WHAT WAR? NEVER HAPPENED. LIGHTBRINGERS DON’T DO THAT KIND OF THING. Why Has Barack Obama’s Unprecedented War with Inspectors General Been Forgotten?
Archive for 2020
May 22, 2020
WELL, THREE YEARS AGO WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE: Antitrust Charges Against Google Couldn’t Come at a Better Time.
New unemployment numbers are out today. After reading them, I told my wife, “If a soothsayer had shown up on New Year’s Eve and said that by summer, 40 million people would be unemployed in this country, we would have thought he was crazy.”
A global economic crash like 2008, sure, that we could understand — but even then, the job losses weren’t this bad, and they happened over 18 monhts. This thing, though? Forty million made jobless in 10 weeks? Seriously, if someone had told you that this was going to happen, and you believed them, what kind of plausible scenario would you have come up with to explain this catastrophe? I don’t know if most of us could have done it.
And yet, here we are.
An aside: it’s a tale that has been told many times: how World War I destroyed European civilization, and ushered in modernity in full force.
Read the whole thing.
On the flip-side, if Rod Dreher’s doomsday prognostication seems too wildly over the top, James Lileks tours the office building housing the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and writes, “Outside the building, the helpful [social distancing] stickers are already coming off, giving you that ‘oh, I remember those, there was a pandemic’ feeling we’ll all have in October, except probably not; there will be a second wave reported no matter the severity.”
In 2020, October will not lack for October surprises.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): If you’d told me on New Year’s Eve that we’d be paying people handsomely to be unemployed, I would have found the numbers easier to believe.
ANOTHER HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE STUDY WITHOUT ZINC. Worthless.
HMM: A new Swedish coronavirus antibody study suggests the herd-immunity strategy isn’t working. “The study, based on 1,100 tests across Sweden and carried out by the country’s public-health agency, found that just 7.3% of people in Stockholm had developed antibodies, Reuters reported on Wednesday.”
Doesn’t this also suggest that it’s not as contagious as feared? Plus:
Tom Britton, a professor who helped develop the agency’s forecasting model, acknowledged that the calculations may have been wrong.
“It means either the calculations made by the agency and myself are quite wrong, which is possible, but if that’s the case it’s surprising they are so wrong,” he told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, according to The Guardian. “Or more people have been infected than developed antibodies.”
Britton had previously suggested that about half of the country could become infected by the end of April.
His honesty here is refreshing and unusual. One hypothesis: Most people defeat the disease swiftly via the innate immune system, before there’s even time to build antibodies. Are those people immune to reinfection? I’d guess probably — maybe in some sense they were already “immune” since their bodies were capable of fighting it off quickly without illness — but who knows?
UPDATE: I had linked this report a while back, but a commenter reminded me: T cells found in COVID-19 patients ‘bode well’ for long-term immunity. “Immune warriors known as T cells help us fight some viruses, but their importance for battling SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has been unclear. Now, two studies reveal infected people harbor T cells that target the virus—and may help them recover. Both studies also found some people never infected with SARS-CoV-2 have these cellular defenses, most likely because they were previously infected with other coronaviruses.”
NEWS FROM MY NECK OF THE WOODS: Coronavirus in Tennessee: 27 active Knox County cases, 327 total. “The Knox County Health Department reported four new COVID-19 cases on Friday, to bring the county’s total to 327. Knox County reported 27 active cases on Friday, down from 35 active cases on Thursday. The total number of recovered cases grew to 295 from 283. . . . There are two Knox County patients currently hospitalized due to COVID-19. Of the 327 cases, 38 of them have resulted in hospitalization at any point during the illness and five deaths.”
Phase One of our reopening started three weeks ago. We go to Phase Two on Tuesday.
SUPER GAFFE-O-MATIC ’76! Joe Biden tells young black man, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”
Related: “Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Republican African American senator currently in office, slammed Biden’s remarks. ‘1.3M black Americans already voted for Trump in 2016. Joe Biden told every single one of us we ‘ain’t black.’’ Scott wrote on Twitter. ‘I’d say I’m surprised, but it’s sadly par for the course for Democrats to take the black community for granted and browbeat those that don’t agree.’”
More: “This morning should end once and for all the question of which party is more eager to get Biden out of his basement.”
TRAGIC STORY OF FOX NEWS’ JANICE DEAN’S IN-LAWS PUTS A HUMAN FACE ON CUOMO’S DISASTROUS DECISION: Both Of Her Husbands Parents Died Of Covid-19 In Nursing Homes.
TO BE FAIR, THAT’S BY DESIGN: Intellectual diversity missing from Penn State’s new faculty hiring policy on ‘underrepresented groups.’
I HAD BEEN ASSURED BY THE SMARTEST BESTEST PEOPLE THAT THIS KIND OF THING NEVER HAPPENED: Philadelphia Election Official Pleads Guilty To Stuffing Ballots In Return For Bribes.
AUSTRALIAN RESEARCHERS SEE VIRUS DESIGN MANIPULATION: “A forthcoming Australian scientific study concludes that the coronavirus causing the global pandemic contains unique properties suggesting it was manipulated in a Chinese laboratory and was not the result of a natural occurrence.“
GRANDMA-KILLER CUOMO: AP count: Over 4,300 virus patients sent to NY nursing homes. “More than 4,300 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York’s already vulnerable nursing homes under a controversial state directive that was ultimately scrapped amid criticisms it was accelerating the nation’s deadliest outbreaks, according to a count by The Associated Press. AP compiled its own tally to find out how many COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals to nursing homes under the March 25 directive after New York’s Health Department declined to release its internal survey conducted two weeks ago.”
AT AMAZON, Victorinox Fibrox Pro Chef’s Knife.
THE ATLANTIC HARDEST HIT: We should be grateful for good news in Georgia.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Atlanta is not burning. Bodies are not piled up in the streets. Hospitals in Georgia are not being overwhelmed; in fact, they are virtually empty. There is no mad rush for ventilators (remember those?). Instead, men, women, and children in the Peach State are returning to some semblance of normal life: working outside their homes, going to restaurants and bars, getting haircuts, exercising, and most important, spending time with their friends and families and worshipping God. The opening that began more than three weeks ago is continuing apace.
Oh, my apologies, you were waiting for bad news? Sorry, I forgot, we were actually not supposed to be rooting for the virus. Despite the apparent relish behind headlines like “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” one assumes that most Americans, even the ones most committed to omnidirectional prophecies of doom, were actually hoping this would happen. While it really is a shame that we do not get to gloat about the cravenness and stupidity of yet another GOP politician, I think on balance most of us will be glad to hear that Gov. Brian Kemp was not badly wrong here.
What is happening instead of the widely predicted bloodbath? Confirmed cases of the virus are obviously increasing (though the actual rolling weekly average of new ones have been headed down for nearly a month) while deaths remain more or less flat. This is in fact what happens when you test more people for a disease that is not fatal or even particularly serious for the vast majority of those who contract it, for which the median age of death is higher than the American life expectancy.
How was this possible? One answer is that the lockdown did not in fact do what it was supposed to do, which is to say, meaningfully impede transmission of the virus. In fact, data both from states like Georgia and from abroad suggests that the lifting of lockdowns is positively correlated with a decrease in rates of infection. This could be because lockdowns are inherently ineffective at slowing down a disease whose spread appears to be largely intrafamilial and nosocomial.
So you’re saying “listening to the scientists” was a mistake?
HEY, IT JUST MIGHT TURN OUT THAT WAY:
“I’m going to beat Joe Biden”??? pic.twitter.com/feUIVH0uhh
— Jewish Deplorable 🇺🇸 (@TrumpJew) May 22, 2020
HIGHER ED REVELS IN DOING THINGS MOST AMERICANS OPPOSE, FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN THAT MOST AMERICANS OPPOSE THEM: Colleges give money to illegal immigrants, despite most Americans’ opposition.
