I searched for as many of these as I could find since I refused to believe it the first time I came across the story.
Trump ‘glorifying white supremacy’ with July 4 fireworks at Mount Rushmore, Democrats say
Democratic Party: Mount Rushmore Glorifies White Supremacy
Rubicon Crossed – DNC Official 2020 Position: Celebrating July 4th Equals White Supremacy….
These lice will do anything to win the election, but what will be left of America if they do?
Although the article starts with these two charts, it is not about the Chinese Flu but about why people believe things in spite of all the evidence to show they are utterly untrue. The title is Why Facts Don’t Matter to People. That is, why it is near impossible to get those who seem able to believe ten impossible things before breakfast to change their minds. It is like dealing with members of a cult, except they are now the mainstream.
Here’s his point. “Engage them in conversation”, he suggests, meaning getting others – you know, like people who want to blow up power stations and defund the police – to explain their views while listening sympathetically to yours.
If you’re wondering why so many people don’t see the world the way you do, engage them in conversation. You will find they are as well-intentioned as you are, but they are looking in a different direction. Beneath their opinions and fears, beliefs are shaping how they see the world.
Because of different beliefs, your villains may be their heroes. They may look at the world of effects while you are looking at causes. They’re hoping a better leader comes to power, while you’re considering how the presidency became so powerful and destructive.
Until their beliefs change, they will never consider how politicians and experts with too much power turned a pandemic into a catastrophe. As Einstein put it, “Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is theory which decides what can be observed.”
The “clear guidance” politicians claim to dispense and “the truth” my friend wants to learn are not rooted in the principles of human flourishing. My friend is waiting for a government official to blow the all-clear whistle. My friend doesn’t want to believe experts are as fallible as he is, and that the prevailing scientific consensus may be false. For me to explain to him why “defining risk is an exercise in power” would bring a blank stare of disbelief.
I don’t think the author has an answer. He adds this at the end which only emphasises how deep the problem is.
Read Hayek’s famous observation about order, replacing the words “that in complex conditions” with the words “during a pandemic:” “To the naive mind that conceives of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions [during a pandemic], order and adaptation to the unknown can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions.”
With that simple substitution, we expose a core belief shared by many Americans. They believe centralizing decision-making is effective in unknown, complex conditions and they want their politicians to do something.
Well, that’s the problem right there. No one any longer wants governments to do nothing, even if that really would be the best thing to do. We are therefore falling towards a totalitarian state. One day no one may even notice our freedoms have gone, since those who grow up in this new world may never have known what freedom is.
And there is this comment I really liked:
People like that exist because reality doesn’t kick them in the teeth hard enough.
Imagine how life has been through most of human history. Life was hard. Being wrong could get you dead, and in a hurry. People who were prone to believing nonsense got that tendency beaten out of them.
Today the consequences for being wrong are extraordinarily mild, if they ever arrive at all. People can believe all sorts of false and ridiculous things without ever having to worry that they’ll pay a price for doing so, or that they will suffer as a result.
That’s where leftists come from.
And this is where they end up.
From Watch Antifa Run When Portland Police Rush Them, It Doesn’t End Well for Them.
Early Friday morning, hundreds of Antifa attacked police and the North Precinct in Portland. They tried to set up another autonomous zone around the precinct with fencing and dumpsters, tried to lock police in the precinct and light it on fire, and pelted the police outside with objects like glass bottles.
See what happened then.
She, bless her, is our modern Madame Defarge (and if you are the subject of our modern system of miseducation, this is who Madame Defarge is).
There is more at the link and more videos too.
Found at: Black Americans Turn Out To Defend Lincoln Emancipation Memorial From Extremists.
The statue, erected on April 14, 1876, stands in Lincoln Park and built with “contributions from hundreds of former slaves who wanted to pay tribute to the man who had proclaimed their freedom in 1863,” The Washington Post reported. “Just after Lincoln’s death, the [Western Sanitary Commission, which aided Civil War victims] had received an intriguing request from a former slave, who sent the commission $5 — her first earnings as a free woman — to help build a monument to Lincoln, ‘the best friend the colored people ever had.’ The commission began a fund-raising campaign and invited former slaves to contribute.”
Famed orator and author Frederick Douglass spoke at the unveiling of the memorial in Washington, D.C., saying, “The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.
“It has crowned and made glorious the high places of all civilized nations with the grandest and most enduring works of art, designed to illustrate the characters and perpetuate the memories of great public men,” Douglass continued. “It is the sentiment which from year to year adorns with fragrant and beautiful flowers the graves of our loyal, brave, and patriotic soldiers who fell in defence of the Union and liberty. It is the sentiment of gratitude and appreciation, which often, in presence of many who hear me, has filled yonder heights of Arlington with the eloquence of eulogy and the sublime enthusiasm of poetry and song; a sentiment which can never die while the Republic lives.”
Douglass later added, “We, the colored people, newly emancipated and rejoicing in our blood-bought freedom, near the close of the first century in the life of this Republic, have now and here unveiled, set apart, and dedicated a monument of enduring granite and bronze, in every line, feature, and figure of which the men of this generation may read, and those of after-coming generations may read, something of the exalted character and great works of Abraham Lincoln, the first martyr President of the United States.”
Via Instapundit. Not to deny that it can kill you, but there are positive signs that you are unlikely to hear from Daniel Andrews.
Related: Hospital patients four times less likely to die now than they were in April, Oxford study finds.
Related: Heather Mac Donald: Where Are The Deaths? “In May, Georgia was the main target of expert contempt for its allegedly premature reopening. Since then, the media have gone silent, due to the state’s truly discouraging downward daily death toll from a high of 119 on April 7, long before the reopenings, to 10 on June 24. . . . There are no crises in hospital capacity anywhere in the country. Nursing homes, meat-packing plants, and prisons remain the main sources of new infections.”
Also: Getting Realistic About The Coronavirus Death Rate.
Nearly all the studies find between 10 and 100 times the number of total infections as reported infections, with the average somewhere around 20 to 25 times.
In other words, while the CDC reports 2.34 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, the actual number of infected and recovered people may be closer to 50 million. (CDC Director Robert Redfield told journalists Thursday that the number of cases may be 10 times higher than the earlier 2.34 million.)
Thus, the death rate, which would be 5.2 percent based on that 2.34 million figure, is actually more like one-20th as high — or 0.26 percent.
It can be awful in some people, but overall it’s turning out to be nowhere near as bad as we feared a few months ago. And that’s good!
138Posted at 8:45 am by Glenn Reynolds`
Plus this.
WELL, THE PRESS WON’T SAY IT, SO YOU KIND OF HAVE TO: Seen on Facebook: “So there’s a COVID spike 3-4 weeks after the mass protests. Just saying.”
Related: Did Austin’s protests produce coronavirus spike? (Yes.)
192Posted at 8:04 am by Glenn Reynolds
Melbourne too, it seems.
It is often asked why in the face of everything we see from the left that there is not more fighting back going on. Lots of reasons for that, but the most important one may be is that most of us cannot believe how insane the modern left is. Surely they can’t be that crazy, we say, but they are. A couple of examples plucked from Instapundit that are there right now. There were plenty of others yesterday, and there will be more tomorrow. We are dealing with the insane. Not that their being nuts makes then less dangerous, but these people must be treated as the nutters they really are.
GRAY LADY DOWN: In Racist Screed, NYT’s 1619 Project Founder Calls ‘White Race’ ‘Barbaric Devils,’ ‘Bloodsuckers,’ Columbus ‘No Different Than Hitler.’ “This isn’t the first time the New York Times has hired and kept a writer with a history of racism and radical views. In 2018, the NYT hired Sarah Jeong despite a long string of racist tweets that littered her Twitter calling white people ‘goblins,’ likening their smell to dogs, and asking to ‘#cancelallwhitepeople’.”
IT MAY NOT SAVE ANY BLACK LIVES, BUT IT’S GIVING MEANING TO LOTS OF WHITE LIVES THAT ARE SHORT OF SIGNIFICANCE: Pew Analysis Shows Only 1 In 6 BLM Protesters Are Black.
Found here: BIDEN’S MENTAL CAPACITY: THE EMERGING ISSUE. It’s a Trump ad focused on Biden’s mental incapacities, but what makes it especially special is that it includes our very own Rita Panahi!
Not that I have anything against people who are old, nor people who are white, nor people who are male. Senile is a large problem. But an even larger problem is that Biden is a Democrat in the mould cast by Obama and Black Lives Matter. And in regard to BLM, there is also this to consider: ‘Our Goal Is To Get Trump Out’ Admits Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Who Is A ‘Trained Marxist’.
Speaking to The Real News Now, one of BLM’s co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, admitted “we are trained Marxists.” That sounds like there’s more to this group than hope for racial equality. Never in history has Marxism, socialism, and/or communism turned violence, inequality and poverty into peace, equality, and economic prosperity?
When asked to respond to concerns that Black Lives Matter could “fizzle out” due to a “lack of ideological direction,” Cullors assured her interviewer BLM does indeed have direction; “we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia, in particular, are trained organizers, we are trained Marxists. We are super versed in ideological theories.”
More relevant news not to be found amongst the Fake Stream Media.
There are 6.5 million people living in Victoria.
If 10% of the population had the CV-19, that would be 650,000 people.
If 1% of the population had the CV-19, that would be 65,000 people.
If 0.1% of the population had the CV-19, that would be 6,500 people. That is one person in 1000.
If 0.01% of the population had the CV-19, that would be 650 people. That is one person in 10,000.
The actual number of people in Victoria who now have the CV-19 is now 121. That is 0.002% of the population, one person in 50,000.
The trouble is we may be living in an Idiocracy which is why Daniel Andrews is premier. What is an idiocracy?
A dystopian world where mankind has embraced anti-intellectualism, and society is devoid of traits such as intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, justice, and human rights.
And that’s apparently just how we like it. See the trailer for Idiocracy and then think about modern Seattle. Or perhaps we could just look around at our own willingness to lock ourselves up in our own self-constructed modern penal colony (if you will pardon the expression).
And it may not just be us. This is from the US: The blind continuing panic over COVID-19.
With totalitarian Democratically-controlled cities and states across the nation now imposing odious rules requiring the wearing of masks at all times, based entirely on emotion and symbolism with absolutely no reliance on the actual science that says masks are not only useless against a virus like COVID-19, they could be medically harmful to the user, I think it is time to do a little science journalism and illustrate again the absurdity of this situation.
First, the Wuhan flu epidemic is clearly ending, as shown by the graph above. This graph, based on numbers from this site, shows that the disease reached its peak sometime near the start of May. Since then its threat has been declining steadily, until it reached today the lowest number of deaths since March, only 285.
Right now the chances of you catching COVID-19 and dying from it are practically nil, even if you live in densely populated states like New York, where only 14 people died yesterday from the virus.
Second, as predicted by some scientists, the lockdowns, social distancing, and silly symbolic mask use did nothing to stretch out the epidemic or flatten the curve. These scientists, ignored by politicians and the mainstream press, had predicted it would be a seasonal flu, dying out come summer, and that it would last from six to eight weeks, as it has done in every country where it has arrived, regardless of any government action.
That is exactly what the Wuhan flu has done. After eight weeks it is now fading away, like all such seasonal diseases.
Third, the numbers on this graph are certainly inflated. The total deaths in the U.S. assigned to the Wuhan flu as of today is just over 114,000. Based on numerous reports (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), we can estimate that this number is inflated from 25% o 50%.
Personally, it’s nice to know that the Middle Ages have not gone away and we are only moments away from burning our first witches. Of course, we have better lighting and heating, but really, given everything you see around you, how long do you think any of that is going to last?
The first one was in Atlanta the other day, the one below was of Floyd George in Minneapolis. What I find more amazing than anything is how patient the police are in both cases. And if you want an understanding of why the police use handcuffs, both are examples why but the one above is more than enough to see the point.
Defend the police. And put all that in the context of this:
Now go on and watch this.
Via Instapundit, with a couple of comments below.
Sure wish I could meet an intelligent progressive. I’m in my fifties and it hasn’t happened yet. I’ve tried to have conversations with a few self-styled ones. It never takes long to conclude they don’t know much of anything. Not even stuff you would you think they might like literature, art or theater. Science, math, economics; don’t even try that.
Same experience . Amazing. What sets off progressives from others is that it is simply impossible to tell a progressive anything. They have no embarrassment being completely wrong on any particular issue regarding the facts. They have their beliefs. It is really amazing. For example, some years back a progressive younger friend bought a Prius to help reduce the CO2 in the atm. I asked him how much CO2 was in the atmosphere. He said about 20%. This young fellow was university educated, very smart, and a H.S. math teacher. When I told him the truth, (0.35%), he just shrugged off his abysmal ignorance. The facts just don’t matter to these people. On the other had, I know plenty of “blue collar types.” and they actually are much more fact driven than the college educated types. The only conclusion is that the progressives are a cult.
We have created such prosperity and immensely high per capita productivity that even morons survive.
Law of Markets 