Archive for September 2020
The truth comes out, political correctness overrules real science
From a New York Times article:
When the coronavirus emerged in China in January, the World Health Organization didn’t flinch in its advice: Do not restrict travel.
But what is now clear is that the policy was about politics and economics more than public health.
Public health records, scores of scientific studies and interviews with more than two dozen experts show the policy of unobstructed travel was never based on hard science. It was a political decision, recast as health advice, which emerged after a plague outbreak in India in the 1990s. By the time Covid-19 surfaced, it had become an article of faith.
“It’s part of the religion of global health: Travel and trade restrictions are bad,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who helped write the global rules known as the International Health Regulations. “I’m one of the congregants.”
So we see, the mantra against not restricting travel is a combination of political correctness (don’t stigmatize non-white countries) and business interests (don’t harm the profitability of airlines and the tourism industry).
OK, so I was wrong, Biden didn’t win, except that he did win the long game
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I think that most of Trump’s prole super-supporters (the kind who go to his rallies) who watched the debate are thinking that Trump won because he talked louder than everyone else in the room and proved that he has more energy than “sleepy” Joe Biden.
But maybe some of the college-educated voters, who voted for Trump because they traditionally vote Republican, watched this and decided that they can’t take another four years of a clown in the White House.
I’m in the “get the clown out of the White House” crowd, even though there’s little there that would specifically want to make me vote for Biden other than that he’s not a clown. I’m specifically annoyed that Biden refused to answer the question about packing the Supreme Court, which I think was one of the most important questions in the debate and was an opportunity for Biden to indicate that his presidency would be a return to normalcy.
Everyone in the MSM and Biden too think that the worst thing they can say about Trump is that he’s a “racist.” It’s like a kid in kindergarten thinking he really tore down another kid because he said that the other kid has “cooties.” Nevertheless, Trump could have answered that a lot better. I don’t think that “stand by” was meant for the Proud Boys, but merely that he meant to say some other more important stuff about Antifa first and then get back to condemning people, but he lost this train of thought because Trump is as bad as Biden when it comes to speaking coherently for more than a minute at a time.
One thing that Biden did well is say very firmly that he’s the Democratic Party now and not radical leftists. And he did come out firmly for NOT defunding the police.
Also, Biden didn’t debate poorly enough for anyone to be able to prove that he’s senile. In fact, that he was able to remember some obviously canned responses proves that he’s not senile, because Alzheimer’s disease is specifically the loss of short-term memory.
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Prediction: Biden will win the debate
Remember the Lloyd Bentsen-Dan Quayle debate? Notice the smile on Bentsen’s face when Quayle predictably compared himself to “Jack” Kennedy, and Bentsen knew that he would get to clobber him with the zinger his debate-prep people prepared for him and Bentsen had practiced.
This Associated Press article should worry Trump supporters. Trump is barely doing any debate prep, while Biden has probably been doing little else. Trump is very predictable in the things he brags about and the insults he hurls. I am sure the Biden has several Lloyd-Bentsen-type zingers locked and loaded. The mainstream media will then surely amplify it to deafening proportions, and for 24 hours we will hear nothing on CNN except for how Biden really crushed Trump.
But wait, isn’t Biden supposed to be “senile”? That’s what you believe if you live in a right-wing echo chamber, but there don’t seem to be any leaks from the Biden camp about Biden being too senile to debate. I predict that Biden’s “senility” will turn out just like Hillary Clinton’s supposed “illness” back in 2016. Four years later, there’s still no sign of the mysterious malady that was supposed to have her on death’s door.
Democrats are projecting again
Right now, MSM is full of articles in the nature of “OMG! Trump isn’t going to concede that Biden legitimately won the election.”
But that is exactly what Democrats have been doing for the last four years. They never accepted that Trump legitimately won the election. They tried to push electors to change their votes. Before Trump even took office, they were dreaming up a strategy to impeach him. He’s not the legitimate president because he didn’t win the popular vote (even though the system set up in the Constitution for selecting the president has nothing to do with the popular vote). His winning the election was blamed on James Comey, on Russian spies, on anything except that voters in key swing states liked him better than Hillary Clinton. And to the extent that they sometimes grudgingly admit that some voters did like him better, it’s only because those voters were racists and deplorables or otherwise motivated by evil thoughts and desires.
The Democrats are right that it will be bad for America if Trump and his supporters never accept Biden as the legitimate president, just as it has been bad for America that Democrats never accepted Trump as the legitimate president.
Jeffrey Johnson and Breonna Taylor
Remember Jeffrey Johnson?
Jeffrey Johnson was the nerdy beta-male T-shirt artist (not an especially talented artist) who shot and killed his bullying guido co-worker. When police caught up with him near the Empire State Building, Johnson pulled out a gun, but didn’t shoot it. It’s not even clear to me that the gun was aimed at the cops. Nevertheless, police officers opened up at him firing 16 bullets, not only killing Johnson but also wounding nine innocent bystanders.
But no one cared much about the Jeffrey Johnson incident because Johnson was white, and I have no clue about the races of the innocent bystanders who were shot, but only black lives matter. None of those cops in New York City were prosecuted for reckless endangerment, even though it’s pretty reckless firing off sixteen shots on a crowded New York City street. It’s only blind luck that no one else was killed besides Johnson. I don’t even think that any of the cops suffered any sort of reprimand. A lawsuit against the city and the officers seems to have gone nowhere.
The point here is that there’s a long history of the police being trigger happy. Whites are also victims. It’s not racism, “systemic” or otherwise.
Supreme Court, 2020
Yes, it’s a little unseemly to talk about replacing Ginsburg so soon after her death. But the fate of the Supreme Court is simply too important to not talk about it.
First, let me say a few things about Ginsburg. She seems like she was a nice woman, not bitter and angry like a lot of feminists and liberals. She was said to be a good friend of Antonin Scalia, which speaks very well of her. She wrote one particularly really bad dissent, but she was a liberal after all. Antonin Scalia was still able to be friends with her after that dissent.
But now that she’s dead, it’s extremely important for Republicans to make sure that a good conservative Justice replaces her and not allow Biden to replace her with someone who will most likely be an extreme liberal based on the way things are going.
I expect that extreme liberals will be pushing the following extreme-left legal theories in the near future:
- People in other countries have a constitutional right to enter into the United States, and a constitutional right to stay here once they’ve entered.
- The planet has constitutional rights such that laws that are perceived by liberals to be bad for the planet (such as whatever liberals think causes “climate change”) are unconstitutional.
- People no longer have freedom of speech if what they say is perceived as “racist,” with liberals controlling the definition of “racist.” This will then be extended to speech that’s is deemed to be “homophobic” or “Islamophobic.”
- Any laws that perpetuate “systemic racism” are unconstitutional, with liberals, once again, controlling the determination of which laws fall under this rubric.
- As a matter of statutory interpretation, any business that doesn’t have enough of the right types of minorities working for them are in violation of the various Civil Rights Acts.
- Children have a constitutional right to get sex change operations, with parents forbidden from interfering.
If you’re response to this is “oh, that’s a lot of nonsense, where did you hear anyone say they are going to do that?”, well that’s the exact same thing that liberals would have said a few decades ago about gay marriage. They said that conservatives who speculated that liberal judges would find a constitutional right for gay marriage were just being paranoid and making stuff up.
But the reality is that it has been liberals, not conservatives, who have a long history of using the courts to accomplish political goals that they can’t accomplish through legislation.
Liberals are going to hyperventilate during the next two months about abortion, but we have had a conservative Supreme Court since Nixon, yet Roe v. Wade was never overturned. There’s no reason to think they are going to overturn it now. And if they do, it’s Democrats’ fault for not passing legislation to make abortion legal everywhere. After each of the last three Democratic presidents were elected, Carter, Clinton and Obama, Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, but they never passed an Abortion Rights Act because they were too pussified or something. Democrats will probably control the government again after Biden wins and the Senate flips to Democratic control. Here’s my advice to any Democrats reading this: If you care so much about abortion, than pass a a damn law that gives women the right to have an abortion and stop depending on the Supreme Court to do it for you.
In order to prevent the possibility of a liberal Supreme Court, a sixth “conservative” Justice is essential, because otherwise during the next four years when we have a Democratric administration, the Supreme Court is just one heart attack away from going to a liberal majority (with Justices Thomas and Alito, both in their 70s, the most likely heart attack victims).
And I put the word “conservative” in parentheses because of the known phenomenon in which some presumed-conservative Justices become more liberal over time. There’s no guarantee that a five-Justice conservative majority will stay conservative.
Talking about Constitutional rights, there’s no dispute that the President has the Constitutional right to nominate a new Justice when there’s a vacancy, and that the Senate has the constitutional right to confirm the nomination. There has never been any sort of rule that a certain number of days before an election the President isn’t allowed to nominate someone or that the Senate isn’t allowed to do its Constitutionally required duty to consider the nomination and confirm if they think the nominee should be confirmed.
A few elected Republicans said otherwise four years ago, which caps a long history of politicians making up stupid reasons to hide their real reasons for doing things. Some dumb crap that some Republicans said to the media isn’t legally binding. A new Supreme Court Justice isn’t for the personal benefit of Trump, McConnell, or any other individual elected official, it’s for the benefit of the American people. I shouldn’t be forced to suffer an extreme liberal Biden appointee because McConnell, who I didn’t vote for, said some stupid crap four years ago that he shouldn’t have said. (Regarding Trump, he may be a bozo who’s unfit to be President, but one of the few things he and the Republicans have done right during his term in office is appoint judges).
Some liberals are talking about packing the Court. It’s probably not going to happen, I don’t think enough Democrats will go along with such an extreme middle finger to our nation’s customs. If they can’t get enough of a majority together to pass an Abortion Rights Act (which would solve the abortion problem for Democrats without more extreme court packing), I don’t see how they can get enough of a majority together to pack the Court.
The coming October surprise
There have been a lot of articles in the MSM recently worrying about Trump coming up with some October surprise. They’re especially worried about the announcement of a vaccine, which they think would allow Trump to say that he beat the pandemic and he’s a hero.
Unfortunately for Trump supporters, that particular October surprise is unlikely to happen, because all of the big vaccine makers have gotten together and agreed that they aren’t going to apply for approval with the FDA until November 4th at the earliest. Of course, that’s not exactly what they said for public consumption, but CEOs of big corporations don’t want Trump to win the election and they have now joined the anti-Trump team. They don’t care that Trump massively cut their taxes, Trump’s prole-stink is too strong for them to hold their noses and do something that would help him win.
Going back to the topic of the MSM worrying about an October surprise from Trump, we have seen over and over again that liberals tend to publicly fret over Trump doing something that the liberals know their side is doing. So if there’s going to be a big October surprise, you can be sure it’s going to come from the liberal MSM and not the Trump side.
The only hope for Trump supporters is that the MSM is too stupid to understand the difference between a good October surprise and a bad one. Liberals continue to be fixated on racism, sexism, homophobia, and think the biggest possible killing blow would come from something having to do with Trump saying things along those lines. Liberals thought they beat Trump with that stuff four years ago, but it turned out the proles don’t give a crap that Trump said some locker-room talk in private. Why would they vote against Trump for saying the same kind of stuff that they’ve said themselves in private? The prole whites are sick and tired of political correctness.
The recent revelation that Trump called soldiers “suckers” is an example of an effective type of story. The prole whites love the military (because they really are suckers just as Trump said, but they don’t want to hear it), so it’s certainly going to hurt Trump with his base.
So far, the retired General Kelly, Trump’s former Chief of Staff, has remained silent about confirming or denying the story, but that’s an example of how Trump has set himself up to fail. There are so many people that used to work for Trump who now hate him. I’d say there’s a pretty good chance that Kelly or someone else close to his stature is going to come out with some pretty salacious info in October.
Excess deaths outstrip official Covid-19 deaths
For people who don’t read my tweets:
Yes, New York City (and others like it) is really doomed
I previously wrote about the coming death spiral.
Why did Detroit decline from being one of the country’s major cities to being a crime-ridden dump? Because its main industry that it total relied upon, automobile manufacturing, left. The same thing happened, though not quite as dramatically, across the region known now as the “Rust Belt.” Manufacturing left, the factories were left empty, the cities died.
What is New York City’s main industry? Some people will insist that New York City has many industries like Finance, business services, media, etc. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. New York City is actually totally dependent on a single industry: people working in office buildings. If that industry moves away, in this case to people’s homes, then New York City no longer has much of an economic purpose.
But what about all the great “culture,” the New York apologists keep saying. People will stay for the “culture!” Well Detroit once had a lot of culture. Maybe not as much as New York City, but for a city in the Midwest there was a lot of culture there. The culture left when the consumers of culture left. I hear that some big-name (and surely overpriced) restaurants and art galleries have already moved to the Hamptons. In fact, I would bet on the Hamptons as being the place that supplants Manhattan as the playground for the richest of the rich after New York City collapses. Eventually, even big museums can move out. If MOMO and the Whitney could both move to new buildings in Manhattan, then they can move to a new buildings outside of Manhattan.
New York City won’t survive as a tourist city, like Rome. Tourists won’t go there when New York City becomes crime-ridden like Detroit. New York may be the oldest and most important city in the New World, but it ain’t Rome. Rome was never full of NAMs. (In case you don’t understand the comparison, once upon a time, Rome was the most important commercial city in the world. But today, it’s not even the most important metropolitan area in Italy, that’s Milan. And Italy itself has become a minor country. Rome survives mostly as a tourist attraction.)
Lion of the Blogosphere 