Yves here. As of midnight yesterday, neither Lambert nor I had heard from Jerri nor been able to raise her, which is very unlike her. So we’ve now gone from Thesis A, that she was having another wifi crisis, to Thesis B, that something Seriously Bad has happened. None of the friends I know in common has a clue and they agree this is very much out of band.
So we’ve rearranged coverage for today. Will keep you posted. Cross your fingers as to what is up with Jerri.
How Animals Map 3D Spaces Surprises Brain Researchers Quanta (David L)
An Explosion in Snake Diversity Came After a Major Moment in Earth’s History ScienceAlert (Kevin W)
American bumblebees disappeared from 8 states, face extinction USA Today (resilc)
These Butterflies Full of Wasps Full of Microwasps Are a Science Nightmare Atlas Obscura (Chuck L)
A meteorite barely missed hitting a Canadian woman who was asleep NPR (David L)
La Nina Arrives, Threatening to Stoke Droughts and Roil Markets Bloomberg
The Road To Clean Energy Is Messier Than We Thought Forbes
The climate disaster is here Guardian (resilc)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE’S PROMISE AND PERIL Harvard School of Public Health (David L)
Mauritania Railway Atlas Obscura. Chuck L: “A line item on your life time bucket list on which you’d better bring your own bucket. You’ll need it.”
#COVID-19
Science/Medicine
Click through to read entire tweetstorm (guurst):
It’s so funny because the effects of what happens are the exact opposite of what is being sold
The virus is becoming more virulent with passage and deadly in successive waves
The waves are increasing in amplitude as it approaches endemicity
The virus is becoming immune-evasive
— Anthony J Leonardi, PhD, MS (@fitterhappierAJ) October 14, 2021
This makes our GM look like a ray of sunshine, because as you will see below, not the right metric:
The cost of endemicity: Over 50% of survivors reported sequelae 6m after recovery. The most common were mobility impairments, pulmonary abnormalities, and mental health disorders. “These occur on a scale that could overwhelm existing health care capacity.” https://t.co/GwHlrG9iPA
— Diego Bassani, PhD ?? ? ? (@DGBassani) October 13, 2021
From GM:
This is skewed — 80% of the sample were hospitalized. The number of infections is much higher. Disability ran 25-50% of infections for SARS-1, it’s 5-10 times less for SARS-2 (it seems to track proportionally to the IFR).
But then of course people will get reinfected (more on that in a separate message) so with endemic COVID is kind of the same. And the reduction from vaccines doesn’t make that much difference either given how many times we plan to roll that dice.
This study does, however, show the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of managing up to hospital capacity. One is lucky to come out of the hospital without damage. This is not the flu, for the 32543543th time. So if you are managing up to hospital capacity, you effectively sentence a huge number of people to death and several times that to disability.
But how many prominent experts and public health figures called it out for what it is? Basically none…
Newly Discovered Bat Viruses Give Hints to Covid’s Origins New York Times (David L)
WHO launches a new group to study the origins of the coronavirus NPR
How many people get ‘long COVID?’ More than half, researchers find Pennsylvania State University (Robert M)
‘I hope you die’: how the COVID pandemic unleashed attacks on scientists Nature (Dr. Kevin)
US
This is such an important exchange. CNN loves to herald itself as vital warriors against disinformation and lies, while vilifying independent voices like Joe Rogan as a plague on our discourse.
Yet here, Rogan all but forces Sanjay Gupta to admit CNN lied about him *on purpose*. https://t.co/mrfjyuPA0v
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 14, 2021
By happenstance, I was at a doctor’s office in the heart of Manhattan’s Upper East Side a few hours after Greenwald’s tweet went live, meaning the Rogan controversy had gotten traction.
I didn’t pay attention to which network it was, but I presumed MSNBC. If not, CNN.
I didn’t know the antecedent at the time, and the hosts may not even have mentioned the Gupta interview which clearly led to this attack, but they were dumping on Rogan. I was trying to work so and so trying to tune the show out, but it was impossible not to get the drift of the gist. Rogan was somehow a hypocrite about his own Covid case. Evil because recommending teens not get the vax. Even moar evil because transphobic and racist.
Parents Are Suing Schools for Throwing Their Kids in a ‘COVID Snakepit’ Vice (resilc)
How bad will Covid-19 cases and deaths get in winter 2021? Vox. No acknowledgment of surges in countries with high vax rates.
New York City judge STOPS Long Island father from visiting his three-year-old daughter in Manhattan unless he gets the shot or has weekly COVID-19 tests Daily Mail. Note that getting tested in Manhattan is not a hardship. I wasn’t even particularly looking for them and went by 2 testing centers, vans with little tents and seats. Fast, easy, and free. I’d get tested weekly for the hell of it, and yours truly is vaxxed.
Catholic Troops Can Refuse COVID Vaccine, Archbishop Declares Defense One
Biden plans to pick FDA veteran Robert Califf to lead the agency Politico (Kevin C)
China?
The Real Reasons Behind China’s Energy Crisis Foreign Policy
Microsoft to shut down LinkedIn website in China as internet censorship increases in the country CNBC (Kevin W)
Gobbling China’s exports, US sinks into dependency Asia Times
Brexit/UK
A hard look at the latest Brexit speech of Lord Frost David Allen Green (guurst)
Brexit: why does Northern Ireland matter so much? Social Europe (GM)
GPs warn face-to-face appointments plan could lead to exodus of doctors Guardian (Kevin W)
New Cold War
Russia draws a red line for US in Central Asia Asia Times (Kevin W)
RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 14 OCTOBER 2021 Russia Observer (Kevin W)
Konstantin Kilimnik, Russiagate’s Last Fall Guy, Speaks Out Matt Taibbi
Assange
Netflix To Launch WikiLeaks Smear Job Three Days Before Assange Court Date Caitlin Johnstone (Kevin W)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Has anyone written about America’s slowing temporality, its inability to imagine change of any kind—starting to become its defining trait!
— Quinn Slobodian (@zeithistoriker) October 9, 2021
Syraqistan
US Steps Up Rhetoric Against Iran, Weighing ‘All Options’ If Talks Fail Antiwar (resilc)
Pakistan’s spy agency gets shaken, but not stirred Asia Times
Blinken: US Policy Is to ‘Oppose the Reconstruction of Syria Antiwar
Trump
Trump Urges Republicans to Sit Out Coming Elections National Review (furzy)
Top conservative lawyers steer clear of Trump’s latest legal fight CNN
Biden
Biden’s Supreme Court commission ‘divided’ on adding justices but warns of ‘considerable’ risk USA Today. If you want to kill Democrats’ chance at the midterms, pushing for Supreme Court expansion is just the way to do it. One conservative friend argues that the point is not to get it done but to intimidate the current justices, arguing that Kavanaugh’s vote on Planned Parenthood was contrary to his form and the apparent result of pressure. Yours truly is of the view that judges aren’t easily intimidated. Readers?
White House banking on another McConnell retreat over the debt ceiling Politico
GOP rallies around Manchin, Sinema The Hill
Biden bets big on wind power ahead of climate summit The Hill
Leaked Border Patrol Docs Appear to Show Biden Admin Released 160,000 Illegal Immigrants Into US Sputnik (Kevin W)
Texas Abortion Restrictions Can Continue During Litigation, Appeals Court Rules Wall Street Journal
Supply Chain
U.S. supply chain too snarled for Biden Christmas fix, experts say Reuters (resilc). I was stunned that the Administration was so clueless as to try to wrestle with this tar baby. This is not a problem you want to own yet they are on their way to doing so.
Utilize knowledge of Indigenous people to prevent wildfires CalMatters (David L)
Update: Leader of California’s largest union resigns amid tax fraud, embezzlement charges Sacramento Bee (DSC). Same bunch that buried JJ Jelincic and Margaret Brown in the CalPERS board election.
Woke Watch
Hizzoner’s dishonor: Bill de Blasio buckles to the fringe New York Post (furzy)
FAA Fumbled Its Response To a Surge in GPS Jamming Spectrum IEE. Chuck L: “What could go wrong?”
John Deere–Backed Lobbying Groups Host Anti-Right to Repair Conference Vice (resilc)
BREAKING: Johnson & Johnson Puts Talc Spinoff Into Ch. 11 Health Law 360
Federal judge rejects a government bid to delay Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement NPR (Kevin C)
US heating bills will jump as much as 54% this winter, says government Guardian (Kevin W). The natives will not be happy.
Bitcoin Futures Volume & Open Interest CME Group. Furzy notes:
Total open interest in bitcoin futures, trading 7 months forward = 11,218
not very impressive….or liquid….for comparison, CME’s Dec corn contract alone has open interest of 620,483
…..but never let facts get in the way of a headline. Again from furzy: Bitcoin Fans Flock to the Futures Market Wall Street Journal
Class Warfare
When a Factory Relocates to Mexico, What Happens to Its American Workers? New York Times. Resilc: “They turn into Trump voters.”
Reich: US has an unofficial worker’s strike Guardian (vlade)
Antidote du jour. Bob H: “Betsy in the Maine woods on Sunday”:
And quite a bonus, from Chuck L:
When marine biologist Roger Hanlon caught this creature on camera, he said he screamed bloody murder. And no wonder. A superb visualization of how chromatophores allow an octopus to blend in with the backdrops [source, read more: https://t.co/Vp1Uxhq0He] pic.twitter.com/1bp6cWouSN
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 12, 2021
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
200 comments
Comments are closed.
I appreciate the more humane handling of Jeri-Lynn’s whatever this morning.
Agree and hope they’re OK
Yves and Lambert, giving any thought to contacting the local police to go to her residence and do a welfare check? Assuming her local police don’t have form for going in with guns drawn…
Sending good thoughts towards Jerri-Lynn this morning. I so hope she is OK!
Yes!
Hope all is good with Jerri-Lynn!
+1
+100!
I’m hoping she’s okay. My best vibes to JLS.
Working link for “American bumblebees disappeared from 8 states, face extinction” article at-
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/14/american-bumble-bees-disappeared-8-states-face-extinction/8448637002/
I seriously hope that all is well with Jerri. Going MIA like that may very well imply something medical which is a bit of a worry. She’s good people.
Fixed the link. Thanks!
I don’t think the bumblebee story is accurate. As a former beekeeper and someone who has kept an eye out for bumblebees for years, I can say with certainty that the American bumblebee is not extinct in Vermont. I saw some last summer. We planted sunflowers for the first time and it turns out bumblebees love them. I observed several different kinds of bumbles on the sunflowers, including the one claimed to be extinct in the article, which I think is the big yellow and black striped bumble. There was no picture with the article. Bumblebees are getting to be fewer and fewer though.
I live in Massachusetts and have been seeing a lot of bumblebees this year in the places where I bird-watch. (I have no way of knowing if the population numbers are decreasing, but I assume they are.)
Tomatoes are fertilized by bumblebees.
Bumblebees are critical pollinators in part because they emerge earlier in the season and fly at lower light levels than most bees. But it’s their unique method of “buzz pollination” that my tomato plants love: A female wraps herself around the flower’s reproductive structures, anchors herself with her jaws, and vibrates her wing muscles at a frequency that sounds like middle C to shake pollen from the flower’s anthers. Bumblebees’ musical pollination is the only effective method for fertilizing flowers like tomatoes, peppers, and cranberries. Since bumblebees discovered my kitchen garden, my yields of tomatoes have increased four-fold.
https://www.audubon.org/news/tomatoes-and-bumblebees
Hmm, “musical pollination? Middle C (C4) on the piano has a variable range of “acceptable” frequencies. One places it at 256 Hz, J.S. Bach’s even-tempered tuning placed it at 262 Hz. (The human ear can discern frequency difference of 1 Hz; not certain what plant flowers hear.)
Just hope Jeri-Lynn’s OK.
Ditto
>CNN Gupta Rogan Interview damage control
No matter how CNN tries to spin the interview that Greenwald commented on, if you go to YTube and look at the comments you’ll see people are not buying it. On their own channel there are ~20k thumbs down and ~6K thumbs up. I scrolled through comments and they are uniformly negative and call out CNN’s horrible selective editing.
The “Let’s go Brandon” meme might have been initiated by NBC, but it is just as applicable to CNN and other MSM that pushed Russiagate. These outlets have lost almost every bit of legitimacy outside a small insulated audience.
We are living in news environment similar to the Soviet Union just before it unraveled with respect to how Russians viewed Pravda. The vaccine mandates may be the catalyst for precipitating the unraveling of this country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYZTN5NkxmQ&ab_channel=CNN
Thanks for the link – helps for the downvote party.
CJ highlights 18 seconds from the Rogan/CNN interview: https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1448783912168091670
“The vaccine mandates may be the catalyst for precipitating the unraveling of this country.”
***********
Not only the mandates but the denial of prophylactics and treatments and the exploitation of Covid for profit by Public Health, Big Pharma and Global interests. Already one can see a serious political divide on this issue.
Bret Weinstein, in one of his podcasts, had this right: pay off the Grifters and Blackmailers before too much damage is done.
Sorry, but this means absolutely nothing. All it shows is that Joe Rogan fans came out of the woodwork to downvote the video. And I’m not saying they’re wrong to do so, but I’m saying this isn’t reflective of the CNN viewing hivemind having been breached.
The way the Sanders ‘revolution’ completely collapsed has thoroughly disabused me of any notion that online participation means much of anything. Upvotes and retweets and so on seldom translate into real-world pull. Even in its degraded state legacy media still has massive pull. Especially with old people who actually vote. Because, and again, sorry, but the youth mostly don’t vote. Of the ones that are politically active at all, many of them are too busy playing anarchist and setting dumpster fires and convincing themselves that not voting is some radical, effective political measure (it isn’t).
Italy Introduces Strict Covid Rules for Workers Amid Pushback
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-15/italian-protests-for-new-covid-rules-not-affecting-supply-chains?utm_source=google&utm_medium=bd&cmpId=google
Port workers in Trieste – the seventh-largest port in Europe for handling goods and the leading oil terminal in the Mediterranean – have announced a total block of operations starting Friday in protest against the national health pass mandate for all workers.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/trieste-port-workers-announce-total-block-of-operations/
If a meteor crash landed in my home, I’m pretty sure my first call is to Mulder or the Lone Gunmen. Sounds like a cover up or government conspiracy. Trust no one. \sarc
If you find one and it breaks open revealing a gelatinous mass – get out! Seriously. Don’t even try to examine it with a long stick as it never ends well-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OKa_CGMmhE (1:32 mins)
She is lucky that she lives in Canada and so can keep it. I believe that many Aussie States have laws on the books saying that meteorites belong to the Crown and are to be sent to a museum. Also, it is illegal to send meteorites overseas that have been found in Australia and doing so breaks Federal Law-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-15/lake-eyre-meteorite-crown-property/7091562
And a monetary tale of 2 meteorites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)
“After her startling experience, Hamilton handed over the meteorite to scientists to study….”
**********
“Honey, did you get a receipt for the meteorite?”
Maybe not Trust the behind-in-the-mortgage Scientist here. A good Meteorite Lawyer may be in order. Somewhat reminiscent of the lost gazillion lotto ticket in the municipal landfill.
If it’s oddly colored, run!:
https://youtu.be/TXyda5iiGEo
What struck me about the Rogan interview was how sweetly and gently, yet firmly, he kept the discussion focused on “Why did CNN lie”.
That makes the clip much more effective than if he were yelling or badgering (both of which would have been understandable under the circumstances).
Rogan can really be a great interviewer sometimes. There’s a reason he got so successful, it’s not for the sometimes crazy crap he talks about.
Largely agreed. Personally, I don’t find much crazy stuff, but he does tend to inject his own experiences into some interviews at excessive length. Far outweighing this, though, is his patience pursuing difficult subjects in a way that anyone can follow and his tendency to ask obvious questions. That sounds like faint praise, but it certainly isn’t. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been frustrated by journalists who fail to ask the obvious or refuse to follow up to any remotely satisfying degree on their own lines of inquiry. Rogan stands alone, or nearly so, in this regard, and it’s much appreciated.
He handled Bari “Babykiller” Weiss well, never lost his cool and she melted away…
“One conservative friend argues that the point is not to get it done but to intimidate the current justices, arguing that Kavanaugh’s vote on Planned Parenthood was contrary to his form and the apparent result of pressure.”
The right-wing Supreme Court of the 1930s cut FDR far, far more slack after his failed attempt to pack the court.
That was before the Powell Memorandum and Big Business getting its act so thoroughly together. Kind of aligned in time with the failure of Prescott Bush and his gang to pull off the “Business Plot” to depose Roosevelt…
How many armies does the SC command? But they provide the legitimacy that lets the Armies of the Night do all the stuff they have done and continue to do.
It was a different country back then.
As with most issues that mean life or death to “our democracy” or to the actual demos, establishment Democrats apparently have neither the will nor the skills to put pressure even on themselves. They can’t even put together a commission to examine real issues.
Meanwhile:
Of course on that last point, the Democrats also have a few “donor interests” that aren’t incompatible with those of the right-wingers on the court, so there’s that.
What irks me out the “vaccine-pushers” is that they completely neglect side-effects of the vaccine, as well as the reduction of chance of infection/severe disease from improving your general health (vitamin D and more). We’re not getting out of this mess with just vaccines, we need a much broader approach:
– Ventilation
– Improving general health
– Early treatment
– Vaccines
The vaccines haven’t “fixed” our Covid-19 problem so far, and it’s time to stop that insanely narrow focus. And the current hard or soft vaccine mandates are incredibly damaging in a variety of ways.
>The vaccines haven’t “fixed” our Covid-19 problem so far
They fixed the only ones that matter: getting the peons back to work, their brats back in school, their economies open again, and put any question of shut down or quarantine into the grave.
Not all vaccine-pushers ignore the undesireable effects of the vaccines. Anthony Leonardi, whose tweetstorm is featured above is a good example.
Leonardi should be better known. He formulates a cogent and damning critique of the nominal establishment policy and its Roganesque ‘Just eat yer ‘mectin and catch the damn bug.’ faux alternative.
I haven’t seen his other tweets, but seems to me like he too thinks vaccination is the only way out. Heck, his suggestion is worse than that, he’s saying the whole world needs to be vaccinated at roughly the same time every couple of months, years or so. That might not be easy to do.
Context: He’s of the opinon that we’ve made the virus worse, and he’s explaining how dire the situation we’ve gotten ourselves into actualy is.
Anthony Who?
Looked up AL’s Twitter, and found this gem:
What doesn’t kill you, mutates and tries again!
Dark subject, dark (gallows) humor.
Yeah, what doesn’t kill you gets stronger.
What doesn’t kill you leaves you broken and bloody in the middle of the road (I rode motorcycles for 50+ years).
I once somehow recovered after going airborne while rounding a gravel-strewn downhill curve too fast.
My last thoughts would have been that I couldn’t believe my last thoughts were going to be about what a jackass I am. I feel this made me stronger, though I’m not sure it’s what Nietzsche had in mind.
Actually, Nietzsche had meant it semi-mockingly, IIRC the full quote is something like “The Teutonic warrior’s creed: that which does not kill me makes me stronger”
“… it’s time to stop that insanely narrow focus.”
It’s not only irksome, it’s plain damn suspicious.
Given the severity of the “pandemic,” as judged by the draconian societal damage perpetrated in the name of “controlling” it, you would expect enthusiastic pursuit of absolutely ANY drug or treatment with even a whisper of the possibility of positive effect. Instead you get derangement and distortion on anything that’s NOT the “vaccine” like, of course, Ivermectin.
But forget Ivermectin for a minute and consider molnupiravir. Whatever else it is, its purported effects are similar to those of Ivermectin. After initial euphoria, undoubtedly due to its patent and profit potentials and multi-billion dollar government commitment, its utility has been downplayed as no substitute for a leaky “vaccine” with rapidly waning “effectiveness” and absolutely no long term side effects data, which has historically been an ultra-important factor in evaluating such drugs for use in humans.
From a “public health” perspective, the obsession with the “vaccine,” and only the “vaccine” makes no sense. The dismissal of natural immunity makes no sense. And as the coercion ratchets up with threats of job and benefit losses and general societal excommunication for refuseniks, my suspicion grows exponentially. Sorry, not sorry.
In The Netherlands the pro-vaccine propaganda is really getting insane. Our hell minister is shamelessly putting away people that are not vaccinated as “taking up beds for other people” in hospital, he “cannot understand why you wouldn’t get the jab” and more.
Add to that, a recent “synchronized offensive” in the mainstream media, and the ridiculous goal of 90+% vaccinated; moving the goalposts part xx. And hardly anyone in the main stream media is pushing back against this.
Whinge all you want, the facts are are unchanged. Hospitalized cases are 90% unvaccinated. Simple enough to move from that perspective to one where vaccinating more people reduces a drain on hospital resources.
People are selfish. The numbers of adverse reactions are minuscule. So instead of focusing on my rights to spread it, focus on being a good citizen and cooperating for the common good and get the jab!
Sure, when my wife got her vaccine I briefly thought this could be goodbye to my best friend of 43 years, but I didn’t dwell on it. Ditto her for me (she may have been hoping to get rid of me for all I know). Didn’t happen with me, either.
Why not? Because these are really slim odds when you look at data for adverse reactions. What? Think you’re going to live forever? Find something else to fret about.
Your factoid is incorrect. The folks trying to pass this one off are counting total cases from early 2021 if not sooner, when just about no one was vaccinated.
MDs in the Southwest (TX and neighboring states, the very large mafia trained at a Texas med school who regularly have big Zoom meetings) say it’s running 60% vaxxed/40% unvaxxed. IM Doc says in his 80% vaxxed county, it’s 80% vaxxed to 20% unvaxxed, so proportional to vax levels. That is what we saw out of Israel in July, BTW.
IM Doc does say the very sickest are unvaxxed and is generally the experience of the big mafia.
“The dismissal of natural immunity makes no sense.”
Yes it does, I can assert with completely rational confidence that you should dismiss whatever hopes you’re cherishing for the benefits of natural immunity – unless you happen to really be into draconian lockdowns, and I mean real lockdowns, not this pissant stuff we’ve had so far.
I was watching for signs of developing herd immunity starting mid 2020. Nada, from then till now, nada. In fact worse than nada – outbreak severity doesn’t appear to diminish where prevalence has been high, if anything it gets worse. The only sensible conclusion is that we should dismiss natural immunity.
Agreed. And that is why the strategy of some countries like the UK to go with ‘herd immunity’ was just insane. It may be that this idea was simply the easiest and cheapest way to deal with this virus which is why they chose it. Or so they thought it would be.
Having dipped into the House of Commons report on the early UK response to the virus, my impression is that very little thinking was done by anyone in the UK decision making apparatus. The sheer, overwhelming incompetence of everybody involved in the decision making is astonishing. Politicians, political advisers, scientific experts, civil servants – it seems none of them had a clue what they were doing.
You should never advocate for “natural immunity”. Covid is if anything worse in its morbidity risks than death risk: long Covid plus good odds of impaired brain, heart, lung and/or renal function.
I’m not “advocating” for anything.
I am simply saying that “natural immunity” should not be dismissed out of hand. At least one “expert” agrees:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/15/natural-immunity-vaccine-mandate/
I don’t understand why this is controversial or continues to be disputed, which was the point I attempted to make in my original comment.
While natural immunity gained from exposure to Covid is a good thing, avoiding one of the vaccines is not. Proceeding through a Covid infection can be extremely debilitating, if not deadly. Anything that intentionally reduces the stress on the healthcare system (vaccine) is good for everyone.
This is the part that I still have trouble accepting. The vaccines are non sterilizing. Also, what about asymptomatic people? There’s studies out there that show that the majority of people who got Covid were asymptomatic.
Also vaccines may protect against the current variants, so what happens when a new variant were to enter the fold? Competition between big pharmas and the existence of the emergency authorization (no lawsuits allowed) will eventually make sure that one of them will make a big mistake and introduce a vaccine with really severe long term side effects. No way it’s going to happen? Then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
“While natural immunity gained from exposure to Covid is a good thing,…”
Unfortunately this may not always be true (see Dengue fever and feline enteric coronavirus) Time will tell. But damage to and depletion of the immune system subsequent to infection is well documented. So what we can say is “Infection with SARS-CoV-2 is a bad thing.”
Yes, I agree. I was referring to the people that gain immunity from surviving their bout of Covid. My second sentence suggests that bout doesn’t always turn out well.
I’ve never thought the vaccine would be sterilizing. It was intended to reduce morbidity and serious illness while teaching your immune system to recognize the virus and respond appropriately. I use all manner of prophylactic measures to keep the virus away, as well.
I have no interest in gaining “natural immunity” through a battle with Covid.
Wash your mouth out. Natural immunity is NOT a good thing. It is never a good idea to get Covid.
See my comment above– 5:59pm. If, in fact, natural immunity occurs through an encounter with Covid consider yourself lucky.
“Natural” immunity has all of the Madison Avenue goodness of playing off positive associations of “natural”. It’s just herd immunity in new bottles.
This is massive disinformation and a violation of site Policies (agnotology, aka Making Shit Up). Covid often, even frequently produces, EVEN IN ASYMPTOMATIC cases:
And this high risk of damage comes with immunity that is not lasting. No coronavirus infection has ever produced durable immunity.
You need to drop it.
“I don’t understand why this is controversial or continues to be disputed,.. ”
The article you quote is by this guy:
https://www.newsweek.com/john-hopkins-doctor-thinks-covid-will-largely-gone-april-half-us-has-herd-immunity-1570615
is it not?
Marty Makary’s assertions regarding Covid have often been absurdly, flagrantly ridiculous.
In February there was “reason to think” the country was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection”.
“At the current trajectory, I expect COVID will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.” Quoth he.
You appear to have been taken in. It happens to everyone sooner or later in life. Please direct your righteous wrath at the appropriate targets.
Because treating “natural immunity” as desirable is exactly the same argument with different words as the “herd immunity”‘ approach, which is tantamount to prioritizing business over people. Getting Covid is a terrible idea, period, particularly since as GM keeps stressing, this is not a one-shot game. Most people are faced with the very realistic prospect of getting Covid repeatedly even if they get Covid OR keep up with their vaccinations.
The UK large scale repeated population surveys found that with wild type Covid (and before vaccinations were available), immunity looked to last only 6 to 8 months, based on antibody levels. Due to being on a plane, I have not read the study referenced by the Post. But pretty much all claims of “long term immunity”‘ with respect to Covid are bollocks. They rely on T cells and memory B cells. Those are backup defenses. Those mechanisms do not kick in until an infection is already underway in your system. Delta progresses rapidly, faster than wild type, with median time from exposure to symptom onset at 4 days. Anyone who goes a sufficiently high exposure is at risk of sufferering cytokine storm before memory B cells and T cells kick in.
On top of that, you make all the T cells you ever will have in you childhood. Using them much to fight Covid makes you vulnerable to future Covid and other infections.
As Ignacio explains, those cells do play a role but not in preventing infection but in mitigating the severity of the disease:
…advocate for “natural immunity”?
–Impaired brain? Check.
–Impaired heart? Check.
–Impaired lung function? Likely already breathless from shouting…
–Impaired renal function? (Full of hot pi–?)
Was just on the phone with a friend who’s had Covid twice. After the last bout, he said he feels like he got a “new brain,” and not in a good way. Specifically, he can no longer handle loud noises (a problem as he lives in an dense urban area).
And for more bad news see TWiV 815: MIS-C with Moshe Arditi and Ivet Bahar.
From what I infer from a discussion involving a lot of molecular microbiology well above my pay grade, MIS-C displays symptoms akin to toxic shock syndrome, indicating that the Covid virus, displays super antigenic traits that trigger cytokine storms, and with repeated exposures causes autoimmune disorders.
As I understand it, the vaccine induces immunity by exposing the immune system to a piece of the virus, the spike protein. Natural immunity is acquired when the immune system is exposed to the entire virus, including the spike protein. Therefore, assuming that a patient recovered completely from the first infection, natural immunity should be at least as good as vaccine immunity. Is there a fault in my logic?
OTOH, if the argument is that being infected with covid for the first time without the benefit of vaccine immunity can cause great harm, that is a different and very easily understood point.
Yet if the latter, then the potential problem of increasingly severe waves of reinfections remains even for fully vaccinated populations, since vaccine immunity doesn’t stop covid completely as we all know by now.
I responded to Grumpy Engineer on this topic recently. Short version: This doesn’t hold true because:
1) the virus gets a vote, and can screw with your immune system
2) your immune system can make mistakes
3) a lot of our immune systems will make very similar mistakes, and the virus can exploit that
There’s vaccines as in diphtheria, measles, smallpox, polio etc., and then there’s these corporate-owned small-target “intellectual property” syrups that are barely neutralizing and in no way sterilizing and will never result in extirpation of CV. Do I misremember that FDA and CDC have had to re-define what constitutes a vaccine? Alongside ignoring the language of the relevant statutes in granting “emergency use authorization,” morphing with little additional Level III evidence or public input into full on approval of these jabs?
My wife and I, over 65 with health issues, got two jabs of Moderna, with side effects, and now are told we need another dose to do what? Kick the effing can down the road until the next (expensive and grossly profitable) “booster” is needed? Turned the whole fricking population into jab junkies, enforced by the PMC and wholly-owned government agencies?
And is there any possibility (likely to come from some place like Cuba or maybe Russia) of an actual sterilizing actual vaccine?
And what about the overall plan differs from the Opium Wars run against China by Britain and more recently by the Sacklers against Americans -?
I’m not sure but I believe that no sterilizing immunity vaccine has ever been made for a coronavirus.
At least, the cesspit that Google now is hasn’t shown me any evidence of such.
General overview: https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-few-vaccines-prevent-infection-heres-why-thats-not-a-problem-152204
The Blob Strikes Back. That stalwart champion of “official” narratives, The Atlantic, casts doubt on the very idea of a “sterilizing immunity” vaccine.
Hmmm…: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/sterilizing-immunity-myth-covid-19-vaccines/620023/
It’s very clarifying to see that almost no promotion of ‘community’ based medicine, absent the curiously weak vaccines themselves, is going on at the “Official” level.
It seems that, absent a technological breakthrough, durable herd immunity is likely only a realistic goal for a rather narrow range of viruses:
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1009509
Indigenous approach to forestry–
Wuk has been commending this approach to us for some time. It’s great that the idea is gaining momentum.
Here’s an example of an indigenous group in Colombia reconnecting with their roots and becoming another resource as we look to replace cleverness and acquisitiveness with harmony and wisdom in our relationship with Nature. Excerpt:
> supply chain
I didn’t really understand the supply chain issue until I stumbled on this reddit thread. . As far as reddit threads go, this one seems legit given the details put forth by the users. The supply chain issue is impacting small business and domestic manufacturing in a way that is not yet showing up in either “main street” or “wall street”. My guess is that both private and public small cap enterprises are starting to feel the pinch. Given that there seems no end to the supply chain snafu, or that China’s factories are simply not running, I don’t see how this will get better before some these businesses go under. My sister in laws ex-husband runs a chain of successful paint stores, I wonder how things are going for him….
My small biz has seen supply issues since the beginning of the pandemic. One of the things we sell is 100% cotton fabric. It’s all coming from overseas. After the reopen, supply was limited. What we call a basic, something that would never be out of stock, was and we ran out. So we over ordered so we would have it in house. By Jan 2021, we had our stock of the basics. The lingering effect is shipping of all stock is always at least a month out, often a minimum of 6 weeks. Used to be all was shipped in a week.
We have fabric dyed for us by an individual in the USA. Last fall she had issues getting some of the dyes. As of last week, she was operating normally.
We also use a large amount of a special paper that has been out of stock for 6 months. Don’t know when that will be back. We found a substitute, so it didn’t affect sales.
Stock of other goods we order has changed. Lots of “out of stock,” with no idea of when they will be back in stock.
It’s been a learning experience, but nothing like what happened with the financial crisis in 2008. That took out our customers which was a far bigger problem.
This link comes from an admittedly “Let’s go, Brandon” site. But the fact that I have seen no mention of this situation in the “legacy media” suggests to me that there may be a kernel of truth to it.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/14/the-california-version-of-the-green-new-deal-and-an-october-16-2020-epa-settlement-with-transportation-is-whats-creating-the-container-shipping-backlog-working-ca-ports-24-7-will-not-help-here/#more-218447
Don’t kill me. I’m just the messenger.
No killing, just an acknowledgement that the state government is seriously incompetent. Pollution and climate change are serious problems, but negotiating a temporary change in the rules is apparently beyond the state abilities.
if you give them an inch they will take a yard. Relaxing emission standards temporarily will not work as there will be shrill cries to relax them permanently. Perhaps we should all start buying less “stuff” and thereby reduce imports and the need for additional trucks to move them.
It’s been my experience that environmental rules governing emissions from any source do not simply drop from the sky like bird poop. There are typically long periods of back and forth negotiations followed by draft rules and comments and eventually followed by a final rule and long post-statute implementation period. If stakeholders are unaware of deadlines it’s usually because of willful ignorance or poverty. A temporary suspension of the rule undermines everyone who is trying to do the right thing by way of improving air quality.
My best guess is that the port truckers who schlep containers around locally are driving crappy old diesels that do not meet the new standards. All they can afford is the crappy old diesels that should be on the scrap heap. This is Amerika, land of the you’re-on-your-own. Compounded by this is California where a port trucker gig worker ain’t worth a pound of seaweed.
I’ve mentioned the issue with Diesel Exhaust Fluid sensors on big rigs, and how a $300 part is suddenly only available for $4,000, because of ongoing chip shortage issues.
Looks like they’re coming up with an override…
Software overrides for diesel exhaust fluid sensors that are in perilously short supply are making their way from truck manufacturers to repair shops, helping keep equipment on the road and prevent engine shutdowns that can leave a truck stranded when the sensors fail.
In recent weeks, DEF sensor failures have left thousands of trucks parked, with a scarcity of replacement sensors leaving carriers scrambling for solutions. For some, that meant swapping sensors from trucks that were being retired into trucks that were sitting idle with failed sensors.
There are signs that the arrival of software codes is helping to ease the situation.
“I have talked to a number of my dealers. They do have the codes and are starting to bring the trucks in to get the code change so they don’t de-rate with the bad sensors,” said Paul Enos, president of the Nevada Trucking Association. “But it’s really ugly right now. I think the truck dealers are having a difficult time with how many trucks they have coming in.”
Rules are rules. The state government should not change them because of this. They are not incompetent. Most people watched as our products and jobs were off shored. Now the chickens are coming home to roost!
I have a lot of friends who run or work at small businesses, from print shops, to book stores, to bars, to coffee shops. They’ve all shared stories with me of not being able to get various stuff. Sometimes it’s longer turnaround or smaller quantities. Others it’s just plain they don’t know when it will show up, if it will show up. And the shortages are all over the map as far as what they are.
Rack of lamb at Costco now $15.99. $12.99 in August, $11.99 in July, and (IIRC) $7.99 pre-covid.
I didn’t buy any.
But gov says inflation only 5% and change.
Why are you buying baby sheeps to eat – have you thought about it? And at Costco? Jeebus.
Sheep get better treatment than CAFO chicken, cattle and swine…
Local hardware store sold out of a lot of camping cookware and the kid said they are having trouble restocking.
Extreme shortage of Common Sense in my jurisdiction and getting worse day by day, broadcast by broadcast, press conference by press conference……..
You can sense that the supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link, of which there are so many now.
We made everything so distantly complex, and are now paying the price, or should I say we’re not even able to pay the price as so much is simply not available.
But, but, congress members and Dr Fauci have a lot of their personal money invested in these vaccines. When ever the stock price drops, they double down. Lol
I hope they lose their shirts.
sending good vibes to jerri lynn
Seconded.
And from here.
Here as well, and to Yves.
“Catholic Troops Can Refuse COVID Vaccine, Archbishop Declares”
When asked for a comment on how the US military will deal with conscientious Catholic vaccine objectors, the Pentagon asked ‘And how many divisions does the Pope have?’
this article was the first time i learned that the US military has its own archbishop.
I didn’t know it was an archbishop unless he’s presiding over the specific US military bishop among other jobs, but any organizational job outside of Holy Orders gets a bishop, even if they don’t wear the accompanying regalia or have priests to oversee.
Now you know why all of our wars are just.
Your Reverendness Kev: It is hard to believe that members of an organization with a main goal of killing people are suddenly having all kinds of convenient scruples.
And there’s this from the article:
“No one should be forced to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience,” said Archbishop for the Military Services Timothy P. Broglio, in a statement released Tuesday.
Sheesh. If any of them had a conscience, they wouldn’t be in the imperial military, now would they?
Oh c’mon. A lot of them are poor kids without other options. And if they do kill under orders during one of our wars the Catholic church has no problem with that. Remember “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition?”
If anyone should search their conscience it should be the Congress and the American people who go along with these acts of aggression falsely depicted as defensive.
I will c’mon and say that the rationalization for kids volunteering for the military because they “are poor kids without other options ” is an old trope and not relevant at this time. If it was a draft of poor kids and other unfortunate sons, then there is logic to that reason. No one has to join a volunteer institution. There is no secret that killing other people under orders is intrinsic to its “mission”. With the ubiquitous information via current communications in the world, not a single kid could honestly claim that they did not know this. If they buy into BS that it is to defend the fatherland, then they are either blind to reality or rationalize their “duty” .I personally know kids who would rather work at low wage jobs then join the imperial military. Conscience is within individuals, as well as with Congress and the people. Reminds me of the saying, What if they had a war and nobody came? It matters not if a particular church, Catholic, or any other religious authority sanctions killing in the military. Ultimately, it is individual conscience that is the choice.
By your logic there’s no such thing as legitimate military service. You are condemning people for refusing to make the “correct” moral judgments that society itself refuses to make. This form of moral judging isn’t all that different from the rationalizations employed by the military itself where the “bad guys” always have it coming.
Off course you are entitled to your opinion. The way the military is in operation now, then, yes there is no “legitimate military service”. It’s a racket for the MIC. It there really was a military that was only for defense or to promote peace in the world, then that is different. I am not judging anyone or condemning anyone. I am stating my opinion. To conflate my “moral judging ” with the military’s rationalism is disingenuous and fallacious. Perhaps projecting your judgement on my opinions is something for you to contemplate.
I believe there was once someone named Smedley Butler who said war was always “a racket.” And yet most people would agree that fighting WW2 was the right decision.
At any rate I’m not sure what any of this has to do with Covid other than the implication that those recruits deserve to be forced due to their bad moral choice. Biden has even insisted that they be given a dishonorable discharge that will follow them through life if they disobey him. If this were a true vaccine that does indeed prevent Covid then he might have a point. But it isn’t that and therefore he is punishing them (and people in lots of other jobs) for disobeying him (or, if you will, disagreeing with him).
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth but I do think there’s far too much “judging” going on these days and that all of us, including me, should do a better job of seeing other people’s point of view rather than dividing up into tribes. And that’s why I’m defending these young soldiers who were at age 19 or 20 convinced to join the military. How many things have any of us done at that age that we “should have known better.”
Well said! If people worried about these kids with no options they should’ve pitched in help. All this false alibing make me sick. There is no reason for the army to lure the kids into a killing job by offering incentive such as paying for college (which they may never get to attend).
Tim Broglio? It would be more fitting if his name was Mark, that is M. Broglio.
It’s the military. STFU and follow your orders or they fire you. Somehow I don’t think they just allow people to refuse the plethora of other shots the military gives out.
GM mentions that disability seems proportional to IFR. This is my impression as well, and in fact is the main reason I’m starting to think Covid-related disability is probably already significantly affecting the U.S. economy.
I think the default expectation would be for the coefficient to rise with reinfection.
The cynic in me now expects the “official” zeitgeist to shift to; “They had it coming. Leave them to their fate while we forge ahead to a New Shining Lower Population Earth!”
I’m pretty sure some U.K. politicians have already been caught out saying pretty much exactly that.
And one info-op theme from the greater Great Barrington nexus of Coviphilia is that the vaccines represent an attempt at depopulation. At this point I take it for granted that any heinous intent this particular bunch of defenders of liberty attributes to others represents their own actual hearts’ desires.
Right now this seems to be largely white racist dogwhistling, but white racist tropes adapt to idpol utilization pretty readily.
Yes, and as I learned many years ago, there are many more forms of “racism” than just “white.”
Tribalism is an universal Terran human attribute.
I’m beginning to wonder whether the ‘accumulation’ of “Long Covid” effects is the major malign outcome of the coronavirus-19. Ie. the more times one ‘catches’ the coronavirus, the shorter your eventual lifespan becomes.
Jackpot Lite.
I’ve no doubt that is what lies behind “herd” immunity. Especially given that the common people are the herd to be culled.
Could someone explain to a lay person what IFR stands for?
Infection Fatality Rate I think.
And all the best to JL, hopefully its just a comms outage.
Infection Fatality Rate
Instrument Flying Rules, when you can no longer trust your lyin’ eyes to those Visual Flying Rules, like on television. Believe the experts and their instruments, just because. They will tell you what
you needThey need you to know about infections, too. /sYou sure you want to go with “Don’t trust the guy with the IFR rating.” as your analogy?
In pilot training I learned it stood for ‘I follow roads’. Wishing JLS the best.
Dr. Campbell video on “Mass loss of trust” mentions in passing that it is being reported in Russia, where anti-vaccine sentiment is even greater than in the U.S., that the period between initial infection and the development of serious symptoms, which has been typically about a week, is now only 3 to 4 days. Not sure what that portends but I would assume it is nothing good.
Damn right about loss of trust. I trust my doctor but I no longer have any trust in the medical authorities in Oz whatsoever. That has been irrevocably been broken. And my long earned mistrust in the media here has now gone over into just sheer disgust territory.
I found GM’s opinion so insightful that I wanted to add it to my bookmarks, along with the original JAMA article, but since it wasn’t a BTL comment, it didn’t have its own URL.
Enter one of my favourite internet tools: Rob Bescizza’s ‘txt.fyi’
https://txt.fyi/-/21287/f9415534/
This provides a one-shot process for anyone to turn a bunch of text into a web page. It’s bare bones – no styling, no spellcheck, and no second thoughts editing once you hit “publish”, but there it is.
Sending good thoughts to Jerri-Lyn! I hope she is okay!
Re Joe Rogan incident: I mentioned it to my mother, and she went ballistic about what a bad guy Rogan is, that she doesn’t need him and she can make her own decisions, etc. It was like touching the 3rd rail-automatic reaction. She’s 74 and totally brainwashed by NBC, CNN, Maddow, etc. I, on the other hand, am glad Rogan nailed Gupta. About time they get called out and cornered-I don’t care who does it as long as it gets done.
I’m listening to the entire podcast right now. A very nuanced discussion. Highly recommended.
Most people who watch CNN all day react to common sense views that way. Peopaganda repeated 24×7. Gupta took the easy way out rather than working as a doc. He’s joke.
Not a happy start to the day, if not already done I hope someone has contacted the local law enforcement agency and asked them to do a welfare check on Jerri-Lynn.
It’s a routine job for LEO, a sheriff’s deputy came out to check on my landlord at his Dr’s request a week or so ago.
And that mess is getting worse, the LL took off for Florida last Thursday without dealing with the flooded cess pit which is on the verge of collapse.
It reeks of raw sewage.
He’s suffering from senile dementia and while I managed to reach his only son and the family lawyer neither is able or willing to deal with the situation.
I did get through to legal aid yesterday after 22 days,, after 20 days I got the first name of the Attorney handling my case and an assurance he would call me day 21.
Day 22 after not getting a call I found the Attorneys direct # on line and called him.
He was badly flustered by the call, talked at me rather than to me and after 10 unnecessary minutes told me that all he could do is help me write a firmly worded letter to my LL, who is again, suffering from dementia.
That Attorney passed the Bar in March 2021.
I forgot to mention the bad case of pinkeye…and yes he drove.
So it’s a PI lawyer next and a call to code enforcement because we are about to have enough rain that the runoff will contaminate a seasonal creek and then the Russian River.
I contacted emergency housing, due to my health issues they have nothing suitable, so it looks like I’ll be sleeping in my .pickup truck for a while.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, if a $500 per day fine from the County doesn’t get someone’s attention a six figure lawsuit probably will.
I’ve known my LL for a decade and rented from him for 5 years, after trying everything I could think of to deal with this mess for months I don’t have an alternative way to deal with a sick old man with dementia.
Shit,
Aw Tom, I’m really sorry. I was thinking of you this morning and wondering what the latest was. I have a 3-man tent I’d be happy to send you if you’d like.
Thanks, petal, I have a tent.
I will have a safe place to park and sleep, it’s a contractor’s yard with a locked gate.
I have a camp stove and showers are available through social services, I’ll get by.
Not comfortably, I haven’t fully recovered fro my last cardiac incident and the stress is bad enough that I puked up my first cup of tea this morning.
There simply isn’t a way to deal with this situation in a civilized manner given our systems, which sucks.
>I hope someone has contacted the local law enforcement agency and asked them to do a welfare check on Jerri-Lynn.
There isn’t a single situation that can possibly be improved by adding cops to it.
In this context, that is an asinine thing to say.
I disagree. When a coworker was not showing up for work and not coming to his front door a shop steward and I went to the local police and accompanied them for a welfare check. Fortunately it turned out that the man had had a mental health episode and was hiding in his house. We were able to get in touch with his family and get help for him. We also were able to work with a very good manager who, since the coworker could no longer work on safety sensitive tasks, found an accommodation doing non-safety sensitive work which he excelled at.
The police were happy that all went well and having two familiar faces with the police maybe helped keep everything calm too.
You have that dead wrong. Cops do welfare checks all the time, very often for relatives of old people who quit answering the phone.
That is exactly why every police department of small city size and larger needs a dedicated crew to respond to those sitches.
I had to call the police on a drunk girl who would not stop pounding on my front door, and I had a 3 year old in the house and it was 3 a.m. In retrospect I might not call the cops again. Try to talk her out of it. Smoke a bowl.
My mom put out an APB on me in the 1980’s, i’d kind of disappeared and hadn’t made contact in awhile with my family and they were concerned. Things moved like molasses back in the stone age though, and before the coppers could contact me, I showed up back home, mystery solved.
I hope Jerri-Lynn is only experiencing computer difficulties and nothing more.
I know someone who could have died on the floor of their apartment if not for a wellness check. Yes they spent quite a while in the hospital, but are back home and alive now.
Unless a family and friends system has been set up, with keys, it may be the only means to get to a person who has had an accident or incapacitating medical event.
Anecdotal here – but my wife requested a welfare check when we could not reach her sister, and potentially saved her from an abusive (now ex-) husband on a rampage.
This is exactly what -Defund the Police- should be about. There is no reason armed police officers should be used for welfare checks (which is an important and needed service). This should be done more effectively and cheaply using social workers. This needs to be explained to the general population and not allow right-wingers to straw-man progressive positions.
Hoping everything is OK with Jerri-Lynn
Most important at this point: Jerri-Lynn’s welfare.
Jerri-Lynn, wherever and however you are, we are rooting for you!
Of much less importance at this moment, but I think it still needs to be said: Defund the Police is probably the worst slogan the American left has ever come up with.
Finally, just want to throw this out there: might it actually be beneficial to both the population AND police officers for the latter to have some humanitarian responsibilities (such as welfare checks) to perform? Do we really want police officers that are only enforcers, and not ALSO peace officers truly dedicated to the well-being of the communities that they serve?
Grateful to you Carla for saying it: Jerri-Lynn, we are rooting for you! I finally thought of Command F to see if Yves or Lambert had shared news. On the other point, in the late ’60’s here in VT, there were “Overseers of the Poor”– a position in Town government. I interviewed one back then; he said his service was to keep an eye out for the welfare of the town’s poor and if they needed something to bring it to them. What happened to that?
Yes, that was a traditional office in small New England towns that have the Open Town Meeting form of government. Used to see Overseers of the Poor all the time during my doctoral research on 18th c. Town Meetings.
Don’t know what happened to them, unfortunately.
One of my Tucson mentors was found dead in her house. Police did a welfare check and made the discovery.
Hoping for a much better outcome for Jerri-Lynn.
I am so so sorry you have to deal with this on top of big time health issues. Hope you get a break. You deserve one.
>Newly Discovered Bat Viruses Give Hints to Covid’s Origins New York Times (David L)
The findings also have significant implications for the charged debate over Covid’s origins, experts say. Some people have speculated that SARS-CoV-2’s impressive ability to infect human cells could not have evolved through a natural spillover from an animal. But the new findings seem to suggest otherwise.
“That really puts to bed any notion that this virus had to have been concocted, or somehow manipulated in a lab, to be so good at infecting humans,” said Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona virologist who was not involved in the work.
I suppose it is possible that the origins of the virus was “natural”, but probable? Which way you lean on this I’m finding is really on who you trust and what sources you’re reading. I just find the timing of this article somewhat suspect in view of the new investigation into the origins that the WHO is putting together.
>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses-lab-leak.html
No serious person raising concerns over the activities of WIV has ever asserted a natural origin was impossible. Nor does a natural origin rule out a lab leak.
On the other hand, if the virus could be proved to be of natural origin then WIV’s surveillance and collection activities were grossly insecure, and extremely ill-advised.
There was a Science-sponsored discussion between Linfa Wang, Michael Worobey, Jesse Bloom and Alina Chan about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic a couple of weeks ago. Well worth watching if you’re interested in the topic – and none of them thought it was definitely entirely natural or definitely from or via a lab.
https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-leak-and-natural-origin-proponents-face-civilly-forum-pandemic-origins (1 hour)
Is that the occasion where, I think it was Linfa Wang, said the furin cleavage site insertion was Ralph Baric’s suggestion?
Ever since early days I’ve been telling people that the fact it was first noticed in Wuhan doesn’t mean it didn’t come from say, Chapel Hill for instance. But yikes!
Linfa Wang says, 50:51, the Laos bat viruses have something not far off SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site.
I have wondered why the distinctly illogical arguments that the Covid virus origin is entirely natural or “manipulated in a lab”. An example of either- or thinking that is not “scientific” reasoning . It is possible the virus was an original natural virus that was being “studied and manipulated ” in a lab.
That’s exactly why I say ‘from or via a lab’, and so far as I remember, the participants in the video say something equivalent. It’s possible it was being studied and manipulated; it’s also possible it was being studied but not manipulated, or that animals were being investigated but nothing was found. There are a lot of distinctly illogical arguments around COVID!
There is no proof yet, either way, and won’t be for a very long time – if ever.
Bitcoin futures for “financial settlement”, as opposed to physical settlement (albeit central clearing exchange definitions of physical settlement in other commodities strain the definition of physical), further highlight the lack of utility in Bitcoin and other non-sovereign backed cryptos.
Despite what crypto evangelist may believe about the nature of money, and the dirtiest word in their lexicon: fiat; non-sovereign cryptos are simply speculative derivatives of fiat. Fiat on fiat!
This is not to say it’s not a good trade. The ability to leverage into bitcoin returns via an exchange traded cash settled future already increased demand and the dollar denominated value of bitcoin; as with all financial assets it should go up so long as the Fed keeps rates at zero in the face of “transitory inflation”.
But the thing to keep at the back of your mind is this: if bitcoin where to explode in dollar denominated value, let’s say to $1 million per; then you would be left with a worthless bitcoin and a worthless million bucks.
“Parents Are Suing Schools for Throwing Their Kids in a ‘COVID Snakepit’”
Those parents are right to take that action but perhaps more so than they think. It is obvious by now that this virus is endemic to the population so for everybody, it is no longer a matter of if you will get it but when. Actually, it is worse than that. You won’t just get it once and be done with but that you can expect to get it multiple times over the years. And I am just talking about the present Delta strain of this virus and won’t go into what may be the dominant strain by this time next year. A link today talks about how the virus is becoming immune-evasive. So what does that mean for these schoolkids?
It is this. Our society is going to have to invest the resources to modify those school buildings so that they have proper ventilation, that each class-room will have an air-filter, that mask-wearing will be generalized, etc. to take in account the fact that this virus is here for good now. A few months ago I was commenting that vaccines were being pushed so that our societies would not have to rework our infrastructure with things like ventilation in mind. Well, we have the vaccines OK but because they are non-sterilizing, they still led to this virus becoming endemic. So now, whether we like it or not, we will have to upgrade our present buildings and modify the plans for any future buildings to take into account virus transmission.
Excellent points. An interesting point is that many schools, at least in the US, have atrocious lack of ventilation or any effective AC in warm climates and heating in cold. It was just a feature, especially in lower income area schools that cause no money to renovate or upgrade, kids, teachers and staff could literally sweat, or bundle in sweaters and sweatshirts, and bear it. In the same area of a large city, public schools were like going from a second world to the first world. Wealthy public school districts had AC and lower income schools had swamp coolers. Covid has just brought out the inequities in sharp relief. File it under, Class Warfare.
I would like to offer my support to Yves for sounding crabby yesterday.
I’m pretty sure that were that not her way, Yves wouldn’t be Yves.
And I sure hope everything is okay with Jerri-Lynn and those near and dear to her.
Thank you.
For the record, I was bad and got a haircut when in NYC. Guy comes to my hotel so not as serious Covid risk as going to a salon anywhere.
Anyway, he went on about how great my hair is (which does happen to be true), how it was well suited to my cut (and in both respects very similar to his ex wife who had the same cut)….and cut well suited to my personality, as in bitchy.
The guy is so great with hair he can be that blunt.
More substantively, I hate shortchaning readers. I once said that the worker me could probably charge the boss me with mistreatment.
I am not a registered Twitter user, and in general they have been making the site more difficult to use without being registered, but I have recently noticed that “subversive” tweets like the greenwald one above seem to be suppressed. Whenever I click on it, I get a page saying “oops, something went wrong, try again”. I do not get a similar message when I click on the octopus antidote, for example. I have noticed a clear pattern along these lines and believe it’s a form of stealth censorship. I cannot be the only one to have noticed this but haven’t seen anything. For what it’s worth…
You’re not the only one who noticed. They have been doing it since the last election. When you click through to a tweet, the link tells Twitter what website you came from to get there. Initially, they seemed to be soft-blocking based on their opinion of the referring website. They still do that, but they have refined it somewhat based on either the content of the tweet or the person tweeting. You can usually get around it by deleting most of the URL except for the initial part that identifies the specific tweet. Sometimes you need to clear cookies from Twitter or wait a while to try again with the shortened URL, which may indicate some sort of IP-based logging system.
They have also taken to bouncing unregistered users back to original tweets when you click on a down thread reply with a message that you should register. This anti-user change is purely financially motivated, and I’m not sure what triggers it since it happens on two of my computers but not a third. You get around it by clicking in the address bar, hitting return to reload the page, and then closing the registration prompt. If you try to close the prompt without reloading, it sends you back to the linking tweet without letting you see the tweet you wanted to see.
I am a registered twitter user and never have seen the problem you’ve described. I have noticed that the twitter algorithm seems to promote interaction while devaluing simply reading tweets without responding to them. In practice what this means is that even though I follow people like Matt Taibbi, unless I to go to his timeline to read his posts I never see them in my feed. If it is not the algorithm, then he is actively being censored by having his feed throttled somehow. The latter is certainly not out of the question IMO.
I got the same. When it ‘works’ I can see a still but not play the video. Mostly though “something went wrong”. I put it down to my refusal to be tracked and advertised at rather than censorship but I can’t know for sure.
I’m not a registered Twitterer either, but I don’t get that problem. As for the message urging me to register that Gareth mentions, I can just click outside the message and it goes away.
I am not on any anti-social media. I do, however, use a VPN. My observations are that Big Tech and other interests are going to flag those users with VPNs and treat them differently than normal users who expose themselves to violations of privacy. After all, the use of VPNs is costing them loot.
So already I believe there are two user worlds, VPN and non-VPN. As we move along the rights violating tech curve, humans will be fighting the bots and AI (then GI) more and more and understanding the tech environment less and less.
I’m on Twitter constantly, both logged in and not, and don’t have these technical issues, especially the error messages. I do a lot of curation, with many non-US sources, and I think that helps me bypass whatever the censors are doing. I also have my timeline set to be chronological, which at least avoids the algo Twitter explicitly uses. And I clear my cache and cookies a lot.
“Blinken: US Policy Is to ‘Oppose the Reconstruction of Syria’’
This is really bad this. Can you imagine if we had forbid Germany & Japan to rebuild after WW2 and denied them access to their grain-growing regions to starve them? And just let the people live in ruins while our sanctions ensured a regular death toll of civilians and child mortality? Washington seems determined to do the same with Afghanistan too as they lost there as well. Sure, that would cause a few million Afghans to flee as refugees in the direction of Europe but that would be Europe’s problem, not Washington. Probably the net effect would be to drive both countries firmly into Russia and China’s embrace for generations in the same way that Washington drove both China and Russia to work together as allies. It seems what Washington really needs is horse’s fronts to be shipped there for assembly.
It’s distressing to be a citizen and to be, or at least feel like, complicit in all this. The policy of inflicting mass misery on the subjects of countries our byzantine foreign policy has decided are our enemy (even though, in this case, this pitted us on the side of supporting al qaeda and even worse groups against a country that as far as I can tell we dislike just because Israel dislikes it) is so ingrained in both parties that I don’t see how I can change it. Voting them out doesn’t work, protesting is studiously ignored by our captured media. What’s left?
Most distressing is this evil only seems to be in service of protecting the wounded egos of warhawks. Yeah you beat us and our proxy terrorists, but we’ll show you! Doesn’t matter that this misery just fuels more terrorism and unrest and other bad policy outcomes.
I agree with you, Randy, though I’m a citizen of Australia, the US’ lapdog since 1975. Our governments’ policies are stupid, cruel and expensive. I don’t know what to do to stop it.
We have to destroy the country in order to save it…
“Can you imagine if we had forbid Germany & Japan to rebuild after WW2 and denied them access to their grain-growing regions to starve them?”
That’s what they forbade after WW1, resulting in Weimar hyper-inflation, the Crash of ’29, and probably Hitler. Learning those bitter lessons was what made US policy after WW2 so smart by comparison. Time to do it all again, I guess.
The latter part is what Stalin did with the Ukrainians in the 1930’s in starving them to death en masse.
Read all about it in Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder
One hundred years ago today:
“The German mark continues to drop dramatically in value. The Berlin Bourse will close every day this week except Thursday.”
Who was it said “Build Back Better”?
Well hey, what with Anthony Leonardi being a topic of discussion, I went to read his Twitter next thing after NC and I found this:
https://twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/1448981249092169728
and a link to this:
https://twitter.com/RougeMatisse/status/1448909737224032261
I know he’s not terribly layman-friendly to read, but he’s worth checking out on the regular, if only to see what he’s linked.
La Nina Arrives, Threatening to Stoke Droughts and Roil Markets Bloomberg
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The oft cited numbers that Ag uses 80% of the surface water and consumers use the other 20% in Cali is probably the opposite now, as almost all trees and veggies are nourished from well water exclusively, there is going to be oh so much subsidence as a result. But the days of pumping as much as you damned well please are dwindling, and if the drought holds up a good many of the 666 million nut & fruit trees are going to go toes up, almonds in particular because the wholesale value has dropped so precipitously.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/07/1037369959/new-protections-for-californias-aquifers-are-reshaping-the-states-central-valley
Is it reasonable to run a risk / reward scenario on moving or transitioning a part of the annual cornucopia to a more acceptable climate & sustainable water resources?
I’m sure the listing of produce, fruit and nuts is an exhaustive list. All those almond growers and not nearly enough water. I need to ration out my almond milk consumption accordingly.
Somebody wrote on here awhile back, that the fun foods are grown in Cali, yeah there’s a bit of corn to feed the dairy cows, but no soybeans or sorghum, and alfalfa is about as boring as it gets in terms of what’s grown here.
We have to be smarter about things, the value of almonds has decreased by 2/3rds because everybody and their mother got in on the game, why not set limits and keep the price sustained & higher for 1/3rd of what is now grown instead by letting 2/3rds of it die off, and almonds can only be grown in a few select spots on this orb, so it isn’t as if somebody else is going to steal our thunder.
twitter food scientist Sarah Taber has discussed this in the past on her feed and I believe the big blocker to moving it to, for ex, the se usa states, is lack of hort services to handle produce harvest/maintenence. all of those services already exist in the CVBB so if a farmer switches from alfafa to cabbages, there are people to call to get the harvest tested and brought in. Whereas in the SE USA, which has good weather and water for two summer harvest seasons, currently lacks those services. So farmers who switch from big ag vertical models to produce have to create those services on their own, usually not an option in such a thin-margined industry.
These points above are great to be aware of. I grew up in eastern NC mostly flat but there was peanut farming (aside from the more obvious crops like tobacco or cotton). Just up the road from my humble hobbit home, there is a giant peach statue denoting a key crop from South Carolina.
I’d venture that buying enough acreage to break even, let alone a marginal profit, would be prohibitive. Then layer in the harvesting and distribution network and you’re taking a long ramp to get anywhere.
FAA Fumbled Its Response To a Surge in GPS Jamming
I assumed from the headline it was the evil Russians, Chinese, Cubans, or perhaps domestic hackers behind the jamming. But no, it’s the US military. The White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico (where the first atomic bomb was detonated) regularly jams GPS, leading pilots into all sorts of potential danger, though no actual crashes so far, it seems.
Pilots have lots of navigational backup not to mention air controllers following them on radar.
Please be OK, Jerri!
>”I hope you die”
Be careful with the attack on scientist routine. When I see Fiona Fox at the SMC in the UK, alarm bells go off. She’s pretty comfy with big Pharma/big industry and as I understand it supported by them. It’s a playbook they like to run whenever there is criticism of Pharma/big business activities…”we’re just hard working credentialed scientists being attacked by the unwashed masses”.
An excellent appellate lawyer told me the thing to remember is, short of force, the only way to get someone to give you what you seek is to appeal to their the sense of shame or guilt if they do not give it to you. They need to see themselves as a SOB when they look in the mirror. So while using legal reasoning he tweaked it towards shame and guilt for, at the bottom, all decisions are emotional. Since The National Media took over in the 1960s we have been fed nothing but emotional, not rational, appeals to our individual shame and guilt. The same lawyer also told me it doesn’t always work for some have neither and feel no shame or guilt, e.g. criminals, and politicians.
Please be OK Jerri and do get in touch with us, this precious nakedcapitalism community, as soon as possible.
I’m not sure what to make of all this. Israeli studies showed around 10 times more protection from delta for people infected with the original strain compared to people who were vaccinated and not previously infected. Could the Iranian reinfection studies possibly reflect higher levels of poverty and therefore weaker immune systems in general more so than the effects of the virus itself in a healthy population? Not that the US is particularly healthy.
There are a lot of potentially confounding elements. One that people don’t seem very aware of is the erratic nature of cross-immunity between variants.
But I think it’s an extrememly safe bet that the most significant difference between the two countries is government response. Israel’s proactive measures will have made many many differences in the challenges to citizens’ immune systems. For instance, people in Iran are likely being exposed to the virus much more often, and in more concentrated doses.
Being ‘immune’ to a pathogen is all too often presented as something absolute, whereas it’s really more of a resource you can possess some degree of, depending on circumstances, and which, like other resources, it’s possible to use up.
I recently read that people immune to smallpox are frequently, perhaps even usually, vulnerable to respiratory infection by the virus. It apparently doesn’t normally lead to severe disease, or lead to enough transmission to prevent herd immunity developing. SARS-CoV-2 and a whole bunch of its coronavirus kin are a very different story.
Could this also be a reflection that the initial infection killed off the ones most likely to die? I’ve read covid kills about 1-2%. My understanding is that vaccination doesn’t prevent infection, it lowers severity and chances of death.
If 1-2% die from natural infection, but that is reduced to .25% (or whatever, I don’t know the statistic) if vaccinated, wouldn’t that create a difference between groups for the second infection? The most vulnerable died in the first infection for non-vaccinated, but the most vulnerable survived in the vaccinated.
I have a link going up in future Links that last month in the US, Covid was the leading cause of death for 34 to 50 year olds. So, nope.
Quinn Slobodian
@zeithistoriker
Has anyone written about America’s slowing temporality, its inability to imagine change of any kind—starting to become its defining trait!
My impression: Stagnation. A number of fundamentalisms have come together, none of which are shared by the majority of Americans, but the fundamentalisms are only too happy to make life miserable for all. I refer to Chicago School economics (Friedman-Becker libertarianism), decadent U.S. Protestantism, now devolved into the Prosperity Gospel, and U.S. individualism (now at the fundamentalist level of “I’ve got mine + Screw you). Let alone the various forms of puritanism now masquerading as academic research and disciplines.
What could possibly go wrong?
And then we hear of publication o this new Hillary Clinton “mystery” as if to show us the deeply superficial state of U.S. culture and its division into well-heeled mindless gangs.
A stagnant pond.
It’s not just fundamentalisms. It’s entrenched interests, as the Chinese recognize about the US, that buy or otherwise suborn the various fundamentalist proponents so as to perpetuate their scams.
The for-profit ‘healthcare-insurance industry’ scam is the obvious example, looting 7 percent annually of US GDP for its asset holders and executives. Clearly, it is looting — US healthcare costs now run at 17-18 percent of GDP for nearly the worst outcomes in the developed world, where N. European nations, including the UK, run at 8-10 percent GDP.
And it’s a system of looting so entrenched that even in a pandemic the ownership class of the US demand it remains entrenched and untouchable.
There are other entrenched scams, like the MIC, with the most expensive weapons system in history — a plane with troubles even flying.
The US is what it is. Beyond pathetic. All becomes clear once one grasps that its owners– except for the brief interregnum of the New Deal — has always had and has now the mentality of a colonial kleptocracy, perpetually looking to screw, cheat, enslave, or steal from everybody else on the planet.
Geography’s great, though!
Relevant saying, Geography is Everything.
Stories from the American workplace… this is golden:
https://twitter.com/BizarreLazar/status/1448719712389459969
Wow, that sums a lot as to why strikes are and going to continue occur.
Leader: The beatings will continue until morale improves. I want 110% at all times.
Worker: I’ll choose not to come in, your presence is intolerable. Good luck with your widget factory.
I didn’t appreciate the satirical nature and dialogue of “Fight Club” when it first was in theaters in 1999.
“Fight Club” is a classic, I’ve re-watched it many times. Funny thing is, the first time I watched it (with our oldest offspring), we were halfway through when I mentioned that I didn’t recognize who the main actor was. “C’mon Dad, it’s Brad Pitt.” Wow I felt stupid, but that’s also the moment when I realized that he’s actually a good actor. Like in “War Machine.”
I am not sure if Trump’s statement that Republicans would not be voting in ’22 and ’24 without solving his election concerns is actually a call for a boycott. The statement is vague, and it is ambiguous enough that he could be arguing that Republican votes would be meaningless in a system he believes to be rigged. None of the news organizations that picked it up appear to have contacted Trump to request clarification.
If he is calling for a boycott, he may be surprised at how quickly he gets dropped by Republicans in favor a candidate who can offer all the things they like about Trump without the ego and other baggage. Covid restrictions, inflation, and the Supreme Court will all be strong motivators for the Republican base. If Biden and friends successfully take credit for a hard-candy Christmas, the mid-terms may be 1994 all over again.
Trump’s could be to trying to suppress turnout so that he can argue that only he can save the Republican Party in hopes of running again in ’24, but I don’t think he will get much traction with that. Some people may be partial to their losers, but that doesn’t mean they let them keep running the show.
Help us Obi-Wan (Trump), you’re our only hope.
Said no one ever ! But seriously the R candidate in 2024 needs an actual vision for the country and not a retread of what worked in 2016. I acknowledge this is asking much of our purported leaders; I am inclined to suggest 2022 will be an interesting year*
*It really depends on the economy, inflation and jobs. I hate sounding like Jimmy “who dat and LSU” Carville, though I enjoy his bayou accent.
Dat Carville! He plays up the bayou accent with the emotional delivery worthy of a Louisiana man. Think his facial expressions have become etched with time. Reminds me of watching Martin Short in action. Enjoy him. His and Steve Martin’s , ” Murders in the House” is a gem.
I mentioned once before and will mention again a ” Beau of the Fifth Column” 5 minute video where Beau theorizes that Trump is serially suggesting to his fanbase that they not vote unless the “fraudulent 2020 election problem” is solved, and then threatening the Republican officeholder class with his base boycotting their elections if they don’t support Trump’s ongoing ” election fraud” Information Operations Agitprop. In this theory, Trump is extorting the Republican officeholder class to support his fake “election fraud” theory or he will instruct his base to defeat all the Republican candidates by withholding votes from them.
Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xs4ikEXQbo&list=PLQDS8YKa2B0kkdfbs6x8dMPdm6u-XxWs6&index=5
GM’s comment:
I get so angry at what is being done.
But we’re just supposed to accept that “this is the way it is.”
I DO NOT ACCEPT what is being done here. There are too many deaths and too many long-term consequences.
It is profoundly depressing to be told that we just have to learn to live with it.
There are so many things we should be doing — ventilation, testing, N95 masks, treatments…
And the toll this is taking on our health care professionals is cruel.
“An Explosion in Snake Diversity Came After a Major Moment in Earth’s History ScienceAlert (Kevin W)” — Old Silicon Valley joke: So after 40 days and 40 nights, the rains stopped, the world was purged of wickedness, the ark came to rest on a mountaintop, and the waters receded. Noah threw open the doors of the ark and he and his sons led the animals forth, and Noah said unto them, “go forth and multiply.” At which time two of the snakes turned back and replied unto Noah, “we can’t – we’re adders.”
Can’t resist a little bragging, already bought my firewood for the winter (in March so nice and dry!) so we won’t be paying the 54% price increase for fossil fuel. Sorry Exxon.
“US heating bills will jump as much as 54% this winter, says government Guardian”
‘New Cold War’
So an American Arleigh-Burke class warship tried to enter Russian territorial waters on the grounds that they were recovering a helicopter and could not change course while doing so which would lead them into those waters. So then a Russian warship chased them out. This was in the Sea of Japan region. So this makes for an interesting guessing game.
There were just negotiations between the US and Russia which fell kind of flat. So was this engineered incident a way to put some sort of pressure on Russia or was it that factions in the Pentagon do not want to see reproachment and so ordered one of their ships to stir up a bit of trouble? I have seen a major incident during the Obama era where it was the later but you still wonder which it was-
https://www.rt.com/russia/537618-us-warship-intercepted-navy/
Does anybody know if this makes sense outside of perhaps an inflight emergency on the aircraft?
Does the ship even have to be underway to recover a helicopter?