Pasta News Network - New Zealand

After an extraordinary four years as director general of health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield has been made a knight for services to public health.

Sir Ashley was pushed into the limelight heading up the country's response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

He became a familiar face, as he fronted up day after day behind one of the podiums in the Beehive theatrette.

Respect, for being a figure of calm and admiration for a populace confused and sitting in fear during a time of crisis.

Disappointing, how like many other health officials, he publicly chose "The Science" over science. Time will tell us the implications of this.

Ultimately,

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

The replacement of fossil fuels (and nuclear) by wind and solar is said to be a ‘transition’ implying, like that from sail to steam and horse to motor power, that this is being inexorably pushed by consumers adopting a lower cost technology. In fact, the ‘transition’, wherever it is taking place, is due to government subsidies and regulations. Not one significant unit of wind or solar power generation anywhere in the world has been installed without such assistance.

Moreover, a wind/solar-rich electricity system requires expensive features that are naturally present or available at a trivial cost in systems dominated by coal, gas, or nuclear generation. Among these are ‘system strength’ and frequency control, both of which are automatically present in the ‘synchronous’ spinning machines in coal, gas, and nuclear plants but need to be carefully managed and separately arranged for the ‘asynchronous’ wind and solar facilities.

Going "Green" is hard and expensive. Yet the people advocating for these things cannot look past their feelings and see the totality of consequences and practicality.

Conservatives never should have surrendered the ground of environmental conservation to the radicalised, collectivised, totalitarian Left.

Since becoming custodians of the environment, left-wing politicians, bureaucracies, and businesses have done little except monetise the rapid expansion of renewable energy which, ironically, is one of the most wasteful and destructive technologies in modern history.

Far from ‘saving the planet’, these environmentalists have made their intentions perfectly clear – and we should listen to them.

Worth reading in full, with a fantastic closing segment.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” - Maya Angelou

The New Yorker has published a disturbing article by Emma Green (’The Case For Wearing Masks Forever’) on the political activists in America demanding we lockdown forever in the name of racial justice. They sound like textbook left-wing loons, but we know from bitter experience that these post-Christian, quasi-religious cults have a nasty habit of infecting state bureaucracies, particularly in public health – and that already appears to be happening with respect to this cult.

What emerged was the People’s C.D.C.: a ragtag coalition of academics, doctors, activists, and artists who believe that the Government has left them to fend for themselves against COVID-19. As governments, schools, and businesses have scaled back their covid precautions, the members of the People’s C.D.C. have made it their mission to distribute information about the pandemic – what they see as real information, as opposed to what’s circulated by the actual C.D.C.

The opposite end of what happens when the system is not being forth right with factual information. What makes this a "disaster in the making" is letting feelings win over facts.

Viruses impact host cells and have indirect effects on ecosystem processes. Plankton such as ciliates can reduce the abundance of virions in water, but whether virus consumption translates into demographic consequences for the grazers is unknown. Here, we show that small protists not only can consume viruses they also can grow and divide given only viruses to eat. Moreover, the ciliate Halteria sp. foraging on chloroviruses displays dynamics and interaction parameters that are similar to other microbial trophic interactions. These results suggest that the effect of viruses on ecosystems extends beyond (and in contrast to) the viral shunt by redirecting energy up food chains.

Nature will recycle anything.

From 2020:

The SARS-CoV-2 virus spreading across the world has led to surges of COVID-19 illness, hospitalizations, and death. The complex and multifaceted pathophysiology of life-threatening COVID-19 illness including viral mediated organ damage, cytokine storm, and thrombosis warrants early interventions to address all components of the devastating illness. In countries where therapeutic nihilism is prevalent, patients endure escalating symptoms and without early treatment can succumb to delayed in-hospital care and death. Prompt early initiation of sequenced multidrug therapy (SMDT) is a widely and currently available solution to stem the tide of hospitalizations and death.

Genuinely "Safe & Effective". Early treatment could have been, and can still be, done cheap.

• Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ)
• Ivermectin (IVM)
• Zinc
• Vitamin C
• Vitamin D

Don't forget to exercise for beneficial cytokine storms that strengthen the immune system.

Despite its well-known association with IgE-mediated allergy, IgG4 antibodies still have several poorly understood characteristics. IgG4 is a very dynamic antibody: the antibody is involved in a continuous process of half-molecules (i.e. a heavy and attached light-chain) exchange. This process, also referred to as ‘Fab-arm exchange’, results usually in asymmetric antibodies with two different antigen-combining sites. While these antibodies are hetero- bivalent, they will behave as monovalent antibodies in most situations. Another aspect of IgG4, still poorly understood, is its tendency to mimic IgG rheumatoid factor (RF) activity by interacting with IgG on a solid support. In contrast to conventional RF, which binds via its variable domains, the activity of IgG4 is located in its constant domains.

Beekeepers are exposed to multiple stings in season although they are immune to the effects apart from local swellings at the site of the sting. This is in contrast to venom-allergic individuals who are in general stung only occasionally yet remain at risk of IgE-mediated anaphylaxis. To assess the mechanism of tolerance in beekeepers, we measured their serum allergen-specific IgE and IgG4 levels. We measured the ability of their serum to form bee venom IgE-allergen complexes (the IgE-facilitated-allergen binding [FAB] assay).

The immune system is a magical thing.