RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/05/when-government-uses-the-private-sector-as-agents-of-censorship/

Over the weekend, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene got the Donald Trump treatment from Twitter: The social media platform permanently banned her personal account. If this were simply a private group deciding who can and can’t participate in its forums, then there’s no problem. That would be Twitter’s right. But we know Democrats are using private companies to censor speech they don’t like, and any discussion that threatens their plans to accumulate ever more political power. This is not America, more like Amerika.

Twitter booted Greene due to her “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” which is another way to say she’s tweeting messages contrary to the narrative constructed by the Faucists: There is no solution to the pandemic outside of vaccines, lockdowns, and masks.

Twitter, which regularly sends users to “Twitter jail” when their tweets challenge and offend left-wing orthodoxy, permanently banned Trump a year ago “​​due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” It has also permanently suspended a Newsmax reporter “for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” which means his tweets didn’t meet the Twitter mob’s demand for conformity. Dr. Robert Malone, an mRNA vaccine researcher, has also been suspended from Twitter. The official word is he disobeyed the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy – he said something the Twitter hall monitors didn’t like.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/disapproval-of-biden-hits-new-high-11641334239?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

President Joe Biden’s popularity in the early months of his term proved to be transitory. Now surging inflation is among the reasons that more voters are expressing disapproval than at any point in his presidency. Adding ingratitude to injury, the progressive activists Mr. Biden has been indulging since the moment he took office are now talking about canceling him before the 2024 general election.

No wonder Senate Democrats want to talk so much about the last days of the Trump presidency. There’s precious little for them to celebrate about the current one. Nearly 54% of Americans express disapproval of the job Mr. Biden is doing in the Oval Office—a new high for his term in the RealClearPolitics average of public opinion polls. Meanwhile just 42.3% of Americans approve of the president’s work.

This column will offer the usual caveat that polling is not an exact science, if it’s even a science. But the bad Biden news across the survey landscape has to concern partisan Democrats.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-yorks-trump-inquisition-letitia-james-ivanka-eric-donald-11641336578?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

One feature that distinguishes the U.S. legal system from, say, Russia’s, is that prosecutors are charged with pursuing justice—not politically disfavored individuals or families. New York Attorney General Letitia James’s legal pursuit of Donald Trump, his organization and his children, now entering its fourth calendar year, smacks of the latter. She’s now trying to compel testimony from two of the former President’s children, and there had better be rock-solid evidence of significant wrongdoing at the end of this road to justify the corrosive appearance of politicized justice.

Ms. James’s investigation, according to a 2020 court filing, focuses on whether Mr. Trump or others “improperly inflated the value of [his] assets on annual financial statements in order to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.”

The Attorney General’s recent subpoena of Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, which they are trying to quash, seeks information “in connection with an investigation into the valuation of properties owned or controlled by Donald J. Trump or the Trump Organization, or any matter which the Attorney General deems pertinent thereto.”

A federal lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump seeking to halt the investigation notes that his son Eric already was deposed by Ms. James’s office in 2020, and that the former President has “produced over 8 million pages of documents in response to [Ms. James’s] subpoenas” since 2019.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-s-fiercest-critics-now-agree-with-his-covid-fighting-strategy/ar-AASq1df?cvid=0c9f7f7b822d4e8d960b1a3c9c071b9a&ocid=winp1taskbar

“There is no federal solution,” President Joe Biden told the nation’s governors last week while addressing surging COVID cases from the Omicron variant, the latest wrinkle in the coronavirus pandemic. “This gets solved at the state level.”

That’s exactly what then-President Donald Trump said in 2020. While campaigning for the presidency, Biden accused Trump of “not having a plan” to beat COVID, while he himself did. Now, with this apparent reversal of his campaign message, Biden seems to be channeling the position championed by his predecessor, who said in April 2020 that the federal government should be a “backstop” for whatever states chose to do to control their health emergencies.

“My message to the governors is simple. If you need something, say something,” Biden said on Dec. 27.

Trump’s handling of the pandemic was widely criticized—by Democrats, the media, foreign allies and adversaries as well as some in his own party. It was a key factor, perhaps the decisive factor, in his election defeat at the hands of Biden in November.

Biden’s tacit acknowledgment that Trump was right about the scope of a federal pandemic response and his explicit praise of Trump’s messaging on vaccines this month begs the question: What else might Trump have been right about?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/04/a-mistrust-thats-been-brewing-for-a-half-century/

The divisions in American society keep building, despite all the talk of tolerance and unity.  Divisions between the genders, as well as between the gendered and nongendered.  Divisions between the races.  Between the different legal classes of immigrants.  Between the religious and the secular, the Ivy League-educated and the Midwestern farmer, and between those thriving on the global economy and those tied to and dependent on their local communities.  But now, yet another division has been added: between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.

Never before has someone who has refused a particular medical treatment been so ostracized and condemned.  And yet, the division has gone beyond just the difference between those who have received the shot and those who haven’t.  The vaccinated/unvaccinated division now comprises a distinct political subset all its own.

The battle lines between vaccinated and unvaccinated mirror other combative fronts within society. The mistrust of the unvaccinated toward the aims and methods of the vaccine advocates reflects the mistrust of urban minorities toward the police.  The harsh and condemning invectives hurled by the vaccine-pushers against the unvaccinated reflect those hurled by secularists against religious believers.  The unvaccinated don’t just pose a health risk to COVID; they constitute a subversive group that threatens the very fabric of democracy.

In viewing the unvaccinated in the same light as it sees terrorists, the political left seems surprised, even shocked, at the emergence of this allegedly dangerous group. But it shouldn’t be surprised.  The mistrust that the unvaccinated now harbor toward the vaccine-pushers is a direct result of the seeds of mistrust planted by the political left a half-century ago.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/04/can-we-stop-fearing-covid-this-chart-suggests-the-answer-is-yes/

Two years after COVID first landed on our shores, the rate of new cases has absolutely exploded. That’s making headlines. Here’s what isn’t making headlines: Daily COVID deaths are down.

As before, news that COVID is spreading has generated a raft of stories about how the latest wave is stretching the nation’s health care system to the breaking point. A small sampling of headlines:

“EMS response times lengthening as COVID cases skyrocket”
“VA Officials Fear Overburdened Hospitals As COVID Cases Skyrocket”
“Boston hospitals could face ‘disaster’ as coronavirus wastewater shoots up and virus cases explode”
“Fauci expresses worry for hospitals amid omicron-fueled spike in COVID cases”

But wait a second. Tracking data from the Centers for Disease Control show that this time, things are very different from previous waves.

While the number of people testing positive for COVID has indeed soared – the CDC reported almost half a million new cases on Dec. 29 alone, nearly twice the daily peak from last year – the number of people being admitted to intensive care units and the number reported to have died from COVID hasn’t followed suit.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/universities-covid-policies-defy

Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.

Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.

At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door.

I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face. Another told me that the experience in quarantine “totally changed” her feelings about the school. “Everyone’s just fed up at this point,” she said. “People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And it was during finals.” She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.”

Given the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently changed the official quarantine period from 10 days to five, I reached out to Georgetown’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Ranit Mishori. She told me that Georgetown is still using a 10-day quarantine.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18092/heed-the-advice-of-edmund-burke

The British statesman Edmund Burke left the stage centuries ago but left behind wisdom that would be well heeded by the America of 2022.

“Nothing,” he reminds us, “turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.”

Today our nation is facing multiple threats and the question its citizens need to ask is whether Washington is capable of recognizing these threats. Can this Administration confront and defeat them? Upon that answer hangs the future of our country and our democracy.

From a China intent on assuming global military dominance to an Iran whose nuclear ambition remains unchecked – from an America dependent on goods and services from the very nation that intends to reduce us to a third rate power to international cyber terrorists who put our economic foundations at risk — we need to acknowledge that America is under siege.

There are extraordinary domestic threats as well. Legitimate concerns remain about the integrity of our voting system as well as equally serious questions about the role of “bad actors” both here and overseas sowing mistrust by deliberately spreading social media disinformation.

This coming year will be a challenge for virtually every element of our society as COVID variants continue to take their toll. The credibility of health authorities is suffering: they offer conflicting advice, creating doubt and confusion. What also cannot be debated is COVID’s winter impact on hospital staff and emergency first-responders as they suffer from COVID infections, further reducing the nation’s ability to recover its health.

https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/p/on-utopian-thinking

Introduction

Pundits, professors and social psychologists have made numerous attempts at explaining the nature of contemporary woke progressivism. None seem to perceive the great awokening as a human, psychological phenomenon, perhaps precipitated by a national trauma such as the George Floyd knee-on-neck fatality, but ultimately, at its deepest level, generated by profound utopian longings, intrinsic to human nature. These may seem harmless enough as fantasies, but in fact they have been at the root of political ideologies that have made the 20th century the bloodiest in human history, and promise to do the same for the 21st Century.

As psychoanalysts with a combined experience of 100+ years, our observation of the human psyche has revealed how rarely humans, under the influence of utopian fantasies, are guided by reality and rationality. We will take as a given that consciously stated motives can coexist with behavior that has the exact opposite result from conscious desires. We will describe the largely unconscious motives that drive the great awokening in its search for the perfect world.

What follows first is an unpublished essay written 40 years ago. At the time we wrote it we were disturbed by the destructive violence of the New Left. We tried to understand, from our perspective as psychoanalysts, how people who wished to create a perfect world would want to destroy the world we live in first. Fortunately the Radical Left of those days did not succeed in destroying our world. But now, forty years later we have another group the Woke Progressives  who again seem bent on destroying civilization in the service of building a perfect world.  And so, we will be bringing up to date the observations in this earlier essay. While we could not have foreseen the contemporary version of utopian thinking, this early paper can serve as an introduction to our present moment. We will subsequently update the perspective while holding fast to its central account of the human mind.

Utopia

Utopian longings are virtually as old as human consciousness itself- or one second younger. For if the dawning self-awareness of primitive man, shivering in his cave could be fancifully telescoped into a single sequence of thought, it might have been: “Why look at this…there has to be something better.”-and so. utopianism was born.

Of course, the utopian dream in its fullest expression comprises much more than “something better.” Utopia is perfection itself: no pain, no worries, no conflict, no evil, perfect humans in a perfect world- one happy family needing no “government”. Marx and Engels, for example,  argued that after the revolution “state interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then dies of itself..”

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.