Almost 90,000 people are dying every month which is why we should accelerate vaccination (lower dose, postpose 2nd shot, postpone shots to those with + antibody tests, approve Astra Zeneca and JNJ.) The US has turned another corner and Illinois continues to trend down.
US is similar to major EU countries
Why I am (we are?) Angry
(liberally plagiarized from Victor Davis Hanson - https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/24/the-river-of-forgetfulness/)
A handful of idiots, out of tens of thousands of Trump supporters, out of 74 million Trump voters, rioted and broke into the Capitol on January 6. (Note they were universally condemned by Republicans and conservatives who support prosecuting these idiots to the full extent of the law.) Does this bother me? Yes. But, what bothers me more and makes me angry is what I see in reaction to this and what I have seen in recent years:
1. These actions have allowed the Democrats and the Mainstream Media to label all Trump voters and conservatives as racists, Nazi’s, white supremacists, abettors, terrorists, seditionists, and traitors and call for the silencing, deprogramming and re-educating of half the country;
2. The Democrats were silent over this past summer when downtowns were ravaged, stores were looted, arson was customary, more than 700 police were injured and spat upon.
3. Democrats and the Mainstream media labeled these riots as “mostly peaceful” protests while causing billions of dollars in damage, leaving thousands of business owners bankrupt, and at least three-dozen people dead;
4. Democrats saw far more election-year political advantage in defending the violence than in suppressing it, and so made the necessary adjustments, at least until Election Day;
5. Democratic mayors of the targeted cities like Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and Minneapolis contextualized and supported the mayhem (“block party” and “summer of love”). They cared little for the thousands of lives that were wrecked by the destruction;
6. Joe Biden excused Antifa as a mere “idea” (a presidential ante facto impeachable offense?)—largely because millions of his supporters condoned or explained away the violence, and they said so publicly;
7. The New York Times architect of the “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones boasted at the height of the unrest, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence;”
8. Kamala Harris recklessly warned America that the protests, which were increasingly turning more violent, would and should continue;
9. Kamala Harris helped to bail out arrested street activists instead of raising funds for injured police;
10. It was not sedition, insurrection, and treason to try to torch a federal courthouse or incinerate police precincts with all their occupants inside;
11. Slinging around an illegal “assault weapon,” if you were Seattle rapper Raz Simone, was almost cool and neat, even if four people were shot, and two killed in his “autonomous zone;”
12. When the violence spread to the nation’s capital, a church near the White House was torched. Mobs threatened to enter the White House grounds;
13. When the president raised the issue of employing federal troops in extremis, he was declared a near insurrectionary himself;
14. Democrats exempting the violence and rioting that we saw during the 2017 Inauguration when over 200 people were indicted for, and then excused from, felony rioting charges after hundreds of businesses were looted, vandalized, and destroyed;
15. Nobody cared when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) railed at the doors of the Supreme Court amid a throng of furious pro-abortion protestors, called out the judges in session by name, and threatened and warned them that they were to reap a whirlwind and that they would have no idea of what might soon “hit” them;
16. Nobody complained when Obama told his supporters “I want you to argue with them and get in their face;”
17. Nobody complained when Maxine Waters told America “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents.”
18. For over a year, mobs and rioters have destroyed or defaced thousands of American monuments, and not just those of Confederate generals. We have witnessed attacks on everything from the Lincoln Memorial to statues of Frederick Douglass and Miguel de Cervantes;
19. We see Democratic cities removing the names of Washington and Lincoln from their schools;
20. For four years the American public was subject to the greatest political hoax and scandal in American history. Candidate Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national, disguised by the firewalls of the DNC, Perkins-Coie, and Fusion GPS, to compile dirt on rival candidate Donald Trump. Then her minions used her lifelong government contacts to seed the made-up file by Christopher Steele among the highest echelons of the Obama Administration, the Justice Department, FBI, and CIA—with absolute impunity;
21. We are asked to forget that the FBI deliberately doctored court evidence to greenlight unlawful surveillance, and lost or destroyed evidence and even the phone records of rogue FBI agents;
22. We are asked to forget that it is illegal for a foreign national like Christopher Steele to work for an American presidential candidate, much less to use his work to seek the destruction of a president-elect’s transition and presidency;
23. For four years I saw half of the country say “Not my President;”
24. I saw four years of open active “resistance” with not a whiff of insurrection or sedition claims;
25. I saw Hollywood for four years, in word and video, boasting and encouraging of beating the president up, of burning him alive, of decapitating him, of blowing him up, of shooting him, of torturing his children, of stabbing him;
26. I saw for four years members of Congress and democratic grandees—including former president Jimmy Carter—described Trump as an illegitimately elected president. We are to forget that Hillary Clinton said repeatedly that she was robbed of her actual “victory,” and advised Joe Biden “never” to concede if he lost;
27. I saw the Left sue to nullify the 2016 election on grounds that voting machines were fraudulent. Hollywood stars ran commercials urging the electors to become insurrectionaries and to undermine their constitutional mandates;
28. For years Stacey Abrams was feted by elected officials as the “real” governor of Georgia, as she insisted that she had been “cheated” out of her real victory;
29. I saw Democrats who once warned that massive mail-in and early-voting might be subject to fraud sue and harangue to undermine the existing voting protocols passed by state legislatures, so that 100 million votes might be cast before Election Day, and 100 of thousands of votes were counted that were not cast according to their state legislature’s laws;
30. I saw the Democrats and Mainstream media completely hide and sensor important documented evidence of serious questions related to Biden and his son right before an elections; and,
Perhaps most important to me, I have seen Democrats and Mainstream media lie and propagate the false narrative that the primary cause of the disparities between blacks and whites is due to systemic racism when it is clear that the issue is closer to home (police shoot blacks disproportionately lower than whites when you include the rate of murder and violent crime, black immigrants have the same incarceration rate as whites across all incomes and education, blacks have a dramatically higher level of fatherless homes.) This false narrative is tearing this country apart and is hurting blacks. (https://glennloury.substack.com/p/the-developmental-imperative)
“ By the way, the US failure to authorize the AstraZeneca vaccine in the midst of a pandemic when thousands are dying daily and a factory in Baltimore is warmed up and ready to run is a tragedy and dereliction of duty of epic proportions. The AZ vaccine should be given an EUA immediately and made available in pharmacies for anyone who wants it ”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/pascal-soriot-on-first-doses-first.html
Minimum wage hurts!
How is the US doing with vaccinations?
We are behind the United Kingdom, who quickly postponed the second dose to vaccinate more people, but leading the major EU countries and Canada.
Operation Warp Speed developed a vaccine in unprecedented time, faster than any of the so-called experts claimed was possible. The US contracted to buy 200 million doses, enough for 100 million people from Pfizer and the same numbers from Moderna. The US contracted to buy 300 million doses from Johnson and Johnson, enough for 300 million people, and it is widely expected that these will have approval in several weeks. This secured vaccinations for 500 million people.
Operation Warp Speed essentially was designed to increases vaccinations per day by 26,298 vaccinations per day and reach 894,132 by January 20 and theoretically deliver the total of 500 million by June 30, 2021.
The doses started to be delivered in late December and despite the widely varying ability of different states to coordinate their delivery, the vaccinations per day has been increasing by an average of 33,365 vaccinations per day and surpassed 1,000,000 vaccinations per day by January 20.
Biden has targeted 100 million vaccinations in 100 days or 1 million per day and claims this is a great improved meant for the mess he inherited.
Biden is claiming that he is increasing the vaccinations from 500,000 per day to 1,000,000 per day and that we should all be impressed.
The big lie is that he is comparing his 1 million per day goal to the average per day from December 18, 2020 to January 20, 20221 of 558,668. This is intellectually dishonest and dangerous. There is no way we should be satisfied with this number. In fact, Biden’s goal will actually be significantly lower than Operation Warp speed is designed to deliver and is on trajectory to meet.
I am not sure why Biden has positioned this in the way he
has or why the main stream media and Democrats are acting like this Biden Plan
is an amazing improvement over what is already happening but I for one think
his plan is horrible and we MUST do better.
Maybe it’s a new affliction: BIS (Biden Infatuation Syndrome).
Do you think it will displace TDS?
Say it ain’t so Joe.
Day 1
10,000+ jobs destroyed, with no benefit to the climate.
Keystone’s benefits - 10’s of thousands American jobs; steel pipe made in the USA, $10 million Green Job Training Fund; $500 million for indigenous suppliers and jobs; and 100% renewable power to operate the pipeline.
Cancel Keystone - reduction of CO2 emissions in the world- 0, nada, zip
We have a very limited window in the United States to make a big push on vaccines and we are failing. We are failing phenomenally badly.
Excerpt from Woodson’s WSJ piece - “...leftist elites teach their own children the values of working and studying hard even as they encourage behavior among blacks that will make sure they remain uncompetitive but “authentic.” By the time young blacks today discover, as did the slaves of Douglass’s time, that freedom understood as “do whatever you feel like” is no way to build a worthwhile life, it will be too late. The fruits of the civil-rights movement’s hard labor—teaching the young to be so self-disciplined that they were able to resist responding in kind to hatred and abuse from whites—will have been lost.”
Relative to the major EU countries and Canada the US has been on the high end of cases (positive tests per million) but more in the middle of the pack in deaths per million. Given that positive tests are affected by testing availability, non-random population sampling, and inter-country events/requirements, it is not a perfect measure of actual cases per million. Deaths, however, are most likley the ultimate measure of Covid effect.
Recent buzz from London is that a study shows that trickle down didn't work. However, if one reads the paper, what it says is that changes to taxes on the top 1% did not lessen income inequality. But, and this is the big but, trickle down was never claimed to be the secret to reducing income inequality It was positioned as the best way to improve all levels of income. And guess what? It does. Yes, the highest earners are making 1.7x's more in income. But the lowest earners are making 1.2 x's more. And that's in the face of the least skilled workers having to compete with a developing world.
And, as is clear, the highest earners are already paying 1/3 of their income to the federal government, not to mention additional taxes they pay at the state level. How much more should someone pay to the government for their value creation.
As scary and obtrusive as it may sound, Google is able to "track mobility" of it's users: " We aggregated, anonymized data to chart movement trends over time by geography, across different high-level categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential."
Below is Cook County Il's mobility data showing the mobility for various activities as a result of Covid.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is practicing her capitalistic rights by selling merch with the slogan: "Tax the Rich." Despite having a degree in economics from Boston University, it is not clear how she justifies her position. Maybe 5 years of bartending, working long double shifts and working her fingers to the bone, before becoming the woke darling of the left and liberal media, caused her to loose whatever abilities she had to understand facts and use logic to make a valid point.
I used the recent CBO Income Distribution Data to look at what US households are making in income (includes all income including government transfers) and paying in taxes. What did I find?
The top 20% of households makes 51.1% of all of the US income and pays 67.5% of all of the taxes. The second highest quintile makes 19.07% and pays 16.8%. The middle quintile 13.8% and 9.1%. The second to lowest makes 9.8% and pays 4.8%. And the bottom quintile makes 5.6% of the nations income and pays only 1.8% of the nations taxes.
Note that this is just the Federal level of taxes. There are additional taxes, progressive in most states, that are also being paid.
Below you can see we are already taxing the rich at much higher tax rates than other quintiles of income. How much higher does AOC want?
US cases and deaths have started to decline and let's hope hospitalizations are starting to flatten soon.
Illinois' cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all dropping.
State cases, hospitalizations and deaths per million shown below.
When I saw the video of the Minneapolis police building burning during the initial George Floyd riots, I asked her “How she could support such violent protesting.”
My woke niece called me a racist and defended it as a reasonable reaction to the systemic racism that blacks experience today as evidenced by Floyd’s death and that police shootings were the leading cause of young black male deaths.
I looked into the CDC data for cause of death and learned that the leading cause of young (10-29y) male black deaths was actually non-police homicides, almost always by other blacks, and that police shootings, whether justified or not, was only 2%.
My “woke” niece called me a racist.
She then claimed that police were racist because they shoot blacks 3xs more than whites. I looked into the FBI crime data and the Washington Post’s police shooting data and found that blacks committed 6.9x’s more homicides and 3.6x’s more violent crimes and explained that this data might explain that police aren’t racist but actually shooting blacks at a lower ratio when you take into account the crime rates.
My
“woke” niece called me a racist and said look at mortgage rates where data
shows that blacks pay more than whites on average.
I looked at the studies and data regarding mortgage rates and found that on average blacks do pay more than whites. Yet those same studies pointed out that they had no data on the credit worthiness of the two different groups including key factors that would determine credit worthiness such as FICA scores and therefore could not conclude anything about race.
My
“woke” niece called me a racist and told me to read White Fragility.
I then reviewed Coates, Kendi, and DiAngelo and Critical Race Theory(CRT) and how this narrative pointed out all of the disparities between blacks and whites (wealth, income, incarceration, crime, police shootings, etc) and concludes it can only be systemic racism.
I brought up the great differences in teen births and fatherless homes and questioned the culture and behaviors in certain communities.
My “woke”
niece called me racist.
She claimed this country was founded as a white supremacy racist country (Project 1619.)
Project 1619 is a New York Times’ narrative that America was founded to preserve slavery that is being widely promoted and being encouraged as part of schools' history curriculum. I’ve enjoyed learning about the founding of this country, the constitution, its ratification, and the founding fathers. Project 1619, to me, was a false narrative. This country was founded in 1776/1787 with a necessary compromise between the north and the south. A compromise that tore this country apart as time went on through the Civil War to finally end slavery. The false narrative of Project 1619 has now been widely criticized by historians and that the NYT has been quietly removing many of the outlandish claims.
I
shared this.
My “woke” niece called me a racist and said we should defund the police.
I looked at interactions with police and showed that the data did not support that police were racists in arrests, use of force or shooting when crime rates were taken into account and shared that what I hear from many inner city voices was that while they may want police reform, there is little interest in reducing police presence.
My “woke” niece called me a racist.
I shared
thoughtful studies and pieces by well-respected black scholars (Sowell,
Steele, Loury, Hughes, etc), successful black businessmen/leaders (Riley,
Carson, Payne, etc) and, yes, Candace Owens.
All of these black conservatives, in a deeper, more thorough, and more
in depth way than I could ever hope, have disputed systemic racism as the
primary cause for the disparities, highlighted that this propagated false
narrative cannot even define systemic racism in any meaningful way, point out
how CRT essentially takes away agency (individual responsibility and
capability) from blacks, encourages a victim mentality, lowers the expectations
for personal responsibility and accountability and is, in fact, hurting blacks
and this country.
They also point out that there is no excuse for black behaviors when you look at violent crime data. Blacks commit 30% more crimes against whites than their population proportion, 483% more crimes against black than their proportion, whereas whites commit only 1/6 of the crimes against blacks than their proportion.
My “woke” niece called me a racist and said she wasn’t going to waste any time reading anything from conservatives.
[NOTE1 – Obviously, systemic racism was widely pervasive in the early years of our country and even in recent history with Jim Crow laws and redlining, etc. However, I think systemic racism TODAY is hard to find, though I welcome any data that supports such claims.]
[NOTE2 – I am sure some racism exists today, any racism is bad and we should continue to work to reduce it, but I think it is only a minor factor today in anyone’s ability to succeed and in fact there are clear advantages to being black for getting into college, getting a corporate job or promotion.]
[NOTE3 – I am sure some excess police force is used today, excess police force is bad and we should continue to try to reduce it but, excess police force is not a major factor in anyone’s ability to succeed.]
Below are two sources that are relatively easy to digest that may be of interest.
WhyDoes Racial Inequality Exist? – Glen Loury
ColemanHughes and Glenn Loury on Race in America, Patriotism, and College Campuses
US President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the US will not aid any Israeli counterattack on Iran , US media report,...
