Thanks …
the M2 does have a dovetail for a telescopic sight on the left side of the receiver
but I´ve never seen the intended sight.
– The Vietnam-era AN/PVS-2 had a range of 200yds – it would have been pretty pointless to put it on an M2.

I don’t think that does anything for your argument that the M2 is useless…

Not my argument at all, although very few ships go for them alone as point surface defense , I’ve see the Bushmaster 25 mm chain gun being very popular for that like on Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Ah, but I see the current plan for the littoral ship followup is a Constellation-class frigate with only a 57-mm main gun and “Various machine guns M240 or M2” per Wikipedia.

Based on a Franco-Italian design in service for nine years with nineteen built so far, maybe this time the Navy is serious about not screwing up everything. Although we’ll have to learn how to maintain combined diesel-electric and gas (CODLAG) propulsion systems (Diesel engines feeding into generators, the electric motors powering the shafts can be augmented by a turbine). That is, lubricating the system with oil will remain a requirement … but they’re not 44-47 knot ships, instead “in excess of 26 knots” akin to the same in the French engine version. Construction of the first begins … this month, per the Wikipedia linked January article they’re primarily ASW escort platforms with I’ll add an updated Aegis system and 32 VLS cells plus 16 canister mounted over the horizon anti-ship missiles.

Just double checked with Wikipedia, and the US has never used a M2 in a coaxial (with the main gun) mount, just .30 machine guns. And per Hathcock’s autobiography he made some kills with M2s to which he attached his old fashioned optical scope with some widget someone had constructed. From memory of reading that book long ago, I did not get the impression that was a large fraction of his kills, but he didn’t detail them all.

Or Xi, who’s made a lot of enemies, due to a faction fight, mounting issues due to for example his bad fossil fuel policies, Zero COVID polices, food supply issues (see both of the former, especially the first) etc. (he’s a bad helmsman), or perhaps trouble in retaining his position this year as he in theory is subject to an internal CCP reelection or the like, will tell the PLA to “go” whether they’re ready or not.

We just can’t say if or when the PRC will try to take back the ROC by force, just that if you hear it’s happening, buy all the electronics you think you’ll be needing for years to come ASAP.

Although it bears mention that in WWII we didn’t have a lot of bombers, especially bigger ones, to shoot down. So 4-8 M2s firing Armor Piercing Incendiary were very effective in our fighter planes against small craft including other fighters, as well as in ground attack roles. In the Pacific, M2s salvaged from unreparable planes were mounted on medium bombers like the B-24, as many as twelve, and were very effective in wrecking pretty much anything on the ground that wasn’t protected by revetments.

Again, it’s an anti-material gun, and to this day militaries still have lots of things that can be destroyed by them. If not all armored fighting vehicles, then pretty much everything that supports them like trucks.

They also did not go for the covid-19 lockdown and vaccine madness.

The thanks was meant for the The Anti-Gnostic above you. But let me emphasize his point, population pyramids that look like pyramids, that is most of the people are young, are obviously going to have very different overall outcomes for a disease that has such a heavy weighting in bad outcomes with age, and remarkably passing over as far as we know almost all “children.” (Weasel wording because I worry about long term effects.)

And it wasn’t that “they did not go for ‘vaccine madness’,” it was simply not an option, especially give how comprehensively the national government of India dropped the ball (companies in it were supposed to provide lots of vaccine, but the government just declared they’d beaten COVID before their first wave, at which time it was a bit late to do anything but for example threaten the CEO of the Serum Institute of India (SII, a private company) who then fled to London).

One hour to figure out that the average age in Africa is 19.7 years?

Africans are mostly young and are mostly outdoors in warm to hot weather. They also did not go for the covid-19 lockdown and vaccine madness. So they are OK now.

YouTuber The Chieftain is a genuine former tanker who does in-detail videos on armored warfare, and posted a video about the subject, that makes much the same argument.
He illustrates it with a popular video from Ukraine which is usually edited to show a tank being hit by an infantry antitank missile because there was no infantry support. Wow, that was easy.
In his case however he does something the propagandists don’t do which is play the entire recording which shows the tanks right behind that one killing the soldiers in the anti-tank team. I think he says something along the line that what you don’t see is videos of attacks where the ambush fails and “you are now dealing with a very angry tank”.

Some analysts are predicting that future warfare may be fought almost entirely by autonomous machines because flesh and blood won’t survive very long in a combat zone. The AI sensing and control software is becoming very small, cheap and effective. Think of your new car that can identify pedestrians in your path and warn you, parallel park itself, and read speed limit signs. Or your phone camera that picks human faces out of the picture. At some point we could have swarms of air and ground drones that autonomously look for targets, zip up to them and detonate themselves. Mouse and hummingbird sized ones for soldiers, vultures sized ones for vehicles. The war is decided by whose little robots defeat the other side’s little robots, while humans hide out in bunkers.

I notice the US and UK don’t order any MBTs and haven’t for quite a few years.

Maybe because we have more than enough chassis we built for the Cold War, and their Chobham armor is easy to upgrade, fits inside sheet metal boxes? Chrysler also made sure to include an extra road wheel to accommodate greater weight versions.

One thing I’ve read is the higher end, that is not T-72 Soviet tanks had something similar but was sealed at the factory for good, and reactive armor can in part because the factories weren’t trusted to put the correct, expensive stuff in it.

Not even vaguely in the same class. .303 is from memory a slightly lighter than average battle rifle round, something the British also used in the “Short, Magazine, Lee–Enfield” SMLE for WWI, which some consider to be the best bolt action battle rifle. .50 BMG is an anti-material round and it takes some significant and wearisome to the operator rifle adaptations for a single human to fire it from a rifle, but it does have a place there.

Bullet weights and energies 174-5 gr, ~2,400 ft⋅lbf vs. ~600 or over gr and and over 13,000 ft⋅lbf, almost three and a half times the weight, almost five and half times the energy. And significantly longer ranges, one use for putting it in a rifle is very long range sniping. There’s enough size and weight budget in the .50 BMG to make complicated rounds said to have roughly the same effect as standard 20 mm cannon rounds.

Or another way of putting it, rifle plates can stop battle rifle rounds, anti-material ones have so much energy the human behind the plate wouldn’t survive the experience.

Armor unaccompanied by infantry support has been a death trap since WWII. A Javelin missile is certainly a more effective weapon than a Panzerfaust, but my guess is proper integrated arms techniques, especially combined with drone technology so you can find Javelin teams, would still make armored warfare effective.

I’m not sure how many of us have “hangups” but it’s not for a lack of trying. A few choice bits from your link:

Let’s face it, anyone born in the U.S. in the past 70 years, particularly the last 30 years, meaning the millenial generation, grew up in a Jewish sewer. A New World Order sewer. It is crucial to realize that a very toxic environment was constructed for us before we ever set foot on this earth. It was designed to cause us sexual problems. Many powerful people, enemies of Jesus Christ, were lying in wait for us, just as we headed to adolescence.

I’m early Gen X and can most certainly confirm this. No matter how wholesome your upbringing was back then, go to a college about the community or thereabouts level and perversion of all sorts was the culture by the late 1970s. Including Jewish professors pushing the mentioned Screw magazine, as reported to me by a good Boomer friend about a decade older, was staff at the school and this came up out of the blue in a conversation enough to make a lasting impression on her, and she was no prude.

There’s lots more to why the NWO/globohomo/Jews hate Putin and the Russians he sort of supports (not to the extent of taming the oligarchy that keeps most of them poor, but the war with Ukraine is going to give him a chance to fix that. Doubt he’ll take, one of my issues with him is “Putin == KGB” and running a “gangster government” is probably part of the natural order for him and I assume others). Damaging and killing as many Slavs as possible has been a top agenda item since the 19th Century, so it’s another “embrace the healing power of and.” Although they’re certainly upset Putin and company are forcefully rejecting this gambit.

If the NWO is the problem, then God is the solution. Now that the problem has been identified, we can go to work on solving it. Stay tuned.

Well, yes, and that extends way beyond the domain of sexual degeneracy of this essay. But how to turn that principle into effective action, especially when so many Christian churches are pozzed is quite the problem. In my darker moods I have to agree with Fr. Seraphim Rose, “In the end, ALL the Churches will serve Antichrist. Which of course helps focus on some answers that might work, for example churches per se are at best a means to the end of “God is the solution.”

Testing is indeed an obvious issue with these current warheads and any iterations made on old designs, but when looking at future threats you have to consider a nation considering a first strike or the credible ability to make on breaking the currently informal Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by testing their designs, and from their viewpoint ideally the whole weapons system including the delivery part. That again emphasizes the value of a triad vs. for example putting all your eggs in one SLBM basket.

If something important fails, they stop, leaving open the question about whether their other systems might work and maintaining deterrence. If they or enough of them work, things could get very interesting especially with target nations like the US having too much friction and compromise at the very top by countries like the PRC to respond in a timely manner if at all.

The intercept profile question is very simple, and is one you’ve been claiming without evidence but would be violating your TS/SCI gained secrets if indeed it was boost vs. the mid-course as we’ve always been told.

After writing my last reply, it occurred to me it can’t possibly be boost profile because the usual suspects would be screaming bloody murder as they did in the 1980s about SDI because of how that would edge us towards the temptation of a first strike. So given those two facts, it’s clear you’re just making this up this claim out of whole cloth.

I don’t have an especially urgent desire to describe TS/SCI level intercept profiles to a random, severely misguided stranger off the internet. Just intern at Raytheon with your oddly pristine academic record like the rest of your ilk, dear comrade.

I don’t get where you’re getting your figures from.

As I said, Wikipedia for the single 100 mile one; that’s from the GAO for boost phase interception for the SM-3 Block IIB, and of course they might not be honest and IIB is an abandoned paper Power Point design.

I’m not talking about risking these ships per se, just saying it doesn’t make sense to use them as essentially fixed position ABM platforms unless of course we became plenty desperate and abandon a lot of missions they normally do (unless of course they’ve quietly become Fatherland Defense Barges). And contrary to lots of experience in the real world, have these systems turned on and operating when a threat arises.

I can see a Kwajalein fired to off Hawaii, per Bing that’s ~2,570 miles, being a boost phase intercept. But where are Russia’s ICBM’s located? I assume the PRC’s are closer to the coastline, but being near there again as I said opens the gambit of taking out the ships before a first strike, which I gather the PRC is moving towards gaining the capability of trying.

Is there any information you can point me at that describes the flight profiles of the ICBM and SM-3 for that “Flight Test Maritime-44 (FTM-44)” (the ones I just looked up aren’t useful, quote or rewrite the government’s press release which is non-technical, except for an artist’s conception that’s bogus for a real test against an ICBM at boost range).

My point about VLS cells is that they place a firm limit on the energy/range of a missile that fits into them. Your claim about our Ohios is what we hope, but the point is that if they become vulnerable, the other legs of the triad are not likely to share the same problem; their’s a point beyond which nation’s survival should not be economized. And again, bombers can be launched on warning! That capability without committing yourself to warhead delivery is priceless.

To compare it to the oil fires (quickly extinguished-no fire brigade after nuclear war), caused by US air attacks, NOT Iraq, in 1991, is the work of a meat-head.

Those meat-heads were the “experts” who claimed nuclear winter would be a catastrophic thing.

Otherwise there is no “of course” to anything you claim, you can wave your hands all you want without denying any specific I brought up, and I’ll repeat, the Earth is very big and we humans and our works are very small. Then again you believe in “climate change” despite its nomenclature being non-falsifiable and thus tell us it’s not science!

That you’re on the side of Team Energy Poverty tells us who has “moral insanity and spiritual wickedness typical of the dead souls who deny the hideous reality, simply because it does not suit their barbarous, Life-hating, ideology.”

So what’s probably of a US President “pressing the button”, and the US military following his orders, and that resulting in a “nuclear-ash-pile tipping point?”

I thought I made it very clear the latter was a lie. As for the first two questions, they’re out of my areas of expertise, but we be pretty certain if it’s Trump, absent or maybe even if the homeland is getting bombarded, the US military would refuse. “Biden???” Who the hell knows. A future different President? I’m not a fortune teller.

Your claim that the SM-3 is a boost as well as (hit to kill mid-)orbital phase ABM weapon disagrees with everything I’ve ever heard about it, and wouldn’t even vaguely have the range required for that mission. Per Wikipedia to put figures that make sense on this, the not-developed Block IIB would have to be within 100 miles of the launch site.

That mission, and homeland defense in general given its range limitations built into the design from it being a Standard Missile that has to fit in a standard vertical launch cell envelope, doesn’t fit well with where our very expensive Aegis ships might be when an adversary launches, as well as the adversary having the option of trying to destroy the ships as part of an integrated attack plan, outside of course special cases like Japan defending itself from North Korea, also see the Obama “non-agreement capable” betrayal of Poland etc. where Iran is the danger being defended against.

It’s also Officially only good for short and intermediate range missiles, but that’s maybe a lie, or not true for Block IIA, or maybe we’ll do a new block sooner or later, and also see the SM-6 which puts a AMRAAM seeker head with a bigger antenna on the front of a Standard Missile and per Wikipedia has had a successful test against a medium range missle.

While the Air Force has or had aspirations for flying laser projectors, and maybe you can do that at distance from the ground (but probably not, plus see weather), credible boost phase interception has as far as I can remember always been in the domain of hitting a big, slow, massive thermal signature booster from high above.

Perhaps the conventional orbital laser or other type of directed energy weapon satellite or integrate that into solar power satellites including for their self protection, perhaps Smart Rocks/Brilliant Pebbles placed in orbit, perhaps based on the expectation nothing in orbit will survive an adversary’s attack nuclear explosion pumped X ray/gamma ray lasers launched as soon as we see the enemy launching, each device taking out multiple boosters at once. But not a surface lauched missile with such a limiting envelope to begin with.

Since talk of nuking people seems to have come back into fashion, does the US government, God of Democracy (and the Democratic Party) have any plans for actually protecting the citizens?

Yes, as or before the DoD Office of Civil Defense was turned into the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA!!!) the Democrats realized there would be more money for buying votes if real Civil Defense was changed into “crisis relocation.” That is, safely before cities would get nuked, their populations would be moved out into the hinterlands. Teddy Kennedy was involved in this….

As for the populace, you’re confusing two different threats, being too near the explosion of a nuclear warhead, and the fallout it leaves behind. Lots of Americans will survive the latter just fine without taking special actions, lots more would be OK with just a little bit of information, and more if they read and follow the directions for expedient protections, eating afterwords, etc. in a green cover printed copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills.

Which also includes blast shelters for the really serious but also improbably long to prepare, all this tested in the field with normie Americans and at least one non-nuclear massive explosion test for that and lots of other stuff, huge pile of ANFO was set off. The basic slit trench covered by doors and a foot of dirt to mitigate “sky shine” fallout shelter also performed well in that test. (Sky shine is gamma rays, high energy photons coming from fallout particles on the ground and being reflected off atoms in the air down into the trench.)

The ICBMs were new, and the only defense against these things until “Star Wars” (initially bluffing, anyway)

Nope, we built our first mid-range and terminal intercept ABM system long before, and the Democratic Congress fully on the side of the Soviets by then canceled it a day after it went operational, see the Spartan and especially the insane 100g Sprint missiles and of course all their support systems.

Multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) were part of the excuse for that, although a Spartan style intercept might have worked if it could have done it before the “bus” released all its warheads one at a time. And thus all the interest un boost phase intercept, which as mostly gone poof nowadays which is very telling about what it really driving today’s efforts, protection of the population isn’t even on the table unless it’s a few missiles from North Korea or Iran. Well, the Russians might be more serious, see some of the S-400 missile variants, that family/class has always had an (illegal during the ABM treaty) ABM role. And PRC has been cool with depopulation until very recently as their post-Mao one child policy inevitably went bad.

The bomber third of the triad is vital because it’s the only part you can launch on warning, so if your warning is a mistake you can call them back, with PALs they couldn’t even fire off working warheads until they got the codes to unlock them. All three make pulling off a successful counter-force first strike nearly impossible, and even a modest ABM system and there’s no way because on top of your systems’ reliability issues you don’t get to pick which warheads get intercepted.

The period you describe was indeed from everything I’ve heard a wonderful time for engineers, I came of political age a little before we generally gave up on it and everything and among other things adopted a policy of energy poverty which the West’s ruling trash is so, so upset today to extend to a virtual blockade of Russian oil and gas. That resulted in an early 1970s and to this day still pretty permanent crash in aero-astro, which confirmed the wisdom of MIT’s policy of not letting departments get too big in terms of tenured professors and face losing reprogramming of buildings (and that of course implicitly puts a cap on grad student populations, which then can result in high teaching loads like EECS until the dot.com bust).

Contrary to your prior comment, from mostly memory I believe the Eckert and Mauchly team grasped the concept of a stored program computer computer, and the utility of it was certainly evident based on the cumbersome patch panel nature of programming their ENIAC you describe, which as I recall did at least one useful job for the Manhattan Project.

Konrad Zuse in Germany deserves mention if only because per Wikipedia he’s credited with anticipating the concept in 1936 with “two patent applications that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data” so that’s on the official record.

To reiterate and expand on a bit, the heritage of the idea and thus its official record is not completely clear because of the difficulties of reducing it to practice. The EDVAC and UNIVAC used mercury acoustic delay lines, long horizontal columns of that with an actuator at one end that created pulses and a receiver at the other that read them, with hardware in between to regenerate the memory as well as read and write values to it. Wikipedia says the general concept goes back to analog work in the 1920s, and Project Whirlwind was desperate enough to consider doing this with a (microwave?) radio links to and back from western Massachusetts.

The U.K. CRT based Williams Tube was the first DRAM, although I’m not sure how reliable it ever was (per IBM evidently enough for scientists but not businessmen). The 1932 magnetic drum was used a lot, the 1954 IBM 650 was the first mass produced computer and used that for its main memory. It wasn’t until Project Whirlwind that 3D magnetic core memory was developed and reduced to practice as their version of Williams Tubes were not working out very well. That got us our first “fast,” reliable and affordable enough RAM (no D for dynamic, didn’t require regeneration) which despite many other efforts ruled until static and dynamic silicon chip RAM fairly slowly displaced it (the S in Cray 1S was for that model using super fast static RAM for its main memory, while IBM was using it through an internal development Intel was the first to sell it commercially, the 1103 with a whopping 1024 or a kilobit of memory).

My assumption is von Neumann wrote up an elegant description of the whole stored program computer concept which was in part based on Turing’s theoretical work, but was at most formalizing it all. It wasn’t by any means how he thought we should really be doing computing, I’ve read or been told that was based on automata although I’m not sure if it could have been easily programed by mere mortals.

Eckert and Mauchly’s story is long and kinda sad, Wikipedia reminds me “new university policies that would have forced Eckert and Mauchly to sign over intellectual property rights for their inventions led to their resignation,” the University of Pennsylvania went from #1 in the world to essentially nothing in the space of a year and that significantly delayed the EDVAC (that’s another government project as most early computers were). On their own they almost ran out of money and their first big investor who then helped died in plane crash, Remington Rand eventually bought their company. Another thing to make Mauchly bitter was that included a ten year non-compete so he was sidelined for eight years after resigning in 1952 (that’s a not so hidden secret of California’s general high tech success, although it wouldn’t have been for a principal like him).

Another factor would be I think IBM running a survey, don’t know if they made it public but it would have been in the air, that everyone had heard of the UNIVAC and everyone thought it was made by IBM….

I’d be surprised if you understood a single technical detail of what this was all about, plus you’ve effectively fingered the wrong Jew.

ENIAC was pretty amazing because of its conservative engineering with vacuum tubes, something you also see with U.K. 1943-5 Colossus, essentially an ASIC for breaking the Nazi Lorenz cypher which was used for more important stuff than the Enigma cypher. But both had very limited memory, essentially today’s registers and whatever was used for I/O, paper tape of a sort for the latter’s input, and were programmed with patch panels which took a long time to set up, and see below for 1939 prior art in electronic computing which Mauchly was formally aware of.

And for that matter there’s lots of electromechanical prior art; be it counting widgets, relays, vacuum tubed, transistors, or integrated circuits and the multiple generations of the latter two, there’s a qualitative difference between computing and computers per se and the technologies used to implement them. But patents aren’t my forte, are in fact very bad news in my field of software development.

It was very obvious to everyone that when we could create sufficient amounts of cheaper memory (and boy was that a mess until core memory), programs would live in it along with data, and Herman Goldstine as noted prompted the hell out of Von Neumann’s thoughts, ultimately resulting in the “Von Neumann” architecture nomenclature, which is used in all but a few relatively obscure niches compared to for example earlier “Harvard” architecture where programs and data live in quite different places like PIC microcontrollers.

As for those patents, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert comprehensively lost, the list of deficiencies is much longer than I’d known or remembered. They most certainly did not invent even the electronic computer contrary to your first source (last can be found in the Wayback Machine).

That honor goes to John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry and their 1939 one which while very modest is conceptually on a par with Mauchly and Eckert’s ENIAC, plus there’s more limited IBM prior art of a vacuum tube multiplier. Pretty sure that was IBM’s first offering in the field, while it wasn’t a tremendous advance over electromechanical multipliers Watson Jr. got his father to turn it into a product to get them started in the field, and it sold a lot more units than expected. Then they added a divider to the next model….

Goldstine’s dissemination of First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is just one of twelve specific items in Wikipedia’s distillation of key findings of the 248 page decision, and they paint Mauchly and Eckert in a terrible light: “Sperry Rand had tried to monopolize the electronic data processing industry in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, on the basis of a cross-licensing agreement between Sperry Rand and IBM signed on August 21, 1956, but that only IBM had in fact succeeded in creating such a monopoly (Finding 15).”

That was due to IBM’s general competence in everything, getting experience in doing this sort of this ASAP, and for example cross fertilization with MIT’s Project Whirlwind and SAGE. IBM for example knew anything like this needed to be divided into reasonably sized units that could fit in normal elevators and doorways (the latter sealed the ultimate fate of the Atanasoff-Berry computer) that could then be hooked up by cables. I recall reading the first model of the UNIVAC requiring serious disassembly and then reassembly at the customer’s site.

And I’ll add due to a prior punched card antitrust settlement, IBM licensed all the computer technology it came up with on a FRAND basis, how for example the one half inch reel to reel tape drive became ubiquitous and disk drives became a general thing quickly. In addition Mauchly and Eckert filed their patent applications too long after the unveiling of ENIAC, plus what the judge saw as unproven “willful and intentional fraud on the U.S. Patent Office in filing the patent” which he wasn’t in a position to criminally prosecute and was moot anyway, and OMG, the patent was so sloppy it originally wouldn’t cover clock cycles greater than 1 MHz!

So, yeah, Jewish ethnic promotion, but ultimately in this case not resulting in holding back progress or profiting until you can cite how that came into play through for example cross-licensing … with an invalid patent.

Colossus also beat ENIAC, but since Lorenz type machines were still in common use and it was only useful for the Nazi model of that so all but a couple were dismantled at the end of the war, it remained secret until the 1970s as I recall, and like in the US with some other secret computing projects people who’d worked on it then went on to do new and improved stuff a lot more openly.

Meanwhile, this iSteve article and as I recall the previous one doesn’t touch on whatever contributions Von Neumann did or did not made to computing (and he died before he could finish his work on next generation stuff), you’re a very small man who can only hide behind an anonymous account and try to bite the ankles of your betters, be they Jew or gentile.

I’ve “kept up” with “nuclear winter” research starting with the very first “TTAPS” paper on it published in Science and it’s garbage from the same sorts of people who’ve served us up with global cooling, oops global warming and now the unfalsifiable climate change. Note the name from the order of the author’s last names, Sagan the last, they hired a PR firm before their paper was published.

It started as an attempt to give a scientific gloss on Jonathan Schell’s execrable The Fate of the Earth. In order to come up with its results, there’s at least three highly questionable to fraudulent details: how many cities, facilities like oil refineries and forests in the vicinity of missile silos would a nuclear war set ablaze, what size soot would they produce (they provided no source or justification for the range they chose), and worst of all they fed it into a one dimensional model of the Earth. That is, particles could go up or down, but there were no winds, oceans, basically anything resembling the real Earth.

I read quite credibly these models are easy to overbalance, “tip over” and spit out completely erroneous results, and the 3D models later applied to the problem said at worst, depending on what time of the year it would happen, we’d have up to as I recall up to three cold quarters. Compare to some of the recent enough recorded history volcanic eruptions and resultant volcanic winters as Wikipedia titles them, 1600 is a good place to start. Those are different phenomena but give you one well established angle for comparison.

Wikipedia has a pretty good summary paragraph of what followed, see also the detailed account, even its editors can’t put lipstick on this pig:

After the failure of the predictions on the effects of the 1991 Kuwait oil fires that were made by the primary team of climatologists that advocate the hypothesis, over a decade passed without any new published papers on the topic. More recently, the same team of prominent modellers from the 1980s have begun again to publish the outputs of computer models. These newer models produce the same general findings as their old ones, namely that the ignition of 100 firestorms, each comparable in intensity to that observed in Hiroshima in 1945, could produce a “small” nuclear winter. These firestorms would result in the injection of soot (specifically black carbon) into the Earth’s stratosphere, producing an anti-greenhouse effect that would lower the Earth’s surface temperature. The severity of this cooling in Alan Robock’s model suggests that the cumulative products of 100 of these firestorms could cool the global climate by approximately 1 °C (1.8 °F), largely eliminating the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming for the next roughly two or three years. Robock has not modeled this, but has speculated that it would have global agricultural losses as a consequence.

Another issue which I’d need to review is the claims about city “firestorms.” If as I recall they were referring to a real firestorm like the one that helped wipe out sixteen square miles of Tokyo, you need a certain fuel load to create the air currents phenomena that lofts a lot of stuff up fairly high. There’s one city in the US with that as of the 1980s, Somerville, MA which is wall to wall triple deckers and three story Philadelphias (I happened to spend a lot of time there in the latter half of the 1980s).

Your case against WWIII would be a lot stronger if you didn’t fantastically exaggerate the effects to “end all life on this planet.” The Earth is very big and we humans are very small, it’s extreme hubris to imagine we could accomplish such a feat without specifically intending it.

Given the decreases in US and Soviet to now Russia nuclear inventories, they for example no long have 40,000 warheads they might be able to use makes this all the more ludicrous.

On the other hand it would not be remiss to get a paper copy of the green cover edition of Nuclear War Survival Skills which covers all relevant topics for expedient survival and read and skim it now and take some relevant steps.

The only terrible advice in your column is living in East Campus. They are a bunch of no-date-getting, acid-dropping, depressive freaks.

In the early 1980s East Campus culture wildly depended on the floor (there are ten, five in two parallel buildings with grass in between them). There were floors with that sort of culture, and ones with much better ones.

All of the 10-keg ragers are in West Campus or across the river.

One of the latter got a freshman residing there dead, changing MIT’s very old pattern of having a lot of students immediately join fraternities when they showed up to requiring them to spend their first year in an on campus dorm once enough new ones were built. From inside reports the Institution was terrified of getting sued into the ground on that case, fortunately the family wasn’t quite that bloody minded.

Depends on how much money MIT has available, a lot of the buildings are more constrained by cost. Note a lot of donation money for colleges in general is not fungible, alumni don’t always trust the school to spend it well, and see Princeton and the Wilson Center for an extreme example.

_Some_ of the cutting edge buildings are pretty damned cool I think, as someone who generally hates modern architecture and loves the original buildings built in Cambridge. Note also I.M. Pei “received his B.Arch. degree in 1940” from MIT (and is totally not at fault for the Hancock Tower execution problems), and was a designer the Green Building AKA Building 54. The tallest in the campus, appropriate in many ways as the home for the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, the middle and maybe last needing instruments way high up.

However the (((Frank Gehry))) Stata Center that our host mentions in his reply is a catastrophic disaster as a useful space for computer science people to do all their things (details on request, although not all of it is the fault his or the other professionals, for example too much attention was paid to Michael Dertouzos’ vision of what it should be like so no offices with a door for you).

A counter-example the the EG&G Building 34, the severe space constraints gave the architect a good excuse to design it in the shape of an egg and it’s a good building for its users, and is well build, I watched it from the start where they used a very interesting method to create the piles for its foundation.

To put that in perspective, that happened 20 years ago. So 1 murder in 20 years is a fluke.

Still bad news if it’s you. In as you note soft on crime Cambridge.

Mostly it’s an illustration that a place you might have thought was safe very much wasn’t. In probably any urban campus you have to learn the boundaries that match your acceptable risk.

Now that you mention it, Hayden isn’t really much of a library, certainly not compared to Widener at Harvard.

Very few libraries in the world can compare to Widener.

I guess that for a STEM heavy university, everything today is pretty much online and most people have no reason to visit it.

Depends, there are topic specific libraries that I found to be very good in the 1980s, including the “management and social sciences” one for the latter. The Great Dome supports the ceiling for the engineering one. It’s just that Hayden is the general library, and in Boston it doesn’t make a lot of sense for MIT to try make that one “great.”

They’ve completely renovated the project on Main St. I don’t know whether they’ve upgraded the tenants but the circa 1938 buildings look a lot better.

As I said, it goes in cycles, which I was told tend to go along with regular renovations. But I also don’t know the current 2020 BLM summer of love and after secular trends, or how they might for example have been changed by COVID and work from home, which we’re guessing has a lot to do with a lot of blacks bashing Asians in big cities by removing a bunch of white “fish” which provided the Asians a safer, more crowded sea in which to travel.

MIT housing blends into Cambridge and Boston, so there isn’t a clear bubble. Those fringes are where the occasional student gets knifed.

Or not. One was knifed to death “in front of the main library,” but that’s not quite as bad as it sounds, that library isn’t really very good and the murder was on the side facing the river where you never have to travel, vs. the “inside” part of the bubble of the campus that’s well protected by the Campus Police except for property crimes. The perp was a white local teenager, one of those sociopathic stone killer types. Most of the crimes are of course by blacks.

My advice is the usual in any urban areas, find a safe location to start with, the East Campus dorms might be to your liking and are great for attending classes, and find out what parts are safe and which not so safe, where are the edges of the bubble. The housing projects on Main Street if they’re still there were very much not when they’re in a down cycle, but that’s not anywhere you have to travel on foot. it’s a shortcut between Kendall and Central Square.

“If tracking our computer use doesn’t work, we have the National Patient ID, a single number issued by the federal government containing all the details of a person’s medical records from cradle to grave…”

The linked take on the advocacy of a National Patient ID was well picked, it has some amazing garbage. While I suppose this may not apply to Congressmen who have their own gold plated healthcare benefit system, pretty much everyone in the real world knows that the system works not just on names, which would be idiotic, but them plus date of birth (DOB). And implicitly that healthcare is generally delivered locally so someone in San Francisco with the same name and DOB isn’t likely to be confused with someone in Manhattan Island. To make a solid case you’d have to show this doublet or triplet is resulting in too many collisions.

Second, it’s my understanding a single identifier would be the least of the challenges in achieving the stated goals. While Obama’s “stimulus” required “meaningful use” of electronic healthcare records (EHRs), and those two words turned into “750 pages of regulations” per a friend in the industry and obvious to most of us has resulted in too many healthcare providers looking at a screen instead of their patients while they for example made enough red lights turn green to prove meaningful use, it didn’t require the EHRs to be interoperable.

That sort of thing is a massive IT challenge, would be very expensive, take a long time, and would almost certainly result in a least common denominator approach where information would be lost going from A to B. Where B would likely be an exchange so you don’t have a N time M requirement of every EHR system being required to interface to every other one, and for our concerns, a limited number of throats to choke by bad actors.

Note also EHRs are a cost center to healthcare providers, meaning they will never get the respect and resources computer systems get for companies that are based on them like Google’s or Microsoft’s (and you probably know by now the rough edges or worse in those). That puts strict limits on what you can actually accomplish in the real world.

Might be good to mention SWIFT here since it’s so much in the news; it’s a messaging system, not the means for transferring funds which uses correspondent accounts between banks. See how much effort was required to standardize and implement its much more simple information transfers.

When state governments like Michigan and Vermont were willing to prevent people from gardening, it would be astounding if they didn’t attack “the Second Amendment” by also closing down its venues as “not essential.” Here’s one report from January on litigation arising from that in California where “Ventura County’s COVID-19 public health orders mandating a 48-day closure of gun shops, ammunition shops, and firing ranges violated plaintiffs’ Second Amendment rights.” As I recall there’s more where that came from.

And good for you on calling out the West’s, not just America’s “banditry and piracy.” Our ruling trash is not thinking through the implications of formally ending everything from property rights to the wisdom of playing the game of having foreign currency reserves.

I wish I could say the supply chain issues outlined would have much effect, but look at how after WWI it took many decades for world trade to return to its previous levels, as I vaguely recall maybe not until the 1960s. There’s no limits to the willingness of our current ruling trash to make us suffer in the service of their tastes and projects like the Ukraine which was subjected to two color revolutions. Although it’s partly personal, we know of the Biden family’s financial ties to that very corrupt regime, who knows how many other countries have similar ones?

The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care) from 2010 is supposed to explain it. Don’t know if it covers the huge amounts of outside money that’s played a roal, Bloomberg for gun control, with less than complete success but no long term costs, you’d also want to check to see if Soros installed the Secretary of State (runs elections) and of course this DA.

Not that any of us think this will matter in the foreseeable future, but Federal laws against “violating the civil rights” of someone where that results in death have no statute of limitations.

First, I recorded the dates on which each country announced its first domestic (indigenous) infection, those not transferred by travel to or from China, not arising from external contact. These were local infections which had no connection to Chinese nor to foreign travel; thus, by definition, they originated inside the country.

Are you for real?

Living in a world where countries have impervious borders if they so wish, being able to control all air, land and sea travel? Even North Korea can’t pull that off. Talking about a disease transmitted by breathing etc., and that’s frequently infectious a bit before symptoms start to become really noticeable? Ever studied the spread of the 1918-19 “Spanish Flu?” and its multiple waves. Note with COVID we’ve had three waves of increasingly transmissible variants, which I noticed but with much less rigor than you resulted in countries with previously successful isolation measures to fail.

One reason you can’t prove your theory (that’s not really a thing except here by confession from those you assume are deliberately spreading it, but you might be able to adduce enough evidence to make a case for it) is that you’re starting with data that’s too low quality to support it.

I think some of the problem you believe you are seeing in for example Unz.com coverage of the 1960s is that they were the climax of a very long process, something you in part acknowledge in a variety of places, like the ultimately ineffective resistance to the New Deal or “the disappearance of prominent public commentators” that Mr. Unz mostly recently discussed here.

Perhaps view the 1960s as a coup, or better a long in process revolution that decisively won in in that period and a bit into the 1970s? 1917 was hardly the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution.

One reason I say this is your comment on “serious attempts to degrade the capabilities of the US population.” High on the lists of important “general purpose technologies” is writing. The movement to stop effectively teaching reading to the large fraction of US students who required formal teaching of phonics was in the works for a while but you could date its real start in 1930 with the publication of the first Dick and Jane and Their Running Dog Spot book. The most famous book calling this out was the 1955 Why Johnny Can’t Read and that fight is still going on.

So my point is that I don’t know anyone who lived through the 1960s like my Silent Generation parents who didn’t believe a revolution of sorts happened then, that’s just not controversial to anyone who reads practically any history of the period, the Left of course saying it was a good thing, the Right not so much. And thus a focus by Mr. Unz and many of his commentators is on the roots of this, or its status today and how to fight it.

That 403 message you’re seeing from RT.com in the U.K. with the strange English wording is the sort I often see here in the US, and just now got exactly it (“403 Forbidden” in bold, “That’s an error” and “That’s all we know” in grey) trying with stock Google Chrome and Firefox for a bit, Brave which is what I normally use didn’t get that, but then both of the former started working at slightly different times, current top headline is “US hints at what would happen were Zelensky to be killed.” And I can still get their English broadcast through YouTube through their red “Live” button, although I’ve not tried listening to it for more than a few seconds, don’t prefer to get my information through video or audio.

So you may have to be persistent, may have to wait until a different time in the day as I’ve had to do many times, it sure looks like something that’s part of or behind the non-Cloudflare CDN they’re using. Could be they’re just getting too much traffic for the obvious reasons, plus we can be certain the site is getting attacked.

I’m talking more in short term great power politics terms. As I said in my comment, I know (as clearly do you) the overall trajectory is catastrophic in the West, and I also agree with Michael Hudson. I suppose the million dollar question is what happens to the American Empire once America is wrecked. The obvious answer is that it will decline along with it, but due to the increasingly global and abstract forms power seems to take I personally find it hard to say. I don’t even know to what extent the American Empire can even be thought of as based in a nation state. Sorry for the tangent, and sorry if I’m not making myself clear here. Like you could say, for instance, that Covid was a disaster for America. But Covid was not a disaster for BlackRock and Amazon. Nominally those entities are part of something called “America” or “The West,” yet their interests and outcomes don’t seem tied to it. I’m continually amazed at the adaptability of the neoliberal system to persevere, when it’s been a house of cards for decades. Anyway, I’m rambling, but I’m skeptical of declaring how “The American Empire is finished!” and toasting BRICS supremacy, when I see no tangible reason for doing so. The crises that dragged the USSR into Eastern

Wizard

My apologies for not including sources in my post.

I was alive back when LBJ was president, lived in NY State, much of the time in Westchester County, and so have some memories of what happened.

A whole lot of what you say about who manufacture’s what is dangerously wrong. The PRC doesn’t manufacture the CPUs and displays of iPhones (very few, like only one or two companies in the world can do this for the high end), and I doubt the memory, DRAM and Flash, which contrary to your amazing claims about what we can manufacture (make military stuff with what, pray tell? Never heard of SpaceX ???) we still have a toehold in due to Micron. Despite the best efforts of our ruling trash, we still manufacture a whole lot of non-military and non-food stuff. The PRC is also losing business as “the world’s workshop” for cheaper places as it and its people have climbed up the value chain and wealth levels, the big limitation there as far as I can tell is finite trained human capital in places like Vietnam.

The PRC certainly could and maybe does make completely indigenous smartphones using Android (iOS would be too messy even with successful espionage), they wouldn’t be power drain competitive in normal markets but would suffice for embargoed ones like Russia. For that matter, Russia is the country that to my limited knowledge has only has military, food, and fuel plus VVER reasonably safe pressurized water nuclear reactors to offer the PRC (four in operation, four planned, appears to be a competitive design in that market). But maybe there’s other things they can or do supply that I’m not familiar with, but a gangster government makes every big company political one way or another.

but if Germans want to heat their homes next winter, they will be cheerfully selling cars, capital equipment, components, and whatever else to Russia by September.

Are you really so sure the German ruling trash, especially their current “traffic light,” with green for the Greens coalition government is going to be doing that, let along “cheerfully?” I’d guess it depends on how much of their industry they want to preserve, I don’t think they care about their people at all.

On the other hand, you’ve grossly overstated what “dumbass Washington geniuses” have been able to accomplish vs. talk and boast about in shutting down our fossil fuel production and transportation. They’re much better in stopping new things like the Keystone XL pipeline than for example that 50 year old pipeline from Canada which supplies 25% of Michigan’s propane and from refineries in Indiana makes the jet fuel used by Detroit’s airport.

FWIW, way back when, I found Caltech’s intro math and physics courses to be considerably more difficult. It’s expected that everybody, regardless of major, go through that, and the stuff they do in Math 1a would be baby real analysis elsewhere.

So I suspect, though cannot confirm, that MIT has a more relatively diverse student body in terms of background.

During the early 50’s, possibly during the Korean War when we were in a Hot War with China, the national collegiate debate topic was admission of Red China to the UN. The Naval Academy wouldn’t participate because everybody had to debate both sides of the question, or at least be prepared to. If this was not during the War, it was in a short space of time before it, right after Chiang’s collapse, or else immediately after it.

This was a clear case of tone deafness or else in your face contempt for the vast majority of Americans. (No, we’re not militaristic robots, but we’re not, with the obvious exception of our elites, apologists for totalitarianism.)

probably the biggest “benefit” [to the “‘more accessible’ (or something like that) versions of the [first] required physics” class] is not having the smarter people in your year (the smartest test through them or take harder core versions) wrecking the curve.

MIT absolutely does not grade on the curve for it would be completely unfair when everyone is expected to do adequately or better at the MIT level. People who chose a suitable major will get As and Bs if they demonstrate mastery, anything less signals trouble (sometimes with the professor) although one of my best professors said he didn’t know anyone good in his field who hadn’t bombed one undergraduate course in their major.

I sense the 8.01L version of classical mechanics is about one of the harder problems for many MIT students and one of the reasons the first term is graded Pass (A-C)/No Record: almost all of us were used to not having to work very hard to get straight As in high school. MIT teaches at high levels, like no algebra based physics (which is a cargo cult subject anyway) and at a deliberately fast pace, a lot if not most students have to work harder than they ever had to and almost all of us had to learn at a faster pace than we’d ever had to.

So one way or another there’s a period of adjustment, and the first term physics course is the first one where you have to learn to apply math to real world problems with the usual “assume a spherical cow” simplifications. And I strongly suspect taking algebra based high school physics requires unlearning it when you do it for real using calculus.

I base that on theory because I can emphasize the above “not having to work hard” by relating how my high school senior year math and physics subjects had no tests or homework, the teachers, the math was one lazy and outright refused to do any teach or grading, the other for physics I’m not sure of the why for no homework or tests but he did give us useful lectures every day. Four of my six courses were like this, in one the teacher didn’t even bother to show up (really), and anything like AP or honors courses had been punted as “discriminatory.”

I’d done a fair amount of hard intellectual work outside the school system, biology is so vast you can always learn more stuff, and the first three years of high school math were at a good pace or for one self-study with another STEM career student so I came to MIT expecting to have to work hard. And saw some other students generally struggling, and struggled myself to master some of the topics in calculus. (Compared to most other MIT students I was in a cohort that was relatively weak in math, we could aspire to majors in for example chemistry or materials science and engineering, but not physics or chemical engineering).

>Though I will note I don’t think the admissions office is doing any favors if they admit someone who is only marginally qualified.

It’s also not just about intelligence. You don’t want someone who will crack under the pressure. That, and if you are dealing with an applicant pool where the majority of applicants are already in the top percentiles in terms of test scores, you need to find a way to distinguish between them anyhow.

Note, most of this data is from the 1980s, and as res noted the recentering of the SATs largely ruined them for admittance purposes. By sometime in the 00s ACT scores were a better prediction of good outcomes.

Like the US Navy and carrier landings, MIT has a competence floor of having to do a semester of math past the BC AP Calculus sequence, and one each of calculus based classical mechanics and E&M and optics etc. They don’t accept anyone who they don’t believe can do the work, and in the last 2-3 decades when it became much more nationally famous and popular if you made that cut the raw odds of acceptance were around one out of three.

As for AA every black I’ve met who went there belonged there. Of course there’s intense self-selection in even seriously considering going to MIT, especially for blacks as it’s not as likely a path to wealth and power like other schools they can get into if they can get into MIT. Cliche or not black nerds exist and MIT gets a fair number of them.

MIT definitely has problems with people cracking under the pressure. One thing they really like to see that’s probably related to that is evidence applicants can do projects. Class ranking in high school also has good predictive power.

And while I don’t think they look for it, there’s a massive bias in those who accept admittance offers of only children and first-borne. Another thing that weeds out people one way or another is coming from intact families.

You are overly emotional with your name calling.

A fourth tier school has worse students than a third tier school. Bright kids go to third tier schools (the main state U) to get a cheap and decent education. Dumb kids graduate from fourth tier schools.

Two people with sub-120 IQs are in charge at the only nuclear weapons factory in America.

What is your factual evidence for that assertion?

The Anonymous Coward did not cite any and I’m pretty sure doesn’t have any. Getting into MIT means you’ve got an IQ of say 145 at minimum, but the logical error of saying “graduates of fourth-tier schools” axiomatically means sub-120 IQ is, well, this AC didn’t attend MIT I’m pretty sure.

If AC was a bit more savvy, he’d know a lot of people have to attend “fourth-tier schools” because they’re cheap and they don’t qualify for serious financial assistance. Some can be very good, enough to prepare people for first rank MIT graduate programs. In part because they tend to have no pretenses about existing to do anything but teach, and they also avoid the pathologies of second to third tier schools that are envious of the first tier. Although all but the first tier have tendencies to cargo cult things.

Steve, you might find this analysis and essay on “Language homogenization at Harvard” interesting, as well as the Hacker News discussion of it where among other things the author goes into more depth about what he did and didn’t do.

First half is on a paper titled “Increasing Politicization and Homogeneity in Scientific Funding: An Analysis of NSF Grants, 1990-2020” but be sure to read the discussion because there’s a forcing function from the NSF itself, as well as a couple of secular trends that would help bring about the results. The posting uses it to explain the methodology that the author then uses on the Harvard Crimson daily student newspaper 1900 to 2000. The most interesting thing I found in the latter is a discontinuity between 1999 and 2000, with what looks like a steady state following for twenty years.

Perhaps evidence for a current peak of wokeness, and even more speculatively could presage extreme wokeness moving to colleges that ape Harvard and these people getting into positions of woke status where they could enforce the new holiness on a lot of society.

I have posted many negative comments about Mr. Rall’s columns.

But this is an informative, thoughtful essay.

I never say “peak” clown world because that’s a foolish attempt to call the end of a holiness spiral, but here we have some classic examples of trying to play by the other side’s rules, which is almost always going to fail.

A Filipina lady is here on Unz review as forefront figure defending trad America

Who as I recall brings legitimate grudges from the Imperial Japanese occupation of her homeland to the table, which doesn’t help us at all, and being a female PoC doesn’t for example stop the totlatarian tech Left from canceling her, Airbnb the latest example. But too many on the right are only willing to try to work through people like her.

You, as so many others, have failed miserably, by not naming the root cause of all the world’s troubles, and failing to strike the root.

It’s Jews, Jonathan.

That statement is in keeping with the usual stupid statements about Jews on this blog. Your claim that 0.19 percent of the earth’s population has total control over the 99.81 percent of the gentile population is moronic.

“There’s nothing middle-of-the-road except yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” according to a Texas farmer as related by Jim Hightower.

I would add that fighting a battle by the other side’s rules when the other side isn’t stupid is likely to rail.

Even our “Good times make soft Jews” reversion to the mean ones aren’t that stupid.

Maybe first look at the account of the “person” you’re quoting?

Totally honest MP for West Suffolk who definitely shouldn’t be in jail for corruption in public office.(parody) kneel before me maggots

While I can’t expect everyone to learn enough electrical engineering to know what’s possible now and in the future, you might still look up the current state of the art. Can’t be “smaller than a pinhead” and be able to communicate with anything.

But the kill switches for cars is real in the US. Buy your next one before it becomes mandatory as well as likely a colossal mess.

“What do you think is more likely, that the left which comes up with so many other bad policies suddenly becomes brilliant and gets it right on their Covid policy…”

The “left”, you say? Like Netanyahu, or Putin, you mean? Or Duterte, who thought that lockdown violators should be shot? Or that Chechen leader with the blingy gun, who imposed a flat out nighttime curfew during the lockdowns? Or maybe Sailer or Cochran or Unz? THAT’S what you call the “left”?

No, face it, your framing is as full of potholes as the rest of your failed narrative. This time around, it’s true that in the US the Russian and Chinese troll farms were able to hit a home run by focusing on gullible Trumpster geezers in disseminating their propaganda (though in the end, even Trump was sane enough to disavow the anti-vaxxers), but prior to Trump, anti-vaxxers tended to lean left. You chose to join cause with the Jenny McCarthys and Alicia Silverstones of the world and other such renowned vaccine experts, and that’s your damage. As far as I’m concerned, this is basic epidemiology more than right or left, as practiced for millennia. Washington imposed a quarantine on Boston during the Revolutionary War and enforced it at gunpoint, and required his soldiers to get vaccinated at a time when vaccination itself killed as many as 10% of those who opted for it. Was he a leftist too? So much for the eagle and American flag memes the anti-vaxxers keep waving.

In the end, I care what’s right and wrong more so than what’s right or left, and I’m not impressed by people who think scanning electron microscope imagery is a mafia plot. If you want to say that somehow makes me “left”, it says more about you than me. You might also want to question why your fellow bros all of a sudden thought Sweden had all the answers if this left-right thing continues to be a preoccupation.

Once upon a time, those willing to sell out America to Moscow at the drop of a feather were pretty much squarely on the left. Next time around, that polarity may similarly flip. Either way, they’ll likely still be traitors in my book, and I hope I won’t ever make a habit of checking which way the political winds are blowing when stating the obvious.

The Omicron wave has peaked in the U.K., that a game changer although people will still be hospitalized and dying from it for a while. That’s not true everywhere, isn’t true for my part of deep Red state America where total hospitalizations are now rising after being in a steady state for a long time, so it’s not “over” yet for Steve’s commentariat. And there’s still a great deal to discuss, people are still litigating everything back to before it broke out in Wuhan all the way to the discovery of viruses which too many deny, and the future is unknown, for example who knows what else “Biden” will try to milk out of this a day late and a dollar short, although things are certainly looking hopeful now.

Mark G seems to think that if Chicago had not bothered with lockdowns, no one would want to leave there. Give me a break. ‘Yeah, I’d have no problem with Floyd riots trashing stores all over downtown, or with high density urban living in general, and paying exorbitant city taxes and getting carjacked, or polar-bear-hunted, or pushed onto subway tracks. That was all fine and dandy, but you know, what really got my goat was having to wear a mask at Starbucks. No way, I said to myself, I’m heading to Texas because no one in a Starbucks in Austin ever wore a mask.”

What do you think is more likely, that the left which comes up with so many other bad policies suddenly becomes brilliant and gets it right on their Covid policy and the value of vaccines and vaccine mandates, mask mandates and lockdowns or that their Covid policy is just as poorly thought out and mistaken as their crime policy, their tax policy, their inflation policy, their immigration policy, their Afghanistan withdrawal plan, their environmental policy, their support of BLM and critical race theory and so on?

HA, for you information my recent comment on why the commonly raised argument that the vaccinated should not be concerned with the unvaccinated is fallacious:

https://www.unz.com/runz/covid-deaths-and-vaxxing-deaths/#comment-5127080

” So the vaccinated have little to fear from those who reject the needle” – Not really. Wrong (libertarian) thinking. The epidemic is more than just the sum of individual transmissions.

(1) While the peaks of viral load in vaccinated and unvaccinated are similar the decline of viral load in vaccinated is quicker, so the probability of being infected by unvaccinated will be somewhat higher.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00648-4/fulltext
Community transmission and viral load kinetics of the SARS-CoV-2 delta (B.1.617.2) variant in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in the UK: a prospective, longitudinal, cohort study

Viral Dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 Variants in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Persons
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2102507

Breakthrough infections among vaccine recipients were characterized by a faster clearance time than that among unvaccinated participants, with a mean of 5.5 days (95% credible interval, 4.6 to 6.5) and 7.5 days (95% credible interval, 6.8 to 8.2), respectively. The shorter clearance time led to a shorter overall duration of infection among vaccine recipients

(7.5 days)/(5.5 days) = 1.36 meaning that unvaccinated are 1.36 times more infectious because they have 1.36x more time to infect somebody.

(2a) Then there is the epidemic aspect of risk. While the effectiveness of vaccine against infection is much lower now still it is greater than zero. Thus among N number of unvaccinated one may expect more infected than among N number of vaccinated. So when you walk into the crowd of N vaccinated and N unvaccinated probability of being infected by unvaccinated will be higher.

(2b) At any stage of epidemic in population where k=70% are vaccinated chances of being infected (regardless if you are vaccinated or not vaccinated) will be lower than in population where 50% are vaccinated. Your chance of being infected whether you are vaccinated or unvaccinated decrease with the prevalence k of vaccination.

Because of (1), (2a), (2b) blaming the unvaccinated for increasing the risk of infection for everybody not just the vaccinated is justified.

Therefore not admitting Djokovic to Australia was rational and justified. Entrance of unvaccinated Djokowic would decrease the prevalence of vaccination in Australia and thus would increase the risk of infection for everybody.

By not admitting Djokovic Australia demonstrated that it is a serious country that acts consistently by enforcing its regulations and laws.

One must keep in mind that Australia soon after the pandemic began in Australia decided on the virus elimination strategy (Zero Covid). By sticking to it they achieved 25.4 times lower death toll than the US. If similar policy was carried out in the US over 800, 000 Americans would be still alive. And you want tell Australians to be inconsistent and lackadaisical because some Serbian schmuck is good at tennis?

“What in the Sam Hill do the Koch Brothers have to do with anything I’ve written, on this site, ever?”

You just submitted a video that you yourself admitted was from Reason magazine, and you’re asking me what the Koch Brothers have to do with anything? Are you and the dimwits who actually bothered to agree with you really that clueless? Oh wait, the latter group includes the guy who didn’t bother with the vaccine and then wound up in a hospital with COVID and now complains about about how hospitals are dropping the ball when it comes to COVID, while the other is a former self-appointed spokesman of the just-a-flu bros who now claims he was never a member. Well, never mind — it all makes sense.

“The people wanting to turn Americans into cannon fodder are the Neocons,…

Open your eyes. Plenty of groups follow the exact some rulebook, from Moscow to DC. Try and be as cynical about the troll farms and the libertarian think tanks you get your coronavirus “information” from as you are about big media or big pharma and get back to me.

Still, it represents the most significant federal effort to distribute face coverings since the pandemic began.

And that’s criminal two years into the pandemic. It would have taken a while to create factories to make the special filtering material used in HEPA mask filters, but we could have done it as long as the owners were assured of continued purchases after the pandemic, one mask maker that geared up for the 2009 swine flu pandemic almost went out of business after it when hospitals etc. returned to sourcing them from the PRC.

The West’s ruling trash shows all the time they’re not serious, for example France let Honeywell shut down there and the machines were scrapped. 3M is serious, but they can afford to maintain only 2X the machines etc. they usually use in their many factories.

The 400 million masks represent a little more than half of the federal stockpile that officials have worked to replenish since the earliest days of the Covid-19 outbreak

This is extremely dangerous if something new pops up and healthcare workers again need outsized quantities of masks (note industrial ones are fine as long as they aren’t doing procedures that might cause something to splash in their face). Obama didn’t replenish the stockpile after 2009 and the ones that were left from before then were generally expired by 2020, like their elastic bands were failing.

Given how late in the day of Omicron this will be, we can tell it’s another stunt by “Biden” to try to reduce the heat of being the worst President since Jimmy Carter. If we believe the polling, he’s below Carter’s lows.

All I can take away from that is……………that you really don’t know, nor does anyone.

No, you really don’t know. I have a good idea, and the various experts have an excellent one.

There is some genetic testing of certain cases that indicate a different strain. Fine. But that is only done in certain cases. For everyone else, they’re getting the same PCR or anti-body test that people were getting a year ago or more that does not differentiate between strains. And yet everything is said to be Omicron.

No, in the UK genetic sequencing is done with the PCR tests. By October 11th last year, Britain had uploaded 1 million Covid sequences and do even more now. It is not a small data set.

People are now suddenly coming down with a respiratory illness that is different than the previous version of COVID. Different how? Less severe symptoms? Couldn’t that just be due to people having greater immunity against it, because they’ve already been exposed

While previous exposure and, primarily, the vaccine, are greatly helping, the sudden appearance of mass reinfection, the symptom changes from Delta infections (even post vaccine), and the results of the large scale genetic sequencing are more than evidence enough for me. That you didn’t even realise that positive PCR tests are routinely sequenced should lead you to question where you’ve been getting your information from and your general knowledge.

Are you sure about childhood live attenuated viruses requiring multiple shots per disease? I thought MMR was a single shot. Googled, they recommend two doses for both infants and adults.

From the CDC

Also see from the CDC their “Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule for ages 18 years or younger.” I’m going to iterate over the ones specified through six years of age. One rotavirus requires two doses, one three. TDaP is a special case along with the two following, five for it plus another age 11-12 and 3-4 for the others (it’s credibly claimed we should have either struck with whole cell pertussis (whooping cough) or the vaccine should include another toxiod from it). Salk type inactivated whole virus four, although it’s arguably gratuitous to start at two months given how close it is to eradication even if now going in the wrong direction.

OK, my memory was wrong, confounded it with less effective vaccines I would guess, MMR live attenuated viruses only two doses starting at twelve months. Or maybe early dosing has been dropped because of the anti-vaxxers. And maybe that’s right, on the other hand measles in addition to its immediate effects trashes the immune system for a couple of years, is credibly claimed to be related to 90% of childhood deaths in the Third World and historically that was probably also true for the US, U.K. and Denmark where I guess this has been seriously studied.

Chicken pox also live attenuated virus and two doses, and that’s a really good idea to avoid shingles later in your life (ask me how I know…). “Passive” hepatitis A vaccines two doses, a non-Western freeze dried live attenuated virus only one dose per Wikipedia. For other nations, the WHO collects their vaccination schedules here.

I think smallpox called for so frequent revaccination because it had a 30% death rate, but vaccination is (nearly) harmless.

Per Wikipedia there were two variants of circulating smallpox, Variola major and Variola minor, the former was the most common and most severe with something like the overall 30% death rate we remember, the later “1%”or less.”

In the US in the 1960s-70s it was a younger childhood vaccine, you only needed a booster if you were going to travel someplace that still had it like Haiti (again, ask me how I know…). A really terrible disease, and a reminder that evolution to minor symptoms is not at all guaranteed.

I don’t think COVID fascism is the only reason people are moving from Blue hellholes to states like Florida and Texas, you’ve got to factor in the BLM summer of mostly peaceful protests. New York City is a trifecta of that, inherent limits for many in avoiding getting exposed to COVID due to shared high rise elevators, the subway system, and probably other packing people close together issues, and letting essentially no one own a gun (~60K licenses just for that for each of handguns and long guns). NY state is also bad in places with the most population about handgun ownership and concealed carry, and in any case you have deal with the authorities to get approvals. Other extreme Blue states cover a spectrum in this, and far too many places including NYC have Soros prosecutors adding to the need to get out because the police can’t protect you, can’t keep crime tamped down, and you can’t protect yourself.

I guess my general point is that all these things from COVID fascism to quality of living including crime tend to cluster together on the anti-freedom or pro-freedom as you put it sides, with exceptions in for example The Final Solution to the Medicaid Problem of sending COVID positive patients to nursing homes not set up for isolation in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania which are Purple but currently with Blue governors. And Florida is a near archetypal example, it’s ruling trash are for example terrified of open carry and ready to pounce on any self-defense shooter of a Special Victim like George Zimmerman, but it’s still generally good and as you note, when adjusted for age has done very well in handling COVID. Although I’d want to calculate that without the five Final Solution states.

they’re so grossly ignorant of SCIENCE!!! and so resistant to actually learning anything new about it—two solid years into a pandemic!!!

They operate in the pseudo-science paradigm where epistemology is subservient to hypotheses. But I would not discount possibility that many of them are trolls with no intent of learning and modifying their position. Look at Mr. Anon – his position about the validity of PCR tests has not changed.

The skepticism and suspiciousness is natural and useful in moderation but it have been weaponized and raised to the rabid level when the anti-covid disinformation propaganda was launched with “just-the-flu”, “no virus”, “PCR tests fake” and then “masks not needed or do not work”, “lockdowns not needed or do not work and harmful” and then going full anti-vaxx.

Ron Unz has observed that early in the pandemic the right and the alt-right were pretty angry with China blaming it for the virus release but when the anti-covid disinformation propaganda was launched the right and the alt-right shifted its attention from China to Western governments as the culprits who imposed a massive psy-op on them by launching a non existent virus pandemic. Who would blame China if it is just the flu? But if it is just the flu you must blame Washington, Media, Bill Gates, Davos for the psy-op of false pandemic.

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/lifting-the-lockdown-easy-does-it/?showcomments#comment-3863472

Based on the comments to that ZeroHedge article someone linked, it seems to have worked perfectly. The “China bioweapon” people at ZeroHedge are apparently getting totally swamped by the “It’s Just the Flu!!” people. After all, if It’s Just the Flu! how can anyone blame China?

It is well know that China’s soft power and her abilities in pushing their narrative in the West are very weak however Russia always was pretty good in disinformation games since the times of Okhrana and then KGB (*). There is no question that Russian media, bots and trolls were engaged in disinformation campaign form the very beginning of the pandemic. It is possible that the job of saving China’s ass was outsourced to Lubyanka and for Russians it was just an extra motive to do what they love to do anyway (**).

(*) See. Operation Infektion (wiki)

(**) Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate (October 2018)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/

Please define what you think a “traditional type vaccine” is.

All that came before the mRNA ones for Covid. You will probably tell me that there were mRNA vaccines used previously. If so, I hope they actually worked. To the average person like me, I never heard of mRNA before Covidxyz.

The trad vaxxx route probably doesn’t work for Corona viruses like Covidxyz and the common cold.

Thanks! Your essay on this addition to our first generation mRNA vaccine technology emphasizes to me how there’s a whole bunch of tricks cells and viruses use that we can try adding to get better vaccines besides just generating N copies of a target protein.

The mRNA vaccines are not particularly immunogenic, that’s why it takes three shots (and counting) to get an adequate immune response.

Can’t help but notice multiple doses are required for some childhood attenuated live virus vaccines, and the old smallpox vaccine of this type, perhaps due to its pre-sterile injection technology administration method wasn’t considered to provide good protection for more than three, maybe five years. And of course the toxiod (non-pathogenic analogue of a toxin) TDaP vaccine needs boosters every 5-10 years.

So I wonder how we can know this, especially with the moving target presented by variants of classic Wuhan. We can also see the limits of adenovirus vector vaccines which I assume produce copies of the spike protein for much longer than the current mRNA vaccines and also need multiple doses, and that appears to be evident in Janssen’s one jab results.

On the other hand as far as I know this is the first time this class of vectors has been tried beyond Janssen’s Phase III trial for their Ebola vaccine, which has never been put to the Phase IV (post-marketing) test against the virus. Based on the immunological surrogate endpoints, it’s believed the first dose using their adenovirus vector must be followed up in two months by one using Modified Vaccinia Ankara, and per Wikipedia

This prophylactic two-dose regimen is therefore not suitable for an outbreak response where immediate protection is necessary. As a precautionary measure for individuals at imminent risk of exposure to Ebola virus (for example healthcare professionals and those living in or visiting areas with an ongoing Ebola virus disease outbreak), an extra Zabdeno [the adenovirus] booster vaccination should be considered for individuals who completed the Zabdeno-Mvabea two-dose vaccination regimen more than four months ago.

For that matter, has there been any credible claims of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines that required only one dose for sterilizing efficacy against classic Wuhan? I think we can’t answer a lot of questions until this virus is no longer a moving target.

Please define what you think a “traditional type vaccine” is.

If we go by the name “vaccine” and what it originally was, a pox virus a lot less pathogenic than smallpox, then we’re talking attenuated viruses. While people have speculated this will be the Final Solution to the COVID Question, the problem is that these take a long time to develop unless nature hands us a strain or species like cowpox and vaccinia.

So you have to take the real thing, remove its fangs, and prove the fangs won’t come back, as they can with the Sabin type polio vaccine if it passes through enough people (fecal->oral route).

Are you really honestly going to tell me that people (like you?) who do not trust non-profits (Oxford), companies and governments for safe and effective COVID vaccines with newer technology will trust any attenuated virus vaccine developed, tested, and approved by these institutions? If you do I will laugh in your face.

Next most traditional would be inactivated whole virus vaccines, which for COVID are not a stunning example of success with maybe 1-2 exceptions. The PRC ones are from the PRC, and one isn’t very effective. The one Western effort I’m familiar with from Valneva isn’t looking good, the U.K. was an early investor and has canceled their order; this might be due to insufficient funding to do a Phase III trail big enough for Western regulators. Trusting India for this sort of thing is iffy, but Bharat Biotech’s paper(s) on their’s looked good, including a response to the nucleocapid protein.

After that is proteins and some other approaches that the like the above inactivated vaccines do their thing outside of cells, I’ve previously discussed how this approach hasn’t worked well for Sanofi Pasteur, Novavax or the Vector Institute.

Viral vector vaccines are technology almost as new as mRNA and have not been a stunning success, Oxford’s is not very effective, Sputnik V’s second dose is very hard to make, Janssen is more effective than Oxford’s but is not great in the pandemic context if you can deliver multiple doses of another vaccine to your population. They’re fairly fast to market, and Oxford had a big advantage in starting for real, on the ground, a Phase I trial for a MERS vaccine, their second attempt, in the middle of December 2019. But their side effect profiles are not great, Oxford and blood clots, Janssen the same but at a lower rate, Sputnik V’s claim of absolutely no serious side effects ever is not credible.

Leaving us with mRNA, which is very fast to market and easier to manufacture than stuff in cell cultures, which is every one of the above options except for Medicago making the spike protein in plants instead of bug cells. Now there’s preliminary efficacy results from them, might actually be good since they’re against the variants that followed classic Wuhan.

Which of course also answers your complaint about “low efficacy” in mRNA vaccines, although I have no idea why you’re so sure we’re stuck with mRNA vaccines, or more importantly, the first generation of them. I mean, if another technology actually was head to head better than mRNA and had a good side effect profile it would be favored, and getting to Phase II trials where you can start to guess all of that doesn’t require “billions.”

“Except nothing of the sort happened in Belarus, with just 5,574 deaths for a population of 9,439,233.”

Let me get this straight. The just-a-flu bros won’t believe a virus exists even when it’s sequenced and photographed with a scanning electron microscope, and even when it’s studied and sliced and diced by researchers from Atlanta/Seoul/Moscow/TelAviv, but they have no problem swallowing official stats from Lukashenko?

Well, there’s your answer: the Evan Neumann option. But if you do decide to follow through with it, I’d wait till winter is over before you head off to Minsk. In fact, you might want to stop a while in Sweden. I know the just-a-flu bros were hoping that was from whence their salvation comes, once not so long ago, but make sure they’re OK with you showing up — seems like they’re pretty gung-ho about vaccines over there. How quickly things change. Hopefully your Belarussian idols won’t have the same feet of clay the Swedish ones did.

I would say it’s impressive that these people can’t grok the concept of false color as a visualization aid, but in general they’re so grossly ignorant of SCIENCE!!! and so resistant to actually learning anything new about it—two solid years into a pandemic!!!—that it’s actually the sort of thing I’ve come to expect. Without actually knowing science, and trying to critique it on it’s own terms which should be possible, they demand you do things on their own terms even when that’s physically impossible (“isolation of a pure virus”), while denying a great deal of established science, which again if it’s science can be falsified as for example global cooling and global warming were in turn.

Whatever Galileo said to Kepler didn’t stick, nor did it for him and his contemporaries who insisted orbits were circles stick to the Church. Because while both were properly skeptical of epicycles et. al. (a word which to this day is a criticism of the “you appear to be going down the wrong path” type), the Church also knew the data didn’t fit circles (Kepler realized they were ellipses). That was the Church’s scientific issue with Galileo, his bigger crime was that he was a jerk in general and about this. Which we can observe is a tradition that continues to this day in so many who are wrong, or Not Even Wrong about COVID.

In the middle of winter a lot of people have found out that facemasks perform the secondary function of keeping your face warm.

Unfortunately, if you need to wear glasses they also tend to have a “side effect” of fogging them up….

The thing I still can’t “get” is why so few on the Right didn’t realize how they make facial recognition harder. If we could have normalized wearing face masks when you feel sick like in Japan we would have struck a blow to partly counter the more fascist and unneeded non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPIs) various segments of our ruling trash imposed on us.

The problem with creating sterilizing immunity is that intramuscular injection, the easiest route to go with an injected vaccine, does not cause secretory IgA antibodies in the respiratory tract.

So, why not just do an intranasal vaccine? Non-replicating, generally meaning non-live-attenuated, intranasal vaccines do not induce much secretory IgA, either.

The mRNA vaccines could be created a lot faster than a live-attenuated one could be created. With the mRNA ones, we knew that they could not revert to virulence. Live-attenuated vaccines need to be tested more thoroughly.

There are couple-few intranasal and oral covid vaccines being tested, I don’t know if any are in phase III trials yet.

If they are approved, i strongly suggest getting one, even if you’ve already had mRNA + boosters. If the virus cannot get a foothold in you, the chance that it’s going to do you any harm is exremely low.

I sort of understand your cynicism. Certainly, at the beginning of the pandemic, the authorities got a lot of things wrong about Covid, but that’s because it was a new disease and the situation required them to nonetheless project confidence in order to reduce panic.

The thing is that, by now, Covid is one of the most studied phenomena in human history, coming close behind HIV, the Holocaust, 9/11, the assassination of JFK, IQ tests and more*, and so the expert consensus is generally very good, and certainly excellent considering how hard it is to understand something that is constantly changing and with which you cannot conduct easy laboratory experiments of infecting people on purpose.

Specifically, as regards believing the consensus on Omicron, the UK conducts a wildly disproportionate number of the global viral genetic tests. This is a complicated process but one that is long-established as effective, and the labs are not part of any sort of conspiracy. They are staffed by ordinary people in civilian jobs, some of whom I have met. I trust them fine.

However, for confirmation, I also know doctors in a few countries, and have read of more, who have seen different symptoms appear as the Omicron wave has hit. They noticed this independently and would find it ludicrous if someone disagreed.

On top of that, both those medical staff, and ordinary people I know, have hit the first wave of reinfection. Many of the doctors, who first got Covid at the beginning, suddenly got it again only once Omicron was established, and I had the same experience, as did a close friend.

In this way, from personal experience, to those of familial and intimate relations, to those of professionals I know, to global scientific consensus, both as reported directly, and through the better newspaper articles, I can be as sure of these things as I can be sure of anything.

And if wrong, I am in no place to even begin to know.

*Yes, I am being intentionally provocative, but it is a good point. Far too many people pick these subjects, convince themselves of their arguments, test it against complete amateurs whom they “defeat” as anyone would by their obsessiveness, and declare themselves “right.” Which is like reading about football every day, always “winning” arguments at the pub with your far wider knowledge, but then thinking that you know more than the actual managers, or even close to what they know, which is completely ridiculous. The first part is a fun intellectual game, but the second part, if performed only earnestly, betrays a common character flaw, though I am not sure exactly what to call it?

Cloud is just a metaphor for quasispecies diversity. There is no necessary center to a cloud that no genome can get too far from. The fact remains that within an infection, there is a selection for spreading better within that host. This happens even though it is not in the best interest of the virus. There is “fecundity” selection inside every cell. Maybe the fact that you shed virus for a while before the immune response kicks in is a clue to this. “The” virus benefits from having you walking around and shedding virus, but within you, the selection favors increased reproduction, which means increased virulence.

If temperature in the lungs restricts it from infecting the lower respiratory tract, that’s pretty easy to evolve around. We can select viruses that replicate well at lower temperatures quite readily. I’m not sure if anyone has tried to select viruses that have higher temperature cutoffs than the wild type. Mammalian cell cultures don’t grow well at around 41 °C. While temperature sensitivity, meaning heat intolerance, is easy to select or intentionally modify in a protein. High thermal tolerance is harder to get. The most effective way is to reduce the number of conformations the unfolded state has, reducing the entropy gain when the protein unfolds. That is harder to do, as the best way to do it requires cysteines in the right places so that the disulfide bridges constrain it when unfolded. That requires paired mutations in places that don’t interfere with the folded state. Hard to evolve. But, most proteins are only marginally stable. This makes sense because once it is, say, 99.9% folded there is little fitness to be gained by being more stable, so it really cannot evolve to be more stable, implying that small improvements in thermostability are probably easier to evolve by selection at high temperature if you are only looking for improvements of a few degrees at reasonably low temperatures, say, under 40 °C.

You don’t really need to get tested. Just take 10,000 [IU of D3] until you stop getting infections.

At the very least you need to get your calcium blood and/or urine levels checked because too much Vitamin D can cause a variety of problems. If you want to get started without checking for a while, I’d go with a more modest 2,000 to 5,000 IU, although depending on how deficient you are, and you almost certainly are, there is of course a premium on getting up to a good level right now ASAP.

One of the many curious things about Omicron is per this December 2021 Science article:

Omicron clearly did not develop out of one of the earlier variants of concern, such as Alpha or Delta. Instead, it appears to have evolved in parallel—and in the dark. Omicron is so different from the millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes that have been shared publicly that pinpointing its closest relative is difficult, says Emma Hodcroft, a virologist at the University of Bern. It likely diverged early from other strains, she says. “I would say it goes back to mid-2020.”

That raises the question of where Omicron’s predecessors lurked for more than a year. Scientists see essentially three possible explanations: The virus could have circulated and evolved in a population with little surveillance and sequencing. It could have gestated in a chronically infected COVID-19 patient. Or it might have evolved in a nonhuman species, from which it recently spilled back into people.

The mice theory for that nonhuman species explanation was per Wikipedia advanced in this paper, two key sentences in its abstract are:

The molecular spectrum of mutations (i.e., the relative frequency of the 12 types of base substitutions) acquired by the progenitor of Omicron was significantly different from the spectrum for viruses that evolved in human patients but resembled the spectra associated with virus evolution in a mouse cellular environment. Furthermore, mutations in the Omicron spike protein significantly overlapped with SARS-CoV-2 mutations known to promote adaptation to mouse hosts, particularly through enhanced spike protein binding affinity for the mouse cell entry receptor.

I was watching the Wall Street Journal Editorial Report, when a News Alert cut into the 60-minute program, around 1/3 through. I lost the remaining 2/3 of this superb program to the hostage coverage. (except for the final 2 minutes at the end). The hostage coverage consisted of a camera focused on a police SUV with flashing lights, in the synagogue parking lot. It would be an anti-semitic hate crime not to devote 40 minutes to the SUV’s flashing lights, I guess.

Yet, to my knowledge, no tests of a sterilizing vaccine have been undertaken.

AZ/Oxford did try with a small subset of Phase III test subjects giving them weekly tests. But that’s high touch, expensive, and the proxy of not getting symptomatic illness was used for other Western vaccines and most testing of Oxford, excepting the one jab version of Janssen which was never intended to be sterilizing although that was a secondary endpoint after the primary of preventing serious disease.

In theory we would have deduced how good these were in sterilizing in Phase IV post marketing, but Alpha started roaming the earth about the time any of these vaccines were ready to be tried on the general population. And no one sees a pressing need quite yet for a reformulation of these first generation vaccines.

I would expect that’ll change if and when significantly new variants stop popping up. For now the mitigations they deliver are considered to be good enough. To address your specific points:

(a) Is addressed above in part. I’d add that requiring weekly swabbing—how far into your upper respiratory system, and how far for classic Wuhan through Delta vs. Omicron?—is going to cause people to drop out of your trial. And I’d say it what happened was, based on the years of research into making effective and safe SARS type coronavirus vaccines, each organization or company making the best vaccine they could (some did try out more than one candidate). If it turned out to be sterilizing, great! If not, well, they’ve still prevented a lot of bad outcomes.

(b) Different candidates are easy to make with modern biotech, but testing them on animals and humans is another matter. How good are our mouse models with one or more humanized systems for example? Non-human primates are expensive and if your goal is to determine how well the vaccine works on a naive subject, they’re “used up” for the purposes of COVID testing after their first exposure, they’d be like most of us with prior vaccine and/or natural immunity.

As for biology in general, maybe look into how the body can make millions of different antibodies from many many fewer genes, including antibodies against things which have never previously existed on earth. The latter factoid convinced me in the 1970s to learn about the immune system on an “as needed” basis, and there’s still a lot we don’t understand about it. Since this is what we trigger to react to a vaccine….

Mostly, though, I’d say Omicron put a spike into your ambitions and showed the conservative approach all the organizations in question took was wise. For example a proven sterilizing vaccine for Delta would be of very little use by now.

You do an excellent job of laying out many of the constraints in drug and biologic development in answering megabar’s question. Let me fill in what gaps I can:

> But the whole point is that the side effects are rare and the [SARS-CoV-2] vaccines have saved many more lives than they have taken.

This is undoubtedly true, overall.

As ‘everybody’ knows, the risks of Covid (death, severe illness, long Covid) are higher for people who are older, and for people who are in poorer health. It follows that the older and the sicker one is, the greater is the benefit-to-cost ratio.

Reliable numbers are hard to come by, especially as the situation keeps changing. As a wild guess, the odds for a 30-year-old who is healthy (not obese, not diabetic, etc.) might be 10x in favor of vaccination, perhaps rising to 100x for a healthy 70-year-old. The presence of risk factors (comorbidities) would raise the odds even higher, in favor of vaccination.

Given the overall mildness of Covid symptoms — in general — to healthy children, teens, and (perhaps) twentysomethings, I am not confident in comparing the benefits and risks of three courses of vaccination for these groups. In particular, healthy men ~16-25 have a non-negligible increase in severe myocarditis after the third (booster) dose. One or two doses may be a better choice for them. [Edit: TWBT argues against the efficacy of one Pfizer dose, immediately upthread.]

It’s a numbers question. I’ve looked for them, but not hard enough to point to sources that are relevant and trustworthy.

Links and references appreciated.

The theory is that an ecological battle occurs inside that single body and the patient transmits to others a significantly more competitive variant of the virus, the “winner” that turned out to be more “fit” than the previous dominant variant.

That sounds more like a noghtmare than a theory, TWBT.

– Why not asshume ( Dr. John Campbell), that Omikron will turn Covid into somthing mild and endemic – on the basis of the current data, coming in?

For a sack full of detailed infos from the perfectly harmonius choir of GB experts tuning in to that optimistic Covid-ditty of mine – see here:

https://www.waronflu.org/dr-john-campbell-daily-covid-19-updates/

Ah – and just in case you’d hesitate – no: It is no insecure website as the automatic warning says – the website is the perfcly reliable private site of perfectly tustworthy Dr. John Campbell with the latetst data from Saturday night.

The vax people are partly to blame in that the vax was oversold originally – NOW you tell us that the vaccines aren’t really sterilizing?

One thing that’s obvious in hindsight is a great reluctance in a lot of classes of people like politicians to act on likely to almost sure probabilities. Instead they wait until the problem was banging on the door or already in the house (and then often overreact). Cuomo was first all “hug Chinese people,” by 4/3/2020 was directing the National Guard to seize “unused” respirators from upstate.

So once it became obvious contrary to PRC lies that classic Wuhan was readily transmitted by air we should have known it was very possible it would be significantly worse than SARS in transmission, but we kept getting “things are fine a this point” and we’re “handling” it well messaging. While CDC ineptitude and FDA malfeasance allowed it to take hold without our knowing, only 4,000 people tested through the end of February and no looking for community transmission allowed.

Here we had for the first time in the history of modern biomedicine a novel respiratory pathogen causing a pandemic, and most origin explanations left the future natural history of it wide open for significant mutations, although we can still reasonably hope we don’t get a new strain that avoids almost all existing immunity (see the paper on 20% of us having significant preexisting immunity through targeting a region that’s conserved in all coronaviruses).

This is not at all like immunizing for measles many centuries after it jumped from animal rinderpest to humans, it had a very long time to get adapted to humans (and that’s not always going to result in a possibly vaguely acceptable outcome, see smallpox).

So any scientist type who appended “[against classic Wuhan]” to “has 95% efficacy in its Phase III trial” didn’t get his signal boosted. More bad vibes, might as well kick the can down the road. In a sense worked for Trump, he was out of the Oval Office by the time Alpha started taking hold in the US.

Not really sure what to do about this but tell the truth (and get labeled as alarmist, not counting those who still insist viruses don’t exist etc.). It doesn’t help that propagandists never let go of the earliest inaccurate pronouncements of politicians and so called experts, stuff they’d never have believed if they had enough education and did enough research, or were good at choosing experts to trust. Or you say, only interested in what they can use as a club.

The longer it is in an infected person and the more people it is in, then the more chance of a viable variant mutation happening, so there are reasons to think we have not seen the last of it.

Right you are.

We’re pretty sure all of Alpha, Delta, and Omicron were brewed up in individual humans who didn’t throw it off quickly. This is especially likely for Beta and Omicron, both first discovered in the south of Africa where HIV is endemic. The theory is that an ecological battle occurs inside that single body and the patient transmits to others a significantly more competitive variant of the virus, the “winner” that turned out to be more “fit” than the previous dominant variant.

The thought of foreign objects being shoved into my orifices and scraped around turns my stomach.

But, but, it’s for SCIENCE!!!

Seriously, if that meme resonates for you you might ask your public health department on Facebook if they’d like you to use up a test if you think you’ve got a mild case of Omicron and report the result to them. Otherwise it’s best to reserve them for healthcare contexts and the like where differential diagnosis will help confirm if they need to isolate you.

‘Lateral flow test’ sounds like a schoolboys’ pissing competition to see who can urinate the greatest distance.

It does have a subpar name, but it’s really cool technology, uses antibodies and gold to provide a quick although not as sensitive test as something like RT-PCR.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/cdc-director-admits-over-75-of-covid-deaths-in-people-with-at-least-4-comorbidities is answered by https://www.unz.com/isteve/is-omicron-just-the-flu-bro/#comment-5120086

Or just read the update in your fine article, the Daily Wire had enough self-respect to make the needed correction.

The Anti-Gnostic is also studiously ignorant of how schedules for many existing vaccines include three doses within one year, how we didn’t have the luxury of figuring out optimal dosing schedules, or how schedules in the middle of a pandemic might be different than for endemic but low prevalence pathogens. So for example existing schedules that space out prime and first boost dose by two months don’t make sense in terms of giving people the highest immunity as quickly as possible (Janssen, and only when the boost dose is Janssen is two months based on their second Phase III trial, the likely explanation being waiting for the body’s immune system responses to the virus vector to wane, a known problem with this approach).

So look at for example this WHO collection of many nations’ vaccination schedules and see for example 2-4-6 month examples. See also for example how Pfizer’s vaccine doesn’t appear to develop good cellular immunity until after the second dose.