JustOneMinute

OK, Back To Zoom Calls Everyone

The Biden Recovery hits a wall. Clearly the gloomy jobs report is due to fear of out-of-control Federal spending. Unless its due to a failure by Biden to propose free child care, pick up the tab on student debt, push for DC statehood, pack the Supreme Court and pound the table for the Green New Deal.

Or maybe this sort of recovery takes time? Nahh... crazy talk.

Go long candles. And start brushing up on your cave art.

Lock 'Em Up

Facebook continues its suspension of Trump. Trump has as much media access as anyone in the world, so I just can't get exercised about a 'free speech' issue here.

Banning lunatic fringe anti-vax groups gets closer to a danger zone. I generally think the anti-vaxxers are doing the public a disservice, but plenty of libs (and Facebook employees) would say the same about gun rights enthusiasts.

Now, if Facebook wants to ban their own highly lucrative practice of selling micro-targeted ads, we'd be getting somewhere. With their micro-targeting, good speech can't counter bad speech because (unlike radio, TV or print) most of those ads never hit the mainstream radar. Can't rebut what you haven't heard!

But yes, pigs will fly to the board meeting where FB changes their ad policies.

MORE: Trump has launched "From The Desk of Donald J. Trump". His latest missive suggests he has not yet Moved On:

Have You Herd?

'Herd immunity' for COVID probably won't happen, per the NY Times. Variants plus vaccine hesitancy mean we'll have COVID as background noise for a while:

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

FWIW, its not just us. Circulating disease anywhere creates opportunities for new variants, and the developing world won't have a chance to get vaccinated (or not) for quite a while now.

Groan. Annual booster shots, like with the flu. Experts will study emerging variants and guess at the appropriate booster for the next season. I'll guess COVID season will overlap with flu season, since more of us are indoors breathing each others deadly air. 

And do keep in mind:

Herd immunity is often described as a national target. But that is a hazy concept in a country this large.

“Disease transmission is local,” Dr. Lipsitch noted.

“If the coverage is 95 percent in the United States as a whole, but 70 percent in some small town, the virus doesn’t care,” he explained. “It will make its way around the small town.”

Or vice versa. The Times presents a cool but sort of unreadable graphic showing poll results about vaccine hesitancy across the US. Northeasterners have a good shot at wanting a shot. Down South, less so.

Squint and see!

 

Saturday Afternoon

Away we go.

Energy Weapons Used Near White House?!?

This is the biggest story ever to be totally overlooked. From CNN:

Washington (CNN)Federal agencies are investigating at least two possible incidents on US soil, including one near the White House in November of last year, that appear similar to mysterious, invisible attacks that have led to debilitating symptoms for dozens of US personnel abroad.

Multiple sources familiar with the matter tell CNN that while the Pentagon and other agencies probing the matter have reached no clear conclusions on what happened, the fact that such an attack might have taken place so close to the White House is particularly alarming.

Defense officials briefed lawmakers on the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on the matter earlier this month, including on the incident near the White House. That incident, which occurred near the Ellipse, the large oval lawn on the south side of the White House, sickened one National Security Council official, according to multiple current and former US officials and sources familiar with the matter.

In a separate 2019 episode, a White House official reported a similar attack while walking her dog in a Virginia suburb just outside Washington, GQ reported last year.

 

Those sickened reported similar symptoms to CIA and State Department personnel impacted overseas, and officials quickly began to investigate the incident as a possible "Havana syndrome" attack. That name refers to unexplained symptoms that US personnel in Cuba began experiencing in late 2016 -- a varying set of complaints that includes ear popping, vertigo, pounding headaches and nausea, sometimes accompanied by an unidentified "piercing directional noise."

 

Apparently lawmakers have been briefed bit not Joe Biden. From Jim Geraghty:

 

Q    Mr. President, what do you know about this supposed direct energy attack on the Ellipse and the person who was injured?

THE PRESIDENT:  I don’t know anything about it.

Q    So you have not been briefed on it?

THE PRESIDENT:  I have not been briefed on it.

Like Obama, Biden gets the bad news by watching the news.

Now To Be Fair, I am mildly sympathetic to the decision to not brief the President. That would be a heck of a brief:

"Mr. President, we aren't sure what, if anything happened. We don't know who did it and we don't have any decisions to be made about how to respond. We've been investigating seemingly similar incidents for years and don't have many answers."

This is not actionable intel at this point and the intelligence services probably don't need to hear Biden rant at them to get to the bottom of this. On the other hand, the media went wild over the idea that Trump was giving a pass to Russians paying bounties for dead American soldiers in Afghanistan. Yes, Trump said it was Fake News and it remains unconfirmed, but still - we expect a but more energy from our Media Lapdogs Watchdogs.