1. Omicron is 70x as infectious as delta, which was twice as infectious as the original variant. 2. Omicron is resulting in 10x fewer hospitalizations than prior waves in S. Africa. 3. Conclusion A: Everyone will get Omicron. Get used to it.
4. Conclusion B: Your chances of dying are minimal, and much lower than if you had delta. Those chances are striated based on age. 5. Conclusion C: Overall number of deaths will be higher than right now solely because number of infections will be larger.
6. Conclusion D: Vaccine passports will not do anything, because vaccines are not preventing infection at a high enough rate. 7. Conclusion E: There is no data that masks short of KN-95s did anything about Delta, so they'll do even less against Omicron.
8. Conclusion F: You're going to have a tough time convincing people to get vaccinated because of Omicron. If they weren't afraid of delta, which is more deadly, they're highly unlikely to be persuaded by Omicron, which is far less deadly.
9. Final conclusion: All the measures currently being suggested by the covid panic crowd are completely untethered from the realities of Omicron risk and infectiousness.
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This, from David Brooks' much-ballyhooed essay on conservatism, is absolutely absurd.
1. Statism is deeply related to social decay. To posit a dichotomy between the two problems is to absolutely misapprehend the nature of conservatism, to botch the relationship between community and liberty.
2. If you are deeply concerned about social decay, positing that the Democratic Party is the solution is patently insane. That party currently denies basic biological reality, promotes racial essentialism, destroys national unity by undermining our history and philosophy...
This article from Elizabeth Spiers in the NYT is true, bats*** lunacy. Let us examine the ways. nytimes.com/2021/12/03/opi…
1. Bearing a child and giving it up for adoption is significantly less difficult, expensive, dangerous and potentially traumatic for the child than, you know, stabbing it in the head and sucking it into a sink.
2. Adoption is often a pretty good thing, as the author acknowledges. But wait...she'll buy it back momentarily.
If the defendants in the Arbery case are acquitted, the media will, of course, blame racism. The reality is more complex. The case is about whether the defendants had probable cause to believe Arbery was committing a felony when they tried to effectuate a citizen's arrest.
If they did not, then it's false imprisonment and murder. If they did, it's self-defense. The question arises because Arbery was apparently seen repeatedly on video in a house under construction from which equipment had been stolen.
A police officer testified that he had warned neighbors about Arbery's alleged trespassing. He also testified that he had told the defendants about this -- and that he told the owner of the house to call the defendants if he saw such trespassing occurring.
This, from David Brooks, is wild. Brooks accusing anyone else of being sealed inside a hermetic bubble is incredible stuff. Yes, America's major institutions are dominated by Left-wing thought, or cowards who cave to it.
Also, there are arguments to be made about the scope of freedom and liberty inside a conservative philosophical framework. But I don't know a single conservative -- including NatCons -- who suggests that these factors are irrelevant to the common good, as Brooks seems to suggest.
Most conservatives who call themselves classically liberal do so understanding that cultural institutions under liberalism must be conservative, a la Adams. Conservatives who disagree think that the neutrality of the public square erodes such cultural conservatism beyond repair.
This is absolutely idiotic gobbledygook. Those most worried about inflation are those whose wages have been eaten up by inflation. The rich, who have their money in assets like stocks and real estate, are making bank.