Steve U,
Your position on Covid-19 issues sounds very reasonable to me. I give you a thumbs up.
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Is anyone else amused by the idea that there are people out there who would refuse a covid vaccine because it had not been sufficiently thoroughly tested, but would gladly gulp down their dogs heartworm medicine based on claims they read floating around the internet?
I will be the first one to agree that our medical system is deeply flawed - but I dont think that means we should try and pick and choose which products of that system to believe in.
What I think we really need is to move away from healthcare for profit. We should publicly fund this sort of basic research, have much more transparency, and treat healthcare like a basic human right. It would be nice to feel like doctors were trying to make you well, rather than wondering if they are just trying to make a quick buck by over-testing and over-treating. But thats just like, my opinion, man.
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Maybe technically true, but the only topic officially outlawed on this site has been climate change. Despite it’s persistent habit of cropping back up in the news, with the ice fishing in Texas, unprecedented fires, etc… 
It is amazing how people have such strong reservations about the vaccines. The reason they came through testing so fast was the billions pushed into the trials and manpower aspects. They are all open to independent peer review and scientific challenge. And all seem to nicely pass safety standards at a minimum, tens of millions have been injected, no signs of zombie-ism or nanobots. (As if that’s even a thing at all yet, where are people dreaming up this stuff?)
My main critique about the vaccines is that it appears they are becoming partially ineffective due to the rapid pace of mutations and the unregulated international travel and lack of effective public health measures.
With the exceptions of New Zealand and Australia. Concerts and major sports events are going on there in relative safety.
Vaccines are credited with 20 of the 25 year increase in life expectancy in the 20th century. The other 5 food inspection, clean water, advances in medicine.
So they can shoot me up with as many approved vaccines as they have. Sadly with all the conspiracy theorists out there, and national health policies that seem aimed at population thinning, this won’t be over this year or for years. Especially with the new variants out competing the weaker early strains. This 3rd wave is going to be a wicked kick in the butt. The good news is I’ll be able to get my shots a lot sooner than planned, as I think only 40 percent of the population will get their shots. But because of all the deniers and carelessness, we’ll be as much constrained by this public health and economic emergency for a very long time, until we take up the eradication policies of Australia and New Zealand. We wouldn’t tell people to “just live with” smallpox. They started out wrong, and have doubled down. The cost to society has been incalculable. Our leadership thought they could manage this, and keep their money rolling in all the while instead of cleaning it up.
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Anything that questions to information provided by the ruling order and distributed by the Main Stream Media is going to be labeled as conspiracy theory. Why would they lie? Many years I have been ridiculed for being a prepper. Water off a ducks back. The things that happened to the people in Texas would not have given me any real concern. Don’t really have to leave this property for at least a year if I didn’t want to. Would not really notice any difference. If some governmental agency were to come to confiscate what I have I would not be able to resist, but anyone else better be way better prepared than me because I don’t play.
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My ignorance continually amazes me! I would never have guessed that was banned!
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I think the conspiracy part comes in when you start to imagine that there is a “ruling order” or that the “main stream media” is somehow conspiring to do anything other than sell the most advertising.
We still live in a free country, and I wholeheartedly support the right to free speech that was enshrined in our founding documents. But, we need to be able to agree on facts! People will always have biases, and some people will continue to assert falsehoods even with the truth staring them in the face. It is easy to get dug in and want something to be true, even when it would not take much introspection to see that somewhere along the line one simply got turned around. If history proves me wrong about all the wacky theories floating around, I will be glad to admit it. Proof always comes out. Conspiracies inevitably unravel, because people are terrible at keeping secrets.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that the conspiracy can always go one level deeper. You can keep adding on more and more people who are in on the big lie, until eventually there is nobody left - everyone else is out to get you!
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A church is just a building, it is where all meetings were held for the first 150 years of this country, and yes they even discussed politics. 
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That’s the foundation right there. It’s the backbone of the scientific principle. Show repeatable, verifiable truth, or admit you’re wrong. No shame in that, that’s how we learn and grow. There’s a saying that I can’t cite right now that the man who thinks the same at 40 as 20 has wasted 20 years. Or something like that. Mark Twain? Our culture seems to criticize changing ones mind. What is unconscionable is not changing opinion in light of better information.
Look at plate tectonics, for a fine example. Though generations of elementary school students had asked if South America and Africa didn’t fit together, it wasn’t till the 60s that the prevailing wisdom was finally overturned, many a tenured professor had to eat crow I imagine. And science advanced. Now we know better, and have much better knowledge of geology as a result. That’s the challenge and learning process. It surpasses individual intuition and pride. We are blessed to have discovered this incredible tool to learn the truth of our world and our universe. No previous culture has had anything close.
There are opinions, and then there are facts. And there are things that are verifiable as non factual. Such as nanobots. I am aware of much talk and research on the topic, but as far as I know to date there’s no such thing. Never mind something so sophisticated that it could be engineered to manipulate people. Never mind that we don’t have any decent grasp on human physiology to even begin such a project. There is one science of manipulation that is advanced though, marketing. Corporations and political parties use those extremely sophisticated techniques, now turbo boosted with meta data analysis and AI to be able to manipulate people in ways they are unequipped or unaware to guard against. Such as the war against the truth of climate change, which seems to have led so many down the rabbit hole of disbelief in science. Follow the money…
As has been mentioned, soundest is to analyze the biases of any news source, and seek other sources to verify.
In this matter, it’s conclusive that the vaccines are safe. And generally vaccines are the best thing to ever happen to humanity. These ones may not fully hit the mark due to the out of control problem we face. I expect the MRNA vaccines will have an even faster turn around now that they are proven, there will be a second and probably third round of vaccinations, and hopefully a dismissal of some incompetent public health leaders so we can get down to eradicating this scourge.
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So, i had an idea! If one of you guys who are experiencing see your breath cold,could do an experiment. I think it wpould be interesting to take a picture of your breath cloud, and then put on a face mask and take another. This should give a visual representation of how much a mask captures or redirects your aerosols in your breath.
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Interesting idea but a week to late. -31f last Monday with a high of -4 for the day. Now as I write this+39 f. But if temps drop I will get after it.
BTW got your second shot yet?
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Hope you stay healthy too koen,God bless you and your shop crew and people comunitys. I agree that mask is better than not, i have had many serprize sneezing, a d the mask being there surely is better for keeping the spray much lower or less spray too hit some one with week ammune system.If i may have a bit of the virous and not know it. Since Testing only includes if you still haveing hard high fevers,as i had at the begining of outbrake, for at leist 3 weeks,I the bed then symptoms got less over the long haul.
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I am not sure that would work, as the mask is not filtering out suspended moisture - which is what makes your breath visible. I think I recall that a person can exhale a whole pint of water overnight - i.e. while breathing very lightly.
That moisture is dissolved in the air itself, which would make it too small for any filter you could breathe through (would need to be a molecular sieve). The Aerosol particles that have virus hitching a ride are larger, but of course some of them do probably get out and around most masks.
It would be interesting to see though if a mask changed the pattern of an exhaled breath. I would imagine it might exit the mask more as an expanding sphere than a directed stream? I feel like public funding for doing basic research about this sort of stuff should be obvious - and the results should be on the evening news.
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Hi Carl,
Its actual easy to test…
compare breathing without or wiyh any kind of mask ( obstacle ) towards:
Cold mirror at distance,
Inside a freezer
towards a qualm of smoke
Towards a candle
in air floating talcum powder
Anything that moves with a gentle breeze…
1000 and 1 possible ways to have it visible…
if you run around with a mask in a climate as ours over here, you’ll notice how fast it catches the moist from your breath…
if you want to think on the safe side; imagine the smoke from a cigarett / vape floating near you…
if you can smell it, you’r to close…
imagine the smell of gunpowder…
how far away to keep distance from the smell of wood condensate before it sticks with you 
dang man… 500+ K gone
still some doubters ? what does it take ?
To ya all: be careful, stay safe and healthy
i would love to see an Argos 2021 with all of you…
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Yes, it is hard to follow the rules. I have had it, and today I recieve the news that several people (in the 80’s but very active) unexpected and quickly died. I shut my mouth again and hold on, no other options.
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Sounds like you can add Ivermectin to the list of other supposed cures for covid.
Or it could be part of some sort of conspiracy. Get your newspaper clippings and a bunch of string, and connect it all up with thumb tacks on your wall 
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This whole topic is just like a sleeping bear.
A hornets nest. A wasps nest.
A forest ants pile colony.
Some kids just cannot resist poking and stirring it up.
The science Believers turning the human conceived TOOL of science into a worship system.
Unable to accept anything is true until their concept of peer reviewed science would prove it.
Here’s self beliefs for you.
All control groups have adverse reactions in the order of 2% knowing they were given something. And that something, possibly negative.
But the peer-science fails to acknowledge then in the given study group that a percentage of those sick given personalized attentions may be positively good-news benefited.
That nursing-Aid giving a warm wash cloth face washing to someone bed bound WORKS.
That Minister, nurse, family member hands holding and bedside praying WORKS.
Ain’t none of us want to just be a study group science experiment statistic. Just another data point in a contrived mathematical matrix.
People die waiting for the peer reviewed science to years later settle out.
F’k that noise.
Clearly this is really all about who will financially pay for what.
Another strike against western tech socialized medical systems.
I die, it will be my own choices.
No I will not take Ivermectin before getting COVID. Would not take it just mild sickened. Stupid. Let the body fight it. But body failing. THEN hammer me with Ivermectin.
And I WILL get COVID-19 vaccinated. Any one of the now three.
Bring it on. 66% to 85% effective is a no-brainer.
Steve unruh
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“This study has several limitations. First, the study was not conducted or completed according to the original design, and the original primary outcome to detect the ability of ivermectin to prevent clinical deterioration was changed 6 weeks into the trial. In the study population, the incidence of clinical deterioration was below 3%, making the original planned analysis futile. Ultimately, findings for primary and secondary end points were not significantly different between the ivermectin and placebo groups.”
This from the study conclusions.
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Yes, isnt it nice that real scientists are willing to be open about the fact that science is never perfect? They assumed that more people would develop worsening symptoms than actually did, so they would have needed more subjects than they had.
" The primary outcome was originally defined as the time from randomization until worsening by 2 points on the 8-category ordinal scale. According to the literature, approximately 18% of patients were expected to have such an outcome.23 However, before the interim analysis, it became apparent that the pooled event rate of worsening by 2 points was substantially lower than the initial 18% expectation, requiring an unattainable sample size."
The participants they recruited were also fairly young and healthy, so maybe it would have been different if they have been able to get more participants and had more old people who developed more serious symptoms.
I think the discussion of the underlying theory of the drug is also of interest:
" Interest in ivermectin in COVID-19 therapy began from an in vitro study that found that bathing SARS-CoV-2–infected Vero-hSLAM cells with 5-μM ivermectin led to an approximately 5000-fold reduction in viral RNA.8 However, pharmacokinetic models indicated that the concentrations used in the in vitro study are difficult to achieve in human lungs or plasma,25 and inhibitory concentrations of ivermectin are unlikely to be achieved in humans at clinically safe doses."
Sounds like the placebo might be safer and just as effective
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I’m sticking with Elderberry for now. It won’t prevent it. It won’t cure it. But it might slow it down enough to prevent nasty symptoms.
I will get the vaccine, but I’m not seeing much information on the long-term effectiveness of it especially with the different strains that are evolving. I forgot which trial vaccine trial I read, I think it was the astro-zenica, but it said it was only like 70% effective after 3 months. i’m like huh?
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Hi Steve, I’ve had dogs my whole life, a raw meat diet is the only way to go. All of our Shepard dogs lived beyond average life span, and never to a vet.
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