tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62441934923822718872024-03-04T21:28:04.540-08:00 The Las Vegas GentlemanStyle, Thought & OpinionThe Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comBlogger791125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-18912966965840014942020-08-29T17:17:00.007-07:002020-08-29T17:18:26.646-07:00NO LONGER BLOGGING HERE<p> This Blog is Continues at:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://thelasvegasgentleman.wordpress.com"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">https://thelasvegasgentleman.wordpress.com</span></b></a><br /></p>The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-82262793734718153652020-06-23T13:04:00.002-07:002020-06-23T13:05:36.471-07:00Masks-for-all for COVID-19 not based on sound data<div class="field field-name-field-byline field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden" style="color: #003b75; display: inline; font-family: arial, "helvetica neue", helvetica, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
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<a href="https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/ongoing-programs/news-publishing/news-publishing-staff" style="background-color: #f3f3f3; color: #900028; display: inline;">Lisa M Brosseau, ScD, and Margaret Sietsema, PhD</a></div>
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<span class="date-display-single" content="2020-04-01T00:00:00-05:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime" property="dc:date" style="background-color: #f3f3f3; display: inline;"><em style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"><a href="https://today.uic.edu/experts/lisa-brosseau" style="color: #900028;" target="_blank">Dr. Brosseau</a> is a national expert on respiratory protection and infectious diseases and professor (retired), University of Illinois at Chicago.</em><em style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"><a href="https://publichealth.uic.edu/?s=sietsema" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Dr. Sietsema</a></em><em style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"> is also an </em><em style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">expert on respiratory protection and an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.</em></span></div>
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<span class="date-display-single" content="2020-04-01T00:00:00-05:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime" property="dc:date" style="background-color: #f3f3f3; display: inline;">In response to the stream of misinformation and misunderstanding about the nature and role of masks and respirators as source control or personal protective equipment (PPE), we critically review the topic to inform ongoing COVID-19 decision-making that relies on science-based data and professional expertise.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">As noted in a previous <a href="http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/03/commentary-covid-19-transmission-messages-should-hinge-science" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;">commentary</a>, the limited data we have for COVID-19 strongly support the possibility that SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—is transmitted by inhalation of both droplets and aerosols near the source. It is also likely that people who are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic throughout the duration of their infection are spreading the disease in this way.</span></div>
<h3 style="color: black; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Data lacking to recommend broad mask use</span></h3>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">We do not recommend requiring the general public who do not have symptoms of COVID-19-like illness to routinely wear cloth or surgical masks because:</span></div>
<ul style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1.3em;">
<li style="list-style: outside disc; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">There is no scientific evidence they are effective in reducing the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside disc; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Their use may result in those wearing the masks to relax other distancing efforts because they have a sense of protection</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside disc; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">We need to preserve the supply of surgical masks for at-risk healthcare workers.</span></li>
</ul>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Sweeping mask recommendations—as many have proposed—will not reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission, as evidenced by the widespread practice of wearing such masks in Hubei province, China, before and during its mass COVID-19 transmission experience earlier this year. Our review of relevant studies indicates that cloth masks will be ineffective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, whether worn as source control or as PPE. </span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Surgical masks likely have some utility as source control (meaning the wearer limits virus dispersal to another person) from a symptomatic patient in a healthcare setting to stop the spread of large cough particles and limit the lateral dispersion of cough particles. They may also have very limited utility as source control or PPE in households.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Respirators, though, are the only option that can ensure protection for frontline workers dealing with COVID-19 cases, once all of the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirators-strategy/index.html" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">strategies</a> for optimizing respirator supply have been implemented.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">We do not know whether respirators are an effective intervention as source control for the public. A non-fit-tested respirator may not offer any better protection than a surgical mask. Respirators work as PPE only when they are the right size and have been fit-tested to demonstrate they achieve an adequate protection factor. In a time when respirator supplies are limited, we should be saving them for frontline workers to prevent infection and remain in their jobs.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">These recommendations are based on a review of available literature and informed by professional expertise and consultation. We outline our review criteria, summarize the literature that best addresses these criteria, and describe some activities the public can do to help "flatten the curve" and to protect frontline workers and the general public.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">We realize that the public yearns to help protect medical professionals by contributing homemade masks, but there are better ways to help.</span></div>
<h3 style="color: black; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Filter efficiency and fit are key for masks, respirators</span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">The best evidence of mask and respirator performance starts with testing filter efficiency and then evaluating fit (facepiece leakage). Filter efficiency must be measured first. If the filter is inefficient, then fit will be a measure of filter efficiency only and not what is being leaked around the facepiece.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Filter efficiency</span></h4>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Masks and respirators work by collecting particles through several physical mechanisms, including diffusion (small particles) and interception and impaction (large particles).<sup>1</sup> N95 filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs) are constructed from electret filter material, with electrostatic attraction for additional collection of all particle sizes.<sup>2</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Every filter has a particle size range that it collects inefficiently. <em>Above and below this range, particles will be collected with greater efficiency</em>. For fibrous non-electret filters, this size is about 0.3 micrometers (µm); for electret filters, it ranges from 0.06 to 0.1 µm. When testing, we care most about the point of inefficiency. As flow increases, particles in this range will be collected less efficiently.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">The best filter tests use worst-case conditions: high flow rates (80 to 90 liters per minute [L/min]) with particle sizes in the least efficiency range. This guarantees that filter efficiency will be high at typical, lower flow rates for all particle sizes. Respirator filter certification tests use 84 L/min, well above the typical 10 to 30 L/min breathing rates. The N95 designation means the filter exhibits at least 95% efficiency in the least efficient particle size range.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Studies should also use well-characterized inert particles (not biological, anthropogenic, or naturogenic ones) and instruments that quantify concentrations in narrow size categories, and they should include an N95 FFR or similar respirator as a positive control.</span></div>
<h4 style="color: black; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Fit</span></h4>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Fit should be a measure of how well the mask or respirator prevents leakage around the facepiece, as noted earlier. Panels of representative human subjects reveal more about fit than tests on a few individuals or mannequins.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Quantitative fit tests that measure concentrations inside and outside of the facepiece are more discriminating than qualitative ones that rely on taste or odor.</span></div>
<h3 style="color: black; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Mask, N95 respirator filtering performance</span></h3>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Following a recommendation that cloth masks be explored for use in healthcare settings during the next influenza pandemic,<sup>3</sup> The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) conducted a study of the filter performance on clothing materials and articles, including commercial cloth masks marketed for air pollution and allergens, sweatshirts, t-shirts, and scarfs.<sup>4</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Filter efficiency was measured across a wide range of small particle sizes (0.02 to 1 µm) at 33 and 99 L/min. N95 respirators had efficiencies greater than 95% (as expected). For the entire range of particles tested, t-shirts had 10% efficiency, scarves 10% to 20%, cloth masks 10% to 30%, sweatshirts 20% to 40%, and towels 40%. All of the cloth masks and materials had near zero efficiency at 0.3 µm, a particle size that easily penetrates into the lungs.<sup>4</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Another study evaluated 44 masks, respirators, and other materials with similar methods and small aerosols (0.08 and 0.22 µm).<sup>5</sup> N95 FFR filter efficiency was greater than 95%. Medical masks exhibited 55% efficiency, general masks 38% and handkerchiefs 2% (one layer) to 13% (four layers).</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">These studies demonstrate that cloth or homemade masks will have very low filter efficiency (2% to 38%). Medical masks are made from a wide range of materials, and studies have found a wide range of filter efficiency (2% to 98%), with most exhibiting 30% to 50% efficiency.<sup>6-12</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">We reviewed other filter efficiency studies of makeshift cloth masks made with various materials. Limitations included challenge aerosols that were poorly characterized<sup>13</sup> or too large<sup>14-16</sup> or flow rates that were too low.<sup>17</sup></span></div>
<h3 style="color: black; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Mask and respirator fit</span></h3>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Regulators have not developed guidelines for cloth or surgical mask fit. N95 FFRs must achieve a fit factor (outside divided by inside concentration) of at least 100, which means that the facepiece must lower the outside concentration by 99%, according to the <a href="https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.134" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">OSHA respiratory protection standard</a>. When fit is measured on a mask with inefficient filters, it is really a measure of the collection of particles by the filter plus how well the mask prevents particles from leaking around the facepiece.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Several studies have measured the fit of masks made of cloth and other homemade materials.<sup>13,18,19</sup> We have not used their results to evaluate mask performance, because none measured filter efficiency or included respirators as positive controls.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">One study of surgical masks showing relatively high efficiencies of 70% to 95% using NIOSH test methods measured total mask efficiencies (filter plus facepiece) of 67% to 90%.<sup>7</sup> These results illustrate that surgical masks, even with relatively efficient filters, do not fit well against the face.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">In sum, cloth masks exhibit very low filter efficiency. Thus, even masks that fit well against the face will not prevent inhalation of small particles by the wearer or emission of small particles from the wearer.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">One study of surgical mask fit described above suggests that poor fit can be somewhat offset by good filter collection, but will not approach the level of protection offered by a respirator. The problem is, however, that many surgical masks have very poor filter performance. Surgical masks are not evaluated using worst-case filter tests, so there is no way to know which ones offer better filter efficiency.</span></div>
<h3 style="color: black; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Studies of performance in real-world settings</span></h3>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Before recommending them, it's important to understand how masks and respirators perform in households, healthcare, and other settings.</span></div>
<h4 style="color: black; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Cloth masks as source control</span></h4>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">A historical overview of cloth masks notes their use in US healthcare settings starting in the late 1800s, first as source control on patients and nurses and later as PPE by nurses.<sup>20</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Kellogg,<sup>21</sup> seeking a reason for the failure of cloth masks required for the public in stopping the 1918 influenza pandemic, found that the number of cloth layers needed to achieve acceptable efficiency made them difficult to breathe through and caused leakage around the mask. We found no well-designed studies of cloth masks as source control in household or healthcare settings.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">In sum, given the paucity of information about their performance as source control in real-world settings, along with the extremely low efficiency of cloth masks as filters and their poor fit, there is no evidence to support their use by the public or healthcare workers to control the emission of particles from the wearer.</span></div>
<h4 style="color: black; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Surgical masks as source control</span></h4>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Household studies find very limited effectiveness of surgical masks at reducing respiratory illness in other household members.<sup>22-25</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Clinical trials in the surgery theater have found no difference in wound infection rates with and without surgical masks.<sup>26-29</sup> Despite these findings, it has been difficult for surgeons to give up a long-standing practice.<sup>30</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">There is evidence from laboratory studies with coughing infectious subjects that surgical masks are effective at preventing emission of large particles<sup>31-34</sup> and minimizing lateral dispersion of cough particles, but with simultaneous displacement of aerosol emission upward and downward from the mask.<sup>35</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">There is some evidence that surgical masks can be effective at reducing overall particle emission from patients who have multidrug-resistant tuberculosis,<sup>36</sup> cystic fibrosis,<sup>34</sup> and influenza.<sup>33</sup> The latter found surgical masks decreased emission of large particles (larger than 5 µm) by 25-fold and small particles by threefold from flu-infected patients.<sup>33</sup> Sung<sup>37</sup> found a 43% reduction in respiratory viral infections in stem-cell patients when everyone, including patients, visitors, and healthcare workers, wore surgical masks.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">In sum, wearing surgical masks in households appears to have very little impact on transmission of respiratory disease. One possible reason may be that masks are not likely worn continuously in households. These data suggest that surgical masks worn by the public will have no or very low impact on disease transmission during a pandemic.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">There is no evidence that surgical masks worn by healthcare workers are effective at limiting the emission of small particles or in preventing contamination of wounds during surgery.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">There is moderate evidence that surgical masks worn by patients in healthcare settings can lower the emission of large particles generated during coughing and limited evidence that small particle emission may also be reduced.</span></div>
<h4 style="color: black; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
N95 FFRs as source control</span></h4>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Respirator use by the public was reviewed by <a href="https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2018/01/04/respirators-public-use/" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">NIOSH</a>: (1) untrained users will not wear respirators correctly, (2) non-fit tested respirators are not likely to fit, and (3) improvised cloth masks do not provide the level of protection of a fit-tested respirator.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">There are few studies examining the effectiveness of respirators on patients. An N95 FFR on coughing human subjects showed greater effectiveness at limiting lateral particle dispersion than surgical masks (15 cm and 30 cm dispersion, respectively) in comparison to no mask (68 cm).<sup> 35</sup> Cystic fibrosis patients reported that surgical masks were tolerable for short periods, but N95 FFRs were not.<sup>34</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">In summary, N95 FFRs on patients will not be effective and may not be appropriate, particularly if they have respiratory illness or other underlying health conditions. Given the current extreme shortages of respirators needed in healthcare, we do not recommend the use of N95 FFRs in public or household settings.</span></div>
<h4 style="color: black; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Cloth masks as PPE</span></h4>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">A randomized trial comparing the effect of medical and cloth masks on healthcare worker illness found that those wearing cloth masks were 13 times more likely to experience influenza-like illness than those wearing medical masks.<sup>38</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">In sum, very poor filter and fit performance of cloth masks described earlier and very low effectiveness for cloth masks in healthcare settings lead us conclude that cloth masks offer no protection for healthcare workers inhaling infectious particles near an infected or confirmed patient.</span></div>
<h4 style="color: black; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Surgical masks as PPE</span></h4>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Several randomized trials have not found any statistical difference in the efficacy of surgical masks versus N95 FFRs at lowering infectious respiratory disease outcomes for healthcare workers.<sup>39-43</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Most reviews have failed to find any advantage of one intervention over the other.<sup>23,44-48</sup> Recent meta-analyses found that N95 FFRs offered higher protection against clinical respiratory illness<sup>49,50</sup> and lab-confirmed bacterial infections,<sup>49</sup> but not viral infections or influenza-like illness.<sup>49</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">A recent pooled analysis of two earlier trials comparing medical masks and N95 filtering facepiece respirators <strong>with controls </strong>(no protection) found that healthcare workers continuously wearing N95 FFRs were 54% less likely to experience respiratory viral infections than controls (<em>P</em> = 0.03), while those wearing medical masks were only 12% less likely than controls (<em>P</em> = 0.48; result is not significantly different from zero).<sup>51</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">While the data supporting the use of surgical masks as PPE in real-world settings are limited, the two meta-analyses and the most recent randomized controlled study<sup>51</sup> combined with evidence of moderate filter efficiency and complete lack of facepiece fit lead us to conclude that surgical masks offer very low levels of protection for the wearer from aerosol inhalation. There may be some protection from droplets and liquids propelled directly onto the mask, but a faceshield would be a better choice if this is a concern.</span></div>
<h4 style="color: black; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
N95 FFRs as PPE</span></h4>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">A retrospective cohort study found that nurses' risk of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome, also caused by a coronavirus) was lower with consistent use of N95 FFRs than with consistent use of a surgical mask.<sup>52</sup></span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">In sum, this study, the meta-analyses, randomized controlled trial described above,<sup>49,51</sup> and laboratory data showing high filter efficiency and high achievable fit factors lead us to conclude that N95 FFRs offer superior protection from inhalable infectious aerosols likely to be encountered when caring for suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">The precautionary principle supports higher levels of respiratory protection, such as powered air-purifying respirators, for aerosol-generating procedures such as intubation, bronchoscopy, and acquiring respiratory specimens.</span></div>
<h3 style="color: black; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Conclusions</span></h3>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">While this is not an exhaustive review of masks and respirators as source control and PPE, we made our best effort to locate and review the most relevant studies of laboratory and real-world performance to inform our recommendations. Results from laboratory studies of filter and fit performance inform and support the findings in real-world settings.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Cloth masks are ineffective as source control and PPE, surgical masks have some role to play in preventing emissions from infected patients, and respirators are the best choice for protecting healthcare and other frontline workers, but not recommended for source control. These recommendations apply to pandemic and non-pandemic situations.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Leaving aside the fact that they are ineffective, telling the public to wear cloth or surgical masks could be interpreted by some to mean that people are safe to stop isolating at home. It's too late now for anything but stopping as much person-to-person interaction as possible.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Masks may confuse that message and give people a false sense of security. If masks had been the solution in Asia, shouldn't they have stopped the pandemic before it spread elsewhere?</span></div>
<h3 style="color: black; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
Ways to best protect health workers</span></h3>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">We recommend that healthcare organizations follow <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirators-strategy/index.html" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance</a> by moving first through conventional, then contingency, and finally crisis scenarios to optimize the supply of respirators. We recommend using the CDC's <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/ppe-strategy/burn-calculator.html" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">burn rate calculator</a> to help identify areas to reduce N95 consumption and working down the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/checklist-n95-strategy.html" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">CDC checklist</a> for a strategic approach to extend N95 supply.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">For readers who are disappointed in our recommendations to stop making cloth masks for themselves or healthcare workers, we recommend instead pitching in to locate N95 FFRs and other types of respirators for healthcare organizations. Encourage your local or state government to organize and reach out to industries to locate respirators not currently being used in the non-healthcare sector and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/apple-and-facebook-face-masks-were-stockpiled-after-wildfires.html" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">coordinate donation efforts</a> to frontline health workers.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="color: black; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
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<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Milton DK, Fabian MP, Cowling BJ, et al.</strong> <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1003205" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Influenza virus aerosols in human exhaled breath: particle size, culturability, and effect of surgical masks.</a>PLoS Pathog 2013 Mar;9(3):e1003205</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Stockwell RE, Wood ME, He C, et al.</strong> <a href="https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201805-0823LE?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%3dpubmed" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Face masks reduce the release of Pseudomonas aeruginosa cough aerosols when worn for clinically relevant periods.</a>Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2018 Nov 15;198(10):1339-42</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Hui DS, Chow BK, Chu L, et al.</strong> <a href="http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050845" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Exhaled air dispersion during coughing with and without wearing a surgical or N95 mask.</a>PloS One 2012;7(12)e50845</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Dharmadhikari AS, Mphahlele M, Stoltz A, et al.</strong> <a href="https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201107-1190OC?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%3dpubmed" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Surgical face masks worn by patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis: impact on infectivity of air on a hospital ward.</a>Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2012 May 15;185(10):1104-9</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Sung AD, Sung JA, Thomas S, et al.</strong> <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/63/8/999/2389110" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Universal mask usage for reduction of respiratory viral infections after stem cell transplant: a prospective trial.</a>Clin Infect Dis 2016 Oct 15;63(8):999-1006</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>MacIntyre CR, Seale H, Dung TC, et al.</strong> <a href="https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.long" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers.</a>BMJ Open 2015 Apr 22;5(4):e006577</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Loeb M, Dafoe N, Mahony J, et al.</strong> <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/184819" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Surgical mask vs N95 respirator for preventing influenza among healthcare workers: a randomized trial.</a> JAMA 2009 Nov 4;302(17):1865-71</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>MacIntyre CR, Wang Q, Cauchemez S, et al.</strong> <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-2659.2011.00198.x" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">A cluster randomized clinical trial comparing fit‐tested and non‐fit‐tested N95 respirators to medical masks to prevent respiratory virus infection in health care workers</a>. Influenza Other Respir Viruses 2011;5(3):170-9</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>MacIntyre CR, Wang Q, Rahman B, et al.</strong> <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009174351400190X" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Efficacy of face masks and respirators in preventing upper respiratory tract bacterial colonization and co-infection in hospital healthcare workers—authors' reply</a>. Prev Med 2014 Aug;65:154</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>MacIntyre CR, Wang Q, Seale H, et al.</strong> <a href="https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201207-1164OC" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">A randomized clinical trial of three options for N95 respirators and medical masks in health workers</a>. Am J Resp Crit Care Med 2013;187(9):960-6</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Radonovich LJ, Simberkoff MS, Bessesen MT, et al.</strong> <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2749214" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">N95 respirators vs medical masks for preventing influenza among health care personnel: a randomized clinical trial.</a> JAMA 2019 Sep 3;322(9):824-33</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Gralton J, and McLaws ML.</strong> <a href="https://journals.lww.com/ccmjournal/Abstract/2010/02000/Protecting_healthcare_workers_from_pandemic.40.aspx" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Protecting healthcare workers from pandemic influenza: N95 or surgical masks?.</a> Crit Care Med 2010 Feb;38(2):657-67</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">bin Reza 2012 (we have Bin-Reza 2011)</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Bunyan D, Ritchie L, Jenkins D, et al.</strong> <a href="https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0195-6701(13)00280-6" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Respiratory and facial protection: a critical review of recent literature.</a> J Hosp Infect 2013 Nov;85(3):165-9</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Smith JD, MacDougall CC, Johnstone J, et al.</strong> <a href="https://www.cmaj.ca/content/188/8/567.long" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Effectiveness of N95 respirators versus surgical masks in protecting health care workers from acute respiratory infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis.</a> CMAJ 2016 May 17;188(8):567-74</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Jefferson T, Jones M, Ansari LAA, et al.</strong> <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047217v1" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Part 1 - Face masks, eye protection and person distancing: systematic review and meta-analysis.</a> medRxiv 2020 Mar 30</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Offeddu V, Yung CF, Low MSF, et al.</strong> <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/65/11/1934/4068747" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Effectiveness of masks and respirators against respiratory infections in healthcare workers: a systematic review and meta-analysis.</a> Clin Infect Dis 2017 Aug 7;65(11):1934-42</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Long Y, Hu T, Liu L, et al.</strong> <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jebm.12381" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Effectiveness of N95 respirators versus surgical masks against influenza: A systematic review and meta‐analysis.</a> J Evid Based Med 2020 (published online Mar 13)</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>MacIntyre CR, Chughtai AA, Rahman B, et al.</strong> <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irv.12474" style="color: #900028; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">The efficacy of medical masks and respirators against respiratory infection in healthcare workers</a>. Influenza Other Respir Viruses 2017;11(6):511-7</span></li>
<li style="list-style: outside decimal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><strong>Loeb M, McGeer A, Henry B, et al. </strong><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322898/" style="color: #900028;" target="_blank">SARS among critical care nurses, Toronto.</a>Emerg Infect Dis 2004 Feb;10(2):251-5</span></li>
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The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-36658522645126084912020-06-23T13:02:00.002-07:002020-06-23T13:02:32.582-07:00Cloth Masks Are Useless Against COVID-19<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #373a3c; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Source Sans Pro", Calibri, Candara, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18.75px;">
April 25, 2020</div>
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<a href="https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/authors/frank-diamond" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e3f3a; text-decoration-line: none;">Frank Diamond</a></div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Lisa Brosseau, ScD: "What we’re seeing is a lot of magical thinking. A lot of wishful thinking. Cloth masks are wishful thinking."</em></div>
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Lisa Brosseau, ScD, is a nationally recognized expert on infectious diseases. Brousseau taught for many years at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She may be retired from the university, but she’s not retired from teaching. She recently cowrote an <a href="https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0075c1; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_self">opinion piece</a>that drew a lot of notice: In it Brousseau argues that cloth masks offer no protection from COVID-19. As one might imagine, it drew a lot of attention and caused a fair amount of controversy. She recently sat down with <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Infection Control Today<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14.0625px; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">®</span></em>to talk about her strong feelings about cloth masks and that data she used to reach her conclusions.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Infection Control Today<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14.0625px; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">®</span></em>: </span>What made you decide to write the piece?</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;">Lisa Brosseau: </span>The article started out with the goal of trying to look at the literature related to cloth masks in healthcare. And then it got expanded way beyond that to cloth masks and surgical masks and respirators for healthcare and for the community. It was much more comprehensive than I expected it to be. Took me a little longer to write but at the end of the day, I was looking at cloth masks and surgical masks and respirators from several points of view. First of all, for healthcare and community, but also do they work as source control? Or do they work as personal protective equipment? Or both? And at the end of the day, cloth masks in my opinion don’t work in any form. They aren’t very good at source control, except for maybe very large particles. And they should not be used in healthcare settings for a number of reasons. Surgical masks, I decided, based on the literature, might have a role as source control for people who have symptoms. Say if they’re staying home and they have some symptoms. They shouldn’t be something you’d wear if you have symptoms going out into the public because you shouldn’t be going out into the public service. But it’s a good option for patients to wear in healthcare settings where they-especially for those who are experiencing symptoms-to what I would call diminish the viral load. Basically, decrease the amount of particles, infectious particles in the air in a healthcare setting. So, at the end of the day, the only thing that provides personal protection for the person wearing the mask is a respirator. And that is the thing that healthcare workers should be wearing. Particularly if we’re worried about the small aerosols, small particles that people will generate when they’re infectious. And in fact, people generate particles, whether they’re infectious or not. But particularly when they’re infected and infectious, that will be present in the vicinity of a patient. The best protection in that case is for the healthcare worker to wear a respirator. And I’ve got asked a little bit to think about respirators for the community. You know, if we had a lot of respirators, that might be a good idea, but we don’t have very many of them. And so, for the purposes of saving those respirators for the people who really need them, I recommended that the public not be wearing respirators and not be buying respirators. And if they had them, please donate them even to healthcare workers. That’s a good summary.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">ICT<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14.0625px; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">®</span></em>: </span>You did a deep dive into the literature. I saw you had many, many references. So, the mystery to me is why did the CDC say to people go out and wear cloth masks if you want to? </div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;">Brosseau: </span>What’s interesting to me is if you look at the references that were listed on under their recommendation, none of them have anything to do with masks or the performance of masks or the performance of their filters or any of that. They’re all references related to pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic transmission. I didn’t get the message there entirely, but I was glad to see is that they recognized that asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission are happening. My message would have been if those were the references I was looking at, is maybe we should actually be encouraging people to stay home more. My biggest problem with telling people they can wear masks is it gives you this false sense of security. And it might even encourage you to think that now you’re protected and you’re protecting people around you. My husband and I try to take a walk every afternoon, just to get out, get a little bit of fresh air and exercise. And I’m seeing more and more people now wearing cloth masks on the streets. And I don’t go to stores anymore, but my understanding is they’re wearing them there as well. I don’t have a problem with people wearing them. I just want them to understand that they aren’t very much more protective than if they weren’t wearing them. And they’re really not doing a whole lot of good for the people around them. So, we should continue to do social distancing as much as we possibly can. I have places that are saying that you actually have to wear them. New York where you’re supposed to wear them anytime you’re in contact with people. I don’t know. I just think it’s not recognizing that the mode of transmission for this organism is likely small aerosols and close range and wearing a cloth mask shouldn’t give you any feeling of safety for being close to people. It shouldn’t make you feel that you’re not generating small particles because you still are. And since we none of us know if we’re infected or infectious, many of us probably are and aren’t going to have symptoms because we know that that’s the case for at least some fraction of the population that we’re putting everyone around us at risk. And especially the people I most care about are the workers. Our essential workers are really key to our success in flattening the curve. And they’re the ones who make it possible for us to stay home and be isolated those of us who are privileged enough to have that opportunity. But we go out and think that we are doing something good for the public and the workers, and we’re actually not. I think we put them at more risk. So, I don’t understand the CDC’s recommendations for this. My guess is that there’s a lot of political pressure. And no government agency is entirely immune from political pressure. There’s pressure to open, right? There’s pressure to restart the economy. I understand that entirely. And so I think the feeling was, probably if we give everybody a mask, we can just reopen and everything’s going to be fine. I think we’re going to be shocked to find that that’s not going to work. And I mean, I won’t be shocked, but there will be lots of people who will be shocked. And in fact, I read an article recently about a funeral. A number of people who attended the funeral. They were all wearing masks. They were taking photos next to each other. They were talking and a number of people got infected. So, it’s very clear these things do no good.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">ICT<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14.0625px; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">®</span></em>: </span>Have you gotten much feedback from healthcare workers or healthcare experts themselves? </div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;">Brosseau: </span>Oh, yeah. There are a number who don’t agree, but there are a lot of people who didn’t agree with my first article about aerosol transmission either. I’m sort of used to it. The important thing is to say, here’s what the science tells us. My conversations with people these days, I often point out that what we’re seeing is a lot of magical thinking. A lot of wishful thinking. Cloth masks are wishful thinking. And people saying, well, they worked in Asia. There’s no evidence that they worked in Asia. In fact, it’s very clear that the healthcare workers in China, they may have been wearing cloth masks to start with, but when you look at pictures of what they were wearing later, they were wearing respirators. They were wearing full face gear and body gear and gloves. It was clear that even surgical masks weren’t working in healthcare settings or controlling COVID-19. I don’t understand it. The Asian countries wear masks for societal and cultural reasons, not because they actually think they’re protecting. I’m not an expert in epidemiology. So, I will leave the modeling to the to those who know more about how this is going to work, but I do know my history. And if you read about the 1918 influenza and the pandemic, it took almost two years for that to be completely done with. They did a lot of similar things. They closed down. They opened again. Then they had to close down and then they had to open again. Now, granted, they didn’t have a lot of what we have today. But in some ways, we’re not all that different from 1918. We don’t have any testing. We don’t have any contact tracing. They didn’t either. They didn’t even really know about that. They didn’t know much about viruses. So, we have huge amounts of scientific information. But we have almost no infrastructure anymore in public health. Without our infrastructure in public health and our resources to do contact tracing and testing…. And testing, I mean with tests that really work that are both highly specific and highly sensitive. And we don’t have any of those yet. In many ways we’re being forced to make many of the same decisions that were made during the 1918 influenza pandemic. And the results are going to be similar. We are trying to decide when to open it back up. No one really knows the perfect answer to that. The models, they’re not perfect, right? I know infection preventionists are often pulled in two directions. One is they have to worry about patients. The other is they have to worry about workers. And sometimes the things you do for patients don’t work for workers and sometimes the other way around. That’s why I recommend including your health and safety people, industrial hygienists, and others, because they can give you that perspective about workers that will help you make good decisions for both. And really, it should be a hand-in-hand decision making that goes on.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">ICT<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14.0625px; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">®</span></em>: </span>Any final words about cloth masks?</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;">Brosseau: </span>I would really strongly encourage hospitals to stop asking people to send them cloth masks and instead asked for respirators. I don’t necessarily discourage the public from wearing them if it makes them feel comfortable, but I hope they don’t think that they’re protecting themselves.</div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">This interview has been edited for clarity and length.</em></div>
The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-3504491118759434632020-06-21T08:37:00.001-07:002020-06-21T08:37:48.777-07:00There are two versions of the law<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-34364616788099269562020-06-17T14:16:00.003-07:002020-06-17T14:16:49.333-07:00Google tries to censor content it disagrees with<br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZLH077cE7Y&t=7s">(Link)</a></div>
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From the comments on this video:</div>
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<i><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Just Google </span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">“European people history”</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Pregnant white women”</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">“American inventors”</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">“White couple”</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then look up anything else and tell me they aren’t blackwashing everything</span></i></div>
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<span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" style="background: rgb(249, 249, 249); border: 0px; color: #030303; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I tried this and was amazed with the results.</span></div>
The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-49840466114160994732020-06-16T08:17:00.002-07:002020-06-16T08:17:37.976-07:00Enough.....Seriously ENOUGH<br />
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The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-19274088988606867002020-06-10T08:36:00.001-07:002020-06-10T08:36:13.431-07:00Rebels<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It would not surprise me that YouTube will take these videos down, due to their record of censoring speech.</div>
The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-49389694423994771492020-06-09T13:42:00.002-07:002020-06-09T13:43:16.770-07:00Anarchy will rule in every major city<span style="color: white;"><span id="article-single-author" style="font-family: "open sans" , sans-serif; font-style: italic;"><a class="author url fn" href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/author/dhorowitz/" rel="author" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;" title="Posts by Daniel Horowitz">Daniel Horowitz</a> </span><span style="font-family: "open sans" , sans-serif; font-style: italic;">· </span><span id="article-single-dateline" style="font-family: "open sans" , sans-serif; font-style: italic;">June 9, 2020</span><span style="font-family: "open sans" , sans-serif; font-style: italic;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;">Call it reverse broken windows policing. Police are treated as criminals and criminals are exalted as oppressed and entitled to riot with no consequences for assaults and property damage. The result? Record shootings and homicides in some major cities. This is only the beginning.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">The societal and cultural response to the killing of George Floyd is closely paralleling the response to coronavirus. Just <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-lockdown-killing-patients-coronavirus/" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">as with the virus</a>, the lockdown <a class="external" href="https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/ready-horowitz-new-study-lockdowns-destroy-nearly-twice-as-many-years-of-life-as-the-coronavirus" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">killed more people</a> than the ailment itself, the rioting in response to George Floyd’s death will lead to thousands more deaths in the long run and is already directly and indirectly responsible for exponentially more murders – primarily of black citizens.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">On Sunday, a record 18 people were killed in Chicago in the worst single day of violence in 60 years, since the University of Chicago’s crime lab <a class="external" href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">began keeping records in 1961</a>. In total, over the weekend, <a class="external" href="https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-violence-crime-fatal-shooting-shootings/6224654/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">92 were shot</a> and 27 succumbed to their wounds. <a class="external" href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">All of the pictures</a> of the known victims indicate they were African-Americans. And unlike with coronavirus, nearly all the victims were very young with much more life to live. Who is going to kneel on the ground for them? Who is going to pass legislation deterring repeat violent offenders, ending bail and parole for career criminals, and prescribing tougher sentences on gun felons? Well, certainly not the people using George Floyd’s death to promote the exact opposite.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">The reality is that at least <a class="external" href="https://disrn.com/news/the-16-people-who-have-died-in-the-riots-following-george-floyds-death" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">17 people</a> have been killed so far during the riots. However, as we see from Chicago and other cities, an unknown number – possibly totaling in the hundreds – have died likely as the result of police taking a hands-off approach to their work. The results of the riots and the war on cops are more deadly for African-Americans than anything imaginable.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">Here is an <a class="external" href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">eyewitness account</a> of downtown Chicago by anti-gun violence activist Rev. Michael Pfleger:</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">“On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing,’” Pfleger said.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: white;">“I sat and watched a store looted for over an hour,” he added. “No police came. I got in my car and drove around to some other places getting looted [and] didn’t see police anywhere.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: white;">Chicago is not even the most vivid example. In some ways, they have been experiencing a relative increase in violence for several years. New York is really where we are seeing the stark contrast. Thanks to the more aggressive policing first begun by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York City enjoyed a massive decline in violent crime for over two decades.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">Now that is all being wiped out overnight by new jailbreak laws and the war on the NYPD. Last week, the city <a class="external" href="https://nypost.com/2020/06/08/shootings-and-murders-rise-dramatically-in-nyc-last-week/?utm_source=url_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">reported</a> 13 murders, up from just five over the same week last year. Shootings have nearly doubled and property crime is up. On Monday night, <a class="external" href="https://nypost.com/2020/06/09/7-people-shot-in-three-separate-brooklyn-shootings-monday-night/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=pasteboard_app" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">seven people were shot</a> in Brooklyn over a 10-minute period.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">Why? Because police are getting beaten and can’t defend themselves lest they face prosecution. Over 300 NYPD officers <a class="external" href="https://nypost.com/2020/06/07/nearly-300-nypd-officers-injured-in-george-floyd-protests-cops/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">have been injured in the riots</a>. Few will see justice. In Los Angeles, the prosecutor <a class="external" href="https://twitter.com/ZekeJMiller/status/1270080874848169984?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">announced</a> that few rioters will face charges and all those who violated curfew will be free from criminal charges. In Chicago alone, in just nine days, <a class="external" href="https://twitter.com/fspielman/status/1270040330398769160?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">2,665 arrests</a> have been made for civil unrest and disorderly, 788 arrests for looting, and 525 guns recovered. Watch for the same people who claim to abhor guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens to suddenly ignore these gun crimes.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">What is the point of being a cop in America today? According to the FBI, in 2018, there were <a class="external" href="https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2018/topic-pages/officers-assaulted" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">58,866 assaults</a> against law enforcement officers, resulting in 18,005 injuries. You almost never heard about them. God knows how many are taking place today. The resignations and retirements will continue while new recruitment will be nonexistent. The ones who don’t resign will be fired unless they kneel to the mob, like one police chief in Michigan who <a class="external" href="https://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/2020/06/lowell-police-chief-resigns-after-controversial-facebook-posts.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">was forced out</a> after voicing support for people engaging in open carry to protect their families from the politically untouchable rioters.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">By far, <a class="external" href="https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2018/topic-pages/tables/table-84.xls" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="transition: all 0.5s ease 0s, all 0.5s ease 0s;">according to the FBI</a>, the most common circumstance leading to a cop injury is a disturbance call. Police are responding to help and protect other citizens. Now they will just take a hands-off approach and come to do the paperwork.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white;">The question President Trump and Republicans must start asking is what level of killings, injuries, and property damage is acceptable before they begin pushing an active pro-enforcement agenda with as much passion and energy as the Left is pushing anarchy?</span></div>
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The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-1152532610961550892020-06-08T10:56:00.001-07:002020-06-08T10:56:26.361-07:00Overcoming ALL the Big Lies!<a href="https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/">Kevin McCullough</a> <br />
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<strong>America has had enough.</strong><br />
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The amount of dishonesty being peddled from Congressional representatives to CNN is suffocating the average citizen. Half of them believing every word of it and feeling helpless to do anything about it. The other half knowing it’s nearly all false and also feeling helpless to be able to do anything about it.<br />
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Stirred outrage that’s uninformed but highly volatile and mixed with misguided ideas and a powder keg has been lit. Combined with utterly incompetent mayors, governors, and other public officials and we see disasters one never imagined in America have become reality.<br />
It’s time to stop.<br />
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To pull the plug on the incendiary.<br />
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To quell the violence, end the murder, correct the record.<br />
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To call out the biggest lies...<br />
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<strong>We were </strong><strong><em>never</em></strong><strong> divided.</strong><br />
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As the horrific death of George Floyd played out on viral video captured publicly from what seemed like endless angles, NO ONE defended the actions. The president, the mayor, the African American vice-chair of the Minneapolis City Council who grew up in the inflammatory teaching of Jeremiah Wright, the white Bible-teaching pastors of the suburbs, civil rights organizations and thousands of police unions ALL condemned the killing that took place not even two weeks ago. From the homogeneous to the multi-cultural, north to south, from Hollywood to the White House, the nation was outraged, angry, and determined to seek justice.<br />
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<strong>All Black Lives have </strong><strong><em>not</em></strong><strong> mattered.</strong><br />
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Oddly after such unity—violence broke out inexplicably. Even though the president green-lit a federal investigation into the Floyd death as a homicide, it took days for the mayor to fire, then have arrested, first just the one offender and many more days to follow for the three accomplices. The initially peaceful protests were aimed at demanding the city act as swiftly and as thoroughly as the feds. The actions finally took place but the slight hiccup in time allowed for Antifa, some black extremist groups, and ne’er-do-wells to infiltrate, terrorize, loot, and kill. Sadly, the criminal element of the protests have already (in 12 days) killed roughly the same number of unarmed black people (14) as all police departments did for the entire year of 2019 (15) (according to a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Washington Post</a> crime report). The media has ignored the lives of these murdered black citizens, proving ultimately—they simply do not matter—for the sake of the narrative.<br />
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<strong>The media </strong><strong><em>is</em></strong><strong> and </strong><strong><em>has become more so</em></strong><strong> the enemy of the people. </strong><br />
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Such negligence has proven that most of our nation’s media is heavily invested in manipulating an outcome through their “influence” rather than giving the facts and allowing the people to draw their own conclusions about their meaning. Through the obfuscation of the deadly toll of the riots, and the omission of important information in some cases one could argue media malfeasance. But the whole-cloth invention of facts and twisting outcomes is another level of malevolent disrespect for their viewers. For instance, it’s one thing to refuse to report on the impact to black-owned businesses, violence (serious but non-lethal) to black people, and to most certainly ignore the hundreds of hospitalizations of police officers. It’s another thing entirely to report that the president used weapons of war against the American people for a photo-op, with reckless disregard for any of the facts of the report. Most precisely that the president never ordered it, no such weapons were used, and the photo was taken in front of a historic church that terrorists had attempted to burn down the night before. Through all of it the media acts as though they are above any accountability for their actions.<br />
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<strong>“Bad cops” are the problem, not “police.” </strong><br />
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One of the untold stories the media has yet to even demonstrate curiosity about is just how bad the “policing” issue is across the country. Unilaterally the activists associate police departments with being a “white on black” matter. But increasingly in cities across the nation, police chiefs are POC (people of color.) On some of the largest police forces, the departments themselves are POC majority. So many of the minutes of footage from even the riots show black officers being screamed at in the face by a white protestor. Police departments have been undergoing reforms for the past couple of decades. Diversity in management, adjustment of policies regarding techniques used, and other criteria have consistently been re-examined. The murderer of George Floyd had not been reformed. <br />
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Through the protection of a big union, operating in a heavily unionized blue city, and an increasingly less blue state this bad apple had not been held accountable for 18 different complaints of excessive force with nearly all of them being made by POC. A simple review at the 2019 Uniform Crime Report would have again shed light on the overall trend. Out of a nation of 328,000,000 citizens, a total of 56 shootings of unarmed individuals occurred from all of the millions of police officers across the nation. 25 of those were against white individuals, and only 15 against black ones. Nevertheless, the newest demand by the extremists and their accomplices in the media is to eliminate police departments by defunding the police.<br />
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<strong>More engagement with police is necessary—not their elimination.</strong><br />
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At the very moment when (perhaps ever) the nation cried out as a united voice to correct an injustice, those who would hijack that progress are seeking to destroy the nation as a whole. The idea that the answer to a society that has struggled as mightily for the last 90 days as ours has is to remove the only restraint against evil that we lawfully trust is just insane. Speak to civil rights leaders—real ones who have been through the fight, not the woke snowflake wannabes like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—and they will tell you what low income and crime-ridden neighborhoods need is greater engagement with police. And on a couple of levels, more POC who look like the people in their neighborhood, and come from their neighborhood develops a level of trust. But even when they don’t look like or come from where they live it is a detriment to the welfare of society to not have police engaging with citizens. This week my heart was touched when a viral video of a white Houston PD officer put his arm around a five-year-old black girl and assured her he was there for her protection, that he was there to keep her and her parents safe. Why did he need to assure her? Because the little girl had asked him if he was there to shoot her or her parents. Whoever planted that thought in her little heart was evil. But her interaction with a police officer—even one who looked nothing like her—broke down the barrier.<br />
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Breaking down barriers is what our nation desperately needs.<br />
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We came together to seek justice for Floyd. It’s time to overcome these lies and seek the best for all of our fellow Americans from this point forward.<br />
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We long for that more perfect union!<br />
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But there are those invested in preventing it from occurring. And it is to those evil elements we reply...<br />
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We will overcome!</div>
The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-18326512527580164142020-06-07T12:00:00.001-07:002020-06-07T12:00:05.994-07:00There Is No Epidemic of Racist Police Shootings <a class="author" href="https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/heather-mac-donald"><span class="name">Heather Mac Donald</span></a> <span class="source"><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/white-cops-dont-commit-more-shootings/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">National Review Online</a></span> <span class="date">July 31, 2019</span><br />
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<strong>A new study debunks a common myth.</strong><br />
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The Democratic presidential candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s <a href="https://joebiden.com/justice/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">criminal-justice plan</a> promises that after his policing reforms, black mothers and fathers will no longer have to fear when their children “walk[] the streets of America” — the threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. President Barack Obama likewise claimed during the memorial for five Dallas police officers killed by a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin in July 2016 that black parents were right to fear that their child could be killed by a police officer whenever he “walks out the door.” South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has said that police shootings of black men won’t be solved “until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that the police shoot blacks “solely based on the color of their skin.”<br />
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A <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/16/1903856116" rel="noopener" target="_blank">new study</a> published in the <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em> demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.<br />
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The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.<br />
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Earlier studies have also disproven the idea that white officers are biased in shooting black citizens. The Black Lives Matter narrative has been impervious to the truth, however. Police departments are under enormous political pressure to hire based on race, despite existing efforts to recruit minorities, on the theory that doing so will decrease police shootings of minorities. Buttigieg came under fire from his presidential rivals for not having more black officers on the South Bend force after a white officer killed a black suspect this June. (The officer had responded to a 911 call about a possible car-theft suspect, saw a man leaning into a car, and shot off two rounds after the man threatened him with a knife.) <br />
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The Obama administration <a href="https://www.justice.gov/crt/case-document/file/900761/download" rel="noopener" target="_blank">recommended</a> in 2016 that police departments lower their entry standards in order to be able to qualify more minorities for recruitment. Departments had already been deemphasizing written exams or eliminating requirements that recruits have a clean criminal record, but the trend intensified thereafter. The Baltimore Police Department changed its qualifying exam to such an extent that the director of legal instruction in the Baltimore Police Academy <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-recruits-law-understanding-20180202-story.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">complained</a> in 2018 that rookie officers were being let out onto the street with little understanding of the law. Mr. Biden’s criminal-justice plan would require police hiring to “mirror the racial diversity” of the local community as a precondition of federal funding.<br />
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This effort to increase minority representation will not reduce racial disparities in shootings, concludes the <em>PNAS</em> study, since white officers are not responsible for those disparities; black crime rates are. Moreover, lowered hiring standards risk bad police work and corruption. A 2015 Justice Department <a href="http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-releases-report-philadelphia-police-departments-use-deadly-force" rel="noopener" target="_blank">study</a> of the Philadelphia Police Department found that black officers were 67 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect; Hispanic officers were 145 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect. Whether lowered hiring standards are responsible for those disparities was not addressed.<br />
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The persistent belief that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings is a creation of selective reporting. In 2015, the year the <em>PNAS</em> study addressed, the white victims of fatal police shootings included a 50-year-old suspect in a domestic assault in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who ran at the officer with a spoon; a 28-year-old driver in Des Moines, Iowa, who exited his car and walked quickly toward an officer after a car chase; and a 21-year-old suspect in a grocery-store robbery in Akron, Ohio, who had escaped on a bike and who did not remove his hand from his waistband when ordered to do so. Had any of these victims been black, the media and activists would probably have jumped on their stories and added their names to the roster of victims of police racism. Instead, because they are white, they are unknown.<br />
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The “policing is racist” discourse is poisonous. It exacerbates anti-cop tensions in minority communities and makes cops unwilling to engage in the proactive policing that can save lives. Last month, viral videos of pedestrians in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn assaulting passive New York Police Department officers showed that hostility toward the police in inner-city neighborhoods remains at dangerous levels.<br />
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The anti-cop narrative deflects attention away from solving the real criminal-justice problem, which is high rates of black-on-black victimization. Blacks die of homicide at <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">eight times the rate of non-Hispanic whites</a>, overwhelmingly killed not by cops, not by whites, but by other blacks. The Democratic candidates should get their facts straight and address that issue. Until they do, their talk of racial justice will ring hollow.<br />
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<strong><em>This piece originally appeared at <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/white-cops-dont-commit-more-shootings/" target="_blank">National Review Online</a></em></strong></div>
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<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-releases-report-philadelphia-police-departments-use-deadly-force">https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-releases-report-philadelphia-police-departments-use-deadly-force</a></div>
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The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-76618293283827085782020-05-04T09:47:00.000-07:002020-05-04T09:47:37.724-07:00Our Dress Rehearsal for a Police State<em>Tue, Apr 28, 2020</em> • <a href="https://www.dennisprager.com/prager-column/">Prager's Column</a> <br />
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All my life, I have dismissed paranoids on the right (“America is headed to communism”) and the left (“It can happen here” — referring to fascism). It’s not that I’ve ever believed liberty was guaranteed. Being familiar with history and a pessimist regarding the human condition, I never believed that.<br />
But the ease with which police state tactics have been employed and the equal ease with which most Americans have accepted them have been breathtaking.<br />
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People will argue that a temporary police state has been justified because of the allegedly unique threat to life posed by the new coronavirus. I do not believe the data will bear that out. Regardless, let us at least agree that we are closer to a police state than ever in American history.<br />
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“Police state” does not mean totalitarian state. America is not a totalitarian state; we still have many freedoms. In a totalitarian state, this article could not be legally published, and if it were illegally published, I would be imprisoned and/or executed. But we are presently living with all four of the key hallmarks of a police state:<br />
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No. 1: Draconian laws depriving citizens of elementary civil rights.<br />
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The federal, state, county and city governments are now restricting almost every freedom except those of travel and speech. Americans have been banned from going to work (and thereby earning a living), meeting in groups (both indoors and outdoors), meeting in their cars in church parking lots to pray and entering state-owned properties such as beaches and parks — among many other prohibitions.<br />
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No. 2: A mass media supportive of the state’s messaging and deprivation of rights.<br />
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The New York Times, CNN and every other mainstream mass medium — except Fox News, The Wall Street Journal (editorial and opinion pages only) and talk radio — have served the cause of state control over individual Americans’ lives just as Pravda served the Soviet government. In fact, there is almost no more dissent in The New York Times than there was in Pravda. And the Big Tech platforms are removing posts about the virus and potential treatments they deem “misinformation.”<br />
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No. 3: Use of police.<br />
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Police departments throughout America have agreed to enforce these laws and edicts with what can only be described as frightening alacrity. After hearing me describe police giving summonses to, or even arresting, people for playing baseball with their children on a beach, jogging alone without a mask, or worshipping on Easter while sitting isolated in their cars in a church parking lot, a police officer called my show. He explained that the police have no choice. They must respond to every dispatch they receive.<br />
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“And why are they dispatched to a person jogging on a beach or sitting alone in a park?” I asked.<br />
Because the department was informed about these lawbreakers.<br />
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“And who told the police about these lawbreakers?” I asked.<br />
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His answer brings us to the fourth characteristic of a police state:<br />
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No. 4: Snitches.<br />
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How do the police dispatchers learn of lawbreakers such as families playing softball in a public park, lone joggers without face masks, etc.? From their fellow citizens snitching on them. The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, set up a “snitch line,” whereby New Yorkers were told to send authorities photos of fellow New Yorkers violating any of the quarantine laws. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti similarly encouraged snitching, unabashedly using the term.<br />
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It is said that about 1 in every 100 East German citizens were informers for the Stasi, the East German secret police, as superbly portrayed in the film “The Lives of Others.” It would be interesting, and, I think, important, to know what percentage of New Yorkers informed on their fellow citizens. Now, again, you may think such a comparison is not morally valid, that de Blasio’s call to New Yorkers to serve a Stasi-like role was morally justified given the coronavirus pandemic. But you cannot deny it <em>is</em> Stasi-like or that, other than identifying spies during World War II, this is unprecedented in American history at anywhere near this level.<br />
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This past Friday night, I gathered with six others for a Shabbat dinner with friends in Santa Monica, California. On my Friday radio show, I announced I would be doing that, and if I was arrested, it would be worth it. In my most pessimistic dreams, I never imagined that in America, having dinner at a friend’s house would be an act of civil disobedience, perhaps even a criminal act. But that is precisely what happens in a police state.<br />
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The reason I believe this is a dress rehearsal is that too many Americans appear untroubled by it; the dominant force in America, the left, supports it, and one of the two major political parties has been taken over by the left. Democrats and their supporters have, in effect, announced they will use state power to enforce any law they can to combat the even greater “existential” crisis of global warming.<br />
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On the CNN website this weekend, in one of the most frightening and fanatical articles in an era of fanaticism, Bill Weir, CNN chief climate correspondent, wrote an open letter to his newborn son. In it, he wrote of his idealized future for America: “completely new forms of power, food, construction, transportation, economics and politics.”<br />
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You cannot get there without a police state.<br />
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If you love liberty, you must see that it is jeopardized more than at any time since America’s founding. And that means, among other things, that at this time, a vote for any Democrat is a vote to end liberty.<br />
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This column was originally posted on <a href="https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2020/04/28/our-dress-rehearsal-for-a-police-state-n2567744" target="_blank">Townhall.com</a>.The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-19789847353474212642020-04-29T08:14:00.002-07:002020-04-29T08:33:45.103-07:00Google Censors Doctors on Covid 19<h1 class="article">
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The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-19197099484663425832020-04-28T12:38:00.001-07:002020-04-28T12:38:10.423-07:00Tucker Carlson: New Evidence Means The Coronavirus Far Less Deadly Than We Were ToldPosted By <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/ian_schwartz">Ian Schwartz</a> <br />On Date April 27, 2020 <br />
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TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: The study from New York you just heard about is a remarkable new development in what we know about the Wuhan Coronavirus. One in four New Yorkers may have already contracted the illness and not known they had it. That’s not even close to the result we expected. And it’s not the only study to find stunningly widespread infections. There are many such studies, from around the world. This new evidence means that the virus is far less deadly — a full order of magnitude less deadly — than authorities told us it was. At the same time, the same research also suggests that the virus is incredibly easy to spread between adults — which is another way of saying, the Wuhan coronavirus is nearly impossible to control. We know that because we haven’t managed to control its spread. Our national mass quarantine hasn’t worked.<br /><br /> You’d never know that from listening to the people in charge. Given the suffering and disruption their policies have caused, you’d think our politicians would be staying up late double checking their assumptions. They’re doing the opposite. They’re ignoring the science, because it indicts their judgements. A recent analysis published in the Wall Street Journal found virtually no correlation at all between how quickly a state locked down and how deadly that state’s coronavirus outbreak was. You’d think that would be breaking news on every channel. Needless to say, it’s not.<br /><br /> From Australia, meanwhile, we have new evidence that for huge segments of the population, this virus poses no meaningful risk. Researchers there tracked 18 students and staff who contracted the coronavirus, across 15 different schools. They concluded that about 850 people had come into close physical contact with the virus carriers. Yet they found only two cases of secondary coronavirus infections at school. None of them involved students infecting adults. In other words, this strain of coronavirus is extremely mild in children: It's hard for kids to get, and hard for them to spread. If they do get it, their risk of dying is, mathematically, almost zero. Keep in mind, this is all in dramatic contrast to ordinary influenza. Children contract and spread the flu very easily. The annual flu is much more dangerous to young people than the coronavirus is.<br /><br /> Why is this relevant? Because we’ve shut down education nationwide. Many schools are considering staying closed next fall. For kids and their families, it’s been a complete disaster. Who exactly has been saved by doing this? They don’t even bother to tell us. “Shut up and lock down. You’ve saving lives. People will die if you don’t.” But those are political slogans. They’re not science. Increasingly, people fluent in the actual science of epidemiology are asking hard questions about what we’re doing. Here’s a physician and researcher from California called Dr. Dan Erickson. He and a partner just delivered a 50-minute briefing on the latest numbers in their state. The video has since been viewed millions of times online. After looking carefully at the data, they’ve concluded that California should end its shelter-in-place order:<br /><br /><i>Dr. Dan Erickson: "We've seen 1,227 deaths in the state of California, with a possible incidence or prevalence of 4.7 million. That means you have a 0.03 chance of dying from COVID-19 in the state of California. 0.03 chance of dying from COVID in the state of California. Does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work?"</i><br /><br /> In other words, are the lockdowns worth it? What’s the answer of that? Many politicians couldn’t seem less interested in asking. Just today, the San Francisco Bay area announced it will be extending its lockdown until the end of May, five weeks from now. What’s the scientific justification for doing that? None. There isn’t any.<br /><br /> You may remember what they first told us, back in February and March: We’ve got to take radical steps in order to quote, "flatten the curve." Six weeks later, the curve has been flattened, but not because of the lockdowns. The virus just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought. Hospitals never collapsed. Outside of a tiny number of places, they never came close, at least not from an influx of patients. Instead the opposite happened: thanks to the lockdowns, hospitals have begun to collapse from a lack of patients. Politicians who couldn’t pass ninth-grade biology decided that practicing physicians shouldn’t be trusted to calculate the risk of transmitting the virus. So they banned so called “non-essential” procedures, many of which are in fact essential. The result: In many hospitals, entire floors have been mothballed. Doctors and nurses are being furloughed. In the middle of a pandemic. This is insanity. How long will we have to live with it?<br /><br /> Earlier this month, Doctor Anthony Fauci, whom we’re required by law to respect no matter what he says, suggested that, in fact, we may never be allowed to resume normal life:<br /><br /><em>FAUCI: if back to normal means acting like there never was a corona virus problem, I don't think that's going to happen until we do have a situation where you can completely protect the population. (edit) if you want to get to pre corona virus, you know, that might not ever happen in the sense of the fact that the threat is there.<br /></em> Other "experts" on TV warned that full-blown lockdowns will be necessary until a vaccine or treatments are found. What they didn’t mention is that scientists have never produced a single approved vaccine or anti-viral drug for any other strain of Coronavirus. So it could be a while. That seemed to please frequent television guest Zeke Emanuel.<br /><br /><i>EMANUEL: Realistically, COVID-19 will be here for the next 18 months or more. We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine or effective medications. (edit) Is all that economic pain worth trying to stop COVID-19? The truth is we have no choice.</i><br /><br /> When a political operative like Zeke Emanuel, someone with a long history of lying, begins a sentence with the phrase, "the truth is,” you ought to be on guard. When he ends that sentence with, “we have no choice," you should to be terrified. In fact we've always had a choice. Other countries made different choices. They’re not waiting for a vaccine to open their societies. Why should they? There’s no precedent for doing that. We spent millions of dollars and more than 15 years trying to develop a vaccine for the SARS virus. Scientists never found one. Did we halt life in the United States? Of course not. You may not even remember it happened. The science hasn’t changed much since then. Unfortunately, American politics have changed a lot. And that’s the difference.</div>
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The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-1439964802356430712020-04-26T14:04:00.003-07:002020-04-29T08:03:46.324-07:00"Open Up Society Now" Because "Lock downs Are Weakening Our Immune Systems"<div class="submitted-username" style="background-color: white; border: 0px currentColor; box-sizing: border-box; color: #919191; font-family: "lucida_granderegular" , "lucida grande" , "verdana" , sans-serif; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">by Tyler Durden<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Sun, 04/26/2020 - 16:45<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Authored by Edward Peter Stringham via The American Institute
for Economic Research,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Dr.
Daniel W. Erickson of Bakersfield, California, is a former emergency-room
physician who co-owns, with his partner Dr. Artin Massih, Accelerated Urgent
Care in Bakersfield.They are experienced medical professionals who have 40
years of hands-on experience in dealing with viruses and respiratory
infections.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Watching the news in China in January, they knew the virus
was on its way. They ordered many COVID-19 tests because they knew they would
need them. They tested many thousands of people, and discovered for themselves
what epidemiologists around the world are saying:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>COVID-19 came here earlier than previously
believed, is more ubiquitous, and ultimately for the general population less
deadly than we thought.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">While this realization is gradually dawning on people
around the world, they went public with their findings, which are not generated
out of a predictive model but rather the actual facts of the case. In the
course of their press conference, they addressed the question of whether or not
California should have shut down much of its economy. Their answer is no. They
conclude with the need to open up immediately, on grounds of health and human
rights. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">“If you’re going to dance on someone’s constitutional
rights you better have a good reason, you better have a really good reason, not
just a theory,” he said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">“The data is showing us it’s time to lift (the stay-at-home
orders) so if we don’t lift, what is the reason?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Here are some selected quotes from their interview with a
hostile reporter (emphasis added).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">We’d like to look at how we’ve responded as a nation, and
why you responded. Our first initial response two months ago was a little bit
of fear: [the government] decided to shut down travel to and from China. These
are good ideas when you don’t have any facts. [Governments] decided to keep
people at home and isolate them. Typically you quarantine the sick. When
someone has measles you quarantine them. We’ve never seen where we quarantine
the healthy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">So that’s kind of how we started. We don’t know what’s
going on, we see this new virus. How should we respond? So we did that
initially, and over the last couple months we’ve gained a lot of data
typically. We’re going to go over the numbers a little bit to kind of help you
see how widespread COVID is, and see how we should be responding to it based on
its prevalence throughout society—or the existence of the cases that we already
know about….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">So if you look at California—these numbers are from
yesterday—we have 33,865 COVID cases, out of a total of 280,900 total tested.
That’s 12% of Californians were positive for COVID. So we don’t, the initial—as
you guys know, the initial models were woefully inaccurate. They predicted
millions of cases of death - not of prevalence or incidence - but death.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">That is not materializing. What is materializing is, in the
state of California is 12% positives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">You have a 0.03% chance of dying from COVID in the state of
California. Does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate
shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">96% of people in California who get COVID would recover,
with almost no significant sequelae;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or
no significant continuing medical problems. Two months ago we didn’t know this.
The more you test, the more positives you get. The prevalence number goes up,
and the death rate stays the same. So [the death rate] gets smaller and smaller
and smaller. And as we move through this data—what I want you to see
is—millions of cases, small death. Millions of cases, small death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">We extrapolate data, we test people, and then we
extrapolate for the entire community based on the numbers. The initial models
were so inaccurate they’re not even correct. And some of them were based on
social distancing and still predicted hundreds of thousands of deaths, which
has been inaccurate. In New York the ones they tested they found 39% positive.
So if they tested the whole state would we indeed have 7.5 million cases? We
don’t know; we will never test the entire state. So we extrapolate out; we use
the data we have because it’s the most we have versus a predictive model that
has been nowhere in the ballpark of accurate. How many deaths do they have?
19,410 out of 19 million people, which is a 0.1% chance of dying from COVID in
the state of New York. If you are indeed diagnosed with COVID-19, 92% of you
will recover.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">We’ve tested over 4 million… which gives us a 19.6% positive
out of those who are tested for COVID-19. So if this is a typical extrapolation
328 million people times 19.6 is 64 million. That’s a significant amount of
people with COVID; it’s similar to the flu. If you study the numbers in 2017
and 2018 we had 50 to 60 million with the flu. And we had a similar death rate
in the deaths the United States were 43,545—similar to the flu of 2017-2018. We
always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single
year. No pandemic talk. No shelter-in-place. No shutting down businesses… <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">We do thousands of flu tests every year. We don’t report
every one, because the flu is ubiquitous and to that note we have a flu
vaccine. How many people even get the flu vaccine? The flu is dangerous, it
kills people. Just because you have a vaccine doesn’t mean it’s gonna be
everywhere and it doesn’t mean everyone’s going to take it… I would say
probably 50% of the public doesn’t even want it. Just because you have a
vaccine—unless you forced it on the public—doesn’t mean they’re going to take
it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Norway has locked down; Sweden does not have lock down.
What happened in those two countries? Are they vastly different? Did Sweden
have a massive outbreak of cases? Did Norway have nothing? Let’s look at the
numbers. Sweden has 15,322 cases of COVID—21% of all those tested came out
positive for COVID. What’s the population of Sweden? About 10.4 million. So if
we extrapolate out the data about 2 million cases of COVID in Sweden. They did
a little bit of social distancing; they would wear masks and separate; they
went to schools; stores were open. They were almost about their normal daily
life with a little bit of social distancing. They had how many deaths? 1,765.
California’s had 1,220 with isolation. No isolation: 1,765. We have more
people. Norway: its next-door neighbor. These are two Scandinavian nations; we
can compare them as they are similar. 4.9% of all COVID tests were positive in
Norway. Population of Norway: 5.4 million. So if we extrapolate the data, as
we’ve been doing, which is the best we can do at this point, they have about
1.3 million cases. Now their deaths as a total number, were 182. So you have a
0.003 chance of death as a citizen of Norway and a 97% recovery. Their numbers
are a little bit better. Does it necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs,
destruction of the oil company, furloughing doctors?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">I wanted to talk about the effects of COVID-19, the
secondary effects. COVID-19 is one aspect of our health sector. What has it
caused to have us be involved in social isolation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What does it cause that we are seeing the
community respond to? Child molestation is increasing at a severe rate. We
could go over multiple cases of children who have been molested due to angry
family members who are intoxicated, who are home, who have no paycheck. Spousal
abuse: we are seeing people coming in here with black eyes and cuts on their
face. It’s an obvious abuse of case. These are things that will affect them for
a lifetime, not for a season. Alcoholism, anxiety, depression, suicide. Suicide
is spiking; education is dropped off; economic collapse. Medical industry we’re
all suffering because our staff isn’t here and we have no volume. We have
clinics from Fresno to San Diego and these things are spiking in our community.
These things will affect people for a lifetime, not for a season. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">I’d like to go over some basic things about how the immune
system functions so people have a good understanding. The immune system is
built by exposure to antigens: viruses, bacteria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you’re a little child crawling on the
ground, putting stuff in your mouth, viruses and bacteria come in. You form an
antigen antibody complex. You form IgG IgM. This is how your immune system is
built. You don’t take a small child put them in bubble wrap in a room and say,
“go have a healthy immune system.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">This is immunology, microbiology 101. This is the basis of
what we’ve known for years. When you take human beings and you say, “go into
your house, clean all your counters—Lysol them down you’re gonna kill 99% of
viruses and bacteria; wear a mask; don’t go outside,” what does it do to our
immune system? Our immune system is used to touching. We share bacteria.
Staphylococcus, streptococcal, bacteria, viruses. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Sheltering in place decreases your immune system. And then
as we all come out of shelter in place with a lower immune system and start
trading viruses, bacteria—what do you think is going to happen? Disease is
going to spike. And then you’ve got diseases spike—amongst a hospital system
with furloughed doctors and nurses. This is not the combination we want to set
up for a healthy society. It doesn’t make any sense.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">…Did we respond appropriately? Initially the response, fine
shut it down, but as the data comes across—and we say now, wait a second, we’ve
never, ever responded like this in the history of the country why are we doing
this now? Any time you have something new in the community medical community it
sparks fear—and I would have done what Dr. Fauci did—so we both would have
initially. Because the first thing you do is, you want to make sure you limit
liability—and deaths—and I think what they did was brilliant, initially. But
you know, looking at theories and models—which is what these folks use—is very
different than the way the actual virus presents itself throughout
communities….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Nobody talks about the fact that coronavirus lives on
plastics for three days and we’re all sheltering in place. Where’d you get your
water bottles from? Costco. Where did you get that plastic shovel from? Home
Depot. If I swab things in your home I would likely find COVID-19. And so you
think you’re protected. Do you see the lack of consistency here? Do you think
you’re protected from COVID when you wear gloves that transfer disease
everywhere? Those gloves have bacteria all over them. We wear masks in an acute
setting to protect us. We’re not wearing masks. Why is that? Because we
understand microbiology; we understand immunology; and we want strong immune
systems. I don’t want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune system, and
then come out and get disease.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">When someone dies in this country right now they’re not
talking about the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the stroke. They say they
died from COVID. We’ve been to hundreds of autopsies. You don’t talk about one
thing, you talk about comorbidities. COVID was part of it, it is not the reason
they died folks. When I’m writing up my death report I’m being pressured to add
COVID. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add COVID? To
maybe increase the numbers, and make it look a little bit worse than it is.
We’re being pressured in-house to add COVID to the diagnostic list when we
think it has nothing to do with the actual cause of death. The actual cause of
death was not COVID, but it’s being reported as one of the disease processes
and being added to the death list. COVID didn’t kill them, 25 years of tobacco
use killed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">There’s two ways to get rid of virus: either burns itself
out or herd immunity. For hundreds of years we relied on herd immunity. Viruses
kill people, end of story. The flu kills people. COVID kills people. But for
the rest of us we develop herd immunity. We developed the ability to take this
virus in and defeat it and for the vast majority 95% of those around the globe.
Do you want your immune system built or do you want it not built? The building
blocks of your immune system is a virus and bacteria. There’s normal bacteria
in normal flora that we have to be exposed to bacteria and viruses that are not
virulent are our friends. They protect us against bad bacteria and bad viruses.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Right now, if you look at Dr. Erikson’s skin or my skin we
have strep, we have stuff—they protect us against opportunistic infections.
That’s why for the first three to six months [babies are] extremely vulnerable
to opportunistic infection. Which is why, when we see a little baby in the ER
with fever who is one month old, you do a spinal tap, you do a chest x-ray, you
do blood cultures, you do urine cultures. But if you had a fever I wouldn’t do
that for you. Why? Because that baby does not have the normal bacteria and
flora from the community, whereas you do. I guarantee when we reopen there’s
going to be a huge, huge amount of illness that’s going to be rampant because
our immune systems have weakened. That’s just basic immunology.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is
emphatically no. Do we need businesses to be shut down? Emphatically no. Do we
need to have it, do we need to test them, and get them back to work? Yes, we
do. The the secondary effects that we went over—the child abuse, alcoholism,
loss of revenue—all these are, in our opinion, a significantly more detrimental
thing to society than a virus that has proven similar in nature to the seasonal
flu we have every year. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">We also need to put measures in place so economic shutdown
like this does not happen again. We want to make sure we understand that
quarantining the sick is what we do, not quarantine the healthy. We need to
make sure if you’re gonna dance on someone’s constitutional rights you better
have a good reason. You better have a really good scientific reason, and not
just theory. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">One of the most important things is we need our hospitals
back up. We need our furloughed doctors back. We need our nurses back. Because
when we lift this thing, we’re gonna need all hands on deck. I know the local
hospitals have closed two floors. Folks, that’s not the situation you want.
We’re essentially setting ourselves up to have minimal staff, and we’re going
to have significant disease. That’s the wrong combination. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">I’ve talked to our local head of the Health Department and
he’s waiting… for the powers that be to lift. Because the data is showing it’s
time to lift. I would start slowly [open up schools sporting events] I think we
need to open up the schools start getting kids back to the immune system you
know and the major events the sporting events these are non-essential let’s get
back to those slowly let’s start with schools let’s start with cafe Rio and the
pizza place here… Does that make sense to you guys and I think I can go into
Costco and I can shop with people and there’s probably a couple hundred people
but I can’t go in Cafe Rio so big businesses are open little businesses are
not….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Eventually we treat this like we treat flu. Which is if you
have the flu and you’re feeling fever and body aches you just stay home if you
have coughing or shortness of breath—COVID is more of a respiratory thing—you
stay home. You don’t get tested, even when people come with flu a lot of times
we don’t test them. We go, “you have flu. Here’s a medication.” You have COVID,
go home, let it resolve and come back negative. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">If you have no symptoms you should be able to return to work.
Are you an asymptomatic viral spreader? Maybe, but we can’t test all of
humanity. Sure we’re gonna miss cases of coronavirus, just like we miss cases
of the flu. It would be nice to capture every coronavirus patient, but is that
realistic? Are we gonna keep the economy shut down for two years and vaccinate
everybody? That’s an unrealistic expectation. You’re going to cause financial
ruin, domestic violence, suicide, rape, violence and what are you going to get
out of it? You’re still going to miss a lot of cases. So we need to treat this
like the flu, which is familiar, and eventually this will mutate and become
less and less virulent… <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">I don’t need a double-blind clinically controlled trial to
tell me if sheltering in place is appropriate, that is a college-level
understanding of microbiology. A lot of times in medicine you have to make you
have to make educated decisions with the data that you have. I can sit up in
the 47th-floor in the penthouse and say we should do this, this, and this, but
I haven’t seen a patient for 20 years—that’s not realistic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">If you’re healthy and you don’t have significant
comorbidities and you know you’re not immunodeficient and you’re not elderly
you should be able to go out without any gloves and without a mask. If you are
those things you should either shelter in place or wear a mask and gloves. I
don’t think everybody needs to wear the masks and gloves because it reduces
your bacterial flora… and your bacterial flora and your viruses your friends
that protect you from other diseases [if they] end up going away and now you’re
more likely to get opportunistic infections that are hoping you don’t have your
good bugs fighting for you.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfLVxx_lBLU&t=62s">Link</a>)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb6j7o1pLBw">Link</a>)<br />
<br />
Google DELETED these videos! Apparently someone doesn't want us to see them.<br />
<a href="https://www.redstate.com/jeffc/2020/04/28/youtube-takes-down-video-of-california-doctors-who-argued-for-lifting-covid-19-restrictions/">https://www.redstate.com/jeffc/2020/04/28/youtube-takes-down-video-of-california-doctors-who-argued-for-lifting-covid-19-restrictions/</a><br />
</div>
The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-54260654418721687802020-01-02T12:56:00.001-08:002020-01-02T12:56:13.912-08:00Gender Identification in one Video<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PObBA2wH5l0&t=82s">Link</a>)</div>
The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-34655953409112768212019-10-23T14:48:00.000-07:002019-10-23T14:48:24.686-07:00Is this where the USA is headed? Apparently so.<span class="desktop"><strong><span style="font-size: large;">Word Crime: Two UConn Students Arrested For Saying Racial Slurs</span></strong></span><br />
<span class="desktop"></span><br />
<span class="desktop">Posted by </span><a href="https://legalinsurrection.com/author/aleister-g/" rel="author" title="Posts by Mike LaChance">Mike LaChance</a> <span class="dot desktop"> </span> <span class="desktop">Wednesday, October 23, 2019 at 7:00am</span><br />
<span class="desktop"></span><br />
<span class="desktop"><a href="https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/10/word-crime-two-uconn-students-arrested-for-saying-racial-slurs/">On Legal Insurrection</a></span><br />
<span class="desktop"></span><br />
<span class="desktop">Two students from the University of Connecticut are currently under arrest because they used racial slurs. That may be tasteless and inappropriate, but at the end of the day, they’re just words.<br />
These students were arrested for saying words.<br />
They were walking through a parking lot and claimed they were playing a game by shouting vulgar words. Someone heard them and took a video.<br />
Ben Kesslen reports at <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/2-white-uconn-students-arrested-after-video-showed-them-shouting-n1069891?" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NBC News</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
<strong>2 white UConn students arrested after video showed them shouting racial slurs</strong><br />
Two white students at the University of Connecticut were arrested Monday after video that showed them shouting racial slurs prompted campus protests, university police told NBC News. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Jarred Mitchell Karal, 21, and Ryan Gilman Mucaj, 21, face charges of ridicule on account of race, color, or creed. They were released with a court date set for Oct. 30 at Rockville Superior Court in Vernon, Connecticut. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Karal and Mucaj’s charges could result in a $50 fine or up to 30 days in jail.<br />
NBC sent emails to the two men Tuesday morning requesting comment but did not immediately hear back.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Campus police learned of the incident from social media footage showing Karal and Mucaj shouting epithets in an apartment complex parking lot, a university spokesperson told NBC News. The men were playing a game that involved yelling vulgar words, university police said, and then started shouting epithets. Karal and Mucaj were walking with a third man, whom police said did not shout epithets and was not charged.</blockquote>
Jon Street of <a href="https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=13898" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Campus Reform</a> explains how the situation led to arrests:<br />
<blockquote>
The video prompted the UConn NAACP chapter to pen a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, The Daily Campus, calling on officials “to fully investigate this incident and apply the proper justice.” Following those calls, the university confirmed to Campus Reform Monday that two of the three men allegedly seen in the video were arrested under a Connecticut state statute that makes it a crime to “ridicule” certain persons. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“Any person who, by his advertisement, ridicules or holds up to contempt any person or class of persons, on account of the creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race of such person or class of persons, shall be guilty of a class D misdemeanor,” the statute states.</blockquote>
In this short video report from WFSB News, you will see that this sparked campus protests and demands from student activists:<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="338" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S3Vz2jXhOqY" width="600"></iframe><br />
Adam Steinbaugh of the <a href="https://www.thefire.org/university-of-connecticut-police-arrest-students-for-use-of-racial-slur/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Foundation for Individual Rights in Education</a> (FIRE) provides background on the statute used to justify the arrest, and calls this unconstitutional:<br />
<blockquote>
The Connecticut statute is a rarely-enforced relic dating to 1917 and intended to address advertisements for businesses, not every use of derogatory language. There are scattered references to charges under the statute in news reports and legal databases, but no substantive analysis of the statute’s constitutional viability has been undertaken by any court, much less any appellate court. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Why is it rarely enforced? Because it is plainly unconstitutional. The use of racially-derogatory language — without more — is protected by the First Amendment.</blockquote>
This incident is just the latest example in a disturbing trend of criminalizing speech. Last month, New York made it illegal to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/new-york-city-bans-use-illegals-illegal-alien-n1062161" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">use the term “illegal alien” in a derogatory manner</a>. This week, a lawmaker in Massachusetts is proposing <a href="https://reason.com/2019/10/22/massachusetts-legislator-proposes-200-fines-6-months-in-jail-for-using-the-word-bitch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">outlawing use of the word “bitch.”</a><br />
<br />
How much longer are we going to tolerate this constant erosion of our rights?<br />
Featured image via <a href="https://youtu.be/S3Vz2jXhOqY" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">YouTube</a>.</span><br />
<span class="desktop"></span>The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-28464852353856793612019-09-09T16:00:00.001-07:002019-09-09T16:00:30.834-07:00Media Focus on Mass Shootings Shows Disconnect from Actual Crime Trends<br />
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<div class="required-fields group-date-author field-group-html-element">
<span class="date">08/03/2019 </span><span class="author"><a href="https://mises.org/profile/ryan-mcmaken" rel="author">Ryan McMaken</a></span></div>
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Following last weekend's Gilroy, California shooting during which three victims died, media outlets have begun to suggest again that murder is a growing reality in the lives of Americans.<br />
<br />
For example, the Associated Press ran an article titled "U.S. already has nearly 20 mass killings in 2019," suggesting the threat of dying in a shooting is becoming an ever-more-likely fate in America. <em>USA Today</em> took it a step further with an article titled "Not an unreasonable fear: Mass shootings such as the one at Gilroy Garlic Festival more numerous, deadly."<br />
<br />
Articles like these combine to send the message that homicides are a growing part of American life. Moreover, these sorts of articles have had the intended effect.<br />
<br />
As the Pew Research Center <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/03/5-facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> has noted</a>, [i]n a survey in late 2016, 57% of registered voters said crime in the U.S. had <a href="https://www.people-press.org/2016/11/10/a-divided-and-pessimistic-electorate/#voters-said-there-has-been-scant-progress-across-most-areas" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> gotten worse </a> since 2008." At least some of these poorly conceived estimates of crime trends can likely be attributed to an ongoing media focus on mass shootings. But as we shall see, mass shootings are but a very small part of larger crime trends. <em>And</em>, the overall trend has been downward for decades.<br />
<br />
The homicide rate in America in recent years has been around half of what it was in the early 1990s.<br />
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<div class="media media-element-container media-image_no_caption">
<a class="colorbox init-colorbox-processed cboxElement" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-file-84847-8gHQMuWKZAc" href="https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/styles/max_1160/s3/homicide_2017_0.PNG?itok=ShdLb21P" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="homicide_2017.PNG"><img alt="homicide_2017_0.PNG" height="448" src="https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/styles/max_full/s3/homicide_2017_0.PNG?itok=MOq9FxtZ" title="" typeof="foaf:Image" width="640" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG8t_GrbF2TdMGGxdeYRiDzpj4pjRdSpJLPhwdHjHMQ1g2LjYXLVB1HzZc7HjXi64MbBKrvjZ0HHoxwsbDeQG76GPaiqrHN9x1FYQKhpSgM_qUrE6d-9Y5xXEhG05WsVRnOc7eUofUgZ_j/s1600/homicide_2017.PNG" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> </a> Indeed, for Americans born in the 1970s or after, the last few years have been the<em> least</em> homicidal years of their lives.<br />
<br />
It is true that nationwide homicide rates have increased since 2014's 51-year low, rising from 4.4 homicides per 100,000 people in 2014 to 5.3 per 100,000 in 2017. But, the most recent data we have suggests 2018 may be another down year for homicides.<a class="see-footnote" href="https://mises.org/wire/media-focus-mass-shootings-shows-disconnect-actual-crime-trends-0#footnote1_8uq9s99" id="footnoteref1_8uq9s99" title="All crime data in this article, unless otherwise noted, comes from FBI "Crime in the US" reports and FBI historical data. (https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s)">1</a><br />
<br />
According to preliminary crime data from the FBI for 2018, homicides and violent crime were both down in the first half of 2018, compared to the previous year.<br />
<br />
Full-year stats for 2018 will become available in September.<br />
<br />
From January to June of 2018, there were 6.7 percent fewer murders, and 4.3 percent less violent crime overall.<br />
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<div class="media media-element-container media-image_no_caption">
<a class="colorbox init-colorbox-processed cboxElement" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-file-84848-8gHQMuWKZAc" href="https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/styles/max_1160/s3/annual_change_prelim.PNG?itok=RAZzXXwf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="annual_change_prelim.PNG"><img alt="annual_change_prelim.PNG" height="405" src="https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/styles/max_full/s3/annual_change_prelim.PNG?itok=WVBTm0_4" title="" typeof="foaf:Image" width="640" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIfzl_P_AoUpUtDLIrFKHpSPNnHnzTCcJBPQXoHjgibVVC_Rs-pw_J6lJiPBdcx8EezOuPgrs-Ety_LZfPWNpHxzfyZ3yXuuAGw5ZkQFVQdC4VBcZ4aq4GzcRkDujmQY73lZSnFDDQhiqu/s1600/annual_change_prelim.PNG" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> </a> This decline follows a three year period during which murders rose form the previous year (in the first half of the year). But the preliminary data and the<em> full-year</em> data do not always match up. For example, the first half of 2017 showed an increase in homicides, although homicides ended up being down for the full year of 2017.<br />
<br />
Trends can change at any time, of course. But for now, the data points toward a continued overall trend toward less homicide in the United States.<br />
<br />
Nor is this trend just limited to homicides. This is important to note because sometimes observers of homicide data suggest homicides have only lessened because medical science means fewer assaults result in death.<br />
<br />
But we can also see that violent crime<em> in general</em> — including aggravated assaults — are down considerably from earlier peaks.<br />
<br />
Violent crime overall was at 382.9 per 100,000 during 2017, near a 45 year low.<br />
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<div class="media media-element-container media-image_no_caption">
<a class="colorbox init-colorbox-processed cboxElement" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-file-84849-8gHQMuWKZAc" href="https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/styles/max_1160/s3/vc.PNG?itok=0wLisE3i" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="vc.PNG"><img alt="vc.PNG" height="386" src="https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/styles/max_full/s3/vc.PNG?itok=4sbnxe8E" title="" typeof="foaf:Image" width="640" /></a></div>
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Aggravated assaults were near a 40-year low, at 248.9 per 100,000.<br />
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<div class="media media-element-container media-image_no_caption">
<a class="colorbox init-colorbox-processed cboxElement" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-file-84850-8gHQMuWKZAc" href="https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/styles/max_1160/s3/aa.PNG?itok=gHvb7bh1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="aa.PNG"><img alt="aa.PNG" height="388" src="https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/styles/max_full/s3/aa.PNG?itok=WWbtb8w9" title="" typeof="foaf:Image" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
It may very well be that medical science is helping prevent many assaults from turning into homicides, but it's also true that fewer violent crimes in general are taking place. Thus, we cannot only attribute declines in homicide rates only to improved medical care for homicide victims. There are simply fewer violent attacks in America over the past twenty years.<br />
<h4>
What Role Do Mass Shootings Play?</h4>
In spite of all this, journalists and pundits who focus on mass shootings might say "well, the homicide rate would improve more if mass shootings weren't such a problem."<br />
<br />
That may be so. But how <em>much</em> of the homicide puzzle are mass shootings? It turns out: very small.<br />
<a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">According to<em> Mother Jones</em> magazine</a> — a publication that's hardly a right-wing stooge for the NRA — there were 117 deaths resulting from mass shootings in 2017. Given that there were 17,284 homicides reported during 2017, mass shootings made up 0.7 percent off all homicides.<br />
<br />
In 2018, there were 80 deaths from mass shootings. We don't have full-year 2018 data yet, but since the first half of the year already shows a 6.7 percent decrease, let's assume a slight decrease for the year, down to 17,000 homicides. If this turns out to be the case, that means mass shooting deaths will make up about 0.5 percent of all homicides.<br />
<br />
Those wounded in mass shootings are an even smaller percentage of those who survive serious assaults nationwide. Indeed, because aggravated assaults are so numerous, the non-homicide victims of mass shootings barely register as a percentage of total assaults. For example, in 2017, there were more than 810,000 aggravated assaults in the US. Even if we count the shockingly large number of wounded (i.e., 546 people) from the Las Vegas shooting that year, the total comes to 0.07 percent of all aggravated assaults.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, <em>USAToday</em> reports, <a href="https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2018/10/16/americas-top-fears-2018/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> 41% of Americans fear random mass shootings. </a><br />
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It remains unclear, however, why <em>USAToday</em> should label such concerns as "not an unreasonable fear." True, it makes sense to not discount the risk of mass shootings entirely, and to be aware that the risk exists. Even if very small.<br />
<br />
However, for all the air time and public discussion devoted to mass shootings in the US, nearly all people murdered in America this year will be murdered the "old fashioned" way. They'll be murdered by a family member or a jilted lover or by some street thug looking to score some cash to pay for a drug fix. Most Americans murdered this year will be victims of <a href="https://mises.org/wire/baltimores-homicide-rate-ten-times-larger-us-rate">the sort we see in Baltimore</a> where ordinary murders of the non-mass-shooting variety continue to wreak havoc on the local population. These murders won't be any less tragic than murders from mass shootings. But you won't hear nearly as much about them as you'll hear about the mass shootings.<br />
<br />
Of course, from a public policy perspective, it's easy to see why pundits and politicians and media journalists would push the mass-shooting angle so hard. The seeming randomness of the shootings allows nearly the entire population to imagine that it could be a victim of a mass shooting at any time. After all, these shootings occur in churches and in schools and at county fairs. These are places where ordinary, middle class Americans go. More importantly, these are places <em>voters</em> go. It's easy to look at street crime in a big city and dismiss it as simply a problem for people who live in "slums." Thus, by focusing on mass shootings, its easier to create the impression that violence has exploded across the US, as mass shootings get ever more air time and discussion in social media.<br />
<br />
Yes, it may very well be that trends reverse themselves, and we enter another cycle of rising crime in coming years. For now, however, most Americans' estimates that crime is "getting worse" in the US appear to be unfounded.<br />
<ul class="footnotes">
<li class="footnote" id="footnote1_8uq9s99"><a class="footnote-label" href="https://mises.org/wire/media-focus-mass-shootings-shows-disconnect-actual-crime-trends-0#footnoteref1_8uq9s99">1.</a> All crime data in this article, unless otherwise noted, comes from FBI "Crime in the US" reports and FBI historical data. (<a href="https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s">https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s</a>)</li>
<li class="footnote"></li>
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The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-74601212829701027312019-09-01T16:23:00.002-07:002019-09-01T16:23:30.827-07:00Why I proudly don’t watch the news or read the papers (and you shouldn’t either)<span class="fl-post-info-date">May 17, 2018</span><span class="fl-post-info-sep"> / </span><span class="fl-post-info-author"><a href="https://sellyourservice.co.uk/author/mike_killen/">Mike Killen</a></span> <br />
<br />
<br />
“You can’t be serious? How on Earth can you possibly call yourself educated and informed when you refuse to watch the news! You’re an intelligent boy Michael, I really expected better.”<br />
<br />
This particular customer wasn’t happy that I didn’t watch the news. I also admitted to not reading the newspapers, listening to the radio or watching political shows and debates.<br />
John (the customer) runs a financial tech company and while we’re good friends now, it took him a while to understand why I so adamantly refused to watch the news.<br />
<br />
Refusing to watch the news, reducing your news intake and going into information ignorance can make you wealthier, wiser, happier, safer and BETTER informed than most “informed” people.<br />
<h2>
Most people pride themselves on being informed</h2>
There is an ENORMOUS paradox when it comes to consuming journalism, news and current events.<br />
John was a great example of this. He was one of the few people that really understood what was happening with Brexit. He was also one of the only people that knew what was really going to happen with Trump.<br />
<br />
In fact, John openly admitted to being the only person who really understood the economy, the job market, crypto-currency, North Korea, the Royal Wedding, dieting, terrorism, travel, exercise and why iPhones cost so much.<br />
<h2>
We ALL think we’re well informed</h2>
<img alt="news informed unhappy, ignorance news," class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12073" height="281" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" src="https://sellyourservice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/jonah-30-rock-news-gta.png" srcset="https://sellyourservice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/jonah-30-rock-news-gta.png 500w, https://sellyourservice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/jonah-30-rock-news-gta-300x169.png 300w" width="500" /><br />
John is very well informed.<br />
<br />
But that’s the thing. We ALL think we’re well informed. The information that John read, watched and listened to has a complete opposite bias from other sources. Meaning that everyone else who has the exact OPPOSITE opinion (or truth) considers themselves just as well informed.<br />
<br />
Some people think the job market is bad because of immigration. Others think it’s because of automation and robots.<br />
<br />
Some people think crime is up because of video <br />
game violence. Others think it’s because of poor parenting.<br />
<br />
By definition, most people’s explanations CAN’T be correct. If there is conflicting information then surely only one can be true. Or, more likely BOTH are just as incorrect and they embellish their answer for various reasons.<br />
<h2>
Crime is LOWER than ever</h2>
The job market is in GREAT condition. Crime is LOWER than ever.<br />
<br />
This post could easily slide into conspiracy theories of Mass media mind control, advertising revenue and fear-based manipulation. But in truth none of that really matters. What matters, even if what we read is true or complete nonsense, is does it really affect us?<br />
<br />
Considering yourself well-informed is a massive paradox. We internally believe that we have some kind of insider knowledge, that allows us to have a clearer or deeper insight on the topic. However we have undoubtedly gained that knowledge from third-party sources and journalists on a mass media level.<br />
<br />
It’s like considering Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War a small indie film. Just because you have seen it and have an opinion, doesn’t make it smaller than it is. Millions of people have consumed that content and will have just a strong opinion as you do.<br />
<br />
The reason that people justify having an insider knowledge, is because they apply the story through their own experience and filter.<br />
<br />
A news story about a business owner going bankrupt will produce two completely different opinions, based on our own filter and experience. On the one hand someone who has always struggled with money, and is from a lower economic background might say the business owner deserved it.<br />
<br />
Someone who’s made a lot of money by running their own business, might say that they obviously weren’t focused enough on their business.<br />
<br />
Someone else who’s made a lot of money by running a business might say it’s just part of becoming an entrepreneur.<br />
<br />
The same news story can create entirely different reactions in people based on our filters. Our filters are created from our past experiences, our values and our own thought processes.<br />
My argument is that any new story is worthless, as it’s often presented as a dramatic retelling, rather than stating the pure facts.<br />
<h2>
All news positions itself as unbiased (which is can’t ever be)</h2>
Many journalists pride themselves on being unbiased when they present a new story. This is by definition completely impossible.<br />
<br />
When Saddam Hussein was removed from power from Iraq in 2003, most Western nations agreed that it was the right thing to do. Similarly, most Western journalists looked for stories of Iraqis celebrating their freedom, celebrating Saddam’s downfall and exploring the bright positive future that Iraq had.<br />
<br />
Iraqi journalists however reported on a foreign nation invading their country, removing their leader and destroying healthcare, education and transport systems.<br />
<br />
Many Iraqi citizens do not care for Western intervention. As far as they are aware, America removed a benevolent and powerful leader, only to leave the country with no infrastructure.<br />
<br />
Regardless of your understanding. Regardless of Saddam Hussein being a murderous dictator. The news could not be possibly told in an unbiased manner because of the very nature of how we consume media.<br />
<br />
Eventually journalists were really happy to jump on the bandwagon of the invasion being a bad idea. The exact same journalists who were originally reporting the great job that a Western invasion had done.<br />
<br />
At its core, we can learn two things from examples like this. 1) any large story will by definition have a bias when presented to any mass market. 2) whether we like to admit it or not, this story does not affect us at all.<br />
<h2>
It’s scary calling yourself uninformed</h2>
One of the biggest reasons we hang onto our idea of consuming news, is that we like to stay informed. We are taught that being informed is safer, shows a higher intellect and is even more moral than being ignorant.<br />
<br />
To say you’re uninformed on politics, geography, the economy or anything else covered in the news, is admitting ignorance. To some people, it’s extremely important to never be seen as ignorant.<br />
However, recent studies have shown that the most educated people on the planet don’t make any better decisions than random chance.<br />
<br />
In fact, Hans Rosling of TED fame, initiator of Médecins Sans Frontières in Sweden and author of Factfulness, did a test where he asked people from a wide range of backgrounds to guess the answers to large scale problems in the world.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>How many of the world’s one year old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?</em></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>In all low income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?</em></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has…?</em></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em></em> </div>
Every single person that answered consider themselves well informed, educated and well read. They prided themselves on reading the news, keeping up-to-date and debating current affairs.<br />
<br />
The answers to each question were even given as a multiple choice. They could choose one of three possible answers. Fewer than 25% of people asked guessed the correct answer.<br />
<br />
With most countries having between 10% and 2% of their population answering the correct answer.<br />
The poverty question is one of my favourite examples. Most people believe that global poverty is either increasing or at least the of the gap between rich and poor is widening.<br />
<h2>
Poverty across the world has dropped</h2>
However statistics show that since 1997, poverty across the world has dropped to less than 9% globally. In 20 years alone poverty levels have halved. Compared to 1966 when poverty levels were around 50% (living on less than $2 per day), we are now at the <a href="https://www.gapminder.org/answers/how-many-are-rich-and-how-many-are-poor/">lowest level of global poverty in history</a>.<br />
<br />
The problem is that when people answer broad sweeping statements about the state of the world, such as poverty, the economy and health. They are viewing the entire world through a very specific filter. Even though they are not as well-informed as they think they are.<br />
<br />
We all pride ourselves on accepting evolution. We will pride ourselves on accepting having a solar-centric solar system. We’ll happily agree that the Earth is round. But on so many after massive scale truths about the world, we view it through a broken and biased lens.<br />
<br />
Therefore, is it possible that all our perceptions about the economy, health, jobs, politics, religion and more could not only be plain wrong? But also preventing us from living a happier, more successful and wealthy life?<br />
<br />
Imagine “knowing” that the world is getting worse. How would that affect your view on the future for your own life? How would that affect your view on your ability to earn more money, help more people, or change the world?<br />
<br />
Can you imagine the difference it would make to your own psychology and spirit, if you only accepted things that were 100% true and that showed the world in a more positive light?<br />
<h2>
It doesn’t help me, help people</h2>
The biggest fundamental reason why I don’t watch the news or consume any kind of news content, is that it doesn’t help me help other people.<br />
<br />
My ability to consume newspapers, radio and TV doesn’t increase my capacity to change the lives of other people.Being informed on why Amber Heard was fired from the British Cabinet, or who Kim Jong Un Has recently had assassinated doesn’t change or affect my ability to help other people.<br />
<br />
Many journalists and news outlets pride themselves on presenting the facts to people. They say that people are better informed through them, and that they are helping people make the right choices.<br />
Political debates and democracy are a great example of news being used to influence people’s votes.<br />
<br />
However, statistics show that you’re basically just as likely to vote for who your parents voted for. We ignore any information that goes against our current beliefs. And we actively search out and blow out of proportion stories that support our beliefs.<br />
<br />
We also have a habit of justifying something that we do believe in, whereas we vilify something we don’t believe in. At its core however, most of our belief systems are imprinted in us from a very young age and we don’t really have that much control over them.<br />
<br />
Remember, NO ONE has the inside track. You aren’t smarter than everybody else just because you can justify your own beliefs with your own internal dialogue.<br />
<br />
After all of that, does being informed on world events, bearing in mind that they are both biased and untrue, help you help people? Probably not.<br />
<h2>
People confuse opinion and offense, with fact</h2>
Something people confuse with fact, is opinion. The rise of social media and the ease at which people can create content, has led us down a path of opinions being positioned as facts.<br />
<br />
Frankly it’s been happening with newspapers, radio shows and TV programmes for years. While journalists might say they have integrity with presenting the story “as it is”. Every single headline is <span style="text-decoration: underline;">by definition,</span> designed to invoke an emotional response.<br />
<br />
Emotional feelings and responses are personal, therefore can never be considered fact. We somehow seem to view celebrity scandals, political scandals and economic blunders as fact, because we have strong feelings about them.<br />
<br />
Take the royal wedding for example. Prince Harry is marrying Megan Markle and I have absolutely zero opinion on it.<br />
<br />
However a quick Google search would show plenty of emotional opinions being presented as facts.<br />
<img alt="Royal wedding, opinions based as fact, fact almost, opinion headlines" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12070" height="640" sizes="(max-width: 1127px) 100vw, 1127px" src="https://sellyourservice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/royal-wedding-news-bias-emotion.png" srcset="https://sellyourservice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/royal-wedding-news-bias-emotion.png 1127w, https://sellyourservice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/royal-wedding-news-bias-emotion-217x300.png 217w, https://sellyourservice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/royal-wedding-news-bias-emotion-768x1064.png 768w, https://sellyourservice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/royal-wedding-news-bias-emotion-739x1024.png 739w" width="460" /><br />
<br />
Every single one of these results is designed to invoke an emotional response. Why? Because emotional responses get clicks. The highlighted results even show a explicit attempt at invoking a response or emotion.<br />
<br />
This is not to have a go at headline writing. I write emotional headlines for all of my blog posts. I know that emotion sells.<br />
<br />
However, to position an emotional response or opinion as fact, is by its very definition not journalism. Any of these pieces will have an absolute emotional bias based around the writer, the media outlet and the audience.<br />
<br />
We also have a habit of asking other people’s opinions and positioning them as fact. Journalists are often seen asking “<em>How do you feel about this?” </em>or “<em>What do you think about…?”</em><br />
It’s as if we have confused individual feelings with facts.<br />
<br />
It gets even worse when people exclaim offence or outrage at something, which has absolutely no bearing or concern to them.<br />
<br />
Every single day there are stories of celebrities, comedians, politicians and religious leaders saying or doing something which causes offence. People then proudly exclaim their offence and outrage on channels like Twitter and Facebook, confusing their ability to publish an opinion as something worth reading.<br />
<br />
Opinions, offence and outrage are emotions. Emotions are personal and private and therefore, could never be considered fact.<br />
<br />
This of course raises the most impactful thought of all…<br />
<h2>
It’s been proven to make you unhappy</h2>
If something makes you unhappy, causes offence or makes you angry. Whose fault is that?<br />
People are very quick to blame external events on their emotions. Stories about terrorism make us anxious. Stories about entrepreneurs defrauding customers make us angry. Stories about kittens being fed into a wood furnace make us unhappy (if people have got a more economic solution to my heating/kitten problem, I’m all ears).<br />
<br />
So doesn’t the smart thing to do sound like turning all that shit off?<br />
<br />
It’s no longer a secret that social media channels like Instagram and Facebook <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/social-media-is-making-us-depressed-lets-learn-to-turn-it-off-a6974526.html">make us unhappy</a>. But so do broader media channels like the news. Consuming content that is inherently negative and has a negative message, unsurprisingly will have a negative impact on your psychology.<br />
<br />
It causes <a href="https://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/">stress</a>, depression, anxiety, anger, unhappiness, feeling unfulfilled and restricts <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli">creativity</a>.<br />
Interestingly, reading and educating yourself on things that do matter – such as personal development, health and fitness, personal economy and finance and life management – has been proven to make people happier.<br />
<br />
<div style="height: 0px; padding-bottom: 80%; position: relative; width: 100%;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" class="giphy-embed" frameborder="0" height="100%" src="https://giphy.com/embed/3oKIPoAP1wLvewc7QI" style="position: absolute;" width="100%"></iframe></div>
<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/funny-fail-kid-3oKIPoAP1wLvewc7QI">via GIPHY</a> This makes me happy.<br />
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Ignoring the news doesn’t make you ignorant. I would even argue that consuming the news, while ignoring personal development does make you ignorant.<br />
<br />
There are pretty well documented models, on anxiety causing people to consume and buy more things. It’s no coincidence that most news channels are surrounded by advertising. It’s very easy to get someone to buy something when they feel anxious about the future.<br />
<br />
I don’t want to get into mind control based conspiracy theories, but I’m very sceptical of a news outlet that generates revenue from selling products, which also positions itself as an unbiased fact source.<br />
<br />
It’d be like listening to Volkswagen saying that they are good for the environment. And that they love <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/30/vw-suspends-media-chief-monkey-exhaust-tests-diesel-emissions">monkeys.</a><br />
<h2>
Some of it is plain wrong</h2>
We’ve already talked about how many of the stories published are skewed at best. Some of them will even purposefully present statistics in a misleading manner in order to create a story out of nothing.<br />
<br />
So if we can already agree that being informed on current events doesn’t make you happy. We can also agree that being informed on current events doesn’t help you help more people. And we can agree that anything you do consume will be applied through the presenters bias filter THEN your own bias filter. Doesn’t it make it laughable that we still consider the news important, when most of it is wrong?<br />
<br />
News coverage of crime goes up year on year, whereas actual crime statistics are showing that crime is going down. Headlines such as “knife crime up by 22%” or “police reports show violent crime up 24%” use very specific scenarios and data presentations to show a far higher increase than there actually is.<br />
<br />
In fact, if you’re clever with statistics you can even present a number that’s gone down, as an increase. And vice versa.<br />
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<div style="height: 0px; padding-bottom: 48%; position: relative; width: 100%;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" class="giphy-embed" frameborder="0" height="100%" src="https://giphy.com/embed/12jHPvCe8Nh87C" style="position: absolute;" width="100%"></iframe></div>
<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/happy-reactiongifs-mrw-12jHPvCe8Nh87C">via GIPHY</a><br />
<br />
It doesn’t make sense for the news to say “you’re safer than ever before”. Can you imagine the news for 24 hours saying how fantastic the world is and that we are in a great position? It would be laughed at, because the only way we can ever position something as serious is if it’s depressing.<br />
<h2>
Some of it is literal fantasy</h2>
Rainbow parties. This is one of my favourite news stories because it involves everything. Children, parents, sex, underage sex, teenagers, confusing language.<br />
<br />
Humans have a very bizarre moral compass. We all agree that underage sex is a bad thing. But we LOVE news stories about it. We can’t help but read them.<br />
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If our emotional response is strong enough we won’t even fact check. We’ll just accept something as true because it’s so offensive. It’s a well-known phenomenon amongst parents for example. The idea that something is happening to their children is not worth fact checking, because they’d rather not take the risk.<br />
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<div style="height: 0px; padding-bottom: 68%; position: relative; width: 100%;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" class="giphy-embed" frameborder="0" height="100%" src="https://giphy.com/embed/3xz2BFkdjoXXmbBya4" style="position: absolute;" width="100%"></iframe></div>
<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/snow-blizzard-kent-brockman-3xz2BFkdjoXXmbBya4">via GIPHY</a><br />
<br />
And of course many media outlets love to cover stories such as rainbow parties. Or kittens in jars. Or the fact that we eat eight spiders a year. Despite the fact that all of it is literal, grade-A bullshit.<br />
<br />
We take for granted anything that’s published as true. Despite the arguments made above, that at best they are biased and at worst they completely made up, will still follow them.<br />
<br />
This then adds another layer to our own filter of the world, which affects our day-to-day lives. Imagine living your life thinking that the world is getting worse, based off stories and news that you’ve heard, when in fact those news stories aren’t even true. How would that affect your worldview?<br />
<br />
Without wanting to get too heavily into conspiracy rhetoric, it’s not that far off brainwashing.<br />
<h2>
So what can I do instead?</h2>
The easiest thing to do is to switch off the TV, radio and refuse to buy newspapers. Just try it for 30 days and see if your happiness levels increase, stay the same or go down.<br />
<br />
Anything that does affect your happiness levels, will probably not be affected by the news. Also, check in after a few days to see if you are any worse off, or poorer, or have fewer friends. I guarantee you that absolutely nothing in your life will change for the worse when you give up the news.<br />
<br />
Instead, I have what Tim Ferris has, and I have a few well-informed people that I trust. When it comes to voting, or stories that might affect me I’ll email or call those people and ask for their opinion. If they want to spend their time reading the scholarship, argues them as a mini media source.<br />
Educate yourself on self-improvement and emotional management. Your emotions are internal, and you are responsible for 100% of how you feel. Your feelings are entirely within your control, and once you embrace that you will know that you don’t have to rely on external sources to feel better or worse about anything.<br />
<br />
You don’t have to proudly proclaim that you no longer watch the news, one of my favorite methods for dealing with “important” new stories is to ask people for their opinions.<br />
<br />
For example with breaks it, I purposefully stayed away from any of the arguments made by either leader. And instead asked for the opinions of people that I cared about. When people asked me for my opinion on breaks it, I simply asked them “what do you feel about it?”<br />
<br />
When people ask you for your opinions, what they’re really asking for is an opener for them to tell you why you’re wrong, they are right and this is why their opinion is correct.<br />
<br />
Don’t worry about the big stories, they’ll be considered trivia at best in a few years. Smaller stories matter even less. You’re in total control of what you consume and what you create.The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-89590414793834043202019-08-27T09:01:00.000-07:002019-08-27T09:01:21.021-07:005 Ancient Stoic Tactics for Modern Life <br />
<span style="font-size: large;">From the </span><a href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/"><span style="font-size: large;">Art Of Manliness</span></a><br />
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<span>in:</span> <a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/category/a-mans-life/" rel="category tag">A Man's Life</a><br />
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<span class="vcard author" itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Jeremy Anderberg</span></span> • <span itemprop="">April 9, 2018</span> Last updated: <span itemprop="dateModified">October 24, 2018</span> </div>
<br />
Stoicism emerged as a philosophy, a way of life — similar to a religion, really — most famously in ancient Rome somewhere around 50-100 AD (even though it was Greeks who pioneered the thinking).<br />
<br />
Two millennia later, the philosophy is enjoying a revival of sorts, and it’s not hard to understand why.<br />
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The primary goal of ancient Stoicism was to figure out the best way to live; <a data-wpel-link="external" href="https://amzn.to/2EqNBNM" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">as modern philosopher Lawrence Becker writes</a>: “Its central, organizing concern is about what one ought to do or be to live well — to flourish.” And this question of how to live is perhaps humanity’s most enduring — becoming especially acute in ages in which a sense of shared meaning has atrophied and every individual is left to find meaning on his own. Stoicism’s answers, its fundamental tenets — what many modern writers and thinkers have deemed the “art of living” — thus feel just as relevant now as they did a couple thousand years ago.<br />
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While we’ve covered some tenets of Stoicism on the Art of Manliness before (<a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/stoicism-podcast/">and given an introduction to it in a podcast interview</a>), we’ve never laid out its more concrete practices — the tactics that lead both to personal joy and the betterment of society. It’s my aim to present five ways you can start to inject Stoicism into your life today, and begin experiencing more happiness and fulfillment.<br />
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These aren’t just abstract ideas that I’ll be presenting to you. Rather, they’re based on firsthand experience. <a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/meditations-first-reading-aurelius-meditations/">Since I first read Marcus Aurelius’ <i>Meditations</i> last year</a>, I’ve been rather intrigued by the philosophy he espoused. So I’ve studied up, read a handful of books — both ancient source material and contemporary guidebooks — and have incorporated a number of new habits into my own daily routines. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">While there are many more practices and principles that can be gleaned and applied from Stoicism, my goal with this article is to provide those that have most impacted my own life (providing plenty of personal anecdotes to that end), and which I believe can most impact the lives of other men as well. These are things to </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">do</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> on a daily and weekly basis (even if some of them are more psychological in nature). While Stoicism also offers an outline of how to react and respond in a number of different situations — from anger and anxiety, to disability and death — that isn’t in the purview of this piece (though perhaps it will be in another article later on). </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">What’s especially appealing about Stoicism is that it’s what </span><a data-wpel-link="external" href="https://amzn.to/2uNpFVd" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Massimo Pigliucci</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> calls an “ecumenical philosophy.” Its precepts complement those of many other philosophies, religions, and ways of life. You can practice elements of Stoicism and still pursue Christianity, Judaism, atheism, and a number of other isms or non-isms out there. It’s about finding joy, fulfillment, and tranquility, and making society a better place for everyone in it. Isn’t that something we can all get behind? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Without further ado, I present 5 ways to make Stoicism a daily practice:</span><br />
<h3>
1. Visualize Your Life Without the Things You Love</h3>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.” —Seneca </span></blockquote>
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<a data-wpel-link="external" href="https://amzn.to/2GyBpR9" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">William Irvine</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> argues that “the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological toolkit” is a tactic he calls “negative visualization.” To fully appreciate your blessings — the immaterial and material alike — imagine your life without them.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">For example, if you live in a tornado-prone region, imagine your house being destroyed, along with all your possessions. Obviously sort of a sad thought experiment, but chances are good that you’ll actually come to better appreciate your home, and the stuff in it, if you can really visualize what life might be like without it.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">This practice might make it seem like Stoics are lifelong pessimists, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Stoics are in fact the ultimate optimists. Consider the image of a 16oz drinking glass holding 8oz of water. It’s of course either half full or half empty, right? The Stoic, though, would actually just be grateful that there was any water at all! And that there was a vessel to hold that water to boot. The Stoic takes nothing for granted.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">This exercise is of course harder to practice with your loved ones, but it’s well worth it. When I drive to daycare in the afternoon to pick up my son, I briefly meditate on the fact that each day really is a gift, and that anything can happen. He might not be around tomorrow, so I better live and love and parent to my fullest, most joyful abilities today. </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Now, I’m not consumed with anxiety that my kids aren’t long for this earth (Irvine notes the important difference between </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">contemplating</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">worrying</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">). I know the odds are extremely slim of that reality. It’s more an acknowledgment that you just never know when the things and people you love might not be there anymore. It’s truly made a difference in my mindset, general gratitude, and mostly — as perhaps to be expected in this young kids phase — my patience. Whether my toddler son is taking </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">forever</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to brush his teeth, or my 1-month-old daughter decides she won’t sleep unless she’s held and rocked, I seem better able to cope when I briefly imagine a life without them. It should also be noted that this exercise hasn’t made me sad or mopey as you might expect; rather, it makes me swell with gratitude for the days we are given, and I can say that I better </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">truly</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> appreciate all the blessings life has to offer, from my wife and kids, to the cheerful song of a bird out my window on a nice spring day. </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">As Seneca noted at the top of this section, bad things — which inevitably happen to all of us — are robbed of at least some of their power when we’ve anticipated their possibility, and consequently taken full advantage of each day, hour, and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">moment</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> given us. The grief of loss isn’t quite as acute when we can truthfully state that we squeezed every ounce of joy out of what we own and who we love when they were with us. As the Reverend William Sloane Coffin said in giving <a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/a-eulogy-for-alex/">a eulogy for his 24-year-old son, Alex</a>:</span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“there is much by way of consolation. Because there are no rankling unanswered questions, and because Alex and I simply adored each other, the wound for me is deep, but clean. I know how lucky I am!”</span></blockquote>
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<h3>
2<i>. Memento Mori</i> — Meditate on Death</h3>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. . . . The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” —Seneca</span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">While related to the above point, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">memento mori</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is about meditating on </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">your </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">death rather than that of your loved ones. Whereas negative visualization is about imagining life without the things you love, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">memento mori</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> asks you to meditate and be aware that you will not, in fact, live forever. Death comes for us all, including you, dear reader. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">We live in a pretty death-averse culture though. At large, we’re terribly afraid of it. The Stoics would argue, though, that if you’ve lived a life of purpose and meaning, you shouldn’t have any fear of something that has naturally befallen each and every human being (and every other living creature) since time immemorial. </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Now, meditating on your own death is not the same as asking something like “If you knew this was your last day on Earth, what would you do?” In that scenario, I’d play hooky, make my friends and family do the same, and do something memorable with them. I’d eat a ton of tasty but bad-for-you food, drink some whiskey, stay up all night, etc. Those aren’t things you can do on a daily basis, though. Rather, the question is more like “If you don’t wake up in the morning, would you be satisfied with how your last day was spent?” Did you engage fully at work? Did you love your family and your friends? Did you add to society’s greater good at all? Did you make virtuous decisions? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">When I ask myself this question, as with the previous point, it’s not a depression- or anxiety-inducing meditation. I realize the likelihood of my dying tomorrow is very slim; I am simply countenancing the fact that it </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">is</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> possible. And this possibility isn’t demoralizing, but invigorating. It makes me far less likely to waste time. If I’m gone tomorrow, I’d much rather have spent time baking a loaf of bread than playing games on my phone. I’d much rather have spent time reading stories to my son at bedtime (</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">all</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the words) rather than speeding through it to watch another episode of </span><a data-wpel-link="external" href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80179138" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nailed It</span></i></a><i> </i><span style="font-weight: 400;">(which is great, don’t get me wrong). </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">As you go through the day, or just at the end of it, reflect on your activities and decisions. Both the good and the bad. If this day was your last, would you be satisfied with its outcome? What would you have done differently? How would you have changed your interactions with others? How can you use this information to make better decisions and engage in more worthwhile activities tomorrow? Make it actionable. As the Stoics themselves would have asked, what good is philosophy if there’s no impact on how we live day to day?</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">I’ve also found it’s good to occasionally read memoirs about death and dying. One of my all-time favorite books is </span><a data-amzn-asin="B00XSSYR50" data-wpel-link="external" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00XSSYR50/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00XSSYR50&linkCode=as2&tag=stucosuccess&linkId=FSXA3GZUT5SFDAZ4" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">When Breath Becomes Air</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> by Paul Kalanithi. He wrote the book as he was dying of lung cancer in his late 30s, married and with a young child. I’ve read it twice — when both of my children were just days old. He provides an unmatched perspective on what it means to not only die well, but to acknowledge its reality: “The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.” Even in his waning months, he maintained an incredible sense of positivity: “Even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.” If the words of dying people don’t inspire you to live more fully each day, then nothing will! A few more good books are </span><a data-amzn-asin="B01N5XM6OB" data-wpel-link="external" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N5XM6OB/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B01N5XM6OB&linkCode=as2&tag=stucosuccess&linkId=FSXA3GZUT5SFDAZ4" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Bright Hour</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a data-amzn-asin="B01N03RVWI" data-wpel-link="external" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N03RVWI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B01N03RVWI&linkCode=as2&tag=stucosuccess&linkId=FSXA3GZUT5SFDAZ4" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dying: A Memoir</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, and </span><a data-amzn-asin="B00139VU7E" data-wpel-link="external" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00139VU7E/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00139VU7E&linkCode=as2&tag=stucosuccess&linkId=FSXA3GZUT5SFDAZ4" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Last Lecture</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span><br />
<h3>
3. Set Internal Goals and Detach Yourself From Outcomes</h3>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.” —Epictetus</span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the pillars of Stoic philosophy is not letting circumstances outside your control disturb your equilibrium. Such externally-dictated circumstances include things we’re used to thinking of as being out of our hands, like the weather, traffic, and our health (and that of our loved ones). But it also includes things we often erroneously believe we have full personal control over, like the outcomes of contests and the success or failure of business ventures.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">As a help in grasping a truth we inveterate bootstrappers often resist, Irvine gives the example of a tennis match. You might set a goal of winning the match. Seems perfectly reasonable, no? But when you really think about it, you can’t control many of the factors that determine the contest’s outcome: The weather is poor and wind gusts aren’t favoring you; you experience equipment failure (like a broken string) that isn’t disastrous but a distraction nonetheless; your opponent is simply better prepared than you (or perhaps just better, period); you sprain an ankle part way through the match and can’t continue on. If your goal is to win, and any of these things happen, you’ll be rather upset.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Recognizing that much of life is out of your control doesn’t mean giving up your sense of agency; instead, it means focusing it on the only areas where you </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">do</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> have full control: your own actions.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Instead of focusing on results — which are impacted by external circumstances outside your control — set goals strictly related to your own efforts. Instead of setting a goal to win the match, make it a goal to prepare as best you can, practice as hard as you can, and then play to the best of your abilities. If you do those things, and still lose, there’s just nothing more you could have done, so why fret? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Rather than setting a goal of getting the job you’re interviewing for, make it your goal to prepare well, dress right, and answer every question as best you can. If you do all that and don’t get the job, it wasn’t meant to be (or so the Stoics would argue). </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Rather than setting a goal of getting a girlfriend, prioritize making yourself a good catch. Eat well, work out, have a stable job, dress nicely, and make it a goal to ask someone out X times a month until you get a yes. </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">My own hope regarding this article shouldn’t be, and truly isn’t, that it gets shared or retweeted X number of times. I can’t control what goes viral and what doesn’t. The whims of the internet aren’t worth thinking or worrying about. Instead, my true goal was that I would do all the research I could, and write, organize, and edit the article to the best of my abilities so that those who read it have the best possible chance of engaging it meaningfully and putting something into practice. </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">When you set goals, attach them to what you can control — your own efforts and attitude — and detach them from what you cannot — their ultimate outcome.</span><br />
<h3>
4. Welcome Discomfort</h3>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Nature has intermingled pleasure with necessary things — not in order that we should seek pleasure, but in order that the addition of pleasure may make the indispensable means of existence attractive to our eyes. Should it claim rights of its own, it is luxury. Let us therefore resist these faults when they are demanding entrance, because, as I have said, it is easier to deny them admittance than to make them depart.” —Seneca</span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">One practice the Stoics famously abided was welcoming a certain degree of discomfort into their lives. They’d go without, for a time, certain pleasures — food, drink, sex. They’d immerse themselves in poor weather conditions (and with few clothes to boot). They’d eschew riches (and even praise) so as to not learn to cling to those things. They’d even deliberately subject themselves to ridicule. These practices were rather contrary to the Epicurean view of things, which was to ultimately pursue pleasure. The Stoics knew, though, that in welcoming challenge, they were actually far more content and fulfilled than their Epicurean peers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">To be Epicurean — one who basically just seeks the things in life that feel the best — you have to ever be experiencing pleasure. You’re basically living off constant dopamine hits. But, those senses get dulled after a while, and you need ever bigger and more pervasive doses to keep your pleasure sensors activated at the same level. Once you start running on the “hedonic treadmill,” real contentedness becomes frustratingly elusive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Let’s show this with a quick little thought exercise. It’s simple: you want to stay cool when it’s hot outside. It’s a natural inclination. So you turn on the AC at home to a chilly 65 degrees while it’s a sizzlingly 95 outside. Ahhh, feels nice, doesn’t it? You get used to that sense of comfort, and even </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">pleasure</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of staying so cool. But now, to feel comfortable, you also need to feel that cool </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">wherever</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> you go. You need to start your car 10 minutes early so that it cools down enough for you to be comfortable, otherwise you’ll just be miserable. You need your workplace, your favorite restaurant, heck, every establishment you enter, to be that chilled. If, God forbid, the AC goes out, you’re royally screwed. A friend invites you to an outdoor ball game? You’ll go, but you won’t enjoy it because it’ll be too stinkin’ hot. It’s all you’ll be able to focus on. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Consider the alternate scenario. Yes, you turn on the AC at home, but in the car, you just roll the windows down and let yourself be a little warm if it’s hot outside. Rather than work out in your refrigerator of a basement, you take a ruck outside in order to break a sweat. In some regards, you embrace being hot every now and then so that you can feel content in any situation. AC goes out? No biggie, you can adjust. Invited to a ball game in a heat wave? Heck yes! You love baseball, and you’re happy to just be at the game, regardless of the weather. You are a tranquil man who isn’t bothered merely by what the mercury reads on the thermometer. </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Isn’t that a better way to live? </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s sort of a silly and shallow example, but the principle holds for just about any pleasure in life. If your enjoyment and comfort relies too much on it, you’ll turn into a fragile, petulant curmudgeon when you don’t have it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Irvine lays out three specific benefits of sometimes welcoming discomfort and intentionally foregoing pleasures (with an example of how a particular practice — periodically abstaining from alcohol — could play out): </span><br />
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<li><span style="font-weight: 400;"> It hardens us to whatever misfortunes may come in the future. (If your health turns, and the doctor forbids you imbibing alcohol, having practiced regular periods of sobriety will help you to easily get through that period.) </span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The idea of those misfortunes won’t cause us anxiety, because we know we can withstand and even be content in just about any scenario. (You can look forward to a birthday party with friends where you know the booze will be flowing; you won’t be downtrodden about not being able to have any fun, because you know you can enjoy things just fine without alcohol.) </span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400;"> It helps us appreciate the pleasures we do have, when we have them. (If you then receive a clean bill of health, you’ll be far more appreciative of the dram of whiskey you can enjoy with friends.) </span></li>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">This is one of the practices most associated with Stoicism, and there are a number of specific things you can do to welcome discomfort into your life and harden your general resolve: </span><br />
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<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a data-wpel-link="external" href="https://strenuouslife.co/" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Enroll in The Strenuous Life</a> (embrace the motto of “Do Hard Things”) </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-james-bond-shower-a-shot-of-cold-water-for-health-and-vitality/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Take cold showers </span></a></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hold/try to calm a crying baby while staying completely cool</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Exercise outside in inclement weather (perhaps without shirt, shoes, etc.) </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keep your house at a higher temp in the summer, and a lower temp in the winter (don’t freeze out your family though; be reasonable!) </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Eat nothing but rice/beans for a week (or a month)</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/spiritual-disciplines-fasting/">Fast from food</a> completely for 24 hours once a month</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Embrace challenging situations in which you aren’t comfortable (travel/vacation with your kids, go to an event you don’t want to attend, make small talk with strangers, volunteer at a soup kitchen)</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Do manual labor around your house instead of hiring it out </span></li>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">There are innumerable ways to embrace some semblance of discomfort in your life, and it can and will be different for each person. Find yours, and tackle it head on. As Irvine astutely observes, “The act of forgoing pleasure can itself be pleasant.” <a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/embracing-grind-barbell-training-beyond/">Embrace the grind! </a></span><br />
<h3>
5. Vigorously Pursue Character and Virtue</h3>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Every day I reduce the number of my vices.” —Seneca </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">To the Stoics, the best way to live well was to pursue virtue. William Irvine even writes: “What, then, must a person do to have what the Stoics would call a good life? Be virtuous!” In becoming a better person — a man of great character — we’ll naturally find fulfillment, but also make greater contributions to society as a whole in the process. How might that happen, you ask? If you’re committed to virtue, won’t you volunteer more? Be more likely to help a stranger in need? Won’t you take on the role of Neighborhood Watch leader or Little League coach? Will you be more likely to say “Yes!” when a favor is asked? These are all things that improve our communities, and are natural byproducts of attaining greater personal virtue and character. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">How does one become more virtuous though? How do you develop your character and exercise it in daily life? Luckily, there are a number of good options (many of which we’ve previously covered in-depth):</span><br />
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<b>Regularly ask yourself: “What would my best self do in this situation?”</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Father James Martin brought up this idea in his book </span><a data-amzn-asin="0061432695" data-wpel-link="external" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061432695/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0061432695&linkCode=as2&tag=stucosuccess&linkId=FSXA3GZUT5SFDAZ4" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and in <a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/podcast-392-jesuit-spirituality-can-improve-life/">his interview with Brett on our podcast</a>. All of us have an ideal version of ourselves in our head. That version eats better, exercises more, is a little more patient with his wife and kids, doesn’t waste time at work, etc. To more consistently act in ways that align with this ideal, simply ask what your best self would do, or how that best self would decide, in any given scenario:</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self take two minutes to floss in the morning? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self choose a hard-boiled egg to snack on, or a Girl Scout cookie? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self call his parents and grandparents just a little more often? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self watch porn? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self write more letters to old friends as a way to stay in touch? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self have a little more patience with his kids’ drawn-out bedtime routines? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self yell and flip the bird to the guy who cut him off on the freeway? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self take work time to dink around with his fantasy football team?</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self read a book on the Kindle app, or play another level of Candy Crush? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self pursue romancing his wife, or spend another conversation-less night watching TV on the couch? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self have yet another drink? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self attend the far-away funeral of a dear friend’s parent? </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Would my best self volunteer to clean up a park on a weekend morning, or would he sleep in? </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s such a simple question to ask, but remarkably powerful. And these aren’t just theoretical examples. Some of these are the very questions I’ve been asking myself since I read Fr. Martin’s book late last year. And while I don’t always follow-through on what I know my best self would do (particularly when it comes to Girl Scout cookies), I’ve seen enormous strides in my being able to make more virtuous decisions on a consistent basis and am slowly getting closer to that ideal.</span><br />
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<b>Follow Benjamin Franklin’s virtue plan. </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">As a 20-year-old, Franklin set a lofty goal for himself: attain moral perfection. To do so, he developed a 13-week plan to improve himself in 13 areas or virtues. He’d particularly focus on one each week, while also keeping track of his progress with the others as well. <a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/lessons-in-manliness-benjamin-franklins-pursuit-of-the-virtuous-life/">We’ve written about the program in-depth here</a>, and </span><a data-wpel-link="external" href="https://store.artofmanliness.com/collections/accessories/products/franklin-virtues-journal" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">we have also created a unique journal that acts as a virtue tracker based on this 13-week plan</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. While Franklin never did attain perfection, over time he saw his mis-steps decrease, and had this to say about his program later in his life: </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”</span></blockquote>
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<b>Ask “What good shall I do this day?”</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Another of Franklin’s ideas on his own pursuit toward being more virtuous. Every morning he’d ask himself this question, and every evening he’d reflect with “What good have I done today?” This question will have you focus less on your pie-in-the-sky “I want to change the world” ideas, and more on doing daily kindnesses to and for your fellow humans. Whether it’s writing a letter home, helping an elderly woman with her groceries, or maybe even just giving someone (your wife, a stranger, anyone!) a compliment, sometimes going smaller to change the world accomplishes much more. <a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/what-good-shall-i-do-this-day/">Read more about this idea here. </a></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<b>Develop a code of principles. </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">How can you pursue virtue if you aren’t sure of your life’s guiding principles? Massimo Pigliucci writes in </span><a data-amzn-asin="B01K3WN1BY" data-wpel-link="external" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01K3WN1BY/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B01K3WN1BY&linkCode=as2&tag=stucosuccess&linkId=FSXA3GZUT5SFDAZ4" rel="external noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">How to Be a Stoic</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: “the question of how to live is central. How should we handle life’s challenges and vicissitudes? How should we conduct ourselves in the world and treat others?” You need some sort of guide in order to best answer those questions; the answers aren’t going to come out of thin air. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Stoics thought there was one universal Truth which could be discovered by contemplating the laws of Nature. You may choose a different course of study. Whether from religious texts, philosophical ideas, or some combination thereof arrived at through your own rigorous reading and reflection (</span><a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-churchill-school-of-adulthood-lesson-1-develop-a-mighty-moral-code/">à la </a><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-churchill-school-of-adulthood-lesson-1-develop-a-mighty-moral-code/">Winston Churchill</a>), it should be your aim to acquire a defined set of principles and values you’ll adhere to in your daily life. If you aren’t sure where to start, dig into classic religious texts. From there dive into various schools of philosophy. What resonates in your soul? What are some practices and/or spiritual disciplines your ideal self would commit to? Speaking of disciplines . . . </span><br />
<b>Regularly practice the spiritual disciplines.</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> While called “spiritual” because their original purpose was to bring the practitioner closer to God, these disciplines can be used by anyone in order to develop character and “<a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/training-the-soul/">train the soul</a>.” From fasting, to pursuing solitude, to doing service and practicing gratitude, there are a number of disciplines that have guided and strengthened higher-purpose-minded people for thousands of years. <a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/tag/disciplines/">Read our series on the topic</a>, and decide which you’d like to take up in daily, weekly, monthly, and annual cycles. You’re guaranteed to come out on the other side more centered, virtuous, and fulfilled.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Pick one of these ideas, stick with it, and see what happens. The only thing holding you back from attaining greater character and virtue is yourself. If you truly and wholeheartedly pursue the task — <a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/life-hard-get-drunk/">making it a goal to in fact get veritably drunk on virtue</a> — you’re bound to make strides, and as noted above, you’ll improve your community at the same time. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Stoicism is a rich philosophy, but it’s not just for contemplation. Full of ancient truths, it’s got myriad modern applications. Put it into action, and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">practice</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the art of living. </span>The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-73475010629086079732019-08-07T08:49:00.002-07:002019-08-07T08:51:38.103-07:00The Czarist image of mass shootingsIn almost every generation since 1880, some young men have decided it would be fine to kill a large number of people.<br />
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<div class="article-header__author">
<a href="https://spectator.us/nihilism-stupid-czarist-origins/"><span style="font-size: large;">Spectator USA</span></a><br />
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<a href="https://spectator.us/author/claire-berlinski/" rel="author" title="Posts by Claire Berlinski">Claire Berlinski</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">August 6, 2019</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">11:55 AM</span></div>
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Let’s retire the term ‘gun violence,’ or reserve it for jealous husbands who shoot their wives. What happened in <a href="https://spectator.us/liberalism-cannot-stop-shootings/">El Paso</a> is terrorism; more properly, it is a nihilist insurgency.</div>
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We should pause consider the origins of this phenomenon in late Czarist Russia, the cradle of modern terrorism. There is an eerie similarity between America’s shooter culture and the sinister and contagious form of violent nihilism that emerged between 1861 and 1866 in Russia. A number of young men seemed to decide that it would be fine to kill a large number of people. No one knows why. The killer in El Paso scribbled a lunatic alt-right manifesto; the Dayton murderer, to judge from his Twitter feed, was drawn to far-left bromides. But neither were in the thrall of a genuinely intelligible <wbr></wbr>ideology. The killings were sanguinary performance art, detached from any set of principles. They could have walked off the pages Dostoevsky’s <em>Demons</em>. Does Verkovensky not sound familiar?</div>
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<em>‘…one or two generations of vice are absolutely essential now. Monstrous, disgusting vice which turns man into an abject, cowardly, cruel and selfish wretch – that’s what we want. And on top of it, a little “fresh blood”…We shall proclaim destruction – why? why? – well, because the idea is so fascinating! But – we must get a little exercise. We’ll have a few fires – we’ll spread a few legends. Every mangy little group will be useful…There’s going to be such a to-do as the world has never seen, Russia will become shrouded in fog, the earth will weep for its old gods.’</em></div>
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The <em>narodniki</em> — whose terrorist wing undertook a campaign of assassination that culminated in the murder of Czar Alexander II — inspired anarchists and political assassins throughout Europe and the United States. Then as now, this sinister form of violent nihilism proved contagious. Now it is spread by the internet; in the late 19th century, it was spread by novel technologies, too: the telegraph, the daily mass newspaper, and railroads. Then as now, the disease could be traced to Russia, but it adapted and merged with local pathologies.</div>
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A trio of causes — the invention of dynamite, anarchist incitement to ‘propaganda by the deed,’ and a sensationalist media — persuaded publics in Europe and America that these killing sprees, in fact infrequent outside of Spain, represented a movement vastly more powerful than it was. Then as now, the public was fascinated, terrorized, and manipulated by a small insurgency of <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.signandsight.com/features/493.html&source=gmail&ust=1565184502620000&usg=AFQjCNH17ZAABzdlLCB707oSeebnmONoxw" href="http://www.signandsight.com/features/493.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">radical losers</a>, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger termed them. The losers spent the next 30-odd years picking off heads of state before achieving an unlikely triumph: the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand set Europe ablaze. It is important to remember this. The consequences of this species of violence vastly exceeded the imaginative capacities of its authors.</div>
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Many have <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09546550802257333&source=gmail&ust=1565184502620000&usg=AFQjCNHiJecRdo_H5BW7Inwm-gy9Fdqbjw" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09546550802257333" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">pointed out</a> the similarities between 19th-century anarchist terrorism and modern jihadism. James L. Gelvin argued forcibly for the proposition that jihadism is a form of anarchism — Islamic anarchism — essentially a Western phenomenon, 60 years dormant: the areas of resemblance include the preference for action over ideology, the obsessive focus on resistance to alien intrusion, the lack of programmatic goals, the pursuit of violence for its own sake, the hatred of the established world order, and the tendency to operate in decentralized cells. Before he died, Walter Laqueur wrote <em>The Future of Terrorism: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Alt-Right</em>, tracing all three movements back to their origins in Czarist Russia. In 2011, David Rappaport wrote of the <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286896869_The_four_waves_of_modern_terror_International_dimensions_and_consequences&source=gmail&ust=1565184502620000&usg=AFQjCNHaxKlpQKle6lWuzfUlpCYc_1JYSQ" href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286896869_The_four_waves_of_modern_terror_International_dimensions_and_consequences" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">four waves of modern terrorism</a>: the anarchist wave, from 1880-1920, followed by the ‘similar, consecutive, and overlapping wave’ of anti-colonial terror, then ‘the new left-wave,’ and then the ‘religious wave.’ ‘If it follows the history of its predecessors,’ he wrote, Islamist terrorism would ‘disappear by 2025, and a new one may then appear.’ We seem to be right on schedule.</div>
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In almost every generation since 1880, a number of young men have decided that it would be fine to kill a large number of people. The Czars were almost forced to their knees in 1905 by this kind of violence. In the end, they put it down, but they did so by an application of utterly ruthless force — all in vain, of course.</div>
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The extensive literature on previous waves of terrorism, and our now-considerable experience in combatting insurgencies abroad, should inform us as we consider our problem. It is the same species of thing. If we hope to devise a policy that might mitigate it, we must call upon that experience.</div>
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Experience suggests that routine incantations of the words ‘white supremacists’ and ‘federal background checks’ won’t have a hope in hell of working. We must think in counterinsurgency terms. We now have an international, mass-murdering subculture. There is a distinct communications infrastructure through which young men are radicalized. How can we dismantle this insurgency? <br />
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Because it is happening in America, we’re enjoined from employing the more effective tools we’ve developed to counter insurgencies abroad. Our record abroad suggests, too, that many of the tools we’ve tried have been <em>ineffective</em> — indeed, they have made the problem worse — and there is no reason to imagine they would be better at home. This should sober those who keep repeating, ‘Imagine what we’d do if al-Qaeda were doing this.’</div>
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What works? Our government has a great deal of skill and practice in taking down insurgent communication networks. That works. But the First Amendment prevents us from going after 8chan the way we did ISIS’s propaganda channels. For the moment, large technology corporations have stepped in where civilization and morality have fallen apart. But the ethical and political ramifications of this are unclear and disturbing: How viable is the American proposition if speech is now to be mediated by giant technology corporations, with overwhelming public support?<br />
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The First Amendment likewise prevents us from taking another obvious step: forbidding the media to report on these events. Terrorism makes no sense unless it’s a spectacle. If we banned the media from reporting on these massacres and turning every one of them into a lurid, ritualized mass spectacle, the shootings would stop. Does anyone doubt that? I have lived in countries where the government has the power to do that, and it does. It works. But it is not the American way. Obviously, we can’t defend an open society by turning it into a closed one. So those strategies do not seem available to us — yet.</div>
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Still, the public response to these events has so far been confused. A wave of terrorism like this — it will continue, to judge from the past, for a generation — will sooner or later create overwhelming demand for a response. And the kind of response that works would not put the Second Amendment in jeopardy so much as the First.</div>
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‘Comprehensive background checks’ are a slogan, not a solution. They will not put so much as a dent in this problem. The fact is there are already more than 300 million guns in America. We are not New Zealand. To a significant part of the American public, guns are an object of spiritual veneration, as sacred to them as the Qur’an is to jihadis. Burning them will have the same effect. Even if through the repeal of the Second Amendment and vigorous prohibition we managed to get half of these weapons out of civilian hands, there would still be 150 million on the streets. A contraband gun market would emerge as quickly as the market for opiates and enrich the same people.</div>
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More to the point, ‘getting half of them off the streets’ is completely unrealistic. The plain truth is we don’t have the civic trust to achieve that. Our country is divided into camps that loathe and fear each other. The more viciously divided the population, the less inclined will anyone be to give up their weapons. Efforts to confiscate them would inevitably lead to precisely the kind of scenario that becomes terrorist propaganda. If we’ve learned anything from two decades of fighting insurgencies abroad, one hopes we’ve at least learned not to hand the enemy own goals. And were somehow to achieve the miracle of making it difficult to acquire guns in America, history suggests that terrorists are inventive. They will graduate to IEDs and learn how to 3D-print their weapons.</div>
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A good portion of these shooters are ideologically motivated, as opposed to ‘mentally ill.’ The ideology may be unfathomable — a weird solution of white nationalism, Russian propaganda, and <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror/&source=gmail&ust=1565184502620000&usg=AFQjCNHJtubkPZz29DO4cpSpbMHycWQFmA" href="https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">unfathomable sociopathy</a> — but the fantasy of restoring a 7th-century caliphate was no less absurd, and no one in his right mind proposed seriously to dismantle ISIS by means of better psychiatric care. Talking about ‘mental health’ and ‘video games’ is preposterous in this context.</div>
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I don’t know what the solution is. But I do know what it isn’t: it isn’t ‘closing the gun show loophole,’ and it isn’t even getting Trump out of office. Trump a symptom, not a cause, and this will continue after he’s gone. In fact, if the Russian example is the right analogy, it will get worse, and Democrats and other politicians who helped to usher him out of power will become targets for assassination.</div>
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Enacting minor gun controls and electing a president who doesn’t egg the killers on could make some difference at the margins, and since ‘the margins’ represent human lives, these are steps worth taking. But we are deluding ourselves if we think either would be sufficient. No one should make this the focus of their strategic thinking. This delusion, too, will cost human life.</div>
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We have a much bigger, more depressing problem on our hands than our political class seems to grasp. The only good news is that these scum are not likely to get beyond killing a few hundred people at a time. They’re unlikely to get their hands on chemical weapons, barrel bombs, or a 747. Statistically, the vast majority of Americans will be fine.</div>
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But the historic evidence suggests that this will go on for a generation, at least, until, at best, it burns itself out, and at worst, they achieve another unlikely triumph.</div>
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The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-44502405589128443942019-07-20T16:41:00.003-07:002019-07-20T16:41:45.145-07:00Lessons From the PastBy Thomas Sowell<br />
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Published Jan. 29, 2019</div>
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Seventy-one years ago this month — in January 1948 — a black,
17-year-old high school dropout left home. The last grade he had
completed was the 9th grade. He had no skills, little experience, and
not a lot of maturity. Yet he was able to find jobs to support himself,
to a far greater extent than someone similar can find jobs today.<br />
<br />
I know because I was that black 17-year-old. And, decades later, I did research on economic conditions back then.<br />
<br />
Back in 1948, the unemployment rate for 17-year-old black males was
just under 10 percent, and no higher than the unemployment rate among
white male 17-year-olds.<br />
<br />
How could that be, when we have for decades gotten used to seeing
unemployment rates for teenage males that have been some multiple of
what it was then — and with black teenage unemployment often twice as
high, or higher, than white teenage unemployment?<br />
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Many people automatically assume that racism explains the large
difference in unemployment rates between black and white teenagers
today. Was there no racism in 1948? No sane person who was alive in 1948
could believe that. Racism was worse — and of course there was no Civil
Rights Act of 1964 then.<br />
<br />
How then could there be this low unemployment rate, with virtually no
racial difference? Racism is despicable. But that tells us nothing
about what weight it has — compared to other factors — as a cause of
particular social problems such as unemployment.<br />
<br />
Perhaps the most widely condemned racism in the second half of
the 20th century was that in South Africa under apartheid, when an
openly racist government proclaimed white supremacy, and denied blacks
basic human rights. Yet, even under such a regime, there were particular
occupations in which black workers outnumbered white workers — even
though it was illegal to hire any blacks at all in those particular
occupations. Economics carried weight, even in South Africa under
apartheid.<br />
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In the United States, what was unusual about 1948 was that, for all
practical purposes, there was no minimum wage law in effect. There was a
minimum wage law on the books. But it was passed in 1938, and a decade
of high inflation had raised money wages, for even low-level jobs, above
that minimum wage.<br />
<br />
Among the effects of a minimum wage law, when it is effective, is
that many unskilled and inexperienced workers are priced out of a job,
when employers do not find them worth what the law specifies. Another
effect of a minimum wage law is that it can lead to a chronic surplus of
job applicants.<br />
<br />
When an employer has 40 qualified applicants for 20 jobs, it costs
the employer nothing to refuse to hire 10 qualified black applicants.
But if he has no more than 20 qualified applicants, that is a different
ball game.<br />
<br />
The point here is that economic factors carry weight, and sometimes,
under some conditions, those economic factors carry more weight than
racism. Even in South Africa under apartheid.<br />
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In the United States, as the minimum wage rate specified in the law
began to be raised, beginning in the 1950s, so as to catch up with
inflation and then keep up with inflation, the minimum wage law became
effective in practice once again — and a racial gap in unemployment
rates opened up and expanded.<br />
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As a black teenager, I was lucky enough to be looking for jobs
when the minimum wage law was rendered ineffective by inflation. I was
also lucky enough to have gone through New York schools at a time when
they still had high educational standards.<br />
<br />
Decades later, when examining the math textbook used by some young
relatives of mine, who were living where I grew up in Harlem, I
discovered that the math they were being taught in the 11th grade was
less than what I had been taught in the 9th grade.<br />
<br />
The opportunities open to my young relatives in Harlem — and to other
young blacks elsewhere — were not nearly as good as the opportunities
open to me back in 1948.<br />
<br />
Many of the seemingly compassionate policies promoted by the
progressives in later years — whether in economics or in education —
have had outcomes the opposite of what was expected. One of the
tragedies of our times is that so many people judge by rhetoric, rather
than by results.The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-70682891481421955722019-05-14T15:43:00.000-07:002019-05-14T15:43:24.175-07:0097 Articles Refuting The '97% Consensus' on global warming<div class="entry-meta">
<a class="author" href="https://wattsupwiththat.com/author/wattsupwiththat/" rel="author">Anthony Watts</a> / <a class="entry-date" href="https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/19/97-articles-refuting-the-97-consensus-on-global-warming/">December 19, 2014</a> </div>
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The 97% “consensus” study, <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cook et al. (2013)</a> has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, highly credentialed scientists and extensively in the climate blogosphere. The shoddy methodology of Cook’s study has been shown to be so fatally flawed that well known climate scientists have publicly spoken out against it,<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-1421851593611342004">
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“<i>The ‘97% consensus’ article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it.</i>”<br />
– <a href="http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2013/07/23/whats-behind-the-battle-of-received-wisdoms/#comment-182401" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Mike Hulme, Ph.D. Professor of Climate Change, University of East Anglia (UEA)</a></blockquote>
The following is a list of 97 articles that refute Cook’s (poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed) 97% “consensus” study. The fact that anyone continues to bring up such soundly debunked nonsense like Cook’s study is an embarrassment to science.<br />
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[ <b>Journal Coverage</b> ]<br />
<b>Energy Policy</b> – <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2014.04.045" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the literature: A re-analysis</a> (<i>October 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Energy Policy</b> – <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2014.06.003" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the literature: Rejoinder</a> (<i>October 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Science & Education</b> – <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change</a> (<i>August 2013</i>)<br />
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[ <b>Media Coverage</b> ]<br />
<b>American Thinker</b> – <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/02/climate_consensus_con_game.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Climate Consensus Con Game</a> (<i>February 17, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Breitbart</b> – <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/08/obama-s-97-percent-climate-consensus-debunked-demolished-staked-through-the-heart/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Obama’s ’97 Percent’ Climate Consensus: Debunked, Demolished, Staked through the heart</a> (<i>September 8, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Canada Free Press</b> – <a href="http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/sorry-global-warmists-the-97-percent-consensus-is-complete-fiction" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sorry, global warmists: The ’97 percent consensus’ is complete fiction</a> (<i>May 27, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Financial Post</b> – <a href="http://business.financialpost.com/2013/09/19/meaningless-consensus-on-climate-change/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Meaningless consensus on climate change</a> (<i>September 19, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Financial Post</b> – <a href="http://business.financialpost.com/2013/09/25/the-97-no-you-dont-have-a-consensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The 97%: No you don’t have a climate consensus</a> (<i>September 25, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Forbes</b> – <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring ’97-Percent Consensus’ Claims</a> (<i>May 30, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Fox News</b> – <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/10/16/balance-is-not-bias-fox-news-critics-mislead-public-on-climate-change/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Balance is not bias — Fox News critics mislead public on climate change</a> (<i>October 16, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Herald Sun</b> – <a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/that_97_per_cent_claim_four_problems_with_cook_and_obama/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">That 97 per cent claim: four problems with Cook and Obama</a> (<i>May 22, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Power Line</b> – <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/breaking-the-97-percent-climate-consensus-canard.php" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Breaking: The “97 Percent Climate Consensus” Canard</a> (<i>May 18, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Spiked</b> – <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/global-warming-the-97-fallacy/15069#.VJO69sAA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Global warming: the 97% fallacy</a> (<i>May 28, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>The Daily Caller</b> – <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/16/where-did-97-percent-global-warming-consensus-figure-come-from/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Where Did ’97 Percent’ Global Warming Consensus Figure Come From?</a> (<i>May 16, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>The Daily Telegraph</b> – <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100227804/97-per-cent-of-climate-activists-in-the-pay-of-big-oil-shock/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">97 per cent of climate activists in the pay of Big Oil shock!</a> (<i>July 23, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Guardian</b> – <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2014/jun/06/97-consensus-global-warming" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up</a> (<i>June 6, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>The New American</b> – <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/15457-global-warming-consensus-cooking-the-books" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Global Warming “Consensus”: Cooking the Books</a> (<i>May 21, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The New American</b> – <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/15624-cooking-climate-consensus-data-97-of-scientists-affirm-agw-debunked" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cooking Climate Consensus Data: “97% of Scientists Affirm AGW” Debunked</a> (<i>June 5, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The New American</b> – <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/18300-climategate-3-0-university-threatens-blogger-for-exposing-97-consensus-fraud" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Climategate 3.0: Blogger Threatened for Exposing 97% “Consensus” Fraud</a> (<i>May 20, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>The Patriot Post</b> – <a href="https://patriotpost.us/opinion/18237" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The 97% Consensus — A Lie of Epic Proportions</a> (<i>May 17, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Patriot Post</b> – <a href="http://patriotpost.us/articles/28035" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Debunking the ‘97% Consensus’ & Why Global Cooling May Loom</a> (<i>August 7, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>The Press-Enterprise</b> – <a href="http://www.pe.com/articles/climate-673830-consensus-paper.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Don’t be swayed by climate change ‘consensus’</a> (<i>September 10, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Tampa Tribune</b> – <a href="http://tbo.com/news/blogs/the-right-stuff/about-that-97-percent-it-aint-necessarily-so-20140519/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">About that ’97 percent’: It ain’t necessarily so</a> (<i>May 19, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>The Wall Street Journal</b> – <a href="http://blog.heartland.org/2014/06/the-myth-of-the-climate-change-97/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Myth of the Climate Change ‘97%’</a> (<i>May 26, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Troy Media</b> – <a href="http://www.troymedia.com/2014/02/18/bandwagon-psychology-root-of-97-per-cent-climate-change-consensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bandwagon psychology root of 97 per cent climate change “consensus”</a> (<i>February 18, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>WND</b> – <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/black-jesus-climate-consensus-fantasy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Black Jesus’ Climate Consensus Fantasy</a> (<i>June 25, 2013</i>)<br />
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[ <b>Organization Coverage</b> ]<br />
<b>Competitive Enterprise Institute</b> – <a href="http://www.globalwarming.org/2013/09/05/consensus-shmensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Consensus Shmensus</a> (<i>September 5, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Cornwall Alliance</b> – <a href="http://www.cornwallalliance.org/2014/07/16/climate-consensus-nonsense/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Climate Consensus? Nonsense!</a> (<i>June 16, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Friends of Science</b> – <a href="http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10753602.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Friends of Science Challenge the Cook Study for Bandwagon Fear Mongering on Climate Change and Global Warming</a> (<i>May 21, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Friends of Science</b> – <a href="http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10772757.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Only 65 Scientists of 12,000 Make up Alleged 97% on Climate Change and Global Warming Consensus</a> (<i>May 28, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Friends of Science</b> – <a href="http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/97_Consensus_Myth.pdf?vsmaid=398" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">97% Consensus? No! Global Warming Math Myths & Social Proofs</a> (PDF) (<i>February 3, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Friends of Science</b> – <a href="http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/02/prweb11550514.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Climate Change Is a Fact of Life, the Science Is Not Settled and 97% Consensus on Global Warming Is a Math Myth</a> (<i>February 4, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>George C. Marshall Institute</b> – <a href="http://marshall.org/climate-change/the-corruption-of-science/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Corruption of Science</a> (<i>October 5, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>John Locke Foundation</b> – <a href="http://www.johnlocke.org/newsletters/research/2014-07-03-336vtqiqkv07qql88b56192k61-enviro-update.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The 97% consensus on global warming exposed</a> (<i>July 3, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Liberty Fund</b> – <a href="http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/david_friedman_14.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">David Friedman on the 97% Consensus on Global Warming</a> (<i>February 27, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Global Warming Policy Foundation</b> – <a href="http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2013/09/Montford-Consensus.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Consensus? What Consensus?</a> (PDF) (<i>September 2, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Global Warming Policy Foundation</b> – <a href="http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/09/Warming-consensus-and-it-critics1.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Fraud, Bias And Public Relations: The 97% ‘Consensus’ And Its Critics</a> (PDF) (<i>September 8, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>National Center for Policy Analysis</b> – <a href="http://environmentblog.ncpa.org/the-big-lie-of-the-consensus-view-on-global-warming/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Big Lie of the “Consensus View” on Global Warming</a> (<i>July 30, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>National Center for Public Policy Research</b> – <a href="http://www.conservativeblog.org/amyridenour/2014/2/10/do-97-of-all-climate-scientists-really-believe-mankind-is-ca.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Do 97% of All Climate Scientists Really Believe Mankind is Causing Catastrophic Global Warming?</a> (<i>February 10, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Principia Scientific International</b> – <a href="http://www.principia-scientific.org/exposed-academic-fraud-in-new-climate-science-consensus-claim.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Exposed: Academic Fraud in New Climate Science Consensus Claim</a> (<i>May 23, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Heartland Institute</b> – <a href="http://blog.heartland.org/2014/05/what-97-percent-of-climate-scientists-do/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">What 97 Percent of Climate Scientists Do</a> (<i>May 12, 2014</i>)<br />
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[ <b>Weblog Coverage</b> ]<br />
<b>Australian Climate Madness</b> – <a href="http://australianclimatemadness.com/2014/05/29/get-at-the-truth-and-not-fool-yourself/#more-14155" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">‘Get at the truth, and not fool yourself’</a> (<i>May 29, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Bishop Hill</b> – <a href="http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/5/27/landmark-consensus-study-is-incomplete.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">‘Landmark consensus study’ is incomplete</a> (<i>May 27, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Climate Audit</b> – <a href="http://climateaudit.org/2013/05/24/undercooked-statistics/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">UnderCooked Statistics</a> (<i>May 24, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Climate Etc.</b> – <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2013/07/26/the-97-consensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The 97% ‘consensus’</a> (<i>July 26, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Climate Etc.</b> – <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2013/07/27/the-97-consensus-part-ii/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The 97% ‘consensus’: Part II</a> (<i>July 27, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Climate Etc.</b> – <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/27/the-97-feud/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The 97% feud</a> (<i>July 27, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Climate Resistance</b> – <a href="http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/07/tom-curtis-doesnt-understand-the-97-paper.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tom Curtis Doesn’t Understand the 97% Paper</a> (<i>July 27, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>JoNova</b> – <a href="http://joannenova.com.au/2013/05/cooks-fallacy-97-consensus-study-is-a-marketing-ploy-some-journalists-will-fall-for/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cook’s fallacy “97% consensus” study is a marketing ploy some journalists will fall for</a> (<i>May 17, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>JoNova</b> – <a href="http://joannenova.com.au/2013/07/thats-a-0-3-consensus-not-97/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">That’s a 0.3% consensus, not 97%</a> (<i>July 1, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>JoNova</b> – <a href="http://joannenova.com.au/2013/09/monckton-honey-i-shrunk-the-consensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">“Honey, I shrunk the consensus” – Monckton takes action on Cooks paper</a> (<i>September 24, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>JoNova</b> – <a href="http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/john-cooks-consensus-data-is-so-good-hell-sue-you-if-you-discuss-it/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">John Cook’s consensus data is so good his Uni will sue you if you discuss it</a> (<i>May 18, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>JoNova</b> – <a href="http://joannenova.com.au/2014/05/uni-queensland-defends-legal-threats-over-climate-data-they-want-to-keep-secret/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Uni Queensland defends legal threats over “climate” data they want to keep secret</a> (<i>May 21, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>JoNova</b> – <a href="http://joannenova.com.au/2014/06/cook-scores-97-for-incompetence-on-a-meaningless-consensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cook scores 97% for incompetence on a meaningless consensus</a> (<i>June 6, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>José Duarte</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cooking stove use, housing associations, white males, and the 97%</a> (<i>August 28, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>José Duarte</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/the-art-of-evasion" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The art of evasion</a> (<i>September 9, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Making Science Public</b> – <a href="http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2013/07/23/whats-behind-the-battle-of-received-wisdoms/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">What’s behind the battle of received wisdoms?</a> (<i>July 23, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Popular Technology.net</b> – <a href="http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/05/97-study-falsely-classifies-scientists.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists’ Papers, according to the scientists that published them</a> (<i>May 21, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Popular Technology.net</b> – <a href="http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/06/the-statistical-destruction-of-97.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Statistical Destruction of the 97% Consensus</a> (<i>June 1, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Popular Technology.net</b> – <a href="http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/06/cooks-97-consensus-study-game-plan.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cook’s 97% Consensus Study Game Plan Revealed</a> (<i>June 4, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-consensus-project-update.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Consensus Project: An update</a> (<i>August 16, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/biases-in-consensus-data.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Biases in consensus data</a> (<i>August 24, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2013/08/more-irregularities-in-consensus-data.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">More irregularities in the consensus data</a> (<i>August 24, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/open-letter-to-vice-chancellor-of.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open letter to the Vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland</a> (<i>August 27, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2013/08/bootstrap-results-for-initial-ratings.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bootstrap results for initial ratings by the Consensus Project</a> (<i>August 28, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-97-consensus.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The 97% consensus</a> (<i>May 10, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/05/my-first-audioslide.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">My First Audioslide</a> (<i>May 20, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-new-contribution-to-consensus-debate.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">A new contribution to the consensus debate</a> (<i>June 4, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/06/24-errors.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">24 errors?</a> (<i>June 8, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/07/more-cook-data-released.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">More Cook data released</a> (<i>July 21, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/07/days-of-rater-bias.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Days of rater bias</a> (<i>July 23, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/07/days-of-rater-bias-ctd.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Days of rater bias (ctd)</a> <i>July 28, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/08/another-chapter-on-97-nonsensus.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Another chapter on the 97% nonsensus</a> (<i>August 1, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>Richard Tol</b> (Ph.D.) – <a href="http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/10/erl-does-not-want-you-to-read-this_90.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ERL does not want you to read this</a> (<i>October 14, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>The Blackboard</b> – <a href="http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">I Do Not Think it Means What You Think it Means</a> (<i>May 15, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Blackboard</b> – <a href="http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/on-the-consensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">On the Consensus</a> (<i>May 17, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Blackboard</b> – <a href="http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/nir-shaviv-one-of-the-97/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Nir Shaviv: One of the 97%</a> (<i>May 17, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Blackboard</b> – <a href="http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/why-symmetry-is-bad/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Why Symmetry is Bad</a> (<i>May 19, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Blackboard</b> – <a href="http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/possible-self-selection-bias-in-cook-author-responses/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Possible Self-Selection Bias in Cook: Author responses.</a> (<i>May 20, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Blackboard</b> – <a href="http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/bias-author-survey-pro-agw/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bias Author Survey: Pro AGW</a> (<i>May 21, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>The Lid</b> – <a href="http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2014/05/claim-97-of-climate-scientists-believe.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Claim 97% of Climate Scientists Believe In Global Warming is TOTALLY BOGUS!</a> (<i>May 21, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>The State of the Climate</b> – <a href="http://www.staatvanhetklimaat.nl/2013/05/17/cooks-survey-not-only-meaningless-but-also-misleading/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cook’s survey not only meaningless but also misleading</a> (<i>May 17, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/22/the-collapsing-consensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Collapsing ‘Consensus’</a> (<i>May 22, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/04/self-admitted-cyber-thief-peter-gleick-is-still-on-the-iop-board-that-approved-the-cook-97-consensus-paper/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Self admitted cyber thief Peter Gleick is still on the IOP board that approved the Cook 97% consensus paper</a> (<i>June 4, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/24/quantifying-the-consensus-on-global-warming-in-the-literature-a-comment/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">‘Quantifying the consensus on global warming in the literature’: a comment</a> (<i>June 24, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/28/on-the-97-percenters-you-must-admit-they-were-careful/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">On the 97 percenters: ‘You Must Admit, They Were Careful’</a> (<i>July 28, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/29/what-is-cooks-consensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">What Is Cook’s Consensus?</a> (<i>July 29, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/03/cooks-97-consensus-disproven-by-a-new-paper-showing-major-math-errors/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cooks ‘97% consensus’ disproven by a new peer reviewed paper showing major math errors</a> (<i>September 3, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/09/97-climate-consensus-denial-the-debunkers-debunked/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">97% Climate consensus ‘denial’: the debunkers debunked</a> (<i>September 9, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/20/join-my-crowd-sourced-complaint-about-97-1-consensus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Join my crowd-sourced complaint about the ‘97% consensus’</a> (<i>September 20, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/20/the-97-consensus-myth-busted-by-a-real-survey/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The 97% consensus myth – busted by a real survey</a> (<i>November 20, 2013</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/26/97-of-pictures-are-worth-1000-climate-words/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">97% of pictures are worth 1000 climate words</a> (<i>February 26, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/10/john-cooks-97-consensus-claim-is-about-to-go-pear-shaped/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">John Cook’s 97% consensus claim is about to go ‘pear-shaped’</a> (<i>May 10, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/22/an-open-letter-puts-the-university-of-queensland-in-a-dilemma-over-john-cooks-97-consensus-paper/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">An Open Letter puts the University of Queensland in a dilemma over John Cook’s ‘97% consensus’ paper</a> (<i>May 22, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/11/the-climate-consensus-is-not-97-its-100/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The climate consensus is not 97% – it’s 100%</a> (<i>June 11, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/24/the-disagreement-of-what-defines-consensus-by-cook-et-al-is-revealed-in-raters-remarks-and-it-sure-isnt-97/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The disagreement over what defines ‘endorsment of AGW’ by Cook et al. is revealed in raters remarks, and it sure isn’t a 97% consensus</a> (<i>June 24, 2014</i>)<br />
<b>WUWT</b> – <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/18/if-97-of-scientists-say-global-warming-is-real-100-say-it-has-nearly-stopped/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">If 97% of Scientists Say Global Warming is Real, 100% Say It Has Nearly Stopped</a> (<i>November 18, 2014</i>)</div>
The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-71331498573557026962019-04-28T13:46:00.002-07:002019-04-28T13:46:14.786-07:00Slowly Losing your Freedom America.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn5opUFNs-I">Link</a>)</div>
The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-47624236077205924802019-04-15T16:20:00.002-07:002019-04-28T13:50:47.196-07:00Socialism vs. Capitalism <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76frHHpoNFs">Link</a>)</div>
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A Modern argument which was answered years ago.<br />
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(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYeYPcougmA">Link</a>)<br />
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(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdfru9NHGvE">Link</a>)</div>
The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244193492382271887.post-50483447516842308552019-03-31T10:45:00.002-07:002019-03-31T10:47:52.249-07:00American Health Care: Essential Principles and 50 Common Fallaciesby <span class="author vcard"><a href="https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/author/RichardERalston/" rel="author" title="Posts by Richard E. Ralston">Richard E. Ralston</a></span> | <span class="published">Mar 7, 2019</span> | <a href="https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/category/classic/" rel="category tag">Classic</a>, <a href="https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/category/law/regulation/fda/" rel="category tag">FDA</a>, <a href="https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/category/politics/healthcare/" rel="category tag">Healthcare</a><br />
<br />
From <a href="https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/">Capitalism Magazine</a>.<br />
<br />
Virtually all discussion of health care policy today avoids explicit reference to underlying principles. In the United States, any reference to uniquely American values—including the inviolability of the individual—is particularly avoided. Indeed, while the discussion consistently and studiously neglects to mention any fundamental ideology, it invariably takes for granted the standards of altruism and collectivism. Outwardly, the mantra is “practicality.”<br />
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Even within the terms of pragmatism, socialized medicine is <em>not</em> practical—it does not work. When policy proposals from pragmatic arguments are offered (always as a litany of concretes, and often based on erroneous information), they should be addressed in the full context of the ideological causes such proposals routinely ignore. And it must be established that the <em>reason</em> socialized medicine (or any application of socialism or collectivism) does not work is <em>because</em> it is immoral.<br />
The first task in proper health care policy formulation must therefore be to turn the discussion to its necessary roots. A foundation must be built by establishing the proper political and moral principles: the distinctly American values of freedom, individualism and the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. <br />
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<strong>Political Principles</strong><br />
One economist who is a tireless advocate of medical socialism has written that the only obstacle to universal health care is “ideology and personal choice.” Eliminate those and we can have universal health care. Of course, that is quite correct, and it is seldom that the advocates of such policies are so explicit. Although the writer obviously is talking only about ideologies other than his own (which is easy to identify), elimination of such ideologies as freedom and individualism, and such concepts as personal choice, are a sure foundation for collectivism.<br />
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Individualism must be at the heart of health care policy. Life, liberty and the pursuit (or practice) of happiness is the proper basis for policy. That must include property rights, and no right to property is more important than one’s ownership of his own body. Failure to maintain this foundation opens the door to the most common attacks on freedom in health care.<br />
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It is important to recognize that advocates of medical socialism are not primarily trying to apply the principles of collectivism in order to promote better health care. They are using the issue of health care in order to promote collectivism. In 2007 Senator Clinton proposed the expansion of an expensive and wasteful federal and state program to expand government health care from poor children to families of four with incomes up to $82,000. The proposals became law in 2009. The goal is obviously not to help the poor but to move as many children as possible—eventually all children—into a government health care system. This is another “slice of the sausage” that Senator Clinton promised when the Clinton administration’s proposals for national health care were defeated in 1994. When she could not get the whole sausage of national health care, she promised to deliver it one slice at a time.<br />
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The objective of such paternalism extends far beyond the nationalization of health care. We and our children must all become dependent on government as the only source of our health care. Most children already must depend on government for their education (i.e., their indoctrination). Ideally these advocates of government would also like children to rely on government for food and housing.<br />
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The motive may or may not be an ideological commitment to socialism; it is certainly an avid commitment to a political spoils system. The enemies of such a system are autonomous individuals pursuing their own happiness and deciding how to live their own lives. Like the corruption of the client system that helped destroy the Roman Republic, citizens are inculcated into a system that destroys personal freedom and choice through dependence on government for the needs of daily life. That is the ultimate goal: the abdication of freedom by citizens in exchange for a government that will take care of them. “It takes a village.”<br />
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Without a foundation on the principles of individualism, the door is open to anti-concepts such as the “right to health care.” Those who proclaim the “right” to health care usually mean its opposite, i.e., that no one has the right to any health care at all unless they get it from the government. When private health care is criminalized and everyone is forced into a government system with nowhere else to go, we are at the mercy of the political powers that administer such a system, whether it actually delivers health care or not. (This perversion of the concept of rights into goods and services, which you must be forced to provide to others, is described by Ayn Rand in her article “Man’s Rights” in <em>The Virtue of Selfishness</em>.)<br />
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Is the objective really to criminalize private health care? To some extent that already has been achieved. The federal regulations governing Medicare were 130,000 pages long, until the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill added another 1,300 pages. No one can understand them. No one can read them. No one can even lift them. It is not possible to comply with some of these regulations without being in violation of other provisions. Yet physicians and hospitals can be held criminally liable for violating many of these provisions. What can be the purpose of such confusion? It is the ability to subject physicians and the rest of us to the arbitrary and capricious application of these regulations by any random bureaucrat. These regulations have grotesquely distorted and set the standard for the way private insurance companies pay for medical expenses.<br />
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Does this currently affect us on a daily basis? Most definitely. If you are 65 years of age or older, after a lifetime of paying Medicare taxes you are stuck with it. But if you want or need a procedure that Medicare does not allow, and if your physician accepts Medicare patients, he is forbidden by law to provide it even if you choose to pay for it yourself.<br />
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Medicare and Medicaid expenses have increased exponentially over the last 40 years and are a primary contributor to increased spending on health care. Federal programs now account for about 50 percent of medical spending. Federal tax policy has provided strong incentives for third-party payment of medical expenses, divorcing most of the costs from those who receive services. That is another primary factor in increasing costs. Heavy regulatory regimes of insurance and medical licensing by 50 state governments have greatly inflated the cost of both insurance and health care itself. State regulations prohibit the purchase of insurance from other states—thereby eliminating the possibility of a competitive national market for insurance and further increasing the cost of insurance.<br />
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Insurance commissioners and other regulators in every state have united in opposition to legislation allowing their citizens to buy insurance from other states. Presumably they each must believe that consumers are endangered by the regulatory environment in the other 49 states. Affordable health insurance is thus often impossible for consumers to find because it is forbidden by law.<br />
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The strongest advocates of medical socialism want Americans to believe that what we have today is a free-market health care system based on principles of <em>laissez-faire</em> capitalism, and that we need to replace it. What we actually have, of course, is an essentially fascist system of highly complex and government-financed health care manipulated by interest groups with political pull.<br />
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America’s health insurance and medical care system is an overregulated, bureaucratic monster that is the creation of government. It is in need of major reform, and the <em>status quo</em> should not be defended. But reform of the system must not take the form of more of the government poison that has been killing it.<br />
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<strong>American Values</strong><br />
Michael Moore’s comedy-drama <em>Sicko</em> (it was hardly a documentary) was only tangentially about health care. The clear underlying theme of the movie was the inferiority of American society and culture to almost all others. Name a country, and Mr. Moore makes the case that its culture, education, politics, economy and health care are superior to America’s to the degree that they embrace collectivism.<br />
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That is the foundation for the frequently heard statement that all other industrialized countries have a government-financed health care system. (That is, incidentally, not true.) Americans should, in this view, be embarrassed by their lack of collectivism and outmoded commitment to free markets. Collectivist systems ruled by enlightened intellectuals are obviously superior in every respect. If only Americans would discard such parochial curiosities as the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the very concepts of individualism and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we could freely embrace the benefits of government micro-management of our health care. Of course, a government that pays for all of our health care ultimately acts as if it owns our bodies, but anti-American elitists tell us that we should not be concerned with such ideological considerations. <br />
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Obviously we must vigorously defend American values as a necessary precondition of health care policy. We must recognize that disdain and contempt for American values is often the motivation for collectivist policies. This is the current manifestation of a very old trend in America. In the 19th Century many intellectuals began to look to Europe for validation of their abandonment of the reason-based world view of the Enlightenment and justification for replacing free institutions with various forms of state tyranny. Americans must recognize these intellectual roots, best expressed in the surprisingly accurate popular term “Health Care Nazis.” The only appropriate <em>American</em> response to such health care folly is individualism and a free market.<br />
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<strong>Moral Foundations</strong><br />
Many people cannot afford comprehensive health insurance—especially with current government regulations. Many people need medical care they cannot afford. These unfortunate facts are used as the basis for the argument that others must be forced to supply them with both insurance and health care. The context of proper political principles and American values is ignored and replaced with the implied moral context of altruism. Even if the existence of individual rights is acknowledged, it is trumped by altruism and collectivism.<br />
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Because health care is so important, we are told, issues of freedom and individual rights must be set aside. The need of patients requires that government sweep away the rights of all individuals in order to seize and distribute medical care to others. Of course, the truth of the matter is that it is precisely because health care is so important that the individual rights of patients and physicians must be vigorously defended.<br />
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It is appropriate for defenders of individual rights to point out that the government action that would in fact help make affordable health care more widely available is not more government controls and regulations, but the elimination of most current controls and medical programs. (Government-funded medical care for active-duty military personnel and injured veterans is of course appropriate, but in the case of veterans could be best managed by reimbursement to them for private care.) But that should never obscure a defense of self-interest as the only moral foundation for health care. The moral issue is also often clouded with the notion that even if socialism is immoral and inefficient in most cases, it is somehow appropriate in others—such as for children or the elderly. That assumes that the most precious value or gift that can be given to children is socialism or paternalistic fascism.<br />
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Across the entire political spectrum, altruism is the common element that clears the way for both the right and the left to devastate freedom and individualism. Socialists, welfare-state paternalists, Christian conservatives, public employee unions and politicians seeking to make their constituents dependent on them for all of their needs unite under the banner of altruism. There is no principle of political philosophy, no economic law, no proven efficiency of free markets or proven incompetence of government, no American value, that is not trumped by altruism. Any government action purporting to be a sacrifice for the good of others is generally sanctioned—even when in fact the proposal will help kill those it is supposed to help while making life miserable for everyone else. That is why supporters of reason, freedom and individualism should always take altruism on directly.<br />
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Michael Moore has remarked that socialized medicine should more appropriately be called “Christianized medicine.” This extreme opponent of free markets and American values has thus been inspired by the success of some Christians in using the power of government to force Christian morality on American citizens. While Mr. Moore’s piety may be highly selective, it is a symbol of what pandering to the religious right by conservatives has made possible.<br />
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<strong>Specific Policy Development</strong><br />
Health care based on the foundations of individualism—uniquely expressed through American values—requires free markets to work effectively. Self-interest requires a principled defense of free-market health care.<br />
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Because the transition from the current regulated mess governments have created will be long and difficult, it is also necessary to take notice of not just the unprincipled and immoral foundations of the present corrupt system, but of the huge amount of misinformation in circulation about current needs and realities.<br />
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In this context, while policy options must always refer back to correct principles, in any given instance it is the <em>direction</em> of policy that often should be considered. Is the direction more government controls, regulations, bureaucracy and spending, or less? If less, a proposed reform <em>might</em> be appropriate if it is not proposed in conjunction with regression to more government.<br />
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For example, the Medicare Prescription Drug legislation of 2003 was a horrible expansion of government health care—the largest in 40 years. It did include a pitiful few helpful features such as the expansion of Health Savings Accounts and some paltry choices for private insurance options within Medicare. Neither of those features justified passage of the legislation. But now that we are burdened with the program, it is appropriate to build on those features to push in the direction of more private options in health care and to build a constituency for free markets. Exempting individual health care expenses from income tax is fine, but of course not ultimately a reason to maintain income taxes at all. We can take advantage of limited opportunities for progress on the road back to freedom in medicine only if our goals remain firmly rooted in the right principles.<br />
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In this context it can be useful to review the most common misinformation and fallacious reasoning about the current policy situation and suggest rhetorically effective replies. Recourse to correct principles is the best response, as there is no limit to the false information and irrationality that can be manufactured. Nevertheless, some things should not be allowed to go by without comment and need to be specifically refuted. A mantra of commonly accepted misrepresentations has developed that is endlessly chanted to the exclusion of any rational discussion of the real issues. They must therefore be challenged.<br />
<br />
Following are some of the most common arguments with suggested responses that apply the principles discussed above.<br />
<br />
<strong>1. “The quality of health care in America is ranked lower than 36 other countries.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, always ask, “Ranked by whom and how?” In 2000 United Nations bureaucrats at the World Health Organization sent a survey to “officials and experts” selected by the U.N. Why should we be surprised to learn that government “officials and experts” in France thought that their government-run health care system was the best in the world? The scoring of these surveys also made them meaningless. For example, 25 percent of the scoring was weighted based on the assessment of how “fair” the financing was in each country. For “fair,” read <em>socialist</em>—the list was largely a ranking of how socialist each country’s system is.<br />
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<strong>2. “Medicare and Medicaid are far more efficient and less wasteful than private insurance, spending only three percent on administrative overhead.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, always ask, “Why is the administrative cost always given as a percentage?” One reason is that, due to the age of covered patients, the average Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements are higher than those of private insurance—and administrative costs are therefore a lower percentage of the larger amount paid. Another reason is that the huge cost of contending with 130,000 pages of Medicare regulations is pushed onto the providers. The cost of the more than 100,000 employees of the Internal Revenue Service who collect Medicare taxes are also omitted from Medicare’s “administrative overhead.” But the biggest reason is that the government programs make no effort to minimize expense or fraud. Fraud counts for about $50 billion in Medicaid expenses every year—as high as $18 billion in New York alone. Total spending has been going through the roof for more than 40 years, but the government’s administrative cost of burning money is quite low. That does not prove that the government is efficient or prudent. Private insurance companies, on the other hand, need to keep fraud and expenses down or go out of business. <br />
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<strong>3. “Government or universities develop most new medications and then just hand them over to pharmaceutical companies to manufacture and make all the profits.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, mention that the National Institutes of Health (a government agency) reports that the pharmaceutical companies—who spend about $60 billion each year on research—develop more than 90 percent of new drugs.<br />
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<strong>4. “Advertising of drugs is bad because it increases the price of medications.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, ask, “Why does any business advertise any product? Because they just want to add to their costs and increase the price?” Manufacturers of computers and other technological products who spend a lot on research need to find their market. A pharmaceutical company, spending an average of $800 million to develop a major new drug, has a few years of patent protection to bring the drug to the attention of physicians and patients who need it. This allows them to spread research costs over a much larger customer base and reduce unit cost—which lowers the price.<br />
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<strong>5. “Private corporations are wasteful and bloated bureaucracies. Government-provided health care is lean and efficient.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, you might want to laugh. Then ask, “So you think that the 20th Century proved that communism and fascism work?” Is the Department of Motor Vehicles or the purchasing practices of the Defense Department our best models of administrative efficiency?<br />
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<strong>6. “People live longer in some countries because of their socialist health care systems.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, ask if the people in those countries didn’t live longer <em>before</em> they nationalized their health care systems. Ask how many people in those countries died on their highways, were killed in combat, shot by criminals, addicted to drugs, were severely overweight or in poor health when they arrived as illegal immigrants.<br />
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<strong>7. “The free market is callous and greedy, while government health care is compassionate and pays close and solicitous attention to the needs of every individual.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, recite the following litany: Katrina, King-Harbor Hospital in Los Angeles, the annex at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the Veterans Administration, the government of New York State, members of Congress, every political spoils system since the Roman Republic.<br />
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<strong>8. “We can lower health care spending by eliminating all profits.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, ask why we pay FedEx, UPS and DHL to deliver packages at a profit instead of using the U.S. Postal Service. Ask why we pay Microsoft and Apple for computer products at a profit instead of having all computers and software produced by the government. Ask why we don’t have the government produce all of our food and build all of our housing if it can do it so much better without needing a profit. Ask where the money would come from, without profits, for drug research and development. Ask how expensive government drug research would be if it never had to get results. Ask what the cost of assuaging public employee unions and the politicians they fund will be when profits are eliminated.<br />
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<strong>9. “Government controls will lower the cost of insurance premiums to what we can afford.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, ask why the government requires those who struggle to afford insurance to pay taxes on the money they use to pay for it. Ask why the government mandates that insurance cover treatments advocated by special-interest lobbies even when people do not want the coverage. Ask why state governments refuse to allow competition—and lower premiums—from insurers in other states. Government controls are now making insurance more expensive. Affordable insurance is hard to find because it is forbidden by law.<br />
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<strong>10. “Americans spend a higher percentage of their GDP on health care than any other country.”</strong><br />
There are both good and bad reasons for the present level of spending on health care. Bad reasons include the waste and fraud in government-financed health care, regulations that drive up the cost of insurance, and what following the lead of complex Medicare reimbursement procedures and regulations has done to private insurance. Good reasons include the fact that one reason Americans spend more on health care is because they can. America is a rich country, and what is more important than health care? How much is too much? Americans not only have the most advanced drugs, diagnostic and other medical equipment but also make them more available than any other country. If we had a free-market medical system, those who could afford to try and live forever in perfect health would spend money that would stimulate medical research that would benefit all of us.<br />
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<strong>11. “Public opinion polls show that most Americans want more government health care.”</strong><br />
A lot of people may respond favorably when asked if they think someone else—anyone else—should pay for their health insurance. Government, their employer, anyone else will do. They might not reply in the same way if asked if they should be responsible for providing everyone else with health care. They might not reply in the same way if they understood the consequences of government health care, such as rationing and long waits for surgery, treatments, or referral to specialists—or the government causes of problems with the <em>status quo</em>. They might not reply in the same way if asked if they really trust politicians and the loving arms of the federal bureaucracy for all of their health care. They might not respond in the same way if asked if they want government control of all aspects of health with nowhere else left to go.<br />
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<strong>12. “Huge jury awards in medical malpractice suits do not increase health care or insurance costs.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, ask where the money comes from to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars in contingency fees that go to some trial lawyers every year. Ask whether these lawyers really care only about the “little guy.” Ask why so many physicians and surgeons now have to pay liability insurance premiums of far more than $100,000 a year. (No, the insurance companies do not keep it all or lose it in the stock market.) Ask how the government legal framework and court management for our tort system is set up to encourage lawyers to convince so many juries that all patients live forever in perfect health unless a physician or hospital makes a mistake. Ask how much is paid in political contributions every year by trial lawyers to buy protection for this legalized extortion. Ask how some law firms were able to hire one radiologist to review more than 600,000 x-rays and diagnose most of them with the same disease. Ask how many billions of dollars are wasted on unnecessary tests and procedures that physicians have to order to protect themselves from frivolous lawsuits.<br />
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<strong>13. “When the Association of Trial Lawyers of America changed its name in 2006 to the American Association for Justice, did that not prove the true purpose of the organization?”</strong><br />
That only proved that they thought the name “American Association for Sincerity” was already taken. Their market research indicated most Americans had a low opinion of trial lawyers. That low opinion was unfortunate, because it was based on the action of only some trial lawyers—most of whom provide needed services to their clients. But who did they think there were fooling? It was an act of transparent hypocrisy. Their new name absurdly assumes that judgments favoring plaintiffs always reflect justice, and judgment favoring defendants always reflect injustice. If that were the case, juries could be dispensed with so judges could always find for the plaintiff. Although they claim their only interest is protecting “the little guy,” a more accurate name would have been the “American Association for Huge Contingency Fees.”<br />
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<strong>14. “The best way to reduce the debt and federal spending is health care reform.”</strong><br />
Ask how the largest entitlement program in history, administered through more than one hundred new boards, agencies and commissions, will reduce spending and government debt. Ask how Medicare and Medicaid have reduced spending and debt. <br />
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<strong>15. “Members of Congress resist government control of medicine because of political contributions of drug and insurance companies and their lobbyists.”</strong><br />
Some may be motivated by such financial considerations. But other politicians eagerly threaten those corporations with legislation that would do great harm or put them out of business completely. In the face of such threats they have the right to protect themselves. Those who are offended by these contributions are strangely unconcerned by $1 billion in campaign contributions from trial lawyers since 1990, massive political contributions paid for by the dues of members of public employee unions or by politicians who extort contributions from the American Medical Association through annual threats to lower Medicare reimbursements to physicians. Fastidiousness about political contributions is unconvincing when it is so highly selective.<br />
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<strong>16. “Congress will pay for whatever is required by health care reform in a way that is budget-neutral.”</strong><br />
It never has—certainly not for Medicare, Medicaid or the Prescription Drug Program. Health care reform proposals pretend to do that, which is why they rely on creative accounting gimmick—such as combining ten years of new taxes with only six years of new spending. As a rule, politicians who seek more power do not spend a lot of time worrying about how to pay for that power. That is a detail. The important principle for them is an ancient one, “bread and circuses.” They will promise anything to those citizens who surrender their choices and rights in return for a promise to take care of them. Dependence on government and politicians is the goal, and end in itself.<br />
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<strong>17. “Government-owned insurance companies must be created to provide competition in the marketplace.”</strong><br />
It is a clear principle of the philosophy of law that government, or the “Sovereign,” cannot compete—it can only compel. Competition does not exist because by law and regulation the government does not permit it. Advocates of such government insurance have clearly stated that they support it only because it is the best path to a single-payer system or complete government takeover of insurance. As Congressman Barney Frank said, government insurance would soon “demonstrate the strength of its power” and wipe out all private insurance. A public option would be created by Congress for that purpose and would then be administered by the government with that goal. An optional trigger to create a public option would be administered by those looking for any excuse to pull it. That would be the inevitable result of a game in which the government is the dealer, the cashier, the banker, the rule maker, the policeman and the judge.<br />
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<strong>18. “Support of a vast expansion of government control of medicine by drug companies means reform must be good for business.”</strong><br />
When drug companies abandon a moral and economic defense of their business in favor of buying influence or making a deal within the spoils system, they have started down a road to their own destruction. As has the American Medical Association, which long ago gave up any defense of the rights of physicians to practice medicine as they think best, in favor of transforming themselves into a public employee union going checks-in-hand to Congress every year to prop up the size of Medicare reimbursements. When businessmen and professionals flee from their principles to play the political game, they will discover that politicians can play it far more effectively. The bribes will progressively buy less and less, and politicians will forget their new friends and move on to more lucrative conquests. Then Big Pharma will find itself without principles, without friends and without the resources to continue what has been the most productive drug research in human history.<br />
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<strong>19. “Health care reform would be supported by the public if politicians would just give straight answers about legislation.”</strong><br />
Members of Congress cannot give straight answers about thousands of pages of legislation they cannot read or understand themselves. They may have a vague idea of whether special provisions to serve the special interests they support have been slipped into the bill. They may know that it authorizes additional taxes for ten years but additional spending for only the last six years so the result will be “balanced” on a ten-year basis. The last thing that advocates of such a shell game want to bring to the discussion is the clarity of straight answers.<br />
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<strong>20. “The government should require all senior citizens to receive end-of-life counseling.”</strong><br />
End-of-life counseling is important, although receiving it many years in advance of death will not always provide sufficient guidance when it is most needed. But the government has no business forcing seniors to submit to such counseling. Americans are correctly concerned that a government that pays for such counseling and the cost of care will seek to set the terms of the counseling, or to place emphasis on the financial advantages of dying sooner rather that later. Government must never make or force end-of-life decisions.<br />
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<strong>21. “Old age is not a disease.”</strong><br />
That idea is the reason that the Food and Drug Administration has no interest in research on drugs and supplements that would extend healthy life spans. Death from old age is not officially a disease. The FDA does not care if and when you die, as long as you are not sick when it happens. Admittedly the rigidity of the FDA’s methods does not lend itself to such research. If a supplement demonstrates promise for extending life spans, the FDA would probably require a thirty-year clinical trial to approve it. If approved they would then require another thirty years of “comparative effectiveness” studies to make sure it works better than everything else. By then we would be dead, but the FDA will have kept us safe. If that seems ridiculous, remember all of the terminally ill patients who have died in recent decades while being denied access to existing drugs approved years later by the FDA.<br />
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<strong>22. “Government insurance mandates will decrease the cost of insurance premiums.”</strong><br />
Forcing everyone to buy insurance (or anything) will drive up the price. Forcing coverage for treatments or conditions for which everyone does not want coverage will drive up the price. Forcing young people to buy insurance will cost them a lot more if it used to cover insurance for older Americans. Requiring men to pay as much as women will increase premiums for men, even though they die younger. (It is not fair that men stop paying for women’s insurance just because they are dead.)<br />
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<strong>23. “Too many medications are wasteful and unnecessary. The government must decide which are the most effective and forbid the use of any others.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, first ask how much it will cost the government to do this and how long it will take. Do you want to pay that additional cost? How many years are you willing to wait for a drug you need while the government decides this? Do you want to decide, for example, if Excedrin or Advil relieves your headache most effectively? Or do you want the U.S. government to tell you? Do you want your doctor to decide if a drug will save your life, or do you want to wait for the government to decide? Should a drug be forbidden for a woman because it does not work as well for men? Or forbidden for a member of one race because it does not work as well for all races? Or do you want your doctor to treat you as a unique individual with your own needs? One of the most promising areas of medical research is personalized medicine, developing treatments based on each patient’s genetic information. Will a huge government “comparative effectiveness” bureaucracy eliminate that research? Should the use of drugs that work best for you become a crime?<br />
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<strong>24. “Insurance companies can afford huge malpractice settlements, and doctors can afford large liability insurance premiums.”</strong><br />
Ask who we really think ends up paying those premiums. Ask how much the fear of second-guessing and litigation has increased the use of unnecessary and expensive testing and treatments, and how much other “defensive medicine” has driven up the cost of health care and health insurance for everyone. <br />
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<strong>25. “Governments provide their citizens with free health care.”</strong><br />
Point out that government cannot create anything, but rather it can only take things. Health care, like everything else, is ultimately made possible by business activity. What a government means when it says it is giving you something for “free” is that it is forcing you to pay for something whether you use it or not, or taking something from you to give to someone else.<br />
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<strong>26. “Countries with nationalized health care systems provide their citizens with all the health care that they need.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, ask why Canadians travel to the United States every year and spend $1 billion on American health care. Ask why Americans have more access to MRI and CT scan equipment and more of the new breakthrough drugs. Ask why Americans have better survival rates for cancer and heart attacks. Ask why more than one third of physicians employed by the National Health Service in Britain buy private insurance, and why six million of their potential patients in Britain also buy private insurance, when government health care is free. Ask why so many British citizens waiting for free surgery and cancer treatment fly to India to pay for it, and ask why no one, other than Michael Moore, is jumping on a boat to get free health care in Cuba.<br />
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<strong>27. “Physicians must provide any services that the government requires because they are indebted to society for their medical education.”</strong><br />
The first answer to this is that “society” did not spend many years of intense, dedicated effort to complete a medical education. Individual physicians did that, most of them accumulating a lot of personal debt in the process. But the most important answer is that, while many of us experienced public education (of inconsistent quality), we do not owe anyone anything. You might be grateful to some but not all of your teachers. You might be grateful to your parents for their taxes that paid for your education. But that does not mean that you must accept an undefined, unlimited and eternal moral obligation to everyone that ever has been or will be alive because you received a public education. Of course, this argument indicates that, for some people, imposing such an obligation might be the purpose of public education: if the government provides a part of your education, it owns you for life.<br />
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<strong>28. “Health care is very important, so the government should control all medical practices and health providers, to give everyone all the health care they lay claim to.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, say, “Not in America. Our own health must never be handed over to government <em>because</em> it is so important.<br />
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<strong>29. “The government must take over health care to control increasing costs.”</strong><br />
Ask when the government has been able to control the cost of anything, let alone something as technological, complex, personal and dynamic as health care. Ask why the cost of health care managed by the government has been increasing so rapidly. Ask, “What is the cost of cost control? How much do current cost-control efforts add to the amount of paperwork and expense of billing? How much would ever more controls add to the cost of health care?”<br />
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<strong>30. “The Food and Drug Administration must be given more powers and funding to control the development of drugs.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, ask, “How many terminally ill patients have died while waiting for drugs later approved by the FDA? What does the FDA approval process add to the cost of new drugs? Why does the FDA spend years trying to determine how drugs might work in every possible instance, while losing track of safety issues? Why do clinical trials using terminally ill patients require that half of the dying patients be given a placebo instead of the new drug? How has the enormous power of the FDA become a magnet drawing those with a political agenda to manipulate and manufacture clinical research to serve their objectives?<br />
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<strong>31. “The Food and Drug Administration must create a new agency to evaluate new drugs for comparative effectiveness with other drugs, after they have spent years being evaluated and tested before being approved for safety and effectiveness.”</strong><br />
Ask how much longer that will add to the time needed for new drugs. Ask what that will add to the cost of each new drug. Ask how new clinical trials will be able to compare the effectiveness of drugs that meet the unique needs of each gender and of different ethnic and age groups. Will your gender or ethnic group be denied medications that work better for them but not for all groups? Ask how all drugs can be compared in this way when some individuals respond differently to many drugs, and what will happen when a drug that is the only thing that helps some people is prohibited because something else works for others. (Ask whether the government should decide that, if ibuprofen works better than aspirin for most people, aspirin should be prohibited even if it works better for you.) Ask what will happen to the development of new “personalized medicine” that targets only a few individuals if the government requires that everything work the same way for everybody.<br />
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<strong>32. “The government should spend billions more on medical research to cure more diseases.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, point out the most distinguishing factor of government medical research: it never has to actually get results. Private research is always more efficient and gets results because it has to in order to pay for itself. Also point out that government research funds are often allocated to “politically correct” diseases based on the political pull of the constituents for those diseases, rather than to areas that are more auspicious for research. Invested funds are always more productive than dollars taken from taxpayers.<br />
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<strong>33. “Will not the commitment of President Obama in his 2009 address to Congress to eliminate cancer save many lives?”</strong><br />
Ask if the increased funding of $2.9 billion to the National Cancer Institute, with President Clinton’s commitment to eliminate cancer, eliminated cancer. Ask if President Nixon’s commitment to eliminate cancer, with the major new research in the National Cancer Act of 1971, eliminated cancer. Ask why, if government spending can be depended on to eliminate a disease, the President did not pledge new spending to eliminate death.<br />
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<strong>34. “The government can rapidly cut the cost of health care by mandating electronic medical records.”</strong><br />
Ask how that will reduce the cost of treatment, medical equipment, drugs, physician services or any other health costs. Ask if the increase of electronic records that has been happening for many years has had any substantial impact on rising costs. Ask how, if all medical records are included into a single, government database, with access available to hundreds of thousands of workers in medicine and related fields, there will be any medical privacy possible. Ask why creating electronic records require that all of your medical records must be turned over to the government without your permission. Ask why the new “national coordinator” will be able to review your records to evaluate and require changes in the treatment recommended by your physician. Ask why this national coordinator will be able to turn your records over to any organization for “research,” without your permission, or sell your records to outside businesses for marketing purposes, without your permission, or why the Secretary of Health and Human Services will be able to turn your records over to anyone for any purpose, without your permission. Ask anyone if they think their physician will be able to recommend a treatment for them if inspection of medical records resulted in a rebuke by the national coordinator for providing the same treatment to other patients. <br />
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<strong>35. “Health care is broken.”</strong><br />
First ask yourself if you think your own health care is broken. If it is, ask who broke it. If the answer is the regulatory and legislative activity of politicians, ask how they can be trusted to fix it. Ask if the reform they advocate will be in their own political interest or in the interest of the best health care.<br />
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<strong>36. “Government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid cut medical costs by controlling and reducing reimbursements paid to physicians and hospitals and other providers.”</strong><br />
Ask what happens when providers are forced to provide services at a rate that does not cover their costs. We have decades of experience with that. They must shift those costs to other patients and private insurers, which increases the cost of health care and insurance for everyone.<br />
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<strong>37. “Mandatory insurance is the best course of health care policy because it supports individual responsibility.”</strong><br />
When you hear this, ask if it should also be mandatory to buy a nice house and take out a big mortgage to solve housing problems. Ask if making the lack of insurance into a crime has anything to do with individual responsibility. Ask how destroying individual rights supports responsibility. Ask if the purchase of something is made mandatory, will that make it cheaper, or more expensive. Ask if politicians who use the force of law to require you to buy health insurance will be able to resist micro-managing exactly what such insurance must cover. Ask how special interests will use the mandate to make contributions to politicians and lobby to add more coverage requirements for their benefit. Ask why politicians, like former Senator John Edwards, also want to require, through such mandates, that everyone get specific examinations. Ask how such requirements will be enforced and what it will do to the privacy of medical records. How does being forced by the government to do things increase individual responsibility? Why not encourage freedom?<br />
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<strong>38. “The government should require the computerization of all medical records, which should then be made available to the government to ensure their privacy.”</strong><br />
Ask why the same people that are terrified (perhaps with justification) of the government intercepting some international phone calls have no problem with giving the government every personal detail of your medical history.<br />
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<strong>39. “We <em>need</em> Universal Health Care.”</strong><br />
The best response to whatever that means is that “Universal Freedom” is the best and only effective means to maintain our health, our lives and anything else that we value.<br />
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<strong>40. “We need to trust the government to provide us with the best medical care.”</strong><br />
Ask if we <em>really</em> trust the loving arms of government to provide us with the best medical care. Ask if government health care does not often turn into political health care, to serve the spoils system of politicians and provide service primarily to those special interests with political pull.<br />
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<strong>41. “Only government can reduce the cost of health care.”</strong><br />
Ask why every government health care system in the world reduces cost only by reducing the availability of health care and increasing rationing and the time spent on waiting lists for referral to specialists, diagnosis and treatment, and by denying access to some medications, testing and treatment completely.<br />
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<strong>42. “People need health care, so health care is a right that must be provided to them by others.”</strong><br />
The response must be that everyone has a right to <em>seek</em> health care, to make their own decisions about it, and even to ask others for it if they can’t get it. But no one has a right to anyone else’s life.<br />
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<strong>43. “Health care spending can be reduced by providing insurance to everyone, because costs now incurred by the uninsured will no longer be passed along to the rest of us.”</strong><br />
Ask how those savings can be achieved without spending as much or probably more to pay for the insurance.<br />
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<strong>44. “Health care spending can be reduced by mandating that everyone buy insurance.”</strong><br />
Ask, if this is true, why mandatory insurance in Massachusetts resulted in rapidly increasing spending beyond all projections. Ask why Medicare, which is mandatory for all Americans, has seen rapidly increased spending beyond all expectations, has $36 trillion in unfunded liabilities and is rapidly running out of money.<br />
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<strong>45. “The State Children’s Health Program is necessary to provide children with health care.”</strong><br />
Ask why it is necessary to move millions of children who have private insurance into a government program, if not to make them dependent on politicians handing out benefits. Ask why the program slips in restrictions on opening more efficient specialty hospitals, if not to protect the special interest of large hospital empires. Ask how the program will be funded once income from the tax on a rapidly diminishing pool of smokers runs out.<br />
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<strong>46. “A Federal Health Board is required to control expense and require better health care.”</strong><br />
Nearly one hundred years ago the Federal Reserve System with a Federal Reserve Board was established to insure a stable money supply and eliminate recessions, depressions, inflation, and unemployment. Ask how the Federal Reserve Board has done with that. Ask why we should expect more of a Federal Health Board. Based on experience, what could possibly go wrong?<br />
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<strong>47. “Medicare should be expanded to cover all Americans.”</strong><br />
Ask how Medicare can do that when it already has tens of trillions of unfunded liability for current Medicare patients and has not been able to control spending for them.<br />
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<strong>48. “Only government can control health care spending and hold costs down.”</strong><br />
Ask why, based on more than two hundred years of experience, we should think that the government can hold down the cost of anything. Ask why the government cannot do as good a job at providing affordable primary care as new walk-in clinics in retail stores. Ask why Wal-Mart and its competitors have done more to reduce the cost of generic drugs than any government program.<br />
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<strong>49. “Only the government can guarantee quality health care.”</strong><br />
Ask if the U.S. Postal Service provides better and more affordable delivery than FedEx or UPS. Ask if public schools and teacher unions guarantee better or even more affordable education for children than private and parochial schools. Ask if government-run hospitals provide better care than private commercial and non-profit hospitals. <br />
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<strong>50. “The government can require American medicine to concentrate on wellness.”</strong><br />
Ask if most government systems don’t concentrate instead on rationing. Ask if a wellness approach will help those on waiting lists for months or years for medical diagnostic equipment, access to specialists or surgery.<br />
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<strong>Fighting for the Future</strong><br />
The specific issues addressed above do not offer much hope for the level of the current discussion on health care in America. Restoring free choice and free markets in medicine will clearly be an uphill struggle. That must not discourage us. In a letter to a fan of <em>The Fountainhead</em> in 1945, Ayn Rand wrote:<br />
<blockquote>
“Free enterprise as a system may be wiped out for a while by fools, cowards and second handers—but its spirit (Individualism, which means Man’s spirit) cannot be destroyed, it will go on and win in the end, even if it takes centuries, as it has always won in the past. Because individualism is the only thing that works or can work.” (<em>Letters of Ayn Rand</em>, Michael S. Berliner, Ed., p. 225).</blockquote>
The first step in restoring individualism as the basis for medical care is to speak out. Silence implies consent, and we must never be silent in the face of collectivist propaganda. We can relentlessly point to the facts that demonstrate collectivism does not work, and make clear that it <em>cannot</em> work because it is immoral.The Las Vegas Gentlemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03158158956838785902noreply@blogger.com