Muda69

Team Blue Should End Its Unhealthy Obsession With COVID-19 Panic Porn https://reason.com/2021/04/19/team-blue-should-end-its-unhealthy-obsession-with-covid-19-panic-porn/ Masks have been an important tool in slowing the course of the pandemic. There's a strong case to be made that the unvaccinated should still wear them when they gather in large numbers in indoor spaces. But there's never been a particularly good reason to require masks outdoors, and that's doubly true for the vaccinated. Could a vaccinated person suffer a breakthrough infection, and then spread the disease during outdoor contact to an unvaccinated person who gets very sick or dies? Yes, it's theoretically possible, but we're starting to get into hit-by-lightning chances here. In no other context would we accept that this level of safety is insufficient. On his show over the weekend, HBO's Bill Maher delivered a terrific monologue on the subject of COVID-19 paranoia among Team Blue. Maher referenced a fascinating December 2020 survey result from Gallup that found Democrats wildly overestimated the odds that someone who contracts the virus will need to be hospitalized. Some 41 percent of Democrats thought the hospitalization rate was higher than 50 percent—in reality, it's between 1 and 5 percent. "If the right-wing media bubble has to own things like climate change denial, shouldn't liberal media have to answer for how did your audience wind up believing such a bunch of crap about COVID?" asked Maher. Whenever I tweet that post-vaccination outdoor masking is unnecessary, I am inundated with hostile feedback from liberals who stridently assert that the performance is important because it sends the right message and puts other people at ease. Well, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) probably puts some people at ease, too—but it shouldn't, because removing our shoes and belts before we get on a plane doesn't make us any safer at all. The TSA is a massive waste of time, money, and energy, and the American people have put up with it for more than 20 years. If we don't want pandemic restrictions to become the new airport security, there needs to be pushback: Get vaccinated, and then get back to normal. Agreed. Stop listening to and watching the covid-19 panic porn.

No, it's not. A beautiful country facility, everything that high school football , a game played by children, should represent.

Biden Set to Push Critical Race Theory on U.S. Schools https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-set-to-push-critical-race-theory-on-u-s-schools/ Yet another reason why the unconstitutional U.S. Department of Education should be abolished. This blatant attempt to bring race politics into K-12 classrooms across the nation is heinous and immoral.

No, DK. I beg to differ. The moment you began accepting donations to keep the GID and running, it became a product. Much like the "shareware" programs of old. Such software products had little to no to marketing behind them, yet they were products all the same.

I hope you are as well, Bobref. Another question is will Tom Allen or Brian Kelly still be coaches of their respective teams by 2030? Odds say probably one if not both of them will have moved on by 2030.

Much like you, Dante.

Radical Chic Real Estate https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/radical-chic-real-estate-marxist-patrisse-cullors-black-lives-matter/ More: She owns two more houses worth over $1.5 million. “Champagne socialist” doesn’t even begin to describe it! So, last night Cullors went on a friendly TV broadcast to explain that she’s using her money to help black people … and the black people she’s helping are her family members. Seriously, that’s her argument: Here’s a story about the interview, including an embed of the entire thing. Excerpts: Phony, phony, phony. Race hustling and woke capitalism have been very, very good to Patrisse Cullors. Meanwhile, Twitter put black journalist Jason Whitlock in Twitter jail for daring to criticize the posh Marxist, and Facebook wouldn’t let its users share the New York Post article on Cullors’ property buying. The Post editorial board writes: The Woke & The Powerful will always protect each other. Count on it. It’s a racket.

https://www.ocregister.com/2021/04/09/conservatives-embrace-their-own-form-of-wokeness/ Uni-party big government to the max.

Court-Packing Bill Is an Attempt to Intimidate Sitting Supreme Court Justices https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/court-packing-bill-is-an-attempt-to-intimidate-sitting-supreme-court-justices/ Mr. McConnell is correct.

Speaking of college, this was recently part of a Frankfort High School daily newsletter: And this particular company has recently advertised it's looking for experienced plumbers, compensation for them up to $100,000 dollars a year. Sorry, I don't see how your average English or Library Sciences degree from a traditional 4-year college can compete.

https://reason.com/2021/04/15/is-stephen-breyer-about-to-retire-his-clerk-hiring-spree-suggests-otherwise/ Once can hope so.

I firmly believe that most Indiana High School football fans these days are not interested in the honest debate of issues surrounding their team and/or sport. Instead they flock to other social media outlets where confirmation bias and navel gazing are the norm. It makes them "feel good", and that is all that matters, right?

As an I.T. professional with 30+ years experience I beg to differ.

The FDA's Decision To Pause J&J Vaccination Will Kill People https://reason.com/2021/04/13/the-fdas-decision-to-pause-jj-vaccination-will-kill-people/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/unions-dirty-secret-they-cant-survive-without-coercion/ Agreed. The time of time of the organized labor union has come and gone. They currently only exist to raise $ and votes for the left.

University of Oklahoma Diversity Training Forces Students and Faculty To Affirm the School's Political Views https://reason.com/2021/04/13/university-of-oklahoma-diversity-training-forces-students-and-faculty-to-affirm-the-schools-political-views/ That a government university as large of the U. of Oklahoma would do this is chilling.

You are not wrong.

Biden's Gun-Limitation Schemes Make a Mockery of His 'Unity' Message https://reason.com/2021/04/12/bidens-gun-limitation-schemes-make-a-mockery-of-his-unity-message/

Biden Sets Up Commission To Study Supreme Court Reform: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/985738915/biden-sets-up-commission-to-study-supreme-court-reform Dante's dream may come true.

https://mises.org/wire/government-property-sacred-your-property-not-so-much He then had some colorful language for those who hazarded to question the prevailing narrative: Only a detached member of the ruling class whose livelihood is sustained by some of America’s most powerful corporations can have the gall to downplay the trials and tribulations untold numbers of small business owners had to endure during last summer’s mayhem. Scarborough and his coterie would have us believe that paying respect to the hallowed institutions of mass democracy is the highest virtue while trying to defend the fundamental property rights of the common man is the province of buffoons and country bumpkins. Private Property Is Critical for Civilization For the adherents of the present political order, symbols of the state have a religious aura. Private property, on the other hand, is a sacrificial animal to be slaughtered as an offering to the state, though the whole conversation would likely change if the property of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Big Tech, or politically connected corporations were defiled. The media would instantly become situational capitalists and vigorously defend the sanctity of their fellow peers’ property. Heck, they might just throw some radical free market defenses here and there. But this is out of pure self-interest, not because political leaders and their corporate patrons hold private property in high esteem at a holistic level. As for the rest of the rubes in Middle America, they must put up with whatever political violence befalls them and their property. Simply raising their voices in opposition will have the legacy media branding them as “reactionary,” “racist,” or “bigoted.” On the other hand, Ludwig von Mises championed private property not just for the sake of sloganeering but to impart to others the necessity property rights as a means of fostering social harmony. As he observed in Omnipotent Government, “If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.” Mises’s vision for a social order predicated on respect for property rights has not disappeared from the intellectual consciousness. Successors of the Misesian tradition such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe have continued making the case for the respect of private property as a civilizing force. Unlike the public sector worshippers, Hoppe understood the bigger picture of why private property, not public property, should be treated as sacred. In fact, he views the modern-day state as one of the principal drivers of the erosion of property rights throughout the West. As Hoppe argued in Democracy, The God That Failed, As a consequence of being accustomed to having mandarins in distant government agencies lord over them, Americans have gradually come to disrespect or at least take for granted the concept of property rights. Hence their relative indifference toward the wanton destruction of the property of many small business owners’ establishments during last summer’s riots and toward the devastation government-promoted lockdowns inflicted on these small business operations. The sign of a healthy society is one where private property is respected, and not just the private property of social media whales or parasitic defense contractors, but that of everyday business owners. By the same token, a society with a modicum of sanity would laud acts of self-defense against criminals who wish to harm the property and persons of lawful individuals. Many of the shibboleths that Americans have been so inured to accept are now imploding. Millions of Americans took it upon themselves to buy firearms at record levels during a time when police services could be relied on to uphold their end of the proverbial social contract. Moreover, a number of Americans responded by forming community defense groups to protect their neighborhoods when police were standing down left and right as cities nationwide burned. Even the idea of privatized policing is starting to gain traction in certain parts of America. Occasionally, moments of crisis force people to rethink many political premises they’ve stubbornly held. There’s something to be said about how operating outside of one’s comfort zone can compel one to look at things differently. All things considered, the past year should all but dispel the notion that America is “exceptional.” It’s a country with a myriad of problems that have dotted empires in decay throughout world history—a corrupt ruling class, an overstretched military presence, an unstable monetary system, and declining public order. Reassuring ourselves of empty bromides that it “can’t happen here” because America is exceptional is a pathetic cope that ignores the iron laws of politics and economics, which the US is not exempt from. The only thing exceptional is the level of befuddlement that many experts will find themselves in once the US inevitably careens into the abyss of social and economic decadence if the country’s leaders don’t get their act together. Yes, America is slowly failing.

https://mises.org/wire/equality-acts-attack-religion-really-about-private-property-rights Moreover, the Act expands the definition of organizations that fall under public accommodation laws: Notable among these is the expansion to “shelters” which include domestic violence shelters. Under the Equality Act, these organizations would be required to house males self-identifying as women in shelters alongside abused women. The inclusion of salons is also notable, since—as was exhibited by the notorious Jessica Yaniv case in Canada—public accommodation mandates would likely erase the ability of salons to limit waxing services to women, since the employees at these institutions could easily be forced into waxing men’s genitals provided those men identify as women. The Act also could easily be interpreted as a blanket ban on refusals to perform abortions: The Abolition of Religious Exemptions But perhaps most central to the Act are its provisions to reduce exemptions for religious persons and institutions. Historically, federal law and federal court decisions have in many cases noted that religious institutions—if the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights is to mean anything—must be able to behave in ways that are compatible with religious belief. Thus, in some cases, a church or other religious organization can refuse to hire persons who espouse ideology or behavior that stands contrary to a religious group’s beliefs. Similarly, in some cases, a religious doctor or nurse could have found some protections under these provisions for refusing to perform religiously objectionable medical procedures such as sex reassignment surgery or abortions. This has always been rather weak tea in terms of limiting federal powers, since it restricts private discretion to only to those acts that are religiously motivated. Moreover, government agents themselves—i.e., government judges—have also often arrogated to themselves the power to determine if a discriminatory decision fits under any known religious category. In other words, the government will tell you if your legal defense can be defined as a religious defense. Moreover, as the Masterpiece Cake Shop case and similar cases have shown, even religious objections fail to provide much in the way of protection from these legal mandates. But even these few and weak loopholes are too much for backers of the Equality Act which is designed to further restrict religious freedom: A Doorway to Widespread Regulation of Private Life This was to be expected. The public accommodation provisions have long served as a doorway for federal regulators to enter and manage the daily minutiae of private life and the private sector. The expansion of these powers under the Equality Act is only the next logical step. After all, this body of law has always constituted a direct assault on the private sector and the institution of private property, bringing more and more of private life under the watchful eye of government bureaucrats. It has provided an excuse for government regulators to investigate, fine, sue, and otherwise harass and destroy business owners in a wide variety of ways. For those business owners who cannot afford a legal defense, there is no recourse. Naturally, this is all to the benefit of the regime itself. As Ludwig von Mises has noted, private property is an institution that is absolutely central and essential in limiting government power and in providing some small realm of freedom beyond the reach of the regime's coercion. Like market institutions and the family, religious institutions are themselves within the private sector and a key part of what the early laissez-faire liberals called "society." Society represents those noncoercive institutions that are to be contrasted with the state and its mandates, imposed under threat of fines and imprisonment. All else being equal, it's a good thing that religious organizations have been able to exercise discretion in "discrimination" even if these same freedoms were denied to others. Some freedom—what some might call loopholes—is preferable to no freedom. But that was never enough for the advocates of the Equality Act, and they're now moving faster in the wrong direction. The small bit of freedom carved out for religious institutions is being reduced further and religious institutions are likely to soon be considered more or less indistinguishable from long-beleaguered commercial organizations. The Answer Lies in Private Property But what we can we do about the problem of private sector discrimination that's truly designed to disadvantage some specific minority group? Ironically, the answer lies in protecting private property. For those of us who are concerned about increasing access to goods and services for minority groups—ethnic and otherwise—it is most effective to combat the regime's restrictions on private sector activities and lower barriers to entry in the marketplace. The legal public accommodation edifice is largely built on the idea that firms headed by bigots will be able to establish partial or total monopolies that can dictate to consumers who can buy what. In a reasonably free economy, however, this is extremely unlikely. As I have shown in the past, we can find many examples of much-discriminated-against Japanese Americans and Latinos—and in other groups that have built up ethnic economic enclaves—rushing to provide a responsive economic foundation of goods and services built around the needs of their group. If our goal is to broaden and expand services—and those who can count on them—the last thing we need is an ever more repressive legal regime built on the constant threat of lawsuits and fines for organizations that run afoul of the regime's ideological preferences. On the other hand, it is unlikely that the backers of the Equality Act are actually motivated by securing economic prosperity for constituents. Rather, this is about settling political scores—carving out privileges for certain interest groups at the expense of other interest groups. In other words, it's a culture war. And that means maximizing the regime's ability to dole out favors and punishments. Yep, the culture war is raging, and this Equality Act is the federal government's, and the progressives, first big salvo against freedom.

High school football nirvana.

A Rhythm Of Racist Prayer: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/a-rhythm-of-racist-prayer/ The book contains a “Prayer of a Weary Black Woman,” by Chanequa Walker-Barnes, an associate professor in the Mercy University’s School of Theology (Mercer is a Georgia Baptist school). This piece breaks down the prayer. Here are close-ups in the photo of the tweet above: Here are quotes, if you can’t read the shots. More: And: My, my, we have come a long way from Dr. King, haven’t we? Now, imagine that you are a white student at Mercer, and Dr. Walker-Barnes is your professor. How can you possibly succeed in that class, knowing that your professor is an open racist who asks God to help her hate people like you? This is not really about the deranged hater Chanequa Walker-Barnes, who, get this, says that her ministry advocates for “reconciliation.” This is about a progressive establishment that valorizes anti-white hatred. How the hell did the people at Convergent Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, approve this? Is racial hatred fine by them if it’s directed at white people? Apparently so. I’ve read a couple of reviews of A Rhythm of Prayer, and not one of them have expressed surprise or alarm that Walker-Barnes prays for God to help her hate white people, and asking God to help her see them all as Klansmen. Not one. Walker-Barnes would not have written such a blasphemous, hateful, racist prayer if she thought she would face any sanction for it from her university, or within her professional milieu. My conclusion is that the woke establishment is completely on board with stoking anti-white hatred. This is the fruit of Critical Race Theory. This week, the black Southern Baptist pastor Voddie Baucham published an incredibly powerful indictment of CRT and what it’s doing to Evangelical churches: Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe. Baucham pulls no punches. He writes: I’m going to devote a separate post to Baucham’s powerful, urgent book, but let me here exhort Christian readers to buy it and share it with everyone you know. It’s important. What Walker-Barnes and her progressive Christian allies represent is, let’s be clear, the spirit of Antichrist. It is blasphemous to call on God to make you hate people at all, much less on the basis of race. Voddie Baucham is calling them out on it. I have said for years in this space that the progressives are calling up racist demons that they won’t be able to control. A Rhythm Of Prayer — or at least the Walker-Barnes contribution to it — is an incantation to the demon of racial hate. This is embraced and promoted by a mainstream publisher. Until this morning, when I saw this on conservative websites, there was no criticism of it. This is what these people, these progressives, believe. They are preparing the country for violent racial conflict. Voddie Baucham characterizes the “antiracist” propaganda as follows: People like Chanequa Walker-Barnes get away with this because all the white people in their social and professional circles sit down and shut up as a matter of course. And those who don’t — like Kieran Bhattacharya (who, by the sound of his last name, is not even white) — face the full weight of persecutorial institutions coming down on them to destroy their careers and their lives. But not all white people, and not all people in general, are like those cowardly white liberals. It is time for those who hate this racism to find their backbones and their voices. Do not embrace anti-black racism, which is also the spirit of Antichrist! Stand against all race hatred. Confront managers of stores that sell this hateful book. Tell everybody you know that Mercer University employs an open racist. When your school, or your kid’s school, teaches garbage like this, confront the school’s administration. Don’t let it pass. If your church is teaching it, leave that church. This evil will never stop until and unless people of good will stand up against it, like Voddie Baucham is doing, and demand that it go away. I remind you that propaganda like A Rhythm Of Prayer is what pre-Nazi Germany did to the Jews, preparing Germany for the Holocaust. It’s what the Hutus in power did to the Tutsis of Rwanda, preparing Rwanda for the 1994 genocide. If a bestselling prayerbook called on God to help one learn how to hate people of color, we would know exactly what we were looking at, and we would rightly condemn it without qualification. But our institutions — academia, publishing, media, and others — have been captured by this evil ideology. If we don’t stand up against it right now, without fear or apology, then history tells us where it may lead. Again, the problem here is not really Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes. The problem is a progressive-controlled system — academia, publishing, and retailing — that valorizes her kind of race hatred. I believe that she should have the legal right to publish this. But it should be vigorously condemned all the same. You can buy this book featuring Chanequa Walker-Barnes prayer for the gift of racial hatred through Amazon. You cannot buy Ryan T. Anderson’s sober, well-reasoned book critiquing transgender ideology at Amazon. This is what it means for progressives — not liberals, progressives — to have captured institutions. None of this moral insanity will stop if the rest of us simply sit back and hope that it goes away. Fight it now, or the fight that’s coming is going to be much uglier, maybe, God forbid, even violent. If that happens, if the shooting starts, remember that progressive elites did this to us, to all of us, black, white, brown, all of us. They are openly teaching us to hate each other on the basis of race. Hell, they’re even praying for it! UPDATE: Reader Coleman Glenn comments: I see. I’m not sure I buy it, though. I need to think about it. I see your point, and you might well be right, but Walker-Barnes’s writing is so muddled on this point that it’s not clear to me what she’s saying. Or rather, given the fact that she has written such a long and vivid version of an imprecatory prayer, one fuzzy paragraph saying, in effect, “They deserve all this, but I need you to keep me on the straight and narrow in my denunciations of them,” is pretty puny. It reads to me as completely insincere, though obviously I can’t know my heart Put another way, it reads like a kind of pornography: a detailed and highly-charged prayer about lust, with an obligatory, “but I know I can’t have that” graph slapped on to pass the censors, so to speak. Still, I will concede that that may have been her intention, however badly executed. UPDATE.2: Think of it this way: if a white theologian had written a “prayer” that was a lengthy, lurid discourse on how black people deserved to be hated, but saying in a single paragraph at the end, “but Lord, I know that I can’t have what I’m asking for,” would we think that it was unproblematic? Again, if Walker-Barnes’s sin here is not moral, but aesthetic — that is, if she simply did a poor job of saying what she meant — that is important to note. But that potentially exculpatory graf seems awfully weak. I remember when I was writing about the black radical professor Tommy Curry at Texas A&M a few years ago, and the many awful, racist things he was saying, some who came to his defense argued that in some cases, technically, he was simply quoting others, etc., and that we can’t say that he really believed these things. This was maybe — maybe — plausible in some of the instances, if you squinted and applied the strictest possible hair-splitting logic. But it was clear what he was doing. I think the same thing is happening here. Reading the entire “prayer,” I don’t believe for one second that Walker-Barnes struggles with her anger at white people. She does not sound like the sort of person begging for deliverance from her anti-white passions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleur-de-lis The National Honor Society chapter at Greenfield High School is called the Fleur-De-Lis chapter. There may be a connection there, but I am not sure.