HMM: Harnessing a forgotten plague: Mathematical models suggest vaccine control of TB in hard hit countries. The coronavirus models haven’t been exactly spectacular.
Archive for 2020
November 3, 2020
ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY. Austria: Terrorist killed in attack was on early release from prison — for trying to join ISIS.
BATTLESWARM BLOG: Special Election Day LinkSwarm.
VITAMIN D UPDATE: Vitamin D levels during pregnancy linked with child IQ. “Vitamin D is a critical nutrient and has many important functions in the body. A mother’s vitamin D supply is passed to her baby in utero and helps regulate processes including brain development. A study published today in The Journal of Nutrition showed that mothers’ vitamin D levels during pregnancy were associated with their children’s IQ, suggesting that higher vitamin D levels in pregnancy may lead to greater childhood IQ scores.”
We’ve seen a drop in IQ scores in recent decades, reversing a long upward trend. I wonder if this doesn’t more or less match an increased reluctance on the part of women to spend time in the sun in recent years, after decades of women trying harder to get a tan? Worthy of further research, anyway.
OUT OF THE BATHTUB, AND INTO THE FRYING PAN: Keith Olbermann calls President Trump a ‘whiny little Kunta Kinte.’
UPDATE: Olbermann deletes the above tweet, but not before LeVar Burton responded to him:
(Updated and bumped.)
VOTERS USUALLY GO FOR THE CANDIDATE HAVING THE MOST FUN: Trump shared a hype video that’s 2 straight minutes of him dancing.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Snopes Rates Biden’s Claim That He Has Best Strategy To Mobilize Trunalimunumaprzure As ‘Mostly True.’
DON’T GET COCKY: The red wave is inbound.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BIDEN RIOTS: It’s not right-wingers who business owners are afraid of on Election Day.
Trump was big on the national stage long before he was president. Why would he go away after the election is over? He’ll still have tens of millions of (probably angry) followers, deep pockets and a huge megaphone.
There has already been some talk of Trump starting his own television network to rival Fox News, and/or his own social media platform — the latter made more plausible by the heavy censorious hands of those running Twitter and Facebook — and I suspect that Trump would regard a 2020 loss as a setback, not a defeat. Grover Cleveland came back to win a second term after losing the White House, Trump might reason. Why not me? He’ll probably hold campaign-style rallies around the country starting right after the election.
Democrats want to get rid of Trump because they think it will get rid of Trump voters. But they’ll still be around no matter what happens in the election, and they have legitimate grievances — lots of them — with the way the country has been run. Likewise, of course, a Trump win won’t get rid of the Angry Left. I’d say that it will just make them angrier, but I think they’ve already gone to 11.
I think that the older political coalitions — like the New Deal coalition, which combined Southern Agrarians with northern near-commies (and sometimes actual commies) — tended to mute ideological hatred. Intraparty battles could be fierce, but it was still all in the family, and party leaders could work a compromise. Now the parties are much more ideological. The funny thing is that many years ago — long before I was born — the American Political Science Association called for more ideologically pure parties. And now that’s what we’ve got. As usual, when you listen to political scientists, the result is disaster.
TYLER O’NEIL: 3 Reasons Joe Biden Is NOT the Candidate of Science.
IN THE MAIL: From Roger Kimball, Who Rules?: Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in the Twenty-First Century.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Supercharge the Election Day Madness.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Is the tension getting to you?
Answer: Then you’ve come to the right place because Insanity Wrap has the numbers that will make you feel sane again.
Instead of the usual hot mess of crazy stories, today’s Insanity Wrap will drill down into each battleground state to give you a feel for the state of the race — and maybe even a small measure of sanity.
Plus a small measure of the usual craziness because we can’t help ourselves.
Shall we begin?
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Vote No on 1984.
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! University offers whites-only space for students to learn how they oppress nonwhites. Nonwhite students get ‘healing’ space instead.
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: Why China’s Communists Would Prefer Biden.
SHY TRUMP VOTERS: Young minority Trump voters share fear of expressing views.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Your No Pants Apocalypse Guide to Election Day 2020. “The one thing that I do know for certain is that people should not pay attention whatsoever to exit polls. They’re garbage. They exist to give brain-dead network news talking heads something to babble about before any real results come in. Don’t get sucked into the madness.”
Ignore the exit polls, and then ignore them some more.
EARLY OPEN THREAD: Talk about the day, all day in this extra open thread. I’m also starting the regular open thread early, around 8 tonight.
HERE COMES THE FATAL THEFT OF PENNSYLVANIA: Issues & Insights says be prepared to see robbery of the Keystone State’s 20 electoral votes to give victory to Biden sometime later this week after a knife-fight set up by the highly partisan Pennsylvania State Supreme Court’s Democratic majority.