Trump’s COVID comeback, Democrat theatrics on ACB
I wouldn’t crow too soon. Trump may have to go back into hospital. That does happen
Perhaps Dr. James P. Phillips, the attending physician at Walter Reed Hospital, hasn’t yet noticed, but President Donald Trump is in the midst of a critical election battle.
Indeed, the president yesterday was behaving as if his COVID convalescence was less important than the task of saving the nation from Joe Biden and his hard-left handlers. Accordingly, he tweeted a MAGA message to his supporters, recorded a thank-you video to the medical staff at Walter Reed, and took a quick ride to thank his many well-wishers gathered outside the Beltway-based military medical center. And it was this last transgression that got the Trump-hating medicine man all worked up.
Phillips, whose Twitter image shows him clenching his fists on the CNN set with Ezekiel Emanuel and Wolf Blitzer, and whose followers number a fair bit fewer than the president’s 86.9 million, heaped scorn on Trump for what he characterized as a stunt rather than a show of presidential strength and resilience.
“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” Phillips raged. “They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”
They may die? C’mon, doc, your derangement is showing. The idea that a young, strong, peak-of-fitness Secret Service agent will soon succumb to COVID is just plain idiotic. Or maybe it’s just plain hyper-partisan. A quick spin through Phillips’s Twitter page, after all, shows that he follows the likes of Kamala Harris, Jill Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Mike Bloomberg, George Conway, Never-Trumpers Max Boot and Bill Kristol, Doctors for Biden, Republicans for Joe Biden, The Lincoln Project, and, well, you get the idea. Let’s just hope the president’s Secret Service detail doesn’t let this guy anywhere near our commander-in-chief.
Not content with a single rant, however, Phillips sent out a second salvo: “That Presidential SUV is not only bulletproof, but hermetically sealed against chemical attack. The risk of COVID19 transmission inside is as high as it gets outside of medical procedures. The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play.”
One wonders whether those committed professionals in the president’s SUV were “forced to play,” as Phillips insists, or instead drew straws for the honor of accompanying their America First president on a brief trip around the grounds.
In any case, President Trump’s medical team said his health continues to improve, and he might even be discharged today. If that happens, it’ll mark the most remarkable curb-stomping of this coronavirus by any septuagenarian anywhere ever — especially given what we now know about the president’s condition just a couple of days ago.
“During a press conference late Sunday morning at Walter Reed National Military Medical Hospital,” reports the Washington Examiner, “Dr. Sean Conley confirmed that Trump was given supplemental oxygen on Friday out of concern of ‘possible rapid progression of the illness,’ which the president was adamantly against. Conley said the president had a ‘high fever,’ and his oxygen saturation was dipping below 94%.”
“Today he feels well,” said Dr. Brian Garibaldi. “He’s been up and around. Our plan for today is to have him to eat and drink, be up out of bed as much as possible, to be mobile. And if he continues to look and feel as well as he does today, our hope is that we can plan for a discharge as early as [Monday] to the White House where he can continue his treatment course.”
A word of caution, then, to Dr. James P. Phillips, his Trump-addled fellow travelers, and the fatalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times who’ve been tasked with updating the president’s obituary: Reports of his demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Coronavirus: Sweden defied zealots and never met its Waterloo
Comment from Australia, an exceptionally low death-rate jurisdiction
Sweden’s impressive legacy — ABBA, dynamite, Ikea, for instance — has expanded significantly in 2020, having provided the world with an example of a sane response to what’s turned out a relatively mild pandemic.
The Scandinavian nation deserves enduring credit from reasonable people everywhere for resisting the destructive authoritarian mindset that enveloped democratic nations this year. Sweden was viciously attacked by supposed experts and mainstream media all year that if it didn’t crush commerce by fiat and suspend civil liberties indefinitely, as has occurred in Europe, many US states, and of course Victoria, more than 90,000 Swedes would die.
The army of lockdown zealots will never be able to say lockdowns are essential to avert disaster, if that wasn’t already clear enough from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
Historians will struggle to see a public policy disaster in Sweden. The number of deaths there from all causes so far this year, just less than 68,000, is fewer than over the same period in 2015, adjusted for population size. Far from an apocalypse, the total death rate from January 1 to September 20 is barely distinguishable from recent years, notwithstanding a jump from 2019, during which it was unusually low.
While its European neighbours, which bludgeoned their economies for months, now battle “second waves” (albeit with far lower death rates), Sweden has barely had any COVID-19 deaths since mid-July alongside a much milder uptick in so-called cases, which in any case often mean little.
The feared “exponential growth” never occurred (it never occurred anywhere). Swedish hospitals were never “overwhelmed”.
But Sweden’s GDP, which plunged 8.3 per cent in the second quarter, tanked anyway so should it have locked down too and “saved lives”? It’s a fatuous argument, faulty on its own terms, even assuming lockdowns do “save lives” overall.
For a start, its economy suffered in part because its larger neighbours, which themselves endured far bigger drops in GDP, locked down. Second, media fear-mongering left people unreasonably terrified, which, naturally, saw Swedes curtail economic activity.
In any case, looking at GDP over three months is hardly definitive. Sweden’s economy is expected to grow 4 per cent next year, twice as fast as ours, according to the Reserve Bank.
Having inflicted less economic chaos, Sweden’s gross government debt won’t rise beyond 40 per cent, according to its September budget papers, while Canberra’s debt ceiling will be lifted to the equivalent of 55 per cent of GDP along with far bigger budget deficits.
The bigger point is this: the short-term trajectory of GDP matters little. As I’ve argued for years in this column, it’s a flawed, dated measure of prosperity.
In Sweden, no one will be cowering in masks for years; Swedish police are not dragging people screaming from cars or invading homes to stop Facebook sharing. They aren’t shutting internal borders, stopping weddings, funerals or undermining children’s education. The Swedish parliament, unlike Victoria’s, isn’t using the pandemic as an excuse to increase police power. And the Swedish people never had to endure rambling, ridiculous daily press conferences for months about “cases” that belong in a scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
And the Swedish government hasn’t set a precedent, which will hang over business investment considerations here for a generation, that whenever a virus emerges, businesses and households will be shut down for months.
None of these factors is reflected in GDP.
There was never a health crisis in Sweden. And there hasn’t been one in Australia, either.
In the first six months of the year, there were 134 fewer deaths from respiratory diseases in Australia, which includes pneumonia and influenza, and 617 additional deaths from cancer compared with the average over 2015-19, according to the ABS’s provisional mortality statistics, released last week. Doctor-certified deaths are within the normal range.
Sweden hasn’t hitched its economic future — and the mobility of its people — to the prospect of a vaccine, either.
As our budget will make clear, forecasts of a return to normality will be contingent on an effective vaccine emerging, and one people will want to take. Given the survival rate for people under 70 is about 99.9 per cent — if they get the virus — it’s unclear how many will want to. Drug companies, under immense pressure to find a vaccine in months rather than the usual eight to 10 years, are understandably trying to wriggle out of liability if something goes wrong.
There are 243 candidate vaccines, of which nine are in stage-three trials, where the wider population testing takes place. There’s no guarantee of success. There’s been no vaccine developed for HIV, for instance.
“It is likely individuals will need two doses of a vaccine and this may need to be repeated every year,” says JP Morgan analyst David Mackie, who took stock of vaccination developments last month. “With a global population of 7.8 billion, this would require 4.7 billion individuals to be vaccinated with two doses each, separated by three to four weeks, and possibly repeated every year.”
Australia’s coronavirus elimination strategy leaves many questions unanswered. How long will we be prevented from leaving, if there’s no effective vaccine? Given the virus is contagious, is it realistic to keep it out forever (assuming it’s not prevalent here)? If not, why has Victoria imposed a 20-week lockdown on its biggest city?
Nations that don’t lock down their populations for months have been cast as immoral, but the truth is more complex. Leadership requires balancing competing objectives, governing for the long term, and being honest with people when new information emerges.
It will require a few more years of data to work out the optimal strategies to fight future pandemics. But what’s clear already — certainly to citizens of Victoria, New Zealand, Israel, the UK and Europe — is that one lockdown, as promised by proponents, does not eradicate the coronavirus.
And let’s drop the idea Swedes care less for their elderly than we do. Sweden spends the equivalent of 3.2 per cent of GDP on its aged-care facilities, compared to about 1 per cent here.
Polished man month
When I first heard of this, I thought: “How F…ing useless can you get?”. A professional reader of mine, however had some more sophisticated comments — which I reproduce below:
October is Polished Man month, when leftist men put on nail polish to end violence against children.
Painting a fingernail is supposed to start a conversation about violence against children. It also advertises that the male wearer of the nail polish is one of society’s very few good men.
And leftist men try very hard to be seen as among the few good men by leftist standards. Leftist groups/cultures cast out any man who is not continually performing to show that he is an enlightened caring feminist, and being cast out can mean losing his employment, his friends, and in some cases even his family.
So lots of men working in heavily leftist/feminist dominated fields will this month be under pressure to show their painted fingernail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs2PfzuYK4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMd58QwdnfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQGQVh57Ejo
The implication of the Polished Man initiative is that men are the main perpetrators of violence against children, and it is men who must stop it.
Early in the counselling process when working as a forensic clinician, I would ask each prisoner about his childhood experiences, and many would tell me they were physically and emotionally abused by a parent. Not always but often that parent was a mother.
In fact, about 80% of prisoners did not even have a father or other male in the house, just a crazy abusive neglectful mother. “Crazy” was a common description.
Some stories of what some mothers do to little boys, and the number of such stories, cannot be believed or accepted by average decent people. Even my psychologist colleagues (who were all female) could not bring themselves to accept that such a number of women do such things.
The gender of abusers was seldom documented. Due to the pervasive leftist/feminist push that men are society’s abusers, so most people presume child abusers are mostly male.
Leftists/feminists are collective thinkers so psychologists, social workers and welfare workers generally, of whom nearly all are leftist-feminist, easily fall into reflexive mass collaboration. Some may call it conspiracy, which it is among the few most intelligent, conscious, and manipulative.
But most psychologists, social workers and welfare workers are emotional and peer centred people, and reflexively adopt the attitude, outlook and behaviour of the leftist-feminist culture in which they work.
One consequence of this is that a lot of falsities are put out about men and women and assumed by the general public to be true. One of those falsities is that women seldom abuse children. Here is some actual data on the horrible truth:
http://www.breakingthescience.org/SimplifiedDataFromDHHS.php
As the idea of painting a fingernail is to start a conversation about child abuse, then I propose that when the conversations start be sure to encourage people to do their own research into the subject, because truth is more fascinating than leftist-feminist propaganda.
IN BRIEF
Stats suggest that lockdowns may have had little effect on spread (National Review)
Biden campaign reportedly pulling negative ads against Trump after his COVID diagnoses (The Daily Wire)
“I hope they die”: Left-wingers react to positive coronavirus diagnosis for the Trumps (The Federalist)
“Our liberties … have been stampeded over by these dirty cops”: Republicans rage over unverified but potentially damning Russian report on Clinton, suggest shutting down intelligence agencies (Washington Examiner)
New Supreme Court term begins Monday, with major cases from ObamaCare to religious liberty on the docket (Washington Examiner)
“Our presentation followed the facts and the evidence”: Highly anticipated grand jury recordings of Breonna Taylor case have been released (Disrn)
New Home, Texas, becomes the 15th city in the nation to outlaw abortion (Disrn)
NBA viewership keeps sinking: Game 2 of NBA finals the least-watched game on record (Washington Examiner)
Hondurans in migrant caravan bused back after entering Guatemala (Fox News)
Policy: Could it happen here? The parallels between the Soviet Bloc and the modern U.S. (The Daily Signal)
Policy: The Fed and the housing bubble/bust (Mises Institute)
For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here. Home page supplement
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