DON’T LET KAREN KILL YOUR COMMUNITY:

But now, Karen is queen of enforcing mask-wearing. Everyone must wear one at all times, even if they are not near other people. Karen takes to the Nextdoor message boards to complain about all the people she sees without one. Joggers are currently the  main target, because engaging in a solitary exercise with a covering on your nose and mouth should apparently be easy, but that could shift at any time.

‘Why is this so hard?’, Karen asks. Yes, it’s hard for people to understand how we went from ‘masks are pointless’ to ‘masks are mandatory’ in a few short weeks with Karen lecturing us the whole way. Even now the World Health Organization suggests ‘if you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.’

It’s almost unfair that the term for this kind of busybody has a gendered name. Men can be, and often are, Karens.

Just ask CBS Chicago: CBS Chicago Slammed For Segment Harassing Ice Cream Truck Driver During Stay-At-Home Order, Encouraging Folks To Call 9-1-1.

HMM: What Does Trump Know About the Russia Hoax That Is About to Come Out?

MATT RIDLEY: We know everything — and nothing — about Covid: It is data, not modeling, that we need now.

Related: The Covid-19 Riddle: Why Does the Virus Wallop Some Places and Spare Others?

DISPATCHES FROM THE MANCHURIAN MEDIA: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Changes Anti-Epoch Times Headline Three Times, Removes More Than 300 Comments.

Take off to the Great Red North!

MODERN PROBLEMS: Calculator Hacked for Cheating Includes a Secret OLED Screen, Wifi, and Even a Chat Function.

I THINK THAT STATES THAT GO BANKRUPT SHOULD REVERT TO TERRITORY STATUS FOR FIVE YEARS: Bankruptcy for States? It’s a Better Idea than You Think. With existing elected officials ineligible to serve in any capacity, or draw a state pension, during that time.

UPDATE: Michael Lotus writes:

Don’t do it on a fixed time. Make them reapply for statehood.

Also, critically, they lose Congressional representation during territorial status, which means that they would not be voting on any assistance, and would not be voting on readmission.

Bankruptcy for states is so obviously a good idea that is too bad it has not come up sooner. A default without any workout system would be a mess. Having the option of an orderly workout would give relief to all creditors. And it would give state governments a huge element of bargaining leverage in negotiations. Almost as importantly, subordinate units of government should be able to file for bankruptcy much more easily than they do currently, with states setting the rules. A uniform national system making municipal and county bankruptcy easy would also impose discipline which is absent now on local retirement obligations.

They shouldn’t get any presidential electors either, of course.

KIRA DAVIS: The One Act of Heroism We Never Acknowledge Is the Nuclear Family.

In these days of coronavirus, the word “hero” has been used non-stop to describe doctors and nurses working on the “front lines”. We’re even calling our teachers heroes. I guess I don’t mind all that much. I understand the sentiment. I suppose it’s quite easy to look at a picture of a tired doctor at the end of a long day in ICU and call him a hero for sticking out the job he gets paid to do. We can look at his fatigue, his crumpled scrubs, the lines on his face from his mask and we can see the sacrifice right there on his face. We can measure his impact because what he does has immediate outcomes in real-time.

It is far more difficult for some starry-eyed, millennial opinion writer with a brand new thesaurus and a gig at The New York Times to look at a father schlepping back and forth to his office job every day and see a hero. That writer probably sees a bored man, or a defeated man, or an uninteresting man who doesn’t have an immediate impact on those around him….certainly not the way a doctor does. His heroism is invisible, because you can’t make a commercial out of it. His service, his bravery is spread out over an entire lifetime, not just one crisis.

The commitment to the nuclear family is one of the most heroic acts in our culture and yet it remains invisible…to the media, to celebrities making thirsty social media posts thanking the “heroes” four times a day, to our elected officials. In fact, the traditional family seems to only ever be insulted and derided in pop culture these days. I suppose that is because so many of our coastal reporters and celebrities don’t have families of their own. They don’t know how to quantify the sacrifice it takes to raise a family and maintain a marriage. It just looks like a relic of a different era to them, instead of the essential foundation of a healthy and prosperous society.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

THIS IS GOOD NEWS, OF COURSE, BUT SUGGESTS THINGS MAY HAVE BEEN OVERSOLD IN THE BEGINNING: U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients.

But I see it as evidence that President Trump’s swift and effective action has saved millions of lives.

FLORIDA’S CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE SHOWS US WHAT WE MIGHT HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY:

As the coronavirus approached its peak in New York and other hard-hit parts of the country, many people looked to Florida as the next hot spot. I was one of them. I argued back in April that Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hesitation to adopt early, statewide preventive measures could become problematic, given the rising number of confirmed cases in heavily populated areas, such as Miami, and rural hospitals’ lack of preparedness.

But the anticipated disaster never occurred. The worst of the state’s outbreak has thus far been contained in a handful of populous South Florida counties. The average of new cases has steadily declined over the past few weeks, and the average of new deaths has largely plateaued.

The question is: Why? How did Florida avoid what seemed like an inevitable crisis, while other parts of the country have floundered? We might not know for a long while yet. But for right now, there’s something to be said of Florida’s strategy and the way in which Floridians responded to it.

Read the whole thing; though note how the media is distorting the responses of New York and Florida’s governors:

WHEN YOU’RE RICH, YOU CAN LEAVE YOUR PROBLEMS TO THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Democrats fume over having to clean up Bloomberg’s mess.

By the way, I want to point out that after spending a billion dollars on a vanity campaign, Bloomberg has been nowhere to be seen as Americans everywhere are suffering during this pandemic.

UPDATE: To be fair, a friend points out that while Bloomberg’s been awfully quiet, Bloomberg Philanthropies is doing Covid work.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Michael Moore Hearts Extinction Rebellion. Here’s What They Do. “Does the filmmaker support destruction, violence and hurting a reeling economy?”

MATT RIDLEY: It is time to take seriously the link between Vitamin D deficiency and more serious Covid-19 symptoms.

INTERVIEW: Dan Crenshaw talks to Salena Zito about having fortitude in a time of outrage.

OH: Court Docs From 1996 Confirm Tara Reade Told Her Husband About the Sexual Harassment in Biden’s Office.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The Second Cold War: Oops, We Did It Again. “‘The Capitalists will pay us to make the rope with which we will hang them.’ – Deng Xiaoping, apparently.”

This is the first of a multipart series available to just our VIP members, and I hope you’ll use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code if you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter.

THOUGHTS: Covid-19 and incremental risk in American life.

FIGHT THE POWER: University of Michigan law students devise legal challenge to governor’s stay-at-home order. It’s fairly rare to see law students taking on Democrats’ policies. And this seems quite a fair description of Whitmer’s work in general: “The more we assessed the executive order, the more irrational it looked.”

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Democratic congressman said opening California beaches was ‘reckless.’ Then he was seen at a private beach.

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EDITION: Are Spaniards “Persons of Spanish Culture”? A strange affirmative action classification in Boston suggested that the answer is no.

SO I WENT GROCERY SHOPPING LAST NIGHT AFTER DINNER. They had plenty of everything. There was even hand sanitizer and toilet paper. Bought some nice prime steaks and some pork chops from a fully-stocked meat department.

JOHN KASS: How does Gov. J.B. Pritzker — and how do local governments — collect taxes from businesses he’s shut down?

Until Pritzker shut down the state’s restaurants and bars, they employed more than 500,000 Illinois workers. The only employers with more workers are the state and local governments.

And he has yet to offer leadership for business owners who are obligated to pay state and local taxes, and who, through no fault of their own, are hemorrhaging money because he shut them down.

Pritzker has granted himself immense state emergency powers. But he hasn’t demanded the Illinois General Assembly meet and act, and the state tax code is written largely by the legislature, though local governments set their own levies.

Pritzker also hasn’t told homeowners what he’d do, if anything, about paying the property bills they’ll be getting in July, even if they’ve lost their jobs.

Most government operates on the Goodfellas principle: “F*** you, pay me.”

I’M SURE HIS SCHOLARLY WORK IN EPIDEMIOLOGY IS CAUTIOUS AND CORRECT: Yale prof promotes ‘Trump death clock,’ says COVID-19 ‘getting awfully close to genocide.’

Notice he’s not interested in Bill “take the subway to a theater” De Blasio. But when taxpayers tire of supporting this sort of thing, we’ll be told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”

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