DrW

As long as a vaccine is available, I do not think it is necessary.

You missed the point. I responded to a post discussing masks. Do you really think that there are many doctors who tell their patients that masks are useless?

Nobody can prevent you from listening just to voices confirming your point of view.

What you have linked there is a commentary on some biased site; it is not a scientific study. The guy has his own agenda (look him up on Wikipedia) and cherry-picks scientific papers that show the lack of protection by masks. The cited papers themselves are legit (peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal). However, there are significantly more papers that come to the opposite conclusion. To judge for yourself, go to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ and do your own search. PubMed indexes all scientific peer-reviewed journals in the medical and life sciences.

DeSantis mixed up his numbers. The correction is here https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2020/06/17/orlando-airport-clears-up--confusion--from-desantis-on-coronavirus-cases

After 13 years in Rochester, I went grocery shopping for the first time here in West Texas. After I had paid, a kid came up and offered to take my cart (here they call it "basket") to my car. No, I said, I can do it myself. He: But, sir... Me: No, I do it myself. Then, the next time grocery shopping it dawned on me: here they have employees who push your cart, load up your car, and return the cart to avoid it being stranded on the lot. I do not know how widespread this service is - I have not encountered it anywhere else. In Walmarts and Target you have to push your cart yourself.

Estelle Getty (Golden Girls)?

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I work in basic biochemical research, in a field less sensitive to concerns of national security. In our field, when you see the grant scores handed out by your peers in the study section, you can pretty much predict who will get funded and who will not, without external input. But I can see that things might be different in more security-sensitive areas.

Hillary's Mom?

The term "general contractor" gives the impression that the NIH comes up with research plans. As you might know, this is not the case. The individual researcher (PI, "Principal Investigator") at University XYZ comes up with a hypothesis to solve a potentially interesting problem, designs experiments to confirm or disprove it, and asks the NIH for a grant. In 5-20% of all cases he/she will be successful. Officially, the money goes to the university which then passes it along to the PI. It is primarily the university's duty to obtain the required "financial disclosures" of outside funds from the PI. Believe me, I have to go through this process every year (our university wants the data even if you are not federally funded). Of course, I am not under the illusion that the university can check every detail in my disclosures, especially if foreign funds are involved. This task then falls to the NIH, and I agree with you that for a long time they did not do proper checks. I attribute this to sloppiness, or lack of awareness of the problem, and not to evil intentions. But we might differ on this conclusion. And when an NIH grant expires, you are not "fired". You still get your salary from the university for all the other things you do (teaching, service).

The headline is misleading. The 54 researchers did not work at the NIH, they received extramural grants from the NIH. After the China links became known, the NIH rescinded the grants. As a consequence, the researchers were fired from the home institutions. The National Pulse article in your link is based on an article in the magazine "Science", which has a more appropriate headline: "Fifty-four scientists have lost their jobs as a result of NIH probe into foreign ties"

Rosemary's Baby Alien Silence of the Lambs

Truly awesome, and a beautiful example of using a violin in rock/fusion. Jerry Goodman had already done very well in the short-lived "The Flock".

John McLaughlin

Lawrence Welk?

Here you get three for the price of one. Sadly, they just made one outstanding album; the follow-up 5 years later was crap. And as a bonus

According to this web site https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#coronavirus-country-profiles the total number of tests in the US up to today is around 28 M. They do not give numbers for the EU as a single entity, but when you add up the numbers from individual countries you get 14 M for Germany, Italy and Spain combined. The four most populous countries in the EU are these three plus France; data for France seem to be missing. Germany, Italy and Spain have a total population of 190 M, compared to 330 M for the US. Thus, I would say that the percentage of the population that has been tested on both sides of the Atlantic is similar.

I always saw you as a rational poster, but here you are really comparing apples and oranges. A shop owner might deny service to people without mask to prevent infection of other customers. Buying cigarettes, booze, or Coke might kill the buyer, but will not affect the other customers in the store.

Wednesday I watched the riot...

When I went to college in the seventies, the student club had parties every Saturday. The two favorite "long" songs were "In A Gadda Da Vida" and Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water". I very much preferred the latter.

Very interesting topic. Usually I think the longer the better. It might be blasphemy, but I prefer the 20:30 version of "Cortez the Killer" by Built to Spill over Neil Young's 7:29 original. But there is one song where everything is said after two and a half minutes:

I am not sure. However, I would agree that at some point of his later career Zappa cared about muffins.