RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/03/one-year-later-more-lingering-questions-about-january-6/

A bombshell report just published in Newsweek details an in-depth, secret operation conducted by the Justice Department before and during January 6. Contrary to the lamentations of FBI Director Christopher Wray that he wished his agency had had better resources to prevent the Capitol breach, hundreds of elite forces under Wray’s authority were on stand-by days just before the protest, and even on the ground as it happened.

The “shadowy commandos” stationed at Quantico, home of the FBI Academy, on January 2, 2021 included the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and SWAT teams. 

“On the morning of January 6, most of these forces staged closer to downtown Washington, particularly after intelligence was received indicating a possible threat to FBI headquarters building or the FBI’s Washington Field Office,” Newsweek investigative reporter William M. Arkin wrote. “FBI tactical teams arrived on Capitol Hill early in the day to assist in the collection of evidence at sites—including the Republican and Democrat party national headquarters—where explosive devices were found. FBI SWAT teams and snipers were deployed to secure nearby congressional office buildings. Other FBI agents provided selective security around the U.S. Capitol and protection to congressional members and staff.”

An FBI tactical team, according to the report, entered the building immediately after protesters did, which was shortly after 2 p.m.

To the casual reader, news that the nation’s top law enforcement agency prepared ahead of time to combat possible violence on January 6 is reassuring. But to anyone who has closely followed the hyperpartisan activity of the FBI over the past several years, the article reads more like a confession, confirming deep suspicions that the FBI played an instrumental role in prompting the events of that day rather than act as a legitimate police force helping to keep lawmakers and American citizens safe.

Those suspicions are not without merit. In September, the New York Times confirmed that at least two FBI informants had infiltrated the Proud Boys, an alleged “militia group” that breached the Capitol that day. Defense attorneys disclose in court documents that FBI agents were in the crowd.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/03/china-to-conquer-moon-in-2026-while-america-makes-gender-neutral-space-suits/

Space is the ultimate strategic high ground. This domain is divided into various zones. First there are the orbits around the Earth: low-Earth orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and geosynchronous orbit. Ancillary to those orbits are the Lagrange points, which are the orbits separating the Earth from its moon. Next up is the Earth-Moon system. If you control the orbits around the Earth and the Lagrange points—as well as the moon itself—you effectively have total dominance over the Earth below. Today, China is poised to dominate not just the orbits around the Earth, but the entire Earth-Moon system. The Americans, despite having won the original space race with the Soviet Union, have yet to realize that another space race is at hand.

In 2018, Ye Peijian, the man charged with getting Chinese taikonauts to the moon, told audiences that China’s leaders viewed the “universe as an ocean.” Beijing believes the moon is analogous to “the South China Sea,” and Mars is akin to the Philippines. Chinese leaders, therefore, are applying classical geopolitical principles to space at a time when their space program is enjoying extraordinary success, all while the Americans remain firmly grounded (and as Washington is doing its best to complicate and stymie SpaceX through onerous regulations).

Recently, China announced it was building the rocket system that would deliver its personnel to the moon by 2026. It’s hardly a far-fetched goal; the Chinese have either hit or come very close to fulfilling their lofty space policy goals since the turn of this century. 

China’s rockets are essentially as advanced as SpaceX’s rockets are. As I wrote in Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, China’s space program is likely to overtake the U.S. program unless Washington embraces drastic changes. Yet, NASA has already announced that its lunar return mission—originally approved by former President Donald Trump in 2018—has been pushed back to the 2030s. China announced its 2026 target shortly after NASA’s disappointing news. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/fly-elon-fly-frontpagemagcom/

Scoring political populist points is the only thing that can explain Elizabeth Warren’s self-serving, myopic and relentless scorn of Elon Musk. To one of the greatest innovators and taxpayers in all human history, Senator Warren mockingly called on the billionaire to pay more in taxes, tweeting, “Lets change a rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.” 

Elon Musk came to America with no money, risked everything he had, and in the process minted thousands of productive and now wealthy members of society, all while steering us, the entire world, toward a brighter future. This is the very essence of the American Dream. What world does Elizabeth Warren inhabit when her only inclination regarding Elon is to mock and ridicule him?

Her target is a guy who will personally pay upwards of $10 billion in taxes in just 2021. That is roughly equivalent to what the entire population of Boston will pay in income taxes in 2021. Or what 20,000 average American taxpayers will pay in their entire lifetimes.

This is a guy who is bending history before our very eyes to all of humankind’s benefit by accelerating the global shift to electrify transportation. That is a very big deal.

This is a guy who put it all on the line fifteen years ago in self-funding what is now the globe’s most innovative automobile company that is now, depending on the day, worth more than the next eight or nine largest global automobile companies combined. What he is doing to turn the automobile industry on its head is beyond comprehension, yet Elizabeth Warren feels compelled to berate and scold him. I can only ask: Why?