↓
 
Home » Open thread 4/11/22

Open thread 4/11/22

The New Neo Posted on by

Two of my favorites – Fil and Robin Gibb. If you’ve ever wondered what made Robin Gibb’s vibrato so unique, Fil will show you beginning at 16:37:

His vibrato was unusually fast and unusually narrow in pitch variation.

Comments

Open thread 4/11/22 — 39 Comments

  1. A final Covid report. As the pandemic ends I’m seeing much data manipulation. Last week before I left for my trip, WoM was reporting about 15million active cases. I returned Saturday to find it was now about 5million…what happened to 10million cases?? Now today, it’s down to about 1million since yesterday. 2 years ago I thought the active cases being reported was too high as they (JH and CDC where WoM get their data) were not subtracting out recovered cases properly, so I started to do it myself based on the number of serious cases. Amazingly enough the current active cases is close to what I would have after the subtraction. So, again not surprisingly, they were greatly exaggerating the cases for two years and just now reporting what are probably more accurate numbers. Liars lie and now time to CYA.

    State level: Colorado, like WoM, has totally messed up its case numbers starting about 2 weeks ago. CT suddenly has lost over 3 million tests numbers…previously reported about 15million tests over the 2 years, now says 12million. NC has gone to weekly reporting. GA continues its daily good reporting but I can’t see that lasting too much longer, and same for NH. FL biweekly as it has been for about 2 months.

    I’ll continue to watch the states, but despite Shanghai and Lord Fauci declarations, I think this is really over.

  4. I watched the film “Someone to Watch Over Me” about a week ago. The plot is entirely conventional, but it is really about a culture clash and something of a mood poem, which is Ridley Scott’s forte. And to the mood setting end, the title song melody is used repeatedly throughout the film.

    One thing they did in making the film, which is more of a pleasant surprise nowadays than when the film came out, is that the film opens with the song sung by Sting and closes with the song sung by Roberta Flack. Both singers have unique voices and were popular around that time and faded away. At least I hadn’t heard them in a very long time.

    A scan of youtube would suggest that dozens of singers have performed the song, but I could not find the Roberta Flack rendition.

    Sting
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AITbFEgzZPU

    I loved Lorraine Bracco’s acting performance, though some may find it over the top.

  5. physicsguy: Thanks for the Covid updates. Covid mania has been over for a while in AZ (except for the schools) Country Thunder – our country music festival – had record attendance this year.
    That’s a great video from Fil.
    And thanks TommyJay for the movie recommendation.

  6. COVID isn’t gone, but I hope the hysteria is. Friends of mine, vaxxed and boosted, caught it on a cruise ship in the Caribbean and had to stay an extra week on the ship, and we got an email this morning to say that the dog grooming/boarding place we use has been hit with staff cases. We assume we’re going to get it, if we haven’t already. We expect to survive it without much trouble.

  8. I looked at the Snow on Pine link about the 2020 election. The obvious question there is, WTF is going on with the Republican party?

    It reminded me on someone I know who has spent most of his life living in Manhattan and is a stalwart Dem, who sent out an irate email on the occasion of the Hillary-Trump campaign. Apparently, every major election cycle he signs up for get out the vote duty with the Dem party, and every time they bus him from Penn station to Philadelphia. (My first thought: is this get out the vote, or get out the fraud??)

    Amusingly, the email then lists a number of rude and disrespectful things that the volunteers were subjected to during the long wait prior to the bus trip being canceled. He then said that the Hillary campaign was a shambles, and when they requested that they all come back in a couple weeks for a repeat, he said no thanks.

    I suspect that Philly hasn’t had a really clean presidential election in my lifetime. Probably one of the worst places. You would think that this would make the city a target of opportunity for finding and prosecuting election fraud so as to refute the claim that the number of proven fraud cases is always negligible. But that would look racist. Better (and easier) to just let it slide.

  9. Kate, covid will never be gone, but I think the pandemic is over. It’s now obvious the vaxes do nothing against any variant other than the alpha. And, if there was no testing would any of these people actually think they have covid or just a typical cold/scratchy throat/flu.

    What really irks me is how the data is being “adjusted” now that the craziness is over. The political use of the pandemic is really the main story.

  10. physicsguy says, “I’ll continue to watch the states, but despite Shanghai and Lord Fauci declarations, I think this is really over.”

    I think so too. I couldn’t help noticing that the Phillies home opener on April 8 was sold out, standing room only. Okay, the fans are hoping the Phils will make the postseason for the first time in forever, but 43,000 people crowding into Citizens Bank Park means that pandemic panic has pretty much evaporated.

    As for Fauci– he may have put a curse on the Nats; they’ve won only 1 of their first 4 games. Who can forget his 2020 ceremonial first pitch (from the base of the mound, yet!) in Nationals Park?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rr9XC3hNGg&ab_channel=CBS17

  11. Update on the daughter:

    I had a very tense conversation with her mother last night when I took custody for the week. She assured me that not only does she not want our daughter to rush into medical transition, she said that she asked and the daughter does not want to rush into it either (her mother used the phrase “years and years of counseling”). Whew.

    So I’m a little mollified and much less stressed out. On the other hand, the daughter now wants to go by a boy’s name, has asked her school to comply, and has been using it online for over a year now.

    I’m hoping that this will fade in time as it does in 80% of cases and I’m no longer in a hurry to try to dissuade her. Eventually I’ll come back with “what does pretending to be a boy do for you?” but right now I’m going to work on rebuilding our relationship so she’s not afraid to talk to her scary conservative daddy (booga booga).

    I’m also hoping that the psychological profession (helped on by a change in popular attitudes) will someday in the next few years have “wtf were we thinking?” moment like they did with lobotomies 60 years ago.

    Yeah, this is a little bit “and maybe the horse will learn to sing”, but I have to work with what I’ve got.

  12. Bryan Lovely, this is good news. I prayed for you and for your daughter. Yes, building the relationship so she’s comfortable with you and knows you care about her is very, very important. Fortunately attire is pretty much androgynous these days. Since her mother is not pushing transition, with luck you’ve got time and your daughter will accept her biological body.

  13. The only question left with COVID now is what are they going to try and do next winter when it inevitably returns. This is complicated by the elections so I can’t imagine them trying anything before then but in the blue states I would say mask mandates returning are a 50/50 bet at this point.

  19. physicsguy,

    ‘will this set off a trend among blue cities and states??’

    I think yes on cities less so on statewide levels. Seattle never really wanted to get rid of theirs and would love to go back to it but I don’t think the entire state of WA would comply at all.

    I have now amended my above guess that masks returning next winter in blue states from 50/50 to about 90/10. Silly me I thought they could at least wait until then but if they are doing it now it is highly likely they will do it next winter.

  20. The only question left with COVID now is what are they going to try and do next winter when it inevitably returns. This is complicated by the elections so I can’t imagine them trying anything before then but in the blue states I would say mask mandates returning are a 50/50 bet at this point.

    Who is going to pay attention? Have a gander at the year-over-year death toll during each country’s winter wave (November-March), 2021/22 in comparison to 2020/21

    United States: -30%
    France: -58%
    Germany: -50%
    Britain: -70%
    Italy: -62%
    Spain: -61%
    Netherlands: -60%

    These are the temperate occidental countries with the highest caseloads to date. For comparison

    Canada: -29%
    Sweden: -55%

    Globally, the seven-day moving average of death tolls is at it’s lowest level recorded since 29 March 2020. At 3,200 per day, it’s 60% below the mean of the last two years. During the period running from 1 April 2020 to 24 March 2022, the nadir recorded was 4,885. We’re now running at 1/3 below that. COVID may not be over, but we’re entering territory we’ve not been in before.

    Here’s a brain squeezer: why was the performance of western Europe so much better than that of North America during the recent winter wave? Hypothesis: treatment of COVID patients in North America is hampered by social and political signaling by members of the medical profession and hospital administrations. Deaths per million in this country are running behind those of certain eastern European countries, but, for the most part, we are performing poorly compared to just about every occidental country outside of eastern Europe. Some of that may be due to public health considerations, e.g. obesity being more of a problem here; I cannot help but note, however, that mean BMI in the U.S. is only about 4% higher than that in Britain. It isn’t a racial factor; the share of coronavirus deaths in this country who are black or hispanic is almost precisely their share of the population. We shovel pots of money into our system of medical care, and what does it get us?

  21. Art,

    One thing that makes it hard to tell what is going on is that countries have very different ways of counting COVID deaths and as physicsguy highlighted above they all love to retcon the data.

    There have been a few stories the last couple of months of various counties, states quietly down counting their COVID deaths now that it is no longer needed for scare tactics.

    As for who is going to pay attention believe me their are still plenty of people in these deep blue states that are obsessed with the masks and would love to force others to wear them.

  22. Griffin and physicsguy–

    About the BA.2 variant and the reimposition of mask mandates, a blogger called el gato malo hypothesizes that “covid is becoming increasingly vaccine enabled” (the title of his newest post at Bad Cattitude). “it has long been known that the covid vaccines were non-sterilizing. it has also been known, based on the countries like the UK that report the stats honestly that the vaccinated are at greater risk of contracting covid than the unvaxxed. this has even been known about the boosters.

    but where this gets really worrying is this: each new variant is seeing this relative risk rate rise and the rate of rise is accelerating. this is, unfortunately, exactly what one would predict as a leaky vaccine with a strong tendency to antigenically fixate those having received it drives viral evolution to prey upon this vulnerability. herd OAS replaces herd immunity and vaccine driven evolution does the rest.”

    His analysis of the UK data leads him to conclude that “no one looks protected from infection, all look like they have been made far more vulnerable. and this risk ratio enhancement looks to be accelerating upward. . . . the question becomes: what is driving this? the answer, i believe, is vaccine directed viral evolution and the possible emergence of what i will term vaccine fixation syndrome (VFS).”

    He notes that the same uptick in cases is happening in the high-booster areas of the Northeast U.S. I’m not a statistician, and I have no explanation for Bad Cattitude’s allergy to capital letters, but I’m linking to his post in hopes that physicsguy or one of the MDs among Neo’s readers can shed more light on vaccine-directed viral evolution and/or the BA.2 variant.

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/covid-is-becoming-increasingly-vaccine?s=r

    Meanwhile, I too am glad to hear the good news from Bryan Lovely about his daughter; I’ll add my prayers that things will continue to improve for them.

  24. PA+Cat, sounds reasonable to me, but not being anywhere near an evolutionary biologist, I’d have to defer to those with better knowledge.

  26. Also of note is each seasonal wave over the years(!!!) of this thing has been about a month later than the previous year so last year was late March peak so any rise now makes sense.

    Seasonality!!!

  27. Griffin —

    Seasonality!!!

    I’m sure there’s no such thing. It’s just the evil choices of selfish people who want their convenience back and don’t care if they kill Grandma.

    So I’m told, anyway.

  28. Brian Lovely. Keep your chin up.

    I very distinctly remember a girl in the neighborhood who was a tomboy and terrorized the smaller kids. My older boy has a friend who would only play with the boys and wouldn’t play with the other girls when she was young. She hit puberty and eventually became quite a nice feminine girl.

    Merriam-Webster dates the first use of tomboy to 1566. It’s not a new phenomenon.

  29. Paul in Boston (and others) —

    Thank you for your support, it’s appreciated.

    The thing is, my daughter was not in any way a tomboy. She grew out of frilly dresses when she was a toddler, but grew into t-shirts and leggings like 90% of other American girls. She never liked competition or rough-and-tumble play. She was only interested in “things” like science kits or even the “engineering-for-girls” product lines when I specifically suggested that we do a project.

    I think she’s a poster child for Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, brought on by her priors of dreading getting her period and then getting it right when maximally isolated and indoctrinated with fear, plus the baleful influence of viral Tiktok videos and possibly sub rosa suggestion from “new friends” in the online gay students group.

    So for now I’ll play along, sort of, or at least not directly challenge her, and hope that as she grows up and physically matures she eventually desists. If she goes back to a “non-binary” identity I’ll call that a tactical victory.

    Hell, it’s entirely possible that she’s not even gay*, and that once the natural hormones kick in she’ll experience an attraction toward males, and that will be another impetus toward identifying as a girl. The wife of one of my best friends is a psychologist for the Anchorage school district, and when the daughter came out at age 11 she said “oh, she’s too young to really know.”

    *(Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. 🙂 I really don’t care, although I’d like to have grandchildren and that makes it more difficult.)

  30. As for who is going to pay attention believe me their are still plenty of people in these deep blue states that are obsessed with the masks and would love to force others to wear them

    I live in a deep blue commuter belt. The stickers have been scraped off the floor of the stores, I have not seen anyone asked to mask up in I cannot remember when (medical and veterinary practices are the only places I can recall being told to do this). Yesterday at the grocery, about half the store’s customers were unmasked. They’ll try it in the schools. Other places they’ll get mass noncompliance.

  31. His analysis of the UK data leads him to conclude that “no one looks protected from infection, all look like they have been made far more vulnerable. and this risk ratio enhancement looks to be accelerating upward. . . . the question becomes: what is driving this? the answer, i believe, is vaccine directed viral evolution and the possible emergence of what i will term vaccine fixation syndrome (VFS).”

    Have a gander at the death toll in each successive wave in the UK. The case fatality rate during the latest wave in the UK was about 0.2%. He’s a panic porn peddler.

  32. Art Deco —

    Here in Seattle proper the masks at the grocery store about three weeks ago were down to about 20%. But then “cases” ticked up slightly in the county (and they’re still going up though nowhere near as fast as the original Omicron wave) and masks went up to about 80%.

  33. Griffin: “I have now amended my above guess that masks returning next winter in blue states from 50/50 to about 90/10.”

    Probably not until after the election …

    As for “retcon” on the data, yes in CA last year at one point they just magically reduced the COVID death toll by about 25%. I had thought that death rates were somewhat more reliable than case rates but too much manipulation even there.

  34. Bryan, good news about your daughter. It may be a long road but I hope things work out in a good way.

  35. Great analysis of Robin`s incredible voice! Thank you very much for sharing, dear Neo <3

  36. I attended the Abq Zen Center until Covid moved the zendo meditation to a virtual Zoom form which I decided to skip until the real world version became available.

    Later they re-opened the zendo, though vaxxed, boosted and masked. Now masks are optional but:
    ____________________________

    At this time, we ask that all who attend Zazen or other activities at AZC to be fully vaccinated unless you have a medical condition that prevents a vaccination. Face masks are optional but encouraged due to the presence of older members age 65+ and/or those individuals who are immuno-compromised.
    ____________________________

    Given the serious concerns about courtesy and cooperation in the American Zen community, that’s a stronger statement than it might sound.

    I don’t feel free to return unmasked to the community. And I don’t feel inclined to wear a mask, which I consider rather spineless pandering to Democrat/Social Justice forces.

    Nor do I feel like pushing back against said forces. Perhaps I’m spineless.

    I’ll continue to track the Center’s policies. When the Covid concerns are dropped, I’ll return.

  37. Huxley,

    ‘When the COVID concerns are dropped I’ll return’

    I have had that opinion about some things but now I have found I don’t need them anymore so they have lost me. I haven’t been to a sporting event in Seattle since 2019 and I used to go to a lot of baseball and football games but not showing my vax card (I’m double vaxxed) and I haven’t flown in almost three years now because I refuse to wear the damn mask for hours on end and I’m afraid I’d be that guy getting dragged off the plane when the flight attendant scolded me for letting my mask slip a quarter inch below my nose. It’s the longest I have gone without flying certainly in my adult life and maybe my entire life. Have taken some road trips and that is just fine.

    There hasn’t been an event in my lifetime that has changed my entire worldview like the response to this.

  39. @ Bryan – so sorry to hear about your daughter.
    Some good news, though, in the sane Red states.

    https://notthebee.com/article/alabama-just-gave-the-country-a-masterclass-in-how-to-fight-back-against-transgender-indoctrination-of-children-

    HB322 is rock-bottom simple, barely over two pages long, the gist of which is: A public K-12 school shall require every multiple occupancy restroom or changing area designated for student use to be used by individuals based on their biological sex.
    ….
    SB184 is a bit more involved, but in a good way.

    It outlaws the surgical mutilation of children’s genitals and the administration of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers to children, and

    It forbids school officials from keeping secrets from parents about their children’s “gender identities.”

    The law itself is chock-full of broadsides against transgender ideology

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

↑