Interesting Items 03/16

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue:

1. Corona
2. Corona 2
3. Flynn
4. Bernie
5. Biden
6. Snakebite
7. SETI@home
8. China

1. Corona. The top news story of the week (last year or two?) was spread and impact of the Wuhan (previously called Corona) virus.  The ChiComs decided that it shouldn’t be called the Wuhan virus, as its arrival and spread was clearly the fault of the US Army.  Their willing cheerleaders and enablers in the media promptly agreed and started calling anyone still referring to it as Wuhan racists and xenophobes.  Instapundit dropped its twice daily summary links as there is more than enough other links to Wuhan-related stories.  The three best sources (at least for me) seem to be Ars Technica, JoNova (Oz), and the Chiefio.  Here in Alaska, we have seen rolling cancellations and lockdowns over the course of the last week, starting with sports at all levels and spreading to public and private education.  There are rumors of a hard 14-day nationwide shutdown.  There is still no explanation why the outbreak in the Washington State nursing home started or where it was sourced from.  As of Monday, the three worst states were WA, CA, MA and NY, all hard-blue democrat cesspits.  Sadly, I’ve shut down weight training at the local gym for the last couple weeks.  Looks like that will extend at least to the rest of this month if not longer.  We’ve had at least a two weeklong run on the local Costco.  Friday and Saturday last were particularly bad.  This extended to other local shopping locations.  I’ve had fun torturing local politicians asking them to roll back the ban on disposable plastic shopping bags they imposed last fall.  So far, no takers, though the one who responded thought it was working well.  No comprehension from him or people on his side of the political fence that the world had changed, and arguments in opposition to the ban based in sanitation that were ignored or dismissed out of hand now ought to carry some additional (or a lot of) weight in their deliberations.  They don’t even want to hold the discussion.  Such is the political left these days.  We must instantly and subserviently snap to attention and do whatever they want based on their ‘concerns’ completely without question, while ours are dismissed out of hand.  I don’t these guys are gonna enjoy playing under their new rules.  But I will.

 

2. Corona Part 2. This is a short list of items for your consideration.  Most of them out of the Chiefio.

• Low Vitamin D levels in the body may contribute to the severity of the infection.
• There was a mention that blood potassium levels were low in pneumonia sufferers. There is a product called NoSalt used by people who are on low sodium diets.  It uses potassium chloride and is widely available.
• There was some concern about the lack of ventilators as this disease ramps up. I wonder if the growing use of CPAP machines in the elderly community won’t be an out of plane way to address this concern.
• A lot of elderly got the pneumonia shot over the years, which is supposed to help fend off pneumonias. There is Good News and Bad News with this, as it does help make it at least a little more difficult for infections to progress to pneumonia.  The bad news is that there are both bacterial and viral pneumonias and Wuhan is a viral one.
• Anyone wonder what the number on the end of the virus name (COVID-19) signifies? It means that this is the 19^th of these type viruses.  So, what happened to the other 18?  Well they are with us also, with at least 4 Corona viruses bringing us the common cold.  And the antiviral for the common cold?
• Finally, there appears to be a drug effective against Wuhan virus. It was developed in WWII, is a generic, and widely used as an anti-Malaria drug.  Name is chloroquine.  There is a less toxic form called hydroxychloroquine.  Appears to be effectively used in South Korea and China.

Bottom line?  Be safe out there.  This is deadly serious stuff and a LOT of people will get sick.  The older you are, the more risk you run of an infection progressing to pneumonia, so take appropriate action.  Final thought:  The very same people who have been lying through their teeth for the last 4 years haven’t suddenly started telling the truth.  Run everything you hear about this virus from the media and more importantly what they believe the administration is or is not doing about it through that same filter.  These guys haven’t changed their stripes or goals.

 

3. Flynn. Wuhan is not the only thing happening in the world these days.  The Michael Flynn case continues to shock and amaze, with the latest twist having the FIB (conveniently) losing original interview sheets for their sandbag visit to Flynn just after the inauguration.  Flynn’s legal team has requested the original interview Forms 302 via the presiding judge.  The remaining embedded liars and frauds in the FIB and (In)Justice have refused to produce them, most recently with the excuse they had been ‘lost’.  This prompted a Trump tweet on March 15 blasting the FIB and threatening a full and complete pardon.  Once that happens, he ought to rehire Flynn in some capacity in the WH and make him financially whole following his journey through politically motivated prosecution and impoverishment via legal fees.

 

4. Bernie. Given that Bernie Sanders is most assuredly not the preferred candidate of the democrat establishment or either of its predominant crime families (O’Bama and Clinton), where does he get the money to run a national campaign?  Legal Insurrection last week posted an investigative piece that took a look into Bernie’s financial supporters.  His supporters tend to be under 50, childless and unmarried.  These donors are slightly more male than female, so there is no significant sexual divide in his support.  Rather, it appears to be centered among people who are ashamed to be wealthy.  Most of them from some of the richest gentrified neighborhoods in the nation.  Daniel Greenfield described his supporters as “… techies, hipsters, and champagne socialist trustafarians…”  His top dollar zip code is in San Francisco, in a zip code with the median home value around $1.5 million.  The second is Haight-Ashbury in SF and the third in LA.  Note for the record, that these people are singularly unable to govern themselves, busily turning both SF and LA into expensive dystopian, soul-destroying cities.  But at least they don’t live in the worst parts of the cities where homelessness, rampant drug use, and public defecation is not only making their cities unlivable but downright dangerous to boot, embracing lawlessness and ineptitude.  This is the future these guys want to bring to the rest of us.

 

5. Biden. Now that the democrat establishment has adopted Weekend At Bernie’s as their campaign model this cycle, they are busily putting it into play, with their current goal of minimizing the number of minutes Biden spends in front of the public between now and the convention.  Should he get that far, the next goal will then be to do the same thing between the convention and Election Day.  It’s not that they are out of practice doing that, as they had to do the same thing with Hilly during the last couple months of the 2016 campaign.  The Weekend At Bernie’s approach has been the reason they’ve been doing everything humanly possible to get Bernie to drop out so they can shut down public appearances completely.  Best I can figure out, Biden is not good for any more than a 10-minute talk.  He gets angry easily and goes after people who would putatively be his voters like he did with a question on firearms ban and confiscation last week.  By all rights, he should be dead man walking in the political world.  The problem is that the economy is in the midst of taking an incredible hit as the rolling shutdowns and other economic impact of Wuhan combine with the market correction and transition to a bear market for a time to put Trump’s reelection at risk.  I believe that this is all happening too early to conclusively elect Biden and all the down-ballot democrats.  But every day this goes on, is one less day that the turnaround will have to happen before the election.  Things move pretty quickly in the world these days, once the turn takes place, the mood changes, things will come roaring back, but my view today is that it will be at best, a close-run thing.

 

6. Snakebite. At first glance, this story had an almost biblical aura.  Legend has it that St Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland and into the sea.  Unfortunately, its citizens are busily bringing them back.  Over the last decade or so, this former Catholic nation has swung increasingly socialist carrying with it all the progressive social ills and demands that come with being good leftists.  A 22-year old Dublin man got the first snakebite recorded in Ireland last week.  It was a venomous puff adder, commonly found in Morocco or Western Arabia.  The guy owned the snake and got himself bit.  He was treated with antivenom.  This incident was the first recorded venomous snakebite in Ireland.

 

7. SETI@home. SETI@home was a two-decades long crowdsourcing project launched by University of California Berkeley in 1999.  The idea was to use home computers to analyze radio telescope data and look for any sort of signal.  The application was downloaded and run on home computers as a screen saver.  Data was chunked, crunched by the screen saver, and the results sent back to Berkeley.  Once the program was finished with one chunk of data, it grabbed the next chunk.  Prior to this program, this data was crunched in supercomputers and there simply wasn’t enough computing capacity to analyze it all.  The distributed data processing technique was adopted by Bitcoin miners in recent years.  The project team decided that they were at the point of diminishing returns, as it has become more work for them to manage the distributed data processing than it was to process the remaining data.  It sounds like they’ve analyzed all the data they currently want to analyze and will now attempt to put the results together.  The underlying platform will be swung (with the agreement and participation of the installed user base) to other crowd-sourced data analysis projects like climate, molecular biology, and other space-related projects with massive datasets and limitations on computing time and power.  SETI@home was quite popular with the scientific / space-oriented community over the years.  Will be interested in seeing the results.

 

8. China. A few disconcerting things about China over the course of last week.  Two of them previously mentioned. First, internal propagandists have started blaming the Wuhan flu on the US.  Second, there have been thinly veiled threats in at least a couple papers to withhold drugs from the West, particularly the US.  Final item has been official pressure from the ChiCom government to not refer to the virus as either Wuhan or anything connected with China.  The first two are most disconcerting, as far too many US media and democrat presidential candidates (you know who you are, Joe Biden) do not look at China as a threat.  The second is both an important reminder and incentive for expedited economic disentanglement from China.  On the one hand, I have no problem with any nation taking care of its people first.  On the other, this is an actual threat, and I tend to take very seriously any threats aimed at hurting Americans.  It is a reminder that we have outsourced far too much to China.  And that must stop, with a significant amount of outsourced production returned back to the US.  Business taxes and regulations that encouraged outsourcing should be revised so that the US is as friendly a place to do business as China was.  Do this and production will move back.  This might even be an economic driver for a rebound following the ongoing correction.  At the very least, we should never be dependent on ANY nation for drugs and medicines in the future.  Remember that Donald Trump was front and center about the Chinese threat to the US and has been for over a decade.  He was ridiculed, laughed at, and dismissed.  But unlike all politicians in the DC Party, he turned out to be right.

More later –

– AG