SeniorJunior

I’m not saying “Build Back Better” is a slogan I originated...  ...It just struck me that I said it loud and clear in July of 2008 in my endless blog. That was just after the vicious floods in the spring of 2008. They made  a huge mess of Iowa and so many other places.  The phrase was (first?) used big time in 2009 by former President Bill Clinton while referring to Haiti after the political upheaval and storms of 2008.  The U.N. picked it up in 2015. It’s a good, common sense slogan. Luckily (Luck, HA!) Most of what I was talking about then was “hard infrastructure" and the passed and signed Infrastructure Bill addresses that and more. Thank You Lord. But that’s only two of the legs on the three legged American stool, the other part of the infrastructure is the WorkForce, and ours is as worn out, over-used and neglected as the creaky old bridges. That stool is rickety, and it makes no sense to just fix part of it. So the fact that the contemporary Build Back Better puts

 ... On Most things. Andrew Sullivan "Gave 'em hell" on Sixty Minutes Sunday night 11/14/2011.   He's a conservative author, editor and blogger. As a British-American, his style combines the perception of an outsider with the devotion of a native son. "Too many Americans  are no longer the citizens that the founders were counting on."    [On our current hyper-polarization]: "You wait and hope that will pass. So that we can get back to the pragmatic process of governing reality. And that's not what we're engaged in now. We're flying from reality. We're inventing abstractions and ideologies. We're fighting each other. We're demonizing each other. The system can still work. It's we who are broken." His whole interview strikes me as so important that everyone, on both sides of our Great Divide should give it a listen. He's a gay man and an AIDS survivor, which makes his commentary poignant on the subject of gay marria

The Good News (updated) I got my Moderna booster jab Nov 9th. Now I feel less "old fart vulnerability," but how much less?  I had not seen stats on how the “boosted” crowd is doing. Are we now bullet proof?  Slightly, somewhat, very? Googling the question, I found this New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) piece which is a thorough analysis of Israeli data on their experience with the Delta variant in their highly, and early, vaccinated population. Delta knocked the straw out of Israel. August 2021 So they went full barrel with Pfizer booster shots, with their over-65s first. Then they did an excellent job of tracking booster effectiveness. The study has this exciting headline: Protection of BNT162b2 (Pfizer) Vaccine Booster against Covid-19 in Israel (Link to the study) Bottom line of the research? Boosters do super.  Twelve days after your jab, you are  eleven times less likely  to get infected compared to a fully vaccinated peer, and  19.5 times less likely  to get a ser

  We Will Meet Our Betters Avi Loeb in Scientific American : "If the  Perseverance rover  finds evidence for microbes on Mars, our self-esteem will not be affected since it is obvious that we are more intelligent than they are. But if the rover bumps into the wreckage of a spacecraft far more advanced than we ever produced, our ego will be challenged." We WILL find evidence of life with science and tech incomprehensibly ahead of where we are now. Maybe not tomorrow, or the next decades, or the next centuries. (Too bad we don't live long enough to catch more of these rare events.) But it is inevitable. They may be so far superior to us they will seem like giant gods. Hey, Fellas. Look at this little blue one. Probably a giant metal mind, probabilities be told. Biological creatures, at least on oxygen planets, are vulnerable to death and decay, even with great technology. Artificial intelligence will  inevitably  evolve into superintelligence. At that juncture SI will preva

Look Into an Author's Mind and Find His Books. Look into his books and find his soul. I am NOT Scooter's soul, whatever you think Ok, Ok, maybe just his typos. Consider this a marketing move and we'll be square. Bigger pictures HERE Look into this sci-fi quartet and find new worlds (a bunch)  and new times -- both future and past.  

"Work" has become a dirty word for many These days people are uncertain about what to do with their work life. We read all the time that the Covid lockdown caused many people to reconsider whether to go back to the job(s) they had, or something like them. Maybe they were working for minimum wage, maybe working two or more jobs to make ends meet, putting in 80 hours in conditions that weren't all that great, getting few or no benefits. This situation has made "work"a terrible thing for some.  There is even a subReddit called "antiwork," with a half million members. ( The graffiti above is from that sub.)  Judging from their comments and votes, most of their work experience has been really rotten.  It is fundamentally a sad subReddit.  They are looking desperately for an alternative way to survive - and enjoy life in the process.  ...Short of that, how about a decent job? With a while to think about their personal rat race, some have thought it over and

  THE WATER PROJECT for AMERICA (WPA!) Solving the looming fresh water shortage* while Taking a big step in “Adaptation” to the climate crisis This new WPA will be limited to a very tightly defined mission. (Good for focus and bad for distractions.**) [Much like the Apollo Project was tightly defined as “landing men on the moon.” Period.] The Mission:   Solve the Fresh Water Problem in the USA The direct benefits are huge.  (“Game Changer” is an understatement.) It will address a severe problem pending for people of all economic, political and cultural stripes. It has the potential to be supported by even diametrically opposed subsets of the population. The offshoot benefits are unpredictable but, based on history, will be extraordinary. (It will turn on the creative spigot like the Apollo Project did.) Click one version of this gigantic project: No More Floods; No More Droughts *How bad is the water crisis? ** Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalis

 So Just How Infectious IS chicken pox? Can you catch chicken pox just by looking someone in the eye?* Will chicken pox seek you out and hunt you down like a dog?** Will chicken pox infect you if you are downwind half a mile?*** Whatever, it must be BAD. BECAUSE THE DELTA VARIANT IS "AS INFECTIOUS AS CHICKEN POX!!" Not to make light of the damn Delta variant... it's apparently terribly infectious. But to assume everybody knows how infectious chicken pox is -- then make that comparison hundreds of times without explaining just what it means -- seems berserk to me as a communication device. I'm an old guy with lots of memories about chicken pox pre-vaccine (1995, U.S. approval), but I really didn't know how infectious it is. So I Googled my brains out, and found this: (In english) The Delta variant is more   transmissible than the viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu and smallpox, and it is as contagious as chickenpox, according to

  Cognitively Challenging * ** I know I'm missing something here.   * STAT ** AP

70% of Republicans BELIEVE Trump won.   They BELIEVE in this one man. Many BELIEVE God sent him. Some BELIEVE he has never been wrong.    Bow down. LOWER! Say the magic words, again and again.                                                                    'Trump has never actually been wrong' Never been wrong, Never Wrong. Really! Ah, belief!   "A feeling of being sure that a person or thing exists or is true or trustworthy, such as a  belief  in ghosts." - Merriam Webster

" America: The Only Advanced Country  Without Universal Health Care" Yeah, yeah, I know, but socialism ....! For another perspective, what do people in countries WITH  universal health care think about all that?                                                                             Oh dear... The New York Times has put together a straightforward little work of communications art*, methinks, in this six minute video. I love it, but I suspect the profiteers who lobby so long and so furiously to maintain their super profitable status quo hate it.   Watch it here (clickey, clickey) Other Duffer rants on Health Insurance. *Consultantitus Attack Countries with universal healthcare include Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Isle of Man, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Sweden,  Switzerland , Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

 Indulging My Catastrophe Imagination (Hey, I write sci-fi)   " T he warning signs of a longer pandemic" (Headline in Axios*) The perfect pla ce for a sci-fi extrapolation!   With active cases of Covid-19 mutating into Covid-21 being so numerous,  there is a (darn near) inevitable end-game story.  Thus... The End IF:     - The South African variant “evades the Pfizer vaccine”      - The UK B-1.1.7 variant is “50% more transmissible”      - More young people are getting Covid and it’s making them sicker (news pending)     - New mutations are popping up like Orville Redenbacker's best... THEN:   One or more sci-fi-horror stories are being written in the mystical language  of statistics.  ( 3σ ) Dramatis personae     -  “ Heartless Dodger ”     A new variant will dodge ALL vaccines     -  “ Brain Drainer ”   A mean mutation will turn “long Covid” into insta-dementia:      -  “ Coin Flip Killer ”  Badass   variant will be 50% fatal:  Dodger, Drainer and Killer meet, share RN

...AND FOR A GAIL COLLINS COLUMN! (Nobody calls 'em "columns" any more, I know, I know)  Almost every morning I scan the NYTimes and WaPo - mostly the Opinion sections - and clack out a few words of "comments." The general Net gratification of a few "likes," or in the case of the Times "Recommendeds" is there, and at the Times they have two layers up, the "Times Pick" which guarantees a lot of Recommends, and even higher, "NYT Replies," wherein the columnist herself responds to selected comments.  Joy unending, I suppose. I have not experienced it. However, this is a modest pick, which I hereby share with you.  Gail is talking about the infrastructure proposal and will Congress go along. will duff Tijeras, NM 6h ago Times Pick Just post a lot of pictures of what China has done in the last decades. Whole new, shiney, super modern cities, more high speed rail in one province than in all of Europe, never mind the U.S. with o

Let's Hear It for White Collar Crime! Every once in a while a new piece of highly credible information comes along that whacks me upside the head. A sort of shameful response is "I knew that." This is one of those once-in-a-whiles. Heads up . PROVEN:  Big, well known, highly successful companies are more likely to commit  "Vast corporate illegalities" than smaller or troubled companies. As an impressive research project has discovered: Big name corporations more likely to commit fraud One paragraph from the Washington State University research captures it: “Prestigious companies, those that are household names, were actually more prone to engage in financial fraud, which was very surprising,” said Jennifer Schwartz, WSU sociologist and lead author on the study. “We thought it would be companies that were struggling financially, that were nearing bankruptcy, but it was quite the opposite. It was the companies that thought they should be doing better than they w