RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/vaccine-mandates-the-end-of-covid

This Will Come Back to Haunt Us

By Jay Bhattacharya and Jonathan Ketcham  

Why the push for vaccine passports and mandates? Public health officials have offered one overriding justification: As soon as enough of us are vaccinated, we’ll reach herd immunity and the disease will stop spreading. Vaccine passports and mandates get us there faster.

This is nonsense.

We have good reason to doubt that, if most everyone got vaccinated, we’d achieve herd immunity. That’s because the protection offered by the Covid-19 vaccines against infection is short-lived. A large study of vaccinated patients in Qatar found that, by five months after the second jab, the vaccine’s effectiveness had already started to wane. It continued to protect against severe disease and death, but it did not provide any protection from less severe infection.

In fact, getting Covid and recovering from it is better protection from future reinfection and severe Covid disease than any of the available vaccines. This is clear from an excellent Israeli study. 

That study, conducted at the Maccabi Healthcare Services, in Tel Aviv, makes clear that it is probably safer to be in a room filled with unvaccinated people who have recovered from Covid than it is to be in a room filled with vaccinated people who have never had Covid.

Now, looking beyond the epidemiology, it’s worth considering the psychology that comes into play when we start forcing people to do things: It is practically a mathematical certainty that the mandates will lead many people to distrust the government, leading experts at places like the Centers for Disease Control, and our most prominent research universities even more than they do now. Why, the thinking goes, are you forcing me to do something that, you insist, is obviously good for me? If it were obviously good for me, you wouldn’t have to force me to do it. 

The mandates, far from persuading the unvaccinated to fall into line, will further undermine the authority of those pushing them — and, critically, it will make it that much harder to persuade the public to get vaccinated when an even more dangerous pandemic sweeps the globe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17802/democrats-bill-endangering-israel

This is not an “occupation.” It is legitimate and entirely lawful self-defense. It would be a lie — a blood libel — for the United States to declare Gaza to be occupied territory.

Under international law, a military occupation may continue as long as there is belligerence, as there certainly continues to be.

Had Israeli troops remained, Israel would be criticized. Now that they have left, there is still criticism. For some, Israel can do no right.

Jerusalem is more complicated… These are not occupied territories. Nor is the rest of East Jerusalem which is part of a united city.

Israel twice offered to end its presence in more than 90% of the West Bank in exchange for peace. The Palestinian leadership refused these offers and are thus responsible for the current situation.

The bill proposed by Levin and his fellow Democrats encourages the refusal of Palestinian leaders to negotiate painful compromises that are essential to achieving peace. It also rewards the pay-to-slay and terrorist policies… It sends a dangerous message to Palestinian naysayers: you do not have to negotiate or compromise; the United States will compel Israel to give in to your demands without requiring the Palestinians to negotiate, compromise or give up terrorism.

A far better bill would be one that conditioned reopening the Palestinian embassy on a willingness of the Palestinian leadership to return to the negotiating table and engage in genuine and honest discussions leading toward a peaceful two-state solution that assured security for Israel and autonomy for the West Bank Palestinians. (There can be no solution for Gaza except a military one as long as Hamas remains in charge, and persists in its terrorism and refuses to recognize Israel.)

Just when Congress overwhelmingly defeated an effort by eight radical Democrats and one Republican to defund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, several “mainstream” Democrats proposed legislation that is equally dangerous and filled with half-truths, omissions and outright fabrications.

Congressman Andy Levin has introduced a bill that purports to further the “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although I favor two states for two peoples, I strongly oppose Levin’s perhaps well-intentioned but ill-conceived bill, because it would destroy any prospect for peace, would reward and encourage terrorism and disincentivize Palestinian leaders from negotiating with Israel.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/tragedy-therapy-and-challenge-jihad-bruce-thornton/

After a year of righteous anger and renewed patriotism, post-9/11 America returned to many of the dysfunctional orthodoxies and bad received wisdom that had helped pave the way for al Qaeda’s success. Foreign policy in particular quickly shifted from punitive kinetic realism to enhance our prestige and create deterrence, to nation-building idealism and cringing “diplomatic outreach.” But this “rules-based international order” foreign-policy thinking itself was a consequence of a long shift in Western culture from tragic realism to therapeutic idealism that permeates our culture and accounts for many of its utopian fantasies.

Twenty years later, the debacle in Afghanistan shows that when it comes to Islam, we are still crippled by our therapeutic delusions.

The tragic view of human life derives from both our Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots. It can be summed up in a line from Euripides: “To suffer is necessity for mortals.” We are beings driven by destructive passions and impulses, yet possessing as well conscious minds and free will. We live in a hostile natural world indifferent to our pain and suffering. We are bound by time and vulnerable to change and the consequence of choices that we can’t foresee. Our world is defined by those limits, and no human effort, no philosophy, no social or political order we create can transcend them or our destructive passions.

Modernity is defined by its claims to correct this tragic world through human knowledge, technology, and the progressive improvement of humanity by eliminating those tragic constants that create our misery and suffering. Educate people to know their true best interests, remove or reform tyrannical governments, provide adequate nutrition and health-care, and create freedom and prosperity, then people will become peaceful, free, and tolerant. Pain, suffering, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” injustice, bigotry, cruelty, hunger, and even emotional pain caused by our own bad choices––remove these tragic conditions of human existence and we can create heaven on earth.