Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
A danger to the republic
No sane person would object to this (except that Lincoln was a racist and his memorial is on the agenda for removal), but imagine the media frenzy had these kids been members of Trump’s family: super-spreaders!
Follow the science! OR Something
Lengthy article, but every point is well-taken.
Stacy Lennox:
I’ve been saying it for months. In fact, I documented it on October 27, 2020, for posterity. As soon as Joe Biden became president, the narrative on COVID-19 would change. Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) proved me right.
In August of last year, The New York Times published an article stating that as many as 90% of COVID-19 tests in three states were not indicative of active illness. In other words, they were picking up viral debris incapable of causing infection or being transmitted because the cycle threshold (Ct) of the PCR testing amplified the sample too many times.
Labs in the United States were using a Ct of 37-40. Epidemiologists interviewed at the time said a Ct of around 30 was probably more appropriate. This means the CDC’s COVID-19 test standards for the PCR test would pick up an excessive number of false positives. The Times report noted the CDC’s own data suggested the PCR did not detect live virus over a Ct of 33. The reporter also noted that clinicians were not receiving the Ct value as part of the test results.
Yet a PCR test instruction document from the CDC that had been revised five times as of July 13, 2020, specified testing and interpretation of the test using a Ct of 40. On September 28, 2020, a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases from Jaafar et al. had asserted, based on patient labs and clinical data involving nearly 4,000 patients, that a Ct of 30 was appropriate for making public policy. An update to the CDC instructions for PCR testing from December 1, 2020, still uses a Ct of 40.
Shortly before the New York Times article was published, the CDC revised its COVID-19 test recommendations, saying that only syptomatic patients should be tested. The media went insane, and Dr. Fauci went all over television saying he was not part of the decision to change the testing standards:
“I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact it is.”
So, of course, the Mendacious Midget™ had spoken, and the guidelines went back to testing everyone, all the time, with an oversensitive test. The idea that asymptomatic spread was a concern as of August was just one of many lies Dr. Fauci told. At the beginning of the pandemic in late January, he said:
The one thing historically that people need to realize is that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there is a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.
There is not a single study or meta-analysis that differs from Fauci’s original assessment.
Today, within an hour of Joe Biden being inaugurated and signing an executive order mandating masks on all federal property, the WHO sent out a notice to lab professionals using the PCR test. It said:
WHO guidance Diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 states that careful interpretation of weak positive results is needed (1). The cycle threshold (Ct) needed to detect virus is inversely proportional to the patient’s viral load. Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.
This translates to “in the absence of symptoms, a high Ct value means you are highly unlikely to become ill or get anyone else sick in the absence of very recent exposure to an infected person.” Dr. Fauci knew this in July when he said that tests with a Ct above 35 were likely picking up viral debris or dead virus. Even at a Ct of 35, the incidence of virus samples that could replicate is very low, according to Jaafar et al. The only state I know that requires reporting the Ct with every test is Florida, which started this policy in December.
The WHO went on, stating:
Most PCR assays are indicated as an aid for diagnosis, therefore, health care providers must consider any result in combination with timing of sampling, specimen type, assay specifics, clinical observations, patient history, confirmed status of any contacts, and epidemiological information.
In short, a positive PCR test in the absence of symptoms means nothing at a Ct of higher than 30, according to the experts interviewed by the New York Times and according to Jaafar et al. Yet positive tests is the number CNN loves flashing on the screen. If the percentage found by the Times in August holds, there have been approximately 2.43 million actual cases to date, not 24.3 million. There is also no way to calculate the deaths from COVID-19 rather than deaths with some dead viral debris in the nostrils.
What I have referred to as the “casedemic” since September will be magically solved just in time for Joe Biden to look like a hero. For doing absolutely nothing. Do not tell me there is not a politicized deep state in our health agencies. Do not ever tell me I need to listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci again. And every business owner who has been ruined because of lockdowns due to a high number of “cases” should be livid. Any parent whose child has lost a year of school should be furious.
None of this was for your health. It was to get rid of Orange Man Bad.
Our not-so-benevolent Master
Amazon waits for Biden inauguration before offering COVID help
Amazon offered to help the Biden administration on Wednesday, shortly after President Joe Biden was sworn into office, with efforts to distribute the coronavirus vaccine, a proposal that the tech giant had not submitted to the Trump administration in the month since the vaccine was approved for public use.
“As you begin your work leading the country out of COVID-19 crisis, Amazon stands ready to assist you in reaching your goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of your administration,” Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of world-wide operations, wrote in a letter to Biden, according to Axios.
“We are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology, and communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts. Our scale allows us to make a meaningful impact immediately in the fight against COVID-19, and we stand ready to assist you in this effort,” said Clark.
Clark also requested that Amazon’s 800,000 employees — who he characterized as “essential workers” — should be prioritized for vaccination.
Assuming that Amazon expects its assistance in distributing vaccines will save lives, its decision to delay offering its services while Trump was in office was a deliberate balancing of its hatred of Trump and the lives of citizens, and hate won out. The company could have made this offer months ago, and had its delivery systems coordinated with others and ready to go when the first vaccine was approved last November. How may lives were lost because Bezos and his company hate Trump so much?
A cynic might point out that no one has profited more from COVID-19 and the resulting lockdowns than Amazon, so anything that extends the pandemic can only benefit the company’s bottom line. So there’s that.
Suppression of speech, profiteering, and denying desperate old people medicine for political reasons: Bezos is not a good man.
Too dangerous for impressionable youngsters
There will be no countering or interference with the government’s reeducation campaign.
Gail Heriot: THAT WAS FAST: Minutes after Biden took office, the Report of President Trump’s 1776 Commission (on which my colleague Peter Kirsanow served) was taken off the White House website. I am told a Biden Executive Order has abolished the 1776 Commission already.
This afternoon I got an email from Pete. As he put it, this “tells you everything about the Left’s priorities–can’t have the truth about America out there for even a minute” and “I’m sure the Fahrenheit 451 crowd is tracking down every copy they can.”
Obama called the Paris Accord “an agreement” rather than a treaty because, under our constitution, treaties must be approved by the Senate, and there was no way this was going to pass the Senate, even with the Democrats in control. It still wouldn't. Obama Administration 2.0, staffed with retreads, and repeat tactics.
Matt Margolis: wow, Politico is no longer covering up Biden’s cognitive decline
During a speech prep session last year, Biden snapped at an aide: “I would never say this. Where did you get this from?’” The aide explained that Biden had just said it in a public speech a couple of weeks earlier.
…. Obviously, Politico got the memo. The election is over. Trump is out of office. Biden’s cognitive decline is no longer taboo. It can be discussed ad nauseam by the media now because getting Biden into office wasn’t the primary objective of getting him elected.
Biden’s sole purpose was to play the role of an “electable” candidate who could appeal to independents and anti-Trump Republicans under the ruse of being a centrist just to get Trump out of office. For all intents and purposes, Biden’s job is complete, and a San Francisco liberal is now waiting in the wings to take his place at the appropriate time.
While conservative media outlets didn’t shy away from reporting on Biden’s deteriorating mental faculties, the mainstream media tried to pretend they didn’t exist. But the rules have changed now. Expect more anecdotes like the one above to make their way into mainstream media reports.
UPDATE: Of course he still has the NYT, at least for today:
Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School of Marxists, fled the Nazis and came to the United States in order to save his life. He repaid that debt our country by setting about destroying it.
You can find a summary of his screed on “Repressive Tolerance”, a term he coined, here. (Or, if you care to plow all 100+ pages, you can go here — I don’t recommend it)
Except from the summary:
Marcuse argued that, because of the radical repressiveness of Western society, a tolerance for all viewpoints actually contributed to social oppression. A pervasive network of assumptions and biases implicitly privileges the viewpoint of the powerful, so that seemingly “equal” presentations of opposite opinions actually end up benefiting the viewpoint of the powerful. He offered the example of a magazine running a piece criticizing the FBI along with one praising the FBI. Fair and balanced? Not so fast, Marcuse said: “the chances are that the positive [story] wins because the image of [the FBI] is deeply engraved in the mind of the people.” Because of social programming, the inhabitants of a given society automatically favor certain values. The ideological playing field’s lack of levelness means that seemingly equal presentations of ideas are not really equal.
[His “remedy”] includes the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior — thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives. And to the degree to which freedom of thought involves the struggle against inhumanity, restoration of such freedom would also imply intolerance toward scientific research in the interest of deadly “deterrents,” of abnormal human endurance under inhuman conditions, etc.
I read (some of) Marcuse’s writings back in 1974 or so, when I was in college, and dismissed him as a lightweight, but that was a misjudgment; in fact, his teachings had already infected institutions of higher learning, and in the coming decades, filtered down through the grades and eventually reached kindergarten (and, today, even pre-school). Hence fellow-traveller Howard Zinn’s hate America textbook being used in the standard high school curriculum, and, these days, the NYT 1619 Project. And the graduates of those institutions now run then, as well as our media. That’s bad news.
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School had a goal to destroy capitalism back in the 30s, and 90-years later, they’re almost there.
That’s a term used to describe the process where, as one essential component of a system fails, it overloads the one below it, which overloads the next, and so on, until a final, catastrophic collapse is reached. The human body can suffer a cascading failure, as can power grids, computers, and even entire countries. That’s been happening for decades here, at an ever-faster pace. Today ushers in a new stage.
Do I have a plan for you!
Biden appoints fascist transvestite as Assistant Secretary of Health
No one here cares about what’s dangling beneath Rachael, nee Richard Levinson’s skirt, but sheeit has been one of the worst shutdown Nazis since this started, and has never acknowledged that his efforts were ineffective in stopping the panic and hugely harmful to Pennsylvanians. Now the swamp creature is being released onto the country, all in the name of wokeness.
UPDATE: And instituted an Andy Cuomo assault on nursing home patients. To his credit, he pulled his own mother out of there when the effect of his policy became apparent.
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