Sunday, August 01, 2021

ETTD

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Except....

The CDC wasn't "wrong in May." The "alpha" variant was the dominant strain in May, not delta. And as the insert in this tweet notes, the CDC changed directions on masks because unvaccinated people quit wearing masks (mask mandates went away, is actually what happened) while vaccinated people were told they didn't have to. I suppose the results were predictable, but if CDC had told the vaccinated in May to keep wearing masks, we'd have a lot of people wondering about the efficacy of the vaccine (it's a fringe movement now; it probably would be mainstream if we'd all accurately predicted the future 2 months out.).

And those "basic safety protocols"?  Pretty much shot to hell, thanks largely to the vaccine and the anxiety around mask wearing/social distancing.  We have met the enemy, he is us.  Not the CDC.

Godalmightydamn!, Twitter can be tiresome. 
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Saturday, July 31, 2021

Reading The Legal Tea Leaves

The sentiment that Twitter can’t convey nuance is quite true, and as applicable to the law as to medicine. The problem with that statement is that Treasury is not “holding off,” it is party to a lawsuit over releasing the tax returns. The OLC opinion is advisory only (just like the one that says they can’t prosecute a sitting POTUS). It is not determinative, especially when there is a court involved.

Treasury is playing to the court here, fully aware the court is not going to grant a peremptory release of the tax returns. This is, in other words, how lawsuits are done. Treasury is not “holding off,” Treasury is acting like a party to pending lawsuit. The problem is people who thought the OLC memo was the last word on this. It’s just another brick in the wall.
This is the result of Treasury “holding off.” Matters are moving forward as they should be. The court deadline of August 4, after all, is only Wednesday.
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Whatever Happened To “Economic Anxiety”?

Nearly half of all Republicans in the U.S. believe that "a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands." 

Economic anxiety?  Fear of social collapse?  Or just good old American racism, brought to the fore by Donald Trump and George Floyd?

Where did I read that a state wants schools to stop teaching that the Constitution is a racist document, that racism had anything to do with the government created in 1798?  Despite the Missouri Compromise and the 3/5ths compromise and the continuation of slavery until that issue alone nearly broke the Union four score and seven years later?

Economic anxiety, right?

Nobody's blaming that on economic anxiety. I don't think you can blame it on racism, either.  But crises tend to reveal the character of individuals, and of nations.  And apparently some portion of our nation is seriously unhinged and fruity as a nutcake.  It would be a mistake to think it was all of us, though; or even a large portion of us:

Vaccinated Americans living in Los Angeles County, California told CNN this week that they've lost patience with their fellow Americans who are refusing to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.

LA County-based educational show host Michael Burns explained to CNN that he's grown particularly angry with people who openly boast about their refusal to get vaccinated.

"There are people who have been flaunting not being vaccinated or not wanting to be vaccinated in both Los Angeles and Southern California more generally," he said. "It's extremely frustrating."

LA County resident Ann Rodarte, meanwhile, said she felt "disappointment" by vaccine resisters because they had spoiled what had been the start of a return to normalcy earlier this summer.

LA County resident Paula Stewart similarly said she was "angry, disappointed and scared" that, because of vax resisters, "this is not going away."

Despite the fact political Twitter thinks majority rule means the minority is always squashed into silence and impotence, this is the sound of the majority pushing back.  Greg Abbott may hide behind bromides about how Texans have learned to take care of themselves in this pandemic, but I've been in stores and restaurants where almost no one was wearing a mask or practicing anything like social distancing, and the hospitalization rates and positivity rates in Texas equal what they were 5 months ago, and they are only rising.  Eventually the majority is going to demand the minority stop endangering all of us; and demand our officeholders do their jobs to protect the public.

And when that happens, the anxiety is not gonna be economic.  But before we get there, Gov. Faubus wants his chance to stand in the school house door one more time, and declare "race mixing" something up with which he will not put!  That part is gonna get real ugly, real fast.

I kind of expect the DOJ lawsuit to bring that to the fore, in a way even the media can't prance around.


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Yeah, But Who’s Counting?

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But He Is A Joke

Shouldn’t I worry more about this guy, who is at least a sitting U.S. Senator? By the way, there’s no mechanism for imposing a national vaccine mandate any more than there is for imposing an election “do-over.”

Calm down , Chicken Little.
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So, How Small Is The GOP Base?

And why are we so afraid of them?
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Taking It Personally

Texas has recorded 53,375 deaths from Covid. That’s roughly the population of the town I grew up in, while I was living there.

Giv. Absent, the city of the dead salute you. Job well done. Couldn’t have done it without you.
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In Re: The Rising Number Of “Breakthrough Infections”

"Context is all.” See?
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Vaccine Or Mask Mandates…

are out of the question:

In Mount Pleasant, the COVID unit at Titus could typically handle 21 patients — but the facility now only has the nursing staff to cover 6 of those beds, Scoggin said. Transferring new patients to a nearby facility is out of the question, he said. Those who can’t fit in the COVID unit are in the ICU, or the emergency department, or isolated in the labor-and-delivery unit, but that’s not a long-term solution, he said.

“I don't see another hospital within another 100 miles in a better situation,” Scoggin said.

Henderson said he spoke with a chief nursing officer north of Waco who said that her staff is near collapse after a physically and emotionally exhausting 16 months of fighting the pandemic.

That region, which includes Hill and McLennan counties, has seen one of the sharpest increases in COVID hospitalization rates in the state, according to state health numbers. On July 1, nearly 2% of hospitalizations in the region were COVID patients. By July 27, that had climbed to nearly 10%. Hill County ranks in the bottom half of the state for vaccinated residents. 

That’s East Texas. What about central Texas, in a town you may have heard of:

Abbott lives there. Maybe he expects to get first dibs if he needs it. Maybe he just doesn’t give a shit about his neighbors. Or about the parents of school children:

Austin is not close to the border. Mt. Pleasant is a long, long way from Val Verde County.   Nor are school children likely to encounter immigrants. I suspect this has a lot more to do with vaccination rates than with brown people. And again, I don’t understand what the endgame is.  Maybe Abbott is counting on us all forgetting this by 2022. But the way things are going, we may still be suffering from it then.

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If Exposed To Expertise, Break Glass

As I understand it, you have to work in the Capitol, and go to the House floor, and like any other employee in any other place of business, you're being asked to wear a mask for the safety of others. "Come and get me" implies you won't be showing up for work anytime soon.

And Covid-19 will be happy to come and get you.  You just sit real still, now.





For those who prefer something like a transcript, this is courtesy of Raw Story:

During the Friday White House press briefing, the Newsmax reporter asked, "How do you know test whether it's the dominant strain in the area when people just test whether they're COVID-positive?"

"We don't test it, we listen to public health and scientists and they tell us it's the delta variant," Jean-Pierre said.

The reporter then asked if the health experts explained their "process" for testing.

"I don't even understand the question," she replied. "That's what they are telling us. I just laid out how contagious it was."

The reporter then complained that a lot of answers we get about public health questions are "because [public health experts] say so."

"Well they're the experts!" a baffled Jean-Pierre replied.
I mean, "experts" say the earth is round, but have you walked all the way around it to see?  And is it really gravity, or does the earth just suck?  I know what the "experts" say, but....

(And then we find out who she is:)
Which does raise a good question:
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The GOP Is Literally A Death Cult ☠️

Because now we must all rely on the kindness of strangers.

Relaxing restrictions like mask-wearing and social distancing when most people have been vaccinated greatly increases the risk of vaccine-resistant variants of the virus that causes Covid-19, new research showed on Friday.

At a time when nearly 60 percent of Europeans have received at least one vaccine dose, the authors said their modelling study showed the need to maintain non-vaccination measures until everyone is fully jabbed.

To predict how the SARS-CoV-2 virus might mutate in response to vaccination campaigns, a pan-European team of experts simulated the probability of a vaccine-resistant strain emerging in a population of 10 million people over three years.

Variables included vaccination, mutation and transmission rates -- including recurring "waves" of infections and falls in cases in response to lockdowns.

But in what the authors called a "counterintuitive result", the model showed that the highest risk of resistant strains emerging came when a large proportion of the population was vaccinated, but not large enough to ensure herd immunity.

This is in essence where much of Europe is currently, where the Delta variant is spreading rapidly.

The authors said the model showed a threshold of 60 percent of the population vaccinated, after which resistant variants were more likely to occur.

"Vaccines are our best bet to beat this pandemic" said co-author Simon Rella, from Austria's Institute of Science and Technology (IST).

"What our model showed is that when most people are vaccinated, the vaccine-resistant strain has an advantage over the original strain.


"This means that the vaccine-resistant strain spreads through the population faster than the original strain at a time when most people are vaccinated," Rella told journalists in an online briefing.

Authors said that their research highlighted the need to maintain other anti-Covid measures until everyone is vaccinated.

So because Greg Abbott is running against the Texas GOP base and batshit crazy people like Dan Crenshaw (not literally against Crenshaw, but forced to stay on his good side) and Ted Cruz:
We all have to protect ourselves as best we can, though we won't be allowed to protect our children in schools this fall.

All that matters is....what?  I don't even understand the endgame here.
Losing and dying to own the libs?
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Friday, July 30, 2021

"She Has To Be Trolling, Right?"

Let's see: Medicare/Medicaid=good. Medicare for all (which is what LBJ envisioned, and hoped he had started)=bad socialist health care which will kill us all. Medicare for people over 65 is good American freedom. Medicare for everybody under 65 is a commie plot to destroy the country?

Have I got that right?  Something magic happens at 65 to make you no longer susceptible to socialism?

She knows Medicare is one of the most "Socialist healthcare schemes" on the planet, right?  Right?
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That Didn’t Take Long

That’s not the best part. This is the best part.

The DOJ said in the lawsuit that Abbott’s order will contribute to the spread of COVID-19 and it will disrupt immigration officials’ network of contractors and non government organizations that help host recently arrived migrants as their legal cases are pending.

Going right to the heart of it and (fingers crossed 🤞) getting a court to rule on it.

This could actually be fun.

The Feds don’t like being interfered with.
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The Conspiracy Conspiracy Theory

I'm wondering at this point which version of the statement is the statement. Change the facts, change the outcome. A criminal case must rest on a great deal more than handwritten notes; but it also must rest on one version of the statement, not four. All by way of saying "we GOT Trump!" or it's an "open and shut" case. And a reminder that, if the House Committee had these notes, so does the DOJ. And while I may wish them to prosecute Trump, I also want them to get a conviction. And they know how to do that far better than I do.
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MASKS! 😷

There is a portion of the population of this country that is certifiably insane. There is no other explanation. Except plain evil.  Evil is an explanation, too.
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This Is Going To Be More Interesting…

...than I expected.

Maybe we all got used to four years of Trump, but this feels like bringing the hammer down. I don’t even care that Abbott will trumpet his righteous racism as standing up for states’ rights and public health. I just want to see his racist abuse of government power curb-stomped to the gutter ASAP.

And it feels like I’m going to.

(Though I still object to the narrative that Abbott wants to detain people who pose a risk of spreading Covid. He didn’t order troopers to test immigrants, just to detain them. There are major 4th and 14th Amendment issues here, aside from federal supremacy in matters of who is allowed into the country on what terms.)
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It's a Death Cult

That's the only explanation left. He's complaining about masks, but he's doing so incoherently. I think of it as a double-tap. The first time I heard my representative on the radio, he was raving like a madman about Covid and masks and lockdowns (vaccines weren’t even on the horizon) and I thought “why did my local NPR station get this ignorant boob to talk in this subject?”

After a few minutes, they identified him. I’ve never given the man any credence on any subject since.
We’re going to defeat Covid by locking up brown people. If that doesn’t work, it’s Biden’s fault we’re all getting sick.
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"When The Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Madam?"

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Not Afraid Of The Deeper Questions Of Theology

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