Mike Huckabee

Sadly, a number of cities are again canceling New Year’s celebrations due to the rise in cases caused by the easily-transmissible Omicron variant. Naturally, Dr. Fauci is urging everyone to cancel their New Year’s parties and sit home alone on New Year’s Eve, as I assume he will be doing from now on.

Omicron appears to be much milder than previous variants, but it can be deadly for those particularly susceptible. So once again, instead of protecting those who are particularly susceptible, some government officials are going back into their dictatorial “lockdown everyone” modes. But there’s growing evidence that people have seen how useless and harmful that was and are in no mood to put up with it any longer.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/covid-19-omicron-variant-new-year

Meanwhile, the CDC’s baffling refusal even to consider the effectiveness of natural immunity among the previously infected took another blow with the release of a new study published in the European Journal of Immunology. It was conducted by a group of highly-qualified researchers, including members of the Department of Health Security and Department of Public Health and Welfare in Helsinki, Finland.

https://beckernews.com/the-latest-research-puts-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-for-deniers-of-natural-immunity-to-covid-43518/

The official argument for those with natural immunity to get vaccinated has been that we don’t know if it lasts as long as vaccines (an argument that gets less convincing with each new demand for yet another booster shot.) But the new study found that whether someone had a mild or severe case, natural antibodies persisted in the vast majority of patients at least 13 months after infection, suggesting long-lasting protection.

https://beckernews.com/the-latest-research-puts-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-for-deniers-of-natural-immunity-to-covid-43518/

The rate was lower among those with less robust immune systems, such as the elderly (you know, the people we should have protected in the first place, rather than locking down the rest of the world while moving COVID patients into nursing homes.)

That link also includes information about a recent study published in Nature Immunology that found that COVID is generally mild or asymptomatic in children ages 3-11. Researchers don’t know why, but most children had a much stronger T-cell natural immunity response than adults, and it lasted longer.

In Washington, DC, which has recognized only one out of 839 requests for a religious exemption from the COVID vaccination mandate for city workers, unvaccinated firefighters and EMTs who are under threat of firing worked overtime over Christmas to cover for their 100+ vaccinated colleagues who’ve tested positive for COVID.

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/dc-fire-and-ems-covid-outbreak-100-plus-postitive/65-422e6c12-567c-4e3a-a507-f7459755380b

While the media continue their efforts to tar Florida as a COVID hotbed for Gov. DeSantis’ refusal to institute draconian measures that have repeatedly proven ineffective, they seem oddly uninterested in the news that on Dec. 26, there were 189,714 new cases of COVID reported nationwide, and 54,828 (nearly 30%) came from New York City, the realm of the Genghis Khan of vaccine mandates, Bill DeBlasio.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/12/27/nearly-30-of-new-covid-cases-in-america-came-from-one-city-n1544735

And for those who believe, for some reason, that COVID automatically means a “winter of severe illness and death,” Oxford University just published a study of British disease statistics that likely apply in other populations. It calculated the odds of a vaccinated person dying from various causes (this was conducted before the Omicron variant appeared.)

https://www.westernjournal.com/oxford-study-dramatically-undercuts-dem-covid-narrative-finds-shockingly-low-death-rate/

It found, for instance, that a healthy, 75-year-old woman had a death risk from COVID of 0.45%, or about 1 in 220. That means the average American has a 37 times greater risk of dying from heart disease than a 75-year-old British woman does from COVID. But we haven't locked down all the Twinkies yet (although I shouldn't give them ideas.) A 55-year-old British woman had a 0.03% chance of dying of COVID, a 45-year-old woman had a 0.01% risk, and a 25-year-old man had a 0.00% chance of dying of COVID.

Of course, this is not to say there is no risk of dying, and that you can’t also have severe illness with long-lasting negative effects. But as with all things in life, you need to consider the odds. There’s a risk that you might get hit by a bus, but that means you take reasonable precautions not to walk in front of a bus, not that you quit your job and hide out in your attic for the rest of your life.

Mike Huckabee

There are a lot of things people like to believe that are patently absurd if you think about it. Much of the Obama Administration was based on making confident declarations – we can’t just drill our way out of an energy shortage, it would take a magic wand to bring back manufacturing jobs, 2 percent growth is the “new normal,” etc. – all delivered in a somber, imperious tone that made them sound like unassailable truth, when in fact, all of them were patently false.

One of the most common pieces of false conventional wisdom is that “the government can’t legislate morality!” But of course, they do it all the time. We have millions of laws, just to enforce society’s consensus of what’s morally right or wrong. Liberals used to protest this, and now they’re the chief generators of morality laws, usually bans on everything they find morally offensive, including smoking, using racist words or an unpreferred pronoun, giving someone an unrequested plastic straw, attending a protest for a cause they personally disagree with, etc. etc. etc. Each law comes with loopholes, so government adds more laws to close them. Plus we’ll need police, courts and jails, because some people will always insist on doing the wrong thing anyway. All to legislate morality.

(I know, today’s liberals want to do away with police and jails, but that’s just for actual criminals. They still want to arrest and jail law-abiding citizens who exercise rights they disapprove of, like reopening their gyms, salons and barber shops.)

Self-government requires self-discipline, self-respect, and respect for others. When people don’t follow an accepted standard moral code, government keeps passing new laws to try to force them to, which creates bigger government and more expense and less freedom for everybody. Maybe the national debt wouldn’t be sky high now if our behavior standards hadn’t sunk so low.

How much do people’s bad personal choices end up costing all the rest of us? You might be surprised at the size of the bill. When I left the governor’s office in Arkansas, we had more than 13,000 inmates in the Department of Corrections. Just keeping them locked up cost taxpayers more than $220 million a year. That’s more than it would have cost to send 13,000 kids to any college in the state, all expenses paid. If every prison inmate had just lived a moral life and stayed out of trouble, the taxpayers could have enjoyed a $220 million tax cut. Or the money might have been used to improve roads and services that benefit everyone.

From the left, I’d always hear that we should spend more money on prisoners or else turn more of them loose. From the right, I’d hear that we should lock up more people and eliminate parole while cutting the prison budget. Both were unrealistic. But hardly anyone wanted to talk about the real problem: the lack of morality that led to all those people being locked up in the first place.

And what about juvenile offenders? Every kid placed into our Division of Youth Services cost taxpayers up to $80,000 a year. If they’d all had stable, nurturing homes and been taught to be obedient, responsible and moral, it would’ve saved the taxpayers of just that one state $80 million a year. Imagine how many parks we could have built for all kids to enjoy, or how many books we could’ve bought for school libraries, if we could’ve freed up $80 million a year in the state budget.

A lot of kids get into trouble because of peer pressure, which social media and Twitter mob shaming have made even more oppressive. They think breaking the rules makes them look cool and that they will never face any consequences for it. So kids, when someone you know starts acting up, instead of rewarding them with your admiration or covering for them with your silence, please have the courage to stand up and say, “That’s not cool! Thanks for costing us our parks and turning our generation into tax slaves, jerk!”

Hey, as long as kids are going to be vulnerable to peer pressure, why not use its power for good?

Mike Huckabee

When I was growing up, my bedtime ritual always included a fairy tale that started with “Once upon a time...” and ended with the comforting words we all remember: “And they lived happily ever after.” As a child of the optimistic 1950s, I dreamed that life might be like that: whatever obstacles, dangers or perils might come my way, in the end, I would live happily ever after.

There were certainly plenty of struggles along the way, but I have to say that things did eventually work out even more happily than I could have imagined, from a career that I love to a wonderful family, including the world’s greatest grandkids. But sadly, for many people, “living happily ever after” does seem like an unobtainable fairy tale. Why is that happy ending growing ever more out-of-reach for so many people?

Of course, there are always factors beyond our control, like health problems and accidents. None of us can ever know if our birthday or Christmas celebration was the last we’ll ever enjoy. We have no way of knowing when it will all end, only that someday, it will (that’s why it’s said that the only certainties in life are death and taxes.)

Well, I can’t help you with your taxes, but I do have a bit of advice that I think will make death less frightening and greatly increase your chances of living “happily ever after.”

For decades, our nation has been focused on personal pleasure. The message drummed into everyone by pop culture is, “If it feels good, do it.” It’s fostered a culture of self-centeredness that led to Baby Boomers being nicknamed “The Me Generation.” Today’s young people have been dubbed “iGen” because many are so fixated on self and selfies that even their gadgets’ names all start with “I.” Advertising bombards us with the message that life is all about me and all about now. Such messages of immediate self-gratification may sell products and services, but they cause us to sell our souls if we follow this philosophy to its logical conclusion.

At some point in life, we all experience events that shake up our routine, much like the agitator in a washing machine shakes loose the grime in our clothes. We may not want or enjoy such experiences, but they’re necessary to force us to focus on the frailty of life and the certainty of death. They also force us to begin asking what really matters and why.

If we react to setbacks based solely on what feels good right now, we greatly lower our chances of enjoying a happy future. But if we believe there is even a remote possibility that our actions have lasting implications beyond the immediate, both within and beyond our lifetimes, it should cause us to think differently, live differently, and leave a different kind of legacy.

Without apology, I believe that the spiritual side of our lives really does matter. To believe otherwise is to define humans as little more than animated protoplasm, going through the motions of life for no particular purpose. I prefer to believe there’s more to us than flesh and blood. If we possess a soul capable of living beyond our lifetimes, then the seeds we plant in this life will yield fruit forever. If you believe those things, the ultimate becomes more important than the immediate.

When we decide to live beyond our lifetimes, our responsibilities to the next generation will outweigh our roles in our current jobs. More important than the money we’re paid for our work is what we will become as a result of our work. Our character will become more important than the careers we follow.

For all of us, life began “once upon a time.” Unlike the fairy tales, however, it’s up to us to make the choices that determine whether the last line of our life stories will read, “And they lived happily ever after.”

(Adapted from the book, “Rare, Medium or Done Well: Make the Most of your Life.”)