RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.aol.com/news/fauci-death-toll-pandemic-anniversary-132621394.html

All the mixed messages, conflicting statistics and predictions and suggestions came from Dr. Fauxi himself….rsk

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that had he known a year ago what the death toll from Covid-19 would be, “it would have shocked me completely,” and blamed the politicization of safety measures and “mixed messages” out of Washington for the high number of fatalities.

In an interview on NBC’s “TODAY” show on the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a global pandemic, host Savannah Guthrie noted that Fauci said exactly one year ago that 27 people in the U.S. had died from Covid-19 and asked what he would have thought then of today’s death toll of more than 531,000.

“I have to tell you quite honestly, Savannah, it would have shocked me completely,” said Fauci, who recounted that he warned at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing that day that things would get much worse before they get better.

“It was March 11, 2020, that I said that, but I did not in my mind think that ‘much worse’ was going to be 525,000 deaths,” he said.

Asked what went wrong, Fauci pointed to the “divisiveness in our country.”

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive-755

THE ELECT: THE THREAT TO A PROGRESSIVE AMERICA FROM ANTI-BLACK ANTIRACISTS
Serial excerpt No. 4: They will object that they are “dismantling structures” – while enjoying making people cry and dismantling nothing.

DISMANTLING HEGEMONIC STRUCTURES?

To tar The Elect as crazy is lazy. Dumb, even. It recalls Hungarian physician Max Nordau who deemed Wagner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Schopenhauer as degenerates seized by hysteria and self-involvement. While Die Walküre and War and Peace are hardly grape soda, none of us would join Nordau today. He wasn’t up to the challenge of his times.

I want us to be. But this will require understanding The Elect in an initially counterintuitive way, just as getting Schopenhauer meant letting go of the easier pleasures of Ruskin. The “advanced” way of getting the Elect is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are.

One thing that will discourage a general perception of them in this way is that they themselves will resist the charge so heartily. This is understandable. For one, it will feel unwelcome to them because they do not bill themselves as such, and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. Then, it also implies that they are not thinking for themselves. However understandable their objections, though, we must not let them distract us, as we roll up our sleeves and fashion a way of living among people devoted permanently to this new, yes, religion.

For one, The Elect will insist that what they are doing is not founding a replacement for Protestantism, but acting upon what I have seen phrased as “an enduring white responsibility for deconstructing our own privilege and the systemic pervasiveness of white supremacy.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/542300-maybe-a-biden-hologram-can-handle-his-public-speeches

Joe Biden isn’t a hologram. But the relative absence from the public stage of a newly elected U.S. president and leader of the free world is sparking no small amount of speculation and chatter about the brave new world of possibilities offered by technological advancements and the unprecedented control over information on the internet.

So far, under Biden, there have been none of the extended press availabilities to which we got accustomed under President Trump. No impromptu sessions with the media where he fields questions and attacks, dealing with dozens of wide-ranging topics. President Biden even skipped the traditional live, in-person February address to Congress. We’ve only seen him primarily in the form of various “proof of life”-like video clips distributed on the internet, where he reads scripted remarks from a teleprompter. 

Even some officials who work in the Biden administration told me they can’t help but wonder why. And it has them mulling over farfetched speculation that, upon further examination, starts to look almost like it is not completely outside the realm of the possible.

In June 2019 I published a story on “deep fake” technology. It explored how artificial intelligence (AI) computer technology has put special effects, once reserved as expensive and time-consuming accomplishments of Hollywood films, in the hands of most anybody with a computer and the desire to use it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/11/predictable_train_wrecks_on_crime_and_immigration__145383.html

If you think really hard, perhaps you can imagine more disastrous policies than throwing open our country’s southern border and abandoning criminal-law enforcement in city after city. The consequences are already emerging, and they are grim. It is important to examine them without ideological blinders so we can change course before more damage is done.

Our border policies are national fiats handed down by the Biden administration. The abandonment of criminal enforcement, by contrast, is a local decision, made by supine city councils and district attorneys, many of them “social justice Democrats” backed by progressive elites and Black Lives Matter.

The problem with these policies is not their moral motivation. Helping the poor from Central America is a worthy cause. So is reducing the incarceration rate of young males from minority communities. The problem lies in their practical effects. It is those effects, not sugarplum dreams, that matter in judging public policy.

The most consequential effect of open immigration and lax criminal enforcement is to undermine the safe, stable environment law-abiding citizens need to go about their lives, free from predation. Providing that environment — and signaling clearly that you intend to provide it — is the first responsibility of government.

That means punishing crimes. The goal is not vengeance. Nor is it solely to provide justice for the victims, important as that is. It is also to send a strong message to would-be criminals: Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. Right now, we are sending the wrong message and, by doing so, we are encouraging law breaking on a massive scale.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-prescription-get-the-vaccine-wait-a-month-return-to-normal-11615401516?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is chief medical advisor to Sesame Care and author of “The Price We Pay.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lost a lot of credibility during the Covid-19 pandemic by being late or wrong on testing, masks, vaccine allocation and school reopening. Staying consistent with that pattern, this week—three months after the vaccine rollout began—the CDC finally started telling vaccinated people that they can have normal interactions with other vaccinated people—but only in highly limited circumstances. Given the impressive effectiveness of the vaccine, that should have been immediately obvious by applying scientific inference and common sense.

Parts of the new guidelines are absurdly restrictive. For example, the CDC didn’t withdraw its advice to avoid air travel after vaccination. A year of prevaccine experience has demonstrated that airplanes aren’t a source of spread. A study conducted for the defense department found that commercial planes have HEPA filtration and airflow that exceed the standards of a hospital operating room.

The guidelines do approve of vaccinated people meeting with low-risk unvaccinated ones—but only with people from the same household and in a small private setting. So much for restaurants, birthday parties and weddings.

An unpublished study conducted by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer showed that vaccination reduced transmission by 89% to 94% and almost totally prevented hospitalization and death, according to press reports. Immunity kicks in fully about four weeks after the first vaccine dose, and then you are essentially bulletproof. With the added safety of wearing a mask indoors for a few more weeks or months—a practical necessity in public places even if not a medical one, since you can’t tell on sight if someone’s immune—there is little a vaccinated person should be discouraged from doing.