I’ve retired the post asking for donations that was at the top of the blog for a little over a week. Of course, you’re welcome to contribute at any time of year.
But I want to extend a huge “thank you” to everyone who donated. You are, quite simply, the best. Without you, the readers and commenters at this blog, I wouldn’t be blogging. I deeply appreciate every single one of you.
The left and the MSM (but I repeat myself) have created a narrative of increasing racism over the last ten years:
…[T]he media’s embrace of “wokeness” did not begin in response to the death of George Floyd. This racial ideology first began to take hold at leading liberal media institutions years before the arrival of Donald Trump and, in fact, heavily influenced the journalistic response to the protest movements of recent years and their critique of American society.
Starting well before Donald Trump’s rise to power, while President Obama was still in office, terms like “microaggression” and “white privilege” were picked up by liberal journalists. These terms went from being obscure fragments of academic jargon to commonplace journalistic language in only a few years—a process that I document here in detail. During this same period, while exotic new phrases were entering the discourse, universally recognizable words like “racism” were being radically redefined. Along with the new language came ideas and beliefs animating a new moral-political framework to apply to public life and American society.
This is followed by a graph which cannot be reproduced here, so you’ll have to follow the link to see it. It tells the tale of a sharp increase in “the usage of the terms ‘racist(s)’ and ‘racism’ as a percentage of all words in four of the nation’s largest newspapers from (depending on the publication) 1970 through 2019.” You can see from the graph that the increase began around 2011 in all four papers, with the WaPo leading the way in steepness of the climb, the NY Times not far behind, the WSJ having a much more modest increase, and the LA Times somewhere in-between the WSJ and the NY Times.
It is highly unlikely that racism itself ramped up during those years; just the propaganda about it. The reporting increase predated Trump and started during the presidency of that great racial healer, Barack Obama. The mechanism came from academia, and involved defining racism as something so broad that it can consist of nearly anything:
In the absence of legal discrimination, in the post-affirmative-action era, and in light of the immense absolute improvements in the quality of life of the average Black person over the past half century, concepts like “microaggression” and “implicit bias” have been critical in cultivating the perception, amplified by the media, that America still practices a form of insidious racial apartheid. This occurs by a process of concept creep—a stretching of the terminological and normative boundaries of what constitutes racism and racist behavior. In other words: The racialization of things that weren’t previously viewed or understood through the lens of race. The upshot is that the more aspects of social life the media racializes, the more “racism” there is for the media to report on.
And like all effective propaganda, many people appear highly susceptible to it – and those people are of the white Democrat persuasion:
In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.
In December of 2006, 45% of white Democrats and 41% of white Republicans reported that they knew someone they considered racist. By June of 2015, this figure increased to 64% among white Democrats, while remaining at a steady 41% among white Republicans. No increases were observed for any of the nonwhite Democrat groups. In fact, what (statistically insignificant) change occurred among Black (52.7% to 47.2%) and Hispanic (41.1% to 33.8%) Democrats were actually in the opposite direction.
There’s a great deal more at the link.
Here’s another convincing defense of the use of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of early COVID. It’s also an indictment of those who’ve been saying the opposite:
To a media unrelentingly hostile to Donald Trump, this meant that the president could be portrayed as recklessly promoting the use of a “dangerous” drug. Ignoring the refutation of the VA study in its May 15 article, the Washington Post cited a Brazil study published on April 24 in which a COVID trial using chloroquine (a related but different drug than hydroxychloroquine) was stopped because 11 patients treated with it died. The reporters never mentioned another problem with that study: The Brazilian doctors were giving their patients lethal cumulative doses of the drug.
On and on it has gone since then, in a circle of self-reinforcing commentary…
So what is the real story on hydroxychloroquine? Here, briefly, is what we know…
The whole article is worth reading. And lest you think the credentials of the author are weak, here they are:
Steven Hatfill is a veteran virologist who helped establish the Rapid Hemorrhagic Fever Response Teams for the National Medical Disaster Unit in Kenya, Africa. He is an adjunct assistant professor in two departments at the George Washington University Medical Center where he teaches mass casualty medicine. He is principle author of the prophetic book “Three Seconds Until Midnight — Preparing for the Next Pandemic,” published by Amazon in 2019.
Among other things, I guess Hatfill can lay claim to the “I told you so” award.
However, if his name sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because Hatfill has another claim to fame that the bio at the article doesn’t mention:
A former biodefense researcher for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Hatfill came to the public eye after being suspected in the 2001 anthrax attacks, of which he was later exonerated.
Hatfill became the subject of extensive media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed FBI agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment and then Attorney General John Ashcroft naming him a “person of interest” in the investigation. Hatfill’s home was repeatedly raided by the FBI, his phone was tapped, and he was extensively surveilled for more than two years; he was also fired from his job at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). At a news conference in August 2002, Hatfill denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said “irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks” had “destroyed his reputation”. Hatfill filed a lawsuit in 2003, accusing the FBI agents and Justice Department officials who led the criminal investigation of leaking information about him to the press in violation of the federal Privacy Act.
In 2008, the government settled Hatfill’s lawsuit with a $4.6 million annuity totaling $5.8 million in payment. The government officially exonerated Hatfill of any involvement in the anthrax attacks, and the Justice Department identified another military scientist, Bruce Edward Ivins, as the sole perpetrator of the anthrax attacks…
In 2004, Hatfill filed lawsuits against several periodicals and journalists who had identified him as a figure warranting further investigation in the anthrax attacks. Hatfill sued the New York Times Company and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for defamation, defamation per se, and intentional infliction of emotional distress in connection with five of Kristof’s columns in 2002. The courts dismissed this suit, finding that Hatfill was a limited purpose public figure. In 2007, Hatfill settled a similar libel lawsuit against Vanity Fair and Reader’s Digest for an undisclosed amount, after both magazines agreed to formally retract any implication that Hatfill was involved in the anthrax mailings.
Let’s just say that Hatfill has a lot of reasons to be disgusted with the behavior of the MSM.
[NOTE: Hatfill’s book Three Seconds Until Midnight suggests that we are unprepared for an almost inevitable influenza pandemic of major proportions. He was right in principle, but wrong in that detail – so far, anyway, but probably not forever. In addition, the book was published on November 1, 2019, just as COVID was starting to rev up in China.]
[NOTE: The following is a slightly changed version of a post of mine. If you follow the links in the second paragraph, you’ll find three other pieces I’ve written about the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.]
Once again it’s the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Nagasaki followed three days later, and Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945.
To date these two bombs remain—astoundingly enough, considering the nature of our oft-troubled and troubling species—the only nuclear warheads ever detonated over populated areas. (I’ve written at length on the subject of those bombs: see this, this, and this.)
Oliver Kamm wrote a while back:
Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties.
This context always needs to be kept in mind when evaluating any “terrible thing”—and there is no question that the dropping of these bombs was a terrible thing.
But critics who are bound and determined to portray the West as evil, marauding, bloodthirsty— whatever the dreadful adjective du jour might be—are bound and determined to either avoid all context, or to change the true context and replace it with fanciful myth. As Kamm writes, those who want to portray Hiroshima and Nagasaki as American crimes cite evidence of an imminent Japanese surrender that would have happened anyway.
Trouble is, available information points strongly to the contrary. It’s difficult to know whether those who argue that the bombs were unnecessary and the deaths that ensued gratuitous are guilty of poor scholarship, wishful thinking, or willful lying – but most likely it’s some combination of these elements.
Truth in history is not easy to determine (see this), although it helps greatly if conventions of scholarship (sources, citations) are properly followed. Oh, the main events themselves are often not disputed – except for fringe groups – although the details are often the subject of disagreement. But it’s the motivations behind the acts, the hearts and minds of the movers and shakers, the “what-might-have-been’s” and the “but-fors” that are so open to both partisan interpretation and willful distortion, and so deeply meaningful.
It’s hard enough to determine what happened. How many died in Dresden, for example? Do we believe Goebbels’s propaganda as promulgated by David Irving, or do we believe this work of recent exhaustive scholarship? The former “facts” have reigned now in popular opinion for quite a while, and although the latter mounts a far more convincing case, how many have read it or are familiar with the facts in it, compared to those who have been heavily exposed to the former?
There’s what happened, and then there’s why it happened—the meaning and intent behind the policy. A combination of the two is what propaganda is all about. It takes a lot of time and effort to wade through facts, make judgments about the veracity of sources, and be willing to keep an open mind.
Much easier to stand in a public square (as a bunch of nodding, smiling, waving, elderly peace-love Boomers regularly used to do in a town where I lived) holding huge banners declaring “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.” Repeat it often enough, and the hope is it will become Truth in people’s eyes.
Especially in the eyes of the young, and of future generations, who don’t have their own memories to go on. It’s much harder to convince a WWII vet that Hiroshima was an unnecessary war crime than it is to convince a young person of same; the former not only has the context, he has own personal memories of the context. World War II veterans are scarce these days and getting scarcer by the minute. And propagandists from the left are more numerous, with larger platforms from which to distribute their products. They are not just interested in changing opinions in the present, they’re interested in history and the future.
[NOTE: The definitive essay on the dropping of the atomic bomb by a contemporary and a fine historian is Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” And for a good discussion of all the controversy about whether Japan was thinking of surrendering prior to Hiroshima, see this. For a discussion of the idea that Russia’s entry into the war against Japan rather than the atomic bomb was the cause of Japan’s surrender, see this.]
I just had power restored after about an 18-hour power outage occasioned by yesterday’s storm. I’m more used to power outages in the winter, from ice storms, than in the summer. It’s somewhat easier to keep warm without heat than to keep cool without AC, a thought that occurred to me rather forcibly last night when I woke up sweaty and uncomfortable and had difficulty going back to sleep. And in the winter there’s less concern about the food in the freezer going bad.
First world problems, right?
And then, when the power was finally restored late this morning, the blog went down. Suddenly and inexplicably, but fortunately only for about fifteen minutes.
Actually, even though I’m not a Democrat, it makes me cringe.
This might be a good time to mention that I bet Biden’s handlers are rueing the day that Joe promised that his VP pick would be a woman. It narrows the already-narrow field down in a way that was unnecessary. The people considered at the moment to be the top contenders – Kamala Harris and Susan Rice – not only both have considerable baggage, but come across as cold and unlikable. Ah, but good old Joe has likability to spare, supposedly.
I know a lot of people keep saying that it will be Michelle Obama who ends up as the VP nominee. I’ve never thought she wanted it. But anything is possible in this extremely strange year of 2020.
A study says they are experiencing more cognitive decline than previous generations.
I can well imagine that it’s true. I think earlier generations were tougher, and the weak were winnowed out earlier. Plus, who knows what all that Boomer turning on, tuning in, and dropping out did?
Yesterday an enormously large and destructive explosion occurred in Beirut, and no one is yet certain what caused it or how many people it killed. What is known is certainly bad, and probably will get worse as time goes on and the damage is assessed.
Initial reports are that a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate were stored in the port and exploded. Here’s a Times of Israel article on that, and here’s another. From the latter:
The scale of the damage — from the epicenter of the explosion at the port of Beirut to the windows blown out kilometers (miles) away — resembles other blasts involving the chemical compound commonly used as an agricultural fertilizer.
But the compound itself typically doesn’t detonate on its own and requires another ignition source. That likely came from a fire that engulfed what initially appeared to be fireworks that were stored at the port.
So it was a chain of events, compounded by the storage of potentially dangerous substances in a highly populated area? More:
Online videos of the disaster’s initial moments show sparks and lights inside the smoke rising from the blaze, just prior to the massive blast. That likely indicates that fireworks were involved, said Boaz Hayoun, owner of the Tamar Group, an Israeli firm that works closely with the Israeli government on safety and certification issues involving explosives.
I have no doubt that other theories will be entertained.
The death toll is likely to rise well into several hundreds, with many more injured and immense property damage.
Also:
What initially started the fire at the port remains unclear. Beirut was sunny before Tuesday’s explosion, with a daily high of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit).
Lebanese Interior Minister Mohammed Fahmi, in comments to a local TV station, made no mention of ignited fireworks but said it appeared the blast was caused by the detonation of more than 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been stored in a warehouse at the dock ever since it was confiscated from a cargo ship in 2014.
Based on the timeline and the size of the cargo, that ship could be the MV Rhosus. The ship was initially seized in Beirut in 2013 when it entered the port due to technical problems, according to lawyers involved in the case. It came from the nation of Georgia, and had been bound for Mozambique.
“Owing to the risks associated with retaining the ammonium nitrate on board the vessel, the port authorities discharged the cargo onto the port’s warehouses,” the lawyers wrote in a 2015 article published by shiparrested.com. “The vessel and cargo remain to date in port awaiting auctioning and/or proper disposal.”
If all of this is true – and at the moment I believe it is – what a massive failure on the part of authorities to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe.
Here.
Would would academia do without jargon?
I’ve previously analyzed the George Floyd transcripts here. Now the British paper Daily Mail has obtained the videos despite the efforts of prosecutor Keith Ellison to suppress them. Here’s a discussion by shipwreckedcrew of Red State about what the videos reveal, and it’s unsurprising that it’s in line with what I wrote based on the transcript – because after all, it’s a transcript of the video. At the link you can also find the videos themselves, if you wish to view them.
The only new information I can discern is that the visuals of what happened when the officers tried to place Floyd in the squad car tell the following tale:
At 4:40 Officer Lueng begins to open the back door on the driver’s side of his car, but it remains locked after a couple of efforts. While trying to resolve the issue, Floyd begins to protest about having to get in the car.
At about the 5:00 minute mark Floyd’s protests begin to take the form of some physical resistance — not really combative but just turning his body back and forth to keep the officer from holding on to him. Floyd is not a small man…
Lane is perfectly calm and measured at all times up to this point. Nothing about his actions or comments show him to be agitated or irritated by Floyd’s actions.
At 6:10 a second officer has joined Lane — he may have been there for a period of time and been off-camera and didn’t make a comment — to assist in getting Floyd to enter the vehicle. Floyd says at one point “I’m getting in” but he is at the same time resisting their ability to “move him” forward into the vehicle, and the officer responded “No you’re not.” He’s told repeatedly to “take a seat”, and he responds “I’m not that kind of guy”, something he said numerous times throughout the encounter. At this point, he has turned around to face the officers and is stiffening his body in resistance to their efforts to push him into the back of the car.
At 6:35 he says “I’m going to die in here”, and the officer responds “I’ll roll the windows down.” The officers succeed in getting him to sit on the backseat but with his legs still outside the car, and his upper body not inside the door frame as he continues to resist going inside the car. The efforts by the officers are still not violent — they are simply trying to “force” him enter the car by depriving him of other opportunities to move and pushing him backwards into the backseat.
There is no other way to describe Floyd at this point other than bordering on irrational.
There are more efforts to get Floyd into the squad car, described at the link. In the end, Floyd (who at one point asked to lie on the ground) ends up being restrained on the ground, as a bystander video which has been beamed around the world has already revealed.
Shipwreckedcrew wonders “where in the timeline the Officers made the decision to call for paramedics and an ambulance.” I don’t know the exact time, but from the transcript it appears to have been around the time they’re having so much difficulty getting Floyd into the squad car.
Shipwreckedcrew also seems to think that Floyd “quit breathing while he was on the ground, and the officers should have realized that and responded to his condition.” I say maybe yes, maybe no. He seems to have lost consciousness. But did he stop breathing? And did he go into cardiac arrest? I’ve never seen any official word on that. It’s important to know what the EMTs found when they arrived on the scene. At some point, we may finally learn.
Shipwreckedcrew also notes that there’s not a hint of any racial issue in the video. I would add there’s nothing in the transcript, either. But that won’t stop BLM and all the rest from asserting that the entire episode was a case of a race-motivated murder.
Dr. Simone Gold, a long-time and previously-respected emergency room physician, has been fired for expressing the non-approved view of the drug hydroxychloroquine:
Dr. Simone, 54, graduated from Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine Science, The Chicago Medical School in 1989. She has worked in Emergency Rooms across Los Angeles, treating Covid-19 patients since the pandemic outbreak. She is currently registered with Providence Hospital located at 501 South Buena Vista Street in Burbank.
Simon stated she was fired from her job because of media slander, after her employer found out about the viral video where she claimed her patients have received positive results from using the drug to treat COVID-19. She is the founder of the newly created group called “America’s Frontline Doctors…
The hydroxychloroquine video, a 45-minute livestream of the first day of a “White Coat” summit by the group, was posted to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by Breitbart and quickly went viral on July 28. It was viewed over 17 million times on Facebook. The video has been taken down by social media citing “misinformation.”
The video can be seen here.
Everything is now politicized, and so a seemingly sane and competent MD with lots of experience cannot state a case for a medication that is – as they say – “controversial,” without losing her job. This is something that should be battled out in the pages of scientific journals and not cause any bona fide doctor, pro or con, to lose his or her job.
I wonder if they’ll be coming next for noted Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch, who has written a comprehensive article making the current case for using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID (at that link there is another link to a PDF file that has the entire article).
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You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Ah, but you don’t have to. You just have to fool enough of the people enough of the time.
The Democrats are in trouble with their presidential nominee, even though the MSM is heroically and energetically covering for them and for him. I don’t know what will ultimately happen to Biden in terms of whether he will remain the nominee, but I do know that, if he does, the Democrats are desperate to keep him as quiet as possible. That includes, of course, the elimination of challenges such as tough questions from the press – easy to eliminate when the press is fully on your side – and avoidance of traditional presidential debates.
The latter is a bit tricky, in the sense that debates have long been a required part of running for president. I’ve never been a big debate fan because I think they tend to be a superficial string of “gotcha” sound bites as well as being skewed by the media for the Democrat. However, what they are and always have been is a test of the ability to verbally express ideas at least somewhat spontaneously. Candidates practice answering all the questions that can reasonably be anticipated, but there is still a factor involving thinking quickly on one’s feet, under pressure.
That’s an important skill, too. And it’s one that in this case is even more important than usual, since one of the candidates gives every indication of being in the early-to-mid stages of senility. If that’s the case, then a debate would be a format that might be particularly likely to expose that fact. And if so, the Democrats are highly motivated to make sure that a debate will not occur.
But the dilemma is how to do that without arousing a great deal of suspicion that the reason for avoiding a debate is that Joe Biden’s advancing senility would be too nakedly revealed. That would be damaging, too. So the solution the Democrats and their handmaidens in the MSM seem to have arrived at is to pooh-pooh the necessity and value of debates themselves. Debates, who needs them?
What sort of fool would be convinced by arguments such as this?:
Longtime Democratic strategist and former Hillary Clinton senior adviser Zac Petkanas agreed with calls for Biden to back out of any and all debates with Trump in the coming months. As it stands currently, there are three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate scheduled between September 29 and October 22.
“Biden shouldn’t feel obligated to throw Trump a lifeline by granting him any debates at all. This is not a normal presidential election and Trump is not a legitimate candidate,” Petkanas tweeted last week, expressing his “opinion that no one asked for.”
Trump is president, but not a “legitimate candidate.” That’s been the Democrats’ mantra since Day 1.
Or how about this in the NY Times from Elizabeth Drew (whose articles I remember from years past in The New Yorker) [emphasis mine]?
The debates have never made sense as a test for presidential leadership. In fact, one could argue that they reward precisely the opposite of what we want in a president. When we were serious about the presidency, we wanted intelligence, thoughtfulness, knowledge, empathy and, to be sure, likability. It should also without saying, dignity….
This, by the way, isn’t written out of any concern that Donald Trump will prevail over Joe Biden in the debates; Mr. Biden has done just fine in a long string of such contests. The point is that “winning” a debate, however assessed, should be irrelevant, as are the debates themselves.
That effort by Drew would be funny if it weren’t so sad. I wonder who Drew thinks she’s fooling. Unfortunately, I think I know the answer: an awful lot of people who read the Times and the rest of the MSM and just follow the meme du jour, nodding sagely and not remembering all the years the MSM felt the debates were ultra-important, and when they skewed their coverage to favor the Democrat.
Who sometimes was Joe Biden. Well do I remember his awful debate performance against Sarah Palin in 2008, when he at least supposedly had all his marbles.
Columnists such as Drew know exactly why they are now trashing the debates, but they hope the public doesn’t notice the obvious. Perhaps it doesn’t even matter. Many of the people who will be voting for Biden don’t care that he might belong off the world stage. They know that other people, particularly from the Obama administration and to the left of it, will actually be in control and Biden will only be a ceremonial figurehead, something like a modern-day monarch. That state of affairs is worth it to get rid of the “illegitimate” candidate, Donald Trump.
[NOTE: While I was looking for that post on the Biden/Palin debate, I came across this one from December of 2008 with the curious title of “Biden’s Bin Hidin’.” I couldn’t recall what I was referring to, but here it is:
…Joe Biden has been unusually invisible, even for a Vice-President elect.
Usually, Vice Presidents are forgotten after their terms in office. Biden seems to be on track for being forgotten before he even takes office. His profile has been so low it’s underground…
A strange foreshadowing of the present. Could it be that Biden was already showing signs of mental deterioration? There’s also this:
…[Biden’s] been kept under wraps post-election in a manner that’s reminiscent of the McCain team’s early handling of the Alaska governor:
“Still, being number two in the Obama campaign and then the transition has made the public persona of Washington’s most loquacious, happy-go-lucky politician nearly unrecognizable.
“The lack of interviews alone is an about face. Biden was the most frequent guest on the Sunday news shows – in just 10 months, from August 2007 to this past June, he appeared on the shows at least 13 times. His interview with Stephanopoulos will be his first Sunday news show junket since joining the Democratic ticket – and he is only on for half of the hour-long show.”
Interesting.]
[ADDENDUM: Elizabeth Drew herself was a panelist and moderator for some presidential debates during the 70s and 80s.]