Delta Variant is a Game Changer

Our slow slide into a science fiction dystopian nightmare has accelerated. Masking has already been a political flashpoint. Now, masking will become even more divisive. Time to put the anti-maskers to the sword:

Until Friday morning, July 30, 2021, herd immunity was the goal we were all working towards. Remember when President Biden set his goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the population by July 4?

...Most experts believed that it would take vaccinating somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of Americans for the country to reach something resembling herd immunity. The fact that COVID is a global pandemic, with many countries in the developing world lacking widespread vaccine distribution, argued against the kind of herd immunity eventually reached against diseases like polio. Still, the goal seemed within reach if enough of us could be convinced to get vaccinated. At that point, it was hoped, normal life in this country could resume, with people eating in restaurants, going to the movies, attending concerts, singing in church choirs, playing sports and attending school uninhibited by requirements to social distance or keep wearing masks.

On Friday, that hope went out the door. The CDC internal health document obtained by the Post and the Times urges federal health officials to "acknowledge the war has changed."

...Herd immunity has to do with transmissibility. A disease goes away when enough people become immune to the infectious agent such that it can no longer be transmitted among a population. The CDC on Friday essentially admitted that being vaccinated against COVID doesn't make you immune. You can still contract the disease, especially the delta variant, and having become infected, you can still transmit the disease to others whether you have symptoms or not.

...When the COVID vaccines are injected, the antibodies produced by the human immune system appear mostly in the blood. "Some antibodies may make their way into the nose, the main port of entry for the virus, but not enough to block it," the Times reported Friday. "The Delta variant seems to flourish in the nose, and its abundance may explain why more people than scientists expected are experiencing break-through infections and cold-like symptoms."

Vaccinated people can spread the virus almost as easily as unvaccinated people because the so-called "viral loads" in their noses and upper respiratory tracts can be nearly as strong as in unvaccinated people. When vaccinated people become infected, the virus attempts to travel from the nose and throat into the lungs. This is where the antibodies built up by the vaccines go to work, preventing a severe enough infection to need hospitalization.

"The vaccines — they're beautiful, they work, they're amazing," Dr. Frances Lund, a viral immunologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the Times. "But they're not going to give you that local immunity." Vaccinated people will be contagious for a much shorter time, Dr. Lund told the Times. "But that doesn't mean that in those first couple of days, when they're infected, they can't transmit it to somebody else."

...This is why the CDC's findings this week are a game-changer. It's also why the CDC has released new guidelines suggesting a return to mask-wearing, even among vaccinated people, in areas of the country that are experiencing an uptick in breakouts of the disease. Getting the vaccine doesn't keep you from getting the disease, and it doesn't keep you from spreading it.

...I think the other thing the CDC findings published on Friday tell us is that the unvaccinated population is no longer "the problem." They are part of the problem, because they can of course catch the disease and spread it, but, as we just learned, so can those of us who are vaccinated. We may be returning to the point where "the problem," if there is one, is more about people who refuse to adhere to mask mandates, or those politicians who, faced with outbreaks of the disease, refuse to impose them.

If there is an enemy in the war against COVID it's the virus itself, which is far more virulent than we knew. It is mutating, and mutations like the delta variant are making the disease much worse than it was in the beginning. I think we will have to assume that there will be new mutations, new variants, meaning this disease is going to be with us in one form or another for years – maybe forever, like the seasonal flu and the common cold.

Daniel Watts For California Governor

Forty six candidates will appear on the second part of California Gubernatorial Recall ballot, but only nine of those candidates will be Democrats. (The dubious theory that Newsom will do better if no prominent Democrats are on the second part of the ballot will get a trial.) 

Six prominent Republicans are running, and the expectation is that one of those GOP candidates will win if Gavin Newsom loses on the first part of the Recall ballot. Nevertheless, Republicans are so attenuated as a political party in California that that expectation is questionable. 

The more important question is, who will the majority Democrats vote for? THAT candidate will likely win! 

These nine Democrats are: 

• Holly L. Baade, spiritual teacher and coach;
• John R. Drake, college student; 
• Patrick Kilpatrick, actor, screenwriter, and producer; 
• Jacqueline McGowan, cannabis advocate and business owner; 
• Kevin Paffrath, YouTuber, real estate broker and landlord; 
• Armando "Mando" Perez-Serrato, business owner; 
• Brandon M. Ross, doctor, lawyer; 
• Joel A. Ventresca, perennial San Francisco mayoral candidate; and, 
• Daniel Watts, free-speech lawyer. 

I urge everyone to vote for Daniel Watts. I've known him for 18 years - since the 2003 Recall race! - and he has the best background and experience to make an excellent governor (should Newsom falter). Plus, he plays piano and does community theater!

Control Group

Spreadnecks

@the.southern.momma

#stitch with @canknucklehead #spreadnecks #antiva #thatwasgood #accurate #ChiliDogYumPlz #LiveFlowSweatDuet

♬ original sound - the.southern.momma

Pentagon Threatening to Abandon FireGuard

Renew that program!:

Since 2019, the nascent FireGuard program has relied on temporary permission from the Pentagon to review classified data collected from a variety of government sources, including U.S. military satellites that search the skies for enemy missiles.

...The latest authorization expires Sept. 30, and the Pentagon hasn’t acted on a pending one-year renewal request, or on a separate request from California lawmakers to make the pilot program permanent.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), who is leading the effort on Capitol Hill to save the program, said Pentagon officials are skeptical about extending — or making permanent — a program they view as outside the scope of their mission.

...“It’s important for situational awareness, for the alert of a new and emerging fire, as well as the ongoing assessment of fires,” SeLegue said. “Right now we utilize this on an hourly basis.”

FireGuard pulls data from government and military-operated satellites, as well as from drones and on-the-ground sensors and cameras. Images are altered to ensure that the military’s classified capabilities are not revealed as they are shared with the California National Guard, which has a team of intelligence analysts to sift through the information. They are on call 24/7 during wildfire season in California, alerting incident commanders on the fire lines to new developments.

The program began in California with the goal of providing a detailed view of wildfires, updated frequently enough — every 15 minutes — to be almost in real time. The COVID-19 pandemic and catastrophic 2020 wildfire season quickly convinced the fire community of FireGuard’s value. It now operates out of California and Colorado, and shares information with firefighters throughout the nation.

RIP, Rebecca Holt

I was very surprised to hear of the passing of Rebecca Holt, due to Covid-19. Her husband, Frank Holt, is apparently still hospitalized with Covid-19. 

I met Rebecca and several of her family members through community theater, specifically at DMTC. Her family was more active, however, at Woodland Opera House. 

This news is so sad, and tragic. Condolences to her entire family, in general, and to daughter Chantelle, in particular. 

Chantelle played Pepper, one of the orphan kids, in DMTC's 2018 production of "Annie." That production was menaced by smoke from the Camp Fire, which burned down Paradise, CA in November, 2018, and proceeded to fumigate the northern Central Valley for a couple of weeks. Chantelle had breathing issues, as did several other people in that production. 

My understanding is that Rebecca was politically conservative, but not an anti-masker, in part because she had family members who suffered various auto-immune disorders, and had to do more than just empathize with their suffering. I do not know how Rebecca came in contact with Covid-19. It's just too easy to come in contact with Covid-19 these days. 

There is a GoFundMe for funeral expenses. Please consider donating.

Mike Lindell, Advance Guard of Dictatorship

Anne Applebaum is from Russia, and knows a thing or two about dictators. She sees infinite possibilities with Mike Lindell:

When you contemplate the end of democracy in America, what kind of person do you think will bring it about?

...Here is what you probably don’t imagine: an affable, self-made midwesterner, one of those goofy businessmen who makes his own infomercials. A recovered crack addict, no less, who laughs good-naturedly when jokes are made at his expense. A man who will talk to anyone willing to listen (and to many who aren’t). A philanthropist. A good boss. A patriot—or so he says—who may well be doing more damage to American democracy than anyone since Jefferson Davis.

...Wacky though it seems for a businessman to invest so much in a conspiracy theory, there are important historical precedents. Think of Olof Aschberg, the Swedish banker who helped finance the Bolshevik revolution, allegedly melting down the bars of gold that Lenin’s comrades stole in train robberies and reselling them, unmarked, on European exchanges. Or Henry Ford, whose infamous anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew, was widely read in Nazi Germany, including by Hitler himself. Plenty of successful, wealthy people think that their knowledge of production technology or private equity gives them clairvoyant insight into politics. But Aschberg, Ford, and Lindell represent the extreme edge of that phenomenon: Their business success gives them the confidence to promote malevolent conspiracy theories, and the means to reach wide audiences.

In the cases of Aschberg and Ford, this had tragic, real-world consequences. Lindell hasn’t created Ford-level havoc yet, but the potential is there. Along with Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the conspiracy posse, he is helping create profound distrust in the American electoral system, in the American political system, in the American public-health system, and ultimately in American democracy. The eventual consequences of their actions may well be a genuinely stolen or disputed election in 2024, and political violence on a scale the U.S. hasn’t seen in decades. You can mock Lindell, dismiss him, or call him a crackhead, but none of this will seem particularly funny when we truly have an illegitimate president in the White House and a total breakdown of law and order.

...Lindell mostly speaks in long, rambling monologues filled with allusions and grievances; he circles back again and again to electoral fraud, to the campaigns against him, to particular interviewers and articles that he disputes, some of it only barely comprehensible unless you’ve been following his frequent media appearances—which I have not. At only one moment was there a hint that this performance was more artful than it appeared to be. I asked him about the events of January 6. He immediately grew more precise. “I was not there, by the grace of God,” he said. He was doing media events elsewhere, he said. Nor did he want to talk about what happened that day: “I think that there were a lot of things that I’m not going to comment on, because I don’t want that to be your story.”

Not too long after that, I suddenly found I couldn’t take any more of this calculated ranting. (I can hear that moment on the recording, when I suddenly said “Okay, enough” and switched off the device.) Although he ate almost nothing, Lindell insisted on grabbing the check, like any well-mannered Minnesotan would. 

...When we walked outside, I thought that I might say something dramatic, something cutting, something like “You realize that you are destroying our country.” But I didn’t. He is our country after all, or one face of our country: hyper-optimistic and overconfident, ignorant of history and fond of myths, firm in the belief that we alone are the exceptional nation and we alone have access to exceptional truths. Safe in his absolute certainty, he got into his black SUV and drove away.

Wet Tucson

A banner monsoon season, so far!:

So far this monsoon season, the Tucson International Airport has seen a total of 5.88 inches of rain, the NWS said.

This month's storms have made this the wettest monsoon through July 25.

The monsoon season officially runs from June 15 to Sept. 30. The July rainfall — 5.71 inches — makes this the fourth-wettest July and the sixth-wettest month on record. An average July during Tucson's monsoon season receives 1.79 inches of rain, the NWS said.

Throughout the past week, the Catalina Foothills area has had 2 to 3 inches of rainfall, the NWS said. Within the past 30 days, the Foothills area has seen 6 to 7 inches of rain. Tucson’s metro area has seen a little over 2 inches of rainfall this week, the NWS said. Areas in the northwest have seen 2 to 3 inches of rainfall while the south side has topped 2 inches.

Tucson temperatures also have broken records. Tucson peaked at 77 degrees Saturday, setting a record for the coolest high temperature for July 24, according to the NWS. The previous record was 79 degrees set in 1912.

Saturday was also the first July day with a high below 80 degrees since 1998, the NWS said. Sunday's temperature was similar to Saturdays with an expected high of 77 and a low of 69.

PG&E Finally Gets Serious

Time to bury the power lines:

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. executives committed Wednesday to move 10,000 miles of the utility’s power lines underground, a daunting and expensive task for the embattled utility that’s just emerging from bankruptcy after it was held responsible for some of California’s most destructive wildfires in recent years.

...At the press conference, PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe told reporters a utility employee called in the fire after he found it burning near where a 70-foot tree fell on a utility power line along the border with Butte and Plumas counties, though she didn’t directly acknowledge that the tree sparked the fire.

“We were going to make this announcement in a couple of months when we had a little more meat on the bones,” Poppe told reporters. “But we couldn’t wait, particularly given the proximity to the Dixie Fire and the emotional toll that it has on all of us.“

...Utility experts have said in the past that planting power lines underground is one of the most expensive measures that can be taken to improve wildfire safety. In 2019 PG&E was scolded by a Public Utilities Commission consultant for failing to spend $120 million in ratepayer money that was earmarked for underground projects.

PG&E officials noted that they’ve already buried some 65 miles lines in Butte County, especially in Paradise, the site of the infamous 2018 Camp Fire.

But Poppe said more lines need to go underground to keep communities safe.

“We start today. We know that this is an extraordinary condition and an extraordinary time. It requires extraordinary solutions and extraordinary thinking and extraordinary people,” she said. “Where else but in California would we tackle something such as this and expect it to be achieved?” 

PG&E was found criminally responsible for the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California’s recorded history, which killed 85 people in Butte County. The Camp Fire, which destroyed much of Paradise, was the latest in a string of mega-fires that landed PG&E in bankruptcy in early 2019. The company exited bankruptcy last year after pledging to pay $13.5 billion to compensate fire victims for losses not covered by their insurance.

Monterey Bay Aquarium - July 27, 2021

 

Paragliders and Surf at Seaside (near Monterey) - July 27, 2021