The FDA is as paralytically slow as ever -- denying safe and effective healthcare to millions

On December 1, the UK pharmaceutical regulatory agency, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), approved the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Meanwhile, the US will wait on the FDA bureaucracy to reach a decision.

The British will be able to start receiving the vaccine within days. Their focus will be on protecting the frontline workers and the elderly; those in the highest risk groups. Those in the highest risk groups in the US, on the other hand, will be forced to wait.

On November 9th, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their vaccine was over 90 percent effective. A press release is no substitute for the actual data from the study, and review of the data is necessary. They applied to the FDA for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on November 30th.  An EUA allows the FDA to streamline the approval process in the case of an emergency, or if running a clinic trial is impossible.

The FDA released a notice in the Federal Register on Nov. 27, giving the public information about the EUA approval meeting. This provided the public with the opportunity to comment on the proposals being discussed, which is the normal process for federal agencies issuing regulatory changes. Finally, on December 10th, the FDA advisory committee will meet to discuss the EUA request. Upon reaching a recommendation, the FDA will choose whether or not to act upon it, which the FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn said in an interview would likely be within a few days.

According to Dr. Hahn, the FDA has been and will continue to review data and generate reports to prepare for the meeting during this time. In his interviews, Dr. Hahn’s description of the process implies that he believes that slow equals safe. But this is a false dichotomy. Rather than setting an arbitrary deadline for how long approvals should take to be complete, approvals should last until a rigorous analysis can be completed. How much additional data will we be able to gather by waiting a week longer than the UK?  

The EUA means that this is an emergency. On average COVID-19 deaths amount to over 1,500 per day. For much of the year, excess deaths were even higher than COVID-19 deaths. Whether those deaths are undiagnosed COVID-19 deaths or deaths due to our response does not matter; they are a result of the virus and need to be considered when we are weighing the tradeoffs. We need to consider the risk of the vaccine and the risks of people contracting COVID-19 without the vaccine.

Unfortunately, the FDA has a long history of risk aversion when considering these tradeoffs. Former FDA Chair Scott Gottlieb detailed the culture of risk aversion at the FDA and its pitfalls. Vahid Montazerhodjat and Andrew Lo used Bayesian decision analysis to analyze the FDA approval stance. They also find that the FDA is too conservative, overweighing the risk of ineffective treatments and undervaluing the cost of rejecting effective treatments for severe diseases. This lengthens the process from discovery in the lab to use as treatment, which already sits at an average of over 15 years.

But this risk aversion and slow process is outdated in today’s rapidly advancing world. Technology is progressing at a rapid pace. It took researchers at Moderna just two days to design their vaccine in January, something unimaginable years ago. The rapid speed with which researchers are able to isolate a problem and design a solution tailored to it is only increasing as our technology improves. For example, just this week researchers released that they have solved the 50-year-old protein folding challenge, successfully cultured meat grown in a lab, and discovered a treatment to de-age and regenerate neurons.

Just 10 years ago it would have been impossible for so many people to seamlessly transition to working remotely. It should be no shock that science is seeing these improvements too.

Despite the rapid advances or science and technology, the FDA is still mired in an outdated regulatory process designed for the world of fax machines, not smartphones. The regulatory process is more suited for the pre-internet age, stifled by much slower data collection and the movement of information. We need nimble regulations that are able to keep up, rather than arcane and ritualized procedures.

Of course, you can’t shorten the time to conduct clinical safety and efficacy trials, but the UK allowed Pfizer to submit information on a rolling basis to shorten the approval process timeline. The FDA can do that to make it easier. The FDA could also end the requirement to fax or mail in hard copies of data.

The FDA also has a history of moving the goalposts, and requesting additional data from pharmaceutical developers, lengthening the approval process. After some time on the market, the Multiple Sclerosis drug Tysabri was found to increase the chance of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy and was voluntarily withdrawn from the market. Despite the FDA advisory committee recommending only a warning accompanying the package, the FDA required they create a risk map and limited the availability of the drug, which they didn’t require for Rituxan, which was in a similar situation.

Similarly, the FDA added requirements during the EUA process. In October, they announced a 2-month post injection review for side effects for 50 percent of participants. This forced Pfizer to wait an additional month to apply in order to meet the requirement. Eric Topol worked to convince the FDA to add this requirement to lengthen the process. The FDA’s decision was called “bureaucratic jujitsu” by a supporter. I’d call it bureaucratic obstruction which cost the lives of thousands of people forced to wait for the vaccine. Meanwhile patients in the UK are able to receive that vaccine. 

The UK approval should inspire us to enact a reform that is far overdue and is a simple alternative that still keeps the protections of a regulatory agency but will allow for some speed. We should have reciprocity agreements with regulators in other countries. This would allow any drug approved for use in another country to be used by American patients. Some countries, like Australia and New Zealand, already take FDA approval into consideration during their approval process. 

The U.S. government can limit reciprocity to countries that have a proven track record of approving safe and effective drugs. This would include countries in the European Union, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. This reciprocity would reduce delay and limit wasting time and effort applying to multiple regulatory bodies. Comparing the approved drugs in the UK and the US, researchers have found no significant difference in the safety between the countries, suggesting that MHRA approval is no less safe than FDA approval.

Ensuring that the COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective is important, no one is arguing that. The question is how long a process is necessary, considering the continuing death toll. While the FDA abides by their bureaucratic process, the MHRA has acted quickly and approved the Pfizer vaccine, allowing people in the UK to begin to be vaccinated.

The FDA approval process, even in their Emergency Use Authorization, is a long process, taking time and costing us lives. 

https://catalyst.independent.org/2020/12/08/fda-delays-covid-vaccine-review/?omhide=true

Texas Files Lawsuit With SCOTUS Challenging Election Procedures in 4 Swing States

Texas is suing Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the Supreme Court over "unconstitutional irregularities" in the election process, saying the states used the coronavirus pandemic to justify "ignoring state laws" with regard to absentee and mail-in voting.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit on Tuesday, alleging the four swing states violated state and federal law when they modified election procedures. The four battleground states listed in the suit were key to President Donald Trump's path to victory in 2016 and were vital to his reelection bid. Given the number of electoral votes at stake, the plaintiffs argued the states will "determine the outcome of the election."

"With all unlawful votes discounted, the election result is an open question that this Court must address," Paxton's brief to the Supreme Court said.

Without factoring the four states into the electoral vote totals, former Vice President Biden, who has 306 votes, would be down to 244, compared with Trump's 232. Therefore, the plaintiffs argue, those states are critical to the election. Trump won all four states in 2016 but lost them this year.

The suit charged executive and judicial officials in the four states with making "significant changes" to election rules, a move that the plaintiffs argue "did away" with security measures for absentee and mail-in ballots. Among the measures that the plaintiffs say were removed were signature verification, witness requirements, poll observers and authorized secure ballot drop-off locations.

Signature verification and the ability for people to observe the election process are two issues the Trump campaign and the president have stressed in their election fight. Poll observers being kept too far from where ballots were being opened was one of the first problems the campaign had with the election, and Trump has pushed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to demand signature verification in the election.

"The Republican Governor of Georgia refuses to do signature verification, which would give us an easy win. What's wrong with this guy? What is he hiding?" Trump, who also called Kemp a RINO (Republican in name only), tweeted on Monday.

Without matching signatures, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said, a recount in Georgia means nothing because alleged "fraudulent" ballots would still be added to the total votes for each candidate.

On Election Night, Trump had the lead over Biden as in-person votes were being counted. However, that lead quickly dwindled as states counted mail-in ballots, a voting method the president dissuaded his supporters from using. In the suit, the plaintiffs argue that there was a "one in a quadrillion" probability of Biden winning the popular vote in the four key swing states, given Trump's lead early on Wednesday morning after the election.

"Invalid or fraudulent votes debase or dilute the weight of each validly cast vote," the plaintiffs wrote in the brief.

The four states targeted in the Supreme Court filing are all ones that the Trump campaign has gone after themselves, but so far they've been fighting a losing legal battle. In legal filings, they cited many of the same reasons as the Supreme Court brief, and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called the most recent development meant "huge."

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called the lawsuit a "publicity stunt" and not a "serious legal pleading." She said that Paxton, not voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania, was to blame for the "erosion of confidence in our democratic system." Nessel added that the issues raised in the complaint have already been litigated and "roundly rejected."

Legal experts aren't confident the Supreme Court will take the case, though, and the plaintiffs are up against the clock. The plaintiffs' attorneys argued that the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over the case because it isn't just a matter of state laws but a violation of the Constitution. They added that the Supreme Court is the only forum that can "delay" the December 14 deadline for states to appoint their electors and pushed for them to do so.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/politics/texas-files-lawsuit-with-scotus-challenging-election-procedures-in-4-swing-states/ar-BB1bJYvt

Patrick Basham Lays Out Why He Believes Biden's Election Win Is 'Statistically Implausible'

Pollster Patrick Basham explained during an interview with Fox News’s Mark Levin why he believes Joe Biden’s supposed election victory, while “not statistically impossible,” is “statistically implausible.”

Basham said during the interview that aired Sunday that he looked at numerous “non-polling metrics,” which have a “100 percent accuracy rate in terms of predicting the winner of the presidential election,” to come to his conclusion.

“Something very strange has happened because the numbers just don't add up,” he said referring to the election results.

Some of the “dozen or more” metrics include “party registration trends, how the candidates did in their respective presidential primaries, the number of individual donations, [and] how much enthusiasm each candidate generated in the opinion polls.”

He said these metrics pointed to a Trump victory in 2016 and “that was again the case in 2020.”

“So if we are to accept that Biden won against the trend of all these non-polling metrics, it not only means that one of these metrics was inaccurate ... for the first time ever, it means that each one of these metrics was wrong for the first time and at the same time as all of the others,” Basham explained.

The founding director of the Democracy Institute said if 100 observers were only shown the “vote breakdown by demographic group” on election night, 99 “would say, well, obviously, Trump.”

Basham also called into question the ballot rejection rate for absentee and mail-in ballots, which he said was “historically low.”

“Rejection rates, which in the primaries earlier this year were well into the double-digits and which historically have often been very, very high in these key swing states, or at least in the key swing counties, we're seeing rejection rates of less than 1 percent, often very close to to zero,” he noted. “Given the increase in absentee balloting and the lack of experience that most of the new voters and those doing the counting would have with those ballots, it is implausible, to put it politely, that that figure would be as low as it was.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/12/07/mark-levin-guest-on-puzzling-election-results-n2581144

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More Lockdowns Aren’t Answer to Stopping COVID-19

As infections increase during the “second wave” of the coronavirus, too many politicians are knee-jerking to reimpose harsh restrictions such as business shutdowns, curfews, and home confinements.

These types of sweeping and overly restrictive COVID-19 measures cause needless harm, especially for the majority of generally healthy Americans who will experience moderate to no symptoms if they catch the virus.

More effective approaches include doing more to protect vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions; getting newly approved rapid at-home tests into the hands of more Americans so those who are infected can be immediately identified and quarantined; and preparing for a potential vaccine by developing a plan for quick distribution and prioritizing who gets it first.

Shutting down entire states only worsens the economic devastation as well as the health and welfare of otherwise healthy Americans. The answer to defeating the coronavirus can’t be choosing between our health and our economy. The answer isn’t either-or, rather it’s both-and.

Our economic health has an incredible effect on our physical and mental health, and vice versa. The longer that healthier, lower-risk Americans are out of work, deprived of contact with family and friends, and sheltered at home, the more public health suffers, both physically and mentally.

Governors and local officials need to make shutdown decisions on a targeted, county-by-county basis, based on virus case numbers and infection rates. And such actions must be very temporary.

Research shows that areas where state and local officials have allowed places to safely reopen are well on their way to economic recovery. Meanwhile, in areas with excessive restrictions, including business and school closures, families and children are struggling.

We’ve also seen that strict lockdown orders in many European countries haven’t prevented a second wave of the virus.

A more effective approach to stopping the spread is widespread testing—figuring out who has the virus and temporarily quarantining them from others as they ride out the illness.

The Food and Drug Administration has just approved COVID-19 self-tests that can be easily conducted at home or work and don’t need to be sent off to a lab. Rapid manufacture and distribution of these kits is now key.

Quickly determining who is infected and who isn’t can go a long way toward mitigating the spread of the virus and makes going into businesses, schools, churches, and other facilities much safer.

Especially for nursing home and hospital staff who work around vulnerable people, being able to rapid-test each day before going into work will help prevent more breakouts and deaths.

States also must prepare an effective distribution strategy for a potentially soon-to-be-released vaccine. State public health agencies must prioritize who should receive the vaccine first.

The top of the list should include those with the highest degree of transmission risk and those who may experience the severest consequences of an infection. That means starting with front-line health care workers, the elderly, and those with underlying medical conditions.

States also immediately should allow pharmacists to administer the vaccine, just as many already allow them to administer flu and pneumonia vaccines. Pharmacists are positioned to ensure fast and efficient mass immunization, and that kind of rapid response could prevent millions of additional infections and tens of thousands of additional deaths.

A complete road map to recovery (found here) has been created by the National Coronavirus Recovery Commission; it contains 265 specific, actionable recommendations, including those mentioned above. The road map was developed for governments, businesses, churches, educational institutions, and community organizations to navigate as safely as possible through the pandemic.

Instead of indiscriminate and ineffective statewide shutdowns, public health measures should be focused on continuing to inform Americans how to reduce their chances of catching and spreading COVID-19; doing more to protect the elderly and those with underlying conditions; distributing rapid at-home tests to determine who may be contagious; and preparing a strategy for rapid public vaccination once a vaccine is released.

Lockdowns and prohibiting families from visiting one another in their own homes this holiday season aren’t the answers, and there’s no reason they should be the go-to tool for our leaders.

It’s time that the same politicians who regularly lecture us about “following the science” actually look in the mirror and take their own advice.

Following the science and assessing everything that we’ve learned in the months since the pandemic first struck will help us to defeat this deadly disease more quickly; recover our jobs and our economy; and get us reunited with family and community and back to some sense of normality again.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/12/02/more-lockdowns-arent-answer-to-stopping-covid-19

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Universal flu vaccine could be on the horizon after trials show experimental jab can protect humans 'from getting countless strains of the virus'

A universal flu vaccine could protect patients from countless strains of the virus for at least 18 months, scientists have found.

Those over 65, in care homes and frontline medics are told to get the jab every year because the virus constantly mutates to evade the body's defences.

The current jab is based on predictions of which strain of influenza may cause havoc in Britain and only offers protection against three or four.

But today scientists inched a step closer to a universal jab which can protect against countless flu strains, after human trials showed it triggered the production of antibodies that block the influenza virus' spike proteins - stopping it from invading cells and causing an infection.

Despite not being proof that it works, it offers a first glimpse of a possible new jab.

It works by triggering an immune response against the 'stalk' part of the virus' spike protein — which it uses to help it invade cells.

This part, unlike the 'head' of the spike, rarely differs between the hundreds of strains meaning a vaccine against it could provide wide-ranging and long-lasting immunity.

Coronavirus has killed three times as many people as influenza and pneumonia this year, official data has revealed.

Covid-19 was listed as the underlying cause of death in 48,168 fatalities recorded in England and Wales between January and August, according to a September report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Influenza caused just 394 deaths during the same time period and pneumonia — often caused by the flu — was behind 13,619 deaths.

But deaths from the two common respiratory illnesses have actually outnumbered Covid-19 fatalities since July, when the pandemic began to fade away, the data also revealed. For instance, flu and influenza killed 14 people on August 31 — the most recent day figures are available for, compared to five from the coronavirus.

The report also revealed flu or pneumonia were mentioned on more than 70,000 death certificates, which is more than the 52,327 linked to Covid-19. When a condition is mentioned on a death certificate it means doctors consider it to have contributed to someone's death but to have not been the main factor that lead to the end of their life.

Deaths from pneumonia and influenza were seven times below the average 100,000 deaths they cause each year, which experts said was due to social distancing restrictions hampering the transmission of the diseases.

This means that without lockdown restrictions Covid-19 could easily have caused more than a tenth of a million fatalities.

Millions of flu vaccines are rolled out by the NHS in the UK every winter to stop a major outbreak of influenza, which adds pressure to busy hospitals.

But the jabs often miss the mark because they don't protect against all strains and can only be 30 to 40 per cent effective.

Health chiefs called on people to get the flu vaccine this year to protect health services from a 'double-whammy' of Covid-19 and flu cases.

Influenza — considered the most likely to cause a pandemic — kills around 17,000 people every year in England and up to 62,000 in the US, according to statistics.

When Spanish flu struck in 1918/19, it spread through a third of the world's population and is estimated to have killed around 100million people.

Results of the study on the universal flu vaccine, published in the journal Nature Medicine, saw it administered to 65 US adults aged between 18 and 39.

Participants were given two injections of the trial vaccine — which focused on the 'stalk' of a spike protein — three months apart.

Ten blood samples were taken to see if the individuals still had any antibodies — disease-fighting proteins — against the hundreds of strains of the virus.

'Vaccination was found to be safe and induced a broad, strong, durable and (trigger) functional immune response targeting the conserved,' the team from the New York-based Mount Sinai School of Medicine wrote in the study.

'The results suggest that (the vaccine candidate) has the potential to be developed as universal vaccines that protect broadly against influenza viruses.'

Professor Florian Krammer, from Mount Sinai School of Medicine who led the study, said: 'An influenza virus vaccine that results in broad immunity would likely protect against any emerging influenza virus subtype or strain and would significantly enhance our pandemic preparedness, avoiding future problems with influenza pandemics as we see them now with Covid-19.'

Professor Krammer added: 'Our chimeric hemagglutinin vaccine is a major advance over conventional vaccines which are often mismatched to the circulating strains of virus, impacting their effectiveness. 'In addition, re-vaccinating individuals annually is a huge and expensive undertaking.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9026585/Universal-flu-vaccine-horizon.html

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SURVIVING

It seems that I am not dead yet.  Although my energies for blogging are much reduced, I have been able to keep posting to some extent.  I have mainly found material worth posting on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. I have had a bit of fun with postings about China on the latter.  So I think I will continue to be able to post a few worthwhile things

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Examining the Evidence for Democrats' 'No Evidence of Voter Fraud' Claim

On November 14, the U.S. edition of The Guardian ran an article by Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe headlined "Republicans are playing with fire. And we all risk getting burned." Tribe claimed that there is "no evidence" so far of systemic fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

The next day on FNC's Fox News Sunday, Mr. Tribe and Judge Kenneth Starr discussed the president's legal challenges to the election. It's an interesting exchange, and one can watch it here and here. In this writer's opinion, Mr. Starr was the more persuasive, for Tribe again claimed "there is nothing in his [Trump's] arguments and no evidence to back them."

Immediately after Tribe's claim, FNC's moderator quoted a November 12 joint statement put out by the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a division of the DHS: "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised." The CISA's statement is quite short, and it should be read with a jaundiced eye. There are no links to web pages that explain its methodology and how it arrived at its conclusion that the 2020 election is "the most secure election in American history." But that's not saying much, given America's long history of election fraud.

By employing the same "no evidence" rhetoric, both Tribe and the CISA attempt to shut down the debate. The tacit implication is that they have examined all of the evidence and found none of it to hold water. Also, by employing "no evidence" rhetoric, they expect us to accept them as the experts on these matters.

But this article isn't about rhetoric; it's about evidence, and there is "no evidence" that the vote counts in the 2020 presidential election are correct. But then no one can produce evidence to demonstrate what the legitimate vote counts were in any presidential election, at least within any reasonable time constraints. The changes to our voting systems in the 2020 elections were expressly designed so that there cannot be any evidence. Professor Tribe should tell us what the evidence would consist of that would allow us to know what the correct vote counts are.

Larry Tribe may like to oraculate from on high as though he were some objective, disinterested analyst calling balls and strikes, but he's actually a highly partisan left-wing Democrat. In the Guardian article, he touches on the possibility of state legislatures going rogue and appointing electors who would vote against the candidate the people (supposedly) voted for. In disapproving of that, Tribe proves himself a hypocrite, for back in 2016, he was involved with Electors Trust and even wrote a letter "encouraging electors to vote against Trump." In other words, Tribe was urging that they go rogue and become faithless electors. Also, when President Trump fired FBI director James Comey, which was entirely within his purview, Tribe urged impeachment. Tribe seems little better than the worthies on MSNBC and CNN who were hired precisely because they're willing to say anything.

Only a small portion of Tribe's article in The Guardian deals with vote counts. It quickly gets past election issues and degenerates into yet another broadside against Republicans in general and Trump in particular, and it's wacky, repugnant stuff. However, it can be read for its sociological value and for entertainment.

For Tribe to pooh-pooh the considerable evidence that has been brought forward is evidence of Tribe's bad faith. Perhaps Larry Tribe is a fraud. What kind of election systems would Tribe propose that would give Americans confidence in the vote count?

It was after the 37-day post-election brouhaha in 2000 when I started thinking about how to mend our broken election systems. One of my aims was not only to make fraud detectable, which it currently isn't, but also to make fraud impossible to commit, or at least much more difficult. Have any of the changes made to our election systems since 2000 tried to do that? Of course not — the changes have all been geared to making registration and voting easier and easier. Election integrity hasn't been the aim.

Larry Tribe would benefit from watching the opening to Mark Levin's FNC show of November 22, "What is the civil litigation process of 2020 election suits?" He can find it here and here. Not only will Tribe discover that there are tons of evidence, but he might also learn how to litigate a case.

Why shouldn't the Tribes of this world be required to prove that no fraud occurred? For that matter, why shouldn't the boards of elections in the states be required to provide proof of the integrity of their elections? Voters are expected to just accept that the election officials in the several states are competent and honest and wouldn't dream of breaking the law to throw an election to their candidate.

Whenever some self-appointed "expert" makes a claim of there being "no evidence" for something, insist that he produce the evidence for his claims. Ask him: what evidence do you have that there is "no evidence"?

Because they haven't demanded that our election systems be fixed so that vote counts can be shown to be correct, the American people may deserve to have a frail, senile president and a braying, hebephrenic V.P. More's the pity.

As of November 30, we were still counting votes for U.S. representatives. If it weren't for the 20th Amendment, which moved Inauguration Day from March 4 to January 20, we'd have 43 more days to contest this election's fraud. The U.S. Supreme Court needs to vacate the presidential elections in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, and especially Pennsylvania and order that new elections be held with more security. The mountain of evidence of fraud demands a do-over.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/examining_the_evidence_for_democrats_no_evidence_of_voter_fraud_claim.html

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Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley Give Up on California, Move to Texas

It’s got to be a public relations gut punch for California Governor Gavin Newsom, who’s done little to retain all the companies bailing out of Silicon Valley because it’s too expensive to conduct business there.

The headquarters for one of the Founding Fathers of the Silicon Valley is pulling up stakes and leaving the Golden State. Bill Packard and Dave Hewlett’s legacy company, Hewlett-Packard, is packing up “the garage” and moving to Texas.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, split off from the hardware portion of the company in 2015, is moving its HQ to Houston.

But HPE’s move is particularly notable because Hewlett-Packard was one of the original Silicon Valley success stories, founded by partners Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in a garage in Palo Alto 1939. In 2015, that company split into HPE and hardware maker HP Inc., which is not moving. But even that company is reducing its footprint in California, consolidating its Bay Area sites to San Jose.

The company reported $7.21 billion in earnings in the fourth quarter, which now will not replenish California’s tax stockpiles. No one is being fired in this move.

The pandemic is giving companies a good reason to get out of the California gulag. CNBC reports that there are more virtual employees. Companies don’t want the expensive overhead.

The coronavirus pandemic has given a number of tech companies and prominent Silicon Valley figures an excuse to exit California. Without many needing to go into an office every day, many are questioning the high cost of living and the state’s hefty taxes amid a broader shift to remote work.

The pandemic also means that employees can live nearly anywhere. Affordable housing considerations for employees will become less of an issue.

The Left-leaning employees may vote out the conservatives in the next election, though, as Texas is being overrun with Silicon Valley ‘fugees.

Data analytics software company Palantir Technologies moved its headquarters to Denver, Colorado from Palo Alto, California, earlier this year. The company’s co-founder Joe Lonsdale followed suit, and announced last month he was moving the headquarters of 8VC, his venture firm, from San Francisco to Austin, Texas.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston has also reportedly decided to move to Austin. Dropbox said in October it will stop asking employees to come into its offices and instead make remote work the standard practice. For employees who need to meet or work together in person, the company is setting up “Dropbox Studios” in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and Dublin when it’s safe to do so.

Some companies are also allowing employees more flexibility with where they work, while retaining office space.

Twitter and Square are letting employees work from home “forever,” while Microsoft said workers will have more flexibility to work from home. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted in May that 50% of employees will be working remotely within the next decade.

In the last decade, well more than 13,000 companies have moved out of California. The South Star Communities newspaper reported that “1,800 relocation or “disinvestment events” occurred in 2016, the most recent year available, setting a record yearly high going back to 2008. About 13,000 companies left the state during that nine-year period. Of the 1,800 events, 299 of those departures landed in Texas.”

And the moves are understandable because California has utter “contempt for business,” according to Joseph Vranich, a corporate relocation expert. Vranich’s company Spectrum, a huge presence in Orange County, just moved it’s HQ out of California.

“Departures are understandable when year after year CEOs nationwide surveyed by Chief Executive Magazine have declared California the worst state in which to do business,” said Vranich, a corporate relocation expert who jokes that he loves California’s weather, but not its business climate. Until recently, Spectrum and Vranich were based in Irvine, Calif. …

Hostility toward businesses, high utility and labor costs, punitive regulations and worrisome housing affordability for employees are among California’s other negatives, Vranich said. …

“Signs are that California politicians’ contempt for business will persist,” he said.

A study of the companies moving out of the state found that according to numbers in 2016, 275,000 jobs and $76.7 billion in capital funds “were diverted” out of California.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/12/05/founding-fathers-of-silicon-valley-give-up-on-california-move-to-texas-n1193826

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IN BRIEF

Trump's legal team to submit evidence of over 40,000 people who voted twice in Nevada (Post Millennial)

Iowa Democrat Rita Hart asks House lawmakers to overturn her loss (Washington Times)

Rep. Mo Brooks plans to challenge Electoral College vote (Daily Wire)

Biden surge in red states won't help Democrats with looming redistricting fights (Washington Examiner)

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib headline anti-Israel hatefest (Free Beacon)

CNN anchors and Biden advisers attended major CCP conference with Xi Jinping (National Pulse)

Nancy Pelosi caves, backs bipartisan relief proposal as basis for new negotiations (Washington Times)

Prominent diversity consulting firm funded entirely by taxpayer dollars (Free Beacon)

Appeals court gives OK to North Carolina voter ID law (Washington Times)

"Time to cancel everything": Los Angeles residents are ordered to stay in their homes (Daily Mail)

CDC shortens recommended quarantine time from 14 days to as few as seven (Washington Examiner)

The three stooges: Obama, Bush, and Clinton willing to get vaccine on camera (NPR)

"I thought we weren't supposed to trust the Trump vaccine for the China virus? Now that the election is over, it seems safe." —Keith Koffler

House backs curbs on China stock listings, sends bill to Trump (Bloomberg)

Adult businesses, foreign operators target Parler social platform with pornography (Disrn)

November bankruptcies hit 14-year low with steep drop in personal filings (Fox Business)

Labor board claims evil Google illegally spied on and fired workers (Washington Examiner)

Kayleigh McEnany opens press conference with video of Dems breaking own lockdown rules (Daily Caller)

Austin mayor tells community to stay home while in Cabo after flying there in private jet (Fox News)

Jon Ossoff, whose father took $1M from relief fund, slams greedy businesses raiding PPP (Free Beacon)

Kentucky mayor falls asleep in fast-food drive-thru line, crashes into pole (Fox News)

KFC rolls out self-driving 5G "chicken trucks" in China (Interesting Engineering)

Father and son graduate Texas police academy together: "It gave us a bond" (People)

102-year-old World War II veteran has Columbia park named in her honor (Baltimore Sun)

Policy: If you smash capitalism, you can't "build back better" (Daily Signal)

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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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An Election Bombshell Gets Buried

It's hard to decide what's more outrageous: a mind-bendingly impossible 570,000-to-3,200 ballot dump in Pennsylvania favoring Joe Biden over Donald Trump, or a mainstream media blackout of this and other election anomalies.

In any case, a collective media yawn is simply not the appropriate response to news such as this — at least not in a healthy republic. Then again, such stories don't happen in a healthy republic.

Nor is "Look, the election is over" an appropriate response. But that's exactly what we got from Kate Bedingfield, whom Biden just tapped to be his White House communications director. "Virtually everyone on Earth has accepted that truth except for Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani," Bedingfield falsely asserted. "The Trump campaign has been laughed out of every courtroom, with their meritless and baseless lawsuits meant to undermine the will of the American people."

As for the Pennsylvania ballot-dump bombshell, this news of a massive and decisive "spike anomaly" was provided by Phil Waldren, a retired Army colonel and former combat officer with a background in information and electronic warfare. As Paul Kengor writes, "Waldren, who testified along with Rudy Giuliani's team, brought to the hearing his considerable expertise in analysis of election-data fraud. After Waldren presented his material, the chair opened the floor for questions. Rudy Giuliani went first, asking Waldren to clarify what his analytics team means when they talk about 'spike anomalies' in voting patterns. These, as Waldren defines them, are 'events where a numerical amount of votes are processed in a time period that is not feasible or mechanically possible under normal circumstances.' Waldren showed a chart with a shocking example of an apparent massive dump of votes for Joe Biden."

Giuliani pressed Waldren for clarification about the spike, and the shocked reaction of those in attendance speaks for itself. And one wonders what kind of judge would, as Bedingfield suggested, laugh such evidence out of a courtroom or, likewise, the eyewitness evidence of Olivia Jane Winters, a registered Democrat and vote inspector who told of being repeatedly cursed at and threatened with bodily harm merely for having tried to enforce the state's election laws. The hearing was chock-full of compelling witnesses like Waldren and Winters, but the media's coverage was nearly nonexistent.

If you're keeping score at home, Joe Biden bagged 99.4% of that enormous chunk of votes. Donald Trump? 0.6%.

As we've said before, it's critical that every fraud charge in this election be investigated thoroughly — for the sake of this election and all future elections. Whether in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin or Georgia or Nevada or Arizona, if we're going to have confidence in our electoral process — more confidence than, say, the people of Venezuela or Cuba have in their electoral process — we need to address both the fraud-friendly nature of mass mail-in balloting as well as the potential for data manipulation in our vote-counting machines.

We're the world's most advanced country. We've been a beacon of freedom and democracy to all other nations. We put a man on the moon more than half a century ago. Is a reliable and tamper-resistant election system too much to ask for? How about a free press that helps safeguard such a system?

Sadly, today, the answer to both questions is Yes.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/75267-an-election-bombshell-gets-buried-2020-12-01

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New Conservative Coalition Is a Foundational Shift

Democrats are scrambling to explain away the inroads Republicans have made with minorities, as evidenced in the November election results. Instead of listening to the concerns of the Black and Hispanic voters who voted for President Trump — after years of being assured that Trump is one of the “most racist presidents” in history — Democrats are instead blaming them.

“Some Democrats argue that the support for Mr. Trump is an example of machismo culture, venerating traditional gender roles and a kind of hyper-masculinity,” the New York Times reported. But Axios admitted, “The media (and many Democrats) are fairly clueless about the needs, wants and trends of Hispanic voters. Top Latinos warned about overlooking and misreading the fastest-growing population in America — but most didn’t listen.”

The same is true of Black voters (Trump gained 4 more percentage points of the Black vote over his 2016 numbers), yet progressives such as Chauncey DeVega at Salon still insist that white supremacy “now controls the Republican Party.”

Here’s what they’re missing: A new coalition is taking shape. It’s multiethnic, multiracial — and it’s conservative. It rejects the regimentation of identity politics, and even rejects the attendant language (just 3% of Hispanics use the term “Latinx,” for example). It’s working class and it’s growing.

The new coalition rejects the premise of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” the grand critique of America, which says the U.S. is fundamentally racist and a real-life dystopia. They know better. It’s the country they or their parents or their grandparents came to, and in many cases, fled to. The America they experience is one of opportunity and freedom.

The left tells them the past was unbearable, yet plans to ensure that the future will be worse. Minority-owned small businesses were hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic lockdowns, but the incoming Biden administration hints at more of the same. Working from home is a privilege that Blacks and Hispanics are far less likely to enjoy.

They also reject any Green New Deal. In 2018, California lawyers filed a massive civil rights lawsuit claiming that the Golden State’s climate policies disproportionately punish the poor, especially Blacks and Hispanics. “California’s climate policies guarantee that housing, transportation and electricity prices will continue to rise,” the lawsuit says, “while ‘gateway’ jobs to the middle class for those without college degrees, such as manufacturing and logistics, will continue to locate in other states.”

Democrats pledge to make California a model for the nation.

More than anything, the new coalition has come together over jobs. They see Republican policies as more likely to result in job creation, and Democratic policies as less likely to. They know this because they’ve seen it.

“During each of the [first] three years of Trump/Pence, about 380,000 Blacks climbed their way out of poverty, compared to only 80,000 for the Obama/Biden era,” a University of Colorado study found. “More than a half-million Hispanics moved up the economic ladder past the poverty line in each of the three years of Trump/Pence, compared to only 150,000 for the Obama/Biden era.”

We shouldn’t leave out Asian Americans, who also moved in greater numbers to the R camp. There’s evidence that affirmative action is behind much of that movement; the Trump administration has backed a lawsuit brought by Asian Americans against Harvard’s affirmative action policies. Again, it’s all about opportunity.

Of course, the prevailing narrative is that the GOP of the future is the man-cave of the aging white male in decline. The truth, however, is that Republicans on Nov. 3 lost ground with white men, while gaining greater support from white women and minorities.

For years, the left has divided America along the lines of race and gender, and attempted bring together these camps into a working-class, multiethnic coalition. They have succeeded.

It’s just that the working-class, multiethnic coalition votes Republican.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/11/28/new_conservative_coalition_is_a_foundational_shift_144741.html

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Bad News for Progressives: It's Still a Conservative Country

It's not exactly clear how it happened. No one expected it, least of all the media and pollsters. But that promised big blue wave of Democratic victories across the country turned instead into a red tidal wave from coast to coast. Most progressive ballot issues in the states -- from tax increases to racial preferences -- also came crashing down.

A big reason for this turnaround in the election was the massive turnout for President Donald Trump on Election Day. The irony is that Trump's coattails pulled hundreds of Republicans over the goal line -- but as things currently stand, they didn't save him from a razor-tight defeat.

So, how deep were the losses for the Democrats? In the U.S. House, Nancy Pelosi thought her troops would gain 10 to 12 seats. Instead, they lost, at last count, nine.

But the real carnage was in the state houses. Hold on to your hats; here is the latest from our allies at the American Legislative Exchange Council. The GOP gained a total of 192 House and 40 Senate seats. Republicans flipped control of three chambers.

As a result of these big and improbable wins, Republicans now have majority control in both House and Senate chambers in 31 of 50 states. Democrats have control in only 18 states. That's a map of the USA that looks awfully red throughout middle America, with only the rusting Northeast and the West Coast colored blue.

What is truly stunning about this story is that Democrats and liberal/progressive donors (Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, et al.) poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the states to take over legislatures with unprecedented spending in Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania. The American Legislative Exchange Council president, Lisa Nelson, estimates that Democrats outspent Republicans "at least 3-to-1 in the states." And all they got was a lousy T-shirt.

Money just doesn't buy you love with voters.

Speaking of money, voters don't want politicians taking more of it from them. In Illinois, Colorado and California, major tax hikes lost, and tax cuts were approved by voters. Racial preferences, rent control and pro-union measures went down in flames in California -- the cradle of progressive wacko ideas.

Even Democrats admit that their party's embrace of socialism was a major turnoff to voters. Rep. Abigail Spanberger from Virginia won her race, but she isn't a happy camper. "We need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again," she says. Democrats, she angrily continued, "lost good members because of that."

Though litigation is ongoing, Republicans appear to have lost by a razor's edge the prize of the White House, which is a stinging defeat for conservatism. But no one in modern times has turned out voters like Donald J. Trump. Even USA Today admits that it was the big "Trump turnout" that swung state and local elections in a conservative direction.

If the Democrats govern as the party of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, they can expect even deeper losses in 2022. They may even suffer their ultimate nightmare, a return to the White House by Trump in 2024. Trumpism and putting America first are still alive and well.

https://townhall.com/columnists/stephenmoore/2020/12/01/bad-news-for-progressives-its-still-a-conservative-country-n2580824

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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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You can't keep a good blogger down

I have mustered enough energy to do some blogging. Below is an article that bears closely on something I have written. It energizes me into putting it up.  It rightly sees a bit of clinical psychology originally published in 2003 as very influential to this day.  

As it happens, the topic concerned was one that I had already extensively researched, so I knew where the skeletons were buried.  It was a totally absurd piece of research. My comments on it published at the time can be found here: http://tongue-tied2.blogspot.com/2007/01/academic-fakers-by-john-j.html

 

How the Left Uses ‘Science’ to Extend Its Bias in Media and Academia

The 2020 election has revealed jaw-dropping levels of “liberal” or progressive bias in the media, from the increasing ascendance of woke language, enforced by the thought police, to deliberately ignored issues and information considered uncongenial to those dominating the agenda. To many, it seems as if the power being exercised against freedom of uncoerced and uncensored expression had metastasized full-blown out of almost nowhere. However, that ignores the fact that the bias extends beyond the media, to think tanks and “research” devoted to creating ammunition for the left/progressive conclusions the media loves to reach, and this bias has been around for a substantial period of time.

An excellent example of the production of the groundwork for the bias infusing media today is “research” published in 2003, in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin. Supported by $1.2 million in federal money, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition” supposedly provided an “elegant and unifying explanation” for political conservatism. If you have been paying attention this year, some of its themes will seem familiar.

The authors found resistance to change and tolerance for inequality at the core of political conservatism. While proclaiming their findings to be nonjudgmental, they also concluded that conservatism was “significantly linked with mental rigidity and close-mindedness, increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, decreased cognitive complexity, decreased openness to experience, uncertainty avoidance, personal needs for order and structure, need for cognitive closure, lowered self-esteem; fear, anger, and aggression; pessimism, disgust, and contempt.”

The researchers also equated Hitler and Mussolini with Ronald Reagan as “right-wing conservatives...because they all preached a return to an idealized past and favored or condoned inequality in some form.” And the types of inequality conservatives supposedly favored included the Indian caste system, South African apartheid, and segregation in the US.

Of course, according to the study, that “does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled.” But its authors certainly implied it.

Unfortunately, the hit-piece “research” overlooked crucial distinctions.

“Conservative” and “liberal,” as well as “progressive,” are adjectives that have been converted into nouns. But adjectives modify something else. That means the questions that must be addressed if bias is to be avoided include what it is someone is trying to conserve, in what ways whether we are liberal is to be judged, and what is to be considered progress.

America’s history illustrates these distinctions. Our founding was radical although it sought to conserve what the colonists considered their rights. America was liberal in trying to provide the broadest possible sweep of individual freedom against government coercion. It was tremendously progressive in its recognition of inalienable rights for all (a long way from the “conservative” divine right of kings). And it was brought together under a constitution our founders intended to conserve that vision, which was considered a beacon of hope to the world.

Trying to restore or conserve that vision does not logically categorize one with Hitler, nor does every politician who has sworn “to preserve, protect and defend [i.e., conserve] the Constitution of the United States” belong in that category. America’s past proves the folly of a study that makes no distinction between those desiring to conserve the power of governments to be massively abusive of its citizens and those seeking to conserve the ideal of a government constrained from such abuse, by returning to a prior approach where such abuses were off-limits. When such diametrically opposed positions are both given the same label, it produces misunderstanding, not insight.

In addition to equating political conservatism with some of history’s most egregious abuses of human liberty, which are plainly inconsistent with conservatism’s principles, the study employed sleight of hand to characterize conservatives as condoning inequality while implying that others do not.

Given that all men are not equal in all ways, inequality is unavoidable. Inequality of results is unavoidable if people are treated equally under the law—the form of equality our founders defended. However, efforts to mandate more equal results are inconsistent with treating citizens equally, as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and others committed to liberty have demonstrated. For the government to give to some requires taking from others without their consent, violating their rights to equal treatment. Yet the APA study simply ignored the inequality of treatment inherent in such policies, and so misrepresented conservatives as favoring inequality even when they are, in fact, combating government-imposed unequal treatment.

The study also denigrates conservatives for close-minded resistance to political change, presumably in contrast to more open-minded liberals and progressives. However, rather than closed-mindedness, hesitation to adopt sweeping changes in government originating in someone’s imagination might represent the frequently reinforced recognition of politically imposed changes’ consistent track record of failure. As economist Paul Heyne once put it: “economic theory often treats proposals for reform of the economic system so unkindly...[it] calls attention to the unexamined consequences of proposals for change. It won’t work out that way is the economist’s standard response to many well-intentioned policy proposals. Realism is not necessarily conservatism, but it often looks quite similar.” And when inherited rights and freedoms are the objects being conserved, conservatives and libertarians are fellow travelers.

America was founded to protect the freedoms of every citizen from government coercion. One need not be a genius to recognize the value of conserving that. But this Psychological Bulletin “research,” now almost two decades old, missed that point entirely, by treating all resistance to change as equivalent, regardless of the value of what is being defended, and by misrepresenting American conservatives’ views on inequality, as well as other cheats. Far from being an “elegant and unifying explanation” for political conservatism, it was just one more libel against it.

Unfortunately, in the seventeen years since that article was published, what careful thinking would once have recognized as slander disguised as science has seeped into much of our political culture as all but unchallengeable truths. And freed from the necessity of valid premises, as logic would require, those motivated to shift social cognition “their” direction have changed thinking considerably over time. But that is not the same as better representing the truth.

A more accurate result of such research would have been that many self-proclaimed conservatives have deviated from the principles they espouse. That deserves criticism. But it does not establish that all those principles are in error. However, such a more accurate and limited conclusion would have forced those who constantly work against attempts to defend our freedoms from encroachment to face the fact that they are further, rather than closer, to the ideal of liberty that led to America’s creation. And that wouldn’t move the electoral needle in their desired direction.

The 2020 election results will be a test of earlier liberal/progressive “investments” in modifying how Americans think about things. But at this point, perhaps more important will be whether, after the fact, people recognize how much they have been manipulated, which is the first step to thinking more accurately, which must precede learning to effectively resist that manipulation.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13318

Progress report

While there is no way I will be able to revive my regular schedule of blogging, I find I am able to put up a few bits and pieces here and there. I have just posted to:  

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) and 

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

The time has come

I am 77 and have been blogging since 2002.  But my health and vitality are now so low that  I will have to cut back.  I have put up three blogs so far today and that may be all I can manage.  All I want to do now is sleep.  I hope what I have done has been some help to some people

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The ‘Trump is Hitler’ meme collides with reality

The use and abuse of the word fascism these past four years has done real damage.

So this is how America’s ‘fascist’ presidency ends — with the peaceful transfer of power.

This is the news that Donald Trump has kind of conceded the US presidential election to Joe Biden. With Trump’s blessing, the official transition process has begun – though he is continuing to claim the election was ‘rigged’.

The Trumpist tantrum over the 2020 election result – the increasingly absurd, evidence-free attempts to prove the Democrats stole the White House via mass electoral fraud – seems finally to be colliding with reality.

But so is another absurd idea, entertained by many supposedly sensible people since before Trump won in 2016. The idea Trump is essentially a fascist intent on keeping his manicured hands on state power forever.

Ever since Trump arrived on the political scene, the Hitler comparisons have flown. ‘Donald Trump is actually a fascist’, ran one not-so-subtle headline in the Washington Post, while Britain’s Independent opted for the more charitable ‘he’s not Mussolini or Hitler just yet – but he’s not far off’.

In the weeks before the 2020 election, the Proud Boys – a pro-Trump group whose boozed-up members show up at protests to brawl with Antifa – were ludicrously elevated into some paramilitary group, waiting in the wings to forcibly keep Trump in power.

Just contrast all that with the takes we’re seeing now. Ever since Joe Biden’s decisive election victory, with some lurid exceptions, the response from the liberal media has been more snarky and triumphalist than anything else.

Even as Trump’s legal team has continued to refuse to concede, concocting ever more absurd stories of the vote being hijacked by George Soros and the late Hugo Chavez, the tone has been one of well-earned derision.

‘Can this get any more pathetic?’, ran one New York Times headline in the wake of that press conference last week, at which Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sweated out his hair dye as he made his insane claims.

So either Trump’s post-election coup is not nearly as sophisticated as elite journalists were expecting, or they never believed their own bullshit about Trump and fascism in the first place. Neither speaks well of them.

To take issue with the ‘Trump is Hitler’ meme is not to squabble over semantics or overheated partisan rhetoric. It has been immensely damaging to politics over the past four years, for a few reasons.

First, it has made criticising the Trump administration in a clear-eyed way virtually impossible. Rather than attack Trump for the wrongheaded things he was actually doing, pundits constructed fantasies of a new 1930s. Much time was lost arguing the toss over their fever dreams rather than discussing what was actually happening.

Trump’s years spent sowing doubt in the electoral process is a case in point.

His refusal to recognise any election result that doesn’t go his way – he also claims he won the popular vote in 2016 – is genuinely shameful and anti-democratic. But as the past few weeks have shown, these are more egotistical rants than serious threats to American democracy.

Second, it has downplayed the ills of the political elites who preceded Trump. Anyone who joined the anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ was hailed as a hero – even warmongering Republicans responsible for inflicting genuine fire, fury and bloodshed on innocent people around the world.

Similarly, the Trump administration’s detention of migrants at the southern border was time and again held up as uniquely fascistic. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused Trump of running ‘concentration camps’.

But while Trump’s family-separation policy was brutal, the detention centres run during Barack Obama’s tenure were hardly pleasant. Indeed, the ‘it’s only bad when Trump does it’ routine reached its embarrassing nadir when leading Democrats unwittingly tweeted an image of caged migrant children dating from 2014.

But more than all that, more than an assault on common sense and rational debate, the Trump-Hitler stuff has been a vile assault on historical memory itself.

As Brendan O’Neill wrote on spiked last week, the tendency among some liberals to liken politicians they dislike to Nazis and policies they dislike to the Holocaust relativises the greatest crime in human history, diluting its unique depravity and historical specificity.

Such talk, in turn, adds weight to the arguments of assorted anti-Semites and Islamists today, who insist the Holocaust was overstated, just one bad historical event among many bad historical events, and that we all go on about it way too much.

Now the ‘Trump is Hitler’ talk has been exposed for what it always was – a mix of elite hysteria and desperation to de-legitimise the election of a president that the liberal establishment loathed.

But as faintly ludicrous as it has all been, it has come at a serious cost.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/24/the-trump-is-hitler-meme-collides-with-reality/

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The Coming Totalitarianism

If you haven't heard of "The Great Reset," it's time to start paying attention.

Back in August, Apple became the first company on earth to reach a market value of $2 trillion, even as the world remained besieged by the coronavirus. Hot on its heels are Microsoft ($1.6 trillion), Amazon ($1.59 trillion), Google ($1.2 trillion), and Facebook ($789 billion). For perspective’s sake, it should be noted there are only 17 countries in the entire world whose GDPs are larger than these five mega-corporations. Mega-corporations that, along with their globalist-minded allies, have little use for the rules and regulations these “pesky” nation-states can impose on them. Hence, they and their equally corrupt media allies are bent on imposing a new world order called “The Great Reset.” It is nothing less than George Orwell’s 1984 — on steroids.

Columnist James Delingpole sums up this monstrous agenda. “Put simply, it is the blueprint for a complete transformation of the world economy,” he writes. “There will be no money, no private property, no democracy. Instead, every key decision — what you do for a living, how much stuff you consume, whether you can take a vacation — will be decided for you by a remote, unaccountable elite of ‘experts.’”

What experts? Those who will be attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) at the end of January in Davos, Switzerland. Forum CEO Klaus Schwab, a German octogenarian, is the driving force behind this elitist power grab. “COVID-19 lockdowns may be gradually easing, but anxiety about the world’s social and economic prospects is only intensifying,” he insists. “There is good reason to worry: a sharp economic downturn has already begun, and we could be facing the worst depression since the 1930s. But, while this outcome is likely, it is not unavoidable.”

How do Schwab and his contemptible allies intend to avoid the consequences of the chaos they themselves created? “To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.” He concludes, “In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

What Schwab is proposing has nothing whatsoever to do with capitalism. What he is proposing, also using terms like “Fourth Industrial Revolution” to obscure his agenda, is a globalist oligarchy comprised of billionaire elitists answerable to no one but themselves.

Nothing has been more instrumental in realizing this agenda than COVID-19. Schwab, who also coauthored a book titled COVID-19: The Great Reset, insists that one way of looking at the pandemic is as a “silver lining” because “it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles.” In other words, the singularly worst consequence of the globalist order — the one inflicted on the world and purposefully allowed to spread by Chinese communist thugs and their World Health Organization puppet — should be viewed as an opportunity rather than the crime against humanity it truly is.

According to Schwab, The Great Reset requires three main components — all of which require top-down control of every economic sector on the planet. “During the COVID-19 crisis, companies, universities, and others have joined forces to develop diagnostics, therapeutics, and possible vaccines; establish testing centers; create mechanisms for tracing infections; and deliver telemedicine,” he states. “Imagine what could be possible if similar concerted efforts were made in every sector.”

A chilling video posted on Facebook by the WEF tells you everything you need to know, offering eight predictions the globalists wish to impose on the world by 2030:

“The United States won’t be the world’s leading superpower. A handful of countries will dominate.”

“You won’t die waiting for an organ donor. We won’t transplant organs. We’ll print new ones instead.”

“You’ll eat much less meat. An occasional treat not a staple. For the good of the environment and our health.”

“A billion people will be displaced by climate change. We’ll have to do a better job at welcoming and integrating refugees.”

“Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide. There will be a global price on carbon. This will help make fossil fuels history.”

“You could be preparing to go to Mars. Scientists will have worked out how to keep you healthy in space. The start of a journey to find alien life?”

Laughingly, the video ends with this statement: “Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Checks and balances that underpin our democracies must not be forgotten.”

Checks and balances that underpin democracies? One of the bedrocks of all democracies is private property. Another is fair and transparent elections. A third is the reasonable expectation of privacy.

Does anyone seriously believe any of these contemptible mandarins will own nothing, or ever again allow their agenda to be challenged at the ballot box? Is there any doubt that Big Tech already engages in unprecedented levels of surveillance — when it and its media allies aren’t actively censoring “misinformation” inimical to that agenda?

The New World Order is the Same Old Communism, replete with the yawing chasm between the “more equal” wannabe totalitarian party insiders and a wholly oppressed proletariat who will ostensibly be “happy” living lives dictated by the whims of their masters.

Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò isn’t buying the rank propaganda. In a letter to President Donald Trump — one conveniently buried by the same media that thinks it has secured a place at the globalist insider table — he warned about the “transition” the entire world is currently experiencing. “The fundamental rights of citizens and believers are being denied in the name of a health emergency that is revealing itself more and more fully as instrumental to the establishment of an inhuman, faceless tyranny,” he wrote.

Not quite. Plenty of these tyrants have faces. Progressive politicians all over America are tripping over themselves to impose ever more unconstitutional diktats, yet again under the guise of “flattening the curve,” using the very same methods that failed the first time around. Toward that end, they saw Thanksgiving Day as an opportunity to turn in one’s neighbors or one’s own family if they defied the very same edicts the politicians themselves ignored.

Is there anything more indicative of a totalitarian society?

“When the coronavirus hit, Americans did not realize how thoroughly their ruling class had already jelled into an oligarchy with the intention above all to crush them,” writes Angelo Codevilla. “Neither did they comprehend how assuredly it would not waste this opportunity to do so.”

In short, while ordinary Americans yearn for a “return to normal,” our would-be globalist overlords are determined to make sure that never happens. And while they have generated an avalanche of media-trumpeted hysteria and fear surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday in America, more than likely it will pale in comparison to the orchestrated deconstruction of Christmas — all over the world.

The Great Reset and its utterly despicable enablers demand nothing less.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/75219-the-coming-totalitarianism-2020-11-30

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IN BRIEF

Sidney Powell files lawsuits alleging massive election fraud in Michigan and Georgia (Disrn)

Rudy Giuliani claims Trump team has a "mountain" of evidence (Examiner)

Joe Biden is unlikely to offer Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren jobs (Just the News)

Biden's communications team raises questions over revolving door with leftist networks (Fox News)

Barack Obama takes shot at evangelical Hispanics who voted for Trump despite "racist" rhetoric (Fox News)

After years of calling Trump supporters Nazis and Klan members, Alyssa Milano wants to "extend an olive branch" (Not the Bee)

Facebook used "secret internal ranking" to suppress "right-wing" sources after the election (Daily Wire)

CNN silent after investigation finds nurse's claims dying patients do not believe in coronavirus is a "massive exaggeration" (Disrn)

YouTube snubbed Thanksgiving on its Twitter account, celebrated "Unthanksgiving" instead (Disrn)

Nursing home COVID deaths now eclipse 100,000 in the U.S. (Disrn)

New York City to reopen schools for 200,000 students December 7 (Politico)

5,000 Alabama students haven't shown up for any sort of class (AP)

Coronavirus delays national math and reading tests until 2022 (Fox News)

U.S. sends aircraft carrier to Persian Gulf as Iran vows retaliation for scientist's assassination (Daily Wire)

Thrice-deported illegal immigrant arrested for double homicide after jail ignores ICE detainer (Examiner)

Nike and Coca-Cola lobby against Xinjiang forced-labor bill (NY Times)

"Welcome to the worst in corporate greed and swamp culture. China is persecuting an entire region of its country, but who wants to have to charge more on an iPhone?" —Keith Koffler

Britain expects "very significant" week for Brexit talks as clock ticks down (Reuters)

LANDBACK campaign supporters vandalize statues in "national decolonial day of action" (Disrn)

U.S. women's soccer team dons BLM shirts and kneels for national anthem on foreign soil (Daily Wire)

Star-studded Time's Up charities spent big on salaries, little on helping victims (NY Post)

Denver mayor who told citizens to "avoid travel" gets caught flying for Thanksgiving (Bongino.com)

Antiracism icon Robin DiAngelo paid more than black woman for the same job (Free Beacon)

MSNBC's Chris Hayes haunted by 2016 "fun fact" when he suggested electors abandon POTUS-elect (Fox News)

Fish farts almost caused a diplomatic crisis for Sweden (Not the Bee)

Policy: The Supreme Court got church restrictions right (National Review)

Policy: Jordan Peterson's new book couldn't be more timely (FEE)

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Sidney Powell Releases the 'Kraken' in Georgia with Explosive New Lawsuit

Defense Attorneys Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and others have filed a lawsuit in Georgia demanding that the results of the 2020 election be set aside because of “massive election fraud” and foreign influence in the election. The lawsuit claims that 96,600 mail-in ballots “were fraudulently cast” and that “136,098 ballots were illegally counted as a result of improper manipulation of the Dominion software.”

Powell, a high-profile attorney who represents former Trump National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn, asks that the governor be enjoined from certifying the election. The 104-page lawsuit claims that Gov. Brian Kemp, Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, and the chair and members of the Georgia State Elections Board failed to police the alleged fraud, including “multiple violations of Georgia laws, including O.C.G.A. §§ 21-2-30(d), 21-2-31, 21-2- 33.1 and §21-2-522, and multiple Constitutional violations, as shown by fact witnesses to specific incidents, multiple expert witnesses and the sheer mathematical impossibilities found in the Georgia 2020 General Election.”

The lawsuit, co-filed with attorney Lin Wood and an Atlanta attorney, asks a judge to set aside the results of the election in a permanent injunction; enjoin elections officials from certifying the election; demands that all voting machines be subjected to forensic assessment; and asks that election officials produce 36 hours of surveillance video of “all rooms used in the voting process at State Farm Arena in Fulton County, GA from 12:00am to 3:00am until 6:00pm on November.”

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, also alleges that Georgia’s sloppy mail-in balloting was responsible for thousands of shady, illegal votes.

Plaintiff’s expert also finds that voters received tens of thousands of ballots that they never requested. (See Exh. 1, Dr. Briggs’ Report). Specifically, Dr. Briggs found that in the state of Georgia, based on a statistically significant sample, the expected amount of persons that received an absentee ballot that they did not request ranges from 16,938 to 22,771. This range exceeds the margin of loss of President Trump by 12,670 votes by at least 4,268 unlawful requests and by as many as 10,101 unlawful requests.

She alleges that voters were denied their due process because the fraud diluted their votes and treated the mail-in ballots differently in different counties, which is similar to what Trump attorneys have alleged in the Pennsylvania election case.

The lawsuit alleges that “rogue actors” were able to manipulate the voting software.

Russell Ramsland confirms that data breaches in the Dominion software permitted rogue actors to penetrate and manipulate the software during the recent general election. He further concludes that at least 96,600 mail-in ballots were illegally counted as they were not cast by legal voters.

The lawsuit used some of the open-source statistics that Matt Braynard has put out on his Twitter account. Braynard was a 2016 data chief for the Trump campaign. He put out a video outlining his findings on YouTube.

https://pjmedia.com/election/victoria-taft/2020/11/26/breaking-sidney-powell-releases-the-kraken-in-georgia-with-explosive-new-lawsuit-n1174691

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If Voters Had Known About 8 Stories Media Ignored, Trump Would Have Won, Says Media Watchdog

Noncitizens likely voted at a high enough rate to alter the 2020 Electoral College tally, potentially flipping the states of Arizona and Georgia in the presidential election, according to an analysis by Just Facts, a research group.

That’s significant, and while it wouldn’t be enough to hand the election to President Donald Trump, it potentially could have made a difference. Only U.S. citizens are legally allowed to vote in federal elections.

The revised estimate, as of Monday, shows that Trump could have won 259 electoral votes if noncitizen votes were not counted. But that would likely still leave former Vice President Joe Biden with 279 electoral votes, nine votes more than the 270 needed to win.

The current electoral vote tally stands at 306 for Biden, 232 for Trump. Arizona has 11 Electoral College votes, while Georgia gets 16.

Just Facts first released an analysis on Nov. 8, five days after the election, that calculated a lower and upper estimate of the extent of noncitizen voting. That analysis determined that Trump could have won as few as 259 electoral votes—or as many as 285. The latter would have secured a second term.

However, as more mail-in votes were counted, Biden’s lead widened in states such Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada.

Several major media outlets have projected Biden as the president-elect, but the Trump campaign is still litigating in several battleground states. The Trump team has not made noncitizen voting a significant part of its allegations of voter fraud.

The revised study estimated the number of noncitizen votes cast in the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—all of which were closely contested on election night.

It estimated that 234,570 noncitizen votes benefited Biden across seven battleground states. That estimate did not change as more votes were counted.

“Based on the latest vote counts and the upper and lower bounds of the study results, Georgia and Arizona would flip to Trump, leaving him with 259 Electoral College votes,” James Agresti, president of Just Facts, told The Daily Signal. “Under the upper bound, Nevada gets really close, with Trump down by 3,858 votes.”

With the exception of Arizona, each of the states in question appeared to be favoring Trump until the early-morning hours of Nov. 4, but began to shift to Biden over several days. North Carolina is the only state of the seven that appears likely to go to Trump.

The Electoral College will cast its vote in 50 states and the District of Columbia on Dec. 14.

The estimate is based on the percentages of noncitizens that voted in previous elections, predicated on a 2014 study by researchers at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, that evaluated rates of noncitizen voting in 2008 and 2010, Agresti said, applied only to the seven battleground states.

The Old Dominion study determined 6.4% of noncitizens voted in the 2008 presidential election and 3% in the 2010 congressional midterm elections, with 81% voting Democrat.

The rate was high enough to change the Electoral College vote count in 2008 (although not enough to swing the presidential election) and actually change the outcome of some congressional races, particularly the Senate race in Minnesota that year.

That race was decided in favor of Democrat Al Franken over Republican Norm Coleman by just 312 votes out of more than 2.86 million votes cast.

Agresti noted that illegal noncitizen voting is just “one type of fraud” that could have occurred in the 2020 election.

Asked about the proliferation of mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, he said, “That could certainly make it easier, with fewer checks and balances,” for a larger number of noncitizens to vote.

Last week, USA Today criticized the initial study claiming in a “fact check” column that rated the study as “missing context,” and arguing that it “relies on unverifiable estimates.”

The USA Today fact check largely relied on rebuttals from left-leaning sources such as the Fair Elections Center and the Brennan Center for Justice. USA Today also referenced a Wired magazine article to question the Old Dominion researchers.

Just Facts issued a rebuttal on Tuesday to what it called a “slanderous ‘fact check'” of its study:

The Just Facts study doesn’t claim to have the precise 2020 numbers, and is clear in its reliance on the Old Dominion study and other sources, such as a 2008 Harvard/YouGov survey, the Government Accountability Office, and the Social Security Administration, to apply data from past elections as the basis for the assumptions of the numbers this year.

Agresti noted that as many as 15% of noncitizens said they were registered to vote, based on survey data cited in the Old Dominion report.

The full extent of noncitizen voting is a problem, as demonstrated in past years in Pennsylvania, said Hans von Spakovsky, the manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation.

“We don’t know the full extent of the problem, but we know it is a problem,” von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, told The Daily Signal. “We need to require proof of citizenship from people registering to vote.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/11/24/illegal-votes-from-noncitizens-likely-affected-the-2020-election-study-says/ ?

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Our Overlords Are Using The ‘Big Lie Technique’ To Convince Us Masks Work

The “big lie” propaganda technique, a phrase coined by Adolf Hitler, purports to tell a lie so "colossal" that people simply wouldn’t believe the teller "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." You’ve doubtless seen the most famous adaptation of this, which may or may not have been said by former Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. It goes as follows:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Now today, we thankfully don’t have an all-powerful “State,” not yet anyway, but we do have what I’ll call the ‘System,’ a toxic mishmash of do-gooder Big Tech overlords, power-hungry ‘public servants,’ liberty-hating ‘health officials,’ and frightened corporations bullied into both submitting and forcing others to submit to this nonsense. And that ‘System,’ as it were, is most certainly busy repressing dissent in order to bolster its very own, albeit new, “Big Lie,” that “face masks work to stop the spread of COVID-19.”

Not a soul could have possibly predicted this eight months ago when established science laughed at the idea that a piece of cloth over people’s faces would somehow abate the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus. Everyone is aware of the extreme course-reversal our overlords took on forced public masking almost overnight. We’re supposed to believe they simply told us a "noble lie" to preserve masks for healthcare workers, but the problem for them is that back then they gave us solid reasons backed up by decades of science to make their case.

“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask when you’re in the middle of an outbreak,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said back in March. “Wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often, there are unintended consequences; people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

Obviously, the good doctor eventually took an about-face on that advice, attributing it, apparently, to a national shortage of fabric capable of being turned into face coverings, or something. But what part of his initial rationale was incorrect? Did scientists not know about “droplets” in March? Apparently they did, considering Fauci addressed the issue in his statement. Did the “unintended consequences” he listed suddenly disappear as soon as mask use to “stop the spread” became a literal religious cult? Did people stop fiddling with their masks and touching their faces? Of course not. Given the amount of almost nonstop “fiddling” I see just in my own observations, it’s hard to imagine any real gain in the reduction of droplet transmission not being more than made up for by bacterial and viral surface spread.

With so many high-mask-compliance places now going into lockdown, does it not strike anyone as odd that the bold statements made by our overlords months ago - that 80+% mask compliance would end the pandemic, or at least severely curb it - are now being memory-holed? Remember when CDC Director Robert Redford told us in July (and God knows how many other times), that mask-wearing would end this pandemic. I believe he may have even said that masks were a “vaccine,” although the memory-holing is fogging my own memory a bit.

Remember when Variety wrote in May about a “compelling new study” they claimed provided “fresh evidence for a simple solution to help us emerge from this nightmarish lockdown.” Their ‘solution’? “If 80% of Americans wore masks, COVID-19 infections would plummet.” Well, mask compliance is well, well above 80%. In fact, in the states that fine businesses for people not wearing masks in their facilities, boots on the ground tell me it’s pretty close to 100%. Yet, other than a few New England states where the virus just hasn’t hit yet, high mask compliance states aren’t really doing any better than low mask compliance ones, and are in many cases doing quite worse.

From Italy to France to Czechia to the United Kingdom to lockdown and mask-loving U.S. states like Illinois, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Michigan, and California, the virus is spreading like wildfire regardless of humans turning themselves and their societies into pretzels trying to avoid it. The data is right before the eyes of anyone who bothers to look, as the Mises Institute’s Tom Woods points out in this powerful video that YouTube felt obligated to suppress (you know, to protect the Big Lie). Mask mandates, no matter how strictly imposed and adhered to, are almost always eventually followed by tremendous spikes in the virus. And yet, the response from the powers-that-be is always, always, ALWAYS to MASK HARRDERRR!!! California, which has mandated masks statewide for months, decided to deal with a November spike in cases by extending their outdoor mask mandate, despite the fact that zero science says the virus spreads outdoors to any significant extent. Oh, and they’re also locking down, albeit without admitting that the masking has completely failed to curb the virus. Otherwise, why would they need to lock down? Yep, it’s just another one of those difficult-to-answer questions that only a Big Lie could even begin to answer.

Of course, when infection rates do come down, and they will, they will come down regardless of how high or low mask “compliance” is in an area, because that’s also what viruses do when a certain seroprevalence is reached (yes, there are problems with PCR tests, but the herd immunity threshold admittedly seems higher than what many of us initially thought). Except, the masks will then be given the “credit” in the high compliance areas, while the low compliance areas that also decrease will be ignored.

Whether they mean well or they just want to turn us all into faceless sheeple capable of obeying even the most absurd and destructive commands, the truth is, it takes a lie the size of Mount Everest to continually prop nonsense like this up and to keep people believing it despite what we all see in front of our eyes. It takes a "Big Lie."

https://townhall.com/columnists/scottmorefield/2020/11/30/our-overlords-are-using-the-big-lie-technique-to-convince-us-masks-work-n2580788

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