It’s Wednesday, January 26th, 2022…but before we begin, so much for the kinder, gentler political dialogue 46* promised the country:
But here’s the juice: As G. Trevor so insightfully observed, while the language Biden used is unbecoming of anyone, let alone a sitting President*, Doocy’s question was, nonetheless, stupid. Asking what Biden planned on doing to reduce inflation prior to the midterms would have a fair and balanced question, so in our mind both Biden and Doocy exercised poor judgement. But Doocy is just 34, with frankly less journalistic experience than his position warrants, and Biden is supposed to be the elder statesman, the “adult in the room” in contrast to The Donald.
Yeah, an adult who takes any question regarding his record as an assault deserving of an angry, personal attack.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, a thought-provoking piece from the Washington Times in which Michael McKenna poses a legitimate question:
“The military-industrial complex and its clients sprinkled throughout both political parties seem to have decided that the next place we need to go and kill people (or at least sell weapons to help others kill people) is Ukraine, assuming that Russia decides to slice off a section of its former province.
Good for them. But before the rest of us get involved in yet another war that no one intends to win, it might be worthwhile to consider a few features of the landscape.
There is no nice way to say this, but the idea of Ukraine as a nation-state is relatively new. In the 350 years since the Eternal Peace Treaty (actual name) was signed in 1686, Ukraine has been either a vassal state or province of Russia. Ukraine has been independent only since 1991, and that independence happened only as a consequence of the United States and its allies winning the Cold War.
Like all people living near great powers, the Ukrainians have suffered from the proximity. Ireland has suffered for 1,000 years in the shadow of England. Our own neighbors — Canada and Mexico — do not consider living on the same continent with the United States an unmixed blessing.
However, misfortunes of geographical fate do not mean that we should wander into conflict. In the long sweep of American history, no serious person has ever suggested we assist Ireland in gaining or preserving her independence from England. There’s a good reason for that. We’re Americans — not Irish and certainly not Ukrainians. Our own problems are sufficient to themselves.
Nevertheless, folks ranging from President Biden to Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Texas Republican, have made it clear (well, sort of clear in the case of Mr. Biden) that they intend to view any crossing of the Ukrainian border as an act against the United States.
That is especially odd given that Mr. Biden and his party — and a pretty sizable chunk of the pre-Trump Republican Party — have been content to watch the slow-motion invasion of our own southern border for most of the last 50 years. Last year, for example, about 10 divisions crossed the border each month. We did nothing.
I guess there’s no money for the weapons crowd in protecting our own border.
The fixation on Ukraine is also odd because we are under no legal or moral obligations to protect Ukraine, nor do we have any treaty obligations to Ukraine. No one has explained what American interest is at risk in Ukraine, nor has anyone explained why American lives or property should be put at risk in the event of a Russian invasion into one of its former provinces.
Mr. Biden has not even done us the courtesy of pretending to seek congressional approval for whatever he might have in mind.
There are a handful of border disputes underway on this planet at any given moment. There is a 100-year-old border dispute in Ireland. There are border disputes in Sudan, India, Gibraltar, etc. There is a border dispute on our southern border where pretty much everyone on the planet believes they have the right to enter our country at will.
There is an increasingly ominous border dispute between the Republic of Taiwan and Communist China. That one, and the one on our southern border, are most material to specific American interests and specific American legal and moral obligations.
It is not clear why this border dispute in a corner of Eastern Europe is worthy of our attention. As the great German prime minister Otto von Bismarck once noted: “The entire Balkans are not worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier.” Nor are they worth the bones of a single United States soldier or Marine.
Russia is not a material threat to the United States. With a GDP of less than $2 trillion, Russia’s economy is smaller than Canada’s. It is a country with deteriorating economics and demographics. The real and existential threat we face is from the Communist Chinese Party. Russia, and by extension Ukraine, is a sideshow.
Finally, we’ve just lost the longest and most pointless war in the history of our nation. Now is not the time for more foreign and military adventurism and yet another pointless war.“
Though we strongly disagree with McKenna’s characterization of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan as a pointless war, and don’t find the relative situations of Ireland and Ukraine even remotely comparable, he makes some valid points. But what neither he, nor Tucker Carlson, another adamant opponent of U.S. assistance to Ukraine, mentions is why on earth isn’t the U.N. stepping in to halt Russian aggression against one of its members?!?
We are facing enemies — both without and within — hoping to exploit the fissures in our society, undermine our democracy, break up our alliances, and return us to an international system where might determines right.
The answer to this threat is more openness — not less. More friendships, more cooperation, more alliances. More democracy.
Vladimir Putin wants to tell himself and anyone he can dupe into believing him that the liberal idea is “obsolete” — because he’s afraid of its power.
No army on earth can match — how the Electric Idea of Liberty — passes freely from person to person, jumps borders, transcends languages and cultures — how it can supercharge communities of ordinary citizens into activists and organizers and change agents.
We must once more harness that power and rally the Free World to meet the challenges facing our world today. And it falls to the United States of America to lead the way.
No other nation has the capacity. No other nation is built on that idea – that promise.
And it’s in our self-interest.
We have to champion liberty and democracy. We have to reclaim our credibility.
And of course, we saw how Afghanistan turned out. After ISIS killed 13 American servicemen, Biden stood before the country and pledged, “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this — we will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
ISIS has yet to pay any price. Those were just words on a teleprompter; they didn’t really mean anything.
A small boon for which we guess we should be grateful.
Moving on, writing at the Brownstone Institute via The Epoch Times, Harvey Risch, Jayanta Bhattacharya and Paul Elias Alexanderoffer their expert opinions as to why…
“The time has come to terminate the pandemic state of emergency. (If it was ever necessary in the first place, which we highly doubt!)It’s time to end the controls, the closures, the restrictions, the plexiglass, the stickers, the exhortations, the panic-mongering, the distancing announcements, the ubiquitous commercials, the forced masking, the vaccine mandates.
We don’t mean that the virus is gone—Omicron is still spreading wildly, and the virus may circulate forever. But with a normal focus on protecting the vulnerable, we can treat the virus as a medical rather than a social matter (or, perhaps more accurately, a political matter) and manage it in ordinary ways. A declared emergency needs continuous justification, and that’s now lacking.
Over the last six weeks in the United States, the Delta variant strain—the most recent aggressive version of the infection—has according to the CDC been declining in both the proportion of infections (60 percent on Dec. 18 to 0.5 percent on Jan. 15) and the number of daily infected people (95,000 to 2,100). During the next two weeks, Delta will decline to the point that it essentially disappears like the strains before it.
Omicron is mild enough that most people, even many high-risk people, can adequately cope with the infection. Omicron infection is no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so. A large portion of the vulnerable population in the developed world is already vaccinated and protected against severe disease. We have learned much about the utility of inexpensive supplements like Vitamin D to reduce disease risk, and there’s a host of good therapeutics available to prevent hospitalization and death should a vulnerable patient become infected. And for younger people, the risk of severe disease—already low before Omicron—is minuscule.
Even in places with strict lockdown measures, there are hundreds of thousands of newly registered Omicron cases daily and countless unregistered positives from home testing. Measures like mandatory masking and distancing have had negligible or at most small effects on transmission. Large-scale population quarantines only delay the inevitable. Vaccination and boosters have not halted Omicron disease spread; heavily vaccinated nations like Israel and Australia have more daily cases per capita than any place on earth at the moment. This wave will run its course despite all of the emergency measures.
Until Omicron, recovery from COVID provided substantial protection against subsequent infection. While the Omicron variant can reinfect patients recovered from infection by previous strains, such reinfection tends to produce mild disease. Future variants, whether evolved from Omicron or not, are unlikely to evade the immunity provided by Omicron infection for a long while. With the universal spread of Omicron worldwide, new strains will likely have more difficulty finding a hospitable environment because of the protection provided to the population by Omicron’s widespread natural immunity.
It’s true that—despite emergency measures—hospitalization counts and COVID-associated mortality have risen. Since mortality tends to trail symptomatic infection by about 3–4 weeks, we’re still seeing the Delta strain’s remaining effects and the waning of vaccine immunity against serious outcomes at 6–8 months after vaccination. These cases should decline over time as Delta finally says goodbye. It’s too late to alter their course with lockdowns (if that were ever possible).
Given that Omicron, with its mild infection, is running its course to the end, there’s no justification for maintaining emergency status. The lockdowns, personnel firings, and shortages and school disruptions have done at least as much damage to the population’s health and welfare as the virus.
The state of emergency isn’t justified now, and it can’t be justified by fears of a hypothetical recurrence of some more severe infection at some unknown point in the future. If such a severe new variant were to occur—and it seems unlikely from Omicron—then that would be the time to discuss a declaration of emergency.
Americans have sacrificed enough of their human rights and of their livelihoods for two years in the service of protecting the general public health. Omicron is circulating but it’s not an emergency. The emergency is over. The current emergency declaration must be canceled. It’s time.“
It’s worth noting the credentials of the three authors which appear at the end of the article online:
Harvey Risch is Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Risch received his MD degree from the University of California San Diego and PhD from the University of Chicago. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at the University of Washington, Dr. Risch was a faculty member in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Toronto before coming to Yale.
Jay Bhattacharya, Senior Scholar of Brownstone Institute, is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute.
Dr. Paul Alexander is an epidemiologist focusing on clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. He has a bachelor’s in epidemiology from McMaster University, and a master’s degree from Oxford University. He earned his PhD from McMaster’s Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact. Paul is a former WHO Consultant and Senior Advisor to US Department of HHS in 2020 for the COVID-19 response.
We’re reminded of this scene from Armageddon, which is particularly appropriate given Dr. Faux Chi’s status as 46*’s chief “scientific advisor” in matters regarding the WuFlu:
Then again, what advice could one expect from a “scientist” covering up his own direct involvement in COVID-19’s development?!?
“Noted dead white guy Samuel Johnson, who believed that there are only two genders, once observed, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It’s an apt analogy here, both because it evokes the fact that the Democrats have gone all-in on the side of the criminals as the crime rate rockets up, and also because it demonstrates just how intractably stupid the Democrats are. They ride in the little cart heading toward their November 8th date with the electoral noose, but their minds are not concentrated on that. Instead they are concentrated on fake insurrections and telling us how CRT is not taught in schools yet must absolutely continue to be taught in schools.
This is unsustainable, and normal people would know it, but normal people are not quasi-Marxist pagan fanatics who drove actual religion out of their lives and let commie nonsense fill the void. They can’t stop it, even if they wanted to stop it, because their collection of bizarre obsessions is not merely an ideology but a substitute for actual faith. Progressivism is their god. Unfortunately for them, it’s a false god. It’s a political golden calf, except they oppose the gold standard because it wouldn’t let them print all the cash they want to spend, and Dems are leery of cattle because their Swalwellian flatulence causes global warming, which is another facet of their fake, foolish faith.
But then again, no cow ever scored with Fang Fang, so advantage steak.
Sucks for the Dems that they have no choice but to stagger on toward ruin, accumulating ever more failures and disgraces, all the while doing the impossible and making the Republican Party look good, if only in comparison. But this is more than just a bad electoral cycle. Everyone has up years and down years. This is something much worse. This is a head-first dive into a cesspool with their eyes and mouths wide open.“
“This is the point we’ve been making for months. Look at the reaction and coverage tonight. Tear jerker press conferences and proclamations of heroes coming soon. Imagine if people knew these folks’ names. Being Black in DC is more dangerous than any job.”
“If listeners weren’t skeptical enough about a story that has been flatly rejected on the record by the Chief Justice, they are now being asked to believe a tale attributed to anonymous sources who can’t or won’t provide either documentary evidence or even the most basic details related to their claims. Once Ms. Totenberg gave NPR’s sources anonymity, why could these sources not share the form and timing of the alleged communication?“
(5). And why HAS the FDA revoked its authorization for the administration of monoclonal antibodies, a proven and effective means of dramatically lessening the effects of the WuFlu, and forcing Florida to close its COVID treatment sites?!? Sorta kinda makes Russell Brand’s point featured in today’s Tales of The Darkside video, accessible via link #3 immediately below our Quote of the Day at the top of the page.
(6). Since we’re on the subject of dubious medical moves, Breeze Gould forwarded an item which relates all you need to know about COVID in one chart, courtesy of Alex Berenson and “the good people at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark”.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Breeze Gould…
…and this from a contributor whose identity we inexcusably misplaced:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, courtesy today of two older White women who won’t be ignored, particularly when it comes to the wearing of utterly useless masks:
Hell hath no fury like a pair of ugly, elderly Liberal women scorned.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Peter Schweitzer reveals the depth of corruption at the heart of the Biden criminal cartel.
Tales of The Darkside
Courtesy of the lovely Shannon, a Brit who’s finally asking the right questions. It’s a bit lengthy, but well worth the watch. FYI, the money quote comes at the 9:46 mark.
On the Lighter Side
Contributor James Nichols offers this blast from the past as 46* considers making American troops pay for his mistakes and his Administration’s asinine foreign policy.
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