Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of Freedom's Creed. We've come to the end of the week, and I do hope that your week was great, and that you were able to accomplish the things that you set out to accomplish at the beginning of the week, if you're like me. A lot of times the things that you set out to accomplish or the goals that you have for yourself, short-term or long term, don't always come to fruition, and that's okay. What we do is we go back and we say, okay, what can we do better? We re-evaluate what happened during the week and we try to minimize those obstacles that get in our way of us accomplishing the things that we want to do. So here's to better fortune next week. My wife and I were having a conversation earlier this week, and we were talking about the personalities of people. And what brought that up was that we both know a gentleman who is very mild-mannered. And my wife asked his wife if that's the way he always is. And she essentially confirmed that yes, that is true, and that he's only been mad that she's seen two or three times in their married life, and they've been married for quite some time. Going back to my wife and I's conversation, I jokingly mentioned to her that, wow, he sounds a lot like me. She almost lost her sense of humor at that point because she knows me, but she played along and made me feel good about the whole situation. So, you know, credit to her, right? I bring this up because on many of the different topics that I have discussed so far in my early podcasting career, I have sometimes allowed my passion to get the best of me. And I don't want people to think that somehow I am upset or that I have bitterness or hatred for any one person or any one group. I don't. I just get very involved and passionate about the things that I talk about, and when I believe something wholeheartedly, I tend to put everything that I have into that. And sometimes it can come across as me being angry or upset about something, and I'm really not. Truth be told, as a Christian, I try to value those Christian ideals and beliefs. In other words, as a follower of Christ, I try to emulate the behavior that he exhibited on a regular basis, and that is a soft tone, one who exhibited love and kindness to everyone he interacted with. And that's something that I strive to do, but in the end, I'm not him. I'm trying to be like him on a daily basis, but I'm not. And that's okay, because none of us are. None of us can live up to such a high standard, but we can strive for it. At least that's what I believe. The last thing I want to do is produce episode after episode where I'm just like this and just not into it and ho-hum. You know, nobody wants that. Come on. I can tell you this right now that what I have for you today is anything but ho-hum, for sure. Let me just say that I am not anti-establishment, but I have an article today that I'm going to be sifting through and picking the heck out of it from an institution of so-called higher learning. I have a lot of problems with institutions of higher learning nowadays, maybe not so much 30 years ago, but today the things that are taught at these institutions are intertwined so much with the political realm. And I believe that this is, well, it's wrong, for one. When young people attend these institutions of higher learning, they're supposed to be taught how to think, how to reason, not be told what to think. And I think a lot of that happens not only at the university, but it actually, I think, happens in high school, where these young people are feeding into these colleges and universities. So it does start well before college, but certainly in post-secondary education is an area where people are just not taught how to think and how to come to a conclusion about something by weighing the evidence, no matter where it takes them. I have an article that was published in February of this year, and it's called Anti-Racist Epidemiology, written and published from Harvard University's medical school. And yeah, the title bothers me as well. They start off the very beginning of the article by saying this quote, this article is part of Harvard Medical School's continuing coverage of medicine, biomedical research, medical education, and policy related to the SARS COVID-2 pandemic and the disease COVID-19. End of quote. Really? That's how they're going to start this off? Based on the title, Anti-racist epidemiology? Seriously? Come on. Of course they start off talking about monetary reparations for the black descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States. Okay, that's all well and good. But what about the descendants of every other ethnicity that was enslaved in the United States or anywhere else in the world, for that matter? Shouldn't they too receive some sort of restitution for the institution of slavery that involved their descendants? I'm not a fan of reparations. I think it's a horrible idea. I think it's impossible to try to distinguish who would actually receive these reparations. How do you even figure that out? Or do you just say every person of a certain ethnicity, you automatically get reparations, whether you're descended from African uh slaves or not? I mean, it's ridiculous. I'm gonna tell you what, the first time I read this article, I just was shaking my head, thinking to myself, this is coming from the Harvard Medical School? Are you are you kidding me, really? The researchers apparently chose the state of Louisiana to conduct their so-called research. And the article says this quote, if reparations had been made before the COVID-19 pandemic, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the state's overall population could have been reduced by anywhere from 31 to 68%, end of quote. Would blacks who lived in overcrowded housing have been able to move and somehow escape the effects of COVID? Is that what they're trying to say? I mean, this is ridiculous. Again, this is supposed to be a professional publication. I mean, Harvard Medical School, it's like the pinnacle of medical schools, or at least in the top five or ten, I don't know, but it's just ridiculous. And throughout the article, they use all these different f buzz phrases like structural inequities and redistributive justice. It's clear what they're trying to do here, and it's despicable as far as I'm concerned. And check this one out. One of the senior professors of the study said this quote, while there are compelling moral and historical arguments for racial injustice interventions, such as reparations, our study demonstrates that repairing the damage caused by the legacy of slavery would have enormous benefits to the entire population of the United States. End of quote. I'm being absolutely serious. I mean it. This is just blatant irresponsibility, if you ask me. And it may be very well true that black individuals are impacted disproportionately by COVID than other races. Even if that is true, does that fact diminish the anguish of any other race getting COVID and the things that families and friends have to deal with and go through in order to get over the loss of a loved one due to COVID? Or for that matter, any other disease? These kinds of studies usually only do one thing, and that is stir up contention between people. What other objective do they have here? The study says that, quote, the greater disease burden among black people has caused tremendous loss of life and unspeakable suffering across these already vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. Notably, these effects have also spilled over and are driving transmission rates of the virus in the overall population. End of quote. So what, it's the government's fault that since reparations haven't been paid, that the effects of COVID have been worse for everyone else? Hmm. It would seem that this so-called study is blaming the transmission rate increase on none other than black people. They say this, quote, if we extrapolate these results to the entire United States, we can imagine that tens or hundreds of thousands of lives would have been spared, and the entire nation would have been saved much of the hardship it has endured in the last year. End of quote. So let me get this straight. We're talking about a medical study, or at least a study that was published by the Harvard Medical School, and they're going to use the phrase we can imagine We can imagine. Is this a lottery prediction that we can imagine who might have the magic numbers to win the lotto? I mean really I guess imagine is a new medical term that I'm unfamiliar with. This study, as well as a ton of other studies, to include also what the government does, is just looking for an excuse to blame on the reason why people don't achieve. So if there's a certain segment of society, a certain ethnicity that the powers that be deem a group of people who just for some reason are not able to achieve like anyone else. And so, therefore, because of this, we have to find an excuse or a reason why they don't achieve. It's a bunch of bull. It really is to me. Come on. But check this out, it gets even better. The article says, quote, Louisiana has a population heavily segregated by race, with black people having higher levels of overcrowded housing and working jobs that are more likely to expose them to SARS-CoV-2 than white people. In comparison, South Korea has a more homogeneous population with far less segregation. Now they mention South Korea because that's their supposed control group for the study. Okay, so the study showed that it took Louisiana more than twice as long to bring the early wave of the epidemic under control than South Korea. You might be thinking, wow, why did they choose South Korea as the control group? Well, I wondered the same thing. And so I went to the worldpopulationreview.com and looked up the population density of Seoul compared to the population density of New Orleans. Well, in South Korea, or shall I say in Seoul, there are 45,000 people per square mile. Guess how many people there are per square mile in New Orleans, Louisiana? 2,292. Now, I get it, the population of Seoul is a lot bigger than the population of New Orleans. However, when we're talking about how many people live in a square mile, in other words, the population density of a square mile in Seoul, there are 45,000 people per square mile compared to New Orleans, where there are 2,292 per square mile. Something about that just doesn't add up for me. So I'm gonna leave it at that. But to me that's very troubling, and it's not a very good control group, unless I just don't understand what a control group is. And who knows, maybe I don't. But I do understand square mileage and that if you pack a ton more people per square mile in one location, the chances that you're going to have issues, particularly with the virus, seem to be a lot worse with 45,000 people per square mile as opposed to 2,900 people per square mile. Wow. Let me continue with the article. They say this, and get ready for this one. Quote, this research comes at a time when many Americans are already thinking about the larger societal costs of structural racism. They noted, for example, that the nationwide movement to protest police brutality against black people has been fueled by many of the inequitable outcomes exemplified so painfully by the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. End of quote. Are you serious? Many Americans already thinking about larger societal costs of structural racism? That's a outright blatant lie. That's pathetic. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the thing that Rahman said at one time in the while he was in the uh Obama administration, where he said that you never want to let a good crisis go to waste. Well, I think that's exactly what we have with the COVID-19 virus and this study. It's unbelievable. One of the researchers said that, quote, the research was designed to explore how reparations payments might have altered the trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. and how a different response to the disease could have helped mitigate the disparities fueled by social conditions that are vestiges of slavery. Such conditions include ongoing discrimination and structural racism in the form of redlining, overcrowding, over incarceration, and the heightened use of lethal force and policing experienced by black people. End of quote. It's despicable. The people who spew out this propaganda ought to be ashamed of themselves. They act as if every weekend a majority of black people in the country are experiencing lethal force by the police. And what does that have to do with the coronavirus? It's a joke. There's a lot more in this article that I could go over, but I don't have the time today to do it. I want to encourage you to go and look the article up for yourself. Again, it's called the Anti-Racist Epidemiology. They talk about using mathematical models and to help them try to understand the differences in the average number of people an infected individual transmits the virus to, for black people and white people in Louisiana, mind you, to help them think about how things would change if racism were less prevalent in America. It's it's just despicable for these so-called researchers to say something like that or talk about increasing equality and how that would have a big impact on infection rates for everyone. What do you mean increasing equality? What does that even mean? You can talk about the institution of slavery all you want, you can talk about the inequities that were created by slavery, you can talk about the vestiges of slavery all you want, but we're not living at a time of slavery. We live in the greatest country in the world, as far as I'm concerned, where opportunity abounds for everyone. If you want to continue making excuses for why your life is in the gutter, then go ahead and make the excuses, but don't blame other people and all you fricking academics who want to get out there and try to blame all these other people or blame the institution of slavery on why black people aren't getting ahead in America. That's a bunch of bull. And do you want to know who is responsible? Well, not completely responsible, but in part responsible for this so-called research, at least indirectly? Yeah, you guessed it. The United States government. The reason I say that is because at the end of the article, they list a ton of different organizations who guess what? Received grants. And where do grants come from? For the most part, they come from the government of the United States. Hmm. In my last episode, I talked about trust and referred to an article that talked about the importance of quote-unquote trusting the experts. Do you think that the people at Harvard Medical School, the people who did the research that I just outlined today, are considered by mainstream society as the quote-unquote experts? When people read these things and they look at who produced them, they just automatically say, Well, well, yeah, they're Harvard Medical School? I mean, wow, yeah, that's the icon of researchers. They know what they're doing, they know what they're talking about. Well, I beg to differ. You know, empowering someone is probably one of the most liberating aspects that anyone could teach another person. The ability to do things independent of anyone else is what empowerment is all about. It doesn't mean, however, that you can just act irresponsibly and do whatever you want because you have this certain amount of power that's been given to you. Empowering really means to harness the good that we can do to help other people, not to instill in people a sense of hopelessness. Empowering someone means that they have a belief that they can do something no matter what the odds are. In the book Principle Centered Leadership, Stephen R. Covey talks about six conditions of empowerment, and I want to share those with you as my parting positive thought for this episode. One is character, to be able to be a person of integrity. Two is skills, having the ability to help problem solve, to plan, to organize. Three is a win-win agreement, meaning that you do something where both parties win. Four, self-supervision. That's pretty self-explanatory, if I could use that term. Five, helpful structures and systems. And six, and I think this is probably the most important, and that is accountability. We need to be able to empower ourselves, to teach empowerment to other people, to help people realize that character, skills, creating win-win situations and agreements, having self-supervision, having helpful structures and systems, and being accountable should be highly sought after. It's my hope that we can make the world a better place because we're in it. With that, if you can think it, you can plan it. If you can plan it, you can do it.