> "So think you're a sorceress"

"Open Sorceress" is a very common reference to open-source software engineering.

"Explicitly ethnic in nature" - okay, which explicit ethnicity? What about when all of those other ethnicities showed up? (They were explicitly *civil rights* in nature. The fact that race and ethnicity were the patternistic basis of infringement of those civil rights was the thing being protested. "Stop killing Black people" could be better phrased as "Stop looking for people to kill because they are Black" but it's an attention span deficit thing on the part of the listener.)

Funny thing. I sat in on a call with hundreds of other startup founders from across the country being held by the former president of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, who is another global epidemiologist of the same level as Dr. Fauci. Together, they had saved the world from HIV in Africa, swine flu, Ebola, and SARS. Now they were faced with saving the world from COVID. They laid forth the steps that must be undertaken, in unison, to contain a highly contagious airborne virus like COVID. The thing is the four steps must be undertaken in unison. Half-assing it inflicts economic and interpersonal harm and doesn't do much to stop the spread of the virus. In typical American fashion, naturally, 49 states opted to half-ass it; hence, the call I was on was Dr. Kim soliciting us to pressure state legislature and governors to push the whole mile. Only Massachusetts pulled it off.)

I had a teacher in high school who was paralyzed from the waist down as a child by polio. He was among the last kids to be infected before the vaccine became widely available. To this day, polio eradication is currently being actively undertaken, for example, by teams sent to the mountains of Afghanistan at the border of Pakistan to do polio vaccinations. Unlike smallpox, polio was not eradicated, and places like that still have a problem with it. Even though the international teams stopped going out, **the fucking Taliban continued the program, and 9.4 million children were vaccinated against polio last year.**

That's right, even the Taliban knows better than you - a bunch of illiterate poppy farmers with AK-47s.

And nice try, son, but I pay more in taxes than you earn in a year. (It's kind of obvious, sorry.) I'm a consulting CTO with a patent on 8 inventions relating to a drone that stops bullets. I am a guest lecturer at 5 universities on AI/ML, robotics, sensor fusion, and practical AR/VR at the master's level; my white papers have been published by the IEEE. I've paid lobbyists, drafted public policy as an industry expert, and addressed Congress. And while we're on the topic, I own one ranch four miles north of I-10 in the Chihuahuan desert and another ranch at the foot of the Guadalupe mountains and guess what there isn't? A migrant "invasion." The only problem I've had comes from the vigilantes LARPing and trespassing across my property.

And my feelings have nothing to do with your death toll - the majority of those who've died of covid were Republicans, most of whom refused Trump's vaccine. Listen, if you want to self-select like that, you do you. I won't miss having to subsidize your hobo states and doling out for your corporate and DoD subcontractor welfare.

Fun fact time.

You know what masks definitely stop?

Facial recognition technology.

But you never thought of that, did you, because you were in such an ass-busting rush to "own the libs." But if you've ever wondered how facial recognition technology was deployed so effectively after Jan 6, well. Now you know. It really was a bunch of lay people downloading footage from the news and running it through models trained on publicly available surveillance data. If you collectively had been in the habit of wearing masks regularly, like we were, it wouldn't have been nearly as easy to peg people as it was.