Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Just so you know
COVID-19: Vaccine Trials Ended
Dear Mr. Frank Wilson:
How much confidence do you have in a new product that has been tested for only a few months?
People are clamoring to get the new COVID products, including those who might have been in the placebo group in the Pfizer and Moderna trials. Now, they can get their shots because trials that were supposed to continue for two years are being terminated prematurely.
As Shannon Brownlee, a lecturer at George Washington University School of Public Health, and Jeanne Lenzer, author of The Danger Within Us: America's Untested, Unregulated Medical Device Industry and One Man's Battle to Survive It, point out, “Many vaccines, along with drugs and medical devices, look ‘miraculous’ at first—only to turn out to be less so as more data comes in.”
The possibility that the FDA might fail to insist on further testing once vaccines were marketed was pointed out in September by Howard Bauchner, M.D., editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). “Prematurely approving a vaccine could undermine Covid-19 vaccine efforts and erode confidence in vaccines more generally.”
Vaccine adverse effects are tracked by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), but reporting is voluntary and incomplete. And without a controlled trial, it is hard to determine whether the vaccine caused the effect.
More than a dozen countries, mostly in Europe, temporarily halted the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine because of reports of serious or deadly bleeding or blood clotting problems, but then restarted them after the European regulatory agency declared the product safe. It was not clear that the rate of post-vaccine problems was greater than the background rate.
But on Mar 31, Germany suspended the product in persons under the age of 60 due to renewed concerns. The regulatory agency found 31 cases of rare blood clots in veins draining the brain (cerebral venous sinus thrombosis).
While the demand for vaccines is high overall, there is also considerable resistance, especially in health workers. In Switzerland, at most half of health workers were willing to get inoculated. In Germany, a survey by a care home operator found that only 30% wanted to get vaccinated. Half of French workers say they will resist.
French hospitals had to slow the rollout because 25 percent of workers were too sick to work for a time after the injections.
As trust diminishes, more coercive measures are being used to get people to take the jabs.
For information on prevention and early treatment protocols, see c19protocols.com.
Jane M. Orient, M.D.
Executive Director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
Hmm …
‘Twas ever thus …
Q&A …
The icon is highly symbolic, a grace, and a unique kind of sacramental, not just an art-form. Icons are never purely naturalistic, but are a place of prayerful encounter with the “prototypes,” the Lord and the saints the images portray. Learning to paint them according to the strict canon of traditional iconography was a path of submission that led to new vistas of freedom, both spiritually and artistically — one might say a “narrow gate.” It was one of the greatest teachers of my life.
Something to think on …
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Another challenge to the current orthodoxy …
Trust me, this is only the beginning. Anybody who knows how to report has known this from the start (by doing a little reporting).
These times …
All that happens now is an ignorant 'parroting' of the superficial forms of brain-thinking - such as managerialist flow-charts and checklists - whose application is rigid but whose content is increasingly arbitrary and incoherent.
The sooner the better …
… the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, who killed 13; the Boston Marathon bombers of 2013 who killed three and injured 264; and the Pulse nightclub shooter who killed 49 people and wounded 53 more. All were known to the FBI and several had been interviewed by the FBI before they went on killing sprees.
In case you wondered …
In a Dec 8 submission to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), pediatric rheumatologist J. Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D., expressed concern that mRNA products, through spike proteins, have “the potential to cause microvascular injury [inflammation and small blood clots called microthrombi] to the brain, heart, liver and kidneys in ways that were not assessed in the safety trials.”
The question of depression …
One of the problems of depression as an object of study is that there are no clear-cut biological markers to distinguish cases from non-cases. Some endocrinological conditions mimic depression, and some medications undoubtedly cause it. In the great majority of cases, however, there are no measurable bodily changes, except those brought about by the symptoms themselves: in depression, symptoms and disease are one, at least in the present state of knowledge.
In time for Easter …
Something to think on …
Monday, March 29, 2021
This will disappoint many …
How about that …
How dare they not listen to the redoubtable Dr. Fauci.
Something to think on …
Beguiling remnants …
Beauty and Truth present themselves to us in fragments, not all at once in a seamless web. If such a seamless web exists, it is beyond our ken in this World. Now and then we glimpse scattered threads, or what might be emerging patterns.
About time …
Practically nothing of what you have advised and predicted for the Middle East in the last 30 years has ever happened. You have always written the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
Sunday, March 28, 2021
Where we find ourselves just now …
… the “dictatorship of woke capital” is not inevitable. The book’s title is in fact taken from the title the editors of the journal First Things gave to a powerful speech that Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton gave in June 2019. “As liberal activists have lost control of the judiciary, they have turned to a different hub of power,” Cotton said. In a democracy, we resolve our differences through democratic debate; “what should never happen is a billion-dollar corporation trying to dictate these moral questions to us.” America has awakened, finally, to what the woke are doing.
Something to think on …
Saturday, March 27, 2021
An agrarian uprising …
The seditious Sooners intend to throw a monkey wrench into the war machine. They plan to gather at the farm of “Old Man” Spears, a local Socialist and son of a Confederate veteran, where they will commence a long march eastward, subsisting on green corn and picking up rebellion-minded farmers as they go. When this agrarian army arrives in Washington, they will depose “Kaiser Wilson” and call the boys home.
Imagine that …
Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively
Something to think on …
Friday, March 26, 2021
The view from Britain …
It’s true, Biden managed not to fall off the dais, or go completely blank, or fall over his dog. It’s true, he matched the topics on his cue cards to the subjects of the questions. But this press conference was nerve-wracking and enervating to watch. It’s obvious that Biden’s mind often has no idea what his mouth is saying. This press conference was supposed to dampen concerns about his mental acuity. Instead it confirmed that Biden is too old and complacent for the scale of the task
Just so you know …
Never apologize, don’t act afraid, and, to borrow a phrase from Obama, “punch back twice as hard.” Call the mob out for what it is: a bunch of bad people trying to pretend they stand for something moral. Going after people for their political views this way isn’t an act of morality. It’s an attempt at political terrorism, and it’s un-American
In case you wondered …
The essence of finding pleasure in art poetry is paying attention to language in a new way. In daily talk and in most writing, words are used to convey information: you’re not supposed to pay attention to the words themselves but to the message they deliver. The ultimate example is a stop sign, where the meaning resides just as much in the red octagon as in the word “stop.” A driver isn’t meant to read the word at all, just reflexively put a foot on the brake.
Something to think on …
Thursday, March 25, 2021
Hmm …
Be careful, true believers.
Odd couple …
Not to put too fine a point on it, he was more accomplished than the person writing these words. To those few who knew us both, we presented a curious juxtaposition. But it wasn’t simply a matter of opposites’ attracting, although I think we both enjoyed the weak gravitational force between us. Where he was calm, I was quick to anger. Where he enjoyed prestige, I eschewed the institutions necessary to attain it. Where I reacted hotly to people and their behavior, he concluded that “resentment is a form of ego I detest.” And I believe it was my unsettled state that drew me to him and, in a strange way, him to me. Even a malcontent can come in handy.
Something to think on …
An odd biography …
… the author has chosen to write his subject’s biography backwards, from maturity to infancy. Perhaps he took the idea from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”(Fitzgerald in turn may have had it from Eden Philpotts’s novel A Deal with the Devil), or perhaps he wanted to shake the complacency of those of us who still think we live in a Newtonian universe and for whom time remains an absolute measure, an inexorable, unidirectional forward march of events. Be that as it may, as a biographical device I found it distracting rather than illuminating. It makes for a jerky rather than a smooth narrative, placing an unnecessary strain on the reader’s mind, for each chapter oscillates backwards and forwards so that one is often not quite sure of the temporal relation of what is being discussed to what one has already read and to what is to come. A more conventional approach, beginning with birth and ending with death, would have been better; sometimes convention is superior to originality or eccentricity.
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Blogging note …
I am at Jefferson Sports Medicine awaiting some cortisone shots for my knees. Blogging will resume later today.
Questioning the party line …
… the spike proteins studding SARS-CoV-2 bound more tightly to their human cell receptor, a protein called ACE2, than target receptors on any other species evaluated. In other words, SARS-CoV-2 was surprisingly well adapted to its human prey, which is unusual for a newly emerging pathogen. “Holy shit, that’s really weird,’” Petrovsky recalls thinking.
Something to think on …
RIP …
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Appreciation …
… after exploding onto the world stage at such a tender age, Friedlander was gone from the pages of his own creation by the age of 25, drifting out of sight, then in and out of mental institutions. Only decades later did his own magazine track him down and reconnect; by then he had just months to live.
Something to think on …
Contemporary discourse …
… subscriber-based platforms like Patreon and Substack allowed for some cast-offs to build new careers as independents. For a long time, this was a small enough group that few noticed or cared.Now, however, these second acts are prompting a backlash. What’s the point of canceling someone, if they don’t stay canceled? Why consign someone to purgatory if they can make a living there?
Monday, March 22, 2021
Hardly surprising …
This morning, however, the Inquirer committed a few new crimes against journalism. First, they printed a story that said the district attorney's office was withdrawing three sexual assault charges against Carl Holmes, a former chief inspector in the police department.But in reporting that news, the Inquirer deliberately omitted the main reason why Common Pleas Court Judge Karen Simmons tossed those charges -- on Jan. 7th, the judge caught Assistant District Attorney Rachel Black lying about an alleged victim's availability to appear in court.
Hmm …
Something to think on …
Nice to know …
A century-and-a-half after the Civil War, the Society of Jesus has acknowledged the justice of specific reparations owed to the five thousand or so living descendants of the Black people the Jesuits once owned, an enterprise they had engaged in for more than a century. With a “down payment” of $15 million, the Jesuits have pledged to raise $100 million in private donations (not taxpayer funds).[2] What follows is an edited excerpt from “Lock(e), Stock and Jesuit,” Chapter 29 of my Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic.
The new class …
The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates.
Q&A …
Veteran journalist and New York Times best-selling author Mark Harris spent a number of years (and conducted more than 250 interviews) putting together a substantial new biography of Nichols called Mike Nichols: A Life. The book is a testament to the enduring power of a man who could seemingly always find an audience willing to listen to what he had to say — and to the endurance of a biographer who has adeptly helped us understand and appreciate Nichols for the complicated genius he was.
Sunday, March 21, 2021
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord …
A sad tale …
Three months before Waugh’s death Cardinal Heenan, having returned from Rome, reassured Waugh that things were not so bad as they seemed. Waugh replied politely to Heenan’s brief letter, but wrote to Lady Diana Mosley: “I have become very old in the last two years. Not diseased, but enfeebled. There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me.” Ten days before his death, Waugh wrote again to Lady Mosley: “Easter used to mean so much to me before Pope John and his Council – they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy. I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the faith doggedly without joy.”
Not to be overlooked …
He was a statesman, not an ideologue. His beliefs were shaped by his experiences as a lawyer, a small-town mayor, a state senator, a governor, and a vice president. It is not an abstract belief system that motivated Coolidge, but wisdom gained through the practice of political life. Well-known for his reluctance to bloviate, “Silent Cal” was nonetheless a well-regarded speaker in his day. He took to the new medium of radio with gusto; a book of his speeches bolstered his reputation when he was governor of Massachusetts.
Something to think on …
Saturday, March 20, 2021
Dana Gioia talks about poetry …
Appreciation …
Progress, Chesterton pointed out, isn’t anything. You can’t be for progress unless you’ve defined the thing towards which you are progressing. Otherwise progress is simply a comparative for which we have not established the superlative. The Progressives, according to Chesterton, were only interested in “going on towards going on.” Their notion of progress was based on a rejection of the past, a hatred of history, and a breaking of the commandment that tells us to honor our father and mother. Tradition means giving a vote to our ancestors. It is, Chesterton said, “the democracy of the dead.” Letting our ancestors have a vote is only common sense, whereas voting on behalf of our ancestors is election fraud.
A worthy cause …
If craft without inspiration avails little, inspiration without craft avails even less. Ultimately the failure of craft, apart from the question of sheer inability, is a matter of laziness, of a reluctance to sacrifice for excellence, of a preference, in in the end, for sin.
RIP …
Esteemed editor, publisher, education reformer, and founder of Cricket magazine Marianne Carus died on March 3 at her home in Peru, Ill. She was 92.
Something to think on …
Very interesting …
On the surface, there is nothing much to get excited, or confused about, yet. However, when you start looking a little more closely, you begin to notice stranger things.
Friday, March 19, 2021
In case you wondered …
It is a jewel, one that takes seriously the BBC’s founding mission ‘to inform, educate and entertain’, while simultaneously giving lie to the idea that this is at all difficult. Making intelligent radio is as simple as letting people say intelligent things. Along with Bragg’s not-quite-gruff, economical style, the key ingredient is the extent to which he and his producers trust their audience. In turn, the show’s enormous audience have repaid this trust by making it one of BBC Radio 4’s most well-loved and long-running features.
Something to think on …
Thursday, March 18, 2021
These times …
Getting to know him …
Ben Jonson, an edition of whose poems Gunn once edited, is an important figure here: Nott quotes Gunn saying that people have ‘difficulty with my poetry … in locating the central voice or central personality. But I’m not aiming for central voice and I’m not aiming for central personality. I want to be an Elizabethan poet. I want to write with the same anonymity you get in the Elizabethans.’ Nott suggests that we get a ‘staging’ of Gunn’s personality in these letters, a tailoring of voice to recipient. That certainly feels right, though it feels too as though the life and personality come through in the letters in a way they don’t in his poetry, particularly the earlier work.
Some useful context …
'It is not clear what legal changes could remedy this. But what is clear is that our nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of antitrust, the public square, state power, and the free market are presently incapable of cabining corporate forces that are hostile to the perpetuation of a free society.
Cause for concern at least …
… the technology is not what most folks think it is. It does not work like a simple vaccine. And that difference could make a difference. How big? Very; extremely:
[I]t’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine how the consequences of the extensive and erroneous human intervention in this pandemic are not going to wipe out large parts of our human population.
Something to think on …
Q&A …
There is also the Buckley who was the peerless discoverer of talent. Garry Wills is one. George Will is another. My predecessor at the New York Times Book Review, John Leonard, was a third — who was a superb literary journalist and really the best editor by far in the history of the New York Times Book Review. And I feel I’m qualified to say that because I had the same job. But a brilliant writer and critic. And when Bill hired him, he was 19 years old. He was a Harvard dropout.
Getting his due …
Written by Neal Cassady in 1950 and lost for 60 years, The Joan Anderson Letter was indeed considered a holy relic of the Beat Generation, and a Rosetta stone document that would show how Cassady’s writing directly influenced Jack Kerouac’s style and direction in life. Which is to say that without this document, On The Road might never have been written, and without Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac might have written In My Room, instead of setting the literary world on fire.
Appreciation …
It should be noted that these songs weren’t just old chestnuts picked for a theme album. These were tunes Willie had grown up with. As a child in Abbott, he heard the full spectrum of American popular song from his household’s Philco radio, which could pick up faraway stations. Night after night, he listened and learned. He heard Armstrong and Ellington out of WLS, in Chicago. He enjoyed the more countrified sounds of KWKH, in Shreveport (the station that later helped launch Elvis to fame). In 1943, when Willie was only ten, he was already admiring Sinatra, who performed on CBS Radio’s Your Hit Parade and impressed the youngster with his phrasing. In his teen years he listened to XERF, a powerhouse station operating by its own rules across the border in Mexico, that played everything from gospel to hillbilly tunes. Along the way, Willie also picked up jazz style points frobm a range of other performers, people like Crosby and Django Reinhardt.