Innocent Bystanders

Eurovision 2021 Winner May 30, 2021

Time to check in on Eurovision. This year’s contest was not in front of a live audience, so it must have been tough for the acts to get fired up.

Måneskin, the entry from Italy, won with their (somewhat dated, IMHO) head-bangy rock song, Zitti E Buoni (“Shut Up and Behave”). Here’s their entry video (videos from the Finals aren’t yet available in the US):

A translation of the lyrics can be found here.

Old Vid of a Russian Guy With a Mean Falsetto May 29, 2021

My daughter and I were playing “Dueling YouTube Videos” the other night, where we alternate in picking videos to impress, educate, and/or horrify the other party. One of her early entries was from Vitas, a Russian singer known for singing ridiculously high notes (for a guy, anyway). Here’s his Opera No. 2 (very poor quality video).

Can’t get enough? Try this goofy disco-ey song entitled The 7th Element:

Biden Proposes Uberhurtling Towards Doom May 28, 2021

A few days ago I was lamenting over the CBO’s latest long-term projection, saying that it spelled inescapable doom for the United States.

Trust Biden and his team of woke advisors to step on the gas, because doom can’t come quickly enough for these guys.

Compare the already-dire CBO projections to Biden’s budget proposal:

Biden is cranking up spending from a historical level of 20% to 24%, and he’s taking 19-20% out of the economy to pay for it, vs. the historical level of 17-18%.

At this point you may not be able to see the charts through the tears, but here’s a comparison of the CBO’s disheartening deficit projections to the White House’s slit-your-wrists-now-to-avoid-drawn-out-agony projections.

Yup, our deficit was already enough to take the country down, and now it’s worse. When you get to 2029 the streams supposedly cross, but nobody has the ability to forecast accurately that far ahead. My impression is that reality is always worse than the worst projection.

I’m going to be beating his budget like a dusty rug over the next few days. I hope it’s not too tedious and depressing.

Watching COVID Turn Tail and Run May 27, 2021

Nice lookin’ trend in COVID-19 cases (graphs from the CDC):

In case you’re wondering, Biden was inaugurated about a third of the way down that big downslope, and the big downward trend bottomed out a month after Biden took office. Two months later it started what is hopefully its final decline.

Here are COVID-19 deaths (however inflated they may be):

We haven’t had this few deaths since March of last year. Very encouraging.

Fauci’s Near-Sighted COVID-19 Guidance May 26, 2021

I think we* all understand that the “sure-safe” lockdown recommendations of the medical establishment have to be tempered by consideration of the impact on the economy and the stability of the country. So when Fauci opines on a subject and the media takes it as gospel, vilifying any leaders who deviate from his guidance, we know they’re being naive idiots.

But what I don’t get is why the media hasn’t taken Fauci to task over his failure to even give balanced health recommendations. Critics have pointed out throughout the pandemic that there are serious physical and mental health issues associated with the lockdown strategy, but Fauci has ignored all of those, acting as though the only health consideration is COVID.

Now we see the fallout, with mental health issues due to extended isolation, aggravation of health conditions due to deferred medical treatment, and widespread weight gain. Some have estimated that people gained 29 lbs on average, which would push the formerly marginally-obese average American well into the obese range. Which in turn makes them more vulnerable to COVID-19.

You’d think the media would ask the question: “How did you try to optimize the total health of Americans when you created your COVID response strategies?”

But they won’t because he didn’t.

And we are left with the horrible consequences of his myopic strategy.

*We who value and practice logic & reason.

The Futility of COVID Policy-Making May 25, 2021

It’s pretty clear that we don’t understand many aspects of COVID-19, like its transmission, its survivability outside the body, its effects, and why some people shrug it off while others die (…and its origin, heh). We won’t fully understand these things until long after it ceases to be a threat.

But I think I can say with at least a little authority that until we started vaccinating, nothing we did mattered all that much. Closures, curfews, re-openings, masks, distancing; these policies varied from state to state, but how did they affect the transmission of the disease?

Not so much:

I apologize for the horrible quality of this graph – I copied it directly from the CDC’s site. In any case, you can see that the six most populous states are all within +/- 10% of each other. Michigan, who is ranked 7th in population (you can only plot 6 for some reason), is pretty close to Texas.

Similarly, if you plot cumulative cases for metropolitan vs. non-metropolitan victims, you get no difference. All roads lead to the same place.

Without doing some real work (which I am oh so loathe to do), all I can say is that it seems like COVID cases are not transmission-limited, they are victim limited. That means that the virus made its rounds with little impact from our various policies, taking root in the 10% of the population (so far) who were susceptible.

This is not to say that throwing everything you have at the virus was an inherently bad idea, but that the lockdown policies should have been critiqued and updated much earlier in the pandemic. Sadly, those policies have assumed a religious status among some, so that was not possible.

If the US wasn’t broken before, it’s certainly broken now May 24, 2021

The Congressional Budget Office just gave a presentation to The Conference Board, in which they summarized the results of the last Long-Term Budget Outlook report. I’ve included some of my favorite charts from their presentation below – you can see the entire presentation here.

Let’s start with the always-exciting (and by exciting I mean thoroughly depressing) public debt graph:

Yeah, that’s a pretty juicy one. All of our whining about the debt increases during the recession shows just how little we appreciated the actual peril we faced.

So when you see a chart like that, the next natural question is: “Well, is it because of falling revenues or increasing outlays?”

Hah! You already know the answer:

Yup, it’s always the outlays. But now I’m sure your question is: “What’s the source of the huge increase in outlays?”

From this you can see that the “bending of the cost growth curve,” one of the major selling points of the Obamacare legislation, is entirely mythical. From the cost projections, you can’t even tell that the Affordable Care Act happened.

The second thing you notice is that our interest payments are going to skyrocket, reaching almost 9% of GDP in 30 years. You can compare that to defense spending, which was a mere 3.4% of GDP in 2019.

With that level of interest payments, we will never balance the budget and never reduce our debt. Never.

I’m afraid that the United States has done been kilt, and we’re going to spend the next 30 years watching parts of it slowly die off. Our creditors will probably step in before that, though, using the hopelessness of the situation to force us into the global collective.

The Decline of COVID May 9, 2021

Seems like the writing’s on the wall for COVID-19, at least so far as deaths are concerned. Check out this chart I lifted from the CDC:

As everyone who “follows the science” has been saying since the COVID onslaught began, there was never much risk of death for people under the age of 65. And looking at the trend since December 2020, even those deaths have declined to their lowest values since the first few months of the epidemic.

Then have a gander at this table, also lifted from the CDC, which shows vaccinations by age:

For all the hand-wringing about people refusing to be vaccinated, it seems to me that the most vulnerable people have done quite well in getting shots. It has, after all, only been 5 months since the vaccines were released, and we have fully vaccinated 71.3% of the people over 65.

A year ago we had 1846 deaths/day, while now we have 633. I expect that number to plummet over the summer.