RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/11/one-year-later-vindication-for-lockdown-skeptics/ 

One year ago, I tweeted: “This is what the Left wants. They want people stripped of wealth, isolated, and terrified. They want sources of joy—church, sporting events, vacations, large social gatherings—eliminated. This is how they get control. And it’s far scarier than any virus.”

It was not a popular sentiment at the time.

My initial reaction to government-ordered lockdowns, promoted by politicians on both sides and President Trump, was in the slim minority to say the least. “Flattening the curve” required deep personal sacrifices, we were warned.

Anyone skeptical of the alleged effectiveness of lockdowns or concerned about the long-term consequences was condemned as a bloodless “grandma killer” or “greedy capitalist” defying science and lacking compassion.

But from the start, “the curve” was bogus stagecraft. As I explained last year, the curve the authorities presented to Americans wasn’t accurate. 

“It’s not unreasonable, in fact, it’s necessary and responsible, to consider that COVID-19 has been in the states since the first of the year,” I wrote March 19, an assessment we now know is true. “If this is the new normal, where incomplete data and media-fueled panic rule the day, that is an even more frightening prospect than what’s happening right now.”

Sadly and shamefully, it has been America’s new normal for one year and counting.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/12/the-blatant-fraud-behind-the-new-1-9-tril-covid-relief-law/

With the COVID-19 relief bill now signed into law, it can’t be any clearer that Americans have had the wool pulled over their eyes on what this really was all about. Far from “COVID relief,” the mantra of the far-left Democrats, it was really all about “Blue State” relief.

That’s right, in case you haven’t been paying attention, the bill that many Americans thought would bring them fat checks and some reprieve from their government-induced lockdown woes has turned into a giant Christmas tree surrounded by goodies for Democrat-run Blue States and their Big Labor allies.

As we’ve pointed out here, here, here and elsewhere in recent weeks, the $1.9 trillion virus relief bill wasn’t even needed. The economy has already been bouncing back sharply, while most states actually weathered last year’s downturn nicely. Some 22 states actually reported higher tax revenues during the pandemic than in the same period in 2019.

So why was it passed? Democrats knew it wasn’t needed, so they used this crisis — remember, their unofficial party motto is “never let a crisis go to waste” — for an unparalleled expansion of the size and scope of government.

Looked at another way, the $1,400 checks handed out to Americans were merely bribes. Democrats could have asked for much more for struggling families and those truly in need, but didn’t.

Why? They really don’t care about them, as the bill plainly shows.

https://news.yahoo.com/pfizer-vaccine-blocks-94-per-183448165.html

The Pfizer vaccine blocks 94 per cent of asymptomatic cases, an Israli study has shown, reigniting hopes herd immunity can be reached.

The Israeli ministry of health found that the Pfizer vaccine has an efficacy of 97 per cent against disease and death and 94 per cent against infection without symptoms.

The figures, which have not yet been peer-reviewed by scientists, were welcomed by scientists as they will help the UK reach herd immunity and eventually relax social distancing rules.

Israel is the first country to have vaccinated more than half its population, which it has done with Pfizer/BioNTech.

As of Wednesday, 55 per cent of its nine million population had been given at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine, and 43 per cent had received a second dose.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-of-the-long-covid-year-11615506819?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“The pandemic is now easing thanks largely to the ingenuity of American drug and biotech companies. The Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed made the inspired decision last year to invest $20 billion developing six vaccine candidates. This is the best decision government made. Vaccines typically take a decade to develop, but years of private investment and innovation have paid off in advanced technologies that have cut the time to a year.”

When a SARS-like virus was reported spreading in Wuhan in late 2019, most Americans never imagined their own government would soon close schools, churches and businesses, order people to stay home, and spend more than $5 trillion to offset the damage. Yet a year later, here we are.

The anniversary is a moment to consider what the pandemic has wrought and how well the U.S. has responded. Healthcare workers have been courageous, drug companies ingenious, and average Americans resilient. The political class and health experts? Not so much.

*Start with China and the World Health Organization, which is supposed to patrol for global health threats. China lied and the WHO played along. After censoring doctors, Beijing denied there was evidence of human-to-human transmission until shortly before it locked down Hubei province with 60 million people. Many Chinese had already left the country for Lunar New Year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-covid-advisor-i-would-tip-my-hat-to-trump-admin-for-vaccine-development-distribution/

Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the White House’s COVID team, on Thursday applauded the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed for the “record time” in which the COVID vaccine was developed, after months of Biden administration officials claiming they had been forced to start from scratch on vaccine distribution efforts.

“We’re grateful for the work that came before us and are doing the best we can to continue it and accelerate it,” Slavitt said on Fox News. “I would absolutely tip my hat. … The Trump administration made sure that we got in record time a vaccine up and out. That’s a great thing and it’s something we should all be excited about.”

The comment contradicts other Biden administration officials who have claimed their predecessors left them “a mess” of a vaccine rollout. The president has previously called Trump’s vaccine distribution a “dismal failure.”

“The sad part is the last administration didn’t leave anything. They didn’t leave a plan,” Biden senior adviser Cedric Richmond told CNN in January. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said “the process to distribute the vaccine, particularly outside of nursing homes and hospitals out into the community as a whole, did not really exist when we came into the White House.” 

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki similarly called the vaccine situation that the new administration had inherited “much worse than we could have imagined.”

As National Review has previously reported, a look at the Bloomberg vaccine tracker shortly after Biden took office reveals that on the last day of the Trump administration more than 1.5 million Americans were vaccinated. The Biden administration inherited a system that had already reached a pace that would meet the president’s goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office.

Slavitt said Thursday that the Biden administration hadn’t been trying to “point fingers.”

https://spectator.org/

Under the heading “Justice for the Victims of Witch Hunts, Old and New,” the Wall Street Journal describes a movement by European activists, including Human Rights Watch, to rehabilitate the many thousands executed for witchcraft from the 1400s to the early 1800s. They are playing belated catchup with the American colonies.  In 1697 the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a Day of Contrition of fasting and remorse for the 1692 Salem witch trials and in 1711 formally exonerated those convicted and paid restitution to their heirs. The current activists are hoping to influence non-Western countries like Saudi Arabia, India, Ghana, and Papua New Guinea, where accusations of witchcraft still lead to torture and death.

But before human rights groups here and in Europe focus their attention far in the past and far afield, they would do well to seek apologies, restitution, and justice for the victims of witch hunts much closer in time and space: victims of the sex abuse in day care hysteria that in the 1980s and early ’90s swept the U.S. (and manifested itself to a much lesser extent in Canada, New Zealand, and Europe). One victim, Frank Fuster, remains in prison. He has now served 36 years of a sentence of six life terms and 165 years. (In 2014 the Florida Parole Commission sent him a letter telling him his initial parole interview was scheduled in 120 years.) All this for crimes that existed only in the fevered imagination of his accusers.

These were witch trials just as surely as the much earlier versions, complete with accusations of Satanic rituals tied to the supposed abuse of preschoolers. Robert Rosenthal, the attorney who won reversals on appeal in a number of these cases, still marvels at public credulity: “These cases made normal people abandon their disbelief. In another situation, would they believe this crazy stuff about pentagrams and Satan? But here they believed it.”

https://www.aol.com/news/fauci-death-toll-pandemic-anniversary-132621394.html

All the mixed messages, conflicting statistics and predictions and suggestions came from Dr. Fauxi himself….rsk

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that had he known a year ago what the death toll from Covid-19 would be, “it would have shocked me completely,” and blamed the politicization of safety measures and “mixed messages” out of Washington for the high number of fatalities.

In an interview on NBC’s “TODAY” show on the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a global pandemic, host Savannah Guthrie noted that Fauci said exactly one year ago that 27 people in the U.S. had died from Covid-19 and asked what he would have thought then of today’s death toll of more than 531,000.

“I have to tell you quite honestly, Savannah, it would have shocked me completely,” said Fauci, who recounted that he warned at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing that day that things would get much worse before they get better.

“It was March 11, 2020, that I said that, but I did not in my mind think that ‘much worse’ was going to be 525,000 deaths,” he said.

Asked what went wrong, Fauci pointed to the “divisiveness in our country.”

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive-755

THE ELECT: THE THREAT TO A PROGRESSIVE AMERICA FROM ANTI-BLACK ANTIRACISTS
Serial excerpt No. 4: They will object that they are “dismantling structures” – while enjoying making people cry and dismantling nothing.

DISMANTLING HEGEMONIC STRUCTURES?

To tar The Elect as crazy is lazy. Dumb, even. It recalls Hungarian physician Max Nordau who deemed Wagner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Schopenhauer as degenerates seized by hysteria and self-involvement. While Die Walküre and War and Peace are hardly grape soda, none of us would join Nordau today. He wasn’t up to the challenge of his times.

I want us to be. But this will require understanding The Elect in an initially counterintuitive way, just as getting Schopenhauer meant letting go of the easier pleasures of Ruskin. The “advanced” way of getting the Elect is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are.

One thing that will discourage a general perception of them in this way is that they themselves will resist the charge so heartily. This is understandable. For one, it will feel unwelcome to them because they do not bill themselves as such, and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. Then, it also implies that they are not thinking for themselves. However understandable their objections, though, we must not let them distract us, as we roll up our sleeves and fashion a way of living among people devoted permanently to this new, yes, religion.

For one, The Elect will insist that what they are doing is not founding a replacement for Protestantism, but acting upon what I have seen phrased as “an enduring white responsibility for deconstructing our own privilege and the systemic pervasiveness of white supremacy.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/542300-maybe-a-biden-hologram-can-handle-his-public-speeches

Joe Biden isn’t a hologram. But the relative absence from the public stage of a newly elected U.S. president and leader of the free world is sparking no small amount of speculation and chatter about the brave new world of possibilities offered by technological advancements and the unprecedented control over information on the internet.

So far, under Biden, there have been none of the extended press availabilities to which we got accustomed under President Trump. No impromptu sessions with the media where he fields questions and attacks, dealing with dozens of wide-ranging topics. President Biden even skipped the traditional live, in-person February address to Congress. We’ve only seen him primarily in the form of various “proof of life”-like video clips distributed on the internet, where he reads scripted remarks from a teleprompter. 

Even some officials who work in the Biden administration told me they can’t help but wonder why. And it has them mulling over farfetched speculation that, upon further examination, starts to look almost like it is not completely outside the realm of the possible.

In June 2019 I published a story on “deep fake” technology. It explored how artificial intelligence (AI) computer technology has put special effects, once reserved as expensive and time-consuming accomplishments of Hollywood films, in the hands of most anybody with a computer and the desire to use it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/11/predictable_train_wrecks_on_crime_and_immigration__145383.html

If you think really hard, perhaps you can imagine more disastrous policies than throwing open our country’s southern border and abandoning criminal-law enforcement in city after city. The consequences are already emerging, and they are grim. It is important to examine them without ideological blinders so we can change course before more damage is done.

Our border policies are national fiats handed down by the Biden administration. The abandonment of criminal enforcement, by contrast, is a local decision, made by supine city councils and district attorneys, many of them “social justice Democrats” backed by progressive elites and Black Lives Matter.

The problem with these policies is not their moral motivation. Helping the poor from Central America is a worthy cause. So is reducing the incarceration rate of young males from minority communities. The problem lies in their practical effects. It is those effects, not sugarplum dreams, that matter in judging public policy.

The most consequential effect of open immigration and lax criminal enforcement is to undermine the safe, stable environment law-abiding citizens need to go about their lives, free from predation. Providing that environment — and signaling clearly that you intend to provide it — is the first responsibility of government.

That means punishing crimes. The goal is not vengeance. Nor is it solely to provide justice for the victims, important as that is. It is also to send a strong message to would-be criminals: Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. Right now, we are sending the wrong message and, by doing so, we are encouraging law breaking on a massive scale.