(08-17-2021, 01:01 AM)Mav link Wrote:Cookie, the US almost had a successful coup by the far right. Yes, the US is more right-wing than Australia, but we tend to follow in their footsteps.

(08-17-2021, 01:45 AM)cookie2 link Wrote:Mav I think the progressive left is also very strong in the US which could well lead to an ugly clash with the right.

(08-17-2021, 02:09 AM)capcom date Wrote:Better believe it [member=36]cookie2[/member] .... trouble is many of them can't even see it.

(08-17-2021, 01:45 AM)cookie2 link Wrote:Mav I think the progressive left is also very strong in the US which could well lead to an ugly clash with the right.

(08-17-2021, 01:29 AM)LP link Wrote:But the Taliban deal was done wasn't it?

I feel sections of the current media are trying to repaint history, Obama and Biden did not do that deal.

I agree it was stupid, Al-Qaeda is just a label, like referring to a mass murderer as a crusader!

(08-17-2021, 03:29 AM)Mav link Wrote:Right-wing extremists are considered by the FBI as the major terrorist threat inside the US. More so than Islamic extremists. Left-wing extremists hardly rate. The insurrection on 5 Jan was just one example of it. Sometimes, both-side-ism isn't balanced, it's just wrong.

(08-17-2021, 03:59 AM)ElwoodBlues1 link Wrote:Biden and Trump both stuffed it up but Biden kept the intitial agreement and even used Trumps envoy didnt he?
The Pentagon warned Biden what was happening but he dithered around like he usually does and now is blaming the Afghan army. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9898177/How-Joe-botched-Afghanistan-Biden-ignored-Pentagon-warnings-Taliban-over.html

Quote:Australia’s federal government wisely funded Cochrane to set up a COVID-19 taskforce here, made up of representatives from across Australia’s medical societies. They are independent and unafraid; willing to point out a drug the government has purchased to treat COVID-19 might not work.

For these three reasons - independence, Cochrane methodology, representation across the medical spectrum - we can have a very high degree of confidence in their findings.

Compare that to c19early.com, one of the leading ivermectin websites. Put on your critical thinking hat, and ask: is an independent, government-funded, Cochrane-using panel made up of scientists drawn from across Australia’s leading institutions, or… a website put up anonymously... best placed to scrutinise the evidence?

Every week - seriously, every week - the Cochrane taskforce reviews all the new evidence generated on how to prevent and treat COVID-19. All this goes online. You can look up any treatment you want here. Just hit Ctrl-F on your keyboard.

Here’s its recommendation on ivermectin: Do not use ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 outside of randomised trials with appropriate ethical approval.

Click on ‘research evidence’ and you can see a collection of all the published ivermectin data, sorted by outcome. But the more important thing to look at is the columns on the right.

Certainty of evidence takes into account the quality of the study. A study might claim to find ivermectin works, but if the quality is low, we cannot have faith in that finding. The evidence for every single clinical outcome for ivermectin is either low or very low quality.

There is simply not enough evidence to show whether ivermectin is helpful or harmful for patients with COVID-19.

Quote:Let’s turn, now, to a study that is actually quite good.

It’s called the TOGETHER trial. It’s a randomised controlled trial, and it’s very large. It publishes all its trial methodology online for everyone to read. Mr Meyerowitz-Katz describes it as a “masterpiece of science”.

The full findings haven’t been published yet, so we should treat them with a grain of salt. But the conclusions are available via a PowerPoint slide. They found essentially no benefit to ivermectin.