The previous thread closed itself. 🙂
This week, on Monday, my ballroom pro and the owner of the studio called to say the pros wife had Covid. As I’d been in the same room with her for 3 hours, I got a Covid test. (Negative.) So I don’t have to worry about spreading a case of “nose Covid” to the unvaccinated who can end up with full body Covid.
Cases are up. Be save. (Be vaccinated.)
Yes. More exciting things have been happening. I prefer boring historical times.
Open thread.
Something occurred to me I wanted to get feedback on from people here. I think it’s fair to say there are a number of people here who lean towards the right end of the political spectrum as opposed to the left.
Anybody delighted that Biden is making such a mess?
Because honestly, I’m not. I’m worried as a result of it. Are there going to be terrorist attacks again in the U.S. again before his term is up. Are there going to be more black swan events. When there is a lack of competent national leadership and it becomes widely known, I think bad things tend to happen. What mess is likely to come next and how do I brace for it.
I keep finding myself wishing I lived further out in the country and had more ammunition stockpiled.
Maybe it’s just me. But I thought I’d ask.
You can only love this SC decision:
The court was much kinder in its words than i would have been. Good news: people now have greater motivation to work and pay their rent. Bad news: the three ‘progressives’ on the court are perfectly OK with ignoring the law…. every time they “know in their heart” the law is wrong. Same with the US Constitution, of course.
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The interesting question is if the Biden administration will defy the court. I hope not, but fear it will… that is, continue to block evictions for lack of payment of rent. That will quickly become a Constitutional crisis. I think the Alzheimer addled Biden could be talked into anything by the crazy left.
Here is the frightening thing: Past SC decisions have consistently held that even clear misapplication of existing law to further the ‘progressive’ agenda is OK….. the clean air act applied to CO2 emissions, for example. Even when the clear intent of a law has nothing whatever to do with how the law is being used to advance the ‘progressive’ agenda, the SC has to my knowledge never until now repudiated crazy misapplication of unrelated laws. Now is the time to extend the eviction moratorium ruling by reversing the most egregious mis-applications of existing laws.
mark bofill: “Anybody delighted that Biden is making such a mess?”
I, for one, am not. Naturally, though, there are Republicans in Congress who are making political hay out of the tragedy. Not qualitatively different from Democrats who made political hay about Covid tragedy when Trump was in office.
All I can do is sigh.
I’m definitely not delighted!!
Thanks Harold.
It makes me feel a little better for some reason to know other people out there think there’s more at risk than the outcome of political contests.
[Edit: Thanks Lucia.]
mark bofill,
I can’t say I am happy that Biden’s administration is a catastrophe…. I would like it a lot more if he had left many of Trump’s policies in place and just tried to raise taxes and social spending rather than screw everything up. For the sake of all the people at risk in Afghanistan, I hope the Biden administration gets 99+ out.
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But there is a bit of told-you-so satisfaction in seeing a grossly debilitated president act like the grossly debilitated person I have bern watching for a year. The guy is 5 or 6 years from needing diapers, and he absolutely should not be president.
Steve,
Yeah, the SC is one of the few bright points on the national scene right now in my opinion. Thank you, Bad-Orange-Man who was formerly our President.
Steve, (Re: Biden)
Yes. My position is wavering on removing President Biden. I don’t think Harris will be much improvement but at least there is a chance she will be. I am beginning to wonder if the odds of Harris turning out to be reasonably competent aren’t greater than odds that Biden will suddenly start demonstrating reasonable competence. It might be that Harris is the better bet.
Better if Biden would resign, but I doubt that will happen.
On the “IC” report about the origins of covid,
story here:
I always thought the whole point of “intelligence” was being able to find out stuff other countries didn’t want us to know. Maybe I never understood that properly…
mark bofill,
I don’t see anything good coming from Kamala being president. Every time I have listened to her talk I have found it frightening; she has a combination of stupidity and lack of moral conviction that is surprising, even for a politician. In lack of morality, she is a bit like Hillary on steroids, but at the same time considerably dumber. With Biden clearly descending into the twilight of Alzheimer’s, Kamala may end up taking over. Ugg.
mark bofill (Comment #205251),
I agree with all you said.
mark bofill (Comment #205262)” “I always thought the whole point of “intelligence†was being able to find out stuff other countries didn’t want us to know.”
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Heh. But that stuff won’t be in an unclassified report since what we know is one of things that we don’t want them to know.
SteveF (Comment #205253): “The interesting question is if the Biden administration will defy the court.”
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I don’t see any action they could take to defy the court.
mark
I seriously doubt it. People with Alzheimers generally don’t recognize they have it. They generally adamantly refuse to admit it and the denial only gets worse with time.
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I don’t relish the fights we are going to see about getting him out. I think there will be “get him out” vs ” keep him in” camps. It’s not going to be pretty.
Mike M,
The Biden administration could do a number of things, like having the DOJ file lawsuits to try to slow or block evictions, or pressing state governments to do the same. I hope they will, but I am not at all certain they will follow the SC order, and may simply try to bypass it. After all, If you believe Merrick Garland should be on the Court and Amy Barrett should not be, then it is easy to declare the SC illegitimate….. and many on the left have said exactly that.
Thanks Mike.
Lucia, yes. It’s going to get ugly at some point. I hate it that the man ended up in this position; we should never have elected him.
mark bofill (Comment #205269): “It’s going to get ugly at some point. I hate it that the man ended up in this position; we should never have elected him.”
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Indeed. That is a problem with Democracy: The people get the government they deserve. I think we are stuck with him unless he either resigns or gets to the point where he is unable to oppose an action taken under the 25th Amendment.
mark bofill,
“…we should never have elected him.”
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I personally blame Trump. In spite of many sensible policies (replacing Obama’s nutty policies), he made himself so offensive that even an Alzheimer’s patient, one hardly able to read a teleprompter, was preferred by lots of voters. Take away Trump’s crazy tweets, his buffoonery, and his endless, obnoxious preening, and we would not be suffering Biden.
The problem with Biden is the same as with all Democrats claiming to be centrist or moderate. There is currently no such animal in or running for high office, nor is there likely to be in the foreseeable future. In the House of Representatives, they’re cannon fodder. Either they go along with Pelosi or they get a primary challenge. They can’t win. But they should have known that from the beginning and so should the voters.
It’s like what they say about someone getting married again after a failed marriage ending in divorce: The triumph of hope over experience. It’s also the same as when the stock market is fairly clearly peaking: But it’s different this time. No, it’s picking up nickels and dimes in front of a steamroller.
Mike,
Yep.
Steve,
I can’t quite bring myself to lay blame for Biden’s election at Trump’s doorstep for being obnoxious, but I get the sentiment. Maybe people wanted quiet and boring, or normal, or the way it was before, or whatever after Trump.
Also, I’ll admit I didn’t think Biden would be this bad. I thought he was a relative mediocrity, but.. I didn’t expect the Afghanistan train wreck level of incompetence.
We droned somebody, we’re told it’s an ISIS leader.
I’ll take it. Better than nothing.
Trump may have been obnoxious, but I think the vehemently negative and hostile press fed by constant establishment witch hunts versus the media white wash of Biden played a far greater part. The guy was under siege since he announced his candidacy. I can’t imagine the mental strain of enduring that level hostility and hatred.
I never watch Presidents speak, it’s so useless and often completely unrelated relative to their actions. I did watch Biden speak for about 5 minutes on Afghanistan because somebody else was watching. He seemed pretty slow and a bit confused. Not exactly inspiring confidence.
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I think the Presidency is overrated, see the US surviving just fine with Trump, although the fainting couches did get quite a workout last term.
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I expect most people outside the US barely discriminate red vs blue. Afghanistan was botched but it just isn’t that big a deal to the level of getting him tossed out of office, it did starkly end the honeymoon phase with Biden. Something real could happen like the Chinese sensing weakness and moving on Taiwan and then we are in for it with Sleepy Joe calling the shots.
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If the economy goes south (… inflation …) then Biden will have real problems. He also basically promised salvation on covid because “competence” and that isn’t exactly working out either. Sh** happens when you are President and it has always struck me as odd that partisans believe sh** will stop happening when their side is in charge. That is a mirage.
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Biden will likely plod along and get about 50% of the coin flip decisions right like most Presidents. If he does have accelerating dementia he will be kept out of view as much as possible like Reagan was near the end.
If you’ve seen the crowd shots of reporters at his addresses, you’ll see the big autoprompt he’s reading off in the middle, which is why he mostly stares fixedly straight ahead with a look of squinty concentration. I suspect the slow speed is to try and reduce the frequency of reading failures.
Youtube has reinstated its prominent news placement in my video feed. Oddly, in the reappeared subsection it calls “breaking news”, the event occurred 4 days ago and there’s been no sign of it until now.
Tom Scharf (Comment #205276): “Biden will likely plod along and get about 50% of the coin flip decisions right like most Presidents.”
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Not on foreign policy, if his track record is any indicator. He has been wrong on virtually every such decision, for 50 years.
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Tom Scharf: “If he does have accelerating dementia he will be kept out of view as much as possible”.
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Seems to me they have been doing that for a year or more.
I’m not so sure firing a drone at a “planner” while you are still in a very exposed position in an urban area under enemy control is wise. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want anyone I know manning the check in gates at the Kabul Airport tomorrow. How hard is it to fire an RPG or small surface to air missile at a lumbering plane taking off from a city? That’s going to be a white knuckle take off.
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Perhaps this couldn’t be done a week later, or perhaps it was a panicked and desperate political move. They seemed a little too sure too soon the target had been killed when this process usually takes days.
I think the plan is to wait until 2023, so that Kamala will be able to run for president twice.
MikeN,
I would be shocked if Kamala got elected even once. She has shown herself unwilling to address serious problems, and offends many with her hostility to honest questions and her surly cackle. California is not Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. Besides, she seems to me really dumb and completely un-selfaware.
Tom Scharf,
I agree that the power of the presidency is over-rated; the permanent bureaucracy runs pretty much on autopilot, and that is how the bureaucrats like it. Congress could rein in the bureaucracy via defunding, but that is very unlikely to happen.
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Still, in a crisis (large or small) the president has to “address the nation”, and I very much doubt Biden will be able to even read a teleprompter and repeat the words in a year or two. His behavior is likely to become more erratic and obviously crazy. At which point I suspect there will be behind-the-scenes pressure on Biden to resign. As Lucia suggested, lots of dementia patients are unaware of their own decline, and absolutely will not accept what others tell them, so it could get very ugly.
MikeN (Comment #205282): “I think the plan is to wait until 2023, so that Kamala will be able to run for president twice.”
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Whose plan? It might be *her* plan, since she probably thinks she is both qualified and electable. But I doubt many others would be fond of the idea.
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The other day, Tucker Carlson commented that he had never met anyone who liked Kamala. But he admitted that he had never asked her husband. 🙂
Tom Scharf (Comment #205280): “I’m not so sure firing a drone at a “planner†while you are still in a very exposed position in an urban area under enemy control is wise.”
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I am sure that the idea is deterrence, effectively assuming that the bosses care more about their own lives than those of their countrymen or followers. I don’t see much of a downside; it is not like they can get any more murderous.
SteveF (Comment #205284): “I agree that the power of the presidency is over-rated; the permanent bureaucracy runs pretty much on autopilot”.
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Good analogy, but you don’t take it far enough. A commercial airliner flies on autopilot almost all of the time. But every now and then, you encounter something that the autopilot is not designed for. Then if the actual pilot is not up to the job, disaster results.
Mike M,
Exactly. I couldn’t agree more.
MikeM
If you think Biden has dementia and you think Kamala is qualified and can do a good job, this is a terrible plan for the country. But this decision will involve lots of politics. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that was someone’s plan.
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Does Tucker Carlson know any democrats? I’m sure there are people who like Kamala. Those people likely don’t like Tucker.
Tom,
The drone strike isn’t my preferred response, but I think it’s better than nothing. When our people get killed a cost needs to be imposed for that.
I’m not a military planner, therefore I fully expect military planners could do better than what I can come up with. In my view, we should have taken control of the situation back by bringing in whatever forces and aircraft were deemed necessary to conduct a secure and orderly evacuation. I didn’t see any military obstacle to this, it appeared to be pure politics. I have read a number of veterans voice similar opinions.
Shrug.
Let me put that another way:
Yes. We are only in a very exposed position because for political reasons we have decided to defer to the Taliban instead of using our forces to retake control of the situation. And the Taliban hasn’t been doing a particularly good job of managing security for the evacuation.
Tom,
I do agree though with your assessment of probable trouble spots to watch – China and Taiwan, and potential runaway inflation.
I sure hope so.
mark bofill,
Maybe he’ll get 50% on coinflips. But he seems to be on a streak of bad flips right now. And a lot of these flips really matter.
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The thing is, some choices don’t matter a lot and can be changed later. (Even some people think can’t be changed.) The dead can’t be made undead. Displaced people can’t really be undisplaced. Their lives were still disrupted a long time.
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May you live in interesting times is a curse.
Lucia,
I know. I was trying to temper my pessimism. I probably should have said, ‘I sure hope so, but I don’t think so…’
It’s one of those things where I’d be genuinely pleased to be wrong though.
lucia (Comment #205290): “Does Tucker Carlson know any democrats?”
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I am sure he does. He regularly has lefties and Democrats on his show. Much fewer lately and those have been the dissident lefties, like Glenn Greenwald. Maybe he disinvited the others, but my guess is that they have disinvited themselves, under pressure.
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Tucker was, of course, exaggerating, but I think his point, that even most Democrats don’t like Kamala, is probably true.
We are in such a bad spot in Afghanistan in large part because Biden forced the abandonment of Bagram Air Field. He is saying the military told him we didn’t need it, but that is not so. They told him that he was not letting them have enough troops to hold both Bagram and the embassy, so he made them choose.
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Any general worth his stars would have resigned rather than do that. But they went along. We need wholesale changes at the top ranks of our military.
Mike M,
Yeah. I read about that .. let me see.. here.
Some highlights:
Sounds plausible. I don’t have anything either way that confirms or discredits this.
Obviously we would have been better off evacuating from Bagram air base. They made an assessment that the Afghan army would hold on for at least months. They were wrong and they were in the best position to make that assessment. Once it collapsed it appears that they didn’t have a very good Plan B. They are doing an air lift from Kabul. It’s unclear why they didn’t leave Bagram * last *, duh.
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I suspect part of this is bad military judgment and the other part is Biden’s feel good “leave by Sept 11th” demand. Bush Sr. really liked ending the Iraq conflict at 100 hours which was also not so wise in retrospect.
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The enemy gets a vote and there will be downsides to military conflict. Casualties have been very low for years in Afghanistan, these might have been more avoidable than others though.
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If you haven’t seen Restrepo by Sebastian Junger that will give you a good idea of what it was like over there.
Just because there were downsides doesn’t mean the coin flip decision was wrong. Most of these decisions are a choice of the lesser of evils.
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Do you let the Chinese continue to militarize the South Pacific? Do you let Iran build and manufacture nuclear weapons? Was allowing North Korea to obtain nuclear weapons and ICBM’s smart?
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These are all very hazy and have very serious potential downsides and the upsides are only BAU. Preemptive military engagement will without question have big downsides, but those look like an upside if DC is a smoking crater.
Tom,
I’m starting to feel a little lost here. Are you referring to some specific decision? If so, which one?
Tom Scharf (Comment #205299): “Obviously we would have been better off evacuating from Bagram air base. They made an assessment that the Afghan army would hold on for at least months.”
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I don’t think that is true. They may have hoped that the Afghans would hold out, but there is lots of evidence that they knew that a rapid collapse was at least a possibility. There is no excuse for making plans solely on the basis of the best case scenario.
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We did not turn Bagram over to the Afghans in an orderly manner. We snuck out like a thief in the night. The only reason I can see for that is that we knew that the Afghans would fold the minute the realized we were leaving. So we had to be gone before they realized it.
———-
Tom Scharf: “It’s unclear why they didn’t leave Bagram * last *, duh.”
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From what I have seen it IS clear: Biden did not allow the military enough troops to hold Bagram and do anything else. And the generals were too gutless to firmly tell him the truth.
I expect the military answer would probably be “No, you don’t.”
The political answer would probably be “Yes, unless the voters are pissed about it and we are confident we can solve it in a quick feel good way.”
The President is the commander in chief. In my view, it is his job to look out for the long term security interests of the country. Yes, it’s a difficult job where many decisions don’t have clear cut right and wrong answers.
I don’t get why you are making this point in this context though. I don’t think the evacuation of Afghanistan qualifies as one of these difficult, intractable events that couldn’t have been managed better.
So – a different question. I read in many places that ISIS and the Taliban are ‘enemies’. I put that in quotes because in this context I’m not sure I know exactly what that means.
For example, I read that the Taliban freed ISIS prisoners during this recent mess. I don’t understand why that would be the case, if the Taliban and ISIS are enemies in the sense that I usually understand the word ‘enemy’ to mean.
Maybe the Taliban is just disorganized as heck? I don’t know.
[Edit: Or are they ‘enemies’ more in the sense that conservatives and democrats are ‘enemies’; I.E., sharing most things in common but belonging to different political parties… or theocratic structures I guess in this case…]
I am referring to a partisan knee jerk reaction (mostly a media exercise) in which a political decision is deemed “wrong” because something bad happens. The heavy bias being in favor of “taking action that results in any bad outcomes” is wrong while “failure to take action which results in no bad things happening for the moment” is somehow right.
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Things are just much more complicated than that and I provided multiple examples of where failing to take action is deemed the correct political decision for the moment which can go quite badly later.
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I’m not saying judgments can’t be made, but I am saying that the mere presence of bad things happening is not sufficient to make that judgment. Looking at it from 9/12/2001 (remember those days?) keeping the Taliban out of power for 20 years might have looked like a win.
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The Afghan exit * process * was an avoidable debacle and that decision looks like a clear error. People should be held accountable, Biden and the military.
Tom,
Okay, I don’t have a problem with that.
I don’t think this is a partisan reaction though. Look, I am tribal as all get out; you guys know me, I’m not trying to fool anybody. But the democrats also appear to believe this was a colossal unforced error.
Still, thanks for clarifying, much appreciated.
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[Edit: Okay, yes. That’s all [most of what..] I’ve been talking about, the exit process.]
The Taliban also executed an ISIS leader who was in prison. They are rivals who hate each other almost as much as they hate the USA. Game of Thrones. I expect things won’t be rainbows and butterflies in Afghanistan for quite a while. That’s all they know how to do, fight. When the foreign invaders leave, they fight each other.
As an old Bedouin proverb goes, “Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and all of us against the stranger.”
Maybe that’s it.
Tom Scharf,
“Most of these decisions are a choice of the lesser of evils.”
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I think we can be certain the Biden administration will always choose the lefter of two evils….. which half the country will think is the greater of evils.
SteveF (Comment #205311): “I think we can be certain the Biden administration will always choose the lefter of two evils….. which half the country will think is the greater of evils.”
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OK with me. He won the election
What bothers me is when he makes a choice that 80% or more think is the greater evil. Either because of incompetence (Afghanistan) or because he figures that most people aren’t paying attention (southern border). Of course, the latter is made much easier by the corporate media carrying his water.
Mike M.,
And that’s why I’m becoming more convinced that Biden is actually running the show and not some puppet-master behind a curtain. Or at least he thinks he is. Telling Biden he’s wrong about something is not a path to advancement. Yes, he reads everything from a teleprompter, but it’s distinctly possible that he previously approved everything that he’s reading.
Besides, Obama got rid of most of the competent military brass that might have pushed back publicly.
According to this article, Biden doesn’t tolerate people who he thinks are wasting his time. I suspect he has the same opinion of the press that Trump has, so he thinks answering their questions in a press conference is wasting his time. He’s probably correct. They mostly ask stupid questions.
DeWitt,
I thought that too, strangely enough, about the “Ladies and gentlemen, they gave me a list here. The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O’Donnell of NBC” thing.
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I don’t think this is the way an actual puppet who knows he’s a puppet would put it. I think this is the phrasing of a guy who thinks he is placating some advisor who (in Biden’s view) gets worked up over nothing. Granted, I don’t think it occurred to President Biden that his remark would cause such consternation. But that it probably didn’t occur to Biden just supports the idea that as far as HE is concerned, he’s nobody’s puppet.
[Edit: Just my impression.]
One of the better look at the political infighting between agencies. A short, but relevant, look at the infighting.
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https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/08/27/the-report-on-u-s-officials-giving-taliban-a-list-of-american-and-allied-afghans-makes-sense-the-lists-were-provided-to-taliban-by-state-dept-and-cia/
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The Report on U.S. Officials Giving Taliban a List of American and Allied Afghans Makes Sense – The Lists Were Provided to Taliban by State Dept. and CIA
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“ the State Dept (DoS) and CIA are one team. The White House and Pentagon are another team.â€
DeWitt Payne (Comment #205313): “And that’s why I’m becoming more convinced that Biden is actually running the show and not some puppet-master behind a curtain.”
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I think that is probably so. Biden probably has some number of hours a day when he is reasonably cogent and capable of being in charge. More on some days, less on others. So he is ultimately in charge, even if he often has a weak grasp on issues and has to leave all the details to others.
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So he probably approves at least the outline of what he reads from the teleprompter. If he has a list of people to call on, it is probably because he told some aide to give him a list. He hides out a lot and does not take many questions because he really does not have enough bandwidth for the job, so hates to waste any. But he is in charge enough that people don’t cross him openly.
I think a lot of the people who like Kamala, Indians, are upset with her for saying her name wrong, and gets attention brought to it when her staff attacks people for using a different mispronunciation.
Regarding the question I posed earlier (ISIS Taliban enemies?) I read this Army Ranger’s take:
Shrug.
[Edit: Here’s another source that says they’re different. Clearly there’s a lot of confusion. Here]
https://nypost.com/2021/08/27/biden-and-fauci-discuss-covid-19-booster-shots-every-5-months/
DeWitt,
Biden has Alzheimer’s. I have watched the process with three different elderly relatives; the garbled speech, the confusion, the strange and inappropriate aggressive behavior, etc. It is Alzheimer’s. Short of some kind of miracle, he is not really cogent at any time of the day. Unfortunately, he is president, 24 hours a day, at least for a while. I find it frightening; he should be in assisted living, not in the White House.
Here’s an opinion piece from the WSJ on the difference between the Taliban and ISIS in Afghanistan:
The latest thing I saw is that the Taliban is saying they will ban poppy growing and maybe get out of the drug trade. Where they’ll get the money to run the government is going to be an issue. And what the poppy growers are going to do for income is another.
lucia,
Requiring booster shots every however many months is a strange proposal when they can’t get entirely too many people to get vaccinated in the first place. Someone, likely both Biden and Fauci, is out of touch with reality.
DeWitt,
Yes. I can’t imagine them requiring booster shots. I was hoping for allowing. Currently most people who might think it’s best have to lie to get one.
“Anybody delighted that Biden is making such a mess?
Because honestly, I’m not. I’m worried as a result of it”
You reap what you sow collectively.
It is hard to change the past and even harder to change the future.
Nonetheless, at the end of the day, you get another President of either persuasion.
“I think it’s fair to say there are a number of people here who lean towards the right end of the political spectrum as opposed to the left.”
Is it fair to say that?
I would say that this site promotes clear thinking about current issues and tries to remain apolitical in terms of having a bias.
There are a number of commentators from all sides who get a fair go.
I have become a cranky, opinionated, and at times not nice commentator with more opinions lining up with the right side in recent years. Was fairly left when younger. Glad to see you all having a go.
Biden’s actions merely reflect the views of those that put him in and those around him in power.
I see him as doing a Jimmy Carter for the next 4 years with the consequence that someone hard right will certainly come in next.
angech,
“Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains.
Winston S. Churchill”
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The funny thing is that a shift toward more conservative views happens even among people who are clearly left leaning. (Glenn Greewald comes to mind.). I suspect greater experience and knowledge undermine once sincerely held beliefs about ideas like ‘equity’.
Tom Scharf,
Keeping the Taliban out of power for 20 years is good, but the way we did that was very inefficient. We spent $2 trillion, suffered 2,000 KIA, and many more permanently disabled. That’s an awfully high price to keep some religious crazies from providing a haven for terrorists. Simpler and cheaper to just go in and kill as many bad guys as possible in as short a time as possible, maximizing destruction of governing infrastructure, then leave with a warning the next time they supported terrorists our response would be much, much worse. There is no way you can make religious crazies any less crazy (they are just awaiting their virgins in Heaven!), but you can put a very high price on unwanted behavior. The whole idea that war is related to nation building is unmoored from reality. War is a process by which you destroy whatever is required to stop unwanted behavior. “Diplomacy by other means.”
The Democrats might not be able to afford to lose Biden to resignation or the application of the 25th Amendment. If they do, they lose control of the Senate because there will be no Vice President to cast the deciding vote in the event of a 50-50 tie. If Harris became President, she would nominate a Vice President who would need to be confirmed by a majority vote of both the House and the Senate. Theoretically, the Republicans could block the appointment by a tie vote in the Senate because there would be no one to break the tie. I doubt that would happen, though. There are too many Republican Senators who are wobbly.
“That’s an awfully high price to keep some religious crazies from providing a haven for terrorists”
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Compared to what? That is always the confounder that makes these judgments so uncertain. Alternate timelines where the Taliban / Al Qaeda grew more powerful, made dirty bombs, bought old smallpox bioweapons from disgruntled scientists in the disbanded USSR and wreaked havoc all over the west? Or an alternate reality where they just behaved like Pakistan and mostly kept to their own business and fought internal battles?
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I don’t know. Nobody really knows. The people who decided to enter these foreign wars are making judgments about the future based on highly speculative information.
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We just did sabre rattling with the USSR and they disintegrated. Libya, Syria we mostly stayed out of and they are just failed states. Somalia we entered and exited and they remain a failed state that requires jihadi grass cutting on a regular basis. We left the Norks alone and they built nuclear weapons. By the time a threat becomes clear and convincing it may be too late to do anything about it. A nuclear armed Iran is a huge threat to Israel for sure given the religious nature of that conflict and the willingness of both sides to engage, rational actors may not apply.
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But yes, I think we have learned that trying to force democracy on a region that has a long history of theocratic rule and a population that apparently is satisfied with it is a fool’s errand.
A shorter timeline for boosters may be an attempt to keep antibodies at high levels to ensure most people survive their first endemic covid infection and acquire natural immunity along with the vaccine. Most people aren’t taking a long view here. I’m still hoping an effective treatment can be discovered / invented. A pot of gold lies at the end of that rainbow.
Angech,
It’s not an important issue to me one way or the other. My impression is that many of the regulars here lean right in their thinking. Perhaps I am mistaken.
IMO, everybody likes to believe they are objective and unbiased and it’s hardly ever so. I personally prefer to try to be as open as I can be about my biases and assume by default that they influence me.
Like I said, I don’t feel like any of this is important, just my opinions, your mileage may vary, it’s all good with me.
Tom Scharf (Comment #205337): “Compared to what? That is always the confounder that makes these judgments so uncertain.”
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SteveF (Comment #205335) provided an alternative: ” Simpler and cheaper to just go in and kill as many bad guys as possible in as short a time as possible, maximizing destruction of governing infrastructure, then leave with a warning the next time they supported terrorists our response would be much, much worse.”
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Another alternative would have been to give our allies support in re-establishing Afghanistan’s constitutional monarchy and let them attempt to govern the country in a manner acceptable to the populace. One can argue that most of the blood and treasure we expended there did not go to fighting the Taliban, it went toward trying to turn the country in Belgium or some such against the wishes of most Afghanis.
Tom Scharf,
I don’t think that’s right. The Taliban was an entirely different animal than what existed before. And the population wasn’t satisfied with it. That’s why we were able to use a relatively small group working with the Northern Alliance of local tribes to initially overthrow the Taliban at very low cost. But then we took our eye off the ball and failed to destroy Al Queda at Tora Bora. That was definitely on W.
Possibly the fundamental error in Afghanistan, though, was to try to replace the central government of the Taliban with some sort of western style representative government rather than using the mostly already established tribal authorities.
Then again, allowing Pakistan to be a haven for all the various insurgents was the same mistake we made in Vietnam by allowing Laos and Cambodia to be sanctuaries for the VC and the North Vietnamese army. When you do that, there is a low probability of ultimate success. That’s especially true when you completely cut off support at some point.
And another example of the total absence of math skills in the press. The WSJ has an article about MLB and COVID positive tests. They test frequently and the positivity ratio is 0.0004 of 215,000 tests (that’s 86 positives, that number wasn’t in the article). At that positivity, they are probably catching close to 100% of all infections, or maybe exposures. 85% of Tier I employees (numbers not given), players, coaches and essential staff in close contact with players, have been fully vaccinated. The J&J vaccine is the most popular, but they don’t break it down.
Of the 86 positive tests, approximately 20% were fully vaccinated. That would likely be 17 +/- 1, another number not reported. The press seems to have a fascination with percentages even when the actual number would be much more informative. Needless to say, in the comments the assumption is that means the vaccine was only 80% effective. But that’s obviously not true since there are 5.7 times as many vaccinated as unvaccinated.
There are 30 teams with 88 people from each team designated as Tier I or 2640 people. 85% of 2640 is 2244, leaving 396 as not fully vaccinated. So the incidence in the fully vaccinated group would be 17/2244 = 0.0076 (less than 1%, this is a percentage they don’t report) and 69/396 = 0.174 (also not reported). I think that works out to 95% effectiveness, but I may be doing something wrong and I’m estimating the actual numbers.
They also make somewhat of a big deal about clusters in a few teams, which I believe are expected in small number statistics and non-random transmission.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/baseball-covid-vaccine-outbreaks-new-york-yankees-11629129582
DeWitt,
Your estimate of effectiveness looks about right given what we know from that data.
Whether the clusters we see differ from what we expect would take longer to do. But yeah… we expect clusters.
Some not so bright boys in the decision to go into Afghanistan 20 years ago.
Took Obama 8 years and Trump 4 to steer the boat in the right direction.
Glad the USA is out.
Modern technology and information, vital in helping the result will lead to the modernization of Afghanistan in its own way in a short time.
Look at Korea.
I actually read the newsletter from the NYT this morning rather than trashing without reading. It’s on whether vaccine protection is waning. The answer is maybe not. It turns out that the evidence from Israel may not be cut and dried because the people who were vaccinated early were not randomly selected and may not be representative.
I was going to submit a question about infection acquired immunity, but I’ve hit my free article limit and I’m not going to subscribe. Now I’m back to waiting to see if a Δ booster comes out any time soon. I don’t want to risk getting sick for a day or two for possibly no benefit.
Angech,
That’d be great, if Afghanistan went the way of South Korea. Color me skeptical though.
angech,
North Korea is more likely. You can see North Korea from space. Unlike China to the north and South Korea to the south, it’s mostly dark at night. The apparatchiks in NK do more or less okay, the rest of the population, not so much.
mark bofill,
Your skepticism is perfectly sensible. Korea is not and has never been dominated by 8th century religious zealots. Afghanistan is. Maybe Afghanistan will someday become a stable, modern democracy. But I suspect a major asteroid impact in Kabul is more likely.
The papers that the CDC used to support boosters were careful to point out that factors other than waning immunity might have been responsible for the appearance of waning immunity.
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Another factor is that the first people to get vaccinated were largely the elderly and health care workers. So a group for which the vaccine might be expected to be somewhat less effective and a group likely to have high exposure.
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Another Israeli study has shown that natural infection is much more effective than the vaccine. Maybe similar issue make the vaccine seem less effective in that study.
———–
At this point, I am partially back to being a vaccine skeptic. I am glad I got the shot, but I have no intention of getting a booster until there is good evidence that thery actually know what is going on.
angech (Comment #205350): “Some not so bright boys in the decision to go into Afghanistan 20 years ago.”
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There was nothing wrong with the decision to go in. The problem was that we tried to turn Afghanistan into something the Afghani’s don’t want. Until the 1970’s, they had a reasonably stable government that was slowly modernizing the country and trying to build a sense of national identify. We refused to let them try to return to that path.
Delta and vaccines waning are intertangled. Delta could be more infectious and make it look like the vaccine is waning. Another example of the CDC not collecting enough baseline data to get important real time answers.
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What is clear is that vaccinated people are getting more infections now than they used to by a large margin.
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The best evidence that vaccines are waning and boosters would be helpful is the preliminary results from Israel’s recent implementation of boosters.
https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/vaccine-efficacy-safety-follow-up-committee/he/files_publications_corona_booster-27082021.pdf
“1,144,690 individuals aged 60y and older who were eligible for a booster dose were followed between July 30 and August 22, 2021”
“Results: Twelve days or more after the booster dose we found an 11.4-fold (95% CI: [10.0,12.9]) decrease in the relative risk of confirmed infection, and a >10-fold decrease in the relative risk of severe illness. Under a conservative sensitivity analysis, we find ≈5-fold protection against confirmed infection.”
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What I find is that these type of 10x results tend to go down over time, not up. The CDC should release it’s booster findings in 2024, ha ha.
I think Biden was being slow rolled by the generals who wanted to stay in Afghanistan, and this led to the immediate withdrawal from Bagram.
Australia has decided that its covid-zero policy is unsustainable and that they will be relaxing restrictions. In four months. Maybe.
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Sounds to me like they are sensing that they have a revolt brewing.
You open back up after all the willing have been vaccinated. Setting arbitrary numbers like 80% is a formula for permanent lockdowns.
If this is true, I would really like to hear the explanation behind it:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taliban-offered-kabul-to-u-s-but-americans-said-no-report
Considering what the Taliban did to the last Afghan President when they first took power, I’m not surprised that Ghani left in a hurry. They, as they say, dealt him the final insult and strung him up from a lamppost.
mark bofill (Comment #205365): “If this is true, I would really like to hear the explanation behind it”.
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Obvious enough, I think. The U.S. did not have enough forces in Kabul to police the city. So when the Afghani’s quit, it was one of (1) total anarchy (2) a lot more U.S. troops needed (3) let the Taliban do it.
In other words, a military decision determined by artificial political constraints. Just like abandoning Bagram airfield.
Shame on all involved.
DeWitt,
I don’t care at all about Ghani. It bothers me (if this story is true) that the U.S. military ceded control of Kabul to the Taliban rather than taking control of it themselves. I am bothered by this because it seems to me that many, possibly most of the difficulties involved in the evacuation were a direct consequence of the Taliban being in control of the city rather than the U.S. military.
I don’t claim that there is no possible explanation that could justify this decision, merely that I would like to hear that explanation.
Mike,
Yes. If that was why that decision was made (politics), then I hope this incident gets widespread attention and that there are negative political consequences for the decision makers involved.
[Edit: I don’t believe there was a real logistical problem with the idea of getting more troops in. The Ronald Reagan carrier group and the Iwo Jima amphibious group are (and have been) right there the entire time. That’s at least two thousand Marines. If there weren’t enough troops there, it could have been remedied at any time on pretty short notice. It wasn’t logistics. Maybe it was nothing but politics.]
Indeed, two weeks ago we were apparently sending Marines into Kabul to help with the evacuation.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/13/marine-vanguard-lands-kabul-us-speeds-evacuations.html
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[Edit:
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Definitely not logistics.]
Also on the WSJ website:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/idiocy-stupidity-afghanistan-covid-vaccine-maga-trump-civility-privacy-common-sense-11630271666?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
I blame it all on Social Media.
angech (Comment #205332) You wrote “I would say that this site promotes clear thinking about current issues and tries to remain apolitical in terms of having a bias. There are a number of commentators from all sides who get a fair go.â€
That was not my experience. Try saying something negative about Desantis, the Republican Governor of Florida, or positive about vaccine requirements, but only if you have a thick skin. This comes to mind…. “ONE OF THE WORST INDICATORS OF GROUPTHINK – “DIRECT PRESSURE ON DISSENTERSâ€. https://www.indabaglobal.com/symptoms-of-groupthink/
MikeM
I never thought you stopped being a vaccine skeptic!
Russell,
Stille! Ihre Meinung ist verboten!
Respectfully,
Mind Guard bofill.
Russel
I’ve said DeSantis is wrong about not letting companies impose vaccine mandates and he’s wrong about not letting NCL ask people if they are vaccinated. But then I guess I do have thick skin.
Many people who allegedly lean right are actually better described as leaning libertarian. That is more accurate for me. The Republican platform is a mish mash of conflicting policies from a libertarian POV, as are the Democrats. Depending on what one considers the most important aspects (freedom of speech, liberty, individual responsibility, low tax burden) this usually makes libertarians vote Republican. If you are an anti-cop, anti-foreign intervention libertarian then you might go left.
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Many people are one issue voters whether it is gun control, abortion, etc. They will vote the obvious way and hold their nose for the rest. Partisans know this is true for their side, but assume everyone on the other side supports everything that side does.
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Freedom of speech and individual liberty are very important to me, so I vote the obvious way.
lucia (Comment #205373): “I never thought you stopped being a vaccine skeptic!”
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Well, I got vaccinated. All along, I thought that people could be rational and decide the vaccine was not for them. Does that make me a skeptic?
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That said, I could have used a better word. I should have said I was back to being somewhat vaccine hesitant. Maybe that should be “booster hesitant”.
RUSSELL KLIER (Comment #205372): “This comes to mind…. “ONE OF THE WORST INDICATORS OF GROUPTHINK – “DIRECT PRESSURE ON DISSENTERSâ€. https://www.indabaglobal.com/symptoms-of-groupthink/”
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OK. No groupthink here.
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Disagreeing with the opinions of others and giving reasons why they are wrong is NOT “pressure on dissenters”.
Mike,
I think Russell is talking about all the poopyheads (like me) who were mocking him.
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Russell,
Believe what you want. Indulging in hyperbole with political claims (remember ‘DeSantis the Dictator’) invites mockery. Trolling us with the endless doom scrolling COVID messages invites mockery. Is this an echo chamber? Heck, maybe it is. Maybe you’re right. I’m willing to entertain that possibility.
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To get back to the question I kept asking that you never wanted to answer: Let’s say you’re totally right and we’re (or just me, I’m) totally wrong. Now what? What is it you want of us?
Russell,
Groupthink? That is silly. Most commenters here have differing views about multiple subjects. What seems groupthink to you may just be a common reaction to an outlandish, outrageous comment….. oh say, supporting policies which are specifically designed to *force* people to accept a medical treatment they don’t want, by making their lives essentially impossible otherwise. Suitable for Vox and similar lefty outlets, but not among people who believe the Constitutions is a foundational document that guarantees individual liberty.
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WRT DeSantis, I think he is a good governor, but certainly not perfect. I strongly disagreed with DeSantis’ change in reporting covid deaths, because it is the kind of blatant political spin that I fully expect from scoundrels like Cuomo and Whitmer. I think that was a political mistake, and one he will regret.
Hopefully just this last comment from me, hopefully last out of consideration for others on this blog, some of who I think of as online friends, who likely find this subject boring.
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Russell:
I am not out to save the world. I’m not here to champion truth or justice or anything at all. I’m not posting here to accomplish anything in the grand scheme of things.
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This is Lucia’s blog. It’s a place where people who feel like talking about certain subjects can talk about those subjects. I post here because I enjoy talking with the people here, because I’ve been talking with them for years and I consider them online friends. That is all.
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Does this constitute an echo chamber, or group think? Maybe! Maybe it does. I don’t see how that matters. It’s Lucia’s blog, and as long as she lets us talk here, I don’t see the harm. Wrong and hypocritical and misguided and groupthinky as we all may be — and we really might be, I get that, it’s possible. So. What.
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If you want us to mend our wicked ways, say so. If you want us to shut up, say so. These seem like dumb things to request in my view and I don’t actually believe they are what you’re after. But I honestly have no idea what you are after, so I keep coming back to this point. I don’t know what you want, and you refuse to say what it is you want. You just hector us endlessly. Looks like trolling. I treat you like a troll. If you have some suggestion to improve the situation, by all means share it so we can be done with the stupidity already.
mark bofill (Comment #205380): ” Indulging in hyperbole with political claims (remember ‘DeSantis the Dictator’) invites mockery. Trolling us with the endless doom scrolling COVID messages invites mockery.”
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Russell:
Mark is extremely polite and open minded; a good example for the rest of us. If mark is mocking you, it is a good bet that you have said something that deserves mockery.
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Edit: I should not speak for anyone else. So I will amend that to: Mark is a good example for ME. I need it.
Mike M,
I want to see convincing evidence of the benefit of a booster before agreeing to it. Same with a topical nasal vaccine to supplement the injected vaccine. Does that make me hesitant? No just rational.
Mark,
Ya, DeSantis is no ‘dictator’; he has the support of both houses of the legislature…. he is far from acting alone. When Russell declares DeSantis a dictator, then he is in reality suggesting the good people of the Sate of Florida do not have the right to elect their representatives and governor. That will always piss off a lot of people, and mockery in response is one of the manifestations.
Mike, Steve,
Thanks.
MikeM
I’d say yes.
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I’m not surprised you are booster hesitant. I expected that based on the totality of posts.
Russell, at many blogs you get banned for posting opinions that are against a certain consensus. I know of one semilarge blog/forum where the admin says he deletes posts that might cause vaccine hesitancy.
I have been banned there, don’t know if it is for that reason.
SteveF (Comment #205356)
Your skepticism is perfectly sensible. Korea is not and has never been dominated by 8th century religious zealots. Afghanistan is. Maybe Afghanistan will someday become a stable, modern democracy. But I suspect a major asteroid impact in Kabul is more likely.
What was that currency Lucia used to use for bets before Bitcoin?
On the sea ice.
Could I borrow some to bet against the Kabul meteor?
Predictions for 2022.
Always good to make 3 or 4 so when one becomes right you look good.
Inflation 20% for the year.
Midterm sweep of the houses for the Republicans. Triple vaccines three different companies to quell covid.
King Charles.
angech,
Quatloos, I think.
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20% inflation where? Australia? USA? Venezuela?
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Almost seemed like the Queen was hoping she would outlive Charles, but probably not. Charles will just be a return to normal…. British monarchs who are more than a little crazy.
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Triple vaccines: You mean vaccines which target three different strains of covid in one injection?
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I hope you are right about the 2022 midterms; voters have certainly witnessed the damage done to the ship of state when the captain is demented and the unhinged are in charge of the bridge. Unfortunately, 2022 can only stop additional damage, not reverse the terrible policies and laws already in place. That requires both houses and the presidency. The tax increases Democrats are considering, along with increased inflation, will wipe out economic growth for the middle class for a generation, which I suspect is the main objective: reduce the size of the pie and allocate most pieces to people who support Democrats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKoMHJ0IzK0
Lucia,
Funny, but only because the Biden puppet is way more cognizant than the real Biden. A more accurate portrayal of Biden’s condition would be mostly sad, but with frightening mixed in.
I was thinking that ‘quatloo’ is a great name for a cryptocurrency and wondering why it wasn’t a thing.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/quatloo/
Always important to establish ‘if’ before asking ‘why’. 🙂
I like LiteCoin though. Relatively quick, relatively cheap fees (cheap enough for microtransactions). Doesn’t look like Quatloos are taking off.
Thanks Lucia. That was funny.
On a different topic, I am wondering about New Orleans and hurricane Ida. Ida was a Category 4 hurricane, and it appears that the impact is mostly that the power is out. Some flooding and storm damage occurred of course, but. I am not getting the sense that the situation is anywhere near as bad as Katrina was.
I read that Katrina was a Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall.
I am wondering if whatever measures / preparations were put into place after Katrina are vindicated by this situation. I don’t know what (if anything) was actually done though.
[Edit: I read here the levees held up this time. But look out for next time! Climate Change!]
mark bofill,
I don’t remember high voltage transmission line towers being turned into pretzels from Katrina. But then with all the flooding, I may have missed that. All eight high voltage lines into NO are down. The report this morning from one major power company is that 2,000 miles of transmission lines are down in MS and LA. It’s going to take a while to fix that. The local power company has sent heavy equipment to the area. I remember seeing convoys of power company equipment heading south after Katrina ( I think, or possibly a different hurricane ).
I know they feather the props on wind turbine generators when the wind speed gets too high, but do they design them to withstand wind speeds greater than 120mph? Dunno. I doubt that rooftop solar panels would survive either. Even nuclear power doesn’t help if the transmission lines are down.
DeWitt,
Thanks. True. The power outage situation may be worse. I think that issue is going to continue to be a function of the decision not to pay for underground transmission lines. Who knows? Maybe it’s more cost effective to let hurricanes tear above ground powerlines up and fix them than to bury them. Inconvenient when the hurricanes come though.
Lyin’ Biden is taking a victory lap over the wonderful job his administration has done in Afghanistan, in spite of the mess Trump left him and the treachery and cowardice of the Afghans.
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At least he does not sound senile.
This says that Ida remained unusually strong for hours after landfall and discusses why that might have been:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/hurricane-ida-slammed-into-louisiana-and-then-didnt-really-weaken-why/
Yeah. We don’t even know exactly what Americans are there. If the Taliban decides to execute or imprison them we won’t even know it happened. But that’s best politically – what we don’t know for sure can be denied as conspiracy theory and right wing misinformation.
Sad though.
For all we know, the Taliban are executing them right now. Fox News seems to think so, although I don’t see how they’d know who’s being executed any better than anybody else.
But no worries, for President Biden says,
The bulk of the devastation from Katrina was due to the failure of multiple levees around New Orleans. This was obvious and known from the beginning. It didn’t stop the usual suspects from making the usual claims. They did a massive rebuild of the levee and pumping system and it apparently held up fine this time. It wasn’t a direct hit though.
I have no idea why Biden keeps making a “big speech” every two days. These are just words and change nothing. Being presidential and performatively competent doesn’t move the needle on a major show of on the ground actual incompetence.
The very large high voltage lines wouldn’t seem to have a large surface area that would be difficult to design to a high wind standard. Not sure which power lines are down. It’s possible they are just old and need to be replaced with something better, but it sounds like power is going to be out for a while with hot/humid temperatures. Probably best to stay out until power is back on in your area.
Thanks Tom.
Tom Scharf (Comment #205410): “The very large high voltage lines wouldn’t seem to have a large surface area that would be difficult to design to a high wind standard.”
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Compared to a solid structure, an open lattice would be subject to less force, but would surely have much less strength. I think that they use a lattice so as to be light, which means it need not be so strong. There is also quite a bit of force on the lines; skinny but very long. I would not be surprised if they design to “only” 100 MPH or so. So if poor maintenance comprised design margins, a 150 MPH wind might bring them down. Similar to what happened in the Quebec ice storm.
A 400 foot tall tower that held the high voltage lines crossing the Mississippi river collapsed. The power lines are in the river now. I doubt they have one of those towers in stock. This article has a before and after picture, but not a picture of the remains of the tower.
https://www.wafb.com/2021/08/30/no-power-orleans-parish-due-catastrophic-damage/
Another article said that the tower had survived Katrina.
“All eight major transmission lines are down, according to Entergy.”
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Those type of towers are not an easy rebuild. The pumping stations are a big issue I suspect. They can only run so long on generators but I guess they can be refueled.
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One of the downsides with super awesome engineering tools is you can design a structure right to a spec, and not routinely overbuild it they way they used to. I read somewhere that the previous spec was 120 mph and they will rebuild to 150 mph.
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I was without power for 4-5 days after a hurricane, our street of only about 10 houses had as tree down so we were way down on the priority list. It is no fun in FL without AC and local flooding.
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Now I live in a planned community with underground utilities that is much more robust.
The integrity of science has taken some big hits, but it seems that some remains. Two top FDA officials are resigning, apparently over the politically driven push for boosters:
https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/01/high-profile-fda-officials-resign-over-bidens-rushed-push-for-booster-shots/
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General Milley and company should take notice.
If you live in an area that “may†be subject to power outages, and you don’t have a backup power generator for your house, you are not taking adequate insurance against possible outages.
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I live in central Ca where natural disaster causing power outages is rare, but where rotating power outages due to Ca government incompetence is moderate due to a lack of power generation. Some parts of Ca have a high chance of power being shut off due to wind conditions in possible fire areas.
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For about $1200 one can install a 5-7k 3 fuel generator and a switch to disconnect from the grid and power most of a house from the generator. I also added a 12k btu 120v split mini AC unit that draws less than 1kw in case the power goes out on one of our 110d days.
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Insurance is more than just writing a check to your insurance co.
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The split mini ac unit saves me about $100/mo is summer power billing also due better power efficiency
Mark bofill,
There’s more to Ida than New Orleans. I’m a resident of Houma, SW of New Orleans. Our parish, Terrebonne, was hit hard. Entire parish without electricity and water. Hospitals closed. My house is like many, if not most, in the area: shingles gone, lots of water damage. I have a whole-house generator, so a/c and food. Weeks and weeks of hard work ahead. As I write, it’s starting to rain again.
Thanks Paul.
Do you mind if I ask how Ida compares to Katrina with respect to your local community, damage-wise? I’m curious about any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise that might speak to whether or not measures taken after Katrina to prepare for future hurricanes have been effective.
mark bofill,
Katrina made landfall east of NO. The worst flooding and storm surge is generally east of the eye, but the strongest winds are usually in the eye wall. Ida made landfall west of NO. I think the eye either passed over Houma or very near it. A WSJ article indicated that the storm surge from Katrina was higher than Ida.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/five-ways-hurricane-ida-damage-compares-with-katrina-11630451062
Not sure about LA, but anyone who replaced their roof recently near the coast in FL has to have ~130 mph protection, it depends on where you live. When we did our roof about 5 years ago they had to re-nail all the deck and install 130 mph shingles which required 4 fasteners, inspected by the county, etc.
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If you get a direct hit by a Cat4 then all bets are off, but hopefully the region of very high winds is narrow enough so that not a large area is impacted. You can get unlucky.
Mark bofill,
Ida was much worse than Katrina for us. As Dewitt points out, Houma was very close to Ida’s eye. I can’t speak for the whole parish, as Terrebonne parish extends to the Gulf, and I live in the northern area, but I’m pretty sure most of the damage is wind related as opposed to flooding.
Tom,
Metal roofs seem to have been less affected by the winds than shingle roofs. I hope to replace my shingled one with metal, but only ifI can get one in a reasonable time.
I spent two weeks in Ocean Springs, MS immediately following (i.e. within a few days of landfall) Katrina. Katrina was much worse there than Ida has been. However, Katrina damage there was largely due to a huge storm surge.
DeWitt,
Thanks. You keep me from going off into the weeds before I even get rolling properly.
Paul,
Thanks. It’s interesting anyway, even if it’s not useful to compare apples with orangutans.
DeWitt,
It occurs to me, maybe it wasn’t your point that [] differences in landfall location make comparison of the two hurricanes not as trivial as I initially supposed. It’s what I took from what you said though.
Shrug. Long day.
Perhaps the vaccines are like drug addiction, your body requires regular boosters.
Paul Maeder (Comment #205431)
“Metal roofs seem to have been less affected by the winds than shingle roofs. “
I don’t know if this applies to Louisiana, but I replaced a shingle roof with metal in Florida and it saves me about $110 per month on my homeowners insurance. It requires a “Self-Adhering Underlayment for Secondary Water Resistance†that is peel and stick that attaches directly on the sheathing. https://www.floridaroof.com/news/blog/Self-Adhering-Underlayment-Issues-During-Roof-Replacement-April2020
The contractor significantly increased the number of nails that attached the sheathing to the roof joists, rolled out the peel and stick, layed the metal right on top of the underlayment and attached it with about a million lag screws. It is an incredibly strong composite finished product, which is important because I live in a forest. I had installed hurricane tie down straps previously when I built the house and that is a requirement for the insurance discount. An added benefit is the music of rain on a metal roof. Metal cost me about 30% more than replacing it with shingles would have cost.
Russell,
Is the metal roof aluminum or galvanized steel? I have seen many roofs made of galvanized steel that had to be replace because the steel had started to rust; I don’t know how old they were.
SteveF (Comment #205437) “Is the metal roof aluminum or galvanized steel? “
Galvalume. I have been dealing with this contractor for 50 years. His estimate is 40 year life in Florida. Warranty is 25 years. Either way it should outlive me.
“Galvalume metal roof and siding panels are coated with a mixture of zinc and aluminum and siliconized coating to help resist scuffs and fingerprints better than a bare metal product. The mixture of zinc and aluminum protects the Galvalume metal against corrosion and rust, helping Galvalume typically last much longer than Galvanized steel. Galvalume also comes with a 25-year warranty, which is something that cannot be provided with Galvanized steel.†https://www.bridgersteel.com/metal-colors/galvalume
My wife has always been interested in houses with metal roofs; if I remember right she lived in one as a kid in Pennsylvania. More for the ‘music of the rain’ than for practical reasons I think. We might end up living out our days in one yet.
Russell, thanks for the info. I knew about the insurance discount but the underlayment was news to me. I have a friend in Houma who put a metal roof on his house last year. He caught a lot of flak from his neighbors who thought it wasn’t appropriate for the neighborhood. But, now, his is the only house on the street without roof damage. I expect there will be lots more metal roofs showing up in that subdivision.
mark bofill, ‘Music of the Rain’ The new sandwich composite design used for strength probably mutes the sound somewhat. I would imagine the traditional metal on furring strips with an air gap might be more what she remembers.
Thanks Russell.
Paul Maeder (Comment #205440)
“He caught a lot of flak from his neighbors who thought it wasn’t appropriate for the neighborhood.â€
The first metal roof in my neighborhood appeared in 2005, after hurricane Charley blew apart Charlotte County just South of us. It did look out of place. Now more than half the roofs are metal. [I haven’t seen a single shingle roof installed since 2017 when hurricane Irma tore through here as a category 2 storm.] We are one acre wooded lots, so metal looks just right now that there are a lot of them. http://hiddenoakssarasota.com/
MikeN
Perhaps food, water and air are like drug addition, your body requires regular boosters.
Noticed Youtube had buried the news again today. “Leaked Biden phonecall”. Oh, right.
I think roof tie-downs have been a new/updated roof requirement in FL for a couple decades. We originally had a tile roof. It was supposed to last 30 years but the underlayment only lasted 15. The entire neighborhood pretty much changed out their roofs within a 5 year span to shingle. Tile roofs are now >2X the cost, $50K depending on the size. Ouch. Allegedly shingle technology has improved over the past 30 years. We did get a significant insurance discount after the roof was replaced. The next biggest discount is changing all the doors/windows to the new code but that is another $30K upgrade.
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My understanding is you may have to wait months after a hurricane to get your roof replaced and you need to be quite careful of out of town shysters ripping you off.
Shall we just say that leaks of WH conversations are handled slightly differently than they were 4 years ago? It’s not just the willingness of people to leak things anonymously (and they media’s willingness to cover anonymous leaks) that can be easily taken out of context, but also the uncharitable viewpoint one takes with those leaks. This is expected behavior these days, it is only an anomaly when the opposite happens such as the recent rather hostile coverage of the Afghanistan situation for Biden.
Big study in Bangladesh comes to conclusion that masks help prevent covid infection by about 10%
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/01/masks-study-covid-bangladesh/
10% is higher than I expected as I figured real world would be sub 5%. Regardless the way masking is discussed by some, you’d think it was 70-80% effective. It’s better than nothing, but even 100% compliance isn’t going to stop the pandemic.
Tom Scharf (Comment #205448): “Big study in Bangladesh comes to conclusion that masks help prevent covid infection by about 10%”.
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Actually, 11%, with error bars of +/-11%. But only for surgical masks; no benefit for cloth masks. From a quick glance at the paper, it looks like there may have been some p-hacking.
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So that basically agrees with all prior studies.
Lucia, I think YOU are an anti-vaxxer, at least under the new definition by Merriam Webster.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer
Wow. Has Merriam Webster become like Wikipedia these days, where people can just write whatever they feel like? Looks like it!
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[Edit: uhm, yeah. I’m an anti-vaxxer too, by that definition.]
Mike,
How did you chance upon that, if you don’t mind my asking?
The WP isn’t going to cover a study that doesn’t support the preferred narrative. 10% is low relative to the sell job of pro-maskers. It’s observational so it can be manipulated in all the usual ways, but 10% seems within the realm of the possible. Some of the quotes in the article are definitely cringeworthy IMO.
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“The study does not quite claim to be the final word on masks. The authors found that while cloth masks clearly reduced symptoms, they “cannot reject†the idea that unlike surgical masks, they may have only a small effect on symptomatic coronavirus infections, and possibly none at all.
Abaluck emphasized, however, that research did not produce evidence that cloth masks are ineffective.
The results “don’t necessarily show that surgical masks are much, much better than cloth masks, but we find much clearer evidence of the effectiveness in surgical masks,†he said.
Abaluck also noted that the intervention group was found to practice more social distancing, which may complicate the findings on masks.”
Tom,
LOL. I get how that could technically be true. But. Give us a break already. If you find much clearer evidence of the effectiveness of A as opposed to B, one very good possible reason why this could be so would be because A is much more effective than B. [There’s this razor. Occam’s razor I’m pretty sure it’s called that has something to do with the issue here…]
‘Come on, man’ as President Biden might say.
I read a story that Merriam Webster changed the definition. The dictionary writers inject politics into their work.
Here’s politifact to assure us that this was always the definition.
LOL. What a wacky definition.
[Edit: I’m pro marriage, meaning I think people should marry before they start a family. OR meaning that I think the government should force people to get married before they start a family. The two ideas are practically similar, if you do six quick shots of cheap gin and hit yourself in the head with a baseball bat a couple of times.]
MikeN,
Does Merriam Webster have a definition for climate change d3ni3r? If it does, I’m betting we all qualify. If they could call Pielke, Jr. that, then everybody but the most rabid, sky is falling, catastrophists are.
Climate change denier acccording to Merriam Webster:
Shrug.
Here is a paper on adverse effects of wearing masks:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/
There are many.
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Summary, possibly biased, here:
https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/02/a-look-at-scientific-evidence-suggesting-face-masks-damage-your-health/
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The effects are pertinent to prolonged use (especially for children) and people with medical problems. And maybe those idiots who wear masks like driving. So not the people who make the rules, or advocate for them.
MikeN,
I’m not sure how you think I fit that definition.
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I’m not against requiring kids in public school to be vaccinated for measles, mumps, polio whatever the current ones the require are.
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I’m not against employers being allowed to make vaccination a requirement for employees. I lean toward making school teachers and hospital workers be required.
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I’m not against service providers insisting on vaccination to render services. If the local dance studio wanted to require dancers to be vaccinated, I think they should be allowed to do that.
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I’m not against the government creating something that lets me prove I’m vaccinated to people who want to screen.
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I’m not against universities requiring students to be vaccinated.
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Admittedly: I think there should be some religious and health exemptions in appropriate circumstances. But I lean toward mandating, not against.
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I’ve already said all these things. Some other people here are against some or many of these thigns, bit I’m not.
Mark,
I don’t qualify for that definition of denier. Either do either of the Pielkes. Nor many people here.
Footnote: the wife assures me she has never lived in a metal roofed house and suggests I get tested for early onset dementia.
Lucia,
Yes. I like to identify as a denier but I don’t even qualify.. :/
Lucia,
You know, I was about to challenge you on this. But trying to put a case together I realized, oh yeah. Most States actually have laws [that] require vaccinations for school.
Shrug. It’s not the controversy I thought.
I don’t think the government should mandate vaccinations, but maybe I’m full of cheese whiz as usual.
LOL.
The anti-vaxxer movement was originally a progressive movement. Look at this:
We stepped in that one Mike. We’re dirty no good gosh darn Progressives now.
~grins~
[Edit: I recant my incredulity regarding the definition. Now that I look into the matter a little, I see that the definition makes sense. I don’t think there’s grounds to scoff like I did.]
mark,
Yes. The Anti-vaxxers were people who were refusing to have their kids vaccinated for schools or where at least opposed to having them vaccinated. The schools mandated the vaccine. That’s where they butted heads.
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Some were very vocal too and promoted a number of scientific arguments, some of which were flawed. (The purely ‘rights’ based arguments are not the same as the science ones.)
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I’m pretty sure no one mandated vaccines for plain ol’ ordinary adults who just went about their business. At least not recently. (I have no idea what happened with smallpox which is now gone.)
Lucia,
Yep. Once I had the historical context the definition made a lot more sense.
Mark wrote: “The anti-vaxxer movement was originally a progressive movement.”
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You didn’t know? Antivaxxers are very much the same people who had california warn everyone that everything causes cancer and are horrified to discover “chemicals” in everything.
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“We stepped in that one Mike. We’re dirty no good gosh darn Progressives now.”
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The antivaxxer movement has always been a dirty far right movement. History just hasn’t had enough time to catch up.
Dave,
I’m sorry. I was actually mocking myself (and Mike I guess, although he was collateral damage) there. If I have offense, it was unintentional.
Well even with DeSantis cooking the books the Covid death count during this run is now the worst. The new record death day for Florida is 263 which occured on August 14, 2021. This comes from the official CDC report. [Remember with his new reporting scheme it takes two weeks to get accurate numbers.] He seems to be getting away with it. Only a few media outlets have called him on it. “Florida reported ‘artificial decline’ in COVID-19 deaths as cases were surging†https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/570192-florida-reported-artificial-decline-in-covid-19-deaths-as-cases-were
More bad news to follow.
Desantis continues to lean on businesses and local school boards who are trying to take steps to be safe. “Florida will soon start issuing $5,000 fines for businesses that require customers to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination.†https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/politics-issues/2021-09-02/florida-will-soon-issue-5-000-fines-for-violating-states-vaccine-passport-ban and this where he lost in court: “ Florida school districts can legally require their students to wear face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 after Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper filed his decision he made during a ruling last week. Cooper said Gov. Ron DeSantis overstepped his authority when he issued an executive order banning such mandates.†https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/09/02/judge-signs-order-giving-florida-school-boards-power-to-issue-mask-mandates-to-combat-covid/
Russell,
I think I read DeSantis is appealing. This is a case where I think we could pretty much anticipate appeals by the losing side whoever they were.
Russell,
The second circuit is in the FL panhandle, which is the most Republican part of the state, where DeSantis has very strong support. After this ruling, Judge John Cooper could not likely win election again when his term is up (2027). Of course, he is already past 70, so I am sure he is not worried about re-election. Judge Cooper has refused to any hear cases except by teleconference since the covid pandemic started, so I guess his ruling in this case is no surprise.
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While it is impossible to say for sure what the court of appeals for the second circuit will rule (it is officially the ‘First Circuit Court of Appeals’ which covers all the panhandle district courts), but the three judges assigned to the case (to be argued on Sept. 8) all appear to be middle aged conservatives. They risk not winning re-election if they uphold the original order. So I would not bet on the original order being sustained.
In politically charged cases, judges who must be ‘affirmed’ at the ballot to stay in office are unlikely to vote against their own future employment. Voters in the panhandle are not likely to forget the ruling in this case.
Appeal to the FL SC is a given. The outcome there will depend on which judges are assigned to the case.
Most of Latin America is well past the delta-surge, in spite of relatively low vaccination rates. Looks like delta infections/deaths usually drop when the death toll reaches 2,400 to 2,700 per million population. Mexico is the exception, with a still high rate of infection, and death toll just over 2,000 per million.
The US SC ruling to allow a Texas anti-abortion law to stand was something of a surprise. Many legal observers now are suggesting that the five conservatives on the SC will vote in support of the Mississippi law that restricts all abortions after 15 weeks gestation. This kind of restriction is in line with abortion limits in some other Western countries (eg France).
SteveF (Comment #205481): “The US SC ruling to allow a Texas anti-abortion law to stand was something of a surprise.”
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SCOTUS did not rule on the law. They ruled on technical grounds against a request for an injunction. Jonathan Turley:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/roe-vs-wade-mainstream-media-jonathan-turley
Trying (or the perception of) to overturn Roe vs Wade is the best path toward losing the midterm elections. Congratulations Republicans!
Lucia, SteveF, I agree that the Governor and State Attorney may ultimately win the appeal and reinstate their edict forcing the local school boards to stop their student mask mandates. The bigger issue is that Florida is at the peak of an unprecedented Covid epidemic and the Governor and the State Attorney General are spending time and resources pursuing this issue at all. I further agree that there is limited scientific documentation proving that masks are effective at reducing the spread of Covid. But there is zero scientific documentation proving masks facilitate the spread of Covid. And there are years and years of public health protocol using masks to help control the spread of airborne disease. The local school boards collect local tax dollars and up till now have set local rules. Florida’s new chief executive title is “Little Ronnie Bonaparte, Emperor of Floridaâ€.
Local school boards may set certain rules, but only because the state allows them to do so and specifically delegates authority to them.
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I haven’t seen anything on FL’s local laws that explains what the specific legal situation is, but apparently there is some type of “provide for the health and welfare of students” verbiage for local schools. If the state really wants to assert authority then they can change the law and do what they want. I think it is unwise to do so and this hill isn’t worth dying on.
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I have seen many busses unload over the past week and * not a single * child was wearing a mask. A lot of the discussion is just disingenuous as a mask mandate with parental opt out is commonly referred to as “no universal masking mandate” inferring there aren’t any rules in place. I have seen zero information on what the actual opt-out rate is or what the on the ground masking in class really is, and I would venture a guess that the media isn’t interested in knowing that number.
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There are arguments that it must be 100% to be useful blah blah blah, but then make those arguments instead of pretending there aren’t any mandates.
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Politically I would guess FL is running out the clock on the delta surge until it starts obviously declining and the media go find a new shiny object to play with.
Ha ha, The Atlantic:
Climate Change Is Already Rejiggering Where Americans Live
Some Hurricane Ida survivors may have no choice but to leave. Sooner or later, people across the country will be in the same bind.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/hurricane-ida-louisiana-climate-migration/619971/
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In other news ~6 people died in LA from Cat4 Ida and ~50 people died in the Northeast from non-hurricane Ida. See “Superstorm” Sandy (i.e. not a hurricane at landfall) for another example of where you would choose to not move to. High taxes, bad infrastructure, and journalists who don’t know how to count when trying to make a point.
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“Americans still think of “climate migration†as a global phenomenon, one that would displace the residents of low-lying Bangladesh or scalding Yemen, but even before Ida hit, distinct migration patterns were taking shape in the United States too.”
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Yes, those patterns have worn out the roads * from NY to FL *. What a howler.
Russell,
There is a great deal of evidence that masks are far more harmful to children than the Wuhan virus.
Russell,
“The bigger issue is that Florida is at the peak of an unprecedented Covid epidemic and the Governor and the State Attorney General are spending time and resources pursuing this issue at all.”
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There is little scientific evidence that masking kids makes a pinch of difference, so why make them suffer? All of Europe continued with normal schooling (at least for kids under 16), right through the pandemic, with no masks…. and no documented significant spread of covid. The people in Europe sensibly recognized 1) kids are at virtually zero risk, and 2) kids rarely spread the virus to others. Lots of people in the States have consistently (and still) refused to accept this reality. So most kids lost a year of school for nothing… except for wealthy kids, of course, who went to private schools.
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Why are we having this ridiculous fight of masking kids? Because some people, like you, are hysterical about covid, and because teachers (among the most hysterical of all) are politically powerful in the USA. There is ZERO reason for kids to be wearing masks in school. That is why DeSantis fights the mask nonsense. You may disagree, but I believe he will win the legal fight…. rationality is on his side.
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Those concerned about covid deaths should focus on who is actually dying: mostly late middle age and elderly people who refused vaccinations. I am very sorry for their families they are dying, but I also recognize it is their own fault. I am also very sorry that a relative handful of people with other serious health issues like your brother in law also die from covid, in spite of vaccination. But that is not a good reason for the rest of the world, and especially not kids, to be endlessly tortured with arbitrary rules and regulations….. which mostly do nothing of any use.
Tom Scharf,
“Politically I would guess FL is running out the clock on the delta surge until it starts obviously declining and the media go find a new shiny object to play with.”
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Absolutely correct. It is really just an effort by DeSantis to resist irrational local rules. This irrational push for masking will pass when the irrational population focuses on something else.
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I agree, under the Florida constitution, the legislature has the authority to enact laws restricting, to whatever extent they want, what regulations local governments in the state can do, and there are already many such state-wide restrictions. If DeSantis should lose the school mask appeal at the FL SC, I expect the legislature will be happy to pass a law to stop the local school masking madness.
Tom Scharf,
I do not think there will be anything like a complete overturning of Roe. More likely the court will allow states to set ‘reasonable’ gestational limits short of viability (typically considered~24 weeks gestation). The Mississippi law blocks abortion after 15 weeks, but allows abortion after 15 weeks in the cases of fetal deformity or serious maternal health risk. The Mississippi law is far less restrictive than most anti-abortion laws the court has struck in the past.
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What is ‘reasonable’? That is a difficult question, like all moral questions are. I believe a large majority of Americans support access to abortion in the first trimester, but a large majority are opposed to abortion after the first trimester (14 weeks counting from the last menstrual cycle). If the court were to set that kind of limit on the state restricting abortion, I think Republicans will probably not be harmed politically. An explicit reversal of Roe (that is, the states can make any abortion unlawful) would hurt Republicans.
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Organizations like Planned Parenthood should try to increase access and use of the morning after pill, since it seems likely there will be some additional restrictions on abortion in the future
Russel
The only thing that raises my eyebrow is your choice of words to set a tone:
The verb “lean” makes it sound like you think DeSantis is a member of the Mafia!
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There is certainly a sKirmish over who has authority. DeSantis may merely be exercising the powers granted by the state to a governor. Or he may have overstepped.
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Meanwhile, the protesting school boards members– who are politicians– would say they are merely exercising their powers. If you want to use the word “lean” someone might characterize this a school boards leaning on parents and students.
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I have no idea who has what legal authority in Florida. I don’t endorse every choice DeSantis has made but his masks and children one doesn’t really move me one way or the other.
Russell,
Do you have any grandchildren?
lucia (Comment #205493) you wrote:
“The verb “lean†makes it sound like you think DeSantis is a member of the Mafia!†Lucia, he is withholding the school board members’ whole monthly paycheck in retaliation. That sounds like leaning on them to me. “Despite court’s decision, Florida withholds school board salaries over mask mandatesâ€
Nero fiddled while Rome burned and DeSantis litigated while Florida died.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/despite-court-s-decision-florida-withholds-school-board-salaries-over-n1278107
Russell,
“DeSantis litigated while Florida died.”
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Plaeeeez. That is utter rubbish. You are both completely wrong on the facts and, I fear, quite crazy. Florida is not ‘dying’, it has a rapidly growing population. Northerners are (sensibly) relocating to Florida in droves, in part to avoid the nutty covid rules in the north. There is nothing anyone can do that will stop the spread of the delta variant. Politicians who try are so small minded that they should be voted out of office. Nowhere in the world have “social rules” kept the virus at bay. Reality is hard to deal with, but stupidity among politicians is even harder.
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I ask again: do you have any grandchildren? I am guessing you do not. That would explain your insistence on sacrificing the welfare of kids for the benefit of the elderly,
SteveF (Comment #205490) you wrote: “Why are we having this ridiculous fight of masking kids? Because some people, like you, are hysterical about covidâ€. You wrote that in response to my comment: “The bigger issue is that Florida is at the peak of an unprecedented Covid epidemic and the Governor and the State Attorney General are spending time and resources pursuing this issue at all.†I did not say I support masking children in school. I said I am against DeSantis fighting with local school boards right now. In my opinion he is trying to make political hay by going after local school boards on masks. I think it is the wrong time to play politics and I predict it will backfire on him. Sarasota is an extremely Republican county. Our school board fretted for weeks over this issue and finally enacted a short term mask mandate that they honestly believe will help. “Gov. DeSantis says Sarasota County school mask mandate goes against state law†https://www.rochesterfirst.com/news/gov-desantis-says-sarasota-county-school-mask-mandate-goes-against-state-law/ He should spend his time elsewhere.
Russell,
DeSantis is simply not going to allow local school boards to abuse children. This is not even difficult for most to understand.
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I ask yet again: do you have grandchildren, and especially grandchildren in FL? I am guessing no.
I think there is many times an impulse to blame people, specifically the outgroup, when bad things happen regardless of the cause. Human determinism. This is so tiring. Blame the virus. It is beyond wishful thinking that FL voting 1% differently a few years ago would have resulted in significantly less death. The most progressive counties in FL have some of the worst results. Why? Likely because they have high density less educated populations. Move to Miami-Dade if you like.
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You can look across the US, Europe and elsewhere and find exactly zero winners in the covid battle (maybe NZ but that is exceptional circumstances). The policies one endorses that they claim would have prevented mass death with covid have been tried elsewhere (NY, CA, etc.) and if anything the most restrictive polices have even worse results. Why? Because the most restrictive policies were implemented after things got very bad initially.
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DeSantis is running the same playbook he did last year that worked out better than … ahem … experts predicted. Perhaps it worked out less well this time, and then again maybe there just isn’t a whole lot to do here beyond vaccination that moves the needle. As delta moves through the rest of the US this year we shall see if perceived good intentions make any difference. I think we have enough data to already answer that question though.
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It’s a novel airborne highly contagious respiratory virus. It’s global and its mutating. It sucks and it isn’t going away. Vent away if it makes one feel better, but it’s irrational to believe politics is the solution.
Who owns the future? It is an interesting question. I am spending the next two weeks on Cape Cod with my (as they say in Massachusetts) “wicked smart” granddaughter (3 YO), who simply can’t stop talking until she is asleep.
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She is the future, like it or not. There is no alternative. I cant try, in a grumpy grandfather way, to guide her to think critically, and to hit a golf ball without too much curve. But the fundamental issue is: she is the future, and we who are destined to ‘the dustbin of history’ … which is all of us… have no say. All we can do is try to instill in the people who will rule the future a sense of the value of liberty.
Russell
I’m amazed that “school board member” is a paid. I’d be even more amazed if it’s a full time job! This is usually a nearly-volunteer position. This shouldn’t be enough money to have withholding it represent “leaning”. They’ll get it eventually. Just like DOE and federal employees get their money after Congress passes budget resolutions and they are back to work.
Wow! The school board members make shitwads!!
Oh.. anyway, the state isn’t preventing the school board members from being paid. This article says
“he Florida Department of Education has withheld an amount equal to monthly school board member salaries in Alachua and Broward counties”
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Local districts raise their own money. They can perfectly well use their own money to pay their own school board members. If they want to be independent from the State and State rules, it makes perfect sense the State stops sending them funding. Having locals carry their own weight to implement their own policies is not “leaning”.
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I mean, you’ve said you like local control. This is just letting them have local control and pay for their own choices.
As for shit wads:
https://www.news4jax.com/news/florida/2021/08/31/alachua-county-vows-to-fight-back-after-state-withholds-school-board-salaries-over-mask-mandate/
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That’s a heck of a lot of money for a position that has to be very part time!
Florida has 74 schools districts. My county has a single district with 100K students.
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TX = 1035 districts
CA = 977
IL = 879
NY = 688
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I imagine some board members work harder than others, ha ha. FL probably makes up for it with plenty of other administrative positions.
Lucia,
“That’s a heck of a lot of money for a position that has to be very part time!”
Why there are any paid school board positions is a mystery similar to why there is dark energy: not only does it make no sense, there is no evidence it should exist at all….. plenty of parents would be happy to step up and fill those rolls.
Lucia, You wrote: “That’s a heck of a lot of money for a position that has to be very part time!†and “Local districts raise their own money. “
From Sarasota County School Board 2020 Financial Report: “Expenses totaled $596,993,299†It’s a $600 MILLION per year enterprise! It is presided over by an elected board of five people and not a job for amateurs. I have had two close family friends who were elected school board members in Sarasota. Both were accomplished business professionals who shelved their careers for a term on the school board. [They both had higher political aspirations.] They spent a lot of time on school board work.
The money flow is complicated. It is something like this [I think]: It is taxed locally via the annual property tax bill. The State administers the funds, takes a cut for themselves, takes some for the poorer school districts and doles the rest back to the local district. In the middle of a fiscal year the local board can’t just raise more local money to give to the board members.
Sarasota School Board Financial Report:
https://www.sarasotacountyschools.net/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=2759&dataid=83085&FileName=CAFR%202020%20FINAL%20revised%20with%20CB%20letterhead.pdf
Florida funding for school districts: https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/7507/urlt/Fefpdist.pdf
Tom Scharf, you are probably correct that if Republicans were to ban abortion, there would then be fewer Republicans in the next Congress. However, the pro-life faction doesn’t care about how many Republicans there are, just that they want to ban abortion.
In some states there are lots of Democrats who vote Republican primarily because they are pro-life.
It is a generally losing idea to say we can’t pass something because we don’t have the votes, then when they have the votes to say we can’t pass it because then we will lost seats. Democrats don’t do this, and they got ObamaCare, and if they could get a few Senators to budge it looks like they would have a whole lot more.
The budget reconciliation bill has nothing to do with the budget and instead is a liberal wish list.
MikeN,
“The budget reconciliation bill has nothing to do with the budget and instead is a liberal wish list.”
Every bill advanced in this Congress is a progressive wish list. The Democrat party is wholly and utterly dishonest: propaganda-” we are the party that cares about people”, reality-“we are the party that will do ANYTHING, no matter how damaging to the country, to take and keep power.”
Russell Klier (Comment #205506): “It’s a $600 MILLION per year enterprise! It is presided over by an elected board of five people and not a job for amateurs.”
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Corporations with 100 times that budget have part time boards of directors.
The Florida weekly numbers come out late on Fridays.
“Florida COVID update: 1,338 more fatalities. Average daily reported deaths reaches record high†Florida accounting sleight of hand can’t hide the bad news any longer with and the chickens are finally coming home to roost.
More gloom and doom:
“In the past seven days, on average, the state has added 325 deaths and 19,902 cases each day, according to Herald calculations of CDC data. This is a record high for the death average.â€
“There were 14,949 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Florida on Thursday. Of the hospitalized in Florida, 3,340 people were in intensive care unit beds.”
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253940263.html
Russel
It’s not an “enterprise”. It’s not a business This isn’t like running a business. You don’t have to market, advertise, get people to spend money. It’s all pouring in from taxes.
The point is: they have money. If they want local control, they can use their own. Business people ought to know this.
SteveF Today you wrote:
“I ask again: do you have any grandchildren? I am guessing you do not. That would explain your insistence on sacrificing the welfare of kids for the benefit of the elderly,â€
“Why are we having this ridiculous fight of masking kids? Because some people, like you, are hysterical about covid“
Your comments are factually wrong, inappropriate, insulting and uncalled for.
Russell
The funding doesn’t seem to be that particularly complicated. You can find Sarasota’s school revenue broken down here:
https://www.sarasotacountyschools.net/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=2759&dataid=83085&FileName=CAFR%202020%20FINAL%20revised%20with%20CB%20letterhead.pdf
In 2020, they got
1,990,812 from the feds.
84,585,782 from the state and
360,141,663 from Local sources.
See page 10.
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I would suggest that if that particular school board wants full local control and to not be able to entirely unburden itself from State interference they should just give up the $84,585,782 from FLA. Certainly, there is no reason why the state should pay for a board especially if the board wants to insist they be independent of all State control.
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You really can’t get on your high horse about feeling locals should have full control unless you carry the full expense.
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Given the amount of local money coming in, and their reserves, it looks like Sarasota could still still pay the board their $2,590,854 which for some reason was an increase of 78% from 2019 (despite flat total expenses and even do so on short notice.
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lucia (Comment #205515) you wrote: “The funding doesn’t seem to be that particularly complicated. In 2020, they got 1,990,812 from the feds.84,585,782 from the state and 360,141,663 from Local sources.â€
Lucia, the $84,585,782 is very complicated. It is our own sales and property tax dollars that are generated in Sarasota County, sent to the State and a dubious portion gets sent back to us. It’s a mess. I think it is intentionally murky so the State can use local dollars to fund statewide general revenue items. Here are two old newspaper articles that try to explain where the money comes from and goes to: “Education funding in Florida can’t be easily explained†https://www.heraldtribune.com/article/LK/20100228/News/605204628/SH
And “State prepares school tax trick — again“
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/editorials/fl-editorial-school-property-tax-20151009-story.html
Here is the State’s 2021 report on school funding:
https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/7507/urlt/Fefpdist.pdf
Here is a sample excerpt: “To equalize educational opportunities, the FEFP formula recognizes: (1) varying local property tax bases; (2) varying education program costs; (3) varying costs of living; and (4) varying costs for equivalent educational programs due to sparsity and dispersion of the student population.â€
What frosts me is Governor DeSantis inserting himself into the local school board operational decisions for political gain. I have been an active responsible citizen and local government department head here for 40 years and I have never seen a governor try to coerce the school board like this.
Florida sales tax is a state tax, collected everywhere in the state. The legislature has passed laws which specify how those funds are spent. Any suggestion that education funds received from the state are really ‘our sales tax money’ the state has taken is nonsense. It is a state tax administered by the state and controlled by the state.
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As far as I can tell, every FL school district defying the no-mask mandate is run by Democrats. The mask fight is a political disagreement, nothing more. The opposing sides weigh the costs and benefits of mask mandates differently.
Russell,
“Your comments are factually wrong, inappropriate, insulting and uncalled for.”
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A remarkably accurate description of many of your past comments.
So things still go south even if I keep my mouth shut. I was honestly curious about that.
Russell
That doesn’t make it complicated. It’s levied by the State. It’s not earmarked for education. The state doesn’t have to give it to the school board.
You said your friends were on the school board because they have political ambitions. And it appears the Sarasota school board gave themselves ginormous raises this year. If it were my district, I’d be frosted that these people are using board membership for political and financial gain. But that’s just me.
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States have always had some involvement in schools. If they did not, they wouldn’t send the schools any money at all!
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I bet that’s more for lack of looking that lack of the state imposing requirements. I’m sure the state has lots of requirements for teacher licensing, minimum course requirements and so on. That’s all “coercive” if you want to look at it that way.
lucia (Comment #205522): “If it were my district, I’d be frosted that these people are using board membership for political and financial gain. But that’s just me.”
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Indeed. I am sure that so would most people, if they realized it.
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School boards should be part-time. That way, members of the community are free to serve. By requiring, at least in effect, that people quit their jobs to be on the board, parents are effectively excluded. It becomes a job for grifters and politicians.
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If districts are too large for that, split them up.
Our school district budget is $2.6B. Overseeing that and all the various high stress issues in education is probably not a part time job in our school system. These are basically the only people accountable to voters for local school policy, so they are going to have a fair amount of decision making ability. Even in my area they are only paid around $44K. I think these are political positions mostly and most people likely have further political ambitions.
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If you have school board that only oversees a few schools then maybe it is a part time job. If I had my choice between fully paid unelected bureaucrats making all the decisions in schools or having fully paid elected officials then I would prefer elected officials.
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Should a decision on whether to introduce critical race theory or do universal masking be left to a low paid part timer who isn’t required to spend much effort on it? They also have to be educated on the law and take time to understand the issues from teachers, parents, and student perspectives.
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This job sounds worse than being a board member of an HOA.
Small districts have more overhead and are the primary source of disparate school district funding claims. Rich districts must pass along extra funds to poor districts in a complex process.
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There is a direct correlation between states with a large number of districts in the state and the spending per pupil.
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TX = 1035 districts
CA = 977
IL = 879
NY = 688
FL = 74
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NY – $24K
CA – $12K
IL – $15K
TX – $10K (this is an outlier)
FL – $9K
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Students outcomes are not correlated with spending as we all know. Disparate racial outcomes persist in my county even though we have equivalent spending per student in a large well funded district. The usual suspects ignore this when they make vague claims of funding disparities as a root problem.
Yeah. Our school districts are a lot smaller than FL!!! Florida’s are ginormous!
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But the fact that they are so ginormous makes it even more laughable that the governor is “leaning” on them — as if he’s the only one with power to lean. The people who he is supposedly “leaning” on have considerable power to “lean” on others– specifically parents. And. They. Are. Specifically, they would be “leaning” on parents who want to opt out of masks.
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I don’t know who is right and who is wrong. This is one set of politicians disagreeing and using whatever authority they have. It’s fine to prefer the choice of one group– as Russel clearly does. But school decisions have not been totally “local” in my lifetime nor have they been totally “state level” nor totally “federal”. The idea that the State is somehow out of line to make rules is laughable. They always do and always have.
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And beyond that: the locals have access to tons of moneys if they don’t want to follow State rules. Is it tighter? Might the want the state money? Sure. But Sarasota certainly has money to pay their board out of their own pocket if they so wish.
In Florida the districts are on county boundaries. Some are huge, some are small.
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Florida State Constitution:
https://ballotpedia.org/Article_IX,_Florida_Constitution
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“The school board shall operate, control and supervise all free public schools within the school district and determine the rate of school district taxes within the limits prescribed herein.â€
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There is also the FLDOE which is the department of education:
“The state board of education shall be a body corporate and have such supervision of the system of free public education as is provided by law.â€
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I’m no legal scholar but it appears that where there is ambiguity on the law then the local school board controls the policy and that power comes from the state constitution. I’m sure the board has to follow state laws so it is unclear if the mask mandates are controlled in any way here, I doubt it. A law could be created.
I think the budget cuts for the rebellious school districts had language so the reduced funds could only come from the school board salaries; they was language about not being allowed to cut certain areas.
I suspect Russell that had the state education board mandated that schools be closed last year and cut funding from school boards that opened, you would not have been upset by the interference of the governor on local control.
It’s been known from spring 2020 that children are only mildly affected by Covid19. Total fatalities in the US for those under 18 is about 350 out of a cohort of 73 million. Similarly, there are several studies showing that children are quite unlikely to spread Covid19 even if infected.
3 weeks ago I was exposed to a teenager who wasCovid19 positive with mild symptoms. I got a test but also looked at the scientific evidence.
BTW, for the nanny’s out there, there is now evidence from Israel that natural immuinity is 13 times more effective against serious disease (reinfection) than vaccination. Also that vaccine effectiveness declines with time (often by a lot). I think I saw that Phizer effectiveness has declined from 95% TO 75%. That is why Israel is having a third wave with significant deaths among the vaccinated.
If Delta has an R of between 5 and 9, its as contageous as chicken pox. This means that masks are going to be largely ineffective (the best evidence from before the pandemic always showed this for the flu too). If you are vaccinated and get infected, you are likely to have a mild infection and then be immune for years. A real infection generates T and B cell immunity. Vaccination does not do that as well. Antibodies always wane over time and all long term immunity is due to Cellular immunity.
The question I have for our “authorities” is why is not a “zero Covid” strategy not pure insanity. I am resigned to the fact that covid is going to be a chronic problem and I’m probably going to get exposed at some point.
David Young,
Unless you have been in a hole for the last 16 months, it is very likely you have been exposed, at least to the original strain if not the delta strain.
David Young,
The knock(s) on the infection acquired immunity results from Israel are that the numbers are small and, of course, that the study has not been peer reviewed yet. Given that the new case rate and number of active cases is now higher than in previous waves, those numbers should be getting larger fast.
As far as cellular immunity, I think all the vaccine manufacturers (well Pfizer, Moderna and J&J, dunno about AstraZeneca and the various Chinese vaccines) claim that their vaccines create some B and T cell immunity. But I haven’t seen any numbers as to how they compare to infection acquired immunity. And then there’s mucosal immunity. That’s not going to happen with an intramuscular injected vaccine.
But even if the COVID-19 vaccines are leaky, vaccines are still better than no vaccines. That was proven in the chicken industry with an extremely leaky vaccine. They’re now on the third generation vaccine. It took about ten years for each previous generation to become ineffective enough that a new vaccine was necessary.
My understanding is the vaccines do generate T & B cells.
From Peggy Noonan’s recent column in the WSJ:
I heard that about Obama, who may have had a bit more reason to think that. But Biden??? Can you say hubris?
DeWitt,
Obama was just dumb… a typical racially motivated admit to a selective school (same for his wife). Biden was even dumber…. before becoming demented. He is a frightening person to be in office as president.
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I expect Biden has already reached the “can’t possibly balance his checking account” level of dementia. Which is where most families intervene to stop the madness. It only gets worse from here: he will be ever more confused, angry, and hopelessly lost. But Kamala would clearly be worse.
Steve,
Do you mind if I ask why you believe Harris would clearly be worse? I am not saying I think you are wrong, but rather I am honestly curious about your thinking regarding this.
mark bofill,
I watched her at the Kavanaugh hearings: Dumb, dishonest, and willfully injurious. I also looked at her history: years of sleeping with the most powerful politician in California (30 years her senior!) and enjoying high-pay little-work committee appointments as a result. She is an unprincipled lightweight. Sensibly, people don’t like her. Her presidential campaign collapsed before the first primary votes were cast. There appears nothing she would not do for personal advancement.
Steve,
Yes. That lines up with my own opinion of Harris almost verbatim. I stumble at the worse than Biden part. In my view, she might be worse, but I don’t think of that as a sure thing. She’s got her faculties, such as they are.
My dance pro’s wife got Covid. She appears to have recovered.
It turns out he already had antibodies. So he clearly had a case he never, every noticed. There was a period several months ago when he complained about being tired and thought it was all the travel. Maybe it was back then.
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Lots of people have been infected.
mark bofill (Comment #205547): “She’s got her faculties, such as they are.”
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That might not be a good thing. The *best* we could hope for from Cackles would be ineptitude.
Mike,
Thanks, that brings light closer to the issue maybe. Biden has a lifetime in politics but seems to be mentally failing, and IMO he was never all that sharp to begin with. So he seems incompetent or unfit
Harris is not in cognitive decline, presumably. Her ideology doesn’t match mine. Her character isn’t promising. But Bidens effective ideology and character aren’t much different in my view. I tend to suspect the main difference may be that Harris has all her marbles.
I can’t help but think that having a cognitively functional President is better than having a President in cognitive decline, all other things held equal.
mark bofill,
“…having a cognitively functional President is better than having a President in cognitive decline….”
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Depends I guess if having her faculties would allow Kamala to ‘accomplish’ more damaging things than Biden. Biden is a placeholder, Harris is an active negative influence.
Lucia,
“Lots of people have been infected.”
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Indeed. And even antibody screening is not going to define how many have been infected, since antibodies decline to undetectable levels. I guess screening of T and B cell populations would be the only way to accurately evaluate who among the unvaccinated was exposed.
I think I understand your reasoning now, thanks Steve.
You could be right.
The most “dangerous” of presidents IMO are those who are over confident in their abilities, who have little real understanding of how global politics work, and who think the most productive and successful country on earth needs a revolution to fix what are really minor things in the grand scheme.
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I’ll take a dullard who is for the status quo any time, or a split government where infighting stops any big and stupid changes. You just don’t get elected saying you won’t fix everything unfortunately.
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One could opine that Trump matches the first description, and yet the US system vast bureaucracy and momentum dulled his sharpest points and he had to learn the hard way that a bull in a china shop can only do so much.
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All the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Biden is clearly not the smartest man in the room (what a laugher), and Obama might have been smarter and actually tried harder, but they both couldn’t fix Afghanistan.
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“I’m competent so everything will get fixed”. No, not really. Artillery shells don’t mystically avoid the best soldiers.
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First a belief in one’s competence to the point of stating it out loud is usually a red flag in over confidence that leads to bias controlling outcomes. “Things are complicated and I’ll take reasonable care in my decision making but things won’t always go well” sounds better to me at my age.
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There are many in the expert class who are truly surprised that Afghanistan happened the way it did. This lack of humility is a big problem. We do want the best and brightest making decisions, but when they become overconfident to the point of arrogance it becomes counterproductive. Biden repeatedly trying to alter reality on the ground with speeches attempting to change “perception” is just bizarre in my view. People can’t be fooled that easily and he should know that, but he doesn’t.
The FDA’s delaying of booster shots for more information may be yet another example of not responding fast enough to an ongoing problem. Delta is spreading and it is likely to be a tough winter up north. It’s too late for a booster to help Florida but it probably would have helped. They probably should act on the partial information they have because the tea leaves are very easy to read here.
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I get that some people are booster hesitant, but they can choose to not have it. Specifically the J&J people probably need a booster, but there is still very little information on that shot relative to Pfizer. The CDC/FDA are not quick and nimble enough for these evolving situations which aren’t really moving that fast in reality.
Yes, yet another of my fully vaccinated family members had a breakthrough infection last week. He was also vaccinated very early (Dec/Jan). Ironically he contracted covid a day or two after getting a booster shot. My anecdotal info say vaccines are waning after 6 months, but that is as useful as all other anecdotal info.
Tom Scharf,
Was the breakthrough case severe? How old is your relative who had the breakthrough case? I know several people who had breakthrough cases….. all mild.
Tom Scharf (Comment #205556): “The most “dangerous†of presidents IMO are those who are over confident in their abilities, who have little real understanding of how global politics work, and who think the most productive and successful country on earth needs a revolution to fix what are really minor things in the grand scheme.
…
“One could opine that Trump matches the first description, and yet the US system vast bureaucracy and momentum dulled his sharpest points and he had to learn the hard way that a bull in a china shop can only do so much.”
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Harris arguably fits the first description. The big danger is that she would be glad to work hand-in-hand with the Deep State. And Congress will do nothing to stop it.
I think popular Presidents are the ones to watch. As Tom has remarked before, a U.S. President isn’t necessarily all that powerful. It’s when Congress critters depend on a President’s coat-tails to remain in office that they [Presidents] get the power to pass agendas.
Biden’s popularity has plummeted (Covid Delta and Afghanistan) so Machin and Sinema are immune to pressure; Dem agenda is essentially dead. I don’t think Harris changes this equation at all, she’s always been immensely unpopular.
Maybe it’d [‘it’ being Harris vs Biden in the driver seat] make no difference whatsoever. But assuming the President does anything useful day to day that requires some degree of intelligence, Harris might be an improvement.
I don’t know.
It could be reasonably argued that Machin and Sinema were always immune, I didn’t mean to imply this had changed.
Tom wrote: “Biden repeatedly trying to alter reality on the ground with speeches attempting to change “perception†is just bizarre in my view.”
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I don’t think that’s true at all and it’s a game progressives excel at given their massive media influence. “Peaceful protest” vs “insurrection”. Police killing people with dark skin is so frequent they’re being “hunted down”. There’s no reason why they wouldn’t try to alter reality by changing perception, because it generally works out well for them, until reality can no longer be covered up, anyway.
Well still early days, but I dont think my optimism about NZ lockdown was misplaced. Case numbers have been falling for several days now, and contact tracing data suggesting R eff. of less than 1, with 95% confidence range.
Again, the delay between start of lockdown and peak daily cases was 12 days. I dont really get skepticism of lockdowns as a way to slow spread. Even in Australia where delta got away, the number are not for exponential spread, which I would expect without control measures.
Further easing of restrictions on all of NZ outside Auckland are expected tomorrow. Auckland does it tough but looks like at least 2 days in a row where all cases were isolating or quarantined known contacts. The battle now is to keep testing rates up so any leakage of delta is picked up early – and continue with the vaccine rollout.
Phil Scadden,
Lockdowns have not worked in the States and many other places. While places like Sweden and Japan have done pretty well without lockdowns.
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It would be good to determine why it has worked in New Zealand. Something specific about how implemented? Combining lockdown with efficient contact tracing and/or isolation? Does that only work if the number of cases is small?
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Cases in Australia have been rising exponentially for two months, doubling roughly every 11 days. That is similar to what the USA saw during the first month of that period and much faster than the USA for the last month.
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Cases per 100 K, from Financial Times
Date USA Aust
Jul_4 04.0 0.16
Aug_4 28.4 0.94
Sep_4 49.5 5.84
Tom
Yep. We know the boosters are doing no harm in Israel and they seem to be doing good. This delay to meet “gold standards” is going to kill people or, failing that, at least harm them.
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People who want boosters should be allowed to get them.
I read the way to get it is to drive to another state. Illinois has a state registry, so I could be “caught”. I’m tempted to drive to WI and get a Moderna. (I read mixing and matching might be best. 😉
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I’m waiting to hear more though.
Mike. Ok, thanks for correction on the Australian situation – it seemed like steady rise from only a casual view. I still suspect better than would be with no lockdown.
Lockdowns – well I take it as read that virus cannot spread if it cannot come into contact with susceptible hosts. So it comes down to lockdown rules that are strict enough to prevent spread (outside China, overseas rules seem pretty slack to kiwis)- and a population that will go along with those rules. Our government knows that very strict lockdowns also need to be very short – 4 weeks is about as long as people are going to take, so it has to corral the virus quickly.
I would also say that if you cant control virus incursions from outside your border, then elimination strategies are pointless, but limiting the amount of the contacts people have still seems the obvious way to keep R eff below the point where hospitals are overrun. When your infection rates are already higher than Sweden, then I think you are denial of germ theory to suggest that cases would reduce to Swedish levels if you didnt have lockdowns. I would also note that Sweden does far worse than neighbouring countries with similar climate and culture. (eg 1440 d/1000 cf 186 for Finland or 150 for Norway).
Contact-tracing. For first off, there is the contact tracing app (built on google/apple API) but only in latest lockdown has government mandated either recording the visit or using the app. Not really an enforceable mandate though it does give businesses the social permission to request a scan. Compliance depends on how much risk people perceive – usually goes through the roof when there is a border breach. Secondly, low numbers are critical as contacts go up exponentially. A workforce of a 1000 was starting to struggle with 50,000 contacts, though yesterday’s figures were well of 90% contacted. At peak daily cases, contact tracing was falling well below the gold standard of 80% in 48 hours.
My perception is that contacting tracing vastly improves the speed at which cases are corralled but the strict lockdown is main factor. At start of this pandemic, there was no contact tracing app, and a tiny workforce of contact tracers more used to tracking minor measles and hepatitis outbreaks. The numbers were falling before much in the way of effective contract tracing was going on.
Just don’t drive too fast after crossing the border. Those Wisconsin cops are aggressive.
Lucia,
There will be a great deal of political pressure on the FDA to approve boosters very soon. So you should soon be able to get a booster. But I would want to see more evidence that it makes a difference in number of breakthrough cases and severity of breakthrough cases before signing up for a booster. The downside risk for a booster does seem pretty small; I still haven’t heard much of people changing into brain-eating zombies after vaccination.
SteveF,
I think we will have heard a lot before the approve of a booster for J&J which is what I got. What I really want to hear is results from people who mixed and matched. That is being studied. Some think that might be better. But we don’t know.
“Almost 25% of daily US COVID deaths are in Florida. This wave is striking because it is pretty hard to go above pre-vaccination waves. It’s almost double.†Vincent Rajkumar @VincentRK, Professor, Mayo Clinic
Even I doubted this but the FT and NYT pages support that conclusion. Double the death rate of the spikes from before vaccines were available. Think about that.
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&areas=bra&areas=gbr&areas=tun&areas=nam&areasRegional=usfl&cumulative=0&logScale=0&per100K=0&startDate=2020-09-01&values=deaths
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/florida-covid-cases.html
None of the breakthrough infections of the people I know have been serious, although they were symptomatic. It’s very unclear what the vaccinated mild or non-symptomatic infection rate is.
This is concerning, not alarming, but concerning. Since the middle of July there has been a steady increase in the rate of pediatric hospital admissions for Covid in Florida. I am not a professional in reading this data but, the rate went from 1 per 100,000 to 11 per 100,000 in two month’s time. The absolute number still seems small but the rate of change is what concerns me. Covid numbers seem to be able to go from small to out of control really quickly. On the Hospitalizations page at the bottom:
“5. Rates of new CONFIRMED admissions in the last 7 days, by age and over time†https://covid19florida.mystrikingly.com/new-hospital-admissions-by-age
Russell,
My carefully considered opinion is that you are at best terrified and delusional; at worst, just plain nutty.
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Kids are not at significant risk from covid. They have never been at significant risk. They will not become at significant risk, delta or not. For goodness sakes, look at the damned numbers. This is for kids much less consequential than their first encounter with the flu, which will, unfortunately, kill many more. Vaccinated people are not at significant risk.
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Unvaccinated older people will suffer severe illness and (unfortunately) many, and especially those with serious existing health issues, vaccinated or not, will die. Get over it. Everyone dies.
Who is more at risk right now from delta or other covid-19, someone unvaccinated age 30, or someone age 70 who was vaccinated in January?
Russell,
The pediatric hospital admissions are likely for RSV, with a false or meaningless positive covid test.
Mike M. (Comment #205593)
“The pediatric hospital admissions are likely for RSV, with a false or meaningless positive covid test.†Thanks Mike. I just found a September 3 report from CDC that mentions a similar thing [down near the end ‘The findings in this report are subject to at least five limitations.’] .
They still stuck with their main conclusion:
“Weekly COVID-19–associated hospitalization rates among children and adolescents rose nearly five-fold during late June–mid-August 2021â€
The Florida data was nine fold during that time period.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7036e2.htm#suggestedcitation
Hospitalizations Associated with COVID-19 Among Children and Adolescents — COVID-NET, 14 States, March 1, 2020–August 14, 2021
MikeN (Comment #205591)
“Who is more at risk right now from delta or other covid-19, someone unvaccinated age 30, or someone age 70 who was vaccinated in January?â€
Mike I have no credentials or training to answer your question but I remembered this article from the CDC. It may help.:
“Effectiveness of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Vaccines in Preventing SARS-CoV-2 Infection Among Nursing Home Residents Before and During Widespread Circulation of the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant — National Healthcare Safety Network, March 1–August 1, 2021â€
The paragraph that I think is on point: â€Two doses of mRNA vaccines were 74.7% effective against infection among nursing home residents early in the vaccination program (March–May 2021). During June–July 2021, when B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant circulation predominated, effectiveness declined significantly to 53.1%.â€
“The pediatric hospital admissions are likely for RSV, with a false or meaningless positive covid test.”
Having 2 kids in extended family testing positive for RSV, I would note that it is a quick test to identify RSV. Do you have any support for your guess? Do you think there is something inherent in Covid19 that makes kids invulnerable to later mutations because they were little affected by original strains? I am not suggesting that Delta or other variants ARE more dangerous to children, but I would not dismiss the possibility that covid COULD become more dangerous just because I would prefer not to believe that. Increased hospitalization of kids with Covid would be the indicator to look for.
A rather good article on how our biases lead us astray (and how it makes media reports just junk) here. Something for everyone. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three
Phil,
Thanks for that link.
There is a great deal of data showing that young kids (those under 12) are at minimal risk…. remember that the FDA still considers the risk of the vaccine, while tiny, greater than the risk for the infection. The problem with reported “pediatric” cases is that they include cases among those under 18 years old as “pediatric”. Older kids do become ill with covid; the rate of positive cases increases rapidly from about 13, reaching the adult rate by about 20. But the key thing is: even among older minors, the rate of death is tiny compared to older adults. The least vaccinated population in the states is the 12 to 18 age group, but they still are not dying at a significant rate.
Phil
If you look at the link Russel gave, the increase in children being hospitalized goes along with adults being hospitalized in Florida where cases have risen a lot.
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If you change to %, there is a small shift toward children being hospitalized, not a large one. It’s likey explained by the fact that adults have been vaccinated and children either not (if below 12) or less so.
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Russell is reacting to that data and presenting statistics in a rather distorted form that misleads. It is true the rate of kids getting it increase, but that’s mostly because the rate of cases in Florida soared. It’s not predominantly a “shift to kids”.
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Russell: I hope you are staying at home and having your food delivered. I’m pretty sure you can’t withstand the strain or worry otherwise. You may also qualify for a booster. If I were you I’d ask my doctor.
Phil,
Based on CDC numbers for January to end of August 2021, the risk of death from covid in the USA among those 5 to 14 years old is a bit less than 1/700 of the risk of death for those 55 to 64 years (this includes both vaccinated and unvaccinated people). Of course, many in the 55 to 64 age group have been vaccinated, so the actual risk ratio is much smaller than 1/700 if you compare unvaccinated 55 to 64 year olds to unvaccinated 5 to 14 year olds. For sure, unvaccinated kids face less than 1/1000 the risk of older adults who are unvaccinated. Covid could evolve to be a greater risk for kids, but there is no evidence that delta is significantly more dangerous to kids.
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Kids face much greater risks of death from other causes than from covid; 54,000 under 17 have died in the USA so far in 2021, 400 (total) were associated with covid, but those often had other serious health issues.
Phil Scadden (Comment #205596): “Do you have any support for your guess?”
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It is a fact that there was a huge RSV epidemic here this summer (might still be going on, I have not heard) and it is a fact that RSV is a much bigger risk to kids than the Wuhan virus. In a typical year, RSV puts something like 60K American children in the hospital and about 1% of those die.
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I did not save links, but reports from a month or so ago were that most children in hospital with respiratory infections had RSV, that a fraction of those also tested positive for the Wuhan virus, and that most hospitakized children who tested positive for Wuhan also tested positive for RSV. So I am guessing that is still the case.
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Remember that a positive test does not mean infected; it only indicate the presence of viral RNA, possibly just a tiny amount and possibly just fragments.
—–
Phil Scadden: “Do you think there is something inherent in Covid19 that makes kids invulnerable to later mutations because they were little affected by original strains?”
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I don’t know if that was meant for me, but after multiple attempts I can not find a way to read it that makes sense to me.
MikeN (Comment #205591): “Who is more at risk right now from delta or other covid-19, someone unvaccinated age 30, or someone age 70 who was vaccinated in January?”
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A while ago you posted this: MikeN (Comment #204560) “Truth is that across all age groups, the risk of death rises by about a factor of almost 3 per decade of age.”
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I have no reason to doubt that. So if the vaccine is 90% effective, an unvaccinated 30 year old would have about the same risk as a vaccinated 50 year old and an unvaccinated 50 year old would have about the same risk as a vaccinated 70 year old.
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So far as I know, there is no evidence that vaccine protection against severe illness wanes.
Phil,
I think it’s fairly obvious that we don’t know how much immunity one mutation confers vis-a-vis another. Like all other viruses, it’s going to be between “near perfect” to “none”, all depending on the specific mutation. I doubt that being a kid vs. being an adult is going to be the biggest difference.
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It’s also possible later mutations will harm kids more. We don’t really now. But right now we don’t really have data suggesting the new mutations are worse for kids. The stuff Russel shows doesn’t indicate that. He’s just reporting kids infections growing at about the same rate overall cases grew in FL. It might be a little more for kids, but that’s what you would expect to result from adults being vaccinated while kids are not!
As lucia has stated the serious illness ratio was established a long time ago favoring kids over seniors by several orders of magnitude. All things being equal severe illness will scale with the size of the outbreak across the board. With a large portion of seniors being vaccinated the ratio has shifted somewhat to “kids with covid!!!!”. I have highlighted several of these type of articles in the past which don’t even mention that the change was fewer seniors getting ill due to vaccines. I’m sure there is some noise to these measurements but I don’t think anyone has concluded that the variants are any more dangerous to kids * because they are kids *.
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If you want to fix this “alarming” problem, vaccinate the kids. The FDA is spending approx. forever authorizing this because the tradeoffs are much less obvious for young kids. Their immune systems are pretty much up to the task.
FL’s case counts are declining. Hospitalizations peaked about two weeks ago. Deaths should be about at peak now. Hopefully the worst is now over for Florida but there is at least another month or two of this outbreak on the downside. I sure hope this was the last big outbreak but I was wrong last time. My guess is we will follow the UK pattern eventually with additional sustained outbreaks but less serious illness.
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The UK has 7M confirmed cases with population of 67M
The US has 40M confirmed cases with population of 330M
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Not apples to apples as the UK had worse outbreaks earlier when examining deaths (the best measurement looking back) that put them further ahead on the curve.
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The global evolution pressure is going to start shifting to prior immunity evasion.
lucia (Comment #205604) you wrote: “The stuff Russel shows doesn’t indicate that. He’s just reporting kids infections growing at about the same rate overall cases grew in FL.†Lucia I wrote that kids’ hospitalizations had started to increase but were still at a very low level. I did not mention infections. The actual infections in kids were much higher than all the other age groups. Under 12 was 825 cases for 100k and 12-19 was 998 per 100k. The lowest group was over 65 at 293 per 100k. From: COVID-19 in Florida (an epidemiologist’s take) WEBSITE WEEKLY byJason L. Salemi, PhD Weekly cases per capita and age group. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jason.salemi/viz/shared/P26KYFMG4
The kids’ hospitalization data is here, listed as “all peds†[pediatric]. The kids are at a much lower rate than all the adult age groups. I was concerned that the number had increased from near zero to 10 per 100k in recent weeks.
Mike M. (Comment #205593) wrote: “The pediatric hospital admissions are likely for RSV, with a false or meaningless positive covid test.†So these may just be kids who were in the hospital for something else and failed a Covid test . COVID-19 in Florida (an epidemiologist’s take) WEBSITE WEEKLY
byJason L. Salemi, PhD Confirmed admissions by age group https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jason.salemi/viz/shared/J9972GPR4
Yes. Sorry, I wrote cases when I meant hospitalizations.
Russell: In your previous post, you actually cited this
https://covid19florida.mystrikingly.com/new-hospital-admissions-by-age
Which shows us this:
And this
I agree you focused on raw numbers of rises in cases.
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I put what you wrote in context of what others were discussing which is how Covid affects you vs. old. That is Covid is getting any worse for children relative to adults. The raw numbers you posted are not the thing to look at in that regard. it’s the relative fraction of children to adults.
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We all know the cases in Florida rose dramatically (and may now be receeding.) That has nothing to do with “children” vs “other groups”. We all have known Covid can grow dramatically in the unvaccinated. We’ve known that since at least May 2020. But this has nothing to do with children per se.
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The way you wrote it made it sound like you’d discovered something new about it’s effect o children. That is absolutely not the case. It still looks like children get it at much lower rates than adults. That’s what your data shows.
The Intercept gets a bunch of FOIA documents relating to the Wuhan lab / NIH work.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/06/new-details-emerge-about-coronavirus-research-at-chinese-lab/
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“One of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,†outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed.
The bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments. The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.â€
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab-leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,†Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?â€â€
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“Asked about the grant materials, Robert Kessler, communications manager at EcoHealth Alliance, said, “We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it. So I don’t know that there’s a whole lot to say.—
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I think there’s a bit more to say actually. I think Daszak really is Snidely Whiplash. The appearances here are very, very, bad. It’s a bit late but the FBI probably ought to raid EcoHealth and get all their documents. These guys cannot be trusted.
Tom
Uhmm… people aren’t asking for comments on whether they committed graft or misappropriated funds. They are asking for comments on whether that research might have lead to accidents that caused the release of Covid!!!
I don’t see anything criminal here but I think they are basically in a corporate coverup at this point. The lack of transparency isn’t going to stop (another?) lab accident from happening. It’s like a plane crash and Boeing tell the NTSA it doesn’t want to cooperate because it might make them look bad. This is one rather large potential plane crash.
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Team Science is in bunker mode here and if they don’t want to try harder then I say use the blunt tool of shutting down anything within a mile of GOF research NOW, and basically shut down any related virology research until they can make the public feel safe about their efforts. The burden of proof is now on Team Science to prove safety. The media is doing next to nothing to shine a light on this and make a finding one way or the other.
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The Intercept should be commended for at least doing some FOIA work. One can only imagine what internal emails about GOF research really look like and what EcoHealth didn’t produce or has destroyed. If they didn’t vigorously debate this internally then that is really a worst case scenario.
MikeM, you said
A while ago you posted this: MikeN (Comment #204560) “Truth is that across all age groups, the risk of death rises by about a factor of almost 3 per decade of age.â€
I didn’t remember saying that so I went back and checked. That wasn’t me, but someone replying to me. At the time I assumed it was you, but it could have been anyone putting that in the name field instead of the start of the post.
My question then was at what age does the risk of vaccine outweigh the risk of covid. My current question assumes a drop in vaccine effectiveness after a certain point in time.
Re-iterating – I am not suggesting that Covid19 is getting worse for kids (I havent looked at the data, let alone attempted any bayesian analysis). What I am objecting to is suggesting that hospitalization numbers are inflated because clinicians are mistaking RSV for Covid19. That smacks of motivated reasoning given that RSV is easy to test for.
Phil Scadden (Comment #205615): “What I am objecting to is suggesting that hospitalization numbers are inflated because clinicians are mistaking RSV for Covid19.”
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A sensible objection. In most states, if not all, patients are listed as “covid” if they have a positive test on admission or have had a recent positive test. That is so even if the patient is admitted for injuries suffered in a car crash. In Minnesota, admission for covid are now about 50% of covid cases in hospital; the other half were admitted for something else but have a positive covid test. It is probably similar in other states. So what I am saying is that children are being diagnosed with RSV and treated in hospital for RSV. But some fraction of them also test positive for covid. So they get added to the covid numbers. That is not something I made up, it is something that I am passing on.
MikeN (Comment #205614): “My current question assumes a drop in vaccine effectiveness after a certain point in time.”
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That would require data that we don’t have. There is some evidence that effectiveness for preventing “infection” decreases. But vaccines do not prevent infection; they are intended to prevent illness by providing a rapid immune response. In particular, the covid vaccine is to prevent infection from spreading into the lungs and/or bloodstream. I don’t think there is any good evidence that such effectiveness wanes.
We should eventually get good data from Israel for the relative hospitalization rates of the boosted vaccines vs the not boosted. This should tell us if the protection against severe illness is waning (or that boosters improve results). It’s early now and you have to do the analysis very carefully. Early data suggests it helps both infection protection and severe illness.
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https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccine/94344
“Twelve days or more after the booster dose, there was a greater than tenfold diminution in the relative risk of both confirmed infection and severe disease,” Fauci said.
The chances of testing positive with two doses versus three doses of the Pfizer vaccine was looked at in another preprint study published on MedRxiv by Tal Patalon, MD, of Maccabi Healthcare Services, and colleagues. In that study, among “more than 150,000 people in the first 3 weeks of August, they found after 7 to 13 days up to a 68% reduction in the risk of infection” if a third dose was given, Fauci said.”
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Every time I hear 10x I tend to doubt the results, but we shall see.
Tom: 68% reduction is enough to motivate me to get a booster. 🙂
We’re up to μ!
Tom Scharf,
“Team Science is in bunker mode here and if they don’t want to try harder then I say use the blunt tool of shutting down anything within a mile of GOF research NOW”
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Absolutely, and this should have happen a while ago not some indefinite time in the future. The potential downside for this type of viral research is almost unlimited, while the scientific benefit is, if anything, minuscule by comparison. I really do think there is private benefit in the research….. generous public funding for virologists and a few Snidely Whiplashes like Daszak.
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IOW, no real public benefit, but huge public risk. I say defund much of virology until a thorough (and completely public) evaluation of the source of the pandemic can be done. China won’t likely allow that, so I am OK with lots of virologists exploring other career options.
Ok Mike. Thanks for that clarification. I can see the value of hospitals screening everyone for covid when community cases are high. We have a ward closed and 26 staff stood down because they were slow testing for covid in a patient presenting with abdominal symptoms.
Close analysis of rate of hospitalization in general as well as covid hospitalization (and vaccination status) is needed for any meaningful metric.
SteveF
The ones with tenure will have plenty of time to find something new. The ones heading funded institutes have become “funding guys”, they can find something new. New Ph.D’s may need to be nimble. But lots of the skills have to translate to something else.
This year’s leading contender for most callous misleading statement goes to a joint medical journal editorial:
“Global heating is also contributing to the decline in global yield potential for major crops, falling by 1.8-5.6% since 1981; this, together with the effects of extreme weather and soil depletion, is hampering efforts to reduce undernutrition”
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In case this seems confusing they are actually saying crop yields are up, but not as much as theoretically possible under a model. That might not be so clear given the eloquent phrasing from our experts on crops in the medical field. I’d even go so far as to say crop yields are a hockey stick, ha ha.
https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
I cannot understand why people who are showing 7 or 14 day running averages of cases and deaths cannot handle days of no reports properly. If you examine the Google graphs (“covid florida”) which are sourced from the NYT the averaging makes no sense at all.
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For example on Sept 6 Google showed a running average of 11K when there hadn’t been a single day less than 15K in the past week. How hard is this? Not hard. No report is not zero cases. It is null. When a new report comes in you average the new count over the past X days of no report. This will still make it a bit noisy, but come on people, you do data analysis for a living?
In yet another sign of how far the ACLU has fallen, they come out in favor of vaccine mandates. This organization has zero relevancy to liberty at this point. They are just another run of the mill Democrat NGO. SAD!
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“Far from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties, vaccine requirements also safeguard those whose work involves regular exposure to the public.”
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https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-aclu-prior-to-covid-denounced
Tom Scharf,
Maybe I’m getting old, but how is this different from no report equaling zero? Or are you suggesting that the no reports should be replaced by the average calculated over the total number of days? It’s not at all clear to me.
Edit: worldometers.info has the seven day trailing average for new cases for Florida for 9/6 of 17,588/day.
Tom Scharf,
I quickly scanned the article then did a page search for abortion and didn’t find it. Obviously then the ACLU did not understand the possible unintended consequences of their argument for vaccine mandates undermining their arguments in favor of no restrictions on abortion.
DeWitt,
“Obviously then the ACLU did not understand the possible unintended consequences of their argument for vaccine mandates undermining their arguments in favor of no restrictions on abortion.”
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Exactly the thought that came to my mind when I read the Greenwald piece. The ACLU’s position on vaccinations is actually worse than that…. except in cases of rape, nobody forces women to become pregnant, but the left now wants to force everyone to get something injected into their body.
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The ACLU is at this point in no way connected to civil liberties, they are just lefty political hacks. The left corrupts and diminishes everything it gains control over: MSM, universities, government bureaucracies, international organizations like the WHO, the IPCC (of course!), many ‘woke’ corporations, and now the ACLU.
One could do the averaging in different ways, but the way they (Google, NYT) are doing it is clearly ridiculous.
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Effectively what you need to do is:
1. Hold the last valid averaged value as the current value on days of no report.
2. When a new report comes in you average the new value of the last X days of no report and then update the current value.
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I assume this problem exists because they are using a simplistic graphing function that requires all days to have valid data.
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Reports: 5 5 5 5 5 5 5, – – 15
7 day average: – – – – – – 5, 5 5 5
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If the averaged value is changing on days of no report then I think it is flawed for its intended purpose.
Tom Scharf,
“In case this seems confusing they are actually saying crop yields are up, but not as much as theoretically possible under a model.”
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Yes, another garbage analysis designed only to frighten people about global warming.
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The reality is that crop yields have grown dramatically most everywhere since the 1960’s, and there is every expectation that trend will continue (see for example: ‘RNA demethylation increases the yield and biomass of rice and potato plants in field trials’, Nature Biotechnology (2021). The optimizations (both simple trait selection and genetic manipulation) that have driven crop yields upward can just as easily be used to develop greater heat tolerance. I grow tired of all the willful disinformation constantly used to advance global warming hysteria. It is simply dishonest.
Tom Scharf,
The example you give seems unreasonable to me. What is more likely is – x x x x x – for a week’s worth of samples, i.e. no reports on Saturday and Sunday. That’s why you do a seven day running average. Every seven days will normally include two no report days. I don’t see much of a problem if you occasionally have a three or four day weekend. The small increase in variability shouldn’t matter in the long run. In the example you give the results would be 5 4.3 3.6 5. Now if the pattern is always 7 days of data followed by two days of no reports, then you should be doing a nine day running average.
Except its not always a 5/2 cadence. Florida has 1,2 and 3 day gaps in the last month. There is a generalized way to get a more accurate presentation. There is no perfect algorithm as the reporting variances are not entirely predictable but there are worse and better ways to do it.
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As it sat yesterday it appeared cases had dropped from 18K to 11K in one week. Actual = ~16K cases (>30% error of an average). One can zoom in and check every single time to see if the cadence has been broken for some reason or one could choose to do better data processing.
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This is one of the reasons reporting “by date of case” works better overall, but not for real time analysis.
“but not for real time analysis”
For sure. That is the problem with all reporting of cases and deaths. The only way to relate (for example) reported cases to deaths is to have accurate dates for both. DeSantis should still have not changed the reporting data protocol mid stream. It made him look bad for zero benefit.
The left never quits: the same judge who initially blocked DeSantis from enforcing the no-mask-mandade in FL public schools, has now, contrary to the FL constitution, insisted that local school boards can continue to defy DeSantis. The guy is essentially a criminal. This will not turn out well for the (soon to be retired) judge. The circuit court of appeals will smack him down, as is most richly deserved. Cooper is an idiot and an a$$hole, who is retiring very soon, like it or not. Really, what a jerk.
The FL legislature should enact laws making judges personally liable for any illegal and unconstitutional orders, with long prison sentences for non-compliance. Cooper is nothing but a criminal, and should be treated like the criminal he is.
More fear porn from the WSJ news section:
Since the last flu season was nearly non-existent, this year’s season was almost guaranteed to be worse.
The Pan American Health Organization in their week 33 sitrep, OTOH, says:
https://www.paho.org/en/influenza-situation-report
“On track” implies to me that things are already in motion. From what I can see, there is no reason, and so far no evidence, to believe that this year’s flu season is actually going to be much worse than last year, ‘expert’ opinion notwithstanding.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #205656),
Indeed. The prediction of flu+covid=catastrophe is the same as last year. I suppose if they keep making it, it will eventually turn out to be right and they can say “we told you so”.
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Sadly, fairy tales are not real life. In the story, the boy got eaten by the wolf. There is little chance that our “experts” will suffer the same fate.
Mike M.,
I think more of Chicken Little than The Boy Who Cried Wolf. However, I believe that TBWCF has another moral: As long as there are actually wolves, you cannot afford to ignore your warning system even if there are a lot of false alarms.
In other news – polling indicates Dems have pulled it together for Newsom. It looks like he will survive the recall effort.
I shudder to think what would happen to Alabama if a black Democrat politician was accosted by somebody throwing eggs, wearing a gorilla mask, and shooting a pellet gun here. The Feds would come in and setup the Second Reconstruction without further ado, most likely.
[Edit: Oh. link.]
The Green New Reconstruction? Something like that.
mark bofill,
Assaults on conservatives are rarely even reported by the MSM. It is neither surprising nor unusual. (https://www.foxnews.com/media/elder-egg-media)
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When there is a report, the spin will often be that the conservative arguably deserved to be assaulted, of course.
Hospitalization data indicates the peak in the delta-variant surge has passed in Florida (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend/florida). But don’t worry, the MSM will continue to hammer DeSantis, even if the state wide total death rate remains well below many states controlled by Democrats and even though Florida has a greater fraction of older, at-risk people.
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In spite of relatively low vaccination rates, the delta variant appears to have long ago peaked in most of Latin America. (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/brazil/)
(https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/argentina/)
(https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/colombia/)
I wrote a post about that very same WSJ flu article and decided it was so ridiculous that I deleted it, ha ha. The cases were down 10x to 100x last year. It was unprecedented.
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/2021/saw0821Peek31_d.png
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It does demonstrate that the covid lockdowns / masks / social distancing / ??? work really good for the flu. The experts should have no idea what is going to happen this year.
A good one from the Bee:
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Democrats in Congress have condemned the recent election integrity law passed in Texas. In addition to the laws being extremely racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, Democrat politicians are saying that such laws will lead to a devastating decline in cheating.
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“Cheating is the lifeblood of LGBTQ+ culture, and ballot harvesting is the cornerstone of black American culture,” said AOC in a speech to her constituents in the World Economic Forum. “In addition—like, so many women will be negatively impacted by the male gaze of partisan poll-watchers. This is literal fascism guys.”
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Experts warn that if more states pass similar laws, it may empower far-far-right candidates to win elections, as cheating and fraud will decline sharply.
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“This is a white supremacist country,” AOC continued, “so we know that free and fair elections without any fraud will lead to more white supremacists being elected. White supremacists like Larry Elder. Like, I literally can’t even.”
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“Say—I should tweet that.” She then pulled out her phone and began tweeting.
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Leftists have called for more relaxed voting with fewer protections against fraud, so that only good people will be elected, like in California and New York. Frustrated Democrats have promised to leave Texas to live in states where the voting laws aren’t evil and racist. Texas Governor Greg Abbot is currently looking at additional legislation to see if he can make more Democrats leave.
I imagine the media will do the usual shift to shocking revelations that “liberal states are victims of a terrible delta virus even though they are such incredibly moral people with all the best intentions and follow science”. They will add in a bit of blame on the rubes who live in their own state. That has been the pattern.
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All things equal the places with high vaccination rates and previous high infection rates should fare better than those who do not. Florida was middle of the road in both and the delta outbreak exceeded previous outbreaks.
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If you want to do vaccine mandates (setting aside the ethics debate), you need to do them now. Booster shots should be sooner rather than later as fall/winter approaches.
Dave,
The sad part is, at least one speaker at a Newsom event really did call Elder the ‘black face of white supremacy’. The ‘satire’ part of that seems to be that AOC wasn’t the one who said it.
here:
https://www.newsweek.com/professor-calls-larry-elder-black-face-white-supremacy-newsom-campaign-event-1627196
mark bofill,
Joe Biden:
So race is now a social construct like gender? Sure, Biden apologized later, but like Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”, that’s obviously what he thinks and probably did even before his senile dementia became obvious.
DeWitt,
Yes, except that gender is a fluid social construct that depends on mood and race is only [as] fluid [a] social construct as political orientation.
Let Elder run as a democrat someday and we’ll observe the state change.
Newsom vs Elder is a rather stunning example, when viewed through the critical race theory lens we’re always admonished to employ. I’d be hard put to come up with a better example of a privileged white elite guy keeping a black man down than this race, were I inclined to view things using the CRT perspective. The unutterable gall of painting the black man as the white supremacist by people who apparently subscribe to CRT is a truly amazing thing. Those are some amazing people out there in California.
Tom Scharf,
“All things equal the places with high vaccination rates and previous high infection rates should fare better than those who do not.”
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I did a three factor linear regression of the 7-day average number of confirmed cases per million population for each state against 1) cumulative covid deaths per million population (an indication of acquired immunity), 2) fraction of people over 65 (and indication of vulnerability) and 3) fraction of people not vaccinated. The model accounts for ~53% of the total variance (state to state), with the fraction not vaccinated being by far the strongest influence. All three variable influence the rate of cases as we would expect: more elderly leads to more cases, more cumulative deaths lowers case rates, and more unvaccinated people increases cases rates.
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So other factors (population density, climate, personal behavior, etc) probably explain a significant fraction of the remaining variance. One interesting note: there are three wild outliers, where actual confirmed cases far exceeds the expected cases: KY, TN, and SC. That these are close to each other both politically and geographically is interesting.
DeWitt,
“that’s obviously what he thinks and probably did even before his senile dementia became obvious..”
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Sure, Biden has always been a closet racist…. in 2008 Biden said that Obama was the first presentable black presidential candidate (“articulate, bright, clean and nice looking”).
mark bofill,
Yah. There’s obviously cognitive dissonance going on. A white man can choose to be an anti-racist, whatever that actually means. But a black man is a traitor to his race if he ‘acts white’, chooses to not be a victim and to have his own political opinions.
Biden to mandate vaccines for companies with 100 or more workers, or weekly testing.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/09/politics/joe-biden-covid-speech/index.html
Huh. I’ve been vaccinated but I didn’t keep any documentation. Maybe I’ll get a free booster out of this.
mark bofill,
I doubt that will pass muster with the Supreme Court. Biden has no legal authority to make that demand.
Steve,
I’m going to give this one some thought. I’m not sure I have any issue with this yet.
From the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/star-of-the-munich-auto-show-the-push-for-faster-electrification-11631217600?mod=hp_lead_pos13
Of course we don’t want to mention the Le Mans winning diesel powered Audi’s now.
What do I think? Not much. The article doesn’t say whether it runs 30 minutes on an 80% charge. A modern hybrid F1 car can run at an average of 150mph for up to two hours on one 110kg tank of fuel (they don’t allow refueling during an F1 race, too dangerous). Pit stops to change tires take seconds. The pit lane speed limit is the time limiting factor on pit stops. A fossil fuel powered car would run rings around the electric car in an endurance race. A hybrid would probably be even faster because it would likely be more fuel efficient and have to stop less often. The Porsche is a sprint racer only, a one-trick pony.
Oh, and you need a 900V, 340kW power source to charge it in 15 minutes.
There’s a phrase that I can’t remember that I wanted to use rather than one-trick pony. It has something to do with a trained animal and it’s not lipstick on a pig or polishing dung.
SteveF (Comment #205680): “I doubt that will pass muster with the Supreme Court. Biden has no legal authority to make that demand.”
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What I heard was that they are going to have OSHA make it a work place safety rule. I have no idea if that is legit. But I think it would take many months via normal rule making procedures.
SteveF,
Biden admitted he had no legal authority to extend the eviction moratorium. That didn’t stop him from extending it anyway. Then there’s Obama and DACA. Another example of the political double standard. When a Republican tries to do something with questionable legal authority, it’s a threat to ‘our democracy.’ When a Democrat does it, it’s brave.
DeWitt,
The SC quickly stopped the unlawful moratorium on evictions. I think the court will ultimately put real limits on forcing people to get vaccinated. By the time it ends up at the SC, the pandemic may well be over, or nearly so, giving the court an excuse to mot rule on the merits. The legal precedent (Sulllivan) was about requiring smallpox vaccinations…. an illness which killed a large fraction and permanently maimed many more. Different than covid.
mikeM,
OSHA can implement work safety regulations. Nowhere is OSHA authorized to implement public health rules. Like many ‘progressive’ rules, this is unrelated to the intent and letter of the statute… it’s just another ‘ends justifies the means’ usurpation of law and separation of powers. I hope the five SC conservatives stop it.
Mark
You may not. But someone will. This is going to SCOTUS!
Lucia,
Yep. I expect so.
DeWitt,
Is the car a ‘quarter-horse’?
Alright. I’ve thought it through.
The way I see it is this:
1) Essentially, the unvaccinated aren’t hurting anybody but themselves and other unvaccinated people. If you’re vaccinated, the occasional break through case notwithstanding, you’re in statistical good shape. Boosters may help this further.
There’s no urgent reason for this.
2) This doesn’t appear to be constitutional, AFAICT.
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Now, as a political gambit, this might be a good one for President Biden. I think his supporters will love this, I think the people who will hate this weren’t supporters of the President to begin with. After Afghanistan, President Biden’s supporters could certainly use some reassurance that their guy isn’t a total screw up. I think this helps him in the polls to return towards a polarized status quo.
Maybe the mandate is more aimed at changing media focus away from Afghanistan.
Dave,
Yep. I lean towards thinking that.
SteveF (Comment #205687): “OSHA can implement work safety regulations. Nowhere is OSHA authorized to implement public health rules.”
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It is worker health and safety that they regulate. One could argue that unvaccinated coworkers are aworkplace health hazard. IMO, not legit, but well within prior limits of Chevron deference. So maybe such a rule would be a chance for SCOTUS to start to limit Chevron deference.
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I am guessing that won’t happen. Normal rule making takes an absolute minimum of three months, I think. Biden said “emergency rule”, so they are going to try to cut corners to put it in place ASAP. Hard to claim an emergency when they have been waiting for months. But I am having a hard time finding what the rules are.
It’s a vaccine or weekly testing. That’s a critical point.
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Who pays for the testing is unclear. If the feds pay for testing then I think it may pass muster. If the business/worker must bear a significant burden here then it gets complicated.
DeWitt,
The numbers for recharging don’t seem to add up. 340 KW for 15 minutes is only 85 KWH. Assuming 100% efficiency for the battery charger, battery, and electric motor(s), 85KWH is only 114 horse-power-hours. So in a 30 minute run, the available power is just 228 HP. At 85% round trip efficiency, that is only 194 HP for 30 minutes. Sounds pretty anemic for a car rated for 1,088 HP.
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The standard F-1 turo-charged V6 engines generate well over 1000 HP maximum.
I looked over the list of judges for the Florida first circuit court of appeals. It looks like 2:1 or more Republicans; 4 appointed by DeSantis and another 5 or 6 appointed by Rick Scott. DeSantis is likely to get the stay (against his rule requiring parents be able to opt out of masks for their kids) issued by judge John Cooper yesterday lifted by the appeals court. Strange things can happen, but the panhandle/northern FL voters who must re-affirm judges each 6 years to stay in office are not going to be happy about any judge that votes to keep Cooper’s stay in force.
Tom Scharf,
“If the business/worker must bear a significant burden here then it gets complicated.”
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Considering that the entire process is an effort to place the maximum burden on those not cooperating on vaccinations, I am pretty sure OSHA will insist the employer or employee bear the cost….. just like with every other OSHA regulation. Lots of potential court fights are ahead. The only good thing is that court fights will take many months before the SC makes a judgement on the OSHA rules, and the pandemic will be likely just about over before the court cases are resolved.
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The left wants virtually complete public control of all private actions; forcing people to get vaccinations is only one step in gaining that control. It is not like they will ever stop at just requiring vaccinations. It is Orwellian, and it will not stop unless voters stop it at the ballot box.
MikeM
On can argue all sorts of things. I’m sure they will in court.There will be counter arguments.
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Does this new OSHA reg have different provisions for people who telecommute? It’s hard to argue they are a workplace hazard.
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The only thing I heard was “over 100” employees vs under. There are all sorts of other provisions one might want to have. People who work outdoors are unlikely to transmit Covid.
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OSHA rules can sometimes seem mysterious. But there is generally at least an attempt to connect the rule to a threat. If the only division is over/under 100 I think this is going to sound bad in court.
Even for our socialist hellhole :-), this seems to be going too far. We have mandate that frontline border and quarantine workers must be vaccinated but the entire public service??
Lucia: “If the only division is over/under 100 I think this is going to sound bad in court.”
Might be a minimum jurisdictional amount applicable to certain functions of OHSA. Personally, even if that isn’t the case, I believe it could be justified on grounds of administrative feasibility and efficiency.
mark bofill,
“Boosters may help this further.
There’s no urgent reason for this.”
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Yup, it is 100% political posturing by people who want to establish a permanent right to control everything you do.
Phil,
It is not just the entire public employee segment, it is that they want to force everyone to get vaccinated by whatever coercive measures it takes. ‘Sinister’ seems not nearly a strong enough description. I predict this will not end well for the Biden administration.
Lucia,
“OSHA rules can sometimes seem mysterious.”
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Mysterious? Based on personal experience, I would say more suitable adjectives are ‘onerous’, ‘stupid’, arbitrary’, ‘wasteful’, and ‘irrational’.
SteveF,
Current F1 engines are somewhat less than 900hp when run on fuel only. The electric motor/generator adds 160hp, but is only available for a few seconds each lap. There’s an electric motor/generator on the turbocharger too to spin it up faster and minimize turbo lag. The system harvests energy to recharge the batteries from braking and the turbocharger. During a qualifying lap, the batteries are discharged enough and there is probably less harvesting that you couldn’t do two successive laps at qualifying speeds even if the tire temperatures allowed it. So they do a slow lap to cool the tires and recharge the batteries.
On the Porsche charging, there’s also going to be energy harvested from braking. That could be on the order of 10% of the total power expended per lap. And a race car on a road course isn’t at full throttle for 100% of the lap. But your point is taken. I’m also not convinced that 85kWh is enough for half an hour of racing, not to mention that charging won’t be 100% efficient.
I never cared about F1, then I watched the Netflix documentary series “Drive to Survive”. The documentary is interesting in that it doesn’t spend a lot of time on the actual races but is mostly backstage access. Now I follow F1 but not religiously. F1 is a little bit different in that the engineering of the cars is a bigger factor in which teams are successful. Mercedes has been dominant over the past years but are finally being challenged this year.
I think it is becoming a bit of a religious tenet that the vaccines will have no long term side effects. It’s one thing to allow people to make a personal decision based on this unknown and it’s an entirely different thing for the government to force people to take it.
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The proposed mandates are such that one could not reasonably even change jobs to avoid it, and they took their current job without that precondition. It remains to be seen if weekly testing will be a reasonable alternative and I suspect that this was inserted primarily for legal reasons and testing will be made difficult to push people to be vaccinated.
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mRNA is new biotech. Although I would suppose it is likely safe, I just don’t know and I’m not sure anyone else really does either. It is highly likely that even if the vaccine had some long term side effects the net gain in lives saved will still far exceed those lost from the unknown unknowns. Still it is a big step to take away personal decision making here. Other scenarios exist where future variants render the vaccine useless and the government forced everyone to take a risk on new biotech for no real net gain.
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I think the mandates are political in nature but still may be justified. There is a large political risk here. I really dislike the piling on of the unvaccinated as some sort of leper community, yet another example of the tolerant loving everyone except their outgroup(s).
lucia (Comment #205702): “OSHA rules can sometimes seem mysterious. But there is generally at least an attempt to connect the rule to a threat. If the only division is over/under 100 I think this is going to sound bad in court.”
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I only said that one could make an argument, not that it would be a good argument. And I noted that precedent on Chevron deference gives regulators a ridiculous degree of lattitude in interpreting the law.
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I think you make a good point re to whom it applies. A workplace safety rule would seem to have to take account of the nature of the workplace. Telecommuting, outdoor work, and indoor work are all different. And a meat packing plant is different from an office. But the rule has not yet been promulgated, so maybe it will be more nuanced than Biden said.
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JD Ohio (Comment #205704): “I believe it could be justified on grounds of administrative feasibility and efficiency.
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I don’t see how that could be. Exempting at home workers would certainly be less administratively burdensome than having them get weekly tests.
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It is a lie that vaccine mandates are about public health or based on science. If they were, then a positive antibody test would be accepted in lieu of a vaccine.
The Dems are taking a big political risk with vaccine mandates. The voters most affected are Blacks and Latinos. I do not believe that the Dem are taking a principled stand that is worth it even if they alienate their voters. They are simply taking those voters for granted. I guess we will see if that assumption is justified.
I just cannot see how the mandate doesn’t get tangled up in the courts for months. Forcing this kind of major health requirement on citizens without a thorough vetting seems quite unwise. They are using OSHA to do it which seems like a legal trick. They will try to declare this an “emergency†but I just don’t think that will fly. A good chance this will be decided by the SC. After all these delays delta will have likely taken its toll so it may not matter.
Looks like the Kiwis have done it again. They are down to 20 cases a day, compared to 60/day at the end of August.
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On the other hand, the Aussies’ massive fail continues. I guess nobody told them that the virus spreads well in prisons.
Mike,
I don’t disagree with you. It is a risk, but in my view the risk of doing nothing is greater for them. After Afghanistan Biden looks weak and incompetent. Dems are gambling with little to lose; it’s not like they can sit tight and everything will be OK.
Biden has to do something drastic about COVID. One of the reasons cited for voting for him was the perception that Trump had done a bad job including many people blaming him for all the deaths from COVID in 2020. Δ could conceivably make that impression go away.
Tom Scharf,
There’s a lot of emphasis in the press coverage of F1 on the driver’s championship, but in fact the bulk of the season championship money in F1 goes to the constructors, so the competition in the rest of the field can result in differences of millions of dollars to the constructors. Each team must build their own car, unlike Indy car racing. The teams in NASCAR mostly build their own cars, but the design is fixed. The F1 teams can buy engines, though. The F1 drivers are also very well paid.
Admittedly, the F1 races frequently look like parades, but there have been some surprising results this year.
That’s why I think this is all just political in nature. I’d like to see a prediction of what they think will happen if this is implemented.
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Delta is moving north and the sane people in the WH probably told Biden it’s inevitable there will be some carnage both healthwise and politically. So Biden is doing his Afghanistan thing to try to change the impression with words. The media lapdogs will concentrate on Republican opposition.
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There has already been a very tiring “blame the unvaccinated” for the outbreaks narrative that doesn’t get fact checked. The limited ability of the vaccinated to spread delta is rarely even mentioned now and the fact that the unvaccinated really only endanger themselves is also left on the shelf. However this will be very important in the courts.
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Combined with the conclusion that covid will be globally endemic, the US already has decent vaccination rates, and other countries with high vaccination rates have large delta outbreaks leaves this entire narrative very questionable from a science perspective.
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Politically they probably believe the “blame the unvaccinated” narrative works for their base. However Biden ran on not being divisive and this move is rather divisive. The tut-tutters will have a field day.
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The calculation may be that this move has little chance of stopping covid but it will be easy to blame the right for it not happening. Alternately the right’s best move may be to just let it happen and let the usual NGO’s file the lawsuits.
Cases in the U.S. appear to have passed the peak. Of course, last fall/winter there were two dips on the way to the ultimate peak. But I think that when those dips happened, there were some states past peak while others were climbing strongly. The states I have looked at lately pretty much all seem to be flattening out or declining. Are there any states where to increase is still going strong? If not, then it would seem that we could expect overall declining cases in the near future.
Maybe it would be cynical for me to suggest that the idea that we can expect overall declining cases in the near future might be one of the reasons Biden is announcing his initiative now — so he can take credit.
I think after the leak of his counsel to the former President of Afghanistan over the importance of perceptions and appearance (regarding the Taliban taking over again) that my speculation isn’t completely baseless or out of line; this is an administration that cares about perception and appearance.
mark bofil,
“…so he can take credit.”
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Sure, except none of the unconstitutional stuff Biden will try to force on the country, if it ever happens, is going to do anything before the decline in cases and deaths is already very obvious. Perhaps Biden’s puppet masters think everyone is as intellectually debilitated as he is. In case there were a doubt: IMO, after his speech about hammering the unvacinated, Biden is just as much a jerk as Trump ever was, but in addition adopts really stupid, socially and economically destructive policies. I keep thinking ‘I will never live to see a worse president than Carter…. OK… nobody worse than Obama…. OK… nobody worse than Trump…. and now, OK… nobody worse than Biden…. clearly the worst evah’.
Phil,
“Even for our socialist hellhole :-)”
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Glad to see you are starting to see reality…. 😉
I don’t know Steve. The guys running the company I’m currently working with can probably hardly wait to implement this. They certainly will as soon as they feel they have cover against lawsuits… as soon as they can blame OSHA or Department of Labor.
We’ll see how it plays out.
Mike M.,
At worldometers.info, the dips correspond to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. IOW, they’re almost certainly reporting glitches not a change in actual case rates.
No skin off my butt, I’d be pleased to get a free booster if that’s what they need. Whatever.
mark bofill,
Unfortunately, the issue is bigger than our personal costs and benefits. The Biden administration is doing its best to eliminate all limits the Constitution places on the authority of the Federal government. It is horribly damaging to the rule of law and the social contract people in the USA have lived under for a century.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #205734): “At worldometers.info, the dips correspond to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. IOW, they’re almost certainly reporting glitches not a change in actual case rates.”
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Right you are. The dips in the Financial Times 7-day averages are so timed and just a little over a week wide. I knew that, but had forgotten.
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So that increases the chance that we are just past the peak of the latest wave. And Biden is trying to claim the credit. Sadly, he will get away with it.
The Florida First Circuit Court of Appeals sided with DeSantis and re-instated the automatic appeals stay…. allowing the DeSantis administration to enforce the parental opt-out rule for mandatory masks in all FL public schools. The order is here: https://edca.1dca.org/DCADocs/2021/2685/212685_55_09102021_12250624_i.pdf
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This wasn’t even close: issues of standing, fact, and precedent all went against judge John Cooper’s lifting of the automatic stay pending appeal. It takes no effort in reading the order to see the court of appeals will ultimately rule in favor of DeSantis, as likely will the FL Supreme Court if it goes to them.
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My expectation is the losing side will now go to Federal Court….. to which the Federal Court will probably respond: ‘Exhaust your appeals in the FL court system, then talk to us.’ Effectively this will put the mask opt-out rule in place for the remainder of this school year, if not longer. Should a Democrat appointed Federal judge get involved, I am confident Justice Thomas and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals will immediately reverse that judge, and the US SC will back them up.
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DeSantis appears to have won this battle. Of course, the Florida legislature may need to get involved to pass a law requiring removing from office school board members who refuse to follow the rules, but I suspect most will comply rather than lose their jobs. One small victory for sanity in a covid crazy world.
It is widely, if not universally, held that press secretaries engage in self-serving linguistic contortions. This is up there near the top.
The administration asked all Trump appointees to resign from military service academy advisory boards (else they’d be fired). White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki defended the decision as not being political, saying “the President’s qualification requirements are not your party registration, they are whether you’re qualified to serve and whether you’re aligned with the values of this administration.”
It is true that “aligned with the values” is not literally the same as party registration, but it sure is the same as “political”.
P.S. I believe it is entirely within the President’s legal powers to do this. [Although imagine the media howls if Trump had done it.] It’s just the denial that it’s a political move that amuses/discourages me.
HaroldW,
The next Republican president will clean house like has never happened before. Democrats have acted in ways that beg for payback, and payback they will get. Things like no committee memberships for all the crazy left members in the House, using reconciliation to pass socially motivated laws unrelated to the budget, punishing and breaking up tech companies for disparate treatment of conservatives, etc, etc. Really, Democrats are way beyond the pale, and have been since they gained control of the House. They will suffer the consequences when they lose power in January 2023.
SteveF: “The next Republican president will clean house like has never happened before. Democrats have acted in ways that beg for payback, and payback they will get.”
But that’s just how we’ve gotten into the position we’re in now, with each party p*ssing at the other for little reason other than spite. It may feel good at the moment, but it’s no way to run a government.
HaroldW,
Sure, but I reject the equivalency argument. Conservatives are, naturally, conservative, and try to preserve historical norms. Progressives explicitly reject historical norms, and will (seemingly) do anything which advances their agenda. Conservatives usually compromise on substance, progressives never compromise on substance. Comes from being convinced you are absolutely right and your opponents absolutely wrong…. which is a good working definition of what makes someone a progressive. It will take a substantial change in attitude on the left to break the cycle. I do not see that happening. The side which will not compromise is the side which needs to change.
HaroldW (Comment #205741): “But that’s just how we’ve gotten into the position we’re in now, with each party p*ssing at the other for little reason other than spite. It may feel good at the moment, but it’s no way to run a government.”
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Indeed. The Left does whatever moves them toward their goals, even if it undermines our republican system of government, constitutional order, and the rule of law. For the Left, those are not unfortunate side effects; they are a key part of their objectives. If Republicans give in and do the same, the Left wins. They seek to destroy our society.
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To fight them, Republicans must convince the public that the Left is out to destroy our society. They have destroyed our universities. They are busily destroying our schools; much of the public is waking up to that fact. They our destroying our borders and the value of citizenship; it should not be too hard to get people to wake up to that. They are working on destroying our military; Biden’s purge of the Boards of Visitors is part of that. The Afghanistan debacle should be a good opportunity to sound the alarm on that.
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We are in a race between the Left’s campaign of destruction and the public waking up. Conservatives should seek to slow the former and speed up the latter. Tit-for-tat undermines both.
The 60 vote threshold in the Senate typically prevents whiplash legislation. It would be very unwise to change this. Using reconciliation to push through a $3.5T spending bill would be a disaster. The Democrats are fooling themselves if they don’t think that would come back to haunt them.
Tom Scharf,
“Using reconciliation to push through a $3.5T spending bill would be a disaster.”
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Of course, but unless Joe Manchin says no (and I have zero confidence he will ultimately say no) that is exactly what they will do. The biggest difference between the left and the right is that the right considers the consequences of their choices…. progressives? Never. Like petulant, obnoxious 6 year olds, they want exactly what they want…… and they want it NOW. They don’t care a bit about the consequences.
“The next Republican president will clean house like has never happened before. Democrats have acted in ways that beg for payback,”
Did any Republican Senators insist on maximum debate time for each Biden nominee? If the answer is no, then I would not expect much payback in the future.