Who Are the Idiots Who Still Think the CDC Has Any Credibility?

Who Are the Idiots Who Still Think the CDC Has Any Credibility?

BY STEPHEN KRUISER 

 

AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool

Top O’ the Briefing

Have the CDC Geniuses Been Right About Anything?

Happy Wednesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Crudités and wine on the mezzanine at 3:42 PM sharp. Pants optional.

Full disclosure: I’ve never really trusted doctors. Yeah, I wanted to be one back in the day but then I decided to hit the road and tell jokes for a living.

Save me your sob stories about your parents’ disappointment in your career choices.

Anyway, that’s just one of the many reasons I haven’t gotten swept up in the Cult of Fauci. Even if I were in awe of physicians, Fauci is really a bureaucrat. He went to work for the National Institutes of Health when Richard Nixon was president. No doubt the guy is brilliant when it comes to filling out government forms, but he’s been a bumbling buffoon with this pandemic guru gig.

His cohorts over at the Centers for Disease Control haven’t performed much better under pressure. Bless their hearts, that hasn’t made them give up their petty tyranny ambitions, which Paula wrote about yesterday:

On Tuesday, the CDC released a statement on its website with updated COVID-19 guidance, including masking recommendations.

“To maximize protection from the Delta variant and prevent possibly spreading it to others, wear a mask indoors in public if you are in an area of substantial or high transmission,” the CDC said. “Wearing a mask is most important if you have a weakened immune system or if, because of your age or an underlying medical condition, you are at increased risk for severe disease, or if someone in your household has a weakened immune system, is at increased risk for severe disease, or is unvaccinated. If this applies to you or your household, you might choose to wear a mask regardless of the level of transmission in your area.” [Emphasis added]

There are so many languages available to learn for free on apps like Duolingo that I’m learning how to say, “Oh HELL no!” in every one of them just to add some variety to my reactions to the government mask overlords.

This is all such a you-know-what show that I wonder if this country will survive until Halloween.

On the same day that the CDC issued its latest change-of-mind-masquerading-as-science, our alleged president was attempting to exhort people to get vaccinated by calling them stupid.

But wait, sports fans, there’s more:

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) document obtained by ABC News shows that “breakthrough” COVID-19 infections — among those who are already vaccinated — are extremely rare, despite headlines and scare stories in the media.

More than 156 million Americans have been fully vaccinated. The CDC estimates that there have been approximately 153,000 infections among vaccinated individuals — about 0.098 percent. This number comes from an unpublished internal CDC document obtained by ABC News.

“The risk to fully vaccinated people is dramatically less than that to unvaccinated individuals. The occurrence of breakthrough cases is expected and, at this point, is not at a level that should raise any concerns about the performance of the currently available vaccines,” said Matthew Ferrari, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University.

If you’re keeping score at home, the story goes something like this: vaccinated people should start wearing masks indoors again and everyone else should get vaccinated if you don’t want the dumbest president in history calling you stupid, and the same organization that came up with the first part has documentation that proves they’re all full of crap.

Yesterday I was recording a podcast with my friend Carol Roth, who just published a brilliant book titled The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America. The first few chapters painstakingly chronicle all of the monumentally awful decisions made by the CDC and NIH in the early days of the pandemic. Of course, the awfulness didn’t stop there, but the incompetence in the first quarter of 2020 was particularly staggering. 

Carol and I were discussing the latest from the CDC and I asked her: “How are there any people left in America who think the CDC has any credibility?”

We were both mystified.

Once more, with feeling: Pressuring people to get vaccinated while you’re telling those who are vaccinated that we still need to be wearing masks isn’t a winning message. Seriously, is there no one in government who can figure this out?

No. No there isn’t. Because they’re all morons.

The government we deserve, indeed.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/07/28/the-morning-briefing-who-are-the-idiots-who-still-think-the-cdc-has-any-credibility-n1465144

Don's Tuesday Column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   8/03/2021

“Evergreen” thoughts—worthy reruns

Imagine an “off the grid” vacation: no phone (dumb or smart), Internet, social media, streaming content— no TV—with only a distant AM radio station that comes and goes as the wind allows. We’re there.

Will anything shake your world if you don’t know and obsess over it? Even the Surfside condo disaster would be a brief summary of a multistory collapse, a hundred unfortunates dead (no one you know, though), someone (not you, of course) needs to know why, and idiot politicos trying to take partisan advantage.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) Wuhan Flu death toll has become a minor statistic; over recent months, America’s Coronavirus deaths have become almost a rounding error in the 7-8,000 daily deaths from all causes. A graph showed America’s monthly actual deaths, the 5-year-average, and “excess deaths.”  Assuming “excess” accounted for the Wuhan Flu deaths, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans died “from” it (or “with” it, since PCR tests overstate COVID, and Medicare pays more for Wuhan flu deaths).

The deaths in recent months are now declining below that 5-year average, as happened after the Spanish Flu. That proves that many (overwhelmingly elderly) who died would have reached “life’s reward” within the next year or so anyway. Now that’s a loss of the “enjoyment” of their company by their relatives; however, it’s statistically relevant as it informs open-minded, impartial people that we’ve been vastly oversold on the danger to children, young adults and the healthy middle-aged of all races.

So, why does the political/ruling/media/medical elite only have the same response to a continuing-but-greatly-declining flu? According to worldometers.info, it’s currently producing about 1-2 “serious, critical” cases out of every 1,000 “currently infected.” “To a someone with a hammer, everything is a nail.” Their only response is the proven-ineffective “lockdowns” (Australia) and “mask mandates” (Gov. Newsom, Biden’s threat).

Could it be that, having tasted the intoxicating power of rule-by-whim (Constitution-be-damned), our “leaders” saw that a controlled population is a compliant population, sheepishly accepting today’s pronouncements and disregarding (“fuhgetaboutem”) prior ones?

Without the Wuhan Flu “panic porn” and daily death counts, could governors, election officials and judges have usurped the state legislatures and mandated open-ended, unlimited “mail-in” ballots? That produced the ensuing fraud (er, “irregularities”), without which there’s no Slow-Joe-Biden, just more OrangeManBad. Yes. The reasons Biden’s DOJ is threatening states to keep the ‘rona rules and mail-in voting is simple: more fraud, perpetual rule.

“Evergreen” thoughts can apply anytime, which includes the current (and regularly predictable) wildland fires. My last Internet access to the Daily News “Opinion” page had analysis on that topic; my laptop allowed me to review last September’s columns. Here are some quotes:

“Do not succumb to the blathering about “climate change” causing fires when your own eyes and mind can tell you that anti-logging, anti-thinning, anti-clearing of dead trees—are the true conditions that turn routine forest fires, part of California’s climate for centuries, into raging monsters.

“We have driven along some Central Oregon highways and seen, on one side, a forest cleared of undergrowth with spaced trees, resistant to ‘crown fires’—and on the other side a thicket of bushes and trees providing a continuous layer of flammable material up to the tree crowns. It’s obvious what’s to blame: naïve, bad forest practices, not so-called ‘climate change.’ Climate alarmists’ predictions have failed—they’ve no credibility.” (Sept. 15, 2020, “Ethereal, ephemeral beauty, horror”) Please look up “Climate prediction swings and misses: A decade of alarmist strike outs, 2010-2019” (Heartland.org).

From Sept. 22, 2020: “There’s only been about 0.4-degree Centigrade warming in 40 years—that’s one-tenth of a degree per decade averaged over 4 decades (1979-2021, per satellites and weather balloons, not subject to human ‘adjustments’). That extrapolates to 1 degree in 100 years, well below the “target” 1.5 degrees. It’s barely perceptible over an hour, let alone over a year or 4 decades. The ‘margin of error’ in the computer model projections is invariably greater than the warming they’ve predicted; it’s anything but ‘scientifically proven.’ (Fact: deaths from weather and climate have declined 95 percent in a century.)

“Predictions based on computers are no better than the data, logarithms, and (to state the obvious) the biases and fallibility of those doing the programming. That’s the reason that around 95 percent of the temperature projections over decades have been wildly off—meaning they predicted more warming than has actually occurred (See: ‘drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/,’ ‘UAH Satellite-Based Temperature of the Global Lower Atmosphere—Version 6.0’).”

I also mentioned Bill Clinton’s “Roadless Rule,” pushed by environmental scientists, that “restricted the use of existing roads and construction of new roads on 49 million acres of National Forest, making it difficult for officials to scan the land for the kind of kindling that fuels massive conflagrations.” See: “Wildfires Will Get Worse Under Decades-Old Liberal Policies, Veteran Forester Says,” by Chris White, 9/14, citing Bob Zybach, experienced forester with a Ph.D. in environmental science.

“Zybach cited warnings he made years ago, telling officials that warding off prescribed burns in Oregon and California creates kindling that fuels fires. Such rules make it more difficult to deploy prescribed burns…designed to cull all of the underbrush in forests to lessen the chance of massive fires.”

I also cited a NYTimes article, “California Today: 100 million Dead Trees Prompt Fears of Giant Wildfires” (1/2018); “Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California.” Between 1982 and 1998, state land managers burned about 30,000 acres per year, dropping to about 13,000 per year from 1999 to 2017. NASA’s Earth Observatory graph showed a decline in “Global Burned Area” from 2003 to 2015. Fanatical environmental policies underly devastating forest fires.

Calm down about the Delta varian

Calm down about the Delta varian

There is no good reason for the US to keep its ‘essential’ travel restrictions in placeJuly 28, 2021 | 11:42 a

Jen Psaki (Getty)

Written by:

Roger Kimball

The great thing about COVID, I like to quip, is that has abolished death from old age. Also the flu. That malady typically claims 30,000 to 40,000 scalps per annum in the US, many more in a bad year. How many flu deaths were there last season? According to the Scientific American, 700.

Find yourself in a motorcycle accident suffering the inconvenience of losing your cerebellum and all that other gooey stuff spread like jam over the interstate? Don’t worry. The medics will find an intact nostril and will determine that you tested ‘positive for COVID’. What remains of you will be transported to a hospital where management will file a claim and get 15 percent more on their government reimbursement because you ‘died from’, or at least with COVID.

There are exceptions, of course. I am told that St George Floyd, for example, tested positive for COVID but too late — not too late because he had expired but too late because a racism, racism, racism narrative intervened and took priority.

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I thought we’d be well beyond the the Wuhan flu by now. Yes, it probably came from a Chinese virology lab, one where ‘gain-of-function’ (i.e., bio-weaponization) research, generously funded by St Anthony Fauci’s NIH, was taking place, but you’re not supposed to say that. The Chinese don’t like it to have it bruited about publicly. So I won’t say it.

But I thought we would be beyond it because, after all, it is a seasonal respiratory virus that ebbs and flows and it is definitely on the ebb now. But what about (cue scary music), what about the Delta variant? They should have called it the Andromeda Strain for all the carefully cultivated and deliberately fanned panic its advent has occasioned.

Here’s a biology lesson. Viruses mutate. They can’t help it. It’s in their nature. Perhaps the so-called Delta variant is ‘more communicable’. So what? It is also markedly less deadly.

But, but, but: there is a great surge in people ‘testing positive’ for COVID. Again, so what? ‘Testing positive’ signifies — nothing. It really is a tale told by an idiot, many idiots. What if the people who run our lives, who bark at you on public transport to put on a face-diaper, who pontificate from state capitals about who can eat in restaurants, go to the theater, travel on airplanes — what if they started testing for your ordinary run-of-the-mill coronaviruses, the ones that are responsible for the common cold? Want to bet that there would be an awful lot of positives?

It’s Rahm Emanuel time now and forever: never let a good crisis go waste, he advised, and rest assured, they — the alphabet-soup pod-people who we put in charge of our lives — they have run with it big time. A couple of days ago, the White House (how long before they change the insulting name of that edifice) announced that because of the ‘Delta variant’ they would not be lifting travel restrictions ‘at this point’. They hope, of course, that they can maintain, and perhaps stiffen, the restriction indefinitely, maybe forever. After all, as the White House press secretary demanded a week or two back, ‘Why do you need to have that information?’

For the time being, then, the US will continue to restrict ‘non-essential travel for non-US citizens from several countries around the world, including from the United Kingdom, the European Union, Brazil, South Africa, China’. But what about ‘travelers’ across our southern border? Is it essential that tens of thousands of aliens be allowed to pour over our southern border, to be transported free and for nothing all across the fruited plain to suck up any unclaimed welfare benefits, while possibly infecting the locals with COVID? I merely ask.

As I have said before, my dream job is to be the chap who decides whose travel, whose job, whose business, whose livelihood is essential. Of course, that task, deciding what is essential and what is not is absolutely essential, falls to all the politicians and their phalanx of busybody bureaucrats enforcing the diktats that keep us little folk in line — for our own good, it goes without saying (it certainly does).

It is not true, at least as far as I know, that Jen Psaki was an employee of the East German Stasi, though possibly that was her dream as a little girl. If things keep going as they have been, she may get her chance right here at home.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/delta-variant-essential-travel-biden-administration/

Democrats Know Election Integrity Dooms Their Chances in 2022

Democrats Know Election Integrity Dooms Their Chances in 2022

BY MATT MARGOLIS 

(AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)

Democrats are terrified that commonsense election integrity laws will likely destroy their chances of victory at the ballot box and will likely doom their chances of winning in the 2022 midterm elections.

In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican-controlled state legislatures in 18 states have reformed their election laws, making it easier to vote but harder to cheat.

“If there isn’t a way for us to repeat what happened in November 2020, we’re f—ed,” Nsé Ufot, the CEO of the New Georgia Project, which Stacey Abrams founded, told Politico.  “We are doing what we do to make sure that not only our constituents, our base, the people, the communities that we organize with, get it. We’re trying to make sure that our elected officials get it as well.”

Max Wood, the founder and CEO of a left-wing data analytics company that analyzes voting behavior, told Politico that he is “super worried.”

“I try to be optimistic, and I do think there are times when this kind of stuff can galvanize enthusiasm and turnout,” Wood said. “But I don’t know that that will be enough, especially with how extreme some of these laws are.”

Extreme? Hardly. According to recent polling, various voter restrictions are supported by bipartisan majorities. For example, 70 percent of all voters want all mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day, 57 percent of all voters believe ballot harvesting should be outlawed, and 76 percent believe all voters should be required to show a photo ID before voting. In fact, support for Voter ID is so high that some Democrats have even claimed they’ve supported it all along.

If Democrats admit they can’t win with Voter ID and other commonsense election integrity provisions in place, what does that tell you? Why is it that Democrats oppose laws that make it harder for them to cheat? Are we supposed to look at this and not find that suspicious? These Democrats claim Republicans are trying to restrict voting and “suppress” minority votes, but to believe that, you have to believe that somehow minorities are incapable of acquiring an ID… which is absurd… and pretty racist.

Despite the efforts of various states to restore election integrity, Democrats are hellbent on nationalizing elections and turning elections into a fraud-plagued disaster. Their laundry list of proposals is basically the polar opposite of what most voters want, but Democrats in power know are necessary for them to keep their power. This is why the fight for election integrity is so important. Bring back fair and secure elections, and prevent Democrats from federalizing elections. This is why they’re panicking. Election integrity is the main thing standing between them and their quest for power in perpetuity. That Democrats are terrified right now tells us that we’re on the right track. We have to support Republicans nationwide trying to fix the problems that allowed the widespread election irregularities to occur in November 2020. The 2022 election isn’t just about electing Republicans to thwart Joe Biden’s radical agenda. It’s about saving our republic from Democrats who want to radically transform our elections into a fraud-plague dumpster fire that will keep them in power. We can’t afford to lose this fight

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/07/26/democrats-know-election-integrity-dooms-their-chances-in-2022-n1464784

WHERE IS KAMALA HARRIS?

WHERE IS KAMALA HARRIS?

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, DEMOCRATS, KAMALA HARRIS

Has Kamala Harris been sent into the federal witness protection program? It seems so. She’s disappeared from view suddenly. No more interviews with network anchors apparently. Think of it as the “Democratic Election Prospects Protection Program.”

The Hill reports today:

Harris’s bad polls trigger Democratic worries

Vice President Harris has some ground to make up in order to be perceived more favorably by the public, a complicating factor for the Biden administration as it maps out its midterm strategy.

Six months into office, polls indicate Harris is viewed less favorably than President Biden. She has also made some tactical missteps outside of the White House that Democrats say show she hasn’t quite yet found her bearings. . .

“As of right now, I think she has the potential of doing more harm than good for some of these candidates,” said one Democratic strategist. . . “No one is coming out and saying she’s doing an amazing job, because the first question would be ‘On what?'” acknowledged one Harris ally. “She’s made a bunch of mistakes and she’s made herself a story for good and bad.”

One thing to keep in mind in reading a story like this is that The Hill, being part of the “mainstream” media, bends over backwards to downplay just how bad Harris’s plight is. (In fact the story tries to blame her problems on Republican attacks to “negatively brand Harris, oftentimes relying on racist and sexist stereotypes [boy, didn’t see that coming] to minimize her standing as the first female, Black and Asian American vice president.” Yeah, sure, that’s explains the whole thing. Funny how that didn’t work with Obama.) And yet the story still turns out this bad.

What this means is that behind the scenes, her poll numbers must be really bad, and leading Dems are panicked about it. Pass the popcorn please.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/07/where-is-kamala-harris.php

THE END OF MERITOCRACY?

THE END OF MERITOCRACY?

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CONSERVATISM, CRITICAL RACE THEORY, EDUCATION

The main reason why the United States easily outstripped Europe and Asia in economic growth and cultural influence in the 19th and 20th centuries is that we were a meritocracy. Talent and hard work prevailed over privilege of birth and adherence to established ideologies. Sadly, we have lost that advantage. As we have documented many times on this site, the Left’s war on standards has resulted in a dumbing down of our educational system and our culture. None of our competitors has been this stupid, and China, in particular–despite ostensibly being a Communist country!–is a ruthless meritocracy where it counts.

At The American Mind, a Claremont Institute outlet, Joel Kotkin asks whether we have reached “The end of merit.” (Via InstaPundit.) Links omitted:

Over time, our educational deficit with other countries, notably China, particularly in the acquisition of practical skills in mathematics, engineering, medical technology, and management, has grown, threatening our economic and political pre-eminence. Our competitors, whatever their shortcomings, are focused on economic competition and technological supremacy. In math, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, not only by China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

Critical Race Theory and its growing chorus of implementers—from the highest reaches of academia down to the grade school level—have little use for such practical skills acquisition and brook little dissent from teachers and researchers who raise objections to the new curriculum of racial grievance. Woke educators, like San Francisco’s School board member Alison Collins, claim that “merit, meritocracy and especially meritocracy based on standardized testing” are essentially “racist systems.” Some among the new racial cadres even denounce habits such as punctuality, rationality, and hard work as reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”.

A society that denigrates hard work and rationality cannot possibly succeed.

This is an interesting point:

Even though the vast majority of corporate executives perceive a growing skills gap, they have failed to stop educators from abandoning skills in favor of ever greater emphasis on ephemera of race and gender.

It is worse than that: corporate America has signed on wholeheartedly to the “woke” agenda, despite the fact that businessmen are acutely aware that they need more welders and CNC programmers, not more untrained and ill-educated race fanatics.

The numbers are grim:

Only 5 percent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 percent in China; as of 2016, China graduated 4.7 million STEM students versus 568,000 in the United States, as well as six times as many students with engineering and computer science bachelor’s degrees.
***
The skills shortage may be even more profound on the factory floor. Due to an aging workforce, as many as 600,000 new manufacturing jobs expected to be generated this decade cannot be filled. The percentage of the skilled manufacturing work force over the age of 55 has doubled in the last 10 years to 20 percent of active workers. And there is no deep bench of talent waiting to replace retirees—50 percent of the active workers are above the age of 45. The current shortage of welders, now 240,000, could grow to 340,000 by 2024.Manufacturing employment is expanding more rapidly than in almost four decades but there are an estimated 500,000 manufacturing jobs unfilled right now.

This is largely the result of the Left’s domination of our education system, I think.

Theoretically, progressives should embrace the idea of restoring a competitive workforce, particularly for people without college degrees, in order to extend opportunities to an increasingly diverse working-class population.

Heh. I don’t think anyone believes that “progressives” care a whit about working-class people. Polls indicate that most people believe working-class Americans are mostly Republicans; election results suggest that they are right.

There is much, much more at the link. For example:

As the concepts of objectivity, debate, and merit decline, even “talent” is now seen as yet another social construct of our corrupt society. This undermines the very notions of upward mobility by which our diverse society accommodated immigrants. Asian parents have to fight off attempts to eliminate merit for admission to elite high schools—often the most affordable option for working class immigrants—in places like San Francisco or New York.

And finally:

The pushback against the war on merit won’t come from the craven masters of Wall Street or Silicon Valley but from the grassroots, operators of small businesses, new and old, and most importantly, from parents. Most American voters—by wide margins—reject the notion of teaching Critical Race Theory in schools, even though the effort is supported by most Democrats, the powerful teachers’ unions, particularly in deep blue cities like Los Angeles, and the White House.

Once again: much more at the link. But the conclusion is obvious. If America is no longer a meritocracy, but rather a cynical left-wing spoils system, we no longer have a meaningful reason for being.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/07/the-end-of-meritocracy.php

CALIFORNIA’S NUKE FOLLIES

CALIFORNIA’S NUKE FOLLIES

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN ENERGY POLICY

Of all of the endless follies of California these days—I know, it’s hard to enumerate all of them let alone put them in rank order—closing our last nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon ranks perhaps at the top of the list. It provides more than 10 percent of California’s electricity, and can run 24/7, unlike wind and solar power. As one of the last nuclear power plants built and brought online in the 1980s, it easily has another 40 years of potential service left in it, if not more.

The perverse energy policy of California, which excludes nuclear along with any new dams from its legal definition and mandates for clean or “renewable” energy, virtually compelled the closure of Diablo Canyon, and the corporate socialists who run PG&E simply lied to the public that they can make up the shortfall with wind and solar power and magic batteries. In fact, they will make up electricity shortfalls in large part with natural gas and power imports from other states. It will likely cause California’s CO2 emissions (and utility rates) to rise, just as closing nukes in Germany has halted and perhaps reversed the greenhouse gas emissions decline in Germany, while doubling their electricity prices.

Even the very liberal Sacramento Bee has figured out that closing Diablo Canyon is a mistake. It editorialized earlier this week (and hat tip to our lefty friends at the Breakthrough Institute for breaking through to the Bee‘s editorial board):

The closure of Diablo Canyon and the driving forces behind the decommission project show that California’s ambitions are once again being humbled by the constraints of reality. The prospects of delivering on the promises of the 2016 agreement have sharply divided scientists, analysts and think tanks around the state.

This Editorial Board recently met with the Breakthrough Institute, an organization that argues that a carbon-free energy producer like Diablo Canyon needs to remain open. For decades, we’ve been told that closing nuclear plants is a good thing, yet a growing body of research shows that it’s far safer and cleaner than coal and gas. State regulators are failing to eliminate fossil fuels from California’s energy stock, and with alternatives lacking in scale, Breakthrough’s experts believe a more realistic path to achieving California’s climate goals is by salvaging our last nuclear facility.

Meanwhile, have a look at this short video on nuclear power from the brand new “Kite and Key Media” project, whose work we intend to feature more regularly here on Power Line.

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