An excavator operates at the Quito Village Development Project in Saratoga on Apr. 13, 2023. Photo by Martin do Nascimento, CalMatters
Visits: 8
This editorial board routinely decries the failure of state lawmakers to address some of the biggest issues that confront California, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the state’s continuing commitment to loosen the encrusted housing-construction rules that create years-long delays to build important new projects.
The latest two governors have signed dozens of housing-related bills — the most significant of which reduce housing regulations and zoning requirements. One of the earliest ones is 2017’s Senate Bill 35 by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. Although we generally disagree with his politics, we can’t deny that Wiener has been a force of nature on the housing front.
SB 35 created a template for housing reform. It gives developers have a right to build their properties without going through the long and subjective local approval process provided the projects meet some basic standards.
For instance, the streamlined projects must be multi-family projects located on an urban infill site and conform to general zoning and design standards. The projects also must contain certain levels of affordability and conform to a long list of other standards. Developers also were required to pay their workers union-level wages.
Obviously, we prefer a wider loosening of standards, but negotiating any serious reform that might actually pass in the state Capitol means confronting the vested interests that hold sway. SB 35 passes our test of offering far more good than bad, even if we have to hold our collective noses at the bad.
Prominent research already has detailed the specific ways that SB 35 has helped cities build affordable-housing and homeless-related projects. However, SB 35 will sunset in 2026 and Wiener has introduced a new bill, Senate Bill 423, to make its provisions permanent.
The legislative sausage-making process never is pleasant, but it’s dismaying to see major unions throw a wrench in that process to achieve self-interested provisions. The bill would eliminate certain union-only hiring regulations because, as CalMatters explained, “there aren’t enough unionized construction workers to build all the new housing California requires.”
Two major unions have admirably backed the bill even though some of the more politically powerful construction unions oppose it, the article adds. Former Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez — author of disastrous Assembly Bill 5, which largely banned independent contracting — attacked the proposed change in her usual class-warfare manner.
Unfortunately, local governments also opposed the law’s extension. Transparently slow-growth efforts by cities such as Huntington Beach to stymie housing construction, however, only reinforce the need for state regulatory pre-emptions. Regarding union opposition, construction trades already enjoy many government-granted privileges. Trade unions tout the benefits that they offer builders in terms of training and apprenticeship programs. So union workers will naturally grab the lion’s share of new construction jobs, but they want to use the government to grab it all.
“We say, represent and raise all workers up,” Northern California Carpenters Regional Council executive secretary Jay Bradshaw told CalMatters. “It’s an organizing opportunity and we’ll produce housing at all income levels.” We wholeheartedly agree.
Housing streamlining rules such as SB 423 will help the state meet its desperate housing needs – and help all workers in the process. They help cities, too.
It would be a shame if narrow interests derail one of the rare areas where the state has the right idea.
So why are Californians who stayed and those who arrived during that same time among the happiest folks in America?
It might be that they are among the select who can afford to live in this state, where the median housing price of more than $700,000 puts California among the top three priciest places in the nation. Its most populous county, Los Angeles, even tops the statewide median price figure by about $100,000.
Strikingly, research indicates it’s not the most expensive places in California that are happiest. Atherton, whose people average out as America’s wealthiest, does not make the top 10 list of the happiest spots in the nation, while six other California cities are on that list, as reported by the website smartassett.com.
Those six include the happiest city, Sunnyvale, hard by the headquarters of Apple and Google in the heart of the Silicon Valley; Fremont, where most Teslas are built, ranked fourth; with the Sacramento suburb Roseville seventh, San Jose eighth, the Los Angeles bedroom suburb of Santa Clarita ninth and Irvine in Orange County rounding out the top 10.
Among the happiness measures the study used were the percentage of individuals earning more than $100,000 per year, living costs as a percentage of income, violent crime rates, life expectancy and the number of poor mental health days reported.
Sunnyvale ranked first because 62.5% of its residents earned more than $100,000 (highest in the nation) and only 5% lived below the poverty level, third lowest nationally.
No. 10 Irvine ranked high in every category, with more than 45% of residents earning more than $100,000 and living costs consuming just 38% of income. Violent crime is also very low there, at 51 incidents per 100,000 population for the last year, and citizens reporting poor mental health on just 11.3% of their days, with average life expectancy almost 83 years.
By contrast, the happiest place in Texas, the Dallas suburb of Plano, with 288,000 population (about double the size of the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance), saw about one-third of its populace earn more than $100,000 and cost of living expenses eat up 40.3% of income, even though housing prices are far lower than in Irvine.
Some might say that there’s too much emphasis on money in this study. But a 2021 University of Pennsylvania study found a direct link between happiness and income growth.
Another major factor in happiness, as shown by many studies, is marriage: The higher the percentage of married people in a locale, the happier the average person will be.
And among the top 10 happiest cities in the smartasset.com report, the majority of adults were married in all but one — Arlington, Virginia, which came in second on the overall happiness index.
Still, despite its strong showing on happiness, California has seen slightly more than 1% of its people depart for other states over the last three years. Again, the primary factor is money, if the state’s Finance Department is to be believed.
That department hangs responsibility for most of the population loss on housing prices. Prices are too high for most Americans to buy in, even if they sell off fully paid-off homes in other places. High prices also cause many Californians to sell and move to larger, cheaper homes elsewhere, in many cases pocketing hundreds of thousands in the process. It’s hard to argue with buying larger quarters surrounded by more open space, all at lower cost.
These moves have been eased by the great workplace shift that’s occurred almost simultaneously with California’s largest-ever population losses. With vast numbers of white collar workers now able to work remotely from almost anywhere, and still keep their high-paying jobs, it’s completely expectable that some will move out of state, and some have.
But if legislative strategies designed to make housing here denser come to reality, it’s also expectable that some prices will drop and allow more people to move here and enjoy the lifestyle that makes this state dominate the list of happy places.
Demonstrators gather at the Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial to mark Juneteenth in Washington, DC (Getty)
Visits: 16
The case for slavery reparations seems to be growing louder every day. This week, indigenous representatives from twelve Commonwealth countries called on King Charles to begin the process of paying reparations. The King has personally expressed sorrow for the suffering of slaves and Buckingham Palace has said that it is taking the issue of reparations “profoundly seriously.” Earlier this year, a former BBC journalist committed to sending £100,000 ($126,000) in aid to the Caribbean to atone for her own family’s historical links to the slave trade.
The voluntary role that many Africans played in the transatlantic slave trade is ignored
The central thesis of slavery reparations is that white majority countries owe money to ethnic minorities as their ancestors may have enslaved others or benefited from a slave-system economy.
There is a problem with this though: ultimately, the great evil of slavery was practiced by all inhabited continents and all races. And there will be almost no one alive today in the world who doesn’t have an ancestral link to the slave trade. This fact collapses the modern-day reparations argument.
Take the Afro-Omani slave trader Tippu Tip, who in 1895 was reported to have seven plantations and own 10,000 slaves. He was one of the largest slavers in all of East Africa.
Tip, alongside countless fellow indigenous Africans, would capture slaves in village raids or as prisoners of war, and they would be sold at the African coast to outside traders or fellow Africans within the subcontinent. Tip’s own home country Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) was, although small in size, a large trading empire. In 1859 alone, 19,000 slaves were imported there from the East African Coast.
Long before the transatlantic slave trade began, slavery was commonplace in many parts of the globe. As al-Tabari, the Muslim scholar, showed in the mid-ninth century, the Basra port at al-Ahwaz alone had about 15,000 enslaved workers. Even in New Zealand, Māori chiefs enslaved prisoners of war — occasionally going as far as eating them in tribal feasts. The further you go back in history the longer the list of slavers grows, including everyone from the Ancient Egyptians to the Shang dynasty in China.
Given that many of the nations now calling for reparations also enslaved and sold others, the reparations argument when brought to its logical conclusion would have to demand that descendants of African slavers owe reparations to those who may have been the victims of slavery.
This argument could even be applied to the white descendants of the victims of the Barbary slave trade. Though undoubtedly far smaller than the transatlantic slave trade, the Barbary trade still saw over a million Europeans captured by North African pirates in slave raids between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
So why is this devastating blow to the reparations argument often ignored? Politically, it seems that although we generally accept that slavery was universal in ancient history, we often pretend that only European powers practiced slavery from the sixteenth century onwards, when this is clearly not the case. Meanwhile, the voluntary role that many Africans played in the transatlantic slave trade is also ignored.
Generally the European powers, with the exception of Portugal, lacked the resources to delve deep into the African continent for slaves. They were instead met at the coast by willing traders looking to make a profit by selling their fellow man. Though it is undoubtedly true that the rise of the transatlantic trade encouraged the growth of African slavers, this does not excuse those who took part in the trade.
Nor did slavery end in Africa when European colonialists were removed from the continent. When the Portuguese were forced off the East African Coast in 1699 by the Imam of the Omani Empire, he himself owned about 1,700 slaves.
The same is true for colonies outside Africa. In the early 1820s, Brazil broke away from the Portuguese Empire. Despite its later anti-slavery treaties with the UK, Brazil would continue importing about 750,000 slaves between 1831-1850. In 1844 it refused to renew the Anglo-Brazilian anti-slave trade agreement. Brazil’s slave trade only effectively stopped after 1850 when the UK formed a naval blockade in its coastal waters.
During the age of abolition led by Britain, the king of Dahomey (a West African Kingdom in modern day Benin) reportedly protested to a British officer that:
“The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.“
Some independent African nations and empires continued to allow slavery well after abolitionism in Europe. This was especially true in the eastern side of Africa where it was more difficult for the British to influence local politics and for the Royal Navy to enforce abolition.
From the 1860s onwards, Bemba chiefs in northeastern Zambia traded ivory and slaves for guns. As the supply of elephants for ivory depleted, the chiefs moved to selling even more slaves. In Barotseland, the monarch Lewanika was considered king of the Barotses, a South African ethnic group. From the beginning of his reign in 1878 until the region became a British protectorate, oral sources claim that up to a third of his subjects were slaves.
There is no question that the Euro-American trade in slaves — which began with Portugal and later included other colonial powers such as France and Britain — was huge in size. This evil should never be forgotten.
But neither should we forget that people from all parts of the world, races and religions took part in what was one of the most horrid systems in human history.
In many parts of the world today, slavery is still rife. Rather than trying to create division by blaming people for the sins of their ancestors, we should instead come together to try and solve the problems we face today.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
Joe Biden’s wet nurses clearly did a poor job of vetting the audience as a heckler managed to derail his speech, which was annoying, because Biden was planning on derailing it himself, probably. Except this time the heckler was a federal judge. Biden’s attempts at calming the situation failed, leading to a slightly exasperated and condescending ‘hush up, boy!’
Things could only have gotten more awkward if the judge were Muslim and it was supposed to be an Eid celebration. Wait, it was?
Ah, for the days when Muslims could shut a president up by throwing a shoe.
Oh my! No more Whopper? Burger King to Close 400 Stores Nationwide. So BK who’s been around since 1954 is cutting back on the number of stores? Most of the locations like McDonalds and Wendy’s are franchise. So that will be interesting to see how this is done.
The popular fast food chain Burger King plans to close up to 400 restaurants before the end of 2023, TODAY.com confirmed.
This week, the CEO of Restaurant Brands International Inc., which owns Burger King, said they are preparing to close between 300 and 400 locations.
The CEO, Joshua Kobza, said in a call announcing Q1 earnings results, that the company “historically” closes “a couple hundred” Burger King restaurants each year.
So far this year, several large Burger King franchisees have filed for bankruptcy: Illinois-based Toms King, Michigan-based EYM King, and Utah-based Meridian Restaurants Unlimited.
According to a Restaurant Brands International release announcing the earnings, 124 Burger Kings have already shuttered this year, bringing the total number in the United States to fewer than 7,000.
Progressives today making the same mistakes as those who did in the 20th Century.
It also shouldn’t surprise anyone that Nazi Germany embraced wage controls, Social Security, public schooling, a government-managed economy, a military-industrial complex, and other programs that have long been central to the American progressive program.
A quote by Hitler regarding the importance of public schooling, one of the main German socialist programs that progressives imported to the United States, should be contemplated by every American who enthusiastically supports the idea that the state should be responsible for the education of people’s children.
And how about some of the famous people who early on had no issues with the Nazi’s. Chamberlan, FDR, Ford, Joseph Kennedy, and those below.
Ezra Pound was a famous modernist writer who was prominent during the early 20th century among writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway in Europe, who he edited and collaborated with. After World War I, Pound had moved to Italy in apparent defiance to the UK and struck up support for Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator. Pound met Mussolini in 1933. He spent years before and during World War II broadcasting on Rome Radio in support of Mussolini and Hitler and against Jews.
Pound was arrested when Italy fell to the Allies and would be charged with treason by the US. During this period, he spent three weeks in an outdoor cage before suffering a mental breakdown. He reportedly called Hitler “a saint” when talking to reporters and had asked to record one last radio broadcast which, among other things, would ask for leniency toward Germany. Pound would spend 13 years in a psychiatric hospital in the US before returning to Italy, where he still harbored anti-Semitic views.[1] He died in 1972, leaving behind a literary legacy which is revered but a personal legacy which is full of controversy.
The assertion that the man behind one of the most famous and loved companies in the world harbored pro-Nazi sympathies is extremely controversial and somewhat shocking. However, there are reports that Disney was linked to a few events in the 1930s which were essentially US Nazi Party meetings. In the period before the war and the full atrocities of Hitler’s regime were known, there are smatterings of information that suggest elitist groups in the US and the UK held views similar to those of the Nazis, and Disney seems to have been one of them. In a book called Hitler’s Doubles, it is said that Disney was attending pro-Nazi meetings prior to the war.[2]
It is also known that Disney had hosted Leni Riefenstahl and gave her a tour of his studios. Riefenstahl was the director of Nazi propaganda films Olympia and Triumph des Willens. Disney’s company was criticized for this move. Disney would go on to create anti-Nazi films such as Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi, which somewhat muddies the waters. We will probably never know the true nature of his Nazi links.
Edward VIII is perhaps the most visible and remembered person on this list who had pro-Nazi sentiments. His abdication of the throne in 1936 was caused by his marriage to the American Wallis Simpson, which caused a constitutional crisis, but it was said that he also had too close a connection with Adolf Hitler. Hitler was fond of Edward VIII, and his abdication in 1936 was seen as a blow to the relations Hitler hoped to keep with the UK. In 1937, the then-duke and duchess (Simpson) visited Nazi Germany and are famously pictured with Hitler during this visit.
During World War II, Edward was seen as a risk to the future democracy of the UK, as Hitler had plans to reinstate him upon successful invasion of England. He was made governor of the Bahamas during the war to keep him out of the way. There are numerous accounts of Edward professing his support of Hitler and his policies, with suggestions that he and his wife were fascists. It remains an awkward and contentious point of history in the monarchy of the UK.[3]
Henry Ford is an American pioneer who revolutionized the motor industry with the first assembly line for cars in the early 20th century, but some links exist between the man and the Nazi regime. In 1920, he gave an interview to New York World in which his anti-Semitic views were apparent, calling the “International Jew” a “threat” and accusing them of being behind World War I. The New York Times would also publish an article that suggested Adolf Hitler had a large picture of Henry Ford up on his office wall—in admiration of Ford.[4] This admiration is made clear when Hitler actually name-drops Henry Ford in his book Mein Kampf, calling Ford a “single great man” who “still maintains full independence” from the Jewish threat.
In 1938, only a year before Hitler would invade Poland, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal possible for a person of non-German origin, with Ford being the only US citizen to receive the award. Ford’s name and collection of articles The International Jew was also brought up during the Nuremberg Trials after the conclusion of World War II as an influential piece of anti-Semitic rhetoric. Ford died in 1947.
Charles Lindbergh was made famous overnight in 1927 when he successfully manned a plane from New York to Paris and won the Orteig Prize. His life was also struck by tragedy in 1932, when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered in a ransom attempt which was widely covered in the US media, being dubbed the “Crime of the Century.” He is perhaps remembered least for his outspoken rhetoric against entering the war against Nazi Germany and for his pro-Germany actions.
In June 1936, Lindbergh visited Germany on behalf of the US government in an effort to learn more about how far German aviation had come. Lindbergh also sat near Hitler during the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Summer Olympics but, by all accounts, did not communicate with him.[5] After this, Lindbergh became a pariah in the US, as he called for neutrality and nonengagement in the war with Germany, often attracting German American Bund (a US pro-Nazi organization) members to his speeches. Lindbergh was careful never to admit to Nazi sympathy, and to some extent, he may not have been a sympathizer, but his position was confusing for the US public, and his reputation undoubtedly suffered from it.
Charles Coughlin, commonly referred to as Father Coughlin, was a Roman Catholic priest who used radio before World War II to reach millions of listeners to his doctrines. Coughlin expressed interest in fascist governments, including the Third Reich, in an apparent contrast to communism and Jewish control of banking. In November 1938, Coughlin effectively spoke out against Kristallnacht when asserting that Christian persecution came first. After this controversial broadcast, he became an outcast from mainstream radio and began to receive followers who were anti-Semitic, to the extent that public protests were carried out.
After World War II broke out, he was forced out of radio by the US government and was also made to stop publishing his newspaper, Social Justice. He was to cease all political activity and perform only parish duties. Coughlin denied his anti-Semitic views throughout his active political life, but there is a wealth of facts (including some evidence that suggests Coughlin received funding from Nazi Germany) that point to him being sympathetic with Hitler’s regime.[6]
4 Cliveden Set
The “Cliveden set” was a name given to a group of wealthy individuals who would regularly meet at Cliveden, a home in Buckinghamshire that was the residence of Nancy and Waldorf Astor in the interim period between the World Wars. The group, who were dubbed the Cliveden set in 1937, were one of the most controversial of the period. They seemed to be deeply anti-Semitic and had considerable influence on some of the highest members of the British government. They also seemed to have connections with some high-ranking officials of the Nazi Party and were known in the US. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of the UK from 1937 to 1940, was said to have been influenced by the group.
However, in more recent years, it has been discovered that the Cliveden set may have been misunderstood and were on a list of people who would be immediately arrested on the successful invasion of Britain by Germany. The Cliveden set were often written about by Claud Cockburn, the editor of The Week, and his shaming of the group is disregarded today as biased. It might be called “fake news” in 2019. It remains unclear if the group were really pro-Nazi, but they seem to be linked forever in history to being pro-German.[7]
Sir Oswald Mosley is probably the most obvious Nazi sympathizer on this list. Mosley was a British politician who had failed to be elected in his constituency in 1931, despite being a convincing speaker. After visiting Mussolini in Italy in 1936, he became convinced that fascism was the best alternative to communism and that Britain needed to embrace it.[8] He founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. The BUF targeted Jewish neighborhoods with Mosley’s Fascist Defence Force (nicknamed the “blackshirts”) but remained popular with some strands of followers in England. Mosley would perform the Nazi salute to his blackshirts, who, in turn, performed it back. In 1936, Mosley married Diana Guiness in the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler in attendance.
During World War II, Mosely attempted to convince the British government to accept Hitler’s offerings of peace, but he would be arrested and placed under house arrest. Mosely had extremely strong verbal skills, and this was considered dangerous in a turbulent time in Britain. However, public opinion on Mosley dipped after Nazi Germany began the Blitz on London. He spent the majority of World War II under house arrest, and after the war, he pursued trying to drive Europe to become a single state.
The architect Philip Johnson, known for designing the Glass House in which he lived in Connecticut, was an active supporter of Hitler’s Third Reich prior to the outbreak of World War II. Johnson was linked with Father Charles Coughlin and the anti-Semitic newspaper Social Justice, writing articles for them. Johnson was also known to have traveled to Nazi Germany to report on the huge rallies that were organized, including the annual Nuremberg rally. He was said to have been enthralled by them and made contacts with key Nazi officials during his visits.[9]
In 1940, the FBI would uncover Johnson’s involvement in driving German propaganda to the US “on the Nazis’ behalf.” Johnson would refer to the destruction of Warsaw as a “stirring spectacle.” He was undoubtedly a Nazi sympathizer, but Johnson would try to distance himself once World War II broke out. Years later, in 2018, The New Yorker wrote that Johnson still professed admiration for Hitler as of 1964 by calling him “better than Roosevelt.”
Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, may not be a name you have heard before, but he was a groundbreaking journalist who was fundamental in the creation of the UK newspapers the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. To this day, his family have control over the newspapers and have had an influence on British politics due to this. During the years between the World Wars, Rothermere corresponded with Hitler and would publish articles in his newspapers that essentially promoted fascism. He was also supportive of Oswald Mosley and his BUF. To have a man in such an influential position as Rotheremere openly supporting the Nazi regime must have been deeply concerning.
Rotheremere also paid an annual fee to Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a notorious German spy who was watched by British and American authorities and eventually arrested. This fee was said to be in the aim of promoting Nazi Germany and helping Rothermere get closer to influencing Hitler.[10] In 1939, he wrote a book, My Fight to Rearm Britain, in which he detailed his fight for increased spending on defense and resources needed to protect the country. Regardless, he was heavily linked with the Nazi party in their earlier days, as many English aristocrats seemingly were, yet held such an influential position that it can only be regarded a miracle that many others were not persuaded by his publications.
Fauci retcons the pandemic in laughable NYT interview. The doctor, once again, proved himself a master of illusion and obfuscation. Article was found here.
The New York Times published an extensive interview with Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, and the doc still shows little remorse. To his credit, Times reporter David Wallace-Wells did not let Fauci off easily — there was no Joe Biden treatment in this one.
Fauci, as usual, showed himself a master of illusion. Take his assertion that “only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly.” Really? Well that depends on what you mean by “vaccinated”. If that means you got the first shot — the only one that actually provided transmission protection — then the US actually did quite well, with 80 percent receiving at least one dose. Germany, Luxembourg and Austria are at 78 percent, and progressives’ favorite Scandinavian country, Sweden, sits at 76 percent. Even if you assume he meant “fully vaccinated” with the latest jab, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Baltic states are all pretty darn close to the US’s 68 percent.
He plays the same game with the lab leak theory. Asked about the “lab leak versus natural origin” debate, Fauci said, “until you have a definitive proof of one or the other, it is essential to have an open mind. And I have been this way from the very beginning, David, notwithstanding the criticisms to the contrary.” Is that so? Cockburn certainly does not remember that, and neither, apparently, does Doctor Robert Redfield, the CDC director at the time, who claims that Fauci slammed the door shut on the lab leak hypothesis pretty early on.
And that’s not all! Fauci, in response to an inquiry about gain of function funding, claimed:
[A]ll of the intelligence groups agree that this was not an engineered virus. And if it’s not an engineered virus, what actually leaked from the lab? If it wasn’t an engineered virus, somebody went out into the field, got infected, came back to the lab and then spread it out to other people. That ain’t a lab leak, strictly speaking. That’s a natural occurrence.
Let’s unpack that marvelous trickery. There is some limited truth that intelligence agencies agree that the virus was not “genetically engineered,” as the DNI reported in 2021 that “most agencies also assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered”. The first wrinkle, obviously, is that this assessment is from “most agencies” and is “low confidence.” The second wrinkle is that “two agencies believe there was not sufficient evidence to make an assessment either way.” Not exactly a resounding renunciation of an engineered virus. It is not clear to Cockburn how the agencies have shifted their opinions, if at all, on the topic since 2021, though we may know soon once the intelligence is declassified.
Further, his definition of a lab leak is comically oversimplified. For Fauci, the way it could be a “lab leak” is if the scientist caught the virus from some natural source and then infected his or her colleagues. Admittedly, Fauci gets points for creativity: he effectively coopts the lab leak theory to confirm his own belief that that virus spread from a natural origin point.
Now on to the pandemic response. Fauci complained that “I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations [lockdowns],” that he only “gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.” If he did not want to be the “personification” of pandemic policy, then maybe he should not have played into the panegyrics — like going on the cover of InStyle magazine. And anyway, Fauci can’t claim to have been a mere bystander — he knew very well that his and the CDC’s recommendations were taken and used to enact a very particular set of policies.
Fauci would like to think that public health institutions can look “at it from a purely public-health standpoint. It was for other people to make broader assessments — people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health.” The problem here is that public health institutions are, by their very nature, inseparable from the “broader assessments.” Public health must deal with the public — shocking, but it’s true — and that means there is an interface with policy. That is what makes public health a messy, difficult thing to wrangle with, because you cannot simply make the calculations and run; you have to make the calculations and then mold them into recommendations that are workable for the society to which they will be applied. That did not happen, not because of maliciousness, but because of human error. That is all people want Fauci to admit — actually admit, not massaging an admission with obfuscation and deflection.
By far the most irritating for Cockburn, though, is the moralizing and grumbling about the public’s skepticism of the public health establishment and its recommendations. At the beginning of the condensed interview, Fauci mentions the “smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country.” The irony is that Fauci is at the epicenter of the crisis that caused that very “smoldering anti-science feeling.”
Take the mask debacle. At the beginning, in March 2020, Fauci argued that masking was unnecessary, that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” The argument — which, it turns out, was correct — was that masks were not effective enough to wear. Underlying that contention, though, was what those in government felt was a noble lie: the masks were not recommended not because they did not work, but because they wanted to make sure healthcare workers had access to them, primarily the N95. Then, all of a sudden, the guidance did a 180 and masks were not only protective, but mandated. Even when evidence began to pour in that cloth and surgical masks were not effective enough to warrant mandating them, nothing changed. This is why there is a crisis of trust, a “smoldering anti-science feeling”; it is not so much anti-science as it is skepticism of government claims to science.
And then there was the lockdown policy. The doctor said in the interview that “somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85 percent of the hospitalizations are there.” Why was that the case? It happened because the public health establishment failed to communicate. Fauci would likely disagree: “Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes.” Fair enough, but the public health institutions paired those warnings with policy recommendations that said the contrary. Why was he suggesting that students still be masked mid-2021? Why were the teachers’ unions so involved in crafting school reopening processes? Where was Fauci when a voice of reason was needed in the school reopening process? He can point to a few meek comments, but where was the pandemic warrior he likes to portray himself as? It was this kind of behavior that helped produce an “anti-science feeling” in the country; it was a lack of honesty, a lack of consistency and the appearance of foul play.
Does Fauci deserve all the blame? Of course not — but nor does he get to exonerate himself either.
Apparently, though, he does not feel he has anything worth exonerating himself of. When Wallace-Wells asked Fauci if the idea that gain-of-function research may (however unlikely and improbable it may be) have had some relation to Covid-19’s origins, weighed on him, the doctor was both defensive and dismissive. “Now you’re saying things that are a little bit troublesome to me. That I need to go to bed tonight worrying that NIH-funded research was responsible for pandemic origins.”
“Well, I sleep fine, I sleep fine”, he added, before defending the research as “not conceived by me as I was having my omelet in the morning. It is a grant that was put before peer review of independent scientists whose main role is to try to get data to protect the health and safety of the American public and the world.” Whatever the facts are in this case, the response is a microcosm of the broader problem: Fauci cannot seem to accept any culpability, it is always someone else’s fault — the politicians, the Republicans who “don’t like to be told what to do,” or the “independent scientists” — and rarely his own.
Cockburn, more than anything else, would just like to see Fauci show — even if it’s feigned — some understanding of the concerns his critics bring to the table, some recognition of his own faults. That would require introspection, though, and despite all of his skills, that one is conspicuously lacking.
Does my heart good to see the Fauch lies exposed so all can see. Thanks Newsmax for this great article.
https://youtu.be/soMUg_y3sqw
Fauci Emails and Covid Lab Leak Theory
By Nick Koutsobinas
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) has released six video depositions taken in a federal lawsuit that sheds light on what role government actors, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, played in censoring or, as revealed in the Twitter Files, the offshoring of government requests to private social media companies or foreign actors to censor speech around COVID-19.
In his deposition for State of Missouri v. Joseph R. Biden Jr., as NCLA outlines, Fauci “testified ‘I do not recall’ 174 times, and ‘I don’t remember,’ at least 212 times.” According to NCLA, evidence from “his own emails and past statements” indicate the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) “cast substantial doubt” on his claim to a “failing memory.”
According to U.S. Right to Know, Fauci requested Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar organize a secret teleconference on Feb. 1, 2020, onstensibly to shift concerns from a lab leak to one of natural origin.
Furthermore, NCLA says, “his deposition testimony — that he genuinely believed COVID had natural origins — conflicts with emails he exchanged with scientists in early 2020, indicating that he believed the lab leak hypothesis could be accurate.”
The recent ruling by Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana denying the government defendants’ motion to dismiss has paved the way for the case to continue. The judge was unpersuaded by the defendants’ arguments.
Elvis Chan, who has been named in the Twitter Files, said in his deposition that the FBI played a prominent role in working with Big Tech to sway public opinion. In regard to the wider scope of what’s been termed the “censorship industrial complex,” Chan, on the eve of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, sent Twitter’s then-head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, 10 documents. “Within hours,” journalist Michael Shellenberger writes, “Twitter and other social media companies” began censoring the story.
Nonetheless, the recently filed Supplemental Preliminary Injunction Brief as well as the Proposed Findings of Fact reveal a damning effort by the Biden administration and federal officials’ in employing “illicit tactics” to silence voices on social media that presented views on COVID-19 that were otherwise deemed inconvenient or disfavored.
Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for NCLA, said, “These depositions further confirm what other discovery in the case has already demonstrated: Dozens of members of the federal government, including unelected bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci, orchestrated a campaign to shut down debate about COVID-19 related subjects; and they deceived the American public on issues ranging from the lab leak theory to efficacy of masks to the protection offered by naturally acquired immunity to whether the vaccines could prevent disease transmission.”
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Two BNSF trains derailed in separate incidents in Arizona and Washington state on Thursday, with the latter spilling diesel fuel on tribal land along Puget Sound.
No injuries were reported.
It wasn’t clear what caused either derailment.
The derailment in Washington occurred on a berm along Padilla Bay, on the Swinomish tribal reservation near Anacortes.
Most of 5,000 gallons of spilled diesel fuel leaked on the land side of the berm rather than toward the water, according to the state Ecology Department.
Officials said there were no indications the spill reached the water or affected any wildlife.
Responders placed a boom along the shoreline as a precaution and removed the remaining fuel from two locomotives that derailed.
Four tank cars remained upright.
The derailment in western Arizona, near the state’s border with California and Nevada, involved a train carrying corn syrup.
A spokeswoman for the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office, Anita Mortensen, said that she was not aware of any spills or leaks.
BNSF spokeswoman Lena Kent said an estimated eight cars derailed in Arizona and were blocking the main track.
The cause of the derailment was under investigation, and it was not immediately known when the track will reopen.
The derailments came amid heightened attention to rail safety nationwide following a fiery derailment last month in Ohio and a string of derailments since then that have been grabbing headlines, including ones in Michigan, Alabama and other states.
Last month, a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, igniting a fire and causing hundreds of people to be evacuated.
Officials seeking to avoid an uncontrolled blast intentionally released and burned toxic vinyl chloride from five rail cars, sending flames and black smoke high into the sky.
That left people questioning the potential health impacts even as authorities maintained they were doing their best to protect people.
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