He's a tall, lanky Southerner with a penchant for cars, and, of all things, lizards. He has a polite face and an eager-to-please demeanor. His teaches Sunday school with his wife. Ed Bolian is the kind of guy you might meet on an airplane and forget before you picked up your bags – with one exception: he just became the fastest man ever to drive across the United States.

That's right: Alex Roy's familiar cross-country driving record, set in his now-famous LeMans Blue 2000 BMW M5 during the fall of 2006, no longer stands. It was allegedly broken by a three-man team consisting of Ed, a co-driver, and a passenger, in a 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG.

First, we should address the term "broken". When I think of a record that's been "broken," I imagine beating something by a second, or a minute, or maybe a few RBIs. If what Ed says is true, the record wasn't broken: it was shattered. In 2006, Alex and company completed the transcontinental journey in 31 hours and 4 minutes. Two weeks ago, Ed and his crew say they managed to do the deed in 28 hours and 50 minutes. Google says it takes 40 and a half. //

All of this started in 1933 when a crazy man from Indiana named Edwin "Cannonball" Baker drove from New York to Los Angeles in 53 hours and 30 minutes in some car called the Blue Streak. No one knows Baker's motivation for the run, but his 50 mph average was highly impressive, considering the interstate system was not yet built. The record went unbeaten for 40 years.

In the 1970s, noted auto racer and Car and Driver contributor Brock Yates conceived the "Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash" – also called the Cannonball Run – to protest highway speed limits. I won't bore you with the details, but the record was slowly whittled down over the next decade until Dave Heinz and Dave Yarborough teamed up in 1979 to make the trek in 32 hours and 51 minutes behind the wheel of a Jaguar XJS.

A new pre-print Israeli study has found that people with natural immunity to COVID-19 could be 13 times less likely to contract the respiratory virus than those who were solely vaccinated against the disease.

Conducted by researchers at Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University, the yet-to-be peer-reviewed study found that when comparing individuals previously infected with the virus and those that received two jabs of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, those with natural infection saw greater protection against the delta variant and breakthrough infection.

“SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021,” the study read. “The increased risk was significant for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold increased risk for symptomatic disease.”

The analysis also found that solely vaccinated individuals “were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.”

The study ultimately concluded that “natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity” and that “individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.”

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1

Psaki was asked Friday about members of the Marine Corps criticizing top generals on social media.

Al Jazeera English correspondent Kimberly Halkett asked, “Does [the president] believe he was given bad advice? And will he ask for any resignations of his generals given the high cost of American and Afghan lives?”

“No to both of those questions,” Psaki responded.

So that means he’s endorsing all the actions, refusing to cashier anyone. He’s explicitly endorsed the decisions. It’s all on him now //

As I pointed out previously, this mess of this withdrawal was intentional by Biden. He always intended to just pull everything out and absorb whatever the consequences were, because he didn’t think there would be a lot of consequences. “F**k that,” he said about obligations to allies, others “got away with it” when it came to Vietnam. Indeed, he’s so old, he was one of the people responsible for the Saigon failure, as well. He had no moral compass then either.

That’s been the whole problem here. The “empathetic” old “unifier” is and always has been a mean old guy who doesn’t really care about anyone other than himself.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/08/17/bidens-afghanistan-debacle-may-have-been-intentional-n428183

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/08/17/youll-never-guess-who-was-also-involved-in-the-1975-debacle-in-saigon-n428530

Accumulating evidence supports ending isolation and precautions for adults with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 using a symptom-based strategy. This update incorporates recent evidence to inform the duration of isolation and precautions recommended to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to others, while limiting unnecessary prolonged isolation and unnecessary use of laboratory testing resources. This interim guidance is based upon information available to date and will be updated as new information becomes available. //

Summary of Key Findings

1. Concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in upper respiratory specimens decline after onset of symptoms. (39,56,61,63,64,66)
2. The likelihood of recovering replication-competent virus also declines after onset of symptoms. For patients with mild to moderate COVID-19, replication-competent virus has not been recovered after 10 days following symptom onset. (1,8,31,36,42,61,66) Recovery of replication-competent virus between 10 and 20 days after symptom onset has been reported in some adults with severe COVID-19; some of these cases were immunocompromised. (56) However, in this series of patients, it was estimated that 88% and 95% of their specimens no longer yielded replication-competent virus after 10 and 15 days, respectively, following symptom onset. Detection of sub-genomic SARS-CoV-2 RNA or recovery of replication-competent virus has been reported in severely immunocompromised patients (e.g., patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and acquired hypogammaglobulinemia, lymphoma and immunochemotherapy, hematopoietic stem-cell transplant, chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or AIDS) beyond 20 days, and as long as 143 days after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result. (2,6,7,14,74)
3. In a large contact tracing study, no contacts at high risk of exposure developed infection if their exposure to a case patient started 6 days or more after the case patient’s infection onset. (12)
   Recovered patients can continue to have SARS-CoV-2 RNA detected in their upper respiratory specimens for up to 12 weeks after symptom onset. (31,33,34) Investigation of 285 “persistently positive” adults, which included 126 adults who had developed recurrent symptoms, found no secondary infections among 790 contacts to these case patients. Efforts to isolate replication-competent virus from 108 of these 285 case patients were unsuccessful. (31)