2022-08-30 Maxim Lott
Instead of trusting governments to correctly classify and report Covid deaths, take total deaths (all deaths from all causes, not just from Covid) in 2020/2021 and compare that to total death pre-Covid, in 2018/2019.1
The difference is the “excess mortality.”
https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/the-covid-fudge-factor
Discovered from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32649350
2021-12-14 Charlie McCarthy
John Stossel, a TV reporter for more than 50 years, recently sued Facebook, now known as Meta, for defamation.
…
Stossel said Facebook’s lawyers responded to him in court and claimed the company’s “fact-checks” are merely “opinion” and therefore immune from defamation.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/facebook-meta-fact-checkers-opinion/2021/12/14/id/1048577/
2022-04-12 Bryan Caplan
Racism is wrong because collective guilt is wrong.
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In my childhood, I heard the ironclad argument against racism frequently. But I sense that it’s no longer popular. Why not? Because once you reject collective guilt, you have to abandon any notion of collectively punishing racism itself!
https://betonit.substack.com/p/the-ironclad-argument-against-racism?s=r
2022-03-16 Brian Klaas
For those of us living in liberal democracies, criticizing the boss is risky, but we’re not going to be shipped off to a gulag or watch our family get tortured. In authoritarian regimes, those all-too-real risks have a way of focusing the mind. Is it ever worthwhile for authoritarian advisers to speak truth to power?
As a result, despots rarely get told that their stupid ideas are stupid, or that their ill-conceived wars are likely to be catastrophic. Offering honest criticism is a deadly game and most advisers avoid doing so. Those who dare to gamble eventually lose and are purged. So over time, the advisers who remain are usually yes-men who act like bobbleheads, nodding along when the despot outlines some crackpot scheme.
…
When despots screw up, they need to watch their own back. Yet again, they can become victims of the dictator trap. To crush prospective enemies, they must demand loyalty and crack down on criticism. But the more they do so, the lower the quality of information they receive, and the less they can trust the people who purport to serve them. As a result, even when government officials learn about plots to overthrow an autocrat, they may not share that knowledge. This is known as the “vacuum effect”—and it means that authoritarian presidents might learn of coup attempts and putsches only when it’s too late. This raises a question that should keep Putin awake at night: If the oligarchs were to eventually make a move against him, would anyone warn him?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/
Because “killing [Obama] automatically will make Biden take over the presidency for the remainder of the term,” and “Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the US into a crisis.”
2021-08-17 Mike Pence
In February 2020, the Trump administration reached an agreement that required the Taliban to end all attacks on U.S. military personnel, to refuse terrorists safe harbor, and to negotiate with Afghan leaders on creating a new government. As long as these conditions were met, the U.S. would conduct a gradual and orderly withdrawal of military forces.
Unanimously endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, the agreement immediately brought to Afghanistan a stability unseen in decades. In the past 18 months, the U.S. has not suffered a single combat casualty there.
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But when Mr. Biden became president, he quickly announced that U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan for an additional four months without a clear reason for doing so. There was no plan to transport the billions of dollars worth of American equipment recently captured by the Taliban, or evacuate the thousands of Americans now scrambling to escape Kabul, or facilitate the regional resettlement of the thousands of Afghan refugees who will now be seeking asylum in the U.S. with little or no vetting.
…Once Mr. Biden broke the deal, the Taliban launched a major offensive against the Afghan government and seized Kabul. They knew there was no credible threat of force under this president. They’ve seen him kowtow to anti-Semitic terrorist groups like Hamas, restore millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority, and sit by earlier this year while thousands of rockets rained down on Israeli civilians.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-pence-biden-broke-our-deal-with-the-taliban-11629238764
2021-08-03 James Surowiecki
Deep in the laws and commentaries of the Talmud, there is an unusual provision about capital punishment: if all 71 judges in a capital case agree that the death penalty should be imposed, then it is automatically taken off the table … if everyone is seeing things a certain way, you may well have missed something important.…It takes a rare leader to see discord as a boon, however. Alfred Sloan, the legendary boss of General Motors from the 1920s to the 1950s, was one such maverick. “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here,” he said at the end of one board meeting. “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting, to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain understanding of what the decision is all about.”
https://www.economist.com/1843/2021/08/03/why-satan-should-chair-your-meetings
2021-07-15 Joshua Q. Nelson
“Critical race theory asserts that the world and America are divided into a racial caste system, Whites on the top, Blacks on the bottom,” Kenny Xu, author of “An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy,” said on “America Reports.” “But they have no idea what to do with the Asian Americans because the Asian Americans are a minority that has been discriminated against in this country, and yet they succeed and they achieve. And that, I think, inconveniences the critical race theory narrative today, and that’s why I wrote this book.”
2021-05-09 Eric Mack
While Democrats and the Biden administration are pushing a narrative the United States is a flawed country that is systematically racist, former Trump White House senior adviser Stephen Miller presents the most basic fact debunking that as fallacious doctrine.
“The best measure of the kinds of freedom, rights, dignity that is afforded by a society is whether or not people are trying to leave en masse, or whether or not people are trying to arrive en masse,” Miller told Fox News’ “Life, Liberty & Levin.”
“It is as basic a measure as you’re going to get.”
And Miller reminds host Mark Levin, the entire world sees benefit emigrating to America, so therefore it cannot be the evil country Democrats profess it to be.
“In the United States, we are the No. 1 global destination for migration, and we have been for a very long time,” Miller said.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/stephenmiller-openborder-migration-reform/2021/05/09/id/1020677/
2021-05-07 Charles Creitz
Graham … opined on Facebook about the president leaving God out of his proclamation:
“Why would President Biden omit God? … I was deeply saddened to read that President Biden is the first president to omit the word “God” in his proclamation. That speaks volumes doesn’t it? It is hard to believe we have come this far,” he wrote.