Good Night, Stinkin Prig

I have a dream.

At 12.01 PM on 20 January, 2021 wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 gets indicted by both the Manhattan DA and the New York AG on criminal charges. .

Boeing Boeing - part the thirteenth

One aspect of the now flying again MAX is how little has been written about a previous, and far more pervasive, issue with the 737. An extensive report from 'The Seattle Times' , in five parts, details a decades long screw up in design and engineering, and long term cover up. The issue was that the rudder of the 737, from the outset in the mid-60s, was a shitty design and implementation. It was engineering too clever by half to save a couple of bucks. Literally. Planes crashed and people were killed. Boeing, the FAA, and, to a lesser extent, the NTSB let it happen. The FAA, in particular, had already been captured by Boeing.

A shorter piece is in the wiki. Same basic facts, without the extensive history.

Deep state. Yeah, right. Owned by American Big Bidnezz.

Parallax View - part the thirty eighth

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   957 
100 to 999 - 1,760

(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.

Something of a mixed bag. The Topo map shows a marked decrease in the total for upper groups, and remarkable thinning out of 100+ counties in the Northern Plains. On the other hand, the Johns Hopkins derived map (per capita) continues to show that area deep in disease.

The CNN map, also per capita, continues to show the Northern Plains still quite hot.

Yet, on the next hand, the NYT map, again per capita, shows the Northern Plains abating, but the mid-south from Tennessee on west pushing ever upward. Of course, The Times admits the obvious:

Holiday reporting quirks will likely blur the country's data. Testing was expected to decrease around Christmas and New Year's, and many states have said they will not report data on certain days. More typical reporting patterns were expected to resume in early January.

Is this data showing we're around the curve, or just cheering for finding a lode of fool's gold? Fauci:

And the reason I'm concerned and my colleagues in public health are concerned also is that we very well might see a post-seasonal, in the sense of Christmas, New Year's, surge, and, as I have described it, as a surge upon a surge, because, if you look at the slope, the incline of cases that we have experienced as we have gone into the late fall and soon-to-be-early winter, it is really quite troubling.

My bet goes to significant under-reporting over the holiday, since the last Topo map before Christmas had the 1000+ group at 979 and the 100-999 group at 1,760. The bottom two groups totalled 26. The chances that the two ends of the spectrum would shift so fast isn't likely. We'll see what happens to the data during the week. If there's been under-reporting, it may catch up. Or reporting will continue to be spotty until at least 11 January 2021.

Parallax View - part the thirty seventh

Another week's up (well, a bit less), so here are Monday's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   979
100 to 999 - 1,779

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,133. 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.

Not much to report on the data front. County total is up a tad. The bridging through the middle America axis continues apace, except for South Dakota and Nebraska. The top groups have, more or less, swapped spit and the bottom two have dropped a tick. Neither condition represents progress in getting Covid under control.

One is tempted to discuss Batshit J. Moron's attempts at coup and ignoring, totally, the Covid situation, but that would turn this weekly entry into a text that would rival "War and Peace" in extent.

Thought For The Day - 21 December 2020

If it doesn't have a spike protein, is it still a coronavirus? If it still has a spike protein, does it matter how it might otherwise mutate, even if it changes its attack vector? If it still has a spike protein, won't the mRNA vaccines still work, even if it changes its attack vector? If it sheds its spike protein, will it become another, hopefully less damaging virus? So many questions. Let's look for some answers.

Here's a preliminary answer, and a bit dated (in pandemic time), from August

What scientists can say is that the virus seems to tolerate mutations to this key piece of the coronavirus, and more elaborate methods of focusing immune responses may become necessary. "But just because we find that there are mutations that are tolerated, it doesn't necessarily mean anything bad is going to happen," Greaney said.

Furthermore, here is an undated report (but cites others from the August time frame) on how mutations happen and what happens as a result.

The G614 mutation significantly impacts antigenicity of the virus, but not at all in the way we were expecting. The G form of Spike is more sensitive to neutralizing antibodies than the D form. This was reproducible in mice, monkeys, and humans (Weissman 2020).

If you don't read the whole paper, the G form is the mutated Covid, while the D form is the original (so far as I know) from Wuhan. In other words, the mRNA vaccines blocking the spike protein shouldn't/won't be diminshed by this mutation.

Thought For The Day - 19 December 2020

Well, that didn't take long. Well, a tad longer than I expected, still, I was able to get my post out just under the wire yesterday:

There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA.
-- wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024

Didn't, yet, add the assertion that Russia was really, really backing Hillary. 'Just look what they did to me!!!' 'Me!!!' Nor blaming Krebs's CISA for 'losing the election!'

May be tomorrow?

To be clear, while computer based, none of the Batshit J. Moron's whipping boy voting systems are vulnerable to the hack.

Dominion Voting Systems does not now - nor has it ever - used the SolarWinds Orion Platform, which was subject of the DHS emergency directive dated December 13, 2020 (Emergency Directive 21-01).

Which is not to assert that some state election systems don't use Orion somewhere on their network(s). The key to understanding the hack is that, while it entered through the bathroom Windows, the purpose of the hack was to control the network. Many (most?) voting machines run on antique versions of Windows (not Dominion, as it happens). Which is to say, if those machines are networked with other sub-nets with Orion support, they were vulnerable.

The bottom line, so to speak, is 'security through obscurity'

To be clear, individual machines are notoriously vulnerable to hackers, but the decentralized nature of the US's election infrastructure means that it's hard to change votes en-masse.

To bad I haven't read that statement in the Lamestream press. I suppose that civlians, or idiots like Benito Trumpilini, just assume that every computing device is set up for Twitter and every other internet option. Not yet.

Thought For The Day - 18 December 2020

Now, as we learn more about the Russian cyber hack, we can see what comes next.

` 1 - wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 will tie the hack to Chris Krebs, since the initial intrusion was in the spring, under his watch.

` 2 - Therefore, Batshit J. Moron will use this incursion as more 'evidence' that the 2020 election had to have been hacked by the Russians. And that Krebs's assertion that the election was the most secure, etc. has to be bullshit; he didn't even see a hack in his own systems. ex-President AuH₂O 2020 will say, 'see, the Russians have been after me from the beginnning'.