Tag Archives: politics

Essential Services

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A Florida bill is starting to make inroads on defining what services are essential in an emergency.

State Senator Jason Brodeur (R, Sanford) filed Senate Bill 254 on September 17. It stipulates that “emergency orders may not expressly prohibit religious institutions from regular religious services or activities.”
On Thursday, state Representative Nick DiCeglie (R, Indian Rocks Beach) filed a House companion, House Bill 215, which reiterates that an emergency lockdown or shutdown order must apply equally across businesses and religious institutions.

The bill, a shockingly concise one-pager, says

An emergency order…may not expressly prohibit a religious institution from conducting regular religious services or activities. However, a general provision in an emergency order which applies uniformly to all entities in the affected jurisdiction may be applied to a religious institution if the provision is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

I’ll go them one further. Keeping our economy open and running is an essential service. Unless bombs are falling, there is no emergency that justifies shutting down, damaging our economy, destroying businesses, destroying livelihoods, even lives.

On the contrary, an open and operating economy is the best means of dealing with the emergency because that keeps operational the ability to generate the weal and mechanisms necessary to bring the emergency quickly and efficiently to a favorable conclusion.

 

The bill can be read here (the bill actually spills onto a second page by one line).

Importance of Some Wuhan Virus Vaccination Side Effects

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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

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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

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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

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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.