RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/and-the-fair-land-11637710823?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Any one whose labors take him into the far reaches of the country, as ours lately have done, is bound to mark how the years have made the land grow fruitful.

This is indeed a big country, a rich country, in a way no array of figures can measure and so in a way past belief of those who have not seen it. Even those who journey through its Northeastern complex, into the Southern lands, across the central plains and to its Western slopes can only glimpse a measure of the bounty of America.

And a traveler cannot but be struck on his journey by the thought that this country, one day, can be even greater. America, though many know it not, is one of the great underdeveloped countries of the world; what it reaches for exceeds by far what it has grasped.

So the visitor returns thankful for much of what he has seen, and, in spite of everything, an optimist about what his country might be. Yet the visitor, if he is to make an honest report, must also note the air of unease that hangs everywhere.

For the traveler, as travelers have been always, is as much questioned as questioning. And for all the abundance he sees, he finds the questions put to him ask where men may repair for succor from the troubles that beset them.

His countrymen cannot forget the savage face of war. Too often they have been asked to fight in strange and distant places, for no clear purpose they could see and for no accomplishment they can measure. Their spirits are not quieted by the thought that the good and pleasant bounty that surrounds them can be destroyed in an instant by a single bomb. Yet they find no escape, for their survival and comfort now depend on unpredictable strangers in far-off corners of the globe.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/strategic-political-oil-reserve-opec-biden-11637701493?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Crude prices rose Tuesday after the Biden Administration announced that the U.S. and other countries would tap their petroleum reserves. Sorry, Mr. President. Markets know that this political gesture won’t fix the supply shortage and could make it worse.

The Energy Department next month will begin releasing 50 million barrels from the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve (SPR), the first major release since the Libyan conflict in 2011. Congress already requires that some 18 million barrels are to be sold to raise revenue, and the other 32 million will be returned to the reserve when prices drop. China, India, Japan, South Korea and the U.K. will also make modest drawdowns.

So why did crude prices tick up? One reason is the release was less than markets expected. For weeks the Administration has been hinting at a coordinated release, so traders overbaked it into prices. Oil stocks also rose smartly— Continental Resources by 8.3%.

Some also expect the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia to respond in kind at their next meeting in December by reducing supply. OPEC+ has been steadily raising supply by about 400,000 barrels per day each month, though the Administration for months has been lambasting the cartel for not doing more.

It’s true that the Saudis are content with crude averaging the current price of about $80 per barrel, which is about break-even for the Saudi budget. The Kingdom also worries that Iranian supply could increase if the Biden Administration renegotiates a nuclear agreement and lifts sanctions.

For a decade the U.S. was the world’s swing oil producer. But U.S. drillers have retreated amid a regulatory assault from Washington, pressure from progressive investors, and challenges obtaining capital. Some say they are also struggling to find workers. Output is set to hit a record in the Permian Basin, where the break-even costs are low and new production doesn’t require long-term investment.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/paul-krugman-michael-lind

How a trash-talking neoliberal economist harmed America by vilifying strategic trade and industrial policy

Strategic trade and national industrial policy are back. Growing U.S. military and economic competition with China, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, have revealed the dependence of the United States on manufacturing supply chains in China and other foreign sources. The neoliberal consensus in favor of indiscriminate trade liberalization and against government support for strategic industries is evaporating: The Biden administration, in a more nuanced way, has continued many of Donald Trump’s nationalist economic policies, including some tariffs and programs to promote reshoring. In an era of extreme polarization, there is a high degree of bipartisan support for measures like the CHIPS for America Act, which seeks to reduce U.S. reliance for semiconductors on a few Asian sources like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics.

The last time these issues were at the center of public debate was during the 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, both the industrial revival of Japan and West Germany after the devastation of World War II and the increasing offshoring of production to low-wage countries by U.S. corporations were challenging America’s manufacturing sector and its workers.

Then as now, America’s university-based economics profession was dominated by the otherworldly neoclassical school, which, having purged the empirical and realistic institutional school of economics after 1945, specializes in using mathematics to model unrealistic assumptions. Even so, a generation ago the debate over whether the U.S. should adopt a strategic trade and industrial policy—favoring some industries over others and including selective protectionism or export promotion—was causing a few bold academic economists to rethink the discipline’s creed that free trade is always and everywhere good for everyone.

One was a promising young economist named Paul Krugman. In a 1987 paper for The Journal of Economic Perspectives, “Is Free Trade Passe?” Krugman noted:

If there were an Economist’s Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations “I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage” and “I advocate Free Trade.” … Yet the case for free trade is currently more in doubt than at any time since the 1817 publication of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy … because of the changes that have recently taken place in the theory of international trade itself. … There is still a case for free trade as a good policy, and as a useful target in the practical world of politics, but it can never again be asserted as the policy that economic theory tells us is always right.

Only a few years later, however, Krugman had become one of the most vehement critics of scholars, public servants, and journalists who questioned free trade, doing his best to destroy their reputations in the eyes of the trans-Atlantic media and business and academic establishments. He and other intellectual vigilantes like Martin Wolf of the Financial Times and the economist Jagdish Bhagwati who policed the borders of acceptable discourse about trade in general and offshoring to China in particular were all too successful. It might have happened anyway, but Krugman’s prestige and skill as a polemicist helped persuade elite media outlets, think tanks, government agencies, and business institutions that they could ignore the experts from varied backgrounds who were raising alarms about the consequences that offshoring U.S. manufacturing would have for supply chain fragility, domestic jobs, and U.S. military power. By the time Krugman confessed that he and others had been wrong to minimize the problems involved in globalization for a quarter of a century, the damage to the United States had been done.

.https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/23/atlas-i-watched-the-nations-top-scientists-lie-about-covid-and-get-away-with-it/

This is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” which releases December 7 and is available now for preorder.

[CDC Director Robert] Redfield’s congressional testimony on September 23 immediately caught my attention. I watched in disbelief as Redfield told Congress that “more than 90 percent of the population”—more than three hundred million people in the US—remains susceptible to the illness.

The statement was based on incomplete and outdated data, as well as an apparent lack of understanding of the literature, and it struck me as one of the most erroneous and fear-inducing proclamations of any public health official to that moment. Approximately two hundred thousand Americans had already died from COVID; the last thing the public needed was an exaggeration of the future risks, implying to some that ten times that number could still die.

First of all, the numbers didn’t add up. At that point, confirmed cases in the US already totaled approximately seven million, and the CDC itself had estimated that approximately ten times the number of confirmed cases, a very conservative estimate, were likely to have had the infection. A Stanford seropositivity study back in April had shown that confirmed cases underestimated the total infections by a factor of approximately forty times. It made no sense that only 9 percent, or thirty million Americans, had been infected.

Second, the 9 percent calculation was blatantly wrong. That number came from antibody testing by the states. I looked at the CDC website myself, and sure enough, the data was based on antiquated testing from several states.

Some antibody totals were pulled from several months earlier, before many of those states had experienced a significant number of cases. It therefore grossly underestimated the number of cases that had already occurred. The data was simply not valid, but you needed to pay attention to the details.

More importantly, Redfield’s basic claim was fundamentally flawed. The conclusion that serum antibody testing revealed the entire population of those protected from COVID was counter to an entire body of published literature and contrary to fundamental knowledge of immunology, including other coronavirus infections.

It was well known that antibody tests showed one cross-section in time—they were transient—even though immune protection can last. From studies on SARS-2 and most other viruses, antibody levels change over a span of months. They typically appear in the first couple of weeks, peak in a few months, and then decrease over a span of several months.

The literature on COVID had already shown these patterns. A month before this press conference, a Nature Reviews Immunology study on COVID-19 explicitly stated, “The absence of specific antibodies in the serum does not necessarily mean an absence of immune memory,” and explained, “memory B-cells and T-cells may be maintained even if there are not measurable levels of serum antibodies.”

Japan’s study demonstrated this dramatically. In their study, antibody levels increased from 5.8 percent to 46.8 percent over the course of the summer. The most dramatic increase occurred in late June and early July, paralleling the rise in daily confirmed cases within Tokyo, which peaked on August 4.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/22/select-committee-covering-up-police-brutality-on-january-6/

The family of Rosanne Boyland, one of two female Trump supporters who died at the Capitol on January 6, just announced they have hired a lawyer to investigate the suspicious circumstances of her untimely death. Boyland, 34, traveled with her friend Justin Winchell from Georgia to Washington to hear President Trump’s speech.

The pair then walked from the Ellipse to Capitol Hill; a photo published in a local Georgia newspaper shows Boyland smiling, wearing Old Glory sunglasses and carrying a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag that day.

A few hours later, she was dead.

In April, the D.C. Medical Examiner’s office claimed Boyland died of “accidental acute amphetamine intoxication.” Boyland reportedly used Adderall, a drug commonly used to treat attention deficit disorders that contains amphetamines. Fatal Adderall overdoses are rare; Boyland would have had to ingest roughly 25 times her standard dose to die from it.

Aside from the unlikelihood Boyland overdosed on her daily medicine while actively participating in a day-long political rally, recently released footage and firsthand accounts contradict the coroner’s report. “There are still many questions about exactly what happened to her,” Rosanne’s aunt, Cheryl Boyland, wrote in a GiveSendGo post. 

Videos show her being beaten by a female officer after being crushed by protesters pushed by police.  Yet the D.C. Medical Examiner said Rosanne’s body showed no signs of trauma, and attributed her death to the prescription medication she took every day for years. According to videos and statements, Rosanne was dragged unconscious through the west tunnel by the police at 4:31 PM.  Then she was taken to the crypt and to the House Majority Leader’s office before EMTs arrived at 5:45 PM, finding her inside the rotunda being given CPR by Capitol police.

Further, both the Medical Examiner’s office and D.C. Metropolitan Police Department continue to refuse to release pertinent information related to her death. Boyland’s mother told the Gateway Pundit that the coroner is withholding her full autopsy report; D.C. police have denied numerous requests for body-worn camera footage, claiming the recordings are part of an “ongoing investigation and criminal proceeding.”

As I reported last week, a new court filing details a shocking account of police brutality inside the lower west terrace tunnel on January 6 where Boyland died. Dozens of police officers clad in full riot gear were stationed there, ostensibly to stop protesters from entering the building. But emerging evidence suggests a more nefarious purpose—officers used the tunnel as a bunker of sorts to launch a gruesome offensive against American citizens on federal property.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/22/doctors-not-administrators-should-be-treating-patients/

Before COVID-19, physicians routinely treated patients based on our best clinical judgment. But politics have corrupted the practice of medicine, and today hospitals tie physicians’ hands while their patients needlessly suffer and die.

Patients at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital where I work are dying because they are unjustifiably and unlawfully being denied safe and effective treatments that their attending physician determines to be medically appropriate. This same scene is playing out in hospitals across the country. It must stop.

I have devoted my life to caring for people. As a physician scientist, I have tried and tested new methods to fill gaps in our ability to treat patients and have established protocols based on what works. Through these efforts I developed a protocol for sepsis treatment that is now used all around the world.

Early in the pandemic, together with a team of practicing physicians across the United States, I developed a protocol for the use of corticosteroids to treat COVID-19. At the time our public health agencies recommended against the use of corticosteroids—but we were soon vindicated, and corticosteroids are now part of the CDC’s recommended protocol.  

As the pandemic wore on, we pooled our experience treating patients on the frontlines, and based on emerging data from academic studies, including peer-reviewed randomized-controlled trials (RCTs), we expanded our treatment protocol to employ various FDA-approved medicines. This includes fluvoxamine, methylprednisolone, ascorbic acid, thiamine, heparin, vitamin D, zinc, melatonin, and ivermectin.

I’ve used this treatment protocol to reduce COVID-19 deaths in my intensive care unit by up to 50 percent. And one of my colleagues, Dr. Joseph Varon, a renowned critical care specialist, has used this protocol at his hospitals in Houston since the beginning of the pandemic and has consistently maintained a mortality rate for COVID-19 patients between 4.4 percent and 7 percent. By comparison, the average nationwide mortality in hospitals is around 23 percent.