Wednesday, May 05, 2021

American Black Ducks napping


 

17 comments:

  1. Eldest got his second dose of Pfizer on Sunday. His symptoms were about medium, compared with the rest of the family. Root*Center*Son gets his second Pfizer on Friday and Eldest's*Spouse gets her second Pfizer on Mother's Day. At that point all the adults in the family will be vaccinated (and "marinating"). And right about that point we'll hear if the eldest of our grands can get vaccinated! By September, these three will be 15, 14, and 12. The youngest of the three won't turn 12 until late July, so she will be at a disadvantage at first. But ... it's HAPPENING! I was surprised to read that they're already testing babies as young as 6 months old. Pretty scary to be a parent and agree to that. My heart goes out to them all.

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    1. Hey, they start routine vaccinations at six months; that's about the time that the babies' own immune systems start working well, and the protective efficacy of the inherited mothers' antibodies is wearing off. And bear in mind that Covid-19 is probably going to be with us for a very long time--certainly for decades, perhaps forever. Nothing scary at all.

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    2. Sure, but those vaccines are already proven safe. I was speaking of the first babies being tested. And I take it your reaction to the vaccine wasn't so terrible. I sure wouldn't wish the reaction I had on a baby...! It is scary not knowing what the vaccine will do to a young child and waiting to see how it all turns out.

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    1. Maybe an executive order could borrow some money from the F-35 procurement program to get collections from tax cheats going, then fund the program from revenues--no taxes required!

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    2. Hey, as far as we in Vermont are concerned, they are welcome to sell all the darn F-35s that got placed here in Vermont and give the money where it's needed. The noise these beasts make is horrific.

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  3. The return of currency (as revenue) to the place where it was issued serves two main purposes: to provide information about where the currency has been and who used it for what and to provide for its redistribution. Congress is tasked with spending currency into the economy to pay for necessary goods and services. However, about a hundred years ago they were persuaded to organize a central bank and let the bankers have first dibs on the distribution while Congress proposed to limit itself to spending the collected revenue on projects dear to the hearts of the electeds to curry favor with voters or the voters employers. This roundabout has been disrupted by the virus and, because the CARES Act demonstrated that banks are slow dispensaries, Congress came up with a package that distributed currency more efficiently. Where Congress had allocated $500 Billion for banks to distribute as forgivable loans if they did not lay people off, over nine months the banks were only able to distribute $42 Billion. Who knew it takes so much longer to spend money than to collect it? Republicans did not want another rescue package because bankers are their friends and they wanted to give the banks more time to earn interest. Also, they do not want to admit that decades of rationing had prompted hoarding and stagnation. Trump's early boost of military spending did not have the desired effect.. For that matter, the premature termination of the rescue in 2009 resulted in an anemic "recovery" from the 2008 crash. By the way, World War II cost $4 trillion, the pandemic has cost $5 trillion, the 2008 crash cost $14 trillion. Dollars are worthless, but relative values are instructive.

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    1. Very interesting.
      What would WWII have cost in 2008 dollars? Today?

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    2. Four trillion 1942 dollars = 65 trillion 2021 dollars, per government inflation calculator. But the true cost would have been much more.

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    3. Whoa! That's a huge chunk of change. One more way we see what a sacrifice was made by people in that war.
      And how ironic to be considering this today...as I received in the mail today a large notebook from my sister, with all the letters my grandmother saved during WWII... Letters home from my uncles, including one from my Uncle Walter after he was wounded at Iwo Jima at age 18. And one home from my Uncle Harold speaking of the Invasion and the latest invasion in Holland at which his was one of the first planes in to the battle and that it came out looking like Swiss cheese. Or telling about his new fiancee, an English woman named Vivienne, and that they planned to wed maybe in February (1945). And the letter telling my grandmother exactly what happened to Harold's new plane when it crashed during a training mission and all aboard were killed on 15 February 1945.

      The sacrifices were immense.

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    4. It's a wonder that no one in either my family or my wife's family died in WWII, but it was a near thing several times. After the war my wife's parents moved from upcountry to a city near Yokohama. The old carpenter who lived just down the street and remodeled their house was one of the few Japanese survivors of Iwo Jima. The story of how my wife's younger maternal uncle survived was spooky--but out in those sorts of remote country areas spooky things had a way of happening. Same thing where I am originally from; my parents told me of a couple of them. And being outsiders, there were probably other stories the locals didn't share with them.

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  4. VT May 5th: 23,247-23,191 = 56
    Active Cases:2139
    Deaths:248(x3)
    Recovered:20,860 (89.7%)
    Hospital:15(-2) ICU:4(-2)
    Tests:382,981 (+578)

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  5. Ironically, the arm where I got the Tetanus shot today feels fine. (A first!) However, the arm where I got the Pneumonia shot is complaining a bit. The pharmacist who administered both was sure I'd feel nothing much from the P shot but warned the T shot could make trouble. So we made sure to administer the P shot to the arm I sleep on. Heh.

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    1. I got three shots at once two or three years ago, including the new pneumococcus vaccine. I had a sore arm too, and I think it was in the one with the pneumococcus vaccine plus another. Well, no big. I've seen two strong young people very nearly die from pneumococcal pneumonia; it is still a killer. When I first started working in clinical microbiology there were only six reported cases of penicillin-resistant pneumoccus reported, all in South Africa. For the past thirty years of so pneuococci have used penicillin for sauce. The last I heard there was only one antibiotic left that was uniformly effective against it.

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  6. Speaking of vaccinations, my mother had smallpox as a child, nursed me, and as a result, has been close to impossible to vaccinate me for smallpox for my whole life. Best you can get is one tiny blister, and that's usually after three or four trys.

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    1. I had the smallpox vaccine as a child, and then had it at the student health center when I was in college--they were giving out all sorts of vaccines for free, so why not? I had no scar from the initial vaccination, and just a tiny red spot that went away without scarring from the second. They don't try to scarify with the antigen the way they used to. Dollars to doughnut holes that you are very well vaccinated.

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