Daily Archives: 24 February 2022

Ending Secret Laboratories

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Dr Marty Makary, Islet Transplant Surgery Chief and Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wants to do away with them, and he wants to start with the CDC’s. I think he doesn’t go far enough.

Despite housing treasure troves of critical COVID data on vaccines and on natural immunity, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only been releasing slivers of data that support its own scientific dogma.

And, closing his op-ed,

The CDC has a pattern of hoarding data in order to cherry-pick the findings it likes and then publish them in its own journal, called MMWR [Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report].

The CDC’s—CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s—rationale for this utter dishonesty is that us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to understand the data if they were released for our perusal. Here’s Kristen Nordlund, CDC Health Communication Specialist [Aside: be sure to crook your pinky finger when you read that. Most such positions are “Press Secretary.” Nordlund’s title is an indication of just how self-importantly precious the CDC is, in addition to the agency’s fundamental dishonesty]:

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted[.]

Makary also says,

If I were advising President Joe Biden [D], I would tell him that the CDC needs to restore the public trust by making all CDC data available in real-time for researchers around the country to access and to study.

The problem in the CDC’s case is that the dishonesty extends far beyond the agency’s laboratories and personages making the editorial [sic] decisions on what information to withhold from a dull and uncomprehending populace. I often call for a broad removal of an organization’s top management, sometimes extending the call into middle management.

It isn’t possible for the CDC to have trust in it restored, even with that broad personnel turnover. All of the data in the CDC’s databases need to be released immediately, certainly. However, merely releasing the data would leave the dishonest bureaucrats managing the agency and doing the “work” in it in place. The CDC’s cancer of dishonesty has broadly metastasized far beyond Stage IV. The dishonesty is terminal, and the CDC needs to be disbanded altogether—not merely have its budget zeroed out; the Center must be completely removed from the Federal government—and all of its personnel returned to the private sector, not reassigned elsewhere in government.

If the nation truly needs a medical agency for managing the (medical) diseases extant in our nation or that enter it, such a facility must be built anew, from the ground up.

Meek

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Not merely weak. That’s the response of the US and Europe to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The coordinated US and European actions fall short of the package of sanctions threatened by the administration if Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine

Never mind that there is no such thing as a less-than full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation. Either a hostile nation invades, or it does not. And Russia has invaded Ukraine.

Nor is it a surprise that the Biden-Harris administration’s threats of serious sanctions far exceeded Biden-Harris’ actions. The highly (self-)touted 40-year foreign policy expert is too timorous to act seriously in the face of a serious enemy. Former SecDef Robert Gates’ characterization of Biden’s foreign policy chops are proven still accurate eight years later. Only today, Biden-Harris’ failure is exceedingly dangerous for our nation, for our friends, for our allies.

That package of wrist-slaps and virtue-signals consists of

  • blacklisting two major banks and
  • halting the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline

That second is a misrepresentation of what’s been done. All Germany is doing is “delaying” certification of Nordstream 2.

Other parts of the package include

  • Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Japan, like the US, would ban the trade of new Russian sovereign debt
  • sanction individuals connected to the breakaway regions.
  • Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia would impose travel bans
  • [impose] targeted financial sanctions on eight members of Russia’s Security Council
  • Canada said its sanctions would target state-backed Russian lenders
  • ban Canadians from buying sovereign Russian debt.

“You can’t come here.” Yeah, that’ll show Putin and his cronies. Pretending that sanctioning a few individuals—who’ve also already moved their money—is a serious action is insulting to the rest of us. The sovereign debt bit could be serious, except that Putin has his BFF and…mentor…People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping backing him economically. The sovereign debt bit is necessary, but it’s far from sufficient.

And this risible move, planned for some time in the future:

The Biden administration plans to impose sanctions on the company constructing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline….

To what end, I have to wonder? The pipeline’s construction is completed, and the pipeline has moved into Germany’s certification stage.

No one is contemplating cutting Russia off altogether from western funds, which would push him into complete dependency on Xi’s good offices. No one contemplating even sanctioning Putin.

No one is contemplating shipping offensive weapons to Ukraine so that nation would have a chance, not of merely holding on, but actually defeating Putin’s invasion and driving the Russians back out of Ukraine altogether. No one is contemplating even sending Ukraine sufficient defensive arms that they even can hold on. Germany is, though, still actively interfering with any arms shipments at all for Ukraine.

Indeed,

A key calculation among officials on both sides of the Atlantic is how hard to hit if Russia occupies parts of eastern Ukraine beyond the separatist-held areas and to what extent to maintain some deterrence in case Moscow moves to take the rest of the country[.]

It’s a simple calculation, really, or should be. Hit Russia without limit economically and politically, and ready our respective military establishments. We should have learned from Vietnam that gradual, or graduated, response is the path to ultimate and bloody defeat. Hit Russia now, faster than Putin can respond. Putin, as noted above, has already invaded Ukraine; now he must be driven out altogether.

And: Russia has already invaded Ukraine, there is nothing left to deter.

And, and: Putin said quite clearly what his goals were in his Monday night address to his nation. Those goals include that Ukraine isn’t a nation, it’s a part of Russia, and he means to “recover” it. His larger goal is to reconstitute the 20th century Russian empire of SSRs orbiting the Russian SSR along with the client states beyond the SSRs. Why is it, also, that western managers (we don’t have any actual leaders today) continue to turn deaf ears to what our enemies say when they tell us what they’re going to do? Germany, especially, should be attending to that larger statement of Putin’s: one of the client states Putin means to recover is the German Democratic Republic—East Germany.

Instead, the goal of today’s western nation managers seems to be to ensnare Putin in a Ukrainian quagmire, to bleed Ukrainian men and women—and children as inevitable “collateral damage”—in the effort while the rest of these nations sit in the Coliseum seats, cheering.