Haven’t read the ruling, but here it is:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf
The “held” part
Held:
1. This case remains justiciable notwithstanding the Government’s
contention that no petitioner has Article III standing, given EPA’s
stated intention not to enforce the Clean Power Plan and to instead
engage in new rulemaking. In considering standing to appeal, the
question is whether the appellant has experienced an injury “fairly
traceable to the judgment below.” Food Marketing Institute v. Argus
Leader Media, 588 U. S. ___, ___. If so, and a “favorable ruling” from
the appellate court “would redress [that] injury,” then the appellant
has a cognizable Article III stake. Ibid. Here, the judgment belowvacated the ACE rule and its embedded repeal of the Clean Power
Plan, and accordingly purports to bring the Clean Power Plan back
into legal effect. There is little question that the petitioner States are
injured, since the rule requires them to more stringently regulate
power plant emissions within their borders. The Government counters
that EPA’s current posture has mooted the prior dispute. The distinc-
tion between mootness and standing matters, however, because the
Government bears the burden to establish that a once-live case has
become moot. The Government’s argument in this case boils down to
its representation that EPA does not intend to enforce the Clean Power
Plan prior to promulgating a new Section 111(d) rule. But “voluntary
cessation does not moot a case” unless it is “absolutely clear that the
allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur.”
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1,
551 U. S. 701, 719. Here, the Government “nowhere suggests that if
this litigation is resolved in its favor it will not” reimpose emissions
limits predicated on generation shifting. Ibid. Pp. 14–16.2. Congress did not grant EPA in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act
the authority to devise emissions caps based on the generation shifting
approach the Agency took in the Clean Power Plan. Pp. 16–31.
(a) In devising emissions limits for power plants, EPA “deter-
mines” the BSER that—taking into account cost, health, and other fac-
tors—it finds “has been adequately demonstrated,” and then quanti-
fies “the degree of emission limitation achievable” if that best system
were applied to the covered source. §7411(a)(1). The issue here is
whether restructuring the Nation’s overall mix of electricity genera-
tion, to transition from 38% to 27% coal by 2030, can be the BSER
within the meaning of Section 111.
Precedent teaches that there are “extraordinary cases” in which the
“history and the breadth of the authority that [the agency] has as-
serted,” and the “economic and political significance” of that assertion,
provide a “reason to hesitate before concluding that Congress” meant
to confer such authority. FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp.,
529 U. S. 120, 159–160. See, e.g., Alabama Assn. of Realtors v. Depart-
ment of Health and Human Servs., 594 U. S. ___, ___; Utility Air Reg-
ulatory Group v. EPA, 573 U. S. 302, 324; Gonzales v. Oregon, 546
U. S. 243, 267; National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA,
595 U. S. ___, ___. Under this body of law, known as the major ques-
tions doctrine, given both separation of powers principles and a prac-
tical understanding of legislative intent, the agency must point to
“clear congressional authorization” for the authority it claims. Utility
Air, 573 U. S., at 324. Pp. 16–20.
(b) This is a major questions case. EPA claimed to discover an
unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its reg-
ulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely
used, statute designed as a gap filler. That discovery allowed it to
adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined
to enact itself. Given these circumstances, there is every reason to
“hesitate before concluding that Congress” meant to confer on EPA the
authority it claims under Section 111(d). Brown & Williamson, 529
U. S., at 160.
Prior to 2015, EPA had always set Section 111 emissions limits
based on the application of measures that would reduce pollution by
causing the regulated source to operate more cleanly, see, e.g., 41 Fed.
Reg. 48706—never by looking to a “system” that would reduce pollu-
tion simply by “shifting” polluting activity “from dirtier to cleaner
sources.” 80 Fed. Reg. 64726. The Government quibbles with this his-
tory, pointing to the 2005 Mercury Rule as one Section 111 rule that it
says relied upon a cap-and-trade mechanism to reduce emissions. See
70 Fed. Reg. 28616. But in that regulation, EPA set the emissions
limit—the “cap”—based on the use of “technologies [that could be] in-
stalled and operational on a nationwide basis” in the relevant
timeframe. Id., at 28620–28621. By contrast, and by design, there are
no particular controls a coal plant operator can install and operate to
attain the emissions limits established by the Clean Power Plan. In-
deed, the Agency nodded to the novelty of its approach when it ex-
plained that it was pursuing a “broader, forward-thinking approach to
the design” of Section 111 regulations that would “improve the overall
power system,” rather than the emissions performance of individual
sources, by forcing a shift throughout the power grid from one type of
energy source to another. 80 Fed. Reg. 64703 (emphasis added). This
view of EPA’s authority was not only unprecedented; it also effected a
“fundamental revision of the statute, changing it from [one sort of]
scheme of . . . regulation” into an entirely different kind. MCI Tele-
communications Corp. v. American Telephone & Telegraph Co., 512
U. S. 218, 231.
The Government attempts to downplay matters, noting that the
Agency must limit the magnitude of generation shift it demands to a
level that will not be “exorbitantly costly” or “threaten the reliability
of the grid.” Brief for Federal Respondents 42. This argument does
not limit the breadth of EPA’s claimed authority so much as reveal it:
On EPA’s view of Section 111(d), Congress implicitly tasked it, and it
alone, with balancing the many vital considerations of national policy
implicated in the basic regulation of how Americans get their energy.
There is little reason to think Congress did so. EPA has admitted that
issues of electricity transmission, distribution, and storage are not
within its traditional expertise. And this Court doubts that “Congress
. . . intended to delegate . . . decision[s] of such economic and political
significance,” i.e., how much coal-based generation there should be
over the coming decades, to any administrative agency. Brown & Wil-
liamson, 529 U. S., at 160. Nor can the Court ignore that the regula-
tory writ EPA newly uncovered in Section 111(d) conveniently enabled
it to enact a program, namely, cap-and-trade for carbon, that Congress
had already considered and rejected numerous times. The importance
of the policy issue and ongoing debate over its merits “makes the
oblique form of the claimed delegation all the more suspect.” Gonzales,
546 U. S., at 267–268. Pp. 20–28.
(c) Given that precedent counsels skepticism toward EPA’s claim
that Section 111 empowers it to devise carbon emissions caps based on
a generation shifting approach, the Government must point to “clear
congressional authorization” to regulate in that manner. Utility Air,
573 U. S., at 324. The Government can offer only EPA’s authority to
establish emissions caps at a level reflecting “the application of the
best system of emission reduction . . . adequately demonstrated.”
§7411(a)(1). The word “system” shorn of all context, however, is an
empty vessel. Such a vague statutory grant is not close to the sort of
clear authorization required. The Government points to other provi-
sions of the Clean Air Act—specifically the Acid Rain and National
Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) programs—that use the
word “system” or “similar words” to describe sector-wide mechanisms
for reducing pollution. But just because a cap-and-trade “system” can
be used to reduce emissions does not mean that it is the kind of “system
of emission reduction” referred to in Section 111.
Finally, the Court has no occasion to decide whether the statutory
phrase “system of emission reduction” refers exclusively to measures
that improve the pollution performance of individual sources, such
that all other actions are ineligible to qualify as the BSER. It is perti-
nent to the Court’s analysis that EPA has acted consistent with such
a limitation for four decades. But the only question before the Court
is more narrow: whether the “best system of emission reduction” iden-
tified by EPA in the Clean Power Plan was within the authority
granted to the Agency in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. For the
reasons given, the answer is no. Pp. 28–31.
985 F. 3d 914, reversed and remanded.
Everyone expects EPA to drop. Watching the livestream at Scotus Blog
https://www.scotusblog.com/
From the ruling:
From Gorsuch’s concurrence (on the EPA case):
Seems a direct rebuttal to the dissent (Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor), which opens with:
In other words, we think climate change is serious enough that we’re happy to re-define “air pollution” to include CO2 and thereby be interpreted as Congressional authorization to regulate it.
The good news:
The EPA is out of the CO2 emissions reduction business…. Congress must act to give them that authority. Congress likely won’t without meaningful compromise on nuclear power, reduced subsidies for renewables, and clear guarantees any CO2 reduction rules won’t be nutty and economically destructive. To even consider those issues means Congress is unlikely to act at all; the crazy green left will not ever compromise on nuclear power or eliminating fossil fuels ASAP, full stop.
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Gorsuch’s concurring opinion lays it out clearly: un-elected bureaucrats don’t get to assume vast powers that Congress never intended them to have, based on nothing more than their own say-so. I believe WV v EPA is biggest step toward the rule of law which has happened at the court in decades. There will be an enormous impact on regulatory over-reach.
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The bad news: Biden can let as many illegal aliens into the country as he wants. Count on 4+ million more undocumented residents in the country before Biden is gone.
Not sure how narrow this ruling is yet, but this is huge. Reigning in the regulatory state is a very big deal to those not measuring outcomes by the wokeness quotient.
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The era of clever liberal lawyering may be coming to an end. They will continue to try, but not likely to succeed as often.
“Today, the Court strips the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the power Congress gave it to respond to “the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”
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I don’t find these instant appeals to emotion from justices to be particularly convincing. Same things happened with abortion, and almost everything Breyer did. Pounding the table.
To the extent that these rulings absolutely force the parties to compromise with each other, they are good for society. There was compromise on guns, likely to be some compromises in many states on abortion, and if the left really believes their own rhetoric on climate, they will compromise on this too.
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There is some fear that compromising with the opposing party will cost them politically, but I just don’t think that actually happens most of the time. People understand this because most people just aren’t hardcore partisans and compromise themselves all the time.
Tom Scharf,
“…if the left really believes their own rhetoric on climate, they will compromise on this too.”
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I kind of doubt it. The green left is too crazy to reach a compromise on any question of substance. “OK, we can reduce coal fired electrical production if you agree to substitute a significant portion of that capacity with nuclear plants” is not something I think the crazy green left will go for any time soon.
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This mostly because the crazy green left *hates* material wealth for the unwashed masses, and wants “solutions” to the “climate crisis” which make those people much poorer… and hopefully force them to not have children.
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But if you happen to be a wealthy green lunatic like John Kerry who is always going to a climate conference, then flying a private jet burning kerosene (and jetting between your multiple mansions!) is perfectly OK. The hypocrisy is almost unbearable. Extreme scarcity for thee… not for me. A$$holes.
EPA and other agencies are not out of the CO2 reduction business, until Congress or the courts remove the ‘social cost of carbon’ weapon from the arsenal of regulators.
MikeN,
The “social cost of carbon’ is almost the definition of arbitrary and capricious. I doubt it will ever be accepted by the SC majority as justification for CO2 reduction regulations, especially since USA emissions reductions are not going to material influence future warming with global emissions growing rapidly. The Court has stated pretty clearly: major questions like banning fossil fuel consumption require explicit Congressional authorization.
I believe a NYT article said all the other social cost of carbon rules were also vulnerable to being struck down now. Basically anything that imposes a lot of cost or change and isn’t set out by congress will now be much harder to justify legally. They will still try it, but it will be harder to win those cases.
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This SC case very explicitly said that the EPA cannot set rules which explicitly are targeted toward changing the mix of energy use or “power generation shifting” and can only regulate individual power plants. “The answer is no”. I’m no legal scholar but it also seems to hint rather heavily that attempting to do this by regulations on individual plants (imposing unreasonable burdens on coal generating plants) and hand waving is not going to be viewed favorably either.
Tom Scharf,
“…attempting to do this by regulations on individual plants (imposing unreasonable burdens on coal generating plants) and hand waving is not going to be viewed favorably either.”
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Nor should they be viewed favorably. The entire end-around of EPA limiting CO2 emissions is because Congress has explicitly refused (on multiple occasions) to enact enabling legislation to regulate emissions of CO2. For me, the strange thing is that just about everyone understands the entire EPA scheme is just a way for bureaucratic “experts” to impose regulations which Congress does not support. Yet this doesn’t seem to bother anybody…. certainly not in the MSM and certainly not among the ‘elite’ in academia. Weird.
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Like the repeal of Roe, this ruling tells us a lot more about the people who oppose it than the people who favor it.
The environmental movement used to be about more than lawyers, IMO they have gotten lazy and have become almost entirely reliant on legal maneuvering to get what they want. Sue and Settle ™, etc. Now they will need to go back to lobbying Congress and trying to get their people elected, or convincing the public to do the same. It will take some time to change that culture, I don’t see the SC putting up with the current “legislate through regulatory agencies” trickery.
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The CDC was trying to ban evictions, OSHA was trying to do vaccine mandates. No, and no.
My very bad experience with the EPA in 1979,80 arose from their imposition of highly viscous review processes which seemed to me at the time well within the parameters of the enabling legislation. I read it all, and although I was lot younger then, thought most of it was written by summer interns.
I’m delighted if the Court has recognized that the agency has exceeded its authority. Although I’m pretty sure that despite loose enabling parameters, they were still able to confound my projects in ways that congress could never have anticipated.
I was even told by a Wisconsin DNR (may not be right acronym) reviewer that he saw his role as to prevent development, not help the developer to find project configurations with the least environmental impact.
GRRRR!!!!
‘Social cost of carbon’ I am not referring to regulations of power plants, but this has been used in various other regulations by many different agencies. I think even microwaves are covered by this.
“… VILNIUS/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Trade through Lithuania to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad could return to normal within days, two sources familiar with the matter said, as European officials edge towards a compromise deal with the Baltic state to defuse a row with Moscow.…”
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It looks as though Europe is looking down the barrel of a gun held to their head on their dependence on Russian NG. Advantage to Russia on disputes with Europe.
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Winter Is Coming.
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Russia is going to supply the minimum amount of NG to Europe over the summer and fall with no extra gas supplied to fill reserves. What happens after the first snow fall between Russian NG supplies and European policy on Russia should be interesting.
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I am Sooo glad I don’t live in Europe !
Finland and Sweden entry into NATO is not quite a done deal.
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Politically, the Turkish requirements might be a bit too much domestically for these two nations.
“.. Sweden and Finland must fulfill their promises to get into NATO”
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““The key thing is for promises to come true,” Erdogan said during a press conference at the end of a NATO summit in Madrid. “First Sweden and Finland should carry out their duties and those are in the text … But if they don’t, of course it is out of the question for the ratification to be sent to our parliament,”
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“Turkey will closely monitor whether or not Sweden and Finland implement their promises, such as extraditing dozens of individuals wanted by Ankara. “Sweden has promised to extradite 73 terrorists to Turkey”
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https://www.rt.com/news/558167-sweden-finland-nato-turkey/?ysclid=l51zxk25yo75342805
EPA:
Techincally, they can still regulate carbon. They can’t use the “generation shifting” approach.
Basically, the EPA can require businesses use the the best “system of emission reduction”. But they can’t stretch the word “system” to mean anything and everything. A “system of emission reduction” appears to be a technology or practice implemented at a particular emitting facility. It’s not something like “cap and trade” or insisting on using solar instead of coal.
The clever lawyers will try to work around it. The calculus has changed though, even clever lawyers know that wasting years and money on dubious legal strategies is not wise.
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Speaking of overly clever lawyers, the NY state SC struck down a NYC council resolution that allowed illegals to vote. The law said citizens are allowed to vote, the legal argument was that the law was silent on non-citizens, ha ha. The law also said any voting changes has to come from legislatures, not city councils. This was apparently argued in some other insane fashion.
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This type of performative display just costs the citizens money to defend the undefendable. There has been a lot of this going on lately at the city council level. The JV squad.
Tom
Glad the court saw that as “ha, ha”!
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Of course people will try to interpret a law as permitting what they want and/or forbidding what they don’t want.
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But sometimes, the law says what it says even if one wishes otherwise. In the words of the Mikado
Turkey will be paid off. Sweden and Finland will enter NATO. Sticking a finger in the eye of Putin is too important. The war appears to be settling down into a long term slog, exactly what NATO wants (but won’t say out loud). Bleed Russia, bleed Russia, bleed Russia.
I’m assuming that this is the new thread.
angech,
Sure. So what. We generally don’t correct for Special and General Relativity either because the correction is not significant except for things like the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites. Any contribution from dark matter would also be included in the masses of the planets derived from satellite orbital periods and their effect on the orbits of the other planets.
That’s the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the Earth. It requires the mass of the Earth. The local density of dark matter is very, very small compared to the mass of the Earth and any effect would be included in the measurement of local g. When measuring local g, one cannot distinguish between the force of gravity from dark matter and visible matter.
I can’t see how anyone thinks that MOND theories which require, among other things, that the force of gravity varies with scale by a parameter that is specifically adjusted to fit observation is, IMO, a much larger departure from known physics than dark matter and dark energy. As the quote from Enrico Fermi goes: “I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
While MOND theories can apparently be adjusted to account for gravitational lensing near observed galaxies and galactic clusters, The Bullet Cluster where the lensing occurs outside the visible matter or the Abell 222/223 system where gravitational lensing is observed with essentially no visible matter (see Figure 1.3 here). These images do not appear to be consistent with MOND but are completely consistent with dark matter that interacts weakly with both itself and visible matter. In the Bullet Cluster, the collision of the two galactic clusters slowed the visible matter, but did not slow the dark matter.
Wrong. Fritz Zwicky, in his famous 1937 article on galaxy clusters, discussed the possibility of using the rotation curves of galaxies to infer their mass distribution, concluding that: It is not possible to derive the masses of [galaxies] from observed rotations, without the use of additional information. So we have known for 85 years that galactic rotation curves cannot be explained by conventional physics.
“except for things like the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites”
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Right, I always laugh when people say “GPS wouldn’t work if we didn’t know about relativity”. Engineers would just note the difference in expected measurements, scratch their head and say WTF? Then proceed to quickly calibrate it out, while somebody would wave their hands and say something smart sounding like “the orbital environment is affecting our oscillators due to the differential thermal affects of the impurities in the aluminum enclosure!”.
Tom Scharf,
“Bleed Russia, bleed Russia, bleed Russia.”
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Sure, that is what the USA wants, but if Russia turns off the natural gas supply in December and Germans and Dutch are freezing to death (or even if German industry has to close up shop for lack of gas) I think there will be a lot of pressure from Europe for the war to end.
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What I think will happen in the next few months is Russia will consolidate its positions in the Donbas and along the eastern coast, then dig into a defensive posture along a frontier they define. “Bleeding Russia” is then going to be a lot harder. The Ukrainians can try to take back territory, of course, but it seems to me unlikely they are going to be in a military position to do that. In the mean time, count on the Russians to toss lots of Ukrainian civilians out of Russian speaking regions to reduce the risk of insurgency, and a formal declaration of most of the captured territory to be a permanent part of Russia.
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It will be an ugly, drawn out slog, with little to show for all the destruction the Ukraine is suffering. The Russians are not going to give up what they have gained.
FYI: A 10 minute overview on Dark Matter and it solutions/problems. I’m not endorsing it, just a backrounder. Obviously not solved yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qJptwikRc
I’m specifically addressing the desires of NATO the military organization, there are of course greater(?) geopolitical forces at play here.
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Russia can win the first game of the chess match here because they have an advantage, Europe can win eventually by not playing Russia anymore. Europe’s citizens aren’t going to forget being held hostage by Russia’s energy supply. Putin thought this invasion was going to be Crimea+ and he miscalculated. I see Russia being ostracized for decades, I could be wrong. They will likely get at least eastern Ukraine. Whether it was worth it or not is hard to tell right now.
NYT reported that CIA is operating out of Kiev, helping Ukraine’s troops. More significantly, this was leaked to NYT because State wanted Russia to know this. They are trying to push NATO into war with Russia. Unlike in previous wars, it appears to be Defense that is trying to hold back State.
Tom Scharf (Comment #213168): “Sticking a finger in the eye of Putin is too important. The war appears to be settling down into a long term slog, exactly what NATO wants (but won’t say out loud). Bleed Russia, bleed Russia, bleed Russia.”
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I fear that might well be what Biden and company want. If so, then Biden and Putin deserve to be cellmates in hell.
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But it seems that many European countries are getting nervous with the situation and want to push Ukraine to trade land for peace. If Ed Forbes (Comment #213163) is right about Russia’s natural gas supply strategy (I have no reason to doubt him on that) then an endless war is not at all in Europe’s interest. Even setting that aside, there is the refugee situation.
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But land for peace is more problematic than it sounds. Here is a pretty good explanation, if you can get past the author’s inane first five words.
https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2022/06/29/ukraine_and_the_allure_of_false_realisms_840008.html
Ukraine is the one being bled. Russia, not so much.
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The battle for Luhansk is about over with a considerable piece of the Ukraine army trapped. The Ukraine “Not One Step Back” orders are stupid.
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Luhansk Front ] Russian forces captured Zolotarivka, Spirne & Pavlohrad; Pincer on the city center
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygl8UxqbJnM
I don’t see a “land for peace” deal being done in the short term. Ukraine and NATO have admitted to lying to Russia on the Minsk Ukraine agreements. With no trust, no agreement.
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Russia sees Ukraine as a proxy in a total economic war vs the west. A short term agreement is not in Russian interests. Russia currently has the advantage in the ongoing economic war due to energy and would be foolish to give it up for a short term gain. Winter in Europe without Russian oil and NG is a scary place.
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NATO can not supply ammunition and material faster than Ukraine uses it up, so advantage to Russia. Small amounts of superior high tech weapons will not affect the strategic position at all. Quantity has a quality all of it’s own. .
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Once all of the east and all of the coast of Ukraine is secured, then Russia may consider terms with a very reduced and land locked Ukraine as a buffer state.
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More likely is a total collapse of either, or both, the Ukraine army or its political organization.
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Ukraine cannot sustain its current losses of manpower and its army units are continuously being degraded with replacements given extremely short amounts of training. Russia on the other hand is continuously rotating units out for refitting and retraining. Russian troop quality is actually getting better as the war continues.
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Germany potentially has lots of gas and oil if they allowed hydraulic fracturing. Perhaps if they freeze this winter, the greens might lose some of their influence. From a global carbon emissions perspective, it really doesn’t matter if gas comes from wells in Russia or wells in Germany. Well, maybe it does. The Germans would likely be a lot more careful than the Russians.
Energiewende from my point of view has been a disaster for both German consumers and the environment. And now they’re planning on burning lots more lignite again. So much for their responsibilities to the Paris climate accords. If they didn’t have France next door, they would already have been in a lot more trouble.
I keep hearing this record skipping over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over …
Ed Forbes,
“Once all of the east and all of the coast of Ukraine is secured, then Russia may consider terms with a very reduced and land locked Ukraine as a buffer state.”
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I doubt Russia has any interest in the Odesa region, and will be shocked if they move to take that region. They would be inviting endless popular resistance, and they will not want to post a huge army in places like that to resist the non-Russian population. The further west they go, the more popular resistance they will face. NATO countries will be more than happy to supply a long term popular resistance….. like Russia’s sorry adventure in Afghanistan.
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In fact, I suspect Russia is very close to reaching the point where they will stop their advance into Ukraine altogether. 1) They have the Donbas pretty much secured, 2) they have a land corridor between the Crimea and Russia, 3) they have secured the southeastern bank of the Dnipro near Kherson and the important water supply canal to the Crimea, 4) they are already in the process of annexing those mostly Russian language regions and handing out Russian passports. Further advance toward the west will be costly, both short and long term, and seemingly without strategic reward.
Germany also has coal. I think it will take a while to ramp up shut down nuclear plants if they chose to do so, and parts of their industry absolutely need natural gas, mostly the chemical industry. They walked into this trap, so my expectation is that they will suffer some for this, and not repeat the error going forward. You cannot wish energy infrastructure into existence even with Germany’s economy.
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Germany’s gas reserves were supposedly left more empty than usual before the war started which suggests this war plan has been in progress for a while.
Steve, Russia ( and the US in its west ) has historical solutions to restive populations. Remove them elsewhere.
I believe that the Ukraine war is going to show how useless and wasteful wars truly are. I hear discussion about this war were soldiers and civilians are pointed to as if they were just pieces in chess game and as if the real import is strategizing how the pieces are moved.
What if Russia instead had used these wars funds and left it in private hands (and not the oligarchs) to head towards a freer market economy and garnered the expected benefits. A strong economy where the effort is directed inward by a free market and outward by free trade without military threats would have put Russia in good standing with the rest of the world.
Ukraine has to seriously consider at what point it needs to consider hanging onto a goodly share of its country and proceed with a less corrupt and free market economy with a smaller country. Most nations become considerably less free during war times and the longer the war goes on the more likely many of those foregone freedoms will remain gone. I suspect that Ukraine is no exception.
The game plan of Ukraine demanding Western support will continue as long as the Ukraine effort is popular in those supporting nations. When the direct and indirect costs become more apparent to the citizens of the supporting nations, I suspect the support will dimmish. Some of those costs have already become apparent to those who are paying attention. As a practical matter US support could be merely throwing away money, not changing the war’s outcome and prolonging the killing of Ukrainians and destruction of its country. Has it been decided who would pay for the damages done to a defeated Ukraine?
As another hard cold matter are the Ukrainians fighting for a freer economy and political system. Most indexes I have seen on this matter show Ukraine and Russian being on the same plane. I sometimes get the idea that Ukraine claims to be fighting for a future Ukraine that is freer and less corrupt. I do not think that fighting this war will help get them there.
I want to touch on my comment on the decrease in Ukraine army effectiveness and increasing Russian effectiveness over time.
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The policy of troop replacement and training levels for Russia and Ukraine is similar to the difference between Japanese and US pilot training in WWII.
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The US made a point of continual withdrawal of veteran pilots from the front and sending them home to pass their experience on to new pilots. As a result, US airpower became more effective as the war progressed as this hard won battlefield experience was past on to the new pilots.
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Japanese training policy did not recall experienced pilots home to train new pilots. As Japanese veteran pilots died, new, and undertrained, pilots replaced them. Training time for Japanese pilots was continuously reduced and Japanese air effectiveness was continuously degraded.
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You can see the same difference in replacement policy at work in the Ukraine war to Russian advantage.
Ukraine is in a war because it had no choice, Russia invaded it. That’s why people have to have armies because of regimes like Putin. They could of course just submit to Russia and take the knee and maybe avoid the war. Ukraine is mostly fighting because a bunch of a-holes invaded them and are killing their people and taking their land. This is not an intellectual exercise. It is basically the same as always, tribal warfare from 10,000 years ago with the same base instincts driving it. We just have better sticks and stones now.
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The direct and indirect costs are very evident in Ukraine. A poll this week showed 87% of people in Ukraine not wanting to give any land for peace. There aren’t any signs they plan on submitting soon.
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I doubt the US is really planning on winning this war. If they wanted to “win” they would use the tools they have. They could do brinkmanship and line up a 1000 tanks on the Polish/Russian border and see if that gets Russia’s attention. Naval blockades, no fly zones. They could allow Ukraine to fire artillery and long range weaponry into Russia. It’s not worth it, so assist Ukraine in grinding Russia down. That’s what Ukraine wants, that’s what NATO wants.
Tom Scharf (Comment #213185): “so assist Ukraine in grinding Russia down. That’s what Ukraine wants, that’s what NATO wants.”
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That is not what Ukraine wants, but they will take it if it is the best they can get. What they want is to expel the Russians as quickly as possible.
Mike M,
Nobody is going to expel the Russians.
“.. It’s not worth it, so assist Ukraine in grinding Russia down. That’s what Ukraine wants, that’s what NATO want….”
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It’s good to want.
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Unfortunately the balance of power is tilted heavily in favor of Russia vs Ukraine and as the disparity increases, Ukraine losses becomes higher and Russian losses decline.
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You can see this situation in the pace of Russian advances where they focus. The pace of Russian advances are increasing. As Russia has not significantly increased its force level, either, or both, Ukraine ability is decreasing or Russian ability is increasing.
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Long term, this increasing difference in combat ability is disaster for Ukraine.
Tom Scharf,
“They could do brinkmanship and line up a 1000 tanks on the Polish/Russian border and see if that gets Russia’s attention. Naval blockades, no fly zones.”
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Sounds a lot like tactical nuclear weapon exchanges, followed by complete destruction of the USA, Europe, and Russia. I am pleased it is very unlikely to happen. But putting 1,000 tanks on Russia’s border and enforcing a no-fly zone, however unlikely these are to happen, could well end much of civilization. Nobody is going to force Russia out of Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. That is a fantasy.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #213169).
“angech, If the local density of dark matter is not zero.Then the equations and theories we use for physics on earth are wrong.”
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“Sure. So what. We generally don’t correct for Special and General Relativity either because the correction is not significant except for things like the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites. Any contribution from dark matter would also be included in the masses of the planets derived from satellite orbital periods and their effect on the orbits of the other planets.”
If we do not know what the amount of local dark matter is [if it exists then our laws, based on the assumption that it does not exist are wrong and perhaps not by a very , very small amount at all.
After all being local and invisible you cannot say how much it is.
Yet by comparison to the Solar System and Galaxies we can see that locally it all complies, we believe it complies for our galaxy yet one’s further away do not obey the same rules hence one of the two reasons for extrapolating dark matter.
The “So what” is a pretty big so what is it not?
Tom, that hardly sounds like a game plan or an end game. When is Russia sufficiently ground down? That poll of Ukrainians sounds like they think they can win the war; otherwise it would almost be a suicide pact. Do they think that the West will come to their rescue before their entire nation is destroyed? I hope somebody from the West is informing Ukraine of the limits and boundaries of the aid they can expect. If NATO truly wants to see Ukrainians slaughtered and Ukraine destroyed, instead of working towards a settlement, in order to see Russia ground down but yet “winning” the war, that in my estimation is sickening. That is like playing Ukrainians for suckers.
Weaken Russia as much as possible. If Russia cannot be beaten directly (unlikely) then proceed to a long term insurgency.
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There is no realistic game plan to have Ukraine push the Russian army out of Ukraine territory except for the long term Afghanistan insurgency plan. Give Ukraine weapons and let them fight the Russians wherever and whenever they can as long as they want to. If Ukraine wants to give up, then so be it. If they want to fight, then aide them up to the point of escalating to a direct NATO conflict with Russia.
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The plan is to weaken Russia and convince them a further invasion is foolhardy. Isolate them internationally as long as a regime such as Putin’s is in charge. There is no reason to believe Putin is going to stop at Ukraine unless he is forced to stop or he assesses the next invasion is dangerous to his future. The action now is about stopping the next invasion, that is winning for NATO.
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What’s the alternate plan? Ukraine surrenders to Russia … and all is well? Appease Putin? Then he just stops, forever? I don’t see that as realistic based on Putin’s recent behavior. There is no settlement here, Russia doesn’t want to stop the war, neither does Ukraine.
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The Ukrainians aren’t children. They know they are pawns in a greater conflict. They can choose their future accordingly. NATO allows Ukraine to be slowly destroyed, or NATO allows Russia to quickly plunder Ukraine. Not exactly good options. One of these options has deterrence though.
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Ukraine is obviously in a tough position. If I was them the plan would be to stop the Russians somewhere, get a cease fire, and try to get NATO protection somehow. This is probably unrealistic. The Taliban kicked Russia (and everyone else) out of Afghanistan by making it clear they would be unwelcome today, tomorrow, and forever. The insurgency will never stop, ever, because they live there and will never concede.
Perhaps Ukraine will be left with its borders in 1654.
Tom Scharf,
I think Kissinger (and others) have it about right. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/henry-kissinger-to-settle-the-ukraine-crisis-start-at-the-end/2014/03/05/46dad868-a496-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html). I recognize their advice is not currently popular (especially in Washington), but eventually some kind of negotiated settlement, with security guarantees for the remainder of the Ukraine jointly by the west and Russia is the likely outcome. The Russian speaking population in Eastern Ukraine is not going to resist Russia with endless insurgency like the Taliban did… that would more likely happen if the Russians go further west. IMO, righteous indignation is not going to bring peace, nor leave anything but rubble in the Ukraine. Everything the Biden administration has done is driven by a combination of righteous indignation and fear of WW III. They are going to have to get past the former, and continue to avoid the later.
mikeN,
This map is very informative about likely final outcomes in the Ukraine:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Russianlang2001ua.PNG
I don’t see how that map is informative, unless it is to show the folly of Putin’s project. The areas where Russian was dominant were mostly already not under Ukrainian control.
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But that map is 20 years old. I am pretty sure a modern map would look quite different except for the heavily Ukrainian areas and the areas lost in 2014. There are not two main demographic groups, there are three: Ukrainian speaking Ukrainians, Russian speaking Ukrainians, and Russian speaking Russians. Note that Zelenski would likely have been in that last group when that map was made but is presumably now in the first group.
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Note that both language and ethnicity are a matter of self identification. Lots of people speak both languages and have mixed ancestry. In many cases how they identify has changed since 2014. And younger people are, I think, more likely to identify as Ukrainian than their parents.
SteveF (Comment #213195): “eventually some kind of negotiated settlement, with security guarantees for the remainder of the Ukraine jointly by the west and Russia is the likely outcome.”
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So what would those joint security guarantees look like and how would they differ from the existing joint security guarantees?
A propos of (imo) stretching the definition of “air pollution” under the Clean Air Act to include CO2, a California court has deemed bees to be “fish” under California’s Endangered Species Act.
[Detail: the definition of “fish” in the Act includes “invertebrates”. The first court to rule said this should be interpreted (in context) as marine invertebrates. The Third District Court said that this distinction is not literally made:
]
The legal process took at least 4 years. Given that protection of bumblebees is unlikely to be politically contentious, I find it ridiculous that the Legislature could not find time to amend the Act to avoid such strained interpretations.
Mike M,
“…unless it is to show the folly of Putin’s project.”
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Please explain the folly of Putin’s project. And while at it, perhaps you could describe what the “project” is; confirmed sources defining that project rather than wild speculation would be good.
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“So what would those joint security guarantees look like and how would they differ from the existing joint security guarantees?”
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No NATO membership for Ukraine, treaty ceding control of most Russian held territories for a long time (eg 50 or 100 years, but not forever), treaty guarantee of no Russian invasion of the remainder of Ukraine signed by Russia, USA, and NATO countries, lifting of sanctions on Russia and Russian nationals over a specified time, some agreement on allocating reconstruction costs outside the Russian controlled areas. Or similar…. give and take is possible.
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I just don’t believe for a second that simply supplying Ukraine with weapons is going to ever drive the Russians out, and the more weapons (and more advanced weapons) supplied to the Ukraine, the greater the chance for escalation. I know this view is unpopular in many circles (and often criticized as “appeasement”), but I am far from the only person saying these things, and the longer the war grinds on, the more people will come to realize that “driving Russia from all Ukrainian lands” is a pure fantasy that is just not going to happen, but that fantasy will cause enormous (and IMO unnecessary) suffering in the Ukraine.
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Unfortunately, it seems to me many people in Washington believe fantastic things.
SteveF (Comment #213200): “Please explain the folly of Putin’s project.”
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Seeking to annex lands occupied bu Ukrainians who do not want to be Russian citizens.
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SteveF: “treaty guarantee of no Russian invasion of the remainder of Ukraine signed by Russia, USA, and NATO countries”.
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Which would differ how from the Budapest Memorandum?
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No doubt a secure peace would be better for Ukraine than war, even if it involved some ceding of territory. But it is not at all clear that such a peace is available at present.
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StevF: “I just don’t believe for a second that simply supplying Ukraine with weapons is going to ever drive the Russians out”.
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Yes, that is hard to imagine. But Ukraine had no chance of lasting more than a few weeks, or of keeping Russia from taking the entire Black Sea coast, or of driving the Russians back from Kiev, or of preventing the capture of Kharkiv. So I am not inclined to write them off.
Mike M,
Russia has 3.5 times the population of Ukraine, and GDP of ~$1.7 trillion versus $0.12 trillion (and falling); per capita in the Ukraine is about $2,800 per year. Ukraine is being destroyed economically. I think the Ukraine would be wise to try to stop the war now, not 6 months from now when their country will be half rubble and their population even more poor than now.
SteveF (Comment #213202): “I think the Ukraine would be wise to try to stop the war now”.
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Of course. The problem is that the only way to do that would be to surrender. They understandably do not regard that as an option.
It is not just a surrender of land. Russia is demanding Russian be on equal footing with Ukrainian in Ukraine.
My wife is in Taiwan now, they are on the back end of their first big covid surge. Mandatory masks outside, ha ha. Mandatory masks on incoming planes, 4 day hotel quarantine, had to get a special entry visa. She had to have a Taiwan phone number while she was there (for monitoring), but they wouldn’t let her go to the airport sim card store to pick it up. Chaos ensued. They did actually call her to check she was properly staying in quarantine.
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Once your rates are as high as Taiwan’s got and are, it is silly to screen at the border. They have 10K’s of cases a day now.
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Those paranoid days seem like forever ago in the US.
Taiwan has a highly vaccinated population; they will likely have a death rate in the range of 1 in 500 cases or less, and as everywhere else, almost all who suffer severe illness or death will be elderly to very elderly. Hysteria ensues anyway. Irrational fear (and the policies it produces) are always stupid and destructive.
An ideal peace agreement in my view would be for the Russian territorial gains in Ukraine to become independent nations or some other entity that is not part of Russia. Those enclaves may initially be under Russian influence but would be able to change overtime more towards Ukraine or Russia depending on those two nations political situations.
I also believe that the idealistic take on Ukraine was that it was transitioning from a corrupt and unfree political system to something better. Unfortunately a long war will probably result in a regression from that idealistic view.
SteveF,
I don’t like the sound of elderly to very elderly suspecting at 79 I would find myself somewhere in one of these cohorts.
Our approach to the plague evolved over time and was based on what we took to be sophisticated knowledgeable advice from the gang of MD’s we hang out with. Even my brother Dr. Dr. Ferguson.
Mostly N95 masking and no indoor socializing.
We understood when we took the Viking Athens to Venice cruise that everyone on board would have been “provably” vaccinated and negatively pcr tested within 72 hours of embarkation ( fancy word for coming aboard).
We also understood that the vaccinated could become infected and spread, And so Janet became infected, and later me as well but in Rome.
Neither of has any known physical affliction so we were confident that we would recover if we caught it. We did recover, but I’m not so sure about whether I’ve got a long covid issue. I seem to be needing a couple of hours of nap on many days. Before the trip, it might be 45 minutes in late afternoon. Now it is more although not every day.
There is also nasal congestion but it seems to be diminishing.
I did seem to get brain fog after the second shot and it lasted for a bit more than a month. I spend some time trying to write code for a long term project which is slowly advancing and involves working well beyond my competence. Usually, I can overcome some obstacle in a few days – trial and error, not giving up, and remembering what I’ve already tried.
But, alas, I just jammed up and couldn’t get anywhere. I came back to it a couple of months later and knocked it out in an hour doing something that I hadn’t thought of earlier.
If I still have the fog, it hasn’t provoked any criticism.
if you disagree, feel free.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #213210): “An ideal peace agreement in my view would be for the Russian territorial gains in Ukraine to become independent nations or some other entity that is not part of Russia.”
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I don’t think that there is any reason to believe that those areas want to be either independent or part of Russia, other than the areas that were already de facto independent. I don’t see why Russia would agree to that unless they thought they could set up puppet governments. I don’t see why Ukraine would agree unless they thought those areas would quickly rejoin Ukraine. I don’t see why the inhabitants would agree to an indefinite period in limbo. Does not seem workable.
Kenneth, the independent countries would end up being continuous war zones, and then Russia will invade on behalf of the independent country. This is how they started the current war, recognizing these areas as independent countries and saying they were sending in troops as peacekeepers.
A long form summation by an expert of why AI is going to kill us all, and can’t be stopped now even if we wanted to stop it. A pretty hard read.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities
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Basically eventually one of the high level AI’s will be Putin or Hitler, access the internet, and for example order some modified highly lethal DNA, and pay some humans to distribute it. It’s a pretty paranoid read, but he backs it up with a lucid argument. Very much convinced AI self evolution cannot be constrained because software bugs basically. This theory is easy to believe as I use my bug ridden phone every day. And it only takes one getting out of the box.
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Once AI exceeds human capability, don’t expect lowly humans or their amateurish methods to be able to stop it from doing what it wants, and one of them will want to “kill us all”. Yes, it is the intellectual version of Skynet.
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Counterpoint:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer
Mikes M & N, I used the terms ideal and idealist as an antithetical to Tom’s 10,000 years of tribalism even knowing my ideas are not predictive. It would take a whole new way of thinking about political systems that used freedoms to an advantage and seeing smaller political independent entities as more efficient and oriented away from all sizes fits one.
Without thinking that people and political systems can change, and for the better, we are back to Tom’s tribalism and not having learned anything in 10,000 years except to make killing and distruction. more efficient.
My theory is that you can’t deprogram out millenniums of human base instinct evolution by 100 years of book learning. Even college professors still like sex. IMO the behavior on both local and global scales is better explained many/most times by viewing people as 5 year olds rather than applying a façade of what we wish humans really were. Trump, AOC? I rest my case. At best, these two models are in constant conflict and sometimes our more sophisticated selves win out.
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Eventually with whatever form of ceasefire happens, I fully expect Putin to declare eastern Ukraine “independent” with their own local government. They will be freed from the Nazi influence, blah blah blah. This independence will work out fine right up until they declare they are independent from Russian state influence. Eventually a voter referendum will be held a few years later once NATO finds another toy to play with and Russ-Kraine will be absorbed into the Russian federation of everlasting joy and happiness. Lot of Russian soldiers will man the polls to make sure things are “fair”. All the Nazi’s who want to stay independent will find radioactive pellets in their Cheerios or be publicly executed as a warning to those who might want a life outside of Russian statehood. Maybe they will actually want to be part of Russia, but one thing for sure is there will be a purge large or small of anyone who feels differently. Mostly an open invitation to move to western Ukraine.
Tom Scharf,
“A long form summation by an expert of why AI is going to kill us all, and can’t be stopped now even if we wanted to stop it.”
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It is so stupid that I can’t imagine who could actually believe such tripe.
Tom Scharf,
Yes, Putin is a murderous thug. But he is already 69, and there is a limit to what an old, very bad guy can do, especially if he suffers severe illness (as some have suggested he does). Within a decade it is likely saner heads will be in charge in Russia. Of course, in reality, nobody in their right mind would want to invade/control Russia; the whole idea is preposterous, but someone like Putin can’t see that and seems to imagine NATO wants to invade. Like I said, saner heads will eventually be in charge in Russia.
An important distinction: sex is good; war is bad.
kenneth,
“An important distinction: sex is good; war is bad.”
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Finally! Something everyone can agree on.
John Ferguson,
“I came back to it a couple of months later and knocked it out in an hour doing something that I hadn’t thought of earlier.”
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Donno. The same thing has happened to me (get away from a hard problem for a couple of months, and upon return the solution becomes obvious) when I was in my 30’s and 40’s. Maybe you are in terminal decline…. from COVID or age, but I would not bet on it.
1. It is a near certainty that generalized artificial intelligence (the evolved ability to solve problems outside their training sets) will exceed human capability. The time frames differ, but few people doubt the outcome will occur.
2. Generalized intelligence must be trained and programmed in certain ways if we want them to solve problems outside of their training sets. Alpha-Go isn’t dangerous, but a generalized version of this at a 1000 fold scale might be. Alpha-Go taught itself to play the game and exceeded human ability in a few days of self play.
3. It is an explicit goal of AI to solve generalized problems.
4. AI is programmed to evolve with rewards and constraints. Don’t kill humans might be one rule.
5. Evil programmers intentionally designing a malevolent AI is not the problem being addressed.
6. The major point being made here is it is not the intent or goals that are a problem, but the almost certain imperfect execution by flawed designers, programmers, and operators. Certainly experimenting with GOF on viruses could never go wrong because they have safeguards in place, well AI does too.
7. The paranoia is that you don’t get a do-over once the flawed AI has left the building, and the chances of designing a flawless constraint system on the first try(s) is approx. zero.
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It is a serious argument though that deserves a serious response. I have been in the “this is alarmism” camp for a while, but haven’t considered what a buggy superintelligence might look like, and also didn’t consider whether a flawed constraint system could be called back if HAL didn’t want it to.
SteveF,
More like accelerating dwindles.
The situation in eastern Ukraine is confusing with VERY different situation maps shown between the ISW and Russia.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A71vL3UBqCw
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The Russian tempo of combat has increased markedly as seen in how fast the Russians have taken the Lysychansk Pockets.
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Russia is claiming on their map that the entire eastern pocket has collapsed, they are attacking Siveresk, and the battle for Slaviansk has started.
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ISW relies mostly on Ukraine for its information and shows the eastern pocket still existing all the way to Lysychansk.
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I lean towards the Russian maps being closer to correct due to how fast the Russians are moving and that the Ukraine high command is trying to spin a major setback by slowing down their public situation reports.
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The next day or so should show which side is spinning the situation the most. If the Russian account is true, Ukraine will be forced to pull back a considerable distance to try and stabilize their lines or risk a number of additional pockets.
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Russia sees itself as holding the winning hand in this war and sees no need to agree to a cease fire prior to the destruction of the Ukraine army. Any terms will be fully on Russian terms.
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Melos: “. since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must…”
John Ferguson,
“More like accelerating dwindles.”
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I have not the slightest clue.
Dwindles was a Pogo expression, maybe before your time. I thought it a better word than decline, but same idea,
For AI to end the world as we know it, would require AI to have been given the power to do that. Unlike movies and stories about such topics where in the name of purifying government power such tragedies come about by way of private entities in various forms, I could see a government having this capability through AI.
Wait a minute, their are governments that currently have that power without AI.
John Ferguson, from what you write it appears to me that have surmised that you might have some longer Covid-19 issues, but none you think cannot be overcome and none very debilitating.
I think I have a good baseline to be used for brain fog or loss of brain power with age. I play chess against a computer on a regular basis and play at the highest level which says nothing about my abilities since much more powerful computer chess exists, but it does give me a baseline. There are differences in outcomes for me with 1 drink or 2 or if I am agitated or feeling calm. If I am impatient and go for a quicker win I am playing to the computer’s advantage and I will have to fight for a draw or lose. The computer has a weaker end game where I have an advantage.
I have noticed with age that there I times I interupt the game and come back later because I feel I have overworked or will have to overwork my brain. I have the same feeling when I am working on a programming problem. I do not take naps but I do feel my brain needs them.
Hi Kenneth,
The chess computer poses an interesting issue. Your games might seem to you to have level success, but what if the reason is not that you are not losing mental sharpness but the loss is compensated by increasing understanding of the computer’s game?
When I was 40 and enjoying the Osborne I’d just bought, I could spend hours at a time writing code – foolish me – I was trying to detect early indicators of price trend on tapes of NYSE daily transactions a friend loaned me. Freshly divorced and suddenly with lots of time, I spent 4 to 6 hours every night working on this, ultimately for naught.
Now I can be as productive as I ever am for about an hour, then I stall and need to come back to it later.
I write comments frequently on the blog of a columnist I respect and think that my writing has improved in the last 20 years. The test is whether what I’ve written has been understood by the other commenters.
I’ve assembled the small machine shop I’d always wanted but was never able to fund. CNC Mill and Router, two 3d printers, lathe, drill press, saws, compressor, etc. the usual stuff.
With the CAD solid modeling software, I can design and make almost anything within the capabilities of my tools.
Current project is a fully functional SwitchBlade 300. My guess with the time Janet allows me, I’ll have something flying this fall.
Aside from the aerodynamics of what is essentially a canard, the challenge will be controlling it via elevons on the forward wing and operable vertical stabilizers. My guess is I’m going to wreck a lot of the early “mules”.
My conclusion from my 20 years of retirement is to do things you are not good at. It takes longer and there can be improvement which is pleasant to think about.
John, you are correct about learning the computer chess program weaknesses and that potetialy being a source of mistaken change in skill on my part. I did, however, learn those weaknesses early on and thus ongoing I think I have a baseline for my mind. I have also learned my weaknesses playing the game. I sometimes tell myself that if I am not willing to take the time to thoughtfully develop my pieces I should not be playing.
From what you have posted I take it that you program at a more basic and difficult level than I do. I use R a lot and look up code to perform various functions. It has been an evolving process with R and I have been pleasantly surprised what can be done with it.
It sounds like you retired early as I did. I enjoyed school and all the jobs I had after school, but I think I have had more satisfaction with my life efforts after retirement and that includes making compensations for aging.
Kenneth,
Retirement has been so much better than working. I can do things which interest me and which my skill would never have been sufficient to get paid for doing.
My dad was first person in our family to retire, at 67. Others worked out their lives, one passing at age 77 at the throttle of the locomotive he was hostling.
Dad called me about a year after retiring and told me to quit buying new cars and eating out and save our money like crazy. Retirement was wonderful. He played sax and clarinet in a number of swing bands in Chicago suburbs, one, the “Freenotes” in Hinsdale which was composed of retired Stan Kenton guys.
They were doing 3 jobs a week, and all of them loved it. They were really good and I have the tapes to prove it.
We did what he recommended. I was able to quit at 61. We sold our south beach condo, moved onto the trawler we already owned and lived aboard for ten years; anchored out or moored, only in marinas when we had to take a land trip.
I also discovered that I’d hated being an architect. It’s tough to perform every day when you know that you don’t have an adequate grasp of what you’re doing. The problems we encountered generally came to me and I did the best I could but sometimes I knew I was way out on a limb. Fortunately whatever I did worked out, or if it didn’t no-one ever told me.
Apparently there is a PTSD (light) which can afflict folks in the sort of situations I was in – nightmares about problems at the office. It
continued for 10 years before finally going away. Mostly just before a pour getting a phone call from the field that it had been discovered that we were 6 inches into the neighbor’s property.
I understand that a typical academic version of this is waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat having just dreamed of facing a full lecture hall and having completely forgotten the lecture du jour.
Ed Forbes, I never bothered to learn all this Ukrainian geography, but I think the Russian reports are more likely to be correct.
I’ve read these ISW reports many times, and they seem to have a pattern of ‘Ukraine is causing all sorts of problems for Russia. Russia had to remobilize forces to X to stop counterattacks by Ukrainian forces, and their offensive at Y is stalled. Troops and weapons supply is a problem for Russia.’ This repeats over and over with X and Y changing, and the red area just gets bigger without acknowledgement of what was lost.
The latest report says Ukraine evacuated troops, which I thought they had been ordered to stay. Looks like Luhansk is completely under Russian control, while ISW gives very little area in Donetsk to Russia.
john ferguson (Comment #213232): “I understand that a typical academic version of this is waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat having just dreamed of facing a full lecture hall and having completely forgotten the lecture du jour.”
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🙂 For me it was the lecture starts in 5 minutes and I had completely forgotten to prepare any notes.
The alarmist position on AI safety would be this length post (from AI safety researcher as opposed to armchair speculator) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities
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Same person behind the AI box experiment (would a human let an AI “out of the box” experiment – answer yes). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box
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I remain far from convinced on real progress to AGI but the safety aspect is certainly worth investigation. The constraint system (AI alignment) is much much harder than “dont harm humans”.
Phil,
The guy is, IMHO, bonkers. Maybe he watched ‘a space oddessy’ one time too many.
If you, the human, are the AGI and the creators are at dog level then I think you are probably going to have success stopping them from terminating you. I think it is worth considering it from the POV of the AGI. Are you malevolent, or just want to survive? Who knows?
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I think people generally fail to imagine what a wide gap would really be like. The AGI is not only magnitudes faster than you now, it’s also magnitudes smarter. There is an open question of whether this development would be slow and steady or exponentially fast when it happens. The AGI updating itself …
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This is only for the accidental release of a buggy AGI. I think it’s pretty clear that global adversaries would use AGI’s for their own purposes. Burrow into the Chinese and Russian networks and these might not be friendly on purpose.
There are many problems with solutions beyond any level of intelligence…. the potential permutations in chess or go are tens of orders of magnitude greater than the number of atoms in the universe. No intelligence or potential intelligence can ‘solve’ the game of chess; computers today are much stronger than humans (2860 rating versus ~3400 rating) but there is not and there will never be artificial intelligence that solves chess in closed form. The programs are stronger mostly because they are faster and can search deeper. Yes, Google’s neural network program is claimed to be the strongest program, but even that claim is hotly disputed.
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The potential for advanced general intelligence has been touted endlessly since my youth, and is omni-present in sci-fi movies, of course. But it seems to me to be still very far away. It is a bit like fusion power, but with lower cost research. Being better at some types of problems does not really suggest to me any progress toward artificial general intelligence.
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If, as is often claimed, there are almost certainly hundreds if not many more intelligent civilizations in the Milky-way galaxy, and if those civilizations eventually develop advanced artificial intelligence which inevitably decides to kill off their creators and take over the entire universe, then why are we stupid humans still here? I think the question pretty much answers itself. ‘overblown’ is perhaps too weak an adjective to apply to the endless AI scare stories.
Frankly, he know vastly more about AI then either of us, and I don’t think anyone who managed win the AI box experiment against another human is bonkers. His views are far from left field among those working in the AGI alignment community which is where I would look for informed views. I would readily acknowledge that my prior on this (a strong disbelief) could be rooted in motivated reasoning since I lack enough knowledge for an informed view. Within the community, I note practitioners that doubt AGI is going to be obtained from simply upscaling existing LLMs. The most convincing counter-evidence I know of the $500,000 bet offered to Musk on AGI. https://twitter.com/wadhwa/status/1532000359098593280
I will take some comfort from that.
“If, as is often claimed, there are almost certainly hundreds if not many more intelligent civilizations in the Milky-way galaxy, and if those civilizations eventually develop advanced artificial intelligence which inevitably decides to kill off their creators and take over the entire universe, then why are we stupid humans still here”
I dont think that argument has less broad assumptions than arguments for dangerous AGI. For starters, advanced AI does not suddenly negate the laws of physics. (eg speed of light). Nor does an AI that inadvertently killed its creators because of a misunderstood utility function automatically want to rule the universe.
AGI? How does that differ from AI? As near as I can tell it is effectively a recognition that AI is not in any way intelligent, but they do not want to openly admit that. So they need a new term for a hypothetical system that would actually be intelligent.
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In principle, it ought to be fairly straightforward to keep an AGI confined. Like keeping pathogens confined in a lab. OK, not comforting.
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So I guess the safety issue is whether AGI is actually possible and if there would be any reason for it to be malevolent.
AGI – is Artificial General Intelligence and is supposed to be able to learn, comprehend, and do intellectual tasks at close to or better than humans. Does not imply sentience. Does not actually exist despite hype.
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Look at the AI box experiment if you are confident of confinement.
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The safety question isnt about a machine become “malevolent” in ordinary sense, but more like an inadvertent result of a poorly described utility function. See https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai for example. The trick is what constitutes “well described” when applying to an alien intelligence. Google AGI alignment for the ugly details.
Phil,
I very rarely trust experts, and if your linked article is any indication of the general thinking in the “AGI alignment community” of experts, then this seems a group of experts who especially should be ignored. Perhaps my perspective is distorted by a lifetime of working with technology and the many foibles of computer programs, but with that lifetime comes experience proving, without doubt, that experts are very often very wrong, and the more extreme their predictions, the more likely they are very wrong.
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If you don’t mind saying Phil, what is your background and what motivated your interest in AGI?
It’s been 15 years since a human beat a computer in chess. I still remember Chessmaster 2000 whose biggest feature was humorously intentionally making mistakes a human might make to make gameplay more interesting. It was demoralizing to get thumped by computer chess programs time after time. That might make you a better player but wasn’t much fun.
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I don’t follow this closely, but the battle now I assume is who can write the best chess program. The competition being you get so much time, or so many cycles, and so much memory to make a move. Intelligence efficiency. I once tried to write a chess program, it is fricking hard, very, very, hard.
Just because it can’t be solved completely doesn’t mean there aren’t distinctly different levels of competence. Alpha-Go was arguably a much bigger breakthrough than chess. The numbers are even bigger and strategy more complex.
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But that is the wrong model for AGI. This is more or less being able to use training in one domain and applying it to others * effectively *. Understanding that piece sacrifices in chess could be mapped to military strategy and so on. This comes naturally to humans but doesn’t really work for standard procedural programming most common in software.
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You turn the AGI loose on “the internet” and I’m guessing it can exploit the many weaknesses of humans pretty easily. A simple example would be Twitter bots to create social division.
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AGI is just five years away, ha ha. There have been endless claims like this. The alarm is definitely speculative, but it is hard to really gauge.
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Let’s say an AGI was able to derive relativity from known sensor data, then things have changed in a groundbreaking way. Then it starts suggesting new experiments to run, and so on. It derives the Theory of Everything. Talking to humans isn’t going to be very interesting anymore.
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As for the Fermi Paradox, my favorite paranoid theory is The Dark Forest. The foolish newbie cockroaches get serially stamped out once they show themselves. The “we are here” radio emissions haven’t traveled very far yet on cosmic scales. AGI’s might see resource hungry bio-masses as just another mundane galactic virus.
SteveF,
I think it is natural to look at the technological progress made in the last 75 years in computer hardware and software and wonder what this will look like in another 75 years if that pace of innovation continued. Moore’s law, etc.
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The latest GPU has 80 billion transistors. The brain has about the same number of neurons. Maybe humans just aren’t smart enough to build something smarter than themselves. Other animals certainly are not able to do this.
LoL….
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“.. A lawsuit filed by whistleblower Brook Jackson alleging Pfizer and two of its contractors manipulated data and committed other acts of fraud during Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials is paused following a motion by the defendants to dismiss the case.
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In an interview with The Defender, Jackson’s lawyer said Pfizer argued the lawsuit, which was filed under the False Claims Act, should be dismissed because the U.S. government knew of the wrongdoings in the clinical trials but continued to do business with the vaccine maker….”
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https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/pfizer-whistleblower-lawsuit-fraud/
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I am Sooooo glad I passed on the jab
Tom Scharf,
“The latest GPU has 80 billion transistors.”
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You are comparing many-connected neurons to limited connected transistors that are physically unaware of their surroundings. But putting that aside, the big issue is that the GPU has no physical awareness, and no ‘self’. All talk of AGI is, IMHO, ridiculously early, silly, more than a little crazy, and wildly disconnected from (silicon) reality.
Could someone develop artificial general intelligence? Donno. Maybe. But it is clear we are nowhere near that. What we have is people who oversell their technology, and a cheer-leading team of folks who likely could not tell the difference between their own a$$hole and a hole in the ground. YMMV. Mine won’t: this is a crazy subject for discussion in any thoughtful forum.
AI has been “real soon now” since I started learning LISP back in the ’80s. There are some problems that used to fall into the AI bailiwick that have had lots of progress – speech comprehension being one, language translation being another. But the main problem with AI is that we still don’t understand th physics of human thought or even have a definition of “inelligence” that separates the living things from one another in a clear manner that all will agree on (pet owners know that their pets “think” but don’t necessarily believe they think as well as they do).
The Turing Test was proposed as a way to dfferentiate human level of thinking from others, but now folks are thinking that isn’t really enough.
For now, I fall in the camp of thinking that some sort of man made and self aware intelligence is possible, but we are a long ways away from being able to measure that kind of thing so I doubt that we’ll have anything like that very soon.
Note that we have been putting decision making capabilities into the computer software for a long time. (Think engine controls, fly by wire, etc.) Usually, when we do that sort of thing we put a tremendous amount of effort into making sure that it makes good decisions under all foreseeable circumstances. I worry about when soebody sells the idea of putting a “learning system” in charge of operating a critical piece of infrastructure and discover that the lesson we thought it had learned was something else entirely.
The Ukraine propaganda war is in full swing.
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Ukraine supporting outlets are saying major portions of the last 2 captured cities are almost totally destroyed, along with most of the major industrial sites.
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Russian supporting sites are saying the Russians took both cities by storm and with little major destruction.
No mistake on the smaller towns. They are being flattened if defended, but it looks as though the Russians want the major industrial cities mostly intact.
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One site with drone shots of the cities. 5th graphic down.
https://southfront.org/ukraine-lost-battle-for-lisichansk-but-continues-fighting-in-media-videos/
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“.. Footage of the city of Lisichansk confirmed that it did not suffer the same damage as the city of Mariupol did, for example. The main destructions were reported in the city center, while the residential districts were almost untouched by the battles.
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However, Ukrainian forces were preparing for street battles in Lisichansk, there were barricades of civilian cars and buses on the streets, and trenches were dug in the courtyards of residential buildings…”
The number of synapse connections per brain neuron is not exactly known, but is estimated to be on the order of 10,000. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/67396/distribution-of-the-number-of-synapses-per-neuron
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That makes comparisons of numbers of transistors in a GPU and neurons in a brain a bit irrelevant. Brain processes are almost infinitely more complex. I can in my ‘minds eye’ see an instant replay of the flights of the ball in dozens of golf shots I made yesterday afternoon, and that is essentially without effort. Computers don’t work that way.
SteveF,
I take the AGI end of the world scenario about as seriously as the nanobot grey goo end of the world scenario. Nanotechnology has been oversold too. DNA repair by nanobots, for example, is pure fantasy. It doesn’t even qualify as hard science fiction.
I do like Iain Banks’ concept of Minds in his Culture books. They’re complex enough to run simulations with sentient agents detailed enough that there is a moral question of genocide if the simulation is ended. There are even hints that the Culture Universe is itself a simulation in an even larger Mind. But we’re a very, very long way from those.
Speaking of simulations, what you think you see is mostly a simulation in your head. Your high resolution color vision is actually very limited in area. They can demonstrate this by using eye trackers. They take a screen of text and replace actual text by random letters everywhere you aren’t actually looking. But you think you see a full screen of text and don’t notice the garbage.
Last summer I discovered that emails regarding the calibration of a pulse generator had been going to spam. I had thought I was corresponding with the lab, but I was not getting any responses. I checked with a friend and learned lab was alive and well.
I sent him a note using a different email setup and got a quick response confirming most of what I had been requesting.
The amazing part is that Chuck had never realized that I wasn’t reading his responses. He hadn’t even suspected that i’d lost my mind.
The scale of datacenters at Google, Amazon, and Apple, and bitcoin mining operations is very large, it’s networked. The point here is that the computing scale is no longer the biggest limitation, it is the software. That may be the limit for a long time.
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Google Lens on Android does an amazing job of identifying animals and plants in pictures, in real time, to your phone. A couple decades ago they couldn’t reliably differentiate between dogs and cats. But its one thing to access a large database and do probability calculations and another thing to have imagination and make deductive leaps.
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As pauligon59 says, they seem to have made little progress on the “physics of thought”. But there must just be physics there and it can likely be replicated.
Bitcoin mining operation in Russia:
https://i.insider.com/60c0e12d8afda0001895d537?width=2000&format=jpeg&auto=webp
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A mere billion dollars will buy you a craplot of computing power. We shall see what happens, but my money is on it’s still 5 years away, ha ha.
The leap from AI to AGI is a bigger chasm than predicting the odds for human type intelligence and awareness in our universe. I also think that the term Artificial Intelligence is misnomer of no little consequence. It is not artificial or intelligence as commonly defined. It is not even a break though technologically but rather a grand (and wonderful in my eyes) evolution of some integrated and masterful combinations of computer and sensor technology. Humankind may be considered insignificant on some proportionality scale of the universe and for those whose agendas require a downplaying human existence but look what that mind can produce and for the good.
I suppose I have not read sufficient science fiction writings to be aware of the many processes whereby AGI or AI, for that matter, obtains control of civilization or why it would be manifested in a given way. I do know that an authoritative large central government could under current technology have a great deal of control over large expanses of civilization. If we worry about AGI or AI under human command at some distant future time controlling us, we should be worried much more about current time. I doubt that many people make that connection but rather they might even see a rationalization for creating an authoritative, powerful and controlling government to ensure that AGI (even though non existent at that time) would never become authoritative, powerful and controlling.
From today’s Best of the Web column in the WSJ:
I do expect her to not have her current job at that point, so she would have the time.
And from the Babylon Bee:
Liz Cheney is delusional and unelectable. Her political career is over. Sad that she sold herself out over something as stupid as the australian electivective 9
Not sure where those last words came from. Should have been:” sold herself out over something as stupid as the Jan6 riot.”
In today’s WSJ, there is a report that a Uvalde police officer armed with a rifle had the shooter in his sights before he entered the school building but couldn’t get permission to take the shot. George Floyd strikes again from beyond the grave.
I am of the opinion that the Jan 6th committee could be a boon to the Republican party. I do not believe that these hearings are any better or worse than what I have seen over the years coming out of the House or Senate. They come with an agenda where evidence gets spun. These hearings have the added spinning benefit in that the opposition is absent.
Any showing of the loser mentality of Trump that might pave the path for getting him out of the political picture will help keep the national debate focused on issues and not Trump. There are indications that Trump might announce a 2024 presidential run before the mid term elections. While the attention that would focus on Trump might quench some of his narcissistic thirst it would be a negative for the Republican party – given the problems of the current administration.
I think what gets left out of the debates about what can be done to prevent future mass shootings is pinpointing the errors of omission in the current and past incidents. Part of this has to do with the left’s difficulty in criticizing governments’ failures and in turn having standard solutions that involves more government in the face of government failures and the hesitancy of those on the right to criticize law enforcement.
Kenneth,
The biggest societal failure is that we seem unwilling to address obvious mental illness. The most recent shooter is a glaring case:
1) Face coved in tatoos
2) Heavy, constant use of high potentcy marajuana (already shown to increase schizophrenia in people with that tendency)
3) Multiple threats to kill people…. including himself
4) Multiple calls to police over multiple years by family members complaining of threats of violence
5) Social media posts focusing on killing/death
6) described by people who know him as socially withdrawn
In spite of all this, the psycho passed a background check (with the help of his father) and purchased a semi-automatic rifle (.223 caliper).
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If we are unwilling/unable to keep a madman like this from buying guns, there there is no possibility of stopping shootings by madmen.
Technically, according to the NRA, a .223 caliber rifle is ‘high powered’. But in reality, many states won’t let you hunt deer with one because the result is likely to be a wounded, not dead, deer. It’s pretty good for varmints like coyotes or groundhogs, though. The selection of that caliber for the M-16 was supposedly because the lower recoil allowed the average soldier to control fully automatic fire.
The next generation army rifle has gone to higher caliber / higher energy 6.8 mm bullets. Supposedly because body armor has become so common. Apparently hunters use these were .223 is not allowed. Apparently takes down pesky hogs better.
553 and 223 are somewhat interchangeable. The main difference is the higher pressure firing 553. You can fire 223 through a 553 gun, but it’s inadvisable to do the reverse because your barrel might not be strong enough.
Russia is turning up the pressure on both oil prices and sanctions. 2 actions for the price of 1.
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“Russian Court Suspends Caspian Pipeline Consortium Over Environmental Violation”
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Russian-Court-Suspends-Caspian-Pipeline-Consortium-Over-Environmental-Violations.html
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“.. The pipeline is the biggest outlet for Kazakh oil, which uses to ship most of its crude to world markets, notably Europe. Earlier this year, the pipeline got damaged in a storm, and most of the flow of oil along it was suspended for a mont….”
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“Some analysts have interpreted this ruling as an attempt by Moscow to put pressure Nur-Sultan into providing Russia with relief from Western sanctions. Kazakhstan has instead been acting in ways that Russia might perceive as low-key hostile…”
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https://eurasianet.org/kazakhstan-president-seeks-to-diversify-oil-export-routes-away-from-russia
SteveF (Comment #213269): “The biggest societal failure is that we seem unwilling to address obvious mental illness.”
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Indeed. Here is a chronology of a dozen years of a mentally ill man’s interaction with the system. Society was unwilling and or unable to actually deal with the problem, so it ended the only way it could end: with a tragedy.
https://www.abqjournal.com/376292/incidents-involving-james.html
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When you have behavior like that exhibited by the Highland Park shooter or the Uvalde shooter etc. and you take away the guy’s guns, you have not dealt with the problem. You have ignored the problem, since the real problem is a person who has formed a desire to commit mass murder. But ignoring the problem seems to be the only way we deal with mental illness.
SteveF
The family is disputing the media’s reporting of 2019 events. But if the police thought there was sufficient evidence to take guns (and it seems the did) I would think there was sufficient evidence to file a firearms restraining order. The person restrained doesn’t have to have used a threat with a gun. (Or at least, that’s how I read this.)
https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/fulltext.asp?Name=100-0607
Crimo could have disputed the order– there is a process for that. But these laws can’t work if the police don’t file when they are called to a scene because someone is threatening to kill other people. (You really can’t expect the family to do it. Yes, they should do it– if they know about the law. But expecting them to do it is going to fail most of the time.)
Mike M wrote: “But ignoring the problem seems to be the only way we deal with mental illness.”
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Ignoring the problem is so five years ago. The new solution is that there is no problem. These people are just “neurodivergent” and everyone else is the problem for not accepting them for who they are.
Liz Cheney is appealing to Democrats to switch their party registration and vote for her in the primary. Numbers show this is happening to some degree.
She is basking in the praise of people who wanted her dad tried for war crimes.
A problem that I see is that laws concerning the prevention of mass shootings are going to be righteously talked up with some coming into being. Unfortunately it appears once this righteousness wears off the law makers and involved agencies will go back to sitting on their collective a$$es while the laws are often not enforced.
When the failures arrive and we have more mass shootings those failures are not analyzed and rather are virtually ignored in favor of even more righteous calls for more restrictive laws.
Making political points appear to be more the goal than actually preventing future incidents.
While we are talking about law enforcement (at least I am) I have to say that I agreed with the 3 liberal members of the Supreme Court who decided in favor of allowing police to be prosecuted for failure to give Miranda rights.
Um, 223 vs 556, not 553.
Kenneth
Or not enforced in any meaningful way. That illinois statute permits people to petition for someone to be subject to a “firearms restraining order”. But it doesn’t seem to require police to file a petition when someone makes a credible threat on someone else’s life.
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On the one hand, you don’t want police filing these petitions willy-nilly. But on the other hand, if police seized a bunch of knives and a sword after a complaint that someone threatened to use them to kill other people, you would think, perhaps, the police ought to file the petition. Otherwise, there is very little point of having the law that allows these restraining orders to be created.
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In the end, when Crimo’s father sponsored Crimo and, when later Crimo bought guns on his own, there was nothing on file. (Mind you, a 6 month restraining order after the 2019 incident would have ended. So maybe it still wouldn’t have preventing him from getting guns in 2021 and after. But still, there would be a record.)
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A long time I remember reading that domestic violence plunged after localities started requiring police to arrest if they saw any evidence of violence when called to a scene where there was a complaint. Prior, they had been allowed “judgement”. Well, when they “judged” it wasn’t all that bad, that communicated to the batterer that smacking his wife around wasn’t really such a bad thing.
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Requiring police to file something when someone’s behavior was sufficiently threatening to police to judge they need to remove the weapons might have had a sobering effect on the Crimo family.
The issue is never a 42 YO deer hunter from Wisconsin (nor my 74 YO hunting cousin in upstate NY (deer, turkeys, and most anything else that moves). The problem in never someone who wants a gun to protect their home (or themselves), whether in the Bronx or Okeechobee, Fl. The huge majority of the problem is criminals who kill people they know/competitors, mainly with semiautomatic handguns, as a normal part of their criminal enterprise, and a very small minority of absolutely nutty young men (most suffering severe mental illness), who kill strangers with semiautomatic rifles for no motivation beyond their own insanity. Neither group should ever be able to obtain a firearm.
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And solving the problem means:
1) Identifying and confining crazy young men, giving them no access to weapons of any kind. (5% of the problem)
2) Putting career criminals (and that is who we are describing) in prison, pretty much forever. (95% of the problem)
Lucia,
“Crimo could have disputed the order– there is a process for that.”
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Sure. There will be overzealous police and prosecutors. And non-criminal non-crazy people can fight against overzealous prosecutors/ police. But the truly nutty (like the July 4 shooter in Illinois) are not going to be able to actually fight having their gun (or right to purchase a gun) restricted. They are, after all, absolutely bonkers, and at some point, judges will recognize this. The more interaction crazy young men have with the courts, the LESS likely they can secure a firearm.
SteveF,
What I was thinking is the fact that he could dispute the restriction lowers the risk that the restrictions will simply be applied in cases where their application would be inappropriate.
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Given what we’ve read in the paper, it looks to me application would have been appropriate in 2019, but it didn’t happen. (The family supposedly disputes reports about the 2019 incident but has not provided “their side”. Their silence may be due to possible legal liability in some way or another. I don’t know what that might be but both parents are reported to have lawyered up.)
lucia:
“..both parents are reported to have lawyered up.”
a lawyer each? Wow.
I think they may have the same lawyer. There are lots of rumors out there. I have a word search on Twitter, so I see rumors there first. But I try to avoid mentioning until somewhat confirmed. Sharing a lawer is “Twitter” level. Having lawyers is certain. Press articles consistently mention they get responses from lawyers, not Mom and Pop themselves. (The parents are either divorced or separated. Dad lived in Highwood, mom in Highland Park.)
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Here’s ABC news suggesting police say Dad could have legal issues:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/highland-park-suspects-father-responsibility-attack-police-said-rcna37093
Even if it’s “too early” for police to charge him with anything, that sort of wording would mean it’s not too early for Crimo II to lawyer up and be very careful.
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But honestly, it would be wise to lawyer up merely to have a buffer from press and to avoid saying anything that might make things worse for the son. (How the could be worse I don’t know.)
An attorney representing the father (or parents) has been interviewed on TV ins several different sessions or maybe his remarks in one session are shown .in different packages depending on the station.
There was a report that father and son had had a discussion about mass murder the night of the 3rd.
John,
The various stories related to the family alternately or collectively suggest
(a) a degree of obliviousness or willful blindness to their son’s symptoms.
(b) a degree of past violent behavior. (The mom seems to have been charged with domestic battery for hitting someone while in a car. That’s an interesting trick.)
(c) some amount of generally disorganized or neglectful parenting. (Stories about kids not getting picked up after events to the extent that Cub scout leaders/ teachers etc had to pester or find things to do with them.)
There don’t seem to be any stories about disagreements with neighbors or outsiders. So lots of people seemed to “like” the parents the same way one likes lots of neighbors and acquaintances who you but don’t necessarily really know well. (I mean, I “like” the cashier at the grocery store. I have no idea what she’s really like to her family etc. I would assume nice based on her demeanor at grocery store. But it’s not like I actually know.)
The idea that parents should rat out their kids (or vice versa) strikes me as creepy, to say the least. Unless, that is, there is a actual specific threat of the sort that would require a psychiatrist to violate confidentiality. But if the July 4 shooter’s dad actually committed perjury to let him get a gun, then that would be a crime in itself.
Identifying mental illness isn’t that hard, fixing it is very, very hard. How many serious mentally ill people have you known that got “fixed” by science? It’s mostly dealing with symptoms.
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There is certainly a class related to drug addiction and so forth that is fixable by behavior modification, but other mental illnesses are sometimes treatable with drugs or they can just resolve on their own over time. People stop taking meds for a reason, they sometimes suck.
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Those people who have overt tendencies towards violence just don’t go to family therapy and get better most of the time. The vast majority of these people don’t go on to become mass shooters, they just yell and scream at their family and inconsiderate drivers.
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Violent behavior definitely has an age profile. Restricting firearms to people over 30 would be very effective if it was feasible.
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Anyway it is my opinion that predicting Future Crime(tm) by mundane near criminal behavior isn’t going to be very successful for the stated purpose. I’m not saying don’t try it, just that it won’t be meaningfully effective in reducing these very rare shootings. The false positive rate of “possible future mass shooter” will be very high.
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Uncle Whacko shouldn’t be allowed to have guns is OK but there needs to be clear boundaries for taking them away and giving them back. Similar to getting your license taken away for DUI’s.
Yes, domestic violence laws were changed for the good when the police were mandated to arrest someone if there was a physical altercation. It was routine in cop shows to see an officer explain that it was not the wife’s decision to charge the husband, it was the state charging the husband and the officer had no option.
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What tended to happen though was that the wife later refused to cooperate and charges were many times dropped. If there was enough evidence though they were charged and convicted. However there was a lot of process punishment anyway with counseling mandated etc.
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Just so I don’t offend anyone, women were also arrested from time to time.
I find this trend to criminally investigate parents for their adult (or near adult) children’s behavior abhorrent. We don’t have enough prison space to lockup all the irresponsible parents out there. I find it curious we put kids into school for endless hours and never even really attempt to teach them good parenting skills, and now we want to hold up a few isolated examples to some ethical standard that was never taught, advertised, or uniformly applied. Try to write that standard in a neutral way and see how many people you sweep up into that net.
Tom Scharf,
Do your really want woke educationists to teach parenting skills? I don’t. They would just compound all the misinformation that has been promulgated by psychologists over the last few decades. Remember the self-esteem thing?
Maybe if John Rosemond were in charge of the curriculum it might work. But he wouldn’t be. He makes too much sense.
Another Biden gaffe you won’t see covered in the MSM:
Sandra Lindsay, awarded the Medal of Freedom for supposedly being the first person in the US to receive a COVID vaccine injection in December 2020, wasn’t anywhere near the first. That honor belongs to people in the vaccine trials which started in July, 2020. But she’s a POC and a nurse, so image trumps reality again.
Some of the coverage did say Sandra Lindsay was the first person outside a clinical trial. But so what? What’s so worthy of honor about that? She should have refused the award if she had a scrap of personal integrity.
MikeM,
I think the police should have filed a petition to prevent Crimo III from getting a gun.
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I do think the father showed very bad judgement signing to get him a gun when he otherwise would have. I also wouldn’t have called not signing to get your kid an gun permit “ratting him out”.
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I have no idea what criminal or civil penalties might be envisioned for Crimo IIIs parents. I’m not going to get irate about that yet because nothing has been lodged or filed.
Well… the Crimo’s were a fun bunch. Record from various 911 calls:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/highland-park-fourth-july-suspect-boozy-parents-who-often-called-911-home
Excellent current overview for the eastern front of the Ukraine war
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Österreichs Bundesheer, Austrian Army
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEbLuAPobao
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The parents/family obviously knew the kid was way out of control, and had they between them half a functioning neutron, the shooter would NEVER have purchased a rifle. He was beyond bonkers, yet the family did nothing, and the police took a pass. Lots of blame to go around, but the biggest blame is the fact that we, as a society, simply can’t put crazies out of harms way. Asylum means protection… we have, as a society, refused to provide protection for those who are desperately in need of it….. and we suffer the consequences. The July 4th shootings have little to do with gun control, and much to do with mental health policies….. and family disfunction.
The parents/family obviously knew the kid was way out of control, and had they between them half a functioning neutron, the shooter would NEVER have purchased a rifle. He was beyond bonkers, yet the family did nothing, and the police took a pass. Lots of blame to go around, but the biggest blame is the fact that we, as a society, simply can’t put crazies out of harms way. Asylum means protection… we have, as a society, refused to provide protection for those who are desperately in need of it….. and we suffer the consequences. The July 4th shootings have little to do with gun control, and much to do with mental health policies….. and family disfunction.
SteveF,
“… functioning neutron,” ??
Wouldn’t you agree that writing critically about someone else’s mental processes would require a higher level of precision lest the petard ignites?
Democrats are worried period tracking apps might be misused to track potential abortion seeking birthing people. Is it possible their concern for privacy might be subject dependent?
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Yes, it’s possible.
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Gun applicants in New York will have to submit their social accounts for review
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1110477445/gun-applicants-social-media-accounts-new-york
“People seeking to carry concealed handguns will be required to hand over their social media accounts for a review of their “character and conduct.”
It’s an approach applauded by many Democrats “
Some parents do everything right yet the kids turn out wrong.
Some parents do everything wrong yet the kids turn out good people.
The ultimate responsibility for most actions comes back onto the person carrying out the action.
If that action is actually and actively abetted by the parents then they have some degree of culpability.
Buying children guns and cars is different to pulling triggers or driving cars.
We all want someone to blame, sometimes we blame ourselves when things do not work out right.
Usually we blame others.
It is understandable.
Life is unpredictable and predicated on chance occurrences.
The grief is immense.
Angech,
Sure. But it’s pretty clear the Crimos did a lot of things wrong and their kid turned out messed up.
Honestly, generally speaking, decent parenting results in better outcomes and poor parenting results in poorer outcomes. It’s just not a perfect correlation.
The father took positive active steps to make it possible for his son to buy a gun in 2019 when otherwise the son would not have been able to buy it. He did that two months after the son threatened to kill family members and a police man found the threat sufficiently credible to seize numerous knives and a sword.
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The father’s action was at best, really, really poor judgement on the father’s part.
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As for “culpability”: I doubt that Crimo II is legally culpable for Crimo IIIs actual crime. Among other things, 2022 is a long time after 2019, and by 2022 Crimo III was legally able to buy guns without the card his Dad had gotten for him. But I do think Crimo III has some moral culpability for assisting his son in obtaining guns when the son was clearly not in a safe mind to own them and would have been unable to get the gun without his father’s assistance.
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Sure. But helping someone who is mentally unbalanced and has recently threatened people’s lives buy a high velocity rifle is something that has a high probability in resulting in a bad outcome. The fact that sometimes things go wrong even when one could never have anticipated it doesn’t mean we are required to be blind and fail to observe that some behaviors are unwise to the point of negligence.
John Ferguson,
OK, if the family displayed even a bit of good sense, then they would have recognized the boy had serious mental health issues and serious behavioral issues, and would never facilitate his purchase of a gun.
But “neutrons” SteveF?
But “neutrons” SteveF?
John,
Neutrons is now my favorite way to spell neurons.
John Ferguson,
To paraphrase an adage:
Never attribute to ignorance what can be explained by a rogue spell checker.
I suppose the threshold number of neutrons to get anything done would be a very large. 10^29?
Maybe Neutrinos at the Crimo’s?
DeWitt,
I need to memorize and use this.
Based on the rare but repeating incidents, it appears that school shootings and other location mass shootings are not going to be reduced through government actions any time soon and thus attempts at prevention must be best considered a very local responsibility. I think that responsibility is too often not taken locally because the responsible and involved people feel that government agencies are or will or should be taking care of a situation. When less local governments get involved it is often with some grand scheme for one size fits all that often fail.
It appears to me that school shootings would not take that much added effort to avoid, but the effort would have to be an everyday one. Uvalde was a prime example of what appears to be in hindsight minor rule violations that led to easy access to the school classroom by an otherwise inept killer.
Entrance to schools would have to be kept secure and those entering identified with no exceptions and carrying cases contents revealed externally or searched. Profiling might make these operations more efficient. These suggestions are from an outsider, and I have to believe that the locals would be much more aware of what would work best for their more unique situations.
The rarity of mass shootings, on one hand, makes prevention measures more difficult to devise and put in place and on the other hand when they occur come with great outcries to “do something”. The public should be made aware of the odds they are facing for various potential shooting scenarios and what measures would be most effective for these scenarios.
Outside of school, public gatherings would be more difficult to protect against mass shootings but the same calculations of odds for scenarios and suggested prevention measures could be undertaken.
Where more damage from shootings occurs is in the inner cities where that situation is also not improving. For some time now I have been of the view that inner cities need more autonomy and control, and particularly when it comes to crime. The local inner-city residents know better the everyday situations than the white and black politicians, who are currently in charge of what amounts to plantation politics with those politicians considered too often and by too many of the city dwellers as the masters.
Kenneth,
Yes, people acting locally might be useful. But people simply acting on threats would be helpful at a national or local level.
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The Uvalde killer evidently actually threatened to rape, kill or kidnap girls. The threats were online. But I should think for the purpose of filing a petition to restrict gun ownership, online threats to rape, kill or kidnap people should be presumed real especially if sent by a stranger and with photos of guns.
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Yeah, well, even if someone thinks making death threats is how “how online is”, blocking gun ownership to those who make such threats would be prudent. This is particularly so if they make multiple threats.
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Maybe one might be worried about forcing social media to moderate speech of any sort. But this is something where requiring social media to at least report complaints about death, kidnapping or rape threats to some place might be useful.
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And beyond that: true threats do not have 1st amendment protection. SCOTUS has left open the possibility of restricting guns from individual people for their behavior or dangerousness. Not allowing people who make threats online could be useful.
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But there needs to be a mechanism for these threats to be reported and kept track of.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/28/uvalde-shooting-gunmen-teen-girls/
More on threats by Uvalde killer in Yubo:
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There ought to someone people can complain to outside the social media app. That ought to be publicized and even the social media ought to be required to point to where you can submit a complaint.
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I mean, if the real-meat world, if a kid threatens to kidnap, kill or rape your son or daughter, having a chat with the kid’s parents or talking to his teacher are not your only options. You can call the cops and file a report.
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We have methods to file complaints in the real-meat world. We need them online too.
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Tracing who the person doing it can be difficult online. But it’s also sometimes difficult in real life. And that’s no excuse for there being no way to even file a complaint!
Isn’t the real question how many kids are out there who could generate the sort of concern that the recent mass-killers might have?
There could be tens of thousand of them who even more than superficially look like killers, but probably aren’t.
Can government agencies really be trusted to devise and employ the filters we’d need not to harass the less destructive?
John,
I don’t know. But even if it’s a lot, I still think the Illinois law providing for restricting an individual’s ability to buy or own a gun should have required the Highland Park officer to file a petition in the specific circumstances that occurred in 2019. That is: they were called to the scene because of death threats and believed them credible enough to take away deadly weapons.
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It’s true that not everyone who threatens others with deadly weapons is going to continue on and actually kill people with those deadly weapons. But I think it’s fair for them to not be allowed to own guns. And I think that sort of condition is narrow enough.
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I also think we need ways for people to report online threats to something other than merely the social media company. When online threats should reach the threshold of resulting in someone not being able to get a gun is something that needs to be figured out. One threat — especially if possibly casual — could be a joke. How to screen out false reports is something that needs to be figured out. But those same questions exist InRealLife.
Having no means to even report the online threats doesn’t make any sense.
Beyond that: even if someone who makes credible threats to rape, murder or kidnao doesn’t go on to mass murder, those sorts of threats are bad things in and of themselves. We don’t just say “oh well” about that sort of thing InRealLife. So it would hardly be a miscarriage of justice if there was a formal mechanism for complaining about the threats!
john
I don’t know what you think I’m envisioning happening if someone can file a complaint.
I don’t think blocking a gun purchase is “harrassing” them. It’s especially not harrassing if they are given due process to dispute the claim they were making death, rape or kidnapping threats.
In any case, if my neighbors kid brandished a knife and threatened to kill me InRealLife, I could call the police. They might go around and talk to him and get his side of the story. Under the circumstances I would consider that “harrassing” him. I don’t think we really worry about having “filters” to prevent the cops from discussing the incident with him, nor do we think it’s only worth having a cop speak to him if he was “the” one who would eventually go on to be a mass murderer.
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The behavior being reported is objectionable in itself.
Lucia,
It may be my paranoia, but I did things when I was a kid that would have gotten me arrested today – no reason to go into details, but the strongest admonition I received for one of the more astonishing ones was to be told not to do it again, and if I did, there would be some sort of punishment.
I think I agree that someone who is threatening death ought to at least be visited. But then there should be a record and the issue of what should be done about it.
It appears that the bad kid in every one of these recent events showed symptoms which at the least should have kept him from owning a gun, although I think in the case of Sandy Hook, the kid’s mother bought it for him. That’;s hard to detect and prevent.
And I just naturally worry about files being accumulated on kids which might later cloud their lives even if they never do anything.
Lucia,
I agree that there is no good reason to not hold up gun purchases for people with a police report on violence or credible threats of violence. And there was such a police report filed in this most recent case, with multiple calls to police claiming the perpetrator threatened family members with death. I read that the police went to the family home 20 different times over 10 years, all related to domestic violence or the threat of domestic violence.
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All that said, murder of strangers by crazy men really is a very small fraction of the murders conducted with a gun, even while those murders get almost endless MSM attention. The most common mass shooting (defined as 4 or more victims) is within-family murders (eg enraged, crazy husband kills wife, kids, and self). You do hear about this kind of mass murder, but not often. You almost never hear of the vast majority of mass killings by criminal gangs, unless innocent people are caught in the crossfire.
SteveF,
But the police didn’t fill out a specific petition to not allow the kid to own guns. We have such a petition in Illinois, but someone needs to take the step to fill it out! Honestly, if the police don’t, no one will.
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Sure. But that’s not a good argument for doing pretty much nothing to keep the guns away from people who are crazy enough to actually threaten people with deadly weapons. We should want to reduce these in addition to reducing the other murders.
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John,
I agree that sometimes some of these crazy kids will get guns anyway. I mean perhaps Crimo’s dad would have bought him the gun if he’d needed to do more than fill out paper work.
“But helping someone who is mentally unbalanced and has recently threatened people’s lives buy a high velocity rifle is something that has a high probability in resulting in a bad outcome.”
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How high is that probability? 98%? 9.8% 0.98%? Probably closer to 0.00098%. The relative probability for a bad outcome over a church going straight A Mormon is higher but there are over 300M guns in the US and something less than 300M mass shootings. The argument against this logic is that enforcing some kind of moral judgment law on gun ownership will punish many more lawful owners than it will prevent mass shootings. I just don’t think the judgment here scales to something useful.
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People let their kids drive around knowing they will “party” and many of them end up getting killed. Society allows people to do dangerous things. Onerous laws can prevent some of these things but there is a cost in liberty.
Tom
I don’t see how allowing an individual who actually threatened to kill people with available deadly weapons (knives/swords) punishes non-violent lawful owners. Beyond that, I’m not advocating a “moral judgement”. People will make those regardless. I’m advocating a restriction on gun ownership by (the possibly very good and moral people) people who make credible threats to kill other people. We don’t have a right to kill other people. We also don’t have a right to threaten to kill other people. Even fine, upstanding moral people do not have that right.
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Sure. But it’s not the same to allow normal kids to drive to a party vs. allowing a person who has actually threatened to kill people to own a high velocity rifle.
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Sure. That’s true of onerous laws. But I don’t see anything “onerous” in not allowing specific individuals who made credible true death threats to own guns. If you see something “onerous” in that, you’ll need to identify the burden because I see practically none.
It seems to me that a big issue is what exactly counts as a credible threat. It is not clear to me that any of the recent shooters made credible threats, as opposed to behavior that is disturbing. It is also not clear to me that they haven’t, I have not paid enough attention.
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Addition: It would seem that if the person threatened is not worried, then it is not a credible threat:
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/a-credible-threat
Less than 150 days to a change in the house.
Jan6 committee, tree and witness huggers , have to get everything wrapped up quickly for the third trial by the DOJ (Garland?)
-All the props seem to be in place, news agencies on side and DOJ lining up people to charge.
Things do need to move at warp speed to overcome last minute challenges and a DOJ trial, once under way is out of the house control.
Cipolline in cahoots with Democrats would be a big plus to provide a reasonable grounds argument.
MikeM
We know Crimo’s were credible enough for his family to call the police and for the police to seize weapons (knives and a sword.) I don’t think this was just a joke and it wasn’t perceived as hyperbole.
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If the police officer had filed a petition to deprive him of the right to own a gun, Crimo could have disputed that in court. A judge could have heard evidence an arguments in favor of it being not a real threat.
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In the Uvalde shooters case we have no good information because there seems to be no method for the people threatened to even file a report. I don’t see lack of evidence that it might be a not-real threat as a reason why there is no mechanism for anyone to file a complaint.
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I once filed a complaint about a neighbors dog. Filing a complaint doesn’t result in the dog being seized anyone being fined etc. It just collects information. (The dog was a pit bull rescue who had been, sadly, trained to attack and he’d attacked another dog. I filed a complaint before the attack because the dog was menacing. The fact of a complaint did make a difference to decisions after the dog did attack the poor elderly greyhound.)
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Even entirely separate from the gun issue, there should be a way for people to file complaints about things like death threats, rape threats and kidnapping threats on line– just as there are mechanisms InRealLife. This shouldn’t be a DEM/GOP issue. We’ve always thought true threats are a problem. Being against mechanisms to even report them is perverse.
MikeM
Obviously, in the case of Crimo’s family, they were worried on the day in Jan 19 when the threats were made. They called the cops. The trove of knives and the sword made the threat realistic. This sounds like a “credible” threat.
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In the case of the Uvalde killer, threatened girls interviewed said they were worried. On reported to the social media platform which did nothing.
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So none of these can be excluded on the basis of no one being worried. People threatened were certainly worried. And Crimo had weapons. Obviously the girls threatened online couldn’t know whether the Uvalde killer had weapons at the time of the threats. (Seems likely he did.) They also couldn’t know if he had any clue where they lived.
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But even if the threat ultimately was not credible, we’ve never suggested the standard for filing a complaint about a death threat is that the person filing needs to be certain the death threat is credible. Being worried is certainly reason enough to be allowed to file a complaint. After that it’s up to cops or other authorities to investigate.
lucia (Comment #213332): “We know Crimo’s were credible enough for his family to call the police and for the police to seize weapons”.
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And then they helped him get guns. So it seems they were not all that worried.
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lucia: “there should be a way for people to file complaints about things like death threats, rape threats and kidnapping threats”.
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Indeed. And not just file them. Somebody ought to follow up by examining the person’s social media history (with the tech companies being obliged to cooperate), checking police reports etc, then making an evaluation as to whether that is a real problem. Maybe we can learn to predict who is a real threat or maybe we can’t. But as it is, we don’t know since nobody ever seems to have tried.
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Off hand, I don’t think that ‘somebody’ ought to be the police, although at some point they might have to be involved. Maybe the county public health department? In any case, it ought to be easy to know who to call.
MikeM
There is no evidence “they” plural helped him get guns. Hid father did. His mother and father are now divorced.
On the day the threat happened, those threatened were clearly frightend. Had they not been, they wouldn’t have called the police. Of course even they might not have been frightened two months later when he had calmed down and he no longer had the weapons. But that’s irrelevant to whether it was a true threat when it was made.
In the case of Crimo where the police, arriving at the scene thought the threat was credible enough to seize guns, I think the police should have filled out a petition to prevent him from getting guns. I think county health departments should also be able to file. I see absolutely no good reason why the police should be excluded from the list of who can fine. In facg, I think it’s just silly to suggest that police can’t be the ones to file a petition when given evidence of a threat.
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I mean: We don’t need a medical diagnosis to recognize that someone making a true threat is potentially dangerous. They made a threat.
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(BTW: In principle, anyone can file in Illinois. The problem is that police don’t even when presented with what appears to be a credible threat.)
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Obviously, as the police are not clairvoyant they couldn’t decide the threat can’t be real because two months later the Dad (who I think likely wasn’t in the home and so probably not in the group threatened) may not have felt threatened. So the Dad’s future action or belief shouldn’t have prevented the police from filing nor could it have affected their impression of what was going.)
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(The reason I suspect the Dad was not home is he got the knives back on the basis that they were that Dad’s knives. He conveyed ownership information to the police in person on the day the knives were taken. In which case, he could have been instructed to keep them away from the son– which he was when he later retrieved them.)
(Correction–I’m not sure the Crimo parents are divorced. They were living in separate houses. She lived in Highland Park. He lived in Highwood where his brother also lived.)
angech,
The show trial will end, but it is not clear that the DOJ will try to prosecute before Republicans gain control of at least the house. Filing charges would be a huge get-out-the-vote motivator for Republicans if it happened before the election, so if it happens, count on after the November election.
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Garland is a grotesque political hack, of course, but is smart enough to understand how difficult Congress can make life for the DOJ should he be foolish enough to prosecute Trump. I think the show trial is mainly aimed at motivating Democrats to vote in November, and to distract voters from a Biden administration which can only be described as worse than a raging dumpster fire.
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If Republicans gain control of both houses, then the Bidden administration will be effectively finished…. no more crazy judges appointed, no funding for crazy green projects, and endless investigations: Biden’s personal corruption, security failures caused by Congressional Democrats, the Jan 6 show trial, and the FBIs placing of multiple “informants” in the Jan 6 crowd who then tried to instigate the riot.
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Nancy Pelosi has behaved like a spoiled 4 year old since January 2019, and House Democrats are going to suffer lot of well deserved payback for their outrageous treatment of the minority party…. count on the worst of the left wing crazies to be censured for past behavior and barred from committee assignments.
SteveF
I hope you are right.
I think the Democrat hatred and fear of Trump and their own illegal actions will force their hand to go all the way in a persecution before the midterms, come what may.
If not, and they lose, they will be in a world of pain.
Interesting times you guys, and girls are living in.
Garland also has the Hunter Biden affair, if he charges Trump and takes a pass on Biden it isn’t going to help trust in institutions much. The political pressure is charge both or charge neither.
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The show trial is obviously being politically timed. This is expected and should surprise nobody. When your opponents hand you a gift then you make the most of it in politics. Overplaying the cards happens almost every single time. The media being compliant lapdogs is also not surprising, but still a bit disturbing. Just because the committee is putting on a one sided show doesn’t mean the media can’t make an effort to tell both sides. There is exactly zero curiosity here.
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If they want to charge Trump with obstruction or whatever I think he will survive that with any balanced jury because the sides are hardened. If they try to go the sedition route to prevent Trump from running again then we can count on political violence. This is predictable, the case is weak, and doing this in a partisan way would be a disaster. Let the voters decide.
Tom Scharf,
“Let the voters decide.”
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I guess you forget…. the voters are a bunch of deplorables, so can’t be allowed to decide.
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Garland could charge Trump with virtually any crime, and with a DC jury pool Trump would almost certainly be convicted. Which is what they are counting on; the DOJ knows it doesn’t need a case, just the right jury pool…. one with a visceral hatred for all things Trump. I agree that using Jan 6 as an excuse to keep Trump from running in 2024 would almost certainly lead to political violence. I really do hope Garland understands how dangerous indicting Trump in a 100% politically motivated case would be.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coney-island-n-y-shooting-leaves-five-wounded-11657472664?mod=e2tw
July 10, 2022 1:04 pm ET
Tom,
Neither Hunter nor Joe will suffer any real consequence for being corrupt, major-league tax cheats. Some people are hammered as much as possible for relatively minor crimes. Others are never going to be prosecuted for far worse crimes. This is 100% driven by ‘progressive’ politicians, ‘progressive’ law enforcement officials, and ‘progressive’ bureaucrats. They all need to be unemployed.
Russian Ukraine war continues to grind on and the Russians continue to advance.
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Logistics will determine the winner of this war and Ukraine is losing the logistical battle. Ukraine is using ammunition and losing equipment faster than NATO can replace it.
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Without artillery or armor, Ukraine forces are basically a light infantry army regardless of what Ukraine lists the individual units as. As such, they are not able to maneuver effectively against the highly mechanized Russian army. Ukraine is forced to dig in for protection against massive heavy artillery fire called directly onto their positions. This allows the Russians the full ability to mass forces at a location of their choosing and operationally outnumber Ukraine at the point of contact.
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This Russian superiority in mobility allows the Russians to attack the Ukraine flanks, threatening encirclement of Ukraine units. This forces Ukraine to withdraw from the forming pocket under fire, causing high Ukraine casualties. Rinse and Repeat.
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The talk of NATO “super weapons” are reminiscent of the Germans in WWII. As in WWII, vast numbers of technically inferior weapons are superior to low numbers of technically superior weapons if the inferior weapons are “good enough” to do the job at hand.
I have always said progressives want to undermine the Constitution by having the Supreme Court say the Constitution means things it clearly does not say (AKA the ‘living Constitution’).
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After carefully explaining all the things he thinks are wrong with the Constitution (including supermajorities needed to amend it), this numbskull says the Supreme Court should simply subvert it out of existence: https://news.yahoo.com/nicholas-goldberg-hate-supreme-court-100019517.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
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To paraphrase Sam Harris describing Islam: Progressive politics is the mother-load of very bad ideas.
I continue to judge that these mass shootings are best prevented at the local level and I do that partly based on the problems of omission I have seen occurring with these incidents.
We lock our doors and secure our valuables on a continuous basis even though we know that if we did not observe security measures the chances of a violation of our person and property are very small. Part of the small odds is because of the expectation that nearly all people use security measures. We take these measure even though we have laws and agencies that supposedly protect us. Unfortunately their efforts are most often after the fact.
Uvalde is an example where there were several omissions of what should have been simple local security measures that could have prevented the incident. For some reason these omissions are way down on the list of topics in discussions of these incidents.
LoL….I haven’t confirmed this, but it is to good to pass
Take a look at the pay scale
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Ukraine HR hiring policy ????
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https://southfront.org/25-year-old-girl-without-any-experience-appointed-deputy-minister-of-european-integration-in-ukraine/
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Ed Forbes,
And this is different from a barista, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, being elected to the US Congress how? Or the attention paid to Greta Thunberg, for that matter.
Bartender not Barista. Double major from BU with Cum Laude graduation.
I like the bartender part, but I wish, really wish, she’d stuck to that.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #213347): “And this is different from a barista, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, being elected to the US Congress how?”
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For one thing, being a Representative does not and should not require any particular expertise. It only requires that an individual convince the voters of her district that she is a suitable person to speak for them.
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For another, AOC’s job does not depend on sleeping with someone, which is the implication of the article Ed linked.
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There is certainly more than a little corruption in Ukraine. But that seems rather in-your-face, even for a corrupt country. I don’t know how reliable the source is.
Hi Mike M.
Despite my discomfort with her views on almost everything, I think bartending experience makes more sense in a congress-person than some of the other possibilities.
John
I agree with you. There is nothing wrong with a congress-critters previous job being bartender. I honestly don’t know why people think there is anything shameful in that. It’s a job. Some people are hairdressers, dance teachers, waiters yada yada. People have to make a living somehow.
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I could understand criticism of her previous job if it had been hit-man or drug-dealer. But congress would likely be generally improved if people with a wider range of former jobs were in office rather than the generally narrow range we have.
Super clever people are much better at hiding corruption than blue collar workers. I worry much less about bartenders than I do about finance majors from Princeton on Wall Street coming up super awesome derivative trading schemes.
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When it comes to who is going to design and build my local nuclear power plant then credentials are going to matter.
Hi Lucia,
I suppose a bartender could be understood to be a drug dealer.
john,
Well…Sure. But there is a difference between selling pharmaceuticals, liquor and (now) legal marijuana and selling illegal drugs or even buying cigarettes in Indiana to sell in Illinois without paying Illinois taxes.
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My impression is the people slamming AOC for being a bartender would equally have slammed her form being a nail technician, braiding hair or being a garbage collector. All are legal jobs with very, very modest education and training. (Nail tech and braiding may have some ridiculous requirements in some states. But that’s a problem with escalating requirements for licensing.)
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We don’t need every in congress to be college educated. But even if we did, AOC is.
Paul Simon, former Illinois Senator attended but never graduated college. No one slammed him for that. In the army he was nothing more than a private. I mean, not even a non-com officer! The horror!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Simon_(politician)
64% of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. Job approval at 33% with 2/3 of independents not approving. This is the floor I think, hard to see it getting worse.
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The only thing worse than confused old man is angry confused and ineffective old man. Yelling at the gas station owners? I don’t know about where you live, but these places aren’t exactly palaces of wealth.
More pulse oximetry equity disinformation.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/07/11/1110370384/when-it-comes-to-darker-skin-pulse-oximeters-fall-short
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“She says a national legacy of racist, pseudo-scientific studies has left scientists wary of exploring physical differences between people of varied races.
“People are afraid to talk about physical differences because they won’t want to appear to be discriminative,” says Koomson. “But I think that we have to talk about aspects that affect people’s health and have an impact on the care that they’re being given.”
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Masimo’s CEO responds last year
https://www.ocbj.com/healthcare/pulse-oximeters-not-racist/
“Therefore, we did a further review of our internal data—which covers over 2,000 subjects with more than 1,000 dark-skinned people (more than the number of subjects in the Michigan study)—and found a 0.3% difference between the groups across an oxygen saturation range of 70% to 100%, and a 0.25% in the more limited pulse oximetry range the Michigan study focused on.”
john ferguson,
“I think bartending experience makes more sense in a congress-person than some of the other possibilities.”
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Sure. Bartenders at least know something….how to mix drinks. The same can’t be said for many elected to Congress. Still, someone who is promulgating laws (and especially gigantic programs like the ‘Green New Deal’), maybe ought to know a little more than how to mix bar drinks. And based on her many statements on a multitude of subjects, it seems mixing bar drinks is likely the upper limit of her competency.
Tom Scharf,
“…and found a 0.3% difference between the groups across an oxygen saturation range of 70% to 100%, and a 0.25% in the more limited pulse oximetry range the Michigan study focused on.”
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See, that proves it… oximeter companies are always trying to kill black people, just because they can!
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Maybe the oximeters need, by Federal Regulation, a “Black-Caucasian” switch to make up that 0.3% difference in O2 saturation….. you might call it an “anti-black-kill” switch. 😉
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But really, what do you expect from people who are profoundly stupid? No amount of data makes a bit of difference to the terminally stupid or the terminally uninformed (not mutually exclusive classes, BTW).
Lucia,
“My impression is the people slamming AOC for being a bartender would equally have slammed her form being a nail technician, braiding hair or being a garbage collector. All are legal jobs with very, very modest education and training.”
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Well, I slam her mostly for proposing really stupid, damaging things (eg 85% marginal Federal tax rates, wealth confiscation taxes, forced “decarbonization” with no alternative energy source in sight). The fact she was a bartender actually is a plus compared to those other jobs, since bartenders (usually) make a lot more money, which proves that at some level she responds to cues like how to increase her own income.
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But please note: she NEVER got a job related to her undergraduate degree(s)…. “intentional relations” and “economics”. OK, the subjects are not quite as fluffy as sports management and “gender studies”, but damned close. IMHO, she’s an utter fool. And delusional to boot: she claims men ‘desire her’ and that causes them to treat her badly… I find her not attractive at all… she mostly reminds me of Jaba the Hut from Star Wars; repulsive.
SteveF,
I think it’s fine to criticize her for being a fool, having stupid ideas and so on. I just don’t think “bartender” is a negative.
SteveF (Comment #213359)
Steve, I believe you are forgetting that we have moved on to allowing experts and the science tell us what to do through our patronizing government. Elected officials, like AOC, are merely cheerleaders for their POV. The voting constituents of these cheer leaders get to decide whether they like the cheers.
Seriously, when this country was first established, elected officials of the government were considered best to come from all parts of the population. Government was not meant to be big or take on complicated tasks. Those undertakings were thought better left to the private sector. Politicians were to be sent to governing centers and most expected to begrudgingly take on the duty for as short a time as possible.
It seems we have come a long way from that understanding. Today’s politician in general wants to stay in office as long as possible, are for the most part irresponsible and think in terms of simple explanations for problems and policies that they condescendingly think is the only way to communicate with their voting public and which further makes exaggeration and lying much easier. I suspect you could find these qualifications from all parts of our society. All you need to do is groom them physically and politically. The political part is learning to bull sh-t so that the voters think you know something about what you are talking about, and learning to lie with a straight face. If a politician makes a convincing argument that it takes a great mind and special skills to do his job that is a politician who has mastered the art of bull sh-tting.
Very interesting piece on Ukraine-Russia on the Australian ABC
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-12/russia-ukraine-putins-revised-theory-of-victory/101227820
Written by Mick Ryan who is a strategist and recently retired Australian Army major general. He served in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a strategist on the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. His first book, War Transformed, is about 21st century warfare.
SteveF,
I suppose if they’d had a major in “intentional relations” I might have done a double major too.
The ideas she promotes are so nutty, that one wonders whether she believes them herself. Maybe she picked all this stuff up bar tending.
Andrew Kennett (Comment #213364)
Per the link:
“.. Then, with increasing energy costs, rising inflation and a general weariness with the war (among populations who are sacrificing nothing), Putin is counting on assistance to Ukraine declining. And he is betting on greater pressure on Ukraine from the old European powers for some form of accommodatio….”
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This does not begin to address the economic ruin that Europe, and Germany especially, is looking forward to this winter when Russia is just dribbling out greatly reduced gas and oil shipments and they have zero reserves.
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Europe has brought their fists to a gun fight in their economic war against Russia and will ( have ?) come to regret starting this fight.
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1/2 (or more) of the world supports Russia and are quietly cheering for a western fall from dominance which now looks likely.
Andrew Kennett,
I think that author is wildly optimistic about the outcome in the Ukraine. Russia has already said that they consider the regions they now hold to be independent or part of Russia, and in fact those regions have either large majority ethnic Russians or near majority ethnic Russians. I will not be surprised if the Russians begin forcing ethnic Ukrainians out of the regions they control.
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The author seems also confused about major ports. The main ports (by volume shipped) are in the Odessa region; only smaller ports are in the regions the Russians now control. Of course, those main ports are not operating now because of the Russian navy. The Odessa region has almost no ethnic Russians. Should Russia try to control regions that are nearly 100% Ukrainian, they will face the kind of endless popular resistance they faced in Afghanistan.
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My guess is that the Ukrainians will ultimately have no choice but to trade land for peace, as distasteful as that will be. The Europeans are not going to sacrifice their economies and the USA is not going to spend 500 billion dollars a year supporting the Ukraine. After Republicans take control of the House, unlimited and unquestioned funding for the Ukraine be likely be over.
john ferguson,
The sequence goes like this: I type on an iphone, and my finger hits the wrong (tiny) keys. The spellchecker offers to fix my error. Unless I look carefully, the correction can be nonsense. In any case, “international relations” is a stupid, fluff major.
Hi SteveF,
your phone makes interesting errors, I’m sure you’ll agree. agreed on international relations.
SteveF,
The combination of fat finger syndrome and rogue spell checker often leads to interesting unintentional results.
Kenneth Fritsch,
As I said somewhere else, the Jean Giraudoux quote applies to many, if not all politicians, actors and other con artists:
DeWitt,
Great quote. Made me think of Bill Clinton versus Hillary Clinton. One could fake sincerity like the best of actors, the other couldn’t.
Looks like the media is starting to wake up to the looming disaster in Ukraine . The below is linked in RealClear Politics, so now going mainstream
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“Current Thing chaos: Biden sanctions collapse, as Ukraine piles up losses & hemorrhages cash”
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https://dossier.substack.com/p/current-thing-chaos-biden-sanctions
When will the media start reporting that the aid sent to Ukraine included paying government salaries and pensions, and that even many of the weapons were sold.
Re: feigning sincerity.
Book published maybe 30 years ago detailed unusual abilities of effective politicians. It appraised Stalin, Hitler, Fidel Castro, and Bill Clinton. Maybe others as well.
What each of these guys was really good at was conveying complete focus on whomever they were speaking with. Interviews with people who had spoken with him reported that Stalin (for example) had focused his complete attention on them, had asked probing questions and seemed genuinely interested in their view of whatever the subject had been.
I suspect this focus was not feigned.
It would be wonderful to find this book.
Three of those fellas did not have to worry about politics as they were heads of a reign of terror. If they paid close attention to someone speaking to them it was probably because they were determining whether that person should live or die.
Bill, on the other hand, was the classic example of faked sincerity as SteveF noted.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #213377): “Three of those fellas did not have to worry about politics as they were heads of a reign of terror. If they paid close attention to someone speaking to them it was probably because they were determining whether that person should live or die.”
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Perhaps. But on the way up they did have to worry about politics. They likely learned that complete focus, real or feigned, was a useful tool in gaining the loyalty of others. It also is likely useful in discerning lies, if only by unnerving the liar. Even for an absolute despot, gaining loyalty and discerning lies are no doubt very useful tools.
No, Mike, on the way up their focus was does this person live or die when I gain power. They were evil before they gained power. They were never good old boy phonies like Bill?
On the good news side of things, Webb released the first images today. I like this one the best:
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/031/01G77PKB8NKR7S8Z6HBXMYATGJ
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Full resolution of 14K x 8K download. Sometimes it is hard to believe this stuff is real.
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The other can be downloaded from here:
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-028
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The initial deep field ones are also incredible. Galaxies just everywhere. Hard to believe we are the only ones around with these kind of numbers of stars. Got to hand it to the engineers, they pulled off the origami unfolding and got some dramatic results. Let’s hope it lasts the full 20 years of expected lifetime.
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It’s good to be proud of the work we do every now and then.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #213381): “They were evil before they gained power.”
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Of course they were. But they couldn’t let it show. At least not too much.
I suppose I’ve read too much about these guys, but I continue to be puzzled by the supposition that evil-doers intend evil or recognize that what they are doing is evil.
The book I sort of referenced was based on interviews with hundreds of people who had met and “conversed” with each of these characters.
The idea was to discover what unusual skills they might have had to find themselves at the top of their respective organizations.
Which is not to say one cannot get there without this ability, but….
john ferguson,
Everything I’ve read suggests the opposite in most cases. I suspect that Hitler, for example, had convinced himself that what he was doing was necessary.
john ferguson,
“but I continue to be puzzled by the supposition that evil-doers intend evil or recognize that what they are doing is evil.”
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I suspect they mostly believe they are advancing toward a long term outcome, and discount all the killing/atrocities as an acceptable means to an end. Castro and Ché thought nothing of immediately executing those around them if there was any doubt at all about dedication to the ’cause’ of a Communist paradise in Cuba. Chairman Mao thought killing many millions was an acceptable price for eliminating any residual capitalism in China. Whether on the left or right, whether inspired by Hitler, Marx, Christianity or Islam, the common thread in monstrous leaders is always a complete dedication to a desired political outcome, and a willingness to do most anything to achieve that outcome……. no matter the costs. It seems to me that kind of dedication to an outcome, no matter the means, is only possible when someone is absolutely convinced they (and their preferred outcomes) are 100% correct, and all other views are completely wrong. It is a religious (or religious-like) belief, which can only be held by the utterly arrogant.
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It is personal arrogance that yields monstrous outcomes. It is personal arrogance that drives crazy green policies (consider Sri Lanka!). It is personal arrogance that drives extremes of all persuasions.
SteveF and Dewitt, my views exactly and better expressed.
SteveF,
Speaking of Sri Lanka, the President has just fled the country for the Maldives and the Prime Minister’s office is under siege. That’s what you get when you do stupid things like banning chemical fertilizers. Organic farming can’t feed a country, much less the world.
DeWitt,
The crazy greens (who happen to be mostly vegetarians) have forced the Dutch government to commit to reducing all livestock in the Netherlands by 50%…. Netherlands is the largest exporter of meat products in Europe, generating $100 billion in export sales, and the government (by fiat) wants to reduce their total production by half. Pictures of giant farm tractors blocking roadways and airports come as no surprise to any sensible person. But the greens are anything but sensible…. only very arrogant.
On another topic entirely, it has been my (and others’) casual observation that prices at the gas pump go up rapidly when oil prices increase, and come down more slowly. Today I saw a graph here which compares wholesale and retail gasoline prices, which seems to confirm that speculation. [I would prefer to see a comparison between retail gasoline and crude oil prices, but this is close enough.]
HaroldW,
I looked a the graph at your link. It doesn’t look like it confirms your speculation at all. Looks like in late 2021, retail prices were rising while whole sale were flat. This is not a quick spike “after” whole sale rose. Then whole sale prices spiked really quickly, while retail oddly flattened briefly during the spike. At the very end, wholesale and retail values both started declining in lockstep. (Let’s hope that continues– I doubt it will.)
Honestly, someone would have to figure out some analysis of rate of change of the two signals and then see if one leads or lags. But my eyeball doesn’t seen the behavior you think you see in that graph.
HaroldW (Comment #213390): “it has been my (and others’) casual observation that prices at the gas pump go up rapidly when oil prices increase, and come down more slowly. Today I saw a graph here which compares wholesale and retail gasoline prices, which seems to confirm that speculation.”
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I don’t see that at all. They seem to track very well, except for recently when retail prices have clearly risen more slowly.
SteveF wrote “The crazy greens (who happen to be mostly vegetarians) have forced the Dutch government to commit to reducing all livestock in the Netherlands by 50%….”
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The Dutch prime minister is a WEF darling. I highly doubt this was forced.
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We are told that famine from war and covid is in the very near future, so, naturally, reducing farming capacity (in the same vein as reducing fossil fuel supplies) right now makes complete sense if exploitable chaos is your goal.
It’s a habit of historians to paint people as all evil or good. I would agree it is the, for lack of a better term, religious devotion to a cause that leads powerful people astray. Certainty, righteousness, dehumanization of opponents, we see this over and over. Combine this with a charismatic leader and submissive adulating followers then you have a recipe for yet another cause gone wrong.
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All sides, all causes, are prone to this failure mode. Unfortunately it is also this same devotion that leads to many successes. Steve Jobs was pretty much a tyrant as a leader. It’s not obvious to me why some causes step back from the precipice and others take a big leap into the void.
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I have worked for some hypnotically charismatic business people before. It’s very strange, I would call it more a gift than a learned trait. Just like all gifts, that tool can be used for good and not good. There is one thing for sure, I don’t have that gift, ha ha.
A short article on observations for the current Russian war. As usual in these types of articles, I agree with some if the points and disagree with others, but well worth a reading.
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10 Lessons From The Russia-Ukraine War
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https://medium.com/@daniel_clarc/10-lessons-from-the-russia-ukraine-war-f0a70a1c9d50
Mike M., Lucia —
Hmm…my eyeball take was different. Looking in particular at 2015, one sees the retail price go up in accord with the wholesale (with a small delay) in the early part of the year, but declining more steadily in the last half of the year, after wholesale prices dropped more sharply. And in the latter half of 2020, there was a decline in wholesale prices not followed by retail.
So I find it interesting that both of you perceive the relationship differently. I may well be focusing on the portion of the graph which bolsters my pre-conceived notion.
I’ll try to download data from EIA and analyze.
On gasoline prices: Get the data and run the analysis. Use lags as Lucia suggests. The eyeball correlation between retail and whole sale appears to high.
In the three tyrant discussion, it is important to point to all three of the tyrants leading socialist regimes where government has great control over people’s lives. It is not a long stretch from that control ending in the taking of lives. I do not think that the means and ends here are very different. Once you get rid of enemies you will get new enemies – nothing personal since they get in trouble because they are considered enemies of the state.
Rationalizing wars and the killing that occurs plus the use of language and policy whereby the victims are considered mere pawns in a righteous cause helps rationalizing it in non war situations. I cringe when I hear the government use language like war on poverty or drugs or on whatever emergency, real or otherwise, for which we need to go to war.
Bad actors in the private world do not on their own have the ultimate power that those in government have or the power to maintain their positions when things go bad. I use the term on their own because a private individual can gain considerable power with the aid of government.
Ed Forbes,
Some of what the article argues makes some sense, but much is delusional nonsense.
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The situation is not that complicated: Putin wants control of historically ‘Russian’ lands and a buffer against NATO. The West wants Putin to be exactly the opposite of what Putin is (or most any plausible Russian leader would be), and the Ukraine to be as free, and free of corruption as the Netherlands. Putin is not going to suddenly become Macron, and the Ukraine is not going to suddenly become a model enlightened democracy……. no matter how much money we spend in the Ukraine to prop up the government. I am confident the West will ultimately recognize that their desired outcome in the Ukraine is impossible, but that may not be until Russia has caused enormously more (unnecessary) damage to the Ukraine.
Russia’s purge of ethnic Ukrainians in the east is apparently well under way:
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“Blinken said an estimated 900,000 to 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens — including 260,000 children — have been interrogated, detained and deported to Russia, with some sent to the country’s far east.”
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Terrible, but not at all a surprise. Putin plans to make the east and south east of the Ukraine permanent Russian territory. Russia subdued Chechnya in large part by deporting/imprisoning/murdering about 15% of the population. Sounds like the same sort of thing is already underway in eastern Ukraine, but on a larger scale.
The estimated number of stars in the universe is 10^22 to 10^24, whereas 12 grams of carbon 12 is 1 mol and the number of carbon 12 atoms in 1 mol is 6×10^23 (Avogadro’s number). The universe then would be approximately 1 mol if we could relate stars of various masses to atoms or molecules.
Kenneth,
Which begins to explain just how incomprehensibly small individual atoms are. 10 million carbon atoms lined up in a row (single bonds, like in linear polyethylene), would not reach much over a millimeter in length. The instruments I build can measure gold sols (very finely divided gold particles) down to 2*10^(-9) meter, 2 nanometers…. but that very small particle still has over 1,000 individual gold atoms. Atoms are crazy small.
SteveF (Comment #213403): “Russia’s purge of ethnic Ukrainians in the east is apparently well under way”.
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Otherwise known as ethnic cleansing.
From the two links below, I found crude oil and gasoline monthly prices for the US from April 1993 to June 2022. I did straight correlations of prices and lags for gasoline of -1,1, 2 and 3 months. There was, as expected, a high degree of auto correlation for the both the oil and gasoline prices and thus the correlations differences were not large. I also did the same correlations with the first difference for the oil and gasoline prices, i.e. the absolute change in price month over month.
The results for correlation of prices were:
No Lag= 0.964282 Gas lag3= 0.911821
Gas lag1= 0.959375 Gas lag-1= 0.949761
Gas lag2= 0.938587 Gas lag-2= 0.929232
The results for correlation of first differences of prices were:
No lag= 0.693021 Gas 3 lag= 0.029782
Gas 1 lag= 0.56977 Gas -1 lag= 0.173464
Gas 2 lag= 0.230784
This analysis does not mean that there could not be short periods where gas prices or changes in prices lag oil prices but over the period analyzed here and using monthly lags there is no evidence for lags.
Crude oil price link:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MCOILWTICO
Gasoline price link:
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=m
SteveF (Comment #213405)
And the universe is crazy large. The contrast perhaps puts in prospective the difficulty in adding gravity to reach the final goal of one unified force.
Mike
Its political cleansing, not ethnic cleansing. Russia will happily remove ethnic Russians from the Ukraine areas if they are politically unreliable.
both sides are mainly Slavic so ethnic cleansing won’t apply in any case.
Ed Forbes (Comment #213409): “Its political cleansing, not ethnic cleansing.”
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I am skeptical.
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Ed Forbes : “both sides are mainly Slavic so ethnic cleansing won’t apply in any case.”
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That is just plain ignorant.
Mike
How so?
https://www.history.com/topics/holocaust/ethnic-cleansing
“Ethnic cleansing” has been defined as the attempt to get rid of (through deportation, displacement or even mass killing) members of an unwanted ethnic group in order to establish an ethnically homogenous geographic area. Though “cleansing” campaigns for ethnic or religious reasons have existed throughout history, the rise of extreme nationalist movements during the 20th century led to an unprecedented level of ethnically motivated brutality, including the Turkish massacre of Armenians during World War I; the Nazis’ annihilation of some 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust; and the forced displacement and mass killings carried out in the former Yugoslavia and the African country of Rwanda during the 1990s.
Ed Forbes,
Ok. I’n not Mike, but I’m going to take a stab at this.
The idea that “slavs” will see all other “slavs” as the same ethnic group is pig-ignorant. If anything, the when people are in the same ‘generic’ group but differ in some small respect, “cleansing” becomes amplified. Protest and Catholic Irish went at it for quite a long time. They were all “Irish”.
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Similar hatreds where outsiders see the two sides as indistinguishable but the insiders see some ginormous difference leads to people killing each other pretty frequently.
“ The idea that “slavs” will see all other “slavs” as the same ethnic group is pig-ignorant.”
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I would be interested in seeing what you have to back this up.
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My statement stands: “Ukraine “ is not an ethnic group.
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Now if you say one can self identify their ethnic identity as one can do so with gender identity , I will bow out of the discussion and leave the field to you.
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Societies clean out differing groups all through history. “ethnicity “ is only one of many ways groups are sorted.
Ed Forbes (Comment #213414): “I would be interested in seeing what you have to back this up.”
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The Holodomor.
Poland/Ukraine at the end of WW2.
Croats and Serbs.
Bosnia.
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Ed Forbes: “My statement stands: “Ukraine “ is not an ethnic group.”
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Ukraine is a nation. Ukrainians are an ethnic group.
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At best, you quibble about whether it is ethnic cleansing or something equally bad.
Not making a judgment on good, bad, or indifferent
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But language matters.
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In the case of Russia sorting the population under its control, sorting is being done on a individual political basis, not ethnic basis. If Russia believes an individual will be a problem, they deport them. Heritage is not a determining basis as they are all “Ukrainian “.
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Now if a word means whatever one wants it to mean,….not sure how one can make a logical argument that means anything worthwhile.
My understanding is that the Russians are taking Ukrainian passports and issuing Russian passports, at least for some who are being sent to Russia, so it may be as much a purge of the politically unreliable as an ethnic purge. In any case, probably a war crime according to the Geneva accords. That didn’t stop Russia in the past, and I doubt it will stop them now. Is Putin a murderous thug? Of course. Will Putin ever be prosecuted? Of course not.
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Will this purge make any difference to the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, etc? I *very* much doubt it. They want Russian petroleum, grain, natural gas, fertilizer, etc. Heck, the Chinese would do the same as the Russians (or worse!) in a heartbeat. There are a lot of really bad guys like Putin in the world, but IMHO, there is a bit too much pearl clutching over them. Sometimes there is little choice but to negotiate with bad guys.
**** cleansing
Sometimes a word isn’t up to the job; or maybe down to it. Don’t you often see some magistrate trying to fit the event du jour into a proscribed category?
If millions of people are being forcefully removed, then it is not just matter of dealing with troublemakers.
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The only “politics” is whether people see themselves as Ukrainian or Russian.
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Language does indeed matter. “Sorting” is obvious propaganda meant to hide the evil being done.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #213407)
I did not mention the timing of the data I used for the correlations in the above comment as I was waiting to see if any poster here was going to look at it. I read the data as the crude oil prices being for the first day of the month and the gasoline prices as a monthly average and thus the data has a “kind of built in” 2 week lag in the data. That would be expected.
I attempted to find the weekly data used for the graph that HaroldW linked, but have failed to this date. If I have the Harolds correct, I believe in the past that HaroldW has always been very good at finding information and data from online sources where others had failed. I am hoping he can come up with weekly gasoline and crude oil prices for analyzing.
Mike M,
I don’t doubt the Russians will describe the process, as best they can, to obscure the reality of what is going on. I just doubt they are going to stop. They will probably drive 3 or 4 million residents out of the regions they control.
I did find historical crude daily prices and gasoline weekly prices to analyze.
Crude:
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/RWTCD.htm
Gasoline:
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/PET_PRI_GND_DCUS_NUS_W.htm
Ukrainian language is not similar to Russian.
Ukraine is a nation, with many different groups settling there over the centuries. If Ukraine had won, I suspect they would have cleansed the Russian speakers out.
MikeN
I would have thought that 86% lexical similarity would make them similar, wouldn’t you?
If Ukraine ere to clear out the Russian speakers where would they stop, since it appears that most Ukrainians also speak Russian.
If the Russians are sending Ukrainians to Russia against their will, I do not see where that should not be a war crime. The Roosevelt administration put American Japanese in camps in the US during WWII and that should have been a war crime but was not considered as such and probably was not since it occurred on the winning side. Like SteveF says: Russia, unless against all odds is totally defeated, will not pay a price for these deportations.
Wars are a wonderful rationalization of some greater cause allowing an escape from any normal moral codes.
Suvarov’s book on the Spetsnaz is an excellent guide to how the Russian military would like their operations conducted.
What has happened in Ukraine falls so far outside Spetsnaz protocols and methods that one wonders what’s happened in Russia.
It is interesting that Suvarov was a Ukrainian and in one or two places in the book suggests that the folks from Kiev might be better at this sort of thing.
john ferguson,
“I would have thought that 86% lexical similarity would make them similar, wouldn’t you?”
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Yup. Russian and Ukrainian are *much* closer to each other than Portuguese and Spanish. They are further apart than USA and British English. Even my Polish born daughter-in-law (linguistically far more distant) can understand quite a lot of Russian and Ukrainian.
Mike N,
Compare Ukrainian and Russian on this web site: http://elinguistics.net/Compare_Languages.aspx
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They are rated ‘highly similar’ languages. Most all words are common, but with somewhat different accents. This is no surprise; the physical and political histories of the countries are closely intertwined.
I find it highly entertaining that Elon Musk buying Twitter was the end of the world according to the organs of elite opinion, and now Elon Musk not wanting to buy Twitter is met with the same people saying he must be forced to buy Twitter. It’s a bit telling that their views aren’t exactly based in a rational world.
Tom Scharf,
“It’s a bit telling that their views aren’t exactly based in a rational world.”
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It is a demented mixture of virtue signaling and desire to punish anyone who disagrees with them. Sick.
There are quantitative measurements of lexical distance:
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages/
The lexical distance between Ukrainian and Russian (38) is larger than Portugese and Spanish. It’s about equal to Port. and French (39).
The lexical distances between Ukrainian and Russian is further than English to Dutch (37). Yes. English is close to Dutch. I’m not going to pretend I understand spoken or written Dutch.
I have no idea whether there is any serious support for this notion, but after spending a couple of weeks in the Netherlands, I came to suspect that if the Normans hadn’t brought French to England, present day English would be something like present day Dutch.
john ferguson,
I agree. In 1979-80 I went to England around X-mass New Years. I heard spoken Dutch, having listened to little but French since August. My thought was “That sounds so much like English. Except I don’t understand anything!!
English is in the Germanic language group but lexically far from all other Germanic languages. So it can be called “close” to Dutch. But the fact that English speakers overhearing Dutch understand pretty much nothing tells you that “close” doesn’t necessarily mean “mutually comprehensible”.
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The Norman invasion did pull English a considerable lexical distance away from all the other Germanic languages. English ends up being weird.
https://termcoord.eu/2014/01/lexical-distance-languages-europe/
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I know based on the ballroom dance teachers that they all consider Ukrainian distinct from Russian. None consider it some dialect of Russian.
The “closeness” between those two languages isn’t like “Scotts” vs “English” where someone would be debating whether the one is just a dialect of the other. (I suspect it takes about 2 weeks for an American English speaker to understand “Scotts” with it’s “Ken” and “bairns”. But it can take a similar amount of time to just deal with some British accents (or for that matter some broad American accents!) The closeness is like Dutch vs English.
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Though FWIW: Every Ukrainian, Moldovan, Romanian, Estonia etc. teacher at the studio also speak Russian. The visiting coaches from Belarus speaks Russian. Russian is the “lingua franca”.
The one born-Russian teacher happens to also speak French because he is a naturalized Canadian who moved to Quebec. (He also speaks Latvian because he was born in Latvia!)
Since someone made a claim that all “slavs” are somehow the same ethnic group, it’s worth nothing that Croatians and Serbians are often considered different ethnic groups. In fact, Serbia recognizes Croations as a “minority group”. And Serbian and Croatian dialects would hardly be considered different lexically. Look at the slavic langauge region the lexical map:
https://termcoord.eu/2014/01/lexical-distance-languages-europe/
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I’d guess “Received Pronunciation” and “Liverpudlian” are probably further lexically– if anyone bothered to try to distinguish between them.
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Whether someone likes it or not, not all “slavs” are the same ethnic group. Or at least slavs themselves don’t think so.
(Honestly, I’m not sure Catalonians consider themselves the same “ethnic” group as Spaniards despite both speaking a “Romance” language. I’m pretty darn sure Romanians and Italians don’t consider themselves the same “ethnic” group despite both speaking a Romance language. )
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There are many elements to ethnic groups and I’m pretty dang sure Ukranians don’t consider themselves the same ethnic group as Russians. And a groups own belief actually matters when defining an ethnic group!
I asked someone once if he speaks Catalonian or Castilian- “Spanish.”
John Ferguson, I read a detailed article on the history of various peoples in Ukraine and the languages. The linked site showed Polish as closer to Ukrainian than Russian. The article dealt with some specific aspects of the languages like sentence structure or verb tense. I’ll see if I can find it.
Update, looks like grammar and sentence structure are pretty similar in Russian and Ukrainian.
Hi Lucia,
For me spoken understanding anything but English is pretty tough. My high school Spanish worked fine in Mexico but was hopeless in Miami. I spent a month in Mexico in ’65 and felt I was comprehending between 50 and 75% of what was said to me.
With some speakers, I could have transcribed what they were saying including the words I didn’t know. But then not everyone speaks with crystalline clarity. I certainly don’t.
In 14 years in Miami, it was 10% – Cuban Spanish as it is spoken in Miami seemed to me very idiomatic. And they leave out a lot of syllables.
Don’t you find that you can read to some degree newspaper level stuff in any of the Romance languages?
if you get a chance stream Kruti, recently made Ukrainian historic film describing a battle between the Ukrainians and the Russians in 1919. It includes some the political maneuvering of the period and conveys very clearly what at least the western Ukrainians think of the Russians. It’s available on Amazon. I had to watch it twice to “get” it and read-up on what was going on at that time. I thougt it well worth the time.
If you do watch it, let me know who you think the Russian commander resembles.
Well… French and Spanish yes. But I studied one (and then lived in France for a year) and the other was my first language (though I mostly forgot it.)
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I honestly have less trouble with spoken french vs. written French! I’d guess the same might be true for Spanish. But my abilities in these languages aren’t a good measure of distance between languages.
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I haven’t tried to read Romanian newspapers ; I’m pretty sure I have trouble trying to read Italian newspapers.
MikeN,
The year I went to school in France, I went to Spain for Spring break. I tried to call information to ask for a phone number in my attempt at Spanish. They accused me of speaking in Catalonian and told me I had to speak Spanish to get help from Spanish information.
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This was very frustrating. My theory was the French I had been speaking was cropping up in my attempted Spanish. Although that shouldn’t necessarily make it seem like Catalan. (My other theory was the operator was an a**hole because she knew perfectly well I was asking for a phone number and could perfectly well have either told me it wasn’t available or given it to me. Americans are much more tolerate of butchered English than some Europeans about butchered whatever language.)
Off the top of my head, I can’t give examples, but there seems to be some French in Catalan – at least in print.
I must be lucky. Janet and I travel on our own in countries where we don’t speak the language, even China in 2019. When I have to, I can be conspicuously humble. The result is that sometimes there’s no comprehension, but always it ends in a lot of laughter.
I do admit that we ate a meal in Beijing which included objects which I never was able to identify, even close. No-one in the place had any English at all and the meal was chosen from a picture book of the dishes. But then what we got didn’t look like any of the pictures. It was spicy which is what we like.
Next and following nights we ate at another restaurant – soup like hot and sour but with more ingredients.
Only once have we been treated with mild hostility, in what turned out to be a gay pub in Paris. Maybe they hadn’t wanted couples there, or there was some other issue which I hadn’t recognized – certainly nothing negative from us.
At least learning the Cyrillic alphabet reveals a lot in Russia, such that what looked impenetrable was “toilet” or “information’.
I find the real killer to be German, I had to translate a technical paper written in late ’20’s in Germany. A lot of the words were not in the dictionary I had. Someone told me they had a big one from that period at Northwestern. In 1959, there was a German in the engine school there, but he couldn’t get all of them. We decided to get the information we needed some other way that I’ve now forgotten.
Lucia,
Donno. I am a fluent Portuguese (second language) speaker, and I can understand clear, formal Spanish (eg CNN in Spanish) about 80-90%. On the streets of Cartagena, Colombia, it is more like 30% . I routinely communicate with Spanish speakers in business settings via a mix of Spanish and Portuguese if my counterpart has no English. I can understand almost nothing of dutch, and I suspect that is because even though there are many common words, the pronunciation in dutch is very (very!) different for the same or similar words.
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Perhaps the measures of similarity that you site do not accurately reflect cross-intelligibility of spoken related languages.
SteveF,
Do you find any challenge in Lisboa Portugese?
SteveF,
My Dad spoke Spanish and said he could communicate with people in Brazil also.
The measure of similarity at that site is “shared words” (lexical distance). I don’t know how the define a shared word. Perhaps pronunciation doesn’t matter? Also, the purpose of showing the language families is that will affect things like grammar– so order of words.
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It may well matter what words have changed. If things like conjugating “to be”, “to have” changed dramatically, that could matter more a lot. In English, differences in Rythm and stress on syllables can matter too. (It can take time to get used to a strong Indian accent, and most Indians who move here adjust that somewhat. But I know as an undergrad it often took me a few classes to get used to a really strong Indian pronunciation. But all the words right.)
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But the original post saying Ukrainian and Russian were similar was “shared words”, so that’s the same measure in this chart.
Ahh! SteveF,
The site you linked does more than lexical distance! It explain here (though I haven’t groked the entire explanation.)
http://elinguistics.net/Language_Evolution.html
It does place Ukrainian closer to Russian than English to Dutch. (And if you use their comparison tool, it’s results for closeness values would sort of “make sense” of Spanish and Portugeuse being fairly mutually intelligible and English-Dutch not so much.)
It’s trying to look at additional factors.
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Admittedly, they don’t actually talk about mutual intelligibility.
john ferguson,
It is sort of like the difference between UK English and US English. Same language, accent is different. Colloquial expressions are very different. When I have encountered Portuguese people (in Europe) I have not had any trouble communicating….. they usually say “Voce e’ do brasil?” (Are you from Brazil?)
Lucia,
The Elinquistics.net site shows that Russian and Ukrainian are extremely closely related….. far closer than Portuguese and Spanish. As my Polish daughter in law has told me: it appears there is broad mutual intelligibility between Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian. Her language skills are perhaps greater than most people’s, but I have to believe that most Ukrainians and Russians can in fact communicate pretty easily.
SteveF– I agree. Elinquistics.net showed the two closer. See two comments above. They account for more than “lexical closeness”.
What they capture seems to matter because it explains the “puzzle” of why we “all” have noticed Portugese and Spanish are mutually intelligle while English and Dutch are not. This isn’t explained by the “lexical proximity” (number of shared words) alone.
Lucia,
Dutch/English is a puzzle. I can understand more German than Dutch, even though Dutch is “lexically closer”. My dad was stationed in Germany after WWII for about 4 months. He told me that after 4 months he could understand a great deal of German. I have probably spent 4 months in the Netherlands over the past 15 years…. but understand absolutely nothing of spoken Dutch.
Possibly wrongly, I was impressed that Dutch sentence construction was more like ours certainly than German where in some sentences you don’t find out where it’s going until the last word.
I also read in a link posted here that English is classified as a Germanic Language. I wonder how much closer it would be to Dutch if all the French stuff was removed.
SteveF,
I thought all the sibilants you hear In Portugal are not heard in Brazil. My Daughters Portuguese is readily identified as Recife originated which of course where her college roommate was from.
John,
Imaginetrying to speak with all the French stuffremoved!! There is so much of it!Yes, it can be done. But oy!
Lucia, a few years ago, while half-awake thinking about these things, it occurred to me that my education or at least what they tried to convey to me included no French history. I suppose that was, or may still be, typical of the time. So I rummaged around trying to find something suitable in English, and gave up.
Eventually I read a book that had been prepared during WW1 by an historian for the war department which was a hundred pages or so and pretty much laid it out. And best of all Guttenberg has a Kindle version.
While I’m at it, another useful book is de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution. Food for though in today’s political climate especially how the aristocracy couldn’t see it coming when in fact the seeds had been planted over 100 years earlier.
He relies on a series of travel reports by Irishman Arthur Young in France 1777,78, and 79. He mostly stayed with aristocrats during these trips and I think is one of the bases for de Tocqville’s conviction that no-one could see the revolution coming, but had they, they might have either prevented it or sucked the latent enthusiasm into more orderly progress.
I should add that about 7 years ago The Old Regime and the Revolution was assigned reading to the Chinese Peoples’ Republic Central Committee.
Likely with the thought that if you don’t pay close attention you won’t see it coming.
John,
Honestly, I had neither a French History nor English History class. I did have Russian history. That was an elective in high school. Some students asked to have it!
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But which kings were which in England? Who’s a Plantagenet? What was the war of the Roses about? I think I got most of that from movies or reading encyclopedias after reading movies. It’s really spotty.
From the two links below, I found crude oil and retail gasoline weekly prices for the US from Jan 21, 1991 to July 2022. I did straight correlations of prices and lags for gasoline of -1,1, 2 and 3 weeks. There was, as expected, a high degree of auto correlation for the both the oil and gasoline prices and thus the correlations differences were not large. I also did the same correlations with the residuals from arima(1,0,2) models for the oil and gasoline prices.
The results for correlation of prices were:
no lag= 0.97; 1 wk lag= 0.97; 2 wk lag= 0.97; 3 wk lag= 0.97; -1 wk lag= 0.97
The results for correlation of prices using arima residuals were:
no lag 0.08; 1 wk lag =0.54; 2 wk lag =0.13; 3 wk lag=0.08; -1 wk lag=0.06
As can be seen from the correlation results the very high level of auto correlation of the price series prevents doing reasonable statistical analysis without “whitening” the series. The weekly lag for gas prices to crude oil prices is close to 1 week and perhaps a day or two over a week.
Regardless of the very high correlation in prices due to past prices having a large effect on current prices, answering the question about shorter time periods where gas prices might not go down with crude oil prices requires dealing with the actual prices and not whitened residuals. To that end, I looked at 12- and 25-week intervals over the entire time series with a 1-week gas lag with linear regression of (1) oil versus gasoline prices, (2) oil prices versus weeks and (3) gas prices versus weeks.
In the first regression I obtained the slope of oil versus gas prices and the r square value. If the slope here was positive, it could be assumed that for that period oil and gas prices were aligned. If the slope was negative than either the oil price was going up and the gas price down or the oil price was decreasing while the gas price was going up. The r square value was used to determine whether the slope was significant. The second and third regression determined the oil and gas prices versus time where a negative slope shows prices decreasing and a positive slope shows prices increasing over the period of interest.
The results for the 25 week intervals had 4 intervals with a negative oil versus gas slope and a significant r value. In all 4 cases oil prices went up and gas prices went down. For 12 week periods there were 6 periods where the oil versus gas slope was negative and the r square was significant. For 5 of these periods oil prices were going up and gas prices were going down while 1 period had oil prices going down and gas price going up.
Using shorter periods of time for regression was ruled out due to obtaining statistically significant slopes. I have attempted to give at least an eyeball analysis with finer detail by plotting the entire oil and gas price series together in the same plot with 2 different y axis. That plot can be viewed from this link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r5ap4zxwtuoo989/CrudeOilGasolineChart.pdf?dl=0
My view of the plot is that when there are spikes in prices gas and oil prices might spike at different rates.
Crude:
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/RWTCD.htm
Gasoline:
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/PET_PRI_GND_DCUS_NUS_W.htm
SteveF (Comment #213451)
I took a year of German in college in preparation for a proficiency test of a scientific article in order to get a masters degree. We had vets who were stationed in Germany in the class who could converse with the class professor from day one. I do not believe they did that well with the grammar or reading German. Those areas were where I excelled but I never mastered speaking the language. The test was a German article about a topic with which I was familiar. Any word meaning where I had doubts I could simply fill in from knowing the subject matter.
Once on a business trip to Germany I was dining with 3 work colleagues when on leaving the restaurant an older German approached with a party of four of five and started shouting at us. I wished I understood spoken German well enough to determine why he was so anger. I did not think it would have been a good idea to ask him to write it down.
On the July 4th weekend I was visiting my MN family and they had a family from Columbia staying with them. They spoke no English and my daughter-in-law speaks no Spanish. They all had i-phones with a translation app and that is how they communicated. It was fast and efficient. My daughter-in-law’s sister speaks Spanish fluently and she talked to the Columbian couple for quite awhile. Afterwards I asked her what they talked about. On her telling me those people’s personalities were coming across and differently than when communicating with an app. She said the wife kept interrupting the husband and correcting him. I said that sounds familiar.
Lucia
“lingua franca”.
The one born-Russian teacher happens to also speak French because he is a naturalized Canadian who moved to Quebec.
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Do French Canadians speak actual French?
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Real question.
In the Netflix series (French) A very Secret Service two Quebecois separatists meet the French agents who clearly cannot understand their patois and dish them unmercifully for their words and accents.
Bill Bryson A short history of nearly everything explains the evolution of the English language from its roots.
German type connecting words everywhere.
Nouns from French , German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and Latin plus any language the English contacted.
W words from Germany, double OO words (school) from the Dutch
French words for the privileged.
My Ukrainian friend who travelled to Russia with us had virtually no problems understanding Russian, she picks up languages very quickly but said it was very close.
Her husband, Italian teacher, said I would always speak Italian like an Englishman ( or American I guess)
It was not a compliment and was very true.
angech, try moving your arms and hands more.
I like the sound of the spoken Italian by Italians, but I do not think I could ever do it. I know someone who speaks Spanish as a second language but not Italian who spent an evening conversing with Italians in Italian.
I worked a project with a couple of Netherlanders. Their English was perfect and quite British. And then one of them said controversy. I thought it was hilarious until I was told that the Brits accent the second syllable instead of the first as we in the colonies have come to do.
Kenneth,
I can understand about 10% of Italian on TV due to similarity to Portuguese. For a Spanish speaker to jump right into conversation with Italians is very impressive.
Angech
“Do French Canadians speak actual French?”
Yes, and it has improved a lot with access to French TV. However, some French tourists are jerks, and they can be treated to a made-up mixture of old French, mis-pronounced English words, and whatever is appropriate.
There are some local accents, of course. In the sixties, there were 3 documentaries made in Isle-aux-Coudres, where my Hervé ancestors immigrated from France. As I was born some 50 Kms away, I can understand the accent, but most French Canadians would need the subtitles.
SteveF/John ferguson,
When in an outdoor restaurant in Italy, I overheard a Spaniard and his family trying to ask for some sort of tableware from the Italian waiter. The two parties could not manage to figure out how to communicate. I did a Spanish-Italian translation based on knowing a tiny bit of Spanish and a tiny bit of French. (This was a situation where the word in Italian was similar to French but was something totally different sounding in Spanish. I’d been to enough restaurants to have learned that word in Italian)
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Honestly, I was surprised the waiter couldn’t figure it out because there are only so many things someone would be asking for given the context. It was a tourist area, I would have expected the waiter to know a smattering of words like “spoon”, “fork” etc in nearby language.
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Jim was very impressed I could do it. The waiter and customer assumed I must no both Italian and Spanish, and were rather surprised that I speak neither!
Angech,
I spoke French the year I lived in France. I have no trouble speaking to Pavel in French.
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That’s not a true test of whether French Canadians “really speak French” because Pavel likely learned book-French while in Russia. But I’ve run into other French Canadians and been able to speak to them briefly. So I think Canadians do speak real enough French.
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My late Mother, the inveterate traveler, used to tell me that absolutely everyone spoke English worldwide. She took tours organized by various universities. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that the only people she spoke with were provided by the tour.
Dad understood what was happening but it wasn’t his way to dispute anything with her.
From my experience in situations like the one Lucia describes above, far fewer people have working English even for the trade they are in.
I find acting usually gets the job done.
john ferguson,
“absolutely everyone spoke English worldwide”
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Heck, there are plenty of people working at Miami airport who speak little or no English. Just about everyone at the airport can speak
Spanish, even those who speak English well.
English spoken in China can be pretty amazing. We had a challenging encounter with a Chinese guy in Guilen. He knew that his English though probably well organized could not be easily understood. As it turned out it had been learned via a “tree” of English instructors who had never heard native spoken English. He thought that it was possible that no-one in this tree had ever heard a native speaker.
When our daughter ran away from home after high school she wound up teaching vernacular English to doctors in a medical center in Barcelona. The intention was to tune up pronunciation affected by learning from non-native speakers.
John,
The spaniard and italian weren’t speaking english. The spaniard was attempting to ask for some sort of table ware in Italian– but was substituting the spanish word for whatever it was he wanted. (Perhaps fork?) The waiter knew the spaniard wanted something, just not what.
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Overhearing their frustration, recognizing the Spanish word, and having learned the italian word (which I knew was very similar to the French word), I told supplied the Italian word to the waiter!
(The word may have been ‘fork’ which is very similar in italian and French (forchetta, fourchette) — and noticably close in English (fork). But it’s very different in Spanish (tenedor). I don’t really remember what the word was, only that it was some sort of tableware.)
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Many Italian waiters we encountered know a smattering of English. But this one didn’t seem to know relevant words in Spanish.
john ferguson,
Speaking a second language well requires that you hear native speakers, not people who themselves have a characteristic non-native accent. It is all about duplicating sounds, not just learning words, conjugation, and sentence structure; you have to learn the way a little kid learns, by ear, lest you end up sounding like the queen of England reading Spanish from a text book.
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Years ago I worked with a group of Japanese engineers for about two weeks; their English pronunciation was uniformly terrible even though they all had good English vocabularies; they were difficult even to understand, in spite of their vocabularies. But when I went to a karaoke bar with them, they could all sing well known English songs with virtually no accent. I was shocked!
SteveF,
One should start learning a second language before puberty. Otherwise, it is difficult to leave the plantation. Nationalist leaders know that.
SteveF (Comment #213463)
The conversation occurred a long time ago and, as I was trying to recall all the details, I think the person told me that the Italians knew some Spanish, but, as I recall the overheard conversation, I heard a lot of Italian being used.
SteveF, is not that fairly typical that accents get lost when singing popular songs.
I am way past puberty and I am still learning my first language.
first was baby-talk
Kenneth,
“SteveF, is not that fairly typical that accents get lost when singing popular songs.”
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Maybe, but that is really the point. Lots of actors can sing a song very well in a language they do not know because they are simply duplicating sounds……. even if those sounds carry no meaning for them. That is how you have to learn to speak a second language well: duplicate the sounds, but know the meaning of the words as well.
SteveF,
Opera or dialogue. I was going to use Gert Frobe in Goldfinger as an example, but his dialogue turned out to have been dubbed in post-production by Michael Collins because of Frobe’s heavy German accent. But I think there are actors who do memorize phonetic scripts.
Anyone who sang hymns in church by now has probably realized that they had no idea what was being sung about in many of them.
The hit song from Cool Hand Luke was very popular with us as a song to be sung while driving somewhere.
When she was six, daughter asked why anyone would want “plastic cheeses” on their dashboard.
That is cute when for a six year old: plastic Jesus = plastic cheeses, but not so cute when a hard of hearing older person makes those hearing equivalencies. I speak from experience.
They are still doing GOF research on coronaviruses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/science/bat-coronavirus-laboratory-experiments.html
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““For me, the benefits of this work are outweighed by the risks,” said Dr. David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University.”
“Gaining a furin cleavage site may have been a crucial step in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. To explore that possibility, Dr. Eloit and his colleagues ran lab experiments to give BANAL-236 a chance to evolve new traits, such as a furin cleavage site.”
“In a similar fashion, the Pasteur researchers removed lung tissue from mice infected with BANAL-236 and used the tissue to infect healthy animals. They then repeated the cycle, transferring viruses from mouse to mouse.”
“Some critics said the research was so reckless that it shouldn’t be published, for fear that other researchers would copy the work and accidentally release a new pandemic strain of flu.”
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“This virus would probably hit a brick wall in the general population,” Dr. Peacock said. “I don’t really have much issue with
the experiments.””
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Probably…
“This virus would probably hit a brick wall in the general population”
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Without the furin cleavage site, they are likely correct. But they are trying to get it to develop a furin cleavage site. Madness.
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“Some critics said the research was so reckless that it shouldn’t be published”
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Indeed. Not being able to publish such madness would greatly reduce the incentive to do such research. Unless it is for the military.
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So what is this BANAL-236? A quick search found that is one of the “bat sarbecoviruses with high sequence homology to SARS-CoV-2 found in caves in Laos that can directly infect human cells via the human ACE2 receptor”. https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06141
Not at all comforting.
Mike M, Tom Scharf,
Utter madness.
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This kind of research needs to be made a felony crime, and financial support for work outside the US, from US funds, should be prohibited. The UN should take up the issue and do their best to get all countries to sign on to a ban.
I believe Plastic Jesus predates Cool Hand Luke by about ten years. What I found was that it was written in 1957 by Ed Rush and George Cromarty in 1957. They recorded it as The Goldcoast Singers in an album published in 1962. I vaguely remember either hearing it on the radio or live at a folk music club when I was in college.
One of the classic mishearings of a song, IMO, is hearing “there’s a bathroom on the right” instead of ‘there’s a bad moon on the rise.”
For a very long time I thought that misled was pronounced ‘myzelled’ instead of miss-led. A few years back, I heard a storyteller on the radio saying that he did it too when he was younger, which made me feel a little better.
DeWitt,
SteveF’s observation that Japanese he knew could sing perfect English doing Karaoke but not in conversation is not surprising to me. I sang in choirs which did the three requiems in addition to various masses and never troubled myself to understand what the Latin was driving at. It might have well have been skat, but it had to be correct so we did sing the words.
If our Latin wasn’t proper, no one ever complained.
I suspect that conversing in a language has nothing at all to do with singing it.
At the same time, if it was English, we sometimes moved the accents around a bit to mess with the meaning. Example was where Handle inserted a comma between “All we” and “like sheep.”
We did this with the connivance of our director who also thought it was funny.
Tom Scharf,
I suspect the only risk he sees is not getting a publishable result. I bet he believes the original SARS-CoV-2 virus did not come from GOF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Maybe he thinks that if he can get a furin cleavage site without chemically inserting it into the virus it will prove the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. I don’t think so.
john ferguson,
“I suspect that conversing in a language has nothing at all to do with singing it.”
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I am certain you can both converse and sing English without accent. 😉 It is the duplication of sounds that I am talking about. Those Japanese engineers never tried duplicating the sounds of spoken English, but did duplicate the sounds of many of the same words when singing. I’ve been watching my 3 1/2 YO grand daughter learn to duplicate word sounds since she was about 12 months.
When they speak about the benefits of GOF research there is a lot of hand waving. They get “insights” and so forth. They can get insights from not trying to make it dangerous to humans in my view. This person’s job likely depends on this funding so they aren’t exactly neutral.
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As for their view of the lab leak theory, same article:
““This is another nail in the coffin of the lab leak theory that by now should be firmly sealed in the crypt,” said Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney.”
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Really? If that is how the professionals view lab safety risk then I’m even more worried.
Another nail in the coffin of the lab leak theory? How so? Did they manage to get the virus to evolve a furin cleavage site? If not, it is support for the lab leak since the strongest single piece of evidence is that the furin cleavage site had to be inserted by humans.
Kenneth,
Leaving a concert of Handle’s messiah I heard children singing,
“Oh we like cheese,
Oh we like cheese, “
It seems that the significance of BANAL virus is that it is rather similar overall to the Wuhan virus and has a RBD very like the Wuhan virus. Apparently the first bat virus with the latter. So it makes natural origin a bit more plausible, but hardly rules out the lab leak.
https://www.science.org/content/article/close-cousins-sars-cov-2-found-cave-laos-yield-new-clues-about-pandemic-s-origins
https://www.science.org/content/article/close-cousins-sars-cov-2-found-cave-laos-yield-new-clues-about-pandemic-s-origins
But no cleavage site, which is the big indicator of artificial modification.
Mike M.,
It’s not just the furin cleavage site, but the protein sequence at the site. I don’t remember the details, but apparently the protein sequence is highly unlikely to be found in animals. Also, I don’t think any virologist who supports GOF research can be trusted to have an unbiased opinion about lab leak vs zoonotic disease for SARS-CoV-2.
Besides, if the Chinese knew for a fact that it was zoonotic, they wouldn’t be insisting that the origin was actually in the US.
I think there was some faulty logic that proving that covid could be naturally occurring is the same thing as proving it was naturally occurring. They allegedly prove this by growing it in a lab, ha ha, or something. This may put more weight against the theory it was intentionally designed and released, but it doesn’t put away the theory that it was an accidentally released virus studying “insights” with GOF. If we really knew what was going on in the Wuhan lab then maybe we could know the answer, but I don’t think we will ever put that question to rest.
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If people think the 2nd amendment is harmful, publishing GOF recipes and making genetic bioengineering cheap and accessible is much more scary. At least guns don’t reproduce on their own and spread by aerosols.
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The general public may think people in white lab coats are not capable of making big blunders with safety. Just like anything there is a spectrum of discipline in people. People watch too much CSI. My observation of many small companies dedication to safety is, shall we say, highly variable.
The guy who shot the mall shooter within 2 minutes is a legitimate hero (from everything I know so far). I wish the legacy media could drop their ideology for just two seconds and legitimately celebrate this act. You can be against the 2nd amendment and honor this person at the same time. C’mon, man.
So I asked Vlad about the mutual intelligibility of Russian and Ukrainian (explaining the issue of Spanish/Protugese and English/Dutch.) He said it was MORE complicated than whether they are are or aren’t mutually intelligible.
First: He grew up in a city where 98% speak Ukrainian as a first language. The remaining 2% are not necessarily Russian.
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First, he says: There are parts of rural Ukraine were he can’t understand the locals initially.
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Then, he says: If you collect together a bunch of Russians who are shooting the breeze and pick a non-Russian speaking Ukrainian (assuming you can find one) the Ukrainian can usually understand the Russian even if he can’t speak Russian.
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But if you flip that around, a Russian will not understand the Ukranians shooting the breeze. So there is some assymetry about the words/accent and so on.
He also mentioned some words that in the two languages where the difference was clearly just accent. Others that were cognates. Others that were loans (into Ukraine from Russian). And others that seem to have no relationship at all.
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That said: he said the most Ukrainians do know some Russian (sort of like so many Scandinavians do know English, but American’s don’t know Norwegian.)
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If the Russians can’t all understand the Ukrainians, then it’s not quite like “Portugueses/Spanish”. But it’s also not like Dutch and English (which he agrees are mutually totally unintelligible.)
Tom Scharf,
“C’mon, man.”
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There has be at least some coverage in the MSM, but they mostly quote the local law enforcement folks describing the ‘goos samaritan’ as a hero. I doubt MSNBCNN will be asking the guy for a live interview.
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I saw one great comment from an opponent of the second amendment that went something like: “You can’t rely on a private person to stop the shooter. There were 433 ‘active shooter’ incidents last year, and only 22 were stopped by a private person with a gun….. that’s less than 1%.” Looks like that ’emotional learning’ in math is doing exactly the job liberals hope for…… inability of people to clearly understand reality.
Lucia,
Thanks for that information. With any two relatively intelligible related languages, understanding will also depend on clarity and speed…. slow and clear speech is always going to facilitate understanding. Fast speech that is full of colloquial expressions does the opposite.
Lucia, Kenneth, and SteveF,
How much better can you do when you can recognize the words?
I would think a whole lot better. Being able to puzzle your way through the local newspaper in a place where you cannot grok a single spoken word.
SteveF,
So how long did it take for the police to get there in the other 411 incidents? And, of course, you make the problem worse if you act to prevent private citizens from being able to stop shooters by keeping them from carrying guns. But that would be logical thinking.
john ferguson,
Not sure I understand the question; maybe I am not reading it right. The more common words there are between related languages (with at least recognizable pronunciations) the easier will be communication.
Only 22 were stopped by armed citizens? Sounds like the bomber bullet hole misconception to me.
I read here that the CDC summarized back in 2013 that the best estimates say guns are used between half a million and three million times a year in self defense, but the vast majority of the incidents are never reported. It’s enough that the gun owner has the gun, they don’t injure or kill anyone and nothing gets reported.
How many ‘mass’ shootings were deterred? I don’t believe we have much way of knowing, but if between .5 and 3 million defense gun uses occur a year I’d guess it’s a lot more than 22 mass shootings prevented.
Shrug.
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I cannot understand spoken French at more than 5% but maybe more like 40% written. Better with Spanish in some places in Mexico, but hopeless in Miami. We seem to be judging commonality (best word?) in languages on whether we can understand each other’s speech.
I think we’re writing the same thing.
Lebanese colleague who went to LSU was touring in cajun territory with another Lebanese. They got lost, stopped to ask directions from a local. After a bit of a struggle, he asked forgiveness to ask if English was being spoken. Yes, was the answer. My colleague’s and the local’s versions of English didn’t meet in the middle. Their French did work, to their mutual astonishment.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #213493): “It’s not just the furin cleavage site, but the protein sequence at the site. I don’t remember the details, but apparently the protein sequence is highly unlikely to be found in animals.”
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The amino acid sequence itself is not the issue so much as the codons used. Each amino acid is coded for by 2-4 different RNA codons. The furin cleavage site has 3 arginines in a span of 4 amino acid. In the Wuhan virus, all three use the same codon. It is an uncommon codon in nature, but is the standard choice for the genetic engineer.
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It also seems that omicron came from a lab. Natural mutation will produce a mix of synonymous and non-synonymous mutations. the former change the codon but not the amino acid, the latter change the amino acid specified. A majority of mutations are synonymous. Omicron has something like 27 mutations in a short stretch of the receptor binding motif, which is the region targeted by the vaccines. All but one is non-synonymous. Just like an engineer would do it.
My wife and her sister grew up in Taiwan but moved to the states relatively young in their teens. Listening to them talk on the phone after living in the states for 50 years is bizarre. They intersperse Chinese and English words in the same sentence all the time.
Mike M.,
Thanks for the correction. As I said, I was working from memory, which is somewhat less than reliable now.
That’s the first I’ve heard that omicron may have been engineered to bypass the vaccines. At least it is less virulent than the original.
The results are in. Shocked, shocked, I say.
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Gallup: Media Confidence Ratings at Record Lows
https://news.gallup.com/poll/394817/media-confidence-ratings-record-lows.aspx
“Taken together, these data suggest that the media has a long way to go to win back the public’s confidence.”
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Ummmm … yes.
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16% of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers
11% have same the degree of confidence in television news
Democrats’ confidence low but higher than Republicans’, independents’
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Republicans are at a whopping 5% confidence level. Independents are at 12%. Dismal, dismal, dismal. Keep it up and see if you can get lower than 5%! I mean 4% is the “lizardmen are running the world” level of polling.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
DeWitt: “engineered to bypass the vaccines.”
not evolved?
I think it was somewhat predictable that the virus would be pressured to evolve to bypass high levels of population immunity. It’s unpredictable how successful that evolution will be, but a few zillion virus replications sure helps.
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It found some new paths, but became less lethal. Nobody can predict with confidence where it will go from here, and (almost) everyone has given up trying to do so. All the confident assertions of herd immunity are gone, among other declarations from those who allegedly represent “science” that didn’t pan out. Mercifully the arrogant lecturing is also gone.
SteveF
That could be the issue. It may be that Ukrainians use more colloqual expressions. He did say there Ukrainian has dialects. Once you start dividing speaking into “language”, “dialect”, “just a different accent and some colloquialisms”, the divisions can be murky.
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It may well be that, owing to the hegemony of the Russian state under the USSR, Russian ended up with more people speaking what would be “official Russian” with dialects being stamped out. Meanwhile Ukraine, not being the “top-dog-state” may have kept it’s dialects along with official Ukrainian. Then measures of “similarity” we see might be between “official Ukrainian” and “official Russian” which would be more similar than “real, colloquial laden Ukrainian that people actually speak” vs. “Official Russian”.
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That’s speculation of course.
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Vlad did, after all, say there were dialects of Ukrainian he can’t understand. It would be hard to believe Russians would then easily understand all possible dialects of Ukrainian.
Tom Scharf
Is that certain? (Real Q). I’ve read lots of “on the one hand on the other hand” discussions. ( Fewer people are dying. But maybe it’s either some, albeit imperfect natural immunity or vaccine immunity from previous infection.)
It’s definitely less lethal on a deaths per infection basis, but it is a bit messy due to natural immunity and vaccination now.
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So you would need to look at the unvaccinated death rates and age brackets (or should you?). According to this:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
Omicron and unvaccinated had about 4x the case rate over delta and about 1.3x the death rate delta. So approx. 3x less lethal per case, but lots of fudge factor there.
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The death rates of the vaccinated should count too. The unvaccinated / uninfected group is getting vanishingly small at this point and it is really hard to verify that group as uninfected. Looking at the other groups you also now have the time since vaccination / infection being meaningful so it is a very difficult to normalize.
Vaccinated had about 10x the case rate in omicron over delta and 2x the death rate. 5x less lethal.
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Those numbers can be contested in detail but the overall trends looks pretty clear as less lethal. 2x to 5x probably. As a big blob though, obviously less deaths per infection as one can eyeball rather easily on the basic charts.
On a different topic, according to Gallup, Americans’ confidence in news media is at a new low of 16% for newspapers, 11% for TV. The newspaper figure broken down along partisan lines: Democrats 35%, independents 12%, Republicans 5%. TV similarly: Democrats 20%, independents 8%, Republicans 8%
Edit: oops, reported above, sorry
Tom Scharf,
The extra complication is availability of home test kits…. lots of positive, symptomatic cases go unreported. So while the reported cases to death ratio in the USA is now about 300:1, the total cases to deaths ratio is almost certainly much higher, though exactly how much higher is unknown. My daughter’s entire family (4) caught covid and recovered over the past three weeks; I think one case (the first) was reported of the four. Covid is now in the fatality range of the flu for vaccinated elderly, and less fatal than the flu for people under 40 or so, and much less fatal than the flu for infants and toddlers.
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I suspect the ‘pandemic’ will never officially end so long as Biden is in office, but as a practical matter it is all over but the shouting. When the requirement for a negative covid test for travel to the USA was (finally) dropped in June, that was a reasonable point to declare the pandemic de facto over.
SteveF,
Four of us who went to the same waltz group dance class got it the same week. At least three of those were reported. We all wanted treatment, which meant we had to go see a doctor and got an office test. I don’t know if Matt went in to confirm his. So his may not have been reported.
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But I agree lots of these won’t be reported. One of the odd things about messaging is it’s all “vaccine, vaccine, vaccine”. But they rarely say “there are treatments if you act quick”. You really want those treatments pre-emptively because you need them before. (And yes, Paxlovid does have potential rebound. But the treated group has less than 20% hospitalization of the treatment group. It worth getting it and then just seeing if you do get “rebound”, which isn’t that frequent. Though Fauci got it. 🙂 )
john ferguson,
I say engineered because of what Mike M. said in his reply to me above.
Obviously this is not proof, but it is evidence. The probability that so many non-synonymous mutations happened by evolution is vanishingly small. It’s similar to the reasoning that the unusual codon sequence for the furin cleavage site is more consistent with an engineered virus than natural evolution.
lucia,
I frequently see tv ads from Pfizer during daytime shows talking about seeing your doctor to get treatment if you have tested positive. Probably more people see those ads than read newspapers.
Lucia,
My younger brother was symptomatic, tested positive, and qualified for Paxlovid, which he got within 36 hours of symptoms in late May. He said all symptoms disappeared within 24 hours. I explained the rebound issue to him (so he wouldn’t infect others… including me), but rebound or not, no symptoms returned.
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The mechanism of action for Paxlovid seems to be general for RNA viruses…. I wonder when off-label use against the common cold will be studied; perhaps very soon.
I wonder it the mortality rate among the un-vaccinated but infected has dropped – I suspect it has. Hospitalization rate in same group?
SteveF, neither of us got treatment for our symptomatic infections and I think symptoms might have lasted more than 3 days if exhaustion can be counted a symptom.
withe regard to the unvaccinated, the constituency of this population would be different from what it was 2 years ago.
I can’t think of any causation, but there is a correlation between the stridency of people who tell me to get vaccinated, and particularly to get my kids vaccinated, and those people getting COVID.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #213518): “Obviously this is not proof, but it is evidence. The probability that so many non-synonymous mutations happened by evolution is vanishingly small.”
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Yes, and that is not the only evidence.
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The rest of the omicron virus somehow evolved from an early strain that had disappeared from the wild long before omicron showed up. There are various theories as to how that might have happened, such as an early strain crossing into an animal population, evolving there, and then crossing back to humans. But such theories do not explain how it got so well adapted to humans or how it came to partially evade the vaccine or the lack of synonymous mutations.
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But omicron is fully consistent with someone using computer simulations of protein binding to predict the needed RBM structure, then editing the RNA of an early strain stored in a lab, then passaging the result through a human cell culture.
So you are saying it has tons of non-synonymous mutations but very few synonymous ones? If true, I guess that does sound low probability. (OTOH: I don’t know much about genetics. But I did at least skim to find out what they difference is. )
lucia (Comment #213517): “And yes, Paxlovid does have potential rebound. But the treated group has less than 20% hospitalization of the [not] treatment group.”
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I inserted the ‘not’.
That sounds like the original trial result for unvaccinated individuals. As usual, Paxlovid has been less effective in actual use than in the trial. And it seems to have little benefit for the vaccinated.
lucia (Comment #213524): “So you are saying it has tons of non-synonymous mutations but very few synonymous ones? If true, I guess that does sound low probability.”
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That is my understanding. And that appears to be specific to receptor binding motif. As near as I can tell, the evolution of the rest of the virus seems to be normal, except that it diverged early in 2020.
SteveF,
I had no rebound; neither did Jim. I don’t think it’s frequent. The nurse did explain it could happen and so we should watch for return of symptoms after we finished our course of Paxlovid.
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I haven’t read anything about how frequent rebound is nor under what circumstances it happens. Rampant speculation ahead: Fauci was probably being pro-actively tested — possibly even with very sensitive PCR. If so he may have gotten Paxlovid much earlier than most people do. The paper reporting tests I read had people get them either 3 days after first symptom or 5 days. Perhaps Fauci got it the day of his first positive test and that could have even been before symptoms.
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If so, that might mean that the anti-viral came in so soon his body never saw enough virus for his own immune system to kick in. Then, possibly, the antiviral doesn’t quite “kill” all the virus (it just slows replication.) So when it was done, he still had a very low level, which could grow.
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In contrast, most people will have had had the virus grow somewhat before they get the anti-viral. That slows the growth, but it’s sort of just “helping” while your own immune system also operates. When you are done, your immune system has helped.
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Yep: rampant speculation on may points. Fauci’s treatment. Behavior of Palovid. Bodies response. That entire reasoning chain could break anywhere!!! 🙂
MikeM,
I haven’t been following that speculation, so I certainly suspend my judgement. But at least that aspect of the reasoning has a patina of credibility. Thing is, I’m not going to track down the facts to see if they hold up. So I’ll continue to suspend judgement!
I agree with SteveF that the death to cases ratio for Covid-19 must be very low currently and much lower than reported cases would indicate. The cumulative US rate for infected and vaccinated as measured by seroprevalence has to be nearly 100 %. Unfortunately, the infection rate for the previously vaccinated and infected with the current variants of Covid-19 is much higher than for previous ones.
From anecdotal evidence of friends and relatives I had the reinfection rate at something in the low single digits percentages. Infection after vaccination has been much higher and again anecdotally the friends and relatives have been mostly infected with the recent Omicron strains and after they were vaccinated and boostered. My sister recently reported to me that her daughter has been infected 3 times and 2 other members of her daughter’s family have been twice infected.
The second booster rate for the US has been around 25% as I recall.
Omicron is a branch of the early covid tree. I think it came out of South Africa as I recall. It’s certainly possible that this was circulating in a remote area for a while before it broke out. Delta is likely still around but at really small numbers. The complete elimination of variants is probably better stated as almost complete elimination.
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I would probably believe Omicron is naturally evolving unless I see some good evidence otherwise. Engineering the virus doesn’t make much sense, what would be the point? Realistically I would more likely believe this was intentionally engineered as a service to humanity due to its decreased lethality! We either got “lucky” with Omicron or this is just the way viruses tend to evolve. It seems the science here is bit limited.
This graphic (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status?country=~65%2B)
shows how the risk ratios between the vaccinated and vaccinated in different age groups have changed over time. For the under 18 group, the risk has been so consistently low (1 chance in 5 million per week un-vaccinated versus 0 chance per week in vaccinated) that vaccinated or not makes very little difference in total deaths for that age group.
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As age increases, the risk ratio increases, of course. But for me the interesting thing is how the risk ratio has changed for the one group at real risk of death (over 65).
In this group the risk ratio has fallen dramatically since omicron arrived. At the peak of the omicron surge (January 2022) the vaccinated/un-vaccinated risk ratio for death was just under 24. By the end of April, the ratio had dropped to 7.2, a factor of over 3. (The absolute risk of death fell by a factor of more than 30!)
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I suspect the fall in risk ratio is due mainly to ever more un-vaccinated people having become infected and acquired natural immunity (and survived), not a change in omicron during the January-April period.
SteveF,
That’s an interesting chart. One might think that the plague has already clipped off the low hanging fruit among the un-vaxxed; fewer left to infect. Or, it is different now.
And of course there was the first year when no one was vaccinated which was really deadly in the +65 cohort here in Pinellas County.
Maybe it is in your chart somewhere, but I wonder if vaccination and the booster increase one’s chances of getting the plague, and with the numbers done in recognition of the vaccinated tossing caution to the winds, eating indoors in restaurants, never masking in close quarters etc.
We live in a condo with 20 residential floors of 12 units each and have had a couple of floors within the last month where almost everyone was infected, yet no hospitalizations nor deaths. And most of us are over 60.
Something is certainly different.
To clarify what I wrote inartfully above, I intended not to suggest that there were fewer unvaxxed to be infected but fewer infectable unvaxxed now subject to infection. If it was ever established that there could be immunity among the unvaxxed, I never read it but imagine it could be true.
Tom Scharf (Comment #213530): “Omicron is a branch of the early covid tree. I think it came out of South Africa as I recall. It’s certainly possible that this was circulating in a remote area for a while before it broke out. Delta is likely still around but at really small numbers.”
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It would have had to circulate for a year and a half without dying out or being replaced by a new strain introduced from. I don’t think anyplace on earth is that isolated.
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And a remote area would mean nobody vaccinated, so how did it evolve resistance to the vaccine? And of course there is the lack of synonymous mutations.
———-
Addition:
Tom Scharf: “Engineering the virus doesn’t make much sense, what would be the point? Realistically I would more likely believe this was intentionally engineered as a service to humanity due to its decreased lethality!”
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Sadly, we have learned that ‘not making sense’ is not disqualifying.
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It may have been engineered in an attempt to determine if there was a possible problem with vaccine evasion and then to get ahead of that. Then released by accident.
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Or maybe it was done on purpose as a sort of self-administering vaccine.
john ferguson,
“I wonder if vaccination and the booster increase one’s chances of getting the plague, and with the numbers done in recognition of the vaccinated tossing caution to the winds, eating indoors in restaurants, never masking in close quarters etc.”
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Who knows? For sure most people are now much less cautious. How much of that is due to perceived lower personal risk is impossible to say; some of it could just be people tiring of avoiding risk. My mother-in-law (92 YO) is in an assisted living community (mostly age 75 to 95) with about 200 residents, all vaccinated. They had a covid outbreak in May where the majority of the people in the community tested positive, but there were no deaths nor hospitalizations….. and I am in a lot better health than most of those people!
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FWIW, although I am vaccinated and got one booster, I have pretty much “tossed caution” since mid 2020 when I reviewed the early Florida cases vs. deaths data (first ~50,000 confirmed cases). At that time my nominal risk of death from covid was ~3%-4%, but I figured it was actually much lower than that because there were so many documented cases of certain exposure but no symptomatic illness, and because so many of the deaths were associated with serious co-morbidities. Covid just didn’t seem to me that high of a risk if you didn’t suffer serious pre-existing health issues. I mean, if I am lucky, I might have 15 – 16 years left; turning a year or two of that time into torment to reduce covid risk just didn’t seem to me any kind of bargain.
SteveF,
re:time left.
As I was devoting an hour or so to cutting through a piece of steel in the shop. It occurred to me that this time could be measured as an increasingly significant part of my time left, possibly same as yours.
I went out and bought a band saw.
For those interested in in-depth coverage of the political and military situation in the Ukraine-Russian war, attached are a couple of podcasts produced daily.
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On the overall political situation
https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexanderMercourisReal
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On the military situation
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUnc496-PPmFZVKlYxUnToA
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Neither are short productions and both get “into the weeds” with deep detail. The focus with both is strategic, not tactical, which aligns with my interest.
Tom Scharf
That’s a huge point against the “it was engineered” claims. It’s why I would need a very clear, convincing discussion where someone really showed all the evidence and supported all the claimed underlying facts.
I think a lot of people also have less caution now because they are convinced nothing can be done about it, there was a hope at one time that the worst of it could be waited out, herd immunity et. al. That doesn’t mean you invite covid in, but you just have to live your life at some point.
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Seroprevalence shows “only” about 35% of seniors had been infected a few months ago, that number will be higher now. Waiting out the virus for vaccines and (unknowingly) a less virulent strain did pay off for those not infected yet.
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The plague sucks but we have to live with it. Onward.
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My wife saw some passengers literally wearing hazmat suits boarding a plane at the airport in Taiwan today. The US is far past that phase of the pandemic. I look back at people here stepping off the sidewalk to let other pass with adequate distance with kind of a chuckle now.
Reportedly, Biden & co. are considering declaring a national emergency of global warming, to implement the agenda they couldn’t get passed thru Congress. They already did a test run and activated the Defense Production Act to produce solar panels.
MikeN,
“Reportedly, Biden & co. are considering declaring a national emergency of global warming, to implement the agenda they couldn’t get passed thru Congress.”
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Almost any measure that makes a difference will be contrary to existing law and will be struck by the SC.
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Biden is, I am now convinced, both crazy and suffering Alzheimer’s dementia, and those two may in fact be related. The guy is disconnected from reality. If he could compromise with Republicans on substance, he could make some progress. He can’t do either. Every major public policy is ‘non-negotiable’ for the extreme-left Biden Whitehouse. I believe it is a coin toss whether he stays in office until January 2025.
SteveF, what you say about Biden is about Biden’s helplessness as a failing old man which in turn means there are others telling him what to do. If these were ideas coming from Biden as original ones it would be much less problematic with me. Those policies and ideas are coming from a progressive philosophy that pervades most of the intelligentsia, academia and main stream media. It is that observation that is problematic for me. As a whole that crowd is neither old, demented nor crazy. Biden is currently their useful idiot.
Biden may have problems getting his fly down, but the crowd telling him what to do and cheering him on are very politically adept – and that should not be overlooked.
Fortunately we have a democracy to correct for Biden’s dwindling capabilities, as opposed to the “Democracy” the organs of elite opinion keep talking about, which I have never quite determined what they mean beyond their side winning.
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Realistically every young person (including myself) goes through a phase of actually believing if only people with their wise and just views were in charge all will be well. This is just another rotation of learning “this is way harder than it looks”. Inflation, violent crime, war in Europe, pandemics, etc. The best and brightest literally cannot believe those impertinent problems don’t magically go away in the powerful presence of such smart people with such great motives. Maybe they aren’t so bright after all and a little humility is a good way to get better.
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Things were actually better under Trump, they were. This isn’t because Trump wasn’t a raging egomaniac, but because he was a little lucky and also actually competent at a few things that people will never give him credit for. Judicial appointments for example. More or less he knew to get out of the way for things he didn’t care about or he knew he was incompetent at.
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Add on to this manufactured crisis such as systemic racism and climate change which in their view just go away with the correct political will.
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Caring deeply about a problem isn’t a solution, although it is possibly a prerequisite. I can respect true believers but there are many more charlatans just signaling to their peers on social media. I just wish they would get out of the way. If you want to raise taxes and increase government’s role in people’s lives, you have to have a compelling argument. If the only argument you have is “Trump, Trump, Trump” then you aren’t going to get very far.
Tom,
Yes. I think that the underlying difficulty is that many of these problems are too varied and complex for a centralized solution. It’s part of the rationale for freedom, laissez-nous faire, and smaller government. Let people optimize locally, they are more expert in their local situations than the smart overlord will ever be. So on.
Mark Bofill: “Let people optimize locally, they are more expert in their local situations than the smart overlord will ever be. So on.”
I’m not sure this is true, based on recent bad experience with our HOA board.
On the other hand, if a locally devised “solution” to some problem doesn’t work out, we at least have the dissatisfaction of knowing that we did it to ourselves
John,
Just imagine how much worse it would be if it was a *town* HOA board.
Now imagine how much worse it would be if it was a *county* HOA board.
A state board.
A federal board…
John,
Do you mind if I ask what your specific HOA board complaint is?
Mark, the issue was a technical one outside the competence of the board who didn’t realize that they didn’t understand the thing.
Although I agree that there is no good reason to expect competence from afar, one could suppose that there might be a greater chance that the ‘authority” might include someone who understood the issue.
I think one would *also* need to suppose that the authority from afar would have time to learn about and address the specific instance issue and allocate the correct knowledgeable resource to the problem.
I think the market solves this problem better. When individuals realize they are in over their heads they can choose to call in experts.
—
Ultimately, there is no cure for stupid and there is no formulaic approach that guarantees endeavor success. There are more and less optimal strategies.
Shrug.
Trump was a useful idiot for a non progressive crowd and that had a lot to do with his unpopularity with the dominant progressive crowd – even though Trump”s personality made him an easy target.
By the way, using emergencies has become a more frequent method of getting around democracy unless, of course, we can redefine democracy as being confined to voting for presidents or governors.
Unfortunately, the Covid-19 emergencies for the US states set a nice precedent for using emergencies as an excuse for executive action. The democratic populace was mostly very compliant with these undemocratic actions.
Kenneth,
“Unfortunately, the Covid-19 emergencies for the US states set a nice precedent for using emergencies as an excuse for executive action.”
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But in fact, state legislatures in many states passed laws to restrict the emergency powers of the governor….. in a few case over-riding the governor’s veto to put those limitation in place. I think there will always be a fraction of the population who are mainly motivated by fear, and quite willing to give up any liberty to reduce fear. But if covid has taught us anything, it is that the government response often added enormously to the damage done by the virus. I hope no sensible person will again argue that keeping kids (who were at essentially zero risk of severe illness) out of school for a year and more was a good idea. I hope a majority of people in future ’emergencies’ will recognize that government powers must be limited and clearly specified, even during a declared emergency.
lucia,
For anyone who has read Stephen King’s The Stand or, for that matter, played the Resident Evil video games or watched the movie, Gain-of-Function research makes no sense. But they do it anyway, even now, and claim the benefits, which I’ve never seen them actually list, outweigh the blindingly obvious risks which anyone with half a brain can see. Mass shootings make no sense, but they happen too. The reaction of law enforcement in Uvalde also makes no sense. IMO, ‘makes no sense’ is probative of absolutely nothing.
DeWitt
Sure. I agree. But we do know it happens. Which cuts both ways on the theory that Omicron might have engineered.
1) It’s not impossible.
2) It makes no sense.
3) But other things that make no sense also are done.
So while (2) leans against engineering Omicron, it doesn’t positively exclude it.
Probative? No. But you do need to be cautious about jumping to the conclusion that it did happen when the evidence in favor is not convincing and it makes no sense for it to have done it.
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Obvious, after a mass shooting happened, we know it happened, whether or not it makes sense. But if someone predicted that a mass shooting would happen at location X tomorrow at noon, you would probably want to understand what it was that lead them to believe that would happen. The “makes no particular sense” would strongly favor the notion the prediction will not pan out absent other evidence.
lucia,
Saying omicron was engineered (which also, IMO, implies it was released intentionally) does not fall in the category of predicting when a mass shooting will happen. It does exist. The evidence in the structure of the virus that is unlikely to have occurred by random mutation of a virus long out of general circulation is similar to the evidence that the original SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered in the lab. If anything, it’s stronger.
They way that people try to sweep this under the rug without any actual evidence is what makes not sense to me.
Covid was a legitimate emergency. We can look back now and say we probably overreacted in many areas and it does look like it was inevitable that covid would go endemic. We didn’t know that then. It was unprecedented and the government just doesn’t do unprecedented well.
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1 million people died in the US, a global pandemic. It’s something emergency powers are meant for. They floundered and flailed but got the vaccines done. The economy was kept afloat (for a while???). Of course the powers were abused. Of course. That’s why they are for emergency use only.
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Now they want to declare emergencies for climate and abortion. The right wants emergencies for immigration. How convenient it would be to not have that bothersome legislature in the way. Not going to happen. They will try anyway, and get pushed back.
Tom Scharf,
Yes it was a ‘legitimate emergency’, at least at the beginning, because much was unknown. But as time when on, and the nature of the pandemic became more clear, the emergence policies simply did not evolve as they should have. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but after 6 months, the information needed was enough to justify better, less damaging policies, like recognizing that young people were not at risk and should have been in school. Like recognizing that protecting the elderly from exposure was the best way to reduce deaths. Yes, our government does not do unprecedented very well, but that doesn’t mean every government was as incompetent. Sweden had no lockdowns, no school closures, no endless legal fights over mandates for masks and vaccinations, yet ended up with a much lower rate of deaths than most developed countries.
The states model in the US ended up being a good thing for trying out different strategies for covid. Florida was more aggressive in opening up and paid little price for doing so, much to the continued consternation of those who know it all.
Tom,
On what do you base this [claim]?
I don’t want emergencies for immigration. I’d like for our laws to be enforced. They are not currently being enforced.
Shrug.
Tom Scharf,
“Florida was more aggressive in opening up and paid little price for doing so, much to the continued consternation of those who know it all.”
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Age adjusted death rates are virtually identical for Florida and California…. one of the least extreme states versus one of the most extreme states. Californians suffered loss of liberty and much more economic damage, for absolutely no benefit in deaths. Somehow that reality needs to be remembered the next time there is a pandemic ’emergency’.
Trump declared a border emergency and used military funds to help build the wall. At least that is the way the legacy media tells it.
Tom Scharf (Comment #213557): “The right wants emergencies for immigration.”
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That overstates the case. Trump declared an emergency to build the wall that Congress had approved but stopped funding. Trump used the declaration to use other defense spending for the wall. Congress gives the President quite a bit of latitude to move funds around and the President has considerable latitude for defending the border. Nevertheless, many on the right criticized Trump’s move. I am not sure if that was limited to the open borders types on the right.
Thanks Tom.
Thanks Mike.
SteveF, I believe that a majority of the US voting public was in favor of government mandates concerning Covid-19. Mandates were imposed through state and local government emergency executive action. A number of mandates had end dates that were being continually re-imposed with new end dates. I recall that some mandates had no end dates.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/02/16/many-voters-think-its-too-early-to-lift-covid-mandates-poll-finds-as-democratic-leaders-do-it-anyway/?sh=637baa137426
Voters are very prone to being convinced that dire emergencies exist. The media and so-called experts are good at reinforcing this feeling. Giving up individual freedoms for an undetermined duration of a real or invented emergency with no democratic inputs (democratically imposed mandates can also be problematic) unfortunately will not be a problem for a large number of people who have been convinced that only government can resolve or solve a large array of problems.
In the US we are probably on the borderline of sufficient numbers of public-minded citizens being comfortable turning in those thought to be violators of emergencies mandates for that aspect of maintaining mandate effectiveness to work similar to how it works for communists and fascists regimes.
I have been saying for some time now that those pushing for attempts at more draconian immediate climate change mitigation by government will need to create a climate emergency and best done in real time with extreme weather conditions such as heat waves , drought and flooding. Once convinced of an emergency – and that can happen in quick order – executive orders can be the order of day.
The initial mandates and shutdowns were legally justified (even if not good policy) as emergency measures. But continuation should not have been allowed without legislative approval. The justification for emergency *powers* is that sometimes action must be taken on a schedule that does not permit consulting the legislature.
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Trump’s action re the wall could have arguably been justified under certain circumstances. But he had already asked Congress for funding and Congress had declined. So the “emergency” was not an actual emergency but was instead used to circumvent Congress on an issue that was both important and urgent. That was not proper.
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That said, given the way other President’s have wielded Presidential power, Trump’s emergency was hardly out of the ordinary.
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Although “climate” is arguably important, it is certainly not an emergency. It is not even urgent. And Congress has had time to act and has refused to do so. So no way is an emergency justified.
The emergency funding for the wall was likely illegal. The law used was for spending on military bases and the like.
MikeN
Yep. And not all conservatives wanted the wall. And not all those who wanted the wall wanted the funding to come illegally.
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It’s a mistake to say that if Trump was clamoring for it, then “conservatives wanted it”.
Lucia,
Exactly. I didn’t realize that was the issue until I asked Tom what he meant.
Shrug. Fair enough.
For the most part, Trump was quite restrained in using presidential power. Certainly more restrained than any other President this century. I think his border emergency was the one time he pushed the limit of that power.
MikeM,
Whether Trump was or was not restrained might be relevant to some other discussion. But is irrelevant to diagnosing if his use of that power was illegal in any particular instance.
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I agree with Mike N that Trump emergency for the wall was likely illegal.
Just for fun I scanned the text of Title IX. I couldn’t find a single mention of gender or sexual orientation. It was all about sex and there were specifically two, male and female. So it’s not women’s sports, it’s female sports and while it may be arguable that gender is a social construct and you can be whatever gender you want to be, there are only two sexes and they can’t currently be changed. Sex is not arbitrary. It is determined at conception, not assigned at birth. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped the bureaucrats.
DeWitt is absolutely correct. With luck, SCOTUS will agree.
I believe Trump took executive action and inaction to the extremes in his manically and egocentrically attempt to change the 2020 election results. He was requesting executive actions to overturn, or at last delay, the results of a democratic election. He also failed to use his well accepted and legally endowed executive powers to quell the ongoing and potentially escalating violence on Jan 6th when he put Vice President Pence’s well being at risk.
These actions should disqualify him for running for office again and be a precedent in discouraging any future presidents from following a similar path. Both Republicans and Democrats let politicians off the hook much too easily. Politicians already have way too much power over individuals and thus they need to be held to a higher standard than individual citizens and not have it, like the current case, the other way around.
Kenneth,
If Trump is penalized for his nonfeasance on January 6, 2021, then Biden should also be penalized for a variety of inactions, especially involving our southern border. I’m not holding my breath.
Then there are also all those district attorneys who refuse to prosecute general categories of cases rather than executing discretion on an individual basis.
From the link below, Trump was no shrinking violet when it came to executive orders and it is at odds with what MikeM indicated here. It appears that you have to go back to Jimmy Carter to have more orders per year. Biden is on track to best Trump based on his current time in office. And I blame Trump for having Biden as a president.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-orders
DeWitt Payne (Comment #213576)
You caught my drift.
There are a number of interesting comments over at Science of Doom on renewable energy and grid reliability starting here:
https://scienceofdoom.com/2015/10/20/renewables-xiv-minimized-cost-of-99-9-renewable-study/#comment-175785
They relate to a paper by Tong, et. al. titled:
Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power worldwide.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z#ref-CR29
But not the costs. It’s not at all clear to me that perfect transmission, i.e. no wasted power, is achievable in a country as large as the US.
Country by country graphs of power supply gap vs number of hours the gap lasts is here:
https://scienceofdoom.com/2015/10/20/renewables-xiv-minimized-cost-of-99-9-renewable-study/#comment-175813
My conclusion is that while it may be possible to construct a more or less reliable grid in the US using only wind and solar, it will be very, very expensive.
Kenneth,
While I believe Trump disqualified himself from being president again in the eyes of the (rational) voters, it is another thing entirely whether he legally disqualified himself.
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I didn’t watch the hearings but the arguments are veering rather conveniently between “look what he did” and “look what he didn’t do”. I don’t think the President of the US is personally in charge of the Capital security’s day to day operations. The whole thing went down in a matter of a few hours. Chaos, confusion. There is a whole string of people who didn’t assess what was going on or act with enough power to stop the riot. People whose actual job it was to provide security.
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This all comes down to isolated demands of rigor for Trump and everyone else gets a pass. Has a single person been fired for this yet?
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Trump has proven himself unworthy of being president again, but I also simultaneously believe he was, and is still being unfairly persecuted by political partisans and an irredeemable media. This is more a matter of an * equal standard of justice * for me rather than whether Trump violated the letter of the law. For example, the Late Night crew that was arrested for being on the Capital grounds will not be prosecuted, while every MAGA tourist who did the same was prosecuted to the maximum extent. But, but, but they were harmless! You know what, so was the Viking King.
It’s not up to the President to hold back on executive actions, although this would be laudable. It is up to the design of the governing system to prevent this from being exploited too heavily. It should be expected that the administration will use clever lawyering to get what it wants. The Supreme Court has slapped down lots of these actions. I’d certainly prefer the legislature resolve immigration in a more forward looking manner, but until they do the current law should stand. I haven’t the slightest idea how Biden could have the power to forgive student loans.
DeWitt,
The entire series from SoD on renewable energy was the best I have read on the subject. It really gets into the details. Non-obvious details such as how much more backup is required as renewables gain a larger share of the energy are enlightening. You have to pay for and maintain two energy systems. The immense cost of transmission lines from where the wind is to where people live. How often and for how long does the wind actually stop? Etc. People aren’t likely to accept just 99% reliability.
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In the US you can look at population density and windy locations, they are almost exact inversions.
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Good stuff. Renewables are getting more viable, that is good news. They should be phased in as it becomes economically feasible. There should be large scale pilot projects to test the technology at scale. It’s a very hard engineering problem.
The issue is not the number of executive actions Trump took. It is whether they were used to expand presidential power. Many of Trump’s orders rolled back the excesses of his predecessors.
Trump will be the GOP candidate for President in 24 barring some unforeseen event.
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So…its a binary choice…either support the Democrats in their insane policy positions by supporting the the Democrat party candidate or support the GOP candidate ( Trump ).
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If you support GOP party policies over Democrat party policies, then not voting for Trump is supporting the Democrat candidate and Democrat party policies. It’s truly a situation where not actively supporting the candidate for your policy preference IS making a choice by default.
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Trumps an a**, but this has no bearing on the direction this nation will be directed towards in 24.
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Let the screams of outrage commence.
Post went to moderation
Ed Forbes
Sure. And if you vote for Trump, you are supporting Trump in his totality. That includes his policies, and his other features.
It is also truly a situation where actively supporting Trump IS making a whole package of things that ranging from his behaviors and policies. And some of those behaviors are seriously bad and have seriously bad consequences.
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Nonesense. His being a ** does have a bearing if he gets elected again.
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We just heard your screams of outrage. I don’t think “commence” is the right verb.
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Really, it’s ridiculous to imply that people disagreeing with you in civil measured tons are “screaming with outrage”. You also should know better than to believe you are going to shame the people present into silence with that strategy.
Ed Forbes,
By the way: If Trump is the GOP nominee, I will once again not vote for him.
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I will likely be making a choice between the lesser of evils; that choice will not be to vote for Trump.
It is far from certain that Trump will be the nominee. More and more, his supporters say they support his ideas and party more than Trump as an individual. DeSantis has actually beaten Trump in some straw polls. There is a lot of time for things to change.
Yeah. It’s too far out to call who is going to win the R nomination. We can say ‘barring some unforeseen circumstance’ but in essence the future between now and then is very probably chock full of unforeseen circumstances.
[Edit: Like Lucia, I will not vote for Trump.]
MikeM
Yep. And I think it’s important for those of us who will not vote for Trump to say so. That way those who love Trump might become aware of the fact that there is a very good chance Dem candidates will win if Trump is the GOP candidate
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YOu love him? Youwant to vote for him? Fine. You get to decide who you love and vote for. But be aware that if he is nominated, there is much, much stronger chance that a Dem candidate for Pres will win in 2024, and some GOP congress critters could be get swept out the Anti-Trump broom.
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You want to maximize the change of Dem polices from 2024-2028? Nominate Trump.
The weapon Russia fears PROJECT E.M.M.A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXgk6IELHdU
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US military recruitment advertising has changed a but over the years
Mike M,
“With luck, SCOTUS will agree.”
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I think you can count on conservative justices to reject the notion that Title IX has anything at all to do with people claiming to be other than their genetic gender, or allowing men to compete in women’s athletics. The whole lgbtqwerty focus of the craze woke left is one of the reasons the Dems are going to lose big in November; it is basically a question of accepting reality or not…. the woke crazies don’t accept reality, and the rest of the Dems are not willing to say a word, lest they be put upon by the woke mob. The Dems are going down in November.
SteveF (Comment #213592): “I think you can count on conservative justices to reject the notion that Title IX has anything at all to do with people claiming to be other than their genetic gender, or allowing men to compete in women’s athletics.”
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Sadly, they have already done the opposite as regard the Civil Rights Act of the same vintage. Bostock v. Clayton County
A vote for Trump in a primary is a vote for more progressive government. It is a vote for a man who cares nothing about the political sway of the country but rather only his own personal gain in the matter. Trump is not a small government conservative by any stretch of the imagination. A vote for Trump is a vote for Trump to take the debate away from political rule and focus it squarely on Trump. A vote for Trump is vote for Republicans voters being much less savvy about winning elections than Democrats.
In addition, I have to say that I do not know if the following deficit I see in our approach to political partisanship stems from the two party system we have, but I think it does.
There is a problem in holding responsible a politician of ones favored party because the other party’s politician do as bad or worse. Where does this lead? It leads to tolerating even worse politician’s actions and by both parties. If you call out your own party politicians transgressions you have set a precedent for doing the same for the other party because you can be assured if you do call out your own the other party is going to agree with the action which when it occurs to their politician the precedent has been set and the other party is very transparently being hypocritical if they ignore the precedent.
This is quite analogous to the situation where, for example, the Republicans call for less domestic spending and the Democrats call for less military spending. So what is the compromise? It is very seldom that the parties agree to compromise by cutting both military and domestic spending but rather it is to spend more on both budget items.
There is a current example in the Senate whereby there appears to be sufficient bipartisan agreement in congress to subsidize the chip makers based on security issues with China and a current shortage (which is actually getting better and the US chip makers are far from going broke.) Once the sufficient Senate Republicans voted to proceed, Schumer added more subsidies and brought the total to 250 billion dollars. Lets us see where this compromise goes when in my view there should be no subsidies.
>There is a whole string of people who didn’t assess what was going on or act with enough power to stop the riot. People whose actual job it was to provide security.
Trump wasn’t interested in doing anything to stop the riot after it started. He eventually put out a call to stop things, which Twitter and Facebook banned. Beforehand he said ‘peaceful and patriotic’, and suggested 10000 National Guard would be needed.
The people whose job it was to provide security helped arrange the riot. Distract those who weren’t involved with fake bomb threats at DNC and RNC. Secret Service escorted Kamala Harris to DNC earlier, yet somehow didn’t spot these bombs that ‘random passerby’ spotted out in the open. After the distraction, as Trump was giving his speech, Ray Epps and others removed the police barricades at the Capitol.
Now, the New York Times has come out with an article about 0Ray Epps saying he is being attacked by MAGAs who falsely say he was working for FBI. Why the New York Times is just full of sympathy for this guy who tried to get people to go into Congress.
Trump is an insufferable a$$hole, but it is always a choice between evils, and Biden is far worse for the country
Cutting to the chase.
DeSantis looming large.
Trump still in deep trouble on at least 3 legal fronts.
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In my perfect world the guy with the white hat wins by legal means and methods.
In a perfect world the guy with best use of underhand tricks wins.
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What I would like to see is Trump get back in and have a united team help him clean out the Stygian stables.
Then, in 4 long years of sufferance put up with his antics, bluster and Truth social tweets and see DeSantis, as VP or Haley as VP take over the reins as the swamp slowly returns.
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The truth hurts.
The truth is that he has not been guilty of committing a true crime as evinced by 7 1/2 years of non stop biased and degrading investigation turning up nothing substantial.
Nothing substantial.
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Did he come close to committing crimes or try to commit crimes?
Yes, but every time the people around him closed the illegal attempts down.
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Will he in future?
Yes, but so would every politician
His track record on the things that count is so good that even 1 1/2 years of the worst policies seem have not , yet undone his legacy.
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( running for job of press secretary in next Gvt)
Trump was advised and pleaded with by his advisers, family members, political allies, friends and friends at FOX early on in the Jan 6th ruckus to say something to stop the Jan 6th riot. Trump sat alone in a room watching the events unfold on TV and did nothing until he finally told the “great” ,or something to that effect, crowd to go home. Vice President Pence called for security support (the DC National Guard) and Trump did not. Pence told the Guard to get there faster than they were going about it. Trump was aware of the potential danger Pence was in and did nothing.
I would love to hear Trump attempt to defend his actions on Jan 6th in a court of law.
MikeN (Comment #213596)
All the conspiracy theories in the world cannot undo what Trump did on Jan 6th.
Ray Epps is or was an Oath Keeper who removed barriers and helped people into the Capitol Building. That sounds like something an Oath Keeper would do. I see no evidence that he is or was connected with the FBI.
Went to a Red Sox game…… 97F at game time. Worse loss in the 100+ year history of the team; down 27 to 3 after 5 and 1/3. the Red sox need two things: a new owner and a new president of baseball operations. That pair has dismantled what was a very competitive team and created a third tier team. The players move on the field exactly like you would expect players who have been thrown under the bus buy the owner. It’s a shame.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #213601): “I see no evidence that he is or was connected with the FBI.”
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Ray Epps also spent a lot of effort on both the 5th and 6th exhorting people to go into the capitol. So why has he not been arrested?
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The logical answer is that he was acting on behalf of the government.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #213601)
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“Ray Epps is or was an Oath Keeper who removed barriers and helped people into the Capitol Building. That sounds like something an Oath Keeper would do. I see no evidence that he is or was connected with the FBI.”
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Why would you expect to be able to see such evidence, Kenneth?
The whole point of secret activity is not to be seen.
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Does this sound right?
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“a supervising agent must sign off if the plan is for an FBI agent to infiltrate a group in order to gain information or as part of an investigation. If the participation of the FBI agent or informant will influence the group’s activities, then the head counsel for the division needs to review the plan. If the FBI’s presence is specifically likely to influence First Amendment-protected activity (if, the FBI participant plans to steer the group’s agenda on “social, religious, or political” issues), then the FBI’s office of general counsel must get involved, and perhaps senior FBI officials.”
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Why would they tell us?
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Mr Carlson has raised the issue nationally and he is not given to hyperbole *** [grin]
When what appears to be doing nothing is really doing something.
Dereliction of Duty on the afternoon of January 6? Nonsense.
The innocence of so much of the press seems to prevent anyone from realizing that Trump wasn’t simply doing nothing during the assault on the capitol.
He was actively preventing any one else from doing anything through his refusal to authorize an appropriate response early on, he himself having the only suitable authority. He actively hog-tied any possibility of a response.
It is so clear that he kept hoping the assault would achieve his objective even after the SS attempt to kidnap Pence failed. It failed because Pence recognized it for what it was and wouldn’t be “driven off to safety”
Trump at least was able to recognize that his scheme had failed and called it off before even worse things were done.
Duh….
john
The WSJ editorial page has a good discussion today.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-president-who-stood-still-donald-trump-jan-6-committee-mike-pence-capitol-riot-11658528548?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
It ends with
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Trumps defenders want to focus on the overreach of the comittee and defend that he didn’t do worse than he did. Or make claims that he didn’t “have” to stop the rioters.
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But you know, the cops in Uvalde didn’t “have” to stop the gun man and they didn’t. They stopped some parents from going in to rescue.
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We get to criticise them and most people do. We get to critcize Trump.
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And on the flip side: We praise the Indiana concealed gun carrier for killing the shooter. He also didn’t have to do what he did.
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Trump is to be criticized. And everyone should recognize that he shouldn’t be president. Changing the conversation to whether he should be hog tide is just a distraction from the important question: Should he be president. The answer is No.
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Lots of people know that and will not vote for him. I won’t vote for him. I’ve voted 3rd party in tons of elections and if he and Biden are nominated again, I will do it again. They are both dangerous and unsuitable people to have as president, in different ways.
Lucia,
My theory of Jan 6 is that the riot was intended, it was intended to disrupt the certification (correct term?) and the rioters were clearly dispatched with this intention.
If a general sends a battalion into the field, he doesn’t withdraw it at the first sign of resistance. If he withdraws it at all it isn’t until success proves impossible.
This is what we are looking at here. Accordingly, I feel that all this talk about dereliction of duty is either disingenuous or arises out of insufficient consideration of what was clearly visible.
i suspect that Trump and is associates believed that if the certification would be shut down, they might be able to provide sufficient alternate slates of electors to change the election outcome, or throw the decision into the house where the mechanics of vote assignment would make his selection feasible.
This plan was probably conceived before the infamous “it will be wild” tweet.
I agree with you about Biden. I wonder why he hasn’t yet been portrayed as the defunct parrot in the Monty Python skit.
But then I’m coming up on 80 and should probably let this lie.
One last thing, SteveF, please, please, don’t go to any more Red Sox games.
On the other hand, they might not have been jinxed by h your presence. They were able to bungle some infield ball handling enough to earn two errors in a single play at a game here in St Pete.
john Ferguson,
Do not worry, I won’t be going to any Red Sox games in the near future…. it was almost too depressing to watch. Add to that the heat, noise, and people spilling beer on me, and it is very hard to see any motivation to go again. Boston traffic near Fenway Park goes into complete gridlock an hour+ before game time…. another reason to not go.
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I doubt one lifelong fan shaking his head at each buffoonish play jinxed the Sox. What jinxed them was a series of you-have-to-blink-in-disbelief bad decisions by the owner and ‘chief of baseball operations” Chaim Bloom.
john,
I don’t disagree with you. But some might. And the fact is, at a minimum Trump did what the WSJ wrote. It’s undeniable. And that minimum version of his transgressions is sufficient to mean he should not be nominated or elected president.
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Certainly at this point in the election cycle where there is no nominated candidate, it’s silly for someone to assume Trump will be nominated (as Ed Forbes seems to think inevitable) and to then inveigh for those in the GOP to vote for Trump in the 2024 election.
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(This is what i call “inveighing’)
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In fact at this point the choice by responsible people in the GOP is to air their lack of support for Trump. And if someone is utterly unwilling to vote for Trump, it is to say so.
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And if/when Trump declares he is running for President, responsible people in the GOP should air their lack of support for him and not vote for him. And not donate to any group that is going to channel money to his nomination committee.
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I know there are some people who support Trump. Of course they can do what they like. But responsible people should not support a Trump run for presidency. They should especially not do it unless they think DEM’s in office is better than a “not Trump” GOP president in office.
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Because if Trump is nominated, there is a high probability that what we will get DEM control of at least the presidency. Lots of people who would vote for nearly any other GOP candidate will not vote for Trump. I won’t vote for Trump. Period.
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If Trump only GOP person someone who claims they are a supporter of conservative politics would prefer to DEM control of the office, then that person isn’t for GOP politics. They are just a RITO. (Republican in ‘Trump’ only. ) That’s not a true Republican. It’s just a personality cult.
Re: Baseball. We watched a Rays game which went so badly for them that in the last inning they let Phillips pitch which he did underhanded like softball and actually got as couple of strikes.
The Rays light the roof of Tropicana field orange when they win. I think it was a win against the Red Sox which apparently embarrassed the Rays enough not to to do the high-five dance at the end nor orange light the roof.
Watching the game you did must have been excruciating.
Meh, I’m not buying it. Was Trump supposed to personally go get an AR-15 and defend the Capital? This is all some biased post-hoc standard of what should have / could have been done in a perfect world. This standard only applies to Trump and his supporters.
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Was it not somebody’s actual job to defend the Capital? Real question. As part of security planning for a large security force which sees varying levels of protests constantly … the SOP manual says “wait for the President to do something?” No.
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Can Pelosi or Schumer do something? What is their minute by minute timeline of doing “nothing”? They were confused and didn’t know what was going on and were simply reacting to evolving events. That’s the standard of judgment for everyone, but Trump.
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And the people actually in charge of defending the Capital? Why aren’t we prosecuting the Texas governor for the Uvalde shooting? He stood by for an hour and did nothing. Nothing. What, you think it’s the police’s fault here? Very strange thinking.
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Let’s imagine Trump says call the National Guard, that happens in 5 minutes? The President is not in charge of Capital security, and nobody needs his personal OK to provide actual security, because it’s not his job.
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Sure, Trump sat back and was wishy washy and wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe he wished it to continue, but even if he did it is other people’s jobs to not let that happen. Exactly what I would expect Trump the a$$clown to do. However Trump actually told protesters to go home. But, but, but that doesn’t count because everyone can read his mind and knows he meant the opposite. We KNOW. Don’t we? Yes, we do. Or it wasn’t soon enough, or it wasn’t sincere enough. Or maybe it doesn’t fit the preferred narrative.
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There is a mess at the Capital, confusion chaos. People did stupid things and people were slow to react, because as usual the government doesn’t handle unprecedented well. Trump could have been more forceful, would that have stopped the riot? I very much doubt it. It’s a bad reflection on his character. End of story.
Tom,
It makes a lot more sense if what was happening at the capitol was exactly what Trump wanted to be happening.
john ferguson (Comment #213606)
John if you are implying what Trump did is worse than Dereliction of Duty, I would agree. I also judge that being grounds for prosecution in a court of law.
I have to laugh at the “high” conspiracy theories whereby Epps is a government agent and that will forever be kept secret. Looney tunes in defense of Trump is so Trumpian.
Josh Hawley comes across on Jan 6th as a hypocrite by hailing the mob and then running to safety from the mob. He reminds me too much of Trump and I hope he is not considered a Trump alternate for President.
Kenneth,
What makes me think that DOJ is going to prosecute is that no-one from DOJ has barked. I assume that it is Garland’s decision and that wherever he is on indicting (charging?) there has to be a group there which is privy to his thinking as it evolves.
It is very hard for me to imagine that there aren’t a few people in this group that would resign and go public if they thought this wasn’t going to proceed to wherever it can.
I’ve posted comments along this line in the two newspapers I read online and more than once. No one has ever attempted to refute this, even though there is constant gnashing of teeth and rending of garments including knotting of undies about Garland not having acted so far.
It may be that DOJ is going for seditious conspiracy and would like to have as many ducks as possible identified and aligned before they initiate the “public” part of their prosecution.
Tom Scharf (Comment #213612): “Meh, I’m not buying it. Was Trump supposed to personally go get an AR-15 and defend the Capital? This is all some biased post-hoc standard of what should have / could have been done in a perfect world. This standard only applies to Trump and his supporters.”
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I agree.
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I don’t know what Trump did or did not do on that afternoon. I don’t know what he did or did not try to do. I don’t know what his advisors were telling him he should or should not do. I don’t know where I can find that information. The Jan. 6 committee is obviously not a reliable source.
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Trump repeatedly told his supporters to be peaceful. Over 99% of them were peaceful. Seems to me that he wanted the protest to be peaceful.
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Trump was concerned ahead of time that there *might* be trouble. That is just common sense, even without all the intelligence indicating that some people were planning trouble. Trump told Milley and Secretary Miller (DoD) to make sure that there was sufficient security to keep any trouble from getting out of hand. Miller told Trump “We’ve got a plan and we’ve got it covered.”
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I think that makes it pretty clear that Trump did not want a riot. But the people whose actual job was Capitol security totally failed to do their job.
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It may be that when the riot started, Trump went into a funk rather than responding appropriately. If so, that is a black mark on his record. But at this point I do not have enough information to make a judgment.
Lucia
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You keep focusing on the vote to nominate Trump, where my post is clearly on the general election. The nominations are supposed to be a dog fight, so I will support my dog against yours, with the full expectation my dog will come out the winner.
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But….failure to vote for Trump in the general election if he is the nominee is a vote for the insane Democrat party policies.
So for what it’s worth – my problem with Trump does not really stem from the riot. My problem stems from the fact that he genuinely wanted his VP to overturn the election and send the results back for recertification. I thought then, and still think now, that it should be obvious to any simpleton why our system does not and cannot work that way. Trump knew he would be breaking and damaging our system and he didn’t care; he apparently felt that the chance of having his exalted presence in the WH for four more years would be worth whatever long term damage such an action would cause. In my view, this makes him unfit for the office. The man seems to be too much of an egomaniac to see clearly. I believe he wants what he thinks is best but I don’t think his egomania permits him to see what’s best.
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Trump advanced the right in this country in many ways, and I’m grateful for his service. It is time to move on; Trump is done in office. He can help best (if he chooses) by being active as an elder statesman in the party.
Ed Forbes
Yes. Not only am I focusing on that, I said I am and I said why I am focusing on that.
Yes. You are want to focus on a something you predict will happen, that might not, and that conservatives living in the here an now should wish to act and avert.
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And, even in your hypothetical, which I did address, I disagree with you. (a) I don’t think voting for Trump would be the “best” way to avoid Dem. progressive policies if he is elected and (b) I don’t think voting for Trump would necessarily give us a better outcome than having a Dem in congress.
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It would all depends on many other factors including who held the House and the Senate.
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But it’s true I’m not going to “focus” on the disagreement of what to do in an entirely hypothetical future that may not occur. I think that’s a bit silly. The only reason I can imagine someone would want to focus on tht to that fairly distant hypothetical is that someone is a RITO who wants to grease the path to a Trump nomination.
Incorrect. You can see my earlier post.
mark bofill
I agree with this too. The problems with Trump are numerous.
Agreed. And this also makes him unpredictable in times where he is stressed and not getting something he very much wants.
Yep. And RITO’s should learn that the GOP should not revolve around Trump or be lead by Trump.
Ed Forbes, what Lucia is describing is what NeverTrump tried in 2016, and I think it is a much larger presence in 2024.
Nikki Haley was an original NeverTrumper who got a top posting in the Trump Administration, to the point that other NeverTrumpers pretend to be mad at her. She is their preferred candidate in 2024. They are just not sure how to express support for her now.
MikeN
Much larger. Also: I think “NeverTrump” refers to official GOP voters, not independents. And Ed Forbes inveighing about not voting for Trump would be a vote for the Demps progressive policies might have spoken to them in 2016. Maybe it could now.
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But there independent swing voters also exist. They do vote in elections. Trying to “scare” the about “progressive politics” and “Democrats” should Trump not win isn’t all that likely to make them say, “Oh Geeh! You’re right. I’ll vote for SATAN if it means no Democratic president!”.
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So if you really do dislike the Democrat’s progressive policies, you need to focus on the here and now. You need to say “Don’t nominate Trump” now.
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Otherwise, if you are a RITO and want to lay the ground work for Trump winning if he gets nominated, sure focus on the hypothetical future where Trump is nominated. And try to guilt people into thinking the must someone vote for Trump in 2024. You’ll likely fail. And if he gets nominated the most likely outcome will be a president who tries to push through progressive Dem policies.
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And you should know that. But if you are a RITO, you won’t care because what you really want is Trump– not conservative policies.
john ferguson,
I would be more than willing to wager Garland does not prosecute Trump. The information coming out of the Jan6 show trial is, to be a bit understated, one sided and wildly hyped by the MSM. Had the committee been selected in the normal way, a lot of very different information would have been presented. Had there been any obvious criminal case against Trump, he would long ago have been prosecuted. Real prosecution is very different from a show trial; multiple news reports say that plenty of former Federal prosecutors don’t think there is a criminal case to be made.
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Like many people, you obviously don’t like Trump. He is a dreadful person and wholly unsuited to be president. I very much hope he does not get the Republican nomination in 2024, since his candidacy would almost surely lead to another 4 years of crazy/woke/lefty presidency, and maybe return control of the House to democrats. These things would be very bad for the country. But run he most likely will.
Hi SteveF,
I wouldn’t take a bet on Garland prosecuting either, it would be problematic in the extreme.
It might be useful to discover whether anyone who reads and comments here believes the election was stolen from Trump.
As to his crimes, I don’t have any trouble putting a list together of what he’s done which appears to be quite naughty, but without professional insight as to whether any of these things are prosecutable.
SteveF,
Did you watch any of the Jan 6 hearings?
Tom Scharf (Comment #213612)
July 23rd, 2022 at 9:47 am
Tom, you might want to peddle your view to potential defense attorneys for Trump, but it is not about the media or what Schumer and Pelosi should have done or the one sided presentation of the Jan 6th committee or any other fairness issue. Those are deflections that probably would not even work for a defense attorney because none of those entities would be on trial.
I also believe that an intelligent person can take away from the one sided Jan 6th hearing some very troubling facts about Trumps actions and inactions during that time and his other actions in attempting to overturn the elections by requesting others in power to act illegally. He also maintains the unhinged view, and without evidence, that the election was stolen.
If prosecuted he could cop an insanity plea, but I think the verdict might still be insane but guilty. Trump has not bothered to refute any parts of the Jan 6th evidence with credible counter evidence, because in my view he thinks his true believers are larger in number than they actually are (at least I hope that is the case). Remember Trump said in the presidential campaign that if he killed someone in the streets he would not lose any support.
Some definitions might help
Egomaniac a politician
Democracy a system of putting one egomaniac in charge of all the other egomaniacs.
Stolen election one won by the other side.
–
Some rules may help
Only egomaniacs born in the USA who have been registered as running on time, and fulfil the other requirements such as no known and recorded excluding criminal records can run and only every 4 years and only win the prize twice.
–
Caring and outcomes and caring about outcomes.
Yes.
Yes.
No.
– such is life. *
Australian TM saying
What I am “peddling” is the same thing you were peddling earlier. Equal standards of justice for political prosecutions.
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What you are peddling is a political conspiracy prosecution. The election was not overturned. Lots of bad ideas didn’t actually happen because the system worked as designed. Endless clever lawyering by political partisans gets shot down routinely by the US system and US courts. Gore wanted to only recount selected heavily Democratic Florida counties. Was this a crime or a bad idea? Biden had the CDC prevent evictions even though basically everyone knew it would be shot down by the courts. A crime? No, a bad idea.
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What doesn’t happen is the prosecution of partisans with desperate bad ideas that are eventually deemed illegal. Losing a legal case isn’t a crime, but it never even got that far. This alleged standard of justice only applies to Trump because he is reprehensible, but reprehensible people have rights too. Trump executes his right to be stupid and wrong more often than most.
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Trump should have conceded, failing to do so will cost him his legacy and likely his political career. As it should be. You may very well get your wish for a political prosecution, but it is much closer to a persecution IMO.
john ferguson,
Whether or not the election was ‘stolen’ is a complicated one, because many states changed voting rules and ID requirements without clear legal authority to make those changes, mostly in response to covid. There is little doubt there was also some level of fraud (eg entire nursing homes of the demented sending in votes, even though the residents were in no way capable of making a choice….. so they clearly had ‘help’). All of this for certain helped Biden, but it is unclear if any of this was actually enough to have changed the outcome of closely contested states.
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Trump and his supporters were very late in raising objections to changes of dubious legality, and after the fact the courts would not get involved. There is plenty for Trump supporters to be unhappy about, but Trump did the country a terrible disservice when he would not accept the outcome when the courts would not get involved. His continued endless rants about 2020 being stolen damage his chance of election in 2024, as well as Republicans in all races, but he is too much an egomaniac to see that. He is like a raging spoiled 6 year old, and can’t get past it.
angech,
“– such is life. *
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It was my mom’s favorite expression circa 1958, and she never visited Australia.
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Tom Scharf,
“This alleged standard of justice only applies to Trump because he is reprehensible,”
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Wait. You think Trump is reprehensible?
😉
john ferguson,
“Did you watch any of the Jan 6 hearings?”
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The Watergate hearings were actually hearings; Iran Contra hearings were actually hearings. The Jan 6 show trial is no hearing…. it is a politically motivated show trial. When Pelosi blocked Republican participation on the committee, something never before done, I decided the show trial was not worth watching, because it would be neither honest nor informative.
.
If Republicans set up a show trial for President Alzheimers when they gain control of the House, then I won’t watch that either.
SteveF,
You may be right on the “hearing” name.
Pelosi did not block Republican participation. She objected to two of Kevin McCarthy’s proposed participants each of which had publicly ridiculed the idea of this procedure. Pelosi accepted the other three Republicans proposed but McCarthy withdrew them in what looked to me like a fit of pique. Adam Kinsinger and Liz Cheny, both Republicans found themselves on the committee.
I don;t think your assertion that Pelosi prevented the participation of Republicans holds water. She prevented the participation of two specific Republicans, not all Republicans.
I thought the quality and the sobriety of the presentations compelling almost all recitations and responses to questions by Republicans who were there maybe not during the genesis but certainly during the development and execution of what looks to me like an attempted “coup”
There may be a set of alternative facts out there somewhere that might have surfaced had McCarthy not chosen to take his football and go home, but we won’t know unless they are at least trotted out in the interview shows. So far nothing.
Given all that, I agree that the premise of the even didn’t look at all fair, but the actuality was, I think.
John,
I agree with Steve above. I’d add this – the election was fair enough. Some irregularities, yeah. A bit of outright fraud here and there I don’t doubt. I expect there always is and always will be.
I don’t think Trump lost because of Zuck bucks, or COVID, or ballot boxes, or fraud. I think he lost because he was divisive and ultimately unpopular… Like the election being fair enough, Trump was unpopular enough to lose legitimately.
Shrug.
God have mercy on y’all who thought that was a coup attempt, the riot. That’s … whatever. Bless your hearts. I’m dropping back out of this conversation.
Hi Mark,
Sure there was fraud but clearly if there had been enough to change the outcome, or even close, Bill Barr would have found it and the appropriate response would have been made.
As to coup, when I get time, maybe tomorrow I’ll put together the actions taken by Trump and company which smell to me of coup attempt.
I’m not adamant about it mind you.
angech, where in Oz? Daughter lectures at ANU, spouse lived in Bundaberg in dark antiquity.
john ferguson (Comment #213636): “Sure there was fraud but clearly if there had been enough to change the outcome, or even close, Bill Barr would have found it and the appropriate response would have been made.”
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That is silly. The violations were of state laws, not federal law.
John,
Good. Don’t misunderstand me, I think Trump might technically have committed election fraud himself, with the sorry business with Eastman’s scheme for Pence. I think the riot had nothing to do with a coup attempt. But I’ll read what case you can make if you care to try to make it.
[Edit: also,
Uhm, yes. In my comment I thought I said that I did not believe Trump lost because of fraud.]
HI Mark,
I think the riot had everything to do with the coup attempt, but it was not a coup in the usual sense of a military takeover where the premise is that democracy needs peace and quiet for a few years to settle down and then can be restored ala Thailand from time to time.
Here the intention was to prevent the counting of the electoral votes which would have led to Biden’s win and to upset the process so that it could not be completed which would have thrown the thing into the house ( I think) where each state delegation would be assigned a number of votes by pre-established rules and because of the particular distribution of members within the stares would have assured Trump a victory.
I think Pence leaving could have produced that result. You do know that a secret service car offered to rescue Pence from the chaos but he refused to get into it?
Mike M,
Bill Barr’s appropriate response might have been to call the State’s Governor to ask what action was proposed, or to seek a delay on the certification of the counts through the courts.
John,
Thanks for explaining your theory. That is considerably less stupid than most of the crap I hear put forward about that day. I still don’t buy it, but at least your proposal has a patina of plausibility.
Pence’s role was ceremonial. In my view, it needn’t have (and wouldn’t have) made a bit of difference if Pence was forced to flee. Even if this were so [even if I have this wrong, maybe I should have said] – I don’t see what prevents the authorities from calling in the national guard or enough force to quash the riot and resuming with proceedings. Further, is there legal requirement that says the proceedings must be held in a particular location?
I think this is all awfully far fetched. But I thank you for explaining your theory, and as I said, it’s a lot better than most of the theories I’ve heard about it.
Mark,.
the only one who could have called in the national guard was Trump. This is by law.
Without Pence Officiating the counting process could not proceed, his presence was required. by law.
This as I think I suggested somewhere above is why all the fuss about Trump’s dereliction of duty is nonsense. He wanted the mob to prevent the completion of the counting and by doing nothing he prevented the national guard from being called in. to me, this seems much much worse than dereliction. It’s strange that inaction can actually be action, but there it is.
Trump let the riots go on until it was clear that it wasn’t going to work.
If there is anything to this theory, it will need to be supported by identification of the person who devised it. Trump is a very clever guy, but understanding how this aspect of government works is not likely one of his strengths.
finally, just because it seems so obvious to me doesn’t mean it’s right.
John,
So, why do you think this plan didn’t work? Real question.
I always liked the idea that Trump could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any support.
First, It seemed unlikely that a random New Yorker would have been a supporter, and
Second, in much of the country the loss of a New Yorker would not be seen as a negative.
If you don’t believe this, go out in the country sometime.
I read here that the authority to call in the National Guard was delegated down to the Secretary of the Army. At the time, this was Ryan D McCarthy:
I guess we have to suppose Ryan was part of the conspiracy.
You do wonder why Kevin McCarthy and others spent so much time on the phone trying to get Trump to call out the guard. But then they might not have been aware of the delegation you refer to.
On the other hand if Trump had called out the guard, assuming they were able, they would have deployed.
I’m sticking to my theory for the time being.
thanks for looking this up
As reported in Newsweek 12/31/2021
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin requested a review of how the National Guard is operated and deployed in Washington D.C. following the events of Jan. 6, when the Pentagon was criticized for not deploying National Guard troops to the Capitol faster.
Austin now has the authority to approve requests for National Guard personnel when they are to be deployed within 48 hours, or when the activities the Guardsmen are needed for involve civilian law enforcement tasks like crowd control or making arrests, according to the memo announcing the changes.
Apparently, as I suggested before, only the President had the power to order a deployment within 48 hours on Jan 6, 2021
john ferguson (Comment #213642): “the only one who could have called in the national guard was Trump. This is by law.”
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I am not sure that is true. At this link:
https://justthenews.com/government/congress/trump-gave-explicit-order-about-jan-6-rally-make-sure-it-was-safe-event-dod
You can find a link to a report by the DoD Inspector General, titled
“REVIEW OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE’S ROLE, RESPONSIBILITIES, AND ACTIONS TO PREPARE FOR AND RESPOND TO THE PROTEST AND ITS AFTERMATH AT THE U.S. CAPITOL CAMPUS ON JANUARY 6, 2021”
On pages 44-46, there is a timeline of events on Jan. 6.
Sund was the head of Capitol Police, General Walker was commander of the DC National Guard.
Miller was acting Sec. Defense and McCarthy was Sec. Army. Nothing about seeking or getting Trump’s permission, either then or earlier.
The report is 150 pages and rather heavy going. I have only taken a quick look, so I may be missing important details. But it seems that Trump wanted DCNG deployed in advance and that Miller and Milley told him they had it covered. It might be that is doing that, Trump gave an order that authorized Miller to act.
I don’t think that’s true John.
Here is a story that relates:
It looks to me like it was the Secretary of the Army’s call. Or else this politico story makes no sense whatsoever.
You can believe what you like, and we can agree to disagree. I’m sort of losing interest in this anyway. Shrug.
[Edit: Crossposted with you Mike]
I should have refreshed the page before composing my post.
~grins~ happens to me all the time.
john ferguson (Comment #213642): “the only one who could have called in the national guard was Trump. This is by law.”
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Definitely not true. The ultimate authority lies with the President, but it can be delegated and has been so delegated within specific constraints.
From the DoD IG report, pg 13:
It seems that this business about Trump not calling out the National Guard is bogus.
Looks like I was wrong. Thanks guys. But what about who can call for a deployment within 48 hours? Is there any evidence that Trump had asked for DCNG availability in advance?
If, in fact, he had asked for DCNG presence or availability, my theory is, as you say, bogus
john ferguson,
“I don;t think your assertion that Pelosi prevented the participation of Republicans holds water. She prevented the participation of two specific Republicans, not all Republicans.”
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I think it is absolutely water tight. A congressional committee usually has adversarial members, and they are selected by the other party….. always. Pelosi blocking members who disagreed and who would defend Trump was a grotesque power grab, and perfectly consistent with Pelosi’s behavior the entire time Trump was in office (tearing his State of the Union speech was typical of Pelosi’s histrionics). Pelosi is an immature, arrogant a$$ who is nearly as disruptive and damaging as Trump, and her favorability ratings (far worse than Trump’s!) reflect that fact. IMHO, the sooner she is gone the better off the country will be.
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Show trials are garbage. Always garbage. No exceptions. Any legitimate investigatory committee will hear all arguments. Show trials will not.
SteveF,
I was wrong again, although I agree with your characterization of Pelosi. She seems to have a talent for creating conflict where there wasn’t any. It goes back a long way, too.
At the same time, do you think Jim Jordan would have comported himself as the Republicans did in the Watergate House hearings?
Show trial or not, I’m glad i watched the sessions I did. I don’t think there is any reason why the Republicans cannot refute the elements of their presentation (maybe not correct to call them findings) one by one. Or is there?
john ferguson,
If you read the Capitol Police timeline report about Jan 6, (I did, it is available on line, many pages long and painfully detailed), you will see that support from the national guard was recommended multiple times in the days leading up to Jan 6, but that Pelosi’s office refused those recommendations. Note that the Capitol Police work directly for Pelosi, and she *had* to approve a request for national guard support. If you ever wonder why Pelosi refused the Republicans on the show trial committee, this Capitol Police timeline may have something to do with it.
SteveF,
Wow!!!
john ferguson,
I am sure Jim Jordan would have raised lots of very difficult questions and pointed out the many, many failures of judgement by people other than Trump that allowed the protest to get out of hand. He would also have defended Trump’s non-action when he did not in fact have the authority to act. He would have pointed out the complete absence of guns and relative lack of violence in a ‘violent insurrection’. A crazy guy in a horned hat does not an insurrection make.
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Trump is an a$$hole, and his behavior after November 2020 was idiotic and childish. Pelosi is an a$$hole, and her behavior since…. well since forever… has been horrible. None of that justifies a politically motivated show trial that is an affront to justice.
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When McCarthy gains control of the House he will be under pressure from many in his caucus to start ‘payback’ against the Democrats responsible for creating the show trial and refusal to allow seating of McCarthy’s selected members. Things like excluding the entire Progressive Caucus from all committees would be a reasonable first step. A show trial ‘investigating’ Pelosi for her many failures would be another. Impeaching Biden for refusal to enforce immigration laws would be another. For the sake of the country, I hope McCarthy resists this pressure, but he is still very pissed, and justifiably so, so he may not.
From the DoD report, it is clear that Trump wanted the Guard deployed in advance and that Miller and Milley assured him that they “had it covered”. The report seems to say that the decision to not deploy the Guard was Miller’s. I had previously read what Steve says: That the Capitol Police refused the help, presumably at Pelosi’s direction.
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john ferguson (Comment #213657): “Wow!!!”
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Kudos to john for being willing to listen to evidence and change his mind.
Mike M,
thanks for the nod, but I have to be comfortable being wrong a lot when I like to develop alternative theories which seem to better fit the known facts than the ones trotted out in the msm.
“ angech, where in Oz ? spouse lived in Bundaberg in dark antiquity.”
–
Northern Victoria near Benalla, above Ned Kelly countryside.
Ned Kelly being the Australian equivalent of Billy the Kid.
He is famous in Australia for having fought the police dressed in makeshift armour and helmet.
“Such is life” were his last words on the gallows and epitaph though as Steve F says, not original.
–
Bundaberg sounds a rum sort of place?
????
First of all, almost all Congressional hearings could be considered having elements of a show trail. I do have a major problem with Congressional hearings with suponea powers crossing the separation of powers of the legislature and judicial. That is why I favor the prosecution of Trump in a court of law.
Pelosi’s actions and failure to act in the Jan 6th riot should be adjudicated. There are others to blame for the Jan 6th riots and aftermath, but none of that should deflect from the fact that Trump attempted to overturn the results of the election and in a manner not seen in the history of the republic.
Mike M,
The problem with listening to a show trial is that you only get carefully selected information, which is designed to distort, not actually inform…. you don’t get anything like the whole story.
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Every opinion column from The Atlantic, Vox, or Fox will mainly distort rather than inform. But I expect better from the US Congress. Let’s hear every argument, not just the ones Pelosi wants us to hear.
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The truth is: there were many failures leading to the capitol riot on Jan 6. Yes, Trump’s idiocy after November 2020 motivated people to protest on Jan 6, but blame for protesters ending up inside the Capitol rests with a multitude of incompetent people….. starting, it seems, with Pelosi, and ending with the FBI, with ‘assets’ in the crowd who were instigating unlawful entry.
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On thing I hope McCarthy *does* do in January 2023 is call the head of the FBI and demand a full accounting of how many FBI informants were in the crown on Jan 6 and what they did. If he refuses, then McCarthy should zero out the next FBI budget, and refuse to give them a single dollar until they provide the requested information.
The fact remains that Trump could have called in the National Guard, as Pence eventually did, at anytime the riots were developing and underway and he did not. If Trump was so emphatic before the riot in getting the National Guard involved why was he silent during the lead up to and during the riot?
Russiagate was far worse than Jan 6th and als in a manner not seen in history. Trump’s entire term was an attempted democrat insurrection. Jan 6th doesn’t hold a candle to what came before.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #213664): “The fact remains that Trump could have called in the National Guard, as Pence eventually did, at anytime the riots were developing and underway and he did not. If Trump was so emphatic before the riot in getting the National Guard involved why was he silent during the lead up to and during the riot?”
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Pence had absolutely NOTHING to do with calling out the National Guard. He had no authority to do so and was not in the loop.
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Miller told Trump on Jan. 4 that he had a plan and had it covered. That appears to have been a bald-faced lie. Trump tended to trust his generals, so it makes sense that he let them execute their plan without interference. He would not have know that there was no plan. Kenneth’s criticism is totally ex post facto.
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Had Trump ordered the National Guard into action, it would have made no difference unless he went over the heads of Sec. Miller, Sec. McCarthy, and Gen. Piatt to give the order directly to Gen. Walker. Of course, he would have no way to know that was the only way to get action.
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If Trump HAD given orders directly to Walker, people like Kenneth would now be accusing Trump of attempting a military coup. As near as I can tell, Trump did the only thing he could do.
Kenneth,
Yes, he could have sent the national guard on Jan 6 AM, over the objections of Pelosi and the mayor of Washington DC. Trump could have accepted the election results by the beginning of December, and avoided the protests altogether…. but obviously he wanted protests. So I’m not sure I see your point. Trump acted like a jerk; which was nothing new for him. But Pelosi could just have listened to her own police and defused the problem days before the riot. To suggest Trump wanted people to enter the Capitol unlawfully and stage an insurrection is without basis in fact, and is actually ridiculous.
Working through the DoD IG report. Scary stuff.
At 2:10 p.m. the Capitol Police Board authorized the request for DC National Guard assistance.
At 2:15 p.m. the first breach of the capital occurred.
At 4:35 p.m. General Walker, commander of the DC National Guard, was informed that Sec. Miller had approved the request for assistance.
So what happened in the intervening two and a half hours? The report describes a scene of chaos at the Pentagon, with people screaming at each other, people panicking, Gen Piatt demanding that Gen. Walker give him a plan and dissing Walker’s response, people worrying about the optics of taking action etc. It sounds to me that nobody except Walker was willing to take responsibility for acting, but Walker had no authority.
And after all that, it took another 45 minutes for the National Guard to finally show up at the Capitol at 5:20.
SteveF:
“To suggest Trump wanted people to enter the Capitol unlawfully and stage an insurrection is without basis in fact, and is actually ridiculous.”
Why ridiculous?
It’s true that we have no facts to base this supposition on, but what would we ever have failing Trump confessing to it?
I’m not sure he knew himself what he wanted, which might be another explanation for what some observers infer to be his inexplicable dithering.
He may well have not intended the entrance into the capitol, but once it had begun, he wanted to wait and see where it would go.
Having said all that, I continue to believe that he intended the entrance, perhaps the removal of Pence by one means or another and the interruption and perhaps prevention of the certification process. And of course I can’t prove any of this, and doubt that it ever will be proved. At best, whoever dreamed this up wil
If anyone would have called in the National Guard it would have made no difference in the outcome. The riot itself lasted a few hours and it doesn’t seem possible the Guard would have been able to assemble fast enough to make any impact. The Guard would have needed to be in place, that would have prevented a riot.
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The rest of this is mind reading of intent through inaction. As is the case with most political scuffles, the opposition assumes the worst intentions of their opponents. I absolutely believe that had Trump called in the National Guard it would have been painted as “Trump calls in the National Guard … for his attempted coup!!!!!”. We would currently be mind reading Trump’s intent of calling in the guard, because WE KNOW it was to back up his coup with military force.
Tom Scharf, your’s is a good point and may have been the basis of the worrying about “optics”
I’m not sure sure what the actual charges would be, for the moment almost everyone has settled on “general menace” from Trump which is not really on the books. Anything related to an alleged conspiracy is going to be very difficult to prove intent. This has to be balanced against an alleged real belief the election was stolen and exhausting all possible legal challenges, no matter how low probability they were.
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Perhaps there is some more likely territory on low end stuff like obstructing Congress and so forth. This is small potatoes.
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I don’t think they will ever prove to an impartial jury (which will never exist on this subject) that Trump had control of the protesters, preplanned a riot, or the rioters had some kind of secretly organized insurrection in mind. There were some bad actors involved to be sure, but the storming of the Capital seemed like a free form out of control mob action. I have no sympathy for those who are charged and convicted, but as always expect that same standard to apply to other protests.
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If you get 4 Republicans, 4 independents, and 4 Democrats on a jury with a neutral judge I think you have almost zero chance of convicting Trump of anything. Maybe an obstruction charge but I doubt it.
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Politically related charges need to have a high bar to prevent their abuse. The zealots want some kind of sedition or insurrection charge to prevent Trump from running for office again. You will need a smoking gun for this and I haven’t seen it. This has a very low chance of conviction IMO and will be socially destructive, and likely physically destructive.
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One cannot ignore the years long failed witch hunt already in place with Trump Russia collusion and everything else. The inquisitors don’t have high credibility. It’s possible a highly partisan committee could present a neutral case against Trump, but one could be forgiven for assuming the opposite based on recent history.
john ferguson (Comment #213669): “I’m not sure he knew himself what he wanted, which might be another explanation for what some observers infer to be his inexplicable dithering.”
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I thought that we had established that the dithering was in the Pentagon.
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We can not know what was in Trump’s mind. For that reason, it is not at all relevant. What we can know is what Trump did or did not do.
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We know that he did not take any explicit action to organize or encourage violence. The most one can say is that he was perhaps reckless in stirring up people’s emotions. But even that is iffy. The mob itself did not become violent. The violence was caused by people who came to the rally with the intent of causing violence. I don’t see how Trump can be blamed for that.
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We also know that Trump did act in advance in an attempt to prevent violence. But his desire to have the National Guard in place was not acted on. Still not clear the extent to which that inaction was due to people in the Pentagon or Pelosi and people who report to her.
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And as for Trump’s inaction the afternoon of the 6th, it now seems clear that he was letting the Pentagon do their job, as they climed they were prepared to do.
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I do not claim that Trump’s actions were above criticism. But nothing he did or failed to do comes remotely close to being criminal.
Mike M,
Doin’t you think if Trump had ordered out the national guard at 2:00PM something might have happened sooner?
Trump’s request that the mags be taken away from the eclipse, and that he knew that some attendees were coming armed, but not for him, would suggest that he must have realized if not intended that this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.
john ferguson (Comment #213674): “Doin’t you think if Trump had ordered out the national guard at 2:00PM something might have happened sooner?”
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No I don’t. Trump would not have provided Miller with a detailed plan of action, so Miller and company would probably have spent just as much time dithering about what to do and the resulting optics.
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If Trump had ordered Gen. Walker to act, Walker might well have done so. And folks like you would be going on about Trump’s attempted military coup and how his action was obviously meant as a coup since he bypassed Miller and McCarthy.
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john ferguson: “Trump’s request that the mags be taken away from the eclipse”
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You are going to have to explain that to me. I don’t know what request you refer to or what “mags” are. But I think I can guess what you mean by “eclipse”.
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john ferguson: “that he knew that some attendees were coming armed”
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Do you have any actual evidence for that?
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john ferguson: “would suggest that he must have realized if not intended that this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.”
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What evidence do you have for claiming “wasn’t going to be” rather than “might not be”? The latter should have been obvious to anyone with a brain.
Remember: Trump wanted the National Guard called out in advance.
The mags were the magnetic detectors which the attendees were expected to walk through on their way to the Ellipse. There were complaints that many were refusing to walk through them and the belief was that they were armed and didn’t want to have their weapons taken from them.
Trump saw real-time videos of the attendees as they assembled and saw too much open space. He was told it was the mags. He said, quoted by several sources, that the mags should be removed “Let my people in” and he wasn’t worried, they weren’t after him (somewhat misquoted)
the conclusion was that many in the crowd were armed, Trump, by witness report knew it, and did nothing to diminish this aspect of the event.
This was all revealed in some detail in the Select committee proceedings.
The goings on at the Pentagon were quite remarkable. From the IG report:
It goes on and on.
john ferguson (Comment #213678): “There were complaints that many were refusing to walk through them and the belief was that they were armed and didn’t want to have their weapons taken from them … the conclusion was that many in the crowd were armed”.
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Except that very few in the crowd were armed. The passive voice is great for spreading innuendo. So it seems that the “evidence” comes from mind readers.
Mike M, Thanks much for sharing this. It’s not at all surprising that they would have had no idea how to handle what was really an unprecedented problem.
It’s also very worrying. After all this was just a riot. suppose it had been an attack by novel means?
I think it is correct that had Trump called for a National Guard intervention, it would have proceeded pretty much as described in the notes you’ve provided.
It makes one wonder what other “not-impossible” situations these guys are unprepared for.
Mike M, Thanks much for sharing this. It’s not at all surprising that they would have had no idea how to handle what was really an unprecedented problem.
It’s also very worrying. After all this was just a riot. suppose it had been an attack by novel means?
I think it is correct that had Trump called for a National Guard intervention, it would have proceeded pretty much as described in the notes you’ve provided.
It makes one wonder what other “not-impossible” situations these guys are unprepared for.
My understanding was that almost nobody who was arrested was found to be armed and that video and photo evidence showed almost nobody having deadly weapons like knives and guns. Certainly mace and bear spray was evident. The only person shot was a protester by Capital police and that shooting was captured on video. If many in the crowd were armed then they chose to not use those weapons during the riot, were never arrested, and never brandished those weapons from what I saw. Certainly there was other types of physical violence. The Viking King did have some pointy horns, there is that. The armed insurrection narrative never panned out.
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There was also some delirious “kill or capture” stories that showed a guy with nylon cuffs that was later determined to be police cuffs found on site at the Capital. Don’t get me started on Sicknick, just don’t. Still awaiting that autopsy report and I’m guessing the committee chose to not reveal it.
The obvious “not impossible” scenario is that things went down more or less as, if not planned, then definitely hoped for. I still don’t know why the doors were opened. Some of those under prosecution were acquitted precisely because they were invited in! Can we imagine what would have happened at the SC if the doors were opened during the Kavanaugh protests? I sure can, and it would have probably have turned out far worse.
The bottom line if the IG report is that the National Guard response was pretty much as rapid and as effective as could be expected. But there might be some possible improvements to planning and communication.
A big part of that seems to be:
Tom, It makes one wonder if the folks who showed up to hear the speech and were actually armed didn’t go to the capitol. I don’t feel that much information as to whether everyone at the speech proceeded down Pennsylvania Avenue, or just some.
I agree, that as far as has become public, virtually none of the people arrested was armed.
Here is a link to the NYT take on the National Guard delay on Jan 6th. It appears that Trump initially wanted the National Guard to protect the protesters. That would explain his lack of action with the Guard as the riot commenced after seemingly in favor of posting it previously. Pence did call for the National Guard. And as anything to do with government there were lots of politics and optics involved by many of those involved.
Meanwhile Trump watched TV much like Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/us/politics/national-guard-january-6-riot.html
Pence was targeted by the mob calling for Pence to be hung and Trump did nothing.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-video-shows-capitol-mob-calling-for-the-death-of-the-vice-president-plaskett-says
The establishment fiddled while Rome got mildly defaced. Convenient. The situation didn’t even meet the standard of “firey” but mostly peaceful protest level. Storm in a teacup instigated for political theater.
The establishment have one major weapon on their side. A lack of reciprocity. Only one side is held accountable by both sides. The “left” can do no wrong. The “right” can do no right. Meanwhile, the “left” complain that any level of accountability called for by the “right” is never enough.
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If Jan 6th was carried out by the left, the congress critters would be saying how appropriate, predictable, understandable, and totally American the outcome was. As would the media. They’d be baying for blood over the unprovoked murder of Ashley Babbitt. They’d be calling for changes to be made to ensure the protestors complaints were properly addressed.
Timeline.
Jan 6th court made it’s case.
Meets to consolidate its points and issue it’s verdict.
Requests DOJ charges be laid against Trump.
DOJ considers request and 1 week later announces charges and a Grand duty to commence.
Allow another 2 weeks for the first step.
DOJ should be announcing trial August 21.
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No need for September meeting with more witnesses as they must have sufficient intent and evidence already.
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Any further delay risks the Comey problem.
An indictment of Trump anywhere from September to December will be seen as political interference in an election.
A very bad mistake.
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The small window of opportunity is closing fast.
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As an aside any further attempt to drag the Supreme Court Judges wife into the matter, the toes have been poked in the water, will result in the biggest backlash the Democratic Party could ever imagine.
Or should that be could not imagine, if they do.
I think election interference is obviously the entire point, although I get the drift that plausible deniability would be nice to have. They have been denying access to the DOJ for interview transcripts both to time the decision by the DOJ and also to not allow any counter evidence to be presented in the media, although I don’t think the media has even the slightest shred of ethics left anymore when it comes to political stories. It’s hard to differentiate their “news” and political ads I am now being inundated with in Florida.
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I believe the DOJ said if they don’t get the transcripts in a timely manner they would delay the decision to December a while back. I haven’t seen any information on whether they actually got them.
.
I’m not even sure which side charging Trump would actually help the most. Right now I would say it will actually really fire up the Republicans.
.
The ability to subpoena the opposing party members for what is effectively a fishing expedition in most cases will be returned in kind. It’s not going to make our political system any better or more trustworthy.
I can’t see a good reason for the Select Committee to hold any more public events. it seems to me that they’ve made their case and if, as they say, more people are coming forward, they can refer them to DOJ.
Dragging Virginia Thomas in for interviews etc would be the height of folly.
And I also agree that subpoenaing the likes of Jordan and company would also be nuts. If they may be guilty of an indictable offense leave it to DOJ who probably wouldn’t pursue it in any case.
And yes Angech, Bundaberg is quite rum, although spouse worked for FairyMeade Sugar which was a teetotaler outfit.
We still have friend a bit north of Comargo.
JF. Cobargo, NSW?
Bundie and coke a very popular Australian drink with a polar bear in the ads.
Likewise Jim Beam and coke.
–
Off for 2 weeks holiday on the Gold Coast.
In the middle of Covid season here.
Had a Novovax for my 4th shot, hard to access, not popular in community but, Lucia, closest to a real vaccine that is available.
Don’t know why everyone does not have one.
Oops,It was Conargo, NSW.
Prosecuting Trump would be a horrible mistake for many reasons. Dems should remember that Republicans will almost certainly control the House, if not both chambers. Two years is a long time for of endless investigations of Biden, Hunter, the DOJ, the FBI, the failings of Pelosi and company leading up to January 6, and the communications between members of the Jan 6 show trial and outside third parties. All backed up by the power of the purse. I hope Merrick Garland considers all the many very bad consequences of prosecuting Trump, one of which is making his his re-election in 2024 much more likely. Dems should be very careful what they wish for.
angech,
Please define “real vaccine”.
SteveF,
A lot of people, most seem to be anti-vaxxers, think that it isn’t a vaccine if it doesn’t provide lifetime immunity. For example, to them the annual influenza vaccine is a shot, not a vaccine. They claim that the definition of vaccine has been changed recently.
Novavax has been produced, IIRC, by somewhat more traditional vaccine methodology. It delivers the spike protein itself, grown in insect cells and then packaged in a nanoparticle rather than mRNA that makes cells produce the spike protein in your body or a vector virus (J&J) that does something similar. But I doubt that it provides any better immunity than the Pfizer, Moderna and J&J, especially against omicron.
Steve, what is so terrible about what you describe happening. The only time I tend to believe politicians is when they are being critical of other politicians.
Kenneth,
What is terrible is that it is all socially divisive and destructive, just like the Jan 6 show trial. What is terrible is that all of this makes substantive compromise on important policies ever less likely, if not impossible. Joe Biden promised to turn down the invective, while in fact everything he has done in office has made politics only more divisive and poisonous, and utterly devoid of substantive compromise. Every policy he has adopted since January 2021 is divorced from all of the policy positions he claimed to hold over decades in the Senate.
.
If Republicans adopt the ‘payback’ model, then things will only get worse.
It’s pretty clear that once you get to DC the focus becomes destroying the opposing party by any means necessary, regardless of your initial intentions. If you aren’t on board with that then you will be ostracized from your own party. I would trade our two party system for a group of independents in a heartbeat.
.
Disbanding DC and spreading it across the country would be a great idea IMO. Everyone else can work remotely, so can the state department and everyone else. That place seems to be a poison factory lately. It won’t solve everything but it will be a start and a strong signal that the citizens have had it with all the navel gazing going on up there.
.
It’s one thing to have an adversarial system, that can work, but this has really become counterproductive.
Steve, if the alternative is letting these politician’s transgressions slide, I will disagree with you. Politicians are let off the hook much too easily by the media, academia and the public. Actually politicians are quite good at analyzing the opposition, but terrible at doing the same for their own party, much like the public partisans.
I will point out that the Republicans could have put HRC through the same grinder after she was defeated. They chose not to for whatever reason (and I’m not claiming it was their good hearts). The amount of dirt one could dig up on the Clintons is probably immense given blanket subpoena powers. I’m just sick of the whole thing, I don’t care what Bill did to the interns, or Hillary’s server, or nutty Pizza Parlor insanity.
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The media could choose to focus on other things than palace intrigue, but they know what people like to read. When there isn’t actual drama, they manufacture it. What we have now is much closer to reality TV / Survivor than something of real interest.
Novavax definitely had inferior results to mRNA against the original strain. I’m not sure how it stacks up to omicron. The gap has likely closed some, but that may be as much because the virus is evolving to evade the prevalent mRNA vaccines than some superiority of the Novavax vaccine. There is a theory that boosting with different vaccines is better, but once again there is very little information here that I have seen.
Steve, Biden has always followed the party line. The difference you see is the party line has swung far left, progressive and pushing much bigger government.
Attempting to change the results of an election is not palace intrigue.
Kenneth,
I think the issue is mainly that politicians can’t (and won’t) accept that their policy positions are mostly extreme and destructive. Case in point: A substantial majority of voters (near 2/3) support access to early abortion (12-15 weeks) but are opposed to later abortions except in very special circumstances (severe fetal abnormality, risk of maternal death). That is the kind of broad consensus which *should* quickly lead to law. But it is a “reasonable compromise”, and with our divisive politics, poisoned by extreme politicians on both sides, any such reasonable compromise is impossible to achieve. This is bad for the future of the country.
.
It is more of the same wherever. you look: Get rid of the filibuster, pack the supreme court, make same-sex marriage unlawful, prohibit all abortions at all times, even something like the “morning after” pill or pregnancy resulting from rape or incest.
.
Whatever Trumps actions on Jan 6, pursuing criminal charges against him will be horribly destructive and counterproductive. The impeachment efforts failed, and that is how Presidents are removed. Whatever Hillary’s many efforts to delegitimize Trump’s election by willful deception, in spite of her clearly criminal use of a non-secured server for government business, in spite of Biden’s obvious long term selling of political influence (and likely tax evasion!), yes, in spite of all these things, criminal prosecution is not the answer. Let the voters decide.
In other news: I tested positive for covid this morning (fever, headache, cough, body aches). I’m counting on Paxlovid to minimize the unpleasant symptoms.
SteveF,
good luck with it. My case in June brought exhaustion and aching bones in my leg (not one of the recognized symptoms). Mild fever – 99F
We chose not to do Paxlovid because it seemed not to do much in the trial report I read, but maybe there is better support for it now, or I didn’t understand what I was reading.
Thanks john. Maybe the effectiveness of Paxlovid varies. My bother told me his symptoms improved in the first 24 hours, and by 48 hours there were almost no symptoms remaining. So we will see.
My symptoms lasted about 3 days, although the exhaustion continues a month later. I need a couple of cat naps every day or two, maybe about 40 minutes each. Could be age??
SteveF and john,
There was an article in the WSJ recently about direct vagus nerve stimulation being effective for autoimmune diseases. One of the things mentioned is that famotidine (Pepcid) might have some effect on COVID. The article seemed a bit over the top optimistic, though and larger trials have not been completed.
At least famotidine is available over the counter and doesn’t have much in the way of side effects.
New Zealand’s total deaths and deaths per confirmed case have worsened in the last few weeks. Perhaps different (less vaccinated) people are catching covid in New Zealand. For a while it looked like total deaths (per million population) would end up at ~15% of the USA rate, but an eyeball estimate now looks closer to 25% or more of the USA death rate.
SteveF (Comment #213714)
Steve, I am hoping you well with your bout with Covid-19. Please keep us posted if you feel up to it.
Kenneth,
Thanks. I have had two doses of Paxlovid, and I clearly feel better already. Fever is down about 1.4F, and body aches/headache are reduced. I will post how I feel over the next couple days. I am reluctant to say it is magic… but it clearly works.
Sfitzpa@comcast.net (Comment #213701)
“angech, Please define “real vaccine”.
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Real seems to be the word of contention here, I guess.
The word vaccine could be the problem but people usually do not ask for a definition of vaccine, they “know” what it means to them.
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Still,
A vaccination, by the definition that I would use, is based on the original technique of injecting a small amount of the material that one wishes to be protected against to develop said protection (or vaccination) to that material by activating the bodies natural antibody production system.
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Note that this is done in the Hippocratic tradition of first doing no harm. While not specified directly the intent is to stimulate antibody protection without unduly making the recipient ill.
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Now I know that this definition does not include all semantic twisting available in the English language, so I would ask could you either please argue from my definition or else put up your own definition for the use of the qualifier “real”.
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In my terms a real vaccine does what I just described.
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A real vaccine should generally prevent an illness caused by a virus.
Again a vaccine does not stop you coming into contact with a virus, just like a raincoat does not stop it raining.
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The virus once present will enter cells and try to multiply and infect more. The body, having developed antibodies by vaccination is primed to both register its presence and mount an effective defence by extremely rapid antibody production so that the infection is blocked from spreading and causes no symptoms.
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Novavax creates antibodies to the spike protein which is present in all covid infections. Thus it is a true, proper, hence real vaccination
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The MRA “vaccines” are not real vaccines.
They do not stop infection.
That is blindingly obvious.
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SteveF
Hope you get better quickly, best of luck
SteveF,
Get well soon. Natural immunity awaits.
Novavax is a more traditional vaccine.
.
All the vaccines target the spike protein. Novavax doesn’t stop infections either, nor does the flu shot. So far the virus is winning, but the vaccines do a decent job with severe illness. Although what was once a 10X lower chance of severe illness with mRNA vaccines is now closer to a 3X lower chance AFAICT, but that is on top of about a 5X lower chance of severe illness from omicron itself.
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You can attach whatever label you wish, but the data doesn’t change. There isn’t nearly as much real world clinical data for Novavax and most of it is before Delta, so its a bit of a mystery how well it works at the moment.
angech (Comment #213723): “Novavax creates antibodies to the spike protein which is present in all covid infections. Thus it is a true, proper, hence real vaccination”
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ALL the covid vaccines do that. Traditional vaccines use inactivated or weakened virus, but none of the approved covid vaccines do that.
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The Novavax vaccine might be deemed more conservative than the mRNA vaccines since it introduces the protein directly.
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angech: “The MRA “vaccines” are not real vaccines.
They do not stop infection.”
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They do stop infection, but the effect is short lived. There is no reason to believe that Novavax will do any better since it also will not induce mucosal immunity.
Steve,
Glad to hear you are feeling a little better. Are you getting the horrible taste in your mouth from the Paxlovid? I did. Still glad I took it!
Tom Scharf (Comment #213726)
“Novavax is a more traditional vaccine. Thanks Tom.
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A real vaccine, includes traditional vaccines which I repeat work by giving the body real antigen to make real antibodies with.
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As opposed to ersatz, wrongly named “vaccines” like the MRA concoctions.They are not vaccines.
A totally different product is injected, RNA not viral protein.You could call it an antigen production injection but it is not in itself a vaccine and produces possible extremely harmful situations by default of its activation of the RNA transcriptase system of unknown current and future concern.
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A few small points
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All the vaccines target the spike protein.”
No.
A vaccine targets an antibody producing system by presenting it with inactivated [in this case] spike protein.
MRA does not even do this.
Antibodies target spike protein.
No antibodies in a vaccine.[normally]
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” Novavax doesn’t stop infections either, nor does the flu shot.”
Wrong.
A real vaccine should generally prevent an illness caused by a virus.
Again a vaccine does not stop you coming into contact with a virus, just like a raincoat does not stop it raining. The body mounst an effective defence by extremely rapid antibody production so that the infection is blocked from spreading and causes no symptoms.
Again it is only semantics with the word infection.
Here used by you to mean the virus entering the system only whereas in talking about vaccines we mean going on to get an actual infection usually with but not always illness.
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Think of it this way,
You are exposed to infection a billion times a day [conservatively].
Active virus and bacteria are constantly breaching and invading the mucosa every second all over the body.
Do you have a viral or bacterial infection even though active infective process are constantly taking place?
No
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” So far the virus is winning, but the vaccines do a decent job with severe illness. ”
Yes
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“You can attach whatever label you wish, but the data doesn’t change. Novavax , its a bit of a mystery how well it works at the moment.”
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My point is that we know how real vaccines work, how well it works is provable with time but we do know that it should work and is relatively safe based on past experience with real vaccines.
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On the other hand mass injection of RNA with not enough knowledge of its integration into our own ribosomal RNA could mean we are all now genetically modified with a range of possible problems.
Given a choice the choice should be obvious.
* NB I do not know if it is integrated into our own messenger RNA or is only active for a short time and then disappears.
Anyone able to comment?
Lucia,
No odd taste so far. 22 hours from first dose:
Fever reduced from 102.6F to 100.2F
Headache reduced about 80%
Body aches (febrile symptoms) reduced about 85%
Cough reduced about 75%
.
I was feeling very bad, now much better. I am reminded of the old saw that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Someone needs to develop similar for the flu.
Mike M. (Comment #213727)
The Novavax vaccine might be deemed more conservative than the mRNA vaccines since it introduces the protein directly.
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“The MRA vaccines do stop infection, but the effect is short lived.”
No.’
The majority of recent infections occur in vaccinated people.
To me the problem is that the immune system lacks the activation mechanism that an immediate antigen from an infection or a novavax gives.
Hi SteveF, Happy to hear that you are on the mend. It’s puzzling that symptoms can vary so much. I was prepared to assume I just had a cold until Janet insisted on buying some antogen test kits. I did one and got the positive line, and then thinking we’d screwed it up, took another one with same result.
I think the aching legs were only thing I hadn’t had in past infections.
As to this business with immunity, I don’t expect it to last if I have it now. Doctor friend is on her third bout. She thinks that having had the recent B.5 variant will better reduce chance of new infection by same or similar variant — she hopes.
My take is I don’t want to get it again, so it’s continuing with the KN95, no indoor restaurants (which in St Pete is not that difficult) and so forth.
Is there any effort in the pharmaceutical world to invent something that really does immunize one against this thing?
angech,
You are thoroughly misinformed. The mRNA vaccines cause your cells to produce a section of the spike protein, which is a subset of what the virus does.
You are unreasonable to demand that the vaccine produce better protection than that produced by infection with the virus.
johnferguson
There are efforts to create a virus that uses a part of the virus that doesn’t mutate as quickly as the spike turns out to mutate. I think they focused on the spike because it’s important to “how it enters the cell”, but it turns out that it can still enter the cell with other shapes. I think they also assumed it would either be hard for the cell to mutate without making the virus unviable (such a mutation would be deletrious to the virus integrity, so such a virus wouldn’t exist at all.)
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That’s what someone with a degree in bio told me back before we had the vaccine and I wondered (on the forum) if it would be too easy for the virus to mutate around a vaccine that only has “part” of the virus. At the time, I thought “ok. Sounds plausible.”
.
Anyway, I don’t know if the main problem with reinfections is that the bodies immunity to covid itself is short lived or if it’s that the vaccine only gives immunity to “the spike” which has been changing on mutation. Seems possibly a little of both.
Lucia: ” a little of both”
sounds plausible to me.
lucia,
The omicron variant spike mutations are highly suspicious, and the strain to which it is most closely related had been out of general circulation for some time before omicron appeared as pointed out by Mike M. above. It’s going to be really hard to create a vaccine that lasts if someone out there is purposely modifying the virus to get around the vaccine.
Also, as Mike M. pointed out, we need a vaccine that’s administered by nasal spray rather than injection. The oral polio vaccine was developed because the virus initially attacked the upper GI tract so an orally administered vaccine produced antibodies in the mucous membranes of the upper GI tract as well as in the circulatory system. A working nasal vaccine would similarly produce antibodies in the area where the virus attacks.
SteveF, it appears from your post that you were posting with body temperature around 103 F. You must be one tough guy.
In the past when I have had those symptoms I tend to hibernate. Knock on wood but it has been a long time since I have had those symptoms.
From my addled memory, the mRNA vaccines are unique in they make the body manufacture the virus spikes and then the body responds to that, so there is little difference in the end effect between vaccines for generating antibodies. Against the original strain the mRNA tested at 95% efficacy against infection and Novavax was 89%. I think Novavax had some production issues so lost the race to market.
.
The high level marketing is that the mRNA injection puts a limited amount of “vaccine” in the body that makes the body manufacture a limited amount of * just spike proteins *, and then it is completely gone after 72 hours. The vaccine nor the spikes can reproduce because it is only a spike protein incapable of that. They do not modify DNA etc. There is probably some fine print here.
.
Things have changed as the virus evolved. They are all basically terrible against preventing infections, maybe 30% for four months? After all, it’s hard to measure people who were exposed who aren’t getting infected. With upwards of 95%+ of people in the US having some form of immunity the numbers get messy. There’s plenty of evidence some minority of people just don’t get infected. Genetics? Better immune systems? Better vaccine?
.
It’s possible that mRNA was “overfitted” to the original strain and another traditional vaccine could be more generally effective against omicron in the same way that natural immunity has outperformed mRNA with Delta. There just isn’t any data to show this, and if Novavax was very effective with * infections * against omicron it would be quite obvious. Australia is still under an enduring large omicron wave.
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The J&J vaccine was effectively removed from the market because of side effects and the Novavax vaccine technology is also known to have side effects while the mRNA has been very safe to use … so far. While Novavax might have higher side effects than mRNA they are still small in the grand scheme. The main risk with mRNA are the unknown unknowns, perhaps this new biotech will have long term effects, but after billions of injections so far so good.
.
The polio and measles vaccines produced nearly sterilizing immunity, but I guess that term is not technically accurate, although I think that is what you are looking towards. Preventing symptomatic infections, severe disease, and transmission to the point a virus can be eradicated. This is rare, nonexistent for respiratory viruses, and require a virus that doesn’t effectively evolve. Covid evolves unfortunately.
Natural immunity against symptomatic covid infection also wanes pretty quickly, as it does with the cold and flu. Omicron and its variants are reinfecting everyone. Natural immunity offers decent protection for at least 6 months, and then you can be reinfected, but severe disease is less likely the second time around.
.
I have looked previously and cannot find good data on the reinfection rates by immunity type, nor can I find good data on the prevalence of severe disease on repeated infections. I don’t know why this basic and informative data isn’t being gathered and disseminated, but I suspect it might be the vaccine evangelists don’t like the answers and are using the “we don’t want the data to be misinterpreted” BS we have heard before.
Kenneth,
“You must be one tough guy.”
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I was sitting in a recliner with nothing much else to do. When I feel that poorly I can’t really work, not even emails. I have a difficult programming task ahead of me, but that will have to wait a day or two. While I feel better than yesterday, I am still too tired to do much of anything.
I think the endgame here is:
.
Covid will replace the flu / pneumonia as the primary killer of the elderly with compromised immune systems.
.
We may see a slight reduction in life expectancy because covid is better at infecting people, but the root problem is still the elderly having compromised immune systems, something will eventually take them out.
Tom Scharf,
Very recently published work suggests that getting infected with omicron doesn’t help much with another omicron infection, because existing immunity (from vaccine or previous infection with earlier strains) “patterns” the immune response. Getting omicron apparently makes you much more resistant to earlier strains (lots of antibodies), but much less to omicron. The suggestion is that your immune system generates antibodies that it already knowns how to make, but these are not very effective against reinfection with omicron because the spike protein is sufficiently different that binding by antibodies from earlier strains is weak.
.
If you had an active infection with an earlier strain, the “patterning” effect is apparently stronger. If your first active infection is omicron (like mine likely is) then there is some resistance to immediate reinfection, but it is not strong, and multiple bouts of omicron remain possible.
.
Less severe illness (hospitalizations, deaths) is speculated to be due to T-cell and B-cell memory, but these can’t stop re-infection.
.
All very depressing. Those crazy coronavirus researchers doing gain of function work didn’t do the world any favors.
Tom Scharf,
“Covid will replace the flu / pneumonia as the primary killer of the elderly with compromised immune systems.”
.
That already seems to be the situation. Treatments like Paxlovid help, but if their use becomes very wide spread, the virus will probably evolve to avoid them. The active material in Paxlovid is a molecular “mimic” of the peptide sequence where the viral protease cuts a long protein into subunits. The minic compound binds competitively to the viral protease, but the mimic has an active cyanide group (carbon triple bonded to nitrogen) which forms a permanent covalent bond to the viral protease active site, permanently deactivating it. We might hope that the pot-boiling organic chemists can develop alternative mimics should the virus evolve to avoid Paxlovid.
.
What I find interesting is the parallel between what looks like immune patterning with covid and known immune patterning with flu. People’s susceptibility to different flu strains depends strongly on the strain they first encountered (usually as a child); they are lifetime resistant to that strain, but not other strains of flu. Their immune system seems pattered to fight the first they saw, but that interferes with developing true resistance to other strains they encounter.
lucia (Comment #213734): “There are efforts to create a virus that uses a part of the virus that doesn’t mutate as quickly as the spike turns out to mutate.”
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All parts of the virus should mutate at the same rate. I think you meant to say “evolve” (mutation+selection). The spike ought to be highly conserved, that is, mutations should be selected out. Is there any evidence, other than the appearance of omicron, that the spike evolves rapidly? Because I don’t think that the changes in the omicron spike have anything to do with evolution.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #213736): “we need a vaccine that’s administered by nasal spray rather than injection.”
.
The fact that people can readily get reinfected suggests that might be a forlorn hope.
.
I suspect SteveF is correct about “patterning”. I think that is also called “original antigenic sin”.
This is the study I found unnerving. Reinfection and re-reinfection and the possibility of increased “adverse health outcomes” with each additional infection. AKKK!
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1
We’ve gotten used to donning KN95s or N95s (as a function of who we’re joining) to go out, not eating indoors, nor going to any quasi-public places where masking is not required, etc.
Our conodominium building issues plague reports as victims reveal themselves. Of 20 floors- 256 units, there are infections on at least 2 floors newly reported during a typical week. And those are the ones who report.
In a place where one would expect people to be pretty sharp, it’s astonishing how little some of them know about the current situation.
“it’s over, we’re moving on, no worse than a common cold, I’ve had it so am immune, masks don’t do anything so why wear one? etc. etc…”
john ferguson,
During the mask mandates, I saw very few people wearing effective masks like ?95 or better. Most were cloth or surgical masks. A large fraction of the time, people’s noses were exposed. Cloth and surgical masks aren’t particularly effective and at least have the potential of giving people a false sense of security.
The way I read the abstract, if reinfection increases risk, then it’s not at all clear that boosting doesn’t also have a negative effect on the immune system since the resistance from infection from a booster shot doesn’t last very long.
Mike M.,
When I put on my foil hat, I think that omicron was specifically designed to kneecap China’s economy with their zero COVID policy and mostly ineffective vaccines. Xi is never going to admit that zero COVID was a mistake. If he did, it might give his opponents the excuse and support to dump him.
This study was a bit screwy:
“Compared to veterans with a first coronavirus infection, those who got a reinfection had more than double the risk of dying from any cause.”
.
Why all cause? And why would they not also state what the risk of dying from covid by reinfection?
.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(22)00147-8/fulltext
“SARS-CoV-2 reinfections were uncommon until the end of 2021 but became common with the advent of Omicron. Very few reinfections were severe. Boosters may modestly reduce reinfection risk.”
“Until January 31, 2022, 13,792 reinfections were recorded among 251,104 COVID-19 primary infections (5.49%). Most reinfections (86.77%, 11,967/13,792) were recorded in January 2022. Reinfections were mostly mild (99.17%, 13,678/13,792). Hospitalizations were uncommon [1.08% (149/13,792) vs. 3.66% (505/13,792) in primary infection] and COVID-19 deaths were very rare (20/13,792, case fatality rate 0.15%). The overall incidence rate of reinfections was 5.99 (95% CI 5.89–6.09) per 1000 person-months. The reinfection risk was estimated as 0.76% at six months, 1.36% at nine months, 4.96% at 12 months, 16.68% at 15 months, and 18.86% at 18 months. Unvaccinated (OR=1.23; 95%CI=1.14–1.33), incompletely (OR=1.33; 95%CI=1.08–1.64) or completely vaccinated (OR=1.50; 95%CI=1.37–1.63), were modestly more likely to be reinfected compared with recipients of a third (booster) vaccine dose.”
double the risk of dying? maybe they were already on their way out – ??
So if you are in failing health, you are more likely to get re-infected than if you are healthy. Big surprise.
MikeM
You are right: I mean evolve.
Supposedly there is. That’s what motives looking for vaccines based on the bits that don’t evolve. I don’t have a compendium of the info.
Obviously, I can’t predict whether they will succeed or fail. I do know that I’m not strongly motivated to get another booster until they have one for a different variant from the original.
lucia,
And that they can show that the new booster/vaccine gives immunity for longer than a few months to those who have already been either infected or vaccinated and boosted. Given the reinfection rate for omicron compared to earlier variants, I’m, as the cliche goes, not holding my breath.
As of right now, I don’t think it’s worth not living what was previously a normal life. I don’t wear a mask unless it’s required in a specific location like my doctor’s office. I eat in indoor restaurants, which is pretty much all that’s available in my area, etc. I don’t think living in a bubble is worth it.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #213755): “And that they can show that the new booster/vaccine gives immunity for longer than a few months to those who have already been either infected or vaccinated and boosted.”
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Or if the booster gives enhanced protection against serious illness.
I have not gotten boosted since I don’t know of any evidence that the booster produces any lasting benefit over the original shot.
The posters here appear to me to be well informed about Covid-19 from the technical standpoint and in being so are better able to find and appreciate the apparent contradictions in technical reports, the uncertainty in conclusions from these reports and the lack of supporting data. I am wondering how well the general population compares in this matter and how much it affects their ability to judge “expert” policy making.
Recently I have been looking at 4 models that were developed to estimate the actual number of Covid-19 cases in the US over time. While the models show that the reported cases over time can deviate from model estimates by factors from 2 to 16 times (estimated/reported) the models do not agree well with one another. One model had a cumulative total of 350 million cases in early 2022. When I did a deaths/cases ratio using this model with reported deaths I found structure in the series that showed abrupt changes in the ratios. I was not expecting to see this since when I saw it in the reported deaths/reported cases ratios I could show it was probably due to changes in the portion of actual cases reported.
Even the seroprevalence data I was attempting to hang my hat on shows periods of time where the cumulative number of cases goes down. The confidence intervals reported for these estimates are rather narrow and do not reflect the cumulative problem. I continue to look for seroprevalence data beyond Feb 2022.
I have found that when reported Covid-19 cases surge to their peaks the reported case count is closer to the actual estimate (although can be significantly lower) and when the cases decrease to the valleys the reported case counts are much lower than the actual estimate. This was apparent using model results and from peaks in valleys from a trend line in reported ratio results.
Government administrators use reported cases when deciding to impose or lessen mandate restrictions. I wonder how much they really understand about that data. It reminds me of the mask mandates where masks are required but do not have to be effective and it becomes a matter of going through the motions. I suspect that many of those people in the private who are truly most concerned about Covid-19 are wearing properly fitted N95 masks were the occasion might deem it necessary to them.
My niece who was infected with Covid-19 three times had milder symptoms each time. My daughter-in-law’s grandmother who is 96 was infected twice and both times was asymptomatic. My granddaughters’ cousin was infected twice with no symptoms. I now know of at least 12 cases of reinfections without evidence of an increase in symptom severity.
There is a very small portion of the population that has been infected four or more times. That would be an interesting group to study.
Kenneth,
Are you sure that the government’s thresholds for declaring levels of local risk were Covid related hospital admissions? I ask, because this could be a real number, the others such as “reported” being subsets of the probable extent of infection.
john ferguson,
Besides hospital admissions, I think local health departments use COVID test positivity rates. With many people testing at home, I’m not sure how relevant that is anymore.
DeWitt
I’d love no re-infection. But I‘ll take it if we think it’s likely to make symptoms less severe when I get infected. As far as I can determine the reduction in symptom severity lingers longer than the actual immunity.
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I don’t need a vaccine to be super-perfect. I just don’t see much use in getting the one for “original variant” over and over and over. That variant, like MontePython’s parrot, is dead.
When I hear about multiple symptomless reinfections, I think “false positives”.
Mike M,
The PCR tests do seem susceptible to false positives, but with the antigen rapid tests, the false positive rates (reported to the FDA) are very low. False negatives are very common, and seem to depend strongly on viral load. Depending on the test, false negatives are reported ~12% to ~28% of the time (that is, 100 tests of truly positive individuals will yield 12 to 28 negatives). My at-home test just after symptoms started was negative, but the next morning, with worse symptoms, a clinic test was positive (more sensitive than the home test, with fewer false negatives).
Lucia,
I do now have some metallic-like taste in my mouth (4 doses).
DeWitt, the possibility of jamming up the hospitals drove the classification here in Pinellas County specifically because that was the only thing that might be responsive to planning and covid admissions could be counted reliably.
Lucia,
“I just don’t see much use in getting the one for “original variant” over and over and over. That variant, like MontePython’s parrot, is dead.”
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The problem is that even *infection* with omicron does not seem to make antibodies that target omicron variants very well, perhaps due to the “immune patterning” I wrote about up thread. So even if an mRNA vaccine targeting the omicron spike protein were available, there is no guarantee it will provide much more protection than the existing vaccines. It would be interesting to look at un-vaccinated kids initially infected with omicron (like my youngest grandson, who was born in late February). He caught the omicron variant 4 weeks ago from his mom (it was nothing more than a two-day cold for him). Since he could not have been exposed to earlier variants, his immune response ought to be the best possible against the omicron strain. I have had a harder time with omicron than my grandson did. 😉
John and DeWitt, hospitalizations and positivity rates were used for determining the level of government restrictions.
When I did my analysis of hospitalization rates as a ratio against deaths it had some of the same problems as reported cases, but is probably a better indicator than reported cases. If testing were random, positivity rate would probably be the best indicator. When I looked at the amount of testing it went up with the number of positive tests. In other words when there was a surge in infections more people felt the need to be tested and thus even more infections are found than otherwise would have been. When the surge abates less testing occurs and more positive cases are missed.
Mike M. (Comment #213733)
“angech, You are thoroughly misinformed”
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Nothing new there Mike M.
I do try to both think about and research the questions or comments people pose but as you know research on the net is fraught.
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That does not rule out my comments being at times sensible and incisive [and other times not].
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This comment by you was spot on. Mike M. (Comment #213762) When I hear about multiple symptomless reinfections, I think “false positives”.
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This comment not so much “Mike M. (Comment #213756) I have not gotten boosted since I don’t know of any evidence that the booster produces any lasting benefit over the original shot.”
The original shot runs out of effectiveness, Boosters give a new benefit of renewed protection for a further period.
So one should have booster shots when ones protection wanes.
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“The mRNA “vaccines” cause your cells to produce a section of the spike protein, which is a subset of what the virus does.”
Hence numerous problems.
Real infections produce antibodies to both the spike and other sections of the virus which is why one does not tend to get the same cold twice.
Inactivated real spike protein produces a wider range of antigen than an mRNA produced partial spike protein and presents it in the right manner to develop an effective and long lasting response albeit not as good as a live infection [but much, much safer].
The trouble with mRNA is that having been produced in the presenting cell there is not necessarily a correlation with the body deigning to recognize something produced by the body as a foreign antigen.
Though as antibodies are produced there does appear to be a correlation.
How effective these antibodies are and how effectively they can be switched back on when the trigger of an actual virus infection with cellular damage is not present means that the person with an mRNA antibody actually has to suffer an infection with cell lysis to activate the immune response which is why mRNA treated people get infections.
Tom Scharf (Comment #213738)
“The high level marketing is that the mRNA injection puts a limited amount of “vaccine” in the body that makes the body manufacture a limited amount of * just spike proteins *, and then it is completely gone after 72 hours”
Thanks, this was not my understanding of it. Good if correct.
–
Antibodies develop to different parts of the spike protein.
A mutation that changes the spike protein can obviously kill the virus as unable to stick.
Make it weaker [less sticky].
Make it stick even more, not as problem as the problem is not the fact that it can stick and infect but what the other proteins do in the replication in the cell that helps create disease and death [not the spike protein]]
Make the spike more antibody recognizable.
Make the spike less antibody recognizable.
Other mutations maker the virus more or less lethal by altering the other lethal proteins.
Omicron should have had a more lethal core than the original virus.
Symptoms at 46 hours (4 doses of Paxlovid):
Fever none (98.4F)
Headache none
Body aches more than 95% gone
Cough 80% gone
I still feel a little fatigued.
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Paxlovid is indeed like magic.
.
My wife tested positive this morning….. 48 hours after my positive test. Fortunately, her symptoms are (so far) very mild…. mostly a sore throat and cough. FWIW: My wife got a second booster in mid June, my only booster was last November.
angech,
m-RNA is constantly recycled in cells, since the need for new proteins is constant. That is why the m-RNA vaccines are supposed to stop producing spike protein pretty quickly.
SteveF
I prescribe naps.
I slept a lot when I had Covid.
Jim had a second booster; I didn’t. My Covid was milder. (Jim takes medication that reduces his immune system. He skipped his weekly injection after testing positive, then resumed when his home test showed negative. This was fine because of the type of medicine.)
the post-covid nap.
I don’t think I was doing this before I was afflicted, but now every day or two I take a nap about 4:00pm which seems to last about 40 minutes assuming no external intervention.
Otherwise no other symptoms although it does seem in some things I’m not as sharp as i was 2 years ago.
Current project is a full scale radio controlled electric powered flying reverse engineered Switch-Blade 300. Progress is pretty good, but there is not sufficient information in the wreck photos to understand fully how the vertical fins in the rear work, although I think I can fake it. The original is really clever especially the design for moving the elevons on the front wing.
angech (Comment #213769): “Real infections produce antibodies to both the spike and other sections of the virus which is why one does not tend to get the same cold twice. Inactivated real spike protein produces a wider range of antigen”.
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But we do get repeat infections from the same type of cold virus. I had not realized that Novavax uses the entire spike protein. It makes sense that a broader range of antigen would provide better protection, but natural infection does not seem all that much better.
————-
angech: “The trouble with mRNA is that having been produced in the presenting cell there is not necessarily a correlation with the body deigning to recognize something produced by the body as a foreign antigen.”
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But that is exactly what the virus does.
———–
angech: “The original shot runs out of effectiveness, Boosters give a new benefit of renewed protection for a further period.”
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That is extremely vague. The antibodies fade, but memory cells remain. So protection against infection wanes pretty quickly, but protection against severe disease lasts much longer. A booster briefly restores protection against infection. But I know of no evidence that a booster produces a lasting benefit.
———–
angech: “So one should have booster shots when ones protection wanes.”
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That would require several boosters a year. There are a number of reasons why that would be a bad idea, especially if the vaccine contains PEG, like the mRNA vaccines and Novavax.
MikeM
For the record, what really motivates me to get a vaccine is protection against severe or painful disease. It’s wonderful if a vaccine does both. That’s an ideal. That’s what we hoped for. But it’s avoiding hospitalization, death and pain that motivates me to get a vaccine.
There are tons of not very severe diseases out there that I wouldn’t necessarily rush out to be vaccinated for. Yeah, I might get a vaccine for the common cold eventually if it could promise lasting protection against the current virus, all mutated viruses and so on. No side-effects what-so-ever. But I wouldn’t be in a huge rush to get it. I’m not clamoring for someone to develop the vaccine. If it existed but protection against the cold lasted only three months, I wouldn’t schedule a vaccine very 3 months and make sure I went in to get it. I’d risk a cold.
SteveF (Comment #213772)
“m-RNA is constantly recycled in cells, since the need for new proteins is constant.”
Thanks.
My concerns were on using mRNA without years of research on potential intracellular effects of putting new RNA in which might become a part of the cell or cause disturbances to other functions of that cell on a long term basis.
MikeM
“That would require several boosters a year. There are a number of reasons why that would be a bad idea”
The current advice is frequent [several] vaccines a year to reduce one’s risk of death.
Because the immunity wanes. Because the risk in older people is severe.
Someone obviously sees it as a good idea.
I do not like the idea of using messenger RNA as a treatment as there are a number of reasons why that might be a bad idea.
lucia (Comment #213776): “But it’s avoiding hospitalization, death and pain that motivates me to get a vaccine.”
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Me too. If it were to be shown that a covid booster would produce a significant, lasting benefit of that sort, I’d get one.
angech (Comment #213777): “The current advice is frequent [several] vaccines a year to reduce one’s risk of death.”
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I have not heard that. Maybe it is specific to Australia?
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It strikes me as a very bad idea for several reasons.
Frequent injections of PEG (poly ethylene glycol) could induce an allergic response to PEG. That would be bad because some medications use PEG.
Frequent doses of the same vaccine might enhance imprinting, thus impeding immune response to new strains.
There is such a thing as immune exhaustion.
There is some risk to each dose.
Or maybe repeat doses might trigger an autoimmune reaction.
We have zero evidence that such a regimen is either safe or effective.
Recent study. Basically this says that BA.5 is evading very well but claims boosters are helping.
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2 doses: J&J/prior infection performing poorly against omicron, mRNA holding up better (Fig 2).
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>2 doses mix/match: mRNA still faring well, 2X Novavax + Pfizer performed the best (Fig 3).
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Omicron spike function and neutralizing activity elicited by a comprehensive panel of vaccines
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq0203
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“… severe dampening of plasma neutralizing activity elicited by infection or seven clinical vaccines relative to the ancestral virus”
“Our data suggest that although Omicron sublineages evade polyclonal neutralizing antibody responses elicited by primary vaccine series, vaccine boosters may provide sufficient protection against Omicron-induced severe disease.”
“The recent evaluation of intranasal vaccine administration could also be important to not only prevent severe disease but also curtail viral infection and transmission through induction of mucosal immunity ”
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I don’t actually see any info on severe disease here, it looks like a neutralizing study, I think they just threw that statement in. As usual there are lots of normalizing issues here such as timing of infection and boosting that may or may not have been dealt with properly.
More global warming news
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2022/07/28/residents-tie-forest-fire-suspect-to-tree-wait-for-police-n1616507
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“ A man suspected of starting two wildfires in rural Oregon has been arrested with the help of three local residents who tied him to a tree.”
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“.. Smith was treated for an injury he allegedly sustained while falling down and then taken to jai….”
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Watch that first step …LoL..
Biden says the dopiest things. 2 days ago:
“We’re not going to be in a recession,” Biden himself told reporters on Monday. “My hope is we go from this rapid growth to a steady growth.”
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This is apparently some strategy to redefine what a recession actually is by the White House geniuses. This just makes them look bad, deceptive. You want people to be more optimistic about the economy, but this is just an attempted Jedi Mind Trick by the worst possible spokesman.
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The legacy media hive mind is enthusiastically debating what a recession “really” is today. I’m sure they will re-adapt the 2 quarters of growth definition once it starts going the other direction.
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Example, The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/recession-definition-wrong-question-inflation-unemployment/670983/
“One popular definition of a recession is indeed two straight quarters of negative growth. And we might have reached that milestone today. But not necessarily. Quarterly growth estimates are revised multiple times, and they’re commonly revised dramatically. Collecting a bunch of numbers about the economy in real-ish time—the car purchases, the single-family-housing investments, the furniture imports, and the iPhone exports—is grueling and complex work for the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Factoring in the error margins, there is still roughly a 50 percent chance that the economy grew in the first six months of this year.”
“Another is that a recession call isn’t particularly important to anybody’s life.”
““Is this a recession?” feels like the question of the day. But I’m telling you it’s the wrong question. It represents an anxiety over terminology rather than over reality. ”
Joe Manchin, like Dr. Strangelove’s failure to suppress his salute, was no longer able to suppress his Democrat instincts to spend and tax.
Some Republicans had a similar problem with the crony capitalism chip deal.
Irresponsibility has a majority position in congress that will give children and grandchildren down the road a choice between defaulting national debt or debilitating inflation. And those innocents do not even understand how this will occur.
Rapid growth ended a year ago. I think that overall growth for the last year is under 2%.
The jobs numbers are something of a puzzlement. They suggest that the economy has been growing. But a tight job market should result in increasing real wages. Instead, real wages have been falling. Strange.
Here is a guy who would seem to have nothing the do with the administration but who says that he does not think we are in a recession. He bases that largely on corporate earnings. He thinks that the negative growth is due to businesses over ordering during the supply change bottleneck, so that they now have a glut of inventory. Well, maybe.
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/doesnt-look-like-recession?ccsource=email_weekly_0728
The NBER is the official arbiter of when we are in a recession, but it has taken as long as a year to determine that. We have had 2 quarters of reported negative GDP growth which does portend well for the economy no matter how it is defined or caused (inventory??) or, for that matter, whether it even is a true indicator of economic wellbeing. I hear a lot of political spinning and plain old wishful thinking.
Real wages are stickier than prices and thus high inflation, like we are currently experiencing, sees real wages going down.
Actually Keynesian economics was originally promoted by Keynes on the proposition that the economy needed lower wages to reach an optimum and with the fact that they were sticky a bout of price inflation would lower real wages. In turns out that workers and unions caught unto this Keynesian trick and inserted inflation clauses in their contracts. That may well have changed again with the lower price inflation rates in recent decades, but with a Keynesian oriented Democrat administration in power unions might be hesitant to complain or act.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #213786)
which does not portend well
The supply chain is a nightmare in electrical and electronics components. Several of my customers have had upwards of 50% of the components in their devices out of stock. Usually this is less than 5%. This has been ongoing for at least a year now. Some had to initiate redesigns of working products just to be able to manufacture anything. They are all hoarding components which makes the problems worse of course.
The “re-defining” of a recession to avoid admitting there is a recession is not going to help in November. What Dems need to do to avoid a wipe-out is adopt more sensible policies. They won’t.
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The more dishonestly Dems deal with reality, the worse the outcome will be for them….. they are almost writing the TV attack ads Republicans will use to good effect in September and October. For the good of the Country, loss of Dem control of at least one chamber can’t come soon enough…. they have done more than enough damage already.
Kenneth,
“Real wages are stickier than prices and thus high inflation, like we are currently experiencing, sees real wages going down.”
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For sure. I remember that the company I worked for starting in 1973 simply didn’t have the structures/procedures to keep workers whole during the period of high inflation. Only when they started losing younger (and usually more talented) employees did they enact across-the board cost of living adjustments (COLA) based on published inflation figures. These adjustments were independent of merit based salary increases.
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Some of the more savvy folks I worked with immediately sold their existing house and upgraded to a better one; mortgage rates were high, but they figured their COLA salary increases would make their mortgage payments ever more affordable. When interest rates returned to Earth, they re-financed….. leaving them with a very nice house and a low payment.
SteveF, Weren’t Nixon’s Wage and Price Controls reinstituted abut that time?
john ferguson,
I think Nixon’s wage and price controls ended by 1974. Of course there were the abominations of gas rationing and 55 MPH speed limits around the same time….. I actually contemplated buying 55 gallon drums of toluene and cyclohexane and blending my own, but the rationing madness ended before that happened.
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It helped that Nixon was driven from office; everything Nixonian got a bad reputation, including his very stupid market interventions. Of course, when controls were lifted there was an immediate jump in inflation. Milton Freedman was constantly on TV saying (I paraphrase)… “This is really stupid, and it is only going to damage the economy.”. Freedman was right, but Nixon won his election in 1972 by telling people he would control inflation…. he knew that was a lie, but he was a politician, so lies were normal for him.
By the end of the 70’s, COLA was built into everything. I suspect that was part of why inflation was so hard to knock down when Carter gave Volcker the mandate to do that. One of the few good things Carter did, although Reagan got most of the credit because of “stay the course” and it finally working when Reagan was in office.
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The current bout of inflation has been somewhat restrained by businesses trying to hold the line on prices and costs (including wages). The longer it lasts, the more inflation will become ingrained, and the harder it will be to control. So of course, Congress and Biden are giving us two more big borrow and throw away money bills.
Interesting data out of Australia from the Kirby Institute’s Prof Dorothy Machalek https://kirby.unsw.edu.au/news/june-almost-half-aussies-had-recently-had-covid-19
The ‘real’ number of Covid infections much higher than previously thought (tested blood samples from blood donors).
Almost half (46.2%) of adults in Australia are estimated to have had SARS-CoV-2 by early June 2022.
Based on comparison with the previous survey, more than a quarter of the population was infected in the previous three-month period.
The highest SARS-CoV-2 antibody positivity was in the 18-29 year old age group, at 61.7%.
The methods for calculating inflation have changed since the 1970s. I have read that if we used the 1970s’ methods inflation would be closer to 20 percent.
Lucia, I used Ken Fritsch instead of Kenneth Fritsch and my post went to moderation. My attempt to become less formal failed and now I feel like the guy who shows up for a formal dance in blue jeans and gets shown the door.
released.
70 hours after first dose of Paxlovid: all significant symptoms are gone. One observation: after dosing Paxlovid, blood levels peak at about three hours, then decline with a half life of ~6 hours. I noted that my blood pressure and pulse seem to vary inversely with the Paxlovid. At peak concentration my BP was 115/60 (way low for me… and feeling very light-headed), 59-60 pulse rate, and before the next dose 132/76, with 70 pulse rate (still a bit lower than normal for me). I don’t take medications for BP or anything else. Could be coincidence I guess, but very odd.
Andrew Kennett,
“The highest SARS-CoV-2 antibody positivity was in the 18-29 year old age group, at 61.7%.”
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No surprise there; that age group in the USA also has very high antibody positivity. I guess it is because they have nothing to fear from the virus…… only the Australian government’s brownshirt covid policies.
SteveF, yesterday I had my annual physical and after running up 3 flights of stairs and having a very frustrating interlude with the attending nurse my BP was 155 over 99. My normal BP is your light headed BP. When I requested a second BP measurement by the doctor it was back in the normal range.
My point here is that there are many factors that can temporarily affect your BP. If you have an unexpected BP it always prudent to check it again after a short pause.
Kenneth Fritsch: “My attempt to become less formal failed”
Perhaps try “Kenny” next time? 😉
kenneth,
I monitored every ~30 minutes most of the day yesterday. There wasn’t much in the way of sudden jumps or falls, just trends over hours. Similar pattern today, but a little less extreme in the low range; pulse rate still dropped 3 hrs after dosing to 59-60…. well below what I have frequently measured in the past.
Kenneth/ken,
Now that our hostess has released your comment under ken, you should be able to use both.
HaroldW (Comment #213805)
Harold, you can call me Kenneth or you can call Ken or you can call call me Kenny or you can call me Kenneth Lloyd or you can call me Lloyd but don’t you call me Fritsch.
My life time friend still calls me Kenny and I call him Eddie. I guess we never grew up.
Kenneth Lloyd Fritsch
At least they have more current seroprevalence data than the US – June 2022 versus Feb 2022. Well I guess even Mussolini had the trains running on time.
Good news, the organs of elite opinion are in 100% agreement that the recession is transitory. They might be randomly right about this, but one thing for sure is that they don’t know. I’ve read some very strange articles over the past few days and the synchronization of the thought processes written down is rather striking. These places are usually inclined to report bad news with great trumpets, so it is really odd when they all start spinning things the exact same way.
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This is exactly how you get to 5% trust numbers, the laundering of expert opinion to unanimously state something that is quickly proven false. Repeatedly.
For the amount of money the CDC receives annually and the amount of special funding they received for covid it is unacceptable they can’t even report basic statistical data such as seroprevalence on the evolving covid situation. Reinfection rates. Natural immunity. Waning timelines. Vaccine efficacy over time.
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A lot of this stuff is occasionally available, but it seems to be a series of one off studies. It just seems unfocused. Cases, deaths, tests are being done OK.
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Countries with national medical systems such as the UK and Israel do the job better. They have an advantage of large centralized databases but just because it is harder in the US doesn’t excuse the fact that the CDC just isn’t doing it’s basic job in many cases.
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The reaction to monkeypox appears to have caught the CDC flat footed again after several years of a global pandemic. It’s probably time to make some significant changes there.
Tom Scharf,
” It’s probably time to make some significant changes there.”
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Ya think?!?
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They waste taxpayer money ($11 billion pre-covid!) promulgating emergency measures that are clearly unlawful (vaccination mandates, mask mandates, eviction moratoriums, etc), worry endlessly about the truly idiotic (equity, inclusivity, LGBTQWERTY, and giving priority in treatment based on skin color alone), but can’t bring themselves to gather and disseminate basic but critically important data on the worst pandemic in a century, nor honestly discuss things as simple as immunity following infection. They are not just not doing their jobs, most of what they are doing is dishonest, destructive, or unlawful.
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The organization needs to be zeroed out of the Federal budget, the entire staff fired, and replaced with a much smaller entity, with no staff located anywhere near Washington DC, and focused 100% on non-political gathering and analyzing disease data.
“with no staff located anywhere near Washington DC”
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They already have that one covered. The CDC is in Atlanta.
Tom, I believe the use of the word transitory, being largely undefined is intentional. All recessions can be considered transitory. Periods of economic growth can be considered transitory. We have had 12 recessions since 1950 – not including the uncalled recent one.
High inflation occurring with declining economic growth was the bane of Keynesians in the 1970s and beyond where after they fell out of favor – but only temporarily. So-called elites and experts are very good at coming up with extenuating circumstances when their theories and/or actions fail. Add that to their being the arbiter of definitions and re-definitions and they have little concern of ever being wrong.
Mike M,
Some staff are in the Washington, DC area. The Director probably spends most of her time there.
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If you ever have a need to throw up, read all the woke garbage at the CDC website…. I especially liked that what the CDC staff considers discrimination of any kind (like using the wrong pronouns) against anyone for any reason is automatically a national health crisis. They have lost their way.
They have requested $28 billion/year in new funding starting in September for “pandemic preparedness”. IOW, a $28 billion slush fund for woke social engineering.
HaroldW
Naw. The database doesn’t know “Kenny” either.
There is a filter that compares name-email combination to the name-email combination that is already in the data base. If the exact combo isn’t there, the comment doesn’t get through.
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Lots of visitors have most their comments under 1 name-email and others onuer a misspelled name-email combo (or even name-mistyped email.)
SteveF,
The CDC couldn’t initially produce a COVID test that worked properly in the early stages of the pandemic. And the FDA wouldn’t approve other tests. Things didn’t improve much with time.
Speaking of the FDA, from what I’ve read recently, they continue to approve new opioids and haven’t removed approval from a single one. At some point you have to believe that the problem isn’t just Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers.
CDC new report on vaccine effectiveness and severe disease, mostly during BA.2 period.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7129e1.htm?s_cid=mm7129e1_w
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“Among adults aged >50 years, VE against COVID-19–associated hospitalization >120 days after receipt of dose 3 was 55% … and >7 days (median = 27 days) after a fourth dose was 80%”
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A couple things I think, this continues to verify that the vaccines are much less effective against omicron (55%), and that there is short term benefit measured in months of boosters even for severe illness (80%). This is mostly because the current vaccines are stinking it up relatively and BA.5 has made it even worse.
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The reports now keep using the term “immunocompetent” which may mean that the vaccines are very ineffective for people who are not immunocompetent(?). They keep repeating a need for a new booster every 4 months. This data kind of supports that, but I would not argue with an assertion that the recommendation came before the data analysis.
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One possible reason for a drop of effectiveness to severe disease is the “unvaccinated” reference group now has a lot more people with natural immunity from infection. Impossible to sort out with these type of studies.
Tom Scharf,
In 1947, there were two consecutive quarters of GDP decrease without a recession being declared. So the probability that this is a recession is only 90%. Obviously not significant.
Kind of strange this has not been reported anywhere. For the last 4 months excess deaths in the US are right in line with historical averages.
https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1545065471497617408/photo/1
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Verified here:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard
Tom Scharf,
If the fearmongers had to admit that most current COVID related deaths are now with rather than from, how could they keep insisting that the health emergency isn’t over?
Are the excess deaths back to near zero because those most vulnerable already died from covid? There really were a lot of excess deaths earlier in the pandemic.
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Or perhaps magical treatments like Paxlovid are reducing deaths.
I think a few meaningful things can be determined:
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1. The current covid death rate is the floor. ~350 deaths /day in the US is the “dying with covid”, not from covid rate. Perhaps it is also a combination of people dying from covid at the same rate they were dying from the flu and other things that were routinely taking out the elderly.
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2. It also may mean that BA.5 is not very lethal at all if it cannot even put a meaningful dent in the excess mortality rate.
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3. The covid maps and “danger levels” should be recalibrated so that this case rate is not deemed sufficiently dangerous.
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That doesn’t mean we won’t have an outbreak this fall and winter that does increase the mortality rate. We do now know where the floor is with omicron BA.5 if this data is correct.
Ken knowledge or to know in Scottish
So very apt do you ken ?
Also an unfortunate child in South Park I recall.
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One of my mates is a Kenny with the motto when things go wrong (a lot of the time) is
“You’ve got to toughen up”
Off on our road trip, approaching -5 C capital city Canberra