Baaa-aa!

 

Baaa-aa!

 President Donald Trump is an old “meanie”!  And the gullible people listened to the biased propaganda on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT and WaPo, and bleated – “baaa-aa”!

 President Donald Trump’s tweets to the people are too raw and direct.   And the gullible people listened to the biased propaganda on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT and WaPo, and bleated – “baaa-aa”!

 President Donald Trump is a “racist”!  And the gullible people listened to the biased propaganda on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT and WaPo, and bleated – “baaa-aa”, ignoring his positive works for minorities.

 President Donald Trump is a “misogynist”!  And the gullible people listened to the biased propaganda on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT and WaPo, and bleated – “baaa-aa”, ignoring his positive works for women.

 President Donald Trump is a “homophobic”!  And the gullible people listened to the biased propaganda on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT and WaPo, and bleated – “baaa-aa”, ignoring his positive works for the LGBTQ+ community.

 And the biased media suppressed and covered up the Hunter Biden and Biden Family crime family scandals.  And the gullible people listened to the biased propaganda on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT and WaPo, and bleated – “baaa-aa”!

 And Joe Biden did not stress the published, and readily available, socialist democrat platform, or his own accomplishments.  His message was “Trump killed people with his virus, and I’m not Trump”.  And the gullible people listened to the biased propaganda on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT and WaPo, and bleated – “baaa-aa”! 

 And the gullible people listened to the biased propaganda on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT and WaPo, and bleated – “baaa-aa”, and they elected Biden, after their crooked and unscrupulous minions first illegally “cooked” the rules in the big democrat swing state cities.  Signed and testified, whistleblower, eyewitness attempts to expose the fraud and illegality were met with the same derisive ovine bleats, and an uninterested judiciary.

 So, we will have Joe Biden as a figurehead president, really Obamas 3^rd term, as evidenced by Biden’s platitudes, and his cabinet picks, trying to balance the extreme left socialist democrats with the more moderate middle in his own party, with a much weaker Pelosi-run house and an opposition senate (assuming republicans win the Georgia runoff).

 And the people that elected Biden, albeit illegally, will need to learn to bleat their acquiescence in Mandarin, since their buddies, the Biden crime family will ensure Chinese communist party hegemony in world affairs.  Maybe the sheeple will need to learn to bleat in Farsi, also, since the Ayatollahs will no doubt attain nuclear military capability under the “new world order” Biden administration.  Watch out also, for the little thugs, like Putin, Erdogan, Kim Jong-Un and Maduro, all of whom will no doubt ascend in stature under a demonstrably weak Biden foreign policy.

 Things will be just as bad domestically.  Trump removed many unnecessary restrictions, decreased taxes and let the economy grow to record proportions before having to shut it down due to the corona virus.  Trump also appealed to our patriotism and love of country, with all of its warts.  Biden will concentrate on the warts. To hell with the patriotism.  The Biden administration will stress political correctness,  identity politics, the cancel culture, the 1619 project in schools, and, the gullible people will hear the state propaganda media, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT and WaPo, and will bleat. – “baaa-aa”!

 Until, hopefully, it all sinks in, - and the gullible sheeple wake up to reality, turn on their media herders, and re-establish some of the Lockeian and Burkeian principles that our founders believed to originally establish our country.

Ray Gruszecki

December 26, 2020

“The Good Old Days”

 

“The Good Old Days”

 Just in case we begin to pine for simpler times and “the good old days”, I’ve extracted some commentary on life in nineteenth century America. After reading about diseases, sanitation and what horses contributed to society, maybe our fast-paced, seemingly narcissistic life and addiction to our electronic devices doesn’t seem quite so bad.

Nineteenth Century

Spreading Diseases

As American cities industrialized throughout the nineteenth century, infectious diseases emerged as a real threat. The introduction of new immigrants and the growth of large urban areas allowed previously localized diseases to spread quickly and infect larger populations. Towns grew into cities as industrialization sparked urban migration from rural communities in both the United States and Europe. The increased demand for cheap housing by urban migrants led to poorly built homes that inadequately provided for personal hygiene. Immigrant workers in the nineteenth century often lived in cramped tenement housing that regularly lacked basic amenities such as running water, ventilation, and toilets. These conditions were ideal for the spread of bacteria and infectious diseases. Without organized sanitation systems, bacteria easily passed from person to person through the water and sewage. As a result, many of America’s largest urban areas like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington DC fell prey to a rash of infectious diseases in the middle and end of the nineteenth century.

 

Understanding Diseases

Urban Disease and New York City

Large waves of immigration in the nineteenth century, made New York City America’s largest and most diverse city, but also its most unhealthy, as the large spike in population made it more susceptible to disease.16 Compared to other large urban areas, such as Boston or Philadelphia, New York’s death rate due to disease was considerably higher.17 It was not until the middle of the century that New Yorkers realized that their poor living conditions might be the cause of the city’s poor health. By the 1840s, high rates of disease were ascribed to the housing many of New York’s poverty-stricken immigrants lived in. Fear spread that while disease was rooted in the polluted living conditions of New York’s poorer communities, disease could easily spread to the more well-off citizens too. Public health officials realized that the city’s soiled streets and polluted sewers were a health risk to all New Yorkers.18 In the mid-nineteenth century, New York possessed a primitive sewage system. Poorly planned sewers spanned the city, but most citizens’ homes did not connect to these pipes. Instead, most New Yorkers relied on outdoor outhouses and privies. These outhouses were usually poorly maintained and covered in filth. Poorer families did not even have the luxury of an outhouse. They simply dug a small trench into the ground outside of their homes. Trenches and outhouses were both unsavory solutions as waste was rarely removed from them and frequently flowed into the streets of the city.

 Because of the high levels of unmanaged waste, epidemics of infectious diseases were commonplace in New York. The city battled outbreaks of smallpox, typhoid, malaria, yellow fever, cholera, and tuberculosis. In 1849, a rash of cholera struck the city, killing more than five thousand people. A wave of typhoid in the mid-1860s resulted in a similar amount of deaths.20 Port cities and transportation hubs, like New York, were especially prone to outbursts of infectious diseases because of the high volume of travelers that passed through the city. Cholera, for instance, was never a problem in New York until the overseas shipment of goods and persons between Asia and New York drastically increased in the mid-nineteenth century.

These epidemics were particularly deadly to children. In 1840, almost two percent of New York’s newborns failed to reach their first birthday. Especially in the summer months, infants and children were extremely susceptible to diarrheal diseases. These infections led to severe dehydration and, frequently, death. Young adults also faced many health risks. Between 1840 and 1870, nearly twenty-five percent of twenty-year-olds did not make it to the age of thirty. People in their twenties were often the most exposed to infectious diseases because of the long hours and dirty conditions they were expected to work in. The high death rate for children and young adults also had an impact on how nineteenth-century parents planned their families. Urban families realized that most likely at least one of their children would not reach the age of five. It was even more unlikely that parents would have most of their children survive their twenties to have children of their own. As a result, many working-class families adopted a sense of fatalism and planned on having large families so that at least some of their children would survive.

 This fatalist attitude was largely caused by the fact that Americans realized that they were contracting and dying from infectious diseases at an alarming rate, but weren’t entirely sure of why or how. The answers to these questions came later in the nineteenth century with the emergence of germ theory.

The Spread of Germ Theory

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, people sought to better understand and manage infectious diseases. A large part of this process was the widespread acceptance of germ theory.25 It was evident that poor living conditions—polluted water, overcrowding, spoiled food, etc.—were contributing to the spread of disease, but the science behind this could not be explained. It seemed that the only way to solve New York’s health problems was a massive investment in social programs for better housing and sewage systems, but also an expressed emphasis on personal hygiene. By stressing personal hygiene, however, responsibility for sickness was placed on the individual. This caused many people to blame the poor and infected for spreading their diseases.

It was not until the 1870s and 1880s that Americans began to realize that an individual was not entirely to blame for the spread of disease. As scientists analyzed transmission patterns of infectious diseases, they began to understand how specific pathogens were the causes of specific diseases. At first, many doctors doubted that something as small as a single bacterium could cause such deadly diseases. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, germ theory gained widespread acceptance in the medical community. The work of scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch helped convince doctors and the public that the ideas proposed by germ theory were in fact true. Their work focused on testing the spawning of infections from bacteria, proving that specific pathogens were the causes of specific diseases. Convinced of the science behind germ theory, doctors and public health officials began testing water, food, and blood samples for traces of specific diseases. Using this data, government officials scrapped the old plan that emphasized simply ridding cities of waste and introduced a new strategy based on germ theory. Highlighting that diseases were often spread by individual contact, the new public health strategy focused on educating people on how they could prevent the transmission of diseases. These practices included recommendations as simple as frequent hand washing and ensuring that food was fully cooked before serving. The introduction of germ theory shifted the focus of public health and disease prevention away from citywide waste control towards an emphasis on personal contact and the individual spread of disease.

“Typhoid Mary”

The most infamous case of germ theory at work is the story of “Typhoid Mary.” Typhoid fever was a common problem in many nineteenth-century urban areas. A water- and food-borne bacteria, the disease spread easily and caused about a ten percent fatality rate. Typhoid typically struck hardest in cities without proper water sanitation systems, such as New York. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, when most American cities had built water treatment facilities, typhoid fever was still an issue and public health officials did not understand why. The answer was that many people remained typhoid carriers, without showing symptoms of the disease. Carriers showed no signs of illness themselves, but were host to the typhoid bacteria and could spread the disease to others.

 Mary Mallon, otherwise known as “Typhoid Mary,” is the most famous of these carriers. An Irish immigrant cook living in New York City, Mary was the first recorded carrier of typhoid fever. As a cook, Mary unknowingly spread the disease to many of the wealthy families she worked for across the city. In 1906, Mary began working in a summer rental home for a New York banker. Over the summer, typhoid fever struck over half of the people living in the home and the banker became worried that he would not be able to rent out the house again until he found the source of the disease. The banker hired George Soper to investigate the outbreak. ref]Evelynn Hammonds, “Infectious Diseases in the 19th-Century City” Soper determined that none of the food or water was contaminated so it must have been a cook who spread the disease. After tracing Mary’s work records back to 1900, Soper realized that Mary not only infected this family, but many others as well. Soper attempted to explain the situation to Mary, but she refused to believe him. In 1907, Soper turned over his findings to the New York City health department. The health department proceeded to apprehend Mary and quarantine her in a hospital. By this point, Mary was extremely untrusting of any health officials and frequently acted aggressively towards them. Tests performed on Mary confirmed the assumption that she was a carrier. For three years, Mary was forcibly held in health department custody. Mary was eventually released under the condition that she never cook again. However, she was recaptured shortly thereafter when another outbreak of typhoid was traced to her kitchen. Mary lived in forced isolation for the rest of her life, until her death in 1938.

 The story of “Typhoid Mary” has remained popular to this day, not because Mary Mallon was terribly unique as a carrier of typhoid fever, but because her tale epitomizes an entire era. Mallon was the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever, but definitely not the last. At the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately one hundred New Yorkers became carriers of the disease each year. Mallon was neither the most deadly carrier nor the only carrier to disobey the health department’s guidelines. A man named Tony Labella is attributed to spreading typhoid fever to almost three times as many people as Mary and Alphonse Cotils, a bakery owner and typhoid carrier. “Typhoid Mary”, though, has found a prominent place in America’s history books because her story is the same story of thousands of others in the late nineteenth century. Mallon immigrated across the Atlantic to America’s largest city in search of a better life. What she found was a dirty and crowded city that offered work that came with low pay and long hours. Mary’s contraction and subsequent spread of typhoid fever is the perfect example of the cramped living quarters, poor working conditions, and poor hygiene that many late nineteenth-century immigrants faced.

What horses left behind in the 19th century city

Without the estimated 170,000 horses pulling street cars and delivery wagons at any given time in the late 1800s, the city would never have become an economic powerhouse.

But all those equines created a filthy mess. Each horse produced several pounds of manure and more than a quart of urine a day—much of it deposited on city streets and sidewalks.

 “Despite the presence of animals, the city had no systematic street-cleaning efforts,” wrote Columbia University professor David Rosner in an article called Portrait of an Unhealthy City: New York in the 1800s.

 “During winter, neighborhoods sometimes rose between two and six feet in height because of the accumulation of waste and snow.”

 “Dirt carters” would pick up the manure from the streets and haul it to specially designated “manure blocks,” where the waste attracted massive numbers of disease-transmitting flies.

Then there was the problem of working horses dropping dead in the street. “When a horse died, its carcass would be left to rot until it had disintegrated enough for someone to pick up the pieces,” wrote Rosner. “Children would play with dead horses lying in the street.”

 In 1880, the city picked up 15,000 abandoned horse carcasses off the streets. With that in mind, the noise and pollution from vehicular traffic doesn’t seem so bad.

[photo at right: the last horsecar run in the city, July 1917, on Bleecker Street at Mercer]

The 1918 Pandemic

The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. Although there is not universal consensus regarding where the virus originated, it spread worldwide during 1918-1919. In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in spring 1918. It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.

Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old, and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the 20-40 year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic. While the 1918 H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated, the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood. With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.

 

So, think about it. Notwithstanding the politics, and the nonsense barraged at us daily, we can truly be grateful that we live in our modern 21st century. Even 100 years ago, the Spanish Flu Pandemic killed 50 million people world-wide and 675,000 in the U.S. No Trump ‘warp speed” vaccines or antibiotics or therapeutics then. People just died.

And 150 years ago, 15 years before Gottlieb Daimler invented the automobile, if we wanted to travel somewhere, we got our buggy whip, hitched the horse to a buggy, and off we would go through the smelly, horseshit covered streets.

So much for “the good old days”.

Ray Gruszecki

December 26, 2020

Hillbilly Elegy

 

Hillbilly Elegy

 Through the years, there were a few New York Times columnists that I enjoyed reading.  Unfortunately, Tom Friedman, David Brooks and Ross Douthat have all joined the New York Times anti-Trump train into leftist bias.  There are still smatterings of objectivity in Brooks, and sometimes more so in Douthat, but all three of these writers have become indistinguishable from the left-wing media mob.  These guys are a far cry from truly enjoyable books like Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, and Brooks’ “Bobos in Paradise”, of years past.

 Ross Douthat here comments on Ron Howard’s movie “Hillbilly Elegy”, and the bad rap it is getting from movie critics.  I agree with Douthat that the movie will not win a bunch of awards, compared to J.D. Vance’s book of the same name, but it was not that bad, and some of the acting, particularly by Glen Close, was great.

 As I’ve commented before, J.D. Vance’s book was a sociological, in in depth look at opioid addiction and alcoholism in small town America, and how our society is affected.  Although the “Hillbilly” in the title pertains specifically to Northern Kentucky and Southern Ohio, I am originally from small town Massachusetts, and it equally applies there, as well as to thousands of small towns throughout America.  The movie is a more shallow, personal slice of the issue than  Vance’s book.

 https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/31/what-explains-the-movie-critics-loathing-of-hillbilly-elegy/#slide-1

Ray Gruszecki

December 24, 2020

The China Virus as a Weapon?

 

The China Virus as a Weapon?

 If I were a Machiavellian member of the ruling Chinese communist party, and I wanted to accelerate China’s economic and military capabilities to more rapidly gain on the United States and the European Union, what would be an efficacious approach?

 Oh, I know.  Let’s release a debilitating novel virus from our experimental laboratory at Wuhan, don’t tell the rest of the world, hunt down and kill off any of our population that contract it, and blame it on the Americans and Trump.  If they don’t believe that the American military did it, we can always say that it spread from a bat, and if that’s challenged, we can reluctantly admit that it was accidently released from the Wuhan facility by a careless worker.

 Since we can essentially kill off the virus spread within China, we can get on with our world expansion, - in the South China Sea, with our “Belt and Road Initiative” takeover of developing counties’ infrastructure, with our space efforts on the moon and Mars, - and in the cyber workings of our competitors.

 Too far out? Conspiracy theory?  It can’t be proven, but the CCP are not moral and ethical rulers.  They may be need to be market oriented to remain economically viable, but they are communists, and they follow Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin in their revolutionary aims to dominate the world. So, the cynical side of me does not put it beyond the realm of possibility that the Chinese communists weaponized the Civid-19 virus to take advantage of the resulting chaos in the rest of the world, to further their own ends and advance economically and militarily.

 President Trump saw the Chinese for what they are, our main competitors and antagonists. He balanced trade with China and stopped playing the economic “sucker” to the Chinese as previous administrations had done.  Of course, that will now be completely undone by the “Biden crime family’s” cozy relationship with China.  And unfortunately, as a result, China may very well, not only catch the West, but surpass us in economic and military strength, thanks to Biden and the Obama retreads.

Ray Gruszecki

December 21, 2020

Comments on Visit to China

 Comments on Visit to China

My trip to China was in 2015, before President Trump challenged the Chinese communist party, (CCP), leadership on trade disparities, intellectual property theft and other abuses, - and long before the Chinese-sourced corona virus crisis. Back in 2015, the U.S. attitude toward the Chinese communist party, as expressed by the Obama administration, was that if we treated them nicely and bowed to them a little, maybe they would become responsible world citizens, and would be nice to us.

Of course, the CCP said “ah, so, thank you very much”, and proceeded their well-defined path toward regional, and eventual, world, domination. These leaders of China are totalitarian, but they are not revolutionary, firebrand communists like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De were. The current leaders, like Xi Jinping are communists, but they are also engineers, economists and professionals utilizing market principles within their totalitarian, communist system.

The distances covered in this trip were challenging. The trip covered approximately 5000 km (3100 mi) of domestic airline flights within China, and another 600 km (372 mi) by boat on the Yangtze River.

This was not just a “showcase” type of trip. We really experienced the diversity of China, from the capital and center of government, Beijing to the financial and metropolitan centers of Shanghai and Hong Kong, to the massive Three Gorges hydroelectric project, to the interior cities of Chongqing, Xi’an and Guilin. We visited interior Chinese people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. We also visited schools, jade, silk and cloisonné factories, operas, musicals, the terra cotta warriors, the great wall, – a full range of social and cultural activities.

The overwhelming features of China that I observed were people, people, people and cars, cars, cars. (Other vehicles, too), in a seemingly chaotic mix. There are 1.4 billion people in China. That’s 500 million more people than the U.S and E.U. combined. There are more cell phones in China than the U.S. has people, and they all seem glued to the ears or thumbs of the people in the cities.

There are over 150 cities in China with a population over 1 million. Cities of 1-2 million people are called “towns”. China is a massive, crowded country ruled by an ostensibly communist government with a market-oriented philosophy. That sounds like an oxymoron, but there it is. Everyone in the cities is hell-bent toward capitalism and consumerism. Marx and Lenin and Mao are rolling over in their graves, while Deng Xiaoping smiles in his grave and says “I told you so – just the way I orchestrated it”.

The Chinese are rules oriented, and people obey the rules without too much complaint. Dissension is allowed, as long as it is not too loud. The system is not our system, but it works for them. The per capita GDP in China in 1985 was $600. In 2015, it is estimated as $13,800. This is across 1.4 billion people, and this is absolutely phenomenal growth. Of course, these GDP figures are averages, and the wealth is really concentrated in the large cities and professional classes. The rural peasants (nearly a billion of them), really do not share too much in this wealth or in the social amenities that city residents get. The goal of most rural Chinese is to get to a city and obtain city-based identification.

This almost oligarchic social system must be anathema to hardline communists like Mao Zedong, but Mao tried to equalize the masses and nearly destroyed the country. Upwards of 30 million people died of famine during Mao’s “great leap forward”. And another 1.5 million died during his “cultural revolution”. We had several lectures and discussions during this trip by people who lived through these social upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s. Our tour director’s (George’s) parents were among them, and he expounded on this at some length one afternoon on the Yangtze.

Mao Zedong is still considered the founder of the present incarnation of the country. His mummified body lies in Tiananmen Square. His portrait appears on Chinese paper money. People now say that he was “80 percent right and 20 percent wrong”. Deng Xiaoping is acknowledged as the founder of modern China by instituting a market-oriented economy in the late 70’s. His successors have continued Deng’s policies and we can observe their efficacy by the growth of the Chinese economy over the last 30+ years.

Although there are no official estimates of the population of Beijing in 2012, unofficial estimates put the population at around 21-22 million. Although Beijing is the capital city of China, there are larger cities in the country. Shanghai is home to 23 million people in 2013, and is considered to be China's largest city. Others, however, argue that Chongqing, a municipality of 28,846,200 in the center of China is technically China's largest city. This is because, although the urban population of Chongqing is only 6-7 million, under Chinese law a municipality is considered to be the equivalent of a city. If we take Chongqing out of the equation, Beijing is the second largest city in China and the sixth largest city in the world, behind Shanghai, Istanbul, Karachi, Mumbai and Moscow.

Since 2015, Xi Jinping has aggrandized power and is now the “Paramount Leader” of China, essentially a permanent, dictatorial role.

Recently, The Chinese Communists suppressed knowledge about the corona virus that originated in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China and allowed it to spread, vacuumed up all the PPE they could in the world, and are hacking our vaccine efforts.

Politically, the CCP are in process of imposing a china style security system on Hong Kong, thereby nullifying its 50-year special status, increasing activity in the South China Sea and calling in their economic chips along their “Belt and Road Initiative”. The CCP also “never let a good crisis go to waste”, and they are flexing their political and military muscles all over the world, while the world is busy with the corona virus that the CCP started. The CCP is hell-bent to overcome the United States and the European Union, and become the predominant economic and military power in the world.

Much of the world is responding by classifying the Communist rulers of China a pariah in world affairs and taking legal action against them, but the long-term action against the CCP is to disengage from them in trade and finance, not easily done because of their size and the West’s debt relationship with them, but they can be increasingly directionally marginalized.

President Trump kept the CCP’s “feet to the fire” during his four years in office. Historically, Joe Biden has been “Sino-philic”, with his immediate family accused of using the past Biden vice presidency in pay for play schemes to enrich themselves. Not a positive harbinger for keeping the CCP in check in coming years.

Ray Gruszecki

December 20, 2020

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Yes, Biden Won

 

Yes, Biden Won

 Most Trump backers are not going to like this, and I don’t either.

 Like many of the 74 million who voted for Donald Trump, I swallowed the Kool Aid being distributed by Trump’s legal efforts to discredit Joe Biden’s victory as illegal, and that Biden would be a illegitimate president.  Anecdotal evidence and eyewitness whistleblower affidavits supported this.  However, in nearly every instance, the courts, including SCOTUS, refused to hear Trump’s cases, or ruled against them.  One can believe that the democrats are crooked, but all of the courts in the country?  Clearly something was wrong, and it wasn’t just Biden’s incomprehensible win of the presidential election.

 I subscribe to “National Review”, which is the voice of responsible conservatism in the U.S. Founded by William F. Buckley in 1955, it has generally been a honest and fair commentator on politics from the conservative side.  I have to take heed, in spite of my contrary opinions, when National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry and well known former Assistant U.S. Attorney for SDNY, Andrew McCarthy and many others, consider the collective courts’ action as correct and proper, and the Trump forces; efforts as legally unfounded.

 So, I’ll hold my nose, and no longer consider Joe Biden an illegitimate president, just one I don’t like, based on politics that are anathema to me.  Here are excerpts from articles by Lowry and McCarthy of National Review, as well as links to the full articles.  As I’ve said, I’m not happy with the content of these articles by political and legal analysts that I respect.  However, I am honest enough to have to accept what these respected experts say.  This is the conservative National Review, after all.  Not the New York Times, Washington Post, or some other leftist rag.

  

Andy McCarthy, National Review

“The franchise epitomizes the political nature of the democratic process. Through it, we elect the political branches of government, which have that designation not because they engage in hardball tactics but because they are accountable to us. The federal judiciary is not. It is intentionally insulated in the expectation that (a) it will limit its intrusions on public life to controversies in which someone has suffered a concrete harm owing to an illegal act, and (b) it will decide the resulting cases based solely on the law, not public sentiment. Courts are thus anti-democratic. We expect them to tune out the will of the people, the opposite of governing in accordance with it.

 The last six weeks since the presidential election, then, have proceeded along the lines of an illusion: the notion that, in light of litigation in multiple states over voting procedures, ballot integrity, and tabulation processes (in which Team Trump stacked up loss upon loss), the Supreme Court would inevitably decide the winner. That was never going to happen.”

 

Lowry and Ponnuru, National Review

“Vote fraud is a serious offense against democracy and the law, and should be combated as such. But the Trump team and its allies have not been able to provide evidence of widespread illegal activity despite an intense, indeed fevered, search for it. While the rhetoric of Trump’s lawyers has emphasized a fraudulent, stolen election, the arguments in court typically haven’t been about alleged fraud at all. They have focused on changes in procedures prior to the election, disparities in how counties handled absentee ballots, and the distance Republican observers were kept from the counting — none of which has come close to supporting the drastic remedies Trump has sought.”

 https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/31/the-courts-hold-the-line/

 https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/31/disgrace-after-defeat/

Ray Gruszecki

December 20, 2020

Foreign National Anthems

 

Foreign National Anthems

 Just for grins, these are Youtube clips of the national anthems of some of the major foreign countries.  Some are very familiar.  Some, not so much.

 I’ve included two versions of Mireille Mathieu’s rendition of “La Marseillaise” because it is so emotionally powerful.  One version is subtitled French only. The other has overlaid English lyrics.

 I’ve excluded “Die Fahne Hoch – Horst Wessel Lied”, which was Germany’s second national anthem in 1930-1945, during the Nazi era, even though the melody is memorable.  It is currently banned in Germany and Austria.

 British National Anthem

https://youtu.be/Xm7CZvvsC64

French National Anthem, and “La Marseillaise” - Mireille Mathieu

https://youtu.be/215W-29Gt7s

https://youtu.be/SIxOl1EraXA

https://youtu.be/7MQ-SC9bmp4

 

German National Anthem - "Das Deutschlandlied"

https://youtu.be/cIff7EB7pvc

 

Polish National Anthem

https://youtu.be/KQTq07gihqg

 

European Union National Anthem – Ode to Joy, Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony

https://youtu.be/cUR7zmNeHxY

 

Russian National Anthem

https://youtu.be/DAz7Bdqi2iQ

 

Chinese National Anthem

https://youtu.be/UctriMuXYS0

 

Italian National Anthem

https://youtu.be/z3RToBymttA

 

Spanish National Anthem – No Lyrics

https://youtu.be/2DGqtEo4CF4

 

Ray Gruszecki

December 19, 2020

Why Did We Quit Exploring?

 

Why Did We Quit Exploring?

 Only in science fiction do we walk and live on Mars, mine minerals on the moons of the gas giants, and continue to expand our knowledge of the universe.

 Men walked on the moon a half century ago using technology which is weaker and more primitive than I have in my watch, and infinitely weak and minute when compared to my smart phone.  So, what happened?  I guess the rocks they brought back and the diminishing news cycles weren’t worth the billions spent on the effort.

 Instead of the explorative and pioneering spirit that has fueled humanity in the past, and particularly fueled our American psyche, we have turned inward and now question ourselves and explore our motives.  Rather than thinking of the astronauts as heroic expanders of humanity’s horizons, we are being taught to look at them as privileged white male elites who excluded other races and genders from their ranks.

 The corrosive nature of identity politics, which strives to divide us into subgroups rather than treat us all as Americans, and then either reward or condemn these subgroups, has stifled American creativity to the point that we no longer seek the best or most qualified for a job or profession.  We look for appearance, color or gender first.  Enough of this sort of “woke” thinking, coupled with “doxxing” and “cancel culture”, is enough to keep us fully self-absorbed, and to stop thinking about exploring our universe. 

 When someone like President Donald Trump comes along, starts a “Space Force” branch of the military, and talks about exploring Mars, he is attacked by his massed political rivals as being some sort of “kook”.

 It is a shame that with the technology that we have developed over the past 50 years, that we sit here on our moribund little blue rock eschewing further exploration of other worlds.  Particularly during the incipient Biden administration, I guess we Americans will continue to tear ourselves and our history down, while the Chinese communists walk on the moon and move on to Mars.  What a theme for “An American Tragedy”

Ray Gruszecki

December 19, 2020

Vaccines Just in Time

 

Vaccines Just in Time

 It appears as if President Donald Trump’s “Warp Speed” Covid-19 vaccine efforts will save countless thousands, or even millions, of lives, by being available nine months after getting started. Of course, the way our politics and media work, the plagiarist, Joe Biden, will no doubt find a way to take credit for this effort, and claim it as his own.

 Crooked politicians and the biased leftist media will have handed Biden an illegal presidency by unconstitutionally changing the election rules in several swing states, and deliberately suppressing deleterious news about the Bidens that would have swayed voters and changed the election.  Does anyone doubt that these same forces wouldn’t use similar nefarious means to claim that the vaccines were developed under their, and Biden’s aegis, and make Biden the hero?

 First the Pfizer, and next the Moderna vaccines, have been approved by the FDA just in time, at the height of a winter peak in Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. and world-wide.  Upwards of six more vaccines are in final trials, and close to approval.

 The genius of Trump’s approach in “Warp Speed”, is that literally millions of doses of all of the vaccines have been produced and are ready for distribution, prior to, and waiting for, stage 3 trials and FDA approval.  As with the Pfizer vaccine, shipments of mass quantities begin the same day the vaccine is approved.  Extrapolating from past government bureaucracies, we would be still waiting for approvals and production two years, or more, from now, while the virus ravaged the world and killed millions. 

 The attached charts show where we are, insofar as seven day rolling averages for deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S, and in the world.  Obviously, the alarms about the virus that the media report this winter are true.  What is wrong about the political responses to the virus is that shutdowns are used by democrat politicians to mitigate the virus, to the other ruinous detriments of their constituents.  This includes physically closing schools and paying NEA union members, even though schools have been shown not to be spreaders of the virus.

 

 

 Trump’s (and Pence’s) hardnosed and unrelenting pursuit of the government agencies, the pharma industry, the commercial carriers and the military to make effective vaccines a reality within nine months, is a study in management technique and persistence in face of political opposition and constant denigration.  Only a Trump type, from the Manhattan real estate wars, could have accomplished such a feat.  Kudos to him for saving millions of lives.

 There does not seem to be conclusive evidence of the efficacy of shutdowns.  Population centers versus rural areas seem to be pertinent.  Democrat run California, which is almost fully shutdown, has the highest number of Covid-19 cases in the country, but its mortality rate is relatively low. Republican run Texas and Florida, which are not shutdown have a lower number of cases, but higher mortality rates.  New York State, New Jersey and Massachusetts, which are partially shutdown, have very high mortality rates, but these are skewed by bad early decisions regarding nursing homes in NY and NJ, and a veteran’s home in MA.

 Of course, Covid-19 mortality rates are not the whole story and tend to be inflated, in any case.  The societal consequences of shutdowns are massive.  Alcoholism, drug addiction, broken homes, crime, shattered businesses, and much, much, more. Truly, the cure is worse than the disease.

 The advent of the vaccine is not a panacea.  The “experts” tell us that we need to be at least 70% vaccinated to attain “herd immunity”.  In the meantime, masks are recommended in enclosed spaces, as well as social distancing washing our hands, and all the other trappings of the pandemic.  Since Pew Research reports that only some 52% of Americans are positive about taking the vaccine, we’ll need to increase this to reach herd immunity.  Our irresponsible politicians, who have politicized vaccine development and cast doubt about the efficacy and safety of the vaccines has brought this number down from 72% last May to 52% now.

 In the meantime, many of us stand ready, with arms exposed, to go through the vaccination sequence and develop the antibodies necessary to resist the Covid-19 virus.

Ray Gruszecki

December 18, 2020

The Coming Biden Regime

 

The Coming Biden Regime

 Barring a miracle in the Congress, two weeks after January 6, 2021, when the Electoral College presents the votes of their states for president and vice president to the Congress, Joe Biden, who is dumb as a post, who has never had a creative thought in his nearly 50 years in Washington, and who has messed up virtually everything that he has ever touched in government, will be sworn in as the 46^th president.  Along with Biden, whose singular claim to fame is the wealth that he accumulated as boss of the “Biden crime family”, while serving as Obama’s vice president, we’ll see the Obama leftist retreads and other proponents of domestic “identity politics” and international “world globalism”, which are both antitheses of American social and economic freedom and liberties. 

 We are in for a rough time as a country in the coming years.  Biden has always been a not too bright political hack, and his current incipient senility truly makes him an “empty vessel”, to be manipulated by the Alinskyites, borderline socialists and communists surrounding him.  Expect a weak and docile foreign policy, catering to China, Russia, the European Union and others, similar to, but not as focused as Obama’s.  And expect the typical leftist domestic policies – higher taxes, more expensive social programs, more identity politics masquerading as “social justice”, less law enforcement, and the full litany of “woke”, “cancel” culture” abuses.

 I disagreed vehemently with Bill Clinton’ and Barrack Obama’s administrations on conventional political grounds, such as their Keynesian economic policies.  I never thought that I would say it, but I think that both Clinton and Obama were focused, intelligent, charismatic leaders.  As a republican, (and somewhat libertarian), I disagreed with the politics, but could discuss them rationally, and there were democrats then who did not consider their political beliefs almost religious, and similarly could discuss political differences rationally.

 Unfortunately, in the 21^st century, politics have taken on an almost religious fervor.  Friends and family members are ostracized for expressing the “wrong” political views.  “Free” speech is censored in schools and college campuses.  Rationality has diminished and almost disappeared.

 And into this charged political mix, will come Joe Biden; illegally elected because of unconstitutional, non-legislative, Covid-related, state election rule changes. Dumb as a post, charisma of a dish rag, mouthing platitudes and plagiarisms, and choosing as his minions all of the failed administrative state of previous leftist governments.  What a travesty!

 All the recent left-wing crimes and abuses will be swept away, unless the senate remains republican and keeps the Durham investigation going, starts an investigation of Hunter Biden, et al, and exposes the illegal election and other leftist crimes and abuses.  Not too much chance of success against the unscrupulous democrats and the biased propagandist leftist media, but at least this might keep public awareness alive.

Ray Gruszecki

December 17, 2020

Its not Over Till Its Over

 

Its not Over Till Its Over

 This explains how there is still scope to stop the installation of an illegitimately elected president.

 The constitutional reference from the Congressional Research Service is: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32717.pdf

 From President Trump’s, Attorney, Jenna Ellis...

 “Today, the electoral college votes will be sealed and sent by special carrier to Washington where they will remain sealed until January 6th when the House and Senate will come into a joint session to open the votes.

 The media is going to make you believe that it's all over and Joe Biden is now officially president...

 On January 6th, Nancy Pelosi will sit down with the rest of the House members as she has no special power or authority over the hearing...

 Vice President Mike Pence will have all the authority as president of the Senate for that day and will accept or reject motions to decide the next steps by the assembly.

 Remember... Mike Pence is in full authority that day as written in the Constitution. The ballots will be certified today but that means nothing...

 The votes will be opened and at that point one House member could, and most likely will, raise their hand to object to the Vice President on the state of elector's votes.

 That objection could cover fraud or any other reason, and with the seconding of that objection everything changes. Everything!!

 The House and Senate will divide for two hours (at least) to debate, then vote.

 The vote will be per Senator with the Vice President being the deciding vote if needed in the Senate, while the vote in the House will be only be ONE vote per delegation, per state, not per House member!!!

 The Republicans have 30 delegation votes compared to the Democrats 20 delegation votes.

If this scenario runs true, President Trump gets re-elected.

 The Democrats, the media, social networks and globalists around the world will come unhinged and chaos will erupt.

 President Trump is trying to do the right thing and go through the courts first, expose all the fraud, but we all knew that none of the courts, even the Supreme Court wanted to touch this issue with a 10-ft pole!

 This is why our forefathers were so brilliant because they knew something like this could happen someday.

 So, don't listen to the media and all their deception and lies. All you have to do is read the Constitution and you know that the law, policies and procedures in the end are on our side.

Tic Toc... Tic Toc...”

 

Further - If this scenario plays out, we will not see the sort of mild, legal disappointment exhibited by 75 million Trump supporters when they thought that Trump had lost the election.  As Jenna Ellis points out above, we will have chaos, in the destructive form of violent Marxist Antifa and BLM mobs burning our cities and killing our citizens.  To some, this rioting, and the inevitable put-down, will be worth it if our country doesn’t have to endure four years of an illegitimately elected, crime ridden, identity politics based Biden administration.

Ray Gruszecki

December 15, 2020

Trump’s Greatest Achievement

 

Trump’s Greatest Achievement

 Our arms, and the arms of millions of Americans, are ready to receive the Pfizer, and soon the Moderna, corona virus vaccines, just nine months after development of these vaccines began.  This is a signature accomplishment of President Donald Trump and his administration.  Trump’s accomplishments in his first four years dwarf most longer presidential terms, but the rapid availability of the corona virus vaccines has to stand out.  I say “first four years” because I believe that he, (or his principles) will be back. 

 In the long list of positive accomplishments by Trump, none ranks higher than his handling of the corona virus crisis.  Trump will have been responsible for saving up to a million American lives, and further millions of lives throughout the world by his fast-tracking of vaccine research, development and production.  Rather than a 3 or 4 year development cycle, under Trump’s leadership, we have millions of effective vaccine doses in literally nine months.  Even though he was illegally and unconstitutionally voted out of office in November, this is Trump’s singular greatest accomplishment.

 The biased media propagandists blamed Trump for not acting fast enough when the world first learned that this devasting killer virus had escaped Wuhan, China in early 2020.  Recall, though, that Trump closed travel to China on January 31, 2020, and to Europe, where the virus was rampant, a week or so later.  Trump played down the virus issue, so as not to panic the public, but the administration did founder for several weeks, until they got a clearer handle on what they were facing.  A lack of ventilators and protective equipment left by the Obama folks exacerbated the situation.

 

Once the problems around the corona virus crisis became defined, Trump acted decisively and within our federal system.  He brought in scientists and medical experts for guidance, activated private industry to develop therapeutics and vaccines, put Mike Pence in charge of the federal effort, developed “flatten the curve” guidelines (including temporarily shutting down the economy), and let the governors of the states implement the actual procedures.

 And all of this to the persistent, shrill din of the anti-Trump biased mainstream media propagandists, who criticized and denigrated everything he did.  The unscrupulous leftists even called it the Trump virus”, and accused him of being responsible for the deaths thousands of people. 

 Many just plain hated Donald Trump and conservatives in general.  Many drank the biased media propaganda Kool Aid, and believed that Trump is a racist and misogynist in spite of his good works for minorities and women. Many voters for Trump were disenfranchised by illegal dead, out of state, and plain false ballots.

 The net result is that Joe Biden, who is dumb as a post, who never had a creative thought in nearly 50 years in Washington, and who sat on his ass in his Delaware basement for most of the presidential campaign will most likely be inaugurated as the 46^th president on January 20, with a claimed 15 million more votes than the sainted Barrack Obama ever got.  And he will bring back all of the corrupt, self-aggrandizing, America-hating minions of the Obama administration, plus some.

 Would Biden or Obama, or any of the “woke”, politically correct, culture cancelling leftists ever have led the effort to make millions of doses of vaccines available to the American public within nine months?  Hardly likely.  But Trump did, against all of the vituperative condemnation of the unprincipled leftist mob.  And if he doesn’t receive the Nobel Prize for his efforts for peace and stability in the Middle East, he certainly deserves it for his effort to save millions of lives by overseeing and fast-tracking the corona virus vaccines.

Ray Gruszecki

December 14, 2020