‘I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization,’ Birx, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, said during an appearance on Fox News.
Not that long ago however, Dr. Birx said of the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines,
‘This is one of the most highly-effective vaccines we have in our infectious disease arsenal. And so that’s why I’m very enthusiastic about the vaccine.’
Yet she now says,
‘So, that’s why I’m saying, even if you’re vaccinated and boosted if you’re unvaccinated, right now, the key is testing and Paxlovid.’
Indeed, and wouldn’t that have been the appropriate counsel two-and-a-half years ago, obviating lockdowns and closings of so many of our country’s businesses, particularly small ones, many never to re-open? Or the closings of our schools, thus our children losing two formative years, never to be made up, of their educations? Or the utterly ridiculous mask mandates, despite evidence appearing early on they offered little or no protection from COVID, just as we are now learning about the vaccines?
And for what? Basically a flu epidemic, potent, but hardly the worst the world has ever seen, e.g., the Spanish flu or, more recently, the Asian flu of the late ’60s (your correspondent when in his early teens caught that one–as did at least a third of his classmates. He has never had flu since, by the way. Anyone care to hazard a guess why that might be?).
Your humble servant Bickerstaff is disinclined to believe in conspiracy theories, but it does seem striking in an election year the severest lockdowns were those in states controlled by Democrats. This then provided the pretext for ignoring or eliminating safeguards to prevent election fraud, e.g., vote harvesting, mail-in ballots, multiple voting etc.
Also striking is concomitantly, an ageing political hack, a zero to begin with, now well into the negative numbers and obviously going gentle into that good night, could nevertheless reap 81 million votes, thus claiming the presidency.
Just coincidences? Who knows, but it is unnerving there isn’t a single Democrat in our present administration even remotely competent yet there are any number of them hugely proficient at making it easier to cheat at elections. It’s as if they don’t know how or want to do anything else.
In downtown Greenwich Connecticut, a woman is robbed in broad daylight. @CTDems want you disarmed and to be a victim. Republicans want to empower you and embrace your right to defend yourself. What is the plan to keep Connecticut residents safe? pic.twitter.com/sPqJqw5lT7
— Greenwich Republicans (@GreenwichRTC) July 19, 2022
It’s not just rich New Yorkers who find Greenwich so attractive.
Comes word your Tatler’s hometown is seeing a sharp increase in crime these days and it’s not just the bored and spoiled scions of billionaire hedge funders smashing mailboxes or drunk driving daddy’s Lamborghini at 100 mph on North Street before barreling into their country club’s pool.
No, this is more serious. Miscreants from NYC have discovered there’s gold (figuratively–usually) to be had in the chic and pricey stores on Greenwich Avenue. With easy-on, easy-off access to Interstate 95, the pickins are choice and usually easy, In this latest heist though, a good Samaritan came to the rescue of a woman being robbed outside the Apple store, a favorite of the criminal class who visit Greenwich’s shopping district, and tried hard to nab the perp.
Nonetheless, the robber got away, but there is sufficient evidence to assume he’ll be busted eventually and no doubt released shortly afterward on his own recognizance (Connecticut’s courts are as lenient as New York’s these days). The local paper has declined to reveal the suspect’s hue so identifying him should be much less burdensome.
With events like these occuring more and more often in Greenwich, a conundrum is facing many of Greenwich’s newer residents who virtually all, despite their great wealth, range politically from liberal to radical left. Despite their being exemplars of capitalism, Wall Street bankers and the like, they are the same people who, when living in the City enthusiastically supported the reforms [sic] of its last mayor, Bill de Blasio, possibly the dumbest politician in America. This cretin defunded the police, eliminated bail, decriminalized most quality-of-life offenses and other idiocies. When the predicted results of these changes materialized with astonishing quickness, returning New York to the David Dinkins ’80s and ’90s,
the millionaire and billionaire leftists with children began to flee what they had wrought and Greenwich was their number-one destination. Sadly though, those radical chic-ers brought their political baggage with them and Greenwich, which used to be one the most solidly Republican strongholds in the nation, now has a majority of Democrat voters, who already are pushing the same tired progressive agenda so dear to them.
Your Tatler (who also fled New York in the de Blasio years, but chose to go west instead), wonders how the arriviste monied commies of Greenwich will deal with its rising crime rate. Will they at last get wise and perhaps reconsider the wisdom of soiling their own nest? Or will they pretend as before none of it is happening until this idyllic suburb has declined enough to compel them seeking out fresh territories on which to spread their ruination. Your Tatler’s money is on the latter.
Ocasio-Cortez, Members Of ‘The Squad’ Appear To Have Been Arrested In Front Of Supreme Court.
Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the far-left group “the squad” were escorted away from the Supreme Court Tuesday afternoon during a protest.
In several videos posted on Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez can be seen with her hands behind her back being held by police officers who appear to be escorting her away from a protest in front of the Supreme Court.
Of course, your Tatler being of charity, ten years hard labor would certainly be satisfactory as well.
Big news! Your Tatler’s been outdone. The good souls at the The Federalist now offer downloadable inspirational posters containing pearls of prose by the Bardess of Embassy Row.
Harry just compared the repeal of Roe to the mass slaughter of Ukrainians. Whatever. No one gives a flying fuck what he thinks. https://t.co/Woms6iR7Pd
Damian Thompson expresses a popular sentiment, though perhaps a tad more exuberantly than your Tatler would.
An accident of birth does not automatically grant the right to publicly voice ill-formed, unasked for opinions with the expectation they be regarded the least bit seriously. It’s a pity this highborn larrikin couldn’t have followed the example of his older brother, who seems to have accepted his birthright and the responsibilities thereto: ribbon cuttings, charitable events, state dinners, diplomatic greetings and the like (things your Tatler would sooner chew glass than have to engage in) with grace and gratitude, while also producing two heirs with his lovely wife.
The leader of a failed state hosts the leader of a failing state.
One might think the Jewish state nearby could easily muster up real musicians to play our national anthem. Indeed, compare and contrast.
Addendum: the clown show above brings to mind another occasion our national anthem was played overseas: shortly after 9/11 at the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace by the band of the Coldstream Guards. This was at the behest of Queen Elizabeth and a graceful and touching gesture by a true ally. At that same time Palestinians were dancing in the streets with joy at our loss.
Irrespective this silly little man’s needless slamming of our country’s two most stalwart allies, it takes a special kind of brazenness for someone excommunicated latae sententiae, owing to his enthusiastic support of abortion, to express empathy with Catholics past. He also displays ignorance of history, as the Palestinians have time after time rejected opportunities having their own state, preferring instead maintaining their state of war with Israel. This writer has no knowledge of England acting similarly with Ireland.
There are many reasons to abhor the 1970s and its gross excesses, theological, political, and cultural, but there are those of a certain age who actually wax nostalgic over that awful decade. One of them was your Tatler’s former superior in the music industry, who understandably, as a student of the Frankfurt School of Economics and the likes of George Soros, embraced decay with a passion.
Then again, it’s difficult to imagine anyone waxing nostalgic over the above. Let it serve therefore as warning: it happened once, it can happen again.
“No foundation, anywhere. Whole world. No foundation. All the way down the line.“
–William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life.
Social sciences are in a perilous state and have been for some time. Half-a-century ago the Bostonian historian Walter Muir Whitehill derided them as “the fraudulent disciplines,” singling out psychology and sociology, and saying he would much prefer the company of an Egyptologist. Things have gotten far worse since then and worst of all is the alleged discipline which didn’t even exist in Whitehill’s time, so-called gender studies.
As a case in point, For What It’s Worth reports the supposedly science-based World Health Organization, architect of the brilliantly managed COVID (née Wu Han Flu) outbreak, has just announced its latest triumph, the updating of its coveted gender-mainstreaming manual, which now reads gender goes “beyond non-binary and that “highlighting and expanding on the concept of intersectionality, which looks at how gender power dynamics interact with other hierarchies of privilege or disadvantage, resulting in inequality and differential health outcomes for different people.”
In the odd chance readers can’t quite grasp the meaning of the above, the WHO provides further clarification on its website.
• Harmonize a common intersectional feminist lens for WHO programme activities and deliverables across all three levels of the Organization;
• strengthen the integration of intersectionality and gender diversity aspects across the training content and materials with practical examples;
• update existing gender integration tools and frameworks and introduce new ones to further strengthen learning outcomes for staff and health outcomes at country level, supported by a practical “how-to” guide;
• ensure that the principles of ethics, gender, equity and human rights are embedded in public health activities and systems to optimize the achievement of the triple billion goals set out in GPW13.
All sarcasm (reluctantly) aside, there is a commonality to writings in the social sciences, their utter opaqueness. Endless strings of cumbersome latinate words and neologisms (deliverables?) obscure–deliberately–one simple fact. There is nothing there.
Consider this single wordy paragraph from an accepted dissertation entitled A Queer and Crip Grotesque, which your Tatler chose at random from a website for such things. The topic is somewhat removed from that the WHO writes of, but it doesn’t matter. All dissertations, theses, books, newspaper and magazine articles pertaining to gender studies read alike.
Carnivalesque and Cosmic Terror
The co-presence of horror and humor is central to understanding the ways in which the positive and negative grotesque interact. It functions as more than a literary trope and begins to denote relations of power through the carnivalesque. The carnivalesque cannot, however, exist without cosmic terror. Cosmic terror is the fear of the infinitely powerful, that which cannot be overcome by force (Dentith 241). For religion it is a higher being, for nature it is the elemental catastrophe, for humans it is the governing institution. These terrors are a means for control, an omniscient presence to guide human behavior through fear of punishment. True to the grotesque, the terror of the cosmos is countered by the carnivalesque. It is a time of blasphemy, of masquerade and merry making, of feasting and fools. The carnivalesque is suspended in time and removed from the trepidations of reality (McWilliam 220). It often involves colorful and ornate clothing, protruding masks, and satire. Kings become fools and fools kings! Carnivale occurs in a liminal space, one that is temporary and peripheral to the lived world: It is a simulacrum (McWilliam 220, Russo 5). The carnivale flips the social script, makes the world topsy-turvy. It is a means to relieve the pressure of terror, to remove, if even for a moment, the weight of authoritative control by disarming it through farcicality. The dualistic world of the carnivalesque, both terror and laughter, expresses a distinct social commentary and subversive political tool, giving the grotesque critical implications in its application.
There is not one single fact in all that verbiage, just lots and lots of opinions. The author provides links to some of them (your correspondent assumes links are the 21st-Century equivalent of footnotes), presumably to add weight to her baseless arguments, but lo, those links simply lead one to the opinions of others higher up the academic latter.
Such is the state of the social sciences these days, scholarship without facts. With murmurings in this country growing louder and louder concerning the state of all our institutions, including the academy, it seems to your Tatler the fraudulent disciplines will eventually collapse as they grow ever bigger without foundation.
The British engineering genius Isambard Kindom Brunel (1806-59) when just a schoolboy, predicted to his classmates a building they could see going up outside the classroom window would collapse, owing to a fault he had detected in the foundation. It did, shortly afterward.
It takes no genius to predict the collapse of academic disciplines with no foundation at all.
THE TAOS TATLER. 