Vote by Mail: It Is The USPS

I have multiple concerns by the proposed Mail in Voting. I expressed my concern about being denied my right to a secret ballot. I was denied that in the State Primary. I was required to give them my ballot along with my name, address, date of birth, and I think even my blood type. Needless to say I refused and the morons in charge said they never heard of a secret ballot. No surprise here.

But now the USPS. As usual the NY Times blames Trump. Now he may not be the brightest bulb on the block but the real problem is the USPS. My local PO refuses to deliver my mail, especially if it is raining or they want to go somewhere else. I wrote the Postmaster General but that did no good. The USPS refuses to deliver Amazon, takes two weeks to get a bill from one town to the adjacent, takes two weeks to move a package 14 miles en-route locally, loses a Certified Return Receipt letter and tells you to send another one. By the way, it took them 3 months to get back to me. The local Post Master tells you it is your problem and then allows the Carrier to repeat the process, not delivering mail.

It is not Trump, it is the USPS, they are Government workers. They are all the same. Remember Government Health Care folks.

Now here is just some of what the USPS can do to your ballot:

1. You never get it. Yes, it gets into the mail but it get "lost". This happens frequently. My experience.

2. You mail it and it never gets delivered. My experience again is that there is almost a 50% chance that it will happen. You will never know.

3. You mail it and it takes weeks to get there. My experience spot on.

4. They get dumped in the trash. Happens frequently. It even gets reported in the News unless they are fronting for Mail In Voting.

5. They get filled out by someone else. That is Chicago and Mayor Daly. You need 10,000 more votes, no problem, we have millions of paper ballots an lots of willing Carriers. After Carriers are Union and well you know the rest.

The list goes on. The USPS is the weakest link in the chain. The result is an explosion of conspiracy ideas and a total loss of trust in the Government, worse than even now. There is no audit trail.

If you want less crowded voting, spread it out over a few days. Try looking at Walmart, they manage, in fact have Walmart manage it. But for the good Lord's sake, keep votes out of the hands of the USPS, and any other Government employee.

Now in addition to the USPS there is the audit capability to determine valid votes. There is none. NONE. Who knows or checks my signature. What if someone sends in a duplicate ballot for me. Which one is real, mine or the "Russian" fake? The list goes on.

Just an historical note. Back in the early days of nuclear weapons there was a real concern of unwanted explosions. The developed a technique called the "Fault Tree Analysis" It was an audit trail for faults. It kind of worked but when you read the history there were lost weapons, broken weapons, dropped weapons, burned weapons. It is no wonder we did not destroy ourselves. However the USPS may manage this very well on their own.

Overall, Mail In Voting is the most dangerous of all methods of voting. It has multiple points for fraud, it is enabled by multiple individuals who can alter, it lacks any form of identification, and it results in a totally untrustworthy result. If one has been worried about Voter Fraud, this is the sine qua non example of how to make it happen.

Unfortunately I live in New Jersey. My vote does not count for anything. The Party rounds up the usual Voters and they get what they want. Pity!

One final note. Mail In Voting is NOT Absentee Ballots. The Absentee Ballot requires you to go to the Town or County, identify yourself, get a ballot for you, and you agree to waive your right to a secret ballot. You then return the ballot signed and it is processed. It must be returned, preferably in person well before the election. There are decades of integrity and auditability in this process. NONE with Mail In.

NJ 2020 07 31

First, Google changes the location of keys again. I guess they never had a mother. Or a father. "A place for everything and everything in its place". Also the Google morons messed up the figures, they must be viewed separately. They do not fit the screen. Do these characters ever check their software! I have to adjust each image. Never happened in the past 12 years!

Now for COVID. I can see the big tent in my backyard for the teenagers massive party. Guess I go into my Level 4 suit.

As usual we have high density infections. The old Public Health System would remedy this. Not in NJ now!

NJ 2020 07 30

Not much new

A Virus Free Environment

Here are a few of the no viral infected companions in my backyard in New Hampshire. Alone on the slopes of a mountain, hot but bearable today, saw these along my morning trek.

NJ 2020 07 29

Steady but look at infections per square mile. It shows where the problems are!

This shows where the problems are.

NJ 2020 07 28

The figure below demonstrates the various death rates by county in LTC. Mostly 18% or higher. At some point as these continue some DA may start filing Manslaughter charges against people. Perhaps that will stop the problem.

The other data demonstrates a resilience of the virus at a low level. Perhaps if we knew where it was simmering we could do something. Yet the State seem silent or grossly incompetent. I suspect the latter.

We can see below in the prevalence curves the plateau effect.

Masks

In a recent Lancet article the author notes (see Fennelly, Particle sizes of infectious aerosols: implications for infection control, Lancet, 24 July, 2020) :

Surgical masks might offer some respiratory protection from inhalation of infectious aerosols, but not as much as respirators. However, surgical masks worn by patients reduce exposures to infectious aerosols to health-care workers and other individuals. The variability of infectious aerosol production, with some socalled super-emitters producing much higher amounts of infectious aerosol than most, might help to explain the epidemiology of super-spreading. Airborne infection control measures are indicated for potentially lethal respiratory pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus ... Modelling studies and simulated workplace protection studies in the USA have shown benefits of various types of respirators and little to no protection from surgical masks. A study in the UK found that surgical masks could reduce inert aerosol exposure by two times, but filtering facepiece respirators reduced the exposure by a factor of 100 or higher. In a study of influenza aerosols, surgical masks reduced exposure by an average of six times, but there was a wide range of reduction from 1·1 to 55 times, depending on the design of the mask. Two randomised trials  did not show any benefit of N95 respirators over surgical masks in reducing respiratory illnesses, and two showed that the respirators were protective. However, none of the trials used quantitative fit testing, and two had surprisingly low failure rates (1·1–2·6%) compared with 60% found in a panel study for the same N95 respirators. The low failure rates suggest a problem ith fit testing.

Overall we still have a "on the one hand and on the other hand". It seems that there is a class of people who vehemently refuse any advice and do not care.

 

NJ 2020 07 27

Well the morons in Trenton changed the format and massively screwed up the LTC data. What would General Groves have done to these Buck Privates, I shudder to think! The collection of grossly incompetent Government employees are making long term careers out of this plague. We don't have to worry about the Communist Chinese, we have our own highly paid destroyers! And I pay taxes to keep these dullards fed.

Testing, where is General Groves?

In WW II General Groves ran the atomic bomb project. No Press interviews just get the job done. If it worked it would save 1 million American troops, my father included. He did the job. Thanks General.

Now a similar job is to be done on COVID testing. But no General Groves. Just dumb and dumber or worse the Three Stooges.

Take the NEJM article:

Expanding the capacity, throughput, speed of returning results, analytic performance, and regional placement of diagnostic technologies is urgently needed and, if successful, will contribute importantly to the current national efforts to curb the Covid-19 pandemic and help to reduce inequities for underserved populations. As we embark on this initiative, the challenges ahead are considerable, and the timetable is truly daunting. Aiming to achieve this rapid evaluation, validation, and scale-up has rarely, if ever, been attempted at this pace. However, the NIH is in a position to serve as a “venture investment” organization and is currently striving to operate in that entrepreneurial spirit. The success of the RADx program will depend on truly innovative ideas coming forward from the minds and laboratories of technology developers, a robust and rapidly responsive expert evaluation system, extensive collaborations in validation and scale-up with experts from all sectors, and strong community partnerships to support testing availability and uptake. All these partners are profoundly energized by a sense of urgency, opportunity, and responsibility to provide testing at scale in the face of this global pandemic.

Well not really. The above is Government double speak. They are trying to praise themselves as the country collapses. Namely we have a "plan" for a "plan". Thanks, but we have a lot of dead bodies.

Now the NY Times states:

Federal, state and local officials on Sunday appeared to agree on one thing: Test results are taking too long. But they gave conflicting assessments of the U.S. response to recent spikes in coronavirus cases, which have severely strained testing nationwide and led to  renewed shortages and weeklong backlogs at major labs. Adm. Brett Giroir, the assistant health secretary overseeing the national coronavirus testing response, said the country was performing enough testing to “achieve the goals we need to achieve.” ... Mr. Giroir acknowledged that turnaround times were too long. But he asserted that while testing was still not widely available to anyone who wanted it — despite past claims from Mr. Trump that it would be — it was available to those who needed it. Testing is considered crucial to understanding and stopping the spread of the coronavirus. When turnaround times extend beyond several days, it can render the information useless since those tested may have spread the virus to other people by the time their results are back. Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, skirted questions about the administration’s early missteps by suggesting that medical advancements, not masks, would be the only way to end the pandemic. “Hopefully it is American ingenuity that will allow for therapies and vaccines to ultimately conquer this,” he said ...

Well Admiral you are no General Groves. In fact, in my opinion, you should seek employment elsewhere. Now for the politicians, look what FDR did, any comparisons folks. One cannot Tweet your way out of this.

The US has great examples of getting things done. This is not one of them. Frankly, have they no shame!

NJ 2020 07 26

Not much changed

Past as Prologue

In 1992 the National Academies published a report entitled Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States (1992) which laid out the potential for massive life threatening viral attacks. The summary noted:

The committee recommends the development and implementation of strategies that would strengthen state and federal efforts in U.S. surveillance. Strategy development could be a function of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Alternatively, the strategy development and coordination functions could be assigned to a federal coordinating body (e.g., a subcommittee of the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology's [FCCSET] Committee on Life Sciences and Health, specifically constituted to address this issue. Implementation of the strategies would be assigned to the appropriate federal agencies (e.g., CDC, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Agriculture). Approaches for consideration could include simplifying current reporting forms and procedures, establishing a telephone hotline by which physicians could report unusual syndromes, and using electronic patient data collected by insurance companies to assist in infectious disease surveillance.

The report opened with:

In May 1989, Rockefeller University, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Fogarty International Center co-sponsored a conference on emerging viral agents. Although the conference focused on viruses, it spurred interest in the emergence and resurgence of all classes of infectious agents. At the conference and in other forums, concern was expressed about the apparent complacency of the scientific and medical communities, the public, and the political leadership of the United States toward the danger of emerging infectious diseases and the potential for devastating epidemics. Recognizing these concerns, the Board on Health Sciences Policy of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) determined that the IOM could play a unique role by reviewing the relevant science, developing a research agenda, considering the implications for policy, and making specific  recommendations for minimizing the public health impact of future emerging microbial threats. In  mid-1989, a study proposal was developed and approved, and sponsors were secured. Thus, the 1989 conference served as an excellent prelude to the IOM study. In February 1991, the IOM convened a 19-member multidisciplinary committee to conduct an 18-month study of emerging microbial threats to health. Committee expertise comprised the fields of epidemiology, virology, immunology, food safety microbiology, food toxicology, public health, molecular biology, cell biology, economics, microbial genetics, parasitology, infectious diseases, microbial pathogenesis, medical entomology and systematics, and bacterial physiology.

In 1997 Frank Ryan wrote a book entitled Virus X. Ryan took the Lederberg report one more step. He actually stated that a Corona virus being air borne and highly virulent could be the source of the next plague. Ryan's prediction was spot on. But he was just reflecting the warnings by Lederberg. Airborne corona viruses were deadly and spread like wildfire.

Thus we have had almost thirty years warning over five Presidents and a CDC which seems to have been stuck in neutral not to mention a WHO which seems to be in the pocket of the Communist Chinese.

Is there a parallel? Yes, prior to the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor there was an author, Hector Bywater, who wrote the fictional book, The Great Pacific War, describing just such an attack. As I had noted a decade ago:

In 1925 an English writer, Hector Bywater, who was a journalist living in Japan, was a military journalist who had developed an excellent knowledge of all the capabilities of the worlds naval powers. After a brief while in Japan he came to see that Japan could after World War I become a  strategic threat. In 1925 he published a futuristic book about a futuristic war, one in 1931-1933, initiated by Japan against the US. In certain ways the book would presage Pearl Harbor. The attack was on the Philippines, and in a manner which almost mirrored what actually happened on December 8, 1941 and following. If MacArthur had read and understood Bywater then perhaps he may have learned something. The Japanese attack the Panama Canal, rather than Pearl, and the IS forces via their naval resources retaliate. The book alleges to cover only the first two years of the war.

As my father had said many times: Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance. We clearly have thirty years of useless planning. That includes all five Presidents, so take your pick. Moreover, the WHO, in which Communist China has both participated and somewhat influences, were more then aware of the threat their lack of control posed. Thus we have a great deal of blame all around. But frankly, this is not new.

NJ 2020 07 25

Still present. Most likely the teenagers who feel invincible. They seem to be everywhere.

NJ 2020 07 24

Again some bumps but steady low level infection.

War, COVID and Battling the Enemy

The United States has gone to war on many occasions. The basis for the entry into the war varies dramatically from one war to another. WW II was Pearl Harbor, whereas Vietnam was Tonkin Gulf, a made up excuse by President Johnson. Lincoln’s election set off the Civil War whereas 911 set off the Afghan war. In contrast Iraq was a single minded attempt to overthrow a leader disliked by the sitting President. One can examine each of these wars and see their cause and results vary dramatically.

However what is true if that the President is the Commander in Chief and the President selects his military leaders to fight the war. The military leaders then have at their command a set of capabilities to be deployed. These capabilities include a set of staff functions:

1. Logistics: G4 in Army jargon. This is the collection, management, deployment, and maintenance of the tools of ear. Such logistics include fuel, weapons, food, infrastructure and the like. Troops cannot fight without food and bullets.

2. Intelligence: G2 in Army jargon. This function must ferret out what the enemy is doing, where, and with what. It must counterbalance all information regarding friendly forces as well.

3. Plans: This function prepare plans for possible scenarios using the knowledge of wharf resources are available and also of the enemy capabilities.

4. Staffing: This is the function of putting the right people in the right place.

5. Operations: This commend element focuses on current operations.

6. Communications: This is the essential function of making certain that all commands can communicate.

The above is but a brief summary. Then there are the troops who do the fighting under a common structure of generals or admirals. This structure may vary a bit but the staff elements are key to a successful battle, not just the capabilities and competence of the troops.

Another essential ingredient is the commander, the top military person. The President is not a military person, the President may be Commander in Chief but the President does not fight the battles. The President assigns the generals and admirals.

FDR, through the innate brilliance of Harry Hopkins, selected Admiral King and General Marshall. Then they selected Nimitz and Eisenhower. They were stuck with MacArthur, but they managed their way around this. The four individuals first noted were brilliant in the execution of a two Ocean war. In contrast Lincoln had McLellan, and let his incompetence last too long. Yet he did finally choose Grant who graciously defeated Lee and the other traitors who disavowed their oaths of loyalty.

In contrast, Johnson tried to micro manage Vietnam, the result is the greatest defeat the US has ever suffered. Bush got us into Iraq for reasons that lacked credibility. Wilson got us into WW I with a vision of creating world peace and a massive naivety regarding the European allies.

Needless to say we have had some good presidents and some less than good ones. They are humans so what else is new.

Now why this five cent history lesson? Simple, COVID is an enemy and we are at war. The President is Commander in Chief yet we have no military like structure to work with. We have incompetent individuals, gadflies, wannabe politicians, and a mass of people who have not a clue as to what needs to be done. We lack the staff functions above. Take logistics. We still cannot do massive testing. Why not? We do not have the overall general and that general lacks a Logistics Staff. It certainly is not the CDC. We lack Intelligence. We have no true idea of who is infected and when they were infected and who infected them. Testing is at best sparse and results are delays a week or more, and errors are rampant. We need a general for Intelligence as we need a general for Logistics. The list goes on.

The current President went to a military secondary school. One could assume that somewhere he had to learn about military staff functions. It is clear that none in the current amalgam of bumbling characters has a clue.

The solution is staring us in the face. Use the military paradigm. Have the staff organization one needs to win, than the troops, our nurses and physicians, can fight and win the battle. Keep the propagandists and nay sayers at bay. Unfortunately the battlefield generals are the Governors and they cannot be fired for incompetence. But one can see the McLellan, the Patton, the Grant, the Nimitz, the Halsey, the Bradley, the Sherman, the Eisenhower, and the MacArthur. We also have our Lee and other individuals who seek to overthrow.

But to successfully fight this war, and it is a war, we need not only troops in battle, again the nurses and doctors, but the staff forces to be certain they troops have what they need. The lack of this, in my opinion, is a gross failure in this current conflict.

NJ 2020 07 23

Not much new

NJ 2020 07 22

Not much. The concern is the residual daily levels seem almost flat. That is truly indicative of a set of carriers.

NJ 2020 07 21

Again, not much:

Note the short term numbers show a decline but not much. Seems to be a residual infection source. This is a classic "Typhoid Mary" effect. There is(are) asymptomatic carrier(s).