RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/delta-variant-doesnt-justify-new-covid-restrictions?wallit_nosession=1

One cannot open a newspaper, turn on a TV, or scroll through an online news feed without hearing about Covid-19’s new Delta variant. While the variant is cause for concern among unvaccinated Americans and in many foreign countries, it shouldn’t make us reconsider our approach to the virus at this stage in the reopening process.

Delta is a variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. It was first identified in India more than six months ago and has spread to 100 plus countries, having become the dominant variant in many, including the United States. It is 60 percent more transmissible than the Alpha, or U.K., variant, which previously predominated in the U.S. and was itself 50 percent more transmissible than the original viral strain from China. This has led to increased infections both here and worldwide.

But the bump in infections is nearly entirely among the unvaccinated. The authorized Covid-19 vaccines appear to be effective against Delta. And Delta is not clearly more dangerous than earlier variants: the average Covid-19 case with Delta is no more likely to lead to severe disease, hospitalization, or death than cases with other variants. Despite rising numbers of U.S. Delta cases, hospitalizations in July have risen only minimally, while Covid-19 deaths have remained flat.

The accumulating evidence shows that the authorized vaccines are highly effective at lessening transmission for all variants—including Delta. In the rare cases where vaccinated people become infected, their disease is mild and they pose a lower risk of transmitting the virus to others than do unvaccinated people.

Thankfully, 59 percent of American adults are fully vaccinated. Sixty-eight percent have received at least one dose, which provides them some protection, though not as much as the complete regimen. The news is even better for the most vulnerable population: those 65 and older. Nearly 80 percent have been fully vaccinated and nearly 90 percent received at least one dose.

While younger people remain unvaccinated—authorization was only recently approved for those age 12 and up—Covid-19 is rarely a severe disease for people under 18. Deaths in those 18 and younger account for only one-tenth of 1 percent of Covid-19 deaths. Deaths below age 12 are practically unheard of. In fact, severe disease in people under 50 is rare unless they have comorbidities.

Despite this good news, pockets of concern do exist. Nine southern states, along with Wyoming and Idaho, significantly lag the nation in vaccination rates. Moreover, even well-vaccinated states have localized communities with large numbers of unvaccinated people.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Sixty years ago, the threat of population growth outstripping the ability of the Earth to feed, clothe and house people was real. That is no longer the case. We now face the opposite challenge. The West, including the U.S. and the rest of the developed world, are no longer having enough children to replace themselves. Simultaneously, in the U.S. there has been a sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births and father-less children. In a world consumed with identity politics, legalizing marijuana and climate change the problem of one-parent families has been ignored. 

Aging and (ultimately for Europe and the U.S.) declining populations face us. Japan’s population declined by about 400,000 over the past twenty years. Europe’s population increased by sixteen million (727 million to 743 million) between 2000 and 2020, but only because of an estimated 40 million immigrants. The United States population grew by 50 million during the past twenty years, with about half the growth coming from immigrants.

Demographers use TFR (Total Fertility Rate) to determine whether a nation’s native population is increasing or shrinking. It is a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman through her reproductive life. Replacement is 2.1. In 2019, the TFR for Japan was 1.37, for Europe 1.52 and for the U.S. 1.71. The last time a TFR of 2.1 was reached in the U.S. was in 2007. In contrast, in 1960 the TFR was 3.65. Economic growth, over time, relies on population expansion. If it doesn’t come through births, it must come by way of immigration. As the United States grew rapidly in the post-World War II period, TFRs averaged over 3.0. Where population growth exceeds replacement are in undeveloped countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and in India and Indonesia. Even in those regions, TFRs are declining.

Problems associated from aging and shrinking populations, i.e., a smaller workforce supporting a larger retired population and greater use of healthcare, have been exacerbated by changing cultural mores and an abandonment of traditional Judeo-Christian values, particularly in the U.S.  Out-of-wedlock births have increased, while births to married women have declined. And, it has been clearly demonstrated that out-of-wedlock births (70% of all births in a city like Baltimore) lead to drug and alcohol abuse, with criminality, poverty and illiteracy as their progeny. Not assuming responsibility for one’s actions leads to increased dependency on the state, and increased dependency leads to a loss of the dignity associated with work.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percent of children living in two-parent households declined from 88% in 1960 to 69% in 2016, while the percent of children living with a single mother rose from 8% in 1960 to 23% in 2016. A survey by the Pew Research Center reports that the U.S. “has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households.”

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/biden-voting-rights-demagoguery-made?token=

President Joe Biden’s recent remarks on “protecting the sacred, constitutional right to vote” advocated for nothing of the sort. Biden, at his demagogic worst, in fact maligned those who would ensure the sanctity of the vote by passing laws undoing the election security-threatening, confidence-sapping, legitimacy-imperiling practices enacted during the COVID-stricken 2020 election season.

Biden’s disturbing rhetoric might be chalked up to politics, but when considered in the broader context of the Biden administration’s unprecedented and recently revealed “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” document, which links questions about election integrity to terrorism, it takes on an even more sinister edge.

Biden describes the election reforms now being considered in some Republican-controlled state legislatures, most of which aim to restore some semblance of normalcy with respect to absentee and mail-in voting, as a “21st-century Jim Crow assault” and “the most dangerous threat to voting and integrity of free and fair elections in our history.”

“To me, this is simple,” says Biden, “This is election subversion…an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty.” The president goes still further: “We’re are [sic] facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War. The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/getting-un-help-american-civil-rights-great-idea/

The small-minded people who believe in freedom and democratic self-government have their shorts in a bunch over the Biden administration’s invitation to the United Nations to review our country’s civil-rights record. What a superb idea. Long overdue.

The countries filling the human rights bodies at the UN have the kind of expertise you can’t get by reading books or following the rule of law. You have to get that kind of experience in the streets. Police brutality? All you have to do is ask the leading members of the UN Human Rights Council like Cuba, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Somalia, Sudan and Venezuela. They know a thing or two about protecting civil rights. But why stop there?

Let’s say the US wants to know whether it is imprisoning religious minorities and forcing them to work as slaves. Well, you definitely want to ask China. They have practical, on-the-ground experience. If Chinese observers see us jailing all the Uighur Muslims in Vermont, they are gonna reprimand us right away. Personally, I want to know. I think most red-blooded Americans do. After all, we may be falling short of China’s standards.

As for press freedom, China is not the only country that can help us, although Beijing’s experience shutting down all independent publications in Hong Kong is surely useful. Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran can all pitch in. So can Belarus, Syria, Sudan and Libya. If any regimes understand what a free press really means, it’s them. It would be foolhardy to ignore their expertise.

Important as it is to work closely with these international partners, we should also ask for help from Facebook, Google and Twitter. They have particular experience dealing with stories that might affect election outcomes, such as discussing Hunter Biden’s laptop. They also knew that ‘loose lips sink ships’ in the early months of the COVID pandemic. That’s why they suppressed any mention that the pandemic may have come from a ‘lab leak’ in Wuhan. They knew it was pure disinformation. The more we learn, the more their wisdom shines through.

What about free assembly? Here again, the US is missing out on some great international experience. The United Nations can help by asking local police and their political bosses in Hong Kong, Moscow, Tehran, Caracas, Managua and Havana to review American procedures.

As for racial equity, I think we all stand with Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose scholarly expertise and nuanced knowledge of American history has been so helpful in designing the 1619 Project. In a podcast two years ago, she told Vox’s Ezra Klein, ‘If you want to see the most equal multiracial — it’s not a democracy — the most equal multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba…Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere.’

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/14/class-the-word-we-dare-not-speak/

How often during the last year of woke, have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions? 

Million-dollar-a year university presidents virtue signal on the cheap their own sort of “unearned white privilege.” 

Multimillionaire Meghan Markle and the Obamas, from their plush estates, indict Americans for their biases. 

Former Black Lives Matter founder and cultural Marxist Patrisse Khan-Cullors Brignac decries the oppressive victimization she and others have suffered—from one of her four newly acquired homes. 

Do we need another performance-art sermon on America’s innate unfairness from a Hollywood billionaire such as Beyoncé, Jay-Z, or Oprah Winfrey—or a multimillion-dollar-per year Delta Airlines or Coca-Cola CEO? 

During the 1980s cultural war, the Left’s mantra was “race, class, and gender.” Occasionally we still hear of that trifecta, but the class part has now increasingly dropped out. 

The neglect of class is ironic given that dozens of recent studies conclude class differences are widening as never before. 

Middle-class incomes among all races have stagnated and family net worth has declined. Far greater percentages of rising incomes go to the already rich. Student debt, mostly a phenomenon of the middle and lower classes, has hit $1.7 trillion dollars. 

States like California have bifurcated into Medieval-style societies. The state’s progressive coastal elite can boast of some of the highest incomes in the nation. But in the more conservative north and central interior nearly a third of the population lives below the poverty line, explaining why one of every three American welfare recipients lives in California. 

California’s heating and cooling, gasoline, and housing—the stuff of life—are the highest in the continental United States. Most of these spiraling costs are attributable to polices embraced by an upper-class elite—in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and marquee universities—whose incomes shield them from the deleterious consequences of their utopian bromides. The poor and middle class have no such insulation. 

So why are we not talking about class? 

First, we are watching historic changes in political alignment. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/11/trump-winds-and-biden-whirlwinds/

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

What was common to the media’s deification of the criminally minded Michael Avenatti, and the promotion of a series of abject hoaxes? Do we remember the Steele “dossier,” the supposed authority of Fusion-GPS, the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn? 

Do we recall how the Left invented the Charlottesville construct out of a supposedly racist and unqualified endorsement by the president of the Klan and neo-Nazis? Who has forgotten the charge of “racism” for merely connecting the origins of COVID-19 to a Wuhan, level-4 security, gain-of-function-research, Chinese-military-affiliated virology lab rather than to a chopped-up wet bat or pangolin? 

Do we remember the names of our supposed best and brightest retired intelligence officials who lied shamelessly and on spec for the Biden campaign, claiming that Russian “disinformation” accounted for a supposedly fictitious Hunter Biden’s laptop? And are the fabrications by Joe Biden and the media—that men with guns staged an “armed insurrection” of January 6 and “killed” officer Brian Sicknick—the new standard of truth? 

What ties together the efforts of Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $40 million witch hunt, and the two impeachment proceedings—the last dispensing with witnesses, formal hearings, cross-examinations, a special prosecutor, and the Chief Justice presiding, all in mob-like efforts to try to convict in the Senate now private citizen Donald Trump? Must a Joe Biden, one day as president-emeritus and private citizen, fear that there will be no statutes of limitation to his vulnerability, when the vast trove of Hunter Biden’s laptop is finally accessed and turned over to a future hostile congress or federal prosecutor?