“China eats weird animals disease”

The insanity of the American and Western world is the great sadness of my old age. It is absolutely clear to me now, with the idiotic and groundless fake panic over “omicron,” which is killing no one, that this is the “crisis” our ruling elites have been waiting for, and they will not let go of it. The disproportion between the enormous and incalculable economic, psychological, educational, cultural, and human damage the COVID measures are causing and the nearly nonexistent benefit they are producing is of no interest to our elites. They know that it is not about health, and they are unreachable by argument and facts addressed to that disproportion.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 12,000 military service members refusing the COVID-19 vaccine are seeking religious exemptions, and so far they are having zero success.

That total lack of approvals is creating new tensions within the military, even as the vast majority of the armed forces have gotten vaccinated.

The services, urgently trying to keep the coronavirus pandemic in check by getting troops vaccinated, are now besieged with exemption requests they are unlikely to approve. Meanwhile, troops claiming religious reasons for avoiding the shots are perplexed because exemptions are theoretically available, yet seem impossible to obtain.

TORONTO (AP) — Quebec announced Monday that it is closing bars, cinemas, gyms and spas because of a record number of coronavirus cases in the Canadian province. Sporting events will be closed to spectators.

Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé also said restaurants must close by 10 p.m. nightly.

The new measures come on top of last week’s decision to restrict restaurants and bars to 50% capacity.

Last week Vox published a piece which argued we all needed to take a break from capitalism because the world is ending. The author of that piece, Anna North, also described present reality as “the apocalypse.” That seemed a bit overwrought to me but today Freddie deBoer argues it’s just one example of a recent trend. He also points to this recent piece at the Atlantic titled “I’m Starting to Give Up on Post-pandemic Life.”

Hold the caviar and put the mink back in the closet.

Davos is dead, again. The glitzy and eagerly awaited World Economic Forum annual meeting scheduled for the Swiss mountain resort on Jan. 17-21 has been shelved for the second year in a row, replaced by a series of online discussions.

LONDON (AP) — Britain’s main nurses’ union warned Monday that exhaustion and surging coronavirus cases among medical staff are pushing them to the breaking point, adding to pressure on the government for new restrictions to curb record numbers of infections driven by the omicron variant.

The warning throws into stark relief the unpalatable choice Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces: wreck holiday plans for millions for a second year running, or face a potential tidal wave of cases and disruption.

Many governments in Europe and the U.S. are confronting similar dilemmas over how hard to come down in the face of omicron, which appears more transmissible than the previous delta variant that itself led to surges in many parts of the world. Early evidence suggests omicron may also produce less serious illness — though scientists caution it is too soon to say — and that it could better evade vaccine protection.

Pfizer Inc. funded presentations to Canadian health professionals earlier this year that claimed rival COVID-19 vaccines could cause cancer and were inappropriate for immunocompromised people, claims that experts say were not true.