Illinois Review

HAPPY THANKSGIVING 2020

For the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith

 

The Mayflower Compact was important because it was the first document to establish self-government in the New World. It remained active until 1691 when Plymouth Colony became part of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The Mayflower Compact was an early, successful attempt at democracy and undoubtedly played a role in future colonists seeking permanent independence from British rule and shaping the nation that eventually became the United States of America.

There were arguments among the 102 Mayflower passengers as to whether the compact should be rewritten when they landed on Plymouth Rock rather than the northern part of Virginia as originally planned. It was somewhat amended as to locations noted, but the point remained: They - from Great Britain, France and Ireland - started their journey "for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith ..." 

It was over a year later - in 1621 - that the Pilgrims and native Americans together celebrated the First Thanksgiving.

The full text of the Mayflower Compact is as follows:

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.:

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith, and the honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another; covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.

Per the History Channel 

Illinois GOP Leaders demand Trump concede; others say "too soon"

SPRINGFIELD - Key IL GOP leaders have been vocal for days and weeks about the 2020 presidential election, demanding President Trump concede. Others are saying it's too soon, that the process needs to play itself out. 

RNC National Committeewoman Demetra DeMonte told Illinois Review this week that calls for Trump to concede from fellow Republicans are premature. 

"We gave Al Gore 37 days to work through the process in 2000," DeMonte said. "That's the least we can do for President Trump." 

Illinois GOP House leader Jim Durkin told the Chicago Sun Times last Thursday that Trump should concede minutes after State Rep. Grant Wehli (R-Naperville) publicly called for Trump to give up on his re-election bid.

"It's very simple," Durkin, who was also a leading 2016 John Kasich supporter, said with a smirk. "The election is over. Begin the transition process... I hope the president understands there's no avenue for him to overturn the results..." 

Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-16) is getting stronger and stronger with his demands that the Republican Party stop encouraging President Trump to fight the 2020 election results and instead force him to concede. Kinzinger, who was weakly challenged for another term, continues to line up with the anti-Trump faction of the party - both at the national and the state levels.

Two days ago, Kinzinger tweeted: 

Now would be a great time to denounce this, @gop how embarrassing. Our party needs to be better than giving credence to these insane conspiracy theories. https://t.co/urkllgQKJi

— Adam Kinzinger (@RepKinzinger) November 23, 2020

In addition, retiring Congressman John Shimkus (R-15) has congratulated Joe Biden on being elected president in 2020. 

After Danish Mask Study, What's Next?

Now that we have a randomized controlled trial (RCT) about masks, will it change what you do?

After being rejected by three major journals, an RCT completed by 4,862 participants has been published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The volunteers were adults spending more than 3 hours per day outside the home without occupational mask use. All were instructed to follow social-distancing and other public health measures, and those in the mask group were instructed to wear a mask when outside the home during the next month.

Infection with SARS-CoV-2 within one month occurred in 42 participants who were recommended to wear masks (1.8%) and 53 control participants (2.1%). The difference of 0.3% was not statistically significant (p = 0.38). Ordinarily, this would be described as a negative study.

“This should put an end to any Governor claiming that mask mandates are backed by science and data, but it won’t,” writes Kevin Roche of Roche Consulting.

“It should not be used as evidence to not wear a mask,” writes Leah Rosenbaum in Forbes.

More HERE

Di Leo: Harvesting the Cemetery Vote

By John F. Di Leo - 

In September, October, and November, the dead voted. 

This is stated as fact, by reporters and politicians, by attorneys and prosecutors.  But it makes no sense.  Zombies and vampires are fictional, the dead can’t really vote.  So what does it mean when people say they did? 

Well, sometimes, there’s a simple explanation:  through the use of such tools as traditional absentee ballots and the recent explosion of mail-in voting and “early voting,” it’s possible for a person to vote legally in September or October and die on or before election day. 

This does happen occasionally, but it’s a miniscule percentage of the “dead vote” that we’re talking about here. 

Thorner: Biden - the Political Magician

By Nancy Thorner - 

As for this scam election, truth is being revealed about the Scamdemica.  A former Pfizer chief science officer says second wave faked false positive. 

Despite the frantic attempts to suppress holiday gatherings with lockdowns, the truth about all the scams will get out over the holidays. There has never been a better year to illustrate how those who have been labeled as “conspiracy nuts” have been right all along.

The Child-Neglect Pandemic

Reports of child abuse are skyrocketing. Naomi Schaefer Riley writes:

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that, once again, the nation’s largest public school system would close, in response to spiking Covid-19 infections—throwing hundreds of thousands of children back into remote-learning environments. The human cost of school closures on children cannot be overstated. According to a new report from JAMA Network Open, the American Medical Association’s monthly open-access medical journal, “a total of 24.2 million children aged 5 to 11 attended public schools that were closed during the pandemic, losing a median of 54 days of instruction.” The report also declares that “missed instruction during 2020 could be associated with an estimated 5.53 million years of life lost. This loss in life expectancy was likely to be greater than would have been observed if leaving primary schools open had led to an expansion of the first wave of the pandemic.”

Harvard Researchers: Nearly Half of Young Adults Showing Signs of Depression Amid Pandemic

Mounting evidence shows that pandemic-related lockdowns and restrictions have inflicted much more harm on younger people than the coronavirus itself. A new report reveals that nearly half of 18 to 24 year-olds are “showing at least moderate depressive symptoms," and for many the depression is severe.

Researchers at Harvard, Northeastern, Rutgers, and Northwestern universities conducted eight large survey rounds across all US states from April through October, finding that young adults are increasingly having suicidal thoughts. In the US adult population as a whole, the incidence of suicidal ideation typically hovers around 3.4 percent. But this new study reveals that in October, 36.9 percent of young adults had suicidal thoughts, compared to 32.2 percent in May in the wake of the first round of government lockdowns.

These new figures reinforce similarly dismal data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in August. The CDC found that one-quarter of young people ages 18-24 contemplated suicide in the previous month, in large part due to the pandemic and lockdowns.

More HERE

Workers vs. Wokeness: Recognizing Campus Social Justice as a Luxury Good

How Social justice became a luxury good for the elite. Jonathan Kay writes:

The University of Michigan alone has nearly 100 full-time diversity-related administrative workers, more than a quarter of whom earned in excess of $100,000 in 2018. And at nearby Michigan State University, the newly appointed diversity director will earn a $315,000 salary. These people aren’t getting hired to tell students to toughen up and hit the books. Just the opposite: Their livelihoods depend on upholding the idea that navigating campus life is a difficult struggle, punctuated frequently by invisible forms of bigotry whose negative effects can be managed only through the intervention of a professionalized corps of trained diversity officers.

Cancel Culture Forces Companies to Embrace Woke Capitalism

Many corporations are being pushed into wokeness. Tanner Aliff writes:

Cancel culture is a black hole that is swallowing corporate America. The zeitgeist of social awareness and virtue signaling has spread far beyond the realm of adolescent Instagram posts to the point where corporate titans now have joined in the effort to push woke capitalism.

Don’t be fooled. Principles are hardly the reason companies are altering their marketing faces to appeal to progressive America.

How America’s Cities Became Bastions of Progressive Politics

There is clearly a political and cultural schism today between America’s urban voters and rural voters. But what political forces are exploiting and exacerbating this schism?

In America’s cities, where the union agenda that controls public education trains Americans to be hyper-sensitive to any alleged infringements on their “identity,” big government is presented as the guardian of their futures and their freedoms. In America’s cities, where poor education combined with overregulation has resulted in a paucity of good jobs, welfare and entitlement programs are presented as the government’s answer. And the more poverty and social instability we have in America, the bigger government gets. When society loses, government unions win.

More HERE

Sen. Whitehouse Threatens to Prosecute Climate Realists If Dems Take Senate

U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) threatened climate realists with criminal prosecution in an interview with E&E News, published yesterday. Whitehouse said Democrats gaining control of the U.S. Senate would be key to launching investigations, hauling climate realists in front of Senate show trials, “or even potentially in grand juries.”

E&E News reported Whitehouse is “keen on investigating the fossil fuel industry and what he sees as a massive conspiracy of dark money hindering action on climate change.”

More HERE

Thorner: Trump’s Lawyers Under Gun to Produce

By Nancy Thorner - 

“According to a Rasmussen poll conducted November 17-18:  75 percent of Republicans believe it is very likely (61 percent) or somewhat likely (14 percent) that the election was stolen from Trump. But, according to the poll, while 69 percent of Democrats say it is not at all likely (61 percent) or not very likely (8 percent) that the election was stolen from Trump, 30 percent of Democrats believe it is very likely (20 percent) or somewhat likely (10 percent) that it was.”

These numbers should continue to climb as the truth finally gets through the censorship.  But will it come in time for “Republicans” in both the state legislature and the courts to do the right thing and “stop the steal”?

Effective November 20, 2020, ordered pursuant to Title 28, United States Code, Section 42, Circuit Courts have been reassigned.  Look who is now in charge of MI, WI, PA, and GA:  MI – Brett M. Kavanaugh; WI – Amy Coney Barrett; PA – Samuel A. Alito; GA – Clarence Thomas.”  This reassignment does represents a slight positive for court cases for Trump, especially with time starting to run out before the Electoral College is supposed to be chosen.

The Last Children of Down Syndrome

Encouraged by government and the medical community, prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning.

Every few weeks or so, Grete Fält-Hansen gets a call from a stranger asking a question for the first time: What is it like to raise a child with Down syndrome?

Sometimes the caller is a pregnant woman, deciding whether to have an abortion. Sometimes a husband and wife are on the line, the two of them in agonizing disagreement. Once, Fält-Hansen remembers, it was a couple who had waited for their prenatal screening to come back normal before announcing the pregnancy to friends and family. “We wanted to wait,” they’d told their loved ones, “because if it had Down syndrome, we would have had an abortion.” They called Fält-Hansen after their daughter was born—with slanted eyes, a flattened nose, and, most unmistakable, the extra copy of chromosome 21 that defines Down syndrome. They were afraid their friends and family would now think they didn’t love their daughter.

More HERE

Sunde: Biden’s minimum wage proposal would prolong pandemic pain

By Joseph Sunde - 

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, America’s planning class has relied on a predictable mix of so-called stimulusand monetarist tricks to curb the pain of economic disruption. Such heavy-handed interventionism has long been misguided, but for many, the government’s efforts have not gone far enough.

Last spring, California Gov. Gavin Newsom talked of exploiting the pandemic as a way to “reshape how we do business and how we govern,” leading us into a “new progressive era.” Others, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have gotten more specific with their proposals, trying to connect the particular problems of the pandemic with generic lists of progressive policy aims, from universal healthcare to “free” college and housing.

AARP is a Sales Front for Health Insurance, Report States

A new report shows that AARP is a marketing operation designed to sell high-priced Medigap plans to seniors, rather than an advocacy organization representing the interests of retired people.

The August 2020 report, “How AARP Puts Profits over Patients – and Principles,” by Chris Jacobs of analytics firm, Juniper Research Group shows in 2018 alone, AARP’s net income totaled $246,463,998, of which 13.4 percent went into AARP’s pocket as net margin. AARP, formally known as the American Association of Retired Persons, has racked up $1.4 billion in profits since 2009, which is remarkable performance for any organization, claims the report.

“For instance, of seven major health insurers listed in the Fortune 500, none had a 2018 profit margin exceeding 5.42 percent,” the report states.

More HERE

Politics Breeds Fear and Anger

The recent presidential election confirms and reinforces what many political observers and common citizens have increasingly known and noted: Americans are seriously divided over the problems they see facing society, and the means and methods to solve or reduce their impact on all of us. 

This division of views is, of course, partly shown in the number of votes cast for the two major political party candidates in the 2020 presidential election. With the final tally still not completed, over 75.2 million Americans voted for Democratic Party candidate, Joe Biden, and more than 70.8 million voters cast their ballot for the incumbent Republican president, Donald Trump. While the votes separating them number at least 4.4 million, that represents barely a 3 percent difference between them from a total of more than 146 million votes, combined, that they received. 

Another way of saying this is that nearly 48 percent of these voters supported the losing candidate. Hardly a landslide or an unequivocal mandate, especially considering that an additional over 1.6 million votes were cast for a third-party presidential candidate, Jo Jorgensen, representing the Libertarian Party. This means Biden’s margin of “victory” is less than 51 percent (at the time of this writing).

More HERE

Carlson: Four things social conservatism must do to survive

In order for the social conservative movement to survive, and ultimately thrive, there are four things it must do, says Allan Carlson, the John A. Howard Distinguished Fellow for Family and Religious Studies at the International Organization for the Family, based in Rockford, Illinois. 

In the iFamNews.com Friday, he asks, "Whither Social Conservatism?" and proposes four things the American social conservative movement must do:

Illinois business, health groups mount campaign to keep people home on Thanksgiving

CHICAGO - Illinois is facing a spike in COVID infections and hospitalizations, prompting a public relations effort to keep people home and away from contact with non-household family and friends over the Thanksgiving holiday next week. The Illinois Manufacturers Association, the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, the Illinois State Medical Society and the Illinois Health and Hospital Association sent out a poster rating levels of behavior as "safe," "less safe" and "unsafe." 

The point to the Center for Disease Control's recommendations as their guidelines: 

"The safest option is to avoid travel, which increases risk of exposure, and limiting gatherings to one household," the group said in a press release Friday. "If gatherings will include people from more than one household, it is advised to limit the length of time spent together, and to keep festivities outside instead of indoors, which pose more risk. Attendees from different households should stay at least six feet apart, wear masks, wash hands and follow all other local health guidelines. The CDC advises that alcohol consumption may alter judgement and make it more difficult to adhere by proper safety measures."

In other words, stay home on Thanksgiving 2020. 

Wisconsin recount starts today

MADISON, WI - Official recount procedures begin in Wisconsin Friday, following a petition from President Donald J. Trump’s campaign. Jim Troupis, Wisconsin counsel to the campaign says changing the rules at the last minute and ignoring the election law has created unreliable results in the state's election.

On behalf of the campaign, Troupis released the following statement:

Our democracy depends on fair and impartial elections that fully adhere to the Constitution and state statute. By staging a last minute attempt to change the rules, and by providing unlawful advice before then, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has repeatedly failed to follow the law. They have disenfranchised voters and undermined the integrity of this election. We continue to be confident that when all of the legal ballots are counted and illegal ballots are not counted, President Trump will be proven the winner.

Biden currently leads President Trump with a little more than 20,600 votes.

From the AP, the results they will begin recounting in certain counties: