1/ Am I the only one who thinks that Hamas has grossly, horrendously outplayed Israel? Hamas can dribble out hostages for a month, keeping the ceasefire going as it rearms - and publicizes civilian casualties, raising international pressure on Israel not to restart the attack...
2/ But the pressure won't only be international. Time will slowly corrode Israel's fury over the Oct. 7 attacks (impossible but true) and certainty that it must destroy Hamas completely; it will tell itself that slowly chasing down Hamas's leaders is an acceptable compromise.
3/ Further, the pause all by itself lets Israeli critics question the invasion's casualties - if the attack was so necessary, why was Israel so willing to stop it without having achieved any of its goals? Not one top commander has been killed, and Hamas still rules Gaza...
1/ Back to flu jabs: In 1980, before the public health complex went nuts pushing vaccines for respiratory viruses, the US gave out 12.4MM jabs.
And had 19,000 flu deaths.
From 2016-2019 (before Covid), the US gave out about 160MM shots a year.
And averaged 35,000 flu deaths...
2/ This does NOT mean flu shots cause flu deaths; the US has aged since 1980, and age is a huge driver of flu risk (though not as much as Covid risk), and flu deaths move randomly year-to-year.
But if the shots worked AT ALL, you would expect SOME drop in deaths over time...
3/ But we have seen no decline. Because flu shots don't work. At all. Good epidemiology (including a massive and irrefutable study from Britain in 2020) makes clear: flu shots are a MARKER for health, not a driver of health. But they aren't very risky, so no one cares...
It is not clear they work at all, much less better than inactivated virus vaccines, at stopping infection OR severe disease in the long run. But China's experience (even assuming 1-2 million Chinese died in the Omicron wave) suggests they don't...
3/ What we do know for sure: their side effects are FAR worse than inactivated virus jabs in the short run and that they appear to carry long-run risks (IgG4 class switching, most notably) that the traditional vaccines do not.
On the plus side, they cost about 10 times as much!
1/ Upon further review I think the WaPo’s framing of the ruling may mark the beginning of a meaningful change in the way some smarter people on the left view the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts, a realization they really did go too far
2/ The story - and the people quoted - make an big distinction between the initial district court injunction against gov’t contact with social media companies, which was VERY broad, and the new, much narrower injunction the circuit court issued, which captures the worst conduct…
3/ Implicit in that is a dawning awareness that this White House really did overreach in 2021 and constant jawbowing to tell private companies what speech they should and should not carry is unacceptable.
It’s the first time I’ve seen that anywhere in the non-conservative media
"The dispositive question is whether the Individual Plaintiffs’ censorship can also be traced to government-coerced enforcement of those policies. We agree with the district court that it can be."
"The Individual Plaintiffs adduced extensive evidence... that the government has engaged in a years-long pressure campaign designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints"
"The district court thus had a sound basis upon which to find a likelihood that, faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, social-media platforms did, and would continue to, bend to the government’s will."