Month: December 2021

Check this out. It's only a minute long:

'You’re playing right into their hands' when you doubt the vaccine, President Trump says. pic.twitter.com/xJc7JTL0cR

— No Spin News (@NoSpinNews) December 20, 2021

This is just jaw dropping. Finally, a year after vaccines became available, Donald Trump is telling his fans that he was the one responsible for getting them out so fast and they've saved "tens of millions of lives." Conservatives should embrace vaccines!

You're playing right into their hands when you're sort of like, "oh the vaccine"....We saved tens of millions of lives. Take credit. Don't let them take that away from you.

"Them" is liberals, in case you're wondering. And that's fine. Trump could pretend that he uncovered a plot by Hunter Biden to wreck the vaccine supply if that's what it takes to get conservatives on board.

Can you imagine if Trump had taken this position from the start? We'd probably be 90% vaxed by now. Hell, Republicans might have a higher vaccination rate than Democrats.

Better late than never, I suppose. I wonder how this is going to go over with the faithful?

This is Catalina Island, shot during takeoff from John Wayne Airport. The picture was taken around noon, so I don't know why the sky is reddish at the horizon.

From the Washington Post:

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) last week made the White House a concrete counteroffer for its spending bill, saying he would accept a $1.8 trillion package that included universal prekindergarten for 10 years, an expansion of Obamacare, and hundreds of billions of dollars to combat climate change, three people familiar with the matter said.

But Manchin’s counteroffer excluded an extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit the administration has seen as a cornerstone of President Biden’s economic legacy, the people said, an omission difficult for the White House to accept in the high-stakes negotiations.

If this is true, I would have taken Manchin's offer. The expanded CTC with no work requirement was always going to be a heavy lift, and I don't entirely understand why Biden was so attached to it. Oh well.

UPDATE: Sorry, I was in a hurry and wrote a bad headline. All I meant was that Biden didn't accept Manchin's offer at the time Manchin made it. However, the White House didn't "reject" the Manchin plan, as I said in the original headline. It was just considering how to respond. Obviously something happened over the next 24 hours to piss off Manchin—maybe some kind of staff communication?—but we don't know for sure what that was.

Israel has added the US and Canada to its travel ban, and it seems likely that other countries are going to start doing the same in the face of the Omicron onslaught.

At the risk of sounding like an idiot, I don't get it. What's the point of all these bans? Omicron is already in every country and it's going to spread whether people travel or not. In fact, since proof of vaccination is required to travel, the people entering all these countries are probably safer than the average resident.

What's more, a grueling five-minute scan of Google suggests that epidemiologists pretty much agree about this. Generally speaking, a travel ban might slow down transmission in a region that hasn't been hit with a particular virus—which means the initial COVID travel bans in early 2020 might have done a little bit of good—but it doesn't do any good if the virus is already there. And in the case of COVID in December 2021, the virus is already everywhere.

So this is all just virus theater, and it's a huge pain in the ass for a lot of people. Why don't we knock off this nonsense and put our energy into stuff that actually has an effect?

Joe Manchin allegedly torpedoed BBB because he was worried about inflation, but that's never really made much sense. Even inflation hawks agreed that BBB would have little effect, and the Fed had just announced a tougher stance on inflation. If anything, inflation fears should have subsided a little by yesterday, when Manchin took to the airwaves to announce his opposition to BBB.

I suspect the real catalyst behind Manchin's decision was the CBO's response to a Republican request for a new cost analysis that assumes all the programs in the bill are permanent rather than temporary. That analysis suggested that BBB could blow a $3 trillion hole in the deficit.

Republicans claimed—and Manchin agreed—that the BBB bill as it stands is basically just an effort to game the CBO scoring system. And they're right. Everyone does this, including Republicans in their 2017 tax cut, but it's nonetheless true that the rat's nest of programs that start and stop, along with funding that's backloaded, is designed to give the impression of low cost even though Democrats clearly want to try to make all of the programs permanent at some future point.

Manchin wanted a "clean" bill. That is, a bill that included a smaller number of program but funded them permanently. The irony is that this is literally what every single liberal analyst wanted too. Lefties and centrists all agreed that this would be best, since permanent programs can be designed better and are much harder for Republicans to cancel down the line.

And yet that was apparently never on the table. Why? Because analysts may have loved the idea but politicians hated it. It would have meant killing all but two or three programs, and it was impossible to get agreement within the Democratic caucus about which ones to keep. Everyone had their own pet program.

So there you have it. If we had done it Manchin's way, we would have kept his vote and we probably would have gotten a better bill out of it. I wonder why this was so impossible?

I woke up late today and then left on a photographic mission of great importance. Because of this, I missed all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Joe Manchin's announcement that he wasn't going to vote for the BBB bill no matter how it was tweaked or cut down.

In other words, my mission was perfectly timed. If I have anything profound to say about this turn of affairs, Monday is soon enough to let the world know about it.

How are we doing on booster shots? The Kaiser Family Foundation has the numbers:

This is remarkable. Even among Republicans who aren't nuts and have gotten vaccinated, only 50% plan to get a booster shot. Hell, the number is only 75% even among Democrats.

Get vaccinated, people! And if you're already vaccinated, get a booster shot!

I've been browsing around some COVID vaccination data and came across a couple that might be of interest. First off, here is how much getting vaccinated protects you:

In the 50-64 age group, for example, the annualized mortality rate for the unvaccinated is currently 270 per 100,000, while the rate for the vaccinated is 10.4 per 100,000. That's a difference of 26x, or 2,500%. Get vaccinated!

Next, here's an oddball chart that shows how many people who have gotten one dose of the vaccine have gone on to become fully vaccinated:

In Minnesota, 92% of the people who have gotten one shot have gone back for a second. In New Hampshire, only 70% have gone back for a second shot.

Just eyeballing this chart, nothing special catches my eye. Is there some thread that connects states with high callback rates? It doesn't seem to be geography. Nor does it seem to have anything to do with red vs. blue states. Nor with average income. Maybe it's just random?

UPDATE: I have corrected the mortality rates for all age groups. I originally used numbers from both the CDC and Our World In Data, but that introduced some inconsistencies. The chart is now based entirely on CDC data from October (the most recent month available).

A friend of my mother's is a whiz at creating custom-made Christmas ornaments in the shape of—well, anything, I guess. But Mom gave her a picture of our cats and she returned little stuffed ornaments that look like Hilbert and Charlie. Here is Charlie ignoring his ornament while Marian holds it up to his face.

As you can imagine, Charlie wasn't especially cooperative with my photographic endeavors. However, this one does a good job of showing just how good the ornament is. It really does look like Charlie.

With the Omicron variant barreling down on us, I'd like to take this chance to say that I'm all in favor of making life as miserable as possible for people who don't get vaccinated.¹ This is not because I have no empathy for them, or because I think they're stupid and want to punish them. It's purely for selfish reasons.

The more people who get vaccinated, the safer I am. Every person who refuses to get vaccinated is a mortal threat to me and my family, and that's not something I'm willing to treat lightly.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

¹Standard caveat here about those who have legit medical reasons for not getting vaccinated.