Last month, a billboard featuring Kamala Harris and Joe Biden as Dumb and Dumber became a "viral hit."
Do they deserve the title?
I think Harris and Biden should be be mad that they won the title when it is becoming more and more obvious that Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Stephen Breyer deserve the title of Dumb and Dumber.
As this UK Daily Mail headline revealed neither is the brightest of lights:
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor under fire for overstating that 100,000 children are currently hospitalized with COVID and 'many are on ventilators' while Stephen Breyer says there have been 750 MILLION cases...
Jeffrey Albert Tucker, who according to Wikipedia is the "Chief Liberty Officer (CLO) of Liberty.me... also an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy,[2] a research affiliate of RMIT University's Blockchain Innovation Hub," appears to agree saying "This morning I listened to the oral arguments in the case of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates as enforced by OSHA. It was a demoralizing experience." He thinks the courts need to get "Out of Science":
I heard some crazy things, such as a claim that “750 million” Americans just got Covid yesterday, and that 100,000 kids with Covid are in the hospital, many on ventilators. The correct number is 3,300 with positive tests, but not necessarily suffering from Covid. I further heard strong claims that the vaccines block disease spread, despite every bit of evidence to the contrary.
It was my first time hearing oral arguments in the Supreme Court. I might have thought that facts on the ground would actually matter to people who are holding the fate of human liberty in their hands. I might have thought that they would be getting their information from somewhere other than their political intuition, mixed with wildly inaccurate claims from bloggers and media pundits.
I was wrong. And that is deeply alarming. Or maybe it is a wake up call to us all. We have learned today that these people are no smarter than our neighbors, no more qualified to address complicated questions than our friends, and arguably far less informed than the Twittersphere about basic issues of Covid and public health.
The backdrop of today’s arguments is that 74 percent of Americans of all ages have had at least one shot. Meanwhile, case numbers are up 500 percent in many places, and 721,000 new cases have been logged throughout the country, and that’s obviously a large underestimate because it does not count at-home tests which are selling out in stores around the country.
The extremely obvious point—the most basic observation one can make about this data—is that the vaccinations are not controlling the spread. This has been granted already by the CDC and every other authority.
No matter what people say in retrospect, I seriously doubt that anyone would have predicted a future in which the pandemic highs would be reached following mass vaccination. It’s not only true in the United States but also all over the world. However much they help with mitigating severe outcomes of the disease, at least for a time, they have not been successful in stopping the spread of the virus. They will not end the pandemic.
And yet, so far as I can understand this, that is the whole point of the vaccine mandate. It is to protect workers from getting Covid. There is no evidence that this is possible with mass mandates in the workforce. People can get and are getting Covid anywhere and everywhere, among which surely means the workplace too. The vaccine is not stopping that. What will bring this pandemic to an end will not be the vaccines but the adaptation of human immune systems, exposed and then developing resilience.
Apparently there was not one mention of natural immunity during the oral arguments, which is truly astounding. From what I could hear, there was a strangely truncated environment in which no one was willing to say certain obvious truths, almost as if a pre-set orthodoxy had been defined at the outset. There were certain givens that simply were not questioned; namely that this is a disease without precedent, that the state can stop it, that vaccines are the best ticket we have, that the unvaccinated have absolutely no good reason to remain that way.
To be sure, the oral arguments are not what decides a case. The briefs filed for the court are much better on the side of opposing the mandates, while the briefs for the mandates are filled with untruths that are easily exploded. In the end, it is very likely that the mandate will be struck down in a 6 to 3 vote. I’m glad for that. We should be relieved.
However, we need to do some serious thinking about what is going on here. We are talking about a mandate that profoundly affects the health and well-being of millions of people. The question of whether someone should take the vaccine is bound up with extremely complex empirical questions, and opinions run in every direction, from those who think it is the greatest gift of modern science to those who think the vaccines themselves are not only dangerous but also unleashing ever more variants. These are matters of science and should be subject to debate, with the final choices made by individuals.
What absolutely cannot happen in any free, civilized, and stable country is to have such fundamental questions of liberty and bodily autonomy adjudicated by a panel of lawyers who have limited curiosity in the science, a lack of knowledge of facts on the ground...
... Let us hope that this case awakens a culture and a world to a desperate need for dramatic reform. Human rights and public health are too important to be left in the hands of high courts. [https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/get-the-courts-out-of-science_4203665.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2022-01-11&mktids=2e63bc4dcdf4dbf1d2375481e17904fe&est=VglxGdqRy22jn%2FAnGDpB7A%2F7C44lXbkXHnRmKB7Kjp42y68%2BlmKLrbWcpLLK]
Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis's Amoris Laetitia.