The continuing trend toward the loss of our freedom - free speech at the brink

 Jonathan Turley gets it right again.

Those who want to control speech deserve what they will get - tyranny.  The rest of us don't.

The Progressives' agenda is Repressive.

Here is JT's blog entry.

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We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in Europe. The move to criminalize speech has led to an insatiable appetite for new limitations and broader prosecutions. Norway is an example of this headlong plunge into speech controls and crimes in the West. This week the legislature adopted (without even a vote) a new criminal law that punishes people for saying anything deemed hate speech toward transgender people in their own home or private conversations.

Minister of Justice and Public Security Monica Maeland declared victory because speech regulation must be “adapted to the practical situations that arise.” The “practical situation” includes speaking to your own spouse or family.

Birna Rorslett, vice president of the Association of Transgender People in Norway added allowing people to speak out against transgender values or issues “has been an eyesore for trans people for many, many years.”

Such speech controls in Europe have led to a chilling effect on political and religious speech. In their homes, people will often share religious and political views that depart from majoritarian values or beliefs. This law would regulate those conversations and criminalize the expression of prohibited viewpoints.

As we recently discussed, a poll in Germany found only 18 percent of Germans feel free to express their views in public. Notably, over 31 percent of Germans did not even feel free expressing themselves in private among friends. Just 17 percent felt free to express themselves on the Internet and 35 percent said that freedom to speak is confined to the smallest of private circles.

The most chilling fact is that European-style speech controls have become a core value in the Democratic Party. Once a party that fought for free speech, it has become the party demanding Internet censorship and hate speech laws. President-Elect Joe Biden has called for speech controls and recently appointed a transition head for agency media issues that is one of the most pronounced anti-free speech figures in the United States. It is a trend that seems now to be find support in the media, which celebrated the speech of French President Emmanuel Macron before Congress where he called on the United States to follow the model of Europe on hate speech.

For free speech advocates, we need to educate the public on where this road leads in places like Norway. What is at stake is the very right that has long defined us as a nation. Once we cross the Rubicon into speech criminalization and controls, Europe has shown that it is rarely possible to work back to liberties lost. We are moving into potentially the most anti-free speech period of American history — and possibly the most anti-free speech Administration. Many politicians are already arguing for citizens to give up their free speech rights in forums like the Internet. With the media echoing many of these anti-free speech sentiments, it will require a greater effort of those who value the First Amendment and its core place in our constitutional system.

Vitamin D3 supplements and cancer

 Here is a link to a paper at jamanetwork.com, "Effect of Vitamin D3 Supplements on Development of Advanced Cancer.

Here is the Findings.

In this secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial with 25 871 patients, supplementation with vitamin D3 reduced the incidence of advanced (metastatic or fatal) cancer in the overall cohort, with strongest risk reduction in individuals with normal weight and no reduction among individuals with overweight or obesity.

Here is the Results.

Among 25 871 randomized VITAL participants (51% female; mean [SD] age, 67.1 [7.1] years), 1617 were diagnosed with invasive cancer over a median intervention period of 5.3 years (range, 3.8-6.1 years). As previously reported, no significant differences for cancer incidence by treatment arm were observed. However, a significant reduction in advanced cancers (metastatic or fatal) was found for those randomized to vitamin D compared with placebo (226 of 12 927 assigned to vitamin D [1.7%] and 274 of 12 944 assigned to placebo [2.1%]; HR, 0.83 [95% CI, 0.69-0.99]; P = .04). When stratified by BMI, there was a significant reduction for the vitamin D arm in incident metastatic or fatal cancer among those with normal BMI (BMI<25: HR, 0.62 [95% CI, 0.45-0.86]) but not among those with overweight or obesity (BMI 25-<30: HR, 0.89 [95% CI, 0.68-1.17]; BMI≥30: HR, 1.05 [95% CI, 0.74-1.49]) (P = .03 for interaction by BMI).

The ethics of forgiving student debt

 Jeff Jacoby gets it right at Jewish World Review.

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During the presidential primary campaign last winter, as Democratic candidates were promoting various plans to cancel federal student loan debt, one Iowa father's encounter with Elizabeth Warren captured the raw unfairness of the idea.

"My daughter's getting out of school. I saved all my money [so] she doesn't have any student loans," the man said. "Am I going to get my money back?"

"Of course not," Warren answered.

"So you're going to pay for people who didn't save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed," said the father, visibly upset. "My buddy had fun, bought a car, went on vacations. I saved my money. He made more than I did, but I worked a double shift, worked extra. My daughter's worked since she was 10."

That exchange vividly illustrates the injustice of student-debt proposals that would, in effect, punish those who saved and worked more to pay for college, those who deferred higher education until they could afford it, and those who responsibly repaid their loans — by forcing them to pay for those who didn't. Even more outrageous, it would compel the two-thirds of Americans who didn't earn a college degree to help pick up the tab for many of those who did.

Of the nearly $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, according to the Federal Reserve, the vast majority, more than $1.5 trillion, is held by the US government. Since higher education correlates strongly with higher earnings, these college loans are concentrated among the relatively well-to-do. So an immense government program to forgive outstanding student debt would disproportionately benefit high-income people at the expense of those less fortunate. Democrats a year ago may have thought that offering a bailout to college-educated, upper-middle-class voters made political sense. But how can they still think so after an election in which the "blue wave" they expected never materialized, in part because of Republican gains among working-class Americans without college degrees?

Yet leading Democrats and progressives are doubling down. "Biden-Harris can cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt," Warren tweeted recently. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, claims that any college graduate's "first $50,000 of debt [can] be vanquished" through an executive order by the next president. On Wednesday, a coalition of 236 liberal organizations called upon Biden to issue that order upon taking office.

It is far from clear that billions of dollars of debt can be simply written off via presidential decree. But set aside the procedural question. A huge new student loan forgiveness scheme is indefensible as a matter of policy.

As noted, it would amount to a boon for the relatively well-off. But it would also treat similarly situated people dissimilarly. Imagine three 30-year-old neighbors, each of whom earns $50,000 — a construction worker who never went to college, a legal secretary with a two-year associate's degree and $2,000 in remaining student debt, and a software engineer who attended a four-year college and graduate school and still has $50,000 in unpaid loans. A bailout that erased $50,000 of student debt would give nothing to one of the neighbors, a modest $2,000 to the second, and a $50,000 bonanza to the third.

College loan forgiveness isn't just unfair. It is unnecessary. Some borrowers have a hard time managing their student debt, but the data make clear that this is not a national crisis. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 70 percent of college loans are fully paid off within 10 years. Among borrowers with loan amounts between $5,000 and $10,000, fully 80 percent clear the debt within a decade.

For the typical American household paying down a student loan, the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances has found, payments amount to around 5 percent of income. According to Jason DeLisle, a specialist on higher-education financing at the American Enterprise Institute, a recent analysis of 4 million families' financial records by the JP Morgan Chase Institute calculated that the typical monthly student loan payment ranged between $144 and $203. For the median family, that amounted to 5.5 percent of take-home income.

Of course, there are borrowers who find themselves struggling to make their payments. But those borrowers can avail themselves of existing means to have their debt deferred, reduced, or even canceled. By one count, there are 13 major student loan forgiveness programs. Some are geared to people who work in public service, education, health care, or the military; others enable borrowers to have their payments capped at an affordable percentage of their discretionary income. Bottom line: The overwhelming majority of college loans are paid off, and help is available for debtors who get in over their heads.

Even amid the financial stresses triggered by the pandemic, the American people are not drowning in debt, college-related or otherwise. Bloomberg noted the other day that household debt payments are currently lower than they have been in decades. Which suggests that even if the government were to forgive all student loan debt, it wouldn't provide much of a fiscal stimulus.

What it would provide is an unstoppable demand for the government to wipe out other kinds of personal obligations. "Cancel rent. Cancel mortgage. Cancel student debt," Representative Ayanna Pressley tweeted in July. And why stop there? From Matthew Walther, writing in The Week, comes a call for a "debt jubilee" that would wipe out $50,000 of debt owed for anything at all: "credit cards, auto loans, remaining mortgage balances, and, especially, medical debts, which should be discharged without any limit."

Children send Santa Claus lists of things they want for free, but adults know that Santa isn't real. Santa isn't the federal government, either. Washington cannot magically make people's debts disappear; it can only compel other people to pay them. That may or may not be good politics, but it is certainly terrible economics.

The battle between good and evil in the United States

 Here is an editorial by the Editorial Board of The Epoch Times.

The Board is on target.

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When the founders of our newspaper fled a communist regime to come to America, they never expected that this great nation would one day become the focal point of the battle between communism and freedom.

Many Americans believe communism is an abstract concept, something that only affects faraway nations, without realizing that it has already arrived at our doorstep.

Communism has spread in America under names such as socialism, progressivism, liberalism, neo-Marxism, and so on, in a slow process over decades of systematic subversion by first the Soviet Union, and now the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

This cumulative battle for the future of America—and with it, the rest of the world—is now coming to a head in the U.S. presidential election.

This is a conflict that transcends partisanship and party affiliation.

Belief in God has always been fundamental to America. The early colonists fled here so that they could practice their religion freely. This nation was founded on the belief that we are all created equal by God and endowed by the Creator with our rights. The U.S. motto is “In God we trust.”

Belief in God and the principles derived from that belief are the fundamental reasons why the United States can enjoy freedom, democracy, and prosperity, and why the United States has become the nation it is today.

In this great tradition, voting is a sacred duty in which each citizen may take responsibility for who governs. This year, a record number of Americans voted to choose their next leader.

We have since learned that this process has been subverted. Numerous credible allegations of voter fraud have emerged, pointing to a systematic effort to change the outcome of the election.

The far-left and the communist devil behind it—the same force that Karl Marx once described as haunting Europe—are using lies, fraud, and manipulation in an attempt to deprive the people of their rights and freedoms.

One of the two major U.S. parties, the Democratic Party, is no longer the political party it used to be. Over the decades, it has gradually been infiltrated by the same Marxist ideology that has created the most brutal and repressive communist regimes in history.

Communist ideology, including socialism and its associated ideas, is not a normal ideology. It is the ideology that has caused the unnatural deaths of at least 100 million people.

The communist ideology uses seemingly righteous concepts, such as “equality” and “political correctness,” to confuse people. Its ideology has infiltrated all fields in our society, including education, media, and art. It unscrupulously destroys everything that is traditional, including faith, religion, morality, culture, family, art, education, law, and so on, and leads people to fall into moral depravity.

This is the ideology of totalitarianism, one that drives once-thriving nations such as Venezuela into the abyss and that was able to destroy 5,000 years of culture in China, where people went from a belief in the divine to a devotion to the state.

It is the systematic undoing of all that is good that humankind stands for. It stands diametrically opposed to goodness, fairness, truth, and compassion.

This not only has undermined people’s spirits and their righteous faith in God, but has dragged the American people and all of mankind to the brink of danger.
A Choice Between Good and Evil

This is a conflict that transcends party lines, a battle between whether we as Americans can stay true to our founding principles and follow God’s will, or whether we will be subjected to forces that seek to control and destroy our most fundamental rights.

This is not something we say lightly; because our newspaper’s founders lived through communist totalitarianism, they understand its destructive force.

As a media organization, we are independent and don’t take positions on political issues or candidates, but rather stand for truth and justice.

America has now come to the brink of falling into a communist abyss.

At the center of this battle is now President Donald Trump, who has clearly said no to socialism and communism and ended decades of appeasement of the Chinese regime by enacting a nationwide effort to counter its influence and infiltration.

Trump has confronted the CCP at this critical moment in history.

To communist China, the trajectory has been clear: Trump is an American president who values tradition and opposes communism, and as long as he leads, the Chinese regime knows it won’t succeed in its decades-long objective to overthrow America and, with it, the rest of the free world.

We have communist China at our gates, ready to take over. The CCP has carefully studied the U.S. system over the decades and now has successfully taken advantage of our open society and has infiltrated our country.

Internally, we have far-left groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter (which refers to the organization, whose founders describe themselves as “Marxists” and have ties to pro-CCP groups, not people broadly supporting black lives) organizing protests and riots. The movement is similar to the CCP’s Cultural Revolution, which destroyed the cultural heritage and traditions of the nation. It is an anti-American movement, just like the Cultural Revolution was anti-Chinese. The core of the movement’s ideology is no different from that of the communist movement in China, and it goes hand in hand with the CCP, ready to subvert America.

The impact of this election is far-reaching. It has made clear to people, governments, and organizations around the world that they must decide whether they stand with the communist devil or with tradition and universal values.

More and more people are now realizing that the 2020 U.S. election is not a two-party fight, not a dispute between Trump and Joe Biden, but a battle between tradition ​​and socialism, a battle between good and evil, a battle between the divine and the communist devil.

Sub-optimal choices concerning COVID-19 and some common sense

Here is a link to a paper by Budish "Maximize Utility subject to R ≤ 1: A Simple Price-Theory Approach to Covid-19 Lockdown and Reopening Policy".

The paper illustrates the non-think to date exhibited by most Politicians, Talking Heads, and "Scientists" such as Fauci and Osterholm.

Here are some excerpts.

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When eradication of an infectious threat is not feasible,

the second-best from a public health perspective is to minimize its spread. For example Dr.

Michael Osterholm writes: “As epidemiologists, we have two goals. The first is to prevent.

When that is not possible, the second is to minimize ...” (Osterholm and Olshaker, 2020, pg.

26). As emphasized in the introduction, however, the minimize objective makes it difficult

to think about tradeoffs if the interventions themselves are very expensive. This latter point bears emphasis. In the HIV pandemic, the minimize strategy entailed widespread public

education about safe sex, condom distribution, needle exchange, etc. — but no public health

expert recommended literally trying to minimize the spread of the virus by banning sex (or

banning non-monogamous sex, etc.). In the Covid-19 pandemic, however, the minimize

strategy has included not just the kinds of interventions that are relatively cheap like virusrisk

education, masks, testing, etc., but also much more severe and expensive measures which

have included banning many forms of social and commercial contact.

[The “economic cost of reducing spread” curve grows very steeply as R gets lower than

lower than 1.0, even if simple interventions are utilized, because of the increasingly-valuable

activities that have to be dropped.]

The public-health instinct expressed by Dr. Osterholm to eradicate if feasible, and otherwise
minimize, is a useful heuristic in the scenarios depicted in Panels D, E, and F. Specifically, if we
understand “eradicate if feasible” to mean feasible at a fathomable fixed cost, and “minimize” to
mean doing all of the cheap interventions, on the relatively flat part of the mitigation curve, as
fully as possible, then this heuristic gets to the optimal policy response in each of Panels D, E,
and F.

However, if the costs of interventions being considered grow large enough — as they clearly
have done in the Covid-19 response — then this instinct may lead to sub-optimal policy. This is
the case depicted in Panels A and B and that has been emphasized throughout this paper.
It therefore seems that Covid-19 required a novel play in the epidemiological playbook: maximize
societal utility subject to R <= 1. That is, get to R <= 1 as efficiently as possible, using either
simple interventions or targeted bans of activities with particularly poor utility-to-risk.
I want to close by emphasizing that this paper, at most, puts economics language on a formulation
that many medical experts have converged on as well. There were also several other
economists who, early in the pandemic, seemed to have in mind that getting to R <= 1 at the
lowest harm to societal utility is the appropriate formulation of the policy problem.

The case against lockdowns – the cure is worse than the disease

 A group of Irish Doctors presents the tradeoffs of lockdowns and finds them wanting.  They are a bad idea.  Here is a link to the paper.

Trust Government to make problems worse.

Some excerpts follow.

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Firstly, let’s briefly take stock of the current situation, with the benefit of 8 months of experience:

 • Mortality impacts from COVID-19 are now known to be within the envelope of previous recent significant respiratory seasons (e.g. 2000, 2015, 2018).2

 • Current pressure on hospital and ICU beds is comparable to previous winters.

 • Lockdown has not previously been employed as a strategy in pandemic management, in fact, it was ruled out in 2019 WHO and Irish pandemic guidelines,3 and as expected, it has proven a poor mitigator of morbidity and mortality (fig.1).

 • “Test and trace” becomes overwhelmed and loses effectiveness after a virus has substantially entered a population (up until 2019 it was not recommended by the WHO for this very reason).3 Tactical testing may still have a role e.g. for workers and residents in key environments such as nursing homes etc, ideally using dependable antigen testing rather than PCR. We believe that the virus is on its way to being endemic, and recommend that testing be reorganised and focussed in conjunction with clinical case evaluation, as per pre-existing WHO and Irish pandemic guidelines.

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The original purpose of lockdown was to "flatten the curve", protect hospital capacity for the provision of ongoing non COVID-19 care and reduce morbidity and mortality from COVID-19. Confidence in this strategy was based on reasonable assumptions, modelling and forecasts derived from the available data in the spring of 2020. We now have the benefit of experience and multiple published analyses reflecting real-world data and outcomes. A recent paper in The Lancet showed no correlation between lockdown measures and mortality outcomes: “Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people”. 4 Notably, a large number of published preprint analyses converge on lockdowns having a minimal beneficial effect on mortality outcomes.5 6 7 8 9 10 

There is a dearth of published evidence indicating that lockdowns reduce overall mortality; a significant concern in itself, given the enormous negative impacts of lockdown. Sweden is particularly notable as a “control” country which largely followed the 2019 WHO Pandemic Guidelines, rather than pursuing the very new lockdown approach. With this strategy, they experienced a similar mortality impact to other European countries, when various key factors are accounted for. Below we see that Sweden had a relatively tiny impact compared to the Spanish Flu of 1918, and one which hardly stands out from more recent years (fig. 2). On current data, Sweden will essentially have a “normal” excess mortality in 2020 – with no real signal emerging versus prior years. Regardless of lockdown intervention, Ireland also exhibits no excess mortality versus prior years, even when zoning in on the first five months of the year (fig. 3).

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It is difficult to estimate the burden of non-Covid morbidity and mortality during 2020 and to predict the effects in the years to come. An April report from the UK ONS indicated that it will far exceed the number of deaths observed with, or due to COVID-19 (in the region of 50,000 for the UK so far): “Various evidence supports the estimate that 75% of elective care has been postponed…If this activity were cancelled entirely it would result in an estimated 185,000 additional deaths. This scenario does not account for other cuts to services that are known to have taken place already in many out-of-hospital services partially or fully, including NHS health checks, non-urgent primary care (dental and GP), de-prioritised community services, and some screening and vaccination programmes”. 15 It is crucial to note that COVID-19 deaths sadly occur in people close to or above life expectancy age. In contrast, lockdown-induced deaths will occur in people well below the life expectancy age. Therefore the “life years lost” as a result of lockdown could far exceed the number of those saved. Given that many publications demonstrate that lockdown has no significant impact on mortality – the life years lost due to lockdown will likely outweigh those saved by a huge factor.

Striking data from Public Health England, detailed excess mortality trends for the months leading up to November 2020.16 No excess mortality was observed in the hospital or care home setting. In contrast, all of the excess mortality occurred in the “home” or “other places” (fig. 6). In other words, the excess death for many months now, cannot be due to COVID-19, as the latter would dominate deaths in the hospital and care home settings. Rather, the inference is that excess death is now driven by the negative effects of lockdown itself.

In further support of this, it is clear that the excess death is dominated by the 14-44 and 45-64 age groups, and largely absent from the more aged groups (fig. 7). This is not the pattern of COVID-19 impact. We believe this pattern is consistent with lockdown-induced morbidity and mortality.

Cardiovascular disease is the world’s biggest killer, and fatal events are strikingly affected by speed of access to proper care. Lockdown interventions have seriously impacted this care. There are many published analyses now summarizing the impacts. For instance, a recent UK study “…recorded a 56% increase in the incidence of OHCA (out of hospital cardiac arrest) from 1stFeb to 14thMay, versus 2019” 17. Another study had similarly striking conclusions: “A retrospective analysis of 9 UK hospitals showed a decrease in admissions of 58% and a decrease in emergency department presentations of 53% after 23rdMarch 2020, when compared to the same period in 2019”18.

 Another study concluded: “Deaths in the home included a 35% excess cardiovascular deaths”, while another stated the COVID-19 pandemic resulted “in an excess of acute cardiovascular deaths, nearly half of which occurred in the community” 19. These impacts of lockdown, for cardiovascular deaths alone – could potentially exceed the COVID-19 mortality impacts over the longer term.

Cancer screening and treatment are additional crucial health pillars negatively impacted by the lockdown strategy. A recent UK paper captured the stark reality: “Results of COVID-19 disruption on cancer mortality range from 1,412 deaths for one month of assumed disruption to 9,280 deaths for six months of disruption” 20. Cancer screening has also been badly impacted: “the number of performed CT scans dropped by 28% in April, May and June 2020 compared to the same time last year, with the additional challenge that CT scanning has been used to diagnose COVID-19. MRI scanning has also decreased by 53%.” 21Just one cancer type e.g. colorectal, could have very significant numbers of life years lost: “Delays of 2/4/6 months across all 11,266 patients with colorectal cancer diagnosed per typical year via the 2 week wait pathway were estimated to result in 653/1,419/2,250 attributable deaths and loss of 9,214/20,315/32,799 life years respectively”. 22Another report calls out the major impacts and future loss of life years in the balance: “the weekly number of cancers detected decreased by 58%. The proportion of missing cancers ranged from 19% (pancreaticobiliary) to 72% (colorectal)”. 23The Irish Cancer Society published a submission to the Oireachtas on 17thJuly, which laid out the grim impacts that lockdown would have on increased cancer death rates into the future.24As with cardiovascular disease, the impacts of lockdown, for cancer deaths alone - may exceed the COVID-19 mortality impacts over the longer term.

Real Systematic Racism

 Walter Williams gets it right.  Here is his column.

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You present to a physician with severe abdominal pain. He examines you and concludes that your ingrown toenails are the cause of your abdominal distress. He prescribes that you soak your feet in warm water but that does not bring relief to your abdominal pain. Then he suggests that you apply antibiotics to your feet. Still no relief. Then the physician suggests that you wear sandals instead of shoes. Still no relief. The point of this story is that your toenails can be treated until the cows come home, but if there is improper diagnosis, then you are still going to have your abdominal pain.

The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Meria Carstarphen, last year said, “White students are nearly 4.5 grade levels ahead of their black peers within Atlanta Public Schools.” In San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students, it is 12% — a gap of 58%. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading, as did only 23% of black students — a gap of 60%. In Philadelphia, 47% of black students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, 59% of black students scored below basic in math and 49% in reading. In Detroit, 73% of black students scored below basic in math and 56% in reading.

“Below basic” is the score a student receives when he is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and grade level skills. How much can racism explain this? To do well in school, someone must make a kid do his homework, get a good night’s rest, have breakfast and mind the teacher. If these basic family functions are not performed, it makes little difference how much money is put into education the result will be disappointing.

In 2019, the racial breakdown of high school seniors who took the ACT college entrance exam and met its readiness benchmarks was 62% of Asians, 47% of whites, 23% of Hispanics and 11% of blacks. That helps explain a 2016 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce “African Americans: College Majors and Earnings.” It found that black college students were highly concentrated in lower-paying and less academically demanding majors like administrative services and social work. They are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering and math, even though blacks in these fields earned as much as 50% more than blacks who earned a bachelor’s degree in art or psychology and social work.

James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled “Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism.” Agresti writes: “Among all of the afflictions that disproportionately impact people of color, violence may be the worst. In 2018, blacks comprised 13% of the U.S. population but roughly 53% of the 16,000 murder victims.” The clearance rate for murders, where a suspect was identified and charged, declined from 92% in 1960 to 62% in 2018. For example, in Chicago, the clearance rate fell from 96% in 1964 to 45% in 2018. In Baltimore, the 2019 clearance rate was 32%. In 2015, when Baltimore experienced the highest per-capita murder rate in its history, the average homicide suspect had been previously arrested more than nine times. When crimes remain unsolved, it gives criminals free range and black people are their primary victims. By the way, most law enforcement occurs at the local level. The governments at these local levels are typically dominated by Democrats.

According to statistics about fatherless homes, 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes; 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father figure; 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes; 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes; and 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions have no father. Furthermore, fatherless boys and girls are twice as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to end up in jail. Dr. Thomas Sowell has argued, “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

The bottom line is that while every vestige of racial discrimination has not been eliminated, today’s discrimination cannot go very far in explaining the problems faced by a large segment of the black community.

The threat of tyranny from the Liberal Intelligentsia

 Jonathan Turley cites another example that illustrates the danger of some in the Liberal Intelligentsia.  This kind of thinking is not rare, either among intellectuals or ordinary folk.

It is, perhaps, somewhat understandable if an uneducated, not too bright person has these kind of attitudes.  It is unforgivable on the part of academics and other supposedly smart people.  Make no mistake, otherwise brilliant people can be pretty stupid or disgusting.

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We have been discussing how the celebration of Joe Biden’s election as a “unifying” and “healing” moment has been lost on many who are calling for blacklists and retaliatory actions against anyone viewed as “complicit” in the Trump period. Indeed, for years, I have been writing about a rising McCarthyism in our country and the growing threat to both free speech and academic freedom. This hateful or unhinged rhetoric has on occasion come from law professors, but most academics have retained a modicum of restraint and tolerance. For that reason, it was disappointing to read a bizarre attack from University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campus who compared my discussion of possible voting irregularities to Holocaust denial.

Professor Campus writes for a legal site called Lawyers, Guns and Money and clearly took umbrage over my discussion of recent challenges filed over the 2020 presidential election this morning. The segment addressed the recent ruling in Pennsylvania that the Secretary of State violated the law in extending a deadline. I also addressed President Obama’s comments about how these challenges may be undermining democracy. I noted that confirming the vote count only reinforces democracy, particularly in identifying problems for future elections.

My comments on the software controversy in Michigan was the focus of the posting and generally my statement that we need to review the actual evidence that emerges from these cases. I have repeatedly stated that I do not believe that the current challenges are likely to overturn the election of Biden as the president-elect. However, I have stated that there is no reason why these challenges should not be considered and problems addressed. There have been irregularities ranging from the improper order in Pennsylvania to a small number of identified deceased voters in Nevada to the controversy over the tally error in Michigan. Again, I have emphasized that these remain localized problems and there remains no evidence of systemic problems that would overturn the results in various states.

On the software, I have addressed the Michigan issue repeatedly in interviews and noted that the votes were given back to Trump and we do not know if such human error occurred outside of that district. I have repeatedly stated that it was caught and corrected. The Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson confirmed that an Antrim County clerk reported the glitch that miscounted 6,000 Trump votes as Biden votes. The wrong designation of Trump votes as Biden votes was quickly corrected. That is why I have repeatedly said that this was not a case of fraud or nefarious purpose. The point is that there is a valid reason to check to see if others made such mistakes of human error. The “vulnerability” of the system was a reference to the fact that there was clearly a stage where the ballots could be wrongly assigned by human error. (In this morning’s interview, one of the hosts repeated that this was human error and stated that this problem had no impact on actual votes. I had already noted that this involved one district and was attributed to human error. The host added that it appears that only five counties had computer issues and only one involved the Dominion software). The reason for noting that Dominion is used in many other districts and states was a reference to the allegations that if system is vulnerable to such human error, it could impact other ballot tabulations around the country.

Campus however ignores the very interview that he references and falsely claims that I am “going on national TV telling lies to promote a paranoid conspiracy theory believed by tens of millions of Americans: that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump by massive amounts of voter fraud.”

Every interview that I have given has included a statement that there is no such evidence and that it is unlikely that such evidence will emerge. However, while some were claiming the absence of serious irregularities within 24 hours of the race being called for Biden, I have noted that we are still waiting to see any underlying evidence in these cases. At the same time, I have criticized the Trump legal team (in the very interview Campos references) and previously said that it was time for the team to produce claimed evidence. I have also criticized President Trump for his rhetoric. Indeed, liberal sites have cited my interviews as expressing doubt over the evidence of widespread fraud.

Yet, Campos declared that this commentary amounts to Holocaust denial. (By the way, he includes a tweet from a person falsely suggesting that I failed to reveal that the software in Michigan may actually have been the result of human error. I said expressly in the interview that it appeared to be human error and that there was no evidence of any nefarious purpose). I argued that it would be useful, regardless of the findings, to look at the performance of new systems and software:

“What I don’t understand about this rush to end all challenges is what is being achieved here? People treating the president-elect as the president-elect. Most of us are supporting his going forward with the transition.

But we also don’t see the great harm to democracy in guaranteeing that votes were counted. If nothing else, not just for his election but for future elections. This is a very different election. We used new systems, new software; shouldn’t we take a look at that and resolve these questions?”

Campos however called for my termination for stating such views:

Should a history department continue to employ a Holocaust denier? Let me sharpen that up a bit: Should a history department continue to employ a Holocaust denier whose academic speciality is the Holocaust?…

To pursue this analogy further, Turley is the kind of mendacious troll who would just ask questions about whether the gas chambers and the death camps really existed, while of course acknowledging that many Jews — maybe even hundreds of thousands! — died because of “harsh conditions” in the concentration camps etc. etc. so you’re actually libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier etc. etc. (BTW before anybody gets to that I don’t know or care whether Turley himself is Jewish, or whether he lost family in the Holcaust [sic] etc. etc. because the analogy is valid in any case m’kay snowflakes?).

Campos goes on to call for my shunning by my faculty and professors everywhere. He also notes that I would ideally be fired for such an interview:

“If Turley were a contract faculty member it would be appropriate to fire him immediately for promoting paranoid conspiracy theories directly related to his area of purported professional competence…. It’s s tricky question, but it’s a real one, and Turley should at a minimum be excoriated and shunned by anyone in legal academia in possession of a brain and a conscience.”

We have been discussing efforts to fire professors who voice dissenting views of the basis or demands of recent protests, including an effort to oust a leading economist from the University of Chicago as well as a leading linguistics professor at Harvard. It is part of a wave of intolerance sweeping over our colleges and our newsrooms.

It is therefore an ironic moment as someone who has been writing about the growing intolerance of dissenting views on our campuses and efforts to fire academic. Some have been targeted for engaging in what is called “both sides rhetoric” rather than supporting a preferred narrative or viewpoint.

Campos is arguing that it “would be appropriate to fire” any professor who stated that we should allow these challenges to be heard even though they have not and are unlikely to produce evidence of systemic fraud to overturn these results. That is a view of academic freedom and viewpoint tolerance shared by some in academia.

I am not the first academic that Campos called to be terminated for his views. In the end, I would defend Campos in his posting such views. Unlike Professor Campos, I do not believe that he should be fired for holding opposing views or even calling for others to be fired. That is the cost of free speech. Indeed, Professor Campos is the cost of free speech.

Update:

Notably, CNN Legal Analyst and Stanford Professor Rangappa has sent out a link for people to contact the law school over my interview, presumably to follow up on the calls for my termination. Just for record, I have criticized Rangappa previously for doxxing a student who criticized her and a baseless attack on Nikki Haley. She has also called for sanctioning Trump lawyers.

The consequences of “defunding the police” cannot be reversed easily

 From "Just The News".

The crime wave stemming from "defunding the police", the failure to back up Officers, the limitations put on enforcement, and the rush to charge Officers with crimes cannot easily be stopped. It's no longer an issue of money or saying you will reverse all these actions - Officers have little reason to expect reasonable treatment if they do the things that control crime, hence they will not.  Reputation is is the basis for credibility, and the reputation of politicians and many District Attorneys is, rightfully, gone.

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The Minneapolis City Council voted Friday to approve an additional $496,800 for the city's police department to help with the recent crime surge, which has grown after the city took away nearly $1 million over the summer during the "defund the police" wave.

After the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody sparked weeks of riots, the City Council cutting police funding and reallocate it to "violence interpreters" through the health department. The council also voted to dismantle the department and replace it with a community-based public-safety system.

Several months later, Police Chief Medaria Arradondo has said violent crime is up more than 20% compared to last year and 40% compared to two years ago. The police department is prepared to undergo a proposed budget cut of about $12 million and many officers are retiring or leaving the city's department.

“Our resources are hemorrhaging,” Arradondo said to members of the city council during a committee meeting Tuesday. “Our city is bleeding at this moment. I'm trying to do all I can to stop that bleeding and I'm hoping that having the funds to launch a citywide joint enforcement team initiative we can try to stop the bleeding in our city."

The Friday vote passed 7-6 vote, which will allow for a Joint Enforcement Team pulling in officers from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and Metro Transit Police to temporarily assist the Minnesota Police Department with violent crimes through the end of the year. The extra hands will cost the city about $496,800.

“Today we sent a clear signal that we will support Chief Arradondo and that we are ready to work collaboratively with our law enforcement partners and neighboring jurisdictions while continuing to implement concrete, transformative public safety measures," Mayor Jacob Frey said about the decision.

Math For All Ages

 Here is a link to a short video of Steven Landsburg discussing what it is like to be a mathematician.