Comments by "Theodore Shulman" (@ColonelFredPuntridge) on "John Stossel" channel.

OK, but you might just as easily have had something much more dangerous. What would you be writing now it you had had something really dangerous, and they had sent you home with antibiotics, and you hadn't learned about the real problem, and you had died of it? What would you say then, eh? (Not much.)
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It’s a nice slogan. In real life, frightened criminals will arm themselves better, spend more of their time training, and become more proficient shooters, than you.
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Right! Before COVID, no one ever neglected the elderly. They all died clean and well-attended, with happy smiles on their faces. (/Sarcasm)
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@theresagomez2605 Not all were neglected before COVID, and not all are being neglected now! Unknown pandemics are, as a rule, dicey. Go review some of what people put up with in 1918 with the "Spanish" flu. And like almost all diciness, it tends to hit the elderly disproportionately. This is especially true now, when so many elderly are so much more elderly (and weaker, and naturally more vulnerable) than ever before. The best way to respect the victims is to describe the situation rationally and accurately, not to promulgate loopy conspiracy-theories. (Jean Amery (that was his nom de plume ), who survived the Holocaust and also survived interrogation under torture by Third-Reich agents, wrote: "when one speaks of torture, one must be careful not to exaggerate.")
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@markedid5818 Can you see antibodies with your own eyes? Virions? B-cells? T-cells?
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Not quite. It's a little more complicated than that. More like "I don't need a small farm in my own back yard because I can get mass-grown food in the grocery store." There's plenty to be said against factory-farming, but there's also a lot to be said in its favor, including, it produces much more food for your money than small individual farms. It may not taste as nice, but it keeps you alive longer for less money. That's why factory-mega-farms are so successful.
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There you go. That's right! Your comment deserves ten-million up-votes. The error people make is they think they can figure this kind of stuff out for themselves, or, learn quickly by reading a few articles. It's funny, because they don't do this with other esoteric specialties. No one thinks they can referee a professional boxing match after reading a couple of books, or a few news articles, about boxing. No one thinks they can conduct an orchestra by reading about it. No one even thinks they can learn to drive a truck, or be a chef, by reading a few manuals and articles. But with virology, epidemiology, statistical analysis of surveys and studies, and immunology - subjects many times more complicated than boxing, orchestral music, truck driving, or cooking - they think they can become as proficient as Dr. Fauci by reading some articles by science-journalists. Good old American know-how only works if it is accompanied by a large side-order of good old American humility. The characters Ronald Reagan played (usually) understood this. Reagan knew how to find out why the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up: call in Professor Richard Feynman and turn the question over to him!
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@natepoodle9132 And the criminals will win, because the ones who are only as serious as ordinary folks will get weeded out of the crime business.
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@natepoodle9132 Well, that's what I would do. Then again I don't carry very much money on the street, and my dwelling is guarded.
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@ericgibbs2223 Do I know you? Why do you call me Teddy? I might equally well be a Thad or a Theo.
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@unknownsword9042 Where would you have sent them? To the subway stations, perhaps? To the hospitals which were already full? Here's an idea: maybe they should have sent them to hotel-rooms and make you pay the hotel bills.
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@maloalaho9294 Or when stupid individuals make a stupid or careless decision to leave loaded guns around where a six-year-old can get their hands on one. (Although, to be fair, I probably would not have handled it when I was six years old. I had already been taught to stay away from guns.)
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This will lead to local neighborhood arms races as the cops, criminals, and ordinary folks compete for who can buy the best, newest guns, and who is willing to learn best how to use them. Cops and criminals are professionals. Their livelihoods and lives depend on being the best equipped and best trained shooters. Ordinary citizens who have limited time and money will lose just as amateur boxers lose when they try to fight professionals. Additionally, cops will get more and more trigger happy because they will fear that everyone at a crime scene is armed and ready to shoot. This is already the main reason cops shoot so many people who turn out to be armed only with toys or phones. The winners will be the gun stores and manufacturers. The losers will be emergency healthcare workers, especially trauma -surgeons, who won’t get any sleep
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Let's be fair to Paul Erlich. He did not predict that we would suffer mass famine, period. He predicted that ONE OF THREE things would happen: EITHER we would stop breeding so quickly and so much, OR that we would invent ways to produce more food on less land faster, OR that we would suffer mass famine. Only ONE of these THREE options would have to be realized in order for him to have been right. Well, we have learned how to produce much more food per acre of arable land, AND we seem to be breeding less. So he's really double-right.
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The flip side will be that shootings by single-digit-age shooters will become a regular pattern, and sooner or later somewhere or other a single-digit age shooter will shoot a teacher to death.
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What dp you think the criminals will do, after you have made them afraid?
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@UncaAlbyGmail Happy ending, yes, because the criminal in that case didn't happen to have a better gun, and better training, than your dad. And yes, he probably got weeded out by retiring from crime, or, by getting killed. Either way, he'd get replaced by someone more dedicated or more skillful. Guys like your dad would help weed the weaklings out of the armed-crime industry - the same way infectious pathogens develop resistance to commonly-used antimicrobial medicines.
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@UncaAlbyGmail You don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Being a successful criminal takes more effort and diligence than being law-abiding.
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@UncaAlbyGmail Did your brother tell you that a live of crime was easy? A smooth, comfortable way for a lazy or careless person to make money?
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@silverjohn6037 I was with you until the end, when you wrote: "Just explaining to people how the vectors of contagion work so they'd understand why they'd benefit from wearing a mask instead of the "just shut up and do what we say" mindset would have helped." That is exactly what Dr. Fauci tried to do - what he has always tried to do - and this time, he got his head handed to him by an organized, purposeful campaign to sap Americans' confidence in our leaders by pretending that changing ones position as new data emerge is a sign of weakness, when in fact it is a sign of strength. Fauci often talks about how different his experience with COVID was from his experience with HIV, but he doesn't usually say what MADE the two experiences different. With HIV he was only up against a weak minority, but with COVID he was up against the right-wing anti-science cultist press - the creationists, and the anti-vaxxers, and the people who want to de-fund our public education system (which was, once upon a time, the envy of the world) and replace it with a chain of peddlers of Bible-based fantasy, and the faux-environmentalists, and all the rest of the lobby of organized dumb-dumbery.
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Yeah, but your governor is a charlatan, and your homes are subject to attacks by anacondas and crocodiles.
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@markhall3165 How many elderly at risk? How many hospital beds available?
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@moralityisnotsubjective5 You will, if she gets too sick for you to care for her at home. It's so funny. Everyone swears that they'll never put their parents in a home, but everyone changes their minds when the parent gets too sick or too frail to manage at home. The only exception is people who can afford to recreate the conditions of the home, at home -- to hire just as many nurses and professional caregivers at home as the parents would have access to at the home.
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@c.d.7742 That may be (or not) but the inconvenience and harm done by the response to the 1918 flu DID affect the elderly disproportionately.
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@c.d.7742 Young healthy individuals were INFECTED more, but not AFFECTED more by the response.
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@3832dan Typical.
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That doesn't let us off the hook. It just means that instead of recycling plastic, we're gonna have to live without it (at least, without most of it). Hardly a reason for Stossel to celebrate!
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First of all, the argument that electrical energy is created by burning fossil fuels doesn't work, because it's much more efficient to burn fossil fuels in a large, continuous operational reactor than to burn it in many small, on/off engines. In on/off small engines in cars, the heat changes the dimensions of the components, so that much of your ride is very inefficient, This is less true with electric cars where there is less heat because you're not burning anything in the engine when you drive them. Secondly, the whole gripe about mining assumes that the current technology and geopolitics related to mining will not change. But in real life it almost certainly will change. Sweden just discovered a huge deposit of rare-earth metals, which may well be possible to keep out of the hands of the Chinese government. I bet we can count on the Swedes to treat their miners more humanely!. Also (key point from late 2022, still very new) the currently-used permanent magnets which use a lot of rare earth alloys may be replaceable with magnets made of tetrataenite. (Look that up if you don't know what it is; NPR did a piece on it, but it can be made into very strong permanent magnets, and it contains no rare earth elements at all, only iron and nickel (and elemental phosphorus as a catalyst in its manufacture.)
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Is the question: "who turned out to be right, when we discovered what we know now" or is it "who made the best recommendations given that we didn't know what we know now"??? It's easy to be right AFTER you know all the facts. Dr. Fauci's special expertise is not corona viruses, not HIV, not COVID. His special expertise is in dealing with a much more terrifying pathogen: Pestis Wedontknowyetwhatitisorwhatitsgonnadonext. Very few people are good at dealing with that particular pathogen.
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You mean if peaceful people were armed and properly trained
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