“BLACK Lives Matter protesters crashed Oklahoma’s House of Representatives on Wednesday while it was in session to pass controversial bills.
The phalanx of over two dozen BLM marchers entered Oklahoma City’s House of Representatives launching fists in the air and chanting, “We will use our voices to stand against corruption” and “No justice, no peace,” according to the local television station KOCO.
One of the protesters was videotaped hurling expletives.
“You’re a f***ing disgrace to the whole country,” the bearded man is recorded dressing down a suited man who appears to be urging him and fellow protesters to disperse.
The defiant demonstration paused the session and its agenda for a few minutes.
Recorded video clips show protesters managing to occupy the fifth-floor gallery for a few minutes while legislators were in session; one of them could be seen futilely slamming his gavel to restore order.”
This is a lawsuit against the will of the people of Arizona. If the election was legit, then why fight the audit? Wouldn’t you want to prove that Biden was the first Dem to win Maricopa County in decades? Wouldn’t you want to prove that this was “the most fair and secure election in history”?
“The Arizona Democratic Party filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to stop the state’s Senate from carrying out an audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County.
The complaint (pdf), filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, comes just before the audit is set to begin on Friday. In preparation, 2.1 million ballots, as well as voting equipment that includes 385 tabulators, were delivered to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, the site of the planned audit.
An emergency court hearing has been scheduled for 11 a.m. on Friday.”
Adults have failed children in foisting unnecessary, harmful Covid-19 restrictions on them.”
““There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul,” Nelson Mandela famously said, “than the way in which it treats its children.” By that standard, our society now has the soul of an abusive parent. The pandemic has turned American adults, or at least the ones who make the rules, into selfish neurotics who have been punishing innocent children for over a year—and still can’t restrain themselves.
When the pandemic began, the lack of knowledge about Covid-19 justified this behavior. That excuse has vanished. It became clear long ago that the virus is less dangerous to children than the flu, and that keeping schools open poses minimal risk of spreading infections. Yet despite this evidence—and despite the widespread availability of vaccines to teachers and other adults—many schools have yet to reopen full-time, and others are still making students as miserable as possible.
Schools have canceled many sports and other extracurricular activities, isolated students in Plexiglas cells, and forced them to wear masks in classrooms and on playgrounds. Social distancing and masks hinder learning while harming children emotionally, socially, and physically, all for no purpose other than providing false comfort to adults who ought to know better.
The rationale for forcing anyone to wear a mask is questionable, as my colleague Connor Harris has meticulously demonstrated. Wearing masks might provide some protection for some high-risk adults in crowded indoor settings, but the evidence is mixed, and masks can be not just uncomfortable but harmful. Some adults may judge the trade-offs worthwhile for themselves, but for children it’s all pain and no gain.
The mask mandates are especially cruel to young children. Adults are supposed to ease their fears, to reassure them that monsters aren’t hiding under the bed. Instead, we’re frightening them into believing they’re being stalked by invisible menaces lurking in the air. A year of mask-wearing will scar some of them psychologically—and maybe physically, too, according to a team of Italian professors of plastic surgery, who warn that the prolonged pressure from the elastic straps could leave young children with permanently protruding ears. By hiding teachers’ lips and muffling their speech, mask-wearing makes it harder for young children to develop linguistic skills and prevents children with hearing impairments from lip reading. Unable to rely on facial cues, teachers and students of all ages are more likely to misinterpret one other, a particularly acute problem for children on the autism spectrum. How are children supposed to develop social skills when they can’t see one another’s faces, sit together, or play together?
Researchers from the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany have catalogued other problems. They established an online registry for parents to report on the side effects of mask-wearing. Among the nearly 18,000 parents who chose to respond (not a random sample, obviously), more than half reported that the masks were giving their children headaches and making it difficult for them to concentrate. More than one-third cited other side effects: increased reluctance to go to school, unhappiness, malaise, impaired learning, drowsiness, and fatigue. After considering those reports as well as testimony from other researchers, a court in Weimar, Germany, recently ruled in favor of a parent arguing that her children’s basic rights were being violated by the mandates for masks and social distancing at her children’s two schools. The court ordered the schools to end the mandates, declaring that they damaged the “mental, physical and spiritual well-being” of students while failing to offer “any discernible benefit for the children themselves or for third parties.”
Masks can be breeding grounds for infections from bacteria, mold and fungi, which is why the Centers for Disease Control recommends that a cloth mask should be washed with soap and water “whenever it gets dirty or at least daily.” The CDC also advises washing your hands any time you take off the mask, and then washing your hands again after you put it back on. Pretending that children (or adults, for that matter) are dutifully taking all these precautions is absurd, yet the CDC nonetheless recommends that everyone older than two should wear masks both indoors and outdoors.
The CDC’s policy placates the leaders of teachers’ unions but flouts the guidance issued jointly by UNICEF and the World Health Organization: “Children aged 5 years and under should not be required to wear masks. This is based on the safety and overall interest of the child and the capacity to appropriately use a mask with minimal assistance.” The groups also advise against masks for older children when physically active: “Children should not wear a mask when playing sports or doing physical activities, such as running, jumping or playing on the playground, so that it doesn’t compromise their breathing.” For children aged six to 11, masks are recommended in classrooms only if the school is in a locality with “widespread transmission,” and then only after consulting with parents and weighing the potential impact on “learning and psychosocial development.”
Since UNICEF and WHO issued that guidance in August, the evidence emerging from schools shows that masks and most other restrictions are unnecessary for children of any age. Swedish economists at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala conducted the most rigorous and comprehensive study. During last spring’s outbreak, Sweden in effect undertook a nationwide controlled experiment by switching its senior high schools to online instruction while keeping younger students in classrooms with few Covid restrictions. Class sizes for the younger students were not reduced, and students who had been in contact with an infected person were allowed to stay in school (instead of being quarantined at home, as the CDC in the United States recommends). Neither teachers nor students were encouraged to wear masks—in fact, health authorities discouraged the wearing of masks, and few Swedes of any age wore them last year.
None of the children who kept going to school died of Covid, and there was little effect on the adults in their lives. The Swedish researchers, who had access to the health records of the entire population, analyzed the rates of Covid infections and medical treatments among hundreds of thousands of teachers and parents. To minimize confounding variables, the economists compared two groups of parents with similarly aged children: those with ninth-graders who kept going to school and those with tenth-graders who stayed home. There was no difference in their risk of serious Covid disease. The parents whose children kept going to school were slightly more likely to test positive for Covid, but no more likely to be treated or hospitalized for it, than were the parents whose children stayed home.”
“US. public health experts increasingly urge the reopening of schools, and yet much of the country still seems unable to do so. This is the most visible and, perhaps, most tragic consequence of the toxic environment surrounding discussions of how to respond to the pandemic that has been driven by a technocratic elite harboring a dim view of the public’s role in important discussions. Yet it is not the failure of the public, but rather of these self-appointed guardians of public discourse to glimpse their own shortcomings, that has crippled our national debate.
The simple, elite explanation for all our problems during the pandemic has been that the public failed to trust the experts and didn’t “follow the science.” This, they argue, is the result of tolerating too much skepticism, which is an ordinary feature of scientific debate. Instead, elites have openly embraced the notion that the public is better served by exaggeration, downplaying uncertainty, or even deception (such as in official estimates of herd immunity).
This disdain for healthy skepticism, a normal part of functioning science and democracy, is corrosive to public trust and impedes the accumulation of knowledge. A climate of overconfidence makes it both more likely that we will adopt bad policy and harder to fix our missteps. Reversals of conventional wisdom are, for better or worse, inevitable in science. We have had many reversals of official positions on COVID-19—from the usefulness of masks to which medications work to guidance about school openings—and will likely see more as evidence continues to come in. The problem is that our current climate locks us into polarized mindsets, which makes it harder to recategorize “misinformation” that winds up being correct.
We’re frequently asked—especially by fellow elites—why we use the term “elite.” The moniker refers to university-credentialed experts in high-paying, usually urban-centric jobs, alongside the politicians and members of the media who enable them. Although the term has a long pedigree, it was repopularized by Christopher Lasch in his bestselling 1996 book The Revolt of the Elites, which criticized the belief system of America’s professional and managerial class. Many commentators increasingly link pathologies in our public sphere, including the populist backlash, to elites’ disconnection from the real experience of others. As philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in his recent takedown of meritocracy, elites exhibit relentless credentialism, embrace the argot of “smart versus dumb,” and have little time for the uninformed opinions of their fellow citizens. Sandel notes that elites misunderstand debates over facts and mischaracterize such arguments as a novel misinformation epidemic, as opposed to a longstanding feature of democratic debate. Increasingly, elites believe that all problems have technocratic solutions, and that they are uniquely qualified to identify them.
Central to the elite claim is that they “follow the science,” a mantra that falsely suggests all science is settled, and implies that science alone should decide complex public policy tradeoffs. When we drive out uncertainty and debate, and falsely or prematurely declare consensus or that a decision is “settled,” we make it more likely that the mistaken policy will be widely adopted in its most extreme form. We also make it far less likely that research will be done to evaluate whether a given policy decision was correct.
America’s schoolchildren have been one of the primary victims of this toxic climate. Today, scientific consensus, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, increasingly favors reopening schools, whose closures were more severe and more unfair in the U.S. than in almost any other country. A growing chorus holds that our early, flawed decision to impose sweeping, extended closures of public schools was a mistake all along.
Worse, our patchwork of closures has not been tied to the local prevalence of the pandemic. These closures reflect polarized politics, not public health. Studies have repeatedly concluded that there was no relationship between reopening decisions and COVID-19 case counts. Instead, it appeared to be based on whether the locals were pro- or anti-Trump; schools in Democratic-leaning locations were more likely to close. Partly as a result, school closures also demonstrate a strong racial gap, with white students more likely to have the option of in-person schooling than Black or brown students. Meanwhile, nearly all private schools—95%, by one count—stayed open for in-person learning, compared with 40% for public schools in the fall. As others have noted, many of the most vocal advocates for school closures have in fact had their own children in private school all along, just one of the many ways elites bought their way out of pandemic restrictions.
Many opponents of reopening questioned the motives of those advocating it, rather than their actual arguments. Supporters of reopening were labeled “conservative,” or more commonly, “Trumpian,” an ad hominem attack that has a corrosive impact within the liberal orthodoxy of academia. Those who paid the price for this kind of self-righteous name-calling and politically driven accusation were children.”
“Consider this a follow-up to last night’s post about the curious case of the Kentucky nursing home where most residents were fully vaccinated — and an outbreak of COVID happened anyway, thanks to a nasty little variant of the virus. With 40 percent of Americans having received their first dose and the country hopefully on its way to herd immunity, we’re faced with a new coronavirus mystery: What share of vaccinated people will suffer “breakthrough infections”?
Is it really .008 percent, as the initial CDC data indicated? Because there shouldn’t be outbreaks happening in any vaccinated population, even a population of elderly people, if it’s .008 percent.
What we do know, even if we don’t know the exact number, is that the percentage is very, very low. Low enough that our scaremongering, bad-news-obsessed media resorts to headlines like this to frame a story about a mere 71 out of 226,000 fully vaccinated people testing positive for COVID:”
This is how @stltoday decided to play and headline a story that 0.03% of people who have been vaccinated in St. Louis County later tested positive, resulting in two hospitalizations and 0 deaths so far. pic.twitter.com/YRtTJlRR1m
““Vaccinated Test Positive” isn’t news given that we already know that the mRNA vaccines are “only” 95 percent effective. If anything, the news is that they seem to be more effective than one might expect from that 95 percent figure.
CDC director Rochelle Walensky went on the “Today” show this morning to try to calm people’s nerves about reports of “breakthrough infections.” Not only are they to be expected with any vaccine, she explained, but many vaccinated people who get infected aren’t experiencing symptoms and aren’t carrying enough of a viral load to get anyone else sick:”
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on rare cases of people who are fully vaccinated but still get COVID: – 1/3 “are completely asymptomatic” – Many “can’t transmit to others” pic.twitter.com/vlSbMk91ga
“President Biden claimed that Derek Chauvin’s conviction on Tuesday “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism” of police. With the police shooting that same day of 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio, the White House again pushed the racism claim, noting that this was just another example of how “police violence disproportionately impacts Black and Latino people.”
But where is the evidence for these claims? In Chauvin’s trial, the prosecution never once mentioned evidence that the now-former officer is racist. A day after the verdict, the Biden administration announced plans for a pattern-or-practice investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department to determine if there is such racism, but the administration’s comments sure sound as if they have already determined the study’s outcome.
In the other case, body camera footage released by police revealed that Ma’Khia Bryant was fatally shot as she charged another girl with a knife. The officer shot one black girl in an attempt to save what appears to be another black girl from being stabbed.
Politicians such as Biden as well as the media have helped create a biased perception that is far from the reality of shootings by police. In a study, the Crime Prevention Research Center (where I serve as president) found that when a white officer kills a suspect, the media usually mention the officer’s race. When the officer is black, news coverage rarely mentions that detail.
And there’s evidence that blacks aren’t all that fed up with the police. A July 2017 Quinnipiac University poll in New York City found that blacks strongly support the cops in their neighborhoods — 62% approved compared to just 35% who disapproved. That approval rating was 11 percentage points higher than for the New York City Police Department as a whole. It makes sense that people only know their local cops, and rely on media reports to form impressions about other areas they are less familiar with. A 2020 Monmouth University poll found that 72% of both blacks and whites are satisfied with their local police.
There is other evidence. If blacks don’t trust the police, they presumably won’t turn to them as frequently as whites when a crime occurs. Yet, blacks report violent crime to police at a higher rate than either whites or Hispanics, even when controlling for income levels. Low- and middle-income blacks are about 11 percentage points more likely to report violent crimes to police.
Through extensive research, we found 2,699 police shootings across the nation from 2013-2015. That’s far more than the FBI found, since its data is limited to only 1,366 cases voluntarily provided by police departments. The FBI data has other shortcomings, too: It disproportionately includes cases from heavily minority areas, giving a misleading picture of the frequency at which blacks are shot.
Our database keeps track of characteristics of both the suspect and the officer involved in each shooting, local violent crime rates, demographics of the city and police department, and many other factors that help determine what causes police shootings.
Officers kill blacks at a higher rate than their share of the population: 25% of the suspects killed were black, 45% white, and 16% Hispanic. As for where the deaths are occurring, black suspects tend to die in heavily black larger cities with populations averaging over 600,000, while whites are killed in smaller cities with an average population of 250,000.
White suspects were slightly more likely to be holding a firearm than blacks (63% to 61%). Black and white suspects were both equally likely to be involved in violent crime when they lose their lives at an officer’s hands, though blacks who died were more likely to be involved in drug or property offenses. But police generally have more challenging jobs in cities where blacks are killed. The average city where blacks are killed had a 61% higher violent crime rate and 126% higher murder rate than where the average white was killed.
After accounting for these and other factors, including averaged cultural differences in police departments, we found that black officers were at least as likely as their white peers to kill black suspects, but that black officers were more likely to kill unarmed blacks than were white officers.”
If these weren’t predominantly black churches, some white liberal would be screaming about separation of church and state. But they are, so crickets…..
“Religious leaders hold Home Depot hostage unless company meets its demands over election reform law”
“The largest company headquartered in Georgia, Home Depot, is being told that if it fails to publicly denounce the state’s voting law reform legislation, it will be boycotted. This isn’t coming from Black Lives Matter, per se. The corporation is being held hostage by religious leaders who demand specific talking points be delivered … or else.
Corporations, especially those headquartered in Georgia, have come out against the legislation signed by Governor Kemp. Republicans describe the bill as one that addresses election integrity while Democrats call it a voter suppression law – “Jim Crow 2.0”. Coca-Cola and Delta were among the first to make a point to virtue-signal after the governor signed the bill, only to be exposed as taking part in the process and giving input into the legislation. Both were fine with the law until the governor signed it and grievance activists did their thing. Coke soon discovered that not all of its consumers think that companies should be making policy – that ‘s the job of lawmakers- and now it is trying to clean up the mess it made for itself.
Churches have increasingly played a part in American politics and this is an escalation of that trend. Evangelical churches have shown support for conservative and Republican candidates while black churches get out the vote for Democrats. This threat of bringing a large-scale boycott over state legislation is a hostile action against the corporation. It’s political theatre. Groups like Black Voters Matter, the New Georgia Project Action Fund (Stacey Abrams), and the Georgia NAACP are pressuring companies to publicly voice their opposition and the religious leaders are doing the bidding of these politically active groups.
When SB 241 and HB 531 were working through the legislative process, the groups put pressure on Republican lawmakers and the governor to abandon the voting reform legislation. They also demanded that donations to any lawmakers supporting the legislation be stopped. The Georgia Chamber of Commerce tried to remain bipartisan while still voicing support for voting rights but then caved and expressed “concern and opposition” to some provisions. At the time, several large Georgia companies were targeted by activists, including Aflac, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Home Depot, Southern Company and UPS.
The Georgia Chamber of Commerce previously reiterated the importance of voting rights without voicing opposition against any specific legislation. In a new statement to CNBC, the Georgia Chamber said it has “expressed concern and opposition to provisions found in both HB 531 and SB 241 that restrict or diminish voter access” and “continues to engage in a bipartisan manner with leaders of the General Assembly on bills that would impact voting rights in our state.”
Office Depot came out at the time and supported the Chamber’s statement. The Election Integrity Act of 2021, originally known as Georgia Senate Bill 202, is a Georgia law overhauling elections in the state that was signed into effect by the governor and we know what happened. Office Depot has not delivered for the activists as they demand so now the company faces boycott drama. The religious leaders are taking up where the activist groups left off.
African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Reginald Jackson said the company has remained “silent and indifferent” to his efforts to rally opposition to the new state law pushed by Republicans, as well as to similar efforts elsewhere.
“We just don’t think we ought to let their indifference stand,” Jackson said.
The leader of all his denomination’s churches in Georgia, Jackson had a meeting last week with other Georgia-based executives to urge them to oppose the voting law, but said he’s had no contact with Home Depot, despite repeated efforts to reach the company.
Faith leaders at first were hesitant to jump into the boycott game. Now the political atmosphere has changed and they are being vocal. Jackson focused on pressuring Coca-Cola first. After that company went along to get along, before it realized its error, Jackson moved his focus onto other companies.”
“The Biden Department of Education has quietly proposed a new rule prioritizing the use of federal tax dollars for K-12 schools that replace traditional education with “culturally responsive teaching and learning” – more commonly referred to as critical race theory. This is the most significant move by the federal government to redefine the nature of state-funded public schools in U.S. history.
Although the current effort to push public schools receiving federal funding to adopt a detailed indoctrination agenda may feel new and overwhelming for parents, the truth is that the Biden attempt is simply the last phase in a decades-long effort to control local schools and press the progressive agenda on our children. With the power of taxpayer-funded purse strings, the federal government sends a message to public schools that if they want financial aid they must “teach” critical race theory and prioritize its ideologically anti-American, anti-traditional agenda over traditional education.
Under Obama, public schools were thrust into the controversial world of Common Core, a series of federal mandates that included “awareness education” involving a progressive view of race, gender, and so-called “equity” (not to be confused with “equality”).
Under Biden, a far more aggressive level of federal control over our nation’s K-12 classrooms will replace history (and objective truth) with identity politics and a warped view of American civics and institutions. In many cases, teachers are told to hide the racially divisive curriculum from parents. In others, students are encouraged to report the words and views of their parents and caretakers as examples of institutional racism. The initial goal is the indoctrination of young minds, but the long view is to aggregate power behind an alien political worldview that fed the dehumanizing machines of the Soviet Union and communist China.
At its core, critical race theory is the false idea that the United States is a fundamentally racist country and that all of our nation’s institutions – the law, culture, business, economy, education – are designed to maintain white supremacy. Politicians and pundits market critical race theory as inclusive teaching, one that promotes understanding and tolerance. When the truth is exposed, they try to repackage it in a series of euphemisms, including anti-racism, equity, or culturally responsive teaching. But the “scholars,” like Ibram X. Kendi and the 1619 Project behind the related anti-racist rhetoric proposed in the rule – the true believers – admit the truth.
Critical race theory curriculum tells students that they fall into one of two categories – the oppressed or the oppressor – based solely on the color of their skin. It tells students that if they are white then they are privileged and racist, and makes them affirm this ideology through classroom discussion and assignments. Some school districts take it even a step further and physically segregate students based on their race for lessons, reducing them to nothing more than a set of racial stereotypes.
This is not healthy. It erases decades of progress. And it pits our children against each other, teaching them to hate one another. Parents must stay alert because this week’s proposed rule is just the beginning. Senate and House Democrats have already introduced bills, including the Civics Secures Democracy Act, which would require schools to promote critical race theory in exchange for more federal money.”
One company has now spent 19 years and millions and millions of dollars to get a final mine permit. Lots of other companies also trying to get permits, of course. In the meantime China and other countries are glad to mine. Other countries use child labor to find minerals in huge landfills. Such insanity!
We’ve got to remember that Ma’Khia Bryant is clearly a victim in all this. Numerous people and systems failed her in her short life to get to this point. That is enormously, irreparably sad.
But suggesting that the problem here is the police is bad faith, as is pretending like any police use of force is illegitimate. This type of push is a recipe for civic disaster (and a world where police forces nationwide see their numbers dwindle dangerously low).
This chart breaks down the disparity, especially on the left, between how dangerous covid actually is vs how dangerous people think it is. Spoiler, those on the left think it’s way more dangerous than it is. pic.twitter.com/UYrueOMjHn
The long-awaited hand count and forensic audit of the election in Maricopa County starts Friday. Process will be live-streamed nationally @OANN observers will be non-partisan for full transparency. Glad to support @AZSenateGOP in their efforts. #ElectionIntegritypic.twitter.com/nqRgyPVuaN
AUDIT UPDATE: Maricopa County Superior Court has ruled that AZ audit will be paused at 5PM today (to allow for appeal) until Monday 12PM IF plaintiffs provide $1million bond for damages. Judge said "The audit will proceed" but he wants to review policies and procedures in place.
Kessler is scum, and his “fact checks” are garbage.
That time a leftist hack attempted to delegitimize a black man’s ancestral history in the cotton fields because said ancestor’s work ethic and devotion to family were a little too strong (uppity) for the leftist hack’s tastes. #bigothttps://t.co/jiSruDC3Sm
Wandering Views 
Where’s the National Guard, the police, federal agents, the representatives claiming PTSD from the “experience”?
Some insurrectionists are more equal than others I guess…..
“BLM CAPITOL SIEGE BLM storms Oklahoma state capitol to confront lawmakers over anti-riot bill and scream ‘you’re a f***ing disgrace’”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14728203/blm-storms-oklahoma-state-capitol/
“BLACK Lives Matter protesters crashed Oklahoma’s House of Representatives on Wednesday while it was in session to pass controversial bills.
The phalanx of over two dozen BLM marchers entered Oklahoma City’s House of Representatives launching fists in the air and chanting, “We will use our voices to stand against corruption” and “No justice, no peace,” according to the local television station KOCO.
One of the protesters was videotaped hurling expletives.
“You’re a f***ing disgrace to the whole country,” the bearded man is recorded dressing down a suited man who appears to be urging him and fellow protesters to disperse.
The defiant demonstration paused the session and its agenda for a few minutes.
Recorded video clips show protesters managing to occupy the fifth-floor gallery for a few minutes while legislators were in session; one of them could be seen futilely slamming his gavel to restore order.”
———–
Insurrectionists! Call the FBI!
Frauds.
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This is a lawsuit against the will of the people of Arizona. If the election was legit, then why fight the audit? Wouldn’t you want to prove that Biden was the first Dem to win Maricopa County in decades? Wouldn’t you want to prove that this was “the most fair and secure election in history”?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/dems-last-minute-lawsuit-seeks-to-block-audit-of-arizonas-maricopa-county-election-results_3787963.html
“The Arizona Democratic Party filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to stop the state’s Senate from carrying out an audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County.
The complaint (pdf), filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, comes just before the audit is set to begin on Friday. In preparation, 2.1 million ballots, as well as voting equipment that includes 385 tabulators, were delivered to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, the site of the planned audit.
An emergency court hearing has been scheduled for 11 a.m. on Friday.”
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Unnecessary and harmful.
https://www.city-journal.org/masking-children-unnecessary-and-harmful
“Much to Forgive
Adults have failed children in foisting unnecessary, harmful Covid-19 restrictions on them.”
““There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul,” Nelson Mandela famously said, “than the way in which it treats its children.” By that standard, our society now has the soul of an abusive parent. The pandemic has turned American adults, or at least the ones who make the rules, into selfish neurotics who have been punishing innocent children for over a year—and still can’t restrain themselves.
When the pandemic began, the lack of knowledge about Covid-19 justified this behavior. That excuse has vanished. It became clear long ago that the virus is less dangerous to children than the flu, and that keeping schools open poses minimal risk of spreading infections. Yet despite this evidence—and despite the widespread availability of vaccines to teachers and other adults—many schools have yet to reopen full-time, and others are still making students as miserable as possible.
Schools have canceled many sports and other extracurricular activities, isolated students in Plexiglas cells, and forced them to wear masks in classrooms and on playgrounds. Social distancing and masks hinder learning while harming children emotionally, socially, and physically, all for no purpose other than providing false comfort to adults who ought to know better.
The rationale for forcing anyone to wear a mask is questionable, as my colleague Connor Harris has meticulously demonstrated. Wearing masks might provide some protection for some high-risk adults in crowded indoor settings, but the evidence is mixed, and masks can be not just uncomfortable but harmful. Some adults may judge the trade-offs worthwhile for themselves, but for children it’s all pain and no gain.
The mask mandates are especially cruel to young children. Adults are supposed to ease their fears, to reassure them that monsters aren’t hiding under the bed. Instead, we’re frightening them into believing they’re being stalked by invisible menaces lurking in the air. A year of mask-wearing will scar some of them psychologically—and maybe physically, too, according to a team of Italian professors of plastic surgery, who warn that the prolonged pressure from the elastic straps could leave young children with permanently protruding ears. By hiding teachers’ lips and muffling their speech, mask-wearing makes it harder for young children to develop linguistic skills and prevents children with hearing impairments from lip reading. Unable to rely on facial cues, teachers and students of all ages are more likely to misinterpret one other, a particularly acute problem for children on the autism spectrum. How are children supposed to develop social skills when they can’t see one another’s faces, sit together, or play together?
Researchers from the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany have catalogued other problems. They established an online registry for parents to report on the side effects of mask-wearing. Among the nearly 18,000 parents who chose to respond (not a random sample, obviously), more than half reported that the masks were giving their children headaches and making it difficult for them to concentrate. More than one-third cited other side effects: increased reluctance to go to school, unhappiness, malaise, impaired learning, drowsiness, and fatigue. After considering those reports as well as testimony from other researchers, a court in Weimar, Germany, recently ruled in favor of a parent arguing that her children’s basic rights were being violated by the mandates for masks and social distancing at her children’s two schools. The court ordered the schools to end the mandates, declaring that they damaged the “mental, physical and spiritual well-being” of students while failing to offer “any discernible benefit for the children themselves or for third parties.”
Masks can be breeding grounds for infections from bacteria, mold and fungi, which is why the Centers for Disease Control recommends that a cloth mask should be washed with soap and water “whenever it gets dirty or at least daily.” The CDC also advises washing your hands any time you take off the mask, and then washing your hands again after you put it back on. Pretending that children (or adults, for that matter) are dutifully taking all these precautions is absurd, yet the CDC nonetheless recommends that everyone older than two should wear masks both indoors and outdoors.
The CDC’s policy placates the leaders of teachers’ unions but flouts the guidance issued jointly by UNICEF and the World Health Organization: “Children aged 5 years and under should not be required to wear masks. This is based on the safety and overall interest of the child and the capacity to appropriately use a mask with minimal assistance.” The groups also advise against masks for older children when physically active: “Children should not wear a mask when playing sports or doing physical activities, such as running, jumping or playing on the playground, so that it doesn’t compromise their breathing.” For children aged six to 11, masks are recommended in classrooms only if the school is in a locality with “widespread transmission,” and then only after consulting with parents and weighing the potential impact on “learning and psychosocial development.”
Since UNICEF and WHO issued that guidance in August, the evidence emerging from schools shows that masks and most other restrictions are unnecessary for children of any age. Swedish economists at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala conducted the most rigorous and comprehensive study. During last spring’s outbreak, Sweden in effect undertook a nationwide controlled experiment by switching its senior high schools to online instruction while keeping younger students in classrooms with few Covid restrictions. Class sizes for the younger students were not reduced, and students who had been in contact with an infected person were allowed to stay in school (instead of being quarantined at home, as the CDC in the United States recommends). Neither teachers nor students were encouraged to wear masks—in fact, health authorities discouraged the wearing of masks, and few Swedes of any age wore them last year.
None of the children who kept going to school died of Covid, and there was little effect on the adults in their lives. The Swedish researchers, who had access to the health records of the entire population, analyzed the rates of Covid infections and medical treatments among hundreds of thousands of teachers and parents. To minimize confounding variables, the economists compared two groups of parents with similarly aged children: those with ninth-graders who kept going to school and those with tenth-graders who stayed home. There was no difference in their risk of serious Covid disease. The parents whose children kept going to school were slightly more likely to test positive for Covid, but no more likely to be treated or hospitalized for it, than were the parents whose children stayed home.”
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Yep.
“America’s Smug Elite Is Harming Our Kids”
“The push to decouple skepticism from science turns schoolchildren into victims”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/americas-ham-fisted-elite-harming-kids-wrecking-scientific-debate-dennis-patterson-jacob-hale-russell
“US. public health experts increasingly urge the reopening of schools, and yet much of the country still seems unable to do so. This is the most visible and, perhaps, most tragic consequence of the toxic environment surrounding discussions of how to respond to the pandemic that has been driven by a technocratic elite harboring a dim view of the public’s role in important discussions. Yet it is not the failure of the public, but rather of these self-appointed guardians of public discourse to glimpse their own shortcomings, that has crippled our national debate.
The simple, elite explanation for all our problems during the pandemic has been that the public failed to trust the experts and didn’t “follow the science.” This, they argue, is the result of tolerating too much skepticism, which is an ordinary feature of scientific debate. Instead, elites have openly embraced the notion that the public is better served by exaggeration, downplaying uncertainty, or even deception (such as in official estimates of herd immunity).
This disdain for healthy skepticism, a normal part of functioning science and democracy, is corrosive to public trust and impedes the accumulation of knowledge. A climate of overconfidence makes it both more likely that we will adopt bad policy and harder to fix our missteps. Reversals of conventional wisdom are, for better or worse, inevitable in science. We have had many reversals of official positions on COVID-19—from the usefulness of masks to which medications work to guidance about school openings—and will likely see more as evidence continues to come in. The problem is that our current climate locks us into polarized mindsets, which makes it harder to recategorize “misinformation” that winds up being correct.
We’re frequently asked—especially by fellow elites—why we use the term “elite.” The moniker refers to university-credentialed experts in high-paying, usually urban-centric jobs, alongside the politicians and members of the media who enable them. Although the term has a long pedigree, it was repopularized by Christopher Lasch in his bestselling 1996 book The Revolt of the Elites, which criticized the belief system of America’s professional and managerial class. Many commentators increasingly link pathologies in our public sphere, including the populist backlash, to elites’ disconnection from the real experience of others. As philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in his recent takedown of meritocracy, elites exhibit relentless credentialism, embrace the argot of “smart versus dumb,” and have little time for the uninformed opinions of their fellow citizens. Sandel notes that elites misunderstand debates over facts and mischaracterize such arguments as a novel misinformation epidemic, as opposed to a longstanding feature of democratic debate. Increasingly, elites believe that all problems have technocratic solutions, and that they are uniquely qualified to identify them.
Central to the elite claim is that they “follow the science,” a mantra that falsely suggests all science is settled, and implies that science alone should decide complex public policy tradeoffs. When we drive out uncertainty and debate, and falsely or prematurely declare consensus or that a decision is “settled,” we make it more likely that the mistaken policy will be widely adopted in its most extreme form. We also make it far less likely that research will be done to evaluate whether a given policy decision was correct.
America’s schoolchildren have been one of the primary victims of this toxic climate. Today, scientific consensus, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, increasingly favors reopening schools, whose closures were more severe and more unfair in the U.S. than in almost any other country. A growing chorus holds that our early, flawed decision to impose sweeping, extended closures of public schools was a mistake all along.
Worse, our patchwork of closures has not been tied to the local prevalence of the pandemic. These closures reflect polarized politics, not public health. Studies have repeatedly concluded that there was no relationship between reopening decisions and COVID-19 case counts. Instead, it appeared to be based on whether the locals were pro- or anti-Trump; schools in Democratic-leaning locations were more likely to close. Partly as a result, school closures also demonstrate a strong racial gap, with white students more likely to have the option of in-person schooling than Black or brown students. Meanwhile, nearly all private schools—95%, by one count—stayed open for in-person learning, compared with 40% for public schools in the fall. As others have noted, many of the most vocal advocates for school closures have in fact had their own children in private school all along, just one of the many ways elites bought their way out of pandemic restrictions.
Many opponents of reopening questioned the motives of those advocating it, rather than their actual arguments. Supporters of reopening were labeled “conservative,” or more commonly, “Trumpian,” an ad hominem attack that has a corrosive impact within the liberal orthodoxy of academia. Those who paid the price for this kind of self-righteous name-calling and politically driven accusation were children.”
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“CDC chief: A third of “breakthrough” infections are asymptomatic and “many” infected don’t transmit the virus to others”
https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2021/04/22/cdc-chief-a-third-of-breakthrough-infections-are-asymptomatic-and-many-infected-dont-transmit-the-virus-to-others-n385188
“Consider this a follow-up to last night’s post about the curious case of the Kentucky nursing home where most residents were fully vaccinated — and an outbreak of COVID happened anyway, thanks to a nasty little variant of the virus. With 40 percent of Americans having received their first dose and the country hopefully on its way to herd immunity, we’re faced with a new coronavirus mystery: What share of vaccinated people will suffer “breakthrough infections”?
Is it really .008 percent, as the initial CDC data indicated? Because there shouldn’t be outbreaks happening in any vaccinated population, even a population of elderly people, if it’s .008 percent.
What we do know, even if we don’t know the exact number, is that the percentage is very, very low. Low enough that our scaremongering, bad-news-obsessed media resorts to headlines like this to frame a story about a mere 71 out of 226,000 fully vaccinated people testing positive for COVID:”
““Vaccinated Test Positive” isn’t news given that we already know that the mRNA vaccines are “only” 95 percent effective. If anything, the news is that they seem to be more effective than one might expect from that 95 percent figure.
CDC director Rochelle Walensky went on the “Today” show this morning to try to calm people’s nerves about reports of “breakthrough infections.” Not only are they to be expected with any vaccine, she explained, but many vaccinated people who get infected aren’t experiencing symptoms and aren’t carrying enough of a viral load to get anyone else sick:”
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Facts are pesky things to the leftist agenda.
“Data Undercuts Myth of ‘Racism’ in Police Killings”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/04/22/data_undercuts_myth_of_racism_in_police_killings_145640.html
“President Biden claimed that Derek Chauvin’s conviction on Tuesday “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism” of police. With the police shooting that same day of 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio, the White House again pushed the racism claim, noting that this was just another example of how “police violence disproportionately impacts Black and Latino people.”
But where is the evidence for these claims? In Chauvin’s trial, the prosecution never once mentioned evidence that the now-former officer is racist. A day after the verdict, the Biden administration announced plans for a pattern-or-practice investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department to determine if there is such racism, but the administration’s comments sure sound as if they have already determined the study’s outcome.
In the other case, body camera footage released by police revealed that Ma’Khia Bryant was fatally shot as she charged another girl with a knife. The officer shot one black girl in an attempt to save what appears to be another black girl from being stabbed.
Politicians such as Biden as well as the media have helped create a biased perception that is far from the reality of shootings by police. In a study, the Crime Prevention Research Center (where I serve as president) found that when a white officer kills a suspect, the media usually mention the officer’s race. When the officer is black, news coverage rarely mentions that detail.
And there’s evidence that blacks aren’t all that fed up with the police. A July 2017 Quinnipiac University poll in New York City found that blacks strongly support the cops in their neighborhoods — 62% approved compared to just 35% who disapproved. That approval rating was 11 percentage points higher than for the New York City Police Department as a whole. It makes sense that people only know their local cops, and rely on media reports to form impressions about other areas they are less familiar with. A 2020 Monmouth University poll found that 72% of both blacks and whites are satisfied with their local police.
There is other evidence. If blacks don’t trust the police, they presumably won’t turn to them as frequently as whites when a crime occurs. Yet, blacks report violent crime to police at a higher rate than either whites or Hispanics, even when controlling for income levels. Low- and middle-income blacks are about 11 percentage points more likely to report violent crimes to police.
Through extensive research, we found 2,699 police shootings across the nation from 2013-2015. That’s far more than the FBI found, since its data is limited to only 1,366 cases voluntarily provided by police departments. The FBI data has other shortcomings, too: It disproportionately includes cases from heavily minority areas, giving a misleading picture of the frequency at which blacks are shot.
Our database keeps track of characteristics of both the suspect and the officer involved in each shooting, local violent crime rates, demographics of the city and police department, and many other factors that help determine what causes police shootings.
Officers kill blacks at a higher rate than their share of the population: 25% of the suspects killed were black, 45% white, and 16% Hispanic. As for where the deaths are occurring, black suspects tend to die in heavily black larger cities with populations averaging over 600,000, while whites are killed in smaller cities with an average population of 250,000.
White suspects were slightly more likely to be holding a firearm than blacks (63% to 61%). Black and white suspects were both equally likely to be involved in violent crime when they lose their lives at an officer’s hands, though blacks who died were more likely to be involved in drug or property offenses. But police generally have more challenging jobs in cities where blacks are killed. The average city where blacks are killed had a 61% higher violent crime rate and 126% higher murder rate than where the average white was killed.
After accounting for these and other factors, including averaged cultural differences in police departments, we found that black officers were at least as likely as their white peers to kill black suspects, but that black officers were more likely to kill unarmed blacks than were white officers.”
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If these weren’t predominantly black churches, some white liberal would be screaming about separation of church and state. But they are, so crickets…..
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2021/04/21/religious-leaders-hold-home-depot-hostage-unless-company-meets-its-demands-over-election-reform-law-n384800
“Religious leaders hold Home Depot hostage unless company meets its demands over election reform law”
“The largest company headquartered in Georgia, Home Depot, is being told that if it fails to publicly denounce the state’s voting law reform legislation, it will be boycotted. This isn’t coming from Black Lives Matter, per se. The corporation is being held hostage by religious leaders who demand specific talking points be delivered … or else.
Corporations, especially those headquartered in Georgia, have come out against the legislation signed by Governor Kemp. Republicans describe the bill as one that addresses election integrity while Democrats call it a voter suppression law – “Jim Crow 2.0”. Coca-Cola and Delta were among the first to make a point to virtue-signal after the governor signed the bill, only to be exposed as taking part in the process and giving input into the legislation. Both were fine with the law until the governor signed it and grievance activists did their thing. Coke soon discovered that not all of its consumers think that companies should be making policy – that ‘s the job of lawmakers- and now it is trying to clean up the mess it made for itself.
Churches have increasingly played a part in American politics and this is an escalation of that trend. Evangelical churches have shown support for conservative and Republican candidates while black churches get out the vote for Democrats. This threat of bringing a large-scale boycott over state legislation is a hostile action against the corporation. It’s political theatre. Groups like Black Voters Matter, the New Georgia Project Action Fund (Stacey Abrams), and the Georgia NAACP are pressuring companies to publicly voice their opposition and the religious leaders are doing the bidding of these politically active groups.
When SB 241 and HB 531 were working through the legislative process, the groups put pressure on Republican lawmakers and the governor to abandon the voting reform legislation. They also demanded that donations to any lawmakers supporting the legislation be stopped. The Georgia Chamber of Commerce tried to remain bipartisan while still voicing support for voting rights but then caved and expressed “concern and opposition” to some provisions. At the time, several large Georgia companies were targeted by activists, including Aflac, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Home Depot, Southern Company and UPS.
The Georgia Chamber of Commerce previously reiterated the importance of voting rights without voicing opposition against any specific legislation. In a new statement to CNBC, the Georgia Chamber said it has “expressed concern and opposition to provisions found in both HB 531 and SB 241 that restrict or diminish voter access” and “continues to engage in a bipartisan manner with leaders of the General Assembly on bills that would impact voting rights in our state.”
Office Depot came out at the time and supported the Chamber’s statement. The Election Integrity Act of 2021, originally known as Georgia Senate Bill 202, is a Georgia law overhauling elections in the state that was signed into effect by the governor and we know what happened. Office Depot has not delivered for the activists as they demand so now the company faces boycott drama. The religious leaders are taking up where the activist groups left off.
African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Reginald Jackson said the company has remained “silent and indifferent” to his efforts to rally opposition to the new state law pushed by Republicans, as well as to similar efforts elsewhere.
“We just don’t think we ought to let their indifference stand,” Jackson said.
The leader of all his denomination’s churches in Georgia, Jackson had a meeting last week with other Georgia-based executives to urge them to oppose the voting law, but said he’s had no contact with Home Depot, despite repeated efforts to reach the company.
Faith leaders at first were hesitant to jump into the boycott game. Now the political atmosphere has changed and they are being vocal. Jackson focused on pressuring Coca-Cola first. After that company went along to get along, before it realized its error, Jackson moved his focus onto other companies.”
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The death knell for public education. Get your kids out now.
“The End of Basic Education: Biden Issues Universal Public School Critical Race Theory Order”
https://pjmedia.com/columns/kimberlyhermann/2021/04/22/the-end-of-basic-education-biden-issues-universal-public-school-critical-race-theory-order-n1441832
“The Biden Department of Education has quietly proposed a new rule prioritizing the use of federal tax dollars for K-12 schools that replace traditional education with “culturally responsive teaching and learning” – more commonly referred to as critical race theory. This is the most significant move by the federal government to redefine the nature of state-funded public schools in U.S. history.
Although the current effort to push public schools receiving federal funding to adopt a detailed indoctrination agenda may feel new and overwhelming for parents, the truth is that the Biden attempt is simply the last phase in a decades-long effort to control local schools and press the progressive agenda on our children. With the power of taxpayer-funded purse strings, the federal government sends a message to public schools that if they want financial aid they must “teach” critical race theory and prioritize its ideologically anti-American, anti-traditional agenda over traditional education.
Under Obama, public schools were thrust into the controversial world of Common Core, a series of federal mandates that included “awareness education” involving a progressive view of race, gender, and so-called “equity” (not to be confused with “equality”).
Under Biden, a far more aggressive level of federal control over our nation’s K-12 classrooms will replace history (and objective truth) with identity politics and a warped view of American civics and institutions. In many cases, teachers are told to hide the racially divisive curriculum from parents. In others, students are encouraged to report the words and views of their parents and caretakers as examples of institutional racism. The initial goal is the indoctrination of young minds, but the long view is to aggregate power behind an alien political worldview that fed the dehumanizing machines of the Soviet Union and communist China.
At its core, critical race theory is the false idea that the United States is a fundamentally racist country and that all of our nation’s institutions – the law, culture, business, economy, education – are designed to maintain white supremacy. Politicians and pundits market critical race theory as inclusive teaching, one that promotes understanding and tolerance. When the truth is exposed, they try to repackage it in a series of euphemisms, including anti-racism, equity, or culturally responsive teaching. But the “scholars,” like Ibram X. Kendi and the 1619 Project behind the related anti-racist rhetoric proposed in the rule – the true believers – admit the truth.
Critical race theory curriculum tells students that they fall into one of two categories – the oppressed or the oppressor – based solely on the color of their skin. It tells students that if they are white then they are privileged and racist, and makes them affirm this ideology through classroom discussion and assignments. Some school districts take it even a step further and physically segregate students based on their race for lessons, reducing them to nothing more than a set of racial stereotypes.
This is not healthy. It erases decades of progress. And it pits our children against each other, teaching them to hate one another. Parents must stay alert because this week’s proposed rule is just the beginning. Senate and House Democrats have already introduced bills, including the Civics Secures Democracy Act, which would require schools to promote critical race theory in exchange for more federal money.”
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One company has now spent 19 years and millions and millions of dollars to get a final mine permit. Lots of other companies also trying to get permits, of course. In the meantime China and other countries are glad to mine. Other countries use child labor to find minerals in huge landfills. Such insanity!
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I disagree. The Russia, Russia, Russia @#$%%$#@ was the worst ever. This is just icing.
https://twitter.com/DrewHolden360/status/1385354595803795456
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https://twitter.com/DrewHolden360/status/1385354614741082113
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The. Media. Is. Garbage.
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The uninformed left.
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The uniformed left 2.0.
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https://twitter.com/rachelbovard/status/1385350803913850887
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Kessler is scum, and his “fact checks” are garbage.
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