By Katelynn Richardson A second Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower came forward Monday to express concern about the investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax fraud and financial crimes after the entire team working on it was removed from the case, according to the New York Post. The whistleblower has worked on the case since it […]
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POTEMKIN ENVIRONMENTALISM: California Dumps Nearly Half of Its Hazardous Waste out of State.
California is revealing new information to the public that shows that the eco-friendly state is dumping tons of toxic waste in other states every year.
Since 2010, California has dumped nearly half of its hazardous waste out of state—mostly in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada—according to the state’s latest figures (pdf). Thirteen more states also have received California’s toxic waste but in much lower quantities.
In the past 13 years, the state has dumped 3.7 million tons of hazardous waste in Utah, more than 2.9 million tons in Arizona, and nearly 2.3 million tons in Nevada.
An investigation published by CalMatters in January found that one of the biggest out-of-state toxic waste dumpers was the state’s own Department of Toxic Substances Control.
The reason is that neighboring states don’t have as many environmental regulations for dumping hazardous waste, and it costs less.
There’s a pleasing circularity to California leftists using other states as their dumping grounds, since they also use the much more functional other states to help keep the lights on: California’s Potemkin Environmentalism.
A dirty secret about California’s energy economy is that it imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for the shortfall caused by having too few power plants. Up to 20 percent of the state’s power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana, and another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State, and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. “California practices a sort of energy colonialism,” says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.–area investment group. “They rely on western states to supply them with power generation they are unwilling to build for themselves”—and leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution.
And California’s garbage, as well.
Jts5665I have to wonder if this is some kind of roundabout way to backdoor some graft.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: US Senators Are Being Issued Satellite Phones in Preparation for a ‘Disruptive Event’. “Gibson said the phones are a security backstop in the case of an emergency that ‘takes out communications’ in part of America. Federal funding will pay for the satellite airtime needed to utilize the phone devices.”
A friend comments, “It’s either a good idea, or foreshadowing.”
JOANNE JACOBS: SATs are out. Published ‘research’ is in, but it’s pay to play.
Test scores are out. Everyone’s got an A average. The “community service” trip to Mexico and the start-your-own-charity gambit are ho-hum.
Ambitious parents are paying to get a published “research” project on their teenagers’ college applications, report Daniel Golden and Kunal Purohit for ProPublica and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
High-priced college counselors link high schoolers to services that provide online mentors to guide the work and sites to publish it.
“A new industry is extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential,” they write. “At least 20 online research programs for high schoolers have sprung up in the U.S. and abroad in recent years, along with a bevy of journals that publish the work.”
Weird how the SATs were abandoned in the name of fairness, but it’s the rich benefitting.
Jts5665It's good to be a member of the aristocracy and above the law.
Jts5665Corrupt to the core.
TELLING US THEY FIXED THE PROBLEMS IS NOT ENOUGH. UNLESS THERE ARE TRIALS AND PEOPLE GOING TO JAIL, THEY DIDN’T FIX THE PROBLEMS: FBI improperly used warrantless search powers more than 278,000 times in 2021, FISA court filing reveals.
Disband. Salt the Earth.
Jts5665WTF. There need to repercussions to just randomly killing people in the middle east. This crap is just going to inspire more terrorism.
NOT A TERRORIST? The Biden Team Killed the Wrong Person Again.
U.S. military officials are walking back claims that a recent strike in Syria killed an influential al-Qaeda figure, following assertions by the dead man’s family that he had no ties to terrorists but was a father of 10 tending to his sheep when he was slain by an American missile.
Lotfi Hassan Misto, 56, whose family identified him as the victim of a Hellfire missile attack on May 3, was a former bricklayer who lived quietly in this town in northwest Syria, according to interviews with his brother, son and six others who knew him. They described a kind, hard-working man whose “whole life was spent poor.”
The operation was overseen by U.S. Central Command, which claimed hours after the strike, without citing evidence or naming a suspect, that the Predator drone strike had targeted a “senior Al Qaeda leader.” But now there is doubt inside the Pentagon about who was killed, two U.S. defense officials told The Washington Post.
“We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,” one official said. The other, offering a slightly different view, said “though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda.” Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss preliminary determinations of an ongoing investigation into the incident.
In the weeks since the attack, U.S. military officials have refused to identify publicly who their target was, how the apparent error occurred, whether a legitimate terrorist leader escaped and why some in the Pentagon maintain Misto was a member of al-Qaeda despite his family’s denials.
In a statement, Michael Lawhorn, a spokesman for Central Command, said officials are aware of reports of a civilian casualty and continue to assess the outcome.
It’s par for the course for an Obama administration retread: Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki Would Have Been 26 Today If Not for the US Drone War.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PUT CROOKS, GRIFTERS, AND INCOMPETENTS IN CHARGE: Just so we’re clear – New York has “No Plan B” for the power plants they’re shutting down. “The power plants that take the edge off of the peak times/events when loads are heaviest – literally called ‘peakers’ – are being shut down or driven into intentional disrepair by the state of New York in concert with the EPA.”
Power plants should never be closed down until after there’s full replacement capacity actually online. But remember, making ordinary people’s lives worse isn’t an unforeseen consequence. It’s a goal.
By Jason Cohen Former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent Garret O’Boyle said his family became homeless after he reported “illegal activity” in the agency, according to a report from the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released on Thursday. O’Boyle disclosed possible illegal actions to his Supervisory […]
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TALES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Colorado School District Hosts Drag Show Amid Teachers Union Embrace of Gender Ideology.
The performance was just one among the Vilar’s 2022-2023 STARS series lineup, the product of a partnership between the facility and the school district intended to provide “an array of performing arts genres from dance and theater to world music” to Eagle County students. Eagle County parents trust and expect STARS performances to be positive, educational experiences for their children. The description of Muse, however, should have raised red flags.
“What does it mean to be a woman?” the flier asked. “There’s hardly one answer, and exploring the question calls for some acrobatics … Get ready to see powerful women, graceful men and every permutation in between.” Just vague enough to masquerade as a children’s show, this language didn’t do the performance justice. Muse, rated for children aged eight and above, focused on an adult male transitioning to a female and featured provocatively dressed men performing sexual dances for an audience full of children.
Young audience members were clearly disturbed. One student expressed his concern by interrupting the show: “This is wrong,” he cried. “Don’t you know we’re in third grade?”
Parental consent for this school sponsored field trip was assumed and covered under a blanket permission slip that authorized student attendance to all STARS performances throughout the year.
If they aren’t telling you what it is then they don’t want you to know.
Jts5665Holy crap.
When the federal government sent $9,000 to Patty Myers to pay for her husband’s funeral, she got angry. “I didn’t want to take a penny. It felt like hush money, like they were paying me to keep quiet about how my husband died in the hospital.”
In a burst of inspiration, Patty decided to take the government’s money and use it to make a documentary. She found a director through a church friend on Facebook and created Making A Killing, which exposes the covid hospital protocol that she believes killed her husband and thousands of other Americans.
“When I started making this film, I didn’t know about the federal money driving the protocol. I do now,” Patty told me. The federal money was titanic, flooding hospitals with cash that stimulated record-breaking profits. A new report from Open The Books reveals that the 20 largest nonprofit hospitals in America received more than $23 billion in federal aid during the 2018 – 2021 time period, and “their cumulative net assets soared to $324.3 billion in 2021, up from 200.6 billion in 2018.” And, in a wonderful development for the hospitals’ top executives, those lavish taxpayer funds enabled many of them to get paid $10 million or more a year.
Alas, as Patty discovered, all that sweet federal money came with a catch: it incentivized specific medical treatments for Covid that happened to be deadly. If the hospital admitted you with a Covid diagnosis – great, they got paid more! If they “treated” you with remdesivir, a drug well-documented as lethal – fantastic, they got a 20% bonus on the whole bill! If the hospital tortured you with mechanical ventilation that caused secondary bacterial pneumonia – hooray, they got an even bigger payout! And if the hospital really lucked out and you died of Covid (even if not directly of Covid) – the cash bonanza was absolutely awesome.
“The hospital billed over $500,000 for Tony’s treatment and they couldn’t even find someone to give him water,” Patty said. I notice that Patty can’t talk too long about Tony without breaking into sobs. “He was my best friend. He was my partner. We did everything together.”
And what they did together was not only difficult, it was inspirational. After they learned their son had autism, Patty and Tony teamed up to create two nonprofits to help kids with special needs in the Orlando area. Patty is now Executive Director of Pathways for Life Academy, a private middle and high school that she and Tony founded, which prepares special needs kids for independence in life and learning. And she’s also the director of Building Pathways, which offers classes and summer camps to teach these kids practical skills.
“Tony called me from the hospital and said that we volunteer to advocate for people with disabilities all the time. And here I am in this hospital, trying to advocate for myself and nobody will listen. I’ve called the news media, the governor, anyone I can think of; nobody will respond.”
Tragically, Tony was locked into the Hospital Death Protocol, moving in predictable phases from remdesivir to ventilation, all while being isolated from his family, and refused water, ice, or food. Patty tells his story in Making a Killing in a poignantly straightforward manner, noting that the medical staff randomly stopped his breathing treatments.
Patty did manage an unusual triumph: she talked the staff into giving Tony ivermectin, which dramatically improved his condition. But her triumph was temporary: the staff then refused to keep giving it, telling her that it was not FDA-approved. Tony Myers died on September 9, 2021, almost four weeks after he entered Orlando Health Hospital. He was 55 years old.
Making A Killing also features Dayna Stevens, who tells of the brutal death of her mother. Rebecca Stevens read the Epoch Times, so she was informed enough to refuse both remdesivir and ventilation. But that didn’t save her. Her normal medications were withheld, and she was given remdesivir without her knowledge.
“The disdain they showed for my mother once they knew she was unvaccinated was unbelievable,” Dayna told me. “They mocked and ridiculed her. Nurses told her that patients who were unvaccinated shouldn’t be allowed to get oxygen. It’s almost like they normalized cruelty. They wouldn’t release her to me, so I called the cops.”
All Dayna’s efforts failed. She watched as medical staff at Advent Health Hospital in Altamonte Springs, Florida took away her mother’s oxygen and sedated her to death. Rebecca Stevens was 59, a grandmother of five.
The intense suffering of Patty and Dayna permeates the screen, leaving viewers bewildered. When did America transform into a place where patients have no rights and life is pathetically cheap? How did hospitals metastasize from houses of healing into chambers of horrors? Where did “Do No Harm” go?
Nobody knows how many people died due to the lethal hospital protocols. I’ve heard estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to over a million. Senator Ron Johnson appears in Making a Killing to condemn the “rigid top-down protocols” that caused this catastrophe. “Patients lost all their freedom when they went in the hospital,” he said.
And Robert Hall, a State Senator from Texas, told Patty, “Hospitals refused early treatments, and they treated patients wrong and too late. And they got huge financial incentives for a long hospital stay.”
The media has managed to muffle the voices of the bereaved, stifling their stories and ignoring the killing. For now, anguished family members have been confined to telling their stories to activist organizations like American Frontline Nurses, FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, and Protocol Kills. But their voices may finally break through, now that they’ve entered the legal arena.
Fourteen bereaved families in California have filed “wrongful death” lawsuits against three hospitals, claiming that their loved ones were murdered by the protocol. And the family of Grace Schara, a 19-year-old girl with Down Syndrome who was sedated to death as her family watched on FaceTime, is suing a hospital in Wisconsin “to pave the way for thousands of other victims’ families to file similar claims.”
As for Patty Myers, she’s hard at work finishing up Making a Killing 2. “After the film came out, so many nurses reached out to me begging to tell their story. They want to share what they witnessed and how they were bullied to keep quiet. And we’re following the money trail of the hospital protocols to see how it all worked. We’re digging deep.”
I asked Patty how she got the money to make the new film, given that she had used up the government’s funeral payout. “I was at a Reawaken event with a sign that said, “My husband was killed by the hospital protocols.” A man saw it and came over crying. He gave me the money.”
When I last spoke to Patty, she was hard at work at the school she and Tony founded, working on maintenance issues. “Our kids in the nonprofits miss him,” she told me. “He was the maintenance guy and the bus driver. I miss him, too. Now I have to figure out how to fix everything by myself.”
Jts5665NPC response.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Daniel Cameron wins GOP nom for Kentucky governor and is called the black face of white supremacy:
C’mon guys, make up your minds — the L.A. Times assured me in 2021 that it was Larry Elder: “Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.”
Jts5665I wish they would use the absolute rates rather than, or in addition to, the relative changes.
UGH: Young Americans Are Dying at Alarming Rates, Reversing Years of Progress.
For decades, advances in healthcare and safety steadily drove down death rates among American children. In an alarming reversal, rates have now risen to the highest level in nearly 15 years, particularly driven by homicides, drug overdoses, car accidents and suicides.
The uptick among younger Americans accelerated in 2020. Though Covid-19 itself wasn’t a major cause of death for young people, researchers say social disruption caused by the pandemic exacerbated public-health problems, including worsening anxiety and depression. Greater access to firearms, dangerous driving and more lethal narcotics also helped push up death rates.
Between 2019 and 2020, the overall mortality rate for ages 1 to 19 rose by 10.7%, and increased by an additional 8.3% the following year, according to an analysis of federal death statistics led by Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, published in JAMA in March. That’s the highest increase for two consecutive years in the half-century that the government has publicly tracked such figures, according to Woolf’s analysis.
The planet is dying, racism is systemic, education is both pointless and unaffordable, you’ll probably catch Long COVID, gang-banging is cool… all these attitudes take their toll.
SCIENCE AS A RACKET: “It’s hopeless,” the prospect of reforming cancer trials. “The most common errors in cancer trials work to ensure that the data are not actually applicable to average Americans. Over the last 10 years, we have done work showing many trials lack control arms, use inferior controls, measure unreliable endpoints, have the inappropriate use of crossover, poor post protocol care or improper drug dosing.”
In the words of evolutionary biologist Thomas Ray, every successful system accumulates parasites. And American science has been successful enough, long enough, to have accumulated a very serious parasitic load.
STERILIZATION OF MINORS FOR FUN AND PROFIT: How A Left-Wing Activist Group Teamed Up With Big Pharma To Push Radical Gender Ideology on American Hospitals.
By 2022, Rempe said, Children’s National was requiring staffers to use a patient’s preferred pronouns, no questions asked, even as European medical authorities were backing away from that practice, warning that on-demand gender affirmation could entrench dysphoria rather than reduce it, particularly in children. Worried the policy did more harm than good, Rempe asked for an exemption, which the hospital denied. She quit in early 2022.
“I was concerned that I would eventually have to administer puberty blockers and hormones, not just use the pronouns,” Rempe told the Free Beacon. “I kept finding myself in situations I wasn’t comfortable with ethically.”
Since her departure, Rempe has struggled to make sense of what happened to the hospital where she spent 16 years of her professional life. Was there a common thread behind the transgender flag pins, the pronouns, the puberty blockers, and the trainings and policies that enforced the new culture?
As it turns out, there is an outside force pushing hospitals in this direction.
I.
Adam Mastroianni has a great review of Memories Of My Life, the autobiography of Francis Galton. Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
This sparked the usual eugenics discussion. In case you haven’t heard it before:
Beroe: Eugenics inspired the Nazis (and 1920s Americans) to do very evil things. But Islam inspired Osama bin Laden to do very evil things, and we rightly believe that it’s fine to practice Islam as long as you don’t use it as an excuse to do evil things. Islam isn’t bad, flying planes into buildings is bad. Likewise, eugenics isn’t bad, involuntarily sterilizing people, or sending them to gas chambers, is bad. What’s the argument against forms of eugenics that don’t do this?
Adraste: Like what?
Beroe: Let’s say - financial incentives for the most talented people to have lots of children. Something like the old Nobel Sperm Bank, where people with great socially-valuable gifts are encouraged to deposit gametes, and couples who can’t conceive naturally - maybe infertile people, maybe lesbians - are encouraged to make use of them. And making voluntary contraception free and easily available, since by far the most common reason for the less-genetically-blessed part of the population having children is that they want contraceptives but can’t access them.
Adraste: Oh, interesting. I thought you were going to say a much worse thing, along the lines of "identify people you consider genetically inferior, then offer them money to undergo voluntary sterilization”. But of course there are many things we don’t allow people to offer other people money for. Like sex work. Or organ donation. Although people are allowed to have sex and donate organs for free, we think the desperation of poverty is so compelling, and the danger of these irreversible actions so great, that we ban seemingly-voluntary economic transactions around them. Call me a BETA-MEALR, but I think sterilization should be in the same category. Still, your suggestion avoided that, so good job.
Beroe: I take it you will shortly find some other objection, though.
Adraste: A brief aside: eugenics, as implemented in the early part of the 20th century, was extraordinarily evil. We might loosely consider the entire Holocaust eugenics, based on Nazi theory of racial purity1, but even if we restrict the label to the Nazis’ specific campaign against the disabled and mentally ill, it caused about 300,000 deaths. And although “Nazis are bad” is already priced in to our moral system, here in the United States we sterilized between 60,000 and 150,000 people. Also - it wouldn’t have been any better if it was scientifically competent, but it really wasn’t2. They sterilized 2,000 people for a form of blindness that wasn’t even genetic.
Beroe: Blindness, wow. I’d only heard about the cases around mental disabilities.
Adraste: Ah yes, mental disabilities. Carrie Buck was the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, the case where the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that involuntary sterilization was fully constitutional. She was sterilized for a mental disability. . . after making the honor roll at her school! Probably a family member raped her, and the family was trying to save their reputation and prevent any further inconvenient pregnancies. Then they sterilized her sister, on the grounds that she was related to Carrie and so probably had the same genes. Nobody knows how many of the hundred-thousand-odd forced sterilizations in the US were like this. Probably a lot. Again, not that it would have been any better if they were all real disability cases - just that the sheer incompetence and callousness of the people charged with making these life-ruining decisions is impossible to overestimate.
Beroe: But Galton was -
Adraste: - against this kind of thing. Which brings me back to my objection to your seemingly-compassionate-and-sensible eugenics proposal. Francis Galton said we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way3. People listened to him, nodded along, and then went and did eugenics in a coercive and horrifying way. Now here you are, saying we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way. You can see why I might be concerned. People roll their eyes at slippery slopes, but some slopes are genuinely slippery, and the slope from “thinks about eugenics at all” to “involuntary sterilization campaign” seems steep enough that I would just rather people not think about eugenics at all.
Beroe: If I understand you right, you’re saying that some things are so bad that we must ban not only the bad thing, but also innocent things that bad people could use to promote the bad thing. This seems to grant you, as arbiter of which things are too close for comfort to other things, an extraordinary amount of power. As I said before, Islam has been used by bad people to promote bad things. Some people would be very happy if we banned Islam. Should we?
Adraste: You seek hard-and-fast rules, but these will always elude you. You can’t escape adding up the costs and benefits and having a specific object-level opinion. Banning Islam has few benefits and many costs. It violates religious freedom. It perpetuates racist stereotypes. You couldn’t do it if you tried, plus a billion people would declare jihad on you. And the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t commit terrorist acts anyway. Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory requires minimal effort to maintain. Rolling it back has many costs and few benefits. I say keep it banned.
Beroe: You can’t assess idea how many benefits it does or doesn’t have, because your principle commits you to putting your fingers in your ears and saying “la la la I can’t hear you” whenever someone discusses the issue. Consider Garrett Jones’ hypothesis that most international differences - eg between developed and underdeveloped countries - are due to IQ. And consider that IQ is mostly genetic and could be improved with eugenics. Bringing all underdeveloped countries up to First World living standards would be the most valuable thing humanity has ever done. Or consider Greg Cochran’s hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews have a 15-point genetic IQ advantage - there aren’t a lot of Jews starving or in prison. If you could lift everyone up fifteen points, you could come close to ending poverty even within developed countries. Obviously these hypotheses are controversial, but they’re controversial not because there’s a lot of evidence against them but because everything about genetics and society is controversial because of your policy of cutting off all lines of speculation that might lead to eugenics. I maintain that if we discussed these ideas openly, we might find that they held the key to ending global poverty, crime, and disease. Meanwhile, what has Islam given us? Pretty buildings, calligraphy, and hummus.
Adraste: See, this is what worries me. I’m not sure you raise global IQ fifteen points merely by distributing condoms and subsidizing sperm banks. And if the advantages are so great - a fact which, of course, you haven’t remotely proven, merely gestured at a few renegade scientists speculating along similar lines - then it will seem so very tempting to do a bit more, the kinds of things that really could raise global IQ 15 points in a reasonable amount of time. Either eugenics isn’t tempting - in which case why do it? - or it’s very tempting - in which case we definitely shouldn’t do it.4
Beroe: The great sin of rationality is to look for justifications for your prejudices. I worry you have found a fully general one. Everything good could in theory be bad if it was implemented dictatorially and violently. You will use this as a rationalization to condemn any unpopular idea, but give every popular idea a pass based on hokey cost-benefit analyses and witty sayings.
Adraste: I may be more consistent than you think. Eugenics caused hundreds of thousands of involuntary sterilizations, ending just a few decades ago. And the perpetrators weren’t al-Qaeda terrorists or blood-crazed generalissimos who we can safely distance ourselves from. They were smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit, just like us. Show me another idea like that and I bet I’d be against that one too.
II.
I regret to say Adraste would lose her bet.
Paul Ehrlich is an environmentalist leader best known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb. He helped develop ideas like sustainability, biodiversity, and ecological footprints. But he’s best known for prophecies of doom which have not come true - for example, that collapsing ecosystems would cause hundreds of millions of deaths in the 1970s, or make England “cease to exist” by the year 2000.
Population Bomb calls for a multi-pronged solution to a coming overpopulation crisis. One prong was coercive mass sterilization. Ehrlich particularly recommended this for India, a country at the forefront of rising populations.
When we suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, [Chandrasekhar, an Indian official who shared Ehrlich’s views] should have encouraged the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.
I am sometimes astounded at the attitudes of Americans who are horrified at the prospect of our government insisting on population control as the price of food aid. All too often the very same people are fully in support of applying military force against those who disagree with our form of government or our rapacious foreign policy. We must be just as relentless in pushing ·for population control around the world, together with rearrangement of trade relations to benefit UDCs, and massive economic aid.
I wish I could offer you some sugarcoated solutions, but I'm afraid the time for them is long gone. A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies - often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival.
Ehrlich’s supporters included President Lyndon Johnson, who told the Prime Minister of India that US foreign aid was conditional on India sterilizing lots of people. The broader Democratic Party and environmentalist movement were completely on board.
In 1975, India had a worse-than-usual economic crisis and declared martial law. They asked the World Bank for help. The World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, made support conditional on an increase in sterilizations. India complied:
Before the Emergency, compulsory sterilization was considered in different states, but no concrete decision was ever made. At the time, only states had the authority to make a decision in the area of family planning. Once the Emergency was imposed, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, on her son’s insistence, amended the Constitution. The Constitution Act of 1976 gave the central government the right to execute family planning programs. Soon after, the central government mobilized the state political leadership and took decisive actions, such as setting up camps and sterilization targets.
Mr. [Sanjay] Gandhi allocated quotas to the chief ministers of every state that they were supposed to meet by any means possible. The chief ministers, too, in an attempt to impress the younger Gandhi, strived hard to meet those targets. Mr. Gandhi often visited villages and towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to encourage and approve the tremendous work being done in terms of meeting sterilization goals. Commissioners were awarded gold medals for their hard work. As a result, nothing mattered when it came to meeting the targets. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were at the top when it came to exceeding the targeted number of sterilizations, resulting in more commissioners from these states receiving medals.
Force was not only physical in form but also indirect. The government issued circulars stating that promotion and payments to employees were in abeyance until they were sterilized or completed their assigned quota of people they convinced to undergo sterilization. People had to produce a certificate of sterilization to get their salaries or even renew their driving/ rickshaw/scooter/sales tax license. Students whose parents had not undergone a sterilization were detained. Free medical treatment in hospitals was also suspended until a sterilization certificate was shown. Those who suffered the most were people associated with lower classes. These unfortunate people were picked up from railway stations or bus stops by policemen, regardless of their age or marital status. Poor, illiterate people, jail inmates, pavement dwellers, bachelors, young married men, and hospital patients were all victims.
In the end about eight million people were sterilized over the course of two years. No one will ever know how many were “voluntary” by standards that we would be comfortable with, but plausibly well below half.
The West didn’t just tolerate this process, they supported it and cheered it on. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations provided much of the funding. Western media ranged from supportive to concerned-for-the-wrong-reasons; my favorite example of the latter is the Washington Post’s Compulsory Sterilization Provokes Fear, Contempt. It worried that the campaign produced too much backlash:
By forcibly sterilizing millions of men during the 20-month emergency, the government of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi may made some very limited inroads on the birthrate, but it probably set back by a generation all efforts to contain the exploding population of India.
The closest it comes to moral criticism is in a section on a populist politician who wanted to solve overpopulation through yoga:
While Narain's folksy approach fits generally into the government's roughly sketched plans for returning India to its peasant roots, some Western experts are skeptical that there can be anything like a voluntary solution to the crisis, especially under the constraints created by the emergency.
"Compulsory sterilization was an obscenity," said a West European economist. "But I'm afraid, I'm convinced that there's no way to cope with the population problem of this country if birth control is not made compulsory. There should at least be disincentives against having more than two children."
The article mostly focuses not on condemning or condoning, but on the war against “misinformation” - in the “peasant bitterness” around the sterilization campaigns, many poor Indians spread false rumors, like that sterilization could make them sick. Until the Indian government worked harder to fight these kinds of myths, it would never be able to meet sterilization quotas effectively.
Francis Galton had the good fortune to die before people started misusing his ideas, allowing us to hope he would have opposed such developments. Ehrlich is still very much alive. When asked in 2015 if he still agreed with everything in his book, he said that “I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb. My language would be even more apocalyptic today. The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody oughta be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
Luckily for Ehrlich, no one cares. He remains a professor emeritus at Stanford, and president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. He has won practically every environmental award imaginable, including from the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, and the United Nations (all > 10 years after the Indian sterilization campaign he endorsed). He won the MacArthur “Genius” Prize ($800,000) in 1990, the Crafoord Prize ($700,000, presented by the King of Sweden) that same year, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. He was recently interviewed on 60 Minutes about the importance of sustainability; the mass sterilization campaign never came up. He is about as honored and beloved as it’s possible for a public intellectual to get.
(meanwhile, in 2020 the University College of London, to worldwide acclaim, announed that they were “denaming” a building previously named for Galton to show their repugnance for his eugenic theories).
Francis Galton’s ideas led - without his support or consent - to several hundred thousand forced sterilizations. Paul Ehrlich’s ideas - with his full support and consent - led to several million forced sterilizations.
Adraste claims our society has a taboo around eugenics only because of its repugnance at coercive sterilization. But actually, our society can’t bring itself to care at all about coercive sterilizations at all when eugenics isn’t involved.
III.
Beroe: I claim that if eugenics is discredited because its morally bankrupt proponents forcibly sterilized people in its name, then environmentalism - whose morally bankrupt proponents forcibly sterilized ten times as many people in its name - should be ten times as discredited. The only reason they aren’t is that the failures of eugenics received enough public attention to generate a hyperstitious slur cascade against it, and the failures of environmentalism didn’t.
Adraste: That seems bonkers to me. It seems easy to draw a line between demanding that foreign dictatorships sterilize their populace - which would be evil whether or not it was done under the environmental aegis - and saving the whales, or ensuring clean water, or protecting the rainforest.
Beroe: And it seems easy to me to draw a line between demanding that mental hospitals sterilize their patients - which would be evil whether or not it was done under the eugenic aegis - and having a sperm bank for talented people, or providing financial incentives to reproduce. You’re trying to take refuge in the exact sort of distinctions you wanted to deny me, under the argument that the harmless ideas were a “slippery slope” towards the harmful ones. Once you start saving the whales, you’re implicitly accepting a worldview which questions the sustainability of industrial civilization. And that worldview is a risk factor for demanding that Indira Gandhi sterilize millions of Indians. I’m not asserting this, mind you - I love whales! - just trying to point out the hypocrisy of your position.
Adraste: I recognize the similarity between these two cases, but if you retreat from your pathological extreme Outside View for a second, I think a gestalt look at both movements would show that eugenics had many other failures, and environmentalism many other successes, and that it’s fair to use these as context when deciding how to legislate each particular case.
Beroe: What you call my “pathological extreme Outside View” is an attempt to ban myself from smuggling in all my prejudices under the guise of “context”. For example, someone with different biases than you might say eugenics had many successes - my favorite is Dor Yeshorim, the group that screens for the genetic mutations common in Ashkenazi Jews and makes sure that two carriers don’t marry each other and produce a child with a deadly condition. Or they might say environmentalism has had some pretty spectacular failures - knee-jerk environmentalist opposition to nuclear power prevented it from taking over from fossil fuels, leading to our current coal-and-oil-dominated regime and all the worries about climate change that come with it - also coal pollution in the air kills tens of thousands of people per year directly. I think that if you do your calculations and context-finding without writing the bottom line ahead of time, it’s actually quite hard to make environmentalism come out on top.
Adraste: So, what? So we should drink lead-filled water on purpose to own the libs? Or whoever it is you’re trying to own here, I must admit I’m having trouble keeping track.
Beroe: No! We can admit that “environmentalism” is a big tent containing both evil hurtful ideas and good valuable ideas, and that the evil hurtful ideas do not detract one whit from the goodness of the good valuable ideas. And then we can do the same with eugenics!
Adraste: I must admit you make a compelling point. But don’t you agree there is sometimes a place for slippery slopes? For example, it seems so attractive to hand over the government to a nice-seeming communist dictator with good ideas. Maybe he can use that absolute power to really fix things up! But if someone proposes this, I would like to be able to object that, in the past, “give all power to a nice-seeming communist who will use it for good things” has slipped down a slope to “the communist dictator is actually a bad guy and abuses his power”. And I would like to be able to make this argument without a certain dear friend objecting that it’s exactly the same as saying that if you let people save the whales, maybe they will end up sterilizing millions of Indians.
Beroe: You also make a compelling point. I cannot deny that past atrocities cast deontological shadows, making us wary of doing anything in their vicinity. Indeed, it seems like this is the origin of deontology, and all moral systems beyond a naive act utilitarianism - that sometimes our attempts to do good will end in evil, and so we shut off large categories of apparently-good things because they resemble those that have historically ending in evil more often than we expected. If I have any argument at all here, beyond a simple “well, my intuitions about whether to do this say no in this particular case”, it’s that we should rarely let an atrocity cast shadows over speech, belief, or opinion, because once we ban those things, we lose the capacity for self-correction. I may deny your right to save the whales, but I will defend to the death your right to argue that the whales should be saved without facing the least bit of social sanction for your views.5
IV.
Character views are not author views, but I will admit to agreeing with Beroe’s final paragraph above.
Footnotes
Although eugenics eventually became labeled racist, this took a while and before it happened the political coalitions were not what you would expect. The anti-racist positions of the 1920s, expressed by black leaders like W.E.B. DuBois, centered around fear that only white people would get to do eugenics to themselves, leaving the white race irrecoverably better than the black. Black organizations demanded that eugenics be applied to blacks as well, with many of them thinking of it as their ticket out of relative poverty. See eg Nuriddin and Ginther.
As far as I can tell, Galton had a reasonable 19th century view of genetics, making a few good guesses while also appreciating how little he knew. His successors were utterly and inexcusably confused about the topic, and conceptualized all negative traits as simple recessive genes; once these were were removed from the population by killing or sterilizing their carriers, nobody would have negative traits anymore. A grim reminder of how wrong they were: the Nazis killed nearly ever schizophrenic in Germany, hoping to eliminate “the schizophrenia gene”. Today, Germany has exactly as many schizophrenics as any other country, because there are thousands of genes involved in schizophrenia, and all the deleterious variants are present in some frequency in the healthy population. But see footnote 4 below.
This is eliding a lot of complexity in what Galton actually believed. Most of his published speeches focus on “positive eugenics” - convincing geniuses to breed more, rather than undesirables to breed less. He seemed to understand how little we knew about genetics, and wanted more research before doing anything rash (if the research had been done, it would have shown that most negative eugenic practices could not possibly have worked). But he also wrote an unpublished novel about a eugenic utopia, whose policies extended to social pressure for undesirables not to have children, and sometimes exile. There was no mention of forcible sterilization or murder. I am not an expert in Galton and he may have mentioned these somewhere else.
Adraste sticks to moral arguments against eugenics and never tries to claim it wouldn’t work; I don’t think arguments that it wouldn’t work are defensible. Nobody doubts that breeding programs can successfully enhance or remove traits from farm animals or dogs; nobody serious doubts anymore that most human traits are at least partly genetic. And Beroe specifically mentions sperm banks - I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that which sperm donor you choose affects your future child’s traits a lot, and the child of a Nobel Prize winner is about 100,000x more likely to win a prize themselves than the average person. Even if you doubt the existence of genes, eugenics should work on whatever alternative explanation you have for the clustering of traits within families. For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is educational access / culture / cycles of poverty, you should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people in the next generation. This doesn’t mean that a given proposal to change the gene pool might not need much more selection pressure / take much longer than expected (see footnote 2 above), but now that we understand genetics we can calculate this. Also, common sense goes a long way here - most people have a good idea how much more children resemble their parents than the average adult.
Coria: Oh, hello there! You always seem so surprised to see me, even though I always show up at times like this!
Adraste: Oh no, what kind of crazy galaxy-brained take do you have for us today?
Coria: I want to claim that, in expectation, Paul Ehrlich did nothing wrong. He thought a population explosion was going to end the world! In fact, he had good reason to think this - it was the natural continuation of the trends at the time, averted only by a Green Revolution outside the window of what most forecasters considered possible. If he had been right, mass sterilization would have been the only way to save the world.
We have a known system for dealing with times when you need to break deontological prohibitions for the greater good, which is you present your case to the government and let it be considered democratically. He did that, the government agreed, and everyone tried mass sterilization. They were all tragically wrong, of course, but if they’d been right it would have been the right thing to do. Ehrlich was stupid but not evil.
Beroe: You could justify anything with that!
Coria: Quite! For example, Galton was pretty sure that there was a dysgenic trend - the human race was getting sicker and dumber every generation, and would soon lose the ability to sustain complex societies. He was more careful than Ehrlich - unable to prove it, he didn’t exactly propose any solutions. But his successors did, they went through the proper legal channels, and they took extreme action to avert the collapse of civilization. Now, in fact Galton was almost as wrong as Ehrlich - modern research suggests the dysgenic trend does exist, but it’s only 1-3 IQ points per century - things will be very different long before we notice it. Still, even the counterfactual Galton who demanded full-speed ahead negative eugenics acted correctly based on what he knew at the time.
Beroe: So are you endorsing pure act utilitarianism?
Coria: Absolutely not. I’m only recommending the existence of governments, which has been standard practice since Gilgamesh. Many things are rights violations - for example, seizing someone’s property. But when a legitimate government does so in the public interest after due consideration, we accept it as part of living in a society. It was a rights violation to quarantine an entire population in their homes during the early days of the coronavirus. But the legitimate government decided to do it in order to protect the public interest, so it’s not morally equivalent to kidnapping or whatever we would call it if a random person did it. And some states still castrate pedophiles as a punishment - one which naturally includes sterilization - and I have no particular problem with that. So it seems I must believe governments may sometimes involuntarily sterilize citizens when it is in the public interest. Did you know the Supreme Court’s ruling on Buck said that “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes?”
Beroe: Awkward.
Adraste: Yes, this is one of the very many things about the Buck ruling I would change if I had a time machine.
Beroe: So are you saying that governments can’t be judged on normal standards of good and evil? Everything Stalin did was okay, because he was dictator while he did it?
Coria: No, of course not. I’m saying that individuals are judged on a strictly deontological standard, and governments on something partway between deontology and consequentialism. During a crisis, governments are licensed - within the bounds of their constitutions - to act for the greater good. These acts can still be judged as evil, but only on consequentialist grounds - they made the world worse rather than better.
If the governments that followed Ehrlich had succeeded in averting a population bomb that would otherwise have destroyed humanity, I would judge them as good. If the governments that followed Galton had succeeded in preventing a dysgenic collapse of civilization, I would judge them as good too. Instead, their actions caused great suffering for no benefit, so I judge them as bad.
Adraste: I thought you said Ehrlich did nothing wrong!
Coria: I said bad, not wrong. If you see your friend and hug them, but unbeknownst to you they have an aneurysm which is activated by hugs, and they die, then you have done a thing which went badly, but you were not morally in the wrong for doing it. Ehrlich did the best he could have based on what he knew at the time. If we are to do better than him, it will have to be by being smarter, not by being more moral.
Adraste: I find this pretty concerning. My original position is that we must taboo everything about eugenics. Beroe made an argument that perhaps we could relax the taboo if we promise never to do anything unethical or coercive. But she hasn’t even had time to gather her breath before you come in and say that in fact, we should sometimes do unethical and coercive things too. I think this just reinforces my suspicion that we shouldn’t even take that first step.
Coria: That’s fine. You have every right to oppose eugenics, but you must exercise that right in your capacity as a citizen of a democratic polity, not as some sort of impersonal arbiter of morality who gets to decide prima facie what actions are always and forever off limits. Paul Ehrlich estimated that what was best for the world was to pursue a sterilization campaign, and he lobbied the government for it. If you estimate that what’s best for the world is to never do sterilization campaigns, you should also lobby the government for that. I will believe both of you are good people trying to do the right thing as you understand it. Only one of you can be right, of course, but that reflects on your intelligence, not your morality. We can’t all be geniuses. At least not until Beroe gets her Nobel Sperm Bank!
I (Scott) definitely do not admit to agreeing with Coria’s final paragraph, but I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism.
Recently, a whistleblower testified to Congress regarding a probe into Hunter Biden's finances, which accused high-ranking members of Biden's Justice Department of thwarting US Attorney David Weiss' ability to bring charges against the president's son.
I have columns out today on the release of the long-awaited report from John Durham on the Russian collusion investigation, including on the new Messenger site. However, I wanted to post the report itself below. As expected, it is a scathing indictment of the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the media for one of the most successful political hit jobs in history.
The report shreds the FBI and Justice Department for abandoning standards and ignoring the lack of evidence to launch and prolong the investigation. The report notes that the treatment of the unsubstantiated allegations in the Steele Dossier, funded by the Clinton Campaign, was “markedly different” from the government’s level of interest in Clinton’s campaign when it faced such allegations.
Durham’s report confirmed that the FBI ignored intelligence it received from “a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server.”
Durham noted that “The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.”
The FBI issued a statement on Monday:
“The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time. Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented. This report reinforces the importance of ensuring the FBI continues to do its work with the rigor, objectivity, and professionalism the American people deserve and rightly expect.”
“Missteps” is hardly how one would describe a false narrative promulgated by a campaign and perpetuated by the FBI or the derailing of a duly elected president for three years in a faux conspiracy. The statement is ample evidence of a lack of remorse by the FBI like a habitual offender giving a shrug in his court “allocution” before a judge.
As for the media, they are already minimizing and spinning their own key role in this disinformation campaign. Yesterday, as I went to the studio, I listened to CBS/WTOP cover the report in 20 words before a lengthy report on Martha Stewart making the cover of Sports Illustrated. Most viewers and readers will be given few details of this report by a media that spent three years pushing this false narrative. It is part of a long pattern that raises troubling questions of a de facto state media in this country.
Below is my column in The Hill on the continued media blackout on evidence of influence peddling and corrupt practices by the Biden family. The coverage of the recent disclosure of dozens of LLCs and bank accounts used to funnel up to $10 million to Biden family members captured the growing concerns over a de facto state media in the United States. Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story.
Here is the column:
This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this is easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.
The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”
For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family members, including Biden grandchildren.
Last year, I wrote a column about how the media were preparing a difficult “scandal implosion” to protect the Bidens and themselves from the backlash from disclosures of this influence peddling operation.
The brilliance of the Biden team was that it invested the media in this scandal at the outset by burying the laptop story as “Russian disinformation” before the election. That was, of course, false, but it took two years for most major media outlets to admit that the laptop was authentic.
But the media then ignored what was on that “authentic laptop.” Hundreds of emails detailed potentially criminal conduct and raw influence peddling in foreign countries.
When media outlets such as the New York Post confirmed the emails, the media then insisted that there was no corroboration of the influence peddling payments and no clear proof of criminal conduct. It entirely ignored the obvious corruption itself.
Now that the House has released corroboration in actual money transfers linking many in the Biden family, the media is insisting that this is no scandal because there is no direct proof of payments to Joe Biden.
Putting aside that this is only the fourth month of an investigation, the media’s demand of a direct payment to President Biden is laughably absurd. The payments were going to his family, but he was the object of the influence peddling.
The House has shown millions of dollars going to at least nine Bidens like dividends from a family business. As a long-time critic of influence peddling among both Republicans and Democrats, I have never seen the equal of the Bidens.
The whole purpose of influence peddling is to use family members as shields for corrupt officials. Instead of making a direct payment to a politician, which could be seen as a bribe, you can give millions to his or her spouse or children.
Moreover, these emails include references to Joe Biden getting a 10 percent cut of one Chinese deal. It also shows Biden associates warning not to use Joe Biden’s name but to employ code names like “the Big Guy.” At the same time, the president and the first lady are referenced as benefiting from offices and receiving payments from Hunter.
Indeed, Hunter complains that his father is taking half of everything that he is raking in.
None of that matters. The New York Times ran a piece headlined, “House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden.” That is putting aside evidence against all the family members around Joe Biden. It also ignored that other evidence clearly shows Biden lied about his family not receiving Chinese funds or that he never had any knowledge of his son’s business dealings.
The fact is that the Times may indeed be trying for another Pulitzer Prize. The newspaper previously won a Pulitzer for the now debunked Russian collusion story. It was later revealed that this story was based on a dossier funded by the Clinton campaign and placed in the media by Clinton officials. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward warned the co-winner The Washington Post that the story was unreliable but was ignored. The Pulitzer Committee refused to withdraw the award.
What Donalds fails to appreciate is that this is sometimes how Pulitzers are made. Roughly 100 years ago, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer for his coverage of the Soviet Union despite serving as an apologist for Joe Stalin. Duranty refused to report on actual conditions from mass killing to starvation in the “worker’s paradise.”
Thus, when the Soviets were starving to death as many as 10 million Ukrainians, the Times ran a Duranty story with the headline “Russians Hungry but Not Starving.” He not only spinned Stalin labor camps that killed millions but also attacked reporters who sought to uncover the truth.
Years later, Ukraine and various groups demanded that Duranty’s prize be rescinded, but the Committee insisted that there was no “clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”
What is most impressive about this week is that all but a few outlets seem to be angling for the next Duranty Pulitzer.
In discussing modern Russian propaganda, researchers at the Rand Corporation described it as having “two distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”
Sound familiar?
Today we are seeing a much more dangerous phenomenon. The coverage this week has all the markings of a state media. The consistent spin. The almost universal lack of details. The absurd distinctions.
It is the blindside of our First Amendment, which addresses the classic use of state authority to coerce and control media. It does not address a circumstance in which most of the media will maintain an official line by consent rather than coercion.
The media simply fails to see the story. Of course, it can always look to the president for enlightenment. Just before his son received a massive transfer of money from one of the most corrupt figures in Romania, Biden explained to that country why corruption must remain everyone’s focus. “Corruption is a cancer, a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy,” he said. “Corruption is just another form of tyranny.”
It is just a shame that no one wants to cover it.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.
LATERAL MOVE: Ex-AOC aide Justine Medina now New York Communist party boss.
Jts5665Market based economies being more successful than planned economies shouldn't be surprising.
DON SURBER: The Polish Plumber for the Win.
For the past two decades, Brits and other Western Europeans have mocked the big dumb Polish Plumber who migrated to the more prosperous countries in Europe once Poland joined the EU. While there was some resentment about the Poles taking jobs by working cheaper, they were jobs most Westerners would rather not have because no one wants to work with toilets and underground pipes. Those putting plumbers down pursued college degrees. . . .
Nearly a decade later, British media now fears that Poland will overtake England.
The Sunday Telegraph reported on Coronation Day, “Poland will be wealthier than Britain by 2030 — it’s time we took notice.”
What a way to greet the crowning of King Charles III by announcing the kingdom is going broke.
The story said, “After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Poles were the first former Soviet country to restore democracy, free markets and the rule of law. Yet they still had a mountain to climb. In 1989, Polish workers had a GDP per capita that was just a tenth of their German counterparts.
“Three decades of steady growth has wrought a miracle. The economic disparities have narrowed dramatically. Adjusted for purchasing parity, GDP per head in Poland is now £28,200 compared with £35,000 in the UK, £34,200 in France and £39,800 in Germany. At its current trajectory rate, Poland will overtake the UK by 2030.
“Since the millennium, Poland’s real GDP per capita has more than doubled; by contrast, GDP per capita in Britain, France and Germany grew between 15% and 24% over the same period.
“The truth is that living standards in places like Warsaw or Wrocław are already comparable to those in Berlin, Paris and London.
“Indeed, the quality of life for young families is undoubtedly higher.”
This should encourage some self-examination, but probably won’t.
Jts5665Government schools teach people to be poor and then government medicine exterminates them... Chilling.
Remember Amir Farsoud? The man that nearly chose Canadian euthanasia over homelessness but was saved from being suicided by an outpouring of generosity from concerned citizens.
Jts5665The only way they'll panic is if the other side starts ballot harvesting as efficiently as they do.
MICHAEL BARONE: ‘Segregation’ Is a Deliberate Act.
Those familiar with the America that emerged victorious but still largely racially segregated after World War II should have no trouble appreciating how racial discrimination and racial segregation have almost entirely disappeared in voting, in the jobs market and in public accommodations. Yet some of the most knowledgeable and perceptive writers and analysts still sometimes use the verb “segregate” without identifying who is doing the segregating.
One example is Clare Malone, a former FiveThirtyEight analyst and now a New Yorker writer. Back in a March 2016 column on how people with low social connectedness tended to vote for Donald Trump, I quoted her analysis of the crowd at a Trump rally. “Something inspirational seems to be happening among the assembled — a sense of collective identity being discovered,” she wrote. The observation stands up well seven years later.
Similarly sharp were her descriptions of two Cleveland suburbs — Shaker Heights, where she grew up, a high-income suburb east of downtown planned a century ago, and Parma, a working-class enclave that grew up west of the Cuyahoga River factories in the 1950s and 1960s.
The differences are not just economic but also ethnic. Parma is populated in large part by the descendants of pre-1924 immigrants from Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. Shaker Heights started off “exclusive,” meaning no Jews or blacks, but has substantial percentages of both groups now, with most of the whites and blacks being college-educated. It’s an unusual mix, similar to Montclair, New Jersey, and Oak Park, Illinois.
Malone ignores those differences, however, when she quotes a Census Bureau finding that “a ‘typical white’ American lives in a neighborhood that’s 75 percent white.” She then adds, “American suburban life seems to regress to a mean of segregation.”
America is basically 75% white. That’s not segregation, it’s the norm.
