Author Archive

Don’t know much about history

Posted: July 14, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths

By Christopher Harper

After I assigned two readings about the end of World War II, I received a question from one student: Why did the United States want to invade Japan?

The readings included John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Paul Fussell’s Thank God for the Atom Bomb!

The latter recounts how Fussell was part of the army ready to invade Japan. Estimates of allied casualties stood at roughly one million before the atomic bombs were used.

I explained to the student the history of Japanese involvement in the war and how Japan refused to surrender in the closing days of World War II.

I couldn’t really fault the student because his public school teachers have turned courses on American history into a social justice warrior screed about the nation’s misdeeds.

Now these failures in public education have created massive misunderstanding of the history of this country and some of its key leaders.

Take, for example, the recent desecration of the statues of Frederick Douglass and Ulysses S. Grant.

If anyone represented the values of Black Americans, Douglass did.

Douglass, who was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, escaped and became the leading abolitionist in his day. In 1847, Douglass started The North Star, an abolitionist newspaper in Rochester, New York.

In Rochester, in 1852, Douglass delivered an address that eventually became known as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” One biographer called it “perhaps the greatest antislavery oration ever given.”

It was on the anniversary of this speech that protesters toppled his statue in Rochester, a gross lack of understanding of Douglass’s role in Black Americans’ struggle.

A few days later, rioters in San Francisco defaced and damaged a statue of Grant, a committed abolitionist. 

Author Ron Chernow has recently written an excellent account of Grant’s role in fighting for abolitionist causes. The History Channel recently turned Chernow’s book into a three-part series for television.

As a general, Grant defeated the Confederacy and insisted that the opposing army treat Black soldiers the same as whites. As president, Grant fought the Ku Klux Klan and endorsed Black voting rights.

His sin, according to the protestors? He kept one of his wife’s family slaves as an aide for a year before giving him freedom. 

All of the recent acts to cancel the culture of the United States reminded of Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s famous warning: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I would add that those who do not know history—as well as those who failed to teach history properly—should also be condemned.

The gentleman journalist

Posted: July 7, 2020 by chrisharper in media
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By Christopher Harper

Hugh Downs stood far above the self-absorbed bloviators who pawn themselves off today as journalists.

For nearly a decade, I worked with Hugh for ABC’s 20/20. He was the consummate gentleman and Renaissance man who treated everyone with respect.

Hugh referred to himself as “a champion dilettante,” who dabbled in music, art, and science. His 1986 memoir, “On Camera: My 10,000 Hours on Television,” was no idle boast: For years, he held the Guinness record for most hours on commercial network television until Regis Philbin eventually passed him.

Hugh was born and grew up in Ohio. His father worked as a salesman who struggled to make ends meet during the Depression. Hugh had to drop out of college to support the family as a radio announcer in Lima, Ohio.

In 1940, after serving in the Army, he joined the staff of WMAQ, the NBC radio station in Chicago. Later in the decade, he made the transition to television, working on “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie,” a popular puppet show.
Eventually, he would appear on “The Tonight Show,” “The Today Show,” “Concentration,” “20/20,” and others.

At the beginning of his career, Hugh said he suffered from stage fright. He recalled those days in “On Camera,” his memoir:

“At the end of a piece of music, when I was supposed to say something, my knees would shake uncontrollably. My pulse and respiration went up. Fortunately, the fear never showed in my delivery, but it did in my hands. If I had to hold copy, the paper would rattle. As a defense, I learned to lay copy out flat on the desk, or, if standing, to grab my lapels along with the copy, so the paper didn’t move with my hands.”

In 1978, Hugh received a call from Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, asking him to take over the newsmagazine “20/20.” Its debut just a week earlier had been a disaster. Hugh was the sole host until 1984, when his former “Today” colleague Barbara Walters became his co-host. He remained with the program until retiring in 1999.
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In addition to his television work, Hugh was a composer. He wrote a prelude that was performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Hugh was an amateur guitarist and played for Andrés Segovia. He said he was pleased that Segovia did not leave the room.

Hugh also was a science buff and an adventurer. He piloted a 65-foot ketch across the Pacific and traveled to the South Pole.

During my time at “20/20,” I worked with Hugh on a project to create coral reefs near Miami. We had a great deal of fun, including the opportunity to blow up an old ship to start a reef.

But I truly appreciated Hugh’s fame when he was able to get a reservation for our team at Joe’s Stone Crabs in South Beach, where people lined up for hours to get inside in the usually first-come, first-serve restaurant.

Hugh died at the age of 99. I know he probably wanted to reach 100, but somehow 2020 seems more appropriate.

Defund and depose the Democrat dimwits

Posted: June 30, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths

By Christopher Harper

As Philadelphia slouches toward its new normal, city residents face myriad issues from police protection to garbage removal to exploding fireworks on a continuing basis to downed trees to….

You get the drift. Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Chief Danielle Outlaw—no kidding—apologized to demonstrators who were tear-gassed while blocking an interstate highway. 

The police have suspended the use of tear gas and pepper spray except when an officer faced an imminent threat of death! 

At least the police union got it right. “We’re apologizing to protestors? Protestors?” said FOP Lodge President John McNesby. “To the officers out there, the message is be careful. Call us if you need us. No one has your back.”

Although the city did not fire or furlough any workers, garbage pickup has generally been one or two days late. Recycling has been changed to once every two weeks. 

That’s unlikely to change, given an allegedly huge hole in the city budget. I know that my city income tax and real estate taxes didn’t decline during the pandemic. The tax on soda and other drinks goes on unabated. 

But the city did use its “forward-looking approach” to an urban environment by eliminating laws against using fireworks in Philadelphia. 

Since the first of the year, the city has had nearly 1,000 complaints about excessive noise from fireworks, but no prosecutions. With fewer police wanting to get into any confrontations over enforcing laws, it’s unlikely that the boom of summer evenings will dissipate anytime soon. 

In Kensington, a poor neighborhood in North Philly, veterans with PTSD have complained vociferously about the nightly barrages of fireworks. See https://billypenn.com/2020/06/23/its-the-first-year-fireworks-are-legal-in-philly-and-cops-have-gotten-nearly-1000-complaints/

Then there is the massive number of trees downed a month ago during a severe storm. Dozens litter my neighborhood in Northwest Philly. Residents pushed the branches aside, but the downed trunks require cranes and chainsaws. Some people got so tired of the junk on the sidewalks they paid thousands of dollars to cut up the trees that are technically on city property. 

It would be nice to consider a home outside of Philly, but the Democrat creeps in the suburbs have created significant increases in real estate taxes. 

So I’ll just have to sit back and watch the Democrats destroy what remains of a once-proud place.

One final note: At least I was able to get a haircut this week!

Covid-19: What the media and the Democrats don’t want you to realize

Posted: June 23, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

After the media and the Democrats trashed the response of the Trump administration’s actions toward the pandemic, few analysts have circled back to assess the success of the federal government.

Overall, the administration did quite well in facing the most horrific disease outbreak in a century.

The only way to accurately assess the overall effectiveness is to compare apples to apples, or death rates to 100,000 people. To wit, the United States did better than Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and about the same as the Netherlands and Ireland. Germany and South Korea did better.

The cancellation of flights from China held down the infection rate; the cancellation of flights from Europe could have come earlier.

The patchwork of shutdowns and social distancing across almost every U.S. state has succeeded in stopping the exponential spread of the virus; the subsequent government subsidies have helped the economy.

Remember the ventilator shortage? It never materialized. Now the United States has a considerable surplus after mobilizing production by the likes of General Motors.

Remember the hospital bed shortage? On March 18, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a dire warning. Within 45 days, New York City would need 110,000 hospital beds to treat those suffering from Covid-19, and it only had 53,000 available. In the end, New York hit a peak for hospitalizations on April 12 at 18,825–well below the worst-case scenario.

Across the nation, the healthcare system became strained in some states, such as New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts, but it held up to the increased demand.

The problem is New York and other states was the inadequate oversight of nursing homes and long-health facilities, where about 40 percent of the 120,000 victims died.

Although the federal government sets standards for these facilities that receive Medicare, state and local governments are responsible for overseeing the quality of care. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and others failed miserably, while Florida and a few others did not.

Multiple vaccines for the coronavirus have begun clinical trials on humans. According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 100 possible vaccines in various stages of development around the world.

Earlier predictions argued it could be more than a year and a half before a vaccine was proven effective and ready to use. Now one is expected some time in the beginning of next year.

“From a vaccine development, we are doing incredibly well in that we’ve got a large number of entities trying to develop the vaccine,” says Gerard Anderson, a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Meanwhile, the antiviral drug Remdesivir has been found to shorten the average hospital stays of coronavirus patients.

Remember that study that argued hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, was dangerous? It turns out the data were false, and the study was withdrawn from a prominent medical journal.

Some shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPEs, occurred during the initial outbreak. That shortage was caused, in part, by virus-related disruptions in the supply chain from manufacturers in China, Anderson says.

Again, the United States now has a vast surplus. As of June 12, the government and industry had delivered more than 140 million N95 masks, 600 million surgical and procedural masks, 20 million eye and face shields, 265 million gowns and coveralls, and 14 billion gloves.

The Centers for Disease Control bungled test kits after the initial outbreak—part of the reason why Trump bypassed the organization. Again, the country now has a vast stockpile of testing kits and is performing roughly 500,000 examinations a day, with more than 20 million done in total.

But the media and the Democrats have shifted away from the positive steps the Trump administration made during the pandemic to the issue of racism. It’s the whack-a-mole strategy they’ve played from Russiagate to Racegate.

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