The Feds always bury the bad info in Friday afternoon data dumps when no one is paying attention

 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday said it is “very unlikely” the Pfizer omicron booster carries a risk of stroke for seniors after it launched an investigation into a preliminary safety concern detected by one of its monitoring systems.

The CDC, in a statement posted to its website Friday, said a surveillance system called the Vaccine Safety Datalink detected a possible risk for stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer booster shot targeting the omicron Covid variant. A CDC spokesperson said this issue was first detected in late November.

By mid-December, the CDC concluded the concern was persisting and launched an investigation into whether seniors are more likely to have a stroke in the first 21 days after receiving the Pfizer booster, the spokesperson said. A similar preliminary signal was not detected for Moderna’s booster.

The VSD monitoring system found that 130 people ages 65 and older had a stroke within 21 days of receiving the Pfizer omicron booster among about 550,000 seniors who received the shot, the CDC spokesperson said. No deaths have been reported. The Washington Post earlier reported the news. ...

The agency spokesperson said investigators hope to have a clearer picture and more data in the coming weeks.

Story here.

Again, notice the limited scope "within 21 days". 

Hey, if I don't get sick within 90 days of reception the jab worked, right?

And if I don't have a stroke within 21 days of reception, no problem, right? 

Right?

The people have been voting on this with their feet.

From the peak in April 2021, the vaccine uptake rate in the US has collapsed from 1.06% to 0.04%, or over 96%.

The current rate annualized would mean just 48.5 million Americans per year will get a jab, about 14.6% of the 332 million population.

Meanwhile, France, 80.6% of which has received at least one dose of a vaccine to date, ranks 37th to date for deaths per million at 2438.

Germany, 77.8% of which has received at least one dose of a vaccine, ranks 50th at 1975.

The United States, 80.9% of which has received at least one dose of a vaccine, ranks 12th WORST in the world at 3439.

Vaccine coverage doesn't seem obviously correlated with outcomes.

Year over year in December, broad inflation is down for six consecutive months, core inflation is down three consecutive months

 

But there's still a long way to go to get to 2-ish percent in either category.

The Fed Funds Rate will be kept higher for longer.

Classified documents found in Biden's garage on Dec 20

 ... a small number of additional Obama-Biden Administration records with classified markings were found in the President’s Wilmington residence garage. One document consisting of one page was discovered in an adjacent room.

Story here.

These document eruptions aren't as funny as Bill Clinton's bimbo eruptions. 

America in decline.

LOL: Not only 10-year old classified documents found in VP Biden's drawers marked "personal", but "three or four boxes containing papers that fall under the Presidential Records Act"

 CNN, the first name in news!, here:

Among the items from Joe Biden’s time as vice president discovered in a private office last fall are 10 classified documents including US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom, according to a source familiar with the matter. ...

The classified documents were dated between 2013 and 2016, according to the source familiar. They were found in three or four boxes also containing unclassified papers that fall under the Presidential Records Act. ...

The documents were discovered on November 2, just six days before the midterm elections, but the matter only became public Monday due to news reports. ...

The lawyer saw a manila folder that was labeled “personal,” opened the envelope and noticed there were classified documents inside.

US National Archives, a bunch of partisan hacks

 It will never not be funny that our US National Archives was all over Trump like white on rice but hadn't the slightest bit of interest in finding classified documents from the Obama administration that went missing for five years because VP Joe Biden had them in his drawers.

Like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, VP Joe Biden discovered to have possessed top secret classified documents FOR YEARS

 Way to go, Brandon.

Notice how this was supposedly discovered early last November, but we're only finding out about it now.

Also notice how no one at National Archives is out to investigate Democrats like these for infractions of rules pertaining to classified documents, but if you're President Trump, watch out.

Sweet meteor of death, come to DC.

400k without power in California

 

 

... hurricane-force winds ...

 

The storms won’t be enough to officially end California’s ongoing drought but they have helped.

 

Jonathan Mitchell, the man ultimately behind the overthrow of Roe vs. Wade, is a constitutional departmentalist whose real target is judicial supremacy

Early on, Mitchell insisted that, although he personally opposes abortion, “I’m not an anti-abortion activist. I never have been.” His goal is to destroy “judicial supremacy”—the idea that the Supreme Court is the final authority on the meaning of the Constitution—a campaign with bipartisan potential at a moment when liberals and progressives have little to gain from an imposing conservative Court. ...

Mitchell disapproved of the Supreme Court’s use of “language that makes its precedents seem sacrosanct or irreversible,” even going “so far to equate its interpretations of the Constitution with the Constitution itself.” The conventional idea that courts can “strike down,” “invalidate,” or “block” statutes was, he wrote, simply wrong. A court can “opine” that a statute is unconstitutional and tell an official not to enforce it, but the statute nonetheless “remains a law until it is repealed by the legislature that enacted it.” ...

In their dissenting opinions on S.B. 8, both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor went to first judicial principles by invoking Marbury v. Madison to rebuke Mitchell’s judiciary-evading tactic. In Marbury, in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall proclaimed, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” There, the Supreme Court, for the first time, declared an act of Congress unconstitutional and “entirely void.” Because the Court implied that its own authority to interpret the Constitution is superior to that of the other branches, the case is the fountainhead of judicial supremacy. One could view it as a power grab that we have mostly accepted for more than two hundred years.

Mitchell said he found it telling that Roberts and Sotomayor treated judicial supremacy as “axiomatic” rather than as “a choice that must be defended.” From the beginning of the country, there were prominent anti-federalists who were opposed to judicial supremacy. Thomas Jefferson—who was President when Marbury was decided—believed that “each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution.” Jefferson’s view, which scholars have called departmentalism, countered judicial supremacy with the claim that the power to determine whether acts violate the Constitution is enjoyed by each branch in its own sphere of action.

Several Presidents since have embraced departmentalism to varying degrees. Andrew Jackson explained his veto of Congress’s bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States as being based on its unconstitutionality, even though the Supreme Court had approved Congress’s authority to so act years earlier. He said, “The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.” The same year, Chief Justice Marshall held that Georgia’s regulations on Cherokee lands violated federal treaties. An enraged Jackson didn’t enforce the ruling, which enabled Georgia to disobey it.

Abraham Lincoln resisted judicial supremacy in his scathing reaction to Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the Court declared that Congress’s prohibition of slavery in the territories was unconstitutional. Lincoln, who was not yet President, acknowledged that the Court resolved the parties’ dispute, but he rejected the idea that the ruling authoritatively answered the constitutional question of slavery. In his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln further worried that, if policy on “vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” ...

Like other critics of judicial supremacy, Mitchell believes that Congress, rather than the Court, should have final say on constitutional meaning, even if it means rights might shift along with electoral outcomes—and the Court, where possible, should decide matters based on congressional statutes rather than judicial doctrines on constitutional rights.

That approach has recently put Mitchell at odds with other conservative lawyers.

More.

The Eugenics movement, victorious with abortion, aims now for widespread euthanasia to cull the herd of the poor, homeless, and mentally ill

In 2021, only 486 people died using California's assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 died used MAID to die that year.  MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives. ... MAID has fallen into further scrutiny over claims that people are now seeking assisted suicide due to poverty and homelessness or mental anguish, as opposed to the traditional method of the terminally-ill seeking a painless death.

More.

 

The January 6th protesters were treated as enemies of the state by the so-called Department of Justice, the Kavanaugh protesters not so much

 In it Medvin lays out in detail what she illustrates as the hypocrisy of the government’s approach to punishing (or not punishing) protesters opposing the nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Protesters entering the Capitol were charged under local D.C. statutes as opposed to federal ones.

Medvin cites a tweet from the Women’s March Twitter account during that protest. “Hundreds of people are being trained for today’s #CancelKavanaugh action every 30 minutes this morning. We’re going to flood the Capitol.” Crisis Magazine tweeted later that day: “@womensmarch just took the Capitol. Women, survivors, and allies walked straight past the police, climbed over barricades, and sat down on the Capitol steps.” Others did make it inside the building, into the gallery, disrupting Senate proceedings. They were charged with “Crowding, Obstructing, or Incommoding,” under the local D.C. code.

Medvin points out that only one of the Kavanaugh protesters was charged under federal statutes and that person was ultimately not prosecuted. But even more importantly, in court papers from that case, it states, “Notably, no other person charged with protest and/or disruptive-type behavior at the U.S. Capitol Grounds has been previously charged in federal court for the District of Columbia.”

More.

Rasmussen Reports wrecks its credibility with this COVID-19 vaccine deaths tweet from Jan 2, both for the scale and the math

 73 million don't die in the world every year, let alone in the United States.

At best the math means 73 million KNOW of a vaccine related death. This is why converting math problems into word problems used to be drilled into children's heads. Now they just drill racism into their heads.

Full time employment finished 2022 pretty strong, given the circumstances

 Full time in December 2022 was 49.76% of civilian population.

The full year 2022 average was 50.09%.

This still falls short of 2019, and is woefully underperforming even at that level, but considering the economic problems of 2022 the end result is pretty good.

 

 

NFL Draft goes to only seven rounds

 

GOP leader McCarthy loses 10th House speaker vote as far right Republicans dig in -- CNBC

I watched Die Hard on Christmas Eve

 It was much dumber than I remember, but then so was I back in the day.

It turns out that Roger Ebert's review here captured what's wrong with the film.

The review in THE GRAUNIAD here is just laughable.

Yippee-ki-yay. 

 

Total bond market index for long term investors vs. S&P 500

Return for VBMFX, Vanguard's Total Bond Market Index Fund, investor shares, closed to new investors, inception December 1986-December 2022 per annum:

5.08%.

Return for S&P 500, average nominal, dividends fully reinvested, December 1986-December 2022 per annum:

10.28%.

Long-term investment grade bonds for long term investors vs. the S&P 500

Return for VWESX, Vanguard's Long-Term Investment Grade Bond Fund, inception July 1973-December 2022:

7.48%.

Return for S&P 500, average nominal, dividends fully reinvested, July 1973-December 2022:

10.61%.

Germany boosts electricity from coal to 10 gigawatts, a drop in the bucket

 Bloomberg, here:

Germany now generates more than a third of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, according to Destatis, the federal statistical office. In the third quarter, its electricity from the fuel was 13.3% higher than the same period a year earlier, the agency said.  

Germany as recently as 2019 still had 40 gigawatts of electricity capacity from coal, and planned to reduce that to 27 by 2022, so obviously Germany has much more capacity available than 10 gigawatts during its present natural gas supply crisis caused by the Ukraine war.

But Germany's more serious mistake than reducing its coal capacity was its voluntary and hysterical reduction of nuclear generation capacity by 40% in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Now it's got just 3 reactors left out of the 17 it had back in the day. 

Meanwhile US electric capacity from coal in 2021 dwarfed the German, at about 210 gigawatts, but that is way down from almost 318 in 2011, a similarly ideologically driven, self-imposed, and illogical reduction of 108 gigawatts, or 33% in ten years.

The foolish growing reliance on unreliable "green energy" in the US and the turn away from coal which began in earnest under Obama has meant increasing unreliability of electric resources during extreme events, and a huge increase in the duration of power outages experienced by customers.

The average customer outage was just north of 8 hours in 2020 vs. about 3.5 hours in 2013, an increase of over 130%.

This will only get worse if America tries to rely on wind and solar at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear.

 

 

Climate Update for KGRR 2022

 Mean average temperature in Grand Rapids, Michigan since 1892: 48.2 degrees F.

Mean average temperature in 2022: 48.7.

That is all.

Welcome to 2023: Better make the most of it since you have only eight years left, lol

 

US COVID-19 vaccination fell off a cliff in 2022, down 90% from 2021, while confirmed deaths fell by 44% overall

 Just 24.3 million received at least one dose in 2022 through Dec 27.

244.06 million had received at least one dose through 12/31/21.

Per Our World In Data, here.

About 19 million in 2022 received what amounts to the two-dose protocol.

Confirmed deaths in 2022 fell to about 264k from 475k in 2021 at the same time that vaccination fell off the cliff (724 deaths per day vs. 1301 deaths per day).

And in the second half of 2022 about only 70k have died (roughly 385 per day vs. 1066 per day in the first half of 2022). That's still 3.85 times worse than for an average influenza year, but that's a win in my book at this stage of the game.