John Ioannidis Warned COVID-19 Could Be a “Once-In-A-Century” Data Fiasco. He Was Right The unreliability of COVID-19 data is a problem everyone seems to agree on. Jon Miltimore

https://fee.org/articles/john-ioannidis-warned-covid-19-could-be-a-once-in-a-century

On Thursday, a Florida health official told a local news station that a young man who was listed as a COVID-19 victim had no underlying conditions.

The answer surprised reporters, who probed for additional information.

“He died in a motorcycle accident,” Dr. Raul Pino clarified. “You could actually argue that it could have been the COVID-19 that caused him to crash. I don’t know the conclusion of that one.”

The anecdote is a ridiculous example of a real controversy that has inspired some colorful memes: what should define a COVID-19 death?

While the question is important, such incidents may be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg regarding the unreliability of COVID-19 data.

In May, a public radio station in Miami broke what soon became a national story. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been conflating antibody and viral testing, obscuring key metrics lawmakers use to determine if they should reopen their respective economies.

The story was soon picked up by NPR, who spoke to an epidemiologist who condemned the practice.

“Reporting both serology and viral tests under the same category is not appropriate, as these two types of tests are very different and tell us different things,” Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told NPR.

The Atlantic soon followed with an article that explained the agency was painting an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. The practice, the writers said, was making it difficult to tell if more people were actually sick or had merely acquired antibodies from fighting off the virus.

Public health experts were not impressed.

THE UNTEACHABLES: MIKE ADAMS

https://townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/2020/02/06/the-unteachables-n2560821

Last week, I received a phone call from a professor who teaches in another department here at the University of North Carolina – Wilmington (UNCW), where I have taught for the past 27 years. He was reporting a case of possible discrimination, which resulted in a professor being denied tenure thus losing his livelihood very soon. When I received the call, I immediately began asking questions to assess the validity of his concern. After just a few questions, I came across some information that will shock the conscience of any clear thinking, rational individual.

By way of background information, professors at our university must pass through several hoops to get tenure after they are initially hired for a tenure-track position. The initial contract is only for a few years. If professors get reappointed, a few years later they have an opportunity to apply for lifetime tenure. But to get this tenure, they first have to get approval from a majority of the tenured professors in their department, their department chair, and their college dean. If applicants succeed at this, they face a final vote from the university-wide Reappointment, Tenure, and Promotion (RTP) Committee. Since every faculty member must pass through this committee, its chair is arguably the most powerful professor on campus.

In the case that was reported to me, the applicant had received all three initial approvals. But, then, the RTP committee chair rejected the application. When I learned this, I asked about who is currently on the RTP committee. That is when I learned that its chair is Dr. Kimberly Cook.

White Man Can’t Breathe By Mike Adams

https://townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/2020/06/02/white-man-cant-breathe-n2

Cary Aspinwall and Dave Boucher are investigative reporters for The Dallas Morning News. They deserve a Pulitzer Prize for an article written last summer that apparently no one in America has read, which is why I am summarizing it here today. It was about a man named Tony Timpa who cried for help more than 30 times as Dallas police officers pinned his neck to the ground. Before he died, Timpa shouted repeatedly, “You’re gonna kill me!”

And kill him the police officers did. After Timpa became unconscious, the officers who had him cuffed assumed he was asleep. As the minutes passed, the officers joked about waking him up for school and making him waffles for breakfast.

Body camera footage shows first responders waited at least four minutes after Timpa became unresponsive to begin CPR. Even worse, the police officers pinned his handcuffed arms behind his back for nearly 14 minutes and zip-tied his legs together. Shortly after he was loaded onto a gurney and put into an ambulance, Timpa was pronounced dead.

This culminated an incident that began when Timpa called 911 from the parking lot of a Dallas porn store. He told a dispatcher he suffered from schizophrenia and depression and was off his prescription medication. Later, police incident reports falsely claimed Timpa’s behavior that night was aggressive. In stark contradiction, the police video shows Timpa struggling to breathe and asking the officers to stop pinning him down. 

France’s Cathedrals on Fire: ‘The Final Stage of De-Christianization’? by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16264/france-cathedrals-fire

“The desecration continues to grow in Europe. Recent acts on statues of the Virgin Mary in French churches show how much these gestures are the result of barbaric hatred. They call for reactions. Catholics can no longer remain silent”. — Cardinal Robert Sarah, January 10, 2020.

“We must try everything, while it is still possible, to save our civilization. Our civilization is the Greek, Roman, Judeo-Christian heritage”. — Alain Finkielkraut, author, L’Opinon, December 17, 2013.

If France keeps failing to protect its Christian identity, France as we know it will cease to exist; it will become a different place entirely.

A leading curator of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Keith Christiansen, was criticized for posting on Instagram a painting of Alexandre Lenoir saving France’s monuments from the ravages of the French Revolution. Christiansen wrote:

“Alexandre Lenoir battling the revolutionary zealots bent on destroying the royal tombs in Saint Denis. How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve. And how grateful we are to people like Lenoir who realized that their value — both artistic and historical — extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change”.

Christiansen was criticizing the current removal and desecration of historic monuments. He could not have known that, a few weeks later, another French cathedral would be vandalized and an ancient organ, which had survived Lenoir’s revolutionary zealots, destroyed by the blaze.

Communist China: A History Lesson for Mark Cuban To virtue-signaling corporatists, black lives matter but Chinese lives do not. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/24/communist-china-a-history-lesson-for-mark-cuban/

Recently, in what constitutes the modern equivalent of an old-fashioned Texas showdown, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban met in the middle of the Twitter community’s Main Street and exchanged fire.

The genesis of the dispute was conservative talk radio host Mark Davis’ statement that he would be “out” if Mavericks players took a knee during the national anthem in a show of support for the Black Lives Matters movement. Not surprisingly, Cuban defended his players by responding to Davis with “Bye.” 

Not surprisingly, too, Senator Cruz took exception to Cuban’s cavalier attitude toward Texans who believe kneeling for the national anthem is disrespectful. This led to Cuban questioning Cruz’s manhood. Cruz responded in kind.

Though initially about the anthem controversy, the most noteworthy aspect of this Twitter shootout at the “I’m OK, You’re Not Corral,” occurred when Cruz challenged Cuban to criticize Communist China, in general, and Beijing’s mistreatment of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs in particular. 

After Cuban affirmed his support for Black Lives Matter, claimed America is systemically racist, and accused Cruz of not doing enough to stop the COVID-19 pandemic (which Cuban failed to note originated in Communist China), he espoused the amoral canard corporate titans have long used to justify their complicit silence about oppression in the face of massive profits: “But I have never gotten involved in the domestic policies of ANY foreign country. We have too much to do here.”

High Culture’s Iminent Surrender to the Woke By Jared Peterson

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/high_cultures_iminent_surrender_to_the_woke_.html

Not at all surprisingly, the classical music world is now squarely in the sights of the woke mob.  So now the gang of callow American Maoists is going to teach us that excellence in classical music — composers and performers — is also a white male plot.  I suppose that soon great American symphonies will be hiring violinists who might just barely be able to cut it in a small-town community orchestra.  And the Metropolitan Opera? As an opera lover I can attest: Few sounds are more grating to the ear than opera badly sung, and to sing it well takes extraordinary talent and a lifetime of devotion.

For lovers of classical instrumental music and opera, prepare yourselves for mediocrity and worse.  Can the legitimate stage and museums be far behind?

Of course, in the current revolutionary environment, the culmination of 50 years, this had to come.

It’s important to see this ongoing cultural revolution in some kind of historical context.

America’s rapid cultural collapse, as distinct from its gradual decline, started with an attack on a key cultural — not political or economic — institution, the university.  It began in earnest in the fall of 1964 at UC, Berkeley.  This writer was present, a 19-year-old junior, participated as a dissenter, and followed events closely in amazed disgust, as President Clark Kerr surrendered the university to the radical left and handed them a tactical roadmap for the next 60 years.

The events at Berkeley in 1964 and Kerr’s handling of them provided the template for the left’s destruction of the American university: Take over the Dean’s office, employ a mob to bring normal university functions to a halt, make “non- negotiable” demands, and then, as a reward, get anything you want from administrators and faculty prepared to sell out the functions of the university – imparting knowledge and pursuing truth – for (temporary) peace.

The depth of UC President Clark Kerr’s confusion, weakness and cowardice in October of 1964 — an important story for another time — shocked even the left.  But leftists quickly drew the correct lesson from Kerr’s fecklessness: Universities are easy to mug.  And, employing the Berkeley model, mug them the left did over the next two decades.  By 1985, perhaps earlier, American universities were unrecognizable as the institutions they had been.  The worst consequence of that period was the creation of an entire array of politicized and intellectually vacuous new departments and majors focusing on grievance and specializing in victimology, all born at the gunpoint of the Berkeley tactics that had been validated by Clark Kerr in 1964.  For at least 30 years those new departments have been spreading the lie of American and western civilizational evil, tarted up as academic theory and gradually oozing outward to infect all aspects of campus life with the new university ethic: Ideology over rigorous analysis, mandatory beliefs over rational inquiry, and — above all — feelings over facts.

Another company stands up to the cancel culture mob By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/another_company_stands_up_to_the_cancel_culture_mob.html

For quite a while now, we’ve been treated to the demoralizing and unedifying spectacle of media outlets and corporations bowing down to the mob’s cancel culture demands. Authors have been banned, editors fired, Trader Joe’s products renamed, statues dragged down, and much more, merely because spoiled, entitled, college-educated snowflakes, secure in their victimhood, have said that words or products hurt their feelings and made them feel “unsafe.”

Thankfully, after the first shock of this Maoist attack on American institutions, some are beginning to recover their backbone. First, Goya Foods stood up to the mob. Then Red Bull refused to back down. And now the Wall Street Journal has declined to allow its baby journalists to hold its editorial page hostage.

The back story to the Journal’s courageous stand is that 280 employees in the News department signed a letter to the publisher, Almar Latour, criticizing the paper’s opinion pages. The letter is a marvel of Orwellian writing. It opens by expressing support for the First Amendment and then spends three pages explaining why the paper’s opinion page needs to stifle itself because it publishes material with which the letter’s signatories disagree. Not coincidentally, they invariably disagree with conservative content.

The greatest offender, according to the letter, was Heather MacDonald’s piece about a pair of academics’ cowardly decision to withdraw from publication a study showing the absence of systemic racism when it came to the police shooting blacks in America. The academics wanted to withdraw the piece because MacDonald had relied on its findings. (NB: MacDonald had not twisted the results; she had merely relied on them.)

MacDonald wrote about this academic game in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, something the letter writers found unacceptable. Indeed, the MacDonald article caused psychic pain greater than any snowflake should have to bear:

Multiple employees of color publicly spoke out about the pain this Opinion piece caused them during company-held discussions surrounding diversity initiatives…. If the company is serious about better supporting its employees of color, at a bare minimum it should raise Opinion’s standards so that misinformation about racism isn’t published.

Democrats Have Completely Abandoned Civility By Jeffrey Folks

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/democrats_have_completely_abandoned_civility.html

On July 20, Nancy Pelosi said that if President Trump refuses to accept the results of the November election, he will have to be “fumigated” out of the White House.  Fumigation is a technique used against insects, and the idea that human beings are insects has a long history in totalitarian discourse.  Hitler described Jews as “vermin” and “parasites,” a form of dehumanization that is always just one step away from physical violence.  Speaker Pelosi should apologize immediately, and profusely, for her use of this inappropriate rhetoric.

Most thoughtful persons would agree that labeling another an “insect” is uncivil.  A cultured individual who practices civility is tolerant of the opinions and beliefs of others, and indeed, toleration is the best measure of civility.  One may be a Catholic, but he practices tolerance toward other Christian and non-Christian forms of belief, even including atheism and agnosticism.  He may be a liberal, but he values the opinions of conservatives and treats conservatives with respect.

By this measure, Joe Biden and the radicals who now support him have not been civil.  Biden now expresses contempt for conservative policies before even considering their potential value.  So it was with President Trump’s pledge to buy American-made goods.  That pledge of “America First” drew harsh criticism from Biden and his party — until Biden stole the idea and made it part of his own platform.  Biden could not bring himself to admit that Trump was right.  That sort of contempt for another is the essence of incivility. 

Like most liberals, Biden’s contempt is all-encompassing.  In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., ultimately decided in Hobby Lobby’s favor by the Supreme Court, Biden sided with those who would force persons of traditional Christian faith to pay for employees’ contraceptives.  Indeed, it was Biden’s Affordable Care Act that forced Hobby Lobby to provide all twenty FDA-approved contraceptives to employees.  The Obama administration was intolerant of traditionalists when it wrote the contraceptive mandate into the Affordable Care Act, and Biden would only double down on this intolerance if he sought to restore the mandate to his “expanded” version of Obamacare.

Hobby Lobby was not an isolated case of liberal intolerance.  In every free speech case that arose during the Obama years, Biden seemed more than willing to force his opinions on others.

The Frankfurt School and Excellent Foolishness: How the Left Infects Impressionable Minds By David Solway,

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/07/24/the-frankfurt-school-and-excellent-foolishness-how-the-left-infects-impressionable-minds-n696846

It has long struck me how the Frankfurt School, a collection of Leftist émigrés from Nazi Germany, could have been so successful in dominating the curriculum of the American university and wielding so massive an influence over following generations of students. Its major figures, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, were the main authors of the political revolution of the 1960s which gradually filtered into the culture to produce the revisionist “narrative” and physical violence we observe all around us today.

The most publically significant spokesperson was Herbert Marcuse, whose One Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization and his influential, totalitarian-inspired essay “Repressive Tolerance” planted the seeds of political and epistemic subversion in the fertile soil of American academia and, ultimately, in the marl of the cultural and institutional life. Marcuse argued in the essay that we must be “intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” By “status quo,” he meant classical liberal thought with its emphasis on tradition, individual autonomy, civic responsibility, and limited government, which he thought were responsible for deep-rooted social injustice. The narrative he developed was irresistible to his legion of acolytes.

The Frankfurters were the red brigades of the university Left, striving to fill their students’ minds with the doctrine of human and social perfectibility according to the egalitarian principles of their Marxist forbears, in particular the theories and ruminations of the Italian revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács. The Woke generation now rioting in the streets of Portland, Seattle, and other cities are their unwitting progeny, the shock troops of Antifa and BLM who never read Marcuse, let alone Horkheimer, Adorno, Gramsci or Lukács—and surely would be incapable of doing so with any comprehension. They have succumbed to a political virus of which they are unaware, fallen prey to a toxic narrative developed by the luminaries of the intellectual Left. This is what I would dub trickle-down intellectonomics, how complex thought (however specious) gradually leaks away into howls, bellows, and yawps.

There is no doubt that the crucial figures of the “Western Marxist” movement were brilliant men and erudite scholars, eloquent to a fault. They were right about some things, in particular about the rise of anti-Semitism as a function of a world sinking into barbarism. But how could they have been so wrong about America, working to transform the American Dream into the American Nightmare?

The Racism of Anti-Racist Education by Noah Rothman

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/noah-rothman/the-racism-of-anti-racist-education/

Amid an aggressive campaign by teachers unions to prove that the work public-school teachers do is so essential that they cannot be allowed to do it, it would seem an inopportune time for the New York Times to mount an attack on those schools. But that is what it plans to do—at least, implicitly, and only in the most socially acceptable of ways: by attacking the white parents of white students, who make up a plurality of public-school enrollees.

“[W]hen we look at how our schools are failing, we usually focus on who they’re failing: Black and brown kids,” the Times noted in announcing a new podcast series contemptuously entitled “Nice White Parents.” Indeed, we usually ask that question because those are the demographics public schools are failing—a condition that has gotten worse in the age of distance learning (an objective assessment rendered by no less a source than the New York Times itself). “If you want to understand what’s wrong with our public education system,” the podcast’s pitch continues, “you have to look at what is arguably the most powerful force in our schools: White parents.”

In truth, they’ve got a point, though not the one they’re intent on making. A national effort to purge from the American political landscape even the subtlest remnants of racist thought long ago captured the primarily white educational establishment. “Anti-racism” may be relatively new to the American political vocabulary, but it’s been an objective America’s educators have pursued for some time. Unfortunately, the forms this well-meaning mission has taken look to a skeptical observer like marginally more benign forms of racism.

For example, English grammar is now racist. Or, translated into the inscrutable language of the academy, the expectation that minority students should be as competent as their white counterparts in the syntax and morphology of the written word is an outgrowth of internalized racial constructs.