On December 11, 2022,
in Uncategorized,
by magoo1310
It’s Friday, December 9th, 2022…but before we begin…
Faux Chi’s avoidance brings to mind the interrogation scene from L.A. Confidential:
Here’s hoping this lying, self-important pr*ck responsible for the deaths of many and the impoverishment of many more gets his comeuppance, if not in this life than most certainly in the next.
“…Why is this year’s cold-and-flu season so rough? One theory is that we spent almost all of one year (2020) and portions of another year (2021) taking all those precautions against Covid-19, which meant that our bodies encountered fewer viruses of any kind. The CDC concluded that the 2020–2021 flu season had “dramatically fewer flu illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths” than previous years, and then characterized the 2021–2022 flu season as “mild” or “low.” Our bodies have had a nearly three-year vacation from fighting off influenza viruses, which means that they’re out of practice.
And with our lives still being shaped by the decisions made during the pandemic, it’s a good time to reexamine those decisions. (Heck, even the Chinese government is finally giving up on the always-unworkable “Zero Covid ” philosophy.)
I don’t agree with everything in this David Wallace Wells New York Times column, particularly the contention that Ben Shapiro was “blithe” about the deaths of the elderly from Covid-19. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of Shapiro’s comment that, “If somebody who is 81 dies of COVID-19, that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of COVID-19.”
But Wells brings up two points that a lot of powerful voices didn’t want to acknowledge during the pandemic. First, vaccination dramatically reduced the risk of death in the elderly and immunocompromised, but it did not eliminate it, which is why vaccinated people are now a larger percentage of Covid deaths than unvaccinated people. Wells writes:
Vaccines are not as effective among older adults because the immune system weakens with age. It’s much harder to train older immune systems, and that training diminishes more quickly. In Americans between the ages of 65 and 79, for instance, vaccination reduced mortality risk about eightfold, compared to the unvaccinated. . . .
Given the underlying age skew, a twice-boosted 87-year-old shares a similar risk of Covid death as a never-vaccinated 70-year-old. Which is to say, some real risk. If it was ever comfortable to say that the unconscionable levels of American deaths were a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” it is surely now accurate to describe the ongoing toll as a “pandemic of the old.”
Second, the desire to get as many Americans vaccinated as possible spurred many influential voices to ignore or dispute that different people had different levels of risk from a Covid-19 infection. The typical 30-year-old faced much less risk of serious consequences from a Covid-19 infection than the typical 70-year-old, and the typical ten-year-old faced much, much less risk from a Covid-19 infection than adults. But openly discussing those facts might make some 30-year-olds blow off getting vaccinated and might make some parents conclude that getting their kids vaccinated wasn’t that important. In light of that fear, a lot of public-health experts chose to pretend that Covid was equally dangerous to everyone.
(Hey, remember monkeypox? Remember how the overwhelming majority of cases were among sexually active gay men — and that by August, 99 percent of cases were in males, and 94 percent of cases were in men who reported having sex with other men? Remember how even though monkeypox wasn’t technically a sexually transmitted disease, because it spread through close contact, it was spreading in a manner similar to a sexually transmitted disease? Remember how President Biden chose to characterize monkeypox as “something that everybody should be concerned about”? Have you noticed that many of our public-health officials really have difficulty being honest about who is most at risk from certain maladies?)
Wells continues:
Vaccination and natural immunity had indeed dramatically reduced the country’s overall mortality risk. But while it’s comforting to believe that protection is a choice, for some populations it isn’t. And in moving pretty swiftly from treating everyone as high-risk to treating everyone as low-risk, we neglected to pay much attention to the differential of risk: that even if the average American had reduced his or her chances of dying by a factor of five or 10, 300 or more Americans might still be dying each day for many months, and there were probably some targeted things to do about that.
I think you have a much better chance of persuading someone if you level with them and tell them the whole story. But what do I know. I’m not a doctor.“
For that matter, neither is Faux Chi, regardless of what his diplomas claim.
Since we’re on the subject of retrospection, now that the final race of the 2022 election has been decided, Jim Geraghty wonders…
“And with that, the 2022 midterm-election cycle is now completely over: “Georgia’s Democratic senator Raphael Warnock was re-elected Tuesday night, winning his second runoff in less than two years by besting Herschel Walker, a scandal-ridden football star whom former president Donald Trump had once called ‘unstoppable.’” With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Warnock finished with 51.28 percent and Walker finished with 48.72 percent.
Yesterday, I noted that Republicans had won every other statewide office in Georgia in 2022, but I forgot to mention an important point: that every other Republican running statewide had won with more than 50 percent, which was the threshold to avoid a runoff election. Besides Walker, the Republican with the lowest percentage was lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Burt Jones, who finished with 51.39 percent.
In every other race on the ballot, this was a good year for Georgia Republicans. There’s no getting around it: Last night’s loss was on Herschel Walker. We don’t know how much the allegations of paying for abortions in the past, and the allegations of Walker’s own son, caused otherwise Republican-leaning Georgians to not vote for him. But it’s hard to believe that Walker’s scandalous past wasn’t a big factor, if not the decisive factor, in the race. Yes, Warnock outspent the former NFL running back by a considerable margin in the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history. But in the governor’s race, Stacey Abrams outspent Brian Kemp, $46 million to $28 million. Kemp won by about 7.5 percentage points.
Back in October, when the Walker news broke, I wrote, “The abortion accusation — coupled with the candidate’s son, Christian Walker, accusing his father of running around with other women, threatening to kill members of his family, and being violent — will be exceptionally hard to overcome.” A lot of people gave me grief for acknowledging that obvious consequence. The fact that you don’t want some accusation to be consequential does not mean that it isn’t going to be consequential.
I also wrote back then:
The Walker news will leave a lot of Republicans depressed, and it should leave them depressed. In this kind of political environment, with Biden’s approval rating being lousy in just about all of the key states, a bunch of nice, boring, generic Republicans would likely be enjoying solid leads over Raphael Warnock, Mark Kelly, Maggie Hassan, and maybe even John Fetterman. All Republicans needed to do to win big this midterm cycle was to be normal. Apparently, that was too much to ask.
I noticed that in the general election in November, a bit more than 1.9 million Georgians voted for Walker. In yesterday’s runoff, a bit more than 1.7 million Georgians voted for Walker. It seems reasonable to surmise that roughly 194,000 Georgians were willing to vote for Walker and overlook his flaws if control of the U.S. Senate was at stake, but were less motivated to vote for him once Democratic control of the Senate was assured…”
In a related item, the Journal‘s Kim Strassel highlights one significant aspect of the Republican’s lackluster performance:
“If there was a sense of doom among smart Republicans in the runup to Herschel Walker’s Georgia Senate defeat on Tuesday, it’s because they understood he’d already been beaten. The evidence sat in a towering pile of mail-in ballots.
The GOP did plenty wrong in this midterm, and any honest autopsy would reckon with its decisions to saddle itself again with subpar Senate candidates (remember 2010?) and to tie its fortunes again to Donald Trump (remember 2020?). But the other big takeaway: Republicans got whupped by Democrats’ early-voting game and may be years behind in a major shift in turnout tactics. The party spent more time grousing over Democrats’ 2020 voting changes than it did asking itself why its opponents were so laser-focused on making mail-in and early voting easier.
It turns out that 720 hours (the month Democrats use to mobilize early voters) is more than 72 hours (the three days Republicans use to mobilize their Election Day voters). Top Republicans have finally discovered arithmetic. “Our voters need to vote early,” Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel said this week on Fox News. “There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early,’ and we have to stop that and understand that if Democrats are getting ballots in for a month, we can’t expect to get it all done in day.”
The Georgia Senate results sum it up. This week’s runoff saw all-time midterm records in both early and absentee voting in a midterm. Some 1.9 million people cast their ballot prior to Tuesday, and Democrat Raphael Warnock won 64% of those voting absentee and 58% of those voting early. Yes, Mr. Walker had a good election day, winning 57% of votes cast Tuesday. But turnout for the day was 1.6 million, or 46% of the total vote.
Some will note that a failed GOP early game didn’t stop Gov. Brian Kemp or other statewide Republicans from winning decisive victories in November. But Mr. Walker’s troubled candidacy was the shining example of the need for a more sophisticated early-voting plan.Candidates who don’t excite voters shouldn’t count on their flocking to the polls on Election Day. Better to track them down and lock their votes in.
Which is exactly what Democrats have been doing…”
We’ve said it before and we’d say it again, but we’ll let Liz Peek’s thoughts expressed at FOX speak for us:
“Having suffered the rare humiliation of failing to win a second term in the Oval Office, and having cost his party a majority in the senate – three times – it is time for Donald Trump to step away from politics. It is the right thing to do for his party, for the country, and for himself.
Mr. Trump will not win another election. His most glaring political strength today is his ability to energize Democrats, causing not only historic turnout but attracting gushers of campaign cash – for the opposition.“
Next, courtesy of Townhall.com, Julio Rosas informs us an…
“…“Our investigation is the first ever to document the physical movement of illegal aliens into the interior of the country. What we uncovered is a mass resettlement program in which the Biden administration works hand-in-hand with NGOs. It affects the entirety of the United States. Every fire dies out unless someone fans the flames. Now we know the Biden administration has help in keeping the flames at the border burning,” said Mike Howell, director of the Oversight Project.
…The investigation confirmed that a host of NGOs (principally Catholic Charities) are actively facilitating the Biden border crisis. Overflow from Customs and Border Protection is being transferred to these organizations so that Border Patrol avoids overcrowded facilities. These organizations apply for, and receive, taxpayer money to provide processing and transportation services and infrastructure to facilitate the migration of illegal aliens into the interior of the country…”
Here’s the juice: We’ll never work with, let alone contribute to, Catholic Charities ever again.
Moving on, here’s a quintet of special selections certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). We must confess this one truly has us scratching our head:
Forget the Barney Fife-like police chief, the Joint Base confirmed to FOX it notified local law enforcement about the Facebook posting, “which is common information-sharing practice among law enforcement entities.”
REALLY? The U.S. Army is now a law enforcement entity?!? Soooo…when the ChiComs invade Taiwan, the Army is going to…what…arrest them for crimes against humanity?
Here’s a second shot of the juice: To the best our knowledge, like the CIA, every branch of the U.S. Military is barred by statute from enforcing domestic policies within the United States, so why WOULD the command of one of our military bases be “working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor the situation to ensure the continued safety of the entire community”? And if LTCOL Schilling is just some rogue actor, why would he still have a job?
(4). Those following the continuing saga of the “Twitter Files” know the next installment was supposed to be released this past weekend weekend, but became delayed for a reason that was unknown at the time. Turns out the delay came when it was discovered the individual responsible for vetting the files was none other than disgraced former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who was immediately terminated when Elon Musk learned of his involvement, with Musk tweeting “In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today.”
(5). Demonstrating either ignorance, narcissism or both, Jennifer Lawrence recently claimed she was the first female action hero in cinema when she starred in The Hunger Games, which no doubt came as a surprise to one of the first female action heroes:
Yo, J-Law: Pam Grier was kickin’ ass and takin’ names 16 year before you was BORN!
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these Breeze…
…and Balls…
…the latter of which confirms the only thing generally Conservative about the Journal is its Editorial Page.
Finally, we’ll call it a week with News of the Bizarre, and this story just in from the land of Cheeseheads…
P.S. As a 1975 graduate of the Air Force Academy reminded us, a fortnight is two weeks, not twenty days. We stand corrected!
Video of the Day
Make sure you watch this ’til the end, as Tom Cotton not only reams Kroger’s CEO a new one, but his conclusion is one of the greatest we’ve ever heard.
Tales of The Darkside
Any questions?!?
On the Lighter Side
Club Pro Guy at the top of his game! Where WAS little Caleb?!?
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