Jack Phillip reports for Epoch Times:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director (CDC) Dr. Rochelle Walensky says the number of hospitalizations for children with COVID-19 has increased in recent days, but she pointed out that many of them are not related to the virus.
“Many of them are actually coming in for another reason. But they happen to be tested when they come in and they’re found incidentally to have COVID,” she told MSNBC on Dec. 29, referring to the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.
Walensky also noted that the high number of child hospitalizations is “common” for this “time of year,” adding that children “more often” don’t require intensive care unit treatment. Toward the end of the segment, Walensky said that children who are eligible should receive COVID-19 vaccinations.
Even if you think asymptomatic COVID is a big deal, this sort of information has to be a giant asterisk on your analysis.
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… this sort of thing would attract a lot more attention. Instead, it seems the only time Democrats like police (as distinct from their union organizers) is when they attack Republicans:
Recently-released surveillance video from inside the lower west terrace tunnel at the Capitol building from last January 6 confirms what American Greatness has reported for months: law enforcement officers from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Capitol Police led a brutal assault against Trump supporters trapped inside that tunnel during the Capitol protest.
We’re not talking ambiguity, here. Women attempting to get out of the tunnel were repeatedly punch, kicked, and clubbed in the head.
Considering how much the entry into the Capitol differed from door to door, and that this entry was by far the most violent, we need to understand the degree to which authorities might have elevated rather than deescalated tensions.
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I’m still trying to get my head around the fascinating experience of swimming against the tide of social media condemnations of Patricia Morgan. One thing I can say emphatically is that the attractions of wokeness are clear. Without having to do any research or get into messy evaluation of human frailties, an adherent can feel morally superior and intellectually unassailable. Of course, the problem of going with the tide is that you don’t know where it’s really taking you.
Happily, one person with whom I’ve engaged, who happens to be a co-creator of the hit television show, Big Bang Theory, has given me a separate little eddy of conversation in which to float for a moment and catch my breath. Specifically, Bill Prady asked:
I see so there’s no systemic racism. The reason that the average Black family’s wealth is 1/8th of white families is that Black people are 1/8th as capible of earning money. That it, Justin?
Bill didn’t like my response, but the question came well after midnight, and since he was citing a very specific statistic, I told him I’d have to look into it and get back to him. Simply proclaiming “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” is more like placing blame than explaining a fact, and it doesn’t suggest any solutions other than insisting that white people debase themselves. Even if “systemic racism” exists, an explanation requires us to know how it functions in the actual lives of actual people.
It looks like Prady’s number comes from a Federal Reserve study based on its Survey of Consumer Finances, released in September 2020:
In the 2019 survey, White families have the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $188,200 and $983,400, respectively (Figure 1). Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than White families. Black families’ median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families, at $24,100 and $142,500, respectively. Hispanic families’ median and mean wealth is $36,100 and $165,500, respectively. Other families—a diverse group that includes those identifying as Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, other race, and all respondents reporting more than one racial identification—have lower wealth than White families but higher wealth than Black and Hispanic families. The same patterns of inequality in the distribution of wealth across all families are also evident within race/ethnicity groups; for each of the four race/ethnicity groups, the mean is substantially higher than the median, reflecting the concentration of wealth at the top of the wealth distribution for each group.
This paragraph contains two important elements that we must tease out. The first is that the Fed lumps Asians in with other racial groups, which is a clever way of disguising the fact that Asian households actually have higher median wealth than whites, which kinda cuts across the “systemic racism” narrative. The second important element is the comment that “the same patterns of inequality in the distribution of wealth across all families are also evident within race/ethnicity groups.” The study doesn’t elaborate, but it appears to be saying that the same factors (age, homeownership, etc.) that mark the disparities between races also mark disparities among those of the same race.
Unfortunately, the Fed data doesn’t make it easy to combine multiple factors (like race and age), but we can still get a sense of what affects household wealth. A big one is owning a home versus renting. The net worth of homeowners is 41 times that of renters, so if some group is more likely to rent, then that will explain a big part of any disparity.
Another important factor is educational status. Those with college degrees have net worth that is 15 times that of high-school dropouts. Not only does educational success typically suggest higher income, but it also tends to allow entry into jobs that offer valuable benefits that affect net worth, like retirement accounts.
A last factor I’ll put on the table is family structure. Obviously, couples combine two adults, so their net worth should be at least twice as high, but the gap is bigger than that. The wealthiest group is couples with no children, although the data isn’t clear whether this includes adult progeny and/or only children who live in the house. In any event, couples with children have net worth 4.5 times that of single parents with children, who (themselves) have more than twice the net worth of single people without children. (Obviously, this could have a lot to do with age.)
As the reader no doubt knows, compared with white Americans, black Americans are much more likely to rent rather than own homes, have lower levels of educational attainment, and are significantly less likely to be married.
This is where the conversation becomes more difficult, because we’d have to look at the factors that have concentrated blacks on the disadvantaged side of all these lines, and the answer isn’t simple. My view is that progressive policies of the past century are largely to blame for the lack of improvement, and “anti-racism” is the pinnacle of that insidious trend.
Consider this: If you wanted to help somebody increase his or her net worth, you’d encourage him or her to be diligent in school, work hard in a steady job, get and stay married, buy a home in the suburbs, and prudently invest money. This is precisely the picture that radicals paint of “white supremacy,” which reinforces my ongoing suggestion that the goal of wokism is to trick people into rejecting on ideological grounds exactly those things that empower them to thrive in our society. Why? Because our society is “white supremacist,” and thriving in it is therefore participation in evil.
So, perpetual differences in net worth may very well be indicators of “system racism,” but if so, it is currently known as “critical race theory” and “anti-racism.”
ADDENDUM (8:03 a.m., 12/31/21)
Prady insists that the above essay is racist, specifically because my advice to black people is simply to work harder. While I can see how somebody looking for racism might find a hook, there, that is a misreading of what I wrote. The purpose to which the “consider this” paragraph is put is not instruction on how to gain net worth. Rather, it is elaboration of the problem of wokism. The claim of “systemic racism” is that our entire system is built to maintain racial advantage and disadvantage, such that the behaviors and activities that allow one to thrive within our system are themselves “white supremacy.”
Featured image by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash.
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Governor Dan McKee,
I’m being forced to choose… between a state that I share a profound love for and a career I simply cannot live without. I write to you with great respect for your role in navigating our state from these rough waters; you are the captain of our ship, so consider this a letter from a deckhand.
Six years ago, I quit all I knew to pursue a dream. I left my job on a fishing boat to perform, produce, and write music full time here in Rhode Island. Bringing souls together in concert venues through my songs and stories of friends, family, and love of country has in every way fueled my journey.
Raised here, Rhode Island has been home base for all that I have been able to accomplish, and its people are like no other.
This state has delivered opportunities to me that leave me with a deep sense of gratitude, and I guess that’s what makes my next decision so difficult.
In nearly two years since Covid began, people have lost their livelihoods, their lives, their passions, and their dreams, and in the world of live entertainment a deep sense of purpose has been stripped.
Governor, my future here in Rhode Island is beginning to look grim.
Hosting a concert in this state requires me to violate the values I was raised with, values this nation was built upon. In order to pursue my happiness here you are requiring me to confront and question my audience of their private medical decisions, a decision that is protected by the liberties this nation affords, one that is deeply personal and rooted in reasons far beyond the narrow scope of politics. Your order is suggesting that I label human beings without a care for diversity, inclusion, or compassion… all characteristics that America cherishes. This mandate places me and thousands of others in positions of dividing rather than uniting, something we need now more than ever.
The beauty in what we possess here is the ability to object, converse, and chart a brighter course, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans. Our word, our faith, and our values are all we have. If we cannot uphold these values when we are tested, then who are we?
With the privilege of your time I ask you this:
Are you willing to discuss an approach that maintains liberties while ensuring safety?
Respectfully,
Ben O’Connor
Sign Ben’s petition through Rhode Island for Liberty.
Learn more about Ben’s music.
Featured image by Anni Gupta on Unsplash.
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Alexa Gagosz of the Boston Globe tweeted out a little while a note from Sage Myers, who appears to be a Pennsylvania doctor, with the following scary message:
Just finished an ED shift. Literally everyone has COVID. Everyone. And the few people who don’t have COVID have the flu.
There are never enough beds. Or enough people to staff those beds.
The waiting room is full.
I’m so so so tired.
Gagosz follows that up with a report from a woman in Illinois talking about how her mother can’t get a non-ER room or receive visitors because of COVID precautions.
If we stop searching the country for unverified panic and look to Rhode Island, what do we find in the data? As of this writing, the data on the state’s tracking site shows new hospital admissions going down, week after week, even as cases go up.
Sure, there’s a lag between cases and hospitalizations, but cases have been climbing for weeks, at this point, while deaths have been pretty steady, or even decreasing, except for an outlier day that might have to do with reporting peculiarities.
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Well… it’s not just COVID, obviously. People have gone crazy on a bunch of issues, but with COVID, as a topic, data is involved, which really ought to make it easier to pull everybody into productive discussion. Unfortunately, it’s not often working out that way (at least among those I encounter).
The latest example to flitter across my screen comes via a tweet by the Roosevelt Society linking to a Daily Mail article that makes the headline claim, “Unvaccinated people who catch Covid are 60 TIMES more likely to end up in intensive care, new research reveals.” Reading the article, however, this claim simply isn’t accurate. Even in the first paragraph, one gets the almost imperceptible adjustment that it’s “up to 60 times.” What’s the difference? Well, read on to paragraphs seven and eight:
Figures from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC), which covers units in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, show that between May and November the rate of admission for double-jabbed Covid sufferers in their 60s was just 0.6 cases per 100,000 people per week.
But among people of the same age who remained unvaccinated, the rate was 37.3 per 100,000 per week – equating to a relative risk about 60 times higher.
So, the 60-times measure only applies to those in their 60s. After a bunch of charts, images, and videos, we learn that the rate is halved (to 30-fold) for those in their 50s and, oddly, in their 70s. It more than halves again for those in their 30s and 40s (10- to 15-fold).
Yes, those are still big spreads, but look more closely at the numbers in the blockquote. If we convert the numbers to percentages, the intensive-care risk for unvaccinated 60-somethings is 0.04%. Sure, that’s a bigger risk than 0.0006% for the vaccinated, but is it reasonable for the Health Secretary to be chiding unvaccinated residents to “think about the damage that they are doing to society” because only 99.96% of them will avoid intensive care if they catch the disease?
As I said, people have gone crazy. I don’t know how the odds that you’ll be hit by falling space debris change when you step outside, but it’s probably a pretty big increase in your risk, relatively. But the danger is still miniscule.
If we can’t agree that the risk from COVID is so minimal already that anybody who doesn’t want to be vaccinated can simply live with it, could we at least agree on some threshold at which we can feel safe? The standard that we can only feel safe when there is no way to feel safer just doesn’t work.
Featured image by Marcelo Vaz on Unsplash.
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With Rhode Island’s politics-watchers all atwitter and fainting over a white woman’s expression of regret about a lost friendship that seems to her to have been related to differing races, the need for context seems urgent. For comparison, consider this story out of London:
The attack, which took place at 7.20pm on December 2, happened as the victim left West Hampstead Underground Station after work. His alleged attacker was desecrating a public menorah, erected to celebrate Chanukah, when he approached his victim and asked: “Are you Jewish?”
He added: “I want to find a Jew to kill.”
The attacker chased the victim into a local store after the police told the latter that his situation “did not warrant a priority response.” In the store, the attacker beat the man expressing his intention to murder him. It appears he pulled out a knife, and the police eventually were persuaded to travel to the scene, although the order isn’t clear.
Whatever those details, we should keep this incident on the board for comparison with the outrages of the day in Rhode Island.
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Somehow, one still sees comments from people who seem oblivious of the effects that our anti-COVID measures are having on children. College professor Glenn Reynolds mentions the experience on his campus:
I was talking to a couple of freshman advisors from UT, and they noted that our freshmen had crucial years of their educations and development done online, which leaves them socially and intellectually behind in many ways. And the mental health problems, already bad pre-pandemic, are much worse.
This is in response to worries from the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy that the experience of the COVID years has amplified a trend that was already underway. That this is not a bigger part of the conversation in Rhode Island and elsewhere shows either that the COVID response is mostly political or that, deep down, the people making decisions don’t believe they’re up to the challenge of making real tradeoffs in the face of real risks.
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A while back, I saw a short article about an incident in which the Providence police saved a woman from suicide.
Police went to the scene at 9:26 a.m. Some officers tried to calm her down and coax her off the ledge, Verdi said. But at one point the woman became despondent and a crisis negotiator thought she was disconnected.
She began to panic while looking down from the ledge, Verdi said.
While such incidents can be traumatizing for all involved when they go the other way, when they turn out well, the job can be extremely rewarding.
Broadly, this is a point people don’t consider often enough, whether they’re citizens engaging in public policy debates or my small business clients figuring out how to structure their employee compensation. Cash (including, for my purposes here, financial benefits) is only one consideration as people decide whether something is worth doing, and it can probably be thought of as a final filler.
When people say they love or hate their jobs, they tend to have the nature of their jobs in mind, and pay can (or has to) adjust accordingly. If a job is highly rewarding and fun, people will be more likely to do it as long as the pay covers their basic needs. If a job is demoralizing or dangerous, then higher compensation is needed. This point is relevant when journalists fret that non-profits can’t keep up with market pay, but thinking about police officers suggests a different angle.
Police are paid reasonably well in Rhode Island and the United States, but in a less rewarding setting, the pay would have to go up. Of course, the anti-police sentiment of the past couple of years counts in this calculation, but the topic broadens if we look at a different context: when police function as enforcement for a nasty dictator.
Sure, some people will find the ability to lord it over others as a rewarding perk, but that is less common than novelists and screenwriters tend to imagine. More often, I think, the mechanism is relative. The dictators make life so difficult or painful for the masses that the relative liberty, security, or compensation of police makes up for the pain of moral qualms. It could be, therefore, less that the dictator needs the police state in order to oppress the people than that the dictator’s oppression of the people makes it easier to compensate those who sustain his or her rule.
In any case, the on-the-job satisfaction of police might be one factor to track while assessing the civic health of our society.
Featured image by Fred Moon on Unsplash.
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Here’s the comment of Est Providence Representative Brianna Henries on today’s biggest news in RI:
gob·smacked
/ˈɡäbˌsmakt/ adjective
INFORMAL•BRITISH
utterly astonished; astounded….however I’m not surprised. I can’t even fathom meeting this level of racism with a clever quip, it does not merit that. This is the reality of our world. We simply must do better.
Marvel at how wonderful and fair-minded a world one must inhabit for Morgan’s statement to seem like the height of racism. Unfortunately, lots of money and political power is invested in the lie that America is a racist country, so we’ll keep seeing this nonsense. They need to divide and scare because otherwise people might think about how devastating their worldview is for our country.
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