Biden vs. Biden (“Fine People” Edition)

First of all, this is a remaking of my original video titled: Fine People On Both Sides (Biden Edition)”  I remove Trump and add “Confederate Biden” into the mix (original file at Trump War Room).

The GRUNGE makes a simple notation to start out their wonderful article on “The United Daughters of the Confederacy,” or, UDC:

Honestly, with a name like “The United Daughters of the Confederacy,” it’s really not all that hard to imagine why in the world this group would be at the center of some pretty controversial stuff.

My post that gives one of the best synopsis, “media-wise”, is here: The ‘Big Lie’ Biden Continues To Spread

My main point I bring up in conversation regarding the statues and now the KKK is this,

  • I am enjoying ityou have a radical socialist group on one-side (the KKK) clashing with a radical socialist group on the other (BLM and social justice warriors) — all fighting over DEMOCRATIC history.

Which is why I personally do not like the Confederate flag as many display it. It represents racist slave holding/fighting Democrats who were defeated by Republicans. And who later founded the KKK as the terrorist are of the south to keep blacks and other Republicans from voting.

  • virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.” — Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ix;
  • not every Democrat was a KKK’er, but every KKK’er was a Democrat.” — Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 19.

For Republicans to fly the Confederate flag on the back of their truck is a political tragedy.

See More

LIE: Mass Shootings “Tripled” After Assault Weapons Ban Ended

Jesse Watters: “Can you guess who’s running these places? Democrats. Democrats want to disarm you during the crime wave they created”

The FEDERALIST notes:

The following photographs illustrate the point. Here is a pre-“ban” AR-15. On the end of its barrel is a two-inch-long attachment that reduces smoke and flash, and underneath its A-frame front sight is another attachment called a bayonet lug.

Now here is what the 730,000 AR-15s made during the ban looked like.

BREITBART notes the WaPo article Watters mentions above:

….Setting aside the question of what an “assault weapon” is, Biden’s claim has been fact-checked by the Washington Post — hardly a conservative outlet — and found to be lacking.

The Post fact-checked the statement, “When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.” The Post reported:

Biden claimed that mass shooting deaths tripled after the law expired. He appears to be relying on a study of mass shooting data from 1981 to 2017, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery by a team led by Charles DiMaggio, a professor of surgery at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. That group found that an assault weapons ban would have prevented 314 out of 448, or 70 percent, of the mass shooting deaths during the years when the ban was not in effect. But the data used in that study has come under attack by some analysts.

[….]

The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth.

Earlier, the Post gave “Three Pinocchios” to the claim that the end of the assault weapons ban led to a rise in mass shootings. It has since revised that conclusion, given new data. “The body of research now increasingly suggests the 1994 law was effective in reducing mass-shooting deaths,” the Post concluded. Still, it left the claim “unrated,” because the evidence is inconclusive.

The claim mass shootings “tripled” after the end of the ban is based on one study, and is speculative at best…..

Here is FACT CHECK .ORG for one example:

….President Joe Biden claims the 10-year assault weapons ban that he helped shepherd through the Senate as part of the 1994 crime bill “brought down these mass killings.” But the raw numbers, when adjusted for population and other factors, aren’t so clear on that.

There is, however, growing evidence that bans on large-capacity magazines, in particular, might reduce the number of those killed and injured in mass public shootings.

A day after the Boulder, Colorado, mass shooting, in which 10 people were killed by a gunman in a grocery store on March 22, Biden spoke in support of two House-approved bills that would expand background checks to include private sales. Biden also returned to another campaign promise on gun control: to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

“We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country, once again,” Biden said. “I got that done when I was a senator. It passed. It was a law for the longest time and it brought down these mass killings. We should do it again.”

Biden is referring to his work as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when he sponsored and largely shepherded the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law in 1994. That law, among other things, included an “assault weapons” ban, which prohibited the sale of certain semiautomatic firearms and large-capacity magazines that could accommodate 10 rounds or more. (Existing weapons on the banned list were “grandfathered,” meaning people could keep them.) A sunset provision, however, meant that the ban expired in 10 years, in 2004.

We wrote about this issue eight years ago, when the gun debate was again raging in Congress. At the time, we found that a three-part study funded by the Department of Justice concluded that the ban’s success in reducing crimes committed with banned guns was “mixed.”

We wrote:

FactCheck.org, Feb. 1, 2013: The final report concluded the ban’s success in reducing crimes committed with banned guns was “mixed.” Gun crimes involving assault weapons declined. However, that decline was “offset throughout at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns equipped with [large-capacity magazines].”

Ultimately, the research concluded that it was “premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun crime,” largely because the law’s grandfathering of millions of pre-ban assault weapons and large-capacity magazines “ensured that the effects of the law would occur only gradually” and were “still unfolding” when the ban expired in 2004.

Recent Research 

Some things haven’t changed much since then. A RAND review of gun studies, updated in 2020, concluded there is “inconclusive evidence for the effect of assault weapon bans on mass shootings.”

“We don’t think there are great studies available yet to state the effectiveness of assault weapons bans,” Andrew Morral, a RAND senior behavioral scientist who led the project, told FactCheck.org in a phone interview. “That’s not to say they aren’t effective. The research we reviewed doesn’t provide compelling evidence one way or the other.”…..

TUCKER

‘Disarming You Is The Point’: Tucker Slams Biden’s Gun Control Speech


MORE LIES THE MSM FEEDS US


(See more at NEWSBUSTERS)

AMMOLAND joins the fray:

Here are the three big TRUTHS the left is lying about.

  • 78% of mass shooting do NOT use an “Assault Rifle”
  • As a Percentage of the population, whites, and Hispanics are the LEAST likely to do a mass shooting.
  • Gun Control laws have NO effect on mass shootings.

Only 15 of the 67 events involved an “AR patterned” firearm; they are used in less than 22% of mass shootings. Only 22% of all mass shooting used AR style rifles.

2018 Excoriated a Bit (RALLY FOR OUR RIGHTS):

…..For the sake of this investigation, we used the definition put forth by the Congressional Research Service.  The CRS’s website explains that it “works exclusively for the United States congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and members of both members of the house and senate, regardless of party affiliation.” The website further explains that the CRS  is a “shared staff to congressional committees and members of congress. CRS experts assist at every stage of the legislative process.” 

DEFINITION USED:

Finally we come to the Congressional Research Service’s definition: “The incident takes place in a public area involving four or more deaths—not including the gunman, the shooter selects victims indiscriminately, the violence in these incidents are not a means to an end.”  It should be noted that CRS breaks up shootings involving four or more individuals as public, familial, and felony (robbery, gang activity, etc).  This is because the motives behind each vary greatly.

To put it simply, congress uses the CRS’s research to develop policy and create laws.

THE LIE

Now that we’re “armed” with the facts we need, lets dissect the statistics being pushed by the media.

The stats used in the news sources cited above stating there have been 307 mass shootings thus far in 2018 are from the Gun Violence Archive.  Okay, let’s look a little deeper into the GVA. The mission statement on their website states it is a “non-profit corporation formed in 2013 to provide free online public access to accurate information about gun related violence in the United States.”

We dug into the website’s “mass shooting” report for 2018. We filtered the list by lowest deaths to highest. Immediately 11 out of the 13 pages were disqualified, as there were between 0 and 3 deaths per incident. That means right away, 287 incidents out of 307 do not qualify as a mass shooting by definition. In fact, 155 of these incidents resulted in zero deaths.  This is unbelievable.

That leaves only two pages to dig through. The most common theme with the remaining list of incidents is that they were primarily either family or domestic violence related. Using the definition used by the CRS, that removes all but six shootings that actually count as a public mass shooting. Yes folks, there have only been SIX mass shootings this year in the United States – not 307.

Here are the six qualifying incidents:

  • February 14, 2018, Broward County Florida (Parkland), 17 dead, 17 injured.
  • April 22, 2018, Antioch, Tennessee, 4 dead, 3 injured.
  • May 18, 2018, Santa Fe Texas, 10 dead, 13 injured.
  • June 28, 2018 Annapolis, Maryland, 5 dead, two injured.
  • October 27, 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11 dead, 7 injured.
  • November 7, 2018, Thousand Oaks, California, 13 dead, 2 injured.

Six mass shootings compared to 307 is a substantial difference. The media easily plays off the ignorance of the public, taking advantage of the fact that there is not a universal definition of “mass shooting”, and blowing up an issue that, although very tragic, is only part of a larger picture of violent crime, most of which does not involve firearms…..


🧵 THREAD 🧵


And a noteworthy TWITTER THREAD discussing the idea that the United States leads the world in gun violence:

[….]

School Shooting List (Fabrications of a Political Mind)

A list is making its rounds showing a crapload of “school shootings” — I will post the list at the end because it is long. But this is the most recent list shared primarily on Facebook. The version I saw was by Greg Atkinson:

It is a list of 245 school shootings. This is nothing new, per-se, at every similar event some list is trotted out to use a real event to make untrue statements about others. Why? To elicit an emotional response. This was confirmed to me as I went through the comments under the list; one person was even calling for a teacher strike.

Lol.

I thought to myself at the time of reading it (but did not respond),

  • “Yes, please strike… it will chase EVEN MORE parents to choose private and home schooling even more than the last 2-years of masking and ‘at home education. Pretty please’.”

Even NPR admits issues with such lists, this is from August of 2018:

How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school?

We should know. But we don’t.

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.

We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.

In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.

“When we’re talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful,” says Deborah Temkin, a researcher and program director at Child Trends.

NPR goes on to note:

  • This confusion comes at a time when the need for clear data on school violence has never been more pressing.

All lists like the one shared [below] do is add to the confusion. This was my response to a friend sharing the list:

QUOTING MYSELF

Much of this list is not an example of “school shootings” like the one that recently happened. Just to exemplify my broader statement, here is one example pulled from the list to engender emotion rather than reasonable thought on the issue (#200).

Providence Career & Technical Academy

  • William Parsons was shot and killed in this event;
  • He was not a student at Providence Career & Technical Academy, rather, a student at a nearby school, Central High School;
  • He was a bystander to a fight between gang members [also not students at Providence] outside Providence Career & Technical Academy while waiting for his father to pick him up;
  • The school was not targeted, and the violence happened to be near the school.

Much of the list is like thisand has nothing ta do with “mass shootings” like the one that killed those kids and teachers. And as a point in history, the worst school massacre was in 1927 by a school board treasurer in Michigan (Bath School disaster). He killed 38 children. Which falls at #13 in the world’s deadliest.


SIDE NOTE


As an aside: I make it a habit not to post on this person’s Facebook (FB), and this was one of almost zero comments on their FB I have made over time. And my comment was pretty benign (minus facts), which are abrasive to perceived narratives — I get that.  Subsequentially my status was changed so I could not see any posts on their Facebook.

Which reminded me of a recently read article,

  • The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another. (THE ATLANTIC)

It’s the “bubbles” part that interests me.

I simply offered a view unlike any other in the strain; and what did the person do? Shut themselves off to the rare viewpoint that disagreed with the consensus they wish to artificially build around themself.

Another example of regular conversation moving toward censorship of viewpoints that offer even the slightest dissent (in Orwellian fashion) is this: years ago there was a weekly series in the L.A. Times where a column would take an event or position and have a progressive leaning columnist give their thoughts and position; and another column was written by a more conservative columnist giving theirs. I believe it was called, “View from the Left,” and, “View from the Right.”

Often times the writer on the right was Dennis Prager.

The L.A. Times has long nixed thoughtful thinking, comparison, and columns/columnists like this and Dennis.

Another example comes by way of the Executive Editor of the New York Times (the top position in the newsroom), Dean Baquet, who admitted that it is the Left who does not want to hear thoughtful responses to issues from a countering viewpoint.

You see, progressive leaning individuals are far more likely to unfriend or censor opposing political views (see HERE). Here is a snippet of the poll via TOWNHALL shortly after the 2016 election

  • Nearly one-quarter (24%) of Democrats say they blocked, unfriended, or stopped following someone on social media after the election because of their political posts on social media. Fewer than one in ten Republicans (9%) and independents (9%) report eliminating people from their social media circle. Political liberals are also far more likely than conservatives to say they removed someone from their social media circle due to what they shared online (28% vs. 8%, respectively). Eleven percent of moderates say they blocked, unfollowed, or unfriended someone due to what they posted online…Only five percent of Americans say they are planning on spending less time with certain family members because of their political views. Democrats, however, are five times more likely than Republicans to say they are trying to avoid certain family members due to their political views (10% vs. 2%, respectively). The pattern among political independents mirrors the general population.

The least tolerant sub-demographic measured in the poll was Democratic-leaning women

And this still holds true in large measure. And as you can see from my very reasonable, non-yelling, non-gaslighting comment [in the “Calvin” text box] — this holds true.

BUBBLES


…CONTINUING…


In another 2018 posting, DAILY CALLER catalogs CNN’s use of bad stats as well:

The list of school shootings used by CNN and other news outlets, however, wildly exaggerates the number by lumping in accidental firearm discharges, domestic disputes, and events that don’t involve students with the active shooter situations that most people don’t lump into the specific category of school shootings.

CNN’s list includes one shooting incident in Alabama where one person was injured at an on-campus apartment building. Another shooting at Savannah State University in Georgia is counted despite the fact that the two people involved were not students.

Many media outlets also pull their numbers from Everytown for Gun Safety, a non-profit gun control advocacy group, and includes any time “a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds.” Their current count is even higher than CNN’s.

Again, NPR:

  • “When we’re talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful,” says Deborah Temkin, a researcher and program director at Child Trends.

PIVOTING A BIT…. REAL WORLD SOLUTIONS

When I found this video I posted it on my Facebook with the following note:

  • Damn. Easy peasy. Should give the teacher extra time to get her or his gun out of the lock box and protect her (or his life) as well as the lives of the kids under her (or his) care.

And that is the key… what will a teacher do, or what length will he or she go in our more secularly violent society to protect his or her own life and thus her children in the classroom? After Sandy Hook some schools offered training and more for teachers that chose to arm themselves.

Some schools in south-central Missouri have created their own measures to stop a mass shooter: arming teachers. The move is not without controversy—but these extremely rural communities say it was their best option for safety.

For many schools, the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, which killed 26 people, was a wake-up call. Aaron Sydow, Superintendent of the K-8 Fairview School District in West Plains, says his community looked to the school board for help.

“When Sandy Hook actually occurred, just after that, we had a lot of public outcry, locally,” Sydow told KSMU. “Parents [asked], ‘How are you going to protect the kids here? We want you to do something.’” 

Fairview board members reached out to a security contractor named Greg Martin. He created a program for school employees, including teachers, to carry concealed firearms in the classroom.

Martin founded Shield Solutions, a firm that trains staff at businesses and schools in firearm skills. Its programs are currently used in more than 35 schools, mostly in south-central Missouri.

Martin says teachers and staff who are recruited for the program go through a series of mental and physical tests before being approved to carry a weapon…..

Here is the training they go through:

….The training consists of 40 hours – five hours of classroom instruction and 35 hours of range time. And the instructors don’t go easy on their pupils either. Although participants may begin their training wet behind the ears, by the end of the course they are required to prove that they can not only handle a gun safely and accurately. Additionally, the training also prepares the class to handle the emotional toil that comes when dealing with a potentially lethal situation. And if they can’t cut it, they’re cut from the program, but the school district has the option of sending another staffer in their stead.

In a recent class there was one elementary school teacher who couldn’t handle the military-style training, complete with running uphill as punishment for making mistakes.

“She’s not going to make it,” said Dan Wehmer, sales manager for Shield Solutions, who was initially told that the idea of armed teachers wouldn’t fly. “She can’t handle the stress. And if she can’t handle it out here, what would she do in a real situation?”

Greg Martin, founder of Shield Solutions and a former Missouri Highway Patrol trooper, believes the physical and emotional strain imposed is a vital part of the training.

They have to know that they won’t crumble under stress and that they can and will pull the trigger during an active shooter scenario to save lives, even if it means that – heaven forbid – the shooter is their own student who has sat in their own classroom.

“It adds to the stress,” Martin said. “But it makes them better. “They can’t fail at this.”

(More at GUNS.COM)

These districts took to heart recommendations made after other school shooting. The Parkland police also failed like the Uvalde school shooting.

So 2 of the 3 deadliest school shootings made it to that gruesome list because of inaction by armed and trained professionals. When my life is about to end by violence, I need to be trained to keep it. And I can rely on myself to do so.

But the Biden Admin doesn’t track with this common sense:

Very…

very…

sad


Politicized School List


  1. Thurston High School.
  2. Columbine High School.
  3. Heritage High School.
  4. Deming Middle School.
  5. Fort Gibson Middle School.
  6. Buell Elementary School.
  7. Lake Worth Middle School.
  8. University of Arkansas.
  9. Junipero Serra High School.
  10. Santana High School.
  11. Bishop Neumann High School.
  12. Pacific Lutheran University.
  13. Granite Hills High School.
  14. Lew Wallace High School.
  15. Martin Luther King, Jr. High School.
  16. Appalachian School of Law.
  17. Washington High School.
  18. Conception Abbey.
  19. Benjamin Tasker Middle School.
  20. University of Arizona.
  21. Lincoln High School.
  22. John McDonogh High School.
  23. Red Lion Area Junior High School.
  24. Case Western Reserve University.
  25. Rocori High School.
  26. Ballou High School.
  27. Randallstown High School.
  28. Bowen High School.
  29. Red Lake Senior High School.
  30. Harlan Community Academy High School.
  31. Campbell County High School.
  32. Milwee Middle School.
  33. Roseburg High School.
  34. Pine Middle School.
  35. Essex Elementary School.
  36. Duquesne University.
  37. Platte Canyon High School.
  38. Weston High School.
  39. West Nickel Mines School.
  40. Joplin Memorial Middle School.
  41. Henry Foss High School.
  42. Compton Centennial High School.
  43. Virginia Tech.
  44. Success Tech Academy.
  45. Miami Carol City Senior High School.
  46. Hamilton High School.
  47. Louisiana Technical College.
  48. Mitchell High School.
  49. O. Green Junior High School.
  50. Northern Illinois University.
  51. Lakota Middle School.
  52. Knoxville Central High School.
  53. Willoughby South High School.
  54. Henry Ford High School.
  55. University of Central Arkansas.
  56. Dillard High School.
  57. Dunbar High School.
  58. Hampton University.
  59. Harvard College.
  60. Larose-Cut Off Middle School.
  61. International Studies Academy.
  62. Skyline College.
  63. Discovery Middle School.
  64. University of Alabama.
  65. DeKalb School.
  66. Deer Creek Middle School.
  67. Ohio State University.
  68. Mumford High School.
  69. University of Texas.
  70. Kelly Elementary School.
  71. Marinette High School.
  72. Aurora Central High School.
  73. Millard South High School.
  74. Martinsville West Middle School.
  75. Worthing High School.
  76. Millard South High School.
  77. Highlands Intermediate School.
  78. Cape Fear High School.
  79. Chardon High School.
  80. Episcopal School of Jacksonville.
  81. Oikos University.
  82. Hamilton High School.
  83. Perry Hall School.
  84. Normal Community High School.
  85. University of South Alabama.
  86. Banner Academy South.
  87. University of Southern California.
  88. Sandy Hook Elementary School.
  89. Apostolic Revival Center Christian School.
  90. Taft Union High School.
  91. Osborn High School.
  92. Stevens Institute of Business and Arts.
  93. Hazard Community and Technical College.
  94. Chicago State University.
  95. Lone Star College-North.
  96. Cesar Chavez High School.
  97. Price Middle School.
  98. University of Central Florida.
  99. New River Community College.
  100. Grambling State University.
  101. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  102. Ossie Ware Mitchell Middle School.
  103. Ronald E. McNair Discovery Academy.
  104. North Panola High School.
  105. Carver High School.
  106. Agape Christian Academy.
  107. Sparks Middle School.
  108. North Carolina A&T State University.
  109. Stephenson High School.
  110. Brashear High School.
  111. West Orange High School.
  112. Arapahoe High School.
  113. Edison High School.
  114. Liberty Technology Magnet High School.
  115. Hillhouse High School.
  116. Berrendo Middle School.
  117. Purdue University.
  118. South Carolina State University.
  119. Los Angeles Valley College.
  120. Charles F. Brush High School.
  121. University of Southern California.
  122. Georgia Regents University.
  123. Academy of Knowledge Preschool.
  124. Benjamin Banneker High School.
  125. H. Conley High School.
  126. East English Village Preparatory Academy.
  127. Paine College.
  128. Georgia Gwinnett College.
  129. John F. Kennedy High School.
  130. Seattle Pacific University.
  131. Reynolds High School.
  132. Indiana State University.
  133. Albemarle High School.
  134. Fern Creek Traditional High School.
  135. Langston Hughes High School.
  136. Marysville Pilchuck High School.
  137. Florida State University.
  138. Miami Carol City High School.
  139. Rogers State University.
  140. Rosemary Anderson High School.
  141. Wisconsin Lutheran High School.
  142. Frederick High School.
  143. Tenaya Middle School.
  144. Bethune-Cookman University.
  145. Pershing Elementary School.
  146. Wayne Community College.
  147. B. Martin Middle School.
  148. Southwestern Classical Academy.
  149. Savannah State University.
  150. Harrisburg High School.
  151. Umpqua Community College.
  152. Northern Arizona University.
  153. Texas Southern University.
  154. Tennessee State University.
  155. Winston-Salem State University.
  156. Mojave High School.
  157. Lawrence Central High School.
  158. Franklin High School.
  159. Muskegon Heights High School.
  160. Independence High School.
  161. Madison High School.
  162. Antigo High School.
  163. University of California-Los Angeles.
  164. Jeremiah Burke High School.
  165. Alpine High School.
  166. Townville Elementary School.
  167. Vigor High School.
  168. Linden McKinley STEM Academy.
  169. June Jordan High School for Equity.
  170. Union Middle School.
  171. Mueller Park Junior High School.
  172. West Liberty-Salem High School.
  173. University of Washington.
  174. King City High School.
  175. North Park Elementary School.
  176. North Lake College.
  177. Freeman High School.
  178. Mattoon High School.
  179. Rancho Tehama Elementary School.
  180. Aztec High School.
  181. Wake Forest University.
  182. Italy High School.
  183. NET Charter High School.
  184. Marshall County High School.
  185. Sal Castro Middle School.
  186. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
  187. Great Mills High School
  188. Central Michigan University
  189. Huffman High School
  190. Frederick Douglass High School
  191. Forest High School
  192. Highland High School
  193. Dixon High School
  194. Santa Fe High School
  195. Noblesville West Middle School
  196. University of North Carolina Charlotte
  197. STEM School Highlands Ranch
  198. Edgewood High School
  199. Palm Beach Central High School
  200. Providence Career & Technical Academy
  201. Fairley High School (school bus)
  202. Canyon Springs High School
  203. Dennis Intermediate School
  204. Florida International University
  205. Central Elementary School
  206. Cascade Middle School
  207. Davidson High School
  208. Prairie View A & M University
  209. Altascocita High School
  210. Central Academy of Excellence
  211. Cleveland High School
  212. Robert E. Lee High School
  213. Cheyenne South High School
  214. Grambling State University
  215. Blountsville Elementary School
  216. Holmes County, Mississippi (school bus)
  217. Prescott High School
  218. College of the Mainland
  219. Wynbrooke Elementary School
  220. UNC Charlotte
  221. Riverview Florida (school bus)
  222. Second Chance High School
  223. Carman-Ainsworth High School
  224. Williwaw Elementary School
  225. Monroe Clark Middle School
  226. Central Catholic High School
  227. Jeanette High School
  228. Eastern Hills High School
  229. DeAnza High School
  230. Ridgway High School
  231. Reginald F. Lewis High School
  232. Saugus High School
  233. Pleasantville High School
  234. Waukesha South High School
  235. Oshkosh High School
  236. Catholic Academy of New Haven
  237. Bellaire High School
  238. North Crowley High School
  239. McAuliffe Elementary School
  240. South Oak Cliff High School
  241. Texas A&M University-Commerce
  242. Sonora High School
  243. Western Illinois University
  244. Oxford High School
  245. Robb Elementary School

Did We “Lose” the Vietnam War?

(Originally posted June, 2014)

“The war America never lost, but wasn’t allowed to win” — L. Brent Bozell III

Video description:

Did the United States win or lose the Vietnam War? We are taught that it was a resounding loss for America, one that proves that intervening in the affairs of other nations is usually misguided. The truth is that our military won the war, but our politicians lost it. The Communists in North Vietnam actually signed a peace treaty, effectively surrendering. But the U.S. Congress didn’t hold up its end of the bargain. In just five minutes, learn the truth about who really lost the Vietnam War

Remember, these countries actually fell to the spread of Communism:

➤ Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia, and half of Germany, North Korea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Congo-Brazzaville, Benin, Vietnam, on and on.

Here is a great thought experiment from David Mamet:

Let us squint for a moment, to see if we may blur the particulars and perceive a familiar outline in an unfamiliar act. A young wealthy woman puts on vaguely military garb and travels to a far-off, less-developed land to participate in adventure. She meets there the more primitive indigenous people, admires their hunting abilities, and, in fact, poses with one of their large guns, famous for having bagged many trophies.

Q. What is she doing?

A. Going on Safari.

Essentially, yes. The woman, however, would be appalled had the big gun been used to kill an elephant. But it has not. It has been used to kill American fliers.

Jane Fonda’s Adventure Tourism is, then, incorrectly, identified not as a safari but as “Ending the War.”

This was a no-cost, exhilarating adventure, all the more attractive because it took place in the purlieus of danger, but contained no danger; and it could be described as “humanitarianism,” which is an edifying title, rather than “slumming,” which is perhaps less so.

Ms. Fonda did not choose to take her wish for adventure into the veldt, where, after all, the beasts might strike back, but to Hanoi in 1969. At the height of the Vietnam War—to pose with the enemy, secure in the knowledge that her (largely inherited) position would protect her from prosecution for what was, arguably, an act of treason.

In her reliance upon this protection she was, of course, availing herself of that same privilege and culture whose destruction she was endorsing in posing by the gun.

Her pilgrimage, as Mr. Hollander points out, was not unique. Intellectuals through the twentieth century have traveled see the Potemkin Villages of Stalin’s “Workers Miracle,” the happy children of China, and the grinning, sun-drenched Campesinos [peasants] of the Island Paradise. They have believed what they were shown.

From the Webbs, and Bertrand Russell, to Susan Sontag, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and various movie stars of our day, these happy dupes reward themselves for feeling superior to their own country, from which country they were free to travel, and to which they were free to return, while the smiling folk they visited were locked in slave states.

See also the brave actors who endeavored to boycott, and so close, the 2009 Toronto Film Festival because it offended by showing films from Israel.

This “visiting” and political pilgrimage differs from safari in that one does not here toy with danger. It more closely resembles the Victorian practice of “going among the poor.”

It used to be called “passing out tracts.”

David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), 96-98.

The following is Dennis Prager’s interview of Senior Fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, Bruce Herschensohn, about his latest book: An American Amnesia: How the US Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia. An excellent interview with two calls included.

And here is a longer dealing with myths surrounding Vietnam, via the indomitable Michael Medved:

Michael Medved (in this edited version of this Lie #1) talks to the reasons and history behind us entering the Vietnam war. This can be listened to in whole via iTunes free subscription to American Conservative University’s channel, or on their website: acu.libsyn.com/​

 ✦ Show 51 [Fri, 9 June 2006]

 ✦ Show 52 [Thu, 15 June 2006]

Afterword

Here are three book recommends that re-influenced me (deprogrammed me) on Vietnam after owning and watching many years prior Time-Life’s VHS series on Vietnam:

Bonus Interview:

Phillip E. Jennings served in Vietnam with the United States Marine Corps, flying helicopters, and in Laos as a pilot for Air America. He is the author of Nam-a-Rama and Goodbye Mexico, and won the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society first prize for fiction with his short story, “Train Wreck in a Small Town.” A successful entrepreneur, he is currently CEO of Molecular Resonance Corporation, which is developing technology to detect Improvised Explosive Devices. The book discussed is, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War (The Politically Incorrect Guides)”

Are 97% Of Doctors Vaccinated? (Challenging an AMA Survey)

I came across a comment on Facebook that I wish to refute as I am sure it is being widely used in conversations.

  • According to the American Medical Association 97% of all American Doctors have been vaccinated. They want to save lives even their own! We trust them when we’ve been in car accidents, when having babies, when being diagnosed with cancer, when in need of school vaccines, diabetes and any number of things we turn to doctors to fix. Please talk with your physician and save a life hopefully your own! 

A “FLASHBACK” EXAMPLE: What it is with 97%… climate ACTIVISTS love this number as well. We can see from this early example of Climate activists using the number, it was based on 77 participants:

(CLICK GRAPH TO ENLARGE IN SEPERATE WINDOW)

It looks like 98% of Climate Scientists support the “global warming” positions held by the “professional Left,” however, this is not the case.

This is the point I am making with the “Vaxxed Doctors” survey from the American Medical Association. Which is, there almost 97% was based on 300 physicians who RESPONDED to the survey. In another survey done by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons of 700 physicians shows a different percentage. 

(CLICK GRAPH TO ENLARGE IN SEPERATE WINDOW)

Of the 700 physicians responding to an internet survey by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), nearly 60 percent said they were not “fully vaccinated” against COVID.

This contrasts with the claim by the American Medical Association that 96 percent of practicing physicians are fully vaccinated. This was based on 300 respondents.

Neither survey represents a random sample of all American physicians, but the AAPS survey shows that physician support for the mass injection campaign is far from unanimous.

“It is wrong to call a person who declines a shot an ‘anti-vaxxer,’” states AAPS executive director Jane Orient, M.D. “Virtually no physicians are ‘anti-antibiotics’ or ‘anti-surgery,’ whereas all are opposed to treatments that they think are unnecessary, more likely to harm than to benefit an individual patient, or inadequately tested.”

The AAPS survey also showed that 54 percent of physician respondents were aware of patients suffering a “significant adverse reaction.” Of the unvaccinated physicians, 80 percent said “I believe risk of shots exceeds risk of disease,” and 30% said “I already had COVID.”………

This has to do with as well which doctors belong to which organizations. For instance, I myself belong to AMAC, The Association of Mature American Citizens, and not AARP – American Association of Retired Persons, Why? Because the former uses my money in a way the latter does not that comports to my interests more closely. The former (AMAC) may support Crisis Pregnancy Centers rather than Planned Parenthood (AARP) – as one example.

So too do doctors and physicians belong to certain organizations that better represent their interests – or – respond to surveys from organizations [if they were to receive two “competing” surveys] they admire more.

At any rate, the AMA survey is not by any means the end all in percentages.

Cue an “LOL” here.

Republicans Not Getting Vaccinated | Delta Variant Dangers

The Left is making Trump supporters the Boogeyman. Here are the stats of those not getting vaccinated

Ben Shapiro runs through some of the real numbers… instead of percentages of those sick with Delta.


GRAPHIC I ADDED


A Facebook “Covid Meme” Examined (“Experts vs Dummies”)

This is something I saw pop up on my FB in slow traffic yesterday and I thought it worthy of a “quick” retort.

A couple things going on here. First, no one I listen to or have read (other than the kooky “Alex Jones fringe,” has said it’s “not dangerous.” For instance, I myself argue it is as dangerous as the 1957-1958 and the 1968-1969 outbreaks — when the numbers are tampered down with the CDC’s change to how death certificates are written:

SOME EXAMPLES TO SUPPORT THE CONTENTION

  • Last month Alameda County, Calif., reduced its Covid death toll by 25% after state public-health officials insisted that deaths be attributed to Covid only if the virus was a direct or contributing factor. — Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health and Carey Business School. (Wall Street Journal)
    1. Alameda County has changed the way it calculates deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a 25% drop this weekend. The official total fell from 1,634 to 1,223 on Friday after the county changed its methodology to align with narrower guidelines used by California and U.S. health agencies. According to a news release from the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency, the new number includes only people who “died as a direct result of COVID-19, or had the virus as a contributing cause of death as well as people for whom COVID-19 could not be ruled out as a cause of death.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

(FLASHBACK VIA RPT) And as states are going over death certificates, they are dropping by at least 25% in deaths by Covid-19. And some independent groups are helping “catch” the inflated number, like Pennsylvania’s “Wolf administration was caught this week adding up to 269 fake deaths to the state totals on Tuesday” (CITADELPOLITICS). Or this short example (PJ-MEDIA)

  • On Thursday, the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) confirmed a report by the Freedom Foundation that they have included those who tested positive for COVID-19 but died of other causes, including gunshot injuries, in their coronavirus death totals. This calls into serious question the state’s calculations of residents who have actually died of the CCP pandemic.
  • Last week, after it was reported that, like Washington, Colorado was counting deaths of all COVID-19 positive persons regardless of cause (which had resulted in the inclusion of deaths from alcohol poisoning), the Colorado Department of Health and Environment began to differentiate between deaths “among people with COVID-19” and “deaths due to COVID-19.”

Just one more of the many examples I could share is the New York Times getting 40% wrong of their “died from Covid-19 under 30-years old” front page news story. Mmmm, no, they didn’t die of Covid.

  • This Sunday morning, The New York Times has devoted their front page to the nearly 100,000 U.S. victims of COVID-19. The text-only cover lists 1,000 names and excerpts from the obituaries of people who have succumbed to the dreaded virus. The only problem with this lovely memorial is that at least one of the victims did not appear to have died from the coronavirus and his was only the sixth name on the list. [….] But others were quick to point out that Haynes was only the sixth name on the list. One replied, “He was one out of 5 under 30 on the list. Another in that group had a condition that doctors told him he would not live to 18. Did not test positive for COVID but still ruled a COVID death. That’s 40% of the under 30 age bracket.” (Red State)

[….]

APRIL 8TH (2020):

APRIL 19 (2020):

So, I am saying as an example, that a good portion of the deaths being attributed to Covid are not in fact Covid deaths.

The CDC has introduced a new ICD code, “to accurately capture mortality data for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) on death certificates.”

(Note: ICD stands for International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. It is a medical classification list by the World Health Organization (WHO).)

The new ICD code for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is U07.1. The CDC email says that the WHO has added a second code, U07.2, for instances “where a laboratory confirmation is inconclusive or not available. Because laboratory test results are not typically reported on death certificates in the U.S., National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is not planning to implement U07.2 for mortality statistics.”

The problem with the new codes is that it may result in an inflated number of coronavirus deaths….

(RED STATE)

And this is what I [for example] have argued. Do these changes made in April of 2020 impact previous outbreaks? Would this change also increase the 1957-1958 and the1968-1969 outbreaks? I think so.

A couple more examples to support the contention

(Story about a May 2020 death cert)

…. Jack Dake, an Oklahoma man who lived an admirable life as a veteran, a lifelong blue-collar worker and a loving dad, died on May 6 after contracting COVID-19.

There’s just one problem with his cause of death, his family says: Jack Dake did not die from the coronavirus.

The man barely had any symptoms, his family told The Oklahoman, and he died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

But, the family insists, that didn’t stop a coroner from labeling Dake as a coronavirus statistic on his death certificate on May 14.

Dake’s son, Jack Dake Jr., told the newspaper that his father’s death had absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic.

“Alzheimer’s was the cause of death, and COVID-19 was not even a contributing condition,” Dake Jr. told The Oklahoman. “Yet it’s recorded as the only cause of death.”

Dake apparently contracted the coronavirus at an Oklahoma City assisted living center and tested positive on April 17.

[….]

But the elder Dake was in one of the final stages of his battle with Alzheimer’s and had quit eating and drinking, which is common for end-stage sufferers of the degenerative brain disease.

Dake Jr. also said his father was never again tested for the coronavirus, but the family did request that he be put on hospice care, as he was not eating and was dehydrated.

Dake was listed as being terminal with COVID-19 by hospice workers, and when he died 20 days after testing positive, his death was recorded as one of the state’s coronavirus fatalities.

[….]

According to USA Today,  a provision in the Coronavirus Aid, Relieve and Economic Securities Act provides a “20% premium or add on” to Medicare reimbursements to health care facilities. (More information about that provision from the American Hospital Association.)

(WESTERN JOURNAL)

  • The Montezuma County Coroner’s Office is disputing the state’s claim of a third fatal case of the coronavirus in Cortez, saying the person died of alcohol poisoning. County Coroner George Deavers said the person tested positive for COVID-19, but an investigation by him and the pathologist determined the cause of death was ethanol toxicity. The person’s blood-alcohol content was 0.55, or almost seven times the legal driving limit of 0.08 in Colorado, Deavers said. A BAC of 0.3 is considered lethal. (DURANGO HERALD)
  • CBS 12 News examined medical examiner’s reports on COVID-19 deaths and found eight examples where a person was listed as a coronavirus death but had actually died from something else. This includes a 60-year-old man who died from a gunshot wound to the head, a 90-year-old who fell and broke a hip, and a 77-year-old who died of Parkinson’s disease. (CBS)
  • A woman is left with “no peace” after her father’s death certificate stated he died of the coronavirus despite previously testing negative and an MRI test showing he suffered multiple strokes. Jay Smith died on July 12 in San Antonio, Texas, after an MRI showed brain damage from enduring multiple strokes. Kayla Smith, however, said last week that her father’s death certificate listed him as a coronavirus victim. “They put him as COVID. He didn’t have COVID. He had a stroke,” she said. “The MRI showed that he had multiple strokes in the brain, and also he had a blood clot. Those multiple strokes caused so much damage in his brain that it caused damage in his body.” Jay Smith was first taken to the hospital on July 6, where he tested negative for the coronavirus and was transferred to a non-COVID floor on July 7, according to local outlet KATU. (WASHINGTON EXAMINER)

I have argued from the very get-go [or pointed to] stuff like: that (a) the PCR “cycle test” was too high, (b) that deaths attributed to Covid shouldn’t have been (here as well) that (c) the numbers of unknown – asymptomatic – cases lower the infection percentages/rates, i.e., the Infection Fatality rate, Etc., Etc.

The other contention in the “meme” is that “no experts” agree with portions of the above. Just high-school dummies.

Here is an older post:


List of “Dummies”


Dennis Prager interviews the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, Jay Bhattacharya. Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. Most recently, Bhattacharya has focused his research on the epidemiology of COVID-19 and evaluation of the various policy responses to the epidemic. He is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document proposing a relaxation of social controls that delay the spread of COVID-19.

A worthwhile interview.

Here are some of the signatories of Great Barrington Declaration:

  • Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
  • Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.
  • Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.
  • Alexander Walker, principal at World Health Information Science Consultants, former Chair of Epidemiology, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, USA
  • Andrius Kavaliunas, epidemiologist and assistant professor at Karolinska Institute, Sweden
  • Angus Dalgleish, oncologist, infectious disease expert and professor, St. George’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, England
  • Anthony J Brookes, professor of genetics, University of Leicester, England
  • Annie Janvier, professor of pediatrics and clinical ethics, Université de Montréal and Sainte-Justine University Medical Centre, Canada
  • Ariel Munitz, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
  • Boris Kotchoubey, Institute for Medical Psychology, University of Tübingen, Germany
  • Cody Meissner, professor of pediatrics, expert on vaccine development, efficacy, and safety. Tufts University School of Medicine, USA
  • David Katz, physician and president, True Health Initiative, and founder of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, USA
  • David Livermore, microbiologist, infectious disease epidemiologist and professor, University of East Anglia, England
  • Eitan Friedman, professor of medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
  • Ellen Townsend, professor of psychology, head of the Self-Harm Research Group, University of Nottingham, England
  • Eyal Shahar, physician, epidemiologist and professor (emeritus) of public health, University of Arizona, USA
  • Florian Limbourg, physician and hypertension researcher, professor at Hannover Medical School, Germany
  • Gabriela Gomes, mathematician studying infectious disease epidemiology, professor, University of Strathclyde, Scotland
  • Gerhard Krönke, physician and professor of translational immunology, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
  • Gesine Weckmann, professor of health education and prevention, Europäische Fachhochschule, Rostock, Germany
  • Günter Kampf, associate professor, Institute for Hygiene and Environmental Medicine, Greifswald University, Germany
  • Helen Colhoun, professor of medical informatics and epidemiology, and public health physician, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
  • Jonas Ludvigsson, pediatrician, epidemiologist and professor at Karolinska Institute and senior physician at Örebro University Hospital, Sweden
  • Karol Sikora, physician, oncologist, and professor of medicine at the University of Buckingham, England
  • Laura Lazzeroni, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of biomedical data science, Stanford University Medical School, USA
  • Lisa White, professor of modelling and epidemiology, Oxford University, England
  • Mario Recker, malaria researcher and associate professor, University of Exeter, England
  • Matthew Ratcliffe, professor of philosophy, specializing in philosophy of mental health, University of York, England
  • Matthew Strauss, critical care physician and assistant professor of medicine, Queen’s University, Canada
  • Michael Jackson, research fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
  • Michael Levitt, biophysicist and professor of structural biology, Stanford University, USA.
  • Recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
  • Mike Hulme, professor of human geography, University of Cambridge, England
  • Motti Gerlic, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
  • Partha P. Majumder, professor and founder of the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani, India
  • Paul McKeigue, physician, disease modeler and professor of epidemiology and public health, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
  • Rajiv Bhatia, physician, epidemiologist and public policy expert at the Veterans Administration, USA
  • Rodney Sturdivant, infectious disease scientist and associate professor of biostatistics, Baylor University, USA
  • Salmaan Keshavjee, professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, USA
  • Simon Thornley, epidemiologist and biostatistician, University of Auckland, New Zealand
  • Simon Wood, biostatistician and professor, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
  • Stephen Bremner,professor of medical statistics, University of Sussex, England
  • Sylvia Fogel, autism provider and psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School, USA
  • Tom Nicholson, Associate in Research, Duke Center for International Development, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, USA
  • Udi Qimron, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
  • Ulrike Kämmerer, professor and expert in virology, immunology and cell biology, University of Würzburg, Germany
  • Uri Gavish, biomedical consultant, Israel
  • Yaz Gulnur Muradoglu, professor of finance, director of the Behavioural Finance Working Group, Queen Mary University of London, England

Filibuster Hypocrisy: Biden Supported It, Harris Led It, Dems Used It

DAVID HARRIS JR. expands on the facts mentioned above in the video:

According to the Democrats, anyone who uses the filibuster is a racist, If that is true then Democrats in the Senate. Last year alone the Democrats used the filibuster over 300 times. The KKK did not block anything. That must mean that the Democrats are much worse than KKK. I’m just kidding.

The reason that Democrats used the filibuster over 300 times is their ideology, not their racism.

Now, the Democrats want to kill the filibuster so that they will have a dictatorship in order to control the masses. The Democrats claim that slave owners were the people responsible for the filibuster.

But, that s a lie.

The filibuster was put in place in 1806, 55 years before the civil war. Slavery was the law of the land them. There was no need to put the filibuster in place due to slavery.

The filibuster is the only thing standing in the way for the Democrats to have total control of the government. That should scare you and it is a dangerous thing for them. What happens when the Republicans take control with no filibuster?  They could make crossing our border a felony and anyone who aids them could be tried for aiding and abetting the illegal aliens. They could cut all funding for Planned Parenthood and other budget items.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Democrats used filibuster 327 times, compared to only once by GOP in 2020: Report

President Joe Biden has been increasingly critical of the Senate filibuster, calling it a Jim Crow relic and saying it has been widely abused despite Democrats using it over 300 times in 2020, compared to once by Republicans.

    • “After @POTUS @JoeBiden denounced the rampant abuse of the filibuster last year, we did some digging,” Fox News anchor John Roberts tweeted Friday. “Republicans used it once. Democrats used it 327 times.”

Remember when Kamala Harris said she would get rid of the filibuster to pass AOC’s socialist, job-killing Green New Deal. (See more at DAILY CALLER)

BREITBART:

Harris said, “Here’s the thing. first of all, let me tell you, I think about this issue about this, my nieces are one-and-a-half and three-years old. When I look at those babies, and I think about what the world will be like in 20 years if we don’t act. I’m really afraid. And as it relates to those Republicans in Congress where I’ve now been for two and a half years, every one of those members needs to look at the babies, the grand babies in their life and then look in the mirror and ask themselves why have they failed to act?”

She continued, “On the issue of this climate crisis, I strongly believe this is a fight against powerful interests. and leaders need to lead. So lead, follow, or get out of the way. Get out of the way starting with Donald Trump. So yeah we need to work across the aisle. I’m going to tell you, I’ve been there two years and some months. I see no evidence of it. I kid you guys not. In the United States Congress, I was part of a committee hearing during which the underlying premise of the hearing was to debate whether science should be the basis of public policy. This on a matter that is about an existential threat to who we are as human beings.”

She added, “So again back to the United States Congress, here’s my point. if they fail to act as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal.”

Disinfecting the Media | The Bleach Lie (Part 2)

Rumble — Larry Elder touches on a previous media and Democrat obsession. That is, that Trump told people to drink bleach or inject disinfectant. PART ONE is here: “Larry Elder Sanitizes the Left (Bleach Lie)”.

I have also posted on the topic a bit….

Here, Larry Elder knocks it out of the park as usual. I insert a flashback to PART ONE (3:30 to 5:25). Likewise, I include my “Biden Edition” of the President mischaracterizing Trump’s Charlottesville statements (6:08 to 7:15). I also include a phone call Larry took (7:53 to 9:32). At the end of the call I insert another upload I cobbled together to expand what Trump was trying to express (11:11 to the end).

People Never PAID 90% in Taxes (Economic Myths)

This is posted for adding to a conversation from FACEBOOK where I repeatedly noted no one ever paid 90% in taxes after it was brought up by my antagonist — hoping the operative word “PAID” would sink in — (conversation reproduced at the end of this post for clarity — JUMP.) Other Posts that discuss related issues:

90% MYTH

(From the video):

  • “economic historian Phil Magness, of the American Institute for Economic Research, says that progressives miss an important fact: The high tax rates that America had in the past actually didn’t bring in much revenue. When rates were at 70 percent, Magness tells John Stossel, ‘A millionaire on average would pay 41 percent’.”

Even “CheckYourFact” says this:

  • While the top marginal income tax rate was over 90 percent [92%] while Eisenhower was president, few people were subject to that rate due to deductions and other tax loopholes. Top income earners paid much lower average tax rates.

(MISES.ORG has an excellent article dealing with the 90% issue, as well as GREY ENLIGHTENMENT)

ALMOST CLASSICAL notes this in their “The 90% Tax Rate Myth” post:

So, let’s get more complicated. When there was a 94% top rate in 1944-45, there were so many deductions and exclusions that the taxable income was not comparable to someone’s entire income. First, the top rate started at $200,000, which today is equal to $2,413,059.90 — so the maximum EMTR would apply only to incomes of $2.5 million. But, that’s still taxable income, not earned income.

In 1944, you could deduct business meals, all business travel, all forms of interest payments, and much more. You could even deduct spousal travel expenses on a business trip! (Why travel alone?) Companies could also “loan” or “provide” almost anything to an employee, from an apartment to standard benefits. It was possible to shelter tens of thousands of dollars from taxable income. Three-martini lunches and expense accounts were important realities, skewing tax calculations.

As a result of deductions and exclusions, even the theoretical maximum Real Rate of taxation at 60% in 1944 overstates taxation dramatically. The reality? On earned income, the richest U.S. taxpayers paid close to 40 percent of their earned incomes in taxes in 1944. We simply didn’t count much of the compensation as taxable income.

Allow me to introduce you to Hauser’s Law. Published in 1993 by William Kurt Hauser, a San Francisco investment economist, Hauser’s Law suggests, “No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP.” This theory was published in The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 1993. For a variety of reasons, we seem to balance tax collections within a narrow range.

Since 1945, U.S. federal tax receipts have been fairly constant in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with taxes ranging from 15 to 20 percent of GDP. The graph is as follows:

When people demand higher taxes on the rich, usually phrased as paying a “fair share,” they are ignoring how our tax system has functioned historically. We could create more brackets, to tax the top 1% at a higher rate once again, but the net increase in tax revenues wouldn’t be dramatic. Why not? Because government spending is near historical highs: we are spending at near-WWII levels. It would be nearly impossible to tax enough to pay the federal bills, and doing so would likely crush the economy….

CREATING MORE REVENUE

So, what did JFK’s “the rising tide lifts all the boats,” Reagan’s tax cuts and Bush’s tax cuts show? (See: John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan Proved Tax Cuts Work“) That lower taxes brings in more revenue.

  • Should tax rates be higher? It’s the million dollar question! Up? Down? No change? Where in the world should taxes go? In election years, the question of tax rates fills the airwaves. In non-election years, the question of tax rates, again, fills the airwaves. So what’s the answer? UCLA Professor of Economics Tim Groseclose explains his research on the topic. Basically, there’s a certain point at which higher tax rates actually reduce the amount of revenue the government collects. What’s that point? When are tax rates too high? Learn a valuable lesson in economics, and public policy.

Which is why either a national sales tax or a flat tax would help fuel our GDP engine more. Thomas Sowell further explains via an excerpt (my scan from my book) of the “conclusion” of Thomas Sowell’s “The World of Numbers.” You can listen to the entirety of chapter 4 read via MIKE READS: Chpt 4(a) | Chpt 4(b).

I will also emphasize AEI’s PARTIAL QUOTE from my expanded quote — it has changed a bit due to my having the revised edition (as usual I add the references for people to further follow the rabbit trail):

THOMAS SOWELL

  • Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities: Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019), 110-114; (references), 255-257.

IMPLICATIONS

The emphasis on complex statistical analysis in economics and other fields— however valuable, or even vital, such statistical analysis may be in many cases— can lead to overlooking simple but fundamental questions as to whether the numbers on which these complex analyses are based are in fact measuring what they seem to be measuring, or claim to be measuring. “Income” statistics which lump together annual salaries and multi-year capital gains are just one of many sets of statistics which could stand much closer scrutiny at this fundamental level— especially if laws and policies affecting millions of human beings are to be based on statistical conclusions.

What can be disconcerting, if not painful, are the simple and obvious fallacies that can pass muster in intellectual circles when these fallacies seem to advance the prevailing vision of what is called “social justice.” Among prominent current examples is French economist Thomas Piketty’s large international statistical study of income inequality, which was instantly acclaimed in many countries, despite such obvious and fundamental misstatements as one pointed out by Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard:

Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a talisman in the uproar over inequality, wrote, “The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.” But total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not “as poor.”66

In addition to speaking of percentages as if they represented a given amount of income or wealth over the course of a century, Professor Piketty also made such assertions as that, in income, “the upper decile is truly a world unto itself,”67 when in fact just over half of all Americans are in that upper decile at some point in their lives.68 When Piketty said that the top one percent sit atop the “hierarchy” and “structure of inequality,”69 he again verbally transformed a changing mix of people in particular income brackets into a fixed structure rather than a fluid process, in which most Americans do not remain in the same quintile from one decade to the next.

Such misstatements are different expressions of the same fundamental misconception. As an empirical study of the 400 richest Americans pointed out, Piketty “naively assumes that it’s the same people getting richer.”70 But the majority of the 400 richest Americans have earned their fortunes in their own lifetimes, rather than being heirs of the 400 largest fortunes of the past!71

Such misconceptions are not peculiar to Professor Piketty. Nor are these the only problems with his statistics. But that such simple and obvious misstatements can pass muster in intellectual circles is a problem and a danger that goes far beyond Thomas Piketty.

Whether income differences are measured before taxes or after taxes can change the degree of inequality. If inequalities are measured both after taxes and after government transfers, whether in money or in goods and services, that can reduce the inequality considerably, when high-income people pay higher taxes and low-income people receive most of the government transfers.

Statistics on tax rates themselves can be grossly misleading when changes in tax rates are described in such terms as “a $300 billion increase in taxes” or “a $300 billion decrease in taxes.In reality, all that the government can do is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react. There have been times when higher tax rates have produced lower tax revenues, and other times when lower tax rates have produced higher tax revenues,72 as well as times when tax rates and tax revenues moved in the same direction.

During the 1920s, for example, the tax rate on the highest income Americans was reduced from 73 percent to 24 percent— and the income tax revenue rose substantially73— especially income tax revenues received from people in the highest income brackets. Under the older and much higher tax rate, vast sums of money from wealthy investors were sheltered in tax-exempt securities, such as municipal bonds. The total amount of money invested in tax-free securities was estimated to be three times the size of the annual budget of the federal government, and more than half as large as the national debt.74

Such vast and legally untaxable sums of money caught the attention and aroused the ire of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, who declared it “repugnant” in a democracy that there should be “a class in the community which cannot be reached for tax purposes.”75 Failing to get Congress to take steps toward ending tax exemptions for incomes from particular securities,76 Secretary Mellon sought instead to lower the tax rates to the point where it would in fact lead to collection of more tax revenues.

Tax-exempt securities tend not to pay as high a rate of return on investments as other securities, whose earnings are taxed. It made sense for wealthy investors to accept these lower rates of return from tax-exempt securities when the tax rate was 73 percent, but not after the tax rate was lowered to 24 percent. In terms of words on paper, the official tax rate on the highest incomes was cut from 73 percent to 24 percent in the 1920s. But, in terms of events in the real world, the tax rate actually paid— on staggering sums of money previously untouchable in tax shelters— rose from zero percent to 24 percent. This produced huge increases in tax revenues received from high-income people, both absolutely and as a percentage of all income taxes collected.77

This increase in income taxes collected from high-income taxpayers was a result of the plain fact that 24 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing. Tax rate cuts in some later administrations also led to increases in tax revenues!78 For example, a front-page news story in the New York Times of July 9, 2006 said: “An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year.79

However unexpected this increase in tax revenues may have been to the New York Times and others decrying “tax cuts for the rich,” this was precisely the kind of outcome predicted and expected by others in various administrations over the years, who had urged that tax rates be cut, in order to get money disgorged from tax shelters and invested in the market economy. This included people in the Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, where there were similar outcomes.80 But the very possibility that tax rates and tax revenues can move in opposite directions is seldom mentioned in the media— a crucial error of omission.

These are not simply arguments about history. Among the consequences in our own time is that proposals to reduce income tax rates are automatically met with objections to reducing income tax revenues. In the Wall Street Journal of January 31, 2018, for example, economist Alan Blinder objected to tax rate cuts on grounds that “the deficit is already too large!”81

This is in defiance of what the New York Times reported about the unexpected reduction of the deficit by increased tax revenues during the administration of President George W. Bush. It is also in defiance of a record-breaking budget surplus after tax rates were reduced in the 1920s— a surplus large enough to allow about one-fourth of the national debt to be paid off.82 Like many others, Professor Blinder proceeded as if it were axiomatic that tax rate reductions mean tax revenue reductions.

There is, of course, no guarantee of what any given tax rate reduction will lead to in a given set of circumstances. But Professor Blinder’s assertion was not based on any argument that a tax rate reduction under particular current circumstances would lead to a reduction in tax revenues. There was in fact no argument whatever on that point, nor apparently any sense of need to make such an argument. Similarly, a twenty-first century book on President Calvin Coolidge likewise asserted that, as a result of the tax rate cuts during his administration, “the bounty that the rich enjoyed sapped the U.S. Treasury of funds it might have used for other ends.”83 Thus a record-breaking budget surplus under President Coolidge was verbally transmuted into a deprivation of funds, with the turn of a phrase.

All the voluminous and detailed statistics on tax rates and tax revenues published by the Internal Revenue Service, going back more than a hundred years, might as well not exist, as far as many of those with the prevailing social vision are concerned. This is ultimately not a question about history, but about what such heedlessness implies for the present and still more so for the future.

REFERENCES

66 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), p. 99.

67 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 252.

68 Thomas A. Hirschl and Mark R. Rank, “The Life Course Dynamics of Affluence,” PLoS ONE, January 28, 2015, p. 5.

69 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 278.

70 Robert Arnott, William Bernstein, and Lillian Wu, “The Myth of Dynastic Wealth: The Rich Get Poorer,” Cato Journal, Fall 2015, p. 461.

71 “Spare a Dime,” a special report on the rich, The Economist, April 4, 2009, p. 4.

72 See, for example, Phil Gramm and John F. Early, “The Myth of American Inequality,” Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2018, p. A15. See also Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, fifth edition (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 426-427, 428.

73 Gene Smiley and Richard Keehn, “Federal Personal Income Tax Policy in the 1920s,” Journal ofEconomic History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 1995), p. 286; Benjamin G. Rader, “Federal Taxation in the 1920s,” The Historian, Vol. 33, No. 3 (May 1971), p. 432; Burton W. Fulsom, Jr., The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America, sixth edition (Herndon, Virginia: Young America’s Foundation, 2010), pp. 108, 115, 116.

74 Burton W. Fulsom, Jr., The Myth of the Robber Barons, sixth edition, p. 109.

75 Andrew W. Mellon, Taxation: The People’s Business (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), p. 170.

76 Gene Smiley and Richard Keehn, “Federal Personal Income Tax Policy in the 1920s,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 1995), p. 289.

77 Burton W. Fulsom, Jr., The Myth of the Robber Barons, sixth edition, p. 116. The share of income tax revenues paid by people with incomes up to $50,000 a year fell, and the share of income tax revenues paid by people with incomes of $100,000 and up increased. At the extremes, taxpayers in the lowest income bracket paid 13 percent of all income tax revenues in 1921, but less than half of one percent of all income taxes in 1929, while taxpayers with incomes of a million dollars a year and up saw their share of income taxes paid rise from less than 5 percent to just over 19 percent. Gene Smiley and Richard Keehn, “Federal Personal Income Tax Policy in the 1920s,”Journal ofEconomic Histoy, Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 1995), p. 295; Benjamin G. Rader, “Federal Taxation in the 1920s,” The Historian, Vol. 33, No. 3 (May 1971), pp. 432-434.

78 Alan Reynolds, “Why 70% Tax Rates Won’t Work,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2011, p. A19; Stephen Moore, “Real Tax Cuts Have Curves,” Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2005, p. A13. Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz argued that the tax rate cuts during the Reagan administration failed: “In fact, Reagan had promised that the incentive effects of his tax cuts would be so powerful that tax revenues would increase. And yet, the only thing that increased was the deficit.” Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), p. 89. However, the tax revenues collected by the federal government during every year of the Reagan administration exceeded the tax revenues collected in any previous administration in the history of the country. Economic Report of the President: 2018 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2018), p. 552; U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Part 2, pp. 1104-1105. The deficit reflected the fact that there is no amount of money that Congress cannot outspend.

79 Edmund L. Andrews, “Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Curbs U.S. Deficit,” New York Times, July 9, 2006, p. Al.

80 James Gwartney and Richard Stroup, “Tax Cuts: Who Shoulders the Burden?” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Economic Review, March 1982, pp. 19-27; Benjamin G. Rader, “Federal Taxation in the 1920s: A Re-examination,” Historian, Vol. 33, No. 3, p. 432; Burton W. Folsom, Jr., The Myth of the Robber Barons, sixth edition, p. 116; Robert L. Bartley, The Seven Fat Years: And How to Do It Again (New York: The Free Press, 1992), pp. 71-74; Alan Reynolds, ‘Why 70% Tax Rates Won’t Work,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2011, p. A19; Stephen Moore, “Real Tax Cuts Have Curves,” Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2005, p. A13; Economic Report of the President: 2017 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2017), p. 586. See also United States Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income 1920-1929 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922-1932).

81 Alan S. Blinder, “Why Now Is the Wrong Time to Increase the Deficit,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2018, p. A15.

82 The national debt, which was a little over $24 billion in 1920— the last year of President Woodrow Wilson’s administration— was reduced to less than $18 billion in 1928, the last year of President Calvin Coolidge’s administration. U. S. Bureau of the Census, _Historical Statistics ofthe United States, Part 2, p.1104. See also David Greenberg, Calvin Coolidge (New York: Times Books, 2006), p. 67.

83 David Greenberg, Calvin Coolidge, p. 72.


CONVERSATION


 

Thomas Sowell DEBUNKS the Legacy of Slavery Argument

In this video Thomas Sowell quashes the legacy of slavery argument that liberals use to explain disparities between blacks and whites in the United States. He also shares his thoughts on giving reparations for descendants of slaves.

(Check out the 22 books Thomas Sowell highly recommends)