WTA Courage

WTA Courage

Commentators often bore people to tears about 'nerves' and 'anxiety' as factors in high-level women's tennis. But WTA courage is leaving men's sports far behind. 

The Women’s Tennis Association said Wednesday that it would halt all of its tournaments in China because it isn’t satisfied that Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai is safe following an allegation of sexual assault against a retired senior government official made last month on her verified social-media account.
Though the decision could cost women’s tennis hundreds of millions of dollars in future revenue, WTA Chief Executive Steve Simon said he would willingly cut off one of the sport’s largest business partners until Ms. Peng’s status was clarified.
Other sports organizations, such as the National Basketball Association and soccer’s English Premier League, have previously found themselves in conflict with China over various matters, usually integrity vs. profit. Integrity is usually defeated handily. But the WTA’s move to suspend the nine tournaments it has scheduled there for next year appears to be unprecedented in global sports. Brave and laudable.

And the Olympics in China is coming. (much from WSJ via Don)

Covid Questions

Covid Questions

Verein Sterbehilfe – the German Euthanasia Association – has issued a new directive, declaring it will now only help those who have been vaccinated or recovered from the disease.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge say the social distancing rule of six feet does not protect against catching COVID-19, even outdoors.

An email from a school contained the following sentence: “Those pupils who were exempt from wearing a mask last academic year will once again be exempt and should wear a yellow badge to indicate this.”

Covid-19 cases in the U.S. need to fall “well below 10,000” per day for the country to achieve some semblance of pre-pandemic life, White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated Tuesday. This is a completely fabricated number with no basis in science or epidemiology.

Sorta like 'social distancing.'

New York’s mayor announced that children aged five and older would get $100 for being vaccinated against Covid. Based on seroprevalence surveys, it appears that close to half of American schoolchildren have already had Covid. (The estimate was about 40 percent as of June and has undoubtedly risen during the spread of the Delta variant.) So, with a very low rate of significant disease in children under age 18, uncertain risks of vaccine side effects and half of these kids already immunized, why the enthusiasm to vaccinate?

David Rubin was banned from Twitter for a week in July for predicting that the Biden administration would impose a federal vaccine mandate.

The vaccine does not stop disease transmission. So, support for lockdown policies has nothing to do with the risk posed by unvaccinated.

The government has just had a significant defeat with the courts' disallowing the OSHA mandated vaccine for companies with over 100 employees.

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle’s tweet, “OSHA doing this vax mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate workaround for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.” "Work-around." Let's think about that. Does that mean "not exactly permitted," something OSHA is supposed to prevent? Doesn't that mean 'illegal?'

French study finds most long COVID symptoms (except loss of sense of smell) not associated with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. NIH will spend $1.1 Billion on it anyway.

Surprising no one paying attention, a french study seems to demonstrate that “long covid” is not, in fact, predominantly caused by covid.

A November 14 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper on the pandemic and test scores led by Brown University economist Emily Oster found that (in Oster’s words) “Bottom line: losses are big, and much bigger with less in-person school.” 

Strangely, this is optimistic regarding formal education.

Across Europe, basic norms of civilised society are giving way to panic. The unvaccinated are being excluded from an ever-wider range of basic rights. Austria has criminalised them. Italy has stopped them doing their jobs. The Dutch police have fired on anti-lockdown demonstrators, seriously injuring some of them. We are witnessing the ultimate folly of frightened politicians who cannot accept that they are impotent in the face of some natural phenomena.--Telegraph

The ‘politician’s fallacy’ was first identified on 'Yes Minister.' It reads, ‘We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.’

Registered nurse Donna Schmidt, 52, is on unpaid leave from her job at a Long Island-based healthcare system. She has both religious and scientific objections to Covid-19 vaccinations. “I’m not against vaccinations,” she told me. “Traditionally, the Covid-19 vaccine isn’t a vaccine. The CDC changed its definition of a vaccine. It’s truly gene therapy. The mRNA technology has never been used in human beings before.” She adds: “Historically, government doesn’t give back power. What’s next?”

Seventy-five percent of Covid deaths in America are of people retirement age (65) and older. On the other side, only 7 percent of Covid deaths are of people below the age of 50.

By mid-October, New York State reported that 4,100 unvaccinated workers were put on furlough or unpaid leave, 3,100 had been fired and another 1,300 quit or retired.

In the first year of the pandemic, around 100,000 people in the UK died after testing positive for Covid. Of these, just 0.025 percent were children. That’s tragic for the families of those 25, of whom six were otherwise healthy. But during that same period, around 50 children were killed on Britain’s roads, and around 16,000 were injured.

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:"