PRAYING FOR AMERICANS TO DIE: “The Biden side is banking on a relapse — a new, big spike in deaths. They’ll have to guard against letting their macabre enthusiasm show. If they don’t get that horrible wish, then they’re hoping people will want to maintain an inert holding pattern and accept delaying the economic comeback. Trump is planning to emphasize his contrast with that depressing position.”
Archive for 2020
May 24, 2020
AT AMAZON, Schwinn recumbent bikes.
OPEN THREAD: I think the people down the hall know who you are.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Chinese Troops Cross Into India, Fortify Positions. “The United States backed India amid recent aggressive actions by the Chinese army. Ambassador Alice Wells, the senior U.S. diplomat for South and Central Asia, called Beijing’s behavior towards India provocative and disturbing.”
THE PEOPLE RUNNING DC COULDN’T RUN A POPSICLE STAND. HELL, THEY CAN’T EVEN RUN DC. D.C.’s So-Called Reopen Plan Is a Suicide Pact for the Restaurant Industry.
HONG KONG: Police fire tear gas and make 180 arrests as Hongkongers rally against national security law.
UPDATE: Well.
Reuters article here.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Kids and Teachers Are Going to Need Therapy if Schools Follow the CDC’s Recommendations for Classrooms.
FROM A READER: “Sedona today. Dining inside in Williams earlier. Slide Rock Park was closed to parking at 10a because it was already full. Grand Canyon South Rim open from 4a to 10a for entry. Not a typo. You can stay all day but you got to go in early. Even got my hair done.”
ROGER KIMBALL: Rage and Recriminations in the Wake of COVID-19. “For the past two months, the country has been on a moral bender, intoxicated by fear and panic. As with most benders, the aftermath will be painful.”
AT AMAZON, save in Blu Ray and DVD.
Plus, deals in CDs and Vinyl.
IF YOU CAN HEAR THE WHISTLE, YOU’RE THE DOG: Brooklyn-based “China Affairs Editor” for the Economist declares pro-police “Blue Lives Matter” flag racist.
UPDATE (7:17 PM): Deleted, but screen grab remains above and in tweet by Andy Ngo.
(Classical reference in headline.)
PREDICTION: No journalists will ask him this question.
HONG KONG, ALL ALONE.
China is currently transgressing the terms of its 1997 treaty over Hong Kong, which promised a “one country, two systems” settlement that preserved Hong Kong’s somewhat autonomous democratic institutions. These institutions guarantee rights to Hong Kongers and guard its common-law inheritance.
China’s legislature in Beijing is preparing a new national-security law aimed at Hong Kong to prohibit and punish terrorism, foreign influence, and secession. By that, they mean demonstration, free speech, and a functioning democratic system with rights guaranteed to citizens. Meanwhile, Beijing’s loyalists installed in Hong Kong’s legislative council have been making open attempts at a putsch against the pro-democracy majority.
Commies gonna commie. The only way to stop them is by killing them, or beating them into submission. And in the latter case, they still don’t give up for long.
NEW YORK TIMES FILLS FRONT PAGE WITH 1,000 NAMES OF CORONAVIRUS DEAD. And a possibly a few non-Coronavirus deaths as well:
But one of the first names on the paper’s earlier editions of the front page, Jordan Driver Haynes, 27, didn’t actually die from the virus. He was murdered, according to local reports.
Haynes’ body was found in a vehicle left in a wooded area off a highway in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the local NBC affiliate reported.
In fact, there may be more coronavirus deaths or many fewer. No one knows. People who died at home without going to a hospital and were never tested aren’t counted while we know for a fact that many coronavirus victims counted as dead probably didn’t die of COVID-19. But the New York Times chose an arbitrary time and arbitrary number to tell the rest of us to mourn.
Frankly, it turns my stomach. Using dead people as a political platform to make a political statement is about as low as it gets. But Democrats have done it before, piling the dead from Hurricane Katrina in front of George Bush’s White House. And every mass shooting in America becomes a political rally against the Second Amendment.
Flashback: How the DNC-MSM weaponized Katrina, which allowed Democrats to retake both houses of Congress in 2006, and ultimately, put Obama in the White House.
UH-OH. I SMELL ANOTHER CHEAP CARTOON CROSSOVER. Fredo Meets Florida Girl: CNN’s Chris Cuomo Brings on Discredited Florida Employee to Spread Anti-DeSantis Conspiracy Theory.
Earlier: Rebekah Jones’ firing is the COVID clickbait the media dreams of – but it’s all fake.
(Classical reference in headline.)
OBAMAGATE: The Revolting Inquisition of K.T. McFarland.
TWO CALIFORNIAS IN ONE:
Shot: 9th Circuit Court: Allowing California Churches to Open Is a ‘Suicide Pact.’
—Headline, Victoria Taft at PJ Media today.
Chaser: Northern California Docs See More Suicides Than CCP Virus Deaths.
—Headline, Mark Tapscott at Instapundit today.
OLD AND BUSTED: Democrat Paranoia over “Voter Suppression.”
The New Hotness? Charlamagne tha God: ‘Dems Have to Worry About Voter Depression’ Over Biden.
18 YEARS: 18 THOUGHTS. Congratulations to Power Line for 18 years in the Blogosphere! Not least of which, this moment:
As we were flooded with emails following the post, I called John mid-morning for help sorting through the messages and assessing the information. John took a look and called me back 15 minutes later. “Dan Rather is toast,” he said. “The key to the case is kerning.”
Working for Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart linked to the post early that afternoon with a screaming siren on the Drudge Report. By the end of the day some 500,000 readers had visited the post. Inside CBS News they were trying to figure out what had happened. What had happened was one of the great journalistic frauds of all time, the unraveling of which led to Dan Rather’s early retirement from CBS News. In his 2012 memoir, however, Rather stands behind the fraud. He titled the memoir Rather Outspoken. In it he retracts his 2004 on-air apology, writing that it was extracted from him involuntarily by CBS News management. That may be true, but Rather’s defense of the Bush National Guard story in “For the Record” strongly suggests Rather Full of It would be more like it.
9. John and I joked that when they got around to making a movie about Rathergate, Robert Redford might play him and Dustin Hoffman might play me. Wrong! When they made the movie — 2014’s inaptly titled Truth, based on segment producer Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty — Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett played the perpetrators of the fraud. When it comes to rewriting history, the left never quits and its media adjunct is always there to lend a hand.
10. Andrew Heyward was president of CBS News at the time of Rathergate. He hadn’t spoken much about the scandal for public consumption, but he talked about Truth to the New York Times when the Times celebrated the film at a TimesTalks event with Redford, Blanchett, Rather and Mapes. Heyward told the Times that the film “takes people responsible for the worst embarrassment in the history of CBS News, and what was at the time a grievous blow to the credibility of a proud news organization, and turns them into martyrs and heroes. Only Hollywood could come up with that.”
One might say that truer words were never spoken.
Read the whole thing.
THEY CARE MORE ABOUT REVENUE THAN THEY CARE ABOUT CITIZENS: Why Did Arizona Democrats Kill a Bill Protecting Citizens From Police Overreach?
THE OTHER GREAT WAR: Rudyard Kipling’s World War I-era book contains surreal and haunting similarities to today’s pandemic.
At first, the Irish Guards were relatively mobile—and naïve. If they came under fire, they scraped out shallow foxholes in which to huddle until the storm passed. But soon enough, an entire new civilization of trenches had coalesced below the level of the earth—a primitive, but elaborate, megalopolis. The trenches became a way of life: boredom, terror, endurance, courage, random carnage, confusion, the fog of war, and a new way of perceiving death. It’s not that individual death became unimportant, but that it became routine and, though one might not say so, a little bit meaningless—nothing to write home about. The dead were out of it. The miseries remained: “No sooner is a trench dug than it fills with water. . . . Every one is looking like the worst form of tramp—standing, walking, sleeping and eating mud.” An Irish soldier remembered: “In those days we was throubled the way a man is disthressed in dhreams. All manner of things happening, ye’ll understand, and him the only one able to do nothing.”
That same soldier told the author: “Ye’ll understand, ‘twas no question, those days, what ye could or could not do. Ye did it.”
It was then that the Spanish flu began.
Read the whole thing.