Archive for the ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ Category

Yup, they came for Jesus

Posted: June 27, 2020 by ng36b in catholic, Church doctrine, Uncomfortable Truths
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Pearl Monument torn down, from Wikipedia

Not that long ago, the military sent me to Bahrain to work a particular mission. While I was there, I learned about the political differences between the King of Bahrain (a Sunni) and the majority Shia population on the small island nation. Protests against the King were somewhat common, and I would get text notifications if one flared up. The protests weren’t aimed at America (a nice change), but we were always advised to stay away from them because the mob mentality might make us a target of convenience.

Mobs make people stupid by allowing people to offload their decision making, and thus responsibility, onto the mob. The danger is that someone with a strong personality will use the mob’s power towards their own end. What starts as a peaceful demonstration can end in violence. That’s what happened in Bahrain, climaxing in 2011 with the demonstration near the Pearl Monument and its subsequent destruction by the government.

The scary part about mobs is that the people pulling the strings typically don’t have a peaceful end state. President Trump understands this and pointed it out in 2017 that tearing down statues to appease the mob isn’t going to work. Plenty of people ridiculed him, including Slate:

“So Trump’s comparison there is dumb. It doesn’t really even make any sense. And the notion that there’s some slippery slope is dumb.”

-Slate article, 2017

Doesn’t look so dumb now. It’s one thing for a city government to remove a Confederate statue or the federal government to rename a base. I’d be happy renaming Fort Gordon to something else, since General John Gordon seemed more capable of getting shot than being an effective general, and was probably a KKK member. There’s a system for doing that, so we should use that. We don’t need a mob for these things.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CB0snigDnXI/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading

Worse, this mob mentality isn’t going to end anytime soon. We’re now seeing Catholic churches targeted in California. My wife alerted me to an FSSP parish in San Diego, where the address was being posted in order to mobilize a protest. The right to peacefully protest is a good thing. It allows things like praying outside a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic. But it should be fairly obvious from the above Instagram picture, which makes plenty of assumptions on the church members, that the point isn’t to be peaceful, but rather intimidate people from attending church. Think about it, would YOU walk through a throng of angry protestors to attend Mass?

Mob leaders want people to submit to mob control. Worse still, when mob leadership adheres to Antifa ideaology, it will violently attack any authority that opposes it. This includes Church authority, especially Catholic teachings.

Prediction: we’re going to see attempts by the mob to link Catholicism to slavery, Trump, COVID-19, and whatever else comes to mind in order to justify defacing and tearing buildings down. This, despite a decent Church history of opposing slavery, even having a Pope that was a former slave. Remember that actual history doesn’t matter to the mob.

The question we have to start asking Catholics now is: are you prepared to wade through a mob to attend Mass? Will you tolerate a mob defacing or tearing down your Church? Because the mob is coming for Jesus. Which side will you be on when it arrives?

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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.

Rise, Take Up Your Bed, and Walk

Posted: June 20, 2020 by julietteochieng in News/opinion, politics, Uncomfortable Truths
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by baldilocks

Originally posted July 15, 2004. Edited for contemporaneousness. I think that this is the third or fourth time I’ve reposted it.

What have Republicans/conservatives done for black Americans? I hear that question constantly when I disclose that I am a conservative Republican. Often I will provide the usual facts that seem to be missing from the historical lexicon these days: freed the slaves, were 90%+ in the majority in the votes for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and many other things in between. However, something about the question sets steel to my nerves.

Implied in the question is that a political party must “do something” for blacks. Not merely the usual “something” that a government entity does for all constituents, e.g. provides utilities, regulates commerce, etc., but something special.

That word special has taken on a new meaning in the past few decades and I think that it applies to the special items that liberals/leftists believe that the government should provide for the special people, the congenitally retarded developmentally disabled folk.

Yes, we special people–with special needs–require special handling: special education and special employment. You can’t expect black people to live up to the standards of normal people. Like paraplegics or the blind or the deaf or those born with Down Syndrome, singular accommodations must be made for the great handicap of being born with black skin. To liberals/leftists, black people are a crippled class that can never be made whole just as long as we can never be made not-black. What’s this notion called?

And if anyone tries to treat us as full, competent adults, the liberals/leftists will scream in righteous anger and protest about the unfairness of it all. And if some of us ‘handicapped’ verbally express the desire to be treated like full, competent adults and act in a manner that demonstrates that desire, we are deemed as traitors by those who share the same racial makeup and who buy into the blackness-as-handicap philosophy.

Yes, we are traitors to that cause, because if some of us refuse to take advantage of the special needs offered and succeed anyway, the vast majority of America will begin to think that we don’t really require the handicap parking space.

The vast majority of Americans will begin to think that we’re not really inferior after all. (Optimistically speaking, I believe that the majority think this anyway.)

However, this idea of our race-wide handicap is so ingrained in the mindsets of of the Left — of all races — that it has morphed into the very core of black identity: a black person who believes that black Americans need extra help to succeed is “authentically black.” Conversely, one who doesn’t buy it “isn’t really black” [Ed. note: Did Biden steal this notion from me?] and is, therefore, a traitor to black identity.

In short, blacks who believe in their own inferiority are the real deal and those who don’t, aren’t. How’s that for twisted dogma?

(This is why Candace Owens comes in for special scorn among the liberals/leftists, especially black ones. Having been born with not merely one, but the proverbial two strikes against her, her very existence gives lie to the entire notion of black inferiority. I’m sure that white supremacists hate her just as much.)

So, when some black people find out that Republicans don’t want to “do anything” for them except to encourage them to take part in the American dream of prosperity, stemming from work and ingenuity, they’re like, “WTF? Where’s my money?” So it is that white Republicans/conservatives, those whose ideology purports to treat blacks as equals are considered racists. We blacks who agree with this are merely sell-outs.

Those that have wondered why the Republican party don’t spend time on “minority outreach” miss the point. Republicans do outreach already. They just don’t do handicapped outreach, not unless you’re really handicapped.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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COVID-19 Wealth Transfer

Posted: June 13, 2020 by ng36b in Uncomfortable Truths
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COVID-19 is exacerbating many things, but one that is flying under the radar right now is a pending, unprecedented wealth transfer from old to young. The transfer of wealth from the Boomer generation to Millenials was already being discussed in 2014 due to its shear size (somewhere between 30 and 60 trillion dollars). While some people predicted it wouldn’t be as large because of rising health care and long-term care costs, those will be cut short by the disease.

This is important for a few reasons. First, COVID-19 wiped out any senior care center it touched. These centers all too often make their money by sucking the benefits from their members, to the point they have no wealth left to transfer to heirs. Now that many of the members have died, there will be a transfer of funds surviving family members, likely to spur a bit of the economy. Because COVID-19 hit the older population much more so than younger, it’s not a surprise that the economy can bounce back faster than expected.

Given the poor performance of senior centers, I would expect many people to be hesitant to trust them with aging boomer parents in the future. Once the full truth comes out, especially about how places like Michigan and New York knowingly put COVID-positive seniors back in homes, it will become the scandal of 2020. I’d expect to see a rise in senior centers that boast a better cleaning and isolation regiment, as well as people adding mother-in-law suites to provide for parents in the future.

Lastly, COVID-19 is likely to spur quick changes on Medicare. Medicare as a program has never been setup for long-term success. Taxing the working people to pay for seniors only works if you have a large, growing population and a relatively short lifespan. Given that people live longer and have less children, those economic don’t work when health care costs rise. But COVID-19 exposed medical treatment costs as perhaps more driven by red tape than anything else. Regardless, the lack of taxpayer funds due to unemployment will likely bring in some much needed change to the system.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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