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.

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.

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.

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.