RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/bidens-covid-advisors-ignore-high-costs-of-lockdowns

For the lockdown-weary, a brief window of hope opened after the presidential election. With Joe Biden victorious, Democratic politicians and their media allies lost their incentive to weaken Donald Trump’s economy and stoke Covid-19 panic among voters. And with Republicans well-positioned to retain the Senate, governors and mayors in blue states could no longer count on a windfall from a Democratic Congress to rescue them from the consequences of their lockdowns. Finally, cooler heads could prevail—right?

So much for that fantasy. Instead of reconsidering their policies, local officials are restricting more businesses and closing more schools, as New York City has just done. Journalists continue treating Covid deaths as the only ones that matter, while ignoring the mounting medical and social toll from lockdowns. Promising more restrictions, Biden has created an advisory board comprised of individuals who favor stricter lockdowns and foresee restrictions continuing until late next year, even if a Covid vaccine is quickly approved.

Biden and other leaders claim to be following “the science,” but that obviously doesn’t include the research showing the high costs and low benefits of lockdowns and school closures. Closing schools was a dubious move in the spring, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that it would likely do little to stem the pandemic (and noted that school closings in other countries had failed to make a discernible impact). Today it makes even less sense in light of the accumulated evidence.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/19/covid-19-lockdowns-lead-to-a-failure-to-thrive/

What in the hell are we doing?

There once was a time, like any other time before the year 2020, when people would have been ashamed to openly boast about abandoning their aging parents during the holidays.

But broadcasting plans to ditch ailing mothers and fathers for Thanksgiving is the latest in COVID-19 fashion. Thanks to more heartless, cruel guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and outlandish orders issued by tyrannical governors of both political parties, families are planning to forego holiday traditions to avoid infecting each other with the virus.

“I already canceled Thanksgiving and Christmas with my 91-year-old mother because I DON’T WANT TO KILL HER,” left-wing pundit John Aravosis declared on Twitter. Dozens of his followers chimed in to announce similar plans. 

Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, after disclosing he and his family had contracted coronavirus despite following all the rules since the start, said he had not seen his 85-year-old mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, since last spring. “I’ve been able to do almost nothing with her for six months,” Duncan admitted on CNN. “But there’s nothing worse than having the people you care about contract this virus.”

That is, of course, a preposterous statement. It would be easy to name dozens if not hundreds of “worse” things that could happen to a loved one; for example, slowly withering away in a long-term care facility, isolated from family, desperate for human touch and interaction. But that is exactly what’s happening across the country as most states continue to impose harsh restrictions for nursing home visits. The most prosperous country in the world is allowing its most vulnerable citizens—men and women who defended and built America—to die of Third World causes including “failure to thrive,” a common ailment among children in impoverished nations.

“I’d Rather Die From COVID Than Loneliness”

According to an Associated Press story this week, an estimated 40,000 nursing home residents have died prematurely since March, resulting in a 15 percent increase in “excess deaths” at those facilities. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/correct-diagnostics-needed-walter-williams/

“……

The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Meria Carstarphen, last year said, “White students are nearly 4.5 grade levels ahead of their black peers within Atlanta Public Schools.” In San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students, it is 12% — a gap of 58%. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading, as did only 23% of black students — a gap of 60%. In Philadelphia, 47% of black students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, 59% of black students scored below basic in math and 49% in reading. In Detroit, 73% of black students scored below basic in math and 56% in reading.

“Below basic” is the score a student receives when he is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and grade level skills. How much can racism explain this? To do well in school, someone must make a kid do his homework, get a good night’s rest, have breakfast and mind the teacher. If these basic family functions are not performed, it makes little difference how much money is put into education the result will be disappointing.

In 2019, the racial breakdown of high school seniors who took the ACT college entrance exam and met its readiness benchmarks was 62% of Asians, 47% of whites, 23% of Hispanics and 11% of blacks. That helps explain a 2016 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce “African Americans: College Majors and Earnings.” It found that black college students were highly concentrated in lower-paying and less academically demanding majors like administrative services and social work. They are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering and math, even though blacks in these fields earned as much as 50% more than blacks who earned a bachelor’s degree in art or psychology and social work.

James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled “Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/our-dysfunctional-race-relations-bruce-thornton/

Commentator and radio host Larry Elder recently posted an insightful tweet: “It is a sign of progress that today in America ‘race relations’ pretty much comes down to just one thing: how black people feel about white people––and how white people feel about how black people feel about white people.”

Unpacking this comment will reveal how dysfunctional “race relations” and racial discourse have been for half a century since legal segregation was ended.

First, I suspect the word “progress” carries a double edge. Of course, the condescending and patronizing sensibility that underlies “white” America’s obsession with black people’s opinions of them is a tremendous improvement over the indifference and neglect at best, and at worst the daily demeaning humiliations and physical violence of the past.

But the goal of the Civil Rights Movement that brought down legal segregation wasn’t for blacks to become “mascots,” to use Thomas Sowell’s metaphor, of enlightened white people’s moral preening, or superficial compassion, or need for racial redemption and absolution. Rather, it was for black people to be in full possession of the unalienable rights upon which the country and the Constitution were founded, and hence to be politically and legally equal to other Americans. The color of their skin, then, would be irrelevant to their political and national identities and the “content of their character.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-left-politicizes-covid-irony-abounds/

The ‘follow the science’ Democrats care more about politics than science.

Where has the coronavirus gone?

Nowhere. The pandemic has gained a second wind, even as it is mysteriously scarcer in post-election headlines. If anything, COVID-19 seems more contagious as cold temperatures arrive, people stay in indoors, and perhaps their vitamin D levels taper off.

Whatever one’s views on the virus — whether it remains an existential threat or, contrarily, prompts overreactive lockdowns that are more harmful and maybe even deadlier than the virus itself — nothing much has changed since Election Day.

Or did viral perceptions suddenly change? The pandemic certainly no longer serves as an election lever to demagogue President Trump as a veritable killer.States such as California are under a nearly complete lockdown. Draconian measures will abbreviate Thanksgiving gatherings in a way unprecedented in U.S. history. Yet elites such as California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) have violated the quarantines they themselves have endorsed.

Following the media announcement that Joe Biden would likely become president, crowds swarmed into the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. They violated every state mandate requiring masks and social distancing. Authorities did nothing — just as they had done nothing during the summer-long protesting and rioting. Apparently, some outdoor gatherings were correct; others, not so much.

A similar warping of science accompanied news about the possible rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Julie Kelly of the conservative website American Greatness has documented the changing narratives about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer is one of five companies in line to receive massive federal funding under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program to hasten mass vaccinations. Such an ambitious program is unmatched in the history of viral epidemiology. On November 16, another company in the program, Moderna, announced promising results from a clinical trial.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla predicted in early September that by the end of October, his company would offer a preliminary announcement concerning the safety and effectiveness of his company’s vaccine. His forecast was met with apprehension on the left. Any positive assessment was seen by the Left as political, validating, shortly before the election, the Trump administration’s rapid response to the virus.

Yet on October 27, a week before the election, Pfizer corrected Bourla’s earlier estimate. The company claimed any such declaration would follow rather than precede the election.

https://dianebederman.com/you-racist-karen-the-devolution-of-civility-and-the-declin

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Without ideas held in common there is no common action and without common action there may still be men but there is no social body in order that society should exist and a fortiori that a society should prosper it is necessary that the minds of all the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas.”

Grandiose infantile delusions of entitlement; what a spectacular expression. I first learned it in the 1990s when I took my 2000 hour residency in clinical pastoral education to be a hospital chaplain. And here we are in the 2020’s and the entitlement has expanded. Now it includes calls for the right to free stuff: education, healthcare, housing, food and a get out of jail free card. My, my, aren’t we so entitled.

But this entitlement has taken on a more sinister meaning because of critical race theory and diversity politics. “Critical race theory (CRT), the view that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist and that race itself, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of colour. According to critical race theory (CRT), racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between “races” to maintain elite white interests in labour markets and politics, giving rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities. The CRT movement officially organized itself in 1989, at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory, though its intellectual origins go back much further, to the 1960s and ’70s.”

https://www.wnd.com/2020/11/4871000/
After listing his credentials, a Cambridge University-trained virologist spoke in a public forum against the extension of a mask mandate in one of Canada’s largest cities, calling comprehensive lockdowns, masks and other mitigation efforts against the coronavirus “utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians.”

“It’s outrageous. This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting population,” said Dr. Roger Hodkinson, the CEO of Western Medical Assessments.

He was speaking via telephone during an Edmonton City Council Community and Public Services Committee meeting last Fridayregarding the Alberta city’s move to extend its face-covering bylaw.

Hodkinson began with a summary of his credentials to ensure he not be regarded as a “quack.”

He said he is a medical specialist in pathology, which includes virology, who trained at Cambridge University in England. A Royal College certified pathologist in Canada, he is the former chairman of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons committee in Ottawa. Hodkinson served as CEO of a large private medical laboratory in Edmonton, Alberta, and now runs MutantDx, a molecular diagnostics company in North Carolina that provides COVID-19 tests.

Hodkinson warned that what he was about to say was “lay language and blunt” and “counter-narrative.”

“There is absolutely nothing that can be done to contain this virus other than protecting older, more vulnerable people,” he said.

“It should be thought of as nothing other than a bad flu season,” said Hodkinson. “This is not ebola. It’s not SARS.”

https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/11/18/flash-on-the-danish-mask-study/

This is the fuller post.   The headline result–wearing a mask makes no difference in cases or in level of transmission in the community.   It is obvious to all of us now, that this is true, as we can see the case growth in areas of the country with extremely high mask-wearing rates.  Here is the cite.  (Danish Mask Study)  Coupled with the withdrawal of the county study which purported to show a benefit based on limited time period study, this should put an end to any Governor claiming that mask mandates are backed by science and data, but it won’t.  As I noted in my flash report, people are already coming out with all kinds of BS criticisms of the trial. It is amusing in a sense, that people who just accepted all the mask modeling “research” without any quibbles or skepticism are finding all kinds of criticism directed at an actual randomized trial attempting to answer a real-life question–what is the effect of wearing a mask in the community.

Before describing the study and its findings, let me make a couple of preliminary observations.  I have been reading medical research for 40 years and science papers for even longer.  When you read this study and you know the history of the attempt to get it published, you are immediately struck by what the authors must have been forced to do to get any reputable journal to publish it.  They were clearly forced to constantly refer to limitations and caveats about the study and there is a discussion about the confidence intervals around the results that you absolutely never see in the published reports of research.  What kind of science is it that decides in advance what the results have to be and tries to suppress any research that challenges those pre-ordained results?  When I complain that science has become completely politicized, what happened to this study is Exhibit A.