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The Road to Serfdom—We’re Almost There: Roger Simon

Posted By on March 19th, 2022

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-road-to-serfdom-were-almost-there_4347402.html

We are learning March 18 something that apparently slipped under the radar for a few days.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “quietly” made some changes to its data tracker website on March 15, removing tens of thousands of deaths from COVID-19, nearly a quarter of which were those for young people under 18.

They tell us this occurred because of a “coding logic error.”

I wonder how many they would have had to remove if they included those who were registered by hospitals—for profit or otherwise—as having died from the virus when they had multiple other of what we have learned to call co-morbidities. (If there’s one thing we can say for the pandemic, it built our vocabularies.)

In other words, they didn’t necessarily die of COVID-19, but the hospitals said they did, a different kind of coding error, I guess.

The number would likely be staggering.

This supposed “coding logic error”—whatever that may be; the CDC doesn’t precisely tell us—could indeed be symbolic of, or even actually encompass, the entire pandemic.

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HAS ONE RIGGED ELECTION DESTROYED AMERICA FOREVER? THE ODDS ARE AGAINST US. Wayne Allyn Root

Posted By on March 19th, 2022

https://rootforamerica.com/has-one-rigged-election-destroyed-america-forever-the-odds-are-against-us/

Folks, we are in a world of trouble.

America has faced tough odds before. America beats impossible odds all the time. We are resilient and relentless. We are a nation of people who believe nothing is impossible. So, never count us out. There is always hope.

But make no mistake, we are now in the fight of our lives. The odds may be worse than we have ever faced. Our nation is being destroyed from within. America is hanging by a thread. The attacks are relentless and ominous.

The nation is divided like never before. You’d have to go back to the Civil War to find our nation this bitterly divided.

Our borders are wide open with millions of foreign invaders coming in each year. The bad countries of the world are emptying out their prisons- to send their worst criminals to us. Illegal aliens by the millions are bringing poverty, disease and violent crime; bloating our budgets; exploding our national debt; and destroying our education, healthcare and social security systems.

Inflation is raging like never before in modern history. No one really knows how bad it will get. But the government is hiding the true level. More accurate measurements of inflation put us in the range of 15% to 20%. And it’s only going to get worse. This has the potential to wipe out the great American middle class.

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Shameless, delusional Cuomo brothers continue to play the role of victims By Maureen Callahan

Posted By on March 18th, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/shameless-delusional-cuomo-brothers-continue-to-play-the-role-of-victims/

Cockroaches.

Keith Richards.

The Cuomo brothers.

Yes, Andrew and Chris, those heroes-to-zeroes, have officially earned their place among the rare life forms sure to survive Armageddon.

Nothing can exterminate these two from public life, because nothing Andrew or Chris has ever done is their fault.

Actually, scratch that. The problem, you see (and can’t you just hear Andrew’s pedantic, patronizing voice saying this, lowering down into that slow, conspiratorial whisper?) is ev-er-y-bo-dy else.

And really, the Cuomo brothers believe this. Two delusional, power-hungry, disloyal narcissists, determined to bully weary voters and viewers into submission. It’s all so very dignified and statesman-like.

On Thursday morning, just seven months shy of resigning in disgrace, Andrew gave a lengthy speech explaining what’s gone wrong with the modern Democratic party.

Answer: They pushed him out of it.

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Retiring Moderate Democrat Unloads on Her Party’s Extremists By Rick Moran

Posted By on March 18th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/03/18/retiring-moderate-democrat-unloads-on-her-partys-extremists-n1567548

Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida is retiring despite being only 43 years old and well established in her Orlando-area district. She has helped lead the few remaining centrists in the Democratic Party back to relevance and has gone against Speaker Nancy Pelosi numerous times to try and moderate some of the party’s extremist views.

But the fiction that the Democrats are a “big tent,” tolerant party is being exposed with the party being in control of Congress. Murphy told Politico that there’s no middle ground anymore.

Politico:

“My first term … there was a lot more tolerance for, ‘Do what you need to do to hold your seat, and come back because we’re trying to build towards [a] majority,’” Murphy said. “With us being in the majority, that tolerance eroded a bit. It’s unfortunate, because I think in order for us as Democrats to hold the majority, you have to be able to win in seats like mine and in redder seats.

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This Photo Should End the Transgender-Athlete Debate By Judson Berger

Posted By on March 18th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/this-photo-should-end-the-transgender-athlete-debate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

On a most basic level, everyone knows that the decision to allow Lia Thomas to compete against women at the collegiate level is wrong. The decision has been rationalized to death with rhetoric concerning the transgender swimmer’s “authentic self,” as if the female swimmers competing under a new glass ceiling had any quarrel with that.

But the photo above should end that debate. In a tolerant and reasonable society that values fairness — fairness for women, which understandably has been an animating issue for progressives and was the motivation for the first bill Barack Obama signed as president — the jarring image of Thomas towering over the defeated women at the 500-yard freestyle yesterday is unassailable evidence of how wrong this charade is.

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The Democrats Are Building Themselves a Suicide Machine By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on March 18th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-democrats-are-building-themselves-a-suicide-machine/

The party has gone along with the American media in advancing a bizarro-world ideology that few support.

T he Democrats are in political trouble, and the media bear much of the blame.

This is not because the media have ceased to be horribly biased in the Democrats’ favor. They remain that, and hopelessly so. Rather, it’s because the media have become more crazy, more self-confident, and less respected than ever, and because this shift has rendered their bias less useful than it once was.

For reasons that remain alien to me, almost the entirety of the American press — as well as much of academia and the entertainment industry — has spent the last five years assiduously adopting an exceptionally weird race-and gender-essentialist ideology that pretty much everyone outside of those institutions absolutely loathes. And, in its infinite wisdom, the Democratic Party has followed suit. The result has been the creation of a narrow, extremely peculiar feedback loop, within which the institutional Democratic Party and its friends in the press have concocted — and then adopted — a set of bizarro-world ideas that are met with confusion and horror once they are released into the general population. Bit by bit, piece by piece, tweet by tweet, the wagon to which the Democrats have hitched themselves is becoming a suicide machine.

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Another sign the Dem establishment fears DeSantis more than Trump By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on March 18th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/another_sign_the_dem_establishment_fears_desantis_more_than_trump.html

It would be hard to find a person who better represents the liberal media establishment than Thomas B. Edsall, whose career includes the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In his latest column for the Times, he attempts to slam Ron DeSantis, letting the world know that the Democrats fear him more than Donald Trump at the top of the 2024 presidential ticket.  But in the process of doing so, far from damaging the Florida governor with the GOP electorate and middle-of-the-road voters, he awards DeSantis badges of honor.

Consider:

DeSantis relishes using the state to enforce his aggressive social agenda and has consistently plotted a hard-right course on issues from critical race theory to transgender rights.

For example, DeSantis sponsored and pushed through the legislature the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act” — or the Stop Woke Act for short — which now awaits his signature.

The legislation, Florida H.B. 7, bans teaching critical race theory that suggests that

A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

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Cringe: Biden tells St. Patrick’s Day group, ‘I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid By Monica Showalter

Posted By on March 18th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/biden_tells_st_patricks_day_group_i_may_be_irish_but_im_not_stupid.html

Is there anything that senile Joe Biden touches that doesn’t turn to something awful?

Here’s a report from the London Daily Telegraph:

Joe Biden opened a St Patrick’s Day speech at the White House by saying: “I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid.”

While some interpreted his remark as a self-deprecating joke, others suggested it could be seen as offensive to Ireland.

Mr Biden began his speech by saying: “Father, before I begin. Bless me, Father, for I’m about to sin. I, well, I just want you to know, I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid. I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter.”

The joke was greeted with laughter in the room, and there was no reaction from Irish officials.

The Telegraph also noted:

It was at least the third time Mr Biden has used the phrase.

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The Energy Crisis and Weakening the West: Rupert Darwall

Posted By on March 18th, 2022

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/03/17/net-zero_and_esg_are_worsening_the_energy_crisis__and_weakening_the_west_822337.html

The day after President Biden announced that the United States would ban imports of Russian oil and gas, a group of eleven powerful European investment funds that includes Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, outlined plans to force Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second largest bank, to cut its lending to oil and gas companies. The juxtaposition of these two events dramatizes the fundamental disunity of the West. At the same time as the Biden administration is sanctioning Russian oil and gas producers, Western investors are sanctioning Western ones. Under the banner of ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing, the West’s capital is being deployed to create an artificial shortage of oil and gas produced by its companies and reward non-Western oil and gas producers such as Russia and Iran with higher prices. In doing so, the West is undermining its own security interests.

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy markets were already extremely tight. In the past, high oil and gas prices stimulated a supply-side response leading to increased output and to prices falling back. This relationship has broken down. According to analysts at JP Morgan, capital spending by S&P Global 1200 energy companies peaked in 2015 at just over $400 billion and shrank to around $120 billion last year – less than half its previous trough of $250 billion in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, even though global demand is now around 15% higher than it was then.

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DEI Will Cause People To DIE of Medical Education Wokeness Rod Dreher

Posted By on March 18th, 2022

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/dei-will-cause-people-to-die-medical-education-wokeness/

In the comments to the crackpot Yale Law students post, my good friend JonF suggests that this is not a big deal, really, that the protesters will grow up to mature into normalcy, and pose no threat to common sense. I pushed back, saying that may have been true in our generation (we’re the same age, Gen X), but that pattern changed with the Millennials, who marched through the institutions and changed them.

Here’s a chilling — seriously, chilling — example from the medical profession. John Sailer, on the National Association of Scholars website, writes:

In October 2021, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association jointly released its 54-page Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narratives and Concepts, which received widespread criticism for its ideologically-charged language and recommendations. The guide suggested physicians update their language using “equity-focused alternatives,” trading terms such as “vulnerable” for “oppressed” and “disadvantaged” for “historically and intentionally excluded.”