The very obscure reference of my subject line is to Jonathan Coulton’s song, “I Crush Everything.” Spoiler alert: It’s about a lonely sea monster that has banished itself to the bottom of the sea because everything it tries to get close to and hug it crushes.
The chorus came to mind as I read Dennis Prager’s recent column about “leftist destruction”:
To understand the modern world, perhaps the most important rule one needs to know is this: Everything the Left touches it ruins.
This first became clear to me years ago during my radio show. I was talking about the Left’s war on the Boy Scouts (for not accepting announced gay people). It was becoming clear that this would ultimately lead to the decline of the Boy Scouts, which led me to ask: “Will the left replace the Boy Scouts with a left-wing Boy Scouts?”
Then I answered my own question: Of course not. Because the Left only destroys; it doesn’t build anything (other than government).
He goes on to describe how this happens across multiple areas in our society.
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In drug trials, researchers give a control group of participants a placebo (or a pill with no medical effect) because it is understood that just doing something can have an effect on people’s symptoms, or at least their perception of their symptoms. In most cases, the effect is small, which is why the research can show the benefit of the actual medicine. Naturally, it’s absolutely imperative that the placebo have no negative effects.
Now, I’m not saying that mandating masks in all indoor spaces, which is what Dan McGowan is calling for at the Boston Globe link above, would be totally without effect on the spread of COVID-19. The proposal is, however, very much in keeping with the Democrat (and especially progressive) approach t0 government, which is, in a phrase: just do something! We’ve got this government thing lying around, so we ought to use it… seems to be their attitude. Does masking help? Well, it couldn’t hurt, they believe, so just do it.
But masking does hurt, in all sorts of ways. On the surface, of course, is the hotly debated physical harm they can do by trapping germs outside your mouth and limiting oxygen. I think these risks are minimal, although advocates are overly confident that it’s just fine to mask everybody all the time. More profound, especially for children, is the effect on our ability to communicate, both in the muffling of sound and in the inability to observe whole faces. Even deeper is the erosion of our rights as we lose the assumption that government (1) must thoroughly justify its impositions, and (2) must follow a legislative process involving elected representatives to impose them.
This is where Dan’s column is way too blithe. He contrasts two events in Providence: a college basketball game, without required masks, and a musical performance, with required masks. This comparison should be where the analysis starts, not where it ends. With respect to outcomes, do we know that COVID spread at the game but not at the show, or we just assuming that it probably could have? With respect to particulars, are there any differences between the types of people at each event that are relevant, such as the average age, considering that COVID is barely a danger to younger people?
Other details Dan provides are similarly inadequate to justify the harms of masking:
On Monday, six hospitals were at 100 percent occupancy (based on staff levels) for ICU beds, according to data from the health department. For example, at Kent Hospital, there were 10 staffed ICU beds, and 10 patients in them. The occupancy rates for staffed inpatient beds are lower, but they’ve consistently been above 85 percent occupancy.
Take very careful note of the phrase Dan squeezes between two parentheses: “based on staff levels.” We should want a well-managed hospital to always run near capacity for staffed beds. Otherwise, nurses would be standing around collecting healthcare-dollar paychecks with nothing to do. If we’re in the position that hospitals can’t easily increase the number of employees to service their beds, that’s a different problem than COVID (and it’s one that isn’t helped by things like vaccine mandates).
These are considerations that must be included in any serious suggestion to force our fellow citizens to do something that they don’t want to do. The need to be clear and justified is especially high when your primary source of authority, Dr. Megan Ranney, is infamous for her insistence that, “We are never going back to a pre-pandemic realty.”
Yeah, says you. Some of us think this attitude is becoming a disease in need of something more than the placebo of disregard.
Featured image from the Matrix on YouTube.
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Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the school-shooting story in Oxford, Michigan, is that it shouldn’t have happened at all, judging from details provided by Tim Meads in the Daily Wire:
The morning of the attack, school administrators met with the boy’s parents and showed them disturbing notes found that day indicating the boy was willing to do harm to himself and others. The boy also was caught searching for ammo on his phone just days before the shooting.
But, rather than disciplining the child, the school simply gave the parents the option of pulling him out of class or leaving him in school following a meeting with school officials.
School officials found and ultimately, in consultation with the boy’s parents, let slide notes with comments like “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” and “my life is useless,” even as he had a gun in the room, in his backpack. To a disturbed mind, the chain of events must have seemed to be confirmation of his feelings and his plans. Yet, his handling appears to have been in line with the “restorative justice” policy of the school, which emphasized avoiding punishment in favor of keeping troubled students in class.
The contrast is stark with the freakout in Coventry after a staff member heard a student say, “he’s got a gun,” between classes in the hallway. In that case, the school shut down, and the student was arrested for his spoken words for no apparent reason.
Obviously, the single most significant difference between the two events is that Oxford had a shooting and Coventry did not, but Coventry would not have had a shooting had the staff member simply gone about his or her day; it was never a possibility. Yes, the Coventry approach probably would have prevented the Oxford outcome in the same situation, but so would a broad spectrum of possible policies that aren’t so insane.
Both extremes arguably point to the same, incredibly unhealthy institutional trend.
Healthy institutions have balance and common sense. They’re able to differentiate between extremes — between threats and non-threats. Unhealthy institutions have no discernment. They will take obvious falsehoods as truth and obvious realities as falsehoods. Faced with potential threats, they either freak out or ignore the obvious, depending on the panic threshold of those involved.
Currently, the lack of balance traces back to denial of our own responsibility and willingness to hand it off to government agencies, which are almost always unaccountable. Note that no news has emerged of consequences for the school officials who caused so much anxiety in Coventry, even though the student was arrested, or for the school officials who facilitated the incident in Oxford, even though the parents have been arrested and charged with manslaughter.
Featured image by Edvard Munch on WikiArt.
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Wherever you look to find your bogeymen or whether you support some individual or organization or oppose it, modern society absolutely requires you to keep an eye out for the nudging that Joel Kotkin describes:
Nudging grew out of research into behavioural economics, and was popularised in Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book, Nudge. It now has widespread public support and has influenced everything from health warnings for cigarettes to calorie counts for fast food. Yet nudging also has an authoritarian edge, employing techniques and technologies that the Gestapo or NKVD could only dream about to promote the ‘right behaviour’.
Tech firms, both in the US and China, already use messaging nudges to ‘control behaviours’. They use their power to purge their platforms of the wrong messages, as both Facebook and Twitter did when they censored the New York Post’s pre-election story about President Biden’s dissolute son, Hunter.
I’m with Kotkin in thinking the threat is mainly from government and leftist elites, but you can be reasonably certain that anybody who cares about changing opinions in organized ways for good or evil is contemplating studies about brain chemistry and human behavior. With everything you absorb, be aware.
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Judging by social media comments, mainstream media types have been thrilled to hear from NPR that people are dying with COVID-19 at a higher rate in Trump-supporting counties across the United States.
Of course, substantive analysis would require many more caveats than our social-media-driven culture tends to address. As the article concedes, the analysis does not make any attempt to align actual deaths with actual political views. It’s all aggregate by county. It also doesn’t attempt to assess breakthrough infections of people who are vaccinated or, for that matter, to measure ready access to healthcare and other important factors, like average age or the prevalence of comorbidities.
Then there are the numerical caveats that ought to be considered, because counties vary by hugely by size. The most populous county in the U.S. is L.A. county, with around 10 million people. On the other end of the spectrum (leaving out Hawaii, which NPR excluded), the least populous county is Loving County in Texas, with around 170 people. If a single person died while testing positive with COVID in Loving, that would be a death rate of 588 per 100k. The same rate in L.
A. would require 58,800 deaths.
More interesting, however, are two very important points that NPR avoids.
The first point is that the percentage vote for Trump is not the most relevant variable. As the article intimates, and as a Kaiser Foundation survey it cites further amplifies, it is probably more relevant and more fundamental that the pro-Trump counties are also much more likely to distrust the mainstream media. If journalists consider it their higher calling to inform the public, then the COVID outcomes are in large part their fault. Yet, there’s no handwringing to be seen about what they can do to regain trust. Indeed, the tone is the typical one of treating flyover country as a separate nation.
The second point follows on the first. NPR claims “misinformation appears to be a major factor in the lagging vaccination rates, with “a full 94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines might be true,” but you have to dig to find the source survey linked above. An objective review of the supposedly false statements shows that all reasonably well-informed people should think one or more of them “might be true” (which the survey actual characterizes as “haven’t heard” or “unsure about”).
The government is exaggerating the number of COVID-19 deaths, to the extent that it includes people who obviously did not die from the disease, but only while testing positive. Ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19, especially when stated absent any standards or comparisons. And the COVID-19 vaccines can change DNA, albeit probably in a limited number of cells, not in the whole-body way people tend to think when they hear that phrase.
Other statements are certainly not settled matters. Should pregnant women get the COVID-19 vaccine? We can’t say for certain, yet. Is the government hiding data about COVID-19 deaths? Maybe; check in a decade from now.
So, of the eight supposedly false statements, people should say “true” or “unsure” to five of them. Arguably, those relying on the mainstream media are less-well-informed than those who look to other sources for information. At the very least, we can say that the mainstream media is providing the same amount of misinformation as alternative sources, except in the opposite direction — the direction promoting the Democrat, government line.
For evidence, consider that NPR’s study did not compare vaccine side-effects in Trump and anti-Trump counties. Indeed, nobody should expect that NPR or the rest of the mainstream media is now conducting or will ever in the future conduct analyses that might disprove their preconceptions, which is why so many people don’t trust them even when the demands of Democrat politics allow them to be correct.
Featured image by the Climate Reality Project on Unsplash.
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We’ve reached the point that an obvious, relatively mild head cold that peters away over a weekend can keep a child out of school for days. Testing sites in Rhode Island are saying it can take up to 72 hours to get results from COVID tests. Pharmacies are a day out for appointments, with who-knows-how-long to get results after that.
All of this, by the way, filters down not only from the requirement to be tested, but also that the test must be the most-sensitive PCR variety. For the purposes of testing a child with symptoms to see whether COVID is the cause, the at-home tests should be more than adequate.
But we’re being ruled by a self-aggrandized bureaucracy, which doesn’t care about balancing needs and interests.
How much longer are we going to tolerate this?
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At least that’s how some health professionals are seeing it:
Dr. Omar Hamada on Dec. 1 said that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 may provide natural immunity without inducing severe illness, as the symptoms so far resemble more of a “mild, common cold” in South Africa.
In an interview with NTD’s “Capitol Report,” the emergency room doctor and former U.S. Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel said that even though “we’re seeing an uptick in [the] number of people affected, the severity of disease seems to be, at this point, minimal.”
“If the infectivity is greater, but the virulence or severity is less, this may be actually something good in terms of getting people immune to it without necessarily having to depend on a vaccine that’s not incredibly effective,” Hamada stated.
Bizarrely, however, the people in power will refuse to recognize its effects, either because they’ve got plans for their new power or because they’re basically zealots in a cult.
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Reactions to bad theater reviews have been a topic to which comic writers have returned for material over decades. Naturally, such reviews are much more personal than their analog in the movie or television market. The performer knows the person was out there in the audience watching him or her perform. Often, they circulate in the same communities. And, of course, actors have to keep repeating the performance if it’s a play, whereas movies are recorded and done and television shows at least have different episodes, so it’s easier to move on.
Susan McDonald’s Providence Journal review of this year’s take on A Christmas Carol at Trinity Repertory Company can only be described as mostly positive. She just felt the company tinkered a little too much with the story this time around, particularly when it came to wokeness:
… beginning with an opening monologue — inviting people to remember Native American tribes that once populated the state, mentioning slave trade connections and urging support for people of color — there is a layer being added to Dickens’ message of humanity and kindness that feels forced. …
What proves awkward [in the Fezziwig party scene], however, is an extended segment in which half the actors dance boisterously, stomping feet and banging brooms on the wooden stage, while the others mill about, watching. While wisely advocating diversity in the show, Wilson has created a moment that splits the cast along racial lines, with actors of color dancing and white actors looking on. It seems divisive instead of inclusive.
Faced with such comments from a reviewer who is obviously on the side of the production, both as theater and as a “progressive” statement, a company can take the criticism as an indication that it perhaps missed the mark in some ways or it can internally dismiss the reviewer as having been the one to have missed something.
Not a chance, in this case. Much of the attraction of being woke, as James Lindsay describes in a recent episode of his New Discourses podcast, is that it comes so readily to hand for grift. That includes the evasion of blame, responsibility, or self-reflection.
So, Trinity can’t just let McDonald’s review go. Wokism forces everything to be political and ideological, so sprinkling woke dust into a performance has to have the magical effect of making it beyond criticism on woke grounds. Thus, Trinity deploys, in an open letter, the chilling accusation that the review “contained a number of elements that were problematic from an equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism perspective.” Any totalizing, oppressive movement has codewords to suggest that somebody is guilty of a thought crime, and “problematic” is one for the woke.
This isn’t just a vague, consequence-free observation. Apparently, the reviewer made multiple statements “that were in violation of the theater’s content guidelines, designed to protect our artists and staff from harm caused by unconscious bias.” It sounds as if Ms. McDonald must either issue a forced apology or perhaps be banned from the theater.
Theirs is not merely a thinned skinned reaction, the theater management assures the reader, oh no, not at all. McDonald is guilty, guilty, guilty — marked by the color of her skin:
The elements that we have taken issue with have nothing to do with the artistic quality of the production, but rather the lack of knowledge on the part of a white reviewer and a white editorial staff. Our historical moment demands that greater attention is paid to the subtext of the writing; that if a production is making a concerted effort to center BIPOC voices, that effort is respected; and that stereotyping is avoided.
Trinity Artistic Director Curt Columbus (a white man) and Interim Executive Director Jennifer Canole (a white woman) cast McDonald’s review into the metaphoric fire as “language… rooted in hate.” Her entire newspaper, they say, should “take this as an opportunity for growth and change,” regarding which the theater offers to act as guide.
The coded, threatening language of the open letter is chilling stuff, redolent of jackboot fascism, and Rhode Islanders should take the warning that an iconic theater has marked a new step into the community’s loss of freedom and rights. Trinity no longer sees its role as entertaining the public, but as instructing it in the rigid belief system of guilt and penance.
You can try to enjoy the performance if you want, whitey, but you’d best not express an opinion that proves your deep, intrinsic guilt! Direct your entertainment dollars accordingly.
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In the middle of the Sixteenth Century, St. Francis Xavier wrote to his friend, St. Ignatius of Loyola, of his experience ministering to Christians in India:
We have visited the villages of the new converts who accepted the Christian religion a few years ago. No Portuguese live here, the country is so utterly barren and poor. The native Christians have no priests. They know only that they are Christians. There is nobody to say Mass for them; nobody to teach them the Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Commandments of God’s Law.
Children would not leave him alone with requests to teach them prayers. “If only someone could educate them in the Christian way of life, I have no doubt that they would make excellent Christians.” The letter closes with a lamentation that the intellectuals of Europe were not undertaking the mission of educating such as these, rather than digging ever more deeply into their books.
Times have changed.
For some years, I’ve been on the lookout for a sort of Post Testament. The Old Testament tells the history of Israel’s relationship with God, and the New Testament describes the coming of the Messiah and the activities of his first apostles. In our time, “new” is entirely relative; the book is two millennia old!
Where is the new New Testament, which I’d call the Post Testament out of deference to the Gospels? What is God’s story since the apostles were busy writing letters to new Christians about the faith? The available texts are far too numerous to canonize — official letters, catechisms, poetry, proclamations, stories, histories of saints, histories of nations, and on and on. The lack of some book summarizing the story contributes to the impression that the story of the God of Israel is done. How might we understand what He has been up to all these centuries?
The closest thing I’ve found is a relatively recent history by the non-Christian writer Tom Holland, Dominion. As he briefly summarizes on a recent episode of the Andrew Klavan podcast, his conclusion is that Christianity has essentially become the default belief system of the planet — the water in which modern society swims. Even the often-anti-Christian “woke” activists can be understood as a sect of the faith, except that, in contrast with Francis Xavier’s Indian students, they know not that they are Christians.
Moreover, rattling the cages of the Ivory Towers these days, as Francis Xavier fantasized about doing four-and-a-half centuries ago, would only shake loose more evangelists for the modern heresy.
Four-and-a-half centuries Before Christ, Malachi wrote the last book of the Old Testament, as compiled by the Roman Catholic Church. The short scripture has blistering words about the condition of Israel:
A son honors his father, and a servant fears his master;
If then I am a father, where is the honor due to me?
So says the Lord of hosts to you, O priests, who despise his name.
But you ask, “How have we despised your name?”
By offering polluted food on my altar!…
You[, the people,] have wearied the Lord with your words,
yet you say, “How have we wearied him?”
By your saying, “Every evildoer is good in the sight of the Lord,
And he is pleased with him”; or else, “Where is the just God?”
The pages of God’s calendar turn slowly, to human eyes, but they turn. From Malachi comes the promise, “Lo, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me.” Today, the second Sunday of Advent, as we approach Christmas and celebration of the Messiah’s birth, Catholic churches read from the Gospel According to Luke, in which John the Baptist calls the Jews of Jordan to “prepare the way of the Lord.”
The prophesied messenger comes and tells us to prepare. St. Francis Xavier from his mission calls on us to teach. As our subconsciously Christian civilization wearies the Lord with words of perverted justice to the point that many think His story has concluded, we should wonder why we wait to be called.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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You’ve probably heard the mainstream media claim that we’re facing the Omicron variant (which may represent the merger of COVID with the common cold) because greedy, racist Westerners were refusing to share their vaccines with Africa. Drew Holden and Aaron Sibarium suggest in the Washington Free Beacon that this analysis is all wrong:
In fact, several African countries have sent back vaccines: The problem they face is one of demand, not supply. Five of the eight countries from which the Biden administration has suspended travel have pumped the brakes on new vaccine shipments, even as cases have increased, because the countries have more doses than health officials can administer.
Across the continent, vaccine hesitancy remains high. A recent survey that spans five West African countries found that 6 in 10 people were vaccine hesitant—compared with 13 percent or less in France, the United Kingdom, and other parts of Europe and 27 percent in the United States.
Mark Tapscott is right to ask why the U.S. and the West are always presented as the bad guy. Methinks there’s an agenda at play.
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