Days of Change

Day 5536

Here we go again. Election in 10 months.

A Renewed Spirit

I was thinking about what my approach would be to this post. It’s been 15 years since I started this blog and 22 since 9/11/2001. The attack is now part of history. High school kids were born before 9/11 and nearly every student in college has no direct memory of it. At the same time, I have seen and heard people marking and remembering the day, now more than the last couple of years. My new employer dedicated time to today and the 4 employees who were killed on a flight that day. The memories of the day are still alive. So is my tribute.

Taking Your Appliances to Meet Impossible Goals

Wow. I am no good at writing titles these days.

Long before this blog, I wrote about technology like electric cars when there was the Prius and, not much else. The Chevrolet Volt was announced, but not built for years after. Chris Paine directed the anti-GM documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” In subsequent interviews, he talked about how great the technology of the Prius (which used NiMH batteries) was. When he made a sequel, he was taking delivery of a Tesla. In about 5 years, cars went from being hybrids that ran efficiently on gas to fully electric vehicles with higher capacity batteries. Imagine if everyone bought a Prius when they first came out (or a Volt). They’d be annoyed that they couldn’t get a Tesla with a power socket and newer batteries.

The environmentalist mantra of “electrify everything” is trying to shift consumption to fairly new technology that may improve in 5-10 years and is really not ready for prime time in much of the northern US. Even if it were, electric grid capacity is severely lagging. There is some value in bringing more solar and wind power online at the utility level. But there are NIMBY issues, location issues with distance from substations and a fairly big financial cost unless current power plants actually reach catastrophic failure. Getting us off foreign oil will also be helped by renewables, but not from people putting in their own panels.

Countries that made climate pledges are finding that the costs to go green exceeded their expectations and are trying to save face. The cheapest way to make anything happen in government is the unfunded mandate. Pass a law telling people what to do, don’t pay them for it and fine them if they don’t comply. Then politicians can look good in front of the UN by claiming x amount of fossil fuels were cut by forcing poor people to buy appliances they don’t need.

In New York, the state is “recommending” a ban on natural gas furnaces by 2025 to be replaced by air source heat pumps. Ground source heat pumps are highly effective, but their upfront cost is not something New York is willing to pay for in grants. Air source heat pumps are cheaper, but can freeze up or require additional heaters while they are maxing out your electric demand. New York wants to give rebates for those because they’re cheap and they *almost* work.

New York and the Federal government want to phase out the gas stove as well. From a perspective of reducing fossil fuels, gas ranges would be the last on the list. They don’t get used for a long time during the day but they use large amounts of energy when on. The conversion to electricity would almost certainly cost a homeowner money in electrical upgrades along with the higher cost of electricity vs. gas which can’t be overcome with efficiency gains.

There will be early adopters who put solar panels on the roof or buy new whiz-bang appliances because they’re new. Those people are also likely to buy the very next new appliance because of the improvements. A lot of electrification technology is hard to install, hard to service and is not proven over time. This is why taking away the time factor by claiming global destruction in 25 years is the future. How long ago was Al Gore saying the same thing?

A Memory

My original 9/11 Tribute.

September 11 fell on Sunday of the weekend of Queen Elizabeth’s death. Like the British on 9/11/2001, the Americans have been watching the events in the monarchy. 21 years before 9/11, Muslims were taking hostages. Now, the’re back to fighting themselves and the Israelis. Governance is largely broken in the Middle East, with economics being one of the few things holding the region together.

2001 is a memory to me, 4 jobs and two careers ago. In many ways, Donald Trump closed the book on this conflict by pulling US forces out of a disintegrating country. The children of 9/11 have children of their own and can only relate their memories, if they even choose to. But it will be decades before those of us who do remember are gone and we will never forget.

Alaskan Bush People

Sarah Palin “lost” a contest for the single House seat in Alaska yesterday. I put lost in quotations because there are too many factors involved to leave it at that. MSNBC was wetting themselves over it because Sarah Palin was Donald Trump before Donald Trump. Here’s a few reasons to take the results with a grain of salt.

• The “winner” gets the right to serve for four months. This was a special election and most of the same candidates will have a do-over in November. The results could change, but they might not due to the next issue.
• Ranked choice voting is a fake runoff. While I support actual runoff elections, the fast food version of runoffs puts the voter in a “sour grapes” mode where they choose the next rank based on the assumption their candidate lost without knowing the actual alternative. In the case, however, it probably had more to do with the next issue.
• Alaskans are Bush people. Alaska is a very Republican state and that means mainstream Republican affiliation. When Palin was rooting out corrupt Republicans, she was doing the state and the party good. Being a Trump supporter is less endearing. This leads me to my last point.
• The Republican split is moving the voting public in the GOP’s direction, but a three-way split will hand over elections to Democrats. Aside from the actual cheating, Democrats are making use of their probably-should-be-illegal tactics to manufacture consent.

The Gods Must Be Crazy

Hello, and welcome back.

The purpose of modern government is to do something. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t and most of the time it’s somewhere in-between. This week it’s “common sense” gun control and I’ll be damned if I can find the common sense.

When terrible things happened in the past, people used to blame it on the gods or other forces beyond their control. They would also do things to placate the gods that we would think don’t make logical (or common) sense. Now, we have politicians trying to placate professional protesters, Hollywood actors and media personalities.

What can we do about school shootings? I’m willing to admit I have no idea. Banning guns is stupid, impossible and ineffective against both death and shootings. Raising the age of gun ownership is great if you’re over 21 and have no use for a gun. It’s also popular with politicians who have little to risk with a low-voting population. Red flag laws are completely arbitrary. Judges and psychologists (also police) with political leanings can just yank guns indefinitely.

I see this as a basic problem of evil. Trying to end evil is the territory of the gods again. I personally think we could curb the school shooter population by jailing them when the reach the stage of animal cruelty. Or we can just keep whittling away at the Second Amendment every time gun laws fail. The politicians must be crazy, too.

Why Should I Get the Vaccine, Again?

December 2020
“Get the vaccine.”

February 2021
“When? I can’t get it right now.”
“In a month or two. The most at risk people need it and most others don’t.”

May 2021
“Okay. People stopped dying. I don’t think I need the vaccine.”
“Get the vaccine! You need to stop the spread.”

July 2021
“I didn’t get the vaccine, but people who did stopped wearing their masks and then got COVID.”
“Breakthrough cases! It’s extremely rare. Get the vaccine.”

September 2021
“Now, a lot of people are getting COVID with the vaccine. I don’t think I’ll get it.”
“No! we just need boosters! Get it, you racist moron!”

October 2021
“Wait. People are vaccinated and boosted and still getting and spreading COVID. So the only difference is the vaccine slightly lowers the chance of serious illness. If I don’t take the vaccine, I’m basically just rolling the dice on my own health. Why is that the government’s business?”
“Take it or you’re fired. Also, we’ll watch you die outside the hospital if you don’t.”

Worse Than 9/11

My Project 2996 Tribute

The 20th anniversary of the 9/11/01 attacks fell on a weekend this year. The US has just pulled out of Afghanistan with the conclusion that the country can’t be fixed, but only endlessly maintained. Islamic terror has entered a kind of political phase where they are being paid off by countries (and under Democrat control, the US) in the guise of support and rebuilding. In a war like this, the US can only draw a line in the sand. “Do this much damage to us, and your leadership will be dead, then you’ll hide in a hold until you die.” It’s an uncomfortable fact that third world countries need to know their place in the world, and it doesn’t involve attacking first world countries.

Conventional warfare is being pushed off the page by the (Natural?) biological warfare of the Wuhan Flu. Public health was a concept from a century ago that people’s usual rights could be suspended to keep the public healthy. An early example is “Typhoid” Mary Mallon. She was sequestered at North Brother Island until her death because she not only spread Typhoid by being a carrier, but was released after promising to not work as a cook and then got two people killed working as a cook.

Given the Delta and the false sense of security from vaccination, the US is getting close to the “one 9/11 per day” death total from COVID-19 again. After 9/11, there was a lot of debate over how much freedom was going to lose out to security measures, only some of which were effective. Now, the federal government is giving people two choices: lose your bodily autonomy and get a shot or lose your livelihood. These options are not to keep people with the shot from dying, but the options are there because the shot has been a bigger failure than expected. The answer is more shots.

Freedoms should not be infringed because something seems better “on balance.” Things considered freedoms should only be affected if there are no alternatives.

The Delta Strain

Since the “vaccine,” I’ve decided to go back to data on separate axes, except it’s numbers instead of percentages. Percent increase is more relevant for a general population where the more people have it, the more opportunities there are for new cases. The point of this chart is to show when vaccination failed.

The number of COVID-19 cases peaked in early January and the number of deaths peaked about a week later. This was the most effective period for the shots, because the most likely to get seriously ill were getting vaccinated. By April, the impact of the shot dropped considerably, as otherwise healthy people were being vaccinated and the administration announced the vaccination prize: not having to wear a mask while un-vaccinated people were suppoed to keep wearing theirs.

However, by July, the worst result was being seen. This questionable COVID vaccine also had an expiration date. People who were vaccinated essentially pretended COVID didn’t exist and were both contracting actual COVID-19 along with spreading it. On the plus side, the shot is keeping most people from dying or ended up in COVID ICU. the negative is that the government can’t accept that and is doing the following:

• Shame the un-vaccinated by claiming they’re the only virus spreaders (not true) and everyone needs the shot for herd immunity (not even possible while other countries can’t get the shot)
• Mandate the shot wherever possible, even though this will just reset the clock for a while
• Approve constant “boosters” for the population that was already compliant enough to take 2 shots. Now, they can take 3 a year!

No Cure for COVID

I don’t post much anymore, but this media excrement was enough to make me post. Speaking of post, this is plagiarized drivel from the Washington Post. Literally, they published an except from an upcoming book about COVID (and why Orange Man bad, literally they mention his orange coloring). They get to avoid journalism and the author gets free promotion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/24/nightmare-scenario-book-excerpt/

Anyway, not much value in the actual story. It is a rehash of the four days President Trump was sick with COVID. What they want you to think is that the White House staff rushed (incompetently, of course) to get Trump unapproved and hard-to-get treatments for COVID right away, while Trump got it from not wearing a mask ever and putting his staff in danger. Cut the commentary by about 80%, and the story sounds more like this:

• Donald Trump came down with COVID symptoms
• Trump got treatment
• Trump got better

The connections anti-Trump media won’t make about the pandemic is that “lockdown” isolated less than 50% of the population, told people they could not get early treatment, made them wait until they needed an ambulance, then stuck them on ventilators after the virus had run its course and the immune response damaged the lungs to a near or actual fatal level. Also, whole families were infected in their pods, along with whatever people needed to drive them to the hospital.

Treatments were largely ignored because doctors were punished for attempting them, while experts curled up in a corner afraid to die from a virus. Seriously, the protocol for COVID was to make everyone stay home, keep the minimum people in the hospital, lock away health care professionals and inflate people’s collapsed lungs in a low success attempt to save them. Even that would be excusable, had it not been for “experts,” afraid of being attacked by Black people, saying that the BLM protests weren’t super spreader events. Read my post before this one. You can literally see the BLM spike that fueled the other two.

Ultimately, this is important because there will be a SARS 3, and none of these coronaviruses have effective vaccinations that don’t put the host in danger. Now mRNA is being used because a traditional weakened virus vaccine seems unlikely, but this type of vaccination has never been widely released for so much as a flu shot until now. Coronavirus does respond to treatment, like Hydroxychloroquine. If you don’t believe me, just don’t believe the experts either. Especially the ones who told us the wrong thing. That’s basically all of them.