[NPR] Just a few months into the coronavirus pandemic, Holly Smith had already made up her mind. She was not going to reopen her restaurant to diners until there was a vaccine. She just didn't think it was safe. When she shared the decision with her staff, they asked: Would the vaccine be mandatory?
Yes, she said. It would be.
"I'm not going to open until I can indeed be sure that everyone on my staff is vaccinated," says Smith, chef and owner of Cafe Juanita in Kirkland, Wash. "The immediate people on the team — you've got to take care of them. If you don't take care of them, they cannot help you take care of business."
With promising news from three COVID-19 vaccine trials showing 90% to 95% efficacy, employers are now weighing whether they should simply encourage their employees to get vaccinated or make it mandatory.
#1
What after that? Mandatory homosexual encounters to promote sensitivity? Mandatory microchip implantation? Mandatory brain surgery? Seems like the sky could be the limit, eh?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
11/27/2020 9:13 Comments ||
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#2
Disgusting. I can see not using illegal drugs as a term of employment, but a mandatory vaccine? They can just phook off. (I hope I didn't lose too many social credits on that.)
#3
Requiring the vaccine is all very well, but it may be a year or more before it is available to restaurant staff. The odds ae high that those employers that require vaccination as a condition of reopening will go broke before they have a chance to enforce it.
(Reuters) - National math and reading tests used to track U.S. students’ knowledge in those subjects are being postponed until 2022 due to the coronavirus outbreak, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) said. "Math is hard": Barbie
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as "the nation’s report card," previously had been planned to be held at the beginning of 2021 for hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders in the United States.
"I have determined that NCES cannot at this time conduct a national-level assessment in a manner with sufficient validity and reliability to meet the mandate of the law", NCES Commissioner James Woodworth said on Wednesday.
"I was obviously concerned about sending outsiders into schools and possibly increasing the risk of COVID transmission", he said.
The NAEP assessments are a key indicator of educational progress in the United States with trends going back decades.
#1
In Other News: In the early 1990s, the Department of the Army abandoned its Skill Qualification Test (SQT) program due primarily to maintenance, development, and administration costs.
#2
So Virtual education manure is so bad, that if students were tested the collection of misfits called Democrats fear the general public would see the obvious failing results of this not so well thought out item.
Maybe they are too busy with the 2020 Election to handle rigging this outcome at the same time?
#3
Looking at the winners that show up in the Portland Catch and Release series, it's likely the testees in question will be dumber in 2022 than they are right now.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
11/27/2020 9:09 Comments ||
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(Hoover Institute)The late World War II combat veteran and memoirist E. B. Sledge enshrined his generation of fellow Marines as "The Old Breed" in his gripping account of the hellish battle of Okinawa. Now, most of those who fought in World War II are either dead or in their nineties.
Much has been written about the disappearance of these members of the Greatest Generation—there are now over 1,000 veterans passing away per day. Of the 16 million who at one time served in the American military during World War II, only about a half-million are still alive.
Military historians, of course, lament the loss of their first-hand recollections of battle. The collective memories of these veterans were never systematically recorded and catalogued. Yet even in haphazard fashion, their stories of dropping into Sainte-Mère-Église or surviving a sinking Liberty ship in the frigid North Atlantic have offered correctives about the war otherwise impossible to attain from the data of national archives.
More worrisome, however, is that the collective ethos of the World War II generation is fading. It may not have been fully absorbed by the Baby Boomer generation and has not been fully passed on to today’s young adults, the so-called Millennials. While U.S. soldiers proved heroic and lethal in Afghanistan and Iraq, their sacrifices were never commensurately appreciated by the larger culture.
The generation that came of age in the 1940s had survived the poverty of the Great Depression to win a global war that cost 60 million lives, while participating in the most profound economic and technological transformation in human history as a once rural America metamorphosed into a largely urban and suburban culture of vast wealth and leisure.
Their achievement from 1941 to 1945 remains unprecedented. The United States on the eve of World War II had an army smaller than Portugal’s. It finished the conflict with a global navy larger than all of the fleets of the world put together. By 1945, America had a GDP equal to those of Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire combined. With a population 50 million people smaller than that of the USSR, the United States fielded a military of roughly the same size.
America almost uniquely fought at once in the Pacific, Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe, on and beneath the seas, in the skies, and on land. On the eve of the war, America’s military and political leaders, still traumatized by the Great Depression, fought bitterly over modest military appropriations, unsure of whether the country could afford even a single additional aircraft carrier or another small squadron of B-17s. Yet four years later, civilians had built 120 carriers of various types and were producing a B-24 bomber at the rate of one an hour at the Willow Run factory in Michigan. Such vast changes are still difficult to appreciate.
Certainly, what was learned through poverty and mayhem by those Americans born in the 1920s became invaluable in the decades following the war. The World War II cohort was a can-do generation who believed that they did not need to be perfect to be good enough. The strategic and operational disasters of World War II—the calamitous daylight bombing campaign of Europe in 1942-43, the quagmire of the Heurtgen Forest, or being surprised at the Battle of Bulge—hardly demoralized these men and women.
Miscalculations and follies were not blame-gamed or endlessly litigated, but were instead seen as tragic setbacks on the otherwise inevitable trajectory to victory. When we review their postwar technological achievements—from the interstate highway system and California Water Project to the Apollo missions and the Lockheed SR-71 flights—it is difficult to detect comparable confidence and audacity in subsequent generations. To paraphrase Nietzsche, anything that did not kill those of the Old Breed generation made them stronger and more assured.
As an ignorant teenager, I once asked my father whether the war had been worth it. After all, I smugly pointed out, the "victory" had ensured the postwar empowerment and global ascendance of the Soviet Union. My father had been a combat veteran during the war, flying nearly 40 missions over Japan as the central fire control gunner in a B-29. He replied in an instant, "You win the battle in front of you and then just go on to the next."
I wondered where his assurance came. Fourteen of 16 planes—each holding eleven crewmen—in his initial squadron of bombers were lost to enemy action or mechanical problems. The planes were gargantuan, problem-plagued, and still experimental—and some of them also simply vanished on the 3,000-mile nocturnal flight over the empty Pacific from Tinian to Tokyo and back.
As a college student, I once pressed him about my cousin and his closest male relative, Victor Hanson, a corporal of the Sixth Marine Division who was killed on the last day of the assault on Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa. Wasn’t the unimaginative Marine tactic of plowing straight ahead through entrenched and fortified Japanese positions insane? He answered dryly, "Maybe, maybe not. But the enemy was in the way, then Marines took them out, and they were no longer in the way."
My father, William F. Hanson, died when I was 45 and I still recall his advice whenever I am at an impasse, personally or professionally. "Just barrel ahead onto the next mission." Such a spirit, which defined his generation, is the antithesis of the therapeutic culture that is the legacy of my generation of Baby Boomers—and I believe it explains everything from the spectacular economic growth of the 1960s to the audacity of landing a man on the moon.
On rare occasions over the last thirty years, I’ve run into hard-left professors who had been combat pilots over Germany or fought the Germans in Italy. I never could quite muster the energy to oppose them; they seemed too earnest and too genuine in what I thought were their mistaken views. I mostly kept quiet, recalling Pericles’s controversial advice that a man’s combat service and sacrifice for his country should wash away his perceived blemishes. Perhaps it’s an amoral and illogical admonition, but it has nonetheless stayed with me throughout the years. It perhaps explains why I look at John F. Kennedy’s personal foibles in a different light from those similar excesses of Bill Clinton. A man, I tend to think, should be judged by his best moments rather than his worst ones.
Growing up with a father, uncles, and cousins who struggled to maintain our California farm during the Depression and then fought in an existential war was a constant immersion in their predominantly tragic view of life. Most were chain smokers, ate and drank too much, drove too fast, avoided doctors, and were often impulsive—as if in their fifties and sixties, they were still prepping for another amphibious assault or day-time run over the Third Reich. Though they viewed human nature with suspicion, they were nonetheless upbeat—their Homeric optimism empowered by an acceptance of a man’s limitations during his brief and often tragic life. Time was short; but heroism was eternal. "Of course you can" was their stock reply to any hint of uncertainty about a decision. The World War II generation had little patience with subtlety, or even the suggestion of indecision—how could it when such things would have gotten them killed at Monte Cassino or stalking a Japanese convoy under the Pacific in a submarine?
After the stubborn poverty and stasis of the Great Depression, the Old Breed saw the challenge of World War II as redemptive—a pragmatic extension of President Franklin Roosevelt news-conference confession that the "Old Dr. New Deal" had been supplanted by the new "Dr. Win-the-War" in restoring prosperity.
One lesson of the war on my father’s generation was that dramatic action was always preferable to incrementalism, even if that meant that the postwar "best and brightest" would sometimes plunge into unwise policies at home or misadventures abroad. Another lesson the World War II generation learned—a lesson now almost forgotten—was that perseverance and its twin courage were the most important of all collective virtues. What was worse than a bad war was losing it. And given their sometimes tragic view of human nature, the Old Breed believed that winning changed a lot of minds, as if the policy itself was not as important as the appreciation that it was working.
In reaction to the stubborn certainty of our fathers, we of the Baby Boomer generation prided ourselves on introspection, questioning authority, and nuance. We certainly saw doubt and uncertainty as virtues rather than vices—but not necessarily because we saw these traits as correctives to the excesses of the GIs. Rather, as one follows the trajectory of my generation, whose members are now in their sixties and seventies, it is difficult not to conclude that we were contemplative and critical mostly because we could be—our mindset being the product of a far safer, more prosperous, and leisured society that did not face the existential challenges of those who bequeathed such bounty to us. Had the veterans of Henry Kaiser’s shipyards been in charge of California’s high-speed rail project, they would have built on time and on budget, rather than endlessly litigating various issues as costs soared in pursuit of a mythical perfection.
The logical conclusion of our cohort’s emphasis on "finding oneself" and discovering an "inner self" is the now iconic ad of a young man in pajamas sipping hot chocolate while contemplating signing up for government health insurance. Such, it seems, is the arrested millennial mindset. The man-child ad is just 70 years removed from the eighteen-year-olds who fought and died on Guadalcanal and above Schweinfurt, but that disconnect now seems like an abyss over centuries. One cannot loiter one’s mornings away when there is a plane to fly or a tank to build. I am not sure that presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower were always better men than were presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, but they were certainly bigger in the challenges they faced and the spirit in which they met them.
This New Year's Eve, let us give a toast to the millions who are no longer with us and the thousands who will soon depart this earth. They gave us a world far better than they inherited.
[KhaamaPress] Mohammad Naeem Wardak, front man for Taliban ...Arabic for students... ’s political office in Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... , says the Afghan and Taliban negotiating teams met on peace dialogues but had not yet reached to any agreement, denying reports that Doha talks have agreed on procedural rules.
Continued on Page 49
[Washington Examiner] Chinese state media outlets are claiming that "all available evidence suggests" the coronavirus did not originate in Wuhan but instead came to China via imported frozen food.
"All available evidence suggests that #COVID19 did not start in central China’s Wuhan, but may come into China through imported frozen food products and their packaging: experts," the Chinese state-run People’s Daily tweeted. "Anyone with a different view has been...terminated"
The claim was also pushed by the Chinese tabloid Global Times, but it has been disputed by health experts worldwide, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said there is "no evidence" handling or consuming food transmits the disease.
"When and where did the virus start circulating? Tracing the virus cannot answer all questions, but it is very likely that the virus had co-existed in multiple places before being spotted in Wuhan," Zeng Guang, the former chief epidemiologist of China’s Center for Disease Control, said in a Global Times article.
Most health experts have concluded that the coronavirus originated in Wuhan, China, although there is a dispute as to where specifically in that region the spread began.
There is some data to suggest, however, that the virus was present in other places earlier than scientists previously thought, including a study released last week suggesting that the virus was circulating in Italy in September 2019.
[NBC] WASHINGTON — When David Priess was a CIA officer, he traveled to Houston, he recalls, to brief former President George H.W. Bush on classified developments in the Middle East.
It was part of a long tradition of former presidents being consulted about, and granted access to, some of the nation's secrets.
Priess and other former intelligence officials say Joe Biden would be wise not to let that tradition continue in the case of Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump is already getting 4:1 odds on the betting markets for a presidential run in 2024, and he is a firm believer in strategic sunshine moving the Overton Window...
They argue soon-to-be-former President Trump already poses a danger because of the secrets he currently possesses, and they say it would be foolish to trust him with more sensitive information. With Trump's real estate empire under financial pressure and his brand suffering, they worry he will see American secrets as a profit center.
"This is not something that one could have ever imagined with other presidents, but it's easy to imagine with this one," said Jack Goldsmith, who worked as a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
"He's shown as president that he doesn't take secret-keeping terribly seriously," Goldsmith said in an interview. "He has a known tendency to disrespect rules related to national security. And he has a known tendency to like to sell things that are valuable to him."
Goldsmith and other experts noted that Trump has a history of carelessly revealing classified information. He told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in 2017 about extremely sensitive terrorism threat information the U.S. had received from an ally. Last year he tweeted what experts said was a secret satellite photo of an Iranian nuclear installation.
#6
But it's OK for a guy who mind is failing and who is up to his neck in a Chinese bribery scandal to have total access? Personally I think "trunalimunumaprzure" was a coded message to the CCP.
They're really just worried that Trump will release Obama's college transcripts and the Khalidi video.
Posted by: Matt ||
11/27/2020 11:19 Comments ||
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#7
"This is not something that one could have ever imagined with other presidents, but it's easy to imagine with this one," said Jack Goldsmith, who worked as a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
Love these former government officials' oh so serious tone denigrating the only President since Reagan who hasn't sold out to foreign governments or interests. Mr Goldsmith is not above selling his expertise to foreigners. Wiki: He worked at the Washington, D.C. law firm Covington & Burling.
Covington & Burling LLP is an international law firm with offices in Beijing, Brussels, Frankfurt, Dubai, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, New York, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai, and Washington, DC. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the firm advises clients on significant transactional, litigation, regulatory, and public policy matters.
[The Federalist] Former President Barack Obama accused Hispanic voters of being bigots, claiming that they ignored the current administration’s "racist" immigration policies to vote for Donald Trump because "he supports their views on gay marriage."
"People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump," Obama said on The Breakfast Club podcast Wednesday. "But there’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees undocumented workers in cages, they think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion."
#1
With Trump right behind him, Obama may just regret being the first ex-asshole in chief to not STFU after being President; Trump will be on his case in this life and the next. There's nothing as profitable for him, Jackson & Sharpton as keeping the pot well stirred with racial strife and yes, Obama belongs in the same bag of shit as those other two assholes.
#2
Obama's such a lying piece of shit, he's even attacking brown people now. The man who gave us a Marxist cop-killer extortion-and-terror movement is preaching about racism. Fuck him with a pogo stick
[National Review] - Donald Trump is nearing a crossroads.
Those who allege that he has endangered the tradition of smooth presidential transitions by not conceding immediately after the media declared him the loser suffer amnesia.
...So it is a bit rich for the media to now warn of Trump’s dangers to the spirit of smooth presidential transitions. Such protocols were deliberately rendered null and void in 2016.
But all that is past. What matters now are the interests of the country first and Trump’s constituents second. So Trump has a number of pathways.
One is to keep addressing legitimate reports of voter irregularities. He can continue to ask the courts to set aside any illegal votes that do not conform to state voting laws. His supporters demand and deserve no less than the investigation of all charges of serial voting impropriety.
But Trump within days will have to prove that any such crimes and lapses warped state counts enough to have wrongly elected Joe Biden president. Trump realistically has perhaps a week or so left to either make his case or concede.
Then, to maintain the Senate majority for Republicans and to save the very rules and protocols of the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Constitution, Trump will have to barnstorm Georgia. His challenge will be to enthuse his conservative base to reelect the state’s two incumbent senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
Trump’s "Make America Great Again" agenda will be codified as his party’s own. He has a year or more to decide whether he wishes to play kingmaker among would-be Republican congressional and presidential candidates or run himself for a second term. The two options are ultimately not mutually exclusive.
By then, there is some chance that the country will have been turned off by a hard-left shift by Biden, surrogate to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of his party. Such extremism made Democrats lose House seats in 2020.
Trump can bask in a successful first term that remade the Republican Party into a multiracial coalition of the broad middle class. His Middle East and China resets will unlikely be altered by future presidents.
Trump finally did close the border to illegal immigration. His initiatives to revitalize America’s interior ended the notion that industrial decline was inevitable rather than a silly choice.
But Trump’s other alternative is bleaker. Currently, Trump-affiliated lawyers claim they can prove their bombshell allegations of historic voting fraud by leftists and foreign interests. They further claim that Trump was robbed not of a close election but of a veritable landslide, constituting the greatest scandal in U.S. history.
But so far none of these advocates have produced the requisite whistleblowers, computer data, or forensic evidence to prove their astounding charges. If they do not produce it in a few days, and if Trump pivots to put his fate in their hands, then the pilloried Republicans may well lose the Senate races in Georgia. And with that historic setback, he would endanger his legacy, his influence, and perhaps a crack at a second presidential term.
In blunter terms, Trump may be forced to choose within days whether he wishes to emulate Andrew Jackson, the aggrieved victim of the crooked bargain of 1824 that denied him victory in that year’s presidential election. Jackson stormed back in 1828 to an overwhelming populist victory fueled by a righteously aggrieved following.
Otherwise, Trump would risk being reduced to the status of sore presidential losers such as Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. For all their media accolades, Gore and Clinton never really accepted their losses in 2000 and 2016, respectively. Despite their supposed magnanimity, Gore and Clinton turned ever more bitter, shrill, and conspiratorial — and ended up caricatured and largely irrelevant.
#2
He is a Jacksonian, but does he have the ability to "put away" the ego and restructure for 2024? lets hope they have a fail safe case of fraud that the court can easily see.....
#7
Most political Dems know he didn't go after them with the full force of law as he could have and know that if they go after Trump the gloves are off with GOP.
Data-filled post-Election Day piece by Musa al-Gharbi, a liberal Columbia University sociology professor who takes an honest look at the numbers — except for not noticing the possibility of fraud.
[TheGuardian] Minorities and women — the very people who are supposed to be central to the Democratic coalition — seem to have shifted in Trump’s direction this year.
The prevailing narrative of the last five years has been that Trump seized and maintains power by appealing to the desires of white voters and men (and especially, white men) to preserve the patriarchy and white supremacy ...the pernicious doctrine that laws were intended to be obeyed, that society works better when people don't pour shreiking from their places of worship every Friday for a weekend of rioting over insults real or imagined; and that cannibalism, beastiality, incest, murder, theft, rape, and similar activities are bad. A Dead White European (which invalidates his opinion) philosopher once opined that societies thrive when a person's word can be relied upon, and that a society which puts individual happiness first will invariably fail. Strangely enough, other successful societies, such as China, Japan, Korea, and those kinds of places could also be lumped with white supremacist societies, since they push the same values... . However,
Continued on Page 49
#4
hmmm....did you analyze the vote in specific areas? Say, like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta to see if more of the local population voted for Trump?
#7
In fact, virtually the only racial or gender constellation the President did not gain with are the people that are often described as his core constituency: white men.
Yup, he's rayciss alright. Never mind that all the nonwhite groups looked at Trump's actual record and increased their support while he lost ground with white men.
Even the Guardian can admit the obvious -- and state what our gaslighting media liars refuse to say. The man not only isn't and never was in any way racist.
He and his economic policies are the best friend that working people and people of color have ever had in the White House -- far better than that bumbling narcissistic fool who preceded him.
[Daily Caller] Teachers unions have been instrumental in keeping American schools online during the pandemic. But some have escalated their positions on reopening to include an array of social justice demands.
A set of demands from teachers unions in July, which addressed how to safely reopen schools amid a pandemic, was criticized by The Wall Street Journal editorial board as "political extortion." The board argued that unions were taking advantage of a health crisis to advance their own ideological agendas and to eliminate competition from charter schools. Who was it that said, "Never let a crisis go to waste"?
"If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Americans are getting a closer look at the true, self-interested character of today’s teachers unions," The Wall Street Journal editorial board added.
"Nobody wants to see students back in the classroom more than educators, but it must be our way when it comes to their safety, we’re not ready to take any options off the table," [head of the NEA] Garcia said.
"It is time to take a stand against Trump’s dangerous, anti-science agenda that puts the lives of our members, our students, and our families at risk," said UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz, The Daily Wire reported. "Even before the spike in infections and Trump’s reckless talk, there were serious issues with starting the year on school campuses." Serious racial social justice issues.
Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that before Trump, teachers unions were on the ropes. Yet Trump "the boogeyman" invigorated their causes. But once Trump is out of office, teachers unions' political wish lists will look selfish and unfocused on student needs, Hess wrote.
"In the last few years, things have turned around for the unions ‐ they've effectively positioned their members as sympathetic underdogs while riding an anti-Trump progressive wave to great effect," Hess wrote.
"If Biden is wearing his mask and pushing for more school funding, unions will no longer be able to insist that school reopening is just a Trumpian rush back to business-as-usual. A reluctance to get teachers back to school will look less responsible and more self-interested," Hess continued. To the blind who will not see.
#2
Thanks to the complete circus that is education via Zoom, parents are now getting a front row view of how incompetent and stupid their kids' public school teachers are. Parents are running away from these shitty schools, in droves.
The Democrat lockdown will finish the job that their Bolshevik teachers union began. Within five years, public school enrollment will have fallen by 25%. Poor kids will be hit hardest.
This is the start of the death spiral of public education. No wonder the teachers unions are freaking and trying to shut down charters and homeschooling.
#3
Let's hope this online/distant nonsense has the unintended consequence of driving kids away from the cesspool called public schools and the AFT (Amer. Federation of Teachers) by having more home schooling or better remote learning (non-public school rubbish).
#2
In a normal world if 'staff confronted management' over a routine business decision, they would all be 'former staff' within an hour. It's not like you can't find people to replace them, especially in light of all the government-forced unemployment going on now.
#6
They’ve been apparently getting wokeness training for months, so this kind of thing was inevitable. But there are plenty of established publishing houses hardnosed enough to be happy to take on the good professor’s little project — and if not, I have no doubt the independents will be lining up to do it for a considerably smaller take of the profits.
So let us cheer the crybullies of PenguinRandomHouse Canada, as they ride their SJW-signalling employer into the ground.
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/27/2020 17:22 Comments ||
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#8
Just let the fact out that *their* salaries are being paid by that [in their word despicable] little book.
IF you lucky you won't even have to fire them.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.