Will BLM cancel MLK?

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“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” 

— Martin Luther King Jr., 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial

Now, fifty-eight years later, Black Lives Matter and the politically correct wokerati scorn and condemn the land King dreamed of. We’re told that if we judge people by their character, we’re racist.

Character, we’re told, is a dog whistle for white supremacy. Hard work, rule-following, merit, law-abiding, test scores, marriage, family, honesty, generosity, loyalty, decency and objective measurements of productivity are simply white tools to subordinate minorities.  

The left argues that people who value these traits do better in the game of life – and they do – and that those people tend not to be the left’s favored flavors of skin colors. Therefore, these traits are bad and must be de-legitimized.

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Is Mulberry Street racist? You decide

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dr-seuss-column

People of my generation learned to read with Dr. Seuss. Sure, there were some child-like hijinks in the doctor’s prescriptions but to many toddlers the rhyme and rhythm were music to the ears, tonic to the souls and tutors to the unschooled. Mostly, they were exactly what Dr. Seuss intended them to be – entertaining, mischievous children’s literature.

Dr. Seuss succeeded for nearly a century. In that time, millions of children learned to read and Dr. Seuss was awarded numerous prizes. President Barack Obama lauded him in 2016: “March 2 is also the birthday of one of America’s revered wordsmiths. Theodor Seuss Geisel — or Dr. Seuss — used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear.”

Dr. Seuss is the Left’s latest victim. They cancelled him. eBay has banned many of his books including “And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street.” (while continuing to sell Mein Kampf). The company that survives him, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, grovels that, “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” The cardboard cutout passing for the current President of the United States or America has expunged Dr. Seuss from his proclamation celebrating Read Across America Day.

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What’s up with Biden’s transsexual?

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If you want to be part of Joe Biden’s administration, you need to be a “first.”

I don’t mean “first” like first in your college graduation class. Heck, Biden himself was only in the top 50% of his law school class according to Biden and only in the top 85% according to the school records.  

No, not that kind of first. After all, this is a Democrat administration and so we’re not talking about dead white patriarchal European so-called merit.

What we’re talking about is that you need to be a “first” in your skin color or sexuality. Such as “first Asian Director of the Office of Management and Budget” or “first black woman vice president” or “first gay cabinet member” or “first Native American cabinet secretary.”

Or the subject of this column. Biden boasts that he has nominated the first transsexual Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services.  

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Is Europe seeking herd immunity, or just culling the herd?

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The first vaccine against the Wuhan virus was developed by a German biotech company, BioNTech, in partnership with American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

So why is the vaccination rate in Germany stuck at 4% while the American vaccination rate is now quadruple that? Throughout Europe, it’s much the same story. The vaccination rate is 4% in France, Spain, Sweden and Italy, and 5% in Finland, Greece, Poland and Norway.

Only the UK, now separate from the EU, is doing well with a vaccination rate of 27% after approving the vaccine weeks before the FDA did in the U.S. (with the same data that the FDA ultimately based its approval on, it should be noted).

Unsurprisingly, this dawdling on the Continent has an effect: death. While the death rates have come down from January’s peak wave, daily new cases and daily deaths in the EU remain stubbornly high. In contrast, in the UK where the vaccine is really rolling, daily new cases are down by three-quarters and daily deaths are down two-thirds.

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People are getting stupider, it’s a scientific fact

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The “Flynn Effect” is the phenomenon identified by intelligence researcher James Flynn. He found that average intelligence quotients, or IQ’s, as measured by standardized tests were steadily increasing through the course of the 20th century.

That sounds quite natural because, after all, each generation gets better nurturing. They get better health, improved medical care, more nutritious food and greater schooling.

But IQ is supposed to be mainly about nature, not nurture. Nurturing can certainly affect a person’s well-being, but in theory it doesn’t change a person’s IQ much (except of course when the nurturing is so bad that it produces negative neurological effects).

Flynn and other scientists puzzled for years over the reasons we kept getting smarter. Even as scientists themselves along with everyone else got smarter and smarter, they still never managed to figure out why.

Now they have a reverse Flynn Effect to figure out. In recent decades, average IQ’s have gone down, not up. For those of you who are personally experiencing this reverse effect, I’ll put it in simple terms: People are getting stupider.

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Media “news” is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

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Senator Ted Cruz noted that the Democrats’ latest impeachment of Donald Trump even though Mr. Trump has duly departed from the White House is, “like Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Long-time NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell purported to correct Senator Cruz. On Twitter she sniped, “No, that’s Faulkner.”

But of course, Cruz was right. It’s Shakespeare. Faulkner centuries later wrote a book entitled “The Sound and the Fury” which consciously and famously borrowed Shakespeare’s line, as every high schooler knows (or used to).

The Twitter-verse went wild correcting Mitchell’s erroneous correction. She finally issued an apology of sorts: “I clearly studied too much American literature and not enough Macbeth. My apologies to Sen. Cruz.”

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Masks are killing us

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The bulk of seniors who are at risk from COVID have either died of the disease, survived the disease or been vaccinated against the disease. New cases are dropping quickly.

Over ten percent of the overall American population has been vaccinated – over 40 million of them – and that figure is increasing at the rate of about 11 million a week. It looks like nearly everyone who wants to be vaccinated will be vaccinated by late spring. Meanwhile, drug treatments have proved increasingly effective. Most recently, the FDA approved a drug cocktail from Eli Lilly.

There will come a time when COVID masks are no longer necessary.

The implicit assumption in that statement is that masks were necessary before. The science is not clear in that regard, but it seems logical that they helped to some degree. The virus seems to be transmitted by airborne particles like microdroplets of sputum. The virus is far too small to be intercepted by a mask, but many of those microdroplets are not.

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Who is Elon Musk and what is he selling?

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Elon Musk wants to go to Mars.  More precisely, he wants you or me to go. It’s a bad idea.

Apart from provisioning and energy problems that are potentially solvable, there are three big problems with a Mars mission: Getting there, getting back and being there. All three problems center around an insolvable radiation problem.

On Earth, molten material under the mantle slowly circles a solid iron core. This produces a dynamo effect generating an electrical current and a corresponding magnetic field. This magnetic field is well known, and is the basis for the simple magnetic compass that has been used for centuries.

This magnetic field also serves to divert away from the earth 99.9% of the radiation and cosmic rays that bathe the universe. The remaining tiny amount that is not diverted is largely blocked by the earth’s atmosphere. Our atmosphere blocks radiation as effectively as a slab of steel three feet thick.

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Be a tribe of one

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Suppose you’re a die-hard Democrat. What do you do about such issues as:

Transgenderism in women’s sports. Do you side with persons having male chromosomes but identify as women when they want to compete in sports against women, simply because such persons are overwhelmingly Democrats? Or do you side with genetic women – who are also predominately Democrats – who are concerned that subjecting genetic women to competition from persons who’ve spent most of their lives developing height, girth and muscle mass as a man with male chromosomes and testosterone levels will destroy women’s sports?

Environmentalism and immigration versus unions. Do you side with trade unions – which are overwhelmingly Democrats – who understandably want good jobs for workers? Or do you side with environmentalists – who are also overwhelmingly Democrats – who want to eliminate the oil and gas industry and the millions of jobs that accompany it, and illegal immigration advocates – who are overwhelmingly Democrats – who want to flood America with low-paid immigrants that may eventually vote Democrat but will drive down America’s worker wages even further?

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Vaccinating anti-vaxxers’ children is associated with autism in their parents

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Regular Beatniks know that since last summer I’ve been enrolled in the clinical trials for the Pfizer COVID vaccine. Because it’s a “blinded” study, I never really knew whether I’d received the vaccine or a placebo.

The clinic called me last week to tell me that Pfizer was unblinding the study for people in my demographic (translation: old farts) if we wished. Moreover, Pfizer was offering to administer the vaccine to those whom the unblinding revealed had received the placebo.

I accepted Pfizer’s offer. They then told me I’d received the placebo. I suspected as much based on the complete absence of any side effects, as well as the antibody test that I took a week after getting the injection which told me I had no COVID antibodies. (Getting the antibody test was not prohibited by the paperwork I signed.)

Pfizer then offered me the vaccine. I accepted their offer, and received the vaccine this morning. 

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