Articles by Herschel Smith

So do a lot of other people.  But Shannon wants to make it abundantly clear.

Remember that I said this to you?

Next up, the wearing of masks.  I have some experience in air filtration engineering from my early career testing and balancing HEPA filters and charcoal adsorbers.  HEPA filters (of concern here) work by particle interception due to electrostatic force.  Surgical masks, cloths, handkerchiefs, and other manner of cotton material (cotton is cellulose) do not have that.

My daughter wears one in surgery and the ER to prevent potential blood-borne pathogens from entering her mouth, not to prevent SARS-CoV-2, flu or the common cold (which is also a Coronavirus).  N95 masks are just that, 95% efficient for particles down to a given size.  Moreover, when a nuclear or chemical worker wears a full face respirator, if the wearer is a male and has a beard, he must shave.  Workers have tried to create work-arounds for this by glazing their face with Vaseline, but the seal never works.  The bulk of breathing air goes around the filtration media if there is no testable seal, not through it.  This is true of full face respirators, and it is true in the superlative for these silly little masks half of America is wearing.

When you put an N95 mask on, the bulk of your breathing air is going under and over the top of the mask, not through it.  Furthermore, every decontamination technique eventually destroys the electrostatic charge on the fibers, thus rendering the mask useless.  It’s designed to be worn and then thrown away.  It’s actually worse than useless, because we are now learning that there is a heavy viral and pathogenic loading on both the outside and the inside of the filter media, and we also now know that the degree to which a patient suffers from this disease is a function – at least partially – of the amount of inoculate that you breath.

I’m certainly not perfect, but I won’t mislead you.  I stumbled upon this video and thought it might be enlightening that someone else thinks the same way.

This information is true because: HEPA filters will remove particles down to 0.3 µm in size (to usually 99.95% efficiency, depending upon the filter – here I have used data for nuclear grade filters).  The SARS-CoV-2 virus is 80 nm in diameter.  A few viruses out of a million might be intercepted by electrostatic force, but that’s essentially zero.

If the particle you’re trying to intercept is spittle, stay away from coughing people anyway.  But those particles drop by sedimentation, diffusiophoresis, etc.

You’ll have to forward to about five minutes in the video to get past the rambling. I think some inspired readers could add to all of this by linking video or citing URLs where Fauci now claims that the wearing of masks is merely a sign of respect.

For him it’s the .45-70 and .454 Casull.

Not so much.

This morning the Supreme Court issued orders from the justices’ private conference last week. The justices did not add any cases to their merits docket for next term, nor did they seek the views of the federal government in any new cases. And perhaps most notably, the justices did not act on any of the Second Amendment cases that they have now considered at three consecutive conferences; somewhat unusually, the electronic dockets for those cases (see, for example, here) all indicated late last week – that is, before today’s order list was even released – that the cases had been relisted for the upcoming conference on Thursday, May 28.

The court also granted a motion to substitute Donna Stephens, the wife of Aimee Stephens, as the respondent in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, in which the justices are considering whether federal employment-discrimination laws protect transgender employees. Aimee Stephens died earlier this month of complications from kidney disease.

But we need to make sure that the rights of transgenders are considered.

News from NYC.

EAST NEW YORK, Brooklyn (WABC) — A grocery store worker in Brooklyn is in custody after police say he shot and killed a man armed with a knife.

It happened just after 11 p.m. Monday at Rose Family Grocery Store in East New York.

Police say 25-year-old Edwin Candelario attempted to attack the worker with a knife during an argument.

That’s when the 34-year-old worker pulled out a gun and police say he shot Candelario several times, killing him.

It appears the worker was not licensed to have the gun.

We certainly need to focus resources on where they’re needed.  A man defending his life cannot be allowed.

“You shall rise up before the grayheaded and honor the aged, and you shall revere your God; I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 19:32).

News from New York and the Northeast on how they have treated the elderly.

Health policy expert Avik Roy noted on Twitter Tuesday morning that if you remove New York from the national statistics, the percentage of COVID-19 deaths attributed to nursing homes jumps to 52%. Roy also reminds us that “only 1.8% of U.S. residents live in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, meaning that people in one of those facilities are 23 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than anyone else.

This isn’t without background.

Those deaths have occurred as Cuomo’s critics say he has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the healthcare industry interests that helped bankroll his election campaign. In March, Cuomo’s administration issued an order that allowed nursing homes to readmit sick patients without testing them for Covid-19. Amid allegations of undercounted casualties, the governor also pushed back against pressure to have state regulators more stringently record and report death rates in nursing homes.

And then came Cuomo’s annual budget – which included a little-noticed passage shielding corporate officials who run New York hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities from liability for Covid-related deaths and injuries.

GNYHA – a lobbying group for hospital systems, including some that own nursing homes – said it “drafted and aggressively advocated for” the immunity provision. The new law declares that top officials at hospital and nursing home companies “shall have immunity from any liability, civil or criminal, for any harm or damages alleged to have been sustained as a result of an act or omission in the course of arranging for or providing healthcare services” to address the Covid-19 outbreak.

Prior to the budget language, Cuomo had already temporarily granted limited legal immunity to doctors and nurses serving on the medical frontlines. But the carefully sculpted passage buried in the state’s annual spending bill expanded that by offering extensive immunity to any “healthcare facility administrator, executive, supervisor, board member, trustee or other person responsible for directing, supervising or managing a healthcare facility and its personnel or other individual in a comparable role”.

One of the most hideous things done in American history, second to abortion.

Politico.

The battle over the impact of coronavirus lockdown measures on Americans’ religious observances has reached the Supreme Court as a Southern California church and its pastor made an emergency appeal for relief from executive orders issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Lawyers for the South Bay United Pentecostal Church and Bishop Arthur Hodges asked the justices to step in Sunday after a federal appeals court panel rejected a similar emergency application Friday.

The decision from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals came on the same day President Donald Trump publicly backed churches seeking to escape various stay-at-home orders in place across the country. Trump said he was ordering governors to exempt churches “right now” by declaring religious services to be essential, although he lacks any evident legal authority to impose his view on state officials.

Still, Trump’s pointed rhetoric added new fire to the simmering legal battles, including pledges by thousands of churches to defy local public-health restrictions by holding services on Pentecost, which falls next Sunday.

In the California-focused case that reached the high court Sunday night, a 9th Circuit panel split, 2-1, with the majority declining to disturb the state government’s action in light of the health dangers posed by the ongoing pandemic.

“We’re dealing here with a highly contagious and often fatal disease for which there presently is no known cure,’” Judges Barry Silverman and Jacqueline Nguyen wrote. “In the words of Justice Robert Jackson, if a ‘court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.’”

Silverman, a Clinton appointee, and Nguyen, an Obama appointee, were dismissive of the church’s arguments in the Friday order, devoting only two paragraphs to the substance of the dispute.

However, the third judge on the panel — Trump appointee Daniel Collins — weighed in with an 18-page dissent arguing that Newsom’s orders are impermissibly intruding on religious freedom protected by the First Amendment.

“I do not doubt the importance of the public health objectives that the State puts forth, but the State can accomplish those objectives without resorting to its current inflexible and over-broad ban on religious services,” Collins wrote.

Collins noted that the orders allow many workplaces to open, but ban religious gatherings even when they could meet the social distancing standards imposed on other activities that are now permitted.

“By explicitly and categorically assigning all in-person ‘religious services’ to a future Phase 3 — without any express regard to the number of attendees, the size of the space, or the safety protocols followed in such services8 — the State’s Reopening Plan undeniably ‘discriminate[s] on its face’ against ‘religious conduct,’” the judge said.

The legal dispute may turn on how much weight the justices choose to give to a 115-year-old Supreme Court precedent, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld a mandatory vaccination scheme for smallpox.

Who wants to lay bets with me?  I say the Supreme Court punts and refuses even to hear the case, leaving it to the cowards in the Ninth Circuit who didn’t even have the courage to hear the case En banc.

Good innovation.