SeniorJunior

 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, Ice...

 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 “l...

...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...

 So, Big Truth vs. Big Lie "Big Lies" are the bread and butter, the hard currency, the soul of propaganda. They so deviate from the truth that they elicit this response: "Man, that wouldn't say something that crazy unless it was true." Then to augment the outrageousness comes REPETITION, repetition, repetition... "Man, I hear that all the time. It must be true." Everybody - EVERYBODY - is capable of being propagandized. Some of us more, some less; our susceptibility distributed along a normal curve, like everything else. So a really good Big Lie propaganda campaign can convince a very large portion of the population it targets. For instance, one whole side of the normal curve. Or even  almost everybody . Whenever I hear of a substantial number of folks who share a specific belief that defies logic or scientific findings, I suspect propaganda has worked. The anti-vaxers are a current example. Childhood jabs actually don't cause autism, but there is...

America Must Restore the Value of TRUTH Currently it seems: We don't need have no stinkin' truth*  My eight million vote win! My landslide win, STOLEN! * We have "Freedom of Speech." We are free to lie, misrepresent, twist, spin, slant, and propagandize to our heart's content. The Constitution says so.  IT'S KILLING US!  We are split into "tribes" with our own truths, our own facts. It is ripping us apart, making us distrustful of fellow citizens, stabbing our democracy in the heart.  I've got a secret plan!                                            We need a CRUSADE FOR TRUTH              The Plan We Need Two (2) Freedoms of Speech Freedom of Truthful Speech   All current Constitutional protections apply only when verifiable   truth is spoken. and Freedom of Opinion Speech   No truth requirement All curren...

 Three Standard Deviations Off "Normal" Describing our lame duck Prez with distribution curves "Bell" Curves, "Clappers," get it? Ding dong? Oh, forget it. Lame Duck President Trump is on the far ends of these distributions. Way weirder than most humans, and in ways that make him dangerous. I left out the killer curve, "Charismatic Cult Leader". He's clear to the right, "very high" on that one. Maybe that's why he's so interesting to watch.   So I suggest we watch the heck out of him through this lame duck period. And after!