Pandemania

A Critical Analysis of the Covid Response
Eine kritische Analyse der Covid-Strategie
Un análisis crítico de la respuesta al Covid

by Dr R. Iván Iriarte, MD, MS
29 March 2021

Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 global pandemic, many issues have arisen that run contrary to historical precedents and known and practiced public health principles of the last century. This article discusses some of these issues: assumptions made without evidence, the incorrect case definition, PCR diagnostic test problems, the impact of these two factors on morbidity and mortality estimates, school closures, facemasks, lockdowns and their effects on children.

Assumptions about SARS-CoV-2 made without evidence – the creation of panic

Panic has been spread among the general population since the beginning of the pandemic, based on the idea of “asymptomatic transmission”. This idea was strongly influenced by a case report in Germany, in which an infection was attributed to contact with an asymptomatic person. Further investigation revealed that this person had actually been sick and had been suppressing her symptoms with medication. The original misleading paper was never rectified. Based on this, and limited case reports from China, the “experts” began to promote the idea that this virus behaves differently to other respiratory viruses. All prior knowledge indicates that epidemics are not driven by asymptomatic individuals. However, the decision-makers in this epidemic determined that this does not apply to COVID-19 and every single individual we encounter could be an infectious person capable of killing us. This is contrary to conventional reasoning in medicine and public health. Decisions have always been based on prior knowledge, until there is compelling evidence to disprove what we thought we knew. Articles in the literature have found that secondary transmission by asymptomatic individuals is very low. In a cohort study with a very large sample size, no one became infected among 1,174 contacts of 300 asymptomatic subjects who had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

Another assumption promoted by the “experts” in this epidemic is the idea that the general population would be immunologically “naive” to this virus and thus 100% susceptible to develop the disease. This is again not consistent with previous knowledge about human immunity to viral agents. Cross-immunity is a well-known fact. It is not reasonable to assume that the entire population is immunologically susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, when in fact it is very likely that many individuals have at least partial immunity to the virus due to prior infection with similar viruses or agents with similar antigenic properties. There are several studies showing that individuals have immunity to SARS-CoV-2 by T-cell mediated mechanisms.

Problems with the “case” definition

Over centuries of epidemic management, a case always constituted a sick individual who presented a series of established clinical criteria, confirmed – if deemed necessary – by a laboratory test. In the COVID-19 pandemic, a “case” has been redefined as anyone with a positive PCR test result, independent of clinical signs and symptoms. There is no historical precedent for defining a symptomless infection with a respiratory virus as a medical case.

The practice has been to report “new cases” every day based on positive test results and including asymptomatic individuals. Any person with even a rudimentary understanding of epidemiology knows that this is not how the incidence (new cases) of an illness is measured. Only the prevalence of positive test results is being measured every day. As we will see below, these results do not necessarily relate to infectiousness. The number of reported positive test results depends on the number of tests administered. When a high volume of tests are being administered, there will be a high number of positives. These positive test results are not “new medical cases” with the disease.

The correct way to estimate the disease incidence is to have doctors count and report subjects who are ill with characteristic symptoms and are then confirmed as COVID-19 cases through a positive test result. Incidence of hospitalizations should be reported in the same manner.

Problems with the PCR test

There are serious problems with the use of the PCR test on asymptomatic individuals. There is extensive literature that shows that the PCR test is not a “gold standard” for defining a case of disease and that it can have a high percentage of false positive results. It remains a well-known epidemiological principle that even with a highly sensitive and specific test, if the test is administered in a population with low disease or infection prevalence, there will be a relatively high percentage of false positive results.

This becomes even more problematic in light of the studies showing that at a high number of amplification cycles (as have been used during this pandemic) the PCR test detects RNA fragments that do not represent a viable virus. Authorities managing this epidemic have been identifying individuals who are healthy and do not present a risk to the community.

The research paper used by WHO at the beginning of 2020 to establish the PCR test as the primary criterion to diagnose COVID-19 was written by Corman, Drosten and several others. An independent panel of scientists found this work to contain a large number of flaws in its methodology and in the validity of the results. In addition, it was accepted for publication in a most irregular manner without the standard peer-review.

In a notice written on January 13, 2021, and published on January 20, 2021, WHO confirmed that PCR tests should not be used as the sole method of diagnosing COVID-19; they should only be used where clinical signs and symptoms are present; and they can yield false positive results at high amplification cycles. The package inserts accompanying PCR test kits state that the test should be administered only to patients with signs and symptoms suggestive of COVID-19.

Problems with estimates of morbidity and mortality indicators

It is evident that COVID-19 “cases” are being defined incorrectly. The logical conclusion is that there may be major errors in all reports of incidence, deaths and hospitalizations attributed to this disease. In the United States, anyone who dies with a recent positive PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 (up to 30 days prior to death) is counted as a COVID-19 death. CDC guidelines published in April 2020 encourage the reporting of COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death in circumstances where it played a role in the death, even without laboratory confirmation. It is unclear to what extent this was done in other countries as well. It is very important to investigate this matter, as the reported number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 is likely to be inflated.

Mitigation measures

World leaders believe – without evidence – that the way to mitigate the effects of the epidemic consists of imposing confinement measures, the generalized use of masks, restrictions on social activities, restrictions on mobility, business closures, curfews, school closures and more, including contact tracing and the quarantining of asymptomatic individuals. In the past the WHO established that the latter two measures should not be used under any circumstances. These measures were theorised to be effective without any evidence, and the potential harms caused by these policies were not calculated or taken into account. This goes against the fundamental principles of public health and medicine, which require the implementation of any intervention to be supported by evidence of its effectiveness. Any intervention should attempt to minimize the impact on the population’s daily life. The stated goal of all public health policy is to reduce total harm to the population, while considering a wide range of health, economic and social factors. The goal is not to reduce harm from a single disease only.

School closures – children are “granny killers”

The impact the epidemic response has had on children is one of the greatest disgraces in history. At the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, it was established that children mostly have a mild or asymptomatic presentation of the disease. However, decision-makers relentlessly promoted the idea that children, although they rarely get sick, are capable of infecting others. This unsupported idea was enough to order school closures and keep children away from their grandparents, as if they were potential “granny killers”. Studies show that children do not significantly transmit infection. Yet we already see the adverse effects that confinement and school closures have had on the mental health of children and adolescents. Sweden’s experience demonstrates that keeping schools open does not result in any excess morbidity or mortality in children or teachers. A recent article found that adults living in households with children actually have a lower risk of getting sick with COVID-19 than adults who live in households without children.

Mask use

There are many studies that show that masking is not effective in preventing infection transmission, except possibly in settings where there are sick individuals. A recent document published by WHO – in December 2020 – states that there is very inconsistent evidence proving the effectiveness of mask-wearing in the community for the prevention of respiratory virus infections, including COVID-19. When we compare the epidemic curves in places with and without mask mandates, the curves look similar. In fact, we observe a higher number of infections per 100,000 of the population in places with mask mandates.

The most important argument against the compulsory use of masks is simply the lack of evidence that anyone without symptoms walking around the community will be a contagious person. In public health management, sometimes it is appropriate to impose a certain measure upon an individual, for the common good, when there is evidence that the individual represents a major risk to the rest of the population. It is not acceptable, however, to restrict or impose a behavior on individuals without evidence that the individual represents a significant risk to the community, and that this measure will not harm the individual. It is very unlikely that an asymptomatic person is infectious. Therefore, it is unjustified to require everyone to wear a mask in the community, even if masks have shown some benefit when worn by individuals with symptoms. This argument becomes even stronger when we take the potential adverse effects of masks into consideration. These include symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, shortness of breath and other problems including psychological impact, acne, respiratory infections and dental problems.

Lockdowns

“Without lockdowns, the situation would have been worse”. This is the claim of lockdown advocates. However, this is the equivalent of administering treatment to a patient and claiming that despite a negative outcome the treatment is effective, because without the treatment the patient’s condition would have been even worse. Never in past epidemics or pandemics have lockdowns been imposed as a mitigation strategy over a large area or for a long period of time. Studies have shown that lockdowns cause unintended negative consequences to social well-being, mental health, physical health, mobility, employment, education, and the economy at large while undermining fundamental rights. Lockdown-induced deaths occur in younger people, causing an increase in total years of life lost. The comparison of epidemic curves in places with strict lockdowns and those with less stringent measures shows no significant differences in COVID-19 indicators. A simple cost-benefit analysis would clearly show that lockdown harms greatly outweigh any claimed benefits.

Summary

It is inexplicable that world governments and the “experts” advising them have chosen to completely ignore this information as if it did not exist, and persist in doing the following:

1. Reporting “new cases” on a daily basis, using only PCR test results.
2. Doing mass PCR testing, including asymptomatic individuals.
3. Imposing quarantines on asymptomatic individuals based on a positive test result or history of exposure.
4. Requiring the use of masks despite lack of evidence to support this mandate.
5. Insisting that lockdowns are the way to mitigate the pandemic.

A course-correction in the management of this epidemic is urgently needed. The response to the COVID-19 epidemic should be based on reliable data and sound public health principles that have been practiced successfully for over a century. The following measures should be adopted immediately:

1. Provide the public with accurate information about COVID-19 risk in order to reduce the fear.
2. Cease the mass administration of diagnostic tests on asymptomatic individuals.
3. Define cases according to clinical criteria – confirmed by laboratory tests. The determination of a case should be the decision of a duly licensed medical doctor.
4. Use the case definition listed above to determine indicators such as new cases (incidence), hospitalizations and mortality.
5. Establish measures to protect vulnerable individuals.
6. Encourage the population to take hygiene measures such as hand washing, covering the mouth when coughing and staying at home when sick.
7. Open schools, businesses and travel.

These measures are described in a published document by Pandemics Data & Analytics titled: “Protocol for Reopening Society”.

[References are available at the original.]

Covid, fetishism, fear → hatred

I am so sick of the masking charade. I am not diseased. You are not diseased. (No more than usual.) It’s like people just learned about the germ theory and something they've lived with forever is now seen as a deadly threat. It's pathetic and idiotic. The people pushing it are simply evil: manipulative psychopaths insisting that people fear each other. And demonize those who don't play along.

It’s particularly appalling that so much of the health care industry has participated in the panic. They have destroyed any good reputation they have had.

Even if Covid-19 were an especial threat, masking and distancing are almost completely useless. But after a few weeks in 2020, it was clear that it was not a threat at all for most of the population – particularly the young – and effective prevention and treatment were soon established for the rest, though denied and still denigrated by the opportunistic psychopaths who prefer to keep people living in fear. The mask is today’s version of a string of garlic. It is a fetish, a talisman.

And now the vaccines (of unknown efficacy, for just one of the thousands of viruses we live – yes, live – with) are clinching the whole charade’s purpose of separating an imagined unclean class from the clean, the blessed, those who walk in grace. The vaccine is another fetish. Instead of determining actual need – like, maybe you’re at virtually no serious risk if you contract the virus, or maybe you’ve already carried the virus and therefore already have the antibodies that the vaccine is supposed to stimulate production of (and a reminder here that asymptomatic people don’t spread it, and that even symptomatic people don’t spread it except with longer close contact than passing someone in the grocery aisle or even chatting with them for a few minutes) – instead of determining actual need, or weighing risk vs theoretical benefit, for each potential recipient, the vaccine has become a salvatory elixir. And those who refuse to take it will be pariahs, shunned from society, barred from jobs, shopping, dining and drinking and entertainment, travel, etc, life itself.

It’s all so sickening: the barriers both literal and figurative that have been thrown up between us all.

FÁSACH: waste, desert; deserted place; luxuriant growth

Fás, -áis, pl.id. m., act of growing, increasing, becoming; springing or resulting from (ó, de); growth, cinrease; a plant, a rod; a growth; an dara f., second- or after-growth; f. (na h-) aon oidhche, mushroom, al. the name of an ancient monument near Dundalk; ní’l aon fh. fé, it (he) is not growing well; d’éirigh an f. leis, he has grown considerably; tá f. gach uile shóirt ann, everything grows there; tá sé ag f. geal, fuar, ⁊c., it is grwoing white, cold, etc.; dims. fásán, -óg. See fáis.

Fáis, a., gs. of fás, growing; flasraidhe f., growing vegetables, greens.

Fás, a., empty, void, vain; go follamh, f., quite empty; in compds. fás-buille, a missed stroke; fás-bholg, an empty bag; fás-chogaint, empty chewing; fás-bhruchtghail, empty belching.

Fás, -áis, m., a void, a waste, a vacuum.

Fásach, -aigh, pl. -aighe, m., a precedent.

Fásach, -aighe, a., desolate, desert, overgrown with grass.

Fásach, -aigh, pl. id., -aighe, and -atha, m., a desert, a wilderness, a prairie, a wast; paster land, a field, luxuriant grass, pasture ungrazed for a long time; the grass headland of an unploughed field; a deserted place or house. f. coille, a grove; tá f. ag na buaibh ’san pháirc sin, the cows have prairie pasture in that field; ní féar atá ann acht f., that is not ordiinary grass but something more luxuriant; ag tabhairt an fhásaigh, lit. growing grass, i.e., dead and buried; bhí an gnó ’na fh. air, he got into business difficulties; beidh an teach so ’na fh. ort, you will not be allowed to enter this house; dearg-fh., sheer wilderness; flaitheas na naomh ar Shéamas ’na dhearg-fh., may heaven be completely closed against James (McD.). See fásaigh.

Fásachadh, -chta, m., desolation, act of depopulating.

Fásaidheacht, -a, f., act of devastating or turning into a desert.

Fásaigh, gs. of fásach, a., wild, overgrown with vegetation, ruined; teampall f., a deserted church yeard; biolar f., wild cress.

Fásaim, vl. fás, v. intr. I grow, increase; I am born, sprung from (ó); I rise, as a river from its source; I come constantly, as an income or a periodical allowance; tá an t-airgead ag fás chuige, he has a constant income; ar fhás eadrainn, those of our stock, those who grew up with us; there is a mod. tr. use.

—Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla, 1927, by Patrick Dinneen

Bealach na Spáinneach le Liam Mac Cóil

Is grástúil é an leabhar seo, an triú cheann sraithe. Agus grástúil atá a laoch óg, Lúcás Ó Bhriain, pionsóir den scoth, léannta, fiosrach, machnamhach, múinte, agus saonta. Giota beag mar Parsifal mar laoch. Tá sé gafa istigh plota mór casta, spiaireachta agus polaitíochta, agus creidimh i gceist freisin – bhíothas siocháin ar bun in Eoraip sa bhliain 1612, ach tá gabháil níos crua ar bun in Éirinn faoin rí nua Sasanach. Le linn a thurais ó Ghaillimh go dtí an Róimh, tá níos lú ina thuiscint an níos mó ina fhios air.

Tar éis a éalamh Sasana le báid go dtí na tIsilthíortha ag an deireadh dara leabhar, dúisíonn Lúcás ag tús an cheann seo i bhFrainc, baile beag cois fharraige san Bhríotáin. Bhí stoirm ar muir agus bhualadh a chloigean le crann scóide (.i. búm) an bháid. Tar éis an oiread sin gníobh i Sasana, bhí sé anois ina scíth, an t-aoi amháin in óstán leis an bhean tí agus a hiníon déagach aisteach, ag fanacht a neart a fhilleadh.

Ansin bád eile go hOstainn agus eachtraí nua ina hiarraidh a bhealach a dhéanamh go Róimh an litir diamhair a sheachadadh cuig an lámh Aoidh Mhór Uí Néill. Go fírinneach tá an cuid is mó den eachtraí i dtaobh an turas fada seachas an tóir Sasanach chun Lúcás a dunmháradh agus an litir a gabhail as: tríd na tíortha éagsula, na cathreacha mhúrtha, na bailte ar an mbóthar, agus na daoine go hairithe.

Is é bealach na Spáinneach an bóthar mileata idir Milano agus Bruiséil. Ó Lobháin taistealaíonn Lúcás le buíon de triúr shiúr agus triúr saighdiúir agus a ngiollaí mar tionlacán, Éirinneach siúd uile. Tá na saighdiúirí i seirbhís Uí Néill, agus bhí aithne ag an ceannaire ar an athair Lúcáis. (Faoin am seo, tá a bfhios ag roinnt na hÉireannaigh i ndeoraíocht i Lobháin ar an litir agus cé hé Lúcás féin.)

Ní gá a rá, baineann Lúcás Róimh amach agus criochnaíonn sé an scéal i seomra i mbarr páláis fad a bheith an t-amhránaí cáiliúil Girolamo ag canadh amhráin John Dowland i gcóisir i mbun.

“Dúradh liom gur litir thábhachtach í agus go gcaithfinn í a leagan isteach i lámha Uí Néill agus ina lámha seisean amháin. Rinne mé sin.” Thóg sé 1,262 leathanach (agus cló níos lú ná an cinn eile sa sé chéad leathanach an triú leabhar seo), gach uile acu suimiúil, beoga, tochtmhar go minic le gliondar agus iontas nó cumha agus brón, go hálainn i gcónaí.

[Bhí an leabhar foilsithe ag Leabhar Breac]
[An chéad leabhar sa tsraith: An Litir]
[An dara leabhar sa tsraith: I dTír Strainséartha]

How the Left Hijacked Civil Rights

Robert Woodson and Joshua Mitchell write in the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 16, 2021:

The civil-rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., helped deliver America from the historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow by forcing the nation to confront the full humanity of its black citizens. King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound and revealing its redemptive promise. Yet today many black leaders have lost sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.

The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency, sought liberation, and rejected despair.

First, there were the recolonization or “back to Africa” movements championed by the likes of Marcus Garvey. These movements sought an exit from America.

Second, there were the insurrectionists of the 19th century, who believed that black Americans should engage in armed rebellion or vocal opposition so that they might find a home in this country. Here lie Nat Turner and, later, W.E.B. Du Bois. They wanted to have their resistant voice heard in America.

Third, there were accommodationist movements of the sort undertaken by Booker T. Washington, who thought that loyalty to America was the best course.

Exit, voice, loyalty—however different these strategies were, each supposed that human agency mattered, that oppression wasn’t destiny. That is why, even amid great struggle, black Americans responded by building their own institutions and businesses. Great universities, medical schools, hotels, restaurants, movie companies and even a flight school sprung up. All of this was self-financed—and made possible by two-parent families, churches and other cultural institutions that provided shelter against the outside storm of racism.

In the 20th century, that same creative conflict between these three schools of thought reappeared. Debaters included the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Africa, which sought to establish a separate black state within our borders as an exit strategy.

King offered an inspiring combination of the strategies of loyalty and voice. In 1960, when students in Greensboro, N.C., became frustrated with the slow pace of legal action favored by Thurgood Marshall, King was sent to discourage them from engaging in civil disobedience. The students told King to lead, follow or get out of the way. They were determined to liberate themselves. They understood the difficulties and were undeterred by the obstacles. Like King, they were willing to persevere toward justice even when it was inconvenient, and to suffer the consequences of their actions. Hope, not hopelessness, animated all that they did.

King paid a heavy personal price for his hope that America was redeemable. Twice his home was bombed; once, his wife and daughter were nearly killed. Surrounded by hundreds of angry, armed black men after that bombing, he discouraged retaliatory violence. He was assaulted several times, and jailed as well, but he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence. He united black Americans behind the proposition that racism is evil in itself, not simply because white people visited it upon blacks, and that all must unite to combat evil. He warned us about the self-destructive path of violence, not only for blacks but for the whole nation.

One of the original arguments to justify slavery was that blacks were morally inferior and thus incapable of self-government. John C. Calhoun famously asserted: “There is no instance of any civilized colored race of any shade being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government.” Black efforts at self-liberation in the 19th and 20th centuries were based on the opposite assumption.

Today many black leaders defer to angry white progressives who make the same arguments about blacks’ lack of moral agency, reject the country’s founding principles, and seek to undermine its institutions. For months, the radical left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white supremacists. The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”

Civil-rights organizations and their leadership, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus, need to wake up before it’s too late. A faction of black leaders has been silent about, or complicit in, the takeover of the civil-rights movement by the radical left. The effect of this is not to glorify black achievement but to crucify low-income blacks, who are represented in national media outlets by their worst-behaved members, and bear the brunt of the attacks by the woke radical left on the cities where they live.

“Justice” for black America cannot be achieved by framing it solely through the distorted lens of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others in fatal police encounters. For every unarmed black American killed by the police, hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides.

Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America must be overthrown. When citizens declare that they support Black Lives Matter, do they share its opposition to the nuclear family, its objective of abolishing the police, and its view that the Christian cross is a symbol of white supremacy? These positions of the organization—language that has largely been scrubbed from its website—in no way improve the lives of black Americans. They give up on black America and encourage its needless suffering.

Like all Americans, blacks have triumphed over their circumstances only when they have adopted bourgeois virtues such as hard work, respect for learning, self-discipline, faith and personal responsibility. In the 19th century, Frederick Douglass found reading to be the key to his own personal liberation amid slavery, and he understood that whites deliberately withheld literacy from blacks precisely because it was so valuable. Bourgeois values drove blacks to build the powerful religious, fraternal, and other voluntary associations that helped them thrive in the worst days of Jim Crow and cultivated the essential virtues in the next generation.

There would have been no civil-rights movement without this. But radical progressives now insist that such virtues are the legacy of white supremacy, colonialist values that reflect the continuing bondage of blacks to oppressive Western culture. The only “authentic” expression of blackness in America, they claim, is the opposite of bourgeois self-restraint and discipline—indulging in the passions of the moment, whether anarchic rioting, insulting teachers or other unsalutary forms of expression. The radical left—disdaining exhortations toward work, family and faith as “respectability politics”—argues that blacks should feel free to indulge their “true” nature, echoing the age-old white-supremacist notion that said nature is violent, lascivious and incapable of self-restraint.

The slave masters’ trick of old was to dissuade blacks from adopting bourgeois values precisely so they could be kept in servitude. Marriage was forbidden and families were split apart. Douglass observed that slaves were encouraged to indulge in drink and debauchery during the holidays so they would be “led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery.”

But there were always those who saw through the trick and used the holidays to hunt, make items for sale, visit distant family members, and hire out their own labor. Some of these were even able—eventually—to purchase their freedom.

Tellingly, leftist elites teach their own children the values of working and studying hard even as they encourage behavior among blacks that will make sure they remain uncompetitive but “authentic.” By the time young blacks today discover, as did the slaves of Douglass’s time, that freedom understood as “do whatever you feel like” is no way to build a worthwhile life, it will be too late. The fruits of the civil-rights movement’s hard labor—teaching the young to be so self-disciplined that they were able to resist responding in kind to hatred and abuse from whites—will have been lost.

We must turn away from the present course, which preaches despair rather than hope. Black achievement must be glorified. The crucifixion of black America by the radical left must halt. There is a grander, more fruitful future for us all.

Mr. Woodson, a veteran of the civil-rights movement, is founder and president of the Woodson Center and author, most recently, of “Lessons From the Least of These: The Woodson Principles.” Mr. Mitchell is a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Center for the American Way of Life and author of “American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time.”

Presidential Inaugural Address, January 20, 2017

Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power, and we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent.

Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth.

Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you. ...

What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.

January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. ...

Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves.

These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public.

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

We are one nation – and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.

The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.

For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry;

Subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military;

We’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own;

And spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.

We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon.

One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.

The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.

But that is the past. And now we are looking only to the future.

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power.

From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.

From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. ...

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. ...

It is time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget: that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American Flag.

And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky, they fill their heart with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same almighty Creator.

So to all Americans, in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, and from ocean to ocean, hear these words:

You will never be ignored again.

Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.

Together, We Will Make America Strong Again.

We Will Make America Wealthy Again.

We Will Make America Proud Again.

We Will Make America Safe Again.

And, Yes, Together, We Will Make America Great Again. Thank you, God Bless You, And God Bless America.

[source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/]

More Salem than Thanksgiving: Coronavirus panic has set America back hundreds of years

Heather Mac Donald, The Spectator US, November 24, 2020 [excerpts]:

Nearly half the 102 occupants of the Mayflower died in their first year of settlement at Plymouth, sometimes at a rate of three a day. Such a mortality rate was predictable. The earlier outpost at Jamestown, founded in 1607, lost 66 of its original 104 settlers in its first nine months. ...

And yet the voyagers kept coming, driven by something beyond safetyism — religious zeal, ambition, passion for discovery, the desire for greater freedom. Those Americans who later spread across the continent, whether as solo explorers or in wagon trains, likewise eschewed a ‘stay safe’ philosophy.

Today, we are strangling American society in order to avoid a risk of death so infinitesimal — roughly 0.001 percent — for the majority of Americans that it would not have registered in any possible cost-benefit analysis governing both notable American endeavors and quotidian activities over the last four centuries. Our current Thanksgiving Day mantras — ‘Stay within your pod. Stay within your bubble. Stay within your household’ (in the words of a University of California, San Francisco, epidemiologist); don’t travel, don’t share food, don’t touch your family members or friends, speak only in hushed tones — make a mockery of the spirit that creates a country and sustains human life.

This present moment is less like that first Thanksgiving celebration and more like the Salem witch frenzy of 1692. To be sure, the coronavirus is real; witches were not. The virus has cost thousands of lives; witches did not. But the fear that has gripped much of the population over the last year, whipped up by sundry experts and authorities, is as disconnected from reason as that emblematic burst of hysteria in colonial Massachusetts and other such panics throughout medieval and early modern Europe. The shared features of all such contagious fear events include the following:

The belief in ubiquitous threat

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti has advised Los Angelenos to ‘assume that everyone you encounter is infected’. Under even the most liberal assumptions of undetected community spread, however, only a small fraction of Los Angeles’s population would be infected and currently contagious.

As for the threat of death, most of the population faces none from the virus. The average age of coronavirus decedents is 80, which is four years higher than the average life expectancy for US males in 2018 and just a year under the average life expectancy of females. Most decedents have underlying co-morbities. Up to two-thirds of coronavirus casualties may have died of other causes by the end of 2020. Forty percent of US coronavirus deaths have occurred in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Sadly, death is already the fate of virtually all residents of such facilities, however much we may understandably try to defer it.

Scapegoats and stigma

Public officials have piled onto those intransigents who do not wear masks in the great outdoors, blaming them for the spread. Outdoor mask refuseniks have been screamed at and shamed by citizen enforcers of the outdoor mask dogma. The media imply false causal connections ... But there is no evidence for open-air transmission, absent highly unusual packed settings and prolonged contact. Transmission, per the CDC’s own contact tracing guidelines, requires a cumulative 15 minutes of close contact with an infected person, overwhelmingly in poorly ventilated, cramped indoor settings. In the outdoors, circulating air disperses any possible viral dose to the point of non-existence, even if most outdoor encounters were not too fleeting to be of concern.

People who have recovered from the virus are shunned as pariahs, despite their lack of infectious status.

Amulets and ritualistic gestures

The mask is believed to possess totemic power, even though there is little evidence that its use correlates inversely with community spread or that it protects wearers from infection. ...

Magical formulas and the arbitrary exercise of government power

Once hysteria takes over, any expectation that public officials will act according to reason is discarded. New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has long set a metric for re-closing the city’s schools: a three percent infection rate among the tested population. He arrived at the number in conjunction with the teacher’s union. How did the mayor and union come up with it? We don’t know. Is it related to anything real? By definition, no. The evidence is by now overwhelming that children have virtually no risk of dying from the virus, nor do they spread it to adults. A random sample of 16,000 students and staff in New York City schools yielded only 28 positive tests; none of those cases resulted in serious illness or death. The New York City school system, were it a free-standing community, would be among the nation’s safest places to reside. ...

Virginia requires that children from age two onwards wear masks. Such a practice, lacking any grounding in actual science, will likely have crippling psychological consequences.

The rising caseload and the oncoming Thanksgiving holiday have triggered a new explosion of arbitrary government dictates. Oregon’s governor is limiting social gatherings to no more than six people. How did she arrive at that number? By no known body of evidence. If it existed, presumably the six-person ceiling would be universal. But Yolo County, California (where Sacramento is located), has a 16-person cap on Thanksgiving and other gatherings, while Kentucky is limiting Thanksgiving to eight people from two different households. The state of California magnanimously allows a grand total of three households. Before celebrating such relative liberality, note that California requires that the lucky three social units (whose members must of course all be masked) disperse after two hours. That three-household, two-hour ceiling applies even if the gathering occurs in a public park, where the chance of transmission is at its lowest ebb.

Without any advance warning, Los Angeles County shut down all outdoor dining on November 23, signing the death warrant for thousands of restaurants and casting thousands of workers back into unemployment. Restaurant owners had invested thousands of dollars into outdoor heat lamps and other outdoor dining equipment; they will have to throw out thousands of dollars of food.

Los Angeles County has no evidence of any transmission among outdoor diners. It is reacting blindly to a rising case count, even though more than 72 percent of the new cases reported on November 21 were in the lowest risk category — people under 50 — and nearly half of the 34 county residents who died of COVID-19 on November 21 (per the usual over-inclusive count methodology) were over 80. Protecting those octogenarians does not require wholesale business destruction.

The experts are so confident in their fear-induced hold over the popular mind that they feel no compunction about self-contradiction. The CDC has acknowledged that there is little surface transmission of the virus. Yet it recommends that should someone be so rash as to attend a Thanksgiving gathering outside his home, he must bring his own food and utensils so as to avoid touching his host’s kitchenware. We are regressing further back along the civilizational path to medieval times, when everyone carried around his own spoon on his belt. At least those medieval trenchermen followed the environmentally sound practice of reusing their spoons. The CDC advises that all utensils and plates be thrown out after the Thanksgiving meal, showing yet again that environmentalism is usually just empty virtue-signaling.

The experts fear no rebellion over rules that destroy the very thing that they purport to regulate. Bringing your own meal to Thanksgiving and not even sharing it cancels the spirit of holiday. Thanksgiving becomes indistinguishable from those cheerless ‘family dinners’ where every teenager microwaves his own chosen frozen food and then slinks back with it to the privacy of his bedroom and smartphone.

Fetishes

Case counts have been the object of veneration for months, despite their near meaninglessness. The obsession with the case count is an implicit admission that the death rates have been a disappointment, for they are falling rather than increasing. Currently, infections among the young make up the lion’s share of new cases; in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for example, 61 percent of confirmed and probable cases are connected to the university there. Most of these cases among the young are asymptomatic: the infection is so mild that the infected person is unaware he even has it. These infections are being picked up thanks to mandatory testing in college and school settings. It is not just the young, however, that are frequently asymptomatic. Across the entire population, a whopping 40-45 percent of cases are initially unknown to their bearer before a test comes in positive.

A rising case count among the least at-risk population is not something to be feared, since it heralds the approach of herd immunity. Males in the 20-29 age bracket without underlying conditions have 99.9997 chance of surviving a coronavirus infection; females in that age bracket have a 99.9998 survival rate. ...

Yet since the start of the pandemic, the media and their bevy of public health sources have histrionically covered case counts, usually on an hourly basis, as if they signaled imminent doom. ...

And despite today’s raging headlines, the current crisis is still largely anticipatory. Los Angeles County’s director of public health, Barbara Ferrer, has been leaning heavily on the promise of future disaster. ‘This much of an increase in cases may very well result in tremendous suffering and tragic deaths down the road,’ she told the Los Angeles Times on November 12. For now, however, the number of hospitals that are severely burdened nationally is small; at least a quarter of all cases now being labeled as coronavirus hospitalizations in the daily media count were likely admitted for other problems and only retroactively classified as coronavirus cases following a positive test. California governor Gavin Newsom has put 94 percent of the states’ residents under another stay-at-home order. But only six percent of the state’s hospital beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients, up from four percent in early November.

Nationally, the case fatality rate and presumed infection fatality rate continue to drop.

Human sacrifice

Almost all the businesses being sacrificed on the altar of coronavirus fear are as innocent as the vestal virgins of old. The public health authorities have no idea what is driving the current spread. They have no hard evidence that outdoor or indoor restaurant meals are responsible; they certainly have no evidence that shopping is responsible. And yet millions of livelihoods are being destroyed in the exercise of inebriating, limitless power. ‘We don’t want you going into restaurants and sitting and eating outside, and we don’t want you going into retail establishments either,’ Los Angeles’s ubiquitous Barbara Ferrer pronounced recently. Ferrer has no basis for stigmatizing retail establishments.

The shaming of heretics and dissenters

Neuroradiologist Stanford scientist Scott Atlas and the physician scientists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration have been denounced for challenging the efficacy of economic lockdowns, school shutdowns, and outdoor mask requirements. Their heresies have been borne out by the evidence.

False agency

The director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, a major purveyor of pandemic panic, claimed in the Wall Street Journal that the pandemic was threatening ‘jobs and businesses’. It is not the pandemic that is threatening jobs and businesses, however; political decision-making is. COVID is also ascribed a power that it does not likely have. The New York Times has dedicated a special section to ‘those we’ve lost’ from COVID (ignoring the many more people we lose each day to cancer and heart disease). One alleged COVID casualty was a 101-year-old veteran. We are to believe that without COVID, he would have lived an indefinite number of further years.

An advanced civilization builds towards the future, as the Pilgrims and other New World settlers understood. It accumulates social and economic capital to be drawn on by individual discoverers and entrepreneurs for further progress. Now, however, we are cannibalizing our economic inheritance, in the fantastical belief that government transfer payments, generated from ever increased debt, can substitute for private economic activity. Our capital, now being recklessly destroyed by arbitrary government fiat, will take generations to rebuild. We take for granted everything that hard-won prosperity has provided us — well-functioning services (compared to Third World disorder), dependable maintenance, the luxury of choice. We will miss such prosperity when it follows the fate of those millions of businesses whose loss is causing despair, substance abuse, and suicide.

A mature civilization understands that risk is part of life and that there are higher purposes — even mere sociability — than avoiding death at all costs. No great venture can be accomplished if staying safe is life’s only guiding principle. Now, however, our elites mock courage and perseverance, explicitly repudiating the virtues that built this country. President Trump, upon leaving the hospital after a coronavirus infection, admonished the country to not ‘be afraid’ of the virus, in the Washington Post’s words, and to not ‘allow it to dominate’ our lives. That imminently reasonable exhortation, once expected in a leader, is still being denounced by public health experts and the media nearly two months later. If Americans do not repudiate this ethic of fear, future Thanksgivings will be even bleaker than this year’s.

Preventing IP leaks with a VPN and torrent client

There’s a good article from November 7, 2020, at vpnuniversity.com/learn/how-to-fix-every-vpn-ip-leak, though it doesn’t mention torrent client leaks. A good testing site is ipleak.net. It would be good practice to visit ipleak.net every time you use a VPN and before downloading a torrent.

To prevent your torrent client from revealing your home IP address as it tries to maximize your connections, you have to specifically bind it to the VPN network interface. With qbittorrent, for example, in Preferences > Advanced > “Network interface”, choose, on a Mac, e.g., utun1 or, if present, utun2 or ipsec0. When your VPN is connected, select its network address in “Optional IP address to bind to” (just below “Network interface”). On the Mac, that address should be specified in System Preferences > Network or VPN. Or it is given in the VPN application. Also on the Mac, running the ifconfig command in Terminal will show what network interface the VPN is using.

As mentioned above, it would be good practice to check this, i.e., open your torrent client, before downloading a torrent. Then test your setup at ipleak.net.

Other steps to prevent IP leaks while using a VPN:

1. Turn on your VPN’s kill switch, so that it will stop activity if the VPN disconnects. In PureVPN, e.g., this is in Preferences > Advanced options.

2. If your VPN is not using DNS servers from the virtual server it’s using – and instead using your ISP’s DNS servers, or even the DNS servers you’ve otherwise specified (although many ISPs force you to their own) – then you need a new VPN.

3. IPv6 leaks. The new IP address system (because IPv4 addresses ran out in 2011) is still rarely used outside of local networks. It can be disabled on the Mac in System Preferences > Network > WiFi > TCP/IP > “Configure IPv6” → Off. If ”Off” is not an available option, set it to ”Link-local only”, which will use it only on your local network. Or try the Terminal command “sudo networksetup ‑setv6off 'Wi‑Fi' ” (include the straight quotemarks around “Wi-Fi”) (or “Ethernet”) to turn it off completely. Disable IPv6 in Firefox at about:config > “network.dns.disableIPv6” → false (double-click). Alternatively, one of the advanced options in the Windows version of PureVPN is IPv6 leak prevention.

4. WebRTC leaks. This is more a potential security vulnerability while you’re in your browser. It can be disabled, e.g., in Firefox at about:config > “media.peerconnection.enabled” → false (double-click). Ipleak.net describes how to disable it in Chrome and Opera.

As also suggested in a comment to the above-cited article, you can disable location requests, which could reveal your precise location. In Firefox Preferences > Privacy & Security > Permissions > Location, check “Block new requests asking to access your location”. And in about:config, set “geo.enabled” to false.

Finally, use the privacy mode of your browser so no record of your activity (cookies, cache, etc.) is saved.

PS:  In qbittorrent, if a download isn’t starting, try pausing and then resuming it.

PPS:  On a Mac, the torrent client likely requires “full disc access”. Make sure that it is added to the list in System Preferences under Privacy & Security.

PPPS:  When choosing a location in your VPN, be sure it is a “P2P” server.

Tucker Carlson Tonight, November 6, 2020

Who exactly is Joe Biden, the man who may be our president come Jan. 20? The truth is, as of right now, we don’t really know.

We have no clue what Joe Biden actually thinks, or even if he’s capable of thinking. He hasn’t told us and no one’s made him tell us for a full year. In fact, it’s becoming clear, there is no Joe Biden. The man you may remember from the 1980s is gone.

What remains is a projection of sorts, a hologram designed to mimic the behavior of a non-threatening political candidate: “Relax, Joe Biden’s here. He smiles a lot. Everything’s fine.” That’s the message from the vapor candidate.

So who’s running the projector here? Well, the first thing you should know is that the people behind Joe Biden aren’t liberals. We’ve often incorrectly called them that. A liberal believes in the right of all Americans to speak freely, to make a living, to worship their God, to defend their own families, and to do all of that regardless of what political party they belong to or what race they happen to be born into or how far from midtown Manhattan they currently live.

A liberal believes in universal principles, fairly applied. And the funny thing is, all of that describes most of the 70 million people who just voted for Donald Trump this week. Most of them don’t want to hurt or control anyone. They have no interest in silencing the opposition on Facebook or anywhere else. They just want to live their lives in the country they were born in, and it doesn’t seem like a lot to ask. So by any traditional definition, they are liberal.

However, our language has become so politicized and so distorted that you would never know it. What you do know for certain is that the people behind Joe Biden are not like that at all. They don’t believe in dissent. “You think one thing? I think another. That’s OK.” No, that’s not them at all. They demand obedience to diversity, which is to say, legitimate differences between people is the last thing they want. These people seek absolute sameness, total uniformity. You’re happy with your corner coffee shop? They want to make you drink Starbucks every day from now until forever, no matter how it tastes. That’s the future.

Now, if these seem like corporate values to you, then you’re catching on to what’s happening. The Joe Biden for President campaign is a purely corporate enterprise. It’s the first one in American history to come this close to the presidency. If a multinational corporation decided to create a presidential candidate, he would be a former credit card shill from Wilmington, Del., and that’s exactly what they got. What’s good for Google is good for the Biden campaign and vice versa. We have never seen a more soulless project. They literally picked Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate, someone who can’t even pronounce her own name. Not that it matters, because it’s purely an advertising gimmick.

We watched all of this come together in real time. We stood slack-jawed in total disbelief as a man with no discernible constituency of any kind rose to the very top of our political system, as if by magic. It’s possible in the end that Joe Biden himself never convinced a single voter of anything over the entire duration of the presidential campaign, but he didn’t have to. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination because he wasn’t Bernie Sanders. He came to where he is today because he isn’t Donald Trump. It’s the shortest political story ever written.

Now, whatever you may think of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, they did it the traditional way. Each one of them had the support of actual voters. Living, breathing people loved them, believed in them, vested their hope in them, and, by the way, agreed with their ideas, which they articulated clearly. But corporate America hated them both. They couldn’t be controlled, particularly Donald Trump, whose complete unwillingness to submit made him the greatest possible threat. That’s why they hate Donald Trump, because he won’t obey.

It’s insulting to say that Joseph R. Biden won this election, if that is what comes to pass. The tech companies will have won. The big banks will have won. The government of China, the media establishment, the permanent bureaucracy, the billionaire class – they will have won, and not in the way that democracy promises. If a single person equaled a single vote, a coalition like that could never win anything. There aren’t enough of them.

But as a group, they have something that Donald Trump’s voters sadly do not have, and that is power. They have lots of power and they plan to wield that power, whether you like it or not. It’s all starting to look a lot like oligarchy at this point. The people who believe they should have been in charge all along now may actually be in charge.

So what does that mean for the rest of us? Will corporate America declare victory and back off? Can we speak freely again? Will they take the boot from our necks? Can we have America back now that the Great Orange Emergency has passed? Will the mandatory lying orders finally be lifted?

Those are the questions we’ll be paying attention to, since we plan to stay in this country. And one other thing while we’re at it, who’s excited to greet our new corporate overlords? Who plans to collaborate, particularly of those on the right side, the Republican side, the side that said it was defending you? Who’s happy about all of this? That seems worth keeping track of, just so we know who we’re dealing with here.

(via foxnews.com)

Donald Trump, Grand Rapids, Michigan, November 2, 2020

(excerpts)

(01:32:30)
We’ve had so many things that ... the witch hunt, I call it the witch hunt. And it turned out to be a phony witch hunt, and they should have known it the first day. They did know it the first day. But it’s the deep state, it’s whatever you want to call it, but it should have never happened. Think of it. They spied on our campaign. They got caught. They tried to take down a duly elected president of the United States. They got caught. And you know who knew all about it? Barack Hussein Obama and sleepy Joe Biden. They knew all about it. They knew all about it.

And then I watch the fake news back there, look at all of them. Look at all of the fake news, isn’t that nice. It’s a lot of fake news. Then I watch the fake news saying, “You know, his attitude is a very tough attitude. He’s not very nice, he’s a very nasty person.” No no. We’re defending ourselves, and we’re defending all of these people that voted for us.

And then what happens? It turns out to be that it was them that were guilty of all of these horrible crimes. Including the crime of treason, because when you try and take down a duly elected president, you know, it’s called treason. It’s big stuff. So we’re going to see how that all works out. ...

(02:04:28)
Every corrupt force in American life that betrayed you and hurt you is supporting Joe Biden. The failed establishment that started the disastrous foreign wars that hurt our country so badly and hurt our young people so badly, they support Sleepy Joe Biden. The career politicians that offshored your industries and decimated your factories and sent your jobs away, they support Biden. The open border lobbyists that killed our fellow citizens with illegal drugs and gangs and crime, they support Biden. The far left Democrats that ruined our public schools, depleted our inner cities, defunded our police, and demeaned your sacred faith and values, they support Biden. The anti-American radicals defaming our noble history, heritage, and heroes, they support Sleepy Joe Biden. Antifa, and the rioters, looters, Marxists, and left-wing extremists, they all support Biden.

This election comes down to a very simple choice. Do you want to be ruled by the corrupt and selfless political maniacs that you’re dealing with? Or do you want to be ruled by the American people? You’re supposed to be ruled by the American people. Do you want to be represented by a career politician who actually doesn’t like you, or by an outsider who will defend you like you have never been defended before? That’s what I’m doing. And it’s not easy, but there’s nothing I’ve ever enjoyed more in my life, because we are making so much progress. We have to now finish the progress. A vote for Biden is a vote to hand the keys of government over to people who don’t like you, don’t respect you, and who want to rob your children of their American dream. We have a great American dream. We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to keep our great American dream. A vote for Biden is a vote to give control of government over to the globalists, and communists, and socialists, and wealthy liberal hypocrites, and all of those that want to silence, censor, cancel, and punish you.

If you want your children to be safe, if you want your values to be honored, if you want your life to be treated with dignity and respect, then I am asking you to go to the poll tomorrow and vote, vote, vote. Remember what I said four years ago. I am your voice, and we will make America great again, and that’s what we’re doing. For the last four years, the depraved swamp has tried everything to stop me and to stop you, because they know I don’t answer to them. I answer to you. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re here. Together we will defeat the corrupt establishment. We will dethrone the failed political class, and we will drain the Washington swamp. And we will save that American dream. That beautiful, beautiful American dream. ...

This election is a choice between a deadly Biden lockdown or a safe vaccine that ends the pandemic and leads to the greatest economy in the history of the world. That’s where we’re going. We were there, and we’re going to get it back very quickly. And that’s going to bring our whole country together, because success brings it together, and it was happening. Before that plague came in, it was happening. People were calling me that you would least suspect, and it was all happening. And then we had to close it down and now build it up, and it’s building … It’s not a V. It’s a super V. It’s a super V. ...

Joe Biden is promising to delay the vaccine and turn America into a prison state. He’s looking you in the face and he’s locking you in your home while letting rioters, Antifa, the radical left, run down your streets, riot in your streets, burn down your stores, beat you over the head, and they’re allowed to do that. But you can’t go to your church. You can’t have dinner with your family, but you’re allowed to protest and riot. That’s why I call all of these protests, because we’re allowed to protest. You’re not allowed to meet and you’re not allowed to pray together, but you’re allowed to protest, so I call everything that we do a protest. The Biden lockdown will mean no school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgivings, no Easters, no Christmas, no 4th of July, no future for the youth. Other than that, it’s actually quite good.

A vote for Sleepy Joe Biden is a vote for lockdowns, lay-offs, and misery. ...

(02:32:27)
We inherit the legacy of American patriots who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to defend our country, our families, and our freedom. We stand on the shoulders of American heroes who crossed the ocean, settled the continent, tamed the wilderness, laid down the railroads, raised up the great skyscrapers, won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism, and made America into the single greatest nation in the history of the world. And the best is yet to come. The best is yet to come.

Proud citizens like you, who helped build this country, together we will take back our country. We’re taking it back at a level that nobody has believed. We are taking it back and we are winning and we’re going to win tomorrow. We are returning power to you, the American people. With your help, your devotion and your drive, we are going to keep on working, we are going to keep on fighting, and we are going to keep on winning, winning, winning. We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God, and together with the incredible people of Michigan, we have made America powerful again. Our military, it’s never been like this. We have made America wealthy again. We have made America strong again. We have made America proud again. We have made America safe again, and we will make America great again. Thank you, Michigan. Go out and vote. Thank you very much. Thank you.

(via rev.com)

Reading the New York Times

A friend writes:

The Times can’t resist; their repulsive hubris is so great it can’t help but burst forth yet again: “A Biden landslide? Some Democrats can’t help whispering”. They really do assume Biden will win, and win big. Perhaps this horrific scenario will come true, who knows – but it seems incredible that people would actually prefer the violent, totalitarian Dems over Trump.

They actually want to go back to the horrific regime change wars, more unnecessary death and suffering and maimed vets and grieving families, all in the service of US corporate imperialism! Fawning over corrupt European technocrats, refusing to speak to dictators and bombing their countries. That’ll show ’em! Go back to fascistic trade deals that siphon ever more jobs away from Americans, import more lower-wage tech people from India etc, open the borders and let in the low-wage hordes who will undercut US workers and keep millions of them unemployed and homeless. Mandate what language is acceptable, what art we can view, what books we can read, what thoughts we may speak or publish. “Sensitivity reading” will be the order of the day, and all things we once treasured will be shredded, burned, or smashed or disappeared before our eyes.

Down with western culture, old white men statues, the founders of the country, the people who fought and died in the Civil War, smash them to smithereens, erase all history that offends and rewrite it to suit PC standards, and rewrite school curriculum to propagandize the students, up with all manner of ugly “woke” blobby “artpieces” and graffitied streets festooning our public spaces replete with angry POC screeds and proclamations. Truth and reconciliation tribunals, anyone? Apologize for the crime of being born white? Re-education? Reparations? Private property seized to be redistributed? Race war? Quotas everywhere; oh it will be delightful. All the serendipity, nuance, charm, innocence, and the freedom and possibility of life to be expunged in favor of the suffocating New Red Guard sterility and violence; an atmosphere of constant fear. Now we must follow orders! The new Stasi will also rule, the witch-hunters will run ever more amok as they’ll have been given what they’ll see as a mandate to crush and destroy the heretics.

Meanwhile, the Deep State/corporate/MIC/media machine will smoothly roll on after the inconvenient Trump hiccup has been vanquished, doing what it does while the masses brawl far below them. Perhaps some virulently “woke” Dems (or whatever they are) will eventually come to wonder what happened to the utopia they thought they were ushering in, after a “friend” turns them in to the viral ruling tribunal for voicing an incorrect thought, or possessing a “racist” book, or ... well, anything. Yet these people are shaking with pleasure at the thought of voting out Trump and opening the door to this Orwellian hellscape!

So, they are certain, just like last time around, that they have already won and are busy ordering the champagne and measuring the drapes. Being sociopaths, they have no capacity for shame or humility. They might win, who knows, but let us hope this particular nightmare is something we will be spared ...

Good comment from “ss, Boston”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/us/politics/biden-election-landslide.html#commentsContainer&permid=109724282

And a few days later:

As the below comment points out, it’s astonishing that Biden hasn’t been questioned on his vile record and on nothing that happened while he was VP. The Obama years were a disastrous mess by any measure – they bolstered the terrifying rise of al qaeda/isis to try to get rid of Assad, droned countless people to death including three Americans; one of them a child who was given a death sentence for not “having a better father” as one of Obama’s henchmen put it.

Obama’s Tuesday death lists. Obama/Biden left the middle east in smoking ruins, hundreds of thousands dead and displaced, set off the biggest refugee exodus since WW2, destroyed Libya the richest country in Africa (a major war crime) and their psychotic Sec of State Hillary Clinton laughed about Ghaddaffi’s torture and death. Libya is now a hellscape and slave-trading market. Heck of a job, Biden!! What say you now? Alas no one will never hear his response, as the corrupt media, ever-loyal vassals to power and the the Deep State, zealously avoid any of these sticky wickets/thorny thickets. What flavor ice cream, Mr Vice president??

What about their reckless and relentless acts of aggression against Russia? Their bloody interference in Ukraine and Honduras? How about Obama/Biden ignoring Russia’s warning about the terrorist Chechen brothers, and [thus] their culpability in the horrific attack at the Boston marathon? All seemingly forgotten ... as is their vicious war on whistleblowers, further tanking the US economy, giving the bankers prizes for destroying the global economy while turning its back on “Main st”. What about the “Catfood Commission”? Do Democrats really not recall any of this?! What about Obama leaving the unions in Wisconsin twisting in the wind – never spoke in their favor or went to stand by them. Obama opposing the “morning after pill” for teenagers. His accolades for the monstrous TPP. The perfect Davos-haunting servants to the technocrats, to corporations, shipping away jobs, blithely ignoring rural America, the opioid crisis, deaths of despair, the growing unrest, mass shootings.

And the grotesquely twisted Democrats actually long for these years to return – and return they will, with a vengeance, only this time with gov’t-sanctioned riots and Red Guard–style “re-education”, etc, to add to the glory of it all. That Biden has not been asked a single question about those eight years as VP is simply stunning. All is so creepily Orwellian&anbsp;...

Good comment from “Stephen Koffler, New York”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/opinion/hunter-biden-story-media.html#commentsContainer&permid=109823697

And the next day:

Edall’s piece is entitled “How far might Trump go?” Interesting how it never occurs to wonder “How far might the Democrats go?” Or, to be horrified by how far the Orwellian Dems have already gone in the past four years in their Red Guard totalitarianism, endless riots which they approvingly call “peaceful protests” or “reparations”, and their general trashing and smashing-up of the country.

An indication of how much further they will go is pieces like this (like all the other screeds and manifestos in The New Woke Times) which are ginning up even more fear, hate and hysteria and inciting the Dems to go to war against their fellow Americans if they don’t “win”. It was the Dems who petulantly refused to accept the results of the last election in which Trump won fair and square, and yet Edsall writes this?!

They dare to screech about Trump not conceding if he “loses”, when they, from day one of Trump’s election, have torn the country apart over one lost election? When Hillary Clinton told Biden to “never, ever concede”? Engaged in an attempted coup, impeached a president for no reason other than revenge for winning an election. What this country has been put through because of these psychopaths is unforgivable. But they’re not done yet, they’re just getting started. These, the smugly self-proclaimed “decent” people, crave a bloody war against those they see as somehow beneath them. How DARE those peasants ever win against their natural overlords?! They should “know their place” (as that egg-thrower shouted at the Jews for Trump caravan). The Dems have gone so far over the edge they’ve become terrorists, yet they are terrified of the Republicans and Trump supporters, or anyone who won’t do as they say?!

Here’s a rare good comment from “Sunny 4 Life, South Lancaster Ontario”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/opinion/trump-biden-election-scenarios.html#commentsContainer&permid=109840705

Rí na Sióg

Rí na Sióg Aistriúchán le Eoin Mc Evoy ar ‘Der Erlkönig’  le Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Cé seo ar an gcapall chomh deireanach san oíche? An t-athair is a mhac ag rás tríd an ngaoth. Tá an gasúr go daingean go socair lena ucht Coinníonn sé teolaí lena chroí é go docht. A mhaicín, cad chuige a bhfolaíonn tú d’aghaidh? A Dheaide, nach bhfeiceann tú an tsióg ar an gclaí? An Rí atá ann lena ruball is a choróin! A mhaicín, a thaisce, níl ann ach bréid cheo. Nach dtiocfaidh tú liom, a bhuachaillín lách? Go dté muid ag súgradh le chéile go lá Tá bláthanna áille thíos cois na trá Is éadaí mar ór i seomraí mo mháthar. A Dheaide, a Dheaide, nach gcloiseann tú chugainn Glór Rí na Sióg ’ mo mhealladh go ciúin? Fan socair, bí socair, ná bac leis, a chroí, Níl ann ach na duilleoga á mbreith ag an ngaoth. A pháiste chaoin dhil, nach dtiocfá anois? Tabharfaidh m’iníonacha an-aire duit Déanfaidh siad rince na sí ag an ráth Cealgfar a chodladh thú le suantraí bhreá. A Dheaide, a Dheaide, nach bhfeiceann tú thall Iníonacha an Rí i ndorchacht na gcrann! A mhaicín, a thaisce, sea, feicim go glé Seansaileacha liatha is iad geal faoin ré. Meallann do chló mé, a bhuachaill, a shearc, Is murar teacht ded’ dheoin é, imreoidh mé forneart! A Dheaide, a Dheaide, anois braithim a lámh! Tá Rí na Sióg dom ghortú, dom chrá! Tagann scéin ar an athair is géaráionn ar a phráinn Le gach cnead óna ghasúr ina lámha go fann, Isteach leis sa chlós go fuascrach garbh, Thíos ina bhaclainn bhí an gasúr marbh.

Systemic Racism is Antihuman Bullshit

The assertion of “systemic racism”* is nihilist. It denies both past and future progress.

It is also absurd. Systemic, or institutional, racism is in fact illegal. When institutions are in violation, there are systems in place to address it.

Prejudice (not just racial), of course, remains an inherent aspect of the human psyche — and therefore most people know to suppress it (along with many other things in one’s psyche) or otherwise keep it to themselves when it might adversely affect their interactions with others. This is as true for members of historically subordinate groups as it is for those of historically dominant groups. It is how free people engage with each other to keep society working: treating each other as equals with mutual respect, including in debate and criticism. Above all, we cannot fear each other.

The assertion of systemic racism is a con. Rather than combat prejudice, it exploits it. It follows the model of what it condemns: Instead of racially tarring the victims of economic and social disparities as responsible or deserving of their lot, it tars the entire race to which the historically dominant have generally belonged — all of it, even those who cannot be said to be economically or socially dominant in any way. To those now to blame, it tells them to hate and fear themselves. They are blamed for a past they had no part of, by people who are also long out of that past. It warns them that even their children must have the sin purged from them — before it can manifest itself! And the gullible agree.

And like the most cynical of cults — or totalitarian reeducation — after breaking the spirit of its recruits, and its captive audiences in companies and government offices, utterly infantilizing them, denying them their faculties of doubt and reason, it provides an illusion of meaning by urging them to recruit others (Take a knee! Raise your fist! Say their names!), forcing more institutions — that have, along with the society they reflect, for decades striven against racism and other prejudice — to deny their own experience, to deny reality, and declare, against all evidence, that they are racist. There is no longer any life to be lived except through “The Movement”.

Thus an industry that depends on racism perpetuates itself, by perpetuating — even reviving — racism. By making idiots of everyone it takes control of and those who seek to appease its black-and-white absolutes in any way.†

Asserting that racism is unavoidable is nihilist. It denies individual agency. It makes resolution impossible. There is instead an industry of academics and consultants bent on keeping it that way, on making civil society impossible. In thus reviving racism, it remains “the white man’s burden” to validate “people of color” by means of this industry’s sadomasochistic rites of self-abasement, and of course generous fees and pay-offs like a latter-day indulgence scheme.

This is no way to live. There is no way forward in it, no redemption possible. It not only denies historical progress, it also — by asserting that racism is unavoidably “systemic” even to being “unconscious” — makes future progress impossible.

It necessarily ends in coercion and destruction.

*Also “critical race theory” and “unconscious bias”.

†No debate allowed: “An admin turned off commenting for this post.”

Dear Putney community,
As a current resident of Westminster and a part of the Putney community for 30 years, I want to thank community members and the Putney Selectboard for the decision to paint a Black Lives Matter sign on the road in front of Putney Central School [and someone’s house — did anyone ask?].
The “BLM is racist” painted on Route 5 in Putney in July was a gut punch. Black Lives Matter was created by three Black women following the murder of an innocent black teenager whose white killer walks free. BLM arose out of the desperation, anguish, and anger of Black Americans, who repeatedly and disproportionately experience death and brutality at the hands of police, who are stopped, arrested, and sentenced at much higher rates than white people [in roughly the same proportion as Their commission of violent crimes], whose health outcomes and life expectancy severely lag those of whites. It’s a call to all of us to face the racism embedded in our society and ourselves and to work to change it.
I do not want to stand by at this critical time in our town and nation. Please, let’s honestly [sic] confront our nation’s racist history and present and take concrete steps to show that all Black lives matter. Painting this affirming mural is a first step. Seeing it every day will give me and others the inspiration and strength to advocate for a more just nation. I need that reminder every day to keep up the work of outing the racism that’s inherent in me, as a white person in a system that purports to uphold justice for all but fails to deliver it.
Thank you,
Evie Lovett

“Olaf Errwigge” commented elsewhere on Facebook:

That essay makes a lot of good points, but I just realized another aspect: the rhetorical dodge of the "loaded question", ie, one that has an assumption built into it so that it can't be answered without appearing guilty. "What are you doing to combat racism?" First, it reduces all of life and society's issues to one (and because of countervailing evidence, insisting that it's "hidden, unconscious, historical, systemic, etc"), and second, it implies that you need to do something about racism ("Silence is Violence!"). It is impossible to answer without completely accepting all the premises built into it.

Education is to expand experience

Education’s dumbing down frays the bonds of citizenship and is hardest on the poor, says E.D. Hirsch, the man who wrote the book on cultural literacy.

Interviewed by Naomi Schaefer Riley, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2020

If you have school-age children, the pandemic-induced move to online classes may give you an unusual window into their education. E.D. Hirsch expects you’ll be surprised by “how little whole-class instruction is going on,” how little knowledge is communicated, and how there is “no coherence” from day to day, let alone from year to year.

The current fashion is for teachers to be a “guide on the side, instead of a sage on the stage,” he says, quoting the latest pedagogical slogan, which means that teachers aren’t supposed to lecture students but to “facilitate” learning by nudging students to follow their own curiosity. Everything Mr. Hirsch knows about how children learn tells him that’s the wrong approach. “If you want equity in education, as well as excellence, you have to have whole-class instruction,” in which a teacher directly communicates information using a prescribed sequential curriculum.

Mr. Hirsch, 92, is best known for his 1987 book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” It is an argument for teaching “specifics,” followed by a lengthy list of them – thousands of historical figures, events, concepts and literary works with which, in Mr. Hirsch’s view, educated Americans should be familiar. Heavily weighted toward Western history and civilization, the list provoked charges of elitism. Yet Mr. Hirsch is singularly focused on helping disadvantaged kids. They “are not exposed to this information at home,” he says, so they’ll starve intellectually unless the schools provide it.

He continues the argument in his new book, “How to Educate a Citizen,” in which he describes himself as a heretofore “rather polite scholar” who has become more “forthright and impatient because things are getting worse. Intellectual error has become a threat to the well-being of the nation. A truly massive tragedy is building.” Schools “are diminishing our national unity and our basic competence.”

Mr. Hirsch is nonetheless cheerful in a Zoom interview from a vacation home in Maine, his armchair perched next to a window with a water view. An emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, he normally resides in Charlottesville, where he continues his research and acts as the chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

He cites both history and neuroscience in explaining how education went wrong. It began in the 1940s, when “schools unbolted the desks and kids were no longer facing the teacher.” Instead children were divided into small groups and instructed to complete worksheets independently with occasional input from teachers. “That was also when our verbal test scores went down and the relative ranking of our elementary schools declined on a national level.” On the International Adult Literacy Survey, Americans went from being No. 1 for children who were educated in the 1950s to fifth for those in the ’70s and 14th in the ’90s. And things have only gotten worse. Between 2002 and 2015, American schoolchildren went from a ranking of 15th to 24th in reading on the Program for International Student Assessment.

The problem runs deeper than the style of instruction, Mr. Hirsch says. It’s the concept at its root – “child-centered classrooms,” the notion that “education is partly a matter of drawing out a child’s inborn nature.” Mr. Hirsch says emphatically that a child’s mind is “a blank slate.” On this point he agrees with John Locke and disagrees with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought children need to develop according to their nature. Both philosophers make the “Cultural Literacy” list, but “Locke has to make a comeback” among educators, Mr. Hirsch says. “The culture is up for grabs, and elementary schools are the culture makers.”

Mr. Hirsch is a man of the left – he has said he is “practically a socialist.” But he bristles at the idea that kids should read only books by people who look like them or live like them. He recalls how reading outside his own experience enabled him “to gain perspective.” Growing up in Memphis, Tenn., in the 1930s, he says, “there was no one I knew who wasn’t a racist.” In his teens, he picked up Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy” (1944), which “allowed me to escape.” The Swedish sociologist’s survey of American race relations “made a huge impact” on Mr. Hirsch. “I take it as an illustration of how important knowledge is and how important it is to not necessarily become a member of your culture.”

That’s no less true in 21st-century America. “The idea that identity and ethnicity are inborn and indelible from birth is a false view that leads to group hostility,” Mr. Hirsch says. “The idea that there can be an American culture that everyone joins seems to be anathema to some academic thinkers,” Mr. Hirsch says. “But I can’t believe it’s anathema to any normal person in the country who isn’t some social theorist.” It’s fine for children to embrace their particular heritage, he says, but also vital to create an “American ethnicity.” The purpose of elementary schools “is to make children into good citizens.”

That requires knowledge that is “shared nationally, if you’re going to read and write and communicate with one another.” He’s dismayed that people keep getting hung up on the particulars. “I’m fine with arguing about whether it shall be Toni Morrison or Herman Melville. Who cares?” He calls elementary school “a nonpartisan institution,” a view that may seem quaint in an era when schools are adopting ideological curricula like the “1619 Project” and teachers are displaying “Black Lives Matter” banners as their Zoom backgrounds.

Mr. Hirsch wants to correct some of these excesses. He dedicates “How to Educate a Citizen” to the late political scientist Richard Rorty, who died in 2007. Rorty “made a distinction between the political left and the cultural left,” says Mr. Hirsch, who considers himself a man of the former but not the latter. He commends to me a 1994 New York Times article, “The Unpatriotic Academy,” in which Rorty wrote: “In the name of ‘the politics of difference,’ [the left] refuses to rejoice in the country it inhabits. It repudiates the idea of a national identity, and the emotion of national pride.” Mr. Hirsch agrees and longs for the “willingness to sacrifice for the good of society that was very strong” during his early years. “Patriotism is important because we want to make our society work.”

Mr. Hirsch also takes issue with grade schools’ focus on “skills.” Whether it is imparting “critical thinking skills,” “communication skills” or “problem-solving skills,” he says such instruction is a waste of time in the absence of specific knowledge. He describes the findings of the National Academy of Sciences on the subject of the “domain specificity of human skills.” What this means, he explains in the new book, “is that being good at tennis does not make you good at golf or soccer. You may be a talented person with great hand-eye coordination – and indeed there are native general abilities that can be nurtured in different ways – but being a first-class swimmer will not make a person good at hockey.”

He cites the “baseball study,” conducted by researchers at Marquette University in the 1980s, which found that kids who knew more about how baseball was played performed better when answering questions about a text on baseball than those who didn’t understand the game – regardless of their reading level. The conventional response in education circles is that standardized tests are unfair because some kids are exposed to more specific knowledge than others. In Mr. Hirsch’s view that’s precisely why children should be exposed to more content: Educators “simply haven’t faced up to their duty to provide a coherent sequence of knowledge to children.”

There are now about 5,000 schools in the U.S. that use some form of the Core Knowledge curriculum, developed by Mr. Hirsch’s foundation. And research suggests Mr. Hirsch is right. A recent large-scale randomized study of public-school pupils in kindergarten through second grade found that use of the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum had statistically significant benefits for vocabulary, science knowledge, and social-studies knowledge.

Even in poor neighborhoods, kids at Core Knowledge schools perform well and are admitted to competitive high schools. From the South Bronx Classical Charter School to the public schools in Sullivan County, Tenn., Mr. Hirsch is clearly proud that his ideas have helped the least privileged kids in America.

He questions the idea that children who are exposed to more “experiences” are at an automatic advantage. “That’s what fiction is for,” he quips. And not only fiction. “The residue of experience is knowledge,” he says. “If you get your knowledge from the classroom, it’s just as good as if you got it from going to the opera. Poor kids can catch up.” ...

Asked about the effect of the pandemic and lockdown on children’s emotional well-being, Mr. Hirsch shrugs, then offers an anecdote from a principal at a Core Knowledge school. Before classes began one morning, a second-grade girl approached him and said, “I’m so excited for [sic] today.” When the principal asked why, she said, “Because today we are going to learn about the War of 1812.”

“Gee, I wonder what that’s about,” the principal said.

“I don’t know,” the girl replied. “But today I’m going to find out!”

For Mr. Hirsch, the lesson is clear. No matter the circumstances, “kids delight in learning things.”

Ms. Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

The arrogance of intellectual idiotism

A recent addition to the “liberal” genre of “why don’t people think as correctly as I do and how can we help them see the light” is by one Rebecca Coffey: “Why people believe in genuinely fake news”. She argues with a sense of superior logic and respect for “truth” and science, but her two main examples are one a lie and the other a falsehood.

She begins with the example of Trump claiming to have signed “veterans choice”, except that she takes that as referring to the “Veterans Choice Act” (i.e., the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014), which was generally regarded to have been a failure. It was remedied by the “VA MISSION Act of 2018”, which created the permanent as well as more comprehensive Veterans Community Care program. Crucially, it’s apparently been successful. Trump signed it, and gave veterans choice.

So why does she believe otherwise?

Later she cites a Slovakian study showing that logic is not persuasive regarding abortion. The researchers established basic logical syllogism with the participants: if a = b and b = c, then a = c. The establishing example Coffey provides is, “All dogs are mammals. Some carnivores are dogs. Some carnivores are mammals.” (That’s actually a = b, c = a, c = b, but it still works, if a little messy, with a as the connector between b and c. In standard form: Some mammals are dogs, Dogs are carnivores, Some mammals are carnivores. It’s easy to overlook the sloppiness because each statement stands alone as an incontestable fact; none of them actually depends on the others for proof.)

The abortion example, however, utterly fails logically: “All human beings should be protected. Some foetuses should be protected. Some foetuses are human beings.” That’s a = b, c = b, c = a. The conclusion is presented as one of the premises! An elementary logical fallacy. As it is, “should be protected” (b) is a red herring. This syllogism is like, “Dogs are mammals, Bats are mammals, Bats are dogs.” And that makes it clear that the crux of the corrected syllogism – moving c = a back to the middle – depends on proving it as a second premise, which no effort is actually made to do. What is presented as the “logical” conclusion remains both untested and unproven: Bats are dogs.

Yet Coffey writes, “That logical conclusion is not, strictly speaking, an argument for or against abortion. Even so, the researchers ... couldn’t get a statistically significant number of [the participants] to acknowledge the neutral logic that the foetus sequence builds.”

Again, why does Coffey willfully ignore the obvious fallacy?

Old-Time Religious Fanaticism

Penelope Dreadful comments at Clusterfuck:

Many Democrats and Leftists have gone off the deep end on the Democratic Party Narrative, the same way some people go off the deep end over Christianity. I think this is the result of a certain mindset, or maybe Jungian archetype that manifests itself in different ways over different time periods. Move these people back in time a hundred years and they would be busting up saloons and trying to save fallen women from alcohol. Move them to 1930-1940s Germany, and they would be just peachy with rounding up the Jews. Move them back several hundred years and they would be burning heretics at the stake. Or prosecuting witches, as in Europe, and then Salem.

The root of the current manifestation is the whole “we are on the side of the angels” belief among Democrats – that they are good and moral and smart and anybody who isn’t one of them is on the side of the devils. Just like the Spanish Inquisitors thought they were on the side of God, It explains the violent SJWs who are literally trying to burn people (heretics) alive with Molotov cocktails. It explains the Original Sin–like attributes of White Privilege, and the hysterical over-reaction to people who simply say All Lives Matter. And the burning need (literally sometimes) to rewrite history and dwell on 1492 and 1619. It explains the hyperbole about Global Warming and its apocalyptic effect on Earth.

There is even a parallel between “safe spaces” and the “sanctuary” aspect of churches. It explains the hysteria over various symbols like the Confederate flag, or statues of Columbus. It is simply religious fervor and fanaticism unmoored from a physical church building or any actual belief in a god. In fact, the current religious fanatics of the woke Democratic Left are anti-religion and anti-Christianity most of the time. But I surmise that it is more of a Catholic vs. Protestant schism or interdenominational squabble. This is why you see the tremendous pressure on Free Speech, and the attempt to shut down any dissenting view – because those views are not just arguably “wrong”, but are blasphemy and heresy. You even have a tie-in to “transubstantiation” where instead of the bread becoming the actual body of Christ, a man can become a woman, and vice versa, just because they have that Democratic Party faith. They have even brought back the old practice of “shunning”, where the members of the church would “dis-infellowship” the excommunicated, or others who broke certain religious taboos. Now, it is called “cancel culture”.

Outside of the cynical power mad maniacs like Pelosi, the Democrat Party is simply being led by religious fanatics. The Democrats had to go to a faith-based belief system because their main theories about life have turned out to be crap. ...

Democrats are starting to be confronted with the fact that cities and states they have run for decades are not the paradises that were promised. No, by and large they suck. Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, etc. And it is becoming more obvious to sensible people. Electing Democrats did not make things all better. So that is why they need to double down on that Old Time Religion, so to speak, and wasn’t that FDR a pip way back when!

And it is not going to get any better. As they are constantly barraged by real, actual facts as opposed to politically correct facts, they are going to become more mentally unraveled. They are already clamoring to defund the police, which pits them against the cynical wing of the party who knows that is nonsense. They are clamoring to secede, and just like the Old Time Puritans, they are trying to set up their own autonomous zones for “religious freedom” purposes, where they can worship at the altar of Social Justice. Delusional people do not go down easily. They go out kicking and screaming.

Civilization and Discontent

Civilization is a very fragile thing. Every one of its myriad members has to suppress themselves to a certain degree to keep it going, to tolerate things they don’t like, to be tolerated themselves. Some things need to be swept under the rug. People have to behave and respect each other. It’s not actually a natural instinct beyond the family or small tribal group. And it’s a very easy thing to destroy. And then things are much much worse for everyone except the very worst.