Nancy Pelosi is swearing that the Democrats’ insanely expensive quasi-infrastructure infrastructure bill will pass this week. Every time I see these numbers, I remember something I learned during the Obama presidency. This is how the Left funds its movement — not only union workers but progressive non-profits and others, filtering down to the street level.
An in-depth study would sure find that the Obama “stimulus” explains a big portion of the craziness in our country, right now. It funded the machine that developed the activists who are fomenting the unrest.
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One topic conspicuously not addressed in Matt Brown’s slick new video announcing his candidacy for Rhode Island governor is what qualifies him specifically to run an organization as large and complex as the state government. Surely a willingness to drop the F-bomb isn’t sufficient in itself. That omission raises the question asked in the subject of this post.
For some sense of the answer, I took a look at his campaign donors.
For somebody who’s probably been thinking about another run since he reappeared on the Rhode Island scene in 2018, he’s been incredibly inactive on the fundraising circuit. He has not a single donation (other than a loan from himself) since before the 2018 election. Then suddenly, in June of this year people started giving him money.
Not just any people (or even many people). Of the 28 non-Matt Brown donors to Matt Brown in June, only seven did not give him the maximum donation of 1,000, and none gave less than $100. What’s more, eight of his $1,000 donations came from four couples. Additionally, a conspicuous number of the donors list progressive organizations (notably, Renew New England) as their employers.
Also worthy of note is that 81% of Brown’s donation came from out of state.
This puts his rhetoric about starting a revolution in a small place in a different light. It seems Rhode Island has been targeted by big-money national activists as an experiment in electoral politics. Wealthy donors from other states want to see if they can force us to live according to their ideology.
That’s why Brown has such contempt for you, the voter, that he’ll swear in his kick-off video. They’re going to shove their socialism down your throat whether you like it or not.
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Word is that a nearby trampoline park was packed with unvaccinated children over the weekend, with scarcely a mask to be found. Meanwhile, Rhode Island state senator Alana DiMario is proclaiming the pending approval of the Pfizer COVID vaccine for children between five and 11 as “life changing,” because “the daily stress of weighing every decision against risk as most returned to “normal” has left parents of <12 so exhausted.”
Obviously there are different perspectives, and each side seems to feel it’s acting on clear evidence. The confidence with which people are making their assertions shows how political “science” has become. Every study that generally supports a point of view is proclaimed decisive and complete. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work.
So, I was thrilled to see Pablo Rodriguez offer me a link to some of the evidence for his point of view that we can’t rely on natural (that is, acquired) immunity from having been infected with the coronavirus. The summary article from a website called Nebraska Medicine, I’m inclined to dismiss, because it begins, “The data is clear: Natural immunity is not better. The COVID-19 vaccines create more effective and longer-lasting immunity than natural immunity from infection.” That’s an advocate’s rhetoric, not an analyst’s conclusion.
The studies behind the claim are worth reviewing, however. There are three, and I’ll review the second two when I have a chance, but anybody who has followed the debate closely will find the first very interesting. The summary article claims this study shows that “more than a third of COVID-19 infections result in zero protective antibodies,” but the story is much more interesting.
First of all, note that the flip side of one-third not having protective antibodies means that two-thirds do. Dig into the study’s figures, though. In its first column, the first one shows that the people who did not have antibodies were mostly under 40 years old, while those who had antibodies were evenly distributed across age groups. Indeed, according to the demographic table, the non-antibody group was, on average 14 years younger.
The other column is further illustrated in the second figure (which is the featured image for this post). This shows the presence of antibodies compared with PCR count. The higher this count, the less of the virus a positive test found. As Andrew Bostom explained to The College Fix last December:
A 12-cycle test means that a person “is carrying 2 billion copies of the virus.” On the other hand, a 38-cycle test means that someone has merely “eight copies,” and calling that a positive test is “trivial” and “meaningless” because of the dramatically lower risk level, he said.
In the present study, the average PCR count of those who had antibodies was 24.5. For those who didn’t have antibodies, it was 36. This directly supports Bostom’s argument months ago that many of the people counting as “cases” weren’t really infected.
The study doesn’t say how many of the high-count people were also younger, but one suspects lot of overlap. The fact that some of them reported symptoms and even hospitalization (though very few) could simply be noise. The symptoms could have been coincidence, because everything was being attributed to COVID upon a positive test, even if the test was meaningless and trivial.
So, my previous position on natural immunity requires this adjustment: people whose only evidence of having had COVID was a positive test shouldn’t be confident that they actually had it and therefore are immune, but that still leaves plenty of people with a strong claim that they don’t have to be vaccinated, especially if they get their test records and had PCR counts under 30.
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Tucker isn’t wrong in this analysis. There’s a reason our borders are open and buses and planes are distributing all comers across the country. But here’s an important point that’s often ignored: If newly arrived residents are here, and if they’re going to be voters, they might vote with you!
That doesn’t mean pandering, and it doesn’t mean compromising your principles. It does, however, mean never ceasing to persuade and look for common ground. People are people, and it isn’t written in any prophetic scroll that people ushered into a nation to bring about the inevitable permanent aristocracy of socialism actually have to do so.
People who’ve been living in squalor, piecing together their subsistence little by little, may like the idea of being given a baseline livelihood, but they also have a keen understanding of how a privileged governing elite can cut them out of the loop, as well as the value of keeping what they earn.
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Just a few days ago, we were seeing headlines like, “Former USA National Team Gymnasts Testify Against the FBI Over Botched Larry Nassar Investigation.”
Today the news is that “the FBI is investigating a group of male Afghan refugees after they assaulted a female U.S. soldier in New Mexico.”
Notice how all the threads are coming together? The current occupant of the White House is infamous for being handsy and… umm… nosy with women and girls. As Commander in Chief, he badly botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan (as his military was busy proclaiming the importance of reading “anti-racist” tracts and rooting out right-wing extremism from its ranks), adding another tranche to his investment in the future of undocumented immigrants.
Now the incompetent FBI that spent four years playing politics to put a Democrat in office is investigating Afghan refugees’ assault of a female soldier days after being outed as untrustworthy on such matters.
If you don’t see the intended moral of the story, it’s only because our unionized education system long-since ceased teaching how to spot them when they don’t favor progressives.
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Talk about cultivating a hostile environment!
John DePetro reports that the state Department of Health is encouraging healthcare workers to tattle on coworkers who remain unvaccinated against COVID-19 (whether or not they have acquired immunity through prior exposure). Center for Professional Boards and Licensing Chief Ellen Balasco ends a recent notice about vaccination requirements thus:
Additionally, if you are aware of any RIDOH-licensed healthcare provider who is providing direct patient care to patients and is unvaccinated, you can file an online complaint at https://health.ri.gov/complaints/ or you can call 401-222-5200.
Presumably providing direct patient care to people who aren’t patients is still fine…
What people who are keeping their heads throughout this civic crisis have to remember is that a large number of their fellow citizens really do believe that the coronavirus is an unusually deadly pathogen, that the vaccine is a near-flawless medical miracle with few unknown properties, and that claims about gaining immunity after having already been infected are highly suspicious. That truly is the world they think they’re living in, and they are behaving accordingly.
To be clear, if you are an adult who hasn’t had COVID-19, I believe you’re better off being vaccinated than taking your chances with the virus. As I’ve written multiple times in this space, outcomes appear to be better and risks lower with vaccination in every category. However, the very same research and analysis that led me to that conclusion also makes clear that most people have no problem recovering from infection and that doing so provides stronger immunity than the vaccine.
The fact that government and public health leaders refuse to acknowledge this reality remains one of the most mind-boggling indications of the politicization of our society that I’ve seen. Forcing people out of their jobs — while there’s a shortage of workers! — and then calling for them to rat each other out is disturbing and incredibly telling of the way these people see the rest of us.
We’re not equals trying to work out an historically unprecedented situation. No. It’s responsible administrators and hallway monitors (them) versus no-good malefactors (us).
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Jeff Bezos has recruited Star Trek legend William Shatner to give PR for his personal space program a boost. Well, I’ll take any excuse to revisit this classic performance:
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Calls of hypocrisy can go too far, but it’s simply too easy to imagine (meaning “to know”) how differently this sort of news would be handled if Biden were a Republican:
[Rep. Jim] Banks, the Republican Study Committee chairman, was responding to the New York Post’s report on the findings of the nonpartisan CRS showing how Biden — without being mentioned by name — avoided paying Medicare tax on speaking fees and book sales in 2017 and 2018, improperly using S corporations to show low salaries but count most revenue as “distributions” exempt from Medicare tax.
Sometimes it seems like progressives believe supporting higher taxes is a suitable substitute for paying them.
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On one hand, I sympathize with Alexis Santoro, of Cumberland:
Santoro first raised the issue in an email on September 1 to Cumberland school officials.
“Each year there has been a bus monitor/crossing guard for the bus when the bus has stopped at this location since pound road has a lot of blind spots and cars fly around the corner,” wrote Santoro. “In 2019, the bus stop was moved to the corner of Windsong and Goldstar for the safety of the little children. This year, it was set back to the corner of Windsong and Pound for some reason, however, there is no bus monitor/crossing guard, so the children are required to cross this busy and poorly visible street with oncoming traffic coming towards them.”
“I am requesting the bus stop be moved into the neighborhood, [and] the bus drive around so the kids do not have to cross the road or a bus monitor/crossing guard be assigned to the bus,” said Santoro.
We pay plenty of money for our government schools and the related transportation, in Rhode Island, and it is the job of the people whom we pay to provide services at the level for which they’re collecting money. From that perspective, Santoro even went a step toward indulgence, suggesting an alternative for safety that would satisfy her concerns as a parent.
On the other hand, one can’t help but wonder if that very same transactional perspective isn’t creating an unhealthy middle ground of expectation to be served:
According to Santoro, who provided emails to GoLocal — she was told she could “train to become a monitor” in light of the shortage of workers.
“Excuse me, I have a job. This is their responsibility,” said Santoro, of the response from the Cumberland School Department.
What’s wrong with the schools’ response, there? Granted, officials appear to have done a poor job explaining why one stop is necessary over the other, but assuming there is some unspoken explanation, along with a shortage of monitors, taking every opportunity to pitch for employees seems reasonable.
The problem is that Santoro has encountered one of the bottlenecks where the various unaccountable decisions of elected and appointed officials create a situation with which a particular constituent is not happy. Central among those decisions is that government services have to be offered free of charge to all comers.
Let’s imagine, then, if this were a transaction with a private company. In that case, Santoro would have a consumer’s leverage. The school would have reason to do whatever it could to accommodate her concerns, either adding a crossing guard or moving the stop. If that were not possible, she could demand a refund of her busing fee and find another way to get the child to school.
Indeed, once upon a time, children were expected to get to school one way or another, and communities would organize volunteers for things like ensuring children weren’t run over crossing the street. As we’ve been taxed to pay people to do those jobs, we’ve lost that sense that our money is going to particular services and we have to fill in the gap.
Featured image by Cleyton Ewerton on Unsplash.
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