CORONA VIRUS FATALITY RATE: Worse than the flu, not as bad as Ebola. “A fatality rate of 0.6% would make COVID-19 six times deadlier than influenza, but more data is needed to verify the findings. As WSJ points out, there are notable differences between these estimates. The flu figure does not take asymptomatic cases into account. If it did, the flu fatality rate would be even lower than 0.1%.”
Archive for 2020
July 23, 2020
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Twitter says it’s looking at subscription options as ad revenue drops sharply. They’d have to pay me to come back. And handsomely. But honestly, nothing would do more to improve our politics and our public discourse than the demise of Twitter, which is downright toxic.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Washington to use ‘Washington Football Team’ name for 2020.
Found via Jim Geraghty, who tweets, “This is an effort to leave the Babylon Bee speechless.”
It’s also a gag from the earlier, funnier days of Saturday Night Live come to life. When former NBA superstar Bill Russell hosted in 1979, one sketch was a parody of CBS’s The White Shadow titled (of course) “The Black Shadow,” in which “John Davidson High School’s” lily-white basketball team needed Russell’s coaching skills to get them over the top during the big game against their cross-town rivals, “The Visitors.”
Since, as Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, “The NFL Is On The Brink,” and cancel culture will eventually come for every NFL team name, will we reach a point where every game will be a matchup of the hometown “Football Team” against the dreaded “[insert away-team’s city here] Visitors?”
EVERYONE KNOWS YOU NEVER GO FULL SERGEANT SCHULTZ: Portland Mayor Says ‘I Saw Nothing That Provoked’ Use of Tear Gas … as Rioters Set Courthouse on Fire.
THE PHOTO IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WOULD EXPECT: Starbucks barista arrested for spitting in police officers’ beverages.
ROGER SIMON: Et Tu, Nashville–How ‘Liberal’ Democrats Ruin American Cities.
Or as Iowahawk would say:
PORTLAND MAYOR CALLED OUT FOR FAKING TEAR-GAS INCIDENT: Uh-oh, the Rose City’s most righteous liberal may not be.
YEAR OF THE JACKPOT: Mathematician predicted violent upheaval in 2020 all the way back in 2012. “In his 2012 article, published in the Journal of Peace Research, he analyzed political violence, including riots, lynchings and terrorism, in the United States between 1780 and 2010. He found two patterns: First, a long trend of peace followed by rising violence that seems to span about 200 or 300 years, marked in this case by relative peace in the early 1800s, major upheaval in the mid- to late-1800s, and then peace again in the mid-1900s. Superimposed upon this long-term curve were oscillations that seemed to repeat approximately every 50 years. Violence peaked around 1870, 1920 and 1970. Extrapolate another 50 years and you land right smack on 2020.”
No, his name isn’t Potiphar Breen.
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THIS KIND OF THING NEVER HAPPENS: Ozzie Myers, Corrupt Former ‘Abscam’ Congressman, Busted for Vote Fraud.
HOT OFF THE PRESS! On Tuesday, I testified (by phone) before the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. My advice to them was essentially, “don’t do anything crazy during this Summer of Irrationality.”
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What’s the Best 38 Special Ammo for Self-Defense?
FLASHBACK: 1988: An Open Letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci. “It doesn’t take a genius to set up a nationwide network of testing sites, commence a small number of moderately sized treatment efficacy tests on a population desperate to participate in them, import any and all interesting drugs (now numbering approximately 110) from around the world for inclusion in these tests at these sites, and swiftly get into circulation anything that remotely passes muster. Yet, after three years, you have established only a system of waste, chaos, and uselessness. . . . Meanwhile, drugs we have been begging that you test remain untested. The list of promising untested drugs is now so endless and the pipeline so clogged with NIH and FDA bureaucratic lies that there is no Roto-Rooter service in All God’s Christendom that will ever muck it out.”
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Antifa Arsonist’s Sublime Self-Own, Plus America Cancels Cancel Culture. “In which a peaceful protestor peacefully sets himself on fire while attempting to peacefully burn down a courthouse with peace in his peaceful little heart.”
I WEAR AN N95 MASK WHEN I CARE, AND A DISPOSABLE SURGICAL MASK WHEN I’M JUST BEING POLITE: The Best And Worst Face Masks For COVID-19, Ranked by Their Level of Protection. I had a couple of boxes of each stockpiled from the H1N1 days.
WHITE PEOPLE RUIN EVERYTHING, AMIRITE? SF Mayor London Breed shreds white progressives for projecting beliefs onto city’s Black residents. “Breed stated that while she’s happy more white Americans are now supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement — recent polling shows upwards of 60% of white Americans support the protests and calls for police reform — she has ‘a real problem with the takeover of the movement by white people.'”
Well, she needs to understand that the main point of left politics in America is to allow certain white people to feel superior to other white people.
Of course, as usual, the personal is political: “Breed’s proposal to reallocate some funding was met with pushback from some white progressives who accused her of not going far enough. This prompted protests at Breed’s home, protests she was not happy about.”
Quoth the Mayor:
“The people who came out to my home last time, they were all white and wearing masks and walking with these ‘firework sticks’ down the street chanting ‘Black Lives Matter!'” she said. “But then they get to my house and start shooting these fireworks off and aiming them at my window and banging on the gate and calling me names to come outside. It was like, what? In the projects, when you come to somebody’s house, you are coming to get your butt beat. Because I will come out and throw some grits on you if you don’t back up!”
Sounds like she’s siding with the McCloskeys here. . . .
WEIRD, BECAUSE CALIFORNIA LOCKED DOWN HARD AND LONG, AND ALL THE PRESS HAS BEEN ABOUT HOW AWFUL THINGS ARE IN FLORIDA: Gov. Newsom: California Sets Single-Day Record With Nearly 13,000 New COVID-19 Cases.
At this point, I suspect we’re pretty much past any containment, and this will just burn through until it burns out, like every other pandemic in human history. It may be that once the Chinese allowed international flights out of Wuhan to continue the fuse was already lit.