RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/07/when-will-covid-19-become-endemic/

With pandemic fatigue becoming ever more intense, there is increasing speculation about when the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, might become “endemic” – a time when outbreaks will be more modest and manageable and we can “coexist” with the virus. That juncture has been described as when the virus has become “annoying but rarely deadly or disruptive.” Unfortunately, there are no quantitative milestones that tell us when we’ve arrived. It’s really a judgment by individuals and society, and prematurely concluding that we’ve reached endemicity and abandoning precautions can have perilous consequences.

Many observers cite influenza – the “flu” – as an example of an endemic infectious disease, so it’s useful to review its impacts. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s statistics, from 2012-2019 the flu virus annually caused about 31 million symptomatic illnesses, 400,000 hospitalizations, and 39,000 deaths in the U.S. Those high numbers are in spite of moderately good vaccines, with efficacy in the range of 40%-60%, and which need to be administered each year.

Apparently, that’s what we, as a society, consider manageable and acceptable; after all, we don’t impose lockdowns, mask requirements, or widespread vaccine mandates during the annual flu outbreaks.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/02/07/boston_marathon_bomber_dzhokhar_tsarnaev_received_a_1400_covid_stimulus_check_815332.html

On April 15, 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev murdered three people and injured more than 250 others in the horrific Boston Marathon bombing. Seven years later, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev collected a Covid stimulus check in federal prison.

For his role in orchestrating the bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to several life sentences in federal prison, as well as the death penalty (though the death penalty sentence was vacated and is currently under review by the US Supreme Court).

So why is Tsarnaev receiving stimulus checks from the U.S. government?

In March of 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, which included provisions to send $1,400 stimulus checks to all citizens making less than $75,000 filing individually or $150,000 filing jointly. This included felons. Some Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) raised the issue and forced a vote to amend the CARES Act to exclude felons from receiving stimulus money, but it ultimately failed, and felons were included. This means that in addition to Tsarnaev, the likes of Dylan Roof, who murdered nine African Americans at Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, also received stimulus checks.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that a judge ordered Tsarnaev’s stimulus check be seized and put towards the $10.1 million in criminal restitution he owes his victims. So far, he has paid just over $2,000 of that $10 million, despite having an additional personal trust account with a balance of over $3,000.

While there is plenty of healthy debate to be had regarding the efficacy of the stimulus checks, one thing most people should be able to agree on is that murderers like Tsarnaev should not receive federal aid financed by your tax dollars and ever-increasing government debt.

https://www.city-journal.org/understanding-the-covid-odds?wallit_nosession=1

It’s obviously not easy to give up fear of Covid-19, to judge from a recent survey showing that the vaccinated are actually more frightened than the unvaccinated. Another survey found that most Democratic voters are so worried that they want to make it illegal for the unvaccinated to leave home. But before you don another mask or disinfect another surface, before you cheer on politicians and school officials enforcing mandates, consider your odds of a fatal Covid case once you’ve been vaccinated.

Those odds can be gauged from a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, published by the Centers for Disease Control. They tracked more than 1 million vaccinated adults in America over most of last year, including the period when the Delta variant was surging, and classified victims of Covid according to risk factors such as being over 65, being immunosuppressed, or suffering from diabetes or chronic diseases of the heart, kidney, lungs, liver or brain.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/06/hurricane-canada-n1556770

Hurricane Canada, a category 5 political storm, has made landfall on the country’s capital city in the form of a massive truckers’ strike protesting illegal COVID mandates and vaccine passports, a phenomenon that has galvanized the attention of the world and inspired similar demonstrations internationally. This has become common knowledge, and commentary pro and con has been proliferating with abandon.

What is most surprising in a tepid and unadventurous country like Canada that habitually votes left is the degree of popular support the truckers’ Freedom Convoy has garnered from ordinary citizens across the land. Convoys have assembled in several Canadian cities, the Alberta-Montana border has been blockaded, and reinforcements continue to arrive—even on horseback, taking a page from the RCMP.

Naturally, official aggression is also formidable, as a bought-and-paid-for print media, enjoying Prime Minister Trudeau’s $600 million bribe, and the country’s national broadcaster the CBC, rolling in annual billion-dollar government funding, weigh in against the truckers. Government officials at every level, municipal, provincial, and federal, with only a few exceptions, have joined the vigilante movement against the salt-of-the-earth protesters. Threats of reprisal are mounting, highways have been closed, and the turbulence shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

Canada is now a divided country, pitting an elite class of political authorities, journalists, and haranguing pundits against a rising tide of blue-collar resentment.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/06/our-elite-is-no-elite-at-all/

An elite is always variously defined.  

The ideal elites, as ancient philosophers argued, were a “natural elite” due to their exemplary character, aptitude, and work ethic. Understandably, a towering few ascended from all walks of life to positions of power, influence, and occasional wealth.  

But such a natural meritocracy, for obvious reasons, rarely leads to an equality of result.  

Who Are Our Elite? 

Our current idea of ostensible elites could be defined by noting their money and influence. But money alone—even in the huge sums now found on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley—is not the only elite criterion.  

Donald Trump is a billionaire with much influence and lives accordingly. Yet few of our “elite” would consider him a kindred soul. Ditto Elon Musk. He is the richest man in the world. But the elite mostly despise and ostracize him.  

Birth itself has given way somewhat to insider influence and professional parentage. You may be a fifth-generation scion with a name such as Mellon, Vanderbilt, or Rockefeller, but if your dad was not an ambassador, your mom not a VP at CBS, your sibling not a Harvard professor or Google executive, you have fallen out of the elite. 

Zip codes still count. Although there are certainly “elites” who hail from Kansas City, Boise, or Sacramento, most of those who exercise national clout are found inordinately on the two coasts, from Boston to Washington, D.C., and from Seattle to San Diego—with respective windows on the wealth of Europe or Asia.  

The Obamas were going to be anointed as multimillionaires wherever they lived. But they would not necessarily remain as elite as they have become living back in Chicago rather than in a tony D.C. neighborhood and out on Martha’s Vineyard. So, it was an easy call for them to follow the trajectory of the Clintons rather than the Georgia-bound Carters.  

In the 21st century, other elite criteria seem to count as much as the old markers of lineage, money, and location. “Certification,” defined as degrees from the “right” undergraduate and graduate schools, is essential for an elite resumé. 

Such brands have little to do with education per se or aggregate knowledge acquired. (It is not clear that an Ivy League student would do better on the same SAT, taken upon graduation as earlier, upon admittance). Are our best generals those with Yale degrees, and our best CEOs those with Stanford MBAs? And are Harvard Law Review editors—think Barack Obama, the boss of Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, James Comey, and John Brennan—our top legal and ethical minds? 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/02/part-two-covid-politics-and-psychology/

Individual and social psychology offers valuable insights into hysterical personal and small group behaviour under COVID, but how can psychology explain the society-wide mass hysteria?  Enter the theory of ‘mass formation psychosis’.  Psychosis is a severe mental disorder which causes, in an individual, abnormal thought processes at odds with reality.  Psychosis at a mass population level, however, occurs when everyone, simultaneously, goes psychotic together. Think of it as the way a hive frenzy develops when each individual bee gets extremely angry because every other bee is getting angry.

Dr. Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, has been Johnny-on-the-spot during COVID by rebranding mass hysteria as ‘mass formation psychosis’ (MFP).  Desmet’s theory has its antecedents in crowd psychology, especially the collective madness of crowds.  In his formulation, MFP arises from the dynamic of individuals acting as a crowd in projecting their own free-floating, generalised personal anxieties, frustration and aggression onto the social construct of a COVID ‘pandemic’ and providing a sense of renewed ‘social belonging’ to mitigate the anxiety.

In MFP, sacrifice (lockdown, for example) and heroism (such as self-quarantine) are called upon whilst opportunities for virtuous behaviour proliferate (‘I’m masking up, getting jabbed, self-isolating for your benefit’).  All participants in the COVID-driven MFP reinforce the mass psychosis by passing on their latest traumatic fears to each other in a closed-system, positive-feedback loop (‘Oh my God, now it’s Omicron!  It’s highly contagious!  Run for the hills!’) whilst thrashing around for scapegoats to make them feel subjectively safer because all their pet interventions have delivered nothing of any benefit.