CAUGHT BETWEEN NYC AND BOSTON: RI Hospital owner Lifespan lost $76 million in March; no salary for CEO.
Archive for 2020
April 23, 2020
LIKE WHAT, WITH A CLOTH OR SOMETHING? EXCLUSIVE: Dossier Author Testified His Emails Were ‘Wiped,’ He No Longer Has Documents Related To Primary Source.
THIS REALLY DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE: Former NSC Chief Of Staff: John Brennan Buried Evidence That Putin Actually Favored Hillary In 2016. “The former NSC chief of staff further stated that ‘Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election.’”
HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS 20/20: Blame Game. The press wants to blame Trump for warnings that he missed about the pandemic, but it’s easy to point to Democrats and journalists who missed the warnings, too. After every disaster, our hindsight bias leads to a search for scapegoats. But finding scapegoats won’t solve the crisis — or prevent the next one.
AT AMAZON save in Office Electronics.
IT’S CALLED “POLITICAL USEFULNESS BIAS”: I can’t imagine that anybody is surprised by the media’s failure to pounce on the sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden. Still, it’s worth pointing out every time it happens. Rub their noses in it.
UNTIL THERE’S A VACCINE: Alleviation Before Cure. An epidemiologist’s primer on what treatments might work.
IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME CONVENIENT ALTERNATIVE: How Public Transit Makes the Nation More Vulnerable to Disasters Like Covid-19. Instead of subsidizing mass transit, we should encourage a transportation system that’s resilient during pandemics, terrorist attacks and other disasters: the automobile.
The trouble for environmentalists is that the public is getting a big taste of degrowth right now with the current privation and danger from a more immediate threat than climate change. To a public that has been showing signs of apocalypse fatigue for some time, it is dawning on many that the current lockdown, and the palpable enthusiasm of so many politicians toward extreme control, is a dry run for the permanent regimentation of the Green New Deal. To which many environmentalists lend credence with their current celebrations of how great it is that the lockdown is lowering pollution, not to mention some famous old environmental hits such as the research biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, David Graber, who wrote years ago in the Los Angeles Times that humans “have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth… Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (Think of Graber as a member of the Deep-Six State perhaps.)
As equally debilitating as Malthusianism is the way environmentalism after Earth Day became fully an adjunct of leftism. It is still occasionally recalled that the first Earth Day was a wholly bipartisan project, with support from President Richard Nixon, Governor Ronald Reagan (“[There is an] absolute necessity of waging all-out war against the debauching of the environment,” Reagan said in 1970), along with liberal Democrats like Sen. Gaylord Nelson. The activist left was split on “ecology” at the time, worried that it would distract from the anti-war and civil rights movements. Some leftist groups and civil rights leaders advocating a boycott of the first Earth Day. Time magazine quoted a “black militant” in Chicago saying, “Ecology? I don’t give a good goddamn about ecology!”
It did not take long for the activist left to recognize the potential of environmentalism for what became known as “watermelon” politics: green on the outside, red on the inside. The New Republic columnist James Ridgeway wrote shortly after the First Earth day: “Ecology offered liberal-minded people what they had longed for, a safe, rational and above all peaceful way of remaking society . . . [and] developing a more coherent central state. . .” The major environmental advocacy groups like the Sierra Club, which once boasted many Republican supporters, swung hard to the left. It’s only a hop, skip, and jump to the current attitude expressed in Democratic Congressman James Clyburn’s statement that the coronavirus crisis is “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”
Read the whole thing.
GET BACK ON THE PLANTATION: Detroit Democrats to Censure Lawmaker for Saying Trump Saved Her Life.
BAD RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Trumping Poverty. The economist Casey Mulligan calculates how much the poor have benefited from Trump’s rollback of regulations.
THAT’S WHAT XI SAID: These Racist ‘Wuhan Plague’ Plaques Are Popping Up Around Atlanta.
As radiologist Pradheep J. Shanker asks, “This is racist…how, exactly? It is satire, for sure. Unless we are arguing any comedic criticism of China is ‘racist’.”
“Probably a good time to take note of Disney’s investment into Vice media,” Stephen Miller adds.
Flashback: China bans Winnie the Pooh film after comparisons to President Xi.
HMM: French researchers to give nicotine patches to coronavirus patients and frontline workers after lower rates of infection were found among smokers. “A French study found that only 4.4% of 350 coronavirus patients hospitalized were regular smokers and 5.3% of 130 homebound patients smoked. This pales in comparison with at least 25% of the French population that smokes. Researchers theorized nicotine could prevent the virus from infecting cells or that nicotine was preventing the immune system from overreacting to the virus. To test this theory, hospitalized coronavirus patients, intensive care patients and frontline workers nicotine patches “
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Joe Biden: Unfit to Serve by Any and Every Measure. “Democratic presidential nominee-apparent Joe Biden sure likes to talk up his experience, as do his fellow Democrats in Washington and in the news media (but I repeat myself). There’s no doubt that Biden has experience, and lots of it. When Biden was first elected to the Senate in November of 1972, I was still too young for kindergarten. This Saturday, as he prepares to assume his party’s mantle, I’ll turn 51. Aside from the last four years he’s spent either running for president or preparing to run, Biden has held public office at the highest levels since before the end of the Vietnam War, since before stagflation, since before the bloody birth of Iran’s Islamic Republic, since bell bottoms were in fashion the first time around, since before the death of disco, since before the birth of disco for that matter…”
But what has he learned?
Answers at the link.
FASTER, PLEASE: Texas Gov. Abbott says he’s ready to reopen ‘massive amounts of businesses.’
Just remember to wear your face bananas in Houston…
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Pro wrestling icon, former governor Ventura denies reports of third-party presidential bid.
Although it’s probably past time to introduce my nine-year-old to the sublime pleasure of watching Predator.
BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: I Teach* At Oxford, But I Don’t Want It To Win The Coronavirus Vaccine Race.
The race is on and researchers at Oxford are doing vital, life-saving work. But races have winners and losers. If my university is the first to develop the vaccine, I’m worried that it will be used as it has been in the past, to fulfil its political, patriotic function as proof of British excellence.
The story will be clear: China, once again, has unleashed a threat to civilisation. But the best brains of the UK have saved the world.
Whilst I’m hopeful that I will be able to visit my Dad soon, this must not overshadow the key lesson of coronavirus: international cooperation saves lives. The research community knows this. Let’s hope our politicians do too.
Get back to me when the CCP learns that lesson as well.
* “Dr Emily Cousens researches vulnerability and gender and teaches at Oxford and LSE.”
(Classical reference in headline.)