One has to wonder… during the Cold War, national security types talked about the “dense-pack strategy.” If you’ve got an important asset for war, like missile siloes, it may seem obvious that you want to spread them out so they can’t all be taken out at once, but you have to consider the nature of the attacks. If siloes are grouped together, then a missile that destroys one will make the surrounding area more chaotic, which means the next missile will have a harder time finding its target, and perhaps be destroyed before detonating, anyway.
In 2013, Richard Fernandez proposed this as an analog for the process by which foreign extremists were getting us accustomed to their attacks. Our outrage missiles got lost in the field of debris of so many outrages. Others, like Glenn Reynolds, applied the metaphor to the Obama administration’s practice of getting out from under one scandal by initiating another.
These ideas propose “dense-pack” from the perspective of the defender, but it can be flipped to the aggressor, too. If you (on defense) are busy watching the noise of the constant impacts, you might not see a little blip on the edge of your radar, and that may be the aggressor’s primary mission.
And so, Democrats in Congress have now said that they want to be more moderate than the crazy guy in the White House and increase the threshold at which banks would have to report your transactions to the government. Biden wants the government to know every time you deposit or withdraw more than $600, but even raising that threshold, the power-grab is outrageous.
But then… Afghanistan, the border, COVID mandates, inflation… and so on.
The thing with giving government a new view into your bank account is that it’s a fundamental, long-term change. The income tax itself shows that. Giving the government authority to tax your income opened the door for all of the ensuing mischief of social engineering, political leaks, domestic spying, and political leaks. The only reason the government has so much information about you is that it claims a need in order to verify your tax payments.
We already know from civil asset forfeiture outrages how this goes. The government will have a near-complete ledger of your significant transactions (and if you somehow have too few of them, they’ll investigate you for evading). That will be used not only to make sure they’re squeezing every penny in tax from you, but eventually to verify your statements everywhere else (when claiming unemployment benefits, for example).
And then imagine if you try to participate in the political field to push for reform. Who doesn’t have something in their bank records that could be twisted and misrepresented with a government leak as political mud? The Left wants lists of all donors to conservative causes, but this would give them lists of every financial connection of every person in the country.
So, add this effort to the long list of ways in which a razor-thin Democrat majority in the federal government is trying to leave our country unrecognizable even before the midterm elections.
Featured image by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Alexa Gagosz is reporting in the Boston Globe that an increase in “positive cases” is sending Coventry High School into remote classes through Tuesday, followed by a schedule that closes the building at 12:30 starting Thursday until further notice. (They already had Wednesday off.) Here’s the letter from the district.
Come on, folks. It’s time for parents to start being up in arms and for taxpayers to start demanding refunds for the services the schools are refusing to provide.
According to state data, Coventry is the 11th most-vaccinated municipality, at 65%. We know for certain that young people are less likely to have serious effects from COVID and that the risks to vaccinated people are extremely small. We also know for certain that everybody who attends or works in the high school is eligible for vaccination, which means that they (or their parents) are deliberately accepting the risk of remaining unvaccinated. (Exceptional cases cannot be our rule.)
We’ve reached the point that these actions are outrageous. It’s time for rational, non-superstitious people to begin insisting that fearful residents and CYA bureaucrats stop setting the standard for policy.
[Open full post]
Via Instapundit, when did Matthew Yglesias become a voice of sanity? He writes:
… if all the people with degrees are on the same side of certain big moral and political questions, it’s going to be very hard for them to draw the line between actual expert knowledge and beliefs they happen to hold. Perhaps the greatest recent example of this was tons and tons of public health academics joining a sign-on letter in favor of the George Floyd protests. Note they didn’t just say something like “outdoor activity is relatively safe and we encourage everyone to do things outdoors that are important to them (church services, social justice protests, gatherings with family).” Instead, they decided to endorse the agenda of the protests. . . .
This surely did approximately nothing to actually advance anti-racism causes (who cares what public health academics have to say about this?) but a great deal to burn the credibility of public health academics in the eyes of a huge swathe of the population.
A dimension to add is that people can gain educated credentials without being well educated. For many, higher education has simply become a way to claim default authority over others.
[Open full post]
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The progressive co-op cometh
- Elorza pulls the curtain back on political cynicism
- Families advocate in court for their kids
- The Licht family finds a vein
- McKee’s mandate mess
Featured image by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
… why are they investing so much time and money in college? Stephen Green says his conversations with kids doesn’t match the global survey claim that 56% of the young are “very worried or extremely worried” about the climate. Some portion of them are probably just reacting to the tendency to answer a question in a particular way when you know which answer is “right,” even if you don’t believe it. I wonder, though, if a big part of the hysteria is more of a semantic mental trick. It’s like they’re commenting on a fiction about how the world would end in a story without consciously understanding that’s what they’re doing.
[Open full post]
Nancy Pelosi is swearing that the Democrats’ insanely expensive quasi-infrastructure infrastructure bill will pass this week. Every time I see these numbers, I remember something I learned during the Obama presidency. This is how the Left funds its movement — not only union workers but progressive non-profits and others, filtering down to the street level.
An in-depth study would sure find that the Obama “stimulus” explains a big portion of the craziness in our country, right now. It funded the machine that developed the activists who are fomenting the unrest.
[Open full post]
One topic conspicuously not addressed in Matt Brown’s slick new video announcing his candidacy for Rhode Island governor is what qualifies him specifically to run an organization as large and complex as the state government. Surely a willingness to drop the F-bomb isn’t sufficient in itself. That omission raises the question asked in the subject of this post.
For some sense of the answer, I took a look at his campaign donors.
For somebody who’s probably been thinking about another run since he reappeared on the Rhode Island scene in 2018, he’s been incredibly inactive on the fundraising circuit. He has not a single donation (other than a loan from himself) since before the 2018 election. Then suddenly, in June of this year people started giving him money.
Not just any people (or even many people). Of the 28 non-Matt Brown donors to Matt Brown in June, only seven did not give him the maximum donation of 1,000, and none gave less than $100. What’s more, eight of his $1,000 donations came from four couples. Additionally, a conspicuous number of the donors list progressive organizations (notably, Renew New England) as their employers.
Also worthy of note is that 81% of Brown’s donation came from out of state.
This puts his rhetoric about starting a revolution in a small place in a different light. It seems Rhode Island has been targeted by big-money national activists as an experiment in electoral politics. Wealthy donors from other states want to see if they can force us to live according to their ideology.
That’s why Brown has such contempt for you, the voter, that he’ll swear in his kick-off video. They’re going to shove their socialism down your throat whether you like it or not.
[Open full post]
Word is that a nearby trampoline park was packed with unvaccinated children over the weekend, with scarcely a mask to be found. Meanwhile, Rhode Island state senator Alana DiMario is proclaiming the pending approval of the Pfizer COVID vaccine for children between five and 11 as “life changing,” because “the daily stress of weighing every decision against risk as most returned to “normal” has left parents of <12 so exhausted.”
Obviously there are different perspectives, and each side seems to feel it’s acting on clear evidence. The confidence with which people are making their assertions shows how political “science” has become. Every study that generally supports a point of view is proclaimed decisive and complete. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work.
So, I was thrilled to see Pablo Rodriguez offer me a link to some of the evidence for his point of view that we can’t rely on natural (that is, acquired) immunity from having been infected with the coronavirus. The summary article from a website called Nebraska Medicine, I’m inclined to dismiss, because it begins, “The data is clear: Natural immunity is not better. The COVID-19 vaccines create more effective and longer-lasting immunity than natural immunity from infection.” That’s an advocate’s rhetoric, not an analyst’s conclusion.
The studies behind the claim are worth reviewing, however. There are three, and I’ll review the second two when I have a chance, but anybody who has followed the debate closely will find the first very interesting. The summary article claims this study shows that “more than a third of COVID-19 infections result in zero protective antibodies,” but the story is much more interesting.
First of all, note that the flip side of one-third not having protective antibodies means that two-thirds do. Dig into the study’s figures, though. In its first column, the first one shows that the people who did not have antibodies were mostly under 40 years old, while those who had antibodies were evenly distributed across age groups. Indeed, according to the demographic table, the non-antibody group was, on average 14 years younger.
The other column is further illustrated in the second figure (which is the featured image for this post). This shows the presence of antibodies compared with PCR count. The higher this count, the less of the virus a positive test found. As Andrew Bostom explained to The College Fix last December:
A 12-cycle test means that a person “is carrying 2 billion copies of the virus.” On the other hand, a 38-cycle test means that someone has merely “eight copies,” and calling that a positive test is “trivial” and “meaningless” because of the dramatically lower risk level, he said.
In the present study, the average PCR count of those who had antibodies was 24.5. For those who didn’t have antibodies, it was 36. This directly supports Bostom’s argument months ago that many of the people counting as “cases” weren’t really infected.
The study doesn’t say how many of the high-count people were also younger, but one suspects lot of overlap. The fact that some of them reported symptoms and even hospitalization (though very few) could simply be noise. The symptoms could have been coincidence, because everything was being attributed to COVID upon a positive test, even if the test was meaningless and trivial.
So, my previous position on natural immunity requires this adjustment: people whose only evidence of having had COVID was a positive test shouldn’t be confident that they actually had it and therefore are immune, but that still leaves plenty of people with a strong claim that they don’t have to be vaccinated, especially if they get their test records and had PCR counts under 30.
[Open full post]
Tucker isn’t wrong in this analysis. There’s a reason our borders are open and buses and planes are distributing all comers across the country. But here’s an important point that’s often ignored: If newly arrived residents are here, and if they’re going to be voters, they might vote with you!
That doesn’t mean pandering, and it doesn’t mean compromising your principles. It does, however, mean never ceasing to persuade and look for common ground. People are people, and it isn’t written in any prophetic scroll that people ushered into a nation to bring about the inevitable permanent aristocracy of socialism actually have to do so.
People who’ve been living in squalor, piecing together their subsistence little by little, may like the idea of being given a baseline livelihood, but they also have a keen understanding of how a privileged governing elite can cut them out of the loop, as well as the value of keeping what they earn.
[Open full post]
Just a few days ago, we were seeing headlines like, “Former USA National Team Gymnasts Testify Against the FBI Over Botched Larry Nassar Investigation.”
Today the news is that “the FBI is investigating a group of male Afghan refugees after they assaulted a female U.S. soldier in New Mexico.”
Notice how all the threads are coming together? The current occupant of the White House is infamous for being handsy and… umm… nosy with women and girls. As Commander in Chief, he badly botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan (as his military was busy proclaiming the importance of reading “anti-racist” tracts and rooting out right-wing extremism from its ranks), adding another tranche to his investment in the future of undocumented immigrants.
Now the incompetent FBI that spent four years playing politics to put a Democrat in office is investigating Afghan refugees’ assault of a female soldier days after being outed as untrustworthy on such matters.
If you don’t see the intended moral of the story, it’s only because our unionized education system long-since ceased teaching how to spot them when they don’t favor progressives.
[Open full post]