Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup

By William Teach January 2, 2022 – 9:19 am

Patriotic Pinup ice skating

Happy Sunday! Another great day in the Once and Future Nation of America. Getting some much needed rain, the fish are doing well after getting hit by some disease, and it’s a new year! Will it be 2022 or 2020 II? Let’s work on making it the former. This pinup is by Fritz Willis, with a wee bit of help.

What’s happening in Ye Olde Blogosphere? The Fine 15

  1. Green Jihad covers Germany closing 3 of 6 nuclear power plants
  2. Jo Nova calls 2022 the year of inflation
  3. Blazing Cat Fur notes being un-boosted the same as un-vaccinated
  4. DC Clothesline says Omicron will spike prices even higher
  5. Gates Of Vienna notes how the migrants acted in Milan on New Year’s
  6. Gen Z Conservative covers just how bad Brandon’s 1st year has been historically
  7. IOTW Report wonders who’s up for Flurona
  8. Jihad Watch covers making COVID testing racist
  9. Legal Insurrection discusses AOC’s crazy “Republicans can’t date me” meltdown
  10. Pacific Pundit highlights how Omicron was rather mild in South Africa
  11. The First Street Journal covers how things are going in the Democrat run city of Killadelphia
  12. Gateway Pundit shows Italians defying the New Year’s ban on fireworks
  13. The Last Refuge covers a Holocaust museum requiring approved travel and vaccination papers
  14. The Other McCain discusses Never Trumper Jonah Goldberg yammering about Elites
  15. And last, but not least, The Right Scoop shows the horror of the Rose Bowl parade “Vaccinate Our World” float

As always, the full set of pinups can be seen in the Patriotic Pinup category, or over at my Gallery page (nope, that’s gone, the newest Apache killed access, and the program hasn’t been upgraded since 2014). While we are on pinups, since it is that time of year, have you gotten your Pinups for Vets calendar yet? And don’t forget to check out what I declare to be our War on Women Rule 5 and linky luv posts and things that interest me. I’ve also mostly alphabetized them, makes it easier scrolling the feedreader

Don’t forget to check out all the other great material all the linked blogs have!

Anyone else have a link or hotty-fest going on? Let me know so I can add you to the list. And do you have a favorite blog you can recommend be added to the feedreader?

Two great sites for getting news links are Liberty Daily and Whatafinger.

Read: Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup »

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Experts Seem Upset That U.S. Is “Moving Backwards” From COVID Restrictions

By William Teach January 2, 2022 – 7:49 am

Citizens are less likely to accept restrictions. I mean, wasn’t that the whole point of taking the vaccine? To get our lives back? And locking down 15 days to stop the spread?

Much has changed since the start of the pandemic. But the nation’s public health system remains fractured.

Mask mandates. Remote classes. Outdoor dining.

As 2022 dawns, it’s beginning to look a lot like March 2020 – so much so that President Joe Biden sought to reassure Americans they would not return to those dark days, instead promising a future made safer by vaccines and tests.

Yes, the tests developed under President Trump, as well as the vaccines, which Biden said wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

Those breakthroughs, along with genomic sequencing that can identify new variants and the promise of powerful antiviral pills, represent a revolutionary assault on the coronavirus. But biomedical advances are only half the battle, experts say.

“We have seen it isn’t enough to have testing and vaccines; you have to have a public health system that can deliver testing and vaccines,” said Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In other words, a Central Government health system. Here’s the big one, though

The country is at a pivotal moment, Sharfstein said, full of opportunity if the lessons of the past two years lead to a new focus on getting shots in arms, swabs up noses and pills into mouths.

But some experts contend that the imbalance between the country’s scientific advances and its public health response is starker than ever, looking back in wonder on spring 2020 when a largely compliant population submitted to wide-ranging restrictions.

“We are going backward,” said Alfred Sommer, an epidemiologist and former dean at Hopkins.

“People are infinitely less responsive now,” said Sommer, who has tackled outbreaks of cholera and smallpox around the world. “This is different from anything that any public health person I know would have predicted in March 2020.”

Well, yeah, people are less responsive, because they were told if they took the vaccine, they’d get their lives back. We’ve seen all the studies that scientifically show that masks are mostly ineffective. We were told we only needed to wear a mask when we were going to be in close proximity with other people, then they put in mask mandates for everyone when inside. And told to wear a mask even if vaccinated. We were told to keep 6 feet apart, then, suddenly, we were told don’t bother. That disappeared. People have rather had enough 2 years on, and Big Government advocates and politicians are rather upset about this.

For anybody who trusts science, this is “vastly different than March 2020,” said Francis S. Collins, who in December stepped down as director of the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s medical research agency. But those who don’t trust science and haven’t been vaccinated are in a vulnerable place, he said, endangering everyone around them.

Why is there a mandate for companies with 100+ employees, not all companies? That seems rather silly. So does the scaremongering, blamestorming, and other denigration of those who are vaccine resistant, who read the scientific studies which say that most masks barely make a difference.

Those organizational shortcomings are coupled with incomplete and sometimes contradictory messages. There was, for example, the early assertion that the general population would not need to wear masks and, later, a months-long disagreement among federal officials about the importance of booster shots, Winsten recalled.

That’s because this was a rather revolutionary pandemic, and no one really knew what to do, here in the U.S. and in other nations. They were trying to get a handle on it, and the science said that masks were barely effective. For boosters, we were told that the initial shots were all that were necessary, then we learned that they are really just 6 month flu shots. Israel saw that much earlier, requiring boosters way before any other country.

The rest of the Washington Post piece is more about softly pushing for a Big Government solution to controlling the healthcare system and the people.

Read: Experts Seem Upset That U.S. Is “Moving Backwards” From COVID Restrictions »

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Surprise: Warmists Sue To Block Nevada Geothermal Plants

By William Teach January 1, 2022 – 3:00 pm

Warmists are super excited about “clean, green energy” right up to the point it moves from theory to practice

Lawsuit seeks to block 2 geothermal power plants in Nevada

Conservationists and tribal leaders are suing the U.S. government to try to block construction of two geothermal plants in northern Nevada’s high desert that they say will destroy a sacred hot springs and could push a rare toad to the brink of extinction.

The lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe says the project would turn a “pristine and unique location of ecological value and spiritual significance” into an industrial site.

It’s the latest public lands conflict pitting green energy production against potential harm to wildlife habitat or cultural resources in the biggest U.S. gold producing state, where legal challenges traditionally target things like hard-rock mining.

Environmentalists nationally have rallied around President Joe Biden’s ambitious renewable energy agenda, which embraces solar, wind and geothermal production.

Wait, what was that part about being an “industrial site”? Anyhow, did anyone consider the impact of building it there, where it would mess with hot springs sacred to Indians and the toads? Why are most of these things built far, far away from where Warmists can see them? How about we build them right there in the big cities?

The Biden administration approved the project last month even though the center’s petition to list the toad as a U.S. endangered species is still pending before the Fish and Wildlife Service. (snip)

“We strongly support renewable energy when it’s in the right place, but a project like this that threatens sacred sites and endangered species is definitely the wrong place,” Patrick Donnelly, the center’s Nevada state director, said about the geothermal plants.

It rarely ever seems to be “the right place” in practice.

Tribal Chairperson Cathi Tuni said the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone’s ancestors have lived in the Dixie Valley region for thousands of years and long recognized the hot springs as “a sacred place of healing and reflection.”

“The United States has repeatedly promised to honor and protect Indigenous sacred sites, but then the BLM approved a major construction project nearly on top of our most sacred hot springs. It just feels like more empty words,” she said.

Way to turn on the Indians, Brandon!

Read: Surprise: Warmists Sue To Block Nevada Geothermal Plants »

Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming, Joe Biden | 7 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach January 1, 2022 – 1:00 pm

…is a perfect field, far from the big cities so you don’t have to see it, for a solar or wind farm, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Not A Lot Of People Know That, with a post on using children to sue governments over ‘climate change.’

Read: If All You See… »

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Democrats Think Not Giving Free Money For Student Debt Could Hurt Their Midterms

By William Teach January 1, 2022 – 10:30 am

Such is the state of Democratic Party politics, where they have to give oodles of money away in order to get people to go to the ballot box

Progressives warn inaction on student debt could hurt Democrats in midterms

While the Biden administration has once again extended the pause on student loan repayments, some progressives have said that unless more is done, it could cost Democrats in the midterms in 2022.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is sounding the alarm over potentially losing voters and subsequent races if the campaign promise of canceling student loan debt goes unfulfilled by the Biden-Harris administration.

Before the pause was extended, several prominent Democrats voiced their concerns about payments starting again and how it could cost them the midterms.

Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., tweeted, that “forcing millions to start paying student loans again” will cost Democrats the midterms.

Perhaps they shouldn’t have been promising to cancel the debt of people who legally signed for it, knowing that it had to be repaid, particularly when so many used the money to get worthless degrees. No one is worrying about those with home loans, auto loans, or other loans. Why is it necessary to take care of those who signed to take the student loans as adults? Just because they are demanding it? If it causes Democrats problems in the midterms, that’s the fault of the Dem elites, who should have been telling those people “you took it, you pay for it. Stop ordering food delivery every day. Reduce your expenses.”

The total amount of student loan debt in the U.S. currently stands at $1.75 trillion.

The average student debt right now is $37,693. In 2020 dollars, debt in 2001 was $24,680. Perhaps Democrats should be looking at ways to lower the cost of college, which has skyrocketed due to Democratic policies at Democratic Party run colleges.

Natalia Abrams, president of the Student Debt Crisis Center, a nonprofit focused on ending the student debt crisis, told ABC News that “Democrats and lawmakers need to be careful because this is something the public has said they want.”

“If you can afford to pause student loan payments over and over again, you can afford to cancel it,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson tweeted after President Joe Biden announced his administration would extend the federal pause on student loan repayment for the third time in December.

What’s that old saying about people voting themselves money and the end of the Republic?

Vice President Kamala Harris responded to Ocasio-Cortez’s comment in a recent interview with CBS News, saying that Secretary of Education Cardona is looking into what the Biden administration can do to alleviate the pressure that borrowers are enduring from student loan debt. However, Harris also acknowledged the impact student debt is having on individuals across the country.

“Graduates and former students across our country are literally making decisions about whether they can have a family, whether they can buy a home,” she said.

That’s life for everyone, not just people who have student loans debt with a degree in Feminine Studies who can only get a job at a coffee house.

Back in July, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a press conference that President Biden does not have the legal authority to use executive action to cancel federal student loan debt.

“People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness; he does not,” said Pelosi. “He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power, that has to be an act of Congress.”

Remember that.

Read: Democrats Think Not Giving Free Money For Student Debt Could Hurt Their Midterms »

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Climate Cultist Make 2022 Predictions

By William Teach January 1, 2022 – 7:00 am

Well, in lieu of post my yearly challenge to Warmists to make climate predictions, lets see what Andrew Pershing, the director of Climate Science at Climate Central, has to say

Six climate trends may shape 2022 across the US

We’re about to wrap up 2021, another year of climate extremes across the U.S. It’s tempting to look back at the big stories: record cold in Texas, record heat in the Northwest, record rains from Hurricane Ida and December’s heat and deadly weather. But thinking about my climate work over the last year, I was struck by how much of it is about trends. I see six trends that can impact virtually all of us next year.

The first is the big one: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all hoped that maybe the economic slowdown from the COVID-19 pandemic would blunt the rise of carbon dioxide that drives global warming and makes extreme weather more likely. Nope.

Yet, there have warmer periods during the Holocene with much lower CO2 concentrations. Weird

The second trend follows the first: rising temperatures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA in the U.S. and the UK Met Office will soon release their final calculations of global mean temperature. The year 2021 will likely be the sixth warmest on record. We are currently in a La Nina — a weather pattern triggered by unusually cool water in the equatorial Pacific. La Nina is like having the global air conditioner set on max — it tends to depress global temperatures. But it’s expected to fade in the coming months, so 2022 has a good shot at being warmer than 2021.

So, if nature can have such a big impact, why can in not also drive warming?

With or without La Nina, we can expect to see parts of the country struggle with deadly heat this summer. Something as weird as the 2021 Northwest heatwave may be unlikely, but the climbing global temperatures ratchet up the probability of dangerously high temperatures in the U.S. and around the world.

And, what if these don’t happen? Heat waves are entirely normal, but, what if there are few this summer? What will the climate cult say then?

The biggest trend, though, is the chance of storms rapidly intensifying into major hurricanes. In many ways, Ida was the perfect example of how climate change affects hurricanes. It was a fairly ordinary storm until it passed over the unusually hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Then, it exploded into a Category 4 hurricane and crashed into Louisiana — but caused heavy rains and flooding as far north as New York. Even if the number of named storms fluctuates year-to-year, each storm that forms now has a greater chance of growing into a monster like Ida.

That’s a lot of vacillating, eh? It could happen but it might not happen this year but maybe another year we just want to scare you.

Ida points to the fourth big climate trend to watch: more extremes in precipitation. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor. This means that when it rains, there is a greater chance that it will pour. Events like the flash flooding in West Virginia and the catastrophic rains from Ida are becoming more common. Extremes in precipitation also apply to snow. Even though the number of days when it’s cold enough to snow is decreasing across much of the country, the same moist atmosphere that can bring us big rain events can also produce big snow events.

Floods are normal. And here you have him blaming big snow events on warming. But, what if the floods do not happen? In reality, you should expect some, because floods are 100% normal.

Fifth is drought in the Southwest, which is also rather normal. What if it flips to wetter? Will they also blame that on ‘climate change’?

The final trend to watch is the total cost of all of these climate-influenced events. The human costs of extreme heat, fires, floods and high winds are brutal. But there are also direct economic costs — money that we have to pay to rebuild communities and money that we lose due to droughts and disruption. In dollars, final tallies from these events often reach the billions. And their frequency — and costs — are growing every year: the U. S. now experiences a billion-dollar disaster every 22 days.

Actually, they aren’t growing in trend, we can just track them better. But, it’s a cult, so, no matter what the weather does, they’ll blame you.

Read: Climate Cultist Make 2022 Predictions »

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Say, About Those Brandon Home COVID Tests: They’ll Take About Three Years

By William Teach January 1, 2022 – 6:45 am

Obviously, there are already home tests, but, here’s how Team Brandon does it

From the link

Biden Brain SlugThe Biden administration has signed a $137 million contract with a pharmaceutical company for the purpose of building a factory for COVID-19 test strip materials, a White House official confirmed to FOX Business on Wednesday.

But the new facility will not start churning out the materials for three years, according to the company. If the timeline is correct, the deal will not alleviate the administration’s scramble to make more tests available in the near future amid a lack of supply for Americans. The administration is under fire for reportedly rejecting a deal in October that would have strongly ramped up the supply of COVID tests.

But the new facility will not start churning out the materials for three years, according to the company. If the timeline is correct, the deal will not alleviate the administration’s scramble to make more tests available in the near future amid a lack of supply for Americans. The administration is under fire for reportedly rejecting a deal in October that would have strongly ramped up the supply of COVID tests.

The three-year timeline also signals that the administration expects the need for tens of millions of such tests per month into 2024 or 2025 and beyond.

Reuters first reported that the White House inked the agreement with MilliporeSigma, a subsidiary of German firm Merck KGaA, not be confused with U.S. company Merck & Co.

“The money will allow the company over three years to build a new facility to produce nitrocellulose membranes, the paper that displays test results, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin,” the outlet reported. “That, in turn, will allow for 85 million more tests to be produced per month, the official said.”

The whole idea was to make home tests readily available quickly. Trump (and other world leaders) was able to get vaccines available in less than a year (OK, they act more like 6 month flu shots, same as other nations were able to do), and Biden can’t get large amounts of test strips going for three years.

But, hey, there’s a problem with all this home testing, too

(NY Times) Millions of rapid at-home COVID tests are flying off pharmacy shelves across the country, giving Americans an instant, if sometimes imperfect, read on whether they are infected with the coronavirus.

But the results are rarely reported to public health departments, exacerbating the long-standing challenges of maintaining an accurate count of cases at a time when the number of infections is surging because of the omicron variant.

At the minimum, the widespread availability of at-home tests is wreaking havoc with the accuracy of official positivity rates and case counts. At the other extreme, it is one factor making some public health experts raise a question that once would have been unthinkable: Do counts of coronavirus cases serve a useful purpose, and if not, should they be continued?

Whoops! Makes it rather hard to track how many positive tests there have been. How is there any tracking and tracing? Sadly, that is something that really was necessary early on, but, you can understand the resistance, but, it could have eliminated a lot of the spread.

Read: Say, About Those Brandon Home COVID Tests: They’ll Take About Three Years »

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Climate Doom Today: Feral Hogs, Drastic CO2 Cuts Worthless, Radioactive Wildfires

By William Teach December 31, 2021 – 3:00 pm

Oh, this is some great stuff. First I found this cult beauty

Feral hog invasions leave coastal marshes less resilient to climate change

Coastal marshes that have been invaded by feral hogs recover from natural disasters up to three times slower, and are significantly less resilient to climate change, according to a recent study from Duke University and the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Feral hogs invade marshes to eat ribbed mussels, a shellfish species that plays a vital role in the resiliency of marshes by creating healthy areas for marsh plants to live.

“[Saltmarshes are] really considered the Superman of marine ecosystems in that they are incredibly resilient,” said Brian Silliman, a professor of marine conservation biology at Duke and study co-author. “The key to this superpower are the [ribbed] mussels. So the hogs are acting like the Kryptonite here because they’re taking away that superpower.”

Silliman’s research suggests that marshes disturbed by hogs can take an extra 80 to 100 years to recover when hit by a natural disaster, like a drought. There’s also a possibility that disturbed marshes may never recover from disasters.

See, in Warmist World, the Earth is a static system that never, ever changes. Their belief in Darwinism has taken a big hit as the climate cult becomes stronger and spreads.

Even Drastic CO2 Cuts Won’t Bring Back The Climate We’ve Lost

We’re so far down the road of climate change, that even making drastic cuts to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels won’t be enough for the world’s weather systems to fall back into their previous patterns, according to a new study.

But the research also suggests we still can have a huge impact on how severe that change will be.

Through a series of advanced climate model simulations, researchers looked at the effect of ramping up CO2 levels to 1,468 ppm – four times their current level – over the course of the next 140 years, then bringing them all the way back down to where they are today across another 140 years.

First, climate models. Garbage cult beliefs in, garbage cult beliefs out. Second, why was it warmer in previous Holocene warm periods than today with much lower CO2 concentrations? Third, could this be the beginning of the cult saying that reducing CO2 doesn’t matter, and we need to do X?

But, this might top them all, perfect for a year end (you can also read it here, no paywall)

Are radioactive wildfires next on California’s apocalyptic climate-change guest list?

After what we experienced in 2021, there’s no doubt that California’s wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity as climate change alters the ecosystem. The state’s forests are burning at an alarming rate, creating environmental catastrophes and endangering lives. (snip)

And there is another potential hazard that has largely been neglected in forest fire smoke – radiation.

In April 2020, the forest around the disaster site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine ignited into wildfire. More than 115,000 acres burned in 10 days, and the smoke, along with the radiation, traveled 1,000 miles to countries as far as Norway. (snip)

While the risk that California could be similarly affected may be small, the possibility of climate change changing our world in 2022 and beyond adds another kink.

After learning about the Chernobyl fires this summer, I became curious about the possible effects of radiation from forest fires on our populations. As part of my internship at DoseNet, a UC Berkeley science initiative for high school students, I began an investigation using data from the program’s global network of radiation sensors.

Read: Climate Doom Today: Feral Hogs, Drastic CO2 Cuts Worthless, Radioactive Wildfires »

Posted in AGW Scaremongering, Global Warming | 13 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach December 31, 2021 – 1:00 pm

…is a calm sea because carbon pollution is shutting down ocean circulation, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is A View From The Beach, with a post on the possibility of Greater Idaho.

Read: If All You See… »

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Apparently, Florida Is So Bad That AOC Is There On Vacation

By William Teach December 31, 2021 – 10:30 am

AOC, like so many Democrats, has slammed Florida during COVID, complaining about the lack of masking and so much more. Whining at Gov DeSantis and the GOP led general assembly. So, of course

AOC in Miami Beach for ‘taste of freedom’ as New York sees record number of COVID cases: report

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared to get an early start on New Year’s weekend Thursday, according to a report.

The New York Democrat was seen, maskless and drink in hand, as she dined outside in Miami Beach, Florida, the National Review reported. The congresswoman and a companion were spotted at Doraku Sushi and Izakaya, the report said.

The sighting quickly drew snarky reactions on social media.

“You’re being played by @AOC dummies,” one writer claimed, referring to the Democrat’s supporters.

“Hey @AOC tell me you endorse @RonDeSantisFL without telling me you endorse @RonDeSantisFL,” another commenter wrote, referring to Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been known for coronavirus policies that contrast from many of those in Democrat-run states.

And

She’s escaping the record number of cases in NYC, and a huge surge in D.C., by going to a nice, open, Red state. Doesn’t look like she’s masking up, eh? It’s like when COVID hit and the big city liberals blew out of town for better pastures, spreading it around. Photo from National Review.

Meanwhile

(Reuters) – COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations are “comparatively” low as the highly infectious Omicron variant of the coronavirus spreads, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said on Wednesday as cases in the United States reached a record high.

“In a few short weeks Omicron has rapidly increased across the country, and we expect will continue to circulate in the coming weeks. While cases have substantially increased from last week, hospitalizations and deaths remain comparatively low right now,” she said, referring to overall cases.

I wonder how many other Democrats will be seen in Red states?

Read: Apparently, Florida Is So Bad That AOC Is There On Vacation »

Posted in Bat Soup Virus, Democrats | 17 Comments | Trackback URL
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