RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/03/the-wisdom-in-knowing-what-we-dont-know/

“The truth about much regarding the COVID-19 epidemic is that there is no knowledge. We do know what the virus does, and how it kills people. But why isn’t the virus killing entire families, as did the Spanish Flu of a century ago.We do not know how many the virus has killed. Yes, we see running tallies of deaths, but how many, especially the elderly, have died with it, not from it? There are not enough forensic pathologists in the world to have done post-mortem examinations to confirm COVID-19 as the prime cause of death.”

Regrettably, there is little knowledge — read that ‘verifiable facts’ — about treating COVID-19, about preventing its spread, about the facts of herd immunity, about its mutation potential, about any form of treatment, the efficacy of the vaccines and many other open questions. This has left experts, world-wide,  to respond in ignorance to the demands of the media for comment. I have seen some appallingly wrong (as it turned out) opinion pieces by experts.

In January, the respected scientific journal Nature asked more than 100 SARS-CoV-2 immunologists, infectious-disease researchers and virologists if it could be eradicated. Almost 90 per cent thought it would become endemic — circulating in pockets of the global population for many years.

I read through that Nature article carefully. As has been the norm at this stage of COVID-19 ignorance, it is highly speculative.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17104/big-tech-big-brother

The power-sharing of the U.S. Federal government with Big Tech appears a recipe for unharnessed power and corruption. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny caught on right away, saying: “This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world. In Russia as well. Every time when they need to silence someone, they will say: ‘this is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter.'”

Fortunately, governors such as Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas and Kevin Stitt in Oklahoma are now moving legislatively to counter federal laws that may have adverse effects on freedom of speech, jobs, election integrity, the energy industry, the first or second amendments and general constitutional rights.

Democracy cannot survive in a country where a few technocrats and oligarchs can choose to deny access to information or platforms to candidates running for office. It is simply unacceptable that they alone — unelected, unappointed, untransparent and unaccountable — can deem what is “harmful” to society. The job now for all of us is to prevent the United States from slowly becoming a full-blown tyranny.

“Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society… how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest?,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on January 27, 2021.

“Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society[…] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?”

Was Mr. Putin defending democracy? Hardly. What apparently worries him is that the Big Tech might gain the power to control society at the expense of his government. What must be a nightmare for him — as for many Americans — is that the Tech giants were able to censor news favorable to Trump and then censor Trump himself. How could the U.S. do this to the president of a great and free country?

“Here I should add an explanatory remark to the reader. Though in my daily work I continue to focus on politics and social commentary, I am convinced that absolute truth—or at least stable truths—can be found only in the scientific realm, in chemistry, physics and math, founded on fundamental principles of observation, testable theory, experimental confirmation and Karl Popper’s notion of falsifiability, articulated in his The Logic of Scientific Theory. For a theory to be accepted as scientific, it must be able to be proven false. The problem with the discursive fields of commentary, scholarship, the misnamed “social sciences,” and the Humanities in general (with the exception of music, which is built on mathematical ratios) is the inevitability of bias, prior convictions and assumptions, and partisan viewpoints that can never be ruled out. ”

I have always been fascinated by gravity, mainly because I never understood it. Richard Feynman, who gave us the heuristic diagrams of quantum interactions, famously observed that “Nobody understands quantum mechanics”; the same is true of gravity. Like everyone, I know it as a tugging force, dragging you back as you climb a hill, pulling you forward as you descend—a force needing to be fought, to struggle against going up or coming down. Seeing images of astronauts floating in their space capsules was a reconciling factor; at least we were grounded, a relief not to find oneself in a condition of permanent levitation. Yet it remains a mystery defying resolution and comprehension.

It’s common knowledge that gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. The strong force binds the fundamental particles of matter together to form larger particles. The electromagnetic force consists of two parts, electricity and magnetism.  The so-called weak force is responsible for particle decay, Schrödinger’s Cat, and radioactivity, and has been descriptively combined with the former as the electroweak force—models predict it can be united with the strong force as the electronuclear force. Gravity is the feeblest of these forces especially at atomic and quantum scales, resisting unification with the other forces into a single equation. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/texas_and_mississippi_announce_a_return_to_the_old_normal.html

March 2 was a red-letter day in America because Texas announced that all COVID restrictions are henceforth over. Additionally, Mississippi, while it didn’t go quite as far, did end mask mandates. Individual citizens in those states can still make their own choices about masks, social distancing, and their business plans but the government is no longer riding herd on its citizens over a disease that is fading away.

On Monday, the New York Times expressed a panicky concern that life in America might one day return to normal:

Covid-19: The U.S. Is Edging Toward Normal, Alarming Some Officials

Across the country, the first day of March brought a wave of reopenings and liftings of pandemic restrictions, signs that more Americans were tentatively emerging from months of isolation, even if not everyone agrees that the time is ripe.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/texas-gov-abbott-will-open-state-100-percent-lift-mask-mandate/

Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced Tuesday that he will reopen the state “at 100 percent” and will rescind the statewide mask mandate beginning next Wednesday.

“Too many Texans have been sidelined from employment opportunities,” Abbott said. “Too many small business owners have struggled to pay their bills. This must end. It is now time to open Texas 100 percent.”

“Every business that wants to be open should be open,” he said.

However, he warned that removing the mandates “does not end personal responsibility.”

“Personal vigilance to follow the safe standards is still needed to contain COVID. It’s just that now state mandates are no longer needed,” he said.

He said the state’s vaccination efforts, as well as decreasing COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations will allow for the state to safely reopen. The state has the lowest positivity rate it has seen in months.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/03/investigate-bidens-handlers-for-crimes-against-the-republic/

It was clear during the 2020 presidential campaign that Joe Biden was a man in decline. Yet the Democrats ran him as their candidate anyway. Was their obsession with removing Donald Trump from the White House worth turning over the federal machine, with its nuclear codes and ability to destroy innocent people, to a man whose faculties are failing him?

Biden’s cognitive challenges have been obvious to anyone who’s willing to make an honest assessment. In both public appearances and in controlled conditions, he’s slurred words, spewed gibberish, stumbled through remarks even with the aid of a teleprompter, and often had the look of a man lost. His lowlights of 2020 include calling the Declaration of Independence “the thing,” appearing to think he was still in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s running for the U.S Senate, and bumbling basic facts.

Ted Rall, a man of the left and no friend of Trump, complained a year ago – in March 2020, not in September or October – that Democrats were “conspiring to gaslight the American people by engineering the presidential election of a man clearly suffering from dementia, Joe Biden.” At roughly the same time, Eoin Higgins, no Republican he, tweeted that “Biden clearly has serious cognitive issues.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/operation-warp-speeds-triumph-11614728552?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

American governments, federal and state, have made many mistakes in the Covid-19 pandemic. But the great success—the saving grace—was making a financial bet in collaboration with private American industry on the development of vaccines. That effort is now letting the country see the possibility of a return to relatively normal life as early as the spring.

President Biden announced Tuesday that the U.S. should have enough vaccine supply for every American adult by the end of May. Last week the Food and Drug Administration finally approved Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, and this week J&J struck a deal with Merck to manufacture the single-shot J&J vaccine as well. With the Moderna and Pfizer shots already going into more than a million American arms each week, thousands of lives will be saved.

It’s important to appreciate what an achievement this is. Critics scoffed when President Trump set a target of having a vaccine approved by the end of 2020, and Kamala Harris suggested she might not take a shot recommended by the Trump Administration.

The Biden-Harris Administration has now changed to full-throated encouragement—though not before continuing to trash the Trump efforts. White House aides have suggested that they inherited little vaccine supply and no plan for distribution. Both claims are false.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/02/27/president-donald-trum

The President of the United States makes $400,000 annually, before taxes. During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised to donate his salary if elected President. It was a promise, even his critics acknowledge, that Trump was keeping.

The presidential salary is a requirement of the U.S. Constitution in Article II, Section 1, Clause 7 and the specific amount is set by Congress. Presidents are not legally allowed to decline their salary, but can donate it to organizations of their choosing.

Trump is the first president since John F. Kennedy to donate his salary. Both John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover donated their presidential salaries to charitable causes. According to congressional records, George Washington initially declined his $25,000 salary, but Congress wouldn’t let him.

Trump’s first-quarter 2017 salary donation to the National Park Service was for $78,333, likely his take-home pay after taxes. The Park Service said an anonymous donor gave $22,000 to round the donation up to $100,000.

In subsequent press events, Trump presented personal checks for an even $100,000, indicating he was dipping into his own personal finances to make up the difference himself.

President Trump donated at least $1.4 million of the $1.6 million he earned as president to various federal agencies. Still in question, however, are the donations for the third and fourth quarters of 2020. Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com verified fourteen of sixteen quarterly donations over four years.

http://Are We All Controlled Opposition Now? https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4202/Are-We-All-Controlled-Opposi

 On the matter of whether President Trump’s speech at CPAC uplifted or depressed:

I could not have been more depressed while listening to Part 1. It was a stump speech without a stump. Every reference to the terrible things “the Biden administration” is doing to our country without first and foremost establishing the regime’s illegitimacy has the effect of normalizing that regime. It wasn’t enough for Trump to flick at maybe having to win the presidency for a “third” time, either. I felt as though we were watching the debut of Trump’s capitulation to the Narrative. C-PAC, after all, has a long tradition of enforcing capitulations when it comes to the existential threats of the moment, including immigration, Islam, subversion. I had to turn off the President altogether during what turned out to be his lengthy paeon to “the vaccine.” Is it be possible he is unaware of the peril involved in injecting untested and unneccessary gene therapies into human beings? The role the vaccine(s) plays in the Great Reset agenda to turn humanity into digital slaves? These remain open questions. 

When I dared to turn the sound back on, Trump was into Part 2: the stolen election. No longer was he blinding us to the nightmare that paralyzes the nation by pretending Biden won office freely and fairly. This I found uplifting the way truth is uplifting. Trump ran through some of the stunning election anomalies and fraud events, he excoriated SCOTUS and the courts for their cowardice (I prefer “treachery”) in refusing to hear the cases presenting evidence of same, and tossed out other choice items in the red meat category, including shout-outs to warmonger Liz Cheney and other GOP monsters. I, for one, gobbled it all up hungrily, and listened as he laid out a series of  essential steps Republicans “must” take to restore free and fair elections in the USA, and “Save America,” his new mission. He looked tanned, rested and ready, and that was uplifting, too.

But ready for what? Was it really red meat or junk food? That is, came the dawn, no bounce. Without having Trump before me, without seeing him under the lights, on stage, where I could marvel at his undimmed confidence and charisma, the glow was gone and the message was cold. He went back to being President-in-exile and we were still captives of the circus ring that American political arena has become.

Why do I say “circus ring”? The responsible government authories failed to acknowledge and rectify the election fraud of November 3; worse, they perpetrated and/or enabled it. That means that campaigning in the future will be no more than jumping through hoops; voting will be no more than entering data for an algorthm to apportion to the Swamp candidate of choice. From hereon out, politics in America becomes a pre-scripted affair with all the twists and turns of a debate in the Supreme Soviet. How do we Save America from that?