LOL, as telegraphed on March 10th, Massachusetts subtracts 3,770 COVID deaths from total because they died of COVID longer than 30 days after infection

The new system will narrow the state’s definition of who died of COVID. Currently, Massachusetts records anyone who died within 60 days of a COVID diagnosis as having died from COVID, unless it is clear the person died from another cause, such as a traumatic accident. Under the new system, recommended by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, COVID deaths will now be those that occur within 30 days of a diagnosis. The council helps establish uniform methods for states to track and record various diseases. This “will also improve our ability to compare our data with data from other jurisdictions and other states,” Brown said. She said most, but not all, states have adopted this new method. ... The state for the first year counted anyone who had been diagnosed with COVID at any time as a COVID death. ... Most of the overcount, she said, occurred between the summer of 2020 and April 2021, before the state adopted an updated system. That updated method used the 60-day window, counting anyone who died within 60 days of a COVID diagnosis as a COVID death, as well as those in which COVID or an equivalent term was listed on their death certificate. ... Barbara Anthony ... said the Baker administration has been less than transparent about COVID death counts. She said the state did not publicly announce it had significantly changed its system for counting total deaths last April, when it switched to the 60-day method. ... “It’s mind boggling, frankly,” said Anthony, who also is a senior fellow in health care policy at the Pioneer Institute. “It’s not a transparent way to run an operation, and it undermines the faith of the public.”

Read the whole thing.

So, the real story is Massachusetts has changed its counting method TWICE to reduce an "overcount" mostly during the UK variant wave when most authorities increasingly look to excess death data and conclude that COVID death counts don't actually capture the true number of COVID deaths.

Massachusetts is completely counter trend.

 

 

 

 

Gold fanatics never mention the potentially bad tax news

 The war in Ukraine has pushed more investors into gold, which some see as a “safe haven” in volatile times, and fueled a price rally.  ...

And because the IRS classifies metal coins as collectibles, ETF investors face the top 28% tax rate that applies to all collectibles when they sell shares.

 

The IRS outlined this thinking in a 2008 memo. (While the memo doesn’t carry the weight of official law, accountants have largely accepted its rationale, Lewis said.) ...

 

Stock investors generally pay one of three tax rates on their profits — 0%, 15% and 20%, the top rate — based on their income. These rates are preferential with respect to an investor’s regular income tax rates, of which there are seven (10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35% and 37%).

Conversely, the capital-gains tax rate on collectibles aligns with these seven [ordinary income tax] rates, up to a 28% maximum. That means an investor whose annual income puts them in the 12% tax bracket would pay a 12% tax rate on their collectibles profits; an investor in the 37% bracket would be capped at 28% on their collectibles profits.

Read the whole thing.

Hero Joe Manchin won't support Biden climate lunatic Sarah Bloom Raskin for Federal Reserve Board

 

This red diaper doper baby thinks it would be a good idea for banks to refuse to lend to the oil and gas industry in order to end it.

She's an Obama administration retread.

Story.

Welcome to February 2022 CIVPART data at 62.3%, otherwise known as September 1977

 

The 2020 average was revised to 61.8 and the 2021 average is 61.7.

One way to grow the participation rate, as seen in the first chart, which is monthly, is TO NOT HAVE TO COUNT PEOPLE.

How do you do that?

The economy sucks so bad you drop out of the labor force, which instantly shrinks its size. So as jobs recover a little bit the participation rate looks better because more people compared with the smaller underlying base are working again.

 

Not in labor force on an average basis hit an all time high in 2021 of 100.24m, pushed mostly by the 2008 catastrophe for older workers, while growth in the labor force has been anemic to flat because people aren't having enough kids.

People who remember the malaise of the Jimmy Carter era who are still alive today can relate. 

CIVPART hovering on the 63% line was the Trump era's "greatest economy ever", lol.

Click any graph to enlarge.

 

The guy telling us we're not going to have WWIII is the same guy who promised he wouldn't make vaccines mandatory

 

Planet, dumbest guy on the

 

I have seen many examples of Russian military vehicles abandoned in Ukraine in recent days increasingly due to MUD: Here's two tanks in Chernihiv

 Or are they in Sumy? The locations are quite distant from each other.

Verifying this stuff is driving some of these guys crazy.

LOL, according to this stupid definition by a university pinhead, there are only 23.8 million middle class workers

“If you are holding a position that is non-managerial, non-executive level, doesn’t have a lot of decision power, you would have been classified in our study as working class,” Addo says [here].

In February 2022 there were 128.2 million total private employees. 104.4 million of them were "production and nonsupervisory".

 

That's a ratio of workers to supervisors of about 4.4:1 in the private sector. In the federal government, the ratio's much worse, somewhere between 7-10:1. That's probably closer to the truth also for the entire government sector,  which is 22.2  million strong.

 

The supervisors are the elite minority, hello. 

The best proxy for middle class has always been homeownership: house, condo, whatever. It's one of the most basic things which has defined us and more importantly united us for generations. There was a time when everyone said, rich and poor alike, that they were middle class, it was that strong of an American ideal. 

Now we're stuck with a bunch of eggheads trying to divide us by overthrowing definitions.

Total households in 2020 numbered about 128.5 million in the United States. Roughly 84 million were owner occupied at the time, 42 million renter occupied, a ratio of 2:1.

 

The average size of a household in 2020 was about 2.53: (84 + 42) 2.53 = 319 million (a relatively small additional number of Americans lives in subsidized housing, military housing, and institutionalized housing).

A broad swath of Americans, 66%, lives in an owned home, with about a third distributed at the top and the bottom renting out of either convenience or necessity.

 

And most of them are by definition nonsupervisory employees.

Oops, so sorry ve bombed you, dat vas a mishtake, nevermind

India says it accidentally fired missile into Pakistan

 

CBS eyeball news can't even get the basics right for "excess deaths" story

 The eyeball news story gets it wrong by screwing up the time frame. The reporter is just lazy:

Two years after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, new research suggests around 18.2 million people have died worldwide as a result. That toll is more than three times higher than the WHO's tally of nearly 6 million officially reported COVID-19 deaths through the end of 2021.

The new figures, published Thursday in The Lancet, are based on the number of "excess deaths" in countries around the world. Researchers determined how many additional deaths occurred from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2021 by modeling the number of "expected" deaths in years unaffected by a global pandemic, compared to the total number who actually died from any cause. 

You can't use "the current total".  This is March, hello. You have to use the total on 12/31/21 as the study did, which was closer to 825,000. That means C19 deaths in the US might have been as much as 37% higher than actually reported, not 18%.

The disparity between excess deaths and C19 deaths for the US is much larger than the story lets on.

Similarly with the global total figures. There were about 5.46 million deaths globally due to COVID-19 on 12/31/21, not "nearly 6 million", so the excess deaths are about 3.33 times greater than the C19 deaths, not simply 3.03 times greater.

Perhaps the most significant new piece of information from the story is that "deaths from heart attacks and stroke have climbed beyond pre-pandemic levels", but the story won't suggest that there might be an association between those deaths and mass vaccination, only with the disease itself.

How many older people have died of heart attack and stroke after vaccination without contracting COVID-19? There must be many, many millions globally, by definition, but no one is publishing this information.

The bias in favor of the safety of the vaccines will not hold up forever as new evidence like this emerges.

We were confidently told these vaccines would stop the spread, even at the 50% threshold, which turned out to be a huge lie. Even after Provincetown the authorities bent over backwards to stick with the narrative.

Then we were told the vaccines would stop serious outcomes, yet US deaths in January and February 2022 are the fifth and fourth worst months for deaths of the entire pandemic.

The time for the end of this farce is long past. 

The US Senate quickly approved the omnibus spending bill and already has sent it on to Biden for his signature by the deadline tomorrow

 Story here.

I'm guessing that will be the last spending bill of any significance until September when they have to do another continuing resolution because of the upcoming election in November, after which we'll have another omnibus instead of regular order, which no one even remembers what it looks like anymore.

Our government is perennially dysfunctional.

That slavedriver Drudge wants his headline and he wants it NOW!

 

Build Back Better is well and truly dead: House passes $1.5 trillion omnibus to fund federal government through September

 $780 billion is for the Department of Defense.

The bill(s) go to the Senate next.

The usual sausage making, with a little spice added in.

Story.

Low energy Joe: Brian Deese, Director of the National Economic Council for Joe Biden, wants to eliminate fossil fuel use completely

 

Listen.

Electricity use alone in the US is 60% derived from natural gas and coal in 2020.

This is their idiotic message in a crisis.

The Joe Biden regime is avoiding Sunday's statement on jets to Ukraine from NATO by its own Secretary of State Antony Blinken like . . . The Plague

 

This guy's days should be numbered like Rex Tillerson's.

Low energy Joe: The batshit crazy loons of the Biden regime think this crisis is an opportunity to just jettison overnight the 60% of our electricity generation which comes from hydrocarbons

 President Biden's Chief of Staff wants a clean energy revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, revolution would mean breaking most of the eggs.

With Omicron dominant everywhere in the US, we have no idea how many cases there are because the Biden regime has given up on testing

 US COVID-19 deaths in the first 8 days of March average 1,479 per day, 13% higher than the 1,310 per day average rate for all of 2021.

136,351 have died since December 31st, or 2,035 per day, 55% higher than the 2021 average rate.

No one cares anymore, on either side of the politics.

Where's the paxlovid, approved for emergency use on December 22nd?

LOL, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates don't want to talk to Joe Biden about his self-imposed US oil problems

 From the story:

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks . . .

Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden.

Shackleton's "Endurance" finally found at the bottom of the Weddell Sea where climate is still the same more than a hundred years later

Battling sea ice and freezing temperatures, the team had been searching for more than two weeks in a 150-square-mile area around where the ship went down in 1915. ...  

The hunt for the wreck, which cost more than $10 million, provided by a donor who wished to remain anonymous, was conducted from a South African icebreaker that left Cape Town in early February. ...

Once the wreck was located several days ago . . ..

Shackleton was tripped up by the Weddell’s notoriously thick, long-lasting sea ice, which results from a circular current that keeps much ice within it. In early January 1915 Endurance became stuck less than 100 miles from its destination and drifted with the ice for more than 10 months as the ice slowly crushed it. ...

The Weddell Sea still remains far icier than other Antarctic waters . . ..

The icebreaker, Agulhas II, left the search area on Tuesday [yesterday, March 8] for the 11-day voyage back to Cape Town.

More.

Why do you think it's taken this long to find the wreck?

Conditions there are as inhospitable now as they have ever been, and are forbidding even to a $10 million expedition using a modern icebreaker and fancy undersea gear with sonar and high resolution cameras and a short window of opportunity of only "several days" to spend documenting the find once they'd found it before having to high tail it out of there.

From departure from Cape Town Saturday February 5 to departure from the Weddell Sea Tuesday March 8 was thirty-one days.

That's the news that's not mentioned by The New York Times, even while mentioning it.

 

Endurance's coal-fired steam engine could make 10 knots

I hate unnamed former senior White House officials

Defense One, here.

The official outlined a scenario in which Putin consolidates some gains in southern Ukraine but fails to install a new puppet regime. 

“Ukrainians may or may not cease and desist. The West may or may not continue to arm the Ukrainian insurgency and [Putin] might decide, ‘OK. I'm going to set off a bomb somewhere in western Ukraine to send a message that I have crossed the nuclear threshold, and you can follow me if you want.”

An overlooked reason why Japan remains an important ally of The West

 

Japan's plutonium stockpile climbs to 46.1 tons in 2020, first rise in 3 years 

The UK's Boris Johnson turns on a dime

Remember when the British were famous for the phrase, "steady on"?

Or "steady as she goes"?

Yeah, me neither.

 

Remember when Pat Buchanan wanted to pull all US troops out of Europe, basically out of everywhere but Guam?

 Latvia yesterday:

In a press conference Monday, Rinkevics said that public opinion and policymakers’ decision-making had shifted with regards to military deployments, noting that now “we need a permanent stationing of NATO troops, including U.S. troops, on our soil” — something he had called for before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

On the day Russia invaded Ukraine (Feb. 24), Biden ordered the deployment of an additional 7,000 U.S. troops to Europe, and moved forces already in Europe to NATO’s eastern flank, including to Latvia. ...

Even though the Baltic states have been a part of NATO and the EU since 2004, with all three using the euro as their currency, their geographic location makes them vulnerable. Like Ukraine, they all share a border with Russia. Latvia and Lithuania also share a border with Russia’s ally Belarus, which is widely believed to be supporting Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.

More.

Buchanan with Hannity and Colmes, November 26, 2007, Putin's seventh year in office:

COLMES: You want — yes, you want us to get out of Russia, too. You want us to pull the troops back, get the troops out of all — wherever we have United States troops.

BUCHANAN: Look, the Russians got up and walked out of Eastern Europe. They moved their army behind the Urals. They let Eastern Europe go free. They let 15 nations break up. What did we move NATO into their face for?

More.

10,258 US COVID-19 deaths in the first 7 days of March

 1,465 per day.

Normal per day for influenza: 98.

The UK and The Netherlands join Germany in crying uncle over Russian energy embargo to stop Ukraine war

CNBC here:

Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. have appeared to back away from a coordinated Western embargo on Russian energy exports, however. ...

Western sanctions imposed on Russia over the invasion have so far been carefully constructed to avoid directly hitting the country’s energy exports, although there are already signs the measures are inadvertently prompting banks and traders to shun Russian crude. ...

“You can’t simply close down use of oil and gas overnight, even from Russia. That’s obviously not something that every country around the world can do,” Johnson said. ...

Rod Dreher is so desperate for anti-war kinship he's retweeting a Democratic Socialist of America now

Last time I checked the Ukrainians haven't targeted any high rise apartment buildings in Moscow for missile attacks like the Russians have in Ukraine.

 

Like its beer, Germany is the cause of, and the solution to, all of Europe's problems

The Bundeskanzler, quoted here :

"That is why it is a conscious decision on our part to continue the activities of business enterprises in the area of energy supply with Russia," Scholz added.

During the campaign for president in 2019, Joe Biden was pretty clear about punishing the Saudis over Khashoggi, now he plans a trip to beg them for oil

 

Rush Limbaugh's hero Angelo Codevilla was quite mistaken about Russia's ambitions in Ukraine

In "What is Russia to Us?" here Codevilla vainly imagined Russia to be self-limited by the sobering lessons it has learned from its history: 

Today, [John Quincy Adams] would be confident that Russia realizes it cannot control Ukraine except for its Russian part, or the Baltics, never mind the states of Eastern Europe. ...

Adams would not hide the fact that U.S. policy, implemented by ordinary diplomacy, is to foster the Baltic States’, and especially Ukraine’s, independence. But he would know and sincerely convey to Russia that their independence depends on themselves, and that he regards it as counterproductive to try making them into American pawns or even to give the impression that they may be. He would trust in a Ukraine that had stopped longing for the borders that Stalin had fixed for it in 1927 and Khrushchev augmented in 1954, in a Ukraine retrenching into its Western identity (as, for example, by asserting its Orthodox church’s independence from Russia’s), and that is standing firmly on its own feet. He would trust in Russia’s actual acceptance of its inability ever again to control this Ukraine. This would be Adams’s Ukraine policy.

 

Dock workers in the UK and Netherlands refuse to unload Russian oil, gas, and coal

 Story.

Cyprus has denied five Russian navy ships the right to moor and refuel there, so Cyprus' participation in EU sanctions has real teeth

 https://in-cyprus.philenews.com/cyprus-forbids-mooring-of-five-russian-navy-ships-this-week-due-to-ukraine-war/ :

Even though Russia has signed an agreement with Cyprus to give its navy ships access to the Mediterranean country’s ports Nicosia this week forbade five of them from mooring because of the Ukrainian invasion. ... the agreement on the provision of facilities and a mooring permit is suspended.

 

Cancel culture envy on the anti-war right inspires dreams of making an enemies list of people to rub out "when things calm down, God willing"

We are all the same people.

 

The biggest cuck of the moment is Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, prophet of coming soft totalitarianism to The West

Rod Dreher retweets a whiny guy with kids who thinks boomers are dogshit, a Canadian who is intimidated by a Russian circus act training with a bear, and a Russian propaganda map of Ukraine showing "the advance of our troops".

All in the last 24 hours.

He's in Spain and Hungary enjoying the cafe life for Lent.

 

The weak tea of libertarianism means you don't come right out and say the US has no moral obligation to Ukraine, you just retweet it

 

Like it or not, the US owes Ukraine under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, unless of course it wants to be a traitor to Ukraine just like Russia

 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances

As usual Americans are mentally ill, wanting mutually exclusive things

74% want a no fly zone!

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-americans-broadly-support-ukraine-no-fly-zone-russia-oil-ban-poll-2022-03-04/

But fewer than half want the broader war that implies.

 

Not a serious country.
 

 

Remember when The White House was patting itself on the back for evacuating 120k from Afghanistan in 17 days?

 It's always better to rely on yourself. The government will screw up a 2-car funeral.

Half of the country doesn't seem to get it that a wider war in Europe would oblige us to participate under NATO

 Q:

"If a wider war breaks out in Europe, should the U.S. military be involved?" 

A:

 

 

The accent is on the BS

 

Mayor Beetlejuice says “My d--- is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d--- in Chicago”

 Here:

“You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians. ... You are out there stroking your d---- over the Columbus statue, I am trying to keep Chicago police officers from being shot and you are trying to get them shot,” Lightfoot said, according to the complaint. “My d--- is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d--- in Chicago.”

Always thought there was something a little odd about Chicago's Mayor Lori Lightfoot. 

 

Once again, WaPo story critical of Trump's border wall never mentions Republicans forced Trump to accept Bush-era bollard fencing instead of his promised "impenetrable barrier"

The whole point of forcing Trump to accept bollard fencing was to make him a failure on his signature issue. Everyone already knew it was inadequate from the time of Bush, who agreed to it BECAUSE he knew it wouldn't work. Bush WANTED a porous border. Bollard fencing to Bush was like running on a pro-life plank and never having to do anything about it once in office. Good politics, that's all. Good optics.

Trump was set up to fail, and like a fool, he accepted it. That's the real story.

It was Republican payback for all the mean things Trump said about Republicans in 2015-2016. "We'll fix you, buster. Here's your stupid wall."

These facts are why WaPo has to write an article about the failure of bollard fencing periodically, in order to keep the lie alive that a border wall doesn't work. Their agenda is the same as the Republican Democrat agenda of a porous border, to keep the cheap labor flowing in, and the drugs. It's also Drudge's agenda.

Those two things are the most important to a sick, dying society, otherwise we'd have fixed this long ago.

And obviously, Trump is part of the problem, not the solution.

Now the stink on the border wall is so bad no one will come near it for a generation.

Mission accomplished.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-border-wall-has-been-breached-more-than-3000-times-by-smugglers-cbp-records-show/ar-AAUwpuh