Questions 31

Questions 31

Moderna says that the omicron variant is probably not sensitive to the original vaccine. Square one?

The big-spending bill contains $3 billion  for 'tree equity.' How can anyone take these people seriously?

The gist of an article by Henderson defending Rittenhouse's decision to go to protect people's property:
"You don’t have to think that Kyle Rittenhouse was as heroic as Audie Murphy to see that both put themselves in danger to work for something they believed in. Clearly Audie Murphy took more risks than Kyle Rittenhouse, but I don’t hear people saying that Kyle was a fool because he didn’t take enough risks."

How did a virus in bats from south Asia get 1000 miles north?
'Dr Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, spelled out plans to work with his collaborators in Wuhan and elsewhere to artificially insert novel, rare cleavage sites into novel Sars-like coronaviruses collected in the field, so as to better understand the biological function of cleavage sites. His 2018 request for $14.2 million from the Pentagon to do this was turned down amid uneasiness that it was too risky; but the very fact that he was proposing it was alarming.
Most of the funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology comes from the Chinese not the American government, after all; so the failure to win the US grant may not have prevented the work being done. More-over, exactly such an experiment had already been done with a different kind of coronavirus by — guess who? — the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.--Ridley

The great intellectual and moral defect of the present-day … [is] the habit of dwelling on appearances, not on realities….--Acton

In June of 2020, the UNC School of Medicine created a “Task Force to Integrate Social Justice into the Curriculum.” Tenure will be determined, in part, by the Task Force's suggestions. Students will advocate, among others, US ratification of the basic human rights treaties and conventions of the international community, realization in statute of health care as a human right, restoring US leadership to reverse climate change achieving radical reform of the US criminal justice system, ending policies of exclusion and achieving compassionate immigration reform, ending hunger and homelessness in the US, and ensuring every single person’s vote counts equally.
Medicine is probably not what you thought.

Here’s the headline in the Times of London:
'NHS waiting list hits record 6m… and it’s only going to get worse'

Congressional Democrats and the White House have proposed that electric vehicle consumers receive a $12,500 refundable tax credit if they purchase an EV made at an American factory employing unionized workers. The subsidy declines, however, to $8000 if the vehicle is made at a non-union U.S. plant and it drops another $500 if the car’s battery isn’t American‐​made. Starting in 2027, moreover, only cars assembled in the United States would qualify for the base $7,500 credit.

The state of Wisconsin filed its charges against Rittenhouse just two days after the incident. Probably had a premonition.

Did you ever wonder why former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sent Covid patients back to nursing homes instead of to the Javits Center or the USNS Comfort hospital ship, which President Trump had sent? The Cuomo re-election campaign received more than $1 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association in 2018. Mr. Cuomo then increased Medicaid fees paid to nursing homes and hospitals. When the pandemic hit, the same hospital association requested that nursing homes be compelled to accept patients who had tested positive for Covid-19. Then, as deaths mounted, the Cuomo administration underreported the number. wsj

Is terrorism the ultimate Identity Politics?

From the Yale Daily News:
'With the number of minutes of daylight in New Haven dropping each week, some students have expressed increased stress levels as they head into the final few weeks of the semester.
Students explained that they are still adjusting to the change as they start to leave their discussion sections in the dark, their days feel shorter and melatonin initiates earlier in the day. Jaden Gonzalez ’25 said that, even after living in New York his whole life, he finds the whole concept of daylight saving to be confusing and said he felt “victimized” by its occurrence.
“Personally, I respond really well to daytime,” Gonzalez said. “I know nothing about the occurrence and why it happens, but I know that I genuinely have worse days because I cannot enjoy the sun as much as I normally could.”'
Maybe it's satire.

The presidential race came down to 125,084 votes spread across Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. A flip of just 62,543 votes and Donald Trump would now be [well] into a second term.

If the U.S. and the European Union refuse to support an increase in Africa’s power supply, China will. Already 30% of new power plants in Africa are built by Chinese contractors controlled by the Communist government. Some of these are heavily polluting coal plants. wsj

If this pandemic began with the food trade, changes must be made there to prevent another. If it began with products used in traditional Chinese medicine, a set of practices endorsed by the World Health Organisation in 2019 at the urging of Xi Jinping, that needs revisiting. And if the pandemic began as a result of risky virology research, that category of work needs to be made safer. Wuhan is the site of the world’s most active research programme on Sars-like viruses, and viruses have escaped from labs many times.--Ridley

The Thanksgiving Miracle

A Miracle, Thanksgiving-type
In a 2003 Boston Globe article titled “Giving Thanks for the Invisible Hand,” syndicated columnist Jeff Jacoby offered a wonderful tribute to the miracle of the invisible hand that makes affordable turkeys available so efficiently every year at Thanksgiving through the power of “spontaneous order” and without the need for any central planning or “turkey czars.”
“The invisible hand” — the mysterious power that leads innumerable people, each working for his own gain, to promote ends that benefit many.”


The Thanksgiving Miracle

Isn’t there something wondrous — something almost inexplicable — in the way your Thanksgiving weekend is made possible by the skill and labor of vast numbers of total strangers?
To bring that turkey to the dining room table required the efforts of thousands of people — the poultry farmers who raised the birds, of course, but also the feed distributors who supplied their nourishment and the truckers who brought it to the farm, not to mention the architect who designed the hatchery, the workmen who built it, and the technicians who keep it running. The bird had to be slaughtered and defeathered and inspected and transported and unloaded and wrapped and priced and displayed. The people who accomplished those tasks were supported in turn by armies of other people accomplishing other tasks — from refining the gasoline that fueled the trucks to manufacturing the plastic in which the meat was packaged.
The activities of countless far-flung men and women over the course of many months had to be intricately choreographed and precisely timed, so that when you showed up to buy a fresh Thanksgiving turkey, there would be one — or more likely, a few dozen — waiting. The level of coordination that was required to pull it off is mind-boggling. But what is even more mind-boggling is this: No one coordinated it.
No turkey czar sat in a command post somewhere, consulting a master plan and issuing orders. No one forced people to cooperate for your benefit. And yet they did cooperate. When you arrived at the supermarket, your turkey was there. You didn’t have to do anything but show up to buy it. If that isn’t a miracle, what should we call it?
Adam Smith called it “the invisible hand” — the mysterious power that leads innumerable people, each working for his own gain, to promote ends that benefit many. Out of the seeming chaos of millions of uncoordinated private transactions emerges the spontaneous order of the market. Free human beings freely interact, and the result is an array of goods and services more immense than the human mind can comprehend. No dictator, no bureaucracy, no supercomputer plans it in advance. Indeed, the more an economy is planned, the more it is plagued by shortages, dislocation, and failure.
It is commonplace to speak of seeing God’s signature in the intricacy of a spider’s web or the animation of a beehive. But they pale in comparison to the kaleidoscopic energy and productivity of the free market. If it is a blessing from Heaven when seeds are transformed into grain, how much more of a blessing is it when our private, voluntary exchanges are transformed – without our ever intending it – into prosperity, innovation, and growth?

A Reverse Coverup

 A Reverse Coverup

Recent events have raised questions whether agencies and unelected bureaucrats have altered the reporting of events "for our own good."

Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission.
According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots. (Politico)

No doubt this will become our CIA cover-up story for the next decade. But.....

This might remind one of Oswald in Mexico City.
Now a real conspiracy. Jack Childs was a spy/raconteur who knew Castro. He says Castro told him that when Oswald realized the Cubans would not grant him a visa when he was in Mexico City he screamed with defiant bravado, "I'm going to kill Kennedy!" This was confirmed by the spy Rodriques Lahera in a debriefing with Harold Swenson. In November 1963, the Cuban intelligence officer in charge of monitoring possible CIA/exile activity against Cuba, Florintino Aspillaga, was told by Castro to abandon his usual sweeps and focus all his listening devices on the Dallas area.
So.....? The specifics of the assassination are beyond debate. Oswald, a defector to Russia, a communist disillusioned with the Russian system but enamored with the Cuban one, murdered President Kennedy. The only question is whether someone or some group influenced Oswald's decision. Castro may not have been involved. But it sounds as if he was not surprised.

Nast and Thanksgiving

 

                            Nast and Thanksgiving

Thomas Nast was a Bavarian immigrant credited with developing the American cartoon. He arrived in the 1840s as a child and became the illustrator for Harper's Weekly. He developed the modern version of Santa Claus and the elephant as the Republican Party symbol. As such, this is a provocative drawing, from the Nineteenth Century.

Melanie Kirkpatrick’s 2016 book, Thanksgiving: The Holiday and the Heart of the American Experience (link added):

 

{Thomas] Nast was an immigrant, having arrived in America from Germany when he was six years old, and “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” reflected what Nast saw as the immigrant’s passionate affection for his new country and commitment to its democratic values….
At the head of the table stands Uncle Sam, who is carving a turkey. Around the table are seated Americans representing an array of races and religions, identified in many cases by their national dress. Among the guests are an African American family, a Native American, a Chinese man with a long queue, an Irish American couple, a Spanish woman wearing a mantilla and holding a fan, a bearded Muslim with a fez on his head. Nast presents the people in this portrait respectfully, not as caricatures. His message is that every American has an equal right to sit at the Thanksgiving table.

Happy Thanksgiving

 Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a tricky word. It means gratitude but it implies more than something to be grateful for, it implies something to be grateful to.

In the fall of 1621, the Plymouth settlers had a celebratory meal with a local Indian tribe as part of a traditional English harvest festival. There are two accounts; no mention is made of a Day of Thanksgiving but they were probably happy; since their arrival, they had a 50% mortality. It lasted three days. A Day of Thanksgiving, a day the English would have considered religious, was first held in the new land in 1623 following a needed rainfall. Various days of thanksgiving were celebrated by the country over the years, the first in commemoration of the end of the Revolution by Washington. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln formally made Thanksgiving an annual event.

It is interesting to see these two men, Washington suspicious of organized religion and Lincoln harder to read, celebrating an official Thanksgiving, but both seem heartfelt, Lincoln's surprisingly so. Washington is almost a mirror of the mindset of the time. The two proclamations are below.

The Thanksgiving

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor--and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me `to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.'

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be -- That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks -- for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation--for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed--for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted -- for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions--to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually -- to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed--to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn [sic] kindness onto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord -- To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease [sic] of science among them and us -- and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

George Washington

Proclamation Establishing Thanksgiving Day October 3, 1863

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence [sic], have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years, with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
Abraham Lincoln

Samuel Palmer's "Harvest Moon:"

Kennedy #2

Kennedy #2

An industry has arisen to continue the mythology.

Oswald was not capable of such violence; he could not have made the shots in the time allotted; the rifle was inferior and the scope was misaligned; he had an alibi; there is no record of his interrogation by the Dallas police; he was an imposter from Russia; the "Oswald" in Mexico City was an imposter; his pictures holding the rifle with the pistol and the two Communist newspapers are fakes; he travelled with Cuban revolutionaries; the rifle found on the depository sixth floor was a Mauser, not Oswald's Italian infantry rifle Model 1891/1938; the third shot--the head shot--came from the front; a second shooter was seen on the "grassy knoll;" the Dallas doctors disagreed with the Bethesda pathologists; three tramps in a box car in Dallas were likely CIA and were probably involve--one even looked like Woody Harrelson's father; Tippit's murderer was unidentified; the bullets that killed Tippit did not match Oswald's pistol; many involved have died suspiciously; the Mafia did it because of their annimosity to Bobby Kennedy; the CIA did it because of their fear of a Kennedy retaliation over the Bay of Pigs invasion; the Garrison argument implicating Clay Shaw (on the evidence of a psychotic who failed a lie detector test); Castro did it in self-defense; the JFK movie by Stone (see Garrison); the Navy pathologist burnt his notes; the Dallas FBI burnt a note Oswald left for them before the murder; Marina Oswald burnt photographs of Lee holding the rifle, Ruby killed Tippit, Tippit was meeting Oswald and was involved, .....on and on. The democracy is hard at work here. Many of these notions come from average and concerned people, volunteers working far afield. Some are lawyers. Few are experts in the area they are focused on in the murder. One writer on the Zapruder film and what it reveals about the number of bullets and their timing is a Kierkegaard lecturer from Haverford. Some of these objections are just nuts, some are true but, of those that are true, none would change anything.

What is certain is this:
1. Oswald bought the murder weapon from a mail-order house using an alias he always used and had the false ID in his wallet at his arrest. Oswald posed with the rifle holding communist newspapers; his wife, Marina, took the picture. Marina saw the rifle many times and knew where it was kept.
2. Before going to shoot Gen. Walker, a right-wing John Birch Society member, Oswald wrote a detailed letter to Marina explaining what he was going to do and what she should do if he were killed or did not come back.
3. He shot at Walker and the window slat diverted the bullet. He then fled the state for New Orleans.
4. The day of the murder he left his wedding ring in a glass by his wife's bed, then carried the gun to the depository wrapped in paper (later found at the shooting site) in a car driven by a fellow worker.
5. He was seen and described by a witness as he pushed the gun out of the window and the muzzle fire of 3 shots was seen.
6. Men at the window' one floor down and directly below the sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the depository, heard the gunfire above, heard the bolt action, and heard the casings hit the floor.
7. Oswald was seen in the depository after the shooting; he left the building and took a bus, then a cab, to his rooming house where he got his pistol.
8. Officer Tippit was a well-regarded, simple guy and a solid citizen. At least ten people saw him murdered by Oswald and all identified him. Three bullets hit him in the chest. Oswald stepped away, then returned several steps to put a bullet in Officer Tippitt's temple as he lay on the ground. (!)
9. Ruby killed Oswald but his motives are obscure. It may not even have been planned. All acquaintances said he was distraught over Kennedy's death and the possibility that Jackie, whom he adored, would have to return to Dallas to go through a trial with Oswald. (The only press interview he ever gave was to Dorothy Kilgallen. Kilgallen!)

Any theory about the killing has to include and accept these facts.

Kennedy #1

Kennedy #1

The Kennedy assassination was a significant moment for me and for many. Yet the event, so terrible and intense, so researched and analyzed, has developed almost as its own entity, its own beast, as it matures along paths of manipulation, overt deception, and least resistance.

First, the reaction. Mrs. Kennedy's quote here is significant: "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights . . . . It's — it had to be some silly little Communist."

This may not have set the tone for the management of the murder in history but it certainly was representative of it. The general reaction to the murder was completely divorced from what happened. Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy's "martyrdom" to "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots." Drew Pearson wrote that Kennedy was a victim of "hate drive."A Soviet spokesman assigned "moral responsibility" for Kennedy's death to "Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right." The NYT encouraged us all to take blame for "the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down" the President. James Reston's article the day after the shooting--on the first page--was headlined ""Why America Weeps: Kennedy a Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation." Senator Mike Mansfield eulogized the President as a victim of "bigotry, prejudice, and hatred." In Arthur Schlesinger Jr. one thousand page history of the thousand day Kennedy presidency the assassin is not even mentioned. The Manhattan Institute's James Piereson, in his 2007 book "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism," writes that the country's illness that led to the assassination required a curative "punitive liberalism." A newer book, Dallas "1963", says Dallas did it through a "climate of hatred" created by right-wing businessmen, religious leaders, and media moguls. And an updated take by Alex Beam in a Boston Globe article: "Kennedy brought low by some redneck."

This is not simply a need to turn away and shield our eyes; there is plenty of stomach for Zapruder films and autopsy shots. This is much worse, an inability--an unwillingness--to see things as they are. It is simply not possible for the Left to accept the idea that Kennedy was murdered by a Marxist. And this perspective will lead to any number of creative narratives, consistent or not, to shift the blame from Oswald and towards a more acceptable villain. More, it is a refusal to see the modern world and its potential where a man of great standing and regard can be brought down by a fool. It is the egalitarian nightmare.

November 22, 1963

 November 22, 1963

The past and present merge:

The Thanksgiving holiday, one of the best holidays and certainly the best secular one, has been spoiled for everyone who was awake and thinking in the mid 60's by the assassination of Jack Kennedy. That promising shift from the generation of Eisenhower to its sons, to youth and its potential, to the charismatic and the virile, was just stopped cold by Oswald in Dallas. We defaulted back to the older, ponderous Lyndon Johnson, a true guardian of the Old Guard. That loss--of youth, of hope, of promise, of beauty--has never been overcome and we are reminded of it every Thanksgiving. One only wonders how much of the unrest in the '60s and '70s was a result.

An aspect of the assassination that has dogged its shadow has been the shameless exploitation of the atrocity by writers, politicians and artists. This exploitation, which has become almost a cult, believes--or says it believes--that the assassination was a conspiracy of a number of men, groups, or organizations. Every aspect of the event has been picked over, every inconsistency of life magnified, every possibility made a probability. The result is that the event, right before many of our eyes, has been completely recreated and, like an alternative universe, continues without interference with its own laws, experts, and history. It is very like those academic musings run wild. "If, instead, you assume that history and archeology was 300 years wrong--or falsified--and Moses was actually alive in the court of Akhenaton...." "If, instead, you assume there is an unexplained and unexplainable driving force in history..." "If, instead, you assume that everyone is possessed at birth by sexual urges towards their immediate family...." It is another victory of the Art of the Plausible.

This is nowhere more revolting than is seen in the movie "JFK" where a seemingly respectable director rewrites the assassination story according to a man whose grasp on the event is dangerously close to psychosis. Oliver Stone writes a story of the assassination through the eyes and the belief set of James Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, who had arrested, charged, indicted, and tried a local community figure, Clay Shaw, for involvement in the Kennedy murder. Shaw's arrest was virtually random. There was no evidence against him other than the word of a psychiatric patient who failed a lie detector test and refused to testify. How an American citizen could come under such unreasonable, whimsical charges has never been explained. But Garrison persisted and then Stone followed up after the laughable trial (where the jury took longer to find their seats than to find "not guilty") with a movie inexplicably presenting the Garrison thesis as within the same time zone as reason. Of course, all the facts of the assassination were changed to implicate the innocent, the shooting presented was almost a complete fiction and this all was delivered by Kevin Costner, a credible actor, with certainty and outrage. Anyone who knew anything about the assassination walked from the theater with their collective heads spinning. But many with less of a good grasp left alarmed and resentful. This constant barrage of misinformation has done a lot to undermine this country's credibility and value in the minds of its people who, after all, own and run it.

There are two bad lessons here. The first is there are people and industries in the world who, even in those cultures with the highest of ideals, will do anything, say anything, publish anything to make a buck. If possible they will take the Plausible-made-Art and create an industry of it with historians, academics, and franchises. The second is that they often hide their entrepreneurship in the gowns of Art. How many of our greatest artists have questioned the reliability of memory, the interaction of history and art--even to the point of their blending? So Stone calls Julian Barnes and Cormac McCarthy as witnesses for his defense.

Stone is more Goebbels than John Huston here. He is everything that is wrong with businessmen gone rogue. His product is harmful to the society, toxic to the young, and delivered without an ounce of social conscience. The real story about Garrison is how is it possible that Clay Shaw could be treated like a Kafka character in the United States. Another would be a clarifying and cleansing explanation of all the facts and evidence that has been gathered over the years about the murder. This might set the country at ease. But there's probably not much money, or return on arrogance, in this. Instead, why not take advantage of the distressed and confused citizens, contribute to their malaise, and cash in.

In 1976 the U.S. House of representatives created a commission, The House Select Commission on Assassinations, to investigate all the evidence in the murder again. This time they applied all the newer technologies available as well. Aside from the single and erroneous "fourth bullet thesis" not a single new conclusion was reached. Instead, this august deliberative body concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy--but they believed one existed anyway.

Scapegoat

Rittenhouse, the ACLU, and the Scapegoat

In a statement reacting to the Rittenhouse verdict, ACLU-Wisconsin Interim Executive Director Shaadie Ali lamented the “deep roots of white supremacy” in Kenosha that prevented Rittenhouse from being “held responsible for his actions.”

The ACLU for the Prosecution.

So Rittenhouse assumes the identity of people he does not know and is held responsible for their acts. Is the Left becoming New Testament obsessed?

Questions 30

Questions 30

'The huge stimulus bill will not cost anything.' 'The border wall will be paid for by Mexico.' 'You didn't build that.' 'The country was created by slavery and developed to protect it.' These constant, extra-partisan lies by both parties make one wonder how people choose one over the other. How does one rally behind a liar? How does one submit himself and his family to their programs? Or go to war for them?

Why do reporters, who are going to say whatever they feel like, use notes and recorders?

Since Monday, unvaccinated Austrians are not allowed to leave their homes except to go to work, to buy essential supplies, or to take exercise: “It is not a recommendation, but an order,” announced the Interior Minister Karl Nehammer at a press conference. “Every citizen should know that they will be checked by the police.”

Congressman Raja really went after Jay Bhattacharya, an MD, PhD and
Professor Stanford School of Medicine. Some points were clearly taken out of context. This is from his Twitter: 'Finally, the Congressman red-baited me. I gave an interview in May 2020 re: a study I ran to a Chinese tv station. It is shameful that the Congressman would try to insinuate that I support the Chinese government because I communicated a scientific result to the public.'
What's fascinating is an American politician attacking an American citizen and scientist invited to present his scientific opinion and inform them. Think on that.

It seems as though intervention by the state reconciles us with plunder by attributing responsibility for it to everyone, that is to say, to no one, with the result that people can enjoy the property of others with a perfectly clear conscience.--Bastiat

Debt-to-GDP will run about 106 percent in a decade, matching the record set after World War II. By mid-century, that number could be over 200 percent. The interest rate will hurt consumers but will also raise government costs to support that debt and squeeze the loot the government likes to disperse.

On July 23, 2021 White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, said it is not the role of the federal government to issue a vaccine mandate, but the Biden administration will continue to make the vaccine available and advocate for vaccinations.

Identity Politics: The association of an individual with a larger subset and holding him responsible for positions or assumed opinions of that subset. This takes a singularly anti-Western stance: the individual is not responsible for his own acts and his value is determined by the acts of others. This is the virtual definition of bigotry.

From the work of A. Ioannides, one of the most prestigious bio-statisticians in the world, on the Virus:

0-19: .0027% (or a survival rate of 99.9973%)
20-29 .014% (or a survival rate of 99,986%)
30-39 .031% (or a survival rate of 99,969%)
40-49 .082% (or a survival rate of 99,918%)
50-59 .27% (or a survival rate of 99.73%)
60-69 .59% (or a survival rate of 99.31%)

More than 70, between 2.4 and 5.5% (or a survival rate of 97.6 and 94.5% depending on the residential situation).

From the court's decision overturning the OSHA vaccine mandate:

“The Mandate,” it wrote, “likely exceeds the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause because it regulates noneconomic inactivity that falls squarely within the States’ police power,” because “a person’s choice to remain unvaccinated and forgo regular testing is noneconomic inactivity.” “To mandate that a person receive a vaccine or undergo testing,” it added, “falls squarely within the States’ police power.” In addition, “concerns over separation of powers principles cast doubt over the Mandate’s assertion of virtually unlimited power to control individual conduct under the guise of a workplace regulation.” (Good intentions aside.)

Questions of Smallpox

The nation has reached a remarkable state. The country of Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Lincoln will watch as its president, Biden, goes under anesthesia and, during that period of time, the presidential power will be in the hands of one Kamala Harris.

Epidemiologists have estimated that the coronavirus has a “basic reproduction number” between 2 and 3, meaning that each infection leads to roughly two to three other people getting infected. The basic reproduction number is often rendered “R.” New variants push that R to about 4. The virus kills about 0.2% of everyone it infects. Smallpox, before the vaccine, had an R between 5 and 7, a mortality rate over 30%, and disfigured the rest.

A small company has developed a treatment for smallpox, a therapy that works, not a vaccine. The anxiety over the homicidal Soviets' having a bioweapons lab that was using smallpox as their base agent stimulated a plan to have the anti-smallpox therapy available in the U.S. but it was deep-sixed by a Republican 'statesman' who did not want to give profits to the company as it was owned by a prominent Democrat donor. (Sometimes the betterment of the nation has to take a back seat to a higher vision.)

This week a vial of material labeled 'smallpox' was discovered in a Merck lab. Then a guy in Maryland tested positive for Monkeypox, a close relative of smallpox. The stock went nuts.

One can only wonder what a narcissistic culture that thinks selfies is an occupation, demands perfection in all ways, and protection from any threat will react to the appearance of a bug that has a 30% mortality and scars the survivors.

Bureaucrat Zero

                        Bureaucrat Zero

A little satire I conceived was to have the government simply take the energy industry over and then deprive its citizens of energy--whether it for the reason of extortion or global warming, as it would be a lot more efficient in bringing the poor citizen to his exhausted endpoint. Sort of a fuel soil bank program with an edge. Amazingly, my favorite Biden appointee (only because I don't know enough of them) seeming plans just that.

Saule Omarova gave an interview in February on “the case for a U.S. national investment authority.”

The conversation turned to climate change and its impact on fossil-fuel producers, and Ms. Omarova, not surprisingly, had an opinion. “A lot of the smaller players in that industry are going to, probably, go bankrupt in short order—at least, we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change,” she said.

"We want them to go bankrupt."

She went on to say “that creates a lot of this sort of loss of jobs, a lot of displacement, and economic fallback that we cannot afford, really.” 

But sacrifices must be made.

She added that the government response would be to set up a National Capital Management Corporation that would “become a kind of equity investor at that point, taking over management of those companies and basically leading them through restructuring to a new technological basis and to a new technological business model.”

As Comptroller, Ms. Omarova would have enormous authority to regulate banks. Clearly, one of her policy ambitions is to deny capital to certain companies that she wants to go bankrupt. Just because these people know better.

The first person in an epidemic is called "Patient Zero." Somehow we have created a culture and political system where one person can do all sorts of unbelievably dangerous things. Mattis was actually worried whether one unstable president could launch a nuclear war. One guy! Here's another, a woman who wants to make decisions that would bring astonishing change to the financial system. The same people who can't control a border or figure out what a reasonable response to a viral infection is, want to run the U.S. 22 Trillion Dollar economy.

Bureaucrat Zero, bringing more systemic risk to us than any revolutionary enemy could dream of doing.

Crime and Benefits

 

                        Crime and Benefits

Undocumented immigrants, including DACA holders, are ineligible to receive most federal public benefits, including means-tested benefits such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, sometimes referred to as food stamps), regular Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and are prohibited from purchasing unsubsidized health coverage on ACA exchanges.

Undocumented immigrants may be eligible for a handful of benefits that are deemed necessary to protect life or guarantee safety in dire situations, such as emergency Medicaid, access to treatment in hospital emergency rooms, or access to healthcare and nutrition programs under the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

Twenty-six states make immigrants eligible for state-funded benefit programs. Most of these states either offer assistance to families or provide access to healthcare to otherwise uninsured immigrants. Examples of these programs are New York’s Safety Net Assistance, California’s CalFresh Food Assistance Program, and California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI).

all immigrant children, regardless of status, have access to a public education and are eligible to attend public schools for grades K-12. Undocumented immigrants are also eligible for the Head Start program as it is not considered a federal public benefit program – any child who is otherwise eligible, regardless of their or their parents’ immigration status, may enroll in Head Start or Early Head Start. (somewhere)

All this presupposes that the illegal immigrant does not take on a false identity.

Booster

Booster

This past week, a panel of independent FDA advisors has voted to recommend booster shots of both the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccines. Boosters for Moderna and Pfizer were approved last month.

The decision shows some of the huge advantages of the booster but the limits of assessment.

Boosters were recommended for high-risk groups. These people are defined as people over 65, younger people at high risk for severe COVID, and those who work in high-exposure jobs, like nursing. This recommendation is quite specific.

The FDA panel relied on data from Israel, and small studies from the companies themselves. But Israel has largely vaccinated its population with Pfizer, not Moderna or J&J. And the panelists repeatedly raised concerns about the depth of drug company data, particularly on side effects.

As data reporter Betsy Ladyzhets noted in her COVID Data Dispatch Newsletter after the Pfizer booster authorization, there’s a serious lack of home-grown data underlying the entire booster process. Because the CDC doesn’t track all breakthrough infections—just serious ones—federal advisory bodies are relying on data gathered outside the US.

At the FDA presentation, the Israeli officials said that boosters not only reduced the rate of infections but cut the rate of severe disease by about 70 percent. In people older than 60, they said that boosters reduced deaths by 80 percent.

It seems clear that mRNA boosters will further protect their recipients against COVID. But when it comes to the larger questions—breadth of protection against varients, for example—the data is incomplete. This is not a criticism of the vaccine, it just means the information on them is not gathered or can't be. Much of this data is time-dependent and the meds have not been around long enough.

Regarding side effects, there are two main concerns. The first is blood clotting after the J&J vaccine, which primarily affects women in their 20s to 30s. The recognition of this rare but dangerous side effect led the United States to pause its distribution of the J&J vaccine this spring, breaking the momentum of some outreach campaigns. As of October 5, FDA officials reported 47 cases from J&J. The second is swelling of the heart muscle, known as myocarditis, which has most affected young men, and isn’t as dangerous. There have been 93 cases related to J&J, and 300 following Moderna shots as of June.

The Moderna booster dose, which is just half the 100 microgram primary doses, was only tested on 170 people. Instead, many panelists relied on Israeli data, which showed that out of 3.7 million full 100 microgram third doses delivered in Israel, there were only 44 events that required hospitalization or were life-threatening.

There are some serious problems here. There is a vaccine newsletter! This information is being disseminated to everyone and the concepts are sometimes difficult. Regulatory bodies are shy of using data from systems they don't control, especially when nationalism is involved. There is clearly a jump from the science eye to the political eye. The notion of 'high-risk groups' is an obvious one but not often heard in the public discussion.

Then there is 'context.' The dangerous complications are presented as isolated numbers. What does '44 events requiring hospitalization or were life-threatening' mean? Were the events that followed the vaccine directly related to the therapy? Was there a variation in severity? Is 44 out of 3.7 million a lot when compared to, say, penicillin reactions? Is a fever in a guy with leukemia seen as 'life-threatening' when it would be ignored in a healthy one? These kinds of questions are important when this information becomes so generally available.

Finally, there is the democracy of illness. The West is having a change in how it evaluates its population. The culture is having trouble with the Bell Curve.

The Bell Curve is contracting. Everyone is being mainstreamed. Pronoun reassessments are being made universally although gender identification problems are extremely rare. What in many fields is acceptable risk has become emblematic. A bad cop leads to banning cops. An outlier is not proof of the usual, it is brought under the big tent and personalized.

It may be impossible to make decisions with that mindset.

Question 29




Why is science the only area of public funding where it is assumed the funding will not influence the results?




The vaccination exceptions allowed by OSHA do not include people who are resistant to COVID-19 because they were previously infected. Is the point antibodies or conformity?

From "The Atlantic," arguing that the election was not ideological: "Fundamentally, the contest was about schools—specifically, how many parents remain frustrated by the way public schools have handled the coronavirus pandemic."

I think that is an underestimation.

Moscow University graduate Saule Omarova has been nominated to become Comptroller of the Currency. The Wall Street Journal states she would like to put an "'end to banking' as we know it," in part by transferring private banking functions exclusively to the Federal Reserve, where accounts would "fully replace" private bank deposits. Under her plan, the Journal continues, "The Fed would control 'systemically important prices' for fuel, food, raw materials, metals, natural resources, home prices, and wages" after the Fed is transformed into what she calls "the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.'"

Take an ax to the roots of the most successful economy in the world's history. That sounds reasonable.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey last week, 37% of unvaccinated workers said they would leave if their employer required them to get a vaccine or be tested weekly.

A funny line from Will: Government breeds advocacy groups that lobby it to do what it wants to do anyway – expand what it is doing.

The mandatory vaccine rule from the government is snuck in through OSHA, the organization that protects workers from workplace dangers, not general ones. This is typical of the Left, where a reasonable and specific concern gets held hostage by a general platitude.




An Israeli study by Gazit et al. found that the vaccinated have a 27 times higher risk of symptomatic infection than the Covid recovered. At the same time, the vaccinated were nine times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid. In contrast, a CDC study by Bozio et al. claims that the Covid recovered are five times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than the vaccinated. Both studies cannot be right. This is how an epidemiologist opens an article. He evaluates both and comes down on the side of the Israeli study but...

The St. Louis Federal Reserve recently estimated that there have been three million “excess” retirements during the pandemic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/democrats-culture-wars.html?smid=em-share

Surprising Brooks post in the NYT.

Brooks has always tried to be a bit eccentric but if he keeps this up he won’t get invited to NY cocktail parties anymore. 

I think he’s clever to substitute ‘privilege’ for ‘power’ because it implies insight instead of leverage. Their base support, for example, is certainly not privileged. If that base loses hope, things will be worse. He's also wise to make this separation seem accidental rather than what it is: strategic. The elite has nothing but mortality in common with their base. That distinction must remain organizational rather than aristocratic.

Question 28

Question 28

Just spent an hour confirming my Gmail account is indeed mine. This is part of a giant campaign to convince me of the fantasy that it is secure. In fact, for that hour, it was secure only from me.

“In fact, there’s no mention of ‘parents’…at all in the memo, none.” This is what Anderson Cooper said in defense of the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for anti-schoolboard violence. He thought this was a sensible, insightful assessment of the potential trouble, as if the government expects school boards to be attacked by random childless unemployables wearing antlers. This is astonishingly--and brazenly--insincere. Or maybe these people are just on the other side of the bell curve; maybe they're just dumb.

In 1984, Charles Murray wrote Losing Ground in which he argued that the federal government’s War on Poverty had actually made matters worse for the poor, by substituting welfare dependency for self-reliance. In Coming Apart in 2012, he wrote socio-economic groups had less and less contact with each other. In his new book, Facing Reality, Murray foresees an America that is beset by an advanced, highly malignant cancer—identity politics--and different outcomes for people is explainable only through bigotry and 'white privilege.'
What if this explanation is wrong, as in the Black Plague when everyone blamed the cats?

"Until I came to the U.S., I couldn't imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today's world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there.'" This is from Saule Omarova, nominated to become Comptroller of the Currency. Virtually nobody believes this, but the nominee to run the economy does. How did she get a graduate degree?

There should be a law to the People besides its own will.--Acton


According to Thomas Friedman(!), environmentally cautious Western governments are reducing their respective carbon footprints “in totally uncoordinated ways, from the top down, and before the market has produced sufficient clean renewables like wind, solar, and hydro.” This has contributed to the current shortages. Friedman!


A new report by the Axios website claims that a number of federal law enforcement agencies in the Biden administration have purchased drones from China that have previously been labeled a potential national security threat by the Pentagon.

The government gave away computers to help disadvantaged students when COVID started.
Thousands of school districts across the United States have installed surveillance software on those school-provided devices to monitor their students’ online interactions.

People wonder at the violence and the deracination of the Left. But the Left rejects the neutral rule of law, individualism, the market economy, as well as tolerance for disagreement. These are sort of the basis of American thinking and it led to much of the thinking in the West. If you don't believe in these ideas, what do you think will happen?

The Bee thinks their stuff is being censured. This is from an article:

'Despite our growing audience—we have many more followers now than we did a year ago—we're seeing a drastic, steady decline in reach and engagement. It used to be that 80% of our site's traffic came from Facebook. Now, it's down to just 30%. Babylon Bee articles posted to Facebook used to go viral, generating hundreds of thousands of shares. But that just doesn't happen anymore. Facebook doesn't allow it.

In some cases, our posts aren't merely limited in reach — they're completely suppressed. Here's an example of a recent post that Facebook prevented from being seen by anyone:

We'd have reached more people if we'd printed the article and posted it on a single telephone pole in a small town.'

The real question is not which policy or system would work best ideally, but which has in fact produced better results with far from ideal human beings. Even with the more modest task of evaluating different policies within a given system, the real question is not which policy sounds more plausible, or which would work best if people behaved ideally, but which policy, in fact, turns out to produce better results with actual people, behaving as they actually do.--Sowell

The shortcomings of the original American constitution--the first written democratic constitution ever--were the result of democracy's inherent qualities. They protected the right of a minority and compromised, hoping to work the problems out. Those men were radicals. Today's radicals would have simply murdered their opponents.

On Different Pages vs. in Different Books

On Different Pages vs. in Different Books

The election results are sort of in, although some politicians want us always voting until they get the right result. The Dems seem to have overreached and squandered their anti-Trump, manipulation advantage. The Va. election was shocking to them, I'm sure, with a guy without political experience beating an established, anointed Leftist. Common sense victims are optimistic.

Still, in Buffalo, N.Y., an AOC-backed socialist candidate, India Walton, got 41% of the mayoral vote. Aside from the sheer stupidity of the vote, imagine, as a thought experiment, the theoretical local government's effort at socialism. Presume raising taxes on the working taxpayers, giving it to non-working citizens, increasing union strength in schools and increasing subsidies, and decreasing police funding.

What would the average taxpayer do?

41% of Buffalo voters wanted that scenario.

Question 27

Question 27

Platitudes can be righteously mined forever.

The Va. Governor race has some real implications. The Left will simply have to disguise themselves better.

The National Geographic Society has recognized a new ocean, called the Southern Ocean, around Antarctica, because it is a distinct body of water with its unique characteristics.

The esteemed academic and Moscow University graduate, Saule Omarova, appeared in a 2019 documentary, 'Assholes: A Theory,' in which she called finance “a quintessential asshole industry.” In the film, she spoke of the law as a way to reduce the economic rewards for self-serving behavior. This lady just gets creepier and creepier. Are you sure this is the best we can do? And, if it is, maybe we should change how we pick these powerful people.

And while we're on the topic, should we change the basics of the flow of capital in the most successful economic engine in the history of mankind? That would be a pretty radical experiment, right? And what is it about any of these leaders, the Moscow University grad included, that makes anyone feel they are up to the task? And if they are up to it, what if it doesn't work?

Kids are getting their Halloween costumes together, and this year there's a particularly spooky one going around: some kids are wearing a popular new mask that depicts a human face not wearing a mask.--The Bee

The Virus: Over one in five US adults believe that the risk of hospitalization is 50% according to a Gallup survey, whereas it is actually less than 1% for most of the population. The estimated age-specific infection fatality rate is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85.

A new national poll from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) published on Monday shows that 31 percent of Americans believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Zhang argues that government competes for talent to the detriment of the culture. 'The reason some countries are undeveloped is not that they lack entrepreneurial resources; it is because their entrepreneurial talents have been allocated to the government or to other nonproductive sectors.'
I regret I have seen such little talent in government that I can not corroborate this.

Are eugenicists 'following the science?'

There's always somebody willing to fix the ovens at Auschwitz. 

PETA has been riding this story recently and I agree with their outrage.

Distraught monkeys were chained by the neck in tiny cages and tormented with rubber spiders and mechanical snakes, objects the primates instinctively fear, just to observe their reactions. NIH “white coats” sucked out parts of these monkeys’ brains or destroyed them with toxic acid to intentionally worsen the primates’ fear. In the video, a callous NIH “white coat” can be heard joking, “Where the hell is the dancing monkey?” after one of the tests on the terrified monkeys ends.
There are probably a lot of opinions you could offer here but the main one is that science often attracts people unlike you and me. And, by the necessity of self-preservation, at least, we should always be on guard.

How heavy a governmental hand will be required to redistribute the rewards of effort and achievement of others?

'Nothing is more attractive to the benevolent vanity of men than the notion that they can effect great improvement in society by the simple process of forbidding all wrong conduct, or conduct which they think is wrong, by law, and of enjoining all good conduct by the same means; as if men could not find out how to live until a book were placed in the hands of every individual, in which the things to be done and those not to be done were clearly set down.' 

This quote is from James Carter and suggests the basic problem that faces all society: must civic virtue be grown from the bottom (childhood) up or can it be created by imposition from above (government) down?

Friedman has a remarkably upbeat article on how America's distancing itself, global warming, and the decline of fossil fuel are reordering and pacifying the Middle East. Buried in it is this line: Egypt and Ethiopia could actually go to war over the water-trapping dam that Ethiopia has built upstream on the Nile. (P.S. That dam is Chinese-built and they are the landlord.)