WAIT, I THOUGHT IT WAS A DEADLY POISON THAT ONLY THAT DERANGED TODDLER TRUMP BELIEVED IN: UK bulk buys hydroxychloroquine as potential Covid-19 treatment.
Archive for 2020
May 20, 2020
DEAR JOURNALISTS: IF YOU WANT PEOPLE TO STOP THINKING OF YOU AS GARBAGE, STOP BEING GARBAGE:
How it must hurt to have to admit: Jerry Falwell Jr. was right.
No doubt this explains why we’re not reading stories about how the president of Liberty University kept his Lynchburg, Va., campus open while keeping his community safe from Covid-19. The doomsday predicted when Mr. Falwell announced Liberty students would return after spring break never came to pass.
On March 16, three days after that announcement, Mr. Falwell had to abandon his plans for in-person classes when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam banned gatherings of more than 100 people. So Liberty moved its classes online. Thanks to long experience with such instruction—Liberty already had 100,000 online students—the move wasn’t as wrenching as it was for others. Meanwhile, students could still come back to campus if they chose, and about 1,200 of them did.
From the reaction, you would have thought returning to Liberty was a death sentence. An emergency-room physician told the Daily Beast, “If Liberty University reopens, people will die.”
On March 29, the New York Times ran a news story whose original headline read, “Liberty University Brings Back Its Students, and Coronavirus, Too.”
As the Times reported, nearly a dozen Liberty students had come down “with symptoms that suggested Covid-19,” a fact endlessly re-repeated in other news outlets. A snarky Financial Times op-ed citing “Falwell’s hubris” dropped the qualifiers and asserted “twelve students promptly came down with coronavirus,” which was corrected about a week later.
Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote that Mr. Falwell “seems to have created his own personal viral hot spot.” In one of several critical pieces, the Washington Post headlined a story “An authoritarian power structure brought coronavirus to Liberty University.”
Now the university has finished the school year and the students have gone home. So what actually happened?
To start with, only one student tested positive for coronavirus. Liberty says this was a graduate taking an online course who hadn’t been on campus before or after spring break. Four employees either working remotely or from offices off-campus also tested positive. But Mr. Falwell says no infections were traced back to campus. No Liberty student living on campus tested positive, and no staffer stationed on campus tested positive. But press accounts left a different impression.
So far there have been no mea culpas. In fact, now that the story’s had a happy ending, there’s barely been any follow-up at all. Mr. Falwell has company here. Like Mr. Falwell, Gov. Ron DeSantis was pilloried for trying to reopen Florida. Today Politico admits that “DeSantis looks more right than those who criticized the Sunshine State’s coronavirus response” and that the predicted “post-apocalyptic hellscape of coronavirus infection and cadavers stacked like cordwood” hasn’t materialized.
As is true of too much of American life these days, many of the responses are rooted in feelings about Donald Trump.
Trump derangement is real, it’s toxic, and it’s infected nearly all the news media, turning them into terrible people doing a terrible job.
EVERYTHING IS PROCEEDING AS HE HAS FORESEEN: The Politics of Fear. Nobody understands politicians’ power grab during this pandemic better than Robert Higgs, who should have already won the Nobel in economics for his work. In Crisis and Leviathan, he famously demonstrated the “ratchet effect” of government growth, which mostly occurs in spurts during wars, financial panics and other crises, real or imagined. Higgs also identified the underlying psychological cause: the negativity effect, which is the universal tendency of bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly good ones, a cognitive bias that politicians and journalists exploit to foment fear and promote bigger government.
Roy Baumeister and I drew on Higgs’ work in our book on the negativity effect, The Power of Bad, to argue that the greatest problem in politics is what we call the Crisis Crisis — the never-ending series of hyped crises that lead to cures worse than the disease. The pandemic is just the latest and scariest example, in Higgs’ view. “I have an overwhelming feeling,” he told me, “that I am reliving a bad experience I’ve lived through several times before, only this time it’s worse.”
THIS IS TRUE, AND NOTHING NEW: A Pandemic Does Not Suspend the Rule of Law: Courts are beginning to recognize that public health powers, while broad, are not a blank check. The headline isn’t quite right, though: Courts have always recognized that.
AS I UNDERSTAND IT, SWEDEN’S DEATH RATE IS HEAVILY WEIGHTED TOWARD IMMIGRANTS AND THE ELDERLY: Sweden’s death toll unnerves its Nordic neighbours. “Denmark, Finland and Norway are debating whether to maintain travel restrictions on Sweden but ease them for other countries as they nervously eye their Nordic neighbour’s higher coronavirus death toll. Sweden has the highest mortality rate per capita at this stage of the epidemic, according to a Financial Times tracker that uses a seven-day rolling average of new deaths. It has overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium in recent days.”
I LIKE THE CUT OF HER JIB: ‘RIP Fredo’: WH press secretary Kayleigh McEnany dropkicks Chris Cuomo over hydroxychloroquine .
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Biden, amid Reade allegations, hires aide who said candidates should not run if accused of sexual misconduct.
I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Thrash Metal Drummer Awakens from Coronavirus Coma, Doesn’t Think Satan Is That Cool Anymore.
A DEFEAT FOR THE HOUSE IMPEACHMENT CAUCUS: Supreme Court temporarily blocks Mueller grand jury material from being turned over to House. The House Judiciary Committee said it needed the material for its investigations into President Donald Trump.
I think this unending politicized investigation is an abuse of power by the House Judiciary Committee, and they should be removed from office.
SUZANNE VENKER: What Does It Mean To Be Feminine?
FLORIDA WOMAN UPDATE: DeSantis: Florida COVID-19 dashboard designer faces cyber sexual harassment charges.
BIG BROTHER WAS ALWAYS A LEFTIST: Progressive group used phone data to track protesters at anti-lockdown rallies. But as I noted earlier, this shows that the right can now draw on people from a wide area to converge and protest in particular places. It used to be that only the left routinely did that. No wonder “progressive groups” are worried.
ROGER SIMON: Biden’s Ukraine (and China) Problems Will Never Go Away.
I’M SUPPOSED TO BE ON FOX NEWS TONIGHT ABOUT 6:10 PM Eastern, talking about the Chinese coronavirus’s impact on higher education.
WHERE DOES RON DESANTIS GO TO GET HIS APOLOGY?
As the health officials put it, succinctly, “We wanted people out, not in.”
When the state was seeing infections at nursing homes presumably caused by staff, DeSantis deployed what he calls “an expeditionary testing force,” 50 National Guard teams of four guardsmen together with Department of Health personnel that tested staff and residents.
Most facilities haven’t had confirmed cases. “But the ones that have,” he says, “the majority of them have had between one and five infections. So the infections are identified, but then, you’re isolating either the individual or the small cluster before you have an outbreak.”
The state has just deployed a mobile testing lab in an RV that has a rapid test with results in an hour or two. It goes to a community and the staff goes to different long-term-care facilities. “If you’re talking about an asymptomatic carrier, if you can identify that person instead of waiting 48 hours for lab results to come back, I mean, that could be the difference between saving a lot of infections,” according to DeSantis.
The state has also started a sentinel surveillance program for long-term-care facilities, routinely taking representative samples to monitor for flare-ups.
Finally, it has established several COVID-19-only nursing homes, with a couple more in the pipeline. The idea, again, is to get COVID-19-positive residents out of the regular nursing homes to the maximum extent possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXjQn4eGpi8
Earlier: Rebekah Jones’ firing is the COVID clickbait the media dreams of – but it’s all fake.
More on both topics from Ace of Spades: Ron DeSantis Debunks the Leftwing Propaganda Organization’s Latest Conspiracy Theory, That Even Though Florida Seems Safe, That’s Only Because It’s Hiding So Many Bodies It’s Not Funny.
INFLATION AHEAD BUT BIGGER PROBLEM WILL BE MONSTER FED: Yes, Washington’s coronavirus relief spending explosion is likely to cause inflation, but people ought to be more concerned about what the Fed is becoming.
WE LIVE IN A GOLDEN AGE OF CARRY GUNS: First Look: FN 509 Compact Tactical Pistol.
TODAY AT 3:30: EASTERN: Exclusive VIP Gold Live Chat with VodkaPundit, Kruiser, and Managing Editor Paula Bolyard.
There will be cocktails.
FLORIDA WOMAN: Rebekah Jones’ firing is the COVID clickbait the media dreams of – but it’s all fake.
Dozens of media outlets, both in Florida and nationally, published the sensational story of Dr. Rebekah Jones, a state Department of Health employee who was fired by the administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump ally, after – she says – she refused to manipulate data to support the governor’s plan to reopen the state.
But a deeper look at the underlying facts expose a less sensational, yet all-too-common narrative: a media feeding frenzy caused by a deep-seated desire to report on scandal and cover-ups, which Rebekah Jones’ claims delivered – if only they were true.
They are not.
Let’s pick through the individual pieces of wreckage from this crashed-and-burned narrative one by one:
Claim #1: Rebekah Jones was the “architect” of the Florida’s COVID-19 dashboard.
The truth: Jones was more like the drywall hanger of the dashboard rather than the “architect.” The dashboard was built on the same visual mapping tool that Johns Hopkins University made famous at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. In fact, Florida’s tool looks extremely similar. That’s because Johns Hopkins University is not the “architect” of the dashboard, either. The tool is actually built not on any of Florida’s many data servers, but using ready-made modules from a subscription service called ArcGIS. Jones’ job was to load data into those modules and decide how it appeared to visitors.
* * * * * * * *
The media outlets listed above will not issue retractions. They will double down on the idea that DeSantis’s administration is withholding / manipulating / deleting / altering data. That, too is totally false. But mark these words, the embarrassment of touting Rebekah Jones as their coronavirus martyr will quickly fade into the mainstream media memory hole.
Read the whole thing.
IT’S A GOOD IDEA: MTA tests ultraviolet light to kill COVID-19 on trains, buses.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Higher Education At The Covid-19 Crossroads.
The Covid-19 pandemic is placing many universities under extreme budget pressure, owing to the loss of high-margin international students. And, if schools cannot open on campus this fall, many may be forced to discount their tuition to students. Some observers think it likely that many universities will be forced to close, as a result of these pressures.
The longer term picture is not much better. Higher education costs have been rising at an unsustainable rate for decades. Tuition at four year private schools now runs above $40,000 per year, while tuition at public universities runs above $15,000 per year, not including living costs. Public universities were free in the 1960s, and tuition at UC Berkeley ran about $500 per semester as recently as the late 1970s. “Working your way through college” was quite feasible in those days, with a 10 hour per week job and a summer job. No more. The rate of increase has been much higher than inflation, and has even been higher than medical inflation in the US, which is really saying something. The Covid-19 pandemic is merely accelerating a reckoning in higher education, a reckoning that has been coming for quite some time.
I agree.