Mark Steyn on Cancel Culture

 

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Here’s the conclusion of another excellent column from Mark Steyn:

Going along to get along is killing our society, and the one tiny act that anyone with a modicum of self-respect can perform is refusing to participate. For example, the American Medical Association could try butching up to the standards of nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Heverin of Aberdeen University. Following a campaign led by overseas students to ban the British military from campus, Miss Heverin said:

If the British military makes them feel uncomfortable, why did they come to a British uni?

Then she added, for good measure:

Rule, Britannia!

Young Miss Heverin was promptly banned from all Students Association premises for "discriminatory or racist language", and kicked out of the Politics and International Relations Society for "having a right-wing bias". It's the instant, vicious pettiness of these vile twerps that impresses.

Yet, since the "controversy" broke, a nineteen-year-old student has held firm-ish - or, anyway, more firm than the editor of JAMA or the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens or the chiefs of US Special Operations Command.

And so it spreads . . . from the faculty lounge to the botanical gardens to the general staff to the surgeon in your operating room and the pilot of your plane. Some years ago I wrote:

The dwindling number of sane people in the western world vaguely assume that the politically correct celebrate-diversity nonsense is confined to our increasingly worthless universities or NPR panel discussions. But not so. It's burrowed its way into everything, and is slowly but remorselessly moronizing even vital areas of life.

And some years before that - after a great man, Sir Tim Hunt, had his career vaporized by an utter fraud called Connie St Louis:

So we lose a superb Nobel scientist but keep a third-rate lying mediocrity. My problem with all this is that, increasingly, key levers of society are being ceded to the irredeemably stupid and mendacious, who seem to be the only ones capable of navigating the rocks and rapids of political correctness. One has the uneasy feeling that similar scenarios are playing out every day around the western world. How long before the planes start dropping out of the sky?

Not long now.

Mark Steyn’s full column is here.

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Are Your Papers In Order?

 

Insanity Wrap, a/k/a Stephen Green, a/k/a Vodkapundit, sounds the alarm:

“Do you have your papers?” was what the Nazi or Communist Russian official would ask normal citizens as they attempted to travel from one region to another within their own country.

If your papers — your internal passport — weren’t in order, you could be prevented from traveling, detained, or worse.

Insanity Wrap probably wouldn’t shock you with a reminder that sometimes, even when your papers were in order, some kommissar might “find” something out of order if he didn’t like the look of you.

Imagine having all your travel, for business or just your own pleasure, being subject to the whim of the anointed.

Internal passports are anathema to liberty and commerce.

With that in mind:

The Biden administration is working on a vaccine passport program that would allow people to prove they have received a coronavirus vaccination, in order to enter venues which have been closed due to social distancing requirements, such as offices or movie theatres. The Washington Post and CNN reported.

Five officials, who spoke anonymously, told the Post that the White House is pushing efforts by federal agencies and private companies to develop the scheme.

One official suggested to CNN that vaccine passports could be required for people returning to work.

. . .

But even more so, we are pro-liberty.

The liberty to travel between states has long been recognized by the courts, and the liberty to travel within your own state has never, to Insanity Wrap’s recollection, been questioned.

Until now. Until the Democrats won slender congressional majorities and the White House in a questionable election — and then decided to push harder against liberty and basic sense than any previous administration had ever dared.

“Do you have your papers?” to engage in ordinary travel, commerce, or pleasure is something straight out of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

Or Joe Biden’s America, if the Democrats get their way.

You Are Free to Conform

. . .

As authoritarian as an internal passport would be, Insanity Wrap is certain that what’s already being done to our rights by Big Tech is worse.

. . .

The Left was always against privatizing anything that Insanity Wrap can remember — until they figured out how to privatize authoritarian conformity.

It’s inarguable that liberty is denied when millions of Americans are forced to hop from one service or site to another, all while megarich tech companies play Whack-a-Mole with the options available to us.

Drawing the line at internal passports is too little and far too late.

We need a Great Reset, if Insanity Wrap may borrow a phrase, against liberty-crushing wokeness, period.

Insanity Wrap’s full column is here.

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Trump’s meeting with four Ohio GOP Senate candidates

 

John L. Dorman at Yahoo News reports:

• Trump had an "Apprentice"-like meeting with four Ohio GOP Senate candidates.
• The candidates all did their best to prove their loyalty to the former president.
• A potential endorsement from Trump could give a candidate an enormous edge among GOP voters.

Former President Donald Trump may be far from his old New York boardroom, but on Wednesday he gave four Ohio GOP Senate candidates the type of grilling famously depicted on his long-running reality television series "The Apprentice," according to Politico.

Before a fundraiser at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump had the candidates - former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, former state GOP Chairwoman Jane Timken, investment banker Mike Gibbons, and businessman Bernie Moreno - sit together for a backroom meeting.

The four Republicans are set to run for Ohio's open Senate seat in 2022, which will be vacated by two-term GOP Sen. Rob Portman at the end of his term.

The candidates were all in Florida to attend the event for Max Miller, a Trump-backed candidate who is seeking to unseat GOP Rep. Anthony Gonzalez in a primary and win the general election in Ohio's heavily-Republican 16th Congressional District.

RELATED:  Via Breitbart: Exclusive — China Outsourcing from the Timken Company Complicates Jane Timken’s Senate Bid in Ohio

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Good news: treatments for COVID

 

I am posting part of this American Thinker piece, as the information would appear to be under-reported in the mainstream media. Robert Jones provides an interesting historical context for what he refers to as “the Semmelweis Reflex” – establishment resistance to new medical solutions.  He concludes:

. . . an international group of medical experts from 16 countries have recognized ivermectin (which is typically used in combination with other drugs) as a safe and effective treatment for COVID. According to Dr. Pierre Kory, who is the President of the FLCCC, “This group is the latest in the growing number of experts from around the world who recognize Ivermectin’s role in fighting this pandemic.”  Dr. Pierre Kory continued, “The BIRD [British Ivermectin Recommendation Development] panel used the highest form of medical evidence, a meta-analysis, to evaluate data from over 20 trials of Ivermectin before concluding it’s safe and effective for use in treating COVID-19.” 

Given the compelling evidence that there is a close to 100% cure for COVID, it is mindboggling that a person who tests COVID positive will not be offered any medical assistance.  Very recently, on March 11, 2021, Dr. Peter McCullough testified to the Texas Senate HHS Committee about this very issue.  He states, “patients actually think that the virus is untreatable and so what happens is they go out to get a diagnosis… [and] it says here you’re COVID positive, go home, is there any treatment, no, is there any resources I can call, no, any referral lines/hotlines, no, any research hotlines, no.”  He continues, “that is the standard of care in the United States, and if we go to any of our testing centers today in the United States I bet that is the standard of care.”

In short, what we have here is a near complete failure to respond to the COVID crisis due to our reflex-like tendency to reject new knowledge (i.e., that COVID can be effectively treated) because it contradicts the established belief that COVID cannot be effectively treated.  The federal government has failed because it has not evaluated possible treatments for COVID and put its imprimatur on the treatments that are safe and effective.  Also, the majority of physicians have failed because they have not put into practice the safe and effective treatments that now exist for COVID. . . .

The full article is here. Remember the word "Ivermectin."

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Thomas Sowell: Biden is America's point of no return

 

The link here is to a composite of recent interviews with the brilliant economist Thomas Sowell.  It’s sobering and provocative.  It’s less than 10 minutes and worth every second.  At age 90, he remains a national treasure.

Video is here.

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President Biden’s press conference

 

I got this one wrong. I didn’t think there would ever be a Biden press conference. But it did indeed take place earlier today, and if you want to watch it, livestream links are here.  As soon as I saw that Stephen Green (a/k/a Vodkapundit) and his colleagues were live-blogging the whole thing, I went to the PJ Media link here.  Start at the bottom and gradually scroll up.  Takes less time and it’s bearable.

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Guns and Walls

 

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