“. . . nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.” ― Winston Churchill
Please watch a Virginia mom on February 3 lower the hammer on her school board’s policy of mandatory masks in school.
Something is afoot. In the first edition of the American Revolution, it was portrayed as a fight against aristocratic rule. That’s misleading. More correctly, it was a fight against violations of the rights of Englishmen. Key to the rights of Englishmen is self-rule. We rule ourselves though our elected representatives, thus the cry against taxation without representation. The king and Parliament were an ocean away and the colonists had no representation of their own choosing.
In this possibly emerging second edition, unaccountable experts have supplanted self-rule. The expertocracy, like the aristocracy of old, claim a kind of divine right, and too many of a leftist persuasion bend a knee before them. It’s the very essence of progressivism.
The pandemic is proving Churchill right. In an understandable reaction, moms and dads are raising the flag of opposition. Self-rule and the rights of Englishmen are making a comeback.
Biden and New York City mayor, Eric Adams, at yesterdays’ meeting (2/3/22).
Flummoxed: adj.; bewildered or perplexed.
I am flummoxed and so is our president. I am perplexed by young people, formally educated and from comfortable backgrounds, storming police stations, burning down central business districts, and imposing on us their warped views by defacing our monuments and memorials. I am further bewildered by a refusal to recognize the most elemental of things: if you don’t enforce the law, there is more law breaking. Our president is equally flummoxed and displays it regularly. He strode into New York City yesterday (2/3/22) and announced that he was going to lead an effort to arrest, wait for it . . . guns! Arrest guns, not the people who use them to commit heinous acts.
Yes, that’s right, President Biden declared a crackdown on inanimate objects. The favorite phrase in vogue among his people is “gun violence”. And they don’t mean violence committed by human beings WITH guns. They mean violence BY guns. It’s as if these metallic things have a mind, a will of their own. They jump from the coffee table to a person’s hand, take over the psyche, and drive the individual to commit horrifying acts with them.
Nary a word about blue-bubble public leaders vilifying the police, robbing their budgets, and refusing to prosecute lawbreakers. Check this out: mobs using phone calculators during smash-and-grabs to guarantee that their thefts don’t exceed $950, thanks to the voters and political establishment of California (Prop 47). And blue-bubble potentates don’t need a Prop 47 to set a baseline for allowable criminality. They’ve got Soros-funded henchmen as DA’s refusing to fulfill their oaths of office to faithfully enforce the laws, and thusly are deserving of impeachment. Sorry, “prosecutorial discretion” doesn’t cut it. This is not discretion; it’s essentially ripping pages out of the duly-passed code of laws.
Our exalted president says not a word about the vastly more significant contributions of his party to the mayhem. Get prepared for a campaign to hamper your ability to own a gun to protect yourself from the lawlessness that they inspired. Mr. President, you should be condemned for not lowering the boom on your party’s abettors of criminality while leaving the rest of us without any means to protect ourselves.
Watch yesterday’s disgusting spectacle on the video below.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief White House medical adviser, testifying before the Senate Health Committee on Jan. 11, 2022.
In March of 2020, near the start of the government’s forceful reaction to the pandemic, I fretted that “We can’t do this!”, the this being the lockdowns and all the other strangulations of human interaction. I was worried that the virus would still get out and we would have nothing to show for it but a mutilation of our own well-being. Others more knowledgeable than I are starting to chime in. Most recently, a Johns Hopkins University study by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke paint a dismal picture of what we’ve done to ourselves in our COVID panic.
Cutting to the chase, the researchers concluded,
“They [lockdowns] have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best . . . . lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Hindsight has not been kind to the “scientific consensus”. Fauci and company, and hyperactive and panic-riddled governors and mayors, mostly in the blue bubbles, have soiled themselves, and continue to do so. As a consequence, many people are coming to the realization that “scientific consensus” is not science. It’s an easy cover for people who don’t know science to lay claim to it for political advantage. As such, when the opinions hiding under the phrase’s veneer get exposed for their erroneousness, it starts to lack credibility . . . as if it ever had any.
Beware, beware of the “scientific consensus” on climate change. It is bandied about by the same actors pursuing similar goals in similar organizations with similar backgrounds and homogeneous worldviews.
Some have complained that the pandemic shouldn’t be about politics. Really? When has a “crisis too good to waste” not been about politics? Of all people, Clausewitz gave us the proper insight: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Just replace “war” with “scientific consensus”.
2015 meeting of the American Historical Association.
Thomas Piketty, an academic apostle of the Left, once crowed in 2016 of the increasing correlation of higher educational attainment and the tendency to vote Democratic: high school graduates 44%, Bachelor degrees 51%, Masters 70%, and PhD degrees 76%. Does this mean that smarter people vote for the Democrats? Hogwash. The gap between smartness and possession of degrees has not been greater than in our time.
It’s fair to say that degrees and certificates in many cases just paper over human failings. We are still prone to unexamined and purely fashionable beliefs, an overwhelming desire to win at any cost, the penchant to make facts fit predetermined conclusions, and let hubris cloud our vision. Nothing much has changed for many of us after many years of schooling. Today, we have many such highly educated ideologues circulating amongst us.
It’s not necessarily a sign of brilliance to almost uniformly take crass positions on highly contentious issues. It heralds, if anything, a blind deference to peer group pressure. Not exactly evidence of high intellectual acumen. Abortion is one issue that brings to light a kind of organized intellectual debasement among the highly papered.
Justice Harry Blackmun (r), author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is before the Supreme Court. The case has attracted amicus briefs like flies to a feed lot. Stepping into the fracas is the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians in support of the Roe decision and abortion as a right. That wasn’t the first time. In 1989, 400 of them displayed their pro-abortion bona fides in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services.
Strange thing, though, these doyens of historical truth based their position on a falsehood in the original Roe v. Wade decision that was allowed to marinate and pass into their “consensus”. The fallacy stems from the uncritical adoption of the historical exegesis of a lawyer and abortion activist, Cyril Means, Jr., back in 1973. Means contended that abortion was a common-law liberty before the 19th century. He mangled primary sources, such as Samuel Farr’s 1787 medical treatise, to make it sound like abortion was an acceptable practice back then. Instead, his source, Farr, makes the opposite point if Means had only turned a few more pages: “. . . unborn embryos . . . may be supposed indeed from the time of conception, to be living animated beings, there is no doubt but the destruction of them ought to be considered a capital crime.” Historians, of all people, should know better but these didn’t. Apparently, professional integrity must not be allowed to get in the way of prejudices.*
The issue has always been fraught with an emotional tug-of-war between the unborn child and the mother in distress, but it’s very probable that the practice was nonetheless condemned going back centuries. Scholars have uncovered indictments in the 13th century for the killing of unborn children. In 1602, a woman in Surrey, England, was indicted for ingesting poison to kill the “child in her womb”. Many such examples exist in the historical record.
One cause for the confusion has much to do with state of knowledge, or lack thereof at the time, of the embryo (discovered in 1827 and the beginning of embryology) and pregnancy in general which led to the complicated picture in regards to early pregnancy abortions. There were muddled attempts in a few instances at determining when the baby was “alive”, using the arcane language of the “quickening”. Remember, this was a time when medicine was under the sway of Aristotle’s four humors (body fluids). Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was said to ride into battle during the Civil War with one arm raised to keep the fluids in balance. Still, it’s fair to say that abortion has always been considered at least an “inchoate felony” in the common law. The “inchoate” part is tied to the limited pre-natal understanding of the era.
The four humors in a medieval text.
It’s scandalous that professional historians have become so ahistorical. It’s equally scandalous that legal experts are willing to use deceit to establish far-reaching precedents. An example is the factual fraud in Mapp v. Ohio in 1961. The SCOTUS decision extended the exclusionary rule (Weeks v. US, 1914) to state court cases. After Mapp, the most violent perps – these are 90% plus tried in state courts – have a new legal weapon in their arsenal to take a walk.
The legal chicanery revolved around the belated claim of a lack of a valid search warrant. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court under the false assertion that there was no search warrant. A simple examination of past issues of the Cleveland Plain Dealer establish beyond doubt that a valid search warrant was issued to enter the apartment of Dollree Mapp whose boyfriend was a bombing suspect (later convicted). She was charged with the possession of obscene materials as a consequence of the search. Authorities couldn’t locate the warrant during the legal proceedings in her case, but that wasn’t unusual in the era before photocopying. At most, there might be one or two extra carbonized paper copies in a dank basement file room where decay was rampant. Anyway, it wasn’t thought to be relevant since the operative legal principle was that evidence was considered valid no matter how it got to the court if it had a bearing on the case.
Formal portrait of members of the United States Supreme Court,Washington DC, 1962. Pictured are, front row, from left, Justice Tom C Clark, Justice Hugo L Black, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice William O Douglas, and Justice John M Harlan; back row, from left, Justice Byron R White, Justice William J Brennan Jr, Justice Potter Stewart, and Justice Arthur J Goldberg.
Ohio was blindsided late in the game by the defense assertion of no valid search warrant and a call for the Court to apply the exclusionary rule in state jurisprudence. If it was understood to be a point of contention earlier in the process, more stringent efforts at storing and retrieving these documents would have been made. The Court took the side of Mapp: no warrant, no allowable evidence, perp takes a walk. Now, with its application in state courts, where the overwhelming number of violent suspects are tried, the rule is extended to a suspected serial killer as much as a porn enthusiast. And to think that it all rests on an untruth. So much for the integrity of the titans of the law.
Even in cases when the Court reaches the right conclusion, oftentimes the reasoning is littered with drivel. More than that, these decisions sometimes show the degree to which our judicial aristocrats get sucked into vogueish patterns of thought. A classic in how to meander in junk thought but end in the right place is 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. To bolster their argument that racial segregation was unconstitutional, they resorted to the bag of tricks of ideologically charged social science researchers.
The married research team of Mamie and Kenneth Clark, MA student in psychology and CCNY prof respectively, conducted experiments that allegedly proved that black children were mentally and emotionally scarred to a greater degree by segregation. As proof, they conducted studies such as the famous doll test. A small group of children were given dolls of different skin and hair colors. The doll of the lighter shade was preferred by all children, including the black children. Based on these preferences and answers to follow-up questions, the Clarks concluded that black children were traumatized with self-hatred. They further asserted that it was more acute among black children in segregated environments such as segregated schools. The test’s claims were cited in Earl Warren’s majority opinion.
The Clarks’ doll experiment.The Clarks’ doll test with Kenneth Clark in the background.
Since that time, the failings of the experiment were laid bare. Everything from the small sampling to the biases of the researchers to the conclusions drawn from the children’s responses has drawn fire. Yet, there it was; a highly questionable study lassoed into the judgment of the most eminent jurists. The simple thought that crusading academics might not be the most reliable wasn’t a serious enough matter to avoid using them. Right conclusion in the decision, but a perplexing path to get there.
Later, the dam broke on using social science studies as a substitute and supplement to the law in judges’ decisions. The Coleman Report of 1966 proved to be a rich source to order forced busing, a court takeover of the management of the school districts in a region (St. Louis), and all sorts of incessant court and federal meddling in local schools. Earl Warren’s majority opinion in Brown set the precedent for incorporating activism, disguised as chic research, rather than the law, its text and history, into a court’s rulings. What’s next, filling court vacancies from the ranks of Harvard’s African and African-American Studies Department?
We are not well-served by the upper crust in many of our professions, our so-called best and brightest. Historians are ahistorical. The crème de la crème of the legal profession doesn’t hesitate to practice deceit to achieve the desired end. Shoddy social science studies are ingested into rulings that impact everyone in ways large and small. Maybe a civilization’s state of health is reflected in the state of health of its elites. Now that’s serious food for thought.
RogerG
*Read here: “The Corruption of History”, Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, Nov. 29, 2021.
It looks like two-thirds of the key elements for a woke Super Bowl are lined up: a woke team and a woke location (plus the racial anthem and BLM sloganeering on team attire). The NFC championship game will be represented by two urban dystopias in a dystopian state – San Francisco and Los Angeles in California. One woke city or another from a woke state will land in Inglewood, an enclave in one of the worst governed metropolitan areas in the worst governed state. Either the Bengals, Chiefs, or the Bills of the AFC will have to play in wokedom (Bills and Chiefs are tied as of this writing).
49ers celebrate after the winning field goal against the Packers, 1/22/22.Rams players celebrate after defeating the Buccaneers, 1/23/22.
That’s not the end of it. The geographic center of wokedom, the state of California, will get its grubby hands on a good chunk of the players’ earnings. Over half will be taken in income taxes once the tax-thirsty Sacramento goons with their highest state income tax in the nation thrust their mitts into each player’s till. It’d be better if the game was played in Texas or Florida. They don’t have a state income tax.
If you’re wondering how the scam works, California fine-tuned in 1991 the gambit of any professional athlete performing in the state to be subject to the state’s highest in the nation income tax. The state dubs the teams’ visits “duty days” which includes all days for the visit. The players for the Rams, 49ers, and Chargers really get whacked for at least 6 home games. All other teams face the ordeal at most only two times, absent any playoff games in the tax hellhole. The Woke Bowl in Inglewood may not be as joyous of an event if the players’ tax accountants run the numbers and get word to their clients.
As for me, the game is “Meh”. The Woke Bowl has little appeal. I’m not sure if I’ll watch it. It depends on what’s showing at the theater.
Ticker Carlson in early December when he raised the possibility of supporting Russia in its threats against the Ukraine.
Last night (1/20/22), I exploded – not literally, but emotionally. Tucker Carlson performed his now-familiar jeremiad against US overseas intervention. This time, it’s about US support for Ukraine. This guy appears to be so scarred by our recent “forever wars” that he can’t bring himself to ardently oppose naked aggression of the kind that has been abundantly on display throughout history with all their horrifying consequences. Carlson reminds me of Édouard Daladier of France and Neville Chamberlain of the United Kingdom, eager to avoid the bloodbath of World War I, hopping planes to Munich to sell out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Just replace Ukraine for Czechoslovakia.
British statesman and prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940) at Heston Airport on his return from Munich after meeting with Hitler, making his ‘peace in our time’ address. (photo: Central Press)
An accurate film about this disgraceful page in history appeared in 1988, “Munich: A Peace of Paper”. If you watch carefully, the parallels with events on Ukraine’s border are eye-opening. Please watch it if you have an hour to spare. It’s well worth it.
In the lead up to the invasion, Hitler infiltrated the German-speaking Czech population with his sponsorship of the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP) and subsidized paramilitary and militia groups in the country. Hitler massed troops and conducted military exercises to raise tensions to incite an excuse to invade. Sound familiar, familiar to Putin’s activities along Russia’s border with Ukraine?
Daladier and Chamberlain traveled in a panic to Munich to cut a deal to desperately avoid war. They delayed war by sacrificing Czech territory to Germany, the part of Czechoslovakia with the best natural defenses against a German invasion, the so-called Sudetenland. Within seven months, Hitler took the rest of the country. Disgraceful.
From left to right: Neville Chamberlain, Daladier, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano before signing the Munich Agreement. (Wikimedia Commons)
All of it was a prelude to the Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasion of Poland and the onset of WWII with its 60-85 million dead. Of course, our predecessors could have continued to evade war by following the Tucker Doctrine of “Why should Americans shed their blood for a group of German-speaking Czechs?” The US did and stayed on the sidelines till a much larger sacrifice was required.
The fact is, no one is calling for the introduction of the 101st Airborne into the Ukraine. Carlson’s predicate of Americans dying for the Ukraine is a straw man. The airlift of military supplies to the Ukraine doesn’t mean the US is at war with Russia. It means that we are doing what Putin and the CCP do regularly: support their foreign allies. We would be simply empowering Ukrainians to make Russians die for their country, all without US troops.
Hitler made a career of portraying Germany as a victim of Versailles and was surrounded by the “predatory” Allies. Carlson parrots Putin’s identical complaints about NATO. The Allies came together before the World Wars for the same reason that Poland, the Baltic States, and Ukraine are seeking the protective umbrella of NATO. For the former, it was fear of an aggressive and expansionistic Germany. For the latter, they have an understandable fear of the Kremlin seeking to reassemble the Soviet Empire. Their history is littered with Russian invasions, conquests, and depredations.
Russian tanks, artillery, armoured vehicles and trucks situated on the border with Ukraine at Valuyki, Belgorod Oblast. (Pictures: Google Earth)Russian tanks massed on the border with Ukraine in March 2020.The Russian paramilitary group known as the Wolves’ Hundred – “the little green men” – with their commander Evgeny Ponomaryov in the foreground, block the road near the checkpoint not far from Slavyansk, in eastern Ukraine, April 20, 2014 (photo: Maxim Dondyuk)
How calloused and duplicitous can a person be to exclaim, as Carlson did in an earlier broadcast, “Why don’t we take Russia’s side?” Indeed, why didn’t we take the Axis side? Either a moral obtuseness or outright ignorance is at work in the minds of some of our celebrities in front of a camera.
In 2021, Carlson was gung-ho about getting out of Afghanistan. We did and gave up a strategic outpost on the flank of our chief adversary, the CCP. Now, we’re worried about Red Chinese nuclear-tipped hyper-sonics and East Asia as a CCP empire. In 2019, Carlson favored a double-crossing of our Kurdish allies to the Turks who are equally enthralled by a return to Ottoman greatness. There doesn’t appear to be a US intervention that he won’t oppose. The parallels with history are too obvious to ignore.
Yet, he does. Wait for it: you’ll hear talk-radio callers parrot the line almost word-for-word. A significant segment of the right will fall for the nonsense. If Carlson has his way, Reagan’s famous dictum, “Trust but verify”, will be shoved to the side for “Get out and stay out”. This won’t end well.
On the same link you’ll find this gem of a headline: “Christian plumber under fire for refusing same-sex fittings.” Parody is an excellent vehicle to unmask the ditzy pretensions of the Left. The whole belief system is a slipshod amalgam of demonstrably proven silliness.
Long live satire, an admirable tradition going back to Aristophanes of the 5th century BC. I just hope that the lefty die-hards who permeate our cultural commanding heights can take it as well as conservatives in the past century and a half.
At the top of our society is a Brahmin caste of an elect in possession of prestigious degrees. Their high status is drawn from their educations, but the claim can only have legitimacy if their many years of formal instruction truly enlightened. The evidence for that is weakening by the day. Instead, these paragons were marinated in a hot house of radical ideology. It was political activism masquerading as scholarship. Still, off they go to fill positions of power and influence in our culture. They’re everywhere.
Prime example: professional sports, or Big Sports, Inc. An aristocracy of athletic talent earning six figures, sometimes seven, eight, or nine, is managed by a metropolitan administrative apparatus of people marked by paper credentials. It’s an insular social caste far removed from the fan base that is not so well-endowed with these modern markers of prestige. The interests, tastes, social norms, and biases of this caste in the clouds escapes serious cross-examination due to uniform social reinforcement. Nearly everybody around them thinks the same way. It’s the dumb lacking any self-awareness of their dumbness.
How else can the sloganeering of campus neo-Marxists seep onto the helmets of athletes with astronomical salaries, the normal expression of patriotic unity in opening ceremonies be debased by overt racial anthems, and the change of venue of a long-scheduled all-star game after the wailing of small-minded activists be realized? Radicalism becomes fashionable when there’s no competing voices.
Nothing escapes infection including the on-field attire. The NFL has an approved list of slogans for their helmets that includes “Stop Hate”, “End Racism”, and “Black Lives Matter”, all of them taken from people who previously chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”. We know from where the adoption of extremist slogans come. It comes from people whose agenda exceeds the simple and generic meaning of the words. “Stop Hate”? What hate? Do they mean the garden variety of hate exhibited in domestic abuse, or the kind shown by a thief pistol-whipping a store clerk for resisting, or a jihadist taking synagogue worshippers hostage? I think not. The whole “Stop Hate” gambit became a cause because a viral video of an abusive cop was exploited as evidence of a systemic racial hatred. In point of fact, it was a singular incident of a bad cop, not proof of the KKK in blue.
It says more about our time’s hyper-communicability of bad behavior to every corner of the planet, whereas before it would be put in the context of a local incident to be handled locally.
“End Racism”? What racism? Widespread racial animus shows up in no respectable poll. In fact, whatever it is, it’s declining and widely condemned as shameful. So, where’s the “racism” that needs to be “ended”? Instead, a revolutionary agenda is at work. Cutting to the quick, our new fashionable revolutionary cadre want to end “acting white”, the Enlightenment, rationality, math, the scientific method, the constitutional order, anything that they assert stands in the way perfect categorical equality. This is the “racism” that they’re trying to “end”. Of course, none of this is achievable without a totalitarian state. That’s how you really kill the Enlightenment. Mao or Che would be proud.
As for “Black Lives Matter”, it came into vogue as if people needed to be reminded of the obvious: black lives do matter. Though, try saying “All lives matter”, the essence of the Gospels, and see how quickly the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department and Twitter mob pounce. All lives don’t matter to the chic radicals because they are consumed by the oppressor/oppressed shtick of Karl Marx and his later kindred spirits, of which there are many in the country’s thousands of faculty lounges. Things don’t turn out equal in racial enumerations, so the egregious non sequitur “use racism to combat racism” – in the immortal words of the high priest of Anti-Racism, Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers) – becomes the latest slogan to be turned into policy preference. Until the numbers come out equal, ALL lives don’t matter in this sewer of the mind.
Look to the knit caps worn by people on the sidelines. Prominently stitched is the word “Equity”. Just yesterday, “equity” was consonant with justice. Today, it’s consonant with racial vengeance. It’s back to Kendi’s bunk of “use racism to end racism”. That’s right, enact cash payouts for being black (reparations). Hiring, promotions, and admissions should place race as the topmost criteria. If one race shows up too prominently in the crime stats, redefine crime, end bail, and avoid prosecutions. If you haven’t enough miscreants of other racial categories in the prosecutor’s hopper, invent them in campaigns to ferret out “white supremacy” as the new “domestic terrorism”, but define it broadly so you can bag your political opponents.
Why is it that “equity” crusades all too often stray into the ugliest despotism?
We can’t even watch a football game without getting a steady diet of the politicized word salad. I can’t think of my San Francisco 49ers without Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling craze crossing my mind. Ditto for the San Francisco Giants. Taking it further, San Francisco is more aptly “San Fransicko” (Michael Schellenberger’s book of the same title). The city’s muddied reputation proceeds all. Ditto for California.
Most members of the San Francisco Giants kneel during a moment of silence prior to an opening day baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)Hunter Pence #8 of the San Francisco Giants looks on during batting practice before the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on July 23, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
And corporate-boardroom NFL parades across our TV screens BLM/Antifa slogans. It’s just one big “Meh”. No enthusiasm and don’t care. I tried to watch 49ers/Cowboys and Rams/Cardinals but, once again, “Meh”. Time to switch to Netflix.
P.S.: The politicization of professional associations is next.
“Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.” Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Sowell’s truism about freedom came to mind as more gibberish spewed from the mind of the self-styled Wise Latina on the Supreme Court, justice Sonia Sotomayor. In oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, she hysterically proclaimed, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.” First thing, it’s not true! 4 Pinocchios! Next, public imminences can’t be trusted any longer. And, really, should they ever have been?
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
The latest plague apocalypse to go viral is Omicron. It’s certainly launching into our society. It may have launched into me. I can’t tell – wasn’t tested – but it turned out to be a 4-day flu. Tested or not, it was the flu whether as the ominous Omicron or not – a virus by any other name. Earlier in 2020, I had a brief bout with first-wave COVID and it was 2 days one-and-done. Both were characterized by a low-grade fever and fatigue and that’s it. The death cart making its regular rounds didn’t come knocking and I quickly resumed my domestic role as regular irritant to my wife.
According to the over-billed “experts”, I’ve got 2 strikes against me: I’m 69 and voted for Trump. Yet, no comorbidities, not obese, regular exercise, daily vitamin and mineral supplements, and no vices (other than popcorn and “The Lord of the Rings”) may have worked to counteract the age factor. As for the vote, sorry Rachel Maddow, I won’t do anything about it since I can’t endorse a doddering puppet of left-wing lunatics. That “comorbidity” stays.
Our time is not a period of calm reason. Wannabe totalitarians are out to make everyone, literally everyone, conform to their vision of vaccinations, endless boosters, Zoom school for the kids, and masks. These blinkered despots can’t bring themselves to even mention natural immunity and treatments. I’m up-armored by nature against the COVIDs going back to MERS and SARS. Vaccines are obviously part of the public health arsenal, not the entirety of it. Not a peep, though, from Walensky and company and The Big Wheels about natural immunity, monoclonal antibodies, and antivirals. When asked, they act like the kid in the cafeteria buffet line who can’t bring himself to request the broccoli in spite of mom’s insistence before leaving for school.
Instead, we’ve got a truncated public interplay between Vaccine/Vaccine/Vaccine/… on one side and on the other Vaccine/Microchip/One World Order by the people who gave us Q Anon and Death Rays from Space during fire season. Why can’t vaccines be an important element in a strategy without it being the focus of all our efforts? The nutter right, you can drop the resurgent John Bircherism anytime.
Remember the scandal of the East German doping (male hormones) of their female swimmers that ran from the 1970’s into the 1980’s and included the 1976 Montreal Olympics (read about it here)? Our girls (XX chromosomes) had to unknowingly compete against masculinized girls (still XX chromosomes) and few knew it, not even some of the East German girls. Later, these same German girls would suffer mental and physical damage, and later to give birth to babies with serious defects.
As for the Americans, some in the press at the time referred to them as “Ugly Americans” for their justifiable complaints. American Shirley Babashoff, slated to be the next Mark Spitz, wound up with one gold and a bunch of second place finishes in the ’76 Games. She refused to remain silent and sounded the alarm but was dismissed as “Surly Shirley”. She was right, she had courage, she was vilified, and it took 31 years (2007) for the scandal’s cover to be blown for all to see.
Shirley Babashoff (r) and a portion of the 1976 US Olympic women’s swim team.
Check out these understandable reactions by other members of the ’76 team:
“To be frank, I don’t think we should look like men.”
“I wouldn’t want to walk around the neighborhood looking like a guy.”
“That’s not the way God created us to be like that (looking like DDR Swimmers).”
That was then; this is now. Circa 2022 we have gone full circle, and then some. Today, those East Germans would be heralded as trans pioneers. We have men wanting to women and women wanting to be men, jumbled with the many whose psyche match their chromosomes, competing in women’s sports . . . with the full connivance of the so-called adults in the room. Chic ideologies have redefined scandal as liberation, and created a massive class of new victims whose sole characteristic is their satisfaction with God’s endowment. What chaos, what a mess.
Transgender Lia Thomas (MTF) recently hit the airwaves and pool at the U. of Penn. as a sensation setting pool, program, and meet records 38 seconds ahead of a real deal teammate. Then in a Saturday meet, lo and behold, Lia ran into transgender Iszac Henig (FTM) – who underwent a double mastectomy – who bested Lia twice. There you have it: female sports are to be dominated by people disenchanted with mother nature. It’s a competition among the disgruntled, leaving behind the long hours of training and coaching for the well-adjusted and contented girl (XX chromosome), the kind of girl that you as a boy (XY chromosome) wouldn’t mind taking home to mother (also XX chromosome). The other two would be difficult to explain.
Lia Thomas, centerIszac Henig
The “adults” who sanctioned this biological miasma are – you may have guessed it – the NCAA. In a policy that might have been written by a paid lobbyist or Ivy League lawyer, trans female athletes mustn’t compete on the women’s team until after one year of “testosterone suppression treatment”. Not a word about bone density, muscle mass, or anything else is mentioned. Much of the rest of their physical accoutrement in the men’s league follows them into the women’s pool.
Here’s the kicker. The policy is justified by the quality of reasoning that you’d expect from a brainwashed sophomore Anthropology major writing on systemic phobias of western civilization. Here it goes, brace yourself:
“. . . many people may have a stereotype that all transgender women are unusually tall and have large bones and muscles. But that is not true. . . . The assumption that all male-bodied people are taller, stronger, and more highly skilled in a sport than all female-bodied people is not accurate.”
Has anyone informed the geniuses at NCAA headquarters that the subject in question is not whether tall women or small men exist. That’s wholly irrelevant. At the level of elite competition in the vast majority of sports, men are taller, bulkier, faster, and stronger than women. The statement has no credible place in any policy defense, let alone one that seeks to condone the competition of taller, bulkier, faster, and stronger women-with-a-Y-chromosome with women limited to the fetal arrangement. It’s one of the goofiest things ever put to paper.
Girls – Iszac HenigBoys – Lia Thomas
How can women’s sports survive this mounting chaos over who’s a woman? Don’t look to bureaucrats of the NCAA for enlightenment. They spread the chaos by transmitting the confusion. The answer lies with us, the fans of girls’ sports. We must demand an end to the nonsense. Chromosomes are the ultimate determinant, not surgeries, injections, or counseling. Our pools, meets, and locker rooms must be made as safe for our girls and women (XX chromosome) as anywhere else.
