IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:

FIRST-GENERATION RESPIROCYTES: Scientists Just Created Artificial Red Blood Cells That May Be Even Better Than The Real Thing.
COMING THIS FALL: MONDAY NIGHT WOKEBALL? NFL encourages players to peacefully protest, admits it was wrong.
PROGRESSIVES’ DREAMS WILL SEND NEW YORK RIGHT BACK TO ‘70S BLIGHT:
Before the riots and looting of the past week, New Yorkers were facing existential questions about their continued residence in the city going forward. Primarily this: How can we stay here when the compensating pleasures of a life lived in crowds might be putting us and our families in danger?
The economic crash caused by the coronavirus response also raised the prospect of an increasing tax burden in this very highly taxed city to deal with the inevitable budgetary shortfalls that will come in its wake — which will inevitably mean paying more for fewer services.
Now, however, there’s a third existential question: How can we stay here when we’ve seen mass lawlessness go unpunished and the authorities in charge entirely ineffectual (at best) when it comes to keeping the streets safe?
The dream vision of the newest generation of activist urban politicians — living in a world in which job-creating businesses like Amazon are treated like pariahs and the systems by which law is enforced are viewed as enforcers of inequality and injustice — is getting closer to reality.
And people who were already thinking of fleeing for their health are thinking even harder about hitting the road to protect their personal safety and long-term security.
Related: American Cities Take Double-Barreled Hit; How Will They Look in the Future?
THEY SAID OH, NO — WILLIAM AND MARY WON’T DO. Lessons From The ABA’s Attempt To Revoke William & Mary Law School’s Accreditation In The 1970s.
But the accreditation process is basically a joke. As a friend comments, ABA law school accreditation is the TSA in suits: kabuki theatre.
HOW ABOUT NO? Minneapolis Mayor to Seek Federal Aid after Looters Cause At Least $55 Million in Damage.
Minneapolis’s government, top-to-bottom controlled by Democrats, is the author of Minneapolis’s misfortunes. Minneapolis voters voted for them, and they deserve to get what they voted for good and hard. Why should taxpayers from more civilized parts of the country foot the bill.
AMERICAN CITIES TAKE DOUBLE-BARRELED HIT; HOW WILL THEY LOOK IN THE FUTURE?
Over at Ed Driscoll.com, I take a deep-dive, quoting numerous articles, on the future of the American city — or the lack thereof, post-CCP virus and the week and a half (so far) of riots and looting.
(Bumped.)
SOURCES: NEW YORK TIMES NOT TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT TOM COTTON OP-ED.
As the Times tells its reporters, a story needs at least two corroborations to make sure it ‘stands up’. Here’s the second: Tom Cotton’s staff have told Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, that this op-ed, like Cotton’s previous op-eds for the Times, received a ‘rigorous’ and ‘onerous’ fact-checking. Three drafts went back and forth.
So who’s telling the truth? The management, for whom this is only the latest in a series of unprofessional foul-ups — or The Spectator’s source and Tom Cotton’s staff?
The member of Cotton’s staff who worked with Rubenstein on the edits told The Spectator this morning that while he emailed only with Rubenstein, there were sticking points in the process when it was necessary for Rubenstein to consult with unnamed Times colleagues. These points were all resolved. The inference, Cotton’s staffer tells The Spectator, is that Rubenstein was not, as the Times now claims, working alone or unsupervised:
‘What they have attempted to do to a young editor who is doing his job, and also doing it well, is a disgrace.’
All is happening in accordance with the prophecy:


THIS IS THE SORT OF THING OUR POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL LEADERS ARE CHEERING ON:
Detroit father of five loses home he’d been fixing up & work truck after raging blaze: “I’ve done everything right. How am I gonna tell my kids?” MORE: @FOX2News 6PM. DONATE: https://t.co/dtL77dXTOk pic.twitter.com/j0lAN2SYLv
— Erika Erickson (@FOX2Erika) June 4, 2020
He’s got a GoFundMe. I donated. But there are lots of other people in the same situation.
THIS STATE-SANCTIONED GRAFFITI IS THE ULTIMATE EXAMPLE OF ANTI-TRUMP PETTINESS: DC Mayor Paints ‘Black Lives Matter’ by the White House.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, STASI EDITION: Syracuse invented evidence to find fraternity guilty of racial slur after investigation cleared them: lawsuit.
When Syracuse University found Alpha Chi Rho collectively responsible for shouting a racial slur at a black female student, it not only ignored the woman’s family but overruled its own appeals board, according a lawsuit by the fraternity last week. . . .
The allegations would mean the administration had continually defamed AXP going back to last fall, when Chancellor Kent Syverud said four members had been placed on interim suspension for “a verbal assault.”
The suit provides details from the past several months that Syracuse does not appear to have previously acknowledged, including that the members were quickly exonerated back in December, owing to video evidence and “consistent” testimony.
Make ’em pay. Also, why is it only fraternities and sports teams that are subjected to collective punishment?
AT AMAZON, Little Giant Ladder.
WASHINGTON POST: Let’s cancel all the cop shows on TV.
Writing at the Washington Post, author Alyssa Rosenberg has a unique solution for the problems with our policing: Cancel all the cop shows on television. She argues we need to do that because there’s a “reactionary streak” behind the “surface liberalism” in these shows.
● October, 2018: Steve Carell: The Office Would Be Too Offensive Today. If So, What’s Left?
● January, 2018: The post-Pervnado era has made a lot of classic TV cringeworthy.
I’m not expecting sitcoms and cop shows to vanish from TV anytime soon, as those are the genres that have defined American network television since its inception in the late 1940s. Regarding the latter format, as lefty academic Todd Gitlin wrote in his 1983 look at the American TV industry, Inside Prime Time (which served as a textbook at my college, and presumably, loads of others), in the early 1970s, David Gerber, the producer of the NBC series Police Story and Police Woman, “took to cop shows not only because the police were society’s blue line but because they could be the networks’. In the industry jargon, they afforded a franchise — a hero’s right to interfere every week in the lives of others. ‘In television there are a certain amount of franchises,’ Gerber points out. ‘What do you got? You got doctor, lawyer, and chief. Throw in some Indians, for westerns. So doctor, lawyer, and police; the westerns are gone. You try to do something offbeat — White Shadow, Paper Chase, American Dream — and you get shot down. So you stay with the franchise or you take a chance. In June the networks have patience with anything. The flowers are blooming, hooray, hooray. Come September, they lose patience, because they’re in a competitive race.’”
But the left’s desire, whatever the struggle session du jour, whether it’s #metoo or #blacklivesmatter, to airbrush out offending swatches of pop culture is telling, and will slowly take its toll. (See also: Messrs. Woody Allen and Bill Cosby, who were omnipresent in American culture until becoming unpersons.)
As I wrote in May of 2018, the Great Purge of 20th Century Mass Culture will be astonishing to watch, a much more insidious version of the way the arrival of the Beatles to America completely pushed swing music, America’s pop music from the 1920s through the early 1960s, into the dustbin of history
WHICH IS SAYING SOMETHING: Eli Lake: The FBI’s Investigation Into Trump and Russia Now Looks Even Worse.
The FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign has taken a beating in the last six months. Late last year, the Justice Department’s inspector general found the bureau’s application to eavesdrop on a former aide to then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign was riddled with factual errors and omissions. The surveillance court that approved that warrant has barred the agents who submitted it from appearing before it. And last month the Justice Department dropped its case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
On Wednesday, things got worse. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that all of the irregularities and short cuts exposed in recent Justice Department reviews were kept from him when he signed the warrant applications into that campaign aide, Carter Page. Had he known about them at the time, he said, he would have never signed them.
Rosenstein even reluctantly acknowledged that his own August 2017 memo specifying the parameters of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was deeply flawed.
By August 2017, it was clear that there was no support for “the whole concept that the campaign was colluding with the Russians,” said Senator Lindsey Graham at the hearing. “There was no there there.”
“I agree with that general statement,” Rosenstein responded.
In normal times this would be a bombshell. Rosenstein’s memo listed the alleged crimes that Mueller’s team was investigating. Rosenstein said that Mueller’s office helped him draft it. This reflects poorly on Rosenstein. As the most senior Justice Department official overseeing the Mueller investigation, his job was to check its work. He didn’t.
This also reflects poorly on the FBI. The bureau knew, for example, that the opposition research dossier on which it relied to seek the Page warrant was not reliable. By January 2017, the dossier’s primary source had told FBI agents that its most explosive claims were rumor. The former British spy who helped prepare it was fired as an FBI source after the bureau learned he had been speaking to reporters. The Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that none of the unique information in the dossier was corroborated.
It doesn’t stop there. Rosenstein also acknowledged that the FBI never shared its draft memo from January 2017 to close the counter-intelligence investigation into Flynn. That investigation was kept open after former FBI Director James Comey discovered Flynn’s calls with Russia’s ambassador at the end of 2016. While such communications would be unusual for most private citizens, the calls were routine for an incoming national security adviser.
Rosenstein also said exculpatory information collected from FBI informant approaches to the investigation’s targets were not shared with him. One such example involved Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos, who told an informant that a campaign reaching out to Russia to obtain stolen emails would be treason.
It’s as if the whole thing was a political hit job designed to overturn an American election. Which is because it was a political hit job designed to overturn an American election.
ORANGE MAN BAD: Guess What Happens if You Search for ‘Racist’ People on Twitter…
TWITTER IS GARBAGE AND JACK DORSEY SHOULDN’T BE ABLE TO SHOW HIS FACE IN PUBLIC WITHOUT BEING BOOED: Twitter Mistakenly Disables Video Of A GOP Candidate Doing A Pushup Challenge For PTSD Victims, Offers No Explanation. “Mistakenly.”
AMERICA’S MOST ANNOYING GOVERNOR. OKAY, SECOND-MOST. OKAY, PROBABLY REALLY ONLY ABOUT #5, BUT STILL, WHAT A DICK: NC Gov. Cooper vetoes bill to allow outdoor seating at restaurants.
Outdoor protests with thousands of people yelling are fine. Brunch, however, will kill grandma because reasons.
Related: Government Jealous Of Rioters’ Speed, Efficiency In Destroying Local Businesses.
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Planned Parenthood actually said it’s “devastated, grieving, and outraged by violence against black lives.”
Margaret Sanger could not reached for comment.
KRISTI NOEM 2024: South Dakota National Guard quickly shuts down violence as governor calls for swift action against looters. Her pandemic handling was also excellent.
DAILY GOUGE EXPLAINS IT ALL: Want to understand the political reality behind the riots? Here’s the fundamental fact, according to The Daily Gouge:
“Here’s the juice: urban police unions who block accountability for bad cops contribute to Dimocratic politicians running cities who haven’t elected Republicans in 50 years … yet somehow the cause of the problem is thrown at the feet of a President who’s only been in office 3-1/2 years?!?”
ACADEME AT ITS FINEST: Elite New York professors celebrate the destruction of their city.
To quote Neal Stephenson, from In The Beginning Was The Command Line, “During this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well. We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”
And the ones we replaced them with are dumb, self-obsessed, and destructive.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Why isn’t Andrew Sullivan allowed to write his column?
Cockburn understands that Sullivan is not just forbidden from writing for the New York magazine about the riots; his contract means he cannot write on the topic for another publication. He is therefore legally unable to write anything about the protests without losing his job — at the magazine that, in 1970, published Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe’s brilliant and controversial excoriation of progressive piety. It’s the bonfire of the liberals!
* * * * * * * *
Sullivan’s card has been marked, partly because — many years ago — he edited the New Republic and dedicated an issue to a debate about The Bell Curve, the controversial book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray on IQ. At magazines such as the Atlantic, where Sullivan did some of his best work as a journalist and pioneering blogger, this now makes him persona non grata.
Read the whole thing, but…the Atlantic? As Jim Treacher tweeted on Thursday to Sullivan:


Sullivan’s 2008 stint at the Atlantic caused serious damage to the magazine’s reputation, cemented by the hiring and then immediate shameful firing of Kevin Williamson by editor Jeffrey Goldberg in 2018. (The cause of which was a sneak preview of the New York Times’ meltdown earlier this week caused by its crybully young staffers.)
MICHIGAN SUPREME COURT UNANIMOUSLY SIDES WITH 77-YEAR-OLD BARBER OVER GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER.
Related: Whitmer Defies Own Social Distancing Rule at Detroit Protest.
More: Michigan Regulators Prioritized Environmental Quality Over Public Safety In Edenville Dam — Thousands of Michiganders were evacuated after the collapse of the Edenville Dam where state regulators prioritized freshwater mussels over citizen safety.
REPORT: #GoBaldForBLM Dupes Female Moonbats Into Shaving Their Heads. “[T]he hashtag appears to have been a stunt cooked up by 4chan trolls.”
Earlier:


#JOURNALISM: WaPo Mistakes Job Gains for ‘Grim’ Losses. To be fair, they were hoping for grim losses.
WHY IS CBS SHAMING ITS VIEWERS? White silence on social media: Why not saying anything is actually saying a lot.
“It’s incredibly hurtful,” said Broadway star Jelani Alladin. “And you’re telling me that you have no hesitation posting a selfie of yourself… or what you’re eating for dinner, and yet you’re telling me that you’re afraid to say something because you might hurt other people’s feelings? Or you don’t know what to say? Or you don’t have an audience to reach? Were you thinking those things when you posted the other photos? I don’t think you were.”
Social media silence is nuanced. There are people whose feeds have simply gone dark. There are people who, as Alladin notes, have continued posting selfies and pictures of their food as if nothing is wrong. And, as fitness influencer Trammell Logan tells CBS News, it can even be hurtful when white people post messages about #blacklivesmatter side-by-side with more frivolous content.
“In your natural state of being distraught or sadness, if something extremely personal happens to you, I can’t see how you can be in that state and post about it or be about it and then five minutes later like post a cocktail mix, or like you dancing. Our emotions don’t necessarily work like that,” Logan said.
Curiously though, at least based on their Website, CBS hasn’t stopped broadcasting its sitcoms and cop shows in a show of support.
The Tweet promoting the above article is currently getting a huge ratio, driven largely by people posting photos of food in response:


Meanwhile, the New York Times, which described the article they ran by Sen. Tom Cotton as “fascist,” runs an article with this headline: How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror.
Related: Language, Memory, & Soft Totalitarianism.
There’s a new sin. Forget gluttony. Forget sloth. The great moral error today is whiteness. To be white is to be fallen. Whiteness has become a kind of original sin, an inherited moral defect one must atone for throughout one’s life. In the wake of the brutal execution of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, this almost religious treatment of whiteness as an existential flaw has gone uber-mainstream.
Listen to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yesterday he called on ‘white Christians’ to ‘repent of our own prejudices’. Repent, ye sinners! Or if you prefer your leaders to be secular, how about the high priestess of middle-class decency, Nigella Lawson, who instructs her fellow white people to ‘acknowledge [that] systematic racism exists’ and that we are ‘complicit in it’. That brutal killing in Minneapolis – it’s your doing, white people.
Or read Time, the most mainstream magazine in existence. ‘White people’, says one of its contributors, ‘have inherited this house of white supremacy, built by their forebears and willed to them’. Inherited. The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son. The Time writer says white racism is a spectrum, stretching from those white people who tell a black woman ‘how pretty our hair looks when we wear it straight’ to ‘the more extreme end of the spectrum… cops literally suffocating black people like George Floyd as they beg for their lives’.
To compare a compliment about a woman’s hair to the merciless killing of Floyd is deeply disturbing. It sanitises the crime committed against Floyd and debases his suffering by putting it on a par with a mere uninvited compliment. It also confirms how thoroughly whiteness has been pathologised in mainstream ideology. What was once said about black men – that it is problematic when they compliment women of another race and that their racial make-up drives them towards murderous behaviour – is now said about white men. Perhaps someone can explain how replacing one form of racial fatalism with another is progressive.
Flashback: “The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Fascism.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Left’s Eating Itself. Let them Fight.
Blue on blue violence is not my problem. The left eating itself is not my problem. In fact, the only feeling all this mayhem emits from me — and I’m not terribly proud of this — is a twinge of smug satisfaction in the form of Toldjaso.
The moment Barack Obama embraced and legitimized the left-wing terrorists in Occupy Wall Street (that have now morphed into Antifa and Black Lives Matter), I toldjaso. The moment Obama and the corporate media embraced the Trayvon Martin, Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, and Baltimore hoaxes, I toldjaso. I saw the writing on the wall and got the hell out of Los Angeles in 2011.
The left is eating itself.
Watching conservatives stress over this baffles me.
As the meme goes Let them fight.
I can understand the stress if you’re a Republican living in a Democrat-run city, but you need to get out. It’s just that simple… You need to get out. Unfortunately, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better — but they will get better, just like things got better after all the unrest of the 60s.
Eventually, even Democrats will sue for peace by voting for a Rudy Giuliani, because all this baloney about social justice is just the Democrat Party reverting to the soft-on-crime party that imploded in 1972.
Relax.
Sit back.
You get what you vote for and Democrats voted for this.
Sorry, but it’s a waste of time to care about people more than they care about themselves.
I’m certainly not happy about what’s happening. It just it what it is. So…
Let them fight.
Read the whole thing, but note that it was a long and painful quarter-century between New York’s fall from grace starting in the Lindsey years of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, until Giuliani’s election in 1994. To mix and match Tom Wolfe and H.L. Mencken, in the coming months and years, the voters in New York and other riot-torn cities will be getting their “great relearning” good and hard.
CHRISTOPHER FLANNERY: The 1619 Riots: Our elites seek a new nation conceived in violence.
MEGAN MCARDLE: Thanks to the protests, social distancing is over.
In a few weeks, one of two things will have happened. Either covid-19 cases will abruptly reverse their decline in some of America’s largest cities, and we will know that they were seeded by the days of rage we are living through . . . or they won’t. Either way, social distancing is over.
In the happy scenario, the protests will have performed an enormous public service, even beyond agitating for justice. They are basically running a natural experiment that scientists could never have ethically undertaken: Do massive outside gatherings — including singing, chanting, screaming and coughing — spread covid-19, or not? Along with evidence from the Memorial Day weekend parties at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks, they may well demonstrate, once and for all, that the risk of spreading covid-19 outdoors is negligible. At which point, throw open the bar patios and backyard barbecues! Bring on the beach-blanket bingo! Move church pews into the parking lot and sing away!
Unfortunately, it’s also grimly plausible that in a few weeks we’ll see new outbreaks that will soon surge out of control, taking many American lives. Because we’ll never be able to lock down our cities again; once you’ve let the cat out of the bag, kitty won’t allow himself to be stuffed back in. . . .
First, as was pointed out when red states were protesting, you may have every right to risk your own death, but with infectious disease, protesters also risk killing other people, who might not have volunteered to die for your cause. Which brings us to the second caveat: In a diverse and highly pluralistic society, authorities don’t get to declare some causes worthy and others worthless. . . .
It may seem obvious to you that ending police brutality rises to a level of importance that, say, church services don’t. But the impossibility of rank-ordering competing ideas about what is “most important” is the reason liberal democracy had to be invented. If you were a religious believer, you might rank church higher; if you were about to lose your house unless your business reopened, you might put nail salons high up on the list.
As individuals, we can make those distinctions. But our authorities may not except on broadly neutral terms. Some public officials seem to imagine that if they can distinguish between selling food and offering Communion, they must also have the authority to make even finer distinctions: allowing people to exercise their First Amendment right to protest police brutality, while circumscribing their First Amendment right to worship in public. Legally, I doubt it, but I’m quite positive that courts won’t let governments distinguish between assembling to protest police brutality and assembling to protest public health policy.
One can, of course, argue that there’s a moral difference. But moral distinctions have no force outside the community that makes them. However satisfying it feels to call one sort of protest “suicidal,” “reckless” and “mind-bogglingly selfish,” while describing the other as a noble and necessary fight against injustice, this will not restrain the disdained. Indeed, the perceived hypocrisy will deafen them to anything said after that.
Yep. The public health experts had one shot, and they blew it. If deaths do result, they should be specifically blamed — and named — as grandma-killers. If deaths don’t result, they should be specifically blamed — and named — as business-killers. And they can’t hide behind neutral science because they abandoned neutral science for politics and preening within their own social circles
Which is a sub-case of why so many of our institutions, from the New York Times to NYC government to higher education and even sports, are failing: The people running them care more about mugging for their peers than about the welfare of the institutions they are entrusted. That’s a species of corruption, and a highly destructive one.
OPEN THREAD: Use all your well-learned politesse.
I WAS WARNED A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO THAT CHINA WAS GOING TO TRY TO CREATE ITS OWN ELON MUSK: Chinese private launch firms advance with methane engines, launch preparations and new funding.
WELL, THAT’S NOT THE NARRATIVE: Black Likely Voter Approval of Trump at 41%. Hey, maybe that’s why the Democrats are so anxious to push protests and a racial-polarization campaign.
Related: Democrats Scramble to Win Over More Black Men: Some black voters are attracted to what they describe as President Trump’s tell-it-like-it-is demeanor, surveys found. “Black Americans are one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting blocs, and President Trump won just 8% of black voters in 2016, according to exit polls. Mr. Biden is expected to easily win the demographic in November. But if the 2020 presidential election is as close as the 2016 vote, some Democrats say losing even a small number of black men to Mr. Trump—or seeing more of them stay home on Election Day—could hamper Mr. Biden’s White House chances.”
Well, objectively, Trump has done more for blacks in four years than Democrats have done in 40. For all the talk this week, his criminal-justice reforms dwarf anything the Democrats have even attempted, and actually undo some “tough” criminal laws pioneered by . . . Joe Biden.
UPDATE: Uh oh. Even Talcum X has figured out that “systemic racism” is a Democratic Party problem.


Possibly related:


HMM. FOR A WHILE THEY WERE SAYING TO AVOID IT AS DANGEROUS: Coronavirus: Ibuprofen tested as a treatment.
The trial will use a special formulation of ibuprofen rather than the regular tablets that people might usually buy. Some people already take this lipid capsule form of the drug for conditions like arthritis.
Studies in animals suggest it might treat acute respiratory distress syndrome – one of the complications of severe coronavirus.
Prof Mitul Mehta, one of the team at King’s College London, said: “We need to do a trial to show that the evidence actually matches what we expect to happen.”
Early in the pandemic there were some concerns that ibuprofen might be bad for people to take, should they have the virus with mild symptoms.
These were heightened when France’s health minister Oliver Veran said that taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen, could aggravate the infection and advised patients to take paracetamol instead.
A review by the Commission on Human Medicines quickly concluded that, like paracetamol, it was safe to take for coronavirus symptoms. Both can bring a temperature down and help with flu-like symptoms.
Hmm.
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Plus, deals in CDs and Vinyl.
REVOLVING DOOR REVOLVES: MSNBC and NBC News hire Lisa Page as a legal analyst.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This is as if the press had hired G. Gordon Liddy to do color commentary on Watergate.
NOT MUCH OF A RESULT: Hydroxychloroquine For Avoiding Infection? “That means what you think it means: there was no statistical difference in infection rate between the HCQ group and the placebo group. . . . So this trial was negative, although one should remember that it could have missed asymptomatic cases. It also tended to enroll relatively healthy people, and can’t speak to any possible protection of high-risk groups.” Some people in both groups were taking zinc.
A better study would have tested people for infection, rather than relying on self-reported symptoms, but I would have hoped to see a positive result here.
RESEARCH: A cohort study to evaluate the effect of combination Vitamin D, Magnesium and Vitamin B12 (DMB) on progression to severe outcome in older COVID-19 patients. Of course, you should be making sure to get enough of these anyway. And this is a small study, but interesting.
Related: Paging Dr. Hamblin: Does Vitamin D Help Fight COVID-19? Evidence is slowly mounting. Some researchers think that’s enough to recommend it. Of course, you should be making sure to get enough Vitamin D anyway. . .
AMID DEMONSTRATIONS, LIBERAL ELITES PRAISE VIOLENCE AS PROTEST TOOL:
There’s an astonishing story in the Boston Globe-Democrat — it’s hard to imagine it appearing anywhere else — in which Newbury Street shop owners hit by looters and vandals Sunday night still stand by the protest “heroes.” These stores were ransacked, and not for survival gear or basic foodstuffs, but sneakers, coats and luxury goods.
No matter. The events on the streets in response to the killing of George Floyd are good. Period.
If you think it’s unfair to throw peaceful protesters and violent rioters under the same bus, you make an excellent point. That’s almost as bad as treating all cops like racist murderers — throwing bricks at them, screaming in their faces, calling them “pigs,” — because one despicable dirtbag in Minnesota used his badge to perpetrate a horrific crime.
So yes, it’s possible to support protests and not support violence. Unfortunately, many members of the social justice platoons are determined to defend both. And so the headline from Slate.com is “Non-violence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence.”
Nine local police officers were injured trying to protect the lives and property of Bostonians, and Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins takes to the mic Monday to attack the cops as murderers.
In a New York Magazine piece entitled “The Rioters Aren’t Here to Convince You,” Zak Cheney-Rice defends the violence in and of itself, arguing that, like The Joker who wanted to see everything burn, “you might begrudge the rioters their insistence on seeing some of it burn for a few nights. But then again, you’d be missing their point.”
As Stacy McCain writes, it’s “The Return of the Riot Ideology.”
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WASHINGTON POST BLASTED OVER INACCURATE ‘GRIM MILESTONE’ TWEET ON UNEMPLOYMENT RATE: ‘IT’S NOT TRUE.’
The Washington Post was blasted on social media after it jumped the gun with an inaccurate tweet Friday claiming the May U.S. unemployment rate was close to 20 percent, moments after the actual report indicated the rate unexpectedly had dropped to 13.3 percent.
“Grim milestone to be reached as May unemployment rate nears 20 percent,” the Post wrote in a now-deleted tweet to accompany a now-edited story with the same inaccurate headline.


WHY NOT TAKE A BREAK FROM THE SERIOUS NEWS FOR A FEW MINUTES? Florida Man Friday: Gators Gone Wild!
TAKING COVID-19 SERIOUSLY: PJ Media writer Matt Margolis and co-author John Cox have a new book out. Oh, The Places You Can’t Go!
THAT SEEMS USEFUL: Bosch introduces automatic emergency calls for motorcycle accidents.
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: George Floyd Rioters Deface Civil War Monument… Celebrating Black Union Patriots.
SOCIAL-DISTANCING IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE:


OUR FEVERED TIMES: Liberty Unyielding: “Los Angeles Starts to Defund Its Police.”
(For more on the ridiculous view that tolerating more crime somehow benefits African American communities, see this statement of mine from a year or so ago.)
FRANK WHITE WROTE A BOOK ABOUT THIS IN THE EIGHTIES: The Psychological Effect of Seeing Earth From Space Changes You, Astronauts Say.
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Asteroid to pass by Earth tomorrow.
THE INSIDE STORY OF THE TOM COTTON OP-ED THAT ROCKED THE NEW YORK TIMES: “When a newspaper publishes a bombshell op-ed, it doesn’t want the chief casualty to be its own credibility. But this is what has happened with the New York Times and the op-ed it ran by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton this week advocating using federal troops to quell riots.”
Earlier: The New York Times and the Vanguard of the Incognizant.
BILL DE BLASIO HAS HIS PRIORITIES: The NYPD is policing Jewish mothers while the city burns.
TANK MAN: Short Film About Tiananmen Square Hero.
On June 4th and 5th, 1989, the Chinese government violently put down the pro-liberty Tiananmen Square student protest. One man stood alone against a column of tanks, and for his extraordinary heroism became known as “Tank Man,” though nothing more is known about his identity. Some say he was arrested and killed, others that he is still in prison in China, and still others that he is alive and in hiding. Regardless, he has become a symbol for resistance against tyranny.
Tank Man is a powerful short film (15 min.) dramatizing events leading up to his moment of extraordinary courage. He is little known in China, where all images of him have been erased and all mention of him banned. This film does him some small justice.
The video is at the link.
I BLAME THE MEDIA. THEY’RE LIKE A TOBACCO INDUSTRY FOR THE MIND. Depression, anxiety up 3-fold since start of COVID-19 pandemic.
BECAUSE OF COURSE HE IS: Jack Dorsey is giving millions to Colin Kaepernick’s criminal justice group.
Vox link, but the headline tells you pretty much everything you need to know.
QUESTION ASKED: Is Black Lives Matter a religion for woke white people?
While Nietzsche assured the Jurassic “woke” class of the late 19th century that “God is dead,” most of the branches of the “Progressivism” that followed are forms of a substitute religion to fill the void, including both radical environmentalism, and even socialist health care. As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)
STUDIES: WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THEM? Study: Autonomous vehicles won’t make roads completely safe.
PJ MEDIA WEEK ON THE MARK GRIFFITH SHOW:
Today’s guest is Jeff Reynolds, who will talk with Mark about police and National Guard kneeling before the Floyd protesters, and undoubtedly other things as well. The show is from 3-4 PM Eastern, 1-2 PM Mountain, noon-1 PM Pacific, and you can listen via:
PROJECT VERITAS: New Video Exposes Antifa ‘Fight Club Training’ in New York City.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: In Show Of Solidarity, COVID-19 Vows Not To Infect Anyone Protesting Inequality.
There are plenty of police reforms that could be enacted from a libertarian perspective that would improve matters. Qualified immunity reform is libertarian. Holding police accountable for misbehavior is libertarian. Reducing the power of police unions is libertarian. Getting rid of overtime and pension abuse is libertarian. Banning no-knock raids is libertarian. Reducing bloated police department bureaucracies is libertarian.
Broader reforms that would reduce the need for police and reduce police/civilian encounters are also libertarian. Getting rid of victimless crimes, especially the drug war, and certain categories of criminal business regulation that should be handled civilly is libertarian. Getting rid of taxes that lead to black markets that in turn lead to police/civilian encounters is libertarian. Abolishing laws that allow local governments to put people in jail for failure to pay civil fines is libertarian. Separating forensic science services from prosecutors’ offices is libertarian. Holding prosecutors accountable for misconduct is libertarian. Finding alternatives to prison for certain categories of offenders is libertarian.
By contrast, “defunding the police,” if that just means willy-nilly cuts, is not libertarian.
If you get rid of the police, they will be replaced by vigilante justice and mob “protection.”
THIS WILL END WELL: Minneapolis City Council May Eliminate Police Dept. for ‘Transformative New Model.’ “If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police I invite you to reflect: are you willing to stick with it? Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?”
NEVER LET A CRISIS YOU ENGINEERED YOURSELF GO TO WASTE: Riots Are Part of Weeklong Campaign to Defund Police. In Some Places It’s Working.
FOR THE UNFORGIVABLE CRIME OF BEING A REPUBLICAN, AND A TRUMP APPOINTEE. George Washington Law Faculty Tried But Failed (For Now) To Revoke Alum Bill Barr’s Honorary Degree. This effort does not say good things about the seriousness of the legal academy generally. If an “honorary” degree just means you’re a lefty in good standing, then it’s not much of an honor at all.
TODAY’S NON-SHOCKING STORY: Feds Say ‘Very Organized Coordination’ in Riots from ‘Professional Agitators’ Connected to Antifa.
JUSTICE: Appeals court throws open the door to anti-male bias lawsuits against universities. “The 3rd Circuit’s May 29 ruling has already been cited in at least one other similar lawsuit.”
BASKET OF DEPLORABLES, II: Biden claims ’10 to 15 percent’ of Americans are ‘just not very good people.’
LOOTERS ANGERED BY BEING LOOTED: Law Enforcement Seizes Masks Meant To Protect Anti-Racist Protesters From COVID-19.
WELL, GOOD: Federal Court Strikes Down Vote-By-Mail In Texas, Citing ‘Significant, Irreparable Harm.’ “In a 48-page ruling Thursday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a decision by a District Court judge in San Antonio two weeks ago that would have allowed for expanded mail-in balloting during the pandemic.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Gospel According to Peter Thiel. Wherever there’s a major shift in the American landscape, one can usually find Silicon Valley’s iconoclastic investor.
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Students call for laxed grading for black students. University goes along with it.
UNEXPECTED EMPLOYMENT GAINS, MEGALITHIC MEDIA CRUSHED: Biggest Job Gain in History, Unemployment Drops as Lockdowns Lift
UNEXPECTEDLY! US shocks economists by adding 2.5 million jobs in May as unemployment declines to 13.3%.
Models based on past unemployment are unreliable. Today’s “unemployment” is as high as it is because the government is paying many people an above-market wage to be unemployed, and because government is keeping many businesses closed, not because of a fundamental breakdown.
HOT: The California legislature’s effort to repeal Proposition 209 continues apace. Despite my written testimony before the Assembly Appropriations Committee showing that, over time, Prop 209 has saved the state at least a BILLION DOLLARS in public contracting costs, the Appropriation Committee reported the bill out Wednesday afternnoon. (Testimony before that committee is limited to a bill’s fiscal impact.) The issue now goes to the full Assembly.
Also reported out was a bill to study slave reparations. (Note that California was never a slave state.)
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Who In the Heck Even Voted for Bill de Blasio? “When Mayor Moron was first elected almost everyone I know who is well-versed in New York City politics was convinced that he would be a one-term wonder. As he went about dismantling twenty years of progress in the city it seemed almost certain that he would be shown the door, Apparently, every one in New York was drunk in 2017, and de Blasio was given another shot at screwing everything up.”
Give de Blasio this much credit: He certainly didn’t waste the opportunity he was given.
COOL. THEN BLOCK THE ADS FROM FELLOW TRAVELERS AND FRONT ORGANIZATIONS: Facebook will block ads from state-controlled media outlets.