(03-31-2020 04:05 PM)mrbig Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 08:07 AM)Hambone10 Wrote:  

(03-30-2020 02:21 PM)mrbig Wrote:  Again, and I'm not sure why I need to repeat this, Trump is POTUS. It is his job to keep this country safe. It is my job to be an attorney and to keep myself and my family safe. I don't have power or authority necessary to protect the country, he does.

So what did you think about Obama's decision to NOT do any of the things that Trump has done, allowing 60mm Americans to become infected, 275,000 of them hospitalized and over 12,000 die in 2009? 275,000 people in the hospital, and were you concerned about overwhelming the system? We have a minute fraction of that and although we're far from out of the woods and could easily eclipse that number, we were nowhere near it when you started being concerned about preparation.

I have already commented that I do not think it is worth comparing Covid-19 with either H1N1 or ebola. According to the CDC, only .45% of Americans that contracted H1N1 were hospitalized and .021% of Americans died.

According to the numbers I have seen, Covid-19 has a hospitalization rate around 19%, so about 40 times higher than H1N1. Currently in the US, 2.0% of Americans that have contracted Covid-19 have died, so about 95 times higher than H1N1.

If the same number of americans catch Covid-19 as caught H1N1 and the current rates stay the same, we end up with 11.5 million hospitalizations in the USA and 1.2 millions deaths. I'm not sure how anyone other than Trump and Trump Jr. could defend those results.

So to respond to your question, I think Obama's responses were largely proportional with the threat posed by H1N1 and Trump's fall short of the threat posed by Covid-19. If you think Obama should have handled H1N1 the same way Trump has handled Covid-19 or that Trump should handle Covid-19 the same way Obama handled H1N1, I'd say you are a crazy person and stop responding to you.

As such, I don't understand why someone as smart as you keeps comparing Obama/H1N1 to Trump/Covid-19. They are very different and Obama/ebola was even more different.

And isn't the rate and duration of hospitalization one of the most important issues we're facing? Because we have a finite number of beds we can dedicate to treating "normal" patients and the influx of COVID patients? COVID-19 creates issues outside of just hospitilizations/deaths from COVID-19, right?

I wonder if we have statistics on healthcare worker cases for these types of viruses.

(03-31-2020 03:55 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 01:55 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Hospitals should be reserved for people most likely to need the broadest range of medical services... and places that are in some way 'less' than a hospital should be reserved for people who need fewer services.

THIS. Your statement here is one reason I get so pissed with people running to hospitals for every little thing instead of doing a bit of self-triage and learning and understanding what they can treat on their own at home, and saving the hospitals (and Doctor's office visits and expensive medicines) for those whose cases actually demand them. Example: Too many doctors have given out too many antibiotics because their patients demand them when they get the sniffles, leading to antibiotic resistant bugs. I have nothing against a proper response for the sick people who need it. Problem is, too many assume they need every blessed little thing because no one raised them to take care of themselves in the first place (broken families, bad public schooling, ignorant media, et cetera, et cetera (no "x" in there)) People screaming on the news and on the boards about tests when most of them don't need them, making shortages for the people who actually do is another.

It seems like you're primarily talking about pre-COVID care, is that correct? If so, I agree that hospital visits are likely not the best choice for many seeking healthcare - and that utilizing other resources like telemedicine should be the front-line response. I don't think I'd advocate for eschewing proper medical care for self-diagnosis, though. And it seems like you're getting into that realm with the comment about people not taking care of themselves.

Isn't one of the goals of encouraging more preventative screenings with PCPs to cut down on eventual hospital/ER visits?

(03-31-2020 09:19 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Where do we send the flowers?

I must admit, I have wondered at times how in the world you and Lad have Rice degrees, given some of the logic displayed here at times. But I would never insinuate that your intelligence is subpar.

GoodOwl is a nice young man. I met him and his son at the Liberty Bowl.

I think you are also a nice young man.

Lad is a very nice young man.

Foff....well, maybe that is a bridge too far.

I actually spoke with GoodOwl on the phone once shortly after he because an active Parliament participant and he was very nice. Many of his posts on The Quad are toxic and derogatory toward others in ways that exceed anything you, tanq, or 69/70/75 write. The are also less logical and less tethered to what I consider a realistic view of the issues, again unlike how I typically view posts by you, tanq, and 69/70/75. I haven't interacted with illiniowl as much, but that single post was, to me, pretty off the wall. If tanq can get away with his "west texas bluntness" then surely I can get away with some "alaska mountain man bluntness"?

Am I still a nice young man if I am secretly a raging racist who also brings his mom dinner twice a week?

(03-31-2020 04:05 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 03:51 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 03:42 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 03:38 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 02:40 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  N95 masks weight 0.35 oz a piece. So 45 masks per pound.

I doubt the entirety of the shipment was masks, but a lot of this PPE is not heavy.

Still fighting to make it a bad thing, because it done under Trump? Claro.

I don't think 17 tons is a lot. My guess, as a non-expert like you,is that it is really too little. So my non-expert impression is that it was a token, meant to mollify critics like yourself.

I always crammed a lot on my trucks, because the shippers charged by the mile, not the pound.

Uh, no.

I was pointing out that in this case, tonnage may not be connected to volume because PPE is light and not very dense. Describing PPE in tonnage is a bad way to describe PPE. Number of masks, gloves, face shields, etc. is much better.

It doesn't matter if the masks weigh 17 tons each or if they weigh, .0000001 oz each. Your (yours or your alter ego's, Big's, not sure which twin is talking) point is that Trump should not have sent anything to a country with an outbreak, instead hoarding it for us. The fact that they weigh X is not germane to the claim that we should not have sent anything. It is only germane to the claim that it was not a lot.

edit: Turns out it was Big in post #1676 who would have hoarded our supplies and not shared with a country having a crisis.

Yeah, I was just commenting on the weight of the PPE.

I don't know enough about what was sent, and when, to make a firm determination on whether they should have been sent. Hindsight likely dictates not, given that we have a shortage of PPE and healthcare workers are rationing masks. But how much of what we sent is important in saying definitively if we should/shouldn't have.

Considering the wish list for domestic use is measured in 100's of millions of units, mayber even billions of units, I dont think that one light tractor trailer load amounts to even a half-spit in an ocean. *That* is the point.

When you look at those numbers, the fact that one feels the need to even try and quantify a light tractor trailer load is pretty inane.

Kind of like harping on a billionaire who hands out $100 bills as tips when you think of it rationally.

The fact that that a light tractor trailer load is still being discussed seems just as inane. But, sally forth on that quest, Senor Quixote.

(03-31-2020 09:29 AM)tanqtonic Wrote:  You did engage in ad hom name calling. In essence, you communicated that you felt him ignorant enough that you are surprised that he graduated from Rice.

It truly is an ad hom, however nice you wish to dress it up. That is the fuller explanation, I was trying to 'be nice' by saying that it was 'not nice'.

Bluntly, I dont see a lot of tap dancing room on this. Not being judgmental, nor throwing an indictment. But being frank as to how I read this. If I made that comment, I would feel that I would be saying to someone that I believe them ignorant, albeit being couched in (not really) defensible language.

And, your comment above only says that you feel justified in labeling him as such an ignorant person based on his post. Your sentence above isnt that 'you didnt call out an ad hom or a name call', but simply that you feel that there is a justification for the slur by diplomatic sounding words. There is a difference.

I'll be honest. I'm not sure what ad hominem means. I have never cared enough to look it up. I think I get the general gist.

I didn't call him a name. I suggested some stuff, but didn't actually call him a name. Yes, I was doing a little tap dancing. I don't think either of them is ignorant, so that is definitely not a word I would use or intend to suggest.

If I call someone a raving lunatic, that is name calling. If I call someone dumber than a lobotomized cow, that is name calling (or close to it). Incidientally, I don't think either of those is accurate and am using them as random examples, not at all directing them at anyone here.

I certainly was not being respectful or nice. But you must forgive my alaskan mountain man bluntness sometimes. Not many people where I grew up so sometimes I struggle with social interaction.

(03-31-2020 04:26 PM)mrbig Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 09:29 AM)tanqtonic Wrote:  You did engage in ad hom name calling. In essence, you communicated that you felt him ignorant enough that you are surprised that he graduated from Rice.

It truly is an ad hom, however nice you wish to dress it up. That is the fuller explanation, I was trying to 'be nice' by saying that it was 'not nice'.

Bluntly, I dont see a lot of tap dancing room on this. Not being judgmental, nor throwing an indictment. But being frank as to how I read this. If I made that comment, I would feel that I would be saying to someone that I believe them ignorant, albeit being couched in (not really) defensible language.

And, your comment above only says that you feel justified in labeling him as such an ignorant person based on his post. Your sentence above isnt that 'you didnt call out an ad hom or a name call', but simply that you feel that there is a justification for the slur by diplomatic sounding words. There is a difference.

I'll be honest. I'm not sure what ad hominem means. I have never cared enough to look it up. I think I get the general gist.

I didn't call him a name. I suggested some stuff, but didn't actually call him a name. Yes, I was doing a little tap dancing. I don't think either of them is ignorant, so that is definitely not a word I would use or intend to suggest.

If I call someone a raving lunatic, that is name calling. If I call someone dumber than a lobotomized cow, that is name calling (or close to it). Incidientally, I don't think either of those is accurate and am using them as random examples, not at all directing them at anyone here.

I certainly was not being respectful or nice. But you must forgive my alaskan mountain man bluntness sometimes. Not many people where I grew up so sometimes I struggle with social interaction.

No need for any forgiveness from this quarter. As I said, I am far from being a person to cast a stone here.

If you feel comfortable with your bluntness, so be it.

(03-31-2020 04:15 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 03:55 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 01:55 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Hospitals should be reserved for people most likely to need the broadest range of medical services... and places that are in some way 'less' than a hospital should be reserved for people who need fewer services.

THIS. Your statement here is one reason I get so pissed with people running to hospitals for every little thing instead of doing a bit of self-triage and learning and understanding what they can treat on their own at home, and saving the hospitals (and Doctor's office visits and expensive medicines) for those whose cases actually demand them. Example: Too many doctors have given out too many antibiotics because their patients demand them when they get the sniffles, leading to antibiotic resistant bugs. I have nothing against a proper response for the sick people who need it. Problem is, too many assume they need every blessed little thing because no one raised them to take care of themselves in the first place (broken families, bad public schooling, ignorant media, et cetera, et cetera (no "x" in there)) People screaming on the news and on the boards about tests when most of them don't need them, making shortages for the people who actually do is another.

It seems like you're primarily talking about pre-COVID care, is that correct? If so, I agree that hospital visits are likely not the best choice for many seeking healthcare - and that utilizing other resources like telemedicine should be the front-line response. I don't think I'd advocate for eschewing proper medical care for self-diagnosis, though. And it seems like you're getting into that realm with the comment about people not taking care of themselves.

Isn't one of the goals of encouraging more preventative screenings with PCPs to cut down on eventual hospital/ER visits?

Somewhat. For some reasons, it seems today far fewer people have been raised/taught to do some self-care first, or at least consider it. My goodne4ss, more information is available today to the average citizen and less people than ever seem capable of reading ti or using it. Many people today, it seems, don't have a clue how to take care of themselves without a doctor and an insurance card constantly at the ready, and I think that's a problem that makes things like this virus much worse, and more costly, for everybody.

I worked in a pharmacy for a few years among other things growing up. The pharmacists would often point out how many people were coming in for prescriptions that seemed like overkill for what they supposedly had; that many people would get a Rx for something just because their insurance paid for it, when something OTC, or even a home-remedy would do as well or better for them; That many of them never bothered to read the insert information or warnings on the back of medicines they bought, et cetera. Maybe it was the fact that I saw so many people come in for/with so many different things, and I would listen to the pharmacist's conversations with customers and ask them questions about what the different drugs did and also would ask about and read many of the bottles and pills I was stocking out on the shelves in the OTC section...I guess a lot of folks don't know about these things nowadays, but it seems like there is a pre-disposition to just blindly run to doctors and hospitals for anything and do whatever as long as you can scan an insurance card and few seem to question or look for alternative remedies.

My present concerns from this coronabug are the extreme amounts of public financing being thrown at it and the bucket list of goodies in these spending bills that will have a far more negative impact on the average American now and in the future than if we don't get every single case of coronabug exactly right by shutting everything down for several months instead of a few weeks. Inflation and economics are real, as real as this bug. Eventually, those costs have to be weighed against what we are doing and their effect on the average poor and middle-class working American needs to be taken into account. Same as with for Health Insurance, vs 'health "care"' disguised as over-bloated government-mandated insurance monstrosities like ACA, which didn't do anything to fix the alleged problem that insurance and health care cost too much; well, yeah, if you bloat up policies and take away choice from people with government mandates, what else could you expect but much higher prices and much worse actual care and insurance?

Something just feels rotten in Denmark with the way this whole thing is playing out. Ham seems to have a better handle on the medical ground-game reality than many of us, but at some point, someone has to be brave enough to re-examine just what it is we are doing here. We just cannot shut down everything endlessly every single time this comes up--and if the Chinese are planning to release another one of these bug-bombs, what then? We can't use all our ammunition because there may be something worse coming that we will not be able to defend.

(03-31-2020 04:18 PM)mrbig Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 09:19 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Where do we send the flowers?

I must admit, I have wondered at times how in the world you and Lad have Rice degrees, given some of the logic displayed here at times. But I would never insinuate that your intelligence is subpar.

GoodOwl is a nice young man. I met him and his son at the Liberty Bowl.

I think you are also a nice young man.

Lad is a very nice young man.

Foff....well, maybe that is a bridge too far.

I actually spoke with GoodOwl on the phone once shortly after he because an active Parliament participant and he was very nice. Many of his posts on The Quad are toxic and derogatory toward others in ways that exceed anything you, tanq, or 69/70/75 write. The are also less logical and less tethered to what I consider a realistic view of the issues, again unlike how I typically view posts by you, tanq, and 69/70/75. I haven't interacted with illiniowl as much, but that single post was, to me, pretty off the wall. If tanq can get away with his "west texas bluntness" then surely I can get away with some "alaska mountain man bluntness"?

Am I still a nice young man if I am secretly a raging racist who also brings his mom dinner twice a week?

Going back to that, again?

You might be. I don't think anybody is pure evil or pure good. You and the other liberals tend to use racism as the dividing line between pure evil and good people.

I have known lots of good people who have a touch of racism in them. Some have been prejudiced against blacks, or Asians, or Germans, or Mexican(hispanics) or jews, or whites. Some have been virulent, some mild. I once knew a black man who fell apart on learning his daughter was a lesbian. I had to talk him out of suicide. Was he pure evil? I also knew a man who used the n-word a lot. He gave generously to various charities. Was he pure evil. His best friend was Mexican (as he called him). But they had enlisted together and fought on Iwo Jima together. Jay would have given his right arm for Nacho, but you wouldn't know it at first by the language. You guys are very judgmental and rigid.

This is probably the most evil racist I know of, and probably worse than all the guys carrying tiki torches. But I doubt even he is pure evil.

As for GoodOwl, he is part a spectrum of people with a variety of ideas. I think some of his ideas are too much, but I think the same of you and Lad. I tend to be a bit more in agreement with him than you, if only because I cannot identify where his words and thoughts originate. I think it takes all sorts. You and Lad seem to judge on a Pass/Fail basis. Personally I have learned to be more tolerant than I used to be. The group that I really hated back then? Baptists.

Lighten up, Francis.

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/03/31/...-closures/

Texas officially (unofficially) joins the full state lockdown on Thursday. Except Abbott doesn't want to call it a shelter in place. During a news conference at the Texas Capitol, Abbott declined to call his latest executive order a shelter-in-place or stay-at-home order, arguing such labels leave the wrong impression and that he wants Texans to know, for example, they can still go to the grocery store. But in an interview afterward, he said "it's a fact" that the executive order nonetheless brings Texas up to speed with states that have issued orders with those labels.

Oddly, Abbott did include religious services on his list of essential services. All of the churches in my area are already doing virtual services. We had someone pass out in the Catholic church 3 weeks ago and was later determined to be a positive case. But thankfully he and everyone else who helped him are fine.

Here's the full list of essential services.

http://tdem.texas.gov/essentialservices/

Quote:One minor side effect of the pandemic is that perhaps more people will learn about what drug research and clinical trials can really be like. Today’s example: we have a clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine from Wuhan that has just published on a preprint server. What’s good is that this one is blinded, randomized, and controlled (like the earlier hydroxychloroquine which one I blogged about here from Zhejiang University, so we can actually talk about it rather than just spend all our time wondering what the heck is going on.

This time there were 31 patients in the treatment group and 31 in the control group. Median age was 44.7 years, male-female ratio almost even. Both groups got standard-of-care (oxygen therapy, antiviral drugs, antibiotics – presumably against suspected bacterial pneumonia – and immunoglobulin, with or without corticosteroids). In addition, the treatment group got 5 days of hydroxychloroquine, 200 mg b.i.d. All were diagnosed with (relatively) mild illness, but all had pneumonia by CT scan. More patients in the treatment group presented with fever and cough as compared to the control group.

After five days of treatment, the treatment group showed significant improvements in comparison to the controls in fever, in cough, and in pneumonia (by CT scan). This is actually the first controlled study to show any benefit for chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine therapy against the coronavirus – it may sound odd to say that, but all the positive reports we have had up to now are anecdotal reports and open-label studies without control groups. The one controlled study we have seen, as mentioned, showed no effect.

So you can see that these two came out rather differently, with the Zhejiang study showing no detectable difference on treatment and the Wuhan one showing what looks like a real effect, especially on radiological progression of pneumonia (which I have to say is a very strong endpoint to measure). Here, then, is a good exercise in interpreting clinical trial statistics: we are now one-and-one after two small hydroxychloroquine trials: which one (if either) reflects the real-world situation?

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ar...ine-trials

(03-31-2020 03:25 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  So, now you are joining in the parade of putting words into mouths? Is that a legal tactic?

So, feel free to quote the post(s) in which I said trump never lies.

What I have been doing is pointing out to Lad that his heroes, the ones he has voted for, are no different than Trump in their Truthfulness. Sorry that was so hard to see. But I fail to see that failing to detail who is excepted from a ban comes anywhere near those lies, or anywhere near "you can keep your doctor'.

Sorry my point went over your head, and sorry you have to make up a fake position for me to defend.

OO, we obviously clash a lot, but I was 100% just trying to be funny and post the John Oliver bit, not trying to put words in your mouth. I apologize for it coming across that way.

(04-01-2020 12:54 AM)mrbig Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 03:25 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  So, now you are joining in the parade of putting words into mouths? Is that a legal tactic?

So, feel free to quote the post(s) in which I said trump never lies.

What I have been doing is pointing out to Lad that his heroes, the ones he has voted for, are no different than Trump in their Truthfulness. Sorry that was so hard to see. But I fail to see that failing to detail who is excepted from a ban comes anywhere near those lies, or anywhere near "you can keep your doctor'.

Sorry my point went over your head, and sorry you have to make up a fake position for me to defend.

OO, we obviously clash a lot, but I was 100% just trying to be funny, not trying to put words in your mouth. I apologize for it coming across that way.

Yes, this message board medium does not convey humor well. I am sure I could have caught it if we were face to face (but 6 feet apart)

You sometime ago asked for more humor here, and I have tried, but clearly once in a while the efforts will fall flat.

We are good.

(03-31-2020 10:18 AM)tanqtonic Wrote:  3 days ago he leveled the DPA hammer on GM for ventilators. Seems that the left leaning people on this board arent really up on the current status of the use of the DPA.

And, there are no 'step 1, step 2' under the DPA. In the first instance, he invoked it but didnt use it; it was meant as a 'talking point' to the industrials and pharma. Something to show that in 'negotiations', there is *clearly* a party who has leverage.

4 days ago he invoked it again -- but this time with hammer directly on a company.

My advice is that if you lefties are going to argue about the shortcomings of the usage (or not) of it, that you actually get both the usage dates, the mechanics of using it, and the results of any invocation straight before arguing how bad it is.

Just saying.

Forgive me, I am busy trying to keep 3 kids in line with online schooling while doing extra chores and "teleworking". Some of the minutia fall through the cracks.

I still don't understand why he didn't "invoke" it to either use it as a "talking point" or as a "hammer" 20-30 days earlier. People who didn't need to catch Covid-19 have caught it due to inadequate PPE supplies. His decision to not use this tool earlier is, along with a lot of other factors, responsible for some people catching Covid-19. Same with his decision not to invoke the DPA earlier to increase respirator production.

The tidal wave has been coming and plenty of experts were pointing to it and telling him that he had the power to get the country to high ground. He took us up to the porch. Better than standing on the beach, but not as good as the 2nd floor.

(03-31-2020 11:19 AM)Hambone10 Wrote:  On the other hand, the two of you have made if a point to offer criticism and worse, credit to others... without one single scintilla of factual evidence to support that they would have done better.... and when people point this out to you, you act as if the comparisons to those others would have existed independently of your blind support for them and criticism of others?

How on god's green earth are we supposed to offer a scintilla of factual evidence about a hypothetical like "what would Clinton/Biden do?"? To quote a great philosopher, "Christ on a cracker".

Honestly, for purposes of hypothesizing how Clinton or Biden might respond to Covid-19, I consider both a hypothetical Hillary Clinton presidency and a prospective Biden presidency as essentially another term of the Obama presidency. I don't think either of them would have markedly different responses to what he might have done. I think all 3 listen to scientists and experts more than Trump so I think they would have almost everything that Trump did at an earlier date, but without disbanding the NSC staff, cutting the CDC budgets in the same way, and with less inaccurate information disseminated. I think the same is true of most mainstream democratic politicians as well as many non-Trump Republicans. To put it another way, if Dewine or Romney or Kasich was president, I feel like their response to Covid-19 would have been pretty similar to Obama, Clinton, or Biden. For the most part, it is just about listening to the experts.

All that said, I have less than zero interest in discussing hypothetical Clinton or Biden responses. It doesn't get us anywhere and neither side can prove or disprove anything. Why waste the time or words?

69/70/75 gave Trump a B+ and I gave him an F. I'm happy to hear how others would grade him. I think Lad gave him some kind of C, I'm just too lazy to look it up...

Evening graphs. Not really anything good to say for the USA. I'm still waiting for someone to explain why Trump gets a passing grade when the USA had a 1-month head start to respond based on China's response and yet we somehow end up as the worst in the world for total cases and trending in very horrifying directions on total deaths. I guess it was cultural differences and had nothing to do with Trump.

(03-31-2020 03:51 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  edit: Turns out it was Big in post #1676 who would have hoarded our supplies and not shared with a country having a crisis.

Not really what I was saying. My point was at the time the PPE supplies were being given to China, many experts seemed to believe that we had a large active outbreak and just didn't know it yet because of the lack of testing. So I was saying that we should keep the supplies to treat our own outbreak rather than sending supplies elsewhere to treat someone else's outbreak. If we weren't having an outbreak, by all means, donate the supplies to help out. I'm a lefty after all!

(03-31-2020 03:55 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  

(03-31-2020 01:55 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Hospitals should be reserved for people most likely to need the broadest range of medical services... and places that are in some way 'less' than a hospital should be reserved for people who need fewer services.

THIS. Your statement here is one reason I get so pissed with people running to hospitals for every little thing instead of doing a bit of self-triage and learning and understanding what they can treat on their own at home, and saving the hospitals (and Doctor's office visits and expensive medicines) for those whose cases actually demand them. Example: Too many doctors have given out too many antibiotics because their patients demand them when they get the sniffles, leading to antibiotic resistant bugs. I have nothing against a proper response for the sick people who need it. Problem is, too many assume they need every blessed little thing because no one raised them to take care of themselves in the first place (broken families, bad public schooling, ignorant media, et cetera, et cetera (no "x" in there)) People screaming on the news and on the boards about tests when most of them don't need them, making shortages for the people who actually do is another.

My wife was on call last weekend (she covers 2 hospitals). I don't think she had to venture to the ER (just labor & delivery and surgery). But from the people she spoke to, apparently this is actually happening as they were getting many fewer ER visits from people who didn't really need them (but a lot of Covid-19 visits).

Big, I get the impression you are one of these guys who gives all the credit or all the blame to the QB.

Although perhaps Trump better fits the role of Coach or Athletic Director, or in the pros, General Manager. Any way you look at it, you want to blame one guy for the team performance. I am not even sure the performance was bad. Continuing the football analogy, you seem to want to say Rice did poorly because Furman did better.

I don’t know on what basis to rate Trump, or the CDC. I don’t have the experience with huge companies or government. But I think the response was not abjectly terrible, which would be an F. I think it was reasonably within the bounds of what we could expect in this country, regardless,of leader. So a B sounds reasonable to me.

I guess the implication of an F is that anybody would have been better. I don’t come close to believing that. Would somebody else have been better. Maybe. Hard to believe he would be the best out 7 billion, so probably. Maybe Petraeus. Maybe Chris Christie. Maybe Fauci. Maybe Joe the Plumber. But They were not in office. We had no alternative that had been tested. The only alternative would have been Hillary, who had no experience in handling any sort of crisis. She was groomed and nominated to be one thing only, the First Woman POTUS. So, IMO, if you compare only to Hillary, he gets an A. If you compare him to the whole world, he gets a B. If we compare him to you, Big, he gets an F, since you would have done all the right things at the earliest possible moment, quickly discerning which experts to listen to and which to ignore. Compared to me, he gets an A++++++. I would have been vacationing in Hawaii.

I think this assigning of blame/credit is as useless as the comparing of Trump/Hillary. But it seems to be important to you and all Democrats to be certain he is the goat, or scapegoat. Must be an election thing. If the primary goal is to defeat Trump and replace him with anybody, then he cannot be allowed to be credited with anything. So we start with the idea he is bad, and so whatever he did was bad, and then we can fill in the reasons for that as we go along, like he sent 17 tons of gear to China.

Sorry to have rambled. Wizened old coots shouldn’t indulge in energy drinks, I guess.

(03-31-2020 04:40 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Going back to that, again?

You might be. I don't think anybody is pure evil or pure good. You and the other liberals tend to use racism as the dividing line between pure evil and good people.

I have known lots of good people who have a touch of racism in them. Some have been prejudiced against blacks, or Asians, or Germans, or Mexican(hispanics) or jews, or whites. Some have been virulent, some mild. I once knew a black man who fell apart on learning his daughter was a lesbian. I had to talk him out of suicide. Was he pure evil? I also knew a man who used the n-word a lot. He gave generously to various charities. Was he pure evil. His best friend was Mexican (as he called him). But they had enlisted together and fought on Iwo Jima together. Jay would have given his right arm for Nacho, but you wouldn't know it at first by the language. You guys are very judgmental and rigid.

...

As for GoodOwl, he is part a spectrum of people with a variety of ideas. I think some of his ideas are too much, but I think the same of you and Lad. I tend to be a bit more in agreement with him than you, if only because I cannot identify where his words and thoughts originate. I think it takes all sorts. You and Lad seem to judge on a Pass/Fail basis. Personally I have learned to be more tolerant than I used to be. The group that I really hated back then? Baptists.

Lighten up, Francis.

Apparently I am way funnier in my own head than in yours. Just trying to crack some jokes, this time poking fun at our previous exchange about racism. So ... lighten up, Francis? I again don't know what that means, but it seems to fit the circumstances. Another joke!

As for GoodOwl, I might need to retract my earlier comment. He had a couple solid posts today, free of his usual vindictive. A welcome addition to his lexicon, as far as I am concerned.

(04-01-2020 01:56 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Big, I get the impression you are one of these guys who gives all the credit or all the blame to the QB.

Although perhaps Trump better fits the role of Coach or Athletic Director, or in the pros, General Manager. Any way you look at it, you want to blame one guy for the team performance. I am not even sure the performance was bad. Continuing the football analogy, you seem to want to say Rice did poorly because Furman did better.

I think this is a fair assessment of how I assess POTUS, governors, and mayors. They are the QB, the head coach, the general manager, and the owner all wrapped into one spot. Of course, there are certain areas where they are constrained by Congress. But generally, if something falls through the cracks in the executive branch, I think POTUS is the one who needs to answer. After all, he/she is the only one who is elected. It was either POTUS's responsibility to see the problem and fix it or to hire the kind of people who would ferret out the problem and fix it. I guess that is the slings and arrows of being the most powerful person on the planet.