Blackwashing: False stories about black prominence

Threre is a good summary of past blackwashing episodes below:

https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2023/02/blackwashing-just-side-issue-to.html

If you listen to some historians there have been blacks in Britain since prehistoric times. How you tell skin colour from a skeleton is unclear. But a new example of blackwashing has emerged in the form of a book called "Brilliant Black British History". It says; "the very first Britons were black” -- with not a shred of good evidence for most of the claims. Even Stonehenge was built by blacks, allegedly.

The one bit of real evidence offered is that the Roman historian Tacitus reported that the Silures people in Wales were “dark-skinned and curly-haired”. In Tacitus’ full account, he theorised that they may have been from Spain.

The account by Tacitus is confirmed by Jordanes in his "Origins and Deeds of the Goths , where he says, “The Silures have swarthy features and are usually born with curly black hair ... They are like the Gauls or the Spaniards.” So both ancient authors saw the Silures as having a Mediterranean appearance, not an African appearance.

A fuller critique of the book below:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/stonehenge-was-built-by-black-britons-children-s-history-book-claims/ar-AA1gUjpw

Such appropriations have been rather common from American black authors -- again as mere evidence free assertions. Blacks built the pyramids, of course. I have written on that before. See:

http://jonjayray.com/short/gyppos.html

One instance of blackwashing stands out, however: A BBC program in 2017 that describes black and mixed-race families in Britain during the Roman era. It has the distinction that a couple of British historians have defended it. A graphic from the BBC program.



I have commented on the claims of British hisorian Mary Beard elsewhere so will not repeat that. Link below:

https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2017/08/lying-old-leftist-broad-as-professional.html

A much more sustained defence of Africans in Roman Britain comes from Mike Stuchbery so I partly reproduce it below. Stuchbery's argument is mainly in a long series of tweets, which would be rather tedious to reproduce but the opening of the article concerned is as follows:

Alt-right commentator gets 'schooled' by historian over diversity in Roman Britain

An alt-right commentator who complained about the BBC portraying Roman Britain as ethnically diverse has sparked a row with a historian on Twitter.

Paul Joseph Watson (PJW), editor of alt-right website InfoWars, shared a screengrab of a BBC educational video on life in Britain, suggesting it was inaccurate. “Thank God the BBC is portraying Roman Britain as ethnically diverse,” he tweeted. “I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?”

Step forward writer and historian Mike Stuchbery, who gave PJW a quick history lesson on ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.

“Roman Britain was ethnically diverse, almost by design. To begin, occupying legions were drawn from other parts of the Empire,” Stuchbery responded.

“Every year we dig up new remains that suggest that Roman Britain, anywhere larger than a military outpost, was an ethnically diverse place.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/27/alt-right-commentator-gets-schooled-historian-diversity-roman/

All the examples he gives of Africans in Britain are of Mediterranean people, not sub-Saharan Africans. North Africans were and are white, of course. To this day, telling a Berber he is black will get you a dusty response. He will think you are blind or mad.



Berber woman in ethnic dress. It seems likely that the Berbers are in part descendants of the ancient Carthaginians. They are at any event the native people of most of North Africa -- JR

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As the deficit soars, Biden boasts that he has cut the deficit

by Jeff Jacoby

PRESIDENT BIDEN has a well-earned reputation as a fabulist. PolitiFact, the Poynter Institute's accuracy project, debunks his assertions so often that its releases are wearily headlined "Latest False Fact-Checks on Joe Biden." He was rebuked most recently for claiming that he had traveled to Ground Zero in New York on the day after the Twin Towers fell in 2001.

"I remember standing there the next day, and looking at the building," Biden said in a speech at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. "I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell."

In reality, as PolitiFact, CNN, Forbes, and other news sites pointed out, Biden didn't go to New York on Sept. 12. He waited until Sept. 20 to visit the scene of devastation.

To be fair, how soon after 9/11 Biden visited Ground Zero isn't, in itself, that big a deal. What makes it notable is that it is one of an ever-lengthening string of whoppers he has told — including, as CNN pointed out, three false personal anecdotes in a single speech last month.

But worse still is a particular fiscal boast of Biden's that is so deceitful it has been repeatedly discredited by fact-checkers. All to no avail: Biden insists on trotting it out again and again, as he did in a speech on Labor Day.

"In my first two years, all this stuff — guess what?" the president said in Philadelphia during an appearance before the local Sheet Metal Workers union. "I cut the deficit $1.7 trillion. Here's the bottom line: My economic plan is working. It's reducing the deficit."

Biden has made that claim in scores of speeches, many of which are posted on the White House website. According to an online database of his public remarks, he has recited that statistic 44 times this year alone.

But, to use a Bidenesque phrase, here's the thing: He hasn't cut the deficit by a penny.

What Biden's brag is based on is that in fiscal year 2020, before he took office, the federal deficit shot up to $3.1 trillion, whereas by 2022, his second year as president, it had fallen to a little under $1.4 trillion. The difference is $1.7 trillion, the amount of red ink that Biden keeps claiming to have eliminated.

But the 2020 deficit was so gargantuan because of the sudden and unforeseen explosion of spending in response to COVID-19. The CARES Act, passed by near-unanimous votes in Congress and signed by President Donald Trump on March 27, 2020, jacked up federal outlays by $2.2 trillion. Most of that had to be borrowed by the Treasury — that is, it was paid for by adding to the deficit. Later that year, another huge pandemic relief bill, for $900 billion, was passed by Congress and signed into law. Result: The budget deficit soared to levels never before experienced (or even imagined).

Yet that tidal wave of spending was always meant to be temporary. When the funding expired in 2022, the budget receded. The government's borrowing levels dropped — not because of anything Biden did but because that's how the law was written.

In fact, just weeks after Biden's inauguration, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that the deficit in 2022 would be $1 trillion as the emergency outlays were winding down. By 2023, the CBO forecast, the deficit would have shrunk to $963 billion. That wasn't what happened. The 2022 deficit was almost $1.4 trillion — 40 percent higher than projected. And the deficit for the current year is now headed toward $2 trillion.

Far from reducing the level of red ink as was expected when he became president, Biden has raised it.

Though he has sometimes acknowledged that "we need to cut spending," outlays — and borrowing to cover those outlays — have kept going up on his watch. Early on, Biden signed an unnecessary stimulus package worth $1.9 trillion. Then came a $1.2 trillion "infrastructure" package, a huge increase in food stamp spending, and a continuation of the years-long halt in requiring student loans to be repaid.

Oblivious to all of it, Biden boasts that he has "cut the deficit" and proved himself more fiscally responsible than his predecessors. The truth is exactly the opposite.

"My economic plan is working," the president said in his Labor Day speech. As a candidate for reelection, what else is he going to say? But the public isn't buying it. In a survey released Thursday by Suffolk University and USA Today, 70 percent of US residents say the economy is getting worse. Nearly 6 in 10 respondents hold Biden responsible for the nation's economic anxiety. The share of Americans living in poverty has risen dramatically since 2021, inflation has sent the price of pantry staples and gasoline skyward, and home mortgage rates are at their highest level in decades.

And all the while, Washington continues spending money it doesn't have — the Treasury is borrowing $4.6 billion per day. Because interest rates are much higher than they were a couple of years ago, it costs the government much more to service its debt. So much more, in fact, that the United States now pays nearly as much in interest on the federal debt ($644 billion per month) as it spends on national defense ($692 billion). Spending on Social Security and Medicare is up by double digits this year, while revenues are down because tax brackets are indexed for inflation.

We are headed for a fiscal cliff and no one in Washington seems to have a grip on the steering wheel. The $2 trillion federal deficit is a big flashing red light warning policymakers to curb their out-of-control spending. But Congress and the White House won't take their foot off the accelerator. And in the face of onrushing disaster, the president keeps bragging that he has cut the deficit.

It isn't only money that the US government lacks. The worsening fiscal shortfall is deadly serious — but even more ominous is our national deficit of leadership and good judgment. Dollars can be borrowed. But where can Americans find political leaders capable of dealing with this crisis?

https://jeffjacoby.com/27219/as-the-deficit-soars-biden-boasts-that-he-has-cut

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Here’s Where to Take Your Kids When Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts Go Woke

I sat down Wednesday with Patti Garibay, founder and executive director of American Heritage Girls, the leading scouting alternative to the Girl Scouts. She founded American Heritage Girls back in 1995, after she realized that the Girl Scouts were promoting homosexuality and abortion.

While the Girl Scouts had begun moving in that direction during the 1970s, Garibay said, it really hit her in 1993 when the Girl Scouts removed an oath to God from the Girl Scout Promise.

“Well, when you kick God out of a character-development program, what are you going to set the stone on? It’s going to be the shifting sands of cultural winds, and that can be crazy,” she said.

“They have come out of the closet with this,” Garibay added. She mentioned a “Pride patch” with a “very enticing” rainbow and a “Camp Culture Code that tells campers and leaders that you have to use the proper pronouns of whoever the camp counselor might be.”

“I’ll tell you, they are manipulating our kids,” she said. “I believe it’s indoctrination.”

She tried to reform the Girl Scouts from within, but eventually realized she needed to start a separate organization. “Sometimes, we can’t just curse the darkness. We have to light a candle, and we’ve got to start to be part of the solution, rather than the problem,” she said.

American Heritage Girls grew and grew, and it even partnered with the Boy Scouts of America from 2009 to 2013. Garibay lamented that the Boy Scouts changed its policy to allow openly homosexual scouts in 2013, even though the Boy Scouts had won a historic Supreme Court case in 2000 (Boy Scouts of America v. Dale) in which the BSA argued that homosexual conduct was inconsistent with the values it was attempting to instill in young men.

Garibay said that she helped a group of men launch Trail Life USA, a Christian alternative to the Boy Scouts.

While American Heritage Girls is an explicitly Christian organization, it does allow Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish girls to join, so long as they believe in God.

“The girls do all kinds of fun things,” Garibay explained. “They go camping. They serve in the community. They learn about citizenship and government so that they can be good citizens one day. They also learn about badges. We have over 330 badges that the girls can earn, and these are life skills.”

The organization also defends America’s heritage.

“With American Heritage Girls, what we’re training the girls to understand is the Judeo-Christian values upon which our country was founded,” she said. Her organization is bringing back the “basic tenets of America” that are “not being taught in the public schools” or on social media.

Garibay also mentioned resources that American Heritage Girls puts out to help equip families to instill a biblical worldview in their children, and to innoculate them against the lies of transgender identity.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/21/heres-where-take-kids-when-boy-scouts-girl-scouts-go-woke

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ObamaCare Turns Out to Be Affordable Only for the Healthy

The old advice still holds: Don't get sick in America

When Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act of 2010, President Obama and lawmakers made the same claim over and over: The act would make good, affordable health insurance available to people with pre-existing conditions. The actual result has been the opposite. ObamaCare makes health insurance as good as possible for the healthy and as bad as possible for the sick.

According to President Biden, health insurance in America is free or almost free (“as little as $10 a month or less” after subsidies) for about 80% of people who acquire it in an ObamaCare exchange. Most preventive care—the only kind of care healthy people require—is also free.

If you are sick, things are different. Consider a hypothetical middle-aged couple in Dallas earning $70,000 a year. Suppose they have two children, both of whom have serious birth defects. Although this family will pay no premium for a Blue Cross bronze plan in the ObamaCare exchange, they will face a $9,100 deductible for each child. Their total out-of-pocket exposure is $18,200 a year.

It gets worse. Patients with serious diseases often require the care of highly trained specialists who usually work at centers of excellence. But that family in Dallas will discover that their Blue Cross plan isn’t accepted at leading cancer providers nearby, including Baylor University Medical Center and the University of Texas Health Science Center, or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problem isn’t unique to Texas. ObamaCare plans have very skinny networks in every state. They tend to pay providers Medicaid rates or close to them. As a result, ObamaCare looks like Medicaid with a high deductible. A great many providers, including prestigious medical institutions, won’t accept Medicaid managed care—the version of Medicaid most recipients receive—or ObamaCare.

When a patient with ObamaCare coverage goes out of network, the plan usually pays nothing and the patient’s payment doesn’t apply to his deductible or out-of-pocket maximum.

In addition to ObamaCare’s high medical expenses for the sick, there is an implicit tax on their earned income. Suppose our Dallas family earned only $60,000. According to Healthcare.gov, their children could qualify for CHIP, (the Children’s Health Insurance Program) or Medicaid, and they wouldn’t be allowed into a subsidized private exchange plan. Given their lower income, the best exchange plan the family would qualify for would now be the Blue Cross silver plan, which carries zero premium. This means that if the parents stay healthy, they would have no out-of-pocket medical expenses.

But things quickly change if they rose to $70,000 household income again. The penalty would be an $18,200 increase in maximum medical costs—a marginal tax rate of 182%.

Even with the children on CHIP, the parents could have serious medical problems of their own and an accompanying implicit tax on income. At an income, say, of $30,000, the best option is a silver plan with a small premium combined with a small deductible. But if their income doubles to $60,000, the out-of-pocket exposure will increase by $14,200. That’s an implicit marginal tax increase of 47%.

Healthy people tend to buy health plans based on premium alone and ignore all other features. So when premiums are set so low that the enrollee pays nothing, the plan will attract enrollees who will cost almost nothing. But they will generate government subsidies worth thousands of dollars to large insurance companies.

By contrast, sick enrollees are potentially financial losers. High deductibles and narrow provider networks deter the sick, who are guided by these plan features. If a sick potential enrollee chooses a competitor’s plan, so much the better.

If you wonder why ObamaCare was designed this way, consider that it wasn’t designed by Mr. Obama or by Democratic lawmakers. It was designed by special interests. ObamaCare has been pouring about $60 billion a year in new money into the healthcare system. All that spending is lining the pockets of insurance companies, hospitals and some doctors—although it doesn’t appear that there has been any overall increase in the amount of healthcare being delivered.

Most people with serious health problems who have to buy their own coverage would have been much better off in the pre-ObamaCare health system. In Texas there was a risk pool for people who delayed buying a plan until they really needed one. Premiums were higher than what others were paying, but less than ObamaCare premiums today. A typical offering was a standard Blue Cross plan, with reasonable deductibles and networks that covered almost all doctors and medical facilities.

In the last two sessions of Congress, Democrats had an opportunity to reverse some of the worst aspects of ObamaCare. Instead, they added $30 billion of “enhanced subsidies,” which will make health insurance cheaper for healthy people making as much as several hundred thousand dollars a year.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacare-turns-out-to-be-affordable-only-for-the-healthy-hospital-medical-costs-da3e831d

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Australia: Racists under every bed

Cancel culture is about to get interesting and happening right here on Australian campuses. Get your popcorn and tune in!

But be warned: the first episode – the cancelling of Alfred Deakin through the push to rename Deakin University – is dreadfully dull and predictable. It is episode two and three where it gets juicy, where the cancellers cannot escape the undeniable analogies between the deemed offences of Deakin and those of left-wing heroes, John Curtin and (gasp) Gough Whitlam. The cancellers just haven’t realised this yet, which makes it particularly engaging.

Before getting too far ahead of ourselves, let’s recap on developments from earlier in the month which set the scene.

As reported in the Age newspaper, academics and students at Deakin University have decided that the university’s name needs to change, because Alfred Deakin, a founding father and our second prime minister, was apparently – you guessed it – a racist.

The university leadership is resisting the change for the moment, but have established a truth-telling process to document Deakin’s record, which will inevitably add further pressure for a name change.

On what basis do they argue that Deakin was a racist? As it turns out, on the basis of some quite racist policies and statements, as viewed from today’s perspective. In particular, he supported the introduction of the White Australia policy when he was Australia’s first attorney general and continued this support in his times as prime minster.

According to the activists, one of his greatest sins was predicting that Australia would remain a white country in decades to come.

Deakin’s views on race would not be acceptable in Australia today, and I don’t know of a single parliamentarian who would hold such views. Today, we are the most successful multi-racial country and this is a great source of pride to the vast majority of us.

But at the time, Deakin’s views were mainstream. In fact, every political party, including the Labor party, supported the White Australia Policy and nearly the entire population tended to view people through a racial lens. As the federal Parliamentary Library notes, there was ‘almost universal support’ for restricting non-Europeans and the extensive parliamentary debate of the policy concerned the method of exclusion, rather than whether it should occur.

So why single out Alfred Deakin from the entire political class and population of the time? Particularly when Deakin is broadly regarded as an important figure in the development of modern Australia, including being critical in the creation of our federation.

I suspect because he is seen as a figure of the right. The National Union of Students’ Xavier Dupe is clear on this: ‘The University should be renamed, just like other institutions named after right-wingers,’ he is reported as saying.

The problem for left-wing activists, like Dupe, who want to reassess historical figures through the values of today is that their own heroes are likely to be caught up in the revisionism.

And this is certainly the case here with two of the giants of the left, John Curtin and Gough Whitlam. Both were substantial figures in Australia’s history; both have universities or university institutions named after them (Curtin University, the Whitlam Institute) and both said similarly objectionable things to Deakin.

Consider John Curtin’s position on the White Australia policy. He was an ardent supporter, telling the federal parliament in late 1941 that, ‘Our laws have proclaimed the standard of a White Australia…. It was devised for economic and sound humane reasons. It was not challenged for 40 years. We intend to keep it because we know it to be desirable.’

Gough Whitlam’s statements are not as directly analogous. After all, Australia’s discriminatory immigration policy had already been abolished for six years by the time he became prime minister.

However, his position on the south Vietnamese was arguably as appalling. When Saigon fell in April 1975, Whitlam overruled his Foreign Minister’s willingness to admit significant numbers of South Vietnamese refugees, famously telling Foreign Minister Willesee that he didn’t want an influx of ‘f-cking Vietnamese Balts’.

No Labor figure today tries to justify Whitlam’s position. Because it can’t be justified. But if cancel culture activists on campuses are consistent, then surely Curtin University and the Whitlam Institute are also targets for renaming?

Chris Watson, Labor’s first prime minister, was also amongst the Labor luminaries who supported racist policies. In fact, while many unions and Labor people at the time were against non-European immigration for industrial reasons – fearing an undercutting of wages – Chris Watson made it clear that racial impurity was his primary concern, stating, ‘The objection I have to the mixing of these coloured people with the white people of Australia… lies in the main with the possibility and probability of racial contamination.’

Should Watson also be cancelled? Watson doesn’t have a university named after him, but there is a federal electorate and Canberra suburb named in his honour – just like Deakin. Should they be renamed? Tony Burke, who holds the seat of Watson doesn’t think so. Nor does Anthony Albanese who, in his 2015 ‘Light on the Hill’ address, praised Chris Watson as a ‘great leader’ whose record speaks to ‘our [Labor] ideals’.

The truth is that no person in the past would withstand the scrutiny of everything they said if they are judged from today’s moral values. No political leader from the earlier days of Australia’s modern history. And what about the past family members of the activists? Even their own grandparents?

So how should we judge people like Deakin and Watson?

We certainly shouldn’t let left-wing activists be the moral arbiters. Rather, we should assess them in their historical context. This means being honest about our past – the good and the bad.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/its-time-to-cancel-gough/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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