To recap, here are the graph features — and where we are as of June 18:
Dark black line: Hospital bed capacity, “approximately 25,000”
Red peak: The “minimal action” projection: hospitals overwhelmed by an order of magnitude, approximately 225,000 hospitalizations by the peak in late April
Orange peak: The “social distancing” projection: hospitals overwhelmed by a much smaller magnitude, approximately 90,000 hospitalizations by the peak in mid-May
Blue peak: The “stay-at-home” projection: hospitals never overwhelmed, approximately 12,000 hospitalizations by the peak in early July
June 18: Real-time data as of June 18, after recording the 10th record number of hospitalizations this month: 857 hospitalizations
These figures are for North Carolina, but it’s been more or less the same everywhere. Covid-19 has underperformed. To be fair, so has our political/journalistic class.
Posted at 2:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds
WHY I SIGNED “THE STATEMENT ON SOCIAL JUSTICE & THE GOSPEL:” No, I’ve not caved to the SJWs, quite the contrary. But knowing there are legions of professing Christians among Instapundit’s fine readership, many of whom are concerned about the “critical theory” turbulence currently afflicting the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention and the wider evangelical community as well, just wanted to make my position clear. Be sure and read the whole statement, as it covers the waterfront of issues that are convulsing the whole nation.
BUT IT GETS A PASS BECAUSE REASONS: A Farrakhan Supporter Led the LA Black Lives Matter Rally That Became a Pogrom. “It’s no coincidence that the riots here escalated in Fairfax, the icon of the Jewish community. I saw the Watts and the Rodney King riots. They never touched a synagogue or house of prayer. The graffiti showed blatant antisemitism. It’s Kristallnacht all over again.”
So here is an idea — and I give it out there for free. One of the great moments of Ronald Reagan’s presidency was his firing of the airline traffic controllers. In August 1981, these federal employees held the public of the United States government and public hostage. Their unreasonable demands were jeopardizing the American public’s travel plans at peak holiday travel season. In one of the great stands of his presidency, Reagan overnight fired 11,000 air traffic controllers who had refused to return to work unless their demands were met. New, non-recalcitrant staff were immediately brought in to replace the deeply replaceable workers and business soon returned to normal. The President also instituted a lifetime ban on rehiring of these workers.
If publishing house after publishing house and paper after paper is going to be held hostage by the young army of bigots like the anti-Rowling brigade it is high time that somebody made an example of them. The people who cannot bear to work at a publishing house that publishes The Ickabog are a very good and agreeable place to start. There are at least 100 people at Hachette who have now identified themselves as ignorant of the tenets of a free society and utterly unsuited to the industry they have chosen to work in.
I don’t know that there should be a lifetime ban on them working in the publishing industry. Some among their number might grow up. But there should certainly be a large number of much-desired job vacancies coming up at Hachette soon.
CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS AS THE NEW CHIEF JUSTICE EARL WARREN: Warren was appointed by a Republican president, Eisenhower, as was Roberts, by Bush II. Kylee Zempel details the seven decisions in which Roberts appears to be intent on leading a new “Warren Revolution” on the High Court.
SO SUDDENLY “JUNETEENTH” IS A BIG DEAL. I’ve been wishing people a happy Juneteenth for at least a decade now. And why not celebrate a holiday where a Republican president’s general ordered Democrats to free their slaves?
NO, MAIL-IN VOTING IS NOT THE SAME AS ABSENTEE BALLOT VOTING: Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL) is the Ranking Minority Member of the House Administration Committee, which oversees the daily operations of the lower chamber of Congress and oversight of federal elections. He’s been an aggressive battler of the Democrats’ mail-in voting proposals and their proxy voting system for House members.
In the following video, Davis talks with Washington state Secretary of State Kim Wyman, who, among much else, explains why and how Nancy Pelosi’s mail-in voting proposal is a far cry from using an absentee ballot. The difference is subtle but profoundly important, according to Wyman, who oversees her state’s mail-in system, which, Oh-By-The-Way, requires voter ID to vote.
Posted at 12:01 pm by Mark Tapscott
JAMES LILEKS: “I have this queasy, greasy feeling in my stomach that all these signs of the growth and enthusiasms of my beloved city will end up as reminders of something we thought would continue – but stuttered and fell. There’s a lot of turbulence in the Minneapolis psyche these days. A lot of readjusting and rebalancing. Pretty sure what the end result will be, too.”
This 1965 film, created to sell Detroit as a possible host of the 1968 Olympics, looks like something out of The Last Days of Pompeii when viewed in 2020:
WHO SAYS AMERICAN INGENUITY IS DEAD? How A Filmmaker Got The #1 Movie In America During A Pandemic. “We saw an absurd loophole in the system that at any other time would be impossible to exploit and thought it would be funny. Last year, the number one film at this time was ‘The Secret Life of Pets 2’. This year, it was a $0 budget horror film made over Zoom.”
Read the whole thing.
Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll
FIGHT CENSORSHIP, READ THIS POST! The Heritage Foundation was censored by YouTube, but they are fighting back, according to The Federalist.
Did you know that Paul McCartney once wrote a song celebrating slavery? Well, neither did he. It took about half a century after “Penny Lane” was a hit for the Beatles before historians decided that this street in Liverpool was a legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Sir Paul wrote the song as a nostalgic ode to Penny Lane as the scene of childhood happiness “beneath the blue suburban skies.” The Liverpool-born musician could not have known, while composing the cheerful tune in the mid-1960s, that scholars would one day conclude Penny Lane was probably named in honor of James Penny, a local mariner who made his fortune in the slave trade in the 1700s. Historians have not been able to prove this as a certainty, but the mere possibility was enough to inspire vandals to deface a sign in Liverpool with graffiti: “RACIST Lane.”
History is a horror show for liberals, who only look to the past in search of grievances they can exploit in their remorseless quest for political power. The liberal has a quasi-religious faith in Progress, which means that yesterday — another McCartney song title — was self-evidently worse than today. The past was a bad time, according to liberals, who see nothing there but oppression. Your nostalgia for the pleasant memories of childhood is almost certainly racist, and probably also sexist and homophobic. Now that I think about it, didn’t McCartney’s lyrics in “Get Back” mock someone who “thought she was a woman, but she was another man”? Isn’t this the textbook definition of transphobic hate speech?
As the Who suit up for what I suppose will be their final tour (“Who’s Left”?), Chuck Klosterman points out in his book But What if We’re Wrong? that whole forms die out. He compares rock to 19th-century marching music: nothing left of the latter except John Philip Sousa. That’s it. And Sousa himself is barely remembered. In 100 years rock might be gone too, Klosterman guesses. Maybe we’ll remember one rock act. Who will it be? Maybe none of the obvious answers. It certainly wasn’t obvious at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that The Great Gatsby would be the best-remembered novel he or anyone else wrote in the first half of the 20th century. As for the novels of the second half of the 20th century, the clock is ticking on them. The Catcher in the Rye is moribund. Generation X was the last to revere that book. Teaching it to young people today would get you ridiculed. To Kill a Mockingbird? It had a good run but it’s now being labeled a “white savior” story by the grandchildren of those who revered it. Soon schools and teachers will be shunning it.
DID YOU KNOW THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF ORPHANED OIL WELLS IN THE U.S.? Me neither until I read this thoughtful analysis from the Institute for Energy Research. Turns out there is some creative, free-market thinking and doing on the problem.
JUDGE QUESTIONS $30 MILLION TRIAL LAWYER FEE: Trial lawyers who won the huge ($117.5 million)Yahoo Breach MDL settlement claim they should get $30 million. The judge in the case says she has a few questions about how they arrived at that preposterous figure.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Polls Are Getting Worse for Trump, Which Probably Means He Wins in a Landslide. “In a Briefing last month, I wondered whether anyone believed the polls even though I knew the question was largely rhetorical for devoted readers here. Well, maybe not for our regular trolls, but they believed the polls in 2016 too and that’s a big part of what made election night so delicious. That’s why we keep the trolls around, for moments like that. And for the clicks.”
They matter because when a dangerous lie criminalizing all police and victimizing every black criminal is allowed to metastasize, it turns America into a violent, lawless nation, harming the very people that movement purports to champion. The new rioting over what appears to be an act of self-defense on the part of an Atlanta cop demonstrates that this movement was never about justice for George Floyd.
The reason why the video showing the killing of George Floyd sparked so much outrage is precisely because it was so anomalous in police encounters. The video appears to show Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeling, presumably with a lot of pressure, on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, in a contained situation long after Floyd had been subdued.
Well, now we know that the outrage was not over that anomalous act. What the latest blood libel in Atlanta demonstrates is that those pushing the lie seek to criminalize basic police work and lionize career criminals who needlessly escalate arrests into violent altercations, often killing others.
If the goal is to increase lawlessness until people willingly give up their liberties in exchange for (illusory) safety, then it all makes sense.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported the stepmother of the former Atlanta police officer charged with fatally shooting Rayshard Brooks last week has been fired from her job.
Carlson said a “source familiar with the matter” told his show that Melissa Rolfe, the stepmother of Garrett Rolfe, was let go from an Atlanta-based company called Equity Prime Mortgage, where she had been human resources director.
“Rolfe was promised that her job was safe, but today she was told, and we’re quoting, ‘We have to terminate our relationship with you.’ No other explanation was offered,” he said.
Carlson said, “apparently,” her “only crime was being officer Rolfe’s stepmother.” He noted that Rolfe has been scrubbed from the company’s website.
The Washington Examiner checked, and she does not appear on the website’s leadership page. But, using the Wayback Machine, the Washington Examinerdid find her listed as recently as May.
Related: “Among the most shocking of North Korea’s human rights abuses is the ‘three generations of punishment’ rule. If one person is found guilty of a crime and sent to a prison camp, so too will their entire family, and the subsequent two generations born at the camp must remain there for life.”
But he called on Europe to prepare to take a stronger stance and move parts of its supply chains from China to “stable and reliable” alternatives if China failed to offer reciprocity for the European Union.
“Europeans have been too naive for too long,” said Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark who led Nato, the transatlantic security alliance, from 2009 to 2014.
“We had all hoped that we could live harmoniously and that over time engaging with China would lead to it being more like Hong Kong. Unfortunately, under [Chinese President] Xi Jinping it is Hong Kong that has become more like China.”
The EU tends to act mercantilist when negotiating with the US, but too often bends the knee for China.
Unchecked executive authority was just one of the many abuses the Founders tried to guard against, but I guess certain justices missed that day in conlaw.
Journalist? You spelled Democratic Party activist with a byline incorrectly.
Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll
WHICH HAS KILLED MORE PEOPLE, RELIGION OR ATHEISM: The answer may not be what you think, regardless which side you go with. And please play nice in the comments!
The family of Andrew Chatfield gesture after Chatfield signed with the University of Florida on national signing day in Plantation, Fla., Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2018. From left are Candy Diggs, Tiaunte Diggs and Lamont Green. (Taimy Alvarez/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
As the destruction of the George Floyd riots has largely subsided, leftists have launched a new coordinated Cancel Culture. A soccer player got fired for his wife’s tweet, a church lost its lease over a pastor “liking” supposedly insensitive tweets, and New York Times op-ed editor James Bennet stepped down amid outrage that he published an op-ed by a U.S. senator, among many other examples. Some have even targeted black celebrities for refusing to toe the line when it comes to the institutional racism narrative.
Yet the “Gator Bait” cancelation may be among the worst and most petty. [University of Florida President Kent Fuchs] did not explain the “horrific racist imagery” supposedly associated with the chant. It seems he merely sought out an excuse to make an absurd gesture. In doing so, he is robbing UF’s culture to appease an angry mob. It seems far more likely this decision will incite an angry mob … of Gators.
Fuchs is praying that he’ll be eaten by the, err, gators last.
There is one way to stop the unraveling: Refuse the mob. We have seen again and again that the mob comes only for those who hope to please it. And when it does, no amount of apology will save you. We stand against the mob and all its aims. We stand against the chaos and violence, the silencing of debate, the purging of heretics, the rewriting of history, and the destruction of the greatest country in the world. We will defend the most majestic achievement of humankind, the United States of America, against the most ignoble impulse in human history, to tear down that which is good.
At the suggestion of Peter Sellers, Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” was used “with savage irony,” the Grauniad notes, for the closing orgy of mushroom clouds at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove:
The director of adult education at Pedagogical Centre was Helmut Kentler (1928-2008), a social scientist, who argued that sex between adults and children was a crucial part to healthy sexual development, saying that “in some cases almost something like a gentler form of social work”.
A popular figure in Germany’s sexual revolution in the 1960s, Kentler often authored ‘expert’ reports for the Berlin Senate and his books on ‘sexual liberation’ were bestsellers at the time. Indeed, Deutsche Welle notes how the change in attitudes towards child sexuality in Germany at this time was part of the 1968 revolution that swept Europe and worked to throw aside all tradition and conventional wisdom, including the idea that children should not have sex with adults.
I THINK WE NEED SOME NEW TORT LAW TO DEAL WITH OUR CULTURE OF MOBBING AND SNITCHING: When Your Private Dinner Conversation Becomes Your Waiter’s Facebook Post. Though I wonder if existing doctrines couldn’t reach some of this stuff. Even a few lawsuits would probably discourage the worst misbehavior.
The second not-so-hidden intention in all this on the part of both parties—the black separatists and their white social justice acolytes—is, for purposes of their own power, to create racism where it doesn’t exist.
Trying to convince people who aren’t racist that they are is one of the best and most efficient ways imaginable to make them one.
Racism is being manufactured before our eyes across America, indeed across the world.
Segregation is the handmaiden of racism. It makes it go. Keep the races apart and keep them hating each other.
Some of us who were involved in the original civil rights movement remember “Black and white together, we shall not be moved…”. That is no more.
Now it should be written “Black power advocates and SJWs together, we shall overcome some day.” Make that: “We have overcome!”
FAKE NEWS ON FILM: Finally, a Dramatic Film Tackles Walter Duranty’s Lies in the New York Times.
Once in Moscow, Jones realizes that Stalin’s collectivization is a fraud perpetrated by a criminal government and propped up by sympathetic journalists from the West. These include one Walter Duranty, the oleaginous, established correspondent for The New York Times. Duranty is played to slimy effect by Peter Sarsgaard, who coincidentally also played Charles Lane, the editor of the exposed New Republic fabulist Stephen Glass, in Shattered Glass (2003). Duranty strikes entire pages of copy that don’t uphold the official Soviet view. The journalist Joseph Alsop once called Duranty a “fashionable prostitute” for the Bolsheviks, and to British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who was blackballed by many British newspapers after reporting the truth from Russia, Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.” But the Soviet sympathizer won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his exclusive interviews with Stalin. To defend everything from mass starvation to the show trials of 1928, 1934, and 1936, Duranty had a simple response, parroting Robespierre: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
A hedonist who walked with a cane after losing a leg in a train accident, Duranty is shown throwing parties filled with jazz, opium, and lots of naked bodies. One of the funniest and most unsettling scenes in Mr. Jones comes when Jones is confronted by a naked Duranty at one such bacchanal. Duranty, irritated that Jones keeps asking the wrong questions and isn’t interested in sleeping with one of the women at the party, calls him a nobody. “I must be somebody,” Jones retorts. “I’m standing in front of the naked Moscow correspondent of The New York Times.” Director Holland conveys claustrophobic environments well, whether in a parlor-room party or a train packed with starving Ukrainians.
Mr. Jones is available for streaming starting tomorrow from The Loft Cinema. Hopefully it will eventually be available in other formats and/or platforms.
The Police Department provided five photographs of trees, some of which showed knotted ropes and one that appeared to have a piece of plastic pipe attached to a rope, hanging from tree limbs.
They have been removed by city officials.
Victor Sengbe, who is black, told KGO-TV that the ropes were part of a rigging that he and his friends used as part of a larger swing system. He also shared video of the swing in use.
“Out of the dozen and hundreds and thousands of people that walked by, no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose. Folks have used it for exercise. It was really a fun addition to the park that we tried to create,” Sengbe said.
“It’s unfortunate that a genuine gesture of just wanting to have a good time got misinterpreted into something so heinous,” he told the station.
DEMOCRACY DIES IN DOXXING, PART DEUX: Mexican-American Accused of Making ‘White Power’ Sign by Overzealous SJW is Fired. “Cafferty is Mexican-American and says he comes from a diverse family of all races. He says he’s proud of SDG&E for taking any allegations of racism seriously, but he wants his job back…Cafferty is just another casualty of an overzealous social justice warrior. He should file a wrongful termination lawsuit against SDG&E.”
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.