What happened to the annual flu season?

Data coming in indicates that 2020-2021 flu season has been eliminated. Measures to slow the COVID pandemic appear to have almost completely stopped the spread of flu this year. An April 2021 article in Scientific American, Flu Has Disappeared for More Than a Year, included this data:

Extended data through this month indicates that the flu virus never took off. Infections in North America, temperate South America and Oceania all remained at very low levels so far this year. SciAm commented: "When Scientific American first published influenza data in November 2020, the 2020-2021 flu season looked like a possible no-show. Since then, cases around the world remained near zero."

At least, one can reasonably believe that (1) masks are effective to some extent for flu and probably most other virus diseases, and (2) COVID is more infectious than this year's flu strains. A few science deniers continue to argue that masks don't work and COVID is a hoax. The flu data indicates that masks do work to at least some extent and flu isn't responsible for deaths that have been attributed to COVID. 

Eight+ minutes of wasted time…

 

Yesterday after I watch the Jan 6^th Committee hearing, out of curiosity I tuned into FOX News to see what they had to say.  One of the fellows whom Pelosi had rejected for that select committee, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), was being interviewed.

If you have the time to spare and have the stomach for it, below is the full 8:20 interview: 

Click here.

Well, that was good for a belly laugh.  Here are some of my favorite Banks quotes:

“The voice of the majority was taken away…” No.  Banks and Jordan voted, on June 30^th, to NOT have any commission hearings, so you guys GAVE your voice away. 

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/politics/republicans-january-6-select-committee-vote/index.html

Couple that with Kevin McCarthy stubbornly pulling the other three Republicans that Pelosi agreed to have on the committee. 

https://www.axios.com/pelosi-jim-jordan-banks-select-committee-62a31383-be98-485b-933c-e56a28ca5a84.html

“The committee was designed to malign conservatives and justify the left’s authoritarian agenda.”  The left's authoritarian agenda?? Oh, now that’s a gut-splitter!  See all the voter suppression tactics that's happening in Republican-run State Houses.  Google it, as there are too many to list.

“What is the speaker trying to hide by not letting me and Jordan in the room to ask questions?”  Answer: She didn’t want another Gym "foaming at the mouth" Jordan shit-show to happen.  Sorry to break it to you Jim-bo, but that makes her one of the sane ones.

“Imagine where this goes from here.”  Oh yeah.  We’re imagining alright…😉

“Every word that has come out of everyone’s mouth on this committee, has been strategically designed by Nancy Pelosi to fit her narrative.”  LOLing.

“I’m not aware … I have yet to meet a Republican in Congress who has minimized and doesn’t believe that what happened on Jan 6^th was serious.” Reallllly?

https://apnews.com/article/politics-michael-pence-donald-trump-election-2020-capitol-siege-549829098c84b9b8de3012673a104a4c

“If you’re not willing to investigate the bureaucratic failure of what happened on that day that left the Capital vulnerable to an attach…” Stops suddenly there and changes subject, probably realizing that he voted to NOT have hearings.  Can I hear an Oops!

“Subpoenaing someone for something that happened after Jan the 6^th makes no sense.”  Huh?  Say again?? [pulls left upper lip up, cocks head]

And now some bonus material... Take a look at the screen crawler/chyron at the 1:48 mark.  “Medical Examiner: Officer Sicknick died of natural causes the day after the riot.”  “Natural causes” he says.  How about poisoning/poison inhalation, assault with deadly weapons, trauma to the body, etc.?

Maybe it’s just me, but I gotta wonder, how does a man like Banks stand there with a straight face and say these things??  He and I really operate out of two different reality bubbles.

Your Task: Poke as many holes in this interview as you can.  Provide evidence [links] if you feel some parts of it are legitimate.

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Science update: The iron-air battery

Some sources are reporting on a possible breakthrough in iron-air batteries. The goal is to get cost of energy storage down to about $20 per megawatt-hour (MW-h). That is enough to run about 1,000 homes for 1 hour. The idea is simple -- adding oxygen from air to iron causes the metal to rust and give off electricity. The battery is recharged by using electricity energy to remove the oxygen, converting the rust back to metallic iron. Current iron-air batteries require about 1 acre of land for 1 MW of storage, with ~3 MW/acre theoretically possible. One acre is an area of 43560 sq. ft. or about 200 x 217 feet.

Iron-air batteries are made of low cost materials. The question is can they actually be manufactured to store energy for ~$20/MW-h? If that cost point can be reached, it would mark a major milestone for humans and civilization. One could envision a drastic reduction in the need for carbon energy sources, maybe about 85-90%. 

One source comments:

They [iron-air batteries] take in power from renewable sources, storing that energy for up to 150 hours and discharging it to the grid when renewables are offline.

Each individual battery is about the size of a washing machine.

Each of these modules is filled with a water-based, non-flammable electrolyte, similar to the electrolyte used in AA batteries.

Inside of the liquid electrolyte are stacks of between 10 and 20 meter-scale cells, which include iron electrodes and air electrodes, the parts of the battery that enable the electrochemical reactions to store and discharge electricity.

These battery modules are grouped together in modular megawatt-scale power blocks, which comprise thousands of battery modules in an environmentally protected enclosure.

Depending on the system size, tens to hundreds of these power blocks will be connected to the electricity grid.

For scale, in its least dense version , a one megawatt system requires about an acre of land.

Higher density configurations can achieve 3MW/acre.

A Boston-area company involved in developing iron air batteries, Form Energy, has high powered researchers and financial backers. The Washington Post writes in an opinion piece today:

A Boston-area company, Form Energy, announced recently that it has created a battery prototype that stores large amounts of power and releases it not over hours, but over more than four days. And that isn’t the best part. The battery’s main ingredients are iron and oxygen, both incredibly plentiful here on God’s green Earth — and therefore reliably cheap.

Put the two facts together, and you arrive at a sort of tipping point for green energy: reliable power from renewable sources at less than $20 per megawatt-hour. 

Form Energy is no seat-of-the-pants outfit. Its founders include Mateo Jaramillo, former head of battery development for Tesla, and MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang, among the world’s foremost battery scientists. Investors include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder and Post owner Jeff Bezos, the iron and steel colossus ArcelorMittal, and MIT’s The Engine, a strategic fund aimed at long-term solutions to big problems.  

According to its announcement, Form Energy has the process working well under lab conditions. The next step is to build a warehouse-size battery plant to support an electric utility in Minnesota. If successful, a one-megawatt battery will be able to power the entire utility for nearly a week between charges by 2024.

Then we’ll begin to know just how important this is.

What fascist Republicans vehemently oppose: House Hearings on the fascist 1/6 coup attempt

We will be hearing more from this in coming days. But some of the testimony today deserves some respect. The Washington Post writes:

There are people who believe that the moon landing never happened, that the astronauts in the footage all the world saw were actually bouncing around on a soundstage hidden away somewhere. But they aren’t making our laws, they aren’t invited on TV to discuss their perspective, and they don’t have the ability to influence millions.

Yet there are people who deny the truth of what happened in Washington on Jan. 6, despite all the video, all the contemporaneous reports, all the guilty pleas, and all the testimony. And they have a lot more power.

Tuesday’s first hearing of the select House committee investigating the insurrection, with vivid testimony from four police officers who stood against a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters overrunning the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a presidential election, should put at least some questions about that day to rest.

Still recovering from their physical and mental injuries, the officers seemed particularly incensed that the truth of what happened that day is denied by so many on the right, from Trump himself on down.

“To me, it’s insulting, just demoralizing because of everything that we did to prevent everyone in the Capitol from getting hurt,” said Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell about the effort to minimize what happened that day, including by Trump. (“It was a loving crowd,” the former president told Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, “There was a lot of love. I’ve heard that from everybody.”)

Well, there you have it, there was a lot of love in all that hate and violence. Those dumb officers. Incensed that the fascist right, including the ex-president, denies truth. As the ex-president says, it was just a loving crowd full of love. It was not anything close to these images of threat, hate and rage:

SHOOT HER!! SHOOT HER!! SHOOT HER!!

(but bayonet her guts first)

Instead, January 6 was an innocent show of infinite love, peace and tolerance. You know, clearly and undeniably shown and proven in soft, loving images like these:

IMO, the fascist Republican Party and its constant lies, corruption and treason are deeply immoral, and their defenses are usually not even slightly persuasive. Not even a little. 

Questions: Should that evil socialist witch confronting the National Guard have been impaled on bayonets and then shot full of holes? Should the righteous, patriotic tourists of 1/6 been excused for their minor infractions that the law accords all innocent tourists? Is the 1/6 coup attempt how a fascist leader incites fascist inclined followers to fall deeper into the endless pit of hate and lies that American fascism grows and thrives on, or is it a sincere expression of love, tolerance and peace? Am I over the top, outrageous, unfair or otherwise waaay off the mark on this matter?

Peaceful tourists peacefully greeting law enforcement

personnel at the capital during the 1/6 coup attempt

A peaceful tourist expressing his love of country