RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/shifting_goalposts__covid_deaths_versus_vaccine_deaths.html

Imagine changing the rules in the middle of a football game. The halftime score is 14-12, the Raiders scoring two touchdowns while the Broncos kicked four field goals. In the second half the rules change with field goals worth seven points and touchdowns only three points. Suddenly the Broncos are ahead 28-6. Absurd isn’t it?

That’s what is happening with the reporting of COVID deaths versus vaccine deaths, the media and medical establishment now defining deaths far differently in order to push their agenda of COVID bad, vaccine good.

COVID deaths don’t distinguish between death with COVID versus death from COVID. Early in the pandemic, Dr Deborah Birx said as much:

So, I think in this country we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality. There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem some countries are recording as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now…if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.

Perhaps that is why the US has more COVID deaths compared to many other countries, although in a world ranking, the US is in tenth place in deaths per million, behind Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Preexisting conditions are certainly important and death is often multifactorial. According to the CDC, only 6 percent of COVID deaths were due to COVID only, meaning no preexisting conditions. But what about the other 94 percent?

Suppose coroners ask the question, “If not for COVID, would this patient be alive today?” If the answer is yes, it will be recorded as a COVID death. But one could easily ask the question differently. “If not for diabetes (or COPD, heart disease, obesity, etc) would this COVID patient be alive today?” in which case any of those other comorbidities could just as easily be listed as the cause of death, rather than COVID.

In other words, the diabetic patient may not have died if they didn’t have COVID but may not have died either if they didn’t have diabetes. It seems COVID trumps everything else in death attribution.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/03/defenders-of-civilization/

The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876.

What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate our Animal Farm future. What was odder were both the absurdities of the complaints against American civilization, and the unwillingness or inability of Americans to rebut them and defend their own culture.

Demonizing Our Past

In just a year, thousands of memorials and icons have vanished. Names have changed, words are banned. Careers were ruined. As new totalitarian rules were enshrined, old freedoms became despised.

Yet most of the country sat in lockdown quiet, as it was told that it, and its history, were toxic and culpable—and by whom exactly? Moralists like Labron James? Steve Kerr? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Were Americans in their 244th year suddenly to write checks, apologize, and pay penance to their angry self-described moral superiors?

A few schools apparently are no longer to be named after Abraham Lincoln, the president who saved the Union, destroyed the slave-holding Confederacy, and freed the slaves at a cost of nearly 700,000 American lives. Now 155 years after his assassination, the present generation—the most leisured, entitled, and wealthiest cohort in civilization’s history—deems him unworthy and unfit for any commemoration. Do any of the street-brawling Antifa radicals seem tough guys in comparison to the Union troops at Gettysburg or those who marched with Sherman?

Who or what does the Left offer in place in Lincoln—Che? Fidel? Malcolm X? Cesar Chavez? Margaret Sanger? Xi Jinping? FDR? Barack Obama? All would fall well short of the alleged standards applied by cancel culture. So what are we left with other than nothing? Diversity Academy A? Equity High School No. 3? Inclusion College IV? Campus 1619?

What happens if one principal, just a single superintendent, a few parents, three board members say, “Nope, we are not erasing Lincoln’s name, no way, no how”?

Little need be said of increasing tense racial relations, given that the collective optimism of a year ago during the booming 2019 economy—record low minority unemployment and the undepreciated powers of assimilation and integration were beginning to make race more incidental than essential—has dissipated. That was then, and this is now after pandemic, lockdown, recession, George Floyd’s tragic death, riot and looting, a bitter election, and an ongoing cultural revolution.

Cornell University is now mandating flu shots for its on-campus students, but with allowances for nonwhites to petition for exemptions, in the manner of those pedigreed epidemiologists who all but said science should be ignored in ranking those to be vaccinated by their race. Had someone in 1980, 1990, or 2005 predicted such things, he would have been written off as a dystopian crackpot.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/2020-project-daniel-greenfield/

In just one month, Obama’s former acting solicitor general argued in defense of Nestle in a child slave labor case before the Supreme Court, Apple and Nike lobbied against a slave labor bill, Apple and Amazon were caught using slave labor, and Nestle, Pepsi, Unilever, and even the Girl Scouts were discovered to be using palm oil harvested by children as young as 10 years old in Indonesia.

Outsourcing American jobs saves money, not just because the cost of living in lower in Third World countries, but because the use of slave labor and child labor is routine in those parts of the world. The ‘wokest’ companies and conglomerates cheer Black Lives Matter while edging out their competitors by using Third World resources harvested by children, by slaves, and, in some cases, by child slaves.

The ‘woke’ mobs are toppling statues of Washington and Jefferson, and then taking videos of their exploits with phones whose components are produced by slave labor, before binging on snacks produced by child labor, while fiercely denouncing 18th century slavery in the 21st century.

That’s the hypocrisy of the 2021 Project.

The ‘woke’ scrutinize 18th century slavery while paying little attention to 21st century slavery. If they want to understand slavery, they don’t need to waste their time with the revisionist history of the 1619 Project, or the ravings of critical race theory, when all they have to do is check their pockets. Literally.

Clothing made in the Third World is usually made in sweatshops. Even if it’s not, the cotton for it is harvested by child and slave labor in China, which doesn’t see the need to invest in expensive farming equipment when it has a surplus of cheap labor, including its own minority population.

The 1619 Project recirculated the old false claims that slavery was America’s original sin. There was nothing original or American about slavery. And the easiest way to understand that is not just to look at slavery thousands of years ago, but to examine the evil persistence of slavery in the present day.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/our-racialist-follies-bruce-thornton/

The latest act in our racialist follies featured Hilaria, née Hillary, Baldwin, the wife of boorish B-movie star Alec Baldwin, being outed for allegedly pretending to be a Spaniard. It seems her Spanish accent and claims to be from Mallorca are fabrications. In fact, according to prep school and university colleagues, she’s an “archetypal northeastern prep schooler,” which is about as “white” as one can get. Twitter rants from Alec Baldwin in his usual semi-literate blustering style ensued, and professional race-hacks leveled the “cultural appropriation” charge.

As usual, what is significant about this charge, whether true or not, is what it tells us about our dysfunctional, incoherent racialist sensibilities, which would be amusing if not for the malign effects on our political and social institutions.

Indeed, in a society claimed to be saturated with “white privilege,” it’s curious that so many “white” people try to link themselves to some ethnic minority or other. Citizens with European roots understand that a touch of the exotic, particularly the varieties designated as “protected classes” like black or “Hispanic,” to be more useful for one’s career than the taint of oppression and privilege that comes from being “white.”

Similarly, mixed-race, light-skinned blacks who once tried to cross the “color-line” by self-identifying as “white”–– especially those today who have been raised in middle-class comfort or upper-class affluence–– now are anxious to affirm their black bona fides no matter how far removed they are from the actual lives of working-class or ghetto-dwelling blacks whose dysfunctions and misery can be appropriated and exploited for political and social leverage.

Even more incoherent are the labels we’re accustomed to use when speaking of ethnic diversity. Overbroad terms like “white” or “black” are holdovers from the age of “scientific racism,” the misguided attempt to impose the Darwinian theory of the “survival of the fittest” on the astonishing diversity, complexity, and variety of human beings across the globe. These categories keep alive the dubious notion that “race,” a pseudo-scientific concept founded on superficial physical differences, tells us more about human identities than do culture, language, customs, class, mores, and religion. As such, racial identity, the rationale for slavery and segregation, is kept alive at the expense of the actual, complex diversity of unique individuals.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/04/biden-then-trump-is-rushing-covid-vaccine-biden-now-trump-is-going-to-slow/

Joe Biden has started attacking the Trump administration for not getting the COVID vaccines distributed fast enough. It’s the exact opposite of what Biden was saying before the election.

“As I long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should,” Biden said last week.

As he “long feared and warned”? Who is he kidding?

Before the election, the only fear Biden expressed was that Trump was making wildly unrealistic claims about how quickly a vaccine could be developed, and that Trump was putting pressure on regulators to rush approval. “I trust scientists,” Biden said in September, “But I don’t trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people can’t either.”  He added that “The idea that there’s going to be a vaccine and everything’s gonna be fine tomorrow – it’s just not rational.”

Biden also said that even if a vaccine did miraculously emerge by Election Day, it wouldn’t be available to most Americans until “well into 2021.”

Meanwhile, the only warning Biden issued was that the country faced “a dark winter ahead.”

So what actually happened? Two vaccines were developed by Election Day, and both were quickly approved by federal regulators on an emergency basis.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/covid-hospitalizations-reach-new-highs-states-failing-distinguish

States throughout the U.S. are failing to distinguish between patients hospitalized because of COVID-19 and patients who merely test positive for the disease while being hospitalized for other reasons.

Hospitalizations have for months been viewed as one of the critical indicators of the coronavirus pandemic: Countries worldwide have relied heavily on the number of patients sent to hospitals because of the virus as a way of measuring how severe a region or a nation’s outbreak really is. 

In the United States, as in most other countries, one of the chief concerns of the pandemic has been whether or not hospitals have enough capacity to treat surges in COVID patients in addition to more routine procedures and emergency issues. The most recent surge in positive COVID-19 tests, which began in early October, has led to record highs of hospitalized COVID-positive patients.

The COVID Tracking Project, a group of public health experts and journalists who have been collecting COVID-19 data from state health departments since early 2020, currently lists over 125,000 hospitalized COVID patients nationwide, roughly double the earlier peaks seen in the spring and summer. 

Differentiating between ‘with’ and ‘due to’

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16909/new-year-better

To start with, it made most of us understand that as members of the human species, we are all in the same leaking boat. The pandemic was like a general amnesty or a conflagration that transcends boundaries and includes everyone, high or low, rich or poor, young or old.

One other important feature of the crisis may have been the reassertion of capitalism as the surest means of coping with a disaster hitting us out of the blue. The huge mass of available capital with historically low interest rates…. and virtually inexhaustible productive capacities across the globe, provided many nations with a shield against potentially fatal economic and social shocks.

The year just ending taught us not take things for granted and to value even the most pedestrian joys that existence allows us, such a walk in a park….

As 2021 begins, one is reminded of the verse by Persian poet Masud Saad Salman, hoping that the new year would not resemble the old one.

Masud, of course, was expressing that hope from the Nay Fortress where, having fallen from the grace in the court of a local despot, he had been imprisoned for a year, and was to remain there for the rest of his life. He lamented the fact that Saturday was like Friday and April like March and his share of sunshine reduced to a sickly ray from a hole in the roof of his cell. In other words, he wasn’t doing any better than many us did in the year just ended.

But, let us be provocative, didn’t 2020 have any redeeming feature?

I think it did.