All Posts (29104)
Sort by
Source; Sent from a friend...............
The ceasefire on Gaza- whether it lasts four days, 11, or much longer - is a disaster for Israel on every level.
Symbolically: By agreeing to a hostages-for-prisoners swap, Israel has implicitly agreed the Palestinian criminals in its prisons are no different than the civilians that hamas’s terrorists grabbed from their beds and homes.
Militarily/Tactically: The pause gives hamas’s fighters a chance to rest after weeks of bombardment, rebuild their defenses, and rearm. Worse, Israel has lost the chance to force the action. hamas decides whether to keep the ceasefire in place by releasing more hostages; Israel has no choice in the matter.
Militarily/Strategically: By agreeing to a ceasefire so soon, Israel enables its critics to question if the invasion was necessary at all - especially because it has failed to capture any senior hamas commanders and killed only one. Even the most fervent Israeli partisan cannot justify killing thousands of civilians to take out the equivalent of one mid-level general.
Morally: Most importantly, Israel has squandered what is left of the world’s sympathy for it. It should have told Hamas that the taking of hostages was a war crime and it would never agree to a ceasefire as long as hamas held them. It should have drawn that line and stuck to it. It should have repeated over and over: As long as hamas holds hostages, Israel views all of Gaza as a legitimate military target.
Once the ceasefire ends (again, on hamas’s timetable), Israel will be stuck in the worst of all possible places. In reality, though, Israel will face an impossible choice: to push deeper into Gaza - and face even more civilian casualties and worldwide outrage - or to pull back, without coming close to achieving its goal of destroying Hamas.
The deal is so terrible that it raises the question how the Israeli government could possibly agreed to it. One possibility is that the biden regime - despite its public support for Israel - essentially forced it to do so. Another, more hopeful, is that Israel has reached secret side deals with major Arab countries that will help it eliminate hamas’s leadership - and quickly, in months, not years.
But the 3rd is that as pressure from inside Israel to release the hostages grew, Netanyahu buckled, instead of telling his people the truth - that allowing the hostages to be taken was a failure, and he would not compound it by making a terrible deal to release them, as innocent as they are.
Worry about Israel's future. As things stand, it has shown that it cannot protect its civilians yet has also managed to turn much of the world against it through its bombardment of Gaza.
Maybe Israel and Netanyahu have a secret plan. Maybe they have a pinky promise from Qataris that hamas’s leaders will be shipped to Tel Aviv for speedy trial and even speedier execution. At this moment, things look grim.
Additional Info:
https://spectator.org/israel-lost-the-initiative/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/curing_jews_of_leftism.html
Source; Sent from a friend..............
“The Third Way, the intervention of the state into private enterprise, an amalgam of big-business and big-government and big-law firms, does not combine the best features of either socialism or capitalism. There is no evidence that when it was tried it met the expectations of the planners or improved the conditions it set to correct."---Ludwig von Mises
"A free society cannot coexist with a redistributive state-there is no 'Third Way'; people must be vigilant to ensure that majorities are prevented from violating the rights of minorities in the name of distributive justice."---J. A. Dorn
"Perhaps the most painful aspect of reforming a socialist society lies in the values, attitudes and habits of the work force. For years, people will have been taught that private property means exploitation and that socialism means a welfare state, an egalitarian distribution of income, permanent job security, and low prices. In other words, people will have learned to let government take care of them."---G. Schroeder
"Socialism needs an unending series of crisis's to justify the taking away of our liberties and controlling our lives, which never returns to its previous fullness, if at all. And when there isn't even a scent of a crisis, the socialist will work to create the perception of one."--John Lefler
The bottom 50%, generally households with net worth of $166,000 or less before the pandemic, now hold a bigger share of the nation’s wealth than they’ve had for 20 years, the Federal Reserve estimates. Their collective net worth, $3.73 trillion, has almost doubled in 2 years and is more than 10 times higher than in 2011, the nadir after the last recession, according to bloomberg.com.
Who is poor in America? This is not an easy question to answer. It's hard because there's no conclusive definition of poverty. Low income matters, though how low is unclear. Poverty is also a mind-set that fosters self-defeating behavior -- bad work habits, family breakdown, out-of-wedlock births and addictions. Finally, poverty also results from lousy luck: accidents, job losses, disability.
Despite poverty's messiness, we've tended to measure progress against it by a single statistic, the federal poverty line. It is the Agriculture Department's estimated cost for a bare-bones -- but adequate -- diet and multiplied it by three. That figure is adjusted annually for inflation. In 2008, the poverty threshold was $21,834 for a four-member family with two children under 18. It has stayed in a narrow range for decades. In 2007 -- the peak of the last business cycle -- the poverty rate was 12.5%. In 1969, another business cycle peak, the poverty rate was 12.1% percent. The apparent lack of progress is misleading for two reasons.
1st, it ignores immigration, which has increased reported poverty. Many immigrants are poor and low-skilled. From 1989 to 2007, about 75% of the increase in the poverty population occurred among Hispanics -- mostly immigrants. The poverty rate for blacks fell during this period, though it was still much too high (24.5% in 2007). Poverty "experts" don't dwell on immigration, because it implies that more restrictive policies might reduce U.S. poverty.
2nd, the poor's material well-being has improved. The official poverty measure obscures this by counting only pre-tax cash income and ignoring other sources of support. These include the earned-income tax credit (a rebate to low-income workers), food stamps, health insurance (Medicaid), and housing and energy subsidies. Spending by poor households from all sources can double their reported income. Although many poor live hand-to-mouth, they've had rising living standards. In 2005, 91% had microwaves, 795 air conditioning and 48% cellphones.
The existing poverty line could be improved by adding some income sources and subtracting some expenses (example: child care). Unfortunately, BObama’s proposal for a "supplemental poverty measure" -- to complement, not replace, the existing poverty line -- goes beyond these changes. The new poverty number would compound public confusion. It appears that this is being done for a political agenda. The "supplemental measure" ties the poverty threshold to what the poorest third of Americans spend on food, housing, clothes and utilities. The actual threshold -- not yet calculated -- will almost certainly be higher than today's poverty line. Moreover, the new definition has strange consequences. Suppose that all Americans doubled their incomes tomorrow, and suppose that their spending on food, clothing, housing and utilities also doubled. That would seem to signify less poverty -- but not by the new poverty measure. It wouldn't decline, because the poverty threshold would go up as spending went up. Many Americans would find this weird: People get richer but "poverty" stays stuck.
What produces this outcome is a different view of poverty. The present concept is an absolute one: The poverty threshold reflects the amount estimated to meet basic needs. By contrast, the supplemental measure embraces a relative notion of poverty: People are automatically poor if they're a given distance from the top, even if their incomes are increasing. The idea is that they suffer psychological deprivation by being far outside the mainstream. The math of this relative definition makes it hard for people at the bottom ever to escape "poverty." This is simply the liberal ideology of socialism being applied through the tactic of class warfare
The new indicator is a propaganda device to promote income redistribution by deceptively claiming that poverty is stubborn or increasing. The In 2008, the traditional poverty rate was 13.2% percent; estimates of the new statistic range up to 17%. The new poverty statistic exceeds the old, and the gap grows larger over time. To paraphrase the late democrat Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: BObama is attempting to define poverty up. It's legitimate to debate how much we should aid the poor or try to reduce economic inequality. But the debate should not be skewed by misleading statistics that not one American in 100,000 could possibly understand. Government statistics should strive for political neutrality. This one fails.
"If you're a typical American, the truth is that poverty, for you, will be a short-lived experience. The U.S. Census, whose job it is to count all Americans regardless of their economic situation, says so!...That's not to say that poverty isn't a problem. For the vast majority of Americans, it is however best described as a very temporary condition. The only way it could become permanent is if the government acts to put well-intentioned barriers in the way of those seeking to leave poverty behind. And how do we know that isn't what's kept those chronic 2.8% of the U.S. population in their impoverished conditions"---Political Calculations
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it…I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." --Benjamin Franklin
"We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air-conditioning, microwave ovens, cell phones, DVD players, and own either a car or a truck. Why are such people called 'poor'? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. ... Those who believe in an expansive, nanny state government need a large number of people in 'poverty' to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going." --Thomas Sowell
Nicholas Eberstadt points out that America's official poverty rate-for over 4+ decades, the main indicator for the Trillions of tax dollars spent on antipoverty programs, is an outdated and badly broken index. Its built-in defects make it incapable of providing accurate information about poverty trends. Poverty has become a relative, rather than an absolute, concept, unsatisfied wants are usually no longer physical needs but the results of civilization.
Essentially the data matches a family's reported annual income against a "poverty threshold" -a hypothetical bare-bones budget, based on household size and composition, which is adjusted with the inflation rate. The government's aim is to track absolute poverty rather than relative poverty or inequality.
What is wrong with the official poverty rate? It measures the wrong thing and always has. That thing is income. Poverty is not a matter of income; it is a matter of consumption. “Rich” people can and do live in poverty. However, a huge gap separates income and consumption at the lower strata of our income distribution.
But let’s review the data. The latest data, according to the annual Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, show purchases by the poorest 20% of U.S. households were more than twice as high as their income. In fact the surfeit of spending over income among poorer U.S. households has increased dramatically since the 1970s-making income an ever less dependable predictor of living standards. Indeed, while the official poverty thresholds are meant to be constant over time, data confirms the fact that material conditions for our population in "poverty" have been steadily improving. The limited data Official statistics gather is incapable of documenting-or even recognizing any changes in living standards among America's poor.
According to official figures, America's poverty rate was 11.1% in 1973, at 11.4%; in 2020. This is nonsense. Does anyone seriously believe that a smaller fraction of Americans lived in poverty in 1973 than today?
The poverty threshold, in inflation adjusted dollars, for an individual 2020 is 9% lower than 1973, for a median family its 7.5% lower. But, according to the Census Bureau, real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income was 180% higher in 2020 than in 1973. Median family income was over 16%. There are fewer families being formed.The unemployment rate-a key driver of poverty was lower in 2019 (2020 was Covid) than in 1973 (3.6% versus 4.9%). Educational attainment (productivity potential) for the adult population was significantly higher in 2020, and government anti-poverty spending is now way more than 1973. In 2020 41% of those living in poverty were white, 28% were Hispanic, 24% were Black, and 4% were Asian.
All this in the wake of welfare reform that occurred under the guidance, work and effort of the Republican Congress in 1996, who forced b. j. clinton to sign the legislation reform they enacted. They believed that the results of moral decay that our broken welfare system fostered, including not only poverty but, hunger and unemployment too, could be reversed if the rules that encouraged them were changed. In other words, “Change you can believe in”. All the data show that not only poverty, hunger and unemployment dropped, but those on welfare too.
Yet once again, liberalism must intervene and regulate and undo the heart of welfare reform that gave us all the success identified above, to bring back all the aspects on welfare that helped cause all the problems discussed above. It is the idea at the core of that action, that an act of will can reinvent the human condition, which lies at the heart of ideologies that have caused untold human misery. A vision in truth of hopium and chains.
“Philanthropy, charity, voluntarism, activism, and care for the family and the poor are all related to the same impulses that drive the free-market: the peaceful and free association of people in the service of others...What happens when we are no longer able or inclined to defend the institutions and ideas that have enabled our prosperity and that still guarantee of freedom?”---Rev Robert Sirico
Additional Info:
Source; For the children Sent from a friend...........
By no global measure of social and economic well-being have we failed kids as the raging mad child spokesperson for the fake climate crisis, who spoke at the U.N; alleging man-made climate change was hurting children, with the left-wing media supporting her claims. According to HumanProgress.org, the global poverty rate fell from 28% in 1999 to 11% in 2013. Life expectancy increased from 63.2 years to 71.9 years from 1981 to 2015. The completion rate for primary school increased from 80% in 1981 to 90% in 2015. The same benign trends hold for hunger, child labor, literacy, and so on. If climate change proves a significant challenge, today’s youth will have more resources and technology to grapple with it than any other generation in the history of mankind. The mainstream media doesn’t mention any of this.
No wonder Gallup shows fewer Americans trust the mainstream left-wing media for unbiased and accurate information.
Additional Info:
Source; Sent from a friend..........
The Supreme Court has repudiated the claim that the dubious benefits claims, made without a proper accounting of their results and consequences, of diversity cannot override the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment. It's all out in the open now, no more hiding; the subterfusions of affirmative action are exposed and repudiated, after so long disguised as diversity, more recently amplified with equity and inclusion.
The touchstone of an individual's identity is challenges bested, skills built, and lesson learned, not the color of one's skin, which is merely a racist stereotype. As Gayle Heriot points out, to do such most often promotes putting people in a place where they are incapable of performing, hence creating serious negative consequences not only for all parties involved but for society as a whole. All that sneaking and lurking and defending and justifying window dressing for guilt-ridden liberal whites and votes for liberal politicians for so-called social justice merely wreaks havoc for all involved. Yet, in the name of the deceptive term "equity," US resources are moving to groups more closely identified with left-wing/democrats and taken away from groups that aren't. Federal courts all over the country overturn these provisions finding they are not compatible with constitutional equal protection. FOIA requests have revealed just how idiosyncratic and ideological is considerations can be. Enough catering to the lifelong chip on your shoulder like michelle obama
The expedient woke policies (aka social-engineering) of the left-wing, when put into practice, degenerate into social dysfunction, bureaucratic inefficiency, and political corruption. The impetus behind this is Western civilization's self-hatred movement through an uncompromising hatred of only Western tradition. Such self-hatred is most noticeable by how its worldview is so fervently embraced by the left-wing. Western self-hatred has become the core of left-wing ideology and the central bond of the left-wing, the "intersectional" glue that holds the left-wing together.
The central arguments of this movement are that whites in the West are responsible for all or most evil, and that this evil overshadows any alleged good works that might raise doubts about whether whites and Western tradition are appropriate hate figures, and most absurdly--like all marxist beliefs--is that this self-hatred also believes that those who disagree with its obviously false premise must be stigmatized as proof. And, of course, accordingly, any of self-hatred's ideologies or policies that fail are the result of the very presence of any who disagree, and never-ever-never its practioners or its ideas.
Civilizational self-hatred is a systemic, extreme, and and one sided criticism of the values, institutions, and history of one's own civilization which is not extended to other civilizations. The left-wing attacks the West or one of its component parts or systems, such as the traditional family, religion, the market economy or the criminal justice system, typically as a whole. if and when there arises a relevant issue or criticism that would more logically apply to particular persons, events, or issues instead.
For the self-hatred left-winger only revolutionary change can be considered as a remedy. For it there is no point in discussing the relative merits of incremental reforms, and little need to get into specifics of why proposed revolutionary changes will work better than the status quo. We'll work out the details once we dispose of the common enemy is its mindset. That helps paper over important conflicts that will occur, even between various groups of self-haters. It will always attempt to deny or tactically tone down such conflicts.
And of course other civilizations must be viewed as blameless victims of the West, they are to be either ignored or selectively flattered, largely based on their utility as potential allies in the struggle, and not upon germane, cogent facts. If it must, self-hatred will excuse and justify any and all sins of other cultures, again, except its own.
So, why are neo-liberals so easily seduced by a broader, open-ended self-hatred? What is so appealing about self-hatred?
Well, the left wing, with the pervasive tendency to think of the world in terms of groups rather than individuals, expects impossible perfectibility, easily obtained; in far reaching promises of progress that fundamentally corrects their perceived flaws and brings their world to an unobtainable utopia. It offers the illusion of a community of morally and intellectually superiority, on the cheap, and, therefore, the lesser the need to sweat the details or justify/prove their proposed alternatives as actually producing improvement. Self-hatred therefore offers the benefits of membership in the community with little burden of responsibility, other than ideological conformity. It conveniently offers a shield against the most difficult psychological steps - having to admit deep flaws in long-standing beliefs/commitments at the heart of one's self-image, of having to yield one's supposed moral/intellectual superiority, and even worse, having to admit one may have actually helped perpetrate new evils. As such this ideology easily morphs into double-standards compelling one to blame others even more harshly while ignoring one's own equivalent or worse flaws. The more one is dissatisfied with one's own life and with the surrounding society, the more tempting it is to blame the problems on a scapegoat, thereby simplifying the problem and avoiding the need to take responsibility for doing one's best in a complex world. So, the self-hatred people become a movement that takes great satisfaction from directing their frustrations outward at their contrived object of hate, especially when done within a community of fellow believers.
And of course an important driver is political expedience, or to use the left-wing's preferred term, power. Values and institutions deriving largely from Western traditions happened to be the main ideological rival of the West's self-hatred movement.
Incrementally cultivating and refining the West's traditional virtues and institutions - such as the pursuit of moral, educational, technical, and vocational excellence, religious devotion and community, decentralized charitable activities, the rule of law, the market economy, and democratic government rooted in a separation of powers - is not the alternative for the left-wing, only destroying them as a hate object to be superseded by an ever changing assortment of utopian fashions du jour.
Self-hatred makes it possible, not only to discredit its main ideological rival, but to attempt to rule out open, competitive discussion of its strengths and weaknesses and to target its supporters reputations, careers, and even physical safety. Such intimidation has its greatest success, not in direct attacks on targets, but in creating both a persuasive fear that silences so many, along with a thoroughgoing ignorance about the benefits offered by Western tradition.
This hatred, unconstrained by coherent ideals or succesful examples, has no clear standards for appraising or prioritizing its increasingly incoherent array of allied miniutopias - and merely defaults to its already failed, anti-traditional social-engineering in cultural hedonism and economic collectivism. The ideology serves only the privilege of the self-hating elites, while harming most of the less fortunate whom the self-haters falsely claim to represent. The bigotry, failure, and narcissism of the self-hating left wing could hardly be more blatant.
Similarly clear, but ignored by the self-hatred movement, is the universality and success of the tradition it demonizes, whose main progenitors are dismissed with ad hominem, racist argument that they are merely "dead white men." Despite the fact that they expoused timeless values of individual and communal virtue and excellence, were titanic, transformational exemplars of scientific and artistic excellence, world historical contributors to the development of a decentralized, rule-based vastly widepsread prosperous economic and successful political order, which seeks to treat all equally and thereby generates an open and competitive society that best promotes human flourishing.
Of course when reality "constrains" or "exposed" their promises, which it always does, the self-haters will desperately still cling to their ideology, powerfully addicting as it is to them.
"If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the government, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary."--Calvin Coolidge.
Additional Info:
Source; Sent from a friend.........
mRNA advocates have tried to give the vax credit for ending the pandemic, despite massive evidence they stopped working within months and the observational data showing lower deaths among the vaccinated is hopelessly biased.
The Society of Actuaries released an updated report on deaths during the pandemic - the folks who help insurance companies assess risk. Every few months, it has put out reports on trends in American deaths during Covid. The actuaries have access to enough big insurers to make the data a reasonable proxy for full national data Their most recent report includes depictions of both Covid and non-Covid deaths stratified by quarter and by age.
There is some evidence that the fall 2022 bivalent booster rollout led to more non-Covid deaths in older people, but it’s far from definitive. But the trends in Covid deaths could not be clearer. Covid deaths were relatively low in the spring of 2021 - the happy vaccine valley, the brief period when the mRNAs worked as advertised. They then soared in the summer, or Q3 2021. They jumped in ALL ages, including the highly vaccinated, representing people 65+. Overall China virus deaths rose - roughly tripling between spring and fall 2021, despite all the boosters and the mandates like the useless masks for one, detrimental lockdowns for another.
This point can’t be emphasized enough: the soaring deaths in older people came even though nearly every senior in the US was vaccinated. Except me, given my education and knowledge, was already was informed.
Then, in the spring of 2022 Covid ended and it has not come back.
What accounted for this miraculous end to the plague of all plagues? Not vaccines. They were given in early 2021, a year before the tide rolled out, and even their backers concede they don’t work well against Omicron.
No, what happened was Omicron itself. It swept through the US in the winter of 2022, the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. Its mortality rates were overall much lower than the earlier variants - probably in the range of 0.05-0.1%-that's about the same chance of being hit by lightning during your lifetime- though its transmissibility meant that the winter of 2022 still saw a lot of deaths (particularly in older people, no matter that they were vaxxed).
Ever since, various not-very-lethal Omicron strains have bounced around a population that has natural immunity, helping make them even more of a nothingburger.
In the end, the vaccines were a sideshow. SARS-Cov-2 sought and found a truce with its human hosts (assuming the IgG4 class switch doesn’t come back to haunt the mRNA-jabbed).
Meanwhile, there has been a lot of research on high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. During the pandemic, a whole world of people used this research to promote HEPA filters and insist they would save us from the China virus. Like the masketeers, the filtrationists failed to consider that there is a very wide gulf between theory and practice. Many, many health interventions, which ought to work for very theoretically sound reasons, fail to do anything in the real world. This is why we have things like observational studies and randomized controlled trials to determine whether remedies that sound like they should work actually do work. You’d think the filtrationists would have bothered to show at literally any point that their favorite solution would stop Covid, but Nooo!
The pandemic response was not a rational program to mitigate virus infections, but rather was left-wing ideologically driven that turned on demanding specific rituals, including especially children. People were made to feel that they were participating in a larger pathogen extermination effort, and the left-wing establishment needed an opportunity to blame the non-compliant should their interventions fail. With masks, vaccines and social distancing, it is much easier to ascribe failures to nebulous rule-breakers and the smarter non-complaint, maliciously labelled right-wing conspiratorial Covidiots. It is thus best to regard hygiene interventions as a fundamentally political solution to the prior mistake of assuming responsibility for pandemic outcomes.
Researcher @ University Hospital Bonn studied whether HEPA filters actually do anything about Covid. They compared rates of 4th-wave Covid infections that had installed HEPA filters to rates of infection that had not. They found that HEPA filters are associated with dramatically higher rates of infection. But lo, rather than report this result honestly, they explain their results away with ad hoc rationalizations. This is because left-wing Science, as it works today, involves proving propositions which are fixed political let-wing doctrines. Should results contradict these doctrines, they can’t even be discussed, still less acknowledged.
