Globally speaking, the India variant wave appears already to have peaked both in respect of cases/million and deaths/million

It also looks as if the India variant has been not only less deadly, but less infectious as well, not more as most experts had been saying.

The January outbreak remains the dominant one of all the waves so far as to cases, but as to deaths we are clearly seeing a step down in severity.

I'm sure vaccine advocates will chalk it all up to the success of the vaccines, ignoring that the latest wave began on the first day of summer, fully six months into the mass vaccination effort, which most certainly did not prevent infection and transmission as the US CDC continues to say to this day. Pointing this out on Twitter a few days ago got Alex Berenson finally and permanently banned.

The Vaccine Church wants to credit the dramatic decline in cases since January to the vaccines, but refuses to own the wave of July and August. Instead it blames the unvaccinated at the same time it admits that vaccinated people get infected and spread the disease, as was proven by the dramatic Provincetown, Massachusetts, incident. Conveniently for the investors in big pharma, the CDC doesn't count breakthrough cases unless they end up in hospital or die, excluding from the statistics an entire class of superspreaders. There are literally hundreds of millions of them.

Meanwhile as to deaths few will consider that the easy fruit had already been harvested by the Grim Reaper before the India variant even arrived, that as to cases prior infection immunized millions while millions more who were vaccinated relaxed masking and social distancing, with official encouragement, spreading the virus.

There is also the simple fact of seasonality, which may loom larger than we know.

No one can really say.

There isn't just one variable to blame or credit, but that is what tired, frightened, small, greedy, and often hysterical minds end up doing.

It's human nature.

The virus may or may not peter out, but we'll always have human nature.

 

 

Run for your lives: It's Charles Murray who is having the identity crisis, not America

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America:

The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

More. 

What's unnatural is Murray's perennial insistence that America was not a real nation where Englishmen revolted because they were denied their "chartered rights", who hoped to secure that nation "to ourselves and our posterity" as our Constitution says. Whether one believes their claim was legitimate or not is irrelevant to the history. An America populated as a nation by Englishmen who made that argument is a fact and shows they were a nation in their own minds, and nothing the left libertarians can say will ever change that, try as they may.

That opening sentence simply begs the question. You are asked to believe something else, that the first Americans didn't actually behave as a tribe whose members were loyal to each other and didn't already have a long history together before 1776. Which of course is ridiculous.

The violence done to this original American idea by libertarians, Lincoln and his worshippers, liberals, leftists, and other assorted lunatics is what is unnatural. It's they who have the identity crisis. They don't fit in here because our institutions survive from the founding and constantly remind them that they are misfits. They represent the foreign element, and usually are the main advocates for increasing the foreign element.

Instead give me millions upon millions of Italian Americans like Antonin Scalia who bowed to America as an Anglo Saxon nation, instead of this horde of harpies for every heresy.

Joe Biden, the Puritan Catholic, is as bad as the libertarian Justin Amash ever was, making the perfect the enemy of the good, but sillier

President Biden: "Every Time We Let Hate Flourish, We Make A Lie Of Who We Are As A Nation"

"We're the United States of America. We're unique among all nations. We are uniquely a product of a document. Not an ethnicity, not a religion, not a geography, of a document," President Biden says. "Every time we're silent, every time we let hate flourish, we make a lie of who we are as a nation. I mean it literally. We can not let the very foundation of this country continue to be eaten away."

This stupid, futile hate crime business was started by George H. W. Bush.

You might as well outlaw human nature and roll out the guillotines.

Hair on fire fundamentalism about the Declaration of Independence is no different than about the Constitution. The only thing Joe Biden is proving is that the left has its own strutting American exceptionalist fool, too.

"Somebody, somewhere had a bad thought. America is finished!"

The entire Democrat Party is in revolt against human nature

Well then, the next logical step is for them to commit mass suicide.

Libertarian upset with all the stupid opinions spawned by human nature

The libertarian mistake begins with a mistaken view of human nature: You were born a blank slate, and you can erase your slate anytime you choose and start over

Peggy Noonan is blind about conservatism

Republicans Need to Save Capitalism:

I’ll go whole hog here. We need a cleaned-up capitalism, not a weary, sighing, acceptance-of-man’s-fallen-nature capitalism.

Weary sighing acceptance? Try the eager jubilant over being given free reign to exploit man's fallen nature capitalism.

Reagan "conservatives" preached that the Reagan tax cuts and free-trade would usher in a period of investment at home, in a word, that if you just let people have more of their own money they'd know what to do with it and they would do the right thing.

They didn't.

"Conservatives" exported our jobs and invested abroad, creating middle classes in poor countries where there were none before, at the expense of the middle class at home. They drove the opening to China, enriched it and created a monster which now robs us blind and threatens world peace. The libertarians have sold China the rope the communists hope to hang us with.

If Republicans and conservatives had properly understood human nature they wouldn't have made this mistake. The doctrinaire among them showed themselves to be liberals, not conservatives, possessed of a foolish optimism based on the idea that people are basically good. They are not. People do what's best for number one, as they always have. Screw thy neighbor, and thy country if necessary. Are we not a nation of immigrants?

Only conservatism with its roots in the transcendent moral order has been able to curb this false individualism and mistaken enthusiasm. Both were routinely attacked in church in former days, but nobody seems to go there anymore, and when they do go the preacher turns out to have joined the wrong side.

The "conservative" rubes out there still believe this stupid myth of libertarianism, while the billionaire class of both parties which got rich off it only hopes they continue to do so.

They care about nothing but themselves and their right to privacy, the penumbra of our collective deviancy.

Like all liberals, Beto O'Rourke is mistaken about human nature

Beto O'Rourke's immigration plan: No wall but no specifics:

"I trust the wisdom of people. And I'm confident - especially after having traveled Texas for two years - people are good, fundamentally, and if given the choice to do the right thing, they will. To do the good thing, they will," he said, referring to his unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign while giving a walking tour of El Paso and its Mexican sister city, Juarez.

People are not fundamentally good. Nor are they basically evil. Human nature is irreducibly mixed. If people were fundamentally good we wouldn't need laws or government at all, or lawyers, judges, courts and prisons. If they were basically evil the possibility that is America never would have presented itself to history, and monarchy would still be called for. America is the gift of English dissenting Protestantism.

All our political problems remain spiritual ones. There is no freedom without self-control.

Much smaller than first thought to be, the gig economy lies prostrate before the great wall of state capitalism

"The Gig Economy Increasingly Defines Late-Stage Capitalism

Annie Lowrey, Atlantic" is how Real Clear Markets links to:

The Truth About the Gig Economy

Uber and similar companies aren’t driving huge changes in the way that Americans make a living.

Real Clear Markets' libertarian headline writer completely missed the point of the article, which is that the gig economy is as much as 80% smaller than we first thought. A capitalism disintegrating into a chaos of millions of small holders in risky circumstances, careening into the ditch, is a complete myth. The leftists who still long for this resemble no one so much as the Christian millenarians.

Clearly Marxism-light thoroughly infects economic thinking at the popular level in more places than just The Atlantic, blinding us to where we really are, which is in the golden age of fascism. Here tax reform for the individual is an afterthought, a necessary piece of propaganda in the big scheme of things having to do with state capitalism and its myriad forms of corporate welfare. What really matters is the relationship between government and business, protecting their mutual interests.

The West's version is little different from China's. China exercises top down control through the corrupt Communist Party, but we increasingly have the same thing from the bottom up through the unjust hand of Political Correctness, populated through the right schools and the revolving door of Washington where the regulators become the richly rewarded regulated.

The extension and consolidation of control by this globalist fascist system since the Reagan Revolution is responsible for all the failure lately attributed to capitalism by the coddled generations of children of the post-war Baby Boom. It couldn't be otherwise in a world where everything has been organized to feed the corporation through the glorification of the job. You must go to school, you must get good grades, you must get a college degree in order to get hired, you'll need loans to make this happen, and for the car to get to work, and good credit, and . . .. And then they've got you. It's called preying on human nature.

The declarations of independence of our former youth often used to take the form of getting out of Dodge as soon as they turned eighteen. Now those declarations are a mere shadow of their former selves, taking the form of tattoos on that creature that still lives in your basement in his twenties . . . or thirties.

The risk-taking of capitalism has been expunged, and the consequences of rebelling against the new rigidity have been amplified. Stenosis has set in, and if the barbarians finally do overtake us they will find that the bones break easily.     

Bush 41's Americans with Disabilities Act has made the Social Security disability insurance trust fund nearly insolvent because no one ever imagined people would milk it

Contrary to critical analysis, Bush 41 did have a vision thing, it was just a mistaken vision.

He imagined a kinder gentler America full of kinder gentler people, at the expense of a sober estimation of human nature which recognized and reckoned with the baser instincts residing in every human heart.

Conservatives are supposed to specialize in that, but Bush 41 did not.

This mistaken example of liberalism wasn't just a one-off, either. The lack of sobriety extended also to his hate crime legislation.

Bush 41 imagined you could eradicate hate by criminalizing it, as if America ought to become a theocracy with "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer" becoming the law of the land. But who doesn't kill except out of hate? "Nothing personal, just business" is for the movies, not reality. It's as if long established laws differentiating involuntary manslaughter from murder never existed. Now the damn idea has metastasized into the force which is at the heart of America's perilous polarization, and its insanity. We aren't allowed to hate anything except the haters, while entertaining our hate secretly all the while. Enter cognitive dissonance on a national scale. Everyone knows the truth, they just can't say it.

So they're saying Bush 41 was a patrician as they bury him today. Puritan was more like it.

The Price of the Americans with Disabilities Act:

No one expected that more Americans with disabilities would be dependent on government 25 years later, but that’s what has happened. ...

The ADA made no change to Social Security, yet there has been a substantial increase in the number of people who saw the offered hand described by President Bush bearing a monthly check.

The number of workers who receive Social Security disability-insurance payments has almost tripled. At the end of 2014, 9 million workers had a disability award that entitled them and their dependents to a monthly government check. This was a 197 percent increase over the 1990 number; over the same period the working-age population had increased by only 29 percent.

The disability path out of the labor market has become much more inviting since the ADA became law. More claims point to pain and other conditions whose diagnoses largely rely on patients’ subjective experiences rather than the self-evident disabilities of those who have appeared in coverage of the ADA’s 25th.

Jessica Valenti: The snowflake/safe-space phenomenon is all the fault of feminism

And darn it, it just hasn't spread far enough.

The tantrum against intractable human nature continues.

Here:

One of feminism’s biggest successes was creating an alternative culture for girls and women seeking respite from mainstream constraints. Girls worried about unrealistic beauty standards, for example, can turn to the body positivity movement. Those of us who find traditional media’s treatment of women unappealing can read feminist blogs and magazines; female college students who have critical questions about how gender shapes their lives can take women’s studies classes.

From social media campaigns to after-school equality clubs, feminism has birthed dozens of online and real-life spaces where girls can find alternatives to the sexist status quo.

But boys and young men who are struggling have no equivalent culture.

Chicoms admit human nature is evil, justifying imposition of tyrannical "social credit system" modeled on FICO

Apparently the model is the US FICO credit scoring system, except a low score on the Chinese version really emphasizes the socialism, meaning the State won't just stop you from getting a loan to buy a car or house, it will prohibit you from simply traveling, as a form of punishment. Socialism, you see, aims to be all-encompassing, a secular form of Puritanism.

From the propaganda source itself, globaltimes dot cn, here:

In 2014, China released an outline for building a government-led national social credit system, pledging to establish a set of laws and regulations regarding social credit, a credit reference system that covers the whole of society and a related reward and punishment system by 2020. Whether people have ridden the train without tickets, violated traffic laws, conducted heroic acts or performed exemplary acts are rated and the score plays a part in their life, determining whether he or she can buy a plane ticket, secure a loan etc.

In today's Chinese society, trustworthiness is not highly honored. That's why we see corruption, expired vaccines, commercial fraud, tax dodging and academic cheating from time to time. Take the arson case in Hangzhou last year. A nanny started a fire that killed a mother and her three children: She was in huge debt and starving for more money from her wealthy employer. It was a tragedy caused by the lack of a credit ranking system.

Slate takes The Atlantic to task for not taking the 1% seriously enough

Here in "Actually, the 1 Percent Are Still The Problem".

Actually, the Reagan 1986 tax reform was the problem, but Jordan Weissmann never mentions it.

This despite his wonderful graph of the top 10% over time showing the 1% take-off after the reform. When it becomes easier for the already rich to take high incomes the ordinary way, like everyone else, because of low top marginal rates, less money ends up getting plowed back into productive purposes like it used to before 1986.

We keep believing the myth that "the rich are different than you and me", but they're not. They're as indolent, undisciplined and blinkered as any middle class family leveraged to the hilt which believes it deserves a house a little larger than it can afford, two car payments, the weekly fine dinner out and the expensive annual winter vacation.

The 1% aren't the problem. You will have them always with you, by definition. The problem is human nature, and government's failure to correct for it.

Say what you will about "Christian" belief, previously it at least curbed the 1%'s enthusiasm, with the stick of high marginal income tax rates and the carrot of low long term capital gains taxes.

A Massachusetts liberal for The Atlantic vaguely realizes that the wealthy have withdrawn their money from productive purposes

In other words, they've behaved like ordinary people behave, as in badly.

This was first made possible in America broadly by the Kennedy and then the Reagan tax cuts (Irish anyone?), which took away the high-taxation-goad that prodded income into productive investments which in turn benefited more people, but this never occurs to the author, here:

[A]round the world and throughout history, the wealthy have advanced the crystallization process in a straightforward way. They have taken their money out of productive activities and put it into walls.

The whole point of conservatism has been that human nature is mixed, so that "class" is mostly irrelevant. The author, however, is preoccupied with it, especially the "New American Aristocracy", which means he's a liberal who is (mostly) convinced some people are more equal than others for various reasons, which he goes to great, and sometimes convincing, lengths to demonstrate, and criticize.

That's a start.

Conservatives answer that good people and bad people populate the whole at every level, and that everyone has a little bit of each in them at the same time. Conservatives also believe that good government is government which encourages the good in everyone and discourages the evil. Bad government denies that this is government's responsibility at all, or it denies that one of these two irreducible facts of life is a fact so that you get liberal government which lets people run amok or tyrannical government which is too restrictive.

The author's answer is more equality when understanding how we all already are equally good and evil would be better. It's the peculiar blind spot of liberalism, the analogue of which in conservatism is failing to see the good in people:

But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into. The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.

Three salvos this morning in the libertarian war against homeownership: Fortunately human nature is stronger

John O'Sullivan: Rubio is the poster boy for the liberal immigration policies which Trump launched his campaign to oppose

Green card holder John O'Sullivan at National Review prefers Trump to the ever mendacious Marco Rubio, here:

[N]one of the three leading Republicans have been exactly models of truth-telling in this campaign. So the relevant question then becomes “Compared with whom?” Let’s compare Trump’s boastful and evasive untruths with the very different lies of Marco Rubio on various immigration bills he has tried to sell to conservatives (as detailed by John Fonte on NRO on Wednesday.) These amounted to a long campaign of deliberate mendacity intended to deceive allies on a matter of the greatest public interest so that they would unknowingly support what they really oppose.

O'Sullivan correctly acknowledges that Trump's is a non-ideological conservatism which is widely shared among Americans:

Conservatives in practice accept that their realism about human nature shouldn’t (or can’t) stop at the door of the voting booth. What there is of Trump’s conservatism seems to be of that kind. And that seems also to be true of “ordinary” conservatives outside Washington, as several writers such as Rod Dreher have pointed out. They tend not to have highly consistent ideologies but to tolerate contradictions within a broadly conservative outlook. One very likely effect of a GOP conservatism influenced by Trumpery, therefore, is that it will remain conservative but in a less consistently ideological way. It is likely to be more spasmodically interventionist in economic policy, more concerned with directly protecting the interests of Americans (and especially the voting groups who have surged up to back Trump), more anxious about how to solve the problems identified by Charles Murray in Fishtown without spending too much more on them, more protective of entitlements, and more loudly patriotic in general. As a fully paid-up Thatcherite, I will find a lot of this irksome and mistaken. It will remind me of the pre-Thatcher Tory party and its bumbling resistance to economic rationality. And I’m beginning to feel grouchily that I want to hear a little less about American exceptionalism until the U.S. manages not to lose a war. 

Warren Buffett, the king of contraception funding, thinks women waste their brains having children

Two peas in a pod dedicated to deciding against life.

If you want to know why America is dying, look no further than Warren Buffett, a man at war with human nature, who frankly doesn't care that without fertility there will be no one left to consume.

From the story in Bloomberg, here:

“Buffett alone will give more than all of the other foundations combined in reproductive health,” she said. “We already are this year [2008], and that will continue.” [Judith] DeSarno declined to comment for this article, other than to say, “I am incredibly proud of this work and the dramatic decrease in unintended pregnancies.” ...

Quietly, steadily, the Buffett family is funding the biggest shift in birth control in a generation. “For Warren, it’s economic. He thinks that unless women can control their fertility—and that it’s basically their right to control their fertility—that you are sort of wasting more than half of the brainpower in the United States,” DeSarno said about Buffett’s funding of reproductive health in the 2008 interview. “Well, not just the United States. Worldwide.” ...

In the 1960s, the [Buffetts] set up what was then called the Buffett Foundation, which focused on nuclear disarmament and reproductive health, including helping to fund Planned Parenthood as well as the development of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill. In the late ’70s, the duo entered into an unusual arrangement—they remained married, but Susan moved to San Francisco. 

You can blame The Greatest Generation for same sex marriage

From Joel Miller, here:

'The values changed all the way back in the forties and fifties. In that sense, the gay marriage battle was already over when Eisenhower was in the White House. How so?

'[Historian Alan] Petigny describes what he calls the Permissive Turn, a liberalization of values that happened following World War II. Some of it came down to a “renunciation of renunciation.” The war had demanded a great deal of austerity and self-sacrifice. But with Germany and Japan subdued, it was time to live it up. Americans plowed their prosperity into material self-gratification. But there was more.

'At the same time, the culture witnessed a shift in the way we viewed human nature. We swapped the traditional American view, grounded in a certain pessimism inherited from the Protestant understanding of original sin, for the newly refurbished and Americanized psychotherapy. ... Religion, morality, even reality were now questions of self-fulfillment—making truth subjective and traditional truth claims irrelevant and meaningless.'

What unites some Christians and libertarians is radically unconservative: belief in human change for the better

Here's Christian libertarian economist David Brat, Cantor-killer:

"Preach the gospel and change hearts and souls. If we make all of the people good, markets will be good. Markets are made up of people. Supply and Demand are curves, but they are also people. Nothing else. If markets are bad, which they are, that means people are bad, which they are. Want good markets? Change the people. If there are not nervous twitches in the pews when we preach, then we are not doing our jobs."

--------------------------------------------------------

Conservatives generally haven't believed human nature changes for the better, but it is central to the Catholic doctrine of grace that grace infuses the baptized and changes them, and the belief is central also to the doctrine of some protestants.

These were called Schwaermer by Luther, "enthusiasts".

In politics we called them ideologues.

Dennis Prager: Everything In Conservatism Follows From The Belief That People Are Not Basically Good

Dennis Prager, quoted here:

Prager, a practicing Jew who, in addition to hosting a radio show, is a syndicated columnist and author, responded by suggesting several ways in which "this country is changing," each of which he tied to the loss of belief in a transcendent God or moral standard. Prager specifically noted a "loss of meaning" and a loss of objective morality.

"We live in the age of feelings," Prager said, citing abortion rights as the greatest example of individual feelings guiding contemporary morality. The unborn child's worth is "entirely dictated by the feelings of the mother. It is an unbelievable statement of narcissism, which is what happens when there is no transcendent morality," he said.

Extending his theological argument, Prager pointed to assumptions about the nature of humanity as the fundamental dividing line between liberals and conservatives today.

"Everything in leftism [both religious and political liberalism] follows from the belief that people are basically good," Prager said. "And everything in conservatism follows from the belief that people are not basically good. Judaism and Christianity were united in teaching that people were not basically good. With the death of traditional Judaism and traditional Christianity, you have the unbelievably dangerous belief that people are basically good, and everything flows from there to big government to believing that your opinion is what makes things moral. And that's where we now stand."