Plus: “‘Cuomo isn’t holding me hostage so much as coronavirus is, but he is the only one telling me what to do, where I can and cannot go (anywhere), who I can and cannot see (everyone), who I can and cannot listen to (President Trump, Bill de Blasio), what I can and cannot eat (anything but pasta)…. [W]hen I stream his presser… I feel comforted. I feel alive. I feel protected. I feel… butterflies….’ Now, that is partly satirical, but it is a confession that control feels sexually exciting — that dictators are loved.”
Archive for 2021
August 8, 2021
OPEN THREAD: Time is running out.
BLUE ORIGIN’S PROBLEMS: Tory Bruno says the challenges with BE-4 are real but the engine is moving forward. “Blue Origin in 2015 proclaimed that engines would be ready by 2017. Bruno said everything in the BE-4 program has taken far longer than planned.”
IF IT COULD STOP ALL CORONAVIRUSES, IT COULD PREVENT MANY COMMON COLDS TOO: Antibody findings spark ideas for pan-coronavirus vaccine.
REMEMBER WHEN THE CDC BANNED ALL TESTS EXCEPT ITS OWN, WHICH DIDN’T WORK? At-home saliva test can spot COVID-19 variants in an hour.
YOU KNOW WHO GETS TO AUTHORIZE CONVERSATIONS WITH THE PRESIDENT? THE PRESIDENT.
It’s also rich to see the DOJ acting concerned about people casting doubt on an election, when it ran a dishonest, partisan, and almost certainly illegal operation — “Crossfire Hurricane” — to do just that.
Though to be fair, I’m sure they keep a pretty tight lid on who gets to talk to Biden.
MICHAEL MALONE: Can Silicon Valley Find Its Way Back?
I’ve thought about this transformation a lot lately. I grew up Silicon Valley, I’ve covered it as a journalist longer than anybody, and I have known nearly all of its celebrated figures. The particular occasion for my reflection has been the publication of a special edition of my book, The Big Score (1984), the first history of Silicon Valley.
Rereading a book I wrote when I was 30 years old — when I was as shiny and optimistic as the entrepreneurs and companies I wrote about — was a disturbing experience. Here was a Valley on the cusp of greatness, filled with men and women who are now legends — Hewlett and Packard, Noyce, Moore and Grove, Jobs and Wozniak and many more — but who were then still mostly unknown to the general public, still coping with their new wealth, working in companies small enough that they knew the name of every employee. It was a time when Silicon Valley denizens still dreamed of success and — for all of their ambition — could never imagine that it would one day create the wealthiest enterprises in human history, or change the daily lives of every single person on the planet.
So, what turned that Valley into the one we know — and increasingly fear — today? How did Silicon Valley shift from wanting to change the world to wanting to run it?
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend comments: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The funny/tragic part is that such intelligent, well-intentioned, high-minded people thought they were immune to that. Correction: the funny/tragic/nightmarish Kafkaesque Orwellian part …”
FEMALE CHICAGO POLICE OFFICER KILLED, SECOND OFFICER ‘FIGHTING FOR HIS VERY LIFE:’ “Police sources and a family member identified the officer who died as Ella French, a 29-year-old woman who’d worked as a Chicago cop since April 2018. She was the first Chicago police officer to be shot and killed in the line of duty since Mayor Lori Lightfoot took office in 2019. The other officer is fighting for his life in critical condition at the University of Chicago Medical Center.”
JOHN MCWHORTER: KENDI AND DIANGELO DON’T DEBATE PEOPLE LIKE ME.
Grifters seldom debate people pointing out the grift. Instead they make up reasons why their marks should ignore them.
DENNIS PRAGER: The Media Produces Derangement: Proof From New York Times Readers.
This past weekend, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd added another column to the myriad irrational and hysterical pieces about the “existential threat” climate change allegedly poses to human life.
As I do after almost every piece I read on the internet, I read comments submitted by readers.
One provided me with an epiphany.
It was a comment submitted by New York Times reader “Sophia” of Bangor, Maine:
“I have one child, a daughter, who told me age 8 that she would never have a child because of global warming. She’s now 34 and has never changed her mind. So I will not experience a grandchild. For her wisdom, I am grateful. I would be heartsick if I did have a grandchild who would have to experience the onslaught of changing climate.”
It is hard to imagine greater proof than that comment of the power of mass media and of the left. That a normal woman would celebrate her daughter’s choice not to be a mother and not to make her a grandmother can only be described as deranged. No normal-thinking human being would think that way. Jews had children during the Holocaust and made sure to have children if they survived the Holocaust.
Does this deranged woman know how few people are dying due to weather-related incidents in the era of global warming?
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): On the upside, we’re probably better off with people like this out of the gene pool.
JEFF DUNETZ ON THE AUG. 9TH, 2001 JERUSALEM SBARRO BOMBING: ‘The Street Was Covered with Blood and Bodies.’ And appeasement Of Palestinian Terrorists Has Been Renewed By Biden.
QUESTION ASKED: How much of a COVID risk was Obama’s birthday bash?
Two months ago, having a blowout bash with all of your immunized friends wouldn’t have been a problem. The hot vax summer was upon us courtesy of Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson. Two months later, with hospitals in Delta hot spots filling up, we’re back in a nightmare of rampant transmission and rising death. Former Trump advisor Tom Bossert has been studying the numbers and spotted an alarming divergence between our Delta wave and the one in the UK. That country has a larger share of its population vaccinated than we do, but not wildly higher. And it’s possible that we have a similar degree of overall population immunity due to the number of people here who’ve had COVID and recovered.
* * * * * * * *
The grimmest piece on the pandemic that I’ve read this summer is this new interview with scientist Eric Topol titled “Too Many People Are Dying Right Now.” As Delta began to spread in the U.S., experts like Topol expected a surge in cases but a much gentler rise in hospitalizations and an even milder rise in deaths, all thanks to vaccination. Instead we’re seeing about the same ratio of cases to hospitalizations now as we saw during our pre-vaccination winter wave. How can that be when we know that the vaccines substantially reduce one’s risk of hospitalization? Topol isn’t sure but he’s worried:
I mean, one of the worst signals that I’ve seen is San Francisco. San Francisco is like Vermont, they’re even a little higher than Vermont for fully vaccinated — it’s 70 percent of the population of San Francisco county and it’s going through a very substantial hospitalization spike, unlike Vermont.
So I look at San Francisco as a bad bellwether for what might be coming. Why are they doing so poorly right now for hospitalization? Why is it so different than Vermont? If there’s that many people getting so sick, something’s just not right…
In San Diego, too, we’re having hospitalization increases, too — not as bad as San Francisco, but our vaccination rates are quite good for California. But they’re not preventing a surge of new patients in the hospital.
And the rate of rise — it’s scary. We’ve never had a rise like this for the country. And, okay, a lot of it is from Florida and Louisiana. But the rate of rise is just… scary. The fact that this ratio is being maintained, compared to a monster-wave, pre-dating vaccination…
Topol’s article appears on New York magazine’s Website. Note which event isn’t covered on the New York Website this weekend:
JOHN HINDERAKER: The CDC’s Voodoo Epidemiology. “Our country’s response to the covid epidemic has been an unscientific embarrassment. It is not too harsh to say that our policy has consisted of harassing the general public while exposing the vulnerable. In the parade of irrationality, the Centers for Disease Control has been the leader. One way in which the CDC’s unscientific approach is currently on display is its refusal to acknowledge that catching covid confers immunity to the disease, to the same extent, and probably more, than being vaccinated. This stands to reason, since the whole point of vaccination is to mimic the effect–production of antibodies–of having a disease. . . . Our covid response has been dictated by politicians and bureaucrats, while the voices of actual physicians with expertise in the relevant fields and with clinical experience treating covid patients have been suppressed by the press and by social media giants. The result has been a fiasco.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Tell If Your President Is A Totalitarian Fascist (video).
INCONVENIENT TRUTHS: Charles Murray’s ‘Facing Reality’ — A Review. Razib Khan reviews and summarizes Murray’s unwelcome findings regarding “systemic racism.”
Comfortable white people—“nice white parents” in affluent neighborhoods who support efforts to “defund the police”—can refuse to look into the data or insist that those data are the product of racist systems and structures. They can “interrogate their privilege” and “confront their white supremacy,” or better yet, demand that others do so. But they won’t be any closer to understanding why poor African Americans and Latinos in inner-city neighborhoods want more police officers in their neighborhoods and not fewer, nor why poor African American parents clamor for access to strict charter schools that activists condemn for being “anti-black.”
. . . These are not data that foster peace of mind, because they disrupt the delusion that there are easy answers to hard problems or scapegoats we can drive from the village to restore purity and order. But we are not a society in a state of equanimity as it is. Serenity evades us as long as we build upon a foundation of lies. Screaming about injustice, spreading the blame to others less fortunate than ourselves, or denying it outright will not bring us peace, help the less privileged, or fortify our fragile republic.
Read the whole thing — and Murray’s book.
RIP: Night Court actress Markie Post passes away at age 70 after nearly four-year battle with cancer. “Post’s death comes less than a month after the passing of her Night Court co-star Charlie Robinson who played a legal clerk on the series.”
HEATHER MAC DONALD: Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 2). Another cultural institution succumbs to the race-baiters. (In case you missed it: Part 1).
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Staying Alert is Key for Personal Defense.
BACK IN STOCK: Western Pistol Earrings and these Don’t Tread on Me Earrings earrings back too.
CAMILE PAGLIA: Lady Gaga: The Death of Sex.
Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions. They don’t notice her awkwardness because they’ve abandoned body language in daily interactions. They’re not repelled by the choppy cutting of her videos (in febrile one-second bursts) because that’s how they process reality – as a cluttered, de-centred environment of floating bits.
Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Everything is refracted for them through the media. They have been raised in a relativistic cultural vacuum where chronology and sequence as well as distinctions of value have been lost or jettisoned by politically correct educators. It is a world of blurred borderlines – between childhood and adulthood as well as between parents and children. The young waver between dependence and independence and are slow to leave the comforts of home. Old family hierarchies have broken down. Gaga, for example, gets drunk with her parents and calls her father her “best friend.” She startlingly said this summer: “I’ve been in my father’s arms for two weeks wishing him happy Father’s Day.”
There are blurred borderlines between the sexes: gender is now alleged to be fabricated rather than biological; so everything is a pose. Thus Gaga welcomed the rumour about her being intersex and converted it into a fashion statement. Casual “hooking up” blends friends and lovers, with sex becoming merely an excuse for filial hugging. Borderlines have blurred too between public and private: reality-TV shows multiply; cell-phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina. In the sprawling anarchy of the web, the borderline between fact and fiction has melted away.
Yes, it’s a decade old, but it’s also a bravura piece of writing. read the whole thing.
IF IT DOESN’T GET YOU A VAX CARD WHAT’S THE POINT? One dose of Pfizer vaccine may be enough for folks who’ve had COVID: study.