Dantes Last Stand - fellow Scopeans report your positions here :

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dante
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Dantes Last Stand - fellow Scopeans report your positions here :

Post by dante »

Due to corrupt security guards at quarantine outposts, the redzones have got us pinned down. We are in the eye of the storm but power continues to flow to the XITE. Please fellow Scopeans - report your positions as well. Don't bother to encrypt - the redzoners dont understand anyway. Brooklyn and Dallas are locked.
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Im continue to make music - whats your situations ?


Breaking News : Many musicians have taken to the Dandenong hills, where local Tecoma supply chain continues to pump out battle ready stomp boxes.
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SilverScoper
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Re: Dantes Last Stand - fellow Scopeans report your positions here :

Post by SilverScoper »

I've been to the shop where they sell those pedals. Locked down in Cheltenham (non hotspot) but making music with a re-jigged SW1000XG with home brew ISA to PCI adaptor.
dawman
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Post by dawman »

I too fled the COVID-19 infestation areas like Vegas where the only people wearing masks are robbing banks. Dumb shits still got caught, they forgot to take off their masks.....ankyu.

Suffering with no XITE-1 but Lithiam Battery on the MPC is 7 hours of Pad smacking for making Beats under the influence of Booze, Weed and Mushrooms. Trump chased off all of my Cocaine connections, so the only FishScales I see now are on German Brown, Rainbow or Cutthroat Trout......ankyu.

But my son has a battery operated Roland, and a nice JBL Submarine looking BlueTooth Battery operated speaker.
So we be jamming in the Redwoods.

Taking the MPC to the beach tomorrow. Damn I wish I was younger. So many fine ass babes and few men. It’s like Huntington and Redondo Beach was in the 70s when women exploited themselves to crowds of thankful men.

Missing the XITE-1, but will return to Vegas and see if everyone is dead like fake news says.
Brought all the Critters and infants too.



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dante
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Re: Dantes Last Stand - fellow Scopeans report your positions here :

Post by dante »

I dont know if this virus voted for Trump but if he can sling us a few doses of whatever he can pick up from his German pharma acquisitions then Im on board. Our state is in purgatory - all borders closed - for our security regime was slack but we are patriots so here's to to riding out the second wave.
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Hey thats great that you can jam with your kid. After first reading about your MPC I got an iPhone version - sounded great makin beats to kill time while waiting for Mrs in hair salon but it was frustrating trying to change the pitch of individual bass notes. Guess I need the real thing if supply lines stay intact.
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Post by dawman »

Keygroups are what convinced me the MPC was a good buy.
Plus it’s just powerful for Bass and drums and the vocal tricks stream right from the SD Card no problem.
They should add more RAM though.

Nice pic of you and the Mrs.Dante.
Stay safe bro.
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dante
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Post by dante »

Ankyu. We Vic's got marshal law now and 8PM curfew.
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mausmuso
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Re: Dantes Last Stand - fellow Scopeans report your positions here :

Post by mausmuso »

Hang in there Dante
we are ok here in Adelaide at the moment but for how long who knows
Feel for you
My niece is in Bierut and was 200 metres from the blast in her apartment.
Didn't get injured but that was pure luck.
The apartment was wrecked, but she was not near the front windows
Its all relative hey
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valis
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Post by valis »

Glad your niece is ok, that was certainly one of the more attention grabbing events recently. Given this year so far, that's saying something.
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dante
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Post by dante »

mausmuso wrote: Thu Aug 06, 2020 2:19 am Hang in there Dante
we are ok here in Adelaide at the moment but for how long who knows
Feel for you
My niece is in Bierut and was 200 metres from the blast in her apartment.
Didn't get injured but that was pure luck.
The apartment was wrecked, but she was not near the front windows
Its all relative hey
maus
Only 200 metres - she is EXTREMELY lucky - as I saw on news a guy from a house 500 metres his place was decimated luckily he survived. Apparently toxic combustible materials stock piled in the site for 5 years
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Peter Drake
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Post by Peter Drake »

Hunkered down in Portland, Oregon, USA. The federal thugs aren't tear-gassing us anymore, but there are still "roving gangs of anarchists". Turns out they are very nice and earnest young people that want to spread information about community involvement and resources. They often have some nice herbal tea and vegan cookies. I don't see why the racist orange guy is so afraid of them.
Fellow Scopers have checked in with me, and I'm happy to report I'm healthy, the cats are fat and happy, and the project window continues to be a happy refuge from the troubled world.
I ache with sorrow for all of Beirut.
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Post by dawman »

I wish there were more peaceful chaps like you describe in Portland.
My buddy from Sisters, OR told his son to fuck off and not come back home over the 4th of July weekend when he was arrested for assault and vandalism.
He was part of a peaceful looting when the protest turned violent, as they have for months before Federal Goons showed up.

If you’re saying this for moral posturing I can relate, but these protests have been a complete disaster for Portland. I usually don’t believe anything I see, but watching a kid get knocked unconscious, then laying there lifeless kicked in the head again and dies, tells me pretty much what my friend from up the road says.

His son doesn’t work, plays video games, daddy pays his student loans, decided to sell his car, etc.
Seems to me a typical story of kids not having much of a future due to high costs of living and rebelling because they thought they were entitled to something.

We need to help these lost souls. But they want instant gratification.
Very difficult to appease these types.
Bernie Bros are angry because they hate Trump, but have to vote for a real racist to defeat him.

As far as the herbal tea types go, they’re not in charge, and won’t be anytime soon.

Once you allow violence to fester, you get more of it.

Stay safe bro, glad you live in a peaceful area of Portland.
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Post by dawman »

mausmuso wrote: Thu Aug 06, 2020 2:19 am Hang in there Dante
we are ok here in Adelaide at the moment but for how long who knows
Feel for you
My niece is in Bierut and was 200 metres from the blast in her apartment.
Didn't get injured but that was pure luck.
The apartment was wrecked, but she was not near the front windows
Its all relative hey
maus

Can’t believe tons of explosives were stored there fermenting over time.
Glad your loved ones are okay. The trauma caused from this is unmeasurable.
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Post by mausmuso »

Yes my niece came thru unscathed, but the Australian Embassy where she works was badly damaged and a number of staff were injured by flying glass.
The embassy is 1.2 KM away from the explosion site which is a lot further than her apartment.
With all that they got off very light compared to many others.
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dante
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Post by dante »

Thats cool thanks god she was blessed. We in Vic are under a cloud but many others far worse off. At least I still got a job and a DaW .
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Post by mausmuso »

My niece lives in Melbourne when she is home, out Yaraville way.
Enjoy your DAW
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Post by dante »

Melbourne has now been in full lockdown for 11 weeks - longer than Wuhan's original lockdown. The President of Melbourne is being sued over the curfew and the leaders are being called Liars in the press due to denying responsibility for not allowing the national guard to take over Hotel quarantine (cause of second wave) when they had taken over every other major capital city and ran it successfully. The job was given to private security guards who slept on the job and slept with the inmates :lol: Well at least this city has CSL (Commonwealth Serum Labs) who are gonna manufacture the vaccine which might work better than that which is left over from Trumps campaign. My bro in law works not far from where I live at CSL he's gonna save me and wifey a place in the queue with all the other northern rednecks :D
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Post by garyb »

the CDC released numbers here that showed that only a little over 9000 people have died STRICTLY from Covid here in the USA. it seems that ventilators were responsible for most of the early deaths of seniors here in Washington State(my friends and family in the medical business confirm that ventilators are deadly when combined with pneumonia).

Scandinavian countries never went on lockdown and they are not all dead.

Corona virii are the cause of the common cold. there has NEVER been a cure or an effective vaccine for any Corona Virus. there's no reason to expect anything better than spotty results, much like the flu vaccines.

herd immunity is the best hope, especially since this virus is not especially deadly, even though it's especially contagious. i have also heard that herd immunity may not be possible because antibody immunity may not be possible, but if antibody immunity is not possible, no vaccine could work, as the point of a vaccine is to create antibody immunity.

masks are useless as the virus is between .1 and .01 microns depending on who you ask. the mask is about .3 of a MICRON at best.

there is much too much panic.

in Australia and the USA, thousands of doctors have sued to be allowed to use Hydroxychloroquine. Fauci wrote an important peer-reviewed paper about it back in the SARS days, touting it's effectiveness at relieving symptoms and speeding healing while slowing the spread of the virus(yes, i read the paper). now, he says Hydroxychloroquine is useless, but Covid-19's proper name is SARS Cov2 as it is just a SARS variation.

enjoy the time under the control system devised by your superiors. i really don't know anything and i'm not suggesting anyone do anything stupid, but i just am not in favor of a zombie apocalypse either. i've seen many more people lose business, homes and financial independence over this virus, than i have seen dead people personally.
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dante
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Post by dante »

Well yeah its easy to sit at home cutting code and makin Billy Idol covers and generally unaffected when I'm not one of the ones lost a sole trader business, they are not getting much support from the Presidents of Melbourne and Canberra like big business.
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Post by valis »

Choose Only The Drugs And Prescriptions Prescribed By Your Supervisors! Shut Up! Be Happy!

The lockdowns have throttled any business that wasn't deemed "essential", so I'd say the Supervisors did their jobs as prescribed. What's the antidote to this now, after 25 years of using music for that purpose?
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Post by Peter Drake »

Gary and others, I should weigh in here. Outside of the project window I'm a scientist, a molecular biologist with a focus on several things, but particularly viral genomics. I also have significant background in anatomy and physiology, biochemistry, immunology and serology, and cellular signaling. Generally, this means when I'm not relaxing in front of a computer, I'm, ummm... working in front of a computer... I need to get out more. Seriously though, I do have the qualifications and background to interpret a good deal of the flood of SARS-Cov2 information that we're all inundated with. I'm NOT qualified to speak in broad terms about the political and social aspects, that's not in my wheelhouse, but I am dismayed at the situation in my home country and have experienced personal tragedy with this virus.

Not going to get into the primary research weeds here, but hopefully provide some more in-depth background and information. I'm also going to be less guarded in my conclusions than I am when in my full science mode, please don't tell my research committee about this post. Keep in mind I could be, and often am, wrong. Usually that's a good thing, as it means there is something to learn or figure out, but don't take everything I write here as the final word on the matter. Our knowledge in these areas is still developing.

COVID-19 morbidity: I haven't seen the 9000 statistic, but I'm sure the supporting information and statistics feature a great deal of co-morbidity information. Medical mortality definitions are slippery and somewhat arbitrary. All other things considered, the vast majority of humans die of heart failure, due to pneumonia, which is brought about by some other disease etiology. You might have AIDS, flu, leukemia, measles, or kidney disease, but the final cascading failure is generally going to look the same. If you're really interested in following the topic you should go to the CDC website and sign up for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) It's written at a level that is understandable without a background in biostatistics, although following many of the links gets very serious very fast. I have the luxury of a friend in epidemiology for that, and she leans on me for biochemistry questions. I don't really do stuff on the clinical side, but I know that those people have been very agile and adaptable to finding the best treatments for positive clinical outcomes. Remember, this is a novel disease presentation, we haven't seen this exact thing before, arriving at ideal solutions will be a long and imperfect process.

Coronavirus and the common cold... hold on, it's going to be a wild ride. The common cold is actually from around 200 viral strains, including but not limited to picornavirus, syncitial virus, rhinovirus, enterovirus... And yes, coronavirus, four varieties of coronavirus to be exact, out of ~200 viruses/strains. What's important about all of these viruses, for the purposes of our little discussion, is that they produce an overly-exuberant immune response. All of the noticeable symptoms of a cold are a consequence of the immune system. When immune-compromised individuals are infected with common cold viruses the symptoms are often quite minimal and benign. Why does the immune system go so crazy about these viruses in particular? We don't fully know, but we're working it out. The good news: it turns out we DO know the broad outlines of the wild immune response to the four common cold coronaviruses, and our newest one that is joining the pantheon.

All of the human coronaviruses are zoonotic, i.e. they jumped over from another species. It's happened before, it will happen again. It appears that the last time we got a new coronavirus friend was 700-1200 years ago, the molecular clock people are still working it out and arguing about it. When this happened, it was likely very similar in disease outcomes to what we're seeing today, and the time before, and the other previous time, and that other time. Someday COVID-19 will be a minor inconvenience, much like the other human coronaviruses. It's not good for a virus to be too virulent in its host, this evolutionary pressure reduces the virulence over time. Unfortunately, a long time in normal human reference frames. We do not yet have the knowledge, ability, and techniques to speed up this process, but very smart people are working on it.

So why is COVID-19 so much more nasty/deadly to us than those other coronaviruses we get? I'm glad you asked, let's talk about bats for a while. Bats are very weird, and if I were that kind of biologist I would be studying and trying to understand them. Fun fact: bats are more closely related to whales than they are to mice and other rodents, molecular phylogeny is full of surprises. For our discussion the most important thing about bats is that they are very inefficient flyers. They might migrate seasonally like birds if they could, but their flight is metabolically much more expensive than that of birds. A metaphor that might work for this is human swimming. A fish will swim four kilometers and it's no big deal, but for a human it's a major undertaking.

Bats, because they're not great at flying, consume a very great amount of oxygen. It's really quite staggering the proportion of oxygen to body mass they run through while they're flitting about getting food. Oxygen is a very corrosive chemical, and an oxygen-based metabolism requires a lot of protective mechanisms to ensure that oxygen doesn't trash everything in the process. You've heard of the dietary benefits of antioxidants? that's a big part of the protective mechanisms. Bats, because they're using stupendous amounts of oxygen, have some serious adaptations to make sure that all that oxygen doesn't wreak serious destruction on them. One consequence of this is that bats have an immune system that is tilted heavily toward protection from oxidative damage. This somewhat weird immune system, in turn, promotes unusual characteristics in the viruses (and other things) that live in bats.

COVID-19 is "fresh off the bat" and as such has features from its recent coexistence with bats. These features make our immune systems overreact severely. It's like swatting a fly with a hammer, you'll kill the fly eventually but do a lot of damage to your home in the process.

We can tell from the viral genome that COVID-19 was in bats very recently, and some other species too. It may have passed through some other animals on its way to us. Unfortunately, we don't yet know what those other animals are. We've only sequenced the genomes of a small fraction of all the life on this planet, so our references on this are severely limited. Hardly anyone wants to fund this kind of work, because the benefits are not immediately obvious. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to sequence reference genomes for all the species of marmoset? (choose your own obscure animal) Because figuring out any of the myriad and inevitable zoonotic diseases, including COVID-19, requires this base of knowledge. Not as popular as working to end breast cancer, but just as important, I digress... End rant.

Herd immunity, whether conferred through infection or vaccination, won't be a long term solution. Just look at the common cold for how that works out. We don't all get colds at roughly the same time, partly thanks to herd immunity, but individually we can get the exact same cold virus within fairly short intervals of months or years. We don't know the why or how of this, some very smart immunologists have been working on this question for a very long time. Coronavirus vaccines haven't been previously developed because there wasn't a serious need and probably little market. I would love to see the proposal for sinking significant capital and resources into short-term immunization for ~2% of common cold viruses. You're correct about antibody immunity, but don't forget about T-cells. It gets very complicated very fast, but there is an emerging understanding of SARS-Cov2 interaction with interferon signaling, which in turn affects CD4+ and CD8+ processes and cascades... The short version is that SARS-Cov2 vaccines and/or COVID-19 therapeutics may look very different from what has come before in medicine.

This virus IS especially deadly, much more deadly than the flu which kills a lot of humans every year, but not as deadly as SARS 2002. The 2002-2004 pandemic should have prompted more study and research expenditures, and if it had we might not be in the situation we are right now. Let's hope that we don't miss our opportunity this time. The great news is that this virus is not as deadly as it could be, we're not looking at 30-50% population mortality, but we could be next time. Nature has handed us an excellent "dress rehearsal" with a variant that is very pathogenic but not highly virulent (very communicable, not super-deadly) SARS 2002 was highly pathogenic and virulent, we barely avoided a global pandemic there, partly because SARS 2002 really knocks down its victims, so they're not spreading the virus in the community like asymptomatic SARS-Cov2 carriers. MERS is another coronavirus, quite virulent but not very pathogenic. Any of these factors can change fairly rapidly. RNA viruses, which is the coronavirus type, mutate and evolve quite quickly. People like myself are sifting terabytes of coronavirus genetic information through bioinformatic analysis looking for weaknesses and probable paths that these things might take.

Masks are not useless. They're uncomfortable and awkward to be sure, but they are a statistically demonstrable factor in mitigating COVID-19. This is accomplished primarily by limiting respiratory droplets dispersed by SARS Cov2 carriers. I've had way too many discussions about respiratory aerosols and "mouth rain" with my epidemiologist colleague, I'm not going to go into it here, but there's an enormous amount of relevant literature. The argument of mask pore vs virion size is a specious argument. It would be valid if humans were spewing bare viruses, but we're not, we're spewing respiratory droplets that have hundreds or thousands of virions within them. These respiratory droplets are many times larger than the pores of a mask, and therefore the droplets, and in turn the virions are captured (not perfectly, but better than nothing) More fun facts: a virus outside of its host is a very fragile and delicate thing, and a virus that isn't in water is typically a dead virus.

Yes, there are doctors clamoring for hydroxychloroquine. Many doctors are idiots, I've determined this empirically. In university I was on a parallel track with a great deal of pre-meds, those of us pursuing more scientifically rigorous doctorates could easily see their considerable limitations. That being said, the world needs generalists like MDs, but they have no business applying their hazy ideas of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics to drug discovery and application. They should just implement the clinical side of double-blind trials and shut the hell up about what they think of it.

Yes, Fauci has a contradictory history on hydroxychloroquine statements, that's because he's an excellent scientist. Science changes with emerging and new evidence, unlike say chiropractic "medicine" which is still stuck on the idea of ghosts in your bones, or vitalism, spiritual inspiration, or whatever nonsense the founder heard from the "other world". Science adjusts as it progresses, and it's moving very fast on this class of inhibitors. Science also continually works to fill in the details, which corrects and improves our understanding. Take gravity for example: Newtonian gravity works in everyday circumstances, but fails when you're moving very fast and/or in a high gravitational field. General relativity explains and provides tools that cover those situations and makes a clearer picture of gravity, but fails to describe it in very tiny circumstances. Quantum gravity is currently getting worked out and should handle the tiny, but will likely have some other unforeseen shortcoming. So it goes.

Hydroxychloroquine seems like a good clinical solution, but the complications are a prodigious snarl of problems. Efficacy isn't yet fully supported. Don't listen to pundits yammering about it, listen to the smart folk that work in the trenches of drug discovery. One could make the same faulty arguments to use the AIDS drug AZT for COVID-19. It's an anti-retroviral, so it should work on a coronavirus as well as a lentivirus, but just check out that toxicity and complications list. (Note: Do NOT consider AZT as a COVID-19 treatment, I only cite it as an example of how these things are not as simple as they initially appear)

I too wish to avoid a zombie apocalypse, despite the actions of our Rothschild-controlled reptilian overlord Freemason Illuminati chemtrail GMO Antichrist tracking chip secret world government. Seriously, this is hurting everyone in many ways and the recovery will take many years. I hope this helps. Be kind and supportive to each other. Also, Gary, thanks for being cranky and supplying a great writing prompt.
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