George Leef gave the fifth talk in our webinar “Restoring Our Civil Liberties.” Giving an overview of the state of civil liberties in the United States, George tells us where we are and where we are going.
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Watch “Liberty in America — Are We Past the Point of No Return?” on YouTube
Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Civil Liberties, George Leef, Liberty | 1 Comment »
Watch “Biden’s Mad Mandate Is Ripping The Country To Shreds” on YouTube
Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2021
Nuclear scientists dismissed. First responders booted. Doctors and nurses axed. Pilots put on leave. And Biden’s “mandate” has not even been promulgated by OSHA. The country is being ripped apart…and that may be just what they want. Meanwhile, Biden’s numbers continue an express elevator downward. What’s the end game?
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When M.I.T. Asked Dorian Abbot to Speak, It Invited Criticism – The New York Times
Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2021
You need to be a subscriber to the NYT, which I am not, to read this. Look up “government school” and M.I.T.’s picture is there. It is tight with the CIA also.
A bad news place.
“Dorian Abbot is a scientist who has opposed aspects of affirmative action. He is now at the center of an argument over free speech and acceptable discourse.”
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Colin Powell: A Neocon Fellow Traveler | Chronicles
Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2021
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/colin-powell–a-neocon-fellow-traveler/
At a crucial juncture in his life Colin Powell decided that he would just follow orders, like countless officers before him, most notably German ones. He may have been a decent sort to start with, but the Superior Orders defense is unlikely to save him from the harsh judgment of history.
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared on the afternoon of Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2003, at the Security Council of the United Nations. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” Powell, who died Monday due to complications from COVID-19, was seeking the Council’s endorsement of the U.S. attack on Iraq, which had been already decided upon by the neoconservative inner circle surrounding President George W. Bush. He asserted that Saddam Hussein already had at his disposal biological and chemical weapons, that he was developing a nuclear arsenal, and that therefore Iraq was a legitimate target for military action. To support his claim, Powell produced a vial of white powder, allegedly anthrax from the Iraqi arsenal. He played a recording of a supposed discussion among Iraqi military officers about UN inspection teams, which had been doctored to make the proceedings appear sinister. Staking his reputation as a cautious, matter-of-fact soldier, four-star general, and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who served four presidents, he produced photographs of alleged Iraqi WMD depots and other facilities. He also showed detailed drawings of what he claimed were Saddam Hussein’s mobile chemical weapons production facilities. As we now know, and as some of us suspected at the time, every statement Powell made on that day was untrue. Every single assertion was backed by “sources” fabricated by the neocon cabal which had decided to push America into war against Iraq many years earlier. Powell never belonged to this group, which looked down on him and eagerly plotted to exploit him. They wanted to turn him into a useful idiot, to use him – broadly speaking – the way Stalin used Walter Duranty and Hitler used Lloyd George. Colin Powell, to his eternal discredit, allowed some very bad people to use him. He failed to check the veracity of the material they prepared for him, even though his presentation was potentially a matter of life and death for thousands of people. He was told that his speech had been prepared by the National Security Council. In reality it was written by Vice President Dick Cheney’s team, which in the words of a summary of events published Monday by The Guardian, “led the charge in browbeating CIA analysts into coming up with evidence and when that failed, going around the CIA altogether.” Could Powell not smell a rat? Two years later, when he was no longer a senior official, Powell said the speech was “a blot” on his career. “It was painful,” Powell told Barbara Walters. “It’s painful now.” His expression of remorse isn’t enough to exculpate him. Powell could not have been willfully oblivious to what was going on, as some of Stalin’s fellow travelers were. He made a deliberate moral choice, fully in accordance with his rank and station. “For Colin Powell, the situation put reputation and duty in conflict,” according to Sir Christopher Meyer, the UK ambassador in Washington at the time. “When the commander in chief of the United States of America says ‘Go to New York and deliver a presentation,’ a man like Powell doesn’t say no.” Indeed; this is the crux of the matter. At a crucial juncture in his life Colin Powell decided that he would just follow orders, like countless officers before him, most notably German ones. He may have been a decent sort to start with, but the Superior Orders defense is unlikely to save him from the harsh judgment of history.
Srdja Trifkovic
Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles, is the author of The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad.
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Doug Casey on Insider Trading… Why Politicians Can Do it and You Can’t
Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2021
Doug Casey: As I said before, the only way you can end the practice is to get the government 100% out of the economy. Let me reemphasize this point. The government is supposed to have essentially zero to do with the economy. But today, it’s the main thing that government does.
by Doug Casey
International Man: What exactly is insider trading? Is it inherently unethical?
Doug Casey: The term insider trading is nebulous and as open to arbitrary interpretation as the Internal Revenue Code. A brief definition is to “to trade on material, non-public information.” That sounds simple enough, but in its broadest sense, it means you are a potential criminal for attempting to profit from researching a company beyond its public statements.
Is the use of insider information ethical? The government says, “No!” I say, “Absolutely, whenever the data is honestly gained, and no confidence is betrayed by disclosing or using it.” The whole concept of inside information is a floating abstraction, a witch hunter’s dream, and a bonanza for government lawyers looking to take scalps.
When the SEC prosecutes someone, it can cost millions of dollars in legal fees to defend against them. And as with most regulatory law, concepts of ethics, justice, and property rights never even enter the equation. Instead, it’s a question of arbitrary legalities.
Whether someone is prosecuted of insider trading is largely a question of who he is. A maverick researcher and a powerful government official will tend to get very different treatments. It’s also a question of the psychology and motives of the prosecutor. Insider trading is generally a non-crime that can be used in a Kafkaesque manner by upward-mobile prosecutors.
Insider trading should, at best, be the basis of a tort suit by a company if a board member betrays a trust. It shouldn’t be a crime prosecuted by the State.
Any ethical problem shouldn’t be about how information is used or who profits but whether it’s acquired honestly. Whether information is “inside” has no moral significance as long as it is honestly acquired. The market is a register of information, and impeding the free flow of knowledge in any way makes it less efficient. A morass of regulation only opens the door to real corruption. This is nothing new. Tacitus correctly said “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the State.”
In addition, the very concept of insider trading is ridiculous from a practical point of view. Someone always gets the information first. If an announcement is made, the people in the room who hear it first act on it first. By the time it’s published, it’s old news. It’s physically impossible for everyone to get information at the same time.
Insider trading has never cost shareholders a penny. Other actions taken by management insiders have, however, cost shareholders many billions. Regardless of the rhetoric, the name of the game in hostile takeovers and proxy battles is often management versus the shareholders. But that’s a story for another time.
International Man: In the past, politicians in Congress and elsewhere have allegedly engaged in insider trading with impunity.
Meanwhile, the penalties inflicted upon regular citizens can be severe. The maximum criminal penalty for insider trading is 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine.
What is your take on this?
Doug Casey: Congress is in a unique position to treat itself well. They control almost unlimited amounts of both power and money. Politicians really are a favored class.
The people in control of making regulations and printing money can tip off their pals subtly. This naturally lends itself to corruption. Congress critters know who’s going to get the big contract. They don’t have to buy or sell a stock themselves; a discreet tip to a trusted crony is safer. The Federal Reserve sets interest rates and controls the amount of money and credit entering the markets; they’re in a position to take advantage of this situation as well. And I have no doubt they do.
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The Specter of One World Government Looms Large – American Thinker
Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2021
Instead of stressing the word “rights” throughout, as did the original U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the word “rights” appears only once in the Agenda, in Section 19. Instead of “rights,” the two buzzwords that appear throughout the Agenda are “needs” and “sustainability.” “Needs” resonates with the Marxist dictum “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”
The U.N.’s Agenda 2030 is still in place, and the clock is ticking toward its empowerment — only eight years and two-plus months to go. This Agenda is for a new world government, which will implement the policies of the Agenda.
This new government on our horizon explains many of the failures in policies in these first months of the Biden administration. The failures are based not so much on mistakes as on deliberate sabotage to weaken our country, dilute the power that undergirds our sovereignty, and prepare us to accept one-world government.
The seed ideas for Agenda 2030 began with Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations in his Fourteen Points at the end of WWI. A community of nations could bring pressure for peace in the world that the treaty or alliance system could not do, as shown by the First World War. While this idea took hold in Europe and other countries, it was unable to gain sufficient traction in the U.S. as it met with Republican resistance in the U.S. Senate on the grounds that it would lead to a dilution of U.S. sovereignty.
With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, all right-thinking persons can see that Woodrow Wilson’s first giant step toward globalism was rightly rejected. The League was a complete failure in terms of bringing peace to the world. To the German Nazi government, the League was a joke. The Japanese left the League after their invasion of China was repudiated. Yet Republican sway over U.S. governance became diminished by the four-time election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president of the U.S. and the hegemony of the Democrat party for twenty years from 1933 to 1953.
After WWII, the U.N. was conceived of as having duties and functions that the League did not have. The U.N. would sustain the world in real ways with the establishment of the International Monetary Fund to strengthen currencies worldwide and the World Bank to finance and endorse vast construction projects. These institutions would together foster peace and “community” in our fragmented world (whispers of the “it takes a village” cliché that would take hold decades later). After all, is it not true that poverty is ultimately the cause of conflict in our world?
Yes, the U.S. and the other illogical leftists throughout the West and the other parts of the world bought into the Marxist idea that wars are caused by fierce competition for scarce resources. Even the great Harvard economist Walt Rostow in the 1950s and 1960s had a vision of global financial institutions through the sponsorship of the U.N. as bringing the poorest countries to a “take-off stage.” There was only one problem with Prof. Rostow’s well-researched and theoretically sound vision: take-off never happened. All that great Harvard research was not worth the paper it was written on. The wealth disparities among the developed world, the less developed countries (LDCs), and the less developed developing countries (LDDCs) persisted.
As a result of the perceived stratification of the world community, there was a paradigm shift in understanding the relations among the different wealth levels of societies. Many on the left believed that if the whole world were one, then the destitution and resulting despair of the poorer countries could not be dismissed as a failure of local nation-state governments to enact good policies or to be less corrupt. If, so to speak, all nations were under the same roof or same umbrella, the thought “that’s their problem” could not easily obtain.
“Their problem” automatically would become “our problem,” as we all are together under one government. This is an updating of the idea first put forward in 18th-century France by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that the best government is not the liberty-centered, individualistic, and rights-oriented government such as projected by John Locke; rather, the best government bypasses all exploitation by expressing the General Will — it is a vision that goes beyond mere teamwork, a vision of all for all. Any type of individualism or personal achievement is bourgeois and undermines true progress.
That brings us to Agenda 2030. This Agenda puts forward a plan for a new soft world government by the year 2030. It was a plan adopted unanimously by the U.N. on September 25, 2015, and has 91 sections. The Agenda covers every aspect of human experience and thus is a government without using the word government. Instead of stressing the word “rights” throughout, as did the original U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the word “rights” appears only once in the Agenda, in Section 19. Instead of “rights,” the two buzzwords that appear throughout the Agenda are “needs” and “sustainability.” “Needs” resonates with the Marxist dictum “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” Just as the more wealthy and advanced countries engage in various socialist and social welfare programs to meet the needs of their poorer citizens, the wealthier countries will feel more obligated and be expected to contribute much more to the needs of their fellow citizens in their new global state. Trans-national identities of persons will replace national identities. The needs of people will be uppermost in peoples’ minds, not their location in the world, ethnicity, religion, customs, mores, diets, appearances, and gender identities. All distinctions become subsumed under needs in this new vision of one world.
“Sustainability” also brings us into the sphere of commonality rather than differences. We all occupy one environment. Problems with the oceans near one place may have effects on air quality at another — distant — place. We all have to breathe the air on Planet Earth. We influence each other all over the world through carbon emissions and through our habits of waste disposal. Natural resources may be available to some countries more than others, but insofar as we are all residents of one planet, those resources ultimately belong to all. Sustainability according to this vision is a global issue, and it must be addressed as a global issue through a world government.
With this evolution of the U.N. before us, are we not better able to understand why the left is so comfortable with the collapse of our borders? With the capture and availability of so much U.S. military equipment in Afghanistan? With the overthrow of law and order in our cities so we look more and more like an unruly third-world country with each passing year? With our budgets so inflated that currency inflation and collapse are almost a certainty?
Yes, this writer is proposing that these recent “mistakes” are connected with the goal of a one-world government, which has already been enunciated and was signed onto by the USA. The disintegration we are facing in various sectors is, I believe, part of a move toward the collapse of our sovereignty in favor of a world government as outlined in Agenda 2030.
Image: sanjitbakshi via Flickr.
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Yes, They Are Coming for the Oil Companies | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on October 20, 2021
https://mises.org/wire/yes-they-are-coming-oil-companies
n his first year in office, President Joe Biden has made it absolutely clear that he wants to make the oil and natural gas industries disappear. While even a progressive like Biden knows that it would be economically (and, one would hope, politically) disastrous to destroy those industries during his brief term, nonetheless Biden is setting things into motion in which the regulatory and law enforcement apparatus of the central government are quietly but effectively declaring war on what has been one of the most productive industries in US history.
The Biden administration and its allies are looking at a multipronged approach, with the first being efforts at trying to starve the industry of capital. As Biden appointees take over the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), they are turning what once was an agency that regulated capital markets into an environmental regulator:
Under the Biden administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will require public companies to disclose how operations contribute to climate change and what is being done to comply with greenhouse gas emission guidelines.
Former Acting SEC Chair Allison Herren Lee released a statement in July that laid out the update to disclosure requirements. The SEC will evaluate how companies follow climate change guidelines from 2010, discuss the climate-related disclosures with companies, then examine the impact of climate risks on the stock market. The commission will then update the guidelines, most likely resulting in an expansion of disclosure from companies on how their business affects the environment. (emphasis mine)
While some have called this “regulatory overreach,” there is nothing surprising or shocking about this. The Biden administration response to anything it can tie to “climate change” is going to be heavy-handed and expansive, especially since regulators now believe they have been near-divinely appointed to bring better weather to planet Earth.
(For numerous reasons, I am not going into the actual scientific claims regarding climate change, except to say that given the history of governmental initiative failures, I am not optimistic that the Biden administration through heavy-handed edicts can reduce hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters that the ancients once called “acts of God.” Furthermore, no logical person can make a direct connection between Biden’s “Build Back Better” program and better weather.)
One only can imagine how far the SEC will take these so-called disclosure requirements. The idea is to mandate actions that appear to make firms look as though they are “fighting climate change.” For example, Amazon has been advertising that it will engage in corporate “responsibility” by making its delivery fleet all electric in the coming year. Likewise, Ford Motor Company has announced plans to spend billions of dollars on new plants that will make batteries and electric vehicles.
Whether these are “wise” business decisions is another matter. Certainly, they are politically wise in that Ford and Amazon will receive praise from the usual progressive suspects for their investment decisions, although I doubt that the progressive ruling class will let up on either company. Amazon’s so-called commitment to “fighting climate change” still is not going to keep the company from being accused of monopolistic behavior and union busting, along with the usual hysterical attacks that emanate from both the New York Times and the New Republic on the left and the American Conservative on the right, and one can be sure that sooner or later, the US Department of Justice and/or the Federal Trade Commission will be filing lawsuits against Amazon.
But investments must have a certain return in order to be worth undertaking, and given the current state of the US electric grids and the reach of present (and near-future) technology, it is doubtful that this multibillion-dollar turn toward going electric is going to have a return on investment that would come close to buying and building conventional gas- and diesel-powered vehicles. One doubts seriously that if the political climate were not so hostile to oil and gas, Ford and Amazon would be running on batteries.
But there is an even bigger threat to the oil industry than just Ford and Amazon wanting to go electric: there is a movement from the left to charge oil and gas executives with “crimes against humanity” that almost surely will engulf the Democratic Party as it continues to become radicalized. For now, those calling for imprisonment of energy industry leaders are publications like Jacobin, Common Dreams, Gizmodo, and The Guardian, but as the Left continues to march through all of the major institutions in Europe and North America, such a scenario easily could become mainstream in a short time.
Of course, the notion that oil executives “knew” something about “climate change” that was hidden from everyone else is sheer nonsense. There is no other way to describe that belief, but we already know from modern experience that nonsense has become the ruling ideology of progressives in this country. For those that believe that justice or the “rule of law” would prevail in an ideological climate, one is reminded of a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago: If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov, who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years, had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed with iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
While progressives have not (at least yet) reached the depths of the commissars Bernie Sanders used to admire (and probably still does), nonetheless they understand something about the destruction of a society and its economy and seem eager to do what they can. From the Green New Deal, in which progressives believe they can centrally plan an entire economy, to the current “divestment” movement to keep new capital from the oil and gas industries, progressives believe they can somehow improve American lives by making them substantially poorer.
And it is not just the Far Left that is looking to find ways to throw oil and gas executives in prison. The New York State attorney general’s office is currently “investigating” oil companies and Massachusetts also has launched a “probe” into the question of whether oil executives “misled the public” about the horrors of climate change. One can expect other blue state attorney generals to do the same as the divide continues to grow between progressives and the people that are harmed by progressive governance.
The rush to destroy the oil and gas industries is coming from the political, academic, religious, corporate, and entertainment elites in this country, and they don’t care about the ramifications of their actions, and why should they? As elites, they are in the upper-income echelons of society, live in gated communities, and can afford the inconveniences of electric vehicles, which are a symbol to others of their “commitment” to “fighting climate change.”
Nonelites, however, do not have the same privileges, and they are the ones that would face the empty shelves in stores, the shortages, freezing in their homes in the winter, and dealing with summer heat without air conditioning. People in rural areas would find themselves back in the throes of poverty that they left decades ago, thanks to those fossil fuels that the progressives regularly demonize.
Not that the elites would care. Despite their claims that destroying the oil and gas industries would “improve the lives of working-class Americans,” there is no way to keep up even a semblance of our present standard of living without adequate electricity and fuels. Windmills, solar panels, and other renewables cannot replace what already exists no matter how much rhetoric comes from Joe Biden’s office.
Without getting into arguments about fossil fuels and climate change, one of the so-called smoking guns has been the series of massive wildfires on the West Coast. While progressives blame climate change, perhaps they should look in the mirror. Having been successful for the past few decades in setting off vast tracts of forests in the name of “protecting” the lands and forbidding logging, they forget that when there is no land management, trees grow closer together, they die, and they are easier victims of blight and insect damage. The result is that the forests become extremely combustible, and when they inevitably burn, the fires become conflagrations. But it always is easier to blame Exxon. Author:
William L. Anderson is a professor of economics at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Joe Biden, Oil Companies, progressive, SEC | Leave a Comment »
Erie Times E-Edition Article-Boosters were not tweaked for variants
Posted by M. C. on October 20, 2021
Could it be because anything other than what was approved under the EUA may not be immune from lawsuit prevention?
https://erietimes-pa-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=078fe2a40_1345f70
Lauran Neergaard
ASSOCIATED PRESS
More COVID-19 booster shots may be on the way – but when it’s your turn, you’ll get an extra dose of the original vaccine, not one updated to better match the extra-contagious delta variant.
And that has some experts wondering if the booster campaign is a bit of a missed opportunity to target delta and its likely descendants.
“Don’t we want to match the new strains that are most likely to circulate as closely as possible?” Dr. Cody Meissner of Tufts Medical Center, an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, challenged Pfizer scientists recently.
“I don’t quite understand why this is not delta because that’s what we’re facing right now,” fellow adviser Dr. Patrick Moore of the University of Pittsburgh said last week as government experts debated whether it’s time for Moderna boosters. He wondered if such a switch would be particularly useful to block mild infection.
The simple answer: The FDA last month OK’d extra doses of Pfizer’s original recipe after studies showed it still works well enough against delta – and those doses could be rolled out right away. Now the FDA is weighing evidence for boosters of the original Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
See COVID, Page 2A
In September, the FDA approved extra doses of Pfizer’s original COVID-19 vaccine after studies showed it still works well against the delta variant. CHARLES KRUPA/AP
Continued from Page 1A
“It’s less churn and burn on the manufacturing” to only switch formulas when it’s really necessary, said FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks.
But Pfizer and Moderna are hedging their bets. They’re already testing experimental doses customized to delta and another variant, learning how to rapidly tweak the formula in case a change eventually is needed – for today’s mutants or a brand new one. The tougher question for regulators is how they’d decide if and when to ever order such a switch.
What we know:
Current vaccines are working even against delta
Vaccines used in the U.S. remain strongly effective against hospitalization and death from COVID-19, even after the delta variant took over, but authorities hope to shore up waning protection against less severe infection and for high-risk populations. Studies show an extra dose of the original formulas revs up virus-fighting antibodies that fend off infection, including antibodies that target delta.
Vaccines target the spike protein that coats the coronavirus. Mutations in that protein made delta more contagious but to the immune system, it doesn’t look all that different, said virus expert Richard Webby of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
That means there’s no guarantee a delta-specific booster would protect any better, said University of Pennsylvania immunologist John Wherry. Waiting for studies to settle that question – and if necessary, brewing updated doses – would have delayed rolling out boosters to people deemed to need them now.
Still, because delta is now the dominant version of the virus worldwide it almost certainly will be a common ancestor for whatever evolves next in a mostly unvaccinated world, said Trevor Bedford, a biologist and genetics expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
A delta-updated vaccine would “help to provide a buffer against those additional mutations,” he said. Bedford is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also supports The Associated Press Health and Science Department.
Tweaking the recipe
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are made with a piece of genetic code called messenger RNA that tells the body to make harmless copies of the spike protein so it’s trained to recognize the virus. Updating the formula merely requires swapping out the original genetic code with mRNA for a mutated spike protein.
Both companies first experimented with tweaked doses against a mutant that emerged in South Africa, the beta variant, that has been the most vaccineresistant to date, more so than the delta variant. Lab tests showed the updated shots produced potent antibodies. But the beta variant didn’t spread widely.
Now the companies have studies underway of fully vaccinated people who agreed to test a booster dose tweaked to match delta. Moderna’s studies also include some shots that combine protection against more than one version of the coronavirus – much like today’s flu vaccines work against multiple influenza strains.
The mRNA vaccines are considered the easiest kind to tweak but some other vaccine makers also are exploring how to change their recipes if necessary.
Why study updated shots if they’re not yet needed?
Moderna’s Dr. Jacqueline Miller told an FDA advisory panel last week the company is studying variant-specific boosters now to learn if they offer advantages, and to be ready if they’re needed.
And Penn’s Wherry said it is critical to carefully analyze how the body reacts to updated shots because the immune system tends to “imprint” a stronger memory of the first virus strain it encounters. That raises questions about whether a subtly different booster would prompt a temporary jump in antibodies the body’s made before – or the bigger goal, a broader and more durable response that might even be better positioned for the next mutations to come along.
No rules yet for making a switch
“What is the tripping point?” asked Webby, who is part of a World Health Organization network that tracks influenza evolution. “A lot of what is going to need to go into that decision making is just going to be learned by experience, unfortunately.”
Bedford said now is the time to decide what drop in vaccine effectiveness would trigger a formula change, just as is done with flu vaccines every year.
That’s important not just if a dramatically worse variant suddenly develops. Like many scientists, Bedford expects the coronavirus to eventually evolve from a global crisis into a regular threat every winter – which might mean more regular boosters, maybe even yearly in combination with the flu shot.
Timing between shots matters, too, Wherry noted.
“Your boostability may actually improve with longer intervals between stimulation,” he said. While scientists have learned a lot about the coronavirus, “the story’s not finished yet and we don’t know what the last chapters say.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
“A lot of what is going to need to go into that decision making is just going to be learned by experience, unfortunately.”
Richard Webby
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital virus expert speaking about the decision to tweak boosters to match variants
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: boosters, Delta Variant, Food and Drug Administration, Pfizer | Leave a Comment »
Erie Times E-Edition Article-FDA unveils simpler hearing-aid rules for Americans
Posted by M. C. on October 20, 2021
Wow! You can get a hearing aid without government permission.
The article admits the FDA rules makes things expensive and hard to obtain. isn’t this the opposite of what is supposed to happen? The FDA can’t get hearing aids right. How do you think they would handle pandemic remedies?
The FDA will no doubt get more money so they can do what they have been doing better. I.E. failing.
The remedy for the FDA and all other three letter government agencies is to amputate them from our lives.
https://erietimes-pa-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=1aabd43d1_1345f70
Health regulators on Tuesday unveiled their proposal to allow Americans to buy hearing aids without a prescription…
U.S. officials said Tuesday that the FDA change, when finalized, should spur competition and bring down prices.
“Today we open the door to an easier process and a more affordable process,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters…
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: FDA, hearing-aid, Xavier Becerra | 1 Comment »
The Great Struggle of Our Time: The Battle for Reality – American Thinker
Posted by M. C. on October 20, 2021
Gaslighting is now an integral part of the left’s every move, and it is sowing confusion and wreaking havoc everywhere. The gaslighters have already managed to disorient many people and weaken their hold on reality. They correctly sense that if they can press sufficiently hard, they will be able to take advantage of the disarray and implement their godless, nihilistic, inhuman, love-deprived and freedom-negating agenda.
With societal turbulence all around us, many people feel that we are locked in some great and portentous struggle. But because it is so pervasive and multifaced, the nature of this struggle is not readily obvious. There are many fronts on which this struggle is being fought: racial relations, education, healthcare, popular culture, financial system, and freedom of speech, among others. It is not easy to make sense of it all, especially since the battles are highly pitched and emotions are running very high.
What characterizes these battles, besides their intensity, is deep polarization. The possibility of the warring camps coming together and meeting on some common ground seems to be growing more distant by the day. There is even talk that the two sides will either come to blows, or they will each go their own way in some form of secession.
Many have observed that the contenders seem to be separated by an unbridgeable gap, and yet no one has been able to explain the nature of this gap, or what exactly it is that separates the mindsets of the opposing sides.
In our view the great struggle in the grip of which we find ourselves cuts much deeper than the immediate issues we argue over. The real fight extends beyond any particular point of public friction.
The great battle of our time is a battle about the very nature of reality. More precisely, what the two sides war over on the most fundamental level is what constitutes truth and how it should be determined.
To shed light on this dynamic, let us take one of the heated controversies of the present time. For this we choose transgenderism. This is an especially suitable example for two reasons: this issue is highly divisive and polarizing, and it delineates the opposing camps sharply and clearly.
As you may know, transgender advocates claim that biological males can become women and vice versa.
Understandably, many people find this claim rather far-fetched. For one thing, it does not feel true, given that the evidence of our senses seems to refute it. When, for example, people look at transgender “women” – i.e., biological men who say that they are women – most people immediately recognize that these are not real females. What most people see is men who pretend to be girls. This is how the human mind – in the vast majority of instances – interprets sensory input that it receives upon encountering such persons.
Rachel Levine, President Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Health. Few people would perceive Dr. Levine is a genuine woman. (YouTube screengrab)
And yet transgender advocates vehemently maintain that this is not the correct interpretation of visual data. They insist that what is in front of our eyes are not men who pose as girls but real girls.
Be seeing you
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