As Minneapolis Burns

This past week we saw the racism of a city, and perhaps a state and nation, on full display as the police of Minneapolis held down and strangled an African-American to death.  As a result of that horrific act, the aggrieved community has risen up and is in the process of destroying parts of the city and stealing whatever they can get their hands on.  News networks and their “influencers” are taking sides and mincing words to help keep this story alive and growing.  Is the destruction of the city riots and vandalism, or is it simply angry protest? You decide for I guess it all comes down to how you feel emotionally since rational thought seems to escape most of us in these times.

In addition to the racism on display, we are seeing the rise of police states as the various governments deal with the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It is interesting to see how differently the two main political parties handle the fear of a virus we are unfamiliar with, while the anointed medical experts fill the airwaves with guidance that is little-better than informed opinion.  Should we wear masks or not?  Does the virus thrive in sunlight or not?  Is it transmitted beyond 6’ or not?  Will people who flock to a beach, kill hundreds or thousands of others by their action or not?  When is the right time to resume our lives and livelihoods?

We see in the states with the worst impacts – governments who’ve made callous choices for the care of their elderly.  These same governments are praised for their courageous actions by a media that has long abandoned the idea of impartial and unbiased reporting.  These states continue with the pandemic lockdown and daily enforce the idea the government knows what is best and will do whatever is necessary to enforce their will.  The only thing that stands in their way is a citizenry and a court that will hold them accountable to the constitutions that are intended to define and limit the authority of the government.

Minnesota and Minneapolis are governments with a long history of being run by liberal/progressive Democrats.  Supposedly the party of the working man and woman, the party of the African-American, the party of equality and equity, the party of human rights, etc.  What this pandemic should have taught anyone willing to look closely at the approaches of the Democratic politicians, the truth is the party is really about control and domination.  They give lip service to all those ideals they claim, but the bottom line is it is about power and the wealth that comes from maintaining that power.

That thirst for power and control flows from the very top down to the lowest entity and is, in my opinion, why we see in a police force commanded by an African-American such obvious disregard for the rights of their citizens.  Not to single out Minneapolis, for we saw exactly the same thing in New York City where the police executed a government policy of stopping anyone they thought was suspicious, regardless of probable cause.

What seems most unfortunate in these revelations is the principles of the party won’t change.  They will continue to mutter the platitudes they think people want to hear, they will blame their opponents for creating the conditions they have governed to, and the people will continue to believe their empty promises that bigger government is better for everyone.  What we’ve learned is the bigger government is actually only better for the politicians in power.

What Happens Next?

A post this morning (5/24/2020) on social media had me thinking about what happens when the governed lose faith in the government? Our history is built on the very premise the power of government comes not from some absolute right, but from the governed themselves. This was clearly articulated in the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.[1]

 Our founding fathers did not take lightly the steps they were about to take in their decision to abolish the ties with Great Britain but recognized what they viewed as oppressive taxation without representation in the government itself was untenable.

It seems to me for all their elite education and learning the progressive/liberal left have lost sight of the wisdom of these words. This pandemic is really bringing this into sharp focus, and although President Trump is doing an incredibly poor job explaining it, it seems to me he intuitively understands this and his actions speak to the common man or woman in how they want to live their lives. Trump has all the experts around him and chooses to follow his own path. Meanwhile all the experts and the political opposition are doing everything they can think of to shame him and the nation into doing what they think we should do.

We start with creating the panic, educating the masses on how to act, and then demanding they act by the prescribed solution sets. When education fails to achieve universal compliance our “experts” in science and the media begin a campaign of shaming those who find the burden becoming unreasonable. As our founders recognized we are for the most part willing to suffer through some burdens to maintain the government but at some point, those liabilities become so onerous rebellion becomes inevitable.

We take pride in our elections as a routine form of revolution.  As I think about this ongoing crisis the question for this coming election is not who is the best candidate, or VP candidate.  As much as the media would like that to be the question, the real issue is how much government are we willing to put up with, and who represents that choice of how we want to live our individual lives?  I wonder -- if through their actions, the Democratic governors of the North and Northwest will actually hand the GOP a revolutionary victory?

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[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

An Observation on Fear.

The one thing social media is really good at is showing us the polarization of our choices.  Take, for example, the whole idea of self-protection with wearing masks.  While this shouldn’t really be a political debate it has certainly turned into one as those with fear of the COVID-19 pandemic condemning those who question the value of some of the government mandates.  The political parties are happy to take advantage of this division to show their superiority over those who oppose them.

Here in the United States, and hopefully, in Europe, we seem to be on the backside of the crisis.  While a tragically large number of sick and elderly have succumbed to this Chinese virus as of 5/17/2020 (e.g. England 34,546, Italy 31,763, Spain 27,563, France 27,532 and US 88,754) and the rate of mortality for those who’ve been diagnosed is high; as a percent of the total population the mortality rates are not that outrageous (i.e. England .05%, Italy .05%, Spain .06%, France .04% and US .03%)[1].

Let’s compare this to the Avian Flu Pandemic of 1918.  According to the CDC, one third (1/3) of the world’s population (500 million) became infected, and an estimated 50 million died.[2]  Taking this as fact, in gross numbers this means the mortality rate for those infected would be 10% and the total global mortality rate 3%.  In the case of COVID-19 medical science has progressed and our ability to deal with this has also progressed.  According to Johns Hopkins, there have been only 4,656,639[3] confirmed cases and a total death count of 312,188, for a mortality rate of those infected of 6.7% and a total global mortality rate of .004%.  We are not done with this disease, but who among us thinks it will reach the levels of the 1918 episode as we work on treatments and vaccines?

As we begin to recover from this medical crisis what are we to do, and who should we believe? There is an interesting transition in the works right now.  Those who would put all their faith in the “experts” would have us continue with all the protective/restrictive measures we have in place until some undefined point of wellness is reached.  Others who see the effects on the world’s economy would have us remove those restrictions and begin to return to a post-pandemic world (however that is defined).   These two competing views are on-going right now, with all the pseudo-experts weighing in with all the emotional appeals they can dig up.  Which is really the reason for this post.  It got me thinking about “experts” and the fear they can generate within the populations they seem to speak to and for.

Here is my question for the experts.  Were the political-military experts ever able to predict the advent of wars, their cost, or their outcome?  If so why didn’t they stop them, if not why are they called experts?  Were the intelligence experts able to accurately forecast the sneak attacks of our opponents (e.g. Pearl Harbor, World Trade Center)?  If so, why didn’t they alert our political-military experts, or if not, why are they called intelligence experts?  Were the economic experts able to foresee the market crashes that led to the global financial crisis?  If so, why didn’t they convince people to alter their at-risk behavior?  Have the political experts ever accurately foreseen the outcomes of truly democratic contests, for example, the 2016 U.S. Presidential election where the DNC experts forecast with a 98% certainty Hillary would win? Were the pandemic medical experts able to see this pandemic coming and how it would actually play out with all their modern modeling techniques?  If so why didn’t the politicians listen to them?  Why were all their modeling forecasts so wrong?  For example, the models showed NY would be overwhelmed and the governor asked for far more ventilators and hospital support than they came close to needing.  The USNS Comfort and the Javits Center was converted into a hospital, but both were hardly used.  There is a cost to this, but at the time the “experts” all said they were absolutely necessary and the politicians all agreed.

Here is my opinion on all those questions.  Experts get to be experts because someone with an agenda wants to call them experts or other “experts” call them such.  Take for example Paul Krugman, a noble laureate in economics, who now writes opinion for the NY Times.  I believe he is viewed as an economics “expert” who when asked about a slight dip in the stock market after Donald Trump was elected said the market would never recover. It took almost a whole day to prove this estimate was based not on some great insight but was a purely emotional response to his grief that Hillary Rodham Clinton had lost.

So, at the end of the day each of us should ask ourselves; are the experts really worth listening to?  Each of us must answer that question -- as well as the two questions which spring from its answer.  How real is the fear they are warning about, and how much fear can I control, or do I want to live with?

It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in his first inauguration speech attempted to assure a nation panicked by the collapse of the stock market that “the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”  That advice seems to be as good today as it was when FDR first offered it.  The difference today is we’ve created a generation that is more concerned with their personal desires than the general good of society, and we’ve given a wide forum for individual voices who can spread those fears we all must face.

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[1] All values round to nearest whole 1/100^th percent

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/1918-pandemic-history.htm

[3] Total confirmed is suspect based on the assumption of Chinese under-reporting.

A New World Order?

Back in the 1980s, I was taking a course from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and there was a section dealing with the advancement of human development and government.  It offered a fairly good thesis on the evolution from family groups, to extended family groups, to tribes, then on to city-states, nation-states, and empires.  The final section dealt with the potential advancement from nations to the concept of a unifying world government, perhaps as envisioned by those visionaries who created first the League of Nations and then the United Nations as a means to end the global conflict and the devastation from the advancement of technology and man’s cruelty towards their fellow men.

Of course, this was not a psychology course, so any discussion of the psychological implications was nonexistent, and since my degrees dealt with the human psyche I tended to look at the evolution from that perspective.  The one question I kept asking myself was how would we overcome the human traits that were first outlined for me in Exodus 20:2-17.  These include greed, envy, disrespect for others and their property, sloth (or laziness), and pride.  To this list, you may add anger, hate, fear, and self-indulgence and unimaginable cruelty. 

This seems important, for our history is filled with examples of nations which have risen to greatness, some lasting for a thousand years or more, but ultimately fail due to our human weaknesses.  As we become “more advanced” in our knowledge has our thinking evolved to resolve those human issues?  If we are to evolve into a global sized government how will those human qualities affect the average citizen?

Since that time in the 1980s global communication has evolved significantly.  Our (the average American’s) view of the world used to be filtered through the printed word, or brief broadcast snippets.  Then came 24/7/365 broadcast news but as we come to discover those channels make a conscious effort to tailor their content to support an agenda they wish to push.  Finally, we have the world wide web of things and social applications, but they too filter and screen the information to fit their narrative.

It appears to me that with all the advances in communication we are moving not towards a unifying world view but are fracturing even further than we have in the past.  Now, instead of nations where the majority share a common view of their roles and responsibilities we are beginning to regress to city-states or even tribes where smaller and smaller groups are demanding their independence from the overarching government.

We see in the United Nations, and its subordinate organizations the political decisions based on those same human frailties’.  The promise of personal wealth corrupts those charged with guiding their organizations to advance the human condition, and seldom are they held responsible by those who have appointed them.

At this point in time that future utopia so often envisioned by science fiction writers seems a lot less likely than the darker future envisioned by Dante and the apostle John in his book of Revelation.

The Problem with Liberal White Priviledge

We hear a lot about “white privilege” from minority groups who are seeking a dominant position within the political system.  The accusation comes on the heels of the legal theory that racial bias is inherent in the justice system and the minorities cannot get a fair trial in a political system dominated by the white majority.  One has only to look at the percentages of whites, blacks, and Hispanics in the penal system to see there is probably some merit to that theory.  Unfortunately for daily interaction, those with racial political agendas will use that theory as a club to beat everyone over the head and shoulders to demonstrate their superiority.

The white privilege argument is because of our “whiteness” we have some sort of advantage in life that a minority can never overcome.  For most of the middle class who have to compete every day, this is kind of a nonsensical argument, but there are always those who will use it, as well as those who will believe a minority is getting an “unfair” step up through some sort of reverse discrimination.  This is pretty much in keeping with the human traits of personal bias and opportunism.

 Of course, there are those in our “classless” society who believe they are privileged and who do look on the world and see it as their responsibility to bring those poor unfortunate minorities along so they may prosper as they do.  Just not quite as well as they do, but still better than those others who aren’t as good as them.  They claim to buy into all the social justice issues and strive to do all the socially progressive things.  So long as those poor hapless minorities remain supportive of their ruling class.

Let’s review how that philosophy is working out in what we view as the cultural and economic center of the country, New York City.

You might remember a few years ago as the government tried to get a handle on street crime in the city, so the businessmen/women and the tourists felt safe and would spend their dollars.  They implemented a policy called “stop and frisk.”  Unfortunately, for the liberal politicians, the majority of those stopped, frisked and arrested turned out to be black youth who was somehow suspicious by their being black youth and little else.  The discrimination of this policy became so onerous that the current Mayor actually had to call a halt to avoid riots in the city, and the former Mayor (Bloomberg) had to kind of apologize before he was allowed to continue his failed campaign for President.

Fast forward to today, where “social distancing” is all the rage, and the liberal white politicians, who know better than anyone how to govern fairly and equitably are implementing those policies that will keep everyone safe from a virus they don’t fully understand, but one that allows them to enforce rules that are at times draconian. 

It seems like they are returning to the same mindset they thought was such a good idea with “stop and frisk” where the police are now arresting anyone they feel is not social distancing responsibly.  Unfortunately, it appears to be implemented with exactly the same social dynamic where the majority of those arrested are minorities (i.e. African-American).  It is almost as if those liberal white politicians can’t understand that the privilege that got them the limos and bodyguards are not available to the poorest in the city, and running a city isn’t the same thing as running a plantation.  JMO

COVID-19 Facts: Dem vs Rep

This is how to show inflammatory, but totally useless information.  This chart shows how much better the COVID-19 mortality rate is in states run by Republican governors.  The information is taken straight from a COV-19 tracking site.   It shows if you live in a state-run by a Democrat and you catch the virus you have a 5.2% chance of dying from COVID-19 versus a 3.8% chance if you live in a state-run by a Republican.

What it doesn't show is there are far more variables that are completely irrelevant to the political party in power, but simply implies the blame rests with some particular political power.   This is how the news, both fact and fake presents information to push an agenda.

Nowhere does this chart attempt to break out all the variables that go into the mortality rates (like how many are infected or how many have tested negative, or how population density, the average age of the victims, or all the other variables that go into the subject locations.  All it does is pretend to show how much better Republicans are at protecting their populations.  Nor does it suggest either a statistical margin for error, or the standard deviations.

When you see polling data, or 15 second sound bites from some talking head, remember they are often cherry-picking the things that will further their agenda and enrage you as a viewer to side with them against the evil they are supposedly arguing against.

COVID-19 Mortality Rates (as of 8 May 2020)*
Governor = Dem	Mortality Rate	Governor = Rep	Mortality Rate
Michigan	9.5%
Connecticut	8.8%
New York	8%
Louisiana	7.2%
New Jersey	6.6%
Pennsylvania	6.4%	Indiana	6.3%
Washington	5.5%	Massachusetts	6.2%
Minnesota	5.4%	Oklahoma	6%
Nevada	5.1%	Vermont	5.8%
Colorado	5.1%	Ohio	5.7%
District of Columbia**	5%	Maryland	5.1%
Maine	4.7%	Kentucky	4.8%
Illinois	4.4%	Missouri	4.7%
California	4.1%	Mississippi	4.6%
Wisconsin	4.1%	Arizona	4.5%
Oregon	4%	South Dakota	4.4%
New Mexico	3.8%	South Carolina	4.4%
North Carolina	3.8%	Georgia	4.3%
Rhode Island	3.7%	Alabama	4.1%
Virginia	3.6%	Florida	4.1%
Montana	3.5%	New Hampshire	4%
Delaware	3.4%	West Virginia	4%
Hawaii	2.7%	Idaho	3.1%
Kansas	2.6%	Texas	2.7%
		Alaska	2.7%
		North Dakota	2.3%
		Arkansas	2.3%
		Iowa	2.1%
		Tennessee	1.7%
		Nebraska	1.2%
		Wyoming	1.1%
		Utah	1.1%
Average Dem Mortality	5.2%	Average Rep Mortality	3.8%
* Covidusa.net ** A city with Democratic Mayor within the Continental United States