The weekend help at KGRR ain't cuttin' it: They predicted 90 F, we made it to 86

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine being that far off about temperature predictions for a decade from now, or for a century from now, and you get my meaning.

Deaths per million in the US from COVID-19 peaked 129% higher in August 2020 than right now in August 2021

 

Coronavirus hospitalizations in the US have surged to levels similar to spring and summer 2020, Florida numbers now included

 

Color key: NY gray (for reference), CA blue, TX pink, FL green

Michigan in orange had its turn in April

Next up, the Kenya Variant

 

LOL I am so dead

 

 

 

Coronavirus virulence since the India variant became dominant in the US is actually running below the first year average

News reports in early July declared the India variant to be dominant in the United States.

From July 6-August 6 total announced cases per the New York Times data have grown by 1.97 million.

But during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, dated roughly from March 7, 2020 to March 7, 2021 (when The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic stopped collecting data), total announced cases averaged 2.42 million per month over the entire twelve month period.

What is more, since March 7, 2021 total announced cases are averaging an even lower 1.34 million per month to August 6 (five months), which includes the new period of the India variant.

 

So the India variant is really going to have to outperform from here on out to prove the claim by the authorities that the India variant is much more virulent, much more transmissible, et cetera. It is going to have to produce many more millions of cases per month than it is doing in order to do it. They have 7 more months, because that's how these things must be measured to be meaningful (disease morbidity is measured in cases per 100,000 per year). 

But this far at least, the India variant isn't living up to the hype, from either side, which includes the Buck Sextons and Alex Berensons of the world who keep insisting on the basis of specious antibody testing that far more people have been exposed than the case counts show and that natural immunity is widespread.

LOL, anti-vaccine comments by doctors proliferate on doctors-only social media platform Doximity

The social network for doctors is full of vaccine disinformation

 

Doctors on the industry networking site Doximity are finding their news feed inundated with anti-vaccine comments from fellow physicians.

 

LOL, Drudge ponders getting fired for not getting unvaccinated

I think Drudge wants to be the new Norm Crosby.

 

Israel was 60% fully vaccinated on June 25, but cases and hospitalizations blew up anyway

 

CNN shares blame with Anthony Fauci and MSNBC for hyperbolic, irresponsible coverage of India variant: Breakthrough cases are supposed to be mild, not deadly

 

The nice black unvaccinated lady who works at my post office was sicker than she ever was in her life last week, she said yesterday, and says at least there are no breakthrough deaths

 

About 99.999% of fully vaccinated Americans have not had a deadly Covid-19 breakthrough case, CDC data shows

The CDC reported 6,587 Covid-19 breakthrough cases as of July 26, including 6,239 hospitalizations and 1,263 deaths.

Just when you thought that only breakthrough cases were a thing . . .

LOL, to Moderna vaccine failure leading to breakthrough cases just means you'll have to get a booster $hot

 ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching

Delta variant will lead to increase in breakthrough Covid infections among vaccinated, Moderna says

The highly contagious delta variant will lead to an increase in breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated as people begin moving indoors after the summer, Moderna said Thursday.

While Moderna’s two-dose vaccine remains “durable” six months after the second shot, immunity against the coronavirus will continue to wane and eventually diminish vaccine efficacy, the company said in slides that accompanied its second-quarter earnings report.

The company said its vaccine is 93% effective six months after the second dose. By comparison, Pfizer and BioNTech said their vaccine efficacy declined to around 84% after six months.

“Given this intersection, we believe dose 3 booster will likely be necessary prior to the winter season,” Moderna wrote.

 

AP story about coronavirus in China is a contemptible load of rot

China has 4.4 times more people per square mile than the USA, but we are supposed to believe these ridiculous numbers and claims:

China’s worst coronavirus outbreak since the start of the pandemic a year and a half ago escalated Wednesday with dozens more cases around the country ...

Since that initial outbreak was tamed last year, China’s people had lived virtually free of the virus ... 

As of Tuesday, China has given more than 1.71 billion vaccine doses to its population of 1.4 billion. ...

China has reported 4,636 deaths and 93,289 cases of COVID-19 overall, most of them from the original outbreak in Wuhan that peaked early last year.

 

 

The CDC managed to change the subject from breakthrough cases to masks in one stroke, and the right has glommed on to it like the suckers they are

AP Obama last week:

Health officials on Friday released details of that research, which was key in this week’s decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in parts of the U.S. where the delta variant is fueling infection surges. The authors said the findings suggest that the CDC’s mask guidance should be expanded to include the entire country, even outside of hot spots.

The findings have the potential to upend past thinking about how the disease is spread. Previously, vaccinated people who got infected were thought to have low levels of virus and to be unlikely to pass it to others. But the new data shows that is not the case with the delta variant.

The outbreak in Provincetown — a seaside tourist spot on Cape Cod in the county with Massachusetts’ highest vaccination rate — has so far included more than 900 cases. About three-quarters of them were people who were fully vaccinated. ...

People with breakthrough infections make up an increasing portion of hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths among COVID-19 patients, coinciding with the spread of the delta variant, according to the leaked documents. ...

The CDC report is based on about 470 COVID-19 cases linked to the Provincetown festivities, which included densely packed indoor and outdoor holiday events at bars, restaurants, guest houses and rental homes.

Researchers ran tests on a portion of them and found roughly the same level of virus in those who were fully vaccinated and those who were not.

Three-quarters of the infections were in fully vaccinated individuals. Among those fully vaccinated, about 80% experienced symptoms with the most common being cough, headache, sore throat, muscle aches and fever.

The whole thing is here.

The real story here is about vaccine failure, not masks.

The idea that we could find a cure for this ramped up cold virus, in a year!, is as preposterous as finding one for the original thing. Ever. Same with the flu. Every year you get a new flu shot because . . . you have to. The damn things mutate.

So they guess which strain will be dominant and you pays your money and you takes your chance. Often there are several shots to choose from, targeted at different strains. Inevitably they choose wrong, and so do you.

That's what the future holds for COVID-19. We'll most likely be faced with an infinite series of mutations. With any luck the things will concentrate on mutating to survive instead of to kill, and become less deadly. That's already the take on the Delta variant.

But The Powers That Be know how to get your goat if you are right of center and turn an imminent prospect of political disgrace over vaccines into something else: Distract you from the facts and make it about something else, in order to maximize the political opportunity the political disaster presents. It's pure Alinskyism. Pure Rahm Emanuel. Nothing has defined the stupid political polarization between Republicans and Democrats on the street currently better than masks.

Remember how it used to be the Red Hat?

The more things change the more they stay the same.

The left is playing the right like a fiddle.

Twitter has suspended Alex Berenson this week for having the temerity to publish the Pfizer trials conclusion that 15 died in the vaccine group, 14 in the placebo

During the blinded, controlled period, 15 BNT162b2 and 14 placebo recipients died; during the open-label period, 3 BNT162b2 and 2 original placebo recipients who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered related to BNT162b2 by investigators. Causes of death were balanced between BNT162b2 and placebo groups (Table S4).

More.

Six Month Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.full-text

The results receive considerable discussion in the comments section. Many people are uncomfortable given all the hype surrounding this "vaccine" when confronted with the result that 15 vax recipients died and 14 placebo recipients died from all causes.

Many will wonder if causes of death are balanced between the groups, what's the point of getting the vaccine?

And what was the point of the First Amendment again?

All kidding aside, I hope Xi Jinping doesn't take it too personally when the world moves on from the Mu and Nu variants

But the real pressure is on the rho variant.

I tell you what. It better be ready to live up to its name when the time comes . . . or else!

Frankly I miss the Xi variant at this point

Breaking News: Drudge Report spells "restaurant" correctly on a Monday

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is making a big mistake not reporting hospital data like everyone else

 The charts for key Florida indicators have flat-lined since DeSantis gave the order to stop reporting.

 

When is the White House going to reign in Anthony Fauci for exaggerating about the Delta variant?

This is the CDC slide with the Delta comparison to Alpha which Fauci grossly exaggerated on MSNBC. It clearly states the Delta is 10 times worse than the Alpha for viral load, not 1,000 times as Fauci incorrectly stated. The White House claims to be upset about stuff like that.

Har-dee har har har.

 

US COVID-19 hospitalizations have ballooned to 43k as of July 30, 2021, surpassing the April surge: Up 257% since June 27

 

"two-year suspension of the debt ceiling expired at the end of July"

Pure gobbledygook.

The limit, a facet of American politics for over a century, prevents the Treasury from issuing new bonds to fund government activities once a certain debt level is reached. That level reached $22 trillion in August 2019 and was suspended until Saturday. 

The new debt limit will include Washington’s additional borrowing since summer 2019. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in July that the new cap will likely come in just north of $28.5 trillion.

More gobbledygook.

The government's bookkeeping shenanigans here are always amazing, but especially now given the orgy of spending during the pandemic, and the reporting is nearly as bad.

The debt ceiling was "set" at $22 trillion in August 2019, but it wasn't "reached" until April 2021.

Add in the ever present "intragovernmental" borrowings and the total debt is now $28.46 trillion at the end of July. Intragovernmental holdings is code for raiding the Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds. It's one of the weird things about how bureaucrats think that the extent to which they must raid those funds plus the "normal" public debt becomes the sum they'll use to set the new "public" portion, the debt ceiling, when Congress gets around to it.

They all should be in jail. Instead we are.

The thing I like best about CNBC is that I have to pay to read about American fascism

 

Wall Street likes these infrastructure stocks a lot as Washington gets set to give sector a boost

The immigration courts have been understaffed for years, and the problem is only getting worse under Biden

The immigration court currently has 535 judges to deal with its backlog of 1,357,820 cases. The plan calls for hiring an additional 100 judges to deal with this crisis.

The immigration court’s most productive year since fiscal 2008, was fiscal 2019, when it completed 276,970 cases. But it received 546,248 new cases that year, which meant that the backlog increased by 269,278 cases. In the second quarter of fiscal 2021, it received 66,158 new cases and completed 43,652, which increased the backlog by 22,506 cases.

In fact, the immigration court has not reduced the backlog a single time during that 13-year period.

How is a 20 percent increase in the size of the court going to turn this around?

More.

There is no mention in this story that Biden is releasing tens of thousands of illegals into the United States who have been given NO court date, an unprecedented failure to enforce the law. So the magnitude of the problem is much worse than the article lets on.

The Biden administration is deliberately flooding the zone with dependents who will be politically beholden to Democrats for their continued future welfare.

The fastest vaccine to go from development to deployment was the mumps vaccine, from 1963 to 1967

 

 

Pfizer and Moderna want FDA approval in less than two?

What, me worry?

July 2021: US COVID-19 deaths hit their lowest level yet since March 2020, with 8,473

The death pace has really picked up in the last week of July, however, to about 360 per day, from fewer than 250 per day for the previous three weeks, an increase of 44%.

LOL, CNBC a week ago said vaccinations in India, home of the Delta variant, helped to bring about the decline in cases

Public health experts told the Financial Times in late May that regional lockdowns, reduced social interaction and an increasing number of antibodies against Covid among the general population were helping to bring down the infection rate in India. Vaccinations too have helped to continue the downward trend in cases.

More.

Cases per million plummeted 91% between May 7 and July 23, at which point just 7% of India's massive population of 1.3 billion had been fully vaccinated.

The vaccines had nothing to do with the crash in cases, but they may have helped cause this debacle in India.

Vaccination temporarily weakens the immune system, making it more vulnerable to infection, which is why it is inadvisable to vaccinate en masse when infections are raging around you. Mind you, in India on February 18th they were not. It would have been as safe a time as any to start vaccinating.

Yet is it mere coincidence that the massive explosion in cases in India after the approximate bottom around February 18th dovetails perfectly with the commencement of mass vaccinations in India around February 13th?

Well?

I think Nottle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for the antibody hypothesis, the faith placed in it after all this time is quite simply precious.

Antibody tests can miss previous COVID-19 infection

Antibody tests do not reliably confirm that someone has had COVID-19, which means global estimates of infection rates are likely inaccurate, according to researchers. "We studied the blood of over 120 people with confirmed COVID-19 and measured levels of antibodies ... using 14 different tests" up to three months after diagnosis, said Michael Peluso of the University of California, San Francisco. "All of these people definitely had COVID-19, but not all of them had positive COVID-19 blood tests." The accuracy of the tests at confirming prior COVID-19 varied by how sick the person had been, how much time had passed since the illness and which test had been used. "People who were less sick and in whom more time had passed were less likely to test positive using certain tests," Peluso said. "Since most people have mild (or even asymptomatic) infection with SARS-CoV-2, this study has important implications for our interpretation of several of the large studies that have been done ... to try to estimate the number of people who have had COVID-19." In a report published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, his team advises, "Individual patients or providers using these assays to assess the presence or absence of prior infection and/or immune status should take these considerations into account, given the poor negative predictive value of some tests."

 

 

 

Anthony Fauci falsely stated on MSNBC that with the Delta variant "the level of virus in their nasopharynx is about 1,000 times higher than with the alpha variant"

Nope. He's wrong. CDC says 10 times higher than with the Alpha, not 1,000 times. 

Infection with the Delta variant produces virus amounts in the airways that are tenfold higher than what is seen in people infected with the Alpha variant, which is also highly contagious, the document noted.

The amount of virus in a person infected with Delta is a thousandfold more than what is seen in people infected with the original version of the virus, according to one recent study.

The C.D.C. document relies on data from multiple studies, including an analysis of a recent outbreak in Provincetown, Mass., which began after the town’s Fourth of July festivities. By Thursday, that cluster had grown to 882 cases. About 74 percent were vaccinated, local health officials have said.

From The New York Times here. 

Here is Fauci getting it wildly wrong.

Is he just getting too old for this, or is this a deliberate attempt to whip up hysteria about Delta?

 

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is a phenomenon among those under 50, not over

Compared with the flu, COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy is a phenomenon of those under 50 years of age, not over.

Average % vaccinated for flu 2010-20 vs. for C19 through May 22, both per CDC:

18-49: 32.25% flu vs. 25.5% C19

50-64: 45% vs. 44.5%

65 years and up: 65.6% vs. 69.3%.

 

All the scare tactics and non-stop advertizing to persuade people to get vaccinated for COVID-19 have budged senior citizens barely three points

Maybe seniors are wiser to the game.

Senior citizens from 2010-2020 underwent flu vaccination at an average rate of 65.6%, the highest of any age group.

As of May 22, they underwent COVID-19 vaccination at a rate of 69.3%.

Since seniors are by far the most likely to die of C19 infection, you might think they would be taking this somewhat more seriously than that. In California 73% of the deaths have been 65+.

But seniors constitute roughly 16.6% of the US population, or about 55 million people, 3.7% of which is an extra 1.6 million seniors vaccinated for C19 than for flu. The hype doesn't appear to be moving them much, but it is moving them.

The same can't be said for younger people.

People 50-64 are sort of holding up their end to get vaccinated for C19 at 44.5% vs. an average of 45% for flu.

But people 18-49 are way behind, getting vaccinated for flu at an average rate of 32.3% vs. only 25.5% for C19.

Younger tranches represent a far richer target environment for the pharma-companies, which is why billion$ are being spent to reach them, interminably and everywhere.

flu vaccine coverage per CDC

COVID-19 vaccine coverage per CDC

 

The fools were predicting 1-2" of heavy rain after 3 am, and another 3/4" by 8 am, and instead we got BUPKIS

They can't predict the weather overnight, and yet you believe in fantastic theories of global warming caused by too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and assorted tall tales of unprecedented extreme weather events urged on you by these charlatans.

8.2 magnitude earthquake in Alaska brings 2021 total 7.0 and above globally to nine

 

Three weeks ago the New York Post was pooh-poohing "hysteria" over the Delta variant in the UK

Rising cases even prompted Prime Minister Boris Johnson to delay the end of restrictions. But the huge case spike didn’t lead to similar hospitalization or death spikes, so Britain’s back on track to lift regulations July 19.

The seven-day average of new UK cases is above 25,000, the highest since late January, when the weekly average had just dropped from a peak of 50,000. But only 2,000 COVID cases are hospitalized, vs. nearly 40,000 in January. Daily deaths average under 20, vs. more than 1,000 in January.

More.

OK, well, daily new cases coincidentally rolled over after July 18th, so there's that, but hospitalizations are up over 542% in two months, and 179% in the three weeks since the editorial.  And daily new deaths aren't in the 20s anymore. They were 131 yesterday.

The confident pronunciamentoes of a month ago don't look so firm today. They were premature, as is typical during this pandemic, which has made fools of us all.

Debates about severity aside, the main point is still that the vaccines prevented none of this in merry old England in July, where 66% were fully (49%) and partially vaccinated as of the end of June.

We are witnessing vaccine failure in place after place, even as the progress of the pandemic changes as the virus mutates and host populations experience transformation. The low hanging fruit easily picked off and killed by the virus in the past will likely not be matched in magnitude going forward by the deaths of what are by definition sturdier hosts. It would be a mistake to miss that and credit the so-called vaccines instead, which are not preventing disease. 

ROFLMAO: Iceland has way over 75% of its population fully-vaccinated but is now experiencing a coronavirus moonshot outbreak

Herd immunity schmamunity.

If vaccines are supposed to prevent illness, these aren't vaccines. 

h/t Alex Berenson

The CDC Follies

First we were told, most publicly by Fauci in February 2020, that masks won't protect you from the COVID virus. Wash your hands, we were told. Fauci lied to us because PPE was in short supply and was needed by hospitals. They were trying to conserve supplies for hospital workers, because masks work in hospitals, you know.

After the first hospitalization wave subsided, masking gradually became cool again. People wanted to get out and about, so wearing a mask and practicing social distancing became the default position. The authorities realized this would help to keep a lid on things while vaccines were developing.

America divided over this politically, to state the obvious.

When the vaccines began to roll out in late December, the same psychology took over. The vaccine, like a mask, became a ticket back to normalcy. At first, however, the CDC had said a mask would still be necessary after vaccination, but eventually bowed to pressure from freedom advocates, and to overcome the vaccine hesitancy into which the advice to keep wearing a mask kept feeding. The authorities finally relented in May after vaccination enthusiasm had peaked in April and declined quickly, and said the vaccinated could in fact retire their masks after all.

 

This was too little, too late.

 

The share of population dosed at least once moved fewer than ten points from mid-May to July 4th, from 47% to 55%. 

The Biden administration severely undershot its goal of 70% vaccinated by July 4th. It completely miscalculated that vaccine enthusiasm would peak in mid-April.

But now, two months since May, the CDC today is back to saying that masking is necessary after vaccination, ostensibly because the India variant is so virulent that even vaccinated people could still catch it and transmit it.

 

Talk about poking the hornets' nest.

 

The real reason is that breakthrough cases at elite levels are calling attention to a wider spread phenomenon everyone knows about anecdotally but can't quantify because the CDC in May conveniently refused to count all the breakthrough cases like it counts cases generally. These vaccines are failing all over the place in the basic sense of preventing illness.

 

Of course, this isn't going to convince anyone to get vaccinated, because vaccines are supposed to prevent illness, and if they aren't, well, why bother?

 

These aren't real vaccines like the childhood vaccines are real vaccines. Their power peters out quickly and people can and do get COVID-19 anyway. At best these are therapeutic medications which might turn out to be appropriate for certain people, but certainly not as a panacea for the whole nation.

 

NBC actually did a pretty good story laying out many of these details, here, draped in the usual propaganda.

 

The future outlook, unfortunately, remains very uncertain.

 

 

 

US COVID-19 hospitalizations have soared 143% in less than a month

US COVID-19 hospitalizations have soared 143% in less than a month, from 12.2k on June 27 to 29.6k on July 23.

Peak hospitalization was 133.2k on January 14, falling to 33.2k on March 20, or 75%. 

Vaccination levels on March 20 were merely 13% fully vaccinated and 24% dosed once vs. 49% and 56% respectively right now. 

The vaccines had little if anything to do with the declines then and are not preventing the rise now.

Texas, California, Florida and Missouri are the states with the highest numbers of hospitalized, roughly 3.9k, 2.5k, 1.7k, and 1.7k respectively.

Prevalence of variants is mixed in Texas and Florida, where it is not obvious that the India variant is to blame as it appears to be in Missouri. And shouldn't California have more hospitalized than Texas if the India variant is so much more serious and clearly more dominant?

Texas: 43/38% India/UK.

California: 50/23% India/UK.

Florida: 34/39% India/UK.

Missouri: 52/9% India/UK.

Delta schmelta, what we really need to worry about is the Delta Tau Chi variant

 

Alex Berenson: COVID-19 deaths started dropping long before most people had received shots

Vaccine advocates rarely acknowledge the fact that deaths started dropping long before most people had received shots. In reality, even acknowledging that many people who received vaccines in January and February were older and vulnerable, seasonality and herd immunity seem to have had a greater impact on broad Covid trends than vaccinations.

More.

You idiots who attend the Vaccine Church have just helped mint 9 new pharma-billionaires

Pandemic sweeps the nation.

Fascist America under Trump mobilizes pharmaceutical industry to rush vaccines into development, investing billions of dollars in the efforts.

Industry resurrects a discredited drug delivery mechanism and calls it a vaccine. Smelling $$$, it prepares for mass vaccination but doesn't run trials proportionate to that effort, and then cuts off the placebo arm prematurely, making a complete hash of it.

Government gives Emergency Use Authorization, not FDA Approval, to permit these corporations to experiment on the US population during an "emergency".

The corporations, and the government, are exempted from liability.

A fearful population whipped into a hysteria by propaganda paid for with borrowed dollars lines up like sheep to take the vaccine under a new administration but the same old fascism.

Presto! 9 new billionaires:

The 9 new vaccine billionaires, in order of their net worth are: 

1. Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO (worth $4.3 billion)
2. Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech (worth $4 billion)
3. Timothy Springer, an immunologist and founding investor of Moderna (worth $2.2bn)
4. Noubar Afeyan, Moderna’s Chairman (worth $1.9 billion)
5. Juan Lopez-Belmonte, Chairman of ROVI, a company with a deal to manufacture and package the Moderna vaccine (worth $1.8 billion)
6. Robert Langer, a scientist and founding investor in Moderna (worth $1.6 billion)
7. Zhu Tao, co-founder and chief scientific officer at CanSino Biologics (worth $1.3 billion)
8. Qiu Dongxu, co-founder and senior vice president at CanSino Biologics (worth $1.2)
9. Mao Huihua, also co-founder and senior vice president at CanSino Biologics (worth $1 billion)

			The 8 vaccine billionaires who saw their wealth increase are: Name Role/description $ billions 2021 $ billions 2020 Jiang Rensheng & family Chair, Zhifei Biological products $ 24.40 $ 7.60 Cyrus Poonawalla Founder, Serum Institute of India $ 12.70 $ 8.20 Tse Ping Sinopharm $ 8.90 $ 7.30 Wu Guanjiang Co-founder, Zhifei Biological products $ 5.10 $ 1.80 Thomas Struengmann & family Portfolio includes Germany's BioNTech and Uruguay's Mega Pharma $ 11.00 $ 9.60 Andreas Struengmann & family Portfolio includes Germany's BioNTech and Uruguay's Mega Pharma $ 11.00 $ 9.60 Pankaj Patel Controls listed company Cadila Healthcare. The company now manufactures drugs to treat Covid-19 such as Remdesivir from Gilead. Its Covid-19 vaccine, ZyCoV-D, is undergoing clinical trials. $ 5.00 $ 2.90 Patrick Soon-Shiong ImmunityBio - selected for the US federal government's "Operation Warp Speed" to help quickly develop a Covid-19 vaccine. $ 7.50 $ 6.40

Why is the US Vaccine Church pushing mandatory jabs instead of celebrating its amazing success?

TL;dr: fascism.

The data are clear.

Deaths from COVID-19 have been in free-fall from the January peak when over 95k perished to just over 10k dead in June, with July poised to come in even lower than that, near 6.5k.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Vaccine Church should be CROWING over this success, especially when it accomplished this feat with just 36% vaccinated with one dose and only 22% fully vaccinated on April 13, the date of peak US vaccination.

 

April's not quite 24k deaths were equivalent to last year's lows in June, September and October.

 

And May, June and July 2021 are coming in even lower than that, now that vaccination levels have reached about 50% of the population.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Instead the Vaccine Church is wringing its hands about the Indian variant and preaching, preaching, preaching to the people to get vaccinated, and using borrowed funds by the billion to do it, too.

 

The Vaccine Church knows the vaccines had damn little to do with this decline in deaths, and has too much invested in this fascist scheme to look back now.

 

 

To California oil is like slavery and must be banned everywhere

But Californians see Texas as a mortal threat not merely to their state’s business model and way of life but to humanity itself. Drilling is killing. Texas cannot be allowed to be Texas because if Texans get their way, the planet will superheat, destroying us all. You may think that’s ridiculous hyperbole, and maybe it is, but Californians believe it and will not be talked out of it. Hence peaceful coexistence is, for them, possible only on their terms.

The Golden State is no longer down with living and letting live but must impose its will, against the express wishes of others, in fundamentally transformative ways. There’s a word for that.

But Michael Anton can't see how this is just like Lincoln in the North imposing his will on the South in 1861. A Lincoln worshiper in denial.

California is nothing if not Lincolnesque.

Claremont Review of Books,  here.

FBI had at least a dozen "informants" involved prodding along the Gov. Whitmer kidnap plot

But as it was revealed that the FBI had at least a dozen informants heavily involved in the Watchmen — including that Iraq veteran — critics say the G-Men did as much to prod the plot as they did to prevent it from happening in the first place.

The agents took an active part in the scheme from its inception, according to court filings, evidence and dozens of interviews examined by BuzzFeed. Some members of the Wolverine Watchmen are accusing the feds of entrapment. ...

Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI has reportedly recruited thousands of informants. Some, according to a recent investigation in The New York Times that centered on the dubious arrest and conviction of the so-called “Herald Square Bomber” by the use of an informant, said they were retaliated against if they refused. ...

Coulson said he and others are “very upset” the FBI hasn’t arrested anti-government and anti-fascist protesters who have been leading violent demonstrations in Portland and Seattle for more than a year — yet are bearing down so hard on those arrested for the insurrection at the Capitol.

Read it all here.

Looks more and more like a replay of the FBI's Michigan Hutaree Militia fiasco from 2010.

 

"Insurrectionists" were on the FBI payroll

The so-called “Proud Boys,” often cited as a “far-Right” organization and said to be somehow responsible for January 6, was led by one Enrique Tarrio, an FBI informant. The so-called Oath Keepers, the group most cited and said by government sources to be most involved in that day’s events, is led by one Stewart Rhodes, another FBI asset.

In fact, the Justice Department lists some 15 participants in the event against whom it brings no charges, either for “insurrection” or even for trespassing, because these individuals are paid infiltrators. They work for the FBI or other U.S. intelligence agencies. The U.S. government refuses to expose what these persons did because they did it on the government’s behalf. 

More.

The FBI never changes. Its sting operations are legion, without which it would have no successes. It should be abolished.