Tag Archives: #COVID19

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Ve need to see your papers!

It seems that President Joe Biden and his Administration are very concerned, very concerned! about how Americans are going to prove that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. There are just so many ways that such could be documented, that I’m surprised that no one has yet suggested the very simple way that the German government found in the late 1930s.[1]I suppose that I have to note here that yes, I am using sarcasm; too many people take things so deathly seriously.

From The Washington Post:

‘Vaccine passports’ are on the way, but developing them won’t be easy

White House-led effort tries to corral more than a dozen initiatives

By Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun and Isaac Stanley-Becker | March 28, 2021 | 11:00 AM EDT

The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen.

The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again.

The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of announcing updates in coming days, said one official.

I was initially fooled when I saw the tweet by William Teach, which used a photo of an American passport as the illustration. I had originally thought that this was going to be a story about how American passports could be stamped to notify foreign countries that a traveler had been vaccinated.

But nope, I was wrong: the story was about how Americans will prove internally that they had been vaccinated!

The White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative, instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials made this month.

“Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Zients said at a March 12 briefing.

The initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration, with officials working to coordinate across dozens of agencies and a variety of experts, including military officials helping administer vaccines and health officials engaging in international vaccine efforts.

Count on it: as the Biden Administration wants to continue pushing vaccination, they will concomitantly push employers to require proof of vaccination before allowing people to work. The left have no interest, no interest at all, in enforcing existing law requiring people to prove that they are eligible to work under our existing immigration laws, but, damn it, you’d better be vaccinated!

I had frequently complained about the Obama Administration’s passage of the HITECH Act, which required that all medical records be digitized, so that your next physician could easily obtain your medical records from your past doctors, noting that there will never be enough safeguards that hackers won’t be able to break through them. It would only make sense that, if you are a candidate for a job, that a company, if it could, might want to check your medical records to see if you had even been treated for mental illness or had diabetes or a heart condition that could drive up their medical care costs, or which might indicate that you were more prone to missing time from work due to illness. While I’m sure that would be illegal, there would be ‘dark’ companies which might be willing to provide such a service to established human resources departments.

But now? The Biden Administration wants to have a way in which people can prove they had been vaccinated, and the only reason for that is to punish those who have not.

Those initiatives — such as a World Health Organization-led global effort and a digital pass devised by IBM that is being tested in New York state — are rapidly moving forward, even as the White House deliberates about how best to track the shots and avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated.

One of the teams working on vaccine passports is the Vaccination Credential Initiative, a coalition endeavoring to standardize how data in vaccination records is tracked.

If there’s a standardization of data in how vaccination records are tracked, then they will be tracked, and the notion that they will “avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated” will simply be propaganda. If the records can be tracked, they will be tracked, and you can count on the Biden Administration, as well as states with Democratic Governors, who have never shied away from intrusive and unconstitutional mandates to fight COVID-19, to use every tool they have to force compliance.

“The busboy, the janitor, the waiter that works at a restaurant, wants to be surrounded by employees that are going back to work safely — and wants to have the patrons ideally be safe as well,” said Brian Anderson, a physician at Mitre, a nonprofit company that runs federally funded research centers, who is helping lead the initiative. “Creating an environment for those vulnerable populations to get back to work safely — and to know that the people coming back to their business are ‘safe,’ and vaccinated — would be a great scenario.”

This was, of course, the justification for the mask mandates, that you must wear them to protect other people. If you refused to wear a mask, you were harming other people, because the assumption was that you carried the virus. And the vaccination ‘passports’ will have the same underlying assumption: if you have not been vaccinated, you are a carrier.

There’s a lot more at the original, but there is part of one last paragraph I need to quote. An official, speaking anonymously, said that:

some of the considerations include how to adjust for the spread of variants, how booster shots would be tracked and even questions about how long immunity lasts after getting a shot. There’s “a lot to think through,” the official said.

And there it is: it’s not just getting your two-shot vaccine this year, but the government will want to track you, and your movements, every time the CDC decides that there’s another variant out there, and that you require periodic booster shots or re-vaccination.

“It’s for our own good,” we will be told, and there will be plenty of sheeple out there, ready and willing to go along with the Mandates of Our Betters.

I guess that we’ll need a new forearm tattoo every year!

References

References
↑1 I suppose that I have to note here that yes, I am using sarcasm; too many people take things so deathly seriously.
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Do the mandatory face mask orders really protect us from #COVID19? Empirically, that's not the case in one Kentucky county

Search and rescue volunteer, Nate Lair, drives a boat through downtown Beattyville after heavy rains led to the Kentucky River flooding the town and breaking records last set in 1957. March 1, 2021
Alton Strupp / Louisville Courier-Journal

Remember this picture? This is my nephew, Nate Lair, a volunteer fireman in Lee County, who was doing rescue work in Beattyville following the flooding earlier this month. Mr Lair is a trained Emergency Medical Technician as well as a fireman — and no, I don’t use the politically correct term “fire fighter” just because some women work as firemen — so he’s not exactly ignorant when it comes to medicine.

I was teasing him yesterday about killing everyone he rescued, because he wasn’t wearing a mask, something not only shown in the photo, but something I know he just does not do. He’s a fiercely independent sort.

Then he told me that, despite nobody wearing masks during the rescues, Lee County was one of two counties in the Bluegrass State that were in the “green” for COVID positive tests!

Well, he was off a bit, but not by much. The most recent statistics, as indicated by the map at the left from the state website (which you can click to enlarge) has Lee County in the yellow, “Community Spread,” between 1 to 10 average daily cases per 100,000 population, at 3.7.

But Lee County has a population of only 6,881 people! That means just 6.881% of 100,000 people. Doing the math, multiplying the 3.7 per 100,000 rate by 0.06881, I come up with 0.254597, or one confirmed COVID case over the last four days.

Which raises the obvious question: if masks are somehow saving us all from doom from COVID-19, but in less-than-healthy conditions during and after one of the hardest hit areas in the state by the flooding, in which people were more concerned with saving themselves, their jobs, and cleaning up their property, than they were with wearing face masks, why isn’t Lee County in the “red“? Why aren’t the people in and around Beattyville, the “poorest white town in America” from 2008 to 2012 according to CNN, dropping like flies due to the novel coronavirus?

Could it possibly, just possibly, be that these face masks really don’t do much of anything when it comes to the reduction of COVID-19?

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A stunning lack of perspective Sending people to their deaths is no big deal, but Andrew Cuomo making naughty remarks? That has the Democrats incensed!

Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) ordered state nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients. He later denied that such orders had been issued, but even the Democratic Party’s media mouthpiece, CNN, noted that his denial was a lie:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that nursing homes “never needed” to accept Covid-positive patients from hospitals in the state due to a shortage of hospital beds.

During a press call Wednesday, Finger Lakes News Radio asked Cuomo about his administration’s advisory in late March requiring that nursing homes accept the readmission of patients from hospitals, even if they were positive for Covid-19.

The governor’s office has repeatedly said the advisory was based on federal guidance, which prohibited discrimination based on a coronavirus diagnosis. The state’s Department of Health told CNN, “Residents were admitted to nursing homes during that time not as an overflow facility, but because that’s where they live.”

Cuomo said that the advisory was a precaution if hospitals became overwhelmed — calling it an “anticipatory rule” — which he said didn’t happen.

“We never needed nursing home beds because we always had hospital beds,” Cuomo told Finger Lakes News. “So it just never happened in New York where we needed to say to a nursing home, ‘We need you to take this person even though they’re Covid-positive.’ It never happened.”

Facts First: Cuomo’s assertion that “it never happened” is false. According to a report from the New York State Department of Health, “6,326 COVID-positive residents were admitted to [nursing home] facilities” following Cuomo’s mandate that nursing homes accept the readmission of Covid-positive patients from hospitals. Whether or not this was “needed,” it did in fact happen.

So, how many people died due to COVID-19 in nursing homes due to the Governor’s orders? The New York Times reported:

Cuomo Aides Rewrote Nursing Home Report to Hide Higher Death Toll

The intervention was the earliest action yet known in an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo that concealed how many nursing home residents died in the pandemic.

By J. David Goodman and Danny Hakim | Published March 4, 2021 | Updated March 11, 2021

Top aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo were alarmed: A report written by state health officials had just landed, and it included a count of how many nursing home residents in New York had died in the pandemic.

The number — more than 9,000 by that point in June — was not public, and the governor’s most senior aides wanted to keep it that way. They rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.

After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes.

Well, of course it was “withheld” out of concern that President Trump might use it politically . . . which doesn’t explain why it was withheld after election day. And after a whole year of Fredo CNN news anchor Christopher Cuomo reporting on his own brother, CNN finally decided that no, it’s not appropriate that he do that anymore.

Of course, no one can say, for certain, how many of New York State’s nursing home deaths are directly attributable to the Governor’s decision, but it’s safe to say: a whole lot.

And now, from The Wall Street Journal:

Manhattan Law Firm to Lead Andrew Cuomo Impeachment Probe

Democratic governor faces allegations of sexual harassment and criticism over handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes

By Jimmy Vielkind | March 17, 2021 | 9:33 AM EDT

ALBANY, N.Y.—Democrats who dominate the New York state Assembly on Wednesday said that a Manhattan law firm will lead an impeachment investigation into allegations that Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women as well as his administration’s handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes.

Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP will assist the chamber’s judiciary committee in examining Mr. Cuomo’s conduct, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said.

“Hiring Davis Polk will give the committee the experience, independence and resources needed to handle this important investigation in a thorough and expeditious manner,” said Mr. Heastie, a Democrat from the Bronx.

The speaker first announced the impeachment investigation on Thursday and said Monday that he would not predict how long the inquiry would last. A vote to impeach a governor would require a majority of members in the 150-seat chamber.

Three former female aides to the governor and one woman who still works on his staff have accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior. The third-term Democrat has denied he inappropriately touched anybody and apologized if any of his remarks or behavior made people uncomfortable.

Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, is overseeing an investigation into the harassment claims and has already interviewed at least one of the women who complained. Mr. Cuomo has asked people to withhold judgment until that review is completed.

The governor has rebuffed calls for his resignation by senior leaders of his own party, including U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat from Yonkers.

There’s more at the original, including noting the nursing home investigation, but the Democrats controlling the state House of Representatives never considered impeaching the Governor over ordering people to their deaths, yet are now angry, very angry, that he may have inappropriately touched a woman or that some of his remarks or behavior made people uncomfortable.[1]Laughably, Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte wrote, on March 2nd, that Governor Cuomo’s alleged actions “(fall) short of sexual harassment, but more social opprobrium would help stop the … Continue reading

He’s never been accused of an actual rape or sexual assault, mind you, but he may well have behaved poorly. To the Democrats, that’s much more serious than forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients into crowded environments, primarily populated by the elderly, the most vulnerable group when it comes to the virus.

Just how f(ornicating) stupid can this be? How stupid can the Democrats get? The left are invested in complaining about Dr Seuss’ writings and maintaining fences, concertina wire and National Guard troops to defend against non-existent threats, but ignore actual deaths! The Democrats want to worry that some people might not always wear facemasks, but don’t give a damn about virtually deliberately infecting a notably vulnerable population with the virus against which those facemasks are supposed to protect! William Teach noted that the Democrats voted against a bill requiring the Department of Homeland Security Department to test all migrants crossing the border illegally that the DHS releases into the country, as though it’s important to prevent American citizens from spreading the virus, but not illegal immigrants, and not the Governor of New York.

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↑1 Laughably, Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte wrote, on March 2nd, that Governor Cuomo’s alleged actions “(fall) short of sexual harassment, but more social opprobrium would help stop the louts.” Her subsequent Salon writings have ignored the issue completely, at least as of 10:45 AM EDT on St Patrick’s Day.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer laments job losses by women due to COVID-19 But somehow the paper doesn't tell readers that those job losses were pushed by Democrats and women

Being in The Philadelphia Inquirer, even in the business section, it was going to be an opinion piece, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have some good statistics:

Job or kids? One in three working moms forced to choose as pandemic enters Year Two.

Kids at home, chores, and full-time career? Philly’s burnt-out moms quit jobs in droves, setting women back for years. Solutions? Flex time, backup childcare and $39 billion in federal relief.

by Erin Arvedlund | Sunday, March 14, 2021

After 15 years in a high-paying finance job, Joanna Lepore knew she’d have to quit, for a once-unthinkable reason — she has children.

“I never had any intention of leaving my job,” said the married mother of two kids under 10 years of age living in Haddonfield. But working remotely — while home-schooling her son and watching her toddler daughter shut out of day care — burned her out.

With child care and schools closed, the veteran of the Wall Street investment firm PIMCO left her job onboarding clients in August, just before the remote school year resumed. Her husband is employed in food distribution and works outside the home.

Lepore, 38, has lots of company. Women have borne a greater share of job losses during the pandemic. One in three working mothers is considering leaving the workforce or downshifting careers, which could stunt their incomes for decades, surveys show. Women already shoulder more responsibility for the domestic and emotional work in a family — disparities heightened by COVID — and typically make less than men — 82 cents on the dollar.

There’s more at the original, but the subtitle tells you much of what you need to know: the very #woke Erin Arvedlund Beattie, who “cover(s) all things personal finance and investing, as well as Wall Street frauds and other miscreants,” wants changes in how businesses operate and, of course, taxpayer money to address the issue.

Day care centers, Mrs Beattie told us, saw enrollment greatly decline, while expenses for new equipment and more thorough cleaning increased; “up to 40%” of dat care centers eventually shut down. What she did not say is that, in many cases, state and local governments ordered day care centers closed. In the Bluegrass State, Governor Andy Beshear ordered all daycare centers closed by the end of business on Friday, March 20, 2020. A lawsuit finally got a Boone County judge to set aside that order, on July 2nd, 15 weeks later, but, of course, the Governor appealed, and just two weeks later the state Supreme Court voided all of the state court injunctions against the Governor’s orders, saying that it would decide all of the cases. The Court scheduled oral arguments for September 17th, and did not issue its decision until November 12th, upholding the Governor.

Many states had similar government action concerning day care centers. That Mrs Beattie neglected to mention this in her reasons that so many day care centers have closed down is pretty poor journalism.

Mrs Beattie had a subtitled section “Schools must open”:

Alison Perelman calls the “emotional labor” of working from home the toughest double-duty — attending to a child educated on Zoom, motivating family to stick to a routine, undertaking household chores, and cooking endless meals.

”This falls predominantly on women,” Perelman says. ”As we’ve all made peace with the one-year anniversary, it’s now a hinge point where women are opting out. And once we all start to return to the workplace, it’s not clear to me that because women were first out, will we be first back in?”

As executive director of the political advocacy group Philadelphia 3.0, she’s incredulous that the Philadelphia School District has announced only vague plans to reopen in September.

“Why do we not know? This alone is a catastrophe for working women with dependents, and it’s only part of the tsunami destroying their careers,” said Perelman, who has a 6-year-old.

“For women, there’s no going back to work without school.”

However, the greatest resistance to reopening schools fully comes from the teachers’ unions, which are roughly ¾ female. More, President Biden’s criteria for reopening are nowhere close to a full reopening, according to The Washington Post:

Since making his 100-day goal, Biden and his aides have repeatedly loosened their definition of an open school, making it easier to meet his target.

Schools where children are in buildings even one day a week will count as “open.” Opening “most” schools means 51 percent, a metric the nation has probably already reached. And high schools, which are the most likely to be online only, aren’t counted in the measurement at all.

If in-person instruction is only one or two days per week, that isn’t going to get mothers back to work.

Let’s be honest here: the public schools perform a function that teachers are loath to admit, that they serve as free day care centers for children for most of the workday. Opening up paid day care centers because the kids aren’t in school becomes an added expense for working families, primarily, as Mrs Beattie pointed out, working mothers. At some point, calculations have to be made: is it costing more for mothers to work than they bring home from work?

Back to Mrs Beattie’s original for one final point:

Ellen Yin, one of Philly’s top restaurateurs, had to fire 150 workers last spring, roughly 90% of her staff.

“Our industry has large numbers of undocumented workers and immigrants, many of whom never had income before,” she said. “They don’t qualify for unemployment, and that weighs on us.”

There is little which pisses me off more than this: If “one of Philly’s top restaurateurs” has been employing “large numbers of undocumented workers,” she shouldn’t be receiving our sympathy but prison time! At a time when we have 9,972,000 million people officially unemployed, along with 8,493,000 more who have dropped out of the workforce and are thus not counted as officially unemployed, based on February 2020 numbers, 18,465,000 people who ought to be working but aren’t, the last thing we should be worrying about are jobs for illegal immigrants!

As William Teach noted, COVID-19 cases have begun to fall in Florida, even though Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) rolled back restrictions much sooner than in most states, raising the obvious question: did the restrictions actually reduce the spread of the virus, or did they simply force a recession for no useful reason?

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When you tolerate tyranny, you will get more tyranny When you accept tyrants, you will get more tyrants.

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)

If Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) had asked Kentuckians to wear face masks to slow the spread of COVID-19, I would have willingly complied. Had Mr Beshear, seeing that the General Assembly passed new laws to rein in his claimed ’emergency’ executive authority, gone along with the new state laws, and asked the state legislature to approve extensions of his executive orders, I wouldn’t be writing this column. Had the Governor tried to work out his differences with the legislature, as Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd asked him to do, I wouldn’t be so upseet.

Instead, the Governor responded, “See you in court,” showing his utter contempt for democracy.

Am I upset? Hell, yes, I am, totally pissed off, actually shaking in rage.

Beshear: KY won’t repeal its mask mandate anytime soon. 28 new COVID-19 deaths.

By Alex Acquisto | March 4, 2021 | 4:42 PM EST | Updated: March 4, 2021 | 5:28 PM EST

Reiterating that Kentucky will not be repealing its mask mandate anytime soon, Gov. Andy Beshear announced 1,068 new cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky on Thursday, as well as 28 virus-related deaths.

Earlier this week, Republican governors in Texas and Mississippi lifted coronavirus restrictions, repealing their states’ mask mandates and reopening businesses to full capacity. Kentucky will not do that, Beshear said.

“We’re going to continue to lose people until we’re fully out of the woods and everybody is vaccinated,” he said in a live update. “That’s the reason we’re not going to do what Texas or Mississippi has done. Those decisions will increase casualties when we just have maybe even a matter of months to go.”

Well, f(ornicate) him!

The Governor claims that the public support him on this, and keeps producing polls which say so. But, in the only poll that counts, the one on election day, the Republicans who ran against his dictatorial decrees were rewarded with 14 additional seats in the state House of Representatives, and two additional seats, out of only 19 up for election, in the state Senate. At every step along the way, Governor Beshear has excluded the state legislature:

Beshear was asked at Friday’s (July 10, 2020 — Editor) news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

Translation: the General Assembly might not do exactly what I want them to do, so I’ll just go around them!

And here I thought that it was supposed to be the evil reich-wing Donald Trump who was the fascist! From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation.

A contempt for electoral democracy?  Yup, that’s there, showing utter contempt for the legislators elected by the people of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Individual interests and rights subordinated to what the Governor defines as the good of the state?  Yup, that’s there, too.  He even makes his propagandistic appeals as his Twitter feed is full of things like #TogetherKy and #TeamKentucky.

Of course, our Governor’s motives are good ones, right? That’s what Judge Shepherd said, when he granted Mr Beshear’s motion for a temporary injunction and partially stayed the effectiveness of three new laws the legislature approved, overriding the Governor’s veto.

The judge said all parties in the case “are acting in good faith to address public policy challenges of the utmost importance” but “the governor has made a strong case that the legislation, in its current form, is likely to undermine or even cripple, the effectiveness of public health measures necessary to protect the lives and health of Kentuckians from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So, dictatorship is just fine as long as it’s a benevolent dictatorship.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote:

Viktor Yanukovych is the kind of dictator we love to hate. A kleptocrat who chose a bribe from Russia over his people’s future in the EU. A thug who sent other thugs to beat up protesters, until he was finally ousted by his own people. A man who left his country bankrupt while pictures of his palatial estate and private zoo are broadcast around the world. We vilify dictators like this. And, yet, there remains a dream, for far too many development experts, business people and others around the globe that a strong leader with authoritarian powers is needed to move poor countries into the developed world.

I am watching Ukraine implode from a West Africa nation where corruption is perceived to be growing, development is stalled and the economy is heading downhill. From high-level government appointees to members of civil society, I hear: “What we need is a benevolent dictator. … ” The sentiment is generally followed by praise for Paul Kagame, who has created a remarkably clean and efficient Rwanda after that country’s genocide, or Lee Kuan Yew, the “father of Singapore,” who corralled government corruption and thrust his nation into the first world.

The desire for benevolent dictatorship is not confined to developing nations. I hear it even more often from America’s business community and those working on international development – often accompanied by praise for China’s ability to “get things done.” The problem is that the entire 20th century seems to have produced at most one largely benevolent dictator and one efficient but increasingly repressive leader, both in tiny countries.

Meanwhile, we have seen scores of Yanukovych-like kleptocrats, Pinochet-style military dictatorships that torture dissenters in secret prisons and “disappear” those who disagree, and North Korean-style totalitarians whose gulags and concentration camps starve and murder hundreds of thousands or even millions of their countrymen.

Occasionally, dictators begin benevolently and grow worse. The world is littered with Kwame Nkrumahs, Fidel Castros and Robert Mugabes who rose to power with great popularity, built their nations, then turned their people’s hopes to ash through corruption, personality cults and violence. One Lee Kuan Yew and a Kagame teetering from benevolence toward repression, versus every other dictatorship of the 20th century? Those are not odds to bet your country on.

There is no doubt that Governor Beshear is personally popular in the Bluegrass State. He has been right out in front, on television almost every day, with his soothing words and handsome, non-threatening visage. The Governor wrote:

This is a war. We have lost more Kentuckians to COVID-19 than in battles during World War I, World War II and Vietnam combined.

That’s true enough, but there is one very stark difference: those Kentuckians who gave their lives on the battlefield were fighting, and dying, for democracy, for liberty, and not for dictatorship and despotism. Regardless of how benevolent Mr Beshear and his sycophants think he has been, irrespective of how necessary they have thought the Governor’s actions to be, they were, and are, still fundamentally and morally wrong, still an assault on our syste4m of government, far more than the 800 or so rioters in the Capitol kerfuffle, because the Governor has, so far, gotten away with his despotism.

Patriotic Kentuckians must do everything we can to fight Governor Beshear, we must do everything we can to frustrate his taking away of our rights. We must demonstrate, we must protest, we must obstruct his edicts, and we must never, ever accept anything less than liberty.

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Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd! He thinks the General Assembly doesn't matter

We knew that this bovine feces would happen!

Judge rules in Beshear’s favor, blocks laws limiting governor’s COVID-19 powers

By Jack Brammer | March 3, 2021 |3:31 PM EST

Franklin Circuit Judge and Authoritarian Enabler Phillip Shepherd. Photo: Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts.

Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd temporarily blocked Thursday three new laws that limit the governor’s powers to deal with emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic.

In a 23-page order that is a legal victory for Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and a defeat for the Kentucky General Assembly, the judge granted Beshear’s motion for a temporary injunction and partially stayed the effectiveness of the three new laws the legislature approved earlier this year.

Besherar spokeswoman Crystal Staley said, “We appreciate the order. The ability to act and react quickly is necessary in our war against the ever-changing and mutating virus.

Apparently, according to Judge Shepherd, ‘need’ defines the Governor’s powers, not the General Assembly. What powers wouldn’t the Governor have, if he declares a state of emergency, under this kind of standard?

Shepherd said the court “is mindful that the challenged legislation seeks to address a legitimate problem of effective legislative oversight of the governor’s emergency powers in this extraordinary public health crisis” but “is also mindful that the governor and the secretary (Health and Family Services Secretary Eric Friedlander) are faced with the enormous challenge of effectively responding to a world-wide pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Kentuckians and over 500,000 people in the United States.”

Republicans campaigned against the authoritarian use of power by Governor Beshear in last November’s elections, and the voters rewarded the GOP with 14 additional seats in the state House of Representatives, bringing their majority to 75-25, and 2 additional seats in the state Senate, bringing their majority to 30-8.[1]Only 19 of the 38 seats were up for election in the state Senate.

The judge said all parties in the case “are acting in good faith to address public policy challenges of the utmost importance” but “the governor has made a strong case that the legislation, in its current form, is likely to undermine or even cripple, the effectiveness of public health measures necessary to protect the lives and health of Kentuckians from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Oh, so as long as the Governor is “acting in good faith,” he is exempt from legislative oversight?

The Judge stated that the Governor has been ‘adjusting’ his executive orders to be less restrictive as time passes, as current conditions warrant and public health concerns decrease, but that “the court believes those decisions should be made based on medical and scientific evidence, not on arbitrary deadlines imposed by statutes irrespective of the spread of the virus.” Since when does a judge have the authority to decide what motivates the legislature or whether the legislators have taken their decisions based on the right things?

The governor’s general counsel, Amy Cubbage, recently noted that the current executive orders dealing with COVID-19 would expire March 4 unless the legislature extends them or the court rules in Beshear’s favor.

Did the Governor ask the General Assembly to extend them? The Governor filed suit as soon as the General Assembly overrode his vetoes, but if he attempted to work with the legislature, as Judge Shepherd had “strongly urged” him to do, I found no story in the Lexington Herald-Leader telling us about it. All I could find was an article entitled “‘See you in court,’ Beshear tells legislative leaders on taking up his vetoes this week.”

One hopes that the legislature and Attorney General Daniel Cameron immediately appeal the decision to the state Court of Appeals, which has been friendlier to restraining our authoritarian Governor, but we can count on the Governor then taking it to the state Supreme Court which, though officially non-partisan is in practice controlled by Democrats.

It may be time for a little revolution!

References

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↑1 Only 19 of the 38 seats were up for election in the state Senate.
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Our Betters believe COVID-19 restrictions are being eased too quickly

The vaccines are out, and some states are loosening their (mostly unconstitutional) restrictions, so naturally the left are worried:

The positive signs come with caveats. Though the national statistics have improved drastically since January, they have plateaued in the last week or so, and the United States is still reporting more than 65,000 new cases a day on average — comparable to the peak of last summer’s surge, according to a New York Times database. The country is still averaging about 2,000 deaths per day, though deaths are a lagging indicator because it can take weeks for patients to die.

More contagious variants of the virus are circulating in the country, with the potential to push case counts upward again. Testing has fallen 30 percent in recent weeks, leaving experts worried about how quickly new outbreaks will be known. And millions of Americans are still waiting to be vaccinated.

Given all that, some experts worry that the reopenings are coming a bit too soon.

“We’re, hopefully, in between what I hope will be the last big wave, and the beginning of the period where I hope Covid will become very uncommon,” said Robert Horsburgh, an epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health. “But we don’t know that. I’ve been advocating for us to just hang tight for four to six more weeks.”

The director of the C.D.C., Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said at the briefing on Monday that she was “really worried” about the rollbacks of restrictions in some states. She cautioned that with the decline in cases “stalling” and with variants spreading, “we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained.”

And the plateauing case levels “must be taken extremely seriously,” Dr. Walensky warned at a briefing last week. She added: “I know people are tired; they want to get back to life, to normal. But we’re not there yet.”

There’s more at the link.

Let’s face it: disease control experts would like for us to wear face masks and practice social distancing for the rest of our lives. After COVID-19 is over — if it’s ever over — they’ll insist on masks every flu season.

CDC: COVID-19 Wiped Out the Flu Around the World This Year

Community mitigation measures halted the other pandemic here and abroad… but winter is coming

by Molly Walker, Associate Editor, MedPage Today September 17, 2020

Flu numbers in the U.S. were historically low during COVID-19 in the spring, with deep declines also occurring in the recently completed Southern Hemisphere flu season, CDC researchers found.

Influenza positivity rates in specimens tested (a standard metric of community flu activity) fell 98% in 2020 during March 1-May 16 relative to Sept 29, 2019-Feb. 29, 2020, plummeting from a median of 19.34% to 0.33%, reported Sonja Olsen, PhD, of the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues.

Indeed, circulation of influenza in the U.S. hit historic lows in summer 2020, with a median of 0.20% positive tests from May 17-August 8 versus 1%-2% from 2017-2019, the authors wrote in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. A graph indicated that influenza positivity rates dropped off sharply, approaching zero by early April — a time that, in previous seasons, it hovered around 15%.

Olsen and colleagues noted they used March 1 as a benchmark because it was closest to when the U.S. declared COVID-19 a public health emergency, and when “widespread implementation” of community measures such as school closures, social distancing, and mask wearing started around the country.

Because influenza is less transmissible than SARS-CoV-2, these measures “likely contributed to a more substantial interruption in influenza transmission,” according to Olsen and colleagues. “Although causality cannot be inferred from these ecological comparisons, the consistent trends over time and place are compelling and biologically plausible.”

So, if the draconian measures imposed to reduce transmission of COVID-19 brought transmission of influenza to almost a halt, and we have allowed elected officials to impose those measures due to COVID-19 and get away with it, what is to prevent them from imposing the same restrictions every flu season? After all, we are being told, it worked, didn’t it?

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Good News: Double Masking Is Just The Start, Plus, Joe Expects Masks Through 2022

See, all we need was 15 days to bend the curve. If everyone just stays home and washes their hands we’ll beat this. If everyone wears a mask we can end this. If we just get herd immunity we can end this. If most people get a vaccine we can end this. If everyone double masks we can end this

Double masking is only the start. Here are latest CDC face-covering recommendations.

The idea of double masking has been floating around for a few weeks. But now officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are weighing in.

The CDC just released results of a new study that found that double masking offers more protection for the wearer against COVID-19. But that’s not all: The CDC’s experiments also found that there are other ways to make your mask more efficient, and it largely revolves around fit.

The CDC conducted lab tests with dummies and found that exposure to potentially infectious aerosols decreased by about 95 percent when both dummies wore tightly fitted masks. Those face coverings included a cloth face mask over a “medical procedure mask,” like a surgical mask, and a surgical mask with knotted ear loops and tucked-in sides.

The CDC also found that the following helped improve mask efficiency:

  • Using a nylon covering over a mask. When it’s worn, the researchers found that this can offer more than 90 percent protection.
  • Using a mask fitter, a solid or elastic device that’s worn over the mask and secured with head ties or ear loops. When used properly over a surgical mask, researchers found that a fitter can offer more than 90 percent protection for the wearer.

It’s always something new, always something that seems to expand and extend this whole state of emergency. How much is legit? And will Government start mandating this stuff?

Opt for layers, either by double masking with a disposable mask under a cloth mask, noting that the second mask should push the edges of the interior mask against your face, or choosing a multilayer mask.

Interesting, they want us to do the thing most people hate, namely, have the mask tight on their nose and mouth. Are they seeking Compliance? Why is it that almost everything they said would stop this doesn’t work? Lockdown didn’t work.

Biden indicates that masks will be worn through next year

President Biden visited the National Institutes of Health complex on Thursday and he spoke about the U.S. vaccine supply and his goals for the rollout, but he also indicated that mask-wearing will likely be a reality for the next year.

He told reporters that even though he was standing on stage about 10 feet from Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, he would continue to wear his mask. He said that wearing the mask “though the next year” can save a significant number of lives.

Health officials have stressed that even with effective vaccines, many of the same safety protocols will have to remain in place until there is clear herd immunity. But if and when that is achieved seems to be anyone’s guess.

Do you think people will Comply with wearing masks all of 2022, much less through the end of 2021? Will the 30 states with mask mandates comply, or start removing those mask mandates? Will companies start blowing off the mandates? It always seems as if there is something new with these folks.

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After more than half a year of mask mandates, the CDC now wants us to have double mask mandates! Not just no, but Hell no!

As the rollout of the vaccines against COVID-19 has begun — though, even qualifying in Tier 1C, the local Health Department can’t say when I’ll have an opportunity to receive it — people have been looking forward to a return to a normal life. Tom Brady celebrated his seventh Super Bowl win by, Horrors! not wearing a mask, and the left were aghast!

Now, after months and months of mask mandates, the government is urging double masking. From The Wall Street Journal:

Double Masks Offer Significantly Better Protection, CDC Study Finds

By Betsy McKay | February 10, 2021

Upgrading your mask can really make a big difference, according to a study published Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Wearing a double mask or fitting a single mask more closely on the face substantially reduces the risk of infection with the Covid-19 virus, the study, published in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, found.

In a series of laboratory experiments using headforms and machines to generate aerosols, the CDC found that wearing a three-ply cloth mask over a three-ply medical or surgical mask blocked 92.5% of particles from a cough.

That was much more effective than a single mask. A surgical mask alone blocked cough particles by 42%, and a cloth mask blocked them by 44.3%.

Many medical and engineering experts say people need to upgrade their masks because new variants of the virus are spreading around the country, particularly one that is significantly more transmissible than the currently most common strain. Other studies have shown benefits from wearing double masks or using mask fitters, devices which tighten the fit.

Still other experts say that people should wear N95 masks, which are used primarily in hospitals and are certified to filter out at least 95% of small particles.

N95s? We’re now seeing reports that there has been a surge in fake N95 masks, including those in Washington state, the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, and Minnesota.

The CDC is trying to accomplish two goals: convince people to wear a mask at all–since many aren’t doing that currently–and offer options on its website that can help them improve or find a good fit, said John Brooks, chief medical officer of the agency’s Covid-19 response.

“Masking is one of our most potent means for not only the epidemic and its effects on human health and the economy, but also for slowing viral evolution,” he said. “We are looking at all the ways we can enhance our prevention measures.”

After well over half a year — so much for fifteen days to flatten the curve, though others said it might take several weeks more than that — now we are being told that, hey, we aren’t wearing our masks right, and we aren’t wearing the right masks in the first place.

Will it sound paranoid if I say that this seems like more of an attempt at control of the population than anything else?  I’m just waiting for Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) to change his mask mandate to a double-mask mandate.[1]LOL! The Governor’s mask mandate includes descriptions of the face coverings to be worn, and what is included would not come close to the CDC guidelines: “For the purposes of this order, … Continue reading

There’s more at the original, detailing aerosol projection rates by single and doubled masks. After reading it, I have to ask: if doubled masks blocked more vaporized moisture than single ones, why wouldn’t tripled masks be even better? Perhaps if we just stopped breathing altogether?

We’ve seen ‘health care professionals’ tell us that we need to wear masks and not kiss during sex — which makes me wonder if they’ve ever engaged in sexual intercourse themselves, since they don’t seem to understand how people actually copulate — and wear masks even inside your home. Let’s face it: nothing we do will ever be enough. They want us to save our lives by not living our lives.

We’ve known since early on in this pandemic that the various restrictions on people lives were leading to increased mental health issues, and drug overdose deaths have greatly increased. A significant increase in suicides has also been blamed on the restrictions placed on people due to COVID-19.

Unemployment skyrocketed and poverty soared, as government forced many businesses to close.

From Business Insider, on December 9th:

  • On Monday, Moody’s Analytics found millions of Americans are, on average, nearly $6,000 behind on rent payments, according to a Washington Post report.
  • The figure paints a bleak picture for what could happen come January 1, when eviction moratoriums expire and billions in back rent are due.
  • Some estimates — like one from advisory firm Stout — puts as many as 20.1 million tenants in the US at risk of eviction. That’s equivalent to the population of the state of Florida.

At what point will we realize that the ‘cure’ has been worse than the disease? Probably not before the authoritarians issue even more draconian orders trying to control our personal lives and choices.

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↑1 LOL! The Governor’s mask mandate includes descriptions of the face coverings to be worn, and what is included would not come close to the CDC guidelines: “For the purposes of this order, a ‘face covering’ is a material that covers the nose and mouth and is secured to the head with ties, straps or loops over the ears, or is wrapped around the lower face. It can be made of a variety of materials, including cotton, silk, or linen, and ideally has two or more layers. Face coverings may be factory-made, homemade, or improvised from household items such as scarfs, bandanas, and t-shirts.” I do, at least, applaud his use of the Oxford comma.