Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Kapture1]

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[Kapture1]

Let's see if you can figure out why that is fucked up...

[Dr. Strangelove]

This is stupid, gossipy shit so move on if you are too high brow to care

Mentioned last week or the week before that ever since Kyle Rittenhouse went on Tucker and trashed sleazy scumbag lawyer Lin Wood, he has been in in defensive meltdown mode.

Well apparently Lin Wood has a habit of recording lots of people without their knowledge and has been lashing out at just about everyone he thinks has wronged him. Sidney Powell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Michael Flynn, Patrick Byrne, Dan Bongino, the whole QAnon crew. He's been releasing recordings of most of them, including one where Michael Flynn admits he thinks QAnon is complete crap and a CIA psy-op. He's trying to embarrass just about anyone he feels has crossed him.

Anyways, God knows how he got his hands on this, but he's posted an email exchange between Tucker Carlson and Hunter Biden from way back in 2014 where Tucker was thanking Hunter for writing a college recommendation to Georgetown for his son. In 2014 Tucker didn't have his show yet, he was just a Fox & Friends weekend host.

[Hannibal]

Let's see if you can figure out why that is fucked up...

They didn’t shoot them in the spot?

[Jeff Buchanan]

Bulletized take-aways from Omicron week .......

• The Delta Variant remains the dominant SARS2 strain.
• Vaccines continue to be effective for sure v. Delta and likely v. Omicron. Boosting is a good thing, esp. for at risk cohorts.
• New case numbers - a worthless metric except to the press that continues to work to scare the shit out of people - have risen globally and in selected regions.
• These increases are predominantly Delta.
• Hospitalizations and deaths remain within a reasonable range, i., e., these metrics - best to measure disease impact aren't going up much. There are regional increases.
• Everywhere that is dealing with surges in new case numbers that result in the need for hospitalization is managing them within available resources.
• The PH response at all levels with respect to mitigating spread is much more restrained - no place in the US is seeing lock downs. There are some in Europe -- they are short.
• Mobility restrictions involving boarder closures are few and strongly resisted by the public they affect and by PH officials who warn the costs are much higher than benefits.

I'm listing this separately because it is much more important than people realize:

• Pfizer and Merck are ready to introduce antiviral medications that are taken within 5 days of a positive COVID test. Some of you might remember the antiviral whose product name is Tamiflu. It is prescribed if the patient presents with flu symptoms, ostensibly tests + for Flu A or B, but most providers treat on the basis of presenting symptoms only.
• These new antivirals are conceptually the same and they work v. COVID - all strains - better than Tamiflu for + flu. Can take them at home.
• Paxlovid, the Pfizer pill, reduces hospitalizations and death by 85%.
• Projected to be available in January/February - just in time for what is undoubtedly going to be a holidays induced increase in serious COVID related illness

We got this ...... turn of your TVs and put down your news papers. I know, that's not going to happen. Just understand that most of the headlines you'll be reading over the next two months regarding COVID are going to be misleading if not factually incorrect.

[iam416]

It's truly amazing to watch The Chairman proceed on these issues. He desperately needs to say that things are under control and encourage full-on normalcy. I mean, he ran that with his dumbass glib statements of "shutdown the virus not the economy" or whatever. He made it sound all so easy. And absolutely deserves to be excoriated for those statements. Yeah, Delta wasn't his fault, but the notion of variants was out there from day 1 and the complex nature of Covid was well-known, so, yeah, you're accountable for your brazen campaign promises.

Unfortunately for The Chairman, he's surrounded by Covid Fear Monkeys. And they won't ever -- and I mean that -- EVER -- let him say things are back to normal. The Chairman's CDC will be recommending masks forever. And that's not a return to normal.

Meanwhile, we've made it through almost an entire football season of huge public gatherings without the superspreader events the Covid Fear Monkeys warned against. We are at place where vaccinated people are functionally safe from Covid (exception -- anyone over 75 or so is at risk regardless). Young people have always been safe from Covid. And yet, kids are still masking up for school, which I suppose is better than distance learning. But, again, we're talking normal.

So, The Chairman has a real fucking problem. His best course would be to, you know, trust the science and start talking about Covid as being completely manageable. But, instead, he's gonna Fear Monkey. I can speculate as to why, but the why doesn't matter.

*(By "The Chairman" I'm referring to the actual decision-makers in the WH. It's pretty clear to me that The Chairman ain't all there. And, yet, I don't see many Ds clamoring for competency-based removal).

[Dr. Strangelove]

Nov Unemployment Report. There's a new inflation report next week.

BAD NEWS:

* Only 210,000 new jobs when Wall Street was expecting around 575,000
* 20,000 jobs lost in retail. Another 15,000 lost in Education (teachers refusing the jab maybe?)

GOOD NEWS (?):

* Unemployment rate fell from 4.5% to 4.2%
* The Labor force participation rate went UP to 61.8%, the highest since March 2020. It needs to rise about another 1.0% though to be close to the 10 year average. For perspective, labor force participation peaked in the late 90's above 67% and slowly declined after that. But from 2014-2020 it had pretty much plateaued around 63% give or take a bit either way.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Even with the uptick in Labor Force participation, there are about 2.4 M that left the labor force during covid and have not returned.

They are disproportionately women. It's something like a 63-37% split.

[iam416]

Well, based on the irrefutable logic of equality of outcomes, it seems that COVID hates women.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Well, based on the irrefutable logic of equality of outcomes, it seems that COVID hates women.

Maybe so, maybe so.

The two biggest causes are probably

1) The sectors hurt most by shutdowns and covid restrictions are sectors of the economy where more women work than men (retail, restaurants, hospitality, etc.). And the same sectors have been the slowest to recover.

2) Childcare problems. Schools aren't reliably open. A lot of daycares went out of business or reduced the number of children they supervise. And a lot of older relatives who used to watch the grandkids are, quite frankly, dead.

[iam416]

(1) We have vaccines. Return to normal.

(2) We have vaccines. Return to normal.

That said, it doesn't suprise me that generally liberal policies are hurting women.

[iam416]

To add to the labor statistics, we still have roughly 10.4M unfilled jobs: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

We are still very much in a pro-labor marketplace. These are precisely the times when the Federal (or any other) government should stay the fuck out of shit and let the market work.

Instead, it's going to be the clarion call for something like universal childcare or a version of that -- univesial Pre-K.

[Dr. Strangelove]

To add to the labor statistics, we still have roughly 10.4M unfilled jobs: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

We are still very much in a pro-labor marketplace. These are precisely the times when the Federal (or any other) government should stay the fuck out of shit and let the market work.

Instead, it's going to be the clarion call for something like universal childcare or a version of that -- univesial Pre-K.

So even if every single person that lost their job during covid went back to work there would still be almost 8 M unfilled jobs.

Hmmmmmm

Seems like the perfect time to make drastic cuts to legal immigration and make sure foreigners aren't stealing American jobs!

[iam416]

I'm all for legal immigration. But, I also very much disagree with a labor shortage to excuse illegal immigration.

[Dr. Strangelove]

I'm all for legal immigration. But, I also very much disagree with a labor shortage to excuse illegal immigration.

I finally found some numbers on this. In 2020-2021 we granted less than 50% the number of work visas that we had in 2018-19. That represents a total of 1.2M fewer workers in the US.

A lot of this results from policies Trump put in place but Biden is also responsible because he's been very slow to reverse most of them.

https://www.cato.org/blog/us-issued-12-million-fewer-visas-work-eligible-foreigners-march-2020