YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERVANE TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND’S BLOWING BUT HERE’S YOUR WEATHERVANE ANYWAY: 1 bad week for President Joe Biden? Mitt Romney says it’s more like 52 bad weeks.
Archive for 2022
January 16, 2022
SPOILER: NO. No, they aren’t. And it’s not so much a thought as a repeated slogan.
YES: Bob McManus: Eric Adams needs to address senseless crime in NYC after Times Square subway shove. “Whose subways are they, anyway? Michelle Go of Manhattan, dead at 40 beneath the wheels of an R train in a Times Square station Saturday morning? Or Simon Martial, 61, the apparently insane vagrant with a violent history who police say shoved Go to her death?”
The #StopAsianHate folks told us that violence against Asians was from white-supremacist Trump supporters, but this murder by a mentally ill black man seems more typical of NYC.
I FELT THAT WAY WHEN I GOT COVID OVER A YEAR AGO, BECAUSE IT WAS NO BIG DEAL: An unexpected emotion arises for some who are catching this wave of Covid: Relief.
Not long ago a former student posted on social media that having not gotten Covid yet felt like playing middle school dodgeball and seeing the front line get really thin. A few days later she posted that she had Covid. I asked how she was doing and she replied that it was basically like a mid-grade cold: tired, stuffy, sore throat, basically no big deal. I wonder if there will be a Covid-fear backlash as millions have that experience. Yes, some people get really sick or die. But that’s true with flu too. Something more like Ebola or smallpox might have been worth the kind of punishment that the establishment has inflicted on the world; this clearly was not.
OPEN THREAD: Get the party started.
THAT’S NO MOON: China builds ‘artificial moon’ for gravity experiment.
IF THREE SHOTS DOESN’T DO IT, HOW LIKELY IS THE FOURTH ONE TO? ‘Waste of Time’ to Keep Vaccinating People: Ex-Head of UK Vaccine Taskforce.
Dr. Clive Dix, who played a key role in helping pharmaceutical firms create the COVID-19 vaccines, told LBC radio on Jan. 16: “The Omicron variant is a relatively mild virus. And to just keep vaccinating people and thinking of doing it again to protect the population is, in my view, now a waste of time.”
Dix said the focus now should be on protecting vulnerable people, such as those over 60, 2 percent of whom remain unvaccinated.
“We should have a highly-focused approach to get those people vaccinated and anybody else who’s vulnerable,” he said.
Though he supports the ongoing booster campaign, he said he has been “critical” of boosting everybody as he is not convinced “it was needed or is needed” for younger people.
Dix said, “I think the thinking of the time was very much to stop infection and transmission where clearly these vaccines don’t do that.”
He said the government needs to be “very focused” on educating itself for the “future vaccination programme” next winter.
He suggested that an “immune status study” should be conducted to “understand exactly where everybody’s immunity is,” so that “by next winter, we can really have a policy of vaccination that’s educated, using the right vaccines at the right time for the right people.”
Dix told The Observer newspaper last week that mass vaccination against COVID-19 should come to an end and the UK should focus on managing it as an endemic disease like flu.
“We now need to manage disease, not virus spread,” he said. “So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
The UK government’s medical advisers have already acknowledged that it is “untenable” to jab the population every three or six months.
The existing vaccines are clearly underperforming. A new vaccine that worked better might be worth getting; umpteen doses of the same inefficient vaccine not so much.
Well, I reviewed this open letter, and it turns out that only around 100 of the 270+ signatories to the letter are people with qualified medical degrees. And a large chunk of that 100 or so medical doctors are MDs employed at universities who are not in fact practitioners of medicine.
Yet part of the letter reads:
“As physicians, we bear the arduous weight of a pandemic that has stretched our medical systems to their limits and only stands to be exacerbated by the anti-vaccination sentiment woven into this and other episodes of Rogan’s podcast.”
Paradoxically, the disseminators of this petition are guilty of the very misinformation label that they’ve attached to Rogan. In fact, neither of the two reported co authors of the letter — Jessica Rivera and Ben Rein — possess medical degrees. Rivera holds a master’s degree and Rein is a PhD academic who researches psychiatry.
The legacy media is happy to amplify misinformation to attack Rogan, given his numbers: Joe Rogan podcast reaches millions more than cable news: report.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): If Rogan fans operated like the left, they’d be complaining to the signers’ employers and professional licensing boards about their deliberate spreading of misinformation.
HMM: What Is The ‘Lunar Effect,’ And What Does It Have to Do With Shark Attacks? I’m inclined to think that people get in the water at night more when the moon is full. The best night dive I ever did was under a full moon on Cayman and we could see perfectly with no lights. It was amazing.
THESE DAYS, IT SEEMS THAT EVERYONE WHO MATTERS, WHO’S TRYING TO FIX THIS MESS, IS “FAR RIGHT.” The press may regret that formulation.
UPDATE: Res ipsa loquitur.
WHEN BIOSPHERES GET HIGH: Model suggests vertical winds could push bacteria to an altitude beyond 120km.
#RESIST: A reader sends this from Long Island:
And another reader sends this from the SF Bay area:
It’s a coast-to-coast phenomenon.
EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: Hollywood’s New Rules: The old boys club is dead. But a new one—with its own litmus tests and landmines—is rapidly replacing it. “This is all going to end in a giant class-action lawsuit.” We can hope.
ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Biden told reporters on Sunday that “authorities ‘just don’t have enough facts’ to speculate why a man targeted a Colleyville, Texas synagogue, taking four hostages Saturday, calling the standoff ‘an act of terror.’ ‘I don’t– we don’t have I don’t think there is sufficient information to know about why he targeted that synagogue, why he insisted on the release of someone who’s been in prison for over 10 years, why he was engaged, why he was using an anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli comments,’ Biden told reporters.”
OUT ON A LIMB: Joe Biden’s Presidency is shaping up to be a historical disaster.
Americans aren’t waiting to render judgment on this Administration. The collapse in confidence is already well underway. On January 12, Quinnipiac—well-regarded but also chronically left-leaning—released its latest poll on Presidential performance. The results for Joe Biden and his Administration are, in a word, catastrophic.
The President’s job-approval rating is underwater by 20 points, with only 33 percent of Americans approving of him. Now, it should be noted that this figure by itself isn’t historically unprecedented. What is historically unprecedented is when it is happening within the Presidential term. Every President of the modern era who sunk to these depths in job-approval ratings has done so at the end of his term—usually on the verge of failing to secure reelection. Only Joe Biden has managed to get here at the end of year one.
It’s a historic Presidency, but not in the way he envisioned.
Hence: The little president who cried racism. “The Senate won’t repeal the filibuster. They won’t pass Biden’s bill to nationalize election rules. Moreover, as the polls show, voters have caught on to Joe Biden’s diatribes and incompetence. He entered office with a lot of goodwill, despite the close election. Now, however, the public has seen enough. Less than one third think he’s doing a good job. The lower he sinks in public esteem, the more he fulminates. His speech in Atlanta is the latest example. He fouled the public square as he slunk off into the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
BEER: IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Fossil named after Nevada brewer who named his beer after it. His beer is named Icthyosaur IPA and now there’s a species of icthyosaur named for him: “Cymbospondylus youngorum.”
#JOURNALISM:
The press is very careful about who it wants to be angry, and about what. And about who it doesn’t want to be angry, or even aware.
Likewise the FBI Twitter Feed is all about January 6, and has nothing about the synagogue attack. They have their priorities, too.
Related:
TOP SELLER: Jeniulet Waterproof Gloves -30℉ Mens Winter Warm All Finger Touch Screen Gloves. #CommissionEarned
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Wake County NC Democrat tweet includes image disparaging parents.
On Jan. 15, the Wake County Democrats issued a Tweet in support of certain Wake County School board members, notably leaving out member Karen Carter.
The tweet includes an image apparently depicting school board attendees (parents) as conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, anti-vax, and Jan. 6 protesters.
Classy stuff; treating parents as the enemy contributed to Terry McAuliffe‘s defeat in November and is one of (many) factors driving Biden’s poll numbers off a cliff: Senators Demand Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona Explain Role in Letter That Called Parents Domestic Terrorists.
I AGREE WITH THIS WALTER JON WILLIAMS PLOT RANT: “What finally broke my patience was the author’s method of building suspense, which was to have one of his characters do something bone-stupid in order to get into jeopardy.”
REMEMBER WHEN THE #STOPASIANHATE FOLKS TOLD US VIOLENCE AGAINST ASIANS WAS FROM WHITE TRUMP FANS? Times Square subway shove ‘psycho’ showed ‘no emotion’ as he timed train’s arrival: witness.
He doesn’t look like a white Trump fan.
