RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2021/01/15/new-study-lockdowns-didnt-stop-spread-covid-19/

As always, approach all stories that headline the word “study” with some caution. Newsweek’s report on a new study from Stanford published this week in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation should carry the same caveat — one study does not a scientific foundation make. However, the findings in this study of the impact of lockdowns on COVID-19 transmission do seem to fit our own observations, especially in the pandemic’s second and third waves:

The most restrictive non‐pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for controlling the spread of COVID‐19 are mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures. Given the consequences of these policies, it is important to assess their effects. We evaluate the effects on epidemic case growth of more restrictive NPIs (mrNPIs), above and beyond those of less restrictive NPIs (lrNPIs).

We first estimate COVID‐19 case growth in relation to any NPI implementation in subnational regions of 10 countries: England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and the US. Using first‐difference models with fixed effects, we isolate the effects of mrNPIs by subtracting the combined effects of lrNPIs and epidemic dynamics from all NPIs. We use case growth in Sweden and South Korea, two countries that did not implement mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures, as comparison countries for the other 8 countries (16 total comparisons).

Implementing any NPIs was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries, including South Korea and Sweden that implemented only lrNPIs (Spain had a non‐significant effect). After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. In France, e.g., the effect of mrNPIs was +7% (95CI ‐5%‐19%) when compared with Sweden, and +13% (‐12%‐38%) when compared with South Korea (positive means pro‐contagion). The 95% confidence intervals excluded 30% declines in all 16 comparisons and 15% declines in 11/16 comparisons.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/13/the-impeachment-of-freedom-of-speech/

“He did not call for a riot; he did not call for anyone to enter the Capitol Building; he did not say anything about insurrection. As Alan Dershowitz has said, all of Trump’s comments fall under the protections of the First Amendment. It was legitimate political speech – whether you liked it or loathed it – not a cry for the use of imminent violence.”

Donald Trump has once again made history in a way he would rather not have. He has become the first president in the history of the American republic to be impeached twice. The House of Representatives has voted to impeach him for ‘incitement of insurrection’. He will now be put on trial by the Senate. If he is found guilty – not impossible, given how many Republican representatives and senators have been making pro-impeachment noises – he will be turfed out of office at the very end of his presidency and barred from ever standing for political office again.

Who could be against this? Trump, as most of the media, the social-media oligarchies and politicians of all persuasions have been insisting incessantly since the breaching of the Capitol last week, is the new Hitler. The Capitol riot was the Reichstag Fire / the Beer Hall Putsch / Kristallnacht 2.0 – pick your favourite Holocaust metaphor – and Trump is responsible for it. The protesters were insurrectionists – worse, they were terrorists – and Trump was the spiritual and operational instigator of their terrorism. That’s the narrative we have been suffocated with for a week now. The Capitol breach was the 9/11 of our times, serious journalists madly claim, and Trump was its Osama bin Laden. People have actually said this.

In such a moment of hysteria – and we really have reached hysteria now – it can be difficult to call for calm and reflection. But that is what we must do before things go too far. The truth is that this impeachment of Trump is deeply problematic. It is an indictment not just of a president who has done many gravely questionable things in recent weeks, but also of freedom of speech; of the right of everyone – whether president or plebeian – to express him or herself plainly and passionately. Trump is essentially on trial for making heated political comments, for pushing an ideological line – that the 2020 election was ‘fraudulent’ – that many people find offensive. If he is found guilty, he will be found guilty of expressing himself in a way that the political elite considers problematic. Everyone needs to stop, breathe, and consider the impact this would have on the already frail culture of freedom.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/14/revenge-of-the-neocons/

The conflict between neoconservatives and the Trump base sets up a major battle for which faction will control the Republican Party in the post-Trump era.

The conflict between neoconservatives and the Trump base sets up a major battle for which faction will control the Republican Party in the post-Trump era.

It is the retaliation the Bush-Cheney regime has craved for more than a decade.

In a blistering interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in October 2008, Donald Trump wondered aloud why then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had not impeached George W. Bush. “The [Iraq] war is a total catastrophe,” Trump said on the once-friendly network that’s been his mortal enemy since 2016. “There’s only one person you can blame and that’s our current president.”

The Manhattan real estate mogul insisted Bush should have been removed from office for lying about Saddam Hussein’s secret trove of weapons of mass destruction, the rationale for the 2003 invasion. “Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying. By saying they had WMDs, by saying all sorts of things that happened not to be true.” Bush was, Trump claimed, “the worst president ever.”

Trump also unloaded on Bush’s inner circle, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney. “He’s a hawkish guy,” Trump said about Cheney. “He said a few months ago the war was going fantastically . . . you know, it’s just very sad. I just know they got us into a mess the likes of which this country has probably never seen.”

More than 12 years later, Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wy.), the literal and figurative heir to the neoconservative “bloodline,” voted to impeach President Donald Trump. Calling the Capitol the “most sacred place in our Republic”—when you’ve been weaned on the mother’s milk of Beltway bravado and no-bid defense contracts, federal buildings in Washington, D.C. are the most hallowed ground—Cheney announced her intention to support Pelosi’s latest political stunt.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/14/an-impeachment-incitement/

Donald Trump was impeached again on Wednesday, a week before leaving office in one of the great travesties of modern politics.

Here are reasons why the exercise proved a farce.

One, impeachment was never intended by the founders to become a serial effort to weaken a first-term president. But this latest try will mark the third failed attempt of Democrats in Congress to remove Trump before his allotted tenure.

The first Democratic impeachment effort of December 2017 fizzled. The second impeachment of December 2019 succeeded but predictably failed to obtain a Senate conviction.

This third try will likely not result in a Senate conviction, either.

But from now on, House impeachment will be used by the out-party as a periodic club to wound a first-term president. President-elect Biden should beware.

Two, the country is wracked by a pandemic, recession, a summer of Black Lives Matter and Antifa looting, arson, and violence, and the recent rogue group of Trump supporters storming the Capitol. Washington, D.C. is now militarized in a way not seen since the Civil War. Over 20,000 troops patrol the streets.

Thousands are dying from COVID-19. Politics and incompetence at the state level slow down the widespread vaccination of the vulnerable.

So the last thing Americans now needed was the distraction of virtue-signaling politicians to impeach a lame-duck president who will be gone in a week.