DISPATCHES

This is the best that I can make of what happened. A major conservative pundit's Twitter page shows that Twitter itself removed one of the pundit's tweets. There were dozens of irate readers that had no other information other than a tweet was removed....and conspiracy theories and anger were running wild. After a little investigation it appears that the pundit retweeted a select encapsulation from an Israeli news source that highlighted that 40% of new Covid infections were from those vaccinated.....and only 1% were from those who were previously infected. I could find no Israeli news source reporting these statistics....other than the news source at the bottom of the pundit's deleted but retrievable Tweet. Yes....these statistics may be correct.....for new infections in Israel since a May outbreak began. In researching Israel's vaccination program it came up that there is some concern that the particular vaccine used in Israel....'may'....begin to wear out after six months....and this news source reported that most of the recent infections in Israel who had been vaccinated were from people vaccinated in January. So there is concern there....but the data sample is so small that no conclusions have been made. What we can see out of this is that a news source posts a full article....about a small recent sample....in one country....someone reads it and passes on an encapsulated portion....and a major pundit reposts it again....but it being a recent small sample....in one country....is lost in the encapsulation....which set by itself was indeed misleading.

It's an everyday occurrence....and twice today before noon....radio talk show hosts ridiculing the coronavirus. The first gentleman did his Trump impersonation on the word coronavirus....and in the second only minutes ago....the host went on about the number of coronavirus deaths being minuscule. Are 405,000 killed in World War II simply to be considered minuscule....or 58,000 in Vietnam....or the number of those lives lost in Afghanistan or Iraq? But 607,000 Covid deaths are....minuscule! I don't believe that these people are even being honest with themselves. I think that if the political parties had somehow been switched....that we would have been pleading with others to take this pandemic more seriously. I think that the real issue....is the 2020 mid-terms....they simply have to oppose virus restrictions because that is the direction Trump led us into....and we are not going to get the House back unless we stick to it....no matter how absurd it might be....and no matter how many more people have to die. (cheering the low vaccination figures by those at the recent CPAC as just one example)

It's the middle of the day....I painted in the morning....and turned on the television while grabbing a quick lunch.....and the program was a Jewish Messianic teacher with two guests.....the topic being the "end of the end times." I have two comments on what I heard that I would ask you to consider. The topic of the coronavirus came up.....and tied to it was the question if the world elites were behind all of the lockdowns....as a test to see just how far that they could go on their way to a one-world government. Once again these folks are close.....but no cigar....because they put the cart before the horse. No doubt these world elites are looking over all the health restrictions the world just experienced to see if they can use this or even duplicate it in the near future....but the coronavirus was real.....the scientists are real.....their recommendations were the result of expertise in how to limit the amount of deaths in a pandemic. These guests eliminated all of this.....all the science.....and all the expertise.....in order to construct their conspiracy theory....the result of which in effect not only grossly distorted any conclusions that they would come up with....but having downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic.....and thus permitting hundreds of thousands of additional deaths in this country alone.....they continue to ridicule the men and women who are the experts in this field....and listen instead to talking heads on talk radio and Fox who have one thing and one thing only in mind....the mid-term elections.....and this even if they have to allow Donald Trump to continue to cause chaos....thinking that they can worry about him later.

Secondly....one of the authors had written a pro-Trump book a while back....a book that I had read.....so he is operating from a pro-Trump bias....and in this short conversation the American embassy was brought up....in comparison on how Obama was so bad for Israel....but Trump so good. What these men have not been able to discern is that Donald Trump could not care less about Israel....never has....and probably never will. What he does....and has done his whole life.....eighty-plus books on him made this so very clear to me....is to have replaced any ideology that may have ever been in his mind....but probably was never there to begin with....with a transactional philosophy in business or politics or anything else in his life....where he will give to anyone if he can get even more in return. (This is Trump in March of 2018 on Xi Jinping...."He's now president for life. President for life. And he's great....and look.....he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll give that a shot some day." And again at the same time...."Can he be better? I always say yes, he can be better....but he's been very good." He sat on the embassy issue until he needed it....and the same with the Golan issue....and the same with West Bank issues....and we conservatives.....and Netanyahu even....bought it all.