RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/silver-lining-to-omicron-variant-of-covid-19

New Covid-19 infections are reaching record levels in the U.S. and Europe. The surge is due both to the Delta variant that flourished over the past six months and to the new Omicron variant, which, in the week of December 19–December 25, became predominant, accounting for approximately 60 percent of U.S. cases. The rise of Omicron has largely been greeted with apprehension, but the new variant, which tends to cause mild illness, offers hope for a more promising path forward.

A preprint report from South Africa, where Omicron first spread in November, found that individuals infected with the variant had seen increased neutralizing immunity against Delta, making it less likely that Delta would re-infect them. This creates the possibility that large numbers of Omicron cases could immunize the population against past variants and perhaps future ones. Omicron is likely more transmissible than Delta, and Delta has been estimated to be about twice as transmissible as earlier variants. Omicron seems to replicate faster and in greater quantities than earlier variants, meaning that infected people release more virus to infect others. It also appears to be better at evading neutralizing immunity elicited by vaccines or previous infections with earlier variants, including Delta. Omicron was associated with a fivefold higher risk of reinfection and a two-to-four times higher risk of post-vaccination breakthrough compared with Delta in an English study.

These features suggest that Omicron will infect large numbers of people, including many with vaccine and natural immunity. But again, most of these cases will be mild since Omicron by all indications so far seems to be less severe than earlier variants.

Analyses from the Imperial College London, and from Scotland and South Africa, indicate that those infected with Omicron had a 45 percent to 80 percent lower risk of hospital admission than those with a Delta infection. A new analysis by the U.K. Heath Security Agency that adjusts for risk factors including age, sex, and vaccination status found that the risk of hospitalization with Omicron was about a third of the risk associated with Delta. And once hospitalized, Omicron patients fare better than patients with earlier variants.

A just-published study in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases found that 4.5 percent of Covid-19 patients admitted to a large South African hospital from November 14, 2021 and after (the Omicron period) died, compared with 21.3 percent deaths for admissions in the pre-Omicron period. During the Omicron period, 1 percent needed ICU admissions versus 4.3 percent in the earlier period, and the length of hospital stay was cut in half—4.0 days versus 8.8 days. Sixty-three percent of the admissions were “incidental COVID admissions”—patients admitted for another serious medical problem who tested positive for Covid-19 on routine testing—suggesting high levels of asymptomatic or mild illness with Omicron.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/03/one-year-later-more-lingering-questions-about-january-6/

A bombshell report just published in Newsweek details an in-depth, secret operation conducted by the Justice Department before and during January 6. Contrary to the lamentations of FBI Director Christopher Wray that he wished his agency had had better resources to prevent the Capitol breach, hundreds of elite forces under Wray’s authority were on stand-by days just before the protest, and even on the ground as it happened.

The “shadowy commandos” stationed at Quantico, home of the FBI Academy, on January 2, 2021 included the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and SWAT teams. 

“On the morning of January 6, most of these forces staged closer to downtown Washington, particularly after intelligence was received indicating a possible threat to FBI headquarters building or the FBI’s Washington Field Office,” Newsweek investigative reporter William M. Arkin wrote. “FBI tactical teams arrived on Capitol Hill early in the day to assist in the collection of evidence at sites—including the Republican and Democrat party national headquarters—where explosive devices were found. FBI SWAT teams and snipers were deployed to secure nearby congressional office buildings. Other FBI agents provided selective security around the U.S. Capitol and protection to congressional members and staff.”

An FBI tactical team, according to the report, entered the building immediately after protesters did, which was shortly after 2 p.m.

To the casual reader, news that the nation’s top law enforcement agency prepared ahead of time to combat possible violence on January 6 is reassuring. But to anyone who has closely followed the hyperpartisan activity of the FBI over the past several years, the article reads more like a confession, confirming deep suspicions that the FBI played an instrumental role in prompting the events of that day rather than act as a legitimate police force helping to keep lawmakers and American citizens safe.

Those suspicions are not without merit. In September, the New York Times confirmed that at least two FBI informants had infiltrated the Proud Boys, an alleged “militia group” that breached the Capitol that day. Defense attorneys disclose in court documents that FBI agents were in the crowd.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/03/china-to-conquer-moon-in-2026-while-america-makes-gender-neutral-space-suits/

Space is the ultimate strategic high ground. This domain is divided into various zones. First there are the orbits around the Earth: low-Earth orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and geosynchronous orbit. Ancillary to those orbits are the Lagrange points, which are the orbits separating the Earth from its moon. Next up is the Earth-Moon system. If you control the orbits around the Earth and the Lagrange points—as well as the moon itself—you effectively have total dominance over the Earth below. Today, China is poised to dominate not just the orbits around the Earth, but the entire Earth-Moon system. The Americans, despite having won the original space race with the Soviet Union, have yet to realize that another space race is at hand.

In 2018, Ye Peijian, the man charged with getting Chinese taikonauts to the moon, told audiences that China’s leaders viewed the “universe as an ocean.” Beijing believes the moon is analogous to “the South China Sea,” and Mars is akin to the Philippines. Chinese leaders, therefore, are applying classical geopolitical principles to space at a time when their space program is enjoying extraordinary success, all while the Americans remain firmly grounded (and as Washington is doing its best to complicate and stymie SpaceX through onerous regulations).

Recently, China announced it was building the rocket system that would deliver its personnel to the moon by 2026. It’s hardly a far-fetched goal; the Chinese have either hit or come very close to fulfilling their lofty space policy goals since the turn of this century. 

China’s rockets are essentially as advanced as SpaceX’s rockets are. As I wrote in Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, China’s space program is likely to overtake the U.S. program unless Washington embraces drastic changes. Yet, NASA has already announced that its lunar return mission—originally approved by former President Donald Trump in 2018—has been pushed back to the 2030s. China announced its 2026 target shortly after NASA’s disappointing news. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/fly-elon-fly-frontpagemagcom/

Scoring political populist points is the only thing that can explain Elizabeth Warren’s self-serving, myopic and relentless scorn of Elon Musk. To one of the greatest innovators and taxpayers in all human history, Senator Warren mockingly called on the billionaire to pay more in taxes, tweeting, “Lets change a rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.” 

Elon Musk came to America with no money, risked everything he had, and in the process minted thousands of productive and now wealthy members of society, all while steering us, the entire world, toward a brighter future. This is the very essence of the American Dream. What world does Elizabeth Warren inhabit when her only inclination regarding Elon is to mock and ridicule him?

Her target is a guy who will personally pay upwards of $10 billion in taxes in just 2021. That is roughly equivalent to what the entire population of Boston will pay in income taxes in 2021. Or what 20,000 average American taxpayers will pay in their entire lifetimes.

This is a guy who is bending history before our very eyes to all of humankind’s benefit by accelerating the global shift to electrify transportation. That is a very big deal.

This is a guy who put it all on the line fifteen years ago in self-funding what is now the globe’s most innovative automobile company that is now, depending on the day, worth more than the next eight or nine largest global automobile companies combined. What he is doing to turn the automobile industry on its head is beyond comprehension, yet Elizabeth Warren feels compelled to berate and scold him. I can only ask: Why?

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/01/03/falling-back-into-history-n1546610

We are falling back into history, by which I don’t mean the history of the West or of any particular nation but the history of the political world and human settlements from time immemorial, that is, for as long as we have records, monuments, artifacts, cave art, primitive tools and other memorabilia. (I use the term “history” to incorporate what we call “prehistory,” which is pre-literary but discoverable.) Whether we consider Thomas Hobbes’ description of the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” or the erection of a harshly authoritarian governing Leviathan to ensure self-preservation, the picture is one of endemic inequality, poverty, famine, perpetual conflict, and despotic control of a laboring and subject population. 

This is the default position of human life across the millennia, the rope bridge across the historical abyss that civilizations perilously negotiate. The complexities of civilization, however, do not assure general human flourishing. Only the slow and painful emergence of the democratic state has succeeded in lifting vast populations out of misery, destitution, stagnation, and unaccountable, coercive authority.

David Stasavage’s magisterial study The Decline and Rise of Democracy furnishes a comprehensive account of the concept, practice, and history of democracy from its early origins in 6th century Athens to the present day, relying on a minimalist definition of democracy as “based on the presence of competitive elections with a broad suffrage in which incumbent parties stand a chance of losing.” Modern democracy began in the Anglo-American sphere and spread to Europe and certain post-colonial nations in several installments. In an earlier volume, The Third Wave, political philosopher Samuel Huntington provided an assessment of the development of democracy in the modern age, which according to his calculation evolved in three waves dating from the 19th century, post WW II, and the Iberian Peninsula during the 1970s (the Portuguese Carnation Revolution), leading to the establishment of consensual governments. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/gift-mendacious-nikole-hannah-jones-conservative-mary-grabar/

If political leaders across the country are looking for more evidence that they are justified in banning The 1619 Project curriculum in schools they can refer to comments made by the Project’s own creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, on December 26, during the Sunday show line-up, on NBC’s Meet the Press.

In her comments to Chuck Todd, she revealed herself to be a dissembler regarding her role in promoting 1619 Project classroom lessons. Then in tweets that insisted that all critics henceforth engage only with her new book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a 600-page expansion, she admitted that the original project, upon which the lessons are based, is flawed.

Shortly after the program aired, at 10:21 a.m., Hannah-Jones tweeted, “It is revealing when critics of the 1619 Project, 2 yrs later, refuse to critique the book & instead keep rehashing arguments abt the magazine. That’s because we responded to good-faith critique, we revised in response, we included 1,000 endnotes, historians wrote half the essays.” Phil Magness, Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, who has been among the earliest and most frequent critics of the economic claims promoted by The 1619 Project, and who had reached out to Hannah-Jones, commented, “I witnessed this process directly as one of those critics over the last 2 years. And there’s not a word of truth to what she is claiming.” Hannah-Jones, who refuses to engage in debate, in typical fashion, attacked the economic historian’s credentials.

Sixteen minutes later, at 10:37 a.m. she went after Victoria Bynum, one of the historians who early on requested corrections to the Project. In December 2019, Bynum had signed Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s letter to the editor, which was also signed by historians James McPherson, Gordon Wood, and James Oakes. At 6:28 a.m. Bynum had commented on Oakes’s recent article in Catalyst magazine responding to New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein’s November 12 defense of the Project—a promotional lead-up to the November 16 publication of the hardcover book, which is copyrighted by the Times. Bynum summarized it as a critique of the political agenda, specifically Black Nationalism, motivating the project. Hannah-Jones tweeted, with no reference to these points, “Is it common ‘very serious’ practice, 2.5 years later, to critique the unrevised work and to not engage the updated version? Asking for a friend.” Bynum politely replied that neither she nor Oakes was commenting on the new book. As revealed by her defensive response, Hannah-Jones was admitting that the original 1619 Project, the August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine, was error-riddled. As Magness noted, “Nikole Hannah-Jones’s latest argument is to claim that the original 1619 Project—as published in the New York Times as part of a multimillion dollar advertising blitz—was just a rough draft, and the new book is the revised version by which it should be judged. Seriously.”