June 28, 2020

How Deadly Has The Covid-19 Pandemic Really Been?

June 28, 2020/ Francis Menton

Back in April I wrote several posts on the subject of the severity and expected mortality from the Covid-19 pandemic. It is fair to say that I expressed a high degree of skepticism that the pandemic was of sufficient severity to justify the extreme economic suppression that was being undertaken at that time (much of which still remains in place today) . . .
I have been holding off revisiting the subject because I have not been able to find data that answer the principal questions that I asked in those posts. In particular, I made this statement in the April 27 post:
The best indication we will get [of the true death rate from this virus] will come when the CDC issues final data for deaths from all causes in the U.S. for the month of April. When we get that number, we can subtract from it the approximate “normal” number of deaths that would have occurred anyway during April. The difference will be a good estimate of the number of excess deaths attributable to the virus.
At this writing I still cannot find those data. If anyone can point me to a source, I will appreciate it.
But meanwhile, it is timely to come back to this subject . . .

June 26, 2020

Examples Of The Worst Of Progressive Racism

June 26, 2020/ Francis Menton

It’s all the rage right now for progressives and their allies to call anybody who doesn’t toe the party line of Black Live Matter a “racist,” or worse, a “white supremacist.” Even better is to hurl the accusation that the entire American country is “systemically racist.”
And yet, as I repeatedly note on this blog, all you need to do is look at a little data, and you quickly realize that the jurisdictions most firmly in progressive control and for the longest time — the solidly Democratic big cities with Democratic mayors, City Councils, Congresspersons, and state governors for decades on end — are the places that have the worst outcomes for their African American citizens on every metric you can find. . . .
But what does the dynamic that brings about these disastrous results look like on the ground? . . .

June 23, 2020

June 23, 2020/ Francis Menton

Just a few days ago I was making fun of the big tech companies (particularly Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple) for lecturing us all about their woke and anti-racist values, even as their own performance in hiring African Americans, especially in the tech field, was abysmal.
In the midst of endless blather about their commitment to “diversity and inclusion” in frequent publicity on the subject, you then need to dig through reams of numbers to find the unhighlighted facts that Facebook has only 1.5% African Americans among its tech workers, Microsoft 3.3%, and Google and Apple have both stopped providing data broken out this way.
Could anybody top these guys for sanctimonious hypocrisy on the subject of race?
I have a candidate for today: high end lawyers. As a group, they are at least as woke and committed to the progressive political project as are the big tech companies. In the major law firms, every single one has a diversity bureaucracy and ongoing diversity initiatives, most have which have been ongoing for decades.
And yet, out of hundreds of firms, not a single one has succeeded in achieving the goal of having a proportion of African Americans equal to the proportion in the general population. . . .

June 20, 2020

June 20, 2020/ Francis Menton

We are living in the age of cancel culture. All icons from the past associated in any way with mistreatment of minorities are in the process of being eradicated.
Statues of Confederate figures? They’re mostly already gone. But that was just the start. How about statues of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? In New York, First Lady Chirlane McCray will decide on their fate. How about a statue of Ulysses Grant (who may have done more than anyone other than Lincoln to free the slaves, but also once briefly owned a slave before freeing him)? His statue in San Francisco was toppled yesterday. How about the weathervane atop the Dartmouth College library (featuring a sculpture of a Native American)? It now must go (it “do[es] not reflect Dartmouth’s values” says the president). Aunt Jemima? Uncle Ben? They are now unacceptable racial stereotypes. . . .
But what American institution of all those existing today has the longest and deepest association with violent bigotry and grotesque racism, including slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan?
The answer is the Democratic Party.

June 18, 2020

June 18, 2020/ Francis Menton

Here in the United States, the environmental movement has been completely taken over by the campaign to ban use of fossil fuels, with the stated goal of slowing or preventing “climate change.”
But at this point, is the “climate” campaign really about the climate in any meaningful way?
The alternative hypothesis is that the principal goal of the anti-fossil-fuel movement in the United States is destruction of the American freedom-based economic system, commonly going by the name of “capitalism.”
So let’s consider whether the anti-fossil-fuel campaign in the U.S. could really be about its avowed goal of saving the planet from climate change caused by greenhouse gases.

June 16, 2020

June 16, 2020/ Francis Menton

Essentially every form of discrimination on the basis of race in economic matters has been banned by law in the United States since at least the 1960s. That’s sufficiently long ago that the number of people old enough to have living memory of the days when racial discrimination was legally tolerated is rapidly diminishing.
Today, nearly every institution of any size in our country — businesses, the government, educational institutions, arts organizations, you name it — not only asserts that it does not practice discrimination, but also loudly proclaims a commitment to diversity and to economic justice for African Americans.
And yet, while everyone claims to practice non-discrimination, blacks continue to lag other racial groups in various measures reported in government statistics, particularly income and wealth.
What is the explanation? The one most often articulated at this moment goes by the name “systemic racism.”