Today is the Super Bowl. On one side we have junk vaccine profiteer Travis Kelce, paid a reported $20 million to promote Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines (recently shown to have zero effect on death rate among those who’ve previously made it through a SARS-CoV-2 infection; see “Effectiveness of a fourth SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose in previously infected individuals from Austria”). On the other side we have a team from San Francisco, renowned for its muscular 1.5-year public school closures, forced masking, coerced vaccinations (meekly accepted by everyone except In-N-Out), etc.
“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,” Arnie Wensinger, [In-N-Out’s] chief legal and business officer, said in a statement. “It is unreasonable, invasive and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not.”
Our neighborhood is having a party on the green where the kids play every afternoon. The HOA will run a couple of cables from the clubhouse/gym and project the game on an inflatable outdoor screen.
For whom should an anti-coronapanic and anti-Covidcrat American root?
The New York Times has a story on how the coronapanic shutdowns set American K-12 students back (which is the same as killing them, by COVID standards, since people with less education tend to live shorter lives and any shortening of a life can be considered a “COVID death”). Of course, the headline is about the “surprising rebound” (every action taken by a Covidcrat was actually beneficial when viewed in the proper light).
The article has a side note that the recovery in reading ability has been weaker and then proceeds to present charts only on math test scores, where the “rebound” has been stronger. Your kids’ rebound energy may vary, depending on family wealth (like life expectancy, correlated with education). The poor kids were destroyed:
The NYT journalists and editors don’t mention what happened in the one state where school closure was limited by the governor to about 3 months: Florida. Digging into their cited data source, characterized as a “national study” and with analysis “led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard”, it appears that Florida was ignored by the academic worthies (maybe anti-Science DeSantis suppressed data?).
Sweden recently showed a decline in PISA scores, suggesting that keeping schools open is just as bad for kids as closing them.
January 30, 2024 memo from my mom’s retirement community “wellness coordinator”:
I am sorry to report that we are seeing an increase in the number of Covid cases here at [the home for elderly Democrats in Bethesda, Maryland]. Over the last 3 days we have 11 new cases. I ask that you try to distance at meals as much as possible, even avoiding larger table settings. I am recommending that Residents/Guests wear a mask in the hallways and other common areas. I see many residents not wearing masks throughout the community, I cannot make anyone take these precautions, but I highly recommend them: Resume Social Distancing Wash hands often Wear masks in common area The clinic continues to do Rapid Covid testing. If you think you have been exposed or develop symptoms such as headache, nasal or chest congestion, sore throat, or body aches please come and get tested.
Everyone in the building is a Democrat (they all made money via the expansion of the federal government, either as government workers, lobbyists, contractors to the government, lawyers specializing in navigating regulations, etc.) so they’ve all had the maximum number of COVID-19 shots and boosters (not to mention one or two previous cases of COVID-19). In this highly vaccinated and boosted community, what are they told to do? Everything that they were told to do in 2020, before vaccines or boosters were available!
Separately, Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend wants you to get injected with high-quality Pfizer products:
Heading back to SF from Wash U St Louis It was great to give 4 talks over 2 days.
I hope to make at least 2 available on YouTube, & 3 on plenary session.
It was heartening to talk to so many sensible doctors. When it comes to COVID19 ppl stopped me in the halls to say…
Masking 2 year olds… School closure… Vaccine mandates for college kids… Lockdowns…
were all illogical and horrific public health and they are glad I spoke up
Many agreed but the climate was too hostile for them to speak up
Is it fair to say that this is like the Resistance in France during World War II? Before 1945, nobody was a member and after 1945 it transpired that every French person had been a member of the Resistance?
(I had thought that support for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) was the anti-Resistance in the sense that Palestinians polled prior to October 7 generally said that they supported Hamas, but after October 7 we were informed that no Palestinians supported Hamas. That’s still what one learns from the media and the typical Twitter feed, but, as noted in International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (and a poll result), Palestinians polled in November 2023 supported Hamas (75 percent) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (85 percent).)
Dr. Prasad is a vaccine believer: “People died by delaying the initial vaccine.” I think he means that people died because it took a few extra months to get the vaccine approved and distributed. That’s probably true for Israelis because if the vaccine been approved prior to the 2020 election, Trump would have been reelected and Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and various civilians likely wouldn’t have dared to kidnap, rape, and kill U.S. citizens for fear that the unhinged guy in the White House would push the button on them.
I still can’t figure out why we aren’t able to see the effects of the vaccine on a country-by-country basis, e.g., a lower excess death rate for a country that got vaccinated sooner. See Where is the population-wide evidence that COVID vaccines reduce COVID-tagged death rates? for a question that remains unanswered despite some studies within countries and the faith of otherwise reasonably skeptical people such as Dr. Prasad.
Let’s have a look at the Moderna FDA paperwork. Only 3 people in the vaccine group, out of 15,208 total, died during the study (approximately 3 months; see pages 17 and 18), which tells you that Moderna picked a much healthier population with a much longer life expectancy than the kinds of people who have been tagged on death with COVID-19 positive test result. (If we assume that a typical COVID-19-tagged death is among those with a life expectancy of 4 years, we would have expected at least hundreds of deaths during a similar study of vaccination among people who really need the vaccination. Note that the Swedish data suggest that 4 years is an overestimate.)
As we approach the December break, it is a time of year where many families and school staff like to give homemade baked goods and crafts as gifts of appreciation. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic we are going to respectfully ask to put a hold on this practice as a part of our ongoing efforts to keep everyone safe.
We have all worked hard to keep each other safe and to keep our schools open. We appreciate your willingness to find alternative ways to express your gratitude this year. A letter to the teacher with a specific thanks would be greatly appreciated!
(That was at a school for rich suburbanites. It was open with a mask order in force (later they added vaccine coercion). City school systems ostensibly serving the poor in Maskachusetts were still closed and would stay mostly closed until fall 2021.)
It’s the two-year anniversary of the Boston Covidcrats ordering 5-year-olds to be injected with a non-FDA-approved vaccine if they wanted to enter a restaurant, do an after-school sport, see a movie, or visit a museum. The Science-informed order says “vaccinated individuals are less likely to develop serious symptoms or spread COVID19 to those near them” (i.e., claims that the injection prevents transmission despite the fact that the injection was never tested for its ability to reduce transmission).
The requirement will apply to indoor dining at restaurants, including bars and nightclubs; indoor fitness centers; and indoor recreational spaces, like theaters, concert venues, and sports arenas.
The first phase — requiring employees and patrons ages 12 and up to show they’ve gotten at least one dose of a vaccine — takes effect on Jan. 15. They will subsequently be required to show they’ve received at least two doses on Feb. 15.
Boston will also require children as young as 5 to show they’ve gotten at least one dose to enter those indoor spaces by March 1. And by May 1, children aged 5 to 12 will be required to show proof of full vaccination as well.
The order Monday follows similar policies in other major American cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. And it was announced in conjunction with other neighboring Massachusetts communities — including Arlington, Brookline, Cambridge, Salem, Somerville — that are advancing mirroring vaccine requirements for their local indoor venues.
Some initial resistance was anticipated:
Businesses will also be required to post a printed notice, available in multiple languages, informing visitors of the policy. And according to Wu, the city’s Inspectional Services Department will run checks to ensure compliance with the order.
“Once it gets to the point that it is part of the culture, part of the standard expectation, there’s much less direct challenge in compliance,” she said.
However, Wu described the proof of vaccination check as “just one more interaction that is already happening” between customers and staff.
“It would be a quick glance at an app or a card or a photo of your card,” she said.
If the following is true, why didn’t Mayor Wu order a real Chinese-style lockdown?
“We need to take every available action to protect our cities, residents, businesses, and institutions,” she said.
Why did the Followers of Science allow the filthy unvaccinated remnants to continue to congregate inside the never-closed (“essential”) marijuana stores, for example?
If we accept the CDC’s premise that humans are in charge of viruses, the map demonstrates that Science-deniers Ron DeSantis (Yale/Harvard grad) and Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo (Harvard MD/PhD in Science Denial) are doing a great job in Florida! The people who did the opposite of what the CDC suggested are “doing the best” (if we accept the public health premise that COVID-19 infection/death rates are the appropriate measure of a society’s success).
How could the CDC’s social media nerds not have waited for these data to change before highlighting this map to hundreds of thousands of Americans?
Governor French Laundry and Governor Science Denial are debating this evening. Let’s do a little pre-debate fact-checking. Americans have agreed that all of a society’s success can be measured by the society’s score in the COVID-19 Olympics. A society that achieved 0 COVID-tagged deaths by pushing all of its citizens into Hamas-style tunnels for 10 years (until a vaccine-style vaccine became available that definitively reduced deaths on a population-wide basis) would, for example, be celebrated as the best of all possible societies.
Lockdown-champ California starts off in the lead in the COVID-19 Olympics by having a lower COVID-19-tagged death rate. Once you adjust for the percentage of the population over 65, however, the death rates are about the same and the excess death rate may actually be higher in California (the CDC makes these data available, but somehow doesn’t bother to make it easy to compare states).
The Science-denying Republican strongholds of Minnesota and Vermont are seriously plagued (God hates Republicans and loves #Science). California is moderately plagued and the plague level in Florida is “low”. In other words, if we accept that current Scientific dogma that humans, especially politicians and bureaucrats, are in charge of viruses, Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns, mask orders, forced vaccinations, school closures, etc. have resulted in a higher rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection than the Team Sweden approach that Ron DeSantis adopted in the summer of 2020 (see Ron DeSantis and Coronapanic for excerpts from the not-so-great man’s book).
I continue to maintain my position that Nikki Haley would be more likely to prevail over Joe Biden in November 2024 because Ron D doesn’t have the soothing optimistic tone that Americans love. For example, Americans want to believe that someone who hates Jews and loves jihad will do a 180-degree flip once exposed to suburban life in Michigan or Minnesota. Ron just says “no”:
(Possible influence for Ron D’s rejection of Immigration Dogma: Florida is where, in 2016 (prior to Ron DeSantis assuming the governorship), first-generation Afghan-American Omar Mir Seddique Mateen killed 49 people at a gay nightclub. Mr. Mateen came from a “moderate Muslim” family and had spent his entire 29-year life in the land of Diversity is Our Strength (TM).)
“Amazon sets sights on more Miami office space after Jeff Bezos’ Florida move” (New York Post); this seems like it could starve Washington State of expected (and well-deserved!) revenue from its new 7 percent capital gains tax. Senior and/or long-term Amazon employees can choose when to sell shares. They could move to Coral Gables or Miami Beach for a few years, sell whatever they want to sell, go to work in the Amazon Miami office, and eventually move back to Washington State if they’re keen to pay the 20 percent estate tax on death. California-based Amazon employees could skip out on 13.3 percent income tax by moving to Miami, at least during years in which they expected to cash out stock.
“The coronavirus panic is dumb,” Musk tweeted. It was March 6, 2020, and COVID had just shut down his new factory in Shanghai and begun to spread in the U.S. That was decimating Tesla’s stock price, but it was not just the financial hit that upset Musk. The government-imposed mandates, in China and then California, inflamed his anti-authority streak.
It was not being pro-Science that prevented Musk from embracing measures that proved ineffective against SARS-CoV-2, but a mindless anti-authority attitude. (Keep in mind that the author is a huge hater of Donald Trump, a passionate supporter of Democrats, and a believer in cloth masks against an aerosol virus)
When California issued a stay-at-home order later in March, just when the Fremont factory was starting to produce the Model Y, he became defiant. The factory would remain open. He wrote in a company-wide email, “I’d like to be super clear that if you feel the slightest bit ill or even uncomfortable, please do not feel obligated to come to work,” but then he added, “I will personally be at work. My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself.” After county officials threatened to force the plant to shut down, Musk filed suit against the orders. “If somebody wants to stay in their house, that’s great,” Musk said. “But to say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom.” He kept the plant open and challenged the county sheriff to make arrests. “I will be on the line with everyone else,” he tweeted. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.” Musk prevailed. The local authorities reached an agreement with Tesla to let the Fremont factory stay open so long as certain mask-wearing and other safety protocols were followed. These were honored mainly in the breach, but the dispute died down, the assembly line churned out cars, and the factory experienced no serious COVID outbreak.
The controversy became a factor in his political evolution. He went from being a fanboy and fundraiser for Barack Obama to railing against progressive Democrats.
(It cannot be that Democrats evolved, e.g., from being against same-sex marriage to being in favor of gender affirming surgery for teenagers. It is Musk who changed.)
Musk does not love our nation’s second most famous warrior against COVID-19:
… he wasn’t impressed by Joe Biden. “When he was vice president, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.”
“Biden is a damp sock puppet in human form,” Musk responded [regarding Biden’s celebration of GM as the most important company in EVs at a time when GM was shipping 26 cars per calendar quarter]
Nor did Musk appreciate the evolution of California progressivism:
“I came there when it was the land of opportunity,” he says. “Now it’s the land of litigation, regulation, and taxation.”
Isaacson, much as he hates Republicans, attributes Musk’s mind-poisoning to libertarianism. But for this poison, Isaacson suggests, Musk might still be among the righteous. How stupid are libertarians? Isaacson describes Peter Thiel not wearing a seatbelt while Musk drives and crashes a McLaren:
Thiel got a ride with Musk in his McLaren. “So, what can this car do?” Thiel asked. “Watch this,” Musk replied, pulling into the fast lane and flooring the accelerator. The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in the air like a flying saucer. Parts of the body shredded. Thiel, a practicing libertarian, was not wearing a seatbelt, but he emerged unscathed.
Isaacson doesn’t explain why John Stuart Mill and Milton Friedman are against seatbelts in supercars. (I would like an explanation of why the rear axle broke! A pothole on Sand Hill Road?!? Quelle horreur! Acceleration per se doesn’t seem like a plausible cause. In the video below, Musk says “the rear end broke free”; Isaacson, the Harvard graduate, may not have understood that this describes wheelspin, not the rear axle and wheels coming off the car.)
Speaking of coronapanic, Musk and Bill Gates meet in March 2022. They had to agree to disagree on Mars colonization (Gates thinks lacks practical value, as do I, though planning to get to Mars means that if you fail your engineering work makes getting to orbit dirt cheap.)
At the end of the tour, the conversation turned to philanthropy. Musk expressed his view that most of it was “bullshit.” There was only a twenty-cent impact for every dollar put in, he estimated. He could do more good for climate change by investing in Tesla. “Hey, I’m going to show you five projects of a hundred million each,” Gates responded. He listed money for refugees, American schools, an AIDS cure, eradicating some mosquito types through gene drives, and genetically modified seeds that will resist the effects of climate change. Gates is very diligent about philanthropy, and he promised to write for Musk a “super-long description of the ideas.”
Gates had shorted Tesla stock, placing a big bet that it would go down in value. He turned out to be wrong. By the time he arrived in Austin, he had lost $1.5 billion. Musk had heard about it and was seething. Short-sellers occupied his innermost circle of hell. Gates said he was sorry, but that did not placate Musk. “I apologized to him,” Gates says. “Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.” The dispute reflected different mindsets. When I asked Gates why he had shorted Tesla, he explained that he had calculated that the supply of electric cars would get ahead of demand, causing prices to fall.
[after Gates keeps hitting Musk up for cash] “Sorry,” Musk shot back instantly. “I cannot take your philanthropy on climate seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.”
“At this point, I am convinced that he is categorically insane (and an asshole to the core),” Musk texted me right after his exchange with Gates. “I did actually want to like him (sigh).”
Musk’s investments in Neuralink should be considered nonprofit donations in my opinion. This is blue sky research of the type that governments typically fund because there is no reasonable expectation of a return on investment.
I was chatting with an Ivy League graduate who is a loyal Democrat and who follows the mainstream media. He shared that he had learned from news articles that the recently deceased Dianne Feinstein was the first female U.S. senator and, therefore, a true pioneer for her gender ID.
The first female U.S. senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, represented Georgia for a single day in 1922, and the first woman elected to the Senate, Hattie Caraway, was elected from Arkansas in 1932. Fifty-nine women have served in the upper house of the United States Congress since its establishment in 1789.
A gun owner with a concealed carry permit who wanted to deny her subjects the right to carry guns, Ms. Feinstein was also an early crusher of 2SLGBTQQIA+ dreams. A 1982 NYT article:
Mayor Dianne Feinstein today vetoed a San Francisco city ordinance that would have extended to live-in lovers, including homosexuals, the health insurance benefits that now go to husbands and wives of city employees.
The ordinance she vetoed was introduced by Harry Britt, the only publicly homosexual member of the Board of Supervisors. Mr. Britt was traveling in the East today, but his office released a statement in which he said that ”by vetoing this law, Mayor Feinstein has shown it is our nation’s institutions that lack civility. She has done serious harm to the efforts of gay men and lesbians to gain acceptance and understanding of our life styles.”
Dana van Gorder, a member of Mr. Britt’s staff, said the Mayor ”does not believe in the spirit of this legislation whatsoever.” The spokesman said that the homosexual community ”has had a sense for some time that she has viewed us with a certain moral judgment.”
At dusk about 200 people, many identifying themselves as homosexuals, gathered at the City Hall steps in response to a call for a protest. They cheered speakers who criticized Mayor Feinstein, and they chanted ”Dump Dianne.”
She sought to collect income tax and other revenues in Deplorable states, but not to send any money back to them until they accepted Faucism (press release):
The Science of cloth masks was powerful in the summer of 2020. A quote from the above:
“Research shows that masks reduce transmission of the coronavirus. CDC Director Redfield said this surge in COVID-19 cases could end within two months if we adopt ‘universal masking.’… countries that are successfully controlling this virus require masks. So why doesn’t the United States have a national mask mandate?”
(Remember to check cumulative excess deaths to see how those “countries that [were] successfully controlling the virus” eventually fared.)
What are some example articles that communicate to readers that Dianne Feinstein was the first female senator? From the New York Post:
US Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the trailblazing California Democrat who broke gender barriers throughout her five decades in politics, died Thursday night at her Washington, DC home following a number of health scares. She was 90.
The Guardian: “Senator Dianne Feinstein, trailblazer for women in US politics, dies aged 90″.
The Hill: “Senate loses giant in Dianne Feinstein: ‘A trailblazer in every sense of that word’”
New York Times: “Dianne Feinstein, a Trailblazing Senator, Dies at 90″
This is a report on the coronapanic level in Panama observed during a February 2023 visit.
One of the first sights stepping off our Royal Caribbean ship was a mask directive in the duty free shop:
Walking outdoors in the sunshine near the canal:
Two years after coronapanic began, compliance with these indoor and outdoor directives was spotty. Note the chin diapers on the supermarket employees below, for example, and on a gal in an ice cream shop.
On April 1, 2020, the government of Panama introduced a gender-based lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This meant that women and men were only allowed to do essential shopping on alternate days. … An unintended consequence of this measure was that police and private security guards began to single out transgender people for profiling for being out “on the wrong day.” In some cases, they arrested and fined trans people, or prevented them from buying essential items like food and medication. These cases of discrimination occurred when security agents’ visually identified trans people, or after they checked the sex marker on their national identification cards.
Panama was celebrated by the United Nations for its California levels of school closure (more than one year). What were the results achieved by locking up the trans shoppers, kicking kids out of school for 1.5 years, forced masking, and coerced vaccination? Panama ended up with a slightly higher COVID-tagged death rate than no-lockdown, no-mask, no-school-closure Sweden (statista).
What if a Panamanian emerged from his/her/zir/their bunker having survived COVID? Our guide explained that Panamanians pay roughly 20 percent of income in tax. “That covers retirement and health care,” she said. “There is no property tax and you don’t have to pay anything when you go see the doctor.” A tourist from Canada asked if there were long waits to see doctors. “Oh yes,” the guide responded. “Sometimes you have to wait for two weeks.” Women retire at 57, men at 62, and police after 25 years of work (age 43 if they start at 18). Life expectancy is almost the same as in the U.S. (ranking), about 82 for women and 76 for men. Thus, women enjoy 11 additional years of retirement compared to men (5 years from the younger retirement age and 6 years from the longer life expectancy).
One mystery is how the life expectancy in Panama can be comparable to what we have here in the U.S. We are informed that abortion care for pregnant people is life-saving health care. The U.S. is the world’s abortion care capital. By contrast, “Abortion in Panama is illegal except in instances that the pregnancy is life-threatening or the health of the woman is at risk, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. … The punishment for a woman who has an illegal abortion is one to three years in prison. The punishment for a doctor or other person who provides the procedure with the woman’s consent is 3 to 6 years in prison.” (Wikipedia) If abortion care is rare in Panama, how are Panamanians able to live just as long as Americans?
Panama is an underrated tourist destination. The wildlife is as interesting as in Costa Rica. The historic old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is a lot more pleasant than Cartagena. Everything is easier for the traveler because the country is so much richer than these neighbors. Let’s have a look at the old:
Some fancy church interiors:
The “latino style” shop:
(I stopped in to ask directions to the Latinx style shop.)
What pays for it all? Global commerce! Ships going through and also 500,000 containers per year being transferred to another ocean via the Panama Canal Railway.
