Joe Biden, the Puritan Catholic, is as bad as the libertarian Justin Amash ever was, making the perfect the enemy of the good, but sillier

President Biden: "Every Time We Let Hate Flourish, We Make A Lie Of Who We Are As A Nation"

"We're the United States of America. We're unique among all nations. We are uniquely a product of a document. Not an ethnicity, not a religion, not a geography, of a document," President Biden says. "Every time we're silent, every time we let hate flourish, we make a lie of who we are as a nation. I mean it literally. We can not let the very foundation of this country continue to be eaten away."

This stupid, futile hate crime business was started by George H. W. Bush.

You might as well outlaw human nature and roll out the guillotines.

Hair on fire fundamentalism about the Declaration of Independence is no different than about the Constitution. The only thing Joe Biden is proving is that the left has its own strutting American exceptionalist fool, too.

"Somebody, somewhere had a bad thought. America is finished!"

Russell Kirk's "shop and till conservatives", a bunch of cheats

"But all these are trifles, if we consider the fraud and cozenage of trading men and shopkeepers."

-- Jonathan Swift

Inquiring minds want to know: Why is there so much hesitancy at NIH, FDA, CDC with only 50-60% vaccinated?

 

LOL, this is an actual editorial headline from an American newspaper from the city which just let itself burn down, hung Chauvin out to dry, and whose crime rate is soaring off the charts

 

"Integrity is key after Minnesota's mask mandate is lifted

With no way to police vaccine status, individual honesty and responsibility are critical."

They must be joking. There is no integrity left in America. Every institution is shot through with liars, grifters, power-hungry lunatics and ideologues.

And they represent nothing so much as . . . us.

Lunatic Biden shuts down Keystone, rewards Russkies with pipeline waiver after Colonial hack

Not The Onion.

Not Babylon Bee.

According to Mitch Daniels, injuries from mass vaccination with experimental new technologies which do not have FDA approval are just collateral damage

"That, just as medicines have side effects, almost all actions produce collateral consequences, often collateral damage."

His remarks are a cavalcade of crazy, not the least of which is:

"We can overcome even the biggest obstacles and be the masters of our fates and our futures."

You know, just like Amelia Earhart and Gus Grissom.

Jack Cashill calls them the Pontius Pilate Republicans, which is kinda unfair to Pilate

Why Has the Right Let the Floyd Cops Fry?

Feeling they had to say something about the Derek Chauvin verdict, the Republicans in Congress seemed to take their cues from Pontius Pilate. “I think the jury did its job,” said Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst all too typically, “and I would – I did not follow, of course, all the parts of the trial, but I would say that given the information they received, they did their job, and I guess I’m in agreement.” The sound of hands being washed echoed throughout Capitol Hill.

I find in him no fault at all. -- John 18:38

Know that I find no fault in him. -- John 19:4

I find no fault in him. -- John 19:6

From thenceforth Pilate sought to release him. -- John 19:12

Inflation: Last year TurboTax cost me $110, this year $255

CDC Director Walensky, who is not a Flying Wallenda, goes out on a limb and says the science evolved in two weeks, masks no longer necessary for the vaccinated

 

The euphoria in the US about the COVID-19 situation is the direct inverse of the hysteria

 

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Bathroom transmission of COVID-19

From: Preventing Fecal-Oral And Fecal-Aerosol Transmission Of Covid-19

Though the main way Covid-19 spreads will always be from person to person, exposure to infectious waste and sewage has a part to play in starting outbreaks, especially in apartment buildings or schools where many people share close quarters at regular intervals of the day. ...

Fecal-aerosol transmission, according to a research paper published in Annals of Internal Medicine in December 2020, was suspected to be the cause of a Covid-19 outbreak in a high-rise apartment building in Guangzhou, China that infected at least nine people across three separate households. ...

Almost all of the environmental samples that came back positive were from the master bathrooms, giving the researchers reason to believe that the drainage pipes connecting the three units were to blame.

US Covid-19 update for Sunday May 16, 2021: With nearly 47% of the population vaccinated with one dose, no metric has beaten lows achieved without vaccines

 

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still 2k higher in May 2021 than Sep 2020

Click on any chart to enlarge.

same as in Sep 2020 but not a new low

bouncing off 4% without equaling the Jun 2020 low

mortality still has a ways to go to equal Jul 2020

Why no one can get a fair trial in increasingly libertarian America

If justice stood on the side of the single person, it ought to give good men pleasure to see that right should take place; but when, on the contrary, the commonweal of a whole nation is overborn by private interest, what good man but must lament?

-- Jonathan Swift

Now that USA CDC has said people vaccinated against COVID-19 can stop wearing masks, let's acknowledge how well masks worked

In Africa.

The continent was a veritable beacon of mask requirements from the Med to the Cape of Good Hope.

And Africa has the COVID-19 case graph to prove how successful this was!

Cases per million in Africa never topped 25! Whereas in North America the metric hit nearly 475/million.

 

Those dang libertarians really screwed things up big time in El Norte with their "We don't need no stinkin' masks!"

For true conservatism which actually works, look to Africa.

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How come 40%+ of FDA, NIH, CDC employees are not vaccinated against COVID-19?

 Asking for a friend.

This has to be the dumbest blackout story ever written: The crisis is entirely of their own making

Blackouts Threaten Entire U.S. West This Summer as Heat Awaits :

States shuttering coal and gas-fired power plants simply aren’t replacing them fast enough to keep pace with the vagaries of an unstable climate, and the region’s existing power infrastructure is woefully vulnerable to wildfires (which threaten transmission lines), drought (which saps once-abundant hydropower resources) and heat waves (which play havoc with demand).

 

Well don't shutter 'em then!

 

Bunch of idiots.

I'm so old I remember when AIDS was going to wipe out America

"In 2017, 16,358 people with HIV died, and 5,534 of those deaths were from HIV-related causes." 

COVID-19 has wiped out that many since April 18th.

A gasoline pipeline hack, inflation, and Liz Cheney are bigger news.

Daily new COVID-19 cases per million fell 62% in South Korea in the two months before vaccination began on Feb 25, and rose 70% in the two months after

South Korea, which has 7.2% of its population vaccinated with at least one dose, uses the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on its frontline medical workers and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on the more numerous population in the long-term care arena: 

By the end of March, authorities plan to complete injecting the first doses to some 344,000 residents and workers at long-term care settings, who will receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, and 55,000 frontline medical workers, who will receive shots developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.

COVID-19 cases fell without the aid of vaccines in South Korea, and rose again despite them.

Since vaccination began on Feb 25, deaths per million stands today only where it was when the effort first began two and a half months ago.

vaccination

cases

deaths

The Chinese COVID vaccine is a giant nothing burger in Chile

The Chinese COVID vaccine is not preventing much of anything in Chile after three months.

84% of the COVID vaccine doses administered in Chile to date have been Chinese. The effort began in earnest in early February.

44% have received at least one dose of any COVID vaccine in Chile since that time.

Unfortunately, daily new cases per million is still up 44% since the vaccination effort began in early February. And daily new cases per million remains highly elevated compared with the lows of last November, achieved naturally long before any vaccines were available.

Why isn't vaccination producing a low rate similar to that?

Meanwhile deaths per million is still up, 17% since early February when the vaccination effort began. The rate is more than twice as high as it was last November when no vaccines were available at all.

Yet China is distributing these things like hotcakes, over 100 million doses so far, and the WHO is authorizing them for emergency use for the first time.

WHY?

Good a day as any to remember that Alan Greenspan in 2007 explicitly advocated for immigration to suppress the wages of skilled laborers

Greenspan: Let more skilled immigrants in :

"Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world," he said. "If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income."

Yeah, the problem isn't millionaires and billionaires concentrating wealth in their hands, it's the goddamn skilled laborers who must be stopped, the engineers, scientists, doctors and teachers, the crane operators, CDL truck drivers, machinists, drafters, plumbers, craftsmen, cooks and accountants.

 

Quaility Check, Vern: Even the ads at Drudge are misspelled

 

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Correlation is not causation: Daily new cases of COVID-19 fell 75% anyway in Africa even though barely 1% of the continent is vaccinated

The claim that COVID-19 vaccines save lives is not substantiated by declining cases and deaths.

Africa is a good example because it's the least vaccinated continent.

Daily new cases per million fell from 24 in January to 6 now, 75%, even though just 1% of its 1.34 billion people have been vaccinated with one dose.

Cases: Africa

Vaccinations: Africa

Compare North America, population 0.592 billion, the most vaccinated continent.

Over the exact same time period, daily new cases per million have fallen 79%, only just slightly more than in Africa.

The shape of the case graph is damn near indistinguishable from Africa's. You don't have to accept that it's even good data in Africa. Even its bad data, if it is bad, is a mirror image of so-called good North American data.

The idea that North American cases have fallen is because 31% have been vaccinated is preposterous.

Seasonal factors likely play the dominant role in this pandemic, and everything we do to influence it is just pushing on a string.

Cases: North America

  

Vaccinations: North America

You can now by-pass the entire medical bureaucracy and test yourself for COVID-19 easily, cheaply, and quickly right at home

 

Johns Hopkins: 580k US COVID deaths as of Thursday May 6, 2021

 

Climate Update for KGRR: April 2021

Climate Update for KGRR: April 2021

Max T 80, Mean 79

Min T 16, Mean 22 (14th coldest on record-tie)

Av T 48.5, Mean 46.5

Precip 1.91, Mean 3.3 (18th driest on record)

Snow 0.3, Mean 2.4

Heating Degree Days 491, Mean 553

HDD season to date 5863, Mean 6395 (8.3% warmer than mean to date; season set to make the top 20 warmest on record)

Cooling Degree Days 3, Mean 5

Climate Update for KGRR: March 2021

Climate Update for KGRR: March 2021

Max T 74, Mean 66

Min T 13, Mean 7

Av T 41.2, Mean 34.1 (eighth warmest on record-tie)

Precip 1.51, Mean 2.45

Snow T, Mean 9.0 (second least snowy on record)

Heating Degree Days 728, Mean 952 (eighth warmest on record)

Cooling Degree Days 0, Mean 0

IHME in Washington State estimates US COVID-19 dead at 905k, world dead at 7 million

Some countries evidently are lying to save face, others are simply overwhelmed:

Covid-19 deaths in India, Mexico, and Russia — countries with the second, third, and fifth highest tolls (the U.S. has the number one spot) — were also vasty undercounted. ... Researchers additionally found that the tolls in Japan, Egypt, and several other countries are 10 times higher than the reported numbers.

Mediaite has the story here. 

The left is furious that it can't control VAERS

So it's smearing it.

You shouldn't let bogus reports filed with VAERS by malevolent individuals stop you from using the system to report an adverse event you experienced.

 

Mark Krikorian hits on the sorry truth about Trump and Elise Stefanik

MAGAworld pans Stefanik :

...

“She ties with a couple other Republicans for the worst career voting record on immigration in New York,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the anti-immigration Center on Immigration Studies, ticking off a few of her previous positions: a yes on H-2B visas, the Farm Workers Modernization Act, and the Hong Kong Refugee bill, and a no on Trump’s child border separation policies.

“Obviously, Republicans in New York are likely to be more liberal, just because that's the environment they're in,” Krikorian said. “I think everybody understands that. But even by the standards of New York state Republicans, she's bad on immigration.” ...

Krikorian, whose institute is not weighing in on the conference chair election, noted that while Cheney’s downfall was sparked by her criticism of Trump, what had truly tanked her was her ideology, bolstered by her family name: The Wyoming congresswoman’s neoconservative beliefs have no place in today’s GOP.

Stefanik’s positions weren’t much more palatable to the party base, in Krikorian’s view.

“Trump, in his gut, does think we should get out of Afghanistan, he does think there's too many illegal aliens coming over the border,” he observed. “It's not that he doesn't believe any of that stuff. It's just that he's kind of a narcissistic guy. And if people flatter him, he's for them, regardless of what they believe. And so the question is: Do you go for Trumpism? Or do you go for Trump?” 

The system which protects us from tyrants has done so only because we are, when all is said and done, still loyal to it. There was never any danger of a tyranny from Trump, who was easily the weakest president in living memory.

But Trump's character is clearly of the sort Aristotle warned us about. The thing is, we do little worrying about the proliferation of wretches like Stefanik who eventually make the rise of actual tyrants, dangerous men of strong, determined, and ruthless character, more likely.

"And for this reason tyrants always love the worst of wretches, for they rejoice in being flattered, which no man of a liberal spirit will submit to; for they love the virtuous, but flatter none."

Full-time employment as a percentage of civilian population climbed to 48.1% in April 2021

It's a long way from 2019, let alone from the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era.

If 50.4% had a full-time job in April 2021, 6 million more people would be working full-time than do.

 

The rental vacancy rate in the US turned sharply upward beginning in July 2020 and continues higher in 1Q2021

 

The home vacancy rate in the US in 2020 hit a new all-time low of 1%

 

The ratio of owner-occupied to renter-occupied housing soared in 2020 as pandemic hysteria gripped the US and people sought refuge

 

The on-going housing bubble

I checked the value of my home on Zillow today.

It's nuts.

After 13 years the estimated price is up 6.5% per annum.

On the other hand, the house I previously owned and sold is up only 0.8% per annum over the same period.

Two entirely different houses, two entirely different locations, two completely different histories. What seems like a bubble living in my current house wouldn't seem like one living in my old one.

The best way I've found to think about this is to ask, How much of a house will my income buy? For bubble purposes nationally, even though housing is a regional and local matter, use median household income and median sales price.

Here's the chart of that data as currently available.

In 2020 the Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States (MSPUS) averaged a new high of almost $337k. We don't yet have the median household income figure for 2020, but it's likely to be bad news, skewing the graph lower again as less income buys a smaller share of increasingly expensive housing.

As you can plainly see, the trend for the percentage of a house purchased by an income has been all downhill since the end of Reagan Bull in 2000. The percentage really fell a lot during the housing bubble which peaked in 2005-06, helping precipitate GFC1. Incomes fell a lot after the Great Financial Crisis because people lost their jobs by the millions and never got them back and so less income purchased less house. Housing prices bottomed in 2012 and then rebounded slowly. Incomes did not, however, and what you made just kept buying less in the low range of 19%. 

That all sucked. Obama really sucked. Sucked historically bad. Record-setting bad. 

You'll notice things really improved in 2019, however. That's because median household income shot up $5k to over $68k (Trump tax cuts), and the median sales price of a house actually fell $5k to $320k. Your higher income bought more of a slightly cheaper house, not as much as the good old days, but more.

Unfortunately in 2020 median sales price shot up almost $17k while millions upon millions lost their jobs. The feds enacted foreclosure forbearance so that 2.3 million homes whose owners lost their jobs never came onto the market. But desperate people who wanted out of cities snarfed up inventory. Demand far exceeded supply, so prices went up. 

But even at 21.5% in 2019 housing was nowhere near affordable like it was from 1987-2001. It was a nice, hopeful moment, while it lasted.

I'm guessing it's going to be quite a while, though, before we ever see even that again. 

Intersectionality means blacks never having to say sorry for calling NYC "Hymietown"

 Don't let me down, Hymietown.

Breaking News: Judge Demands A Cusser!

 

She could pass for a guy, to be honest

 

Linebacker, I'm thinking.

Probable deaths from COVID-19 globally might be 10 million, not 3.2 million?

 This guy is doing a post-doc at Brown University.

He has a long thread on excess death estimates which support his conclusions.

Is this crazy? 

The US CDC has put excess deaths from all causes in the US in 2020 at ~561k (bottom of the range, too). That's 0.17% of total US population of 331 million.

Global population is 7.8 billion, X 0.17% = 13.26 million.

But 13 million is probably an underestimate, probably by a lot.

If the rest of the world had health care available as in the US, 10-15 million excess deaths would actually be in the ballpark. The thing is that assumption obviously isn't warranted.

Population data gathering over the coming years is going to show huge deficits which researchers will realize cannot be explained but by pandemic deaths. India, for example, and to its credit, is underreporting COVID deaths because it insists on having actual COVID diagnosis. The funeral pyres for cremation in India are working round the clock, but those numbers don't jibe with officially reported COVID deaths in many jurisdictions, by large margins. 

When the history of this thing gets written in ten years, the numbers are going to stagger.

H1N1 suddenly appeared in 2009 and then basically went away all by itself: The vaccine rollout took too long, underdelivered, and flopped

There are no outbreaks of H1N1 at the scale of 2009 in the years following. It basically subsided by itself before the vaccine was ready, and when it was, people pretty much ignored it:

In the U.S., the Health and Human Services Department estimated in July 2009 that 120 million doses would be available by October. By late October, only 17 million doses had been shipped — and fewer than that had been administered. By the time vaccine was becoming available, infections had peaked and flu activity was declining sharply.

 

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COVID-19 in the largest countries by population: Update for Sun 5/2/21

Countries with 200 million population or more: China, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria.

Data isn't available in all categories for all countries, and data quality varies dramatically.

One should assume figures in the Big Seven are more or less gross underestimations except in the USA. 

China in particular is a JOKE. Why anyone takes them seriously as a "global partner" is beyond me. Show me an honest communist and I will give you six free winning lotto numbers.

Hospital reporting is the worst. Very few countries report the data at all, which tells you they are neither motivated nor equipped to do so even though this is a pretty serious situation which is over one year old. Given how important that data is in judging the progress and severity of the pandemic, it is more than discouraging. The top five for hospitalizations are all US and Europe, the difference between true civilization and the rest being that we know the numbers at all.

The situations in Brazil and especially India are alarming given the high positivity rate in India and the high death rate in Brazil. Reports concentrating on India underreporting deaths (from Reuters and the like) in recent weeks are a sick joke compared with neighboring China which the charts say is a COVID utopia. India is a developing nation struggling to cope under an enormous strain while still remaining part of the free world, but journalists would rather criticize it than question China's glaring effrontery. The myopia is damning.

These Big Seven represent 4.065 billion of the world's population of 7.79 billion, 52.2%, and we don't have a clear picture of what's really going on with them.

What reason would there be to think positively?

Daily new cases, and deaths, per million in the US are still at last summer levels and have not made new lows. Same with hospitalizations. Case positivity is rising again and is actually at 5.8%, provisionally, in this data. Previous very recent levels in the 7s, however, have simply vanished from the record. Why? Johns Hopkins is currently showing 4%. What to believe?

Vaccinations still can't be pointed to for lowering the US numbers because the numbers remain too high. I'm sure they'll point to them once they decline as evidence for vaccine efficacy. Seasonality will be ignored. I will leave a vaccination horror story update for a separate, future post.

Why have cases and deaths and hospitalizations ebbed and flowed in the past in the absence of vaccines? I predict they'll never really say, same as we hear no good explanation for why H1N1 from 2009 simply dropped off the radar. Why did it go away despite the vaccine against it turning into a giant flop? 

They can't predict pandemics' comings and goings anymore than they can predict global cooling in the 1970s, global warming in the 2000s, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 or the end of the Reagan Bull in 2000.

Man is a worm, according to the Bible, a poor player upon the stage, according to Shakespeare, an idiot whose tale is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing!

 

daily new cases per million

daily new deaths per million

case positivity rate

share of population vaccinated usa v world

Top five countries for C19 hospitalizations

share vaccinated in the largest countries by population

 

daily new deaths/million

daily new cases/million