalled. Or, Sept. 17, the first of a three-part series about explaining AI, with the fun of Hersh talking about "the cloud" and the Captain Obvious of the person who's interviewed in all three parts talking about AI's electricity use. No shit.
Whetherr it's (ex)-Berners trying to score points on Biden on this issue, as has been the case for a full year now, or simple hysterics, the COVID doomers have been out and about on Twitter for a couple of weeks already.
And?
Wrong once again! Per Worldometers, nope, no surge in cases or death rates.
STFU, hysterics. Or, in the case of Berners, tribalists. Actually, with the likes of attacks on Leana Wen, you're both tribalists. And both hysteriacs.
That said, COVID doomerism, especially when combined with general doomerism, is good money for the likes of Jessica Wildfire finding suckers, even while being full of shit.
And, yes, it's about the semi-continuing #MasksUp and related bullshit hashtags on Twitter.
I'm going to keep dropping links to old blog posts there calling you people out, as well as continuing to post a link to Worldometers showing that we continue to remain under 200 deaths a week, which extrapolates to no more than 10,000 a year, far less than "just the flu."
That leads me first to this self-own:
How many flu deaths do we average per week in the summer months? Hmm, gladfly?
— @CycleLobbyWR (@cyclelobbywr) August 27, 2023
To summarize my response? There are some summer flu cases, but I'll set that aside. The 25K deaths in even a mild winter-half flu season or 50K in a bad one, extrapolate to 50-100K for a full year, showing "just the flu" is even worse worse yet than current COVID. (I also thanked them for making my point for me.)
Second? I go first to the last hashtag. An antivaxxer of some sort challenged my tweet last week on this subject, saying they were always masked, insisting by insinuation that others should be, and then spouting antivaxxer type gibberish. I called them an antivaxxer, then blocked.
Now, to my original "CDC vs People's CDC" story. Some of the People's CDC complaints at the time has some degree of validity, but not full validity. Many of them had no validity. That's in part because, as noted a month later, these people have no nuance. Half the time, I think they don't realize that. The other half, I think they do, and don't care, either because they think the situation has no nuance, or they're trying to "own" the other side.
First, per Idries Shah and what I'm writing as I type, there's more than two sides here. Second and related, that's tribalist. Third and related, it fails, not only with the "other" side of more than two, but with people outside the box like me. Fourth, for the reasons some do this, on political motivation, it's kind of disgusting. More on that in a minute.
But, yeah, even for people who have not heard of the People's CDC movement, its ideas are percolating. And, for the reasons above and more, yes, you're tankies, or some equivalent thereof. Deal with it, even though you won't actually deal with it, for the reasons above.
Now, back to that "hold that thought" and the #BernAnon hashtag. (Said hashtag, AFAIK, invented by me, and discussed in a long Substack re COVID and many other things here.) I called out Pat the Berner by Twitter name six months ago for what I saw as attempted politicization on this issue. I called out Ryan Knight by meatspace name at Substack, more for other issues.
Now, a few school districts are reporting an uptick, even closing a few schools, but the story notes that an uptick in communicable illness happens at the start of every school year. And, Virusmonger Joe is talking about another COVID vaccine. He's not used the word "mandate," powers of which are limited at the federal level, but wingnuts read him that way. I oppose this but for different reasons than the wingnuts. First, since Novavax boosters still aren't out, and due to what I believe was a Biden Administration overcautious fuck-up over the original Johnson and Johnson vaccine, we'll never get one of its type of boosters. I've covered this in detail here. So, that means Virusmonger Joe will be Pfizermonger, or Modernamonger, take your mRNA pick. Hard pass, on the effectiveness claims, the BigPharma patent money and more. There's also no indication this new one would be free. #BernAnon as well as pre-Bernie Greens (except for the antivaxxer contingent) and I agree.
There's plenty of actual reasons to call out Warmonger Joe, starting with him being Warmonger Joe. Besides Ukraine, add in Palestine, his ties to Hunter's corruption that in part itself includes Ukraine, his oil-drilling frenzy, no national health care, and much more. COVID isn't one of them.
Finally, I wrote about "follow the science" on masks two months ago, also noting that despite tankie claims, in reality, mask-wearing was dropping elsewhere in the world, even in places like Japan. I threatened now to call you COVIDIOTS-lite, like the wingnuts got labeled by many 2-3 years ago.
In reality? More and more of you are about to be called COVIDIOTS period. I'm tired of you, but, as long as you keep posting WILLFULLY ignorant stupidity on Twitter, I'm not letting up on firing back.
Wikipedia reminds me, per the first commenter at BAN, Andy, that Badnarik was indeed a true-blue Libertarian nutter in one other way, namely, in that he believed the 16th Amendment had never been properly ratified.
Also in comments there, No. 2 person said that Greens appreciated him for the investigation of alleged vote fraud in Ohio in 2004. I use the word alleged, which said commenter did not, because there was no actual fraud. Unethical vote suppression by Ohio's then Secretary of State? Plenty. Anything fraudulent? No. Mark Hertsgaard has the facts.
Well, Libertarians got butt-hurt about my takedown comments. I replied that, to riff on Liberty Valance, here at this blog, I'd rather repeat the truth before post-mortem hagiography gets set in stone. I noted I'd written takedown obits here of warmonger John McCain, warmonger and NATO-monger Madeleine Albright, First Amendment mocker Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others, for precisely that reason.
And, per a pre-demise post he wrote at his own website, and comments therein, you're a big old gun nut if you have to take a hogleg to a medical conference. That's amplified by having a vertical called "gun friendly restaurants" at the top of the website.
And, his idea of American history was full of shit, as he claims the Civil War didn't exist, and (naturally) uses the secessionist "War of Northern Aggression" instead.
Finally, on current politics, though rightly calling out the departure of Trump, it's typical wingnut bullshit to talk about Americans who "voted for and supported Marxist/socialist legislation." It's a lie. If Badnarik, like many Republican wingnuts, knew it was a lie, then he was part of the problem on both the coarsening of American political discourse and the shifting of Overton windows, and ultimately, to hoist him by his own petard, himself a cancer on the political world. If he truly believed this bullshit, he was an even bigger idiot than the previous post about the Civil War indicates.
This:
They have converted the United States into a communist nation – sometime unintentionally, but often deliberately.
would be fucking laughable if Badnarik didn't mean it quite seriously.
And, of course, and shock me, I googled his blogging for COVID, and as you would expect, he rejected the idea of government actions in the name of public health, even to the point of threats of violence.
You bring the syringe, I’ll bring my .45, and we’ll see who leaves a bigger hole.
(Some Libertarian! [For non-Libertarians, the issue of war, but also somewhat of violence in general and its use, has been a contentious issue within the party.]) And, per him listing that quote elsewhere, I'll take him as a general antivaxxer.
And, as for the Andys of the world, just click the "obits" tab and you'll see plenty of them. I even wrote a semi-takedown of one of my most-liked authors of the past 25 years, David Roberts.
So, goodbye, Badnarik and you won't be missed in this corner of the non-duopoly world. You're the biggest nutter Texas Libertarians, at a minimum, have produced until Dan "Taxation is Theft because Me and My Poopy Pants Don't Like Paying Taxes" Behrman, and given Danny Boy's political takes, you were in the same house on COVID nuttery, too, and presumably on gunz and other lunacies.
• And, hopefully, in the not too distant future, you and I will know how well it works! NIOSH and ASTM are developing mask efficacy standards. As the story notes, the FDA, post-Scott Gottlieb, midst-Stephen Hahn semi-kowtowing to Trump, could have worked on such standards, and didn't.
• None too soon, either. London went on lockdown last Friday as the result of a new strain of coronavirus evolving, and Canada and many other countries temporarily blocked travel. Meanwhile, yet another new strain, perhaps worse than the London one, has also evolved, primarily in South Africa, and reportedly more dangerous than the London mutation, especially as it's more "aggressive" against younger people. I saw a piece by Outside mag recently speculating on how soon international travel might pick up again. Latest answer? Not very, and it is probably irresponsible of Outside to do any more speculating. That said, Dr. Anthony Fauci (wait a minute, is he an MD or not?) has said he opposes a travel ban here.
Meanwhile, here's the latest on Chinese censorship at the start of the spread of the coronavirus. It's also yet another reminder not to trust Chinese case and fatality stats. Sidebar: The piece is also a reminder that I take commenters who pooh-pooh the seriousness of China's reported plans for a social media credit system with a grain or three of salt. The bigger question yet? How long before Beijing tracks down these leakers?
• Another reminder that, contra Trump's "reopen America" and Abbott's "reopen Texas" — dead people don't buy anything.
• That includes the 16,000 and counting age 25-44 COVID deaths.
• Reminder: Face shields, by themselves, are not great protectors. They help. But have gaps — literally.
• Texas, weddings, and maskless COVIDiocy. Shock me.
• Deborah Birx: The coronavirus' John Cornyn of (allegedly) talking tough to Trump in private. Oh, also, a big fat hypocrite.
• Bud Kennedy reports small-town Texans are "angry at COVID." From where I live, they're not angry enough to mask up like they should. He notes it's the same in places like Granbury. What this really is? Another form of American exceptionalism. "We're Merika, we shouldn't be getting bossed around by this little bitty V'uh-EYE-russ."
• Merika's expansive definition of "essential worker" and other things means that there's some major medical ethics involved with vaccine triage. (That doesn't stop Andrew Sullivan from playing "gotcha" with professor Harald Schmidt near the end of the story.)
• Reopening schools has had its own round of detritus in "blue" areas, especially ones that also have teachers unions in contract negotiations. Slate has details of how certain blue state considerations can trump science .... kind of like Trump did. Part of the story in Brookline is "blue against blue" .... Berniecrat type teachers vs. neoliberal Hillbot/Obamiac administrators and parents.
• And, schools largely opened up in Europe, for a variety of reasons that included but weren't limited to weaker unions in a few countries to more centralized (as in federalized/nationalized) school control in many.
• Shelley Luther got off scot-free. Had she been non-white and in the Valley? She'd have been arrested.
• A guest poster at Skeptical Raptor says she'd like coronavirus vaccine liability cases moved OUT of an emergency use liability limitations court system and into the general vaccine court system.
• Jef Rouner talks to Dr.Peter Hotez about the forthcoming anti-vaxxer backlash.
A commenter: Is there going to be an update today on our total numbers?
Cooke County Pandemic Information Page Kristy Jones Spainhour it will be later tomorrow morning than usual. We are adding quite a few.
