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June 2021

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Politics of guilt: Why does the Left oppose ‘occupation’ – opinion Although many in the international community promote a two-state-solution and ending the occupation, they are oblivious to the danger this poses to Israel. Moshe Dann

By on June 13th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/politics-of-guilt-why-does-the-left-oppose-occupation-opinion-670831

Why do leftists oppose “the occupation,” extending Israeli sovereignty to areas of Judea and Samaria under Israeli control, and support a Palestinian state, the “two-state-solution?” They argue that the presence of Jews in what they mistakenly call the “Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)” – all areas conquered by the IDF in 1967 Six Day War – is “illegal according to international law” and a “violation of Palestinian humanitarian rights.”

Presenting ethical and moral concerns – that Israel should not control “another people,” Arab Palestinians – they argue that “the occupation” prevents Palestinians from “controlling their own fate” in their own state. The occupation, they argue, also contradicts Israel’s definition as a “Jewish and democratic state.” As long as Israel restricts their movements (in order to prevent terrorism), determines their ability to export and import (weapons), and prevents them from exercising sovereignty, the occupation is immoral and should end. They argue that preventing or restricting Jews from building in settlements will “keep options open” to the possibility of making peace – however unrealistic – and will encourage Palestinian moderates.

It seems to make sense.

There is no indication, however, that this has worked, or is realistic. It ignores the fact that the PLO (Palestinian Authority) and Hamas already control the areas under their brutal, authoritarian rule, and actively promote incitement and terrorism. It ignores the fact that Palestinians do not want to be Israeli citizens; they identify as Palestinians. Most Israeli Arabs (including those who are citizens) reject Israel and support Palestinianism. These suggestions, therefore, have no practical, or reasonable application. They endanger Israel and support efforts to demonize and vilify Israel and promote antisemitism.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Pushing Through the Decadence The forces of decadence that Jacques Barzun described are formidably potent. But decadence is no more inevitable than progress. By Roger Kimball

By on June 13th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/12/pushing-through-the-decadence/

When the historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun died at 104 in 2012, he was not only full of years but full of honors. The honors started early. 

Born in Créteil, a suburb outside Paris, in 1907, Barzun came to the United States with his parents in 1920. His father, a cultivated man who welcomed such celebrated figures as Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Edgard Varèse, and Stefan Zweig to his home, determined that young Jacques should be educated in America. In 1927, he graduated with honors from Columbia University, where was valedictorian and president of Philolexian Society, one of the oldest university literary and debate societies in the United States. He went on to take a Ph.D. at Columbia and was a distinguished professor and administrator there for decades. (Together with the critic Lionel Trilling, he also presided over the once-celebrated course in Western civilization there.)

As the years and the books accumulated—Barzun was the author of more than 40 books on subjects ranging from history, education, and music to poetry, detective stories, and baseball—he scooped up all the recognitions: the Légion d’Honneur from his native country, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (bestowed by President George W. Bush), National Humanities Medal (Obama), and on and on. 

I believe the first thing that I read by Jacques Barzun was a short book called On Writing, Editing, and Publishing (1971). I cannot lay my hands on it at the moment, but I remember from it a good piece of advice for those young ’uns (and their name is legion) who think they want to be writers. 

It is important, Barzun noted, to decide whether you want to write or to have written. A little honest self-scrutiny on that point can save a world of heartache. Obviously, the point can be generalized for all the arts. (How many self-identifying waiters or waitresses have you met in trendy New York restaurants? They scarcely exist. But there are plenty of novelists, painters, and actors who just happen to be waiting tables until their genius is acknowledged.)

Jacques Barzun was a type of public intellectual that is rare in any age and is more or less extinct today. He was in but not of the academy. He wrote beautifully, for one thing, cared passionately about the life of the mind, and never succumbed to the dead end of what is sometimes called “specialization” but really should be denominated arid irrelevancy. Barzun wrote for the general educated reader about the things that matter most: truth, beauty, the perennial challenges to the human spirit with which life confronts us. 

Barzun always had a teacher’s gift of dramatizing ideas and championing what, in Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941), he called “the pluralism of the world of experience.” Although deeply immersed in intellectual matters himself, he seems never to have succumbed to the intellectual’s chief occupational temptation of mistaking abstractions for the realities they adumbrate. This resistance had stylistic as well as substantive consequences. Barzun once noted that “Intellect watches particularly over language because language is so far the only device for keeping ideas clear and emotions memorable.” 

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden and Putin in G7 and a Half by Amir Taheri

By on June 13th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17464/biden-putin-g7

[Putin] wants a return to the good or bad old days, when the USSR and the United States were regarded as arbiters of world affairs on an equal footing.

Today, thanks to the Obama era, that vast region [Central Asia] is morphing into a race course between China and Russia, with the US as a distant observer.

The summit with Biden would be an opportunity for Putin to impose a number of “events” as faits-accomplis, notably the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Putin has exploited Obama’s numerous mistakes in the Middle East. He has built bridgeheads to a number of countries that were once in the Soviet orbit, notably Egypt and Iraq, while casting itself as the arbiter of Syria’s fate. Using the Islamic Republic in Iran as his Trojan horse, Putin is also gaining a foothold in Lebanon.

What Putin wants from Biden with regard to Iran is the lifting of sanctions against Iran…. With sanctions lifted, Russia could gain control of Iran’s immense energy resources. That would enable Russia to control Iran’s market share, thus heightening its own profile as the key source of supply for Europe and, in time, for China. In exchange, Iran would be helped to secure enough money to keep the regime in place….

Putin also hopes that Iran will quickly ratify the so-called Caspian Convention, which would turn the world’s largest lake into a Russia pond and shut Western powers out.

By excluding itself from Afghanistan, the US leaves the field open for new players in the latest version of the “Great Game”. China, using Pakistan as its local “fixer”, is already courting the Taliban as Islamabad’s surrogate to rule Afghanistan.

For its part, Russia is developing an axis with India and Iran to counter the Beijing-Islamabad duo. Here, too, the US will be distant spectator.

Putin will cast several skillfully baited hooks for Biden. He would talk of stabilizing Europe, containing China, keeping the North Koreans within the red lines, not allowing the mad mullahs of Tehran to go beyond certain limits in their pretended “Jihad” against Israel, and preventing the Taliban from seizing control of Afghanistan and undoing all that has been done with blood and money from the US and its Afghan and Western allies.

The question that Biden needs to ponder is this: Is Putin turning Russia into a mere competitor for power and prestige for the US or is he, as some of his barely concealed misdeeds indicate, an enemy of the democratic world, formerly known as “The Free World”?

By holding a tete-a-tete with Vladimir Putin just after the G7 summit in Cornwall, US President Joe Biden may signal a move towards a G7 and a half arrangement in which Russia, once a full member of the club, secures a side chair in its ante-chamber. The arrangement suits Putin just fine. For his strategy has always aimed at taking the Western democracies one by one and not as a bloc such as NATO, the European Union or the G7.

But what does Putin want?

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump may not be in the White House but at least he’s being vindicated By Andrea Widburg

By on June 13th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/trump_may_not_be_in_the_white_house_but_at_least_hes_being_vindicated.html

I continue to believe that Donald Trump would be in the White House but for massive election fraud. It is an example of how unfair life can be that he is not. However, there is some compensation coming Trump’s way. Day after day, on issue after issue, he’s proven to be correct, whether it was that he pursued policies that worked well for Americans, made predictions that were accurate, or did not do the heinous things that Democrats claimed he’d done. Of course, being Trump, he’s not shy about trumpeting that vindication. Speaking via satellite link to a Frank Speech MAGA rally in Wisconsin that Mike Lindell sponsored, Trump shared his victories with the cheering crowd.

Trump opened his speech by stating that he actually won the election, and noting that he did so despite the Washington Post/ABC that tried to suppress the vote by claiming Trump was 17 points down. He’s still his ebullient self but he definitely feels that he was treated very, very badly.

Trump applauded the patriotism of Mike Lindell, as well as named attendees there: Diamond & Silk, Charlie Kirk, Chris Cox and the Bikers for Trump, Dinesh D’Souza, Sheriff David Clarke. He then spoke about the way he was being silenced because of the election:

Because they know the results; they know what really happened. That’s why if you go to anyplace, you see the kind of fight that the Democrats put up. They don’t want recounts; they don’t want forensic audits in particular. They don’t want it. But in Arizona, you have incredible people. *** These are incredible American patriots and let’s see what they do.

Trump added that it’s incredibly unhealthy if voters cannot understand how and why an election turned out as it did. In other words, true democracy requires these audits.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, EDUCATION Comments turned off

ARUNA KHILANANI – THE INMATE WHO TOOK OVER THE ASYLUM – AN OPEN LETTER TO PETER SALOVEY, PH.D., THE 23RD PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY Terry A. Hurlbut M.D. *****

By on June 13th, 2021

https://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/2021/06/09/accountability/aruna-khilanani-inmate-asylum/

Dear Sir:

I write today to express my outrage over the “Continuing Medical Educational” talk by Aruna Khilanani, M.D., M.A. As you know, that talk took place by Zoom teleconference on 6 April 2021. She titled her talk, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” Incredibly, one Rosemary Serra booked this talk for Grand Rounds at the Yale Child Study Center. Sir, Ms. Serra, as Senior Administrative Assistant, and the faculty of the Psychiatry Department either exploited a very troubled woman or else lent her a platform for a dangerous political manifesto. That manifesto arises out of her paranoid ideation of which I find ample history from a simple Internet engine search.

In the language to which I became accustomed in the course of my training, I find this exercise totally inappropriate. At best, someone exploited a sufferer from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder who presents with paranoid ideation from an unfortunate episode. And at worst someone gave her a platform to start a race war. And what you cannot excuse, is that this happened on your watch.

A glossary

Before I begin, Dr. Salovey, I will share a glossary of terms you might or might not recognize. Your academic background is in social psychology, not in psychiatry or other medical practice. Besides, my readers need to understand these terms to grasp the context of this letter.

Attending – a physician having admitting privileges at a hospital. The term also applies to any physician who has served on a hospital medical staff for, say, three years. Pathologists, radiologists, and anesthesiologists do not normally admit patients. But after they have their three years in (as a “courtesy physician”), a hospital will still call them “attendings.” And in a teaching hospital, the attendings are the professors. (Teaching hospitals also often credential new attending physicians as part of granting them faculty appointments. This does not happen in community hospitals.)
Resident – a member of the “house staff” of a teaching hospital. These are the trainees, who have their medical degrees. In most programs, one chief resident in each department gives orders to all other house staff in that department.
Extern(e) – a senior medical student taking advanced training in patient management but not a member of the house staff. One distinguishes such a person from an intern(e), or a first-year resident.
Clinical clerk – a junior medical student gaining his/her first exposure to patient management.
Rounds – the practice of visiting each patient one is following, to check on clinical progress.
Grand rounds – a lecture for the benefit of medical staff and students.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Cancel Culture Comes for … Birds? By Sarah Schutte

By on June 13th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/cancel-culture-comes-for-birds/

Those who think bird names reinforce prejudice have gone stork raven mad.

C ancel culture is at it again, and this time, they’re coming after . . . birds? Look out, Bachman’s sparrow. Because you were named after a 19th-century Lutheran minister with connections to slavery, you might lose your name. Over 140 North American bird species have eponymous names, from Anna’s hummingbird to MacGillivray’s warbler, but some in the birding community, such as the recently founded Bird Names for Birds, are determined to see these types of names completely rooted out. How refreshing it is to know that because we’ve solved all of the world’s other pressing issues, the only thing we have left to fix is bird names that make people feel “unsafe.”

It was a longspur that started it all. McCown’s longspur, to be specific. John McCown was a Confederate general, a historical fact that became a major issue after the George Floyd protests of last summer, which prompted birding authorities to take action. Now that McCown’s longspur is officially the Thick-billed longspur, activists can breathe more easily and set their bins on other feathered targets.

The Washington Post, NPR, and BirdWatching Daily, all with headlines such as “The Racist Legacy Many Birds Carry” and “Monuments and Teams Have Changed Names As America Reckons with Racism. Birds Are Next,” are filled with quotes from these activists. Many of them claim that we need to “decolonialize” birding, or that the black community isn’t represented enough in this field, or that they feel oppressed by having to wear a shirt with Audubon’s name on it (apparently, the Father of Birding had ties to slavery, too).

Don’t get me wrong; birds can be dangerous. Swans can break a grown man’s leg. Cassowaries have been known to kill humans. Our biblical friend Tobit went blind from bird droppings, for heaven’s sake. But claiming to be threatened or to feel endangered by the name of a bird is disingenuous silliness.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

How to Make China Pay By Matthew Continetti

By on June 13th, 2021

https://freebeacon.com/columns/how-to-make-china-pay/

Engage Taiwan, boycott the 2022 Olympics, and impose a carbon tariff.

The debate over the origins of the coronavirus — did it come from a wet market in Wuhan or from the virology lab nearby — has exposed the bias of media and technology companies and the potential danger of so-called gain-of-function research. But it also has led to something of an intellectual cul-de-sac. Barring a high-level defection from the Chinese Communist Party, we are unlikely ever to learn the answer. And even if we did have conclusive evidence one way or another, we still would have to decide what to do about it. The real question isn’t whether the pandemic is China’s fault. It’s whether China will pay a price for the catastrophic damage it caused the world.

Wherever the virus came from, we know that the Chinese government lied about it for weeks. Dr. Ai Fen shared information about a novel coronavirus with her colleagues on December 30, 2019. The next day, as Lawrence Wright recounts in The Plague Year, China removed social-media posts that mentioned “unknown Wuhan pneumonia” or “Wuhan Seafood Market.” Dr. Li Wenliang, who warned the public that the virus could be transmitted from human to human, was arrested and forced to deliver a televised confession. He died of COVID-19 on February 6, 2020.

Beijing prevaricated for a month while the deadly pandemic spread. China did not allow the World Health Organization to visit Wuhan until January 20, 2020. The same day, one of China’s top doctors finally admitted the obvious: COVID-19 is a communicable disease. By the time the Communist leadership took action, it was too late. On January 21, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first case of coronavirus in America. China did not quarantine Wuhan until January 22. “By that time,” according to Wright, “nearly half the population of Wuhan had already left the city for Chinese New Year.”

The dishonesty and incompetence of the Chinese Communist Party turned a national crisis into a global one. A March 2020 study estimated that cases might have been reduced by anywhere from 66 percent to 95 percent if Chinese authorities had acted earlier. Why was Beijing slow to move? Because bureaucratic collectivist societies such as Communist China are especially prone to delays and coverups as underlings attempt to avoid punishment from above. The same powers of draconian coercion that China used to lock down its population inspired fear among the mid-level and regional officials who allowed the virus to leave China in the first place. The problem wasn’t scientific. It was political. And punishment is deserved.

What to do? Writing in the Washington Post, Mike Pompeo and Scooter Libby call on the “leading democracies” to “act together,” leveraging “their great economic power” to “persuade China to curb its dangerous viral research activities, cooperate with the investigation of the coronavirus’s origins, and, over time, pay some measure of the pandemic’s damages to other nations.” It’s a worthy strategy with a potentially fatal flaw: The other democracies might put economics ahead of accountability.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on June 13th, 2021

http://www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

It does appear that the long political tenure of Benjamin Netanyahu is over. Under his leadership, Israel cemented relationships with many nations in every continent through combined projects in agriculture, health and medicine, science and technology. Furthermore, Israel’s remarkable research and technology thrived and investment in start-ups grew at a phenomenal rate. He shepherded the nation through the Covid pandemic with dazzling results. Gratitude is in order. Hail and farewell! rsk

Michael Ordman’s list speaks for itself:

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

No new Covid infections. Last Shabbat (5th June) Israel registered zero new local COVID-19 infections for the first time in more than a year. There are now only some 200 coronavirus infected patients in the whole country and inoculation of children aged 12-15 has begun. On 15 Jun, Israelis can stop wearing facemasks indoors.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/06/06/israel-records-zero-new-local-covid-19-cases-for-first-time-in-more-than-a-year/  https://www.timesofisrael.com/kids-line-up-for-covid-shots-saying-they-want-to-protect-family-go-on-vacation/

Healthcare appreciation ceremony. (TY Sharon & ILTV) Israel has honored its health system personnel and partner agencies for their work in defeating Covid-19 in Israel.  Speakers at the Jerusalem Theater event included Israel’s Prime Minister, Health Minister, Austria’s Prime Minister and the CEO of Pfizer.
https://baltimorejewishlife.com/news/news-detail.php?SECTION_ID=37&ARTICLE_ID=144873
https://www.jns.org/israel-honors-health-care-workers-in-battle-against-covid-19/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unIOgfwH830

Cancer patients benefit from Covid vaccine. Doctors at Israel’s Beilinson Hospital monitored 102 cancer patients after inoculation with two shots of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine. Only 10 failed to generate an antibody response. It should calm the fears of patients who have been self-isolating even after vaccination.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/covid-vaccine-effective-for-90-of-cancer-patients-israeli-study-finds/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2780584

Using good viruses to kill bad bacteria. For 6 years Tel Aviv University scientists have studied how certain viruses (bacteriophages) take control of dangerous antibiotic resistant bacteria (see here). They found that a virus protein uses a DNA-repair protein in the bacteria to “cunningly” cut the bacteria’s DNA during repairs.
https://www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/tau-scientists-discover-process-to-get-good-viruses-to-destroy-bad-bacteria/2021/06/06/  https://www.pnas.org/content/118/23/e2026354118

Eye scan to replace blood tests. Doctors at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center have developed a blood test without removing any blood. A handheld device scans the blood vessels in the eye – ideal for those who dislike needles, and no laboratory involvement is necessary. It will be tested in zero-gravity by Israeli astronaut Eytan Stibbe.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/invented-in-israel-no-needle-blood-test-will-blast-off-for-testing-in-space/
https://unitedwithisrael.org/new-israeli-prickless-blood-test-heading-to-space/

Saving the sight of AMD patients at home. The ForeseeHome ophthalmic home diagnostic service from Israel’s Notal Vision (see here previously) detects when dry AMD turns to wet AMD and can be treated. It is Medicare accredited and Notal Vision has just raised $60 million to monitor other retinal diseases.
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2021/06/07/israels-notal-vision-raises-60-million-for-its-ophthalmic-home-monitoring-services/   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP7DnYDNbco  https://www.foreseehome.com/

Cancer diagnostic tech is a breakthrough. Having just received European CE mark certification for its Galen AI cancer diagnostic software (see here), Israel’s Ibex Medical has now been awarded “Breakthrough” designation by the US FDA. This will help fast-track clinical review and regulatory approval of its technology.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-tech-to-help-pathologists-detect-cancer-gets-fda-breakthrough-nod/

PillCam and the UK NHS. A couple of weeks ago I publicized Technion UK’s online event featuring the Israeli-invented PillCam colon imaging capsule. 11,000 UK National Health Service patients are to be studied using the capsules.  Here is a recording of that event for those interested but who missed the live presentation.
https://technionuk.org/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqN24JJeltk

We can fix you. (TY Nevet) Social worker Tali used to support staff at Hadassah’s Jerusalem Medical Center. Now her colleagues administer Hadassah’s CAR-T therapy (in Phase 1 trials see here) to hopefully cure Tali’s multiple myeloma. Hadassah hopes to develop cellular therapy for any type of cancer – affordable to everyone.
https://www.hadassah.org/story/hadassah-develops-its-own-car-t-therapy-to-treat-multiple-myeloma

More swords become plowshares. During the coronavirus pandemic, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) used their missile factory to produce ventilators (see here). Now IAI subsidiary Elta and Soroka hospital are setting up an innovation center where doctors and defense engineers can jointly develop medical tech solutions.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-swords-to-scalpels-iai-soroka-hospital-to-use-army-tech-for-medical-edge/

Bystanders can save lives. (TY UWI) The award-winning SALI video medical system from Israel’s Inovytec (see here previously) enables the public to perform non-invasive airway management, automated oxygen therapy, vitals monitoring, and defibrillation. SALI has been implemented in Germany, Romania and Israel.
https://www.israel21c.org/automated-first-aid-system-wins-smart-cities-connect-award/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbKqQzjJRWY   https://www.inovytec.com/sali/

Now everyone can express themselves. Back in Dec 2020, Israel’s Voiceitt (see here) announced that its real time automatic speech recognition app will allow people with speech impairments to access and interact with Amazon’s Alexa. Now anyone can download the Voiceitt app for free from Apple’s App Store.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3909558,00.html

35-second response time. When United Hatzalah volunteer EMT Ron Cohen was called to a choking baby, he rushed from his apartment, jumped onto his ambucycle, drove down his street and ran up 4 floors. 35-seconds after receiving the call he expelled the blockage in the infant’s throat, and she was able to breathe again.
https://israelrescue.org/blog/emt-arrives-in-35-seconds-to-save-a-neighbours-choking-baby/

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Martin Kulldorff: The Necessity of Challenging the Covid Consensus.

By on June 13th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/04/why-i-spoke-out-against-lockdowns/

Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.

Two key Covid facts were quickly obvious to me. First, with the early outbreaks in Italy and Iran, this was a severe pandemic that would eventually spread to the rest of the world, resulting in many deaths. That made me nervous. Second, based on the data from Wuhan, in China, there was a dramatic difference in mortality by age, with over a thousand-fold difference between the young and the old. That was a huge relief. I am a single father with a teenager and five-year-old twins. Like most parents, I care more about my children than myself. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.

For society at large, the conclusion was obvious. We had to protect older, high-risk people while younger low-risk adults kept society moving.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, schools closed while nursing homes went unprotected. Why? It made no sense. So, I picked up a pen. To my surprise, I could not interest any US media in my thoughts, despite my knowledge and experience with infectious-disease outbreaks. I had more success in my native Sweden, with op-eds in the major daily newspapers, and, eventually, a piece in spiked. Other like-minded scientists faced similar hurdles.

Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.

Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for every one of its 1.8million children aged between one and 15. And it did so without subjecting them to testing, masks, physical barriers or social distancing. This policy led to precisely zero Covid deaths in that age group, while teachers had a Covid risk similar to the average of other professions. The Swedish Public Health Agency reported these facts in mid-June, but in the US lockdown proponents still pushed for school closures.

In July, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article on ‘reopening primary schools during the pandemic’. Shockingly, it did not even mention the evidence from the only major Western country that kept schools open throughout the pandemic. That is like evaluating a new drug while ignoring data from the placebo control group.

With difficulty publishing, I decided to use my mostly dormant Twitter account to get the word out. I searched for tweets about schools and replied with a link to the Swedish study. A few of these replies were retweeted, which gave the Swedish data some attention. It also led to an invitation to write for the Spectator. In August, I finally broke into the US media with a CNN op-ed against school closures. I know Spanish, so I wrote a piece for CNN-Español. CNN-English was not interested.

Something was clearly amiss with the media. Among infectious-disease epidemiology colleagues that I know, most favour focused protection of high-risk groups instead of lockdowns, but the media made it sound like there was a scientific consensus for general lockdowns.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Maher: Left’s Refusal To Acknowledge Progress Is A Sickness VIDEO

By on June 13th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/12/lefts_refusal_to_acknowlege_progress_is_a_sickness.html

HBO’s Real Time host, Bill Maher, monologued on progressives’ view that progress has not been made in the United States on cultural issues, such as race relations and gay marriage. Maher called those on the left who believed that the United States lacked any progress had “progressophobia,” meaning “a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress.”

Maher continued, mentioning the views on gay marriage and racism have changed over the years in the United States. “This is one of the big problems with wokeness,” Maher said, “that what you say doesn’t have to make sense or jive with the facts or even be challenged lest the challenge be conflated with racism.’

“But saying that White power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa Race Massacre? Higher than the years when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow went unchallenged? Higher than the 1960s when The Supremes and Willie Mays still couldn’t stay at the same hotel as the White people they were working with? Higher than during slavery?”

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