“China eats weird animals disease”

As Tucker Carlson frequently says, because of the establishment’s response to COVID in 2020, the America we knew has been irrevocably changed, and not for the better. All of us can remember what led to that change: News out of China that hospitals were overrun and people dying in the streets because of a strange infection.

The U.S. Department of Defense is halting all actions relating to its COVID-19 vaccine mandate after President Joe Biden signed a bill—the Fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—that includes an end to the mandate, the department said on Dec. 23.

“The NDAA requires that, not later than 30 days after enactment, the Secretary of Defense rescind the mandate that members of the Armed Forces be vaccinated against COVID-19. As a result, the Department will rescind the mandate and is currently in the process of developing further guidance. During this process, we are pausing all actions related to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

h/t Mauser

The WHO doesn’t mess around. At least when it comes to spreading propaganda.

I will assume for the sake of civility that the WHO genuinely believes that the COVID vaccine is safe and effective. I will even assume that for most people the vaccine is safe, and at least somewhat effective in reducing the likelihood of severe disease in people likely to become deadly ill from COVID, such as the very old and very sick.

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), Breitbart News senior editor, and author of Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, observed on Monday that governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were partially driven by “vested commercial interests” and a corrupt fusion of industry with the state.

Not exactly, but it certainly raises the possibility. A wide-ranging analysis published to little initial fanfare on December 1 reviewed Medicare data for outcomes for more than 30 million recipients of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine above the age of 65. The first pass of the data showed “statistical signals” to four potential adverse outcomes, but subsequent reviews limited the signal to just one: a potential causal link between this particular vaccine and a type of pulmonary embolism …

It’s quite the eye-catching headline: “Covid May Spread From Corpses, Studies Say.” New York Times COVID reporter Apoorva Mandavilli is back, the author of yet another alarmist COVID story.

When the shock wears off, and after one notes that the study it’s based on has yet to undergo peer-review, the bottom line is pretty simple: Don’t handle corpses, it might be bad for you, in case you didn’t know that already. And then there’s yet another big Mandavilli math error in the direction of alarmism.

Body language, mumbling, stuttering & incoherence – speak for themselves.
We see you, Bill. pic.twitter.com/z2vxNw26ko

— Efrat Fenigson (@efenigson) December 19, 2022

h/t Mauser

The elites’ blacklisting of lockdown dissenters was shameful and self-destructive.

There were two viruses that the authorities wanted to control in 2020 and 2021. The first was the virus of Covid-19. The second was the virus of dissent. Throughout the pandemic, experts referred to lockdown scepticism and Covid misinformation as their own kind of disease, as a contagious malady that might sicken the masses’ minds as surely as Covid sickened their bodies. British politicians referred to a ‘pandemic of misinformation’. We must protect people both from ‘physical disease and the “disease of misinformation”’, scientists insisted. ‘False information has plagued the Covid response’, said one academic. Plagued – what a striking choice of verb. And if contrary ideas are an infection in the body politic, then it’s clear what the cure must be: censorship.

What could be worse than an unmasked and normal Christmas?

A great scourge has descended upon the land, leaving in its wake a path of misery and girlfriends shivering under blankets. Crops have been destroyed, and there are times when (after 5 p.m.) it can seem like we might never see the sun again. Yet the greatest terror ushered in by this darkness is its plague, a relentless onslaught of mild coughs and sniffly noses that seems to have left just about everyone feeling marginally annoyed.

Tech workers are still at home. The $17 salad place is expanding into the suburbs. So what is left in San Francisco?

The coffee rush. The lunch rush. The columns of headphone-equipped tech workers rushing in and out of train stations. The lanyard-wearing visitors who crowded the sidewalks when a big conference was in town.

There was a time three years ago when a walk through downtown San Francisco was a picture of what it meant for a city to be economically successful. Take the five-minute jaunt from the office building at 140 New Montgomery Street to a line-out-the-door salad shop nearby.