Author: Ron Clutz

Trudeau Puts In the Jackboots

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Trudeau’s orders, aimed in part at cutting off funds to protesters, have a wider scope than previously reported – which is “forcing portfolio managers and securities firms to take a harder look at who they are doing business with,” according to Bloomberg.

The new rules make demands of a broad list of entities — including banks, investment firms, credit unions, loan companies, securities dealers, fundraising platforms, insurance companies and fraternal benefit societies. They must determine whether they’re in “possession or control of property” of a person who’s attending an illegal protest or providing supplies to demonstrators, according to orders published by the government late Tuesday night.

If they find such a person in their customer list, they must freeze their accounts and report it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or Canada’s intelligence service, the regulations say. Any suspicious transactions must also be reported to the country’s anti-money-laundering agency, known as Fintrac. -Bloomberg

Ottawa police are handing out this leaflet:

Trudeau took the knee beside BLM protesters, and cried and apologized for century-old abuses against Aboriginals. But hard working, patriotic, ordinary Canadians have no place on his victims list. The jackboots are coming, but clever Trudeau will impose the suffering in cyberspace, and no one will notice, except those whose opinion was objectionable to him.

Stand Up Against Wokism

Posted on by Ron Clutz

UK Conservative Party Chairman Oliver Dowden recently spoke at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. decrying the pernicious “woke” ideology.  He describes the ridiculous theories and the dangers to Western democracies at this historical moment. Below is an excerpted transcript of his speech in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T Tyler Dowden and conservatives.com.

For nearly half a century “Heritage” has been central to the revival of conservatism. It has always flown the flag for limited government, for free markets and for individual responsibility. And as someone who grew up under Thatcher and Reagan I am proud to say that those values shaped my politics.  So, it is a huge privilege to be here speaking to you as Chairman of the Conservative Party the oldest and most successful political party in the history of the democratic world.

And the tireless work of institutions such as Heritage in promoting those values is becoming more important, not less. Today, a social media mob can cancel you merely because you have dared to challenge one of the Left’s fashionable nostrums. The enemies of the West are finding fresh confidence in their eternal battle against liberty.

So, conservatives themselves must find the confidence to mount a vigorous defence of the values of a free society. In a speech that is really remarkable for its foresight years before many had woken up to the fragility of the West’s victory in the Cold War Margaret Thatcher warned of a tendency of democracies to relax when the worst appears to be over.

She warned that new dangers to the West were also being ignored. Now, that is certainly true for China. The idea that Beijing’s partial embrace of free markets would automatically lead to greater social and personal political freedoms has proved to be breathtakingly naive. The world watches the relationship between America and its allies not only must we stand together we must be seen to stand together.

But there is another dimension to this crisis afflicting the West that she could not have foreseen. Rogue states are seeking to challenge the international order.

And at the precise point when our resolve ought to be strongest a pernicious new ideology is sweeping our societies.

An ideology that if not confronted threatens to rob us of the self-confidence we need to uphold those very values. It goes by many names. In Britain, its adherents sometimes describe themselves as “social justice warriors”.

They claim to be “woke”, awakened to the so-called truths of our societies. But wherever they are found they pursue a common policy inimical to freedom. In their analysis free speech is not a fundamental right necessary for the discovery of truth. To them it is a dangerous weapon that should be curtailed to prevent “harm”. “Free speech is hate speech” is one of their more bizarre slogans.

Each of us is accorded a level of “privilege”, that has nothing to do with our own personal struggles, but is based on our membership of a particular group. So, by their own shallow logic: as a man who went to Cambridge University and who now serves in the British Cabinet, I am a pinnacle of so-called “privilege”. It is apparently completely irrelevant to them that my parents were a shop worker and a factory worker who lost his job during a recession.

If I am privileged it is because I have a loving family and enjoyed an excellent education at my local state community school. But even to question my supposed privilege is deemed to be proof of how privileged I am.

Now, you might have noticed that the woke warriors take a particularly interest in history. Clearly history is a living subject, one that will inevitably be revised. But these activists are not interested in real scholarship or nuance or in explaining the context of the bad things that our ancestors did alongside the good. They are engaged in a form of Maoism determined to expunge large parts of our past in its entirety.

For them, nothing is sacred. Winston Churchill was central to the Allied victory in a fight for survival against Nazi tyranny. Yet some seek to trash his whole reputation and deface monuments to him in wanton acts of iconoclastic fury.

It is tempting to assume that this onslaught can be passed off as a passing fad. That it is so ridiculous so detached from what the majority think – and many have argued this – that it can simply be ignored. Universities from which so much of this unthinking revisionism has emerged have, of course, for decades been prey to Left-wing excesses. There has always been a tendency among cultural and educational elites to serve their own interests rather than serve the public at large. And of course, we conservatives have frequently confronted it.

But this ideology is now everywhere. It’s in our universities but also, in our schools. In government bodies but also in corporations. In social science faculties but also, in the hard sciences.

But I tell you, it is a dangerous form of decadence. Just when our attention should be focused on external foes we seem to have entered this period of extreme introspection and self-criticism and it really does threaten to sap our societies of their own self-confidence. Just when we should be showcasing the vitality of our values and the strength of democratic societies, we seem to be willing to abandon those values for the sake of appeasing this new groupthink.

There are several interlinked dangers to all of this.

To begin with, perhaps an obvious one. Those of us who grew up under Thatcher and Reagan or indeed, under Roosevelt and Churchill, were inspired by those leaders. But we also had an instinctive pride in our national story, a pride that joined even political opponents in a common sense of endeavour. But if they cease to be sources of pride that unite diverse population in a common understanding of who we are and what we stand for, then we lose that essential unity of purpose.

And it is particularly striking that the two countries, the United Kingdom and the United States, where the woke agenda is pursued the most aggressively, those are also very same countries where patriotism is most open and welcoming. Why on earth else would we be such magnets for migrants seeking to build a better life on our shores?

In Britain first, second and third generation migrants are among the most fervent champions of the countries they have chosen to call their own home. Yet increasingly they are told that the pride they feel is somehow misplaced. Or even worse than that, and even more offensively, that their patriotism is some kind of “false consciousness”.

Moreover this woke ideology encourages a bizarre form of moral relativism, a view that western nations are so compromised that they have no right to denounce the rogue states of today. For all their fury at historical “imperialism” , these activists have absolutely nothing to say about Vladimir Putin’s modern-day empire-building. Indeed, one of the perversities of this worldview is that the “imperialist” West is always at fault, even if that is in standing up for a nation that has experienced the horrors of life under an actual evil empire, in our own living memory.

And yet day by day that worldview gains traction in elite circles. We risk a collapse in resolve if all we hear is that our societies are monstrous, unjust, oppressive. Why on earth would anyone fight to sustain them? It’s a narrative that almost guarantees demoralisation and despair. And of course there is an opportunity cost of our irrational introspection. A West confident in its values would not be obsessing over pronouns or indeed, seeking to decolonise mathematics. Now you might say that’s rather difficult when the numerals we use are actually Arabic, but I’ll leave that to others to explain.

The West should be pointing out to would-be aggressors the strength of the values of a free society even in the most desperate of circumstances. To the Hong Kongers fighting for their rights in the face of extra ordinary odds. To the people of Ukraine determined that their nation should have the right to determine its future. To the women of Afghanistan prepared to defy Taliban rule even at the risk of their own lives.

Yet we allow ourselves to be obsessed by what divides us rather than what unites us. And, it shouldn’t just be conservatives who stand up for what made the West great. There was, of course, a time not very long ago when the mainstream Left was just as committed to free speech as the Right. Or when so-called “liberals” actually had something in common with those great champions of freedom the likes of Gladstone and John Stuart Mill, both of whom, incidentally are currently at risk of cancelled.

The UK joined Nato under a Labour prime minister. And, when Left-wing parties were dominated by working people rather than professional activists, they were just as patriotic as their conservative opponents. Sadly, the Left has abandoned the field. Its leaders are either too weak to stand up for our own common values or worse than that, they’ve embraced the doctrine of woke themselves.

It seems that we conservatives must find the strength to defend the principles of free society on our own.

So, our Conservative government in the United Kingdom is legislating to protect free speech on campus. We will stop the sinister phenomenon of academics or students who offend left wing orthodoxies being censored or harassed. As Culture Secretary I challenged those cultural institutions, those institutions funded by ordinary taxpayers but which promoted politicised agendas. We have made it clear to schools that it is illegal to teach the concept of “white privilege” as though it were undisputed fact.

And we must also not be frightened to expose the behaviour of some corporate giants. And you know, all of us know, the sort of corporations that I’m talking about. Ones that denounced perfectly legitimate efforts to reform electoral laws in democracies, whilst at the very same time, keeping a profitable silence whilst flogging their goods to authoritarian regimes.

We Conservatives, instead, are on the side of people who believe that we are a force for good in the world. The US and the UK may certainly be different societies but we are joined by the same fundamental values.

Neither of us can afford the luxury of indulging in this painful woke psychodrama. It will take courage to resist it. Too many people have already fallen for the dismal argument that standing up for freedom is reactionary, or that somehow it is kind or virtuous to submit to these self-righteous dogmas. Well it plainly is not.

Instead as Margaret Thatcher said to you almost 25 years ago the task of conservatives is to remake the case for the West to proclaim our beliefs in the wonderful creativity of the human spirit, in the rights of property and the rule of law, and in the extraordinary fruitfulness of enterprise and trade.  She refused to see the decline of the West as our inevitable destiny. And neither should we.

 

CDC Chooses Politics Over Science

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Vinay Prasad writes at the Tablet How the CDC Abandoned Science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images. H\T Raymond

Mass youth hospitalizations, COVID-induced diabetes, and other myths from the brave new world of science as political propaganda

The agency guiding America’s pandemic policy is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which sets widely adopted policies on masking, vaccination, distancing, and other mitigation efforts to slow the spread of COVID and ensure the virus is less morbid when it leads to infection. The CDC is, in part, a scientific agency—they use facts and principles of science to guide policy—but they are also fundamentally a political agency: The director is appointed by the president of the United States, and the CDC’s guidance often balances public health and welfare with other priorities of the executive branch.

Throughout this pandemic, the CDC has been a poor steward of that balance, pushing a series of scientific results that are severely deficient.

This research is plagued with classic errors and biases, and does not support the press-released conclusions that often follow. In all cases, the papers are uniquely timed to further political goals and objectives; as such, these papers appear more as propaganda than as science. The CDC’s use of this technique has severely damaged their reputation and helped lead to a growing divide in trust in science by political party. Science now risks entering a death spiral in which it will increasingly fragment into subsidiary verticals of political parties. As a society, we cannot afford to allow this to occur. Impartial, honest appraisal is needed now more than ever, but it is unclear how we can achieve it.

Masking Propaganda

In November 2020, a CDC study sought to prove that mask mandates slowed the spread of the coronavirus. The study found that counties in Kansas which implemented mask mandates saw COVID case rates start to fall (light blue below), while counties that did not saw rates continue to climb (dark blue):

The data scientist Youyang Gu immediately noted that locales with more rapid rise would be more likely to implement a mandate, and thus one would expect cases to fall more in such locations independent of masking, as people’s behavior naturally changes when risk escalates. Gu zoomed out on the same data and considered a longer horizon, and the results were enlightening: It appeared as if all counties did the same whether they masked or not:

The CDC had merely shown a tiny favorable section, depicted in the red circle above, but the subsequent pandemic waves dwarf their results. In short, the CDC’s study was not capable of proving anything and was highly misleading, but it served the policy goal of encouraging cloth mask mandates.

Child Vaccination Propaganda

Masking is not the only matter in which the CDC’s stated policy goal has coincided with very poor-quality science that was, coincidentally, published in their own journal. Consider the case of vaccination for kids between the ages of 5 and 11. COVID vaccination in this age group has stalled, which runs counter to the CDC’s goal of maximum vaccination. Interestingly, vaccinating kids between 5 and 11 is disputed globally; Sweden recently elected not to vaccinate healthy kids in this age group, and some public health experts believe that it would be preferable for kids to gain immunity from natural exposure instead. Stalling U.S. uptake therefore reflects a legitimate and open scientific debate, regardless of whether the CDC’s policy goal would like to consider it closed.

Enter the CDC’s new study. Widely covered in news outlets, the January 2022 study claims that kids below the age of 18 who get diagnosed with COVID are 2.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes. “These findings underscore the importance of COVID-19 prevention among all age groups,” the authors write, “including vaccination for all eligible children and adolescents.” But a closer examination of the study again reveals problems.

First, it does not adjust for body mass index. Higher BMI is a risk factor for COVID, prompting hospitalization and diabetes, and yet the CDC analysis does not adjust for weight at all.

Second, the absolute risks the study finds are incredibly low. Even if the authors’ finding is true, it demonstrates an increase in diabetes of up to 6 in 10,000 COVID survivors.

Third, the CDC’s analysis uses billing record diagnoses as a surrogate for COVID cases, but many kids had and recovered from COVID without seeking medical care. Without a true denominator that conveys the actual number of COVID cases, the entire analysis might be artifact.

As the former dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier told The New York Times, “The CDC erred in taking a preliminary and potentially erroneous association and tweeting it to specifically create alarm in parents.” Some might view it as a mistake, but after observing these matters for almost two years, I believe it was the entire point of the study: Alarm might boost flagging vaccine uptake in kids. (Already, a better study out of the United Kingdom finds no causal link between COVID and diabetes in kids.)

Teenager Vaccination Propaganda

Manufacturing alarm at the very moment an age or other demographic cohort is targeted for vaccination has become a pattern for the CDC. On May 10, 2021, the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization for the 12- to 15-year-old cohort to receive the Pfizer vaccine. On June 11, the CDC published a study in MMWR claiming to demonstrate rising hospitalization among this age group; widespread media coverage of the study quickly followed. But the absolute rates for this age group were, in reality, amazingly low: Less than 1.5 per 100,000, which was lower than they had been in the previous December. Meanwhile, a safety signal was being investigated—myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle—which was more common after the second dose, and reported to be as frequent as 1 in 3,000-6,000, according to the Israeli Ministry of Health. Other countries became reluctant to push two doses within the standard 21- to 28-day timeline for these ages. By July, the U.K. had decided against pushing vaccines for this cohort, a decision that was walked back only slowly.

The CDC was undeterred, and in recent weeks the agency’s director has started to push for more doses at these ages. Against the advice of an FDA advisory committee, Rochelle Walensky has moved forward with recommending boosters for 12- to 15-year-olds. This view differs from WHO guidance and that of other countries, including Canada, which is not authorizing boosters for healthy adolescents aged 12-17. But when it comes to vaccination, the CDC has a single policy: All Americans should get three doses, regardless of age or medical conditions.

This is not science as such, but science as political propaganda.

Natural Immunity Unmentionable

If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider a final example: the CDC’s near-total dismissal of natural immunity. Many other countries consider recovery from prior infection as a vaccination equivalent or better, an assumption that makes both medical and intuitive sense, but the CDC has steadfastly maintained that everyone needs the same number of vaccinations whether they have recovered from a COVID infection or not. This view is countered by data showing that vaccinating people who have recovered from COVID results in more severe adverse events than vaccinating people who have not had COVID.

In order to bolster the claim that people who have recovered from COVID benefit from vaccination as much as those who never had it, the CDC published a fatally flawed Kentucky-based analysis. The August 2021 study compared people who had contracted COVID twice against those who had it just once, and concluded that those who had it once were more likely to have had vaccination. But the study could have easily missed people who had two documented cases of COVID but might have had severe underlying medical conditions—such as immunosuppression—that predisposed them to multiple bouts of infection in a short period. In addition, people who had COVID once and then got vaccinated might not have sought further testing, believing themselves invulnerable to the virus. The study did not adequately address these biases.

Months later, the CDC published a stronger, cohort study showing clearly that natural immunity was more robust than vaccine-induced immunity in preventing future COVID hospitalizations, and moreover, that people who survived infection were massively protected whether vaccinated or not.

Conclusion: Political Capture of CDC

So why does the supposedly impartial CDC push weak or flawed studies to support the administration’s pandemic policy goals? The cynical answer is that the agency is not in fact impartial (and thus not sufficiently scientific), but captured by the country’s national political system. That answer has become harder to avoid. This is a precarious situation, as it undermines trust in federal agencies and naturally leads to a trust vacuum, in which Americans feel forced to cast about in a confused search for alternative sources of information.

Once that trust is broken, it’s not easily regained. One way out would be to reduce the CDC’s role in deciding policy, even during a pandemic. Expecting the executive agency tasked with conducting the science itself to also help formulate national policy—which must balance both scientific and political concerns and preferences—has proven a failure, because the temptation to produce flawed or misleading analysis is simply too great. In order to firewall policymaking from science, perhaps scientific agency directors shouldn’t be political appointees at all.

Ultimately, science is not a political sport. It is a method to ascertain truth in a chaotic, uncertain universe.

Science itself is transcendent, and will outlast our current challenges no matter what we choose to believe. But the more it becomes subordinate to politics—the more it becomes a slogan rather than a method of discovery and understanding—the more impoverished we all become. The next decade will be critical as we face an increasingly existential question: Is science autonomous and sacred, or a branch of politics? I hope we choose wisely, but I fear the die is already cast.

Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer.

 

 

Feb. 2022 Arctic Ice Pauses For Average Catchup

Posted on by Ron Clutz

In January, most of the Arctic ocean basins are frozen over, and so the growth of ice extent slows down.  According to SII (Sea Ice Index) January on average adds 1.326M km2, and this year it was 1.235M.  (background is at Arctic Ice New Year 2022).  Still February started with a surplus of ~200k km2 over the 16 year average.  The few basins that can grow ice this time of year tend to fluctuate and alternate waxing and waning, which appears as a see saw pattern in these images.

Two weeks into February 2022 Arctic ice extents waffled with little growth, resulting in a drop down to match the mean ice extent mid month. The graph below shows the ice recovery since mid-January for 2022, the 16-year average and several recent years.

The graph shows end of January 2022 a 200k km2 surplus to average, then little accumulation in February 2022 until a leap upward yesterday.  SII dropped below MASIE this month and did not yet report its estimate of ice extent on day 45

February Ice Growth Despite See Saws in Atlantic and Pacific

As noted above, this time of year the Arctic adds ice on the fringes since the central basins are already frozen over.  The animation above shows Barents and Greenland Seas on upper right (Atlantic side) retreating and growing with little change the last two weeks. Baffin Bay lower right waffled some but added 200k km2 and reached 117% of maximum last March.

Meanwhile the most dramatic see saw appears on the left (Pacific side)  Both Bering below and Okhotsk above wax and wane over this period. Okhotsk waffles up and down ending sightly lower in the end, only 60% of its last max.  Bering is seen losing, then growing to add 100k km2 by the end, reaching 132% of last March maximum.

The table below presents ice extents in the Arctic regions for day 45 (Feb. 14) compared to the 16 year average and 2021.

Region 2022045 Day 45 Average 2022-Ave. 2021045 2022-2021
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 14771764 14696037 75727 14570648 201117
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 1070776 1070247 529 1070689 87
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 966006 965730 276 966006 0
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 1087137 1087131 6 1087120 17
 (4) Laptev_Sea 897827 897837 -10 897827 0
 (5) Kara_Sea 871231 909595 -38364 934988 -63757
 (6) Barents_Sea 670586 585796 84790 837700 -167114
 (7) Greenland_Sea 711157 617734 93423 637304 73853
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 1521206 1454881 66326 1103099 418107
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 854685 853210 1475 854597 88
 (10) Hudson_Bay 1260903 1260538 365 1260471 432
 (11) Central_Arctic 3222483 3210904 11580 3204694 17790
 (12) Bering_Sea 841781 692225 149557 545267 296515
 (13) Baltic_Sea 64799 96258 -31459 116339 -51540
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk 706456 930957 -224501 1030304 -323848

The table shows that Okhotsk deficit to average is offset by surpluses in Bering, Barents, Greenland and  Baffin Bay.

The polar bears have a Valentine Day’s wish for Arctic Ice.

welovearcticicefinal

And Arctic Ice loves them back, returning every year so the bears can roam and hunt for seals.

Footnote:

Seesaw accurately describes Arctic ice in another sense:  The ice we see now is not the same ice we saw previously.  It is better to think of the Arctic as an ice blender than as an ice cap, explained in the post The Great Arctic Ice Exchange.

People’s Convoy Versus Baby Faced Dictator

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Update on the Canadian struggle to recover freedoms is at Daily Wire ‘These Very Powers … Are Why We Are Here’: Canadian Protesters ‘Dig Their Heels In’ Against Trudeau’s Crackdown.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Monday announcement invoking the Emergencies Act to break a weeks-long protest in Ottawa has only served to inspire more resistance, one protest organizer told The Daily Wire.

The Freedom Convoy, a loose coalition of truckers protesting vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions, rolled into Ottawa in late January and has camped downtown since. The protesters have congested parts of the city around Canada’s seat of government on Parliament Hill while demanding a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions.

So far, Trudeau has refused to meet with the truckers, instead employing increasingly hard-nosed political and legal tactics to try and break the protest.

David Paisley says he has been protesting for weeks now and, as a street captain, helps organize protesters and direct those who wish to support the cause with funds, goods, or services. Paisley told The Daily Wire that Trudeau’s announcement, which made headlines across major news organizations in the U.S. and Canada, went off barely noticed by the protesters on the ground.

“No one really cares about any new announcement. I mean the police have been breaking the law long before any emergency power. They were taking our fuel away. They were arresting people for purely having jerry cans or having empty tanks of fuel,” he said.  “They’ve already been doing these ‘emergency powers’ and all it does is make people dig their heels in more,” Paisley added.

“The irony … is that these very powers and threats are why we are here.”

Trudeau announced in a press conference Monday afternoon that he was authorizing the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act, a law passed in the late 1980s to take the place of the War Measures Act. The act strengthens Canadian law enforcements’ ability to fine and imprison violators and ensures the operation of “essential services” such as towing rigs, Trudeau said during his press conference. It also empowers banks and financial institutions to freeze the accounts of any person or business suspected of being involved with an “illegal blockade.”

Paisley said that the protest would continue despite frozen bank accounts or impounded trucks until every protester is cuffed and thrown in prison.

“[The Trudeau government] underestimated the determination and the intelligence of those here, and so everyone still here on the ground, they’re basically willing to give their lives for this – peacefully of course,” Paisley said.

“They’re prepared to drain every last dollar, even from frozen bank accounts,” he added later.

The truckers in Ottawa have received wave after wave of support in the form of cash funds, food, fuel, letters, and even a free laundry service by two ladies who walk Paisley’s street every day collecting clothes. The trucker said he received word on Monday from two men who wanted to deliver hundreds of liters of extra diesel fuel for the convoy.

“You come and sit in the driver’s seat for a few hours and you’ll be able to fill up your wallet again. It’s incredible. People are just handing you fifties, hundreds, packs of hundreds. A friend of mine received a Bible and when he opened it up it had 500 cash inside the bible,” Paisley said.

“The more the government tries to stomp this out, the more and more it causes people to rise up and say ‘this is wrong, and I side with these truckers,’” he said. “These steps from the government have simply hardened the determination of the great men and women down here, so I’m not really concerned at all.

We’ll have lots of new friends when we all get tossed in prison together.”

Footnote

GiveSendGo hacked, donors leaked amid fundraiser for Canadian trucker convoy protest

The Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has been hacked and temporarily disabled after it facilitated the raising of nearly $9 million for the convoy of Canadian truckers who have been protesting vaccine mandates.

The Delaware-based organization, which hosted a crowdfunding effort for the Canadian truckers after crowdfunding site GoFundMe took down their initial fundraiser at the urging of the Canadian government, was disabled Sunday night. Visitors were redirected to the domain GiveSendGone[.]wtf.

The site had raised over $8.7 million in one week after the GoFundMe effort was taken down.

The [hacker’s] statement alleged that those who had contributed to the fundraiser were the same ones who had “helped fund the January 6 insurrection in the U.S.” and had “helped fund an insurrection in Ottawa.”

GiveSendGo’s list of donors, approximately 92,000 of them, was also leaked and shared online.

The site stated on Feb. 10 in response to previous Canadian court efforts to halt the funds that the Canadian government “has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here” and that all the donations “flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.”

OK, maybe not so baby faced

US Federal Court Rules Against Social Cost of Carbon

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Following a Biden Executive Order, in April 2021 several states went to Louisiana District Court to stop implementation of Social Cost of Carbon with respect to federal regulations.  The Memorandum Ruling regarding that case is State of Louisiana et al Versus Joseph R. Biden Jr. et al.  The Plaintiff States are Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  H/T Francis Menton

The Issues

The Plaintiff States seek injunctive and declaratory relief on three grounds. First, they assert that the SC-GHG Estimates violate the procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) as a substantive rule that did not undergo the requisite notice-and-comment process. See 5 U.S.C. § 553.

Second, the Plaintiff States claim that President Biden, through EO 13990, and the IWG lack the authority to enforce the estimates as they are substantively unlawful under the APA and contravene existing law. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A)–(C).

Third, the Plaintiff States maintain that the Government Defendants acted beyond any congressional authority by basing regulatory policy upon global considerations.

The Plaintiff States request a preliminary injunction:
(1) ordering Defendants to disregard the SC-GHG Estimates and prohibiting them from adopting, employing, treating as binding, or relying upon the work product of the Interagency Working Group (“IWG”);
(2) enjoining Defendants from independently relying upon the IWG’s methodology considering global effects, discount rates, and time horizons; and
(3) ordering Defendants to return to the guidance of Circular A-4, explained infra, in conducting regulatory analysis.

To be clear, the Court is ruling only on the actions of the federal agencies and whether the agencies, by implementing the estimates and considering global effects— violate the APA and whether President Biden upon signing EO 13990, violated the separations of powers clause of the United States Constitution. The Court has the authority to enjoin federal agencies from implementing a rule—mandated by an executive order or not—that violates the APA or violates the separation of powers clause. Importantly, the Court is not opining as to the scientific issues regarding greenhouse gas emissions, their effects on the environment, or whether they contribute to global warming.

The Findings

The Court is persuaded that the Biden Administration’s agencies are using the SCGHG. The Court finds that the Plaintiff States have established injury-in-fact.

Plaintiff States argue that the SC-GHG Estimates “affect[] the states’ ‘quasi-sovereign’ interests by imposing substantial pressure on them to change their” practices and laws to remain in compliance with federal standards. Id. at 153. The Court finds that the Plaintiff States also have standing as they are entitled to special solicitude in the standing inquiry.

The Court finds that EO 13990 contradicts Congress’ intent regarding legislative rulemaking by mandating consideration of the global effects. The Court further finds that the President lacks power to promulgate fundamentally transformative legislative rules in Case 2:21-cv-01074-JDC-KK Document 98 Filed 02/11/22 Page 33 of 44 PageID #: 4175 Page 34 of 44 areas of vast political, social, and economic importance, thus, the issuance of EO 13990 violates the major questions doctrine.

The Court finds that EO 13990 was promulgated without complying with the APA’s notice and comment requirements.

The Plaintiff States thus argue that they have demonstrated multiple independently sufficient grounds to vacate the SC-GHG Estimate and therefore have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits. The Court agrees and finds that the Plaintiff States have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits.

Plaintiff States have sufficiently identified the kinds of harms to support injunctive relief. Moreover, the Court finds that the Plaintiff States have made a clear showing of an injury-in-fact, and that such injury “cannot be undone through monetary remedies,” Louisiana v. Biden, 2021 WL 2446010, at *21 (W.D. La. June 15, 2021), such that they need immediate relief now, lest they be unable to ever obtain meaningful judicial relief in the future.

The Court finds that the balance of the injuries weighs substantially in favor of the Plaintiff States.

The Court agrees that the public interest and balance of equities weigh heavily in favor of granting a preliminary injunction.

CONCLUSION For the reasons set forth herein above, the Motion for Preliminary Injunction will be granted in its entirety.

Comment from Manhattan Contrarian

On taking office, the Trump administration took steps to neutralize the SCC, so that not much has been heard from it for a while. But Biden’s EO 13990 caused the Obama-era version to get re-instated. The Biden people claim that they are working on further tweaks to the regulations, but meanwhile a large group of Republican-led states went ahead and commenced litigation.

With a regulatory initiative obviously intended to force a gigantic transformation of the economy without statutory basis, the Biden people defended against the Complaint using every shuck and jive and technicality known to man. The SCC rules were not “final” because the administration was still working on a few more tweaks (and then a few more, and then a few more); the state plaintiffs lacked “standing” because the harm was to citizens rather than the state itself; and so forth. The court was having none of it.

The heart of the court’s decision is its determination that the SCC falls under the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine,” under which the bureaucracy cannot on its own authority impose “new obligations of vast economic and political significance” unless Congress “speaks clearly.” The states had identified some 83 pending projects involving something in the range of $447 and $561 billion dollars as affected by the SCC rule. That impressed the court as easily within the concept of “major questions.”

We are at the beginning of what could be a very long battle. The bureaucracy has many ways to wear down its opponents. For example, a permit can simply be delayed indefinitely, without any reason being stated, as occurred for example with the Keystone XL pipeline. But at least here battle lines have finally been drawn.

Harvey Risch: Time to End Covid Emergency

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Time to End the COVID Emergency was written by Dr. Harvey Risch, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. This op/ed was originally published by the Wall Street Journal. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The time has come for states and the federal government to end their COVID declarations of emergency and the accompanying closures, restrictions, propaganda, distancing requirements, forced masking and vaccine mandates. COVID may circulate at some level forever, but Americans can now protect those vulnerable to it with standard medical procedures. They can treat it as they would the flu.

Emergency measures need continuous justification and there isn’t one anymore.

Omicron has become the dominant variant. Over the past two months, the Delta variant strain—Omicron’s main competitor and the most recent aggressive version of COVID—has been declining in the U.S. That is true both in proportion of infections (62 percent on Dec. 18 fell to 2 percent on Jan. 15, then to 0.1 percent on Jan. 29) and the number of daily infected people (97,000 to 14,000 to 400), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the next two weeks, Delta cases will almost certainly decline to the point that the variant essentially disappears, as did the strains that came before it.

Omicron is mild enough that most people, even many in high-risk categories, can adequately cope with the infection. Omicron infection is no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so. In America, many of those vulnerable to COVID are already vaccinated and protected against severe disease.

Treatments have also vastly improved since the early days of the pandemic. The medical community has learned much about the utility of inexpensive supplements like vitamin D to reduce severe disease risk, and there are a host of good therapeutics available to prevent hospitalization and death should a vulnerable patient become infected. For young people, the risk of severe disease—already low before Omicron—is minuscule.

There’s evidence that Americans have built up additional immunity through the recent Omicron wave. Daily Omicron infections peaked around Jan. 11 and have been declining. Mortality from COVID, including some from remaining Delta cases, is now declining as well. Influenza in typical seasons peaks in mid-February. That Omicron has been decreasing since early January suggests that the decline may have less to do with seasonal factors than built-up population immunity. If substantial new variants arise, this suggests case and death counts could still remain relatively low.

There is no longer any justification for the federal government and states to maintain their declarations of emergency. The lockdowns, personnel firings, shortages and school disruptions are doing at least as much damage to the population’s health and welfare as the virus. The state of emergency is unjustified now, and it can’t be justified by fears of a hypothetical recurrence of a more severe infection at some unknown point in the future. If the government can grant itself such power, then the limits imposed by the federal and state Constitutions are effectively meaningless.

Americans have sacrificed their rights and livelihoods for two years to protect the general public health. Government officials must now do their part and give Americans their lives back.

https://video-api.wsj.com/api-video/player/v3/iframe.html?guid=B5105512-B010-43ED-8710-D8FAF9A22B4F

 

 

 

NFL Proves Absurdity of Racial Quotas

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jake Bequette writes at The Federalist Brian Flores’ Lawsuit Exposes The Absurdity Of NFL Racial Quotas Like The ‘Rooney Rule’ Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Race obsessed-leftists want it both ways: force the NFL to have fewer white coaches and owners, while still signing NFL players based on their performance.

The efforts of leftists to destroy the world of sports took another Great Leap Forward last week with the news that former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a class-action suit against the NFL and all 32 NFL teams for racial discrimination. Flores was fired in January after three seasons with the Dolphins, and he recently interviewed for the New York Giants head coaching job that instead went to Brian Daboll.

Flores’ lawsuit is an unhinged, 58-page rant that focuses more on topics like professional football history and George Floyd rather than Flores’ specific allegations because his allegations are preposterous. Flores says the NFL “remains rife with racism” when it comes to hiring and retaining black coaches, and that the league “is managed much like a plantation,” yet he has been employed as an NFL coach for the past 14 years, and made upwards of $3 million per season as the Dolphins head coach.

The thrust of Flores’ suit is that since 70 percent of NFL players are black, and anywhere between 3 percent and 34 percent of coaches and executive personnel are black, that is prima facie evidence that the league is “racially segregated.” But Flores himself was an enthusiastic participant in this supposed “injustice,” since nearly 75 percent of his own coaching staff during his tenure with the Dolphins were white. And nowhere in Flores’ lawsuit does it mention that he was fired in Miami by a black general manager, Chris Grier.

Also unmentioned in the lawsuit is precisely how Flores would remedy the situation. If we want an NFL that proportionally “looks like America,” as Joe Biden is so fond of saying, then 3 or 4 of the 32 head coaches, general managers, and team owners would be black, but 75 percent of the players would be white or Hispanic. It’s doubtful that Flores is advocating for two-thirds of black players to be fired and replaced with whites.

Is there any reason, other than “discrimination,” why NFL rosters are still 100 percent male? Why is neither team in the upcoming Super Bowl starting a transgender female at left tackle?

In all my years of playing football, from high school to the NFL, I never heard any teammate of any race complain about a team’s racial composition. Players understand that sports are the ultimate meritocracy, where the currency of the realm is performance, not skin color or political correctness. If a player doesn’t think he’s getting enough playing time, it doesn’t do much good to cry “racism!” The only rational thing to do is to work harder and play better.

Part of the reason this wisdom hasn’t been applied to the coaching world is due to absurd racial quota systems like the “Rooney Rule” in the NFL, which forces teams to interview at least one black candidate for any major coaching or executive vacancy.

The absurdity of this practice can be illustrated by simply applying it to NFL roster vacancies. Imagine if every NFL team were forced to invite a white cornerback into training camp every season. No NFL team has started a white cornerback since Jason Sehorn in 2002. A white cornerback who fulfilled a team’s obligation under a “Sehorn Rule” would feel insecure and teammates would feel resentful, even if the player was qualified for the position and seriously considered for the job.

This is not a defense of the NFL. The league brought this upon themselves when they jumped in bed with the social justice radicals after the Kaepernick saga and doubled down after the George Floyd/BLM riots. They deserve this lawsuit and everything that’s coming to them.

The rest of America would do well to abandon the obsession with racial optics and skin-deep assessments of our fellow countrymen, or we’re heading toward the all-out racial conflict that the radical left seems obsessed with fomenting.

 

 

 

Challenge Your Covid Fear Factor

Posted on by Ron Clutz

John Tierney writes at City Journal Understanding the Covid Odds.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

If you’ve been vaccinated and still feel mortally threatened by the virus, please read this.

It’s obviously not easy to give up fear of Covid-19, to judge from a recent survey showing that the vaccinated are actually more frightened than the unvaccinated. Another survey found that most Democratic voters are so worried that they want to make it illegal for the unvaccinated to leave home. But before you don another mask or disinfect another surface, before you cheer on politicians and school officials enforcing mandates, consider your odds of a fatal Covid case once you’ve been vaccinated.

Those odds can be gauged from a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, published by the Centers for Disease Control. They tracked more than 1 million vaccinated adults in America over most of last year, including the period when the Delta variant was surging, and classified victims of Covid according to risk factors such as being over 65, being immunosuppressed, or suffering from diabetes or chronic diseases of the heart, kidney, lungs, liver or brain.

The researchers report that none of the healthy people under 65 had a severe case of Covid that required treatment in an intensive-care unit. Not a single one of these nearly 700,000 people died, and the risk was minuscule for most older people, too. Among vaccinated people over 65 without an underlying medical condition, only one person died. In all, there were 36 deaths, mostly among a small minority of older people with a multitude of comorbidities: the 3 percent of the sample that had at least four risk factors.

Among everyone else, a group that included elderly people with one or two chronic conditions, there were just eight deaths among more than 1.2 million people, so their risk of dying was about 1 in 150,000.

Those are roughly the same odds that in the course of a year you will die in a fire, or that you’ll perish by falling down stairs. Going anywhere near automobiles is a bigger risk: you’re three times more likely during a given year to be killed while riding in a car, and also three times more likely to be a pedestrian casualty. The 150,000-to-1 odds of a Covid death are even longer than the odds over your lifetime of dying in an earthquake or being killed by lightning.

The CDC study didn’t extend through the surge of the Omicron variant, but there’s no reason to think that the odds going forward are worse. While Omicron was much more infectious than previous variants, spreading widely among the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated, it typically caused milder symptoms. Now that the Omicron surge seems to have peaked, it has left huge numbers of people with what researchers call “super immunity” from both the vaccine and an infection. Studies have shown that natural immunity is much stronger and longer-lasting than vaccine immunity. So whatever new variant emerges, much of the population will confront it this year with stronger immunity than last year. And the odds of survival will improve further thanks to new antiviral drugs reported to reduce Covid mortality by some 90 percent.

Of course, the threat of Covid is greater for unvaccinated adults, but why should their personal decision to take that risk arouse so much angst among those who are safely vaccinated? The original argument for vaccine mandates—that they were necessary to stop the spread—is obsolete, now that it’s clear that vaccination doesn’t prevent reinfection and transmission. Even if vaccines might slow the spread, they won’t prevent the virus from eventually reaching everyone. In any case, the risk to the vaccinated is so low that there’s no justification for forcing everyone else to be jabbed.

Nor is there any justification for mandating masks or vaccines for schoolchildren. Even if masks were effective—and the weight of evidence shows that they do little or no good—it would make no sense to require them in classrooms where the risk is so low to everyone (including the vaccinated teachers). Some children with serious health problems could benefit from being vaccinated, but for others the vaccine offers virtually no benefit while risking rare and unforeseen side effects. By analyzing the rates of death and infection in 2020, before the arrival of vaccines, Cathrine Axfors and John Ioannidis of Stanford calculate that the risk of death for children and adolescents who were infected with the virus was 0.001 percent—one in 100,000. The risk today is lower still thanks to better treatments.

The recent scare stories about children hospitalized for Covid are based on inflated statistics.

Studies have found that nearly half of the children whom the CDC classified as hospitalized Covid cases are actually being treated for other conditions and just happened to test positive. But even if we use the CDC’s inflated numbers—about 300 Covid deaths annually among the nearly 60 million American children aged 5 to 18—the risk of a schoolchild dying from Covid works out to just one in 200,000.

A child is more likely to be killed in a car accident, commit suicide, be murdered, drown, be accidentally poisoned, or die of cancer or heart disease.

If those odds still aren’t enough to assuage your dread of Covid, consider one more statistic, based on Ioannidis’s analysis of data from Covid tests and seroprevalence surveys. He estimates that in the United States, a nation of 331 million people, there have been a total of 250 million to 350 million Covid infections since the pandemic began. While that estimate includes some people who were infected more than once, it seems clear that the vast majority of Americans have already survived an infection and acquired natural immunity, many without being aware of it.

Many don’t realize—and a horde of journalists and public officials are working hard to keep them ignorant—that their enemy today is not a virus in the air but the fear in their minds.

Retiring Covid Dashboards

Posted on by Ron Clutz

UF dashboard to end of 2021. Now retired.

Michael Lauzardo wrote at Washington Post We stopped tracking coronavirus cases at the University of Florida. Here’s why. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Our covid ‘dashboard’ had reported more cases than any other university in the country.
But the data was increasingly unreliable.

For nearly two years, I oversaw the coronavirus “dashboard” at the University of Florida. On that site, we posted the number of tests performed at the university each day, the percentage that were positive and the total number of cases. We also relayed how many students and faculty members were in isolation or quarantine. The dashboard was a tool that people on our campus referred to, and that the national media monitored (along with similar dashboards at hundreds of other schools) as they tracked the coronavirus situation at colleges and universities. In a typical week, some 3,500 people consulted the site, and there were more than 240,000 page views over the course of the pandemic.

Our dashboard attracted an unusual amount of attention because we identified more coronavirus cases than any other higher-education institution in the country — some 14,500 from May 2020, when the university began steps to return to in-person instruction, through 2021.

On Dec. 31, we stopped updating the dashboard because I concluded that the numbers we were posting were no longer useful.

This generated complaints, including accusations that we were covering up cases at a time when the situation was worsening by some measures. But so many students and staff were forgoing the school’s official testing site, and other sites that reported to us, in favor of at-home tests — and not reporting the results to us — that we lost confidence that our totals bore any relation to reality. We also knew that many students were experiencing mild covid-19 symptoms but attributing them to allergies or a cold, and so not reporting them.

Still others didn’t test because they didn’t want to be barred from dining rooms and classrooms — a trend that increased over the course of the pandemic.

Higher-education reporters took note of our move — as did our community, sometimes vociferously. Among those who complained to me, some argued that transparency is an intrinsically important goal; some also said the dashboard helped them to make decisions about their own behavior (signaling when it was safe to go maskless in public indoor spaces, for example). But transparency is an illusion when the data is bad; likewise, you can’t make good decisions by looking at incomplete or misleading numbers. We at the University of Florida concluded that the pandemic had entered a new chapter, and testing and reporting strategies had to change, too.

Coronavirus family with Omicron as newest member.

Nationally, we are moving from the epidemic phase to the endemic phase, in which vaccinated people are less likely to get infected and far less likely to become seriously ill. Case numbers, even if they could be accurately measured, are far less important than such things as hospitalization numbers paired with vaccination status. As of Jan. 1, we ceded all authority to the Alachua County Department of Health to collect and report coronavirus-related information, ending the categorization of data at the university level.

From the beginning, the dashboard was integrally connected to the campus’s virus-fighting strategy — known as UF Health Screen, Test & Protect, or STP. (I directed that program from its start in May 2020 through the end of 2021.) We created it to support the return-to-campus effort, and we were affiliated with the county health department. All test results for students, faculty and staff were reported to STP, regardless of where the tests were done or which laboratory did them. We conducted more than 500,000 tests on campus, and private labs also reported to us the test results of university community members.

The data collected for the dashboard also let us see the effect of things beyond our control. There was another spike on campus in October 2020 that coincided with the opening of the bars frequented by students. More recently, the large (but still smaller overall) rise in cases during the delta variant wave was mitigated by the aggressive vaccine campaign that preceded it.

Among universities, as I mentioned, we led the country in the total number of coronavirus cases — an unenviable category in which to be No. 1. Many commentators inferred that this must have reflected what they saw as a generally disastrous approach to the pandemic in Florida in general. In reality, I would argue, the high numbers stemmed from our aggressive testing program (as many as 3,000 tests a day), which gave us better information than some of our peer institutions had.

As of this writing, we are unaware of any deaths that occurred among our employees and students from a work or classroom exposure. (Overall student enrollment at the university is about 53,000.) To my knowledge there were two deaths of staff members that were due to exposures off campus.

We’d already begun to transition the services my office provided — testing, vaccination and so on — back to the county and student services in November because of decreasing cases and increasing endemicity. But we retained the ability to rapidly scale testing back up. And when the omicron variant hit, we scaled up big time: We went from about 1,000 tests per week in early December to 1,500 daily now. Of those, roughly 20 to 25 percent are positive. Life on campus, however, is surprisingly normal. Students who test positive are isolated or leave campus, but they can continue their coursework online. A few public events have been canceled or delayed, but many continue.

We absolutely need more data in the fight against the coronavirus. We need to know who is being hospitalized for covid as opposed to with it. We will need to know how future variants differ in their ability to cause severe disease. What we don’t need is a catchall of whatever information happens to be available — including wildly imprecise case counts that include people with symptoms resembling a cold. That’s why we decided to stop updating the dashboard at the University of Florida.

Michael Lauzardo is an associate professor in the division of infectious diseases and global medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine, and deputy director of the university’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.

See Also Escape from Covid in 2022

What is the Way Out?

Clean Up the Dashboard

Recommendation:

Stop showing cumulative statistics all the way to beginning of 2020.  These are not informative, only serve to drive fear of numbers that can only rise.  The public needs to see what is the situation now.

Cease use of the categories “cases” and “hospitalizations”.  Both have been corrupted from original definitions and can no longer serve.  Instead report “inpatients” and “outpatients”.  These are people who are in a physician’s care for sickness following infection with SARS-CV2.

Inpatients are those admitted into hospital with a prior covid diagnosis, not anyone testing positive after entering hospital for some other reason. Outpatients are those undergoing a treatment protocol at home under the supervision of a doctor who determined an illness deriving from SARS-CV2 infection.

The only other statistics are “covid deaths” which must be defined as dying from Covid19 not dying with Covid19. This outcome is only valid for inpatients and outpatients (no others) within 28 days of first diagnosed with Covid19. “Recoveries” should be reported daily, meaning patients who survive after 28 days.

Empower Primary Care for the General Population

Over-the-counter medical products should be provided comparable to those to treat cold and flu infections. People with mild symptoms should have access to home tests as well as anti-viral medicines and nutritional supplements shown to be effective against SARS-CV2.

Stop Discrimination Against Persons Based on Vaccination Status or Mask Wearing

Those who are vaccinated are protected and do not threaten others.  Unvaccinated people are trusting their own immune systems.  Likewise, wearing masks is an individual protection choice based upon circumstances.

Outpatients need to self-isolate during treatment, and when symptoms are over, new testing is not required.  People who have contact with others who tested positive do not need to test or to self-isolate if they are without symptoms.

Basically, it is a return to common sense citizen responsibility for public health.  When you are sick, you seek care and medical advice and treatment and isolate until you are well.