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Saturday, November 1, 2025

Post #7424 J

 Pandemic Report

CDC has not updated its summary stats since the end of September. What particularly annoys me is CDC explicitly scapegoats the Democrats for the shutdown and, hence, no webpage updates: 


Perhaps the biggest news item over the past week was the dismissal of Steven Hatfill.a senior biosecurity adviser at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who opposed mRNA Covid shots. I was initially skeptical because RFK, Jr. had gone out of the way to remake a vaccine panel loaded with skeptics, but it seemed to involve a case of misleading credentials: "The agency cited false claims of being the chief medical officer at ASPR and lack of effective cooperation with government agencies and department leadership as reasons for the ouster."

Other COVID news items of note:

  • "COVID-19 has become endemic"
  • "Singapore Approves Latest Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for All Ages"
  • "While the number of vaccinated Americans is high, we are still seeing cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. However, deaths are declining. According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this week’s total number of deaths is 2,838. At this same time last year, the weekly total was 15,031.The death toll is still rising for a few reasons, including a lagging booster rate and high transmissibility, even in vaccinated people. We are also seeing a high concentration of deaths among the elderly. In fact, in recent weeks, people over the age of 75 accounted for seven out of every ten deaths."
  • Prosecution od COVID relief fraud or other crimes continues
    • "Ringleader in multimillion-dollar COVID fraud scheme sentenced to 18 years in federal prison"
    • "SENTENCING FOR NORRIS CITY PASTOR ACCUSED OF COVID-19 LOAN FRAUD PUSHED TO NOVEMBER"
  • Legal/political issues:

Other Notes

Same old same old on dubious Blogger pageviews. I did push out an essay on Halloween to hit my monthly tarhet of 40. I'm still on track to hit 400 posts by the end of the year. More recently I was averaging over 500. but my health issues late winter through spring had me off the web for over a month. And I've written fewer but far more detailed essays recently. For example, I went over the role of tariffs  of American history in general terms using examples of Trump bashing Nabisco and the infant formula crisis from a few years back. I've used a lot of Google AI to support relevant posts and tweets. On Twitter/X, my followers seemed to stabilize around 230 or so, triple the rate over the first 12 years or so.

Sports haven't gone well for me recently Texas upset higher-ranked Vanderbilt today, but the latter scored 3 unanswered fourth-quarter touchdowns and nearly recovered an onside kick just a field goal behind at that point. Then as an AL fan, Toronto lost their last 2 World Series home games in allowing the Dodgers to repeat as champs, the first since the Yankees in the late 90's. It was bad enough I watched most of the Series on my cellphone because the cable connection to Fox was unreliable

But what really made me furious was dealing with my cable/Internet provider. I recently had a modem (literally my my third in 6 months) which was suddenly cycling in a loop. Their tech support sucks, and they try to force you into having someone scheduled for a home visit. There's always an implicit threat they would charge you for the visit. Long story short, they did apply one on my latest statement. The dude didn't even test the modem; he just speculated it was was probably  an electrical power problem and maybe I should plug the modem plug into a surge power strip. Never mind he never tested his hypothesis to see if it worked. So they actually wanted to charge me of his crackpot BS that didn't even work. In fact, a competitor's sales people had a role in getting an ambulance for my health issue in March, and I considered switching shortly thereafter. I suspect probable cabling issues outside the home and the problem eventually went away. 
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