Dissecting Leftism

Sunday, August 28, 2022

Republicans are falling out of love with America Inc

To american executives, Rob Portman is the ideal politician. Clever, reasonable and experienced, he served as the top trade representative and budget director for George W. Bush, the Republican president from 2001 to 2009, before becoming a senator for Ohio more than a decade ago. Mr Portman has just one shortcoming: he is retiring. The party’s nominee to replace him is J.D. Vance, backed by Donald Trump, the most recent Republican commander-in-chief. Mr Vance calls big technology firms “enemies of Western civilisation” and casts elite managers as part of “the regime”, with interests anathema to those of America’s heartland.

The Democratic Party, with its leftier lean, remains companies’ most persistent headache—firms were caught off-guard this month when Senate Democrats approved a rise in corporatetax rates and new restrictions on the pricing of drugs.

But, in the words of an executive at a big financial firm, “We expect Democrats to hate us.” What is new is disdain from those on the right. There used to be a time, one lobbyist recalls with nostalgia, when “you would walk into a Republican office with a company and the question would be, ‘How can I help you?’” Those days are over. The prospect of Republicans sweeping the midterm elections in November and recapturing the White House in 2024 no longer sends waves of relief through American boardrooms.

Executives and lobbyists interviewed by The Economist, speaking on condition of anonymity, described Republicans as becoming more hostile in both tone and, increasingly, substance. Public brawls, such as Disney’s feud with Ron Desantis, Florida’s Republican governor, over discussion of sexual orientation in classrooms, or Republicans blasting Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, for “woke” investments, are only its most obvious manifestations. “It used to be the axis was left to right,” says an executive at one of America’s biggest firms. “Now it is an axis from insiders to outsiders; everyone seems intent on proving they are not part of the superstructure, and that includes business.”

Longheld right-of-centre orthodoxies—in favour of free trade and competition, against industrial policy—are in flux. As Republicans’ stance towards big business changes, so may the contours of American commerce.

The close partnership between Republicans and business has helped shape American capitalism for decades. Companies’ profit-seeking pursuit of free trade abroad and free enterprise at home dovetailed with Republicans’ credo of individual freedom and anticommunism. By the 1990s even Bill Clinton and other Democrats embraced new trade deals, giving American multinational firms access to new markets and cheaper labour.

As Glenn Hubbard, former dean of Columbia Business School and an economic adviser to Mr Bush, puts it, “Social support for the system was a given and you could argue over the parameters.” The 2012 presidential battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney “felt like a big deal at the time”, says Rawi Abdelal of Harvard Business School. “But in terms of the business stakes, it wouldn’t have mattered at all.”

Four years later Republicans were still attracting about two-thirds of spending by corporate political-action committees (pacs), which give money to candidates in federal elections, and a big corporate-tax cut in 2017 went on to be the main legislative achievement of Mr Trump’s term. Yet Mr Trump had campaigned on the feeling of ordinary Americans that they were being left behind. Executives hoping that his fiery campaign rhetoric would be doused by presidential restraint had to contend in stead with his trade war with China, curbs on immigration and contentious positions on climate change and race. Bosses felt compelled to speak out against his policies, which appalled many of their employees and customers. In the eyes of Trump supporters, such pronouncements cast the ceos as members of the progressive elite bent on undermining their champion.

After Mr Trump’s defeat by Mr Biden, companies wondered if their old alliance with Republicans might be restored. In July 17 Republican senators voted in favour of a bill that provides, among other things, $52bn in subsidies to compete with China by manufacturing more semiconductors in America—which chipmakers such as Intel naturally applauded. This month nearly all Republicans opposed the Democrats’ $700bn climate and healthcare bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act (ira), which raises taxes on large companies and enables the government to haggle with drugmakers over the price of some prescription medicines.

This apparent business-friendliness-as-usual conceals a deeper shift, however. The Republican Party has attracted more working-class voters—an evolution accelerated by Mr Trump’s willingness, on paper if not always in practice, to put the interests of the American worker ahead of those of the American multinational.

For most of the past 50 years more Republicans had a lot of confidence in big business than had little or no confidence in it, often by double-digit margins, according to Gallup polls. Last year the mistrustful outnumbered the trusting by a record 17 percentage points, worse than at the height of the global financial crisis of 200709 (see chart 1). Republican election warchests are increasingly filled either by small donors or the extremely rich. Both these groups are likelier to favour ideologues over pragmatists, notes Sarah Bryner of Open-secrets, an ngo which tracks campaign finance and lobbying.

The result of all this is growing Republican support for policies that are hostile to America Inc. Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, wants companies with more than $1bn in annual revenue to pay their staff at least $15 an hour. His colleague from Florida, Marco Rubio, has backed the formation of workers’ councils at companies, an alternative to unions. In March Tom Cotton of Arkansas called for Americans to “reject the ideology of globalism” by curbing immigration, banning some American investments in China and suggesting Congress should “punish offshoring to China”. Republicans in Congress have cosponsored several bills with Democrats to rein in big tech. Mr Vance, who has a good shot at joining them after the midterms, has proposed raising taxes on companies that move jobs abroad. Mr Trump himself repeatedly promised to lower drug prices.

The fact that Republicans opposed the ira—and other business-wary Democratic initiatives—may mean simply that they loathe Democrats more than they dislike big business. Many bosses fret that the Republican Party will enact punitive policies once it is back in power. “There is no person who says, ‘Don’t worry’,” sighs one pharmaceutical executive. “You ignore what a politician says publicly at your peril,” warns another business bigwig.

That is already evident at the state level, where Republicans often control all levers of government and are therefore free to enact their agenda in a way that is impossible in gridlocked Washington. After Disney spoke out against a law in Florida that restricts discussion of gender and sexual orientation in schools, Mr Desantis revoked the company’s special tax status. Texas has a new law that restricts the state’s business with firms that “discriminate against firearm and ammunition industries”. Kentucky, Texas and West Virginia have passed similar laws barring business with banks and other firms that boycott fossil-fuel producers; about a dozen other Republican-controlled states are considering doing the same.

Such laws present a problem for companies. In July West Virginia’s treasurer said that the anti-fossil-fuel policies of some of America’s biggest financial firms—Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo—made them ineligible for state contracts. The definition of what counts as discriminating or boycotting is hazy. JPMorgan Chase, which does not lend to firms that sell military-style weapons to consumers, first said that the Texan law prevented it from underwriting municipal-bond deals in that state, then bid for a contract (unsuccessfully). In Texas, Republican lawmakers are threatening to prosecute firms that pay for staff to travel out of state for abortions, which the Texan legislature has severely restricted.

Rightwing culture-warriors have always been part of the Republican Party, but the line between them and their pro-business country-club colleagues has collapsed. These days, worries a business grandee, both parties see it as “acceptable to use state power to get private entities to conform to their viewpoints”. “esg is a four-letter word in some Republican offices,” says Heather Podesta of Invariant, a lobbying firm, referring to the practice, championed by Blackrock among others, of considering environmental, social and governance factors, not just returns, in investment decisions. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has blamed Larry Fink, Blackrock’s boss, for high petrol prices. “Every time you fill up your tank,” he growled in May, “you can thank Larry for the massive and inappropriate esg pressure.”

Companies are adjusting to this new, more volatile political reality. Some are creating formal processes for reviewing the risks of speaking out on social issues that may provoke a political backlash, including from Republicans. The way firms describe their strategies to politicians is changing, too. Lobbying is no longer confined to the parties’ leaders in the two houses of Congress. Because politicians in both parties are increasingly willing to defy the leadership, says an executive, “you have to go member by member”. Neil Bradley, policy chief of the us Chamber of Commerce, which represents American big business, says that his organisation has had to redouble efforts to “find people who have interest in governing”.

Sometimes that means supporting more Democrats. In 2020 the chamber endorsed more vulnerable freshman Democratic incumbents, who were mostly moderates, than in previous years. That prompted Kevin Mccarthy, the leading Republican in the House of Representatives, to say he didn’t want the organisation’s endorsement “because they have sold out”. So far this year corporate pacs have funnelled 54% of their campaign donations to Republicans, down from 63% in 2012. Firms’ employees have beaten an even hastier retreat, with just 46% donating to Republican candid-ates, compared with 58% ten years ago, according to Opensecrets (see chart 2 on previous page).

If the upshot is divided government, that would suit American business just fine. As one executive remarks, “We might not have improvements, but we won’t get more cataclysmic policies.”

https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/the-elephant-in-the-boardroom/bnl-economist-20220819-4b8c29a3cb6

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Covid skepticism on the rise

James Allan

The tide has turned. Finally. Recently that organ of pro-lockdown orthodoxy, the New York Times, ran an editorial to the effect that during the Covid pandemic no schools should ever have been closed. And that it would take decades to recover from this public policy fiasco. Sure, the NYT buried this editorial in a Saturday edition. But it’s a start. Especially for those of us who doubted the imposition of lockdowns from day one, publicly and in print, and were faced with a barrage of unhinged abuse about being ‘grandmother killers’ or ‘denying the science’ or having some talking head suffering from a toxic overdose of his own supposed virtue ramble on about ‘not on my watch’ as regards adopting the Swedish approach.

Last week the front page of the London Telegraph (far more sane through the pandemic, by the way, than the Australian) published a front page piece with a headline ‘lockdown effects feared to be killing more people than Covid’. In fact, the article by the paper’s science editor Sarah Knapton cites excess deaths data from Britain’s Office for National Statistics that make it plain this will happen. Knapton says that ‘over the past two months, the number of excess deaths not from Covid dwarfs the number linked to the virus’. Even some doctors’ organisations, who were all too willing to try to suppress and cancel lockdown dissenters for over two years, are doing about faces – not least the British Heart Foundation. Others, like the man who goes by the moniker ‘The Naked Emperor’ (for obvious reasons) on Substack, have taken this data and drilled down further. For instance, for the week ending 5 August there were 1,350 excess deaths in England and Wales.

Guess what? That is 14.4 per cent higher than the 5-year average. And you’re seeing those noticeably higher excess deaths in Australia too. But the Naked Emperor makes a point the science editor of the London Telegraph still shies away from, a point related to wide-open, honest debate: ‘There is no doubt that lockdowns are one of the major causes [of these really high excess deaths numbers] but it would be stupid to not even consider vaccines. Investigate whether they have contributed to these excess deaths in any way, present the evidence and then say no they haven’t. But don’t just dogmatically say they are safe and not look into it.’

That sums up the view of this twice-vaccinated, no-boosters, writer. I have so little trust in the expert class (including the medicos) after the last two years I am taking nada, nothing, zero on trust from these people. Many of them spent the last two-plus years stifling dissent; or keeping their heads down and being too cowardly to voice honestly held doubts; or revelling in a heavy-handed ‘we are the incarnation of science and we’re not prepared to brook any dissent’ form of modern-day aristocracy. And this in the context of Anders Tegnell’s Swedish approach (the same as the one recommended by the Great Barrington Declaration) looking better and better with each passing day – on every axis of concern and on every criterion. Not just as regards kids’ schooling outcomes. Not just all the economic outcomes from debt to small business closures to ruined CBDs to incredible asset inflation. Not just the invidious massive transfers of wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich that lockdowns (and the money printing and massive spending needed to support those lockdowns, triggering the above-mentioned asset inflation, now price inflation and a hammered private sector) brought about.

No, even on straight-up ‘which policy choice will have the fewest excess deaths’ criterion, lockdowns were a mistake. The right choice, the one that was WHO and British policy in October of 2019 based on a century of data, was to protect the vulnerable and leave everyone else alone to make their own calls while definitely not locking down, not closing schools, not weaponising the police as the enforcement arm of two-bit public health bureaucrats. It was right even if the only axis you cared about, the only one, was how many deaths your response to Covid would lead to.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/never-forget-their-thuggery/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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Friday, August 26, 2022

I'm astounded

I have had a lot of good news lately but "wait, there is more". According to ResearchGate, a publication which tracks such matters, my academic publications are getting a lot of attention from other academics. They say that "Your Research Interest Score is higher than 95% of ResearchGate members". The score is mainly made up of citations.

Why is that surprising? Because I last published something in the academic journals back in the '90s. The general view of academic publications is that if it is more than 10 years old it no longer exists. But the advent of the internet means that someone researching a topic will usually do an internet search at some point and that will turn up something relevant regardless of date. So as long as your writings are online they are readily accessible. Most of my publications were written before the internet existed but I have made sure to put them online retrospectively. ResearchGate has them all. Being really old means that I can look a long way back.

And the fact that I have had so many papers published (250+) of course increases the likelihood that I will hit on something of interest to others.

But I mustn't get a big head about it all. I have kept some track of my citations and they mostly come from places like Pakistan and Poland -- not great sources of cutting edge academic endeavour

Another reason for humility is that my papers that other people cite are rarely the ones which I think are most significant or important. Instead people cite papers that are more technical or utilitarian. Still, it is nice to be still ahead of the pack even after 30 years. I did after all devote 20 years of my life -- from 1970 to 1990 -- to doing all that research and writing.

I have also now spent 20 years blogging -- from 2002 to 2022.

In all my writing I have aimed to say things that are informative or helpful to others and I think I have achieved that to a small degree. I do get "thank you" messages occasionally, which I appreciate.

JR

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Australia: Covid and miscarriage

‘No evidence Covid-19 vaccines cause miscarriage, despite Queensland doctor claim’, trumpeted the ABCFact Check and RMIT FactLab CheckMate. Unfortunately, that is not true.

The Queensland doctor is Luke McLindon, one of Australia’s leading fertility specialists. He has been collecting data on miscarriages in high-risk patients that he treats for infertility and recurrent miscarriage. Historically, the miscarriage rate has been 12 to 15 per cent. But comparing the period before and after the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists recommended Covid vaccinations for women at any stage during pregnancy, the miscarriage rate among his patients has more than doubled to almost 50 per cent. Disgracefully, Dr McLindon will not be able to continue his research because he declined a Covid vaccination and as a result his accreditation has been withdrawn, but he is not the only specialist who has identified a problem.

There is an ‘avalanche of data’ showing the Covid injections are not safe according to Dr James Thorp, an obstetrician gynaecologist and specialist in maternal foetal medicine in Florida. He wrote to the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynaecology about a study he completed documenting severe adverse outcomes in women of reproductive age and in pregnancy associated with the Covid injections including: an increase in menstrual irregularities, spontaneous abortion, and abnormalities in the foetus including malformations, cardiac arrest and death which he says occur in VAERS in statistically significant numbers and are corroborated by over 20 plus other independent sources.

Data is emerging elsewhere. The Lancet has just published a study of 5,936 pregnant Canadian women, which showed that only 7 out 339 (2.1 per cent) unvaccinated women had miscarriages compared with 258 out of 5,597 (4.6 per cent) vaccinated women. That’s an increase of 119 per cent in the rate of miscarriage in vaccinated women compared with unvaccinated women, just in the period up to 10 days after the second dose. Incredibly, this was obscured by the researchers who only statistically analysed the 83 miscarriages or stillbirths that occurred within seven days of the first jab. There were ‘an additional 175 individuals who reported experiencing miscarriage or stillbirth between the first Covid-19 vaccine dose and completion of the second survey (up to 10 days after dose two)’, more than twice as many as in the week after the first jab, but these miscarriages were left out of the statistical analysis, with no explanation as to why. In addition, only 3.2 per cent of unvaccinated women experienced a new or worsening health event, whereas 12.1 per cent experienced one after a second jab of Moderna. Why would the researchers fail to highlight the increased risk of vaccination during pregnancy, particularly with the Moderna vaccine? Perhaps because the lead author has been an investigator on projects funded by Pfizer, Moderna and other major pharmaceutical companies as have five of the other authors out of a total of 14.

A study of excess mortality in Germany by Christof Kubandner and Matthias Reitzner shows that in 2020, the observed number of deaths was close to the expected number but from April 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 and a similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths, with an increase of about 11 per cent in the second quarter of the year 2021.

Lt. Col. Theresa Long, one of the US Army’s top flight surgeons and an expert on public health testified that in addition to strokes, clots, cancers and myocarditis, she has seen a number of adverse reactions related to reproductive health including testicular pain, menstrual irregularity, miscarriages and infertility.

What could be causing this? Dr Deirdre Little worked with the Brighton Collaboration on Vaccine Safety, a member of the WHO-led Vaccine Safety Net. She is concerned that rat studies published in May 2021 which supposedly demonstrate the safety of the Pfizer vaccine with regard to fertility did not include the histology reports of the rat gonads. Dr Little has been battling the Australian regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), for more than 12 months to see those reports but the TGA has repeatedly refused her request as has Pfizer. Both claim however that the reports show only that the vaccine is safe.

It’s hardly convincing. If the reports back up the claims of safety why not provide them? A report released by the TGA under Freedom of Information showed that the vaccine accumulated in rat ovaries at 48 hours post dose at more than ten times the concentration in other organs, with the exception of liver, spleen and adrenals. Does a similar phenomenon occur in the ovaries of females? Could it affect ovarian function? It is impossible to say without further research, starting with an examination of what happened in the ovaries of rats.

Dr Little highlights a disturbing report from 1993 which found that injected polysorbate 80, one of the mRNA vaccine excipients, has a proven association with ovarian toxicity in rats and its effects resemble those of diethylstilboestrol (DES), a drug used in pregnancy that was eventually linked to miscarriage, stillbirth, and breast, cervical and vaginal cancers.

Dr Little writes that what this means is that vaccines have been mandated which have been only provisionally approved, have been shown to concentrate in the mammalian ovary, have a statistically established safety signal for abnormal menses following vaccination, are also associated with post-menopausal bleeding, and contain a product similar to polysorbate 80, whose delayed effect resembles diethylstilboestrol toxicity to the ovaries and uterine lining when injected into rats, yet the TGA and Pfizer refuse to release the histology reports.

So is the ABC correct that there is no evidence that vaccines increase the risk of miscarriages? Certainly, if there is evidence, the regulator, the pharmaceutical company and the medical establishment is doing everything that it can to prevent it emerging. And yet in multiple places there are worrying signs for those willing to look.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/miscarriage-injustice

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Conservatives Shouldn’t Apologize for Healthy Skepticism of Big Government

“Conservatives need to get over their allergy to government action.”

That was the headline on an opinion column by Henry Olsen last week in The Washington Post. Olsen is not alone among conservatives in thinking so.

Across much of the right today, there’s more openness to having government do more in the economy. Olsen observes that there are significant constituencies in America, especially blue-collar America, who appear supportive of a conservative agenda that would involve more state intervention, whether in the form of industrial policy, tariffs, or more expansive entitlement programs.

The right, Olsen wrote, cannot ignore those trends if it wants to stay electorally relevant. That necessitates moving away from what he labels “market fundamentalism.”

Winning elections is very important. But to embrace a bigger economic role for government amounts to conservatives endorsing policies that would push the United States even further in social democratic directions that would undermine America’s long-term economic and political well-being.

Here’s the fact often omitted by contemporary conservatives friendly to more government economic intervention: The American economy is already awash with interventionist policies—so much so that, according to The Heritage Foundation’s 2022 Index of Economic Freedom, overall economic liberty in America has been in decline since 2008. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

The index ranked America as the world’s 25th-freest economy. Many of the countries listed ahead of it are European nations with strong social democratic traditions. Moreover, the index adds:

Government spending [in America] has amounted to 38.9 percent of total output (GDP) over the past three years, and budget deficits have averaged 9.0 percent of GDP. Public debt is equivalent to 127.1 percent of GDP.

That doesn’t sound like small government to me.

In fact, even with the extra state spending induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government has been spending like a drunken sailor for quite some time—and using debt to do so.

Leaving aside the ruinous expenditure levels and notorious inefficiencies associated with interventionist policies, there are serious political problems associated with conservatives adopting more economically interventionist stances.

“There’s a middle ground,” Olsen asserts, “between government directing everything or nothing.” Alas, if there’s anything that 20th-century economic history shows, it is that once the state’s economic role moves beyond securing certain public goods—the rule of law, property rights, national security, public works, etc. (none of which are small endeavors)—the genie is hard to put back in the bottle.

The middle ground thus ends up not being an essentially market economy operating within a framework of the rule of law and intertwined in a robust civil society. Instead, it becomes a type of social democracy in which excessive state power is omnipresent throughout the economy.

That doesn’t mean that you eventually get a Soviet-style command economy. But you do find yourself encumbered with the rampant cronyism that infects so much of D.C. politics, and, more insidiously, what the great political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville described in his classic “Democracy in America” as “soft despotism.”

Soft despotism is a Faustian bargain between the political class and the public. It involves “an immense protective power,” Tocqueville wrote, in assuming prime responsibility for everyone’s happiness—provided that power remains “sole agent and judge of it.”

That power would, Tocqueville added, “resemble parental authority” and attempt to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by relieving them “from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”

That’s the deal that progressives have proposed to Americans for more than a century. And it has saddled America with social and economic disasters like President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which, as the economic historian Amity Shlaes illustrates in her book “Great Society,” wreaked havoc upon black America and the white working class.

In that light, there’s no reason to think that conservatives can devise an interventionist agenda that somehow avoids all of the problems—the one-size-fits-all mentality approach, the unintended consequences, the inability to address the non-material causes often central to social dysfunctionality, et al.— inseparable from such policies.

Faith in state intervention to effect positive economic and political change has also encumbered America with a vast administrative state. It’s no secret that these federal government departments, administrative bodies, and regulatory agencies are dominated by people ranging from indifferent to hostile to conservative ideas. Why would American conservatives want to affirm (let alone augment) the administrative state’s power by adopting economically interventionist programs?

Americans deserve better than having to choose between soft and hard versions of social democracy at election time. Nor should they have to put up with economic debates being reduced to who is willing to spend more.

If anything, American conservatives need to be more allergic to government economic intervention—not less.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/08/18/conservatives-shouldnt-apologize-for-healthy-skepticism-of-big-government

Thursday, August 25, 2022

Fauci's lockdown legacy: Increases in cancer and drug overdose deaths, a mental health crisis, financial devastation and disruptions to education that left millions of kids behind

Dr Antony Fauci will step down from his post in December, and will leave behind the legacy of his support for COVID-19 lockdowns responsible for thousands of preventable deaths, disruptions to every day life that caused a nationwide mental health crisis, financial devastation for millions and stoppages in education that will impact the next generation for the remainder of their lives.

America's most recognizable public health official announced plans to step down from his post as director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Disease (NIAID) in December. The end of his near-40 year reign as the nation's top infectious disease expert was largely met with praise, but some experts say his legacy will be the devastation caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns he fervently supported throughout the pandemic.

Dr Marty Makary, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University, wrote for Common Sense that the 'draconian policies' supported by Fauci - who served as chief medical officer for both President Trump and Biden - have left millions of Americans worse for wear.

When COVID-19 first erupted around the United States in March 2020, the novel virus caught officials on their backfoot. Little was known about the new threat and news of the devastation it had caused across China and much of Europe terrified millions stateside.

In a panic, many officials instituted lockdowns, closing schools, restaurants and all kinds of businesses.

As more was learned about the virus, it was realized that Covid was far less deadly than initially believed. A DailyMail.com analysis of data from the CDC and Johns Hopkins found that the mortality rate of the virus had dropped as low as 2.8 percent in the United States by September 1, 2020.

It also became clear that while particular groups were at risk, the average person without significant comorbidities should worry about it as much as they do the common flu.

While some red states chose to reopen — and even blue states eventually came along by late-2020 - Fauci remained a fervent supporter for closures, capacity limits and mask orders around America — with little regard for the ancillary issues that arose as a result of these orders.

'To COVID-19 he brought a monomaniacal focus on vanquishing a single virus, whatever the cost — neglecting the damage that can follow when public health loses sight of the public's health,' Makary wrote.

'...What were the impact of those policies on millions of Americans? And what would the country look like now had our public health experts taken a different approach?'

Lockdowns and the fear of the virus perpetuated by officials led to thousands skipping out on routine medical treatments. As a result, the nation suffered a stark increase in deaths from cancer, Alzheimer's and other conditions — much of which could have been prevented.

Disruptions to every day social life led to a surge in mental health issues that has left the nation — which is already facing a massive shortage in therapists — in a lurch. Social isolation has also been named one of the leading drivers in the surge in drug overdose deaths recorded during the pandemic's first year — eclipsing 100,000 for the first time ever.

The closure of businesses caused a surge in employment, leaving Americans waiting in hours-long lines for food pantries. Policies enacted to keep families afloat during lockdowns are now in part to blame for the nation's staggering inflation.

Children may have suffered the most. Experts fear closing in-person education for virtual classes led to massive 'learning loss,' leaving them worse off for the rest of their academic careers. It also harmed the social development of millions, whose interactions with their peers went from the playgrounds to their phone screens.

The 'Covid deaths' left uncounted

Fear of COVID-19 led to many Americans refusing to seek out medical attention for certain issues, or to cancel treatments that were already underway.

In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report on excess deaths from all conditions during the first year of the pandemic from March 2020 to 2021.

Generally, death figures within a country will stay the same year-over-year, with small miniscule changes due to population growth. The same ratio of people that die of cancer in one country in one year than did the year previous, for example.

While Covid was the leading cause of excess deaths, large increases in deaths caused by heart disease and dementia, among other causes, were also recorded during the pandemic.

The CDC report found stark increases in deaths from heart disease, high blood pressure, Alzheimer's, cancer and diabetes.

These increases are directly attributable to reduced access to medical care. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) reports that cancer screening was significantly reduced if not outright paused during the pandemic.

As a result, studies have found that while cancer diagnosis have decreased since the pandemic began the ones that are being found are more serious. This indicates that there are many more cases out there than being recorded, but only people suffering severe late-stage symptoms are coming in to be screened.

Cancer deaths in America rose by three percent in 2020, up to 686,054, according to official figures. The NCI fears that the many undiagnosed cases from 2020 will cause this number to increase further — especially for breast and colorectal cancers.

Lockdowns also caused disruptions in care for dementia, Alzheimer's and other cognitive issues.

The Alzheimer's Society warned in June 2020 — a few months into lockdown — that patients were experiencing 'shocking' declines in their condition and 'rapidly losing memory, speech, and ability to dress and feed themselves' as many could no longer receive treatment.

The Alzheimer's Association reports that deaths from the condition increased by 16 percent in 2021.

Disruptions to life left many isolated and turning to drugs

Covid lockdowns led to millions missing important family gatherings like birthdays and weddings, an entire graduation class never got to walk across the stage, and smaller weekly meetups that allowed people to see their loved ones were halted for months-on-end.

This had a disastrous impact on Americans' mental health.

A report published last year by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that the number of American adults reporting anxiety or depression symptoms surged from 11 percent in 2019 to 41 percent in 2021.

The younger a person is, the harder they seem to have been hit as well. More than half — 56 percent — of those between the ages of 18 to 24 reported feeling anxiety or depression, with 48 percent of 25 to 49-year-olds saying the same.

A CDC survey found that 19.9 percent of high schoolers — typically between ages 14 and 18 — had contemplated suicide in 2021, with nine percent even attempting the act.

This has led to a surge in Americans seeking out mental health care, leaving a nation already facing a massive shortage in mental health professionals facing a crisis.

'I can't refer people to other people because everybody is full. Nobody's taking new patients ... So I've never been as busy in my life, during the pandemic, and ever in my career,' Valentine Raiteri, a New York City-based psychiatrist told CNBC in February.

Experts fear the damage caused by the pandemic — and the lack of access to treatments — will last a generation. Millions who were afflicted by mental health issues during lockdown will never shake their symptoms.

In the most devastating examples, social isolation caused by the the virus led to substance abuse, with many dying as a result.

America suffered a record 99,098 drug overdose deaths during the first year of the pandemic — a figure that has since been smashed by the 107,622 in 2021 as a whole.

'Factors related to the pandemic, such as social isolation, stress, and decreased access to substance use disorder treatment and emergency services made [America's drug overdose] problem worse,' the Senate Republican Committee wrote in March.

Millions plunged into financial uncertainty — and a cost-of-living crisis

Lockdowns and business closures left business owners big and small scrambling, suddenly unable to stay afloat. There were layoffs en masse, leading to a surge in unemployment — with the national rate reaching 15 percent at one point in April 2020.

Job losses plunged millions into economic uncertainty. Staggering pictures of Americans lining up by the hundreds at food pantries and soup kitchens around the country made headlines.

To prevent full collapse as a result of the Fauci-supported lockdowns, the federal government reduced down interest rates, boosted unemployment payments and handed out stimulus checks to millions.

These policies sparked an inflationary crisis the nation is still reeling from. At its peak in June, Americans faced a 9.1 percent year-over-year inflation rate in June. A DailyMail.com analysis from last month revealed that — at the time — American families were paying an average of $5,915 more per year on household items.

Inflation slightly contracted in July, falling to 8.5 percent but still a margin many American families cannot afford.

The analytics firm InMarket found that from October 2021 to June 2022 the amount of groceries being purchased at dollar stores had jumped 71 percent, a signal that Americans are willing to downgrade quality of food to make their dollars go longer.

John Micklitsch, Chief Investment Officer at Cleveland-based wealth management firm Ancora explained to Forbes how the lockdowns impacted inflation: 'It's largely due to a perfect storm of supply chain disruption from Covid, government spending to fill the economic void and a synchronized global recovery driven by vaccine rollout and economies re-opening.

'The pandemic is probably just the event that exposed over a decade of underinvestment in the global commodity supply chain and the vulnerability of "just-in-time" inventories to this sort of supply shock.'

Steven Saunders, an advisory with Round Table Wealth Management said: 'Prices are increasing simply due to a mismatch in the supply and demand of goods.

'Over the last 16 months or so, pandemic restrictions closed many factories and shipping routes around the globe, resulting in less availability of products.'

The children who were left behind

Weeks into the pandemic it became apparent that certain groups suffered little to no risk from the virus. For children in particular, infection was little more than a simple cold.

'Very early on in this pandemic, we knew that there was an extremely stratified risk from Covid,' Makary wrote.

'The elderly and those with co-morbidities were especially vulnerable, while children were extremely unlikely to get dangerously ill.'

Despite this, many schools remained closed to finish the 2019-2020 school year, and some even began the following fall semester remotely. Schools that did return often forced young children to remain masked all day.

Virtual learning is not as instructive as an in-person education. A study published in April found that students who attended school virtually lost one-fifth of a school year's worth of knowledge. Children who come from less-educated families struggled the most.

Fauci remained inconsistent on school closures throughout the pandemic's first year, first supporting them before vaguely waffling about needing to do so safely with masks and testing requirements.

A study published in January — using data from the U.S. and across the world — found that the closures led to increases in mental health issues, child abuse, substantial increases in screen time, jumps in childhood obesity and an overall drop in the well-being of children.

'There are strong theoretical reasons to suggest that school closures may have contributed to a considerable proportion of the harms identified here, particularly mental health harms, through reduction in social contacts with peers and teachers,' researchers wrote.

'Schooling occupies the greater part of students’ awake time during the week, and social mixing studies show that social contacts are higher during the week than on weekdays, most social contacts of children and adolescents are with same-age peers with a smaller degree with family, and that social mixing is reduced during school holidays.'

The isolation caused by these closures also helped fuel the mental health crisis striking Americans.

Schools requiring masks to reopen, which was found to have done little to prevent transmission of the virus, harmed children as well.

Around 40 percent of parents reported that their child suffered emotionally or mentally from having to wear a face-covering in class each day, according to a March study.

Despite this evidence, Fauci told Fox News this week: 'I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11142287/Faucis-lockdown-legacy.html

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Virtually no patients infected with either the BA.1 or BA.2 sublineages experienced symptoms or disease

Academic journal article below

COVID-19 Disease Severity in Persons Infected With Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 Sublineages and Association With Vaccination Status

Adeel A. Butt et al.

Infection with the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant is associated with less severe disease compared with the Delta variant.1-3 Two main Omicron sublineages—BA.1 and BA.2—have variable geographic distribution. In Qatar, BA.1 was initially predominant but was quickly replaced by BA.2 as the predominant sublineage. This study sought to determine and compare the severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection among persons infected with these sublineages.

Methods

The study was approved by the institutional review boards of the Hamad Medical Corporation, Weill Cornell Medicine−Qatar, and Qatar University. A waiver of informed consent was granted because of the retrospective nature of the data retrieval. This retrospective cohort study followed Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guideline.

Using the national COVID-19 database in Qatar, we identified all COVID-19 infections diagnosed between December 19, 2021, and February 6, 2022, in adults (≥18 years). We matched each patient with BA.1 infection with a patient with BA.2 infection, including by age, sex, nationality, comorbidities, and vaccination status. Additional analyses were conducted after excluding all persons with a prior documented infection and all vaccinated persons. The primary outcome was COVID-19 case severity, criticality, and fatality using the World Health Organization guidelines4,5 as assessed by trained medical personnel who reviewed the patients’ medical charts.

Based on national surveillance data, infections between December 19, 2021, and February 6, 2022, were classified as Omicron infections. The BA.1 sublineage infection was proxied as S-gene target failure (SGTF) using the TaqPath COVID-19 Combo Kit (Thermo-Fisher Scientific) while BA.2 sublineage was proxied as a non−SGTF.

Results

From 24 301 total cases of BA.1 and 125 687 of BA.2, we were able to form 20 812 matched pairs of patients (median age [IQR], 35.0 [28.0-44.0] years; 47.9% women; 85.5% with no comorbidities). Of this final sample, 18.7% of patients were unvaccinated and 8.8% had received a booster dose in each group. Severe, critical, or fatal outcomes were recorded in 33 (0.2%) of patients with BA.1 and 36 (0.2%) of those with BA.2 (P = .25; Table 1). All patients with BA.1 and 35 of 36 (97.2%) with BA.2 were among those who had not received a booster dose (Table 1). In conditional logistic regression analyses accounting for exact matching, vaccination with 2 vaccine doses more than 3 months prior to infection (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.22; 95% CI, 0.13-0.36) or with a booster dose (aOR, 0.02; 95% CI, 0.00-0.14) were associated with a significantly lower risk of any composite severe, critical, or fatal outcomes. Prior natural infection was not associated with a lower risk of these outcomes (aOR, 0.29; 95% CI, 0.04-2.14; Table 2); stratification by the sublineage yielded similar results.

We repeated the analyses after excluding those with prior documented SARS-CoV-2 infection and those who were vaccinated. The results mirrored our primary analyses, with a lower risk among the vaccinated, particularly among patients who had received a booster dose.

Discussion

The findings of this study provide reassurances at multiple levels. First, 99.8% to 99.9% of patients infected with either the BA.1 or BA.2 sublineages experienced no symptoms or mild disease. Second, there was no difference in the severity of illness between BA.1 and BA.2 sublineages infections. Among individuals who had received a booster vaccine dose, only 1 person experienced any severe, critical, or fatal outcome.

This study’s data set was derived from the Qatar National COVID-19 database with complete polymerase chain reaction testing and vaccination records. Outcomes were obtained from individual medical charts by trained independent reviewers. However, BA.1 and BA.2 sublineage ascertainment was based on proxy criteria—presence or absence of SGTF using the TaqPath Kit.6 Some Omicron infections may have been misclassified as Delta infections, but this is unlikely because Delta incidence was low during the study.

In conclusion, SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron variant sublineages BA.1 and BA.2 was rarely associated with severe, critical, or fatal disease. There is no discernable difference in severity of BA.1 vs BA.2 infections. Risk of severity is further mitigated by vaccination, particularly the receipt of a booster dose.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2795326

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Fauci, a flawed figurehead

So farewell, Anthony Fauci, the unfortunate face of America’s pandemic response. Well, not so unfortunate – the doctor is stepping down as head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases this December, riding off into the sunset with a reported $350,000 per year golden parachute, the largest pension in US federal history.

Fauci has developed something of a reputation for baffling the public – whether it be for contradictory advice on the efficacy of masks or herd immunity or vaccines. Even his resignation announcement was confusing:

I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career… While I am moving on from my current positions, I am not retiring.

Fauci will be 82 in December. America’s gerontocracy just refuses to budge. In fairness, Fauciwasa pretty good doctor in his prime. Republicans tried to attack him over his handling of Aids, but his record on that public health crisis stacks up pretty well.

During the Covid pandemic, however, Fauci made the mistake a lot of experts made: he equated himself with the entire concept of science as a way of giving his pronouncements an aura of infallibility. ‘Irepresent science,’ he said, as a response to criticism after he repeatedly said his institute didn’t fund ‘gain of function’ virology research in Wuhan, when in fact it did.

Of course Fauci wasn’t the evil mastermind that so many deranged cynics say he was – even if he did dismiss the idea that Covid originated in a lab as a mad conspiracy theory when private emails suggested he may well have known otherwise. Maybe Fauci was just a lot like Donald Trump or Joe Biden: old, faltering, and heavily influenced by the people around him – someone who craved public approval above all. The boring truth about him probably isn’t that he is involved in any sinister conspiracy, it’s that he ignored evidence that didn’t help him and got swept along by a wider zeitgeist instead.

Much like Biden, Fauci perfectly represents that stubborn generation of Americans who have been running their country for decades. As their competence and faculties fade, their grip on power only tightens.He became head of NIAID at just 43, then held the role for almost 40 years.

Fauci appeared to enjoy being the main character of this pandemic rather too much. Commentators fawned over him when he looked so conspicuously uncomfortable next to Trump in those now infamous press conferences when the President rambled wildly about the virus.

Fauci fandom quickly reached cultish levels. The Mayor of Washington, DC said his birthday should renamed ‘Dr. Anthony S. Fauci Day’. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine twice. He also appeared on the cover of magazines such People, InStyle and others. But, like health experts almost everywhere else, Fauci simply pinballed from one official narrative to another. Often there was little to no change in the actual science, just a war-time sense that the public must be scared or reassured for their own good.

In February 2020, he warned that 20 per cent of Covid cases would require hospitalisation, a blunder (shared by many) that did more than anything to fuel the mass lockdowns of spring 2020. In March, Fauci criticised masks for the – accurate, it turns out – reason that face coverings don’t really do much other than make people ‘feel’ safer. He then said his real priority was saving masks for health workers. By summer, however, he had become a big masking fan. In May 2020, he said ‘I want to make it be a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing,’ By 2021, Fauci said that the bizarre practice of double masking was ‘common sense’.

At times, Fauci almost admitted that he was essentially making up health advice to manipulate the public into doing what he decided was best. For instance, when it came to herd immunity, Fauci said: ‘When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 per cent… Then, when newer surveys said 60 per cent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.

But Fauci’s biggest blunder probably wasn’t anything specific he said about masks, or infection rates, or vaccines. It was his broader failure to speak scientific sense when he had the visibility and credibility to at least try. He could have pointed out that cyclical lockdowns for years on end were ineffective and unworkable, but he never really did. He could have called out the hypocritical idea that the Black Lives Matter protests or riots ought somehow to be exempt from social distancing regulations because they were politically fashionable. But he didn’t.

Angry right-wingers now babble about arresting Fauci or suggest that his retirement is an attempt to dodge Congressional testimony after the midterms. Democrats, meanwhile, write mad children’s books about him. His fans and his enemies give him too much credit. In the end, Fauci didn’t actually create mask guidelines or impose lockdowns. He wasn’t doing any substantial work on creating or testing a vaccine. He just became the mascot for a kind of Covid mania. And he loved every second.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/farewell-st-anthony-fauci

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Ron DeSantis will save conservatism

Trump again with DeSantis as veep would be an unstoppable force

There is an inevitability to Ron DeSantis’ rise to power that terrifies Democrat leaders. He is not an unstable political storm, loitering off the coast in fits of distant thunder and light. There are plenty of populist noise-makers whose swift media rise whittles to nothing within the year. They either lack the political fortitude to survive or are set upon by well-organised mobs of censorial algorithms and aggressive media outlets that see ‘clicks’ in the demise of White House hopefuls.

DeSantis is the tide, waiting for the political forces to align in his favour. Challenging Trump would be as damaging as William usurping the Queen and so, unlike the raucous of his ‘never-Trump’ peers, DeSantis busies himself with the State of Florida. His patience is marked by victories in an ongoing culture war against malign progressive thinking. He has proven, beyond question, that strength of character and an abandonment of ‘polite’ acquiescence is key to protecting the nation’s children from predatory ideologies.

While limp conservative parties in Europe, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia paint themselves green and pick up the cross of Marxist ‘struggle’, DeSantis rests on the premise that fighting for traditional values is right – presently, historically, and for the future.

He rejects, outright, the notion of handing children over to the medical profession to be sliced and set on a permanent course of medical intervention. He refuses to follow Democrat Governors in allowing the State and education system to assume authority over the mental health of other people’s children – or to use children as an infant cheer squad to ‘affirm’ the feelings of activist adults who treat the school system as their personal therapy session.

Florida’s don’t say ‘gay’ bill – now law – caused all manner of uproar. In reality, all it did was reset the education system to the same state of normality that we grew up with where teachers were not allowed to indoctrinate children, either subtly or directly, into the adult ideas of gender and sexual orientation at primary grade levels.

Why would a responsible adult teacher wish to do this when there was never any need to?

A cursory look at the teacher Tik Tok culture reveals that in many cases, it is more about how the teacher ‘feels’ when their class parrots activist terms rather than the future mental health of those children.

Children under the care of activists frequently end up wrongly confused during an age where it is not uncommon for them to believe they are animals and superheroes. Imagination without maturity makes children naturally delusional – which is perfectly healthy so long as they are surrounded by responsible adults who allow ‘play’ within the boundaries of reason. They must and will grow out of the belief that they are ‘literally Batman’.

The Guardian writes:

"It [the Bill] was designed to do one thing and one thing only: terrorise LGBTQ+ people. Like Texas’s abortion bounty law, the don’t say gay bill gives parents the power to levy lawsuits against teachers or schools they believe contravene the deliberately broad law. The threat of being hit with a costly lawsuit means that it’s likely underfunded school districts will err on the side of caution and ask teachers to avoid saying or doing anything that could be possibly be construed as queer. Indeed, lawyers have already told teachers in Orange county public schools that they should be careful not to wear rainbows; avoid mentioning same-sex spouses or displaying any pictures of them; and ensure they remove safe-space stickers from their classroom doors".

To which parents in Florida would argue that their children have been wrongly terrorised by the previous inappropriate behaviour of teachers who felt it necessary to bring their personal lives and activism into the classroom where it wasn’t wanted, needed, or appropriate.

Under such attacks from the press, an Australian conservative party would have folded immediately, fooled by the emotive language, and been swiftly herded into reverse until they were not only agreeing with progressive demands but promising to ‘go further’.

No matter how much the activist class complain, it is Ron DeSantis who receives standing ovations and the support of fed-up parents. His Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Bill cleverly acronymed to Stop WOKE has infuriated Marxists because it prevents them from telling children they are ‘victims’ or ‘oppressors’ based on their skin colour, or inherently ‘sexist’ because they are boys.

It outlaws teachers suggesting that people are:

‘Inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; that people are privileged or oppressed based on race, gender, or national origin; or that a person “bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” over actions committed in the past by members of the same race, gender, or national origin. The law defines such training as discrimination.’

Well, it’s about bloody time someone cut out the racist, sexist, Marxist garbage that indulges in the horrific folly of ‘original sin’ and sets in motion a perpetual tribal culture of struggle based on things that never happened to today’s people. In other words, the Marxists are furious that they cannot instil their personal grudges in the minds of innocent children and use them as child soldiers for the ‘revolution’ against capitalism that they desperately want despite showing no desire to go and live in one of the many communist countries on offer.

Instead of complaining about the law, the Left should have sat themselves down and asked why the hell they wanted to corrupt the minds of kids and destroy the peace of innocence to sate their old-fashioned collectivist politics that destroyed Europe last century.

Oh, the irony that the World Socialist Web Site calls this return to common sense ‘fascism’ when the shadow of fascism is exactly what the Left propose. Racial power movements like Black Lives Matter that practice racial supremacy under the raised fist of Marxism and have no place in any school, let alone a civilised society.

Bewilderingly, the courts are fighting to uphold racial discrimination by insisting that workplaces should be allowed to teach about ‘white male privilege’. Hopefully, they lose and racism is thrown out for good.

DeSantis has shown conservatives around the world that while their voter base may be too timid to oppose the fists, censorship, and bullying of progressive social warriors – they do not agree with what has happened to society. When they are given a choice to follow a true leader who has the courage to challenge the destruction of Western Civilisation, conservative voters line up, ready to vote.

Eventually, DeSantis will appear as an unstoppable red wave.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/08/ron-desantis-will-save-conservatism/

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Are Conservatives Dumber Than Liberals?

This article goes back a few years but is still very relevant

It depends on how you define "conservative." The research shows classical liberals/libertarians are smartest of all.

Conservatives exhibit less cognitive ability than liberals do. Or that's what it says in the social science literature, anyway. A 2010 study using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, for example, found that the IQs of young adults who described themselves as "very liberal" averaged 106.42, whereas the mean of those who identified as "very conservative" was 94.82. Similarly, when a 2009 study correlated cognitive capacity with political beliefs among 1,254 community college students and 1,600 foreign students seeking entry to U.S. universities, it found that conservatism is "related to low performance on cognitive ability tests." In 2012, a paper reported that people endorse more conservative views when drunk or under cognitive pressure; it concluded that "political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought."

So have social scientists really proved that conservatives are dumber than liberals? It depends crucially on how you define "conservative."

For an inkling of what some social scientists think conservatives believe, parse a 2008 study by the University of Nevada at Reno sociologist Markus Kemmelmeier. To probe the political and social beliefs of nearly 7,000 undergraduates at an elite university, Kemmelmeier devised a set of six questions asking whether abortion, same-sex marriage, and gay sex should be legal, whether handguns and racist/sexist speech on campus should be banned, and whether higher taxes should be imposed on the wealthy. The first three were supposed to measure the students' views of "conservative gender roles," and the second set was supposed to gauge their "anti-regulation" beliefs. Kemmelmeier clearly thought that "liberals" would tend to be OK with legal abortion, same-sex marriage, and gay sex, and would opt to ban handguns and offensive speech and to tax the rich. Conservatives would supposedly hold the opposite views.

Savvy readers may recognize a problem with using these questions to sort people into just two ideological categories. And sure enough, Kemmelmeier got some results that puzzled him. He found that students who held more traditional views on gender and sex roles averaged lower on their verbal SAT and Achievement Test scores. "Surprisingly," he continued, this was not true of students with anti-regulation attitudes. With them, "all else being equal, more conservative respondents scored higher than more liberal respondents." Kemmelmeier ruefully notes that "this result was not anticipated" and "diametrically contradicts" the hypothesis that conservatism is linked to lower cognitive ability. Kemmelmeier is so evidently lost in the intellectual fog of contemporary progressivism that he does not realize that his questionnaire is impeccably designed to identify classical liberals, a.k.a. libertarians, who endorse liberty in both the social and economic realms.

So how smart are libertarians compared to liberals and conservatives? In a May 2014 study in the journal Intelligence, the Oxford sociologist Noah Carl attempts to answer to that question. Because research has "consistently shown that intelligence is positively correlated with socially liberal beliefs and negatively correlated with religious beliefs," Carl suggests that in the American political context, social scientists would expect Republicans to be less intelligent than Democrats. Instead, Republicans have slightly higher verbal intelligence scores (2–5 IQ points) than Democrats. How could that be?

Carl begins by pointing out that there is data suggesting that a segment of the American population holding classical liberal beliefs tends to vote Republican. Classical liberals, Carl notes, believe that an individual should be free to make his own lifestyle choices and to enjoy the profits derived from voluntary transactions with others. He proposes that intelligence actually correlates with classically liberal beliefs.

To test this hypothesis, Carl uses data on political attitudes and intelligence derived from the General Social Survey, which has been administered to representative samples of American adults every couple of years since 1972. Using GSS data, respondents are classified on a continuum ranging from strong Republican through independent to strong Democrat. Carl then creates a measure of socially liberal beliefs based on respondents' attitudes toward homosexuality, marijuana consumption, abortion, and free speech for communists, racists, and advocates for military dictatorship. He similarly probes liberal economic views, with an assessment of attitudes toward government provision of jobs, industry subsidies, income redistribution, price controls, labor unions, and military spending. Verbal Intelligence is evaluated using the GSS WORDSUM test results.

Comparing strong Republicans with strong Democrats, Carl finds that Republicans have a 5.48 IQ point advantage over Democrats. Broadening party affiliation to include moderate to merely leaning respondents still results in a Republican advantage of 3.47 IQ points and 2.47 IQ points respectively. Carl reconciles his findings with the social science literature that reports that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives by proposing that Americans with classically liberal beliefs are even smarter. Carl further reports that those who endorse both social conservatism and economic statism also have lower verbal IQ scores.

"Overall, my findings suggest that higher intelligence among classically liberal Republicans compensates for lower intelligence among socially conservative Republicans," concludes Carl. If the dumb, I mean socially conservative, Republicans keep disrespecting us classical liberals, we'll take our IQ points and go home.

As gratifying as Carl's research findings are, it is still a deep puzzle to me why it apparently takes high intelligence to understand that the government should stay out of both the bedroom and the boardroom.

https://reason.com/2014/06/13/are-conservatives-dumber-than-liberals/

Monday, August 22, 2022

Lawsuits Coming for Entities That Don’t Change COVID Mandates After CDC Update: Lawyer

Entities with COVID-19 vaccine mandates that don’t pay heed to the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance will face lawsuits, a civil liberties lawyer says.

“We don’t have a new lawsuit in the works yet. But if we see that colleges and universities and public employers are not responding to the new CDC guidance the way that they should be, then we would certainly tee up a new lawsuit,” Mark Chenoweth, president and general counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, told The Epoch Times.

The response to the updated guidance should be, at a minimum, a lifting of mandates for people who have recovered from COVID-19, he added.

Such people have a high level of protection against severe illness and death, according to a number of studies. Many studies indicate the protection is higher than that of the COVID-19 vaccines—including one study funded by the CDC.

The CDC issued updated guidance on Aug. 11, stating in part that risk for illness from COVID-19 “is considerably reduced by immunity derived from vaccination, previous infection, or both” and that “persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”

The public health agency rolled back quarantine recommendations for people, regardless of vaccination status, citing the high amount of immunity in the U.S. population from vaccination, prior infection, or both.

Since virtually all entities that have imposed mandates have cited CDC guidance, the entities won’t be able to argue they aren’t aware of the updated guidance, according to Chenoweth.

That means any institution that doesn’t alter or rescind its mandate in light of the update “is ripe for a lawsuit,” he said.

“Because the thing that the judges have said so far is that it was rational for these employers to follow CDC guidance, but now the CDC guidance is different. And if they’re now going forward with these mandates for example, against people who have natural immunity in the teeth of the CDC guidance on that question, then I think it’s going to be much harder for them to win even a rational basis challenge to their policies.”

Suits

The New Civil Liberties Alliance has brought lawsuits against Michigan State University (MSU), the U.S. government, Fairfax County Public Schools, George Mason University, and Rhode Island officials over mandates that the legal group says are illegal.

They have focused on how entities aren’t granting exemptions to people with proof that they’ve recovered from COVID-19.

While one of the cases won the plaintiff an exemption from the mandate, judges have ruled against many others, often tracing the mandates to CDC guidance.

“Plaintiffs have the burden of negating every rational basis that supports the MSU vaccine mandate, and the Court finds that they have failed to do so,” U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in February as he dismissed the suit.

“CDC guidance is clear: ‘[V]accination remains the safest and primary strategy to prevent SARS-CoV2 infections,'” he added. “In achieving MSU’s stated legitimate goal of protecting its students and staff from COVID-19, it was plainly rational, in July 2021 when MSU established the policy, for MSU to rely on CDC guidance and require its students and staff to receive the COVID vaccination.”

The CDC has long maintained that vaccination is superior to natural immunity, and urged people with natural immunity to get vaccinated, even though many studies show that natural immunity provides better protection than vaccination and some suggest that people who recovered from COVID-19 are at higher risk of side effects if they do get a vaccine.

Moreover, some experts say getting vaccinated after recovery doesn’t make sense because the increase in protection is negligible, though others say the increase is worth the risk.

Could Have Changed in 2021

Chenoweth said the CDC should have updated its guidance in 2021. “I think it’s remarkable that it’s taken the CDC this long to come around to admitting the science on this topic. The science was there at least a year ago when we started litigating the issue of whether or not folks with natural immunity should be subjected to vaccine mandates,” he said.

A CDC spokeswoman told The Epoch Times in an email that the update was based on having more tools such as treatments than were available in 2020 and “the reality that nearly the entire U.S. adult population now has some level of immunity, either due to vaccination, past infection, or both.”

“We also have a better understanding of who is at higher risk for getting very sick with COVID-19 and ways we can help protect them from severe disease. With more tools to protect ourselves and our communities from severe illness from COVID-19—like vaccination, boosters, and treatments—we have increased protection and flexibility for the future. CDC’s commitment to addressing COVID-19 is strong and as a nation, we continue to respond to evolving challenges and identify best practices related to COVID-19,” she added.

The spokesperson didn’t respond when asked why the guidance wasn’t updated in 2021.

Chenoweth said courts would be made aware of the new guidance, including the appeals court weighing the appeal in the MSU case. In another case, for Dr. Stephen Skoly Jr., a surgeon in Rhode Island, the update will be incorporated into an amended complaint

https://www.theepochtimes.com/lawsuits-coming-for-entities-that-dont-change-covid-mandates-after-cdc-update-lawyer_4667572.html

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Approved versions of vaccines now Available for 1st Time in United States

A small number of Comirnaty and Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine doses have become available in the United States in recent weeks, according to court filings and U.S. health departments.

Vials of vaccines labeled Comirnaty started being available to members of the U.S. military in May and tens of thousands of the vials have since been ordered, according to military officials. Dozens of vials were spotted at a clinic in Alaska in June, according to a Coast Guard officer.

Several states, meanwhile, confirmed to The Epoch Times that providers are now able to order the vials.

Comirnaty is the approved version of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Spikevax is the approved version of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. Approval means drug regulators granted a biologics license application (BLA). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2021 approved Comirnaty for adults 16 and older, and in January approved Spikevax for individuals 18 and up. Before that, the vaccines were available under emergency use authorization (EUA).

The differences matter due to federal law. A biologics license requires a higher threshold of evidence, and certain aspects of emergency clearance don’t apply to approved products.

Even after the approvals were issued, no approved versions were available in the United States, according to the vaccine makers and federal and state officials.

Military members, among others, have cited the unavailability of Comirnaty and Spikevax in legal actions against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

One lawsuit, for instance, said that “the only currently available COVID-19 vaccines are authorized under EUA only, and therefore cannot be mandated.”

Thousands of Doses

U.S. regulators and health officials say the approved versions of the vaccines have the same formulations as the older versions, and that the versions are interchangeable. At the same time, the versions “are legally distinct with certain differences,” according to the letters of approval.

The FDA has declined to explain what that means, while a Pfizer spokesperson told The Epoch Times previously that it refers to the differences in manufacturing information included in the submissions for authorization and approval.

Military officials have defended the COVID-19 vaccine mandate despite Comirnaty and, later, Spikevax not being available by claiming that the older versions can be treated as if they’re the licensed versions, a claim challenged in legal cases.

They’re maintaining that position, but also asserting that objections to the mandate centered on the vaccines’ availability are no longer relevant.

“While it is the Defendants’ position that all EUA-authorized Pfizer-BioNTech doses for adults are interchangeable for the purposes of the mandate to vaccine, in order to address Plaintiffs’ assertions they were unable to obtain a Comirnaty or BLA-manufactured doses, I wanted to confirm in writing that any of the Plaintiffs still subject to the mandate may receive the Comirnaty-labeled vaccine,” Amy Elizabeth Powell, a government lawyer, said in an email in June to lawyers for service members challenging the mandate.

At the time, over 35,000 doses had been obtained by the military, with 3,300 available at specific bases.

The disclosures that Comirnaty has become available were made in the case Coker et al v. Austin et al.

States have also recently been able to start ordering vials of Comirnaty and Spikevax for the first time.

The Delaware Department of Health has ordered 300 doses of Comirnaty, but has not administered any due to lack of demand, a spokesperson for the department told The Epoch Times in an email.

South Carolina received over 38,000 doses of Comirnaty and nearly 53,000 doses of Spikevax, and has enabled health care providers to order them from the state, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control told The Epoch Times in an email.

Providers in Arizona can also order the doses from the Arizona Department of Health Services, a spokesperson for the agency told The Epoch Times in an email, and some providers have already ordered some.

“There is supply to meet the demand. Because these vaccines are identical to the EUA-branded presentations, and because there are still large stocks available in the state, very few Spikevax/Comirnaty doses have been ordered,” the spokesperson said.

States order vaccines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which makes them available for no cost.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/comirnaty-spikevax-become-available-for-first-time-in-the-united-states_4677575.html

Sunday, August 21, 2022

Effects of lockdown could be causing more deaths than Covid

The effects of lockdown could be causing more deaths than Covid as nearly 10,000 more deaths than the five-year average are recorded, ONS data has found.

Released on Tuesday, the Office for National Statistics' figures for excess deaths in the UK has revealed that about 1,000 more people than usual are dying each week from illnesses and conditions other than Covid.

This makes the rate for excess deaths 14.4 per cent higher than the five-year average, meaning 1,350 more people have died than usual in the week ending 5 August.

Covid-related deaths made up for 469 of them, but the remaining 881 have 'not been explained'. Since the start of June, nearly 10,000 more deaths unrelated to Covid have been recorded than the five-year average, making up around 1,089 per week.

This figure is over three times the number of people who died from Covid, 2,811, over the same period.

ONS analysis takes into consideration the ageing population changes, yet still found a 'substantial ongoing excess'.

The Telegraph has reported that the Department of Health may have ordered an investigation into the concerning numbers as there is potential for them to be linked to the delays in medical treatment as a result of the ongoing strain on the NHS.

Lockdowns pushed back treatment for conditions including cancer, diabetes and heart disease, with the British Heart Foundation telling the publication it was 'deeply concerned' by the findings.

The Stroke Association said it had been anticipating the rise in deaths for some time.

Noting a 'disturbing' number of mental health conditions, undetected cancers and cardiac problems, chief executive of private GP service Doctorcall Dr Charles Levinson said: 'Hundreds and hundreds of people dying every week, what's going on?

'Delays in seeking and receiving healthcare are no doubt the driving force, in my view. Daily Covid statistics demanded the nation's attention, yet these terrifying figures barely get a look in. A full and urgent government investigation is required immediately,' he told the Telegraph.

Only last week England-wide statistics showed that emergency care standards in hospitals hit an all-time low, with over 20,000 patients facing a 12+ hour wait for medical treatment.

People with mild Covid are likely to be infectious for an average of five days, a new study estimates.

Only one in five people in the study were infectious before symptoms started, it was suggested.

According to the research, two-thirds of cases were still infectious five days after symptoms began, with a quarter still infectious at seven days.

The study, led by Imperial College London and published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal, is the first to reveal how long infectiousness lasts after coronavirus infection in the community.

Detailed daily tests were conducted from when people were exposed to the virus to look at how much virus they were shedding throughout their infection.

The findings indicate that lateral flow tests do not reliably detect the start of infectiousness, but can be used to safely shorten self-isolation.

The researchers recommend people with Covid-19 isolate for five days after symptoms begin and do lateral flow tests from the sixth day.

If tests are negative two days in a row, it is safe to leave isolation, they say. However, if someone continues to test positive, they should isolate while testing positive but may leave isolation 10 days after their symptoms began.

Current NHS guidance suggests that people should try to stay at home and avoid contact with others for just five days.

Study author, Professor Ajit Lalvani, director of the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Respiratory Infections at Imperial, said: 'Before this study we were missing half of the picture about infectiousness, because it's hard to know when people are first exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and when they first become infectious.

'By using special daily tests to measure infectious virus (not just PCR) and daily symptom records, we were able to define the window in which people are infectious.

'This is fundamental to controlling any pandemic and has not been previously defined for any respiratory infection in the community.'

He added: 'Combining our results with what we know about the dynamics of Omicron infections, we believe that the duration of infectiousness we've observed is broadly generalisable to current SARS-CoV-2 variants, though their infectious window may be a bit shorter.

'Our evidence can be used to inform infection control policies and self-isolation guidance to help reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.'

The new study followed people who were exposed to someone with PCR-confirmed Covid in their home between September 2020 and March 2021 and May-October 2021, including some who were vaccinated and others who were not.

Samples from a total of 57 people were used, but the duration of infectiousness was only measured in 42 people. There were 38 people with a confirmed date of when their symptoms started and three were asymptomatic.

Professor Lalvani said: 'Self-isolation is not necessary by law, but people who want to isolate need clear guidance on what to do.

'The NHS currently advises that if you test positive for Covid-19 you should try to stay at home and avoid contact with other people for five days, but our data suggest that under a crude five-day self-isolation period two-thirds of cases released into the community would still be infectious - though their level of infectiousness would have substantially reduced compared to earlier in the course of their infection.'

He continued: 'Our study finds that infectiousness usually begins soon after you develop Covid-19 symptoms.

'We recommend that anyone who has been exposed to the virus and has symptoms isolates for five days, then uses daily lateral flow tests to safely leave isolation when two consecutive daily tests are negative.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11125573/Effects-lockdown-causing-deaths-Covid.html

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Vaccine mandates no longer justified

For almost three years, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) stubbornly refused to admit that infection with Sars-CoV-2 provides robust immunity which is broader and more enduring than vaccine-acquired immunity, even though this had been demonstrated in numerous studies.

It meant that people who had infection-acquired immunity – often healthcare workers – were still forced to get vaccinated or lose their jobs. Sometimes the consequences were disastrous. Bobby Bolin who had recovered from Covid was on a list for a double-lung transplant but was forced to be double vaccinated, and developed a pulmonary embolism and atrial fibrillation after his second Moderna shot which killed him.

On 11 August, with no explanation or apology, the CDC quietly made the long-overdue reversal and also belatedly recognised that vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission, saying that in its recommendations, it would no longer distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Combined these policy changes should spell the immediate end of vaccine mandates.

It was clear in 2020 that Covid is primarily a serious disease for the sick and the elderly. Data from NSW Health which, between 28 May and 30 July, was the first jurisdiction in Australia to provide some deaths by age, vaccination, and health status showed that only three people out of the 1,108 who died (0.3 per cent) over the nine week period were aged under 65 and healthy, and only 11 people who died (1 per cent) were aged under 65 and unvaccinated (all almost certainly seriously ill).

Hardly the pandemic of the unvaccinated that Gladys Berejiklian conjured up to scare the impressionable into getting vaccinated. As for being a burden and overwhelming the health system, only 11 out of 6,481 people hospitalised (0.17 per cent) and only eight of 591 people in ICU (1.3 per cent) were unvaccinated.

With such a tiny fraction of healthy, unvaccinated people of working age dying of Covid in Australia’s most populous state, during the worst three months of the pandemic, how is it possible that vaccine mandates are still in force in so many workplaces? Former Australian deputy chief health officer Dr Nick Coatsworth wrote in mid-July that there is ‘no longer a public health rationale for businesses terminating employees for failing to be vaccinated’. Yet some of the nation’s biggest employers –Coles, Woolworths, Qantas, Virgin Australia, Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank and SPC – are still forcing workers to get vaccinated or boosted.

In Ceduna, up to fifteen teachers at the Crossways Lutheran school are prepared to strike rather than get a booster or wear a mask all day and be tested daily. They want to know why they are being pressured to be triple-vaccinated when protection from boosters lasts only 20 weeks, you can still catch and transmit Covid, and vaccine injuries can be permanent or fatal. Who will compensate them or their families if they are injured or die, they ask.

It’s a good question. In Hobart, a police officer who was incapacitated with myocarditis after his Pfizer booster in November is fighting for compensation because the Department of Police, Fire and Emergency Management claims it isn’t liable even though it told staff they should get vaccinated, claimed the vaccines were safe, and made vaccination mandatory a month after the officer was injured.

With the CDC no longer distinguishing between vaccinated and unvaccinated, why are service members still being kicked out for not taking an ‘ineffective and dangerous experimental jab,’ tweeted Lt. Col. Dr Theresa Long this week, one of the top flight surgeons in the US Armed Forces. Dr Long is one of three military doctors who testified under oath that there was a massive increase in vaccine injuries in the Defence Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) in 2021 showing, for example, a 269 per cent increase in myocardial infarction and a 467 per cent increase in pulmonary embolisms.

If Dr Long’s conclusions are correct, they would explain why excess mortality is so high in Australia and other highly vaccinated countries. In the first four months of 2022, there was an increase in excess mortality of between 6,800 deaths (13 per cent) according to the AI and 8,500 deaths (17 per cent) , according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Either way it’s alarming. Excess deaths for the whole of 2021 were 3,400, yet just for the first third of 2022 excess deaths have increased by up to 150 per cent .

It’s going to get worse. More people died of Covid in July than at any point in the pandemic yet Covid deaths represent only somewhere between 43 per cent and 53 per cent of excess deaths in the first four months of 2022. What is causing the other deaths? Here’s a clue. Deaths from heart disease are up 11 per cent (1,400) and have been above the predicted baseline almost every week since March 2021, a week after the vaccine rollout started on 22 February. Deaths from other unspecified diseases are up by 11 per cent (1,390), continuing a trend observed since April 2021, a month after the vaccine rollout. There was also an increase of 10 per cent in coroner-referred deaths (+680) as well as increases of between five and 11 per cent in diabetes, dementia, and cerebrovascular disease.

A disturbing rise in excess mortality is occurring in many heavily vaccinated countries such as Portugal, experiencing its highest excess mortality in 100 years, Chile, and the US. Up to now doctors in Australia could not criticise any aspect of government management of the pandemic without putting their careers on the line. But in mid-July the left-leaning Victorian Branch of the Australian Medical Association called for a Royal Commission into the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and its muzzling of medical freedom of speech. This week the centre-right Australian Medical Professionals’ Society also called for medical free speech, consideration of scientific data in relation to vaccine mandates and legislative reform to protect the practitioner-patient relationship. With voices across the political spectrum calling for change perhaps an end to the tyranny of bureaucrats is at last in sight.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/tyranny-of-bureaucrats/ .

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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Friday, August 19, 2022

Report: 44 Percent of Pregnant Women in Pfizer Trial Lost Their Babies; FDA and CDC Recommended Jabs For Expectant Mothers Anyway

By Debra Heine

More than 40 percent of pregnant women who participated in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine trial suffered miscarriages, according internal Pfizer documents, recently released under court order. Despite this, Pfizer, and the Biden administration insisted that the vaccines were safe for pregnant women. Out of 50 pregnant women, 22 of them lost their babies, according to an analysis of the documents.

In a January court ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman of the Northern District of Texas, ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release around 12,000 documents immediately, and then 55,000 pages a month until all documents were released, totaling more than 300,000 pages.

The nonprofit group, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, sued the FDA last September, after the agency denied its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to expedite the release of mRNA vaccine review documents. In a November 2021 joint status report, the FDA proposed releasing only 500 pages of the documents a month, which would have taken up to 75 years.

Trial documents released in April revealed that Pfizer had to hire 1,800 additional full-time employees in the first half of 2021 to deal with “the large increase” of adverse reactions to its COVID vaccine.

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine was made available under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on Dec. 11, 2020. By February of 2021, the company was seeing so many safety signals, including in pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, it had to immediately hire 600 employees to process the data.

A batch of documents released in late July showed that 44 percent of women who were pregnant during the trial suffered miscarriages, feminist author and journalist Dr. Naomi Wolf revealed on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Wolf has been spearheading research and analysis of the Pfizer documents through her website Daily Clout.

In the past, only 10 to 15 percent of known pregnancies ended in miscarriage.

“Pfizer took those deaths of babies—those spontaneous abortions and miscarriages—and recategorized them as recovered/resolved adverse effects,” Wolf told Bannon. “In other words, if you lost your baby, it was categorized by Pfizer as a resolved adverse event, like a headache that got better,” she added.

Wolf said adverse event cutoff report showing the miscarriages was March 13, 2021, and the FDA received the report on April 1, 2021.

Therefore, the FDA had this data nearly a year and a half ago, and instead raising an alarm, they, along with the CDC, went ahead and recommended the experimental injections for expectant mothers anyway.

“Over a year ago, the FDA received this report that out of 50 pregnant women, 22 of them lost their babies, and they did not say anything,” Wolf said, choking back tears. “Thus the FDA was aware of the horrifying rate of fetal death by the start of April 2021 and were silent.”

The CDC, as recently as last month, still recommended the experimental mRNA vaccines for pregnant and breastfeeding “people.”

“COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for all people 6 months and older. This includes people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now, or might become pregnant in the future,” the CDC claims in a July 2022 post on its website. “CDC also recommends COVID-19 vaccines for infants 6 months and older who’s mother was vaccinated or had a COVID infection before or while pregnant.”

The FDA and CDC could conceivably claim they were unaware of high rate of miscarriages in the trial because Pfizer attempted to obscure the data.

“Pfizer notes the miscarriages as serious adverse events with moderate or severe toxicity ratings,” Wolf explained. “However, all of them were recategorized, by Pfizer, in the internal documents under the category of adverse events that were ‘recovered’ or ‘resolved.'”

Wolf noted that the Pfizer trial data correlates with the massive increase in miscarriages seen worldwide since the vaccine rollouts.

“If you extrapolate, globally, to all the pregnant women who are injected, it could explain what we’re seeing now of a baby die-off. 200 percent rise in neonatal deaths or spontaneous abortions and miscarriages in Scotland,” she said, adding, “86 babies died in Ontario when they usually have five or six [per quarter], and in Israel, a 34 percent rise of spontaneous abortions and miscarriages to vaccine.”

Back in January, three military doctors who had access to vaccination data in the DoD’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) disclosed that miscarriages and cancers among members of the US military had increased by about 300 percent in 2021 over the five year average.

These alarming safety signals were among several others brought to light by Thomas Renz, a member of America’s Frontline Doctors’ legal team, during a panel discussion convened by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in January.

The CDC, however, still maintains on its website that “evidence continues to build showing that: COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy is safe and effective.”

The agency also claimed “there is currently no evidence that any vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, cause fertility problems in women or men,” despite recent studies showing otherwise.

Dr. James Thorp, an physician MD board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology, as well as maternal-fetal medicine, said in a recent interview that he has seen a massive spike in fetal death and adverse pregnancy outcomes after the mass vaccination campaign began.

Dr. Thorp told Epoch Times he has practiced obstetrics for over 42 years and sees 6,000–7,000 high-risk OB patients a year.

The obstetrician declared that the use of the experimental COVID vaccines on expectant mothers “broke all the rules.”

“We have always been guided by that principle, that longstanding, six millennia principle—the golden rule of pregnancy—you never, ever use an investigational drug, a new substance, a new drug, a new vaccine—even if there’s a potential benefit,” he said. “You don’t ever use a new substance in pregnancy.”

Thorp said that in his practice, he’s seen a “significant increase” in problems, including “extraordinarily abnormal menstrual periods” before pregnancy.

“The vaccine I’m very concerned about and I do believe that in pregnancy, it’s contraindicated,” he said.

He said that his attempts to disclose these adverse events have been hampered by the imposition of gag orders on physicians and nurses that were imposed in September 2021.

In September of 2021, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ABOG) put out a statement in support of the Federation of State Medical Boards’ (FSMB) contention that “providing misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine contradicts physicians’ ethical and professional responsibilities.” The ABOG said physicians disseminating “misinformation” would be subject to “disciplinary actions, including suspension or revocation of their medical license.”

The ACOG, like the CDC, recommends the experimental injections for “pregnant people.”

“The fact that ABOG would recommend this “vaccine” in pregnancy is an abomination and may well be the greatest disaster in the history of obstetrics,” Thorp wrote in an article in the Gazette of Medical Sciences (GMS), titled: Patient Betrayal: The Corruption of Healthcare, Informed Consent and the Physician-Patient Relationship.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/16/report-44-percent-of-pregnant-women-in-pfizer-trial-lost-their-babies-fda-and-cdc-recommended-jabs-for-expectant-mothers-anyway

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More than half of people infected with omicron may not know it

“Having most people with covid-19 being unaware of their infection status, especially while actively transmissible, makes it likely a major driver of the ongoing pandemic,” says Susan Cheng at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California.

Cheng and her colleagues took blood samples from 2479 people who worked at or were registered at a medical centre in Los Angeles. At least two samples were taken per participant. The first was drawn before 15 December 2021, shortly before the area experienced a surge in covid-19 infections driven by the omicron variant.

Subsequent samples were taken between 15 December 2021 and 4 May 2022, during which time omicron became the dominant variant and several subvariants, such as BA.4 and BA.5, emerged.

Of the participants, 210 were found to have had covid-19 between the first time their blood was taken and subsequent samples, based on levels of coronavirus-specific antibodies in their blood.

To ensure this antibody response wasn’t induced via vaccination – 94 per cent of the 210 participants had received at least one vaccine dose – the researchers specifically looked at the participants’ IgG-N levels. IgG-N is an antibody to a structural protein on SARS-CoV-2 that becomes elevated when someone is naturally exposed to the coronavirus, but stays low post-vaccination.

At the time the participants’ blood was sampled for a second or subsequent time, more than half (56 per cent) of the 210 participants who had recently caught covid-19 – based on their IgG-N levels – were unaware they had been infected.

Of the participants who didn’t know they had omicron, one in 10 (10 per cent) said they had experienced mild symptoms but attributed them to other infections, such as the common cold.

Cheng says the findings highlight the importance of each individual working to reduce the likelihood of them transmitting the coronavirus, even if they think they aren’t infected.

“Being thoughtful with self-testing and taking precautions especially after being knowingly exposed to covid or developing even mild symptoms that one might assume are not likely due to covid… these are actions that everyone can be empowered to take on and can make a difference in curbing spread of the virus,” she says.

More work is needed to establish whether these findings apply beyond the single centre studied in Los Angeles.

“It would be helpful to see if other centres, especially in other parts of the world, with ideally larger numbers, could look at similar data and see if they might find similar or different results,” says Cheng.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2334227-more-than-half-of-people-infected-with-omicron-may-not-know-it/

BACKGROUND

Home (Index page)

A simple definiton: Conservatism is all about preserving traditions and resisting sudden change

Deep down: The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

Leftists use the rest of us as a tool to make themselves feel better

The extreme Right are actually the extreme Left

"Social justice" is inherently tyrannical

Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party. And now a "Deplorable"

When it comes to political incorrectness, I hit the trifecta. I talk about race, IQ and social class. I have an academic background in all three subjects but that wins me no forgiveness

Access past and present backups for all my current blogs

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

My annual picture page

Subject index to my academic journal articles

Consolidated list of links to all my writings

The sidebar entries here had become very extensive. I have therefore divided them into two. The first half is below and the second half is here -- including some comments on Jews

References to "Leftists" below are to preachers of Leftism, not the ordinary Leftist voter

As a good academic, I define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

So an essential feature of Leftism is that they think they have the right to tell other people what to do. They see things in the world that are not ideal and conclude therefore that they have the right to change those things by force. Conservative explanations of why things are not ideal -- and never can be -- fall on deaf ears

That Left and Right are so hostile to one-another is most unfortunate. Broadly, the world needs Leftists to highlight problems and conservatives to solve them. But the Left get angry with conservatives when conservatives point out that there are no good solutions to some problems

Conservatism is as much a respect for reality as a respect for tradition. But tradition summarizes a lot of reality. So conservative thinking must change as reality changes. There is no unchanging body of doctrine in conservatism. Conservatism is an attitude, a realistic attitude. Leftists, by contrast, believe whatever suits them, reality regardless

Giorgia dal Italia -- my favourite politician

What the Left routinely forgets: As Henry Hazlitt pointed out: “The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities,” -- Voltaire.

Social justice is injustice. What is just about taking money off people who have earned it and giving it to people who have not earned it? You can call it many things but justice it is not

But it is the aim of all Leftist governments to take money off people who have earned it and give it to people who have not earned it

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice.’ - Thomas Sowell

At the most basic (psychological) level, conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the discontented people. Conservatives don't think the world is perfect but they can happily live with it. And both those attitudes are largely dispositional, inborn -- which is why they so rarely change

Revolution is the ultimate desideratum for Leftists

Patriotism is a happy thing. No wonder Leftists have difficulties with it

Leftists' manifest desire is to destroy their country from the inside with division and hatred

The Left Doesn't Like Christmas because Christmas is just too happy for them

Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo switched from Democrat to the Republican Party, saying, “A conservative is a liberal who was mugged the night before.”

Who is this Leftist? Take his description of his political program: A "declaration of war against the order of things which exist, against the state of things which exist, in a word, against the structure of the world which presently exists". You could hardly get a more change-oriented or revolutionary programme than that. So whose programme was it? Marx? Lenin? Stalin? Trotsky? Mao? No. It was how Hitler described his programme towards the end of "Mein Kampf". And the Left pretend that Hitler was some sort of conservative! Perhaps it not labouring the point also to ask who it was that described his movement as having a 'revolutionary creative will' which had 'no fixed aim, _ no permanency, only eternal change'. It could very easily have been Trotsky or Mao but it was in fact Hitler (O'Sullivan, 1983. p. 138). Clearly, Nazism was nothing more nor less than a racist form of Leftism (rather extreme Leftism at that) and to label it as "Rightist" or anything else is to deny reality.

A rarely acknowledged aim of Leftist policy in a democracy is to deliver dismay and disruption into the lives other people -- whom they regard as "complacent" -- and they are good at achieving that.

As usual, however, it is actually they who are complacent, with a conviction of the rightness and virtue of their own beliefs that merges into arrogance. They regard anyone who disagrees with them with contempt.

Leftists are wolves in sheep's clothing

Liberals are people who don't believe in liberty

Leftist principles are as solid as foam rubber. When they say that there is no such thing as right and wrong they really mean it.

Leftists FEAR the future

There is no dealing with the Left. Their word is no good. You cannot make a deal with someone who thinks lying and stealing are mere tactics, which the Marxists actually brag about

Montesquieu knew Leftists well: "There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."

Because they claim to have all the answers to society's ills, Communists often seem "cool" to young people

German has a word that describes most Leftists well: "Scheinheilig" - A person who appears to be very kind, soft natured, and filled with pure goodness but behind the facade, has a vile nature. He is seemingly holy but is an unscrupulous person on the inside.

The new faith is very oppressive: Leftist orthodoxy is the new dominant religion of the Western world and it is every bit as bigoted and oppressive as Christianity was at its worst

There are two varieties of authoritarian Leftism. Fascists are soft Leftists, preaching one big happy family -- "Better together" in other words. Communists are hard Leftists, preaching class war.

Equality: The nonsensical and incoherent claim that underlies so much Leftist discourse is "all men are equal". And that is the envier's gospel. It makes not a scrap of sense and shows no contact with reality but it is something that enviers resort to as a way of soothing their envious feelings. They deny the very differences that give them so much heartburn. "Denial" was long ago identified by Freud as a maladaptive psychological defence mechanism and "All men are equal" is a prize example of that. Whatever one thinks of his theories, Freud was undoubtedly an acute observer of people and very few psychologists today would doubt the maladaptive nature of denial as described by Freud.

Socialism is the most evil malady ever to afflict the human brain. The death toll in WWII alone tells you that

“Hanlon’s razor”: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

American conservatives have to struggle to hold their country together against Leftist attempts to destroy it. Maduro's Venezuela is a graphic example of how extremely destructive socialism in government can be

The standard response from Marxist apologists for Stalin and other Communist dictators is to say you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. To which Orwell retorted, ‘Where’s the omelette?’

You do still occasionally see some mention of the old idea that Leftist parties represent the worker. In the case of the U.S. Democrats that is long gone. Now they want to REFORM the worker. No wonder most working class Americans these days vote Republican. Democrats are the party of the minorities and the smug

"The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women — of all classes — detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion — mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined." —T.S. Eliot

We live in a country where the people own the Government and not in a country where the Government owns the people -- Churchill

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others" -- Cicero. See here

The Left have a lot in common with tortoises. They have a thick mental shell that protects them from the reality of the world about them

Definition of a Socialist: Someone who wants everything you have...except your job.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

One cheer for Jon Burge

Leftist writers usually seem quite reasonable and persuasive at first glance. The problem is not what they say but what they don't say. Leftist beliefs are so counterfactual ("all men are equal", "all men are brothers" etc.) that to be a Leftist you have to have a talent for blotting out from your mind facts that don't suit you. And that is what you see in Leftist writing: A very selective view of reality. Facts that disrupt a Leftist story are simply ignored. Leftist writing is cherrypicking on a grand scale

So if ever you read something written by a Leftist that sounds totally reasonable, you have an urgent need to find out what other people say on that topic. The Leftist will almost certainly have told only half the story

Leftists commonly have the Cyclops syndrome: to see with only one eye, in only one dimension and only half of reality.

We conservatives have the facts on our side, which is why Leftists never want to debate us and do their best to shut us up. It's very revealing the way they go to great lengths to suppress conservative speech at universities. Universities should be where the best and brightest Leftists are to be found but even they cannot stand the intellectual challenge that conservatism poses for them. It is clearly a great threat to them. If what we say were ridiculous or wrong, they would grab every opportunity to let us know it

A conservative does not hanker after the new; He hankers after the good. Leftists hanker after the untested

Just one thing is sufficient to tell all and sundry what an unamerican lamebrain Obama is. He pronounced an army corps as an army "corpse" Link here. Can you imagine any previous American president doing that? Many were men with significant personal experience in the armed forces in their youth.

'Gay Pride' parades: You know you live in a great country when "oppressed" people have big, colorful parades.

A favorite Leftist saying sums up the whole of Leftism: "To make an omelette, you've got to break eggs". They want to change some state of affairs and don't care who or what they destroy or damage in the process. They think their alleged good intentions are sufficient to absolve them from all blame for even the most evil deeds

In practical politics, the art of Leftism is to sound good while proposing something destructive

Leftists are the "we know best" people, meaning that they are intrinsically arrogant. Matthew chapter 6 would not be for them. And arrogance leads directly into authoritarianism

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His clever short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out

Insight: "A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him." —Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Leftists think of themselves as the new nobility

Many people in literary and academic circles today who once supported Stalin and his heirs are generally held blameless and may even still be admired whereas anybody who gave the slightest hint of support for the similarly brutal Hitler regime is an utter polecat and pariah. Why? Because Hitler's enemies were "only" the Jews whereas Stalin's enemies were those the modern day Left still hates -- people who are doing well for themselves materially. Modern day Leftists understand and excuse Stalin and his supporters because Stalin's hates are their hates.

"Those who see hate everywhere think they're looking thru a window when actually they're looking at a mirror"

Hatred has long been a central pillar of leftist ideologies, premised as they are on trampling individual rights for the sake of a collectivist plan. Karl Marx boasted that he was “the greatest hater of the so-called positive.” In 1923, V.I. Lenin chillingly declared to the Soviet Commissars of Education, “We must teach our children to hate. Hatred is the basis of communism.” In his tract “Left-Wing Communism,” Lenin went so far as to assert that hatred was “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”

Karl Marx in his own words

If you understand that Leftism is hate, everything falls into place.

The strongest way of influencing people is to convince them that you will do them some good. Leftists and con-men misuse that

Leftists believe only what they want to believe. So presenting evidence contradicting their beliefs simply enrages them. They do not learn from it

Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves.

Leftists who think that they can conjure up paradise out of their own limited brains are simply fools -- arrogant and dangerous fools. They essentially know nothing. Conservatives learn from the thousands of years of human brains that have preceded us -- including the Bible, the ancient Greeks and much else. The death of Socrates is, for instance, an amazing prefiguration of the intolerant 21st century. Ask any conservative stranded in academe about his freedom of speech

Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Leftists don't understand that -- which is a major factor behind their simplistic thinking. They just never see the trade-offs. But implementing any Leftist idea will hit us all with the trade-offs

Chesteron's fence -- good conservative thinking

"The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"[go oft astray] is a well known line from a famous poem by the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns. But the next line is even wiser: "And leave us nought but grief and pain for promised joy". Burns was a Leftist of sorts so he knew how often their theories fail badly.

Mostly, luck happens when opportunity meets preparation.

Most Leftist claims are simply propaganda. Those who utter such claims must know that they are not telling the whole story. Hitler described his Marxist adversaries as "lying with a virtuosity that would bend iron beams". At the risk of ad hominem shrieks, I think that image is too good to remain disused.

Conservatives adapt to the world they live in. Leftists want to change the world to suit themselves

ABOUT

Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"

UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.

I imagine that few of my readers will understand it, but I am an unabashed monarchist. And, as someone who was born and bred in a monarchy and who still lives there (i.e. Australia), that gives me no conflicts at all. In theory, one's respect for the monarchy does not depend on who wears the crown but the impeccable behaviour of the present Queen does of course help perpetuate that respect.

I imagine that most Americans might find this rather mad -- but I believe that a constitutional Monarchy is the best form of government presently available. Can a libertarian be a Monarchist? I think so -- and prominent British libertarian Sean Gabb seems to think so too! Long live the Queen! (And note that Australia ranks well above the USA on the Index of Economic freedom. Heh!)

The Australian flag with the Union Jack quartered in it

Throughout Europe there is an association between monarchism and conservatism. It is a little sad that American conservatives do not have access to that satisfaction. So even though Australia is much more distant from Europe (geographically) than the USA is, Australia is in some ways more of an outpost of Europe than America is! Mind you: Australia is not very atypical of its region. Australia lies just South of Asia -- and both Japan and Thailand have greatly respected monarchies. And the demise of the Cambodian monarchy was disastrous for Cambodia

Throughout the world today, possession of a U.S. or U.K. passport is greatly valued. I once shared that view. Developments in recent years have however made me profoundly grateful that I am a 5th generation Australian. My Australian passport is a door into a much less oppressive and much less messed-up place than either the USA or Britain

Following the Sotomayor precedent, I would hope that a wise older white man such as myself with the richness of that experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than someone who hasn’t lived that life.

"Remind me never to get this guy mad at me" -- Instapundit

It seems to be a common view that you cannot talk informatively about a country unless you have been there. I completely reject that view but it is nonetheless likely that some Leftist dimbulb will at some stage aver that any comments I make about politics and events in the USA should not be heeded because I am an Australian who has lived almost all his life in Australia. I am reluctant to pander to such ignorance in the era of the "global village" but for the sake of the argument I might mention that I have visited the USA 3 times -- spending enough time in Los Angeles and NYC to get to know a fair bit about those places at least. I did however get outside those places enough to realize that they are NOT America.

"Intellectual" = Leftist dreamer. I have more publications in the academic journals than almost all "public intellectuals" but I am never called an intellectual and nor would I want to be. Call me a scholar or an academic, however, and I will accept either as a just and earned appellation

Some personal background

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 80 at the time of writing in 2024. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here

I completed the work for my Ph.D. at the end of 1970 but the degree was not awarded until 1974 -- due to some academic nastiness from Seymour Martin Lipset and Fred Emery. A conservative or libertarian who makes it through the academic maze has to be at least twice as good as the average conformist Leftist. Fortunately, I am a born academic.

Despite my great sympathy and respect for Christianity, I am the most complete atheist you could find. I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful. I am not at all original in that view, of course. Such views are particularly associated with the noted German philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Unlike Carnap, however, none of my wives have committed suicide

In my teenage years, however, I was fortunate to be immersed (literally) in a very fundamentalist Christian religion. And the heavy Bible study I did at that time left me with lessons for life that have stood me in good stead ever since

Very occasionally in my writings I make reference to the greats of analytical philosophy such as Carnap and Wittgenstein. As philosophy is a heavily Leftist discipline however, I have long awaited an attack from some philosopher accusing me of making coat-trailing references not backed by any real philosophical erudition. I suppose it is encouraging that no such attacks have eventuated but I thought that I should perhaps forestall them anyway -- by pointing out that in my younger days I did complete three full-year courses in analytical philosophy (at 3 different universities!) and that I have had papers on mainstream analytical philosophy topics published in academic journals

IQ and ideology: Most academics are Left-leaning. Why? Because very bright people who have balls go into business, while very bright people with no balls go into academe. I did both with considerable success, which makes me a considerable rarity. Although I am a born academic, I have always been good with money too. My share portfolio even survived the GFC in good shape. The academics hate it that bright people with balls make more money than them.

I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak. Some might conclude that I must therefore be a very confused sort of atheist but I can assure everyone that I do not feel the least bit confused. The New Testament is a lighthouse that has illumined the thinking of all sorts of men and women and I am deeply grateful that it has shone on me.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age. Conservatism is in touch with reality. Leftism is not.

I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address

Most teenagers have sporting and movie posters on their bedroom walls. At age 14 I had a map of Taiwan on my wall.

A small personal note: I have always been very self-confident. I inherited it from my mother, along with my skeptical nature. So I don't need to feed my self-esteem by claiming that I am wiser than others -- which is what Leftists do.

As with conservatives generally, it bothers me not a bit to admit to large gaps in my knowledge and understanding. For instance, I don't know if the slight global warming of the 20th century will resume in the 21st, though I suspect not. And I don't know what a "healthy" diet is, if there is one. Constantly-changing official advice on the matter suggests that nobody knows

As well as being an academic, I am an army man and I am pleased and proud to say that I have worn my country's uniform. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.

It would be very easy for me to say that I am too much of an individual for the army but I did in fact join the army and enjoy it greatly, as most men do. In my observation, ALL army men are individuals. It is just that they accept discipline in order to be militarily efficient -- which is the whole point of the exercise. But that's too complex for simplistic Leftist thinking, of course

A real army story here

It's amusing that my army service gives me honour among conservatives but contempt from Leftists. I don't weep at all about the latter. I am still in touch with some of the fine people I served with over 50 years ago. The army is like that

This is just a bit of romanticism but I do have permanently located by the head of my bed a genuine century-old British army cavalry sword. It is still a real weapon. I was not in the cavalry but I see that sword as a symbol of many things. I want it to be beside my bed when I die

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and there is JUST ONE saying of Hitler's that I rather like. It may not even be original to him but it is found in chapter 2 of Mein Kampf (published in 1925): "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht". The equivalent English saying is "Difficulties exist to be overcome" and that traces back at least to the 1920s -- with attributions to Montessori and others. Hitler's metaphor is however one of smashing barriers rather than of politely hopping over them and I am myself certainly more outspoken than polite. Hitler's colloquial Southern German is notoriously difficult to translate but I think I can manage a reasonable translation of that saying: "Resistance is there not for us to capitulate to but for us to break". I am quite sure that I don't have anything like that degree of determination in my own life but it seems to me to be a good attitude in general anyway

And something that was perceptive comes from the same chapter. Hitler said that the doctrines of the interwar Social Democrats (mainstream leftists) of Vienna were "comprised of egotism and hate". Not much has changed

I have used many sites to post my writings over the years and many have gone bad on me for various reasons. So if you click on a link here to my other writings you may get a "page not found" response if the link was put up some time before the present. All is not lost, however. All my writings have been reposted elsewhere. If you do strike a failed link, just take the filename (the last part of the link) and add it to the address of any of my current home pages and -- Voila! -- you should find the article concerned.

COMMENTS: I have gradually added comments facilities to all my blogs. The comments I get are interesting. They are mostly from Leftists and most consist either of abuse or mere assertions. Reasoned arguments backed up by references to supporting evidence are almost unheard of from Leftists. Needless to say, I just delete such useless comments.

You can email me here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR" -- and that preference has NOTHING to do with an American soap opera that featured a character who was referred to in that way

SIDEBAR EXTENSION HERE

DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:

"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism"
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
Western Heart

BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:

"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
To be continued ....
Coral reef compendium.
Queensland Police
Australian Police News
Paralipomena (3)
Of Interest
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia

BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED

"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International".
"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
Paralipomena (2)
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Vodafrauds (vodafone)
Bank of Queensland blues

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Some more useful links

Alt archives for "Dissecting Leftism" here or here
Longer Academic Papers
Johnray links
Academic home page
Academic Backup Page
General Backup
General Backup 2
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia

Selected reading

MONOGRAPH ON LEFTISM

CONSERVATISM AS HERESY

A COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF NAZISM

Rightism defined
Leftist Churches
Leftist Racism
Fascism is Leftist
Hitler a socialist
Leftism is authoritarian
James on Leftism
Irbe on Leftism
Beltt on Leftism
Lakoff
Van Hiel
Sidanius
Kruglanski
Pyszczynski et al.

Cautionary blogs about big Australian organizations:

TELSTRA
OPTUS
VODAFONE
AGL
Bank of Queensland
Queensland Police
Australian police news
QANTAS, a dying octopus

INTERESTING BLOGS by others
(My frequent reads are starred)

10 o'clock scholar
Agitator*
AMCGLTD
American Thinker
ASTUTE BLOGGERS
Baby Troll
Bad Eagle
Belmont Club*
Betsy's Page
Bill Keezer
Blackfive
Bleeding Brain
BLOGGER NEWS
Blowhards
Bob McCarty
Booker Rising
Brian Leiter scrutinized
Brothers Judd*
Brussels Journal
Bullied and Badgered, Pressured and Purged
Bureaucrash
Candle in dark
Catallarchy*
Classical Values
Clayton Cramer*
Climate audit
Climate science
Colby Cosh
Cold Fury
Common-sense & Wonder*
Community Pride Childcare
(Clearwater, Florida)
Confront the Left
Conservative Grapevine
Conservative Oasis
Conservative Political Forum
Conservatives Anonymous
Critical Mass
Cronaca*
Daily Caller
Danegerus
Dead Cat Bounce
Dean's World
Dhimmi Watch
Discover the networks
Discriminations
Dodge Blog
Dr Helen
Dr Sanity
Drunkablog
Ed Driscoll
Dyspepsia
Eddy Rants
Electric Venom
Endiana
Enter Stage Right
Eugene Undergound
Evangelical Ecologist
Fighting in the Shade
Find the best gun
Fourth Rail
Free Patriot
Gates of Vienna
Gay and Right
Gene Expression*
Ghost of Flea
Global warming & Climate
Gold Dog
Grumpy Old Sod
Hack Wilson
Hall of Record
Heretical Ideas
Hitler's Leftism
Hugh Hewitt
Hummers & Cigarettes
IMAO
Icecap
Inductivist
Instapunk
Intellectual Conservative
Interested Participant
Jihad Watch
Jim Kalb
Junk Food science
Junk Science
Just One Minute
KBJ
Knowledge is Power
Ladybird Deed
La Shawn
Laudator
Libertyphile
Lone Wacko
Lubos Motl
Luskin
MA firearm safety
Main Street Radical
Mangan
Margaret Thatcher Foundation
Maverick Philosopher
Medicine World
Michelle Malkin
Moderate Voice
Moorewatch
National Center
National Scene
Neo Con Blogger
Never Yet Melted
New Zeal
Northeastern Intelligence Network
Not PC
On the Right Side
Orator
Overlawyered
Parable Man
ParaPundit*
Pedestrian Infidel
Poli Pundit
Prof Bainbridge
Promethean Antagonist
Qando
Qohel
Random Observations
Rand Simberg
Random Jottings
Red State
Rhodey
Rhymes with Right
Right Nation
Right Thinking
Right Wing news
Roadkill
Ron Hebron
Rottweiler
Schansberg
SCSU Scholars*
Sharp Blades
Sharp Knife
Should Know
Shrinkwrapped
Silent Running
Smallest Minority
Squander 2
Steve Sailer
Stop the ACLU
Stuart Buck
Talking Head
Tim Worstall
Truth and consequences
Two-Four Net
Urban Conservative
Urgent Agenda
Vdare blog
View from Right
Viking Pundit
Vodka Pundit
Watt's up with that
Western Standard
Bill Whittle
What If
WICKED THOUGHTS*
Wiki Law
Winds of Change
Wizbang
World of Reason
World Terrorism news

Education Blogs

Early Childhood Education
Education Bug
Eduwonk
Joanne Jacobs*
Marc Miyake*

Economics Blogs

Adam Smith
Arnold Kling
Chicago Boyz
Cafe Hayek
Econopundit
Environmental Economics
Jane Galt
S. Karlson
D. Luskin
Marginal Revolution
Mises Inst.

Australian Blogs

A E Brain
Brookes News
Catallaxy
Fortress Australia
Kev Gillett
Hissink File
ICJS*
Oz Conservative
Slattery
Tim Blair
WESTERN HEART*
Cyclone's Sketchblog

England

Anglo Austrian
Burning our Money
Campaign Against Political Correctness
England Project
Norm Geras
House of Dumb
IQ & PC
Limbic Nutrition
Majority Rights*
NHS Doctor
Policeman
Samizdata
Sean Gabb
Sterling Times
Englishman's Castle

Scotland

Freedom & Whisky
A Place to Stand

ISRAEL

IsraPundit
Steven Plaut
Think Israel

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here