Time for Patriot Retort’s Annual Christmas Tradition

Big Government: Inconveniencing Families for 2000 Years

posted by Dianny at Patriot Retort

Good morning and Merry Christmas, my friends! The time has come for my annual Christmas tradition of recounting the story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.

As happens every Christmas, the Left is once against attempting to superimpose its hyper-woke, social justice spin on the nativity.

Actually, you can probably call it the Left’s annual Christmas tradition.

Joseph and Mary were homeless.

Joseph and Mary were illegal immigrants.

Joseph and Mary were migrants seeking a better life in Bethlehem.

Joseph and Mary were stuck in a stable because the poor are always mistreated by the privileged.

You name the social justice cause, and the Left will find a way to twist the Christmas story to fit it.

So in 2014, I began my own Christmas tradition as a counterpoint to this odious Christmas tradition of the Left.

And here it is:

Big Government: Inconveniencing Families for 2000 Years – December 10, 2014

During a town hall in Nashville, Barack Obama once again proved to the world that he knows absolutely nothing about the Bible (hat tip Breitbart). You see, Joseph and Mary, according to this noted theologian, were homeless wanderers forced to hole up in a stable.

If you have been a regular reader of mine, this particular theme will sound familiar because I touched on it last Christmas.

You know. The last time Barack Obama, Biblical Scholar declared that Mary and Joseph were illegal aliens who had no home in Bethlehem and had to live in the shadows of a stable.

Now, I’m probably not as knowledgeable a Biblical Scholar as Barack Obama.

You see, I only hold a measly Bachelor’s Degree in Biblical Studies.

However, permit me to provide Barack with some, oh, what’s the word, context.

Rome was a micromanaging, Big Government that loved to stick its nose into the lives of the people who lived under its rule.

Sound familiar?

Okay.

Moving on.

During the time of Caesar Augustus, when Quirinius was the Governor of Syria, Rome decreed that a census be performed. Now, the Roman Postal Service didn’t mail everyone a seventeen page form to find out how many people lived in your home, do you have health insurance, how many are gay, or what color your skin is.

Instead, they forced everyone to return to the city of their birth where they would be registered for the census.

So, if you lived in Nazareth, but were born in Bethlehem, you had to pack up your family and set out for Bethlehem in order to be counted in the Big Government Census.

Joseph, being from the House of David, was from Bethlehem.

So, despite the fact that his wife Mary was exceedingly pregnant, they had to pack a bag and make the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem to be in compliance with the Roman census decree.

I’m sure some pencil-pushing hag named Loisius Lernerus was sitting in her office in Rome making sure that the Jews were super-inconvenienced by this census.

But that’s just conjecture on my part and in no way substantiated in the Bible.

Joseph and Mary were not relocating to Bethlehem.

Joseph and Mary were not sneaking into Bethlehem illegally so that Joseph could become an olive-picker in the fields while Mary made beds in Bethlehem’s one and only inn.

They were mandated by the Roman Government to haul their fannies to their city of birth in order to comply with a governmental decree.

And they weren’t the only ones having to do it.

Everyone who was born in Bethlehem, along with their families, were also making the trip.

Now, Bethlehem wasn’t Miami or Las Vegas. It wasn’t known for all of its ample tourist accommodations.

As a result, there was precious little room for all these people mandated by a government decree to return to Bethlehem and be counted in a Big Government Census.

Since accommodations were limited, and Joseph had himself an enormously pregnant wife, they found a place protected from the elements and slept there.

It happened to be a stable.

You see. Joseph and Mary were not illegal aliens.  They were not migrants or refugees.

They were complying with a Big Government mandate.

If you want to take something away from the Christmas story about the circumstances that brought them to the stable, it should be:

Big Government: Inconveniencing Families for 2000 Years

Let’s face it. Had Rome not decreed this census be taken in the manner it was, Joseph and Mary would have welcomed their baby to the world from the comfort of their own home in Nazareth.

Obama wants to use the Christmas story as a lesson. Sadly, as is usually the case with Obama, he failed to get the right lesson.

They were not homeless people, but citizens inconvenienced in order to comply with a government mandate.

They were not illegal aliens, but citizens forced to take a trip at a difficult time in order to comply with a government mandate.

But, don’t be too hard on Obama.

If I had attended a church where the minister told his congregation that “G*d-Damn America” is in the Bible, I probably would be a little confused as well.

Of course, Obama also claimed in this same town hall that the Bible says, “Don’t throw stones in glass houses.”

Ah, yes. If I’m not mistaken, Solomon installed plenty of double-pane, energy-efficient windows when he built the Temple in Jerusalem. They went nicely with the solar panels on the roof. Turns out the reason Solomon was so wise was because he was Green Compliant.

The problem with trying to convince Christians to support Amnesty by misquoting the Bible is most of them probably know the Bible better than you do. They know that the Bible doesn’t say anything about glass houses since, well, you know, glass houses didn’t exist. And they know that Mary and Joseph were not homeless, illegal vagabonds who jumped the border into Bethlehem in order to get the Roman equivalent of Food Stamps.

Jesus isn’t a cat’s paw for you to pull out and utilize to promote your political agenda.

Truth is, Jesus wasn’t ever very keen on people abusing the religion of his “folks.”

Those who tried to profit from pilgrims by setting up booths within the Temple were promptly, and might I add, violently expelled by Jesus.

Stick to your strengths, Barack.

Quote the Koran.

Quote Rules for Radicals.

Quote the Communist Manifesto.

Jesus isn’t a political bludgeon. So, please. Leave the Bible alone.

~~~

I hope you enjoyed this annual Christmas tradition — even if you have read it every year since 2014.

Anyroad.

A very Merry Christmas to you and yours.

I want to thank those of you who made Christmas donations to PatriotRetort.com. They are deeply appreciated. Because even at this festive time of year, I still have bills to pay.

Speaking of traditions:

Tomorrow begins PatriotRetort.com’s End of Year Fundraiser. I know times are tight for all of us. But I hope you are able to make a contribution to keep PatriotRetort.com going in 2021.

Be on the lookout next Thursday for another annual tradition here at PatriotRetort.com – namely Dianny’s Ten Most Tiresome People of the year.

I wish you all the compliments of the season!

 

His Father’s Business

Kevin D. Williamson for National Review 

December 25, 2020 6:30 AM

Detail of Adoration of the Child by Gerard van Honthorst, c. 1620. (Public Domain/via Wikimedia)

Those who seek a model of responsible manhood would do well to imitate Joseph, the nativity story’s forgotten man.

Among the glories of the Uffizi museum is the Dutch artist Gerard Honthorst’s Adoration of the Christ Child, a 1621 masterpiece that, like many of Florence’s treasures, came to the city courtesy of the energetically acquisitive Medici family. The arrangement of figures in the painting is familiar: Mary beaming and beatific, the adoring angels in rapture, the Holy Child at the center, with the light in the dark stable falling on the figures’ faces in such a way as to suggest it is radiating from Jesus, an application of the light-in-the-darkness “tenebrist” style with which Honthorst was so completely identified that he was known to his admirers as Gherardo delle Notti — “Gerard of the Night.” The Incarnate God as a literal light in the darkness: That is the kind of unsubtle illumination we Christians sometimes need to be hammered over the head with.

Oh, and Joseph is in the picture, too.

Not that you’d notice if you were just passing by. In Honthorst’s painting, Joseph is in the background, in the shadows, barely there, as though absenting himself from the scene. You could, at a casual glance, overlook him. Even in the Uffizi’s photo of the painting, he is almost invisible.

That often is the case with Joseph, who must be used to being overlooked. In Caravaggio’s infamous Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence (infamous because it was stolen in the 1960s by Sicilian mafiosi, who apparently trade it around as a trophy), the titular saints figure prominently. That is allegorical: Saint Lawrence was born two centuries after the time of Jesus, and Saint Francis was born more than a thousand years later. Their presence is ahistorical. Joseph, whose presence is not ahistorical, is there, too . . . probably. One account of the painting reads: “There is no clear-cut indication as to which figure represents Joseph, the foster father of the Christ.” Another: “St. Francis of Assisi [is] standing behind the family in his brown Franciscan robe with hands folded. The other figure, in gold-colored deaconate garb, is St. Lawrence.” Joseph? “Mary looks on with an angel overhead and surrounded by men, one of whom we assume to be Joseph.”

Assume.

Joseph is almost entirely absent even from Scripture. The oldest of the gospels, Mark, omits him entirely, as do all of the 13 New Testament books authored by Paul. He is barely present in Luke — indeed, his existence is really all that is reported about him. His dilemma regarding Mary, the only real information we get about him as a man, is communicated only in Matthew. His work is obscure, and his death goes unnoted.

The Bible is filled with accounts of God demanding that His followers do preposterous, unreasonable, and often horrifying things to satisfy Him, demands that we would rightly understand as ranging from cruel to utterly insane if they were made by a human being: Abraham and Isaac, Noah and the Ark, Jesus at Gethsemane. The wild-eyed fanatic welcomes the flood and eagerly awaits “the fire next time.” The reasonable man sips his scotch, straightens his tie, clears his throat, and asks, circumspectly: Perhaps, Lord, there would have been an easier way to make Your point? Joseph was a reasonable man. And being reasonable wasn’t enough. He was commanded to go beyond what is reasonable — to love beyond what is reasonable, to give beyond what is reasonable, to take up burdens beyond what is reasonable.

As bizarre divine demands go, what God required of Joseph was relatively minor: loss of social standing. Possibly ostracism. Whispers.

This should be familiar to us. The people of Joseph’s time were no more likely to credit the idea of a pregnant virgin than are people in our own times. Joseph’s friends, family, and neighbors would have assumed either that Mary had been unfaithful and that Joseph was raising a child not his own, or that Joseph had been brutishly unable to wait until his wedding day and dishonored himself and his future wife. We must always keep in mind that the figures in these stories were men and women quite like us, not cavemen or mythological heroes but H. sap. in robust modern form, in spite of their cultural and technological distance from us.

Joseph, we are told, was an upstanding man, though his sense of honor was, to his great credit, not so demanding as to make him cruel. When he learned that his betrothed was pregnant, he could account for himself and his own actions, and so made the natural assumption about this state of affairs and, though “unwilling to put her to shame,” nonetheless “resolved to divorce her quietly.” (“Divorce” here is not exactly the right word: Joseph and Mary were not yet married, but in their culture an engagement had legal standing as a contract and had to be legally dissolved. We don’t have a word for that in modern English, lacking the underlying concept of a binding engagement.) Mary could expect to give birth — and did — at a time suggesting that the child had been conceived well before her wedding, and her son was given a name that was not traditional to Joseph’s family: He had three ancestors called “Joseph,” according to Luke’s genealogy, and not one “Jesus” among them, though archeologists tell us the name was fairly common.

(That this was significant we may infer from the story of John the Baptist, whose relatives protested his mother’s choice of the name “John,” saying: “There is no one among your relatives called by that name.”)

Scandalous timeline, suspicious name, doubtful paternity: People were going to talk.

Joseph was certain to be seen as a man who had been humiliated. But Joseph did not see things that way, and humiliation, intelligently understood, is something that cannot be imposed from the outside by others, though they may try. A man’s honor is his own. Convinced that he was following God’s command, Joseph took up the invitation to shame, and he dutifully took on the burden of raising and providing for a child who was — in either a natural or supernatural sense — not his own. “Fear not,” Joseph was commanded, and so he had no fear: No fear of shame, no fear of what people might say, no fear of the cost, economic or social, of the course of action to which he had committed himself. Scripture does not tell us that God reached down from Heaven and omnipotently plucked the fear from Joseph’s heart — instead, it says only that Joseph was commanded to liberate himself from that fear, which meant liberating himself from his pride and even from his own righteous understanding of his honor, in the service of a higher honor that transcends a man’s anxieties about his place in the world and the estimate of his neighbors.

We speak of Christmas as a time of peace. For those participating in the original Nativity drama, far from home and in bewildering circumstances, it must have been a time of great anxiety. Joseph and Mary were forced to travel to Bethlehem for reasons of tax compliance, moved around by the relevant political powers like pawns on a chessboard, completely without authority of their own and at the mercy of the merciless. Comfort and joy? Perhaps they tasted some of that, but not much.

Beauty is difficult to fight off, and so Mary gets her moment this time of year. Even those Protestants who typically regard the Catholic veneration of Mary with some suspicion cannot resist the permanent human truth of mother and child. Mary figures prominently in all the Christmas season’s observances and much of its music. She is in good company there: The Magi get one of the best songs, and the drummer boy, good King Wenceslas, the thoroughly pagan tradition of the Christmas tree, silver bells, jingle bells — all are memorialized in some pretty good songs.

Joseph doesn’t even merit a line in “Silent Night.”

Joseph was the custodial guardian of God Himself, yet you’re a lot more likely to hear someone singing about Frosty the Snowman.

(In one of the few songs in which he figures more prominently, “The Cherry-Tree Carol,” Joseph is Mr. Bad Example, the jealous husband who “flew in anger” at his innocent wife. Which is probably why that song is rarely sung, though the dreadful version recorded by Joan Baez did the tune no favors.)

Of course Joseph is in the picture. He is, in fact, the kind of father who, as in the case of Caravaggio’s painting, can be assumed to be in the picture, something that, unhappily, cannot be said with great confidence about far too many men in our own time. If you want a model of how to be a man, imitate Joseph. The scanty information we have about him is enough to see him as a picture of virtue and a rebuke to our own deficiencies: He worked at his trade and provided for his family (the Catholic Church venerates him as Saint Joseph the Worker), followed his God and his conscience even when doing so cost him something, did not cower from whispers and whisperers, and carried his burdens without complaint and with no expectation of reward or glory. Whatever might have been whispered about him by his neighbors, no one can say Joseph was anything less than a father.

The strutting politician Pontius Pilate, the most powerful man in Judea, couldn’t stand up for his own conscience against the whispering (and then screaming) rabble for two minutes. He was a reasonable man, without the strength — or the love — of an unreasonable one. Herod Antipas enjoyed the pomp of a king, and he thought that God had entered the world in order to perform party tricks for his amusement. But he was at the center of every picture, typically the most important man in any room he entered — and he was bullied into committing a horrifying crime by his stepdaughter. He might have benefited from Joseph’s example, but it is unlikely he had ever heard the name of Joseph. We do not have his excuse.

Joseph may recede into the background, but his actual absence would be felt painfully —would, in fact, be catastrophic. The whole picture falls apart without him, teetering out of balance and tottering into chaos. The good father is there even when he is not there, present even if unseen, ready to give everything and, if necessary, receive nothing.

Joseph isn’t unwrapping any Christmas gifts in Bethlehem, singing songs, or drinking eggnog. Honthorst had it right in his painting: Joseph already is pulling away into the darkness. He has business in those shadows: There is no distance to which he will not go to protect the precious life with which he has been entrusted, and the flight to Egypt awaits him. Preparation is now, work is now, sacrifice is now — Joseph is a worker, and that is a father’s work.

If he’d taken the time to explain himself, he might have looked up from the task at hand and said: “Do you not know that I must be about my father’s business?”

It Can’t Get Any Worse Than 2020

Here's a 2021 political wish list.

by Josh Hammer for American Greatness

At long last, 2020 is about to end.

This year, one unlike any other in my lifetime, was uniquely terrible. We faced a once-a-lifetime global pandemic, which brought to heel our entire economy and put an abrupt halt to hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans’ very way of life. We endured a once-a-generation national “dialogue” about race, which was unfortunately characterized, in part, by months of intermittent anarchic mayhem the likes of which no First World country should ever experience. We had a national reckoning about the maturation and rise of an arch geopolitical foe, the Chinese Communist Party. And in perhaps the most important presidential election since 1860, in which the American regime was itself seemingly on the ballot, the American regime lost.

Next year surely cannot be worse than 2020. So, with the expectation that Joe Biden is our next president and Republicans win at least one of January’s two Georgia runoff elections to retain control of the Senate, here is a political wish list for 2021.

No. 1: End COVID-19 Totalitarianism 

The draconian lockdowns and lifestyle restrictions ushered in by COVID-19’s onset, and their stubborn perdurance despite the March-era plea of a mere “15 days to slow the curve,” now collectively amount to our most pressing domestic issue. 

Without our most rudimentary lifestyle liberties, such as the ability of children to socialize with their peers at school and the ability of religious adults to pray at church or synagogue, little else matters. It is unclear whether the Founders would have even bothered to fight a bloody independence war against the British Crown if they had known that their progeny would, centuries later, submit like lemmings with such docility. Our anticipated vaccination rollout simply must end this insanity.

No. 2: Confront the Rise of Communist China 

Just as ending debilitating COVID-19 lockdowns is the most pressing issue on the homefront, confronting China’s rise is the most pressing issue on the geopolitical front. 

China all but assuredly poses a greater threat—militarily, diplomatically, economically, culturally, technologically—to America this century than the Soviet Union posed to the United States at the height of the Cold War. We have never faced a foe so thoroughly determined, in every conceivable way, to subdue and subjugate us. The early stages of COVID-19, with our shortages in personal protective equipment, shined a spotlight upon the pitfalls of our decades-long strategy in neoliberal outsourcing to get the cheapest labor and lowest consumer prices possible—no matter the noneconomic costs. 

Here’s hoping populists and nationalists of both parties unite around a comprehensive China containment strategy affecting every issue from U.S. Navy buildup to pro-manufacturing industrial policy to cybersecurity to intellectual property fortification.

No. 3: Continue President Donald Trump’s Middle East Breakthrough 

President Trump became one of the more unlikely champions of Middle East diplomacy, helping to usher in unprecedented Israeli rapprochement with the broader Islamic world and bolstering the security positions of our Sunni Arab allies against the region’s nonpareil threat, Iran. Trump did so by ditching the outmoded consensus of “inside-out” diplomacy, centered upon coercing Israel to give up precious land for an elusive peace with the Palestinian-Arabs, in favor of an innovative “outside-in” diplomacy that centered upon finding areas of overlapping concern shared by Israel and America’s Arab allies. 

The temptation will be strong for a Biden Administration to reverse Trump’s gains and return to the Obama-era status quo ante of pro-Iran, pro-Palestinian, pro-Muslim Brotherhood appeasement. Such an impetuous move would be enticing, but it would also be calamitous.

No. 4: Push for Solutions That Defy the Stale Neoliberal Consensus 

We are in the midst of a rare political realignment, in which Democrats are emerging as the party of the college-educated elite and Republicans are emerging as the party of the working class. But while this realignment remains in flux, neoliberal elites of both parties, for now, have more in common with one another than they do with the core voters of their respective parties. 

The upshot is that there is at least some potential for bipartisan initiatives on any number of working-class prerogatives that could push back upon the economically and culturally deregulatory excesses that have characterized most of post-World War II neoliberalism. Conservatives should not be content merely to play the role of dedicated opposition; when possible, we should seek to be constructive in attaining mutually desirable ends.

Thank God the year 2020 is about to end. Maybe, just maybe, 2021 won’t be as utterly terrible.

Biden Throwing a Conniption That Twitter Wouldn't Transfer Trump's Followers to Him

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

This was definitely the funniest thing I’ve read so far today.

Joe Biden, who had difficulty having anyone come to any of his events, whose “rallies” may have had those poor little social distancing circles, just not a lot of supporters, is now really upset that Twitter wouldn’t just turn over to him the presidential Twitter account with President Donald Trump’s massive number of followers.

Twitter has decided that while they are turning over the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts to Biden, the account followers will be wiped to zero, that followers will be notified of the change of account and given the choice if they want to continue to follow. Some media initially falsely claimed this was the president’s decision, but Twitter made it clear that it was theirs and theirs alone.

Biden’s transition team gave a statement to CNN, complaining about not getting the followers who Trump had built up.

“Twitter’s reluctance to transfer millions of followers from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration unnecessarily politicizes what otherwise should be a routine transfer of communication from one administration to the next,” spokesperson Cameron French declared.

Trump has over 33 million followers on the @POTUS account and 26 million on the @WhiteHouse account.

Twitter apparently told the Biden people their decision was unequivocal and they didn’t give any reason why. Perhaps they are worried that the followers would just be constantly lighting Biden up and so that was the easiest way to stop that?

The Biden folks are clearly worried that he would have to get his own followers. After all, who wants to follow a Biden account that Biden likely wouldn’t even be tweeting from most of the time? With Trump, you always knew it was Trump. But with Biden it will be some boring functionary trying to say the proper thing… and not Joe. But even if they transferred the followers over, many Trump followers said they would just unfollow the account.

But surely someone who supposedly got the most votes in history should be able to get more followers, right? Why is he so worried that he can’t? Is he worried that he’s going to be horribly embarrassed and that whole concept is going to be challenged by his abysmal number of followers?

Donald Trump’s @POTUS account will be renamed @POTUS45 and archived as is and he will still have his personal account of @realDonaldTrump which has almost 89 million followers.

HT: Twitchy

Texas Tells the CDC to Stuff Their Vaccine Guidelines

Bonchie reporting for RedState

Emotional arguments are a terrible way to make policy. That’s never more true than when dealing with a deadly virus. For example, mask mandates continue to show little or no correlation with any slowing of the spread of COVID, yet they serve as an emotional crutch politicians lean on to shift responsibility for their own failures onto the public. The same is true of lock downs. Right now, we are witnessing heavily restricted states like California and New York endure their largest infection spikes yet while much maligned (and open) Florida continues to do better in comparison.

When it comes to the now available vaccine, we were once again presented with emotional gyrations via the guidelines from the CDC. First, they wanted to prioritize based on racial inequities, an absolutely insane idea that would see elderly people dying so a perfectly healthy, not at risk younger person of a certain race could get the vaccine first. After garnering sufficient blow-back, the CDC fell back on starting with “essential workers” because that’s the next most politically palatable direction to go.

Texas is saying no, instead choosing to follow the science.

Note that CNBC tries to make this sound really nefarious. Texas is doing this “at the cost of excluding frontline essential workers” they scream into the ether. But it’s worth exploring exactly what that means. Most nurses are under 50 years old. Many of them are in their 20s and 30s. The majority of ancillary staff at hospitals and clinics also fall outside the most at risk age ranges for coronavirus. There is simply no science behind the idea of vaccinating a 35 year old nurse with no preconditions before a 78 year old woman in a nursing home. In fact, there are studies that say if you start by vaccinating only those above 65 years of age, you cut deaths by two-thirds.

To be frank, there is no other moral way to distribute a vaccine than by doing what will cost the least amount of death. The moment you start judging by age, race, and profession, you are diving into the realm of eugenics. There’s also the fact that “essential workers” covers a ton of ground. Did you know flacks who work at CNN are considered “essential workers?” Anyone think Jake Tapper should be getting the vaccine before a grandmother? Teenagers and 20-somethings that work at fast food establishments, god bless them, should not get the vaccine before the elderly. Prioritizing by anything but actual risk is simply idiocy. Yes, frontline and other essential workers do great things, but if we are supposed to be following the science, let’s actually follow the science.

Good for Texas for taking this stand. Hopefully, other states will follow suit and do the right thing so that the maximum amount of life can be saved.

Fauci Admits He Didn't Tell Truth, Moved Goalposts Because People Not 'Ready to Hear Truth'

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

You may think that today is Christmas Eve.

But as we reported yesterday, according to the edict of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, it’s “Dr. Anthony Fauci Day,” a day to celebrate Fauci for all he has done.

So perhaps it’s appropriate that there’s a report today about Fauci admitting that he hasn’t been telling us the truth about the virus.

We already saw him say something like this when it came to masks. Initially he said in March that he didn’t think people generally should be wearing masks because they really weren’t all that effective in preventing the spread. But on the other hand, the constant touching, fiddling with and adjusting of the mask could make it worse. He later backtracked on that, saying that he’d said that to discourage people because masks were scarce and he wanted there to be enough for medical workers.

So was he lying then about masks or lying now?

The problem with stuff like this is that when you do this, you torch your credibility, not to mention thinking you can manipulate people and treat them like children.

Now, on “Fauci Day,” comes the report that he’s doing it again, that he admitted in a phone interview he’d been deliberately changing his public statements about the virus because he didn’t think people were “ready” to hear his true beliefs.

According to The NY Times, Fauci admitted he had been slowing “increasing the number of Americans he says need to be vaccinated for the U.S. to reach “herd immunity” in public statements.” He said partly that was due to new science and partly because he thinks the country is finally ready to hear it.

From Daily Caller:

Earlier on in the pandemic, Fauci had said the United States would need 60 to 70 percent of people to be vaccinated in order to reach herd immunity, according to the Times. He cited higher numbers of 75 to 80-plus percent in a CNBC interview last week. That prompted the Times to ask him why he had been “moving the goalposts,” their report says.

Now he’s claiming we might need 90% in order to reach it.

So why should we believe what he has to say? Health officials are supposed to be telling us the truth, however difficult that might be. If they’re not, why are they there? They’re not supposed to be lying and smooth talking us.

There’s no reason to believe the 90% number either, that smacks of just wanting more control and it leaves out those with natural immunity or those immune from having had it. But notice even the definition of herd immunity is in the process of being changed apparently, by WHO.

HT: Twitchy

Progressives have made a mockery of the slogan ‘listen to science’

by Jonah Goldberg for New York Post

Double-standard: Last June's massive Black Trans Lives Matter rally in Brooklyn trumped science 

because protesting transphobia, systemic racism and police brutality is OK.REUTERS

Behold science, the sword and the shield of progressivism.

Over the course of the pandemic (and before that, in debates over climate change, stem cells, etc.), liberals have insisted that we must listen to science and heed the scientists. It was a cornerstone of President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign and a constant refrain of President Trump’s critics. 

Taken literally, I endorse the phrase “listen to science” wholeheartedly. Scientists have important things to say to policymakers and citizens alike — and let’s not forget that in a democracy, voters are policymakers, too. A well-informed electorate is a useful check on ill-informed politicians.

The problem, however, is that the people who say “listen to science” tend not to mean it literally but figuratively, and worse, intermittently.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in May, massive protests against racism and police brutality erupted across the nation. The point of the protests (at least, most of them) was noble and understandable. But the same champions of science suddenly changed their tune about mass gatherings, because this was a good cause.  

In a pluralistic society, the definition of a good cause is going to vary. Telling people that they can’t see their dying parents, attend a funeral or make a living because science says it’s too risky but that protesting systemic racism and police brutality is OK is a great way to convince millions of people that “listen to science” is a weaponized political term, not a universal apolitical standard.

Indeed, liberals handed Trump precisely the kind of foil he wanted. At rallies, the president would tell the packed crowds that “they” don’t want you to go to church, work, school or sporting events, but “they” think social-justice protests are fine. He even started calling his rallies “protests” to highlight the double standard.

Some epidemiologists made things worse by stepping out of their lanes.

“We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, declared on Twitter. “In this moment, the public-health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

I’m open to the idea that if the protests this summer could have ended racism, the benefits would outweigh the risks. But where is the evidence that happened? Is racism over now? Heck, where was the evidence that such an outcome was in the realm of the possible in the first place?

I trust epidemiologists to explain how epidemiology works. But there is no transitive property to their expertise. The opinion that the protests would even come close to eradicating systemic racism and police brutality is just that — an opinion, and a flimsy one at that. Moreover, the opinion of medical scientists on such matters has no more authority than that of plumbers or electricians — and less than that of many social scientists or, dare I say it, politicians. 

Which brings us to the point. Again, politicians should listen to scientists, but at the end of the day, they must consider factors from outside science. That’s not only fine but unavoidable. Using the phrase “listen to the science” as a shield for your preferred policies or as an attack on policies you dislike is not only bad faith, it’s a bad idea, because it will undermine the credibility of scientists and politicians alike.

Now that we’re entering the vaccination chapter of this horrible story, many of the same science worshippers are, in effect, telling the scientists to listen to politics.

In California, there’s an effort to factor “historical injustice” into the vaccination rollout as a form of reparations. Because indigenous Americans were treated horribly in the past, the argument goes, they should be moved higher on the list of vaccine recipients.

A similar argument has emerged over whether the elderly — those most likely to die from COVID-19 — should be moved down the list, because “older populations are whiter,” as noted by Harald Schmidt, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer,” Schmidt told The New York Times. “Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

Scientists are free to make such arguments, but these aren’t scientific arguments. They are political opinions, and they don’t become any more legitimate simply because you wear a lab coat at work. So by all means, listen to the scientists, but listen very carefully, because they might be saying things that aren’t very scientific.