Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Wear a mask and get a vaccine so that SARS-CoV-2 can attack you when you’re older and fatter

November 12, 2021November 12, 2021 by philg

Vaccine and mask heresy seeps into the New York Times, via physician-readers commenting on “What We Know So Far About Waning Vaccine Effectiveness”:

Ben: I am a physician. We need to look at risks and benefits of vaccines and masks. The vaccines seem to protect against serious illness and hospitalization and make sense in terms of risk and benefit for adults. But this is no longer a pandemic but this is endemic. We need to understand the endgame. Covid will always be around like the flu even if every human in the world was immunized due to both vaccine failures and animal reservoirs. The best way to prevent serious illness is to reduce obesity as nearly 80% of deaths and hospitalizations are in obese people. This is not fat shaming but fatsplaining. This is why the USA has so many deaths whereas thinner countries have less. Covid is not going [away] even after reaching promised “herd immunity” percentages of 80% if one adds vaccinated and infected people. Also, masks don’t eliminate covid risk but perhaps delay it statistically until we are older and at higher risk. Thus, we just need to accept that this is just another potential way to die. Masking and social distancing worsens obesity with less exercise and walking, depression and suicide, and hurting kids development as they should be seeing faces. The masks at this point are worse than the disease. And let nature take care of the unvaccinated (and vaccinated) instead of dividing the country. We ban the unvaccinated from work but don’t ban obesity which is a higher risk? I am over covid and want to live my remaining years in peace without masks.
Jeff: @Ben Totally agree. As physicians we are constantly reminded of what an incredibly unhealthy society we have become. Nearly every aspect of medical care is complicated by obesity. It is really impressive that as a disease that has never existed before, COVID is yet again trying to smack us across the face of how unhealthy we are. All the politicized articles written early in the pandemic about how badly the US was performing relative to other countries provided zero context about the biggest factor for the disparity . . . The US is incredibly fat! That 50% of a [country’s] population is looked at as high risk for COVID is deplorable. If half the money/effort spent of COVID related stimulus/prevention were given to improving the daily health of our country, we would save exponentially more lives than COVID itself will ever claim.

These docs raise the same point that I’ve been making here for more than 1.5 years, i.e., that locking people at home next to their refrigerators is not the most obvious optimum public health response to a virus that attacks the fat and sedentary. (And in Massachusetts and California, at least, both brownie mix stores and marijuana shops were deemed “essential” so people were encouraged to stay home, smoke dope, and consume pans of brownies whenever the munchies prompted.) What’s new? The idea that, to the extent natural immunity via infection matters, avoiding COVID-19 could actually be harmful because you’ll just get it when you’re older and fatter. (Counterargument: those magic antiviral drugs we’ve read about will actually work, unlike most previously touted magic drugs, such as Prozac, whose initial efficacy claims could not be replicated.)

They also point out that, if we had budgeted $10 trillion and a lot of individual effort/sacrifice, there are many things that we could do that would save a lot more life-years than continuing to fight in the COVID trenches. (I began pointing this out at least as early as March 26, 2020, e.g., with Why do we care about COVID-19 deaths more than driving-related deaths? and then augmented in Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph?)

If we’re serious enough about public health to suspend the Constitution, e.g., the First Amendment right to assemble, and to close schools, why aren’t we serious enough to ban sweets and junk food until American average BMI trends downward? Why is it legal for a pharmacy to have a sale on candy (as CVS often does)? Although I love them, why is it legal for potato chips to be sold in the U.S.? If restaurants are required to check vaccination tags, why aren’t restaurants required to check BMI for every customer and then limit the number of calories served to customers over a threshold of 25?

From a CVS in Newton, Maskachusetts, October 2021 (enter past a bunch of signs regarding protecting oneself from COVID-19 via masking, then walk out with 10,000 calories of chocolate):

(Ben, the first physician quoted, also says what the Swedish MD/PhDs said in February 2020: you’re not going to avoid COVID, no matter how long you hide in your bunker. So don’t change your lifestyle unless you’re happy to make it a permanent change. That’s another great argument in favor of moving to Florida! The outdoor lifestyle protects against every kind of respiratory virus and it is not an onerous adaption to sit with friends at sidewalk tables or to play tennis outdoors rather than to sit home alone and watch TV.)

Also in the comments for this article, from a Russian trying to influence our elections?

Yuriy: If the vaccines lose effectiveness against infection over time (something that we have known already for a couple of months) then there is no point to vaccine mandates! Vaccine mandates are about protecting other people and Covid spread. If vaccines don’t do that then they are just protecting vaccinated people from hospitalization and death, which sounds like a personal health choice. What is the point of forcing resistant adults and children (who have almost no risk to Covid) to get vaccinated when this doesn’t stop virus spread and just causes conflict in society?

I think the best answer to Yuri is that the government’s forced vaccinations wouldn’t cause conflict if people would #FollowScience and accept vaccinations. Alternatively, those who refuse vaccinations for themselves and their 5-year-olds can be placed in Protection Camps. Then they’re no longer part of “society” and, thus, society becomes conflict-free.

Let’s take a look at Germany (lockdowns, mask orders, and mandatory vaccine paper checks) versus the Swedish Free State:

It certainly look consistent with what Dr. Ben said, above. The Germans completely transformed their society and ended up deferring, rather than avoiding, a lot of COVID-19 cases. Perhaps Germany will ultimately have a slightly lower COVID-19 death rate than Sweden’s, due to the fact that more of the infections are coming after vaccination and better drug therapies, so this will be a “success” from the point of view of folks who judge a society’s success by the sole criterion of COVID leaderboard position.

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Veterans Day book: Call Sign Kluso

November 11, 2021November 12, 2021 by philg

For pilots who want to observe Veterans Day by learning about how the F-15 is flown in combat, let me recommend Call-Sign KLUSO: An American Fighter Pilot in Mr. Reagan’s Air Force by Rick Tollini.

How about those tight formations that we see when the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds perform. That’s how you go into a fight, right? Wrong! Here is how 4 F-15s are arranged to head into Iraq from Saudi Arabia at night:

The basic formation was a little bit wider than a normal daytime formation just to assist with flight path deconfliction and to reduce the workload on the wingman spending time on formation management. About 5nm between #1 (flight lead) and #3 (element lead) with the wingman on the outside of the formation, about 2–3nm away from their respective flight leads. This doubled the total width of the formation from 5nm wide to about 10nm wide. A standardized altitude deconfliction plan was also utilized based on a briefed “base” altitude for the flight lead. So, if the flight lead’s “base” altitude was 25,000 feet, then #3 might be 2,000 feet below, and the wingmen would be 1,000–2,000 feet above their respective flight leads. Any time the “base” altitude changed, the flight members would flex to the new relative deconfliction altitudes. Having the wingman slightly above their flight leads also helped with visual mutual support for the wingmen. That’s right … “visual” at night without NVGs.

If the F-15 is so great, why bother with four at a time? Why not send one to defeat the enemy?

A cold hard fact that has been forgotten and relearned, usually through misfortune, is that a single fighter jet is not an effective combat unit and is more of a liability than anything else. The enemy will grow a brave heart when they know they have a solitary American fighter pilot alone in his aircraft. Even if they should lose a pilot or jet of their own, they will attack confident of downing such a precious prize as an American fighter. If there is another supporting fighter within visual range, then the enemy will begin to lose his courage and doubt his own ability to be victorious. It’s called Mutual Support, and it is the bedrock of air combat tactics. I learned that lesson at my first COPE THUNDER, and I would never forget it.

How did our USAF heroes stay healthy without the marijuana that Maskachusetts and California say is “essential” and, from a medical point of view, super beneficial?

The other key player in this plan was Kory, our flight doc. Kory had been issued a truckload of amphetamines (specifically Dexedrine), or uppers, and the previously mentioned Restoril (downers), and he would be our acting “dealer.” All pilots at some point in our careers had been tested with both pills to insure we did not have any unusual side effects (other than the desired or expected ones), but most of us had never actually experienced using either regularly. The Restoril was to make sure that we could get to sleep quickly and soundly for the small window of opportunity we would have each day between combat missions. The Dexadrine was intended to keep us alert (and in some cases from actually falling asleep) in the cockpit.

Reminding us to “check 6” even after we vanquish the only cause of death that is now on anyone’s mind (i.e., coronaplague):

My roommate for the duration of the deployment was Capt Rory “Hoser” Draeger. Hoser was actually a young flight lead in the Dirty Dozen when I first arrived at Kadena. … I knew he was an outstanding aviator and, being from Kadena originally, he was somebody I could count on to lead some of our more difficult large-force missions. Also, we would need everybody we could get. Hoser and I were not “best friends” by any means, but we got along well together and gave each other “space” as roommates. Not too long after the war, I received news that Hoser was killed in a car accident. Apparently, he was a passenger riding with some friends when the driver lost control and went off the road. Very sad … and ironic to survive a war and be killed in a random accident.

Tollini writes about the modern rules-bound military compared to the 1980s, in which it was, according to him, more about personal responsibility:

The USMTM [a military training liaison base] in Tabuk had very nice apartments (for the residents only, not us), a great swimming pool, and its best asset … a fully stocked bar! There was supposed to be no alcohol allowed on base while we were in-country, but the USMTMs were different. They were a little piece of “America” and had immunity from local laws and customs. So when the Gorillas first arrived in Tabuk all the pilots would head to the USMTM on any given night they could, that is until General Order No. 1 (GO#1) was issued.
GO#1 would (in my opinion) become one of the worst decisions ever in the annals of military history. It was issued by General Norman Schwarzkopf (the commander of US Central Command/CENTOM) and the order stated there would be absolutely NO drinking in the Kingdom. This was hopefully to show “solidarity” with our Saudi hosts and not insult their cultural sensibilities. Even most Saudis I met who heard about this no-drinking order thought it was crazy. They really didn’t care if we drank as long as we behaved.
I now believe the long-term effect of this original GO#1 was that it tried to mandate good order and discipline via a “general order,” rather than to establish this with good leadership and respect up and down the chain of command. From then on, any chance a commanding officer had to create an appearance of “good order and discipline” quickly and easily, he would just start signing out these types of “General Orders” and absolve himself of any responsibility to actually “lead” beyond that point. It was such a crock, and the troops could see right through it. I saw it as kind of the opposite of how Opec Hess treated us that first day in Thailand. Our leadership no longer trusted us. If you think there might be a problem with behavior and leadership in today’s military, I believe the root cause goes all the way back to Stormin’ Norman’s original GO#1.

The F-15 could use a $659 ashtray ($1,727 when we adjust 1985 dollars to today’s Bidie-bucks):

It went so far that Cherry and I (and some others) would smoke in the jets while flying our DCA CAP missions. I had found that I could use these little plastic powdered-lemonade drink cups (which had a foil lid) that fit perfectly between the light control panel knobs on the right side of the F-15 cockpit. So, I had a little ashtray I could use in flight, and when I was done I would just wrap the foil cover back over the top of the cup to prevent spillage. It was perfect. We didn’t smoke when anything important was going on, but for a four- or six-plus hour mission boring holes in the sky, it was a nice “break” to look forward to every hour or so. If I ever took off without a pack of smokes and lighter in my G-suit pocket, I knew it was going to be a long and grueling flight.

After years spent in Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines:

Saudi Arabia was a strange country. I don’t mean that necessarily in a bad way, but just that it felt “strange” being there. I had been in a lot of foreign countries, but this was the first time I had felt like such a “foreigner,” like I did not belong there. The people were nice enough, and most of us even made friends with many of the Saudi pilots. But it just always felt like there was some kind of barrier, as if we were the houseguests that had impolitely overstayed our visit. Our hosts would never say anything to us, but I felt they probably really preferred it if we would leave, as soon as possible. And, frankly, I felt the same way.

From the Boeing web site (source of the above photo):

The F-15 is an affordable, low-risk solution that maintains capacity and adds capability to the U.S. Air Force while preserving the Air Superiority and Homeland Defense missions.

Given the rate of inflation in Cirrus SR22 prices, the F-15 might well be considered “affordable” soon enough!

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Prepare for a worldwide market crash

November 10, 2021November 10, 2021 by philg

I had some cash sitting in a checking account due to selling our house in Maskachusetts and becoming a renter here in the Florida Free State (a relocation analysis). If this had happened a few years ago, I might have let the money sit in checking until the day when it is time to get super extra stupid again and buy a house here in Florida (trade “call the landlord and open the door to the maintenance guys one hour later” for “spend a week begging contractors to come over”). But with inflation for the stuff that we might actually buy, e.g., houses, aircraft, etc., running at 20 percent annually, “park it in checking” didn’t seem viable.

I didn’t have enough confidence in the U.S. dollar or the Democrats’ muscular central management of the economy to buy more U.S. stocks. Buying bonds seems literally crazy given that the interest rate is lower than the official inflation rate. Buying TIPS doesn’t seem wise given that they’re pegged to the official inflation rate, which is way lower than the inflation rate for our family. So… that leaves non-U.S. stocks. The euro seems to have some of the same inflation risks as the USD, with governments using the same logic that Americans used from 1961 through 1975 with respect to the Vietnam War (“if we just throw some more cash at fighting this enemy, we cannot be defeated”; the enemy today, of course, is SARS-CoV-2).

But my beloved Sweden has its own currency! And that currency is up quite a bit against the euro (i.e., of course I am late to the party!):

(The dollar has lost roughly 10 percent of its value against Swedish krona as well.)

From Best way to invest in Sweden? (September):

I do think the Swedes will prosper in the long run due to superior mental health, a focus on something other than COVID-19, their kids having an extra year of in-person school compared to kids in U.S. cities, etc. I want to invest in Sweden with a 10-20-year horizon.

I have now put my money where my mouth is. The house sale proceeds are, as of today, in EWD, a high-fee index fund of Swedish stocks that I never could figure out how to buy directly as an American.

However, since I am the world’s dumbest investor, if I have moved money from cash to stock that can only mean one thing going forward: a worldwide stock market crash (or at least a crash in the Swedish market and/or currency!). You have been warned!

In the best tradition of Wall Street, if this investment outperforms, I will claim credit as a farsighted genius, second only to Mileva Marić, who explained the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and formulated the special and general theories of relativity. If this investment underperforms, I will say that it is my version of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Investing, in which I support a society that had the courage to carry on educating children, working, socializing, breathing without masks, etc. despite recognizing that COVID-19 would kill some people (albeit at a much lower rate than in a lot of countries that were celebrated for their mask and shutdown orders). The Swedes even managed to get through 2020 and 2021 without the marijuana that California and Massachusetts governors/covidcrats deemed “essential” (“Cannabis in Sweden is illegal for all purposes.”).

Readers: What are doing right now for protecting savings from Bidenflation?

“Annual inflation hits 30-year high” (The Hill, today): The consumer price index (CPI), which tracks inflation for a range of staple goods and services, rose 0.9 percent last month and 6.2 percent in the 12-month period ending in October, the highest rate in the U.S. in 30 years. Analysts broadly expected the CPI to rise by 0.5 percent last month, up from a gain of 0.4 percent in August, and 5.8 percent over the past year.

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Let’s Go, Brandon

November 10, 2021November 4, 2021 by philg

I wonder if this Instacart worker gets “Let’s Go, Brandon” messages multiple times per day. Text messages after ordering some canned pumpkin for Mindy the Crippler from the local Publix:

(Brandon M. turned out to be a super nice guy!)

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Bidenflation will make it easier for rich people to avoid estate tax?

November 9, 2021November 9, 2021 by philg

President Biden promised chicken soup for our envious souls in the form of taking money away from rich people. But the inflation associated with Big Government and Bigger Government is already making rich corporate executives richer (easier to meet targets expressed in nominal dollars; see Is Elon Musk one of the bigger winners from inflation?). A recent Bloomberg article makes it look as though inflation also makes it much easier to work around the estate tax. From “The Hidden Ways the Ultrarich Pass Wealth to Their Heirs Tax-Free”:

First, Knight cycled millions of Nike shares through a series of trusts that effectively moved billions of dollars’ worth of stock price gains from his estate to his heirs, tax-free. Then he put most of his remaining shares into a vehicle called Swoosh LLC and let a trust controlled by his son, Travis, purchase a stake at a big discount. The chain of trusts let hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends flow to Knight’s heirs with him covering the income taxes. All this planning also ensured his family would retain control of his sneaker empire.
The foundation of Knight’s strategy is the grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT. His first step was to set up nine GRATs, which successfully transferred Nike shares now worth $6.1 billion to heirs tax-free from 2009 to 2016. Two other GRATs that show up in public filings received about $970 million of unspecified assets from Knight. The filings don’t disclose the ultimate beneficiaries, but Lord says that, based on how family wealth transfers usually work, they might include the family of Knight’s late son, Matthew, who died in 2004.
Officially, gifts are taxable: If you send someone more than $15,000 per year, you’re supposed to file a separate gift tax return, with the total counting toward your $11.7 million lifetime estate-and-gift-tax exemption. (Double that for married couples.) Once you reach that threshold, you must pay a 40% levy. But giving heirs the right to profit, risk-free, from your investments? Not a taxable gift if you route it through a GRAT. “It looks like the heirs didn’t receive anything of value, but in fact they have been given all of the upside growth potential,” says Ray Madoff, a law professor at Boston College.
[section on the grantor-retained annuity trust machinery]
Put in assets, such as stocks, that have a good chance of making money over time. Technically this isn’t a taxable gift, as long as the GRAT is set to repay you the initial value of the assets in the form of an annuity, usually over two or three years.
If the assets go up in value during this period, the gains can stay in the GRAT, minus a (usually low) minimum rate tied to interest rates. Whatever’s left goes to the heirs tax-free.
If the assets drop in value during that time, your heirs are unaffected. You can pretend the GRAT never existed and try again. The more GRATs you set up—and some of the ultrarich open one monthly—the higher the chance some will succeed.

In our current inflationary environment, it is a lot more likely that assets in the trust will go up in value (expressed in nominal dollars rather than real (inflation-adjusted)). Thus, the more money President Biden and the Democrats promise to spend, the richer the children and grandchildren of today’s super rich should become. American tax law in general and estate-/trust-related law in particular are so complex that it takes a $600/hour lawyer to figure it all out and a layperson’s head will be left spinning, but I think the Bloomberg article is worth reading.

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Scientists on the gridiron

November 9, 2021November 9, 2021 by philg

I love the imagery in this New York Times headline: “Scientists Fight a New Source of Vaccine Misinformation: Aaron Rodgers”. Here’s how it renders, for those who are not loyal subscribers:

From the article:

So when news broke that he tested positive for the coronavirus last week and was unvaccinated, Rodgers justified his decision to not get vaccinated by speaking out against the highly effective vaccines and spewing a stream of misinformation and junk science. Medical professionals were disheartened not just because it will make it harder for them to persuade adults to get vaccinated, but because they are also starting to vaccinate 5- to 11-year-olds.
“When you’re a celebrity, you are given a platform,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “When you choose to do what Aaron Rodgers is doing, which is to use the platform to put out misinformation that could cause people to make bad decisions for themselves or their children, then you have done harm.”

Scientists in their lab coats are rushing from the 20-yard line trying to get to the touchdown zone in which 5-year-olds are meekly waiting for their injections with the emergency use authorization (i.e., not FDA-approved) vaccine that will protect them from a killer of 82-year-olds. The scientists are bravely knocking over linebackers, cornerbacks, and safeties.

Separately, it is tough to find a reference for this, but I think that Richard Nixon said “You don’t want to be a candy-ass on the gridiron.”

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Does the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill give us some insight into the cost of immigration?

November 8, 2021November 7, 2021 by philg

With the U.S. already having spent more, as a percentage of GDP, on infrastructure than Germany (previous post), how did we get to the point that we needed to spend another $1.2 trillion? (sounds like a lot, but maybe $1.2 trillion will be the price of a Diet Coke by the time some of these projects are completed)

In How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure? I did a rough calculation that every new migrant would cost the U.S. $250,000 in infrastructure expense. At that rate, the $1.2 trillion will build (or repair) enough infrastructure for 4.8 million migrants (as many people as live in Los Angeles+San Jose (the cities themselves) or about four years of legal immigration under the pre-2021 rules).

So, maybe we could look at this as catching up to the costs of the immigrants who arrived since 2017. On the other hand, is the money going to be spent in states where immigrants have settled and/or where population is growing? And on the third hand, why is infrastructure spending federalized? Don’t individual states have a better idea of what infrastructure is required? Wouldn’t it make more sense for states to tax, borrow, and spend on infrastructure as necessary than to send money up to central planners and have them, sitting in Washington, D.C., try to figure out whether a bridge that is 2,500 miles away should be rebuilt?

Here in Florida, infrastructure spending includes some awesome signage:

“Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico, by a Harvard professor): if we ignore costs such as traffic and school congestion, there are some financial benefits to natives from low-skill immigration, but they all go to the rich at the expense of the poor and working class (i.e., low-skill immigration transfers wealth from American workers to American landlords and corporation owners)

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Harvard Art Museums shows us the alternate universe of non-profits

November 8, 2021November 8, 2021 by philg

Here’s a request for money from the Harvard Art Museums, recently received in the mail:

They lead with the fact that they were closed for 1.5 years. Surrounded by fully open (“essential” according to the governor) marijuana and liquor stores, adults meeting in restaurant-bars after Tinder matches, etc., the Harvard Art Museums decided that they would all sit at home and they want potential donors to know that. If we assume that the primary mission of an art museum is to have people come in and look at art, the non-profit did nothing to further their primary mission during this 1.5-year period, despite the fact that they were ordered closed by the governor for only about 3 months of the 18-month closure that they proudly highlight.

(Even now, they won’t be executing all that aggressively on their primary mission; visitors have to make online reservations before showing up, a significant discouragement to those strolling around (fully masked, of course!) Harvard Square.)

Readers: Does this seem like a good illustration of the alternate universe inhabited by non-profit organizations? A for-profit enterprise wouldn’t expect to win points with customers by highlighting more than a year of voluntary closure, would it?

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Wisdom from Greta Thunberg at COP26

November 7, 2021November 7, 2021 by philg

The wisest comment regarding the most recent mass in-person gathering by the elite? “Greta Thunberg tells protest that COP26 has been a ‘failure'” (BBC):

Ms Thunberg said: “It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.”

She described the UN climate change summit as a “two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah” to “maintain business as usual” and “create loopholes to benefit themselves”.

The logical inconsistency of the gathering was impressive, even by coronapolicy standards. We’re in a climate crisis, so we’ll agree to stop cutting down forests nine years from now (in 2030; BBC: “Experts welcomed the move, but warned a previous deal in 2014 had ‘failed to slow deforestation at all’ and commitments needed to be delivered on.”).

[As with Ayn Rand, I can agree with Greta Thunberg on the description but not the prescription.

She said: “We need immediate drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen.
“The people in power can continue to live in their bubble filled with their fantasies, like eternal growth on a finite planet and technological solutions that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere and will erase all of these crises just like that.

If this is a 100-year problem, as we’ve been previously told that it is by the climate modelers, why does it make sense to try to deal with it via 2021 technology? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_aviation was not very impressive compared to what is doable today. If we need to cool off the planet in 2081, won’t we be able to ask a Chinese space company (“Red Origin”?) to pull down the shades for a few days? Greta T. says this is a “technological solution that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere”, but even a 60-year horizon is nearly impossible to predict. The integrated circuit (“chips”) revolution was transforming lives in the 1980s (PCs and dial-up networks). The first inkling of the modern semiconductor transistor was in 1925 (Julius Edgar Lilienfeld), but it wasn’t until after William Shockley and colleagues at Bell Labs made a prototype in late 1947 that anyone could reasonably have begun to foresee the 1980s tech landscape. (so maybe 30 years is about the limit for the smartest person with the best crystal ball?) From the point of view of someone in 1947, the world of 2007 was, in fact, packed with technological solutions that had suddenly appeared seemingly out of nowhere and the world of 2047 will be yet more advanced (maybe you’ll be able to find an Xbox Series X in stock at Walmart by then!). Furthermore, we don’t have to go it alone. If we go back 60 years from today, China was suffering from famine and poverty in the Great Leap Forward. India was deeply impoverished. Taiwan was not a place to get advanced electronic components. Korea was recovering from a war, not making OLED panels, etc.]

No really related… carbon sequestration Palm Beach style:

How’s the Climate Change summit in Glasgow going? (“For nearly two years, the global elite have been telling the peasantry not to gather across households for fear of spreading deadly SARS-CoV-2. The global elite have closed borders as well (except for the U.S. southern border, which must remain open), because one certainly wouldn’t want to give a variant virus a chance to infect a new area. It is doubly bad when people from different countries mix. Since at least 2015, when elites gathered in Paris via Gulfstream, elites have been telling the peasants not to emit CO2.”)

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