Wednesday, October 21, 2020
2020 US election: Big Tech pulls on censor’s jackboots for the left
The biggest, and long term the most consequential, story of the US election so far is the shocking decision by Twitter and Facebook to outright censor any story promoting the New York Post’s exclusive revelation of emails concerning Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine and China.
This grotesque decision by Big Tech is the most shocking breach of democratic norms the US has seen in decades. Here is a looming threat of authoritarianism in America, but it doesn’t come from Donald Trump.
Trump is not an authoritarian. At worst, he’s an administratively incompetent populist very ragged around the edges. He does not have the support of most media, doesn’t control congress, the military, the intelligence agencies, the courts, state governments. He is constrained and hemmed in on all sides. Nor is he popular.
The threat of authoritarianism from the left liberal ideological establishment, however, is strong and growing. Big Tech political censorship is both a symptom, and an accelerant, of this.
If Biden wins the presidency, and the Democrats win the Senate and hold the House of Representatives, this will concentrate power massively. And it will validate ideological coercion.
It would mean the left liberal movement, with Democrats far left of where they were under Barack Obama, will hold executive government, the legislature, the administrative state, the political sympathies of the leadership of the intelligence agencies, the chief centres of cultural power in Hollywood and most of the media, and now the massive, coercive power of Big Tech companies.
All that power would be propelled by immense self righteousness and a determination that people who seriously disagree are not just wrong but commit a crime against human decency.
A few years ago, I was one of countless commentators worldwide calling on Big Tech companies to clean up social media. By this, almost everyone meant ending expressions of violent hatred, of incitements to violence, of foul abuse, of incitements to direct action against individuals.
No one envisaged direct partisan censorship of mainstream political debate.
Big Tech companies have long had a cultural left liberal bias and made it difficult for conservatives to have big success on social media. But I don’t think their political convictions run very deep, as their long history of co-operation with the Communist Party government in China suggests.
However, they are expert at sniffing the wind and avoiding efforts to reform their unaccountable power. They have taken a big bet on the Biden administration, and on the left generally.
Censoring the New York Post stories is truly outrageous. The Post revealed emails that it claims came from the hard drive of a laptop that it says Hunter Biden left at a repair shop and never picked up. The Post is a mainstream newspaper, bearing all the constraints of such an institution.
It can be sued, it can suffer meaningful reputational damage, readers can turn away from it. It should not be censored.
Twitter and Facebook banned the Post from promoting its story, and then banned anyone else from linking to it, unless of course they were condemning it (this is truly Big Tech learning from the Chinese state on social media policy) on grounds that the story was perhaps unreliable, or may come from hacked documents.
This is a double standard so grotesque as to be beyond parody.
A million stories about Trump have been printed in mainstream media and promoted all over social media which have come from sources later discredited. The stories often turned out to be untrue. Big Tech companies had no objection to any of those.
I am not concerned with the substance of the emails here, or even in a sense with the Biden-Trump contest. But citizens who value democracy in any Western society should object in the strongest way to Big Tech deciding it can censor politics and interfere to promote the fashionable ideological view and exclude the side of politics it doesn’t like.
Nothing is more likely to destroy faith in democracy and create eventually a huge anti-democratic backlash. This is the real outrage of 2020.
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Sick Britons avoid hospitals, driving up deaths at home during the pandemic
London: People are dying at home from cancer, heart disease, dementia and other illnesses in unusually high numbers as the sick avoid hospitals and nursing homes despite assurances the health system has capacity to care for them.
New figures reveal some 116,282 people died in their own homes in England and Wales between January and early September - about 27,000 more than the five-year average.
However, COVID-19 accounted for just 2490 of those 27,000 "excess" deaths.
There was a significant spike in excess deaths in hospitals, care homes and private homes while the pandemic raged in March, April and May. In the months since, excess deaths in hospitals and nursing homes have actually fallen below the five-year average but fatalities at home have remained at levels well above normal.
Deaths in private homes for men suffering heart diseases are up 25.9 per cent in England while heart-related deaths in hospitals decreased by 22.4 per cent. There has also been a 53.5 per cent increase in deaths at home from prostate cancer.
Deaths from dementia and Alzheimer's disease among women are 75.0 per cent above average in private homes in England but 40.6 per cent lower in hospitals.
The National Health Service was not overwhelmed during the first outbreak but there was a waiting time blowout for cancer treatment and other services such as elective surgery. The system has had plenty of capacity over summer and still does despite the UK's worsening second wave.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Monday warned the virus was again "on the offensive" in the United Kingdom and deaths were now doubling every 12 days.
"The best way to protect cancer treatment and all the other treatments in the NHS is to keep the prevalence of coronavirus down," he said. "We are doing everything in our power to suppress the virus, support the economy, support education and the NHS until a vaccine is available. That is the right strategy: charting a path that allows for the greatest economic and social freedom while protecting life."
The excess death data was released by the Office for National Statistics as Wales announced a strict-two week lockdown in a bid to curb a second wave of infections.
While Prime Minister Boris Johnson has responsibility for England's strategy, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own health and education systems.
Restaurants, bars, cafes, non-essential shops, libraries and tourism attractions will close for a fortnight under a "fire break" strategy outlined by Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford.
Primary schools will stay open but students above year eight in secondary schools will have to stay home from this Friday.
"This fire break is the shortest we can make it, but that means that it will have to be sharp and deep in order to have the impact we need it to have on the virus," Drakeford said.
The Wales strategy is among the strictest to be introduced in Europe during its second wave.
Ireland has also announced tough COVID-19 constraints, going to a "level five" lockdown and shutting non-essential retail, limiting restaurants and pubs to take away service and telling people not to travel more than five kilometres from their home.
Johnson has previously cited the need for people to continue their usual medical and hospital appointments as a reason for not ordering a new lockdown in England.
Doctors believe the government's pledge to 'protect the NHS' during Britain's first wave blocked or discouraged people from accessing life-saving diagnoses and treatments in public hospitals.
There are also concerns that major outbreaks in care homes earlier this year have caused families to keep their elderly relatives out of those homes for as long as the pandemic continues.
The ONS figures suggest people were reluctant to use these facilities even when the daily number of infections plummeted over summer. In July - when the spread of the virus was at its lowest in Britain - some 10,936 people died at home in England compared to the five-year average of 8358. Just 102 of those people died from COVID-19.
People aged 70 to 89 accounted for nearly 60 per cent of the overall excess deaths in England and Wales
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Soros-Funded Prosecutors Put ‘Social Justice’ Above Law and Order, Analysts Say
Self-styled progressive political activists who win election as district attorneys with financial support from wealthy donors have made “social justice” initiatives more important than public safety, legal analysts say.
George Soros, the Hungarian American billionaire investor, stands out as the big donor behind a super PAC that helped elect district attorneys who have overseen a dramatic increase in crime.
The Justice and Public Safety super PAC feeds into a larger network of local political action committees. Some of the district attorneys elected with its support have attracted media attention for their antipathy toward law enforcement.
“I refuse to call them progressives,” Charles “Cully” Stimson, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, said in an interview with The Daily Signal, adding: “There’s nothing progressive about what they’re doing.”
In July, Fox News reported on St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who benefited during her 2016 campaign from advertising funded through Justice and Public Safety in her 2016 campaign.
Conservatives criticized Gardner for announcing her intention to pursue felony charges against Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who stood outside their St. Louis home with firearms in June as Black Lives Matter demonstrators marched past after breaking through a gate.
A grand jury indicted the McCloskeys on weapons and evidence-tampering charges Oct. 6, USA Today and other outlets reported.
Gardner, a Democrat who previously was a member of the Missouri House of Representatives, assumed office as circuit attorney in January 2017. She reportedly benefited from more than $190,000 in contributions from the Missouri Justice and Public Safety PAC.
The Daily Signal left a voicemail seeking comment from Gardner’s office, but had not received a response by publication time.
‘Huge Contributions’
The Soros-backed effort to alter America’s established criminal justice system by investing in local district attorneys appears to have been in motion for at least five years, according to Capital Research Center, a Washington-based group that traces how foundations and charities spend their money.
Over those years, Soros has spent more than $17 million on district attorney races, among other local races, in states such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona, California, and New York.
As The Daily Signal previously reported, Soros has helped to elect progressive prosecutors not only in major metropolitan areas, but also in the suburbs.
In contrast to conventional political action committees, Justice and Public Safety and other super PACs may absorb unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations, and individuals such as Soros and then spend the money to advocate or oppose political candidates. Unlike conventional political action committees, super PACs are not allowed to make direct donations to candidates.
But as Shane Devine, an investigator with Capital Research Center, explains in a recent article, the “huge contributions” put into circulation by Soros through his PAC “makes it almost impossible for other candidates to compete because district attorney elections are on such a small scale.”
And, Devine wrote, the campaigns that get such PAC money typically “do not need to raise millions to run local ads and mobilize voters.”
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a Democrat, benefited from about $1.7 million spent by the Soros-backed Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC during the 2017 campaign.
Since Krasner took office in January 2018, aggravated assault with a firearm increased by 18%, and, in one year, violent crime overall rose 5% and robberies climbed by 7%, according to a report in June from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit based in Alexandria, Virginia.
The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund compiled figures for its report, titled “Prosecutorial Malpractice: Progressive Prosecutors, Public Safety, and Felony Outcomes,” that the organization says show “dozens of experienced frontline prosecutors have been fired or resigned under Krasner’s watch.”
What is the result of Krasner’s follow-through on his campaign commitments to alter criminal justice practices?
“Violent crime in Philadelphia is out of control,” Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told The Daily Signal
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Tuesday, October 20, 2020
UK: A lockdown on dissent
The attempt to shut down debate on Covid infantilises the public.
It’s not just pubs, restaurants and gyms that are being shut down in response to an increasing number of people testing positive for coronavirus. Debate is being curtailed, too. When the government’s chief scientific adviser and chief medical officer held a press conference last month to show off graphs with exponentially rising red lines, they left without taking a single question. Science had spoken: there was nothing more to discuss.
Yet, from the time news first broke of the Covid-19 pandemic, the science has been anything but settled. There have been protracted public disputes about the role of children in spreading the virus, the efficacy of face masks, the benefits of ventilators, how long people have immunity post-infection, and even the nature of coronavirus symptoms. There is still no real consensus on how best to respond to this new threat.
Back in April and May, despite knowing that much of the science was uncertain, the overwhelming majority of people kept to the strict lockdown rules. But now, as some parts of the UK face a return to full lockdown, it seems government ministers and their advisers, as well as many journalists, have decided that the public can no longer be trusted with uncertainty and we must be protected from any disputes over ‘the science’.
Last month, following the Whitty and Vallance fear-fest, a group of 32 scientists – led by Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan from Oxford University and Professor Karol Sikora, former chief of the World Health Organisation’s cancer programme – penned an open letter calling on the government to reconsider its approach to suppressing the virus. They warned that lockdowns led to ‘significant harm across all age groups’ and asked the government to focus instead on more targeted measures. In response, they were accused of ‘spoiling for a fight with the establishment’. Sections of the media were criticised for giving their views a platform and for having ‘a tendency to amplify minority positions, particularly if they appear to confirm the right-libertarian worldview’. Challenging the apparent consensus was a ‘dangerous distraction’, which would do ‘damage to public discourse’.
In other words, talk of disagreement may lead people to question and challenge the restrictions they are asked to endure – and that cannot be permitted. So now, with the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration, written and signed by infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists who are concerned about the physical and mental-health effects of lockdown, the gloves are off.
Of course, anti-lockdown scientists should be subjected to the same rigorous criticism as pro-lockdown scientists. But this is not what is happening. As Fraser Myers has pointed out on spiked, the Great Barrington Declaration has prompted a barrage of censorship and smears. It has been ‘signed by fake experts!’, shrieks the Guardian, which finds much hilarity in ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’ and ‘Prof Cominic Dummings’. Another yawn-inducing piece points out that the think-tank backing the declaration, the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), is ‘part-funded by right-wing American billionaire Charles Koch’. The Observer, meanwhile, points to the AIER’s libertarian leanings, complaining that science has been ‘co-opted by shady ideological interests’. This is not advancing a scientific critique – it is simply an attempt to discredit by association. The aim is to present any dissent from lockdown as coming from a ‘fringe group of scientists’ who are out of sync with ‘most of the public-health experts in the world’.
We have been here before. Prior to coronavirus dominating every headline, we were told that the ‘scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming is likely to have passed 99 per cent’. Questioning this ‘consensus’ was – and still is – heresy. When it came to Brexit, if you challenged the experts you found yourself labelled mad, thick and low-information. The exact same urge to label Brexiteers as stupid plays out four years later in the bid to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration. All the same assumptions are there. The little people can’t be trusted with ambiguity and uncertainty. They need stark and simplistic messages. They need to be told not to kill their granny. Any hint of dissent must be removed from public discourse or the idiots will ‘let the virus rip’.
There are real problems with this approach to public debate. Scientific progress, like all knowledge, advances through challenge. Besmirching the reputations of those who don’t fall into line, or implying they have spurious motivations, chills debate. Important questions will go unasked. And rather than promoting trust in experts, squashing dissent in favour of one consistent message has exactly the opposite effect: it promotes conspiratorial thinking. For a time over the weekend, the Great Barrington Declaration was removed from the first pages of Google in a number of countries. This plays into people’s fears that facts are being withheld and they are being manipulated. Yet when a safe vaccine against Covid-19 is developed, people will be expected to trust scientists.
Not even the most watertight scientific conclusions can tell us how to deal with coronavirus. Our response is shaped by a host of ethical, economic and political considerations. The people whose lives are impacted most by lockdown restrictions need to be allowed to participate in these debates. This means trusting us all to cope with ambiguity and scientific uncertainty.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/13/a-lockdown-on-dissent/
********************************Conservatives Must Fight Big Tech or Lose
Facebook and Twitter’s desperate attempts to block a damaging story about Joe and Hunter Biden is the culmination of four years of work to transform social media into the media. Under the guise of false claims about disinformation, foreign election interference, bots, networks, deepfakes, public health risks, and assorted tech paranoia, free speech died on the internet.
The moment when the White House Press Secretary had her account locked for tweeting a damaging news story about Joe Biden brought home the Big Tech reality to most Republicans.
Just like the media, Big Tech is the Democrat Party, and the Democrat Party is Big Tech. But, unlike the media, Big Tech controls the marketplace of ideas to an unprecedented degree.
Facebook controls 80% of social media and Google controls 80% of internet search traffic.
And that’s bad news because Democrats see the internet in the same terms as Xi, Putin, or your average dictator just about anywhere in the world, as a dangerous system spouting disinformation, damaging social ideas, and disruptive political rhetoric that must be controlled using a combination of economic and social pressures, along with government regulation.
Republicans and Democrats are both unhappy with the internet. Republicans are upset because there’s too much censorship and Democrats are upset because there isn’t enough censorship.
That Democrats, who once championed a free internet, now view it the same way all totalitarians do, speaks volumes not only about the death of liberalism but also about the transformation of the internet from a vox populi to a walled garden controlled by a handful of Big Tech monopolies whose cultural views and politics closely align with those of the Democrats.
‘Bigness’ has its own political and economic gravity. Big cities are more likely to have big governments and their inhabitants are more likely to vote for big government policies. They’re also more likely to use and generate the core companies and cultures that make up Big Tech.
The old political alignments based on questions of philosophy are being tossed aside and replaced with a new alignment based on the primevally simple questions of size and power.
The struggle is less defined by abstractions, than by the question of how much power you have.
In the Trump era, the more proximity to power you have, the more likely you are to be a Democrat, and the less proximity to power you have, the more likely you are to be a Republican.
The most striking thing about the Never Trumpers and the Rust Belt and Southern Democrats voting for Trump is how much power the former have and how little power the latter do.
Politics is being reduced to naked power.
Democrats shifted their stance on the internet because they gained control of core national institutions, in no small part through the growing fortunes pouring out of Silicon Valley which have tilted elections, financed political movements, and transformed public perspectives on social issues. And they are using their newfound power to do what the powerful always do, dismantle the safeguards of an open society so that there are no more threats to their power.
They’re doing this under the guise of fighting for equality and justice, and of waging a revolution for the oppressed, but so did most modern tyrants from Stalin to Hitler to Mao.
The Democrats are no longer interested in a free internet, for the same reason that they’ve tossed away free speech, the filibuster, or any institution or procedure that isn’t serving their interests this very minute. This isn’t due to a new progressive enlightenment, Republican obstinacy, grave new threats to democracy, or any of the other talking points they serve up.
The simple answer is that they won.
The Democrats of the 90s who welcomed an open internet were waging an uphill struggle against the open institutions of a generally conservative country. The country is now much less conservative, the institutions are much less open, and every major institutional force, from the biggest companies to the media, is unreservedly and uncritically backing them every step of the way, while suppressing any suggestion that they shouldn’t rule unopposed for all eternity.
All that’s left is collecting their winnings by shutting down the opposition.
Support for free speech is a matter of principle and practical politics. America was built on principle, but the Founding Fathers had a common-sense assessment of human nature. Free societies may be built on principles, but they survive through a balance of power. Every major faction must go on believing that it is in its interest to maintain free speech, checks and balances, and other protections against tyranny because it might end up needing them.
The Democrats have accumulated enough power that they no longer think that they need firewalls because if they play their cards right, the future, the right side of history, is their own.
That’s the fundamental development that explains the current crisis, not only of free speech, but of free elections, and a free country. The internet, like any society’s marketplace of ideas, is a symptom. Free countries have a robust marketplace of ideas. Unfree ones are obsessed with censoring speech and monitoring their citizens, all the while spinning paranoid fantasies about foreign interference, the threat of dangerous ideas, and the risk to political stability from speech.
Anyone who came out of a coma and spent an afternoon listening to CNN (owned by AT&T), reading the Washington Post (owned by the CEO of Amazon), and perusing the latest round of Democrat complaints about election interference and disinformation would know what we are.
The problem isn’t simply radicalism. It’s power.
Democrat radicalism isn’t being driven by the powerless, but by the powerful. That’s why Democrats with PhDs are more radical than those with a high school diploma. The problem of Big Tech can’t be separated from the problem of a political movement with too much power.
The culture of political censorship isn’t merely radical, it’s powerful. Cancel culture by college students or Big Tech censorship aren’t disparate phenomena, they’re the same phenomenon, often practiced on the same platforms by members of the same inbred ruling class.
America has been reconstructed to favor some classes at the expense of others. This new machine combining political institutions, activist groups, and corporations controls public life.
Conservatives can combat it or, like Soviet citizens, make jokes, and wait for it to collapse.
Big Tech is at the nexus of the political, economic, and cultural power of this new machine. That’s why breaking its power must be the objective of any winning conservative movement.
The massive monopolies control political discourse and as they tighten the noose around conservatives, political speech on the internet will consist of media narratives, a few tame conservatives, and little else. Imagine the high point of media dominance with no talk radio or cable conservative news. That’s the future. And it’s not going to arrive a year from now, it may already be here by Election Day. And if not, certainly when the next presidential election arrives.
But Big Tech also holds the key to the radical money machine. AOC and the Squad wouldn’t exist without a founding engineer from Stripe. The founder of eBay is responsible for everything from The Intercept to The Bulwark, the former is the media arm of the Sanders campaign and the latter of the Never Trumpers. The Washington Post was transformed from a fussy government paper into a den of furious radicals by the CEO of Amazon. Google money financed the Bernie Sanders campaign. Big Tech has poured a massive fortune into Black Lives Matter, from Steve Jobs’ widow, to Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, to Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter.
And that’s the tip of the iceberg considering Facebook’s Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.
The cultural power of Big Tech is even vaster. Google and Facebook determine what most people see on the internet. Amazon and Netflix are swallowing the entertainment industry. In a decade, a handful of vast, mostly, tech companies, Apple, Amazon, AT&T, Disney, Google, Netflix, and Verizon will control the culture far more than the old entertainment industry ever did.
By then it will be much too late to do anything except huddle in a few dark web outposts and mutter hate speech like the controversial words of the First Amendment.
If conservatives don’t fight Big Tech now, they will lose. And they will lose everything.
Big Tech’s power is growing exponentially, but it’s still vulnerable. The companies that will become immovable oligarchies in a decade can still be brought down and broken up. The internet and the marketplace of ideas can rise again from the ruins of those monopolies.
Now is the time. If we don’t fight Big Tech now, America has no future.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Monday, October 19, 2020
Uniquely Bad—But Not Uniquely American
For much of history, slavery was as fundamental to society as agriculture.
The 1619 Project has not been having an easy time of it. Ever since the Pulitzer Prize-winning essays first appeared in the New York Times in August 2019, historians have been chipping away at some of the central claims. No, they’ve shown, protecting slavery was not the primary motive of the American revolutionaries when they broke away from Britain in 1776. No, the arrival of 20 African slaves at Jamestown was not when the country “began.”
The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was at first boldly dismissive of the attacks, but she has more recently been going through contortions to insist that she didn’t say what she demonstrably said; she has even erased her Twitter feed. The New York Times has likewise done some stealth editing of its own, altering some of the more controversial assertions in the online edition. A few weeks ago, President Trump himself went on the attack.
I’d like to propose adding another reason to close the book on the 1619 Project: it is based on a twisted notion of American exceptionalism. America’s “brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before,” Hannah-Jones writes. “Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.” Brutal? Yes. Unlike anything that existed in the world before? Seeing how far this is from the truth is the only way to make sense of the contradictions and perplexing compromises of the American Founding that trouble us so much today.
In fact, slavery was a mundane fact in most human civilizations, neither questioned nor much thought about. It appeared in the earliest settlements of Sumer, Babylonia, China, and Egypt, and it continues in many parts of the world to this day. Far from grappling with whether slavery should be legal, the code of Hammurabi, civilization’s first known legal text, simply defines appropriate punishments for recalcitrant slaves (cutting off their ears) or those who help them escape (death). Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament take for granted the existence of slaves. Slavery was so firmly established in ancient Greece that Plato could not imagine his ideal Republic without them, though he rejected the idea of individual ownership in favor of state control. As for Rome, well, Spartacus, anyone?
In the ancient world, slaves were almost always captives from the era’s endless wars of conquest. They were forced to do all the heavy labor required for building and sustaining cities and towns: clearing forests; building roads, temples, and palaces; digging and transporting stone; hoeing fields; rowing galley ships; and marching to almost-certain death in the front line of battle. Women (and often enough boy) slaves had the task of servicing the sexual appetites of their masters. None of that changed with the arrival of a new millennium. Gaelic tribes took advantage of the fall of the Roman Empire to raid the west coast of England and Wales for strong bodies; one belonged to a 16-year-old later anointed St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. “In the slavery business, no tribe was fiercer or more feared than the Irish,” writes Thomas Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization.
Today, of course, the immorality of slave-owning is as clear as day. But in the premodern world, no neat division existed between evil slaveowners and their innocent victims. Once the Vikings arrived in their longboats in the 700s, the Irish enslavers found themselves the enslaved. Slavery became the commanding height of the Viking economy; Norsemen raided coastal villages across Europe and brought their captives to Dublin, which became one of the largest slave markets of the time. The Vikings thought of their slaves as more like cattle than people; the unlucky victims had to sleep alongside the domestic animals, according to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. Norsemen rounded up captured Irish men and women to settle the desolate landscape of Iceland; scientists have found Irish DNA in present-day Icelanders, a legacy of that time. The Slavic tribes in Eastern Europe were an especially fertile supplier for Viking slave traders as well as for Muslim dealers from Spain: their Latin name gave us the word slave. Slavs were evidently not deterred by the misery they must have suffered; when Viking power waned by the twelfth century, the Slavs turned around and enslaved Vikings as well as Greeks.
Slavery was a normal state of affairs well beyond the territory we now call Europe. The Mayans had slaves; the Aztecs harnessed the labor of captives to build their temples and then serve as human sacrifices at the altars they had helped construct. The ancient Near East and Asia Minor were chockfull of slaves, mostly from East Africa. According to eminent slavery scholar Orlando Patterson, East Africa was plundered for human chattel as far back as 1580 BC. Muhammad called for compassion for the enslaved, but that didn’t stop his followers from expanding their search for chattel beyond the east coast into the interior of Africa, where the trade flourished for many centuries before those first West Africans arrived in Jamestown. Throughout that time, African kings and merchants grew rich from capturing and selling the millions of African slaves sent through the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean to Persians and Ottomans.
From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the North African Barbary coast was a hub for “white slavery.” This episode was relatively short-lived in the global history of slavery, but one with overlooked impact on Western culture. Around 1619, just as the first Africans were being sailed from the African coast to Jamestown, Algerian and Tunisian pirates, or “corsairs” as they were known, were using their boats to raid seaside villages on the Mediterranean and Atlantic for slaves who happened in this case to be white. In 1631, Ottoman pirates sacked Baltimore on the southern coast of Ireland, capturing and enslaving the villagers. Around the same time, Iceland was raided by Barbary corsairs who took hundreds of prisoners, selling them into lifetime bondage.
Large stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were emptied as those inhabitants who hadn’t been sent to slave markets fled to safety. Miguel Cervantes was one of those captured; enslaved by Algerians for five years, he returned repeatedly to the trauma in his writings, including his masterpiece Don Quixote. In Robinson Crusoe, the fictional hero is captured by pirates and enslaved in Morocco for two years, before escaping and, with no apparent hesitation, deciding to become a slave trader himself. One 1640 investigation estimated that more than 5,000 English citizens were being held as slaves in North Africa. Amazingly, ten American ships were seized and their passengers enslaved after the nation was founded. The American abolitionist senator Charles Sumner wrote a remarkable short treatise about the white Christians enslaved along the Barbary coast, speculating that outrage over the practice inspired some Americans to notice the evil that they were perpetrating on Africans in their own country.
Some of the few who have noticed this history protest that American slavery was more vicious than other forms. It’s true that some of the ancients and the Barbary Coast masters had a kind of slavery lite for a fortunate few: house slaves could sometimes marry freeborn women and work as skilled artisans or tutors for the children of their owners. Manumission was fairly common among the Greeks and Romans, though that was a minor decision for them; there was always more territory to seize for their empires, and they could quickly repopulate their slave quarters.
Make no mistake, though: slaves were always considered property to be traded, bought, and sold. For millennia, wherever people were buying and selling things, slave markets existed. “Slaves were the closest thing to a universal currency in trading centers,” observes Steven Johnson in his recent book about piracy, The Enemy of All Mankind. Joseph Pitts, an English boy seized by Barbary pirates in the seventeenth century, wrote of a Cairo market: “The slaves are examined much like animals; buyers are allowed to check their teeth, muscles, and stature to get an idea of the overall health of a slave.” David Brion Davis explains: “While African slaves did grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European Christian slaves were often worked just as hard and as lethally—in quarries, in heavy construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys themselves.”
Slavery’s long, cosmopolitan history is ignored by the architects of the 1619 Project. That oversight matters, but not because it would ameliorate the horror of the practice in the United States. No one can erase slavery’s lasting impact on our politics and identity or ease contemporary racial inequalities, entwined, however distantly, with the country’s slave past.
But slavery’s history does suggest two facts that can bring more clarity to how America, the land of the free, tolerated bondage: first, slavery, brutal and repulsive as we rightly believe it to be, was as much a part of ancient and early modern history as farming. And second: widespread revulsion against slavery came relatively late in the human story.
When the first African slaves were stepping off the boat onto American soil in 1619, and as Europeans were being steered into the slave markets of Algiers, there had been only scattered, regional, and temporary gestures toward abolishing the global practice of human bondage: a Greek philosopher here, an Indian emperor there; prohibition against trading in one area, edicts against owning a co-religionist in another. Slavery had been gradually disappearing from France and England by the twelfth century, but less because those civilizations were developing a modern conception of universal human rights than because tribes were coalescing into cities and nations that were finding less appalling ways to harness cheap labor. The spread of Christianity may have played a role in some areas. Urged on by his archbishop, the otherwise ruthless William the Conqueror freed Saxon and Welsh slaves. Still, the early Church’s record on slavery was erratic at best. And centuries later, the English and French, like other Europeans, had little compunction about putting West Africans in chains and transporting them to their colonies in the Americas.
It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that anti-slavery sentiment became enough of a moral force to exorcise the practice on a large scale in the West. Historians generally trace the origins of this revolution to two forces: first, secular, Enlightenment notions about the natural rights of man; and second, religious fervor among Quakers and later on, evangelical Christians. Quakers, the earliest abolitionists in both England and the American colonies, introduced the “Gradual Abolition Act of 1780,” the first such legislation in the West. Though it took more than a century and a horrific civil war to emancipate slaves in the United States, the abolitionist movement was a white Western invention. Other parts of the world remained wedded to slavery well into the twentieth century: slavery was legal in Ethiopia until 1942, in Saudi Arabia until 1963, and Mauritania until 1980. Today, one reads reports of slavery in Mauritania, Sudan, and in Islamist quasi-states in Iraq and Nigeria. As much as 15 percent of the population of Mauritania may be enslaved, according to the BBC. Estimates of those in bondage today run as high as 1 million people, mostly women and children.
What set America apart from other slaveholding societies, and what continues to curse the country to this day, was not slavery per se but its racialization. Slaves had always been inferior “others” in some way meaningful to each society: Greeks only used foreigners, or “barbarians,” as slaves; Christians justified enslaving pagans; Muslims did the same with infidels, even as they spared fellow Muslims; the Chinese enslaved Koreans, Turks, Persians, and Indonesians—and now the Uyghurs—but not ethnic Chinese. But after a brief, unsuccessful attempt to use smallpox-prone Indians as slave labor, Americans turned to a different “other”: Africans, who, thanks to the growing transatlantic slave trade, would now be available in huge numbers.
The advantage for slaveowners—but the affliction for both blacks and the country as a whole—is that race is a highly visible and tenacious dividing line between peoples. Escaped and freed slaves could not simply blend into the local population as they could in other parts of the world. Only 4 percent of the Africans who suffered through the middle passage across the Atlantic ended up in what would become the United States. The rest were sold in the Caribbean and Latin America, where, with the area’s large indigenous and Mestizo population, race was less binary than in the U.S. and the divisions between groups more flexible. Hereditary slavery was not unique to the U.S.—children were born slaves in the Roman empire and early on in the Caribbean and Latin America—but once color became the defining distinction between bonded and free, hereditary slavery made a certain awful sense.
So what should be our stance toward the immorality of our past? After a trip to Dublin in 2007, Danish culture minister Brian Mikkelsen scoffed at the idea of apologizing to the Irish people for the Vikings’ savagery in the Dark Ages, saying “we don’t apologize for what the Vikings did 1,000 years ago. That was the way you acted back then.” That position may make sense for an older civilization whose founding sins are hidden in the mists of ancient tribal history. In the relatively young, racially divided United States, it is inadequate.
But the minister hints at the reality that history presents us with a numbing array of opportunities for indignant judgement: wars of conquest, tortures, massacres, infanticide, beheadings, rapes, kidnappings, coercive and brutalizing labor, gulags, death camps, and so on. While we can and should condemn it all, that judgment has to be tempered by a certain knowing detachment, even humility, especially when we think about the more distant past. Consider that as the American Founders pondered the design of their new country in the 1770s, they were caught between two worlds—a past where human servitude was an unremarkable fact and a future, just taking shape, that condemned the idea as grossly immoral. James Madison grasped the contradictions of the moment: “We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man,” he wrote. Deeply in debt, Madison couldn’t see his way to freeing his own slaves upon his death. It’s a decision deserving our censure. But it is hubris for any person today to assume that they themselves would have had the foresight, the freedom of mind and heart, or even the moral vocabulary, to side with the angels. Remember: even freed black slaves were known to purchase and own slaves.
In an excerpt in The Atlantic from his new book Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs describes Frederick Douglass’s struggle to come to grips with the achievement of the American Founding. No one knew better than this former slave the boundaries of that achievement. No one better understood the limits of the virtue of these men. But the self-taught Douglass understood the omnipresence of human cruelty and the rarity of freedom. Painful as it must have been for him to do so, he conceded about the men who had compromised away his freedom, that they “were great in their day and generation.”
To understand the truth of that qualified praise is to understand the complexities of our history—and of any history. And it is another level on which the 1619 Project fails utterly.
https://www.city-journal.org/slavery-failure-of-1619-project
************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Sunday, October 18, 2020
US election 2020: Why Christians will vote for Donald Trump
The vast majority of churchgoing Christians, Protestant and Catholic, and the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Jews, will vote for Donald Trump on November 3, just as they did four years ago.
This is surely a paradox. Trump is thrice married and was a self-proclaimed libertine in the past. He sometimes tells lies and is frequently boorish in his personal behaviour, mocking and insulting opponents. And he praises some dictators.
He has been shabby about keeping his presidency and the financial interests of his business empire separate, as well as keeping presidential diplomacy and his domestic political interests separate.
The ethical case against Trump is substantial, yet the most religiously conscientious and morally scrupulous people will vote for him overwhelmingly. What explains this paradox? And are they right to do so?
According to exit polls, in 2016 Trump won a majority of those who identify as Protestants and a majority of those who identify as Catholics.
Within each category, there were big differences. Trump’s religious support, according to Pew Research Centre, has declined a very little. Its polls now show Trump winning 78 per cent of white Evangelical Protestants, 53 per cent of white non-Evangelical Protestants, but only 9 per cent of black Protestants.
Trump will again win white Catholics, with 52 per cent supporting him, but because he only secures 26 per cent of Hispanic Catholics he is likely to narrowly lose the Catholic vote overall — to his opponent Joe Biden, who is himself a Catholic.
Most surveys suggest Trump will win the votes of nearly 90 per cent of Orthodox Jews, though he will lose among Jews overall.
However, Trump will win the majority of churchgoing Catholics. Among Christians who attend church weekly, Trump will win 60 per cent or more. That is a striking figure.
It suggests an underlying collision of philosophies, of civic and life philosophies, which is tearing America apart.
The qualified support for Trump by Christians is not irrational, illogical or unjustified.
Part of what voting Christians hope to get from Trump is on display in the Senate confirmation hearings for Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Barrett is surely admirable. She is a conservative Catholic and has been a longtime member of a charismatic Catholic group.
Charismatic Catholics pay special attention to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. To simplify things pretty spectacularly, they are the Catholic cousins of Pentecostals (although there are some theological differences between charismatic and Pentecostal). Just as Scott Morrison is the first Pentecostal leader of an OECD nation, so Barrett will be the first charismatic justice on the bench of the US Supreme Court.
Barrett, now 48, has been married since young to the one husband, and has five biological children with him. The youngest has Downs syndrome. When informed of this, the Barrett parents decided to proceed with the birth. They have also adopted two children from Haiti. There is no suggestion the Barretts are other than a happy family. This is her private business and doesn’t make her better or worse as a judge.
It does, however, suggest that she lives the values she espouses. Barrett is also an immensely distinguished legal academic, becoming at a young age a professor of law at Notre Dame University. Notre Dame is not Ivy League, but is a very prestigious university.
She is a legal conservative. That doesn’t mean she will rule for the right-wing option in any contested case. It means her approach is to interpret the constitution, and the law, as it is written. This does have a profound conservative consequence. Judges with this philosophy are much less likely to discover secret, hidden, implied new rights in the Constitution which accord with contemporary left-liberal ideology and compel people and institutions to abide by that ideology.
American Christians are concerned by assaults on religious freedom. Thus a court could decide that traditional Christian views of marriage or morality or the meaning of human life threaten or contradict some element of contemporary identity politics and then penalise institutions — schools, universities or hospitals — that teach traditional Christian views.
Barrett, in her confirmation hearings, declined to express a view on contentious legal cases because it would be wrong for a judge to do so outside a courtroom. However, she said she personally abhors discrimination and would never discriminate against a person on the grounds of their sex or sexual orientation. But the left-liberal political and legal movements have argued that merely to teach traditional Christian doctrine, at school or university, that marriage is between a man and a woman, is to discriminate against gay students. It is a concern for rulings of this kind that motivates Christians to be obsessed with judges.
In the US, countless issues that should be up to legislatures are determined by judges. Trump has appointed hundreds of legally conservative judges. That was a huge issue in the serious, conscientious debate so many Christian journals and groups conducted about whether to support Trump four years ago.
Way back in the 2000 campaign, it was revealed at the last moment that George W Bush as a young man had been convicted of drink driving. More than a million Evangelicals were so unhappy about this that they stayed away from the polls. Yet now they support Trump, who makes Bush look like Abraham Lincoln.
Some American Christians do indeed enjoy Trump’s crudity and combativeness and seeing voting for him as a gesture of cultural defiance against the dominant left-liberal ideology. But from reading bits and pieces of many American Christian journals, I think tens of millions of Christians vote for Trump despite his bad character, not remotely because of it.
The choice in an election is binary. Hillary Clinton was herself guilty of misconduct in office, and she and her husband grew personally very rich off the back of notionally philanthropic activities. The same is true of Joe Biden and his family.
Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, made huge money in Ukraine and China in large part because his dad was vice-president.
That is not a joyful reflection, but it diminishes the moral choice between Trump and Biden. More important, there is not a single contentious issue on which Biden sticks with the teachings of his own Catholic Church against the dominant zeitgeist.
Thus Biden says that he believes that human life begins at conception and abortion is wrong, but he would not seek to impose this view on society. That’s fair enough. But he then goes on to support, with Kamala Harris, legal abortion at every stage of pregnancy.
These are complex and difficult issues and it is wrong to assume bad faith by anyone. But while many people would reject the idea that one second after a conception there exists a human being with human rights, most are very reluctant to accept abortion up to the point of birth — the idea that an unborn baby is not a human being one minute before he or she is born.
Extreme late-term abortions are very rare. But that doesn’t mean that they are not an ethical issue. Peter Singer is an extremely useful atheist philosopher because he thinks through honestly the logical end point of atheist moral assumptions.
In Rethinking Life and Death, he argues: “Human babies are not born self-aware or capable of grasping their lives over time. They are not persons.” He has argued that if they are born handicapped and their parents don’t want to keep them, they should be allowed to die.
When this position aroused controversy, he replied with compelling logic that if it was OK to kill a baby 10 minutes before it is born, why is it so wrong to kill a baby 10 minutes after birth?
Trump has issued a presidential executive order entitled Born Alive. It requires that if a baby survives a botched abortion attempt, doctors and nurses must render lifesaving assistance, which is not the practice now.
Christians, Evangelicals and Catholics alike regard such babies as human beings, and terminating them as taking innocent human lives. They may be wrong to hold those views, although they were the consensus Western view over most of the past 2000 years. But if they do hold such views, it is certainly not unreasonable to vote for a President who will try to give some limited effect to them.
As Barrett commented during her academic career, it is vanishingly unlikely that abortion will ever again be generally illegal in the US. But there are live questions over restrictions at the margin. It is not hypocritical, nor irrational, for Christians to choose to cast their vote on the basis of such considerations.
American Christians are nothing like the Obama stereotype of them as hillbillies bitterly clinging to guns. The most generous givers to charity among all US demographics are Evangelicals. Domestic violence is much rarer among churchgoing Christian families than in general society. Religious practice in the home is a strong indicator of both spouses feeling that family decision-making is mutual and consensual.
The sociological evidence is overwhelming that religious belief, combined with regular church attendance, predicts human happiness.
There is a split in Christianity, of course. Christians whose chief theological rhetoric is social justice generally oppose Trump. But liberal Christianity has consistently shown itself to be a self-destroying movement. Theologically orthodox Christians believe their faith impels them to acts of charity — often sustained and heroic acts of charity. But if your sole purpose in life is social action, then you don’t need God.
Historically, liberal Christianity first marginalises God, then finds it doesn’t need him at all. In a very short time, this moves from theologically anaemic to no theology at all.
There are other issues that lead Christians to support Trump. His administration has made a big issue internationally of freedom of religion. This includes defending persecuted Christians. The Pew Centre reports that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world today.
Conscientious Christians could vote for Trump or Biden or not vote at all. Neither candidate is so bad as to make them unconscionable, as it would be for a Christian to vote, say, for a communist or a Nazi.
But when you examine the issues that motivate American Christians, it is not irrational that so many vote Trump. A paradox, yes. A contradiction, no.
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SCOTUS Ends Left's Attempt to Delay Census
Leftists have milked the coronavirus excuse for all their worth, including taking advantage of a novel event to further tilt the electoral map in Democrats’ favor. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court has at least slowed the effort to drag out the 2020 Census until a Joe Biden administration takes power.
On Tuesday, the justices ruled that the Census Bureau had the authority to end its data collection on October 31. The Court’s ruling overturned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in favor of leftist groups that have dubiously contended the Census Bureau’s ending date would jeopardize producing an accurate population count. As noted above, the real goal for Democrats and the Left was to push back the census completion date in order to secure greater redistricting power.
However, as noted by Ninth Circuit dissenting Judge Patrick Bumatay — with whom the justices agreed — the constitutional mandate for administration of the census does not mention “accuracy” in the count. The Census Bureau must “balance the need for accuracy against the statute’s hard deadline,” Bumatay observed. “Determining what level of accuracy is sufficient is simply not something that the judicial branch is equipped to do.”
Furthermore, as The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Supreme Court’s unsigned order Tuesday stays the lower-court injunction and allows the bureau to immediately wrap up its data collection. The stay might not have a large practical effect since the bureau has already enumerated 99.9% of the population in 47 states with the exceptions of Louisiana (98.3%), Mississippi (99.4%) and South Dakota (99.8%).”
In short, SCOTUS stepped in to prevent another instance of the judicial branch acting as the legislative. And it stepped in to stop just one more avenue leftists are using to stack the deck in their favor. Whether it be the Census, the Electoral College, adding DC and Puerto Rico as states (to pack the Senate), or packing the Supreme Court, today’s Democrat Party is all about “fundamentally transforming” American institutions with the end result of giving Democrats unassailable power.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/74179-scotus-ends-lefts-attempt-to-delay-census-2020-10-16
************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Friday, October 16, 2020
NYT: Experts Confident Pandemic To Be Over ‘Far Sooner’ Than Expected, Trump Efforts ‘Working With Remarkable Efficiency’
A new report from The New York Times indicates that experts have “genuine confidence” that the coronavirus pandemic will end “far sooner” than originally expected and that President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed — the administration’s efforts to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics — has been “working with remarkable efficiency.”
The report, published on Monday, comes with just over three weeks left in the presidential race between Trump and Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden.
“Events have moved faster than I thought possible. I have become cautiously optimistic,” New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. wrote. “Experts are saying, with genuine confidence, that the pandemic in the United States will be over far sooner than they expected, possibly by the middle of next year.”
The report noted that the U.S. was “faring much better than it did during the Spanish influenza,” which cost 675,000 Americans their lives, adding, “the country’s population at the time was 103 million, so that toll is equivalent to 2 million dead today.”
The report noted numerous positive developments that have come along the way as the U.S. battles the pandemic, ranging from the average age of those being infected being significantly younger now than at the start of the pandemic to nursing homes becoming better at protecting their patients.
“Sometime in the next three months, health experts say, the F.D.A. is likely to begin granting approval to vaccines now in the works,” the report said. “Despite the chaos in day-to-day politics and the fighting over issues like masks and lockdowns, Operation Warp Speed — the government’s agreement to subsidize vaccine companies’ clinical trials and manufacturing costs — appears to have been working with remarkable efficiency. It has put more than $11 billion into seven vaccine candidates, and the F.D.A. has said it will approve any one that is at least 50 percent effective at preventing infection or reducing its severity.”
The report notes that Operation Warp Speed’s chief scientific adviser, Moncef Slaoui, believes that some of the early vaccine candidates will be 75 to 90 percent effective and that at least two will have won approval by sometime in January.
“By then, Dr. Slaoui has estimated, the factories under contract will have produced enough vaccine for 30 to 40 million people, and then another 80 to 90 million people every month after that,” the report added. “Assuming nothing goes wrong, he said, there will be enough doses for all 330 million Americans to be vaccinated by next June.”
The report noted that the military is standing by to assist in the rapid distribution of any vaccines that become available and that skepticism and hesitation to taking a vaccine may quickly fade as people begin to weigh the relatively minuscule risks of a vaccine against the potential effects of contracting the virus, including “the prospect of being unable to return to work, having to home-school one’s children for years and not eating in a restaurant, flying on an airplane or watching a movie in a theater without the specter of anxiety.”
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FACT CHECK: More People Delaying Health Care Over Costs Now Than Pre-Obamacare
A common myth being presented during the Amy Coney Barrett hearings is the notion that many Americans who couldn’t afford healthcare before the Affordable Care Act was passed and implemented suddenly could.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, the data suggests otherwise. According to a Gallup survey from December 2019, 33 percent of Americans say they or a family member put off treatment for a health condition because of the costs.
This number has remained virtually unchanged since Obamacare was passed. In fact, the number has averaged about 30 percent since 2006, which is significantly higher than it was back in 2001, when only 19 percent of Americans said they or a family member put off treatment for a health condition because of the cost.
Worse yet, Obamacare hasn’t improved the situation for those with pre-existing conditions. “Reports of delaying care for a serious condition due to costs are also up 13 points compared with last year among Americans who report they or another household member has a ‘pre-existing condition,'” Gallup reported. “At the same time, there has been virtually no change in the percentage of adults without pre-existing conditions in the household who delayed care for a serious health issue in the past year, currently 12% versus 11% in 2018.”
Gallup does urge some caution with regard to the four-point jump in those reporting delaying care over the previous survey. “Most of the recent increase in reports that family members are delaying treatment for serious conditions has occurred among self-identified Democrats,” explains Gallup. “This is up 12 points since 2018 among Democrats, compared with three- and five-point increases among Republicans and independents, respectively.”
The partisan gap in the responses to these questions is the largest in two decades. The reason for this, Gallup can’t say for sure. But seeing as Gallup reported there’s been no major change in health coverage, the sharp spike of self-identifying Democrats reporting delaying healthcare over costs is likely done for partisan reasons, as the survey occurred in the heat of a Democratic presidential primary.
But one thing that is clear: fewer people were delaying medical care over costs back in 2001, and Obamacare has done nothing to reduce the number of people delaying health care over costs. Nothing at all.
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Handmaids of Bigotry
Well, they dusted off those colorful “Handmaid’s Tale” outfits that were so visible at Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018.
Even before Amy Coney Barrett’s hearing on Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Democrats were being cheered on by permanently angry women (and maybe some men) dressed in red cloaks with white duckbills extending from their hoods.
This is the uniform of the oppressed women in Hulu’s serialization of Margaret Atwood’s dystopic, anti-Christian novel. If you thought atheist crusader Philip Pullman’s thinly disguised depiction of church authorities as evil in “The Golden Compass” book and movie were bad, Ms. Atwood runs circles around him. In her 1985 book and TV series, the polygamous men cite Bible verses and treat the women as sex slaves.
Braving the rain on Monday, the demonstrators held signs festooned with messages such as a giant NO! in rainbow colors over “Trump/Pence Must Go!”
This time around in the Senate star chamber, the Democrats who pretend to honor religious liberty while assailing nominees’ faith think they have a smoking gun. The word “handmaid.”
Mrs. Barrett and her husband have long been members of an ecumenical charismatic Christian group begun in 1971 called People of Praise, based in South Bend, Indiana, home to Notre Dame University and its law school, from which she graduated summa cum laude and taught constitutional law.
Women leaders in the group, including Mrs. Barrett, previously held the title of “handmaid,” which is derived from Jesus’s mother Mary’s own description of herself in Luke 1:38 as “the handmaid of the Lord.”
The group dropped that title in favor of “women’s leader” because “the meaning of this title has shifted dramatically in our culture in recent years,” a spokesman said.
Mrs. Barrett, 48, now serves on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, to which she was nominated by President Trump in 2017. At that time, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said at a hearing that Mrs. Barrett’s religious beliefs worried her because “the dogma lives loudly within you.”
Wow. Talk about open religious bigotry. But it’s OK because the senator is a Democrat, and they get to do this sort of thing. It’s not as if the media would have a problem with it.
Here’s a front-page headline from last Wednesday’s Washington Post: “Barrett long active with insular Christian group: Community preached subservience for women, former members say.”
Ah, those “former members.” You can always dig up a dissident or two to make the point you want, unless you’re reporting on Black Lives Matter or the Democratic National Committee, which are pretty much the same thing.
As for People of Praise, here’s more from their own media statement provided to Heavy.com:
“A majority of People of Praise members are Catholic, and yet the People of Praise is not a Catholic group. We aim to be a witness to the unity Jesus desires for all his followers. Our membership includes not only Catholics but Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Pentecostals and nondenominational Christians. What we share is a common baptism, a commitment to love one another and our teachings, which we hold in common.
“Freedom of conscience is a key to our diversity. People of Praise members are always free to follow their consciences, as formed by the light of reason, experience and the teachings of their churches.”
As the Apostle Paul instructs, and many biblically sound churches teach, men are to be the spiritual leaders in the church and in their own households and they are to love their wives as they love themselves. This is considered scandalous by our cultural commissars.
In Ephesians 5:25, Paul writes: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for her.” That means laying down your life if necessary. It’s why when things go bump in the night, the guy should be the one who goes downstairs with the baseball bat or the Sig Sauer.
Democrats are terrified of the attractive and articulate Mrs. Barrett, a mother of seven, just as they were threatened by Clarence Thomas, who destroyed their narrative that blacks belong on the leftist plantation.
https://qoshe.com/townhall/robert-knight/handmaids-of-bigotry/88000860
*******************************Barrett Nomination Shows Trump Is Giving Power to Everyday Americans, Not Ivy League 'Elites'
President Trump was elected on a simple premise. For too long, the American and global elites had ignored the plight of the average American. Trump’s 2016 electoral victory was echoed in other nations with the Brexit vote and the “yellow jacket” protests in France. The president’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court shows that he continues to be committed to returning power to the forgotten people.
In her opening statement before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Barrett observed that she would be the only justice on the current court that did not attend Harvard or Yale. She defended the honor of her Alma Mater, Notre Dame Law School, and quipped that she might be able to teach the other justices something about football.
There is no question that Atlantic Coast Conference football, where Notre Dame now plays, is far superior to Ivy League football. The same cannot be said about the quality of legal education at Harvard or Yale compared to the many other fine law schools we have across the country. Excellent legal thought and scholarship are not restricted to Boston, Massachusetts or New Haven, Connecticut.
It is interesting to note, that the last four presidents before Donald Trump were all graduates from Yale or Harvard at some level. George W. Bush actually attended both, Yale undergraduate and Harvard Business school. The last two unsuccessful Democratic nominees for president, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, were also Yale products. The last president before Trump who did not go to Harvard or Yale? Ronald Reagan.
Judge Barrett attended Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee for her undergraduate work and Notre Dame Law School in Indiana. It speaks volumes about Judge Barrett’s talent, abilities, and character that she was able to secure a spot as a clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court, under Justice Scalia, without a Yale or Harvard pedigree. It says even more about her that after the lofty heights of Washington, D.C. and the Supreme Court she decided to return to the heartland to continue her career and raise her family. In a time period where diversity is touted as a virtue, a Justice Barrett would bring diversity of thought and life experience to the Court.
This is not to say that Harvard and Yale are bad schools but thinking that they are the only excellent law schools is based more on snobbery than fact. The people who voted to place President Trump in office had grown tired of the bicoastal elites, who have more in common with the global elites than people in the heartland or as they call it “fly over country.” The elites promised that they knew better than the rest of us, and Americans watched as we lost our sovereignty and our jobs to countries overseas. The elites told us that America is not “exceptional.” The elites did not appear to put the interests of their fellow citizens above their own or those of the rest of the world.
That is why the nomination of Judge Barrett is so refreshing. She is an authentic wife, mother, and brilliant legal mind, straight from the heartland. By putting her forward, President Trump continues to demonstrate his affection for the forgotten people of our country and his disdain for the condescending elites.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Thursday, October 15, 2020
The One Metric That Has Decided Every Presidential Winner Since 1988...And Trump Has a Lock on It
Again, David Chapman and PollWatch are two good accounts that have been tracking the polling this cycle and cutting through the nonsense from the liberal media. There’s been a lot of funny business with the polling folks. Firms conducting polls around the same time but getting different results. We have shy Trump voters. We have youth vote interest tanking in this election cycle to levels not seen since 2000. Some polls have one million fewer young people voting this year. But somehow Biden is going to win by like 12 points. It’s unreliable to the nth degree. So, what Chapman did was compile a thread that cuts through a lot of the liberal media silliness out there. For starters, he nixes the idea that bad economies kill incumbents. Yes, that was the case for Bush 41, but historically the incumbent party is 12-11 when facing re-election during an economic downturn.
And speaking of incumbents, Chapman added, “no incumbent who has received at least 75% of the primary vote has lost re-election. Donald Trump received 94% of the primary vote, which is the 4th highest all-time. Higher than Eisenhower, Nixon, Clinton, and Obama.”
Oh, and it gets better.
“Three times in history America has faced a pandemic, recession, and civil unrest during an election year. The incumbent party is 3-0 in those elections,” wrote Chapman “What about polls? Well, polls are predicting Trump's win. The ABC poll shows Trump with a 19-point enthusiasm advantage.”
He noted that every candidate who held the edge in voter enthusiasm since 1988 has won the election.
During Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination hearing, we heard a lot about history and how it’s against the GOP in filling this SCOTUS vacancy left by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Well, here’s some bad news for Biden. No one who served more than 15 years in the Senate has been elected president. Joe Biden has been there for nearly four decades.
It’s why Chapman added that by every historic metric and trend, Trump is the one on the path to winning this election.
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No, Joe, There Was No Economic Boom Under Obama
There was no economic "boom" as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are misremembering. This was an economy that skidded into a financial ditch and seemingly never pulled out of it and got back on the prosperity hot lanes until Donald Trump won the election in November 2016.
You can mark the real recovery -- an economic inflection point almost the day after that surprise election outcome.
Every liberal forecaster and most academic economists had guaranteed America that, if Trump were elected, the stock market would crash; workers would be flattened; and, as New York Times economist Paul Krugman famously predicted, the economy would "never" recover.
Instead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared by 257 points the morning after the election (that's some crash), and it rose for the next three years, as it has again over the last several months. A few days after that election, small-business optimism surged by its most considerable amount ever measured, going back many decades. Family incomes surged to record-high levels in 2017, 2018 and 2019 as deregulation and tax cuts fueled a powerful engine. In three years, ordinary people had made more income gains than in eight years under the Obama-Biden administration.
But now we are being told a fairy tale that the Obama economy was booming and Biden miraculously fixed it and Trump "blew it."
Here's the reality check. Under Barack Obama, the economy barely grew 2% -- rather pathetic for a "recovery." The people who made the preposterous bullish claims that Obama saved the economy are the ones who now say the Biden economic plan will gain millions of jobs.
In the last year of Obama's presidency, growth shrunk to 1.6%, and the concern was the possibility of another recession. That's some boom.
If the Obama recovery had been as rapid as the average recovery, we would have had at least $1 trillion more GDP by 2016. If we had experienced a Ronald Reagan-style recovery, the GDP would have been $2.5 trillion larger when Obama left office. It is almost equivalent to the size of the entire output of the state of California gone missing.
The first four years of the Obama presidency were abysmal. The Obama-Biden $800 billion stimulus plan left unemployment higher every year than their economists had predicted if we did nothing. What bailed out Obama, ironically enough, was the shale oil and gas revolution that added millions of jobs despite the Obama-Biden hatred of fossil fuels. Most of the employment growth came in Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota. Meanwhile, most of the green energy subsidies went into failed and now-bankrupt companies such as Solyndra. And now Biden promises another $2 trillion for "clean energy" corporate welfare subsidies.
Throughout nearly all of the Biden-Obama presidency, roughly 1 out of 3 people in the United States rated the economy as "good" or "excellent." Most of the rest rated the economy "fair" or "poor." That number surged to about 65% rating the economy as "good" or "excellent" within a year of Trump's presidency.
People can debate Trump's handling of the virus and the mistakes that have been made. It now looks like under any scenario, except an airtight sequestering of those over the age of 75, smokers, diabetics and severely overweight people, we would have seen the same or worse results.
Now the question is which game plan gets the economy and employment back to normal as quickly as possible. Biden promises a $4 trillion tax hike on almost all U.S. businesses and investors. That's roughly 5% of everything we produce that gets snatched away in higher taxes. If you believe that this will get America back on the fast track, you probably believe Obama caused an economic boom.
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Democide and the 2020 Election
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s trusted Minister of Propaganda and certainly no friend to democracy, stated, “It will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gives its deadly enemies the means by which to destroy it.” What Goebbels was pointing out was that a democracy, by its very nature, must give voice to its critics, whose real agendas may be cleverly disguised or not revealed at all, as well as to its proponents. John Keane in the Griffith Review reminds us of the often overlooked truth that democracies contain within themselves the very seeds needed to destroy them. Citizens of a democratic nation, by electing through democratic means individuals who clandestinely seek to institute other forms of government once in office, can actually become unwitting accessories in the murder of the democracy they love. Keane believes this thinking is confirmed by democracy's historical decline and the view that democracy may well be its own campfire on ice. When voting in the coming 2020 election, Americans should understand this. They must be wary of candidates who promise almost everything, before completing their ballots and voting for the democracy-destroying Harris-Biden ticket with among other prescriptions, killing the Senate filibuster and packing the Supreme Court.
Fears for the world's democracies are well founded. When Goebbels began mocking democracy as a form of government, he had just played a major role in bringing down the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic had been a noble attempt at creating a true democracy in Europe in the second decade of the 20th century. Attempts to create such a democratic form of government following World War I came during an especially challenging time for the defeated German nation. War reparations, massive national debt, and economic controls on targeted areas of production caused frequent civil unrest. Nonetheless, with financial assistance from the United States under the Dawes Plan, this fledgling attempt at democracy in Europe experienced some noticeable success from 1923-1929. The Great Depression, however, would soon spell doom to the new Republic. Hitler and Goebbels used the very democratic institutions and laws of the Republic to destroy it. In the midst of ubiquitous poverty, unemployment and social unrest during the Great Depression, Hitler and Goebbels discovered that the core tenets of a democracy would allow a path for them to legally come to power. The freedom given to a nation's citizens, when combined with certain extrinsic conditions, could quickly provide the tools to create revolution and wholesale government change.
As with the Weimar Republic, we are now facing the potential death of our American democracy. This, the oldest and most successful democracy in the world, has brought the highest standard of living and individual freedom to its citizens that the world has ever known.
With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, an unforeseen cancer to democracy in America, marginalized since WWII, began to reemerge and metastasize. The education domain and the Democrat Party took hard turns to the left and began supporting socialism and neo-Marxist causes. The mainstream media in the U.S. also aligned itself squarely with the liberal and left-leaning movement of the Democrat Party. No longer was the press free and objective; it became the propaganda arm of the Left, adopting a role similar to Goebbels’ propaganda machine in Germany.
Democrats and the MSM found a ready scapegoat in the non-politician president, Donald J. Trump, an easy target to vilify. Because of his strong opposition to the left, the Democrats were obsessed with removing him from office and moving the nation in a more socialistic direction.
Never before in the history of the United States has a president been attacked so viciously and resolutely by the opposing party in confederation with the MSM. Then came the big lie, in fact, two big lies. The first lie was that “Trump colluded with the Russians” to gain the presidency. After three years of unceasing attacks by the Democrat/MSM confederation, that lie was invalidated. Lee Smith now details how President Obama despotically used FBI and CIA executives to overthrow the Trump administration. Both dollar and opportunity costs to this nation are significant.
This was followed by the Chinese world pandemic and along with it, the opportunity for the second big lie—"it was all President Trump’s fault.” The pandemic offered a new opening for the left to push allegations of systematic racism with corresponding rioting and protests. Democrat and MSM hatred for President Trump blinds them to their position’s tyranny.
Again, Democrats/MSM pointed fingers at Trump, using the 2020 election to make their end run to replace this noble experiment in governance with the shiny new object of socialism masked by social justice recriminations and an occasional dose of neo-Marxism. The democratic processes that made this country so unique and its citizens so endowed, are now being used to kill it. As Mark Chou explains, "when incapable of redressing the political crises they have manufactured themselves, whether because of individual freedom, bureaucratic morass, or the sluggishness of democratic politics, the claim is, democracies can die by their own hand." We see an example of the democratic process being used against itself in the Portland Mayoral race. Sarah Innarone, a leader in the Portland Antifa movement and candidate for mayor, acknowledged: “Peaceful protests, in my opinion, might not necessarily be moving the conversation forward."
Democracy may quickly become only a faint echo in America just as it was in the Weimar Republic—the result of internal democide. What is democide you may ask? Chu concludes: “Democracy is a precarious thing. It’s precarity, more to the point, emanates from itself. Democracy is the very thing, if we take Goebbels seriously, that can bring democracy to its knees." Or as the Australian historian Robert Moss wrote in The Collapse of Democracy, “where else but in a democracy can the system be destroyed through its own institutions?” Although his book was written in 1977, it beckons poignantly from the past to America’s political situation today. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker identifies such MSM threats as, “a media ever more eager to peddle unsubstantiated information of the most negative sort in pursuit of an ideological agenda, and a political class feeding dishonesty to its own partisans—is the larger allegory of modern [and fragile] democracy on display.”
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IN BRIEF
Biden questions "memory" of voters in poll who say they're better off now than four years ago (Fox News)
Biden forgets Mitt Romney's name (The Washington Free Beacon)
Biden talked of attending black church as a teen, but members don't recall it (The Washington Free Beacon)
Some Public Gatherings Are Better Than Others: Twenty-one arrested at DC protest on first day of Amy Coney Barrett hearings (Washington Examiner)
"Back the Blue" Blexit event in DC ends on mall with national anthem (The Daily Wire)
Patriot Post contributors Willie Richardson, Patrick Hampton, and Anthony Brian Logan attend DC Blexit rally (ABC 9 Chattanooga)
Columbus fans defy culture, coronavirus with holiday celebrations (The Washington Times)
Social Justice Warrior LeBron's Lakers win title — thousands of fans ignore virus restrictions, some violently target police (The Daily Wire)
Pelosi faces backlash after rejecting Trump's latest stimulus offer (Fox Business)
Gina Haspel blows off senators' demands to quit stonewalling Congress on Russiagate oversight (The Federalist)
The median household will pay more under Biden-Harris tax plan (National Review)
A farmer made a giant Biden-Harris sign out of hay bales, but it was set on fire the next day (The Washington Post)
Johnson & Johnson pauses coronavirus vaccine trials due to unexplained illness (Reuters)
Nevada man's COVID-19 reinfection, the first in the U.S., is "yellow caution light" about risk of coronavirus (USA Today)
U.S. forces conduct "targeted strikes" to slow Taliban advance (The Washington Times)
Meth bust at U.S.-Mexico border is second largest in history (Washington Examiner)
Policy: Beyond court packing: Here's how Dems plan to create a one-party state (Issues & Insights)
Policy: Why Americans Can't Just 'Listen to the Experts' (Real Clear Policy)
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Wednesday, October 14, 2020
If We Don’t Fight Back Against Corona Fascism, It Will Never End
Scott Morefield
Unicoi County, Tennessee, is a dark-red county in a dark-red state. It’s a beautiful, mountainous place with low population density and an even lower probability of spotting a liberal. The place is as ‘conservative’ as anywhere in the country, yet its feckless mayor just extended a countywide face-covering mandate for yet another month. Though you could count the daily coronavirus cases throughout the entire county on one hand, if not a finger or two, reasons cited were - wait for it - ‘schools fully opening’ and ‘flu season.’
I’m only picking on Unicoi because I live nearby and nearly lost my cool when I heard those ‘reasons’ for the extension calmly cited by the radio news guy while I was driving last week. Their cases are so low they can’t even pretend it’s about the ‘rona anymore, so might as well ‘save some lives’ from the flu, right? In other words, there’s a growing set of people in this country who are so in love with their slave gags that they’re willing to mandate them literally forever because hey, ‘it could save a life!’ And this is a RED county, so it’s obviously going to be infinitely worse in Democratic-controlled areas where they’re often required outdoors anywhere outside the home.
Even if masks worked to stop the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus and had zero negative effects either medically or psychologically, wearing them forever would be a ridiculous stretch. And yet, here we are, in a place where a 5-foot-tall 100-pound woman can literally get arrested for daring to remove her face burqa while sitting outside in the stands with her family at a high school football game in red-state Ohio. You’ve all seen the video by now and yes, I know the whole story. Still, it’s hard to stomach the optics of a giant police officer tasing and handcuffing a woman a third his size for such a ridiculous “offense.” I’m normally very pro-police, but I also think any law enforcement officer who enforces ANY coronavirus restrictions should seriously rethink their purpose. And what of the people sitting there calmly allowing it to happen? From what the woman shouted as she was being let away, she seemed to have had some sort of understanding that several attendees would commit their civil disobedience together, only to be left twisting in the wind, literally alone.
Indeed, what SHOULD happen in a situation like this? How long will people blindly follow these ridiculous, useless, and unconstitutional mandates? How long should we? What would have happened if everyone in that section of the stands had stood up, Spartacus-style, removed their masks and said “you’re going to have to take us too”? Here’s what happened in Spain last month when police tried to arrest a woman on the street, outside, for not wearing a mask. People chanted in support. Others tossed their COVID diapers off and pulled her away from their grasp. They didn’t attack police, but they didn’t allow them to enforce a tyrannical edict either. It was a beautiful sight to behold.
If this virus had a death rate most people should be seriously concerned about (it doesn’t), if temporary mask usage was really proven to permanently stop the spread of COVID-19 in a serious way (it’s not), if places like California, Peru, Columbia, Spain, and countless others that strictly implemented it immediately saw a serious, lasting decline in cases (they haven’t), then maybe the Mask Nazis would have a case. If masks worked, after all, their usage would only be TEMPORARY, right? So why are we now in month eight of this insanity? Why are places like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and even South Dakota NOT rolling in bodies now that they aren’t embracing universal, forced masking? The mask-cult never even attempts to answer those questions, of course. Their ‘answer’ is always some version of “mask up,” “masks work,” “masks have been proven to stop the spread of COVID-19,” and/or “it’s science!” Just simple Orwellian phrases for frightened, impressionable minds.
So, what does successful pushback against corona fascism actually look like? Obviously, getting and staying informed, then informing other people is critical (yes, this “Team Reality” Twitter list is a great place to start!). The more people who know the truth, the better chance we’ll have of beating this in the long-run. But on the ground, in our day-to-day lives, what should those of us who ‘know the deal’ on this actually do to push back? It depends on your own mindset, personality, and local and state government, of course, but personally, I think it’s time for a little bit of healthy civil disobedience.
No, I’m not talking about verbally harassing anyone or being overly confrontational, but I am talking about being a bit more brazen about walking into places while daring to breathe free air. Not all the time, and not in every situation (especially not on an airplane!), but when you do have a reasonable choice between muzzled and free, go with free if at all possible.
From a strategic perspective, where should this be done? Well, federalism and a few reasonably informed governors thankfully give us some opportunities to push on some lower-hanging fruit. If it’s possible to be noncompliant and still bear only social consequences (as opposed to fines or worse), then we should definitely do so, then keep pointing to the fact that the virus isn’t killing more people per capita in the low-compliance areas than the high-compliance ones.
To be completely transparent, I’m fortunate to live in a state without a statewide mandate and only a toothless local one. Still, indoor compliance is probably close to 75 percent. When I go maskless into a store or basically any indoor area, it’s always a little uncomfortable at first. I know I can be pretty bombastic here at Townhall, but in real life, I’m super easy to get along with and generally don’t like negative confrontation. Even knowing what I know, I still have to fight back against the innate desire to conform and simply go-along-to-get-along. But I know it’s important, so I make myself do it when I can. But it’s nice when we can lean on each other. When I see even one other person’s maskless face in a store, I’m always encouraged. In the same way that others are an encouragement to us, we can be an encouragement to them. If I feel this way, it’s likely others do as well when they see me.
Tougher, of course, are the states and places where mask-mandates are enforced with fines and/or compliance is pretty much 100 percent. Sadly, most places are like this, and while that belies the mask-cult’s contention that if “everyone just complied we’d beat the virus” (LOL), it also presents a problem for those of us bent on a little civil disobedience. If you are in this situation, you do what feels right for you. No judging! Maybe going maskless outside is a strong statement that’s reasonably low-risk. Maybe posting on social media, speaking facts to everyone you know, writing a letter to your local editor, or even writing and/or speaking to your local officials is the way to go. Keep pointing to comparisons between more-mask and less-mask areas because obvious truth is our best tool.
Indeed, we are living in an age where simply exposing your face is a revolutionary act. However, to take a cue from Gandhi, it’s time for us to BE the change we want to see. It’s time to simply refuse to comply with their nonsense. Yes, it will mean some uncomfortable moments. If things get worse, it could mean some financial and even legal ramifications for many. However, much worse are the consequences of living in a totalitarian, never-ending corona-fascist state and wearing a face diaper literally forever in a futile attempt to stop a highly transmissable respiratory virus with a .13 percent infection fatality rate.
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The U.S. Economy Is Roaring Back
Over the last few months, we have witnessed the sharpest economic snapback in US history. While many are still out of work, the future looks increasingly promising for those seeking employment. One would think that we were still mired in the deepest throes of April’s COVID-19 crisis if you take heed of the media’s narrative in recent weeks. It is clear the Democrats and Joe Biden are making the pandemic their closing argument for the 2020 election. But why? The economy is a losing argument for the Left.
As of early this October, a majority of voters believe that Trump is best equipped to handle the economy. If the Gallup poll showing 56% of voters believing that they are better off today than they were four years ago is accurate, the Biden campaign is in big trouble. With the political circus dictating the daily narrative, it’s easy to lose track of just how much progress has been made on the economic revival since 2016, and more specifically, since this past spring’s pandemic-induced lows. When assessing the strength of the economy, it’s very useful to look at some of the raw data that gives insight into the global supply and demand dynamic.
The commodity market is a clear window into the cost of goods and the level of demand that exists. As the Coronavirus shut down economies all over the world, global goods demand collapsed. Most notably was the oil market, as energy fuels the economy as a whole. Supply was steady, but a massive collapse in activity that forms demand left producers with a supply glut. The supply/demand gap was so large that oil futures (commodities trade primarily in the futures market) actually went negative, a historic event.
Just 7 months later the market has not only stabilized, but also has rebounded significantly. Oil, itself, is up over 100% from levels seen this Spring. This is a sound indicator of the resumption of robust economic activity. We are now escaping from economic contraction and are closing in on expansion. As consumers travel more and demand comes back for finished goods, the oil market will continue to flourish. This is one of many reasons why the Third Quarter GDP measure, to be released at the end of October only days before the election, will show the most significant rise in US history. The commodities market isn’t limited to oil. There are other very useful economic gauges within the basic goods market.
One of the most important, in terms of assessing global activity, is copper. Copper is a basic material used throughout manufacturing. The copper market collapsed this Spring along with all other raw goods during the crisis. At its low, copper was trading down roughly 35%. As activity has roared back to life, copper has been on an absolute tear. As of this writing, copper is up over 50% above its COVID lows, and is, in fact, higher than the market was trading pre-COVID. That’s a very promising signal emanating from the commodity market.
Here in the United States, we have many indicators painting a picture of a resurgent economy that may already be in a boom despite a high unemployment rate. We have very good cause to remain optimistic. Most recently, the PMI services index, a measure of economic activity in the services sector(and ~70% of the US economy), registered at ~56. A PMI reading 50 represents flat activity, while any figure above 50 indicates growth. 56 is a reassuring figure and represents a substantial increase in the level of activity in a significant portion of our economy.
If there is one metric that reigns supreme over all other data points, it’s the level of employment. On this front, we have seen a surprising rate of recovery. Many suggested this past spring we wouldn’t see a recovery in employment for years and years. Some even suggested we were at the beginning of a decade-long depression. This couldn’t be further from the truth. At the nadir of the Coronavirus recession, the unemployment rate in the United States was a staggering 14.7%. The Payroll Protection Plan (PPP) undoubtedly saved the US labor market from total collapse. Now, unemployment has contracted to 7.9%. This is a remarkable rebound, considering the shape we were in just 6 months ago. This growth is the highest on record for the United States.
Across metrics and hard data, it’s clear the economy is surging its way back to prosperity. It was during Obama’s administration that our leaders suggested we were in a “new normal” in which unemployment was steady at 5% and that we would see sub-3% growth indefinitely. The Trump economy blew that assumption up, capped with the most prosperous year on record in 2019. It is on the strength of that growth that we have been able to power our way through a total economic shutdown.
Despite this gratifying recovery, it remains fragile. A Biden-Harris administration would usher in regulatory and tax policies that would cripple the economy‘s growth and send us backward in ways we can’t imagine. Having come so far in the face of a devastating pandemic, it would be tragic to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Should such a political reversal of fortune transpire, those dire predictions of a long depression just may come true.
https://townhall.com/columnists/harrisondunn/2020/10/12/the-us-economy-is-roaring-back-n2577868
****************************************IN BRIEF
Barrett to praise Scalia in opening hearing statement, say court should not make policy (Fox News)
Democrats collude to accuse GOP of "court packing" ahead of Barrett hearings (Washington Examiner)
Hillary Clinton maintains 2016 election "was not on the level," and "we still don't know what really happened" (National Review)
Trump preparing new $1.8T coronavirus relief package, urges Congress to "go big" (Fox Business)
Dem group spends millions on Fake News Facebook stories in key districts (National Review)
One dead after leftist BLM-antifa groups clash with Patriot rally in Denver (The Federalist)
Planned Parenthood audit shows accusations of multiple incidents of racism (The Daily Wire)
Washington Post blames "systemic racism" for George Floyd robbing a Latino woman at gunpoint (Front Page Mag)
Security guard hired by local NBC News station charged with murder of right-wing protester (The Daily Wire)
Trump is no longer a COVID-19 "transmission risk," says the White House doctor (National Review)
Policy: How China is overtaking the U.S. with the world's No. 1 navy (The Daily Signal)
Policy: Nationalizing 5G is the wrong way for the U.S. to compete with China (The Daily Signal)
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My other blogs:
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
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