Wuhan Virus Delta Variant

With the panic-mongers in full, baying throat over the Delta variant’s spread, here’s a graph from The New York Times showing new reported cases in Great Britain up through 1 August.

Although the graph is for all variants of the Wuhan Virus extant in Great Britain, the Delta variant has become the dominant strain, and it plainly has shot its bolt and is on the wane.

Scroll down the page at the link for a similar graph on the Wuhan Virus-attributed death rate trend (mostly Delta variant since the start of summer). The mortality rate from the Delta variant never has been high, and it already as plateaued. Although the text in the graph above indicates, via snapshot, a sharp increase (from an extremely low rate to a still very low rate), the mortality rate graph down the page gives a truer picture of the trend.

We care because, in addition to Great Britain being a friend of ours, they’re generally a few weeks ahead of us in the progression of the virus. Our own panic-mongers (As Delta Variant Rages screams even a Wall Street Journal headline) have no rational basis for their hype.

The NYT took these data from Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

Color Me Surprised

…or not. It seems Ted Wheeler, the Progressive-Democratic Mayor of Portland, OR, who doubles as the Portland police commissioner, is having trouble finding folks idiot enough willing to work for him in what used to be a critical section of his police facility.

Leaders in Portland, OR, are looking to combat the city’s rising homicide rate by resurrecting a police unit focused on gun violence. But after a year of growing tension within the department, they can’t find enough officers to join.
Since 14 job openings were announced in May, only four police personnel have applied to work with the new version of Portland’s Gun Violence Reduction Team, which was shut down last year amid long-running protests….

Given the few willing, those four have not yet been taken up on their offer.

Daryl Turner, Portland Police Association President has his finger on the problem.

They’re demonizing and vilifying you, and then they want to put you in a unit where you’re under an even bigger microscope

That bigger microscope is the new unit’s very own private citizen-advisory board of woke civilians who would be more interested in the new section cops’ ability to fight systemic racism than in their ability to fight violent crime.

I’m surprised there are any men or women willing to be a Portland cop of any sort as long as Ted Wheeler and the others in his city administration remain in office. They’ve shown they cannot be trusted to support the police in any endeavor.

A Tale Told Of Idiots

This time, it’s a New York Post Late City Final image that exposes the idiots.

This is the basis of the Biden administration’s and Rochelle “Sobbing Doomsayer” Walensky-managed CDC’s manufactured panic and raison d’être for their attempt to reassert their personal control over average Americans‘ lives.

On the Verge

…not only regarding the vast damage that will be done to our economy by President Joe Biden (D) and his deliberately anti-bipartisan Progressive-Democrat cronies with their soon to be unilaterally inflicted spend- and tax-o-rama bills.

Biden’s Progressive-Democrat Treasury Secretary is about to surrender American national sovereignty to an international consortium in the form of putting our Congress’ Constitutionally mandated taxing authority under the control of an international taxing agreement.

The Wall Street Journal worries about Congress’ careful silence on the matter and the paper’s editors are right.

The only saving grace, such as it is, to Yellen’s behavior and Congress’ complicit silence is that Yellen and her cronies will be able to enter into such disastrous tax agreement only via a Biden-executed Executive Agreement, and that sort of thing can be undone with a pen by the next President. The Yellen Tax Abrogation will not become a treaty so long as there are 34 Senators who care about American national sovereignty.

The destruction wreaked in the interim, though, will be broad and deep.

Washington State and Abortion

Washington passed a law—SB6219—that mandates all health coverage policies issued in that State provide (and charge for) coverage for abortions, with no exceptions whatsoever, including no exceptions for religious belief regarding life and conception. Under SB6219, no insurer can offer a policy that does not include abortion coverage.

Leave aside the cynical claim by Washington’s lawyers that

its no-exception abortion coverage mandate in health plans does not necessarily require health plans to include abortion coverage.

Leave aside that the Supreme Court has already ruled—repeatedly—that religious exceptions and conscience exceptions must be included in any such law.

The Cedar Park Church, in Bothell near Seattle, is challenging that law in Cedar Park Assembly of Kirkland v Kreidler (Kreidler is Myron Kreidler, Washington’s Insurance Commissioner; Jay Inslee, Washington’s Governor, also is a defendant. Both are defendants in their official capacities); the case currently is before the 9th Circuit.

What really jumps out at me, though, is this assertion by the State [emphasis added]:

The state lawyer emphasized what the church didn’t allege: “no carrier” would offer a plan consistent with its beliefs, it sought such a plan from other carriers, or that the state rejected a submitted plan.

On what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority over a private enterprise’s business decision?

More importantly, on what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority over a private citizen’s medical decision that should only involve that citizen and his doctor and secondarily (with no tertiary) his health coverage provider?

Most importantly, on what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority to allow a baby to be killed before it’s born?

The answer to each of those questions is that there is no legitimate basis for such claims.