IS THERE ANY END TO INSTITUTIONAL RACISM? ASU publishes ‘black male privilege checklist.’
I don’t need some unaccomplished administrative twit lecturing me on my privilege, and neither do black males or, well, any of us anywhere.
Archive for 2020
August 2, 2020
China now has to deal with over 300 F-35’s operating near its northern borders. In the 1990s Chinese support for an aggressive and unpredictable North Korea prompted South Korea to become a major developer, manufacturer and exporter of modern weapons. Now Japan, with a larger population and industrial base than South Korea has followed South Korean in an arms race with China.
It’s the latest StrategyPage Procurement update. Japan is primarily buying the F-35A but has decided to add some F-35Bs (the vertical takeoff and landing variant) to its air fleet. The update includes a look at the implications of that decision.
UPDATE: A very related post – Taiwan orders $620 million worth of missiles and upgrades for its seven Patriot PAC-3 missile batteries.
WELL, SOMEBODY JUST WENT FROM “CRAZED RIGHT-WING MILITIAMAN TRAITOR” TO “DEEP-THINKING VOICE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE” IN A HURRY: Ammon Bundy Comes Out in Support of BLM, Calls to Defund the Police.
TO BE FAIR, IT SOUNDS LIKE IT COULD BE AN AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: Books pulled from library shelves, songs banned…it’s the new normal in Hong Kong.
How could any person who has lost a loved one during the pandemic see this blatant hypocrisy and not be incensed? You had to decide which family member could enter the hospital and be the last to see their father alive. You had to have last rites read over the phone. You could not touch the casket before it’s lowered into the ground. You could not embrace each other as the dirt was shoveled. All the while, the same politicians who lectured you about making sacrifices to stop the spread traveled with impunity, attended large funerals without proper social distancing and avoided quarantines upon their return.
The funerals for Rep. Lewis in Atlanta and George Floyd in Houston — which was attended by Jamie Foxx, Channing Tatum, Rev. Al Sharpton, Ne-Yo, and others — are a reminder of how the elite prioritize their own lives and needs ahead of the rest of us. They don’t just think they are better than you; they act like it, too.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Question asked and answered:
“Unexpectedly,” it’s the latter: DC Mayor Exempts John Lewis Funeral Attendees From City’s Quarantine Restrictions. “Government activity is essential, and the Capitol of the United States is exempt from the Mayor’s Order.”
NAME THAT PARTY, SPECIAL PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1919 EDITION: Nets Hid The Fact That Racist Woodrow Wilson Was a Democrat.
Flashback: Dixiecrats Triumphant — the menacing Mr. Wilson.
I recently took a drive-through COVID-19 test at the University of North Carolina. Everything was well organized and efficient: I was swabbed for 15 uncomfortable seconds and sent home with two pages of instructions on what to do if I were to test positive, and what precautions people living with or tending to COVID-19 patients should take. The instructions included many detailed sections devoted to preventing transmission via surfaces, and also went into great detail about laundry, disinfectants, and the exact proportions of bleach solutions I should use to wipe surfaces, and how.
My otherwise detailed instructions, however, included only a single sentence on “good ventilation”—a sentence with the potential to do some people more harm than good. I was advised to have “good air flow, such as from an air conditioner or an opened window, weather permitting.” But in certain cases, air-conditioning isn’t helpful. Jose-Luiz Jimenez, an air-quality professor at the University of Colorado, told me that some air conditioners can increase the chances of spreading infection in a household. Besides, “weather permitting” made it all seem insignificant, like an afterthought.
While waiting for my results, I checked the latest batch of announcements from companies trying to assure their customers that they were doing everything right. A major U.S. airline informed me how it was diligently sanitizing surfaces inside its planes and in terminals many times a day, without mentioning anything about the effectiveness of air circulation and filtering inside airplane cabins (pretty good, actually). A local business that operates in a somewhat cramped indoor space sent me an email about how it was “keeping clean and staying healthy,” illustrated by 10 bottles of hand sanitizer without a word on ventilation—whether it was opening windows, employing upgraded filters in its HVAC systems, or using portable HEPA filters. It seems baffling that despite mounting evidence of its importance, we are stuck practicing hygiene theater—constantly deep cleaning everything—while not noticing the air we breathe.
How is it that six months into a respiratory pandemic, we still have so little guidance about this all-important variable, the very air we breathe? . . .
Strikingly, in one database of more than 1,200 super-spreader events, just one incident is classified as outdoor transmission, where a single person was infected outdoors by their jogging partner, and only 39 are classified as outdoor/indoor events, which doesn’t mean that being outdoors played a role, but it couldn’t be ruled out. The rest were all indoor events, and many involved dozens or hundreds of people at once. Other research points to the same result: Super-spreader events occur overwhelmingly in indoor environments where there are a lot of people. . . .
There are two key mitigation strategies for countering poor ventilation and virus-laden aerosols indoors: We can dilute viral particles’ presence by exchanging air in the room with air from outside (and thus lowering the dose, which matters for the possibility and the severity of infection) or we can remove viral particles from the air with filters.
Consider schools, perhaps the most fraught topic for millions. Classrooms are places of a lot of talking; children are not going to be perfect at social distancing; and the more people in a room, the more opportunities for aerosols to accumulate if the ventilation is poor. Most of these ventilation issues are addressable, sometimes by free or inexpensive methods, and sometimes by costly investments in infrastructure that should be a national priority.
Last week, I walked around the public elementary school in my neighborhood while thinking about what we could do if we took aerosol transmission more seriously. It’s a single-story building, all the classrooms have windows, some have doors that open directly to the outside, and many have a cement patio right outside. Teaching could move outdoors, at least some of the time, the way it did during the 1918 pandemic. Moreover, even when indoors or during rainy days, opening the doors and windows would greatly improve air circulation inside, especially if classrooms had fans at the windows that pushed air out. . . .
When windows cannot be opened, classrooms could run portable HEPA filters, which are capable of trapping viruses this small, and which sell for as little as a few hundred dollars. Marr advises schools to measure airflow rates in each classroom, upgrade filters in the HVAC system to MERV 13 or higher (these are air filter grades), and aspire to meet or exceed ASHRAE (the professional society that provides HVAC guidance and standards) standards. Jimenez told me that many building-wide air-conditioning systems have a setting for how much air they take in from outside, and that it is usually minimized to be energy-efficient. During a pandemic, saving lives is more important than saving energy, so schools could, when the setting exists, crank it up to dilute the air (Jimenez persuaded his university to do that).
We had an interesting discussion of this at a faculty meeting recently; to my surprise I was not the only one who had heard of Outside Air Factor, which was a big deal in public health before I was born.
Brimley was also the inspiration for “the Brimley/Cocoon Line Calculator,” which notes that “When ‘Cocoon‘ reached theaters on June 21, 1985, Wilford Brimley was 18,530 days old (50 years, 9 months and 6 days),” but because of his grizzled appearance, played a character much older than Brimley’s actual age at the time.
Given how many Hollywood stars are looking surprisingly youthful these days in their 50s, the Brimley/Cocoon Line Calculator can produce some interesting results. None more so arguably, than another of Brimley’s former co-stars. As the New Yorker spotted in 2018, when Tom Cruise, then 31, starred in 1993’s The Firm, “Brimley was fifty-eight years old—plodding, portly, with a gray walrus mustache, his grandfatherly mien in this case turned sinister. He was just two years older than Cruise is now, appearing boundlessly vigorous as the super-agent Ethan Hunt in the latest ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie. Cruise has been very, very famous for the past thirty-five years, and in that time it’s been difficult to reconcile his unchanging appearance with the flipping pages on the calendar.”
The same could also be said of Brimley, but he was typecast in a rather different role, which he performed equally well in numerous movies, TV shows, and commercials.
MENCKEN WEEPS: New York Times Guild mocked for requesting ‘sensitivity reads’ in its publication process.
Or as Tom Cotton, the man who broke the Times tweeted in response, “New @nytimes motto: All the news that’s fit to print and assessed for sensitivity by well-compensated woke censors.”
Related: The New York Times thinks ‘nice white parents’ are the root of all evil.
LISTEN TO THE SCIENCE! LISTEN TO THE SCIENTISTS! RIGHT? VIDEO: CDC head pushes for schools to reopen, says ‘it is in the public health interest.’
IT WAS A SEDITIOUS POLITICAL HIT JOB, BY CORRUPT LEADERS IN THE FBI, THE DOJ, AND ELSEWHERE IN THE GOVERNMENT: New Disclosures Confirm: Trump Himself Was the Target of Obama Administration’s Russia Probe. And it counted on support from a corrupt press, which it got.
OPEN THREAD: Here’s your one chance Fancy, don’t let me down.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In age of coronavirus, mother finds UNC-Chapel Hill didn’t even clean son’s dorm room.
While university administrators across North Carolina have spent weeks preparing to bring students back to their campuses amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, one mother says University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill missed a basic step: cleaning the dormitories.
Amanda Edwards said that, when she walked into the Ram Village 5 building to help her son move in, the filth she saw was a complete disconnect with all of the talk during the pandemic of frequent cleaning and sanitizing surfaces to limit the spread of the virus.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’ They did not clean anything, Edwards said. “You figure you’re going to have to do some cleaning because you want to do what’s right for your kid. But given the current times, I was, like, ‘Wait a minute.’ This is just inconsistent. This makes no sense.”
The filthy floor included a condom wrapper. The common area was even worse, she said.
UNC is a dump.
THE POINT IS THE GRIFT, NOT THE RESULT: The Lincoln Project indulges in fat shaming, color shaming, and the depreciating of masculinity in this tone-deaf attack on Trump.
But they’re standing up for decency, civility, and traditions, you guys. Plus: “So here’s a picture of Rick Wilson. He has liberated you to say anything you want to roast him based on his appearance.” I’m more concerned with his racist cooler.
NOW THEY’RE BURNING BIBLES IN PORTLAND: What does burning Bibles have to do with “protesting” in Portland? Nothing at all, but it does show everything we need to know about the rioters true intention. Not that there was ever any doubt about that.