Posts Tagged ‘history’

At least overconfidence won’t be a problem for the GOP in 2024 as it was after the two Red Wave elections–and other thoughts

Posted: November 13, 2022 by John Ruberry in congress, culture, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

I was around for the 1994 and the 2010 Red Wave elections. And for the most part, they were pretty awesome, particularly the first one, when the Republican Party bulldozed the Democrats and captured the Senate after eight years of Democrat control, as well as the House of Representatives, after a record 52-year reign by the Dems. And while the GOP didn’t win the Senate in 2010, the Republicans gained an astounding 63 House seats in what is now known as the Tea Party election. 

After both midterms, conservatives salivated at the prospect of the next presidential election. In 1992, Bill Clinton was victorious, it was believed, because George H.W. Bush ran a lackluster campaign–that was true–and votes for third-party candidate Ross Perot siphoned enough support from the GOP conservative base to elect the Democrat. In 2008, the feeling was that John McCain never had a chance against Barack Obama after the Great Recession market crash two months before Election Day. But McCain ran a lackluster campaign too. 

Overconfidence, bordering on hubris, kicked in for the GOP after those Red Waves.

As of this writing there will be a Democrat majority in the Senate in the next Congress, and maybe, a razor-thin Republican majority in the House. 

Bubba had a come-to-Jesus moment–having Dick Morris in his camp helped–and Clinton after the ’94 midterms pivoted to the center by declaring, “The era of big government is over.” The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, widely-known as the Welfare Reform Bill, offered tangible proof.

After what Obama deemed “a shellacking” in 2010, Obama, as he does best, talked a good game–but he didn’t pivot. With no hope of getting unpopular legislation, such as cap-and-trade passed by the new GOP House, he channeled his charisma to win in 2012–as conservatives seethed. And ObamaCare didn’t go into effect until 2013.

Besides over-confidence hindering their White House chances, Republicans nominated country club-flavor Republicans, Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, for president in 1996 and 2012, respectively. In essence, their campaign was, “I’m not the other guy.” Yawn.

As of this writing there will be a Democrat majority in the Senate in the next Congress, and maybe, a razor-thin Republican majority in the House. 

Election denial.

It’s time for the GOP to look at what went wrong this year, starting with election-denial. As I wrote in March, Joe Biden versus Donald Trump was not a free and fair election. Big Tech and media meddling in regard to suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, in my opinion, was the foremost reason. Richard M. Nixon was the victim of a suspicious presidential election tally in 1960. I was a child in 1968 and 1972, but I don’t recall reading about Nixon mentioning the 1960 race at all during his ’68 or ’72 successful presidential runs.

Deal with it. The Dems won in 2020 and we lost. Move on. If Trump runs in 2024, that needs to be his message. Most of the candidates in close races who said that Biden stole the election from Trump in 2020 were defeated. Election denial is toxic for Republicans.

The big winner in the midterms was Florida governor Ron DeSantis. He’s not an election denier and he has a solid list of accomplishments to point to after four years in office.

The new election playing field.

I loathe mail-in voting, “election season” instead of Election Day, and ballot drop-boxes. But these things aren’t going away. To prevail, Republicans have to adapt and find ways to perform better on the new playing field. Mail-in voting is a good place to start. Increasingly, the GOP is the party of private sector jobholders. Let’s say you’re a construction worker raising a family who is told by his boss, “Hey, I need you at this worksite tomorrow in Nebraska–it pays well.” But that worker hasn’t voted yet and Election Day is two days away. Meanwhile, in Blue Illinois, Election Day is a holiday for government workers.

What if it snows on Election Day? That happened in a Republican area in Nevada last Tuesday.

Shortly before Election Day in 2016, my mother was hospitalized. She had voted in every presidential election since 1956, but mom wasn’t able to vote for Trump, much to her disappointment. We need to reach out to seniors and, gently of course, convince them to utilize mail-in or early voting. 

Republicans need to build on its increasing support among Hispanics and reach out to Asians. The GOP is the party of law and order. However, the media wing of the Democratic Party labels the phrase “law and order” as racist. So Republicans need to rebrand and become, let’s say, the “safety and security” party. Safety and security is an appeal that will resonate among all racial groups.

Tribalism.

If the increasingly frail and mentally feeble Joe Biden runs for reelection and wins renomination–the Democrats won’t have a strong campaigner like Clinton or Obama on the top of the ticket in ’24. And Biden has already said that he won’t pivot, as Bill Clinton did, to the center now that the midterms have passed.

Woo-hoo! We’re gonna win!

Slow down there, cowboy.

Republicans face disaster if they underestimate the support Biden will enjoy from the tribalist base of the Democrats. That tribe will vote every candidate who has a “D” next to their name. In the Chicago area, I live among millions of these people. They might wise up one day. Maybe they won’t. But as Dan Bongino said numerous times in the last week, “Things are just not bad enough yet for a lot of people to wake up from the Kool-Aid slumber.”

And it’s not just Illinois that is afflicted by Dem tribalism. Pennsylvanians chose a cognitively challenged far-left US Senate candidate, John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke this spring, over a mentally nimble Republican candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz. True, Oz could have run a better campaign. 

Ronald Reagan, in his 1984 landslide win over Walter Mondale, won 49 states. But in the popular vote–yeah, I know, the Electoral College declares the victor–Mondale still collected more than 40 percent. In 2024, even if Biden is in worse physical and mental shape than Fetterman is, he’ll do much better, courtesy of tribalism, than Mondale did, in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Fetterman, if by some other-worldly convergence ends up as the Democrat nominee for president in 2024, could match Mondale’s popular vote percentage. I am dead serious about that. Tribalism is a tough nut to crack.

There is much to think about and much to do for the Republican Party. But at least the GOP won’t be overconfident in 2024. That might be the best news out of this Red Ripple election.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Thank Those Horrible No Good White European Cultures and The Doctors They Produced That You Haven’t Died from Pneumonia or Tuberculosis

Posted: October 26, 2022 by datechguy in culture, medicine
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As I sit on my couch on the 4th day of antibiotics for Pneumonia coughing up interesting green patterns I found myself contemplating how people handled the disease prior to antibiotics.

I did some searching and it didn’t take me very long to figure out just how damn lucky I am to have been born in 1963 rather than 1863.

I looked up Pneumonia, it’s been known since early Greek Civilization and discovered that one in four used to die from it. In fact from 1917 to my mother’s death in 2012 a Mass was said on the feast of St. John the Baptist by my family in payment of a vow made by my grandmother for the recovery of my infant Uncle John from the disease

Fortunately for the world those horrible terrible no good imperialistic White European scientists were on the case:

A novel technique called antiserum therapy soon began, and by 1913, anti-pneumococcal serum therapy, if given early in disease progression, was able to reduce mortality from 25% to 7.5%. However, this treatment method was slow, costly, and time-consuming.

On Sunday my Nurse practitioner had quipped that Pneumonia had been going around and most of the people she saw that weekend had caught it. I thought about the people I saw coming and going from Urgent care that day and imagined one if four doomed to die from it.

In the 1930s, the first antibacterial agent,. Although sulfapyridine gained a lot of notoriety when it was used to treat Winston Churchill’s bacterial pneumonia in 1942, this agent was quickly set aside upon the discovery of the antibiotic penicillin in the early 1940s.

By 1977 a vaccine was introduced by 2000 a 2nd which could protect against even some antibiotic resistant strains was created. While people still die of Pneumonia today particularly in third world countries for a person like me in America while I have to deal with the cough and aches my biggest worry barring complications is if I have enough vacation and sick days left to cover the time I’m off.

Of course if in the days of my grandparents all born in the 1800’s Pneumonia boasted it was the “Captain of the men of death” Tuberculosis could turn to it and say: “Hold my beer”

TB known also as consumption till about 100 years ago like Pneumonia is an old disease. There were indications of the disease in Egyptian mummies and written records from China, India, and Ancient Israel. In Ancient Greece the disease was well known and even if you lived in an empire where the sun never set in the mid 1800’s it didn’t mean much to TB

In 1838-39, up to a third of English tradesmen and employees died of TB, whereas the same proportion decreased to a sixth in the upper class

Just a reminder in 1838 England was the most developed nation in the history of the world and one sixth of their ELITES died from Consumption.

It ravaged populations an example:

By the beginning of the 19th century, tuberculosis, or “consumption,” had killed one in seven of all people that had ever lived. Victims suffered from hacking, bloody coughs, debilitating pain in the lungs and fatigue

Run that through your head for a moment.

For thousands of years TB slaughtered populations, but fortunately for the world those horrible terrible no good imperialistic white European scientists were on the job:

The famous scientist Robert Koch was able to isolate the tubercle bacillus. Using the methylene blue staining recommended by Paul Ehrlich, he identified, isolated and cultivated the bacillus in animal serum. Finally he reproduced the disease by inoculating the bacillus into laboratory animals.

Robert Koch presented this extraordinary result to the Society of Physiology in Berlin on 24 March 1882, determining a milestone in the fight against TB

In the decades following this discovery, the Pirquet and Mantoux tuberculin skin tests, Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin (BCG) vaccine, Selman Waksman streptomycin and other anti-tuberculous drugs were developed. Koch contributed also to the elucidation of the infectious etiology of TB and for his scientific results, he was awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1905

Despite the efforts of these horrible white people and the vaccines and treatments they and their successors developed, TB, while not thinning the world’s herd dramatically as it once did , is still a danger killing 1.5 million each year but there is some good news:

Around five percent of the 9.5 million people who contract TB each year are resistant to commonly-prescribed antibiotics, making them difficult to treat. ​Until recently, “the situation with drug-resistant TB was horrible,” Spigelman said. ​Patients were forced to take five to eight pills a day, and often a daily injection, for up to two years, with horrible side effects and a cure rate of just 20 to 30 percent. ​But a new drug regimen BPaL, first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2019, consists of just three pills a day for six months, and has far fewer side effects and a cure rate of 90 percent, Spigelman said. ​”I think it’ll really be an amazing game-changer.”

So when you think of all the things in the world that are annoying your particularly if you are a leftist railing against microaggressions and white culture, take a moment to consider how lucky you are to be living in 2022 and if you’re really perceptive take a moment when nobody is looking to thank your lucky starts for all those horrible terrible no good imperialistic white European scientists and doctors whose work allow you to live long enough to gripe about the horror of being “misgendered” or having someone fail to use your desired pronouns in your august presence.

Closing note John Hopkins press has a book out on the subject titled Pneumonia Before Antibiotics Therapeutic Evolution and Evaluation in Twentieth-Century America by Scott H. Podolsky. If you found this post interesting you might consider it a worthwhile read.

If Your Live in the Western Hemisphere & Have Flush Toilets, Electricity & anything with Wheels, Thank Columbus

Posted: October 11, 2022 by datechguy in culture
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I think we need a little experiment for those who are so pissed off at Columbus for starting the chain of events that brought the Indians of the Americas out of the stone age.

If you celebrate “indigenous people day” rather thank Columbus day then let’s do it right.

  • First of all make sure you walk to whatever event you had. After all not only did Europeans invent automobiles that were built in America but they also brought horses to the continent. In fact until the Europeans came the wheel wasn’t in America so make sure you carry or drag on a sled anything you plan on bringing with you, unless you travel by river. The canoe was a legitimate engineering wonder that the Indians developed for river travel that was far superior to anything the Europeans had.
  • Second of all don’t have anything with you that is electrical. All of that power generation stuff came from later European settlers. No solar either, that’s also derivative from electrical development as well. So it goes without saying no Iphones
  • If it’s cold where you celebrate or if it gets dark make a fire, so space heater (electricity) no coal (no mining) and when you get that wood, no using refined metal for saws or axes to cut down those trees or cut off those branches. If stone was good enough for the Indians, it’s good enough for you and remember no flashlights or batteries that would just be celebrating whiteness.
  • Oh and don’t forget if you want to eat anything where you go, again start a fire. Ben Franklin that horrible European invented the stove. Maybe you can build an oven out of clay to bake stuff with a wood fire, or perhaps you can bring heavily salted meat to eat or greens, lot of greens but remember no pesticides so be choosey.
  • Perhaps you might have a moment during your event to remember those that the Indians conquered to take the land. Oh wait, the Indians didn’t preserve those people, they either assimilated to their individual tribes or were destroyed so we don’t know a thing about them.
  • Well at least the Indians didn’t have slavery, well unless you count the Aztecs who build an empire on slavery and human sacrifice and of course cannibalism. Perhaps in honor of their achievements you can find a person who doesn’t follow your beliefs, say an outsider and drag them to be sacrificed and then eat them over a fire in the traditional way, but remember when you try to overpower them no firearms and no refined blades to overpower them and if the person manages to shoot six or eight of your fellows before you drag him to his death at least your pals died pure in the knowledge that they didn’t pollute themselves with those horrible European weapons.

That would be a true celebration of “indigenous” people day. Of course you might instead celebrate the greatness of Columbus on Columbus day while acknowledging that like the people he discovered with the land Columbus was a product of his time and submit to all the human foibles that we all are but that would requiring acknowledging the humanity of both Columbus and the Indians rather than making one your god and the other a devil, and that doesn’t support the narrative does it?

Now that Ukraine is taking back territory from Russia, now is the time for the New York Times to return Walter Duranty’s tainted Pulitzer

Posted: September 11, 2022 by John Ruberry in media, News/opinion, war
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Pro-Ukraine protest in downtown Chicago this spring

By John Ruberry

There is good news out of Ukraine, its forces have made gains in the Kharkiv region and they are near Russian border. There is much ground still to liberate, not only land that Russia has seized in the war that began early this year, but also the area that have been controlled by Russian separatists in the Donetsk region since 2014, as well as Crimea, which Vladimir Putin annexed the same year.

Ukraine has endured an unhappy history. World War II and the Holocaust devastated Ukraine. And in order to impose communism on wealthier peasants in Ukraine, Josef Stalin engineered a famine in the early 1930s, known there as the Holodomor, translating roughly into “man-made starvation.” Roughly four million people perished as a result of Stalin’s atrocities against the kulaks in Ukraine.

Even in a closed society, it’s difficult to coverup a famine. And news trickled out of Ukraine about the Holodomor. But a New York Times reporter, based in Moscow, Walter Duranty, dismissed such stories, instead of “famine” he wrote of “malnutrition” in Ukraine, for instance. 

For a series of 1931 articles about the Soviet Union, Duranty, for his “dispassionate interpretive reporting,” he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. 

While in Moscow, Duranty, was granted a rarity, interviews with Stalin; he also enjoyed another rarity, a luxury apartment in the Soviet capital. During the entire history of the USSR, housing of any kind was scarce. In Moscow Duranty had a mistress, whom he impregnated, and a chauffeur. Automobiles were also rare in Russia in the 1930s. 

In 1933, another journalist, or I should say, a real one, Gareth Jones, visited Ukraine and he was horrified by what he found. “If it is grave now and if millions are dying in the villages, as they are, for I did not visit a single village where many had not died, what will it be like in a month’s time?” Jones wrote for the London Evening Standard. “The potatoes left are being counted one by one, but in so many homes the potatoes have long run out.” 

Duranty’s response to Jones was a New York Times article, “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving.” That same year, Duranty wrote to a friend, “The famine is mostly bunk.”

Another shameful sentence from Duranty, about Stalin’s brutal policies as the Holodomor continued, “To put it brutally,” Duranty wrote for the Times, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Since the war began attention has been brought to Duranty’s undeserved Pulitzer. Even NPR took notice. “He is the personification of evil in journalism,” Oksana Piaseckyj told NPR earlier this year of Duranty. She is a Ukrainian-American activist who emigrated here as a child over 70 years ago. “We think he was like the originator of fake news,” Piaseckyj added.

The New York Times admitted on its corporate website about Duranty’s work, “Since the 1980’s, the [Times] has been publicly acknowledging his failures.” But it has not returned the tainted Pulitzer. It also notes that twice, most recently in 2003, the Pulitzer board has decided not to revoke its award to Duranty. 

It’s time for them to reconsider.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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