What are the five biggest problems facing black Americans? Where do things like racism and police brutality rank? What about the absence of black fathers? Taleeb Starkes, author of Amazon #1 bestseller "Black Lies Matter," lists the five.
With schools closed mostly everywhere, Glenn Woiceshyn has decided to make many of his Powerful Minds homeschool books available for free.
Writes Glenn, "While homeschooling my kids and some of their friends at the grade 6 level, I wrote a few books for homeschoolers that include text and exercises. Regarding the latter there is a teacher’s version with answers and a student’s version with the answers left out. This makes it easy for a parent to teach the material without being an expert.
"The 14 books, which can be used for grades 6-8 (ages ~ 11-13), are as follows:
"For the novel studies you need to purchase the novels, such as from Amazon. Feel free to print or pass around my books, which are only in PDF form."
Link: Powerful Minds homeschool books available for free.
Coronavirus disparities are a class and culture, not a race, problem. Poor people everywhere have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. If the incidence of infection among black New Yorkers and Chicagoans were compared not to that of Manhattanites and the denizens of the Magnificent Mile but to residents of southeastern Ohio and of areas around abandoned steel plants in West Virginia, those alleged race disparities would shrink markedly.There may be “structural” elements to obesity and hypertension, but those conditions are largely the result of behavioral choices that individuals can control. Playing the race card during a pandemic is not just politically corrosive, it is medically unsound.
You can see the long version here.Updates:"If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their character by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons, I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow-creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
LED lighting would be another example of something that's come in within the last 10 years -- unpredicted, unheralded -- the result of an innovation by a Japanese professor 20-30 years ago. But now we can get white or tunable light out of LEDs; uses far less electricity than the preceding technologies .... is yet another step in the incredible decline of the cost of lighting. That's my favorite example of rational optimism. You basically have to work for a third of a second these days on the average wage to earn an hour of light. Well back in 1800 you had to work for six hours to earn that much light from a candle on the average wage. That's the sort of improvement we've seen in technologies over the last couple of centuries.
Invention is as old as human existence, and no country has promoted and thrived on invention more than the United States thanks to its patent system. But is American invention at risk? Framed around the story of two first-time inventors, Inventing to Nowhere explores the stakes in policy fights over the American innovation economy, with interviews of legendary inventor Dean Kamen, historians, members of Congress and other key players in the effort to keep the country innovating. For more than 200 years, the U.S. patent system has helped protect and grow ideas. This reverence for intellectual property rights has been a driving force in making the United States an economic superpower. But as the patent-law debate becomes more influenced by special interests, the future of inventors and entrepreneurs is in jeopardy.SavetheInventor.com
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Related: The next outbreak? We’re not ready | Bill Gates (2015 Talk)RaTG13 is the name, rank and serial number of an individual horseshoe bat of the species Rhinolophus affinis, or rather of a sample of its feces collected in 2013 in a cave in Yunnan, China. The sample was collected by hazmat-clad scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that year. Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19.[...]In a paper published in February last year, Patrick Woo and colleagues at Hong Kong University surveyed the coronaviruses found in bats and came to a prescient conclusion: “Bat–animal and bat–human interactions, such as the presence of live bats in wildlife wet markets and restaurants in Southern China, are important for interspecies transmission of [coronaviruses] and may lead to devastating global outbreaks.”
Another explanation cited by Italian experts, could be that Germany, unlike other countries, tends not to test those who have already died."We don't consider post-mortem tests to be a decisive factor. We work on the principle that patients are tested before they die," the [disease control agency Robert Koch Institute (RKI)] told AFP.That means that if a person dies in quarantine at home and does not go to hospital, there is a high chance they will not be included in the statistics, as Giovanni Maga of Italy's National Research Council pointed out in an interview with Euronews.
Vessel manifests maintained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and reviewed by The Intercept show a steady flow of the medical equipment needed to treat the coronavirus being shipped abroad as recently as March 17.[...]Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare, a Pennsylvania-based health product firm that produces supplemental oxygen machines, sent at least three different shipments of respiratory equipment to Belgium in mid-February and early March. The total cargo included 14 containers weighing more than 55 tons.Fifty-five tons!
On March 8, two tons of Vapotherm’s high-flow disposable patient circuit units, used for operating its respiratory aids, were loaded onto a container ship in the Port of Los Angeles. The shipment was sent to Kobe, Japan, for Japan Medicalnext Co., a health care distributor.
The records show dozens of other shipments of respirator equipment, medical garments, medical masks, oxygen concentrators, and ventilators sent abroad over the last two months.[...]On February 28, a ship left New York for Hamburg, Germany, with about 1.5 tons of ventilator masks manufactured by Allied Healthcare Products, a health product business based in St. Louis. The masks are used for the company’s portable ventilator unit.The reason?
The U.S. government has placed no restrictions on exports of medical supplies while continuing to impose financial penalties on the import of personal protective gear, protective goggles, pulse oximeters, hand sanitizer, and other medical products from China. On March 10 and 12, President Donald Trump temporarily lifted tariffs, in place since 2017, on some of these medical products.
I've been working on an N95 mask production project with a team for about a week now. We just got off the phone with NIOSH [National Institute for Safety and Health]. They told us that approval for a new mask production facility in the US will take at minimum 45 days, but more likely 90 [days]. A lot of people are gonna die.
[WHO]... failed to prepare the world for a pandemic, spending the years since the Sars and ebola alarms talking more about climate change, obesity and tobacco, while others, including the Wellcome Trust and the Gates foundation, actually set up a coalition for epidemic preparedness innovation, and countries like Singapore and South Korea put in place measures to cope with an outbreak like SARS in the future.[WHO]... once the epidemic began in China, WHO downplayed its significance, tweeting as late as January 14 that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus”, when it had already been warned by the Taiwanese health authorities among others of strong evidence for medical staff in Wuhan becoming ill. The Chinese government at this stage had known for weeks that the virus was spreading, probably person to person, yet WHO then sycophantically praised the Chinese government.[WHO]... has failed before. When the ebola outbreak in West Africa that was to kill 11,000 people began in late 2013, on its own admission WHO hindered the fight against the virus, obsessed with not letting others find out what was happening.
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Some of the suspended federal regulations include:FDA allows state leeway in virus testing"The FDA will allow states to take responsibility for tests developed and used by laboratories within their borders. The labs will not have to pursue Emergency Use Authorization from the agency, an emergency clearance that is normally required." - STAT News (3/16/20)FDA loosens regulations on distribution of newly developed tests
"Under certain circumstances, the agency will not object to any manufacturers that distribute newly developed tests before the FDA grants emergency clearance, and a similar stance will be taken toward labs that use these new tests." - STAT News (3/16/20)FDA issues emergency authorization of anti-malaria drug for coronavirus care
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to BARDA to allow hydroxychloroquine sulfate and chloroquine phosphate products donated to the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalized teen and adult patients with COVID-19, as appropriate, when a clinical trial is not available or feasible." - Department of Health and Human Services (3/29/20)Allowance of licensed health care professionals to work in a different state from which they are licensed
The "requirements that physicians or other health care professionals hold licenses in the State in which they provide services, if they have an equivalent license from another State (and are not affirmatively barred from practice in that State or any State a part of which is included in the emergency area)" are being waived. - U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (3/13/20)Physician-owned hospitals can temporarily increase the number of their licensed beds, operating rooms, and procedure rooms
"Physician-owned hospitals can temporarily increase the number of their licensed beds, operating rooms, and procedure rooms. For example, a physician-owned hospital may temporarily convert observation beds to inpatient beds to accommodate patient surge during the public health emergency." - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (3/30/20)Allows non-physician practitioners (physician assistants, nurse practitioners) a wider scope of practice, like ordering tests and medications
"CMS is issuing waivers so that hospitals can use other practitioners, such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners, to the fullest extent possible, in accordance with a state’s emergency preparedness or pandemic plan. These clinicians can perform services such as order tests and medications that may have previously required a physician’s order where this is permitted under state law." - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (3/30/20)American's For Tax Freedom also lists suspended state rules and regulations. Most of these deal with licensing restrictions that:
In a truly capitalist society, here is how the market responds:1. Health insurance companies monitor for health risks (they have an economic interest to do so).2. Warn early -- implement plans with hospitals, that have been developed well in advance.3. Demand from hospitals for extra equipment, causes prices to go up quickly.4. The market responds by bringing on new capacity quickly.5. Groceries raise prices on high in-demand goods, thus reducing "hoarding" and assuring continued supply.6. Hospitals (all private, and in a completely private market) activate emergency plans (which they have a profit-motive to have) for additional beds (in mothballed buildings, local hotels, or other facilities).7. Private pharmaceutical companies and labs develop tests at the request of hospitals and clinics.8. Private clinics start testing in mass.9. Goverment's job -- to make sure those who are a threat to others, are isolated.10. Private media and health experts, provide objective (non-political) advice to individuals and companies on how to deal, in the context of their own lives, with the pandemic.11. Testing provides individuals and companies with the kind of information crucial to making rational decisions.12. Private labs and pharma companies rush to innovate treatments and vaccines.13. Private testing and certification organizations ("FDA" replacements) ramp up to approve test kits, treatments, and vaccines.14. Business adjusts to peoples' preferences for safety. Put in necessary protections and conveniences...15. People who don't follow the reasonable guidelines suffer social ostracism and left to suffer consequences.16. Insurance contracts could be written in ways that say -- if you want to be covered, behave...Feel free to add -- private market responses to pandemic...You can read the original thread and the responses here.