Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Kapture1]

Lots of folks angry about Chairman Joe's order today. But, their anger is in vain. The order is going to be issued, and enforced. Nancy and Chuck will protect the Chairman and make sure there is no challenge allowed from Congress. Only chance this is overcome is if it somehow finds its way to the USSC, and with Roberts sitting there, he's likely to back Joe.

Patrick Henry is turning over in his grave.

States are ready to file. I hate leaving my rights in the hands of the courts.

I won't comply. WaPo did a recent poll, and something like 68% of unvacinated will quit or be fired. For those that won't, I fully understand what's at risk here, if you have to give up your medical autonomy to the state in order to feed your family, people will have to do what they have to do.

But they should never ever forget when America was lost and that they could have taken a stand but didn't.

[lineygoblue]

States are ready to file. I hate leaving my rights in the hands of the courts.

I agree. I have no faith in the USSC headed by John Roberts.

Giddy days for The Party.

[THE_WIZARD_]

Dear Mister Biden:

GFY.

Have a nice day.

Fuck you and your entire administration.

Sincerely,

THE_WIZARD_, Esq.

[Jeff Buchanan]

And we’re in the midst of a surge (mostly amongst the unvaccinated)

.
..... and those of you that have chosen to not get vaccinated are fine with this and the implications. Your right to choose, and I respect that position, supersedes the responsibility of government to protect the public health.

I

t’s pretty well-established government CAN mandate vaccines as a precondition to entry into government spaces, like schools.

I'm no Constitutional scholar but Congress has broadly authorized the federal government to protect the PH beyond "government spaces." I think you have too narrowly defined what government can do in the PH sectors.

The federal government acts in six main areas related to population health: (1) policy making, (2) financing, (3) public health protection, (4) collecting and disseminating information about U.S. health and health care delivery systems, (5) capacity building for population health, and (6) direct management of services (Boufford and Lee, 2001). For most of its history, the U.S. Supreme Court has granted the federal government broad powers under the Constitution to protect the public's health and safety. Under the power to “regulate Commerce . . . among several states” and other constitutional powers, the federal government acts in areas such as environmental protection, occupational health and safety, and food and drug purity (Gostin, 2000). The federal government may set conditions on the expenditure of federal funds (e.g., require adoption of a minimum age of 21 for legal consumption of alcoholic beverages to receive Federal-Aid Highway Funds), tax commodities whose use results in risky behavior (e.g., cigarettes), reduce taxes for socially desirable behaviors (e.g., for voluntary employer provision of health care), and regulate persons and businesses whose activities may affect interstate commerce (e.g., manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and vaccines so that they are safe and effective).

The judicial branch also can shape federal health policy in many ways. It can interpret public health statutes and determine whether agencies are acting within the scope of their legislative authority. The courts can also decide whether public health statutes and regulations are constitutionally permissible. The Supreme Court has made many decisions of fundamental importance to the public's health. The court has upheld the government's power to protect the public's health (e.g., require vaccinations)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK221231/

I'm sure the Biden vaccine mandate extending to businesses and beyond federally regulated venues and conveyances is going to get challenged. The issue is going to be decided on how the law authorizing such actions is written. I followed very closely the legal challenge from the state of FL of the CDC's authority to what amounted to shutting down the cruise industry in March 2020. The maritime law, fashioned by Congress that authorized CDC to protect US PH through various means involving regulation of ship operations in US waters and entry to US ports was complex. The judge that approved FL's request for a PI of what is called the "No Sail Order" followed by the "Conditional Sail Order" ruled that CDC's actions exceeded the narrow authority they were granted in the law to control ship operations for the benefit of protecting the PH. It has not been litigated yet but the PI is enforceable until it is. I have no clue how this will turn out but the fundamental constitutional issue is one that involves separation of powers not freedom of choice. That position - arguing the vaccine mandate compromised a citizens right to choose - is weak on a number of levels.

A successful challenge to the Biden Vaccine Mandate is going to revolve around the question of whether or not the president has been granted the power by congress to do that. IOW, this is less an issue of personal choice/freedom to choose than it is one of government overreach in exercising powers not granted to the president or the agency, HHS, that would implement the policy to carry out and enforce his mandate.

Interestingly, Israel is having a huge surge in cases. Despite being vaccinated out the ass. Again, this is a fact that goes into a policy decision.

I'm going to take issue with the implications I'm reading into this. Israel has a 68% vax rate. That's comparatively low and in countries with low vax rates SARS2D has been a problem. Israel did get an early jump on vaccinations but vaccine hesitancy is affecting further gains. New cases are, as we find in most places, among the unvaxed. Hospitalizations are in the 65+ cohort as we also see elsewhere and among these, 60% have been vaxed. As experts have suggested, these figures don’t necessarily mean that vaccines have lost their effectiveness. The same sort of things has been seen in the UK, and may simply reflect the fact that the elderly are more likely to be vaccinated while also being more susceptible to disease – factors which combine to inflate COVID-19 cases and deaths among the vaccinated.

You seem to using the Israeli experience with COVID as a means of dismissing the role of vaccines in tamping down new case numbers - the horrible metric that is driving unnecessary, costly and often harmful and ineffective mitigation measures. That vaccines don't reduce viral spread is contrary to the facts. Higher vax rates = lowering new case numbers which reduces the public fear factor, promotes public confidence to spend and travel and keeps government overreactions to that useless figure in check.

My gripe with all this refusal to get vaccinated rests on the evidence that the unvaxed cohort is the primary source of increased new case numbers. Concurrently, that drives all sorts of bad things wrt return to some level of normalcy, jobs and economic growth.

[iam416]

Thanks re Israel, Buchanan. Good correction.

FYI -- Chairman Joe has directed the Department of Labor to come up with a rule regarding vaccinations. That still has to work it's way through the Administrative rule-making process. It's not a rule, yet. They have to propose the rule, provide notice and comment and generally work through the process. You may or may not recall that a couple PDJT rules were nixed by the Supreme Court because they did not following the process.

To that end, my guess is the Chairman will use OSHA to issue an emergency rule and bypass comments -- and that is a real Constitutional process problem.

And, despite what you say, it's not particularly clear that the Federal government has the power to issue a nationwide vaccine mandate. States can do it. Schools can do it. The Federal gov't? Eh. I think they'd have to show they're acting to protect employees from some sort of extreme danger. But, in this case, there's zero dispute that employees are free to get vaccinated and that the vaccinated are not in any sort of meaningful danger let alone extreme danger.

I mean, look, man, if you want to go bareback on some chick you know has syphillis, then that's on you. Chairman Joe can't compel you to wrap that shit up or tip Mrs. Wizard when you're done.

The common good argument falls apart when common folks can choose to limit their risk to something akin to the flu. And so we end up with nonsense common good arguments about hospital beds and hypothetical future variant disasters.

[iam416]

My gripe with all this refusal to get vaccinated rests on the evidence that the unvaxed cohort is the primary source of increased new case numbers. Concurrently, that drives all sorts of bad things wrt return to some level of normalcy, jobs and economic growth.

I know this. You've repeated it. And, for the first time, let me point out how much I disagree with it. It is almost identical to rewarding temper tantrums. It is a response that is not dependent on facts or what is actually best, but simply trying to appease a group of people that will do things that you think are bad policy (and I agree with you that they are bad policy). I guess that's one response. The other is to push back hard, to vote them out, to point out how wrong they are.

I completely agree that we have a bunch of nonsensical rules -- the travel bans, in particular, are astounding when you look at some places on the list. But "just let them have there way and it will all stop" doesn't seem like a good answer to me. Again, we're over 75% of folks over 12. There ain't a lot more we're going to do on that front. I've made my peace with that. And I will hold accountable, with my vote, the fear-mongers and Covid-zero'ers. I will not, ever, just say - eh, they're giant bitches, let them have their way.

[iam416]

Chairman Joe:

If they’ll not help, if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way

I remember when people were worried that PDJT was gonna be some sort of autocrat. LOL.

Meanwhile, the Chairman understood the law, vaguely, back in October:

STEPHANOPOULOS: And once we get it, if it is safe, if it is effective, will you mandate its use?

BIDEN: The answer is, depending on how clear there’s — vaccines, they say, have a very positive impact, and they are going to affect positively 85 percent of the American public. There’s others that say, this vaccine is really the key. This is — this is the golden key. It depends on the state of the nature of the vaccine when it comes out and how it’s being distributed. That would depend on. But I would think that we should be talking about — depending on the continuation of the spread of the virus, we should be thinking about making it mandatory.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How could you enforce that?

BIDEN: Well, you couldn’t. That’s the problem, just like can’t enforce — you can’t enforce measles. You can’t come to school until you have a measles shot. You can’t. But you can’t say, everyone has to do this. But you would — just like you can’t mandate a mask. But you can say — you can go to every governor and get them all in a room, all 50 of them, as president, and say, ask people to wear the mask. Everybody knows.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And if they don’t, fine?

BIDEN: If they don’t, no, not fine. Then I go to every governor — I go to every mayor, I go to every councilman, I go to every local official, say, mandate the mask, man — say, this is what you have to do when you’re out. Make sure you encourage it being done. Look, George, you and I know — and I think you do, too, as well — the words of a president matter.

[Obi-Jon]

... And I will hold accountable, with my vote, the fear-mongers and Covid-zero'ers. I will not, ever, just say - eh, they're giant bitches, let them have their way....

Well, I think that puts you in the minority. Biden is tilting at windmills - he's trying to fix stupid. He's charging the covid-zero'ers windmill and ignoring the fear mongerer windmill. And everyone (except Biden seemingly) knows you just can't fix stupid.


tilt.png

[iam416]

Well, he's trying to fix SOME stupid. He's embracing other stupid. For while he was merely tolerating it and even frustrated with it (his, heh, complaints that the Media weren't covering Covid fairly). But, that was transient.

[iam416]

The NYT ran an article yesterday on Chairman Joe's ginormous "infrastructure" plan and noted that one of the problems facing the plan is finding enough employees to do the work. Think abou that for a second -- ostensibly, a jobs plan doesn't have enough people to fill the jobs its creating.

Kevin Williamson had an excellent piece today on the idea of "creating jobs" as some sort of elixir to the truly poor. I won't link it or share it, but the gist of it is that for the small percentage of people truly in poverty -- living on streets etc. -- their poverty isn't caused by a lack of a job, it's caused by some or lots of other things. I could walk around Columbus offering every vagrant I see a $50/hr warehouse job and virtually none would take it.

[Kapture1]

"Your body, MY choice" -Joe Xiden

[Hannibal]

That vaccination and masks are not panaceas via which we can eliminate all of our Covid risk is becoming increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention. At best, a Draconian regime of lockdowns and mask mandates can delay your Covid surge. The low cost, low tech approach being taken in less developed countries is working out much better for them.

Case in point: India has a covid death rate less than one fifth that of the US's. Their vaccination rate is slightly less than half of ours. Not to mention, their country is basically a densely populated, curry-scented toilet where about four times as many people are crammed into a size less than half that of the US. Yet despite this, and despite the population not having access to anywhere near the same level of medical care as us, they have significantly fewer deaths per capita. An intellectually honest approach might be to take a look at that horse dewormer that they have been using there.

[iam416]

Peter Boghossian has resigned from Portland State. I'm sure that name rings no bells, but he was the genius behind publishing obviously nonsense articles in academic, PEER-REVIEWED literature to show how conformist and narrow-minded academia was. He was, of course, excoriated. His resignation letter is here -- it's worth the read, IMO: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/my-...iced-ideas-for

The New York Daily News, to their credit, chimed in with an OpEd calling out Left hypocrisy:https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/...3s4-story.html

The thing of note in that OpEd -- which is meh, I guess -- is that Boghossian has received tons of requests from conservative media outlets to discuss shit, but he has zero interest in appearing -- he's not a conservative. Instead, he'd welcome a chance to appear on liberal outlets. IMO, he has no interest in being paraded about to confirm the worst thoughts of an audience, but rather to engage HIS people and try to ge them to stand up for liberal ideas. Bravo to him if that's the case.

But, heh, speaking of tilting at windmills -- trying to get the Academia to stop their relentless focus on race or, heh, marginalized people, or whatever is the ultimate fool's errand.

[iam416]

And, for the life of me, I really don't understand why on earth ivermectin is so fucking politicized. The Rolling Stone/MSM shit is unfathomable to me. I mean, I rather doubt it's some sort of panacea, to use the parlance of our times, but fuck me -- it ain't poison.

[iam416]

So accurate:

Once you say that the vaccine reduces your chances of hospitalization to one in 160,000, you cannot rationally say that you are breaking your former promises to “protect” the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. You’ve already argued they are protected.