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A great piece on the many attitudes the "Westernalize societies" adopt, I think all stemming from the belief that the nature (along with everything else) is their bitch to rape without serious consequences: America is trapped in a pandemic spiral.
Yes, the story looks at America - where the "sins" are deep and easily recognizable - but the same pitfalls exist more or less in most of the Western World.

As the U.S. heads toward the winter, the country is going round in circles, making the same conceptual errors that have plagued it since spring.

Army ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped.
...
The spiral begins when people forget that controlling the pandemic means doing many things at once.
...
1. A Serial Monogamy of Solutions

Stay-at-home orders dominated March. Masks were fiercely debated in April. Contact tracing took its turn in May. Ventilation is having its moment now. “It’s like we only have attention for only one thing at a time,” says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida.

As often happens, people sought easy technological fixes for complex societal problems....

... Several experts I’ve talked with have been asked: What now? The question assumes that the pandemic lingers because the U.S. simply hasn’t found the right solution yet. In fact, it lingers because the familiar solutions were never fully implemented....

2. False Dichotomies
... Meanwhile, as businesses closed and stay-at-home orders rolled out, “we presumed a trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy,” says Danielle Allen, a political scientist at Harvard. “That was foolishness of the most profound degree.” The two goals were actually aligned: Epidemiologists and economists largely agree that the economy cannot rebound while the pandemic is still raging....

Now, as winter looms and the pandemic continues, another dichotomy has emerged: enter another awful lockdown, or let the virus run free. This choice, too, is false... There’s a “whole control panel of dials” on offer, but “it’s hard to have that conversation when people think of a light switch,”

3. The Comfort of Theatricality
Stay-at-home orders saved lives by curtailing COVID-19’s spread, and by giving hospitals some breathing room. But the orders were also meant to buy time for the nation to ramp up its public-health defenses. Instead, the White House treated months of physical distancing as a pandemic-ending strategy in itself. “We squandered that time in terms of scaling up testing and contact tracing, enacting policies to protect workers who get infected on the job, getting protective equipment to people in food-processing plants, finding places for people to isolate, offering paid sick leave … We still don’t have those things,”...
...
The coronavirus mostly spreads through air rather than contaminated surfaces, but many businesses are nonetheless trying to scrub and bleach their way toward reopening. My colleague Derek Thompson calls this hygiene theater... The same charge applies to temperature checks... It also applies to the porous and inefficient travel bans... These tactics might do some good—let’s not conflate imperfect with useless—but they cause harm when they substitute for stronger measures. Theatricality breeds complacency.

4. Personal Blame Over Systemic Fixes
... Without paid sick leave or a living wage, “essential workers” who earn a low, hourly income could not afford to quarantine themselves when they fell ill—and especially not if that would jeopardize the jobs to which their health care is tied....

... News outlets illustrated pandemic articles with (often distorted) photos of beaches, even though open-air spaces offer low-risk ways for people to enjoy themselves. Marcus attributes this tendency to America’s puritanical roots, which conflate pleasure with irresponsibility, and which prize shame over support....

Moralistic thinking jeopardizes health in two ways. First, people often oppose measures that reduce an individual’s risk—seat belts, condoms, HPV vaccines—because such protections might promote risky behavior. During the pandemic, some experts used such reasoning to question the value of masks, while the University of Michigan’s president argued that testing students widely would offer a “false sense of security.”...

Second, misplaced moralism can provide cover for bad policies... Administrators have chastised students for behaving irresponsibly, while taking no responsibility for setting them up to fail...

5. The Normality Trap
In times of uncertainty and upheaval, “people crave a return to familiar, predictable rhythms,” ... In some circles, returning to normal has been valorized as an act of defiance. That’s a reasonable stance when resisting terrorists, who seek to stoke fear, but a dangerous one when fighting a virus, which doesn’t care.

... “If schools are a priority, you have to put them ahead of something. What is that something?” says Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard. “In an ideal world, they would be the last to close and the first to open, but in many communities, casinos, bars, and tattoo parlors opened before them.”...

6. Magical Thinking
... From the start, he and others wondered if hot, humid [summer] weather might curb the spread of COVID-19, as it does other coronavirus diseases. ... But, fueled by shaky science and speculative stories, people widely latched on to seasonality as a possible savior, before the virus proved that it could thrive in the Arizona, Texas, and Florida summer.

... some commentators have argued that the pandemic will imminently fizzle out for two reasons. First, 20 to 50 percent of people have defensive T-cells... Second, some modeling studies claim that herd immunity—... —could kick in when just 20 percent of the population has been infected.
... neither should be grounds for complacency. No one yet knows if the “cross-reactive” T-cells actually protect against COVID-19... Herd immunity, meanwhile, is not a perfect barrier. Even if the low thresholds are correct, a fast-growing and uncontrolled outbreak will still shoot past them...

7. The Complacency of Inexperience
When illness is averted and lives are spared, “nothing happens and all you have is the miracle of a normal, healthy day,” says Howard Koh, a public-health professor at Harvard. “People take that for granted.” Public-health departments are chronically underfunded because the suffering they prevent is invisible....

... By contrast, America’s lack of similar firsthand experience, combined with its sense of exceptionalism, might have contributed to its initial sloppiness...

Even when the virus began spreading within the U.S., places that weren’t initially pummeled seemed to forget that viruses spread. “In April, I was seeing COVID patients in the ER every day,” Karan says. “In Texas, I had friends saying, ‘No one believes it here because we have no cases.’ ... Three months later, Texas and California saw COVID-19 all too closely....

8. A Reactive Rut

In March, Mike Ryan at the World Health Organization advised, “Be fast, have no regrets … The virus will always get you if you don’t move quickly.” The U.S. failed to heed that warning, and has repeatedly found itself several steps behind the coronavirus. That’s partly because exponential growth is counterintuitive... Policy makers end up acting only when it’s too late. Predictable surges get falsely cast as unexpected surprises.

This reactive rut also precludes long-term planning. In April, Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me that “people haven’t understood that [the pandemic] isn’t about the next couple of weeks [but] about the next two years.”

9. The Habituation of Horror

The U.S. might stop treating the pandemic as the emergency that it is. Daily tragedy might become ambient noise. The desire for normality might render the unthinkable normal. Like poverty and racism, school shootings and police brutality, mass incarceration and sexual harassment, widespread extinctions and changing climate, COVID-19 might become yet another unacceptable thing that America comes to accept.

USB Overload: Portwell Motherboard Has 20 USB Ports

Surprisingly, the PEB-9783G2AR supports all 20 of it's USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports natively. That means there are no fancy gizmos like splitters or hubs, so you'll get the full bandwidth of the USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface on all USB ports. Of course, there are compromises; both chipsets support up to eight USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1, and 4 USB 2.0 ports natively. Presumably, to get to 20 USB ports, Portwell used the chipset lanes dedicated to 6 of the SATA ports and repurposed them to USB ports (there are only two SATA3 ports available).

Portwell positions the motherboard for server and workstation workloads. As such, it comes with an Intel W480E or Q470E chipset that supports 10th Gen Core i7/i5/i3 CPUs, including the 10th Gen Xeon W family of CPUs. However, the board doesn't support all CPUs from the 10th Gen Core and Xeon W Family - you're limited to a peak of 10 cores and an 80W TDP.

>Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
>Filter error: Please take your trolling somewhere else.

Exactly what am gonna do, sorry, but censoring the N* word no matter the context, is, more than the straw breaking the camel's back, a call to devote time to other platforms/tech instead. No bad feelings, this place is home of interesting discussion nonetheless.

Comment enabled (else it won't post, apparently) but won't be read, so don't bother. I'll download my comment history later. Any further message from UID 3902 is a sign of hacked account or onset of dementia.

ATH

Belarus repeatedly interrupts at UN amid 'new iron curtain' warnings

Belarus and its allies have repeatedly tried to muzzle speakers at the UN amid warnings of a new iron curtain falling across Europe during an ill-tempered debate on alleged human rights violations.

The body’s 47-member human rights council voted by 23 votes to two with 22 abstentions to adopt a resolution condemning rights violations in Belarus and requesting the UN high commissioner on Human Rights to take up the issue and report back to the council.

The debate was repeatedly interrupted by the Belarus representative, backed by delegates from Russia, China and Venezuela, who tried to limit presentations – including from Alexander Lukashenko’s main election challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, on procedural grounds.

Tikhanovskaya’s short video message had barely begun when the Belarusian representative, Yuri Ambrazevich, demanded it be switched off. He repeatedly interrupted the screening, raising procedural objections and insisting her words had “no relevance on the substance ... on the events that are taking place today”.

He was overruled by the council president, Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger.

This is how they plan to win. You stick to the script or you're dead meat! This is how the badminton goes with their other antagonists that stay on their favorite topics, and it's always groundhog day, just rehashing the same old shit over and over.

I've never seen liars so supportive of each other! Funny to see them complain about republicans and their band leader. But, this is how they have always been. This is why few people can be motivated.

And this is why Trump is president today, and can easily win again. Of course they would rather do Russiagate and blame me than look into themselves. Amusing, but kinda sad. All those dead people. Fusty did it! And he killed the Kennedys and threw Jimmy Hoffa into Lake Erie. But worst of all, he insulted the democrats! Maybe "antifa" really is democrat, smashing the non-compliant. You must conform!

Eh, voters' fault. Idiots won't look past the Party. Bunch of panicky paranoid bald ass chimps!

Trump v. Biden... You did it, not me

With the nuclear option the democrats had full control during the 111th congress between 2009 and 2011, that's two years, not four months. But like republicans, democrats lie also. They will tell you that they only had full control while they had the super majority for four months. That is a lie. They hold so strongly to that lie, they won't even acknowledge it when brought up. They fling poo and leave the room in a huff to go feed the Russiagators.

With their refusal to undo Bush and punish the bank robbers when they had the chance (and their continued refusal to even admit they had the power), how can we expect them to undo Trump? Well, we don't. We just believe that the pig's lipstick should not be orange colored. So, under duress, the democrats have us. They have a loaded Trump (he really is, on what is anybody's guess) to our heads, ready to pull the trigger. And still their famous 10% lead is dwindling. How can they be so offensive that there are people sitting on the fence? That, nobody wants to address. It's always the Other Guy™

The dems and the trumpies are very nicely matched bookends with no space between them. But none of that matters. We just have to make the place look presentable until we hire a real crew to clean up.

Note to democrats: If Trump wins, it will be your fault. You failed or refused to oppose. Your disappointments over the last fifty years just demoralize people and discourage participation. Please note however that the Party itself will be perfectly happy either way. Your donations are always welcome

UPDATE:

Now who can resist a headline like this?

Senate Democrats Demand Investigation of the John Durham Investigation’s Investigation

Somebody's going for the 'Funny' mod. And that picture! Who are these people??

Well, if your self esteem ever needs a lift, just look at the people you put in charge of things.

With Linux getting silly, and maybe approaching end of life for the tinkerers, which one of these alternatives is best?

1) Free

2) Open

3) Net

Something for you soap opera fans

In 2012, Julian Assange moved into the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Little known is that the Ecuadorian embassy next hired a private security firm -- the Spanish company UC Global -- to protect their famous guest agains spying activity by Her Majesty's police force, which all this time was patiently waiting outside with tea and cookies.

German public broadcasters Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk) now have managed to get their hands on confidential mails and video material belonging to UC Global (German language video).

Turns out that UC Global extensively deployed hidden cameras and microphones within the embassy. Everything was recorded: the IDs of every visitor to Assange, his doctor's visits and his talks with his psychiatrist, every move he made, or conversation he had: with American friends, journalists, his legal team and even Dana Rohrabacher (Rep California) allegedly dispatched there by President Trump himself.

Not wanting to overdo things, the UC Global team even fished a diaper of Assange's son out the trash bin, to compare DNA.

In the end though, their sense of duty had limitations -- and ended up in Spain's Audiencia Nacional court, with employees alleging they were sold out to do the CIA's bidding. The company's boss, a former special forces officer on leave of absence, was helpful enough to state both verbally and in writing to a number of his employees that, despite having been hired by the government of then-Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, he also worked “for the Americans.”

“We are playing in another league. This is the first division,”

he told his closest colleagues after attending a security fair in the US city of Las Vegas in 2015 where he supposedly made his first American contacts.

The latest UK court session for Assange, on Sept 11, was postponed because one of the lawyers for the US side has contracted covid. The Court at the Old Bailey has to decide by the end of this year whether Assange will be extradited to the United States, where he risks 175 years jail time.

*postscript: the Assange case gets quite a bit of attention in Germany: see here for an overview, for a single public broadcaster alone.

She can raise money, but does she bring votes?

She's only a reminder of why they lost.

'Play it down': Trump admits to concealing the true threat of coronavirus in new Woodward book

President Donald Trump admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and "more deadly than even your strenuous flus,"

[ . . . ] "This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward on February 7.

[ . . . ] In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. "Pretty amazing," Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times "more deadly" than the flu.

[ . . . ] Trump's admissions are in stark contrast to his frequent public comments at the time insisting that the virus was "going to disappear" and "all work out fine."

It must all be fake news and sophistry. Because . . .

The book, using Trump's own words . . .

Ah, there they go again. Using Trump's own words. Shame on them!