Todd Rokita, AG Indiana, asks in his Newsweek article Why Did The U.S. Solicitor General Flip-Flop on Climate Change? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In a case called Suncor Energy Inc. v. Board of County Commissioners of Boulder County, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar recently told the Supreme Court that climate-change cases should be heard not in federal courts, but in deep-blue, progressive state courts.  Calling this proposal politically opportunistic would be an understatement.

Sixteen states disagree, as we have made known through a brief
filed by my office. Federal law should govern this and similar cases,
according to legal precedent.

My office always stands for the rule of law and fights for it in the courtroom. This case is no different, as it represents a sharp departure from the Justice Department’s longstanding view that global climate change is a federal issue that belongs in federal court.

The jurisdictional issue may seem mundane, but the stakes are high.  At a time when energy costs already burden hardworking families, environmental activists insist on banning cost-efficient, safe energy production practices. Unable to push their environmental agenda through Congress, they have turned to a series of multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against energy companies in state courts across the country alleging that state and local governments suffer harm from climate change.

The central claims of these cases are that fossil fuel extraction imposes net harm on the world, leading to climate change, and that energy production and promotion are a “public nuisance” for which energy companies must pay.

Federal courts would undoubtedly reject these claims, which is why activists
are fighting to keep their claims in front of their favorite state courts.

The Office of the Solicitor General had previously taken a stand against such gamesmanship, recognizing that climate change claims are inherently federal. But the current solicitor general’s abrupt departure from that position confirms that politics has replaced law in her office.

The solicitor general represents the United States before the Supreme Court and is the only federal officer required by statute to be “learned in the law”—a high calling. Past solicitors general described their obligation to speak “on behalf of the rule of law.”

The Supreme Court relies on the solicitor general to be a non-partisan, trustworthy representative and interpreter of the law. In the words of Seth P. Waxman, solicitor general during the Clinton administration, this “special relationship to the Court is not one of privilege, but of duty”—a duty that includes an obligation “to respect and honor the principle of stare decisis,” meaning consistency over time regardless of the political interests of the current administration.

Interstate environmental issues, especially those relating to air pollution and climate change, have long been governed by federal law and resolved by federal courts.   In 2011, the Supreme Court reaffirmed it “would be inappropriate” to apply state law to claims arising from transboundary greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change.

This makes good sense. Greenhouse gas emissions inherently transcend state borders—the term, after all, is “global climate change” not “Boulder County climate change.”

The Supreme Court has recognized that allowing state courts to interfere with federal regulation of energy production and emissions would “undermine the important goals of efficiency and predictability” and “lead to chaotic confrontation between sovereign states.”

The Office of the Solicitor General has embraced this position for decades, and solicitors general appointed by presidents from both parties have defended it—including left-wing Democrats who used climate change as part of their political platform.

So, in 2022, when the Supreme Court asked the Office of the Solicitor General if lawsuits seeking damages for climate change implicate state or federal issues, and whether they should proceed in state or federal court, the answer should have been simple. But the solicitor general instead said these cases should proceed in state court.

This flip-flop lacks credible explanation.

Here, the solicitor general seems to be acting for special interests and attempting to fix President Joe Biden‘s failure to achieve the climate change outcomes he promised.

Perhaps, instead of “learned in law,” the current solicitor general is
“learned in politics.” My office refuses to stand idly by without a fight.

Footnote:  SCOTUS is expected to hear arguments on this issue later this month.

 

Andrew I. Fillat & Henry Miller explain at Washington Examiner  Climate policies range from inanity to insanity.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The “war” on fossil fuels by activists and bureaucrats is much like how people describe an LSD trip: exhilarating, completely unreal, and possibly dangerous. This is evident from a simple analysis of what it would take to satisfy today’s demand for electricity in the absence of further electrifying transportation, industry, residences, and everything else.

Current domestic demand is 4 billion megawatt hours (MWh, the consumption of 1,000 watts of power for one hour), or 6.6 million MWh per day. Our generating capacity consists of 38% gas-fired, 22% coal-fired, 19% nuclear, 9.2% wind, 6.3% hydropower, 2.8% solar, and 1.7% other. We would need, therefore, to replace 2.4 billion MWh (gas and coal) with wind or solar.

A typical wind turbine generates two megawatts and occupies nearly two acres, or about one megawatt per acre. Solar is similar at one and one-third megawatt per acre. A megawatt creates 8,750 MWh annually. However, wind and solar are only 40% productive on average (due to calm, clouds, and nights). And wind and solar are both land hogs: Generating 2.4 billion MWh would consume 750,000 acres for either technology. To put that in context, the state of Rhode Island occupies 1 million acres.

We would need about 375,000 new wind turbines (up from 3,000 per year now)
at $3 million each, or more than $1 trillion. At $400,000 per acre of solar panels,
that cost is about $3 trillion.

This doesn’t take into account land cost and maintenance or the price escalation for raw materials required for the fabrication of the turbines and solar panels due to increased demand. It also ignores the greenhouse gas emissions from the mining itself.

The killer is backup.

With the decommissioning of fossil fuels, the only practical solution for calm, clouds, and nighttime is batteries. But at $151,000 per MWh for utility-scale batteries, the cost to provide only one day (6.6 MwH) of backup is about $1 trillion. The 2021 West Texas wind farm freeze suggests that a reasonable backup capacity is probably four days. And building these batteries would exacerbate raw materials shortages.

Our calculations are for the U.S. alone, and since we account for about 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions and electricity generation is only a quarter of that, the very best case is a 4% reduction in global greenhouse emissions. Meanwhile, China and India have nearly 10 times the number of coal-fired power plants as the U.S. and continue to build while we decommission ours. They will dwarf any emissions reductions we make while growing their economies as we strangle ours with expensive and limited energy.

Moreover, all of this is before the increased demand in power to electrify cars, factories, homes, and businesses further, which in turn will require upgrading the entire electrical grid — trillions of dollars more to upgrade transmission and connection facilities as well as still more wind or solar.

Just a fraction of the money wasted on the current LSD trip would be far better invested in “geoengineering” mitigation of the effects of climate change, which have never proved to be remotely as dire as the prophets of Armageddon have predicted. They might include, for example, projects such as reforestation; the Amazon provides 20% of the world’s oxygen while consuming carbon dioxide.

The true insanity, however, is ignoring very real opportunities for small-scale nuclear power. That clean source of energy is on the cusp of a major revolution in availability, cost reduction, and safety, if only we put aside our irrational fears. Our Navy has operated more than 150 nuclear-powered vessels for decades without incident.

Energy policies that would devastate our economy in the pursuit of
marginally relevant benefits at monumental cost are truly dangerous
to our way of life, global standing, and national security.
They should be short-circuited or discharged.

Andrew I. Fillat spent his career in technology venture capital and information technology companies. He is also the co-inventor of relational databases. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger distinguished fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. They were undergraduates together at MIT.

David Catron reports at the American Spectator Scientific American Compares DeSantis to Mussolini.  Those who thought Desantis would not attract Trump-like media trash talking should pay more attention to bilge like the latest from Political Scientific American. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Florida’s governor is a “fascist” for listening to voter concerns
about leftist indoctrination in schools.

It is hardly breaking news that many once-trustworthy science and medical publications have been infected by leftist ideology. One of the worst cases involved the Lancet, which published an editorial in May of 2020 that openly urged American voters to replace then-President Trump. Sadly, this disease has continued to metastasize. The latest outbreak just appeared in Scientific American, which published an opinion piece on Friday claiming that the education policies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “mirror past fascist strategies in ways that are disquieting for American democracy.”

The author is Eden McLean, an associate professor of modern European history at Auburn University. She admits that “fascism” is frequently misapplied but exonerates herself of that sin as follows: “Nonetheless, highlighting the parallels between the ambitions of DeSantis and those of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini exposes the shared threat to democracy.” McLean’s academic work focuses on the period of the last century during which authoritarian regimes rose to power in Italy, Germany, and Spain. All three used public education to reinforce their rule, but McLean uses the Italian model to denounce DeSantis:

At the heart of fascist political strategy was the expansion of state control over public and private life under the facades of popular support and common good. Mussolini may have been legally appointed as Italy’s prime minister in 1922, but by 1927 all political parties had been banned or absorbed into his Fascist Party. At the Ministry of Education, Mussolini appointed nine ministers over 21 years. Only five had teaching experience but, more importantly, all but one (who quit after six months) were devoted party members who did little to question Mussolini’s directives.

What “parallels” does McLean see here? She graciously allows that DeSantis hasn’t banned any political parties, yet detects something sinister in the way he exercises his duty under the state constitution to appoint the members of the Board of Education: “In Florida, as in more than a dozen other states, the governor appoints all members to the Board of Education.” If so many other governors do the same thing, what’s the problem? At length she reveals the secret: “Florida’s current Board of Education includes three lawyers, one doctor, two business executives and just one teacher (who was appointed in March).”

McLean clearly doesn’t know that, until recently, the makeup of the Florida School Board was typical of what she once would have found throughout the country. The idea was that school boards should be representative of the communities they serve. The notion that they should be dominated by “educators” is an artifact of the systematic infiltration of school boards by the teachers unions. What DeSantis has been doing with his appointments is precisely the opposite of fascism.

He is returning control of Florida’s schools to parents and students
who want education rather than leftist indoctrination. 

McLean disapproves:  First, it means a small number of people rely on their personal priorities for a child’s education to determine school curricula for all students. The dependence on individual perspectives as much as knowledge grounded in research and expertise leads to an increasing conflation of faith with science, memory with history, and dogmatism with truth. Second, the unwillingness to provide students with subject-appropriate, expert-developed materials that introduce them to new ideas limits their ability to assess sources for reliability and accuracy.

What McLean fails to mention about our expert-heavy education system
is its abysmal results.

The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, indicated that large percentages of American students are functionally illiterate in math and reading. Fully 38 percent of eighth-grade students are below basic achievement levels in math and 30 percent are below basic achievement levels in reading. The NAEP attributes this to COVID-19. As Forbes reports, however, the pandemic merely exacerbated a problem that first beset our education system in 2009.

As to McLean’s charge that DeSantis refuses to provide students with “subject-appropriate, expert-developed materials,” he is simply doing what worried parents have been begging the “experts” to do — expunging leftist dogma, pseudoscience, and revisionist history from the public schools. As he put it in his second inaugural address, “We must ensure school systems are responsive to parents and to students, not partisan interest groups.” This is obviously what the voters of Florida want, as his record-breaking reelection confirmed. For McLean, this overwhelming support for DeSantis constitutes an ominous message.

She solemnly advises her readers, “We must not stop at simply denouncing DeSantis’s efforts as ‘fascist’; to do so sidesteps their homegrown roots and minimizes their full danger.” For McLean, permitting parents to democratically elect a governor who actually listens to them presents enormous peril: “Being part of a democratic republic — embracing our pluralistic society — requires diverse views and their educated assessment.” She assumes that, if Florida’s voters disagree with her, it must be due to bigotry and ignorance.

This leaves one remaining question unanswered:
What the hell happened to Scientific American?

Despite climatists’ insistance on “No Planet B”, their ideas and plans assume some reality other than this world.  Judith Sloan explains the problem in her Spectator Australia article Greens off on another planet.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Today’s Greens make their predecessors look sensible

Let me get back to the chasm that the Greens deliberately create by advocating much higher government spending while calling for all sorts of perverse measures, up to and including the banning of coal and gas projects. Without these projects, there is no prospect there will be sufficient revenue to fund their over-the-top spending aspirations.

The Greens’ wish list is close to endless: free childcare, free TAFE and university, free dental care, higher dole, higher rental assistance, more public housing, more public transport, more spending on government schools, more foreign aid and on and on it goes.

Unless you believe that government spending is costless and never-ending – OK, for a while the crazy advocates of Modern Monetary Theory held sway until the ugly face of inflation reared its head and the interest payable on government debt began to rise – the Greens cannot escape that perennial political question: how are you going to pay for it?

But here’s the thing: the main reason Australia is not completely in the fiscal dog-house is the surging company tax revenues from mining companies and high commodity prices. Now I know some Speccie readers are a little bit allergic to numbers, but bear with me if I point out a few simple facts.

Take iron ore, which is a mainstay of our budget. For every $US10 increase in the price of iron ore per tonne, there is a lift of $600 million in company tax receipts. The high prices of coal, both thermal and coking, as well as liquefied natural gas, have similarly led to rapid growth in company tax receipts.

At the time of the election last year, the Treasury expected company tax revenue for 2022-23 to come in at a tad over $90 billion. It now expects it to be $127 billion – a jump of nearly one third. Company tax revenue is now at an historic high which, in turn, is mainly because of the surging tax being paid by the mining companies so reviled by the Greens.

Talk about contradictory: it’s not just having your cake
and eating it too; it’s about having the whole bakery.

This underscores my conclusion that the Greens are now living on a different planet rather than partying at the bottom of the garden. They want to shut down most of the resource sector but think that government spending can be jacked up big-time.

And let’s not forget here that federal Labor already has substantial spending plans. Next financial year, it expects to spend $666 billion and in 2025-26, the figure is $729 billion, an increase of over 9 per cent in real terms. The Greens’ ambitions are in addition to this increase.

Don’t get me onto some of the other proposals from the Greens. The geniuses in the party think that imposing national rental controls is the answer to our housing rental crisis. The fact that the attractiveness of residential real estate for investors has declined is regarded as neither here nor there by them. And this is before the full impact of the higher cost of investment loans.

They also want to achieve net zero by 2035, think that the ambition of B1(Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen) to reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 is woefully inadequate and want 100-per-cent renewable energy by the end of the decade.

In Bernie Sanders’ style, they think that ‘taxing the billionaires and big corporations’
will release oceans of revenue and a 6 per cent annual wealth tax is the way to go.

Walshy must be spinning in his grave; he would surely conclude that the dotty Greens of his era were sensible pragmatists compared to today’s loopy lot.

 

American Spectator reports Canadian Taxpayers Forced to Fund Federal Employees’ Transgender Surgeries.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The government of Canada announced in February that it will now pay up to $75,000 “per lifetime” for each federal public service employee, and his or her dependents, who wishes to gender transition.

Justin Trudeau’s administration made that change, which will go into effect on July 1.

These changes are part of several changes the government is making to the Public Service Health Care Plan, a program meant to supplement the health care each employee receives from the province in which he or she lives.

As most Canadian provinces already cover “gender reassignment surgeries,” the $75,000 would be in addition to any funding the employee receives for transitioning.

The plan also is specifically meant to cover surgeries that are not included in most other provincial health care plans because they are considered cosmetic, like “facial feminization,” “breast augmentation,” or “voice surgery.”

The changes are supposed to “help people with their gender affirmation journey,” the statement read.

This is just one of many recent moves to support LGBTQ+ ideology made by the Canadian government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

For “Public Service Pride Week” last August, Trudeau put out a statement celebrating “LGBTQ2 public servants.”  “As the largest single employer in Canada, the public service sets an example of what inclusivity means in the workplace,” he said. “We all have a role to play this week, and throughout the year, to support each other.”

Last summer, Trudeau also announced Canada’s first “2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan… Building our future, with pride.”  The plan was designed to be “a whole-of-government approach.”

One of its goals was to “[e]mbed 2SLGBTQI+ issues in the work of the Government of Canada,” which it successfully does with this latest health care expansion.

Footnote:  Backlash Mounts Against Sex Change Operations for Minors

As more evidence emerges about just how dangerous these procedures are, doctors who raise the alarm are increasingly being silenced by organizations like the American College of Pediatrics. In the aforementioned Vanderbilt case, doctors were warned that there would be “consequences” if they refused to perform the surgeries.

Already, we are starting to see the disastrous effects of the left’s gender-affirming care model. A woman in Sydney, Australia, for example, is suing her psychiatrist for medical malpractice after recommending she begin hormone treatment after one meeting and a recommending double mastectomy after only her second meeting. Within three years of the first meeting with her psychiatrist, she had hormone treatment, testosterone injections, a double mastectomy, and a complete hysterectomy. In the lawsuit, the woman claims the psychiatrist “failed to take precautions…in the nature of loss of her breasts, uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries.”

More than five percent of Americans aged 18-29 say they identify as a sex other than the one they were “assigned” at birth – a nearly five-fold increase from the number of 30-49-year-old Americans who say the same. Given trends among Gen Z, it’s likely that number will grow exponentially in the years ahead. With evidence already mounting that many of the young people who undergo sex change treatment as minors come to regret it as adults, the country could soon have a crisis of tens of thousands of disaffected young people who are filled with remorse for the rest of their lives – all because they were allowed to make decisions that they were nowhere near mature or informed enough to make.

A society that fails to protect its children is one that is doomed to fail. In the coming years, Republicans and any Democrats willing to stand up to the trans lobby would do well to ensure that puberty and physical development is allowed to occur naturally for every child and that life-altering decisions are reserved for when individuals mature into adulthood, no sooner.

Thomas Sowell expounds on the contemporary pervasive use of newspeak to confuse public discourse by changing the meaning of words to advance a political agenda.  Below is an excerpt from his Thomas Sowell Reader.

The Left’s Vocabulary

A recent angry e-mail from a reader said that certain issues should not be determined by “the dictates of the market.” With a mere turn of a phrase, he had turned reality upside down. Decisions by people free to make their mutual accommodations with other free people were called “dictates” while having third parties tell all of them what they could and couldn’t do was not.

Verbal coups have long been a specialty of the left. Totalitarian countries on the left have called themselves “people’s democracies” and used the egalitarian greeting “comrade”—even though some comrades had the arbitrary power of life and death over other comrades.

In democratic countries, where public opinion matters, the left has used its verbal talents to change the whole meaning of words and to substitute new words, so that issues would be debated in terms of their redefined vocabulary, instead of the real substance of the issues. Words which have acquired connotations from the actual experiences of millions of human beings over generations, or even centuries, have been replaced by new words that wipe out those connotations and substitute more fashionable notions of the left.

The word “swamp,” for example, has been all but erased from the language. Swamps were messy, sometimes smelly, places where mosquitoes bred and sometimes snakes lurked. The left has replaced the word “swamp” with “wetlands,” a word spoken in pious tones usually reserved for sacred things.  The point of this verbal sleight-of-hand is to impose the left’s notions of how other people can use their own land. Restrictive laws about “wetlands” have imposed huge costs on farmers and other owners of land that happened to have a certain amount of water on it.

Another word that the left has virtually banished from the language is “bum.” Centuries of experience with idlers who refused to work and who hung around on the streets making a nuisance—and sometimes a menace—of themselves were erased from our memories as the left verbally transformed those same people into a sacred icon, “the homeless.”

As with swamps, what was once messy and smelly was now
turned into something we had a duty to protect.

It was now our duty to support people who refused to support themselves. Crimes committed by bums are covered up by the media, by verbally transforming “the homeless” into “transients” or “drifters” whenever they commit crimes. Thus “the homeless” are the only group you never hear of committing any crimes.

More to the point, third parties’ notions are imposed by the power of the government to raise our taxes to support people who are raising hell on our streets and in parks where it has often become too dangerous for our children to play. The left has a whole vocabulary devoted to depicting people who do not meet standards as people who have been denied “access.” Whether it is academic standards, job qualifications or credit requirements, those who do not measure up are said to have been deprived of “opportunity,” “rights” or “social justice.”

The word games of the left—from the mantra of “diversity”
to the pieties of “compassion”—are not just games.

They are ways of imposing power by evading issues of substance through the use of seductive rhetoric. “Rights,” for example, have become an all-purpose term used for evading both facts and logic by saying that people have a “right” to whatever the left wants to give them by taking from others.

For centuries, rights were exemptions from government power, as in the Bill of Rights. Now the left has redefined rights as things that can be demanded from the taxpayers, or from private employers or others, on behalf of people who accept no mutual obligations, even for common decency.

At one time, educators tried to teach students to carefully define words and systematically analyze arguments. They said, “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.” Today, they are teaching students what to think—political correctness. Instead of knowledge, students are given “self-esteem,” so that they can vent their ignorance with confidence.

Footnote on Equivocation

A related wordplay frequently appears concerning the Global Warming/Climate Change issue.  Equivocation is a logic violation when in the course of an argument (making a case), one or more words change their meanings, rendering a nonsensical conclusion.  For example, the switching back and forth between weather and climate:

Then the media refers to climate model outputs as dire predictions of the future.  But buried in the fine print are legal disclaimers talking about scenarios and projections of possibilities.  Of course there is the labelling of carbon dioxide as a “pollutant”, when in fact it is the stuff of life for the biosphere.

Even the term “climate” was always used to describe distinctive local and regional patterns (Climates), but now refers only to a singular global abstraction. And so on.

 

Matt Taibbi: “Twitter Files” Reveal The Structure Of The Relationship Between Social Media Companies And FBI Requests For Censorship Source Real Clear Politics.

 

Brandon Morse writes at Red State No, Slaves Didn’t Build This Country.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Not long ago, Disney ripped off any pretense of being a family company and dove head-first into the social justice muck with an episode of “The Proud Family” that featured a slam poetry segment that echoed the fringe critical race theory claim that “slaves built this country.”

As RedState reported, it soon surfaced that the writer of the show is a very loud and proud social justice radical named Latoya Raveneau, who has a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and wants to introduce “queerness” to the shows your kids watch whenever she gets the chance. She also bragged that no one at Disney is trying to stop her.

First things first, we need to torpedo this idea that slaves built this country. While it’d be unrealistic to say they weren’t a part of the nation’s development, putting them as the prime constructors of an entire nation is like saying the guy who crafted the axle at the car factory built your vehicle. He was definitely a part of it, but he hardly gets to take full credit.

So many kinds of people came to the new world and worked their own land, built their own towns, and established their own societies without the help of slaves. For one thing, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade transported well over 12 million slaves, but only a little over 300,000 made their way into the United States. This didn’t happen all at once.

Slavery did officially begin in 1619, but it began with just over 20 slaves.

To think that over the course of time that singular group of people built an entire nation — even a burgeoning one — by themselves is the height of fantasy. Especially as you continue to plug in the numbers.

The slave population would later balloon to around four million by the time the emancipation proclamation was signed in 1863, and while that number is tragically large, it doesn’t mean that there was a slave for every family. The vast majority of slaves were held in the agrarian south and even then, only around 25 percent of the south was wealthy enough to own slaves.

Meanwhile, the slave-free north continued to outpace the south by leaps and bounds, including agriculturally according to Warfare in the Western World:

“But in a longer struggle the North’s advantages were substantial. With a population of 20 million, the Northern states obviously possessed a much larger military manpower base, but their industrial capacity was far greater as well. In 1860 the North had over 110,000 manufacturing establishments, the South just 18,000. The North produced 94 percent of the country’s iron, 97 percent of is coal and – not incidentally – 97 percent of its firearms. It contained 22,000 miles of railroad to the South’s 8,500. The North outperformed the South agriculturally as well. Northerners held 75 percent of the country’s farm acreage, produced 60 percent of its livestock, 67 percent of its corn, and 81 percent of its wheat. All in all, they held 75 percent of the nation’s total wealth.”

These stats immediately wreck the idea that “slaves built this country.” Not only did the north succeed greatly without them, but the majority of the south also didn’t have them.

The idea that white people were sitting in rocking chairs sipping tea while black people did all the work from 1619 to 1863 is, frankly, stupid. It dismisses the blood, sweat, and tears of many different kinds of people, including Mexicans, Germans, Irish, Chinese, and more. It purposely shoves aside the industriousness of an entire country looking to build a new world and make something for itself.

Yes, slavery did play a part, but not nearly enough of one to claim all the credit.
This leads me to the idea that reparations are owed to the black population
of the United States by the taxpayers of this country.

No. No one owes anything to anyone for the atrocity that is slavery. For one, no one alive today was around to commit that sin or have that sin be committed upon them. Whatever guilt there was for it has long since died off. Outside of the church, the idea of original sin is ludicrous. White people alive today are not guilty of what a percentage of white people did long ago. Moreover, the nation that declared slavery illegal and went to war with emancipation being a goal leading to an astounding loss of life is not responsible for reparations either.

This nation’s story is, in part, a struggle against slavery beginning at its very foundations. White supremacy was never the intended goal of those most loyal to the American dream and spirit, despite the claims of race hustlers. Nothing is owed because there is no one around to whom anything would be owed.

Social sin is non-transferable.

Raveneau is, like most radical leftists, incredibly bitter and bigoted herself. Her racism against white people is clearly on display, as is her disdain for a country that sacrificed much to shed itself of the slavery she’s using as a tool to exert social control over innocent people. That Disney is allowing this to happen shows just how lost it is and how it too wishes to damage this great nation’s reputation and cast its people as villains for simply existing in a place where once there was slavery.

The bitter truth that race hustlers need to face is that white people today aren’t guilty of slavery. White supremacy is not the foremost wish of the vast majority of white people in this nation today, and anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something that would be detrimental to everyone for having bought it.

Slavery is evil and it should be left in the past. No one living today should try to bring it back,
not in practice or as a social tool to use as a method of social dictatorship.

 

Ramesh Thakur writes of his journey since 2019 in his Spectator Australia article A Covid vocabulary.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Words I learned, and learned to hate

When the novel coronavirus began to dominate world news in 2020 (the virus may already have been in circulation in 2019), a modest existing knowledge on pandemic policy, based in a background in global governance, indicated that governments were departing radically from the existing scientific and policy consensus. Several well-credentialled experts tried to say so but were dismissed as has-beens or fringe-dwellers suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome. This was troubling. Being retired, I had immunity against being fired. With time to do my own policy-oriented research, I began digging deeper into Covid pandemic management as a policy challenge. And this meant familiarising myself with the language of health experts and a resulting expansion of my vocabulary.

What follows is a description of the key new words I learnt over the last three years,
but also words I’ve learnt to hate. With each step on the journey,
confidence and trust in the public health clerisy fell further.

We began with the distinctions between (a) infection and case fatality rates and (b) pharmaceutical interventions like vaccines and drugs and non-pharmaceutical interventions like enhanced surveillance, testing and contact tracing; social distancing (a euphemism for anti-social behaviour like physical distancing); workplace and school closures; working from home; sanitisers and surface cleaning.

This led to ‘lockdowns’, another euphemism for shutting down all economic and social activity and locking up entire populations in their homes because the health experts said so despite the previous consensus against it.   As part of the public discourse on justification for the unprecedented lockdowns and possible timing for lifting the restrictions, officials and commentators fussed over the ‘R’ number (how many more people on average will one sick person infect?) or the rate at which the virus was reproducing in order to assess if it was still growing or contracting.   By 2022 the world had lost interest in this 2020 obsession. As the debate between lockdown enthusiasts and sceptics heated up, the language deteriorated into name calling and ‘Covidian’ and ‘Covidiot’ were deployed as reciprocal insults.

With masks we tried to understand the difference between and relative merits of facecloths, surgical masks and N95 respirators; healthcare, outdoor and indoor settings; and why the medical consensus did an instant (that is, without any additional data or scientific studies) 180-degree turn on masks from being pointless to an extremely critical individual and community protection measure. The existing standard metric in 2020 for allocating finite health resources, a cost-benefit analysis using quality adjusted life years for measuring health outcomes, was similarly abandoned without explanation.

In 2021 we turned our attention to vaccines and the importance of numbers: absolute risk reduction, relative risk reduction, and (a) the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one additional infection or death in a specified group (ie elderly, young, children, industry or setting-specific employees) and (b) the number of ‘serious adverse events’ that would constitute a critical ‘safety signal’ within a target cohort. We also had to grasp the distinction between vaccine efficacy in controlled clinical trials and vaccine effectiveness in the real world. The equations just didn’t compute. Despite the famed 95 per cent efficacy claimed in trials, people in NSW who had been vaccinated at least once made up 77 per cent of those infected and 85 per cent of those who died of or with Covid from 22 May-31 December 2022 (the period in which data was separated by vaccination status, as the practice has been discontinued in 2023).

Finally, in response to the increasingly esoteric (and desperate) justifications for the vaccination drives despite the empirical outcomes showing their poor performance, we began looking at all-cause ‘excess’ mortality that is less susceptible to statistical and linguistic manipulation. For example, in an instructive analysis in The Spectator Australia online’s Flat White (6 January 2023), Jason Strecker goes through the Australian statistics on excess deaths to comprehensively demolish the self-serving claims made by federal and state politicians of how many lives they saved with their lockdown policies. You’ve gotta love this sub-heading from the New York Times subscriber-only newsletter (4 January): ‘Mass vaccination, though miraculously effective, didn’t usher in a lower overall death toll’. Which leads me to Merriam-Webster’s word of the year concept of ‘gaslighting’, by the mainstream media as much as by governments.

Moving to words I learnt to hate:

‘Follow The Science’ was the dishonest slogan used to shut down legitimate scientific inquiry even while implementing many unscientific and even some anti-scientific policies.

‘Staying Apart to Stay Together’ was a too-clever-by-half effort to camouflage an oxymoron.

‘Three weeks to flatten the curve’? Yeah, right. Three years later, it’s our lives, spirits and economies that have been flattened.

‘Protect the health service’? No, it’s the mission of the health service to protect us. Sure enough, as the winter pressures return on the broken, dysfunctional yet sacralised National Health Service in the UK that has in recent times spent massive amounts of money recruiting DIE (diversity, inclusion and equity) bureaucrats while firing frontline staff who refused the jab, the Daily Mail reported on 4 January that the government is drawing up plans to reintroduce Covid-era measures ‘to save the NHS’. An online poll showed 65 per cent of over 13,000 readers oppose any measure being brought back but, surprisingly, 22 per cent support the return of face masks. Another pet peeve was,

‘We are all in this together’ and equivalent phrases like the virus doesn’t discriminate, it’s out hunting whoever it can find, etc. No, not really, not by risks, benefits nor burdens are we all in this together.

Finally, the concept currently in vogue: ‘abundance of caution’, used to impose a negative test requirement for Chinese arrivals from 5 January 2023 despite medical advice to the contrary. This substitutes a slogan for a policy and confirms the trigger-happy authoritarian instincts of the government to reimpose curbs on people’s freedoms on the minister’s whim, with no justification advanced in the form of a cost-benefit analysis. It speaks to the undying conceit of politicians that they can control viruses. And it highlights their complete abandonment of caution on the harms of government interventions. 

Despite three years of worldwide evidence that the rise and fall of the virus curve
has been policy-invariant, while the damage from the ill-conceived interventions
has been severe and will be long lasting.