We have a winner!

. . . for our 246th Caption Contest!

Our writers have voted for their respective #1 (best) and #2 (next best) captions. Each #1 vote is worth 4 points; each #2 vote is worth 2 points.

And we have a triple whammy!

The winners of our 246th Caption Contest, each with 8 points, are:

Captain America, Mitchell T, and Reuben G.!!!

Here are their winning captions:

Captain America (with two #1 votes): “Oh No!!! Izz Godzirra!!!”

Mitchell T (with two #1 votes): “Slam Dunk? Not a stage dive without jumping off stage. Falling forward and snapping a fan’s neck is like trying to balance a brick on a straw. IT GUNNA SNAP!!”

Reuben G. (with one #1 and two #2 votes): “She’s not THAT fat, it only registered as 1.8 on local Richter scales”

Lizzo Belly Flop

Greg B is in second place, with one #1 and one #2 votes, totaling 6 points:

Lizzo is seen here performing for SeaWorld hiring managers during her audition to serve as the replacement for the now retired Shamu to splash the audience.

Brian, Jackie Puppet, and vett are in third place, each with one #2 vote and 2 points:

Brian: “That poor teddy bear will argue that point about crushing. Bet there isn’t any stuffing left in that little fella.”

Jackie Puppet: “The poor bed: ‘What did I do to deserve this? OOF!!'”

vett: “Eye bleach! Eye bleach! Where’s my eye bleach.”

WELL DONE, EVERYONE!

Congratulations, Reuben G., Mitchell T, and Captain America!!!

For all the other caption submissions, go here.

Be here later today for our next, very exciting Caption Contest!

~E

Uplifting video that’ll restore your faith in people

Are you depressed by the relentlessly bad news on how the Biden administration is bungling everything, especially the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan?

Watch this video.

~E

The good ones make it look easy: Intricate skills required to land a fighter jet on a carrier

My father served aboard the USS Enterprise for some time while he was in the US Navy. He worked in the ATC tower on that carrier and later went on to become a private pilot himself. While growing up, we took many flights in his Cessna four seater. He even let me skip school one day to take a day flight!

Although I despise flying commercially today, I fondly remember the flights with my dad as a teenager. And I wonder what it would be like to fly a figher jet and try to land/take off from a carrier. Here’s what it takes:

Amazing skill set these pilots have. And amazing technology.

What a ride that would be!

DCG

Tuesday funnies!

DCG

Covid vaccine follies: Unvaxxed scapegoated; vaxxed vulnerable to more severe diseases

Americans who decline to be vaccinated with Covid-19 vaccines are being scapegoated for the Delta-variant infections.

(1) CBS reports that in an interview with “Face the Nation” on August 1, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden, said that Americans who remain unvaccinated against the coronavirus are “propagating” the latest outbreak of casesof the highly contagious Delta variant. Fauci said: “We have 100 million people in this country…who are eligible to be vaccinated, who are not vaccinated. We’ve really got to get those people…vaccinated because they are the ones that are propagating this outbreak.

(2) Actress Jennifer Anniston went so far as to cut off some of her friends who refused to be vaccinated because, she maintains, “if you have the variant, you are still able to give it to me.” (BBC)

(3) Actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called mask-averse Americans “schmucks” and said to them to “screw your freedom.” Well, there are consequences to Schwarzenegger’s name calling — he just lost a sponsor for his annual bodybuilding event known as the Arnold Classic. REDCON1, a sports nutrition brand, confirmed they’ve pulled out from Schwarzenegger’s event as well as any others he’s involved in. “We elected to discontinue support due to Arnold’s comment, ‘Screw Your Freedoms,’” a spokesperson for the company said. (Fox News)

But the testimony from the science so revered by Fauci and the Left says otherwise.

An article in the journal Nature, dated August 12, 2021, says:

[R]eports from various countries seem to confirm what scientists feared after the variant tore through India with alarming speed in April and May: Delta is more likely than other variants to spread through vaccinated people.

Data from COVID-19 tests in the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore are showing that vaccinated people who become infected with Delta SARS-CoV-2 can carry as much virus in their nose as do unvaccinated people. This means that despite the protection offered by vaccines, a proportion of vaccinated people can pass on Delta, possibly aiding its rise….

An August report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that following large gatherings in the beach town [Provincetown, Massachusetts], nearly three-quarters of 469 new COVID-19 cases that occurred in the state were in vaccinated people2. Both vaccinated and unvaccinated people had comparably…high viral loads, and of the 133 samples sequenced, 90% were identified as Delta….

In Houston, Texas…, about 17% of Delta cases are in vaccinated people since March 2021, nearly three times the rate of breakthrough infections compared with all other variants combined. Patients with Delta SARS-CoV-2 also stayed in hospital slightly longer than did people infected with other variants. “There’s potentially a slightly different biology to the [Delta] infection,” says James Musser, a molecular pathologist and director of the hospital’s Center for Molecular and Translational Human Infectious Diseases Research. His team found that Ct levels [viral loads] were similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated people3.

However, vaccinated people with Delta might remain infectious for a shorter period, according to researchers in Singapore…. [And, for that reason] Paul Elliott, an epidemiologist at Imperial [College London], says…“We think it’s really, really important to get as many people double vaccinated, and particularly those younger groups, as soon as possible.

And so, those who have been injected with the Covid vaccines carry as many Delta viruses as the unvaccinated, which means the vaxxed are infecting the unvaxxed just as much as the reverse. But the unvaxxed are being blamed for the Delta breakout, and are treated worse than black people during segregation:

  • Restaurants will not admit the unvaxxed.
  • Employees are being forced to be vaxxed or risk losing their jobs.
  • Schools and universities are forcing all their students to be vaxxed.
  • In California, per a health order from the state, hospital or skilled nursing facility visitors must provide proof of full vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours in order to enter these facilities to visit/accompany a patient.

The push to jab the unvaxxed is intensifying, despite the fact that:

(1) The vaccines are losing their effectiveness against the Delta Covid-mutation, with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine waning faster than others. A UK study found that although the Pfizer vaccine was 90% effective against Delta infections one month after the second dose, this declined to 78% after three months, a loss of 12 percentage points. (Statistica)

That is why the push is now on for a “booster,” i.e., a third vaccination.

Since viruses, including the Covid-19 coronavirus, continue to mutate, this means that those who have been vaccinated will likely have to get “booster” shots, again and again, as new Covid mutations appear.

(2) The absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between Covid attack rates with and without a vaccine, is miniscule (The Lancet):

  • 1-3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccine.
  • 1-2% for the Moderna–NIH.
  • 1-2% for the J&J.
  • 0.93% for the Gamaleya.
  • 0.84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.

Translated, this means that getting the Covid vaccine of whichever variety reduces your chance of getting Covid by less than 1% to at most 3%.

Note: The Lancet scientific journal explains that absolute risk reductions (AAAs) “tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs or relative risk reduction. Vaccine efficacy is generally reported as RRR.

Worse still, leaving aside the many real side-effects of Covid vaccines, is a study published in the Internal Journal of Clinical Practice (IJCP) which found that the vaccines may actually “sensitize” vaccine recipients to more severe diseases than if they had not been vaccinated. The Oxford Dictionary defines “sensitize” as “Cause (someone or something) to respond to certain stimuli; make sensitive.”

From the IJCP article’s “Abstract”:

Results of the study: COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.

~E

Sunday Devotional: Master, to whom shall we go?

John 6:60-69

Many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said,
“This saying is hard; who can accept it?”
Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this,
he said to them, “Does this shock you?
What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending
to where he was before? 
It is the spirit that gives life,
while the flesh is of no avail.
The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.
But there are some of you who do not believe.”
Jesus knew from the beginning the ones who would not believe
and the one who would betray him. 
And he said,
“For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me
unless it is granted him by my Father.”

As a result of this,
many of his disciples returned to their former way of life
and no longer accompanied him.
Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” 
Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? 
You have the words of eternal life. 
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”

“Master, to whom shall we go?”

In voicing those plaintive words, St. Peter spoke for all of us.

In our harrowing times full of bad and ever worse news, those words have special resonance.

For, truly, “to whom shall we go?” but to Jesus the Christ who loves us so much He willingly suffered horribly and died for us, so that we would have the chance for salvation and eternal life with Him — if we so choose.

So, as Joshua said in 24:15:

“decide today whom you will serve…
As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

And may the peace and love of Jesus Christ, our Lord be with you,

~E

Friday funny…is not so funny :(

It’s just rather sad…

DCG

Wednesday Funnies!

~E

Toxic masculinity saves the day: Man rescues female trainer from alligator

This guy is a HERO!

h/t Twitchy

DCG

Another cheap drug effective against COVID-19: fenofibrate

Governments in the U.S. and across the world are reacting with hysteria to alleged spikes in COVID-19 infections of the Delta variety, allegedly because of people who decline to be vaccinated, by re-imposing mask mandates and even lockdowns.

New Zealand’s socialist government, under the allegedly female prime minister Jacinda Ardern who, strangely, seems to have a penis, just re-imposed a lockdown of the entire country because of one single case of COVID-19; while the socialist Scottish government is actually pushing to make permanent its COVID emergency powers.

But the fact of the matter is that there are common, widely-available, and cheap drugs that are effective against the COVID-19 virus. See, for example, my post of August 15: “Ivermectin effective against COVID-19“.

Now comes medical news of another cheap drug that’s shown to be effective against COVID-19 — the anti-cholesterol drug, fenofibrate.

From Medical News Today, August 16, 2021:

An international effort — involving scientists from Keele University and the University of Birmingham, both in the United Kingdom, and the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan — has found that a drug that people formerly used to control cholesterol levels could be an effective treatment against COVID-19.

The results of the study will appear in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology….

Scientists developed fenofibrate in the 1980sTrusted Source, and doctors used it widely [until statin came along] to control people’s cholesterol levels….

In laboratory experiments, the researchers found that fenofibrate destabilized the spike protein and inhibited binding to the ACE2Trusted Source membrane protein, through which the virus enters the cells.

The drug is effective against the Alpha and Beta variants of SARS-CoV-2, and the team is now investigating its effectiveness against the Delta variant.

After experiments with the isolated protein, other researchers in the team repeated the experiments with the live virus and found that fenofibrate was equally effective against the live virus.

Co-corresponding study author Dr. Farhat Khanim, director of research in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Birmingham, tested the drug against the live virus. She was optimistic about its potential.

“We are cautiously very excited. We cannot lose sight of the fact that there are groups of patients at high risk, for whom the vaccine will not work,” she told MNT. “There is still an urgent need to expand our arsenal of drugs to treat SARS-CoV-2 […].”

The drug seems to work, irrespective of spike mutations,” said Dr. Khanim.

The researchers then looked at how much virus infected cells released after treatment with fenofibrate in vitro. They found that there was a 60% reduction in viral release compared with untreated cells. Other drugs, such as statins, did not have a similar effect.

The viral reproduction and spread among cells are what causes the symptoms as the body tries to control the virus. A drug that reduces that viral release should prevent severe disease and hospitalization and reduce the risk of those with SARS-CoV-2 passing it on to others.

~E