Category Archives: politics

Importance of Some Wuhan Virus Vaccination Side Effects

Posted on by
Reply

According to the Federal Government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, there are

569,294 adverse event reports associated with COVID-19 vaccination in the US, with a total of 2,433,730 symptoms reported.

Also reported is that

391 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been given in the US to 185 million people. It’s estimated about 56% of the population is fully vaccinated.

Among the adverse events/symptoms reported are some 34,589 folks getting the Wuhan Virus after having been vaccinated.

What’s carefully omitted from “journalist” reporting of these outcomes is their context—the specific relationship between the numbers of these events/symptoms and the numbers of vaccinated.

Adverse events work out to 0.14% of doses administered, and total symptoms represent 0.6% of doses administered.

Those 56% of Americans who are fully vaccinated are 184,852,416 Americans. Even if we take those 570,000 adverse events and 2.4 million symptoms as being solely allocated to fully vaccinated (which is a boundary value, not the actual distribution of events/symptoms), those per centages work out to 0.3% and 1.3% of fully vaccinated, respectively.

Those extremely tiny rates of uncomfortable-to-bad outcomes are in line with, if not smaller than, the rates of uncomfortable-to-bad outcomes for other vaccines and antibiotics that are routinely prescribed.

Now consider those 34,000 infections despite having been vaccinated. Assuming the boundary condition of those infections occurring despite having been fully vaccinated, that works out to a 99.98% effectiveness of the vaccines. Compare that rate with the rates on which the vaccines were, sort of, approved by the FDA: 95% for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna two-dose vaccines, and 65% for the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccines.

It’s also becoming increasingly established that vaccinated folks who get the Wuhan Virus infection experience weaker symptoms, have lower hospitalization rates, and are even less likely to die than those who are unvaccinated and catch the virus.

With a lethality rate for the unvaccinated of less than a half per cent for healthy folks younger than ~65 and in the 2-5% range for those older, folks should weigh the likelihood of an uncomfortable-to-bad outcome and decide. Folks of any age with one or more comorbidities should weigh very seriously the relative odds.

Especially given the weaker symptoms after vaccination, I still recommend it, even though the vaccine only improves already highly favorable odds: it’s no fun being sick.

Siding with the Extremists

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden (D) not only advised his Progressive-Democrats in the House to hold off on trying to pass the “infrastructure” bill. This is the bill, remember, that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had so solemnly promised the more moderate members of Party she would bring to the floor for a vote on 27 Sept. Then after breaking that promise, she promised to have the vote on 29 Sept, then promised 30 Sept, then 1 Oct, then canceled the vote altogether, for a total of four solemn cynical promises broken.

No, that wasn’t all for Biden. He then made his own promise late Friday to the House Progressive-Democratic Party caucus in a closed door meeting in one of their House conference rooms. The “infrastructure” bill

ain’t going to happen until we reach an agreement on the next piece of legislation[.]

That next piece of legislation is the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill he and his fellows are so anxious to get enacted.

With that commitment, Biden repeated and renewed the promise he made last June to not sign the “infrastructure” bill until he also had his reconciliation bill on his desk. With that renewed commitment, Biden broke earlier, campaign and inauguration speech promises to unite our nation and to govern in a bipartisan manner.

Biden has, instead, openly and irretrievably united with the most progressive of the Progressive-Democrats—the extreme Left of a Party that already has gone far Left.

It Just Never Stops

Posted on by
Reply

Now a Veterans Administration nurse is charged with stealing and selling Wuhan Virus proof of vaccination cards, along with vaccine lot numbers, from a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. She’s been, allegedly, peddling them to non-veterans, and even more despicably, to veterans.

The failures of the VA just never seem to stop.

Until they are stopped. This sort of dishonesty isn’t unique to the VA, but this is an agency with a deep and broad range of dishonesty and failures to perform, and it can be dealt with.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

In Which I Disagree

Posted on by
Reply

This time, I disagree with a Koch family and their Stand Together Foundation and their stance on teaching Critical Race Theory in our schools. They oppose the idea of government bans on speech in general, arguing that even unpopular speech must be protected.

Leaders inside the network of right-leaning organizations built up by the billionaire Koch family are saying they oppose government bans on the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools despite not agreeing with what is being taught.
Evan Feinberg, the executive director of Stand Together Foundation, a Koch-affiliated organization, said that “using government to ban ideas, even those we disagree with, is also counter to core American principles.”

Feinberg, et al., are right as far as they go, and it is difficult to draw a line between what is unpopular, even hateful, speech that must be protected, and speech that is plainly dishonestly done and so legitimately subject to ban. CRT, though, is so blatantly dishonest that it clearly is on the wrong side of that broad gray area.

CRT insists that America is inherently and inescapably racist and that blacks are intrinsically incapable of succeeding—they’re permanently victims, solely because they’re black—and that whites are never anything but oppressors, solely because they’re white. From that, CRT pushes the distinctly racist ideology of identity politics.

Teaching CRT is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater when there is none, akin to committing slander, akin to lying in advertising or contracts. Those limits on free speech are properly applied, and so are the bans on teaching CRT.

Wrong Answer

Posted on by
Reply

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants Congress’ authority over the debt ceiling abolished.

She argued Congress makes the decisions on taxes and spending, so it should also provide the ability to pay those obligations.
“If to finance those spending and tax decisions, it’s necessary to issue additional debt, I believe it’s very disruptive to put the president and myself, the Treasury secretary, in a situation where we might be unable to pay the bills that result from those past decisions[.]”

This would, of course, mean that the concept of a debt ceiling itself would be removed.

Wrong answer.

The right answer, which would make a debt ceiling unnecessary (although not abolish it), is to limit spending to within revenues.

Of course, to prevent Congress from running away with tax rates, as the current Progressive-Democrat-run Congress is attempting to do, it would be necessary to limit Congress’ ability to raise tax and fee rates or to create new taxes or fees. One way to achieve that would be to define a priori the specific purpose of each individual tax or fee increase and each individual new tax or fee and then put each one, individually and separately, to a national plebiscite. If the plebiscite rejects the proposition, then the associated spending cannot occur and existing spending must remain within existing revenues.

A fillip: financial planners recommend individual families each maintain a rainy day/emergency fund of some months’ worth of expenses. Texas, and some other States, also do this at the State level. It would be useful if Federal spending were required to be limited to 90% of Federal revenues until a national level emergency fund were accumulated—say an amount equal to a year’s worth of established Federal spending. A year, rather than the several months that planners recommend for individuals, because of the Federal government’s empirically demonstrated profligacy.

Another fillip: index the size of the Federal Emergency Fund to positive inflation as measured by the Producer Price Index or its successor. Positive inflation: the required level of the FEF could never decrease, even in a deflationary environment.

Of course, this would require a Constitutional Amendment in order to be permanent.

Oh, and never mind the horror of Yellen being inconvenienced by the tasks of her job.