Posts Tagged ‘Da Magnificent Seven’

White is bad

Posted: August 16, 2022 by chrisharper in media
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By Christopher Harper

The ideological attack on white men in the United States has gained considerably in recent years, including a series of blatantly racial attacks. 

Simply put, being white in America has become inherently bad.

For example, Rolling Stone recently highlighted the arrest of a man the publication contends wanted his compatriots to rape white women and kill blacks to increase the majority of Caucasians in America. 

“[A] former U.S. Marine plotted mass murder and sexual assault to ‘decrease the number of minority residents’ in the United States as part of his membership in a far-right neo-Nazi group, ‘Rapekrieg,’ the news organization writes. 

“Belanger was the subject of an FBI Joint Terrorism Taskforce investigation into allegedly plotting to ‘engage in widespread homicide and sexual assault.’ Much of Belanger’s ideology and plotting…is based around a desire to lessen the number of nonwhite Americans and to rape ‘white women to increase the production of white children,'” Rolling Stone contends.

What’s noteworthy about the report is the final paragraph: The Senate Armed Services Committee recently stated that the Pentagon was spending too much money on investigating such matters because the number of individuals is so small.  

So why does Rolling Stone even report the arrest? Because it promotes a frequent meme: Marines are primarily white, rightist wingnuts rather than soldiers who deserve the nation’s respect. 

But there’s more. Atlantic published an article equating Catholic rosaries with extremism. “Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or ‘rad trad’) Catholics,” Atlantic’s Daniel Panneton writes.

“On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture,” Panneton adds. “These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.”

Just think about the outrage if someone wrote that worry beads were a sign of a terrorist in the Middle East.

But there’s even more. Wired, known primarily as a tech publication, has picked up the anti-white meme in a book review. 

“Whiteness is a seduction. Whiteness is also an illusion. These are the twin motifs on which Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid props up The Last White Man, his latest novel,” Wired states. 

The novel focuses on how whites wake up as nonwhites and how society becomes better for the change.

It’s heartening that Atlantic’s outrageous slander against Catholics has faced some blowback on social media. Still, it appears that the current meme in the media elite is to publish even more outrageous and offensive attacks against whites.  

By John Ruberry

Outside of sheer incompetence, a theme has emerged from the Joe Biden administration. When they need help, the White House calls on people they deem to be experts. 

Here’s a dirty secret of politics, or if your prefer, of advancing a preferred narrative. Anyone can find an “expert,” more on them in a bit, to support any opinion. It works in journalism too, the media wing of the Democrat Party.

When the discovery of the Hunter Biden laptop was revealed by the New York Post nearly two years ago–the mainstream media, social media, and of course the Biden campaign immediately moved to denounce it. The casus belli for journalists, Facebook, Twitter, and the like–Biden brought this up in a presidential debate–was that its emergence three weeks before Election Day in 2020 had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” according to 51 former national security experts, led by James Clapper, a director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama. Every one of these “experts” either lied, signed on to something they knew little about, or just simply wanted to do whatever it took to prevent the reelection of Donald J. Trump. 

Eighteen months later, the New York Times admitted Hunter’s laptop, which provided voluminous evidence of his influence peddling centered on his being the son of a powerful politician, was authentic. The 51 experts can expect subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee next year, assuming the Republicans take control of the House. Every one of these “experts” should have their security clearances permanently revoked.

Biden of course won the election. As a result of his policies, such as cancelling the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, blocking new permits for drilling on federal land, gasoline prices soared and remain high. Although the economy was well into recovery mode two years ago, Biden signed into law the unfunded American Rescue Plan. Many experts at the time claimed it would not fuel inflation. They were wrong. Just as those national security “experts” were wrong on Hunter’s laptop. 

When inflation began its ascent, the White House cited 15 Nobel laureates in economics who said that Biden’s Build Back Better bill, enacted in late 2021, would not fuel inflation. They were wrong too. Inflation is now at levels not seen since the early 1980s. Last year Biden and other “experts” were saying inflation was “transitory.” Liberals reading this post will blame inflation on the War in Ukraine, you know, “Putin’s price hike.” Sure, the war likely has an effect on inflation, but the scourge was with us before Russia’s invasion Ukraine. 

Build Back Better was originally part of a much larger bill, the green energy stuff was split off and later discarded after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said he wouldn’t support it. Well, Build Back Better Part Two is back, laughably renamed the Inflation Reduction Act. And to bolster its support, the Biden White House has–are you ready?–called on experts, this time, four former Democratic Treasury secretaries and one Republican, who claim, among other things, that the Inflation Reduction Act will “fight inflation” One of those ex-Treasury secretaries is Larry Summers, who warned last year the Biden White House, “We’re taking very substantial risks on the inflation side.” 

A good journalist would track down Summers and ask him specifics on why this bill really will fight inflation.

Earlier I mentioned that journalists have a role in advancing political narratives. For example, at Forbes, Rhett Buttle offers a slobbering French kiss of propaganda, which is accompanied by this headline, “Experts Agree: The Inflation Reduction Act Accomplishes A Lot For Small Business And Working Families.” While late in the piece Buttle manages to write about the bill, “some who represent select corporate interests in Washington don’t completely agree” with the hype. But if Buttle was truly a journalist, he would have tracked down opponents of the Inflation Reduction Act and presented a balanced article.

Then again, real journalism is dead. Twenty years ago such a piece as the one written by Buttle would contain the sub-headline, “news analysis,” assuming a magazine like Forbes would even publish it. I took some journalism classes at the University of Illinois. If I turned in such an article for an assignment, a professor would have deservedly given me an “F,” enhanced by this underlined comment written in red ink, “This garbage reads like a press release.”

But Biden’s new batch of experts have spoken: The Inflation Reduction Act, which the Senate will vote on Sunday afternoon, will “fight inflation.”

Watch your wallet. Watch the cash in it lose its value.

Disclosure: This blog post should be classified as “news analysis.”

UPDATE 5:15pm EDT: The Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act passed the Senate.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

The death toll from lockdowns

Posted: August 2, 2022 by chrisharper in covid
Tags: ,

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.

By John Ruberry

“The fliparoo theory of PolitiFact is now confirmed,” Dan Bongino said early in his July 28 podcast, “The fliparoo theory is this: If a fact-checker, airquotes, PolitiFact, says something is true it is probably false. If PolitiFact says something is false it’s probably true.”

Which means, of course, that we are now in a recession. PolitiFact, in a piece written by propagandist Louis Jacobson entitled, “No, the White House didn’t change the definition of ‘recession,'” he fact-checked a claim that originally came from an Instagram post. In seemingly 10,000 words, meant to overwhelm low-information voters, Jacobson ruled that statement false.

Jacobson is wrong, he’s gaslighting us. We are in a recession.

And Jacobson is not alone.

The Biden White House, led by the embarrassment of a press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has been redefining “recession” for at least a week. For decades, the generally accepted definition of a recession has been two successive months of negative GDP growth. In the first quarter of 2022, the American economy shrank by 1.4 percent, and it contracted by 0.9 percent in the second quarter. These are facts. 

“However, the two-quarter threshold cited in the Instagram post has never been official,” Jacobson said in his so-called fact-check. “It’s more like a rough guide,” he continued, “one piece of a complicated puzzle.” Translation: the wise and oh-so-brilliant Jacobson is right, and you are a semi-literate yokel for accepting the commonly agreed upon description of a recession. 

In another overly long fact-check, Newsweek’s Tom Norton, another hack apologist, also ruled “false” the claim that the Biden White House is redefining what a recession is. “Furthermore, the White House website doesn’t have a dictionary or catalog of all political terminology and jargon it uses (that is the case for other governments, such as those of the UK and Canada, too),” Norton offered. 

Wow. I’m convinced. Not.

In Norton’s Newsweak–or is it Newspeak?— fact-check, Norton quotes Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen, who, by the way, was wrong about inflation being “transitory,” that it is really up to a secretive private organization to determine a recession. Who knew? “There is an organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks at a broad range of data in deciding whether or not there is a recession,” she revealed.

Another fact-check fabulist, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, appears to be on vacation so he hasn’t weighed in on the leftist-induced recession debate. Three years ago, while fact-checking Donald Trump, Kessler wrote, “A recession is two quarters of negative economic growth.” But Joe Biden wasn’t president then.

Another prominent (along the lines of someone having an ugly prominent nose) fact-checker, USA Today, also hasn’t recently given its opinion on what a recession really is. Oh, what’s this? In a 2020 fact-check USA Today informed us, “A recession is generally defined as two consecutive quarters of declining GDP, or gross domestic product, a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced during a specific time period.”

But on the other hand, Snopes is bowing to the Democrat Party mantra about recessions. Referring to a couple of social media messages, “The tweets quoted above may give readers the misleading impression that the Biden administration literally tried to revise the criteria economists use to determine when a recession has occurred. But that was not the case,” Bethania Palma chimes in for Snopes.

It is the case. Snopes is lying.

Here are some media talking heads talking not too long ago, based on who I see here and the chyrons, using the classical definition of a recession, in a montage compiled by the Media Research Center. You know the, you know the thing, as Biden likes to say, two consecutive quarters of declining GDP growth. C’mon man!

But, assuming briefly we are not in a recession when will we be in one? The Biden administration won’t say. Is it a recession when we have three successive quarters of declining growth? Four? Five-and-a-half?

Or will it be a recession only when there is a Republican president?

Dan Bongino is right. The fliparoo theory of “fact-checkers” is now confirmed. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.