Who Decides Who or What is “Essential”

Editor’s Note: No politician has a right to note which organizations are and are not essential.

From the outset of the COVID-19 crisis, governors told us what were and were not essential businesses. But what criteria were used?

Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano provides insights into legal battles over state stay-at-home orders.

Who Is Stacey Abrams? A Superhero?

Despite fawning media coverage, it’s difficult to point to a single accomplishment.

Stacey Abrams Bonus:

PJ-MEDIA notes Stacey’s side work… as a soft core novelist:

Ever wonder why Stacey Abrams can afford those sumptuous, jewel-toned tents she wears?*

When Abrams isn’t appearing on MSNBC or CNN campaigning to be Joe Biden’s vice president, the mahogany beauty, whose imagination is so active that she thinks she’s the governor of Georgia, is keeping her revenue streams flowing like the Amazon.

Abrams is on the political speech-for-hire circuit, but before she became a professional politician and national victim, the gap-toothed Ivy Leaguer was a soft-core romance novelist.

Stacey Abrams’s nom de plume is Selena Montgomery.

And Selena is thirsty.

Her romance bibliography includes Hidden Sinsthe story of Mara Reed, who has “the devil in her.”

Mara Reed’s been stirring up trouble since she was eighteen—running scams, living on the edge, always on the run. … But cornered in an alley, only seconds from death, an unexpected rescuer comes to her aid—Dr. Ethan Stuart, the dark and beautiful scientist whose heart she once broke and betrayed . . . the only man Mara ever loved. … Ethan needs Mara’s help; she needs his protection. And their search for a shocking, devastating truth could lead them to forgiveness, salvation, passion, and back to loveif they can survive the journey.

Secrets and Lies 

She just witnessed her uncle’s murder, she’s running for her life, and now Dr. Katelyn Lyda is face-to-face with a breathtaking man who could be her salvation. Tall, sexy, his eyes full of mysterious promises, he seems to have the answer she needs.

It’s too bad Sebastian Caine is one of the bad guys

A “recovery specialist” skilled at separating prized possessions from their owners, Sebastian is after an ancient relic. But he reconsiders the job when he finds himself staring at the wrong end of a gun.

With her life in jeopardy, Kat wonders how far she can trust Sebastian Cainehow long she can resist him and dare she fall in love?….

INDEPENDENT SENTINEL has a good story on Abrams.

POWERLINE humorously passes along some humor on the WaPo Magazine puff piece:

Do Republicans win elections by preventing minorities from voting? The Left says yes, but the data says no. Jason Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, settles the argument with hard evidence, separating fact from fiction.

 

Joe Biden’s “Authentic Black” Moment

I will post the teasers to Larry Elders film, UNCLE TOM after this Biden “if you don’t vote Democrat then you aren’t ‘authentic black'” moment. This movie can’t get here quick enough:

LEGAL INSURRERECTION hat-tip:

Biden has benefited by his hiding-in-the-basement strategy, which allows his handlers to minimize his gaffes. But even in that controlled environment, Biden gonna Biden, a preview of the general election.

[….]

A good example of what the general election holds in store for when Biden no longer can hide was revealed during a Biden appearance on The Breakfast Club, hosted by ‘Charlamagne Tha God’:

BIDEN: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

CTG:“It don’t have nothing to do with Trump, it has to do with the fact — I want something for my community.”….

BREITBART has a list of 10 “could be racist offenses” of Bidens, Here are six:

1.) “White Kids” are Smarter than Other Kids – August 2019:

We should challenge these students, we should challenge students in these schools to have advanced placement programs in these schools. We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor you cannot do it, poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.

2.) Brags About His Ability to Work with Racists – June 2019

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland [and Herman Talmadge],” Biden said with an attempted Southern drawl. “He never called me boy, he always called me son.”

“Well guess what?” the former vice president continued. “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

Eastland and Talmadge were arch-segregationists who opposed civil rights and saw black people as an “inferior race.”

3.) Brags About Segregationist Democrat Not Calling Him “Boy” Like He Did Others – 2019

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” the former vice president said while putting on a Southern drawl. “He never called me boy, he always called me son.”

4.) Appears to Use Racist Term “Roaches” to Describe Black Kids – 2017

By the way, you know, I sit on the stand, and it get[s] hot. I got a lot, I got hairy legs that, that, that, that turn blonde in the sun, and the kids used to come up and reach in the pool and rub my leg down so it was straight and then watch the hair come back up again. They’d look at it. I learned about roaches, I learned about kids jumping on my lap.

When he spoke, Biden was surrounded by black children, he was also referring to his time as a lifeguard, where he says the swimmers were mostly black kids.

5.) Mocks Indian-Americans – 2006

You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.

6.) Describes Barack Obama Is a “Bright and Clean” Black Person – 2007

You got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.

UNCLE TOM TEASERS

An oral history of The American Black Conservative.

A JOE BIDEN BONUS:


Black History [every] Month


Books Worth Reading

Biographical

David Barton 3-Part (Video) Series

(Watch now)

Smallpox Blanket Myths and Truths

Updated a bit…

Elizabeth A. Fenn

Usually treated as an isolated anomaly, the Fort Pitt episode itself points to the possibility that biological warfare was not as rare as it might seem. It is conceivable [e.g., makes for good suspense and is merely a guess with no historical proof], of course, that when Fort Pitt personnel gave infected articles to their Delaware visitors on June 24, 1763, they acted on some earlier communication from Amherst that does not survive today.8

[8] Such a communication might have been either written or oral in form. It is also possible that documents relating to such a plan were deliberately destroyed.

 In other words, it’s anybody’s guess if this is real history OR an author’s guess.

Even the HISTORY CHANNEL at the worst says this of the “event”:

  • For all the outrage the account has stirred over the years, there’s only one clearly documented instance of a colonial attempt to spread smallpox during the war, and oddly, Amherst probably didn’t have anything to do with it. There’s also no clear historical verdict on whether the biological attack even worked.

They continue with the “did it work” line of reasoning:

It’s not clear smallpox-infected blankets even worked.

It’s also not clear whether or not the attempt at biological warfare had the intended effect. According to Fenn’s article, the Native Americans around Fort Pitt were “struck hard” by smallpox in the spring and summer of 1763. “We can’t be sure,” Kelton says. Around that time, “we know that smallpox was circulating in the area, but they [Native Americans] could have come down with the disease by other means.”

Historian Philip Ranlet of Hunter College and author of a 2000 article on the smallpox blanket incident in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, also casts doubt. “There is no evidence that the scheme worked,” Ranlet says. “The infection on the blankets was apparently old, so no one could catch smallpox from the blankets. Besides, the Indians just had smallpox—the smallpox that reached Fort Pitt had come from Indians—and anyone susceptible to smallpox had already had it.”

The most important indication that the scheme was a bust, Ranlet says, “is that Trent would have bragged in his journal if the scheme had worked. He is silent as to what happened.”

Even if it didn’t work, British officers’ willingness to contemplate using smallpox against the Indians was a sign of their callousness. “Even for that time period, it violated civilized notions of war,” says Kelton, who notes that disease “kills indiscriminately—it would kill women and children, not just warriors.”

The “Smallpox Blanket” Myth, via Ernest W. Adams

Now, about these smallpox blankets.

During the Siege of Fort Pitt in 1763 — 13 years before American independence — Delaware and Shawnee Indians, aroused by Pontiac’s Rebellion, attacked Fort Pitt, which was near modern day Pittsburgh. Shortly after the siege began, British General Jeffrey Amherst wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet, who was preparing to lead a party of troops to relieve the siege, “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.” Bouquet agreed, but there is no evidence that he actually carried out the suggestion, and he indicated in a letter that he was afraid he could contract smallpox himself.

However, those besieged in the fort had already, of their own initiative, tried to infect the besiegers with smallpox and failed. During a parley, the fort’s leader, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, gave blankets and a handkerchief from a smallpox ward to two of the native American delegates, Turtleheart and Mamaltee. However, the effort evidently failed, because they came back for further talks a month later with no signs of disease, and smallpox normally shows signs within two weeks. Furthermore Turtleheart was one of the signatories in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix five years later. Modern historians believe that the blankets had been unused for too long, and any virus present on the blankets would have already died. It is also possible that the Delaware Indians who were given the blankets were immune through prior contact. Smallpox kills 30-35% of those who get it; those who survive are immune from then on.

One thing that is certain is that many native Americans had already contracted smallpox in the ordinary way, unintentionally though contacts with infected whites. There is no example of an outbreak in the Fort Pitt region following the siege. There is a documented outbreak elsewhere in the region among a different people, the Lenape, who had attacked a white settlement where smallpox was present.

So, in conclusion:

  • Infecting people with smallpox was not US government policy or practice, and the only effort to do so occurred prior to US independence.
  • The Fort Pitt event was undertaken by Captain Simeon Ecuyer of the British army on his own initiative; it was neither official British policy or official army policy. In fact, King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 banned colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains because that territory belonged to the native Americans.
  • There is no evidence that it succeeded; there is some evidence that it failed, as the people given the blankets are known to have survived.

And another post by Beyond Highbrow – Robert Lindsay has the common sense commentary about the incident:

Although we do not know how the plan worked out, modern medicine suggests that it could not possibly have succeeded. Smallpox dies in several minutes outside of the human body. So obviously if those blankets had smallpox germs in them, they were dead smallpox germs. Dead smallpox germs don’t transmit smallpox.

In addition to the apparent scientific impossibility of disease transmission, there is no evidence that any Indians got sick from the blankets, not that they could have anyway. The two Delaware chiefs who personally received the blankets were in good health later. The smallpox epidemic that was sweeping the attacking Indians during this war started before the incident. The Indians themselves said that they were getting smallpox by attacking settler villages infected with smallpox and then bringing it back to their villages.

So, it’s certain that one British commander (British – not even an American, mind you), and not even the one usually accused, did give Indians what he mistakenly thought were smallpox-infected blankets in the course of a war that was genocidal on both sides.

Keep in mind that the men who did this were in their forts, cut off from all supplies and reinforcements, facing an army of genocidal Indians who were more numerous and better armed than they were, Indians who were given to killing all defenders whether they surrendered or not.

If a fort was overwhelmed, all Whites would be immediately killed, except for a few who were taken prisoner by the Indians so they could take them back to the Indian villages to have some fun with them. The fun consisted of slowly torturing the men to death over a 1-2 day period while the women and children watched, laughed and mocked the helpless captives.  So, these guys were facing, if not certain death, something pretty close to that.

And no one knows if any Indians at all died from the smallpox blankets (and modern science apparently says no one could have died anyway). I say the plan probably didn’t even work and almost certainly didn’t kill any of the targeted Indians, much less 50% of them. Yes, the myth says that Amherst’s germ warfare blankets killed 50% of the attacking Indians!

Another example of a big fat myth/legend/historical incident, that, once you cut it open – well, there’s nothing much there

Contact Tracing (Why George Orwell Is Still Important)

From reality TV show Big Brother to warnings about surveillance, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has had a lasting impact on modern society.

Person speaking is, Dorian Lynskey, author of, “The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984

Authorities have found a new excuse to delay reopening America: The need for hundreds of thousands of so-called ‘contact tracers.’

Bill Gates suggests mass surveillance of Americans to combat coronavirus pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic is likely to have a long-lasting impact not just on the world economy and the global population but also on the way we use our gadgets. To keep up with the changes brought by the pandemic, tech giant Apple has released iOS 13.5 with Face ID enhancements, Exposure Notification API and more.

iOS 13.5 speeds up access to the passcode field on devices with Face ID when the user is wearing a mask. Several users who wear masks, were facing difficulty unlocking their handset with Face ID. The Face ID would reject the login attempt multiple times and then the option to enter passcode will appear, causing significant delay.

With iOS 13.5 update, the iPhone will detect when the user is wearing a face mask and the passcode field will now be automatically presented after swiping up from the bottom screen.

The feature is only available on devices with Face ID, that is, iPhone X, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max. This also works when the user is authenticating with the App Store, Apple Books, Apple Pay, iTunes and other apps which support signing in with Face ID.

iOS 13.5 also comes with an Exposure Notification API, which supports Covid-19 contact tracing apps from public health authorities. The exposure notifications, for the uninitiated, are alerts that users will receive on their phones if they have been exposed to someone who has tested positive for or is highly likely to test positive for Covid-19….

(emphasis added)

The original post (OP) on this second strain was a graphic. I will link to the Kent County (Michigan site through it. Here is my FB description of the following: “A person named B.M. wrote on a friends Facebook wall the following regarding “contact tracing.” (The original post had to do with hiring government employees to trace citizens with Covid.)”

(See also this BRIDGE article)

  • [A reader of JP’s noted] Actually, contact tracing sounds like a legitimate work of government. Rather than quarantining the healthy, quarantine the sick and monitor those exposed to the disease.

JP responded:


Sorry in advance for the novel! Heh, I started thinking of other interesting things to add and just decided to run with it.

Contact tracing might work for illnesses that don’t spread very easily (it probably would have exterminated HIV, according to what I’ve read; I’m no expert but it seems reasonable), but for upper respiratory stuff like colds and flus (and the Wu Flu), it’s pretty much doomed, especially with up to 10% of the whole country already having the it.

The original point of the lockdowns (which don’t seem to have worked; lockdown and non-lockdown countries and states have almost identical statistics) was to slow the spread to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. It wasn’t to stop spread, since even the CDC admits that after about 1% of people are infected with a contagious disease, you can’t really close the door on it anymore. Contact tracing is a relatively invasive way of closing the door on a virus, so I don’t think it will work here**.

The data points to a much less lethal bug, though. Stanford’s meta analysis of all of the large-scale antibody testing shows an IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) between 7 times less than the seasonal flu and 2.8 times more. It’s probably in the middle, making it slightly less lethal than regular seasonal flus. And since we know it has been in the US at least since January (probably since December or earlier), the R? (Basic Reproduction Number or Rate) is also much lower than people originally thought. So it spreads like the flu and is as deadly as the flu.

The main difference seems to be the 24/7 media terrorizing of citizens, the complete ignorance most of us (that’s me, too) had in the real pneumonia/influenza deaths each year, and the downright evil policy of many Democrat governors of sending the sick to recover (while contagious) at nursing homes, boosting the deaths by up to 50%.

Sorry for the novel!! Reading every little bit about this thing has become an unfortunate hobby of mine. I’m of the mind now that the best strategy is to fight the fear instead of the virus and to get back to normal in virtually every way. If this is anything like it’s older brother SARS, it will die out in the next couple of months. But if not, keeping everyone from immunity just means extending the risk.

** I think contact tracing may -appear- to work because I think we are naturally bottoming out cases. Same, in my mind, for other measures.

One final bit: I’ve followed lots of different predictions to see who might get things most accurately to see what they did differently. This guy’s been right on (it’s been almost scary) using SARS as a comparison instead of the Spanish Flu (since this bug is SARS 2). This is a really good visual of the whole thing:

(Click to enlarge)

ALSO, a short bit from Bruce Carrol:

“If you are waiting for a “cure” for COVID-19, you’ll never leave your home again.

Even the flu vaccine (not vaccine, flu shot. There is a vaccine for the Polio, not HIV or SARS) results in 60-80,000 deaths every season.

We have to stop the fearmongering and start learning to live with a new virus in a string of new viruses that have emerged for tens of thousands of years.

Boomers and Millennials aren’t that special of a species.”

— Bruce Carroll (Co-founder of the gay Republican group GOProu, and founder of GAYPATRIOT)

The Trans War On Women #FairPlay

Abigail Shrier was on the Dennis Prager Show this week and the discussion surrounded her article in Newsweek and her new book:

  • Who Has the Right to Be Called a Girl? (NEWSWEEK)
  • Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (REGNERY)

Here is a taste of the article:

The physical advantages conferred during male puberty are massive and unbridgeable, especially in sprinting and contests of strength. To take just one example cited in the complaint, the fastest female sprinter in the world is American runner Allyson Felix. Her lifetime best for the 400-meter run is remarkable—just 49.26 seconds. But based on 2018 data, nearly three hundred high school boys in the U.S. alone could beat it. When the two boy runners now besting Connecticut girls identified as male, they had no notable achievements in sprinting; now, identifying as female and competing against girls, they have taken first place in 13 out of 14 state championship events.

(On Twitter, I suggest keeping an eye on the hashtag #fairplay)

Some other sources worth a mention:

  • Attorneys for Conn. High School Runners Ask Judge to Recuse after He Forbids Them from Describing Trans Athletes as ‘Male’ (NATIONAL REVIEW)
  • Teen Girls vs. ‘Trans’ Athletes (NATIONAL REVIEW)
  • TUCKER CARLSON: Biological Boys Compete In Women’s Sports? | Tucker Carlson Interview With Selina Soule (YOUTUBE)
    Just a note on the Tucker video above: The Alliance Defending Freedom attorney noted that one of the transgender athletes (male in otherwords) now holds ten records in the state previously held by other girls over a twenty year period.

Girls shouldn’t be forced to compete against males. Male athletes have numerous unfair physical advantages, and policies that allow males in female athletics will inevitable lead to girls becoming spectators in their own sports. That is why Idaho passed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act in March. But now, the ACLU has filed suit against Idaho in an effort to remove those protections. (If you don’t want to watch the full race, pick it up around the 3-minute mark to see.)

Selina Soule was one of the top five female high school sprinters in Connecticut… until competing against biological boys changed the game. Now, women aren’t just losing their races — they’re losing their chances to compete at all. Why is this happening? And what should we do about it?

SEE MORE AT RPT:

Did Trump Fire Dr. Rick Bright Over Hydroxychloroquine?

Here is a good intro that gives a “front-story” to Ami’s video by NEWSBUSTERS:

  • On Wednesday, the liberal media lit up with the new anti-Trump narrative about Dr. Rick Bright, who claimed without evidence that he was fired from his HHS position for opposing the use of hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug President Trump had touted as a possible treatment for the Chinese coronavirus. 

NEWSBUSTERS continues with their dissecting of the latest “scandal” of Trump’s:

But new reporting from Politico (not a right-wing outlet) found officials had been looking to fire him for incompetence for about a year, and he had praised the drug himself.

[….]

Meanwhile, Politico reporter Dan Diamond did actual research into Dr. Bright and what he found debunked the allegations. According to his reporting, Bright had praised the HHS’s acquisition of large quantities of the drug, and suggested it was a boon to the department [I added more from the Politico story than Newsbusters had]:

Bright told The New York Times on Wednesday that he believed his removal was because of his internal opposition to pursuing investments in malaria drugs as potential treatments for Covid-19, which President Donald Trump has touted without scientific evidence. Three people with knowledge of HHS’ recent acquisition of tens of millions of doses of those drugs said that Bright had supported those acquisitions in internal communications, with one official saying that Bright praised the move as a win for the health department as part of an email exchange that was first reported by Reuters last week, although Bright’s message was not publicly reported.

“If Bright opposed hydroxychloroquine, he certainly didn’t make that clear from his email — quite the opposite,” said the official, who has seen copies of the email exchanges.

In a statement late Wednesday, an HHS official directly linked Bright’s decisions to the health department’s acquisition of the malaria drugs.

“As it relates to chloroquine, it was Dr. Bright who requested an Emergency Use Authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for donations of chloroquine that Bayer and Sandoz recently made to the Strategic National Stockpile for use on COVID-19 patients,” spokesperson Caitlin Oakley said. “The EUA is what made the donated product available for use in combating COVID-19.”

In addition, Diamond took to Twitter to share photographic evidence that Bright was being looked at for removal as early as last year. In the tweet, Diamond showed a timestamped text message exchange from January 2 proving people understood Bright was on the way out because of his “incompetence and insubordination.”

Definitely, not the narrative the networks wanted to go with against Trump….

RIGHT SCOOP notes after reproducing the above the following addition:

Here’s one last tidbit that you should know about Bright

The doctor who claimed he was demoted after raising concerns about hydroxychloroquine hired the attorneys who represented Dr. Christine Blasey Ford during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Dr. Rick Bright, who was the head of the Health and Human Services agency tasked with creating a coronavirus vaccine, claimed he was fired after raising concerns about the anti-malaria drug touted by President Trump as a potential treatment for the coronavirus. After his demotion, Bright linked up with the law firm Katz, Marshall & Banks, the same firm that represented Blasey Ford.

Attorneys Debra Katz and Lisa Banks have deep ties to high-ranking members of the Democratic Party. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein recommended the two to Blasey Ford after she came forward with allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearing.

The two attorneys have also hosted fundraisers for Democratic members of Congress, including a dinner for Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

Well if that doesn’t make his story smell even more like a rat

Profiting From Fear?

What really tans my hide about the CDC announcement that it is IN FACT NOT EASY to contract the Wu Flu from surfaces (HEAVY) is that there is an automatic acceptance that their proclamations are at the heart, noble. As if scientists and organizations cannot be swayed by money, special interests, or by some internal biases. When Trump was mentioning hydroxychloroquine in his pressers, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and the like chased down Trump’s financials and said he had stock in a company that makes the product – ERGO Trump was mentioning it to get rich (HUFFPO).

No “best interest” afforded to the President of these United States. Just to weasels like Fauci.

Trump was one of many people in a 401K type mutual fund where many money markets, stocks, bonds, etc. are invested into – just like my own 401K plan I have. Trump was found to own (along with the 1,000’s of people in that mutual fund, $150 in a company that makes Hydroxychloroquine. This company makes many other medical supplies, and, since Hydroxychloroquine is not patented any longer due to the age of the medicine — and anyone can make the product… there was no profit involved in his touting Hydroxychloroquine. (BREITBART)

  • Trump owns between $29 and $435 worth of Sanofi stock. (CERNO)

This did not matter however. Any chance to smear the President is an opportunity the MSM cannot pass up.

Which got me thinking. Maybe the Washington Post and the New York Times, and NPR, CNN, and the like will scour the decision makers at the CDC to see if any of them have financial ties to makers of disinfectant companies like Clorox? Since Hydroxychloroquine is not a product that can be patented, maybe some overturning of evidence to see if those at the CDC have financial ties to products like Remdesivir, since a single company can copy write that product and hold patent power over it.

The WASHINGTON TIMES notes this:

Anthony Fauci, America’s most-listened-to medical professional on the coronavirus, and apparently on all the political, economic, cultural and social precautions every man, woman and child in the nation should take on the coronavirus, has just warned what cooler-head coronavirus watchers have suspected all along: that this country may never, no never, go back to normal.

Never, that is, Fauci suggested, until a vaccine is developed. And by logical extension, that’s to say — never, until a vaccine is developed that must then be included on the required list of shots for all children to attend school.

What great news for Big Pharma….

No “BREAKING NEWS!” stories about financial ties by persons like Fuaci??? No… I suspect not. UNLESS, it could hurt Trump. Then the Democrats and CNN peeps would be all over it.

Average Age, Co-Morbidities, Inflated “Rona” Deaths, Anti-Bodies

JUMP TO…

More than half of U.S. deaths are from nursing homes — THE GUARDIAN:

  • Yale professor describes as ‘staggering’ research that reveals more than half of all deaths in 14 US states from elderly care facilities

The average age group who dies from “The Rona” is found here in the latest from WORLD O’METER:

Not only that, but the co-morbidities (just as in flu deaths) are high and in multiples. Some examples:

  • Of the 22,332 people who died in hospital in England between 31 March and 12 May, 5,873 (26%) suffered from either type 1 or type 2 diabetes, NHS England figures reveal. That was the most common illness found in an analysis of what existing conditions patients had. The other commonest comorbidities were dementia (18%), serious breathing problems (15%) and chronic kidney disease (14%). One in ten (10%) suffered from ischaemic heart disease. (GUARDIAN)
  • A new study published April 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association characterizes the symptoms, comorbidities, and clinical outcomes of 5,700 patients hospitalized because of COVID-19 in the New York area. The authors found that 94 percent of the patients had a chronic health problem, and 88 percent had two or more. The three most prevalent conditions were hypertension (56.6 percent), obesity (41.7 percent), and diabetes (33.8 percent). (THE SCIENTIST)

Now, many of these deaths were preventable, but for some reason many of the hardest hit states had a tragic policy of sending elderly patients back to nursing homes to recover. Many of the blue states, where most of the deaths have occurred:

  • If you live in New Jersey, you are 13 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than if you live in Florida. The Garden State’s death rate per million is 895.2, according to the RealClearPolitics coronavirus tracker, compared to only 65.1 deaths per million for Florida. This disparity can’t be written off to demography or testing. Florida has a huge elderly population, and it has conducted twice as many tests as New Jersey. (AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

I have a slew of articles regarding this deadly choice by Andrew Cuomo on my site (FULLY reproduced here):


Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Deadly Decision


ERIC METAXAS interviews John Zmirak about his article, “Why Is Andrew Cuomo Killing Patients In Nursing Homes? Imagine If We’D Responded To AIDS By Closing Everything BUT The Gay Bath Houses” (THE STREAM), that puts Governor Cuomo’s “fatal decision” regarding Covid-19 and nursing homes squarely in the bullseye.

Here are SOME of the other stories (earliest to latest) you have probably not heard reported about in the MSM:

  • Andrew Cuomo’s Coronavirus Nursing Home Policy Proves Tragic (NEW YORK POST);
  • Gov. Cuomo Says ‘It’s Not Our Job’ To Provide PPE To Nursing Homes (NEW YORK POST);
  • Forcing Nursing Homes To Take Coronavirus Patients Is Just Insane — And Evil (NEW YORK POST);
  • State Lacked Common Sense In Nursing Homes Coronavirus Approach (NEW YORK POST);
  • Cuomo Doubles Down On Ordering Nursing Homes To Admit Coronavirus Patients (NEW YORK POST);
  • Andrew Cuomo Under Fire for Directive Requiring Nursing Homes to Accept Coronavirus Patients (BREITBART);
  • New York Required Nursing Homes To Admit ‘Medically Stable’ Coronavirus Patients. The Results Were Deadly (DAILY WIRE)
  • ‘Blood On His Hands’: Mark Levin Rips Andrew Cuomo Over ‘Deadly Fiat’ Nursing Home Controversy (WASHINGTON EXAMINER);
  • Three Hardest-Hit, Democrat-Run States Force Nursing Homes To Accept Recovering COVID Patients, Face Backlash (DAILY WIRE);
  • Cuomo Claims He Didn’t Know About New York Rule Forcing Nursing Homes To Accept Elderly With COVID-19 (THE FEDERALIST);
  • Cuomo To Blame For Covid Spreading Through Nursing Home (NEW YORK POST);
  • Media Doesn’t Care That People Died Because Cuomo Put Coronavirus Patients In Nursing Homes (THE FEDERALIST).

I have some older posts dealing with [in some way] Andrew Cuomo (Apparently I only post about Governor Cuomo in the first half of the year?):


End of Reproduction


MAY I ALSO NOTE that I believe the deaths from The Rona are a bit overstated, while Dr. Birx noted that the CDC may be inflating the death toll by 25%, I provide a couple other examples to support my claim. First up, Dr. Birx setting the stage for this with how deaths are coded:

Another example comes from Dr. Ngozi, Director of public health Illinois. She explains how ALL deaths are counted as Covid-19 even if the patient was diagnosed to have die from another disease:

Here is more information from Daniel Horowitz over at CONSERVATIVE REVIEW:

1) The shocking inflation of COVID-19 death numbers: From day one, we were warned that states are ascribing every single death of anyone who happens to test positive for the coronavirus — even if they are asymptomatic — to the virus rather than the clear cause of death. Now, thanks to a lawsuit in Colorado, the state was forced to revise its death count down by 23 % over the weekend — from 1,150 to 878. The state is now publishing numbers of deaths “with” COVID-19 separate from deaths “from” COVID-19. As I reported on Thursday, county officials started accusing the state’s department of health of reclassifying deaths of those who tested positive for the virus but died of things like alcohol poisoning as COVID-19 deaths just to insidiously inflate the numbers. This revision in Colorado is a bombshell story that, of course, will remain unknown to most Americans. Every state needs to do this, and if they did, we would find an across-the-board drop in numbers by at least 25%, the same %age by which Dr. Birx reportedly believes the count is being inflated, according to the Washington Post. For example, in Minnesota, state officials are now admitting that every single person who dies in a nursing home after testing positive is now deemed to have died from the virus, never mind the fact that 25% of all natural deaths in a given week occur in nursing homes and that most cases of COVID-19 are asymptomatic, which means more often than not, they died exclusively of other causes.

(there are five other points made by Horowitz)

TO WIT… Dennis Prager’s guest is Dr. Joel Hay, who is a professor in the department of Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy at the University of Southern California. Both give examples of cancer deaths being coded Covid:

And my third evidence to support my contention a nurse is filmed commenting on the percentages of deaths at NYC hospital. In my posts point #2 (the video still up amazingly) notes that every death cert in NYC-hospital is coded as Rona. In fact, 99% of deaths from that hospital were coded Rona during a period — AN IMPOSSIBLE statistic (https://tinyurl.com/y9awsuor — my site)

A CLEARER PICTURE blog comments on the above indirectly:

….In New York City, around 12,000 people have supposedly died from COVID-19 at the time of this writing. That’s 22% of all alleged U.S. deaths.

Around 7,000 of the NYC deaths attributed to COVID-19 have been thoroughly investigated to determine if there was another serious life-threatening illness present

Take a deep breath if doing so hasn’t been outlawed where you live.

99.2% of those 7,000 New Yorkers who supposedly died from the virus had another antecedent life-threatening illness. For all intents and purposes, that’s all of them.

How is it even remotely possible that 7,000 NYC deaths attributed to COVID-19 were investigated and virtually every single one of them found to have involved at least one other life-threatening illness if the virus is in and of itself deadly?

Most strains of coronavirus that affect humans are common cold viruses.

In light of the apparent almost universal prevalence of at least one other deadly disease among the alleged NYC deceased…

And in light of all the factors massively inflating the bogus death tally we’re being fed every day…

What reason do we have to believe COVID-19 is actually killing anyone?

No one knows how many Americans have really died of COVID-19….

However, we are starting to find out that “pure” deaths caused by Covid-19 exclusivelt is low (DAILY WIRE):

On Tuesday, San Diego county Supervisor Jim Desmond said after digging into the data that he believes only six of the county’s 194 coronavirus-identified deaths are “pure” coronavirus deaths, meaning they died from the virus, not merely with the virus.

Desmond was seemingly ruling out deaths from individuals with preexisting conditions.

“We’ve unfortunately had six pure, solely coronavirus deaths — six out of 3.3 million people,” Desmond said on a podcast, Armstrong & Getty Extra Large Interviews, according to San Diego Tribune. “I mean, what number are we trying to get to with those odds. I mean, it’s incredible. We want to be safe, and we can do it, but unfortunately, it’s more about control than getting the economy going again and keeping people safe.”

Public Health Officer Dr. Wilma Wooten suggested Wednesday during a press briefing that Desmond was being callous, noting that their liberal identification of COVID-19 deaths is uniform with coding nationwide.

“Their life is no less valuable than someone’s life who does not have underlying medical conditions,” Wooten said. “This is not just San Diego. This is how this is done throughout the entire nation in terms of identifying who has died of COVID-19.”

Also note that all the anti-body tests are showing a larger infected population than previously considered. REASON.COM previously noted the Stanford study that between “48,000 and 81,000 residents of Santa Clara County, California are likely to have already been infected by the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.” Stanford University has revised the numbers to better fit the assumption (via MERCURY NEWS):

In a revised analysis of a startling study published last month, they now estimate that 2.8% of Santa Clara residents were previously infected by the virus but didn’t know it.

That implies that the county had up to 54,000 infections — many more than the 1,000 confirmed cases in the county at the time.

“This suggests that the large majority of the population does not have antibodies and may be susceptible to the virus,” concludes the research paper, published in the online report medRxiv….

MY COMMENTS FROM MY FACEBOOK ABOUT THE ABOVE

So, Stanford settled on a number in early April… when there were 1,000 CONFIRMED cases were known in Santa Clara, there were 54,000 infected. To REALLY understand the percentages you would have to follow those 1,000 KNOWN cases from that time and compare the 55,000 cases to those deaths. (BTW, Stanford took the lower path on stats; so there could be a larger number.) Here is part of the article… but know that with the flu shot, there are more deaths by the flu than The Rona, without a “Rona shot.”

UPDATE (trying to figure out deaths per infections): Okay, let us apply the 98% survive who are known to have it and are hospitalized stat I have heard for some time. So 2% of the 1,000 is 20. 20 deaths from that early April figure of 55,000. Right? Gives you… 0.036%


UPDATES!


A friend on FACEBOOK has been a light in the war-torn field of The Rona (Wu Flu) battle of infection rates. Here are two posts of his [combined with a response to a friendly comment from one of his peeps] followed by some recent articles (links to papers will be in graphics):

Here’s a new meta-study from Stanford of all of the antibody testing that’s happened.

This puts the Wu Flu anywhere between 7x LESS deadly than the flu and 2.8x MORE deadly than the flu (making it a little worse than a bad flu season like 2018). And that’s assuming that this doesn’t follow SARS 1 and just disappear.

The data behind this is really solid, and the author is well-respected. Unlike those stupid models we were using, this is really real data.

We don’t do contact tracing, social distancing, mask-wearing, or lockdowns for the seasonal flu, and this looks like a watered down seasonal flu that got 100000000x more media attention and governors sending sick people to nursing homes to boost up the death rate.

The original post (OP) on this second strain was a graphic. I will link to the Kent County (Michigan site through it. Here is my FB description of the following: “A person named B.M. wrote on a friends Facebook wall the following regarding “contact tracing.” (The original post had to do with hiring government employees to trace citizens with Covid.)”

(See also this BRIDGE article)

  • [A reader of JP’s noted] Actually, contact tracing sounds like a legitimate work of government. Rather than quarantining the healthy, quarantine the sick and monitor those exposed to the disease.

JP responded:


Sorry in advance for the novel! Heh, I started thinking of other interesting things to add and just decided to run with it.

Contact tracing might work for illnesses that don’t spread very easily (it probably would have exterminated HIV, according to what I’ve read; I’m no expert but it seems reasonable), but for upper respiratory stuff like colds and flus (and the Wu Flu), it’s pretty much doomed, especially with up to 10% of the whole country already having the it.

The original point of the lockdowns (which don’t seem to have worked; lockdown and non-lockdown countries and states have almost identical statistics) was to slow the spread to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. It wasn’t to stop spread, since even the CDC admits that after about 1% of people are infected with a contagious disease, you can’t really close the door on it anymore. Contact tracing is a relatively invasive way of closing the door on a virus, so I don’t think it will work here**.

The data points to a much less lethal bug, though. Stanford’s meta analysis of all of the large-scale antibody testing shows an IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) between 7 times less than the seasonal flu and 2.8 times more. It’s probably in the middle, making it slightly less lethal than regular seasonal flus. And since we know it has been in the US at least since January (probably since December or earlier), the R? (Basic Reproduction Number or Rate) is also much lower than people originally thought. So it spreads like the flu and is as deadly as the flu.

The main difference seems to be the 24/7 media terrorizing of citizens, the complete ignorance most of us (that’s me, too) had in the real pneumonia/influenza deaths each year, and the downright evil policy of many Democrat governors of sending the sick to recover (while contagious) at nursing homes, boosting the deaths by up to 50%.

Sorry for the novel!! Reading every little bit about this thing has become an unfortunate hobby of mine. I’m of the mind now that the best strategy is to fight the fear instead of the virus and to get back to normal in virtually every way. If this is anything like it’s older brother SARS, it will die out in the next couple of months. But if not, keeping everyone from immunity just means extending the risk.

** I think contact tracing may -appear- to work because I think we are naturally bottoming out cases. Same, in my mind, for other measures.

One final bit: I’ve followed lots of different predictions to see who might get things most accurately to see what they did differently. This guy’s been right on (it’s been almost scary) using SARS as a comparison instead of the Spanish Flu (since this bug is SARS 2). This is a really good visual of the whole thing:

(Click to enlarge)

ALSO, a short bit from Bruce Carrol:

“If you are waiting for a “cure” for COVID-19, you’ll never leave your home again.

Even the flu vaccine (not vaccine, flu shot. There is a vaccine for the Polio, not HIV or SARS) results in 60-80,000 deaths every season.

We have to stop the fearmongering and start learning to live with a new virus in a string of new viruses that have emerged for tens of thousands of years.

Boomers and Millennials aren’t that special of a species.”

— Bruce Carroll (Co-founder of the gay Republican group GOProu, and founder of GAYPATRIOT)

TO WIT…

The SPECTATOR USA has an excellent article backing up the above conversation, entitled, “Stanford Study Suggests Coronavirus Might Not Be As Deadly As Flu: All their estimates for IFR are markedly lower than the figures thrown about a couple of months ago” (This was a SPECTATOR UK original piece –  FYI)

One of the great unknowns of the COVID-19 crisis is just how deadly the disease is. Much of the panic dates from the moment, in early March, when the World Health Organization (WHO) published a mortality rate of 3.2 percent — which turned out to be a crude ‘case fatality rate’ dividing the number of deaths by the number of recorded cases, ignoring the large number of cases which are asymptomatic or otherwise go unrecorded.

The Imperial College modeling, which has been so influential on the UK government, assumed an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.9 percent. This was used to compute the infamous prediction that 250,000 Britons would die unless the government abandoned its mitigation strategy and adopted instead a policy of suppressing the virus through lockdown. Imperial later revised its estimate of the IFR down to 0.66 percent — although the March 16 paper which predicted 250,000 deaths was not updated.

In the past few weeks, a slew of serological studies estimating the prevalence of infection in the general population has become available. This has allowed Prof John Ioannidis of Stanford University to work out the IFR in 12 different locations.

They range between 0.02 percent and 0.5 percent — although Ioannidis has corrected those raw figures to take account of demographic balance and come up with estimates between 0.02 percent and 0.4 percent. The lowest estimates came from Kobe, Japan, found to have an IFR of 0.02 percent and Oise in northern France, with an IFR of 0.04 percent. The highest were in Geneva (a raw figure of 0.5 percent) and Gangelt in Germany (0.28 percent).

The usual caveats apply: most studies to detect the prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the general population remain unpublished, and have not yet been peer-reviewed. Some are likely to be unrepresentative of the general population. The Oise study, in particular, was based on students, teachers and parents in a single high school which was known to be a hotspot on COVID-19 infection. At the other end of the table, Geneva has a relatively high age profile, which is likely to skew its death rate upwards.

But it is noticeable how all these estimates for IFR are markedly lower than the figures thrown about a couple of months ago, when it was widely asserted that COVID-19 was a whole magnitude worse than flu. Seasonal influenza is often quoted as having an IFR of 0.1 to 0.2 percent. The Stanford study suggests that COVID-19 might not, after all, be more deadly than flu — although, as Ioannidis notes, the profile is very different: seasonal flu has a higher IFR in developing countries, where vaccination is rare, while COVID-19 has a higher death rate in the developed world, thanks in part of more elderly populations.

The Stanford study, however, does not include the largest antibody study to date: that involving a randomized sample of 70,000 Spanish residents, whose preliminary results were published by the Carlos III Institute of Health two weeks ago. That suggested that five percent of the Spanish population had been infected with the virus. With 27,000 deaths in the country, that would convert to an IFR of 1.1 percent.

This backs up of course some excellent article by Daniel Horowitz:

A CLEARER PICTURE has a great post about this as well, I suggest if you like what you see you check out that blog weekly.

For one thing, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx have both explicitly stated that anyone dying WITH the virus is counted as dying FROM it. Since 4/5 of COVID-19 infections are mild and 1/2 appear to show no symptoms at all, the official U.S. death tally is bound to include many in which it played little or no role.

The CDC has made matters much worse by insisting that doctors list COVID-19 on death certificates without a positive test confirming its presence and even absent any medical justification at all. A willingness to “assume” it was a factor is all that’s officially required. And hospitals now reap enormous financial rewards for making the assumption.

(Click To Enlarge)

Those in charge couldn’t have possibly shown less interest in determining the real number of Americans who would still be alive if not for having contracted COVID-19. It’s unlikely that ours is the only country in which the data has been turned into garbage by a perfect storm of inflating factors. As hard as it may be to accept, the odds are pretty much nil that we’ll ever know how deadly the virus we were made to spend months obsessively fearing really was.

Even on the inflated numbers we’re getting, however, it isn’t anywhere near 10 times deadlier than the flu; as Dr. Fauci claimed on March 11, while ginning up support for his novel public health strategy of extinguishing our rights and wrecking the economy. But, of course, a few weeks later, we learned that even Fauci didn’t believe a word of the lie he so effectively used to terrorize a nation of over 300 million people into suicidal obedience.

Though perhaps you haven’t heard. You see, on March 26, Dr. Fauci shared his true opinion with his peers in the pages of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine:

The overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).

Dr. Anthony Fauci, March 26, 2020 New England Journal of Medicine

In case you’re wondering, the parenthetical remark is his, not mine. Moreover, when Sharyl Attkisson contacted the journal about the strange discrepancy between what Fauci was scaring the public with and the substantially less alarming take his learned colleagues heard, she discovered his article had been submitted “many weeks ago.”….

(READ IT ALL)

What Started Out As a Question Ended Up Being a Lesson In Gods Love

(Originally posted January of 2011)

During a Q&A with Ravi Zacharias and RZIM at Oxford, a homosexual man asks a question but really ends up encouraging those in the faith of the miraculous work of God in peoples changed lives.

Something said during this exchange that really clicks with my understanding of this very important issue. Love. Most often — as I note often in my debates and posts on this topic (see below) — there is abuse or some family issue that drives these young men and women into this lifestyle. While I am more of a political-animal/armchair-philosopher and I deal with this issue in a “cut-n-dry” fashion, love is the motivating factor of change….

Gay Christians?

….Usually the Christian [at the time of conversion] has this immense connection with their Creator and what He has done for him/her and the depths of their depravity that has been covered. Dorothy Sayers says it best:

  • “None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can’t teach people that — they have to learn by experience.”

There is love and change available to those who seek it (GREGALOGUE). the problem has become a society that perpetuates the PC status quo, i.e, egalitarianism. To keep the quoting of Mrs. Sayers going, she comments well on tolerance:

  • “In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”

This is such a great expansion to my video library and writings on this topic. I highly suggest getting the entire Q&A by Ravi.

CS Lewis Doodles Morality

(Originally posted March, 2011)

[There was a funny video — no longer available — showing some kids arguing almost identically to the example CS LEWIS give in his book, “Mere Christianity.” Sorry for the missing intro, but I do not control YouTube.]

How would you rewrite, or should I say, add to CS Lewis’ examples after seeing this video?

These two men seem to be referring to not only the law as in the penal code/system… but they resolved this act with reference to some “fair standard” that is above the written law of man. IMHO that is.

CS Lewis:

EVERY ONE HAS HEARD people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”–‘That’s my seat, I was there first”–“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”–“Why should you shove in first?”–“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”–“Come on, you promised.” People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: “To hell with your standard.” Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that some thing has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

(accuser) “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”
(responder) “Your right, I apologize.”

(accuser) “That’s my seat, I was there first!”
(responder) “Your right, you were. Here you go.”

(accuser) “Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine.”
(responder) “Oh gosh, I forgot, here you go.”

(accuser) “Come on, you promised.” (responder)
“Your right, lets go to the movies.”


These examples are similar to what the Tosh.0 video showed.

The fairness we know deep down was adhered to.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong “the Law of Nature,” they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law–with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are color-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced! If they had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the color of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Creeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to–whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put Yourself first. selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong–in other words, if there is no Law of Nature–what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, 1 apologize to them. They had much better read some other work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money–the one you have almost forgotten-came when you were very hard up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done–well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behavior to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it–and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much–we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so–that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behavior that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 17-21.

 

After reading that portion of CLASSIC Lewis, here is some thoughts from a philosopher that I disagree with on many points (he is an atheist), but he argues well for the following, even if later rejecting it:

If the reader is not familiar with Mere Christianity, I would urge him or her to buy it. The first chapter alone is worth the cost of the book. It is a brilliant piece of psychology. In it, Lewis sums up two crucial aspects of the human condition. We can see the first aspect in the passage quoted. Human beings do quarrel in the way Lewis describes. We are moral agents who cannot help feeling that there are some things we ought to do, and that there are other things we ought not to do. We believe, sometimes despite ourselves, that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that there are certain principles of conduct to which we and all other human beings ought to adhere. In our dealings with other people we constantly appeal to those principles. We are quick to notice when others violate them. We get defensive and make excuses when it appears that we have violated them ourselves. We get defensive even when no one else is around. We accuse ourselves when no else does, and we rationalize our behavior in front of our consciences just as we would in front of another person. We cannot help applying to ourselves the principles we firmly believe apply to all. To use Alvin Plantinga’s term, the belief in morality is basic. Even when we reject that belief in our theoretical reasoning, it comes back to haunt us at every turn. We can never really get away from it. There is a reason why our legal system defines insanity as the inability to tell right from wrong: people who lack that ability have lost an important part of their humanity. They have taken a step down towards the level of beasts.

Even if, in our heart of hearts, we all believe in morality, we do not necessarily share the exact same moral values. Differences regarding values are at least a part of what we quarrel about. Yet Lewis correctly recognizes that our differences in this area never amount to a total difference. The moral beliefs human beings entertain display broad cross-cultural similarities. Ancient Egyptians did not appreciate having their property stolen any more than we do. A brother’s murder, a wife’s infidelity, or a friend’s betrayal would have angered them, just as it angers us. Human nature has not changed much for tens of thousands of years. It does not change at all when one travels to the other side of the globe.

I did not believe Lewis the first time I read him, or even the second time. This idea, that there is a fundamental underlying unity to the moral fabric of humanity, is a hard one to accept. Think about those suicidal fanatics who crashed planes into the World Trade Center. They “knew” they were doing the right thing, that Allah would reward them in heaven with virgins galore. How radically different from our own values the values of some Muslims must seem! Yet there is common ground. Even the most militant Muslims despise thieves, cheats, and liars, just as Christians. Jews, and atheists do. They value loyalty and friendship. just as we do. They love their children and their parents. just as we do. They even condemn murder, at least within their own societies. It is only when they deal with outsiders like us that some of them may seem like (and in fact, be) monsters. To distinguish between insiders and outsiders, and to treat the latter horribly, is actually not so unusual in human history. Expanding one’s “inside group” until it encompasses all of humanity is something of an innovation. When we consider all this, the moral gulf between us and them does not seem so unbridgeable. Our admittedly great differences occur against a background of fundamental similarities. Similarities guaranteed by the fact that we are all stuck being human. So it seems Lewis was right, despite my earlier skepticism. Universal moral themes can and do underpin the diversity of our moral opinions.

[….]

Moral statements, then, cannot be mere matters of taste and opinion. They essentially involve an appeal to principles that transcend both the wishes of any one individual, and the customs of any one culture or society. That there are such principles, and that we cannot really escape from them, are points Lewis successfully illuminates. It thus seems very plausible to suppose that when our moral statements appeal to these principles in an appropriate and rational manner, they deserve to be called truths.

Andrew Marker, The Ladder: Escaping from Plato’s Cave (iUniverse.com, 2010), 108-110, 111-112.


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Atilis Gym – Let Freedom Lift!

An estimated 200 people showed up to support the decision of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey on May 18, 2020 to open for business despite an executive order by Gov. Phil Murphy prohibiting non-essential businesses from opening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Police warned those attending they were violating the order, but only cited the owners, and didn’t shut the business down.

([below] Video courtesy John Daskas)