If your last #COVID19 vaccine dose was before September 2022 (October 2022 for kids 6 months – 11 years), you need an updated vaccine to help protect against Omicron.
You’re expecting parents of year-old babies who had three shots of Pfizer in the summer of 2022 to take the kids in for additional shots this month? Are you living in an alternate universe of compliance? Please show us a picture of a 1-year-old getting his/her/zir/their 4th shot!
Where are the Super Karens whose existence is assumed by the CDC? The American Academy of Pediatrics tries to keep track of this. Even with more than half of Americans voting for politicians promising lockdowns, school closures, mask orders, and vaccine papers checks, only 11 percent of children 6 months-4 years have been injected:
There is no state in which a majority of young children have received even a single dose of the life-saving vaccine:
The true believers are in D.C. (40%) if we are to believe statistics gathered by a government that can’t run basic services. Vermont’s 33% number looks suspiciously like a guess. The Maskachusetts 25% seems believable, as does the 4% in “walk it off” Florida. California leads in hypocrisy as usual. They want vaccine papers checked and vote for muscular action against SARS-CoV-2, but won’t inject their own kids.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk is taking some heat for saying that mass vaccination might be counterproductive:
I’m pro vaccines in general, but there’s a point where the cure/vaccine is potentially worse, if administered to the whole population, than the disease
Can Musk be right? The best thinker at Stanford Medical School, John Ioannidis, looked at this about 1.5 years ago. “Benefit of COVID-19 vaccination accounting for potential risk compensation” (Nature magazine). Short summary: If the vaccine is less effective than people imagine it is, infections/deaths from COVID will increase as a result of mass vaccination because people change their behavior in response to the false perception of protection. Based on my observations of the righteous, Dr. Ioannidis has been proven correct. Folks who express terror about getting COVID, Medium COVID, or Long COVID are nonetheless out and about on optional trips, e.g., packed airline travel to a theme park.
In a comment on an earlier post, Alex expressed surprise that Joe Biden was popular with a majority of American voters:
This is the guy Republicans are finding tough to beat? It says a lot about how bad everything has become.
My response:
Alex: I don’t think it is surprising that Biden, or anyone else who is a Democrat, is tough to beat. If we model American voters as trying to recapture some of the 50% of the economy that is government, the majority’s best hope is typically a Democrat because the majority of Americans benefit from a larger government (government employee, receiving means-tested benefits, on traditional welfare, married to government employee, government contractor, income too low to pay significant income tax, etc.).
I decided to check the Bidenflation-adjusted numbers for means-tested program (“welfare”) eligibility up in Maskachusetts. In Boston itself, it seems that, as of 2022, a family of 4 could qualify to live in “city-funded” (i.e., taxpayer-funded) housing at below-market rates while earning up to $210,300 per year. The main web page links to a spreadsheet:
The adults in that household would have a strong incentive to vote Democrat!
Related:
“The Work versus Welfare Trade‐Off: 2013” (CATO) found that not working at all in Maskachusetts yielded spending power of 118 percent of what a median-wage worker (“chump”) would have.
“As Thousands Fall Behind on Rent, Public Housing Faces ‘Disaster’” (NYT, 1/23/2023): The New York City Housing Authority collected just 65 percent of the rent it charged in the 12 months leading up to December, the lowest percentage in the agency’s history. … an alarming slide from the annual prepandemic numbers of 90 percent or higher.
The New York Times likes to remind us that we’re facing a climate emergency and/or a climate crisis. Our beloved Spaceship Earth has been infested with too many humans, each of whom emits too much CO2. Last week, however, China released stats showing that the population has leveled off at 1.4 billion. The good old days:
The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible.
Now, facing a population decline, coupled with a long-running rise in life expectancy, the country is being thrust into a demographic crisis that will have consequences not just for China and its economy but for the world.
The entire world is at risk due to China’s failure to push from 1.4 billion up toward 2.8 billion. Because the planet is in a crisis, “her body her choice” is no longer acceptable. Potentially pregnant people who refuse to do their share will be named and shamed:
“I can’t bear the responsibility for giving birth to a life,” said Luna Zhu, 28, who lives in Beijing with her husband. Both their parents would be willing to take care of grandchildren, and she works for a state-owned enterprise that offers a good maternity leave package. Still, Ms. Zhu is not interested in motherhood.
The news is not all bad. If you’re concerned about eliminating your credit card debt or the availability of a “final expense” insurance policy, phone calls from the subcontinent (with local caller ID) should continue to flood in:
Meanwhile, India’s total population is poised to exceed China’s later this year, according to a recent estimate from the United Nations.
Circling back to the first point… how can people who say that their first concern is a climate emergency also characterize a falling human population anywhere in the world as a “crisis”?
Our lab director at MIT went to Davos back in the 1990s and then worked it into every conversation for the next 12 months. If you said “pass the salt please” he would respond “That reminds me of when Bill Gates asked me to pass him the salt at Davos.”
What’s going on this year? The billionaire CEO of Moderna give us his opinion of the peasants who funded his elite lifestyle with their tax dollars:
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel speaking at WEF 23 Davos criticises countries that had scientific, political and public debate about COVID-19 Vaccine products saying such discourse led to lower vaccination rates. Bancel is especially critical of debate on social media #wef23pic.twitter.com/LPHEngVi29
Let’s see how the World Economic Forum, which concludes today, is covered in the New York Times. Donald Trump, Greta Thunberg, and Climate Change are the stars (Trump featured twice!):
For some reason, all of the articles on this page are from 2020 (SARS-CoV-2 thanked these elites for gathering/dispersing in January 2020, no doubt!). From this week’s Gulfstream-enabled event in Davos, “As Humanitarian Crises Escalate, So Do Demands to End Them”:
David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, says the global refugee crisis “is manageable, not insoluble.”
The group, whose founding was precipitated in the 1930s by Albert Einstein, a refugee himself, deploys more than 40,000 staff members and volunteers in 40 countries.
[the refugee crisis] is, right now, concentrated in relatively few countries. It’s about a hundred million people. The number has more or less tripled in the last decade. If you listened to some media, you’d think that Western Europe or Britain or America host most refugees. They don’t. Most are in countries like Lebanon or Jordan or Turkey or Bangladesh or Uganda.
But it can be managed. The refugee crisis is one of the global risks, alongside climate and health pandemics, that have been monstrously undermanaged and mismanaged in this phase of globalization these past 20 years.
My message to the people going to Davos is that if they are to continue to reap the benefits of globalization, they have to be willing to bear the burdens of globalization. The “burdens” refer to those who make the rules for how the world deals with the transnational needs that arise in a connected world.
What has caused the number of refugees to triple in the last 20 years?
Well, we know the answer to that. Civil wars. They represent 80 percent of the driver of humanitarian need. Second, the climate crisis, which for many people is a contributor to conflict and the flight of people. But the fundamental reason we have more refugees is that we’ve had more, longer and more virulent civil wars around the world
Once all of the folks who fought civil wars against each other have migrated to Europe and the U.S. they will be content and will stop fighting?
One sex worker named Liana said she dresses in business attire so she doesn’t stand out among the executives, despite prostitution being legal in Switzerland.
She told Bild she regularly sees an American who visits Switzerland multiple times a year and is among the 2,700 conference attendees.
Liana charges around €700 ($760) for an hour and €2,300 ($2,500) for the whole night, plus travel expenses.
The manager of one escort service in Aargau, 100 miles away from the summit, says she has already received 11 bookings and 25 inquiries – and expects many more to follow this week.
She told 20 Minuten: ‘Some also book escorts for themselves and their employees to party in the hotel suite.’
In 2020, an investigation by The Times found at least 100 prostitutes travel to Davos for the summit according to a Swiss police officer.
(Fact check: Wikipedia says “Prostitution in Switzerland is legal and regulated; it has been legal since 1942.”)
Are these journalists going to the same event?
Readers: What’s been interesting to you regarding the World Economic Forum/Davos 2023? Can you please use the comment section to post your favorite video clips of people talking there? The defrosted Al Gore, for example.
I returned to stay at my grad student apartment in Cambridge, Maskachusetts (pre-2020 it was popular on AirBnB, but despite a 25 percent rate cut (via Bidenflation) it sits vacant much of the time these days) while teaching at MIT. I found that the HP 400 MFP M475dw printer cartridges had been depleted by the AirBnB guests. I went onto Amazon and found a genuine HP replacement set at a shocking $484:
The printer itself, including four cartridges, cost $750 in 2012 (equivalent to 1,000 of today’s mini-dollars).
Who is actually rich enough to pay for the genuine HP-brand cartridges? HP claims that the yield will be roughly 2,000 pages so the HP cartridges will cost 24 cents per page. The ghetto-brand folks say that their cartridges will yield more than 4,000 pages, about 2 cents per page(!).
I would love to know who says “I don’t mind paying $484 rather than $70”!
Another question is why the refillers don’t want customers to send back the spent HP cartridges. The box says “made in China”, but they need to get their old cartridges from somewhere, right?
Representative Kevin McCarthy of California finally secured the House speakership in a dramatic vote ending around 12:30 a.m. Saturday, but the dysfunction in his party and the deal he struck to win over holdout Republicans also raised the risks of persistent political gridlock that could destabilize the American financial system.
Economists, Wall Street analysts and political observers are warning that the concessions he made to fiscal conservatives could make it very difficult for Mr. McCarthy to muster the votes to raise the debt limit — or even put such a measure to a vote. That could prevent Congress from doing the basic tasks of keeping the government open, paying the country’s bills and avoiding default on America’s trillions of dollars in debt.
The only way to stabilize our economy and currency is to borrow and spend more!
Speaking of the economy, here are a few photos from my old neighborhood in Cambridge, Maskachusetts. The marijuana stores are thriving while the bicycle shop went bankrupt:
In other words: Honduran and Venezuelan coffee bad; Honduran and Venezuelan migrants good.
Is there any philosophical inconsistency in wanting to increase the tide of migrants washing into the U.S. while simultaneously refusing to buy goods and services from foreigners who’ve elected to stay in their home countries?
A year ago, my husband and three children got on an airplane, moved to Florida and never looked back. Our move had made the news. I’m a columnist at New York’s storied newspaper, the New York Post, but more than that I had long been New York’s greatest champion.
(When a journalist does something that millions of others have already done, it is news.)
We got a vacation rental in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, an area we hadn’t heard of before, and enrolled our three children in the local public school.
They were our neighbors to the south! Palm Beach Gardens (PBG) is across the main road from our MacArthur Foundation-built development (in Jupiter). PBG has a beautiful county-run park with a dozen soccer fields, clay tennis courts, pickleball courts, a 2-story country club-grade tennis clubhouse, a shaded playground with water, and clean public restrooms (try finding those in NY!). PBG also has a fake downtown/New Urbanism community called Alton that we rejected due to lack of green space, but we were there the other day at Panera, Pet Smart, and Home Depot and found a husky/wolf hybrid:
This animal would be illegal to possess in Maskachusetts, but was legally bred in Ocala, Florida and after some unfortunate incidents with cats, three stays in a shelter, and two previous adoptive homes, now lives with her forever parents in PBG. She was greedy for belly rubs from our 7-year-old.
Our heroic journalist returned to New York, presumably having heard that “COVID is over” and “there were no lockdowns” (one Manhattan-based friend now simply denies that New York was ever subject to any restrictions; schools were not closed, people were not prevented from gathering or working, nobody was ordered to wear a mask, his son loved being home for more than a year (this simultaneous with the son talking about the horrors of his time in lockdown)):
Schools did open for full-time learning in fall of 2021. But masks were required, even outside, even though Dr. Anthony Fauci himself had said that was unnecessary. My kids ate lunch on the ground outdoors, urged to mask between bites, while the elderly Gov. Hochul traipsed the state, maskless, eating as a normal person living a normal life.
Our youngest was falling behind academically. The mask was stunting his verbal skills. He was hard to understand and was having trouble understanding his teacher.
In November of 2021, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was photographed maskless indoors. In her defense she tweeted “I wear a mask most of the time indoors. We took them off as people were having a hard time hearing us.”
Her departure was cheered by the New York governor:
We made the decision in late November of 2021 and by early January we were on a plane to Florida. We landed in our short-term rental and the kids started school, maskless, for the second half of the school year. We were done. We are free. A few months later Gov. Hochul would urge Republican New Yorkers to “jump on a bus and head down to Florida.” She included the dig that they’re not New Yorkers.
I agree with Governor Hochul. Cultures evolve and a critical part of 21st century New York culture is eager compliance with whatever politicians and public health officials order as well as agreement that the order is compelled by Science and that anyone who disagrees with stupid and irrational.
A question I get asked a lot is if I have any regrets about the move “now that COVID is over.” New York continues to have COVID restrictions aimed specifically at children.
My sons’ Brooklyn public school continues to do all of their school events outdoors. A recent one was held while it was 45 degrees.
Parents who haven’t been vaccinated for COVID-19 are not allowed inside the school buildings.
It’s 2023, we know the vaccine doesn’t control spread, and yet some parents haven’t been inside their kid’s classroom since 2020. It’s madness and it continues.
Not everyone I hear from is fully happy with their move. Some aren’t sure they landed in the right place. But I have yet to hear from anyone who is going back.
The great majority of people who contact me are like us: full of gratitude and happiness that we got to sanity, to safety, to normalcy. We’ll always love New York and wish for it to return to its former glory. But we’ll do that wishing from the Sunshine State that has become our family’s home.
On January 3rd our family will celebrate one year as Floridians. The concept is similar. Pursue freedom and celebrate where you find it.
We’ve met quite a few lockdown refugees during our 1.5 years in Florida. All have enough money to live in any part of the U.S. As Ms. Markowicz found, none of them have talked about wanting to return to a slave state. In fact, none have talked about leaving South Florida. We did lose a young friend, originally from Pennsylvania, to a town 30 minutes south because it is closer to her job.
Our government has decided that it is okay for a doctor or hospital to charge an uninsured customer 10X what an insurance company would pay for a service. Thus, an American who doesn’t want to pay 10X the fair price and risk bankruptcy has no choice but to sign up for health insurance. He/she/ze/they cannot pay the $25,000 that an insurance company would pay for a serious issue and defer the purchase of a new car. Instead, he/she/ze/they must deal with a bill for $200,000 and aggressive bill collectors and lawyers from the hospital.
I recently decided to see if it would make sense to get a policy from healthcare.gov for our family. There are three big providers in eastern Florida: Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and University of Miami. The site has a way to enter these providers and see if they’re in the network for the plan. Here are some of the quotes:
The consumer is supposed to evaluate 174 alternatives, build a spreadsheet and run a Monte Carlo experiment to figure out which is likely to result in minimum spending? You’d be a fool to have insurance that didn’t cover these three networks, as we discovered to our chagrin last year with Humana. Healthcare.gov offers to help you register to vote, but it doesn’t offer to limit results to insurance policies that will pay these essential providers.
I thought that Blue Cross had deals with everyone and yet this $66,000+/year policy ($72,000 including the out-of-pocket maximum) is presented as not covering any of the places that you’d want to go if you needed a specialized specialist:
Perhaps we could work it from the other side? Here’s what Mayo Jacksonville says they’ll take:
The consumer is supposed to recognize, therefore, that Mayo takes “Aetna” and “Blue Cross Blue Shield” but not the versions of “Aetna” and “Blue Cross” that are sold on healthcare.gov? How many people are this sophisticated? Mayo Jacksonville takes “Cigna EPO”, but, according to healthcare.gov, not “Cigna Connect 900 EPO”:
As Obama said, if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor so long as your doctor doesn’t work at any of the good clinics or hospitals in the nation’s third largest state. I scrolled through all of the 174 plans and never found one that covered more than University of Miami (and that was rare).
Maybe this is peculiar to Florida? Friends in Maskachusetts who had been paying $30,000 per year to Blue Cross (in pre-Biden dollars) switched to MassHealth (Medicaid; there was an income test, but no asset test on the MA signup web site) and found that their choice of doctors was much wider. That seems to be the case in Florida as well. Mayo Clinic is happy to accept Medicaid. Cleveland Clinic says they take Medicaid. University of Miami takes Medicaid. In other words, Americans have voted to set up a system in which a person who works and pays $72,000 per year for health insurance has inferior access to health care compared to what someone who has never worked enjoys.
Marianne Simmons, a self-professed “Tesla fan girl,” bought her second electric vehicle from the company in September: a white, high-performance Model Y costing more than $77,000. Then the company slashed prices on Thursday and she realized she could have bought the same car today for $13,000 less.
That’s the reality facing owners of Tesla vehicles after the company cut the price of its cars as much as 20%, part of a push from Chief Executive Elon Musk to increase sales volume in the face of weakening demand. For existing customers, the resale value of the cars they own will take a hit along with the drop in prices of new models.
Throughout coronapanic and Bidenflation, I’ve been wondering why car makers didn’t just auction every car as it came off the line (to dealers, not to consumers, except for Tesla). Why bother having a list price at all? Maybe the reaction to the Tesla price cut is part of the reason. Let’s move our minds back to the pre-Biden era. When sales slow down and car companies offer massive incentives to clear inventory, consumers don’t get upset. The list price of a car stays the same, but the price would come down from MSRP to dealer invoice to dealer invoice minus $2,000 “cash back” (back when $2,000 was real money!). Somehow people were okay with this variation. But a variation in the official list price cannot be tolerated!
I’m in Cambridge, Maskachusetts this week and the residents deal with this upsetting issue by continuing to operate their beloved Saabs:
(I didn’t see it when I lived here, but looking at these 140-year-old wooden houses brings to mind my Houston friend’s comment that the entire Northeast is “dilapidated”. He won’t go anywhere north of Washington, D.C. without a compelling reason.)
