A stroke 12 hours after the RSV vaccine

by philg

A healthy tennis-playing 77-year-old friend in the Boston suburbs had his first stroke recently. It occurred 12 hours after he was injected, for the first time, with the newish RSV vaccine. He’s recovering reasonably well, but perhaps he needs some better friends. Having heard about the stroke, I called to scold him for not following the “physician, heal thyself” directive (he’s a cardiologist). On hearing that the stroke had followed the RSV vaccine, I said “I was going to ask whether you think it was the booze or the hookers that caused the stroke.”

I learned that there are some treatments for strokes, but they weren’t helpful to him. One is an injection of tPA, but it works only for certain kinds of strokes and must be administered almost immediately. That wouldn’t have been possible for him because he was waiting for four hours in the migrant-clogged ED to be seen (every migrant to Maskachusetts is immediately entitled to unlimited free health care and, as it turns out, there have been few licensed and board-certified physicians among the migrants so there is more demand for the same amount of supply). The new-to-me treatment was to stick a catheter into the brain and hunt for the clot and remove (“retrieve”) it! This seems to have been invented in 2007 by Medtronic and FDA-approved in 2012. NYU explains:

Other than the 12-hour timing coincidence, could there be any connection at all between an RSV vaccine and a stroke? “RSV and Heart Health” (American Heart Association):

Patients face a higher risk of heart attack or stroke immediately after contracting RSV. The highest risk is within three days of infection but remains heightened for up to 90 days.

Hmmm… the disease causes strokes so we can be 100 percent sure that the vaccine designed to fool the immune system into thinking the body has the disease does not cause strokes?

Related:

  • NHS guidelines for the RSV vaccine from the technocrats in Britain (for 75-79-year-olds)
  • the CDC, which previously said “get it at age 60”, now says “get it at age 75” (Science is always to be followed, of course!)
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How long before the Gazans attack Israel again?

by philg

Here’s a recent video from Gaza showing a well-fed population, undamaged buildings, armed and uniformed soldiers, and freshly washed (/waxed?) vehicles:

If nothing else, Israel has convinced the Palestinians that war is a completely sustainable lifestyle during which their population will continue to expand and through which EU and US taxpayers will continue to supply unlimited food, health care, education, shelter, etc.

What are readers’ guesses as to when the Gazans’ next attack on Israel will be? As there are multiple armed groups within Gaza (e.g., the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad), any of which can launch rockets at Israeli civilians, my guess is that the first rocket attacks will be on May 1, 2025 (Israel doesn’t return fire with 155mm artillery shells as one might expect, so there is no cost to the Gazans from attacking Israeli civilians). The October 7, 2023 attack on Israel was hugely popular among Palestinians polled as well as with the “international community” (Democrats in the U.S.; everyone at Harvard, Columbia, Brown; everyone in Ireland, Norway, and Spain; etc.) so it would be rational for the Gazans to do a repeat ASAP. On the other hand, it will take a while for Palestinians to fully rearm and reorganize and also a while for Israelis to become complacent about watching the border. Thus, my guess about the next major attack on Israel is October 7, 2027.

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Rudy Giuliani would still be rich if he’d moved to Florida, bought a house and universal life insurance, and created a Nevada trust

by philg

Happy National Florida Day, celebrated every year on January 25 to commemorate the founding of Florida becoming a state on… March 3, 1845. (CBS makes no attempt to explain the apparent discrepancy.) Let’s check in with someone who should have paid more attention to National Florida Day…

“Giuliani, Slow to Give Up His Belongings, Tests Patience of Court” (New York Times, January 3, 2025):

After several missed deadlines and extensions, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, could be found in contempt of court on Friday for failing to deliver assets worth $11 million to two poll workers he defamed after the 2020 presidential election.

If he is held in contempt, he could face steep penalties, including jail time.

Mr. Giuliani, 80, was set to appear in federal court in Lower Manhattan to justify the stalled handover of some of his most prized possessions, including a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, a collection of Yankees memorabilia, luxury watches and a vintage Mercedes-Benz convertible. (It is unclear whether Mr. Giuliani will appear in person; his lawyers have indicated that he might attend the hearing remotely, citing health problems.)

The transfer was originally scheduled to take place in October, as a down payment on a $148 million judgment that he was ordered to pay to two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss. Mr. Giuliani had claimed, without evidence, that the women had helped steal the presidential election from Donald J. Trump more than four years ago.

After a lifetime of work, the guy was on track to be destitute, with all of the money that he earned going to a couple of election workers in Georgia whom nobody had ever heard of and who nobody today has apparently heard of (the NYT didn’t think it worth mentioning their names). His two children (Wikipedia) were on track to inherit nothing (though maybe indirectly they would because their mom was divorced from their father in 2001).

Giuliani tried to salvage about $3 million in home equity via a foxhole conversion to Floridianism on July 15, 2024 (a primary residence in Florida cannot be acquired by a creditor). Perhaps this was a factor in a settlement (NYT, Jan 16) where he managed to cling to at least some portion of his former wealth.

What could Giuliani have done as soon as he got sued? Or, indeed, at any time during the trial that wiped him out?

  • sold all real estate outside of Florida
  • consolidated all real estate equity into a single no-mortgage primary residence (“homestead”) in Florida (he likes Palm Beach and his maximum estimated net worth was $50 million so he could have easily found a single house to absorb all of his real estate wealth)
  • sold all financial assets and personal property and split the proceeds into a life insurance policy for himself and a Nevada trust for his heirs

(A universal life policy can be tapped into while the insured is still alive and it can function essentially like a high-fee mutual fund account that has the advantage of no taxation of dividends and no taxation of capital gains when it finally pays out (the capital gains exemption is of more value when the insurance policy is held by an irrevocable trust; any investment positions held personally and not sold during a person’s lifetime will “step up” in basis on death anyway).

Florida State Constitution (which also prevents a state personal income tax from being dreamed up by a righteous legislature), Article X, Section 4:

(a) There shall be exempt from forced sale under process of any court, and no judgment, decree or execution shall be a lien thereon, except for the payment of taxes and assessments thereon, obligations contracted for the purchase, improvement or repair thereof, or obligations contracted for house, field or other labor performed on the realty, the following property owned by a natural person:

A relevant statute:

222.14 Exemption of cash surrender value of life insurance policies and annuity contracts from legal process.—The cash surrender values of life insurance policies issued upon the lives of citizens or residents of the state and the proceeds of annuity contracts issued to citizens or residents of the state, upon whatever form, shall not in any case be liable to attachment, garnishment or legal process in favor of any creditor of the person whose life is so insured or of any creditor of the person who is the beneficiary of such annuity contract, unless the insurance policy or annuity contract was effected for the benefit of such creditor.

(222.21, “Exemption of pension money and certain tax-exempt funds or accounts from legal processes”, may also be relevant)

Why a Nevada trust? Steve Oshins explains it better than I can in a lot of scenarios. Florida appears to offer many of the advantages of Nevada for a conventional trust (not a “domestic asset protection trust” that is “self-settled” (the grantor is also the beneficiary)), but it favors beneficiaries to the point that litigation becomes much more likely than with a Nevada, New Hampshire, or South Dakota trust. A beneficiary can sue because he/she/ze/they is unhappy about a trustee’s decision, e.g., to pay some other more virtuous beneficiary more, and not run afoul of a “no contest” clause. Nevada, as well as some other states, are more likely to consider the grantor’s intent as primary. All of that said, a Florida trust for his kids should have been protected from his plaintiffs.

It is kind of surprising to see such poor planning from a person who is a lawyer and who has been surrounded by lawyers. If the jury verdict had gone the other way, Giuliani wouldn’t have given up anything other than some commissions and the right to continue paying New York State and New York City income taxes. The cobbler’s children have no shoes?

So… let’s remember on National Florida Day that Florida is a place where a person can keep much or most of what he/she/ze/they has earned even if positioned for insolvency in the typical state. (One type of predator against whom Florida law is useless: a divorce, alimony, or child support plaintiff! In those situations, having a Nevada DAPT and actually living in Nevada is the solution.)

Background, from state-sponsored NPR:

From state-sponsored PBS, Giuliani can’t use the bankruptcy process to retain enough for a meager personal lifestyle:

When Giuliani filed for bankruptcy, he listed nearly $153 million in existing or potential debts. That included nearly $1 million in state and federal tax liabilities, money he owes lawyers and millions more in potential judgements in lawsuits against him. He estimated at the time he had assets worth $1 million to $10 million.

In his most recent financial filing in the bankruptcy case, he said he had about $94,000 in cash at the end of May and his company, Guiliani Communications, had about $237,000 in the bank. He has been drawing down on a retirement account, worth nearly $2.5 million in 2022. It had just over $1 million in May.

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My father’s x-ray bill is settled… 10 years later

by philg

The January harvest of physical mail included a Quest Diagnostics bill for $5.86 (maybe the third paper one they’ve mailed out regarding this McDonald’s sandwich (not meal)-sized bill; they have a credit card on file and when I tried to pay it by bill number on their web site it couldn’t be found).

More remarkably, I got an insurance statement, addressed to my late mother, about an X-ray that my father purportedly had. Dad died in 2021 (right after getting the second Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine shot), so I was a little surprised to get health care paperwork four years after the fact. On closer inspection, however, the statement was 10 years after the care event.

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Could Costco hire an all-Asian staff in order to make customers happy?

by philg

Today is the Costco shareholder meeting. The Board recommends against studying whether Costco’s race-/gender-/2SLGBTQQIA+-based discrimination programs (“DEI”) are harmful. Here’s their argument for continuing to discriminate, from the annual meeting notice:

And we believe (and member feedback shows) that many of our members like to see themselves reflected in the people in our warehouses with whom they interact.

I’m wondering how much discrimination is permissible based on customer preference in a 21st century American business. Suppose that “many” customers said that Asian cashiers worked faster and more reliably. Could Costco then refuse to hire non-Asians to work as cashiers? Back in the 20th century, companies were told that they couldn’t use the “customer preference” excuse to exclude Black employees. But the Costco Board and its superstar attorneys tell us that the “customer preference” excuse is usable for excluding at least some employees based on race.

Here’s what Grok thinks the employee mix should look like:

ChatGPT seems to have some issues with (1) racism, and (2) counting to four:

(All of ChatGPT’s highly capable and fast-working Costco cashiers appear to identify as white, including in previous answers to prompts.)

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Could Luigi Mangione be a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Health?

by philg

As of last month, the New York City Department of Health wants the peasants back into masks:

Compliance with this advice doesn’t seem to be high. Non-elite New Yorkers are always in crowded settings and few wear masks (though some wear masks over beards, which is a delightful example of human behavior).

Instead of repeatedly tweeting “Mask Up!” maybe the NYC Covidcrats could hire Luigi Mangione as a spokesperson. Mangione could talk about the critical importance of wearing one’s mask 100 percent of the time rather than 99.9 percent of the time (he might well be free today if he hadn’t dropped his mask a couple of times).

In case the above is memory-holed:

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My love that dare not speak its name for the Chevrolet Tahoe’s isolation from Florida highway texture noise

by philg

Loyal readers know me as someone who rejected the SUV religion almost as early and often as I rejected Faucism (saliva-soaked cloth face rags, lockdowns except for liquor and marijuana stores, and school closure as a way of slowing down SARS-CoV-2). Today I have a shameful admission to make… I’m almost in love with the Chevrolet Tahoe.

Our affair began at the Kissimmee, Florida airport. I dropped off the 20-year-old Cirrus SR20 so that it could get a new parachute and rocket at the factory-owned service center there (see Parachute and rocket replacement option for Cirrus owners who love Disney and Harry Potter). I reserved a “car” from Enterprise for the trip back to Stuart, Florida and was dismayed when they gave me what looked like two huge bricks:

By the time I was done with the two-hour trip, though, I marveled at the isolation from road noise. It seemed even quieter than our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey (not to be confused with the 2025 Honda Odyssey that, thanks to continuous reinvestment and diligent engineering work, is exactly the same as our car). On smooth pavement, the noise level might be similar, but Florida highways have a tremendous amount of texture in the concrete. This is presumably to prevent hydroplaning during the Biblical rains that are common here. The interior noise level of almost every car that I’ve been in goes up dramatically when entering an interstate highway or turnpike from an untextured ramp. Not the Tahoe’s.

The car also drove well and the software design seems slightly better overall than for the typical Japanese car and dramatically better than for the typical European car.

Readers: Who else loves this absurdly oversized/overweight GM vehicle?

(One answer: a neighbor here in Abacoa! Below is a photo of the monster Tahoe in front of an efficiently sized minivan (visitor to the neighborhood? We’re one of the few families that has resisted the SUV craze).)

In other news, “Tested: 2025 Honda Odyssey Still Carries the VTEC Torch” (Car and Driver, December 18, 2024):

The Odyssey is also extraordinarily quiet at speed, which is especially impressive with this much frontal area. We measured 66 decibels at a steady 70-mph cruise, which not only bests all the other minivans—including the ID. Buzz by a wide, four-decibel margin—but also beats some luxury juggernauts, such as the Mercedes-Benz E-class. While the Odyssey is the quietest minivan, put your foot down and it becomes the loudest, with 80 decibels of VTEC fury at wide-open throttle.

The Car and Driver numbers are consistent with what I was able to measure in Maskachusetts, but I’m pretty sure that they’re a lot lower than what we experience when we take the Odyssey out on the textured Florida highways. The Tahoe tested at the same 66 dBA back in 2021, but I think it does a better job of keeping that 66 dBA when the road surface isn’t smooth.

Maybe we could find the perfect tire for the Odyssey and that would help? Car and Driver tested purported noise-killing tires back in 2016 and the results were weak:

If the effect appears small by our sound-meter measurements, it seemed even smaller when measured with our eardrums. We struggled to discern any significant improvement, although it probably didn’t help that our back-to-back drives were sepa­rated by a half-hour tire swap.

Continental confusingly claims a 9 dBA reduction in noise, but only at certain frequencies. I thought that the whole point of A weighting was to give a summary that matches human perception. Their ContiSilent tires aren’t available in sizes to fit the Odyssey, unfortunately.

Is it time to get a new vehicle? Our Odyssey is getting a little shabby after 4 years, but it is tough to summon the energy to push through all of the dealer paperwork in order to trade it for a minivan that is identical in all significant respects. It probably wouldn’t be a huge financial hit to buy the new minivan because our existing minivan will start depreciating like a rock soon enough. I don’t feel sufficiently high and mighty to switch allegiance to the Tahoe. Readers: Have you noticed any other car that is especially quiet over textured concrete?

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A California public school processes today’s grief in a neutral manner

by philg

For parents and students in the East Bay (of San Francisco, California), a reminder from a school bureaucrat, who has stayed entirely “neutral”, to “to follow the example set by Presidents Biden and Obama” (for better readability, not in quote style):

DUSD Community,

In the United States, we have always had a peaceful transition of power between presidents, except for January 6, 2021. President Biden and his administration have demonstrated a high level of professionalism during this transition, just as former President Obama did for President-Elect Donald Trump and each president prior.

The 2024 Presidential election was, for the second time, an extremely divisive election for our country. This election has itself become a point of protest for women, Muslim and Jewish communities, immigrants, and people who care about education, Social Security, Medicare, and a whole list of other issues. There has been a great deal of media coverage regarding the Presidential Inauguration that will take place Monday, January 20, in Washington, D.C.

As educators, we have the incredible opportunity to use the presidential election and the second Trump Inauguration as learning opportunities to help promote social justice [Ed: with taxpayer funds] in a way that actively engages our students. The activities, discussions, and student production that we choose to plan around the inauguration are opportunities to further develop the skills and competencies that we are developing in our Graduate Profile. We need to provide a safe environment for our students during the Presidential Inauguration. I encourage students and staff to reach out to each other and work together on shared, peaceful activities at our school sites. Listening to the Inauguration is an appropriate activity, along with providing the space for students to process Trump’s presidential address. Providing these types of activities is a critical responsibility and opportunity for our educational institutions.

Regardless of the activity, we will stay neutral, share the facts, allow for both sides of an issue to be shared, and create a safe place in our classrooms and at our school sites for discussion to take place. We need to follow the example set by Presidents Biden and Obama and engage in activities that support the peaceful transition of power between Presidents.

In addition, I want to reinforce the importance of maintaining the privacy rights of our students. Under FERPA laws and laws that govern the State of California, our schools will not provide any private student information to ICE (Immigrants and Customs Enforcement) without a formal arrest warrant. Our schools must remain safe and secure for all who attend and work in DUSD.

I thank you in advance for staying in school, remaining respectful, and engaging in meaningful dialogue around the upcoming Presidential Inauguration on Monday, January 20, 2025.

Sincerely,

Chris D. Funk
Superintendent
Dublin Unified School District

In other news, I was just in Berkeley, California, a simple 1.5-hour BART ride from Dublin! The laundry detergent is locked up at Target (along with almost everything you’d find at CVS):

Let’s stroll out of Target, past a few outdoor maskers, and into Pegasus Books, which features a permanent panhandler by the front door. Inside we find empty CD cases for fear that someone without a streaming account will steal the precious CDs themselves:

The Followers of Science (TM) are heavy readers of books about witchcraft:

What if a passion for Hamas rule and Socialism could be combined into a single book?

Some miscellaneous titles:

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Mark Zuckerberg’s foxhole conversion to free speech

by philg

American democracy ends in five minutes. We’ll be weeping not only for the end of Science-guided rule but also because of Climate Change since it was forecast to be the coldest Inauguration Day in 40 years.

Let’s try to push through our shared tears to think about Mark Zuckerberg and his foxhole conversion to free speech. From University of Colorado:

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company would fire its fact-checkers and instead rely on its users, with the help of AI, to police Facebook and Instagram for false or misleading posts. The company will also move its content moderation team from California to Texas, lift restrictions designed to protect immigrants and LGBTQ people from hate speech and “dial back” penalties for rule-breakers.

Nathan Schneider, assistant professor of media studies, sees it as a wake-up call to users that it may be time to take back some control over social media platforms.

Rightly, many people are terrified. The company has been quite explicit that it is committed to tolerating and normalizing the discourse of the far right, which includes denying the dignity of people in many communities, particularly queer folks. This move reflects the kind of naked power that this company has always been able to exert over speech, and its ability to determine what the bounds of acceptable speech in society are. As the political winds shift, the company appears to be embracing that shift across its networks. We should be asking ourselves whether we can continue to place so much trust in a company that can abruptly remove protections in this way.

There is a solution, fortunately, according to the giant brains of academia:

What’s hopeful to me is a growing movement of people embracing other kinds of social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky. … You could look at an example like Wikipedia – a widely trusted utility on the internet that is mission-driven and organized as a nonprofit.

Here are Zuck’s plans for today (AP):

Compare to 2020: “Facebook censors The Post to help Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign” (nobody could suggest that people had been bribing then-VP Joe Biden via Hunter Biden or amplify the misinformation that the Hunter Biden laptop was somehow genuine).

A literal-minded friend in a chat group explained the motivation for Zuck’s elimination of (Democrat) fact-checkers just as the White House was turning over to Republican rule:

He has principles

An immigrant from Eastern Europe in the same group:

when did he have principles, before biden or now?

(My main question about Facebook is how it can be so jammed with pig butchers compared to the purported unregulated hellscape of Twitter. Maybe the answer is that Facebook is explicitly about friendship and therefore it makes sense to try to befriend someone on Facebook?)

Related:

(the image, full size below, is interesting because it shows Kamala Harris as a key figure in the U.S. civil rights movement, which started in 1954 (Wikipedia) despite her parents having migrated to the U.S. in 1958 and 1961)

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Sunset of TikTok will be the dawn of a new era of American productivity?

by philg

I visited TikTok.com at 11 pm Eastern time last night:

I wasn’t a regular TikTok user, but I don’t remember any education- or work-related content there. If Americans aren’t viewing TikTok anymore will there be a huge boost in American productivity and GDP as a result of all the TikTok addicts doing something useful instead?

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