Categories
Life Reprints from others. Science

Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

Thanks to Real Clear Science for this article.

 

It may be one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals. They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction. These links are so solidly evidenced that, for the most part, modern social scientists simply try to explain them. They’ve put forth numerous possible explanations.

There are a couple clear contributors to point out first. Marriage tends to make people happier, and conservatives are more likely to be married. Religious belief is also linked to happiness, and conservatives tend to be more religious. But these explanations don’t account for the entire gap, which equates to about a half-point on a four-point scale, a sizable happiness divide.But these explanations don’t account for the entire gap, which equates to about a half-point on a four-point scale, a sizable happiness divide.

 

Social psychologist Jaime Napier, Program Head of Psychology at NYU-Abu Dhabi has conducted research suggesting that views about inequality play a role.

“One of the biggest correlates with happiness in our surveys was the belief of a meritocracy, which is the belief that anybody who works hard can make it,” she told PBS. “That was the biggest predictor of happiness. That was also one of the biggest predictors of political ideology. So, the conservatives were much higher on these meritocratic beliefs than liberals were.”

To paraphrase, conservatives are less concerned with equality of outcomes and more with equality of opportunity. While American liberals are depressed by inequalities in society, conservatives are okay with them provided that everyone has roughly the same opportunities to succeed. The latter is a more rosy and empowering view than the deterministic former.

Two other studies explored a more surprising contributor: neuroticism, typically defined as “a tendency toward anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and other negative feelings.” Surveyed conservatives consistently score lower in neuroticism than surveyed liberals.

In 2011, psychologists at the University of Florida and the University of Toronto conducted four studies, aiming to find whether conservatives are more “positively adjusted” than liberals.

They found that conservatives “expressed greater personal agency, more positive outlook, more transcendent moral beliefs, and a generalized belief in fairness” compared to liberals.

 

“The portrait of conservatives that emerges is different from the view that conservatives are generally fearful, low in self-esteem, and rationalize away social inequality. Conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, in general… report better mental health and fewer mental and emotional problems (all after controlling for age, sex, income, and education), and view social justice in ways that are consistent with binding moral foundations, such as by emphasizing personal agency and equity. Liberals have become less happy over the last several decades, but this decline is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions.”

There have been a few studies that attempted to rain on conservatives’ happiness parade. In one, scientists proposed that conservatives might simply be more inclined to provide socially desirable answers to surveys than liberals. Society expects you to be happy, and so conservatives say that they are. In another, researchers found that while conservatives certainly report being more happy than liberals, liberals tend to display more signs of happiness, as evidenced by uploading more smiling photographs on Linkedin and posting more positive tweets on Twitter. So maybe conservatives just think they’re happier, or judge happiness differently? Regardless, the gap remains. So if you need some cheering up, maybe turn to a conservative friend rather than a liberal one.

 

Categories
COVID Medicine Opinion Politics Reprints from others. Science

The rise and fall of Tony the Fauch.

Again many thanks to our friends at The Daily Signal.

Of all the institutions that have become radicalized in the last couple of years, the realm of medicine is perhaps the most disturbing.

What will our society look like when you can’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or even your doctor?

Dr. Anthony Fauci announced Monday that he will step down in December from his position at the National Institutes of Health, ending a tenure in public health policy that stretches back to the late 1960s.

It’s a notable moment. Fauci’s long-term obscurity—followed by short-lived, media-driven stardom and then intense polarization—is illustrative of larger trends in American society.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board noted that other public health experts used Fauci, 81, to “lobby for broad economic lockdowns that we now know were far more destructive than they needed to be” and that Fauci advocated “mask and vaccine mandates that were far less protective than his assertions to the public.”

The Journal rightly highlighted the fact that Fauci’s name being widely recognized is a negative mark, not a positive one, of his tenure. It’s like being the long snapper in football: If people generally know who you are, it’s almost certainly because you messed up.

In the case of Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, he became a notable and polarizing figure because he seemed to make often dubious or at least wide-reaching political decisions while hiding behind his credentials.

Again, as The Wall Street Journal explained, Fauci’s public and private comments suggest his ethos was that the public “is supposed to let a few powerful men and women define science and then impose their preferred policies and mandates on the country.”

It’s a philosophy that runs counter to the ideas of 1776 and the American founding, but many of Fauci’s bureaucratic and ideological ilk seem to have little problem with that.

The important matter to recognize here is how institutions and bureaucrats—like Fauci—seemingly have dropped the pretense of objectivity in favor of ideology and, in many cases, duplicity.

To believe in science is also to believe in our new state ideology.

If the facts don’t line up with preferred outcomes, then fudge the facts and silence those who have doubts.

Perhaps paradoxically, the two-sided nature of Western institutions in the past few years—that claim to be guided by objectivity while becoming more nakedly ideological and partisan—is destroying the authority of institutions in the minds of the public. That’s certainly the case in the United States, where we are particularly prone to rebel against an unqualified pseudo-elite claiming a right to rule.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were told by Fauci and other public officials that we had to lock down and suspend the most important parts of our lives—including going to church, weddings, and funerals—to stop the spread of the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

However, when the Black Lives Matter-inspired protests erupted in the summer of 2020, many of those same officials and organizations suddenly said it was OK to gather in massive groups because stopping racism as they defined it was too important.

It only added salt to the wound that these “mostly peaceful” protests soon turned violent and caused enormous damage and loss of life in communities around the country.

Fauci became a hated figure on the right in part because of what he represented—the arrogant, corrupt, and often incompetent bureaucratic managerial class that believes it has a right to rule and make decisions for our society.

Any figure or policy that strikes at the power of the managerial class—whether it be Donald Trump or civil service reform or school choice—is met with unhinged hostility. Resistance by the wrong types is a threat to “democracy.”

The fall of so many institutions at once puts conservatives in an unusual position. The instinct of a conservative is to preserve and perpetuate culture and institutions. We look to what has succeeded in the past and try to make it work for ourselves and posterity. That’s why the Constitution of the United States, though revolutionary in design as a written framework of government, is fundamentally conservative in the best sense.

 

What happens when institutions and the culture they seek to perpetuate are inherently revolutionary? That is the reality of where Americans, and many of us in the West, find ourselves. Our institutions no longer perpetuate the general welfare and ideas that our societies were built on. These institutions increasingly are committed to radical societal transformation, and they think they can do it whether you like it or not, as a smarmy California politician once said.

 

And our institutions do this while obnoxiously holding to the façade of expertise and objectivity. We are supposed to believe, for instance, that the American Academy of Pediatrics is promoting “gender-affirming” care for children because of its  commitment to good medicine and science.

However, it’s all too obvious that the academy’s “science” is working backward from ideology, that it would promote gender “transition” no matter what the facts said. Studies or physicians that say otherwise are ignored or, through the power of the academy’s allies in Big Tech, censored and banned.

Worse, every major health institution, professional organization, and government institution is following in lockstep. When a series of disturbing videos from Boston Children’s Hospital surfaced in which medical doctors advocated “gender-affirming hysterectomies” among other “treatments,” many were horrified.

This wasn’t a disturbing outlier, however. It’s the tip of the iceberg. These ideas are simply what’s being pushed in America’s top medical schools, where the cult of diversity, equity, and inclusion now holds absolute sway with negligible dissent. It’s a double-edged sword, though.

 

As members of the institutions both tout and hide behind their credentialism, their obviously ideological positions shred the public’s faith in their credentials.

The rise and fall of Anthony Fauci is illustrative of this trend. Sure, Fauci will retain his acolytes and super fans. But his actions and attitude have only drawn public attention to the rot and illegitimacy of American institutions, institutions that have squandered their reputations in the name of revolution. This is the real death of expertise. Death by suicide

 

Categories
Opinion Politics Reprints from others.

Biden Dismisses Voter Fraud, but His Justice Department Keeps Prosecuting It

This is my follow up to Phoenix’s article on voter fraud.

Thanks again to our friends at The Daily Signal.

The Biden administration’s Justice Department successfully prosecuted election fraud cases last month in Pennsylvania and Louisiana, even as the president has spent much of his term so far asserting that voter fraud is a myth.

Federal prosecutors in individual U.S. attorney’s offices also have brought separate cases in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York during President Joe Biden’s administration.

At the same time, though, Biden ratcheted up rhetoric against state reforms aimed at preventing voter fraud.

Late last year, the White House issued a press release touting plans to “restore and strengthen American democracy” and improve “voting rights.” Part of that effort by the Biden administration included “combating misinformation and disinformation” that could “sow mistrust” in elections.

White House: Fraud ‘Extremely Rare’

In January, Biden spoke in Atlanta to promote congressional Democrats’ legislation to federalize elections and blasted a Georgia measure aimed at preventing voter fraud.

The president, referring to the contested 2020 election in which he defeated incumbent Donald Trump, criticized those who were “sowing doubt [and] inventing charges of fraud.”

During his State of the Union address in March, Biden again ripped Republicans’ state legislation to prevent voter fraud, saying: “In state after state, new laws have been passed, not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert entire elections. We cannot let this happen.”

In July 2021, during a speech in Philadelphia, Biden said the “denial of full and free and fair elections is the most un-American thing that any of us can imagine.”

In August 2021, senior Biden White House officials issued a report criticizing state proposals for election reforms and argued: “An often-cited reason for these bills and laws is voter fraud, yet voter fraud is extremely rare.”

Louisiana Vote-Buying Case

Last month, two former officials in Amite, Louisiana, pleaded guilty as federal prosecutors pursued their roles in a conspiracy to pay or offer to pay voters for casting ballots in a federal election.

Court documents said former Amite Police Chief Jerry Trabona, 72, and former Amite City Council member Kristian Hart, 49, paid voters in Tangipahoa Parish to vote in open primary and general elections in 2016 in which they were candidates, according to a Justice Department announcement.

Trabona and Hart admitted that they agreed to pay voters during the contests, prosecutors said. Because federal candidates appeared on the same ballot, the matter gained the stature of a federal case.

The former police chief and former council member are scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 1. They face up to five years in prison on each of the three counts.

“We must have fair elections, free from the taint of corruption, to ensure a fully functional government,” U.S. Attorney Duane A. Evans, who oversees the Eastern District of Louisiana, said in a formal statement.

Former Congressman Pleads Guilty in Philadelphia

In Philadelphia, former Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers, 79, pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to deprive voters of civil rights, bribery, obstructing justice, falsifying voting records, and conspiring to illegally vote in a federal election.

“Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy. If even one vote has been illegally cast or if the integrity of just one election official is compromised, it diminishes faith in [the] process,” U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams announced.

“Votes are not things to be purchased and democracy is not for sale,” Williams said. “If you are a political consultant, election official, or work with the polling places in any way, I urge you to do your job honestly and faithfully.”

Myers, a Democrat, represented Pennsylvania’s 1st Congressional District for two terms in the late 1970s, but resigned in disgrace in 1980 as part of the broad “Abscam” bribery scandal.

Myers was convicted and sentenced to federal prison. After his release in 1985, he became a political consultant.

The former congressman admitted to coordinating plots to fraudulently stuff ballot boxes for specific Democratic candidates in Pennsylvania elections in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Myers’ guilty plea came after several others in the conspiracy pleaded guilty last year. The investigation began in 2020 under the Trump administration’s Justice Department and continued during the Biden administration.

Myers admitted in court to bribing Domenick J. DeMuro, a judge of elections for the 39th Ward, 36th Division, in South Philadelphia. Judge of elections is a title held by some election workers in the city.

DeMuro pleaded guilty in May 2020. Myers admitted to bribing DeMuro to add votes illegally for certain Democrat candidates in primary elections.

Some of these candidates were running for judicial office and their campaigns had hired Myers. Others were his favored candidates for federal, state, or local offices.

Myers solicited “consulting fees” from his clients, then used portions of these funds to pay DeMuro and others to tamper with election results, prosecutors said.

The payments from Meyers ranged from $300 to $5,000 per election. According to the Justice Department, DeMuro added fraudulent votes on a voting machine, also known as “ringing up” votes, for Myers’ clients and preferred candidates,

Myers also admitted to conspiring to commit election fraud with Marie Beren, a former judge of elections for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division, in South Philadelphia.

Beren pleaded guilty in October 2021. Myers admitted to giving Beren directions to add votes to his preferred candidates. Myers said that, on almost every Election Day, he drove Beren to a polling station to open up. During the drive, he advised Beren which candidates he was supporting, so that she knew which ones should get fraudulent votes.

Beren also would advise in-person voters to support and cast fraudulent votes for Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters whom she knew would not or did not show up to vote.

On a given Election Day, federal prosecutors said, Myers would talk to Beren by cell phone while she was at the polling station about the number of votes cast for his preferred candidates. She would report to Myers.

If voter turnout were high, Beren would add fewer fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates.

Prosecutors said that Beren and her accomplices from the Philadelphia Board of Elections would falsify polling books as well as the List of Voters and Party Enrollment for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division, by recording the names, party affiliation, and order of appearance for voters who actually had not showed up at the polling station to cast a ballot.

Arizona Surprises

In March, a federal judge sentenced Joseph John Marak, of Surprise, Arizona, to 30 months of supervised probation and fined him $2,400 for making a false voter registration application, a felony offense.

Already a convicted felon, Marak, 62, wasn’t eligible to vote in Arizona, but voted in six federal elections there, federal prosecutors said.

In January, Marak pleaded guilty to submitting a voter registration application and falsely certified the statement, “I am not a convicted felon.”

In August 2011, Marak was convicted of 18 felony counts in U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of North Carolina for crimes unrelated to voter fraud charges in Arizona. He was sentenced to 72 months in prison for the North Carolina felonies.

Based on the fraudulent registration, prosecutors said, Marak voted in elections from 2015 through 2020.

State laws differ on allowing convicted felons to vote.

“If you wish to vote in Arizona following a felony conviction, please speak first with your local County Recorder to fully understand the process for restoring your voting rights,” U.S. Attorney Gary Restaino, of the District of Arizona, said in a written statement.

Restaino noted that his office has prosecuted multiple voter fraud cases.

“This is the second voter fraud case we’ve charged in the last year, and the first arising out of the 2020 election cycle,” Restaino said.

In February, a federal judge sentenced Marcia Johnson, 70, of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, to one year of supervised probation and fined her $1,000. Johnson pleaded guilty to one count of voting more than once, a felony.

Iranian Election Meddling

In November, federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment charging two Iranian nationals with involvement in a cyber-enabled campaign to intimidate American voters.

Seyyed Mohammad Hosein Musa Kazemi, 24, and Sajjad Kashian, 27, obtained confidential voter information from at least one New York state election office website, according to the Justice Department.

Federal prosecutors said the two Iranian nationals also sent threatening email messages to intimidate and interfere with voters; created and disseminated a video containing disinformation about purported vulnerabilities in election infrastructure; and attempted to access, without authorization, the voting-related websites of several states.

Prosecutors also alleged that Kazemi and Kashian successfully gained unauthorized access to a U.S. media company’s computer network. If not for successful FBI and company efforts to mitigate the threat, prosecutors said, the pair would have used the media outlet to promote false claims after the election.

“As alleged, Kazemi and Kashian were part of a coordinated conspiracy in which Iranian hackers sought to undermine faith and confidence in the U.S. presidential election,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, of the Southern District of New York, said in a formal statement, adding:

Working with others, Kazemi and Kashian accessed voter information from at least one state’s voter database, threatened U.S. voters via email, and even disseminated a fictitious video that purported to depict actors fabricating overseas ballots.

In September and October 2020, the Justice Department said, the two indicted Iranian nationals and other conspirators attempted to compromise 11 state election websites, including those providing voter registration and information services. The Iranians downloaded information on about 100,000 separate voters.

Claiming to be members of the right-wing militant group known as the Proud Boys, prosecutors said, members of the conspiracy sent false Facebook messages and emails to congressional Republicans and others associated with Trump’s 2020 campaign, as well as to journalists.

The two Iranians told Republicans that Democrats planned to “edit mail-in ballots or even register non-existent voters,” prosecutors said.

Noncitizen in North Carolina

In November, a federal grand jury in Raleigh charged a North Carolina man with passport fraud, voting as a noncitizen, and falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen in order to register to vote.

Federal prosecutors said that Garbant Piquant, 53, a resident of Garner, North Carolina, used a false Virginia birth certificate as proof that he was a native-born citizen.

Federal investigators checked records and determined that the Virginia birth certificate didn’t exist. Instead, they found Piquant’s birth certificate in the Bahamas.

Prosecutors said he voted in Wake County, North Carolina, primary and general elections from 2018 through 2020.

Trouble in Troy

In June, a city council member in Troy, New York, pleaded guilty to casting absentee ballots in two other people’s names. She resigned from the council as part of a plea agreement with federal prosecutors.

Kimberly Ashe-McPherson successfully ran for reelection to the Troy City Council in 2021, first in the primary and then in the general election.

In her guilty plea, Ashe-McPherson, 61, admitted that in the primary election, she voted by absentee ballot in the name of another person.

In the general election, she admitted, she voted by absentee ballot in the names of two others.

The first subheadline of this report was corrected shorty after publication to reflect the words used in a White House publication.

Categories
Biden Pandemic Child Abuse COVID How sick is this? Opinion Politics Progressive Racism

For the loons who claim that only White Conservatives didn’t get the jab. DC Mayor Says No Virtual Learning, Giving Unvaccinated Black Teens Zero Alternative Options

Remember when Joe and Kamala said don’t get the jab cause it’s the Trump vaccine? But then they jumped the line and got theirs. Well the black folk listened and they still aren’t taking the jab. Especially the children. Well Mayor Bowser of DC has a surprise for you.

During a press conference, Bowser, a Democrat, admitted there are no alternative options, including virtual learning, for students who cannot attend school due to the District’s vaccine mandate, meaning unvaccinated children will effectively be left without an education.

Some interesting numbers from The Daily Signal. Over 40% of blacks ages 12-17 are not vaccinated, according to city data. Among black teens aged 16-17, 42% are unvaccinated.

Updated data from the government’s vaccine numbers website shows 47% of the black children in the district ages 12-15 had not completed their primary vaccination series necessary to go back to school in person.

 

Categories
Crime Human Traficking Opinion Politics Reprints from others.

California Senate Votes Down Amendment to Bill To Make Human Trafficking a Serious, Violent Felony

 

An article from the California Globe.

The California Senate rejected new amendments made by Senator Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) to Assembly Bill 2167 on Monday, rejecting that human trafficking should be considered a serious and violent felony.

AB 2167, authored by Assemblyman Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) and Senator Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), would require courts to consider alternatives to incarceration, including collaborative justice court programs, diversion, restorative justice, and probation. The bill also notes that criminal cases should use the least restrictive means possible.

According to Assemblyman Kalra, he wrote the bill to “encourage restraint in the overuse of incarceration by requiring courts to first consider other alternative options in sentencing decisions.” In his pitch to the Assembly, Kalra tried to win over many on the fence about the issue by pointing out cost differentials, noting that the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) found that incarceration per inmate every year in California is $106,000, while the price of supervised probation a day is $12. This argument however, failed to win many over.

“So the state saves some money each year by doing that,” victim survivor’s advocate Kenji Taylor, who lost her sister to a murder committed by a criminal out on probation, told the Globe on Monday. “What would they say is the price of a human life? Is saving that money really worth people dying for? They never have an answer for that and always think of the criminal more than the people wronged.”

Despite the controversial nature of the bill, AB 2167 managed to pass the Assembly by a tight 42-23 with 13 abstentions in a vote in May, with Republicans and some Democrats either opposing it or not voting on it. Prior to the Assembly vote, the bill had been heavily amended, including writing out a portion that would have heavily favored the use of probations over all other punishments and courts being given the discretion to determine an appropriate sentence rather than it being a rigid system outlined by the bill.

A proposed AB 2167 amendment

While it moved to the Senate, many Senators, both Republican and Democrat, have continued to oppose AB 2167. However, with opposition possibly not being enough to stop the bill from being passed by the end of the session, many have tried to change it through amendments. This included Senator Grove introducing an amendment that would have human trafficking be put down as a serious and violent crime so that probation and other “restorative justice” measures could not be applied to those crimes.

“In California, human trafficking is defined as a non-serious felony and a non-violent crime,” said the Senator during comments on Monday. “How can raping and selling of a child over and over and over again be considered a non-violent crime? I ask that we amend language into this bill and send a message to all Californians that this heinous act will not be tolerated. I’m asking you to give many victims of human trafficking justice and law enforcement to arrest these perpetrators and put them in prison for a very long time. ”

However, on Monday, Senate Democrats rejected adding in the new amendments, voting 31-8 to table to new amendment and not add it in.

“California must prosecute these horrendous acts as the serious and violent crimes that they are,” Senator Grove said after the vote. “The fact that Democrats refuse to do so should concern all Californians.”

In addition, the vote surprised many justice advocates, who thought that it would have been added to the bill as an amendment.

“Look at who voted yes on that amendment question,” continued Taylor. “31 people just don’t care about victims. They can say otherwise all they want, but that single vote just put a hell of a lot of people in danger. I’m just upset and baffled. Why would they choose to protect criminals more than victims?”

AB 2167 is expected to go to a full Senate vote in the next 9 days.

Categories
Uncategorized

Fight Racism: Lock Up Criminals, Even Black Ones.

An Ann Coulter article.

This is a cautionary tale for all Americans, both white and black.

Last Sunday, a college couple, 22-year-old Adam Simjee and his 20-year-old girlfriend, Mikayla Paulus, were driving through Talladega National Forest when they were flagged down by a black woman having car trouble. If I tell you the good Samaritans may have been National Review readers, you can probably guess that one of them ended up dead.

As they were trying to fix the car, the woman, Yasmine Hider, pointed a gun at them and demanded they walk into the woods and hand over their phones and wallets. At some point, Simjee pulled out his own gun and started firing at Hider, wounding her. She shot back, killing him.

The reason I suspect the couple were National Review readers is that the “good Samaritan” ruse was one of the bullet points in John Derbyshire’s famous “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” which got him fired from National Review in 2012 — standing athwart history and mewling, “Please like me, liberals.” Derbyshire hadn’t even published the piece in NR.

He was responding to a spate of lachrymose accounts of black parents describing “The Talk” they have to give their sons, instructing them to be super polite to police officers — smile and say, “Yes, sir” — lest the officer shoot them to death for no reason whatsoever. (Ask any police officer, and they will tell you black arrestees, to a man, are the politest people you will ever meet.)

In the piece, Derbyshire issued exhortations about treating black people with “the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen,” but then listed “some unusual circumstances,” requiring extra vigilance due to “considerations of personal safety.”

The ”personal safety” rules concerned only complete strangers. His point was that when you have no other information to go on, you have to rely on statistics.

Derbyshire’s Rule 10 (h) was: “Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.” He appended links to stories like the one that began this column.

Here are a few other examples from a general Nexis search for “good Samaritan w/s shoot! or kill! w/s car”:

— March 2021: “Boyfriend, 27, who ‘shot dead good Samaritan who stopped to help his girlfriend after her car broke down’ is indicted for murder”

— January 2020: “Motorist accused of fatally shooting good Samaritan after St. Paul crash is found incompetent to stand trial”

— August 2017: “Four strippers with broken down car fatally shoot good Samaritan in the back after he stopped to help them change a tire that HE paid for”

— August 2016: “Good Samaritan shot to death after helping teens pull SUV out of ditch”

Feel free to look them up, but I’ll save you the trouble and tell you: All the perps were black. National Review: DO NOT WARN OUR READERS ABOUT THE “CAR TROUBLE” SCAM!

Derbyshire did warn his readers, so NR editor Rich Lowry dumped him, denouncing the piece as “nasty and indefensible.”

     Not good enough! Slate magazine’s William Saletan thundered, complaining that Lowry had not attacked the “ugly,” “racist” column with sufficient ferocity. He, Saletan, would proceed to explain “what Derbyshire got wrong.” Whereupon he demonstrated that he has no idea what the words “statistical” or “averages” mean — much less the phrase “[when] you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences.”

Thus, his central complaint was: “Derbyshire thinks his data warrant his conclusions. But all his data references include the crucial term ‘mean’ or ‘average.’ They don’t tell you about the person walking toward you. They tell you what you can assess about the probability of danger when the only information you have is color.”

Yes, exactly, you complete moron. That’s the point, subtly indicated by Derbyshire stating that he was referring only to those occasions when you don’t have any other information about a person. (Do black parents giving “The Talk” remind their sons not to make assumptions about any particular cop walking toward them?)

Back in the halcyon days of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, we had one other fact to guide us: Criminals were in prison. Unfortunately for black people, a small percentage of their community commit a boatload of crime. But as long as criminals went to prison, New Yorkers could pass black men with little concern because if they were criminals, they’d most likely be locked up, not standing on a subway platform next to you.

 

Not anymore. Now, the criminals are out among us. There’s no possible way to evaluate a stranger, except the statistics. E.g.: Blacks, who make up about 20% of New York’s population, commit more than 70% of the shootings. In Los Angeles, blacks are only 8% of the population, but commit nearly half of the murders.

Suddenly, New Yorkers, Los Angelinos and anyone else living under Democratic control are behaving like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who once remarked that when he heard footsteps on the street behind him, he would, “look around and see it’s somebody white and feel relieved.” He made that statement in 1993 — the very year Giuliani was elected mayor, before proceeding to drive down crime rates and liberate black people from dangerous neighborhoods, as well as from suspicious looks.

This is the cautionary note for black people. The Democrats’ Free All Criminals policies have hurt black people in myriad ways — mostly by getting thousands more of them robbed, assaulted and killed each year — but also in other, more subtle ways, like this.

As Senate candidate Blake Masters of Arizona said — and the media lied about — it is blacks, frankly, who suffer the most when criminals aren’t locked up. And the Democrats don’t care.

     COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER

Categories
Economy Opinion Politics

White House Budget Update Sees Slower Growth, Higher Inflation, Narrower Deficit. I don’t think so.

The White House on Tuesday issued a budget update that foresees slower economic growth and higher inflation than predicted earlier this year along with narrower deficits in the near term.

They say the debt will be a little over 1 trillion for this year. That doesn’t count the 1 trillion they passed in the last two bills. In its annual mid-session review, the White House Office of Management and Budget said that the economy would grow by 1.4%, adjusted for inflation, from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the fourth quarter of this year. Growth in 2023 is now predicted to be 1.8%. Both figures are sharply lower than the 3.8% and 2.5% growth forecast for this year and next as part of the March publication of President Joe Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal.

But you have loons  out there saying how we’re in happy days and the economy is doing great. Oh my!

Categories
Biden Pandemic COVID Faked news Leftist Virtue(!) Medicine Opinion Politics Reprints from others. Science Uncategorized

Dr. Fauci’s Legacy

A reprint from one of the writers from substack.

Anthony Fauci is ending his long and celebrated government career by being widely lauded for getting so much so very wrong on Covid-19.

Now 81 years old, Dr. Fauci has spent 38 years as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. He has been rightly honored for his many contributions over the decades, most notably during the fight against AIDS, for which he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. But to Covid-19 he brought a monomaniacal focus on vanquishing a single virus, whatever the cost—neglecting the damage that can follow when public health loses sight of the public’s health.

As the lead medical authority to two administrations on Covid-19, Dr. Fauci was unwavering in his advocacy for draconian policies. What were the impact of those policies on millions of Americans? And what would the country look like now had our public health experts taken a different approach? As Dr. Fauci is preparing to leave his post, those are a few of the questions worth asking as we consider his various Covid-19 legacies.

Dr. Fauci attends the National AIDS Update Conference in San Francisco on Oct. 12, 1989. (Deanne Fitzmaurice via Getty Images)

On Children:

Very early on in this pandemic, we knew that there was an extremely stratified risk from Covid. The elderly and those with co-morbidities were especially vulnerable, while children were extremely unlikely to get dangerously ill.

Instead of acting on the good news for children—or drawing on the ample experience in Scandinavian and European countries where schools were open and students were without masks—American kids were seen as vectors of disease. Young children were forced to wear masks inside school and out, affecting the language and social development of many. The effects of school closures will play out for decades, but we already know that children suffered major learning loss, and many left school never to return. Throughout the pandemic, Dr. Fauci supported the most oppressive restrictions for children, including school closures and mandatory cloth masking.

Yesterday on Fox Neil Cavuto asked Dr. Fauci whether Covid restrictions “went too far” and if they “forever damaged” the children “who couldn’t go to school except remotely.” Dr. Fauci replied: “I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.”

Parents know otherwise.

A generation is coping with learning loss, and the impact has been the worst in poor and minority communities. According to the Brookings Institute, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20 percent in math and 15 percent in reading over the pandemic. Meantime, anxiety and depression have hit record highs among young Americans, and the surgeon general has described a youth mental health crisis. Of all of Dr. Fauci’s legacies, this might be the gravest.

On Research:

Dr. Fauci let basic research questions about the nature of the Covid-19 virus go unanswered. Somehow, despite the NIH’s more than $45 billion budget, only 2 percent of grants went to basic Covid research while billions of federal money was invested in developing vaccines, according to a study conducted by my colleagues at Johns Hopkins and I.

The federal government failed to conduct timely studies on the following: masks; the susceptibility of people in nursing homes; natural immunity; wastewater data; vaccine-induced heart injury in young people; and the optimal interval between the first two vaccine doses.

In short, Dr. Fauci didn’t deliver the basic research we needed so that public policy would be shaped by the best science. Because policymakers lacked good evidence to support their dictates, political opinions filled the void. So Covid-19 became a highly politicized health emergency—to all of our detriment.

On Natural Immunity:

One of the most inexplicable decisions by Dr. Fauci and his team was to ignore natural immunity—that is, the immune response generated by contracting Covid-19.  As the evidence mounted that having had the virus was as good as—perhaps even better than—a vaccine, Dr. Fauci and his circle ignored it.

When Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked Dr. Fauci in the Fall of 2021 on CNN: “As we talk about vaccine mandates, I get calls all the time, people say I already had Covid, I’m protected, and now the study says even more protected than the vaccine alone. How do you make the case to them?” Dr. Fauci answered: “I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that.”

Hundreds of studies have now shown that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity and that the level of protection vaccines have against severe disease is at the same level of natural immunity alone.

But Dr. Fauci didn’t talk about it.

Americans had circulating antibodies against the virus, but they were antibodies that Dr. Fauci seemed to ignore. The upshot was that thousands of Americans lost their jobs for their choice not to get vaccinated. Some of those Americans were nurses, pilots, truck drivers, and dock workers central to the American supply chain of food, medication, and other essential products. This summer, more than 60,000 National Guard and Reserve soldiers who refused the Covid-19 vaccine were not allowed to participate in their military duties and lost pay and benefits. All of these people should have their jobs reinstated.

On Dissent:

Any physician who has met Dr. Fauci will agree that he is one of the kindest, most charming human beings you will ever meet. That’s why it was so jarring to witness the way that he and Dr. Francis Collins, his close friend and former director of the NIH, denigrated dissent on Covid-19.

Just ask the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration—the open letter published in October 2020 that called for focused protection of the most vulnerable instead of blanket shutdowns of schools and businesses. It was authored by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard, and it was signed by tens of thousands of doctors and scientists.

Drs. Fauci and Collins never talked to these prominent authors to discuss their differing points of view. Instead, they criticized them.

Four days after the Great Barrington Declaration was published, Dr. Collins sent an email to Dr. Fauci in which he called the authors “fringe epidemiologists.” “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “I don’t see anything like that on line yet—is it underway?” Dr. Fauci replied: “Francis: I am pasting in below a piece from Wired that debunks this theory.” Soon after, big tech platforms like Facebook and Google followed suit, suppressing their ideas and falsely deeming them “misinformation.”

The ultimate irony is that federal officials are now endorsing many of the policies the Great Barrington Declaration authors suggested, insisting schools stay open and quietly ending isolation and quarantine requirements. In the end, Sweden, which adopted many principles in the Great Barrington Declaration, had roughly half the Covid deaths as Michigan, despite having the same population, percent of elderly, and climate.

If dissent had been welcomed from the start—which is what science demands—a lot of suffering could have been avoided.

On Science:

Here’s what Dr. Fauci and other public health authorities could have been saying from the start: We strive to provide you with the best information and recommendations, but in the face of an emergency we will surely make mistakes. We will sometimes change our minds. We may even reverse our guidance. But we will always own up to our mistakes, explain our policy changes and strive to do better. Instead, Dr. Fauci admitted to telling noble lies.

Covid brought us the concept of “The Science.” Dr. Fauci famously said last year: “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” But no person embodies science. To suggest as much betrays a cast of mind that is entirely at odds with science itself.

On Leadership:

George Washington was onto something when he decided to limit his presidency to two terms. New leaders don’t just avoid the risk of too much power concentrated in the hands of one person or group, they also bring new ideas. New perspectives are especially important to accelerating scientific inquiry by challenging deeply held assumptions. In his long tenure, Dr. Fauci made tremendous contributions, but during this crisis we needed someone at the top who took a broad view of how to fight a novel virus, and made recommendations based on weighing the direct and indirect consequences to society.

How to Regain Trust:

We now face the threat of a future pandemic in a country in which a large number of people no longer trust public health authorities. What happens when we have a novel, highly contagious, airborne virus with a much higher fatality rate than that of Covid-19?

We desperately need to rebuild public trust now. That begins by having public health officials apologize for being dogmatic in their pronouncements, when the correct answer should have been: “We don’t know.” One lesson we should all learn from Covid-19 is that we should not put our entire faith and trust in one physician.


Dr. Marty Makary is a public health expert, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the author of the bestselling book The Price We Pay.

His last piece for Common Sense was about top doctors and scientists at the NIH, FDA and CDC who are alarmed at the direction of those institutions. Read it here.

Categories
Opinion Politics

As of today I declare that we have MSM, Conservative, Right and Left wing news.

When it comes to politics all we ever hear is MSM news or Right wing news. Today I’m changing that. Some may be upset with my Right Wing category.

I’m adding Conservative and Left Wing news. MSM is now FOX, WSJ, USA Today, The Hill, Politico, and most of your business publications. Left Wing I’ve added ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, CNN and your regulars like VOX, AXIO, Etc. I’ve put Progressive and Liberal media with Left Wing.

Right wing was a tough call for me. I’m sure many who read my articles may be upset with me. But here goes anyway. Gateway, NewsMax, NY Post, Washington Times and Examiner are a few right wing. They do have great articles and most of the time are very factual. I also have in the past, and will use them in the future.

This brings me to Breitbart. Six months ago I would have placed them in the right wing. Today I’m calling them Conservative. Right now I’ll leave out others that I find Conservative.

What  say you?

Categories
History Leftist Virtue(!) Opinion Politics Progressive Racism Reprints from others.

What can happen when you go after hate speech leftists and race baiters?

A bizarre string of events is unfolding at the American Historical Association (AHA). Last week, AHA president James H. Sweet published a column in the organization’s magazine on the problem of “presentism” in academic historical writing. According to Sweet, an unsettling number of academic historians have allowed their political views in the present to shape and distort their interpretations of the past.

Sweet offered a gentle criticism of the New York Times’s 1619 Project as evidence of this pattern. Many historians embraced the 1619 Project for its political messages despite substantive flaws of fact and interpretation in its content. Sweet thus asked: “As journalism, the project is powerful and effective, but is it history?”

Within moments of his column appearing online, all hell broke loose on Twitter.

Incensed at even the mildest suggestion that politicization is undermining the integrity of historical scholarship, the activist wing of the history profession showed up on the AHA’s thread and began demanding Sweet’s cancellation. Cate Denial, a professor of history at Knox College, led the charge with a widely-retweeted thread calling on colleagues to bombard the AHA’s Executive Board with emails protesting Sweet’s column. “We cannot let this fizzle,” she declared before posting a list of about 20 email addresses.

Other activist historians joined in, flooding the thread with profanity-laced attacks on Sweet’s race and gender as well as calls for his resignation over a disliked opinion column. The responses were almost universally devoid of any substance. None challenged Sweet’s argument in any meaningful way. It was sufficient enough for him to have harbored the “wrong” thoughts – to have questioned the scholarly rigor of activism-infused historical writing, and to have criticized the 1619 Project in even the mildest terms.

New York Times columnist and 1619 Project contributor Jamie Bouie jumped in, casually dismissing Sweet’s concerns over the politicization of scholarship with contemporary “social justice” issues. 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones retweeted the attacks on Sweet, even though she has previously invoked the “journalistic” and editorial nature of her project to shield it from scholarly criticism by historians.

Other activist historians such as the New School’s Claire Potter retorted that the 1619 Project was indeed scholarly history, insisting that “big chunks of it are written by professional, award-winning historians.” Sweet was therefore in the wrong to call it journalism, or to question its scholarly accuracy. Potter’s claims are deeply misleading. Only two of the 1619 Project’s twelve feature essays were written by historians, and neither of them are specialists in the crucial period between 1776-1865, when slavery was at its peak. The controversial parts of the 1619 Project were all written by opinion journalists such as Hannah-Jones, or non-experts writing well outside of their own competencies such as Matthew Desmond.

The frenzy further exposed the very same problems in the profession that Sweet’s essay cautioned against. David Austin Walsh, a historian at the University of Virginia, took issue with historians offering any public criticism of the 1619 Project’s flaws – no matter their validity – because those criticisms are “going to be weaponized by the right.” In Walsh’s hyperpoliticized worldview, historical accuracy is wholly subordinate to the political objectives of the project. Sweet’s sin in telling the truth about the 1619 Project’s defects was being “willfully blind to the predictable political consequences of [his] public interventions.” Any argument that does not advance a narrow band of far-left political activism is not only unfit for sharing – it must be suppressed.

Within hours of the AHA’s original tweet of Sweet’s article, the cancellation campaign was in full swing. Predictably, the AHA caved to the cancellers.

One day after the offending article went live, the AHA tweeted out a “public apology” from Sweet. It reads like a forced confession statement, acknowledging the “harm” and “damage” allegedly caused by simply raising questions about the politicization of scholarship toward overtly ideological activist ends. It did not matter that Sweet’s criticisms were mild and couched in plenty of nuance, or that they even came from a center-left perspective that also criticized conservative historians for politicizing the debate around gun rights. Sweet was guilty of pointing out that partisan political activism undermines scholarly rigor when the lines between the two blur, because the overwhelming majority of that activism inside the history profession currently comes from the political left. And for that, the very same activists extracted an obsequious apology letter. Its text, reproduced below, reads like a “struggle session” for academic wrongthink.

Sweet’s apology excited the activist wing of the profession, though it did little to placate their ire. The resignation demands continued, because Sweet’s apology was “insincere” and because his argument would be used by the “wrong” people – i.e. anyone who dissents from a particular brand of progressive activist orthodoxy. Simply criticizing the 1619 Project would play into the tactics of “Right-wingers, Nazis, and other bad-faith actors” who could use Sweet’s commentary “in the service of white supremacism and misogyny” announced Kevin Gannon, a historian who’s primarily known for scolding other scholars on twitter when they deviate from the profession’s far-left orthodoxies.

In this branch of academia, it does not matter whether the 1619 Project was truthful or factually accurate. The only concerns are whether its narrative can be weaponized for a political cause or used to deflect scrutiny of the same. As is often the case in the pseudo-moralizing political crusades of academia, the loudest demands against Sweet also came from the least-productive academics – historians with thin CVs and little in the way of original scholarly research to their names, although they do maintain 24/7 Twitter feeds of progressive political commentary.

Lora Burnett, one of the more vocal cancellation crusaders after the initial article posted, scoffed at Sweet, announcing “this apology was basically, ‘sorry I made you sad but I’m still right.’” She continued: “lamenting ‘inartful expression’ is apparently easier than admitting to flawed argument, unsupported claims, and factually incorrect assertions.” Note that Burnett and the other detractors never bothered to explain how Sweet’s argument was flawed or unsupported. Nor did they attempt to pen a rebuttal, which could have produced a constructive dialogue about the role of political activism in shaping historical scholarship. It was sufficient to denounce him as guilty for holding the wrong opinions. No matter the apology that Sweet made, the campaign to eject him from the history profession’s markedly impolite company would continue.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world began to take notice of the bizarre spectacle playing out at the main professional organization for a major academic discipline. As criticisms mounted on the AHA’s twitter feed, the organization moved to shut down debate entirely. They locked their twitter account, and posted a message to members denouncing the public blowback as the product of “trolls” and “bad faith actors.”

Keep in mind that only 24 hours earlier, the AHA had no problem with hundreds of activist historians flooding their threads with actual harassing behavior by bad faith actors. It tolerated cancellation threats directed against its president, calls to flood the personal email accounts of its board with harassing messages and denunciations of Sweet, and dozens of profane, sexist, and personally degrading attacks on Sweet himself. There were no AHA denunciations of those “trolls” or their “appalling” behavior, and no statements calling for “civil discourse” while the activist Twitterstorian mobs flooded the original thread with obscenity-laced vitriol and ad hominem attacks on Sweet.

Sadly, this type of unprofessional belligerence is now the norm on History Twitter. It would never be tolerated from any other perspective than the far-left, but it is valorized in the profession as long as it serves that particular set of ideological objectives.

The final irony is that the AHA only shuttered its twitter feed from the public when it could no longer restrict the conversation to the activist mob calling for Sweet’s cancellation. It’s the same brand of intellectual closure that Sweet’s offending column warned against in its final passage: “When we foreshorten or shape history to justify rather than inform contemporary political positions, we not only undermine the discipline but threaten its very integrity.”

Phillip W. Magness

Phil Magness

Phillip W. Magness is Senior Research Faculty and Research and Education Director at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston).

Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College.

Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains active research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic thought. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.