PROOF THAT THEY DON’T CARE WHETHER CHILDREN LEARN: Teachers unions, demands for ‘equity’ work to block online schooling growth amid coronavirus crisis.
Archive for 2020
April 11, 2020
THE LONELY LIVES OF LIBERALS: CBS’s Anti-Trump Drama Fantasizes: President Hillary Cures Cancer, Saves Rainforest.
I thought Newsweek owned the controls to the DNC multiverse:
● If Gore Had Won — An alternate oral history of the last decade.
—Headline, Newsweek, December, 2010.
● Hillary Clinton Is President in an Alternate Universe, Where America Is Great Again.
—Headline, Newsweek, July 12, 2017. (Newsweek also famously dropped the handle on a “Madam President” issue on election night, in a classic “Dewey Defeats Truman” move.)
● If Beto O’Rourke was president, here’s how he would handle migrant caravan.
—Tweet by Newsweek, November 26, 2018.
And of course, the ultimate leftwing fantasy moment from Newsweek immediately after the November election: “Madam President: how Newsweek reported a Clinton victory.”
MANDATORY INDOCTRINATION: Ole Miss students ‘required’ to complete ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ training.
Colleges should be dismantling this stuff. Who needs diversity training at an online school?
UPDATE: From the comments: “I understand that access to the White House Press Room is not controlled by the administration for some reason, but rather by some kind of wankers’ club called the White House Correspondents’ Association, which itself is dominated by the usual CNN-NBC-CBS-ABC-New York Times-Washington Post axis. Why do leading American media give preference to the Chinese Communist Party before struggling American media?”
IT’S SATURDAY, KIND OF THE LOST DAY OF EASTER: And this year, it’s the Easter we’re all staying home pondering, like the disciples, what’s next? Easter is important for many, maybe even most, Instapundit readers, who may appreciate sharing a little quiet reflection about the three most important days of the year.
Yesterday was the horror of the crucifixion. Tomorrow is the miracle of resurrection. But what about today, the in-between day of Easter? I have some thoughts. And if Easter isn’t your cup of tea, maybe you’ll appreciate the sentiment. Or just move along to the next great post, thankful for the freedom we all have, still, to believe or not to believe, and to speak or not to speak, as we each choose.
MICHAEL BARONE: Will post-coronavirus America see a post-war boom, or will people just hunker down?
We’re not going back exactly to that normal life we remember. Even if restrictions are relaxed, many people will likely be reluctant to do things that seemed normal before — eating restaurant meals, fingering merchandise in clothing stores, attending mass events.
Governments’ powers to control people’s movements and restrict their behavior are, for good reasons, greatest in times of epidemics and wars. For that reason, many compare the limits and restrictions imposed in this and other countries with those during World War II. During what some people still call “the war,” the government shut down large parts of the economy and people were prevented from buying most consumer goods. . . .
Government restrictions to combat the coronavirus may not end as crisply as World War II did, but even if they do, it’s not clear whether that would produce something like the effervescence of post-World War II prosperity. Not only are restaurants and hospitality industries unlikely to snap back but, more importantly, it’s not clear that people kept mostly in place indoors will be inspired to venture into new economic enterprises.
Sentimentally, Americans may want things to go back to where they were, but they will be better off if they let their imaginations run loose instead of staying hunkered down.
I think it will be awful for movie theaters, arena sports, and tourism at least for a year or so. Other areas — I’d guess restaurants and gyms — will snap back hard. For the economy as a whole, who knows?
NATURE MAGAZINE JOINS THE MANCHURIAN MEDIA:
British scientific journal Nature has apologised for associating Covid-19 with China in its reporting, saying that early coverage of the global health crisis by itself and other media had led to racist attacks on people of Asian descent around the world.
In an article published on Tuesday, the publication said that the World Health Organisation’s announcement on February 11 that the official name for the pneumonia-like virus would be Covid-19 had been an implicit reminder to “those who had erroneously been associating the virus with Wuhan and with China in their news coverage – including Nature”.
“That we did so was an error on our part, for which we take responsibility and apologise,” it said.
That’s what Xi said.
IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: Young Turks employees vote to unionize over Cenk Uygur’s strenuous objections.
THE DEATH OF STALIN: In “Bye-Bye Bernie,” Kevin Williamson asks, “What did we learn from the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn who once again made a strong but unsuccessful run at the Democratic nomination?”
(2) The demographic shift in the Democratic Party is not necessarily a shift to the left. The Democrats are a party in which the power is held by a caste of relatively well-off white people (the little old liberal white ladies) but the numbers and the votes increasingly come from a party base that is less affluent and less white. Sanders’s movement is dominated by champagne socialists: well-off, college-educated white people who resented having to pay back their Cornell student loans. Black voters, on the other hand, strongly preferred Joe Biden, a more moderate Democratic hack of the familiar kind. Senator Sanders and the former vice president have more in common than it might seem: Neither of them is a native speaker of the language of “social justice” and intersectionality, and their attempts to incorporate yesterday’s voguish enthusiasm into their rhetoric have been pretty weak; even with his 1970s Vermont-stoner radical posturing, Senator Sanders, with his focus on labor and social programs, is closer to a New Deal liberal than is, say, Julián Castro. But if you really want an old-fashioned Democrat, why not vote for an actual old-fashioned Democrat? And that is what Joe Biden is. African Americans were not brought into the Democratic Party by Barack Obama—they were brought into the Democratic Party by Franklin Roosevelt. And though they are by no means politically homogeneous, their politics have been, broadly speaking, a New Deal politics. The boutique radicalism of well-off Millennial college graduates raised in the suburbs of wherever may not be the future of the Democratic Party.
Read the whole thing.
(Classical reference in headline.)
SCIENTIFIC STANDARDS VARY ACCORDING TO RHETORICAL NEED: The Face Mask Debate Reveals a Scientific Double Standard: No one complained about the lack of evidence for 20-second hand-washing. So why did we treat face masks differently?
HIGHER ED’S DIVERSITY BUREAUCRACY: Heather Mac Donald: Call It a Ponzi Scheme. Even during the Covid-19 crisis, colleges abuse their economic and reputational privileges. “Many college presidents are terrified that the coronavirus pandemic will devastate their schools’ finances and enrollment. Anyone who cares about a revival of serious learning can only hope that they are right. . . . The coming higher-ed crisis would, in an ideal world, take out the student-services bureaucracy—that dizzying edifice of associate vice chancellors for student engagement and assistant vice presidents for student development—starting with its most destructive component: the diversocrats. Their job is founded on a patently false proposition: that colleges are filled with racists and sexists who impede the advancement of females, blacks, and Hispanics. To the contrary, virtually every college today is trying to admit, hire, and promote as many females, blacks, and Hispanics as possible. Belonging to those identity categories confers a large advantage on the academic job market and in admissions. Nevertheless, the diversity bureaucracy spends its days devising new ways to promote the culture of victimhood, at the cost of millions of dollars in student loans and private tuition.”
April 10, 2020
JOHN HINDERAKER: The Pandemic: Where We Stand Now.
MAIL VOTING IS A RECIPE FOR DISASTER, AND FRAUD, WHICH IS WHY SOME PEOPLE ARE PROMOTING IT: Wisconsin is discovering problems with absentee ballots, including hundreds that were never delivered.
OPEN THREAD: I heard the general whispering to his aide de camp: “Be watchful for those comment slams.”
CHINA SYNDROME: Pakistan gets Chinese underwear as N95 masks.
Get China out of your supply chain ASAP.
Related: Time to put China on lockdown for its dishonesty amid coronavirus crisis.
UPDATE: I tested one of those Chinese underwear masks and give it two stars out of five: Neither stylish nor particularly comfortable.
OLD AND BUSTED: “Philadelphia Freedom.”
The New Hotness? Police State Chaos: Man Dragged Off Philly Bus for Not Wearing Mask.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Everything old is new again — in the 1918 flu police ticketed and arrested “mask slackers” — people who didn’t wear masks in public. Of course, in 1918 the medical community wasn’t pooh-poohing the benefits of masks.