RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/29/still-more-evidence-that-biden-is-wrong-about-mask-mandates/

A poll out last week found that 75% of Americans say they support a nationwide mask mandate to fight COVID-19. Why shouldn’t they, since the public has been told repeatedly by politicians and public health officials that these steps will slow the spread of the disease and save lives.

Yet new research provides clear evidence that – whatever the lab results of mask-wearing and disease spread might suggest – real-world mask mandates do little, if anything, to slow COVID-19.

The survey, conducted by STAT and the Harris Poll, found there is a partisan split on a mask mandate: 60% of Republicans favor a mandate, compared with more than 85% of Democrats.

Joe Biden promises that, once in the White House, he will order masks on federal property and interstate travel, while pressing state and local leaders to push for mandates. The oft-repeated claim is that this would save hundreds of thousands of lives.

But that is largely based on experimental data, which show that, when worn properly, masks are very effective in preventing the disease from being spread, and provide protection among wearers from getting it.

Too bad the real-world evidence – you know, the stuff scientists rely on to test their theories – doesn’t support any of this.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/27/2020-the-year-racial-identity-took-over/

2020 was the year that a divisive form of racial identity politics, embodied in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, was accelerated and institutionalised.

BLM brought with it a politics of victimhood, a view of races as rigidly defined and adversarial, and a view of the past as something to be sanitised and fought against. The cowardice and capitulation of our institutions to censorious mob pressure made 2020 the year we nearly lost our collective grip on reality.

The intensity of lockdowns, under which billions around the world were confined to their houses, provided the pressure-cooker conditions for BLM’s volcanic eruption on to the global stage. The case of George Floyd in the USA appears, in this sense, merely an opportunistic pretext for an outpouring of self-righteous rage.

What was most striking was the response of the political, cultural and economic elites. BLM, a movement based on fundamentally flawed assumptions and flawed conclusions, was able to demand, and to some extent attain, significant changes to society – the removal of statues, the explosion of corporate diversity programmes, the encroachment of the ‘decolonise the curriculum’ movement – with little sustained pushback from our institutions. You only need to look to history to find several occasions when bad ideas were legitimised as the one and only ‘truth’. But how did today’s bad ideas take over?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/12/28/research-finds-that-uv-leds-kill-99-9-of-covid-19-virus-n1287493

A new study from Tel Aviv University shows that the COVID-19 virus “can be killed efficiently, quickly and cheaply using ultraviolet (UV) light-emitting diodes (UV-LEDs) at specific frequencies,” according to a report from The Jerusalem Post.

“We discovered that it is quite simple to kill the coronavirus using LED bulbs that radiate ultraviolet light,” said Professor Hadas Mamane, head of the Environmental Engineering Program at Tel Aviv University’s School of Mechanical Engineering. Mamane led the study with Professor Yoram Gerchman and Dr. Michal Mandelboim.

UV-LED bulbs require less than half a minute to destroy more than 99.9% of the coronavirus on surfaces, Mamane explained. An article detailing their study and its finding was published earlier this month in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology.

Ultraviolet wavelengths, available in LEDs as UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C, are very effective at disinfecting surfaces using UV-LED bulbs.

“We know, for example, that medical staff do not have time to manually disinfect, say, computer keyboards and other surfaces in hospitals – and the result is infection and quarantine,” said Mamane. “The disinfection systems based on LED bulbs, however, can be installed in the ventilation system and air conditioner, for example, and sterilize the air sucked in and then emitted into the room.”

https://townhall.com/columnists/scottmorefield/2020/12/28/this-data-for-masked-vs-unmasked-counties-would-be-on-every-front-page-if-it-sho-n2582176

As you may have heard, we’ve sort of got a “casedemic” problem here in Tennessee. That means lots and lots (and lots) of people are testing positive for COVID-19. That’s about all we know for sure, of course. Nevertheless, hand-wringing from media, politicians, and local ‘health authorities’ is seemingly neverending, as are local reporters in my neck of the woods being filmed standing in front of that FEMA body truck they don’t bother to tell us has been sitting in front of the regional hospital, unused, SINCE MARCH. Hospitals aren’t overwhelmed by any measure, and even the death toll isn’t really all that impressive either considering that Tennessee is actually below the national average in deaths per million and most people who are dying are either already super old or super sick.

Indeed, while COVID does tragically hit some people hard, most ‘cases’ are quite mild and often non-symptomatic, driven by panic at every sniffle or people being forced to test for work and other reasons. And there is increasingly solid evidence that not everyone counted as a ‘COVID death’ is really a death caused by COVID, but rather someone who had a positive PCR test at some point in 2020 before dying. When you have a highly contagious respiratory virus going around, particularly one that is seasonal and seems to be boxing out the flu, an increasing percentage of those who die will likely have it. These ‘scary’ numbers lie at the root of the ongoing panic and give continued justification for our overlords to continue to exercise control over society.

Here in Tennessee, one of the few states without a statewide mask-mandate, much pressure has been placed upon Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to “do something.” Since lockdowns are thankfully for the most part out of the question here, the pressure has centered on establishing that mandate the mask-Karens have been longing for. Even former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a medical doctor, has gotten in on the action, begging Lee to pull the trigger in a Facebook post earlier this month that blamed rising case numbers not on the winter months when such viruses always tend to spread, but on supposedly unmasked rural counties.