There are those who are sending me New Year Greetings saying '22 cannot be worse than '21 and other such comments.
I believe, as long as Biden is president, along with Kamala, there is little hope things will improve . Maybe we will experience a shift in issue focus and Covid conditions will lessen as well as supply chain impediments but the matter of potential conflicts should heighten, China will continue it's programs of theft and bullying along with strong armed meddling throughout the world. Also, inflation should continue to rise and erode the purchasing power of the dollar. Then there is Putin and his alignment with China and Israel cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran.
Biden's mental condition will not improve and Kamala's abilities will certainly remain challenged so I do not believe, at this time, '22 will necessarily be better than '21, just a shift in the nature of the problems impacting world events.
If we avoid a recession and the mid year elections oust Democrat control of The House and Senate the prospects for domestic political improvement could reinforce gridlock and that might be beneficial. Since government generally fails at what it seeks to accomplish a stifled government could be preferable to an active one. Certainly Republicans will do more to seal our borders.
Time will tell. It always does.
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Hanson nails it once again. The "sniveling generation."
The Ungracious—and Their Demonization of the Past
By Victor Davis Hanson
Never in history has such a mediocre, but self-important and ungracious generation owed so much, and yet expressed so little gratitude to its now dead forebears.
The last two years have seen an unprecedented escalation in a decades-long war on the American past.
But there are lots of logical flaws in attacking prior generations in U.S. history.
Critics assume their own judgmental generation is morally superior to those of the past. So, they use their own standards to condemn the mute dead who supposedly do not measure up to them.
Yet 21st century critics rarely acknowledge their own present affluence and leisure owe much to history’s prior generations whose toil helped create their current comfort.
And what may future scolds say of the modern generation that saw over 60 million abortions since Roe v. Wade, even as fetal viability outside the womb continued to progress to ever earlier ages?
What will our grandchildren say of us who dumped on them over $30 trillion in national debt—much of it as borrowing for entitlements for ourselves?
What sort of society snoozes as record numbers of murders continue in 12 of its major cities? What is so civilized about defunding the police, endemic smash-and-grab thefts, and car-jackings?
Was our media more responsible, professional, and learned in 1965 or 2021? Did Hollywood make more sophisticated and enjoyable films in 1954 or 2021? Was there less or more sportsmanship among professional athletes in 1990 or 2021?
Was it actually moral to discard the “content of our character” and “equal opportunity” principles of the prior Civil Rights movement of 60 years ago? Are their replacement fixations on the “color of our skin” and “equality of result” superior?
Would America have won World War II with the current labor participation rate of only six Americans in 10 working? Would our generation have brought all American troops home and quit World War I, in fear of the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic?
Are we proud that most standardized tests of student knowledge and achievement continue to decline, despite record investments in education?
Do we ever pause to consider that we enjoy our modern standard of living, and security because we were once a meritocracy that quit judging our workforce by tribal affinities and ancient prejudices?
Our generation talks of infrastructure nonstop. But when was the last time it built anything comparable to Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, or the California Water Project—much less sent a man back to the moon or beyond?
If prior generations were so toxic, why do we continue to take for granted the moral and material world they bequeathed to us, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to our airports, freeways, and power plants? Did we ever defeat anything comparable to the Axis powers or Soviet communism?
We know the symptoms of the current epidemic of hating the past.
One is Orwellian renaming and statue-toppling. Historical revision often responds to puritanical mob frenzies rather than to democratic discussion and votes of relevant elected officials.
Where is the pantheon of woke heroes who will replace the toppled or defaced Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt?
Whose morality and achievement should instead be immortalized? Were the public and private lives of Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Margaret Sanger, and Franklin D. Roosevelt without sin?
Racial fixations tend predictably in one direction. In good Confederate fashion, we lump all individuals who look alike into inexact collectives of “white,” “black,” or “brown”—often to stereotype the supposed evils of so-called white supremacy.
But if we go down that tribalist and simplistic road of caricatured oppressors and oppressed, will future generations tally up each group’s merits and demerits, to adjudicate the roles of millions of individuals in making America worse or better?
What standard would they use to judge our ignorant world of racial stereotyping—proportional representation in Nobel Prizes, philanthropy, scientific breakthroughs, or lasting art, music, and literature versus statistics on homicides, assault, divorce, and illegitimacy?
Immigration—when legal, diverse, measured, and often meritocratic—has been the great strength of America, as typified by industrious arrivals who chose to abandon their own homeland to risk new lives in a foreign United States.
But if America is so flawed and so irredeemable, why in fiscal year 2021 are nearly 2 million foreigners now crashing its borders—illegally, en masse, and intent on reaching a supposedly racist nation that is purportedly inferior to those they abandon?
According to the ancient brutal bargain, assimilation and integration grant the immigrant as much claim to America’s present and past as the native born. But then shouldn’t the antithesis also be true? Shouldn’t immigrants at least respect those of the past who created the very country they now so eagerly desire, and died in awful places from Valley Forge to Bastogne to preserve?
Never in history has such a mediocre, but self-important and ungracious generation owed so much, and yet expressed so little gratitude, to its now dead forebears.
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Where is Trump? Joe was right, we neither need government nor him.
Is Fluvoxamine the Covid Drug We’ve Been Waiting For?
A 10-day treatment costs only $4 and appears to greatly reduce symptoms, hospitalization and death.
By Finley
Photo: Alamy Stock Photo
The Food and Drug Administration last week authorized two oral antiviral medicines for the early treatment of Covid-19. But don’t get too excited. The U.S. will still have a meager treatment arsenal this winter.
The U.S. has been relying on monoclonal-antibody treatments, but most don’t hold up against the Omicron variant. One, by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology, does better at neutralizing the variant, but supply is limited. Pfizer’s newly authorized antiviral pack Paxlovid will also have to be rationed. There will be more of Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics’ newly authorized antiviral, molnupiravir, but patients may be reluctant to take the drug. Some scientists worry it could cause DNA mutations in people, though the FDA determined that the likelihood of this was low when used on a short-term basis.
Yet a promising alternative isn’t getting its due: fluvoxamine, a pill the FDA approved in 1994 to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders. Doctors often prescribe it off-label for anxiety, depression and panic attacks. Studies show that fluvoxamine is highly effective at preventing hospitalization in Covid-infected patients, and it’s unlikely to be blunted by Omicron.
Doctors hypothesize that fluvoxamine can trigger a cascade of reactions in cells that modulate inflammation and interfere with virus functions. It could thus prevent an overreactive immune response to pathogens—what’s known as a cytokine storm—that can lead to organ failure and death. It also increases nighttime levels of melatonin—the hormone that makes you sleepy—which evidence suggests can also mitigate inflammation.
While experimenting with mice in 2019, researchers at the University of Virginia discovered that fluvoxamine could be an effective treatment for sepsis, or blood-borne infection. A large study in France during the early months of the pandemic found that Covid-19 patients treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as fluvoxamine were significantly less likely to be intubated or to die.
A small randomized control trial last year by psychiatrists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis was a spectacular success: None of the 80 participants who started fluvoxamine within seven days of developing symptoms deteriorated. In the placebo group, six of the 72 patients got worse, and four were hospitalized. The results were published in November 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association and inspired a real-world experiment.
Soon after the study was published, there was a Covid outbreak among employees at the Golden Gate Fields horse racing track in Berkeley, Calif. The physician at the track offered fluvoxamine to workers. After 14 days, none of the 65 patients who took it were hospitalized or still had symptoms. Of the 48 who didn’t take the drug, six, or 12.5%, were hospitalized and one died. Twenty-nine had lingering symptoms, which might have resulted from inflammatory damage to their organs. Those who took the placebo were more likely to be asymptomatic when they tested positive, so they would have been expected to fare better.
The studies drew the attention of Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “A big need right now is for a drug that you could take by mouth, that you could be offered as soon as you had a positive test, and that would reduce the likelihood that the virus is going to make you really sick,” he said in an interview with “60 Minutes” in March. “Fluvoxamine could certainly be something you want to put in the tool chest,” Dr. Collins added. “It looks as if it has the promise to reduce the likelihood of severe illness.”
Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, last winter launched a large clinical trial in Brazil. The results from their trial, published in the Lancet in October, were stunning: Fluvoxamine reduced the odds of hospitalization or emergency care by 66% and death by 90% among unvaccinated high-risk patients who mostly followed the treatment regimen—comparable to monoclonal antibodies. There was no difference in adverse effects between the fluvoxamine and placebo groups.
The three fluvoxamine trials were conducted while different variants were circulating, so there’s no reason to think the drug wouldn’t work as well against Omicron. A 10-day course of fluvoxamine costs $4, compared with the $2,100 the U.S. government has been paying for monoclonal antibodies, and $530 to $700 for a course of the Pfizer and Merck treatments. Multiple drugmakers manufacture fluvoxamine and could ramp up supply without much difficulty were demand to increase.
While the FDA doesn’t need to grant fluvoxamine emergency-use authorization for doctors to prescribe it, some may be reluctant to do so unless the NIH recommends it in its Covid-19 treatment guidelines. Physicians have been investigated by state medical boards for prescribing the antiparasite ivermectin off-label for Covid-19.
The NIH states that “there is insufficient evidence . . . to recommend either for or against the use of fluvoxamine for the treatment of COVID-19.” It wants evidence from another large clinical trial. Yet the U.S. is recording nearly as many deaths from Covid-19 today as when Dr. Collins made his statement in March. If the NIH doesn’t budge, states could enact laws that protect doctors who prescribe fluvoxamine, They could also order doses to administer to patients, which would cost little but could save many lives.
Ms. Finley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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We have never had such a crew of incompetent blow hard politicians leadnig this nation since "The Tea Pot Dome Crowd."
When you dumb down and entire nation's population you can suck them in or intimidate them to accept just about anything as the truth. Facts no longer matter and therein lies the newly created soft underbelly of this nation. Furthermore, when a nation's mass media is more interested in entertainment than reporting truths and align themselves with a single party, in order to gain more clout, it is only a matter of time before that former free society collapses.
Welcome to America.
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The Establishment Wants to Crush You Uppity Peasants
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Last Season’s Hateful Misinformation Is Today’s Brilliant Point in the Media
By Brad Slager
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Elizabeth Warren's one-trick inflation pony
If corporate greed is Senator Elizabeth Warren's one-size-fits-all explanation for why prices go up, how does she explain why they go down? |
PRICES IN the United States are rising faster than they have in decades. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month that inflation was up 6.8 percent over the past year, the steepest annual increase in consumer prices since 1982.
There is no mystery about why inflation is exploding: Prices spike when too many dollars are chasing too few goods. The federal government has massively increased spending over the past two years in the name of economic stimulus and COVID-19 relief: too many dollars. At the same time, the pandemic's upheaval has led to a global labor shortage and snarled supply chains, preventing commodities of every description from being produced or from reaching vendors: too few goods.
The result is straight out of Economics 101: Everything is more expensive.
But Senator Elizabeth Warren has a different theory. She insists prices are being pushed up not by anything as impersonal as supply and demand, but by greedy business executives.
"Prices at the pump have gone up," she told an MSNBC interviewer last month. "Why? Because giant oil companies like Chevon and ExxonMobil enjoy doubling their profits. This isn't about inflation. This is about price gouging."
Warren had the same explanation for why turkey has become so expensive: "plain old corporate greed." She demanded a Justice Department investigation, accusing poultry companies on Nov. 23 of "abusing their market power" by "giving CEOs raises & earning huge profits."
The next day she widened her indictment from the poultry department to every department.
"Wondering why your Thanksgiving groceries cost more this year?" Warren tweeted. "It's because greedy corporations are charging Americans extra just to keep their stock prices high."
It's more costly to rent a car these days. That too, says Warren, is caused by capitalist greed.
In a letter to the CEO of Hertz, Warren blasted the company for being "happy to reward executives, company insiders, and big shareholders" with stock buybacks, "while stiffing consumers with record-high rental car costs."
Wherever prices are rising, Warren fingers the same culprit: rapacious corporations. Like Henry Ford, who would sell customers a Model T car in any color they wanted as long as it was black, the senator from Massachusetts will gladly explain why any product has become more expensive, as long as the explanation involves greedy businesses out to make more money.
It is true, of course, that corporations continually look for ways to increase their profits. That's how they survive. The reason businesses exist in the first place is to supply goods or services to customers and make money doing so. If companies can't turn a profit, they eventually go out of business and no longer sell those goods or services.
But if corporate greed is Warren's one-size-fits-all explanation for why prices go up, how does she explain why they go down?
Consider gasoline. In the spring of 2020, the average price of gasoline plunged to less than $1.90 a gallon. Why didn't Chevron and ExxonMobil do then what Warren claims they are doing now — gouge customers to boost profits? The answer is that prices aren't driven by all-powerful capitalists capable of "doubling their profits" at will. Last spring, the pandemic and its attendant worldwide lockdowns caused a drastic cut in demand, which led in turn to a sharp fall in prices — so sharp, in fact, that the oil industry suffered an unprecedented crash. In 2020, the five largest oil companies (ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and Total) lost a combined $76 billion. Then, when the economy recovered and the demand for oil grew faster than the inventories available to meet it, prices soared.
Inflation in the US is at its highest level since 1981. Does Sen. Warren believe that, after decades of stable prices, corporate America was suddenly gripped by insatiable greed? |
In the world according to Warren, every unwelcome spike in prices is the result of a conspiracy to put the screws to consumers, while every dramatic price reduction is an irrelevancy. In the real world, market forces, not corporate villainy, explain why prices fluctuate. And "market forces" go far beyond decisions made by a handful business leaders in C-suites. They comprise choices made by tens of thousands of producers and vendors, as well as millions of consumers.
Inflation isn't on the march because, after decades of stable prices, corporate America was suddenly seized by a wave of greed. It's a ridiculous theory, but it's the one Warren is sticking to. So she plays the corporate-greed card over and over, like a relative repeating the same dreary party trick at every family gathering. Meanwhile prices keep rising, and voters are less and less amused.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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