Monday, January 11, 2021
UK: These senseless lockdown fines will only foster contempt among the public
We all know we are in the middle of a pandemic, that Covid-19 is spread by human contact, that the new strain of the virus is significantly more infectious, that cases are soaring and deaths are high – and that the NHS is in danger of being overwhelmed.
We know, too, that we all have a responsibility to keep contact with others to a bare minimum.
It is dangerous and wrong to hold parties, raves and other gatherings – and quite right for the police to use their powers to break them up.
But there comes a point at which over-zealous enforcement of the rules becomes dangerous in itself.
If we want everyone to obey the lockdown rules it is vital that those rules have public consent.
Lose this and we find ourselves in a situation which tends to afflict all dictatorships after a while – where people pay lip service to laws but have such contempt for the rules that they are determined to break them at every opportunity.
Moreover, it destroys public trust even further when police are seen apparently making up the law as they go along.
As the National Police Chiefs’ Council has since acknowledged, there is nothing in the legislation passed last week that prevents someone driving five miles to take a socially distanced walk in the country.
That is exactly what the two women stopped at a Derbyshire reservoir last week had done – they went there, they said, because it was less crowded than the paths near their homes. The tea they had taken to drink on a bitter day apparently constituted a ‘picnic’ and they were fined £200 each on the vague grounds of breaking the ‘spirit’ of lockdown.
Nor is there anything in the legislation to prevent people leaving their home twice a day – the ‘offence’ over which an overly ‘keen’ Thames Valley policeman challenged drivers following the new national lockdown. The ‘once-a-day’ rule is a guideline, but it is not law. The Home Secretary Priti Patel and Health Secretary Matt Hancock surely know that, so why were they so keen yesterday to jump to the support of police officers who appear to have acted outside the powers that Parliament voted to give them?
The irony is that the only social interaction likely to spread Covid in any of these instances was between police officers and the people they were apprehending for perceived breaches of lockdown.
Do these crowds of police hanging around the streets possess some kind of immunity to the disease which the rest of us do not?
I am sure that the vast majority of officers around the country are not acting disproportionately, but are enforcing the rules with common sense – giving advice and verbal warnings to people who, in many cases, are simply confused by the ever-changing rules.
But it damages the reputation of the police as a whole when some start behaving like the Stasi. I wonder whether those individuals who’ve been interrogated by over-zealous boys in blue in recent days will be inclined to cooperate with officers in future if, for example, their assistance is required as witnesses to a real crime?
And I find it particularly worrying that several cases seem to have involved crowds of male officers surrounding women who are either alone or in pairs. It is as if years of equality training have gone out of the window and some officers suddenly think themselves entitled to pick on what they see as soft targets.
We all need to follow the rules of lockdown, but that will be made easier if police forces can retain our respect by acting proportionately, rather than jumping on the first person they can find an excuse to fine.
*********************************
Parler faces SHUTDOWN: Amazon vows to switch off 'free-speech' site's servers at midnight as Apple follows Google in banning it
Conservative social media platform Parler could be shutdown from midnight Sunday after Amazon said it was shutting down its servers.
Jeff Bezos' Amazon said it had suspended Parler from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit, for violating its terms of services by failing to effectively deal with a steady increase in violent content on the social networking service.
Parler's CEO John Matze announced the news, revealing it could leave the app unavailable for a week as the company attempts to rebuild from scratch.
Earlier Saturday night, Apple said it is also suspending the app over accusations it is being used to incite violence.
The Apple suspension comes after the tech giant gave Parler 24 hours to address the 'threats to people's safety' or be removed from its app store.
The move comes one day after Google also removed Parler from its app store, also citing posts inciting violence, and demanded 'robust' content moderation from the app favored by many Trump supporters.
Parler had been flooded by conservatives and right wingers fleeing Facebook and Twitter in recent days in the wake of suspension of prominent conservative figures, including Trump himself, and the warnings from Apple.
Maetze branded the shutoffs and suspensions 'a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place'.
The CEO also revealed late Saturday that Parler had removed a post from right-wing attorney Lin Wood, a staunch Trump supporter, that called for Vice President Mike Pence to be executed by 'firing squads'.
'Yes, some of his parleys that violated our rules were taken down,' Matze told Mediaite, specifying that the post, or parley, about the 'firing squads' was among those removed.
The parley, uploaded Thursday, read: 'They let them in. Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST.'
In a statement to CNN, Wood denied making any threats against Pence, claiming, 'I don't believe in violence, I do believe in the rule of law.'
'I have reliable evidence that Pence has a engaged in acts of treason. My comments were rhetorical hyperbole. Any journalist should understand that concept. If my information is accurate, law enforcement will address what punishment, if any, should be administered to Pence as they do with all criminals,' Wood said.
News of Wood's controversial post came just hours after Apple announced it would be suspending Parler from its app store indefinitely, having earlier issued the company 24 hours to address the 'threats to people's safety'.
In a letter to the social media site explaining its suspension on Saturday, Apple said: 'Parler has not upheld its commitment to moderate and remove harmful or dangerous content encouraging violence and illegal activity, and is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.'
Apple explained: 'We have always supported diverse points of view being represented on the App Store, but there is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity.
'Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people's safety,' it added.
'We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues'.
Matze, in a post on Parler responding to the Apple suspension, said, 'They claim it is due to violence on the platform. The community disagrees as we hit number 1 on their store today'.
'More details about our next plans coming soon as we have many options,' Matze said.
He was forced to post again shortly afterward as Amazon announced the shut off of its servers.
'Amazon will be shutting off all of out servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet,' he wrote.
'There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the Internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on Amazon's proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.
‘We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.
***********************************
Tech giants’ censorship of history must be thwarted
Incoming US president Joe Biden would show his country and the world he is a genuine libertarian and democrat if he took the lead in insisting that Twitter, Facebook, Google and other players overturn their alarming efforts to silence Donald Trump online. Regardless of his faults as a world leader, including his egregious behaviour last week, Mr Trump is an important figure at a fascinating point in history. His election in 2016, as a rank outsider, exposed the deep fissures in American society and since then he has been controversial.
When professional historians come to write and analyse the current period in the context of its strategic challenges, economic struggles, culture wars, Chinese expansionism and the COVID-19 pandemic, primary sources will be central to their work. Twitter has long been Mr Trump’s preferred platform for addressing his followers, whose number had grown to 88 million — foes as well as friends — and millions more who read his tweets but were not signed up. The tweets were candid, spontaneous snapshots of his reactions and attitudes, largely undoctored by officials and spinners. In reaching for the Twitter button at all hours of the day and night, he was often his own worst enemy. But this makes it more important to preserve the record openly and transparently. As former UN ambassador Nikki Haley tweeted: “Silencing people, not to mention the President of the US, is what happens in China not our country.’’
Twitter’s attempt to justify its permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump does not stand scrutiny. Nor is its claim that it acted “due to the risk of further incitement of violence’’ any justification for obliterating his account. The tech giants’ cancelling Mr Trump also provokes a key question. Which controversial figure will they target next? In pulling the plug on the President, they have crossed a crucial line; from being purveyors of first-hand, unedited political utterances to controllers of whose views the public will and will not be allowed to see and hear. Mr Trump has been a consequential president who, in his final days in office, as The Times writes, “may have added another notch to his complicated legacy: bringing the curtain down on the first phase of our social media age’’.
On Friday, we castigated Mr Trump in relation to the violent breach of the Capitol’s security, which resulted in five deaths, including that of a police officer. The President, we said, “had been inciting the mayhem for days, tweeting exhortations to his followers to rally in Washington when both houses of congress were scheduled to go through the ceremonial process of formally certifying Mr Biden’s victory. ‘It’s going to be wild,’ he tweeted. ‘Don’t miss it’.’’ It would be hard to imagine a more incendiary act by an incumbent President, we said, than to exploit passions that were running high. The time for social media to edit or contradict those tweets was then.
In contrast, the two tweets on January 8 that finally provoked permanent suspension of his account were mild. The first said: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” So what? The second, while significant, was not incendiary: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” He will be the first president in more than 150 years not to attend his successor’s inauguration.
Christchurch gunman Brenton Tarrant demonstrated the potential of terrorists and other criminals to misuse the internet to glorify violence. All media, including social media, must guard against such abuses. Examples abound of Twitter giving voice to militant dictators, such as Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. Social media, in general, is more open to abuse and misuse than traditional media, which accounts for its potential to plant dangerous ideas in the minds of unstable individuals. This, regrettably, is how it has evolved; it is not a call for censorship.
But cancelling Mr Trump violates the principle of free speech, a democratic cornerstone, without sufficient reason. So do the actions of Facebook and Instagram, which have blocked him indefinitely, or for “at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete”, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says. Google, Apple and Amazon are also culpable, for booting Parler, a free speech-focused social media network favoured by conservatives.
Across the world, the general public and traditional media organisations should be wary of the unchecked power of a small group of unelected tech titans, including Californian billionaires Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mr Zuckerberg, to manipulate public discourse and thinking. They must not be allowed to delete history. As Republican senator Marco Rubio has tweeted: “Even those who oppose Trump should see the danger of having a small and unelected group with the power to silence and erase anyone. And their actions will only stoke new grievances that will end up fuelling the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent.”
***********************************
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*************************************
Sunday, January 10, 2021
Why Trump Will Weather This Nonsense: He’ll be back
Dov Fischer
We have been through this drill before — as with Charlottesville and as when President Trump held a press conference alongside Vladimir Putin overseas and stated that he believed Putin’s questionable asseveration that Russia had not messed with the 2016 American elections. Everyone is smart except Trump.
I view the video, and more than 95 percent of the people who made their ways inside clearly were just drifting and roaming around, walking mostly in single or double file, as in a tour of the Capitol.
In each case, the Mainstream Media whipped up a froth and frenzy. In all of human history, we essentially were told, there never had been such perfidy. We kept hearing, night after day after night after day, the carefully selected clip: “There were fine people on both sides.” So that meant, we were told, that President Trump, grandfather of Orthodox Jewish children, benefactor of Jared Kushner, doting father of Orthodox Jewish Ivanka, a man who commuted the unfair sentence of Shlomo Rubashkin, endorses Nazis. As recently as this very week, the Mainstream Media still are at it, still lying shamelessly that he endorsed Nazis at Charlottesville. While I was watching the nightly Hebrew news out of Israel on Israel’s equivalent of PBS, the Left-oriented public broadcasting station that the Government funds and that the taxpayers hate because all their Mainstream Media likewise are Left-oriented, their Thursday news report included that same precisely edited clip: “There were fine people on both sides.” Not a word about how the President in truth had condemned Nazism and White Nationalists two separate times in the same four-minute conference. That is why the general Israeli population hate their Mainstream Media and love Trump.
There was a similar froth and frenzy during and after that overseas press conference with Putin: James Clapper and John Brennan were all over CNN asserting that the President had perpetrated treason and such. It was worse than Benedict Arnold giving secrets to the British in the days when the Brits were our mortal enemies. (Interesting how time changes realities.) How could the President publicly say, alongside Putin, that he believes Vladimir Putin and not his own director of intelligence? Why didn’t Trump look Putin in the face, in front of world news media, and call him a liar and a crook and a tyrant — and then privately try to negotiate other issues that were on the table? As if any world leader ever would stare another in the face, in front of the world media, and would speak that way, that directly, rather than scold behind closed doors.
And now the current nonsense.
I have watched video of the Wednesday, January 6, incident over and over and over again. Insurrection? Coup? Yes, the Mainstream Media kept calling them “rioters.” But if you watch again carefully, muting the sound and believing only your own eyes, more than 95 percent of the people inside the Capitol just were milling around. It simply was not anything even remotely approaching what the frenzied Mainstream Media are trying to whip up. They make it sound like an insurrection, a coup. This was not the Bolshevik Revolution. Most trespassers inside had no intention of ending up there. They were rallying outside, and an incredibly deficient police and security detail found itself predictably unable to prevent a comparatively small number of people from knocking over pathetically inadequate barricades. The barricades then were down and the crowd just went forward. They were not armed for insurrection. They were not searching for blood. They were angry but — equally or more — just plain curious: “Let’s see where this goes.”
They meandered inside. I view the video, and more than 95 percent of the people who made their ways inside clearly were just drifting and roaming around, walking mostly in single or double file, as in a tour of the Capitol. The guy in Nancy Pelosi’s chair? OK, he should not have been there. It was not his office, not his chair. My mother taught me that: you don’t sit in someone else’s office chair without permission. But the guy obviously was just playing around, putting his legs on her desk, reading or taking an envelope from her desk. That was not an insurrection; it was a grown-up misbehaving — and, by the way, quite peacefully and jovially. It was not Black Lives Matters breaking a street of windows, ransacking stores, and burning down buildings. It was not Antifa shooting rockets into federal buildings including court houses. Rather, it was a bunch of people who played “Follow the Leader” and, out of curiosity as much as anything else, meandered into and out of the Capitol. It was January D.C. winter, and it was warmer inside.
For the Mainstream Media the incident offered a perfect bookend to their four years of dishonest coverage of a president they hated vitriolically from Day One and from before. They found a nut with a T-Shirt that said “Camp Auschwitz” and did their best to make him a symbol of the day. I am a Jew, an Orthodox rabbi, and I have devoted a good chunk of my life to the causes of American Jewry and Soviet Jewish freedom from Communist tyranny, and I have disseminated the words “Never Again” more than most. Yet I am sophisticated enough to discern that a jerk with a “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt was but one of countless others having a field day in the Capitol. For comparison: a wonderful middle-aged married couple in Brooklyn, Orthodox Jews and former members of the shul where I am congregational rabbi — and still active financial supporters of my rabbinic work and secular writings from their new home in Flatbush — sent me a photo of the two of them, both very pro-Trump activists who campaigned for him across state lines in Philadelphia because New York electoral votes were not in play but Pennsylvania was an electoral battleground, just having fun and smiling outside the Capitol. Another very close friend, the son of an equally very close friend — both actively devoted for decades to the National Council of Young Israel, an organization of more than 130 Orthodox synagogues (including mine) across America and in Israel — was there. If one guy was wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirt, there were many times more Orthodox Jews than he thrilled to be there — and so many scores more mainstream, easy-going, perfectly normal pro-Trump activists who just meandered into the Capitol because the House and Senate Sergeants-of-Arms and the Capitol Police defaulted and practically left the doors open. It was like Motel Six: just come on over, and we’ll leave the lights on for you.
This was no insurrection. It just wasn’t. Any objective look at the pictures sees that, yes, a few did break in, did shatter glass. That is inexcusable and must be prosecuted and punished. But, by and large, this simply was a weird day, when the Capitol found itself pathetically unguarded, and masses poured into the building because, well, hey, everyone else is doing it, so why not, and this is so cool, and can I take a selfie? What kind of insurrection and coup is dominated by people taking selfies and snapping photos on their smart phones? Really, c’mon.
OK, it makes total sense that many Congressional representatives and Senators were in a panic because they heard the worst, and you cannot take chances when something crazy like that happens. You have to be cautious, prudent, and secure when throngs throng into your place uninvited. Fair. And yet there is something rich in hearing all those Democrats who have been demanding “Defund the Police!” now screaming about how they have to fire the Sergeant-at-Arms, presumably the Lieutenant-at-Legs, the head of the Capitol Police, all while demanding angrily: Where were the police?
Uh, defunded?
Meanwhile, Trump made a speech. He urged people to march to the Capitol and peacefully protest. That is what he said: “peacefully.” He simply asked his followers to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. Since this is the Charlottesville Big Lie all over again, you have to listen for yourself to the actual speech. Where is the call for insurrection, for a coup? Where is the incitement? He simply called on them to act peacefully and to make their voices heard. When Obama and Holder and that Crew did that, Ferguson burned, Baltimore burned. Obama fanned flames for eight years: If he had had a son, the boy would have looked like Trayvon Martin. Right.
The whole thing, the whole Media froth and frenzy, comprises a shameful denouement of its four-year effort to destroy President Trump. In its context, of course the Elaine Chaos and Betsy DeVoses are jumping ship. It is January, the start of a new year. Their jobs expire in fewer than fourteen days. So they give two weeks’ notice. It gives them a résumé boost, conveying they “left the Trump Administration in protest.” In protest of what – that your job ends in ten days anyway? So they get to do a bit of virtue signaling, and OK. If that is what they feel they need to do to advance their careers, well — since when did Americans never hear of “taking care of Number One”? So be it. Mick Mulvaney leaving his post as a quasi-ambassador to Northern Ireland. Of course he is doing that. He previously served as the acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from November 2017 to December 2018. He also had served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from February 2017 until March 2020, then as acting White House Chief of Staff from January 2019 until March 2020. So, when the president made Mark Meadows the full-time Chief of Staff, sending Mulvaney for a tour of Northern Ireland, it was a clear demotion. So Mick got his chance to “Watch Out for Number One” by announcing, just two weeks before he is out of a job anyway, that he is coming back to America. Good for him. Welcome back. Set a spell.
As for impeaching Trump with ten days left to his first term in office, that also is rich. In a quirky way, imagine Mike Pence suited up as 46th President for, like, a day — and then watching Pence, as his one act in office, doing as Gerald Ford did and issuing a full anticipatory pardon to his predecessor. But that quirky moment will have to wait. The House would impeach Trump seven days a week if it could. And if the Senate went berserk, down to Joe Manchin, and voted for conviction — well, at least the Mormons of Utah would wake up to the shame they have brought on their state by replacing a statesman like Orrin Hatch with a sore loser like Mitt Romney who, like Hillary, never came to terms with how a sometime-bullvahn like Donald John Trump, often seeming to be a bull in search of a china shop, proved to be so much more popular than did either of those two.
In the 24-7 news cycle in which we live, politicians vie frantically for coverage by out-extreming each other, and media do the same. They exaggerate everything shamelessly. And then a few weeks pass, new “breaking news” captures center stage, and sensible people look back and recognize the hyperbole with accurate hindsight. Let the job seekers give their two-weeks’ notice. Play the full actual speech. Listen especially to the embedded link for one minute between 18:00 and 19:00 — and particularly to the words at 18:47-18:56. Read the transcript. And remember the more sensible, calm, and courageous who weathered the passing storm of Mainstream Media Big Lie Number Infinity with President Trump.
https://spectator.org/trump-will-return/
***********************************Apple bans Parler from App Store in wake of US Capitol riots
The silencing moves into high gear
Apple has suspended an online platform described as a "free speech" Twitter clone from its App Store in the wake of deadly riots at the US Capitol.
Apple says social networking service Parler has not taken adequate measures to prevent the spread of posts inciting violence.
The company had given the platform 24 hours to submit a detailed moderation plan, following complaints it was being used to "plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities".
"Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people's safety," Apple said in a statement. It said it was removing the app "until they resolve these issues".
Parler CEO John Matze complained on his site of being scapegoated. "Standards not applied to Twitter, Facebook or even Apple themselves apply to Parler," he said.
He said he "won't cave to politically motivated companies and those authoritarians who hate free speech".
Losing access to the app stores of Google and Apple — whose operating systems power hundreds of millions of smartphones — severely limits Parler's reach, though it will continue to be accessible via web browsers.
US President Donald Trump has been either banned or restricted on several social media platforms following riots at the US Capitol Building.
Online speech experts expect social media companies led by Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube to more vigorously police hate speech and incitement in the wake of the Capitol rebellion.
University of California-Irvine law professor David Kaye, a former UN special rapporteur on free speech, believes the Parlers of the world will also face pressure from the public and law enforcement, as will little-known sites where further pre-inauguration disruption is now apparently being organised.
They include MeWe, Wimkin, TheDonald.win and Stormfront, according to a report released by The Althea Group, which tracks disinformation.
Professor Kaye rejected arguments by US conservatives including the President's former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, that the Trump ban savaged the US constitution's first amendment, which prohibits the Government from restricting free expression.
"Silencing people, not to mention the President of the US, is what happens in China not our country," Ms Haley said on Twitter.
Professor Kaye said companies also had freedom of speech. "It's not like the platforms' rules are draconian. People don't get caught in violations unless they do something clearly against the rules," he said. "The companies have their freedom of speech too."
IN BRIEF
DC mayor extends public emergency declaration until after Biden's inauguration (Washington Examiner)
At least the media finally came around to the idea that riots are scary (Washington Examiner)
A confident Stacey Abrams says Georgia runoffs are "just the beginning" (Yahoo News)
George Soros gets behind abolishing the police (Free Beacon)
Two Louisville detectives involved in Breonna Taylor raid are fired (AP)
Half of Chicago teachers refused to return to work this week (Disrn)
Tit for tat: Buffalo Bills fans launch petition to keep Andrew Cuomo from attending Saturday's playoff game (Disrn)
Link found between self-control in childhood and success later in life (Medical XPress)
Policy: With 2021 still young, we already have trouble from Tehran (Daily Signal)
***********************************
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*************************************
Saturday, January 09, 2021
Pfizer study suggests vaccine works against COVID-19 mutation
New research suggests that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine can protect against a mutation found in the two more contagious variants of the coronavirus that have erupted in Britain and South Africa.
The study was preliminary and did not look at the two other major vaccines being used in the West – Moderna’s and AstraZeneca’s. But it was reassuring, given questions of whether the virus could mutate to defeat the shots on which the world has pinned its hopes.
The mutated version spreading in Britain has also been detected in Australia, the US and numerous other countries.
The variants that are causing global concern carry multiple mutations but share one in common that's believed to be the reason they are more contagious. Called N501Y, it is a slight alteration on one spot of the spike protein that coats the virus. Most of the vaccines being rolled out around the world train the body to recognise that spike protein and fight it.
Pfizer teamed with researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston for laboratory tests to see if the mutation affected its vaccine's ability to do so.
They used blood samples from 20 people who received the vaccine, made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, during a large study of the shots. Antibodies from those vaccine recipients successfully fended off the virus in lab dishes, according to the study posted on Friday AEDT on an online site for researchers.
The study has not yet been reviewed by experts, a key step for medical research. But “it was a very reassuring finding that at least this mutation, which was one of the ones people are most concerned about, does not seem to be a problem” for the vaccine, said Pfizer chief scientific officer Dr Philip Dormitzer.
A similar vaccine by Moderna is being rolled out in the US and Europe, and on Friday was cleared in Britain. Moderna is doing similar testing to tell if its shot also works against the variants, as are makers of other types of COVID-19 vaccines.
But Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, said this week that vaccines are designed to recognise multiple parts of the spike protein, making it unlikely a single mutation could be enough to block them. Still, testing is needed to be sure.
Viruses constantly undergo minor changes as they spread from person to person. Scientists have used these slight modifications to track how the coronavirus has moved around the globe since it was first detected in China about a year ago.
British scientists have said the variant found in the UK – which has become the dominant type in parts of England – still seemed to be susceptible to vaccines.
But the variant first discovered in South Africa has an additional mutation that has scientists on edge, one named E484K. The Pfizer study found that the vaccine appeared to work against 15 additional possible virus mutations, but E484K wasn’t among those tested. Dormitzer said it is next on the list.
If the virus eventually mutates enough that the vaccine needs adjusting – much like flu shots are adjusted most years – that tweaking the recipe wouldn’t be difficult for his company's shot and similar ones. Both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are made with a piece of the virus genetic code, simple to switch, although it’s not clear what kind of additional testing regulators would require to make such a change.
Dormitzer said this was only the beginning “of ongoing monitoring of virus changes to see if any of them might impact on vaccine coverage”.
***************************************
Did the Capitol Police 'Let In' the Protesters?
One of the most pervasive story lines following the Capitol protest that turned violent is that the Capitol Police let in protesters.
Though some still doubt it, it’s beginning to appear that some of the protesters were, in fact, allowed onto the grounds and into the building, which explains why there were those who entered and stayed within the velvet guide ropes, taking selfies, and staying peaceful. And those who were not peaceful.
There are several people who talked to The Washington Examiner’s congressional reporter, Susan Ferrechio, who claimed that police let them into the Capitol Building.
One small group of men said they walked into the Capitol without resistance through the House side door and were allowed to enter by the police but told to stay away from certain areas. “They were not blocking people from coming into the building,” Nick from St. Louis said.
Nick and his group sat on benches in the Rotunda for about 15 minutes “until a cop comes up with an AR-15 strapped to him and says, ‘You guys got to get up. You can’t sit there.’” The officer did not make them leave the building but rather told them to remain in the center of the Rotunda.
Jeff from Illinois told the Washington Examiner he blamed the violence “on the young kids” and said the vast majority of the protesters were peaceful, even though they entered the Capitol against the wishes of the police.
Some of the protesters “were breaking windows and kicking doors,” Jeff said, adding that he and a friend blocked a protester from breaking into one room outside the Senate.
The Federalist’s Sean Davis says he spoke with multiple people who said that police let them in.
But clearly things went south in a hurry. Windows were bashed in and cops were pushed around.
Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, reportedly climbed through a broken window and was shot and killed by Capitol Police.
Video by Elijah Schaffer shows what he claims is the “exact moment the siege of the Capitol began as the two men in front ripped down a preliminary barrier and rushed officers.”
Police didn’t “let them in.” They were rushed.
Others posted video to show that police let in the protesters onto the Capitol building grounds.
Another woman, who identified herself as Elizabeth from Tennessee, was pepper-sprayed by police as she attempted to step into the building. As she wiped her eyes, she told a reporter what she was doing.
“We’re storming the capitol. It’s a revolution.”
Democrat Congressman Jim Cooper complained to WUSA TV that Capitol Police appeared to be working with the protesters.
“Some people are worried today that some police were complicit with the protesters,” Cooper said. “It’s one thing to be friendly and to de-escalate the violence. But it’s one thing to take selfies with them (rioters) and let them go through the lines.”
Cooper said he did not see these actions by Capitol Police himself, but said he’s “never seen a crowd less afraid of the police than this one.”
“At best they were overwhelmed and did not anticipate what they had been warned of by (President) Trump, even as of this morning when he said he would join the protests at the Capitol. … At worst, they let this protest proceed unlike any other.”
If police did let them in, it’s understandable. Trump supporters have been peaceful in the country. To the extent there has been violence, the Leftist mob started it with few, if any, exceptions.
How soon we forget that Washington, D.C. was on fire last summer by antifa and BLM rioters.
The same scene was played out in several cities throughout the country.
It’s also understandable that these protesters would believe that nothing would happen to them even if they got inside the Capitol. After all, nothing much has happened to BLM and antifa for burning churches, looting stores, trying to kill cops, and attempting to burn them alive at police stations all over the country and inside the nation’s capital.
************************************
Ignoring the concerns of Trump supporters will destroy America
JASON WHITLOCK (who is black)
Wednesday afternoon, angry, unarmed, mostly peaceful protesters stormed the Capitol. They caused hundreds of dollars in damages to "The People's House," the taxpayer-funded building where elected lawmakers work.
They took pictures seated at Nancy Pelosi's desk. They shoved furniture out of place. They pushed their way past unprepared and overwhelmed law enforcement. They shattered a window or two.
If not for police shooting and killing an unarmed, female 14-year Air Force veteran, the protest staged by Trump supporters would have more in common with a 1950s fraternity panty raid than political riot.
Here, I guess, I should apologize for not joining the rest of the media in feigning outrage and calling for the trespassers to be tried for treason. But I'm neither outraged nor feeling vengeful because of their act of civil disobedience.
I understand it. It was an inevitable repercussion from 2020 and what we've all witnessed the last decade. It was Sir Isaac Newton's third law come to life. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
For four years now, the billionaire and millionaire elites who control academia, the mainstream media, politics, popular culture, and the sports world have framed Trump supporters as racist deplorables worthy of elimination from society.
These same elites spent the past decade elevating Michael Brown, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, Rayshard Brooks, Eric Garner, and other resisting criminal suspects to icon status while simultaneously raising bail money for protesters willing to riot, loot, burn, and vandalize in the name of racial justice.
This blatant hypocrisy will not go unchallenged. You cannot ignore the desires, concerns and feelings of 74 million citizens. You cannot write them off as Nazis and answer all their complaints with allegations of racism or sexism. That's fascism.
At this point, the Deplorables should be commended for their restraint. Antifa and Black Lives Matter search, burn, and destroy well into the wee hours. The Deplorables returned to their hotel rooms by nightfall and watched our lawmakers return to work inside the Capitol by 8 p.m.
The critics say President Trump provoked Wednesday's political "violence." His refusal to concede a corrupt election baited his followers to overrun the Capitol with flags, put Ashli Babbitt in harm's way, and do enough property damage to delay the Electoral College confirmation three or four hours.
Fine. Guilty as charged.
But our president for the next two weeks was not Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone provocateur. He had plenty of collaborators. They work on all the major and cable news and sports networks. They play in the NFL and NBA. They represent both political parties, hold high positions in Hollywood, at Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The people wagging their fingers the hardest at Trump and the Deplorables sanctioned, financed, and promoted political violence throughout all of 2020 and for much of the past decade.
Ashli Babbitt's blood is on the hands of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg as much as, if not more than, on President Trump's. That's why Dorsey and Zuckerberg rushed to silence Trump on their respective platforms, Twitter and Facebook.
Political tension and violence are fomented, planned, and monetized on Silicon Valley's social media platforms. Wednesday's "violence" hit the wrong target. The Capitol is where global elites exchange cash for influence and privilege. It's where $150,000-a-year politicians become multimillionaires building cozy relationships with Big Tech lobbyists and American corporations looking to curry favor with China.
There are two different American realities. There's the false reality world created by and for elites and their groupies. In this world, progressive elites feign concern for poor black people by championing the cause of a tiny handful of black resisting criminal suspects harmed by white police officers tasked with subduing them. The elites have no interest in the thousands of black men and boys killed annually due to random gang, street, and drug violence. Those black lives do not matter. Progressive elites live inside a social media matrix where they call the Crips and the Bloods to protect them from the police.
The rest of America lives in an alternate universe driven, at least partially, by reality, facts, and common sense. We don't see the norms of Western Civilization as the root of all evil. We have no interest in disrupting the nuclear family. We don't think the storming of the Capitol is analogous to the months of looting, arson, shooting, rioting, and anarchy we watched throughout 2020.
Trump supporters will not go away quietly or peacefully. It's their country, too. Their concerns are legitimate. The lawmakers they chased to the basement of the Capitol sold out the American working-class man and woman.
Skin color does not explain the Trump phenomenon, the passion of his followers. Trumpism is rooted in a rejection of the elitism, idolatry, and secularism pervasive in modern American culture.
Trumpism is the cry of American citizens uninterested in adopting the cultures and customs of France, China, Italy, Cuba, Venezuela, Canada, or any of the other places global elites romanticize. Trumpism is the cry of the working class who believe the Big Tech billionaires are building an America that cuts them out of the American Dream. Trumpism is the cry of Americans who value authenticity over the fraudulence of political correctness.
The price of ignoring their cries will be war, a civil war.
***********************************
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*************************************
Friday, January 08, 2021
Was it really an “attempted coup” in Washington last night?
Was it really an “attempted coup” in Washington last night?
Watching the highly disturbing footage from Washington DC, last night, my mind kept going back to the autumn of 2018.
On October 4th, of that year, the US Senate was engaged in a confirmation hearing for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh had been accused, you’ll recall, of sexually assaulting a high school classmate, as a teenager. At the height of the #metoo movement, many people on the left found the mere existence of the accusation – devoid of any particular evidence – sufficient enough to disqualify him from service on the court. There were mass protests.
And then, on that day, October 4th, anti-Kavanaugh protestors invaded, and occupied, the US Senate’s Hart Office building:
US Senators were cornered, and shouted at, by protestors. Senators Jeff Flake, and Orrin Hatch, for example, were accosted in an elevator. The US media, and, indeed, the Irish media, did not regard the occupation of parliamentary offices as a coup. Indeed, on MSNBC, over footage of protestors roaming the halls of the US Senate, a reporter described the events as “a large and well organised protest”:
You’ll note that the reporter seems quite nonchalant about the prospect that the invasion of the US Senate’s office complex might be intimidating for politicians: “Just in terms of the optics of this, if you will, this is all definitely audible to Joe Manchin, or Joe Manchin’s staff, and Lisa Murkowski’s staff, who are also in this building”
Manchin and Murkowski, at the time, were two of the US Senators whose votes could have blocked Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation. MSNBC had no qualms about the subtext then: These Senators can hear these angry people, and maybe it will change their votes.
What’s interesting, of course, is that nobody called it an attempted coup.
Last night, there was, of course, an attempted coup. The intent of the Trump protestors, in breaching the US Capitol, was to force the US Congress to change its mind when it came to counting the votes for President, and to use some mechanism (which one is unclear) to win a second term for President Trump. That the attempt never had any chance of succeeding is irrelevant – when it comes to coups, intent is all that matters.
But what’s the difference between these two events, exactly? One of them was covered as a heroic, normal, protest, even though the intent was to invade and intimidate congress into changing its mind on a vote. The other is being covered as an unprecedented attack on democracy, even though the intent was to invade and intimidate congress into changing its mind on a vote. What’s the difference, and what explains the difference in coverage?
The simple answer, whether people like it or not, is that journalists, and other opinion formers, really didn’t like Brett Kavanaugh, and sympathised with the efforts to prevent his confirmation. And those same journalists and opinion formers have considerable antipathy for President Trump, and therefore strongly oppose any effort to prevent Biden’s ratification. Thus, one event is a protest, the other is an attempted coup, or insurrection, as CNN called it last night.
This double standard does nobody any good. It is true that the scenes from Washington last night were disgraceful. It is also indisputably true that President Trump bears almost all of the blame for them: He summoned these people to Washington. He told them explicitly to go to the Capitol. He told them an election was being stolen. Now, a woman, one of his own supporters, lies dead, and his own allies in the US congress are abandoning him in disgust.
But the outrage, to many of us, comes across as both selective, and fake. Throughout the summer, when US Cities burned, the media shied away from talk of insurrections, and coups. Black Lives Matter protestors, who burned cities to the ground, and attacked peoples businesses, were described as protestors. Trump supporters, who smashed some windows in Congress, are described as traitors.
The truth is that when it comes to this kind of thing, people are no longer judged on what they actually do. They’re judged solely on why they did it. Thus, if you burn out a business in Kenosha, Wisconsin, because you are angry at a police shooting, you are a protestor. But if you sit in Nancy Pelosi’s chair for five minutes after occupying congress, because you are angry at an election, you are a domestic terrorist.
If you occupy the US Senate to stop a right wing Judge, you are a peaceful protestor. If you occupy the US Congress to stop a left wing politician, you are an insurrectionist thug.
None of this makes much sense, and yet, it makes perfect sense. There is, and has been for some time, one set of rules for the political left, and another set of rules for the rest of us. And it’s not just in the United States.
In Ireland, if you breach social distancing to protest lockdown restrictions, you are an irresponsible person who is risking the lives of the elderly. But if you breach social distancing to protest a police shooting, you are a group of angry and passionate young people trying bravely to change the world. Though your actions are identical in both instances, you are judged only on what your political views are.
This, it goes without saying, cannot last. People see the double standard. They see the completely different rules. And they stop listening, or caring, what you say about them.
https://gript.ie/was-it-really-an-attempted-coup-in-washington-last-night/
**********************************Democrats Were For Riots Before They Were Against Them
In 2018, the media was writing up glowing stories about the hundreds of Women’s March members who were engaging in "direct action” to disrupt the Senate’s Kavanaugh hearings.
Hundreds of members from the radical leftist group had invaded the hearings and were arrested. Their travel expenses and bail for the disruptions were covered by the Women’s March. Radicals from the March and other leftist groups blocked hallways, shouted down Senate members, and draped protest banners from balconies. Democrats cheered them on.
When a leftist mob assailed the Supreme Court, pounding on the doors, MSNBC called it an “extraordinary moment” and praised the crowd, “besieging the Supreme Court” and “confronting senators”.
"If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them," Rep. Maxine Waters had urged earlier that year.
Later, the Democrat House member told MSNBC, "They’re going to absolutely harass them".
In 2020, Black Lives Matter rioters vandalized the Lincoln Memorial and the WW2 Memorial, along with statues of Gandhi, General Kosciuszko, and Andrew Jackson. The racist thugs marched through the city starting fires, including at a historic church, and tried to besiege the White House. Attempts by federal law enforcement to fight BLM terrorism were falsely denounced as a brutal attack on “peaceful protesters”, and as “militarism” and “fascism”.
Democrat House members took to proposing bills to protect the racist mobs from law enforcement. Meanwhile the BLM mob besieged the White House and battled Secret Service personnel, allegedly forcing the evacuation of President Trump and his family to a bunker.
This was the new normal enthusiastically supported by Democrats and the media.
A bail fund backed by Senator Kamala Harris and Biden campaign staffers focused on helping the rioters and looters get out of prison. Along with any other criminals along for the ride.
Violent protests, including those targeting public officials and legislative bodies, had been championed and normalized by Democrats and their media over the last four years. That included the harassment of officials, property destruction, and assaulting law enforcement.
Now, as the Democrats expect to take power, they suddenly decided that rioting is bad.
Before the Save America protest even began, the same Washington D.C. authorities who had championed and protected the Black Lives Matter riots, prepared for a crackdown.
“We want the military, we want troops from out of state out of Washington, D.C.,” Mayor Muriel Bowser had ranted when BLM was attacking national memorials and the White House.
“We will not allow people to incite violence, intimidate our residents or cause destruction in our city,” Bowser now insisted, demanding that the National Guard come out to stop the protests.
Unless they're Democrats, she failed to mention.
D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine had responded to the Black Lives Matter assault by condemning law enforcement. He had issued a statement falsely accusing President Trump of "responding to nonviolent demonstration with war-like tactics".
"We —the Mayor, the Council, OAG, and MPD—must commit to standing in between our community and the boot of tyranny. And we must act on this commitment. We must start by promising to defend our residents from harm while they engage in peaceful, nonviolent protest.”
"My level of anxiety is high. My preparation is even more intense than that," Racine was telling the media before the pro-Trump Save America rally now.
The double standard was obvious and blatant. The Democrats and media had cheered Black Lives Matter violent protests. They had colluded in previous invasions of Congress and the harassment of elected officials. But now they wanted a violent riot they could condemn.
And such a riot would helpfully put to bed any further questions about a rigged election.
After a massive peaceful rally by Save America protesters, who had been addressed by President Trump, a smaller group marched on Congress. The MPD however reacted very differently than it had to previous Black Lives Matter and four years of leftist rallies.
In the resulting confrontation, a number of fringe elements, Neo-Nazis, Groypers, Boogaloo Bois, a leftist-libertarian anarchist group that collaborates with Antifa and Black Lives Matter, took the opportunity to cause damage and stage photo-ops for the media. Unfortunately some legitimate conservative protesters who had entered the building were caught in the violence.
But the media stars of the confrontation were not conservatives and were anti-Trump.
One photo showed Nick Fuentes, the alt-right Groyper leader whose antisemitic group had previously shut down a Turning Point USA event by booing Donald Trump Jr. off the stage, and Tim ‘Baked Alaska’ Gionet, a former Black Lives Matter supporter and BuzzFeed employee, who has a history of going back and forth between the alt-right and the Left.
Another appeared to show Matthew Heimbach, formerly with the National Socialist Movement, an alleged Neo-Nazi leader, who had previously argued in court that his actions were President Trump’s fault and that Trump should be held legally liable.
Much as in Charlottesville, marginal figures who were hostile to President Trump, to Republicans, and to conservatives, had taken center stage at the behest of the media.
The purpose of the entire circus was to provide a propaganda opportunity for the Left.
The outrage over the protests is a farce coming from a political movement that advocated terrorizing Republican elected officials, that aided invasions of Congress, and that supported the Black Lives Matter riots which, aside from terrorizing D.C., also wrecked much of the country.
Why is broken glass on Capitol Hill so much more precious than the broken glass that ended the dreams of store owners in Kenosha? Where was all the outrage, the tears wept for our country when Black Lives Matter thugs were prying open shops around the country, looting them, and assaulting their owners on a scale so vast it racked up $2 billion in damages?
“Please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful,” CNN’s Chris Cuomo had barked while his news network showed rioting and looting in New York.
Riots are obviously wrong. Except that Democrats and the media decided that wasn’t true.
Martin Luther King's infamous quote, "a riot is the language of the unheard", popped up in Time, USA Today, and on CNN. “Violence was critical to the success of the 1960s civil rights movement,” a Washington Post op-ed argued. The AP urged reporters to use "uprising" instead of "riot" to describe the violence, while suggesting that protests can be violent and that reporting should not focus on the "property destruction”, but instead on the “underlying grievance".
A subsidiary of one of the big 5 publishers put out a book titled, "In Defense of Looting."
You can’t normalize political violence and then expect it to be a one-sided affair. After months in which BLM mobs attacked a federal courthouse in Portland, throwing fireworks and shining lasers in the eyes of law enforcement personnel, toppled statues across the country, and injured hundreds of police officers, the Democrats and their media are suddenly outraged.
How, in the midst of all this rioting, could anyone get the idea that rioting is okay?
Laws only work when they apply to everyone. When violence is okay for some, but not for others, then a violent struggle ensues until a totalitarian monopoly on violence is achieved.
Or until we come to our senses.
There’s little question as to which side of the political spectrum has championed and mainstreamed violence for over a century. The very different fate of Kluxers and the Weathermen, trailer parks for the former and academic careers for the latter, show which side finds political violence not only acceptable, but praiseworthy. And this is no different.
Contrary to the media’s spin, Republicans have never normalized violence. And Republican political power doesn’t depend on political terror and violence. Leftist power invariably does.
The Left began a new age of political violence in 2016. It can turn it off anytime it wants to.
The problem is that it won’t, and an illiberal partisan media and accompanying cultural establishment will never dare to suggest that maybe there should be fewer riots and threats.
https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/daniel-greenfield/democrats-were-for-riots-before-they-were-against-them/2021/01/08/
***********************************
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*************************************
Thursday, January 07, 2021
How Virus Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Americans
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the media have spilled barrels of ink over mistakes by the federal government. We've heard endlessly about the failure to quickly ramp up testing, the confusion over mask-wearing and the debates over proper lockdown policy. But when the history of this time is written, the fundamental mistake made by the United States government won't be rhetorical excesses by the president or conflicting public health advice. It will be the same mistake the government always makes: trusting the bureaucracy.
We now know that the miraculous Moderna vaccine for COVID-19 had been designed by Jan. 13, 2020. That was just two days after the sequencing of the virus had been made public. As David Wallace-Wells writes for New York magazine, "the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. ... By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial." Meanwhile, for six weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci assured Americans that there was little to worry about with COVID-19.
Fast-forward to the end of 2020. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died. Tens of thousands of Americans continue to die every week. The Food and Drug Administration has still not cleared the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which costs a fraction of the other vaccines (about $4 per dose, as opposed to $15 to $25 per dose for Moderna's vaccine or $20 per dose for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine). The FDA approval process cost us critical months, with thousands of Americans dying each day. As Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University told me this week, "Safety is their eternal excuse. They are entirely a broken federal bureaucracy...Why did we not have a combined Phase I-Phase II clinical trial for these vaccines?"
This is an excellent question, of course. Phase I trials involve small numbers of participants, who are then monitored. Phase II trials involve larger numbers. Huge numbers of Americans would have volunteered for a combined Phase I-Phase II trial. And even after we knew the vaccines were effective, the FDA delayed. Data was collected by late October that suggested Phase II/III trials had been successful. The FDA quickly requested more results, which it did not receive until November. It then took until Dec. 11 for the FDA to issue emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine. The Moderna vaccine wasn't cleared until Dec. 18, nearly a year after it had first been produced.
The disgrace continues. The government continues to hold back secondary doses of the vaccine, despite the fact that the first doses provide a significant effect. As Makary says, "We're in a war. The first dose gives immunity that may be as high as 80 to 90 percent protection, and we can probably give half the dose, as Dr. Moncef Slaoui suggested ... We can quadruple our supply overnight."
Meanwhile, states continue to be confused by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on how to tranche out the vaccines. It took until nine days after the FDA authorized the Pfizer vaccine for the CDC to release its recommendations. Those recommendations were still complex and confusing and often rife with self-defeating standards -- even though it was perfectly obvious from the start that the solution ought to be based on age.
Americans have relied on the government -- a government supposedly comprised of well-meaning experts -- to get us through a pandemic. The government not only failed with conflicting information and incoherent lockdown policy but also actively obstructed the chief mechanism for ending the pandemic thanks to bureaucratic bloat. If Americans' takeaway from the COVID-19 pandemic is that centralized government is the all-purpose solution, they're taking precisely the lesson most likely to end in mass death in the future.
************************************
Left media can’t admit Donald Trump was likely right on COVID lab creation
Comment from Australia
A Chinese virologist whistleblower who fled the country after leaving her job at a Hong Kong university claims coronavirus was “man-made” in a lab – and the communist nation released the virus “intentionally”.
Wait a second, this wasn’t supposed to happen. We were all supposed to believe that the COVID-19 pandemic just sort of happened when someone slaughtered the wrong animal too close to some other animal in Wuhan’s notoriously gruesome “wet markets”.
The idea that it may have been cooked up in a lab, even for legitimate purposes? The stuff of internet loonies, we were told.
Yet how things change.
Evidence is now building that in fact the coronavirus was cooked up in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with the idea now being endorsed by US deputy national security adviser Michael Pottinger saying that there was “a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus” — and that in Beijing, “even establishment figures … have openly dismissed the wet market story”.
This lends credence to the theory that the virus may have been created at the lab as part of legitimate scientific research that aims to cut up and recombine viruses in what are known as “gain of function” experiments designed to predict how viruses might evolve — and thus better counter their threat should that occur.
But it’s dangerous work. In 2014 a paper by scientists at Johns Hopkins University in the US called for a moratorium on such experiments, saying that “research that aims to create new potential pandemic pathogens … poses extraordinary potential risks to the public.”
You don’t say.
Now, like the credibility of doctors who used to advertise cigarettes, the preferred media narrative that no way could the coronavirus have slipped through the gates at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is falling apart.
And it hasn’t been helped by China’s response, blocking a World Health Organisation team from landing in Wuhan to investigate the pandemic’s origins.
As the possibility that the pandemic is China’s own Chernobyl, it’s worthwhile looking back at just how this theory of COVID-19’s origins has been dealt with in the leftist media.
After all, the idea that the virus escaped some lab where these things were being tinkered with, for whatever purpose, was popular with Trump and his supporters, making it automatically suspect.
Recall that before the latest round of trade sanctions and social media attacks, hawkishness on China was seen as a thing for the sabre-rattling right.
For the respectable left, it was far better to treat the coronavirus as the natural but unfortunate outcome of Wuhan’s exotic local food scene and make anyone who said otherwise out to be a war-hawk or a pariah.
To blame the communist state which, after all, was supposed to make us all wealthy while providing a counterbalance to a blustering America was unthinkable.
The [Austraian] ABC, naturally, led the charge to depict those who thought something fishy (or even batty, pardon the pun) was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a swivel-eyed lunatic or, even worse, a Trump supporter. “Coronavirus may have come from a Chinese lab, if you believe Donald Trump — but experts disagree”, sneered the headline on a piece by reporter Alan Weedon on April 18 of last year.
Ah yes, where would we be without “experts”?
A month later, after Sharri Markson reported for the The Daily Telegraph that a US State Department dossier suggested links between the coronavirus outbreak and the Chinese facility, the ABC again swept into action to shoot the story down.
“The document contained no new evidence linking the laboratory to the outbreak and instead relied on publicly available news and scientific journal papers,” the ABC’s Dylan Welch wrote.
Not to be outdone, the ABC’s Media Watch did not one but two hit pieces, one week apart, slamming the story as a “conspiracy theory” and citing condemnations of the reporting by everyone from Gareth Evans to Bob Carr.
The same pattern was repeated in leftward-listing newsrooms around the world where for the past four years Donald Trump has been Enemy Number One.
The Los Angeles Times told readers in May that “Like the virus whose origin it purports to explain, the following conjecture refuses to die: The novel coronavirus was cooked up in a Chinese lab.”
A Washington Post “fact check” (yes, really) that same month looked at the question “Was the Wuhan coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab?” and came up with the answer “It’s doubtful”.
This, as they say, is not journalism. It’s activism in plain sight, stemming from the simple equation that has governed so much of the news cycle for the past four years: If Trump says X, then not only must that X be false, it also must be driven into the ground and the earth above it salted so that nothing ever grows there again.
And it is pretty rich to see the ABC of all outlets getting all high and mighty about “conspiracy theories”.
Recall that the billion-dollar broadcaster spent wheelbarrows of cash pushing the greatest conspiracy theory of all (still taken as an article of faith by many on the left), namely, that Donald Trump was somehow an agent of Moscow.
This saw taxpayers fork out for everything from the “Russia, Are You Listening?” podcast to special three-part Four Corners humbly titled, “The Story of the Century”.
The great irony, of course, is that those on the left love to pride themselves on listening to facts and experts and what is pretentiously known as “the science”, while at the same time judging every piece of information’s worth by whether or not it serves their narrative.
There is nothing political about a lab accident; they might happen anywhere scientists are working with these sorts of viruses.
But there something deeply political, to say nothing of incredibly dangerous, about dismissing that possibility simply because it might vindicate the US president
*********************************
IN BRIEF
Well-deserved Medal of Freedom goes to Devin Nunes for "courageous" efforts to stop "plot" against Trump (Washington Times)
British prime minister imposes another national lockdown on England (CNBC)
Nearly one million excess deaths expected over next 15 years from pandemic rise in unemployment (Washington Examiner)
Google workers form union in latest show of discontent with evil tech giant (CBS News)
DC mayor calls in National Guard for Trump supporters but refused to during BLM/antifa riots (Post Millennial)
This just in: Trans women retain athletic edge after a year of hormone therapy, study finds (NBC News)
Nothing to see here... Hunter Biden email associate is on DOJ transition team (Washington Times)
Census Bureau misses year-end deadline for delivering numbers for House seats (NPR)
U.S. votes against UN budget over anti-Israel measure, lack of Iran action (Fox News)
Pelosi just proposed banning gendered terms like "father, mother, son, daughter" in the House. Yet she has "mother" and "grandmother" in her Twitter bio. (Not the Bee)
Novavax starts late-stage trial of vaccine in United States (Reuters) | UK authorizes Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine (NY Times)
New Mexico fines two churches $10,000 each for Christmas Eve services (Disrn)
ICE deports more than 185,000 illegal aliens and 4,200 gang members in 2020 (Breitbart) | ICE says arrestees had average of four criminal convictions or charges each (Fox News)
Mom and pop landlords struggle through eviction freeze (Washington Examiner)
Britain's trade agreement with the European Union enters legal force (UPI)
Portland mayor, antifa enabler now asks for federal and state help against "radical Antifa" (Disrn)
Emancipation Memorial honoring freed slaves in Boston officially removed (Disrn)
New York City shootings doubled in 2020 (Washington Examiner)
Chicago ends 2020 with 769 homicides (AP)
Massachusetts allows abortions without parental consent, codifies Roe v. Wade (Disrn) | Meanwhile, Ohio governor signs bill requiring cremation or burial of aborted babies (Disrn)
***********************************
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*************************************
Wednesday, January 06, 2021
FDA Admits PCR Tests Give False Results, Prepares Ground For Biden To "Crush" Casedemic
Tyler Durden points out that most Covid "positive" test results are false positives
The FDA today joined The WHO and Dr.Fauci in admitting there is a notable risk of false results from the standard PCR-Test used to define whether an individual is a COVID "Case" or not.
This matters significantly as it fits perfectly with the 'fake rescue' plan we have previously described would occur once the Biden admin took office. But before we get to that 'conspiracy', we need a little background on how the world got here...
We have detailed the controversy surrounding America's COVID "casedemic" and the misleading results of the PCR test and its amplification procedure in great detail over the past few months.
As a reminder, "cycle thresholds" (Ct) are the level at which widely used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test can detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus. The higher the number of cycles, the lower the amount of viral load in the sample; the lower the cycles, the more prevalent the virus was in the original sample.
Numerous epidemiological experts have argued that cycle thresholds are an important metric by which patients, the public, and policymakers can make more informed decisions about how infectious and/or sick an individual with a positive COVID-19 test might be. However, as JustTheNews reports, health departments across the country are failing to collect that data.
Here are a few headlines from those experts and scientific studies:
1. Experts compiled three datasets with officials from the states of Massachusetts, New York and Nevada that conclude:“Up to 90% of the people who tested positive did not carry a virus."
2. The Wadworth Center, a New York State laboratory, analyzed the results of its July tests at the request of the NYT: 794 positive tests with a Ct of 40: “With a Ct threshold of 35, approximately half of these PCR tests would no longer be considered positive,” said the NYT. “And about 70% would no longer be considered positive with a Ct of 30! “
3. An appeals court in Portugal has ruled that the PCR process is not a reliable test for Sars-Cov-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful.
4. A new study from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, found that at 25 cycles of amplification, 70% of PCR test "positives" are not "cases" since the virus cannot be cultured, it's dead. And by 35: 97% of the positives are non-clinical.
5. PCR is not testing for disease, it's testing for a specific RNA pattern and this is the key pivot. When you crank it up to 25, 70% of the positive results are not really "positives" in any clinical sense, since it cannot make you or anyone else sick
So, in summary, with regard to our current "casedemic", positive tests as they are counted today do not indicate a “case” of anything. They indicate that viral RNA was found in a nasal swab. It may be enough to make you sick, but according to the New York Times and their experts, probably won’t. And certainly not sufficient replication of the virus to make anyone else sick. But you will be sent home for ten days anyway, even if you never have a sniffle. And this is the number the media breathlessly reports... and is used to fearmonger mask mandates and lockdowns nationwide...
In October we first exposed how PCR Tests have misled officials worldwide into insanely authoritative reactions.
As PJMedia's Stacey Lennox wrote, the “casedemic" is the elevated number of cases we see nationwide because of a flaw in the PCR test. The number of times the sample is amplified, also called the cycle threshold (Ct), is too high.
It identifies people who do not have a viral load capable of making them ill or transmitting the disease to someone else as positive for COVID-19.
The New York Times reported this flaw on August 29 and said that in the samples they reviewed from three states where labs use a Ct of 37-40, up to 90% of tests are essentially false positives. The experts in that article said a Ct of around 30 would be more appropriate for indicating that someone could be contagious - those for whom contact tracing would make sense.
Just a few days earlier, the CDC had updated its guidelines to discourage testing for asymptomatic individuals. It can only be assumed that the rationale for this was that some honest bureaucrat figured out the testing was needlessly sensitive. He or she has probably been demoted.
This change was preceded by a July update that discouraged retesting for recovered patients. The rationale for the update was that viral debris could be detected using the PCR test for 90 days after recovery. The same would be true for some period of time if an individual had an effective immune response and never got sick. Existing immunity from exposure to other coronaviruses has been well documented. These are many of your “asymptomatic” cases.
However, due to political pressure and corporate media tantrums, the new guidance on testing was scrapped, and testing for asymptomatic individuals is now recommended again. Doctors do not receive the Ct information from the labs to make a diagnostic judgment. Neither the CDC nor the FDA has put out guidelines for an accurate Ct to diagnose a contagious illness accurately.
Hence, our current “casedemic.” Positive tests as they are counted today do not indicate a “case” of anything. They indicate that viral RNA was found in a nasal swab. It may be enough to make you sick, but according to the New York Times and their experts, probably won’t. And certainly not sufficient replication of the virus to make anyone else sick. But you will be sent home for ten days anyway, even if you never have a sniffle. And this is the number the media breathlessly reports.
A month later, Dr. Pascal Sacré, explained in great detail how all current propaganda on the COVID-19 pandemic is based on an assumption that is considered obvious, true and no longer questioned: Positive RT-PCR test means being sick with COVID.
This assumption is misleading. Very few people, including doctors, understand how a PCR test works.
In mid-November, none other than he who should not be questioned - Dr. Anthony Fauci - admitted that the PCR Test's high Ct is misleading:
“What is now sort of evolving into a bit of a standard,” Fauci said, is that “if you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more … the chances of it being replication-confident are minuscule.”
“It’s very frustrating for the patients as well as for the physicians,” he continued, when “somebody comes in, and they repeat their PCR, and it’s like [a] 37 cycle threshold, but you almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle.”
So, I think if somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it’s just dead nucleotides, period.”
So, if anyone raises this discussion as a "conspiracy", refer them to Dr.Fauci.
In response to this and the actual "science", Florida's Department of Health (and signed off on by Florida's Republican Governor Ron deSantis), decided that for the first time in the history of the pandemic, a state will require that all labs in the state report the critical “cycle threshold” level of every COVID-19 test they perform.
All of which leads us to today's announcement from The FDA...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is alerting patients and health care providers of the risk of false results... with the Curative SARS-Cov-2 test.
And why does this matter?
Well it's simple - this is how the establishment can show Joe Biden's plan is miraculously rescue the world.
We explained the "fake rescue" plan in October.
The Fake Rescue
Biden will issue national standards, like the plexiglass barriers in restaurants he spoke about during the debate, and pressure governors to implement mask mandates using the federal government’s financial leverage (NOTE: his 100-day mask-wearing 'mandate' is already in play).
Some hack at the CDC or FDA will issue new guidance lowering the Ct the labs use, and cases will magically start to fall.
In reality, the change will only eliminate false positives, but most Americans won’t know that.
Good old Uncle Joe will be the hero, even though it is Deep-State actors in the health bureaucracies who won’t solve a problem with testing they have been aware of for months. TDS is a heck of a drug.
So, there you have it folks... First Fauci, then WHO, now FDA all admit there is malarkey in the PCR Tests, but have - until now, done nothing about it... allowing the daily fearmongering of soaring "cases" to enable their most twisted 1984-esque controls.
All that's needed now is for one of these estemeed groups to decide to cut the Ct for a "positive" PCR Test to say 15x or 20x and suddenly, we are rescued from the "Dark Winter" as Biden's plan slashes the positive case count dramatically... we are saved.
As an aside, this also clearly explains the disappearance of the "flu" during this season as the plethora of high Ct PCR Tests supposedly pointing to a surge in COVID are nothing of the sort.
********************************
I Now Better Understand the 'Good German'
BY DENNIS PRAGER
As my listeners and readers can hopefully attest, I have been on a lifelong quest to understand human nature and human behavior. I am sad to report that I have learned more in the last few years, particularly in 2020, than in any equivalent period of time.
One of the biggest revelations concerns a question that has always plagued me: How does one explain the “good German,” the term used to describe the average, presumably decent German, who did nothing to hurt Jews but also did nothing to help them and did nothing to undermine the Nazi regime? The same question could be asked about the average Frenchman during the Vichy era, the average Russian under Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev and their successors, and the millions of others who did nothing to help their fellow citizens under oppressive dictatorships.
These past few years have taught me not to so quickly judge the quiet German, Russian, etc. Of course, I still judge Germans who helped the Nazis and Germans who in any way hurt Jews. But the Germans who did nothing? Not so fast.
What has changed my thinking has been watching what is happening in America (and Canada and Australia and elsewhere, for that matter).
The ease with which tens of millions of Americans have accepted irrational, unconstitutional and unprecedented police state-type restrictions on their freedoms, including even the freedom to make a living, has been, to understate the case, sobering.
The same holds true for the acceptance by most Americans of the rampant censorship on Twitter and all other major social media platforms. Even physicians and other scientists are deprived of freedom of speech if, for example, they offer scientific support for hydroxychloroquine along with zinc to treat COVID-19 in the early stages. Board-certified physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who has saved hundreds of COVID-19 patients from suffering and/or death, has been banned from Twitter for publicizing his lifesaving hydroxychloroquine and zinc protocol.
Half of America, the nonleft half, is afraid to speak their minds at virtually every university, movie studio and large corporation — indeed, at virtually every place of work. Professors who say anything that offends the left fear being ostracized if they have tenure and being fired if they do not. People are socially ostracized, publicly shamed and/or fired for differing with Black Lives Matter, as America-hating and white-hating a group as has ever existed. And few Americans speak up. On the contrary, when BLM protestors demand that diners outside of restaurants raise their fists to show their support of BLM, nearly every diner does.
So, then, who are we to condemn the average German who faced the Gestapo if he didn’t salute Hitler or the average Russian who faced the NKVD (the secret police and intelligence agency that preceded the KGB) if he didn’t demonstrate sufficient enthusiasm for Stalin? Americans face the left’s cancel culture, but not left-wing secret police or reeducation camps. (At least not yet — I have little doubt the left would send outspoken conservatives to reeducation camps if they could.)
I have come to understand the average German living under Nazism and the average Russian living under communism for another reason: the power of the media to brainwash.
As a student of totalitarianism since my graduate studies at the Russian Institute of Columbia University’s School of International Affairs (as it was then known), I have always believed that only in a dictatorship could a society be brainwashed. I was wrong. I now understand that mass brainwashing can take place in a nominally free society. The incessant left-wing drumbeat of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and almost every other major newspaper, plus The Atlantic, The New Yorker, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, all of Hollywood and almost every school from kindergarten through graduate school, has brainwashed at least half of America every bit as effectively as the German, Soviet and Chinese communist press did (and in the latter case, still does). That thousands of schools will teach the lie that is the New York Times’ “1619 Project” is one of countless examples.
Prior to the lockdowns, I flew almost every week of the year, so I was approached by people who recognized me on a regular basis. Increasingly, I noticed that people would look around to see if anyone was within earshot and then tell me in almost a whisper: “I support Trump” or, “I’m a conservative.” The last time people looked around and whispered things to me was when I used to visit the Soviet Union.
In Quebec this past weekend, as one can see on a viral video, a family was fined and members arrested because six — yes, six — people gathered to celebrate the new year. A neighbor snitched on them, and the celebrants were duly arrested. The Quebec government lauded the snitches and asked for more public “collaboration.”
Snitches are likewise lauded and encouraged in some Democrat-run states and cities in America (Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti in March: “Snitches get rewards”) and by left-wing governments in Australia. Plenty of Americans, Canadians and Australians are only too happy to snitch on people who refuse to lock down their lives.
All this is taking place without concentration camps, without a Gestapo, without a KGB and without Maoist reeducation camps.
That’s why I no longer judge the average German as easily as I used to. Apathy in the face of tyranny turns out not to be a German or Russian characteristic. I just never thought it could happen in America.
***********************************
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*************************************
Tuesday, January 05, 2021
Mask Mandates Aren’t Working As Promised
SUMMARY A surge in COVID-19 cases in the United States and Europe has prompted calls for a national mask mandate here in America. Advocates of government edicts have asserted that these would bring the pandemic “under control” in a matter of weeks. The authors of this Backgrounder found that 97 of the 100 counties with the most confirmed cases had mask mandates. Nor did a national mask mandate prevent a surge in Italy. These findings do not deny the efficacy of mask-wearing, nor should they discourage the practice. Instead, they point to the inadequacy of public health strategies that rely too heavily on lockdowns and mask mandates. Governments should undertake more effective interventions, such as specifically protecting nursing home residents, enabling nationwide screening through use of rapid self-tests, and establishing voluntary isolation centers where infected people can recover, rather than exposing their families to infection.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
A surge in COVID-19 cases in the United States and Europe has prompted calls for a national mask mandate here in America. Advocates of government edicts have asserted that these would bring the pandemic “under control” in a matter of weeks.
Public health officials here and throughout most of the world believe that mask-wearing has some value in reducing the rate at which the pandemic spreads. Accepting this premise, however, does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that government mask mandates will bring the contagion under control.
This Backgrounder examines the effects of mask mandates in the U.S. and Italy. While there is no national mask mandate in the U.S., many states and counties have imposed them. We (the authors) find that, of the 25 counties reporting the highest numbers of new cases during this latest surge, 21 had mask mandates in place since at least July.
Italy does have a national mask mandate that is backed by fines of up to 1,000 euros for non-compliance. We find that the mandate did not prevent a surge in cases in Italy that began in October, peaked in mid-November, and had not yet subsided in mid-December.
These findings do not deny the efficacy of mask-wearing per se. Nor should they discourage the practice.
Instead, they point to the inadequacy of public health strategies that rely predominantly on lockdowns and mask mandates. Governments should undertake more effective interventions. These include adopting better measures to protect nursing home residents, enabling nationwide screening through the widespread use of rapid self-tests, and establishing voluntary isolation centers where infected people can recover, rather than exposing their families to infection.
The Value of Masks
Mask-wearing has become a highly politicized practice in the U.S. Some detractors consider it an emblem of social submission. Others, such as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield, see masks as the best way to get the pandemic under control: “I think if we could get everybody to wear a mask now,” Redfield said in July, “I think in four, six, eight weeks, we could bring this epidemic under control.
Mask-wearing has thus inspired both enthusiasm and revulsion that likely exaggerates its significance.
The CDC in general is a bit more tempered about mask-wearing than its Director. While the CDC has changed its guidance on masks numerous times throughout the pandemic, the agency’s recommendation (as of November 20) endorses mask-wearing both to reduce the risk of infecting others and to protect uninfected people from the contagion.
The discussion of CDC guidance on mask-wearing represents claims that the agency made as of November 20, 2020. As noted, the agency changes its views frequently, and likely will continue to do so.
The CDC and other public health authorities in the U.S. and abroad have been trying to determine the relative efficacy of mask-wearing for two different, though related, purposes. The first is “source control”—meaning the extent to which wearing a mask prevents an infected individual from spreading the virus. The second is “protection”—meaning the extent to which wearing a mask protects an uninfected individual from contracting the virus.
The CDC has, for many months, believed that masks have “source control” value. More specifically, it advises that “multi-layer cloth masks block release of exhaled respiratory particles into the environment.”
Ibid.
According to this theory, by reducing the speed and volume of droplets that an infected person releases into the environment, masks help to protect the uninfected from the infected.
Since November 20, 2020, the CDC has also asserted that masks provide some protection for uninfected people who wear them: “Cloth mask materials can also reduce wearers’ exposure to infectious droplets through filtration.”
Ibid.
The CDC bases its mask guidance on “experimental and epidemiological data,” rather than controlled studies
Experimental data is collected, for example, by squirting an aerosol through a cloth mask and measuring how far particles travel. Epidemiological studies or, as the CDC calls them, “real world” data, generally involve case studies of transmission.
In perhaps the most famous of these, two St. Louis hairstylists who had COVID-19 wore masks while they continued to service customers. They saw 139 clients over eight days. Of those, 67 consented to follow-up testing. None of those 67 tested positive for COVID-19.7
The CDC assigns great weight to this study.
One drawback of these studies is that they lack a control group. Danish researchers recently published the only controlled study of mask-wearing. It tests the hypothesis that wearing a mask protects uninfected people.
The researchers conducted the study, in which 6,000 Danes participated, in spring 2020, before Denmark instituted a mask mandate. The control group followed existing social distancing guidelines but did not wear masks. Researchers provided the experimental group with high-quality surgical masks with a filtration rate of 98 percent and instructed participants to wear them outside their homes.
Those who completed the study underwent COVID-19 tests one month later. Researchers found that 1.8 percent of those in the mask-wearing group tested positive, while 2.1 percent of the control group did. The results were not statistically significant. The researchers concluded that mask-wearing is compatible with a range of outcomes—from a 46 percent reduction in infections to a 23 percent increase.
Although the Annals of Internal Medicine published the study on November 18, the CDC did not cite it in its November 20 revised mask guidance. The Danish study casts doubt on the CDC’s advice about the protective value of masks.
In sum, some studies support the source control value of masks, though none of those studies are controlled. Source control benefits also align with common sense: A face-covering will reduce the speed and distance that an infected person’s droplets travel. The prevention value of masks is less well attested, and the only controlled study of the hypothesis contradicts it.
Much more here:
*************************************
The Media Is Lying About Trump's Call with Georgia Secretary of State
Over the past couple of days, media headlines have tried to convey the impression that a leaked phone call between President Trump and top Georgia officials shows Trump pressuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to fraudulently “find” enough votes for him to win the state.
“Trump pressures Georgia’s Raffensperger to overturn his defeat in extraordinary call” read the headline from the Washington Post.
CNN called the leaked audio “astonishing new evidence of a desperate President Donald Trump” trying to “steal the election,” claiming Trump “tried to bully” Raffensperger “into finding votes” for him.
But a review of the transcript of the call shows no such thing. The Washington Post claimed that Trump “repeatedly urged [Raffensperger] to alter the outcome of the presidential vote in the state,” but that isn’t what happened.
Throughout the conversation, Trump lays out the evidence that there was voter fraud in the state, and demands an honest accounting of the ballots, which he believes would give him more than 11,000 votes needed to win the state. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” is the key quote cited by the media, but there’s more to the quote.
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” is what Trump said, in context. He also insisted that “there’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
During the conversation, Trump laid out the evidence, explaining how there “4,502 voters who voted but who weren’t on the voter registration list,” and “18,325 vacant address voters” whose votes should not have been counted. He even mentioned 904 votes linked to post office boxes, which is also not allowed. Trump also mentioned the State Farm videotape that corresponds to a late-night vote dump of at least 18,000 votes which were counted after Republican poll watchers were told to leave. Trump brought up nearly 5,000 out-of-state votes, 2,326 absentee ballots sent to vacant addresses, and roughly 5,000 votes from dead people. Then there are the suspicious military ballots that went all for Biden.
“So there were many infractions, and the bottom line is, many, many times the 11,779 margin that they said we lost by — we had vast, I mean the state is in turmoil over this,” Trump said on the call.
Raffensperger disputed Trump’s claims, saying that only two dead people voted, that the State Farm video didn’t actually show fraud. Raffensperger also claimed that an audit showed that there weren’t any ballots that were scanned three times.
While it’s true that not all of these allegations by Trump’s team may pan out or be proven, the allegations are linked to many thousands of votes and should be investigated properly. Yes, Trump did acknowledge that he’d only need roughly 12,000 votes to change the result, but that margin is smaller than the number of disputed ballots. “Look, Brad. I got to get . . . I have to find 12,000 votes, and I have them times a lot. And therefore, I won the state. That’s before we go to the next step, which is in the process of right now. You know, and I watched you this morning, and you said, well, there was no criminality.”
Trump very clearly believes that he legitimately won Georgia, and wasn’t asking Raffensperger to fraudulently “find” enough ballots to make up that margin. Trump discussed at length the examples of fraud, which are backed up by video evidence, affidavits, and statistical analyses.
Like the transcript with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky that Democrats impeached him over, this phone call is yet another nothingburger that has the media and the left crying foul. There’s already a Wikipedia page for the “Trump-Raffensperger scandal.” Democrats are reportedly looking to censure Trump and have asked FBI Director Wray to open a criminal probe. But Trump quite clearly presented evidence that there was fraud, and made the case that the number of disputed ballots is larger than his deficit in the certified results. A proper investigation would resolve these outstanding questions about these disputed ballots.
*******************************************
The Worst Argument Ever
Rob Jenkins
As a professional rhetorician and teacher of rhetoric—the art of persuasion—for over 35 years, I have seen a lot of bad arguments. And not all of them have come from my college students. Not by a long shot.
But in all that time, the worst argument I have ever heard, by far, is this one: “If it only saves one life….”
It’s a line big-government types love to trot out whenever they want good-hearted, well-meaning people to accept some sketchy, illogical, oppressive measure because, you know, it just might save one person’s life. An example is socialized medicine, which would make health care worse for far more people than it helped.
Unfortunately, even many conservatives fall for this line, because they’re generally good-hearted, well-meaning people. Yet in almost every case, it is a bad argument, even a ridiculous argument, for several reasons.
First, it is completely irrational, based solely on emotion. It says nothing about the actual merits of the policy or proposition being put forward. It merely attempts to tug at people’s heartstrings — no one wants to see anybody die, right? — while making those who would oppose the idea on moral or logical grounds appear cruel.
Basically, it’s a form of ad hominem attack, a way to make your opponent look bad without actually addressing what they’re saying—probably because you can’t argue the point logically.
Along with that, the “if it only saves one life” argument is also self-righteous and condescending. It’s not only a way of making your opponent look (and hopefully feel) bad, it’s a way of making yourself look better — as if you, and only you, really care about people. Anyone who disagrees with your (cockamamie) idea obviously just wants people to die.
But mostly it’s a bad argument because it’s disingenuous, at the very least, if not downright hypocritical. For example, those who want to ban “assault rifles” because doing so “might save one life” wouldn’t dream of banning alcohol, even though alcohol kills far more people than AR-15s. So do knives. So do falls, for that matter.
Here’s an idea: Let’s just ban ladders. No? Why not? After all, if it just saves one life, it’s worth it, right? What are you, heartless?
https://townhall.com/columnists/robjenkins/2021/01/04/the-worst-argument-ever-n2582491
***********************************http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*************************************
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
