Briefly Noted: News And Views
Ukraine, Covid, And Other Stuff
Who’s winning in the tug of war between Russia and the DC Establishment? The headlines tell the story on who’s calling the shots:
Putin splits NATO and cuts out Biden: Russian president agrees to hold talks with Germany, France and Ukraine as squabbling NATO countries fail to decide joint troop deployment and Joe says he'll go it alone
dailymail.co.uk ^ | January 29, 2022 | Ronny Reyes and Morgan PhillipsRussian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to hold talks with Germany, France and Ukraine as NATO fails to take action on the rising conflict in Easter Europe and President Joe Biden's announcement on Friday that he would deploy troops 'in the near term' without backing from NATO.
The blow to NATO and exclusion of America in negotiation talks on the Russian-Ukraine crisis came after Putin accused the U.S. and NATO of ignoring the Kremlin's 'fundamental concerns' over NATO's growth during a call with French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday.
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Give credit where it’s due—BoJo is fearless. Seemingly unafraid to be laughed at, because I can’t imagine anyone taking this seriously:
Boris Johnson to fly to Ukraine, hold crisis talks with Putin
Nypost ^ | 01/29/2022 | Jon LevineBritish Prime Minister Boris Johnson will fly to Ukraine next week and hold crisis talks by phone with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, his office said.
Reportedly the Zhou regime is appealing to Hungary to accept US troops. That would be the same Hungary that has for years been regularly and ritually denounced by the Globalist West and DC Establishment as fascist.
You can bet that leaders in every capital in Europe are responding to whoever calls them from DC or claims to represent the US at the embassies: What’s in it for us? Why should we be out in front of Germany or France? Or, come to that, Ukraine?
Is anyone besides Putin winning? Well … look at these happy people:
If you have to ask who’s losing …
And:
Anyone thinking a make believe foreign policy win in Ukraine will turn things around for the Dems is dreaming. Meanwhile, the long this goes on, the longer Putin keeps winning, the less incentive he has to provide a face saving exit for Zhou.
Alex Berenson is reading a new book on Covid Origins and asks an interesting question—a question to which I’ll bet he has pretty shrewd idea of the answer:
I am nearly finished with VIRAL, the book from from Alina Chan and Matt Ridley that meticulously documents the origins of SARS-Cov-2.
Let’s just say it raises lots of questions about what China (and China’s top coronavirus scientists) knew and when they knew it.
But it raises another question: WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN CHINA THE LAST TWO YEARS? Has China really controlled the virus far better than any other large and/or wealthy country? If so, how? And why have the Chinese been so reluctant to use mRNA vaccines - either from Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna or homegrown?
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Let me take a stab at an answer—an answer which is strongly suggested by the stories of excess mortality among the vaxxed in the prime of life demographic. These stories are cropping up in multiple countries, despite government efforts to rig the stats. The last thing a rapidly greying country like China needs is huge excess mortality among the prime child bearing demographic. Smart, right? Or basic common sense?
This next article has no big revelations but it’s well presented:
It Was All There in the EUA. Why Couldn’t They See it?
The first thing I did when the three Covid vaccines were given their Emergency Use Authorizations between mid-December 2020 and late February of 2021 was to seek out the summaries of the clinical findings that had led to these regulatory actions. I quickly found them and delved into what they had to say on protection against infection and transmission.
I did so because my intuitions, backed by my reading of non-mainstream sources, had long suggested to me that the endgame envisioned by those managing the pandemic was to impose vaccine mandates on as many people and as many populations as they could.
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The first company to receive approval, and hence to have a briefing document issued about its product by the FDA, was Pfizer. Shortly after the document was published on December 10th 2020 I read the 53-page document and zeroed in on the section titled “Known Benefits” (p.46) where I found the following three-line summary:
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Hmm, that’s funny I thought, there was nothing about the ability to do what government officials and media talking heads were clearly suggesting they would do: stop people from getting infected and passing on the virus.
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And in the midst of all of these de facto admissions of their limits, I found the paragraph below … which seems to indicate that the makers of the vaccines and the regulators overseeing their efforts were well aware that any efficacy might initially have could very well be quickly rendered nil by the fast-mutating nature of the virus:
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When I checked on the Moderna briefing document issued a week later, I found virtually the same set of disclaimers ...
I was stunned. The issuance of these documents coincided with the kick-off the vaccination campaign in which they were clearly being sold to the public on the basis of their ability to stop infection and transmission. To say the least, they were oversold by most of the top public-health officials and TV pundits, including most of the people relied upon as experts.
Is it, and was it, really plausible to believe that the officials who were leading the vaccine charge on this basis were unaware of what I found in an effortless internet search?
Which is a longish way of saying: They lied to us. However, that’s simply an example of the author’s larger point. After all, that information was readily available for free to anyone who could do some basic research. Why didn’t hardly any people do what the author did?
But I think there is a deeper dynamic driving this now persistent failure of so many people, especially the young, to confront authority with the documentary proof of easily-accessible facts. And it has a lot to do with an epochal change in the overall cognitive habits of our culture.
Follow the link for his ruminations.
Related, although not strictly focused on Covid, is this article at Zerohedge:
Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship
Finally. My wife sent me an article about this over a week ago, but other events overtook it. It won’t shock you, but it does suggest an awful lot about America—who we are, and how we got to be like this. This is Steven Hayward’s take on the same story, at Why Do Democrats Hate Children?:
When Democrats aren’t trying to keep children out of school and (not) learning online, or requiring them to wear masks when they’re (not) learning in crappy union-run public schools, they’re trying to warehouse them in government-run universal child care programs.
Universal child care is one of the centerpieces of the Democrats’ BBB Bill (better known as “Biden’s Big Blunder”). Yet the people who scream “follow the science” never seem to take in what several social science studies of early preschool have found. Let’s start with the American Economic Journal:
The Long-Run Impacts of a Universal Child Care Program
Abstract
Past research documents the persistence of positive impacts of early life interventions on noncognitive skills. We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introduction of universal child care in Quebec. We find that the negative effects on noncognitive outcomes persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life. Our results reinforce previous evidence of the central role of the early childhood environment for long-run success.
(Here’s a good news summary of the study.)
And just out this week from Developmental Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association:
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The findings are not new. There have been repeated studies showing that the Great Society-era program Head Start has little or no effect after a few years, which this latest study mentions. But who in Congress, even among mean Republicans, is going to vote to scale back something called “Head Start”?
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Maybe, just maybe, young children are better off staying at home with their mothers. But this is heresy to leftists today.
I think we know what’s going on here, but it’s no longer acceptable to say so out loud, for the most part—see: Censorship By Algorithm, above.
With Trudeau In Hiding, CBC Suggests Putin Behind Truckers' Freedom Convoy
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/worlds-largest-truck-convoy-arrives-ottawa-protest-medical-tyranny
Update (1500ET): While in a normal world this would be beyond satire and ridicule, it is perhaps no surprise whatsoever that the blame for instigation of the "Freedom Convoy" is already being placed on so-called 'Russian actors'...
"...given Canada's support of Ukraine... I don't know if it's far-fetched to ask but there is concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows... perhaps even instigating it..."
The first person to study the effect of Head Start and such programs was Dr Stanley Greenspan who was at NIH. He did the seminal studies and wrote and spoke about the noxious effect these programs had on democracy. You must read him. He was critical to debunking based on actual science to the whole HRC it takes a village garbage.