COVID-19 rarely spreads through surfaces

 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

vax approval

 https://www.fda.gov/media/150386/download

On August 23, 2021, FDA approved the biologics license application (BLA) submitted by BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH for COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older.

Afghanistan Never Existed

 https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/one-thing-we-never-understood-about-afghanistan-daniel-greenfield/

Afghanistan didn’t become a complete disaster for us. Until Obama.

American forces peaked at 25,000 under Bush. Obama quadrupled them to 100,000. That’s the year more American soldiers were wounded than during the entire Bush administration.

1,200 Americans died during Obama's Afghanistan surge, not just because he quadrupled the number of soldiers, but because the military was told to stop trying to defeat the Taliban.

Our soldiers became community organizers with guns who were told not to fight.

No hearts and minds were won. But cemeteries filled up with boys from Texas and West Virginia who weren’t allowed to shoot back because Obama wanted to win Muslim hearts and minds.

The military brass who embraced Obama’s strategy buried and crippled a generation of young men. Countless men and women came home wounded inside. They overdosed or killed themselves.

We came to defeat the Jihadists behind September 11 and we stayed behind to reform Afghanistan. But what were we reforming it from? We couldn’t name the problem.

And when you can’t name a problem, you never come up with a solution.

Having failed to fix Afghanistan, the process is now underway to bring as many Afghans as possible to America. The old plan to bring 100,000 “interpreters” and their family members has been vastly expanded to make any Afghan who did any work for American organizations, from aid groups to the media, eligible to come to America. By the time they’re done, we may end up with a million Afghan refugees in America. Some of them will become Islamic terrorists.

The final act of fighting terrorism is bringing the terrorists to America to create more terror.

The truth about recycling

 https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.

None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.

"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."

Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.

"I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable."

But it's not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.

Moira Greyland Peat writes about men and women

I’ve watched a lot of videos about Hollywood’s two latest flops.  They have failed to listen to the fans, and they’re losing a lot, as in a LOT, of money.

Both “Masters Of The Universe: Revelation” and “Black Widow” have been based around the ubiquitous “Strong Female Character”, while sidelining, cucking, and frankly, simply killing off all the male characters.

Why do “Strong Female Characters” fail to resonate with women?  Primarily because there is a real disconnect between the Hollywood interpretation of female strength and actual female virtues.  

In Hollywood, a “Strong Female Character” is physically strong above all, and usually stronger than any man she interacts with.    Since actual people look for heroes with character traits they can aspire to, this fails at the outset.  

I have never in my life met a woman whose primary ambition was to be physically stronger than a man.  Why?  Well, to begin with, it is impossible.  We don’t have the bone structure to make it possible, and even if it was, that is simply not how we are bent.  Do we generally want to solve our problems by punching people?  No.  We want to outthink our opponents, if at all possible, and avoid physical combat.

Men have a particular set of characteristics that make them very well-suited to physical combat.  They feel relieved after DOING things, while women tend more to feel relieved after TALKING.  These differences are well known, studied, and explored in every way, and have always been known.  Any woman who would rather punch people than to talk her head off would be no woman at all.

That is one reason the “trans” we encounter fail to read as actual women.  Trans who get upset typically launch physical threats, which is a completely unfeminine response.  If we are actually frightened, we are likely to ask a male for help, not only because men enjoy protecting women, but because men are very good at doing so.

Where men run women down for too much talking, women run men down for too much doing: too many physical responses.  And yet both are needed.  It is not a case of “some girls talk, some girls act.”  It is universal and predictable.

As a result, any theatrical thing where a woman is made to behave emotionally or physically as though she is a man, will simply fail to resonate with women.  We identify with the parts of a female character that remind us of ourselves, but the more she acts like a man, the less she will remind us of ourselves.

Also, we know that Hollywood has quotas.  Oh yes, Netflix in particular insists that a percentage, a large one, of everyone involved must be “diverse.”  If this meant that X percent would be Catholic and Y percent would be Protestant, that might lead to interesting stories.  

Insisting that a large percentage of writers and other creatives be gay does not create interesting stories.  Why?  Because the actual percentage of gay human beings is tiny, only 1. 6% in total, including gays and lesbians.  Add to this that the actual genesis of gay conduct has to be denied in the hope of getting more people involved, and we are saddled with a population that nearly nobody can identify with. 

Why do we not identify with this enormous population of mostly gay humans?  Partly because they are lying about themselves, and partly because they are lying about us.  

My own experience as a child of gays gave me the chance not only to be intimately familiar with the ways that my gay parents wanted to be seen, but also with what they actually were.  Where both of them were indisputably brilliant and talented, and even fine writers, what they really wanted to be seen as was suitable, attractive romantic partners, and that was the real heartbreak.  

My father (brace yourself, because this is vile) wanted the children he molested to DESIRE HIM.  Of course this was impossible, because he was a fifty-year-old man with a long gray beard and a huge belly, and the children were universally fooled by his masquerade as a father-figure.  Children need fathers, and if their own fathers are absent or inadequate, they will often try to absorb fathering, even from dangerous people.

My father looked like a safe adult male, who lavished the boys he desired with attention and gifts, and the real price was not instantly apparent.  What my father inevitably discovered was that it was the attention and the gifts the children wanted, and not his repulsive physical attention.

Forgive me for that disgusting illustration.

At the center of the whole business, though, was a man who wanted to be appreciated for something he was not, and could never be.  I remember how infuriated he would get when the boys he was trying to seduce would vastly prefer my company.  I was a young teen girl, which is naturally much more appealing to a teen boy than an old man.

So there you have it.  In order for my father to have what he wanted, the boys he targeted had to pretend to be something they were not, and could never be, that is, they had to pretend to want what he wanted, and he had to pretend to be the father they actually wanted.  Both were lying to get what they wanted.  The center of that transaction ended up being an uneasy exchange of gifts, food and money for sexual favors—until my report ended my father’s reign of error and dumped him in prison where he belonged.

Bear with me a little longer while I paint the rest of the picture.

My mother’s situation was similar, in that she tended to seduce childlike women who needed mothering and had broken relationships with their own mothers.  Since bringing sex into a parental relationship is a deep, deep betrayal, these relationships could only continue on a false basis, again where “parenting” and gifts of food and money and attention were exchanged for sexual favors.  

In the case of my mother and stepmother, the latter simply ended the sex by getting a lock on her door.  She was able to deceive my mother into endless hope to the point that my mother would not leave her, though. One presumes that my stepmother was confident enough that she was earning her keep in other ways to excuse her physical absence from the “relationship.”  

My stepmother was a good secretary and accountant, and created a lot of professional value for my mother, who was no kind of marketer.

Still, in both cases, the relationships were the same.  The “adult” in the relationship wanted sex and attention, and the children wanted parenting, and this is a recipe for disaster.  Since my stepmother was technically an adult, she was able to think her way out of giving my mother what she wanted, and to maintain the relationship on her own terms, even though it meant it was fundamentally a parasitic relationship by two very unequal partners.  

So what on earth does this have to do with the endless gay tropes in Hollywood?  

It points out that gay “relationships” are often simply attempts to repair broken parental relationships, and as a result, many end when the younger party grows up.  Also, it is a fact that the two members of such a relationship often want completely opposite things, and the situation ends up being a pack of lies, in order to simply survive.  That is the reality.

What does Hollywood offer?

Unfeminine women who live to fight, and don’t need no man, who end up desiring each other.  In effect, the relationships end up being between women who only pretend to be masculine, and women who pretend to desire them for a time.  Two unfeminine women is not something one generally sees in the gay community, because the dynamic of the butch lesbian and the femme, or the “parent” and the “child” are much more common.  Opposites attract, after all, even if it is opposites in pathology.  

Since overwhelmingly, women are straight and do not want to fight, making all the Hollywood gals into violent lesbians is simply silly.  We can identify with a blue-skinned seven foot tall alien woman, provided she has other traits we identify with.  A blue-skinned seven foot tall alien woman who hates men and has girlfriends?  That is a bridge too far.  

We like men.  Presenting men as inadequate does not change our view.  Even if we know a few inadequate males, we generally internally dismiss them as being large children, and what is on our radar will be males we deem to be worthy.  

Moreover, we have immutable biological responses to men.  Even among lesbians, this is still true.  My lesbian mother was married to my father until he was incarcerated, and only divorced him when forced to.  I am the youngest of her three children, and the daughter of her second husband.  

Even after she got mixed up with my stepmother, the two of them had numerous entanglements with a variety of men.

This is much more common than one might think.

If this was even the slightest bit mutable, why do so many trans insist on pretending to be far more “feminine” than the vast majority of women?  

Simple.  They know what men like, even if they can only ape it poorly, with the rare exceptions on magazine covers still being a source of horror and disgust to the vast majority of men.  

Men like women.  Women like men.  We are not the same.  All the efforts made by Hollywood to negate or diminish our differences have simply resulted in characters that we cannot identify with.

If Hollywood wanted to get the fans back, they would do well to find out what women actually want and like.  Even if they insisted on women doing some physical fighting, it would be far better to have us doing what we would actually do, in escaping, using weapons, and even using our wits, rather than simply pretending we can out-punch someone literally twice our size and strength. 

At best, the very strongest woman alive can be as strong as a very strong fourteen year old boy.  That’s it.  We don’t ever get stronger than that.  This means that even a man of comparatively average strength would be able to beat any woman, simply via leverage, without even considering brute strength.  It is fantasy and nonsense to claim otherwise, and it means we can’t identify with that sort of thing.  

When I was in high school and college, I was very strong, and I was a fencer.  I could beat every woman I ever fought, because I had reach, via long arms, and unusual upper body strength.  But fencing is a game of speed and reflexes, and where I could beat every woman, I could only reliably beat men of a similar size to me.  If we had been fighting with broadswords, I would have lost, and lost, and lost, had I been so unwise as to fight men.  A foil weighs nearly nothing, so I was fast.  If I had been using a heavy weapon, physics would have defeated me… and any woman with half a brain would know this.

When I was growing up, I used to fight with my nearest brother Mark, and I will never forget when he abruptly became stronger than I was.  I was 12 and he was 13.

I was such a tomboy I thought I could still beat him, even though he had grown taller than I was.  I was wrong.  One day, after I had acted like a total bitch to him, he punched me in the face, knocking me into a door, breaking my nose, and leaving me in a crumpled heap.  I have no illusions: the situation was 100% my fault.

He was, like any reasonable man would be, aghast at what he had done, even though I had provoked him.  But I learned my lesson, and never got into a physical fight with him again.  Even though I became an avid weightlifter, and danced and fenced competitively, I never risked his wrath again.  Even though he was un-athletic, even squishy, he was way too big and too strong for me.

We cannot outfight men.

What we can do is think our way out of combat.  We have all encountered this.  We all know, instinctively, that men can do things we cannot do, and we would be foolish to try.

Why does Hollywood not know what absolutely every woman ever born knows?  

The question of virtue is even more important.  For a man to defend his family is a matter of virtue, but women do not defend our families in the same way.  We can talk and reason and challenge and stand up in the ways we can, and we will certainly risk harm to ourselves to protect our children, but we are not called to physically fight, because if we lose, and we die, our children will have nobody to feed them.

Why are our actual strengths and virtues overlooked, as though the male virtue of protective combat is the only one that matters?

What girl has ever grown up wanting to fight someone to protect our families?  None of us, I think.  But where boys will even turn sticks into swords for play-fights very young, we girls will turn more or less anything into a doll so we can play at being mommies.  I was an unusual girl, because having been raised by gays, I was supposed to “not be like that.”  I never owned a doll until I was an adult, though I did eventually have toy horses.  

Having been made to suppress my femininity in an attempt to please my parents, I have been all over the tomboy thing.  As an adult, I am very glad I was able to be a wife and mother, even though I was shamed for wanting this for as long as I could remember.

Hollywood seems to want to propagandize women in the same way I was propagandized.  We are not supposed to want marriage and children, even though we do.  We are supposed to “out-man” all the men, and doing so is a “win” for us.  We are supposed to demand that men act like women, and refuse to go along with biology.

Furthermore, we are supposed to fight with men, instead of loving them.

But in the final analysis, who is this all for?  We grow out of wanting to please our parents, and then what remains is biology.  We want families, because we are built to want families, and because they are pretty darned cool.  Having had a musical career and a family, the family mattered more, as in a LOT more.  

The bill of goods we are being sold is to delay marriage and family so we can become “Self-Actualized” and yet in retrospect, we can be many things AND have families as well.

Hollywood would do well to bring back feminine women and masculine men, instead of the androgynous neither they seem determined to push on us.  The vast majority of us want normal things, and to twist us away from the things we actually want simply will not maintain our attention.

I might have seen “Black Widow” if ScarJo had not blathered on about feminism, or if it had had a real love interest.  I might have watched “Masters of the Universe” if the women had had beautiful costumes and actual love matches.  

It should go without saying that these imaginary “Strong Female Characters” occasionally ape male failings, such as alcoholic excess, sexual predation and fighting for no reason.  What they cannot do is ape the behaviors of mature men, because those require self-sacrifice, introspection, and deep thought.  Anyone immature enough to pretend a deception as deep as aping another sex will not be engaging in introspection.

Without the centuries-old love story of men and women, there is simply no story.  I watch movies and read books for their stories about people.  If the people are no longer recognizable as people, there is no point.  If a seven foot tall blue skinned alien is more recognizable as a woman than an actual woman, Hollywood has missed the mark.  Heck, if Groot seems more like a man than Prince Adam from He-Man, they’ve completely lost the plot.

And for a movie to have lost the plot is as bad as for salt to lose its saltiness.

—Moira Greyland Peat

Facing Reality

 https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/charles-murrays-forthcoming-book-facing-reality-two-truths-about-race-in-america/

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have 1) different violent crime rates and 2) different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.

What good can come of bringing them into the open? America’s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.

We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed’s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.

AG William Barr

https://billmoyers.com/story/the-long-read-barr-battles-the-rule-of-law/

When the story of the Trump era is written, history will pose a single defining question to every American lawyer: In the fight to preserve the rule of law, which side were you on?

America has seen which side William Barr is on. As the nation’s top law enforcement officer, the attorney general represents the “People of the United States.” Early in his tenure, Barr jettisoned that role.

Operating as Trump’s personal advocate, Barr has abused the power of his office to undermine the Trump-Russia investigation. Although troublesome, Barr’s actions are best viewed as a case study in his modus operandi. What Barr has done to that investigation and its key players, he can do to anything and anyone. That makes Barr’s methods ominous for the rule of law itself.

Hiring Barr was no accident. Early in 2017, before special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment, Trump feared that he was losing control of the Trump-Russia investigation. He was furious at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ (JD, Alabama, 73) for recusing himself from the ongoing probe. Referring to his former personal attorney, notorious fixer, and top aide to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI) during the investigations of communist activity in the 1950s, Trump lamented, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

A year later, he got his answer. Barr sent Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (JD, Harvard, ’89) an unsolicited 19-page memo challenging the premise of Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation and urging that the special counsel should not even be permitted to question Trump. In William Barr, Trump had finally found his Roy Cohn.

First came the lies and deceptions. According to The Washington Post, as of July 9, 2020, Trump had made more than 20,000 “false or misleading claims” since assuming office. Like Trump, Barr understands the rhetorical and psychological concepts of primacy and repetition. Whoever speaks first and most frequently on an important topic has the upper hand in controlling the resulting narrative, regardless of its veracity.

From his first days in office, Barr has reinforced Trump’s false assertions that the Trump-Russia investigation never should have happened. In the maelstrom that followed, truth became a casualty. 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/20/william-barr-trumps-sword-and-shield

Barr showed no sign of tempering Trump’s instincts. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, told me, “I think he was nominated for his ability to protect Trump. His belief in executive power was his primary qualification.” In high-profile cases, Barr has repeatedly aided Trump politically. When Barr issued his summary of the Mueller report, he quoted part of a sentence saying that no conclusive proof of collusion had been found, but left out the rest, which suggested that Russia and the Trump campaign had worked at arm’s length toward similar goals.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155221/dereliction-william-barr

Barr, by comparison, seems to have no such scruples about carrying out Trump’s whims. He hasn’t really deviated from Sessions’s overall policy agenda since taking over DOJ. In some aspects of immigration and criminal-justice matters, he’s even gone further than Sessions ever did. But his greatest achievement so far is doing what his predecessor spent almost two years resisting: transforming the Justice Department from a semi-independent actor into an instrument of Trump’s political interests.

Trump never masked his views on how his attorneys general should act. He believes that the Justice Department should protect him and his friends from legal troubles while inflicting them on his enemies. Multiple White House aides told Mueller that Trump would describe Robert F. Kennedy and Eric Holder as attorneys general who shielded their presidents from political harm, and how he needed to find one like them. To Trump, the attorney general is just another lawyer who should be aggressively advancing his personal interests—another Roy Cohn, or Michael Cohen, or Rudy Giuliani.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/william-barrs-secret-memo-attorney-general-department-justice-mueller.html

So the fact that the president who believes the attorney general should be his Roy Cohn appointed a candidate who had submitted a long defense of Trump to the president’s lawyers turns out not to have been a massive coincidence.

https://www.justsecurity.org/71230/bill-barr-no-lap-dog-just-defending-his-idea-of-the-top-dog/

Barr sent an unsolicited memo to President Trump on June 8, 2018, seemingly in an audition to become Attorney General, making the argument that the aspects of the Mueller investigation were legally insupportable, particularly because the president per se cannot commit obstruction of law, unless he commits an actual crime such as witness tampering.  According to Barr’s memo, the president’s “discretionary prosecutorial power is unreviewable.” As Marty Lederman explained in his review of the memo, this was no simple version of the unitary executive theory.  As Lederman, who is not one to exaggerate, wrote, the 2018 memo advanced “a version of Barr’s notorious 1989 OLC memorandum, boosted by the proverbial ‘steroids.’… so shockingly categorical and so extreme.”

Barr is a fellow traveler in his belief of an all-powerful president with deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former D.C. Circuit judge and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who infamously fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal’s “Saturday night massacre” when none of his Justice Department’s superiors would do so – because Bork believed it was President Nixon’s right to do so. Under President George W. Bush, DOJ lawyers relied on the same theory to advance controversial positions allowing torture and warrantless wiretapping of Americans on U.S. soil.  While those are policy positions that DOJ lawyers regarded as allowed by the unitary executive theory, proponents argue that the ability to control all executive branch personnel, as well as prosecutorial decision-making, is compelled by the theory.  This position undergirds opposition to the just-cause removal proposals for agency inspectors general and to the similar provision applicable to the director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau recently invalidated by the Supreme Court.