I read the US government is buying vaccine for Monkeypox. I told my brother I would line up. His response,
“Your smallpox vaccine should protect you.”
Jim went downstairs to check. He’s vaccinated too. We old farts are protected! Whooo hooo!
Open Thread. (Yes, you can discuss the war, politics etc.)
I thought they stopped vaccinating for smallpox.
MikeN: “I thought they stopped vaccinating for smallpox.”
Correct. The CDC writes, “Routine smallpox vaccination among the American public stopped in 1972 after the disease was eradicated in the United States.”
So anyone under 50 or so (in the US) is unlikely to have been vaccinated. Count me among the fortunate old farts.
Edit: Well, fortunate in this respect anyway. I wouldn’t mind being in my 20’s again. 😉
Yeah. I thought it stopped sooner!! So a larger fraction are protected than I’d guessed.
I too would not mind being younger. I think the sweet spot is early 30s though.
Those were indeed good years Lucia. And my wife remained twenty-nine the entire time.
Spreads by “close physical contact” with someone with active pox….. often during sex or by using the same bedding as a person with the illness. Not quite like covid; no aerosol spread. Surprisingly enough, the greatest frequency in Europe has been among gay men.
I’ve been vaccinated against smallpox. Russia has smallpox samples in their labs, just saying, ha ha. They allegedly genetically modified it and weaponized it. They also allegedly destroyed it all. One good thing about this pandemic is it probably convinced everyone that releasing an agent like that would not be wise.
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Unlike covid I would say monkeypox is likely alarmism due to it being harder to spread.
Tom,
Yeah. Evidently the monkeypox vax also works against small pox. Having people get vaccinated “unnecessarily” could have an upside.
Tom Scharf,
A lot of Soviet bio-weapons labs were located in Ukraine. The US was supposed to help clean them up after the fall of the Soviet Union. Hence Putin’s charge that the US was doing bio-weapons research in Ukraine
Lucia (and others with connections to Chicago),
My son and 2 college friends are visiting Chicago for one day to try deep dish pizza and do whatever they can for fun in one day. Do you have any recommendations for deep dish pizza places?
Also, they are driving to Chicago by way of Indianapolis. I am sure there are places to avoid. (South side). If you or others have insider tips they would be appreciated. As an example, one time I missed a freeway exchange for suburban Detroit and was driving through the city of Detroit at midnight. An extremely scary place and experience that I don’t want to ever repeat.
What really scares me is that there may be really dangerous places near nice places.
jd,
I’m in the suburbs. So I don’t know the best places. But I’ll ask my niece and sisters.
Yes. There are dangerous places near nice places.
This is an interesting writer. Her posts on Twitter show Russian TV news with English subtitles. It’s been mostly about the Ukraine War:
Julia Davis @JuliaDavisNews
“Columnist @TheDailyBeast, creator of the Russian Media Monitor, sanctioned by Russia, member of @TheEmmys. I watch Russian state TV, so you don’t have to.”
Some recent examples:
“Behind all of these nuclear threats and claims that America wouldn’t help Europe if Russia decides to nuke it, there’s underlying panic about Russia being economically unprepared to keep waging this war. Watch:”
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1529877619986006018?s=20&t=i82PQv3D46frOcMkc-lvdg
“I’m hearing this message on multiple programs broadcast by Russian state TV, it must be one of their mandatory assignments. The gist of it: yes, there will be global hunger, but those who have good relations with Russia won’t starve. Primitive, cruel and callous Russian agitprop. Watch:”
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1529877619986006018?s=20&t=ItqddEtlyedpncCywyHXGQ
Sorry the second link in my post above was supposed to be:
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1529230554457055233?s=20&t=ItqddEtlyedpncCywyHXGQ
Sorry the second link in my post above was supposed to be:
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1529230554457055233?s=20&t=ItqddEtlyedpncCywyHXGQ
I duplicated the first link.
Opinion | The U.S. Can’t Force the Rest of the World to Support Ukraine. Here’s Why.
Outside the U.S. and Europe, countries tend to see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a regional conflict, not a global crisis.
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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/25/ukraine-sidelines-regional-not-global-conflict-00034793
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The above is from Politico, who is about as blue as it gets. The article is well worth a read on how the other half of the world views the war in Ukraine.
The Sussmann jury has along with 3 DNC donors and an AOC donor, someone whose daughter is on the same sports team as Sussmann’s daughter.
In the late 90s I drove to Baltimore Harbor which is very nice. Got lost a bit and a few blocks away ended up in a bad area.
Some years later I watched The Wire and saw the same look.
Safe travels…. There was a time when my job involved extensive domestic travel. I would often build in extra time to sample the local culture, environs and cuisine. It was before the internet so I didn’t crowdsource my adventures. I quickly learned to avoid any neighborhood with a street named ‘Martin Luther King’. It was always unsafe for outsiders.
I don’t think that applies in Louisville.
Giodarno’s is our go to when in Chicago. It’s a rather large regional chain. You don’t find very many lacrosse fields in unsafe areas so no help there. Our travels generally take us to the Vernon Hills, Napierville, or Rockford which are nicer areas.
Here’s a hint you are driving in a bad area, the stores all have bars over the windows. Lots of pawn shops and liquors stores. I think the apocalyptic view that just driving through an area is uniquely dangerous is overplayed, but carjackings are up everywhere.
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When I was buying a house a long time ago (or doing a vacation rental) there are usually local crime maps you can filter by carjacking. That is a simple way to identify bad areas.
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See the Carjackings This Year map:
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/carjacking/
Zelensky has started talking about ending the war, this is the surest sign yet that Ukraine is starting to lose. This is more reliable than any propaganda from either side. Too bad, but not totally unexpected.
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Biden needs to not get stupid here and avoid entering the war. Ukraine was likely to lose this from the beginning. The economic isolation of Russia should continue no matter what happens IMO.
Tom Scharf (Comment #212338)
“Ukraine is starting to lose”
Given the ‘David and Goliath’ nature of this fight I think Ukraine has won.
If the final lines end up near where they are today Ukraine has far exceeded what everybody [this blog included] expected.
Also I have said ‘Sanctions are Forever’ since early on in this war. Russia is a rogue state and must be treated as an international pariah at least until there is regime change.
The final lines may be wherever Russia decides they want them. If they try to hold too much land then they may need to occupy a lot of hostile territory. They could still try to take all of Ukraine but I think that would be a mistake. They might take it, but holding it would be a bloodbath.
Tom Scharf,
Based on where the recent fighting is, I looks to me like Russia wants all of the Donbas, a 100 to 150 mile wide strip from the Donbas to Kherson (most everything south of the Dnipro river), and the Crimea. Those are also regions where native Russian speakers are the majority (If I remember correctly). Of course much of that land Russia may be willing to give back in exchange for the Ukraine permanently ceding the Crimea and the Donbas, where native Russian speakers are the large majority. I suspect Zelensky will never accept the permanent loss of the Crimea and the Donbas, and so the war is most likely to end without any formal resolution beyond an informal frontier guarded by lots of troops.
One of the things that puzzles me is why Western nations think sanctions against Russian exports are going to be effective. Petroleum, natural gas, fertilizer, and grains are widely traded commodities. Even if Europe, the USA, Japan, and a few others don’t buy from Russia, that will mostly mean supply lines are rearranged so that Russia continues to export, just to a different mix of countries. The total cost for those goods will be a little higher, since export of commodities generally minimize transport costs, and the realigned exports will have less than optimal transport costs. But still, commodities are generally fungible. Since much of the world is NOT sanctioning Russia, Russia will continue to export these things.
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The Biden administration’s efforts to raise petroleum prices by restricting domestic production will only add to Russia’s export income. Has anybody in the Biden administration actually thought this through? Seems to me they haven’t.
Steve,
Maybe it’s ‘do-somethingism’. There’s a lot of that going around in the wake of the shooting in Texas right now. It doesn’t appear to matter that the proposals are unlikely to solve anything. What matters it that the crisis isn’t going to waste. In the case of the shooting, further gun restrictions are pushed. In the case of Russia, I can’t help but suspect that Biden’s administration wants high gas prices; they just don’t want to be politically accountable for having contributed to high gas prices.
To be fair to Biden, I don’t think anything he could do would turn around the oil production situation right now. Investors and companies aren’t stupid; they know where the administration stands on fossil fuels. He doesn’t have enough time left in office to persuade America that he’s changed his mind and really means to stick by and support the fossil fuel industry.
mark bofill,
“There’s a lot of that going around in the wake of the shooting in Texas right now.
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My wife worked as a high school teacher for advanced chemistry for about 15 years. Every school she worked at had an armed “Police Resource Officer” stationed continuously on campus…. almost always near the entrance. Entrance was physically restricted to one door during the whole day except briefly when students were arriving and students were leaving. Of course, the Resource Officer didn’t have much to do, except when a fight between students broke out. You could even put metal detectors at all entrances to ensure nobody enters the school with a gun.
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A second useful approach is to train teachers to recognize the kind of troubled-teen-loner-going-crazy behaviors which usually precede this kind of mass shooting. In the present case, the perp gradually stopped going to school at all, and was considered strange by his fellow classmates. How was this not investigated?
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I suspect the “do something” crowd won’t even consider the obvious solutions. You can’t will away crazy people. But you can recognize crazy people and stop the worst of their crimes.
mark bofill,
“To be fair to Biden…”
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Why be fair to Biden? He has done terrible and willful damage to the country, and has used every opportunity where he could make a change in course to double down or absolutely stupid policies… causing even more damage to the country. The guy was never very smart, and was always corrupt; he now has dementia. My pity for him will start the day he is out of office and can’t do any more damage.
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2022/05/27/turning-off-the-war/
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I found this article well worth a full reading. Some excerpts below.
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“.. The one curious thing to come out of yet another catastrophic foreign adventure by this administration is the role reversal between the Pentagon and the State Department. In days of old, it was usually State restraining a frothing at the mouth Pentagon from starting WWIII but this time around it’s the Pentagon restraining the raving neo-con liberals of State whose all consuming hatred of Russia has made them take leave of their senses. Truly, we live in strange day….”.
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“.. This time around it’s the Americans who actually installed Zelensky who’re getting in touch but the administration there is unpredictable, unstable and therefore dangerous. We’re finally dealing with the organ grinder rather than his monkey. However, at any one moment, you can’t actually be sure which puppeteer behind a senile president you’re actually dealing with. But in managing such an unstable opponent, you’re the one who can act based on some certainties only you yourself can creat….”
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“.. The first is they’ve got no influence over you – you’re the only one who can decide when you turn the war off. In this case, it comes down to how far westwards to push the offensive. All the military objectives have essentially been achieved or will be but the problem remains of whether you want to leave a festering sore on your border. A little bit of controlled mission creep such as taking Odessa and thereby making the Ukraine a land locked country that neighbours like Poland and Hungry will nibble bits off under the guise of “helping” against the Russians is already shaping u…”
Steve wrote: “I suspect the “do something” crowd won’t even consider the obvious solutions.”
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Of course not. “Crazy” is an oppressed minority. They’re busy trying to destroy the very concept of “normal”.
I’d have more respect for the anti-gun crowd if they just said they wanted to ban and confiscate guns. That is at least arguably effective, eventually.
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The ratio of troubled teens to trouble teens who go mass shooting is at least 1M to one. This guy bought his guns legally and had no criminal history. If we had to lockup every moody teenager …
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Maybe red flag laws, but I have my doubts. People have a misperception that recognizing mental illness and getting treated somehow always fixes mental illness. It doesn’t.
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The cops dropped the ball on this one. An appropriate response likely wouldn’t have made much of a difference, but they still must have an appropriate response. The Orlando gay bar shooting also had a big delay. There is an argument that once the active shooting stops and it becomes a stalemate and then moving in quick may be the wrong answer, but here we had them actively stopping others from entering the building. I await some more details though before I completely condemn them. Small town cops aren’t really ready for this.
I guess I’ve been living under the propaganda that Zelensky was elected. Thank you Kremlin for correcting me with baseless rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ukrainian_presidential_election
Tom Scharf,
It is clear that confiscating guns is the ultimate objective; a few of them are even honest enough to actually say it.
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But I know plenty of good-ol-boys from Louisiana who would shoot a Federal agent at the front door before giving up their guns. Heck, I know one guy who keeps a loaded .38 hidden in a closet near the door! Confiscating guns is not ever going to happen in a hundred years… if ever. Aside from there being more guns than people in the USA, and even more purchased each time the anti-gun crowd talks about restrictions, there is the whole second amendment issue that would somehow have to be ‘eliminated’… I guess by subversion of the constitution rather than amendment to the Constitution, which would never pass. Short version: It is not going to happen.
I still think a major driver of mass shootings is press coverage. That’s why, IMO, everyone uses assault style weapons because everyone else they’ve seen on TV or read about in the newspaper uses them. It’s not at all clear to me that you wouldn’t do a lot more damage with a couple of sawed off 12 gauge double barrel shotguns loaded with 00 buckshot. You would have to practice reloading, but a shotgun also seems far less likely to jam.
Overturn the second amendment, then ban handguns. It’s not impossible, just really hard. Not viable today as you say, but the anti-gun crowd needs to start making sense before anyone will listen to them. The knee jerk blame the Republicans thing has gotten really stale. Perhaps the 2nd amendment could be changed to leave it up the states to gain more support.
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It’s really not the mass shootings, it’s all the senseless “common” murders by handguns. The left wants to overturn the 2nd amendment by legislating from the SC bench. People are pretty dug in on this issue. It’s at least a decade away.
Tom Scharf: “Here’s a hint you are driving in a bad area, the stores all have bars over the windows. Lots of pawn shops and liquors stores. ”
Once I was driving from Columbus to Cleveland, OH. Got off at the wrong exit. (Garfield Hts) For about one mile, there was not one store open. There were empty old business bldgings and old bldings with bars on the windows, but absolutely nothing open. Very eye opening to me even though I grew up in Cleveland.
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Had almost as bad an experience in Detroit, where I was trying to turn around and exited the freeway, but there was no corresponding exit going the other way at about midnight.
Andrew P.
Thanks for the restaurant recommendation. I will pass it on.
Yes Giordano’s is excellent. Keep in mind the pizzas are very deep.
Younger sisters advice:
Steve,
Alabama too. I’d never realized good-ol-boy engineers even existed till I moved here.
If you have some time on your hands, you might find this interesting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4wvITVgzMKU
Lucia,
Thanks a lot for the suggestions. I will definitely pass on.
My older sister can’t eat pizza. (She was diagnosed as celiac before gluten intolerant was fashionable. She’s thrilled gluten intolerant came into fashion because it widened her choices and labeling improved. But she was diagnoed in 1958. 🙂 )
As the internet liberated information, 3D printing is doing the same for tangible objects, that includes guns.
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https://armamentresearch.com/polymer-3d-printed-barrel-successfully-tested/
Dave, that’s neat. I gotta say though, I doubt I’d feel comfortable shooting through a plastic barrel, even just .22 LR. I’ll stick with my old fashioned metal barrel firearms I think.
3D printed gun, sounds like a lost hand waiting to happen.
Amid initial signs of weakening of resolve in the West, there are many signs of strength:
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen:
“Ukraine must win this war, and Putin’s aggression must be a strategic failure.”
Even the Washington Post Editorial Board:
“For now, though, the best way for Ukraine’s friends to help is to accelerate shipments of vital weaponry — and stop negotiating with themselves.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/26/now-is-not-time-seek-deal-with-putin/
It seems there is no weakening of resolve for sanctions.
“Now is the time to help Ukraine by stepping up sanctions on Russia. Broader measures must cover the financial and energy sectors as well as more government officials and business figures.”
https://www.ft.com/content/736f63f5-eb56-4811-85f4-6f275eb36c28
The West has an oppressive array of sanctions in effect. A tally [halfway down the page]:
“Major Sectoral Sanctions and Export Controls Against Russia. Hover over the cards to stop the animation. Swipe left and right to check out different sanctioning authorities.”
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/global-sanctions-dashboard-russia-and-beyond/
Pore it on. Stigmatize Russia. Make it hurt.
Ukraine continues to win the twitter war. Twitter persona Sandra Andersen Aira is a Norwegian from the indigenous tribe ‘Sami’. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, she volunteered for the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, joining a mixed-Canadian/American ranger squad. Her unit calls themselves the ‘Dirty Dozen’. She was a combat medic in the Norwegian army.
Some of her recent posts:
https://twitter.com/DirtydozenEira/status/1527032147013423104?s=20&t=3r76LinK2xzXZBgbPZbhZQ
https://twitter.com/DirtydozenEira/status/1525504209818361856?s=20&t=3r76LinK2xzXZBgbPZbhZQ
https://twitter.com/DirtydozenEira/status/1522210910915469312?s=20&t=3r76LinK2xzXZBgbPZbhZQ
This one is a glitzy video about her:
https://twitter.com/DirtydozenEira/status/1528175019578339328?s=20&t=3r76LinK2xzXZBgbPZbhZQ
From 2017 to 2021, she served as a member of the Sámi Parliament of Norway, elected to the Norwegian Sámi Association from the Ávjovárri constituency.
In civilian life she runs a fishing schooner.
Russians suffer another tactical defeat in the hot zone around Izyum.
Damage assessment from video and pictures
“Ukrainian paratroopers carried out an attack on a Russian forward base.
UAF airborne + army artillery shell targets near Hlynske north of Izyum, claiming 12 tanks, 8 AFVs, 4 units of engineering equipment + approx 36 vehicles burned. Film shows Ural tanker, MT-LB + 2 hangars burning. Geolocation in link.”
Links:
https://twitter.com/Danspiun/status/1530700425741180928?s=20&t=3r76LinK2xzXZBgbPZbhZQ
https://twitter.com/Blue_Sauron/status/1527624852349325312?s=20&t=EchQ3NZjQqTSZ05NfD05QA
https://twitter.com/Danspiun/status/1530695866704613376?s=20&t=3r76LinK2xzXZBgbPZbhZQ
A review of New Zealand’s covid cases and deaths suggests the country will end up with between 1,500 and 2,000 deaths, on a population of ~5 million. The keys for NZ:
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1) Stopped most all travel to/from NZ until vaccines were available
2) Tracked/isolated/stopped spread from the handful of cases that got through
3) Got nearly 100% of vulnerable residents vaccinated before finally
4) Letting covid rip
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Covid deaths per million in NZ will likely end up at ~10% or less of the rates for most or Europe and the USA. Living on a smallish island has its benefits. Having a population which trusts the experts is also very beneficial.
I still think one of the interesting questions to tease out of NZ nos. will be comparison of vaccine-acquired resistance compared to infection-acquired resistance. Ireland, with about same population and vaccination rates has had 2000 or so deaths since the Delta-Omicron wave hit, but had orders of magnitude higher numbers of people with previous infections. On face of it, not much difference.
Russians have lost another decorated officer. From Ukraine Pravda: “Ukrainian Armed Forces kill another Russian commander
The Armed Forces of Ukraine have killed the Russian commander of the assault battalion of the 104th Guards Airborne Assault Regiment, Aleksandr Dosiagaev.”
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/05/28/7349152/
Phil,
I think those 2000 deaths in Ireland include both Delta and Omicron waves, and the delta wave was more virulent (look how long the last 2000 deaths took in Ireland). IIRC, nearly all infections in New Zealand have been the Omicron strain. If someone gets infected with Omicron after vaccination, they are much less likely to die than if infected by Delta, but it is still possible infection with either protects efficiently against death from re-infection by any other strain. I think making a comparison of Ireland and NZ would require knowing the strains in circulation in Ireland over time versus fatality rates. We do know for sure that infection provides ~4X greater protection against re-infection than the m-RNA vaccines, at least up to Delta.
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I know probably a dozen people who got Omicron after three doses of m-RNA vaccine, and none became very sick, not even my 92 YO mother in law. So I speculate the combination of vaccination and catching Omicron is what gives the very low death rates you see in NZ (<0.1%) for confirmed cases.
Russia is still making gains in the East, and from the maps, look to be controlling 15% of Ukraine, more if you include the Crimea.
Even proUkraine media is starting to acknowledge that these areas could be lost.
MikeN (Comment #212378)
“Russia is still making gains in the East”
Yes modest gain in the center while suffering tremendous losses in men and equipment. Meanwhile the Ukrainians are making gains in the North and South.
UK Ministry of Defense Map showing contested areas… https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1530866655454277633?s=20&t=q6sZzRxRW7PJpi4JbxCHYw
Today’s assessment from the UK Ministry of Defence:
“With multiple credible reports of localised mutinies amongst Russia’s forces in Ukraine, a lack of experienced and credible platoon and company commanders is likely to result to a further decrease in morale and continued poor discipline.” https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1531144762396397571?s=20&t=q6sZzRxRW7PJpi4JbxCHYw
ISW analysis from today:
“Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)”
https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1531051422191562752?s=20&t=WB2BrCdJpTKVodtNZKZjEw
“New reports confirmed that #Ukrainian forces conducted a successful limited counterattack near the #Kherson-#Mykolaiv oblast border on May 28, forcing #Russian forces onto the defensive.”
https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1531049383789215744?s=20&t=WB2BrCdJpTKVodtNZKZjEw
ISW Yesterday on the Russian offensive:
“Russian forces continued to assault Severodonetsk on May 29 but did not make any confirmed advances; Russian progress in intense urban combat will likely be slow. The Russian campaign in eastern Ukraine—which previously aimed to capture the entirety of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts—is now focused almost entirely on Severodonetsk. Russian troops are unlikely to be able to conduct multiple simultaneous operations and will likely further deprioritize advances southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman in favor of concentrating available forces on Severodonetsk in the coming days.”
The source of the Russian-Ukraine war reports as noted in the above posts are from Ukraine General Staff which publishes a LARGE amount of outright fabrications, ie “The Ghost of Kiev “.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Kyiv
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The ISW reporting is just as bad as it mostly just regurgitates Ukraine General Staff reports.
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Both sides lie constantly. One has to read reports form both sides and follow progress on the ground to get feel for what is actually going on.
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Progress on the ground in the east says the caldrons are closing on Ukraine forces caught in the pockets. Even Ukraine officials are saying their forces may have to retreat to escape the caldrons, which will be VERY hard to accomplish due to the escape routes are under artillery fire from 3 directions and Russian ground forces are steadily advancing under massive supporting artillery fire.
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As the Russian supply routes are from railways moving supply directly to the front in all the Russian axis of attacks, the supporting artillery fire is in little to no danger of running short of ammunition.
“I think making a comparison of Ireland and NZ would require knowing the strains in circulation in Ireland over time versus fatality rates. “
Oh, a LOT of work with the detailed numbers needs to done to draw any firm conclusions, but it is enough to set a prior of “not much difference”. Ireland has had 1500 deaths since Omicrom became dominant (Dec 20) where NZ as so far had 1000 since it dominated (mid Jan) (but can easily expect another 500 or more).
Phil,
Sure. The prior is: if you are looking at deaths, they are going to be much lower if virtually 100% of the at-risk population (say, all over 45 YO) is fully vaccinated…. they may catch the virus, but are very unlikely to die from it. Same thing if the population has all had the virus. So not much difference in deaths. The number of cases could be very different, even if deaths are not.
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A neighbor told me yesterday that his 78 YO brother died from covid….. “never got around to getting vaccinated”.
That is sad. Simple, low-risk process. Testing hypotheses around case number is much tougher since reported numbers are so unreliable in the “let it rip” phase.
Map with a good representation of the Ukraine rail net in east / central Ukraine.
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https://s2.cdnstatic.space/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/30may2022_Ukraine_map.jpg
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Both Ukraine and Russia have issues with truck based supply lines. Not enough trucks, large distance to travel, and supply of fuel to forward troop deployments.
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Ukraine has a single rail line that has not yet been cut leading to the east, and it is in easy artillery range of the Russian line of advance. Ukraine has to break cargo from rail to trucks a very substantial distance from the eastand then transport over poor roads under artillery fire in a number of locations
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Russia has multiple rail lines supplying all sections of the east and they are in no danger of being cut.
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If either want the tonnage of transport needed for a constant supply of artillery shells to the front, it has to go by rail.
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Logistics will determine the winner of the battle for eastern Ukraine and Russia is currently winning the logistical war in the east.
I think what happens in New Zealand, Taiwan, et. al. remains to be seen. There is no doubt their eventual fatality rates will be lower because of getting vaccinated before the first wave, availability of antivirals(?), and omicron being less severe. The question is whether subsequent waves in these late arriver countries will be more severe relative to the west because of less natural immunity and a higher population of highly susceptible to severe illness group yet to get covid. The vaccines aren’t very useful for preventing infection.
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Both New Zealand and Australia’s first big waves didn’t actually end, they are still in a moderate burn. The UK cases did something similar and stayed at a moderate burn for a long time.
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Still though, much better off to be down under than up top in this pandemic.
I think it would be a terrible idea for a lot of obvious reasons, but Ukraine lining up a crapload of artillery right on the border and unloading on a Russian city near the border would be entirely justified.
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This is a similar move to Saddam launching Scuds into Israel during the Gulf War. It forces Russia to move forces to defend their own territory. It’s an escalation that likely wouldn’t payoff though.
Artillery still matters in 2022. Tubes and ammo. Lots of each. It looks like casualties ratios are going to be similar to WWII maybe, 50% of deaths and injuries from artillery.
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It’s a bit surprising that Russia has not been able to eliminate Ukraine artillery with air power, that is definitely what NATO would be planning.
Tom, Russia has a different mindset on AirPower than NATO.
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NATO relies on AirPower instead of artillery. NATO forces are 3:1 for artillery. 3 inf or armor to 1 artillery. NATO depends on total air superiority to destroy infrastructure and enemy ground forces. Ground forces are to mop up after air breaks the enemy.
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Russia is 1:1 for artillery. Russia assumes it’s anti air systems will contest the air and let the ground forces do their work. The Russian 300 & 400 anti air systems are some of the best deployed, so will make enemy air attacks expensive.
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Russia just needs to contest the air where NATO needs complete dominance.
I’ve said from the beginning that these guys have no idea what they are talking about when predicting inflation. The WashPost provides a timeline of what they have said over the past couple years. What an embarrassment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/05/31/inflation-economy-timeline/
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The WSJ prints Biden op-ed today on inflation. What a bunch of useless blabbering and talking points. It’s humorous to read the WashPost article first and then read Biden’s over confident assertions. We have gone from “transitory” to “transition” now, ha ha. No credibility here at all.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-plan-for-fighting-inflation-joe-biden-gas-prices-economy-unemployment-jobs-covid-11653940654?st=mxhbyg9afd75eow&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Hurricane season starts tomorrow and Southwest Florida already has a storm to watch. Tropical Storm Agatha is expected to cross Mexico and reform in the Gulf of Mexico in about five days.
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gtwo.php?basin=atlc&fdays=5
The newer spaghetti models [run at 5-31/0600Z] all bring it up toward us.
https://www.sfwmd.gov/weather-radar/hurricane-model-plots
Nothing worrisome yet though.
Interesting datum: The Census Bureau now says that it over counted NY residents in 2020 by ~ 625,000.
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An accurate count might have pushed the NY loss in the House of Representatives from 1 to 2. So, high taxes, onerous covid (and other) regulations and rising crime (not to mention crappy weather!) make people leave a state. Which state received the largest net population flow from NY? Surprise: Florida.
Tuesday,
Usually the best and most productive day of the week.
Change of government here for 3 years at least.
I should sell in May and go away but never do.
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Amazed Ukraine still holding out.
Wonder if young men are signing up to go and help from other countries a la Spanish Civil War.
There is one documented logistics problem for the Ukrainian military. They have “mountains” of body bags that they are having difficulty transporting back to Mother Russia.
“Zelenskyy says UN, Red Cross order Russia to take its ‘mountains of corpses’” https://www.foxnews.com/world/zelenskyy-un-red-cross-russia-mountains-corpses
“The bodies of Russian soldiers are piling up in Ukraine, as Kremlin conceals true toll of war”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/23/europe/ukraine-war-russian-soldiers-deaths-cmd-intl/index.html
“Russia ‘refusing’ to take soldiers’ corpses as it tries to hide scale of losses in Ukraine. Russia is reportedly refusing to take bodies of its soldiers killed in fighting in Ukraine, with corpses piling up in refrigerated train cars.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/05/14/russia-refusing-take-bodies-dead-soldiers-tries-hide-scale-ukraine/#:~:text=Latin%20America-,Russia%20'refusing'%20to%20take%20soldiers'%20corpses%20as%20it%20tries,scale%20of%20losses%20in%20Ukraine&text=Russia%20is%20reportedly%20refusing%20to,cars%20outside%20the%20Ukrainian%20capital.
So the recent census report is based on random sampling compared to the census result. So it is not actually a count, it is a statistical analysis.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/2020-census-undercount-overcount-rates-by-state.html
———–
Undercounts:
Arkansas (-5.04),
Florida (-3.48),
Illinois (-1.97),
Mississippi (-4.11),
Tennessee (-4.78), and
Texas (-1.92).
5 out of six have something in common.
————
Overcounts:
Delaware (+5.45),
Hawaii (+6.79),
Massachusetts (+2.24),
Minnesota (+3.84),
New York (+3.44),
Ohio (+1.49),
Rhode Island (+5.05), and
Utah (+2.59)
6 of 8 have something else in common.
—————
Obviously a coincidence. 🙂
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*IF* the new estimates are correct, then it looks like Rhode Island and maybe Minnesota got extra seats and Texas got gypped. Population per CD here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population
Tom Scharf (Comment #212390)
May 30th, 2022 at 9:30 pm
Even though the Fed and its media allies have been very wrong on not just the current inflation but other economic predictions, the Fed continues to get strong support from the media and both major political parties. The predictions are often related to a political agenda and/or self serving by the Fed.
Nothing will change in these regards until the public becomes aware of the cantillion effect with inflation whereby printing money through Fed actions profits those first in line for using cheap money – which is not the common man on the street – and the fact that the extremes of the business cycle are caused by the Fed and not something that the Fed exists to fight. Many of the citizens attempting to live on a fixed income fail to connect that problem to the Fed’s keeping interest rates artificially low and doing so to allow the federal government to spend irresponsibly without debt interest becoming unsustainable.
Further in these regards are the politics evolving from the Texas shooting tragedy with the self righteous Democrats proposing their approach is the only correct one. Yet it obvious that the open door, the lack of security at school and hesitancy of the law enforcement to do what they were trained to do were major revealed problems.
Interesting that the Democrats approach involves curtailing freedoms of law abiding citizens in an attempt to control a very small number of lawless ones and refuses to recognize the problems involved from lack of school security. A lot of this stems from the current widely held idea that government, and more specifically the federal government, must and can solve all problems. I look for the Republicans to fail to make the obvious case in these school shootings and cave on more restrictive approaches.
Hurricanes, the month before and after Sept. 15th are when to watch closely. Early and late season storms are rarely much to worry about except ruining your golf outing. The most likely time to get a powerful storm on the gulf coast is late season when they form in the lower gulf more often. Otherwise they have to form off Africa and then do a u-turn around Florida which can happen, but not that often. There are exceptions of course.
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I’ve had a Cat1 and Cat3 go right near my house over the past 25 years and saw little damage except for lots of tree rubbish and local flooding. The Cat3 had slowed down enough so the local area had about 100 mph winds.
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The home insurance industry is in crisis again in Florida. They just had a special session of the state legislature to try to deal with it. Lots of people with older roofs that were in good shape have been forced to replace them or get no insurance at all, which is not viable if you have a home loan. Huge mess. The reinsurance industry just doesn’t like the uncertainty of many good years followed by occasional catastrophic losses in a year.
Jury finds Sussmann not guilty. Surprise surprise.
Yes, the attack on the police’s not so great response versus the instant forgiveness of a teacher intentionally leaving the door open (after they saw a guy shooting!!!!) lines up with favorable political constituencies.
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The police did drop the ball. Even if most or all of the shooting occurred before they were lined up outside in the hallway, it is entirely possible some of the students might have had survivable wounds. It is well known that treatment within an hour (the golden hour) is vital to trauma treatment.
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Preventing mass shootings in the US is like trying to prevent auto deaths. Lots of things can help at the edges but not any silver bullets beyond banning and confiscating guns. Banning guns is greeted as enthusiastically as banning autos at the moment.
The NYT discovers the vaccines aren’t working very well…
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During the Omicron Wave, Death Rates Soared for Older People
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/health/omicron-deaths-age-65-elderly.html
“Despite strong levels of vaccination among older people, Covid killed them at vastly higher rates during this winter’s Omicron wave than it did last year, preying on long delays since their last shots and the variant’s ability to skirt immune defenses.”
““This is not simply a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Andrew Stokes, an assistant professor in global health at Boston University who studies age patterns of Covid deaths. “There’s still exceptionally high risk among older adults, even those with primary vaccine series.”
Covid deaths, though always concentrated in older people, have in 2022 skewed toward older people more than they did at any point since vaccines became widely available.”
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OMG, they actually said the words out loud …
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“Deaths have fallen from the heights of the winter wave in part because of growing levels of immunity from past infections, experts said.”
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AFAICT even booster shots are not that effective. 60% of the US has had covid, but only ~30% of seniors have had it.
My faith in juries has taken a hit.
Too bad that Martha Stewart didn’t have that jury. Note that her prosecution was another James Comey fiasco.
Mike,
I used to have faith in juries too, until I served on one some decades back. It was a disturbing, sobering experience for me. The people I served with didn’t give a ***t about their instructions; they wanted to decide what they felt like deciding. I argued with them for a couple of days, me and one other person and I’m pretty sure they only agreed in the end because they realized I wasn’t going to budge about following our instructions.
I think we would need to know what happened in the jury room. This was probably a “not proven” verdict and the plausible deniability that he did it on his own was perhaps not disproven by the prosecution. It could also have been an all-left jury panel which is entirely possible in DC. An interview with a juror would be enlightening. Lots of probably guilty people walk free from the justice system. One of the guy’s damning texts apparently was disallowed but I didn’t follow it closely. Lawyers just aren’t convicted that often.
One sees much derision online bof the Russians using T62 tanks from their reserve. I find this misinformed chatter amusing.
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The T62 is only slightly less effective than the T72. It will be very effective in reducing pockets that have used up most of their more modern infantry anti weapons. For this use, even the older obsolete T34-76mm (1942) fitted with cages would work well. The T34 broke the Germans in Berlin who used vast numbers of infantry AT panzerfausts that were effective against even the heaviest armor of the time. T34’s mounted “bed spring “ armor, ie cage armor to partially counter act the panzerfaust.
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Iraq used the T62 for good effect. As most of the weapons and tanks used on both sides are from this general timeframe, the Iraq-Iran war is a good baseline regardless of the upgrades to both the T72 and T62 over the years.
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Wiki
“.. In 1974, the Iraqi Army acquired 100 T-62s and 600 more in 1976, which were delivered through to 1979. In 1982 a further 2,150 were ordered, which were delivered by 1989. These tanks saw service in the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict from 1974 to 1991.[40]
In the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi T-62s performed well against opposing Iranian tanks, such as M47s, M48s, M60A1s and Chieftains. In Operation Nasr, the biggest tank battles of the war, Iran lost 214 Chieftain and M60A1 tanks, while Iraq lost 45 T-62s.[41] The remaining Iranian armour turned about and withdrew.[42] Approximately 200 T-62s were lost in the entire war.[40]”
Tom Scharf (Comment #212397)
“Early and late season storms are rarely much to worry about except ruining your golf outing.”
“The Storm of the Century struck the gulf coast of Florida late on Friday March 12, 1993 and continued slamming Florida and states to the north on Saturday. To Florida residents, it was a “no-name” March hurricane creating wind gusts over 90 mph, tornadoes, and a devastatingly deadly storm surge. The Superstorm produced over $2 billion in property damage across portions of 22 eastern U.S. states. Most of the property damage occurred in Florida. Advanced warnings saved lives with less than 100 direct casualties – half of whom were on vessels in seas estimated as high as 65 feet. Another 118 people perished from indirect causes with many dying during the post storm cleanup.”
https://www.weather.gov/tbw/93storm
They say there was no eyewall, but in the middle of it I was outside in dead calm looking up at a starry sky… no eyewall indeed.
Sometime let me tell you about Charley in 2005 a category 4. I was working in Englewood Florida and had employees and clients who lost nearly everything.
Russel,
You are apparently confused between a statistical argument and an absolute argument. The chances of the storm you indicated developing into something significant are small. I lived in Tampa when Charley approached, it diverted south in the last 24 hours.
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One century of hurricane tracks in Florida:
https://www.news-press.com/story/weather/hurricane/2016/10/05/florida-hurricane-tropical-storm-magnet-for-a-century/91597860/
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Even when a large storm strikes there is pretty narrow corridor of life threatening wind. Deaths are usually from drowning and storm surge which are entirely preventable. The rest are usually indirect from downed power lines, car wrecks, people using generators incorrectly, etc.
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If you are sitting under a Cat4 eyewall then you have big problems. If you have a house built in 1950’s that is less than 10 feet above sea level and a large storm surge occurs during high tide then you have big problems. These are pretty rare. See the actual things that killed people during Hurricane Michael here, it’s like covid, primarily old people died of many indirect maladies.
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2018/11/29/43-and-counting-deconstructing-death-toll-hurricane-michael/2124902002/
Interesting take on the Sussmann verdict from Andrew McCarthy. He says it was a reasonable verdict on the grounds that the lie was immaterial in that the FBI was not duped. They willingly picked up the ball and ran with it.
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Of course, at this point there is no way to know if that was the jury’s reasoning.
I am shocked (shocked!!!) that Sussmann got off, in spite of overwhelming evidence of willfully misleading the FBI. Actually, no. Upthread I placed the chance of conviction in Washington DC as very, very low. In DC, it is all ‘Orange Man Bad’, all the time.
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Unlawfully trespass on the Capitol in support of Trump? People go to jail…. for multiple years, after awaiting trial in prison…. for years.
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Unlawful dirty tricks by Democrats to subvert an election? Wrist slap…. or nothing. Kevin Clinesmith: Pleaded guilty (as a lawyer!) to falsifying an email, so the FBI could to continue spying on Trump. Sentence: Wrist slap….. and he got his law license back shortly thereafter.
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There are two standards for justice in this country, and they have a lot to do with the political convictions of the people who run the DOJ, especially the evil and execrable Merrick Garland. Has there been a more politically motivated and corrupt AG in my lifetime? I doubt it. I thought Eric Holder was as bad as it could get. I was mistaken. Good thing that miserable liar is not on the SC.
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There is nothing sensible people can do except to elect people who will change this sorry state of affairs.
May 27th I wrote: “I don’t believe there is even a 10% chance for conviction.”
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Michael Sussmann, corrupt liar, gets away with it.
SteveF,
IOW, if you’re not part of the correct political class, always assume the FBI is out to get you, because they are. Demand a lawyer and let them do all the talking. There is no such animal as an informal FBI interrogation. Just ask Michael Flynn. Oh, but he pleaded guilty. You would too under the circumstances.
The NYT’s did look at the 2000 mules documentary
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/us/politics/2000-mules-trump-conspiracy-theory.htm
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Most of the article is a useless and expected ad hominem attack. A few points they made:
“What’s more, the film claims, but never shows in its footage, that individual “mules” stuffed drop box after drop box. (Mr. Phillips said such footage exists, but Mr. D’Souza said it wasn’t included because “it’s not easy to tell from the images themselves that it is the same person.”) ”
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The multiple drops are allegedly verified by cellphone tracking data which only supposedly has a resolution of about 100 feet. Somebody just driving by a drop box multiple times could be flagged.
“True the Vote declined to offer tangible proof — Mr. Phillips calls his methodology a “trade secret.””
“The group has not presented any evidence that the ballots themselves — as opposed to their delivery — were improper … when asked to provide evidence of improper votes, she only pointed to previous accusations unrelated to the 2020 general election.”
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Vote harvesting and getting paid to do it are legal in many states.
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So it doesn’t look like this will go anywhere, but as usual we can expect the NYT’s and others to not spend any time investigating it other than to try to disprove it.
The media is flat out lying about the precision of this cell phone data. They have published many articles in the past about how criminals were caught with this cell phone data, and how accurate the tracking is.
Now they get someone to claim it is not that accurate, and they all run with it.
Pretty good article on why we should not be dismissing of possible vote fraud:
https://americanmind.org/features/the-haunting-of-the-american-mind/the-cancer-of-election-fraud/
If there are 2000 mules then they need to start with at least one real person that confesses and has a credible claim of invalid or illegal votes. They have 2000 unidentified people except for cell phone ID’s who passed near some drop boxes and a “non-profit organization”. I would expect in crowded areas the statistics will favor a small subset of people innocently passing by these boxes on a regular basis. What are the chances that nobody randomly did? Employees of nearby businesses?
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Somebody trustworthy could run the numbers, I don’t expect anybody to do so. Being transparent on the algorithm used would be useful, I don’t expect that to happen either. It’s not enough IMO.
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I support voter ID laws and traceability of the voting process to prevent the possibility of these things happening. As it sits I can only confirm my mail in ballot was received and counted. I cannot confirm the actual votes for people.
Cell phone accuracy data varies by model and circumstances, but it is a lot better on average than 100 feet: https://medium.com/@importanttech/we-tested-mobile-gps-gnss-accuracy-and-found-some-surprising-results-b9ec35873e2e
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I looked at the rules for absentee ballots in each swing state: none allow paid vote harvesting. The NYT is simply lying….. as usual. WRT the validity of harvested ballots: There is absolutely no way to know, or even to know where the ballots came from, which means there is no possibility of detecting fraud after the fact. That is why ballot harvesting is extremely limited by law most everywhere. Usually a third party is limited to transport of a ballot from a close family member, and always not more than 2 or 3 ballots in total for an election.
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The film can’t prove voting fraud, but does appear to show clear and widespread violation of absentee ballot laws. Why the NYT doesn’t care about this law-breaking tells a lot more about the NYT than about the film.
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The film producers should stop hiding information; being 100% open and honest works. Claims of ‘proprietary methods’ doesn’t work at all.
SteveF (Comment #212416): “The film producers should stop hiding information; being 100% open and honest works. Claims of ‘proprietary methods’ doesn’t work at all.”
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Why do you say they are hiding stuff? Real question.
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True The Vote is a non-partisan organization that has been around since 2009. So far as I can tell, their focus is not on litigating the past, it is on election integrity moving forward.
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I did find this on their website:
https://www.truethevote.org/another-whipsaw-week/
Mike M,
If they actually post everything as they describe, that should help answer the critics.
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WRT the film: if there exist real images of the same people (based on cell phone positioning data) visiting multiple drop boxes (as the film claims) then they should release those images… it doesn’t matter at all if you can see how many ballots they dropped into the boxes. Such images would be prima facia evidence of illegal third party harvesting of ballots.
Andrew McCarthy on where Durham went wrong in prosecuting Sussmann:
His take on FBI involvement sounds right to me, although I don’t know if that is why the jury failed to convict.
It would seem to me that whether the FBI knew they were being duped or not would be irrelevant as to whether someone attempted to dupe them. I though the dishonesty of Sussman was on trial, not the complicity of the FBI.
DaveJR (Comment #212420): “I though the dishonesty of Sussman was on trial”
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Dishonesty is not against the law. A lie is only criminal if it is material. If the FBI knew it was a lie, then it had no effect and was immaterial.
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Of course, that did not stop them from going after Michael Flynn. But that abuse of the law does not justify other similar abuses.
Sussman juror:
“I don’t think it should have been prosecuted. There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.”
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/06/01/sussmann-juror-there-are-bigger-things-than-a-possible-lie-to-the-fbi/
Sounds like standard issue nullification. I agree that whether the FBI knew he was lying at the time is irrelevant here, but I believe there are some legal issues with whether it materially affected the investigation. Clearly most people bringing the FBI information have motivations beyond good citizenship though.
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I don’t like these type of process crimes at all, even when used against political opponents. People lie to the police and authorities constantly (perjury, etc.) and very few face consequences. The selective prosecution of these type of crimes ends up with biases both overt and hidden.
Especially for you Tom Scharf: https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/01/are-pulse-oximeters-instrinsically-biased-against-people-of-color/
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If the oximeters really are sensitive to skin pigmentation, why would the FDA not have noticed? Real question.
If the FBI was eager to investigate Trump, then Sussmann’s lies were immaterial. The investigating agents testified that it would have mattered to them. Their bosses were hiding this information because they didn’t want the agents to know the info came from the Hillary campaign.
On the 2,000 mules thing:
I bet they didn’t test their hypothesis that the number of repeat visits to the vicinity of the drop box was unusually high by checking against locations with similar traffic but no drop box. My guess is it would fail a significance test against the null hypothesis that the number of repeat visits was statistically insignificantly different from the expected value for a random similar location.
Of course that would mean they would have had to do a lot more work rather than just cherry pick data that confirmed their biases.
“WWIII had started.”
…..Quote from Russian State TV
I have been amazed by the Russian State TV news clips that Julia Davis News posts (with English subtitles)
Yesterday:
“Russian propagandists and government officials look beyond Ukraine and threaten the collective West on Kremlin-controlled state television”
https://twitter.com/juliadavisnews/status/1531872501248278528?s=21&t=q2mxIjJgB7k7diW6zUc7lQ
Oximeters are known to be quantitively inaccurate. 1-2% because of skin pigmentation is irrelevant to their clinical usefulness, but highly lucrative for contributing to, and receiving handouts from, the race hustling industry.
Sigh, I read that oximeter article at the WSJ. Ugh. There was a similar one a while back on another site. What really galls me is the quotes from “experts”.
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To answer your question we were not required to submit statistics by race but as an entire group, but were required to use a diverse group (15% dark skin). The differences were small if they were there at all. We would have noticed a bias of over 1%.
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“Even a small inaccuracy in estimated oxygen saturation can have significant implications for a patient’s treatment options”
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This is utter BS unless you are a terrible doctor and don’t know how to use an oximeter properly, which is entirely possible. Oximeters are specified as +-2% Arms * over 1 standard deviation of the population *. For those who don’t remember I have done many FDA studies to approve both oximeters and sensors.
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Some people do read lower than others. Oximeters are calibrated to “stuff” other than pulsating blood in the arterial tissue or else it would be a simple programming of the oxygen absorbance curves at red and IR wavelengths.
https://medicine.uiowa.edu/iowaprotocols/sites/medicine.uiowa.edu.iowaprotocols/files/wysiwyg_uploads/Screenshot%202017-08-07%2021.20.23.png
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Light scattering, venous pulsation, smokers, carbon monoxide, weaker pulse, altitude, LED wavelength errors etc. It doesn’t matter what really, it is just known error from subject to subject. Oximeter testing and calibration are performed against healthy youngish subjects, non-smokers, no nail polish and a few other things.
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There are enormous amounts of clinical test data with a diverse subject set against blood gas analyzers for oximeter testing. It’s standard to do about 2200 test points for one study which is one oximeter with one sensor type. The testing referenced here was completely unnecessary.
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An error of 1% between one group and another group … yawn. We commonly see 1% to 2% differences on different fingers or hands. The conclusions in this article are overwrought, but that is SOP in the media.
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Sick people have more error. People who have low readings have more error. An error of 7% in an oximeter is considered “clinically significant”, leading to potentially bad decisions.
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To be grudgingly charitable I suppose they are talking about a 94% threshold on whether to hospitalize a covid patient. Typically people read 96% to 100% and they are trying to detect that the respiratory system is starting to fail. So people who are biased low will have more false positives. It would be important to know a person’s baseline reading and I think a trigger at 94% is a bit conservative. Oximeters default alarms are set for 85%.
Tom wrote: “This is utter BS unless you are a terrible doctor and don’t know how to use an oximeter properly, which is entirely possible.”
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Yes, quite. They’re useful as guides together with other visible signs like rapid breathing, increased heart rate, patient’s opinion etc, and also to measure trends over time. No “small inaccuracy” is going to have major implications. That’s reserved for the dumbasses who don’t know what they’re doing or are too busy to pay attention.
Interesting comparison between judge (British) and jury (US) in Depp trial. Judge found Depp committed 12 acts of violence against Heard, but jury found none. Other than situations where one knows that a jury will be stacked against you (such as Sussmann trial), most trial lawyers prefer jury trials. Personally, I think the Depp jury got it right as compared to English judge. https://enews.com.ng/2022/06/why-johnny-depp-lost-his-libel-case-in-the-u-k-but-won-in-the-u-s-more-trending-news-today/
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Sussmann verdict was jury nullification — a practice that happens not infrequently and has been around for a long time.
jd ohio,
I wish the article specified which specific incidences and pieces of evidence the judge found convincing. I also wonder if Heard herself testified in the UK. Whether truthful or not, she has a horrible demeanor and comes off, as best as extremely evasive when asked direct questions. I suspect the jury tended to disbelieve her and that added to any impression one might have about allegations photos were doctors.
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Her having no witness testimony of what would have been severe injury– like a broken nose– did not help you. My sister broke her nose while swimning (someone did a flip turn and kicked her!) You get medical treatment for that. There is tons of blood. It changes the shape of your nose. (My sister got subsequent treatment to reshape.) But Heard supposedly broker her nose and, if I understand correctly, got zero medical treatment. Her nose looks just as dainty, straight and pretty as ever.
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Same with all the supposed beating of the face in general. She had no witnesses of severe injury to face. And this is an actress. If she had cuts or other severe wounds, it could be career damaging. No medical treatment is odd. Medical treatment of any sort would have resulted in there being a witness.
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The fact of a photo of the arm and none of the face– after a fight where she supposedly had damage to the face is also odd. It’s one thing to collect no evidence at all. But to be collecting evidence of an arm bruise, but not a face bruise is odd.
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Amber Heard might have been able to explain the oddities if she’d seemed straightforward on the stand. But she just didn’t.
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Mind you, Depp clearly could be scary. The cabinet hitting incident would have been scary. It definitely happened. But it’s not wife beating.
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But, oddly, Heard didn’t seem to be scared. She remained taunting. I would either have been quietly quivvering in the room or have left it!
I guess these are the incidents the UK judge accepted as proven true to a civil standard:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/02/johnny-depp-trial-how-the-judge-ruled-on-14-alleged-assaults
As far as I can tell, the evidence was “he said she said”. The article doesn’t suggest anything additional.
What keeps the Ukrainian fighters at their post… in hell? My thoughts are that they know what life and death would be like under a Russian occupation…so they endure this hell to avoid a worse hell
NYT: “Every day in the current heavy fighting, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with Newsmax this week, 60 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers are killed and another about 500 soldiers are wounded in combat.”
“The morale of volunteer fighters is also proving to be a challenge, at least in some units. Many who signed up to Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Force in the first days of war believed their task would be limited to defending their hometowns. There were teachers, computer programmers, taxi drivers and others, most with no battlefield experience.”
Now they are hundreds of miles away, and still fighting.
“For now, said Sergeant Mykola Pokotila, who was wounded in a battle north of the town of Sloviansk, Ukrainian soldiers in the East are beleaguered, enduring punishing artillery barrages. “I’ve never seen such hell.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/world/europe/ukraine-russia-losses-east.html
Russell,
That’s what I tend to think too.
Russell Klier (Comment #212433): “What keeps the Ukrainian fighters at their post… in hell? My thoughts are that they know what life and death would be like under a Russian occupation…so they endure this hell to avoid a worse hell”.
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That may be part of it. But I think they are patriots. Patriotism is a very powerful force but it is something that many Americans no longer understand.
Tom Scharf (Comment #212428)
“For those who don’t remember I have done many FDA studies to approve both oximeters and sensors.”
Some requests:
My wife and I are supposed to do the Ox daily. Is this an OK meter and do you have any recommendations as to technique? Thank you.
Zacurate Pro Series 500DL Fingertip Pulse Oximeter Blood Oxygen Saturation Monitor with Silicon Cover, Batteries and Lanyard (Royal Black) From Amazon
My guess is most of these oximeters from Amazon have the same internals. Consumer grade oximeters usually aren’t tested to medical standards but they should be almost identical internally to medical grade oximeters. They may perform worse in challenging situations. They should be perfectly fine if used correctly. I’m comfortable using them.
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Keep your finger still and wait for the reading to stabilize. You don’t want a “squeezy” tight fit, but a contact fit that does not compress the finger. Don’t worry about momentary low readings.
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If you have consistently read 96%+ and you find you are consistently reading lower around 92% then you should check with your doctor.
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Masimo makes the best oximeters, but they are very pricey and that level of technology is not necessary for spot checking.
Additionally, pulse ox’s usually have heart beat monitors, or better, a graphical representation of pulse. Make sure these are producing sensible values and not jumping all over the place or your sat readings are unlikely to be correct.
In case you missed it, the Biden administration is in the process of unilaterally rewriting Title IX of the Civil Rights Act as amended in 1972.
See here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-title-ix-rewrite-is-an-assault-on-womens-rights-schools-protected-speech-education-harassment-11654114281?st=px6ilufdzdo8esx&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
The administration proposes to replace or redefine the term ‘sex’ with ‘gender and gender identity’. So far crickets from the various women’s rights organizations. I would have thought that a rewrite of that magnitude would require an Act of Congress. My guess would be that it wouldn’t stand up in court.
Also, expect the due process rules imposed by DeVos during the Trump administration to be rolled back and kangaroo courts to reappear or possibly to be required. Back to the Red Queen system: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.” That’s, of course, completely ignoring the often substantial court judgements against universities that denied due process to their students.
I was with my wife’s elderly stepmother the other day, she put on the fingertip oximeter. I noticed that the O2 sat reading was fairly steady, but the pulse rate jumped all over. Does this indicate that the device was not correctly located?
Tom, you wrote “Keep your finger still and wait for the reading to stabilize. You don’t want a “squeezy” tight fit, but a contact fit that does not compress the finger.” I can ask next time if it’s “squeezy” — I couldn’t tell just looking at it. Just wondering if the variability in the pulse rate, by itself, indicates improper use.
HaroldW,
According to DaveJR two posts above, the answer is yes. If the pulse rate isn’t stable then the O2sat value is likely wrong.
DeWitt,
“replace or redefine the term ‘sex’ with ‘gender and gender identity’”
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Courts will block this. Confirming, yet again, that the Biden administration is just a continuation of the lawless Obama administration. A law says what is says, not what a wild-eyed “woke” administration wants it to say.
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Another lawlessness: Even more than Obama, the Biden administration refuses to hold illegal border crossers who apply for political asylum until their court date, as the law requires, and simply refuses to follow court orders requiring that Trump’s ‘remain in Mexico’ policy for asylum seekers be retained until new rules pass the “administrative procedures” muster. Immigration law states that someone requesting asylum be held in custody unless there is good reason to believe (on a case-by-case basis) they will return for their court hearing…. which of course they rarely do…. they just disappear into the country, never to be found by INS again.
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Before President Alzheimer’s de Imbeciles is out of office he will have allowed at least 2 million more illegal immigrants into the country.
Regarding Ukraine artillery casualties, I’m not sure what to make of this. True, Russia has been using artillery very aggressively, but I haven’t seen that it has changed much lately. Russian doctrine always emphasizes the heavy use of artillery.
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Ukraine has previously been very secretive on its casualties, implying low Ukraine casualties and high Russian casualties. The west has also not made estimates on Ukraine casualties but has made estimates for Russian casualties.
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Ukraine may be highlighting ( and exaggerating ) artillery casualties to increase the pressure on the west to supply Ukraine with more heavy artillery.
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So I wonder if Ukraine casualties that have been reported the last week is true? If they are true, how long have they been taking the 600-1000 artillery dead and wounded per day as being reported. Generally, artillery casualties are 8-10 wounded to 1 dead if the troops are dug in.
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If Ukraine has been suffering 800-1000 casualties a day for the last month, that adds up to over 25,000 in the last 30 days to artillery alone.
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That seems high to me. But If Ukraine is suffering such losses, they have a real problem going forward. The major flow of western artillery and related ammunition expected to help counter Russian artillery is not expected to reach the front until mid Aug.
Listening to the steady drumbeat of a tropical rainstorm on a metal roof…. It’s mesmerizing. We are under a Tropical Storm Watch. Nothing dangerous is expected, just two more days of rain.
https://twitter.com/JustinMosely/status/1532492219948716034?s=20&t=KynE7jZuoUTj7EFjpTkxpw
https://twitter.com/JustinMosely/status/1532490596362899457?s=20&t=KynE7jZuoUTj7EFjpTkxpw
DaveJR is correct, generally speaking if the pulse rate is incorrect or erratic, or you aren’t getting a repetitive bouncing bar or a “good” waveform then the oximeter reading should be considered unreliable. I always check for a good waveform or bouncing bar before I look at the reading. Garbage in, garbage out.
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It’s possible her heart was actually doing that, atrial fibrillation or other maladies, but a pulse oximeter isn’t a good heart monitor because it is prone to motion artifact and a finger isn’t a good place to measure the heart. Just waving around the oximeter or sensor can usually give you false readings. Thus, stay still.
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Sometimes a patient waveform has a very pronounced “dicrotic notch” which makes some low end oximeters double count a pulse or generally causes signal processing mayhem.
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The biggest problem with older people and sick people tends to be weak signal, or low perfusion. Most oximeters will show this by a low bouncing bar, low height waveform, or a warning. Cold hands tend to have weak signals more often.
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During official oximeter testing a patient is usually kept warm to prevent low perfusion.
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The first thing to always do with an unreliable reading is take off the sensor and put it back on again. This fixes 80% of all problems. You can also change fingers, the middle 3 digits are all reliable, or even change hands if you are getting an unreliable signal.
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A lot of these sensor types have a hinge at the end of the finger that can be expanded so the finger isn’t pinched. Too much pressure will usually just make it read low by a couple points.
I think it was “up to” 100 deaths per day, not 1000.
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Speaking of artillery, this is what this type of war looks like. Ignore the soldiers, look at the scope of damage to the surrounding area.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/v18lxd/russian_shelling_of_civilian_homes_and/
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It should be noted that Ukraine is doing plenty of artillery damage themselves so the point here is how devastating this type of war is. This place might as well have been nuked.
Tom, 6-8 wounded to each dead.
100 dead plus 600-800 wounded = 700 to 900 total casualties
Post went to moderation
HaroldW (Comment #212440)
“June 2nd, 2022 at 1:48 pm
I was with my wife’s elderly stepmother the other day, she put on the fingertip oximeter. I noticed that the O2 sat reading was fairly steady, but the pulse rate jumped all over. Does this indicate that the device was not correctly located?“
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Probably not.
Other explanations might be batteries starting to run flat giving pulse recording difficulty ( or not, Tom S could say)
Alternatively medically your stepmother might have atrial fibrillation
Or variable ventricular ectopics or more esoteric heart arrhythmias.
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Needs an ECG by a medical specialist and appropriate treatment to help prevent CVA’s (strokes) in the former instance.
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LoL….now that’s funny. Maybe setup a gosendme to crowd source ? ????
…SUPPORT PEACE IN UKRAINE, BUY JAVELIN ONLINE…
.. selling the famous Javelins on the darknet… for 30 000 USD
https://southfront.org/support-peace-in-ukraine-buy-javelin-online/
Yet more process crimes. Navarro charged with contempt for ignoring a subpoena to the Jan 6th Kangaroo Court in their search for the Grand Collusion between the Proud Boys and various of their political opponents that had nothing to do with the riot. I’m guessing a DC jury will be more compliant with former Trump officials.
Tom Scharf,
Navarro will likely get multiple years in prison, with no possibility of parole. Of course, that would be commuted on Jan 22, 2024 if a Republican wins the White House.
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The great thing about the left is you can always be certain what they will do. Religious convictions (and leftist convictions) almost never change in response to contrary reality. You don’t need reality as a guide when you are absolutely certain you are right.
Why are the Ukrainians such determined fighters?…… Here is a video that answers that question, and several more. It is a series of interviews of a close knit group of Ukrainian tank soldiers. They talk history, philosophy, training, tactics, but mostly about why they are fighting. It runs 14 minutes. This is an impressive cadre of warriors.
https://youtu.be/2AMJnN0dP-Q
Throwing people in jail because you are in power and can do so is both legal and unconscionable in some cases.
People notice.
People do not like abuse of power.
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Much like the Ukraine really.
When enough people cannot tolerate the actions of bullies, bullies get overthrown.
Putin should go but it will take a putsch or assassination.
Any Jan 6th stuff in Russia would result in massive protestor deaths but would serve as the trigger.
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In the USA as Steve F says the good old ballot box can still triumph
Lucia: Re: Johnny Depp
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In my mind the verdict was reasonably simple. The jury viewed Heard as an aggressive, jealous b*tch who was unafraid of Depp and who tried to provoke him. It seems most people agree with my conclusion that she was not a very nice person.
…..
I would be curious about the background of the UK judge. I would bet his political leanings are Leftist.
jd ohio,
There was definitely evidence she seemed to be trying to provoke him. The cabinet smacking incident. (I think that was the day after his mother’s death?)
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I agree with you about the jury conclusion. I’m more curious what the UK trial was like.
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My impression is the US trial was also much longer. So there was more evidence about whether Heard’s allegations held up. (Example: trashing places– where others who owned the place did not describe as trashed etc.)
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I don’t know how relevant it is that Depp sued a *newspaper* in the UK and *Heard herself* in the US. I don’t think a *newspaper* would have won in the US either. The newspaper would just be relying on Heard as a source, which likely would come off as enough to mean they didn’t know the story was false. And merely not knowing would be enough.
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Amber Heard is a piece of work. I’m not certain she was never, ever hit. But there were lots of bits that looked like making things up. And she seemed to lie a lot– sometimes about things that aren’t directly related to proving defamation of battery, but which came up. (I suspect most people suspect she had an affair with James Franco for instance.) The US trial being long made her personality more apparent.
Amber should hook up with Jada. They sound like they were made for each other.
The world has lost sight in the MeToo era that some women can be quite evil, as has always been the case. A good portion of the women screaming victimhood the loudest are quite aggressive themselves. Men certainly cross the line to violence more often but in the courtroom one needs to not make assumptions. “You made me do it” is actually real in some cases, but I’m not inclined to believe it without evidence.
Russell,
Heading out to the golf course, ha ha. Tropical storm stayed way south.
DaveJR,
Yep. The two are vie-ing for most hated woman in America. But I think Amber has edged Jada out. Jada seems to be trying to reclaim the crown though.
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Tom:
Of course. I read some articles that lament that this verdict is a set back for victims of domestic violence. But honestly, I doubt it. Those articles all seem to be based on the assumption that she could not have been lying and that juries must believe the “she said” part of the case no matter what.
But the standard can’t be that we believe all women no matter what. Women certainly lie sometimes. Heard comes off as one who either lies or seriously exaggerates a lot. She really needed medical evidence of physical injuries. And she needed some that she could not have single handedly faked.
It might turn out she was truthful while also looking like an unbelievable liar. If so, we’ll see Depp in more trouble withing a year or too. That will be like seeing OJ in trouble for his behavior later.
Lucia,
“Women certainly lie sometimes.”
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As the Duke lacrosse team learned. Pretty much everyone lies sometimes.
Tom Scharf (Comment #212459)
We got 3.9 inches of rain on the electronic gauge by the pool so far. Today should be the end for us. Miami is getting blasted. Video: https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/video/drone-shows-just-how-bad-miami-flooding-is
Lucia,
Depp has been through multiple (5?, 6?) living-together relationships, one of which included the birth of two children over 14 years years together (French actress Vanessa Paradis). If he is a serial abuser, then surely one or more of those women would have come forward.
He has become involved in physical altercations which ended up involving the police, but always with men…. and apparently often fueled by substance abuse. He has also blown through hundreds of millions of dollars with absurd spending levels. Judgement is probably not his strong suit.
Lucia,
I think you start with the implicit assumption that individual rights and facts matter to the authors of those articles, but you are being too charitable in my view. I think in general the authors of those articles don’t care what the facts are, [I.E. it doesn’t matter if she is lying] and they don’t think anyone else should either. This is what ‘social justice’ is all about – ignoring the individuals involved in any given situation and judging the situation based on generalizations about minorities being oppressed victims.
Shrug.
Women aren’t a minority, but I think they count as one with respect to social justice in relation to men. Progressive dogma holds that women are oppressed by men, not the reverse.
SteveF,
Oh, I agree!! In spades.
mark
Oh, I agree. They think it doesn’t matter– but that’s position is taken as a law of the universe. Well, sorry buddy, F=ma is a law of the universe. “It doesn’t matter if she is lying”, is not a law of the universe.
If they thought it matters if she’s lying, they might say directly that she needs to be believed no matter what. Or that they believe her for thus-and-so reason.
But they do neither because the saying former is idiotic. If it’s said straight out and actually meant literally, people will roll their eyes.
Saying the latter would mean they have to explain why they believe her. What specific piece of evidence makes them think she couldn’t be or isn’t making it up? The photos of bruises sent to a nurse? The problem with those is one automatically asks: Why didn’t she to to a doctor in person? Or get someone else take the photo so they could come in and say “I saw the bruising up close. It was real, not make up and I took the photo.”
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Heck, her having no photo would be more convincing than that. Because it’s not unusual for a victim to have no evidence. No evidence is even consistent with the claim of “covering” for the abuser. But selfies, copious audio recordings and so on are inconsistent with that.
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As soon as someone writes an explanation why they definitely believe some of the evidence could not be made up, questions about the evidence arise.
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And this is a civil matter. So the jury is going to go with preponderance of evidence. The pre-ponderance strongly suggest Amber lies or, at a minimum, gilds the lily so heavily there is no lily left!
mark,
Well, in the context of domestic abuse, if a woman tells me she has experienced physical or sexual violence, I tend to believe it. Women are smaller, men can be violent. Yada, yada.
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On the other hand, if a guy told me his domestic partner abused him, I’d tend to believe it too. My first inclination is to mostly believe stories. Most of the time, stories are not made up.
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That doesn’t necessarily mean I act on it. It also doesn’t mean I won’t change my mind when I acquire other information.
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It certainly doesn’t mean judicial proceedings should be predicated on the notion that everyone must be telling the truth even from their own point of view. And lets face it, in some circumstances what one person thinks happened might not be what the other person thinks happened.
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But in Heard/Depp, a lot of these stories are beyond just two peoples different interpretation of the same thing. (Occasionally, some are potentially two people’s interpretation.)
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I did like Depp’s answer to why he believed he had never taken 8-10 MDMA pills as Heard alleged he had (in Australia, I think. She claimed to have counted up numbers of pills before and after). The answer was because he would be dead. There was no claim to being able to remember it, no claim to his own virtue. Just that as a practical matter, he would be dead.
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I also really liked Depps response to being asked something like “You poured yourself a mega-pint of wine, didn’t you.” And he sort of blinks, and says “Mega-pint?” Then he said something like “I poured myself a large glass of wine.”
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With more scientific training, he might have been tempted to answer, “Do you have any idea how much a mega pint of wine would be?” But that would have been a mistake. His answer was better.
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(Yes. Like lots of people, I’ve watched too much of this. I’m also reading reactions. The idea in some pro-Heard articles that this ruling is a slap at the first amendment is just absurd.)
Thanks Lucia. I agree with all of that.
lucia: “…gilds the lily….”
OK, this is pedantic, I know. Shakespeare wrote, “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily…”
However, “gild the lily” is seen far more commonly than “paint the lily”. So I’m, er, spitting, into the wind here.
Harold,
That’s interesting.
Makes me glad I’ve never written “As Shakespeare said ‘gilds the lilly'”. 🙂
I do think “gild the lily” is a much more common figure of speech than “paint the lily”. Now I’m tempted to say “to gild gold!” since that’s even more useless than gilding lilies!
Ok. My impression no one reported seeing the injuries in person. The make up articst Rocky Pennington did
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_juIaypeLY
She said she took pictures, but doesn’t specifically recall which pictures she took. That does suggest someone did things that would be unlikely self inflicted. (Though Pennington did not see the fight.)
Oh. It just occurred to me that my comments might be misconstrued as expressing an opinion on Depp vs Heard. I don’t have one, haven’t been following. I was just remarking on some of the over the top articles I’ve glanced through about it.
mark,
Not having an opinion is totally valid. There are many, many hours of testimony!
It is official. The Michigan election fraudsters have succeeded in destroying the Republican primary and, probably, ensuring the reelection of Gov. Whitmer.
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Disgusting.
Excellent overview, well worth watching
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Colonel Markus Reisner of the Austrian Armed Forces describes how the fighting in eastern Ukraine developed.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpC1kXhW2Lw
Tom Scharf (Comment #212397)
“Early and late season storms are rarely much to worry about except ruining your golf outing.”
Ruined more than golf in South Florida, Miami Herald: “Can these cars float? See videos of flooding streets and sinking vehicles in Miami storm”
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article262152617.html#storylink=cpy
People died in Cuba:
“On Friday, at least two people died in Cuba after the storm brought heavy rainfall that caused flooding and landslides.
Cuban state media reported that the deaths happened Friday in the capital, Havana, according to The Associated Press. A person who fell into a rain-swollen river in Pinar del Río, southwest of Havana, was reported missing.
The country’s Civil Defense organization said homes and the power grid were damaged. About 50,000 power outages were being reported in Cuba late Friday night.”
https://weather.com/news/news/2022-06-04-gulf-storm-alex-flooding-rain-cuba-south-florida
I suppose Tom should have said “Early and late season storms are rarely much to worry about unless you live in an area prone to flooding”.
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Summer thunderstorms can flood streets and cause drownings.
Mike M. (Comment #212478)
“Early and late season storms are rarely much to worry about unless you live in an area prone to flooding”.
Those areas prone to flooding have a name. It’s called Florida. The FEMA flood areas interactive map: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search?AddressQuery=florida
Florida had widespread ares of 8” to 10” of rain, with some areas getting 15 inches, associated with the recent tropical storm. I bet that early season storm messed up some tee times.
https://twitter.com/nhc_atlantic/status/1533460646439727104?s=21&t=6GgpNQjwEViUo3UDEF0PvQ
This is seriously cute. “ When Paddington Bear takes tea with the Queen”
https://twitter.com/bethrigby/status/1533171491512143874?s=21&t=6GgpNQjwEViUo3UDEF0PvQ
Russell,
I got 3 inches of rain at my house last week in about an hour. It hailed. There was a minor tornado less than 10 miles away. It’s not national news or anything particularly exciting, it’s tropical weather in Florida. There was zero localized flooding in my area because we have professionally designed storm drainage in our subdivision. The same low lying places predictably flood routinely because water obeys the force called gravity.
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There is also going to be more hurricanes, and if you get unlucky you will get damage. Are you surprised? Plenty of room in rural Georgia. I got over 9 inches of rain in less than 12 hours about 20 years ago as a hurricane passed. Lots of localized flooding but only one house that actually flooded. People get rare rain events … rarely.
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They used to video the same area in Miami every time a King Tide came in for global warming propaganda. Miami installed a massive pump system and the media showed up like Pavlov’s dog a year later to find … nothing. These things can be fixed or low lying places should not be buildable. One thing that is certain is rain and hurricanes will not stop in Florida. Infrastructure can be incrementally built to defeat all but the most severe events, but stupid people falling into rivers is the human condition.
Here is monthly trend of tropical storms over the last 100 years in the North Atlantic Basin. Save up your anxiety medication for August, ha ha.
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-1f3e106f0e4100ca4cccc4eae7f631cb
Tom Scharf,
The 2004 hurricanes Frances and Jeanne were terrible in my area (east coast); we had two eyes pass directly over us. With Jeanne, the wind dropped from 110+ MPH to near zero in 5 minutes, with blue sky and sunshine. But you could see the raging eye-wall in the distance in every direction; almost black vertical clouds that looked to reach 40,000 feet. The eye passed in about 25 minutes, and it was back to 110+ MPH with torrential rain, but with the wind then from the opposite direction. There was a lot of local wind damage, and we were without power for 7 days for the first storm and 3 days for the second. Fortunately, I had a 7 KW generator and 60 gallons of gasoline, so I could keep most things going except the central AC. I had three 6,000 BTU window units that the generator had no problem powering, and I temporarily wired the 240 VAC water heater for 120 VAC (1,200 watts instead or 4,800 watts) so it wasn’t too much a hardship except for the cleanup after the storm. People with no generator were screwed.
Tom Scharf (Comment #212483)
“Save up your anxiety medication for August, ha ha.”
Not really. I have been an avid Florida storm fan since I got here in 1978. Weather station, track em’ all, study the spaghetti models, have all the websites saved as favorites, registered at some for notifications…. and lose sleep waiting for the two AM updates. One son is into it also. We trade notes through every storm. I have been teaching one of my granddaughters geography via the NHC published graphics as the storms develop. She is in sixth grade in Ohio. It’s a fun family pastime. [except for my wife, she needs the Xanax]
Hurricane tracking has certainly gotten way better in the last 30 years. 48 hour storm tracks are pretty good now. The prediction of power at landfall is still pretty mediocre. It’s those ones that are Cat2 and then ramp up unexpectedly to Cat4 in the last 24 hours that are dangerous.
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The European models appear to be superior.
I have less confidence in the models. Hurricane Charley in 2004 took an unexpected right turn and came ashore 75 miles from where the models predicted. Nobody here was prepared for it.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Charley, courtesy of the taxpayers:
https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-08/fema488_mat_report_hurricane_charley_fl.pdf
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“Hurricane Charley was upgraded from a Category 2 to a Category 4 storm based on a rapid intensification in winds measured by dropsonde from a U.S. Air Force Reserve/NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft less than 6 hours prior to landfall.”
“Hurricane Charley was a very intense, but very narrow hurricane.”
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That tends to be the case. They usually can’t maintain a lot of power for very long and the very dangerous areas are narrow. You definitely don’t want to be there.
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The new building codes require reinforced garage doors, doors, and windows, especially for flying debris. That’s a $50K upgrade for older homes so most people don’t do it. Almost everyone will have 130 MPH shingles and roofs over the next 10 years as the replacement cycle continues there.
I have written up an unedited and undetailed Covid 19 analysis that I did and posted it here. If anyone cares to read it (I appreciate that many of us have become stale on Covid 19) their comments would be appreciated.
I have been attempting to find and manipulate Covid-19 data that would allow me to estimate the actual number of infections (cases), or at least a lower bound, with the assumption that the reported death count is a reasonably accurate measure of actual deaths and much more so than the reported cases are of the actual cases. Recently a paper has been published that estimates the Covid 19 infection rates by age groups and a percentage for the entire US population. The results had reasonably small confidence intervals. The admitted shortcoming of this study was that it did not have other information about the subjects tested that could have allowed weighting of the data. The link to the study which used SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (i.e., seroprevalence) to determine infection rates is listed below.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e3.htm?s_cid=mm7117e3_w
The study estimated that approximately 60 % of the US population had been infected by March of 2022. This estimate gave me a number to compare my independent method of estimating this percentage.
A logical point to start looking for a means to determine true cases (infections) was the ratio of deaths to cases. I used the ratio as a dependent variable versus time and number PCR tests as independent variables in two separate regressions. Testing was used because the greater number of tests used in a given period the larger the sample size in estimating infections for the entire population.
I looked at the fit to the data using nonlinear regression with 2 and 3 exponential decay time constants which in the case of testing the time constants were actually testing numbers. The best fits were with a 3 time and number constant regression. Using 3 constants could probably be better justified given the changes over time in testing application, Covid 19 variants, vaccinations rates and home testing.
The daily Covid data tends to be noisy and thus to make more sense of its structure I had a choice of using weekly data or smoothing the daily data. I opted for smoothing with a cubic spline. Either approach eats up degrees of freedom that needs to be taken into account when determining confidence intervals of the smoothed results. To date I have not made those calculations.
The initial fit of the models to the data shows an exponential decay in the deaths to cases ratio with time or amount of testing. These models do not account for the true number of cases but rather the reported ones from the data used. There is, however, a feature of data (the regression residuals) that shows promise in obtaining, at least, a bounded estimate of the true cases. That feature is that the residuals have peaks and valleys which can be shown to be abrupt changes in the number of cases reported while the deaths stay on a trend line. A valley in the ratio residual denotes a time when more of the actual cases are being found and reported. That this is the case is further evidenced by the portion of positive tests during the corresponding residual valley which faithfully peaks at the same time. In other words, when there is a rapid rise in positive tests more people are motivated to get tested and the tests to be reported. It also should be noted that when the portion positive test is in a valley the ratio peaks.
The highest peak for portion of positive tests (around 30%) occurred in the advent of the first omicron variant which also had a record number of PCR tests. That peak corresponded to the largest negative deviation of the ratios from the ratio trendline. It followed that that deviation, representing the closest true value of deaths/cases ratio and thus true value of cases, could be used to adjust the reported data for the entire series time period. Since the 2 largest deviations of a total of 5 were towards the end of the series where the major portion of cases occurred and further that the adjustment of any reasonable size would have little effect on the ratios in the early part of the series where the ratios were larger, it seemed reasonable to use a single correction for the entire series.
When that correction was made the total estimated true cases determined by working backwards from deaths/cases ratios, the cumulative case totals for the ratio versus time regression gave percent cases for the US population of 50% and the ratio versus total PCR tests regression gave a percentage of 60%.
While I was only looking for a rough estimate of actual cases I was surprised by how close those percentages were to that of the study sited above. Obtaining that close estimate would require that the correction used had to derive from a moment in time when the reported cases were very close to the actual cases. I do not have a lot of confidence at this time that that is what occurred.
The Supreme court had 33 opinions to publish as of this morning. They have published 3…. all pretty obscure cases, meaning they have 30 to go and need to average 5 opinions per week (always on Monday unless a holiday) between now and July 5th. Maybe they plan on extending their term to later in the summer than ever. None of the several politically controversial cases have been published.
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Amazing.
Kenneth,
I will take a look.
Last year, 28 of 67 SCOTUS decisions were released in June and July:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/20
The year before, 27 of 63, with 10 of those in June.
For 2018, 29 decisions issued in June 2019 out of 73 total.
This year, it looks like 33 of 66 will be issued in June and July.
It looks like SCOTUS is a bit behind schedule, probably due to the outrage committed in May. But it is not wildly different.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #212490)
“I have written up an unedited and undetailed Covid 19 analysis that I did and posted it here. ”
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A problem with all data on disease relates to the actual reporting and testing.
Hence people make claims that say diabetes reported cases are only half to two thirds of all the actual people with diabetes at any one time.
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Covid analysis suffers from this same problem.
“the cumulative case totals for the ratio versus time regression gave percent cases for the US population of 50% and the ratio versus total PCR tests regression gave a percentage of 60%.”
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Hence the likely number of infected people could by now be easily70-75%.
This would be approaching serious herd immunity for the states which is surprising given the number of cases is till around 100,000 a day [??] .
If this is the case despite reinfection which I believe is still very low and false positives or people wanting time off work then the number of cases should drop precipitously in the next 2 months as no one easy left to infect.
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Your choice of the mortality stats despite over reporting and under reporting and variable alarm seems a clever way to winkle out an average amount of infections per death numbers though I presume you have put in some sort of say regression factor for immunization effects and healthier new infections as the months progressed.
I.e. higher infections to less deaths.
angech,
According to the data at worldometers, the seven day moving average of new cases/day in the US is down to about 80,000 from a peak of about 110,000 in the last week of May. This ripple (it’s hard for me to call it a wave since the peak was so much smaller than omicron) has not resulted in an obvious peak in deaths/day, which are down to about 200/day.
But the fear porn continues, just not quite at the same level. There was a letter to the editors from a math teacher about how badly most of his algebra I students did. The picture above the letters was of a San Francisco teacher in an empty classroom wearing a cloth mask while talking to a zoom monitor.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/zoom-school-remote-learning-teacher-student-math-education-return-to-work-office-covid-11654296075?st=4egcxg2mzt6zvdl&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
angech, my intent was for the 3 additive exponential decay terms in the regression model to handle those changes over time.
The fitted trendline for the ratio of deaths to cases from the non linear regression fits the cubic spline smoothed data very closely.
That ratio can change abruptly to give peaks and valleys in the residuals only if the portion actual cases as reported cases changes abruptly -as it well could from variations in testing efficacy over periods of time. With the assumption that deaths are much better tracked than cases it would not be expected to see abrupt changes in actual deaths to actual cases as the trendline suggests.
The peaks and valleys observed in the residuals based on this thinking would represent this efficacy.
I have some confidence in rationale for this part of the model being correct.
My losing confidence in the adjustments to find a close approximation to the true number of cases comes from knowing that the adjustment requires a period of time (valley) were the reported ratio closely approaches that of the actual. I am confident that the valley ratio gets a closer approximation of the actual ratio, but I, unfortunately, do not have a measure of the closeness.
That the result using my model gives cumulative cases as a percentage of the US population close to that of the percent infected in this same population from an independent source, could mean that my model assumption that those valleys in the residuals represent ratios close to actual ratios is correct or that for some unrelated reason(s) there is an error in my model that just happens to give the results found.
I am currently not motivated to look further into this problem.
DeWitt,
This was hilarious: “Twice my principal, who invariably went on Zoom with a poster of Che Guevara in the background, asked me not to acknowledge active participants: It was a mini-aggression to those students who tuned out. Can you believe it? She canceled participation trophies!”
I had the same response to the principal remark. From the more conservative/ libertarian teachers I know this is not an uncommon occurrence. From the more progressive teachers I know it is crickets.
In my realm the progressive teachers have far larger numbers than do the conservative/ libertarian.
It went from kind of a secret plan to get educational equity by dragging the people at the top down to a now overt unashamed effort. It’s absolutely crazy, right up there with defund the police.
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Let’s hope the SF DA gets recalled today so some semblance of sanity begins to return.
Uhm, lemme ask y’all to slip on those tin foils hats for a second.
DHS and a Dem representative are talking about violence in the midterm elections, by white supremacist Trump supporters.
WTF. Democrats are going to get steamrollered and they know it. Why would Republicans resort to violence at such a time? That makes no sense.
I think this is a false flag operation. I think DHS is doing political operations on behalf of the Democratic party. Crazy? Maybe. It was crazy to think the IRS was targeting conservative groups too. Until it wasn’t crazy to think that.
Shrug. Thanks. You may remove your protective aluminum headgear now.
mark bofill,
“Why would Republicans resort to violence at such a time?”
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They won’t, of course. It is just the crazy left imagining things. What they need not imagine is that there will be a substantial shift in power. The Senate is less certain, but almost certainly the House will be under Republican control. So no more absolutely crazy stuff approved by the House and sent to a closely divided Senate. If both houses are in Republican hands, then the Biden Alzheimer’s presidency will be effectively over: no more crazy judges appointed, no crazy laws passed, and Joe, Joe’s brother, and Hunter will be in a heap of trouble WRT Congressional investigations of corruption.
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For me, the really strange thing is this: Democrats know Biden is suffering dementia and will not run in 2024. They know Kamala is about as intelligent as my daughter’s fluffy cat, and al lot more embarrassing in what she says and does. So who can they plausibly run for president in 2024? Mayor Pete? Pocahontas? Gavin Newsom? Some other less well known, but still crazy-enough lefty? It is opaque to me. It is not just that all the known potent candidates endorse nutty policies (and they do!), it is that they are utterly opposed to most every founding principle the nation stands for: limited Federal government, equality under the law, personal liberty in most things, enforcing laws as they are written, and following the constitution…. or else amending it.
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It is difficult for me to see a plausible Democrat for the oresidency in 2024.
Clearly the right are not fans of “democracy” anymore is how I hear it. There are many very serious people concerned about this. Very seriously concerned. Most people on the right probably believe Trump should be allowed to run for office again, against the expressed desire of people much smarter than they are.
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The Jan 6th committee has a massive burden, and that is to protect democracy. What they may do, more accurately be forced to do with great sadness and a heavy heart, is to recommended to the DOJ that Trump be prosecuted for his seditious behavior.
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This is how we protect democracy, by preventing a semi-popular candidate from being able to run for office at the hands of his political opponents after they have judiciously judged the case on its merits. Now they may find that his behavior doesn’t warrant this action, but just be sure to know that they will have faithfully deliberated the facts on this case no matter which way the decision goes.
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After they decide Trump should be charged his followers may very well be upset, but that is the burden these civil servants have chosen and we should respect them for it. It’s not like they are planning on grandstanding on national TV for slimy partisan advantage or anything!
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This is how democracy works, and Trump supporters need to accept that they don’t get to choose who runs for office in this country.
Steve,
Maybe Oprah? Maybe Michelle Obama.
Tom,
Ahhh. I see now. Thanks, don’t know why I didn’t get it earlier. They predict violence because they think ‘the January 6’th Show’ will be a highly acclaimed theatrical hit.
Maybe.
Thanks Tom.
If the DOJ charges Trump with sedition, Dems may not see a majority in Congress again for a generation. They are being incredibly stupid about Jan 6th. Yes, Trump gives a$$holes a bad name; he is the ultimate jerk, and that is unlikely to change.. ever. But sedition?
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It is like a bad joke. You don’t overthrow a government with a relative handful of unarmed 40-to-60 something trespassers at the Capitol….. and one crazy guy with odd tattoos wearing a funny horned hat.
Steve,
Yeah, it is nutty. But it’s the sort of nutty I can believe Dem politicians in DC buying into.
In a way it’s not a completely nutty ploy though. They don’t have anything else. Any port in a storm is better than none I guess.
The Jan 6th “investigation” matters to the extreme left. But will it matter to most voters? I very much doubt it. I believe Dems are heading for a total face-plant in November with the Jan 6 “investigation”. What Dems would do, if they were rational, is change course, and honestly try to compromise with Republicans in Congress on substantive issues like, oh say, enforcing immigration laws, pressuring on-line companies to not sensor political posts and comments, and many more compromises…. but they are not rational, and so are doomed to lose many seats in Congress in November. The only question is how many seats.
Steve,
I expect you’re right, I don’t really disagree. We’ll see.
After the Trump Dossier, Trump Russia collusion, FBI misbehavior, Clinton campaign involvement, and some impeachments which I can barely remember what they were about, the Jan 6th committee has a tough credibility hill to climb. I very much doubt they will cover themselves in glory attempting to take down Trump based on these previous efforts and I think the US public has very little patience left.
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But maybe we will finally get Sicknick’s autopsy report? Ha.
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If the DC illuminati actually prevented Trump from running it would likely backfire spectacularly. It’s just a mindless political spectacle at this point.
MikeM: “It is official. The Michigan election fraudsters have succeeded in destroying the Republican primary and, probably, ensuring the reelection of Gov. Whitmer.”
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My prediction: Going forwards, there’s going to be ever increasing rhetoric about “protecting democracy”. Demonization and dehumanization from the establishment is going to reach unprecedented levels.
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Conspiracy theories will be circulated in advance about republicans conspiring to cheat and engage in “insurrection”. Come election day, there will be numerous claims of cheating, especially against anti-establishment republicans. In contrast to 2020, these claims will be treated 110% seriously and investigations will be launched immediately to determine the veracity. After the “most secure election in history”, protecting the integrity of this important benchmark will be the hot topic, which republicans cannot easily disagree with. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right? The next two years will follow the progress of these witch hunts, which will leave no stones unturned or associates unquestioned, no evidence of election interference is found, but lots of gossip and innuendo.
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The tin foil hat version is that, similar to MikeM’s post above, “evidence” is found of malfeasance, the culprits will remain at large.
So Boudin was indeed recalled and the vote wasn’t particularly close,60:40. Needless to say, he blames his loss on someone else and not on his failed policies which he still believes are the wave of the future. He was outspent 3:1. He could have had an infinite amount of money and still lost, probably by an even bigger margin.
DeWitt,
I hope that the situation with fossil fuel use mirrors the situation with Boudin and crime. CNN reports:
and
The parallels are there. I don’t think most of even the extreme left wants to live with the consequences of a Green New Deal (runaway inflation, rolling blackouts or power outages, etc); they want their Green dream while the status quo that they enjoy is magically maintained. I really do suspect that many people on the left have lost sight of the cause and effect relationship between our use of fossil fuels and the prosperity the use of fossil fuels gives rise to.
I hope this is the start of a trend. Of course I doubt it is, but one can always hope.
Shrug.
This recall in the most liberal city in America officially signals the death of defund the police. The memory of this madness won’t fade as fast as the left wants it to however. They will not be trusted to handle crime for at least a decade.
Guy arrested with gun, knife, and burglary tools near Kavanaugh’s house. Said he wanted to kill him. There’s that far right threat to “our democracy” again.
We live in a strange world.
I mean, what the heck. He could call 911 on himself and apparently he did. He could have just as easily, more easily in fact, just turned himself around and gone home.
That wouldn’t have had the same effect of making a very public statement and intimindating the right leaning justices.
Andrew,
Yup.
Coming hot on the heels of an SPLC survey showing the younger generation are conflicted on the benefits of political assassination, approaching 50% approval with democrat males, whilst the older generation are firmly against it, just 6%. Oddly, republican females were found to be more enthusiastic about it than republican males!
I suspect the FBI is involved in the threat on Kavanaugh just like they were with the kidnapping of Whitmer. Maybe even provided him with the same gear, that included zip ties and duct tape.
Devlin Barrett reported the story. He was FBI’s primary reporter on the Russia hoax, with some text messages between the agents about when one of his stories would drop.
Kenneth, are you able to get any data on COVID positives as a result of hospital testing?
This would be people who only got tested because they came to the hospital for a different reason, and might give insight into overall case rates.
California is in it deep with inadequate electrical power generation for the state and they going to extreme policy regs to try and cope with their insane stampede toward net zero.
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I have looked at installing solar for over 40 years now and it never made economic sense for me to go solar.
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This may have changed. I had a solar rep in today and the state and PG&E have a program out that may be hard for me to turn down. I will know more after reading the contract they will be sending me later today.
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It is $0 cost, $0 loan, and no lien on my property.
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Generally, if it is too good to be true, it isn’t. But we will see.
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EdForbs,
Depending on the cost for installation, the cost of power can almost pay for the investment, so long as your electrical use is not out-of-sight high. My understanding is the typical rate in California is ~$0.25 per KW-hour and rising. That is almost enough to pay for a good size battery bank (eg Powerwalls from Tesla) that will last at least a decade and enough solar panels to keep the batteries charged. Of course, a lot will depend on how sunny it is where you live… frequent fog/clouds/rain will make the system too costly. I don’t see how a grid-tie system makes any sense for the grid, since it will only make the need for dispatchable power more extreme.
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I know people in Brazil who have installed roof-top solar in a grid-tie system… much simpler and cheaper than a off-grid system, of course: about US$8,000 installed cost for a system that generates about 1,000 KW-hours per month. Their electricity costs are about US$0.19 per KW-hour. There is a monthly minimum cost to tie to the grid (about US$35), so the net-credit received is about US$155 per month, with a pay-back period of somewhere under 5 years. Grid-tie even makes sense for the entire grid in Brazil, because most of their power comes from hydroelectric, which can be rapidly dispatched as needed…. the grid-tie systems reduce hydroelectric water use when the sun shines. I think electrical demand in Brazil is also a bit more uniform than inmost of the States, because much goes to air conditioning of commercial buildings during the heat of the day. For the individual, I think a big attraction is not being as subject to rate increases….. which are expected over the coming years.
“.. Depending on the cost for installation..”
The rep says $0 installation cost
..
The wheels are going to come off California electric grid in about 5 yrs I think. They can barely keep the lights on now and they have scheduled to close the last nuclear plant which supplies close to 10% of the total electric power in the state.
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Interesting times ahead
In Florida the utility companies have put the fix in, requiring a $1M inusrance policy by the homeowner if you want to hook up to their grid to sell energy back, this is to “protect their workers”. There is also another wildcard with the already existing debacle of homeowner insurance in Florida, many companies won’t even insure a house with solar panels on their roof due to wind concerns.
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Also the state legislature passed a rate reduction to homeowners for selling back excess energy to the grid at wholesale rates instead of retail rates. This can affect the amount of time it takes the system to pay itself off. This law was vetoed by the governor but just shows how unstable things are.
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One can overcome these with not connecting to the grid and using a local battery system. I think there is a 10KW limit before the $1M policy kick in. Anyway, it’s complicated. I think it does eventually pay itself off even with the correct financial calculations (lost opportunity). Not clear how much value you get for the panels if you sell the house before the payoff.
Biden’s latest record low job approval polls: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president-biden-job-approval-7320.html
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So if as president:
1) You adopt uniformly foolish and destructive national policies,
2) Refuse to compromise with those who disagree with those policies,
3) Sic the Federal government on people who object to your policies, and
4) Suffer rather obvious dementia that generates worry you will lead the country, via your confused disconnect from reality, into a world war,
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then you are very likely to have very poor job approval ratings.
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Biden is not going to get better mentally, only worse, and he is surrounded by crazy and incompetent staff. But Kamala would be even worse than Joe!
I have installed an emergency generator for backup power for when rolling blackouts come through. These are very common in Northern California and somewhat an issue in my central California area.
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Went cheap with a manual system instead of fully automatic with
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Reliance-Controls-30-Amp-250-Volt-7500-Watt-Non-Fuse-6-Circuit-Transfer-Switch-Kit-3006HDK/202213700
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A smaller 6k , 3 fuel generator keeps a minimum amount of power to selected areas of my house. Plumbed the generator for NG in addition to LPG and gasoline
LoL…..got the solar contract to review..
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The solar company becomes my power company, replacing PG&E.
I would pay them a mere $0.26/kw.
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I asked the rep if the state paid for the installation and she said “yes”. Well, not quite true 🙂
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I think I will pass on this deal
Ed Forbes,
Everything I’ve read about dealer financed, zero homeowner cost solar installations says avoid them like the plague. I’m not sure if they’re as bad as extended vehicle warranties, but they’re in the same ballpark.
Does a transfer switch require close proximity to the main breaker? Unfortunately, my fuse panel is pretty much at the opposite end of the house to my main :/.
Is this SolarCity? I saw a review of them some years back. They take the tax credit for themselves, and sell you power at a rate somewhat less than other California utilities. You get a credit for power you don’t use, which gets sold back to the grid.
Not a full credit, though. If you went on vacation, the system is still generating energy, and you will get charged despite having the lights off.
Ed Forbes,
Since CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are considered by California to be an existential threat to humanity, back-up generators, which are clearly more dangerous than “assault weapons”, may be outlawed in California some time soon. Along with fossil fueled cars. 😉 I wonder how the grid is going to support charging all the electric cars that replace fossil fueled cars.
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You live in a crazy state.
Tom Scharf,
Yes, Florida is not going to push hard for rooftop solar panels. Hurricanes are an issue, of course, and FP&L is rightly concerned that homeowner’s grid-tied systems will destabilize their grid and cut into their profit margin, so they will do everything they can to discourage grid-tie systems.
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But I think the biggest issue is that electric rates in Florida are pretty low (about $0.12 per KW-hour), so there just isn’t much incentive to invest in solar panels and a non-grid tied system. Stand-alone battery systems don’t make sense unless power costs are somewhere over $0.25 per KW-hour. Any further reduction in lifetime cost per KW-hour stored in lithium ion batteries (currently north of $0.15 per KW-hour stored), will bring a stand-alone system somewhat closer to economic breakeven, but it is hard to see a standalone system becoming economically sensible without a big increase in electric rates.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #212498)
Thanks for putting the effort in to show us how models can and should be used.
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Steve F
So who can they plausibly run for president in 2024? Mayor Pete? Pocahontas? Gavin Newsom?
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Obama came from left field as did Trump.
Gavin Newsome has looks and profile and is much better than Avenetti!
Two years is a long way away.
Maybe Cheney will become a Democrat and run against her nemesis.
Or Tiger Woods or Mrs Obama.
All stronger candidates than Camilla.
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I would suggest the next candidate will be new, Hispanic and female, from the West Coast or Florida to obtain maximum Democratic ticks.
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It is hard to fight city hall and Trump may well be stymied by the New York to find a criminal conviction that halts candidateship.
Perhaps Jaywalking or taking the 5th if nothing else ?
Jan 6th is interesting.
Proud boys, person number 1 with inciting texts, was he an FBI plant? Certainly asked the right incriminating questions at exactly the right times and saved them.
A bit like the Papadopoulos plant.
Tin foil hat [aluminum actually] staying firmly on
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Tom Scharf (Comment #212504)
“. Most people on the right probably believe Trump should be allowed to run for office again, against the expressed desire of people much smarter than they are.”
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Hard to see how you and others here get this so wrong.
Expressed desires are allowed in a Democracy.
Democracies also allow anyone to run who is able to run and expresses a desire to do so.
It is not a question of whether people are on the right or left.
50.1 percent of the counting votes in the required number of electorates says you are in, Biden or Trump, no matter what an individual or group smaller than this number desires.
Rightly so.
DaveJR (Comment #212532)
Does a transfer switch require close proximity to the main breaker?
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No.
The unit has a pre wired pig tail several feet long, but not a problem to pull the pig tail and run longer wire if needed. I would likely take the easy way out and run the pig tail to a junction box and splice additional wire from this junction box to the main breaker box.
Angech wrote: “Gavin Newsome has looks and profile”
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Newsom has the looks and demenor of Patrick Bateman. I half expect to see him grab an axe and go postal when he’s giving a speech.
Is it more economical to have no battery storage for solar, and just throw away excess power?
DaveJR (Comment #212538)
“Angech wrote: “Gavin Newsome has looks and profile”
Newsom has the looks and demeanor of Patrick Bateman.”
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Wow!
I have to admit to having to look up who PB was and I think he is a fictional character played by good looking actor Christian Bale.
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The fictional character’s [PB] demeanor would suggest a chance trying for a position at the New York Post which seems to have a few vacancies coming up in the next week.
Obsessive, organized and competitive with colleagues according to the review I read.
angech,
Tiger Woods is on good terms with Trump (they have played golf together multiple times); Tiger seems not very political, but if he is registered then probably is a Republican. When given the chance via leading press questions (early in his career) to rage against racial inequality and how bad white people are, he carefully refused to take the bait, and has noted he is half Thai, about 1/3 African, and the rest European and Native American. He shares two characteristics with Trump: wealthy and been involved with lots of women (and related scandals).
Angech, yes, American Psycho! Newsom has this kind of manic way of speaking that I guess is supposed to be charming, but comes across to me as if he’s about to descend into sudden violence. The Joker is usually portrayed in a similar way!
Tiger Woods has golfed with Obama as well.
MSNBC, I think it was Lawrence O’Donnell, even took a comment by McConnell about Obama golfing and said it was racist, associating him with Tiger Woods and his scandals.
angech,
Tom didn’t use a sarc tag, but I’m pretty sure he was indulging in sarcasm. At least that’s why I didn’t react.
[Edit: Yeah, at the top he said ‘ is how I hear it. ‘. He was giving a media impersonation I think.]
Yes, my sarcasm isn’t all so obvious, especially when I pretty faithfully reproduce talking points in a bit over the top way. My mind works in mysterious ways.
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Attempted murder of a SC justice is also not a danger to democracy I hear, ha ha. More accurately the legacy media don’t opine on whether it is, and they don’t go get quotes from “experts” on whether this type of political violence is tied to political rhetoric, and they don’t run news analysis stories on it. It was amusing to see how they immediately demoted the Kavanaugh story to lesser news status. This is the expected and repeated behavior of the media when presented with the wrong narrative. They have consolidated around “Armed man arrested near Kavanaugh’s house”.
In the print edition, the NYT put the Kavanaugh story on page A20. USA Today didn’t even cover it in the print edition.
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I’m also guessing reporters were not tasked to scour the perpetrator’s social media accounts to find evidence of their political ideology, in fact there is no curiosity whatsoever why this person did what he did. All of these people are by definition whacko, and this guy called 911 himself. However he did show up right in front of the house and had there not been security there who knows what would have happened.
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Compare this with the coverage of the alleged kidnapping conspiracy of the MI governor.
????
This “face with rolling eyes” emoji is supposed to indicate sarcasm or irony. I’m not a big fan of emojis, to put it mildly, but this one might actually be useful. It’s a little small though.
Edit: Big surprise, it didn’t copy to the actual post.
Btw, I can now access this site through my VPN. Thanks.
Michigan taking out another Republican contender?. “Arrested by FBI for involvement in Jan 6th”…
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Edit: They probably searched his place and found zip ties, a gun, and a knife :D.
I read the Capitol Police timeline for events leading up to and including the January 6th riot. Long and complicated, but the gist:
1) Nancy Pelosi (via the ‘Sergeants at Arms’ for the House and Senate) refused national guard help multiple times in the days leading up to the riot.
2) During the riot, the Congressional police chief AGAIN, multiple times requested National Guard help…. but got no answer from Pelosi for hours. Some national guard troops were finally called after the riot was essentially over…. but AFAICT, Pelosi never agreed to have National Guard troops called.
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The security structure at the capitol seems amateurish, and worse, those involved pretty much discounted multiple warnings of potential violence on January 6.
These are Kelley’s crimes according to the NYT:
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“An F.B.I. agent described Mr. Kelley’s actions in a filing to the court, saying at one point that Mr. Kelley appeared to use his phone “to film the crowd assaulting and pushing past U.S. Capitol Police officers.” The filing also said that Mr. Kelley used “his hands to support another rioter” who was pulling down a metal barricade, and that he gestured “to the crowd, consistently indicating” that it should continue moving toward the entrance to the Capitol.”
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I have no idea who Kelley is, but let’s just say this isn’t exactly a damning indictment of a crime. If this is the politically neutral standard for a protest crime that leads to an arrest then I think we need to build more prisons pretty quick based on what I saw the last several years.
Apologies Tom, missed the sarcasm entirely (thanks Mark for explaining)
Seems like I finally got a prediction right
“The Washington Post terminated its reporter Felicia Sonmez on Thursday after she waged war against the paper and her colleagues with tweetstorms for nearly an entire week.”
Justice for Jussie seems to ring a bell.
A small shoot of common sense amid the desolation wrecked on Americans by the very moral themes the Washington Post and other Press outlets espoused.
Hopefully it will settle down but a wrongful firing case and support for a good looking person with a “good” agenda means there may be a lot more deserved grief in store.
MSNBC: “How high did MAGA riot plot go?”
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Sorry, what? A “riot plot”? That’s a rather subdued headline…
Felicia Sonmez had already filed a suit against the POST alleging discrimination. It was dismissed “with prejudice” a couple of months back… meaning she could not likely get a judge to actually hear any similar suit.
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She seems the ultimate nightmare employee: angry, irrational, and insubordinate. No doubt she will file another lawsuit, and no doubt will have it dismissed…. again. She graduated from Harvard in 2005 with a degree in “government”, which explains quite a lot I think.
The hearings declared that Trump ‘lit the fire’ in starting the Capitol riot. So they have nothing directly linking Trump to a plot, and instead put up a bunch of links between Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and Trump. ‘were in Trump’s orbit’
Then they made a hash of that argument by showing that Proud Boys were at the Capitol before Trump’s speech, the one that lit the fire.
This is all just a bunch of indirect links to Trump, it’s really nothing more than they ever had with Russia collusion which was the same breathless hyperventilating reporting. I think now Trump is a pretty bad dude, but I also simultaneously think this is just another partisan witch hunt which says more about DC politics than anything else.
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I am amused by all the “will this changed anyone’s minds?” media stories where it is clear they hold no possibility that somebody might change their mind in the pro-Trump direction.
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If there was ever any question it was laid to rest this committee was always about Trump and not the riot itself. It is clear we are only hearing one side of the story here so that is a fatal flaw in convincing anybody about anything.
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Apparently 66% of people in WY say they will vote against Cheney no matter who runs against her in the next election. I don’t mind politicians stepping outside the tribal boundaries, but she is going to pay a price.
My congressman also faces a lot of challengers after voting for impeachment. Polling suggests he will lose.
Hey! Good guys (cops) with guns and locked doors worked to protect schoolkids here in Alabama yesterday!
https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/10/a-would-be-school-invader-in-alabama-failed-when-the-doors-were-locked-and-police-werent-cowards/
I’ll be darned.
Hope it wasn’t a parent who couldn’t figure out how to get to the Front Office…
DaveJR, that’s their method. Put up lots of challengers so the incumbents can squeak by with a plurality. Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander got renominated with this.
My resident weasel Congress-critter Mo’ Brooks is likely to be replaced by a younger, more attractive female who will doubtless turn out to be every bit as weaselly in the fullness of time, named Katie Britt. No effective change there except Mo’ was a more experienced Congress critter.
Shrug.
Good job they were defeated! Distressing that they even tried. It’s hard to imagine who would want to do such a thing. Maybe it’s time to stop believing that crazy is just a different type of normal.
MikeN, I was thinking this might work in favor of the incumbent. I guess we’ll see.
Mark, odd they apparently needed to try and take a cops weapon rather than having one of their own, but then maybe gun laws do work as intended.
MikeN (Comment #212559): “Put up lots of challengers so the incumbents can squeak by with a plurality. Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander got renominated with this.”
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Not so. Although Alexander once got easily renominated with 49.7% of the vote, and Graham never got renominated without a substantial majority.
MikeN,
Running against a lot of challengers was exactly how Trump got the Republican nomination in 2016. He didn’t get a majority in any primary until quite late when he had the nomination practically wrapped up. It’s not at all clear that if the primaries weren’t first past the post that Trump would have received the nomination. But we’ll never know.
And in Physics news, a new fundamental particle, an axial Higgs boson (a Higgs boson with a magnetic moment), was discovered serendipitously in simple equipment while looking for something else.
https://www.livescience.com/magnetic-higgs-relative-discovered
The title of the article is somewhat misleading. The equipment used fit on a desktop.
A heavy particle that interacts weakly with EM radiation would be a candidate for dark matter.
Dr Witt
Do you think it a little strange that a table top device can detect effects on or of a Higgs boson when the charmed little critter has proved so elusive that it has only been detected a couple of times in the past by presumed massive super hadron collider devices needing a 20 kilometre desk top?
Sounds a bit April 1st, Jan 6th and cold fusion theory parcelled together?
I tend to be skeptical of “guy has quantum physics breakthrough by using parts from his lawnmower in his garage” stories. You never know, but one should wait for confirmation. We know it might be real if a lot of others start claiming they already discovered it too, but earlier.
Lots of people who have parents over 80 know exactly what this is like. Biden having splatter-thought. I suspect Biden is carefully managed because it gets much worse than this sometimes. My Dad is 89 now and this happens routinely.
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1534879638039810054
Thanks for the link, DeWitt. RTe3 rare earth 2D crystals also got my attention.
Biden is getting old and has an excuse for his conversations – so what’s Kimmel’s excuse.
I am beginning to think that Biden’s speaking problem has a source different than Alzheimer’s. He has a hard time focusing on the points he is attempting to make and he fumbles when reading from the teleprompter. He is going to lose confidence in his speaking ability and it will get worse even if his mental state does not deteriorate that much.
He needs something to relax himself, but that might make him fall asleep or say something his handlers would not like.
When he gets obvious facts wrong it makes me wonder whether he is confused or just doing what politicians do, i.e, lie.
There are perhaps 3 different motivations for the Jan 6 hearings. One is that it is political and is being used by the Democrats as a means of getting the voting publics’ attention away from the current problems. To hold it in prime time is a large indicator that indeed this is the main purpose.
Another motivation might be to present evidence to get criminal charges against Trump. The actual participants are already facing charges with a number pleading guilty. I do not know if sedition will be a charge that can win in court. To get charges against Trump would I think require downplaying any collective planning to overthrow the government by participants as it would lessen the effect of Trump encouraging their actions.
If the hearings concentrate on Trump for charges or simply to put him in a darker light than he already is in with a large part of the voting public, I think they will be doing the Republican party a favor. It might just be the prodding that they need to let go of the man who could care less about their party. If Trump melts down as the result of the hearings all the better.
The problem the Democrats will have is make the actions of the crazies who participated in the break in more of a palace coup and insurrection. There is a great opportunity here of going a bridge too far in painting this picture.
Yes Trump got nominated the same way, but usually they put up a bunch of conservative challengers and a less conservative candidate wins. One time Romney was the designated conservative alternative to McCain, and conservatives went hunting for another candidate and settled on Fred Thompson, McCain’s friend.
Trump wrecked the plans, when it was all set up for Jeb Bush.
I think it was Harry Enten who wrote about how Kasich’s entry could be a problem for Jeb Bush because he would be eating into the base of liberal Republicans, which is around 25%.
Lucia: Comment #212431 Amber Heard
I think the killer for Amber Heard was that the photo of her facial injuries was doctored. An expert testified that the meta data was tampered with and that there was no way to tell what device took the picture. This severely undercut the testimony of her assistant that Depp hit her. Really stupid to enter in those pictures.
2. Also, it is possible that Heard’s testimony was entered in by way of a written transcript in the UK and not video. Her actual appearance was not great and a transcript might have made her testimony more convincing.
3. I’ll bet the judge had something in his background that made him lean toward women claiming spousal abuse. All people and judges have intrinsic biases, and I would be very surprised if that was not the case here. The few times I had trials where there was no jury, in the first 20 minutes, I had a very good idea which way the judge rule simply by the questions, the judge would ask.
A liberal Republican sounds like a thoughtful Democrat.
I doubt that there are 10% of Republicans or Democrats who fit that label at the moment.
The filings have all congregated at the poles.
Cheney, in particular, seems to be very much a deep swamp creature at the moment.
Speaks well, dresses wel, hates Trump.
Democrats would do well to take her in and run her for a Democratic President.
jd ohio,
“An expert testified that the meta data was tampered with and that there was no way to tell what device took the picture.”
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Usually the metadata is stripped of time, date, and location information as well when the image is modified. Unless configured otherwise, all modern cell phones (and many cameras) stamp date, time, and geolocation when a photo is taken. It would be possible to fudge the metadata and set it to whatever you wanted, but I think that would be beyond Amber Heard’s technical skilz set.
angech,
I suspect there are a lot more reasonable, rational people than you imagine. There *is* a lot more polarization than 25 years ago, but it is mostly the loudest (and angriest) voices being heard, not the more moderate folks. Unfortunately, politicians cater to the loudest of their supporters, and this is causing really poor government policies and blocking sensible compromises.
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Abortion is a perfect example: a substantial majority (about 66%) of voters hold moderate views about abortion. They support early abortions (say up to 12 or 15 weeks) but are opposed to later abortions except in cases of severe fetal deformity or significant risk to the mother’s life. But that majority has no voice: conservative politicians are terrified of the most extreme opponents of abortion, and progressives are terrified of the ‘abortion-up-until-birth’ crowd. The extremes are blocking compromise policies with large majority support. Most politicians will not even talk about compromise, lest they invite a primary opponent that could drive them from office in a primary election with 10% voter turn-out….. the most extreme 10% of voters on both left and right block sensible policies.
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I can see the problem, but I don’t have any solutions.
Tom Scharf,
“I tend to be skeptical of “guy has quantum physics breakthrough by using parts from his lawnmower in his garage” stories.”
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Me too. The group clearly observed something new, but I doubt it was dark matter. One reviewer (Nature now publishes all reviewer comments) cautioned that “Higg’s boson” is right now very sexy in physics, but was perhaps not the best description of the paper’s results.
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WRT Biden and dementia: IMHO, he clearly has dementia, and it is going to get worse over the next couple of years. His endless (and dangerous) loose-cannon comments, when not reading from a teleprompter show the problem very clearly. His unscripted word-salad constructs (I wouldn’t even call them sentences!) confirm the guy is losing mental capacity fast. If Republicans take control of both houses of Congress, I think the added demands on Biden will make his mental decline ever more obvious, unless he stops making public appearances, which is a real possibility. I believe there is just about 0% chance he will run for re-election in 2024.
MikeN (Comment #212573): “Yes Trump got nominated the same way, but usually they put up a bunch of conservative challengers and a less conservative candidate wins.”
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No, there was nobody in the Republican field that could have beaten Trump head-to-head. Just as in 2012 there was nobody who could beat Romney, except maybe Herman Cain before that bogus scandal took him down.
“I think they will be doing the Republican party a favor”
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I also believe this as I would prefer to not have to fight Trump or his more devoted fans in the next election. However I cannot condone the means to that end of course. Trump’s actual words and actions do not rise to the level of a crime as much as I dislike him for it, I think he truly believes this garbage. The proper outcome is to let the voters deal with it, otherwise known as the dictionary definition of democracy, as opposed to whatever that word now means to legacy media.
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I think the likelihood of the committee deciding to refer a criminal charge against Trump to prevent him from running in the next election is somewhere north of 101%.
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The DOJ doesn’t need this referral, nor is this providing it any info it doesn’t already have, so it is political theater. The DOJ charging Trump with this weak evidence would be a massive blunder IMO, I think there will be actual real political violence if this happens.
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If Trump did get charged, Biden would perhaps help himself out by pardoning Trump. Not sure the zealots could handle that emotionally.
I also cannot square the circle of everyone is deeply and dangerously polarized with my … ahem … lived experiences. My opinion is that most people care very little about political drama and palace intrigue beyond it’s momentary entertainment factor. I just don’t see a lot bumper stickers, yard signs, overhear discussions etc. that reflect that and the people I associate with have opinions but they don’t really seem more emotionally entangled than at any other time.
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The polls supposedly show larger splits, but it’s unclear to me whether this is the social media / legacy media factor that is playing out with everything being over-dramatized to exhaustion.
The larger splits are primarily the left going further left. The left, of course, move the center and claim everyone else is the problem. Clearly, lawmakers proposing drag queen 101 for school kids is nowhere near any kind of normal center.
Tom Scharf (Comment #212580): “I also believe this as I would prefer to not have to fight Trump or his more devoted fans in the next election. However I cannot condone the means to that end of course. Trump’s actual words and actions do not rise to the level of a crime”.
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I think that convincing Trump to bow out would do the Republicans a favor. Using the legal system to block him might trigger a real insurrection.
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Trump did nothing remotely illegal. But he did show a lot of bad judgement.
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Tom Scharf: “as much as I dislike him for it, I think he truly believes this garbage.”
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If you mean that he believes the election was stolen, yes he does. It was rigged in advance via illegal changes in election procedures, hugely improper interference using Zuckerbucks, and yet another mass media hoax. The actual voting was corrupted, quite possibly to the extent of altering the outcome.
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Trump’s error lies in not recognizing that there is nothing to be done other than to move on and put in place safeguards to try to keep it from happening again. But that is Trump’s nature. It is part of what makes him such a formidable force. That said, he is now so tarnished that it would be best if Republicans move on.
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Trump had endorsed Brooks in Alabama. But Brooks said that it is time to move on from the last election, so Trump unendorsed Brooks and endorsed his opponent. Petty. And not healthy for the Republican Party.
The committee is selling that because Barr and others told Trump they didn’t see evidence of a stolen election that Trump knowingly encouraged an insurrection under false pretenses. This confuses a disagreement on the facts with actual facts, especially at that moment in time.
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Of course this has been the SOP with the governing class for quite a while now, examples abound such as covid masks. Once the Ministry of Truth has spoken disagreement is deemed a lie with immoral intent.
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I still think Trump believes it, as HRC believes Russia cost her the election. Criminalizing political disagreement will lead to bad outcomes for society.
And for a break in all the death and destruction
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https://www.westernjournal.com/man-headed-shooting-range-stops-rescue-kitten-road-ends-13/.
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It was an ambush:-)
Ed,
I’ve been at a dance competition and missed a lot of news. But I saw the kittens.Soooooo cute.
Mike M,
“Trump unendorsed Brooks and endorsed his opponent. Petty. And not healthy for the Republican Party.”
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Yup, not good for Republicans at all.
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But just petty? You are far too kind.
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Trump acts 24/7/365 like an a$$hole. That has always been his problem. If he were even half way reasonable, even half less vengeful, even half introspective, even half aware of his personal deficiencies, then he would easily have been re-elected, the House and Senate would be controlled by Republicans, and we wouldn’t be suffering the destructive idiocy of the Biden presidency.
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But sadly, Trump is in fact an irredeemable a$$hole, and he can’t get past that. I do hope his health keeps him from running in 2024…. for the sake of the country.
Lucia,
Did you compete or were you just watching? How did it go?
SteveF: ” It would be possible to fudge the metadata and set it to whatever you wanted, but I think that would be beyond Amber Heard’s technical skilz set.”
Maybe I used the wrong terminology but there was convincing testimony that the pictures had been tampered with and the expert I quoted said you couldn’t tell whether the pictures had been taken with an iphone or another device. Also, the testimony of Heard’s assistant witness was weird in that she said she didn’t know what device was used to take the pictures. Finally, I would add that Heard works in Hollywood and would undoubtedly have access to people who could tamper with the meta data.
Mark,
I competed. Consequently, I have long fakenails on and can barely type. They will be trimmed tomorrow.
jd ohio,
Some metadata can be easily changed (using Windows or Mac OS), including the type of camera used, the date/time the picture was taken, and a couple of others. Photo editing software may allow other changes in metadata, and may add certain information when an edit of an image is done. Freely editing the metadata to hide any past editing of the image would normally require programming…. although there may be such a program available…. I haven’t looked. Someone could have helped Amber Heard fake injuries in a photo and cover it up, but I don’t think it was Amber herself.
You can delete any or all meta data in Windows by right clicking to Properties then to Details and finally the link to Remove Properties and personal information.
I have added meta data using Adobe Premier Elements 2022.
I suspect that if changes were made it could be detected.
I have an ongoing exasperation when politicians, economists who should know better, the Federal Reserve and defenders of the Federal reserve talk about price inflation.
They talk as if the effects are the causes, i.e., higher prices from oil, supply shortages and the Ukraine war come off as root causes and thus printing money which is the root cause can be and is ignored. When the Federal Reserve initiates the processes that lead to printing money the end result can be manifested in any of a number of ways which means some prices are going to increase more than others and at different times. In addition, the effects can be asset inflation which is not tracked or attributed by the Federal Reserve. There are also problems with the way price inflation is defined and tracked over time. Even without price inflation, the artificial effects of the Federal Reserve actions on markets signals are a detriment to the economy by sending the wrong signals to those who make business decisions and result in what the Austrians call malinvestments.
The seemingly obvious contradiction comes when the Federal Reserves strategy for fighting price inflation is the reverse of what it has done up to and through the initial stages of large increases in prices. How can the Federal Reserve claim or at least allow the notion that these price increases are caused exogenously and not by their previous actions? They can because there are large majorities of politicians, economists and Federal Reserve defenders who are willing to accept the party line.
I heard a recent pod cast with Bob Murphy, who thinks along the lines of the Austrian school of economics like I do, and Ross McKitrick, who is an economist well known for his contrarian view of statistics as applied to climate science – but too into econometrics to be an Austrian, where they talked about Central banks of the US and Canada printing money in the past two financial/economic crises and why the results for price inflation were different between the 2008 and 2020 crises. It was also pointed out that the Central banks were mislead into thinking that price inflation was immune from even huge increases in printed money by the misreading of the 2008 crisis.
https://mises.org/library/inflation-then-vs-now-follow-money
jd/steve
Depp’s expert testified that some ‘photos’ weren’t photos. Some were screenshots of an image from a computer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AATOzib6c2c&t=43s
I can also take a screenshot of those images.
He also discussed that some were duplicates with different colors. (Heard lawyers tried to prevent this discussion, but just seeing them side by side, that’s obvious.)
Heard’s lawyers had to retreat back to “You can’t prove they were intentionally edited”. Or,” you can’t prove Heard or human intended to make these changes.” Both true. But given the type of changes which made the injury look greater in some versions given others, the fact that they were changed in some way and in cases untraceable, this evidence was very bad for Heard.
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In addition, in person she comes off as, alternately, self-serving, evasive, prevaricating or outright lying.
Guy at the petrol station telling people to stock up. Truckers are going to stop trucking. Apparently, it’s the greedy oil people though, not Biden’s war on fossil fuels.
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Biden debate clip where he claims what’s happening now is what he’s prepared to do https://youtu.be/0xiLwBT-bTE
JPEG images are not some sort of secure information file container that is designed not to be tampered with. In fact it is the exact opposite, the file format is intended for easy manipulation by photo editing programs and so forth. The metadata (date, device which took the picture, lens information, geolocation, etc.) can be directly edited.
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Most programs have one click auto-enhancement that will usually increase contrast and color saturation.
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It would be simple enough to detect very clumsy manipulation against false claims but very difficult to verify the authenticity one way or the other for an expert manipulation. Any particular file could have been manipulated even if looks authentic.
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There are some sophisticated image algorithms that try to detect things like Photoshop manipulation where “magic eraser” is used to remove stuff or other things are copied in but they are only very effective against amateurs.
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Long story short, common authentic images can’t be verified, but clumsy fakes can be detected.
Kenneth,
Politicians have been pushing garbage explanations of inflation for as long as there have been politicians. It is, of course, always and everywhere a monetary issue, as Milton Freeman noted decades ago. The motivation for inflating the money supply grows stronger the further into debt the Federal government goes; at present total Treasury debt is north of $22 trillion, and coupon yields are mostly very low (except for the $1.75 trillion of “inflation indexed” securities). With inflation running 6% ahead of coupon yield, the true value (purchasing power) of the outstanding debt is reduced about $100 billion per month; this compares to about $237 billion per month in total Federal tax revenues (including Social Security and Medicare). So in effect the Treasury is “taxing” investors at 0.5% per month for the privilege of loaning money to the Treasury.
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Of course, most investors will be loath to buy treasury debt as it is “rolled over” (when Treasury debt matures, new debt is issued to “pay off” the mature debt, the Treasury never reduces outstanding debt) so the treasury will have to pay more to keep investors interested. But much of the debt is very long term (30 year fixed rate Treasury bonds and non-marketable bonds held by foreign governments) so the net to the treasury from inflation will be substantial. Here is a laugher: one of the biggest holders ($5+ trillion) of Treasury debt is the Federal Reserve bank… that self same bank that prints the notes you have in your wallet. At the Federal government they pay their debts the old fashioned way: just print as much funny-money as they need. 😉
Tom,
Metadata on everything can be edited by opening as a text file and finding the text lines that are metadata. At least I think so.
SteveF (Comment #212598):”Politicians have been pushing garbage explanations of inflation for as long as there have been politicians. It is, of course, always and everywhere a monetary issue, as Milton Freeman noted decades ago.”
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I am pretty sure that is circular reasoning. If you define ‘inflation’ as an excessive increase in the money supply, then it is true by definition that inflation is always a monetary phenomenon.
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If the harvest fails, food prices will go up in spite of what the money supply is doing. Shortages of specific goods caused overall prices to rise in early 2021. Of course price increases due to shortages ought to be transitory.
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So:
Monetary inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. It usually, but not always, results in price inflation.
Transitory inflation is not a monetary phenomenon.
Price inflation need not be a monetary phenomenon.
Long term inflation is almost certainly at least mostly a monetary phenomenon.
Across the board inflation is almost certainly at least mostly a monetary phenomenon.
———–
The price increases in early 2021 likely would have occurred even if the Fed had not been reckless. And they likely would have been transitory. Thanks to the Fed, they have now morphed into long-term across-the-board inflation.
Tom
Yes. And if you knew what you were doing and wanted to fake something was an Iphone image, you could learn what the correct meta-data should be. However, you would also have to make sure the actual data constituting the image was consistent with Iphone!
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The problem for Heard’s team is they didn’t have a story to explain why certain changes happen during sort of “natural” handling. If the story is this originated on X’s phone, was saved in itunes, emailed and so on you expect certain changes. (Recompression, blah, blah.) Is what we consistent with that series of image handling? (It may have been. We don’t know. But Heard’s team didn’t seem to suggest their version of what was done to the photo.)
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And, of course, their client projected “liar, liar, pants on fire”. So they really needed to have a storyline for the provenance and handling of the images especially when to similar were submitted in evidence with one looking enhanced relative to the other one.
Mike M,
Price adjustments are not inflation. If the price of a product rises (due either to greater demand or lesser supply), then there will be general price re-alignment and concurrently some fall in consumption of that product. When the price of gasoline goes up, then there is less money available to buy other things, so there will be downward price pressure on other things. That is not inflation; I don’t see any circularity in saying inflation is a monetary effect, because inflation is an increase in the average price of everything. Growth in money supply that is faster than growth in goods and services always causes prices to rise, independent of shifts in supply and demand for specific things. Growth in money supply that is slower than growth in goods and services causes price deflation, independent of shifts in supply and demand for specific items.
Lucia,
“Metadata on everything can be edited by opening as a text file and finding the text lines that are metadata. At least I think so.”
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Some metadata clearly is in text from, and this could be identified and modified with a text editor. But I opened a couple of JPEG images with a text editor, and it looks to me like a lot of the metadata is NOT in simple text from, and so can’t be so easily edited. I checked on line and there are programs available which are said to be able to edit all metadata, but I have never tried one of these.
Here’s something that is pretty interesting with images and photography. The colors your brain sees and the colors the camera image sensor sees are not the same.
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If you shine a white light on a reddish piece of paper the brain sees a reddish piece of paper. If you shine a reddish light on a white piece of paper (thus making it reddish) … the brain usually sees a white piece of paper. This color balancing done by the brain is a bit mysterious and poorly understood. We see white paper at noon and dusk automagically even though the color of the light changes.
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Now a camera dutifully sees a paper with reddish reflected light in both examples as it is correctly interpreting physical reality. However this is actually seen as a defect to photo imaging for lowly humans, so the camera image processing algorithms attempt to color balance the photo in the same way the brain does so the picture looks “right”. It sometimes misses badly and you get poor results.
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Image processing programs allow the color balance/temperature to be shifted as one of their primary controls. DSLR’s allow for pictures to be stored in a RAW format which keeps the original unprocessed / uncompressed image sensor data.
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Most automatic adjustments will shift the colors. One of the primary tools I have used is a white balance which allows you to manually select an area of the photo that you know is grayscale and it will shift the colors of the rest of the photo for a neutral shot. Many people prefer a more reddish tone while bluish tends to be a bit harsh.
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The white balance tool is particularly useful for scans of old pictures and slides that have degraded in color nonuniformly.
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Photographers who really care about color accuracy will use a white balance / color calibration card in an image to ensure proper colors can be obtained.
I use Adobe Lightroom and it shows all the existing metadata and allows you to edit, delete, etc. I use this “innocently” to add geolocation because my DSLR doesn’t have GPS and to add names of the people I care about who are in the photo and a few other things. Then Lightroom and photo websites can be easily setup to show all the pictures that have tom in them and so forth. Since this is stored in the photo file you don’t lose it with different systems.
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Usually the photo program will add/change an edited date and sometimes other stuff that makes it easy to detect some changes were made. You don’t want the picture taken date to be changed even if you edit it. This type of stuff is usually a feature. However you can also get generic metadata editors and do what you want.
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JPEG image compression is a standard but the quality and amount of compression are variable, as is any preprocessing done before compression. So the “fingerprint” of that type compression and preprocessing should be somewhat detectable from device to device, beyond metadata that explicitly states taken by an iPhone 8. Things like over sharpening and oversaturating colors are common with some phones, as is the amount of noise in dark areas of the picture.
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If you edit the image data then you will need to recompress it back to JPEG. If you want it to look like an original iPhone unmanipulated compression then you would likely need to have some expertise so the compression fingerprint looks close.
SteveF, you are correct that if individual prices go up with a constant money supply other prices have to adjust – everything else being equal.
We currently have deflation in equity prices. The Federal Reserve has been reacting to the stock market when it has gone down recently, but I think even they now know that that luxury is gone.
WWI artillery tactics work if you totally outclass your opponent.
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To reduce it’s own manpower losses, Russia has moved to a mostly static tactical stance using recon probes to locate Ukraine positions and then pound them with heavy artillery fire, to which Ukraine is finding impossible to counter.
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The Russian goal seems to be first the destruction of the Ukraine army, then dictate peace on Russian terms.
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https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/06/ukraine-bits-no-ammo-more-casualties-thin-lines-propaganda-and-passing-the-buck.html
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“.. Ukraine has now almost completely run out of ammunition for the Soviet-era weapons systems that were the mainstay of its arsenal, and the Eastern European countries that maintained the same systems have run out of surplus supplies to donate, Danylyuk said. Ukraine urgently needs to shift to longer-range and more sophisticated Western systems, but those have only recently been committed, and in insufficient quantities to match Russia’s immense firepower, he said.
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Russia is firing as many as 50,000 artillery rounds a day into Ukrainian positions, and the Ukrainians can only hit back with around 5,000 to 6,000 rounds a day..”
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SteveF,
I don’t think that’s correct. According to the Treasury, the majority of debt held by the public is in the form of notes, not bonds and the notes have a maximum maturity of ten years.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/monthly-statement-public-debt/summary-of-treasury-securities-outstanding
Specifically, as of 5/31/2022 it consists of $3.67 trillion of Bills,
$13.51 trillion of Notes, $3.73 trillion of Bonds, $1.78 trillion TIPS and $0.60 trillion of floating rate notes. There have been suggestions over the years that debt should be shifted from short term notes to long term bonds, but the Treasury has argued that as long as interest rates were decreasing, that would be too expensive. When interest rates start to increase, it will, of course, be too late to change policy.
The only non-marketable Treasury securities that I know of are held by, among others, the Social Security Administration.
SteveF,
I took a screenshot.
Near the top I can find this:
öú ?iTXtXML:com.adobe.xmp
Screenshot
1725
1184
1
’Ï
@ IDATxÏùú$G}Ô??3;3õs??›ÀI?†p“°Ñ”QHD66»`¿<?‡'?¡?3ÿ e06… ?Ö çrñN'ù.ü.ÔmŒ9N~?_?ˆ›‹jïêÑeÆv{?ª??rW?Í_ø?W KdlŒd2 ?ÌSŒ?sùeʪÕ~Ó?ÛÌ|œ?C619a7?¸C+ÕÀ±¸qѨ?¶?Ú£Q´_º äÀ´,ïL>%ÃßÛ???9;æÛ??Ò<Ä?û[?=? ?ØÖ??ü?Wù?8?Á?Ò?Ì?Û¸ÁŸ˜Ÿnrrrl``– That's a portion of the metadata. Not sure where the time stamp is encoded (I don't see obvious clear text.) Someone who knew what they were doing could change it. But using a program to process would make more sense.
Most of the characters were removed by the wordpress sortware. But meta data was in there!
Tom–
Editing metadata can definitely be innocent! I think the problem for Heard’s side is that they didn’t provide a timeline for the provenance of the photos and then point out that the meta data are consistent under the circumstances.
Oddly, distorted stories with lack of specificity where required were the halmark of the “Heard side”.
We see a similar thing with Amber wanting to insisted she “donated” when she had only “pledged”. Any native English speaker could have understood what Vasquez was driving at much sooner and said, “Oh. I understand what you mean. Waht I meant on tV was I pledged and at the time of that interview the distinction between pledge and donated didn’t seem meaningful. But no, I have not yet fulfilled the pledge. So it’s true I have not yet donated.”
People could accept that.
But it’s now now. And Vasquez asked if she had donated the money and was quite clear what she meant by donating.
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Overall, Heard and her side wanted it all to be “what we say it is is what it is. Period.” And then leave out details. They got ripped apart.
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Amber’s lawyers probably couldn’t fix Ambers demeanor. (And Johnny’s lawyers probably knew what it was and could guess how she would answer.) But if those images were real, they should have seriously attended to disussing the chain of provenance. (Picture snapped. Saved on iTunes. Changed from HEIC to jpg. blah, blah.) They also should have had reasons why they didn’t have as close to original if possible. That was crucial evidence for their side and they didn’t have it.
DeWitt,
You are right about non-marketable securities…. I misread a table I found.
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Notes (~$13.5 trillion) and bonds (~$3.7 trillion) together are $17.2 trillion of the $23 trillion total. You would have to analyze the maturities of all outstanding notes and bonds to make an accurate calculation of how much inflation is going to diminish the value of those debts; the information is available, but would require working with a huge CSV file. Outstanding notes all appear to have relatively low nominal interest rates (eg ~3%). Notes have maturities ranging from 2 to 10 years at issue, but the mix right now probably averages 3 to 4 years. Long term Bonds have high interest rates, but are a relatively small fraction of the total debt.
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Two or three years of 9% – 10% inflation would reduce the real value of those assets considerably.
I worry, when I hear coming from all parts of the political spectrum the drumbeat for the Biden administration to do something about inflation, that it will do something like the disasteruos wage and price controls that Nixon imposed.
Biden has the Covid 19 pandemic as a precedent in declaring an emergency and then imposing very restrictive measures while having a large portion of the public going along with it. It would be relatively easy to get “experts” to favor wage and price controls and then have Biden claim he is following expert advice.
The cure for inflation is to let market forces make the corrections and determine interest rates. Unfortunately this is not the favored approach of the intelligentsia and politicians.
Kenneth,
“I worry, when I hear coming from all parts of the political spectrum the drumbeat for the Biden administration to do something about inflation”
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Me too, because all that can be done is to adopt more sensible fiscal and monetary policies *now* and accept that poor policies in the past are responsible for today’s inflation. A period of higher interest rates and “stagflation”, which corrects for the stupid policies of the past couple years, looks likely to happen over the next few years. Any policies to try to stop that will only make things worse in the future; and of course, the things the Democrats most want to do (spend, spend, spend!!! inflate, inflate, inflate!!!) will make things horribly worse in the future. Like someone with a bad hang-over, getting drunk again (on a huge expansion in money) is not the answer. Suffering the hangover and then not drinking so much in the future is the answer.
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Wage and price controls lead inevitably to supply shortages and economic contraction. Only idiots would consider using them; that is one of the reasons politicians make me nervous.
Online EXIF metadata viewer
https://www.thexifer.net/
They could just say that there was a real covid emergency, they over stimulated the economy under a lot of uncertainty but felt it was the right thing to do at the time, and now we have inflation as a result which will persist for a while. And thank you Joe Manchin for not making it even worse. Governing is hard and predictions about the future are hard. If they had it to do over again then maybe they would use less stimulus, but stimulus was required and the right amount was debatable.
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Another plan would be to deny it was happening or would be short, and then proceed to cleverly calling it “Putin’s price hike” and see how that goes over.
Tom Scharf,
Politicians almost never admit error, and Biden NEVER admits error. ‘Putin’s price hike’ is the final refuge of a scoundrel.
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Oh, and remember it is *crucially* important that a $ trillion in student loan debt be immediately assumed by the Feds (in direct violation of the law) and financed by, um, inflating the money supply even more. Biden is a demented old man who wasn’t very smart before suffering dementia.
That is Keynesian dogma and it is wrong. Unfortunately as Nixon once said we are all Keynesians now.
The Federal Reserve was already stimulating the economy before the pandemic..
Steve, that may be true but he is only following the “experts” advice and orders. I would personally blame those in academia and the intelligentsia for their wrongheaded ideas.
Tom Scharf (Comment #212617): “stimulus was required and the right amount was debatable.”
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Why was stimulus required? The government had its knee on the economy’s neck. Stimulus was not going to help it get up.
Mike M,
“The government had its knee on the economy’s neck.”
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The Federal government as Derek Chauvin…. I like the imagery. 😉
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Are you referencing the federal government’s response to covid?
Looks like fighting in the Ukraine has been pretty much reduced to Russia trying to consolidate its complete control of the Eastern states and to prepare for either bringing them into the Russian Federation or setting up permanent Russia controlled local puppet governments. There appears to be little or no diplomatic effort underway to start negotiations. The West is, I think, becoming occupied with looming economic problems, and while continuing to sanction Russia and support Ukraine, will end up having to accept Russian takeover of the Eastern part of the Ukraine.
SteveF (Comment #212623): “Are you referencing the federal government’s response to covid?”
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Of course. That is what Tom was discussing in the message to which I replied.
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BTW, I think that “knee on the neck” long predates Chauvin.
First of all, my point was that this is a much better sounding talking point to the general public than “Putin did it”, which sounds like amateur hour thinking from a bunch of smug people.
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I don’t think anyone is buying Biden’s attempts to defer blame on gas prices and inflation. This is a party that openly hates fossil fuels and has consistently backed policy to make gas more expensive. This is a party that openly and consistently backs profligate federal spending and has never advanced even a thought on why that might have negative consequences.
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They are deathly afraid people are going to connect the dots here, but that fear will not be solved by telling fantasies to the public like they are in grade school.
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As far as covid stimulus goes, this was likely necessary because of the lockdowns and the effect on the economy. One can certainly advance the theory * now * that we should neve have locked down if that is the theory. But that is hindsight that forgets the uncertainty of where the pandemic was going at the time. People would have self isolated anyway. The professional class would have survived but people living paycheck to paycheck in the service industry would have been seriously hurt without stimulus which would have also not been politically survivable. It was inevitable.
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Really that situation is good example of exactly what government is for and if we had a government that didn’t just spend wildly all the time and saved for a rainy pandemic day, then it wouldn’t be such a burden now.
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I also find reductionist thinking on the economy to not be very convincing, just like crime there are lots of degrees of freedom and in many cases everyone is both right and wrong simultaneously, it is measurement of degree and the moment in time. However magical thinking that we can just print money endlessly seems rather foolish.
Not that Biden doesn’t have enough problems right now, Russia is clearly winning and has momentum. They can likely take this as far as they want with the slow and effective incrementalism of heavy artillery. As Ed says, welcome back to WWI, and WWII.
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Biden will have to really decide if he is going to allow Russia to win, which in my view, he must allow it. In order to stop Russia and reverse their current military strategy it will take air power and/or advanced long range weaponry.
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Biden’s addled thinking may conclude that he can’t politically take another loss here and look weak. That is a problem. He could do something really dumb. The media has been doing him a disservice by constantly propping up Ukraine’s capabilities and the West’s help. Ukraine has overperformed, and that is good, but it isn’t enough. The best plan now is to let Russia declare victory, and transition to a long term insurgency. That was always Plan A anyway.
Tom Scharf (Comment #212627): ” The professional class would have survived but people living paycheck to paycheck in the service industry would have been seriously hurt without stimulus”.
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What do you mean by “stimulus”?
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To me, “economic stimulus” means policies designed to stimulate economic growth. To do that while simultaneously blocking growth was inane.
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But you seem to use “stimulus” to mean financial assistance to those hurt by lockdowns. Yes, assistance was needed. But that is not the same as stimulus.
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Tom Scharf: “One can certainly advance the theory * now * that we should neve have locked down if that is the theory.”
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That is arguably true as regards the initial lockdowns in March and April 2020, although some of us argued otherwise at the time. But the continued lockdowns were obviously misguided at the time.
Tom Scharf (Comment #212628): “Not that Biden doesn’t have enough problems right now, Russia is clearly winning and has momentum.”
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What is your basis for that claim? Russia is making very slow progress in the Donbas, at a very great cost. Ukraine is making slow progress in the Kherson area. Both sides have significant problems with manpower, equipment, and material. It is not at all clear which sides problems are closer to becoming critical.
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My response would be the same if somebody were to claim “Ukraine is clearly winning and has momentum.”
Tom Scharf (Comment #212628)
I am in essential agreement with your post. What I see developing is that Ukraine is beginning to blame the West (US) for not providing endless military equipment to counter Russia’s overwhelming advantage in weapons. The question is: are we going to get bogged down in a war (a proxy one this time) that last years at great expense and costs in life and limb – even if those lives and limbs are not those of US soldiers.
Ukraine is no longer refraining from reporting their death and injury counts. It appears to me that they are wanting to show their dire straights in order to motivate the West to provide a much larger supply of military aid. That plea plus the MSM pushing US involvement could just provoke another military misadventure.
I have seriously wondered if our aid to Ukraine is simply getting more Ukrainians injured and killed before the end result will be something close to what was on the table from the beginning, i.e. the loss of Russian sympathizing Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
Kenneth Fritsch,
At this point I seriously doubt the Russian speaking residents of Eastern Ukraine are, in fact, Russian sympathizers anymore. The Russian speakers in Kharkiv, for example, wanted nothing to do with Russia even before Putin invaded. They saw how the Russians were treating the people in the areas that had been taken over by the Russians before the invasion.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #212633): “At this point I seriously doubt the Russian speaking residents of Eastern Ukraine are, in fact, Russian sympathizers anymore. The Russian speakers in Kharkiv, for example, wanted nothing to do with Russia even before Putin invaded.”
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Indeed. It is important to recognize that there is not such a big difference between the Russian and Ukrainian languages and that most Ukrainians are bilingual. “Russian speaking” or “Ukrainian speaking” is largely a matter of preference, not necessity.
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Many “Russian speaking” Ukrainians identify ethnically as Ukrainian. Even before 2014, ethnic Russians were only a majority in Crimea and the southern part of the Donbas. And fewer Ukrainians now identify as either ethnic or linguistic Russians.
My basis for the claim is Russia is clearly gaining ground according to both sides and Ukraine is clearly losing ground where Russia has chosen to fight (today). Because of all the propaganda you do have to read between the lines so YMMV. WSJ today:
Ukraine Fears Defeat in East Without Surge in Military Aid
Russia advances in Donbas region as U.S., allies prepare to discuss new heavy-weapons supplies for Kyiv
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-fears-defeat-in-east-without-surge-in-military-aid-11655092861?st=w0rr8w1jo4sivge&reflink=share_mobilewebshare
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Generally speaking the western media has not been in the business of spreading bad news unless it is certain it is true and undeniable. Progress is slow, and likely costly, but Russia isn’t going to give up any time soon. My speculation is it is more costly to Ukraine man for man given Russia’s better capability, but no casualty figures are public. I don’t think it is wise to sit under heavy artillery barrages and just die. My guess is dark days ahead if Ukraine does not change tactics, but we shall see.
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Russia changed tactics to their advantage, now Ukraine needs to do the same. Another reason to think it is working for Russia is they aren’t changing their tactics anymore.
Yes, I am grouping stimulus and financial assistance in the same pot. Assistance for people and businesses was necessary for a lockdown, this includes direct payments, relief from rent, bailouts for certain business sectors, free testing and vaccines, etc.
Zelensky never bothered following thru on commitments for more autonomy in areas in the east. If he had done so, the invasion probably doesn’t happen, and those areas would have become effectively Russian, to the detriment of non-Russian sympathizers, who perhaps would have moved out..
Now, a lot of Ukrainians will die, and those areas will become effectively Russian, and the non-Russian sympathizers have mostly moved out.
Tom Scharf (Comment #212636): “Yes, I am grouping stimulus and financial assistance in the same pot. Assistance for people and businesses was necessary for a lockdown, this includes direct payments, relief from rent, bailouts for certain business sectors, free testing and vaccines, etc.”
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I agree that those things were, to at least some extent, necessary. But government spending is at most weak stimulus unless it is accompanied by increasing the money supply to make borrowing easier. There was no need for the latter during the pandemic and now we are paying the price. Literally.
Why was the stimulus necessary? Real question.
1) If it was to save the economy, well.. It contributed to inflation, maybe stagflation. So perhaps it wasn’t the best save from that perspective.
2) If it was to save people from suffering economic hardship, well.. People are suffering economic hardship. Granted, some of that fed by other Biden policies and some of it is fed by the Russia/Ukraine war.
I suppose whether or not the COVID stimulus was necessary (or useful) is a function of how much benefit you think it brought and how much it contributed to inflation, I think that’s hard to dissect. But — the economy is not saved, and people are suffering economically — so, if those were the justification, that seems a questionable justification to me.
You have to compare it to the alternate reality of not providing the stimulus/assistance. You cannot assume everything would have just turned out OK. At the moment unemployment is still low, that may change. No assistance would have meant a lot more people unemployed and a lot of companies going under, at least that is what “experts” claimed. All these assessments may very well be corrupt, biased, and self serving. All the unemployed people not paying rent get evicted, then where do they go? San Francisco, ha ha?
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In 2008 there was a moral hazard with bailing out the banks, but it is hard to gauge how much pain there would have been if we justifiably let the banks die their richly deserved deaths.
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This time around the cruise lines were not bailed out and they survived. I believe the airlines were given lots of assistance and maybe they would have survived as well.
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The other scenario may more likely be not giving assistance and letting covid rip. More people would have died before the vaccine.
I think we sometimes get it wrong about some of our politicians not being very wise in their policies and actions. Part of this conception might arise because their true motivations and goals are obscured or even hidden from the public.
Take for example the recent government-imposed restrictions during the Covid 19 pandemic. The governments shut down the economy and in turn borrowed money to recompensate the public for their actions. The Federal Reserve obliged the borrowing by facilitating the printing of money. The immediate and near-term results might appear to make taking those actions seem like not-so-very-smart ideas since we now have big time price inflation, supply line problems and shortages, labor shortages and a real possibility of a looming recession. In addition we have the shutdown related problems that include the negative effects in the education of our youth, the mental and emotional problems it caused, the medical problems caused by the priority the system put on Covid-19 and the many smaller business that could not make it through the crisis.
What, however, if the motivations for these actions were, at least partly, motivated by the goal of dramatically increasing government reach and getting the public more dependent on government. I can give evidence that the attainment of that goal makes the instigators of these actions appear as political geniuses.
1. A precedent has been set for some very strict executive actions in facing an emergency of unknown danger.
2. The approach found that a majority of the population is ready to allow such executive actions without legislative or judicial restraint, and, in fact, to the contrary there was strong public support for these actions.
3. The idea of expert bureaucratic guidance ruling over elected officials of the government was used with great success where in fact those plebians who differed with the experts were shown as uninformed, untruthful and enemies of the state.
4. Government handouts were provided without regards to need which helps along the idea that all the public should come to depend on the government and not just the less well off.
5. Finally, what do all these problems, that some might say were created by government, provide? It is more emergencies for the public to surmise can only be solved by more government involvement. It is a circular process that never stops giving – the government more power.
MikeN,
If you actually believe this, I have some attractive real estate for sale starting with a bridge in NYC.
Had I been willing to tell a smallish fib about ancient tax debt, I could have personally pocketed $300,000+ for supporting ‘continued employment’ of staff at my company during the ‘covid emergency’. I didn’t fib at all, and we took not penny from the covid emergency funds; we supported the company via reduction in our equity position, combined with some reduction in staff. But I have no doubt lots of companies profited *enormously* from the ‘covid relief’ programs. I rather doubt the cash transfer to companies during the ’emergency’ was a wise investment of taxpayer funds.
Counterfactuals have to be difficult to conjecture for Covid19 policy when the factual case results were not predicted or very well predictable.
While the government spent lots of money during this period, there is no way that the government could have supported people and businesses in “making up” for government restrictions that would result in no financial duress for them. I strongly suspect that people and businesses could have adapted to the pandemic without a shutdown of the economy and schools, but in the world today the consensus is that government must be involved from the start without even allowing private initiatives.
Government wanted to, at least, give the impression that it was indeed making up for its restrictions by spending lots of money in order to keep at least some of the public from resisting further restrictions or the ones in place over time.
In the beginning of the pandemic nearly half the deaths were from nursing homes regulated by the states and a large majority of the deaths going forward were older people. In effect the government shutdown the economy for that small segment of the population and then turned around and do not prevent deaths in that segment.
There were cries from well-placed authorities that whatever restrictions were required to save just one life were justified.
I think Kenneth (Comment #212641) is correct that expansion of government power was a big part of the objective of actions taken during the pandemic. It remains to be seen how effective that will be because it remains to be seen to the extent to which people realize they were had.
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I think that another objective was to enrich corporations (who are now overwhelmingly on the Democrat side) and weaken small business and the middle class. That also seems to have been very successful.
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If you think that nefarious motives don’t explain policy, you have not been paying attention to our southern border. That is going exactly how the Biden administration wants it to go.
Kenneth,
“In the beginning of the pandemic nearly half the deaths were from nursing homes regulated by the states and a large majority of the deaths going forward were older people.”
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Sure. The illness killed almost exclusively people over 55, and more specifically, people over 70, especially those with other serious health issues. Covid was (and is!) mainly a threat for those over 70. IMHO, the entire national response to the pandemic was bonkers because it failed to clearly differentiate and explain age related risk… healthy 35 YO’s had little to fear from the virus. The crazy policies that caused so much damage (both economic and for many individuals) was a direct result of the government ‘experts’ refusing to explain the age dependent risk profile. Fauci, above all, should be carried our of town on a rail after taring and feathering… he is the single person most responsible for the general terror and resultant crazy, destructive policies. He simply refused to state that only elderly people were at significant risk. May he burn in hell for an eternity.
Thanks all for comments.
Tom, thanks for your response.
“.. An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country needs 1,000 155 mm howitzers, 300 multiple-rocket launch systems, 500 tanks, 2,000 armored vehicles and 1,000 drones to win its war against Russia. Mykhailo Podolyak said his country is “waiting for a decision” from NATO defense ministers meeting Wednesday and Thursday in Brussel….”
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He forgot the ammunition needed to support
1,000 155’s=1,000,000 shells
300 rocket systems = 150,000 rockets
500 tanks =50,000 shells
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The ammunition listed above is just to start. 20k 155mm rounds / day is only 50 days of combat at 20 rounds/day/gun. Less if you want full parity with what the Russians are expending.
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Ukraine has a problem. I don’t think you could strip NATO and the US to get these numbers.
Excluding US, NATO has only one enemy – Russia. The only reason for having weapons is to defend against Russia. Giving Ukraine weapons and letting them fight a proxy war for you with no casualties to your own population seems like a winning strategy. If Russia wins and then moves against Poland and Baltic states as their firebrands are advocating, then you will have to fight. If Ukraine makes Russia combat ineffective, then plenty of time to reload.
Phil, my point isn’t if the NATO policy of suppling Ukraine is good, bad, or ugly.
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My point is the European NATO countries don’t have the Ukraine stated needs in inventory to give. Not anywhere close.
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What?
The US is not an enemy of NATO. In fact, we are in NATO and we are NATO’s most powerful member.
[Edit: Oh, I see now. You meant, the US has other enemies, the rest of NATO has only Russia. Don’t know that I agree, but I understand now. Sorry!]
Ed Forbes (Comment #212650): “My point is the European NATO countries don’t have the Ukraine stated needs in inventory to give. Not anywhere close.”
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Is that because they ave a limited supply of old Warsaw Pact munitions? Because if we don’t have sufficient of our own munitions, then we are mighty lucky Russia attacked Ukraine rather than Poland.
Mike M,
My understanding is that in the days of the Soviet Union, NATO expected to use a combination of dominant air power and (if needed) tactical nuclear weapons to defeat a Soviet attack. I expect that is still the plan against Russia.
Not if one is concerned about the miseries of war and for whoever it affects. The US has currently spent 58 billion dollars with no end in sight to the spending or to the effects on the world economies or most importantly to the miseries of those most directly involved.
The Viet Nam debacle was promoted on the false premise that the fall of the South to the North would cause a chain of Communist take overs. I now hear these same dire warnings of next it will be Poland or some other Eastern European nation and emanating the loudest from the left.
Kenneth,
I agree, the “slippery slope” argument that Russia will next attack Poland are nonsense. Russia had consistently stated that it would not allow Ukraine to become a member of NATO. Western governments (and the Ukraine!) should have believed them.
NATO’s preferred plan is not to get into a war whose outcome is determined by artillery duels. NATO has long range artillery (not as long as Russia) and some MRLS systems. These may be better and more accurate than most Russian systems but Russia has craploads of older systems and older munitions.
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What little I have seen shows we are more or less on par with Russia here with shorter ranger but more accuracy. It should be noted that Iraq also had craploads of artillery tubes and that didn’t help them a bit. Drones have helped immensely for spotting so they need to be dealt with.
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The US has some precision and expensive munitions (e.g. Excalibur for the 155 mm). It’s the same game, If you can destroy the target with one or two shots with this, it is better than 200 dumb artillery rounds. Not so great economically against lowly human targets.
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The US is good to best at almost all phases of weaponry, but will not give all the same platforms priority depending on doctrine. NATO will have weaknesses and take some damage in a real war against Russia. It will no doubt be messy. Which side do you want to be on … the side that is better at 10% of things or 90% of things?
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The main thing I think is how it plays with air superiority for conventional war. Russia is betting their air defense systems can keep NATO out of their frontlines and rear areas, if that doesn’t happen they are toast. Then the Iraq model of “plink plink plink …” from the air will decimate them. If it comes down to a grinding artillery war on the ground then both sides will take heavy losses and Russia bets they can take more than NATO. Russia knows how to suffer, but does NATO? Open question. I think they will if they are invaded.
I think one objective for NATO has already been achieved. If Russia is having a hard time dealing with Ukraine and their antiquated weaponry then Russia is very unlikely to assess they will perform well against NATO. They are also taking a considerable dent in their weapon stocks and fighting forces.
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The other side is nothing trains an army better and shows their deficiencies better than an actual war. Russia will come out of this a better army. The same is true for all of the US’s foreign adventures.
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The other-other side is Russia is showing their cards, and the US has no doubt closely watched how Russia operates and how their weapons fare against Russia. The US will likely change their investments based on this (anti-drone capability, large scale offensive drone capability, improved artillery etc.).
DeWitt, do you think Russia is more likely to invade Estonia or Belarus? If those eastern Ukraine provinces they are demanding had been semi-autonomous and favorable towards Russia, I don’t think Russia invades.
I think NATO’s goal here is regime change in Russia, and the sanctions. Removing Russia from SWIFT and setting up a system of demonetizing people of whom they do not approve is a goal in itself.
MikeN,
Russia already effectively owns Belarus and Estonia doesn’t have the oil fields of the Ukraine, so neither. Access to Ukrainian oil is actually what Germany wanted from their invasion of the USSR in WII.
And since you actually believe that Russia, which started the takeover of Ukraine in 2014, wouldn’t have invaded the rest eventually, that bridge is still for sale. There’s also land in Florida. It’s underwater, but it’s a bargain.
NATO’s goals are regime change and sanctions? You really are living in a different universe from the rest of us.
MikeN (Comment #212661): “do you think Russia is more likely to invade Estonia or Belarus? If those eastern Ukraine provinces they are demanding had been semi-autonomous and favorable towards Russia, I don’t think Russia invades.”
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The invasion was not about the Donbas. The objective was to turn Ukraine into another Belarus, if not absorbing it directly.
Mike M,
“The invasion was not about the Donbas. The objective was to turn Ukraine into another Belarus, if not absorbing it directly.”
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Sure, but the difficulty of taking Kiev appears to have convinced Russia that complete control of the eastern regions was much easier and (maybe) enough to declare victory and hunker down for the inevitable long term sanctions from the west. Here is what Russia has gained at present:
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1) Almost complete control of the Donbas (and likely will have complete control in a few more weeks)
2) A 150 Km wide land bridge between Russia and the Crimea
3) Control of enough territory just north of Crimea to ensure continuous water supply for Crimea from the Dnipro river via an existing canal.
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The western Ukrainians I have met are adamantly, vocally and viscerally opposed to Russia…. I am not sure that is true for the eastern (Russian speaking) Ukrainians. The war has cost Russia dearly in blood and treasure, but they are not going to return control of the eastern regions any time soon, if ever.
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FWIW, I think Kissinger probably has it about right: land for peace. Not sure if that will happen in my lifetime, and certainly not in Kissinger’s lifetime.
A very good review of Russian problems with infantry numbers and the problems they face because of this issue.
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On the long side and it does get “into the weeds” of the issue. If you are interested in detail, well worth the time.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKewF8_SiIs
Primary results: representative who voted for impeachment 25%. Top contender out of 6 others 51%.
Six more Supreme Court opinions handed out today…… bringing the total to 11 for the week.
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Most of them are pretty obscure. None of the hot-button cases have been decided:
Biden v. Texas (Immediate revocation of Trump’s “remain in Mexico” allowed?) My guess: you have to follow administrative procedures.
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Carson v. Makin (State student aid at religious schools allowed?) My guess: Sometimes.
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Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (Roe v Wade gone?) My guess: yup, Roe is overturned 5/4.
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New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen (Hidden carry only allowed under special circumstances?) My guess: New York will have to broaden their open carry laws to allow normal law-abiding citizen to get permits.
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Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (Was football coach fired over prayers?) My guess: No, sorry coach.
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West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (Can the EPA stop fossil fuel use without Congressional authorization? AKA – Do “major questions” require Congress to act?) My guess: Yes, the EPA has to go to Congress…. 5/4 with Roberts joining a fiery opinion by one of the libs.
DaveJR,
That representative from costal South Carolina was way out of step with his constituents. Not a surprise that he is gone; I doubt even he is surprised. Nor will Liz Cheney be surprised when she is voted out. Representatives who disagree with a large majority of their constituents either go along with their constituents or get tossed. So it will always be.
That sould have been:
“My guess: New York will have to broaden their *hidden* carry laws to allow normal law-abiding citizens to get permits.”
“An independent German journalist is being targeted by her government for documenting the ongoing atrocities by the Ukrainian government in the Donbas region.
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Alina Lipp claims the German government has opened a criminal case against her and frozen her and her father’s bank accounts pending a trial that she is forbidden to appear at over her reporting of Russia’s military operation in the Donbas region over the last several months.”
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https://www.infowars.com/posts/german-govt-labels-journalist-criminal-freezes-bank-account-over-ukraine-war-reporting-in-donbas/
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“Forbidden to appear” at her trial??
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Looks like Germany is going back to their roots in the 1930’s
US sanctions vs Russia and Iran continues to lose affect.
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https://greatgameindia.com/russia-iran-india-trade-route/
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“ A new trade route between Russia, Iran, and India will shift the existing geopolitical order by lowering transit times and charges and will make it very difficult to keep these countries locked away and duly sanctioned by the West.”
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“According to IRNA, the shipping arrangement allows for the use of a single bill of lading for the entire journey, which minimizes transportation expenses, red tape, and wait periods.
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Two 40-foot shipping containers will make their way from Saint Petersburg to the Caspian Sea to test logistics, customs, and other operations. They’ll be trucked across Iran to the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas, then delivered to the Indian port of Nhava Sheva after arriving by ship in the northern Iranian port of Anzali. According to an Iranian official, the journey will take 25 days.”
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” Representatives who disagree with a large majority of their constituents either go along with their constituents or get tossed. So it will always be.”
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That would be democracy in action. Mind you, I dont think I would want to live in an electorate where the majority of your neighbours would vote for MTG.
Today in “conspiracy theories are just a few months away from being facts” :
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“The Pentagon on June 9, 2022 admitted that the US government has supported 46 biological research facilities in Ukraine over the past 20 years. In a document titled ” Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts “.
She’s Georgia, right? Yeah. District 14.
You should visit Alabama sometime. Georgia is a little too purple for my tastes these days.
Phil,
Who is MTG?
Ed Forbes,
There have never been strong protections for free speech in Europe, so this is nothing new. The left and the greens control most of Europe and they hate free speech; it shows.
SteveF: Marjorie Taylor Greene
Ed Forbes,
Shipping anything to India, and getting paid in a reasonable time, is in my experience, just about impossible. Really, it is comically bad… a lot like India’s business visa application process… also just about impossible. Perhaps they can make some progress by reducing import red tape and telling the Bank Of India to pay letters of credit on time, but I am very skeptical. In any case, five loadings and unloadings of a container (truck, ocean, truck, ocean, truck) sounds terribly inefficient to me.
Lucia,
Thanks. She seems a bit like the AOC of the right. 😉
Phil,
And I would not want to live with neighbors who would elect AOC to congress; there are lots of crazies around.
Yeah, MTG is nutty. But I reacted because I always love me some progressive tolerance and openness, when they explain how glad they are they don’t have to live amongst the deplorable troglodytes.
Is MTG really nutty or is that a media impression? We all know how they love to create their caricatures. Having listened to her speak, she merely seems outspoken and uncompromising in ways that many normal people would agree with ie a populist constitutional conservative, and she abhors “the swamp”, being a target of it, which makes her “literally Hitler” to the left and an inconvenience to the establishment right.
Our diligent protectors of democracy have decided that Trump, his acolytes, and his supporters should be banned from running for office, because they are insurrectionists.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/disqualifying-insurrectionists-and-rebels-how-guide
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I should also add that viewing everything through a Trump lens is getting rather tiring, really really really tiring. Really. Maybe the voters had other things on their minds when they cast a vote, like disagreeing with policies of the left, or policies of the primary candidates. We shall never know.
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You are either voting for authoritarian insurrection and the end of democracy, or you are voting for a wonderful and just world. Which side of history are you on?
Thanks Dave.
I don’t actually know that she is nutty, so I spoke poorly. Really, what I should have said that I don’t really care whether she is or not and I’m perfectly willing to concede for the sake of argument that she’s nutty. I’m not sufficiently motivated to get to the bottom of it. But for all I know you may be correct, maybe she isn’t crazy as an AOC.
I agree with DaveJR (Comment #212683). Although I would add that MTG seems to have a knack for sticking her foot in her mouth, which it makes it easy to depict her as a kook.
On a side note, I recently came across this article about changes at Stanford over the past decade or so. It makes an interesting read because it gives an example of the effects of the “culture war” on a more “traditionally liberal” left institution. It’s essentially turned the place from one of creative chaos into stodgy porridge. Ironically, it would seem, in a way, to have become more “conservative” even while I suspect it would vehemently reject that label.
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https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/
I think New York did loosen its gun control laws in an effort to have the case dropped, but Supremes took the case anyways.
MikeN,
I think that was NY’s earlier law that said you could not leave your house with a handgun without a carry permit. NY did indeed change their law to allow transport to a ‘legitimate destination’ like a practice range when the SC agreed to hear a challenge to that law, and asked the case be dropped as moot rather than allow a SC ruling, which would block similar laws everywhere… which pissed off some of the justices.
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This is a different case on the refusal of NY to issue concealed carry licenses to individuals unless they can demonstrate special need to be armed (eg someone works as a body guard for, oh say, a politician). As far as I know, there has been no change in NY law on concealed carry permits.
On looking for the data over time for infection induced seroprevalence to compare with my modeled output, I found data for the combined infection plus vaccination seroprevalence. The infection induced seroprevalence was to Feb 2022 and combined induced was to Dec 2021. The data indicates that 57.7% of the US population were infected by Feb 2022 and 94.7% were either infected or vaccinated by Dec 2021. I had only recently seen the 57.7% study reported in the media and have never seen the 94.7% study reported. Links to the CDC data are listed below.
Maybe it is just me, but I would think these results and the implications from them would be widely reported by the media.
By the way my cases model data closely tracked the infection seroprevalence data over time – to the tune of a correlation of 0.96.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#national-lab
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#nationwide-blood-donor-seroprevalence
SteveF, what happened to the earlier case?
It’s possible I was mixing up that case and some cases involving covid restrictions. Liberals did something similar with an affirmative action case.
Mark, do not apologize. MTG is definitely nutty. I know media biases for people on the right, but in MTG’s case she is an easy and obvious target.
There are, however, distinctions to be made in the nutty label. There are those who are nutty on personal/personality level like MTG and Donald Trump and those who are nutty in how they view the world policy-wise which would include AOC and Joe Biden. Of course, there are a number of politicians who meet the criteria for both types of nuttiness. I believe the four mention above could on various occasions be placed in both categories.
The 60% infected number was pretty widely reported, but only for a day or two. The 95% US immunity level was not widely reported that I saw. This is probably partly because it doesn’t fit the preferred narrative of constant covid emergency, but there is an argument that natural immunity acquired through delta is not very protective for omicron and a long time lapse leads one vulnerable to reinfection. Not much data here.
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I have not seen numbers on how natural immunity (from delta or omicron) compares to vaccines for serious illness with omicron. What has happened in the past is that if vaccines are not holding up as well then the research is delayed and/or buried by the media.
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In other news, Fauci caught covid recently.
I also eagerly await the SC ruling on Harvard / Asian admissions. This could go either way.
Tom,
I think the praying football coach could go either way also. I hadn’t been able to read facts of the case from both sides.
I do think the perhaps the school should have said it’s policy was that the coach (or anyone) can’t do any sort of “their own personal/political/religious speech” at half time after the game. So no prayers. No BLM announcements. No cure cancer etc. (Possibly excepting the schools official speech. The government can speak for itself without necessarilly providing a platform for individual speech.)
But we’ll see who wins and what the reasoning is.
Thanks Kenneth.
I just wanted to avoid the question entirely. I agree with your distinctions though.
Steve “ In any case, five loadings and unloadings of a container (truck, ocean, truck, ocean, truck) sounds terribly inefficient to me.”
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True, but with Russian navel shipping insurance under sanctions, it provides an alternative to shipping goods that does not fall under sanctions. At 24 days from St Petersburg to India, the shipping time is quite reasonable.
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“ Two 40-foot shipping containers will make their way from Saint Petersburg to the Caspian Sea to test logistics, customs, and other operations. They’ll be trucked across Iran to the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas, then delivered to the Indian port of Nhava Sheva after arriving by ship in the northern Iranian port of Anzali. According to an Iranian official, the journey will take 25 days.”
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I see the above cargo break as rail, sea, truck, sea, for 4 segments, not 5.
Ed Forbes,
When the containers reach India, they have to be transported by truck to their final destination. So 5 segments. Normal transport of a container to virtually anywhere on earth is 3 segments (truck, ocean, truck). Worst case I know of is 4 segments.
Steve, ok, I was just counting to India.
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I would be interested in the cost per container as total cost means more than just the number of cargo break points.
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With cheap labor, expensive navel insurance rates, and sanctions against Russian cargo, the extra break points may well be worth it.
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Also there are a number of navel choke points that may hinder future Russian cargo if hostilities increase.
Ed Forbes,
“….may hinder future Russian cargo if hostilities increase.”
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I think hostilities will decrease over time, not increase. The Russians are likely to dig defensive positions along the Donbas border and along their land bridge to Crimea, and tell the Ukrainians (even if discretely) they will only push further east into Ukraine if they are attacked.
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The likelihood of a negotiated settlement seems to me very close to zero, so it will be ‘facts on the round’ that control what happens.
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The facts on the ground: 1) the Ukraine does not have the military capability to displace Russians from the Donbas and the Crimea, 2) NATO is not going to exhaust their supplies of conventional weapons to give the Ukraine more capability to attack Russian forces in the east, 3) the West and NATO, like someone suffering a hangover, is beginning to understand that some of their choices, even those made with the best of intensions, have caused more problems and harm than they eliminated in the Ukraine.
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There may be enough Ukranian partisans in the Russian occupied territories to initiate guerilla attacks, but I suspect the Russians will deal harshly with any guerilla attacks. (Which is to say, Russia is NOT the USA, and shares none of its sensibilities…. guerilla attacks will be retaliated against ten-fold.)
Steve, odds are highly in favor of your points.
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Having alternate options available to put in place quickly in case things go south is also only good planning.
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And having publicly known alternative options in place may also keep things from going south due to miscalculations.
Russia is cutting some gas off to Europe for “technical reasons”. Allegedly pumps in Canada can’t be shipped due to sanctions or something. Another view is they are trying to keep Europe energy dependent as long as possible. This just reinforces how risky doing business with Russia is because of unpredictable political entanglements, and Europe must be kicking themselves for getting themselves into this situation.
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The long term outlook is Russia will be economically isolated to their detriment. This won’t break Russia, these things never do, but it is an unforced error.
“That single pristine sentence”
“Numerous previous slates of voters by states in the past”
Amendment time!
Thank god for a sensible judge.
angech,
Way beyond obscure. What are you quoting?
Steve,
I am equally mystified. If I were to hazard a guess, “numerous previous slates of voters by states in the past” seems like it could only possibly connect (somehow) to the Jan 6’th hearings, which I (like most everyone else) have been paying little attention to.
What single pristine sentence, amendment, or purportedly sensible judge are being referred to… A quick review tells me that a retired judge, one J. Michael Luttig has recently testified. Perhaps if I invested enough time I could find him saying things that would illuminate what angech is referring to. Perhaps not.
Shrug.
I see the Jan 6th hearings are going in the direction to bring criminal charges against Trump. The displayed craziness of the crazies who were involved in the attack is provided to show the seriousness of Trump’s actions.
With my view that our political systems are much too easy in punishing politicians, I go the route of the Constitution providing means of dealing with politicians in a harsher manner than the ordinary citizens, since obviously the Constitution was written to protect the citizen from the government and the government includes politicians. I would not mind Trump being charged criminally.
When thinking about potential charges against Trump I am wondering if Trump and his confidants from the beginning saw this development coming. I can imagine a conversation going something like: Mr. Trump in the event of criminal charges against your actions of Jan 6th and before regarding the transfer of power to the incoming administration we believe your best defense will be a plea of insanity. We suggest that you continue to call the election a fraud and add some craziness to your public comments. To which Trump answers: I can do that.
Kenneth,
Not sure how much of that is serious and how much is joking.
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IMHO, charging Trump with anything for the Jan 6 capitol riot would be a terrible mistake, and might well lead to significant political violence. Of course, that may be exactly the goal.
The focus on the Capitol riot was a big mistake in my view. Those people had no intention of overthrowing the government, showing up essentially weaponless and disorganized like that, give me a break.
This said, I do think an argument could be made that Trump attempted election fraud. Whether or not it would be wise to bring charges against him I can’t say. Certainly there would be downsides, as Steve notes. Personally I would be content if the guy never held any consequential public office again.
Where I personally would really like to see some sort of change is in the leniency with which the government treats unelected bureaucrats who abuse their powers. Not holding my breath.
SteveF (Comment #212712): “IMHO, charging Trump with anything for the Jan 6 capitol riot would be a terrible mistake, and might well lead to significant political violence. Of course, that may be exactly the goal.”
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All true.
The committee can’t bring charges, only the DOJ can do that. The committee can officially make a “criminal referral” to the DOJ for charges. My view is this has been baked in from the very start.
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The DOJ complained yesterday that the committee has not given the DOJ access to interview transcripts, the committee said it is “too busy” to do that now, but might get around to it around … ummmm … September. This thing is a nakedly political one sided performative display and it boggles my mind that the legacy media can’t even call them out on it, in fact actively participate in the display. It makes them both look bad.
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If one wanted to even give a passing perception this is a trial of some sort, there ought to be a defense, even for somebody like Trump. There is none. I can easily believe Trump might be guilty of something, if only not being worthy of being elected again, but this is a political prosecution by a hand picked partisan group backed by a credulous media. I don’t trust it, but that doesn’t mean I support Trump.
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In further news, Trump is not on the ballot in November, someone please inform the committee.
I will add the DOJ, to their credit, says without access to the interviews they cannot fairly prosecute some of the people in the Capital riot now, and will delay those trials to … ummmm … December if it doesn’t get access now and allow the defense an opportunity to review them.
To their credit? I guess that depends on whether these people are currently residing in lockup. Perhaps they realize a conviction with something ridiculous, or more acquittals isn’t marketable midterm material.
DOJ is currently advancing a conspiracy indictment in court that contradicts what the Committee is selling.
DOJ says Proud Boys and OathKeepers planned an insurrection. They do no include Trump, even as an unindicted co-conspirator. The Committee is all about Trump.
The Committee is also not interested in pursuing questions about who removed the police barricades, Ray Epps, and why he has not been arrested.
Steve, at the moment, and knowing what I know about the judicial ramifications, I would favor seeing what would happen in a court of law were different rules for evidence apply then they do in the House hearings.
What I get tired of hearing and seeing is that issues of political misbehavior, that in the case of private citizens could well be prosecuted, are left to the voting process to, in effect, judicate. That attitude lets politicians off the hook and in some cases allows serious transgressions until the next election. There are also cases where a large majority partisan electorate exists for a transgressing politician to remain in power past the next election.
Since Trump is no longer in office, the “next election” gambit is moot. It is uncertain whether a criminal conviction would even keep him from running in the future, but it would be interesting to find out. There is no doubt in my mind that Trump’s intentions were to usurp the Constitution and totally upset the traditional transition of power to the next administration. Oh, and by the way, I could see where an insanity plea could work for Trump.
There was a link upstream whereby the author talks about forfeiture of a politician running for office and in referring to Section 3 of the 14th amendment where that forfeiture is based on insurrection and rebellion. He in turn references the Webster Dictionary at the time the 14th amendment was written where insurrection refers to a group of individuals who fail to enforce the laws of the land. Now I believe we have seen that failure to enforce laws used by politicians to arbitrarily select the laws to enforce based on an agenda. I have always wondered why those actions are met with shrug by the system and now I wonder even more.
Mike,
Yeah. That’s the way I’d run a coup. I’d have all my guys stockpile weapons and gear in some hotel for backup and then have them go in unarmed. I’d have them do recon and go for tacos for lunch. It’s just common sense and basic paramilitary strategy when you get right down to it.
[ SARC ]
I don’t know about you people, but once the Viking King in his intimidating costume and 5 Proud Boys managed to breach the Capital and declare themselves the new American Führer then I think I would have no other choice but to voluntarily suspend the Constitution and pledge my fealty. I mean, what else could we as Americans do in that situation? Democracy was obviously over.
CNN reports on how close the bloodthirsty mob got to Pence with a cool looking graphic next to the text:
That’s all very well and good. It’s oh so shocking and horrifying and gosh darn offal. But .. stay with me here.. how does the lynching of Pence (which never happened anyway) accomplish the overthrow of the government? Thick headed cuss that I am, I can’t quite puzzle out how that works.
I think the executive branch is very intentionally designed to be immune to prosecution from the legislative branch except in extreme scenarios. That is left to the voting public to prevent exactly this scenario that is happening now. If the committee had the power to remove the executive for lesser crimes then partisan groups would do it. In fact they might have wild fever dreams of Russian Collusion that they deem actionable without a firm grasp on reality and facts. Of course that is just a hypothetical that would probably never happen.
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There does need to be a process, but it needs to be a very high bar. Very high.
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I have plenty of doubt of what Trump’s intentions were. The argument is that he was exhausting every legal means to delay certification because he truly believed there was fraud and the burden of proof is on the DOJ to disprove this. The exhaustion of legal options happens in many many close elections. Keep changing the rules and recounting until you get the result you like or until the judicial branch stops the process based on existing law.
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Had Trump been successful in actually trying some of his stupidity, the judicial branch would have ended it.
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Clownish jerk heads with ADD have the same rights as everyone else. Same as Gore, same as HRC. Exploring faithless electors and every other legal moonshot is not the same as an armed insurrection.
i don’t remember if it was part of DOJ’s case or the Committee’s, but they argued that Trump was telling everyone he won the election, was the legitimate winner, and that the Proud Boys believed it.
I think DOJ has a problem trying to prove insurrection if Proud Boys thinks Trump is the legitimate winner.
Now The Atlantic is publishing that Biden is too old and should step aside.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #212719): “What I get tired of hearing and seeing is that issues of political misbehavior, that in the case of private citizens could well be prosecuted, are left to the voting process to, in effect, judicate. That attitude lets politicians off the hook and in some cases allows serious transgressions until the next election.”
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That also allows democracy to function. When the party in power starts prosecuting their political opponents, democracy can not last very long. Unless, as Tom says, the bar is set VERY high.
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Trump was wise not to prosecute Hillary. Refraining from that was a defense of democracy. Biden would be foolish to prosecute Trump, unless as a deliberate step toward ending our democracy. Too bad that the party that defends democracy is not the one constantly screaming about threats to our democracy.
I think there is a fair chance that Biden will be forced out by the end of the year. Maybe by Thanksgiving. The current wave of “he should not run again” is just prepping the ground.
“.. The game of nominal value of money is over, as this system does not allow to control the supply of resources,” Miller said during a panel discussion at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum on Thursday. “Our product, our rules. We don’t play by the rules we didn’t create,….”
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“The world economy is experiencing a global tectonic shift, with commodities becoming more valuable than money”
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https://www.rt.com/business/557315-our-product-our-rules-gazprom/
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Interesting times ahead
Trump was in a position to do great harm to the constitutional system. We were fortunate to have Pence as the VP. What if Trump had a VP with an irrational allegiance like the crazies that rioted?
Prosecuting the crazies for insurrection does not make sense. They should be prosecuted for their criminal actions.
It takes a two thirds Senate majority to convict an impeached president – that’s a high bar. The President is not immune from criminal prosecution while in office and thus he should not be immune after leaving office.
We do not have a democracy; we have a constitutional republic where the constitution rules. I think the democracy argument is part of the bamboozling that politicians use with the public.
Kenneth,
I agree with everything you’re saying. I am ashamed to admit that the reason I don’t want Trump prosecuted is that I see no real upside and lots of potential downside.
That shouldn’t matter to me, is the source of my shame. If the President commits some crime then he ought to pay for it like anybody else. It shouldn’t matter that I think it would mostly just cause turmoil, if I held faith in my principles. Still, it does.
Oh well.
t’s a “recurring theme” from insiders “predisposed to liking the president” that Biden “just seems old.”
“The age issue will only get worse if Biden runs again,” Leibovich wrote, and already “it can be painful to watch him give prepared speeches.”
“It all feels impolite to point this out — disrespectful, ageist, and taboo, especially given the gross Republican smears about Biden being a doddering and demented old puppet.”
It’s only OK if we say it!
MikeN,
“Now The Atlantic is publishing that Biden is too old and should step aside.”
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Sure, they recognize certain defeat when they see it. But a little late to the party. Biden was in fact too old (with clear evidence of dementia) in 2020; he is not getting better. The suggestion that a dementia patient at 82 should be elected president is laughable save for its obvious danger.
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I thought of something: Biden’s recent selection for the Supreme Court (Ketanji Brown Jackson) testifying at the Senate refused to say what a woman is. I think the Senators asked the wrong questions. What they should have asked was:
“Judge Jackson, I read in your background information that you are married and gave birth to two daughters. Is that information correct?”
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“Judge Jackson, do you believe you are a man or a woman?”
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“Why do you believe you are a woman?”
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Sometimes you have to point out the absurdity of the woke left.
“It takes a two thirds Senate majority to convict an impeached president – that’s a high bar.”
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That is fine.
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The Jan 6th committee is a hand selected small partisan committee in the House controlled by the Democrats. They want to use the DOJ which is currently controlled by Democrats to prevent the ex-President of the opposing party from running again based on Trumped up sedition charges. Nope, can’t possibly see how that can be abused. Not at all.
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Oh wait.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/05/1078416631/saying-hes-an-insurrectionist-challengers-aim-to-keep-rep-cawthorn-off-the-ballo
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We could use voters or we could allow the Democrats to decide without any input from the opposing party or the voters. One of these ways will very possibly cause violence that in my view would be quite justifiable to many people.
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One party does not get veto power on the opposing party’s candidates through clever lawyering. No. No. No.
Tom Scharf,
From what I’ve seen, there are entirely too many people, i.e. more than zero, that would not only ban Trump from running again, but also, if they could figure out how to do it, not merely ostracize but disenfranchise anyone who voted for Trump.
Tom Scharf,
“Nope, can’t possibly see how that can be abused. Not at all.”
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Have you forgotten that the Democrats in Congress are willing to do most *anything* to remain in power?
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Sort of like Trump, but instead of a single half crazed individual, it is an orchestrated conspiracy of usurpation. They are wrong. They are dishonest. They are evil. Fortunately, they are going to be tossed from power in November.
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There will be consequences to their loss of power…. at a minimum, AOC and the rest of the crazies will not be allowed to serve on committees, the Biden family corruption will be investigated in depth, and there will be real investigations into Peloci’s gross incompetence in refusing National Guard troops, and how the FBI actually instigated the Jan 6 riot via many paid ‘informants’ who where part of the protest and actively urged unlawful acts. The screw will turn, and there will be consequences.
The corporate backlash against activism continues. SpaceX fired at least 5 employees one day after they posted an open letter. The letter said SpaceX executives should “publicly address and condemn Elon’s harmful Twitter behavior” and that the company “must swiftly and explicitly separate itself from Elon’s personal brand.”
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The SpaceX president responds: “We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.”
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The usual suspects are in a tizzy, ha ha.
Musk owns a controlling interest in SpaceX (78% of voting shares as of 2020). Of course they were fired. The company is privately held, and will fire any employees who publicly criticize the company (and Musk in particular). What were those numbskulls thinking?
If Trump is prosecuted he will be tried in a court of law where Trump can hire the best defense lawyers money can buy to defend him. I cannot shed any tears over that. It would also provide a much more balanced picture of the events involved with Jan 6th than you will get from the House hearing.
If Trump were to testify on his own behalf it would give him a public sounding board to explain how the election was a fraud and how he came to believe that his advice to Pence was based on best Constitutional advice.
Trump is already in the process of suing the Jan 6th committee and thus he does not appear adverse to litigation.
I believe much of the corporate wokeness was initiated, not by the executives, but by the workers – who did not get fired.
he his him
It’s certainly hard to run for office from a jail cell, but felons get to run for President. The clever lawyering comes in with the sedition clause. I think and hope that Trump’s demonstration of reprehensible character will end as it should, at the hands of the voters. Reprehensible is in the eye of the beholder though. I won’t support him again, but if he runs again and wins, so be it. Deplorables get the same vote I do and if you can’t convince enough people to not burn the place down then you might want to start looking inward.
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2022/06/17/when-all-the-lying-had-to-stop/
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WHEN ALL THE LYING HAD TO STOP.
“.. If you haven’t realised it yet, you must know by now that it was all a bloody pack of lies all along. And you’ve yet to feel the full impact of falling for it all. Your standard of living in the US, EU and Western Europe is dropping like a stone, your currencies are wrecked and inflation like you’ve never seen in your entire lifetime has already arrived with large dollops of seconds to come by winter.
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Just to add to the jollity, we’ve all been dragged into a second Cold War that’ll probably last out towards the end of our grandchildren’s lives.
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The Ukraine is a brave little country struggling against the might of a gigantic bullying neighbour? A lie, it’s the second largest country in Europe behind Russia. The ghost fighter ace of Kiev apparently knocks half the Russian air force out of the skies above it in a single day? A complete lie, no fighter aircraft can carry anywhere near that amount of air-to–air ordinance.
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Russia creates another Chernobyl by shelling a six reactor nuclear power plant wide open releasing huge clouds of radioactive material into the air? A lie or most of Europe would be dying of radiation sickness. Ukraine suffers 547 casualties while the Red Army apparently suffers over 10,000 casualties in a month? A lie…”
Kenneth,
Prosecuting Trump could well lead to a great deal of political violence, especially if said prosecution were to follow standard Justice department intimidation tactics of an armed “raid” on Trump’s residence in the early morning hours, and Trump being trotted out in handcuffs by the FBI for CNN and MSNBC news crews to televise.
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Really, it would be a thousand times more dangerous to the fabric of the country than the Jan 6 riot. I find it almost unbelievable that anyone seriously thinks prosecuting Trump over Jan 6 is a good idea. I hope Merrick Garland understands the potential danger of proceeding with any such prosecution.
Steve, I do not agree with your prediction of political violence. Besides, if not prosecuting a case for fear of a potential or predicted violence were part of our judicial rationale, that system would become even more arbitrary then it currently is.
There are a few crazies out there who will use any excuse to gain attention. Such instances shine a light on their craziness just as the Jan 6th incidence did.
Kenneth,
It’s not solely the possibility of violence. It is also precedent. In this era where bureaucrats and elected officials openly abuse their powers for political reasons, to the cheering of media and activists, Presidents could be intimidated by the threat of retaliation after leaving office. Look at the DOJ and the SC Justices right now — Merrick refuses to use the DOJ to enforce the law to prevent protesters from trying to intimidate justices, even after an attempted assassination of Kavanaugh occurred.
An argument can be made that the President ought to be an edge case, like SC Justices.
Shrug.
[Edit: Supporting link here:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republican-senators-pressure-garland-prosecute-supreme-court-protesters
]
Oh. I didn’t articulate that argument very well. Let me fix it.
I don’t think protesters hassling former Presidents will be the problem. I think activists at various levels of government bringing frivolous charges against former Presidents would be the problem. Throw enough shit at the wall, something eventually will stick.
I do not believe that a case against Trump should be considered frivolous. There are judicial restraints on frivolous cases.
I also really doubt that treating Presidents and past Presidents as ordinary citizens is going to diminish the number of politicians who line up for the opportunity to become President. If it did have some affect it might be more on those who are less scrupulous.
I would think a truly populous movement would favor not treating politicians with kid gloves – and even their favorite ones.
Kenneth,
Criminal charges stemming from what is nothing more than a political show-trial are an abuse of power. If it happens, I fear there will be serious problems; if not violence, then certainly comparable, equally unjust political subversion of criminal law when Republicans gain control. That kind of clear abuse of power means that the structure of government is failing…. failing in the sense that criminal law will have become a corrupt tool for advancing political power. Criminal prosecution of Trump based on the “findings” of a show trial in congress, should that happen, will be a catastrophe for the rule of law, and for the country.
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I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
Yes. This is bigger than Trump, forget about Trump. I don’t care about him one way or the other.
I don’t want our country to become one where the first act of each Democrat administration is to direct the DOJ to seek charges against the former administration. Full stop.
When the right does something “wrong” the “left” and “right” call it out. When the “left” does something wrong, the “right” calls it out, the left circle the wagons and either ignore it or claim the “right” are making it up, blame it on the “right” etc. What then happens is that one side gets held to standards way above the other, whilst the other side contrives of more ways to hold the other “accountable”. Engaging in this farce on matter of principle is actually counterproductive to the desired aim.
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The left already engaged in insurrection when they subverted federal law and resources to remove a sitting president based on fabricated evidence. When they attacked the WH, injuring over 100 officers. Took over city blocks and called them autonomous zones. Burned police stations and attacked federal court houses. The accusations against Trump are frivolous by comparison, which is the point.
Hillary clearly broke multiple laws when she was Secretary of State. Afterwards, she destroyed evidence. Chants of “lock her up” had far more foundation than anything Trump has been or might be accused of.
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At the time, I was strongly opposed to the idea that the Trump administration might go after Hillary and was glad when they did not. Politicians should not be immune from prosecution. But the prosecution of political opponents must have a very high bar. Otherwise, democracy can not survive.
One final point about the show trial in Congress and prosecution of Trump:
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Were Trump ever prosecuted, the jury would (surprise!) be drawn from Washington DC voter rolls. Washington DC voters would send Trump to Hell without the need for a trial if they could, never mind hesitate to convict him of treason… any conviction of Trump, no matter the charges or the facts of the case, would be 100% automatic. Once again, the idea of prosecuting Trump is, IMO, insane and dangerous, and would cause enormous damage to the country.
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Democrat leaders would all risk criminal prosecution after leaving office if Republicans got control. And such prosecution would be well deserved based on the damage they are doing with the Jan 6 show trial. Politically motivated prosecution of opponents is a terribly bad idea, but sadly, one that Democrats seem more than willing to pursue.
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As Mitch McConnell once told Senate Democrats planning to eliminate judicial filibusters: “You will will come to regret this decision, and sooner than you think.” McConnell was 100% correct: the reason Row V Wade is likely to be reversed is because Harry Reid decided to bypass Senate filibusters on Obama’s many nutty lefty judges (hundreds of them now work actively to subvert the Constitution). McConnell responded by bypassing filibusters on Trump’s Supreme Court nominations, and Roe will likely be reversed.
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Concurrently we have a SC justice in waiting (a mother of two!) who claims she doesn’t know the difference between a man and a woman. The wages of lefty, woke idiocy are costly, but unfortunately, the deceased Harry Reid does not have to pay them…. he was a dishonest, evil fool, who did enormous damage to the Republic.
Mike M,
“Otherwise, democracy can not survive.”
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Yup. In their mindless pursuit of Trump, Democrats are putting the republic at real risk.
There might be violence if Trump is put on trial, there will be violence if he is convicted by a partisan jury in a partisan jurisdiction. Real violence. Not a mob taking a tour of the Capital. Doing this would be a very bad misreading of the public, but it wouldn’t be the first time that happened.
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The threat of violence is not a reason to avoid a trial, but a flimsy political persecution is a reason to avoid a trial. Perhaps there will be new information that shows Trump is guilty of something, but I haven’t seen it yet.
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Let Trump blather on into the sunset, or pay the price for a pointless vendetta. Make Trump a martyr, just intellectual insanity.
SteveF (Comment #212754): “In their mindless pursuit of Trump, Democrats are putting the republic at real risk.”
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Maybe not so mindless. From their point of view, putting the republic at risk might be a feature, not a bug. They seem determined to destroy all other institutions on which our society relies.
Protesting is a little different to a putsch.
Tiny Third world countries can sometimes be overthrown by a concentrated group of protestors.
An organised insurrection is a totally different beast.
It needs widespread support from all layers of of government, the armed forces and the intelligence agency, journalists and propaganda (journalist) sources.
It is funny that a 4 years successful insurrection resulting in the Democrats getting in finds the now opposition so hard to put away.
They have to charge Trump who had no major backing in the same way with the very crime they committed.
The American political system is too big to be insurrected by a rag tag band of volunteers.
However starting with the rag tag band is great idea as proven in the past.
Interesting analogy!
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“Imagine oil producers are a man and Biden is
a woman. She demands a $10k ring, a $20k
dress, a $5 million house and a 600-guest
wedding, all at your expense, while publicly
announcing she’s planning to divorce you as
soon as she finds someone she likes better.
And she already has that someone picked
out, and she’s gonna bang him in the coat
room at the wedding.”