LIVING UP TO THE STEREOTYPE: On Facebook yesterday, my mayor got a multi, multi-paragraph rant from a woman upset about all sorts of people and places that weren’t social distancing to her satisfaction. The woman’s name was actually Karen.
Archive for 2020
May 3, 2020
BOSTON BIOGEN CONFERENCE WAS MAJOR EARLY U.S. CORONAVIRUS EVENT, CDC SAYS: “‘During the last week of February, several large events led to further spread of the disease. These included … an international professional conference held in Boston, Massachusetts, with approximately 175 attendees,’ wrote Dr. Anne Schuchat, second in command at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in an article the CDC posted Friday. She is referring to the Feb. 26-27 conference by the biotech company Biogen, where more than 100 of the 175 attendees were infected with the novel coronavirus, fueling the Massachusetts outbreak that has now spiraled into more than 66,000 cases.”
SUZANNE VENKER: America is awash in overmothered men. “Growing up fatherless, or with a father a son rarely sees due to divorce or workaholism (yes, that’s a thing), almost invariably stunts a boy’s growth. The end result is almost always too much mother, which means boys will absorb all so much femininity and none of the masculinity they need. Ergo, he will spend years trying to figure out what it means to be a man. It’s a tough subject, and thus taboo. But at some point, we will have to answer why there are so few strong, grounded, purposeful men among us when they used to be a dime a dozen. Video games have nothing to do with it.”
LUXURY BELIEFS: Organic Food Alarmism Looks Pretty Stupid During A Global Pandemic.
VERY BAD NEWS: John Leo has decided to retire his wonderful Minding the Campus website. John Rosenberg reports.
HARSH, BUT FAIR.
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH BRETT KAVANAUGH: Ouchies! Jim Treacher takes CNN’s Kirsten Powers apart for deleting every single one of her anti-Kavanaugh tweets in brutal thread.
Here is an assortment of Powers’ anti-Kavanaugh tweets.
Earlier: Don’t Let The Washington Post Get Away With Memory-Holing Its Anti-Kavanaugh Campaign.
KNOXVILLE FLASHBACK: THE SPANISH FLU: HOW 1918 WAS THE SAME, BUT VERY DIFFERENT. “Knoxville had once been considered an especially dense city, even by standards of the day. The city had just begun suburbanizing, as symbolized by its recent annexations. But numbers from the era indicate that people who lived in Knoxville proper lived much closer together than we do today, with a density more than twice of what we’re used to. That density is what made the city seem fun, in descriptions from the era. Even in prohibition, the theaters and poolhalls and dancehalls and cafes, all of them within walking distance of thousands of residents, made Knoxville an exciting place to be, at almost every hour of the day. But density also helped the virus spread. Later state records suggest that relatively few country people got sick. . . . By Oct. 21, it was remarked: downtown looked like a ‘ghost town.’ That phrase seems inevitable today, already used frequently to describe downtown in a strange month in 2020. It’s surprising to see it in 1918, when the term was uncommon. According to the Encyclopedia of American Urban History, the phrase ‘ghost town’ became popular in the mid-1920s. Either the unnamed reporter made it up or borrowed it from a recent novel or magazine article about the Wild West.”
Density kills.
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Pompeo Says ‘Enormous Evidence’ Connects Virus to Wuhan Lab.
I mean, just based on how guilty the Chinese are acting. . . .
THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST DANCE: Chicago Bulls Documentary offers Double Escapism.
The end of History was short-lived. After 9/11, Krauthammer took to calling the 1990s not an end but a “holiday from history.” What a pleasant holiday it was. And how large a part Michael Jordan played in it. I can’t be the only child of the Reagan years for whom memories of Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers, and H. Ross Perot are intermixed with recollections of Bulls Starter Jackets, pairs of Air Jordan sneakers, All-Star Weekend, and NBA Inside Stuff with Ahmad Rashad on Saturday mornings. To watch The Last Dance is to revisit America before the fall of the World Trade Center, before Afghanistan and Iraq, before the global financial crisis, Syria, Ukraine, and the rise of China. It was a stronger, more self-confident place. And a naive and superficial one.
Read the whole thing.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Cancel Culture Comes For Michael Moore, Christian Toto writes.
Socialist filmmaker Michael Moore is used to fawning media coverage. It started when he unveiled his debut documentary “Roger and Me” and never let up – despite creating a ream of fact-challenged films, including the abominable 2018 “documentary” “Fahrenheit 11/9.”
Until now.
Moore’s newest project, “Planet of the Humans,” is a dire look at climate change and the so-called heroes trying to save the planet.
Falling under the banner is Al Gore, considered an enviro-prophet second only to Greta Thunberg by most global warming advocates.
Religions get quite cross when their central tenets are called into question.
A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK WRITES:
For an array of major institutions throughout American civic life, there will be two camps: the smaller will be the ones who decoupled themselves from the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party as soon as possible; and the larger will be those who, as events unfold, will wish they had. The former will feature an outsized number of manufacturing and wares firms with supply-chain and logistical concerns. The latter will disproportionately feature American institutions of higher education, for reasons varying from the material (addiction to PRC-student money and PRC-adjacent funding) to the ideological (affinity for Communism, progressive antipathy toward the United States).
In the middle will be entertainment: the NBA and the left-wing athleisure class confronted with the reality that America is in fact the greater good; and Hollywood, stripped of its dreams of one billion theatergoers. Their US-side audiences, always their most lucrative core and also always well to their right, will pull them back. With the new Top Gun delayed to Christmas, there’s still time to get that Taiwanese flag back on Maverick’s jacket.
Everyone is going to have to choose.
Indeed.
WHADDAYA IN FOR, PARTNER? Texas park ranger pushed into lake while telling crowd to social distance (video). “The suspect, Brandon Hicks, 25, has been apprehended, and faces a charge of attempted assault on a public servant.”
DATING ABUSE: Digital Dating Abuse: Many Teens, More Often Boys, Are Being Harassed Online By A Partner.
Defined as using technology to repeatedly harass a love interest, partner, or crush in order to coerce, control, intimidate, threaten, or just plain old annoy, digital dating abuse has developed into a disturbingly common phenomenon. The research team analyzed over 2,200 U.S. middle and high school students, and 28.1% admitted they had been subjected to a form of online dating abuse over the past year.
Perhaps surprisingly, the study also noted that boys (32.3%) appear to be experiencing this type of abuse more often than girls (23.6%). Across all variations, boys were more likely to have experienced a form of digital dating abuse. In fact, boys were also more likely to have experienced physical aggression from their partner. Besides these gender fluctuations, researchers didn’t find any significant demographic differences regarding rate of digital abuse among varying races, ages, or sexual orientations.
Plus: “Girls may use more violence on their boyfriends to try to solve their relational problems, while boys may try to constrain their aggressive impulses when trying to negotiate discord with their girlfriends.”
ROGER KIMBALL: Coronavirus, Flynn, and Epicureanism.
Protecting borders is the thing Trump cares about most. It is also the most time-tested and effective way of fighting epidemics. Trump’s decision to limit the inflow of foreigners from China in January, as soon as news emerged from Wuhan, turns out to have been the earliest constructive step any leader took in stemming the virus. It bought time. In January, one would have expected the virus to hit the US before it hit Europe.
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This viruses-don’t-respect-borders business is a perfect globalist slogan. It conveys absolutely nothing but aggressively enough so as to cow others into swallowing any inclination to stand up and disagree with you. It is what is called in zoology ‘display’.
But in fact, the scientist is wrong. This virus happens to travel on people. If people can be made to respect borders, viruses will ‘respect’ them too, in the sense that they will not cross them. If this is true of households, then it is true of nations.
Read the whole thing.
FROM MY COLLEAGUE BRADLEY AREHEART: Organizational Justice and Antidiscrimination.
SUPER GAFFE-O-MATIC 760,000: Yikes: Biden Makes Huge Gaffe about the Number of People Dead from the Wuhan Coronavirus. “While he was speaking about the Wuhan coronavirus to Joe Scarborough, he told an unbelievable whopper, claiming that over 600,000 Americans had died from the virus and implying most were nurses and doctors. Only slightly off at the time…by about 540,000. The alleged number was about 60,000. The problem was he didn’t even realize it and he said it more than once.”
HAWAII TRAVEL PARADISE IS DESERTED, WITH RECOVERY FURTHER OFF:
Tourism makes up one-fifth of Hawaii’s gross domestic product, with more than 10 million visitors last year — more than six times the size of the local population. That’s all but vanished now. In the week ended April 25, spending by visitors dropped 96% compared with the same period last year, according to the U.S. Travel Association.
“Hawaii is so tourism-dependent that it stands to reason it will be disproportionately affected by a recession that dampens consumer spending on vacations and public health concerns about travel,” said Joseph Parilla, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
Hawaii’s distant location may help, to an extent, shield it from the pandemic that’s ravaging some parts of the mainland. In Hawaii, the number of new cases has dwindled to five on April 30, compared with a peak of 31 on March 17, according to the state’s Department of Health. The state had 618 cases in total, and 16 deaths.
Even as Hawaii’s cases fall, Governor David Ige extended the state-at-home order through the end of May and said visitors need to quarantine for 14 days.
As America’s Newspaper of Record reported: Governor Unveils Innovative 37-Step Plan To Reopen State Over The Next 10 Years.