There Is No Epidemic of Racist Police Shootings

Heather Mac Donald National Review Online July 31, 2019

A new study debunks a common myth.

The Democratic presidential candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan 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.”

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 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.

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.

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.)

The Obama administration recommended 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 complained 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.

This effort to increase minority representation will not reduce racial disparities in shootings, concludes the PNAS 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 study 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.

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 PNAS 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.

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.

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 eight times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, 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.

This piece originally appeared at National Review Online

 

 

Research:

 

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-releases-report-philadelphia-police-departments-use-deadly-force

 

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877

 

 

 

Our Dress Rehearsal for a Police State

Tue, Apr 28, 2020  •  Prager's Column

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.
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.

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.

“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:

No. 1: Draconian laws depriving citizens of elementary civil rights.

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.

No. 2: A mass media supportive of the state’s messaging and deprivation of rights.

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.”

No. 3: Use of police.

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.

“And why are they dispatched to a person jogging on a beach or sitting alone in a park?” I asked.
Because the department was informed about these lawbreakers.

“And who told the police about these lawbreakers?” I asked.

His answer brings us to the fourth characteristic of a police state:

No. 4: Snitches.

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.

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 is Stasi-like or that, other than identifying spies during World War II, this is unprecedented in American history at anywhere near this level.

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.

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.

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.”

You cannot get there without a police state.

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.

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Google Censors Doctors on Covid 19

 

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Tucker Carlson: New Evidence Means The Coronavirus Far Less Deadly Than We Were Told

Posted By Ian Schwartz
On Date April 27, 2020

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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.

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.

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.

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:

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?"

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.

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?

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:

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.
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.

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.

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.



"Open Up Society Now" Because "Lock downs Are Weakening Our Immune Systems"

by Tyler Durden

Sun, 04/26/2020 - 16:45

Authored by Edward Peter Stringham via The American Institute for Economic Research,

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.

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:  COVID-19 came here earlier than previously believed, is more ubiquitous, and ultimately for the general population less deadly than we thought.

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.

“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.

“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?”

Here are some selected quotes from their interview with a hostile reporter (emphasis added).

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.

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….

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.

That is not materializing. What is materializing is, in the state of California is 12% positives.

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?

96% of people in California who get COVID would recover, with almost no significant sequelae;  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.

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.

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…

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.

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?

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?  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.

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.  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.”

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.

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.

…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….

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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….

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.

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…

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.

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.

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Google DELETED these videos!  Apparently someone doesn't want us to see them.
https://www.redstate.com/jeffc/2020/04/28/youtube-takes-down-video-of-california-doctors-who-argued-for-lifting-covid-19-restrictions/
 

Gender Identification in one Video

(Link)

Is this where the USA is headed? Apparently so.

Word Crime: Two UConn Students Arrested For Saying Racial Slurs

Posted by Mike LaChance    Wednesday, October 23, 2019 at 7:00am

On Legal Insurrection

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.
These students were arrested for saying words.
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.
Ben Kesslen reports at NBC News:

2 white UConn students arrested after video showed them shouting racial slurs
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. 

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. 

Karal and Mucaj’s charges could result in a $50 fine or up to 30 days in jail.
NBC sent emails to the two men Tuesday morning requesting comment but did not immediately hear back.

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.

Jon Street of Campus Reform explains how the situation led to arrests:

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. 

“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.

In this short video report from WFSB News, you will see that this sparked campus protests and demands from student activists:

Adam Steinbaugh of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) provides background on the statute used to justify the arrest, and calls this unconstitutional:

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. 

Why is it rarely enforced? Because it is plainly unconstitutional. The use of racially-derogatory language — without more — is protected by the First Amendment.

This incident is just the latest example in a disturbing trend of criminalizing speech. Last month, New York made it illegal to use the term “illegal alien” in a derogatory manner. This week, a lawmaker in Massachusetts is proposing outlawing use of the word “bitch.”

How much longer are we going to tolerate this constant erosion of our rights?
Featured image via YouTube.

Media Focus on Mass Shootings Shows Disconnect from Actual Crime Trends

• 

08/03/2019 Ryan McMaken

 

Mises Institute

 

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.

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. USA Today 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."

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.

As the Pew Research Center has noted, [i]n a survey in late 2016, 57% of registered voters said crime in the U.S. had gotten worse 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. And, the overall trend has been downward for decades.

The homicide rate in America in recent years has been around half of what it was in the early 1990s.

  Indeed, for Americans born in the 1970s or after, the last few years have been the least homicidal years of their lives.

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.1

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.

Full-year stats for 2018 will become available in September.

From January to June of 2018, there were 6.7 percent fewer murders, and 4.3 percent less violent crime overall.

  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 full-year 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.

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.

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.

But we can also see that violent crime in general — including aggravated assaults — are down considerably from earlier peaks.

Violent crime overall was at 382.9 per 100,000 during 2017, near a 45 year low.

Aggravated assaults were near a 40-year low, at 248.9 per 100,000.

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.

What Role Do Mass Shootings Play?

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."

That may be so. But how much of the homicide puzzle are mass shootings? It turns out: very small.
According to Mother Jones magazine — 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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, USAToday reports, 41% of Americans fear random mass shootings.

It remains unclear, however, why USAToday 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.

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 the sort we see in Baltimore 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.

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 voters 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.

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.

• 1. 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)

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Contact Ryan McMakenTwitter

Why I proudly don’t watch the news or read the papers (and you shouldn’t either)

May 17, 2018 / Mike Killen


“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.”

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.
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.

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.

Most people pride themselves on being informed

There is an ENORMOUS paradox when it comes to consuming journalism, news and current events.
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.

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.

We ALL think we’re well informed

John is very well informed.

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.

Some people think the job market is bad because of immigration. Others think it’s because of automation and robots.

Some people think crime is up because of video
game violence. Others think it’s because of poor parenting.

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.

Crime is LOWER than ever

The job market is in GREAT condition. Crime is LOWER than ever.

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?

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.

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.

The reason that people justify having an insider knowledge, is because they apply the story through their own experience and filter.

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.

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.

Someone else who’s made a lot of money by running a business might say it’s just part of becoming an entrepreneur.

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.
My argument is that any new story is worthless, as it’s often presented as a dramatic retelling, rather than stating the pure facts.

All news positions itself as unbiased (which is can’t ever be)

Many journalists pride themselves on being unbiased when they present a new story. This is by definition completely impossible.

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.

Iraqi journalists however reported on a foreign nation invading their country, removing their leader and destroying healthcare, education and transport systems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s scary calling yourself uninformed

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.

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.
However, recent studies have shown that the most educated people on the planet don’t make any better decisions than random chance.

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.

How many of the world’s one year old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?

In all low income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?

In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has…?

 

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.

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.

With most countries having between 10% and 2% of their population answering the correct answer.
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.

Poverty across the world has dropped

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 lowest level of global poverty in history.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

It doesn’t help me, help people

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.

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.

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.
Political debates and democracy are a great example of news being used to influence people’s votes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People confuse opinion and offense, with fact

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.

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 by definition, designed to invoke an emotional response.

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.

Take the royal wedding for example. Prince Harry is marrying Megan Markle and I have absolutely zero opinion on it.

However a quick Google search would show plenty of emotional opinions being presented as facts.


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.

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.

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.

We also have a habit of asking other people’s opinions and positioning them as fact. Journalists are often seen asking “How do you feel about this?” or “What do you think about…?”
It’s as if we have confused individual feelings with facts.

It gets even worse when people exclaim offence or outrage at something, which has absolutely no bearing or concern to them.

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.

Opinions, offence and outrage are emotions. Emotions are personal and private and therefore, could never be considered fact.

This of course raises the most impactful thought of all…

It’s been proven to make you unhappy

If something makes you unhappy, causes offence or makes you angry. Whose fault is that?
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).

So doesn’t the smart thing to do sound like turning all that shit off?

It’s no longer a secret that social media channels like Instagram and Facebook make us unhappy. 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.

It causes stress, depression, anxiety, anger, unhappiness, feeling unfulfilled and restricts creativity.
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.

via GIPHY This makes me happy.

Ignoring the news doesn’t make you ignorant. I would even argue that consuming the news, while ignoring personal development does make you ignorant.

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.

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.

It’d be like listening to Volkswagen saying that they are good for the environment. And that they love monkeys.

Some of it is plain wrong

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.

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?

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.

In fact, if you’re clever with statistics you can even present a number that’s gone down, as an increase. And vice versa.

via GIPHY

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.

Some of it is literal fantasy

Rainbow parties. This is one of my favourite news stories because it involves everything. Children, parents, sex, underage sex, teenagers, confusing language.

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.

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.

via GIPHY

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.

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.

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?

Without wanting to get too heavily into conspiracy rhetoric, it’s not that far off brainwashing.

So what can I do instead?

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

5 Ancient Stoic Tactics for Modern Life

From the Art Of Manliness


in: A Man's Life

Jeremy Anderberg • April 9, 2018 Last updated: October 24, 2018

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).

Two millennia later, the philosophy is enjoying a revival of sorts, and it’s not hard to understand why.

The primary goal of ancient Stoicism was to figure out the best way to live; as modern philosopher Lawrence Becker writes: “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.

While we’ve covered some tenets of Stoicism on the Art of Manliness before (and given an introduction to it in a podcast interview), 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.

These aren’t just abstract ideas that I’ll be presenting to you. Rather, they’re based on firsthand experience. Since I first read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations last year, 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.

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 do 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).

What’s especially appealing about Stoicism is that it’s what Massimo Pigliucci 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?
Without further ado, I present 5 ways to make Stoicism a daily practice:

1. Visualize Your Life Without the Things You Love

“He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.” —Seneca

William Irvine 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.

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.

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.

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.

Now, I’m not consumed with anxiety that my kids aren’t long for this earth (Irvine notes the important difference between contemplating and worrying). 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 forever 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 truly 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.

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 moment 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 eulogy for his 24-year-old son, Alex:

“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!”

2. Memento Mori — Meditate on Death

“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

While related to the above point, memento mori is about meditating on your death rather than that of your loved ones. Whereas negative visualization is about imagining life without the things you love, memento mori asks you to meditate and be aware that you will not, in fact, live forever. Death comes for us all, including you, dear reader.

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.

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?

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 is 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 (all the words) rather than speeding through it to watch another episode of Nailed It (which is great, don’t get me wrong). 

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?

I’ve also found it’s good to occasionally read memoirs about death and dying. One of my all-time favorite books is When Breath Becomes Air 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 The Bright Hour, Dying: A Memoir, and The Last Lecture.

3. Set Internal Goals and Detach Yourself From Outcomes

“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

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.

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.
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 do have full control: your own actions.
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?
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).

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.

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.
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.

4. Welcome Discomfort

“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

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.

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.

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 pleasure of staying so cool. But now, to feel comfortable, you also need to feel that cool wherever 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.

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.
Isn’t that a better way to live?

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.  

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):

1. 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.)
2. 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.)
3. 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.)

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:

• Enroll in The Strenuous Life (embrace the motto of “Do Hard Things”)
• Take cold showers
• Hold/try to calm a crying baby while staying completely cool
• Exercise outside in inclement weather (perhaps without shirt, shoes, etc.)
• 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!)
• Eat nothing but rice/beans for a week (or a month)
• Fast from food completely for 24 hours once a month
• 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)
• Do manual labor around your house instead of hiring it out

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.” Embrace the grind!

5. Vigorously Pursue Character and Virtue

“Every day I reduce the number of my vices.” —Seneca

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.

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):

Regularly ask yourself: “What would my best self do in this situation?” Father James Martin brought up this idea in his book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything and in his interview with Brett on our podcast. 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:

Would my best self take two minutes to floss in the morning?
Would my best self choose a hard-boiled egg to snack on, or a Girl Scout cookie?
Would my best self call his parents and grandparents just a little more often?
Would my best self watch porn?
Would my best self write more letters to old friends as a way to stay in touch?
Would my best self have a little more patience with his kids’ drawn-out bedtime routines? 
Would my best self yell and flip the bird to the guy who cut him off on the freeway?
Would my best self take work time to dink around with his fantasy football team?
Would my best self read a book on the Kindle app, or play another level of Candy Crush?
Would my best self pursue romancing his wife, or spend another conversation-less night watching TV on the couch?
Would my best self have yet another drink?
Would my best self attend the far-away funeral of a dear friend’s parent?
Would my best self volunteer to clean up a park on a weekend morning, or would he sleep in?

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.

Follow Benjamin Franklin’s virtue plan. 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. We’ve written about the program in-depth here, and we have also created a unique journal that acts as a virtue tracker based on this 13-week plan. 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:

“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.”

Ask “What good shall I do this day?” 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. Read more about this idea here.

Develop a code of principles. How can you pursue virtue if you aren’t sure of your life’s guiding principles? Massimo Pigliucci writes in How to Be a Stoic: “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.

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 (à la Winston Churchill), 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 . . .
Regularly practice the spiritual disciplines. 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 “train the soul.” 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. Read our series on the topic, 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.

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 — making it a goal to in fact get veritably drunk on virtue — you’re bound to make strides, and as noted above, you’ll improve your community at the same time.  

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 practice the art of living.