What is your opinion on state governments offering incentives for the unvaccinated to get the COVID shot(s)?
My opinion is below in the posting area.
Thanks for posting your opinion and recommending.
Friday, July 30, 2021
Thursday, July 29, 2021
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.
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
Eight+ minutes of wasted time…
If you have the time to spare and have the stomach for it, below is the full 8:20 interview:
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 30th, 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.
“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 6th was serious.” Reallllly?
“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 6th 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%.
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.
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
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
Ire directed at unvaccinated people is rising
The New York Times reports that increasingly vaccinated people are losing patience with people who refuse to get vaccinated. Some are concerned for their children, who are too young to be vaccinated. Others are concerned about the possibility of lockdowns or reinfections after vaccination. Vaccine hesitancy or refusal is based on legitimate concern about the lack of long-term safety data and/or illegitimate disinformation. So far, vaccines have been in people for about 16 moths. Thus the safety data is limited to that length of time, but it obviously increases as time passes. The New York Times writes:
The reported side effects of the mRNA vaccines were temporary symptoms such as fever and muscle aches, similar to what some people experience after getting other vaccines. Most common side effects of a vaccine are identified in studies before the vaccine is licensed. In rare cases, adverse side effects may not be detected in these studies, which is why the U.S. vaccine safety system continuously monitors for side effects after a vaccine is licensed." (emphasis added)
As coronavirus cases resurge across the country, many inoculated Americans are losing patience with vaccine holdouts who, they say, are neglecting a civic duty or clinging to conspiracy theories and misinformation even as new patients arrive in emergency rooms and the nation renews mask advisories.
The country seemed to be exiting the pandemic; barely a month ago, a sense of celebration was palpable. Now many of the vaccinated fear for their unvaccinated children and worry that they are at risk themselves for breakthrough infections. Rising case rates are upending plans for school and workplace reopenings, and threatening another wave of infections that may overwhelm hospitals in many communities.
“It’s like the sun has come up in the morning and everyone is arguing about it,” said Jim Taylor, 66, a retired civil servant in Baton Rouge, La., a state in which fewer than half of adults are fully vaccinated.
“The virus is here and it’s killing people, and we have a time-tested way to stop it — and we won’t do it. It’s an outrage.”
The rising sentiment is contributing to support for more coercive measures. Scientists, business leaders and government officials are calling for vaccine mandates — if not by the federal government, then by local jurisdictions, schools, employers and businesses.
“I’ve become angrier as time has gone on,” said Doug Robertson, 39, a teacher who lives outside Portland, Ore., and has three children too young to be vaccinated, including a toddler with a serious health condition.
“Now there is a vaccine and a light at the end of the tunnel, and some people are choosing not to walk toward it,” he said. “You are making it darker for my family and others like mine by making that choice.”“It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks,” a frustrated Gov. Kay Ivey, Republican of Alabama, told reporters last week. “It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.”Even though she is fully vaccinated, Aimee McLean, a nurse case manager at University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, worries about contracting the virus from a patient and inadvertently passing it to her father, who has a serious chronic lung disease. Less than half of Utah’s population is fully vaccinated.
“The longer that we’re not getting toward that number, the more it feels like there’s a decent percentage of the population that honestly doesn’t care about us as health care workers,” Ms. McLean, 46, said.
She suggested health insurers link coverage of hospital bills to immunization. “If you choose not to be part of the solution, then you should be accountable for the consequences,” she said.
The NYT goes on to comment that 57% of Americans 12 and older are fully vaccinated. Americans are still getting about 537,000 doses per day on average. That is an 84% decrease from a ~3.38 million peak in early April. The combination of a low vaccination rate and lifted restrictions have caused infections to rise. As of last Sunday, there were an average of 52,000 daily new cases, That is a 170% increase over two weeks before then. Hospitalization and death rates are also slowly increasing.
A parent of a young son in Connecticut commented after a relative who refused vaccination became infected, “I feel like we’re at that same precipice as just a year ago, where people don’t care if more people die.” That parent is worried that his son will become infected from his unvaccinated relative. Similarly, an engineering teacher at the University of Florida, in Gainesville commented, “If we’re respecting the rights and liberties of the unvaccinated, what’s happening to the rights and liberties of the vaccinated?”
One woman who refuses to get vaccinated comments that she is “taking my time with it.” She is concerned about possible long-term vaccine side effects and the rush to get them approved and used by the public. She also commented that “I shouldn’t be judged or forced to make a decision. Society will just have to wait for us.”
Questions: What’s happening to the rights and liberties of the vaccinated? Should vaccinated people have a right to be free from fear of infection from people who refuse to get vaccinated? Should unvaccinated people be financially responsible if they get sick or infect other people? Does the lack of long-term safety data beyond about 16 months justify refusal to be vaccinated?[A] Is society justified in judging people who refuse to get vaccinated or coercing them into getting vaccinated? How much longer should society be forced to wait?
Is distrust of government, the CDC and/or the FDA a legitimate reason to distrust the COVID vaccines, i.e., does distrust simply sweep away or obliterate existing empirical evidence of safety and efficacy?
Footnote:
A. My guess is that the probability of the rise of a major new adverse side-effect from the vaccines available now is very low, maybe 1 chance in ~1,000,000 in the next 5 years. That estimate is based on the following factors:
1. Experience from decades of widespread vaccine use globally indicates that previously unknown side effects from vaccines usually become apparent within about weeks 6-8 of clinical trial use, usually a lot longer than that. All major side effects usually become apparent during clinical trials which look closely for adverse side effects.
2. Such evidence goes back at least to the 1960s (a short review article is here).
3. Some of the factors that caused serious side effects including deaths from vaccines are not present in the current anti-COVID vaccines. The current COVID vaccines contain the nucleic acid from the spike protein so it is impossible for the entire virus to be reconstituted or reassembled as has happened in the past with some vaccines such as the polio vaccine. That was a major source of serious side effects that is simply off the table for COVID.
4. CDC data indicates that over 338 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine were given in the United States from December 14, 2020, through July 19, 2021, which is a massive number of people from which safety data is being drawn. So far, the CDC reports two serious adverse events has been observed through its vaccine safety monitoring system. The CDC writes: "To date, the systems in place to monitor the safety of these vaccines have found only two serious types of health problems after vaccination, both of which are rare. These are anaphylaxis and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) after vaccination with J&J/Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine. Serious side effects that could cause a long-term health problem are extremely unlikely following any vaccination, including COVID-19 vaccination. Vaccine monitoring has historically shown that side effects generally happen within six weeks of receiving a vaccine dose. For this reason, the FDA required each of the authorized COVID-19 vaccines to be studied for at least two months (eight weeks) after the final dose. Millions of people have received COVID-19 vaccines, and no long-term side effects have been detected."
5. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are based on a relatively new technology that delivers nucleic acid (RNA) that encodes the COVID spike protein to human cells, which in turn make the protein, which then causes an immune response against the virus. Similar RNA vaccines against HIV, rabies, Zika and flu have been tested in phase 1 and phase 2 safety trials in people. So far, this kind of vaccine technology has been found to be safe with other viruses, although these experimental vaccines are not on the market, presumably due to lack of efficacy, manufacturing cost and/or unstable or small market size (Zika). Current evidence is that all of the COVID vaccines on the market now are clearly effective enough for mass public use, so that is not a legitimate concern. (link to a general audience article about how RNA COVID vaccines work)
6. The vaccines were developed faster than any others I am aware of. The development time cut off at least 3-5 years of normal development time. The article linked to above comments: "All COVID-19 vaccines have to meet the same rigorous FDA safety standards as any other vaccine. You may be wondering then, how these COVID-19 vaccines were developed so quickly compared to the vaccines of the past, which took years to create. The speed happened on the front end in the development of the vaccines. Because of massive public and private funding, many of the financial hurdles that can delay research projects were removed. But the testing and approval processes were no different than those for other vaccines in the past.
The reported side effects of the mRNA vaccines were temporary symptoms such as fever and muscle aches, similar to what some people experience after getting other vaccines. Most common side effects of a vaccine are identified in studies before the vaccine is licensed. In rare cases, adverse side effects may not be detected in these studies, which is why the U.S. vaccine safety system continuously monitors for side effects after a vaccine is licensed." (emphasis added)
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