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Notes -
A number of stories I vaguely follow have largely been ignored by this space. To start discussion:
Ukraine
Back in November, there was discussion about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk, encirclement of Ukrainian troops and collapse of the frontline:
It seems like the capeshit arc rages on, and yet another prediction of Ukrainian (or Russian, for that matter) collapse goes in the dustbin. Deepstatemap shows the UA holding onto a corner of Pokrovsk, the ISW map doesn't seem to have moved significantly, there haven't been any MSM news articles on Pokrovsk since December (?!), Russian economic collapse seems yet to materialize. Does anyone have more insight?
Measles makes a comeback in the US - who wants some lockdowns?
2025 recorded ~2500 measles cases in the US, and 733 recorded so far in 2026. This is the highest number of cases since about 1990, and for the 90s/2000s we saw low double-digit numbers of cases. A handful of children have died. Solely based on the numbers, I think you'd expect a case or two of encephalitis but I'm unsure. The biggest outbreaks are in Spartanburg county, South Carolina (Trump - 66% of the vote), Gaines county, Texas (Trump won 91% of the vote) and Mohave county, Arizona (Trump won 77% of the vote). As far as I can tell, there are no real cities in any of these counties. We're seeing a remarkable inversion where historically infectious disease outbreaks would start in the cities and people would flee to the suburbs/countryside. Maybe my next startup idea should be a chain of sanatoriums (sanatoria?) in NYC or SF.
Trans identification decreasing?
Several months late to the party, but in October a study came out suggesting the number of trans students applying to Brown had roughly halved, yoy. I suppose it's early to be declaring victory given that the data/methodology don't seem particularly rock-solid, but I'm definitely chalking it as evidence supporting my claim that there is a hardcore group of genuinely trans people, while the significant increases were rebellious teens and some better way to rebel will crop up to replace it. At the least, it's evidence that the doomers and blackpillers claiming lines go up are wrong.
Anecdotally, I've heard gen Z college students get off on being offensive. In 15-20 years Millenials will be even more deeply uncool and taking the place of boomers, while the alphas and betas rebel and move leftwards to areas we can't even imagine (but get ready for AI girlfriends. They'll be called AI-Attracted Individuals, and I'm planting a flag in the AIAI acronym right now).
Poopgate
In the most momentous news since Biden fell off a bike, leftist social media has been circulating a Forbes video claiming to show Trump soiling himself at the 0:34 mark (you'll have to find it on youtube yourself, sorry - and turn up your audio). We've now been blessed with Yahoo News' headline 'No credible evidence Trump pooped himself during executive order signing', which is interesting given the video that millions of people have watched.
It will be interesting watching Trump's mental faculties evolve over the next three years. Biden was notably sharper in 2020 than in his disastrous 2024 debate performance. Presumably Trump won't tolerate handlers the same way Biden did, so it seems like a situation that could rapidly dissolve into a ahem shitshow.
In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns. Lockdowns are just a bad idea.
As far as I can tell, the outbreak is mostly among religious communities who have low vaccination rates (though apparently not actually for religious reasons). There has been a small general drop in vaccination, but it's not clear if it has had a significant effect. The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.
How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.
It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?
No, I think I'll blame the people who choose to not get vaccinated instead. Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?
Mennonites
Fundamentalist Mormons
Slavic-language church
Come on, man. You should know better than this. At least do the 30-second google research instead of jumping to the convenient correlation. I recall you being not so far away from this field professionally, and I've spent some time at the coalface on this, and when it comes to outbreaks of easily-avoidable communicable disease it's pretty much always oddball religious sects or low-trust immigrant communities or, in the latter case, apparently both. I'm totally happy to make the argument that "a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor", because it's right.
Feel free to cite this post smugly in a couple years if the possible trend continues and normie republicans do get memed into antivaxxing below herd immunity, or just down to the level of granola moms that have caused minor outbreaks in the past. Until then,
Edit: CPAR has mea culpa'd elsewhere in the thread - good on him.
Minnesota has low vaccination rates, due to - uh, the Somali community and fears about vaccination there? Gosh, who knew there was a secret nest of Trump voters in that community!
Oh, look. The reason is not correlated with voting for Trump. Impeccably Blue and vaccinated California has outbreaks, one traced to someone who visited Texas and picked up a case from the outbreak there, plus exposure traced to international travellers (one of whom visited Disneyland).
Such a huge drop in 20 years is baffling.
It seems to be a combination of (1) higher autism rates (there's a bit in the article I didn't quote about a gathering for Somali mothers who asked the nurse leading it "Why does autism seem more prevalent here than back home?") being diagnosed in the USA amongst the kids and (2) from that, picking up the anti-vax attitudes around "vaccines cause autism" and (3) cultural habits of vaccinating the kids when they're older plus (4) the article can't resist blaming (a) the pandemic when everything was locked down, people couldn't go out, and thus visits to get the kids vaccinated also fell off and of course (b) it's all the fault of ICE scaring everyone so they stay home and don't go out in case they get picked up by them.
Plus the funding for vaccination initiatives such as outreach to the community got cut and such efforts were start-and-stop anyway, and on top of that back in Somalia measles is endemic, so if people travel home and back to the USA then there's a greater risk that they'll bring infection with them.
Thanks for the summary. I'm somewhat skeptical regarding 2) though, as I imagine these Somalis have long been acculturated in a Blue Tribe milieu which is rather antagonistic towards anti-waxxer activism. And 3) and 4) do sound a bit like Blue Tribe copium. Either way, a drop from 92% to 24% these factors do not really explain.
Somalis may not be running with rednecks very often, but they aren't running with the normal blue tribe locals either- they're probably exposed to antivaxxers because that's in the water, and it's kind of unpredictable what they choose to go with, because this is a fairly inward-looking community.
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They aren't the same Somalis.
My apologies but I don't get it.
The Somali parents in Minnesota in 2006 were a different group than the Somali parents in 2025. Once a foothold had been obtained and a Somalia-to-Minnesota pipeline had been set up, it was much easier for the less functional to migrate.
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"Ancestors" is rather an odd term since 1964 is well within living memory (not mine, but that of many actual Boomers). They just realized the world couldn't come to a stop because of a disease.
Already answered. It is spreading among particular religious communities who, while they are not religiously scrupulous of vaccination, intentionally don't have a lot of contact with the public health system. This includes having their own schools. Since those communities have contact with each other, it has also been spreading between them, both within the US and internationally. This has been going on for a few years now.
You can do that if you want to be hardheaded, but burning the credibility of the CDC had a cost nevertheless. But as far as I know it has nothing to do with the current outbreak.
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I wouldn't go quite so far but it's just open-and-shut correct that many people can't properly evaluate the things that we use to establish the safety of vaccines, like randomized trials. Add in the possibility of fraud/bias (which is a legitimate concern in academia and science) and that almost certainly rises from "many" to "most." Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?
Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.
Not if they just make up or fudge the numbers. In my field I can catch most of the bullshit that isn't outright lying. If it's far enough outside my wheelhouse, almost certainly not.
When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population? If Fauci had noped out day one and been replaced by a COVID mega-dove, you still would have burned credibility with half the country. We'd just be having this conversation with inverse valence.
I maintain that:
I am sympathetic to the problem here, because I do think it is a real one, but "not lying" (or perhaps with unnecessary charity, "not giving confusing, contradictory, or wrong advice") is a good place to start.
Of course, given that there were geographic cleavages in a lot of the response, having a state-by-state approach to these questions is also an underrated solution. We actually got to see that in action during COVID, as a lot of COVID rules were made on a state-by-state basis, and it seems to me that was mostly ignored on both sides in favor of arguing about whatever the CDC had said most recently. Which is unfortunate!
What counts as "corrupt" is open to a lot of discussion, but I don't think the institutions have always been this incompetent. Just look at NASA.
I think this really depends on the institution and circumstance. Sometimes the institutions actually are hostile to you.
HIV was discovered in the early 1980s, a few years after AIDS was recognized as a disease. The first drug was AZT 4 years later (6-7 years after the pandemic started), and that was a stroke of luck in that they repurposed an oncology drug that just happened to have activity against HIV. The first protease inhibitor (something designed specifically to target an HIV protein) was mid 90s, or ~15 years later.
Contrast that to COVID-19, where we had a bajillion genome sequences within months of the virus spreading, RNA-Seq datasets from infected patient lungs which led to a number of therapeutic trials (unfortunately didn't pan out, but still good shots on goal). We had paxlovid (a COVID-19 specific protease inhibitor) within a year. We had mRNA vaccines in a similar timeframe, which were more effective than anything we'd seen prior and outperformed anything the Chinese could do - how many other American institutions can say the same? That's about a 10x compression in timelines for identifying, characterizing and developing drugs to an emerging virus.
All of this, pearls before swine. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? of man hours by people like me all so some retard on twitter can go viral (no pun intended) for writing some hysterical slop about how the mRNA vaccines are going to cause mass infertility/blood clots/insta-death (how did all those predictions pan out?). The public has no idea how much effort is expended on things you would never think of - pharmacology, every manufacturing/storage/distribution step, toxicology and safety, in vitro and preclinical models. The public is ignorant of how far we've come, and the oceans of sweat and tears and grinding in the lab that have built this edifice to improve their lives.
Half the country saying the FDA moved too quickly, mRNA vaccines are dangerous, blah blah blah. Other half saying they have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands. Half the country saying lockdowns are ineffective (as if China didn't exist), the other half that the government doesn't care about their safety and people are dying. Maybe in addition to the internet, the other thing that's changed is everyone with a twitter account feels entitled to weigh in on every issue.
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I don't think NASA is a good example; their mandate means they were always going to have much less friction surface with the general population than most of what we call "institutions".
Perhaps you're right. On the other hand, though, we should expect this to increase their competency, though, since they are going to be less distorted by that friction; instead it seems their competency has declined.
NASAs competency has been consistently lousy since the end of the Apollo program, no?
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The effects of slightly more COVID deaths would have been way less visible in people's lives than the effects of long-term lockdowns turned out to be, and scared people could have just stayed home; work from home could have continued for email people without lockdowns.
They could have just ended the lockdowns after two weeks like they said they would. Or after doctors declared COVID was less dangerous than racism. Or after the vaccines became available. Instead they waited til May 2023, and by that point maskies had become subculture; I still see maskies every day. I tried going to fucking speed dating last year, and they handed out masks and required proof of vaccination.
In the mirror universe, is there a subculture of people in perpetual mourning for those who died from COVID? They'd be indistinguishable from goths.
Last year?!? If you don’t mind saying, where do you live? Or was this hosted by some oddball organization? Genuinely curious. I live in a deep-blue city, I do still see “maskies” out and about, but I haven’t seen an event hand out masks in a very long time. And asking for proof of vaccination in 2025 is basically incomprehensible to me, that was already dying out here (again, deep-blue area) by 2023 at the very latest, and realistically I don’t recall actually being asked to show it later than 2022.
West side Chicago.
Wild. Is that relatively normal, asking for vaccine proof at an event? Or was this one just run by committed weirdos? Either way that really is crazy to me, I had no idea people like that were still out there at a scale where they could end up running a speed-dating event, especially if it wasn’t explicitly branded as a “special” zero-covid event.
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The same two things every technical expert wanting to preserve their credibility should do:
They violated the first by making a lot of confident claims that later turned out to be incorrect. They violated the second by advocating for the implementation of a bunch of specific solutions which had non-medical trade-offs.
If they'd done neither and kept to relatively generic advice and a little bit of carefully-phrased speculation they might get criticism for being useless but would have avoided much of the trust loss from saying wrong things. I think you would have also seen much less aggressive fights over lockdowns and masking without The Science pushing specific solutions.
A lot of the credibility current institutions are burning came from past institutions getting things right. When they said that vaccinating everyone against measles would get rid of measles it actually did do so. The same was not so for the coronavirus.
Past institutions could just have been lucky, but I think a more sensible default assumption is that they got better results because they were better.
Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob. People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.
During COVID, the scientific and medical communities enforced conformity, by ostracizing those like Bhattacharya and calling his ideas "unethical", and pulling the licenses of dissident doctors. They intended to be seen as a solid front.
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I think Arjin responded to the first part more eloquently than I can. I'll just add that to the degree that this was pushed by scientists as a group then scientists should share blame for it as a group.
I've seen this argument before and the aim is usually to imply that because some of the lower-level scientists were correct you should not lose trust in science from failures of science-driven policy. Sorry if that's not what you're getting at here.
That idea is bullshit because nothing has changed in the pipeline of science to policy. When the public next gets some more fancy science-based policy it won't be from the random scientist who has sane opinions but from the same kind of people who got things wrong last time. If scientists want credit for being correct they need to actually speak up when the public is being told incorrect science. Otherwise what the scientists are saying among themselves is irrelevant to whether or not the public should trust the science that gets to them.
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And this was something deliberately cultivated by the scientific community itself. During Covid there were credentialed experts coming out against lockdowns or MRNA vaccines, etc., and the response was that it's the scientific consensus that counts, not individual opinions.
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They could start by admitting that they are capable of being wrong, and when they update their advice, not pretending that We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia.
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My suggestion would be to not inflame the population over it with a massive fear-mongering media campaign combined with insane unconstitutional regulations -- the lockdowns might have been popular-ish for the first few weeks or so, but without all the media and 'nudging' I think this would have faded pretty fast. Indeed it probably could have been nipped in the bud by China coverage along the lines of "look what the crazy totalitarians are doing now" and some pictures of Tank Man rather than "what a good idea!"
Public opinion is super malleable at the moment, is what I'm saying.
That's taking it a tad far.
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I caught my garage in a lie the other day.
They tried to claim my windshield wipers were worn out even though I had replaced them just a few weeks before. They were embarrassed when I said so and at least did not try to push it further. But they did try to cheat me, and they tried to cheat me for about 50 bucks to boot. They have recently been bought out by a different owner, who I'm sure told them to try this, as before they didn't try such tricks.
My brake pads were also worn out. Or so they said. I chose to believe them about the brake pads despite their lie about the windshield wipers, as the brake pads had been on there for about 100k miles and the previous set didn't make it that far. Despite that, I had to restrain myself from telling them to go fuck themselves.
I'm sure that someone who is a bit more hot-headed, and/or with a bit less of an idea of how long brake pads last, would've given them the middle finger they did surely deserve for that stunt right then and there, and gone on to drive another 100k miles with worn-out brake pads. "Oh, sure, the brake pads are worn out. That's what the last guy said, and I know for damn sure he was a cheater and a liar." That would be the wrong thing to do, but I would completely get it if someone did react in that way.
I'm going to go find a different garage. But I can't just go find a different medical establishment.
And while I may have some idea of how long brake pads last, because that's the kind of knowledge you gain just by living your life and paying a little attention, I did not study medicine. I only know about my own field. You can't expect people to have in-depth knowledge about fields other than their own. But you can certainly expect people who've been lied to, to react badly.
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Isn't it, compared to influenza, 10x as infectious, with 10x the hospitalization rate and 5-10x as deadly?
If we had a vaccine that reliably stopped influenza (instead of the bullshit yearly one people try taking which misses 75% of the time) I can't imagine why we wouldn't all be on it? But the measles vaccine is a lot more reliable than the influenza vaccine? And you don't have to take it annually?
It seems like a tragedy that our society is rejecting the measles vaccine. What am I missing?
Supposedly it reduces symptoms more than prevents you from getting sick in the first place, but I haven't dug into the clinical literature.
As for the rest - I was joking. I am pro MMR.
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There has been a marginal change, likely due to the reasons @ABigGuy4U gives -- backlash from all that pushing of the COVID vaccine, which seemed to work about as well as the flu vaccine. Especially the pushing of it on children, who were at very low risk from COVID.
Can you maybe offer some information regarding regulations of measles vaccination in the three federal states OP has mentioned? I guess it'd be relevant here.
South Carolina requires measles vaccination for kindergarten students; they allow both medical and religious exemptions. Texas requires it for pre-K students, and allows medical, religious, and personal belief exemptions. Arizona requires it for daycare and kindergarten and allows medical, religious, and personal belief exemptions. As I understand it, these particular Mennonite communities have their own schools which are simply not covered by any of this.
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When you flood your country with a firehose of malignant propaganda the people eventually stop trusting you, even about basic stuff.
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You're an actual expert on this stuff. I am very much not. But the common rebuttal I've seen from right-wingers is that Canada is seeing a proportionally worse increase with no RFK. The "other" factor they point to that both nations have in common over the relevant time frame is mass immigration from nations with much lower overall vaccination rates.
At a quick glance, that doesn't look like it holds much explanatory power for Spartansburg, but Gains County does seem have a high immigrant rate.. Mojave looks like it might be lower levels of immigrants than the surrounding area.
The bitter lessons of COVID were that my colleagues and I aren't epidemiologists, our actual specialty is worthless for making predictions in the real world and internet autists with sufficient time and motivation are at least as knowledgeable about the literature. At this point, a literate caveman with GPT terminal debating me about the literature would be like watching stockfish demolish a grade school chess class.
I was actually unaware of the outbreak in Canada. Seems like I was wrong and @The_Nybbler was right, it's the mennonite communities in Canada/Texas and apparently 'Slavic' (Ukrainian? Russian? Apparently services are held in both) immigrants in South Carolina. Not really your garden variety Trump supporters. Mea culpa.
FWIW, I'm not giving a lot of credit to the right-wingers on this one either. "Mennonites who came from Mexico in the 70's" is maybe the finest split possible between technically correct, but also really not what I took away from what those guys meant by "immigrants". Just so with "Russo-Ukranian Evangelicals".
When I was looking for links for that last post, I found this ranking of nations by MMR vaccination rate, and it does have some hotly topical immigrant source nations near the bottom, like Somalia, Haiti, and Venezuela. But that doesn't seem to have actually translated into outbreaks.
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