VOTING IS SAFER THAN GROCERY SHOPPING: Wisconsin saw no coronavirus infection-rate spike after April 7 election, study says.
Archive for 2020
April 25, 2020
PANDEMIC FALLOUT: Got this just now from a millennial relation who was a Bernie Sanders supporter: “At this point, even I’m skeptical of anything recommended by a government.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, SUBVERSION EDITION: Coronavirus isn’t the only Chinese infiltration menacing the U.S.: College campuses are the target.
WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE THEY WERE SCAMS WE CAN NO LONGER AFFORD: Covid-19 Is Pulling the Plug on Clean Energy Jobs: A new analysis warns that up to 500,000 jobs in the renewable energy industry will be wiped out by June, including ones in solar power, biofuels, and electric cars.
TELEWORK: The Office As We Knew It Isn’t Coming Back Anytime Soon. Maybe It’s Changed Forever. I think it’s a long-term hit for commercial real-estate. Some people will like this change and some won’t. Employers will like basically dumping a lot of costs — office rent, utilities, Internet service, printer toner, etc. — off on employees.
TRAPPED IN THE MOBIUS LOOP: “Out of Pandemic Crisis, What Could a New New Deal Look Like?,” the New York Times asks. Didn’t we already have a “New New Deal,” in 2009 (and in 1964)?
MINNEAPOLIS: MUSLIM CALL TO PRAYER BLASTED OVER LOUDSPEAKERS FIVE TIMES A DAY IN U.S. FIRST. “The area of Minneapolis blasting the call to prayer lies in the district of controversial Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar.”
THE TIMES’ BRET STEPHENS IS ANGERING LOTS OF NEW YORKERS RIGHT NOW: America Shouldn’t Have to Play by New York Rules.
I write this from New York, so it’s an argument against my personal interest. But I don’t see why people living in a Nashville suburb should not be allowed to return to their jobs because people like me choose to live, travel and work in urban sardine cans.
Gina Raimondo, the Rhode Island governor, was on to something when, a few weeks ago, she wanted to quarantine drivers arriving from New York. The rest of America needs to get back to life. We New Yorkers prefer our own company, anyway.
Keep that last line in mind the next time a Manhattan leftist runs a column along the lines of the April 3rd screed by Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick: “From 9/11 to COVID-19. The last time New York was the center of a catastrophe, America rallied behind it. The nation’s reaction to its coronavirus outbreak is a different story.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Harvard University is no Shake Shack.
Harvard could have had a Shake Shack moment.
But it took President Trump to pry one out of them.
“Harvard should pay that money back,” Trump said Tuesday during a coronavirus press briefing. “This isn’t meant for one of the richest institutions, far beyond schools, in the world.”
The university is now giving the bailout funds a pass.
It would be great if people and institutions did the right thing as a matter of course. These days, we have to take what we can get.
As “recovering investment banker” Carol Roth recently tweeted, “A reminder that Harvard, basically a hedge fund masquerading as a university with north of $40 BILLION in assets in their endowment, received $9 million under the “CARES Act” while small businesses are being told that funds to help them have run out.”
IT’LL PROBABLY BE PRETTY GOOD: Hyundai’s Mid-Engine Sports Car Will Take on Supra and Nissan Z.
STAY TUNED: Numerous U.S. Media Outlets Reporting that Kim Jong Un is in ‘Vegetative’ State.
TMZ is going with the headline, “N. Korea Dictator Kim Jong-un Reportedly Dead After Botched Heart Surgery.” But as NRO’s Dan McLaughlin tweets, “TMZ is rarely wrong about these things, but my guess is that its sources in Pyongyang are not on par with its sources in the LAPD.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Is he alive? Is he dead? For the moment, I’m calling him Schrodinger’s Dictator.
UPDATE (From Ed): America’s Newspaper of Record weighs in on the current state of the big man: North Korea Reports Kim Jong Un Is ‘Most Alive Person In Universe.’
That news conflicts with reports from another great parody news account, DPRK News:
As Glenn said, he really is Schrodinger’s Dictator right now.
The news stories that were published yesterday featured these speculative details: Kim Jong Un in ‘vegetative state’, Japanese media claims; China medical experts dispatched to North Korea.
“Japanese magazine Shukan Gendai reported that Kim collapsed during a visit to a rural area in April. Kim reportedly required a stent procedure following the incident. Shukan Gendai subsequently detailed how the surgeon in charge of Kim’s operation was not used to dealing with obese patients and was too nervous during the operation, leading to delays that left Kim in a ‘vegetative state.’”
How nervous? “Other unconfirmed reports, attributed to senior party sources in Beijing, said an operation to insert a stent went wrong because the surgeon’s hands were shaking so badly,” the New York Post adds.
Shades of the scene in The Death of Stalin when they Politburo couldn’t find any competent doctors to revive Stalin – because Stalin had recently had all the good doctors rounded up and shot during his “Doctors’ Plot” purge.
IF YOU’RE A DEMOCRAT, YOU CAN BE ABSURDLY WRONG WITH NO CONSEQUENCES. If you’re a Republican, you get mocked and shamed for being right.
Related: The weekends at the Covid didn’t turn out like you planned. Most U.S. Hospitals Are Empty. Soon They Might Be Closed for Good.
MEDIA CRITICISM OF GOVERNOR KEMP FOR REOPENING GEORGIA IS DISHONEST AND HYPOCRITICAL: “It is even more outrageous to watch the press completely disregard the specific guidance in Kemp’s order. Then you can add blatant hypocrisy of the coverage when you review the announcement from Colorado’s Democrat governor, Jared Polis. It is infuriating. According to the Denver Post, Governor Polis has given his plan a catchy name, Safer at Home. Maybe that is the difference. However, the fundamentals are pretty similar, right down to tattoo parlors.”
It’s different when they do it, somehow.
WHY JOE BIDEN’S AMERICA LOVES A LOCKDOWN:
It has highlighted the class divide that globalization produces within countries such as America as well. The highly educated professional classes can work from home, and their jobs are relatively secure; the service class, on the other hand—the waiters and cooks and hotel maids and retail clerks and others — are out of their jobs and shit out of luck. Not to worry: the professional class will write all of them checks for $1,200. Let them eat cake, you know?
In our nation’s capital region, DC and its suburbs, the divide is especially pronounced. Just before DC’s mayor and Virginia’s governor issued stay-at-home orders, practically all businesses had already shut down voluntarily. But I ventured out to the city one day and was surprised by what I saw: while the professionals had disappeared — the lobbyists and think-tankers and journalists and other non-essential workers — groundskeepers and maintenance staff were out in force, as many of them or even more than usual, tending to decorative greenery and the facades of the professionals’ buildings. I took the Metro, the DC subway, back home, and noticed that two things had changed. The trains were less crowded than normal but actually more crowded than they had been a week earlier: this was because the Metro system was running fewer trains, which logically enough meant that people who still had to go to work were packed onto the few that were still running. Those people who still had to go to work, or to use the Metro for other reasons, were not the white professional commuters, but mostly black and Hispanic service workers: maintenance men and others.
Related: Northam outlines Virginia’s plan for emerging from pandemic.
“We cannot and will not lift restrictions like one turns on a light switch,” Northam said of moving onto the first phase of recovery, which he called “Phase One.”
“Easing too much too soon could jeopardize public health and consumer confidence,” he said.
Phase One, state officials said Friday, still will involve keeping some businesses closed, while others reopen under “strict safety restrictions.”
Phase One also will involve “continued social distancing, continued teleworking [and] face coverings recommended in public,” according to an outline of the plan made public Friday.
How long that phase will last is unclear, but State Health Commissioner Norman Oliver said he expects it to be in effect until “medical countermeasures” like a treatment or vaccine are rolled out broadly.
“I, personally, think Phase One will be a two-year affair,” Oliver said. “There are a lot of people working on this, and I hope they prove me wrong, but I don’t see it happening in less than two years.”
Businesses closed for two years in Virginia? What could go wrong?
Elsewhere in “Joe Biden’s America:” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Provides a Lesson in What States Shouldn’t Do To Stop a Pandemic.
IF ONLY THIS PROFESSOR HAD BEEN HOMESCHOOLED: Harvard vs. the Family. A Harvard law professor distorts research findings to justify her campaign to ban homeschooling.
CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC REVEALS GERMANS’ POOR COOKING SKILLS.
Found via Iowahawk, who tweets, “OK, you can blame the pandemic for a lot of things, but this ain’t one of them.”
AT AMAZON, EZ Melts Zinc for Immune Support.
NEVER LET A PANDEMIC GO TO WASTE. Michael Walsh: ‘All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray.’
TYLER COWEN: How things are, in a few short words. Quotable:
If we keep the economy closed at current levels, it will continue to decay, and at some point turn into irreversible, non-linear damage. No one knows when, or how to model the course of that process. That decay also will eat into our future public health capacities, and perhaps boost hunger and poverty around the world.
If we keep people locked up at current levels, fewer of them will be exposed to the virus, and in the meantime we can develop better treatments, and also improve test and trace capabilities. No one knows how quickly those improvements will come, or how to model the course of that process, or how much net good they will do.
The relative pace of those two processes should determine our best course of action. No one knows the relative pace of either of those two processes. Yet commentators pretend to be increasingly knowledgeable, moralizing based on the pretense of knowledge they do not have.
Indeed.