gehringer_2

good news bad news story about Omicron in the NYT today. Good news: Data from England/Scotland says that Omicron infections results in fewer hospitalizations per case. Bad news: that may because many Omicron infections are re-infections of people that have already had delta. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/12/22/world/omicron-covid-vaccine-tests and also this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/south-africa-omicron-coronavirus-cases/

if true, silly move politically. Oil Co's will drill if prices stay high - period. Don't need to waste your breath one way or the other.

If I had it to spend, I would rather spend most of $22M on relief arms than Myers.

yeah, that was alarming.

People who have non-serious cases of the flu are not dead, their experience doesn't add into into the counting fatalities at all. People who go to the hospital with serious cases are tested for flu virus. (in fact most people that enter a hospital for any reason during flu season are tested for flu). There is little ambiguity in the results of a clinical flu test - certainly nowhere near enough to affect aggregate statistics.

a vaccine NEVER works until a person has been infected. The question is how much the virus duplicates before the immune system catches up to the infection. With no vaccine about 1% of COVID patients will die before that happens. With the vaccine that is going to happen to ~90% fewer people. With Omicron the vaccine replicates more before the immune system catches up than with delta, but the evidence so far is that even though with Omicron enough replication takes place that you reach the point of being infectious yourself, your immune system is still going to catch up before you get seriously or in most cases more than slightly sick. From a epidemiological stand point you'd prefer a vaccine that is better at stopping the spread, but clinically it's still important to have one that saves peoples' lives.

if you are funding the build out of a new energy industry and you aim some of those development dollars into ex coal areas that is certainly a better shot at giving those guys a leg up than having all the HW come from China.

True, though a lot of the ‘hues’ in the ME today came from the Roman era but even more so from the crusades. In my ME family the joke goes back generations that that the blue eyed among us were “Crusader Babies”. The odds are good that the ME was more ethnically homogenous in 6 BC than it is even today.

Pretty bad when the coal miners understand the future better than leadership. People will accept the future if it comes with a “we in it together” vibe rather than a “good luck buddy” one.

the average American is too steeped in American myth to believe the government could so south here. To entertain the idea violates too much of their identity system. What they do respond to is stuff like Charlottesville or Jan 6 - because "That kind of thing shouldn't happen here". Politically the value is the same - it does drive people away from the right, but it's more reflexive, emotional and abstract than a concern about fascism. And you get the same effect from city riots in the other direction. It's less a particular politics as social embarrassment to be associated with bad stuff.

that is going to be the story of his season the rest of the way.

well that is my point, it is *becoming* visible, but how much more visible will it need to be before it creates real political pressure? The case in point would be FL. If climate change is still not a big political issue across the political spectrum there based on observable evidence, then it's hard to expect it to be other places.

Yes - disregard of American wage earners is a sin the Dems are going to have a hard time atoning for. And to be honest, other than Biden (and I suppose Bernie if you want to consider him "in" the party) I'm not sure much of the rest of the party still gets it.

yes - politics as a matter of signalling group membership.

Climate change is a hard issue because it's invisible and requires people to believe experts and as we see with COVID, as a culture our system for validating publicly accepted truth is totally dysfunctional. But I do think climate is the one thing that could galvanize a new political coalition -- if severe weather continues to intensify everywhere. That is something tangible enough for people to see for themselves so it might be the one thing that finally makes the issue too obvious to ignore.....maybe

Yes- and that perception is a big problem. And I take it back to persuasion. The problem for progs is that they are always too much the 'Brave new Worlders.' Intellectually they are in love with solutions that upend everything, so when they talk about things like climate change they tend to project a vision of the future that is all hair-shirts and birkenstocks instead of how we get to clean energy with the *least* dislocation to our present order of living. That's were you need to be to get the people in the middle. Most people don't want the lives they live upset. And of course the progs are wrong about the way progress works. We will not have less energy when we get to clean energy, anymore than we ended up with less horsepower when we stopped using horses. Progs understand the threat, but most don't really understand technology as a principle.

could be. I've tended to interpret populist movements as what happens when policy politics have lost direction. As what you might call the fall-back position that a party falls into when it doesn't have or know what else to sell. In the 30's and 60' and 80's as I noted above, you had clear understandable policy arguments that interested enough people that it sort of drove populism down to minimalist existence. Plus the periods where clear foreign policy issues dominated. Today, the nation's foreign policy confidence is gone, and (as I have oft argued) domestically no one is presenting a politics that looks like any kind of answer. To too many moderates, the left's program just looks like the kind of warmed over 60's Euro socialism that even Europe had to largely move away from. And we know the right's is still gnawing the bones of failed Reaganism. That becomes the opportunity for petty grievance politics to dominate. And other big overlay is the drift in US Christianity from enlightenment theology back to a more superstitious mind set. This is the movement that supplies the GOP's hard base of support today and its issues are fundamentally non-political - which presents a big problem to political governance.

engineers do chaos theory also my friend.....

but as always, you have to crawl before you can walk. If Progs won't support moderates over conservatives, they will never move the center close enough to where they are to get anything they want. That's just reality. If we had a three party system where a block could swing it's support to a second moderate party they could have more leverage, but unfortunately (or not, YMMV on that) the US system doesn't and never has worked that way. It has *always* been incumbent on the left and right to persuade the middle before they can get what they want. The left did it in the 30's and 60's, with the social net and civil rights, the right did it in the 80's with Reaganomics. That is just how it works. Party Politics is the US can only be done from the inside out. If you can't persuade your own side, you never get an opportunity to persuade anyone else.

Victor was off to a hot start in Venezuelan ball: https://www.freep.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2021/12/14/detroit-tigers-winter-leagues-victor-reyes-joe-jimenez/6499707001/

Riley Greene finds your lack of faith disturbing.

well, sure. But us criticizing them here is not going to be the formulation of the Democratic Congressional Campaign effort.....at least I would hope!

Yeah, Dems have to realize politics is not like football. If you score, you might actually get to keep the ball too.

voters don't pay for Senate campaigns, but coal companies do.

cade had 4 pts, Hayes had 1 assist, and they won the game. Go figure.