On this Saturday, please take a moment to make history.
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Finishing up a fun project this morning with my Kiwanis buddies.
We are loading up a time capsule with all sorts of artifacts that well represent what’s happening in America in the summer of 2021.
As with all such projects, there are at times some difference of opinion about what should be in and what should stay out, but we have largely been in agreement most of the time.
We are saving space for a Hunter Biden painting and a DVD of “Clifford the Big Red Dog,” but for now, here’s what is included.
(Note: Inclusion in the time capsule is not endorsement, just a reflection of our shared belief in what reflects the signs of the times):
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More than 4.7 million newly vaccinated Americans have made similar calculations [to get jabbed] in the past two weeks, as misgivings about the shots based on ideology, apathy or fear have taken a back seat to the desire to protect themselves and their loved ones.
More than 856,000 doses were administered Friday, the highest daily figure since July 3, according to The Washington Post’s vaccine tracker. This was the third week that states with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases also had the highest vaccination numbers, deputy White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing Friday.
Vaccine-hesitant pockets of the country turned hot spots, including Louisiana, experienced a 114 percent increase in uptake, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Arkansas recorded a 96 percent increase, Alabama, 65 percent, and Missouri, 49 percent. (Washington Post)
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[T]his seems to me to be the key question here: do we really want to get back to living? I do. So take the rational precautions — a solid vaccine — and go about your business as you always did. Yes, I’ll wear a mask indoors if I’m legally required or politely asked. But I don’t really see why anyone should. In a free society, once everyone has access to a vaccine that overwhelmingly prevents serious sickness and death, there is no reason to enforce lockdowns again, or mask mandates, or social distancing any longer. In fact, there’s every reason not to.
We are at a stage in this pandemic when we are trying to persuade the hold-outs — disproportionately white Republicans/evangelicals and urban African-Americans — to get vaccinated. How do we best do this? Endless, condescending nagging won’t help. Coercion is not an option in a free country. Since the vaccinated appear to be able to transmit the virus as well, vaccine passports lose their power to remove all risk. Forcing all the responsible people to go back to constraining their everyday lives for the sake of the vaccine-averse is both unfair and actually weakens the incentive to get a vaccine, because it lowers the general risk of getting it in the broader society.
So the obviously correct public policy is to let mounting sickness and rising deaths concentrate the minds of the recalcitrant. Let reality persuade the delusional and deranged. It has a pretty solid record of doing just that.
The government cannot be held responsible for sickness and death it has already provided the means to avoid. People are responsible for their own lives. The government can do some things — like making vaccination mandatory for federal workers and contractors, and especially in the military as George Washington did in the Revolutionary War for smallpox. It could offer money — or entry into a lottery, as many states are doing. All good. But the most potent incentive for vaccination is, to be brutally frank, a sharp rise in mortality rates. The more people who know someone who has suffered and died the likelier they will see the logic of taking measures to avoid the same fate. In other words: if people recklessly refuse to face reality, call their bluff.
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Wall Street Journal lead editorial:
Congress created the CDC precisely to address an event like Covid-19. It has some 10,700 employees. Yet time and again in this pandemic the CDC has been a source of confusion or ineptitude. And Washington wonders why Americans have lost confidence in Covid experts.
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A New York Times essential reading profile of Kyrsten Sinema and Rob Portman that includes a semi-rare interview with the former.
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