31 January 2021

Another Voice

When weighing in on wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's evil doings, and the folks who flock to it, these endeavors have made the case that the poor, uneducated, unhealthy, shitkickers are the ones to blame for their predicament. Their fate lies not in the stars or the immigrants (or the Jews, or the Negroes, or the Snowflakes), but in themselves. They continue to elect autocrats, local, state, and federal who treat them like cattle.

How did this happen? Today's NYT has a report from a hillbilly who's been there, and done that.
The truth is, Republican voters who fight against expanding human rights — who love songs like "If the South Woulda Won" and refuse to support Medicaid expansions that would provide health care to thousands in the South — are simply not rednecks, although they might think of themselves that way. Republican supporters bastardize hillbilly history; you can't claim to be from "Hicktown" if you don't fight for the hicks in it.
These are the same people who would still be living as they did in 1865 were it not for the generosity of the American taxpayer and Snowflake 1, FDR. Was FDR specifically motivated to save the South from antebellum poverty by the striking coal miners?
Then, as now, West Virginia was coal country. The coal industry was essentially the state's sole source of work, and massive corporations built homes, general stores, schools, churches and recreational facilities in the remote towns near the mines. For miners, the system resembled something like feudalism. Sanitary and living conditions in the company houses were abysmal, wages were low, and state politicians supported wealthy coal company owners rather than miners. The problems persisted for decades and only began to improve once Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933.
Yes, yes it appears so. Of course. It remains true that Red states are where Blue state tax payments go. One might wonder who in the Red states ends up with the moolah? Ya think may be it's just the rich folks?

And these shitkickers blame Blue state Liberals for their fate! If the South had remained a separate country, the North would have shed a tremendous burden of millions of ingrates. It would be a textbook example of mercantilism: the South makes raw materials and food stuffs, which they trade at poor advantage for finished good from the North. The North 'loses' the War of Northern Aggression, and gains long term (if not permanent) economic supremacy; if Congress has the wisdom to enforce capital flow restrictions.

A very different ending to the story. Not so great for the Black folk of the South, to be sure.

Thought For The Day - 31 January 2021

If there ever were cast iron proof that events drive data, not the other way round: GameStop. I wonder how many quants have committed suicide, metaphorical or real, in the last week?

30 January 2021

D.J. You Dirty Guy!

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Back in school, which means any time from high school to undergraduate, I was in some class where the instructor posed the following question: will electric vehicles necessarily lead to lower climate change, although that term wasn't much used in the 60s and 70s. Ooh, ooh, call on me!!! Well I got called on and answered: only if bad gases from power plants are lower than those coming out of tail pipes per net energy used. I got an Atta Boy for that. At the time, I didn't have the answer. Clearly, at point of use, an electric vehicle is cleaner than a gas powered one. But how much pollution results from the production and distribution of those wee little electrons? Not known at the time.

Today brings more reporting that it might be true, but only if power plants aren't mostly coal, and to a lesser extent natural gas, fired (lesser extent since natural gas is less polluting).
Today, electric vehicles in the United States usually produce fewer overall emissions than their gasoline- or diesel-fueled counterparts, even if they're plugged into a grid that relies on power plants burning coal or natural gas, which emit carbon dioxide. That's largely because electric motors are so much more efficient than internal combustion engines.
That's good news, not known way back then.

But the other point, mentioned in the report, is that electric vehicles will only work if there's significant Socialism at work; the same was true with the internal combustion engined vehicle displacing Old Dobbin: all those roads were paid for by the taxpayer. And the report goes into detail.

Some reporting states that there's enough lithium in the earth to support widespread battery powered vehicles. But there's also the question of net-energy expenditure. Just as going from gas powered to battery powered plus electric generation requires knowing where the balance lies, one still cannot defy the laws of thermodynamics, which guarantee that you can't even break even. There's also the net energy expenditure of extracting the lithium and manufacturing the batteries.
Most of the known lithium supply is in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Australia and China. The quality is acceptable and reports reveal that Brazil has lithium mineral reserves that are not only of higher quality but also have lower extraction costs. In 2019, meanwhile, Western Australia has become the number one global producer of lithium, the second largest global producer of rare earths, the third largest global producer of cobalt and the fourth largest global producer of nickel.
So, unlike petro, the USofA plays no part. We'll be importers, whether for raw lithium or products. MAGA!! Keep burning coal!!!

And, of course
Rather than worrying about a lack of lithium, there could be shortages of rare earth materials, should the EV replace the conventional car. One such material is the permanent magnet for the electric motors. Permanent magnets make one of the most energy-efficient motors. China controls about 95 percent of the global market for rare earth metals and expects to use most of these resources for its own production. Export of rare earth materials is tightly controlled.
The limiting factor to reducing climate change through replacing gas transport with battery transport (fuel cell may be better?) is that the additional power generation that such a transition demands can't come from coal fired plants. No, Mother Nature wouldn't approve. That leaves nucular and may be natural gas. Wind, except in parts of Texas and off shore, isn't dependable enough. Pumped water facility using excess off-peak electricity to move water uphill, and thence run it through the turbines during peak is another, incremental, source.
Pumped storage hydroelectric projects have been providing energy storage capacity and transmission grid ancillary benefits in the United States and Europe since the 1920s. Today, the 43 pumped-storage projects operating in the United States provide around 23 GW (as of 2017), or nearly 2 percent, of the capacity of the electrical supply system according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

26 January 2021

Hubris Maximus

Well, the SST is trying to make a comeback, this time as business jet. It's an interesting story, especially the assertion that this aircraft/engine combination won't leave a Concorde type sonic boom in its wake.

Beyond holding only a dozen CxO types, it won't fly as fast as Concorde, 'just' 1,000 miles per hour (mach 1.4) vs. Concorde's 1,354 (mach 2.04). Now, why would Big Business choose to spend a boatload of moolah to spirit fat old white men with face lifts around the world?
The craft has a price tag of $120 million, which the planemaker thinks is a price that people will pay because of the time savings.
Time savings? The CxO class spends its time doing what ex-President AuH2O 2020 did/does - "He will make many calls and have many meetings." What with global innterTubes, even at Angels 40, any time in the AS2 should be just as productive a place for calls and meetings as a plush corner suite.
According to Gogo, over 2,500 commercial aircraft and 6,600 business aircraft have been equipped with its onboard Wi-Fi services.
All at a cost of ... in the neighborhood of $70/month; that's airline connection, but a business AS2 would pick from this menu, for as little as $39/hour, of flight one may assume. In summary, then, the CxO class can conduct its calls and meetings while at Angels 40, no matter the aircraft. So, why fly at mach 1.4?

Here's the company's answer:
"We analyzed how business owners fly. We looked at a company out of New York that flew business jets around the world, and when we substitute an AS2 for them and rerun those flights for every person who flew on their airplane, AS2 saved them 142 hours a year."
Wow!! Sign me up fur one a dose dem dings. I gather that those 142 hours are total for all those fat old white guys with facelifts; otherwise the company would have stated that as per fat old white man with face lift, of course.

25 January 2021

Parallax View - part the forty second

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:
  >= 1,000 -   920
100 to 999 - 1,682
(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,119. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's perpetual lying.

Hot off the presses,
For the B.1.351 variant, vaccination with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine produces neutralizing antibody titers that remain above the neutralizing titers that were shown to protect NHPs against wildtype viral challenge. While the Company expects these levels of neutralizing antibodies to be protective, pseudovirus neutralizing antibody titers were approximately 6-fold lower relative to prior variants. These lower titers may suggest a potential risk of earlier waning of immunity to the new B.1.351 strains/. [my emphasis]
Gentle reader may remember the various times in these endeavors where the durability of coronavirus vaccines was mused about. Guess that was warranted.

You Say M-eye-cro I Say M-aa-cro

While events drive the data, not generally, the other way round, data can show how policy will likely work out. Micro is, again generally, about your general beating your competitions' generals. Macro, again generally, is about policy that affects everybody, more or less, and what policy is most effective for the entire society. Slavery was a policy decision that benefited Southern planters, Northern consumers, but the slave population, not so much.

Years ago Leontief devised the modern input-output macro model of economies. While not so popular now, today's NYT has a report that demonstrates that such a model explicates how both such models and policies go a long way toward understanding how The Real World Works. The key takeaway (the lede in news jargon):
In monopolizing the supply of vaccines against Covid-19, wealthy nations are threatening more than a humanitarian catastrophe: The resulting economic devastation will hit affluent countries nearly as hard as those in the developing world.
American capitalists, meet your comeuppance. All that outsourcing to cheap hands in cheap economies doesn't work well if lots of those hands are sick and dying.
At the center of the story is the reality that most international trade involves not finished wares but parts that are shipped from one country to another to be folded into products. Of the $18 trillion worth of goods that were traded last year, so-called intermediate goods represented $11 trillion, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Tim Cook, he of Apple fame, made his bones as a supply chain wizard, defenestrating American production (and employment) in pursuit of cheap labor in autocratic nations. Oh, hell let 'em die, they're just cheap and expendable; just as American (largely immigrant) meat plant workers. The spirit of democracy.

21 January 2021

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the second

CNN, and one suspects other Lamestream News, has a recapitulation and foreshadowing of QAnon in the wake of Sleepy Joe's inauguration. This is the key observation
"The most hardcore QAnon followers are in disarray," said Daniel J. Jones, president of Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks extremist groups and misinformation online. "After years of waiting for the 'Great Awakening,' QAnon adherents seemed genuinely shocked to see President Biden successfully inaugurated. A significant percentage online are writing that they are now done with the QAnon, while others are doubling down and promoting new conspiracies."
[my emphasis]
The thing is, this is by no means a New American Thingee. The 19th century gave us The Second Great Awakening, which was really the first in the time of nationhood.

The better part of 200 years ago, much of the country went through much the same trauma. One of the more wingnut groups, Millerites were led to believe that Jesus would return, on a specific day. Well, I guess he didn't.
October 22, 1844, the day Jesus was expected to return, ended like any other day[31] to the disappointment of the Millerites. Both Millerite leaders and followers were left generally bewildered and disillusioned. Responses varied: some Millerites continued to look daily for Christ's return, others predicted different dates—among them April, July, and October 1845. Some theorized that the world had entered the seventh millennium, the "Great Sabbath", and that, therefore, the saved should not work.
Dejavu all over again. Fun for the feeble minded.

20 January 2021

Back Pedaling

As you may have seen, there's a replacement for Satchel Paige on the front page, and reflects what was apparent from the beginning, that not all vaccines halt infectiousness as well as infection. And, as wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 claimed, I'm immune and don't need to mask or distance or hand wash (not). The whole idea of Herd Mentality is that those vaccinated, if a sufficient proportion of the population is vaccinated/recovered, are the barrier to transmission. And that's not necessarily so.

Yes, one hopes, they won't get sick (again) if exposed to Covid, but do they not transmit if exposed? Aye, matey, thar's the rub. Sterilizing vaccines do that, to a greater or lesser extent, but the evidence so far is that neither the recovered nor the vaccinated never harbor Covid virus and thus can't transmit. If that apparent truth is totally factual, how is Herd Mentality achieved?

A few days ago 'Scientific American' gave an assessment.
The question of whether immunization prevents recipients from becoming ill and from infecting others is not unique to the current pandemic.
For example:
The two main categories of inoculations against polioviruses confer different types of immunity. The inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) protects against systemic infection and consequent paralysis but does not stop viral replication in the gut, so it offers no indirect protection to unvaccinated individuals. The oral polio vaccine (OPV) generates localized intestinal immunity, preventing infection and protecting against disease and transmission.
So, after you get that first shot and after you get the second shot and after the innoculation period has past
- mask
- distance
- wash those filthy hands

Until CDC/WHO tells us that Covid is history. Which is likely to be measured in months, not weeks, and perhaps a year or more after the 75th percentile person is innoculated.

19 January 2021

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

You likely, being of a certain age, know the adage 'Herpes, the gift the keeps on giving'. We now have, for a day or so, the Herpes President. He insists on yet another ego supporting superspreader event. Anything to make his id feel better.
Trump is scheduled to deliver remarks before his final departure from Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, where a military-style ceremony is being planned. Invitations have gone out to Trump's friends, allies and former administration officials saying it will begin at 8 a.m. ET. Each invitee is allowed five guests; organizers hope to secure a large crowd because Trump has complained about the size of his gatherings in the past.
...
One official familiar with the planning said organizers are anxious that a crowd will not materialize on Wednesday morning. But the official said the event would proceed anyway.
Oh!!! The shame of it all!!
Suppose they gave a War and Nobody Came?
-- Charlotte Keys/1966

18 January 2021

Are You Hip Or Square?

Regular readers likely have noticed that oft times you'll see: "statistics isn't all that difficult, it's just squared differences". That's a bit dogmatic, but nearly always true of stat problems involving finding the central tendancy of a pile of numbers; regression being the most famous example. Even with non-linear models or wacky distributions, you'll see something like, "if we assume sufficiently large sample, we can use the normal approximation...", which then allows the pile of numbers to be used to calculate the parameters. Very convenient that.

Well, turns out, I'm not the only dogmatist in the world. And I'm not sure, but think his is a tad more so than mine:
All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.
-- Judea Pearl
The quote leads off the article, but is not from the mouth of the author; Smith sets out to show that Pearl is, basically, right. What's also interesting, from a teeVee point of view, is that the project being discussed is from Max Tegmark, who I see in numerous episodes of "How the Universe Works". My impression has been that he's mostly a naysayer when it comes to the more envelope pushing bits of cosmology.

So, no, AI isn't the next Newton or Einstein or Feynman. Interesting: AI is mostly being used to flog consumer widgets. Mammon always wins.

Parallax View - part the forty first

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:
  >= 1,000 -   943
100 to 999 - 1,683
(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,123. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's perpetual lying.

The major reporting outlets still assert that there's missing data. If not, then the Northern Plains folk are really behaving well, since the axis from Texas to Manitoba is eerily vacant at the 100+ level. There remain multiple paths for the Memorial Trophy Dash from Nebraska south to the Mexican border.

We do know that Reagan California is exploding with Covid. Back in March/April I had something of screaming match with a relative in metro San Diego when Newsom ordered those beaches closed. Let's see... late April. Said relative is a healthcare provider, and ought to know better. I guess if you spend enough time in Reagan California, some part of your brain atrophies. Exponential growth is worse the higher the base; Reagan California is learning (one hopes) that painful lesson.

A note from elsewhere. One hopes that you readers don't need reminding, but just in case.

Far too many vaccinated folks (esp. wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024) assume that being vaccinated means no mask, no distance, no hand washing. The medics know better, and have been saying so. None of these vaccines is proven to be sterilizing, which means that if one encounters Covid two things are true:
1 - you (95%) won't get sick
2 - you (100%) won't infect others

None of these vaccines do 2.

Ergo, until Herd Mentality is reached, even the vaccinated, unless they're also malignant narcissists, must continue to behave in a public health positive manner.

17 January 2021

Base Less - part the third

Yet another data point demonstrating the size of ex-President AuH2O 2020's true, hard core base.
The public mostly rejects the baseless conspiracy theory behind the rioting -- that Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to become president: 65% say that he did legitimately win enough votes, but a sizable share (23%) -- and particularly among Republicans (58%) -- believe that conspiracy theory to be true and that there is solid evidence to support it.
Viewed one way, that 23% number is below my view of 25% as the hard core base. Viewed another, it's gold in them thar hills for minority rule through the power of the Senate. Ah, to be an autocratic minority!! Well, there's not much better than that, eh what? Jackson and Jefferson would be proud that their notion of shitkicker control of government has finally come to pass.

16 January 2021

Bad Dog!! Bad Dog!!

From the beginning, it looked to me that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's base stood around 25% of the electorate. My reasoning has always been that his support, real blind approval, had to come from those with minimal critical thinking ability at the nether end of the Republican party, which has been the distant minority affiliation for decades. He just lies so much, always with the goal of ego-flation. Put another way, his blind approval comes from the minimally educated, bigoted white folks who live vicariously through his malignanat narcissism: "If I were as rich and nasty as him, I'd be just as nasty!".

In sum, a quarter
In the poll, three-quarters of respondents said Trump bears either a lot or some responsibility for the riot, while only 24 percent said he isn't responsible at all. [my emphasis]
Only those completely in thrall to exPresident Mumford would absolve him.

Today's news is a bit better, but damning with faint praise
It means Trump will be the first president in the polling era to end his first term with an approval of below 40%, the first with a disapproval rating north of 50% and the first with a negative net (approval - disapproval) rating.
This was always an attempt at minority rule at best, and elected dictatorship at worst. The insurrection showed anyone with functioning eyesight who his supporters are: "Swamp People" the uneducated rural elite determined to tell us city folks that they're the ones to run a modern country. Swell.

15 January 2021

Thought For The Day - 15 January 2021

Riddle me this, BatPerson.

What's the rush to charge the insurrectionists? ex-President AuH2O 2020 has only until noon next Wednesday to pardon the insurrectionists. A blanket pre-emptive pardon won't survive even this Right Wingnut Supremes, therefore what, exactly, is to be gained by charging insurrectionists by name before 12:01 PM, Wednesday?

Keep you mouths shut until the evil is out of town.

Herd Mentality - part the fourth

It's been a constant theme in these endeavors: curbing Covid-19 either by massive infection or vaccination depends upon the resulting immunity lasting at least as long, first infection/vaccination to last, as it takes to get shots in arms. Otherwise, we're just chasing our collective tail. At the current ex-President AuH2O 2020 rate of progress (a term I use with angst), it'll be more like years than months to get there. If there is any there, there.

Now comes more reporting of data on the durability of immunity.
People who have had COVID-19 are highly likely to have immunity to it for at least five months ... But experts cautioned that the findings mean people who contracted the disease in the first wave of the pandemic in the early months of 2020 may now be vulnerable to catching it again.
Sleepy Joe's 'promise' to get 100 million innoculated in the first 100 days may be a pipe dream, but looks more like a necessary step to a solution. The other import of the report remains: recovered or innoculated, you're highly likely to transmit if you encounter Covid. This whole ex-President AuH2O 2020 bullshit about being immune and therefore not abiding by public health diktat only extends the time to control of Covid. May haps he and the clan will decimate Mar-a-Lago? Hope springs eternal.

13 January 2021

Thought For The Day - 13 January 2021

Recall that missive from January 2017? It was referenced recently, but my addled brain has finally figured out that the insurrection riot was intended to have enough death and destruction to justify that martial law thingee. Nancy and/or Mike dead would be enough, don't you think?

I Still Hate Neil Irwin - part the sixteenth

Once again, into the fray. Neil Irwin takes on Trumpnomics, and finds much that he likes. I don't like it so much. Here's what Irwin either doesn't get (in which case he should shut up and find something less taxing to do) or chooses to ignore.

The essence of the article is that Trump, being ignorant of economics, particularly macro, is either an idiot savant or very dumb lucky.

To start, it's simply a lie that the bottom of the pyramid was the big winner under Trump.
"This is a blue collar boom," Trump also said Tuesday. That's less apparent. The biggest winners on a dollar basis were a familiar group - whites, college graduates, and people born during the "baby boom" between 1946 and 1964.
The issue, as always, is that touting percentage increase is subject to base magnitude bias, e.g. 1 more unit on a base of 10 is a higher percentage growth than a 10 unit increase on a base of 101. Those in the second group have more of more, as always. So
The bottom half of households saw their net worth rise by 54% under Trump, from $1.08 trillion to $1.67 trillion. That's compared to an 18% rise for the top 1%, who control roughly a third of the total household wealth in America, or around $34.5 trillion.
Second, Irwin seems puzzled by the 'orthodoxy' of Philips Curve seemingly not working. But he ignores that the rich have driven significant inflation in asset markets.
If effective corporate rates were cut in half, and firms had new access to $664 billion in overseas income, yet they didn't spend that extra cash on wages or investment, where did it go?

CRS confirms what was well-reported at the time: Much of it went to $1 trillion in stock buybacks.
What remains unexplained by Irwin: why do Treasuries still hover near or below 1%, still? As any econ 101 student finds out in the first week or two, more moolah chasing output leads to increase in price of output. With income and wealth inequality growing, not denied by anyone except the Radical Right, we need only refer to the still true tyranny of the marginal propensity to consume and the ever present risk aversion. As more moolah, from the 1% or so who remain risk averse (either inherently or because they're already chock-a-block with stocks), chases Treasuries their price goes up. Or to be blunt, the market rate of Treasuries can only rise with greater demand and that's not likely coming from Joe Sixpack who's mopping the fifth floor of Trump Tower. And since Treasuries aren't sold with a fixed interest rate but a fixed coupon, as the unit price goes up with that fixed coupon, the rate drops. Recall from econ 101: the Fed isn't a real Central Bank, it doesn't control any interest rates at all. The closest it gets is jawboning the Overnight Bank Funding Rate. That's it. Rates on instruments are set by the auction and the secondary market.
The FOMC cannot force banks to charge the exact federal funds rate. Rather, the FOMC sets a target rate as a guidepost.
And, once again, one cannot ignore the strict relation between interest rate, P/E (arithmetically, E/P of course), and opportunity cost. In simple terms, as the risk-free return drops in lock-step with bond prices, this action forces holders of assets to bid up the prices of other assets and force those returns up to the risk-adjusted (whatever it really is) P/E. Opportunity knocks many times. What may be unknowable in the data, is which is the chicken and which is the egg. Standard micro-theory always, always, always blames the Damn Gummint for stealing investment from the private sector. But that's just false, since bidders for assets always have to weigh opportunity cost (of which perceived risk is a part). If the future of technological progress, i.e. shocks of innovation, looks bleak, then they'll take the sure small beans. On the other hand, when technological progress is running in the lead, that's who to be on. That's always been true.

In sum then:
- the nether regions of the income and wealth pyramid only look like winners by arithmetic sleight of hand
- the rich got richer and the poor had kids
- the rich don't spend windfalls on CPI tracked units
- global interest rates, driven by risk averse holders of more moolah than they know what to do with, have been driven down by the tsunami of 1%-ers moolah

There is another, more speculative, motivation for the denial of the Philips Curve. With much of technology running up against the Laws of Mother Nature, there's less truly innovative activity to be had. As mentioned in these missives with some frequency, the spurt of new stuff in the 19th and 20th centuries was driven by the expanding knowledge of the periodic table and the Bohr atom. Now that we have all the elements, and don't count the fake ones cooked up in high energy labs, and how they combine, we're limited in what whiz band new shit we can make. What has happened, though, is that labor's share of cost of stuff has been falling for some time. Thus, labor costs have less impact on average cost than when the Philips Curve was proposed (1958).

One consequence of the forgoing is right in front of our eyes: 5G mobile phone service. It barely exists, and the Laws of Mother Nature ensure that it'll be infeasible, both as an engineering problem and an economic problem, forever. Not to say NO to a profit opportunity, the carriers are exploiting a loophole they created by flogging an LTE increment that the rules allow them to call 5G. It ain't, but will likely be the most 5G most of us ever get; most prominent use today of real 5G is being able to watch the football game on your phone while you sit in your stadium seat (pre and post Covid, of course). By the way, you should read the entire piece, if only because it documents what's been blindingly obvious to me for years. You can't fool Mother Nature.

Question Of The Day - 13 January 2021

Q: If wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 does pardon, pre-emptively, anyone including his own sorry ass, what happens to the case file(s) of crimes he asserts to erase?

In other words, among other things, what can Biden do with all those NSA intercepts between Russia and that nefarious band of thugs? Or the co-ordination with January 6 plotters? Can he just tell the investigating US attorney to publish the information?

Furthermore, would a pre-emptive pardon, assuming the Supremes don't strike it down, block the DoJ or Congress from investigating that nefarious band of thugs after the pardon is granted? In other words, again, is a pardon a shield against further investigation?

Under normal circumstances (what is this thing of which I speak?), pardon is granted after conviction or sentencing for some specific crime, and the evidence which was sufficient to convict is public.

A search through the innterTubes doesn't reveal the answers, but they are kind of important to have.

11 January 2021

Parallax View - part the fortieth

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:
  >= 1,000 -   952
100 to 999 - 1,692
(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,129. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's perpetual lying.

All that can be said is that these numbers are totally inconsistent with the continuing daily reporting on infections, hospitalizations, and deaths reaching all time levels.

10 January 2021

That Was The Week That Was

You have to admit, one hell of a week. And all explained by data, for better or worse.

Biden won the country by 7,000,000 votes.
Biden won California by 5,000,000 votes.
Biden won the rest by 2,000,000 votes.

At the country level, we are 80.7% urban. Of the states won by exPresident Mumford, only Utah is above average urban and not southern (FL and TX).

Perhaps the most hated modern text to the Snowflake Left is 'The Bell Curve', which nevertheless has been proven true this week, except, of course, that the feeble minded set are fish belly White. There are far more feeble minded grievance whining White people than generally believed previously. These missives have known. Have you, gentle reader? 100 isn't perfection, it's the bare minimum for effective citizenship and there's an army of sub-100s living in the shithole counties and they really, really do believe that they should have the power of government in their hands. We can see that now. It cannot be called a surprise: 'this isn't America!!' is a load of horse shit. This has been America since 1619.

This has come about, in no small measure, because the 19th century restoration reactionaries have continued to elect those who treat their citizens as cattle.

"We don't need no education!'
-- The Who

And here's some data. Just to counter what some in that survey believe, Blue states support Red (rural) states.

Biden won the Blue states, aka city dominant states. exPresident Mumford won the empty shitkicker states.

Over the decades since FDR started all this trouble by providing the shitkicker states with electricity (not to forget TVA), piped water, piped sewerage (also TVA), paved roads and other amenities of 20th century life, these ingrates only become more hidebound to the 19th century life they prefer. Without all these Socialist provided amenities, they'd still be reading their nighttime Bibles with kerosene lamps, shitting in a hole in the ground, and pissing in the creek. You know, back when women were women, and White men owned Black people; the ante-bellum period.

The two history shattering events of the past week are directly driven by these numbers. On Tuesday, city folks significantly Black, took back Georgia from the ante-bellum White racists who've run the place since Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Never before was a Georgia senator anything but White. Never before was a Georgia senator a Jew. Expect White flight to Mississippi. Note that Georgia Republicans (well, Republicans everywhere) are working on ways to limit suffrage. Numbers sure do count, so let's reduce those bad numbers.

Of course, it only took one day, Wednesday, for the shitkickers' revenge. As more video, from inside the insurrection, appears the clearer it is that 'the vast Right Wing Conspiracy' does exist and is white, nearly entirely male, skewing rural, skewing southern, skewing feeble minded, and slovenly. They are all that, but they deserve to live like exPresident Mumford.

Sleepy Joe might want to be the president of All Americans, but the shitkickers have exactly no intention of letting that happen. We'll see what attack happens on 17 January. May be none, but I'm not confident that the police forces of this country are against insurrection.

07 January 2021

Thought For The Day - 7 January 2021

So, what's next for Putin's Bitch? Given all that's gone on, and reporting today that he's been musing about self pardon, his next pardon will be to give the get out of jail free card to all of the insurrectionists.

06 January 2021

It's a Beautiful Day

Now that guillotine has fallen in Georgia, Putin's Bitch and Moscow Mitch should retire to their (Putin gifted) dacha in Praskoveevka, down the beach from one of Putin's favorite dachas. They can wear their 'Hero of the Russian Federation' medals while supping with Vlad. Of course, when Vlad started out, it was the 'Order of Lenin'. Note to self: Bannon is an avowed Leninist.
Stephen Bannon, President Trump's chief political strategist and, after Trump, the most powerful man in Washington, once declared proudly: "I am a Leninist." He was talking to a New York university academic who had written extensively on communism and the former Soviet Union. "What on earth do you mean?" the professor asked him. "Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that's my goal too," replied Bannon. "I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today's establishment."
It was a beautiful day when this was written, anticipating that Ossoff would beat Perdue. A Fascist coup wasn't on the agenda then.

Putsch - part the second

You were warned. wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 has his Brown Shirts invading the Capitol. Get it now?

We Have An Answer

Back in December the question was asked:
If it doesn't have a spike protein, is it still a coronavirus?
The gist of the question - can a coronavirus mutate sufficiently to no longer be vulnerable to the class of vaccines being developed, ones that target this S-protein? The information then was, likely not. Covid-19, sui generis, has to have not only an S-protein, but the one it was born with. No nose jobs for you!

Well, today's news further advises that changes to the S-protein, should they happen, have to be so minor that the gross function of the S-protein remains. Phew!
All the current vaccines target what is known as the spike protein -- the structure the virus uses to get into the cells it attacks.

"This protein happens to be so important that it is always on display," said Dr. Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who is helping lead clinical trials there of coronavirus vaccines.
We was right! We was right!
Creech said a virus really cannot afford to mutate too much.

"If it changes too much, it can't bind to the cell surface now and it's not just a good virus any more," he said. It might evade the immune response elicited by a vaccine, but it also would be unable to infect cells.
And, in what might be a (unknowning) shot at the wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024:
"Let's stop this virus in its tracks. If we could magically get 60-70% of the population vaccinated tomorrow, we wouldn't have to worry about drift because the virus would pretty much go extinct."
As speculated(?) here many times, the length of immunity from a coronavirus appears to be measured in months. If that proves true for Covid-19, times a wastin.

04 January 2021

Parallax View - part the thirty nineth

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:
  >= 1,000 -   944
100 to 999 - 1,739
(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,132. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's perpetual lying.

About all I can say is, the data contradicts every daily report of increasing infections and hospitalizations, now at pandemic high. We'll see how things turn out next Monday. The most obvious anomaly is the scraped out longitude from Texas to Manitoba.

Thought For The Day - 4 January 2021

You knew something like this had to happen.

Enjoy.

02 January 2021

Putsch

One might suspect that many, if not most, of the readers considered this prediction (merely the first of a few) nothing more than excess Snowflake paranoia. Well, what do you think now?

That January, 2017 warning:
OK, so Kim Jong-Don has gone into blatant dictator mode, ignoring all agency heads in issuing the Muslim ban. So we're left with the over/under times to suspending the Constitution and declaring martial law (starting with Chicago, of course).
1 week
1 month
1 year
Cast your vote. Vote early and often.
What's afoot with Hawley, et al is possibly unconstitutional and unambiguously dictatorial, just about what Hitler pulled off in 1933.
Hindenburg reluctantly agreed to appoint Hitler as chancellor after two further parliamentary elections—in July and November 1932—had not resulted in the formation of a majority government. Hitler headed a short-lived coalition government formed by the Nazi Party (which had the most seats in the Reichstag) and Hugenberg's party, the German National People's Party (DNVP). On 30 January 1933, the new cabinet was sworn in during a brief ceremony in Hindenburg's office. The Nazi Party gained three posts: Hitler was named chancellor, Wilhelm Frick Minister of the Interior, and Hermann Göring Minister of the Interior for Prussia.[155] Hitler had insisted on the ministerial positions as a way to gain control over the police in much of Germany.
What wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 is attempting is an even more blatant coup. The sole point of dictatorship is absolute power for a minority over the majority. Republicans have lost the vote in seven of the last eight elections, and want all that moolah flowing from the Blue states to them through DC. Of course, if they end up making the Blue states as backward as themselves, the money flow disappears.

01 January 2021

By The Numbers - part the fourth

Well, some new numbers of interest
Law enforcement and election investigators didn't find a single fraudulent absentee ballot during an audit of over 15,000 voter signatures, according to a report by the Georgia secretary of state's office released Tuesday.
I guess no data means that the perps really did a good job of stealing wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's rightful throne.