DEFEAT IS A CHOICE. AND WE DO NOT CHOOSE IT: We, Magnificent Bastards.
November 21, 2020
NOW OUT: Kurt Schlichter’s latest Kelly Turnbull book, Crisis.
LONGEVITY: First drug for rare rapid-aging disease extends kids’ lives. Now the question is if it can slow aging in everyone else.
HMM: MMR vaccine may protect against severe illness from COVID-19, study finds. I wonder if severe Covid infections are in part a function of an understimulated immune system.
2020, MAN: Sinkhole filled with glowing green liquid found in middle of Toronto street.
(H/T: 5FofF.)
ANALYSIS: TRUE. America’s Elites — Not Trump — Are Responsible For Undermining American Democracy.
Flashback: Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad. What’s happening in America is an echo of what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening because of Trump.
THERE’S A HEADLINE YOU WANT TO SEE DURING A VIRAL OUTBREAK: Illegal border crossings are surging as migrants anticipate Biden changes, DHS says.
WELL, YES, BUT RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Karol Markowicz: Our hypocritical leaders refuse to obey their own COVID-19 rules. “Actually, all the COVID rules are for us, not them. COVID-19, and the accompanying lockdowns, have made it painfully clear: We plebes have to follow the rules; the elites do not.”
I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.
OUT ON A LIMB: Surprise: The “Smartest” People Are Actually Painfully Stupid.
Anyway, today’s Harvard Gazette arrives with some joyful news: Science is back! After four dreadful years of the “anti-science” Trump, we are now going to see, with Biden, the restoration of “science” to its rightful place in the formulation of public policy. This news is right there in the lead story, headline and sub-headline: “Is science back? Harvard’s Holdren says ‘yes’/Ex-Obama adviser says, unlike Trump, Biden and Harris will embrace factual analysis.” From the first paragraph:
[T]he incoming Biden-Harris administration has moved quickly to reinstall science as a foundation for government policy after four years of a president who disdained accepted scientific wisdom on subjects from wildfires to hurricane tracks, climate change to COVID-19.
The Gazette has learned that “science is back” by their usual method, which is by interviewing the leading Harvard professor on the subject. In this case that is John Holdren. Do you remember him? Holdren’s current title is “Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of environmental science and policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.” But before that he was “[A]ssistant to the [P]resident for science and technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,” a position in which he served for the entire eight years of the Obama presidency. You may remember that Holdren was confirmed unanimously by the Senate in March 2009, after minimal scrutiny of his background.
Finally, Holdren may get his shot to fight global warming by firing rockets full of pollution into the upper atmosphere.
ISN’T THE GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA TOO BUSY COORDINATING THE STATE’S COVID RESPONSE FOR A TV INTERVIEW? MSNBC Has Stacey Abrams Advise GOP on How to Accept Election Results, the Jokes Just Write Themselves.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY ACTIVISTS WITH BYLINES LOOKING FORWARD TO THEIR UPCOMING FOUR YEAR NAP: An obituary for the press in the post-Trump era.
The New York Times in October published a collection of essays claiming the Trump presidency has “cost” the United States its “innocence,” its “generosity,” and its “apathy.”
However, what the collaboration does not mention are the things that the Biden administration will “cost” the country, including that it will bring an end to what Vanity Fair calls the “golden age for journalism.”
We say goodbye, then, to journalists elevating as worthy of public notice obvious liars and lunatics, including convicted felon Michael Avenatti, gossip columnist Michael Wolff, mental health quack Bandy Lee, and conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch — all because they oppose the administration.
Goodbye to weekly “bombshells” that land with a “splat!” instead of a “boom!”
Goodbye to near-daily input from presidential historians turned political assassins.
Goodbye to members of the press acting as if the cover artwork of the latest edition of a prestige news magazine is in some way provocative, stunning, or even particularly interesting.
Goodbye to White House correspondents pretending as if they are reporting from an active war zone or claiming they feel safer covering authoritarian regimes.
Goodbye to the Holocaust being invoked against the administration on a near-daily basis.
Read the whole thing. Exit quote: “Goodbye, all. It has been a crazy four years. See you all back here the next time a Republican is president.”
Credit to the Trump administration for finally treating “reporters” like the Democratic Party activists with bylines the rest of us knew they were, and for providing a template for future Republican administrations in dealing with a massively hostile “press:” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Starches the Media On the Issue of “Peaceful Transition of Power.” Exit quote: “I don’t call on activists.”
SCIENCE SAYS HE’S RIGHT. BELIEVE IN SCIENCE. Hospital CEO says he had Covid and doesn’t need a mask. His staff are appalled.
P.J. O’ROURKE: Shamalot.
In 2013, as the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination approached, the New York Times published an article by executive editor Jill Abramson. The Times—always standing ready at the eternal flame, Bic lighter in hand—titled the article “Kennedy, the Elusive President.” Ms. Abramson wrote, in what I suppose she thought was a lament, “An estimated 40,000 books about him have been published since his death… and not one really outstanding one.”
Logevall’s is another. In his JFK and all the rest of these “not really outstanding” books, the problem isn’t Kennedy’s elusiveness. The problem is our elusiveness about Kennedy. We don’t want to grasp and hold in our minds the reality of the man. Nor do we want to dwell on the fecklessness and mediocrity of his kith and kin. After two generations of partisan tarnishing, we want a political memory that gleams.
Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment…A false memory will do. (Camelot lyricist Alan Jay Lerner went to prep school with Jack.) We’re afraid—no, we know—that if we inspect John F. Kennedy too closely, we’ll wonder what we saw in him. To the extent that there’s even a real “we” left to wonder. Anyone old enough to vote for Kennedy in 1960 is over 80 now. (And 49.55 percent of them voted for Nixon.) But the distant, hazy, reminiscent glow lingers, especially in high places such as the Harvard history department.
No thanks, however, to this particular book. Logevall does his clumsy best to walk upon his knees to the shrine. Yet JFK is a life of a saint that makes a hula hoop of his halo. The facts haggle with the hagiography. Logevall has done too much research. The devil (or his lapsed human instrument) is in the details, and so very many details of Kennedy’s life are provided here that Logevall turns into an accidental iconoclast.
Read the whole thing.
And for a look at how the myth of the Kennedy years as Camelot may have permanently damaged the Democratic Party, James Pierson’s 2007 book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism is well worth a read.
JIM TREACHER: Andrew Cuomo Thinks He Can Ban Thanksgiving.
What are [New York’s sheriffs] supposed to do, go house-to-house? Bust down your door and throw open all your closets and cupboards? Maybe shove around some of the older relatives Cuomo hasn’t killed yet? “Hey, maybe there’s an 11th guest hiding in the attic!” I mean, what are we talking about here?
Cuomo keeps ranting about “the law,” but his edicts aren’t laws. That’s not how laws work. He’s not a dictator. He can’t just ban Thanksgiving by fiat and expect everybody to sieg heil.
And he says the cops’ refusal to enforce his imbecilic decree is “frightening to democracy” and “a violation of constitutional duty.” Well, if this wannabe third-world thug wants to bring up the United States Constitution, how does the Fourth Amendment factor into this? Has Cuomo read that one? Is there a coloring book we can give him to explain how it works?
Andrew Cuomo is behaving exactly the way he and his fellow Democrats falsely accuse Trump of behaving. He’s just the sort of tinpot fascist they claim to oppose. Yet all they do is praise him, because he’s a fascist for their team.
You’re gonna need much more Cuomosexual Conversion Therapy:
But in the last few days, more New Yorkers have enrolled in Cuomosexual Conversion Therapy. Their two major sticking points? Vaccines and schools.
There was widespread optimism when Pfizer-BionTECH and Moderna announced success rates of over 90 percent for their COVID-19 vaccines. For the first time in months it seemed as though there was hope for America. Enter Andy-Vaxxer Cuomo, using his platform as governor to undermine public trust in the FDA’s potential authorization of vaccine which we will all need to take. ‘We can’t let this vaccination plan go forward the way that Trump and his administration is designing it,’ he said last week, with all the scientific expertise of an Instagram wellness blogger. ‘I’m pushing hard to make sure that we have a process in place to check what the FDA says before people start getting the vaccine in New York.’
People were happy to put up with Cuomo’s pettiness when he was moving his daughter’s boyfriend to the Canadian border, or deploying the State Liquor Authority to target bars that mocked his dumb food rule by serving ‘Cuomo pizza’. But the prospect that his tussling with Trump might delay the climax of the COVID carnage has given many pause for thought.
The governor compounded his misstep with another display of logger-headed machismo posturing this week, clashing with Mayor Bill de Blasio over school closures. The mayor, after dithering for days, introduced an arbitrary 3 percent positivity rate to re-close NYC’s public schools. The governor contradicted this, saying at a Wednesday press conference that schools could remain open as the positivity rate was only 2.5 percent. A Wall Street Journal reporter expressed confusion on behalf of parents — and Cuomo, acting as hard as a pierced nipple in winter, snapped:
New tools are available to aid in the deprogramming process:
Perhaps these should be sent to the homes of Emmy Award voters:
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Watch: Joe Biden Still Can’t Seem to Complete a Sentence.
WORLD WAR III BEGAN WHEN A MAN NAMED ALBERT SHANKER GOT A HOLD OF A NUCLEAR WARHEAD: Fox News Host MacCallum And NYC Teachers Union Chief Argue Over Schools Closing During Second Coronavirus Surge In America.
And from America’s Newspaper of Record: Democrats Push To Keep Schools Closed So Kids Will Be Dumb Enough To Accept Socialism.
(Classical reference in headline.)
RON RADOSH: The Angela Davis Moment.
The article also hails Davis as a pioneer who “understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even invented” — that is, the belief that all struggles are united and that one can’t work for black liberation without championing the liberation of other oppressed groups. (It doesn’t mention that one of her intersectional causes, as she said in a recent interview, is uniting “antiracist efforts” with “global resistance to the apartheid policies and practices of the State of Israel.”)
George does address Davis’s years of membership and leadership in the (Soviet-run) Communist Party of the U.S.A. Bizarrely, he writes that she stayed in the party even as communist regimes “became more and more totalitarian” (as if the Soviet Union or East Germany had been less totalitarian when they treated Davis as a guest of honor!), leaving its ranks only in 1991 because it did not embrace democratization. But this unsavory part of Davis’s history is placed in the exculpatory context of the Communist Party’s supposed laudable role in the struggle for black equality, “sanitized from many histories of the civil rights movement.” In a particularly dishonest aside, George points to the fact that “Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading tactician of the 1963 March on Washington” as an example of this role.
In fact, the CPUSA’s role in fighting for civil rights was always conducted within the context of Moscow’s needs. In 1941, Rustin’s mentor A. Philip Randolph planned a massive March on Washington to protest discrimination against blacks in the defense industry and the armed forces and other racial injustice. The CPUSA strongly opposed the March as an action that would interfere with wartime unity and the American-Soviet alliance; Rustin, then in his late 20s and a member of the Young Communist League — the Party’s young-adult wing — supported it and was helping organize it. This was one of the issues that led to Rustin’s break from the Communist group. (Eventually, Randolph called off the March after Roosevelt passed the Fair Employment Act.) It is extreme chutzpah for the Times to suggest that Rustin’s leadership in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s had anything to do with his very early membership in the YCL — especially since, in later years, he still considered himself a democratic socialist but was also a staunch anti-Communist.
Davis, on the other hand, tells George that she still believes in communism and Marxist ideology; she doesn’t expect much from the Democratic Party as far as “transforming America,” but does believe that “it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left.” (She’s also a big fan of the progressive “Squad” of AOC+3— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.) The article concludes with Davis saying that “our work as activists is always to prepare the next generation … to engage in even more radical struggles.”
We’ve had nearly a century of what we now call the MSM airbrushing communism, when not outright praising it. No wonder Davis is considered a hero by the far left. As blogger Moe Lane once wrote, “Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally.”
GENTLEMEN YOU CAN’T INVESTIGATE CRIMES HERE — THIS IS A POLICE STATION! Black Female Police Chief in Virginia Fired After Aggressively Investigating and Prosecuting Mob Violence.
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AUDIT: Georgia Governor Calls for Audit of Signatures on Ballot Envelopes.. “It seems simple enough to conduct a sample audit of signatures on the absentee ballot envelopes and compare those to the signatures on applications and on file at the secretary of state’s office.”
NBC NEWS: Chinese parts, hidden ownership, growing scrutiny: Inside America’s biggest maker of voting machines. “The source of the nation’s voting machines has become an urgent issue because of real fears that hackers, whether foreign or domestic, might tamper with the mechanics of the voting system. That has led to calls for ES&S and its competitors, Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems and Austin, Texas-based Hart Intercivic, to reveal details about their ownership and the origins of the parts, some of which come from China, that make up their machines.”
This story is from 2019, of course. If you raise the same concerns today you’re a conspiracy theorist.
DON’T ‘CALIFORNICATE’ THE REST OF AMERICA:
With taxes soaring, quality of life plunging as violent crime and homelessness surge, home prices out of reach, nonsensical government regulations spreading, an increasingly heavy-handed government and a slumping job market, California now ranks 47th out of 50 states on the widely followed Economic Freedom Index issued annually by Canada’s Fraser Institute.
As their future prospects dim, many longtime and even native Californians are leaving for better times in neighboring states such as Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Utah and New Mexico.
More recently, the departing have moved even farther away, relocating in Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama. It’s a “reverse Beverly Hillbillies” migration.
From 2007 to 2016, some 7 million Californians (gross total) left the state, most of them middle-class or upper-class in income. In 2018 alone, the number of economic and quality-of-life refugees surged by nearly 700,000, and the flood appears to be continuing today.
GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column. Otherwise, as a — [cough] — longtime resident of Texas, I’m all in favor of this proposal by America’s Newspaper of Record: Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MORPHED INTO THE CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: In defense of RealClearPolitics.
Dear heavens! Rightward and aggressively pro-Trump? Cockburn almost fainted when he read those words — so he can only imagine the effect they had on the Times’s more delicate subscribers. What else?
‘RealClear became one of the most prominent platforms for elevating unverified and reckless stories about the President’s political opponents, through a mix of its own content and articles from across conservative media.‘
Elevating unverified and reckless stories? Goodness! Don’t they know that’s the New York Times‘s job? What the reporter Jeremy Peters seems to be describing here is aggregation — RealClear posts stories from outlets of different political persuasions. Today, for instance, you can find links to Vox, the Atlantic and Politico, as well as the Washington Examiner, American Greatness and the Wall Street Journal. In the olden times, hacks such as Cockburn used to call this ‘editorial mix’.
Diversity of opinion is a fairly alien concept to the Times, a newspaper that has published approximately one Trump supporter for each year of his presidency.
New York Timespeople can’t handle diversity of opinion within their own newspaper, so no wonder they find it such a repellent concept when they encounter elsewhere.
MOST OF THEM DON’T MIND, BUT STILL: Whoa: Nearly a Third of Democrats Believe the Election Was Stolen From Trump. “According to a Rasmussen poll conducted November 17-18, nearly half of likely voters, 47 percent, believe the election was stolen from Trump. If Joe Biden is ultimately certified as the winner, there will undoubtedly be a big fat asterisk on his presidency. . . . Joe Biden’s problems are not simply because many Republicans believe the election was stolen. It’s true that the poll showed a significant partisan divide on this issue: 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.”
Hard to call it a fringe conspiracy theory with those numbers.
GOOD AND HARD: Newsom’s ‘Disgraceful’ COVID Hypocrisy the Latest Frustration for Napa Restaurant Owners.
In other news from Northern California: ‘Muir Woods, Queer Woods,’ as wokeness and gnosticism comes to the forest. Exit quote: “You might be thinking, well, just get out of crazypants California, and everything will be fine. Do you seriously not think that what starts in California stays in California?”
2020 ISN’T ALL BAD NEWS: Thomas More Society Founder Thomas Brejcha tells HillFaith 31 of the 50 state capitols will have Nativity Scene displays this Christmas season and he is optimistic that all 50 states will have them in the near future.
Considering the flood of anti-faith harassment spawned by the Covid Pandemic in places like California and New York, the long-running success of the Thomas More Society’s defense of the First Amendment’s protection of religious expression in the public square is a good news story that deserves recognition.
BRUCE BOWER ON 1964: A Distant Mirror of Today’s Situation.
It was hard to watch Reagan’s speech, and contemplate the 1964 election, without being reminded of what we’ve all been through in the last four years, and especially during and after the recent election campaign. Like LBJ, Biden is a sordid, self-dealing scapegrace who has little respect for the average citizen and a love of power for its own sake, but who has been relentlessly portrayed by the media as a hero of the downtrodden. Like Goldwater, Trump is a lover of freedom and of the ordinary American who has been smeared as an ugly racist and dangerous extremist.
Fifty-six years ago, the electorate bought the Democratic spin only to experience buyer’s remorse within a year or two. The final results of the 2020 election are not yet entirely clear, but one thing is certain: as in 1964, the Republican candidate is right about virtually everything on which he and his opponent differ, while the Democrat, if put in the Oval Office, will surely lose his luster before very long—provided, indeed, he doesn’t expire or get put out to pasture before wearing out his welcome.
Read the whole thing.
JOEL KOTKIN: The “Environment” End Game is a Massive Corporate Power Play.
In reality, though, few electorates anywhere are ready for extreme policies such as the Green New Deal, which, as its widely acknowledged architect, Saikat Chakrabarti, has acknowledged, is really a redder, more openly anti-capitalist version of the Great Depression-era original.
Yet getting hysterical about the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a waste of emotional energy. The real power of the environmental movement derives from those who occupy “the commanding heights” of our society – at the corporate, media, and academic realms. Though arguably not holding views as economically ludicrous as AOC’s, mainstream corporate greens are far more likely to successfully impose their version of environmental justice on the rest of us.
Read the whole thing.
IT’S GOOD TO BE IN THE NOMENKLATURA: Entertainment Industry Workers Exempt From California Governor Gavin Newsom’s New Stay-At-Home Order.
THE DEMOCRATS HAVE PRACTICALLY ADMITTED THIS: Ivanka Trump Blasts New York Tax Probes As ‘100% Motivated By Politics’.
TOTAL CONTROL OF ENTERTAINMENT BY THE LEFT HURTS THE NATION. IT HURTS ENTERTAINMENT TOO. JUST NOT FAST ENOUGH: Liberal Late Night Hosts Hurt the Nation. Here’s How.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: As Colleges Plan To Return To In-Person Teaching In The Spring Semester, Faculty Rebel.
YES, INDEED: Hands Across The Water: “Free The World”.
I WOULD LIKE TO SAY I CAN’T BELIEVE DISNEY WOULD DO SUCH A THING: ‘Star Wars’ writer Alan Dean Foster says Disney owes him royalties.
I’d like to say it, but I can’t. And Disney is not what I thought it was when I was little. I don’t know if my perception was ever true.
BECAUSE RESPIRATORY VIRUSES CAN’T BE STOPPED WITH LOCKDOWNS OF ANY LENGTH. THEY CAN BE STOPPED WITH PROPER QUARANTINE, IF ONE HAS GOOD TESTS. BUT UNIVERSAL LOCKDOWNS ARE NEVER ABOUT QUARANTINE. EVERY SINGLE TIME I’VE EXPERIENCED UNIVERSAL CURFEWS OR RESTRICTIONS OF MOVEMENT THEY’RE ABOUT ONE THING: THE PEOPLE IN POWER FEAR THE POPULACE: Even a Military-Enforced Quarantine Can’t Stop the Virus, Study Reveals.
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE LEFT IS THAT THEY PROJECT LIKE AN IMAX: Hope and Fear.
THEY THINK IF THEY CALL THEMSELVES ANTI-FASCIST WE WON’T REALIZE THEY ARE FASCIST: Doctor Zuckerberg?
IT IS ACTUALLY THE GRAMSCIAN REBOOT OF MARX (TO MAKE IT VIABLE.) WHEN THE PROLETARIAT FAILED TO RISE, GRAMSCI DECIDED PROLETARIAT ACTUALLY MEANT THIRD WORLD (ROLLS EYES). FROM THERE TO RACE WAS A HOP SKIP AND A JUMP: Dead White Males.
OBJECTION! THEY ARE NOT, IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD, AMERICAN: Our feral American media.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE. WE’RE ALL BECOMING OUTRAGED THEY THINK WE’RE STUPID ENOUGH TO BUY THIS NONSENSE: The Left’s Utter Nonsense.
This is no longer about Trump. This is about us, Americans, and the party who hates us trying to seize power over us.
I’M HEARING THIS FROM EVERYONE IN A NUMBER-RELATED PROFESSION: Did the Computers Report or Structure Voting Results?
IF THEY PUSH THIS THROUGH, THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER HONEST ELECTION IN THIS COUNTRY (SO PLEASE STOP WITH “BUT 2022!”). HOW LONG WILL AMERICANS ENDURE THAT? What a computer expert said about voting results in Michigan.
Because I can tell you from here in all-vote-by-fraud-mail Colorado that when they know they can’t be removed, they delight in exerting power by making your life h*ll.
EVERYONE I KNOW WHO DEALS IN NUMBERS SAYS THIS STINKS: Big Data to the Rescue: The Electoral College Meets Data Pattern Science.
OF COURSE IT’S A COUP. IT’S THEIR WHAT? THIRD? FOURTH ATTEMPT? WHEN ARE PEOPLE GOING TO SEE IT? It’s a Coup. Just Say It!
November 20, 2020
NOW OUT: Kurt Schlichter’s latest Kelly Turnbull book, Crisis.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. You’re not my dad, Gov. Cuomo — and please stop pretending.
WATCH THE INSTAWIFE ON JESSE PETERSON’S THE FALLEN STATE. Must-see Internet TV.
I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Watch a bright fireball explode over the Tasman Sea (video).
HOW BAD HAVE THINGS GOTTEN IN NEW YORK, THAT CHRIS FREAKING CUOMO IS BASHING THEM? CNN’s Chris Cuomo slams New York City school closures: ‘It’s all fear and not enough fact.’
FOR A GUY WHO THEY SAY LOST, TRUMP SURE HAD STRONG COATTAILS, AND FOR A GUY WHO WON, BIDEN SURE DIDN’T:
COLOR ME SKEPTICAL: Statin side effects may be ‘all in your head,’ study suggests.
THE DATA DOESN’T FIT “THE SCIENCE”: Lockdown Addicts. A new — and impressively huge — study of a natural experiment in Sweden shows that closing schools does practically nothing to save lives or stop the spread of Covid. Swedish economists compared Covid infection rates and medical records for all the parents (hundreds of thousands) at senior high schools, which went online during the spring pandemic, against the parents at junior high schools, which stayed open and did not encourage students or teachers wear face masks.
The parents whose children kept going to school were no more likely to be treated or hospitalized for Covid than were the parents of the online students. And the teachers who remained in the classroom had lower rates of infection and hospitalization than did the parents.
A study of this quality ought to be the final word on the subject. But as I write at City Journal, it doesn’t fit “the science” that’s guiding Joe Biden’s Covid advisory board — and the Democratic politicians eager for more lockdowns.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: New Yorkers ask: Is today the day someone attacks me on subway?
YA THINK? Americans experience ‘pandemic fatigue’ as restrictions continue. It’s made worse by the way the public health community has been conflicting and politicized in its advice.
Related: Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry Outing Crystallizes the Arrogance of COVID-19 Dictators.
ROGER SIMON: The Plot Against Sidney.
Lee Smith wrote an explosive narrative of the Russia collusion hoax in the number one best-seller “The Plot Against the President” that became a hit documentary film.
Someone should now write “The Plot Against Sidney,” because Trump and General Michael Flynn attorney Sidney Powell is currently in the crosshairs and then some.
And the attacks are coming not just, predictably, from the left, but from people you would think would be her natural allies.
Tucker Carlson, until recently literally king of cable news, called Ms. Powell out for being unresponsive and repeatedly failing to produce evidence of her claims about Dominion and Smartmatic computer systems and software on his Fox show.
Respected conservative columnist Byron York asserted about Thursday’s Giuliani/Powell/Ellis press conference in his daily email:
“But Powell did not prove it. She did not even allege with any specificity what she believes actually happened in the election. Powell said the Venezuelan software has the ‘ability to flip votes’ and can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President [sic] Biden, which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system, and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in.”
Powell has already responded to Carlson early Friday morning on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show:
“Maria Bartiromo: How did you respond to Tucker Carlson? Did you get angry with the show because they texted you and asked you to provide evidence of what you’re alleging?
“Sidney Powell: No, I didn’t get angry with the request to provide evidence in fact I sent an affidavit to Tucker that I had not even attached to a pleading yet to help him understand the situation and I offered him another witness who could explain the mathematics of the statistical evidence far better than I can. I’m not really a numbers person. But he was very insulting, demanding and rude and I told him not to contact me again in those terms.”
I’m not going to speculate on what’s motivating Tucker and Byron. They are friends and they have their reasons. Apparently, they are not disturbed by such things as “weighted-voting algorithms” or the astonishing fact that Dominion does not even report vote totals, only percentages.
Nor will I wave a finger at them because representatives of Dominion did not show up as promised Friday morning for a fact-finding hearing with a committee of the Pennsylvania House. What did they have to hide?
Well, maybe they do have something to hide.
The biggest issue here is not the presidential election of 2020, gigantic as that may be. It is the integrity of electoral systems world wide.
It is, in a word, democracy.
Are computers subverting it? Have they made democracy obsolete?
If this is true, and she is able to stop it, Sidney Powell may deserve a monument the size of Washington’s.
For counterpoint, as Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line, “If Powell has evidence to back this up, have at it. But so far, she hasn’t produced evidence. And she declined Carlson’s invitation to go on his show or to provide him with any. Powell has no obligation to litigate on television. But she’s already doing so to some degree. With her various utterances, including the highly dubious one that Trump won in a landslide, she’s made, in effect, her opening statement. It would be nice if she offered some evidence to back it up. If it turns out that Team Trump doesn’t have the goods to back up the claim of an international leftist conspiracy, the allegation will have to be considered demagoguery. And it will have caused profound damage to the nation.”
Which will have been compounded with damage done by the Obama administration in their own waning days: The Obama-Trump Transition Was More Like Sedition.
WHEN THE NEW YORK SCHOOL SYSTEM LOSES SUPPORT OF THE NEW YORK TIMES…The Problem With Coronavirus School Closures: When Trump Was Right and Many Democrats Wrong.
THIS SEEMS LIKE A NEW BID FOR GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES: GM Accelerates Electrification Timeline, Plans 30 EVs by 2025.
WHY NOT TAKE A BREAK FROM THE SERIOUS NEWS FOR A FEW MINUTES? Florida Man Friday: The Delirious Week the Whole Country Went Full Florida.
CHARLES LIPSON: Can Trump’s Lawyers Offer Real Proof of their Vast Allegations?
THE FALLEN STATE: You can watch my interview with Jesse Lee Peterson live at 3:00 eastern. You can watch the recorded version here.
WHEN I TALKED TO JIMMY LAI THE OTHER NIGHT, he said that AI is the censorship tool to be feared. But here the IEEE’s magazine is approving it. How Facebook’s AI Tools Tackle Misinformation: Facebook’s weapons against hate speech improve their aim, identify permutations of misinformation, CTO says.
“Misinformation” is just dictatorspeak for wrongthink.
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COLORADO: Color purple added to fear mongering dial in CO.
Most of the Front Range — where the majority of the population lives — just got categorized as “Red – Severe Risk,” whatever that is.
But it’s the VodkaBride’s birthday today and I still have a couple of last-minute things to pick up, so I’ll carry on as usual.
AT THIS POINT I DON’T THINK THEY WANT US TO RECOVER: Listen to the Science, Listen to the Students: Schools Can and Must Reopen. “Keeping kids out of the classroom will make recovering from the pandemic harder in the long term.”
YES. NEXT QUESTION? 2020 election polling: was it really as bad as they say?
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Joe Biden Glitches Again Mid-Sentence.
AT THIS POINT WE’VE HAD CONTACT-TRACING FOR EIGHT MONTHS. HUNCHES AND SKEPTICISM SHOULD BE REPLACED BY SCIENCE BY NOW. Disease experts skeptical on safety of indoor dining at restaurants. My own county health department has twice said that their contact tracing doesn’t show bars and restaurants as significant transmission sites, yet we continue to regulate them. Where’s the science?
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: ‘It’s a miracle!’ Paul Krugman spotted doing a quick economic one-eighty with ‘Biden boom’ prediction:
Exit quote: “The New York Times is just a humorless Babylon Bee.“
Obligatory flashbacks: PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT 2016: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
And from March: GIVEN HIS TRACK RECORD, THIS IS THE BEST NEWS I’VE SEEN IN WEEKS: Paul Krugman: Market signaling a ‘permanent recession.’
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