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Friday, April 29, 2022

Links - 29th April 2022 (2 - Covid-19: Mandates/Passports)

SNOBELEN: Time to stop vilifying the unvaccinated | Toronto Sun - "the logic gets thin on isolating the cost of treating a single virus. There are now vaccines for pneumonia; are the unvaccinated about to be taxed? How about that flu vaccine that 70% of Canadians don’t bother to get? Influenzas land people in the hospital, presumably at some cost to the taxpayer.   And then there are the lifestyle choices that have an impact on health care. One wonders when Premier Francois Legault will undergo a lifestyle assessment and be charged the appropriate tax for his diet and workout choices? Undoubtedly Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos will undergo a similar assessment and pay the appropriate tax for whatever risky behaviour he participates in (skiing, golf on cool mornings, dancing on slick floors). I am bracing for a tax on those of us who persist in starting two-year-old colts (who are known to be a tad snotty). That, my friends, is a clear risk to the health-care system.  If the health-tax efficacy (and legality) is suspect, the politics are crystal clear. The vast majority of people are vaccinated, making the unvaccinated a delicious target for vilification.   Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has mastered politicizing this virus. Vilifying the unvaccinated is morally abhorrent but politically expedient. Trudeau and Legault are following the time-honoured path of fixing the blame instead of the problem.   Blame the unvaccinated for health-care failures. Heck, they are an unseemly lot who probably drink cheap beer. That’s a whole lot easier than fixing a health system that has consistently let down Canadians during the long course of this pandemic...   It might be a good time to heed the wise words of Helen Keller: “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”"

Logic, Empathy, Honesty - Posts | Facebook - "If you had found out that your wife or daughter had been called into her bosses office, and given an ultimatum: sleep with me and ill promote you. Refuse and I'll fire you. How would you feel? Would you argue that's she is being given a fair choice? That she can just quit her job if she doesn't want to sleep with her boss? That she is being offered something in return? Of course not. Because most people understand that coercion is not consent. Having your livelihood threatened to force you to give up your bodily autonomy is evil. Whether you're being asked to perform sexual acts, or to take medical treatments you do not want is simply a matter of scale.  To expect a person to acquiesce is not only to expect them to give up their own choice, but to set a precedent that coercion is okay. Your wife or daughter may willingly conform, because maybe they really want the promotion and the trade off seems worth it, but what other demands will be made of other women once the behavior is excused? Coercion is just a cover for violence. Its the threat of harm used to instill fear. That a person can choose to comply does not make it less evil, it just makes the evil harder to distinguish."

Deloitte reverses COVID-19 vaccine mandate, but remains one of few large employers to do so - The Globe and Mail - "Mr. Samfiru also said that immediately after various provinces started easing their restrictions, his firm started seeing employers debating whether to recall their vaccine mandates.  Recent data from the job posting site Indeed.com showed that the share of Canadian job postings mentioning vaccine requirements stopped rising at the end of January. The share of job postings mentioning some form of vaccine-related requirement went from 2.4 per cent at the beginning of September to 11.5 per cent in mid-January and has remained the same ever since.  A February survey conducted by the Canadian Federation for Independent Business showed that 60 per cent of businesses supported eliminating vaccine mandates for employees, compared with 37 per cent who disagreed with getting rid of them."

Rupa Subramanya: Time to lift the federal government's outdated and unnecessary vaccine mandates - "As provincial vaccine mandates across Canada continue to fall like dominoes, attention is shifting to federal vaccine mandates, which are “some of the strongest in the world,” as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau bragged when he announced the mandates for the civil service and on federally regulated transport back in October 2021. Vaccine rules are much less stringent in most other major western countries. Austria, which announced that it was going to mandate vaccines for everyone last fall, recently withdrew the mandate before it came into force, arguing that it is not needed at this time due to the milder illness caused by the Omicron variant.  A similar vaccine mandate being considered in Germany, which has proved extremely controversial within the governing coalition, has not been implemented and likely won’t be. In that country, except in the health sector, vaccination is not mandatory for federal government employees. The list goes on. Canada has indeed the most stringent federal vaccine mandate as they apply to federal civil servants of any G7 country. In the United States, President Joe Biden’s sweeping federal vaccine mandates, meant to apply to federal workers as well as to private businesses that employ 100 or more people, are in shambles, as they’ve been aggressively challenged in court, and judges have suspended most of the mandates as the challenges work their way through the judicial system... Biden’s difficulties in ramming through federal vaccine mandates via executive orders stands in sharp contrast to the situation here in Canada, where legal challenges to federal and provincial vaccine mandates have enjoyed little success. Canadians, meanwhile, have largely acquiesced to some of the most stringent vaccine mandates and other COVID-related restrictions on individual liberty in the world.  In part, this is a reflection of our legal system, which gives much greater leeway to government-imposed mandates and restrictions than in the U.S., but it also reflects a Canadian culture of compliance, which was only challenged recently during the Freedom Convoy protests. Indeed, despite all the protestations to the contrary, the accelerated removal of vaccine passports and other restrictions at the provincial level arguably reflects the influence of the protesters. According to reports, as of April 4, Ontario will no longer insist on proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID test for provincial civil servants. In Nova Scotia, provincial civil servants who had refused vaccination can return to work on March 21, except for those who work in the health-care sector.  What is truly ironic about the vaccine mandate imposed on the federal workforce is that Canada tops the list of major countries in which public servants continue to work remotely...   It surely is bizarre that unvaccinated federal employees who are working from home have been placed on leave without pay, even though they’re not coming into their offices. And many civil servants will likely continue working remotely for some time to come... some federal employees will have been on leave without pay for nearly half a year, even though they were fully capable of doing their job safely from home. This is about as Kafkaesque as it gets.  Given that the provincial governments and many of our peer countries are removing their pandemic restrictions and starting to find ways to live with the virus, it’s extraordinary that the Canadian government refuses to acknowledge this reality and modify its policies accordingly. If it’s safe for civil servants in Ontario and Nova Scotia to return to work without proof of vaccination, what is so special about federal workplaces?"
Since vaccine mandates are essentially political, the different restrictions make sense

'Judge, jury and executioner': Aurora restaurant owners frustrated with proof-of-vaccination rules - "Not only are eateries forced to police customers for their proof of vaccination — keeping some customers away, slowing the seating process, confronting patrons presenting fake documentation and subjecting staff to possible harassment — but they still have to limit the number of customers dining in despite patrons proving they are double vaxxed... Sposito hasn’t had any run-ins with customers but he feels mandating proof of vaccination is an infringement on the rights of customers and business owners.  There isn’t any proof that restaurants have been the cause of spreading the virus... Checking vaccine certificates is a tool to prevent future lockdowns, Elenis added.  “It’s a good thing for the overall industry because this industry cannot suffer to be closed anymore,” he said.  “It would be totally devastating. This industry has suffered enough. It’s simple. Whether someone prefers vaccination or hates vaccinations, it doesn’t matter. This will keep the industry open.”"
So much for that

It’s Time To End Vaccine Mandates - "vaccine mandates for the general public are a straightforward contravention of standard medical ethics. Specifically the coercive nature of vaccine mandates violates a central principle: freely given consent. We have clearly recognized this in other areas in recent years, by having necessary and long-overdue conversations about what constitutes valid sexual consent.  These same principles also apply to medical consent generally. The Canadian Medical Protective Association publishes legal advice to physicians, in which they say for consent to a medical act to be considered valid, it must be voluntary: “Consent obtained under any suggestion of compulsion either by the actions or words of the physician or others may be no consent at all.” Specifically, if a physician becomes aware that a patient is seeking consultation at the behest of a third party (such as an employer), the Association notes the physician must ensure that “there has been no coercion.”... [a] public approach can legitimize coercion in very limited situations, such as seatbelt legislation, indoor smoking bans, and a prohibition on lead paint. However, it leaves individual physicians in murky ethical waters with respect to individual vaccinations.  This is important because throughout the pandemic, the use of coercive measures to pressure people into getting vaccinated has been normalized. They should not be acceptable practise. Threatening an employee with termination is obvious coercion. Not allowing parents to see their sick children in hospital is obvious coercion. Prior to the pandemic, it would have been widely acknowledged as unethical for physicians to vaccinate individuals who only seek vaccination in response to such coercion. Insofar as these mandates are effective in increasing vaccination uptake, this increase is only achieved unethically.   Incidentally, it is by no means clear to me that these mandates have led to a material increase in vaccine uptake. I have had countless conversations with individuals who refuse to even consider vaccination “so long as the government is forcing it on me.” Studies of vaccine mandates prior to the COVID pandemic have shown mixed results.  Some proponents of vaccine mandates do not call for them in order to increase vaccine uptake, but rather to protect the broader public from the unvaccinated. Ethically, I concede that this is a murkier proposition. If it were conclusively established that those unvaccinated against COVID posed a grave threat to society, such an exceptional violation of ethical norms might be justified. Luckily, we need not entertain such a controversial move, because it happens to be untrue.  As summarized in a recent Public Health Agency of Canada report, six months after receiving two doses of mRNA vaccine, effectiveness at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infection in Ontario was 0 percent. Another study found that 240 days after vaccination, two doses were actually negative 16 percent effective! Studies in England and Denmark also found negative effectiveness of two doses, with the latter study showing that two doses to be 0 percent effective at 2.5 months... We are allowed to put ourselves at risk. Adults in this country are allowed to ride a motorcycle, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and get fries instead of salad. Many of them have wound up as my patients in the ICU on this basis. My job is to dissuade against such activities, not to impose a blanket prohibition on them.   It is true that three doses of mRNA COVID vaccine does a much better job at preventing transmission, to the tune of 60 percent prevention. However, it still seems to be the case that effectiveness wanes over time. One study found three-dose effectiveness dropped to 49.5 percent after 111 days, while another found that it dropped to 48 percent at 3 months.  It seems likely to me that vaccine effectiveness against transmission, for any number of boosters, will continue to decline as time passes. Conversely, the CDC has reported that those who have recovered from previous COVID infection from Delta are three to five times less likely to get COVID than those who are merely vaccinated. Importantly, the protection gained via natural immunity does not appear to wane over the study period.  If we truly did want to segregate society into those who are at risk for transmitting COVID to others and those who are not, it is perhaps the COVID-recovered who should be granted the most freedom of all. I am afraid that failure to recognize this straightforward, scientific point only encourages conspiracy-minded individuals who believe that the COVID vaccination drive is merely a pretext to enrich Big Pharma... Finally, as a matter of practicality, we really need to consider the endgame. However draconian we make our passport policies, some members of society will still refuse to comply. Canada already has one of the highest rates of vaccination in the world with 85 percent of us having at least one dose – something we should be proud of as a society.  Perhaps we might be able to increase this by a few more percentage points by disregarding any consideration for bodily autonomy, freedom of movement, and medical privacy. We should consider whether abandoning such liberal democratic values is worth the price, which will be to ostracize one-in-10 Canadians from mainstream society. The long-term public health consequences of excluding so many Canadians from educational opportunities and gainful employment cannot really be countenanced"
It's not coercion if it's an objective that liberals approve of. But having "mandatory" patriotism in schools (even though students can opt out) is obviously wrong, jingoistic and a hideous violation of human rights

William Watson: Listen to the economics on vaccine mandates - "The authors estimate that mandates raised overall vaccination rates by roughly 2.9 percentage points... Was it worth it? The four SFU economists don’t try to estimate benefits and costs because doing so would require normative judgments — the sort of thing we newspaper columnists have no compunctions about at all... in terms of ending the pandemic, achieving herd immunity and so on, going from a vaccination rate of 80+ per cent, which is where it was when provinces introduced their mandates, to 2.9 percentage points higher doesn’t seem that big a gain. Yes, the world is full of tipping points. But no one predicted ex ante and we may never finally decide ex post whether 82.9 per cent was Canada’s tipping point. It seems unlikely.  We do know that the mandates have created a low-level civil war. Maybe that civil war would have found other fuel: we do seem to love our divides these days, and politicians can profit from deepening them (I’m looking at you, prime minister).  But, adding up all the benefits and costs, which is what economists try to do even when many benefits and costs don’t come in dollars and cents, 2.9 percentage points will strike many people as not having been worth it."

Will Kids Need the COVID Vaccine for School? - The Atlantic - "School mandates for new vaccines tend to lag behind CDC recommendations by about half a decade, but COVID-19 shots appear to be in the express lane. The Los Angeles Unified School District—the nation’s second-largest—will require students 12 or older to be vaccinated by mid-December if they want to continue attending in-person classes. The entire state of California plans to mandate shots for all of its public- and private-school students as soon as vaccines are fully approved for them, and New York City’s mayor-elect has said that he supports the same idea... how, exactly, does the case for mandating COVID vaccines in schools compare to the one for all the other shot requirements—such as those for polio, chicken pox, and measles—that are already in place throughout the country?... no one can say yet whether a bout of vaccine-induced myocarditis now would harm someone’s health in a year, or 10 years, or 50. Salmon told me he wouldn’t support a kids’ mandate until researchers are able to rigorously follow kids who get myocarditis for a year or two, and find no related serious health problems... Should the COVID vaccine become an annual shot... The paperwork, she said, would be a nightmare."
This ignores the fact that for other diseases, their vaccines are good to prevent transmission: but not for covid

Marvel Actress Evangeline Lilly Comes Out Against Vaccine Mandates: ‘Nobody Should Ever Be Forced To Inject Their Body’
The left has a new "anti-vaxxer" to hate. Maybe they will get her fired from future productions

UCLA Threatens to Drop Online Student over Coronavirus Vaccine Mandate - "UCLA is threatening to drop a black student — who says that all of his classes are online — for not submitting proof that he has been vaccinated against the coronavirus...   Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, said it will fine and cut the internet access of non-exempt students who fail to show proof that they have been vaccinated against the coronavirus. The university’s fines for unvaccinated students start at $100 a week and quickly escalate to $200 a week, or $2,275 for a full semester."
Clearly the student is an irresponsible plague rat who could infect everyone else via Zoom. Covid is just that infectious

Raymond J. de Souza: Justin Trudeau's 'punitive' vaccine mandate - "Vaccine mandates should be driven by prophylactic criteria. Blanket measures of a punitive nature, with no adjustment to circumstances or local conditions, are not about public health but political punishment.  Vaccine mandates are a justified tool where there is a demonstrable need and benefit, but it has to be demonstrable, not merely asserted... to suspend or fire employees who work from home? A vaccine mandate ought to be related to an activity that is facilitated by it. There is a reasonable link between vaccination and operating a dining room at near capacity. But if proof of vaccination was required at the drive-through, or for take-out, that would be nonsensical... As of Thursday afternoon, there were twice as many staff on layoff from Kingston, Ont., hospitals as there were COVID cases in our health region; 59 times as many laid off as the sole COVID patient in hospital. There are 10 times as many staff on layoff as the total number of coronavirus deaths during the entire pandemic, which is six in our region.  Is that a carefully targeted prophylactic mandate? Or it is using blunt instruments to batter those who dissent?... .  Emergency measures, such as layoffs in hospitals — where 99 per cent of staff are vaccinated and there is one COVID patient — cannot be considered a “reasonable limit … demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” That quaint phrasing is from our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It’s in Section 1, actually, right at the top...   When asked about what accommodations there will be for those who have medical reasons not to be vaccinated, or conscience objections, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the process for those people would be “onerous.” That gives the game away: it’s designed to be punitive, not prophylactic.  One imagines a directive going out that the usually user-friendly standards employed by government bureaucracy are to be suspended. Make it as difficult as possible!  Article content  It’s hard to see how the prime minister’s heavy-handed approach will survive discussions with the public-sector unions, to say nothing of a constitutional challenge. Courts are reluctant to endorse making the exercise of charter rights “onerous.” But the government is not worried about the charter; it just wants everyone to know that punishment is on the way."

Romanian EU Representatives Expose Culture of Silence on Vaccines, Big Pharma Deals and Vaccine Mandates - "  The rebel MEP Romanian said, “We had a lot of debates at the beginning of this year in the parliament where we demanded full access to the contracts signed between these companies that produce the vaccines and the European Union.”  What they got in return, Terhes explained, was “redacted format, after the [pharma] company agreed to open the contract to scrutiny.” (According to Terhes this was only after the company was pressed hard on the matter.)...   It’s pertinent that a Romanian representative is one of the few speaking out against the infringement on human rights.  Romanians, like all Eastern European countries, who lived like slaves under the Marxist heel of the Soviet Socialist Empire, have first-hand experience with organised state thuggery, and its inhumane, elitist despotism...   He condemned the misuse of “vaccine” passports, stating, “What we have seen in this crisis is that civil rights and liberties have been transformed from fundamental rights to privileges that governments grant or revoke as they see fit.”  Terhes, and those who stand with him, understand that civil liberties are being replaced with “prisoner privileges.”   The government is using the threat of losing those privileges to force compliance with a “fall-in, line-up, goose-step in unison and salute, or else,” Globalist prison.  Like Communist China, privileges will be issued on the basis of someone’s social credit score. Rights will be rationed out by degrees of loyalty to the regime, and its ideology.    One recent example of this is a push from The Greens in Australia to replace free speech, with what they call “fair speech.”  This all sounds “nice,” until you read the fine print. They get to decide what’s fair and what’s not."

Dozens of NBA Players Refuse the Shot - "After spending most of the last few months portraying those refusing to get vaccinated as anti-science, Kool-aid-drinking MAGA supporters, the media is now stuck. How do they stereotype mostly black NBA players who refuse to get vaccinated?  Especially a player like the Orlando Magic’s Jonathan Isaac. Mr. Isaac, who has already contracted COVID-19, wonders why he has to get jabbed if the antibodies in his system are already protecting him?  Nobody had an answer for him because there is none."

NBA players blow up the media’s anti-vaxxer stereotypes - The Spectator World - "The mainstream media has spent months dancing on the graves of political personalities and normal people alike who refused a COVID-19 vaccine and then succumbed to the virus itself. They’ve created a totem of who these unwashed masses of zombie-horde anti-vaxxers are: MAGA hat-wearing, Boomer hicks more interested in their ‘free-dumb’ than their health... there is a deeper meaning to what he’s saying that goes beyond ‘Bill Gates is trying to microchip everyone.’ It stands against what the media and the Biden administration are attempting to do by shaming and other-ing anyone who opts not to get vaccinated or can’t because of medical reasons. And that’s before we even get into the dark history African Americans and vaccinations, which has no doubt played a role in lower vaccination rates among that demographic.   Isaac is rejecting the atmosphere of division, the idea that anyone who’s unvaccinated is deserving of scorn from the desks at CNN, as well as ostracization from polite society by employers, friends and family. Division is the lingua franca of the national media — and Isaac isn’t speaking it. Legitimate medical diagnoses are being lumped in with QAnon Facebook conspiracists. That leads nowhere good.  Jonathan Isaac seems to understand this. It’s worth asking why our media and political leaders choose to ignore it."

The killer cure for alcoholism in Russia - "this all started with a story I heard about a friend’s ex-boyfriend. A Russian alcoholic who promised he’d never ever drink again. Story was he got a capsule surgically inserted under his skin. Some kind of chemical compound, such that if he drank that capsule would explode into his bloodstream, and kill him.  When I got to Moscow, I found out there are dozens of clinics that do this procedure"
One covid hystericist said that covid apartheid didn't mean that alcoholics were in danger of having their rights stripped from them too, since there was no fast, easy intervention for their alcoholism (i.e. a vaccine analogue). So much for that. So first they came for the unvaccinated. Next they'll come for the alcoholics

Some places to keep checking for COVID-19 vaccine proof in Ontario - "Some establishments in Ontario will maintain proof-of-vaccine requirements even after the province ends its vaccine certificate system on Tuesday, saying they want to ensure that people feel safe and comfortable coming through their doors.  Jan Campbell-Luxton, owner of De La Terre Bakery + Café in St. Catharines, Ont., said he and front-of-house staff came to a joint decision to keep checking for proof of vaccination against COVID-19.  Maintaining the policy feels like “a fairly small price” to pay to ensure both staff and customers feel safe"
Covid hystericists only "follow the science" when it plays to their prejudices
Can places discriminate against the HIV-positive so everyone feels safe?

Ron DeSantis: There's a 'Gap' Between Coronavirus Mandates and the Data - "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday noted a sizable gap between the “Faucian pronouncements of what needs to be done” and the actual data... As Florida continued to veer from the mainstream narrative and opened its state early on in the pandemic, drawing thousands seeking relief from lockdown enthusiasts to the Sunshine State over the past two years, DeSantis said: And so there was time and again where the data would diverge from the Fauci pronouncements or from the corporate media or the medical establishment, and in Florida — whether that was having businesses opened, whether that was having kids in school, whether that was about mandating cotton masks, whether that was about mandating vaccines — we always sided with the data and rejected the narrative and that is something that I think was something that’s very, very significant...  
“Time and time again, though, in other jurisdictions over the past two years, with the lack of data to support it, we did have our medical establishment and politicians push repeatedly for these policies, which we know have been ineffective. And we also know they have been ineffective because the first chance they get to violate their own policies, oftentimes, they would do that,” he remarked.  Indeed, several pro-lockdown Democrats have flocked to the state in recent months, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).   Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo added that politicians “made for some entertainment during the dark days of lockdowns” in other parts of the country, noting that some of them were visiting Florida, enjoying the sun “or having a nice dinner at a nice restaurant when everyone else was supposed to be at home and wearing their masks.”"
No wonder the left hate him. Because Florida won't "follow the science" and die of covid

Overcoming COVID-19 vaccination resistance when alternative policies affect the dynamics of conformism, social norms, and crowding out - "What is an effective vaccination policy to end the COVID-19 pandemic? We address this question in a model of the dynamics of policy effectiveness drawing upon the results of a large panel survey implemented in Germany during the first and second waves of the pandemic. We observe increased opposition to vaccinations were they to be legally required. In contrast, for voluntary vaccinations, there was higher and undiminished support. We find that public distrust undermines vaccine acceptance, and is associated with a belief that the vaccine is ineffective and, if enforced, compromises individual freedom. We model how the willingness to be vaccinated may vary over time in response to the fraction of the population already vaccinated and whether vaccination has occurred voluntarily or not. A negative effect of enforcement on vaccine acceptance (of the magnitude observed in our panel or even considerably smaller) could result in a large increase in the numbers that would have to be vaccinated unwillingly in order to reach a herd-immunity target. Costly errors may be avoided if policy makers understand that citizens’ preferences are not fixed but will be affected both by the crowding-out effect of enforcement and by conformism. Our findings have broad policy applicability beyond COVID-19 to cases in which voluntary citizen compliance is essential because state capacities are limited and because effectiveness may depend on the ways that the policies themselves alter citizens’ beliefs and preferences."
In other words, forcing people to get vaccinated reduces the number who get vaccinated. This coheres with the historical observation about the same (as per the History Extra podcast)

Errol Webber on Twitter - "A mask didn’t work. Two masks didn’t work. A vaccine shot didn’t work. A mask + a vaccine didn’t work. Two masks + a vaccine didn’t work. A mask + vaccine + booster didn’t work. Two masks + vaccine + booster didn’t work. But let’s require proof of full vaccination."

Why living with the virus means living with the unvaccinated too - "The evidence suggests that whether it is a young tennis player, or young drinkers out trying to enjoy themselves, the wrong people are being targeted by harsh vaccine restrictions around the world.  Djokovic challenges a draconian Covid strategy down under that has governed life for countless months. It is, as Dominic Wilkinson, professor of medical ethics at the University of Oxford, points out, a strategy founded in the nation’s isolation, which has allowed it to pretend it can cut itself off from the pandemic. But as Wilkinson, himself half-English and half-Australian, also notes: “The difficulty was always going to be in sustaining that.”... on the risk of infection, as Dr Julian Tang, clinical virologist, respiratory sciences, at the University of Leicester, has pointed out, “natural infection with viruses generally provides longer lasting and broader immune protection, compared to vaccination”.  And, on transmission, Javid’s own Department of Health has just released a study showing that while vaccines cut transmission for the original Covid strain, new strains see both vaccinated and unvaccinated people transmitting the virus at similar rates. This is, as Wilkinson is at pains to point out, not to suggest that immunity acquired from catching Covid is somehow preferable to getting a jab. The dangers of contracting Covid are far greater than any potential vaccine side effects. “I think there are strong reasons to have a vaccine for health professionals,” he says. “The question is whether it’s ethically justified to force people to have a vaccine if they have had a confirmed infection… because there is reasonable evidence that those who have had the vaccine and those who have had an infection have similar protection from infection and risk of passing on the virus.” Across the Atlantic, there are similar doubts. “If you listen to the language of our public health officials, they talk about the vaccinated and the unvaccinated,” Marty Makary, professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University told the British Medical Journal last autumn, in an article reviewing a host of studies that described similar protection from vaccine and infection-led immunity. “If we want to be scientific, we should talk about the immune and the non-immune.”...   Here, young people have been targeted with measures requiring them to show proof of vaccination to enter nightclubs. As many in the industry predicted, it appears to be having little effect. Latest ONS figures show the highest rates of infection among young adults.   Indeed, a year into the vaccination campaign, it is beginning to become clear who is most in need of jabs and boosters. And the answer is the same as at the start of the pandemic. Then policy was framed as if the virus did not discriminate. It soon became clear this was not true. The elderly and those with co-morbidities were very much more at risk. The same people, it seems clear, should be the focus of vaccination campaigns... coercion is unlikely to change their minds. Indeed, it is a blunt tool. In the latest ONS survey, fewer than two in 10 of those hesitant to have a vaccine said needing one to work or go on holiday might make them change their mind. The most persuasive reason, for the slim minority willing to countenance it, was altruism – to protect others.  These millions are not anti-vaxxers – militant, headline-hogging campaigners calling doctors and nurses administering jabs murderers. But they are damned by association, making many even more reluctant to come forward now.   Some GPs, like Dr Azhar Farooqi, in Leicester, have realised a less confrontational approach is required. Having noticed that many of his highest-risk patients, particularly from poorer or ethnic minority backgrounds, were turning down the jab, he telephoned them personally for a reassuring chat. On the spot, 70 per cent changed their minds.  It is the very opposite of the French president Emmanuel Macron’s decision to “p––– off” the unvaccinated, making it increasingly hard for them to live without it.   Indeed, insisting people take vaccines to protect themselves is not just of questionable effectiveness, it is also morally wrong, says Wilkinson. “It’s a bad ethical reason, it’s a paternalistic reason, it says government knows better than you what to do with your own health.”   As a society we have chosen not to favour paternalistic health policies, on smoking or drinking, or obesity. Yet with the pandemic, he laments, such nuanced approaches have suffered. “Governments might prefer to keep things very black and white. You get the vaccine, or you don’t get in [to a bar or club, or country]. But ethics is not always simple and black and white. And if you’re restricting people’s freedom, you ought to do so on the basis of evidence and on the basis of valid reasons.”"

Dr. Leana Wen Reveals The Real Agenda to Comatose Cuomo - "Dr. Leana Wen, according to Wikipedia, is very much an establishment medical figure and someone the WaPo and CNN rely on.  The clip is interesting not simply for what Wen has to say but for the unquestioning, semi-comatose state of ‘journalist’ Cuomo...
'But I think that there are many more people – millions of people – who, for whatever reason, have concerns about the vaccine, who just don’t know what’s in it for them. And we need to make it clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket back to pre-pandemic life. And the window to do that is really narrowing. I mean, you were mentioning, Chris, about how all these states are reopening. They’re reopening at a 100 per cent. And we have a very narrow window to tie re-opening policy to vaccination status. Because otherwise, if everything is re-opened, then what’s the carrot going to be ? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine ? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration need to come out a lot bolder and say ‘If you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all these freedoms that you have.’ Because otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy all these freedoms anyway, and I fear a situation of coming into the fall, where we never reach herd immunity, and then we get hit by the next surge of Covid-19 in the fall, something that we could have prevented if we just got people vaccinated now.'"

Chicago Mayor Lightfoot: FOP President Is Attempting To "Induce An Insurrection" By Opposing Vaccine Mandate
"My body, my choice" = "insurrection"

Silkie Carlo on Twitter - "BREAKING. Italy's government approves by decree *compulsory* #Covid vaccinations for residents older than 50. Vaccine passports will be necessary also to enter shops, banks, and hairdressers/barbers" "I’ve said it before, the fact that this astounding authoritarianism across the West is being met with silence by most rights institutions is devastating and their inexcusable cowardice is a horror to witness. Do you know of civil liberties groups in EU, US or Aus taking action?"
No doubt vaxholes will have some tortured logic about how this isn't really compulsory vaccination

Middle eastern democracy

Prescient, from 2003. Of course, the depressing conclusion is that America needs to install dictators in the third world to ensure stability.

Middle eastern democracy

"Many point to the history of modernisation in the west, and to what we know of contemporary Muslim societies, to show that terrorism tends to arise from those rudely uprooted from rapidly changing societies. The biographies of contemporary Islamist terrorists show the majority to be well-educated, semi-westernised young men on the periphery of traditional societies. Force rapid change on such societies with revolutionary ideas like liberal democracy and globe-spanning market economics, and the result will be an accelerated dislocation that will produce more terrorists, not fewer.

Realists favour improving Iraqi political life, even if the result is still short of democracy-and if a good example there spreads, so much the better...

Democratisers, by contrast, believe that the US should promote, even impose, liberal democracy in the middle east, certainly on its adversaries and, some say, even on its authoritarian “friends.” This we must do to eliminate the sources of rage and frustration that give rise to mass-casualty terrorism. (Poverty elimination alone, they argue, is futile, for the sources of poverty lie in the economic logic of autocracy.)

They further believe that there is good precedent for America’s so doing: the post-second world war occupations of Japan and Germany. Based on those examples, they think that the democratisation of Iraq will spread to other Arab countries and to Iran. Many democratisers also believe that democracy promotion has been America’s mission since 1776, one which has grown steadily with US power.

This latter impulse is by no means new. The most significant early American contact with the Arab world came not from the US government but from Christian missionaries. Their intentions were noble and some of their accomplishments, like the American universities in Cairo and Beirut, stand to this day. But they made few converts, and their Muslim targets resented the premise of their zeal: that Islam was a false faith, and that the civilisation to which it gave rise was inferior to that of the Christian west.

Today’s democratisers are replaying the impulses of those 19th-century missionaries; everything, indeed, is more or less the same-except for two things. First, the gospel is now the “social gospel,” a heavily-armed secularised liberal evangelism, America’s manifest destiny globalised. The second difference is that the resentment of insulted Muslims could not reach across the ocean in the 19th century; today it can...

If the administration does proceed with a broad and rapid democratisation, it is likely to produce the worst possible result: failing to produce Arab democracy, yet reaping untold resentment for trying.

There are many problems with the democratisation approach to the war on terrorism, but the most serious of these concerns its very great difficulty. Muslim, and particularly Arab, political cultures are simply not so malleable that within a generation or two we can transform most of them into liberal democracies. There are few genuine democracies in the Muslim world (Turkey’s is the most mature), and none in the Arab world. This is no coincidence. In different degrees, Arab societies lack three prerequisites for democracy: the belief that the source of political authority is intrinsic to society; a concept of majority rule; and the acceptance of all citizens’ equality before the law. Without the first, the idea of pluralism-and the legitimacy of a “loyal opposition”-cannot exist. Without the second, the idea of elections as a means to form a government is incomprehensible. Without the third, a polity can be neither free nor liberal as those terms are understood in the west.

There are only two ways to conceive of political authority: either it is intrinsic-“of the people, by the people, for the people”-or extrinsic (coming from God, or from some accepted imperial source outside the society). The 17th-century concept of the social contract epitomises the former, but Islamic civilisation has never recognised any intrinsic source of political authority. Islam is a radically monadic religion of divine revelation, and Islamic political culture has developed over more than 1,300 years wholly true to that principle. Since divine, extrinsic authority cannot be disputed there is no logic to political pluralism as a permanent or ideal condition. Tolerance for any other set of social and political principles amounts to heresy; tolerance of other private religious beliefs is conceived as virtuous forbearance, not as a recognition that truth might really be in dispute.

A concept of political leadership flows from these predicates. A leader enunciates and spreads God’s law, and since there is only one God and only one law, it follows that there should only be one political structure and one leader of it. Accountability is not democratic in the western procedural sense, but organic in a religious communal will. Even in our more secular times, Arab government is legitimate when it accords with a priori truth, whether Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia or a Jamahiriya socialist mishmash in Libya. Oppositions denying that a priori truth by definition cannot be “loyal.” The typical Arab conceives an ideal single community of belief that contrasts sharply with the western emphasis on competing but mutually adjusting political factions. Western politics has a flavour of controlled conflict, but Arabs tend to regard that conflict as destructive to community-which brings us to majority rule.

If political truth is intrinsic to society and people are fallible, then political life must amount to trial and error attempts at governing. If no one can invoke the authority of unquestioned a priori truth, it follows that the majority should decide which path to follow. Westerners regard this as common sense but, for entirely understandable reasons, most Arabs do not.

For millennia, most middle easterners lived in moderately-sized villages whose organising principle was usually that of the clan or tribe. They also lived in an insecure world of many dangers, putting a huge premium on preventing rifts within tribal society. Governance invariably revolved around a form of consensus-building. Leadership, usually centralised and hereditary, engaged in open-ended negotiation with the dominant males representing the main branches of the clan; problems were discussed, compromises and understandings reached, and in return all swore personal loyalty to the leader. This methodology was absorbed into and sanctified by Islam, wherein a leader comes to his position through a consensus of elders (ijma) and remains in power through the acquiescence of the community (umma).

Now consider in this light the idea that someone who wins 54 per cent of the vote in an election should get 100 per cent of the power, while the person who wins 46 per cent should get none. This strikes those used to consensus decision-making as not only illogical but dangerous-an invitation to civil strife. This is why when Hafez Assad used to win 98.5 per cent of the vote-which we saw as perverse-it did not strike a typical Syrian as very odd. Historically speaking, too, it is worth noting that consensus forms of decision-making have been far more prevalent than democratic ones. Nor do consensus forms of decision-making equate to tyranny or despotism. Traditional Arab and Muslim governance has been patriarchal and authoritarian, but it has been law-based, participatory at some level, and viewed as legitimate by most of the ruled most of the time.

Finally, there is the matter of equality before the law. The idea of the legal equality of all citizens conflicts with nearly all traditional authority. In Islamic civilisation, men are “more equal” than women, the educated more than the illiterate, the noble or Sherifian more than the commoner, the pious more than the reprobate, and the elder more than the youth. Most Arabs find absurd the idea that the vote of a 22-year-old illiterate peasant woman should be equal to that of a 70-year-old qadi. The presumption of natural hierarchy in society is neither parochial nor ridiculous, and it was, after all, true of typical westerners only a historically short time ago...

To push democracy onto the Arabs before they want it and are ready for it is to stoke precisely their fears of failure, and their resentment of the west, that we should wish to minimise. Dealing with the pathologies of the Arab world is one of the great challenges of our time. But there are no quick fixes, and ultimately, the solution must arise from among the Arabs themselves. The west can help; it cannot mandate."

Meanwhile, the optimistic counterpoint seems hopelessly naive especially in retrospect.

Links - 29th April 2022 (1)

The Dream Job That Wasn’t - "The concept of the dream job still persists, likely because so many of us are working in what the late David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” or are simply not employed at all. Finding your dream job is a seductive idea: the do-gooder, Protestant version of the FIRE movement—rather than trying to escape work, why not try loving it instead? It’s a relatable impulse, but I imagine most dream jobs are more like running a lighthouse bed-and-breakfast for 40 paying guests than a paid vacation. Andrew Smith, who has worked as an interpretive ranger at Glacier National Park for four summers, told me that he loves his job, which mostly involves mediating between park visitors and the park itself. There are clear perks to being a park ranger—getting to know a natural site day in and day out is a kind of intimate experience that tourists don’t get to experience. Smith lives in park housing and is happy that he spends his days mainly outdoors, the dream of many metro-locked middle-managers, even if much of it involves dealing with frustrated tourists who can’t find parking at a popular trailhead.   But Smith told me that he still sees his job very much as work, with all the precarity that often comes with it. “Doing what you love as work is not the same as doing it as a hobby,” Smith said. “Going on a hike in uniform is just a fundamentally different experience than going out on my day off and enjoying the park that way.” Because Smith, like most national park employees, is a seasonal worker (right now he’s not employed by the park), his employment and benefits, while good during the park season, are unstable. Smith told me that some people leave park service when they turn 26 and can no longer stay on their parents’ health insurance. In the off-season, Smith works as a substitute teacher. Unless he lands a rare permanent park job, he can’t see it as a long-term career. Caroline Lange, a cookbook recipe tester, feels similarly lucky that she loves what she does. “My friend says it’s like a rom-com job, which I think is really accurate,” Lange said. “You don’t even realize it exists until you meet someone who does it.” But testing recipes isn’t quite like living in a Nancy Meyers film—Lange said that the majority of her job isn’t actually cooking, but schlepping groceries. It’s more physically demanding than people realize (she’s on her feet for much of the day), and since the gigs are freelance, Lange has no paid sick days and is insured on the most basic state exchange plan, which comes with an enormous deductible... the widespread notion of finding meaning in work is a fairly new one... Unsurprisingly, it’s an invention of bosses—the idea that work isn’t supposed to suck changed in the 1970s, experts told Lepore, when “managers began informing workers that they should expect to discover life’s purpose in work.”...  the message around loving what you do can be warped to circumstance: People who work in low-income industries like care work, fields dominated by women of color and immigrant workers, are often exploited in part because they are supposed to love what they do. The language of “family,” often weakly invoked in startup culture, is literalized in fields like home health care, where the work is life-giving and incredibly intimate. This can be the frame—duty, family—through which poor wages and other workplace abuses are ignored... A common mantra among park rangers is, “You get paid in sunrises and sunsets.” The implication is that if you’re working your dream, you’ll take any conditions that come with it. Smith told me that he hates that saying. “The sunrises and sunsets are beautiful, but they don’t put food on the table”... If a dream job is like any other job, then isn’t making all jobs better the dream?"
Ironically, written by a freelance writer. Writing is a dream job of many
This ignores the fact that non-pecuniary benefits are a form of compensation

How to Pick a Job That Will Actually Make You Happy - The Atlantic - "To be happy at work, you don’t have to hold a fascinating job that represents the pinnacle of your educational achievement or the most prestigious use of your “potential,” and you don’t have to make a lot of money. What matters is not so much the “what” of a job, but more the “who” and the “why”: Job satisfaction comes from people, values, and a sense of accomplishment. No doubt a substantial chunk of the job-satisfaction percentage is due to the fact that having any job at all makes people happier. Unemployment is one of the biggest sources of unhappiness people can face... a one-percentage-point increase in unemployment lowers national well-being by more than five times as much as a one-point increase in the inflation rate. When one has a job, the factors that most affect satisfaction have little to do with the line of work. First, there are the uncontrollable variables: One study in the Journal of Applied Psychology of identical twins reared apart found that about 30 percent of job satisfaction is genetic. Then, there are the practical variables: Economists have found that wage increases raise job satisfaction, but only in the short term. The effect decays quickly as time passes. In all careers, regular wage increases are better for happiness than infrequent, larger raises. Some of the squishiest aspects of a job are also the ones that make it most rewarding: the values held by your company and your co-workers. Research has shown, for example, that all over the world job satisfaction depends on a sense of accomplishment, recognition for a job well done, and work-life balance. Teamwork, too, has a strong influence in collectivist cultures, but less so in individualist ones. The late Harvard psychologist Richard Hackman found that job satisfaction was strongly, inversely tied to leader-centricity: In one of his studies, musicians who worked in symphony orchestras, where many conductors rule with an iron fist, were 21 percent less satisfied with their growth opportunities than players in leaderless string quartets... a 2012 study on Iranian nurses found that the happiest ones believed their work was “a divine profession and a tool by which they could gain spiritual pleasure and satisfaction.” Many of my colleagues feel the same way about the vocation of higher education, and as the late philosopher Michael Novak wrote, that sense of a calling can be found in business as well. Researchers who have looked for clear relationships between job satisfaction and the actual type of job one holds have overwhelmingly struck out. CareerBliss, a company dedicated to helping people find greater happiness at work, has published survey results of the “happiest jobs” and the “unhappiest jobs,” as rated by those who hold them. Its most recent rankings, from 2018, show the happiest jobs to be quite disparate: teaching assistant, quality-assurance analyst, net developer, marketing specialist. The unhappiest jobs are similarly grab-baggy, and fairly unrelated to education and income: accountant, security guard, cashier, supervisor... Whatever job they end up in, finding a sense of accomplishment within it is crucial for job satisfaction. It helps to set goals in one’s work, such as increasing skills or responsibility. Some goals lead to more happiness than others, however. While pay increases push up satisfaction temporarily, money as a career goal does not. Volumes of research show that pursuing extrinsic rewards for work, such as money, actually hurts your interest in that work. For real satisfaction, you should pursue intrinsic goals—two in particular. The first is earned success. You can think of it as the opposite of learned helplessness, a term coined by the psychologist Martin Seligman to denote the resignation that people experience when they repeatedly endure unpleasant situations beyond their control. Earned success instead gives you a sense of accomplishment (which Seligman has shown is a source of happiness, and which strongly predicts happiness at work) and professional efficacy (the idea that you are effective in your job, which pushes up commitment to your occupation, also a good measure of job satisfaction)... The second goal worth pursuing at work is service to others—the sense that your job is making the world a better place. That doesn’t mean you need to volunteer or work for a charity to be happy (my own research has shown that nonprofit work is not more inherently satisfying than working for a for-profit or for the government). On the contrary, you can find service in almost any job. One of my students made this point better than I can, in an op-ed he wrote to explain why he had forgone jobs in his field of academic study to become a waiter in Barcelona. As he put it in Spanish, his customers “are all important and equal. They are the same at the table and must be the same in the eyes of the waiter … It’s great to be able to serve the politician on the front page of the newspaper just as well as the kid browsing the news while waiting for his girlfriend.”"
Leftists keep demanding increased wages and are deluded into thinking they'll make people happy. Of course their solution to falling satisfaction is to jack up wages even more

Opinion | After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again - The New York Times - "At least four other women said that he’d made them uncomfortable, in addition to two senior engineers who already made it clear that they wouldn’t work with him. As soon as my complaint with H.R. was filed, Google went from being a great workplace to being any other company: It would protect itself first. I’d structured my life around my job — exactly what they wanted me to do — but that only made the fallout worse when I learned that the workplace that I cherished considered me just an employee, one of many and disposable... Like most of my colleagues, I’d built my life around the company. It could so easily be taken away. People on leave weren’t supposed to enter the office — where I went to the gym and had my entire social life... When I didn’t get a promotion, some of my stock grants ran out and so I effectively took a big pay cut. Nevertheless, I wanted to stay at Google. I still believed, despite everything, that Google was the best company in the world. Now I see that my judgment was clouded, but after years of idolizing my workplace, I couldn’t imagine life beyond its walls... After I quit, I promised myself to never love a job again. Not in the way I loved Google. Not with the devotion businesses wish to inspire when they provide for employees’ most basic needs like food and health care and belonging. No publicly traded company is a family. I fell for the fantasy that it could be.  So I took a role at a firm to which I felt no emotional attachment. I like my colleagues, but I’ve never met them in person. I found my own doctor; I cook my own food. My manager is 26 — too young for me to expect any parental warmth from him. When people ask me how I feel about my new position, I shrug: It’s a job."
Wokewashing hits again
The perils of loving your job, or treating it as a family

Bizarre Japanese job ad looking for someone to fly from Okinawa to Tokyo twice a day to deliver onigiri - "the job has oddly specific requirements for the delivery person, which includes purchasing a pork and egg onigiri from a specific store, and then delivering it."

What is butter chicken? Isn't it curry? | South China Morning Post - "For Raghav Jaggi, however, this aromatic staple is more than a taste of home – it’s his family’s legacy. His grandfather, Kundan Lal Jaggi, dedicated his life to tandoori cuisine and is one of three Punjabi Hindu refugees celebrated for inventing butter chicken... there’s no denying the dish has helped popularise Indian cuisine globally... a busload of refugees came late to the restaurant in search of a meal, but there were only a few dry tandoori chickens left. “There were truckloads of refugees coming into the area, and at that time you never refused food to anyone”...  Kundan Lal Jaggi decided to create a simple sauce of cream, tomatoes and a few spices infused with the smoky tandoori chicken, “so that people could use the naan and dip it into the gravy if they were not able to get a bite of chicken”. “It was rich enough to give them enough [sustenance] to survive another day, and it was totally by chance. Everyone loved the dish so much they asked for it again the next day. And the day after, the same thing happened,” Jaggi says. It was so popular, it was made a permanent fixture on the menu and became one of the dishes that defined the restaurant... Jaggi says his grandfather invented a number of dishes at Moti Mahal that are still enjoyed today, including dal makhani, which has also found global fame... Mitra still remembers the first time he tried butter chicken as a 12-year-old. It was the first time he had eaten meat, and “the smokiness, the texture and flavour was something totally unique”. “It was a turning point in my life. I said, ‘I am not going to eat vegetables any more’... Last year, Jaggi and his childhood friend Amit Bagga opened Daryaganj, a new restaurant chain in Delhi, as a tribute to his grandfather’s legacy and named after the area where Kundan Lal Jaggi opened his first restaurant. Their four venues celebrate north Indian cuisine – including butter chicken – using Kundan Lal Jaggi’s original recipes. Unsurprisingly, butter chicken and dal makhani make up 43 per cent of all orders.”

Danger's Deliverance - "Challenging young people incrementally, and exposing them to dangers, can make them stronger and more resilient, or as Nassim Taleb says: anti-fragile. Sports — without the participation trophies — offers modest hardship, both physical and emotional (when losing). Nations like Spain, Italy, and France, where drinking wine with meals is standard, were ranked as the least risky by the World Health Organization. And “resilience [drug and alcohol] education” trains young adults to make their own decisions than do inanely authoritarian “just say no” type efforts... The saving power in nuclear weapons is in preventing similarly horrendous invasions in the future.  Since their invention in 1945, the number of deaths in battle has declined 95 percent globally. After India and Pakistan got the bomb the number of battle deaths also declined 95 percent. There’s no mystery why. Nations with nuclear weapons pointed at each other exercise greater restraint. They fight skirmishes not full-scale wars. As such, the best part of a nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran means the U.S. won’t replicate the idiocy of its invasion of Iraq.  But won’t more nations with nuclear weapons increase the chance that a weapon will be used in the future? The opposite appears to be the case. The closest humankind came to nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961 — 16 years after the invention of the bomb. Since then, nations have put in place numerous safeguards to prevent against the accidental, unauthorized, and irrational use of a nuclear bomb. As a result, the number of close calls relating to the fearful technology has declined significantly over the last 50 years, even as the number of nations with the bomb doubled, from five to 10...   In her 1966 book, Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that our underlying belief systems, or ideologies, unconsciously determine what we believe is dangerous. We fear what we hate, and vice versa. In the late 1960s, environmentalists influenced by the misanthropic 19th century economist, Thomas Malthus, feared that the cheap energy provided by nuclear plants would result in overpopulation and overconsumption. These fears were intertwined and inseparable from fears of the bomb. Anti-nuclear groups began a concerted fear-mongering campaign, which aroused latent fears of radiation and nuclear weapons within the population, and tied them to an ideological vision of a non-nuclear world.  The success of anti-nuclear campaigning was greatly aided by a generational shift in attitudes toward danger in general."

Chinese Words Aren't Magical Keys to National Plans - "Imagine that you are cornered at a party when the topic of race comes up. Your interlocutor tells you that, in the English language, “race” can refer to both a competition wherein one tries to outrun the others and a visually identifiable group of people sharing common ancestry. It is no wonder that racism has been such an intractable issue in the Anglosphere; the very word embodies a sense of competition among different peoples. You quickly spot a friend on the other side of the room because you understand using a literal reading of a vocabulary item to explain the origins, evolution, and persistence of racism in the Anglosphere is completely ridiculous. For Chinese speakers, however, this is a frustratingly common experience. The sheer novelty and exoticism of a character-based Eastern language to most English readers mean these spurious dissections of Chinese words can easily be passed off as impressive sociolinguistic insight.  The nature of characters themselves, and the common but wrong idea that they’re pictographs, makes this tempting. But most characters in Chinese consist of two—or more—elements: a semantic component that relates to the meaning of the word and a phonetic one that indicates how it sounds. That phonetic component has no relationship to its meaning. The word for “mother,” for instance, contains “horse” because the word for horse is ma and so (pronounced slightly differently) is the word for mother...  None of this stops glib foreign analysts from making grand declarations about the meaning of Chinese words based on entirely false linguistic premises with a heavy splash of Orientalism. I just call it phrenology for words...  English draws heavily from foreign words in the construction of neologisms. Thus, we have “telephone,” the combination of the Greek words for “far” and “sound,” instead of the Chinese 电话, literally “electric” plus “speech.”... People seem to assume that since the two morphemes 电 and 话 are common words encountered in normal context (unlike tele and phone), then Chinese people surely must be reading them literally. But that is not how people parse language, unless you’re the kind of person who refuses to hire a babysitter for fear of crushing your precious child.  Take the word for “compatriot,” 同胞, used by mainland Chinese (in a way sometimes considered rather patronizing) to refer to Taiwanese people. The word is literally the combination of “same” and “placenta, womb.” On this basis, Conal Boyce of Century College argues in the peer-reviewed Journal of Political Risk that the term constitutes “further evidence of a psychic illness that is built into the very bedrock of the culture, so that all Chinese are joined at the hip by a shared Same‑Womb fetish that underpins their We‑Chinese fixation.” Another common example is for “safety” or “security,” 安全. The word is composed of the characters for “peace” and “total, complete.” David Shambaugh in his book China Goes Global: The Partial Power translates the term as “complete tranquility,” which helps us understand why China apparently views security “in more comprehensive terms” than others. The very concept and word rendered in Chinese, he writes, say “more about China’s internal order than external threats to security,” somehow. The word, pronounced anquan in Standard Mandarin, also exists in both Japanese, read as anzen, and Korean, anjeon, but Shambaugh doesn’t extend the anecdote outside Chinese borders. By far the most popular target of Chinese word phrenology is the word for crisis, 危机. There is an entire Wikipedia entry on the Chinese word for crisis, in fact, because dating back to at least John F. Kennedy, Westerners have loved to awe at the fact that the two constituent characters are “danger” plus “opportunity.” This is technically true in the same sense that the opposite of pro-gress is Con-gress: It’s a selective interpretation of morphemes divorced from actual etymology and is best left for a fortune cookie or motivational horoscope.  Phrenology for words further echoes the once fashionable Sapir-Whorf view of language and thought. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, first formulated in the 1920s, posited that the contours of human languages specifically shape speakers’ ability to perceive and understand the world around them. In other words, how you speak and how you think are inextricably linked. Word phrenologists take this one step further: How the people speak and how a state acts are inextricably linked. In a bold Substack letter, Bruno Maçaes, a former Portuguese official who writes frequently about China but does not read Chinese, argues that Chinese words “operate without the dualistic divide between empirical reality and a transcendental realm of language.”"
Also headlined: "Why Do Analysts Keep Talking Nonsense About Chinese Words?"
This is related to the etymological fallacy

Innovation Almost Bankrupted LEGO - Until It Rebuilt with a Better Blueprint - "LEGO had created an innovative culture that seemingly would have been the envy of any firm. “LEGO followed all the advice of the experts,” said Robertson. “And yet it almost went bankrupt.” Robertson’s forthcoming book, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Reinvented Its Innovation System and Conquered the Toy Industry, was the basis for the seminar titled, “Learning From Failure in Innovation.” The LEGO story, according to Robertson, lies at the heart of why companies should not blindly follow the typical mantras of innovation. Management and evaluation must be at the heart of any innovation strategy, he noted, and although it is generally not good for a firm to remain stagnant, the reality is that unbridled innovation in the vein of LEGO may not be the answer, either." "If you don't disrupt yourself, someone else will"

Tasha Kheiriddin: O'Toole gets last laugh over progressives' tempest in a beer can - "Losing your lunch over O’Toole’s lame tweet when the government of the day is mired in multiple military sex scandals is disingenuous to the extreme. It is far more eye-rolling to see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s staff deflect questions on the Vance affair than to see O’Toole mugging for the camera with a beer."

Conrad Black: Erin O'Toole's tacit support for COVID policy has been a grievous mistake - "the Conservatives [are] the most unsuccessful principal political party in any important country in the world... Our politicians are never more contemptible than when jointly celebrating the solidarity of their governments in the imposition of ghastly misconceived policy... Canada had the worst record of any advanced country in protecting its elderly from COVID. And everyone knew a year ago that the survival rate in the whole population was approximately 98 per cent and over 99 percent for those in good health below the age of 65. Yet we have persisted with these insane lockdowns and intensified them in recent days... the Trudeau government’s pretense to protecting our future by subsidizing endless sustainable energy boondoggles and making war on Canada’s oil and gas industry and the provinces where it chiefly operates, and on not lifting a purposeful finger to become petroleum self-sufficient and to pursue our potential as a petroleum exporter... the third thunderbolt that should be hurled in the face of this incompetent regime is Justin Trudeau’s claim that for 400 years Canada has been engaged in cultural genocide against the indigenous peoples. This is an almost complete falsehood. There have been many mistakes, there is much to be done and reparations will have to be made. But this government is responsible for encouraging a political ambience in which the distinguished founder of our country, John A. Macdonald, has been repeatedly likened to Adolf Hitler and other monstrous criminals of world history and Canadians have, through their elected leader, groveled and abased ourselves with the incessant confession of genocidal acts. It is a blood libel on all non-indigenous Canadians and the author of it is unfit to be the head of the country’s government. Instead of mounting this counter-offensive, (as Macdonald, Brian Mulroney, and even John Diefenbaker would have done), the Conservatives have allowed the liberals to make the running, have implicitly approved their goals, and then tried the most unpromising form of catch-up sport by claiming that they, the Conservatives, could do a better job of achieving Liberal goals than the Liberals could. This is essentially how the Conservatives have lost 24 of the last 36 federal elections since the rise of Wilfrid Laurier in 1896, (compared to 13 losses in 25 elections since 1929 by the British Labour Party and for the U.S. Democrats, 24 of the 41 elections since the first Republican victory in 1860-just 16 Republican to 15 Democrat since 1900). Canada’s Conservatives have been astonishingly unsuccessful, and they are at it again."

Carson Jerema: Why Erin O'Toole's strategy to move to the centre should be abandoned - "The Conservatives’ third defeat at the hands of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals should be considered a rebuke of the party’s strategy to tack hard towards the so-called centre. It definitely shouldn’t mean that the party should try even harder to moderate itself, as leader Erin O’Toole suggested in his concession speech . Instead, the lesson the Conservatives should learn from this loss is that they’d be better off selling their own ideas to voters, rather than watered-down Liberal, or even NDP, policies... these are not policies designed to attract workers, but to attract union bosses. And in that regard, they failed to generate a single endorsement from labour groups, which instead backed either the NDP or the Liberals. Union groups even called O’Toole “ dangerous .”... Centre-right parties are often branded as misers for wanting to shrink the size of government, but rather than ditch their principles, they should reframe them as being better for average people. Yes, deregulation and tax cuts benefit corporate owners and managers, but they also benefit people who those owners and managers might employ. The more businesses that are freed from government shackles, the more options there are for workers."

Jamil Jivani: Erin O'Toole privileged liberal elites over his own conservative base - "Column after column, and talking head after talking head, insisted that the Conservative Party of Canada could win, if only conservatives would better appeal to liberal elites by mirroring their positions on social issues while doing nothing to challenge the increasing power of foreign corporations in our country, such as the big tech firms. Under Erin O’Toole’s leadership, the ivory tower commentariat got their way. And they’ve been proven wrong. In the 2021 election, their strategy failed in many parts of Canada, including the Greater Toronto Area where it was supposed to be most effective. And now, with O’Toole no longer the leader, we’ve seen their strategy can’t even unite a caucus."

Meme - Barbaric Red: "I have a confession. When my hubby gets stuck on a part of a video game for a long period of time I will look up the solution on my phone and then give him vague suggestions to push him in the right direction.. I've been doing this for 6 years.."

The Story Behind That Dinosaur Spider-Man Meme - "Sauron tells Spider-Man his intentions, and is asked: "You can rewrite DNA on the fly, and you're using it to turn people into dinosaurs? But with tech like that, you could cure cancer." Sauron now infamously responds that the charge may be true. But Sauron doesn't want to cure cancer: "I want to turn people into dinosaurs.""

Meme - "What are y'all going to do once communism is achieved"
"Building gardens, teaching classes on my farm, creating organizing spaces, and cultivating resources for my community. So basically what I'm planning to do anyway but without fighting capitalism."
"YOUR farm?"

Are Computers Already Smarter Than Humans?
Google's new artificial intelligence bot thinks gay people are bad

Single in Denmark? Prepare for birthday spice attacks - "young unmarried Danes have been taunted with the prospect of a life of singledom by being showered with spices on milestone birthdays. A single male is a Pebersvend while an unmarried woman is referred to as a Pebermø or a ‘pepper-maiden’.   “When you turn 25, you get cinnamon-d,” says The Viking: “I got doused in the stuff by my friends, from the moment I woke up in the morning. I tried to wash it off but every time I got out of the shower, they’d just attack again. So I went outside. But they tied me to a lamppost and gave me swimming goggles to wear and threw more of the stuff at me. Then we all went and got drunk.”... “Then when you hit 30, if you’re still not married, you’re upgraded.”  “Ooh!”  “To pepper.”  “Oh.”  “I had water thrown on me and then pepper, to help it stick. Head to toe. But sometimes people use eggs for this. Helps with adhesion.”...   “If you’re unmarried at 30, you can also expect to be given at least one peppermill as a gift. And your friends build a big sculpture of a peppermill for you, usually out of oilcans. Though these often end up looking less like a spice grinder and more like genitalia.”  “Why?” I ask, baffled.  He shrugs and offers me the age-old explanation for Denmark’s stranger customs: “Tradition.”"

BMA head says forcing GPs to do more face-to-face appointments is 'harassment' and 'discrimination' - "Creating “league tables” to force GPs to provide more face-to-face appointments is “harassment, discrimination, [and] victimisation,” the BMA Council Chair said.  A new £250 million support package for general practice was announced by the Government this week, including plans to publish league tables showing how many in-person consultations GPs held.  The worst-performing practices will be “named and shamed” and denied access to the new fund...   Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the British Medical Association’s council chair, said on Sunday that if practices were employees the treatment would amount to “harassment, discrimination, victimisation"."
Weaponising anti-discrimination and workplace safety laws because you don't want to do your job and reveal if you meet your KPIs is a novel tactic. Hopefully the public are outraged.

Student would not have died if he’d seen GP face-to-face, family says - "A law student described as “caring, charismatic and funny” would not have died if he had been seen face-to-face by a GP, say his family.  David Nash, mature student and musician 26, had four remote consultations with doctors and nurses at a Leeds GP practice over a 19-day period before his death on 4 November 2020.  None of the clinicians spotted that he had developed mastoiditis in his ear which caused a brain abscess, sparking meningitis"
Lucky there was no "harassment"

Trudeau Minister Bill Blair's team endorses ban on criminal background checks - "the unemployment rate for convicted felons lies at around 50 percent... Blair believes these universal background checks are discriminatory, following in the path of provinces like BC, Ontario and Quebec... Canada's leading guns right didn't take too kindly to this news: "we're now in clown country, where Canadian employers have no right to know if they’re hiring violent criminals."  They "protect violent offenders," she added. "But when it comes to legal gun owners, they background check us every day.""
And when they did that in the US, young black men suffered

A YouTuber bet a physicist $10,000 that a wind-powered vehicle could travel twice as fast as the wind itself – and won - "Blackbird is so counterintuitive, in fact, that less than a week after Muller released his video (below), Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics at UCLA, emailed to inform him that it had to be wrong. A vehicle like that would break the laws of physics, Kusenko said."
"If you disagree with a scientist about science, you are wrong"

'There are quite many SIA girls in KTVs': Singapore hostess spills the beans on ins and outs of industry - "these girls are treated as prized commodities by both KTV owners and patrons alike.  For one, the Singapore Girl doesn't share the same waiting area as the other hostesses.   "Inside the KTV, there are two waiting areas. One is for 'normal' Singaporean girls and the other one is all for the 'SIA stewardess'. They'll be very clear about this," Amy said.   She went on to mention that the "SIA girls" have "rates that are usually higher than normal Singaporean girls."  With the premium rates come higher expectations.  Amy added: "If the customer chooses an 'SIA stewardess', that means she'd have to maintain her standards. Similar to what she usually does as an air stewardess."  On top of that, the "SIA girl" is also expected to hold her liquor better than other KTV hostesses... Ladies working in KTV lounges come from a plethora of countries including Singapore, but the Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese girls aged between 18 and 40 form the bulk of hostesses in the KTVs here...   She has also seen a rise in the number of local hostesses at one particular KTV lounge as of late, adding: "Since the beginning of this year, the number of Singaporean hostesses has grown from zero to over 100."  This spike in numbers could be due to the lure of high earnings in a short period of time, she suggested.   A hostess can make between $300 and $500 per night from drinking with customers for three to four hours, but things do get physical in the rooms.  Depending on the customer's behaviour, a hostess' acceptance of his advances may range "from kissing to hugging, maybe touching each other to stripping," Amy shared.  A hostess' earnings for the night can go up to $1,000 if she "wants to go further to earn the extra tips" by offering "discreet services" outside KTVs.  Another method of stacking money fast is for a hostess to be a butterfly within the KTV lounge. This means that they will try to go to as many rooms and entertain as many customers as possible in one night.  Amy said: "The butterfly is usually done by the foreign hostesses. Usually, the local hostesses are more conservative and prefer to sit in the same room for the whole night."  As for Amy herself, she told AsiaOne that she has two children to take care of at home. That's why the single mum felt that "being a hostess is a good job [for her] because the timings are flexible and the working hours are shorter."...   While they usually spend at least $800 at a KTV lounge, Amy has seen instances where customers spend up to $7,000 to book one of the bigger rooms for the night.  Given how expensive a night out at the KTV is, it's no surprise that regular patrons are "bosses of companies or entrepreneurs running their own businesses."  Visiting the KTVs offers customers an escape from reality, Amy suggested.  "They probably don't have a very good relationship at home and they tend to seek happiness in the KTVs.""

Far-left firebrands who led Lambeth Council at time of child abuse scandal - "More than 700 child abuse victims in the care of a notorious hard-Left council were 'pawns in a toxic power game' local leaders were having with Margaret Thatcher's Government in the 1980s, a damning inquiry has found.   Frequent and vicious abuse by paedophiles was allowed to go on while the leaders of Lambeth Council in South London were more focused on opposing the ruling Conservatives - with the children treated as 'worthless'... While nationally-known Labour leaders such as Ted Knight and Linda Bellos postured against the Government and condemned racism, social workers treated children with 'callous disregard' and allowed paedophiles free rein... It told how 'bullying, intimidation, racism and sexism thrived within Lambeth Council', all of which was set within a context of corruption and financial mismanagement which permeated much of the council's operations.   The report said senior council officials who tried to rein in corruption were threatened - and levels of intimidation against staff deepened when one official who resisted corruption was murdered in a crime that went unsolved."

Full stop is 'intimidating' to young people who interpret it as a sign of anger, linguists say - "The study involved 126 undergraduates and the researchers found that text messages ending in the most final of punctuation marks – eg 'lol.', 'let's go to Nando's.', 'send nudes.' – were perceived as being less sincere.  Unusually, texts ending in an exclamation point – 'lmao!', 'just a cheeky one!', 'what body part even is that? I hope it's your arm!' – are deemed heartfelt or more profound."

Chinese-Made Smartphones Are Secretly Stealing Money From People Around The World - "Preinstalled malware on low-cost Chinese phones has stolen data and money from some of the world's poorest people... Mxolosi’s Tecno W2 was infected with xHelper and Triada, malware that secretly downloaded apps and attempted to subscribe him to paid services without his knowledge... Michael Kwet, a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who received his doctorate in South Africa, called the idea of Chinese-made phones extracting data and money from people living in poverty “digital colonialism.”... Mxolosi said he had no idea which company made his phone. He was surprised and disappointed to hear it was a Chinese company.  “Oh god. That means the Chinese are just ripping us off left, right, and center,” he said, comparing his malware-riddled smartphone to designer knockoffs made in China that flood South Africa. “We are getting [counterfeit versions] of clothing that are made in the US. They come in and make them with bad quality.”"

France vows to deport family of Muslim girl 'beaten for dating a Christian' - "France's interior minister has vowed to deport the family of a Bosnian Muslim girl who was allegedly beaten and had her head shaved for dating a Christian.   The 17-year-old was left with a broken rib and multiple bruises after the attack in Besançon, 70 miles north of Geneva... A survey by Pew Research in 2015 found that just 15 per cent of Bosnian Muslims would be comfortable with their son or daughter marrying a Christian"
Islamophobia!

Thursday, April 28, 2022

Links - 28th April 2022 (2 - George Floyd Unrest)

Rioters Are Wrong to Say: Don’t Worry, Insurance Will Bail Out Small Businesses - "Mike and Carolyn Deininger learned the hard way that insurance doesn’t usually make small business owners whole following politically inspired violence...   “We were truly in support of the [current] protests,” Carolyn said. “[I]n the scheme of things we were able to let it go because it feels feel like people are listening and talking and something positive might be coming out of this.”...   “A lot of small businesses either don’t have coverage or, particularly in the pandemic, some of these companies go bare, which is the term when they drop their coverage and decide not to renew”... The limitations of insurance, potential fights with insurers and the reality of trying to rebuild and reestablish operations have become major hardships. Financial pressures pushed some to drop coverage entirely.  People who assume insurance companies will make every business owner whole are wrong...   They see the same fallout as other business owners. No income for months. Existing expenses that can’t be ignored. Even with rent forbearance, landlords eventually expect their due.  Property owners look for ways to cut the bills and commercial insurance is one area as renewal prices have been trending more than 5% higher than the same time last year... Insurance coverage can fall short of what a business owner needs to resume operations. A policy that does not specifically offer “replacement cost” may leave an inadequate amount to rebuild and restock. With replacement coverage usually comes a coinsurance requirement to cover a specified percentage of that amount, like 80%. Fall below, and the amount covered starts to drop... Many small businesses opt for 30, 60, or 90 days of interruption insurance, Miller says. However, serious damage could push recovery times far past those limits.   An insurance company’s primary mission isn’t paying claims. If a building burnt down with all the receipts for inventory and fixtures, the owner won't have proof of his losses—which an insurer will insist on seeing.   Business interruption insurance also leaves open the question of how losses are valued.   “The way an income claim is established is to look at prior periods of the business to see what the lost business is,” said Daniel Struck, a partner in the Chicago office of law firm Culhane Meadows. “An insurance company might make the argument, ‘Let’s look at the last three months when you were closed.’ It’s harder for a small business to argue against an insurer if the insurer is taking an adverse coverage decision. It costs money to do so.” That’s money the business likely doesn’t have, especially if the Covid-19 pandemic shut it down for months...   Recovery is a slow process. Some areas hard hit by rioting in the past, like South Los Angeles in 1992 after police were acquitted in the Rodney King beating case, weren’t restored even after decades.  A small business in an area that has seen rioting not only faces rebuilding but waiting for customers to return."
When premiums go up in minority neighbourhoods, just accuse insurance companies of being racist and redlining. Brilliant!

George Floyd's brother utters three forbidden words after sentencing of Derek Chauvin - "Philonase Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, uttered a forbidden three-word phrase Friday after the sentencing of Derek Chauvin, the former officer who killed his brother.  Floyd was addressing the media after Chauvin was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison. He listed many other names of victims touted by the "Black Lives Matter" movement before saying that "all lives matter."  "I just want to reiterate: not just black lives matter, all lives matter!" he exclaimed... "Your skin color should not define who you are. It should never be a weapon"... Philonase Floyd had previously spoken the phrase when he testified before members of the House Judiciary Committee earlier in June"
Clearly a racist who hates black people

Watch – Ahmaud Arbery's Father Declares 'All Lives Matter' - "Speaking on the steps of the courthouse on Wednesday afternoon, Marcus Arbery said that his son’s murder should not happen to anyone, be they black or white. “For real, all lives matter,” Arbery said as the crowd, including Rev. Al Sharpton, nodded in agreement. “Not just black children, we don’t want to see nobody go through this.”... the family of Ahmaud Arbery has steered clear of divisive politics throughout the aftermath of his murder, having previously met with former President Trump and even granting interviews with Breitbart News.   “Though the trial became racially and politically charged, it was not so initially; the Arbery family’s attorney, Lee Merritt, spoke frequently with Breitbart News and acknowledged that then-President Donald Trump had been helpful in the case”...   “I was very, very emotional throughout the whole conference,” she told Fox News after Trump signed his executive order on police reform. “[Trump] was very compassionate. He showed major concern for all families. Not just one family, but for all families.”"
Another racist who has no heart and no empathy for blacks shot by whites

The Oregonian issued a tweet assuring readers that it was only a white guy who was killed by police so no need to riot and loot - "In fairness to the Oregonian, a crowd had turned out immediately but given this is Portland, the protest was less about social justice and more about primarily white people screaming incoherently."

Facebook - "A year after the murder of George Floyd, Los Angeles and other American cities are facing a surge in violent crime, forcing cities whose leaders embraced the idea of police reform to reassess how far they are willing to go to reimagine public safety."
"This time last year I lost "friends", the studio we recorded TRIGGERnometry in and came under repeated attack for saying that BLM would make things worse, not better.  I hope the people who kneeled, gave money and went after those who told the truth are happy now.  You did this."
Some claim that even cities that didn't do police reform saw crime rise. But thugs across the US were emboldened

Matt Walsh on Twitter - "Minnesota AG Keith Ellison on Kim Potter conviction: "At this moment, I ask us all to reflect upon the life of Daunte Wright, and who he could've been had he had a chance to grow up.""
"Well he shot a kid in the face and robbed a girl at gunpoint so I think we have a pretty good idea about what he would’ve been"

Two Officers Indicted For Murder In 2016 Shooting Of Man Who Was Shooting At Them - "A federal grand jury indicted two members of a U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force on murder charges Tuesday for the shooting of 26-year-old Jamarion Robinson five years ago."
Self defence is racist

George Floyd Mural Struck By Lightning In Toledo, Ohio - "A mural honoring the memory of George Floyd in Toledo, Ohio has collapsed after being struck by lightning"

Devon.eth 〄 on Twitter - "LAPD identifies suspect in stabbing of UCLA grad student Brianna Kupfer"
"Please delete this and post without his photo. We don’t want racist comments #BlackLivesMatter"

Cathy Young on Twitter - "The federal government deliberately targeted BLM protesters via heavy-handed criminal prosecutions in an attempt to disrupt and discourage the movement in the wake of George Floyd's murder, a new report says."
"This is a report from a BLM-affiliated group. Why is NPR presenting it as if it was an objective study?"

McDonald’s CEO’s text to Chicago mayor sparks 'racism' protest - "McDonald’s head honcho Chris Kempczinski is under fire over a text message he sent to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot about shootings in the city that critics say was “racist” and “ignorant.”  Protesters say the message — sent on April 19 but revealed Tuesday — appeared to blame parents who “failed” their children.  “p.s. tragic shootings in last week, both at our restaurant yesterday and with Adam Toldeo [sic]. With both, the parents failed those kids which I know is something you can’t say. Even harder to fix,” he said, according to WBEZ Chicago, which obtained the text through a Freedom of Information Act request."
Personal responsibility and good parenting are racist

Candace Owens on Twitter - "Nobody cared that George Floyd pressed a gun to a black woman. Nobody cares that Rashard Brooks beat a black woman. For defending those women, I’ve had black men threaten to assault me & call me a whore. Black culture is broken and it’s time we STOP blaming white people."

Rep. Jim Jordan on Twitter - "Why won’t Democrats denounce the violence in:
-Kenosha
-Portland
-Seattle
-Chicago
-Minneapolis
-New York City
-Philadelphia
-Washington, D.C.
Because they’re all run by Democrats."

BayCoalition on Twitter - "According to far right-wing extremists, "awful" people are those who *object* to having their city burned down by mobs of feral thugs, whereas the decent people are the looters and arsonists."

Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "Why would any person of color ever comply with a police officer when there is a 50/50 shot of getting “accidentally” shot?"
"A serious issue for the debate right now is that people genuinely, ethically, believe dangerous nonsense like this. Your ACTUAL risk of being shot by a cop as an unarmed Black man, using WaPo data over the rough annual number of in-group stops, is 18/6,000,000...or 1/333,333."
Other replies: "Where did you get this 50/50 statistic from? I mean I know you pulled it out of thin air because you're trying to get more young black men killed, because you're a lying soulless hack, but I just want to hear you acknowledge it."
"Lol twitter fact checks got nothing to say about this one, huh?"
Addendum: This is still up as of 24 Jul 2022. So much for "disinformation" - that's just stuff liberals don't like

Memphis BLM founder Pamela Moses sentenced for illegally voting - "The founder of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Memphis has been sentenced to prison for six years for illegally registering to vote in Tennessee"

Black Americans Sue NYC for Giving Voting Rights to Foreign Nationals - "Black Americans in New York City, New York, have filed a lawsuit against the city for giving municipal voting rights to nearly a million foreign nationals.  As Breitbart News has chronicled, Democrats on the 51-member New York City Council approved a plan last month that allows more than 800,000 foreign nationals with green cards, visas, and work permits the opportunity to vote in citywide elections so long as they have resided in the city for at least 30 consecutive days. Now, four black Americans and New York City residents — Phyllis Coachman, Deroy Murdock, Katherine James, and Anthony Gilhuys — have filed suit with the help of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF).  Their lawsuit accuses the city’s Board of Elections of violating the 15th Amendment by imposing a “racially discriminatory” policy that is set to drastically dilute the voting power of American citizens in New York City, and specifically of black Americans...   This is the second lawsuit to drop against the policy. Last month, the New York State Republican Party, naturalized American citizens, and a Democrat city councilman filed a lawsuit against New York City, alleging the policy is in violation of the state’s constitution. The case is Coachman v. New York City Board of Elections in the Supreme Court of Richmond County, New York."

BLM really showed up to a fundraiser for childhood cancer and caused a scene while people were trying to donate money to cancer research - "Yup, black lives matter...  Even more than children who have cancer, apparently. Here's a video of Black Lives Matter marching through Candy Cane Lane in Milwaukee, disturbing hundreds of people who were just out trying to enjoy themselves, get into the Christmas spirit, and donate to the MACC Fund (Midwest Athletes Against Childhood Cancer Inc.)"
Weird. We're told that "black lives matter" doesn't mean "only black lives matter"

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "Shaun King sinks to a new low. He’s now threatening to dox police officers and falsely say they were involved in a police shooting.  And, yes. Doxxing and threats violate Twitter’s terms of agreement but King’s account and pinned tweet still remain up."
Shaun King threatens to name innocent cops as Jacob Blake shooter - "  “If you do not name the officer who brutally shot Jacob Blake on Sunday, we will simply begin naming officers from your department who may or may not be him,” the anti-police Black Lives Matter activist threatened online.  “F–k it. Your protection of his identity is unethical. What’s his name?” King wrote in a message “to the Kenosha Police Department” that he pinned to the top of his Twitter thread.  The Brooklyn-based King later tweeted the names of two Kenosha officers."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "The MIT Catholic Chaplin was fired for this email to Catholics calling for mutual support instead of division over individuals different justice concerns. In a moral panic everybody must conform."
If you don't support leftist riots, you are a bad person

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "CHOP/CHAZ is ending it’s two week takeover of six blocks in Seattle. A few hours ago they announced on Twitter that the area was becoming too unsafe and their shrinking numbers no longer allow them to maintain their blockades.  Their announcement ended with a call to support their revolution by voting for Joe Biden along with the existing Governor and Mayor.  It’s safe to say that CHOP’s authoritarian policing was an absolute failure on every level. It violated individual liberties, it led to a sharp increase in violence, and it lost support from the revolutionaries. Their final act was to support long-standing mainstream politicians."

Leftists Viciously Attack Cerebral Palsy Victim, 58; Video Shows Victim's Flowers Left Littering Street - "In a series of social media postings, the Columbus Division of Police with information about the rioters who attacked Eldon Hawkins on May 31 to come forward... According to WSYX-TV, rioters also attacked those who were trying to help...   Hawkins said he’s protested before — his father was a union man and he marched with him at the Ohio Statehouse in solidarity with first responders unions.  “We did not break one window, and we did not spray-paint foul language, because this is our city,” Hawkins said. “If troublemakers don’t like it, they can leave.” Well, that’s not how it works nowadays. Troublemakers are encouraged.  Remember, damage to property really isn’t violence... There’s also the sick irony here. The protests-turned-riots that week were all supposed to be about police brutality.  I don’t think attacking anyone like this is called for, much less someone with cerebral palsy, a sentiment with which most sane people would likely agree. Only a few were actually willing to do something about it, however — and they were apparently attacked."
They don't hate police brutality. They hate the police

Put George Floyd on the $20 Bill | Facebook

Nancy Pelosi faces backlash after thanking George Floyd for ‘sacrificing’ his life - The Washington Post - "In comments made after Tuesday’s murder conviction of ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing your life for justice.”
It's funny how both sides attacked her for that

N.J. Teacher Howard Zlotkin Suspended After Calling George Floyd a ‘Criminal’ - The New York Times
The left hates facts again. St Floyd cannot be blasphemed against

Louisville diner pulls gun on armed BLM protesters in shocking video

NJ cop fired for post berating BLM protesters as 'terrorists' - "A New Jersey police officer who wrote on Facebook that Black Lives Matter protesters are “terrorists” who couldn’t care less if she dies has been fired — a move ripped by her attorney as “pandering to the far left.”...  Erwin said her children were crying for her not to go to work on June 8 — two weeks after George Floyd’s police-custody death in Minneapolis sparked heated protests nationwide...   “I’ve seen so many black lives matter hashtags in these posts,” the post continued. “Just to let you know – they are terrorists. They hate me. They hate my uniform. They don’t care if I die.”"
You're only allowed to support BLM, not criticise it

Banning whites from Black Lives Matters meeting feels exclusionary and wrong - "Khalif, whose adopted father is white, had to spend a portion of his morning calming down the 80-year-old he affectionately refers to as "Mama." She was afraid that his social activism had changed him for the worse after reading the article that initially had mentioned him.  "I told her I'm still the same grandson who requests Spam sandwiches when he comes to visit," he said.  When I caught up with him Wednesday afternoon outside Philadelphia's City Hall, Khalif was still upset that she'd happened across the Breitbart piece about BLM's closed-meeting practice, something he describes as "very common in the movement."  "It's a space particularly for black people to heal, to cry, to vent, to organize, to be empowered, to be uplifted," Khalif said about the black-only gatherings. "We deal with anti-blackness every day, just being black in our work spaces and so on. That's why it's a safe space for us. White allies and other allies who stand with us understand that." Even though the Breitbart piece made it look like a Philly thing, it's standard practice to admit only African-Americans and others from the black diaspora to Black Lives Matter meetings.  Who knew?... BLM Philly isn't the least bit shy about its closed-door policy. Its Facebook page clearly states that the next meeting, on April 15, will be a "black only space."  I find this shocking and appalling, especially considering how many non-black faces I see participating in Black Lives Matter demonstrations here and nationwide... I can't imagine how hurtful it must feel for non-blacks who happen upon a BLM meeting to be turned away because of skin color.  Khalif said his grandmother asked him: "Am I welcome in your space?"  The question caused the 34-year-old activist to choke up."
He's upset that his segregation is exposed because he thinks segregation is a good thing

Black Lives Matter leader to Biden and Harris: 'We want something for our vote' - ""We are requesting a meeting with you both to discuss the expectations that we have for your administration and the commitments that must be made to Black people," Cullors wrote, declaring, "We want something for our vote.""

California threatens to hold BLM's leaders personally liable over missing financial records - "The leaders of Black Lives Matter could be held personally liable if they fail to disclose financial records about the charity's $60 million in donations within the next 60 days.   In a letter issued to BLM on Monday, the California Department of Justice accused the charity of failing to submit its annual financial reports and alleged it was in delinquent status... The notice comes just days after it was revealed that BLM has not had anyone in charge of its finances since co-founder Patrisse Cullors resigned last May.  It is not clear who is currently in charge of the activist group after all three of its founding members - Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi  - left the organization... The scrutiny into BLMGN's also finances comes after it was reported that the group transferred $6.3 million to Cullors spouse, Janaya Khan, and other Canadian activists to purchase a mansion in Toronto in 2001. California's warning follows an order from Washington state instructing BLM to 'immediately cease' fundraising in the state due to its 'lack of financial transparency'.  However, the Washington Examiner alleges BLM continues to solicit and receive contributions from Washington state residents despite the order... The most recent tax filing for the charity, from 2019, gives an address in Los Angeles that does not exist, and the two remaining BLM directors identified by The Washington Examiner were not able to assist - with one even scrubbing BLM associations from his social media after he was contacted by the paper.   They are yet to file a 2020 return, a Form 990, as required - which could see BLM fined by the IRS... Cullors owned four properties - three in the Los Angeles area and one outside of Atlanta - the researchers found.  Many within BLM turned against Cullors, questioning where she had accumulated the money. Cullors has written two books, has a deal with YouTube, and signed a production deal with Warner Bros. in 2020 to develop programming 'for children, young adults and families.'   However, amid the furor she stood down and announced that two people were taking over as executive directors - Makani Themba and Monifa Bandele.  Yet Themba and Bandele in September said that they had never taken up the roles, following disagreements with leadership... Cullors has been tied to even more charities whose finances raise 'red flags' after the organization donated hundreds of thousands to the nonprofits which then made payments to Cullors and her business partners, according to a new report on the organization's spending. "
Racism!

BLM Co-Founder Explains Why Owning Multiple Extravagant Homes Doesn’t Betray Her Marxist Principles

Black Lives Matter shuts down fundraising days after liberal states threatened legal action

Amazon Kicks Black Lives Matter Off Its Charity Platform, AmazonSmile - "The Black Lives Matter movement, it has been reported, had received upwards of $10 billion from across the globe... “no one seems to know how most of that money has been spent.”"

University of Kentucky Is Sued Over Mural With Slavery Scene - The New York Times - "For years, there has been a simmering debate over what to do with a New Deal-era mural at the University of Kentucky that students have denounced as a racist sanitizing of history and a painful reminder of slavery in a public setting.  The wall-length mural, a 1934 fresco by Ann Rice O’Hanlon, is covered with vignettes that are intended to illustrate Kentucky’s history. At the center of the mural is an image of enslaved people tending to tobacco plants, and at the bottom, there is a Native American man holding a tomahawk and peering out from behind a tree at a white woman as if poised for attack.  Since 2015, university administrators have tried to find a resolution that doesn’t involve removing the mural. But last month, as many predominantly white institutions in the United States were being forced to answer for their history of racism in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, decided that it was time for the mural to come down... Wendell Berry — the writer, farmer and longtime Kentuckian — is suing the university over its decision to remove the mural, arguing that because it was created through a government program, it is owned by the people of Kentucky and cannot be removed by the university. (Mr. Berry knew the artist of the mural through his wife, who is a niece of Ms. O’Hanlon. Mr. Berry’s wife, Tanya Berry, is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.)  Mr. Berry said that they are also trying to prevent the potential removal of another work, one by a Black artist, Karyn Olivier, that was commissioned by the university and installed in the same campus building in 2018 in response to the mural. Ms. Olivier’s work, called “Witness,” reproduces the likenesses of the Black and Native American people in the mural and positions them on a dome covered with gold leaf so they appear to be floating like celestial beings. The dome is in the vestibule of the building just in front of the room where the mural covers the wall.  But if the university follows through with removing the mural, Ms. Olivier said, she would like her work to come down too.  “My work is dependent on that history,” Ms. Olivier said in an interview. She said the decision to “censor” the 1934 mural would amount to censorship of her own work. At the center of the Berrys’ lawsuit is the argument that the mural is held in trust by the university, on behalf of the public, and that university officials are not allowed to take an action that is counter to the original intent of the work. Anti-censorship advocates are playing close attention and say that what happens here could influence conversations in cities around the country about contested murals... The controversy in Lexington, Ky., is similar to one at a San Francisco high school, where a series of murals depicting the life of George Washington upset students and parents because they showed scenes of slaves at work in the fields and barns of Washington’s Mount Vernon and, in one, Washington pointing westward over the dead body of a Native American man. In 2019, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to conceal, but not destroy, the Depression-era murals; the high school’s alumni association later sued, and there has not yet been a final conclusion in the legal battle... In 2016, the university announced that it would uncover the mural but would surround it “with other works of art from a variety of perspectives that provide a larger narrative of our history.” The university selected a proposal from Ms. Olivier, and the artwork was installed in 2018, covering the inside of the dome at the entry of Memorial Hall. It puts the Black and Native figures from Ms. O’Hanlon’s mural in a different context: the people at the train station, the musicians, the people working the field, all floating in the dome’s sparkling gold background, which Ms. Olivier chose as a gesture to the gold leaf seen in churches and sacred paintings. Ms. Olivier’s work also includes portraits of figures from Kentucky’s history, including Georgia Davis Powers, the first Black person to serve in the State Senate, and Charlotte Dupuy, an enslaved woman who filed a lawsuit against her master, Henry Clay, who was then the secretary of state, seeking freedom. And around the dome’s base, there’s a quotation from Frederick Douglass: “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”  Still, students continued to object to the 1934 mural, and last year, students with the Black Student Advisory Council staged a sit-in at a campus building, demanding that the mural be taken down... Ms. Douglas, who was also the president of the Black Student Union, argued in an op-ed in the newspaper last year that the mural still needed to go. She wrote, “Taking down and completely removing the mural is not with the purpose of destroying art or covering up necessary conversations, but with the intent of giving Black students room to heal.”"
So much for liberals claiming they want to teach history, and that they don't want to destroy anything, just contextualise it
Having a mural stops Black students from "healing" - so much for "white fragility"

Officials Remove Tile Viewed as Offensive from Detroit Museum-Sponsored Mural - The New York Times - "Officials of a Detroit suburb where a new mural has been called too “pro-police” have removed an accompanying tile that depicted a skull logo that critics view as a rebuke to the racial justice movement.  The tile featured the skull imagery associated with a violent vigilante character in Marvel Comics called the Punisher, and a depiction of the “Thin Blue Line” flag, a combination that some police officers say is a show of solidarity for law enforcement but has also become associated with far-right extremism... The artist behind the 20-foot by 30-foot mural, Nicole Macdonald, then disavowed the painting and called for its removal, saying she no longer believed it was appropriate and that she felt used by the museum, which paid for the work as part of an initiative bringing cultural programs to the surrounding counties whose tax dollars support its operations."
Meanwhile BLM is associated with antifa, but that is a good thing

Activists Reenact Communist ‘Struggle Sessions’ for the Insufficiently Woke - "Silence is violence.  That’s the attitude of radical “woke” activists, who increasingly demand that fellow Americans not only agree with them, but publicly demonstrate their support at all times.  Several viral videos from Washington, D.C., on Monday show groups marching around the city, shouting slogans, and yelling things like “white silence is violence.”  In the videos, a mob appears to be harassing diners and other random white people, demanding they raise their fists or otherwise support the Black Lives Matter movement... Lauren B. Victor... said that she was actually a supporter of Black Lives Matter and had participated in protests, but felt like she was under attack by the crowd and didn’t want to be coerced... The crowd appeared to be mostly white, though one of the leaders was a black woman...   One of the protesters, Chuck Modiano, is a self-described “justice journalist” for Deadspin, a sports news and commentary website.  This falls right in line with the idea that “wokeness” in America is being generated by an increasingly activist and stridently left-wing media.  After Victor refused to stand, Modiano said derisively, “Good for you—you stood your ground.”  The incident was so bad that even Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, who has been a supporter of the Black Lives Matter protests, called it “highly inappropriate.”  She suggested businesses call law enforcement if they are subjected to this in the future. Of course, that might be a little rough if activists get their demand to “defund the police.”"

Muhammad Ali's son says he would've hated Black Lives Matters - "On the fourth anniversary of his death, Muhammad Ali’s only biological son says that his father would be against Black Lives Matter, calling the movement “racist” and the protesters “devils.”  The legendary boxer and activist stood up against racism throughout his life, but Muhammad Ali Jr. says his dad would have been sickened by how the protests have turned to violence and looting after the death of George Floyd.  “Don’t bust up s–t, don’t trash the place,” he told The Post. “You can peacefully protest.  ‘‘My father would have said, ‘They ain’t nothing but devils.’ My father said, ‘All lives matter.’ I don’t think he’d agree.”  Of the BLM movement, Ali Jr., a Muslim like his father, said: “I think it’s racist.”  “It’s not just black lives matter, white lives matter, Chinese lives matter, all lives matter, everybody’s life matters. God loves everyone — he never singled anyone out. Killing is wrong no matter who it is”...   On police brutality, Ali defended law enforcement in general.  “Police don’t wake up and think, ‘I’m going to kill a n—-r today or kill a white man,'” he said. “They’re just trying to make it back home to their family in one piece.   Speaking of Floyd’s killing at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer, Ali said, “The officer was wrong with killing that person, but people don’t realize there was more footage than what they showed. The guy resisted arrest, the officer was doing his job, but he used the wrong tactic.”  He agrees with President Trump that Antifa fomented violence during the Floyd protests and should be labeled a terrorist organization.   “They’re no different from Muslim terrorists. They should all get what they deserve. They’re f–king up businesses, beating up innocent people in the neighborhood, smashing up police stations and shops. They’re terrorists — they’re terrorizing the community. I agree with the peaceful protests, but the Antifa, they need to kill everyone in that thing.  “Black Lives Matter is not a peaceful protest. Antifa never wanted it peaceful. I would take them all out.”...   Despite strong tensions between the black community and the Chicago PD — especially after 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot dead in 2014 by a cop later convicted of murder — Ali says he was never singled out by cops for his skin color, and defends them against charges of institutional racism.   “Not all the police are bad, there’s just a few. There’s a handful of police that are crooked, they should be locked up,” he said. “I never had a bad scene with a cop. They’ve always been nice and protect me. I don’t have a problem with them.”  This despite twice being held and questioned by the TSA under Trump’s travel ban on seven Muslim-majority nations. Ali was released both times.  Instead, Ali goes a step further, calling out Black Lives Matter as a divisive movement.  “It’s a racial statement,” he said. “It’s pitting black people against everyone else. It starts racial things to happen; I hate that.”  Ali said he supports Trump and that his father — who went to jail for refusing to be drafted during the Vietnam War on the basis of his religious beliefs — would have too...  Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Ali Jr.     Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Ali Jr. Coleman-Rayner Muhammad Ali Jr. with his father at the MGM Grand in 2009.     Muhammad Ali Jr. with his father at the MGM Grand in 2009. Ken Carl/Coleman-Rayner  “I think Trump’s a good president. My father would have supported him. Trump’s not a racist, he’s for all the people. Democrats are the ones who are racist and not for everybody.  “These [Democrat politicians] saying Black Lives Matter, who the hell are you to say that? You’re not even black.  “Democrats don’t give a s–t about anybody. Hillary Clinton doesn’t give a s–t; she’s trying not to get locked up.  “Trump is much better than Clinton and Obama. … The only one to do what he said he would do is Donald Trump.”"

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