A GOOD DEFENSE: French frigate downs supersonic missile in NATO exercise. “A missile traveling at about 5,000 miles per hour was destroyed recently by a French frigate during NATO exercises off the Scottish coast, the U.S. Navy 6th Fleet and French navy said.”
Archive for 2021
June 1, 2021
RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE (CONT’D): Five times lockdown governors broke their own COVID-19 guidelines.
HOW FACT-CHECKERS ‘DECEIVED THE PUBLIC’ ABOUT POSSIBLE VIRUS OUTBREAK FROM WUHAN LAB: “All that has changed is that the small group that seized control of the narrative in February 2020 and deceived the public and policy-makers for fifteen months now has lost control of the narrative.”
A CONTRACT TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: Trump Taps Newt Gingrich to Come Up With a New Spin on an Old Idea That Worked.
THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY CAN’T STOP BECLOWNING ITSELF: The Saga Continues: Rutgers President Denies Rutgers’ Leadership Ever Apologized for Condemning Antisemitism.
Fire the entire leadership, as an example to others.
YES, VACCINES ARE ONLY ONE WAY TO ACQUIRE IMMUNITY: Johns Hopkins Prof: Half Of Americans Have Natural Immunity; Dismissing It Is ‘Biggest failure Of Medical Leadership.’
Related: Rand Paul: The science proves people with natural immunity should skip COVID vaccines. “To dictate that a person recovered from COVID-19 with natural immunity also submit to a vaccine — without scientific evidence — is nothing more than hubris. If you have no proof that people who acquired natural immunity are getting or transmitting the disease in real numbers, then perhaps you should just be quiet. People are not getting re-infected in large numbers. And that’s not me saying so, that’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quietly admitting that on its website. One thing they also admitted, while at first trying to hide it, was that there are no studies showing that getting the vaccine if you already have natural immunity is of any benefit at all. They can’t show that, because it has not yet been studied. It took my friend Congressman Thomas Massie to make them admit this, by the way. They originally denied their own studies on this.”
Plus: “We know this. Doctors know this. Scientists who design vaccines know this. Vaccines are created to attempt to replicate the immunity we get from having been infected with a disease. I want all the science deniers to read that again. Vaccines are a replacement for natural immunity. They aren’t necessarily better. In fact, natural immunity from measles confers lifelong immunity and the vaccine immunity wanes over a few decades. I choose to follow the science with COVID, rather than submit to fear-mongering.”
Related, from The Lancet:
A study in the UK reported in The Lancet by Victoria Hall and colleagues,8 called the SARS-CoV-2 Immunity and Reinfection Evaluation (SIREN) study, suggests that being seropositive to SARS-CoV-2 through natural infection protects robustly from asymptomatic and symptomatic reinfection. . . . The findings of the authors suggest that infection and the development of an antibody response provides protection similar to or even better than currently used SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Although antibodies induced by SARS-CoV-2 infection are more variable and often lower in titre than antibody responses induced after vaccination, this observation does make sense considering current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines induce systemic immune responses to spike proteins while natural infection also induces mucosal immune responses and immune responses against the many other open reading frames encoded by the approximately 29 900 nucleotides of SARS-CoV-2. The SIREN study adds to a growing number of studies, which demonstrate that infection does protect against reinfection, and probably in an antibody-dependent manner.
In my house, we believe science is real. And Rand Paul’s track record on Covid is vastly better than Fauci’s. Or the CDC’s. (Bumped).
UPDATE: Nature: Had COVID? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime.
NO NOOSE IS GOOD NOOSE: Another “noose” story bites the dust. I hope somebody’s keeping score.
May 31, 2021
HOW THE AUTHORITIES HAVE BLOWN IT:
Several people I spoke with said they’d stop masking only if they had shirts saying “I’m fully vaccinated, not a Republican.”
It’s time for us as a community to continue the effort to de-politicize science and the institutions that analyze it.
Wearing a mask is a public health measure, not a form of dog-whistling.
It has modest utility in certain limited circumstances. But for people who need meaning in their otherwise empty lives, it’s a source of meaning, and self-importance, all the time.
OPEN THREAD: Ponder the meaning of this special day.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: BLM activist steps down from school board after allegations he molested up to 62 children.
SPACE JUNK — BETTER PUT UP MY UMBRELLA: Space station robotic arm hit by orbital debris in ‘lucky strike’ (video).
SANITY IS NOT HIS FRIEND: Andrew Cuomo is using his waning power to block mask sanity for kids.
ANN ALTHOUSE: “This is a lesson on reparations: It will never be enough.” Keep your wallet firmly closed.
GOOD QUESTION: If we’re so worried about rare blood clots from the J&J vaccine, why do we accept more common clotting problems caused by birth control pills? “Where was everyone’s concern for blood clots when we started putting 14-year-old girls on the pill?”
The pill serves the left’s agenda, so it gets a pass. The Insta-Wife’s heart attack was caused by blood clots, most likely brought on by birth control pills, and she’s noticed since that you hear a lot more stories of that sort of thing happening than the news coverage would suggest.
HANNAH COX: America’s Elections: Legally Rigged.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
● Shot: Twitter May Start Labeling Your Tweets Based on How Wrong You Are.
—Gizmodo, today.
● Chaser:
● Hangover: With the Hunter Biden Expose, Suppression is a Bigger Scandal Than The Actual Story.
—Matt Taibbi, Substack, October 24, 2020.
● The D.T.s: Laptop repair store owner who discovered Hunter Biden’s emails sues Twitter for defamation.
—The Post Millennial, December 28th, 2020.
UPDATE: File under whatever the heck is worse than the D.T.s: Twitter Admits ‘Error,’ Reinstates Zerohedge After Banning It in Late January for Calling Out China.
—NewsBusters, June 15th, 2020.
NICE USE OF THE PASSIVE VOICE, AKA, NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: News anchor notes anniversary of that fire that just started somehow at St. John’s Church in Washington, DC.
BENZENE WAS ONCE SOLD AS AN AFTERSHAVE: Online pharmacy lab finds benzene in 78 sunscreen products. “In this new effort, the company tested almost 300 brands of sunscreen and after-tanning products sold by 69 companies—they found some amount of benzene in 78 products. They note that the products were being advertised as a way to prevent skin cancer in adults and children. They also note that some of the products they tested had levels that were higher than the 2% cap mandated by the FDA. . . . They also point out that the FDA recently discovered that sunscreen chemicals can be readily absorbed through the skin.”
What would August Kekulé say?
My own feeling is that sunscreen has been oversold. It has its uses, mostly when you’re going to be unavoidably exposed to too much sun. But you’re better off just moderating your exposure to strong sunlight.
MAVERICK: My copy of Jason Riley’s new biography of Thomas Sowell has arrived. I’m looking forward to reading it.
MORE POWER: 2021 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 392 Goes Nuclear. Note, not actually nuclear, which would be way cool. “And now, rounding out Jeep’s offer-all-the-engines policy, you can get a Wrangler stuffed with a gargantuan 470-hp 6.4-liter Hemi V-8. No, Jeep didn’t use the supercharged Hellcat engine. Nobody has enough life insurance for that.”
MICHAEL WALSH: A Soldier Fights so That Others Might Live.
This was war at its most elemental. The Japanese, with no hope of help and nowhere to run, hid in caves by day and attacked by night. The Army and Marines fought the most brutal war imaginable, with flamethrowers and bayonets and bare hands, in addition to rifles, sidearms, and machine guns. The Japanese would attack in waves, kamikazes of the infantry, attempting to overrun the American positions as the GIs pressed forward.
Salomon’s mobile hospital was set up near the front lines in the early dawn of July 7, just meters between the forward foxholes and the sea. The Japanese burst out of their concealed positions and sent the Americans reeling back. The hospital was soon filled with the wounded as the fighting raged all around it.
Salomon realized his position was untenable and ordered the wounded evacuated while he stayed behind to cover them. It was at this point that his ability with guns and weaponry came into play.
“Everybody’s dead out there,” he was reported to have said. “I can do these guys more good out there than I can in here. I’ll hold them off until you get them to safety. See you later.”
When they found his body, it was riddled with bullet and bayonet wounds, many of them apparently inflicted after death by the enraged enemy. Where Saito had demanded that each of his men kill ten Americans, one dauntless American had killed more than 100 Japanese.
Salomon’s Medal of Honor was delayed by bureaucratic misinterpretation of the Geneva convention, which outlaws identified medical personnel from taking up arms; Salomon was wearing a Red Cross armband when he died. But in fact doctors are allowed to fight in defense of their wounded and so on May 1, 2002—nearly 58 years after his heroic actions—president George W. Bush officially awarded the Medal posthumously to Captain Benjamin Lewis Salomon.
The citation concludes: “Captain Salomon’s extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.” And, it must be added, upon all Americans who put their country before themselves.
Do we still have such men today?
Read the whole thing.
Related: This headline helps to answer Michael’s query. Yes, but…: Crime-Loving Liberals Keep Chasing Patriots Out of Military and Law Enforcement.
ROGER SIMON’S MEMORIAL DAY REGRET: I Did Not Serve.
Like many of my generation—and this is not an excuse, merely, shall we say, a “chronological” notation—I never served in the military.
Indeed, thinking myself morally and politically opposed to the Vietnam War, I did what I could to avoid the draft.
1964, the year of my college graduation—I was only twenty that June, or was it still May—it never entered my head I could possibly volunteer for the Army, Navy, Marines or Air Force. I was going to graduate school, my trusted 2-S exemption in hand.
My only sacrifice, if you can call it that, was that I had to forego a dream I now see as more than a little pretentious, to go to film school in France. My draft board insisted on domestic study so off I went to the Yale School of Drama for a somewhat dubious MFA in playwriting and dramatic literature.
This left me plenty of time to join the ranks on the Washington Mall shouting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” and “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong is going to win!”, not to mention the ever-popular “Off the pig!”
I could never get myself to say the latter, aware that we were largely privileged middle class (and sometimes more) college kids attacking working class police. The hypocrisy was pretty clear even then. The joke went “What’re you gonna do if someone breaks into your house? Call a hippie?” (That fifty-year old joke still pertains.)
I remember having many arguments about the war, even screaming ones, with my father who served as a flight surgeon in WWII, although not “in theater” as they say, but domestically.
A couple of years later, when I got married young, my exemption continued. On graduation from Yale, I still could avoid the draft. I didn’t even have to burn my card. Or fake an asthma attack. Or bother to chant “Hell, no, we won’t go!” although I probably did on occasion.
I’m not here to debate the Vietnam War. That’s already been done ad infinitum. And my own political views have long since shifted.
What I want to point out is that many of us standing around our barbecues today, flipping ribs and downing a Sam Adams, do so in a bit of bad faith. That includes me.
In many of us—again that includes me—is the lingering thought that the reasons we did not serve were not entirely idealistic.
A touch of cowardice might have been buried somewhere not too far below the surface.
Maybe more than a touch.
It was so convenient to be against the war. It got you out of a lot of things.
But I remember being startled when one of my college classmates actually died over there not more than a month after we graduated.
I didn’t know him well. He was in a couple of my classes as a freshman and then we went our separate ways. And he was in ROTC, something I obviously abjured.
There were others shortly thereafter. I read about them in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. Like the first one, they were usually students I didn’t know well, not from my set. They didn’t work on the college paper, as I did, or the literary magazine. They didn’t act in undergraduate productions of Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams.
Now, for the most part, that generation that did not serve has taken over. It’s been a long time since we have had a president who was in the military.
Bill Clinton was typical of the type who did not serve, a protestor elevated to commander-in-chief. Does he have any twinges on Memorial Day? I wonder.
What about Donald Trump, who is so pro-military but did not serve? What does he feel about his lack of service now? It would be interesting to hear. I wouldn’t be surprised if he shares my uneasiness.
It’s rather obvious Joe Biden, who of course never served as well, cares about our fallen in only a perfunctory “political” manner, laying a wreath and so forth. (At least he does that—unlike his clueless Vice-President.)
Instead, this Memorial Day our president is concentrating on what happened in Tulsa 100 years ago, issuing an extremely lengthy, detailed presidential proclamation on the subject that you can be certain Biden—the plagiarist who barely made it through law school—did not write himself.
It seems Memorial Day is just another opportunity for him to stoke the already-raging flames of racial enmity in our country. Oh, well…
For me, and I assume for others of my generation, it is a time for reflection.
But it won’t stop me—and shouldn’t stop us— from celebrating our great country. And enjoying ourselves.
Related: Kamala Harris’ Tardy Notice of Memorial Day Highlights What We All Know About the Democrat Base.
SPACE: CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX is building a Raptor rocket engine every 48 hours, disputing claims of a ‘bottleneck’ for the Artemis moon mission boosters. “NASA in April chose SpaceX as its sole partner for the Artemis moon program. But the contracted work was put on hold in late April pending a Government Accountability Office review after a protest from another bidder, led by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space exploration company.”
Note to Bezos: Less lawyering, more engineering.
ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER:
Joe Biden – “Stay cool this weekend, folks”
Kamala Harris – “Enjoy the long weekend”
Donald Trump – pic.twitter.com/1ETu5TEtKn
— AllegianceToLiberty (@AllegianceTL) May 30, 2021