Tuesday, August 17, 2021
The Afghanistan debacle is of Trump's design, but occurred only because Biden decided to implement it and withdrew the air cover necessary to the Afghan army's mission
William Maley, August 15, 2021:
The 2020 US-Taliban deal created deep and widespread apprehension about
what the future might hold. Then, it only took a few localised failures
to sap the confidence of all sorts of actors, both military and
civilian, in the survival of the government. Side-switching became a
rational strategy, then spun out of control.
The US troop withdrawal also seems to have reflected a failure on the part of Biden – although not the US military — to appreciate how destructive the February 2020 agreement had been to the effectiveness of the Afghan military.
In requiring the withdrawal not just of US troops but US maintenance contractors, it compromised the ongoing capabilities of key assets in the inventory of the Afghan National Army, as well as depriving the army of critical air cover.
As an insightful analysis put it,
in the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the US pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.
William Maley, March 3, 2020
The text provides for a reduction of US troop numbers within 135 days to
8,600, to be followed by “withdrawal of all remaining forces from
Afghanistan within the remaining nine and a half (9.5) months.” It also
purports to bind not just the US but also its allies, including
Australia, even though they were not parties to the agreement; and it
includes “all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security
contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel.” ... the agreement is better seen as a “withdrawal agreement” than a “peace
agreement.” It is no wonder that the Taliban are painting it as a
victory.
We were all consumed with COVID-19 in February 2020, and completely ignored this.
People who say now that the rapid fall of Afghanistan would not have happened under a second Trump term don't know what they are talking about.
Trump designed this outcome, and Biden was only too happy to implement it.
Biden gets to say he ended the war, pleases the progressives on his left, and blames Trump for it, all at the same time.
And the GOP alone gets to be The Stupid Party yet once more, unless of course the thousands of Americans trapped in Kabul this morning because Biden failed to get them out ahead of time are not permitted to leave, or are taken hostage.
Their fate, and Biden's reputation, are in the Taliban's hands, and that, when all is said and done, is the Democrats' disgrace.
Monday, August 16, 2021
The rise and fall of America, in two images
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| Come and take it, Texas 1835 |
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| Come and take my ass, Kabul 2021 |
Sunday, August 15, 2021
Climate Update for KGRR: July 2021 was utterly normal
Climate Update for KGRR: July 2021 was utterly normal, UTTERLY I SAY!
Max T 89, Mean 94
Min T 53, Mean 49
Av T 72.3, Mean 72.3
Rain 4.44, Mean 3.15
Cooling Degree Days 236, Mean 242; CDD to date 505, Mean to date 426.
By average temperature, July 2021 was utterly normal, registering the mean. But to listen to the headlines, July 2021 was the hottest July ever globally. How then did Grand Rapids escape such abnormality by registering such utter normality? Should there not be some sign of temperature pressure in Grand Rapids from this horrible state of affairs all around us, as there was for example in 1936, the hottest July in the United States on record, or in 1901, the second hottest July?
It's all BS. Grand Rapids' hottest days are long behind us, as are the world's, as Tony Heller frequently demonstrates.
Grand Rapids' 11 hottest months of July by average temperature are overwhelmingly a thing of the past. 8 of the 11 instances, 73%, occurred from 1936 and earlier. Just three instances occurred in the post-war. The record breaking heat waves of 1936 and 1901 made themselves clearly felt in Grand Rapids, both years making the top five, while the so-called hottest July ever globally, July 2021, was a giant nothing burger for heat.
1921: 79.7 degrees F
2012: 79.2
1916: 78.7
1901: 78.1
1936: 77.3
2011: 77.0
1955: 76.9
1934: 76.8
1935: 76.5
1897: 76.3
1931: 75.8.
Saturday, August 14, 2021
My incompetent Michigan utility Consumers Energy can't deliver electricity for four days but thinks free ice cream will substitute for doing its job
How about not retiring generating capacity and having to buy power from other states?
How about concentrating on delivering energy from reliable sources instead of risking our future on tenuous green schemes?
How about hiring more workers to keep the gas and power flowing to the people who pay your salaries?
Coronavirus vaccines are just like Keynesianism
54% vaccination isn't enough just like spending 54% more to stimulate the economy isn't enough.
75% won't be enough. 100% won't be enough.
IT'S NEVER ENOUGH.
Both are religions. You can't disprove them because they've never really been tried.
Michigan is increasingly like a third world shit-hole: Day four without electrical power from Consumers Energy, over 81k still affected
My electric power went out Tuesday night at about 11pm.
It is still out.
Over 81,000 customers, just of Consumers Energy, remain without power four days after a line of storms came through.
The utility runs ads on the radio incessantly saying "Count on us"!
It spends more time and money trying to get consumers to curtail electric usage than it does providing it.
It decommissions coal fired generating capacity and then turns around and buys electricity from Indiana. Under Democrat Gretchen Whitmer we are increasingly like California.
The utility is a cruel joke, especially this week as humidity levels soared with the heat. Indoor temperatures at night above 80 degrees F make for miserable sleeping, when sleeping occurs at all.
The air is full of the sound of generators, day and night. Lines are long at gasoline stations where people wait to fill their cans to get them through another night.
Green energy isn't green, and the power company doesn't provide it, green or otherwise.
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Monday, August 9, 2021
Frank Meyer knew better but had it exactly backwards
Seen here:
The political questions are not unimportant, but they pale in comparison to the importance of the moral and religious aspect of our lives. As Frank Meyer put it in his book In Defense of Freedom, “in the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue.”
This is a defect of that poor thing, the libertarian mind, which compartmentalizes reality into aspects, repudiating, with the rest of modernity, the pre-Englightenment understanding that the moral realm is the only meaningful realm inhabited by humanity.
Perhaps the more important defect of this libertarian mind is viewing freedom as a means or instrumentality, rather than as a result of virtue.
In truth, freedom is a condition, a by-product, a sign. It is subsidiary and not the main show. You can't wrangle enough of it and produce virtue with it. That's putting the cart before the horse, as we used to say. In fact quite the opposite. An excess of freedom makes a monster, because men are first and foremost not angels. The excess of freedom in the United States is the precondition for its licentiousness, making it the world capital for obesity, indolence, drug abuse, empty celebrity, sexual perversion, immorality, violence, entertainment, self-loathing, and a host of other ills. Eventually such a people tyrannized by themselves will require an actual tyrant to rule them.
You will not have a good society without good people, as Meyer did recognize as parents in the 1960s gave up being good and expected "institutions" such as schools and churches to take over their responsibility to be so.
This failure of nerve already had the country firmly in its grip by Meyer's time. Today we see the same shirking phenomenon but now writ even larger, as we expect a Trump, a political party, the Conservative Movement Inc., the Federalist Society, the rule of law, the police, the courts, or constitutional parchment to fix what only the individual can fix.
Only you can fix what is wrong. You must, as Bill Buckley once famously said, "Cancel your own goddam subscription". You can. You must. Or it's over.
If you don't the woke will fix it for you. The current rage for and of "woke" is nothing if not a response of the young "nones" to this libertarian misunderstanding. Their chief enemy is freedom. The woke see all too clearly that American culture is incapable of saying No, which is the only true mark of the free man. Instead we think being free means saying Yes, to everything.
And if history is any guide, we'll say Yes to that, too, to the new tyranny of woke.
Sunday, August 8, 2021
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.
Coronavirus hospitalizations in the US have surged to levels similar to spring and summer 2020, Florida numbers now included
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| Color key: NY gray (for reference), CA blue, TX pink, FL green |
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| Michigan in orange had its turn in April |
Saturday, August 7, 2021
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.
Friday, August 6, 2021
LOL, anti-vaccine comments by doctors proliferate on doctors-only social media platform Doximity
Doctors on the industry networking site Doximity are finding their
news feed inundated with anti-vaccine comments from fellow physicians.
Thursday, August 5, 2021
LOL, Drudge ponders getting fired for not getting unvaccinated
I think Drudge wants to be the new Norm Crosby.
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.
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
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?
Tuesday, August 3, 2021
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!
Monday, August 2, 2021
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.
"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.
Sunday, August 1, 2021
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%.
Saturday, July 31, 2021
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."
Friday, July 30, 2021
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?
Thursday, July 29, 2021
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.
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| flu vaccine coverage per CDC |
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| COVID-19 vaccine coverage per CDC |
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