And now it’s goggles

The New Neo Posted on by

Why not full hazmat suits? Wouldn’t that protect us even more?:

During a live chat with the American Federation of Teachers Tuesday night, Fauci said “eyes are also vulnerable, so if you can have goggles of some sort that can cover the eyes” it is “one way” to protect yourself.

On Wednesday, he mentioned again “if you have goggles, or an eye shield, you should use it. I mean, it’s not universally recommended. But if you really want to be complete, you should probably use it if you can.”

As with so much of the COVID warnings and recommendations, this is a subtle appeal to OCD. How far do you go? How seriously are people to take any of this? It’s a slippery slope. Some shrug and ignore it all as preposterous. Their ruling philosophy is that life is inherently risky but it is for living, without too many precautions except for the most basic. For other people, absolute safety is the goal and fear is the major motivator. They are willing to change every single aspect of their lives on the off chance that it will protect them from a menace they see as omnipresent and threatening.

I’ve noticed from the start that Fauci likes to say something and then hedge about it, not quite taking it back but not quite committing to it either. Goggles are typical: “You should use it” followed by “it’s not universally recommended” and then “you should probably use it if you can.” What on earth is the listener supposed to take from that? Nothing except confusion.

As for the science of it – we simply don’t know:

Dr. John Brooks, chief medical officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 response, recently told the AARP.org that, “The virus could enter the body through mucous membranes that cover the white parts of our eyes — but it would be very hard to prove.” Researchers do know that COVID-19 spreads between people who are in close contact to each other through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks. But pinpointing exactly where the coronavirus took root in someone’s body — through the nose, the eyes, the mouth or a combination of all three — is next to impossible.

Preliminary research suggests that we’re probably most likely to get infected through the nose and mouth. In fact, a recent study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that the SARS-CoV-2 — the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 — infects the cells in your nose much more easily than the cells in your throat or your lungs. And early research has found that only a small percentage of hospitalized COVID-19 patients whose eye fluid was tested came up positive for having the virus in their eyes — although it should be noted that swabbing eye fluid isn’t standard in coronavirus patient care, so there could certainly be more cases than have been recorded.

Plus, Dr. Thomas Steinemann, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, told NPR that the coronavirus would have to run “a more circuitous route” to travel from your peepers to your respiratory system. First, the virus would have to get through the eyes’ mucous membrane. Then it would need to be swept by tears behind your cheeks to reach your nasal cavity. And from there, it would need to flow from your nose to your throat. It’s certainly possible, but it’s less direct than inhaling the virus directly through your nose or mouth. And the CDC notes that while the nose and mouth are the main areas where the virus enters the body, “it may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes.”

Clear as mud, right?

Obama the divider

The New Neo Posted on by

At John Lewis’ funeral Obama sowed division, both racially and otherwise. One of Obama’s statements was, “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”

But it’s Obama who is more like Wallace – not just in being Democrats, but in their attitude towards federal troops and/or agents. See this:

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s administration ordered the U.S. Army’s 2nd Infantry Division from Ft. Benning, Georgia to be prepared to enforce the racial integration of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In a vain attempt to halt the enrollment of black students Vivian Malone and James Hood, Governor Wallace stood in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963. This became known as the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”.

If you want to read more of Obama’s eulogy for Lewis, the full text is here. There are plenty of additional things there to criticize, but I’ll just summarize by saying that it’s Obama doing what Obama does best. I mean that without irony, because long ago I noticed that Obama has a particularly useful and well-developed skill, which is to say things that are often untrue, designed to engender anger and hatred towards the opposition and to exploit racial divides, and yet to continue to appear – in the minds of many listeners, at least – to be high-minded, sincere, and loftily above the fray.

That is his greatest skill, and his deft use of it has been instrumental in helping bring this country to the current sorry state in which we find ourselves. I first noticed it during his 2008 campaign, and it alarmed me immediately. Here’s a summary of some of the points I had made then, and here’s a post in which I discuss his dissing of his white grandmother. Here’s another discussion of Obama’s use of the race card during his campaign. Then, during the Obama presidency, we had his statements about the Trayvon Martin case.

But I think the earliest post I ever wrote concerning Obama’s rather sophisticated technique for sowing racial divisiveness was this one from June of 2008. I’m going to quote the whole thing right now:

Barack Obama, the candidate who wants to end divisiveness, and who wants to run a clean and honorable campaign without negativity, said the following in a recent campaign speech at a Florida fund-raising reception:

“It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

We have here a truly masterful attempt to flames of paranoia on the part of his followers and adopt the mantle of victimization for himself, thus raising rather than lowering the amount of divisiveness and vitriol in the campaign. Pretty good for just a couple of sentences.

Obama is correct in saying that there have been racist remarks against him. These have originated from fringe elements and/or commenters in the blogosphere and/or anonymous email campaigns. They focus on his “funny name,” for example, or the fact that he’s black.

But in this speech he appears to attribute—or to encourage his supporters to attribute—these charges to the entire Republican Party, couched as a threatening “they.” At the same time, he fails to differentiate these attacks – and actually connects them as part of an undifferentiated list – from extremely legitimate concerns that people have voiced about other characteristics of his, such as his inexperience.

In the final sentence of the paragraph he slyly encourages a phenomenon I’ve noticed happening more and more: the charge that any criticism of Obama emanates from racism. If the racism isn’t overt and clear, as in the emails, then it’s covert; “inexperience” (a valid concern based on the objective facts of his history) becomes a code word (wink wink) for hidden racism and fearmongering.

This is dangerous demagoguery.

Because one so seldom hears overt expressions of racism any more, and certainly not from mainstream candidates, there has been a tendency to imagine it is everywhere, but hidden. Here Obama cynically fosters that belief and encourages the definition of his entire opposition as energized by this impossible-to-prove—or, more importantly, impossible-to-disprove—motive.

No, it turns out that most of them haven’t mentioned he’s black, except in approving terms. But they don’t have to nowadays to be racists; Obama has taken care of that.

Obama was doing this from the start, so no one should be the least bit surprised that as an ex-president he continues his successful campaign to divide America. Obama had a wonderful opportunity to do the opposite, but that was never the goal of this community organizer par excellence.

Twitter and YouTube are biased political players attempting to influence the election and other world events through censorship

The New Neo Posted on by

I think the above has been clear for a long time.

I have never been part of Twitter, although if memory serves I initially set up an account. But as soon as I checked out the site, I realized it repelled me and I wanted nothing to do with it. And that was before it started censoring people.

Which it’s been doing for quite some time. For example (hat tip: Ace):

And YouTube isn’t far behind. There’s this, which happened just today (hat tip: commenter “Cap’n Rusty”). The poster is John Hinderaker:

Earlier today, Center of the American Experiment hosted a live-streamed presentation by Heather Mac Donald titled “The Truth About Crime, Race and Policing.” Heather’s talk, which lasted for around 40 minutes, was fact-filled. It delivered a knockout punch to the Black Lives Matter “systemic police racism” narrative, which can’t stand up to empirical analysis. Thousands of people watched the livestream on an event page, on YouTube and on Facebook. We intend that a vastly greater number–hundreds of thousands–watch the archived video on YouTube, Facebook and other platforms.

But within an hour after the program ended, YouTube deleted the video on the pretense that it violated YouTube’s “Community Guidelines.”

YouTube said it violated their community guidelines. Hinderaker sent off the following to YouTube:

This is obviously a mistake. The speaker is Heather Mac Donald, one of America’s top authorities on crime and policing. She is the author of a bestselling book on the subject, has testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the topic of her speech, and was described by a former Attorney General of the U.S. as “the greatest thinker on criminal justice in America today.” Her talk was data-rich and totally beyond criticism based on YouTube’s “Community Guidelines.” Please reverse this erroneous decision immediately.

Powerline put the video up at YouTube again, so I’m posting it here (watch it while you can!):

It also can be seen here.

North Korean defector surprised to find out that Americans are really nice

The New Neo Posted on by

Propaganda is difficult to shake, but personal observation and experience can go a long way:

A North Korean defector earlier this month revealed that he was “shocked” at the level of kindness and racial diversity he experienced when he first visited the United States.

The video is worth watching:

In the past, I’ve watched other videos done by foreigners talking about their experiences with Americans or in visiting America. When asked to list characteristics of Americans, almost all of them say that Americans are friendly and smile a lot, and that they can be distinguished from others by their confident way of walking.

RIP Herman Cain

The New Neo Posted on by

More sad news:

Herman Cain — the maverick American business czar and Republican presidential candidate who campaigned for a sweeping tax reform plan called 9-9-9 — died Thursday morning after a monthlong battle with the coronavirus. He was 74.

Cain, who recently joined Newsmax TV and was set to launch a weekly show, died in an Atlanta-area hospital where he had been critically ill for several weeks.

He was admitted on July 1, two days after being diagnosed with COVID-19.

It sounds as though the disease became serious for him very quickly. I don’t know whether he had any pre-existing conditions, although I do know that he was a colon cancer survivor after being diagnosed with Stage IV in 2006.

Note the way the following is framed:

Ten days before, Cain had attended a rally for President Donald Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But it is not known for sure where Cain, co-chairman of Black Voices for Trump, was infected. He had been on a whirlwind travel schedule in June, stopping in multiple cities.

So he could have contracted it anywhere. He was all over the map in June.

Here’s a portion of Cain’s resume of accomplishment:

He was born Dec. 13, 1945, in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up poor in Atlanta, Georgia, where his father worked three jobs — as a janitor, barber, and chauffeur — while his mother toiled as a domestic worker.

A stellar student who worked hard, Cain graduated from Morehouse College with a mathematics degree in 1967. A year later, he married Gloria Etchison, whom he met when he was a sophomore at Morehouse and she was a freshman at Morris Brown College.

Cain went on to earn a master’s degree in computer science from Purdue University in 1971, and helped develop fire control ballistics for ships and fighter planes for the U.S. Navy.

Next, he joined The Coca-Cola Company as a systems analyst, and after considerable success, moved to Pillsbury.

After serving as regional vice president of Pillsbury’s Burger King, Cain then took on the biggest challenge of his career as president and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, a national chain teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

In 14 months, he returned Godfather’s to profitability and led his management team to a buyout of the company.

Much more at the link.

You may recall that, during the 2012 presidential campaign, Cain was sidelined by sexual harassment allegations in a familiar scenario (I chronicled it here). Because of that, as well as the fact that he was a conservative black man, there has been a lot of nasty leftist twittering on his grave.

Here’s an appreciation, though.

RIP.

In further proof of the transformation of the federal judiciary into a political animal (not that we needed further proof), the Flynn/Sullivan case will be heard en banc

The New Neo Posted on by

Terrible news – the Flynn/Sullivan case will now be heard by the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals en banc:

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated the prior order of a panel directing Judge Emmet Sullivan to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn. Sullivan requested the full Circuit court consider the case (“en banc”).

The Court’s focus on “whether there are ‘no other adequate means to attain the relief’ desired” seems to be a clear sign that Sullivan’s argument that the panel order was premature, and that he should have been allowed to rule on the government’s motion to dismiss, is viewed as a problem by many if not most of the appeals court judges.

There are certain times I hate to be right, and this is one of them. On July 10 I wrote, in a post entitled “Judge ‘Ahab’ Sullivan keeps aiming his harpoon at General ‘Moby Dick’ Flynn”:

It is no surprise that Judge Sullivan filed for a full en banc hearing by the DC Circuit Court on the Flynn case rather than comply with the order of the three-judge panel to get off Flynn’s back.

No, no surprise at all. In several previous posts, I’ve compared Sullivan to Captain Ahab, and yesterday’s announcement is further indication that the analogy is pretty apropos. That doesn’t mean that Sullivan is acting on his own; I believe there are plenty of leftists/Democrats supporting him and guiding him in this noble endeavor. His crew, as it were: “To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

My prediction now? I think the court will grant the hearing, and I think there’s a good chance – because of the political makeup of the court, which is heavy with Democrats – that they will side with Sullivan. That’s a travesty of justice, but we see a great deal of that these days, don’t we?

I hope I’m wrong. I’d like to feel a little less cynicism.

As it is, I doubt I could feel more cynicism about the way this case has gone.

Another roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

So much news:

Greatest hits from the Barr hearing.

Our math-challenged public is easy to spook. Math is hard. [Hat tip: commenter “Griffin.”]

The WaPo will be capitalizing “White.”

I cannot resist making a version of the old old joke: What’s White, Black, and Red all over? The WaPo. (And that’s not “red” as in “Republican” – it’s “Red” in the old-fashioned sense.)

Will I ever buy clothing again?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not what you’d call a fashionista. But I’ve always liked clothes, and I like to look nice.

Over the years, fashion has gotten less pretty and less formal. I used to have a raft of skirts and dresses, and many places to wear them. Years ago, even going to the theater – or flying on an airplane – was cause for dressup. No more.

Oh, some people always look great. But most people don’t. And COVID has reduced even that need and that opportunity.

After all, where is there to go? Most of my forays into the outside world are in my exercise clothes, to walk; in very casual clothes, to sit on a friend’s deck and talk; to the store; or to a medical appointment.

That’s it, folks. On a daily basis, there’s really little need to get out of my blogging clothes except to get into my exercise clothes, take a shower, and then back into the blogging clothes or what I’ll euphemistically call my sleepwear.

I long have said that as one gets older, it’s still important to try to dress a bit spiffily. Maybe especially as one gets older – unless:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…

I’ve got a closet full of clothes, including a few fancy dresses. Will I ever wear them again? I hope so. It was only last year when I went to several events – a wedding, a large family reunion – and I hope to do so again. But right now it seems long in the past or far away in the future.

Maybe I should at least dress up for the Zoom meetings.

Bolsonaro, the press, and hydroxychloroquine

The New Neo Posted on by

Brazil’s Bolonaro lives to fight another day – having recovered from COVID.

And to make matters even more tragic for the left, the Brazilian president does a Trumpish thing:

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro announced on Saturday he has tested negative for the new coronavirus more than two weeks after being diagnosed on July 7, attributing his recovery to an unproven malaria drug.

“RT-PCR for Sars-Cov 2: negative. Good morning everyone,” the 65-year-old tweeted, along with a photo of himself smiling and holding a packet of hydroxychloroquine. Its effectiveness against Covid-19 has not been demonstrated in clinical trials.

There are only three sentences in that quote, but there are at least two lies (or errors, or misrepresentations). The first is “unproven malaria drug.” It certainly is an extremely proven malaria drug. From the CDC:

Hydroxychloroquine (also known as hydroxychloroquine sulfate) is an arthritis medicine that also can be used to prevent malaria…Hydroxychloroquine can be prescribed for either prevention or treatment of malaria…Hydroxychloroquine can be prescribed to adults and children of all ages. It can also be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mother.

Both adults and children should take one dose of hydroxychloroquine per week starting at least 1 week before traveling to the area where malaria transmission occurs. They should take one dose per week while there, and for 4 consecutive weeks after leaving…

Hydroxychloroquine can only be used in places where chloroquine (a related medicine) is still effective. There are only a few places left in the world where hydroxychloroquine is still effective including parts of Central America and the Caribbean.

So, to recap: it’s a malaria drug, quite proven, but only good in certain areas. It is also used for arthritis (and, if memory serves me, for certain other auto-immune diseases like lupus).

Ah, but maybe they meant “unproven in treating COVID”? Maybe they did, but that’s not what they wrote. However, that is more or less what they wrote in the last sentence I quoted from the Bolsonaro article: “Its effectiveness against Covid-19 has not been demonstrated in clinical trials.”

Which is confusing and misleading to the average reader, who almost certainly doesn’t know what a “clinical trial” is and how it differs from other types of studies that might show a drug’s efficacy. Let’s just say that clinical trials are a particular type of research, that they take longer to perform, and that in the case of hydroxychloroquine and COVID, the results of the bogus Lancet study (that one that had to be withdrawn) caused the panicked stoppage of a host of clinical trials around the world. And so clinical trials for the use of the drug against COVID have been even slower to come out.

Here’s one that still seems to be in the early stages, and so far they’ve only tested for safety and found it to be safe in COVID patients. Here’s another which, by the headline, seems to have found the drug not to be helpful with COVID, but if you read the actual study you might wonder – as I did – why it was even done, because the researchers did not use zinc. The people I’ve seen advocating the drug as a treatment for early cases of COVID have all emphasized that zinc must be part of the protocol. But that is often ignored. As one of several commenters to that study wrote: “This study and all others left out daily Zinc supplements! And it was given too late, meaning many patients already had a fatal viral load. Study is designed to fail.”

I don’t know about “all others.” But I’ve found plenty of studies (I’m not sure if they were all clinical trials, though) that have those two flaws as well.

Actually, the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine has been demonstrated in a number of studies (not necessarily clinical trials), particularly ones that use it early in the course of the illness, in the right dose, and which include zinc.

In addition, here’s one example of good results with the drug even in sicker patients, and even when taken without zinc:

Treatment with hydroxychloroquine cut the death rate significantly in sick patients hospitalized with COVID-19 – and without heart-related side-effects, according to a new study published by Henry Ford Health System.

In a large-scale retrospective analysis of 2,541 patients hospitalized between March 10 and May 2, 2020 across the system’s six hospitals, the study found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine alone died compared to 26.4% not treated with hydroxychloroquine. None of the patients had documented serious heart abnormalities; however, patients were monitored for a heart condition routinely pointed to as a reason to avoid the drug as a treatment for COVID-19.

The study was published today in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, the peer-reviewed, open-access online publication of the International Society of Infectious Diseases (ISID.org)…

“The findings have been highly analyzed and peer-reviewed,” said Dr. Marcus Zervos, division head of Infectious Disease for Henry Ford Health System, who co-authored the study with Henry Ford epidemiologist Samia Arshad. “We attribute our findings that differ from other studies to early treatment, and part of a combination of interventions that were done in supportive care of patients, including careful cardiac monitoring. Our dosing also differed from other studies not showing a benefit of the drug. And other studies are either not peer reviewed, have limited numbers of patients, different patient populations or other differences from our patients.”

So although these patients were sick enough to be hospitalized, they were treated early, and attention was paid to giving the right dose. On the other hand, zinc doesn’t seem to have been part of the study, and yet the results were good.

The bottom line is that results are encouraging in quite a few studies, particularly ones that involve less sick patients, but there haven’t been sufficent clinical trials to say that the drug has been proven to help COVID. This type of situation is not unusual with drugs, but in the case of COVID the political aims of the press have overshadowed any ability to report fairly on the results of studies of this drug.

NOTE: Speaking of the press – later in the Bolsonaro article you can read this:

The pandemic has exploded in Brazil, the country with the most infections and deaths from Covid-19 anywhere in the world except the United States.

A relatively meaningless statistic, meant to sound worse than it is. Both the US and Brazil have large populations. The most meaningful number to look at is deaths per million of population. That metric puts the US and Brazil either even with or behind most of the countries of western Europe. Even Peru and Chile – if you’re going to look just at Latin America – have had more deaths per capita than Brazil.

Now lawful arrests are called “kidnapping”

The New Neo Posted on by

Leftists love to control the language, like Humpty Dumpty. If they re-label ordinary, customary things as being nefarious when done by the right, it helps their cause.

The new meme of “kidnapping” came to my attention last night, when I was on the phone with a friend who referenced it and was very upset. I didn’t know what she was talking about at the time – but now I realize it must have been this story, and that she believed that shadowy evil Trump agents were kidnapping people off the streets.

Of course.

See also this:

MSNBC Chris Hayes Spreads Fake News That NYPD Undercover Arrest Was A “Kidnapping” – Fresh off Russia collusion hoax, Hayes and Democrats like Jerry Nadler stoke anger at police — Reality is the “kidnapping” was an arrest of a woman wanted for multiple crimes carried out by undercover NYPD officers accompanied by uniformed officers.

Does the MSM report anything straight these days?

The people lack virtue

The New Neo Posted on by

People have lost their way, and the press fills their heads with propaganda. You could say it’s a vast conspiracy. And certainly the left is organized, and the internet helps spread the word.

But it wouldn’t matter so much if so many people weren’t already receptive to the message. You see can the evidence of this around you. Fifty years ago, Americans wouldn’t have been so cowed by a virus of this magnitude. In fact, in 1957 we weren’t cowed by one that killed the equivalent of well over 200,000 people in the US and about 3 million worldwide (when corrected for today’s population). Fifty years ago, we also knew much better what socialism and Communism were. We knew the value of free speech, and even the ACLU defended it (how quaint!).

In sum: we knew what we had, and we didn’t want to let it go.

What happened? The decline of family stability, religion, education, journalism, the arts, entertainment, morality, historical knowledge, language, dress – and I’m sure I left some things out.

And this above all:

To our Founding Fathers, it was obvious, or “self-evident,” that self-government, or a democratic republic, could only be perpetuated by the self-governed. Reflecting these precepts, a contemporary German writer to the Founders, J. W. von Goethe, stated: “What is the best government? — That which teaches us to govern ourselves.”…

John Adams stated it this way, “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.”…

George Washington said: “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” and “Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people.”

Benjamin Franklin said: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

James Madison stated: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical [imaginary] idea.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and … their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice … These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.”

Samuel Adams said: “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.”

Patrick Henry stated that: “A vitiated [impure] state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”

John Adams stated: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

So wise, so true. I think that’s why the fingers we have had in the dike for so long just aren’t doing enough, and the onrushing water threatens to overwhelm us. Perhaps it already has.

It’s not surprising that now the Founders’ names are being tarnished and their statues toppled. It takes a group of people without virtue to do it, and a larger group without virtue to allow it. The irony is that these same people think of themselves as the most virtuous of all.

[NOTE: “Virtue” can be a tricky word. For example, Robespierre thought he was the very embodiment of it, and he justified the Reign of Terror as a necessity in order to further solidify virtue. He wrote, among other things: “Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue.”]