“WOKE” PUBLIC HEALTH: To Mitigate Racial Inequity, the CDC Wants To Vaccinate Essential Workers Before the Elderly: Vaccinating by age would save many more lives.
Obviously, saving lives isn’t the priority here.
Archive for 2020
December 20, 2020
OPEN THREAD: Be nice.
LAUNCHING A FAULTY SPACECRAFT AND RELYING ON THE BACKUPS TO MAKE IT RIGHT: NASA to skip repair of Orion electronics unit.
HUMAN GARBAGE: LA DA George Gascon slams victim’s family as they protest sentencing plan.
Los Angeles’ controversial new district attorney told the family of a murder victim they should “keep their mouth shut” — unwittingly, he later said — as they protested his office’s kid-gloves handling of the accused killers.
“It’s unfortunate that some people do not have enough education to keep their mouth shut for a moment so we can talk,” George Gascon said in a video obtained by FOX 11 Los Angeles.
“My son can never speak again because he was murdered,” shouts a woman identified as the mother of Joshua Rodriguez, who was kidnapped and killed in 2015.
“My son matters!” she screamed as Gascon walked away. “And you’re going to do nothing about it!”
Gascon — who was elected last month promising a sweeping left-wing overhaul of the criminal justice system — was speaking to the press in front of a Pomona courthouse Friday when he was confronted by the family about his intention to drop the punishment sought against Rodriguez’s killers, eliminating the chance they could receive no-parole life sentences.
Why does he hate Hispanic victims and their families? Also, why does he look like a Disney villain?
LOCKDOWN’S LEGACY: U.S. drug overdose deaths reach record highs.
THIS IS SO WEIRD SINCE THEY HAVE NEAR-UNIVERSAL MASKING AND EXTENSIVE LOCKDOWNS: California Hospitals Struggling as Coronavirus Cases Explode.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Are There Anti-Semitic Tropes in Obama’s Memoir?
“If anti-Semitism involves using the label ‘Jew’ to evoke, emphasize or explain an interrelated complex of unattractive attributes, Obama’s description of Sarkozy is unquestionably anti-Semitic,” Ergas contends, before noting that “not one of the gushing reviews” from left-wing papers like the New York Times or the Washington Post, “considered Obama’s statement even worth mentioning.”
He makes a valid point. The political left assumes a moral high ground on diversity, so ready to be offended at words so innocent they have to be dubbed “micro-aggressions” so they can virtue-signal their own “anti-racist” bonafides.
In fairness, Obama’s casual anti-Semitism during his eight years at the White House makes his unflattering depiction of Sarkozy seem trivial by comparison, but imagine if Donald Trump wrote such a thing.
As PJM’s Matt Margolis noted in an article last year: The Democratic Party’s Anti-Semitism Problem Is Obama’s Legacy.
Prior to being elected president of the United States, Obama spent twenty years in the congregation of Jeremiah Wright. Wright’s anti-American and anti-Semitic remarks became a liability for Obama during the 2008 election but didn’t matter enough to the people who voted for him. Obama may have been forced to quit his church and distance himself from Wright, but that didn’t change who Obama was at heart—and it presented itself once he showed up to the White House.
And the Corbynization of the Democratic Party continues apace: Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock defended anti-Semitic pastor Jeremiah Wright.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Dalton Gang Shoots Itself.
Here is a link to the original text of the ransom note, which most of the Dalton faculty have signed. As Scott Johnston, who broke the news on his blog, comments:
The demands for additional staffers alone would add millions of dollars to Dalton’s annual budget. Siphoning off 50% of donations would dry up funding. Eliminating AP classes (referred to as “leveled courses”) would destroy college admissions. It’s not an exaggeration to say these demands, if implemented, would destroy Dalton altogether. According to insiders, much damage has already been done.
But if they don’t agree to the demands, what will happen? Don’t get me wrong, the protesters cannot be allowed to succeed. Yet if they don’t, knowing how insane progressives are on these issues, will they choose to destroy the school? After all, if Dalton is as racist as they say, how can they let it continue forming racist graduates to go out into the world and spread Evil?
Insert Kissinger joke on the Iran-Iraq War here.
BRUTAL, FACTUAL HONESTY ABOUT HOMELESSNESS: Discovery Institute Research Fellow Christopher Rufo takes a little more than 12 minutes in a compelling vidumentary to dissect why the homelessness problem keeps getting worse even as officials spend increasing billions of tax dollars on illusory solutions, then points to the actual causes and how to make measurable progress. Genuine compassion begins with facing reality.
SQUAD OWN GOALS: ‘Squad’ Member Calls Perdue And Loeffler The ‘Bonnie And Clyde Of Corruption.’
Rep. Ayanna Pressley told Georgians to vote for Democrats in the special runoff election and blasted Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Pressley, a Massachusetts member of the “Squad” that includes Democratic lawmakers such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, appeared on MSNBC’s The ReidOut on Friday evening, in which she discussed the Jan. 5 contest.
“Georgia, do your thing. I know we’re asking a lot from Georgia, but do your thing, Georgia. Do what you do. All eyes are on Georgia,” she said.
“Mitch McConnell, Loeffler, Perdue — they are the Bonnie and Clyde of corruption. They are all the same,” she continued. “We need to regain control of the Senate. Georgia, do what you do.”
Does Pressley know that her fellow leftists consider Bonnie and Clyde (thanks in large part to the Warren Beatty movie) to be populist good guys?
INDUSTRY EXPANSION: Wilson Combat Expands Manufacturing, Adds Jobs.
JONAH GOLDBERG: Morality as a Foreign Language.
The New York Times has a big, mostly predictable story on the fall of Jeffrey Toobin. The first thing of note (or the fourth if you count the above) is the headline:
The Undoing of Jeffrey Toobin
How a leading man of legal journalism lost his sweetest gig.
The piece sets this up as some kind of mystery, even though just about everyone who has heard of this story knows how he lost the gig. (Again, I don’t want to offend anybody, so I’ll avoid clinical descriptions. During an online Zoom meeting, he let his mouse out of the house and proceeded to give it a hand.)
In other words, the big reveal of this journalistic whodunnit was his big reveal to his colleagues. (I mean “big reveal” in the literary, and not necessarily the anatomical sense.) The resolution of “How a leading man of legal journalism lost his sweetest gig” was known to the reader from the outset.
Let me explain this in a weird way: Sometimes certain things are explanations in and of themselves, without need of further commentary. For instance, one of my best friends in college was known around campus as one of the nicest people you’d ever meet. One day, a mutual friend who went to high school with him, said “Yeah, Andy’s a very decent guy, but you know his brother’s even nicer.”
I said, “Come on. How could anyone be nicer than Andy?” The guy paused for a second and then said, “His brother was a hugger at the Special Olympics.” He literally waited at the finish line and hugged every kid after they finished.
“Oh. Got it.” I replied.
Or here’s another story. On a business trip in India, my Dad had dinner with a major mogul in Bollywood. The multimillionaire said to my Dad, “Sid, I love your country. America is wonderful. But you can’t really be rich there.”
My Dad said something like, “What are you talking about? We have the richest people in the world in America.”
The mogul paused for a moment, and then said, “Let me put it this way: I have never tied my own shoes.”
“Ah, I see,” my Dad replied.
Now, imagine I was out of the loop and asked someone why Jeffrey Toobin lost his gig at The New Yorker and the answer was, “He pleasured himself on a Zoom call in front of his colleagues and boss.” I might have a lot of questions, but “Why was he fired?” really wouldn’t be one.
Apparently, that just shows I’m ensconced in a bourgeois, Judeo-Christian mindset.
Which for a very long time, is not something one could accuse most Timesmen of. Read the whole thing.
CREDENTIALED, BUT NOT EDUCATED: Jill Biden: I Worked Really Hard on My Misspelled, Mathematically-Incorrect, Dissertation. Math is hard: “Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American; and the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens.”
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Ryan Kaji, age 9, earns $29.5m as this year’s highest-paid YouTuber.
NOT BACKING DOWN:
Story here. “The six dimensions of voting irregularities in the report include: outright voter fraud, ballot mishandling, contestable process fouls, equal protection clause violations, voting machine irregularities, and significant statistical anomalies. All six of those voting issues were present in at least two key states, according to the report, and a total of six battleground states experienced multiple examples of the other dimensions.”
Lots of people think the election was stolen. Democrats and the news media — but I repeat myself — are trying to portray this as a fringe view, but it’s anything but.
DO NOT TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOLE: Zoom Executive Based in China Spied on Dissidents at the Behest of the Chinese Communist Party.
Related: The useful idiots of TikTok.
MELISSA MACKENZIE: BLUE DRESS PROOF. What it takes to get the media to believe a Democrat did wrong.
For a damaging story about a Democrat to be true, DNA must be found on a blue dress. There must be Blue Dress Proof™. It’s not enough to have a witness and a victim. It’s not enough to have a computer, a cache of validated emails, thousands of affadavits signed under the threat of perjury. There must be actual DNA, videotaped evidence. If the bad guy is a Democrat, there must be Blue Dress Proof.
For a damaging story about a Republican to be true, nothing has to be true at all. Third-hand hearsay about hookers and pee, a smile on a face, or a sarcastic tweet or phrase taken out of context can make even the most absurd conclusion be portrayed as fact and conveyed as truth in perpetuity. If the bad guy is a Republican, no proof is needed.
Read the whole thing.