Month: August 2021

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What happened to “Herd Immunity”?

Caught this article.

This is one of the more disturbing things I’ve read. Yeah, today is my news day. There are times when I wonder why I even look. The dumpster fire that is my country today is revolting.PeteParada1 640x480

The short version of the article is that drummer Pete Parada for the band Offspring has been fired because he cannot take the vaccine. Really, he can’t, his doctor recommended against him taking it because he has Guillain-Barré syndrome.

This is an autoimmune disorder wherein the patient’s own immune response attacks their nerves.

Given that there have been cases of Bell’s Palsy associated with some of the vaccines it is completely logical that Parada’s doctor would recommend against the vaccine in his particular case. You know, under the rule “Do No Harm”, or how about “The benefit of taking the vaccine is outweighed by the risk”

But it gets even better. Parada has already had COVID. He had it last year and has been immune for longer than all these newbies with their vaccinations. Technically he has the GOLD standard of immunization.

Not that it matters to the people in power. Managers, Booking Agents, Hollywood, Politicians, or the Media.

This constant push on the part of the media and our government for everyone to take the vaccine is very strange. There was a time not too long ago where moms would arrange playdates for their children with another child who had measles or chickenpox.

OMG!!!

By todays standards, that would have Child Protective Services right up your ass.

But there was method in this apparent madness. Moms could plan to have and care for a sick child. The child had superior immune responses and were extremely likely to get a little sick, get through it, and have lifelong immunity to chickenpox or measles. THE BENEFIT greatly outweighed the risk and inconvenience.

Before there was a vaccine for mumps, it was preferred that all children acquire the disease prior to entering puberty. This avoided much more serious complications of mumps, such as sterility.

As awful and potentially deadly as smallpox is (was) a large majority of people survived it. The vaccine simply was a scientific method of preventing someone catching the disease or being scarred by it. Not everyone in the world today has been vaccinated against smallpox, yet it’s generally accepted that smallpox is a disease of the past. That’s what they call herd immunity.

In the case of drummer Pete Parada if he’s the only person on stage who has not been “officially” vaccinated and all the other members of the band have, what the hell is the problem? He’s going to be at the back of the stage, away from their adoring fans, and  is unlikely to spread COVID.

When did we become a people driven by fear not logic? How is this in any way scientific (following the science) when we are disregarding over 100 years of established medical science. Further since the medical establishment (At least the vocal government sanctioned part of it) has started pushing vaccinations for even people who have already had COVID, how can anyone be surprised at vaccine hesitancy or conspiracy theories popping up?

Suddenly, in 2021 decades of medical information spoon fed to us by the medical establishment is being tossed aside and EVERYONE must take an experimental vaccine. Is it any wonder that Grandma and Grandpa out on the farm might be asking questions?

Then there’s this lovely item in The Atlantic

Juliette Kayyem 640x480Juliette Kayyem writes:

The White House has rejected a nationwide vaccine mandate—a sweeping suggestion that the Biden administration could not easily enact if it wanted to—but a no-fly list for unvaccinated adults is an obvious step that the federal government should take. It will help limit the risk of transmission at destinations where unvaccinated people travel—and, by setting norms that restrict certain privileges to vaccinated people, will also help raise the stagnant vaccination rates that are keeping both the economy and society from fully recovering.

WOW!

This is from a former assistant secretary for Homeland Security under Obama.

WTF?

Elsewhere in the piece she does make a point about limiting the spread of COVID via travel restrictions from other countries. I’m sure she called Trump racist and xenophobic when he stopped incoming flights from China.

Now though, she is suggesting a no fly list for the unvaccinated! This is anti-American and once again unscientific on its face.

If you’re vaccinated then you have taken appropriate steps to minimize the transmission of COVID either by you getting it again, (you shouldn’t since you’re vaccinated,) or spreading it because once again you’re vaccinated.

Therefore a no fly list for the unvaccinated is completely UNTHINKABLE, because it’s INSANE.

Unless…

The vaccine isn’t working like other vaccines have in the past. But do we really know either way? On the one hand we have this oft repeated quote:

…remarkably safe, effective vaccines are widely available, at least to adults.

Yet we have increasing reports of “Breakthrough” COVID infections among the vaccinated. So which is it?

With every passing week, the government attempts to assure the public that vaccination is the ONLY way to go, but then spokespeople from that same government, or those held up by the press as, “People in the know” are undermining that message by their words and actions.

All the Texas Democrats that “fled” Texas to Washington DC were vaccinated. Yet after they met with Vice President Harris, 6 came down with COVID. Then VP Harris ran to Walter Reed for “A routine checkup”.

The VP is vaccinated right?

If she was exposed to some kind of “Breakthrough” variant there’s not a lot that Walter Reed could do. If she was worried about it, she should have quarantined and not exposed everyone else to a potential variant to go to her “routine checkup”.

Isn’t that what the rest of America has been told to do? If you’ve been exposed, self quarantine. I seem to recall something like that over the past year and a half. Even my Doctor said if I’d been exposed to please reschedule my appointment and there’d be no penalty.

That’s my doctor! When have you known a doctor to waive charging you for a missed or late appointment?

Just sayin…

This kind of chaos is not helping to motivate those with vaccination hesitancy, nor is it doing anything to assuage the fear of COVID. All this is doing is deepening the divides between the American people.

We have quite enough division to work through, we don’t need Vaccination status to fracture us further.

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Chasing Gremlins

There are many benefits to technology.

Most of us have various bits of tech in our homes, it may be just our computer, or our phones. Some of us have a bit more technology in our homes, and there be gremlins hiding there.

Most of the time the gremlins are dormant and only awaken when we do something causing us to trip over them. For example, we move something around, or try to add a new device. Usually these instances result in a minor irritation but are easily resolved.

I’ve been chasing gremlins for the past week and a half, and I have a lot of devices to chase the little devils through.

About a week or two ago, Edison was having a problem. In the course of 4 hours they flipped the power on & off at least 6 times. I’d just get the clocks reset and bang! The power was off again. Sometimes the power would stutter on for a moment then go off again.

Technology really doesn’t like that!

All the gremlins awoke and have been running through system after system, creating odd and completely random effects. Devices appearing and disappearing from the network, devices working fine one moment and then refusing to execute a command they’d just completed. Or suddenly executing a command that they’d received an hour ago because they suddenly remembered it (Kinda like Joe Biden…)

Fortunately, unlike in the case of Joe, (switching off humans is generally a bad idea,) I can switch devices off and if necessary reinitialize them.

Over the past two days, I’ve begun to feel like The Exorcist. Get thee back Demon!!

Or like a poor bastard that pissed off a Techno-Madge in Babylon 5.

Then I remembered I AM a Techno-Madge and these gremlins will be purged!

There are 30 devices online at my home at any given moment. I’ve purged 25 of these devices thus far. the remaining 5 are sitting in techno-limbo as I type. They’re being reset to factory default and one by one I’ll add them to the network as they wake up mindless from their reset.

After that, the gremlins should be at least flushed from my systems for the time being.

Gremlins will always make a reappearance. Sometimes they’re artifacts of small little bugs that are no consequence in a particular device. The problem is that they can be cumulative. When you have enough devices added to the same network, these little insignificant bugs combine and mutate, (no, we’re not to Maximum Overdrive or SkyNet yet,) the mutation is more of an interaction between devices.

Mr Scott said it best, “The more you complicate the plumbing, the easier to stop up the works.”

We’re living it. All of our devices are “smart” each of them has memory, when they’re network connected the router and some switches remember the state of each of the devices.

Sometimes, just turning the device off and restarting it isn’t enough. That’s because the router will often reconnect the device(s) in the same way when you turn them back on again and then you’re right back where you started.

The systems are trying to be helpful but they’re actually just more frustrating.

I had to completely reinitialize the Nest Thermostat and the Nest Protect smoke alarms. That was fun, “Gee thanks Google, I knew no good would come of you purchasing Nest, you jackasses could complicate a wet dream.”

Did you know that if you plug a HomePod mini into your computer it will flash Orange? How about that the HomePod mini has around 2.6 gigabytes of software running inside it?

Did you know that your printer is a smart little bugger and it tries to remember it’s setup so hard that it actually fights you when you’re trying to send it back to factory default?

Don’t even ask about network attached storage devices. They can be really contrary. It’s with good reason, they’re trying to protect your data so many of them will require signs, countersigns, along with various incantations and sigils.

The most frustrating part of this particular adventure has been certain smart lightbulbs (I’m looking at you office lamp,) several of these machines have told me they’ve reset, but lied. The office light was the worst offender 5 times straight, “Yep, I’ve reset,” but then, “No, you can’t configure me because I’m already set up.”

“Uh huh, and how did that go for you little light bulb?” (Lightbulb contritely dims)

Don’t get me wrong, I like having a “Smart House”, privacy issues notwithstanding. Yeah, all these smart devices can and do phone their creators regularly. God only knows what information they’re sending.

I thought, and this is demonstrating perhaps white racist language, when I purchased a machine I was that machine’s master.

Yeah, what of it? Am I going to hear from the robot-rights association?

Alright the last devices appear to have returned to their pristine factory reset zombie state…

I’m off to give them a purpose again.

(Wanders off)

“Come on my little slaves, let’s put you back to work.“

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Well, here we are in August

The Summer is coming to a close, the children are supposed to be going back to school. (That rite of passage may again be disrupted due to COVID.)

I’ve got a couple of projects to get done before the Winter, those projects are on hold because of the living room and flooring mess.

There’s no reason to paint the stairs if there’re going to be workmen dragging all manner of tools and things up the stairs.

I can lay in supplies for the projects in the mean time. So at least that will be, in some small way, productive.

The flooring is the last piece of the puzzle regarding the living room, then we’ll have to have the fire suppression system inspected and re-pressurized. The jury is still out on the question of the furniture being replaced. At this point it’s likely that the couch and chair will be, but the rest of the wood furniture may have survived.

As we head back into another heat wave, I’m glad that the ceiling is at least back so that the air conditioning won’t be running quite as hard. My “Martian” special worked but was inefficient as far as insulation went. We’re now fully two months into having this disruption in our lives. Although, there are others who’ve been waiting 4 to 6 months.

Between supply shortages and construction repair crews busy schedules there are a lot of people waiting in line for remodels and repairs.

At the moment, I have a pile of trashed building materials on my front lawn and can’t really even do much in the way of yard work. There’s supposed to be a crew member coming up to pick up the trash and the ladders, I expect he’ll be by when the work is complete. It makes more sense to make only one trip instead of several so I’m not really all that worried about it.

This Summer has been a season of things breaking. My faithful 12 year old monitor gave up the ghost a week ago. While I didn’t want to spend money I’m glad I bought a new monitor. Amazon on the other hand said this monitor had more ports than it actually does. Their description was mostly correct except for this one small detail. Nonetheless, the thunderbolt port was there as indicated, and provided me with a method to connect to the computer.

Amazon’s description said there was a Thunderbolt, DV, and HDMI, port. There was only Thunderbolt and HDMI. I think the copy writer on the Amazon site may have grabbed the wrong specifications. Frankly, it’s probably too much of a pain in the ass to return the monitor and call them on their mistake. Going to the Samsung site told me I had the correct model number and that this unit did not contain the DV port. So word to the wise, cross check Amazon’s description and specifications against the actual manufacturer’s before you click that convenient “BUY” button.

In this case it’s not a big deal, but If I’d specifically needed the DV port it would have been.

The panel itself is very nice and crisp. It’s even convenient to watch movies or TV on.

The new router is working like a champ although there have been some situations where firmware updates on it have caused glitches throughout the WiFi devices connected to it. Nothing particularly difficult to resolve, but as is always the case with computer equipment these glitches show up at the most inconvenient times. I’m enjoying the speeds the router provides. I don’t much notice the difference between WiFi and hardline connections. With the previous router, there was a noticeable difference and if I had to do anything intense, like downloading an OS or watching movies I always connected to the hardline. Now I’ve actually moved devices over to WiFi and been able to decommission some of the network switches.

When I reassemble the living room, I’ll be considering connecting everything WiFi and getting rid of cables that aren’t strictly necessary.

Lately, I’ve noticed that I’m not actually watching what little of the news I used to catch. I’ve even stopped reading the news online. It’s all gotten too crazy for me.

Masks, not masks. Vaccine, not vaccine. Mandated Vaccinations No Mandates. Members of Congress saying that they want to create a two class America over vaccination status.

It’s one thing if the media says stuff like that, you pretty much ignored it because they’re the media, BUT when members of Congress start saying stuff like this, it’s head snapping!

When our government starts asking for vaccination proof, we will be uncomfortably close to NAZI or Communist forms of government. Are we at the point that our Republic is already dead? Are we just scrabbling around in the carcass of what was once a great country? Where does that leave what used to be “Average Americans”?

It’s stuff like those questions that makes reading or watching the News an increasingly unpleasant experience. I’m down to looking at the insanity about once a week unless something really catches my attention. At least I’m not completely uninformed but I can’t be any more informed than once a week.