Author: Redactor
Remember how fast the pandemic scare went partisan? At first Democrats downplayed the contagion . . . because President Trump was up-playing it. Then they switched sides when they saw that they could out-over-play it, it being easy to “out-empathy” Trump.
Masks went from being officially deprecated to officially required.
The lockdowns and extreme “social distancing” were instituted on the Trump/Fauci team’s recommendation to “flatten the curve,” but after the allotted time and many hospitals suffering a serious lack of patients, the lockdowns continued in most states.
Despite a complete change of rationale.
The working notion appeared to be: keep deaths down and panic up . . . and wait for a vaccine.
Which Trump promised, and, well, rushed and pushed past the regulators.
Now, there exist substantial hurdles to fast-tracking a medicine, even in an emergency. But the Democrats’ early resistance to Trump’s talk of HCQ as a successful COVID counter-measure turned out to serve as an excuse to push vaccination, for had treatments using HCQ and similar existing medicines been normalized, the emergency authorization would have been ruled out of bounds.
And the goal of universal vaccination scuttled.
So where are we now?
In America, there are two basic approaches: mRNA gene “therapy” and a modified adenovirus, both focusing on the spiked protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with the aim of jump-starting immune response.
And after the vaccines? The mandates. J.D. Tuccille, at Reason, covers this latest development — which a year ago was called a “conspiracy theory.” The Biden administration and major corporations are now developing “vaccination passports” that would continue the lockdowns for those who have not been vaccinated.
And China may want in on that action.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“Given China’s coverup of the outbreak in Wuhan, the WHO’s early praise for the country’s response and the fact that it took a full year to get a joint Chinese-international team on the ground for a brief visit,” explained The Washington Post, “the critical but challenging search for clues faced skepticism from the start.”
“Skepticism” is a kind reaction to the just-released World Health Organization report on the origin of COVID-19’s transmission to humans.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed CNN that “the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it.” Though “foreign scientists on the trip took pains to praise their Chinese counterparts,” The Post noted, “They also acknowledged the limits of working with data collected before they arrived that may or may not be complete.”
Reuters reported yesterday that “Data was withheld from World Health Organization investigators who travelled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus epidemic,” according to a statement from none other than WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Yet, even acknowledging that the WHO report is based on highly questionable and woefully incomplete data, our major media continue to amplify the message that it is “extremely unlikely” the virus passed to humans through a Wuhan lab.
So suggested a BBC story when international scientists went to China last month: “after visiting the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they have closed the lid on a controversial theory.”
Why controversial? It would place further blame on China.
The possibility of a lab accident was raised a year ago, including here, but the media has seemed incurious. Now, with the newly released report, the unlikeliness of a lab breach is again a theme.
But there has been no real investigation.
The Post points out that the scientists who visited “got a tour of the facility, heard about the lab’s rigorous safety protocols and were told the lab was not working with viruses close to SARS-CoV-2.”
Meanwhile, two new tidbits have emerged: (a) “One member of the team said in a post-trip television interview that researchers at the [Wuhan Institute for Virology] lab were sick in the fall of 2019,” and (b) the final WHO report disclosed that a different lab, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, moved on Dec. 2, 2019.
“I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory,” Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and former CDC director, said over the weekend, “you know, escaped.”
It’s almost as if COVID-19’s origin is the one thing we’re not supposed to uncover.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Economic vs. Political Means
On March 30, 1864, German sociologist and economist Franz Oppenheimer was born. This sociologist is most famous for his 1908 book The State, in which he elaborated some consequences of two means for acquiring wealth, the “economic means,” by which he meant private production or by trade, and the “political means,” by which he meant forcible extraction from one group or person by another person or group. Oppenheimer taught in Palestine in the mid-1930s, and fled the Nazis to the United States, via Japan in 1938. In 1941 he became a founder of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, and died two years later.
Last Thursday, President Biden signaled “that he would be willing to consider supporting the elimination of the filibuster,” CBS News reported following his first news conference, “if Senate Republicans use it to block Democratic legislative priorities from receiving a full vote on the Senate floor.”
“If”? Stopping the majority party from taking its legislation to a floor vote without a 60-vote supermajority to end debate is what the filibuster does.
The president, a Democrat, is saying the filibuster is
You will of course not be shocked to learn that Biden has been a longtime, adamant supporter of the filibuster. In 2005, he gave an impassioned defense, arguing, “At its core, the filibuster is not about stopping a nominee or a bill — it’s about compromise and moderation.”
Biden called the GOP attack then a “fundamental power grab” and said his oration “may be one of the most important speeches for historical purposes that I will have given in the 32 years since I have been in the Senate.”
Yet, the filibuster is not in the Constitution.
It is simply a Senate rule. And the majority party in the Senate can thereby fiddle with it.
I’m not so much wed to the filibuster as I am wed to the idea that the rules with which Washington insiders wield power serve us and not just themselves.
The filibuster should be made official in law or Constitution precisely so politicians cannot change it on whim or passion.
Or it should be ended. But not before one party (or both) actually campaigns to end it, so that the American people can weigh in. Because these must be our rules if it is to be our government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Bernhard von Bülow
Most of the conflicts the world has seen in the past ten decades have not been called forth by princely ambition or ministerial conspiracy but through the passionate agitation of public opinion, which through the press and parliament has swept along the executive.
Bernhard von Bülow, as quoted in “Karl Kraus, the Press, and War” (International Policy Digest, March 27, 2014), by Franz-Stefan Gady. Von Bülow (1849 – 1929), created Fürst von Bülow in 1905, was a German statesman who served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs for three years and then as Chancellor of the German Empire from 1900 to 1909.
On March 28, 1936, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was born. This recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature ran, in 1990, for the presidency of Peru, but lost to Alberto Fujimori. His novels include La casa verde (The Green House), La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat), and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was filmed as Tune in Tomorrow.
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Watch: The World Is Falling Apart
By the way, in case it is not obvious at first blush, the whole “porn” thing is a joke. As should become painfully obvious if you watch the whole video:
Paul’s recap of the big stories of the week:
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Typhoid Mary
On March 27, 1915, Mary Mallon, popularly and scandalously known as “Typhoid Mary,” was put in quarantine, where she would remain for the rest of her life, over 23 years incarcerated.
Ms. Mallon was the first healthy carrier of disease ever identified in the United States. As an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, she was a puzzle to science, and, once discovered, an apparent threat to those around her, with at least three deaths attributable to her presence. She did not co-operate with officials, and preferred to work as a cook, which paid higher wages than less dangerous-to-the-public occupations. She had been quarantined once before her final permanent quarantine in a hospital.
The civil liberties aspect to her incarceration loom large, and it is obvious that health officials of her time were not exactly any more respectful of her rights than she was with those of her clients and neighbors. The case was an obvious turning point in American legal practice, and can be categorized along with eugenics and “social hygiene” — alongand with prohibition regarding alcohol and recreational drugs — in the increasing illiberality of legal practice in America in the early part of the 20th century.