Hodad

Me: Answered you directly You: You refuse to answer my question! ?

I assumed that you used "blew up" as a metaphor for cancellation, but are you trying to say it literally, like they physically sabotaged infrastructure? Are we in conspiracy fever swamp territory? And just spouting off trite phrases like "crapping all over the fossil fuel industry" is ignorant and childish--unless you mean that literally as well. Are you not capable of talking numbers and citing evidence? Is that beyond you? Because if you look at the data you simply cannot support your claims. You say he "destroyed" energy independence while domestic oil production increased dramatically from where it was when he took office, returning to near record levels. Get outside your bubble and deal in reality for a minute. You might even like it.

Oh good, more broad accusations without a shred of evidence or logic. But you did include an op-ed from a sketchy tabloid, so points for trying, I guess. Let's just take one thing and think it through. You say the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline affected gas prices, right? How? It didn't exist. About 8% of the pipe had been laid. It had never delivered a drop off oil anywhere and was years from having any effect of the marketplace--if ever it would have. Canceling it had zero impact on supply or demand, so how can you argue that it affected prices? The same thing is true of the cutback on new leases, etc. If you want to speculate that the decisions Biden is making today will affect had prices in a decade, great, go for it. But it's absurd to argue that he affected prices immediately. Domestic oil production has scaled up dramatically since Biden took office. That's a fact. Facts are good. You should try them sometime. Also, if this isn't vindication I'm not sure what is... A spill of more than 500,000-gallons of crude oil from the Keystone Pipeline in December in Kansas was caused by a combination of a faulty weld and "bending stress fatigue" on the pipe, the conduit's operator announced Thursday.

Maybe, but that's just blaming the victim for the actions of others. Like people who criticize a rape victim for wearing a sexy outfit out on the town. --- Well maybe if she hadn't dressed provocatively the rapist wouldn't have targeted her. Yeah, well maybe. But 100% of the responsibility for the rape lies with the rapist. 100% of the responsibility for Nichols' death lies with the cops who illegally and unjustifiably beat him. Full stop.

Yeah, who doesn't love chaos and hardship.? This is a super smart conversation.

Debt is accumulated deficit + interest. I don't think he's done anything to reduce the debt - nor can he, really - but not adding that larger chunk of deficit to it is a nice start. That debt is never, ever going to be repaid in the way an individual might pay down credit card debt. The only way to deal with it is to outgrow it. Remember, just like in personal finance, debt isn't necessarily a bad thing. Taking on debt to keep a recession from becoming a depression is a good value. There are scenarios in which taking on debt is rational, healthy and beneficial. You just need to make sure that debt is a reasonable relative to your overall financial health. Right now, if I recall, our debt is about 1x GDP. To make progress there we'd need to grow our economy faster than our debt. So even if the nominal debt rises, if the economy is growing at a faster rate we are making progress. And indeed, I think that's the only way forward. If we could ever get back to a balanced budget without crippling the economy we might push the debt to .9 GDP, .8GDP and so on until it's irrelevant, regardless of the number. ^^I would add that that's why economists were pissed at Bush and Trump, both of whom ran up huge elective deficits. That is to say, deficits that were politically motivated to stimulate already healthy economies rather than emergency borrowing to keep the economy afloat. Both left us in poor position to deal with the actual crises at the end of their terms and the ROI was awful.

Minority groups continue to be disadvantaged in every metric you can find. Seriously, all else being equal, being born white in America today is an obvious and irrefutable advantage. Pick a metric, any metric. I'm sorry that you fear the erosion of privilege, but fair is fair. Pop culture is what is popular--what sells. There is no "real" pop culture. Again, this smacks of the erosion of your personal cultural dominance rather than anything real. Like the old folks who complained that rock 'n' roll was not music, just noise. Apparently enough people have tastes different from you to move the market away from your preferences. Get over it.

Do I really need to link these things? Usually people debate about why something happened, rather than common knowledge facts that are available to everyone. Record profits for big oil, reported everywhere, but this site will do fine Treasury: Deficits declined under Obama, rose every year under Trump and are declining under Biden.

I shop carefully for big purchases, but I'm not very price sensitive to day-to-day stuff. If I want it I buy it. So, no, I haven't noticed in my own daily life. Look, pricing is primarily driven by supply and demand. Most of the inflation we're experiencing is related to supply shocks as fallout from the pandemic. Supply chains were disrupted by the pandemic, that caused shortages. A lot of people stopped buying and doing as much during that period, for myriad reasons. Producers scaled back production. And then when people reemerged demand ramped back up faster than production, so prices followed. If you can show me how Biden injected enough loose money into the economy that it translated to greater than pre-pandemic demand, great, we can blame Biden for inflation. But that's just not an economic reality. And in all honesty, the notion that Biden had any meaningful impact on fossil fuels is just silly. Fossil fuels have been going through the same pandemic-driven supply shocks as everything else. There is no shortage of US oil production. We're producing at near record levels. Production ramped up rapidly during the Biden administration. And yes, the oil companies made record profits on their near-record production. The pipeline that didn't happen didn't change anything. It didn't happen. Biden isn't manipulating the oil market with a stern look and a wagging finger. He's not a wizard. It's just a really silly line of criticism. If you want to criticize Biden, go for it, but if your criticism isn't grounded in reality people like me will dispute it.

Yes, Biden "attacked" fossil fuels into record profits for big oil and rapid expansion of production capability to near-record levels. I really wish someone would "attack" me that way and inflict such suffering. And the deficit has actually shrunk under Biden, down significantly from Trump levels. There are confounding factors for both presidents in terms of blame and credit, but the numbers are what they are.

Aside from inflation, which I'm aware of academically but haven't really experienced, this sounds peachy. Maybe oppressed minority groups will clamber toward fair treatment and conservative christians will stop trying to legislate their beliefs. One can dream. I don't think the fact that you're out of sync with pop culture really counts a a bullet point for "times are tough" lol.

No, Trump never "became" a conservative. Attempting to end the republic and seize the presidency without being elected is not conservative. Suggesting we suspend the constitution to put him back in office is not conservative. Those actions are radical in the extreme, far more radical than the "socialists" who hope to persuade people to vote one way or another. Trump never became anything other than the self-obsessed megalomaniac he's always been.

Hunter Biden. (Someone was gonna say it.)

Sorry, but you're reading that passage incorrectly. Deaths were NOT back down to normal in 2022. 44k excess deaths in 2020 (COVID, pre vaccine) 80k excess deaths in 2021, the darkest part of the pandemic. 46K excess deaths in2022 aligned with 2020 while vaccination continues in full stride See, the spike in excess deaths came in 2029 with COVID, but before the vaccine. 2021 came with significant jumps in COVID deaths, suicides, overdoses etc. Hard times are hard. But there's no apparent link to vaccines. I know zero people who were injured by the vaccine. I've never even heard of a third-hand acquaintance being injured, which makes sense, because these are EXTREMELY rare events.

What do I make of that? Honestly, what I make of that is that you are in a conspiracy bubble trying to make/imagine connections that further the conspiracy rather than letting the facts lead you to a conclusion. And part of it is taking in information from bizarre places that are not trustworthy and not in any way grounded in reality. A. That article doesn't say ANYTHING about vaccines. I mean, the Daily Mail is a tabloid, and even they promoting this kind of nonsense. So you or someone on social media that you follow (or whatever) conjured up that association out of thin air, for purposes I cannot fathom. B. SADS is not new. It's been around a looong time. Maybe forever. The SADS Foundation (mentioned in the article) has been around since 1991! Otherwise healthy, young adults have been "dying suddenly" since long before there was any vaccine and you are making a false claim to tie the two together. -- Oh, and BTW, the foundation also recommends the vaccines for all patients with SADS conditions. C. The data for excess deaths does not support any kind of vaccine harm theory. The AP Brian Tsai, a spokesperson for the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told The Associated Press that the claim misrepresents CDC data. Tsai said that from the start of 2021 to the 43rd week of 2022, there have been about 124,000 excess deaths in the U.S. among 0- to 44-year-olds compared to the 2015-2019 average. However, he said, there’s no indication this was vaccine related. This number is higher than the numbers published by OECD because the CDC’s data is now more complete, according to Tsai. The 124,000 excess deaths break down to about 80,000 excess deaths in 2021 and about 44,000 excess deaths in 2022. Tsai also noted that excess deaths for 2022 are similar to those in 2020, when there were about 46,000. Confirmed reports of deaths caused by vaccination are extremely rare, even with millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses having been administered in the U.S. Scott Pauley, a spokesperson for the CDC, told the AP that outside of nine deaths confirmed to be associated with rare blood clots following the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the agency has “not detected any unusual or unexpected patterns for deaths following immunization that would indicate that COVID vaccines are causing or contributing to deaths.” Instead, Tsai wrote in an email to the AP, likely reasons for excess deaths in this age group since 2020 include “increases in accidental deaths (mainly drug overdoses), suicides, homicides, heart diseases, liver disease, and diabetes.” He said a substantial number of the excess deaths are the result of COVID-19 itself. ^^This just isn't grounded in reality. I know you THINK you know lots of people who have been harmed by the vaccine, but I think it vastly more likely that you don't know anyone who has been harmed by the vaccine. Far more likely that you are applying the same conspiracy confirmation bias process evident in this SADS "theory." You, and likely many people in your social circle, are simply attributing any health setback after a vaccine as caused by the vaccine, because that's the narrative you've embraced. Doctors, researchers, statisticians --and the data-- disagree.

If you want to investigate the timing of Statistia's data pulls you go right ahead. The point is that you're looking at the same data set. And yes, that count is going back to the first COVID death, though there are other charts that slice the data other ways. COVID is much worse than the flu in every regard. That's why it caused alarm in the first place. This "dying suddenly" bullshit is straight out of the conspiracy fever swamps of the Internet. Get real.

I'm going to assume you didn't read past the headline. It goes on to say: "Research continues to show that people who are vaccinated or boosted have a lower risk of death. The rise in deaths among the vaccinated is the result of three factors, Cox said. They are: A large majority of people in the U.S. have been vaccinated (267 million people in the U.S., the CDC says). People who are at the greatest risk of dying from COVID-19 are more likely to be vaccinated and boosted, such as the elderly. Vaccines lose their effectiveness over time; the virus changes to avoid vaccines; and people need to choose to get boosters to continue to be protected. The case for the effectiveness of vaccines and boosters versus skipping the shots remains strong. People age 6 months and older who are unvaccinated are six times more likely to die of COVID-19, compared to those who got the primary series of shots..."

Easy poll, Gates is the only one likely to live for 7 more years.

@Infidel Dog IIRC, Statistia is actually sourcing data from the PHAC site at timed intervals, so you're looking at the same data, though perhaps off by an update cycle from time to time. Here's the chart from PHAC (you just select cases deceased in figure 4. And yes, the groups at highest risk are vaccinating at the highest rates.

Ah, the simple pleasure of making cruel and unfunny "jokes" at the expense of others. Whatever happened to the good ol' days when one could bully to the contentment of one's tiny, shriveled heart. Now society is so "woke" it's not even acceptable to tease a fat girl until she commits suicide. "Libbies" have ruined all the fun.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but you seem to be suggesting that tossing an additional 10% of Black children onto the streets with no education, no prospects and no hope will have the effect of reducing crime. That's pretty crazy, IMO. Most people are looking for ways to keep kids off the streets.

No, you can't prove any such thing. The data strictly and explicitly contradicts your claim. Vaccinated individuals are hospitalized at dramatically lower rates and die at dramatically lower rates. You can't hand-wave away that data by pointing to the total deaths, as if that is some meaningful measure of efficacy. If the vaccine weren't saving those lives the total deaths would be higher still And yes, I think that most people, aside from you, do know what a vaccine is. Remember how much time you spent pretending the flu vaccine isn't a vaccine? Didn't learn from that apparently. Your version of "statistics" is *exactly* like claiming that seatbelts don't prevent deaths because more people die in traffic accidents every single year. To make that kind of crazy claim you have to deliberately blind yourself to the lives that are being saved on a per-incident basis. The only reason anyone would ignore the demonstrable efficacy is because it's inconvenient to the political points you're promoting. There are people out there wondering if they should take the vaccine. If they took it, they'd be about 5x less likely to die if infected with COVID. Obviously a huge advantage, but you tell them not to do it because of some useless total death number. Your misinformation is lethal.

Your inability to comprehend and honestly discuss basic information has not changed all of these months (and FFS, learn the definition of the word "several") but for folks playing along at home ^^^ that post is bunch of pure, distilled crap. Statistical malpractice with deadly results. It's been pointed out to him many, many times that any measure of vaccine efficacy should control for age/risk. Despite this being pointed out, he consistently attempts to do the exact opposite, comparing the oldest and highest risk group that have been multi-vaxxed against the youngest and lowest risk group: the unvaxxed. Even if one *doesn't* control for age/risk comparing the standard vax crowd against the unvaxxed is 2x+ less likely to die. That's in the plain data. Again, without controlling for age at all. And when one does have the full data, the difference is even more dramatic. The PHAC data source that he, himself, cites EXPLICITLY contradict him: "Between August 29, 2022 and September 25, 2022, unvaccinated cases were 3 times more likely to be hospitalized and 5 times more likely to die from their illness, compared to cases with a completed primary vaccine series." They could not say it any plainer or more directly. I don't know that I've ever seen a more selfish and dangerous case of cherry picking. I believe this is because he has spent months and hundreds of posts spreading deadly misinformation and correcting course is too embarrassing. He'll deny, deny, deny until he dies--possibly from COVID. His ego is simply far more valuable to him than the lives of his countrymen.

While I can't deny the impulse to think that people too stupid to vax are also too stupid to test, this is observably and obviously false. Otherwise we wouldn't have data on outcomes among the unvaxxed. And it doesn't change the fact that all things being equal, vaccinated people with COVID are many times less likely to be hospitalized and many times less likely to die than unvaccinated people with COVID.

Or better yet, look at the incidence data to actually evaluate efficacy. ?