George Rebane
Online cheating at all time high (here). Getting someone else to do your assignment or take your test is a big business in the current epoch of remote learning. Students cite the difficulty in learning anything in the remote and virtual presentations of material they are offered. Others say that the stress level to achieve today is higher than ever. Both reasons seem to justify cheating by hiring online ‘tutors’ to do their work. Online cheating is very hard to detect, and everyone believes that what was put in practice during the C19 pandemic will be continued in the new post-pandemic ‘normal’. Combine this with the already crap for curriculum that unionized public school teachers deliver, and the future for the next generation of ‘educated’ workers looks very dim, … and what does that do for America having to compete in international markets and maintaining leadership in defense technologies? All this is being brought about in an environment of classroom chaos tolerated more than ever in the name of ‘racial equity’. (more here)
Everyone is testing Biden on the world stage, and so far he continues to fail every test. As most of us predicted last year in these pages, Bumblebrain as president would be subjected to a battery of international ‘crises’ as soon as he was sworn in. And true to form, every bad guy on the geo-strategic stage is now taking advantage of the American president renown for his absolute ignorance of how the world order works as attested to his record of past failures in assessing international events and problems. Bumblebrain has surrounded himself with a remarkable cadre of limp-wristed policy makers and enforcers who have garnered no respect from our allies and antagonists (e.g. note how Alejandro Mayorkas SecDHS continues to deny the border crisis and push the administration’s Big Lie that “the border is secure”). The likelihood for a major conflict and/or setback on the world stage increases daily.
Almost all economists cannot make useful predictions of economic behavior and events. My view of economists, especially those professing quantitative models and more so those of socialist leanings, has been justifiably dour for most of my adult life. Today these know-nothings are especially in demand by the Dems and the Biden administration to sprinkle some progressive pixie dust on the country’s path to ever more comprehensive socialism. But as usual, they make huge errors that would be egregious in any public forum attended by an informed and numerate population. That being far from the case, the current cadre of economists are free to continue their nonsensical blatherings without harming any one but America’s taxpayers. The most recent example being their prediction of a million new jobs for April that turned out to be less than one fourth that number. (more here)
Anybody know what Trump did that was unconstitutional? The Dems and their lamestream lackeys repeat that charge daily in their desperate attempts to divert attention from their own anti-constitutional proposals and policies. Today the list of the most egregious anti-American activities of the Dems is headed by their utter abandonment of border security and their promotion of HR1 in Congress. The latter’s provisions are based on enormous lies and cynical assessments of our national elections and the country's state of affairs in general. Their intent is to bring the nation’s elections under federal control, in distinct contravention of our Constitution’s prescriptions. True to their rampant road to socialism, HR1 would destroy the federalism under which the several states conduct their elections. (more here) Central planning and control über alles.
CDC, NIH, WHO, …, all of them have shown how politicized science can mismanage responses to the Covid pandemic at all levels of government. The potpourri of pronouncements from such agencies over the last year have been all over the map, and continue to this day. Their main function has been to let politicians establish and extend illegal, unnecessary, and harmful public policies, the only function of which is to reduce individual liberties and expand the establishment of a powerful centralized government. The latest such revelation (which is not news to most RR readers) is CDC’s lying about the C19’s outdoor transmission rate which enables politicians to double down on social distancing and mask mandates. These substantive big lies have been enthusiastically backed by the Dems and trumpeted daily by their lamestream media. Their impact on the nation’s economic health and forms of transforming governance will be studied for decades by free-thinking historians. Government historians have already written this history and incorporated it into the nation’s school curricula. (more here and here)
[14may21 update] Masks still required for the vaccinated frequenting crowded spaces. So can someone from the vaunted ‘party of science’ explain how the immunizing and prophylactic properties of the vaccine diminish when the vaccinated walk into one of these crowded space? The CDC failed to expand on that point. Even David Leonhardt of the NYT penned a critical commentary of the CDC (here) about its baseless, fluid, and science-free face mask mandates. (H/T to reader, and more here, here and here)
Covid, the third greatest killer in the land? This little stat is being purveyed perhaps to justify the mostly insane response policies that have been recommended and implemented by government agencies and jurisdictions over the last year. Our own Don Rogers (Union publisher) writes today – “Some of us also learned folly, depression, grief, though these were not nearly so widespread nor the disease so deadly as at first feared. Still, it is widespread. It is deadly. It is the third-leading cause of death in America, right behind cardiac disease and cancer whether you count by diagnosis or annual deaths above average. It is real.” Such naked reporting overlooks C19’s role as the stand-in grim reaper for the elderly and/or infirm who were statistically on death’s door with or without the pandemic. Some malady was going to take these people in any case, and it turned out to be a dreaded disease that had little if any measurable effect on the mortality rates of the young and younger. C19 was able to rack up its score and place third this time only because of its (not so exceptional) virulence and some wrong-headed and random response policies. But writing reports which make the lightly-read reader believe that now we have permanently ensconced a new third-place killer is both misleading and wrong. All that such journalism does is perpetuate continued and docile acceptance of population control policies, no matter how ill-advised.
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