Month: January 2022

While the world’s overall preparedness score in the 2021 Global Health Security Index isn’t particularly good, Statista’s Felix Richter notes that it is markedly worse in the Prevention category.

The global average score for the prevention of the emergence or release of pathogens is just 28.4 out of 100, as 113 countries are found to show “little to no attention” to zoonotic diseases, i.e. diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans, such as Covid-19 according to current knowledge.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As the chart above shows, other categories also score far below the maximum of 100, with just one of the six pillars of health security reaching a global average score above 50.

Worryingly, it’s the early stages of an epidemic, pandemic where the world seems particularly vulnerable.

With a global average Prevention score of 28.4 out of 100 and an Early Detection & Reporting score of 32.3, the world seems dangerously underprepared to stop a future epidemic before it becomes a pandemic.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

The last two years have seen an unprecedented escalation in a decades-long war on the American past. But there are lots of logical flaws in attacking prior generations in U.S. history.

Critics assume their own judgmental generation is morally superior to those of the past. So, they use their own standards to condemn the mute dead who supposedly do not measure up to them.

Yet 21st-century critics rarely acknowledge their own present affluence and leisure owe much to history’s prior generations whose toil helped create their current comfort.

And what may future scolds say of the modern generation that saw over 60 million abortions since Roe v. Wade, even as fetal viability outside the womb continued to progress to ever earlier ages?

What will our grandchildren say of us who dumped on them over $30 trillion in national debt – much of it as borrowing for entitlements for ourselves?

What sort of society snoozes as record numbers of murders continue in 12 of its major cities? What is so civilized about defunding the police, endemic smash-and-grab thefts, and car jackings?

Was our media more responsible, professional, and learned in 1965 or 2021? Did Hollywood make more sophisticated and enjoyable films in 1954 or 2021? Was there less or more sportsmanship among professional athletes in 1990 or 2021?

Was it actually moral to discard the “content of our character” and “equal opportunity” principles of the prior Civil Rights movement of 60 years ago? Are their replacement fixations on the “color of our skin” and “equality of result” superior?

Would America have won World War II with the current labor participation rate of only six in 10 Americans working? Would our generation have brought all American troops home and quit World War I in fear of the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic?

Are we proud that most standardized tests of student knowledge and achievement continue to decline, despite record investments in education?

Do we ever pause to consider that we enjoy our modern standard of living and security because we were once a meritocracy that quit judging our workforce by tribal affinities and ancient prejudices?

Our generation talks of infrastructure nonstop. But when was the last time it built anything comparable to the Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, or the California Water Project – much less sent a man back to the moon or beyond?

If prior generations were so toxic, why do we continue to take for granted the moral and material world they bequeathed to us, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to our airports, freeways, and power plants? Did we ever defeat anything comparable to the Axis powers or Soviet communism?

We know the symptoms of the current epidemic of hating the past.

One is Orwellian renaming and statue-toppling. Historical revision often responds to puritanical mob frenzies rather than to democratic discussion and votes of relevant elected officials.

Where is the pantheon of woke heroes who will replace the toppled or defaced Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt?

Whose morality and achievement should instead be immortalized? Were the public and private lives of Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Margaret Sanger, and Franklin D. Roosevelt without sin?

Racial fixations tend predictably in one direction. In good Confederate fashion, we lump all individuals who look alike into inexact collectives of “white,” “black,” or “brown” – often to stereotype the supposed evils of so-called white supremacy.

But if we go down that tribalist and simplistic road of caricatured oppressors and oppressed, will future generations tally up each group’s merits and demerits, to adjudicate the roles of millions of individuals in making America worse or better?

What standard would they use to judge our ignorant world of racial stereotyping – proportional representation in Nobel Prizes, philanthropy, scientific breakthroughs, or lasting art, music, and literature versus statistics on homicides, assault, divorce, and illegitimacy?

Immigration – when legal, diverse, measured, and often meritocratic – has been the great strength of America, as typified by industrious arrivals who chose to abandon their own homeland to risk new lives in a foreign United States.

But if America is so flawed and so irredeemable, why in fiscal year 2021 are nearly 2 million foreigners now crashing its borders – illegally, en masse, and intent on reaching a supposedly racist nation that is purportedly inferior to those they abandon?

According to the ancient brutal bargain, assimilation and integration grant the immigrant as much claim to America’s present and past as the native-born. But then shouldn’t the antithesis also be true?

Shouldn’t immigrants at least respect those of the past who created the very country they now so eagerly desire, and died in awful places from Valley Forge to Bastogne to preserve?

Never in history has such a mediocre, but self-important and ungracious generation owed so much, and yet expressed so little gratitude, to its now dead forebears.

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times,

Voting irregularities – including potentially thousands of votes cast by non-citizens and the dead – were reported during the first phase of the Texas Secretary of State’s forensic audit of the 2020 general election, but critics deemed it more of a risk-limiting audit at this point.

The Texas Secretary of State’s office released its findings on Dec. 31, but the issues found are not enough to significantly impact 2020 election results of the four counties involved in the audit—Collin, Dallas, Harris, and Tarrant counties—which account for about 10 million people, or a third of the Texas population.

“Generally speaking, nothing was found on such a large scale that could have altered any election,” said Sam Taylor, assistant secretary of state for communications, in an interview with The Epoch Times.

Findings include:

• Statewide, a total of 11,737 potential non-U.S. citizens were identified as being registered to vote. Of these, 327 records were identified in Collin County, 1,385 in Dallas County, 3,063 in Harris County, and 708 in Tarrant County. So far, Dallas County has canceled 1,193 of these records, with Tarrant County canceling one. Neither Collin nor Harris have canceled any potential non-voting records.

• Since November 2020, 224,585 deceased voters have been removed from the voter rolls in Texas. Collin County removed 4,889 deceased voters, Dallas County removed 14,926 deceased voters, Harris County removed 23,914 deceased voters, and Tarrant County removed 13,955 deceased voters.

• Statewide, a total of 67 potential votes cast in the name of deceased people are under investigation. Of those, three were cast in Collin County, nine in Dallas County, four in Harris County, and one in Tarrant County.

• In a review of each county’s partial manual count report required under Texas law, three of the four counties reported discrepancies between ballots counted electronically versus those counted by hand. The reported reasons for these discrepancies will be investigated and verified during Phase 2 of the audit.

Taylor said the state’s audit, currently moving into its second phase, was a first-of-its-kind for Texas.

Secretary of State John Scott portrayed the audit as the country’s “most comprehensive forensic audit of the 2020 election,” according to a November press release. He added the audit will use “analytical tools to examine the literal nuts and bolts of election administration to determine if any illegal activity may have occurred.”

Voters wait in line to cast their vote in Austin, Texas, on Nov. 3, 2020. (Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty Images)

Of the four counties being audited, former President Donald Trump won Collin County, with President Joe Biden taking Dallas and Harris counties. Tarrant County, traditionally a red county, flipped to Biden with a slim 1,826 vote margin. Overall, Trump carried Texas with 52.1 percent of the vote to Biden’s 46.5 percent.

The Texas audit was announced soon after Trump wrote a Sept. 23 open letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who Trump endorsed for re-election in 2022, pushing for a more thorough forensic audit of the 2020 election.

Trump’s letter asked Abbott to include legislation in the third special session that would allow for more comprehensive forensic audits of the 2020 presidential election in Texas, specifically pointing to House Bill 16 and Senate Bill 97. Those pieces of legislation would have allowed party officials to demand county-level audits in future elections and allowed for a 2020 audit as well. Ultimately SB 97, which had similar language as HB 16, was introduced but did not pass both chambers before the clock ran out on the third and final session this fall.

As it stands, the four-county audit is part of Senate Bill 1, a sweeping election bill passed by the Republican-led Legislature in the second special session of 2021, but vehemently opposed by Democrats.

Legislators hoping to revive a fourth Legislative session to deal with voting fraud issues say the current audit is limited in scope.

 

President Donald Trump takes the stage for a rally in support of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas, on Oct. 22, 2018. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)

State Rep. Steve Toth, (R) Woodlands, who sponsored HB 16, called the Secretary of State audit more of a risk-limiting audit that won’t adequately address all 2020 election problems.

“We know that fraud has been taking place in Texas,” Toth said in an interview with The Epoch Times.

“We need a forensic audit.”

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, (R) Houston, who introduced SB 97, agreed that Toth had a point. Bettencourt’s bill would have allowed audits to be conducted at the county level across Texas. However, he said the Secretary of State’s audit has the potential to become a forensic audit during phase two if it begins to dig into voting irregularities.

“My observation over time is that fraud is used against Democrats in their primaries and against the Republicans in the general election,” Bettencourt said in an interview.

He pointed to some 3,000 non-residents potentially voting in Harris County cited by the audit. Bettencourt said as far back as 20 years ago when he was a district voting clerk, he would use jury service data indicating non-citizens to purge them from the rolls. But at this point, he said the county appears to have abandoned such efforts.

Bettencourt noted other irregularities not covered by the state’s audit, such as a situation in Wichita Falls, where a single-family residence was home to more than 500 registered voters.

Then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks at a community event while campaigning in San Antonio, Texas, on Dec. 13, 2019. (Daniel Carde/Getty Images)

While the Texas Attorney General’s office lists only 386 active election fraud investigations, cases of voter fraud have increased in Texas. In a Texan article, Jonathan White, head of the election fraud division in the Texas Attorney General’s Special Prosecution Division said cases were “higher than our historical average by a long shot.” There were 510 offenses pending against 43 defendants at the time, according to the article, with most stemming from mail-in ballots.

Taylor said that the Secretary of State’s audit was indeed a forensic audit. During the second phase of the audit, the secretary of state’s Forensic Audit Division will conduct on-site examinations in January and will compare machine tabulations with paper ballots when possible.

A poll worker talks to a line of voters on election day in Austin, Texas, on Nov. 3, 2020. (Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty Images)

Issues such as how drive-thru voting was conducted in Harris County in 2020, now prohibited by SB 1, will be reviewed, Taylor said, adding there were claims of a 1,800 vote discrepancy between the number of voters checked in and the number of votes cast at drive-thrus. About 127,000 votes were cast in the Houston area this way.

But Leah Shah, communications director for Harris County Elections, said the county uses very strict protocol on how ballots are managed and couldn’t confirm a voting discrepancy.

“We have heard that number, but we have no idea where that number came from,” she said in an interview.

To celebrate the new year, China National Space Administration (CNSA) published astonishing pictures of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter above the north pole of the red planet, according to Shanghai Morning Post.

CNSA said the images were taken by a detachable sensor equipped with two high-definition cameras. The first picture shows the orbiter above the north pole ice cap of Mars. 

The second picture is a close-up of the orbiter’s golden exterior skin where high-speed data communication antennas and a solar wing are seen. Beyond the orbiter are ice caps though not the ice we consider on Earth. Mar’s ice caps are dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) and water ice.

The third picture shows the north pole ice cap, almost like a vanilla swirl ice cream cone. 

The next image is the Zhu Rong rover on the surface of Mars. We can see the topography of the desolate planet that Elon Musk wants to rocket people to at the end of the decade. 

We’ve been closely following the Tianwen-1 mission. In February of last year, the orbiter entered the orbit of the red planet. A couple of months later, a rover was released on the surface of the planet.  

The mission so far means China is the only country besides the US to land a rover on Mars successfully. Its mission is to explore the surface and geology of the planet. 

Space is becoming the next battleground domain for both US and China. Beijing has become super aggressive in space in the last year. The country has also landed a spacecraft on the moon and collected lunar rock samples. 

The final frontier is space — the world’s superpowers are on a hunt for trillion-dollar deposits of rare metals that will power Earth’s green energy revolution in decades to come. 

Authored by Milton Ezrati via The Epoch Times,

With inflation in the headlines, a look back at the last experience might offer needed perspective. There is no claim here that history repeats exactly. Rather a look back offers ways to dispel nonsense and identify what is important.

The Arab oil embargo of 1973 dominates most references to the last great inflation. No doubt oil played a role, but problems appeared long before the embargo.

Inflation began to build in the second half of the 1960s. After years of barely any inflation, consumer prices by 1966 were rising at a 3.5 percent annual rate and then built on themselves so that by 1969 they were rising at a 6.0 percent rate.

This initial price pressure had two clear roots.

One was the strain President Lyndon Johnson had placed on the federal budget and the economy by simultaneously pursuing a war in Vietnam and a domestic war on poverty.

Second was the willingness of the Federal Reserve (Fed) to accommodate the government’s credit needs by creating a powerful flow of new money. The broad M2 measure of the nation’s money supply rose a rapid 8.0 percent a year on average during this time.

When in 1969 Richard Nixon took over from Johnson, he continued to spend freely, even though the war in Vietnam had begun to wind down. Nixon added a new inflationary factor to the mix when in August 1971 he ended the dollar’s convertibility to gold. This move destroyed the fixed exchange rate system that had prevailed for decades. The dollar fell on global exchange markets, adding directly to American living costs by raising the prices of imports. More fundamentally, the break with gold removed any restraint on the Fed’s ability to create new money.

Growth in the country’s money supply soared at rates approaching 12 percent a year on average between 1971 and 1973. Along with federal spending, it boosted buying pressure and added to the inflationary trend, bringing the rate of price increases up quickly from a brief pause during the mild 1971 recession toward the old highs.

Oil entered the picture in 1973. By then, the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had begun to chafe over how the American inflation was eroding the real value of their product. While other prices were rising, oil, set by American interests, had held at a relatively steady $25.00 a barrel. OPEC took control of pricing by imposing an embargo on oil sales and then quadrupled prices.

The Fed responded by pouring still more money on the economy. The broad money supply jumped 14 percent in 1974. The Fed intended this to ease the economic strains of high oil prices, but the added money mostly extended and enlarged the immediate inflationary impact of the one-time jump in oil prices. By early 1975, inflation was running at over 11 percent a year.

By 1979, consumer price inflation verged on a rate of 14 percent a year. The economic harm had become widespread. By skewing notions of value, inflation had destroyed wealth and distorted incentives, retarding the capital spending that would otherwise have fostered growth. With the Fed accommodating inflation, all expected it to continue. Workers made wage demands on the expectation of rapid increases in the cost of living, and managements granted them on the expectation that they could easily raise prices to more than offset the impact on the bottom line. This so-called wage-price spiral gave inflation a life of its own even as workers fell further and further behind. All suffered.

The end came when a new Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, refused to validate the inflation as the Fed had previously done. He cut the pace of money growth. Without a ready source of Fed-provided liquidity, interest rates spiked upward. The 10-year treasury yield briefly hit 16 percent, and short-term rates touched 21 percent. Painful as these responses were, the Fed’s actions broke the inflationary spiral. By 1983, some 18 years after the process had started, consumer price inflation had fallen below 3.0 percent a year.

Though much today is different, much also looks like this past. Washington is spending even more aggressively than it did 40-50 years ago. The Fed similarly has also pursued an expansive monetary policy. Policymakers recently promised a more restrictive monetary posture, but announced plans for only the most gradual of moves. The U.S. economy may get lucky, but the picture looks disturbingly like it did last time.

Just days ahead of the second anniversary of the killing of Iran’s IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, pro-Iran factions in Iraq held a mass demonstration just outside Baghdad’s Green Zone where the American and other international embassies are located.

The protesters were filmed burning and destroying a large mock US embassy, in what appears a “threat” and possible warning of what’s to come. Iranian state media featured and spread the footage, describing the burning of the embassy model as part of events commemorating the “anniversary of the US assassination of Gen. Soleimani”…

Iraqis rally ahead of anniv. of US assassination of Gen. Soleimani, burn model of US embassyhttps://t.co/U0GwljWUdZ pic.twitter.com/kNT6jizu6N

— Press TV (@PressTV) January 1, 2022

The January 3, 2020 US drone strike just outside Baghdad’s airport also took out Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) – which is seen in the West as supported by Tehran. Friday’s demonstration was reportedly organized by the PMF.

It also comes at a time Washington’s expected withdrawal from Iraq date has come and gone. “Baghdad and Washington announced in July that the full withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq would be completed by the end of this year,” a recent report in The National indicated. “Training and advising missions, however, would continue.” So at this point the US deems its “combat mission” as over in the country, and yet hundreds or up to a few thousand troops remain in an ‘advisory role’.

In essence the US presence in Iraq has not at all changed or been drawn down, which is sure to keep the Pentagon on a conflict footing with the pro-Iran paramilitary forces across Iraq.

Iranian media quoted one protester at Friday’s events outside the Green Zone as saying:

“Today we are remembering the day the evil embassy entered Iraq, the embassy of the great devil; the American embassy that never brings good things to any country, that brought harm to the Iraqi people. Today the Iraqis also mourn Qasem Soleimani and the heroic martyr Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.”

Saturday also witnessed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis take to the street to protest the US and the killing of Soleimani and Muhandis. 

🔻Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have rallied ahead of the second anniversary of the US assassination of General Qassem Soleimani & Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.#مليونية_الشهادة_والسيادة pic.twitter.com/3Lt1c2SL6T

— اياد المنصوري (@c0fWTvl6Ua60HBs) January 1, 2022

The US is unlikely to leave Iraq anytime soon. Following the White House and Pentagon’s horribly bungled and botched evacuation mission from Kabul last August, the Biden administration has come under political pressure to “stay the course” in other conflict theaters. 

However, regional leaders who wish to see a swift US departure from the Middle East (including Iraq and northeast Syria), argue that the ‘counter-ISIS’ mission is over, thus there’s no further ‘counter-terror’ justification for the Pentagon to remain there.

Authored by Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

As the COVID-19 pandemic and the Western world’s unprecedented approach to it enters a new phase, with the Omicron variant becoming more prevalent, an opportunity presents itself to effect dramatic and much-needed changes to COVID policy.

When the global pandemic was in its early stages in early 2020, very little was known, and our leaders feared the worst. Some understood, knowing the Chinese communist party’s response to SARS1, that the regime would avoid culpability at all costs, indeed at just about ANY cost, with possibly devastating consequences. Others, facing dubious models touting millions of deaths being brandished about by supposedly eminent scientists, and with the “extreme safety” being demanded by some elements of Western societies, were likewise in a panic. Fear gripped Western societies in a way unseen in generations.

And, coupled with the Chinese regime’s extreme censorship of COVID-related data and workers, coupled with apocalyptic COVID propaganda spread by its mouthpieces and sycophants, it can be argued that the West largely threw out the tried-and-tested traditional pandemic playbook in favor of extreme top-down policies eerily similar to those the Chinese regime was celebrating. Most notably, we locked down our societies, in multiple ways, shuttering businesses and schools, with only “essential” work continuing—something we stuck with despite ample evidence pointing at the dubious nature of these policies. Basic principles of public health went out the window. Instead of fostering robust scientific debate, we censored and vilified contrarian scientists advocating for those principles, such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). 

In our frantic quest to find solutions, we seemingly miraculously developed vaccines to stop the virus, but enamoured by and in our rush to deploy our new miracles, we neglected key safeguards, such as collecting proper safety data. We vilified early clinicians and the therapeutic treatments they were finding success with, pushed vaccines as a panacea only to find that many didn’t want them. Then, we adopted all sorts of tyrannical policies to “encourage” adoption, even for healthy children who are at miniscule risk from the virus. We spent a year and a half breaking up society, chipping away at our most cherished basic rights, and hunkering down into tribal camps, creating a new “unclean” caste, the unvaccinated.

As early as mid-2020, Stanford public health expert Dr. Scott Atlas unambiguously documented using available data that the human cost (in terms of lives) of the lockdown policies was already greater than the human cost of the virus, and this has not changed. Millions missed critical cancer screenings and suicidal ideation in teens skyrocketed—just a tiny part of the cost. A number of studies are showing that adverse events from the new vaccines, notably myocarditis, are more serious and common than has been generally understood. Corporate media, who have largely been cheerleaders in promoting the various questionable policies, are now asking questions about whether, for example, “too many shots might actually harm the body’s ability to fight the coronavirus.” Trillions have been spent for stimulus, and inflation is spiking—people are starting to feel the pain in their pocketbooks, especially the middle and working classes.

The bottom line is, there will be hell to pay. And I can’t help but remember what Governor Ron DeSantis told me when I met him in Florida, trying to understand why he had adopted the unusual, though effective, policies that he had, which we documented in “Desantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns.” He told me: “They will never admit they were wrong.”

Given the magnitude of our failure as a society in dealing with COVID, and the cardinal rule that human beings (but especially politicians) will go to gargantuan lengths to avoid responsibility, I posit that Omicron provides an off-ramp that doesn’t require admission of guilt. We need to halt the highly objectionable COVID policies being employed today, while giving up, for now, the assigning of blame.

Omicron has changed the game. With the preliminary research in, the data appears to show several things:

• Omicron is more contagious than Delta and other variants

• COVID vaccines seem to do little to stop Omicron infection

• Remarkably, there is some evidence that Omicron is breaking through natural immunity from previous variants

• Omicron is much less severe than other variants, with many scientists comparing its symptoms to the common cold

• Omicron is unexpected—its high level of mutation leaves scientists asking questions

Whatever the past reality, the difference in risk from COVID infection between the vaccinated and unvaccinated now appears to be lower than it was with previous variants. Whatever the past reality, the unvaccinated are not more a danger to society than the vaccinated. As the infection goes endemic, many people will get the virus, irrespective of vaccination status or past inflection. 

The obsession with asymptomatic testing for COVID can be left behind with heads held high, as can masks. Ignorance of the past power of natural immunity vs. the virus becomes a non-issue at present. And, unlike past variants, Omicron is indeed a bit of an enigma in terms of both its genetics and of how it functions. 

In other words, a perfect opportunity to effect a dramatic shift in pandemic policy, for example to policies laid out in the Great Barrington Declaration and past pandemic public health standards. Vaccine mandates can be dropped in an instant, policy can indeed be “left to the states” as President Biden has suggested, and state leaders can also follow in kind.

It’s an opportunity for leaders to use the novel Omicron variant to save face, as an “off ramp” off the current authoritarian and unpopular policy track, enacting policies that will have them celebrated and also work well, helping us start to heal our society. The sooner, the better.

Now that Ghislaine Maxwell has been found guilty of sex-trafficking charges tied to her work as Jeffrey Epstein’s de facto “madam”, many legal observers expect that she will eventually be sentenced to a lengthy prison stay that could see her die behind bars. But as the world waits for her sentencing, attention is turning once again the civil courts, where Prince Andrew is fighting a high-profile lawsuit filed by Virginia Roberts Guiffre, a prominent Epstein accuser who claims she was trafficked to Andrew when she was still underage.

The lawsuit was filed in the US by a woman who lives in Australia, against a member of the British royal family. Andrew’s name came up during the Maxwell’s trial, when Jeffrey Epstein’s former pilot named names, though he wasn’t officially named by prosecutors.

Now, an American judge has blocked two critical avenues for Prince Andrew to try and get around the lawsuit. Here’s more from the Guardian:

Two of Prince Andrew’s avenues to prevent or stall the progression of Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s sex assault lawsuit against him were blocked on Saturday by a federal judge, increasing pressure to settle claims before a crucial court hearing this week.

Judge Lewis A Kaplan, in a written order, told the prince’s lawyers they must turn over documents on the schedule that has been set in the lawsuit brought by Guiffre who claims she was abused – aged 17 – by the prince on multiple occasions in 2001 while she was being sexually abused by financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The judge’s decision comes ahead of a critical hearing in the case that’s set for Tuesday. Also, the details of a 2009 settlement agreement between the now-deceased Epstein and Giuffre that lawyers for Prince Andrew had hoped would protect him from Guiffre’s claims are expected to be released on Monday. Among other things, the judge will decide Tuesday whether Giuffre’s claims against the Prince are solid enough to merit a trial. All of this could greatly increase pressure on the Prince’s lawyers to settle.

Giuffre’s lawyers have claimed that they have up to six witnesses linking the Duke to his accuser on the eve of the hearing into the civil lawsuit.

In another document, Andrew’s lawyers acknowledged that they couldn’t provide documentary evidence that he has the “inability to sweat”, one of the defenses employed by Prince Andrew to try and discredit Guiffre (although the reaction to the claim in the press was one of abject dismissal).

Meanwhile, on Saturday, it was revealed that David Boies, a lawyer for Giuffre, had said that Ghislaine Maxwell should have “cut a deal” – the latest indication that Maxwell had the opportunity to turn states’ witness against other high-profile individuals in Epstein’s circle, a group that includes former President Bill Clinton as well as Prince Andrew.

“I have said publicly for five years that she was making a mistake in not going in and trying to cut a deal with prosecutors. She could have cut a very good deal early on but she passed up that opportunity. I think that’s proven to be a fatal mistake,” Boies reportedly said.

See the judge’s official dismissal below:

 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Chief Justice John Roberts used his year-end report on New Year’s Eve to denounce the threats being made against the Court and its members by Democratic politicians and groups, including threats to pack the Court to force an immediate liberal majority. Roberts referred to such threats as efforts to exercise “inappropriate political influence” on the Court in contravention of our constitutional values and traditions.

We have been discussing the ramped up threats from Democratic leaders that the Court will either vote with the liberal justices on key issues or face “consequences,” including court packing.  Recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), a former law professor, became the latest to voice such reckless views.

What Democratic members are demanding is raw court packing to add four members to the Court to give liberals an instant majority — a movement denounced by figures like the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer.

Last year, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass, and others stood in front of the Supreme Court to announce a court packing bill to give liberals a one-justice majority.  This follows threats from various Democratic members that conservative justices had better vote with liberal colleagues . . . or else.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., recently issued a warning to the Supreme Court: reaffirm Roe v. Wade or face a “revolution.”  Sen. Richard Blumenthal previously warned the Supreme Court that, if it continued to issue conservative rulings or “chip away at Roe v Wade,” it would trigger “a seismic movement to reform the Supreme Court. It may not be expanding the Supreme Court, it may be making changes to its jurisdiction, or requiring a certain numbers of votes to strike down certain past precedents.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also declared in front of the Supreme Court “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.”

For her part, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. questioned the whole institution’s value if it is not going to vote consistently with her views and those of the Democratic Party: “How much does the current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does.” Warren seems to be channeling more AOC than FDR. Roosevelt at least tried to hide his reckless desire to pack the Court by pushing an age-based rule. It was uniquely stupid. The bill would have allowed Roosevelt to add up to six justices for every member who is over 70 years old. Warren, like AOC, wants the Democratic base to know that she is pushing a pure, outcome-changing court packing scheme without even the pretense of a neutral rule.

Despite the fact that the Court has more often voted on non-ideological lines (and regularly issued unanimous decisions), Warren denounced the Court as an “extremist” body that has “threatened, or outright dismantled, fundamental rights in this country.” Those “fundamental” values do not apparently include judicial independence.

Now Roberts has responded. His report is striking in its measured and deliberative tone in comparison to the often reckless rhetoric of these politicians. He waited to address the year in review for his court and the 107 district and appeals courts across the country. However, he included the following lines that are clearly directed toward Congress and extreme Democratic groups like Demand Justice:

“Decisional independence is essential to due process, promoting impartial decision-making, free from political or other extraneous influence. The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.”

The criticism comes after new polling shows that Roberts is the most popular government official in the country, a fact that led some on the left to express almost apocalyptic alarm.

He is not the only justice who is speaking out to blunt the attacks on the Court.

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer chaffed at the claim that this is a “conservative” court and noted “The chief justice frequently speaks on this subject as well and says, no, no: we don’t look at our rulings from the point of view of our personal ideology.”

Justice Thomas criticized those who seem intent on diminishing the authority or respect for the Court: “the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference…They think you become like a politician. That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently told an audience that “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

However, as discussed in my Hill column, the attacks are likely to increase in this key election year with so many major decisions ticking away on the Court docket. The type of demagoguery denounced by Chief Justice Roberts is now going mainstream with our leaders, the media, and various advocacy groups. Yet, Democratic strategists are finding that selling court packing and attacking justices is not resonating outside of the same 30 percent of voters on the left. Instead, many view what is “dire for democracy” is the effort to destroy one of the core institutions in our constitutional system.

At this point, members of the public have probably heard the following mantra a hundred times: while omicron is more infectious than delta, it also produces a less severe infection. This has been repeated over and over since the variant was first introduced to the public by a group of South African scientists.

Well, just in case any doubters remain, the NYT reported the results of the latest round of studies on New Year’s Day. The studies mostly focused on animals: In studies on mice and hamsters, omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe.

Most important: omicron appears to do less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and lead to serious difficulty breathing for many patients. But the animal studies show that omicron typically stays in the windpipe and upper respiratory tract: it doesn’t make its way down deep into the lungs like delta.

“It’s fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging,” said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway.

When omicron was first introduced back in November, the only thing scientists knew for certain was that it had more than 50 mutations, many involving the spike protein used by the virus to bind with human cells. But as scientists have discovered in the interim, there is more to a virus than its mutations.

“You can’t predict the behavior of virus from just the mutations,” said Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge.

And after months of scientists’ infecting cells in Petri dishes and spraying the virus into the noses of animals, scientists have learned a little more about omicron. Interestingly, some scientists found the virus behaved in interesting ways, with reactions in certain species of animals drawing attention:

Although the animals infected with Omicron on average experienced much milder symptoms, the scientists were particularly struck by the results in Syrian hamsters, a species known to get severely ill with all previous versions of the virus.

“This was surprising, since every other variant has robustly infected these hamsters,” said Dr. Michael Diamond, a virologist at Washington University and a co-author of the study.

For now, scientists suspect that omicron’s more mild demeanor might be a product of the human anatomy, moreso than the virus’s genetic makeup.

The reason that Omicron is milder may be a matter of anatomy. Dr. Diamond and his colleagues found that the level of Omicron in the noses of the hamsters was the same as in animals infected with an earlier form of the coronavirus. But Omicron levels in the lungs were one-tenth or less of the level of other variants.

A similar finding came from researchers at the University of Hong Kong who studied bits of tissue taken from human airways during surgery. In 12 lung samples, the researchers found that Omicron grew more slowly than Delta and other variants did.

The researchers also infected tissue from the bronchi, the tubes in the upper chest that deliver air from the windpipe to the lungs. And inside of those bronchial cells, in the first two days after an infection, Omicron grew faster than Delta or the original coronavirus did.

Although others have found characteristics in human lung tissue that help to prevent the new variant from spreading in the lungs. Specifically, a protein called TMPRSS2 on the surface of the inside of the lungs. This protein doesn’t take to omicron, impeding its spread in the critically important organ.

Many cells in the lung carry a protein called TMPRSS2 on their surface that can inadvertently help passing viruses gain entry to the cell. But Dr. Gupta’s team found that this protein doesn’t grab on to Omicron very well. As a result, Omicron does a worse job of infecting cells in this manner than Delta does. A team at the University of Glasgow independently came to the same conclusion.

Through an alternative route, coronaviruses can also slip into cells that don’t make TMPRSS2. Higher in the airway, cells tend not to carry the protein, which might explain the evidence that Omicron is found there more often than the lungs. Complicating matters, there are cells in the lungs that react to intruders by destroying all cells, not just infected ones.

Of course, more studies will need to be conducted before the scientific community can say anything for certain.

These findings will have to be followed up with further studies, such as experiments with monkeys or examination of the airways of people infected with Omicron.

If the results hold up to scrutiny, they might explain why people infected with Omicron seem less likely to be hospitalized than those with Delta.

Right now, this is all we can say for certain: COVID infections start in the nose, or possibly the mouth, before spreading down the throat. Mild infections don’t get much further than that…but when the virus takes hold in the lungs, it can then cause serious, lasting tissue damage.