Will Lebanon Fall into the Hands of Iran? by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17600/lebanon-fall-iran

There is growing concern among the Lebanese and other Arabs that Iran is planning to exploit the severe political, economic and financial crisis in Lebanon to complete its takeover of the country.

Iran already has a political and military presence in Lebanon through its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. The current crisis, however, is likely to facilitate Iran’s mission of adding Lebanon to the list of countries it already occupies: Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

“Iran is already very dangerous without a nuclear bomb. The region is witnessing a state of chaos and agitation by fundamentalist forces, which threaten all Arab countries without exception.” — Mishary Dhayidi, Saudi writer, Al-Arabiya, July 21, 2021

The Arabs appear clearly worried about the perceived apathy of the US and other Western powers towards Iran’s scheme to extend its control to Lebanon. They seem particularly alarmed that Lebanon will meet the same fate as Iraq, Syria and Yemen…. thanks to Iran’s continuous efforts to export terrorism and the “Islamic Revolution” to the Arab countries.

[T]he mullahs in Tehran are doubly dangerous: they aspire not only to develop nuclear weapons, but also to occupy Arab states.

There is growing concern among the Lebanese and other Arabs that Iran is planning to exploit the severe political, economic and financial crisis in Lebanon to complete its takeover of the country.

Iran already has a political and military presence in Lebanon through its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. The current crisis, however, is likely to facilitate Iran’s mission of adding Lebanon to the list of countries it already occupies: Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Nostalgia Of The Wordsmiths Stephen Rittenberg

https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/p/nostalgia-of-the-wordsmiths?

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality”-

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes. 

An Émigré From Utopia

When I was a medical student, assigned to the surgical ward, I had an elderly Russian émigré patient, who underwent major abdominal surgery, followed by multiple bleeding episodes requiring more operations. He remained in the hospital a long time, during which we spent many hours together. He told me tales of Mother Russia, its people and his own hair-raising saga of survival. Since my own ancestors came from Russia, one step ahead of pogroms, I was naturally interested in his stories. To a young student living comfortably in America, these were real life, harrowing tales of narrow escapes from fanatical and blood thirsty revolutionaries bent on exterminating the old aristocracy, into which he’d been born. I’d read about such people in Joseph Conrad novels, but to meet an actual living, breathing one was fascinating. Among other things, he was unusually tolerant of pain and suffering, regarding this latest threat to his physical survival with equanimity; his attitude seemed to be “I have survived worse.” He had. He deeply loved America. When I asked him what he thought was the appeal of revolutionary Communism, he smiled as if he had given the question much thought, then replied: “nostalgia”. I have never forgotten that answer, though at the time I forgot to ask, “nostalgia for what?”. Now after 50 plus years of close observation of the human psyche, I think I know.

Many have wondered why the socialist dream remains seductive despite its failures in the real world. This is a psychological question since rational consideration of reality doesn’t change the minds of true believers.  Communism itself seemed to die ignominiously with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it survives now in nostalgic obituaries for long time Stalin defenders in the NYTimes. It lingers on editorial pages in the woke yearning for an unattainable equity in a state run by progressives who will eliminate all differences of ability, talent and biology in pursuit of a transformed human nature and a better world.

Paradise Lost

The engine driving the utopian dream is nostalgia for a lost fantasy of childhood and at the steering wheel are the wordsmith intellectuals. From philosophers like Rousseau, to Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Derrida, Herbert Marcuse, and today’s critical race theorists, intellectuals continue to yearn for a world of perfection—as defined, naturally, by wordsmiths themselves. We were all born innocent and corrupted by external forces like capitalism and the nuclear family.  

The late Robert Nozick, a wordsmith himself, raised the question: Why do intellectuals so often oppose capitalism? https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-do-intellectuals-oppose-capitalism. He suggested it was yearning for lost childhood. Specifically they were the boys and girls who received the currency of smiles and praise from teachers for their verbal ability. As they grew older they learned that our capitalist system does not value words as highly as they once were in the classroom. Outside the classroom, in the schoolyard your ability to hit a jump shot matters more than your ability to talk about it. Pleasing teachers may not get you far in the world outside the classroom. So these budding intellectuals use their skill with words to develop theories of how the bliss of early childhood can be regained along with the status they once enjoyed. Those theories overvalue words, treating them as arbiters of reality. Thus a word like gender is treated as more real than biological sex. In the utopian war on the reality of difference, words can be a potent weapon. As Joseph Conrad wrote in Under Western Eyes: “A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.” Can it destroy reality? We are finding out right now.

Wake up, America: The world just isn’t that into you To much of the world America looks like a declining power, precisely because it is a declining power David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2021/07/wake-up-america-the-world-just-isnt-that-into-you/

Republicans, including many old friends, are outraged that the Biden administration gave up on sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that will pump Russian gas to Germany.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)—on whose foreign policy team I served during the 2016 campaign—declared that he would block Senate confirmation of all of Biden’s ambassadorial appointments until the sanctions are reinstated. Daniel Kochis of the Heritage Foundation titled his piece today, “The US will regret this shameful appeasement of Russia.”

Calm down, everyone. After Donald Trump imposed sanctions on firms laying the Nord Stream 2 pipe across the Baltic Sea, the Russians sent their own ship, and the work is finished. The Germans will go ahead regardless, so the least humiliating thing that Biden could do was to acknowledge reality and stand down.

No one in Europe really cares what Washington thinks about Nord Steam 2 (and a lot of other issues). Once upon a time, about five years ago, America was going to be the new Saudi Arabia, providing Europe with liquefied natural gas to replace Vladimir Putin’s product—at a higher price, to be sure, but wrapped in the blessings of liberty. Trump demanded that Europe eschew Russian gas and buy American LNG instead.

When Trump took office, the energy companies in the S&P 500 were devoting US$70 to $80 billion a year in capital expenditures. This year it will be about $20 billion, barely a quarter as much as the last peak, and analysts polled by Bloomberg put next year’s total at less than $30 billion, despite the strong recovery in energy prices. Natural gas production is down by about 10% from the 2019 peak, and oil production is down by 20%.

US oil rigs aren’t producing as much as promised.
The people with big jobs in Washington came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when America was the technological marvel of the world, and American inventions created the digital age. We haven’t done a lot lately except code some complicated software.

FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots Questioning the FBI’s role in 1/6 was maligned by corporate media as deranged. But only ignorance about the FBI or a desire to deceive could produce such a reaction. Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/fbi-using-the-same-fear-tactic-from?token=eyJ

The narrative that domestic anti-government extremism is the greatest threat to U.S. national security — the official position of the U.S. security state and the Biden administration — received its most potent boost in October 2020, less than one month before the 2020 presidential election. That was when the F.B.I. and Michigan state officials announced the arrest of thirteen people on terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges, with six of them accused of participating in a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had been a particular target of criticism from President Trump for her advocacy for harsh COVID lockdown measures.

The headlines that followed were dramatic and fear-inducing: “F.B.I. Says Michigan Anti-Government Group Plotted to Kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,” announced The New York Times. That same night, ABC News began its broadcast this way: “Tonight, we take you into a hidden world, a place authorities say gave birth to a violent domestic terror plot in Michigan — foiled by the FBI.”

Democrats and liberal journalists instantly seized on this storyline to spin a pre-election theme that was as extreme as it was predictable. Gov. Whitmer herself blamed Trump, claiming that the plotters “heard the president’s words not as a rebuke but as a rallying cry — as a call to action.” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) claimed that “the president is a deranged lunatic and he’s inspired white supremacists to violence, the latest of which was a plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer,” adding: “these groups have attempted to KILL many of us in recent years. They are following Trump’s lead.” Vox’s paid television-watcher and video-manipulator, Aaron Rupar, drew this inference: “Trump hasn’t commended the FBI for breaking up Whitmer kidnapping/murder plot because as always he doesn’t want to denounce his base.” Michael Moore called for Trump’s arrest for having incited the kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer. One viral tweet from a popular Democratic Party activist similarly declared: “Trump should be arrested for this plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. There’s no doubt he inspired this terrorism.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo instantly declared it to be a terrorist attack on America: “We must condemn and call out the cowardly plot against Governor Whitmer for what it is: Domestic terrorism.” MSNBC’s social media star Kyle Griffin cast it as a coup attempt: “The FBI thwarted what they described as a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.” CNN’s Jim Sciutto pronounced it “deeply alarming.”

A lengthy CNN article — dressed up as an investigative exposé that was little more than stenography of FBI messaging disseminated from behind a shield of anonymity — purported in the headline to take the reader “Inside the plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer.” It claimed that it all began when angry discussions about COVID restrictions “spiraled into a terrorism plot, officials say, with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer the target of a kidnapping scheme.” CNN heralded the FBI’s use of informants and agents to break up the plot but depicted them as nothing more than passive bystanders reporting what the domestic terrorists were plotting:

The Watchmen had been flagged to the FBI in March, and one of its members was now an informant. That informant, others on the inside, as well as undercover operatives and recordings, allowed the bureau to monitor what was happening from then on.

The Panic Pandemic Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus. John Tierney

The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.

The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so—unless we begin to understand what went wrong.

The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse. The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that—unless drastic measures were taken—intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.

This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science.” What had originally been a limited lockdown—“15 days to slow the spread”—became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?

The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.

The fury intensified in April 2020, when Ioannidis followed his own advice by joining with Jay Bhattacharya and other colleagues from Stanford to gauge the spread of Covid in the surrounding area, Santa Clara County. After testing for Covid antibodies in the blood of several thousand volunteers, they estimated that the fatality rate among the infected in the county was about 0.2 percent, twice as high as for the flu but considerably lower than the assumptions of public-health officials and computer modelers. The researchers acknowledged that the fatality rate could be substantially higher in other places where the virus spread extensively in nursing homes (which hadn’t yet occurred in the Santa Clara area). But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets.

Other scientists lambasted the researchers and claimed that methodological weaknesses in the study made the results meaningless. A statistician at Columbia wrote that the researchers “owe us all an apology.” A biologist at the University of North Carolina said that the study was “horrible science.” A Rutgers chemist called Ioannidis a “mediocrity” who “cannot even formulate a simulacrum of a coherent, rational argument.” A year later, Ioannidis still marvels at the attacks on the study (which was eventually published in a leading epidemiology journal). “Scientists whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy,” he says. “Every paper I’ve written has errors—I’m a scientist, not the pope—but the main conclusions of this one were correct and have withstood the criticism.”

Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns. The Nation called the research a “black mark” for Stanford. The cheapest shots came from BuzzFeed, which devoted thousands of words to a series of trivial objections and baseless accusations. The article that got the most attention was BuzzFeed’s breathless revelation that an airline executive opposed to lockdowns had contributed $5,000—yes, five thousand dollars!—to an anonymized fund at Stanford that had helped finance the Santa Clara fieldwork.

The notion that a team of prominent academics, who were not paid for their work in the study, would risk their reputations by skewing results for the sake of a $5,000 donation was absurd on its face—and even more ludicrous, given that Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, and the lead investigator, Eran Bendavid, said that they weren’t even aware of the donation while conducting the study. But Stanford University was so cowed by the online uproar that it subjected the researchers to a two-month fact-finding inquiry by an outside legal firm. The inquiry found no evidence of conflict of interest, but the smear campaign succeeded in sending a clear message to scientists everywhere: Don’t question the lockdown narrative.

In a brief interlude of journalistic competence, two veteran science writers, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, published an article in Scientific American decrying the politicization of Covid research. They defended the integrity and methodology of the Stanford researchers, noting that some subsequent studies had found similar rates of fatality among the infected. (In his latest review of the literature, Ioannidis now estimates that the average fatality rate in Europe and the Americas is 0.3 to 0.4 percent and about 0.2 percent among people not living in institutions.) Lenzer and Brownlee lamented that the unjust criticism and ad hominem vitriol had suppressed a legitimate debate by intimidating the scientific community. Their editors then proceeded to prove their point. Responding to more online fury, Scientific American repented by publishing an editor’s note that essentially repudiated its own article. The editors printed BuzzFeed’s accusations as the final word on the matter, refusing to publish a rebuttal from the article’s authors or a supporting letter from Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School. Scientific American, long the most venerable publication in its field, now bowed to the scientific authority of BuzzFeed.

Editors of research journals fell into line, too. When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against Covid, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as “as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.” After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.

Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he said. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly. “Just as in war,” Kulldorff wrote, “we must exploit the characteristics of the enemy in order to defeat it with the minimum number of casualties. Since Covid-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.” It was a tragically accurate prophecy from one of the leading experts on infectious disease, but Kulldorff couldn’t find a scientific journal or media outlet to accept the article, so he ended up posting it on his own LinkedIn page. “There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”

To break the silence, Kulldorff joined with Stanford’s Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for “focused protection,” called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly, such as doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.

They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.” Google initially shadow-banned it so that the first page of search results for “Great Barrington Declaration” showed only criticism of it (like an article calling it “the work of a climate denial network”) but not the declaration itself. Facebook shut down the scientists’ page for a week for violating unspecified “community standards.”

The most reviled heretic was Scott Atlas, a medical doctor and health-policy analyst at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He, too, urged focused protection on nursing homes and calculated that the medical, social, and economic disruptions of the lockdowns would cost more years of life than the coronavirus. When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as “this Stanford guy with no background” promoting “crackpot theories.” Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,” and an editorial in the Stanford Daily urged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.

The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” Several professors from Stanford’s medical school demanded further punishment in a JAMA article, “When Physicians Engage in Practices That Threaten the Nation’s Health.” The article, which misrepresented Atlas’s views as well as the evidence on the efficacy of lockdowns, urged professional medical societies and medical-licensing boards to take action against Atlas on the grounds that it was “ethically inappropriate for physicians to publicly recommend behaviors or interventions that are not scientifically well grounded.”

But if it was unethical to recommend “interventions that are not scientifically well grounded,” how could anyone condone the lockdowns? “It was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,” Bhattacharya says. “The immediate results have been disastrous, especially for the poor, and the long-term effect will be to fundamentally undermine trust in public health and science.” The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu. Yet Fauci dismissed the focused-protection strategy as “total nonsense” to “anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases,” and his verdict became “the science” to leaders in America and elsewhere.

Fortunately, a few leaders followed the science in a different way. Instead of blindly trusting Fauci, they listened to his critics and adopted the focused-protection strategy—most notably, in Florida. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, began to doubt the public-health establishment early in the pandemic, when computer models projected that Covid patients would greatly outnumber hospital beds in many states. Governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were so alarmed and so determined to free up hospital beds that they directed nursing homes and other facilities to admit or readmit Covid patients—with deadly results.

But DeSantis was skeptical of the hospital projections—for good reason, as no state actually ran out of beds—and more worried about the risk of Covid spreading in nursing homes. He forbade long-term-care centers to admit anyone infected with Covid and ordered frequent testing of the staff at senior-care centers. After locking down last spring, he reopened businesses, schools, and restaurants early, rejected mask mandates, and ignored protests from the press and the state’s Democratic leaders. Fauci warned that Florida was “asking for trouble,” but DeSantis went on seeking and heeding advice from Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.

“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”

If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy. The state effectively served as the control group in a natural experiment, and no medical treatment with dangerous side effects would be approved if the control group fared no differently from the treatment group. But the outcome of this experiment was even more damning.

Florida’s mortality rate from Covid is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted Covid mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of “excess mortality” (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average. Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from Covid but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.

Chart by Jamie Meggas
Chart by Jamie Meggas

If the treatment group in a clinical trial were dying off faster than the control group, an ethical researcher would halt the experiment. But the lockdown proponents were undeterred by the numbers in Florida, or by similar results elsewhere, including a comparable natural experiment involving European countries with the least restrictive policies. Sweden, Finland, and Norway rejected mask mandates and extended lockdowns, and they have each suffered significantly less excess mortality than most other European countries during the pandemic.

A nationwide analysis in Sweden showed that keeping schools open throughout the pandemic, without masks or social distancing, had little effect on the spread of Covid, but school closures and mask mandates for students continued elsewhere. Another Swedish researcher, Jonas Ludvigsson, reported that not a single schoolchild in the country died from Covid in Sweden and that their teachers’ risk of serious illness was lower than for the rest of the workforce—but these findings provoked so many online attacks and threats that Ludvigsson decided to stop researching or discussing Covid.

Social-media platforms continued censoring scientists and journalists who questioned lockdowns and mask mandates. YouTube removed a video discussion between DeSantis and the Great Barrington scientists, on the grounds that it “contradicts the consensus” on the efficacy of masks, and also took down the Hoover Institution’s interview with Atlas. Twitter locked out Atlas and Kulldorff for scientifically accurate challenges to mask orthodoxy. A peer-reviewed German study reporting harms to children from mask-wearing was suppressed on Facebook (which labeled my City Journal article “Partly False” because it cited the study) and also at ResearchGate, one of the most widely used websites for scientists to post their papers. ResearchGate refused to explain the censorship to the German scientists, telling them only that the paper was removed from the website in response to “reports from the community about the subject-matter.”

The social-media censors and scientific establishment, aided by the Chinese government, succeeded for a year in suppressing the lab-leak theory, depriving vaccine developers of potentially valuable insights into the virus’s evolution. It’s understandable, if deplorable, that the researchers and officials involved in supporting the Wuhan lab research would cover up the possibility that they’d unleashed a Frankenstein on the world. What’s harder to explain is why journalists and the rest of the scientific community so eagerly bought that story, along with the rest of the Covid narrative.

Why the elite panic? Why did so many go so wrong for so long? When journalists and scientists finally faced up to their mistake in ruling out the lab-leak theory, they blamed their favorite villain: Donald Trump. He had espoused the theory, so they assumed it must be wrong. And since he disagreed at times with Fauci about the danger of the virus and the need for lockdowns, then Fauci must be right, and this was such a deadly plague that the norms of journalism and science must be suspended. Millions would die unless Fauci was obeyed and dissenters were silenced.

But neither the plague nor Trump explains the panic. Yes, the virus was deadly, and Trump’s erratic pronouncements contributed to the confusion and partisanship, but the panic was due to two preexisting pathologies that afflicted other countries, too. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. It’s a longstanding problem—humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the “population crisis” and the “energy crisis”—that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks, and retweets. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics, and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding, and power during a crisis.

Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, the New York Times reported the terrifying possibility that the virus could spread to children through “routine close contact”—quoting from a study by Anthony Fauci. Life magazine wildly exaggerated the number of infections in a cover story, headlined “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS.” It cited a study by Robert Redfield, the future leader of the CDC during the Covid pandemic, predicting that AIDS would soon spread as rapidly among heterosexuals as among homosexuals. Both scientists were absolutely wrong, of course, but the false alarms didn’t harm their careers or their credibility.

Journalists and politicians extend professional courtesy to fellow crisis-mongers by ignoring their mistakes, such as the previous predictions by Neil Ferguson. His team at Imperial College projected up to 65,000 deaths in the United Kingdom from swine flu and 200 million deaths worldwide from bird flu. The death toll each time was in the hundreds, but never mind: when Ferguson’s team projected millions of American deaths from Covid, that was considered reason enough to follow its recommendation for extended lockdowns. And when the modelers’ assumption about the fatality rate proved too high, that mistake was ignored, too.

Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded. For Americans under 70, the probability of surviving a Covid infection was about 99.9 percent, but fear of the virus was higher among the young than among the elderly, and polls showed that people of all ages vastly overestimated the risk of being hospitalized or dying.

The second pathology underlying the elite’s Covid panic is the politicization of research—what I have termed the Left’s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by “expert social engineers”—scientific high priests unconstrained by voters and public opinion—today’s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who “believe in science,” meaning that they use the Left’s version of science to justify their edicts. Now that so many elite institutions are political monocultures, progressives have more power than ever to enforce groupthink and suppress debate. Well before the pandemic, they had mastered the tactics for demonizing and silencing scientists whose findings challenged progressive orthodoxy on issues such as IQ, sex differences, race, family structure, transgenderism, and climate change.

“The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops.”

And then along came Covid—“God’s gift to the Left,” in Jane Fonda’s words. Exaggerating the danger and deflecting blame from China to Trump offered not only short-term political benefits, damaging his reelection prospects, but also an extraordinary opportunity to empower social engineers in Washington and state capitals. Early in the pandemic, Fauci expressed doubt that it was politically possible to lock down American cities, but he underestimated the effectiveness of the crisis industry’s scaremongering. Americans were so frightened that they surrendered their freedoms to work, study, worship, dine, play, socialize, or even leave their homes. Progressives celebrated this “paradigm shift,” calling it a “blueprint” for dealing with climate change.

This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science is a process of discovery and debate, not a faith to profess or a dogma to live by. It provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline do not have the knowledge or perspective to guide society. They’re biased by their own narrow focus and self-interest. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the physician who allied with him against Atlas on the White House task force, had to answer for the daily Covid death toll—that ever-present chyron at the bottom of the television screen—so they focused on one disease instead of the collateral damage of their panic-driven policies.

“The Fauci-Birx lockdowns were a sinful, unconscionable, heinous mistake, and they will never admit they were wrong,” Atlas says. Neither will the journalists and politicians who panicked along with them. They’re still portraying lockdowns as not just a success but also a precedent—proof that Americans can sacrifice for the common good when directed by wise scientists and benevolent autocrats. But the sacrifice did far more harm than good, and the burden was not shared equally. The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world. Students from disadvantaged families suffered the most from school closures, and children everywhere spent a year wearing masks solely to assuage the neurotic fears of adults. The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops. Silicon Valley (and its censors) prospered from lockdowns that bankrupted local businesses.

Luminaries united on Zoom and YouTube to assure the public that “we’re all in this together.” But we weren’t. When the panic infected the nation’s elite—the modern gentry who profess such concern for the downtrodden—it turned out that they weren’t so different from aristocrats of the past. They were in it for themselves.

John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal, a contributing science columnist for the New York Times, and coauthor of The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Israel’s oral Covid vaccine. (TY Mickey) Israel’s Oramed will shortly commence clinical trials of its Oravax vaccine – the world’s first oral Covid-19 vaccine (see here previously). Phase 1/2 trials will take place at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center with Phase 3 in countries desperate for a vaccine.
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israel-to-become-first-in-world-to-test-oral-covid-19-vaccine-674563
 
Israeli Covid vaccine can defeat variants. (TY I24 News & UWI) Israel’s IIBR-developed BriLife vaccine (see here previously – now in Phase 2 testing) has advantages over vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna. It recognizes the whole of the spike protein and can be easily adjusted to protect against mutations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJCGLJoqh5o
 
Existing treatments combat Covid. (TY WIN) Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists have lab-tested 3 existing therapies successfully against SARS-CoV-2.  Darapladib, Flumatinib and an HIV medicine target the virus’ other proteins, which mutate far less than the spike protein. The study is now to be peer-reviewed.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/3-existing-drugs-fight-coronavirus-with-almost-100-success-in-jerusalem-lab/
https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8247/14/7/604
 
Anti-viral nasal spray launched. Israel’s SaNOtize (see here previously) has now begun sales of its Enovid Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) at pharmacies in Israel and Bahrain. It is effective against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and variants Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Final tests for the Delta variant look good.
https://nocamels.com/2021/07/sanotize-covid-nasal-spray-israeli-pharmacies/
 
Israeli doctor advises Canadians about Covid. Israeli-born bioethicist and public health advisor Vardit Ravitsky is Chair of the COVID-19 Impact Committee of the Montreal-based Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. A key influencer was her uncle and Israel Prize laureate philosopher Aviezer Ravitzky.
https://robertsarner.com/israeli-canadian-bioethicist-return-to-pre-covid-normal-would-be-wasted-chance/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-canadian-bioethicist-return-to-pre-covid-normal-would-be-wasted-chance/
 
Home Covid tests. The latest tool to be adopted by Israel against the coronavirus pandemic, rapid home virus-testing kits, is being made available to purchase in Israeli pharmacies as part of a pilot program.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-rolls-out-pilot-for-pharmacies-to-sell-rapid-home-virus-tests/
 
Remote monitoring patients in Alabama. Alabama Regional Medical Services (ARMS) has selected the Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) system from Israel’s DarioHealth (see here previously) to improve the management of ARMS’s hypertension patients, including large numbers of underserved and uninsured patients.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/dariohealth-chosen-to-provide-remote-patient-monitoring-for-alabama-regional-medical-services-301337191.html
 
Effective burns treatment for children. Israel’s MediWound (see here previously) successfully completed Phase 3 clinical trials of its NexoBrid treatment on children with severe thermal burns. The study evaluated 145 pediatric patients, from newborn to eighteen years of age, across 36 burn centers worldwide.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-mediwound-says-key-trial-shows-pineapple-gel-effective-for-kids-burns/
 
EU funds for Israeli alternative insulin therapy. Israel’s Betalin Therapeutics (see here previously) is to receive capital from the European Innovation Council (EIC) fund. The funding will advance human trials of its biological pancreas that can produce insulin in the body independently, thus making injections unnecessary.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3912996,00.html
 
Reprogramming the immune system. This article describes the latest progress of Israel’s Immunai (see here previously) which is mapping the immune system to help develop new life-saving treatments. It acquired US-based Dropprint Genomics and has launched into development of cancer and autoimmune disease therapies.
https://www.israel21c.org/creating-a-google-maps-for-the-immune-system/
 
Support for the immune system. Solabia-Algatech Nutrition based at Kibbutz Ketura has launched BioGlena from whole Euglena gracilis algae grown on the Kibbutz. BioGlena contains over 55% β-glucan polysaccharides, touted as nature’s immune-modulator, helping to prime and support natural immunity.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/solabia-algatech-nutrition-launches-whole-algae-sourced–glucan-301338424.html   https://www.algatech.com/algatech-facility-arava-desert/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkFa-Im2maA

REGULAR POSTINGS WILL BEGIN ON AUGUST 3,2021

How Warmists Package Panic- Michel Kile

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/07/how-warmists-package-panic/

That the latest World Weather Attribution (WWA) post, Rapid attribution analysis of the extraordinary heatwave on the Pacific Coast of the US and Canada June 2021, has twenty-one contributors from prestigious research groups around the world gave it even more piquancy. What a treat! I had not been so flummoxed since reading Alan Sokal’s  scholarly hoax over two decades ago: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. 

The WWA post, alas, is neither hoax nor parody, but the real deal: a collaboration — in record time, no less — “to assess to what extent human-induced climate change made this heatwave hotter and more likely”. Whether “human-induced climate change” – whatever that is – was present at all was not on the menu.

So it’s down the rabbit hole of questionable-cause logical fallacies in search of an answer: post hoc ergo propter hoc: ‘after this, therefore because of this’; “since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X”; or if you prefer, cum hoc ergo propter hoc: ‘with this, therefore because of this’.

A rooster crowing before sunrise does not mean it caused the sun to rise. A lot of cocks crowing before a big conference, however, could cause an increase in the flow of money into the Green Climate Fund. Cock-a-doodle-do. Whatever the case, we clearly need a New Law of Climate Change:

Climate alarmism (CA) increases exponentially as time, T, to the next United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) or atmospheric Armageddon (AA) declines to zero; where CA is measured by the frequency of MSM and social media amplification occurring in a specific period of observation, P.

They’re Your Problem Now, Mr Putin : Michael Galak

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/07/theyre-your-problem-now-mr-putin/

Having spent two years of my life on the border between the contemporary Uzbekistan and Afghanistan as a Soviet Army conscript medic many years ago, my take on the Western withdrawal from this sad place is quite different from what might be called the op-ed page consensus. It was painfully obvious that the Western attempt to help Afghans build a modern state had no chance of success because it never gained popular support. The long-term presence of a Western military coalition in Afghanistan was a grievous political miscalculation, not least because it allowed an increasingly aggressive Russia to direct its resources towards achieving its expansionist goals instead of defending its southern borders. Astonishingly, Western governments persisted with this folly for 20 years, the result being no gain whatsoever. In reality, Western forces were protecting Russia and China from radical Islam’s penetration instead of looking after its members’ own best interests.

At last the penny dropped! The ‘sudden’ withdrawal of Western forces has nothing to do with abandonment of the Afghani people to the Taliban’s less-than-tender mercies as it never won hearts and minds — quite the opposite. What we’re about to see is the beginning of the pushback by the West against Russia and China, the beginning of the America’s embrace of asymmetrical war. The fact of the matter is that this withdrawal has created a political vacuum and the related need for it to be filled.  In one  stroke the US has created a pressure point for the Russians to contain and on which they will be obliged to spend their limited resources. What
goes around, as they say, comes around.

Laws Against Critical Race Theory Are Only the First Step Use every legal and political option to defund CRT. Don’t just ruffle their feathers, pluck ‘em. By David Randall

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/16/laws-against-critical-race-theory-are-only-the-first-step/

Several state bills and laws working to ban critical race theory (CRT) have excited heavy breathing from the see-no-evil allies of the radical educational establishment. Even purist free-speech advocates such as FIRE have expressed some qualms. So, is every bill working to ban critical race theory perfect?

No, of course not—I say with regret, because what America desperately needs is to evict CRT from its schools and from every private and public institution. The National Association of Scholars and the Civics Alliance have endorsed Stanley Kurtz’s model Partisanship Out of Civics Act (POCA), the source for Texas’ new law H.B. 3979, not just because it also bans the vocational training for community organization known as “action civics,” but precisely because its language to ban CRT is carefully crafted to respect free speech and survive the inevitable legal challenges. 

Notably, the Partisanship Out of Civics Act applies to public K-12 schools rather than to higher education, where constitutional precedent has established a larger sphere of academic freedom. We recommend the model legislations’ language to our colleagues throughout America who wish to rid our public schools of CRT because we believe that its precise language has the greatest ability to achieve real and lasting change.

That doesn’t mean we’re fussed by other bills that were introduced using broader language. The legislative process is supposed to improve bills by thoughtful amendment. So we think it is perfectly reasonable to amend a bill banning the racism of CRT to clarify that a teacher can still teach about racist figures from America’s past, such as eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger, as well as assign their writings to students. We also think it is wise to amend the scope of blanket prohibitions of CRT to protect academic freedom in higher education. These are reasonable changes in themselves—and they will allow these bills to survive predictable challenges from the CRT advocates.

What this heavy breathing really illustrates is the need for far greater reform of our schools and universities—indeed, of all our public and private institutions—than can be achieved simply by these bills to ban CRT. America confronts institutions whose members are devoted to subverting the spirit of the Civil Rights Act, which long ago declared that “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The latest bills to ban CRT amount to saying, we really mean it, now practice nondiscrimination in good faith. Since the radical establishment that has seized hold of our institutions wishes to discriminate, by CRT, by so-called “anti-racism,” by “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” or by whatever jargon is in fashion, policymakers must face the fact that the radical establishment, to the greatest of its abilities, will treat these laws as dead letters.