Covid-19 is not an equal opportunities disease

Why are infection rates soaring? I think we need some honesty in this debate: some plain speaking from ministers, doctors and scientists about the genetic and lifestyle risks that make some communities more vulnerable, together with a renewed effort to better target public health measures by officials who may fear they will be accused of stigmatising certain groups if they do so.

Let’s look at the statistics: Compared to the national average of 7.2 cases per 100,000 people, the rate in Blackburn, for example, has climbed to 85.3 cases for every 100,000, while in Oldham it stands at 53.1 and Bradford 44.9.

In Leicester, a partial lockdown had to be reintroduced last month after evidence of a resurgence in the virus there.

Things have improved, but even with the return of these tough rules, Leicester — one of the most diverse cities in England — still has an infection rate of 57.7 cases per 100,000 people today, more than eight times the national average.

This disparity reflects a vital truth that too many figures in authority do not want to face because of politically correct scruples and fears about accusations of prejudice.

The fact is that conurbations like Leicester, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire have been badly hit by the pandemic because their large minority ethnic populations are more susceptible than white populations.

We might like to strive for equality in our modern, multi-racial British society, but I am afraid Covid-19 is not an ‘equal-opportunities’ disease.

Its impact is uneven, but it is hitting South Asians particularly hard.

One survey of 35,000 patients showed that South Asians are 20 per cent more likely to die in hospital than white people, while another showed ethnic minorities are four times more likely to test positive for Covid-19 than white people.

Hiding from that reality does no one any favours, least of all the most vulnerable.

Ignoring dangers is always counter-productive, as I know from my own experience as the Crown Prosecutor for North West England, when I had to battle against the institutionalised determination of the police, the media and local authorities to cover-up of the abuse of white girls by predatory, mainly South Asian, gangs in my locality.

It was a reluctance bred of a desire not to undermine the narrative of multi-cultural success, but, by weakening the integrity of the justice system, it succeeded only in harming both the victims and the Asian communities.

The same misplaced racial sensitivities have inhibited the fight against knife crime, county-line drug gangs, and brutal, misogynistic practices like female genital mutilation.

The advent of coronavirus is no time for squeamishness or hesitation. If we are to counter this brutal scourge, we must deal in the facts, not wishful thinking.

The infection rates among South Asians should be a call to action, not a cue for concealment.

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That's Called Terrorism, Children: Seattle Police Chief Reveals Contents of Van Impounded From Weekend Riot

I mean, this should come as no shock to anyone following the leftist mayhem engulfing the Left Coast. Seattle, Portland, California are seeing the riots continue and getting more violent. It’s no longer about the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May that sparked the latest round of Black Lives Matter activism and political correctness policing. Even then, most of those demonstrations devolved into rioting that spread throughout the country for days.

What we’re seeing now weeks after Floyd is not about racial justice or police brutality. It’s about revolution. These are ardent Marxists trying to destroy what they can in order to fulfill whatever warped agenda they want to be enacted here. And yes, federal agents have a right to respond. Federal agents have a lawful obligation to enforce law and order and protect federal buildings. That’s literally in their mandate. The entire country is their jurisdiction. Deal with it, liberals. Oh, and it’s very rich that they’ve discovered what they think is federalism when they’re told the adults will be coming in to clean up their mess, huh?

The new liberal meltdown is over the deployment of federal agents into these crime-ridden hell holes run by Democrats. In Portland, they’re trying to set the federal courthouse on fire, rioters are throwing IEDs at law enforcement, and they’ve blinded federal officers with lasers, some of whom may not regain their vision. In Seattle, Police Chief Carmen Best ripped into the city council for creating an environment that makes officers vulnerable to harm with their anti-police sentiment, like the push to ban the use of tear gas and flashbangs.

Now, Chief Best has revealed the contents of a van impounded during the riots last Saturday, which include—shocker—bombs, spiked strips, bear spray, and lasers. Best said that these items were being handed out to these left-wing vermin from the van. This isn’t protesting. It’s terrorism—and more federal agents should be deployed as a result. This mayhem has gone on for weeks. It’s time to put the mob down.

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Our Summer of Cultural Suicide

Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.

Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.

Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors' respect for moral and spiritual laws like thrift, moderation, and transcendence.

Take professional sports. Over the last century, professional football, basketball and baseball were racially integrated and adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st century, the NFL, NBA and MLB had become global multibillion-dollar enterprises.

Then hubris ensued.

The owners, coaches and players weren't always racially diverse. But that inconvenient truth did not stop the leagues from hectoring their fans about social activism — even as they no longer honored common patriotic rituals.

All three leagues have suffered terribly during the viral lockdown, as American life mysteriously went on without them. And they have almost ensured that they won't fully recover when the quarantine ends. Many of their often-pampered multimillionaire players refuse to honor the national anthem. In the NFL they now will broadcast their politics on their helmets. They will virtue-signal their moral superiority to increasingly turned-off fans, as if to ensure that their sources of support flee.

Lots of American universities became virtual global brands in the 21st century. Sky-high tuition, rich foreign students, guaranteed student loans, and Club Med-like facilities convinced administrators and faculty that higher education was sacrosanct. The universities preached that every successful American had to have a bachelor's degree, as if the higher-education monopoly deserved guaranteed customers.

But soon, $1.6 trillion in aggregate student-loan debt, lightweight and trendy curricula, ideological hectoring, administrative bloat, reduced teaching loads, poor placement of graduates, and the suspension of the Bill of Rights on campus began turning off both students and the public.

If students can Zoom or Skype their classes from home this fall, why pay $70,000 a year for the campus "experience"?

Supposedly woke and informed rioters this summer incoherently toppled or damaged the statues of everyone from Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant to Frederick Douglass and Miguel de Cervantes. So the public might begin to wonder how the nation's multitrillion-dollar investment in higher education actually served the country.

Soon, popular fury will beget more dangerous questions for American universities. Maybe the country should subsidize the training of more essential electricians, plumbers, contractors, and masons instead of unemployable environmental and ethnic studies majors.

If a university president wanted to devise a plan for how to destroy his university, he could not have come up with a better one than what has happened on campus in recent decades.

Hollywood should have been ecstatic over 21st-century globalization, which should have made filmmakers and stars even richer and more popular, with a potential audience of more than seven billion. But quarantine has shut down most theaters.

Amazon, Netflix and Facebook, along with cable TV, have sent theater revenues diving for years. Silicon Valley can create filmmakers who have no need to get near Southern California.

In response, Hollywood counts on bringing comic books to the big screen, or on making poor remakes of old classics. When directors try to make a serious new movie, the result is often the monotony and boredom of thinly veiled woke propaganda.

Viewers can take only so many heroic green crusaders, diverse superhumans, and beautiful feminists — and only so many villainous cardboard-cutout Russian oligarchs, toothless and twangy Southern Neanderthals, and corporate yes-men.

The hypocrisy gets worse when the Chinese government often adjudicates movie content as the price of entering a Chinese market with more than a billion potential customers.

But viewers do seek out theaters for more lectures from beautiful multimillionaires on their racist, sexist, homophobic country.

Professional sports, universities, and the motion picture industry all know that what they are doing is bad for business. But they still believe they are rich and powerful, and thus invulnerable. They also are ignorant of history and cannot be persuaded that they are destroying themselves.

At this late date, all that matters is that the country itself learns from these suicidal examples and heals itself. If the U.S. is not to become an extinct Easter Island, it must rediscover a respect for its past, honor for the dead who gave us so much, the desire to invest rather than spend, and a need for some sense of transcendence.

If we do not believe that what we do today has consequences for our children after we are gone, there are ancient existential forces in the world that will intervene.

And it won't be nice.

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Insane: Seattle Moves to Abolish Entire Police Force

Well, it may be time to deploy the military to Seattle after all because what local lawmakers are doing is nothing short of allowing the city to be engulfed in violence and anarchy. They’re moving to abolish the police. It’s not defunding. It’s a total dissolution. Non-profit programs and “community-led activities” will replace policing. Why? Well, according to the resolution, the Seattle Police Department perpetuates racism and violence. Oh, yes, and it’s a vehicle of white supremacy. It's typical 'woke' nonsense, and it's a cancer that's killing America.

Also, did you catch that backdoor Marxism with the re-appropriation of land? This is basically making CHOP, the zone that was seized by armed leftists earlier this summer, into citywide policy. Social workers cannot bring law and order, only police officers can do that. You know this. The Emerald City is sprinting further down the path of total anarchy.

Recently, Police Chief Carmen Best revealed a van impounded during last weekend’s riots that contained a variety of weapons including bombs. She said it’s highly probable that these weapons were being distributed to rioters from the van. Best also ripped into the council for making her officers less safe with their nonsensical motions, like banning crowd control munitions such as flashbangs and tear gas.

The ‘woke’ council is gladly handing the city over to Marxist terrorists because ‘orange man…bad.’ They’re mad that the federal government can and should deploy federal agents in cities that are crime-ridden hell holes—all of them run by Democrats. These people cannot govern. This resolution is an endorsement of mob violence and rule. Do they really want the military on the streets after the Insurrection Act is invoked? We can make that happen. And it should happen if Seattle and other places continue to dabble in this idiocy of defunding the police, which we all know means total abolishment.

They’re not shy about their intentions on that front either. This is the Left in 2020. They’re unhinged, violent, intolerant, and prone to throw tantrums when they don’t get what they want. They didn’t want Trump to win the 2016 election, so they’re trashing their communities. These are children we’re dealing with, and it’s about time we give them the belt. Or, in this case, the baton.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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