Profile For midnight fox

The fully approved, licensed vaccine and the emergency use vaccine aren't similar, they are exactly the same, and they both still have the same liability protection, under a public health law the Trump administration invoked. "Both" vaccines (the only difference is a legal distinction) are in the federal government's Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program.

or in the words of Dr. Malone,

Malone quickly conceded his statement on the Bannon show was wrong. “When one is doing rapid analysis on the fly, one does not always get everything right,”

“On this particular legal liability issue I did not hunt down the details myself, and relied on comments from a third party lawyer which were not fully correct.”

Brett asked:

Do you believe I'm "creating an intuition that exaggerates the universality" of the censorship that's taking place?

I couldn't believe that about you because those subjects lie outside of science's domain. My turn of phrase only applies to what can be scientifically observed and determined.

To the extent our record-keeping can go, we can tally how many humans get struck by lightning and we can track how many humans are alive, so we can scientifically determine the statistical odds of being struck by lightning. The same goes for global average temperature and physical distance between locations.

I was showing with those examples some of the challenges of relying on anecdotal evidence, specifically when it comes to calculating the actual risks of adverse side effects of the vaccine. Anecdotal evidence needs to come with additional information to be accurately useful in calculating those risks.

The sociopolitical dimensions to this like government mandates and agendas and the law and social media policies require a different kind of approach to understanding than science can directly offer.

Davy's post did a great job of putting a spotlight on that; people form differing competing narratives of what's happening and what it means, interpretative narratives that attempt to be explanatory.

IMO the best things to look for when evaluating the validity of a narrative is either to which degree it relies on direct evidence to support its conclusions or how much predictive value it has in determining what comes next.

Brett said:

So, four deaths and two dangerous reactions just from the tiny group of people I know, which isn't much. I don't know anyone who died from aspirin or had to be rushed to the hospital after taking it, do you?

I don't know anyone who's had any adverse reaction to aspirin or the vaccine personally. I'm in a group for people with a certain medical condition, and many people ask if the vaccine poses an increased risk to people with that condition. I've seen two or three people say they or someone they knew had an adverse reaction to it, although it wasn't always clear if the vaccine was actually the cause. Dozens of other people said they had no side effects at all, or only a slight immune response.

From a scientific standpoint, when looking at anecdotal evidence, there are other questions that need answering alongside that evidence to help understand what to make of it. How specifically did the vaccine cause those deaths, what was the causal relationship? What were the reactions? What were these people's medical histories? If the accounts are all true, is the sample size representative of the general population, or are there genetic and environmental factors in play that increased the occurence in that sample compared to the overall average?

There's a clear tendency for personal experience to sometimes create an intuition that exaggerates the universality of that experience. Someone who's been struck by lightning will tend to overestimate the odds of it happening to anyone, people who live in the desert will tend to overestimate the global average temperature, people from the north who are afraid of illegal immigrants tend to estimate that the southern border is several hundred miles closer to where they live than northerners who don't feel afraid.

It's why anecdotal evidence needs to come with a lot more information to help settle it within the overall picture. But I understand not trusting whether any of the scientific data isn't completely fabricated. Trust in institutions like the government is pretty low, in many ways deservedly.

Andrey said:

So in this sense your statement is incorrect - experience can offer everything, depending on what you need.

But I was talking specifically about it not being able to directly offer anything in being able to understand what a new virus does inside the human body, what the incidence is of which types of damage it causes to different "types" of bodies, and how to understand and calculate the risks and efficacy of treatments for it. Any of that requires an objective method to obtain that information.

The study didn't compare it that way, but rather compared the vaccinated with those that developed a SARS-CoV-2 infection (and presumably were unvaccinated).

That's incorrect. It was made clear at the very beginning (the abstract) that they performed two separate analyses, neither of which compare what you just said.

"For each potential adverse event, in a population of persons with no previous diagnosis of that event, we individually matched vaccinated persons to unvaccinated persons according to sociodemographic and clinical variables."

"To place these results in context, we performed a similar analysis involving SARS-CoV-2–infected persons matched to uninfected persons."

That's why in the results there are two separate sets of data: "Vaccination Analysis", and "SARS-CoV-2 Infection Analysis".

According to their data derived from hundreds of thousands of cases, the most potentially serious side effects from the vaccine have less chance of occuring than what's apparently the risk of dying from using aspirin. And they're much more likely to occur from contracting the virus itself, alongside much worse adversities. This particular study excluded previous infection before vaccination to ensure "side effects" of the virus itself weren't misattributed as being caused by the vaccine. Other studies with different purposes have shown that some side effects of vaccination might be slightly higher if the person had previously been infected. That's why it's always best to consult with actual doctors about medical decisions, since you might have individual risk factors.

The vaccines seem to be less effective against the delta variant which didn't exist at the time they were created, but the data from Israel also shows the vaccines still offer much more protection against serious cases of hospitalization than being unvaccinated, as the news article you linked to made clear. There are also contrasting studies suggesting natural immunity might in fact offer less protection, especially against a different variant, but my focus here was on the science on the actual risks of adverse side effects from vaccination.

There may be aspects of modern medical science that will appear laughable to scientists in the future, but there are also aspects that will be respected by them, just the same as the many aspects of past medical science that are respected by today's scientists.

What makes the difference is whether that aspect was based on a proper understanding of cause and effect and/or actually achieved the desired result.

No scientist two hundred years in the future is going to laugh at today's doctors for being capable of creating and sucessfully implanting artificial hearts into other humans.

Your experience will offer you nothing in being able to understand the behavior and risk factors of certain diseases or the efficacy and risks of certain treatments for those diseases other than how it may indirectly help guide your ability to utilize your faculties of reason while interpreting the actual science involved, which is the only means of understanding it.

As far as I'm concerned, understanding a disease and its treatment is almost entirely only possible through the work of science and the scientific method.

Nothing else in human history has anything close to science's track record of results in understanding the world or in then changing it.

There are always examples where one direction it seems to be pointing in is wrong, or where someone representing it fails to get something right, but the successes of the overall body of work enormously outweigh those errors, which are just part of the process, 'trial and error'.

People naturally form beliefs and belief systems from how their own emotions and interests create an intuition, which works fine for certain things a lot of the time. The problem is it's only created from past experience. Science has proven many counterintuitive things throughout history because the unknown by definition isn't always going to conform to what we've already experienced.

The Israelis apparently keep such good medical records that there's a lot we can see there on how the mRNA vaccines cause side effects. Scientists made the effort of taking the medical histories of 884,828 people who were vaccinated and comparing them with the records of 884,828 people who were not vaccinated, paired by age, risk factors, etc. They also compared the records of 173,106 unvaccinated people who caught COVID with a matched 173,106 unvaccinated people who never tested positive.

There's very little increased risk of any threatening side effect in the vaccinated population compared to the unvaccinated, and of course a much higher risk of many threatening 'side effects' of the disease itself compared to being vaccinated.

2.5 more people out of 10,000 had inflamnation of the heart after vaccination than how many unvaccinated people had it. And the likelihood of getting it after catching the disease itself was four times higher than it was after vaccination. Then there were hundreds or dozens of excess cases of kidney damage, pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, intracranial hemorrhage, and stroke in people who caught the disease vs. those who did not, of which there were no excess cases in those who'd been vaccinated.

The truth seems to be Las Vegas would say it's a far safer bet to take capitalism's for-profit vaccine than to let a cold and indifferent Mother Nature take its course (or wait for socialism's answer?). Meanwhile everytime the virus enters a new human body it hits the slot machine of at least six mutations, most of which won't change how it reproduces itself next time, but some do. Not sure how to ethically do a study to calculate the odds of it mutating so it has a much higher success rate of inflaming the heart tissue and damaging the cardiovascular system of 20-to-50-year-old-men, but it still has millions and billions of unvaccinated bodies to go through until it gets it right.

Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting

https://www.truckingtruth.com/truckers-forum/Topic-30676/Page-1/dollar-accounts

Midnight Fox, I respectfully disagree. They mean it literally the way they said it.

My observation is there's a difference between what the Department of Homeland Security said and what NBC Nightly News said. Their news story was about the DHS report I linked to.

The report is how the government said what they said; the picture is the Powerpoint slide the television network displayed while saying whatever they said about the report. There may be a transcript somewhere.

I couldn't know if the government is following that playbook, but as far as what they're saying goes, they make the distinction between opposing covid measures and believing unsubstantiated narratives about the election and the violent extremists who are also coming from those perspectives who have already commited and may commit acts of violence and terror.

On the surface that's no different from making the useful distinction between followers of Islam and Islamic fundamentalist extremists. When some individuals are physically assaulting teachers because their children are wearing a piece of cloth on their face in school, I doubt it's a stretch that violent extremists may also be organizing their violence around covid measures.

Mountain Matt replies:

The discussions even in this forum topic about the virus and vaccine are interesting and important, but no one should be labeled a 'terrorist' for opposing COVID measures. That's simply unhelpful, alarmist rhetoric. And I'm an atheist, but when did "religious holidays" and 9/11 remembrances become "Potential Terror Threats"?

The image isn't saying people who believe or observe those things are terror threats, it's saying those things may be why certain violent extremists may commit acts of terrorism. That's based on what they're hearing listening in on the chatter of these violent extremists groups.

The full story won't fit on a television infographic:

https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-august-13-2021

In fact, Israel is suffering with another COVID outbreak despite more than 9/10 of it's citizens being vaccinated.

It's just a placebo at this point.

...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/active-cases-pass-50000-just-2-months-after-they-stood-at-around-200/

The Health Ministry said the rate of serious cases was far higher among unvaccinated Israelis aged 60-plus, who constituted 151.5 people per 100,000 in serious condition on Monday; among the vaccinated the figure was 19.3, and among the partially vaccinated 40.9.

Respect the placebo effect.

As of Monday morning, 964172 people in Israel had received the booster, while out of Israel’s population of some 9.3 million, over 5.8 million had received at least one vaccine dose, and more than 5.4 million had gotten two.

Not quite 6/10 are fully vaccinated in Israel.

The most effective mRNA vaccines seem less effective against the delta variant, which mutated after they were developed, but still seem to dramatically reduce the seriousness of its infection, as Israel shows.

Following!

Them a firm believer in that adage "Some times the best action is no action." Meaning I dont necessarily think I have to do anything about it, but at the same time, it kind of bums me out a little.

Could you bring her out on the road with you someday? She'd be able to experience it all herself and understand more fully how it all is for you.

Came across this today.

Just wondering who gave him the keys.

I read a while back they're looking to open 12 of their own schools and hire 1500 drivers.

https://www.ccjdigital.com/business/article/15063969/yellow-looking-to-hire-1500-drivers-open-trucking-school-network

Google says there's a chip shortage so now they can't make cars. How long is this shortage going to last?

For vehicles the chip shortage could last a year or two.

The automotive industry's orders are a low priority for the foundries. The cloud providers and the smartphone, laptop, wireless, etc. companies get their business first.

Last year those companies' orders went through the roof, while a lot of the automotive industry canceled their orders when they shut down, leaving the foundries high and dry.

Most also don't want to invest in opening more production capacity for the automotive industry because the technology is outdated.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that ". . .between 1995 and 2017, the annual turnover rate at large TL carriers averaged 94.0 percent . . ."

You're overlooking how that figure also includes drivers who jumped ship once other opportunities opened up for them after they gained a few months' experience.

Thanks for keeping such an immersive diary. Enjoy braking in the new truck!

Yes. It will IF you are going too fast as you start down that hill. This is where driving the appropriate speed for conditions is vital. It is all about momentum.

If you begin descending the hill at 50mph (depending on how steep it is), you are going to need to use your service break frequently in order to keep the truck from going too fast. This is dangerous as it could cause the breaks to fade (overheat).

If you begin your descent at 30mph, the truck has less momentum and you will not be required to hit the breaks as often in order to maintain a safe speed. It takes practice and experience to learn the correct speed to descend hills at various weights and speeds, and in various conditions.

Thanks. I misunderstood that keeping it in a certain gear would prevent the truck from accelerating past a certain mph range for that gear.

Noob question: if the manual mode is disabled and you're descending steeper grades in snow or rain w/o jakes, won't it keep trying to shift to higher gears on you as the truck accelerates?

I'd read about making sure to be in the correct gear for the grade from ahead of time to avoid accelerating too fast and burning up the service brakes.

Who would win in a horse race, a Prime horse or a Prime truck?