The Placeholder President

 From Matthew Continetti, at Free Beacon, "When Trump is the issue, Biden wins. And Biden's troubles begin":

The most impassioned speech of Joe Biden's presidency was about events that took place before it began. I'm talking about the president's remarks on the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The energy, force, and direction of Biden's delivery have been missing from practically every address he's made since his inauguration. The Biden who spoke from Statuary Hall on Thursday was not his usual self—listless, reactive, defensive, and confused. This Biden was angry and purposeful and on the attack.

True, it was a partisan speech. How could it not have been? The driving force behind the events of January 6 was a Republican president who remains the most important figure in his party. Many Republicans will accuse Biden of divisiveness. They will say he ignored the faults of his own side. Well, sorry, but what did you expect? Biden was lively and pointed because public opinion is with him. A majority says the 2020 election was legitimate. A plurality blames Trump for the mob assault on the Capitol. Fifty-nine percent of adults don't want Trump to run for president in 2024. When Trump is the issue, Biden wins.

And Biden's troubles start. Trump for now is the least of his worries. Trump is on the sidelines. He's out of office. He's banned from social media. He doesn't figure in the everyday lives of most Americans. He won't be on the ballot this November. A White House midterm strategy based on portraying GOP candidates as Q-Anon shamans ready to storm the Capitol won't work. The hundreds of state and local campaigns will be too diverse. The candidates will be too distinct. And public anger over the economy, the pandemic, the schools, the border, and the cities will matter most of all.

Biden's January 6 speech was a reminder that he's a placeholder president. He's in office because independent voters in the suburbs rejected Donald Trump's personality and Donald Trump's response to the coronavirus. No one expected—or wanted—Biden to be a world-historical statesman. Biden himself said he's a "transitional" figure with a singular goal: Keep Trump away from the White House. He accomplished that task, which is why he began his presidency with healthy approval ratings. The electorate didn't sour on him until he took on additional employment: live-action role-playing FDR and LBJ, dismantling immigration protocols on the southern border, deferring to public health experts and regulatory bodies, and midwifing the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan. Now Biden is at 43-percent approval in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls.

Biden's dilemma is that "I'm not Trump" is a winning message only when Trump is on the ballot, holds office, or is tied to a major event such as January 6. The message doesn't work on the other 364 days of the year. If Biden had grasped why he became president, he would have pursued a modest agenda directed at the independents who elected him. He would have sounded and acted more like Governor Jared Polis than like Senator Elizabeth Warren. Instead, Biden has catered to the left at the expense of the center. He's at odds with the median voter as he fails to control the coronavirus, inflation, the border, and events overseas. His domestic agenda is stalled. And the Democratic congressional majority is at risk.

But not all is lost. A GOP Congress in 2023 may provide Biden with a rationale to shake up his staff, work with Senator Mitch McConnell, and distinguish himself from the cultural left. And the 2024 cycle may not be as good for Republicans as the 2022 cycle is shaping up to be. The last two Democratic presidents won reelection during periods of divided government. The mix of issues may be different. And Biden will be able to play his "I'm not Trump" card if the former president enters the presidential race and wins the GOP nomination...

Keep reading.

 

January 6th: Biden Made No Call to Sooth Americans' Frayed Nerves

 From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "Biden’s January 6 Anniversary Speech - and His Big Lies":

Vice President Kamala Harris set the stage yesterday for the Left’s exploitation of the first anniversary of the Capitol riot one year ago with incendiary remarks that outrageously compared the events of January 6, 2021, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 and the Islamist terrorist attacks on America’s homeland on Sept. 11, 2001. This morbid comparison dishonors the thousands of lives lost on both of those catastrophic days and is a declaration of war on the millions of Americans who reject her corrupt administration.

When Biden took his turn, the self-proclaimed unifier delivered an angry, divisive January 6 anniversary speech, falsely accusing former President Donald Trump and his supporters of placing “a dagger at the throat of American democracy” by questioning his legitimacy. Evidently, in Biden’s version of the Constitution, the right to protest is reserved for Antifa and Black Lives Matter, but not for Americans.

The only dagger at the throat of democracy is Biden's renewed effort to take over and rig national elections under the false flag of voting rights and manufactured emergency because polls show there is no other conceivable way he could win the 2024 presidential election.

Biden asked: “Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? We cannot allow ourselves to be that kind of nation.”

When rioters were burning their way across the country, Kamala Harris and other future members of the Biden administration were raising bail money so they could go out and burn, loot, and beat more police officers.

After leftist radicals attempted to destroy a federal courthouse in Portland in July of that year, setting fires and breaching the courthouse doors, then-candidate Biden’s response to these clear acts of insurrection was to blame Trump, not the rioters.

“We have a president who is determined to sow chaos and division,” said Biden. “To make matters worse instead of better.”

Biden has refused to condemn either Antifa or Black Lives Matter by name. He will not condemn any of the Democrats, including his own vice president, who fundraised for the rioters. And he has met with Black Lives Matter leaders instead of prosecuting them for terrorism.

Kamala and Biden claim that they care about police officers. Where are they on the over 2,000 police officers injured in the summer riots?

Most Americans would agree that political violence is wrong. Yes, prosecute any Capitol rioters who actually engaged in criminal behavior, but what about the Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other leftist rioters who so far have mostly escaped any consequences for their political violence across the country in the second half of 2020? Their anarchy resulted in immeasurably more destruction, fatalities, and injuries than occurred on January 6, 2021.

This is not to excuse the criminal behavior of those who entered the Capitol illegally and engaged in destructive acts, but only to highlight the clear double standard in how the Left views the January 6th riot versus the long hot summer of leftist riots in 2020.

Biden added: “We need a president who will bring us together instead of tear us apart, calm instead of inflame, and enforce the law faithfully rather than put his political interests first.”

He is certainly not that president.

Biden's speech is the embodiment of tearing Americans apart, of inflaming tensions, and of putting his political agenda ahead of the law.

In his January 6th anniversary speech, Biden used Trump and his seventy-four million voters in the 2020 election as foils to divert attention from his own administration’s miserable failures at home and abroad during his first year in office. The COVID-19 pandemic, skyrocketing inflation, surging crime, and illegal immigrants flooding into the country in record numbers are crises still plaguing the country as 2022 begins.

There was no call in Biden’s speech for an end to political violence on the Left as well as on the Right. He made no effort to soothe the American people’s frayed nerves or look forward with a positive agenda to solve the problems his administration has created. Instead, the Divider-in-Chief chose to look backward and hype last year’s Capitol incident as a mortal threat to democracy and the rule of law.

Biden said repeatedly in his speech that he intended to separate the truth about what happened on January 6, 2021 from the “big lies” he claimed were being told by Trump and his supporters. “We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie,” Biden declared. But the President spouted at least three big lies of his own during his speech.

First, Biden falsely accused Trump of trying “to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.” Trump was certainly vocal about challenging the suspicious results of the 2020 election, but he did and said nothing to prevent the transfer of power. Biden assumed office peacefully on January 20, 2021.

Second, Biden claimed that Trump had “rallied the mob to attack.” False. During Trump’s January 6th speech at his peaceful “Save America” rally, Trump said to the attendees: "We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." (Emphasis added) Trump is not responsible for the violent actions of a fringe breakaway group.

Third, Biden exploited the first anniversary of the Capitol riot to promote the Democrats’ power-grab, voting “reform” legislation. He distorted what states are doing to protect the integrity of their election processes, claiming that “new laws are being written not to protect the vote, but to deny it. Not only to suppress the vote but to subvert it.”

Georgia’s new voting law, for example, has been a frequent target of Biden’s verbal attacks. But that law is actually more liberal in allowing no-excuse mail-in voting, as opposed to the more restrictive requirements of New York and Biden’s home state of Delaware where voters must have a valid reason for not voting in person.

Finally, to put things in perspective, it is worth remembering a far more dangerous attack on the Capitol and on members of Congress than the January 6th riot. On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalist radicals invaded the Capitol and began spraying the place with bullets. They shot five congressmen, injuring at least one seriously. Former President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentences of the Puerto Rican terrorists well before the end of what would have been their full sentences.

Despite their hysterical claims of fearing for their lives at the hands of Trump supporters, no members of Congress were injured on January 6, 2021. The only violent fatality at all that day was that of an unarmed protester, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed at point-blank range by a Capitol police officer.

The January 6th breach of the Capitol was no Pearl Harbor. It was no 9/11. Such disgusting comparisons are a brazen appeal to raw emotions in a cynical attempt by Democrats, from the President on down, to push their plan to federalize elections for partisan gain and for permanent one-party control.

 

Paul Lockhart, Firepower

At Amazon, Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare.

Democracy Isn't Dying

I've been saying this all year. Basically, despite the disruptions and violence, the system worked.

The rest is just politics.

At WSJ, "Jan. 6 was a riot, not an insurrection, and U.S. institutions held":

The Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, was a national disgrace, but almost more dispiriting is the way America’s two warring political tribes have responded. Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem intent on exploiting that day to retain power, while the Donald Trump wing of the GOP insists it was merely a protest march that got a little carried away.

We say this as a statement of political reality, not as a counsel of despair. Our job is to face the world as it is and try to move it in a better direction. So a year later, what have we learned?

*** One lesson is that on all the available evidence Jan. 6 was not an “insurrection,” in any meaningful sense of that word. It was not an attempted coup. The Justice Department and the House Select Committee have looked high and low for a conspiracy to overthrow the government, and maybe they will find it. So far they haven’t.

There apparently was a “war room” of motley characters at the Willard hotel and small groups of plotters who wanted to storm the barricades. But they were too disorganized to do much more than incite what became the mob that breached the Capitol.

The Justice Department says some 725 people from nearly all 50 states have been charged in the riot, linked mainly by social media and support for Donald Trump. About 70 defendants have had their cases adjudicated to date, and 31 of those will do time in prison. The rioters aren’t getting off easy.

They also didn’t come close to overturning the election. The Members fled the House chamber during the riot but soon returned to certify the electoral votes. Eight Senators and 139 House Republicans voted against certifying the electoral votes in some states, but that wasn’t close to a majority.

The true man at the margin was Mike Pence. Presiding in the Senate as Vice President, he recognized his constitutional duty as largely ceremonial in certifying the vote count. He stood up to Mr. Trump’s threats for the good of the country and perhaps at the cost of his political future.

In other words, America’s democratic institutions held up under pressure. They also held in the states in which GOP officials and legislators certified electoral votes despite Mr. Trump’s complaints. And they held in the courts as judges rejected claims of election theft that lacked enough evidence. Democrats grudgingly admit these facts but say it was a close run thing. It wasn’t. It was a near-unanimous decision against Mr. Trump’s electoral claims.

None of this absolves Mr. Trump for his behavior. He isn’t the first candidate to question an election result; Hillary Clinton still thinks Vladimir Putin defeated her in 2016. But he was wrong to give his supporters false hope that Congress and Mr. Pence could overturn the electoral vote. He did not directly incite violence, but he did incite them to march on the Capitol.

Worse, he failed to act to stop the riot even as he watched on TV from the White House. He failed to act despite the pleading of family and allies. This was a monumental failure of character and duty. Republicans have gone mute on this dereliction as they try to stay united for the midterms. But they will face a reckoning on this with voters if Mr. Trump runs in 2024.

As for the Pelosi Democrats, the question is when will they ever let Jan. 6 go? The latest news is that the Speaker’s Select Committee may hold prime-time hearings this year, and the leaks are that they may even seek an indictment of Mr. Trump for obstructing Congress...

Still more.

 

Biden Blasts Trump in January 6th Address (VIDEO)

He just looks old, cranky, and mean. 

For all the devastating problems we've got, this is all he's got. This is all the Democrats got. We'll be hearing about January 6th all year. Biden's just previewing his party's midterm election strategy. 

Disgusting. 

At WSJ, "Biden Assails Trump in Speech Over Jan. 6 Riot, Efforts to Overturn 2020 Election Results":

WASHINGTON—President Biden placed blame squarely on former President Donald Trump and his supporters for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, using the first anniversary of the attack to assail the former president’s attempts to undermine the 2020 election results.

Mr. Biden’s remarks, from the Capitol’s Statuary Hall, represented his most pointed rebuke of his predecessor, saying Mr. Trump’s “bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”

The president accused Mr. Trump of spreading a “web of lies about the 2020 election,” pointing to his false claims of election fraud and his attempt to block the certification of the election by Congress that day. Mr. Biden didn’t mention Mr. Trump by name, referring to him throughout the speech as the former president.

Mr. Biden credited law enforcement members, including the Capitol Police, for saving the rule of law. “Our democracy held,” he said.

Mr. Trump, in a statement released shortly after Mr. Biden’s remarks, said the president “used my name today to try to further divide America. This political theater is all just a distraction for the fact Biden has completely and totally failed.” Mr. Trump has said the “real insurrection” happened on Election Day in 2020, not Jan. 6, 2021.

The former president had planned to hold a news conference later in the day. But he canceled the event Tuesday night, saying he would discuss the anniversary during a coming rally in Arizona.

Mr. Biden’s remarks opened a day of remembrances on Capitol Hill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) each led a moment of silence on the House and Senate floors. In the afternoon, Mrs. Pelosi is participating in a conversation with historians and later a series of testimonials from lawmakers. The two leaders will join a candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps in the early evening.

The attack has served as a dividing line between the two parties in Congress, and few Republicans participated in the formal commemorations. Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), accompanied by her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, was the only GOP lawmaker who attended the moment of silence in the House chamber. Democrats have called the riot an assault on democracy, and have cited the event in calling for passing new election laws. GOP leaders have condemned the action of rioters, but they have accused Democrats of trying to use the attack to embarrass Republicans for political gain.

Mr. Biden said the moment called for Americans to “decide what kind of nation we are going to be. Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? Are we going to be a nation where we allow partisan election officials to overturn the legally expressed will of the people?”

“We cannot allow ourselves to be that kind of nation,” Mr. Biden said. He said Jan. 6 marked “not the end of democracy. It’s the beginning of a renaissance of liberty and fair play.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking before Mr. Biden, equated the riot to some of the darkest days in the nation’s history, including the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

On the Senate floor, Mr. Schumer called the Jan. 6 attack “the final, bitter, unforgivable act” of Mr. Trump’s presidency. Mr. Schumer said that it was important to counter the falsehood that the election was stolen because it could provide a pretext for more violence.

In a statement, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) blasted Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris over their remarks, saying that the speeches “were an effort to resurrect a failed presidency more than marking the anniversary of a dark day in American history.”

Hours before the Capitol breach, Mr. Trump spoke at a rally and urged his supporters to stop Mr. Biden’s election win, repeating his false claims that the election was stolen. Some of his supporters then marched to the Capitol and overwhelmed police officers, forcing the evacuation of lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence and temporarily disrupting the certification of Mr. Biden’s win. More than 700 people face criminal charges for their alleged actions that day.

The D.C. medical examiner’s office determined that four people died as a result of the riot, including Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to jump through shattered glass at the door to the Speaker’s Lobby. Two died of heart conditions and one from an amphetamine intoxication. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit was assaulted at the riot, suffered a stroke and died the following day of natural causes, the medical examiner’s office found.

House Democrats, joined by 10 Republicans, impeached Mr. Trump last January on the charge of inciting an insurrection. Mr. Trump was then acquitted in the Senate, with the votes of all Democrats and seven Republicans falling short of the two-thirds threshold needed to convict...

The rest is history, as they say.

The headlines have been dire at home and abroad. The drums of war are beating loudly in Eastern Europe as a showdown at the Russo-Ukrainian border looms. Meanwhile, Moscow's sent troops to Central Asia's Republic of Kazakhstan. Violent anti-government protests have threatened the regime of Nursultan Nazarbayev, which is closely allied to Russia. 

The Omicron variant is closing down government facilities and schools, and the White House has no clue on the way forward. In fact, Biden's going to shift administration policy to emphasize "living with covid," which for Democrats that the president's 2020 campaign platform to "end the pandemic" was a lie. The shoe's on the other foot, it hurts, and the race is lost. 

Still more.

Jonathan Greenblatt, It Could Happen Here

Jonathan Greenblatt, It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable ― And How We Can Stop It.

Nice Young Lady

From the University of Miami. 

She's got a wrist tattoo that says, "Home is Where Mom Is."

Right. She barely looks old enough for college, man.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Defends COVID Guidelines (VIDEO)

There's no rhyme or reason to the latest guidelines. 

First it was ten days isolation after a positive test, then corporations complained, especially the airlines. Then the CDC said after five days, if you have no symptoms, you can go back to work. Now you have to have to be tested, or something? 

Who knows? And who cares at this point? People are so over it. Done. The Biden administration's handling of the pandemic has been a complete joke. 

At NYDN, "CDC chief Dr. Rochelle Walensky defends COVID return-to-work guidelines amid widespread confusion." 

And see Zeynep Tufekci, at the New York Times, "The C.D.C. Is Hoping You’ll Figure Covid Out on Your Own":

I have some good news and some bad news, and they’re both the same.

Seven independent lab studies have found that while Omicron’s mutations make it exceptionally good at causing breakthrough cases even in people who have been vaccinated or previously infected, they also render it less able to effectively infect the lower lungs, a step associated with more serious illness. Plus, in country after country where Omicron has spread, epidemiological data shows that vaccines are still helping prevent severe disease or worse.

Why isn’t that unalloyed good news? Because it’s just luck that this highly transmissible variant appears to be less dangerous than other variants to those with prior immunity. If it had been more deadly — as Delta has been — the U.S. government’s haphazard and disorganized response would have put the whole country much more at risk. Even with this more moderate threat, the highest-ranking public health officials are making statements that seem more aimed at covering up or making excuses for ongoing failures, rather than leveling with the public.

Nowhere are these issues more apparent than on the confusing and zigzag messaging around rapid antigen tests and N95 masks, both of which are important weapons in our arsenal.

With a barrage of cases threatening vital services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Dec. 29 that people could return to work, masked, five days after they first learned they were infected, arguing that many people are infectious for only a short period. People could return to work even while still sick, as long as their symptoms were abating.

It’s not unreasonable to shorten quarantine for some, especially if they are vaccinated. Other countries have allowed infected people to isolate for a shorter time with the added precaution that they take rapid antigen tests to show they are negative two days in a row.

Why doesn’t the C.D.C. call for that added measure of safety? Its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has explained this by saying, “We know that after five days, people are much less likely to transmit the virus and that masking further reduces that risk.”

“Much less likely” isn’t zero, and the likelihood probably varies from person to person. All this means that some would continue to be infectious. So wouldn’t it be great if we could tell who was probably still infectious after five days, and took extra precautions, while allowing people who may be clearing the virus even faster than five days to stop isolating earlier?

Not according to our top officials.

“We opted not to have the rapid test for isolation because we actually don’t know how our rapid tests perform and how well they predict whether you’re transmissible during the end of disease,” Walensky said on Dec. 29. “The F.D.A. has not authorized them for that use.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, argued the same, also on Dec. 29. Referring to antigen tests, he said, “If it’s positive, we don’t know what that means for transmissibility” and that these antigen tests aren’t as sensitive as P.C.R. tests.

Might the real reason be that rapid tests are hard to find and expensive here (while they are easily available and relatively cheap in other countries)?

Is it possible that rapid tests are a good way to see who is infectious and who can return to public life — and their lack of sensitivity to minute amounts of virus is actually a good thing? Let’s ask a brilliant scientist and public health advocate — Rochelle Walensky, circa 2020.

Walensky, who was then on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, was a co-author of a paper in September 2020 that declared that the “P.C.R.-based nasal swab your caregiver uses in the hospital does a great job determining if you are infected but it does a rotten job of zooming in on whether you are infectious.”

That’s right, the key question is who is infectious, who can pass on the virus, not whether someone is still harboring some small amount of virus, or even fragments of it. P.C.R. tests can detect such tiny amounts of the virus that they can “return positives for as many as 6-12 weeks,” she pointed out. That’s “long after a person has ceased to pose any real risk of transmission to others.” P.C.R. tests are a bit like being able to find a thief’s fingerprints after he’s left the house.

So what did 2020 Walensky recommend? “The antigen test is ideally suited to yield positive results precisely when the infected individual is maximally infectious,” she and her co-author concluded. The reason is that antigen tests respond to the viral load in the sample without biologically amplifying the amount and being able to detect even viral fragments, as P.C.R. tests do. So a rapid test turns positive if a sample contains high levels of virus, not nonviable bits or minute amounts — and it’s high viral loads that correlate to higher infectiousness.

What about the objection that rapid antigen tests don’t always detect infections as well as P.C.R. tests can?

The 2020 Walensky wrote that the F.D.A. shouldn’t worry about “false negatives” on rapid tests because “those are true negatives for disease transmission” — meaning that people are unlikely to spread the virus even if they have a bit of virus lingering. In other words, the fact that rapid tests are less likely to turn positive if the viral load isn’t high is a benefit, not a problem.

Rapid tests do have their own considerations. Since you can become infectious even a day or two after getting a negative result on a rapid test, the Walensky of September 2020 noted that rapid tests are most useful if they are used frequently. A paper she co-wrote in July 2020 found that if a test was used every two days it would allow for safely reopening colleges.

The brilliant explanations of Walensky in 2020 leave me at a loss to explain why President Biden said on Dec. 22 that “I wish I had thought about ordering half a billion” rapid tests two months ago. Indeed, why didn’t officials do so two months ago, or 10 months ago?

The administration needs to do more to ramp up production of what should be one crucial tool in controlling the spread of the virus and allowing people to return to normal...

I'll say. 

More, at WSJ, "Biden’s Covid Death Milestone More Americans have died of the virus in 2021 than in all of 2020."

And at Newsweek, "Fact Check: Have More Americans Died From COVID Under Joe Biden Than Donald Trump?"

Discovery of Hundreds of Unmarked Graves at Canada School for Indigenous Children

Horrific.

And Canada's so "progressive." 

At WSJ, "Records Could Shed Light on Canada Residential Schools for Indigenous Children":

OTTAWA—A trove of documents that could help identify children who died while attending boarding schools for indigenous children in Canada is set to be released after a yearslong battle.

Last month, the Canadian government said it would turn over about 12,000 documents to the country’s National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, which houses the largest repository of residential-school records.

The documents include historical records of some of the schools, which operated in Canada for more than a century and were attended by some 150,000 indigenous children, many separated from their families by force or coercion. A majority of the institutions were run by the Catholic Church.

The government came under increased pressure to turn over the documents, which researchers said may include attendance records and staff lists, after the discovery last year of more than 1,000 unmarked graves near former residential schools in western Canada.

The records weren’t made available earlier, the government said, because several Catholic entities that were involved with the schools had refused to consent to their release. The government believed consent was required because the records were collected in response to lawsuits against the government and religious groups.

Advocates say the documents could help offer some closure to survivors of Canada’s residential-school system, which a government-backed inquiry concluded was akin to “cultural genocide.”

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission said in 2015 that it had identified about 3,200 deaths of indigenous children at the schools but said the death toll was likely higher as many student deaths went unreported, partly because records were destroyed and school principals didn’t log all deaths. More deaths have since been identified, bringing the recorded total to about 4,100.

A statement from the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, or NCTR, which holds material that was collected by the Commission, said the records the government plans to release could help identify children who went missing while attending residential schools. The NCTR hopes the documents include attendance records, transportation manifests, staff lists and invoices.

The government expects to provide the records to the NCTR in early 2022.

The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc indigenous community near Kamloops, British Columbia, last spring disclosed evidence of about 200 unmarked graves around a former government-funded and church-operated school for indigenous children. Since then, hundreds more unmarked graves at or near the sites of former residential schools have come to light.

The discoveries prompted some residential-school survivors and indigenous communities to redouble their efforts to gain access to certain historical records. Before the Kamloops discovery, religious orders and governments had stymied efforts to access them, indigenous advocates said.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said all who played a role in the residential-school system must do more to demonstrate transparency. In September, the group issued an apology to indigenous people for the role of Catholic entities in the system and committed to providing records that could help memorialize those buried in unmarked graves.

The Canadian government said on Wednesday that it previously disclosed more than four million documents to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is committed to taking steps to share more records while respecting survivors’ wishes, legislation, court orders and settlement agreements.

The Sisters of St. Ann, a Catholic group whose members taught at the Kamloops school, hadn’t consented to the records’ release to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission when its work was under way in 2014, according to the government. A spokeswoman for the organization said it now supports the government’s plan to release the records and is re-examining other records for further information about its role in residential schools.

Marc Miller, the Canadian minister in charge of indigenous relations, said last month that officials would be reviewing other records the government holds that relate to residential schools to see if more documents could be released.

Ry Moran, the former executive director of the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation and now associate librarian at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said the promise to disclose more documents could mark a pivotal moment in understanding Canada’s history with indigenous peoples.

Mr. Moran, who also worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said the commission realized near the end of its six-year inquiry into the residential-school system, which concluded in 2015, that not all necessary records were obtained and that some might have been withheld.

Separately, the NCTR said last month that the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Catholic organization that ran dozens of Canadian residential schools including the school in Kamloops, had offered to provide copies of any records about the schools that may currently be held in the Oblate archive in Italy. Some of the archival records could include letters sent by Oblate missionaries to leaders in France or Rome, the NCTR said...

 

The Escalating International War Against Israel

From Caroline Glick:

At the UN General Assembly last week, a large majority of member nations voted to lavishly fund a permanent inquisition against the Jewish state. The member states funded the operation of an “ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry,” against Israel.

The commission, run by outspoken haters of Israel with long records of demonizing the State of Israel and its people, was formed by the UN Human Rights Council in a special session in May. Its purpose is to deny and reject Israel’s right to exist, its right to self-defense, its right to enforce is laws, and its citizens rights to their properties and to their very lives.

The Human Rights Council’s decision to form its new permanent inquisition constitutes an unprecedented escalation of the political war the UN has been waging against Israel for the past fifty years. To grasp the danger, it is necessary to understand how Israel’s foes operate at the UN and how their partners in Europe and Israel itself operate.

We begin with the UN. In 2005, acting on pressure from the Bush administration, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan disbanded the UN Human Rights Commission. The Bush administration’s chief complaint was that the commission was endemically anti-Semitic.

The UN Human Rights Council was founded in 2006, and its members and UN staff wasted no time making clear that they intended for the new council to be even more anti-Semitic than its predecessor was.

Shortly after the Human Rights Council was established, it determined that demonizing Israel would be a permanent agenda item. Item Number 7 is the only permanent agenda item that deals with a specific country. And like the council’s nine other permanent agenda items, Item 7 is discussed at every formal council session. Item 7 enjoins the council to discuss, “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.”

Having a permanent agenda item dedicated to specifically demonizing Israel however, wasn’t enough to satisfy the Human Rights Council’s obsession with attacking the Jewish state. So since 2006, the council has convened nine special sessions to expand its focus on attacking the Jews. To get a sense of just how overwhelming the council’s focus on Israel is, in the same period, the council has convened just 19 special sessions to deal with every other country on the planet.

The council’s template for demonizing Israel has been fairly consistent through the years. Immediately after each Palestinian terror campaign against Israel comes to an end, the Holocaust denying, terror sponsoring PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has his UN representatives ask for a special session to discuss the “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity” Israel supposedly carried out against the Palestinians. No one ever mentions that ever single missile launched against Israel from the Hamas terror regime in Gaza constitutes a separate war crime. No one ever mentions Hamas at all.

In short order, the council accedes to the PLO’s request and convenes the special session. On cue the member nation’s representatives rise, accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, operating a killing machine, targeting children, and any other crime they can think of. Then a majority of the members vote to form a new “commission of inquiry,” led and staffed by “independent” investigators nearly all of whom believe that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews have too much power.

At the end of its “in-depth investigation,” the commission issues a report which determines that Israel conducted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This brings us to the second arm of the international political war against Israel – Europe. Every Human Rights Council resolution to form a commission of inquiry, includes a call to non-governmental organizations and other parties to submit “testimonies” and “reports” that will substantiate the council’s blood libel that Israel committed war crimes and is inherently and incurably evil. NGOs registered in Israel, the Palestinian Authority and in Western countries answer the council’s call. And the final reports issued by each of the inquisitions include hundreds of citations from “testimonies” and reports submitted by these NGOs as proof of Israel’s inherent venality.

These organizations are not independent actors. European governments fund them and direct their operations. If they operated in the U.S., nearly every NGO involved in the Human Rights Council’s witch hunts against Israel would have to register as foreign agents of European governments. As MK Amichai Chikli put it, “Europe is waging a war against Israel.”

Last week, Chikli and MK Keti Shitreet were scheduled to hold a conference at the Knesset on European funding of radical NGOs. But in a sign of the depth of Europe’s commitment to its war against Israel, and to its power in Israel, the EU embassy in Israel placed massive pressure on the Knesset secretariat and the Knesset Speaker to cancel the conference. In the end, the conference was cancelled at the last moment, citing Covid-19 restrictions, even as the Knesset’s parliamentary operations went on unimpeded.

The reports the Human Rights Council publishes at the end of each fake commission of inquiry against Israel form the basis for various boycott efforts against Israel that European bureaucrats carry out. For instance, on the basis of one such report, EU member states stopped recognizing Israeli veterinary certificates relating to agricultural exports from Jewish farmers in Samaria.

This brings us to the third arm of the international political war against Israel – Israel’s European-influenced, progressive legal establishment. Last weekend, Haaretz published an interview with former attorney general and recently retired Supreme Court justice Meni Mazuz. Between the lines, Mazuz explained the legal establishment’s methods for transforming anti-Israel UN documents into “law.”

A significant portion of the interview dealt with Mazuz’s campaign from the bench to block military demolitions of homes of terrorists.

As Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University’s Law Faculty explains, “The law explicitly stipulates that it is legal to demolish the homes of terrorists. And there are dozens of Supreme Court decisions that approve demolition orders, based on the law.”

Mazuz told Haaretz that for many years, including during his tenure as Attorney General, “I thought that house demolitions were an immoral step, in contravention of the law whose effectiveness was dubious.”

But when Mazuz served as attorney general, he lacked the authority to end the practice. As he explained, “I couldn’t tell the government that it is prohibited when dozens of Supreme Court decisions say that it is permitted.”

But the minute Mazuz was appointed to the Supreme Court, he began legislating his political views from the bench. To substantiate his position regarding the demolition of terrorists’ homes, Mazuz said that he relied on “the positions of legal scholars,” in Israel and abroad, and on the decisions of the UN Human Rights Council.

“The demolitions cause us international damage,” Mazuz said. “Do you think that these things stay here? That they don’t come up every year at human rights councils in Geneva and in international forums?”

In other words, Mazuz made clear that along with several of his colleagues on the bench, he used the anti-Israel reports generated by the obsessively anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, to justify his rulings which denied Israel the right to act in accordance with Israeli law in a manner that the duly elected government, and the duly constituted leadership of the IDF deemed necessary in their efforts to quell Palestinian terrorism.

As Bell explains, aside from a limited category of UN Security Council resolutions, UN actions and decisions are all devoid of significance in international law. Decisions by the UN Human Rights Council, like those of all other UN bodies are political documents without any legal weight.

Mazuz and his colleagues in the legal fraternity exploit the public’s ignorance and the impotence of the government and Knesset to transform these political documents into “law” through their judgments and legal opinions.

And this brings us to the Human Rights Council’s permanent inquisition whose operations a large majority of UN member nations voted to fund last week at the General Assembly. As Prof. Anne Bayefsky explained in a detailed report published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the commission of inquiry’s mandate is effectively limitless. The commission is empowered to rewrite the entire history of the Arab conflict with Israel and determine that Israel’s birth was an original sin which must be undone. The commission is empowered to carry out an “investigation” on the basis of “testimonies” which EU-funded anti-Israel groups will supply them describing entirely fraudulent “war crimes” that will form the basis of indictments of Israeli elected leaders, IDF commanders and line soldiers, and Israeli civilians who reside in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem. The UN’s political “courts” in turn will agree to try them for these made-up crimes.

Moreover, as Bayefsky noted, the commission is charged with making “recommendations on measures to be taken by third States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem…[to ensure] that they do not aid or assist in the Commission of internationally wrongful acts.”

A similar statement is made in the resolution’s preamble regarding “business enterprises.”

The message in both cases is self-explanatory. The reports the inquisition will publish will serve as the basis

for economic boycotts of Israel to be enacted by both government bureaucrats and businesses.

Israel has no choice but to fight this commission and any business, government or judge that uses its reality-free reports. Israel must ensure that the anti-Semitic propaganda the commission puts out does not turn into “law” through the actions of radical justices and government attorneys. And Israel must reconcile itself to the fact that the EU bureaucracy and much of Europe is waging a war against it, and launch a vigorous counter-assault...

 

Dave Eggers, The Every

 At Amazon,Dave Eggers, The Every: A Novel.

Drivers Stranded on I-95 Over 14 Hours (VIDEO)

In Virginia. 

At WTVR CBS 6 Richmond, Virginia:

And more at CNN, "Hundreds of drivers stranded on I-95 overnight after severe winter storm."

Paige for the Holidays

I'm late on this, but better late than never.

On Twitter.

College, University Lockdowns Can't be Justified by the Science

Dr. Marty Makary, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Universities' Covid Policies Defy Science and Reason":

Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.

Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.

At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door.

I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face. Another told me that the experience in quarantine “totally changed” her feelings about the school. “Everyone’s just fed up at this point,” she said. “People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And it was during finals.” She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.”

Given the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently changed the official quarantine period from 10 days to five, I reached out to Georgetown’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Ranit Mishori. She told me that Georgetown is still using a 10-day quarantine.

Students are the lowest risk population on planet Earth. Over the last six months, the risk of a person in the broader age group (15-24) dying of Covid or dying with Covid (the CDC does not clearly distinguish), was 0.001%. All or nearly all of those deaths were in a very specific subgroup: unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity. But despite Georgetown’s strict vaccination, masking, testing, and quarantine requirements, the university announced late last month that “all University events, including meetings with visitors, will need to be held virtually or outdoors,” among many other restrictions.

At Princeton University, fully vaccinated students are not allowed to leave the county unless they are on a sports team. They’re also testing all students twice a week, usurping the scarce testing supply from vulnerable communities so that low-risk, young people can use them.

At Cornell, masks are still the rule—and even recommended outdoors. “Masks must be worn indoors at all times, unless in a private, non-shared space (e.g., dorm room or office); we strongly recommend masking outdoors when physical distancing is not possible,” the school announced in mid-December.

At Amherst, students must double mask if they don’t use a KN95. In nearby Boston, at Emerson College, students are tested twice a week and have stay-in-room orders. The college instructs students to “only leave their residence halls or place of residence for testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment, or to get mail.” Seriously.

At these institutions of higher learning and thousands more, science is supposedly held in the highest esteem. So where is the scientific support for masking outdoors? Where is the scientific support for constantly testing fully vaccinated young people? Where is the support for the confinement of asymptomatic, young people who test positive for a virus to which they are already immune on a campus of other immune people? The data simply do not justify any of it...

 

Tuesday Cartoon

Via Legal Insurrection:

More at Theo's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

BONUS: At CNBC, "U.S. reports over 1 million new daily Covid cases as omicron surges."

World's Hottest Charger Fan

Seriously.

Huge fan.

Here, "World’s Hottest Chargers Fan Rocks Jersey While Getting Nude to Celebrate Justin Herbert Setting Franchise TD Record (PIC)."

More here and here.

Elizabeth Holmes Found Guilty

A big conviction. 

The Theranos founder was convicted on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

At NYT, "Elizabeth Holmes Found Guilty of Four Charges of Fraud":

The verdict stands out for its rarity. Few technology executives are charged with fraud and even fewer are convicted. If sentenced to prison, Ms. Holmes would be the most notable female executive to serve time since Martha Stewart did in 2004 after lying to investigators about a stock sale. And Theranos, which dissolved in 2018, is likely to stand as a warning to other Silicon Valley start-ups that stretch the truth to score funding and business deals.

The mixed verdict suggested that jurors believed the evidence presented by prosecutors that showed Ms. Holmes lied to investors about Theranos’s technology in the pursuit of money and fame. They were not swayed by her defense of blaming others for Theranos’s problems and accusing her co-conspirator, Ramesh Balwani, the company’s chief operating officer and her former boyfriend, of abusing her. They were also not swayed by the prosecutor’s case that she had defrauded patients.

On Monday, jurors told the court that they were deadlocked on three of the charges of defrauding investors. Judge Davila pushed them to continue deliberating, but they were unable to agree.

The verdict arrived in a frenzied period for the tech industry, with investors fighting to get into hot deals and often ignoring potential red flags about the companies they were putting money into. Some have warned that more Theranos-like disasters loom.

In recent years, tales of start-up chicanery, from the bungled initial public offering of WeWork to the aggressive boundary-pushing tactics of Uber, have not slowed the flow of money toward charismatic founders spinning tales of business success. Those downfalls captured the public’s attention, but did not result in criminal charges.

Yet the Justice Department under President Biden has renewed its focus on white-collar crimes. “We will urge prosecutors to be bold,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, recently said in a speech. “The fear of losing should not deter them.”

Ms. Holmes’s conviction sends a message to other founders and executives to be careful about their statements to investors and the public, said Jessica Roth, a law professor at Cardozo School of Law and former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

It “shines a light on the importance of drawing a distinction between truth and optimistic projections — and keeping that clear in one’s mind,” she said.

Ms. Holmes rose to prominence by mimicking the disruptive change-the-world chutzpah of Silicon Valley heroes like Steve Jobs — a playbook that has turned companies like Apple, Tesla, Google and Facebook into some of the most valuable in the world.

In the process, she captured the attention of heads of state, top business leaders and wealthy families with idealistic plans to revolutionize the health care industry. She traveled the world on private jets, was feted with awards and glowing magazine cover stories and lauded as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

But she crossed into fraud when she lied about the accuracy, types and number of tests Theranos’s machines could do to raise funding and secure business deals.

“That’s a crime on Main Street and it’s a crime in Silicon Valley,” Robert Leach, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in opening statements at the trial’s start...

Still more.

 

Roethlisberger Era Comes to Close in Pittsburgh (VIDEO)

Very emotional night at Heinz Field.

At the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "Steelers win Ben Roethlisberger's likely Heinz Field finale."

And video, "Ben Roethlisberger's Best Moments in Final Game at. Heinz Field."

For Pittsburgh 🖤💛 @_BigBen7 pic.twitter.com/aPq1GN3zEm

— NFL (@NFL) January 4, 2022

An emotional Ben Roethlisberger on his final game in Pittsburgh.

(via @ESPN) pic.twitter.com/lT898HjDeE

— NFL (@NFL) January 4, 2022

Wanting to Convince People to Support You is Not 'Popularism'

It's Freddie deBoer, "[I]t's just politics, it's just movement building, it's just power":

The “popularism” debate is, now, yesterday’s news, although I have a feeling it will crop back up around the 2022 midterms, particularly if the expected happens and the Democrats get walloped. Popularism is an awkward term that stresses the importance of, well, of politicians and political parties being popular with voters. (Crazy.) As Ezra Klein put it in a piece on these themes that centered on the pollster David Shor, “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” ...

Keep reading.

 

'The NYT editorial today makes it sounds like the burning of the Reichstag...'

From Tana Geneva, on Twitter.

She's talking about this absurd piece at the New York Times, "Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now."

SOURCE: "New polling on January 6 is a MAJOR BUZZKILL to Brian Stelter and many other journos."

Ben Shapiro’s Hilarious Takedown of COVID Lies the Left Walked Back in 2021

Yes, it's an excellent takedown.

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN WUHAN CHINA."

And here's Ben, "So once it became clear that covid was not in fact a pagan god visiting vengeance on the unwashed Trump voters alone, the media and Democrats are now willing to admit the following."

Still more, "KEVIN ROCHE: Get the Hell Out of Here 2021 and Oh, Shit, Here Comes 2022."

Facebook's Pushback

I just learned of this, but the "Facebook Files" are available for download, here.

It's actually a full-blown investigation and a massive amount of information, but nevertheless vital for understand what's going on in social media today, and especially Zuckerberg's very threat to civil order and the maintenance of society.

More, from last week, at WSJ, "Facebook’s Pushback: Stem the Leaks, Spin the Politics, Don’t Say Sorry":

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg drove response to disclosures about company’s influence; sending deputies to testify in Congress.

he day after former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen went public in October, the company’s team in Washington started working the phones.

To lawmakers and advocacy groups on the right, according to people familiar with the conversations, their message was that Ms. Haugen was trying to help Democrats. Within hours, several conservative news outlets published stories alleging Ms. Haugen was a Democratic activist.

Later, Facebook lobbyists warned Democratic staffers that Republicans were focused on the company’s decision to ban expressions of support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who killed two people during unrest in Kenosha, Wis., and who was later acquitted of homicide and other charges.

The company’s goal, according to Republicans and Democrats familiar with the company’s outreach, was to muddy the waters, divide lawmakers along partisan lines and forestall a cross-party alliance that was emerging to enact tougher rules on social-media companies in general and Facebook in particular.

Ms. Haugen’s revelations, and the thousands of internal documents she took with her when she quit Facebook earlier this year, showed the company’s influence on political discourse, teen mental health and other matters. The resulting backlash was emerging as the company’s biggest crisis in years. Pushing politics to the forefront was one part of Facebook’s response, in keeping with a sharp-elbowed approach driven by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company conducted reputational reviews of new products. To deter further leaks, internal access settings for research discussions on topics, including mental health and radicalization, were restricted to those directly involved in the work, according to employees and others familiar with the restrictions. Company researchers said they have been asked to submit work on sensitive topics for review by company lawyers, who have sometimes asked for examples of problems to be excised from internal posts.

Mr. Zuckerberg later changed the company’s name to Meta Platforms Inc., to emphasize what he called a new focus on building the metaverse, an immersive digital world he has described as the next phase of the internet. He has been conducting meetings in virtual reality, with digital avatars standing in for the executives, according to people familiar with the meetings. He has encouraged other employees to do the same.

The implication is that Facebook should look toward the future and not get bogged down in the messy past.

Former executives said Mr. Zuckerberg has told employees not to apologize. In contrast to previous controversies, in which the CEO publicly claimed ownership of the company’s mistakes and typically addressed them head-on, Mr. Zuckerberg has spoken little publicly about Ms. Haugen’s disclosures and sent deputies to testify before Congress.

“When our work is being mischaracterized, we’re not going to apologize,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. “We’re going to defend our record.”

Facebook has acknowledged changes to its research operations but pledged to continue the work to understand the impact of its platforms. The company has also said that it invests billions of dollars to protect the safety of its users.

Starting in September, The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles, called The Facebook Files, which identified harm caused by the social-media giant’s platforms, as identified by its own researchers, and its challenges in addressing them. Based in part on Ms. Haugen’s documents, the articles detailed such matters as how Facebook’s algorithm fosters discord and how its researchers concluded that its platforms, especially Instagram, could negatively affect teen mental health.

Ms. Haugen subsequently made the documents available to other media outlets, which published their own articles.

Since then, there have been four U.S. congressional hearings related to issues raised in the articles; a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general launched an investigation into Instagram’s effects on children; and more than a half-dozen prominent Meta executives and other senior employees have departed or announced their departures.

“The documents speak for themselves,” said Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, the leading Republican on the Senate antitrust subcommittee and a member of the consumer protection subcommittee. He said he is pursuing legislation that would promote more market competition in social media and add more protections for children online.

Facebook has responded to criticism by citing billions of dollars of investments it has made in online safety, as well as partnerships with outside entities and experts. During a Sept. 30 hearing, Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, pointed to the company’s work with its safety advisory board, created more than a decade ago, which includes internet-safety experts from around the world.

Facebook has previously said it conducted its own research to identify issues and devise ways to address them...

Still more.

PREVIOUSLY: "Frances Haugen's Testimony (VIDEO)."

Clara Lindblom

According to the results at Google, "Clara Felicia Lindblom is a Swedish social media star, fitness trainer, and fitness model."

From Stockholm, Sweden. She's got 1.9m followers on Instagram.

Nice.

BONUS: "EVENING HEAVEN."

Stephen Soukup, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital

At Amazon, Stephen Soukup, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business.

Happy New Year

From Pasadena's Rose Bowl opening ceremony minutes ago:

Iconic. pic.twitter.com/OzV8Mk3D1d

— Rose Bowl Game (@rosebowlgame) January 1, 2022

ADDED 1/2/2022: More here, "2022 B-2 Stealth Bomber Rose Bowl Flyover Pasadena California (VIDEO)." 

More, "WHITEMAN AIRMAN CONTINUES FAMILY’S LEGACY WITH FLYOVER AT ROSE BOWL," and "HOPALONG CASSIDY'S GRANDSON, CAPTAIN, KYLE CASSIDY, REMEMBERS HIS GRANDFATHER, DISCUSSES ROSE BOWL FLYOVER."

Rebecca Donner, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

At Amazon, Rebecca Donner, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler.

'So once it became clear that covid was not in fact a pagan god visiting vengeance on the unwashed Trump voters alone, the media and Democrats are now willing to admit the following...'

A Ben Shapiro thread on the never-ending pandemic, here.

PREVIOUSLY: "California Issues New Health Guidance Amid Omicron Surge (VIDEO)."

California Issues New Health Guidance Amid Omicron Surge (VIDEO)

Tomorrow is a new year. Can you believe we're still going through this shit?

At LAT, "With Omicron surging, California calls for stricter COVID isolation for infected people":

With California’s coronavirus surge worsening, the state has issued new recommendations for when people infected with the virus can end their isolation, guidance that is stricter than what was made earlier this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

California is now recommending that asymptomatic, coronavirus-infected people can exit isolation after the fifth day following a positive test, but only if they get a negative test result.

By contrast, the CDC’s recommendations don’t ask for a follow-up negative test; the CDC only recommends that those ending isolation continue wearing a mask around other people for five additional days.

Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the UC San Francisco Department of Medicine, praised California’s stricter guidelines. “Kudos,” Wachter wrote. “Safer than [CDC’s] version.”

Los Angeles County on Thursday reported more than 20,000 new cases, fueled in part by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

Overall, California’s reported average daily coronavirus caseload has more than quadrupled in the last two weeks — an astonishing rise that has pushed infection levels significantly higher than during the summer surge linked to the Delta variant.

“The risk for virus transmission has never been higher in our county,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Thursday.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health endorsed California’s new isolation recommendations and will codify them in its latest local mandatory health order.

The new California recommendations still largely mirror the CDC’s guidelines. Both shorten the minimum time recommended for isolation from 10 days to five for asymptomatic people.

Both the CDC and California also suggest the quarantine of people who are not up-to-date on their booster shots if they have been exposed to someone who tests positive for the coronavirus.

Officials recommend calling 911 if you have difficulty breathing, chest pain or pressure on the chest; bluish lips or face; are confused or hard to wake; or have other emergency symptoms.

The Omicron variant is believed to be two to four times as contagious as the previously dominant Delta. People who are eligible for booster shots but haven’t yet received them are at increased risk for infection.

“Data from South Africa and the United Kingdom demonstrate that vaccine effectiveness against infection for two doses of an mRNA vaccine is approximately 35%. A COVID-19 vaccine booster dose restores vaccine effectiveness against infection to 75%,” the CDC said in a statement.

Here’s a summary of California’s new guidelines to exit isolation...

Still more.

Additional video at KPIX News 5 San Francisco, "Crowds Swamp Bay Area COVID Test Sites," and "Mask Mandates Begin Anew Across Bay Area."

New "mask mandates." Right. *Eye-roll.*)

Electric Vehicle Batteries Exploding at General Motors' Orion Assembly Plant, Lake Orion, Michigan

You have to read the whole thing.

The Orion plant shifted to manufacturing 100 percent electricity vehicles, the Chevrolet Bolt, and with an epidemic of battery explosions, G.M. laid off the entire workforce.

Because the shift to green energy is going so swimmingly

At Pirate's Cove, "Oops: GM Electric Vehicle Batteries Keep Exploding":

The crisis involving the Chevrolet Bolt was a painful reminder for the auto industry that despite treating the electric vehicle era as essentially inevitable - a technical fait accompli - significant obstacles to manufacturing the cars, and especially their batteries, continue to threaten that future...

Yes, threatening the future, as I've been blogging recently.

Be smart. Don't buy an electric vehicle.  

Ready for the New Year

Nice boots on this lady.

A beautiful college lady here.

Plus, Christina Ricci. 

Mark Atwood Lawrence, The End of Ambition

At Amazon, Mark Atwood Lawrence, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era.

The Republican Party's Threat to Democracy?

It's always the G.O.P. that's a threat to democracy. 

After all of 2020, and the American left's months-long assault on the very institutions of Ameican democracy, law, and social order, the establishment press remains in the grip "Trumpian nationalism" and its "existential" threat to the nation.

After 2020, folks need to realize how the so-called "mainstream" mass media is destroying the very fabric of our republic. 

A change is coming, and by November we'll see the results. Though even as Republicans retake the levers of government at all levels, this so-called "threat" to democracy will never recede. The left's too much invested in that idea as the foundation of their political (and mass media) model. 

At the Economist, "How to think about the threat to American democracy: The Republican Party’s continued Trump infatuation is alarming. It should not lead to fatalism":

Americans are anxious about the stability of their democracy. Roughly 40% of the politically active say that members of the other tribe are evil; 60% believe they are a threat to the country. More than 80% think the system needs “major changes” or “complete reform”. Jeremiads from pundits about the decay of political life no longer seem to match the gravity of the threat. Some scholars have gone so far as to warn of the risk of civil war.

All this became dangerously real in the attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol a year ago, which injured 140 police officers, in an attempt to prevent the certification of their champion’s defeat. After a fleeting moment of clarity, the majority of Republican lawmakers reverted to making excuses for Donald Trump because his lies had rapidly taken hold. Today, fully 70% of Republican voters still believe that the last presidential election was stolen. In head-to-head polling the former president is one point behind President Joe Biden, well within the margin of error and, thanks to the electoral college, possibly ahead in a theoretical match-up.

Extreme partisanship and the Republican refusal to accept the results of the election are indeed a dangerous combination. Yet easily lost in the daily diet of outrage is a fundamental truth about two-party politics: Democrats and Republicans need each other for the system to function. Renewal therefore must flow through the Republican Party. That will be hard—but not as hard as the catastrophists say.

The threats to the system are real. The greatest is that in several key states the administration of voting has been dragged into the partisan arena. In Arizona some of the candidates running to replace the Republican incumbent, Doug Ducey, this year will argue that he ought to have somehow engineered a victory there for Mr Trump. In Georgia Republicans have weakened the office of secretary of state, after Brad Raffensperger refused to change the results of the elections in 2020 to suit Mr Trump. In Michigan and Pennsylvania Republican candidates who claim that the last presidential election was stolen are running for positions administering and certifying the next one...

Notice how they don't stress that all these Republicans now posing a threat to democracy, and who are "weakening" the bulwarks against populist nationalism (and therefore authoritarianism), were, are, or will be elected through the fully legitimate and established constitutional regime and procedures of the American republic.

If you're on Twitter a lot you'll find it cliche to suggest how "always for the leftist mass media, anything that's good for Republican is a 'threat to democracy'." (See Robert Stacy McCain and Melissa Mackenzie). 

Fight these people. If there's a danger to democracy today, it's on the left. 

Keep reading.

Danielle Allen, Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus

At Amazon, Danielle Allen, Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus.

Surging American Demand Ripples Through the Global Economy

The economy is expected to grow at an annualized rate of 7 percent for the fourth quarter, but big numbers won't help the White House. Voters are really souring on this administration, most likely from relentless inflationary pressures, felt everyday at the gas pumps especially. 

At WSJ, "Booming U.S. Economy Ripples World-Wide":

FRANKFURT—A booming U.S. economy is rippling around the world, leaving global supply chains struggling to keep up and pushing up prices.

The force of the American expansion is also inducing overseas companies to invest in the U.S., betting that the growth is still accelerating and will outpace other major economies.

U.S. consumers, flush with trillions of dollars of fiscal stimulus, are snapping up manufactured goods and scarce materials.

U.S. economic output is set to expand by more than 7% annualized in the final three months of the year, up from about 2% in the previous quarter, according to early output estimates published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That compares with expected annualized growth of about 2% in the eurozone and 4% in China for the fourth quarter, according to JPMorgan Chase.

Major U.S. ports are processing almost one-fifth more container volume this year than they did in 2019, even as volumes at major European ports like Hamburg and Rotterdam are roughly flat or lag behind 2019 levels. The busiest U.S. container ports are leaping ahead of their counterparts in Asia and Europe in global rankings as volumes surge, according to shipping data provider Alphaliner.

In Europe, “durable goods consumption is showing nothing like the boom that is ongoing in the United States,” said Fabio Panetta, who sits on the European Central Bank’s six-member executive board, in a speech last month. Consumption of durable goods has surged about 45% above 2018 levels in the U.S., but is up only about 2% in the eurozone, according to ECB data.

Factory gate prices in China are far outpacing consumer prices, signaling a gulf between weak domestic demand and strong overseas demand that is powered in particular by U.S. hunger for China’s manufactured goods.

While tangled global supply chains also play a role in driving global inflation, economists and central bankers are increasingly pointing to ultrastrong U.S. demand as a root cause.

“Are we crowding out consumers in other countries? Probably,” said Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist at Jefferies in New York. “The U.S. consumer has a lot more purchasing power as a result of fiscal policy than consumers elsewhere. Europe could be in a stagflationary scenario next year as a consequence.”

The U.S. accounts for almost nine-tenths of the roughly 22-percentage-point surge in demand for durable goods among major advanced economies since the end of 2019, according to data from the Bank of England.

“Very strong U.S. demand is certainly where [global supply bottlenecks] started,” said Lars Mikael Jensen, head of network at container ship giant A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S.

“It’s like a queue on a highway. The increase in volume in the U.S…takes ships away from other markets,” said Mr. Jensen. “Problems in one place will trigger problems somewhere else, we live in a global world.”

The U.S. economy will likely grow by around 6% in 2021 and 4% or more in 2022, the highest rates for decades, analysts say. Strong U.S. growth momentum is expected to push the unemployment rate to the lowest level in almost seven decades by 2023, according to Deutsche Bank analysts.

U.S. economic output is likely to surpass its pre-pandemic path early next year, while output in China and emerging markets will remain about 2% below that path through 2023, according to JPMorgan Chase.

U.S. wages are growing by about 4% a year, above the precrisis trend rate, compared with less than 1% growth in the eurozone, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements, a Switzerland-based bank for central banks.

“We threw a lot of support at [the economy] and what’s coming out now is really strong growth, really strong demand, high incomes and all that kind of thing,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell after the central bank’s recent meeting. “People will judge in 25 years whether we overdid it or not.”

The Fed said it would more quickly scale back its Covid-19 bond purchases and set the stage for a series of interest-rate increases beginning next spring.

In Europe, the ECB pledged to continue buying bonds at least through October 2022, and said it was unlikely to raise interest rates next year. Underlying U.S. inflation, annualized over two years, has risen above 3%, roughly double the level in the eurozone, according to data that adjust for the impact of the pandemic and changes in volatile food and energy prices.

“The strong post-pandemic recovery that was originally expected for 2022 still hasn’t materialized,” said Timo Wollmershäuser, head of forecasts at Germany’s Ifo think tank. The institute recently lowered its growth forecast for Germany in 2022 by 1.4 percentage points, to 3.7%, citing ongoing supply bottlenecks and a new wave of Covid-19.

The Fed’s assertiveness is pushing up the value of the U.S. dollar and putting pressure on emerging-market central banks to increase interest rates even before their own economic recoveries are assured or risk depreciating currencies and runaway inflation.

Mexico’s central bank on Dec. 16 said it would increase its benchmark interest rate by 0.5 percentage point to 5.50% after inflation rose to a 20-year high of 7.4%.

In Europe, the ECB pledged to continue buying bonds at least through October 2022, and said it was unlikely to raise interest rates next year. Underlying U.S. inflation, annualized over two years, has risen above 3%, roughly double the level in the eurozone, according to data that adjust for the impact of the pandemic and changes in volatile food and energy prices.

“The strong post-pandemic recovery that was originally expected for 2022 still hasn’t materialized,” said Timo Wollmershäuser, head of forecasts at Germany’s Ifo think tank. The institute recently lowered its growth forecast for Germany in 2022 by 1.4 percentage points, to 3.7%, citing ongoing supply bottlenecks and a new wave of Covid-19.

The Fed’s assertiveness is pushing up the value of the U.S. dollar and putting pressure on emerging-market central banks to increase interest rates even before their own economic recoveries are assured or risk depreciating currencies and runaway inflation.

Mexico’s central bank on Dec. 16 said it would increase its benchmark interest rate by 0.5 percentage point to 5.50% after inflation rose to a 20-year high of 7.4%.

Russia’s central bank said Friday it would increase its key interest rate by 1 percentage point to 8.5%, and might raise rates again soon, after inflation hit a near six-year high of 8.4%.

Businesses are pouring money into the U.S., looking to take advantage of what some expect to be a sustainable increase in demand. In some cases, they are bringing production closer to American consumers, looking to avoid supply shocks related to the pandemic and global trade wars...

Still more.

 

'Dark Winter' at the White House: Just 41 Percent Approve the Way Joe Biden's Handling Job as President (VIDEO)

What a surprise. I mean, with all the Franklin Roosevelt-style leadership Biden's been providing, who would've guessed?

Look, Americans should be worried about this president's dark matter at least as much as his prophesied dark winter. (*Eye-roll.*)

At PBS, "Biden’s approval dips to new low as independents sour on his leadership":

As President Joe Biden heads into the end of the year, he’s facing a sour reality: The number of Americans who approve of his performance has hit a new low. Just 41 percent of Americans approve of the job he has been doing as president, according to a new PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll. Support among independents alone dropped eight points in a week.

Overall, more than half – 55 percent – of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance, including 44 percent who strongly disapprove. His disapproval ratings have jumped 20 points since he took office, reaching a record high this month. The number who strongly disapprove jumped 6 points since a Marist poll conducted just one week earlier...

Ouch! (*Cringe emoji here.*)

Anne Rice, Interview With a Vampire

At Amazon, Anne Rice, Interview With a Vampire.