The other day I listened to Chicago’s Dan Proft and Amy Jacobsen on Radio 560. I am friends with both of them. They were chatting with a Tribune reporter who is diametrically opposed to anything any conservative would be for. I am sure the gentleman thinks he is open-minded, but he is enabling the left-wing Marxists.
The transportation reporter said Dan and John Kass had no credibility commenting on the ills of Chicago because they didn’t “live” there. I guess that would extend to people like me who lived there for 60 years, did a lot there, and left due to the crime and the fact that I saw no way for things to change in my lifetime.
It’s pretty easy to see the problems in Chicago even if you didn’t grow up there. It doesn’t take a lot of nuances to seeing the corruption ingrained by the Daleys, the corruption of the entire Illinois Democratic Party, the acquiescence of the Illinois Republican Party, and the abject failure of people like Emanuel, Preckwinkle, Kim Foxx, and current Mayor Lori Lightfoot to understand what is wrong in Chicago.
By the way, only Paul Vallas could attempt to save Chicago now. Personally, I think it’s past the tipping point. People have already made decisions.
The other day, I opined that I would like to see classical economists take on the gun problem. Of course, economists aren’t firearms experts or anything like that, but classical economists work through the data and see the intersection of markets and social behavior.
If there is anything I learned during Covid it is how many people are sheep and willing to turn on you. The same folks today shouting that we shouldn’t be mean to people who are still pointlessly wearing masks are the same folks that would have turned you into authorities for doing anything against official credentialed government policy during Covid.
People that are wearing masks today are stupid.
Then I read this article about economist Emily Oster. It’s paywalled in the Financial Times and it is primarily a fluff piece anyway but this part of it is interesting. Oster studied under Gary Becker and wrote a very provocative book on pregnancy that dispelled a lot of old wives’ tales and rules. Those rules were made up, and not rooted in real data. She started doing the same with Covid.
When you look at Covid data, there is no reason to vaccinate anyone under the age of 21. Even people who are vaccinated get Covid, so it’s more of a therapeutic rather than a vaccine. Covid primarily killed old people that already had something wrong with them and fat people.
Lauren Fedor writes,
On social media, the attacks have often turned personal, with critics saying she is ill-suited to weigh in on state-schooling when her children attend private school. Others say her data set is incomplete, or question whether she has conflicts of interest because her schools project has accepted funding from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan and the Mercatus Center, a think-tank backed by the Koch brothers. Not long before our lunch, Oster stopped using Twitter, which she describes as “very, very toxic”, adding: “It became very hard actually, for me, even as somebody with a fairly thick skin, whose skin has gotten quite a lot thicker in the last couple of years.”
But she says she was nevertheless unprepared for the level of vitriol directed her way during the pandemic. “I had not put together just how resistant people were going to be,” she says, adding: “Still for me, the most unpleasant are the kind of ‘you’re an economist’ critiques, which is a set of critiques that I have experienced . . . my whole career. “There was no engagement with the data,” she says. “Just: you’re an economist and people died of Covid . . . That credentialism drives me crazy.”
I pose the question she has no doubt answered dozens of times in the past decade: why should an economist weigh in on such issues at all? “Because these questions are about data . . . I am an expert in data, that is what my training is in, and a lot of these things are about what is in the data,” she says. “We can discuss facts without sort of having a particular set of letters after our degree . . . that would be better.”
Personally, I would have appreciated questions from Fedor about how Oster organizes and frames data. I would have liked to see her ask how she forms a hypothesis and tests it. Then, I’d be really interested to see what Oster does when the hypothesis fails.
However, I hear this refrain all the time.
“You aren’t a woman, so you have no standing to comment about (fill in the blank)”.
“You aren’t (pick a race), so you have no standing to comment or opine about (fill in the blank).
On and on.
What people like that are trying to do is undermine any credibility you might have, and put you in a box so you shut up. They disagree with you emotionally and don’t have any facts to back up what they believe. They just “feel” it. Don’t let them hold your tongue or fingers.
The Marxists all over the world feel enabled and are on the march. It used to be Democrats and Republicans in the US had honest disagreements but both wanted the best for the United States and respected the existing system of government. Not anymore. The US is riddled with communists and leftists at all levels and in all branches of government.
They aren’t your pals despite how nice they might seem. Communism can only be successfully instituted and enforced at the tip of a spear and with a lot of capitalists in labor camps or jails.
I was wondering about that last night when I saw the news former Japanese Prime Minister Abe was murdered with a homemade gun. Abe was very anti-communist and was the first foreign leader to reach out to Trump. I don’t think the act of assassinating him was random. To the people in Japan, このたびはご愁傷さまでございます — “On this sad occasion we grieve with you.”
(I am anxiously hoping my friend Yra Harris blogs about Abe. His son Toby is an expert in Japan, and Yra has benefitted from that knowledge.)
When I see deliberate policy put in place by the Biden Administration that ensures instability and enables corruption, I wonder where that ethos comes from? They certainly aren’t doing it for the good of the people.
Communists need anarchy and confusion so that they can rush in and take control.
When someone tries to undermine you to shut you up, don’t let them. If there is anything I have learned it is not to apologize or accede to any point they make because when you do they want more and go for the jugular. I have been called a racist, Nazi, etc but I know that I am not and my opinions are based on real hard immutable data.
When we shut up, we enable them.
Fascists gonna Commie. They don’t want debate. They want power. Then they just debate the easiest and cheapest way to kill you.
Today's Democrat is much different than the Hubert Humphrey types of years past - they're more of Bernie Sanders ilk - simply put, just communists.