DILLINGER REJECTS CALL FOR BANK-ROBBERY INQUIRY: China rejects WHO’s plan for second COVID-19 origins study.
Archive for 2021
July 22, 2021
BACK BY INVITATION: The Return of Urban Blight. “Democrats were allowed to run America’s big cities for decades because machine politics mostly worked well enough most of the time to meet the needs of most citizens. There was enough graft, cronyism and featherbedding to keep close party coalition partners happy while still providing an minimum baseline of services. But Social Justice appears to be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. No longer content with traditional levels of welfare state clientism, Social Justice demands that all city funding must flow through its sticky fingers, especially police funding that previously keep big American cities mostly safe and livable.”
DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Up to 98 percent of faculty donations from Oregon’s largest public universities went to Democrats: report.
America needs universities that “look like America.” Right now they look like anything but.
WELL, SHE’S A MARXIST: D.C. Mayor Painted ‘Black Lives Matter’ on the Streets, But She Erased ‘Cuba Libre.’
HMM: Without EU action, Belarus will become a failed state on Europe’s doorstep.
The Belarus situation today can be described as Donbasization. Like Russia’s effective seizure of that Ukrainian territory, it involves transformation into a full-on rogue state with no rule of law, complete international isolation, the demolition of civil society, the middle class, and the private sector. The hijacking of a passenger plane was merely the pinnacle of this process.
But Aliaksandr Lukashenka is not planning to stop. A few days after the Ryanair incident, he openly declared that Belarus will no longer stop drugs and illegal immigrants at the EU border. And so, to punish the EU, the regime decided to weaponize illegal migration. It launched a scheme of bringing people from Africa and the Middle East into Belarus and then transferred them to Lithuania’s EU border for a fee.
Domestically, the regime has launched a new attack against private businesses. There are talks among pro-regime analysts about the nationalization of Austria’s Raiffeisenbank and A1 Telecom. Belarus has withdrawn from the EU Eastern Partnership scheme, de facto recognized the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (part of Ukraine), and made September 17, the date the Soviet Union invaded Poland, a national holiday. In other words, Belarus is really breaking bad.
What a mess, but one that might work out to Moscow’s advantage, since Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has so far resisted complete Anschluss with Russia.
ST. LOUIS: Gardner meltdown deepens: Who falsely put prosecutor’s electronic signature on 28 cases? “If that turns out to be accurate, hoo boy. It’s one thing to be incompetent and fail to appear at hearings. It’s quite another to put false representations on court documents, let alone forge signatures — electronic or otherwise — while doing so. Those are actual crimes, which might explain why Arshi abruptly quit after discovering what happened.”
Discovering.
Plus: “Even without the forgery issue, Gardner and her office has a few big legal problems ahead of them. Defense attorneys will waste no time in demanding dismissals as well as sanctions against the circuit attorney’s office in these cases for falsely representing itself in those documents. Judges might well be tempted to agree, especially on sanctions against Gardner and others in her office. How big of a problem might depend on what Arshi has to say about what happened, and Arshi might not have much choice in how much she shares. It seems very likely that she will get called in some of those cases to verify that she didn’t sign the documents and didn’t direct anyone to apply her signature as judges attempt to unravel what Gardner’s office did. Defense attorneys won’t pass up an opportunity to interrogate a prosecutor under oath on potential corruption issues, to be sure. And on top of this sits the issue of Gardner’s utter incompetence.”
Incompetence? She’s not there to be a lawyer. She’s an errand-girl sent by grocery clerks, and she’s performed her assigned errands.
RURAL DEMOCRATS ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES, HUNTED ALMOST TO EXTINCTION BY THEIR OWN PARTY: Rural Democrats Are Running Scared From Their Woke Party’s Extremist National Brand.
STAFFING UP FOR LEGAL COMBAT: NCLA HIRES NEW ATTORNEYS. “Jeffrey Clark, Jenin Younes and Sheng Li have joined the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Clark will be chief of litigation and director of strategy and is the former assistant A.G. Younes will be litigation counsel and previously was an appellate public defender in New York City. Li will be litigation counsel and previously was counselor to the administrator of wage and hour at the Labor Department.”
I’m on the board of NCLA, a new public-interest law firm that exists to attack the administrative state.
BIG TECH, RACISM, AND “DIVERSITY:” Silicon Valley’s Cynical Treatment of Asian Engineers.
Silicon Valley runs on Asians. This is a well-known aspect of the tech world in general, but it’s especially apparent in elite sub-sectors. Even by 2010, Asian Americans already had become a majority (50.1 percent) of all tech workers in the Bay Area: software engineers, data engineers, programmers, systems analysts, admins, and developers. Census Bureau statistics from the same year put white tech workers at 40.1 percent. Other races made up, in total, slightly less than 10 percent. . . .
At surface level, you could spin this as a triumph of diversity: Attracting the best of the world’s talent, the American system welcomes people of different races to contribute to American business and society. The narrative of Asians making a difference at a huge American company such as Google or Facebook could be portrayed as a great feat, a demonstration of the American Dream at work.
But that is not what happens. In press briefs and company images, we tend not to be treated to profiles of tech-team members—the core of these companies’ sky-high profits and market dominance. Facebook’s online diversity portal features nine stories. There are three people who appear to be black, and two who look distinctly Latino. Only one looks to be an East Asian person. His name is presented as Henry B.
Little did Henry B. know that he would be the only East Asian person featured, standing in racially for half of all Facebook technical employees. The other employees’ stories and photos tend to feature bright lighting, full smiles, and gushing reports of how much they care about Facebook’s diversity platform. Henry B. has a dimly lit photo and a story that begins, “There are different ways of coding an application to make it more reusable.”
NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: Air Force Directed Energy Report Argues Defensive Force Fields May Be ‘Just On The Horizon.’
EUGENE VOLOKH REPORTS REASON TO BE UNIMPRESSED WITH CDC CLAIMS ABOUT REDUCED LIFE EXPECTANCY DUE TO COVID:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made headlines last week when it announced that Covid-19 had reduced the average life expectancy of Americans in 2020 by a full year…. [But t]he pandemic’s appalling toll could not have reduced life span by nearly that much. My own estimate is that when Covid-19’s ravages in 2020 are averaged across the country’s entire population, we each lost about five days of life.
The CDC’s mistake? It calculated life expectancy using an assumption that is assuredly wrong, which yielded a statistic that was certain to be misunderstood….
People understood [the CDC’s report] to mean that Covid-19 had shaved off a year from how long each of us will live on average. That is, after all, how people tend to think of life expectancy. The New York Times characterized the report as “the first full picture of the pandemic’s effect on American expected life spans.”
But wait. Analysts estimate that, on average, a death from Covid-19 robs its victim of around 12 years of life. Approximately 400,000 Americans died Covid-19 in 2020, meaning about 4.8 million years of life collectively vanished. Spread that ghastly number across the U.S. population of 330 million and it comes out to 0.014 years of life lost per person. That’s 5.3 days. There were other excess deaths in 2020, so maybe the answer is seven days lost per person.
No matter how you look at it, the result is a far cry from what the CDC announced.
It’s not that the agency made a math mistake. I checked the calculations myself, and even went over them with one of the CDC analysts. The error was more problematic in my view: The CDC relied on an assumption it had to know was wrong.
Well, that’s just sad, but not particularly surprising.
UPDATE: Just to be clear, the block quote isn’t from Volokh, but from Peter Bach at StatNews, whom Eugene is quoting.
VOTERS AREN’T AS STUPID AS OUR RULING CLASS HOPED: Two-thirds want BLM riots probed, more than Jan. 6.
AT HELEN’S PAGE: Hacker Golf Mystery Series.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Drunk Uncle Biden Struggles With English, Truth at Town Hall. “The case could be made that this wasn’t that big of a train wreck because it happened on CNN and therefore had an audience only slightly larger than I do when my cat wanders in and watches me while I shave. Still, why can’t they just leave this guy in the White House with his coloring books and spare the country the embarrassment? Television appearances by Biden are probably the only American shows the ChiComs allow to air uncensored so their beleaguered citizens can finally have something to laugh at.”
PIPELINES ARE ONLY BAD WHEN THEY BENEFIT AMERICA: Biden Administration Green Lights Putin’s Pipeline: Nord Stream 2 will boost the Russian president’s influence in Europe.
Flashback:
Ted Cruz notes, “[B]asically what Joe Biden has decided is pipelines in America, bad. Jobs in America, bad. Pipelines in Russia, good. Jobs in Russia, good. And this is exactly backward. It is asinine. And four months into it, Joe Biden is crawling in bed with Putin and Russia and the enemies of America. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Flashback: So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
You know who didn’t do those things? Trump. You know who is doing those things? Biden.
THE WOKE HAVE NO SYMPATHY OR CONCERN FOR THE WORKINGMAN: Colorado AFL-CIO will withhold donations to Democratic campaign committees through May 2022, saying unions have been ‘excluded.’
ACCOUNTABILITY: Rand Paul: I’m sending a letter to the DOJ asking that Fauci be referred for criminal charges. “It’ll keep the pressure on Fauci to explain precisely why the study referenced by Paul during their confrontation yesterday didn’t involve gain of function research. The technique described in the study, splicing parts of different viruses together to test whether the new virus was capable of binding to human ACE2 receptors, sounded like GOF to me. It sounded that way to molecular biologist Richard Ebright too. And it sounded that way to reporter Josh Rogin, who famously broke the news last year that containment measures at the Wuhan Institute of Virology weren’t as rigorous as you’d expect from a lab doing work as dangerous as it was doing.”
I’M SO OLD I CAN REMEMBER WHEN A FEW DEMOCRATS WANTED THIS, TOO: AOC Discovers That Republicans Want Cuba’s Communist Dictatorship to Fall.
Actually, that does make me feel old.
FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: The Gear Engages (Martha’s Sons Book 4).
It takes more than a single terraformer to start a new world.
The human colony on the lost world of Not What We Were Looking For faces fracture and schism. On one side of the river, the settlers from Earth remember what it means to live in a free society. In the Marss-controlled city, the governor cancelled elections long ago and strives daily to cement his grip on the inhabitants.
Thaddeus Dawe and the Hudson cousins, including the one who agreed to marry him, save the colony’s last terraseeder from the governor’s political grandstanding, and head for the secret northern enclave started by Thaddeus’ brother. But all Thaddeus’ careful planning takes a wrenching turn when not one but two parties race in pursuit.
Thwarted in his original goal, faced with repairing the consequences of what he does to escape arrest, and besotted by the discovery of newspapers, Thaddeus wrestles with new ventures and roles in which he dare not fail. He must save not only Earth’s microbial legacy but its knowledge base as well. Not to mention, he’s getting married.
But when the governor’s chief of staff decides to weaponize Thaddeus against both the city’s farmers and the newspaper’s publisher, Thaddeus must fight the governor’s attempts to steal the farmers’ land even as someone destroys everything Thaddeus himself tries to build. In the end, he must do what he can to save those his own betrayal put at risk.
Picking up where Under the Earthline left off, The Gear Engages is the fourth book in the gripping science fiction colonization series Martha’s Sons. If you like action, political machinations, and a driven hero, you’ll want to dive in heart-and-head first.
Pick it up now to join the fight for a lost world!
THE LATEST DUMB DEMOCRATIC INITIATIVE: The SPACE Tax Act.
Legislation from Senior Ways and Means Democrat would tax space travel for non-scientific research purposes
As the space tourism race continues today, U.S. Rep Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, previewed a new space tax.
The Securing Protections Against Carbon Emissions (SPACE) Tax Act would create new excise taxes on commercial space flights carrying human passengers for purposes other than scientific research.
Related, from Don Surber: “A man in a purple paisley bowtie who has accomplished nothing in life wants to tax successful billionaires who venture into space, the final frontier.”
Call his office and tell Rep. Earl Blumenauer he’s an idiot.
SOMETIMES THAT’S JUST HOW YOU FEEL: Crabby.
DON’T DESPAIR, DR. HANSON, THEY MIGHT HAVE ALL THAT, BUT THEY DON’T HAVE AMERICA: Democrats No More.
THIS ISN’T ABOUT COVID. THIS IS ABOUT CURTAILING YOUR FREEDOMS: Homeland Security Announces Border and Travel Restrictions for American Citizens Due to COVID, But Border Will Remain Wide Open for Illegal Aliens.