EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT CASES, NOBODY’S TALKING ABOUT HOSPITALIZATIONS AND DEATHS. WHICH TELLS YOU SOMETHING IN ITSELF. The Covid Story That Sports Media Won’t Tell: Despite heavy coverage of every positive test, remarkably few serious cases have been recorded among pro athletes.
Archive for 2020
September 18, 2020
WHEN A SOCIETY GOES CRAZY, IT’S IN RESPONSE TO THE INSECURITIES AND PREDILECTIONS OF ITS INTELLIGENTSIA:
During this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.
Indeed we have. And not by accident. And given that intellectuals demonstrably play a role in spreading totalitarianism — a much bigger one than, say, bars play in spreading Covid-19 — perhaps we need to consider some sort of precautions.
VITAMIN D UPDATE: Vitamin D deficiency increases COVID-19 risk by more than 50%. I’ve been telling you to keep your Vitamin D levels up for years; this is just another reason.
IT SEEMS LIKE A GAME UNTIL IT DOESN’T. A BETTER FATHER MIGHT HAVE TAUGHT HER THAT. Lancaster protester’s dad calls $1 million bail ‘vindictive.’
Related: Sorority Sister Turned BLM Radical? Kappa Delta Arrested in Lancaster Riot.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Your Racist Lawnmowing Has Got to Stop.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Is there anything that isn’t racist?
Answer: Certainly not you, racist.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Dogs, lawns, Beethoven… all racist.
- Steelers center Maurkice Pouncey has your Daily Dose of Sanity.
- Protesting, Chicken Dance-style.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
YA THINK? Suppressing fires has failed. Here’s what California needs to do instead.
There’s an overwhelming to-do list. But one of the clearest conclusions, as experts have been saying for years, is that California must begin to work with fires, not just fight them. That means reversing a century of US fire suppression policies and relying far more on deliberate, prescribed burns to clear out the vegetation that builds up into giant piles of fuel.
Such practices “don’t prevent wildfires,” says Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor at the University of California, Merced focused on fire and land management. “But it breaks up the landscape, so that when wildfires do occur, they’re much less severe, they’re much smaller, and when they occur around communities, they’re much easier to control.”
Plus: “That will require sweeping regulatory reforms, and tons of money.”
Maybe California should also try not chasing off their tax base.
IF THE VAST RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY SET OUT TO DESTROY HIGHER EDUCATION, IT COULDN’T DO BETTER THAN HIGHER EDUCATION HAS DONE ON ITS OWN: The new Iron Curtain: Colleges use legal innovations to punish dissent and purge academic heretics. And you might think that “Christian” colleges would be better, but you would be wrong.
SO THIS IS KIND OF LIKE A . . . DISINFECTANT . . . THAT YOU MIGHT . . . PUT IN YOUR BODY . . . TO PREVENT COVID? Nasal solution may stop spread of COVID-19, study finds. “A commercially available nasal antiseptic solution ‘inactivates’ COVID-19 just 15 seconds after the coronavirus is exposed to it, effectively preventing the infection from developing, according to a study published Thursday by JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery. By inactivating the virus, the antiseptic nasal rinse — a povidone-iodine solution administered in the nostril — also would help prevent those infected from spreading it to others, the researchers said.”
TRUST THE PUBLIC HEALTH EXPERTS! BELIEVE IN SCIENCE! Harvard Public Health promotes article questioning if 2 plus 2 equals 4.
IS BEING GAY GENETIC? Don’t hear much these days about the search for the definitive “gay gene,” but advocates on both sides of the issue ought to be careful about pronouncing that science “proves” this or science “disproves” that.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: CNN Forum Throws Nothing But Softballs and Pathetic Biden Strikes Out Anyway.
Another on-brand topic here is the thorough awfulness of the American mainstream political media. Wanted in all fifty states for the murder of ethical journalism, the MSM is once again working overtime to help get a Democratic presidential candidate elected despite said candidate’s myriad flaws.
At the beginning of the month I wrote that I didn’t think that the media could prop up Joe Biden until the election.
I may have underestimated the hacks who pollute the MSM.
Democratic operatives with bylines.
WHEN YOU REMEMBER THAT “WOKE” IS JUST A SYNONYM FOR “STUPID AND CRAZY,” EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE: Canceling Beethoven is the latest woke madness for the classical-music world. “Canceling Beethoven is the latest woke madness for the classical-music world.”
But weren’t they telling us Beethoven was actually black a few years ago, or am I remembering that wrong? Nope, I’m not. In fact, this was from last week: ‘Beethoven was black:’ Why the radical idea has power even today. “But the truth is Beethoven is like Michael Rosen’s bear hunt – you can’t go over him, you can’t go under him, you have to go through him. Academics manufacturing a culture war, in which there can be no winners, is a very 21st-century way of dealing with a figure perceived as a problem: you turn him into a straw man and complain about being triggered.”
I’m beginning to think they’re not really here for the hunting. And if you start with the presumption that pretty much all talk about race today is going to be dumb and self-indulgent, you also won’t go far wrong.
SO KNOXVILLE’S BAR CURFEW ISN’T BACKED BY ANY ACTUAL SCIENCE, ACCORDING TO THE KNOX COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT:
“We’ve never said that we’ve had actual cases tracked back to bars what we are looking at and thinking about is the activity and the behavior in bars and restaurants and with drinking alcohol,” said Charity Menefee on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Knox County Health Department.
Menefee explains that although there are not clusters linked to bars or restaurants in Knox County, local contact tracing and information from other cities show that a curfew may help slow the spread of COVID-19 within Knox County.
I hope that Nashville isn’t one of those “other cities.” But seriously, we’ve had six months or more of contact tracing data. If the data don’t show bars as a problem, then “hunching” that maybe they still are isn’t science, and at this point isn’t a legal justification for a curfew.
HA, HA, VERY FUNNY… WAIT, YOU’RE SERIOUS? ‘Come Back So We Can Tax You,’ New York City Begs Departed Residents. “New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer warned the Big Apple’s wealthy residents Tuesday they are likely to face higher taxes to cover this year’s $4.2 billion deficit resulting from state and local overspending and incompetence driving away their rich tax base.”
REWARDING THOSE WHO WORK HARDER: Not all stereotypes are true. But the belief that the average Asian American student studies more than their counterparts of other races is correct. Or at the very least, that’s what students’ self-reported data reveal. According to a Brookings scholar, Asian American high school students spend about twice as much time studying as whites (almost 2 hours per day vs. almost one hour per day). As a group, they study more than three times as much as African Americans (who, on average, study a little more than a half hour per day). The amount of time Hispanics spend on studying is, on average, only slightly lower than that spent by whites.
The study found that the differences were not the result having to care for other household members. Working a job affected the numbers only slightly.
Parental education was associated with more time spent studying, but racial gaps persisted even after that factor was taken into account. Income level was also associated with time spent, but not nearly enough to account for the racial gaps.
The report goes out of its way to suggest some possible non-judgmental explanations for these numbers. It mentions the possibility that African American students are not being sufficiently challenged because of teachers’ low expectations or because too few advanced courses are being offered at their schools.
No matter what the explanation, the figures are worth noting. Time on task is hugely important to the success of nearly all kinds of human effort. Academic pursuits are no exception.
During the 1996 campaign for Proposition 209, I twice heard the argument (put forth with apparent earnestness) that race preferences in admission are necessary, because Asian American students study too much and it’s just not fair. When I heard that argument, all I could do was blink my eyes and stare. Interestingly, that was enough to get the speakers to backpedal.
All this is one more reason for Californians to vote NO on Proposition 16 in November.