Juries decide if someone murdered somebody, not Rush Limbaugh: He might as well be a member of the mainstream media

Rush's rush to prejudge this case and using all this inflammatory language to boot was simply outrageous and would be at any time, but especially while rioters and looters were attempting to burn down the country. He's no conservative, no friend of law and order, no friend of the police. He's a coward who didn't stand up for what's right at a time it was needed most.

The police arrest transcript is out and it shows that the attending officers had a thoroughgoing and reasonable belief from beginning to end that Floyd was resisting arrest under the influence of drugs, that police had called for an ambulance immediately after Floyd hurt himself and that Floyd was bleeding from the mouth long before Chauvin ever arrived and put him on the ground, that Floyd blamed his supposed breathing difficulties on having had COVID when asked directly if he were under the influence of drugs, and that Floyd's complaints about being unable to breathe persisted throughout the encounter which reasonably led police to believe their actions had had nothing to do with his breathing complaints and wouldn't.

The autopsy proved Floyd was under the influence, had in fact had COVID, and did not die of asphyxiation but of cardiac arrest. The police transcript says he crashed in the ambulance and did not die on the pavement.

George Floyd's death was an accident, but mostly of George Floyd's own making, beginning with taking drugs, hanging out with a woman but not his wife and the mother of his children, and ending with possession of multiple counterfeit bills and passing one off as legit.

June 1:

"And poor George Floyd, it’s been said that he lost his life. He didn’t lose his life. It was taken from him. He was murdered for no possible explicable, justifiable reason. It was just sickening, sickening to watch, sickening to see. And you look at the face of the cop involved in the video and the three who stood around and weren’t doing anything. And you just wonder, how stupid can you be..."

June 2: 

"None of this is something happens and these people see it and they get mad and take to the streets. They are waiting. They are programmed. They are waiting for the call to action.It’s not that George Floyd was murdered; it’s that somebody was at the hands of a cop, and that’s the go signal". 

June 2:

"George Floyd died in a blue city. He died in a deep blue city, in a deep blue state. He died in a place where there shouldn’t be any police brutality because the Democrats are not gonna permit it. The Democrats are gonna fix it. The Democrats are gonna make sure it doesn’t happen.And yet George Floyd was murdered in a deep blue state, in a deep blue city, and somehow this is because of systemic racism and white supremacy brought to you by — dadelut, dadelut, dadelut — Donald Trump?"

June 4:

"Coronavirus and the George Floyd Murder:

"What the cops did was obscene. It was. Look, I understand anybody repulsed by that. I was not just repulsed. I was livid. It was so damn stupid. It was mean. Every potential negative character trait that you could associate with it, it was."

June 5:

"But the point is that the Democrat Party, as it is constituted and as it is functioning today, all of this that’s happening that’s in relationship to the George Floyd murder, it’s all a failure. The fact that George Floyd was murdered is a testament to the failure of liberal Democrat politics. Where did it happen?"

Despite rising coronavirus deaths in California, Arizona, Texas and Florida, the overall trend remains down

Daily new deaths nationally hit an interim low on Jun 21 of 257 in the New York Times data set. This was followed by 270 on Jun 28, 264 on Jul 4, and 262 on Jul 5. Clearly the period from the third week of June to the Fourth of July holiday has marked a welcome low in pandemic deaths.

In the 15 worst states for deaths from coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, it is telling how the average of daily new deaths measured from the beginning continues to trend lower. The worst states for average daily new deaths measured from the beginning, as of Jun 27, were, in this order: NY NJ PA MI MA IL CT CA LA FL MD OH GA IN and TX.  

On Jun 27, the sum of the average of daily new deaths from coronavirus in those 15 states stood at 852, measured from the beginning in each state. Again, that's the sum of average daily new deaths in the 15 worst states since the beginning of the pandemic on that date. It includes any and all revisions and updates reported to date, for whatever reason. No messing around with moving averages and all the BS (Yes, I'm talking about you New York, you New Jersey, you Delaware, you Illinois, and who knows who else) which gave false indications at a point in time in the past because the data was provisional, or standards of inclusion changed, or somebody came along and cleaned up your sorry mess. This way at least you have a fixed terminus a quo in each state, and a moving terminus ad quem which you can track from day to day which incorporates all the changes smoothed out over the long haul. A nice relatively clean benchmark, at a time when it appears we have otherwise reached a new low ebb.

Well, a week later from Jun 27 when we were at 852, on Jul 4 that sum had fallen to 828. By Jul 7 it had fallen again, to 819. And despite the rise in deaths in the south very recently, the sum on Jul 8 fell again, to 817 as of this morning's figures.

Despite all the bad news in the south (CA 145 deaths on 7/8, AZ 101 on 7/7, TX 119 on 7/8), and New Jersey again dumping 142 new deaths into the numbers on Jul 8 (really New Jersey?), the death trend in the worst hit states, which again does include CA, TX and FL, overall continues to trend lower. This is what one would expect if the worst of the pandemic is behind us. Time marches on and naturally ameliorates the ugly data, as long as no new ugly data appear. You'd be able to tell easily if deaths were getting worse because the average from the beginning would flatline and then trend higher. Or if suddenly AZ, for example, joined the list of worst hit states (I'm using a low threshold of 18 average daily new deaths measured from the beginning), that would be a huge red flag (AZ did tick up, however, from 11 average daily new deaths to 12 recently). CO at 14 and VA at 15 would be more likely candidates to join the list than AZ at this point. But so far neither flatlining of the average nor "new joiners" is happening.

The death trend is lower.

So far. 

Johns Hopkins University shows 130,007 US deaths from coronavirus just minutes ago

On Jun 22 I estimated we'd see 130k by about Jul 15, so we are nine days early.

So it took 14 days to add another 10k vs. 15 days from 110k to 120k in this data set.

The problem is we had big death data dumps both on Jun 25 and Jun 30, adding 3,766 old deaths from the past which had never been counted in the totals.

I think that sped up the climb unrepresentatively.

New deaths are actually accumulating at a slower pace.

In the 15 worst states for coronavirus deaths, average daily new deaths counted from the very beginning of the pandemic totaled 852 for those 15 states on Sat Jun 27, and declined to 828 on Sat Jul 4. That includes all those data dumps, too.

We've observed four days recently where total US new deaths have been below 300, levels we haven't seen since late March just as the pandemic was kicking into high gear:

Jun 21 257

Jun 28 270

Jul 04 264

Jul 05 262.

With case counts rapidly rising in Florida, Texas, California, Arizona and many other places in the south, it is feared we'll be seeing a rise in deaths in coming weeks. We'll have to see. Since such a high proportion of deaths occurred in nursing and assisted living facilities in the north, it is difficult to say if we'll experience the same thing in the south. They've had time to learn.

With new deaths actually hitting new lows, I'm cautiously optimistic.

Stay away from crowds, especially in enclosed spaces, keep your distance and wear a mask. It's easy if you try.

 

Climate Update For KGRR June 2020

Climate Update For KGRR June 2020

Max T 93, Mean 91

Min T 42, Mean 43

Av T 69.6, Mean 67.7

Precip 2.84, Mean 3.55

Snow measurement season officially ends: Actual 53.5, Mean 66.7.

Heating degree day measurement season officially ends: Actual 6269, Mean 6702; season 6.46% milder than the mean, ranks a "meh" 18th among mildest winters since 1891-92.

Cooling degree days 2020 season to date: 225, Mean 184, hot start to summer 22.3% above the mean.

Rasmussen Trump Approval Index has swung from -7 to -19 May 22-Jul 3 amid protests, riots and violence but has ended up about where it was despite all the hysteria

LOL, this didn't age well

$30 million affordable housing project torched in George Floyd riots in MN

'[T]he old polarizing politics is a spent force. The image of the "angry black man" still purveyed by sensationalists such as Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza is anachronistic today, when blacks and even Muslims, the most conspicuous of "outsider" groups, profess optimism about America and their place in it'.

-- Sam Tanenhaus, The New Republic, 10 Feb 2013

Portland, Oregon, communist protest hell hole since May 28, is also a little coronavirus factory: Cases up 140%

A star is born in St. Louis

The US COVID-19 case fatality rate as of Jun 27 has dropped to 5.07% from 5.56% on Jun 14

New record daily cases above 40,000 in recent days are associated with record testing levels above 600,000 per day for the first time, diluting the fatality rate to a degree.

Hospitalizations in Southern and Western states are on the upswing at the same time.

BLM's Shaun King is Exhibit A for the race war against whites, Hawk Newsome for the class war against property

This is a class war against property combined with a race war against whites

Daily protests in Portland, Oregon, have boosted coronavirus cases by 93% in the last 30 days, media ignores it almost as much as the protests

If it isn't obvious by now that you're an idiot, Johnny Reb tried to tell you

The Civil War was obviously a waste of time, blood and property.

For every Confederate statue now coming down at the hands of BLM there will eventually be three of a founder of America, a Yankee, or an abolitionist to match it. Eventually, the symbols of your country will be gone. That you'll just let them go shows the actual country is already gone.

This isn't a war on racism. It's a revolution against America. Racism is simply the pretext for it. It is led by the "worldly" type of communist, the black radical who:

"with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power".

Think Shaun King the "Christian", who now explicitly aims to obliterate the white Jesus from every one of America's ~375,000 congregations.

No good deed is going unpunished, but fools like Ann Coulter will still argue that blacks deserve and should be paid reparations: Those who have done no wrong should pay those who have suffered none, we are told.

140,414 dead Yankees are just chopped liver to these ingrates and fools.

Pay all you want, it won't change a thing. Still more will be required of you.

They now think they have the upper hand and are out to replace you. "Diversity is our strength" means "their" strength, not yours. Diversity means your weakness, and the unchecked riots and looting are proof of it.

Christians 244 years ago took up arms against "tyrants" like these and called it "obedience to God".

I can't imagine finding one such person among us today. And you certainly won't find one among the paid mercenaries, the cops. They're just trying to make it to full retirement like everybody else.

Instead, most Christians have become Spengler's "credulous" type of communist, who:

"obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort".

On obsession with doctrine think First Things Magazine, think Sojourners, Christianity Today, and the Patheos crowd for the feminine sentimentalists and wealth condemners, think the Prosperity Gospel movement and the charismatic Dominionists for the critics of the Christianity which is content with little, think Rod Dreher's Benedict Option or the survivalists for the separatists, and also the libertarians who "go Galt", accountable to no one but themselves. Representative all.

Perhaps the only Christians who think in robust opposition to the communists are the followers of Adrian Vermeule who envision a once and future Roman Catholic authoritarianism from North to South America with a heavily Spanish content. In other words, when white supremacy fails, replace it with . . . not black.

 

"To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow".

 

The answer to Bolshevism from the foremost grandmothers of Bolshevism is to double down on the Bolshevism. Pre-modern Europe was just a dress rehearsal.

 

I'm sure Black Lives Matter will be thrilled.

Today the US registered 120,036 deaths from COVID-19 at the Johns Hopkins University dashboard

Here's the progression:

50k 4/24

60k 4/29  5 days

70k 5/5    6 days

80k 5/11  6 days

90k 5/18  7 days

100k 5/27  9 days

110k 6/7    11 days

120k 6/22  15 days.

Stay-at-home orders, growth of clinical expertise, and increased mask-wearing among other things have all made a huge impact on the growth of deaths.

New daily deaths hit 275 on Sunday, which was last lower way back on March 25, with 270.

It looks like it will take something like another 20 days to add another 10k deaths, so 130k by roughly July 15.  On May 18 I projected 155k by then, so obviously there's been a big slow down since late May when the projected 100k deaths projected was met.

That's the good news.

The bad news is case counts nationally are rising again after bottoming on May 11. New daily cases were so high on June 20 that you had to go back to May 1 to find a higher single day. In key states in the South this increase is not attributable to increased testing, especially in Florida where testing has declined and in other states where hospitalization increases are outstripping testing increases. Texas, Arizona, California and the Carolinas are all pointed to as examples.

Expect death counts to pick up again starting roughly July 15 due to the mid-June turn higher in cases. It takes about 28 days from classification as a case to classification as a death, according to the modeling.

Death is a lagging indicator. Low deaths today are the result of good action taken many yesterdays ago.   

Hey look at that, Trump finally got his 40% unemployment rate in April 2020

The thrill is gone: Tulsa Trump rally cheap seats empty as Tulsa county adds 627 COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days

Where is ED-209 when we need him? "You're not wearing a mask. You have 20 seconds to comply."

As usual Rush Limbaugh is full of it: He says Lincoln ran an anti-slavery campaign for the presidency

The Republicans of 1860 pledged not to interfere with slavery in the states, but opposed its expansion into the territories. Lincoln's moderation on the issue upset abolitionists.

I check in for 5 minutes just to see what he's on about, and he gets something wrong. Every. Damn. Time.

Update with chapter and verse:

"The Republican Party was actually founded in opposition to slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was the Republican Party’s president. He ran on an anti-slavery agenda, including some other things. The Civil War was waged under his leadership and presidency, and 500,000 Americans lost their lives (mostly white) to end slavery".

Here.

Rush also gets the casualties wrong. Admittedly there is variation in estimates, but 500,000 isn't one of them.

"For 110 years, the numbers stood as gospel: 618,222 men died in the Civil War, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South — by far the greatest toll of any war in American history.

But new research shows that the numbers were far too low.

By combing through newly digitized census data from the 19th century, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has recalculated the death toll and increased it by more than 20 percent — to 750,000".

More.

LOL Bigelow: Refreshing anytime, in the igloo, at the luau, or even after the dance

Cheap widely available steroid confirmed to reduce COVID-19 deaths by 33% among patients on ventilators

Scientists hail dexamethasone as ‘major breakthrough’ in treating coronavirus

"Results of trials announced on Tuesday showed dexamethasone, which is used to reduce inflammation in other diseases, reduced death rates by around a third among the most severely ill Covid-19 patients admitted to hospital".

COVID-19 in the USA is not under control in half the states, with the moving average of daily new cases at record levels in 13 states, including the most populated states of California, Texas and Florida

Redistribution is old, but it's new again

The best thing about this Media Matters attack on Glenn Beck from 2010 is the line it draws from King through Sharpton to BLM

Beck distorts King's legacy while blaming Sharpton for having “perverted” it

'In fact, Sharpton accurately reflected the sentiments of King, who advocated for the “radical redistribution of economic power.” ...

'[A]uthor Nick Kotz writes that during a 1968 trip to Mississippi, King stated: “It didn't cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters” and "[i]t didn't cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote." However, he concluded that “now, we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars -- and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”'

King was a commie from the beginning. Beck just wants to pretend otherwise, like many Republican squishes do. It's whitey pretending things aren't that bad.

Sharpton, like King, is a true believer, if not nearly as intelligent: “the dream was not to put one black family in the White House. The dream was to make everything equal in everybody's house.”

Now the thugs of Black Lives Matter make this the number one demand for economic justice:

"Redistribution of wealth through a 'progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state, and federal levels.'"

They are out in your streets trying to make that happen.

What are you going to do about it?

 

Conservatism would keep military base names, Senate Republicans cave to Crockagawea by voice vote

Spineless, useless cowards, except for a couple:

"Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, and Cotton didn't support the amendment".

More.

Buh bye NASCAR

Remember this hysteria about Trump, before there even was anything to be hysterical about?

March 2016, here.

Yet more hysteria brings down Columbus monuments

Story.

Counterprotesters lose jobs because they shouted George Floyd should have complied with the police

Re-enacting the knee on the neck didn't help.

#MeToo hysteria has been replaced by #RacismReckoning hysteria.

Story and video here.

Hysterical Americans, hysterical military

Here:

THE NAVY ON TUESDAY announced it would prohibit the Confederate battle flag from all its military installations, following the lead of the Marine Corps which last week began implementing a ban on its troops displaying the flag in any form. ...

The top officer for the Marine Corps, which is a part of the Navy Department, issued an order in April to all Marines that would prohibit on its bases any rendering of the Confederate battle flag, including on T-shirts, mugs or bumper stickers.

"Anything that divides us, anything that threatens team cohesion, must be addressed head-on," Berger wrote in a message to all Marines at that time.

In a statement last week detailing that order, now in effect, Berger said, "Current events are a stark reminder that it is not enough for us to remove symbols that cause division – rather, we also must strive to eliminate division itself." ...

The Army on Monday broke from its prior hard line and said it would consider renaming 10 bases currently named for Confederate generals, including Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. ...

Gen. Charles Brown, the incoming Air Force chief of staff, said in an emotional video message earlier this week, "I'm thinking about how full I am with emotion ...

The crime and justice data you don't want to hear

Here:

"If a certain group is committing more crimes, more violent crimes, and law enforcement's having to come into more contact with them, that number is going to be higher. Who in the world in their right mind would think that our shootings should be right along the U.S. Census lines? That's insanity.

"All of the research says we're shooting African-Americans about 24% less than we probably ought to be, based on the crimes being committed."

Yates expressed displeasure with the largely peaceful protests that have been taking place in big cities and small towns all over the country since Floyd's killing on May 25.

"The officer was arrested the next day. They were prosecuted, they were fired. What are you doing? What do you mean, 'justice?' Justice at this point has been done," Yates said. "Well, then it turned into systematic racism, systematic police brutality.

In Michigan at least, there was no spike in COVID-19 cases due to Memorial Day

The New York Times data for Michigan at us-covid-tracker dot com is anomalous. It adds "probable cases" data starting Jun 5 which the State of Michigan COVID-19 Dashboard does not.

Michigan's data shows no up-trend to cases at all, and in fact shows new daily cases trending lower over the period.

"The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported 284 new cases of COVID-19 Monday, bringing the total to 58,525 [both data points are for Fri 6/5/20]. The state also started reporting probable cases; there are 4,928 cases that are not confirmed yet."

More. 

Biden is crushing Trump in Michigan in latest EPIC-MRA poll by 12 points +/-4

The bad news is exactly two weeks after Fri May 22, the kickoff to the Memorial Day holiday weekend, new daily COVID-19 cases are making records in 9 states and Puerto Rico

Michigan had an astounding 4,529 new daily cases added on Fri Jun 5, 2020.

US COVID-19 deaths now total 110,028 in the Johns Hopkins University data

So, 10 days after hitting 100,000 instead of 9 days going from 90k to 100k deaths. Stay-at-home orders slowed down the rate at which deaths piled up.

What in the SAM HELL is this? 4,529 new COVID-19 cases on Fri Jun 5 in Michigan, 250 new deaths!

Climate Update for KGRR May 2020

Climate Update for KGRR May 2020

Max temp 90, Mean 86

Min temp 26, Mean 32

Av temp 56.7, Mean 57.9

Rain 4.22, Mean 3.48

Snow trace, Mean 0.2

HDD 298, Mean 252, Season 6240, Mean 6651, anomaly -411, season to date 6.17% milder than mean and currently ranks only 18th in the list of mildest winters

CDD 50, Mean 39, Season 50, Mean 45

American Shit Show and Antifa

The right wing wants everything opened up right now, yesterday even, no masks, no restrictions.

They are fools.

The left wing wants gradual opening with social distancing, masks, etc., except in protests. By all means go ahead and protest, they say, because it is more important! Many in the medical community have made the mistake of taking this position.

They are hypocrites.

George W. Bush used to maintain, probably still does, that the Muslim fundamentalists who attacked us on 9/11 attacked us because of our freedoms. They never succeeded for the most part. They managed to make us a surveillance society, it is true, and increasingly a security state, but life has been pretty much normal because we took the battle over there, at enormous expense to ourselves and everyone involved. 

Islamic fundamentalism has been no match for freedom. It doesn't really know how to exploit freedom to destroy it, being at its root itself unfree. It has had to resort to a kind of Fabianism instead, exploiting Western openess to emigrate to Western countries and reproduce there in the hope of eventually outnumbering us. They risk assimilating in the process, however.

But really to destroy freedom outright you need freedom to the max . . . you need anarchy!

In other words, you need a virus! The virus is totally free! It spreads just like that, and you can hardly stop it. Just look at how we have tried.

The virus has been everything Antifa only wished it could be. And Antifa has nothing on it. One look at Antifa and people recoil. Hell, Antifa recoils at itself. It disguises itself and skulks around in packs, and runs home to mommy after its violent stunts.

But the virus is totally free. It's everywhere, it's invisible and it's everything Antifa only wishes it could be. For the virus there are already no borders, no walls, no USA at all. It goes wherever it likes, whenever it likes, and doesn't need a disguise, because it looks just like you, just like me.

The only thing more powerful than an anarchic virus is a self-ordered host, a person who chooses not to be a victim or a spreader, a person fully in control of himself, who can say no to himself.

Such a person is truly the most free person there is. The virus stops there, and only there.

Rush Limbaugh the idiot: Sweden Proves the Lockdown Was Unnecessary

"RUSH: This guy, Neil Ferguson's predictions at the outset said 90,000 people in Sweden would die because they weren't gonna lock down, and 4,000 people died."

Rush Limbaugh's standard of expert opinion is always the guy who gets it wrong the worst.

That's called cherry picking, which is what idiots do.

Let's try to do it the right way.

Sweden deaths to date (no lockdown): 4,542 (18th in the world).

Deaths among fellow Nordics to date (with lockdowns):

Norway: 237
Finland: 321
Denmark: 580.

Sweden also has nearly 41,000 cases and rising. Daily new cases there are near record highs. Sweden is still feeding the beast. The other Nordics have 75% fewer total cases and even fewer than that. The other Nordics are doing enormously better than Sweden.

19 times better, 14 times better, 8 times better.

Rush can pretend this is over all he wants. This isn't over by a longshot, there or anywhere else, until new cases come down and fall to zero.

Sweden's fatality rate is more than twice as high as America's at 11%+. Expect 4,000 more deaths in Sweden at the minimum.

Dumb ass Rush Limbaugh says "coronavirus has vanished as an issue"

New cases in the last week: 150,557

Average new cases daily in the last week: 21,508

Expected new cases in the next 30 days at current level of spread: 645,240

Total current active cases: 1.138 million

Deaths expected from current active cases at 5.7%: 64,866

Deaths expected from projected new cases added in next month: 36,778

In other words, add another 102,000 deaths to the current 105,000 . . . and then add some more, and some more, and some more. 

Rioting is just a temporary little diversion from this United States of Shit Show under Trump.

Hey Rush Limbaugh, you dumb ass, they will never prove the cop intended to kill Floyd, who died of cardiopulmonary arrest while under the influence of fentanyl

Maybe you've heard of it?

You are an irresponsible jerk trying to queer the jury so that cop can't get a fair trial.

You are not on the side of law and order.

 

Rush Limbaugh yesterday turned his program into a shit show, called for George Floyd cop to be charged with first degree murder

Mr. COVID IS JUST A COLD DON'T SHUT THE COUNTRY OVER IT intervenes in a local police case and uses his damn microphone to enlist the whole country in calling for the cop to be charged with first degree murder.

Mr. Virtue Signaling, I say. Mr. I'm gonna die soon better burnish my reputation.

Now the medical examiner says Floyd died of cardiopulmonary arrest and was intoxicated with fentanyl.

And during the program Rush said if what happened to Floyd had happened to a white man we probably never would have heard about it.

Well, it did happen to a white man, and we didn't hear about it until now, not because no one cared, but because the case was deliberately kept from the public.

But as usual Rush flaps those gums before looking into anything too deeply. He's a lazy ass. Always has been. Just like Trump.

 

Hillary in 1996 wanted to bring the superpredators to heel

Nine days after hitting the 90,000 threshold, Johns Hopkins shows over 100,000 COVID-19 deaths in the US

The addition of 10,000 deaths in nine days instead of seven, six and five previously shows how the stay-at-home policy in the US has slowed down the spread of infection and therefore the rate at which deaths have been adding to the total.

Using the convenient data shown at The Straits Times, there are still 1,153,566 active cases in the US after subtracting deaths and recoveries from total cases. At the case fatality rate of 5.8% we can expect 66,907 additional deaths within 4-6 weeks.

Adding more cases, however, will obviously mean adding more deaths beyond the current projection of about 167,000 deaths.

LOL, Michigan's rapacious utility Consumers Energy delays roll-out of new Summer Peak Rate program due to COVID-19

 

Due to COVID-19, Peak Pricing has Been Delayed Until 2021:

Given the economic challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are delaying the implementation of the summer peak pricing period until 2021.

While you will still see this rate code (1001) on your bill, we will not be moving forward with the peak pricing for this summer as initially communicated. You will instead have a flat rate for electricity throughout the remainder of 2020.

The Summer Peak Rate includes a peak period from June 1 through September 30. The peak period consists of “on-peak” and “off-peak” rate prices:

• “On-peak” rate price – From 2 to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday, your electricity rate will cost about 1.5 times higher than the “off-peak” rate price.
• “Off-peak” rate price – customers will pay a lower rate price for electricity used outside of on-peak times. This is the same rate you would pay October through May.

Trump will lose because he is alienating millions of people like this guy with incessant calls to reopen before it is safe

"Lehner, who now considers himself an independent, says he is frightened by the president's lack of leadership and maturity amid the nation's health and economic crisis. Several people in his gated community in Delray Beach, Florida, have gotten sick; at least one has died. He worries about his own health - he has an autoimmune disease - and also about his adult children, including a daughter who has gone back to work and a son whose pay has been cut. He plans to vote for Joe Biden in November."

More.

Trump took a big hit in April, now again in May, in Rasmussen's Trump Approval Index, net negative in double digits

Polls by both PEW of nearly 11,000 adults at the beginning of May and AP-NORC of 1,000+ in mid May both indicate 48% to 54% consensus that restrictions imposed by state authorities to prevent spread of COVID-19 have been/are "about right". The balance of opinion is split between "too harsh" and "not harsh enough".

Trump signed on to federal stay-at-home recommendations in mid March but began to argue against them within a week and hasn't let up since.

Meanwhile PEW found that 68% of all adults worried that states would re-open too soon and religious whites expressing falling support for Trump's crisis response.

Trump has a base of strong support at about a third of America.

Trump's greatest US economy ever suddenly has 25 million people on insured unemployment compensation

Somebody must have been asleep at the switch for something that bad to happen so quickly.

Who was that?

Projecting US deaths from COVID-19 to Nov 19, 2020 using optimistic assumptions

Daily US deaths from COVID-19 fell from 27,279 on 4/20 to 20,951 on 5/19, or 23.2% under circumstances of stay-at-home orders in many US states.

The following projection assumes, incorrectly but optimistically, that those orders would remain in place indefinitely, or at least the behaviors from them, and that case growth would continue to fall monthly at the same rate. 

Opening up the country as we are about to will eventually stop the decline trend and increase case counts and therefore death totals, but that's a problem for another day.

Assume that by 6/19 cases per day would fall to 16,090

by 7/19 to 12,357

by 8/19 to 9,490

by 9/19 to 7,288

by 10/19 to 5,597

Assume a simple average daily case addition per period of 18,520.5

14.223.5

10,923.5

8,389

6,442.5

each @30 days

Total cases added by 11/19: 1,754,970 @ 6% case fatality rate =  +105,298 deaths

plus 1.09 million existing cases @ 6% case fatality rate = +65,400 deaths

plus already existing deaths per Johns Hopkins = +92,149 deaths

Total deaths actual and baked in the cake by 11/19 = 262,847

Lots of variables could change the outcome, including improved treatment techniques in ICUs, ramped up use of new drugs like remdesivir, earlier diagnosis of patients through testing, earlier quarantining of the infected, stepped up contact tracing, more mask wearing in public, more social distancing, etc. The country seems quite divided about some of these, however, and many might throw caution to the wind while others do not. Much will depend on the character of local communities. In 1918 St. Louis turned out much differently than Philadelphia.

So as of right now, all things being equal, the much ridiculed original IHME estimate of 240,000 deaths looks more and more plausible with each passing day, even if the "by when" date isn't early August anymore.

USA hits 90,312 deaths from COVID-19 in John Hopkins University data, cases climb to 1,500,753

Here's the recent timeline of fatalities:

50k 4/24/20

60k 4/29

70k 5/5

80k 5/11

90k 5/18

We've gone from adding 10k dead every 5 days to every 6 days and to now 7 days. 

Safe to say we'll be at 100k dead in about a week, approximately May 25 or shortly thereafter.

If you subtract recoveries and fatalities from total cases, there remain roughly 1.09 million active cases as of right now. Keep that in mind for a moment in the context of stay-at-home orders more or less strictly applied around the country.

At the current case fatality rate of 5.95%, that means about 65k more deaths are baked in the cake as of right now, for a total of 155,000 deaths. This would be roughly by July 15.

I will be glad to be wrong and see the number fall, but I can't see why it should given the circumstances. Perhaps there will be improvement at the clinical care stage based on experiences to date. Hard to say.

One thing which might help is seeking help earlier. People have been afraid to go in to hospitals because they don't want to end up on a ventilator. There is evidence that seeking treatment earlier improves your odds.

That said, there is going to be disease spread picking up the pace as states re-open. The curve of infection has flattened precisely because of semi-quarantining of much of the population. Take that away and off we go again.

Ending stay-at-home will give new life to the epidemic in the US, and therefore to the death toll.

This isn't over by a long shot.

Meanwhile the secular bear market in stocks since August 2000 rolls on in April 2020

Return in the last 19.6 years lags the previous period of equal length by 75%, and lags long term return before that by 52%. 

April 2020 Climate Update for KGRR, Grand Rapids, Michigan

April 2020 Climate Update for KGRR

Max temp 75, Mean 79

Min temp 24, Mean 22

Av temp 44.2, Mean 46.5

Precip 4.09, Mean 3.31

Snow 2.2, Mean 2.4

HDD 617, Mean 553

HDD to date 5942, Mean to date 6399

Using Heating Degree Days, a deficit of 457 HDD from the mean to date indicates that this winter has been 7.14% milder through April than the mean winter through April.

May has already racked up enough HDD, however, to take this winter season out of the running to make the list of top ten warmest winters on record. 

Grand total foreign holdings of US Treasury securities in May, 2000-2019

Demand slowed from 2013 as stocks once again got a bid (permanent adoption of Bush tax cuts by Obama and Boehner removed uncertainty), but a flight to safety reappeared in 2019 and 2020. Total was still $6.8 trillion in Mar 2020 even after a big drop from Feb amid currency turmoil, the latest report.

The bid for bonds shows the global economy was already weak last year.

The only thing Trump has accomplished at "warp speed" is ruining the US economy because he ignored a deadly virus until it was too late

Trump, the supposed savior of US manufacturing, has presided over the utter collapse of manufacturing capacity utilization to a level in April 2020 never experienced in the post-war. The president could lawfully and easily order this unused capacity to make masks which would in fact protect everyone, and other PPE for hospital workers and care-givers to protect our front line workers, but he has not. Were he serious about re-opening the country, he would have made this JOB 2 on Feb 1, after JOB 1, which was hard-stopping all passenger air travel, the primary vector for the pandemic. Trump didn't do JOB 1, either.

Industrial production generally has imploded to levels never seen since 1919. The so-called America first president has done nothing in three years to make America strong enough to prevent this from happening. Remember Ann Coulter said long ago already that Trump was a lazy ignoramus. 

Motor vehicle production annualized has tanked 11 million units in just two months to fewer than 72,000 annualized. That's the typical monthly sales figure for a single popular car. 

Oh, I've forgotten unemployment, which also is unprecedented, though understated, at 14.7%. It's actually closer to 20%. North of 33 million not-seasonally-adjusted have made first time claims for unemployment from March 19th inclusive.

Trump's numbers are truly great, as in "you great oaf!"

Yes the government has "bailed out" the workers and the businesses, but with a Rube Goldberg machine which has been completely unfair in its results, picking winners by virtue of their established access to bankers or savvy state systems of unemployment administration. Bank or live somewhere not up to speed? Dats tuff, Anwar. You're a loser anyway.

Meanwhile coronavirus infections are set to soar again because our president is throwing a tantrum to open the country but hasn't made it safe to do so. He's had two months for that but has produced BUPKIS. If you want people to go back to work, they need masks. Where are the masks? Oh well, you were on your last legs anyway.

How anyone can vote to re-elect this level of horrific incompetence and reptilian danger is beyond me.