PILOT SPIN

I am not saying that this statement was controversial, but he didn't have to say anything and often takes the bait of leftists and responds in a embarrassing, childish manner.  That's his blind spot.  However, that's not a reason to decide not to vote for him.  The good far outweighs the bad.

I think you underestimate Trump.  He doesn't take the bait; his seemingly embarrassing, childish statements/tweets ARE the bait, and the left falls for it every time.

He said he would announce Friday or Saturday regardless of when the funeral would be held.

"That's their job.  There's nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being the president in his last year."

--Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Regardless of whether they hid her illness or not, I don't think there is any honest, ethical way we can allow Trump to appoint her successor before the election.  He needs to wait until after he wins.

hmmm, what part of the US Constitution discusses how the Presidents roles and responsibilities are constrained by waiting for the next election?

I was hoping you would weigh in. I thought I had remembered that the virus genome had been sequenced and it had been determined to most likely have arisen in the wild. There was another Chinese researcher who had said so, and that he believed it had been inadvertently released by the lab, not created by it. This woman, as much as I could understand her between her heavy accent and my hearing loss, seems to be saying the Chinese created it and deliberately released it. Why should I believe her over the other guy?

Because I’m not a virologist or haven’t even bothered yet to educate myself on virus genomes and then look at the thing myself, I don’t know first hand what the truth is. Occam’s razor would incline me to say it arose in the wild, was being studied at the lab, and the incompetent Chinese let it escape. But I also wouldn’t put it past the CCP to tweak a wild virus into something they could deploy as a bioweapon. It’s just that, if that’s what they were doing, why the hell wouldn’t they make one that was actually frightful to people not already with one foot in the grave?

I have trouble believing that the Chinese foresaw the economic shutdown when never in the history of man have we reacted to a pandemic by committing economic suicide, least of all for a bug with better than 99.5% survival rate. I’m sure they’re loving the damage being done to the U.S., but I seriously doubt they plotted the whole thing. In fact we know exactly where that idea came from: the 14 year old daughter of some government researcher or bureaucrat many years ago did a paper for her high school class postulating what would happen if we “social distanced” during a pandemic. That paper led to the development of a “plan” a long time ago, but it was never implemented until now. Why now and not for the swine flu is another topic, but not really something the Chinese control, unless they’re collaborating directly with Fauci.

But I am very interested in hearing what this woman says and seeing whatever evidence she can produce. I’m not going to believe it just because Fox and Tucker host her, but at least they’re letting her talk. If she is wrong, let’s look at what she has and prove it wrong.

When you introduce a weapon, you start small, in the event it blows back on you. If this was a weaponized virus, it makes perfect sense to me.

Even though it is not dangerous to people who don’t have one foot in the grave, make no mistake - the fear is real, ESPECIALLY among the young and healthy. This fear was not driven by the virus, it has been driven by the useful idiots in government who have done the CCP’s work for them.

The Founders know all about the media, which included newspapers as the time.  The internet is nothing more than an extension of what they had at the time. I think had they known that the government could stop the spread of plagues they might have thought about things differently.  Personally, I think your much vaunted freedom ends where you can transmit a potentially lethal disease to me, and I suspect the founders might have thought likewise.  And YOU are the most clueless fellow I know.  While my spouse likes you, I suspect she'd agree.

There’s a legal concept where the government may take your rights for a compelling reason. On one end of the spectrum say there’s a disease with a 99.5% fatality rate. Most people here would agree that would justify forcibly limiting rights. The reason would be compelling. On the other end we have diseases with less than 0.5% fatality that no one, ever, has thought justifies taking away our rights. Not compelling enough. Until Covid?

This would be more rational if we were discussing something with a fatality somewhere between these extremes and that would be a good question: who gets to decide what number is the magic cutoff? Apparently now some think it should be zero. That opens the door to the government controlling every detail of all our lives. Drive yourself to the grocery store, you put other people on the road at risk. The government should control when and how often you drive somewhere.

The stuff you do token from getting COVID works for influenza as well.  If folks are with the program there won't be much of a flu season this year.

I've been hoping for lower incidence of respiratory ailments.  And indeed, during today's (17 Sept) Gov Baker brief he mentioned how some of his medical contacts are noting lower numbers being seen (my note:  hopefully, it's real and not an artifact of covid-19 fear)

A counterexample was provided by my nephew's girlfriend.  She's a nurse in a NICU unit.  You'd expect that she is completely up on the whole protocol for masks, hand hygiene, etc etc.  And she is someone that gets a bit upset with people dissing the use of masks, etc.  A few weeks ago she caught a cold or the flu (of course she got tested for covid-19).

So, while all the social distancing, hand hygeine, etc should be effective, it does not guarantee that no one will get the flu this upcoming season.

Nature. 2003 Feb 27;421(6926):942-7

I found it in our university library.  I want to be sure this is your paper with 16 authors:
"Extra-embryonic function of Rb is essential for embryonic development and viability".  It was published in "Letters to Nature" which do not appear to be peer reviewed, but I may be mistaken there.  The research looks like it's an extension of existing research.  "... we hypothesized that disruption of Rb itself might also have deleterious consequences in placental development". 

How is this a major result that goes against established research?  You found another factor that might affect placental development.  Yay.  Is there research that says disruption of Rb does NOT affect placental development?