Sunday’s Forum
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41 responses to “Sunday’s Forum”
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I read the Guardian, but sometimes… Head? Meet Desk.
Can Kamala Harris as vice-president be both loyal deputy and heir apparent?
I just… I just can’t.
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James Palmer
@BeijingPalmer
Many Americans *do not believe* bad things can happen to them as a result of group catastrophe.
Everyone in China, at the least, had grandparents it happened to.
That’s why Chinese villages were putting up quarantine barriers ahead of the government, and Americans are partying.In a nutshell, that’s it.
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It’s ‘World War III,’ says L.A. County doctor beset by intensely sick COVID-19 patients
Morgue space, he said, is also finite — and an ongoing worry.
“When is the last time I thought we are going to run out of morgue space? I never thought this would be a concern of mine.”
Many patients coming in for routine ailments — such as family members who brought their baby to the ER on New Year’s Eve — are treated in the parking lot, sometimes even in their vehicles.
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@Teve:
This is nothing new. The Trumpkins over at Lucianne.com have been calling for civil war for over a year now. They claim to have all the guns and ammo.Just who do they plan to shoot? Where will they start? With their next door neighbors?
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@CSK: I’ve been watching them on Parler. They’re going to shoot pussy Libtards, and it’s going to take a week or less. That’s about as detailed as their plans are, at this stage. 😀
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Greg Olear
1/ When I was in high school, I worked at McDonald’s. It was a really good experience for me, and I met a lot of interesting people there (including, improbably, the best chess player I ever played against).
2/ The lunch rush at McDonald’s was something else. For 2 solid hours, it was all hands on deck, super busy. There was one guy whose job was to run the grill & make sure everything ran smoothly. He would tell us what to make—cheeseburgers or Big Macs, the occasional Filet O’Fish.
3/ Our guy was named Joe Brown. He was a legend. He’d come in at 10 AM and take an entire pot of coffee to the break room, where he would smoke cigarettes and drink the entire pot to prepare himself for the lunch shift.
4/ If you ever worked in fast food, you know: this was a stressful job. And Joe Brown was AMAZINGLY good at it. Supposedly he was in school to be an air traffic controller. I can’t imagine a job that better prepared you for that than overseeing the lunch shift.
5/ (Once, while working the night shift, he had to explain to Lawrence Taylor—yes, THAT Lawrence Taylor—that there were no more apple pies, and none could be made on short notice. Sadly I was not there to see that!)
6/ If Donald John Trump was in charge of the grill during the lunch shift at McDonald’s, it would be a disaster. He’d stop and eat Big Macs. He’d yell at customers. He’d take a dump on the floor. It would be a miracle if any food got made at all.
7/ That’s basically how Trump has handled the rollout of the vaccine. He hasn’t done a fucking thing. He’s been on the golf course. The vaccine was produced and distributed IN SPITE OF HIM. It’s a miracle we ever got this far.
8/ January 20 will be like if Joe Brown came out of the breakroom, fully caffeinated, and took over control of the lunch rush—but on a much grander scale. The upgrade from Trump to Biden is impossible to overstate. It’s going to make a huge difference. It’s going to SAVE LIVES.
This is going to be a scary couple of months, no matter who is in charge. But after four years with an absentee president, it’s going to feel so good to have a competent leader again. -
@Teve:
Interesting that they’ve not done any planning, since they’ve been threatening war for so long.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I know, but I’m deeply sick of listening to their threats. They’re like little kids. No wonder they love Trump. He really is one of them. -
I have risk factors, so have been extremely cautious and have barely left the house since last March. While death and serious long-term illness frighten me, I think that losing sense of taste and smell, perhaps permanently, has to be at the top of the list of sh!t covid can cause that scares me most.
Some Covid Survivors Haunted by Loss of Smell and Taste
Scientists know little about how the virus causes persistent anosmia or how to cure it. But cases are piling up as the coronavirus sweeps across the world, and some experts fear that the pandemic may leave huge numbers of people with a permanent loss of smell and taste. The prospect has set off an urgent scramble among researchers to learn more about why patients are losing these essential senses, and how to help them.
“Many people have been doing olfactory research for decades and getting little attention,” said Dr. Dolores Malaspina, professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, genetics and genomics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “Covid is just turning that field upside down.”
Smell is intimately tied to both taste and appetite, and anosmia often robs people of the pleasure of eating. But the sudden absence also may have a profound impact on mood and quality of life.
Studies have linked anosmia to social isolation and anhedonia, an inability to feel pleasure, as well as a strange sense of detachment and isolation. Memories and emotions are intricately tied to smell, and the olfactory system plays an important though largely unrecognized role in emotional well-being, said Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta, an associate professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.
Permanently losing one’s sense of taste and smell.
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@Jen: that is a terrible condition
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@Teve:
What a whiny, self-pitying pus-pocket he is. -
I am refusing to accept the apparent outcome of the Sugar Bowl! Clearly corrupt influences must be at work! Before the game the point spread favored Clemson which proves that they won. Also, I have heard that one of the referees was born in Ohio, and both of the guys holding the measuring chain have visited there with one of them on the record as saying that Cleveland is not so bad. We should start Congressional committee hearings on Ohio State’s quarterback eligibility to play in view of his transfer from Georgia. Also, the whole departure of Urban Meyer needs to be exposed. You can not trust Ohio State; everybody knows that.
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@CSK:
Oh, come on. You’re maligning whiny, self-pitying pus-pockets everywhere. He’s much worse. -
@Flat Earth Luddite:
True, but it’s difficult for me to think of anything bad enough to describe him adequately. -
@Teve:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, cool. First one through my door gives me a gun. Hate to admit it, but that’s been my first thought every time an open-carry MAGAt wanders up to my cash register. I see several of them every week. -
@CSK:
Point taken. I concede, but it’s still hurtful to the poor whiny, self-pitying pus-pockets who aren’t named Donald Trump. -
@flat earth luddite: They are all around me out here. What it is they are afraid of I do not know.
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@OzarkHillbilly:
If they were 1/32 as smart as they think they are, they’d be afraid of people like me. There are a lot of us out there. We look like everyone else. And personally, I’m old enough that life in prison should be a couple of years and a wake-up. -
@OzarkHillbilly: On the other hand, many Americans have so many sets of (step) grandparents that anyone who catastrophe has struck seem like outliers. That and catastrophes only happen to poor people living in the sticks here in the first place. (And they wouldn’t have had any problems if they’d had the courage to leave their red state sh!thole towns like others of us did. 🙁 )
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@Teve:
8/ January 20 will be like if Joe Brown came out of the breakroom, fully caffeinated, and took over control of the lunch rush—but on a much grander scale. The upgrade from Trump to Biden is impossible to overstate. It’s going to make a huge difference. It’s going to SAVE LIVES.
I hope that’s true. What I expect is for the GOP to see that their big obstacle to regaining complete control during the mid-terms is the nation recovering from Covid-19.
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@Michael Cain: I think supply chain issues are causing some weird shortages. Worcestershire sauce isn’t something I’ve needed lately (I have about a half-bottle on hand), but there have been other items that just seem strange to be missing from the shelves.
Sorry we aren’t neighbors, I’d be happy to let you have some!
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@Just nutha ignint cracker: there is no doubt in my mind that if Biden developed a solid plan which would end the panic in three months, McConnell would do anything in his power to block it. He’s a depraved piece of shit.
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@Michael Cain: Lea & Perrins has had a lockdown-based bottling problem due to Covid.
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@Teve: Good thing I’ve got an extra then.
@flat earth luddite: I’m old enough that life in prison should be a couple of years and a wake-up.
Heh.
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For your edification and entertainment:
http://www.thebulwark.com/portrait-of-the-president-as-a-gangster/
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@Michael Cain: I noticed that, too. Haven’t been able to get any french dijon mustard under ANY brand name since the beginning of the pandemic, either.
Not sure why, but I have an Edit button, and it says my comment is awaiting moderation! What’s going on on the back end of the site today?!
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@Teve:
Lea & Perrins has had a lockdown-based bottling problem due to Covid.
No Lea & Perrins. No Heinz. No French’s. No Kroger’s house brand.
Years ago, there was a shortage of many integrated circuits because all of the resin used in the plastic-mounted versions in the world was produced in a single factory in Japan that was closed by a fire. Is worcestershire like that?
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@Michael Cain: idk. But I’ve seen articles going back to spring about the L&P problem. It could be that demand is very steady so the supply chain has no extra capacity.
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No Lea & Perrins. No Heinz. No French’s. No Kroger’s house brand.
My past experience in both food processing and wholesale grocery finds me unlikely to be surprised to discover that all of those brands might well be manufactured in the same factory. A frozen vegetable company I worked for during the summers in grad school processed frozen vegetables for 3 national brands and 4 or 5 house brands and the wholesaler that I worked for in my university days had a canned food line that they used to bid out to fill. We only provided labels and distribution chains. We canned nothing. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that Lee and Perrins only supplies one additional item–a specific recipe–but they may not, too. Foodstuffs are way more generic than we admit to.
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@Just nutha ignint cracker: it could be that. It could also be that when L&P went down, consumers changed brands and depleted those.
I was very surprised to find out that Red Bull is entirely a marketing company. They subcontract the cans out for like $0.03 apiece and resell for $3.
