A QUESTION THAT FEMINISTS DON’T SEEM VERY INTERESTED IN: What About The Women in Afghanistan?

RULING CLASS PRIORITIES: DC elites mocked for reported worries about Obama bash’s ‘chilling effect’ on party scene. “Journalists ‘could suffer too.'” God, I hope so.

GOODER AND HARDER: Still Don’t Think Biden Is Too Old to Be President?

I don’t remember any other American president destroying an entire country within the space of a week, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised that so many journos are holding Biden’s feet to the fire about it. Maybe they realize how disastrous this is for the Democratic Party, and they’re trying to get rid of him before he does any more damage. Maybe they’re genuinely as outraged by his incompetence and dishonesty as the rest of us. Whatever their motives, I’m glad they’re finally doing their jobs. This isn’t the time to ask Joe which flavor of ice cream he’s eating today. I’m not going to give them a medal for doing their damn jobs, but it should be noted that they are doing their damn jobs.

Well, some of them are, at least.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, THAT SEEMS RIGHT: Majority says Biden is out of it, aides are doing his job.

PUSHBACK: Kemp signs order blocking COVID-19 mandates on Georgia businesses.

IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE:

OLD AND BUSTED: Where’s Hunter, Fat?

The New Hotness? Where’s Joe? Biden scheduled to head to Delaware as Afghanistan crisis spirals.

IT’S COME TO THIS: US general tells British special forces: Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you’re making us look bad.

WELL, THAT’S COMFORTING: Biden Admin Has No Plan to Keep Cash Out of Taliban’s Hands, GOP Lawmakers Say.

USA DOWN: The meltdown of the U.S. federal government occurring before our eyes is so mind-bending it’s hard to find words to talk about it. “A major crisis, one of the biggest in decades, is ongoing in Afghanistan. Thousands of Americans are stranded in the country, unable to get to the international airport where the U.S. military is efficiently pushing out half-full flights because that’s what it can do with the tools it’s been given. Americans are nauseated to hear Pentagon officials claim that we don’t have the ability to go out and collect the imperiled Americans. Why not, if the French and British can do it?”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot:

Chaser:  “Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.”

—Bruce Springsteen, in the monologue proceeding his 1985 cover of Edwin Starr’s 1970 Motown hit “War.”

Related: Why Springsteen never made another album like ‘Born to Run,’ and other questions only his first manager Mike Appel can answer.

Today, many on the right view Springsteen as an aging corporatist tool fully owned by the Democratic Party for election year benefit concerts, who occasionally releases albums on the side. But back in 1973 through 1975, on his second and third albums, The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run, Springsteen was making remarkably supple and innovative music. And then he changed managers, and became, as Slate(!) dubbed him 15 years ago, “Bruce Springsteen, bullshitter:” “Thirty years later, and largely thanks to Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He’s a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You’re either in or you’re out.” Reluctantly, I’m out, but I do love — and miss — his mid-‘70s work.

HMM: Section 230 Doesn’t Protect Yearbook Website’s Ads–Knapke v. Classmates.

Opinion here.

DON SURBER: Taliban May Take Down Biden. “I get that none of this will matter in the 2024 election. The question is whether Biden survives till Labor Day.”

THE ESTABLISHMENT TURNS ON BIDEN: The fiasco in Afghanistan is a grave blow to America’s standing: And much of the blame lies squarely with Joe Biden. “If the propagandists of the Taliban had scripted the collapse of America’s 20-year mission to reshape Afghanistan, they could not have come up with more harrowing images.”

GOOD: As Eviction Moratorium Case Returns to SCOTUS, Landlords Use Biden’s Words Against Him.

CORRECTING AN INEFFECTUAL PRESIDENT:

OPEN THREAD: I see you, baby.

What’s Gramma Funk doing these days, anyway?

FLASHBACK: Fox reporter asks Biden about his cognitive ability. “A Fox News reporter asked former Vice President Joe Biden about his cognitive ability, an attack that President Trump and his allies have seized on.” In 2020, the press ran interference for Biden on this. We are now living with the results.

SHOCKER: ABC accused of cutting unflattering portions of Biden’s interview.

They need to broadcast the whole thing uncut. The people have a right to know!

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA awards $500,000 to develop moon-mining tech.

ISOMETRIC RESISTANCE TRAINING TO REDUCE HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE: “IRT is a time-efficient means of reducing blood pressure, needing only 12 minutes a day, two to three days per week to produce the effects we found in our review.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Sad Record of the Elites.

FROM A FRIEND WITH MILITARY EXPERIENCE AND CONNECTIONS:

Biden’s statement that he has seen ‘no question of our credibility from our allies’ has said allies furious. Every NATO country has people trapped in Afghanistan and they tend to be trust fund babies or friends of trust fund babies. Every prime minister’s phone is blowing up with VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE asking how they’re going to get their kids or their kids’ friends out of Afghanistan and every ally is blowing up the phones of the White House and State Department and getting jack shit from them.

And they’re all blaming ‘America’ but they also know it’s on Biden.

Somebody can probably get an at least ‘off the record’ statement on this from just about any embassy in NATO.

Furious doesn’t cover it.

You’d think that this administration would know all about the management of trust fund babies.

UPDATE: Another friend writes:

Reporters are only calling BS re the airport because their own ox is being gored. I call BS on their belated, situational flailing at accountability. Now they’re indignant, how many lies later?

Pathetic hacks.

That said, he’s making fools of them. Dragging them down with him. Could be a positive development. A corrective sense of embarrassment at long last.

(But I doubt it).

So do I.

FASTER, PLEASE: Experimental drug could cut migraine frequency, clinical trial indicates.

NUMBERS: Israeli data: How can efficacy vs. severe disease be strong when 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?

However, while these numbers are true, to quote them as evidence for low vaccine efficacy is wrong and misleading. Sometimes, with observational data there is confounding of multiple factors that can make it easy to misinterpret simple percentages like this, and the current vaccination situation in Israel brings a perfect storm of confounding factors that lead to confusion if not thought through carefully.

In particular, the key factors here that contribute to this confusion are:
High vaccination rates in the country (nearly 80% of all residents >12yr)

Age disparity in vaccinations, including
Nearly all older people being vaccinated (>90% of residents >50yr) and

The vast majority of unvaccinated being younger people (>85% of unvaccinated <50yr) Older people are orders of magnitude more likely to be hospitalized with a respiratory virus than young people (residents >50yr are >20x more likely to have hospitalized serious infections than residents <50yr, and residents 90+ are >1600x more likely to have hospitalized serious infections than residents 12-15yr)

After accounting for the vaccination rates and stratifying by age groups, from these same data we can see that the vaccines retain high efficacy (85-95%) vs. severe disease, showing that when it comes to preventing severe disease, the Pfizer vaccine is still performing very well vs. Delta, even in Israel from whence the most concerning data have arisen.

When the people who are much more likely to be hospitalized if they get sick are also much more likely to be vaccinated, it’s not surprising that they’re a majority of the hospitalized, even with a 95% effective vaccine.