Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Technically the University of Connecticut is a public institution, but as the Connecticut Mirror noted last week, you wouldn’t know it from following the university’s Board of Trustees. For the board’s meetings are almost always routine and dull, with the board flying through its agenda with little discussion and disagreement.

State Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Killingly, whose district includes UConn’s main campus in Storrs, explained it. “That’s just how UConn does everything,” Flexer said. “Everything is lined up with the members ahead of time before the truly public meeting. It’s how they make many decisions, especially those that might be controversial.”

Michael Bailey, head of UConn’s professors union, concurs. “That’s the way the Board of Trustees has operated,” Bailey said. “There seems to be a lot of discussion in executive sessions and behind closed doors.”

Of course this is contrary to the spirit of Connecticut’s right-to-know law and maybe even the letter of the law, since the law limits causes for excluding the public from the meetings of government agencies. Are all the private discussions among university executives and trustees about subjects for which excluding the public is allowed?

No one in journalism or politics seems to have asked that question, and UConn seldom gets serious news coverage.

Is the public well served when UConn makes a decision without a full public airing of the considerations involved? Can the work of the trustees themselves be evaluated when they do the most important part of it in secret?

Of course not, but then the governor and the General Assembly long have considered the university to be the fourth branch of government in Connecticut, accountable only to itself.

When, after serving less than two years, UConn’s president, Thomas C. Katsouleas, announced his resignation in May, availing himself of the golden parachute the trustees had given him, descending gently into a tenured professorship with a starting salary of $339,000, some people wondered if the scandal would nudge the trustees toward more accountability and competence, or that Governor Lamont might nudge them. But no.

Add it to the pile of good issues waiting for Connecticut’s opposition political party to work up some relevance and nerve.

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Is Manchester’s school system striving to evoke racial consciousness and division among its youngest students? That’s the complaint of a teacher who recently resigned. The teacher, Jennifer Tafuto, charged that the elementary school curriculum injects racial issues with students who ordinarily — and fortunately — would not give a thought to race.

Tafuto says she was instructed to tell her students to focus on the race of characters in books, to ask why some whites once wanted to deprive Blacks of education, and to suggest that brushing teeth and showering are activities considered particularly white.

There must be something to Tafuto’s complaint, since the Manchester school system replied with lofty but unresponsive prattle.

Board of Education Chairman Darryl Thames said: “We are committed to ensuring that every one of our students feels included and affirmed, and has what they need to grow and thrive. We know that the historic and current realities of racism make it more difficult for Black, Latinx, indigenous, and other students of color to be successful. The work we are doing in Manchester is necessary, relevant, and overdue.”

A spokesman for the school system, Jim Farrell added: “Manchester Public Schools recognizes its responsibility to address in grade- and age-appropriate ways issues that include racism, inequities, discrimination, and systemic bias. We proudly do so while also practicing culturally responsive and relevant teaching, affirming students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and including appropriately varied cultural references in all aspects of learning.”

But exactly what is happening in class? Are racial divisions being created among the youngest students instead of erased as they should be? If so, is the point, as many around the country suspect about this kind of thing, to indoctrinate all students and intimidate the white ones?

Whatever is happening, will Manchester’s schools permit outsiders to observe it? Or must townspeople be kept ignorant by the official prattle?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Who will be the first to call the Rev. Boise Kimber a racist?

Kimber, head of the Greater New Haven Clergy Association, is Black. But last week at a rally the association called he got away with saying something no white worthy in Connecticut could say without forfeiting his place in polite society.

With his sometime nemesis, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, at his side, along with other city officials, Kimber confronted the city’s social disintegration, as exemplified by the unsolved fatal shooting of 14-year-old Tyshaun Hargrove in the city’s Fair Haven neighborhood Aug. 25.

“I want to speak to the Black community today,” Kimber said, “because the shootings and murders going on in our city have been basically committed by our own. We’re killing each other.

“It is not the police killing us. We’re killing each other. And today we come to make a serious stand and give serious words to our community.

“This will stop — has to stop. We will not tolerate this in our community any longer.”

Indeed, Mayor Elicker said he had just come from the funeral of another city murder victim, Kevin Mills, shot to death two weeks before Tyshaun.

Yes, someone in New Haven knows who murdered the boy. The mayor and the other officials who stood in solidarity with the clergy association want that someone to come forward and help solve the crime.

But no, the murders will not be stopping any time soon, and it is not a simple matter of “tolerating” them. While Kimber was correct demographically about most of New Haven’s murder victims and perpetrators, to leave that assertion as a rebuke, without adding crucial context, does risk abetting racism.

For Black people as a group are not generally responsible for violent crime among Blacks, nor for crime anywhere, any more than white people are generally responsible for violent crime among whites.

Violent crime is largely a function of poverty, poverty is largely a function of government policy, government policy is the responsibility of everyone, and as poverty and education policy fail, they do the most damage to historically disadvantaged groups — Black people and other racial minorities. Yet the failure of those policies cannot yet be discussed officially or in polite society in Connecticut.

Connecticut cannot yet acknowledge that government invites disaster when it tells people it will keep subsidizing them with cash, food, housing, medical insurance, and other things no matter how many children they have outside marriage, leaving them fatherless and thus far more likely to be neglected or abused and stuck in poverty for life.

Connecticut cannot yet acknowledge that government also invites disaster when it tells students that they need not learn a thing in school to be promoted from grade to grade through 12 years, nor learn a thing to be admitted to something the government calls a public college or university and have to take remedial courses there.

Connecticut cannot yet acknowledge that dumping young people uneducated and unskilled into a world where manual labor is of diminishing value is a catastrophe and abomination.

But that is policy in Connecticut, so in this sense most of New Haven’s murders — and Hartford’s and Bridgeport’s — are policy too.

Flawed as they sometimes are, the police, as Kimber said, are not the ones killing most Black people in the cities. The police are just the most convenient distraction from the failure of poverty and education policy, so Connecticut has been able to acknowledge and even exaggerate their failings. The ranks of the police are much smaller than the ranks of the educators, social workers, policymakers, and apparatchiks whose faulty work product eventually lands on the police.

As long as the police can be blamed, the others won’t be.

But while he may not have meant to, Kimber now has struck a blow against this racket. He has inadvertently invited the loony political left, which runs New Haven and state government, to consider causes of the oppression of Black people other than the police — causes like a racism that is far more “systemic” than anything yet being examined, because it is devised, implemented by, and profiting the political left itself.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

When state legislators next put a survey in their “constituent service” mailings, it should include the question: How many bears will you accept in your neighborhood before Connecticut authorizes bear hunting?

Of course most people don’t want any bears nearby. But then they don’t like the idea of shooting them either, even as bear sightings have increased sharply in the state in recent years, along with home break-ins by bears, bear damage to crops and livestock, and highway crashes caused by bears.

The logic of Connecticut’s laissez-bear policy is that eventually every town in the state will have at least a few dozen. Then no backyards, playgrounds, farms, and streets will be safe. Even finding a discreet spot for smoking marijuana may become impossible, since while sale and possession of the drug are now legal, towns are already using zoning regulations to prohibit dispensaries and public smoking, marijuana being OK in principle but dope smokers being even less popular than bears. If the bears claim the woods, where will dope smokers go?

Zoning may prevent poor people from moving into leafy suburbs but bears won’t comply. Sedating and relocating bears is no longer an option, their population already having exceeded what the state’s wilderness areas can support. Waving bears away toward next door or the next town is no solution either, for another bear will follow soon enough.

It’s not that Connecticut’s bears are so dangerous. They’re not grizzlies. But they’re not compatible with civilization either. Everything has to stop when a bear wanders by looking for food, and the animals do damage.

Trouble is always best handled by prevention. Like other hunting, bear hunting can be kept safe by regulation, and not much of it would be necessary in Connecticut if it was undertaken regularly in the northwest part of the state. Deer, while also cute, are often troublesome too, and the state already authorizes and regulates deer hunting.

Even with bear hunting on top of deer hunting, Connecticut will have plenty of wildlife. Chipmunks, rabbits, woodchucks, foxes, opossums, raccoons, bobcats, squirrels, coyotes, weasels, beavers, birds, and more will continue to delight and sometimes annoy everyone. But nature is not always harmless. The state can do without bears just as it can do without wolves and alligators.

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With infinite money now at their disposal, how have the federal government and state government managed to botch the rental housing problem so badly?

Government’s closure orders during the virus epidemic crippled the economy and put millions of people out of work. Many couldn’t pay their rent, so then government forbade evictions, disregarding constitutional requirements that property cannot be taken for public use without fair compensation.

Eventually rent reimbursement funds were created but not before many landlords were ruined or nearly ruined financially, and even now much of the money has not been distributed, in part because, with evictions forbidden, renters have had little incentive to apply — just as people have had little incentive to return to work while unemployment compensation exceeds their former wages.

A few weeks ago the federal Centers for Disease Control claimed the authority to forbid evictions. President Biden said this was probably unconstitutional but went along with it. The Supreme Court rejected it the other day.

Maybe the government should have simply instructed landlords to send their defaulted rental bills to a government agency for payment. Of course such a system would have invited substantial fraud, but at least it would have been constitutional.

This mess makes even more ridiculous the sanctimonious prattle about housing that filled the General Assembly a few months ago — the prattle that housing is “a human right.”

Rights are things people possess without having to pay for them — like freedom of speech and religion. There is no housing unless somebody pays for it. But housing can be arranged if the money is appropriated.

Of course the state legislators proclaiming that housing is a human right declined to appropriate any money so that housing would be free like other rights. The legislators meant only to strike a pious pose. Could they just try to get the overdue rents paid?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Police departments in Connecticut and throughout the country — especially in cities, like Bridgeport, but also in some suburbs, like Enfield — are having trouble recruiting police officers.

It’s a tough job and getting tougher amid social disintegration and the virus epidemic. Murders and other violent crimes are up and respect for the police is down among many people because of well-publicized misconduct.

In Connecticut police officers and potential candidates for police jobs have been discouraged by the recent enactment of accountability legislation, which has caused them to suspect that government won’t stand behind them in controversy.

But even tough jobs require accountability, and Connecticut’s recent legislation would not have been enacted if there had not been much misconduct that passed without accountability even though some of it was recorded.

For example, six years ago four state troopers were caught on an audio recording fabricating evidence against a man who protested a drunken-driving checkpoint in West Hartford. While the state paid $50,000 to settle the man’s lawsuit, no troopers were disciplined.

Two years ago September many state troopers attended a retirement party in Oxford, some of them driving away after drinking, contrary to regulations, one of them driving drunk in a state car and causing a serious accident. The purported investigation still isn’t done and no discipline has been imposed.

A year ago in May a state trooper was caught on video inflicting a crazed rant on a motorist he had stopped on Interstate 95 in New Haven, cursing and threatening the man and destroying some of his possessions before letting him go without arrest or a ticket. The video was posted on the internet and embarrassed Connecticut internationally. The trooper’s discipline was only a two-day suspension.

A year ago in January a state trooper shot and killed a mentally ill man, Mubarak Soulemane, 19, who was sitting in a stopped car with the doors closed and windows rolled up after a chase that ended in West Haven. Soulemane had hijacked the car at knifepoint in Norwalk and is no martyr. But police video of the incident fails to show that he posed any threat when he was shot. The shooting seems to have been caused by the trooper’s panic and rage. But 18 months have passed, the investigation still isn’t done, and no action has been taken.

In July the Danbury Police Department released body camera video showing officers verbally abusing and threatening a man who had been taking video inside the city’s library. The man may have disconcerted people but he violated no law or regulation.

One officer said to another: “Five years ago with this ******, he would have been on the ******* ground.” The colleague replied, “Absolutely.”

The first officer continued: “And 20 years ago, that ****** would be dead. He’d be ******. His teeth would be missing.”

The two officers and two others were disciplined lightly. But at least the first officer was right about what might have happened five and 20 years ago. Indeed, 50 years ago at a school in Norwich three state troopers murdered two unarmed burglars and then planted a gun on them and lied about it. The troopers got off easy on perjury charges.

These are among the many reasons for the accountability legislation.

As crime has increased lately and teenagers in Connecticut have been emboldened to steal cars and even shoot at people in the confidence that the secretive juvenile justice system will excuse them, the clamor from the crazy left to “defund the police” has died down. Most people know that police officers are far more sinned against than sinning.

But then police officers, like members of other professions, are very much in charge of how much respect they maintain. With so many police cruisers and officers now equipped with video cameras, that respect will not be maintained by concealing, denying, or overlooking misconduct.

People want to appreciate the police and usually do. But every incident of an officer’s misconduct makes the work of all others more difficult. Police must choose between upholding high standards and letting their reputations be damaged and losing public support.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Federal government money is raining down on Connecticut state government and municipal governments every day and yet, according to the Connecticut Mirror, state and municipal officials say there is no money anywhere for renovating or replacing school ventilation systems, despite the danger of the COVID-19 virus epidemic.

While state government long has reimbursed municipalities for a huge portion of school construction and renovation projects — maybe too generously amid Connecticut’s declining student population — state government policy has been not to pay for school ventilation work but to leave that to the towns.

Deputy state budget director Konstantinos Diamantis, state government’s overseer of school construction projects, faults municipalities for deferring maintenance of school ventilation systems. How ironic and hypocritical.

First, state government itself is notorious for deferring maintenance of its transportation system — roads, bridges, and Connecticut’s section of the Metro-North commuter railroad, some of whose bridges are a century old.

Second, state government has imposed on municipalities a system of binding arbitration of government employee union contracts. This robs municipalities of discretion over the great majority of their budgets. Under binding arbitration and the state law forbidding municipalities from reducing school spending even as enrollment declines, employee compensation has first claim on all municipal revenue.

There’s no binding arbitration for building maintenance.

If student health really mattered amid the epidemic, those laws would be suspended in favor of renovating school ventilation systems. Using his emergency powers, Governor Lamont could do that — if he wasn’t more scared of the teacher unions than the virus.

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MORE ON IVERMECTIN: Warren McGrath’s Aug. 30 letter, “Powell Is Off-Base Regarding Ivermectin,” misrepresented this writer’s July 26 column on the drug and COVID-19.

Contrary to McGrath’s assertion, the column did not suggest that in classifying ivermectin as an “essential medicine” the World Health Organization had endorsed its use against the virus. To the contrary, the column complained of the failure of the WHO and other authorities to endorse using ivermectin against the virus. The column said:

“Then there is the indifference shown by the government and mainstream journalism to the growing evidence that the inexpensive anti-parasite drug ivermectin, classified by the World Health Organization as an ‘essential medicine’ and established as safe by 40 years of use, successfully treats and prevents COVID-19 infection.”

McGrath cites the withdrawal of a study asserting ivermectin’s effectiveness against the virus. But many other studies have drawn a similarly favorable conclusion. Last month a study by Sheba Medical Center in Israel confirmed ivermectin’s effectiveness as a cure and preventive for the virus.

McGrath asserts falsely that ivermectin has been approved only for use with animals. In fact ivermectin long has been approved and used safely for millions of people suffering parasite infections, especially what is called river blindness in Africa. The drug turns out to have strong anti-viral properties as well.

McGrath may be somewhat forgiven for his mistake, for misinformation about ivermectin is coming from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration itself. Last month the FDA also dishonestly suggested that ivermectin is used exclusively with animals, issuing a statement mocking people in the South who were said to be taking animal dosages of the drug as a remedy for the virus. “You’re not a horse,” the FDA said. “You’re not a cow.”

But some drugs, like antibiotics, are used with both people and animals, if in different dosages. Ivermectin is one, though the FDA pretends otherwise.

McGrath’s absolute trust in government medical agencies is as misplaced as absolute trust in government agencies dealing with foreign policy and war. Government agencies always need to be questioned critically.

After all, a drug that lately has been causing even more controversy than ivermectin, the painkiller OxyContin, which is said to be responsible for thousands of deaths, was approved by the FDA in 1995. A year later an FDA official involved in OxyContin’s approval was hired by the drug’s manufacturer, the now-infamous Purdue Pharma, at a salary of $400,000 a year.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

When 14-year-old Tyshaun Hargrove was shot to death last week in New Haven, Acting Police Chief Renee Dominguez called it an “isolated incident.” The chief meant that the murder did not seem connected to any other recent crime, but “isolated incident” it was not. For it was the city’s 19th murder of the year and was emblematic of the social disintegration sweeping Connecticut’s cities.

While journalism had trouble finding Tyshaun’s parents or guardians, it was reported that at 14 he was already the father of a 1-year-old son.

Of course the mother of Tyshaun Junior is not likely to be much older than the murdered boy himself was. So their 1-year-old may need much luck reaching the age at which his father was killed.

Hapless New Haven is doing what it can about its explosion of violent crime. The city has brought back its shooting task force, established an agency to work with men returning to the city from prison with few skills and prospects, and is trying to put more police on the street.

But all this responds only to the symptoms of the social disintegration; none of this relates to the disintegration’s causes, for which New Haven is no more to blame than Hartford and Bridgeport are to blame for their own social disintegration.

Connecticut’s cities are what the state has made them — repositories for the poor, fatherless, neglected, abused, and uneducated. Even if the cities began asking about the causes of poverty’s pathologies, they could do little about them.

For poverty and its pathologies are the consequences of state and federal welfare and education policy, especially the catastrophic presumption that children are better and less expensively raised by one parent or a grandparent or two subsidized by the government than in a group home or foster home or by adoptive parents.

This policy of subsidizing incompetence and irresponsibility has only encouraged more fatherlessness, single parenting, child neglect and abuse, and educational failure. But the new Democratic national administration’s policy is to double down on the subsidies, as if that will increase the parenting. Maybe it will in some cases, but it still may leave most neglected children without fathers in their home.

As a matter of simple arithmetic it may seem obvious that two parents are better than one. That sort of family came through the millennia as the wisdom of the ages.

But these revolutionary times disdain the traditional family.

Today’s prevailing wisdom seems to be that children having children really isn’t so bad and that children hardly need parents at all if they have their own therapists, special-education teachers, social workers, police officers, public defenders, prison guards, and probation officers.

The worse social disintegration gets, the more government grows to minister to it, and the more government grows, the more it becomes self-absorbed, loses sight of its nominal objectives, and disregards results.

The most urgent policy question in Connecticut — more urgent even than anything about the virus epidemic — may be:

Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?

A General Assembly that sensed this urgency might hold public hearings examining the short life of Tyshaun Hargrove and the lives of similar young victims of the mean streets, just as it might hold public hearings examining how the secret juvenile justice system handled the many offenses of the 17-year-old boy charged with running a stolen car into and killing Henryk Gudelski in New Britain in June, having been released despite 13 arrests in the previous 3½ years.

Once the legislature gave Connecticut the details of those cases it might have much expertise to draw on — not just police officers and social workers from the state Department of Children and Families but also teachers and school administrators, social scientists, and court personnel.

Someone somewhere might be able to explain exactly who and what undermined and contradicted the wisdom of the ages and who benefited from it, and to explain why, despite more than a half century of “war on poverty,” that war, viewed from Connecticut’s cities, seems no more successful than the recently repudiated “war on drugs.”

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

As was demonstrated by the crude and disgraceful disruption of last week’s back-to-school forum in Cheshire, many people in Connecticut are sick and tired of the virus epidemic and government’s steps against it, however necessary they may have seemed.

Consumed by their hysteria, the dozen or so people at the forum who shouted down the speakers and cursed Governor Lamont seemed not to realize that the governor and other state and municipal officials are entitled to be more sick and tired of the epidemic than anyone else.

The governor may not have been right about everything since the epidemic began, but he could not be more right than he is about getting children back to school in person.

Since “remote learning” works only for the most motivated students with the most motivated parents, a year of education already has been lost for many children — children who were already the most disadvantaged.

The governor was abused in Cheshire last week because he has directed that students should wear masks in school at least until Sept. 30. Yes, children may find the masks annoying, and the medical necessity is questionable. But many parents are nervous about sending their children back to school under any circumstances, and the mask requirement may give them more confidence about it, even as wearing a mask is unlikely to cause substantial harm to anyone.

The school mask requirement may be a political compromise but nearly everyone should be able to live with it.

After all, no matter what the schools do about masks, there will be risk — the risk of contagion, the risk of losing more education, and the risk of getting hit by a car on the way to or from school. Indeed, from the beginning, dealing with the epidemic, for both government and individuals, has been entirely a matter of balancing risk, a daily judgment call. As government officials and individuals gain experience, those judgments evolve.

Anyone who wants perfect safety from the virus can try locking himself in his basement. But eventually he’ll go crazy, and what then?

Next year there will be a state election. The governor, state legislators, and Connecticut’s members of Congress may have a lot to answer for, but the people will be able to make them answer for it then.

Even as virus cases spike again in Connecticut, in part because of “breakthrough” infections — infections suffered by people already vaccinated against the virus — there is cause for optimism in the governor’s daily epidemic reports.

While each day lately has brought hundreds more cases, hospitalizations and deaths have not risen correspondingly. On some days hospitalizations even decline as cases rise. This signifies that many cases are milder or asymptomatic and that doctors have found more effective ways of treating the virus than they had when the virus swept the world a year and a half ago and, upon diagnosis, people were sent home without any serious treatment only to come to the hospital critically ill when it was too late.

As the virus mutates into more evasive “variants” and the vaccines lose effectiveness and reveal more side-effects, government and medicine may realize that treatments rather than vaccines may be the best mechanisms for defeating the virus.

Though government in the United States has been distressingly slow to acknowledge some treatments, several treatments are already in use and showing success around the world and just need publicity.

Vaccines can be great and they have often saved humanity, but getting people vaccinated on a worldwide basis takes a long time. The polio vaccines have been around for 60 years and yet that disease is still not eradicated in the developing world. A vaccine’s success in the developed world breeds complacency, the disease seems to vanish there, people lose fear of it and stop getting vaccinated, and then the disease returns, possibly because of contagion from the developing world.

Medicines are far more easily administered than vaccines. But as long as the government and the medical establishment is obsessed with vaccines, the country may miss a big opportunity and sink deeper into the political controversy about individual choice vs. government coercion.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Science is wonderful. But it is not always settled. Sometimes the prevailing view in science is wrong, especially in medicine.

For 2,000 years a primary treatment for disease was bloodletting, sometimes administered with leeches. Doctors don’t do that anymore.

A sedative called thalidomide was approved for use in European and other countries in the 1960s before it was found to cause birth defects.

The painkiller OxyContin, about which federal litigation is raging because of its highly addictive and even deadly properties, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1995. A year later an FDA official involved in OxyContin’s approval was hired for a six-figure job at the drug’s manufacturer, Stamford-based Purdue Pharma. Now the drug is blamed for thousands of deaths.

Medical mistakes are considered the third leading cause of death in the United States.

This week it was reported that the FDA had given full, formal approval to the Pfizer vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. But the FDA seems just to have extended the vaccine’s authorization for emergency use.

(See https://www.fda.gov/media/150386/download)

Whereupon the acting commissioner of Connecticut’s Public Health Department, Dr. Deidre Gifford, urged state residents to “trust the science” and get vaccinated.

It would have been fair to ask the commissioner: Whose science, exactly?

Of course the commissioner wants people to follow the government’s science. But there is other science, though it is increasingly subject to censorship by internet sites and social media under government pressure.

Yes, quacks and cranks infiltrate discussion of the virus epidemic, as they always have infiltrated medicine. But the discussion also includes many highly credentialed doctors and scientists who — at least before they voiced objections and concerns — were renowned and honored in their fields. Some dispute the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, while others dispute the vaccines’ necessity, arguing that effective treatments for the virus are available.

These doctors and scientists could be mistaken. But censorship isn’t how contrary assertions should be handled. Contrary assertions should be rebutted and learned from in the open.

This isn’t happening because government, its allied medical authorities, and, it seems, journalism don’t want a debate that might interfere with their preferred policy, vaccination. They are convinced that they have nothing to learn from the dissenters.

But the public isn’t convinced. Many people are indifferent or even opposed to COVID-19 vaccination, and the policy advocated by many in government and the medical establishment is to stop trying to persuade people and start coercing them by denying them the right to live ordinary lives if they don’t get vaccinated.

Much indifference and much opposition to vaccination are grounded in ignorance and contrariness. But not all.

Anyone paying attention to developments can perceive fair questions. For example, in regard to the Pfizer vaccine particularly, why is the government pushing it when it is still being tested and side-effects are still being discovered? Is this “approval” really a matter of safety or just political necessity?

And why is Israel’s epidemic worsening, with a new wave of virus cases exploding to the level of the country’s first wave even though Israel’s population now may be the world’s most thoroughly vaccinated — primarily with the Pfizer vaccine?

The more what is said to be science relies on censorship and coercion, the less trust it will deserve.

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If the thousands of Afghans swarming the airport in Kabul for airlift out of the country really think that their country’s new Taliban regime will be so terrible, where were they a few weeks ago when the U.S. military began withdrawing from the country?

Why did those thousands not enlist in the Afghan army in defense of the less totalitarian culture the U.S.-assisted government supported?

Those thousands might have formed a few useful military divisions, just as throughout history civilians were mobilized to defend cities under siege. Since women will be oppressed by the Taliban again, where was the Afghan army’s 1st Women’s Infantry Division? And how will Afghanistan’s prospects be improved by removing so many people who oppose theocratic fascism?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Congratulations to Eversource Energy for scaring the daylights out of Connecticut residents upon the approach of Tropical Storm Henri, warning that two-thirds of them might lose electricity for as long as three weeks. The company was preparing people to be glad if they just escaped with their lives and never got electricity again.

Of course the storm weakened and changed course enough to spare Connecticut the severe damage that Eversource terrified people about. Only a few percent of the company’s customers lost power and most got it back in a day.

Along with its hysterical warning, Eversource said it had recruited more supplemental repair crews from out of state than ever so the company might be more prepared than ever. As it turned out, many of the crews were diverted to Rhode Island, where damage was worse.

But Eversource may be somewhat forgiven for its hysteria, since it was a response to state government’s own hysteria last August following Tropical Storm Isaias, whose winds were underestimated by forecasters and did more damage to Connecticut than any storm in many years. As a result repairs to the electric grid last August were painfully slow and Eversource and United Illuminating were faulted for poor coordination with municipal officials.

After last August’s storm government officials couldn’t just blame the trouble on the difficulty of predicting the weather. For the great virtue of life in Connecticut is convenience, and the power outages last August caused almost unprecedented inconvenience. People were angry, and blaming the weather satisfied no one. So government officials blamed the utilities and eventually even fined them for their supposed lack of preparation.

This time the weather’s changeability worked in Connecticut’s favor and the electric companies were overprepared. As Governor Lamont said, overprepared beats underprepared, and most people were relieved.

But an electric utility’s preparation for a storm will always be a judgment call, susceptible to mockery by nature, and overpreparation, however satisfying at first, will have its own costs. Eventually many of those extra out-of-state crews will show up in Connecticut’s electric bills.

Electric companies are convenient scapegoats in politics, which is why few elected officials who complain about them ever propose that government take over the electricity business directly, eliminating the buffer of a regulatory agency.

State government admits that it isn’t properly maintaining its transportation system. Despite ever-increasing appropriations, Connecticut’s schools have been declining as well. The electrical system is more complicated technically than those two others. So people who can’t manage the transportation and school systems well may be doubly glad they don’t have to manage electricity too.

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In his great speech in 1944 Judge Learned Hand declared that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right.” But according to a poll reported last week by the Pew Research Center, nearly half the country — 48% — wants the government to start censoring “false” information.

The poll found 65% of Democrats favor censorship while only 28% of Republicans do. Democrats used to be the party of free speech and Republicans the party of repression. But now Democrats hold the presidency and Congress, politics is more bitter than ever, and power still corrupts, even faster these days.

So who is to decide what is false? That will be decided by the people in power — people with names like Johnson, Nixon, Bush, Trump, and, yes, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Putin, Xi, Kim, and Khameini, for censorship is the essence of totalitarianism.

Of course imposing censorship in the United States would require subverting the First Amendment. But this has already started under President Biden.

Constitutions, laws, and courts aren’t enough to preserve liberty, Hand warned. “Liberty,” the judge said, “lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

If the Pew poll is right, almost half the country has lost the spirit of liberty. Can the other half save it?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s Republicans have been down so long that they’re entitled to construe almost anything as up. But they’re making too much of Ryan Fazio’s victory in last week’s special election in the 36th Senate District, which includes Greenwich and parts of Stamford and New Canaan.

The district ordinarily leans strongly Republican and until 2018 had not elected a Democratic state senator in 88 years, but Fazio defeated the Democratic nominee, Alexis Gevanter, by only 2½%. In its previous two elections the district had chosen a Democrat, Alexandra Kasser, because she spent a fortune on her campaigns and because of the district’s disdain for President Donald Trump. Kasser resigned this year amid an ugly divorce.

Republican State Chairman Ben Proto claimed that Fazio’s victory was remarkable because President Biden, a Democrat, carried the 36th last year by 25%. But Proto’s cheerleading mainly emphasized how vulnerable Fazio may be in seeking re-election in 2022 if Trump remains national leader of the Republicans. Governor Lamont, a Democrat who presumably will lead his party’s ticket again next year, is inoffensive and a Greenwich resident himself, and the Democrats are sure to try to tie Fazio to Trump.

With the Democrats holding the governor’s office and big majorities in the General Assembly, one-party rule of state government is increasingly worrisome for its lack of oversight. In Washington, Biden seems unable to maintain coherence for more than a half hour a day, and the incompetence of his administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has greatly reduced his approval rate. But to re-elect Fazio, increase their ranks in the legislature, and unseat Lamont, Connecticut’s Republicans will need to develop issues that make people forget Trump.

There are many such issues, like the enduring weakness of Connecticut’s economy, state government’s subservience to government employee unions, and the failure of education, welfare, and urban policy. But, like most Democratic candidates, most Republican candidates in Connecticut strive to avoid the compelling issues, afraid to alienate the special interests to which the Democrats pander even though those interests will never support Republicans anyway.

That is, despite Fazio’s victory, the Republicans seem content to be Connecticut’s minority party.

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Nearly everyone may want to forget the war in Afghanistan. But the lives and treasure lost cry out for accountability.

With the consent of Congress, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to invade Afghanistan in 2001 in pursuit of 9/11 terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, who had been sheltered by Afghanistan’s Taliban government. But it took 10 years to find bin Laden and by then he was in Pakistan. In the meantime the invasion turned to “nation building,” though Afghanistan was not a nation at all but a bunch of primitive tribes.

Presidents Obama and Trump continued the Afghanistan project, repeatedly lying that progress was being made. Trump groused about “forever wars” and “—-hole” countries but never got the United States out. President Biden botched the withdrawal, humiliating the country, but at least he is getting the country out — and despite its vastly superior numbers and equipment, the army of our puppet regime dissolved overnight.

Congress, including Connecticut’s delegation, always approved Afghan war appropriations. A few members struck poses against the war but fewer tried ending it by cutting off appropriations, as that might have cut off their states’ military procurement contracts.

And Americans tolerated “forever war,” war never fought to be won, war without a military draft and war taxes.

Now we are calling our former puppet regime corrupt. But where did it get the money and materiel to be corrupt with? And who overlooked that corruption all this time?

Families who lost loved ones in Afghanistan are now doubly crushed, lamenting that their sacrifices were in vain. But this is mistaken.

All who served in the Armed Forces during the Afghanistan misadventure, as during the Vietnam misadventure, were defending the United States. If only the country had appreciated their service enough to prevent it from being squandered.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.