Slippery logic about Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio

If this study were to be submitted as a Statistics 101 essay, it would be deservedly rejected.  But it in fact appeared in a top medical journal.  It is yet another instance of the deception surrounding Covid

The leap of logic:  They had data about all-cause mortality but somehowthat tells us about mortality from Covid (!!).  How come?  Because the data was gathered DURING Covid it supposedly tells us ABOUT Covid:  Logic only a Leftist could love.  That things other than Covid might have happened in the period concrned is ignored.

There's not much point flogging a dead  horse but I might also note that excess deaths in Ohio and Florida are supposed to tell us something about  Republicans.  What about all the Republican States that did  NOT have excess deaths?  How do they fit in? They don't.  The findings tell us exactly NOTHING about Republicans.  Mention of them is a red herring

I sensed that this study would  be garbage even before I looked up its details.  It is truly lamentable how often science is subjugated to ideology

The original title of the article was "Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic"


Key Points
Question  Was political party affiliation a risk factor associated with excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida and Ohio?

Findings  In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

Meaning  The differences in excess mortality by political party affiliation after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been a factor in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.

Abstract
Importance  There is evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democratic-leaning counties and similar evidence of an association between political party affiliation and attitudes regarding COVID-19 vaccination; further data on these rates may be useful.

Objective  To assess political party affiliation and mortality rates for individuals during the initial 22 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design, Setting, and Participants  A cross-sectional comparison of excess mortality between registered Republican and Democratic voters between March 2020 and December 2021 adjusted for age and state of voter registration was conducted. Voter and mortality data from Florida and Ohio in 2017 linked to mortality records for January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2021, were used in data analysis.

Exposures  Political party affiliation.

Main Outcomes and Measures  Excess weekly deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic adjusted for age, county, party affiliation, and seasonality.

Results  Between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021, there were 538 159 individuals in Ohio and Florida who died at age 25 years or older in the study sample. The median age at death was 78 years (IQR, 71-89 years). Overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters (95% prediction interval [PI], 1.6-3.7 percentage points). After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

Conclusions and Relevance  In this cross-sectional study, an association was observed between political party affiliation and excess deaths in Ohio and Florida after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults. These findings suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been factors in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617

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Biden Betrays Israel in the U.N., Rescinding Trump’s Recognition of Sovereignty over the Golan

The latest act in the Biden administration’s Middle Eastern Kabuki theater is the use of Lebanon to rescind America’s recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. No formal announcement of this major policy shift was made, of course. Instead, it was buried in the fine print of the U.N. Security Council’s reauthorization of UNIFIL, the force that ostensibly secures Lebanon’s border with Israel. In a reprise of Barack Obama’s passage of Security Council Resolution 2334 in the final days of his second term, Team Obama-Biden on Aug. 31 again used the route of the Security Council to abandon a formal American commitment and implement a new policy with extreme repercussions for Israel’s security.

With UNSCR 2334, Obama adopted the so-called 1967 lines as the official U.S. position on Israel and its conflict with neighboring Arabs. The resolution called upon all states “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967,” and reaffirmed that all Israeli communities established in territory “occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, have no legal validity.” It meant that the U.S. had adopted the position of Israel’s enemies on East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, as well as on the Golan Heights.

UNSCR 2334 was the twin of UNSCR 2231, the resolution Obama used to lock in his deal with Iran at the Security Council. Obama’s objective in both cases was to bypass Congress and to tie the hands of his successor by etching his preferences—what people like to call his “legacy”—in Security Council resolutions.

Both planks of Obama’s “legacy” were cracked by Donald Trump, who made two historic moves of his own: moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

When Trump made his move, officials from Team Obama (who now serve in the Biden administration) publicly opposed it. Obama’s former ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, who is currently the Biden administration’s senior adviser for “Regional Integration,” was particularly vocal in his opposition to the recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan. In fact, Shapiro wrote, the recognition might become an obstacle to a future Israeli-Saudi agreement—a line that offered a preview of how the Biden administration would invert the Abraham Accords in order to reassert Obama’s framework.

The growing divide between the policies that America claims to be pursuing and the policies that it’s implementing on the ground poses a growing threat to America’s global standing, as well as to its democracy.

Upon returning to power, the Biden administration underscored its plan to reopen the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. It also quickly tipped its hand on its intention to reaffirm Obama’s position on the Golan. In February 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken telegraphed the administration’s rejection of Trump’s decision, as well as their plan to rescind it during their tenure. The administration continued to speak of Israel’s “control” (as opposed to “sovereignty”) over the Golan as a “practical” matter. The issue of “legality,” however, was “something else” that the administration was “still working on,” as U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield put it in June 2021.

And work on it they did. This past June, the administration took measures to reaffirm Obama’s UNSCR 2334 legacy, issuing new guidance to government agencies ending scientific and technological cooperation with Israel “in geographic areas which came under the administration of Israel after 1967.”

Then Team Obama-Biden received an assist from a party that shared the same objective: Hezbollah. A few months ago, Hezbollah set up an outpost in the Mount Dov region of Israel, in the area of the Golan that the Lebanese refer to as the Shebaa Farms. Hezbollah orchestrated a full-blown campaign around this calculated move, which pro-Hezbollah media framed as a response to Israel capitalizing on Trump’s recognition of its sovereignty over the Golan. The purpose of the campaign, Hezbollah’s leader made clear, was to force the reopening of the border file, from the coast to the Shebaa Farms

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/biden-back-doors-israel

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‘Transportation Equity’ Coming to a 15-Minute City Near You

Freedom of movement is one of the defining characteristics of American history. Indeed, Article IV of the Articles of Confederation expressly recognized the right of interstate travel. Citizens have the right to travel throughout the country at their own leisure. This fundamental right helped ensure the growth and expansion of the United States into the nation that it is today.

Of course, the primary means by which Americans travel around this great big country is via gas-powered vehicles, which the Biden administration increasingly opposes.

In the name of fighting “racism” and “climate change,” one of Joe Biden’s many diversity hires, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, recently appointed a group of 24 “leading experts” dubbed the Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity to help him come up with a plan for — you guessed it — “transportation equity.” It’s a revival of an initiative started under Barack Obama, which Donald Trump wisely ended. And judging by Buttigieg’s choice of “experts,” this is nothing more than a group designated to come up with new ways to attack Americans’ preferred and necessary form of transportation, gas-powered cars.

For example, Buttigieg’s group includes Andrea Marpillero-Colomina, who has stated that “ALL CARS ARE BAD” because they cause “a myriad of environmental issues and conditions.” Another one of Buttigieg’s “experts” is Veronica Davis, who last month wrote a paper ridiculously claiming that cars perpetuate “systemic racism” and are the biggest problem with the nation’s transportation system. Who knew that inanimate cars were racist?

As our Emmy Griffin noted earlier this summer regarding so-called 15-minute cities, the pipe dream of leftist global elites is to create these walkable cities where everyone lives within 15 minutes of each other and all the necessities of life. Necessities as these global elites define them. And cities that would ideally obviate the need for individual motorized transportation, “racist” or otherwise.

The real goal of these 15-minute cities is that of lifestyle control. No more of those “bad,” “racist” cars. Everyone will walk everywhere and be happy about it because they’re “saving the earth.” Far from utopia, this is a vision for dystopia.

Back to Buttigieg and his transportation “equity” group, this is merely the latest in the growing list of ways in which the Biden administration aims to exert more control over Americans’ lives, infringing upon our individual liberty. The EV push, the net-zero crusade, the raising of new regulations on household appliances from gas stoves to ceiling fans — all of it is being done using the excuse of curbing CO2 emissions. Yet it’s ultimately all about pursuing a bloodless revolution against the American people.

Authoritarian socialism is the goal, and individual rights, private property rights, and free speech rights all get in the way of the elites establishing their rule. For Buttigieg’s advisory committee, the goal is not the erasure of all cars but the erasure of the individual right to private ownership of cars.

In this view, cars should be reserved for elites who “need” to travel. Air transportation should be reserved for elites who “need” to jet across the world to fight climate change — elites like John Kerry. The Biden administration’s view is eerily similar to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s all about control — more and more control. Power can be a corrupting elixir, and those who come under its spell just can’t seem to get enough.

Moreover, this obsession with greater control over the lives of Americans won’t stop with cars or 15-minute cities. It will expand into what you eat, what you wear, what you are allowed to read and watch, and of course what you are allowed to say. Individual liberty is the real “problem” these Washington elites are working to eradicate.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/100215-transportation-equity-coming-to-a-15-minute-city-near-you-2023-09-06

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Single parents discriminated against in rental market

It IS discrimination but why?  It's mainly because single parents are usually stretched financially.  So it is rational to question whether they would be reliable rent-payers. So it is rational for a  landlord to pass over them and rent to people who would have less difficulty in paying rent. But not all single mothers are  the same so those in well-paid employment would normally deserve a chance
 

A whistleblowing real estate agent and a landlord say that single parents are “heavily discriminated against” and “stigmatised” in the rental market, with one single mother who works full-time telling of how she lives in her car because no real estate will lease a property to her.

Vicki Eriksson, now a rental property manager with Five Rivers Sales and Rentals in Cairns, has broken ranks with other firms to say discrimination against solo parents is a “massive issue” in the real estate industry.

“In my experience, it was tough to get a rental when I was a single parent … and it’s because there is a stigma attached to it (being a single parent).”

Ms Ericksson said she got involved in real estate management off the back of her difficult experiences as a single parent trying to find a rental and works hard in her role to give single parents rental properties.

“Being a single parent means you are discriminated against and stigmatised in the rental market, just for being a single parent” she said of other real estate agents.

She said the “stigma comes from the fact there is only one income,” and the result is “people becoming homeless and often trying to make ends meet through stealing and violence”.

Indeed one single mother Stephanie Williams, said she works full-time, but is living in her car because of constant rental knock-backs that she believes is because she is a single parent.

“My boss even helped with a letter stating he would pay three months of rent to try help myself get stability for myself and kids. But here I am living in my car” she said.

“When you have kids and you’re on your own it’s tough, but you have to just keep powering on.”

Single parents Patricia Breuil and Jane Mcdonald say they have been forced to share rooms with their teenage daughters after applying for 40 properties between them in the last six months.

Single father Scott Jones says he has applied for around “50 properties” over the past two years.

“It’s beyond a joke” he said.

He is now living in a 14-foot caravan with his three children.

The single parents who contacted the Post know the rental market is already tight with record low vacancy rates and around 1300 homeless people in Cairns, but believe real estate agents are rejecting them simply because they are single parents.

However, another real estate agent property manager who is also a single mother said that while she often leases out to single parents and wanted to remain anonymous – the issue is usually that single parents come to her with poor references.

However, landlord Sarah Wild disagreed.

As a new property owner in the area she told a couple of real estate agents she wanted to rent out to single parents.

“They immediately warned me against this,” she said. “I asked the real estate why and ‘she said you don’t know what their life is like and they come with ‘complications’.”

Ms Eriksson said she believes the stigma against single parents is unfair and unfounded.  “Single parents are my best tenants,” she said.

“I advise any single parent to contact a property manager directly. Don’t just keep making applications online. Share your story, tell them who you are, it puts them in a different focus – you become a real person to a property manager that way.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/cairns/single-parents-discriminated-against-in-cairns-housing-market/news-story/8e4ba55b0c85b5afa84cc7d8c8d690ec

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