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AARP: A bad deal from a bad group

Posted: August 9, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

Like many other seniors, I am bombarded daily by ads, emails, and letters from the American Association of Retired Persons.

AARP is not only a nuisance but also a dangerous, left-leaning organization that concerns itself more with its power than its members.

AARP members should cancel their memberships and, more important, seek other providers for Medicare Advantage and Medigap coverage  

About half of those aged 50 years and older in the United States—or 38.5 million people—belong to AARP. That makes the organization one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country. In comparison, the National Rifle Association has a mere 4.5 million members.

In a cogent analysis, Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal provided a pertinent example of AARP’s duplicity: its support for the Schumer-Manchin bill, known officially as The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

“The group’s particular focus is the provision that would allow the federal government to ‘negotiate’ Medicare drug prices and cap annual increases to inflation—though it is more than happy to also swallow the legislation’s tax hikes and climate spending,” Strassel wrote recently. 

A University of Chicago study found that such a plan would reduce research dollars by $663 billion over the next 17 years, resulting in 135 fewer drugs. The study estimates a loss of 331 million years of life or more than 30 times the toll from COVID.

“Most devastated would be the people AARP claims to represent. Nearly 90% of adults 65 and older take at least one prescription medication—more than half report taking four or more. The AARP’s price controls would mean horrific hits to research in cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, you name it,” Strassel wrote.

The act also provides $64 billion to extend ObamaCare insurance subsidies. That’s a massive chump of change for insurers, including UnitedHealth Group, a company that paid $1 billion in royalty payments to AARP in 2020 alone. 

But there’s more:

–AARP argues that climate change, which gets billions from the law, has been largely responsible for a rise in infectious diseases throughout the world. 
–AARP supports widespread mail-in voting without a requirement for IDs, a significant means through which Joe Biden got elected.
–AARP supports the continuation of masks, social distancing, and contact tracing.
–AARP supports gay marriage.

If these reasons aren’t enough to cancel your AARP membership, consider the consumer complaints. 

Sitejabber.com, which provides overall reviews for various products and services, gives a huge thumbs down to AARP.

“AARP has a consumer rating of 2.17 stars [out of five] from 200 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Consumers complaining about AARP most frequently mention car insurance, customer service, and junk mail problems,'” the website advises. See https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/aarp.org for some of the other issues. 

From just about any way you look at AARP, the organization doesn’t do much except to strive for more power rather than to help seniors! 

That’s just my nickel, which I plan to spend on my membership for the Association of Mature American Citizens, or AMAC, which does a lot more for seniors than AARP and has a political agenda far more in keeping with my outlook. For more information, see http://www.amac.us.

The death toll from lockdowns

Posted: August 2, 2022 by chrisharper in covid
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By Christopher Harper

The death toll from lockdowns increased deaths from heart attacks to cancer to alcohol and drug overdoses to murders.

As of January, the CDC registered roughly 875,000 Covid fatalities [now just over one million], with an alarming number of Americans 65 and up accounting for more than 70 percent of the deaths, according to the CDC and The Wall Street Journal. The federal government counted more than 145,000 Covid deaths among nursing-home residents, most in the pandemic’s first year. At least 2,250 nursing-home staffers also died from Covid-19.

According to a study published in the JAMA Network Open, heart disease and stroke mortality rates rose 4.3% and 6.4%, respectively, in 2020.

Stephen Sidney, the lead author of the study, reported that the 696,962 recorded deaths from heart disease in 2020 was the highest yearly number, adding that preliminary CDC data for 2021 are similar. Stroke deaths rose 1.2% to 162,140, he said.

Much of the increase can be attributed to the inability to get standard medical care because of lockdowns and hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases.

For example, four of my close friends died over the past year because they couldn’t get adequate health care for cancer, and I know only one person who died from Covid. 

According to preliminary data from the CDC, drug-overdose deaths jumped to a record of more than 107,000 in 2021 due to the lockdowns and mental health issues.

Gun murders increased nearly 35% to 6.1 homicides per 100,000 residents from 2019 to 2020 to the highest level since 1994, according to a CDC report. Agency officials cited economic stress, disruption of services, and social isolation during the pandemic as potential factors. The firearm-suicide rate also increased slightly, and that trend continued in 2021.

According to the report, the rate hit 6.1 homicides per 100,000 residents, rising 34.6 % during the first year of the pandemic compared with a year earlier. 

Several cities set new highs for murders in the past two years. Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon., Louisville, Kentucky., and Albuquerque, New Mexico, had their deadliest years on record in 2021, according to data compiled by The Wall Street Journal. 

The number of deaths involving alcohol increased between 2019 and 2020 from 78,927 to 99,017, an increase of 25.5%.

Health experts say it will likely take years to understand the lockdowns’ toll fully. The consequences of people delaying care for chronic illnesses, like diabetes, or delaying cancer screenings that could catch harmful malignancies early have yet to be fully realized, Gerald Harmon, the president of the American Medical Association, told The Wall Street Journal.

In 2020, screening prevalence for breast cancer and cervical cancer decreased by 6% and 11%, respectively, compared with 2018, according to data from the American Cancer Society published in JAMA Network Open. Colonoscopies for men and women dropped 16%.

Add these issues to the impact on the economy, personal wealth, and educational preparation, particularly for kindergarten through high school, and we can indeed say that lockdowns had a lot of unintended consequences that the “experts” failed to consider adequately.

Some righteous blows against the left

Posted: July 26, 2022 by chrisharper in entertainment, Sports
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By Christopher Harper

With the left’s stranglehold hold over the past few decades on much of the arts, entertainment, and sporting industries, it’s encouraging to see conservatives gaining ground.

For example, singer John Rich aimed his latest song, Progress, at the left’s agenda—a piece that quickly rose to the top of the charts on most music websites. If you haven’t seen the video, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMEECbKOH7Q

In the song’s lyrics, Rich outlines a variety of divisive subjects, including his views:

–America’s replacement of religion with government
–Immigration and the death of American soldiers during the evacuation from Afghanistan
–The encroachment on freedoms during the COVID lockdowns
–The impact on Main Street as Wall Street profited from government actions

The message of the chorus is hard to miss:

Stick your progress where the sun don’t shine.
Keep your big mess away from me and mine.
If you leave us alone, we’d all be just fine!

But there’s more. A trio of motion pictures, Top Gun: Maverick, The Gray Man, and The Terminal List, underline individual achievement and patriotism. While the critics may not like these films, audiences love them, highlighting how the elite no longer has much to do with what people like.

In Top Gun, Navy pilots have been tasked with destroying a uranium enrichment plant in a dangerous mission from which few of the fliers are expected to return. Spoiler alert: The pilots complete the difficult mission through individual heroism, military teamwork, and patriotism. 

In The Gray Man and The Terminal List, special forces operators fight corruption in the intelligence and military through a determination to fight evil at all costs. 

The Gray Man, which appears in theaters and on Netflix, comes from a book by Mark Greaney, who helped Tom Clancy with the Jack Ryan series. Jack Carr, a former Navy Seal, wrote The Terminal List, which is a series on Amazon.com. 

All three films are about as red, white, and blue as you can get, emphasizing the importance of moral decisions and individual accomplishment. 

But there’s even more. 

In the heart of leftist academia in Ann Arbor, Michigan, head football coach Jim Harbaugh underlined his pro-life stance. 

Harbaugh told ESPN he encourages his family, players, and staff members that if they could not take care of a baby after an unplanned pregnancy, then he and his wife would take the child and help raise it.

“I encourage them if they have a pregnancy that wasn’t planned, to go through with it, go through with it,” Harbaugh said. “Let that unborn child be born, and if at that time, you don’t feel like you can care for it, you don’t have the means or the wherewithal, then Sarah and I will take that baby.”

In a world where a lot seems headed in the wrong direction, it’s heartening to see conservatives fighting back in arenas long dominated by the left. 

Slouching toward Philadelphia

Posted: July 19, 2022 by chrisharper in crime
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By Christopher Harper

It’s only been about a month since 73-year-old James Lambert Jr. died–one of the most disturbing murders in Philadelphia’s violent history.

But his death has almost faded from the media coverage and the public conscience as other brutal crimes continue in the City of Brotherly Love.

Here are the pertinent facts: surveillance video shows a teen hoisting a traffic cone above his head before striking Lambert. Then, a girl in her stocking feet with a pair of sunglasses atop her head can be seen retrieving the cone and appears to do the same thing. It looks as if she strikes the older man not once but twice. Another child seems to be holding up a phone to videotape what is happening as another rides his scooter. 

Lambert died while walking in a neighborhood about a mile from Temple University, where I worked for many years. 

Two “children”—a 14-year-old boy and girl—have been charged with murder for killing Lambert with a traffic cone that struck him in the head.

Back in the day, “the neighbors were the village. They policed you. They parented. They would tell your parents if they saw you doing something that you weren’t supposed to do, and before they told your parents, they would say something to you. You really couldn’t get away with a lot,” Christine Brown, director of community services for Beech Companies and who grew up near where the attack took place, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Things are just different. Children don’t speak to their seniors, and seniors are afraid to live in their own community, and that’s sad.”

“Back in the day” was a long time ago. Maybe the early 1960s? Since that time, Philadelphia has become a mess, mainly because Democrats have led the city to the brink of despair and disparity. 

Philadelphia isn’t much different from a lot of cities. The school system is bankrupt, and a new superintendent seems more interested in an “anti-racist” curriculum than a formula for learning.

The police chief has neutered her officers.

The district attorney is a George Soros post child.

The mayor has given up even though he has a year left in his term.

The only change after Lambert’s death is a new curfew. Those aged 17 and younger must be indoors and off the streets by 10 p.m.; those 13 and younger must be home by 9:30.

If the schools don’t teach children much, the police chief and district attorney don’t enforce the law, and the mayor has given up, I find it unlikely a curfew, which won’t be enforced, will change Philadelphia’s slide toward anarchy.

A school superintendent who emphasizes learning may make a difference, but school vouchers would be a better solution.

A change in the attitudes of the police hierarchy and the prosecutor would make a difference. 

A new mayor—preferably a Republican—also might make a difference. The Democrats have run the city since 1952, and maybe 1952 was “back in the day” when times were, in fact, better.

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