IT’S THE SAME WAY THEY USE RACE, SEX, TRANSPHOBIA, ETC. AT HOME:
Archive for 2021
April 11, 2021
OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves.
VACCINE RESISTANCE: Nearly 40 Percent of Marines Declining to Get COVID-19 Vaccine: Official.
(Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!)
THE BOOM IN SPACE TOURISM.
HOW IT STARTED: David Hogg’s Pillow Company Is Proceeding Nicely.
Last week I told you about former teen and current gun-grabber David Hogg starting his own pillow company to take down My Pillow founder Mike Lindell. You can almost see the cartoon thought-balloon over Hogg’s adorable little head: “Hey, if a crazy crackhead can become a multimillionaire by making pillows, how tough can it be?” Unfortunately, young Mr. Hogg is quickly discovering exactly how tough it can be. And thanks to the modern miracle of Twitter, we can watch him sink into a pit of disillusioned despair in real-time.
Exhibit A:
Whoops! Hey, how about finding a base of operations first?
California is a prohibitively expensive state for prospective businesses? Weird! Hey, I wonder why that is? Maybe Hogg will figure it out someday.
How It’s Going: David Hogg Quits Progressive MyPillow Competitor Two Months After Launch.
A FAREWELL TO HYGIENE THEATER? Has the Era of Overzealous Cleaning Finally Come to an End? This week, the C.D.C. acknowledged what scientists have been saying for months: The risk of catching the coronavirus from surfaces is low.
When the coronavirus began to spread in the United States last spring, many experts warned of the danger posed by surfaces. Researchers reported that the virus could survive for days on plastic or stainless steel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that if someone touched one of these contaminated surfaces — and then touched their eyes, nose or mouth — they could become infected.
Americans responded in kind, wiping down groceries, quarantining mail and clearing drugstore shelves of Clorox wipes. Facebook closed two of its offices for a “deep cleaning.” New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority began disinfecting subway cars every night.
But the era of “hygiene theater” may have come to an unofficial end this week, when the C.D.C. updated its surface cleaning guidelines and noted that the risk of contracting the virus from touching a contaminated surface was less than 1 in 10,000.
“People can be affected with the virus that causes Covid-19 through contact with contaminated surfaces and objects,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said at a White House briefing on Monday. “However, evidence has demonstrated that the risk by this route of infection of transmission is actually low.” . . .
“Finally,” said Linsey Marr, an expert on airborne viruses at Virginia Tech. “We’ve known this for a long time and yet people are still focusing so much on surface cleaning.” She added, “There’s really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten Covid-19 by touching a contaminated surface.” . . .
“This should be the end of deep cleaning,” Dr. Allen said, noting that the misplaced focus on surfaces has had real costs. “It has led to closed playgrounds, it has led to taking nets off basketball courts, it has led to quarantining books in the library. It has led to entire missed school days for deep cleaning. It has led to not being able to share a pencil. So that’s all that hygiene theater, and it’s a direct result of not properly classifying surface transmission as low risk.”
We’ve known this for months; glad the CDC is finally catching up. That said, anything that got New York and Boston to clean their subways can’t be all bad.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Childhood diet and exercise creates healthier, less anxious adults.
Things your grandmother knew . . .
CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: Never Trump conservatives are complicit with Team Biden’s moral outrages and norm-breaking.
Never Trumpers spoke of the Trump GOP almost as if it were Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, a dictator’s discredited political organ, badly in need of a purge. “President Donald Trump leaves office with a crimson-stained legacy,” thundered Peter Wehner, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “A similar stain attaches to those in the party who supported and sustained him.”
William Kristol, a prominent Twitter user, condemned Trump’s “enablers”: “They share the responsibility. They share the guilt. They ought to share the opprobrium.”
Many of these men and women embraced candidate Joe Biden. Biden, Wehner effused, is “an admirable human being, empathetic and generous in spirit.” Mona Charen, the syndicated moralist and former EPPC fellow, confessed she had “never been happier with a vote” than the one she cast for Biden.
That’s pretty rich considering that Charen “joined the staff of First Lady Nancy Reagan as a speechwriter. She then worked on President Ronald Reagan’s staff, in the White House Office of Public Liaison and in the Office of Communications. Charen served as Jack Kemp’s speechwriter in his unsuccessful 1988 presidential bid.”
CNN’S FOX NEWS DERANGEMENT SYNDROME ROLLS ON. This is a real screen shot of CNN:
THE PROBLEM WITH HYDROGEN-POWERED VEHICLES: finding hydrogen. “Deals and incentives abound, but if you’re driving any of the 9000-plus fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) that call California home, you better be good with logistics. In a state that covers more than 163,000 square miles, there are currently only 45 hydrogen stations, and they don’t always have enough fuel for everyone who needs it.”
Related: Here’s How Hydrogen Engines Work.
I drove a GM hydrogen car for Popular Mechanics a few years back. I still have the same reservations about the hydrogen fuel cycle. To wit: “The car advertises itself as petroleum-free, which is true. But—and here’s my problem with hydrogen cars—it’s not really fossil fuel free. Most hydrogen is made by ‘steam reformation’ of natural gas, which is still a fossil fuel. You can also make it out of water, via electrolysis, but unless you’ve got a non-fossil source of electricity the hydrogen is really just functioning as an energy-storage medium, rather than a source of energy. Of course, build lots of nice, clean nuclear plants, or orbiting solar power plants, or whatever, and that problem goes away.”
Maybe the abundance of fracked natural gas changes this calculation a bit, but I’m not sure. But the people pushing hydrogen cars are generally anti-fracking.
AN UN-WOKE HISTORY of the Krag-Jorgensen rifle.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION RED-LINING THE IRONY METER: ‘Why Are They In Homeland Security Bags?’: Rep. Louie Gohmert Finds Signs Directing Illegal Immigrants To Asylum.
WORLD ENDS, WOMEN HARDEST HIT: Coronavirus pandemic exacerbates inequalities for women, UN warns.
(Via Covid One Year Ago.)
THE ELECTIVE-SURGERY BAN WAS ONE OF THE BIGGEST MISTAKES OF THE PANDEMIC: Non-emergency surgeries in U.S. rebounding, but backlogs remain.
THIS IS A BIG BLACK MARK: Scientists find clues to why AstraZeneca’s vaccine may cause clots.
Plus: “European drug regulators said they are reviewing reports of rare blood clots in four people who received Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine.”
ROGER SIMON: Beware the Asperger’s Fascists of Big Tech.
Unlike, say, Albert Einstein who did not “settle” for Isaac Newton, the powers that be at YouTube evidently believe in that oxymoron “settled science.” They have removed, lest we ignoramuses be misled into believing or even being exposed to anything that was said, a panel discussion on the response to COVID-19—the masks and the lockdowns—with four public health experts from Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School.
Why censor then, given the impeccable backgrounds of the participants? The unspecified medical experts at YouTube/Google/Alphabet could undoubtedly spout some reasons the science in their “humble” opinions is settled on these matters (until Anthony Fauci changes his for the umpteenth time).
But the views of the four panel experts are readily available elsewhere, so why bother to block them?
Well, that may be true, but these experts appeared in a lengthy panel discussion led by Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Imagine a long and serious panel on something scientific led by the current president of the United States. For that matter, imagine the current president passing a high school physics test.
So the Democrats are seeing a problem down the road, a problem with the potential of growing even bigger than Donald Trump, if such a thing were possible, a Republican presidential candidate who is considerably smarter than they are and, thus far, keeps his cool and is willing to punch back at their excesses.
Besides that, he might be more appealing to the “soccer moms” than Trump.
Better to wipe him out now. And who better to do that than Big Tech? DeSantis doesn’t like them—he’s initiating legislation to diminish their power—and they, for that and other reasons, certainly don’t like him.
Interesting here is why Big Tech is the way it is, why its leaders—with the exception of Peter Thiel and a few others—so uniformly think the way they do.
They’re extremely bright (largely) guys who have reinvented the way we communicate and even live and made giant fortunes in the process. They used to be nerds, but now they’re big shots, inhabiting expensive homes in the most expensive place in America, Silicon Valley.
Given their history and the monomaniacal, focused manner in which they got there, I would wager many of them suffer from Asperger’s—“a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.”
They get technology, they get business, but they don’t really get people. They don’t read widely, only within their world. Their machines have revealed the truth and they want to make sure the world follows their orders, which are, after all, politically correct.
When they censor they are doing what they are convinced is the right thing. They are what we may call Asperger’s Fascists.
Blocking a video with “four public health experts from Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School” just because DeSantis is with them seems pretty churlish of YouTube. Don’t they know he enjoys bipartisan support?
YES, WHEN BLACKS KILL ASIANS IT’S OBVIOUSLY WHITE PEOPLE’S FAULT: Professor: White supremacy is to blame for ALL racial violence in the U.S.
Related: Not all crimes matter to the mainstream media.
The reader would be forgiven for assuming that such a heinous crime committed against an Asian-American would further ignite the flames of #StopAsianHate advocacy. After all, Anwar’s death follows a broader trend of Asian Americans being targets of violence. NBC News recently highlighted startling statistics: 3,800 anti-Asian incidents occurred this past year, most of which targeted Asian women. The New York Times reported five new possible anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City. And the “Stop Asian Hate” movement continues to sweep across the country.
However, following Anwar’s death, the loudest sound from the woke media was that of crickets. While The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC published a plethora of racialized articles breaking down the Atlanta shootings, the mainstream media hardly covered the tragedy of Anwar’s death.
Why is this the case? According to the woke media, only white people are capable of committing hate crimes. And in the case of Anwar’s death, the suspects are not white.
When you remember that “woke” is a synonym for “crazy, stupid, and vicious” it all makes sense.
SEEN AT HELEN’S PAGE: An Original Web Series About Antique & Classic Power Boats. You can subscribe to the show on YouTube here. I just did.