CNN idiots say Jan 6 was the single worst act of political violence since the Civil War, making JFK's brains just chopped liver I reckon

 

Fauci and others are not wrong to make comparisons between influenza and COVID-19 in terms of infection spread

One year of COVID-19 infected ~ 8.67% of the US population.

The average influenza year produces a similar result: about 8%.

Deaths are another matter entirely.

A typical flu year involves 36,000 deaths, or about 11/100k at current population.

COVID-19 gave us roughly 515k deaths in one year, March on March, or about 155/100k.

C19 has been 14 times more deadly than the flu.

But will it continue to be?

At this same point last year there were about 27k more dead from C19 than there are today, 108k vs. 81k.

Keep in mind that there are only just so many people with comorbidities and other vulnerabilities to fuel the death fire.

If the S&P 500 regressed to trend level tomorrow, it would fall to about 1551 according to the geeks

Think of it as fair value.

Another way to get there: 

GDP(63) = S&P fair value

$22.061 trillion x 63 = 1390

That formula worked for most of the post-war up until the Trump era. The fancy regression analysis done by the geeks always came up pretty close to the same result, but not lately.

Still another way to look at it:

S&P 500 4230 / GDP 22.061 = 192.

That's an elevated ratio which was common before 1929, but we've never seen such levels in the post-war.

Sum ting funny goin' on. 

Today is the 77th anniversary of the Normandy invasion by the Western allied powers

My dad served in France and Belgium. He never talked about it much at all, when I was growing up or when I became old enough to understand.

We didn't "celebrate" the day or otherwise mark it in any way. Neither did anyone else.  Same with most of the "war" holidays.

They just wanted to forget the war and move on.

And they did.

They were young and had lives to live.

The war sucked.

Biden can crow all he wants about "creating" jobs: The deficit in full-time compared with the 2019 average is still 5.1 million in May; just getting back to where we were before this debacle occurred will take years

 May 2021 full-time jobs: 48.5% of population

Average 2019: 50.4%

Missing full-time compared to 2019: 5.1 million

 

 

Federal extended unemployment pandemic payments are scheduled to end in early September, coinciding with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan

 Or is it the other way around?

In any event, the Taliban is already taking control of the Afghan countryside while the US Taliban of Commerce is celebrating victory here at home.

32 years ago we could have supported the right side but instead our elites chose labor arbitrage to make-ah the moolah, ruining our own country and making China great again

 

Fredo Fauci on US mortality rate for COVID-19 vs. influenza

Anthony Fauci should have known better than to make a mistake like this in March 2020, saying the coronavirus mortality rate was 2%, but I think he's getting beat up over this unfairly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He meant case mortality rate.

Technically that's not a thing, but that's how most of us were talking at the time, as a synonym for case fatality rate. Admittedly using the word "mortality" in this way only confuses matters. And to this day. Yes, I'm talking about Alex Berenson.

Fauci was, after all, responding to the popular press, understanding correctly how the popular press talks about these matters.

Mortality rate is a technical measure of the number of deaths in a particular population per unit of time, usually annual, usually expressed as the number of deaths per 100,000 of population (not per cases!). Since the virus was barely 3 months old, any annual rate could only be a projection, not an observation, and I don't think Fauci was so foolish as to be making such a projection based on not even three months experience with a new virus.

The implications of a 2% mortality rate would be astounding. It would mean 2% of the US population dying over the course of a year, or 6.6 million. The quick spread of the virus from China to the rest of the world by aircraft was reason enough to think this magnitude of death was possible if in fact prevalence of the disease were to dwarf that for influenza.

I don't think Fauci meant that. I think he meant case fatality rate, which fluctuates with cases and necessarily declines over time. One person gets sick with something new and dies, the case fatality rate is automatically 100%. The second case survives, the rate falls to 50%, and so on. CFR is a function of cases.

Mortality rate is function of population and time.

His flu comparison shows that he didn't mean the mortality rate technically understood. He didn't technically give the "mortality rate" for the flu.

He gave the case fatality rate for flu, which is 0.1%.

Prevalence of influenza in the US is roughly 8% of population annually on average (the morbidity rate). In any given year roughly 8% of the population gets the flu. 8% of 328 million people is 26 million cases, 0.1% of which die every year, or 26,000. If the prevalence is a little higher, you'll get more deaths. Just one more point of prevalence gets you to almost 30 million cases and 30,000 deaths, and so on. And that's what we've actually experienced in the US. As the population has aged, more older people have experienced flu which kills. Annual cases for all groups have come in at an average of almost 30 million for the last decade. Deaths have averaged almost 36k per year.

That's an average annual case fatality rate of 0.12%, just as Fauci indicated in the email.

So it's pretty clear to me that Fauci was not referring to the technical "mortality rate", but to the "case fatality rate". We were all talking about it, sloppily.

Here's how COVID-19 in the United States actually looks after what amounts to one year, using covidtracking.com data through March 7, 2021, when it quit its data gathering operation, from which we can calculate an actual mortality rate because it had been a year (population figure is US Census for Sep 7, 2020, the mid-way point, at 331.7774 million):

Confirmed US cases C19 to 3/7/21: 28.7565 million

Cumulative hospitalized to 3/7: 0.8786m

Cumulative dead to 3/7: 0.5152m

% cases hospitalized: 3.06

% cases dead: 1.79 (case fatality rate)

% population infected: ~ 8.67 (morbidity rate, very similar to influenza)

% pop. hospitalized: ~ 0.26

% pop. dead: ~ 0.16 (mortality rate).

 

Now let's compare COVID-19 to flu in terms of the "mortality rate", technically understood, expressed per 100k of population.

To 3/7/21, 515151 C19 deaths per 331.7774 million people works out to 155 deaths per 100k.

Average annual flu deaths of 36,000 per 331.7774 million people (0.011% of population) works out to 10.85 deaths per 100k (In 2019 it was 15.2/100k).

Thus COVID-19 in the US after one year has a mortality rate 14.3 times worse than for the flu on average. Its case fatality rate, 1.79%, has been 14.9 times worse than for flu's average 0.12%.

Fauci's 2% estimate in March 2020 was good enough for government work.

FOIA'd Fauci email shows his top people informed him 31 Jan 2020 that the coronavirus looked engineered and was inconsistent with evolutionary theory

In other words, it might have come out of a lab, not out of nature by crossing from bats to some unknown animal intermediary found at the Wuhan wet market.

 

CDC: Breakthrough cases in Kentucky skilled nursing facility outbreak in March reached 25%

COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with a SARS-CoV-2 R.1 Lineage Variant in a Skilled Nursing Facility After Vaccination Program — Kentucky, March 2021:

Among 83 residents and 116 HCP, 75 (90.4%) and 61 (52.6%), respectively, received 2 vaccine doses. Twenty-six residents and 20 HCP received positive test results for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, including 18 residents and four HCP who had received their second vaccine dose >14 days before the outbreak began. An R.1 lineage variant was detected with whole genome sequencing (WGS). ... 25.4% of vaccinated residents and 7.1% of vaccinated HCP were infected.

Looks like Pfizer vaccines are somewhat less effective in older people, but there is no age data given in this report. Critics of the Pfizer trial say not enough old people were part of it. This would seem to bear that out.

 

Why are 90% of the residents vaccinated but only 52% of the workers who care for them?

 

Seems like an ongoing phenomenon for people "in the industry" to be vaccine hesitant.

 

Let's hear it for democracy!

This shews how perfectly the rump

and commonwealth, in nature jump:

For as a fly that goes to bed,

Rests with his tail above his head;

So in this mungrel state of ours,

The rabble are the supreme powers.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

Heroes never die

Thus am I doubly armed; my death and life,

My bane and antidote, are both before me:

This, in a moment, brings me to an end;

But that informs me I shall never die.

 

-- Joseph Addison

This is Ronald Reagan's baneful legacy: The appointment of libertarian Anthony Kennedy, his third choice after Bork and Ginsburg

If you could poll the American soldiers who died in World War II whether they died to make men and women free to commit sodomy, you would not like their answer.

But hey, fuck you, and enjoy your long weekend.

Coming Supreme Court decision in major LGBT rights case seen as bellwether of conservative court:

Since the mid-1990s, the nation’s top court has gradually expanded protections for gays and lesbians, largely under the leadership of former Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018.

 

The Big Voice on the Right has been replaced by a couple of little pipsqueaks playing deep in center field

 

Rush Limbaugh conservatism is so over, if it ever existed

The worst thing about the announcement of Clay Travis and Buck Sexton being hired by Premiere Radio Networks to fill the noon to three once occupied by Rush Limbaugh is that rushlimbaugh.com is promoting this. That wouldn't be happening without the support of Rush's widow.

Never mind what ex-CIA employee Buck Sexton agreeing to team up with this guy says about him, Travis is the last person to whom Rush's audience would ever warm:

A self-described "radical moderate" who is pro-choice and against the death penalty, Travis said he voted for former President Barack Obama twice and never voted Republican. In 2016, Travis voted for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. As an undergrad, Travis interned for U.S. Representative [Democrat] Bob Clement for four years while in college at George Washington University. In 2000, he worked on Al Gore's presidential campaign. Travis was hired to work on U.S. Representative [Democrat] Jim Cooper's 2002 congressional campaign but was fired for wrecking Cooper's wife's car.

Premiere rolled the dice on this duo and came up with snake eyes. They will have to build an entirely different audience, but it sure as hell won't be a conservative one.

You couldn't have asked for a better recipe to blow-up conservative talk radio.

Looks intentional to me. Is Travis on the Democrat payroll?

Just like that EIB, like Rush Limbaugh, passes into oblivion.

Afghanistan is already collapsing to the Taliban after Biden-ordered US withdrawal continues

 Reported here:

As U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan, Taliban militants seize military outposts by threatening security forces until they agree to surrender, The New York Times reported Thursday. ...

At least 26 outposts have surrendered to the Taliban since May 1, according to government officials and village elders, the Times reported. The Taliban have seized four district centers and displaced governors, police officers and intelligence officials.

WAPo calls Chicom propaganda that coronavirus came from Fort Detrick, Maryland, "baseless"

 I don't think so.

This is the same WAPo which highlighted an unexplained outbreak of a respiratory virus in Virginia, just across the border from the Fort Detrick biodefense facility, in June-July 2019, which killed 3 and hospitalized and sickened dozens more. The CDC concluded in late July 2019 that a "common cold" virus was to blame in the outbreak.

Hm, imagine that. But don't think about it too long. The investigative reporting on the right wants us to concentrate on a possible outbreak at the Wuhan lab, which, by the way, wasn't a Wall Street Journal scoop. An Australian journalist had the story already in March.

Meanwhile the CDC temporarily shut down the US Army part of the Fort Detrick operation in August 2019, just a month after the Virginia outbreak, for numerous safety and other violations, not the least of which was an incomplete inventory of agents. The latter problem seems to be chronic at Fort Detrick. The place was similarly cited way back in 2009.

And Congress was deliberately kept out of the loop.

What else is Fort Detrick famous for, besides bioweapons research long ago supposedly abandoned by the US government? 

In 2001 a bunch of people were killed by anthrax mailed in letters shortly after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The anthrax was traced to Fort Detrick.

Robert Mueller and James Comey infamously fingered the wrong guy for those anthrax attacks, who was later compensated millions and exonerated. The true culprit was a senior scientist at United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008 before our incompetent FBI could arrest him, seven years after the crimes.

What other nutjobs are still working in sensitive positions in our government? 

In light of recent testimony by Anthony Fauci to Congress that he couldn't guarantee that NIH funds awarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third party were not used for gain of function research to weaponize viruses, you have to open your eyes to the fact of long-standing and intimate cooperation of US researchers with their Chinese counterparts. Chinese "scientists" are all over the place at American universities and research institutions, including at Fort Detrick, where their American counterparts seem all too often unruffled by the security implications. They are all also all dependent on US government, including military, funding for their livelihoods, as well as on funding from what President Eisenhower once warned us about, the military-industrial complex.

I don't believe any of these people as far as I can throw them.

We know the Chicoms were working on coronavirus. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that one of the inventory lacunae at Fort Detrick was the coronavirus, too. Was it just a coincidence that there was an outbreak of coronavirus-like disease in Virginia in the summer of 2019? CDC should be forced to reveal more.

The American elites who work on this stuff have all the same incentives to keep it all secret as the Chinese do. American scientists are thick as thieves with the Chinese. The fact is they are in this together, and we are the helpless bystanders on the outside. My estimation is they have too much to lose to tell the truth to the American people. Money trumps patriotism. 

As U.S. calls for focus on covid origins, China repeats speculation about U.S. military base:

Zhao, one of the country’s most notoriously hawkish diplomats, referenced a U.S. military location that has been baselessly linked to the coronavirus outbreak by Chinese media.

Better build a bunker, Chicoms are building two new breeder reactors which produce plutonium

China Is Building Two Secret Nuclear Reactors. Scientists Are Worried:

 

Why would China be stockpiling plutonium behind closed doors? “China is presently engaged in a large nuclear weapons build-up that U.S. intelligence officials publicly estimate will result in at least a doubling (or more) of the size of Beijing’s nuclear arsenal,” the experts explain, and accumulating plutonium gives them even more of these critical resources.

LOL, Rush Limbaugh time slot to be taken over by duo which includes political moderate Clay Travis

Pfffft.

Rush Limbaugh’s Radio Show to Be Taken Over by Clay Travis and Buck Sexton:

The Rush Limbaugh replacements are in, as Clay Travis and Buck Sexton will take over his three-hour conservative talk radio show time slot, said distributor Premiere Networks. ...

Premiere Networks has continued to syndicate “The Rush Limbaugh Show” using archived segments on topics relevant to the day’s news, with guest hosts filling in between clips. The program was attracting about 75% to 80% of its regular audience, according to a person familiar with the matter. ...

A self-proclaimed political moderate and independent, Mr. Travis last year announced he would be voting for former President Donald Trump, saying it would be the first time he would vote for a Republican for president. He has written several books, most recently 2018’s “Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too: How the Left Is Ruining Sports With Politics.”

That lunatic billionaire Ronald Unz not only thinks America developed COVID-19 as a bioweapon, but released it in Wuhan

 

 He also believes the China data:

(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America’s economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.