Puns

I have a few jokes about unemployed people but it doesn't matter none of them work.

I just found out I'm colorblind. The diagnosis came completely out of the purple.

I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. It's impossible to put down.

The first computer dates back to Adam and Eve. It was an Apple with limited memory, just one byte. And then everything crashed.

I'm glad I know sign language, it's pretty handy.

eBay is so useless. I tried to look up lighters and all they had was 13,749 matches.

Don't trust atoms, they make up everything.

I bought some shoes from a drug dealer. I don't know what he laced them with, but I've been tripping all day.

R.I.P boiled water. You will be mist.

My wife just found out I replaced our bed with a trampoline; she hit the roof.

"Two beer or not two beer, that's the question!" William Shakesbeer

Most people are shocked when they find out how incompetent I am as an electrician.

What did E.T.'s mother say to him when he got home? "Where on Earth have you been?!"

What's the difference between a poorly dressed man on a bicycle and a nicely dressed man on a tricycle? A tire.

I couldn't quite remember how to throw a boomerang, but eventually, it came back to me.

A termite walks into a bar and says, "Where is the bar tender?"

Why don't aliens visit our planet? Terrible ratings. One star.

Got my girlfriend a "get better soon" card. She's not sick, I just think she could get better.

I'm reading a horror story in Braille. Something bad is about to happen... I can feel it.

When I was young, I always felt like a male trapped in a females body. Then I was born.

3 men are stranded in a boat with 4 cigarettes and no way to light them. So they toss the 4th cigarette overboard, which makes the whole boat a cigarette lighter.

Another “White Supremacist” arrested for assaulting police officers during the breach of the U.S. Capitol on January 6

 An excerpt from the Epoch Times.

------------------------------------

A man surrendered to police on Monday after being accused of beating police officers with a bat during the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Emmanuel Jackson, no age or state of residence given, was “clearly observed” in surveillance video from outside the Capitol with a metal baseball bat, according to a court filing obtained by The Epoch Times.

Jackson was observed “repeatedly striking a group of both U.S. Capitol and Metropolitan Police Department uniformed officers with the baseball bat,” FBI agent Riley Palmertree wrote in the filing.

Photographs and video footage appeared to show Jackson holding and swinging the bat while wearing a blue surgical mask that partially covered his mouth but left his nose visible.

Jackson surrendered to Washington police officers voluntarily on Monday, waived his constitutional rights, and admitted to taking part in the violent protest, the filing said. He identified himself in the video and photographs and confessed to assaulting officers.

---------------------------------------------------

Now that you are (probably) enraged about this post, here are some morals of this story.

• Those who characterized the idiots who broke into the Capitol as White Supremacists showed themselves to be idiots, too.

• Those who respond to this post by justifying their saying that the crowd was composed of White Supremacists by saying that almost all of the crowd was composed of White Supremacists compound their idiocy.  There is no data available at this time that justifies a conclusion that a large proportion of the crowd was White Supremacists.

• The presence of a Black idiot among all the White idiots does not imply anything about Blacks generally.  So, if you think the post implies that - congratulate yourself on being an idiot.

• The presence of, say, 200 White idiots in a crowd of, say, 200,000 whites does not imply anything about Whites generally.  If you believe otherwise - yes, you are an idiot.

• Yes, this post makes me one of you.

But at least I value freedom of speech - yours included.

Historical perspective on Americans’ behavior

 Here is Dennis Prager's "The Good American".

DP is on target.

We are no longer a free country.

Some people think the Constitution and Bill of Rights are outdated.  More than likely, they haven't even read them.  In any case, I would like to see if they can do better.

-------------------------------------

In my last column, I described how I have come to better understand the moral problem of the “‘good German,’ the term used to describe the average, presumably decent German, who did nothing to hurt Jews but also did nothing to help them and did nothing to undermine the Nazi regime.

”Watching America accept the rationally and morally indefensible physical and economic lockdown of the country, I concluded: “Apathy in the face of tyranny turns out not to be a German or Russian characteristic. I just never thought it could happen in America.”In one week, it has gotten worse. Now we are faced with a lockdown on speech the likes of which have never been seen in America. And the parallels with Germany are even more stark. The left-wing party (the Democrats) and the left-wing media (the “mainstream media”) are using the mob invasion of the Capitol exactly the way the Nazis used the Reichstag fire.On Feb. 27, 1933, exactly one month after the Nazis came to power, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was set ablaze. The Nazis blamed the fire on their archenemy, the communists, and used the fire to essentially extinguish the Communist Party and its ability to publish, speak or otherwise spread its message. Using the Reichstag fire as an excuse, the Nazis passed the Enabling Act, a law that gave the Nazi chancellor, Adolf Hitler, the power to pass laws by decree — without the Reichstag.Now to America 2021.On Jan. 6, 2021, a right-wing mob of a few hundred people broke away from a peaceful right-wing protest involving tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of American conservatives and forced its way into the U.S. Capitol. One Capitol policeman was killed after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, and one of the right-wing Capitol invaders was shot by a Capitol police officer. (A handful of others who died in the vicinity of the Capitol did so of nonviolent causes.) Aside from smashed windows, the mob seems to have done little damage to the Capitol. Their intent is still not clear. It seems to have been largely catharsis. They hurt no legislators, and if they intended to overthrow the government, they were delusional.

Beginning the next day, the American left used the Capitol mob just as the Nazis used the Reichstag: as an excuse to subjugate its conservative enemies and further squelch civil liberties in America — specifically, freedom of speech.

Twitter not only permanently banned the account of President of the United States but permanently banned him from Twitter. Any Twitter account found tweeting Donald Trump was permanently banned.

The left was able to do all this not only by using the Capitol mob incident but also by engaging in a series of lies.

The first was blaming the attack on President Donald Trump. Over and over, in every left-wing medium and stated repeatedly by Democrats, Trump is blamed for “inciting” the riot in his speech just before it took place. Almost never is a Trump quote cited. Because there is none. On the contrary, he did say, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” (italics added).

Another lie was the immediate labeling of the mob attack on the Capitol as “insurrection.” All left-wing media and Democrats now refer to the event as an “insurrection,” a term defined by almost every dictionary as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.” As morally repulsive as the actions of the mob were, they did not constitute a revolt against civil authority or an established government. Disrupting the work of legislators for a few hours — as wrong as that was — does not constitute a “revolt.”

But what proves the left’s “insurrection” label is a lie is that Democrats and their media never once labeled the left-wing riots of 2020 — which involved the destruction by fire and/or occupation and vandalizing of police stations, and the establishment of “autonomous zones,” which, by definition, revolted against “established governments” — as an “insurrection.” The enormous number of businesses burned down, looted or otherwise destroyed was barely covered by the mainstream media, and their violent perpetrators were almost never prosecuted, let alone condemned, as engaging in an insurrection. Dozens of people were killed in these riots, yet there was more outcry and condemnation against the hourslong occupation of the U.S. Capitol than against six months of left-wing violent riots.

Then, like the Nazi regime after the Reichstag fire, the left immediately moved to further curtail civil liberties, specifically conservatives’ ability to promote their ideas. Twitter and Amazon made it impossible for the alternative to Twitter, Parler, to exist, all in the name of preventing another right-wing “insurrection.”

In the name of the Capitol “insurrection,” the Democrats announced they would impeach the president of the United States, though he had only 14 days left in office.

In the name of the Capitol “insurrection,” the editor of Forbes, Randall Lane, announced that Forbes media was “holding those who lied for Trump accountable” in what he called “a truth reckoning”: “Hire any of Trump’s (press secretaries),” Lane warned, “and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”

In the name of the Capitol mob attack, 159 law professors at Chapman University have called for the firing of John Eastman, a tenured fellow law professor and holder of an endowed chair at Chapman — because “his actions Wednesday (that) helped incite a riot.” Eastman had spoken at the Trump rally.

The professors ended their Los Angeles Times letter: “He does not belong on our campus.”

Words well chosen.

What the left is doing is announcing — and enforcing — that conservatives “do not belong” in our society. The parallels to 1933 are precise. And most good Americans are keeping silent, just as did most Germans. Though they do not risk being beaten up, are Americans in 2021 as afraid of the American left as Germans in 1933 were of the German fascists? We’re about to find out.

Frank Wilczek’s book: Fundamentals – Ten Keys to Reality

 I just started this book.

Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Laureate in Physics.

Here is an excerpt from the preface.

-----------------------------------------

Psychophysics reveals that consciousness does not direct most actions, but instead processes reports of them, from unconscious units that do the work.  Using a technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), it is possible to stimulate the left or right brain motor centers in a subject's brain, at the experimenter's discretion.  A properly sculpted TMS signal to the right motor center will cause a twitch of the left wrist, while a properly sculpted TMS signal to the left motor center will cause a twitch of the right wrist.  Alvaro Pascual-Leone used this technique ingeniously in a simple experiment that has profound implications.  He asked subjects, upon receiving a cue, to decide whether they wanted to twitch their right or their left wrist.  Then they were instructed to act out their intention upon receiving an additional cue.  The subjects were in a brain scanner, so the experimenter could watch their motor areas preparing the twitch.  If the had decided to twitch their right wrist, their left motor area was active; if they decided to twitch their left wrist, their right motor area was active.  It was possible, in this way , to predict what choice had been made before any motion occurred.

Now comes a revealing twist.  Occasionally Pascual-Leone would apply a TMS signal to contradict (and, it turns out, override) the subject's choice. The subject's twitch would then be the one that TMS imposed, rather than the one he or she originally chose.  The remarkable thing is how the subjects explained what had happened.  The did not report that some external force had possessed them.  Rather, they said, "II changed my mind".

Mark Twain quotations

If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

- Mark Twain's Autobiography

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.
-"Corn-pone Opinions"

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
- The Innocents Abroad

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

...the liberty of the Press is called the Palladium of Freedom, which means, in these days, the liberty of being deceived, swindled, and humbugged by the Press and paying hugely for the deception.
- "From Author's Sketch Book, Nov. 1870," reprinted in The Twainian, May 1940

There's a good spot tucked away somewhere in everybody. You'll be a long time finding it, sometimes.
- "Refuge of the Derelicts"

The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.
- "Official Physic"

Disappointing news about COVID-19 immunity following recovery

Here is a link to a paper "Health Workers’ Antibody Levels Wane After SARS-CoV-2 Infection".

Here is the abstract.

Antibodies to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) decline during the weeks after infection, in some cases falling below the threshold for seropositivity within 2 months, according to a national study of health care workers.

Most people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop antibodies to the virus within 2 to 3 weeks. But how long those antibodies last is unclear. To learn more, the Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness in the Critically Ill Network, a group of academic centers studying both influenza and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), enrolled 3248 health care workers in a seroprevalence study. All worked directly with patients who had COVID-19 at 13 medical centers throughout the US.

Six percent, or 194, of participants had detectable antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 based on enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay test results. About 80% of these antibody-positive health care workers returned for a second antibody test 2 months later.

At the second test, SARS-CoV-2 antibodies had declined in about 94% of those who initially were seropositive. About 28% no longer tested positive for antibodies. Roughly 1 in 5 individuals who had COVID-19 symptoms fell below the threshold for seropositivity at the second test, as did nearly half of participants who were asymptomatic. Older adults and those with lower antibody levels on the initial test were more likely to seroconvert by the second test.

The results suggest that studies using seropositivity as a proxy for previous infection are likely to underestimate the true prevalence of infections, the authors cautioned. They also suggested that the window for collecting convalescent plasma to use as a potential treatment for COVID-19 is narrow.

Video of Nic Lewis’s lecture “How sensitive is the climate to greenhouse gases”

Wherein NL argues effectively that both the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity and the Transient Climate Sensitivity are actually much lower than the IPCC's estimates - which suggests that Climate Change is not an existential threat at this time.

Here is the link.

Nicholas Lewis shows that a leading climate alarmist scientist doesn’t know what he is doing

 Here is a link to Nicholas Lewis's paper "Mann's new paper recharacterizing the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation", which devastates Michael Mann's paper on the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillaion.

Michael Mann is famous for his hockey stick climate change work.  That work has been shown to be fatally flawed and MM has been shown to have been unethical concerning its flaws.

Here are some excerpts from NL's paper.

--------------------------------------------------------

The conventional view of the AMO NOAA, which provides an AMO index, has a helpful FAQ on the AMO that says:

The AMO is an ongoing series of long-duration changes in the sea surface temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean, with cool and warm phases that may last for 20-40 years at a time and a difference of about 1°F between extremes. These changes are natural and have been occurring for at least the last 1,000 years… Since the mid1990s we have been in a warm phase. The AMO has affected air temperatures and rainfall over much of the Northern Hemisphere… It alternately obscures and exaggerates the global increase in temperatures due to human-induced global warming.

----------------------

Did aerosols rather than the AMO drive 20th century Atlantic SST variations? In 2012 a team of scientists at the UK Met Office published a paper claiming that anthropogenic aerosol indirect forcing, rather than natural variability, drove much of the 20th century variability in North Atlantic SST attributed to the AMO. This claim was based on simulations using the HadGEM2-ES climate model. However, in 2013 a team of scientists from GFDL and elsewhere published a counter-paper entitled "Have Aerosols Caused the Observed Atlantic Multidecadal Variability?", which showed major discrepancies between the HadGEM2-ES simulations and observations in the North Atlantic.

Mann himself had argued that anthropogenic aerosols rather than the AMO drove variability in tropical Atlantic SST in a short 2006 paper, here . However, he accepted therein that his analysis relied upon the AMO having no influence on GMST, and he also used what is arguably a questionable statistical model. AR5 didn't mention this paper when discussing the AMO (in Section 10.3.1.1.3).

Now, however, Mann has returned to this issue, making the extraordinary claim that trends forced by anthropogenic greenhouse gas and sulphate etc. emissions masqueraded as an apparent oscillation, and that, rather than warming the NH:

"The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming temporarily."

Mann's other claims

The press release for the paper also says:

According to Mann, the problem with the earlier estimates stems from having defined the AMO as the low frequency component that is left after statistically accounting for the long-term temperature trends, referred to as detrending.

Mann and his colleagues took a different approach in defining the AMO... They compared observed temperature variation with a variety of historic model simulations to create a model for internal variability of the AMO that minimizes the influence of external forcing -- including greenhouse gases and aerosols. They call this the differenced-AMO because the internal variability comes from the difference between observations and the models' estimates of the forced component of North Atlantic temperature change.

They also constructed plausible synthetic Northern Hemispheric mean temperature histories against which to test the differenced-AMO approaches. Because the researchers know the true AMO signal for their synthetic data from the beginning, they could demonstrate that the differenced-AMO approach yielded the correct signal. They also tested the detrended-AMO approach and found that it did not come up with the known internal variability.

While the detrended-AMO approach produces a spurious temperature increase in recent decades, the differenced approach instead shows a warm peak in the 1990s and a steady cooling since.

That is certainly a novel approach. By defining the AMO as the part of the smoothed temperature change simulated by the models that is not observed, the problem of models warming far too fast since ~2000 largely disappears. So does the inconvenient possibility that the fast model-simulated warming in the 1980s and 1990s might have only been matched in the real world due to a significant contribution from the AMO. Mann's differenced-AMO is a high-sensitivity climate modeller's dream. If climate models were perfect apart from not simulating the AMO, then the differenced-AMO approach would make sense. But models are by no means perfect – and if they were then they would simulate the AMO. 

Mann's differenced-AMO merely reflects, on a smoothed basis, the extent to which the observed NH temperature outpaces climate model simulated NH temperature, going negative when models simulate an unrealistically high temperature rise. It seems likely that it will represent model failings and unrealistic forcings to a greater extent than unforced multidecadal internal climate system variability. The CMIP5 models typically have very high aerosol forcing, and as aerosol forcing grew fast from 1950 to the mid/late 1970s it seems that their high aerosol forcing typically more than compensated for their high transient sensitivity, so that they partially emulated the effects of the AMO downswing.

After defining the differenced-AMO, Mann purports to show – using synthetic temperature histories containing a known AMO signal – that his differenced-AMO approach yields the correct signal, whereas the detrended-AMO approach does not. So how does Mann achieve this impressive feat?

-----------

The flaws in Mann's case

The first part of what Mann writes is obviously true, but are his conclusions warranted? It is true that the detrended-AMO signals diagnosed from the noisy EBM simulations are indeed largely all in phase with, and very similar in amplitude to, the detrended-AMO signal diagnosed from observations (the black line). But their real such relationship is to the detrended-AMO signal diagnosed from the noise-free EBM simulation. Although that signal is not shown in Mann's published Figure 3b, it is actually plotted by his code, and is shown by the blue dashed line in Figure 6b (same as Figure 3 thick blue line). As can be seen both there and in Figure 3 above, the low-passed detrended-AMO signal diagnosed from observations and the low-passed detrendedAMO signal diagnosed from the noise-free EBM simulation are almost identical, reflecting the success of Mann's fitting of his EBM simulation to the smoothed observations. Therefore, the detrended-AMO signals diagnosed from the noisy EBM simulations appear also to be related to the detrended-AMO signal diagnosed from observations. But that apparent relationship is purely an artefact of the similarity of the detrended-AMO signal diagnosed from observations and the detrended-AMO signal diagnosed from the noise-free EBM simulation. 

Mann's random red-noise series have low-passed components typically only a quarter as large as the smoothed signal from applying his detrended-AMO approach to the EBM forced simulation (compare coloured lines in Fig 6a with blue dashed line in Fig 6b, noting different scales). So it is unsurprising that one recovers something close to that signal (as in Fig 6b) – and hence close to the nearly identical detrended-AMO from observed temperatures (black line in Fig 6b) – when applying the detrended-AMO approach to the EBM forced simulation with the random red-noise added, whatever realisation of noise is used.

So Figure 6 does not prove Mann's claim. The detrended-AMO signals are in reality largely all in phase with, and of similar amplitude to, the detrended-AMO signal diagnosed from the noise-free EBM simulation, not (as Mann claims) with that signal derived from observations. One would expect to end up with something close to a smoothed version of the signal when adding a noise component with a small low-frequency amplitude to a signal with a ~4 times larger low-frequency amplitude and low-pass smoothing their sum, where there are only two cycles of signal in the pass band.

Figure S7.b3 in Mann's Supplementary Information, reproduced as Figure 7, very much supports my conclusion. It shows the results when an alternative volcanic forcing series (Crowley) is used. When that is done, the application of the detrended-AMO approach to Mann's EBM simulation gives a significantly different signal (blue line – present, but not identified, in Mann's SI graphs) from when it is applied to the actual temperature observations (black line), and the coloured lines cluster closely around the blue line rather than the black line.

-----------

Conclusions

I have shown that the evidence Mann claims disproves the detrended-AMO, and supports his differenced-AMO, is illusory. I have also shown that his code produces different results from those shown in his accepted paper. I have pointed out that graph lines produced by his code that would have made it much easier to spot the flaws in Mann's evidence, although appearing in the figures in his Supplementary Information, were omitted from the figures in his main paper.

A differenced-AMO approach has attractions in principle, but only makes sense if climate models are near-perfect, which is far from the case. The ease with which a simple EBM model can have its parameters adjusted to produce a nearly flat differenced-AMO shows the very low number of degrees of freedom involved, with only two full AMO cycles during the instrumental period. The very heavy, 50-year low-pass, smoothing applied by Mann arguably exacerbates this problem.

The detrended-AMO approach is not perfect, but the pattern exhibited by NOAA's standard detrended AMO index based on North Atlantic SST appears to be supported by much more sophisticated approaches. The stadium wave theory, if it holds up, offers physical insight into the mechanisms underlying the AMO and may lead to more reliable estimation of its state and influence on surface temperatures and other climate variables.

How Government screwed up the COVID-19 vaccine

 John Cochrane at the National Review.

---------------------------------------------

Free Markets Beat Central Planning, Even for COVID-19 Tests and Vaccines January 12, 2021

Surely, we can’t let there be a free market for COVID-19 tests and vaccines. Indeed, tests and vaccines encapsulate many of the “market failure” parables from introductory economics courses.

But the argument for free markets is not that they are perfect. The argument is that the known alternatives are much worse. And we have seen a catastrophic failure of government at all levels around the world to handle this pandemic, especially in delivering tests and vaccines.

The CDC delayed testing for about two months. While it dithered, it blocked private parties from testing. University labs, for example, were blocked from making and conducting their own tests. During those two months, someone could sell you a thermometer to detect a COVID-19 fever, but if someone tried to sell you anything more effective, the FDA would stop them. Once it finally approved paper-strip tests in November, the FDA insisted that $5 paper-strip tests require a prescription and be bundled with an app, driving the cost to $50. Rapid testing that lets people who are sick isolate, and lets businesses ensure that employees are healthy, is only just becoming widely available, held back for six months by the FDA.

Let’s imagine that the government had not prohibited free-market activities. This is not anarchy, just a lightly regulated sensible market on top of whatever the government wants to do.

Private companies would have developed tests quickly and would have worked to make them faster, better, and cheaper. Why? To make money! Lots of people, businesses, schools, and universities are willing to pay for good, fast testing. Medical companies, knowing they could make a lot of money so long as they beat the competition, would have raced to develop and sell tests. We would have had $5 or less at-home paper-strip tests by late spring. And that would have enabled much of the economy to reopen.

Why does the FDA forbid businesses from telling you what’s inside your own body? Unlike a drug, a test result cannot harm you. Sure, the test might not be perfect, but it would be a lot better than relying on thermometers. Even if you catch only half of the sick people, you can cut the virus’s reproduction rate in half and end its spread. Sure, companies and the FDA should evaluate tests and disclose their false-positive and negative rates. But why forbid companies to make and sell us tests?

Would it be perfect? No. People might ignore positive results and go out anyway. People might not take tests. But did the government do better than the market would have done? Not by a long shot. “The market is not perfect” does not mean “the government is better”!

The first two vaccines were invented in a weekend in January. Then we waited an agonizing 11 months for the drug companies to conduct clinical trials on a small number of volunteers, and for the FDA to grant emergency-use authorizations. Yes, this is the emergency fast track. Approval normally takes years.

In a free market, as soon as the drug is safe, everybody becomes part of the clinical trial. If you want an untested drug, and understand the risks, we won’t put you and the drug company in jail for trying it. We gain experience much more quickly with what works and what doesn’t. In a free market, this pandemic would have been over by midsummer. Yes, some people might have been hurt by bad vaccines. Others might have caught COVID-19 thanks to ineffective vaccines. But the hundreds of thousands who died from COVID-19 would be alive, and so would the economy. Should 200,000 die and many millions lose jobs and businesses to save 100?

Operation Warp Speed, in which the government paid to produce vaccines ahead of FDA approval, was the one huge success of government policy. But why was it needed? Investors seem to have billions of dollars to finance Elon Musk’s electric cars and rockets to Mars. Why would they not spend a few billions ramping up production on a risky but diversified portfolio of vaccines? Because they and the drug companies know that they will not be able to charge a market price when the vaccine is finalized. Inevitable price controls, facing a government monopoly buyer, means no money for risky production, and makes Warp Speed necessary.

People are complaining that the drug companies might make a few billion dollars. The pandemic is costing us trillions! The companies should be making billions more — and more still the sooner, faster, and better their vaccines go out.

And then, the catastrophic rollout. Senseless priority lists. Massive paperwork and restrictions on administering vaccines. Penalties for skipping the line so it’s better to throw out vaccines than use them.

In a free market, vaccines would be sold to the highest bidder. The government could buy too, but you wouldn’t be forbidden from buying them yourself, and companies and schools would not be forbidden from buying them for their employees. Businesses would likely pay top dollar to vaccinate crucial employees who are off the job due to the pandemic. And only businesses know just which employees are crucial to the economy, and which can wait.

We must protect health-care workers, you say. Indeed we must. And hospitals would pay a lot to be first in line. The government, with a strong interest in keeping hospitals going, would pay a lot to give it to health-care workers.

We must protect the elderly, you say. Indeed we should. But this is a purely private benefit. Why should the elderly, who are not all poor, and many quite wealthy, not pay anything to get a shot that only benefits them?

To an individual, the vaccine is a way to avoid getting the disease. Staying home is another way to avoid getting the disease. The vaccine just allows you to go out. So shouldn’t it go to people who have the most urgent reasons to go out — and therefore are willing to pay more to get it?

What about people who can’t afford it? Wouldn’t that be a financial burden? Now we get down to it. This isn’t about efficiently stopping the disease. It’s about money. The first rule of economics is don’t muck with prices in order to transfer small amounts of money. But that’s what we’re doing. The government gives it to old people first, without charging them, to save the old people some money. Why not just give them money, and let them decide if they want the vaccine now or later?

Why won’t the government allow you and me to buy on top of its rationing scheme? Because we might drive the price up. It’s all about saving the government money. But it’s a trivial amount of money. The government is spending trillions of dollars — a trillion in the most recent “stimulus” bill alone. Each trillion dollars is $10,000 for every family in the U.S. The cost of vaccines is chump change on this scale.

What about the “externality?” Indeed, the government should be giving the vaccine to people most likely to spread it, in a way designed to stop the disease. Markets might not do this. Though they might. Businesses and institutions have every interest to make sure they are a place that does not spread the disease, and to buy and require vaccination. But markets do not perfectly account for such externalities — the fact that by giving you a vaccine I help all the people you might spread it to.

Yet the government isn’t even trying. The U..K gave its first dose to a lovely 91-year-old woman. Germany to a 101-year-old. However well-intentioned, this has nothing to do with stopping the disease. The government’s rationing plans, to date, do not begin to define a plan for stopping the disease. It’s just about protecting individuals — i.e., saving them the cost of buying a vaccine.

Allowing the vaccine to go to the highest bidders — and allowing people to get it at CVS or administer it themselves — would have rolled vaccines out much faster, and to people more likely to spread the disease without the vaccine, and encouraged those who can shelter and wait to do so.

We are in a race between evolution and bureaucracy. Evolution just pulled ahead. The new strain is here, growing exponentially. It’s time for a new entrant to the race: freedom.

Climategate: Untangling myth and reality ten years later

 Here is a link to the paper.  It is devastating to the Climate Alarmists.

A must read.