Archive for 2020
December 12, 2020
ANOTHER INDUSTRY SAVED BY TRUMP: The Red-Hot Fall 2021 Law School Admissions Season: Applicants Are Up 38%, With Biggest Increases Among The Highest LSAT Bands.
THERE IS NO SCIENCE BEHIND THIS: Cuomo’s New Ban On Indoor Dining In NYC Is Abject Madness.
On Wednesday, I wrote a column in the New York Post urging Gov. Andrew Cuomo to release contact tracing data on the spread of the Chinese virus in New York restaurants before closing them down. My logic was that the owners of these establishments, their employees, and their patrons deserved to see the evidence that proves that indoor dining is a major driver of virus spread.
On Friday, the governor released that data. It does not show that restaurants are a major driver; it shows they accounted for 1.4 percent of spread. And yet, in a move that defies even the basic tenets of common sense, Emperor Cuomo is closing down indoor dining anyway.
In mid-December, when it is too cold to eat outside and a week before a Christmas, this order will directly lead to thousands of more unemployed New Yorkers.
This decision is insane. It is also cruel and arbitrary. For two months Gotham’s restaurants have done everything asked of them: created outdoor dining areas, bought heaters, run at 25 percent capacity, had customers fill out tracing forms, and enforced masks. And guess what? It looks like it worked. Fewer than 2 in 100 infections can be traced back to eateries. So why are they now being punished? . . .
There is no excuse for this decision. Not only is the infection rate for restaurants and bars a meager 1.4 percent, the rate for households is 74 percent.
So let me posit a simple question. Now that friends are to be banned from sharing time together at a restaurant or pub, where will they gather? Oh, right, in households. Brilliant, governor, just brilliant. Don’t let us go where almost no one gets COVID, but shove us into the places where almost everyone does.
Tar. Feathers.
December 11, 2020
KAROL MARKOWICZ ON FOX NEWS: Cuomo, Democrats didn’t want to give Trump any credit for vaccine: NY Post columnist.
Thought experiment. There are five Democrat justices on the Supreme Court. There was a Democrat president who just ran for reelection. He supposedly lost, but virtually all Democrat voters believe that massive fraud in several Republican controlled states caused him to lose. Many Democrat attorneys general file a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court, essentially identical to the one that is pending now.
Does anyone believe for a second that those five Democrat justices wouldn’t do absolutely anything necessary to make sure the Democrat control of the presidency was maintained? Democrats care about power. Democrats do not care about process, or rules. Now we are being asked to be so meticulous about adhering to the rules, that we are to allow a laughably egregious fraud to succeed, and to permit our own throats to be cut by turning over the executive branch to the people who just committed the biggest political crime in history. I hope five US supreme court justices will show just a tiny bit of the creativity, to put it politely, which Democrat justices had when they, for example, found an imaginary abortion right in the US Constitution. We’ll see what happens.
People always take for granted that the liberal justices will stick together, and rule for the Democrats. Even Democrats take that for granted.
TRUMP GETS RESULTS: US Allows Emergency COVID-19 Vaccine in Bid to End Pandemic. “While the FDA decision came only after public review of data from a huge ongoing study, it has also been dogged by intense political pressure from the Trump administration, which has accused the agency of being too slow and even threatened to remove FDA chief Stephen Hahn if a ruling did not come Friday.”
IT’S REALLY ABOUT RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL TRADITIONALISTS FIGHTING FOR THEIR FREEDOM TO BE JEWS AGAINST ENEMIES WITHIN AND WITHOUT: If you want to know what Hanukkah is NOT really about, watch this video from Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff explaining what they think Hanukkah is about. At least Harris knows how to pronounce the Hebrew “KH” that starts Hanukkah, unlike her Jewish husband. But really, the way American Jews have been dumbing down Hanukkah to make it universalistic is to emphasize the Maccabees fight for religious freedom, which is at least, unlike Harris/Emhoff talking about “tikkun olam,” not wildly inaccurate and anachronistic.
OPEN THREAD: Make it memorable.
HOMER HICKAM: Chuck Yeager Was A Hero’s Hero. “The World War II fighter pilot who broke the sound barrier and lived for the thrill of punching into the air was the man every hero wanted to be. . . . But perhaps the most important thing about Yeager, in terms of why he was chosen to fly the X-1, was that he knew generators, pumps and pressure regulators. He knew how they worked, he knew how to take them apart and he knew how to put them back together. He knew them because he worked with his daddy on gas wells in the hills of West Virginia that used machinery similar to the ones used in jet and rocket engines. Even though he didn’t have an engineering degree, Yeager knew what he had to know to dig into the guts of modern aircraft and rockets and be confident enough to be dropped from the belly of a bomber, light the engine and fly with consummate skill — not only faster than the speed of sound but straight into history. . . . In that, he was a lot like our country during the years following World War II, an era when men like Yeager were not afraid to try and die and laugh while they were doing it.”
I WON’T BE ABLE TO GET TO SAAVEDRA, CHILE FOR THIS: The only total solar eclipse of 2020 occurs Monday. Here’s what to expect.
TEXAS IS GOING TO NEED SOME SORT OF NATURALIZATION TEST SOON: Oracle is moving its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas.
REMINDER THAT MUCH OF OUR POLITICAL CLASS ASPIRES TO MAKE AMERICA MUCH MORE LIKE CHINA: Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai charged under security law.
I spoke to Jimmy Lai a couple of weeks ago.
Related: The Silence of Pope Francis: Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai goes to jail—and his shepherd is missing in action. “Mr. Lai’s jailing has provoked condemnation from figures as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky and New York Rep. Eliot Engel. They have been joined by journalists, activists and politicians such as the Labour Party’s Sarah Champion and other members of Parliament who on Monday raised Mr. Lai’s plight in Britain’s House of Commons. But there is one place where China’s bullying elicits only silence: the Vatican. Which is strange, because Jimmy Lai is not only Hong Kong’s most well-known champion of democracy; he is also its most prominent Catholic layman. At a moment when he and his family most need their shepherd, Pope Francis is MIA. The silence might be understandable if Pope Francis were in the tradition of pontiffs who hold themselves aloof from worldly affairs. But Pope Francis is a man who readily weighs in on outrages wherever he finds them, whether it be modern air conditioning, American capitalism or Catholic moms who breed ‘like rabbits.’ But on China . . . silence. It’s the deliberate consequence of the Vatican’s 2018 agreement with Beijing, just recently renewed, that gives the Communist state extraordinary say over the selection of Catholic bishops—and whose terms Rome insists on keeping secret.”
I don’t think he’s a very good Pope.
HMM: Flu cases lower than normal so far this year, COVID-19 likely the reason. “Flu activity remains ‘unusually low’ in many parts of the United States, according to data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and experts say masking and social distancing to prevent spread of COVID-19 may be the reason. Just 40 of more than 22,000 specimens evaluated at U.S. hospital labs and 16 of more than 16,000 evaluated at public health labs in the country during that week tested positive for the flu, according to the agency. In addition, less than 2% of all doctor visits across the country over the same period were related to the seasonal bug, the CDC said.”
So why are there so many Covid cases? Related:
WELL, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO FOREGO LYING, ARROGANCE, MANIPULATION, AND CONDESCENSION: We Know How to Curb the Pandemic. How Do We Make People Listen? But it’s too late for that now.
IT’S OBVIOUSLY BECAUSE OF #ORANGEMANBAD AND ANTI-MASK REDSTATERS: Covid in Europe: Death tolls soar and hospitals struggle as containment unravels.
BREAKING: Supreme Court Rejects Texas Election Lawsuit. “The Supreme Court, 7-2, voted to deny Texas AG Paxton’s motion for leave to file its election complaint. Justices Alito and Thomas would grant Motion for Leave, but provide no other relief.”
The statement that Texas lacks standing would seem to implicitly overrule Massachusetts v. EPA, a case that found expanded standing for states, though in the “Climate Change” context. But then, I’ve told my students that I doubt that case stood for more than climate change hysteria’s ability to influence John Roberts Anthony Kennedy.
The appeal of dismissing on standing grounds, of course, is that the Court won’t have to deal with any of the factual allegations.
STILL A FEW BUGS IN THE SYSTEM: Test shipments for COVID-19 vaccines exposed problems, official tells Senate.
WHY NOT TAKE A BREAK FROM THE SERIOUS NEWS FOR A FEW MINUTES? Florida Man Friday: Use This One Weird Trick to Double Your Social Security Benefits.
DOGS ARE SMART: Proof-of-concept study shows dogs can detect COVID-19 in human sweat. Well, my friend’s dog who ate his leash, had emergency surgery, and then ate a pair of panties necessitating a second emergency surgery the next week may be an exception.
LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND DEMOCRATS: Biden Urges Dems To Conceal Their Defund the Police Agenda Until After Georgia Runoffs.