HMM: Ridgecrest temblors increase chance of San Andreas earthquake. Frankly, it would probably do less damage than Newsom and Garcetti have already done.
Archive for 2020
July 14, 2020
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Has Democratic Party’s Far Left Hijacked Joe Biden’s Presidential Campaign?
PRESIDENT TRUMP SHOULD ANNOUNCE THAT HE’S ORDERING THE CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION AT THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TO INVESTIGATE THE NEW YORK TIMES. From Bari Weiss’s scorching resignation letter:
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.
Sounds like systemic racism and sexism to me. And DOJ has certainly launched investigations over less.
DETROIT: Video confirms cops aren’t always wrong. “Detroit Police Chief James Craig wisely released the bodycam recording showing a man identified as Littleton firing a handgun point blank at an officer who was attempting to arrest a suspect in a triple homicide. It didn’t stop protesters from trying to fit this shooting into the George Floyd mold, but it did raise important questions about whether the Black Lives Matter movement is really after justice, or simply chaos.”
“CANCEL GHOULS” IS A GOOD TERM: “I don’t even know what the cancel ghouls even say that he did wrong. I just assume they’re crying wolf.”
And that’s a good assumption. The cancel ghouls are basically garbage people.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON PROTESTS AND THE LEFT: Peak Jacobinism?
The Jacobin Left is just now beginning to get edgy.
A few of its appeasers and abettors are becoming embarrassed by some of the outright racists and nihilists of BLM and the Maoists of Antifa — and their wannabe hangers-on who troll the Internet hoping to scalp some minor celebrity.
The woke rich too are worried over talk about substantial wealth, capital-gains, and income taxes, even though they have the resources to navigate around the legislation from their wink-and-nod brethren. Soon, even Hunter Biden and the Clintons could be checking in with their legal teams to see how much it will cost them to get around the Squad’s new tax plan.
The lines are thinning a bit for the guillotine. And the guillotiners are starting to panic as they glimpse faces of a restless mob always starved for something to top last night’s torching. Finally, even looters and arsonists get tired of doing the same old, same old each night. They get bored with the puerile bullhorn chants, the on-spec spray-paint defacement, and the petite fascists among them who hog the megaphones. For the lazy and bored, statue toppling — all of those ropes, those icky pry bars, those heavy sledgehammers, and so much pulling — becomes hard work, especially as the police, camera crews, and fisticuffs thin out on the ground. And the easy bronze and stone prey are now mostly rubble. Now it’s either the big, tough stuff like Mount Rushmore or the crazy targets like Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
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The NFL pulled a Joe Biden VP trick and prematurely promised to play the “black national anthem” at a few games so that all can stand in homage in racial solidarity and then all kneel in disrespect for the subsequent ecumenical national anthem.
Players can wear political insignia to remind incorrect viewers at home about how they are to think correctly. Will extra points be given for great passes and catches by the most woke?
NFL owners can’t yet fathom how they have conjured up a brilliant new way of destroying a 100-year heritage and an inherited huge audience. Is the message of the most non-diverse players to their most diverse fans now to be: “We don’t like your racist country and won’t stand for your toxic anthem, but you owe us to stay tuned for the commercial ads and to come out to the stadium to pay oppressed multimillionaires like us”?
Read the whole thing.
Incidentally, the NFL is now also memory holing the work of an American Indian artist: Wokism Erases Native American Who Designed the Redskins Logo.
CLASSIC TRACKS: LED ZEPPELIN’S ‘KASHMIR:’ Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ became a band-defining track, but it started life in an Airstream trailer known as the Ronnie Lane Mobile Studio.
WHEN YOU CAN’T TRUST THE NUMBERS: Hospitals confirm mistakes in Florida’s COVID-19 report.
The Florida Department of Health released its daily coronavirus testing report showing a statewide positivity rate of 11 percent, but FOX 35 News investigated and quickly noticed some shocking positivity rates.
Countless labs have reported a 100 percent positivity rate, which means every single person tested was positive. Other labs had very high positivity rates. FOX 35 found that testing sites like Centra Care reported that 83 people were tested and all tested positive. Then, NCF Diagnostics in Alachua reported 88 percent of tests were positive.
How could that be? FOX 35 News investigated these astronomical numbers, contacting every local location mentioned in the report.
The report showed that Orlando Health had a 98 percent positivity rate. However, when FOX 35 News contacted the hospital, they confirmed errors in the report. Orlando Health’s positivity rate is only 9.4 percent, not 98 percent as in the report.
The report also showed that the Orlando Veteran’s Medical Center had a positivity rate of 76 percent. A spokesperson for the VA told FOX 35 News on Tuesday that this does not reflect their numbers and that the positivity rate for the center is actually 6 percent.
How does this happen?
EVERYONE’S TRANSGENDER-AWARENESS WORKSHOP ATTENDANCE IS UP TO DATE, THOUGH: A friend on Facebook writes:
From the Seventh Fleet accidents — which cost sailors’ lives — to the USS Theodore Roosevelt leadership fracas, to the slow-rolling LCS debacle, to the pierside loss of the USS Bonhomme Richard, it could not be more obvious that the United States Navy requires a top to bottom reorganization and reassessment. Yet who will make it so? In an organizational culture where it’s nearly impossible to suffer consequences past O-6, where is the imperative to change? How do you impose reform in the service of warfighting when the top-level strategic orientation is toward money and acquisition?
Someone needs to start cleaning out admirals before their due dates — and imposing an absolute prohibition on their post-service migration to industry, consulting, and lobbying. That would be a good start.
Our most important service now has got to refocus on the only thing that really matters: war at sea.
Yes. President Trump needs to do this, but he’s already faced near-revolt from the admirals. The real problem is that the people running the Navy are themselves members of our execrable ruling class, which always and everywhere rewards posturing for one’s peers over doing one’s job.
YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: The World Turned Right Side Up. “At this point, if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were to get on Twitter today to announce that she was actually a chihuahua named Carlos, Insanity Wrap posits that it would be a step up on the 2020 Sanity Scale.”
BARI WEISS RESIGNS FROM NEW YORK TIMES, ALLEGING THE PAPER IS RIFE WITH GROUPTHINK, SELF-CENSORSHIP, AND AN ANTISEMITIC HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT: Her resignation letter is something… Weiss is only conservative by Upper West Side standards, but her letter validates what a lot of people on the right have surmised goes on at the Times.
INDIA: Biocon’s Itolizumab approved for COVID-19 treatment: All you need to know. “The company has received approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) to market Itolizumab injection 25mg/5mL solution for emergency use in India for the treatment of cytokine release syndrome in moderate to severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) due to COVID-19. Biocon says Itolizumab is the first novel biologic therapy to be approved anywhere in the world for treating patients with such complications.”
CANCEL CULTURE CLAIMS ANOTHER SCALP: Bari Weiss Is Leaving the New York Times.
A controversial figure inside and outside the paper, Weiss leaves in the wake of what she recently described as a civil war at the Times between “(mostly young) wokes” and “(mostly 40+) liberals.” That war reached its apex when Opinion head James Bennet, who had been widely tipped as a potential replacement for top Times editor Dean Baquet, left the paper after publishing an op-ed in which Senator Tom Cotton called for the use of the military force against protestors.
In a 2018, review of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind, Quillette contributor Matthew Lesh asked, “Is Safetyism Destroying a Generation?”
Yes, and they’re now collecting plenty of scalps along the way, including those who aren’t true believers. This is what Weiss observed during the Times’ meltdown over Cotton’s op-ed:
Flash-forward to today; here’s her resignation letter. Exit quote: “But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else. Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”
As former newspaper man Rod Dreher writes, “Every now and then, a young person will ask me what advice I have for someone who is thinking about becoming a journalist. My advice: don’t do it. If you are an honest person — whether you’re liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between — you are going to live in constant fear of inadvertently causing a job-ending offense. You will end up a nervous wreck, or you will end up as a conformist drone, or you will end up jobless.”
Or all three.
All is happening in accordance with the prophecy:
MY LATEST FOR THE PJMEDIA MOTHERSHIP: Democrats Are Running a Massive Protection Racket in 2020, Not a Campaign. “The national party is a protection racket so big and so vicious it would fill Tony Soprano’s dark little heart with envy.”
This one is for our VIP members, so if you’ve been thinking of joining, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.
ROGER SIMON: Our Educational System Makes U.S. Land of Useful Idiots.
THE HEADLINE: Three Arizona teachers who shared a classroom got coronavirus. One of them died.
Six paragraphs down: “She was prone to sinus infections, and also had asthma, diabetes and lupus.”
HMM: Immunity to covid-19 could disappear in months, a new study suggests. “Researchers at King’s College London repeatedly tested 96 patients and health-care workers at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust for antibodies between March and June.”
That’s an awfully small set of patients to study.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Given the major role apparently played by T-cell memory in coronavirus immunity, I’m not sure the antibody tests mean as much as they’re suggesting here.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Change All the Names, Nuke All the Statues—Grievance Wusses Will Still Be Whining. “Back in the Occupy days, I kept saying and writing that the rage was the endgame for them. It’s basically the same now. They keep saying they want change, and I don’t doubt that they would like to affect some political change here and there but that won’t make them any less angry. There is nothing that will make them less angry simply because angry is what they want to be.”