W³P Lives: 10/25/21

Monday, October 25, 2021

Empire Lost

America is at its weakest point in at least a century, and China, as well as the rest of the world, notices.

by Max Morton for American Greatness

America is at its weakest point in at least a century, and China, as well as the rest of the world, notices.

According to Russia’s Interfax news agency, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently announced, “Just like the overwhelming majority of other countries, Russia views Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China. This is the premise we proceed from and will continue to proceed from in our policy.” At the time of this statement, Russian forces were conducting joint naval exercises with Chinese forces in the Pacific—culminating in a 10-ship joint formation sailing through Japan’s Tsugaru Strait on October 18.

This, following a series of unprecedented Chinese military aircraft incursions into Taiwan’s airspace, has rattled Taiwan and America’s other allies in the region, namely Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia. During the first week of October, over 150 aircraft, including advanced SU-30 fighters and H-6 heavy bombers, flew into Taiwanese airspace. An unprecedented 56 tactical aircraft penetrated Taiwan’s airspace in a single 24-hour period on October 4, the highest single day total to date.

China has already taken control of multiple islands claimed by these allies in an effort to access vast oil and natural gas resources, as well as project its military power in the contested territorial waters of the South China Sea. China’s ongoing trade dispute with Australia has also ratcheted up tensions in the region.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment has rushed to assure Taiwan and its other allies that the United States intends to honor its regional security agreements. Of late, Joe Biden has publicly pledged to defend the Japanese Senkaku islands, which China claims as its territory.

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 7 that several small U.S. Special Forces and Marine Corps detachments have been quietly training Taiwanese special military units to bolster the island nation’s defensive capabilities . . . a move which has all the appearances of an intentional U.S. tripwire in Taiwan.

Recent Pentagon estimates have warned that China could retake control of Taiwan by force as early as 2027, but current events suggest a much shorter timeline. Much of America’s foreign policy establishment is convinced that China wouldn’t put at risk the 2022 Beijing Olympics scheduled for February, and that it fears the international sanctions and pariah status that would likely result if China invaded Taiwan.

The problem with this analysis is that it is based on a Western worldview, which is to say one that does not account for actual Chinese interests. There is no guarantee that China is using the same equation or making the same calculations that western diplomats and intelligence agencies are making vis à vis Taiwan, or for that matter, the geopolitical status quo in the Pacific.

Imbalances in Power and Reality

Among nations, the most dangerous situations occur when there is a perceived imbalance of power among global or regional competitors. In the case of the Pacific region, that imbalance is beginning to come into focus. China recently shocked western intelligence agencies by reportedly testing a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide weapon that made a complete circle around the planet before descending onto its target. Hypersonic weapons travel between five and 20 times the speed of sound and are difficult to defend against. They are considered a game-changing strategic capability. The United States has yet to field a functional hypersonic weapons platform.

China is a growing regional power with superpower ambitions. It has enormous financial, industrial, and military capability. Though it has experienced certain growing pains in energy production, infrastructure quality control, and corruption—see the latest Evergrande financial catastrophe—these are minor blemishes on a powerful and dangerous communist regime with global aspirations. To date, the Biden Administration thinks we are holding China in check. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.

Thanks to past U.S. economic and domestic policies, we allowed our manufacturing base to be exported to China. While offshoring American jobs to cheaper labor in China was good for U.S. multinational corporations, it resulted in China effectively capturing the bulk of American industrial capacity for consumer goods. This gives China immense leverage within the U.S. economy.

Look now at the supply disruptions spreading across the United States, which result in no small part from our inability to offload Chinese consumer goods at West Coast ports. Consider how U.S. sanctions against China might create an even greater disruption in the supply of goods that the U.S. no longer has the ability to produce. This dynamic gives China considerable sway with a U.S. political donor class that derives its wealth from Chinese industrial capacity. It makes the idea that the Biden Administration would have the will to impose crippling U.S. sanctions as a check against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan unrealistic.

In contrast to China’s relative position of strength, the world has watched as America lost two wars in our failed Global War on Terror. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan was exceptionally humiliating, not just to America, but also to our allies. It was so bad, the UK parliament held Biden in contempt for his mishandling of the withdrawal. Americans swallowed hard when it was revealed that the U.S. general in charge of the evacuation asked the British SAS commander to stop conducting rescue missions to retrieve UK citizens because it was embarrassing the airport-bound U.S. military. We went on to leave thousands of U.S. citizens behind in Afghanistan with only a shrug of Joe Biden’s shoulders.

Today, the United States is a deeply divided nation on the brink of open internal conflict. The Biden Administration is gleefully running down a list of ill-conceived policies that historically have resulted in civil unrest and rebellion. Oblivious to its own incompetence or the concerns of working-class America, it has labeled half the population domestic extremists, including parents angry that their children are being indoctrinated into woke-Marxist ideology. Just this past week, Biden’s national approval rating hit 38 percent and is dropping rapidly. It’s no secret that he appears to be suffering from cognitive decline and who, exactly, is running the country has yet to be revealed. America is at its weakest point in at least a century, and China, as well as the rest of the world, notices.

It’s All in the Strategy

With regard to a China-Taiwan conflict, the danger to America does not necessarily come from what happens to Taiwan. The danger comes from how radically the geopolitical status quo in the Pacific might change should China retake Taiwan by force in the face of U.S. opposition—or lack of opposition.

If the United States opposes China and fails to stop its move against Taiwan, then we will have shown ourselves incapable of fulfilling our security agreements in the Pacific. If the United States demurs and abandons Taiwan to the Chinese, then we will have shown that our security agreements are not worth the paper on which they are printed. Either way, this likely results in the restructuring of alliances in the Pacific away from an impotent or feckless United States to accommodate the new global hegemon—China. The second and third order effects of our losses in the Pacific would reverberate across Europe, particularly in areas threatened by an expansionist Russia . . . which has opportunistically positioned itself for just such a situation.

There are two paths China can take with the United States. The first is to allow the United States slowly to dissolve under its own weight and internal divisions—betting that this slide into irrelevance will be unrecoverable and permanent. The second path is to strike now at Taiwan, while the United States lacks coherent leadership and while its military is in disarray, thus taking advantage of what may not be a permanent U.S. state of weakness, and forcing a change in the status quo that cannot be recovered at a later date by a unified America under competent leadership with a strong, formidable military.

The calculation that China is making right now is based on its assessment of how weak the United States is at the moment. Diplomatic condemnation, impotent threats of U.S. sanctions, and saber rattling by the United States and its allies is a tiny variable . . . if it is one at all. For China, forced repatriation of Taiwan is an ultimate prize which plays to their domestic audience, demonstrates their hyperpower status, and simultaneously sets the long-term conditions for that status by making its sole competitor irrelevant on the world stage.

In military parlance, the term surprise has two subsets: tactical and strategic. Tactical surprise is a show of force raid on a terrorist compound, an ambush, or an operation like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Conversely, strategic surprise is the slow-motion employment of the elements of national power in a manner and at a time which preclude one’s enemy from being able to counter one’s overall objective. Defeating an enemy which has achieved strategic surprise is the equivalent of completing a 60-yard Hail Mary pass with three seconds left on the clock. It takes vision, courage, and some element of error on your enemy’s part.

The United States is facing the fast approaching predicament of our adversary achieving strategic surprise in the Pacific. We are reaching the point where, should China attempt to take Taiwan by force, the outcome will not be in our favor, no matter what we do. We are on the horns of a dilemma from which the only salvation was to have taken actions years ago, when we were not clever enough to be paying attention. Thus, we will need to complete that Hail Mary pass. Now our options are limited—fight and maneuver in whatever manner is required to win, or submit and suffer all that comes with being a has-been power under the heel of a Chinese superpower.

X22, And we Know, and more-Oct 25

Lowdown of today: After last night, I'm convinced that the dummies that run NCIS LA are determined to ruin the show's legacy by trying to completely push Hetty aside and act like there's nothing wrong with it, and I'm extremely upset by it.

Enough about me, here's tonight's news:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/massive-protest-biden-mandates-thousands-filmed-crossing-brooklyn-bridge-shocking-elites/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/little-boy-tom-brady-helped-beat-brain-cancer-sign-cries-tom-brady-gives-signed-cap/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/actress-suffers-stroke-caused-blood-clot-side-effect-taking-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/watch-black-lives-matter-anti-mandate-protesters-join-rally-kyrie-irving/

Strategic Materials and the New Cold War

Confronting China’s industrial ambitions will require a coherent plan placing the reinvigoration of U.S. mining and material supply chains at the top of the agenda.

by Mackubin Owens for American Greatness

It has been clear for some time that China and the United States are pitted against each other in a new cold war. While the current conflict is similar in many respects to the one between the United States and the Soviet Union that ended in the 1990s, one major difference is its less ideological character. The U.S.-Soviet Cold War explicitly pitted communism against liberal capitalism. Although ostensibly communist, China today is communist in the same way that the mafia is Catholic. Instead, China combines its traditional Confucianism with predatory capitalism, which in many respects makes it much more dangerous to the United States than the Soviet Union was.

Of course, there is an important military component of this competition. China has invested in naval, missile, and other military capabilities. It has attempted to establish sovereignty over the South China Sea and has continued to threaten the independence of Taiwan.

But economic and technological factors have been more important in this competition. Economically, China’s “belt and road initiative” has proven to be a debt trap for those countries that have been ensnared in it. Technologically, China is poised, as David Goldman has noted, to exploit the “fourth industrial revolution,” based on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and the exploitation of 5G networks.

But there is another, more mundane, factor at work: the old fashioned competition for resources, especially critical/strategic minerals/metals that are necessary for many of the advanced technologies that will shape the future, including clean energy and especially high-end U.S. defense platforms.

These critical minerals/metals include: copper, an irreplaceable element for advanced energy technology, including electric vehicles (EVs), wind turbines, and solar panels; lithium, which is essential for producing the lithium-ion batteries used in EVs; cobalt, which is integral to the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries and other advanced technologies; nickel, which is used to produce super alloys, strong materials, such as stainless steel, and battery manufacturing; and rare earth elements, which have diverse applications in electrical and electronic components, lasers, glass, magnetic materials, and industrial processes,

For both domestic and international reasons, the United States finds itself at a disadvantage in this area of geopolitical competition. As the Wilson Center argued in a recent report, The Mosaic Approach: a Multidimensional Strategy for Strengthening America’s Critical Minerals Supply Chain:

The United States faces a troubling scenario when it comes to the supply chain for critical minerals. Rapidly increasing demand, under-developed national resources, intense international competition, and years of neglect in this issue area place the U.S. at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis China in securing access to the metals and Rare Earth Elements that are vital for the energy transition and for geopolitical ambitions.

While China has been pursuing a strategic vision for critical minerals by pouring billions of dollars into production assets, the United States has failed to invest in resource-rich developing countries, placing itself at a disadvantage and allowing further opportunities for China and other competitors to exert their dominance.

The Wilson Center working group identified three main U.S. vulnerabilities in the critical materials supply chain. First, despite an ever-rising demand for critical minerals, the United States has continued to underinvest in mining, processing, infrastructure, and human capital. Second, in order to compete on a global basis against China and the European Union for access to critical minerals, the United States must address the geographic concentration of both extractive and processing activities, most critically, China’s dominant position in the supply chain, which stems not only from its ownership and control of critical minerals mines, but also processing facilities.

Third, legislative and regulatory restrictions on U.S. mining firms that place them at a competitive disadvantage vis à vis Chinese competitors, which provide a strong disincentive for developing resources within the United States. Unlike Chinese firms, those from the United States and other western countries must rightly adhere to stringent compliance measures in the areas of environment, society and transparency/anti-corruption regulations, regardless of whether they are operating domestically or internationally.

The confluence of China’s strategic vision for the growing importance of mining and mineral production and U.S. antipathy to resource development has created a perfect storm. Despite vast domestic mineral reserves, U.S. reliance on the importation of critical minerals has more than doubled in little more than two decades with China now the dominant supplier of many of the minerals deemed critical to U.S. interests.

Confronting China’s industrial ambitions will require a coherent plan that places the reinvigoration of U.S. mining and material supply chains at the top of the agenda in order to make the United States more resilient. The Wilson Center report offers a number of concrete steps: first the government should explicitly stress the link between critical minerals on the one hand and geopolitical goals on the other. It should also prioritize the development of critical materials production and processing facilities in the United States, streamline the permitting process for new mines; and stockpile critical minerals.

Meanwhile the private sector should act to lower for investors the risk profile of mining in order to facilitate investment in the industry, seek long-term, fixed price contracts to guarantee supply, invest in new technologies to lower costs, and invest in human capital.

These steps will require a rethinking of a major premise of U.S. economic policy: the commitment to “market fundamentalism,” the belief that adherence to free markets is always the best policy. Of course, when all parties play by the rules, there is little question that free trade is more efficient than the alternatives. But China has failed to do so, remaining committed to authoritarianism and to exploitation of the system in order to improve its position at the expense of liberal states, most notably the United States, thereby upending global markets by employing massive government support for Chinese firms and adhering to atrocious environmental and labor standards.

The problem with making a fetish of free trade is the market’s failure to account for changing geopolitical circumstances. Support for strategic materials is an overdue recognition of the fact that the ability of the market to address strategic vulnerabilities is limited.

Ground Zero of Woke - VDH

Universities are making themselves not just disliked and disreputable but ultimately irrelevant and replaceable.

By Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.

For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.

Never in U.S. history have elite universities piled up such huge endowments, which soared during the lockdown. Harvard has $40 billion, Yale $30 billion, Stanford $28 billion, Princeton $25 billion and so on. The tax-free income from these huge sums ensures equally extravagant budgets that are somewhat insulated from market realities—at least in the sense that the larger endowments grew, the more likely university costs rose beyond the annual rate of inflation, and the greater aggregate student debt rose.

Just as importantly, spending per pupil is rarely calibrated to whether graduating students leave better educated than when they arrived—the ostensible purpose of universities.

There are certainly no “exit tests” for certification of the BA degree, in the manner of, say, a bar exam, that might set a minimum national standard for any acquisition of knowledge. Such standardized reassurance would rescue the BA degree from the growing general public perception that the campus has become politically warped, therapeutic, a poor measure of real knowledge, and is now largely a cattle brand of a sort that qualifies its holder for some sort of non-physical labor.

The result over the last few years of this relatively new higher-education marriage of big money and radical ideas is a strange disconnect. On the one hand, never have elite (though often indebted) college students been so demanding of apartment-style dorm living, latte bars, and rock-climbing walls, while virtue signaling their compensatory proletariat bona fides.

Never have universities been more able financially to subsidize and guarantee their own student loans. And yet they have outsourced that responsibility to federal guaranteed student loan programs. The result of that moral hazard of never being held accountable for rampant inflationary spikes in tuition, room, and board costs, is that universities over the last 30 years spent like drunken sailors on non-essentials: from diversity czars to in loco parentis therapeutic “centers” to Club Med accommodations—even as at the core test scores dived, grade inflation soared, and graduates increasingly did not impress employers.

So, universities themselves are largely responsible for the current $1.7 trillion in aggregate student college debt. Such a staggering encumbrance is not just the concern of higher education, but affects the entire country in manifest ways, well aside from emboldening our global rivals and enemies. Even communist China is spending far more of their higher education budgets on the sciences, math, and liberal arts than therapeutics, social justice crusades, and diversity, equity, and inclusion audits.

Students with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan obligations are likely to marry later, delay child rearing, cannot purchase a home in their 20s or even 30s, and more easily slide into prolonged adolescence. The country itself is experiencing a glut of the over- but not necessarily well-educated: history’s menu for radicalized and angry youth who feel they are properly credentialed with various letters after their names but suspect they lack the training and skills to enter the workforce, be productive, and earn commensurate good pay.

There is also something terribly wrong about well-compensated, tenured professors of the social sciences and humanities—whose own lives are conventionally materialist and bourgeoise—spooning out the usual radical race/class boilerplate to indebted students who in a sense have borrowed heavily to pay a large percentage of faculty salaries.

Few of today’s woke 20-somethings will graduate with rigorous instruction in language, logic, and the inductive methods with a shared knowledge of literature, history, science, and math. At far less cost, they would likely find better online classes in those now ossified subjects than in the courses that they went into hock in order to finance.

Never in U.S. history has the university been so at odds with not just the general pulse of America, but with its major traditions, institutions, and very Constitution. Most recently, Americans have been urged by university law schools and political science departments to eliminate the 233-year-old Electoral College, to pack the Supreme Court after 150 years of a nine-justice bench, to end the 180-year filibuster, to admit two new states to gain four progressive senators, and to question the constitutional cornerstone of two senators per state.

It is chiefly the university that scolds Americans that their customs, traditions, and laws have little moral weight, that they are merely constructs reflecting “white supremacy,” detached from either a natural law common to all humans or customs carefully cross-examined and honed after decades and even centuries of use in the public square.

Once abstract campus theorizing about open borders, hiring and admissions based on race, zero bail even for repeat felons, critical-legal-theory district attorneys, and Green New Deal energy policies have now all seeped out to warp the daily lives of Americans.

Yet unlike free speech movements of the 1960s, in 2021 it is the university that now wars on the First Amendment, castigating unwelcome expression as “hate speech” if found inconvenient for its agendas.

It is the university where the relevant amendments to the Constitution governing due process and confronting one’s accusers is jettisoned when the accused is of the wrong gender or race or both. It is the university that has renounced the legacy of the civil rights movement of the 1960s that once championed open housing, desegregation, and racially blind criteria.

Instead, many colleges now allow students (at least those self-identified as “marginalized”) to pick their dormitory roommates on the basis of race, to declared certain areas of campus racially segregated “safe spaces,” and to discriminate in student admissions and faculty hiring. If Martin Luther King, Jr. were to return to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford and to repeat verbatim the speech I heard (at age 11) that he gave in 1965 at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, about equality, shared humanity, and the need to excel at whatever task one takes on, regardless of his station (“Be the best of whatever you are”), he would likely be jeered and derided as an integrationist and assimilationist.

One final irony? From the university we hear calls to either end or reform radically our major institutions and cultural referents: recalibrate the First and Second Amendments, scrap the border, tear down that statue, rename this plaza, do away with existing classes of gender pronouns, heckle speakers, and destroy the lives of unwoke faculty. And yet from such critical faculty scolds, there is oddly zero self-criticism or indeed any self-reflection of their own shortcomings.

Do academics ponder over why the reputations of their universities are eroding in the public mind? What exactly is the campus responsibility for graduating students with bleak job possibilities and unsustainable debt? Why is the clueless 21-year-old graduate now the stock joke of popular culture and comedy? How did the enlightened institutionalize a two-tier system of privileged tenured grandees resting on the backs of exploited contingent and part-time faculty? Why are critics of a supposedly non-transparent American society so secretive about their own admissions, hiring, and budgetary policies? And how did the locus of cheap anti-corporate boilerplate become so deeply reliant on siphoning corporate cash?

The racialized civil strife of 2020-21, and indeed the entire woke and cancel-culture revolutions originated ultimately from campus fixtures who never suffer the real-life consequences of their abstractions. And meanwhile, China, the greatest threat that the United States has faced in 30 years, smiles at our universities’ importation of most of the bankrupt and suicidal ideas abroad, from Frankfurt School nihilism and Foucauldian postmodern relativism to Soviet sclerosis and Maoist cultural revolutionary suicide.

Unless the university itself is rebooted, its rejection of meritocracy, its partisan venom, its tribalism, its war with free speech and due process, and its inability to provide indebted students with competitive educations will all ensure that that it is not just disliked and disreputable but ultimately irrelevant and replaceable.

And There It Is: WaPo Op-ed Admits We Will 'Never' Be 'Fully Vaccinated'

“‘Fully vaccinated’ is a term for communities or nations, not for individuals.” What the hell is that?

That is a declaration from James Hamblin, a journalist, and physician specializing in public health and preventive medicine, and a lecturer at Yale University, writing in an op-ed for The Washington Post, titled You’re not ‘fully vaccinated.’ You never will be. Any questions?

Oh, I have a hell of a lot of questions for the good doctor — but we’ll get to those later.

“Fully vaccinated.” What does it even mean?

Even the CDC recently admitted that the term is a moving target, at best. “Fully vaccinated” is not dissimilar to “climate change,” in the respect that climate alarmists — the “existential threat of our times” loons — can and do declare anything and everything is caused by climate change, as they see fit.

Hamblin began the op-ed by revisiting the death of retired Gen. Colin Powell, whose family announced his death in a brief Facebook post last Monday, saying the cause was “complications from Covid-19,” despite Powell being “fully vaccinated.” Hamblin noted that Powell had been undergoing treatment for multiple myeloma, a type of cancer that causes a breakdown of the immune system, making it capable of only producing one type of antibody.

Translation: “Fully vaccinated,” or not, Powell was most likely doomed from the start.

Hamblin said that when he read the Powell family’s statement and watched news reports of the retired general’s death, the term “fully vaccinated” stood out.

That specific phrase — “fully vaccinated” — stood out to me especially, as it featured prominently in most news coverage. It implied that Powell should have been completely protected; that he shouldn’t have been able to die from covid-19.
The use of “fully vaccinated” is not unique to Powell, either, though the coverage of his death has highlighted that the term is inappropriate in many cases, primarily because there is no consensus on what it means.
As we’ve seen throughout this pandemic, [the] precision of language and transparency in delineating the known and the unknown are key to any effective public health response.
A sense of false confidence — or of exaggerated risk — can permanently damage the credibility that is so critical to the success of the coronavirus vaccination campaign and of future ones.

Of particular concern to Hamblin and those of us who care about such things is the COVID “booster” shot; defined by Merriam-Webster as “a supplementary dose of an immunizing agent administered as an injection” and how many booster shots await us down the long and winding COVID road. (Emphasis, mine.)

At the moment, the central debate among immunologists and infectious-disease experts — in the United States, at least — pertains to booster doses. It has become clear that some people will benefit from additional shots (third doses of the mRNA vaccines and second doses of Johnson & Johnson) and equally clear that others may not.
The challenge is in determining where to draw that line. Most of us fall into a gray area between the 21-year-old Olympic decathlete in no need of more doses and the 90-year-old with emphysema who sings in an unvaccinated choir and would quite benefit from boosting.

And “fully vaccinated”?

Until 2021, “fully vaccinated” was not a standard phrase, any more than “fully married” or “fully graduated from college.” Typically a person is considered “vaccinated” or “unvaccinated.”
Technical distinctions might be used clinically to describe gray areas — a young child or a puppy, say, between doses of measles or rabies vaccines, may be considered “partially vaccinated” for purposes of logistical communications between doctors.
But such a designation would not imply that the child or puppy is protected.

Hamblin explained that earlier this year, as COVID vaccines began to become available to the public, the term “booster shot” was useful (principally to coax people into getting additional shots, of course). Now, ten months later, said Hamblin, “abundant new evidence has actually made it less clear whether our vaccine regimens should consist of one, two, or three doses.”

Needless to say, the “mainstream” media have pretty much adopted the “If one is good, two or more is better!” approach while shilling for the vaccination, including in some cases for children as young as five.

Hamblin then pointed to the “moving target” reference I made earlier in this article about the CDC.

Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people are fully vaccinated “2 weeks after their second dose” of Pfizer or Moderna, or “2 weeks after a single-dose vaccine” such as Johnson & Johnson.
This definition is already obsolete; as of last month, the agency also recommends third doses of the Pfizer shot for high-risk groups after six months. Soon the recommendation is expected to extend to everyone over 40.

“There is legitimate disagreement among experts, and important debate as to the prudence of such a move,” wrote Hamblin, “all part of the attempt to define “fully vaccinated.”

Hamblin used an example of a hypothetical 84-year-old with blood cancer.

If “fully vaccinated” is useful as a concept, it’s more at the level of the population than the individual. There is probably no amount of vaccine that can guarantee an 84-year-old with blood cancer is absolutely protected from covid-19 — or from anything else.

“It’s more at the level of the population than the individual.” Hamblin took the concept even further.

To be fully vaccinated might more accurately be the goal of a school or business or town or nation. And ideally, of the world. The more we lose sight of this, focusing instead on boosters and some ethereal notion of a “fully optimized individual,” the more we stand to lose, and the longer the pandemic will linger, with doses hoarded and layered on high-risk people […]. —

And a shot at “the unvaccinated,” of course: “While the unvaccinated blame the continued spread of the virus on the vaccines, rather than on themselves.”

What Hamblin fails to admit is, like the CDC, he is also moving the goalposts — attempting to precondition us for a never-ending series of booster shots if deemed “necessary” by the CDC. Moreover, that the term “fully vaccinated” never really meant anything in the first place.

Incidentally, as we reported yesterday, CNN actually said in a headline:

“People vaccinated against Covid-19 less likely to die from any cause, study finds.”

No, really — check out the hilarious article. Pure CNN.

Meanwhile, the lies continue. You in?

H/T ~ Twitchy

The Alec Baldwin Conundrum

written by Kurt Schlicter for Townhall

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own

and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall

Alec Baldwin got to play his dream role last week, and unfortunately for an innocent woman, it was a method-acting version of Ted Kennedy. Now, you note that I am mocking a guy whose probable gross negligence killed a lady and maimed a man, and this raises an important question – do we really want to live in a world where our reaction to a tragedy caused by an enemy is not sorrow and compassion but mockery?

It doesn’t matter what we want. We do live in such a world, in large part due to the likes of Alec Baldwin. Besides his scuzzy abuse of the people – notably women – in his orbit, he is a particularly loathsome social media presence, and as a result, conservatives are gleefully resurrecting his old tweets about guns and his wish for them to be used on his many, many enemies in the wake of his horrible act. There are many, many such tweets. I am not a believer in karma and do not fear it, but I do try to keep a respectful distance from irony.

Note that arguments that this somehow hurts the families of the victims are weak – “My beloved relative has died – I shall seek solace on Twitter” seems far-fetched. Moreover, the families might be mortified to see people taking apart the architect of their pain? Doubtful. If anything, the practical effect of slamming Six Gun Alec is making people think, “Gosh, better not play with firearms lest people on Twitter roast me.”

But there is a legit question of how we should respond to this. There have been two different reactions among those on our general side of the fight to the reactions to Alec Baldwin’s fall from, well, not exactly grace. One is to recoil with horror at the accident and assert that this is a time when we should offer our thoughts and prayers for the victims and for Baldwin, who one would hope is devastated by what he has done. Nice people tend to have this reaction, those who want to live in a more genteel world than we do. I sympathize, in that I would like to live in such a world. I would also like a unicorn pony.

Then there was the opposite reaction, in which our folks ran up the score, skewering the gun control zealot’s failure to zealously control his gun. This is playing by the new rules of gladiatorial combat in the cultural coliseum. Those burned out on the lies and calumny we are bombarded with daily tend to go this way; they are angry, and they are more than willing to give Alec a good, hard dose of his own medicine. That’s certainly my inclination. A tweet for a tweet, so to speak.

So, I sympathize with both options, and I cannot get upset at people for choosing one over the other. If you want to go gentle, cool, and if you want to go hard, okay. After all, the rules are the rules, and there can only be one set of them. In the world I would want to live in, we would all be at Option A, whispering a silent prayer for the hurting – and I did. But this is not the world we live in, and none of us are under any moral obligation to pretend we do. This is a world where the rule is that you take an opening in the enemy’s line and you drive a couple divisions hard right through it.

Alec Baldwin is a bad person, but more than that, he is a bad person who hates us with a mortality rate thanks to his hypocrisy. And now he is vulnerable, and the rules say he is fair game – his rules. Is it significant that this amoral, leftist, Trumpophobic gun grabber has personally executed more mass shootings than any Christian conservative Trump-loving NRA member? Not in any kind of intellectual sense – it’s just a thing that happened – but it makes a helluva meme.

The argument for being nice is that 1) we should live the way we wish to live, that is, model the way we want the world regardless of how the world actually is and set the example; 2) we are better than that; and 3) Jesus tells us to. Of these, No. 3 is the most compelling – the hardest part of Christianity is loving your enemies. Perhaps you can do that even as you tweet that the fifth rule of gun safety is never give Alec Baldwin a gun. Jesus wasn’t a pinko hippie; he confronted and told hard truths. And despite the injunction to turn the other cheek, Christians are not pacifists. After all, many soldiers are Christian and they kill their enemies, so you must be able to be a Christian and point out through biting sarcasm that Alec Baldwin is awful too.

As for us modeling to the world, does that ever work? Has us not matching punch for punch with the cultural left ever made them hold up and think, “Gosh, the conservatives’ refusal to stoop to my level has made me rethink this whole pursuit of power thing – I will forgo it and return to the norms of yesteryear”? Of course not. George W. Bush famously remained above the fray and they only stopped vivisecting him when he joined them in vivisecting us.

As for us being “better than that,” I’ll take being just as bad as that and not being a cultural serf over the David French position, which is the converse.

The argument for Option B is that you can’t go back to the past paradigm where you didn’t hit ‘em when they were down without punishing them for hitting us when we were down. Pain is the teacher. Of course, this assumes a paradigm not in evidence; we were never quite that pristine. I remember that within days of the Challenger accident, cruel jokes circulated across campus. Gallows humor has always existed, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t – maybe we’d just prefer a scenario where we acknowledge it’s appalling even as we laugh in spite of ourselves.

The premise of Option B is that we have to fight fire with fire, though that analogy always puzzled me. Rather, in combat you use the necessary weapons. Nazis and communists used guys with guns to attack us; we used guys with guns to kill them. Was there a moral difference, since everybody used guns, asks the moral illiterate? Yes. The other guys were Nazis and communists, and shooting them was a moral imperative because they were Nazis and communists. Our mean tweets are in the service of light, theirs are on the side of darkness.

To not engage on the terms that reality has set before you is to accept defeat. You might not like the rules, but there they are. In a society that has made the rule that you pummel your opponent when he is down, to not play by the rule is to unilaterally disarm.

Those nice folks on our side don’t see it that way – they see it as embracing decency. But lately, “decency” has translated as submission and, not being Bulwark staffers, we’re not into that scene.

The bad guys want us to be “decent” too – but not because of decency but because it makes their lives easier when we are hamstrung in response to their cultural aggression. We’re not supposed to make jokes about Alec Baldwin’s idiocy for the same reason we’re not supposed to make jokes about men pretending to be women pretending to be admirals. Humor, especially mean humor, is subversive. The leftist joke stasi wants the potential for subversion off the table.

Think of it as the Cold War. Option B is mutually assured destruction – if you launch social media cruelty at our misfortune, you will pay in spades, so don’t. Option A is unilateral disarmament. Nice people on our side want us to disarm to make us better people; our enemies want us to disarm to make us better targets.

So do as you wish about Alec Baldwin. If you want to remain in the light and offer your condolences, do so. Like I said, I’ve muttered a prayer for him and his victims because my faith tells me to do so and loving only your friends is kind of a meaningless exercise. I don’t like Alec Baldwin (though I really enjoy his acting). He’s awful. So I’m also going to talk bad about him and his hypocrisy and negligence.

Those are the rules we’re playing by today. I didn’t make the rules. I don’t like them. I’m even willing to return to the old ones, once enough pain has been inflicted to teach the necessary lesson about changing the rules. But I am not willing to play by a different set of rules that limits me at the expense of my opponents.

That’s the conundrum. I want a nice world, but I can’t get it just by being nice. So leftists, let me know when you want to change the new rules back. Until then, they are in effect.

Vaccine Mandate Threatens Major Trucking Disruption,…

Vaccine Mandate Threatens Major Trucking Disruption, Industry Insiders Say

Multiple Reporters for Epoch Times

American truckers don’t like taking orders. But the Biden administration has increased pressure on some of them to take the vaccine—willing or unwilling.

All through the pandemic, truckers endured hardships to keep America’s infrastructure running. They waited in line for hours in sight of bathrooms they weren’t allowed to use. On the road, some died alone of COVID-19.

Now, with supply chains disrupted, Americans need them more than ever. But faced with the prospect of a mandated vaccination, many drivers are considering quitting.

“I’d fight it,” said veteran trucker Mike Widdins, referring to vaccine mandates. “I think a lot of us will be quitting. Who likes to be forced to do stuff you don’t want to do?”

Widdins isn’t alone in his willingness to leave trucking if he is required to vaccinate. Polls by trucking publications Commercial Carrier Journal and OverDrive indicate that up to 30 percent of truckers will seriously consider quitting if required to vaccinate. If they quit, the consequences for America may be massive. US Transport estimates that 70 percent of American freight goes by truck.

“It would hurt shipping big-time,” Widdins said.

Epoch Times Photo — Capital City Cargo truck driver Robert Wagner finishes gassing up his big-rig at Pilot Travel Center in Bellemont, Arizona on Oct. 19. Wagner said that many long-distance truck drivers like himself reject federal vaccine mandates for COVID-19. “It’s poison, man,” he said of the vaccines. (Allan Stein/Epoch Times)

Narrowing Lanes

President Joe Biden ordered his administration to mandate vaccines for private companies with over 100 employees. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was charged with developing the rule and the Office of Budget and Management is currently reviewing it. The review process can take as long as 90 days.

Most of the trucking industry is composed of companies with less than 100 employees, though a significant portion is made of companies which would fall under the over-100-employee umbrella.

Most truck companies have six trucks or fewer, according to the American Trucking Associations.

Some experts say the selective reach of the mandate makes it ineffective. Barbara Smithers, vice president of the Indiana Motor Truck Association, told The Epoch Times via email that it makes little sense to “cherry pick” who to vaccinate based on company size.

“Truck drivers spend most of their work hours alone in the cab of a truck—literally one of the safest places possible during a pandemic—so why do they need to be regulated in this way?” she said. “Testing hundreds of thousands of truck drivers moving across the country every day is a virtual impossibility.”

For mandate-affected companies, Biden’s decision may drive away employees at a time when America needs them most. The American Trucking Associations estimates that America needs 80,000 more truckers to meet transportation needs.

Recently, supply chain crises have left many Americans in need. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said the shortage will last as long as there’s a pandemic.

With backups unloading goods at America’s ports, shortages already threaten consumers. But if long lines of trucks waiting to ship goods suddenly become shorter, the crisis will become far worse.

Whether America runs short on trucks depends on the Biden administration’s orders and how truckers respond.

Joe Trucker and Joe Biden

Some truckers think of their job as their service to America. In exchange for long hours away from home, they get relatively low pay, independence, and the nation’s best sunsets.

The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus hasn’t been kind to truckers. At a time when many Americans hunkered down at home, they were still on the road.

Trucking life during the pandemic was a series of frustrating restrictions, said trucker Victor Morales at a Georgia One9 truck stop. Morales has driven trucks for 25 years.

After a long day on the road, Morales would wait for hours to drop off a truckful of deliveries at a warehouse. But warehouse owners didn’t allow truckers to leave their cabs for any reason.

“You’re almost forced, like a second-class citizen,” he said. “They want the goods and services you got, but they don’t even want you to get out of your truck.”

If they arrived hungry, they waited hungry, he said. They weren’t even allowed to use the toilet only steps away.

“You can literally see a bathroom right there behind the glass. But you can’t get out,” said Morales.

In the eyes of drivers, Biden’s mandate is the last step in a long line of restrictions that don’t consider their needs or wants.