College Students Say Biden Has Failed

 

Buyers remorse sets in on campus: Students Disown Joe Biden After Endless 'Disaster'

COVID Panic Propaganda is Harmful

Story out of the Boston Herald on hospitals being swamped by psychiatric patients as a result of the lockdowns and COVID hysteria.  It is not surprising as the political class and meia have been telling us for a year and a half that the world is a terrible, dangerous place.  

COVID-induced job losses, fear and isolation have all taken a toll, as well as delays in seeking care, leading to a regular bottleneck of over 500 patients per day in the state awaiting specialized psychiatric care, according to a survey by the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association conducted this summer.

Patients are also sicker — a new impact of the pandemic — including “patients with severe psychosis, patients with severe depression or other mood symptoms or anxiety that lead to suicidal thoughts, patients coming in after suicide attempts,” said Dr. Sejal Shah, medical psychiatry chief at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The toll on young people is particularly high.  Brad Polumbo writes that college students are literally frightened out of their wits.  College used to be fun.  Now it's got the feel of an internment camp.

Government restrictions on daily life during the pandemic have fueled a youth mental health crisis . Yet, even with many of these restrictions now lifted, young people are still living in a hysterical state of fear.

Likely as a result of this widespread fear, 61% of students think their schools should impose restrictions on attending parties and large social gatherings. 

There’s just one problem: There’s almost no basis for any of these fears, and college students are living scared of their own shadows for no reason.

For one, COVID-19 does not pose and has never posed a high risk of death or hospitalization for individuals of college-age. (With the rare exception of those with preexisting conditions that compromise their immune system, individuals for whom many diseases are life-threatening.) Yes, COVID-19 is a serious virus and has claimed many lives. But the deaths are almost exclusively among those much older than the college demographic.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 6,744,362 Americans aged 18 to 29 have tested positive for COVID-19. Among that same age cohort, an estimated 2,951 have died. These figures allow us to calculate a rough fatality rate of 0.04%. This means that if 10,000 members of this age group contract the virus, four will die. And these rates are assuming no vaccination! The available vaccines are highly effective at preventing infections serious enough to lead to hospitalization or death — even for the delta variant . So, for vaccinated students, the risks are even more minuscule.

Gen Z Least Interested in Remote Work

Remote work is not turning out to be a great thing for those starting their careers.  You don't get the skills and connections that come with on-site work.  When asked whether they'd be willing to take a 5 percent pay cut to be able to continue to work at home, members of Gen Z were the least likely to want to take that bargain.  

Smart move.  Remote work isn't all that it is cracked up to be.  Millions of young people will find it harder to build networks and develop their talents when interaction with others takes the form of Zoom calls versus the give and take of workplace interactions.  That will stunt young careers much more than that of the Millenials and older generations that have had the benefit of close contact with colleagues.  

Good News: Gen Z Least Likely to Approve of Censorship

Bad news: Gen Z is more likely to approve of censorship of freedom of speech than in 2018.  According to Pew two-thirds of Democrats want government or big tech to censor speech.  

Roughly half of U.S. adults (48%) now say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means losing some freedom to access and publish content, according to the survey of 11,178 adults conducted July 26-Aug. 8, 2021. That is up from 39% in 2018. At the same time, the share of adults who say freedom of information should be protected – even if it means some misinformation is published online – has decreased from 58% to 50%.

Terrible news for the country and for young people.  The ability to express oneself is the most basic of human freedoms.   Young Americans are heading into a new dark age.  In many ways, they have themselves to blame.  Stop voting for Democrats would be a good start.

More results below:

Gen Z Hates Cancel Culture

Gen Z standing against cancel culture.  Good.  

An interesting example may lie in the experience of the unlikely conservative icon of Scott Cawthorn, the creator of the videogame series Five Nights At Freddy’s. Cawthorn might initially seem like an odd figure to represent conservatism in pop culture. His videogame series is about a fast-food restaurant where animal robot mascots go on murderous rampages at night, and the player, as a security guard, must avoid being killed in gruesome manners. On paper, it is exactly the sort of violent videogame that parents in the early 1990s would have sought to “cancel,” lest it corrupt their kids. And today it has established an enormous fanbase among teenagers, including, for some reason, gay and lesbian teens.

When it was revealed that Cawthon had donated extensively to both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Donald Trump, however, he came under sustained attack online from publications accusing him of “betraying” his “LGBT” fanbase. But something interesting happened. While most media publications, generally staffed by millennials, rushed to condemn him, on social media, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, Gen-Z users rallied to his defense. So after initially condemning Cawthon, many of the millennial journalists quickly shifted to expressing horror that teenagers could possibly defend Cawthon on Twitter and in public, attacking them instead.

The Soviet Union Is Gone, but the Young Yearn for Socialism

 Read the whole thing. 

Picking Your Pockets for .... Nothing

It is bad enough that politicians are saddling young people with enormous debts.  But even worse is that much of this money is being wasted.  

Current entitlement programs are rife with abuse. Their size and lack of guardrails to protect taxpayer dollars open the door for bad actors to take advantage of the system. But rather than acknowledging and addressing these issues, the Biden administration wants to dramatically expand the welfare state, which will undoubtedly result in even more waste, fraud, and abuse.  

Since 2003, when agencies were required to report these payments, the Government Accountability Office estimates $1.9 trillion in improper payments have been made. But that might just be the tip of the iceberg because the GAO maintains it is unable to “determine the full extent to which improper payments occur.” 

In fiscal year 2020, more than 21% of Medicaid’s federal program spending was the result of improper spending, which means one-fifth of taxpayer dollars, intended to help roughly 77 million low-income and medically needy individuals, has been lost without helping those Americans. Medicare was similarly disastrous, with $43 billion in improper payments—money that should have helped provide health care for the 63 million elderly and disabled currently receiving Medicare benefits.  

Outside of Medicare and Medicaid, three other significant sources of improper payments are for the earned income tax credit, unemployment insurance, and supplemental security income. Almost a quarter of the payments made for the earned income tax credit in FY2020 were improper—this amounted to $16 billion. Of the benefits paid by the Department of Labor for the unemployment insurance program, 10% were improper payments, which accounted for $8 billion. The Social Security Administration similarly spent almost 10% of the Supplemental Security Income funds on improper payments during FY2020—amounting to $5.3 billion. 

Afghanistan: The Bigger Cultural Picture

Brendan O'Neil writes about how the West lost in Afghanistan.  Not a military loss.  That would be bad enough.  It was a loss for Western Culture.  The Taliban found a West that no longer believed in itself.  The Taliban did.  Lost in a multicultural haze and moral relativism the West had no ability to criticize the Medieval morality and actions of the Taliban let alone promote values like individualism and freedom.  The Afghan project became one of dishing out cash to the corrupt politicians and generals and welfare to the peasants.  Below is an excerpt.  

But above all of that, above even the political and military incoherence of the American empire, there is the corrosive cultural dynamic. This might just be the most important factor in the Afghan humiliation – the fact that the US, and the West more broadly, clearly lacks the cultural resources necessary for a clash of civilisations. This wasn’t just a territorial battle, a fight over the land of Afghanistan. It was also a cultural clash. It was a war between one side that has very strong beliefs and is more than willing to die for them, and another side that doesn’t know what it stands for anymore and would rather avoid risk and self-sacrifice if at all possible. I’ll leave you to decide which of these is the Taliban, and which the US.

This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.

Anyone who thinks the Taliban did not pick up on all of this, on the Potemkin nature not only of the Afghan government but also of Western civilisation itself, is kidding themselves. The Taliban will have watched as the mighty American military became bogged down in discussions of critical race theory and the problem of ‘white rage’. They will have clocked the British army’s recruitment drive that was aimed at ‘snowflakes’ and ‘me me me millennials’ – for real – on the basis that such people have the ‘compassion’ necessary for the touchy-feely wars of the 21st century. They will know that the contemporary West is shame-faced about its history and its civilisational values and lacks ideas for how to turn its fragile youths into a fighting force, and they will understand their own life-and-death devotion to Sharia as being the opposite to all of this. They know this was a cultural clash as well as a military fight, and that they were by far the stronger side on this front.

This is the truth: America and its Western allies are too consumed by wokeness to be able to pursue a moral or military struggle for their values. The past 20 years of this slow-burning Afghan humiliation have been a modern case of fiddling while Rome burns. An intolerant Islamist army gains in strength and plots its return to power while the American and British armies obsess over how to become more trans-inclusive, which gender pronouns to use (the Royal Air Force’s list includes ‘ze’, ‘per’ and ‘hir’), how to make training exercises more inclusive of ‘snowflakes’, and how to fight wars without offending the enemy. Who can forget when US navymen wrote ‘Hijack this, fags’ on a bomb destined for Afghanistan and all hell broke loose? Such ‘spontaneous acts of penmanship’ are completely unacceptable, said the then US rear admiral. The Taliban was fighting to the death for its theocratic vision – the West was squabbling over offensive words.

This is why the comparison with Saigon is an illegitimate one. Back then, the US was forced into retreat by powerful external forces – the Vietnamese, of course, and also the anti-war movement in the US, in which vast swathes of the youth and significant sections of the elite turned against the war. The Afghan humiliation, in contrast, is a product almost entirely of internal disarray – of the exhaustion of American politics, of Western geopolitical nous, and of the West’s belief in its own project and its own values. There is nothing positive whatsoever in how the Afghan War has ended. It is a disaster for the Afghan people, a devastating blow to the confidence of the United States, and another backward step for those of us who believe that the values of democracy and freedom are superior and are worth fighting for. The Afghan calamity will cast a long shadow, for a long time.

Read the whole thing.

   

The Millennial Wealth Gap

Millennials that are in or approaching their high earnings years are finding out that they are not as prosperous as previous generations.   The problem is high debt and the effects of having lived through two deep recessions early in their careers.  From the Wall Street Journal:  

Older millennials in their high-earning years are also still working to recover lost ground from previous bouts of unemployment or underemployment caused by the 2008 financial crisis, according to a 2020 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“You carry that with you for a long time, maybe your whole career,” said William Gale, one of the authors of the study and a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution.

Do you, or does someone you know, expect the late 30s to early 50s to be the high-earning years? Join the conversation below.

The study—which examined household wealth across generations using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, a survey conducted every three years by the Federal Reserve—found that the 2007-09 recession significantly reduced wealth for all age groups, and younger cohorts in particular. In 2016, millennial households held around 12% less wealth than did households headed by a person of the same age in 1989.

In 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found older millennials’ debt-to-income ratios to be 23% higher than expected, based on previous generations at similar ages.

The overall real average wage of 2018 had the same purchasing power as it did 40 years ago, Drew DeSilver, a senior writer at Pew Research Center, wrote in an article. That means despite the strong gains in earnings and a growing post-pandemic labor market, many millennial households may not see more flexibility in their budgets, according to Mr. DeSilver.

Depression Soars Among Young People

Panic purveyors in the media and political class have had a heavy toll on young people.  A new study shows that depression and suicide rates among young people have soared as a result of the social isolation imposed by the pandemic.  

School closing have been particularly hard on young people.  The school closing are particular wrong headed because schools have not been shown to be centers for the transmission of COVID.  

"Being socially isolated, kept away from their friends, their school routines and extracurricular activities during the pandemic has proven to be difficult on youth," said lead researcher Sheri Madigan.  She is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Calgary, in Canada.

"An important consideration for keeping schools open should be the mental health and well-being of youth," Madigan said.  Children tend to thrive when their environment is predictable, and in-person learning allows for more consistent routines and structure, so keeping schools open may protect children from mental health problems, she said.

The increase in suicide and depression rates is particularly alarming.

Dr. Victor Fornari, vice chair of child and adolescent psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y., said he has seen firsthand the increase in mental health problems among the young.  "We've seen in our emergency rooms a 50% increase in suicidal adolescents presenting over the past 12 months and an almost 300% increase in admissions for eating disorders amongst adolescents," he said.

The pandemic has been stressful for adolescents as they struggle with home instruction and virtual schooling, Fornari said. "School is their social network. Without being with their peers, their friends, they're in a more stressful environment at home."

Not Your Parent's Economy

 Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds blog explains how changes in the economy have resulted in massive inequality in America.  

This wholesale transfer of risk from elites to the workers is finally becoming consequential as wealth / income / security inequality is reaching extremes that are destabilizing society and the economy. As Gordon Long and I explain in our new video, The World Just Got a Lot Riskier crony capitalism has transmogrified into predatory capitalism as government, finance and the corporatocracy have allied into a seamless (and seamlessly corrupt) elite class that has offloaded systemic risk onto the unprotected class.

This is a bad development for young people who have no memory of a country where the middle class was much larger and mattered.  The passage pointing out how Federal Reserve's negative (real) interest rate policies are devastating small savers is well worth reading.  

4. Federal Reserve policies have destroyed safe yields on savings and money-market accounts, forcing workers to take on the enormous risks of the rigged stock market casino (which is rigged to benefit high-frequency traders, front-running trading houses, and those with asymmetrically distributed information, i.e. insiders).

A COVID Apology from the Media

In an extraordinary statement the chief editor of Bild, the largest German newspaper, apologizes for harming young people and especially children with all the scaremongering over COVID.   The apology  is a blunt admission of the harms caused by the media and government.  He says:

"Millions of children in this country, for whom we are all responsible as a society, I would like to say what our Federal Government and our Chancellor have not dare to say so far: We ask your forgiveness. We ask your forgiveness for a year and a half of politics, who sacrificed you."

The statement, which is in German but with English subtitles, is available here.  

This blog has pointed out on several occasions that high cost of the lockdowns and the fearmongering of the media and the political class.  Let's hope that the statement by Reichelt is a crack in the wall of media disinformation about COVID and its consequences for the population.