The kooks on the left scared the normies.
It could have easily gone the other way.
Conservatism keeps redefining itself leftward.
The kooks on the left scared the normies.
It could have easily gone the other way.
Conservatism keeps redefining itself leftward.
Halloween candy.
Not a serious country.
And of course, pretty much every morning, what we had assumed was a joke turns out to be entirely real. It's actually happening. The Biden administration really is that crazy. They really are firing thousands of nurses in the middle of a pandemic, firing thousands of cops in the middle of a crime wave. No, they're not kidding, even in the slightest, when they tell you that's a genuine female four-star admiral standing right there. Joe Biden isn't giggling. He tells you Rachel Levine's promotion is a victory for women everywhere, and he means it when he says it.
More.
Like the full court press by the federal government to exaggerate the January 6 debacle as an insurrection, the "reparations" scheme is designed to do just one thing: Paint the record of Donald Trump in the worst possible light.
One of the most distinctive features about America is how its leadership on both sides fails to take seriously the real problems facing the country while taking too seriously merely imaginary ones.
This is how a nation declines and falls.
Somewhere, out there, there's an iceberg, waiting for its moment.
In the end, what I believe doesn’t really matter. History will out. Ten or 15 or 25 years from now there will a reckoning, deep research, a spate of biographies and memoirs from the people who spent 2020-21 under the sway of gurus. News media that trumpeted their wisdom and methods will issue brisk, researched, documentary-style reports. People will swarm out of the shadows to claim they didn’t really believe the experts embodied science and were secretly resisting all along; even those who preached their gospel and strong-armed the public’s obedience will insist they actually did not.
There were roughly 17.5 million students enrolled as of the last tally.
Combined with last autumn’s declines, the number of undergraduate students in college is now down 6.5% compared to two years ago — the largest two-year enrollment drop in the last 50 years, the report found. ...
Only the most selective colleges notched enrollment gains — up 4.3% — to return to pre-pandemic levels. ...
Community colleges remain the most adversely affected sector, experiencing a 14.1% total enrollment decline since fall 2019. ...
Community college students likely are older, lower-income and often balancing work, children and other obligations — and they are also disproportionately students of color. These are all groups that the pandemic hit especially hard.
More.
Breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths showed modest declines compared to August proportions of 14% and 17% respectively. Since hospitalizations and deaths are lagging indicators, however, the rise in breakthrough cases from 14% to 16% may be a harbinger of more bad news in Tennessee.
The data isn't presented in a straightforward manner. Subtract the percentages shown in the table from 100 to get the breakthrough figures. I can imagine some idiot looking at that table, wondering what the hell he's lookin' at.
Vaccines do not make one bulletproof, as story after story makes plain. This is especially the case for the elderly, for whom the risk of death is the highest, vaccinated or not. Waning vaccine effectiveness is only the second biggest concern facing this group.
But in Tennessee you wouldn't know risk of death is highest if you are old anyway, if you relied on Tennessee's COVID statewide dashboard, hilariously entitled "unified command". You won't find death information visualized anywhere, let alone by age. Cases are visualized by age, which is even more misleading to the elderly since cases abound among the younger tranches, not the older.
You really have to hunt for the death data on a different page and download the data in XLS format from a long list of available data sets entitled "Daily Age Group Outcomes- Statewide case outcomes by age group", and then do the math. And do you see the word "death" in there anywhere?
It's really irresponsible. It's almost like Tennessee is trying to hide the deaths from its old people, and throw shade on the vaccines, by publishing the breakthrough data in a weird way, at the same time. A conspiracy theorist would say they're tryin' to get rid of 'em, real quiet like.
I count 13,119 deaths in TN to date from COVID in people 61 years of age or older, which is about 82% of all the pandemic deaths in the state.
Tennessee really, really sucks at this.
Last week's PROPORTION OF BREAKTHROUGH CASES BY MONTH OF ONSET AS OF OCTOBER 11, 2021 showed the percent of cases vaccinated for October to date at 9.8%, the highest for any month yet.
This week the table is missing, with this message:
At this time, we are currently working on refining the process for identifying breakthrough infections and reinfections. Once we have finalized this process, we will resume providing tables on breakthrough infections and reinfections.
I'm sure it's nothing.
While neglected, the STI crisis presents a serious public health problem. ...
But Harvey warns that a coordinated effort by national health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is needed to combat the waning STI crisis.
Here.
You can always count on THE GRAUNIAD to be clear as mud.
Maybe we should cut down on the immigration:
More than 2.5 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea & syphilis reported in 2019.
Rates for African American or Black people were 5-8 times that of non-Hispanic White people.
Rates for American Indian or Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander people were 3-5 times that of non-Hispanic White people.
Rates for Hispanic or Latino people were 1-2 times that of non-Hispanic White people.
Gay and bisexual men make up nearly half of all 2019 primary and secondary syphilis cases.
Gonorrhea rates were 42 times that of heterosexual men in some areas.
More.
CDC is capitalizing White people now.
Thank you.
A Mount Holyoke College professor of art and Asian studies has been sentenced to 10-12 years in the slammer for nearly killing her female colleague who "should have known" she was in love with her:
Rie Hachiyanagi, an arts professor at Mount Holyoke College, was
sentenced to 10 to 12 years in prison on Wednesday over the 2019 attack
on fellow professor Lauret Savoy, MassLive reports. ...
When the victim let her in, Hachiyanagi bludgeoned her with a rock, fireplace poker and garden shears during a twisted, four-hour attack. ...
Hachiyanagi — who specializes in handmade paper crafts and performance art — had allegedly driven to the victim’s house uninvited the night of Dec. 23, claiming she “wanted to talk about her feelings,” according to a police report.
Once inside, she began attacking the victim, who is over the age of 60, with a myriad of household objects, including rocks, garden clippers and a fire poker, WWLP reported.
Price of one year at Mount Holyoke College in 2019-20: $67,578 for tuition, room, and board. Performance art included at no extra charge.
Can't we all just get along?
Fauci predicted this on December 15, 2020 and again on April 28, 2021.
It turns out he said the same thing as late as June 3:
Having about 50% of adults fully vaccinated and about 62% of adults having received at least one dose across the US as a whole means “as a nation, I feel fairly certain you’re not going to see the kind of surges we’ve seen in the past,” Fauci said.
Three strikes, NPR, WSJ, CNN, and you are out!
The report indicated scientists believe as much as 90% of the
tuberculosis disease released by an infected person could be carried in
the aerosol particles. ...
It was previously believed transmission primarily occurred through coughing, which sprayed heavy droplets containing the bacteria onto others, according to the New York Times report.
Research throughout the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic increasingly found the virus also spread through the air in tiny particles, though that mode of transmission was not fully appreciated in the early stages of the pandemic.
"However, this Task Force recommendation is not for people already taking aspirin for a previous heart attack or stroke; they should continue to do so unless told otherwise by their clinician."
The word "stop" never occurs in the story.
Frozen green beans again tonight.
This shortage business is really weird.
I'm thinking it's not a shortage of product but of help. The store manager was actually working the produce section, spreading out the cabbages where what I was looking for went so that the shelves didn't look so barren.
Checkout was handled by another store manager, who complained "no one wants to work on weekends".
Climate Update for KGRR: September 2021
The anomaly at or below -0.5 persisted for 10 out of 12 overlapping periods in the 2020-2021 measuring season. For the first two periods of the 2021-2022 measuring season the anomaly continues in the negative at sum -0.9. The deepest anomaly in the last season was -1.3 in the October-November-December period, which is considered neither weak nor strong, but middling.
The trend toward lower ONI values since 1951 is consistent with wetter conditions in the Upper Midwest of the US, and greater incidence of tropical storms in the Atlantic from the 1980s. There is no need to adduce "global warming":
the historical tropical storm count record does not provide compelling evidence for a greenhouse warming induced long-term increase.
Gina from San Jose, Christina from South Dakota, Candy from Oklahoma, and Jackie from San Diego.
On Oct. 7, there were reportedly around 60 container ships waiting in open water outside Los Angeles and Long Beach for berths to dock in and unload their goods. Before the pandemic, it was unusual to see even one vessel waiting for a slip. ...
Skyrocketing costs are also part of the problem. Over the past year, the cost to have one container shipped by freighter from China to the West Coast has soared from around $3,000 in Aug. 2020 to more than $20,000 in September of this year.
More.
Breakthrough COVID-19 cases in fully vaccinated Minnesotans have been increasing amid the rise of the delta variant, which is responsible for more than 99% of new infections in the state.
The rise could reflect waning immunity in the earliest vaccine recipients, which include seniors and people with underlying illnesses who tend to have weaker immune system responses to the shots. ...
Minneapolis-based Allina Health reported 249 patients hospitalized for COVID-19 on Monday, and that 77 (31%) were fully vaccinated. Among 51 patients receiving intensive care, six (12%) were fully vaccinated. ...
Bloomington-based HealthPartners similarly reported that it cared for 424 COVID-19 patients in its hospitals over the past 30 days, and that 25% were fully vaccinated. Among the 74 requiring intensive care, 19% were fully vaccinated.
More.
Scalise thinks several states did not follow their election laws existing at the time and that state legislatures were by-passed in the process of changing such laws, which is prohibited by the constitution, in the fit of coronavirus hysteria gripping the country in 2020.
These things are demonstrable but blacked out by the powers that be, which could care less about following Article 1, Section 4.
Scalise has a good voting record when it comes to immigration issues, but he can hardly be described as Trumpian. His voting record has helped maintain the status quo on spending and he is frequently bemoaned as just another RINO.
He joined with most Republicans after all, including Liz Cheney, to pass a resolution condemning the QAnon wackos in October 2020.
The effort by the media to make Republican reasonableness look radical is outrageous, but that is where we are.
The problem for Scalise and for those who make the same argument, however, is that no Republican state legislature had the gumption post-election to do anything about it. They all acquiesced, just as they had acquiesced to allow state bureaucrats to whom they had delegated authority usurp their prerogatives in the first place.
This abdication of responsibility is what is killing the country, all over the place. Into the vacuum sweep the radical forces which would overturn everything.
We're screwed.
Anthony Fauci, The Wall Street Journal, Apr 28, 2021:
"When you get to somewhere between 40 -50%, I believe you’re going to start seeing real change, the start of a precipitous drop in cases”.
Obviously cases exploded because Fauci was wildly mistaken about the vaccines and 165 million fully-vaccinated Americans were as capable of spreading C19 from Aug 1 as were the fewer than 500 fully-vaccinated but infected Provincetown, MA, revelers on Jul 4. Half of those revelers were vaccinated only 6-86 days before they became infected there.
The CDC reversed itself on masks far too late, on Jul 27, after it realized that Provincetown showed that the vaccines do not stop the spread.
This is the dirtiest little secret of the year, too dirty to be repeated in public.
Chappelle won’t be cancelled. He can’t be. ... He values the truth and just being funny more highly than the shrivelled respect you win when you succumb to the diktats of the clerisy.
More.
In a huge Qatar study of 907k, Pfizer effectiveness against infection fell to only 20% in months five to seven after the second dose, which is admittedly pretty shocking (but don't get distracted by the shiny object -- boosters!):
The results indicated that vaccine effectiveness against any SARS-CoV-2 infection was 36.8% (95% CI, 33.2-40.2) in the third week after the first dose, peaking at 77.5% (95% CI, 76.4-78.6) in the first month following the second dose. Effectiveness gradually waned thereafter, then dropped after the fourth month to reach about 20% in the fifth through seventh months, according to the researchers.
“These findings suggest that a large proportion of the vaccinated population could lose its protection against infection in the coming months, perhaps increasing the potential for new epidemic waves,” Chemaitelly and colleagues wrote.
More.
But these claims fly in the face of the Provincetown incident of July 4th, where there was mass infection among fully vaccinated individuals, a plurality of whom had received Pfizer. Loss of protection against infection appears to be coterminous with vaccination "protection", not something which occurs after month seven, for example. The median interval from completion of vaccination to symptom onset in that incident was 3 months, which means half of the infected symptomatic cohort had been recently vaccinated (6-86 days!):
Among fully vaccinated symptomatic persons, the median interval from
completion of ≥14 days after the final vaccine dose to symptom onset was
86 days (range = 6–178 days).
The Qatar study people, apparently:
The vaccine's weakening protection may be due to people's behavior, the study authors noted.
"Vaccinated persons presumably have a higher rate of social contact than unvaccinated persons and may also have lower adherence to safety measures," they wrote. "This behavior could reduce real-world effectiveness of the vaccine as compared with its biologic effectiveness, possibly explaining the waning of protection."
The studies were published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Do you think the campaign to scare everyone into getting vaccinated would have succeeded if that had been reported up front before the FDA gave emergency use authorization?
The chicanery here is very deep, but at least the big bad Delta variant bullshittery is disposed of:
The decline in efficacy for infection is “most likely due to waning and not caused by delta or other variants escaping vaccine protection,” Pfizer chief medical officer for vaccines Dr. Luis Jodar said.
It is claimed the two-dose regimen is 90% effective against hospitalization for six months.
But there is not one single word in this story about how vaccinated people still spread the virus.
Not one.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/04/pfizer-covid-vaccine-protection-against-infection-tumbles-to-47percent-study-confirms.html
NNNNNNNNNNNah.
Global cases to date: 236,600,132. As in a couple of hundred million.
Rational people usually don't speak of "hundreds" until you get well past a "few", which is typically three.
I remember.
Haven't heard much from her lately.
Cackles, mostly.
Sweden has suspended the use of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine for under 30s following reports of rare side effects, while Denmark has said it will no longer offer the shot to under 18s. ...
Denmark’s health agency also blamed concerns over myocarditis for its decision to suspend the use of the Moderna vaccine for people under 18 years.
In April it became the first European country to cease using the AstraZeneca vaccine over concerns about rare cases of blood clots.
More.
Swedish health authorities on Wednesday suspended the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for those ages 30 and under, saying the move was done out of precaution.
The reason for the pausing is “signals of an increased risk of side effects such as inflammation of the heart muscle or the pericardium” — the double-walled sac containing the heart and the roots of the main vessels, Sweden’s Public Health Agency said in a statement. “The risk of being affected is very small.” ...
U.S. and European regulators caution, however, that both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines appear linked to a rare reaction in teenagers and young adults — chest pain and heart inflammation. ...
New preliminary Nordic analyzes indicate that the connection is especially clear when it comes to Moderna’s vaccine, especially after the second dose, the agency said. ...
The Swedish agency said the vaccine from Pfizer is recommended for these age groups instead.
More.
Year over year through October 4, 2021, the C19 vaccines have been a miserable failure.
Which is kinda funny when they've been telling us for months that hospitals designate every death they can as a C19 death in order to collect a government check.
I really wish they'd make up their mind.
332.805 million people (US Census)
23.434 million cases (New York Times)
7.04%
Cases and deaths Apr-Sep 2020 were 7.074m and 0.2025m respectively, for a cfr of 2.863%.
Cases and deaths Apr-Sep 2021 were 12.979m and 0.1463m respectively, for a cfr of 1.127%.
The C19 case fatality rate year over year Apr-Sep 2021 was therefore down over 60%. Total deaths period over period were down almost 28%. The theory that the so-called Delta is more transmissible yet less deadly seems to hold up. The virus has evolved to spread, at the expense of its ability to kill.
That there were comparatively FAR more cases in the 2021 period, nearly 6 million more cases, despite a mass vaccination effort is remarkable. How could that be?
The powers that be are blaming the unvaccinated.
But the timeline of events indicates that the vaccinated are implicated in the latest surge in cases, and therefore also in the deaths, which at over 57k in September are almost as bad as in April 2020.
CDC removed its mask guidance for the vaccinated in mid-May, which the president and vice-president both lauded with great enthusiasm.
And by June 1, 50% of the US population had received at least one dose of a C19 vaccine.
Vaccinated people took off their masks and enjoyed their summer.
Meanwhile Anthony Fauci had indicated on at least two occasions, in December 2020 and again in April 2021, that we would start to witness a decline in cases after achieving that level. But daily new cases just seemed to shrug their shoulders for a month instead, skipping along in a tight range for all of June. Then in July they began to soar, just as the India variant became dominant.
It's important to emphasize how fantastically wrong Fauci was about this.
In December 2020 Fauci had merely said a 50% vaccination level would need to be reached before an impact on the infection numbers would be observed, but by late April, with cases in another steep decline, he really doubled down on his claim and amplified it:
"When you get to somewhere between 40 -50%, I believe you’re going to start seeing real change, the start of a precipitous drop in cases .”
Instead of that precipitous drop he was about to get 9.8 million new cases in Jul-Sep vs. 3.1 million in Apr-Jun.
The dirty truth in all this is that the wildly growing numbers in the vaccinated population unknowingly spread the virus for 2.5 months, from mid-May through July, before the CDC reversed itself on mask guidance at the end of July after the Provincetown, MA, study showed that the virus was spreading like wildfire among vaccinated people. A Texas prison inmate study has shown the same thing since then.
Many vaccinated people have continued to spread the disease since the CDC reversed itself, however, as numerous incidents of masklessness involving celebrities and government officials demonstrate. My own veterinarians saw no need to wear masks when I took my cats in for appointments in early and late August. The late August one even asked if that was OK with me, which was hardly part of the new guidance. Mask wearing by vaccinated people, especially professionals, should have been de rigueur in close quarters in public by then.
With Pfizer vaccine effectiveness falling off to undetectable levels by month seven, we have an awful lot of people walking around who think they are bulletproof when they are not. They are instead dangerous to public health.
The surge in cases beginning in the seventh month of the year proves it.
Six months after receiving the second dose of the two-shot vaccine from Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE, many recipients no longer have vaccine-induced antibodies that can immediately neutralize worrisome variants of the coronavirus, a new study suggests. ... neutralizing antibodies that can block infection against coronavirus variants such as Delta, Beta, and Mu were undetectable at six months after the second dose.
More.