Reality and Dreams

One of the main things I don't understand about Joe Biden and the Democrats is how they always state they are committed to facts and science but their policies and actions invariably fail to back it up.

Joe Biden has spent his first 10 days in office sitting at his desk signing executive orders and actions.

Here is Biden signing a tall stack of executive orders on his first day in office.

I had to laugh considering that one of his orders was a proclamation declaring January 20 a "National Day of Unity".

How much unity did you feel with the unilateral action from Biden that any school receiving federal funding must either allow biological males who identify as female to play on girls’ sports teams or be subject to administrative action from the Education Department?

Biden also signed an executive order that you cannot refer to Covid-19 as the "China" virus. I am waiting for the follow up order to tell people to stop talking about the UK, South African and Brazilian variants.

Biden criticized President Trump's use of executive orders during the campaign stating that building consensus on issues of policy was important. 

"We're a democracy, you need consensus".

I wonder how much consensus there is among female athletes about Biden's executive order affecting them?

It is true that Biden did state that he would use executive orders to undo Trump policies but hasn't he overdone it a little bit in the first ten days? The fact is that a good many of the executive orders are not undoing anything Trump did. I think the idea that biological males and females should play on separate athletic teams went back a long way before Trump. I think it also has something to do with SCIENCE.

Let's look at a comparison of executive orders in the first 10 days of recent Presidents.

One of the areas that Biden has signed the most executive orders and actions is to attack the fossil fuels industry in the name of fighting "climate change".

Biden has paused oil and gas drilling on federal lands, he has banned fracking and stopped work on the Keystone XL Pipeline.

He has also ordered that all federal agencies buy "carbon pollution-free electricity and clean, zero-emission vehicles". It will be interesting to see if this also applies to the Presidential limousines and all of those large, black Secret Service SUV's.

This is all directed at an overall goal of reaching net zero emissions, economy-wide, by 2050.

I am all for cleaner, more efficient and cost-effective forms of energy. I fully support federal funding of new energy technologies. However, it makes absolutely no sense to ban proven energy sources when the clear facts are that there are no realistic alternatives to replace them at the present time.

What Biden and the Democrats want us to do would be akin to banning horses because their manure was polluting all of the country's roads or restricting the use of firewood to heat people's homes because of the smoke pollution in the late 19th century.

The development of alternative energy sources and technology solved these problems but we did not ban what worked to keep the world going in the meantime.

In order to put all of this in context let's take a look at world energy consumption by source in 2020.

The fact is that fossil fuels dominate. Oil and coal---the two sources that emit the most carbon---make up about 60% of global energy consumption. Natural gas is another 25% of the total.

Renewables and hydro make up only about 10% of energy consumption. Nuclear another 5%.

Source: https://desdemonadespair.net/2020/06/bp-statistical-review-of-world-energy-2020-carbon-emissions-increase-for-another-year-coal-still-the-single-largest-source-of-power-generation.html

This chart shows how those shares have changed over the last 25 years.

Source: https://desdemonadespair.net/2020/06/bp-statistical-review-of-world-energy-2020-carbon-emissions-increase-for-another-year-coal-still-the-single-largest-source-of-power-generation.html

In that we have only 29 years until 2050 this shows just how dramatic the changes have to be in eliminating oil, gas and coal and replacing it with something else in order to meet that zero carbon emissions future.

I recently came across an excellent analysis on exactly what would have to happen if we are to get to zero global emissions by 2050. If someone wants to talk about science and facts they ought to start with the reality of where we are today and what we would need to build in alternative energy sources to replace all the fossil fuels we currently use.

The analysis frames all of this in what we would need to build in alternative electric generating capacity to our power grid (after all, those electric cars and trucks will need to charged with power from the grid) each day between now and 2050. 

Starting from today, January 25, 2021, there are 10,568 days until January 1, 2050. So we need to install, test, commission, and add to the grid about 22 TW / 10568 days ≈ 2.1 gigawatts/day (GW/day, or 109 watts/day) of generating capacity each and every day from now until 2050.

We can do that in a couple of ways. We could go all nuclear. In that case, we’d need to build, commission, and bring on-line a brand-new 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every single day from now until 2050. Easy, right? …

Don’t like nukes? Well, we could use wind power. Now, the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Typical wind “capacity factor”, the percentage of actual energy generated compared to the nameplate capacity, is about 35%. So we’d have to build, install, commission and bring online just under 3,000 medium-sized (2 megawatt, MW = 106 watts) wind turbines every single day from now until 2050. No problemo, right? …

Don’t like wind? Well, we could use solar. Per the NREL, actual delivery from grid-scale solar panel installations on a 24/7/365 basis is on the order of 8.3 watts per square metre depending on location. So we’d have to cover ≈ 96 square miles (250 square kilometres) with solar panels, wire them up, test them, and connect them to the grid every single day from now until 2050. Child’s play, right? …

I sincerely hope that everyone can see that any of those alternatives are not just impossible. They are pie-in-the-sky, flying unicorns, bull-goose looney impossible.

The numbers above are based on global energy consumption. The United States consumes about 1/6 of the total so divide the above numbers by 1/6. Another way to look at it is that the United States would have to build this energy capacity each week, instead of each day, between now and 2050.

Do you know how many nuclear power plants have been opened in the United States in the last 25 years?

ONE.

Two nuclear reactors are now under construction in Georgia. They were approved in 2012 and are scheduled to come on line sometime in 2021 or 2022. These were the first nuclear plants approved in the United States in the last 30 years.

Considering the 10 year lead time from regulatory approval to operation in the United States, I think we are going to be a little behind the schedule outlined above. If we started planning today we would already be 10 years behind on that 29 year schedule.

What about those solar panels?

John Kerry, Biden's Climate Change Czar, recently suggested that all of those high paid workers who were building the Keystone Pipeline could get jobs building solar panels.

Exactly how large an area would the array of those solar panels require to replace the power in the grid now being supplied by fossil fuels?

If you assume the 96 square mile calculation above on the added solar panel capacity that is needed every week in the United States for the next 29 years to meet the zero emissions goal in 2050, it would require 144,768 square miles of land.

Let's put that in context.

That is 144 times the size of the state of Rhode Island.

That is an area larger than 46 of the 50 states.

It is actually about the size of the total state of Montana.

Are you beginning to see how ridiculous all of this Green New Deal nonsense is?

Despite all of the statements about science and facts, it has absolutely no grounding in reality.

The stated goal of reducing the environmental impacts with these executive orders is also illogical.

The oil and gas in Canada is already being produced. Right now it is being transported by rail cars. Those trains use fossil fuels to power the engines. Those rail cars also sometimes derail. The pipeline would reduce carbon emissions and also better protect the environment. 

This is a tweet I sent out in 2013 about a crude oil train derailment in Quebec when the Obama administration was blocking Keystone XL at that time.

13 dead and 37 missing not to mention the environmental impact.

We are also going to ban the fracking of natural gas which will most likely end up requiring the United States to import more crude oil. That means more CO2 to transport the oil which also has more CO2 than the natural gas it will displace.

Does any of this make sense?

Of course it doesn't.

This is nothing but a Democrat dream. It has no basis in reality, facts or science despite what they tell you.

Perhaps we will discover new alternative energy sources or enhancements in the next 29 years that can displace fossil fuels. I hope we can. However, that is nothing more than a dream at this point. There is no realistic path to displace fossil fuels with the technology we have today or that could be considered remotely foreseeable right now.

 

Therefore, banning, restricting or limiting our primary energy sources is nothing short of committing economic suicide.

At one time I thought that no one would actually follow through on any public policy proposal that was so out of touch with reality. That was a year ago. I no longer assume anything.

What hasn't changed is that dreams always end. At some point, you wake up. Have these facts caused you to wake up?

Let's hope there is something left when a substantial majority in the United States does wake up.

Are Covid Vaccinations Causing Deaths?

Are Covid vaccinations causing deaths?

That is a question I got from a BeeLine reader recently when he saw this article about a surge in Covid deaths in Gibraltar right after introduction of the Pfizer vaccine in that British Territory adjoining Spain.

He asked me if it was true.

I know a little about Gibraltar having visited there on a cruise about 10 years ago. It only has about 30,000 residents and a good part of the workforce comes into the territory on a daily basis from neighboring Spain.

This is another article on Gibraltar's recent surge in Covid deaths asking the question of whether the vaccine could be contributing to the death toll.

Ever since the epidemic began, sorting genuine Covid deaths from others has been a major issue. Now we have the added problem of vaccines in the mix. The UK now allegedly has the highest daily “Covid death” rate ever. Even higher than the “First Wave,” in spite of the substantial degree of herd immunity that has inevitably accrued since the beginning. This atypical “Second Wave” coincides with the vaccine roll-out. Are the two connected?

Gibraltar, normally called simply “Gib,” provides a very clear picture. This tiny British Colony, barely three miles long, appended to the South coast of Spain, has only 32,000 residents. It had suffered relatively little from the epidemic before the 9th January this year, with only seventeen deaths for the whole period. The death rate was well down the Deaths per Million League Table. This was not due to isolation, since Spanish workers have continued to pour into Gib every morning, and back out every evening.

On January 9th, the British Royal Air Force flew in 6,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and they were quickly deployed on the population to avoid degradation of the supply. Therefore, as many as 20% of the population of Gibraltar were quickly given the vaccine in a short period of time.

I was not aware of what had been going on in Gibraltar so I did a little independent research to understand what the truth might be.

The surge in deaths is true. Answering the question of whether they have been caused by the vaccine is more difficult to answer.

Gibraltar had been relatively unscathed by Covid until the middle of December.

The surge in cases seems to have peaked right about the time that the vaccine was first administered.

Despite the fact that Gibraltar did not have one death from Covid until November, 2020, 69 deaths have now been recorded. There were only 12 deaths from Covid as of January 9.

Despite having one of the lowest Covid death rates in the world two months ago, Gibraltar now has the highest per capita death rate of any place in the world.

Are the Covid vaccinations causing deaths in Gibraltar?

I don't know at this point. 

There is usually about a three week lag effect between the rise in Covid cases and an increase in deaths. It is therefore entirely possible that the increase in deaths in Gibraltar in January are the result of the increasing number of cases that began in mid-December and peaked around January 9. The increased deaths could clearly have nothing to do with the vaccine.

We should know more as we get into February. It is encouraging that new Covid cases have continued a downward trend in Gibraltar recently. Is this due to the vaccine or is it a natural result of the virus burning out? With so many variables involved, it is always difficult to know anything with certainty concerning Covid.

Consider the recent death of Hank Aaron at age 86.

On January 5, Aaron received the Moderna vaccine as part of a public relations campaign to encourage  African Americans to get the vaccine. He passed away in his sleep on January 22 from what has been described as "natural causes".

That very well could be true. It likely is just a coincidence. However, it is also true that if Aaron had tested positive for Covid on January 5 (even if he had no symptoms), and died 17 days later, his death would have been counted as a  Covid death. There is no question about that.

This is the double standard and bias that is so difficult to understand.

Covid is listed as the cause of death if there is the slightest hint it was present in someone's body over the previous 60 days.

If someone dies 60 minutes after getting the vaccine, it is a "coincidence".

This should be troubling to anyone who is trying to honestly assess the issues involving the virus and the vaccines.

The media and the "experts" have painted the most negative and dangerous narrative they could involving Covid-19. They are also portraying the vaccines in the most positive light they can.

The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere in the middle but it is next to impossible for the average person to decipher what it is. 

As an example, here is the Oregon Health Authority falsely stating on its website that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been APPROVED by the FDA. This is a false and deceptive statement. These vaccines have merely been AUTHORIZED for use under an emergency use authorization. They are unapproved and unlicensed at this point. We are effectively still in an experimental trial period with these vaccines.

Source: https://covidvaccine.oregon.gov/#safety

If there is any place in the world we can look to in order to see how effective the Pfizer vaccine is (or is not) it will be Israel.

Israel has now vaccinated 82% of its population in the last month. It is an incredible accomplishment.

Israel was able to acquire large supplies of the vaccine because it agreed to provide Pfizer all of the immunological data on its population in return. In effect, the people of Israel are a huge experimental group that will help Pfizer determine the benefits (and risks) of the vaccine that is much larger than was used in the clinical trials.

Just as was the case in Gibraltar, Israel was seeing a spike in cases just before the vaccination program began. New cases are almost double today what they were a month ago when the vaccine program began. However, in the last week new cases have declined slightly. Is this the beginning of a large trend? We better hope so.

Daily New Cases in Israel
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/

Daily deaths are over three times what they were a month ago when the vaccine program was initiated. If this does fall sharply over the next month with 82% vaccinated, there should be a lot of questions asked about the Pfizer vaccine.

Daily Deaths in Israel
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/

Keep your eyes on Israel's experience with Covid over the next month or two. It could be a useful indicator of how effective the Pfizer vaccine is.

Where can someone go to attempt to find out what adverse effects and deaths are being associated with the Covid vaccines in the United States?

The CDC and the FDA maintain a Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) for doctors, nurses or patients to report any adverse events that occurs after a vaccination. This system was created in 1990 in response to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act which exempted pharmaceutical companies from any liability for damages or deaths caused by their vaccine products. It was thought that having a system to capture adverse events centrally would be helpful in that it might allow vaccines that are causing problems to be scrutinized in a more timely basis to cut off access if there is a problem.

Critics say the problem with VAERS is that many adverse events are not reported. Many see an event and believe it was a " coincidence". Therefore, some believe the VAERS data vastly understates the number of adverse events. Those that are pro-vaccine argue the opposite. They state that many of the events reported are temporal and should not have been reported into the system to begin with.

To compound matters, VAERS is very clunky if you want to attempt to extract data from the system. It has been even worse lately as the system was down recently. The CDC states that it is because the server was overwhelmed by too many queries according to Alex Berenson.

I have found it easier to research vaccine adverse events by going to this site (OpenVAERS) which takes the VAERS data but packages in a user-friendly interface.

This is the VAERS data for the Covid vaccines through January 22, 2021.

This is the breakdown on deaths by vaccine manufacturer and by gender.

It is important to remember that these are cases where the death was close enough in time that someone was suspicious the vaccine caused the death. There might not be a relationship between the vaccine and death. Then again, you have cases like Hank Aaron which were clearly not reported to VAERS but should it have been?

Pfizer has more reported deaths but that might be a function of the fact that it was introduced earlier.

Note that deaths between males and females is almost equal.

This is the distribution by age.

I am personally troubled by the deaths reported in the age 25-50 age group. Did the potential benefit of the vaccine outweigh the cost for this group considering the low Covid death rate for these ages?

I think the breakdowns by sex for the adverse events that have been reported to VAERS for hospitalizations and ER/urgent care visits is very interesting.

Are the vaccines creating greater side effects on females than males? These are very heavily skewed towards females for some reason.

Hospitalizations-VAERS data for Covid vaccines

ER/Urgent Care-VAERS data for Covid vaccines

You also see some interesting differences in the data by age. 

Look at the high number of adverse events in those younger even though a focus in many states has been to prioritize those over age 65 for the vaccine. Most of these younger age people have to have been health care workers.

Some believe that the vaccine elicits a much stronger immune response from the vaccine in the young versus the old. This might be an indication of that. Could the response be too strong in some younger people?

Hospitalizations-VAERS data for Covid vaccine

ER/Urgent Care Visits-VAERS data for Covid vaccine

Of course, you have to keep all of these numbers in perspective. Allowing for a lag of one week in reporting to VAERS, I estimate that approximately 12 million doses of vaccine had been administered to which the potential 182 deaths VAERS associated deaths were reported. 

All of those numbers above don't look as bad with that context. However, if you are THE ONE, odds don't matter much.

Are Covid vaccinations causing deaths? 

It would surprise me if they weren't. The question is whether the number of deaths is acceptable in comparison to the potential deaths saved.

For example, for those between the ages of 18-50, there have been 17,787 deaths attributed to Covid in the last 13 months. 334,689 people in these age groups died of another cause. In other words, in these age groups, there is almost a 20x chance of dying from something else than Covid. 

Deaths by accident in these age groups have annually been about 56,000. This would put the odds of dying from an accident for these ages at over 3x that of dying from Covid. Deaths from suicide have also been higher than the number of Covid deaths and this was before the lockdown effects of Covid have increased the suicide rates for these ages.

Do these low death from Covid rates for these ages justify any risk by taking the vaccine?

My view is that we will know a lot more about the costs and benefits of the vaccines in another couple of months when more data is available----especially from Israel.

What would I recommend in the meantime?

Looking at the data, I would have a hard time recommending anyone under age 50 take the vaccine right now. This seems even more true for females. I just don't see the benefits outweighing the potential costs.

For those above that age it probably comes down to personal choice.

I personally believe that it is more prudent to wait and see what the data from the large population set in Israel reveals. We are going to know a lot more in a few months. It doesn't make sense to me to force a decision when we will be much better informed in a month or two. 

If you choose to wait, there are still things you do to enhance your own immune system naturally.

Many doctors say that the most important preventive health action you can take is to maintain high Vitamin D levels. This might be a reason that lockdowns have not worked as well as we were told they would. If you are inside you are not getting the Vitamin D levels you need.

Most people should be taking Vitamin D supplements in the winter months in particular. Is it a coincidence that we have had the highest peaks of Covid when people were pushed inside due to the weather?

If you want to learn more about Vitamin D levels and Covid, I recommend you read this article on a big push in this area in Ireland.

As always...

Stay informed. Stay healthy.

Coronavirus and BeeLine +1

It was exactly one year ago that I first wrote about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China.

Since that first blog post I have written about Covid another 74 times. That represents almost 50% of all of the blog posts I wrote in the last year.

I am reposting that first blog post from last year below to provide some perspective on my early take about the virus. What it shows is that in some ways we have come a long way in the last year. In other ways we are just as confused about it as we were a year ago.

Early on I showed concern about potential asymptomatic spread and what was said to be a long incubation period that could be as long as 14 days.

There is still not clear consensus that asymptomatic spread is a significant driver in the spread of the virus. A 14 day incubation period seems to be an extreme outlier. Most of the time symptoms will present within no more than 5 days after exposure with 2-3 days being most common.

I wrote a year ago that I suspected the virus might have escaped from the Wuhan biolab that was doing 'gain of function' research on viruses. At that time, China was blaming the virus on people eating bats at a wet market in Wuhan.

A WHO official said yesterday they still could not say the virus originated in China.

A year has passed and we still don't know where the virus originated? That seems to be very hard to believe.

We also still don't know the extent to which Dr. Tony Fauci and his NIH group might have actually been partially funding the "gain of function" research at Wuhan. My guess is that he was.

Fauci was also a name that most had never heard of a year ago.

Now almost everyone knows his name. Until yesterday few would have ever thought that Fauci was also the highest paid federal government employee in 2019.  

He actually made more last year than the President of the United States. However, Donald Trump donated his entire salary to charity. To this day we don't know if Fauci may also be profiting from patents on the Covid vaccines.

Fauci is also the "expert" who told us 11 months ago that the risk of coronavirus in the USA was "minuscule" and there was no value in wearing face masks.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-disease-official-anthony-fauci-risk-of-coronavirus-in-u-s-is-minuscule-skip-mask-and-wash-hands/4787209002/

Fauci is now saying it "makes common sense" that we wear two masks.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/01/26/covid-double-masking-effective-fauci-says-makes-common-sense/4157884001/

Do you think Dr. Fauci might be slightly overpaid?

Speaking of the vaccines, I doubt that any expert a year ago could have conceived that we would have two Covid vaccines being administered right now. It has been an extraordinary achievement.

I also doubt that anyone could have predicted that China, which was being devastated by the virus in Wuhan a year ago, would be the country that would weather the pandemic and its economic ramifications better than any other country.

Was this great crisis management? Did we ever get the real story from China? Is there something more nefarious at play here? A year later and we don't know.

I also wrote a year ago that should the virus spread widely beyond China that the two countries that public health experts believed were best prepared to deal with a pandemic were the United States and the United Kingdom. China was ranked #51.

A year later it is the USA and UK that have fared worse than almost all other major countries. 

Did the world public health experts know what they were talking about when they made that original assessment?

Did the public health experts in the USA or UK make major mistakes in responding to the pandemic?

Or is it just a function that the USA and UK have counted cases and deaths much more thoroughly and liberally than other countries? Perhaps they have inflated case and death counts because they have more resources and tools that other countries do not. Might they have been too smart for their (and our) own good?

There is a lot we still don't know a year later.

I wish I was confident we will know more a year from now. 

In the meantime, take a few minutes and read what I wrote about coronavirus a year ago.

Coronavirus and China

(originally published January 26, 2020)

There is good and bad news about the coronavirus epidemic in China.

The bad news is that this appears to be a particularly virulent virus strain. It is also centered in Wuhan, China which is the home to 11 million people. We are talking about a city that is larger than any in the United States but chances are that 99% of Americans did not even know it existed until last week.

The virus also apparently has a long incubation period (14+ days) before any symptoms manifest themselves. In the meantime, the subject is contagious even if they do not know they are sick. In that 11 million people live in Wuhan it only takes a small percentage of those people to travel elsewhere for the virus to spread.

We are already seeing that effect as we see the confirmed cases spread out from Hubei province in China where Wuhan is located.

* As of Jan. 27 the death toll in China had risen to 80, with 76 in Hubei province, authorities reported. Another 2,744 people in China had been infected: As of the end of Jan. 26, there were 1,423 confirmed cases in Hubei province.

* Thailand and Hong Kong have each reported eight cases of infection; the United States and Macau have five each; Taiwan, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia each have reported four; France and Japan three each; Vietnam and South Korea two apiece, and one each in Canada and Nepal.

* No fatalities have been reported outside China.

The five suspected cases in the United States are in California (3), Washington state and Chicago,

The most effective way to stop an outbreak of a virus such as this one is to aggressively isolate and quarantine those that are ill so as to not infect other people. They need to be identified, treated aggressively by medical professionals, and isolated.

It always seems that new virus strains originate in China. Each year's flu strains are expected to start there.

A lot of that seems to be due to the massive number of people in China and the fact that there is often more daily exposure to animals in China compared to Western countries. Many of these viruses originate in animals and mutate to humans. That is why we have heard of the swine flu, bird flu and the like in the past.

Ground zero for the coronavirus is reportedly a seafood market in central Wushan in which unauthorized animals were also sold. There have been some reports that the virus has been traced to bats that were eaten with soup in that market.

I can't believe that I missed eating that when I was in China a year ago!

More troubling are reports that this virus may have escaped from a Chinese biolab that is located in Wuhan and was involved in studying the highest risk pathogens in the world.

U.S. scientists were worried about the risks that pathogens like this could escape from facilities like this one as evidenced by this article in The Scientist back in 2015.

As a result, the United States ceased funding any of this "gain-of-function" research back in 2013 because it determined the risk of creating a pandemic was much greater than any information gained from the research.

It is worthwhile to note that at that time this decision was made there was research being done in the U.S. on an engineered coronavirus. Note as well where the surface protein came from for that virus.

Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of to one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.

One more piece of bad news is that fact that the Chinese Communists are not known to be the most transparent government on the planet. If they are admitting to 2,700 cases how many are we not being informed about?

Enough bad news.

What is the good news?

If there is any place on earth where a quarantine and mass mobilization can be carried out to combat this disease it is in China where the totalitarian government has total control of the population.

China has already banned all travel in and out of Wuhan. The city has become a ghost town. They have established quarantines in a dozen other cities cities as well such that some 50 million people are locked down.

China also has announced that they are going to build two hospitals each with over 1,000 beds in Wuhan.

What is in incredible is the Chinese say that these hospitals will be able to accept patients in a couple of weeks!

How is that possible?

Here is a photo of the site work on the first hospital taken on January 24..

Credit: Reuters

China's Wuhan city, the centre of the outbreak of the new coronavirus, will build a second dedicated hospital to treat patients.

Construction has already started on the first facility, with enough space for 1,000 patients, which is expected to be completed by 3 February.

The second, which is designed to have 1,300 beds, is due to be finished within three weeks. 

This may seem like an unrealistic time frame, however, China has a history of quickly building hospitals at times of crisis.

During the SARS outbreak in 2003, 7,000 people worked day and night in Beijing, taking just seven days to build the Xiaotangshan facility.  

The Chinese are known for being able to construct buildings and bridges very quickly.

Graham Allison in his book, “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?" has some incredible examples of Chinese construction capabilities.

"Between 2011 and 2013 China both produced and used more cement than did the US in the entire twentieth century. In 2011, a Chinese construction firm built a 30-story skyscraper in just 15 days. Three years later, another firm built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days” 

Allison also observed that it took nearly four years for a bridge near his office at Harvard University that crossed the Charles River to be replaced. The Chinese took only 43 hours to replace a substantially larger 1,300 ton bridge in China in November, 2015.

It just goes to show you have much you can accomplish when the government controls the entire labor supply and you don't need to worry about governmental regulations and permits and dealing with agencies like the EPA, OSHA, HHS and CMS to approve your projects.

Let's hope that China can control the spread of the virus. It is a significant challenge considering the population density in that country and the fact that this outbreak began over the Lunar New Year holiday when many people are traveling.

If you live in the United States some additional good news is that the 2019 Global Health Security Index ranks it as the best prepared in the world to deal with a pandemic although it found that the no country was fully prepared. These are the ten countries that are most prepared.

China ranks 51st out of 195 countries in the index.

If you want to be best prepared personally I thought this was a good article from a reporter who covered the SARS epidemic in China in 2003. It is has some good tips and precautions that you can use to protect yourself. These make good sense even if we are only talking about avoiding seasonal flu or colds.

Let's hope and pray that China and other countries around the world can keep the virus in check.

In the meantime, stay safe and be healthy. 

Proof of Fraud

 Fraud is defined in legal terms as follows.

A false representation of a matter of fact—whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of what should have been disclosed—that deceives and is intended to deceive another so that the individual will act upon it to her or his legal injury.

Allegations of election fraud has gotten a lot of attention in the 2020 election.

However, the most obvious fraud in most elections involves candidates who say one thing on the campaign trail and do something completely different when elected.

They make false or misleading claims to deceive the voters in order to get elected. Once elected, their true position becomes known.

Whatever your views are on Donald Trump, there was no politician in my lifetime who governed consistently in the same manner in office as he did while campaigning. He did not say one thing during the campaign and do something differently in office. There were no games. There was no obfuscation. He did what he said he was going to do. 

It was a big reason why the Washington establishment never liked Trump. He didn't play the game the way it was supposed to be played. It is the real reason why they impeached in the last days of his term and want to bar him from ever running for federal office again. 

Charles Hurt explains it well in a recent opinion piece. "Trump Feared Now More Than Ever" by pointing out that Trump was the only honest and serious person in Washington.

In one final shock to all the people who never understood Mr. Trump (or the 75 million Americans who supported him), he declined to attend his successor’s inauguration. Cue the fits of sputtering rage.

Truly, Mr. Trump is the only honest one of the whole bunch — the only one who is not kidding; the only serious person in Washington.

He didn’t attend Wednesday’s festivities because it would have been a lie — much like everything in Washington.

It was the same shocking outrage Mr. Trump sparked four years ago when he delivered his inaugural address and told the assembled crowd that — yes, indeed — he meant every word of his campaign and intended to make good on every promise he had made.

Washington.

Melted.

Down.

And from that moment on, they never recovered from their visceral hatred of Donald J. Trump.

We are back to standard practice with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The people who vote are viewed as nothing but props in a play or chumps in a fixed game.

We are already seeing it all revealed in the first few days after January 20.

Joe Biden spent most of the campaign criticizing Donald Trump's Covid policy and telling people he had a plan that would end the crisis.

In fact, we heard this claim more than any other during the campaign.

Joe Biden had a plan and he was going to fix everything.

What do we hear from Biden on his second full day in office?

Proof of fraud?

Since the Covid vaccines first began being distributed in mid-December Biden has also been stating that he was going to be introducing an ambitious plan to do 100 million vaccinations in 100 days. Biden intimated that Trump did not have any plan in place to do that.

Source: https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210120/bidens-covid-challenge-100-million-vaccinations-in-the-first-100-days-it-wont-be-easy#1

Biden “has made clear that slowing down the spread of Covid-19 and getting 100 million vaccine shots into Americans’ arms in his first 100 days in office are of utmost priority—goals that will shape whether Biden’s first years in office are ultimately deemed successful.”

An ambitious goal? Trump hasn't done anything?

The reality is that vaccinations in the week before Biden took office were running very close to 1 million per day already. In fact, between January 20-22 vaccinations were running at 1.4 million per day. These vaccinations were already in the logistics pipeline before Biden took office.

Sounds like a misleading allegation to me.

Does anyone remember Joe Biden on the campaign trail when he criticized President Trump for stopping flights from China and Europe into the United States to stop the spread of Covid?

Biden said travel bans were useless. He would have a plan to combat it that didn't rely on racist, xenophobic policies.

I thought walls didn't work?

Perhaps Biden decided they do work considering the fencing that was put up in Washington for his inauguration.

Why didn't Trump come up with that plan? 

You see all of this and you marvel at how Biden can say all of this with a straight face. However, then you realize, he has been a politician all his life and it just comes naturally. 

Biden is also attempting to create a narrative right now that the economic crisis is deepening and it's not getting better.

That's interesting because the unemployment rate is currently less than half of what it was in April.

It would be better still but for the economic lockdowns that have been instituted in Democrat states like California and New York.

The United States economic performance has also been better than any other major country in the world except China. Funny how that has worked out.

 

Despite Covid, it should also be noted that the unemployment rate when President Trump left office is still lower than it was for any of the first five years of the Obama and Biden administration.

More concealment and deception?

Of course, we also have the massive misrepresentation that Biden and Harris made during the campaign about their intentions about fracking and oil and gas drilling.

Remember when Biden and the media stated that Trump was lying when he said Biden wanted to abolish the U.S. oil industry and eliminate fracking.

It was a FACT that Joe Biden had no intention of banning fracking. His own VP said so.

It didn't take long to see where this is going.

Who was telling the truth?

I would say all of this is a pretty convincing proof of election fraud. 

You also had Joe Biden telling labor unions that he was in their corner during the campaign only to kill the Keystone XL pipeline project and thousands of high paying labor jobs even before his first day in office.

Biden told us he was going to be the most "pro-union" President in history.

Here are a couple of big unions endorsing Biden during the campaign.

It seem these unions realized they were a victim of election fraud even before the inauguration.

The most "pro-union" President?

Perhaps that only applies for the teachers' unions.

There was no fraud in the 2020 election?

What more proof does one need?

It doesn't even require anyone to even look at one voting machine or suspicious mail-in ballot.