Internment camps for the unvaccinated?

by philg

Nobody loved my previous modest proposal: Euthanize the unvaccinated?

Here’s another idea for keeping the righteous safe from those who deny #Science… internment camps for the unvaccinated. Korematsu v. United States affirmed FDR’s decision to send Japanese-Americans into camps. World War II was a bad situation, but Japanese-Americans were a minor and speculative threat. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution did not apply #BecauseEmergency.

Consider that COVID-19, at least according to our media, has already killed far more Americans than died in World War II (and the death of an 82-year-old with diabetes and cancer is actually more tragic than the death of a healthy 18-year-old soldier). So the emergency is far more severe right now than whatever we had concerning us in 1942 when Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. This is certainly no time to let purported Constitutional rights interfere with public health.

We are also informed that the unvaccinated are 99.2 percent responsible for spreading coronaplague and for COVID-19 deaths. The unvaccinated are a clear and present danger to themselves and others.

Isn’t the logical next step placing the unvaccinated into internment camps for their own protection? “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens” (PLOS, 2015):

Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. Here we show experimentally that immunization of chickens against Marek’s disease virus enhances the fitness of more virulent strains, making it possible for hyperpathogenic strains to transmit. Immunity elicited by direct vaccination or by maternal vaccination prolongs host survival but does not prevent infection, viral replication or transmission, thus extending the infectious periods of strains otherwise too lethal to persist. Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.

The only way to keep the unvaccinated safe from the super-COVID that we’re breeding by vaccinating those who were never at significant risk (with an imperfect vaccine) is to place the unvaccinated into camps where they can be isolated from the vaccinated population.

Readers: What do you think of this idea? And could Andrew Cuomo be repurposed to run one of the camps? He has experience ordering the infected into nursing homes. (But if he hadn’t done that, the hospital situation could have been worse; see Our hero’s hospital is full (but not with patients who should be there).) Maybe Cuomo could be tasked with rounding up the unvaccinated and ordering them into the Protection Camps. If that’s too big a task for one person, Cuomo could be in charge of outreach to young unvaccinated women.

Loosely related… a fixer-upper in Bodie, California, in the same dry Eastern Sierra environment as Manzanar.

Full post, including comments

Envy in the Home Depot parking lot

by philg

In prep for our move to the Florida Free State, we stopped at Home Depot in Waltham, Maskachusetts to pick up some packing supplies and a trash barrel (out of stock, of course, like everything else in the U.S. economy).

Here’s a rare situation in which the owner of a Ferrari 458 Italia would have to be envious regarding our Honda minivan:

(And what do they sell at Home Depot that would fit into a Ferrari?)

Readers: What do you think about the yellow brake calipers? Has this trend run its course, so to speak? Why can’t wheels be wheels, including everything that is part of the wheels? Why do they have to be part of the body?

Full post, including comments

COVID-19 is sure to kill you, but life insurance rates haven’t changed

by philg

I’m preparing to teach a class at Florida Atlantic University and one of my talking points will be “look at insurance rates if you want to understand the risk of data loss.” In other words, a risk cannot be unquantifiable if there are insurance companies willing to sell coverage for that risk.

Then it occurred to me that we could calibrate our level of coronapanic to what insurance companies are doing. The media informs us that life expectancy has plummeted in the United States. Healthy young people are being felled by the mighty Delta variant and it is urgent for them to get vaccinated (so that the headline can read “Healthy young vaccinated person killed by COVID-19″? See “Nearly 60% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Israel fully vaccinated”).

Insurance companies do have a health screening procedure for their larger policies, e.g., trying to exclude those with heart conditions, morbid obesity, etc. If COVID-19 is a significant risk for those the insurance companies consider “healthy” then rates have surely gone up, right?

“Has COVID-19 made life insurance more expensive? These researchers say they have the answer” (MarketWatch, December 2020):

The coronavirus pandemic has produced grim numbers that keep rising, like case counts, hospitalization rates and deaths.

But there’s [one] that hasn’t increased this year: the cost of life insurance.

“We find limited evidence that life insurance companies increased premiums or decreased policy offerings due to COVID-19,” researchers said Monday in a study analyzing more than 800,000 life insurance-policy quotes from almost 100 companies between 2014 and October 2020.

University of Kentucky and Illinois State University economists did discover fewer policies being extended to the oldest of potential policyholders, above age 75. But even then, the cost of those premiums did not noticeably increase.

How are we able to sustain our high level of panic if the insurance companies aren’t adjusting their rates?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Knocking it out of the park with high-end audio

by philg

I stopped by Goodwin’s High End, an audio store that has been going reasonably strong since 1977. Coronapanic has been great for business. Governors helpfully locked people into their homes where they had little else to do other than seek maximum sound quality. “We have customers in all 50 states now,” said Alan Goodwin.

What’s state of the art in turntables these days? A $120,000 Basis:

What if you want to listen to digital? You download, maybe from hdtracks.com, to a local specialized server and connect that to a microwave-sized D/A converter:

Streaming is generally best for browsing rather than critical listening, but if you must stream, Tidal and Qobuz are reasonable options.

Electrostatic speakers are no longer in. It is all about dynamic speakers, individually priced only slightly more than a new car.

Full post, including comments

Islam is more powerful than Rainbow Flagism?

by philg

An Islamic army has beaten the U.S. military’s proxy force in Afghanistan. The embassy that flew a rainbow flag in June was overrun in August. The U.S. military is nominally secular, but its focus for the past 10 years has been on all things LGBTQIA+ (See “Obama hails end of U.S. military restrictions on gays,” Reuters 2011, for example, and “With Transgender Military Ban Lifted, Obama Cements Historic LGBT Rights Legacy,” NBC 2016).

Given the enormous asymmetry in equipment and funding and the stunningly rapid victory of the Muslim faithful armed with basic rifles, is it now fair to say that Islam is more powerful than America’s current state religion?

Is Rainbow Flagism truly our military’s official religion? The U.S. Air Force:

Our Navy, in 2017:

Seventeen days later, they proudly rammed a cargo ship with a $1.8 billion destroyer and, two months later, smashed a different destroyer into a tanker.

Our Army:

(Trump had a West Point graduate and then a former Army Ranger in the role of Secretary of the Army; Biden appointed someone who had never served in the U.S. military.)

Recruiting new soldiers under the rainbow flag:

Separately, why was it only LGBTI that was celebrated by the U.S. Embassy Kabul? Why not LGBTQIA+?

Perhaps the above post is too negative. Maybe we should say that we’re proud of having spent 20 years and $4 trillion (counting PTSD disability pensions to veterans and all of the welfare that will need to be paid out to Afghan immigrants and their descendants) to transform a nation. When we started the war, Afghanistan was being governed by the Taliban. Now that two decades of war are over and we have run away, the Taliban are governing Afghanistan.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Incentives and Coronapanic

by philg

In response to Recycle Chinese and Soviet anti-landlord propaganda to bolster support for Rochelle Walensky’s rent moratorium order?, Mitch wrote:

So getting vaccinated and slowing the spread increases one’s chance of having to pay rent. The incentives are not well aligned.

(The government says nobody has to pay rent in an area where COVID-19 transmission is occurring (90 percent of current renters covered). And they say that getting the vaccine will stop transmission (except that it doesn’t, according to the same government). Thus, it would be financially irrational for a community of renters to get vaccinated.)

“New Rule Raises Question: Who’ll Pay for All the Covid Tests?” (NYT) also raises a question of how people will respond to economic incentives:

Among the employers taking a different approach is Rhodes College in Tennessee: It will require unvaccinated students without a medical or religious exemption to pay a $1,500 fee per semester to cover the costs associated with a weekly coronavirus testing program.

To avoid paying $3,000 per year, in other words, an unvaccinated student need only get some card stock to feed into a laser printer and create his/her/zir/their own vaccination record. HIPAA would prevent the school from calling whatever “healthcare professional or clinic site” is written down on the record, right? In any case, on my CDC card, the clinic site information does not contain the full city/state nor any contact info. A college would have to be very motivated indeed to try to determine whether a vaccination card is genuine. The vaxyes service checks the lot number against the date of administration, but presumably this would also check out fine if the student copied the information from a virtuous friend who actually got the shots:

An initial review to ensure a match personal identification and vaccine card, vaccine dates make sense, lot numbers, and possible fraud markers.

If colleges want the unvirtuous to admit their thoughtcrime and unreasonable resistance to government pressure, wouldn’t it be smarter to offer the testing at no charge? Then the only incentive to forge a vaccine card would be avoiding the inconvenience and discomfort of weekly testing, not $3,000 in cash on top of that.

Full post, including comments

How the Taliban can fund and run Afghanistan forever

by philg

“The Taliban Have Claimed Afghanistan’s Real Economic Prize” (NYT):

How exactly the Taliban plan to keep all systems running, in one of the poorest countries of the world that depends on more than $4 billion a year in official aid and where foreign donors have been covering 75 percent of government spending, is an urgent question. The state’s bankruptcy has tempted some Western donors into thinking that financial pressure — in the form of threats to withhold humanitarian and development funding — could be brought to bear on the new rulers of Afghanistan. Germany already warned it would cut off financial support to the country if the Taliban “introduce Shariah law.”

But those hopes are misplaced. Even before their blitz into the capital over the weekend, the Taliban had claimed the country’s real economic prize: the trade routes — comprising highways, bridges and footpaths — that serve as strategic choke points for trade across South Asia. With their hands on these highly profitable revenue sources and with neighboring countries, like China and Pakistan, willing to do business, the Taliban are surprisingly insulated from the decisions of international donors. What comes next in the country is uncertain — but it’s likely to unfold without a meaningful exertion of Western power.

One reason foreign donors inflate their own importance in Afghanistan is that they do not understand the informal economy, and the vast amounts of hidden money in the war zone. Trafficking in opium, hashish, methamphetamines and other narcotics is not the biggest kind of trade that happens off the books: The real money comes from the illegal movement of ordinary goods, like fuel and consumer imports. In size and sum, the informal economy dwarfs international aid.

For example, our study of the border province of Nimruz, published this month by the Overseas Development Institute, estimated that informal taxation — the collection of fees by armed personnel to allow safe passage of goods — raised about $235 million annually for the Taliban and pro-government figures. By contrast, the province received less than $20 million a year in foreign aid.

In other words, Afghanistan is in some ways like a super filthy version of Switzerland.

Also interesting, Antonio Garcia Martinez on recent events:

… the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?

And if the situation can’t be mapped, such as Afghanistan or the recent protests in Cuba, it’s utterly ignored for being just completely beyond human comprehension or concern.

This is the true privilege of being an American in 2021 (vs. 1981): Enjoying an imperium so broad and blinding, you’re never made to suffer the limits of your understanding or re-assess your assumptions about a world that, even now, contains regions and peoples and governments antithetical to everything you stand for. If you fight demons, they’re entirely demons of your own creation, whether Cambridge Analytica or QAnon or the ‘insurrection’ or supposed electoral fraud or any of a host of bogeymen, and you get to tweet #resist while not dangling from the side of an airplane or risking your life on a raft to escape.

Full post, including comments

Archival properties of CD-ROMs after 20 years

by philg

As part of the move from Maskachusetts to the Florida Free State, I decided to dispose of all of the CD-ROMs that were lying around in the garage and hangar. These contained backups of long-discarded PCs, 600 MB drum scans that I previously considered too large to maintain on an NAS or local drive, etc.

Despite the crummy storage conditions (temps ranging from 0 degrees to 100 degrees F and high humidity at times), only 2 out of nearly 100 CD-ROMs were problematic for reading with the $75 ASUS Blu-ray burner purchased in 2015 as part of a new PC build. (Would all of you cryptominers please let me know when you’ve stopped so that I can refresh this 6.5-year-old machine?)

Among the scans, I found this one of an early coronascientist:

Here’s a Fuji 617 slide of an oil refinery in Benicia, California:

Check out the detail:

Not bad for old tech and a single image rather than stitched-together multiples!

Full post, including comments

Never say never: Maskachusetts back in masks

by philg

Back in April, when we told friends and neighbors in Massachusetts about the decision to follow the reverse underground railroad to freedom (see Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children), they scoffed at the idea that Florida was a more reliable source of Freedom of Assembly, freedom for children to exercise without masks, in-person education, etc. COVID-19 was finished, vanquished by wise leadership and vaccines. They confidently predicated that, after the 15-month state of emergency officially ended on June 15, 2021, the residents of Massachusetts would never again be ordered to wear masks, to refrain from gathering, to keep children at home, etc.

From our former town:

Effective on 12:01 a.m. August 20, 2021, face coverings are required for all individuals aged two years
and above in all indoor public spaces, or private spaces open to the public…

(the schools, of course, decided months ago that children would be ordered to wear masks, even those children whose parents elect to experiment on them with an emergency authorized vaccine dosage calibrated for adults; this may be moot for urban schools, which closed down for nearly a year during the 2020-2021 coronapanic)

It is currently illegal to be indoors in Provincetown without a mask: “Provincetown Approves Indoor Mask Mandate To Stem Spread” (a bandana is okay when meeting new friends from Grindr!). The situation is similar out across the water: “Three Martha’s Vineyard towns issue mask mandate” (Boston Herald, August 17). How about staying home in the suburbs? Belmont went back into masks on August 9.

Keep in mind that the typical peak period for respiratory viruses in New England is still 3-6 months in the future. The above are the restrictions for the ordinarily flu/cold-free summer (and last summer was more or less COVID-free as well).

The “curve,” according to The Google:

The Leaderboard of the #Science-following Righteous:

(Florida, of course, has a much uglier curve right now, in what seems to be a pattern going forward of high COVID during the peak summer months. But the fact that the government hasn’t caved in to Karens’ demands for muscular orders and restrictions is confidence-inspiring. Unlike most other states, Florida does not pretend that governors’ orders and bandanas are a magic solution for preventing viruses from killing humans. The current COVID-19 wave in Florida is a good stress test for the residents’ and government’s commitment to children, education, freedom, and the Constitution.)

For lockdown state children, from Disney+, Goofy in How to Stay At Home, Episode 1 of which is “How to Wear a Mask”:

Related:

Full post, including comments

Elizabeth Warren’s plane at Oshkosh

by philg

Parked along the main drag at EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) was a homebuilt airplane with Native American portraits airbrushed on the vertical stabilizer:

As we walked by on Day 1 of the event, I said to the kids, “that must be Elizabeth Warren’s plane.” On every subsequent day, we took the 15-passenger hotel shuttle van and, of course, it was always jammed. We would drive by this airplane once in the morning and once in the evening. Every time, our 5-year-old would shout out “Elizabeth Warren’s plane!” for all of the other hotel guests to hear.

(Note the stats on the plane. 2,700 hours to build over 5 years and 3 months. That’s perseverance!)

Coincidentally, at almost the exact moment that our 5-year-old was announcing the Senator’s airplane, I received a group chat message/photo from a friend who is taking his family around the National Parks: “I found Elizabeth Warren’s relatives.”

Related:

Full post, including comments