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15 Days to Flatten the Truth

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15 Days to Flatten the Truth

It made news this week when The Lancet, a once-respected medical journal, finally admitted that there’s such a thing as “natural immunity” with COVID. (Is it too much to hope that, in another three years, The Lancet will cease referring to women as “bodies with vaginas”?)

Several months into “15 days to flatten the curve,” actual experts, like the Great Barrington Declaration scientists, began screaming from the rooftops about natural immunity. They argued — correctly, as it turns out — that we should protect the vulnerable while allowing those not at risk to go about their lives, get COVID and acquire immunity.

Millions upon millions of wrecked lives later (including 170,000 excess non-COVID deaths), the people who lied to us for their own selfish motives — getting on TV, high ratings for their panic porn, the joys of bossing other people around [and changing the voting system to make it easier to cheat]— are quietly admitting the truth.

Contrary to hysterical warnings in 2020 that “people you know” will die from COVID and “it’s definitely not just the flu,” I still don’t know anyone who knows anyone who died from COVID. For most people, it was “just the flu.”

How could the truth about natural immunity be suppressed for so long? At least there weren’t repeated studies during our COVID hell proving the strength and durability of immunity from a prior COVID infection.

Oh, except these:

May 2021: Washington University School of Medicine study finds “robust” antibodies still present at least 11 months after infection.

June 2021: Cleveland Clinic study finds no benefit from vaccination to those with natural immunity.

July 2021: Emory University Vaccine Center study finds “durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

August 2021: Israel study finds natural immunity “confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization” than two shots of the vaccine.

But medical journals, the mainstream media and “public health authorities” dismissed the notion that a prior COVID infection served any useful purpose. Those who mentioned it were treated like flat-earthers.

Days after the Great Barrington Declaration was released, the man chosen by President Donald Trump to lead the country’s response to COVID, Anthony Fauci, and Trump’s director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, colluded to ensure there would be a “quick and devastating published takedown” of the declaration.

As we now know, Twitter dutifully shadow-banned at least one of the signatories, Jay Bhattacharya.

Governors who followed the science — as opposed to Anthony THE SCIENCE Fauci — and opened their states were ripped in deranged headlines.

— “God Save the Florida Governor From His Stupidity” — The New Republic

“Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” — The Atlantic. (President Trump also criticized the state, after a careful examination of the scientific evidence, no doubt.)

The final score on age-adjusted COVID deaths by state proves that the shutdowns accomplished absolutely nothing. Florida, for example, did way better than New York, New Jersey, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. — all top 10 “most aggressive” lockdown states. New Jersey did a lot worse than Wyoming, Kansas and Missouri, three of the least locked-down states. Whatever the explanation for the death rates — ethnicity, wealth, education, population density — it’s clearly not about how masked and locked-down a state was.

The Lancet’s long-delayed admission sent me to Nexis to review the important medical advice I’d been getting from MSNBC’s TV doctors.

— “The 11th Hour With Brian Williams,” June 7, 2020

Dr. Murtaza Akhter, clinical assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine: “Natural immunity is fine for a little bit. But that is not the way to protect yourself. The way to protect yourself from COVID is by being vaccinated and by just not getting it.”

— “All In With Chris Hayes,” Oct. 18, 2021

Dr. Syra Madad, an infectious disease epidemiologist and senior director of the Special Pathogens Program at New York Health and Hospitals system: “With natural infection … it’s like playing a game of Russian roulette. … You know, through natural infection, you’re risking a whole lot, not just yourself, but you know, for the community.”

— “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Oct. 27, 2021

Dr. Vin Gupta, NBC News medical contributor (in one of hundreds of appearances on MSNBC, I’m sure to the delight of his overworked colleagues): “People relying on natural protection, those antibodies are just not where they need to be to prevent an infection.”

— “The 11th Hour With Brian Williams,” Nov. 18, 2021

Gupta: “Natural immunity is 20% as effective at keeping you out of the hospital, in preventing serious illness. … It’s not nearly as effective as vaccine-induced immunity.”

— “The ReidOut With Joy Reid,” Jan. 10, 2022

Dr. Kavita Patel, MSNBC medical contributor: “Here’s the problem with natural immunity. It doesn’t last at the same levels forever.”

You couldn’t get the truth about a worldwide pandemic that led to catastrophic responses from public health authorities, but at least MSNBC’s doctors were “diverse”!

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

Excerpts from President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly, Feb. 21, 2023

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Excerpts from President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly, Feb. 21, 2023

From Putin’s 2-hour speech, Feb. 21, 2023. “We are not at war with the people of Ukraine. I have made that clear many times. The people of Ukraine have become hostages of the Kiev regime and its Western handlers, who have in fact occupied that country in the political, military and economic sense and have been destroying Ukrainian industry for decades now as they plundered its natural resources. …

Responsibility for inciting and escalating the Ukraine conflict as well as the sheer number of casualties lies entirely with the Western elites and, of course, today’s Kiev regime, for which the Ukrainian people are, in fact, not its own people. The current Ukrainian regime is serving not national interests, but the interests of third countries….

The Western elite make no secret of their goal, which is, I quote, “Russia’s strategic defeat.” What does this mean to us? This means they plan to finish us once and for all. In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we understand it and we will respond accordingly, because this represents an existential threat to our country…

Look what they are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages. Bless their hearts, let them do as they please. Here is what I would like to say in this regard. Adult people can do as they please. We in Russia have always seen it that way and always will: no one is going to intrude into other people’s private lives, and we are not going to do it, either. …

As I have already said, the West has opened not only military and informational warfare against us, but is also seeking to fight us on the economic front. However, they have not succeeded on any of these fronts, and never will. Moreover, those who initiated the sanctions are punishing themselves: they sent prices soaring in their own countries, destroyed jobs, forced companies to close, and caused an energy crisis, while telling their people that the Russians were to blame for all of this. We hear that….

We will continue working with our partners to create a sustainable, safe system of international settlements, which will be independent of the dollar and other Western reserve currencies that are bound to lose their universal appeal with this policy of the Western elite, the Western rulers. They are doing all this to themselves with their own hands. We are not the ones reducing transactions in dollars or other so-called universal currencies – they are doing everything with their own hands….

[Regarding Western sanctions on Russian oligarchs]: Trust me, not a single ordinary citizen in our country felt sorry for those who lost their assets in foreign banks, lost their yachts or palaces abroad, and so on. In their conversations around the kitchen table, people have all recalled the privatisation of the 1990s, when enterprises that had been built by our entire nation were sold for next to nothing and the so-called new elites flaunted their lavish lifestyle….

[Regarding ex-pat businessmen]: There is another option: to stay with your Motherland, to work for your compatriots, not only to open new businesses but also to change life around you in cities, towns and throughout your country. We have quite a few businesspeople like this, real fighters in our business community, and we associate the future of our business with them. Everyone must know that the sources of their prosperity and their future can only be here, in their native country Russia. …

Russia is an open country and at the same time, a distinct civilisation. There is no claim to exclusivity or superiority in this statement, but this civilisation of ours – that’s what matters. Our ancestors passed it to us and we must preserve it for our descendants and pass it on to them….

Step by step, they proceeded to revise the existing international order, to dismantle security and arms control systems, and plotted and carried out a series of wars around the world. To reiterate, all of that was done for the sole purpose of dismantling the post-WWII architecture of international relations. This is not a figure of speech. This is how it all unfolded in reality. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they sought to perpetuate their global dominance regardless of the interests of modern Russia or other countries for that matter. …

Now, they are using NATO to give us signals, which, in fact, is an ultimatum whereby Russia should, no questions asked, implement everything that it agreed to, including the New START Treaty, whereas they will do as they please. As if there is no connection between strategic offensive weapons and, say, the conflict in Ukraine or other hostile Western actions against our country. As if there are no vociferous claims about them seeking to inflict a strategic defeat on us. This is either the height of hypocrisy and cynicism, or the height of stupidity, but they are not idiots. They are not stupid after all. They want to inflict a strategic defeat on us and also to get to our nuclear sites. …

Their statement comes, in fact, as a request to join this process. Well, come onboard, we do not mind. Just try not to lie to everyone this time and present yourselves as champions of peace and detente. We know the truth. We are aware of the fact that certain types of US nuclear weapons are reaching the end of their service life. In this regard, we know for certain that some politicians in Washington are already pondering live nuclear tests, especially since the United States is developing innovative nuclear weapons. There is information to that effect. Given these circumstances, the Defence Ministry and Rosatom must make everything ready for Russia to conduct nuclear tests. We will not be the first to proceed with these tests, but if the United States goes ahead with them, we will as well. No one should harbour dangerous illusions that global strategic parity can be disrupted. …

Russia will meet any challenges because we are all one country, a big and united nation. We are confident in ourselves and confident in our strength. The truth is on our side. (Applause.)

Thank you.

The Anthem of the Russian Federation plays.

Nikki Haley Offers Moral Instruction to U.S.

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Nikki Haley Offers Moral Instruction to U.S.

Nikki Haley’s announcement that she was running for president reminded me of my lifelong dream to move to India, so I can boss around Indians and tell them to stop worshipping cows and rats. That was the main point of what I said on the Mark Simone radio show last week, which was promptly chopped up, fed into a computer, translated into German, then into Urdu, back to English and finally came out in endless headlines, to sound like a MAGA moron: Go back to your own country, lady! 

No, actually, I was making an obvious point I’ve been making for some time now. To wit: It’s bad enough when 11th-generation Americans disrespect our country, but enraging when recent arrivals do.

By “recent arrivals,” I mean anyone whose ancestors came to America after 1800.

At that point, America had already been around for two centuries. We had conquered a dangerous wilderness, battled savages, brought Christianity to the natives, divided ourselves into states, fought a revolution, drafted a constitution, built a capitol, established colleges and universities (including six of the seven Ivy Leagues), were about to fight a bloody Civil War to end slavery, and were well on our way to becoming the greatest nation on Earth.

Post-1800 immigrants just kind of showed up. True, many of them were better than the people who already lived here. (Especially the ones who arrived when our greeting was still, “Sink or swim!” instead of, “Here’s your welfare application.”)

Thus, a few years ago, I wrote:

MSNBC’s smirking Chris Hayes can get weepy about some ancient Roman ruin, and Rachel Maddow about a building in Warsaw, but I care about my history. These savages are smashing and graffitiing my antiquities.

No one minded that. That’s because only the most recent of recent arrivals, from the most dissonant cultures, are sacred beings to the left. (Sacred cows?) As Bill Clinton’s director of the census once said, maybe it’s about time the “Western majority” do “some assimilation of its own.”

One of those better-than-us recent arrivals was Louis Brandeis, born to Jewish immigrants from Central Europe. He went on to become a Supreme Court justice and have a university named after him.

This is what Brandeis said, in 1915, on “Americanization Day” [REPORTED TO THE AUTHORITIES] about the process of becoming an American:

However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrant even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done, will he possess the national consciousness of an American.

A big part of that “harmony” is understanding the amazing way this country dealt with the losers of our two major national conflicts: the war(s) with the Indians and the Civil War. We should be on our knees thanking God both those wars came out the way they did or, today, America would be a backward, Third World hellhole.

Both the Indians and Confederates were part of a bygone culture, mostly illiterate, and unable to manufacture anything, much less feed and clothe a transcontinental nation of more than 300 million people. Thanks to the superior culture and technology of Protestant New England and the Midwest, the Confederates and Indians never really stood a chance.

But they fought like banshees [REPORTED!], and we honor them for their breathtaking courage and nobility.

Every macho thing in America is — or was, until about five minutes ago — named after either American Indians or Confederates — e.g., the Apache and Comanche attack helicopters, the Braves, the Redskins, the Indians, Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, Fort Gordon, Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Hood, Fort Lee, Fort Pickett, Fort Polk, Fort Rucker and on and on and on.

Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman got his middle name from a Shawnee warrior chief admired by his father. Paratroopers who jumped into Normandy cut their hair to look like Mohawks and shouted “Geronimo!” as they leapt.

Sometimes, it seems like everybody in America is boasting about Indian heritage — like Elizabeth Warren — or displaying the rebel flag. See, e.g., OutKast, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” Lynyrd Skynyrd, and tiles in the Times Square subway station honoring former New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs — “a Southerner with strong ties to the Confederacy,” according to Civil War historian Dr. David Jackowe.

Sitting Bull became a celebrity, signing autographs and performing with Annie Oakley. (My direct ancestor was a stand-in for Oakley and may have performed with Sitting Bull.)

No other country’s internal wars have ever concluded this way. The usual method of ending a domestic conflict is with ceaseless guerrilla warfare and total humiliation of the defeated.

Yale professor David Blight sneers at the “Lost Cause” expression, calling it “an interpretation of the American Civil War viewed by most historians as a myth that attempts to preserve the honour of the South.”

Oh, how awful. We’d just ended a bloody Civil War with 600,000 dead … Job No. 1: Keep picking at the scab!

David Blight, marriage counselor: Every day, discuss what you hate about each other.

My ancestors were Union soldiers who fought the Confederates. My ancestors were killed by American Indians — and rescued by others! But I don’t go around whining that maybe I’d have more “generational wealth” or higher SAT scores if only we took down statues of Sitting Bull and Robert E. Lee.

Their history is my country’s history. And it’s a history to be proud of — precisely for how the losers were treated. If you don’t understand that, I don’t think you’re really trying to bring yourself into “complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations.”

Again, such ignorance is disgusting coming from Mayflower descendants. But it is beyond galling to have a second-generation immigrant like Haley sanctimoniously take down the Confederate flag, which she did as governor of South Carolina. How about going back and critiquing the Indian culture she’s constantly boasting of? You know, the country where a majority still revere cows, others worship rats, and which has more slaves today than any other nation on Earth.

Whatever else possessing “the national consciousness of an American” entails, it surely includes not being sublimely ignorant of the total awesomeness of the country you’re currently living in.

On Scottish Nationalism

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Re the Quilette article “A Demagogue Departs,” the author overlooks one reason for the success of Scottish nationalism and the Scottish Nationalist Party, to-wit: the fact is that Scottish nationalism (unlike, say, Spanish, French, German, Italian or Russian nationalism) is supported by the worst elements of the international globalist establishment.
The SNP is rumoured (probably correctly) to have enjoyed the covert support of the Soviet Union before the fall of Communism, as was the case with the IRA.
The SNP was not and is not a movement of romantic Jacobites just as the marxist IRA is not a “Catholic” movement but a marxist movement replete with its own “Republican funeral” services from which God is banned.
The SNP was run by Marxists as I witnessed several decades ago when several of its representatives paid a visit to Atlanta, Georgia, to chat up locals who think they are Scottish.  The “Bonnie Prince Charlie” fans met up instead with a set of gritty anti-monarchical Marxists, an encounter that ought to start even the most atrophied brain thinking.
The SNP is a way to undermine not only Britain at home but Anglo-Saxons (and the majority of Scots are Lowlanders who have been speaking English since the seventh or eighth centuries) everywhere.
For this reason it is adored and glowingly reported on in the pages of The NY Times.
By carrying on about now utterly irrelevant “issues” arising from things like the Battle of Culloden, the SNP has served the interests of non-European aliens by picking at the scabs of family feuds that have not the slightest relevance to the present problems facing European people in Scotland and throughout the globe.
Naturally, the enemies of our religion, race, culture and civilization would want to encourage “Scottish” Nationalism especially in the form of a party that wants to welcome Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Nigerians to Scotland but wallows in hatred of the English whom the party wants expelled.
Some “nationalism” that is!
Like most Americans whose family has been here for several centuries, I am something of a “mutt” in terms of European heritage…Scottish, English, German and French in that order.
But Scottish is my largest component by far and I grew up in the Church of Scotland.
As a bastardized child of the Diaspora I cannot speak for real present day Scots but I can speak for myself when I say that I am not keen on Scottish nationalism. Period.
I do not want to consign Milton and Shakespeare to alien status while colonizing Scotland (and America and Europe) with Third World settlers.
And I certainly wish people in the Auld Country would scorn this preposterous thing calling itself “the Scottish Nationalist Party” which is determined to replace the people of Scotland with non-European aliens.

American Krogan video series on the Visigoths and the Jews

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Magical Thinking at The New York Times

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Magical Thinking at The New York Times
Ancient primitives — or as we now call them, “Indigenous people whose land we stole” — believed in talismans, voodoo, rain dances and other versions of “A preceded B, so A caused B.” Today, we consider such reasoning classic fallacy. Except at The New York Times.

     First, you need to understand that the Times is no longer a newspaper, but more of a shaman. The paper used to report news. Anyone reading it for information these days might as well pull into a gas station and expect the nice man in a crisp white shirt to dash out and pump his gas.

     Much like a Starfish tuna factory, the news comes in, then has to be cleaned, chopped up, soaked in oil and tightly packed into a tin can. If you peered into the Times’ back room, you’d find hundreds of woke scriveners repacking the news to fit the narrative.

     Second, an urgent cleanup operation was needed to explain the paroxysm of violence that followed 2020’s anti-cop mania pushed at places like the Times. It simply could not stand to have people imagine that revering criminals while anathematizing the police would have any effect on the crime rate.

     No, that wouldn’t do. The facts had to be retrofitted into an alternative narrative. What was the best backup explanation? The pandemic!

     Attributing the massive crime wave to the pandemic solved two problems that would have arisen had the Times simply reported the facts: the upsurge in black crime, and the Times’ active encouragement of such.

     Unfortunately, doing a rain dance to bring rain is quantum mechanics compared to the Times’ cause-and-effect theory about “The Pandemic” inciting the post-George Floyd violence.

     Here are the facts.

     During the first few months of the pandemic, violent crime plummeted everywhere. You couldn’t have missed it. The Washington Post, Politico, Voice of America, Cambridge University, and on and on and on — even the Times itself! — reported that violent crime had virtually disappeared in cities around the world due to the COVID shutdowns.

     And then on May 25, a fentanyl addict with a bad ticker died in police custody in Minneapolis, whereupon the de-policing demands of Black Lives Matter swept the nation with the active encouragement of all organs of elite liberal opinion, especially the Times.

     Cops, the only people who seem to really believe “black lives matter,” risking their lives to bring safety to dangerous neighborhoods, were viciously slandered and kneecapped at every turn. Again, especially by the Times.

     You’ll never guess what happened next.

     After going into free fall during the first 10 weeks of the pandemic, homicides and aggravated assaults in the U.S. rose by about 35% from Floyd’s death to the end of June. Burglaries, mostly commercial, shot up by an eye-popping 190% the last week of May — the height of looting during the “mostly peaceful protests.”

     Other countries, also affected by the pandemic, saw no such rise in violent crime.

     During the Summer of Floyd, murders increased by 42% in the 21 largest U.S. cities. By the end of 2020, the national murder rate had increased by 30%. That’s double the next largest hike on record, in 1968, the heyday of the country’s last experiment with liberal crime policies, when the murder rate rose by a comparatively paltry 12.7%.

     Rarely has data on any change in human behavior been so clearly demarcated as it is in the crime rate pre- and post-George Floyd’s death.

     Blacks — you know, the people whose lives allegedly “matter” — bore the brunt of this orgy of violence. The CDC reports, for example, that firearm murders of Black people surged by nearly 40% in 2020, the greatest increase of any demographic group.

     It’s understandable that the very same news outlets fanning the flames of anti-police hysteria in the wake of Floyd’s martyrdom — directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Black people — would want to shift blame to “The Pandemic.” But witch doctors have more empirical evidence for their diagnoses than the Times does for its repeated pronouncements that the pandemic caused violent crime.

     At least voodoo practitioners probably believed their magical thinking. The Times’ Tourette-like hectoring about the pandemic proves the paper is lying and knows it’s lying. Nothing true needs to be endlessly repeated with such tenacity. (See also: “Climate Change.”)

     In an article this week on the skyrocketing crime on New York City subways, Times reporter Ana Ley blamed the pandemic nearly a dozen times for the explosion of violence — violence that inexplicably began 10 weeks into the pandemic, but immediately after May 25, 2020.

     E.g.:

     “… an uptick in subway crime during the pandemic …”

     “… safety concerns, which climbed among passengers during the pandemic …”

     “… safety on public transit had gotten worse since the pandemic began …”

     “… she has stopped riding the subway past 6 p.m. during the pandemic.”

     It’s as if the Times has a typewriter key “during the pandemic” that must be inserted into any sentence mentioning “crime.”

     It’s hard to make yourself stupid enough to come up with a similar post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, but how about right-wingers start attributing mass shootings to “the Clinton presidency”?

     … an uptick in mass shootings that began during the Clinton presidency …

     … mass shootings, which climbed during the Clinton presidency …

     … mass shootings have become more common since the Clinton presidency…

     … dance studio says it will reopen after 67th Clinton-era mass shooting …

     … as mass shootings continue, Hillary Clinton struggles to talk about other issues …

     At the Times, the pandemic is a sorcerer’s hex, the cause of violent crime. For unfathomable reasons, it just takes a few months to kick in. The COVID god works in mysterious ways.

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER