RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/understanding-the-covid-odds?wallit_nosession=1

It’s obviously not easy to give up fear of Covid-19, to judge from a recent survey showing that the vaccinated are actually more frightened than the unvaccinated. Another survey found that most Democratic voters are so worried that they want to make it illegal for the unvaccinated to leave home. But before you don another mask or disinfect another surface, before you cheer on politicians and school officials enforcing mandates, consider your odds of a fatal Covid case once you’ve been vaccinated.

Those odds can be gauged from a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, published by the Centers for Disease Control. They tracked more than 1 million vaccinated adults in America over most of last year, including the period when the Delta variant was surging, and classified victims of Covid according to risk factors such as being over 65, being immunosuppressed, or suffering from diabetes or chronic diseases of the heart, kidney, lungs, liver or brain.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/06/hurricane-canada-n1556770

Hurricane Canada, a category 5 political storm, has made landfall on the country’s capital city in the form of a massive truckers’ strike protesting illegal COVID mandates and vaccine passports, a phenomenon that has galvanized the attention of the world and inspired similar demonstrations internationally. This has become common knowledge, and commentary pro and con has been proliferating with abandon.

What is most surprising in a tepid and unadventurous country like Canada that habitually votes left is the degree of popular support the truckers’ Freedom Convoy has garnered from ordinary citizens across the land. Convoys have assembled in several Canadian cities, the Alberta-Montana border has been blockaded, and reinforcements continue to arrive—even on horseback, taking a page from the RCMP.

Naturally, official aggression is also formidable, as a bought-and-paid-for print media, enjoying Prime Minister Trudeau’s $600 million bribe, and the country’s national broadcaster the CBC, rolling in annual billion-dollar government funding, weigh in against the truckers. Government officials at every level, municipal, provincial, and federal, with only a few exceptions, have joined the vigilante movement against the salt-of-the-earth protesters. Threats of reprisal are mounting, highways have been closed, and the turbulence shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

Canada is now a divided country, pitting an elite class of political authorities, journalists, and haranguing pundits against a rising tide of blue-collar resentment.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/06/our-elite-is-no-elite-at-all/

An elite is always variously defined.  

The ideal elites, as ancient philosophers argued, were a “natural elite” due to their exemplary character, aptitude, and work ethic. Understandably, a towering few ascended from all walks of life to positions of power, influence, and occasional wealth.  

But such a natural meritocracy, for obvious reasons, rarely leads to an equality of result.  

Who Are Our Elite? 

Our current idea of ostensible elites could be defined by noting their money and influence. But money alone—even in the huge sums now found on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley—is not the only elite criterion.  

Donald Trump is a billionaire with much influence and lives accordingly. Yet few of our “elite” would consider him a kindred soul. Ditto Elon Musk. He is the richest man in the world. But the elite mostly despise and ostracize him.  

Birth itself has given way somewhat to insider influence and professional parentage. You may be a fifth-generation scion with a name such as Mellon, Vanderbilt, or Rockefeller, but if your dad was not an ambassador, your mom not a VP at CBS, your sibling not a Harvard professor or Google executive, you have fallen out of the elite. 

Zip codes still count. Although there are certainly “elites” who hail from Kansas City, Boise, or Sacramento, most of those who exercise national clout are found inordinately on the two coasts, from Boston to Washington, D.C., and from Seattle to San Diego—with respective windows on the wealth of Europe or Asia.  

The Obamas were going to be anointed as multimillionaires wherever they lived. But they would not necessarily remain as elite as they have become living back in Chicago rather than in a tony D.C. neighborhood and out on Martha’s Vineyard. So, it was an easy call for them to follow the trajectory of the Clintons rather than the Georgia-bound Carters.  

In the 21st century, other elite criteria seem to count as much as the old markers of lineage, money, and location. “Certification,” defined as degrees from the “right” undergraduate and graduate schools, is essential for an elite resumé. 

Such brands have little to do with education per se or aggregate knowledge acquired. (It is not clear that an Ivy League student would do better on the same SAT, taken upon graduation as earlier, upon admittance). Are our best generals those with Yale degrees, and our best CEOs those with Stanford MBAs? And are Harvard Law Review editors—think Barack Obama, the boss of Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, James Comey, and John Brennan—our top legal and ethical minds? 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/02/part-two-covid-politics-and-psychology/

Individual and social psychology offers valuable insights into hysterical personal and small group behaviour under COVID, but how can psychology explain the society-wide mass hysteria?  Enter the theory of ‘mass formation psychosis’.  Psychosis is a severe mental disorder which causes, in an individual, abnormal thought processes at odds with reality.  Psychosis at a mass population level, however, occurs when everyone, simultaneously, goes psychotic together. Think of it as the way a hive frenzy develops when each individual bee gets extremely angry because every other bee is getting angry.

Dr. Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, has been Johnny-on-the-spot during COVID by rebranding mass hysteria as ‘mass formation psychosis’ (MFP).  Desmet’s theory has its antecedents in crowd psychology, especially the collective madness of crowds.  In his formulation, MFP arises from the dynamic of individuals acting as a crowd in projecting their own free-floating, generalised personal anxieties, frustration and aggression onto the social construct of a COVID ‘pandemic’ and providing a sense of renewed ‘social belonging’ to mitigate the anxiety.

In MFP, sacrifice (lockdown, for example) and heroism (such as self-quarantine) are called upon whilst opportunities for virtuous behaviour proliferate (‘I’m masking up, getting jabbed, self-isolating for your benefit’).  All participants in the COVID-driven MFP reinforce the mass psychosis by passing on their latest traumatic fears to each other in a closed-system, positive-feedback loop (‘Oh my God, now it’s Omicron!  It’s highly contagious!  Run for the hills!’) whilst thrashing around for scapegoats to make them feel subjectively safer because all their pet interventions have delivered nothing of any benefit.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/who-gets-to-join-the-black-caucus-in-virginia/

If you’re not a liberal, you need not apply.A. C. Cordoza, a black Republican in the Virginia House of Delegates, is excluded from the legislature’s Black Caucus.

V irginia Democrats are certainly taking their defeat last November hard. Last week, they spitefully refused the application of the lone black Republican in the House of Delegates to join the Black Caucus — which in theory is open to non-Democrats.

A. C. Cordoza, who won a surprise election last November in a significantly minority district in Hampton, took to the House floor to say he had been excluded because he dared to have “diverse” ideas. “The questions for entry had little to do with being black and had more to do with being leftist,” said Cordoza. He said the questionnaire asked about his three top environmental-justice priorities, whether he favored charter schools, whether he would limit recalls of election officials to “end harassment,” and whether he would repeal laws limiting suits against police officers. He was also asked if he backed pro-union legislation, abortion rights, mask mandates, and gun control.

“These questions . . . spit in the face of our ancestors who fought to have all of our rights guaranteed,” Cordoza said. “I asked myself what any of those things mentioned have to do with being black. The answer is it has nothing to do with being black. . . . The caucus is not about being black, it’s about being leftist.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/05/the-drugfather/

“My financial disclosure is public knowledge and has been so for the last 37 years or so the last 35 years. All you have to do is ask for it. You’re so misinformed, all you have to do is ask for it.”

That was Dr. Anthony Fauci last month, in response to Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a medical doctor. As Adam Andrezejewski of OpentheBooks.com learned, the “public knowledge” part is a stretch. 

Fauci’s 2021 salary, and what he earned in royalties, had not been made public. As many as 1,000 National Institutes of Health scientists receive royalties, and each payment is “a potential conflict of interest.” So it was of some concern that “NIH admits it holds approximately 1,200 pages relating to Fauci’s financial information and conflict of interest disclosures.” 

As it turns out, this sort of secrecy is standard practice. 

According to a 2005 British Medical Journal report now posted on an NIH website, patients who took part in NIH clinical trials “had no idea that scientists at the institutes received $8.9m (£4.8m; €6.8m) in royalty payments and might benefit financially for the use of their discoveries by pharmaceutical companies and device makers.” 

Nearly 1,000 NIH researchers received annual royalty payments and “NIH researchers spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars studying the treatments that they had developed that were licensed to drug companies.” If they had known about the researchers’ financial interests, “patients might have thought differently about the risks of trial treatment.” 

The two leading researchers were Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his deputy Clifford Lane. They received payments for the development of interleukin-2 as a treatment for HIV/AIDS. Dr. Lane told the BMJ that the payment was part of his federal compensation and “the government patented the development and shared the payments it received with the inventors.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/05/do-you-trust-the-u-s-government/

Do you trust the U.S. government? I don’t recommend it.  

Consider what John Kirby, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said a couple of days ago at a press briefing. “We believe,” Kirby said, that Russia is planning to stage a fake attack by Ukrainian military or intelligence forces against Russian sovereign territory, or against Russian speaking people,” in order to justify an invasion of Ukraine. Kirby had lots of details: “We believe that Russia would produce a very graphic propaganda video, which would include corpses and actors that would be depicting mourners, and images of destroyed locations, as well as military equipment, at the hands of Ukraine or the West.” 

Gosh. Should we be worried? Yes. But not necessarily for the reasons that Kirby and his puppet masters want you to be worried. The United States is sending troops and arms to aid Ukraine, so of course there needs to be an emergency to justify that action. John Kirby just outlined a scary scenario. But inquiring minds want to know: What’s his evidence for this dramatic claim? 

That was the burden of the remarkable exchange between State Department spokesman Ned Price and veteran AP reporter Matt Lee. 

OK, Lee said, we’ve just heard that Russia is in the process of organizing a gigantic false flag operation to justify its attack on Ukraine. “What evidence,” Lee asked, “do you have to support the idea that there is some propaganda film in the making?”

Bingo. What followed is the stuff of legend.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/look_with_dawning_horror_at_the_presidential_line_of_succession.html

In Major League Baseball, starting pitchers get plenty of press, all the glory, and the really big bucks.  But true afficionados of the sport know that a team is only as good as its bullpen, a collection of lesser known pitchers who are called upon when the starting pitcher runs out of gas.

When it comes to the U.S. government, who’s our big stud starting pitcher?  Why, that would be “Clueless Joe” Biden, the crusty old conniver who turns eighty in November.

Clueless Joe may have once had a political fastball and the ability to put it where he wanted.  But as he turns eighty, Joe Biden’s physically and mentally shot.  All he serves up now is slop.  Even the lying left-wing media are starting to admit what’s been patently obvious to anyone with a working cerebrum: clueless Joe has run out of gas.

It’s only a matter of time before America has to make that call to the bullpen.  And whom do we have warming up in the bullpen, you ask?

Why, that would be the crafty leftie from California, “Heels Up” Harris.  Harris earned her moniker by being Willie Brown’s side piece as she, um, climbed the ladder of political success.

As California’s deputy attorney general, Heels Up sent hundreds of blacks to prison for marijuana offenses.  But years later, when the political winds had changed, Harris laughed off her prior actions.

Having “evolved” on the issue of pot, Harris smilingly admitted to smoking joints in school while listening to Tupac and Snoop Dogg, neither of whom had recorded anything at that time.  Referring to weed, Kammy averred that “it gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/05/terry-fox-and-the-truckers-n1556407

“The question needs to be posed. Who are the real yahoos? Who are the real defacers and defamers? Who are the real thieves and grifters and hypocrites? Who are those who inspire genuine disgust?”

Canadian national hero Terry Fox (1958-1981), after having had a leg amputated due to cancer in 1977, embarked on a cross-country run in 1980 to raise money for cancer research. An annual event held across Canada continues to honor his memory. Terry Fox became a national hero because he represented the spirit of courage and defiance, of rising above the odds, of refusing to surrender to the trials of his condition. He began his “Marathon of Hope” in St. John’s on the island of Newfoundland and ran many thousand kilometers to Thunder Bay, Ontario.

In a telling parallel, the Freedom Convoy, taking issue with the vaccine mandates and demanding the resignation of Canada’s discredited prime minister Justin Trudeau, traversed the country from Prince Rupert, British Columbia to the nation’s capital in Ottawa, travelling approximately the same distance, almost 4,000 kilometers, enduring sub-zero temperatures and without accommodations and salaried income. GoFundMe predictably suspended trucker crowdfunding, only a small portion of the over $10 million sum accumulated having been released owing to obstructionist government intervention. The transparent pretext is that the funds may be used to promote “extremism,” “hate” and “violence.”

Though hampered by spiteful authoritarian manipulations, maligned by the press and the political elect, and libeled for the heinous act of profaning the statue of Terry Fox, the truckers, in fact, embody the buoyant spirit of Terry Fox as they bravely protest the sickly condition in which the country now finds itself—a corrupt media, a coercive government, a heretofore apathetic public and probably the absolute worst prime minister who has ever defaced not a statue but his very office. They want their traditional freedoms back. They want their Constitutional rights restored. And they are prepared to assert these rights.