Reactions to Biden’s COVID speech on vaccination mandates

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve already said a few things earlier today. But I’ll reiterate that this COVID mandate business is being done in order to change the subject from the horror show in Afghanistan to a topic that Biden and his aides think is his strong suit.

I wonder if they are miscalculating once again. It really depends on how many Americans remain interested in liberty. I truly don’t know the answer, but that is the question.

As John Hinderaker writes:

Americans seem appallingly willing to sign away their rights–and worse, other people’s rights–for the sake of “public health.”…

What is still not clear to me is why I, having been vaccinated long ago, should care whether others choose to do the same. If the vaccine works, I have nothing to fear from them. If it doesn’t work, they shouldn’t be forced to submit to it.

Increasingly, it appears that the rationale for vaccination is that you still may catch covid, but your infection won’t be as severe as it might otherwise be. Fine: but for people under 60, covid infections are rarely severe in the first place. Young people who think they have little to fear from covid whether they are vaccinated or not are, in general, right. So the government should not try to dictate their health care decisions. Their bodies, their choice.

…The lawsuits will begin to fly as soon as the starting gun goes off.

Ace has this to say:

A friend emailed me to say Jesse Waters had made a good point on the Fox five o’clock show: Biden is not just attempting to boost his own popularity by demonizing a minority — a “distinct” minority, he said twice, with hissing distaste, as if it were a racial slur — but is setting up an excuse for why the economy is tanking under him.

When the economy continues to tank, and inflation continues to soar, Biden will just blame the unvaccinated.

I’d go further and say This is the entire reason for this unconstitutional power-grab. He knows he faces an increasingly likely wipe-out in 2022: He must do something, then, to change the trajectory.

If he can’t fix the economy, he’ll fix blame…

So divide, divide the country. Attempt to demonize a “distinct” minority to become the hate-objects and scapegoats for a transitory majority, keeping them together through shared, stoked hatred just long enough to get through 2022.

This is fascism.

Direct all of the country’s anger towards a “distinct” minority. Blame the Jews. Wait, I mean blame the unvaccinated, who are the subversive wreckers undermining society with their clannish, inscrutable ways.

A lot of those unvaccinated are black, of course. But Biden is counting on black loyalty to the Democrat Party to be absolute.

Two things come to mind. The first is Sarah Conly – remember her? Conly is the Bowdoin professor who wrote the 2013 book Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, in favor of more government control to ostensibly promote better health. I wrote about her and her book quite a few times – for example, here and here.

And of course, there’s always that evergreen work by the genius known as Dostoevsky. I’m speaking of Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” part of the book The Brothers Karamazov.

In the following passage the Grand Inquisitor is addressing Jesus, who has come back to earth. Although the Inquisitor is a man of the Church, he is not in favor of what he believes Jesus offers to humankind, which is free will. Instead, the Inquisitor proposes to enslave people, and he tells Jesus how he will go about doing it. The Inquisitor speaks here of food, but I think what he says applies just as well to the current situation:

Command that these stones be made bread–and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou should take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread! Thou didst refuse to accept the offer for fear of depriving men of their free choice; for where is there freedom of choice where men are bribed with bread? Man shall not live by bread alone– was Thine answer. Thou knewest not, it seems, that it was precisely in the name of that earthly bread that the terrestrial spirit would one day rise against, struggle with, and finally conquer Thee…

Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee–a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel…

…It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name. Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread?…In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them–so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!

The COVID scare and the COVID vaccine mandates aren’t about food, but they are about the same thing: liberty versus government control “for your own good.” And, just as the Inquisitor said, there are all too many people willing to lay down their liberty – or, as Conly says, their autonomy – for what they perceive to be protection from risk.

ADDENDUM: In his speech, Biden says, “This is not about freedom or personal choice.” And of course he’s right. It’s about lack of freedom (actually, liberty) and personal choice.

Take a look at the comments to the video I just linked above.

ADDENDUM II: Another video:

Vaccine mandates, Kimmel, and Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

The only reason I’m writing about Jimmy Kimmel is that some people apparently see him as some sort of thoughtful person worth listening to, and in many ways he’s expressing views that have become all too typical.

Such as this one:

“Dr. Fauci said if hospitals get any more overcrowded they’re going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed,” the host continued. “That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. ‘Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.’”

Is this what passes for humor these days? Or is it supposed to be cutting edge thought? Not to mention the fact that ivermectin – the medicine he calls “horse goo” – has been used in humans for years as an anti-parasite medication.

It’s the same Jimmy Kimmel who back in 2017 was passionately advocating that health care should be a basic right for all, regardless of ability to pay. What a difference a few years makes. I guess it’s all right to discriminate if it’s based on vaccination status. The unvaccinated have become the new lepers.

Speaking of which – we have employment mandates on the horizon, courtesy of our fearless leader Joe Biden:

When asked whether the Department of Labor or another entity could force vaccine mandates not just on private companies with federal contracts, but major employers without federal contracts, Psaki responded with a resounding “Yes.” She then told the reporter to “stay tuned” for Biden’s speech today where he will lay out the coming action.

Here’s a preview of Biden’s speech:

The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.

Biden is also signing an executive order to require vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government – with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.

The article continues for quite some time, describing the plans, without discussing whether a president has the power to do this and whether there will be legal challenges.

Needless to say, I’m against it. Personally, I’m fully vaccinated, but I defend the right of anyone to refuse vaccination for any reason and am against federal mandates regarding what businesses should require of employees concerning vaccination for COVID. This is extreme coercion, to threaten the livelihood of the unvaccinated (and, by the way, POC – that is, people of color – tend to be disproportionately represented among them).

I also have come to distrust the figures for people dying of COVID, because I know that anyone who has COVID and who dies is often counted as a COVID death whether COVID was actually the cause of death or not. At any rate, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Biden and company would want to “circle back” to their happy place, which is talking about the dangers of COVID and issuing all sorts of liberty-quashing directives about it. He knows and they know that this is the area of his highest approval from Americans – which is another depressing fact.

Biden’s speech is supposed to start at 5 PM, which is now.

When did the leftism trend begin in American education?

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been an ongoing discussion in yesterday’s feminization of education thread concerning when the leftist rot in education actually began. That put me in mind of a post I wrote back in 2017, which I now reproduce here, about some observations Robert Frost made when he was a college professor. He certainly noticed the trend over a century ago.

Robert Frost has long been one of America’s best-known poets. During his lifetime, he was also seen as a sort of folksy New Englander on the lecture circuit.

But Frost was far more than that (as I’ve previously discussed in many posts). Frost not only had a great deal to say about politics, human nature, science, and literature, but he’d been a teacher and a college professor for many years and he had a great deal to say about education as well.

The following excerpts are from a fascinating book called Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, by Peter J. Stanlis. I think they are remarkably apropos to what’s been happening today, because they describe some of its roots [emphasis mine]:

To Frost, progressive education [Dewey] was a closed system that would “compel liberality.” Like Rousseau, it would force students to be free, not merely from self-discipline, but from social traditions and normative beliefs…To Frost, the progressive theory of the child-centered school was false. Its worst feature was to encourage immature and uneducated students to have a decisive voice in determining the curriculum. Frost’s response was to declare, “There is such a thing as not being old enough to understand.”…

Two things in progressive education provoked Frost’s particular rage—their abandonment of the ancient Greek and Roman classics and their attempts to apply the scientific method to teaching. The latter separated form or technique from genuine content…

Frost also rejected the social objective of progressive education—to indoctrinate students in favor of egalitarian democracy. He always favored education that would allow “the cream to rise to the top.” He believed that in secondary education the progressive theory stressed emotion too much, whereas graduate studies were too centered in abstract reason…To Frost, sound education involved all of human nature….

Frost began teaching at Amherst in 1917, under Amherst president Alexander Meiklejohn:

To Frost, Meiklehohn’s conception of academic freedom was merely a collegiate adaptation of Dewey’s progressive education in the form of doctrinaire compulsory liberalism, centered in social problems rather than in psychology. Meiklehohn’s educational reforms were in the spirit of what Frost called “the guild of social planners,” men who assumed that abstract reasoning and logic were sufficient to solve the world’s great perennial problems. After meeting with some of Meiklejohn’s young faculty appointees, Dwight Morrow, an Amherst trustee, described them to a friend as “bumptious young men…who insisted that nobody thought or studied at Amherst until they came.”

Here’s how Frost described them:

They fancied themselves thinkers. At Amherst you thought, while at other colleges you merely learned… I found that by thinking they meant stocking up with radical ideas, by learning they meant stocking up with conservative ideas—a harmless distinction, bless their simple hearts…They had picked up the idea somewhere that the time was now past for the teacher to teach the pupil. From now on it was the thing for the pupil to teach himself using, as he saw fit, the teacher as an instrument…I sat there patiently waiting, waiting for the youth to take education into their own hands and start the new world. Sometimes I laughed and sometimes I cried a little internally…

Here’s more from Stanlis:

The hubris of their young teachers deluded egotistical students to imagine that through their rational discussions they could find easy and valid solutions to the complex problems of society.

Frost wrote of the experience:

I discovered what the Amherst Idea was that is so much talked of, and I got amicably out. The Amherst Idea as I had it in so many words from the high custodian is this: “Freedom for taste and intellect.” Freedom from what? Freedom from every prejudice in favor of state, home, church, morality, etc. I am too much a creature of prejudice to stay and listen to such stuff. Not only in favor of morality am I prejudiced, but in favor of an immorality I could name as against other immoralities. I’d no more set out in pursuit of the truth than I would in pursuit of a living unless mounted on my prejudices.

Stanlis writes:

It was clear that, like Edmund Burke, whom the poet greatly admired, by “prejudice” he simply meant moral habit beyond reflection built into human nature from infancy in favor of home, church, and state. Frost was convinced that Meiklejohn’s “freedom for taste and intellect” was destructive of the norms in the basic institutions of civil society and involved a chronic separation of the intellectual virtues from the moral virtues.

Well, we know how that all turned out, don’t we? Frost experienced a sort of fractal of what was to develop into our current university woes, and recognized at once what the dangers were and what the denouement was likely to be.

The feminization of college

The New Neo Posted on by

This isn’t really a surprise:

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Of course, college has also become an increasingly leftist propaganda experience. Not everyone needs a college degree to work at a good job. But still, this is an ominous trend because it reflects how the left has gone a long way towards destroying education in general.

Note that this trend seems to have begun 40 years ago. That would mean it started in the early 1980s, which is the time of the rise of critical legal studies and critical race theory in academia. I went back to grad school around ten years later, and I was stunned at the changes since I’d left in the 70s.

Biden sinking in polls – so what?

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent The Economist/YouGov poll, Biden’s overall approval rating is at 39%.

My first reaction is: why so high? It should be something like 2%, if that.

My second reaction is: it’s about time.

My third reaction is: so what? Biden can do a lot of damage anyway. After all, no one is about to remove him unless his approval falls down way below that and polls indicate it will really really hurt Democrats in Congress in 2022 and Democrats figure that they can’t cheat enough to overcome that effect. Only those practical considerations might get the Democrats to activate a Biden-ectomy, and if so it will be done not through impeachment but through the more face-saving 25th Amendment or a forceful arm-twisting to effect a resignation for health reasons.

However, looking at the poll numbers we see the following (approval/disapproval numbers in that order):

Overall: 39/50
Men: 36/53
Women: 42/46
White men no degree: 28/61
White women w/ degree: 53/42
Black: 65/26
Hispanic: 41/36
Registered Voters: 43/53
Dems: 77/15
GOP: 9/89
Indie: 35/56

Who are these supposed GOP members who still approve of Biden? As Stephen Green writes in the linked article: “I don’t know how Biden managed to get a positive nod of approval from 9% of GOP voters, unless The Economist/YouGov oversampled the Bill Kristol household.”

The numbers indicate to me that “white men no degree” are the smartest American demographic. Whereas “white women with degree” – a group of which I happen to be a card-carrying member – are pretty stupid and/or gullible and/or uninformed. Note also that black voters are not as keen on Biden as black voters usually are on Democratic presidents, and Hispanic voters really aren’t all that fond of Biden. Independents have soured on him, although a lot of them were fooled at the time of the election and probably are in some ways most responsible for placing him in office because many of them constitute the all-important swing voters.

Some days…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I get so involved in discussions in the comments that I don’t start working on my posts till later than planned. Today is one of those times. I think that in the last few weeks, distraction has become even more enticing than usual, because the news is so hard to face.

It’s not just that it’s ominous, although it’s that. It’s that it feels as though we’re watching an aburdist play, something by Beckett or Ionesco or the like. Are we really seeing a president like Biden, who does destructive things and then brazenly lies about it – albeit ineptly and obviously – and the press for the most part looks the other way, and our Democrat members of Congress (even most of the so-called “moderates”) don’t seem inclined to do a thing about it, or to even criticize?

Are we really seeing what we’re seeing? Has America actually become a laughing stock and a caricature? The answer does appear to be “yes.”

I mentioned once that at this point the US is like Gulliver being tied down by hordes of Lilliputians. Gulliver’s Travels was a serious satire played at least in part for laughs, and there are some bleakly humorous aspects to our current plight, too. But it’s mostly bleak, and unless something changes, it will get bleaker.

And by “our” plight, I don’t just mean the US, I mean the western world and the world in general. The world may come to realize how important the Pax Americana had been.

I’m tempted to give up discussing what Blinken says on Afghanistan or anything else

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s the point, when nothing the man says can be trusted? Of course, I shouldn’t single out Blinken. It’s that way for the entire administration.

And yet I feel duty-bound to mention this story. Note the way Blinken phrases his words:

“We are not aware of anyone being held on an aircraft or any hostage life situation in Mazar-i-Sharif,” Blinken said during a joint news conference with Qatar’s top diplomats and defense officials in Doha.

Blinken did, however, reveal that the U.S. has identified a “relatively small number” of Americans who are trying to depart from the airport. He also said the administration has been “assured” by the Taliban that American and Afghan citizens with valid travel documents will be allowed to exit.

So, we are not aware. Even if that were true, that doesn’t mean something isn’t happening just because we are “not aware” of it.

And of what are we “not aware”? No one is on an aircraft, as far as “we” know. How reassuring. Where are they, then? In the airport? At home, waiting, having been to the airport and not allowed to depart the country? Also, he is also only speaking of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Another thing of which we’re not aware: whether anyone is being held in a hostage life situation. In other words, at the moment we know of no Americans who have a gun held to their heads with a threat to blow them away?

And what is that “relatively small number”? Is the State Department capable of counting? They’ve given little indication of being able to do so, but if they can, then what is this number? And “relative” to what?

One thing of which Blinken may be aware – but we the public are not – is what promises the Biden administration is making to the Taliban in exchange for letting people out.

As for assurances from our new good buddies the Taliban, that is both ludicrous and insulting to any listeners Blinken thinks he’s addressing here. But actually, I don’t think anyone believes him. The left is just happy to have its talking points, and the right long ago justifiably lost trust in these self-serving habitual liars.

As has the rest of the world.

Here’s another statement by Blinken:

And again, we intend to hold the Taliban to that,” he added.

How do you propose to do that, when you’ve given away your leverage, and have shown your extreme propensity to go belly up?

And now something from the past. Blinken has been with Biden for a long time and has worked on previous policies formulated by Biden:

Blinken worked to help Biden formulate one of his most idiotic foreign policy proposals, the partitioning of Iraq into three separate regions along ethnic lines — “Sunnistan”, “Shiastan”, and “Iraqi Kurdistan.” Other than the fact that it was rejected by the US military, the Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and Turkey, it was a fabulous idea.

The ultimate indictment of Blinken as unsuited to serve as Secretary of State comes from the fact that while the 2008 Democrat Presidential Primaries involved Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Tom Vilsack, among others, Blinken chose to work in the “Biden for President” campaign. Apparently, he never recognized in his years of working for Joe Biden that Biden was a moron.

When Obama and Biden were elected, Blinken became National Security Advisor to the Vice President. He served Biden in that capacity for four years.

In 2014, Obama nominated Blinken for Deputy Secretary of State, and John McCain spoke out against that. Now, McCain said a lot of things and did a lot of things with which I take issue. But he certainly seems to have been prescient about Antony Blinken. Please listen to this short excerpt from a speech McCain made back then, and pay particular attention to what he predicts about Blinken and Afghanistan (at :55 to 1:17):

It’s not really the same movie that we’ve seen in Afghanistan as we saw in Iraq, though. It’s a much worse one.

Documents implicate Fauci further in gain-of-function research

The New Neo Posted on by

Is anyone surprised at this?

The Intercept has obtained more than 900 pages of documents detailing the work of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization that used federal money to fund bat coronavirus research at the Chinese laboratory. The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as project updates relating to EcoHealth Alliance’s research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic…

One of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed….

The bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments…

According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, the documents contain critical information about the research done in Wuhan, including about the creation of novel viruses. “The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,” Ebright wrote to The Intercept after reviewing the documents. Ebright also said the documents make it clear that two different types of novel coronaviruses were able to infect humanized mice.

Not only does the research seem inherently dangerous, but in any sort of cost-benefit analysis, why would the US have considered it worth the risk?

Jean Paul Belmondo dies at 88

The New Neo Posted on by

The French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo has died at 88.

Quite a few of the tributes to Belmondo call him “handsome.” That surprises me, because I never thought him handsome. He was something else – unique and compelling and magnetic. I didn’t see many films of his, and yet I knew his name, because for a while he was that famous. I did see “Breathless,” the film that had made him a star, but to me it wasn’t all that great.

The movie of his that I did see, and which I loved (and loved him in it), was one in which he had a much more atypical role: he played the sensitive young eye-glassed man who falls in love with Sophia Loren in “Two Women.” That film made a huge impression when I saw it in 1960 – in a movie theater, at an age I consider way too young to have seen it. I think I was taken by an aunt, but at any rate I went, and was terrified by the film while at the same time I thought it was a masterpiece.

I can’t find a video segment online from “Two Women” that highlights Belmondo, despite there being quite a few video compilations of his greatest roles. But I guess everyone has either forgotten that one or considered it dismissable; it’s certainly atypical for him. But this short trailer for the film does show a bit of him here and there:

I see now that Belmondo said this of his role in that film:

It may disappoint those who’ve got me typed,” said Belmondo. “But so much the better.

Well, it sure didn’t disappoint me. But then, I had no prior idea of who he was and I had no expectations.

Why was Belmondo playing an Italian in that movie? Well, he was actually half Italian, with an Italian father born in Algeria. And Belmondo came by his busted nose in the old-fashioned way, as an amateur boxer before he became an actor.

Here’s a video about Belmondo’s other films. It helps if you speak or understand French. I don’t:

RIP.