Tag: oppression

Thousands of scientists and doctors condemn COVID-19 panic

1:48 pm

Censensus! Since May literally thousands of scientists and doctors, including a Nobel Prize winner, have publicly condemned the heavy-handed lockdowns and restrictions on freedom imposed by governments because of its panic over COVID-19.

The article provides details. It is very clear that a very large number of scientists are appalled by the over-reach by government health officials that has led to the shut downs and the requirements for mask use. (Obviously these scientists are all white supremacists and racists, and should be cancelled immediately!)

The article also led me to this research from Oxford University, which concluded in April that the death rate from the Wuhan virus is just about the same as the flu:

Taking account of historical experience, trends in the data, increased number of infections in the population at largest, and potential impact of misclassification of deaths gives a presumed estimate for the COVID-19 IFR somewhere between 0.1% and 0.41%.

The website states that they update regularly when new data arrives, but it appears that since April nothing has caused them to revise this conclusion. The first link above also notes that Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC agreed with this conclusion in a peer-reviewed March article for the New England Journal of Medicine. (Obviously Oxford and Fauci are white supremacists and racists also, and should be silenced forthwith!)

We should stop this madness and go back to normal. Our government has failed us so completely in its response to COVID-19 it should be fired completely. And that includes every single one of the health officials who pushed for lockdowns, mask rules, and social distancing.

2 comments

A journalist blasts the New York Times in resignation letter

10:54 am

Link here. It appears that the author of this resignation letter, Bari Weiss, had been hired by the New York Times after the 2016 election because the editors there had realized the paper had become to captured by its leftist bubble and had misread the public’s support for Trump in the election. Weiss, whose credentials suggest a more well-rounded background, was hired to give the Times a peek outside its leftist bubble.

Well it appears the Times and its employees don’t really want that peek. From the resignation letter:

The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.

Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.

None of this really is a surprise. Persecution is now cool, and the leftist orthodoxy that controls academia and journalists at the Times all want to be cool.

Worse is yet to come. Be warned. They’re coming for you next.

34 comments

Midnight repost; The utter childishness of modern intellectual discourse

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: This essay from January 8, 2018 encapsulates well the cultural collapse of the United States in the past two decades. And though now more than two and a half years old, it is not dated in the least, and remains terribly predictive of our coming dark future..

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The utter childishness of modern intellectual discourse

The world is faced with threats of nuclear and chemical attacks from North Korea. Iran is hit by protests that might escalate into all out civil war. Islamic terrorist attacks have now become almost routine. And in the U.S. there appears to be corruption at the highest levels of the FBI and the Department of Justice, while at the same time the federal government has produced a national debt exceeding $20 trillion, with more debt on the way.

Have any of these significant stories been the primary focus of our American media, from either side of the political spectrum?

An objective look at the culture of today’s press says no. Even as the leftist American mainstream media continues to focus its energies on petty and ineffective attacks of Donald Trump, too many journalists on the right unfortunately appear to be diving right in to join them with their own petty counter-attacks. The result is a press that spends the bulk of its time on irrelevant stories of partisan bickering that have little substance or importance.

In the last week of 2017 we had one particularly acute example of this. First a mainstream liberal news source pushed an absurdly trivial story in a shallow effort to discredit Donald Trump. This was then followed by a frenzied and as-shallow response from the conservative press. I want to showcase both, not merely to illustrate how weak the original story was (which is obvious on its face), but to also point out the childishness of the response.

I must add that everything written in every one of the news sources that I will cite below appears to be 100% accurate. My point here isn’t to highlight examples of error-filled news reporting — which these days mostly comes from left leaning sources overwhelmed by their blind hatred of Trump — but to illustrate reporting from both sides that hardly rises above the level of a five year old, and is thus completely inconsequential.

From CNN: Truck blocks cameras from filming Trump on golf course.

Apparently the day before CNN had managed, by peering through some bushes on the edge of the Trump International Golf Club in Florida, to videotape President Trump playing some golf. When they came back the next day a white truck now blocked their view. This then became a big scandal for CNN, with the cable network then spending gobs of time every hour for the next few days investigating the truck and following up on this terrible act of corruption, obviously part of the evil Trump administration’s effort to cancel the First Amendment and to silence the press! Much of the leftwing media piled on as well. Below are some of CNN’s coverage, as well as a bit of that liberal news pile on.
» Read more

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Update on the investigation of the coup attempt against Trump

5:53 pm

While the world goes childishly insane over the Wuhan flu (which by the way saw today another plunge, to 327 of the daily death toll), the investigation into the coup attempt from 2017 to 2019 against President Trump by high officials in the Justice Department and the FBI continues.

An article today at The Conservative Treehouse provides a detailed look at the attempted cover-up of that coup attempt, based on a review of information from FISA court materials that were released in April by the Justice Department under the leadership of attorney general Bill Barr.

The amount of information is large, and the story is complex. If you are concerned educated citizen however you are obligated to spend the time to read it. It shows how in the summer of 2018 upper management in both the Justice Department and FBI lied to the FISA court in order to prevent their illegal and unjustified investigation against Carter Page and Donald Trump from being discovered. It also shows in detail the corruption of the mainstream leftist press, which had bought into the fake Russian collusion story being promoted by these same high FBI/Justice officials. That press thus could not do its job and investigate the coup, for if it did it would reveal itself to have been dupes. Instead that leftist press decided to become participants in the cover-up.

The complexity of this story might explain why the criminal investigation by John Durham is taking so long. At the same time, the bulk of evidence now available to the public that confirms this coup attempt suggests it is high time for some indictments. If such prosecutions do not happen soon, then it will simply be too late. Above all some indictments must occur prior to the election.

9 comments

The mask of ignorance

1:49 pm

WHO's do's and don't's for mask use
For the full images, go here and here.

Let us begin with the premise that wearing a mask properly, in the proper situations, will without doubt reduce the chances of someone transmitting COVID-19 from themselves to others. (This premise remains uncertain, but for the sake of this essay I will readily accept it.)

To be clear, the phrase “wearing a mask properly” is critical. You need to follow certain guidelines or you will not only fail to protect others, you will actually increase the chances that you will get the disease. To the right is the infographic provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the proper way to use a mask. It summarizes their full instructions.

The most important take-away one gets from these instructions is that the mask should be treated as something that starts out sterile and antiseptic, but with use will become infected with pathogens. This is why one must never touch the front of the mask with your hands. Every time you do so without washing your hands thoroughly beforehand you risk placing the virus itself on the mask, at the very place you breath.

Even if you exercise proper care to not touch the mask, over time the mask will become filled with moisture from your breath, and will thus become what I like to call a pathogen bomb. It must either be discarded or washed properly.

Do people follow these instructions? » Read more

18 comments

Student senate condemns student for daring to criticize the Black Lives Matter organization

9:58 am

They’re coming for you next: Because one student had the nerve to criticize the Black Lives Matter organization, based on what it itself claims are its goals, the Georgetown University Student Association Senate Student senate passed a resolution condemning that specific student and demanding that everyone at the university fall into lockstep support for that Marxist, racist movement.

This is what the future holds. Note that it isn’t the teachers or college administrators calling for this student’s silencing (though I am sure they applaud it), but the students themselves. The modern generation requires oppression and intolerance of dissenting opinions. It does not believe in free speech. It believes instead in tyranny.

This quote from the article sums up the situation, at least at Georgetown University:

Jacob Adams, secretary of Georgetown Republicans, also told Campus Reform that “students are routinely harassed online by their peers for contrarian opinions at Georgetown. It is not a good college environment for conservatives or simply people who disagree with whatever is the prevailing political push. As it stands right now, I would not recommend Georgetown to any prospective student, and I would strongly discourage alumni from donating to the university until they clearly demonstrate Republicans and conservatives are welcome on campus.”

There is one ray of hope, though one that is incredibly depressing in many ways. Too many American colleges have become havens for this kind of intolerance. They are also finding survival difficult if not impossible under the oppressive rules imposed due to the Wuhan virus panic. The result might be that these havens of intolerance might go out of business.

It couldn’t happen fast enough. The problem is that it will be a trade of one form of oppression for another.

7 comments

COVID-19 update: Though deaths up slightly, CDC says outbreak no longer qualifies as epidemic

11:40 am

U.S. daily COVID-19 deaths through July 12th

But we’re all supposed to die! Even though the last week has seen a slight uptick in the number of daily deaths from COVID-19 (as shown by the graph to the right [source]), the CDC’s latest data update, through July 4th, notes that as of that date the overall death rate put the Wuhan virus below their “epidemic threshold.”

Based on death certificate data, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 (PIC) decreased from 6.9% during week 26 to 5.5% during week 27, representing the eleventh consecutive week during which a declining percentage of deaths due to PIC has been recorded. The percentage is currently below the epidemic threshold but will likely change as additional death certificates for deaths during recent weeks are processed. [emphasis mine]

In other words, at the beginning of this month the numbers said the epidemic was over. To underline this point, the CDC’s totals also include deaths from pneumonia and influenza, which therefore reduces the death rate for the Wuhan flu even more.

(Note: The two spikes on the graph of daily deaths on May 7 and June 25 are because New York and New Jersey suddenly added a whole slew of new deaths, under suspicious circumstances.)

The increase in deaths during the past week probably reflects the increased number of cases in the past month. It also partly explains why the CDC has not officially declared the epidemic over. They expected the death rate to rise, and it has.

However, even that rise hardly ranks as an epidemic. » Read more

7 comments

Midnight repost: The think tank culture of Washington

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: The essay below, first posted on June 22, 2016, was the result of a Washington DC. trip, occurring during the heat of the presidential campaign just after Donald Trump had become the Republican candidate for president.

The impression I got of the Washington culture then has sadly proven more accurate than I would have ever guessed. And their response to Trump’s election was just as I feared.

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The Think Tank Culture of Washington

On Monday I attended and gave a presentation at the one-day annual conference of the Center for New American Security (CNAS) in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the space policy paper I am writing for them, Exploring Space in the 21st Century.

CNAS was founded ten years ago by two political Washington insiders, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, with a focus on foreign policy and defense issues and the central goal of encouraging bi-partisan discussion. For this reason their policy papers cover a wide range of foreign policy subjects, written by authors from both political parties. The conference itself probably had about 1,000 attendees from across the political spectrum, most of whom seemed to me to be part of the Washington establishment of policy makers, either working for elected officials, for various executive agencies, or for one of the capital’s many think tanks, including CNAS.

I myself was definitely not a major presenter at this conference, with speakers like Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), and Senator Joe Reed (D-Rhode Island). I was part of a panel during one of the lunch breakout sessions, where approximately one third of the attendees came to have lunch while we spoke about space. I only had ten minutes to speak, and used that time to outline (1) the influence SpaceX is having on the entire launch industry and (2) the vast differences in cost, development time, and results between the Orion/SLS program and commercial space. Not surprisingly, the aerospace people from the big established companies appeared to be somewhat uncomfortable with what I had to say, though the Airbus people liked it when I made it clear I thought that the U.S. should allow foreign companies to compete for American business, including government launches.

Their discomfort was best illustrated by the one question asked of me following my talk, where the questioner said that I was comparing apples to oranges in comparing a manned capsule like Orion, intended to go beyond Earth orbit, with the unmanned cargo capsules like Dragon and Cygnus, that only go to ISS. I countered that though I recognized these differences, I also recognized that the differences were really not as much as the industry likes to imply, as demonstrated for example by SpaceX’s announcement that they plan to send Dragon capsules to Mars beginning in 2018. After all, a capsule is still only a capsule. The differences simply did not explain the gigantic differences in cost and development time.

I added that Orion compares badly with Apollo as well, noting that Apollo took about a third as long to build and actually cost less. I doubt I satisfied this individual’s objections, but in the end I think future policy will be decided based on results, not the desires of any one industry bigwig. And in this area Orion/SLS has some serious problems. I hope when my policy paper is released in August it will have some influence in determining that future policy.

My overall impression of CNAS, the speakers, and the people who attended was somewhat mixed. Having lived in the Washington, D.C. area from 1998 to 2011, when I attended many such conferences, I found that things haven’t changed much in the last five years. Superficially, everyone was dressed in formal business suits (something you see less and less elsewhere), and they also got to eat some fancy food at lunch.

On a deeper level my impressions were also mixed.
» Read more

4 comments

Midnight repost: Al Gore and the silencing of debate

11:59 pm

The Behind the Black tenth anniversary retrospective: Today’s repost is from August 29, 2011, and was one of my earliest essays describing the real meaning of the scientific method.

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Al Gore and the silencing of debate

Yesterday I posted a link to a story about Al Gore claiming that any expression of skepticism about global warming is to him no different than racism. Here again is what Gore said,

“There came a time when friends or people you work with or people you were in clubs with — you’re much younger than me so you didn’t have to go through this personally — but there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, ‘Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I don’t go for that so don’t talk that way around me. I just don’t believe that.’ That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won. We have to win the conversation on climate.”

More than at any other time, Gore here has very successfully illustrated the differences between how climate skeptics debate the scientific questions of climate change versus how global warming advocates do it.
» Read more

44 comments

Police seize guns of Missouri couple used to defend their home from rioters

10:03 pm

They’re coming for you next: St. Louis police today used a warrant to search the home of the Missouri couple and seize the weapons they had used to ward off threatening rioters last month.

Authorities in St. Louis executed a search warrant Friday evening at the home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who made headlines last month when they took up arms to defend their homes from protesters. During the search, police seized the rifle that Mark McCloskey was shown holding during the June 28 incident, KSDK-TV of St. Louis reported, citing information from a source.

The pistol that Patricia McCloskey held during the June confrontation was already in the possession of the couple’s attorney, the station reported.

There was no immediate indication that the McCloskeys were arrested or charged with a crime. [emphasis mine]

It appears to me that their only crime was that they are white and that they took up arms to defend their lives and home from a group of trespassers linked to Black Lives Matter/Antifa.

It might be possible that they did not have the guns legally (in the original video it clearly appeared they, especially the woman, had never held or used guns before). Nonetheless, they hurt no one, they were on their own property, the protesters were trespassers, and those trespassers had also made actual threats against them, their property, and even their dog. Their description of what happened matches well with the videos available.

In the June incident, Patricia McCloskey said, the couple was startled just before dinnertime when “300 to 500 people” entered the gated community where they live. “[They said] that they were going to kill us,” Patricia McCloskey told Hannity on Monday night. “They were going to come in there. They were going to burn down the house. They were going to be living in our house after I was dead, and they were pointing to different rooms and said, ‘That’s going to be my bedroom and that’s going to be the living room and I’m going to be taking a shower in that room’.”

So what does the local Democratic government do? Do they prosecute any rioters? No, they release them, and then go after these citizens to deny them the ability to defend themselves.

The McCloskeys fortunately have enough resources to hire a security company to protect themselves. Other ordinary citizens in St. Louis however be warned. If you take action to defend yourself, your local Democratic politicians will come after you. And they will move to disarm you so you will be helpless to the mob.

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Launch failure for China’s new Kuaizhou-11 rocket

9:49 am

For reasons not yet specified, China’s new Kuaizhou-11 rocket today failed on its inaugural launch.

Many reports will say that this is a commercial rocket developed by the private company Exspace. That is not true. Like all Chinese aerospace companies, they do their work wholly under the supervision of the Chinese government.

The development of the KZ-11 began in 2015, with a maiden launch originally scheduled for 2018. The rocket is developed by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASIC) and commercialized by the China Space Sanjiang Group Corporation (Expace).

The launch vehicle can loft a 1,500 kg payload into a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or 1,00 kg to a 700 km sun-synchronous orbit.

The KZ-11 solid launch vehicle adopts a mobile launch platform, integrated power supply equipment, test and launch control facilities, aiming facility and temperature control facility, to carry vehicles from the technical support center to launch site, complete temperature control of payload, vehicle test and launch.

CASIC is in many ways China’s equivalent of NASA. And everything described in the last paragraph above, from solid rockets to mobile launches, are technologies developed expressly for military purposes. China will not let such things out for commercial companies to use however they wish, no matter what they claim.

2 comments

Genocide is coming to America

2:09 pm

In my last visit to Israel in 2018, my brother and sister-in-law took me sight-seeing to the northern parts of Israel near the Sea of Galilee. On our first night, we stayed at the home of one of their older friends, a man in his seventies.

That night we sat around their kitchen table so that they could catch up on family matters. At one point in the conversation our host reminisced about an older woman, now gone, who he had known in his childhood in the 1950s who had lived in Germany before and during World War II and had survived a concentration camp.

To paraphrase the story he told us, what this woman always remembered most starkly about that time, especially in the 1930s, was how difficult it was to get German friends who were not Jewish to believe the horrors she and other Jews were going through. To her, their calm nonchalant dismissal of the Nazi bigotry and oppression of Jews — too unbelievable to take seriously — was what had horrified her the most. Even twenty years later, it was this dismissal that appalled her the most, despite her time in a concentration camp and the death she had seen around her.

As he told us this story, what struck me was how similar my own experience has been. Time after time for the past four decades my liberal friends and relatives have refused to believe anything I say to them — always based on actual events — about politics and the growing corruption and bigotry within the Democratic Party. Like those decent Germans in the 1930s, these decent Americans find reasons to quickly dismiss what I say, without making any effort to find out if there is any merit to it.

In fact, less than two days after this very conversation it happened again. » Read more

53 comments

Putin gov’t arrests journalist working as advisor to Roscomsos

9:24 am

The Putin government yesterday arrested Ivan Safronov, a former journalist presently an advisor to that country’s space agency Roscosmos, for passing military secrets to the Czech government back in 2017 when he was employed by a daily newspaper.

It seems the press in Russia is highly skeptical of these charges.

Kommersant [the daily newspaper in which he had worked] put out a statement in support of Safronov, hailing him as one of the country’s top journalists and a “true patriot” who was deeply concerned about the state of the military and space industries that he covered. The newspaper described the accusations against him as “absurd.” The paper noted that rights activists, journalists, scientists and corporate officials who faced treason accusations found it difficult to defend themselves because of secrecy surrounding their cases and lack of public access. “As a result, the public has to rely on the narrative offered by special services, whose work has increasingly raised questions,” Kommersant said. “Journalists asking those questions find themselves under blow.”

About 20 journalists, including those who worked with Safronov for years, were detained outside FSB headquarters in Moscow when they picketed to protest his arrest. Some were handed court summons for violating a ban on street gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic, an offense punishable by an administrative fine.

Many former colleagues of Safronov alleged that the authorities may have wanted to take revenge for his reporting that exposed Russian military incidents and opaque arms trade deals.

It also appears that the charges have nothing to do with Safronov’s work at Roscosmos.

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Midnight repost: No obscenities on Behind the Black

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: I first posted these rules pertaining to commenting on Behind the Black on December 31, 2017, but have always adhered to them.

Anyone, without registering, can come this website and comment about anything (though preferably in connection to something I have posted), as long as they act like an adult. If they want to point out an error in something I’ve written, great. If they want to disagree with me civilly, even better. All they have to do is keep their language clean and not resort to childish insults.

Over the years since I have been amazed how many people in today’s increasingly barbaric culture can’t seem to do this simple thing. Thus I think these rules bear repeating, if only to outline to my many new readers where I stand on this issue. (Note that since I posted this I have relaxed the rules slightly. First time offenders are now issued a warning instead of being suspended immediately.)
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No obscenities on Behind the Black

I have stated this now bluntly more than a few times. I will not tolerate obscenities or curse words on this website. Despite this, today two different regular commenters thought it was perfectly fine to ignore these rules. One I have suspended for a week. The other might be.

The rest of the world might want to wallow in barbarism and ill behavior, but it will not happen here. This is my workplace. If you want to participate in the conversation on Behind the Black, I expect you to act like a civilized adult. If you can’t abide by these rules, then go somewhere else.

And don’t think it is okay to quote someone else verbatim and get away with this. As I noted just now in a reply to the suspended commenter, when Richard Nixon’s White House used the term [expletive deleted] everyone knew what it meant. It wasn’t a great solution, but it at least showed that they recognized that it was inappropriate to nonchalantly print obscenities, even ones spoken by the president. At the same time, they knew they couldn’t edit the transcripts, so they found a way to make it clear what was on the tapes without adding to the misbehavior.

Consider this a final warning. From now on I will not simply delete the obscenity and issue a warning. From now on, any violation of this rule will get an immediate suspension for a week. A second violation by the same person will get them banned.

4 comments

COVID-19 is dying; no evidence of second wave

12:18 pm

Link here.

Lots of detailed information, all of which confirm what I have been reporting for the past week or so. This quote however I think says it all:

The COVID-19 virus is on its final legs, and while I have filled this post with graphs to prove everything I just said, this is really the only graph you need to see, it’s the CDC’s data, over time, of deaths from COVID-19 here in the U.S., and the trend line is unmistakable:

[Click to see]

If virologists were driving policy about COVID-19 rather than public health officials, we’d all be Sweden right now, which means life would effectively be back to normal. The only thing our lockdowns have done at this point is prolong the agony a little bit, and encouraged Governors to make up more useless rules.

His graph is a smoothed version of the graph I have posted several times recently, showing the continuing decline in daily deaths nationwide from COVID-19.

The bottom line: The Wuhan flu epidemic is petering out. Almost all of us have nothing to fear from it. We need to reject that fear and go back to life as normal.

Sadly, I doubt anyone will believe either him, or me.

24 comments

Midnight repost: NASA, the federal budget, and common sense

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: Tonight’s midnight repost is actually two. First we have what might have been my most telling report for John Batchelor, aired in late July 2013. In that appearance I was quite blunt about my contempt for the politicians in Washington and the fake space program they had been foisting on the American public for decades. As I said,

What both those parties in Congress and in the administration are really doing is faking a goal for the purpose of justifying pork to their districts, because none of the proposals they’re making — both the asteroids or the moon — are going to happen.

Here is the audio of that appearance [mp3] for you all to download and enjoy. For reference, these are specific stories from then that I am discussing:

That rant makes for a perfect lead in to an essay I wrote in late 2011, outlining what I would do if I was in a position to reframe NASA’s budget. Everything I said then still applies. And that it does is a great tragedy, in that it means that nothing has changed, and our federal government continues to gather power while bankrupting the country.

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NASA, the federal budget, and common sense

Let’s be blunt: the federal government is broke. With deficits running in the billions per day, there simply is no spare cash for any program, no matter how important or necessary. Nothing is sacrosanct. Even a proposal to cure cancer should be carefully reviewed before it gets federal funding.

Everything has got to be on the table.
» Read more

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Have you fallen in love with your fear of COVID-19?

3:05 pm

The Star Spangled Banner
Fort McHenry bombarded by the British in 1812

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

These two lines are probably the most familiar words to most Americans of their national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Key. When people sing the anthem before sports events, it is these lines alone which everyone clearly knows and sings out robustly. For the rest of the song everyone kind of goes along, mouthing the words based on what they think the entire crowd is singing.

We tend however not to think about what the words mean. That last line especially describes precisely the American nation as Key and his fellow Americans in 1812 saw it, as a land of free and brave people. They understood that they were free, but they also understood that it is impossible to be a free person if you are afraid. You must be brave to be free, because freedom carries risk and danger. The rewards are gigantic, but with those rewards comes the real risk of failure and even death. To be free you need accept that risk and face it boldly.

The results of that courage are evident by what the citizens of the United States of America achieved in the two hundred years since Key wrote these words. We fought a Civil War that killed more than 600,000 people to set everyone in our nation free. We fought two wars in Europe, with the second setting that entire continent free as well because we came not as conquerors but as liberators.

And we built a nation so prosperous, for all its people, that multitudes flock desperately to come here and be part of this great experiment in human freedom.

That noble experiment is now threatened. Within our nation are many people who hate it, and are striving hard to destroy it. Along the way they eagerly long for the day that freedom itself is squelched, a day when they by edict can decide what every citizen is permitted to do, and when they by edict will be able to arrest and destroy anyone who defies them.

It is very simple. They want power. Freedom for everyone denies them that.
» Read more

18 comments

Midnight repost: Obama’s legacy of hate

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: This essay was posted originally on August 19, 2019. It quite correctly predicts the looting, rioting, and violence going on now against monuments honoring past American heroes and defenders of freedom. It also correctly predicts that this looting, rioting, and violence is as yet only beginning. Be prepared for far worse, especially if you wish to defend the honor of the American dream of individual freedom, personal responsibility, and rule by law.

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Obama’s legacy of hate

Of all of Obama’s achievements, probably the one that is going to ring down the decades the longest and maybe do the most to destroy the United States and western civilization was his willingness to either endorse or refuse to condemn the use of slanders and lies to advance the political power of his Democratic Party and the left.

The most obvious example of this were the false accusations by top Democrats that the Tea Party protesters against Obamacare were “racist”, despite zero evidence. (I speak from personal experience, as I was involved in Tea Party groups in both the DC and Tucson areas.) Obama was in a position to tamp down this hateful and dishonest rhetoric. Instead, he allowed members of his administration to encourage it.

This political tactic has now become pervasive and dominant throughout the Democratic Party and its minions in the mainstream press. This fact became especially evident to me this past weekend, during a demonstration in Portland by a group called the Proud Boys. This group was formed in 2016 in reaction to the modern political leftist pressure forcing Americans to adhere to leftist dogma. From their own webpage:
» Read more

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COVID-19 update: CDC says virus close to losing epidemic status

10:06 pm

Daily U.S. COVID-19 deaths

But we’re all supposed to die! According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the number of deaths from the Wuhan virus had declined so much that the agency is on the verge of calling the epidemic over.

The CDC qualifies a disease outbreak as an “epidemic” if the number of deaths attributable to the disease exceeds a certain percentage of total deaths per week. That threshold for pneumonia, influenza and COVID-19 fluctuates slightly depending on the time of year, ranging from around 7% at the height of flu season to around 5% during less virulent months.

…The latest data show that the percentage of deaths in the country attributable to those factors had as of the last week in June reached its lowest point since the end of last year, becoming “equal to the [current] epidemic threshold of 5.9%,” the CDC said.

The numbers will change as more death certificates are processed, with I expect some health agencies in some states continuing their effort to fudge the numbers to pump up the COVID-19 totals. Regardless, the graph above (source here.) clearly shows that the epidemic is declining, with daily deaths dropping steadily since early May. (The two spikes of deaths on May 7 and June 25 are because New York and New Jersey suddenly added a whole slew of new deaths, under suspicious circumstances.)

Actual numbers daily since June 25

The graph shows a very slight increase in the past week, which could be attributed to the uptick in new cases, but if so the increase is tiny, and is close to statistically insignificant. The table to the right shows the actual numbers of deaths per day nationwide since that June 25 New Jersey spike, with the daily New York numbers thrown in as well. Not only is it hard to measure any significant uptick, the numbers in New York have been so low in the past nine days it has become absurd that the Democratically-controlled local governments there continue to insist on maintaining their draconian lock downs and mask requirements.

That the press is now focusing on the increase in cases, when the death toll has been subsiding so steadily, demonstrates their corruption and inability or refusal to do their job properly, If anything, it labels them as fear-mongers screaming fire in a theater (which is not on fire) who should be ostracized from society.

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Midnight repost: “We stand for freedom.”

6:01 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: This essay, portions of which was adapted from the fourth chapter of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, was posted originally on May 25, 2011, the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s speech to Congress where he committed the nation to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.

It seems fitting to repost on July 4th, Independence Day.

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Kennedy's speech

“We stand for freedom.”

Fifty years ago today, John Kennedy stood before Congress and the nation and declared that the United States was going to the Moon. Amazingly, though this is by far the most remembered speech Kennedy ever gave, very few people remember why he gave the speech, and what he was actually trying to achieve by making it.

Above all, going to the Moon and exploring space was not his primary goal.
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The Declaration of Independence

11:01 am

On this day, when we celebrate the founding of the United States — a nation that for more than two centuries has been a beacon of liberty to the entire world — it is the obligation of every American to reflect again on the opening words of the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This is what our Founding Fathers gave to us, the right to pursue our own personal happiness, in freedom.

What do the rioters and protesters during the past month offer? What do they propose for future generations, as they out of blind hatred tear down statues of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and numerous war heroes who fought for this ideal?

I think too few Americans are asking these questions. I ask them, and demand that everyone else do as well. I think just asking them will help clarify the situation for all.

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How Beautiful We Were

8:01 am

For Independence Day, I think this poem is worth reading to remind us what kind of country was bequeathed to us, and created, by the Founding Fathers two hundred and forty-four years ago.

It begins like so:

A short list. In no particular order.

We told our children that any child could grow up to be President. And then we made it come true.

We had car shows, boat shows, beauty shows and dog shows.

We ran robots on the surface of Mars by remote control.

Our women came from all over the world in all shapes and sizes and hues and scents.

We actually believed that all men are created equal and tried to make it come true.

Everybody liked our movies and loved our television shows.

We tried to educate everybody, whether they wanted it or not. Sometimes we succeeded.

We did Levis.

We held the torch high and hundreds of millions came. No matter what the cost.

We saved Europe twice and liberated it once.

We believed so deeply and so abidingly in free speech that we protected and honored and, in some cases, even elected traitors.

We let you be as freaky as you wanted to be.

Read it all, to remind yourself of the refreshing possibilities that freedom bestows. It truly allows everyone, as it says at the base of the Statue of Liberty, to breathe free.

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Midnight repost: The Fantasy of Extreme Weather

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: The science described in this essay, posted originally on April 11, 2013 remains even today entirely accurate. Worse, the story illustrates the exact same kind of obtuse refusal to deal with reality that has put us today in the midst of a panic over a relatively minor seasonal virus.

Unfortunately, the links to the first two articles that I reference no longer work.

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The Fantasy of Extreme Weather

This week there were three stories describing new research proving that global warming is going to cause an increase in the number and violence of extreme weather events. Each was published in one of the world’s three most important scientific journals.

Sounds gloomy, doesn’t it? Not only will extreme heatwaves, cold waves, and droughts tear apart the very fabric of society, you will not be able to drink your soda in peace on your next airplane ride!

However, one little detail, buried in one of these stories as a single sentence, literally makes hogwash out of everything else said in these three articles.
» Read more

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Thomas Jefferson — The meaning of the Declaration of Independence

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, in which lovers of freedom and individual rights celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, where by this nation committed itself forever to providing its citizens “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Those words were written by Thomas Jefferson. In tonight’s evening pause, Steve Edenbo as Thomas Jefferson recites Jefferson’s thoughts on the meaning of his own words, taken from a letter he wrote just prior to the 50th anniversary of that signing in 1826, and mere weeks from his death.

May true Americans never stop honoring these words, and that man.

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Are health agencies changing criteria to fake higher COVID-19 infection numbers?

4:09 pm

This link provides evidence that Texas health officials have changed how they determine the number of people infected with the Wuhan flu by loosening that definition to include anyone who has had any contact with a proven infected person, without bothering with any tests.

In the example the health department itself gives to describe how the definition changes things, the number of infected goes from only one person to seventeen. There have been other stories suggesting the same kind of manipulation in the causes of death is occurring in other states, in New York and New Jersey, as well as Colorado, to name just three.

Covid daily U.S. deaths through July 3, 2020

The press and many politicians are now using the new higher infection rates to warn that a second wave of deaths is about to descend upon us. Since the actual number of daily deaths from the Wuhan flu is actually not rising significantly, as shown in the graph to the right, and has not been rising even though the increase in cases started several weeks ago, these cries by them that the sky is falling are obviously not true. (Note that the sudden spikes of deaths on May 7 and June 25 are because New York and New Jersey suddenly added a whole slew of new deaths, under suspicious circumstances.)

I myself am glad they are widening the definition so that it includes so many more people. I say, widen that definition even more, so that it will quickly include practically everyone in the nation. At that point we shall finally realize maybe that this epidemic is not the threat these dishonest health officials, the lying leftist press, and our corrupt politicians have been making it.

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NPR: “Coronavirus is more common and less deadly”

10:18 am

From that paranoid rightwing news outlet National Public Radio (NPR): “Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared.”

The tests are finding large numbers of people in the U.S. who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous.

“The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

That’s in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person’s body.

It must be noted that the early data (from March 17) did not show a death rate of 5% as NPR claims, but one exactly in the range that NPR is now touting, about 1%, and even that number was thought to be a high estimate at the time.

Of course, you would not have known that if you depended on your news from NPR, or most other mainstream leftist news sources. Once they realized they could use this virus to gin up a panic that could be used politically, suddenly the Wuhan flu was the next plague, with death tolls expected in the millions.

The death rate number of 0.5% to 1% is still about five to ten times higher than the annual flu, but since there is substantial evidence that the number of COVID-19 deaths has been inflated by 25 to 50 percent, we should not be surprised if this new death rate number drops even more with the accumulation of more data.

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Midnight repost: “What ever you do, don’t ‘shut up.'”

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: Tonight’s midnight repost is actually something not by me, but a video commentary by Andrew Klavan that he broadcast in 2011 and I embedded as a post in January of that year.

Sadly, his words have not become dated in the slightest. If anything, they has become more topical. And as then, I abide by his final words, “Whatever you do, don’t ‘shut up.””

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Courts twice today rule against COVID-19 over reach

9:11 pm

Two positive court decisions today, both throwing out attempts by Democrats to use the panic over the Wuhan flu to nullify the U.S. legal system.

The first story outlines the court’s blunt ruling that the Democratic governor of Illinois abused his power when he extended both in restrictions and time the statewide lock downs he had imposed because of the Wuhan flu.

Illinois Circuit Court Judge Mike McHaney ruled on Thursday that Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois had no lawful authority to declare endless disasters past the initial thirty days. Ruling on a lawsuit filed by State House Rep. Darren Bailey (R-Ill.), Judge McHaney wrote, “The court declares that Defendant had no constitutional authority as Governor to restrict a citizen’s movement or activities and/or forcibly close business premises in EO 32.”

The ruling however included this loophole: “The judge also clarified that the lawful authority belongs to the Health Department in a time of health crisis and not the governor.” In other words, the elected official’s power is limited, but the power of unelected health department officials is not. This means that in the end, the ruling will become worthless.

In the second story, the Supreme Court rejected a lower court ruling that exempted some voters in Alabama from presenting voter identification when they voted.

We are sitting on a knife edge. The courts might rule in favor of the rule of law, but many will instead go with the wishes of the partisan Democrats, who clearly want to impose these restrictions to stamp their boot on the population, while loosening voter rules so that they can more easily submit many more fake ballots.

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Visa blacklists business for having incorrect opinions

10:04 am

Capitalism in space: It appears that Visa is blacklisting Gab because it encourages free speech rather than toe the new corporate line that censors any speech the left does not like.

It also appears that Visa is also blacklisting the owner personally, as well as his family. We can’t have wrong thought in this new American nation of rules, regulations, and controlled and policed speech. Remember, persecution is now cool!

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