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Posts posted by Ghost of LL
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13 minutes ago, F250 said:
Because you are hoping for Americans to die in a terrorist attack. That's crazy thinking. I understand the logic but you are expressing the exact thing that you oppose, a lack of empathy.
He’s also demonstrating a troubling lack of profit motive.
I mean, how can I figure out how to short the 2025 version of Canter Fitzgerald?
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1 minute ago, CTC2 said:
Not watching. He’s just going to lie and say crazy shit. If he has a stroke or otherwise falls over dead, I’ll catch the postgame coverage.
If this were any kind of country, the Democrats would go full Liberatores.
Et tu, Bernie?
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2 hours ago, Wally Fairway said:
I moved about 30% into cash in Feb, and today added to my SPY puts. These were short term (Thur/Fri expiry) in anticipation of President Huff & Puff saying shit tonight that will negatively impact the markets over the next couple of days...shit like increasing tariffs, calling out Ukraine leadership, laying off thousands of federal employees, drill baby drill (which will cost the O&G industry money), crypto prez, maybe pardoning more criminals. Most of these things will cause stocks to flinch.
Wait til we get the jobs numbers on Friday.
Oh, and earnings season is going to be fun.
We're going to have a shitshow well into 2Q25.
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The Stars are playing the Devils tonight on Hulu. That's what I'll be watching on my tv with my iPad on Texas baseball.
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Is New York going to be in the United States?
I think not.
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3 hours ago, Bateshorn said:
luckily i slide back into bonds a few weeks ago on a lark.
You know it's bad when people are even really trying to buy the dip.
I also went into bonds about three weeks ago (and actually put the kids' entire 529s into fixed income). And Thursday I bought a bunch of May puts on SPY at 580, and I gotta tell you--I'm feeling pretty good about that.
We're going to get numbers starting this Friday that are going to be . . . not good. And I just don't know how the market is going to react to that.
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- Popular Post
12 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:10 minutes ago, austingirl said:This is from later in the same article. Note the last sentence.
The whole article is worth a read:
SpoilerSEMINOLE, Texas — When the local hospital warned of a brewing measles outbreak, Kaleigh Brantner urged fellow residents of this rural West Texas community to beware of vaccinating their children.
Two weeks later, her unvaccinated 7-year-old son came home from school with a fever. The telltale rash across his body followed. But his mild symptoms and swift recovery only hardened Brantner’s anti-vaccination convictions, even after an unvaccinated child died of measles at a hospital 80 miles away.
Texas’s worst measles eruption in three decades has surged to 146 known cases, with the true toll likely much higher, exposing how under-vaccinated communities are unnecessarily vulnerable to one of the world’s most contagious diseases, experts say. The first known victim was 6 and otherwise healthy, according to two individuals with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details that haven’t been publicly released.
The life-threatening outbreak in West Texas starkly illustrates the stakes of slipping immunization rates and the ascension of vaccine skeptics, including Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to the highest levels of the public health establishment.
And it has revealed how fear and the scientifically false claims of the anti-vaccine movement have seeped into communities such as Gaines County, the epicenter of the outbreak, hardening attitudes about vaccines, pro and con, in the face of a dangerous, preventable disease.
Brantner, 34, said she decided not to vaccinate her children after years of her own research and because, she said, her nephew had a severe reaction to the vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. She moved from New Mexico to Texas in part because it’s easier here to claim an exception to school vaccine mandates.
“A cough, runny nose, fever and rash to a healthy child is mild but vaccine adverse reactions are severe!!!” she commented on Jan. 30 on the local hospital’s Facebook post, which described measles symptoms.
Brantner’s son Paxton recovered from measles with little problem, she said, after she fed him organic food and cod liver oil, bathed him in magnesium salts and rubbed him in beef tallow cream infused with lavender. The family took precautions to protect others in the community, such as ordering groceries for pickup and keeping their older son out of school. He developed a measles rash Friday.
Medical experts and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say harm from vaccines is rare and is vastly outweighed by the risk of preventable disease. Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97 percent effective against the virus.
The origins of the outbreak remain unclear. Infections quickly spread within Gaines County’s Mennonite community, a diverse religious sect of thousands, some of whom educate their children at home or at private schools without vaccine mandates.
But the outbreak is no longer concentrated just in that group. It has infected people like the Brantner family, who are not Mennonites, spread across nine West Texas counties and crossed the border into New Mexico.
The outbreak spurred hundreds in the region to vaccinate themselves and their children as the threat of the virus became immediate. But it has made others dig in their heels, arguing that measles is no worse than chicken pox or the flu.
While most children with measles recover, as many as 1 in 20 develop pneumonia, according to the CDC. One in 1,000 experience swelling of the brain, which can leave a child deaf or with an intellectual disability. For every 1,000 children with measles, one or two die.
Still, some living with the outbreak argue that it is a good thing: Girls can grow up and pass antibodies to their children to shore up protection in infancy, while infected children gain lifelong immunity.
But doctors warn that comes at a cost.
“They could have had that same immunity with the vaccine,” said Tammy Camp, a Lubbock pediatrician who oversees doctors who cared for the child who died. “And, unfortunately, there’s a child who paid a very heavy price for that.”
Why this corner of Texas?
Conditions were ripe for a regional measles outbreak in Gaines County.
It has Texas’s third-highest rate of public school children — 13.6 percent — whose parents claim a “conscientious exemption” for at least one vaccine. In one tiny school district, nearly half the students claim an exemption.
In local private schools, officials believe, the unvaccinated rate is also high.
Measles spreads with extraordinary efficiency, hanging in the air for hours even after a carrier leaves a room. That’s why public health experts say a population needs at least a 95 percent vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity.
Measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000 but periodically reemerges, often after an unvaccinated person travels to a country where measles still broadly circulates. There have been recent cases in the Seattle area, New Jersey and Southern California. If vaccination rates are high, it’s like throwing a match into soaked wood; it fizzles out. If it infiltrates a community with pockets of unvaccinated people, it’s like throwing a torch into a parched forest and igniting a wildfire.
Kennedy, a longtime critic of measles shots and other childhood vaccinations, has not urged Americans to get vaccinated, as federal officials did during past measles outbreaks.
In an op-ed published Sunday on the Fox News website, Kennedy called on parents to discuss measles shots with their health-care providers.
“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” Kennedy wrote. “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”
Because Gaines County has no movie theater, limited health-care options and few big-box stores, people travel to cities more than an hour away for entertainment, shopping and advanced medical care — creating opportunities for the virus to spread through new pockets of unvaccinated people.
Measles outbreaks often link back to tightly knit groups with below-average vaccination rates, even if the majority of the community is immunized. In 2017, measles tore through a Somali community in the Minneapolis area, infecting more than 70. The next year, a measles outbreak in New York City infected more than 600 Orthodox Jews.
Disease detectives are seeing similar conditions among the West Texas Mennonites.
A misunderstood community
The spotlight on Mennonites has bred resentment in the community that they are being unfairly blamed, stereotyped as insular or conflated with subsets of Amish people who eschew modern medicine and technology.
Mennonites, descendants of persecuted European Anabaptists, have roots in the community that stretch back to the 1970s, when hundreds immigrated from Mexico.
Their more than half-dozen churches range from sprawling halls where hundreds pack the pews and services are live-streamed to tiny buildings on the outskirts of town.
Some are recognized as people who speak Low German or as women who wear head coverings. But many are indistinguishable from other residents. They work as baristas, staff home-style cooking joints and run construction companies, sometimes wearing traditional clothing.
Jake Fehr, pastor of the Mennonite Evangelical Church, who wore jeans and a blazer as he delivered a sermon about the dangers of anger, said Mennonite clergy do not use their pulpits to dissuade parishioners from getting vaccines. People base their decisions on their own convictions, he said, which range from skepticism of Big Pharma to a preference for natural immunity.
“It is not a matter of religion,” said Fehr, who noted that he and his four children are vaccinated. “This gets pushed as a narrative that we are not taking good health protocols and that we are sort of these anti-vaccine people, and that’s just simply not the case.”
He and other local leaders said a Mennonite school and day care deserve credit for temporarily closing after measles exposures, as do parents willing to abide by the 21-day isolation guidance for unvaccinated children who have been exposed to the virus.
Tina Siemens, a local Mennonite historian and author, described the ongoing measles outbreak as just another trial endured by a resilient people.
“It’s not like, ‘Oh we’re so anxious, this is an outbreak, we got to really be scared,’” Siemens said. “You work through it and you learn from your hardships and you get stronger because of it.”
Anti-vaccine views harden
Zach Holbrooks, executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, which includes Gaines County, recently visited Siemens at the museum she runs to share a medical journal article about the four months it took to end a measles outbreak in an Amish community in Ohio in 2014.
Some Mennonites have faulted him for singling out their community, but Holbrooks said he is just trying to provide information about the burgeoning risk.
Holbrooks worries that younger generations do not understand the danger of measles that he and his staff are now seeing. At a testing site outside the hospital, a mother showed up with a baby with blue lips — a sign the infant was struggling to breathe.
“That has haunted me,” Holbrooks said. “That would be the impetus for me to do everything I can to get the message out about measles vaccine.”
Vaccines can be a victim of their own success. When diseases vanish, the memory of their dangers and the urgency to eradicate them fade.
Marina Tovar brought her 15-month-old daughter Kambrey to be vaccinated at the Lubbock Health Department after Sunday church services. She had already planned to vaccinate her daughter when the family’s insurance plan restarted, but sped up her plans after reading about the outbreak.
“Why would I chance her getting it?” Tovar asked, noting that her two older children received vaccines. “And they’ve been fine. So we just wanted to keep her protected the best we could.”
But firsthand experience does not always change views on vaccines.
On a morning last week at a Mennonite-owned pizzeria, a Mennonite couple told a waitress that their 16-year-old son’s recent bout of measles was minor. “It was a rough couple of days, but nothing worse than a flu,” the father, Peter, said.
In an interview, the couple said they view childhood vaccination as tantamount to Russian roulette because of the risk of side effects. They spoke on the condition that their last names not be published because, they said, local Mennonites have been harassed and ostracized since the outbreak began.
The couple said those who choose not to vaccinate children are unfairly vilified. They said they protected the community by keeping their son and his older siblings home after he tested positive for measles.
“Some people have it really bad but most people don’t, just like with the vaccine,” said Mary, the mother. “Where there is risk, there should be choice.”
Experts say the choice not to immunize has consequences for the community, even when people experience mild illness and isolate once sick. People infected with measles can transmit the virus four days before the rash appears. Infants are too young to be vaccinated.
Still, some here believe the vaccines themselves are responsible for the rapid spread of the virus. They repeated false claims from anti-vaccine activists outside Texas who blamed free vaccine clinics launched in the early days of the outbreak for accelerating infections.
They have seized on a handful of measles cases in vaccinated patients (five out of 146, with vaccination status unknown for 62, according to state data) to argue that the unvaccinated are not to blame. But epidemiologists say it’s not surprising that occasional infections will occur among vaccinated people when an outbreak is rapidly growing.
Ben Edwards, a physician in Lubbock who treats some patients in Seminole, including a family with measles, recently released an episode of his podcast about the outbreak, in which he described mass infection as “God’s version of measles immunization.”
Edwards said the ideal treatment for measles is not all that dissimilar from other infectious diseases. His advice for patients is to undergo a “mitochondrial tune-up” to strengthen their immune response.
“Go get a green juice, or just drink some water with a pinch of sea salt and go sit outside and listen to a bird chirp,” Edwards said. “It sounds crazy, but it’s the basics. It’s what our ancestors knew.”
His views stand in stark contrast with the pleas of those on the front lines of the outbreak to get vaccinated. All 20 confirmed measles patients treated at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock were unvaccinated, officials said.
Summer Davies, a pediatric hospitalist, has cared for about half of them, including the one who died.
“This is a disease they didn’t have to get if they had adequate vaccination or if we had adequate herd immunity,” Davies said. “Knowing there was a way to prevent it is the heartbreaking part.”
The shocking thing about this article isn't necessarily the ignorance. It's the malevolence: "I'm not going to put my child at risk to save yours." Leaving aside the fact that there is functionally zero fucking risk, the out-and-out unwillingness to help the community in any way is remarkable.
But then it's coupled with the inevitable persecution syndrome. "We're being unfairly blamed for bringing disease." I mean, yeah--because you did bring disease. There's nothing "unfair" about it.
Between the ignorance, the malevolence, and the persecution syndrome, these people are a menace to society. If there's one thing I can agree with this Administration on, is that they be cut off from the federal teat, which is the only way they survive. Let them catch measles. And whopping cough and diphtheria, while they're at it. Cut off their Medicaid. Their hospitals will close. But that's ok--they'll have plenty of snake oil to keep them kicking. And along the way, we can cut off their SNAP and their farm credits and everything else. A century ago, their ancestors in that part of the state died of disease and starvation. We made a mistake in eradicating those two particular horsemen from riding roughshod.
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12 hours ago, Bullneck said:
Fuck all that: what does the D in Kamala D Harris stand for?
"Demon."
I mean, obviously.
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On 2/16/2025 at 8:28 AM, nnm said:
So not that different than American aging boomer Harley crowd. Not to be confused with the true biker gang crowd, who will rip your head off and crap down your neck.
I don't think there's a company out there that is going to suffer from the extinction of the Boomers quite like Harley Davidson.
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On 2/24/2025 at 1:35 PM, tx 3 putt said:
Here you go--the election results from Oklahoma County, Oklahoma (where Tinker AFB is sited):
Oklahoma County is about as blue as Oklahoma gets.
Now you want to really hurt some MAGAts--go after Vance AFB in Garfield County.
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1 hour ago, NoRagrets said:
I was pondering that same thing last week. I guess the hesitation is arms manufacturing. We just have the best shit and it’s not even close.
Well, I mean--yeah.
But at the same time, the Europeans have the F-35. The South Koreans have the F-35. And it doesn't take just a whole lot to reverse engineer it (and that's assuming Lockheed Martin wouldn't just license it out).
But beyond air power, I think the Ukraine War has shown that we're facing an entirely different battlefield than the one for which a lot of our best shit was built. I'm not at all certain that we have the best drones. And I'm definitely not sure we have the best cyber-security. And to the extent we presently have the best of either, the state of the art is advancing so quickly that we could easily be surpassed by a new challenger.
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5 minutes ago, MillerEP said:
I don't think they'll dissolve NATO, if they do anything, they'll create a European Alliance with similar rules. It's been gaining traction, but who knows if it all talk or not, SuingToGetAMessageBoard is probably right, they'll wait it out:
https://www.politico.eu/article/friedrich-merz-germany-election-united-states-donald-trump-nato/Germany’s Merz vows ‘independence’ from Trump’s America, warning NATO may soon be dead
Election winner likens the Trump administration to Putin’s Russia as he bids to take Europe in a new direction.“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” Germany's chancellor-in-waiting said. “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump's statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”
And apart from the foreign-policy wisdom of that statement (which I think is non-controversial), there's also an economic justification for it.
Let's just be real honest right now--the German economy aint looking so great at the moment. It has been stagnating for roughly a decade. And a rejection of free trade by the United States and others is going to disproportionately impact Germany, which has an economy that is heavily reliant on manufacturing.
But therein lies the rub and something the United States figured out a long time ago: a manufacturing-based economy can be boosted by defense spending. Actually, Germany figured that out a long time ago, too. We just made them forget it. But between Thyssenkrupp and Airbus and Rheinmetall, Germany has the industrial base that it can really boost its economy with a significant rearmament program. And while the SPD would have some real reluctance to do that for historical, ideological, and corruption-al reasons (looking at you, Gerhard Schroeder), the CDU doesn't share that handicap.
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On 2/19/2025 at 4:29 PM, The Dog said:
Inevitable, and it will expand again. Lots of money being left on the table by not expanding.
And please have all first round games on campus. That was amazing.
FCS playoffs has 24. Gimme more football.
The insatiable demand for "more football" is why I think CFB is going to become a spring sport as well as a fall sport. It already kind of is, with the last two rounds of the playoffs crossing into the spring semester. And it's not like we don't already have other sports that cross from the fall semester into the spring (e.g., basketball).
Have the regular season go 12 games. Great. But build in two bye weeks. That still puts championship weekend around the second weekend in December. Bowl games for the teams that didn't make an expanded playoffs.
And then a four-round playoff starting January 1. A bye week between each round. And during those bye weeks, have a series of inter-conference "challenges" for teams that aren't in the playoffs. That takes you all the way to the beginning of March Madness.
There's just too much money involved and too much demand for spring football for someone not to provide the supply. College football would be stupid not to do it. And I don't believe for a minute that the likes of Greg Sankey are stupid.
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I still can’t figure out how those penalties all worked out.
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Odds have now dropped to 0.3% after the latest observations.
Maybe next time, folks.
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I gotta tell you--I have four close friends or family members who have lost their jobs over the past three weeks. Even in the depths of the Great Recession, I don't remember anything like that.
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2 hours ago, Im_smarter_then_you said:
These people do American food better than Americans. Best egg salad sandwich and fried chicken I’ve had.
And that's just at the goddamned 7-11!
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- Popular Post
49 minutes ago, South Austin said:How subtle of you. Nothing along the lines of, “I’m ______, nice to meet you in real life.” Or, “How do you know the host?” Just right out of the gate: “How’s your mom?”
I'm sorry--you expected subtlety of a guy who dressed up as Pedobear to troll Penn State fans at their bowl game?
Look, brother--I bring a lot of things to the table. Charm. Wit. An encyclopedic knowledge of late medieval English history. A 9-inch schlong. That's why your mom loves me. But subtlety? Yeah, man--that's not my bag.
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9 hours ago, Red Five said:She's also a raging whore.
I happened to be at a function recently with Mrs.LL, and I ran into @South Austin. I asked, "so how's your mom?" Both Mrs.LL and Mrs.SouthAustin were very confused.
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36 minutes ago, Bateshorn said:
Well, if you want to push the German's and potentially the Poles into seeking to develop Nuclear Weapons, that's certainly one way to bring it to the table.
That's the tip of the iceberg. The South Koreans definitely have to be jonesing for the bomb. And don't think for a minute that the Japanese are going to sit by and not have a nuclear bomb if the Koreans have it.
The concept of non-proliferation is dead. Fucking Armenia will probably have a nuclear weapon by 2030. I mean, they'd be fools not to.
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21 hours ago, Bill Brasky said:
I get that this is the social media world we live in, but goddammit if you are healthy enough to take a video then you are healthy enough to help fellow passengers off the plane
I'm not arguing with you. At the same time, it looks like the FAs and a couple of other pax who were already outside the plane had everything under control and were providing all the assistance anyone needed. And at that point, aren't passengers coming out of the plane just best served to get the fuck out of the way?
And in the course of getting the fuck out of the way, they ought to keep their heads on a swivel so they don't get run over by emergency vehicles as happened with the KE 777 that crashed at SFO some years ago. I don't know that that necessarily means you ought to put your fucking phone away, . . . but yeah--probably a good idea.
In any event, and going to the issue at hand--wind at 270 isn't much of a crosswind when you're landing on Runway 23. It's a bit of a crosswind, but it shouldn't account for that roll to the right.
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2 hours ago, Beau Vine said:
4-0 after 2
Canada-US in the final, barring a miracle in the 3rd. Tonight's game is completely meaningless. Just let BC and BU suit up and play tonight...
The Stars' Finns sure made it interesting there at the end.
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1 hour ago, InkaUtexas said:
That is what Trump would do.
Musk would take the deal and then sell it to China.
Yep--that's exactly how Ukraine should deal with this. Sign on to whatever deal is needed to meet its immediate needs with absolutely no intention of ever fulfilling its side of the bargain. Because that's exactly how Trump deals with the world. So you might as well deal with him on equal terms.
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The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
in Cloak Room
Posted
Six months ago, I completely would have agreed with your take. You're entirely correct that social-media retribution often is disproportionate to the crime.
Today, however, I'm perfectly happy about what's happening to her. She's a wretched human being. She's being harmed because she harmed someone else. She'd harm you, too, if you ever came into contact with her because she loves "lib tears." With her compatriots, she is actively trying to destroy my country. Fuck her--I hope her life becomes so intolerable that she puts a bullet in her brain. Bonus points if she murders her husband on the way out, taking two Trump votes off the rolls.