WELL, WE CERTAINLY CAN’T RELY ON THE COURTS TO PROVIDE SUPERVISION:
And I think people have figured out that nobody else will, either. Trump might have, which is why the FBI was careful to keep him neutralized with bogus scandals, then make sure he didn’t get another term.
NEWS FROM MY NECK OF THE WOODS: Mayor Glenn Jacobs announces end of Knox County mask mandate.
“PROGRESSIVISM:” WHERE TIME STANDS STILL. Vogue magazine asks: Is Having A Baby In 2021 Pure Environmental Vandalism?
To be fair, as with the photos last year of the Chinese spraying bleach onto city streets at night from giant trucks, that headline is right in line with the 21st century promised by Hollywood’s 1970s eco-obsessed sci-fi until Star Wars broke the trend in 1977.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Scientists hope Interstellar Probe will reveal secrets of the heliosphere.
NEW CDC GUIDANCE: Here’s what you can and can’t safely do if you’re vaccinated.
Why are the vaccinated still being urged to wear masks at a crowded *outdoor* event like a baseball game, asks Philip Klein? Good question. I have no answer.
But maybe Rochelle Walensky does:
In other words, your reward for doing the responsible thing and getting your shots is … to carry on as usual and set an example for others even though you’re not personally at risk. The punchline is that the unvaccinated care less about the risk from COVID than the vaccinated do, so we’re going to end up with an absurd situation in which people who’ve been immunized are sitting in restaurants with their masks on to set an example while the unimmunized people at the table next to them are barefaced, having the time of their lives.
I’ll leave you with this guy, our new head of HHS, who’s under the impression somehow that the message from our federal science bureaucracy is “clear.” My dude, the messaging on the pandemic hasn’t been clear since the moment COVID arrived 14 months ago. We were gifted with a new example of just how unclear it is literally just a few hours ago. I have no doubt that, despite today’s guidance encouraging the vaccinated to dine indoors, Fauci will hedge in his next interview when asked if that’s risky. There’s no such thing as a “clear message” from our government on the coronavirus. But admittedly, “get vaccinated” is about as clear — and correct — as it can get.
Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results:
Flashback: The suicide of expertise.
UPDATE: From America’s Newspaper of Record:
(Updated and bumped.)
BUT HEY, IT’S ENRICHING TRIAL LAWYERS: American’s War on Pain Pills Is Killing Addicts and Leaving Patients in Agony. The government’s efforts to get between people and the drugs they want have no prevented drug use, but they have made it more dangerous.
THE CITY THAT NEVER WAKES: The Big Empty. Sohrab Ahmari takes a stroll on the abandoned sidewalks of New York:
By the end of my walk, I was tempted to scream, Charlton-Heston-in-Planet-of-the-Apes-style: “We finally did it! You maniacs . . . God damn you!” They—we—turned the greatest city in the world into Podgorica at nighttime, except weird and dystopian to boot.
When I got home, I told my wife that I wished to launch a civil-disobedience movement against the lockdowns. She blessedly talked me down, and I slept off the strong drink and inspired resolution. Still, I’m angry, as an American and a New Yorker, and have been angry since this all began. I can’t avoid holding in contempt the virtue-signaling double-masking types on the Upper East Side (“I’m one of the good ones, Dr. Fauci!”); the moms at my son’s Catholic school who pull Junior away from touching a metal railing (“Watch out! The virus!”); the young professionals who seem to take a perverse pleasure in the possibility that we are unlikely to socialize in person ever again and must learn to love the Clubhouse voice app.
The pandemic and the lockdowns are highly complex events and, as the social theorists might say, overdetermined. But one clear factor is the behavior of a laptop class that lives in fear of risk, with no transcendent horizon and “the consolations neither of Christ nor of Seneca,” as my friend Rusty Reno likes to say. That class seems prepared to desolate a place like New York City in service of safety-ism, to reorganize our way of life around its own neo-gnostic preferences, its horror of embodied relationships and inherited obligations—including obligations to place.
Yes, it’s now the Big Empty.
HMM: ‘Universal’ coronavirus vaccine may protect against variants, common cold. “The vaccine targets a part of the COVID-19 virus’ spike protein that appears to be highly resistant to mutation and is common across nearly all coronaviruses, said senior researcher Dr. Steven Zeichner. He is a professor of pediatric infectious disease with the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. In animal studies, the COVID-19 vaccine protected pigs against two separate diseases caused by two types of coronavirus, COVID-19 and porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, or PEDV, according to results published online recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
SOMETHING THAT CHINA CELEBRATES, AND IS QUIETLY ENCOURAGING: If ‘Get Woke Go Broke’ Is True, What Might That Mean for the Future of the U.S. Military?
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden wears face mask outdoors to hail CDC guidelines that say you no longer need to.
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH JAMES CARVILLE IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Carville: “Wokeness is a Problem and We All Know It.”
CIVIL RIGHTS LAW: The Law That Ate the Constitution. “Imagine if, instead of passing annual Coercion Acts, Parliament had permanently abolished the right to trial by jury, not just for political crimes but for every crime and not just in Ireland but in the whole United Kingdom. This is akin to what Congress did when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
#RESISTANCE: Bill Making Tennessee a Second Amendment Sanctuary State Passes State Senate. “Sen. Frank Niceley, R-Strawberry Plains, said the bill would be similar to what many states have done by legalizing marijuana, using California and Washington as examples, despite the federal laws making the substance illegal. . . . The House is set to discuss and vote on its companion measure Thursday. Oklahoma, Montana, Arizona and Nebraska have created and passed similar laws this year.”
Flashback: Irish Democracy. “More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called ‘Irish Democracy,’ the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE AND THE GRIFTERS: Obama-era White House adviser arrested and charged with stealing from charter school he created.
WELL, THIS DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE: More Drug Overdose Deaths Than COVID-19 Casualties Reported In San Francisco Last Year.
THE PELOSI PREMIUM: Congress Wants to Hike One Tax That Mostly Punishes the Poor.
New taxes are always bad news, but this one is particularly alarming. Gas taxes and other levies on transportation disproportionately hurt poor and working-class Americans, who, after a year of lockdown-induced recession, can hardly afford another gut punch from our political class.
But everyone uses gas, right?
Well, not in the same amounts. Some people have cars while others do without, and some take public transit while others commute via car. The result is that lower-income Americans disproportionately spend a higher share of their income on transportation. The average American spends 13 percent of their income on transportation, but the bottom 20 percent of earners typically spend 29 percent of their income on it—more than twice as much.
The overall trend is quite clear: Wealthier people tend to spend much less of their income on transportation costs.
I’m old enough to remember when “tax the poor” was an early Rush Limbaugh gag.
YOU CAN ONLY BE AVANT-GARDE FOR SO LONG BEFORE YOU BECOME GARDE: Howard’s end: Shock jock Stern has lost his sting — and his mojo.
“The Howard Stern Show,” long in decline, is dead.
In March 2020, when New York City officially went into lockdown, Stern fled to his basement in the Hamptons. Over one year later and now vaccinated, as he first admitted on-air Monday — back from yet another vacation — Stern still has no intention of ever returning to his Midtown studio, his luxury Upper West Side apartment, or any semblance of pre-pandemic life.
The Howard Stern who stayed on air as planes flew into the World Trade Center is unrecognizable.
“Things will never get back to normal,” he declared just two weeks ago. “I do not believe the pandemic will ever be over.”
For a once-constant listener like me, this is heretical, especially here in New York City, where every single neighborhood is struggling to survive. Also, Howard: This pandemic will end, even though you, a germophobic recluse, clearly wish it would not.
* * * * * * * *
Stern’s rants are so expected and so often hit the same notes — personal hygiene, looks, financial status, marital troubles, professional incompetence — that even attacked staffers feel the same boredom that long ago came over the listener.
And how could they not? Stern long ago abandoned his best attribute, going after famous hypocrites. Hilaria Baldwin, for example, pretending for years to be from Spain — when really she’s from Boston — and bagging a movie star would once have been Stern show fodder for days.
But Hilaria barely rates a mention. Why? Can’t piss off Howard’s good pal Alec in the Hamptons. Howard’s in with the cool kids — all he ever really wanted, despite claims to the contrary.
Flashback: What Happened to Howard Stern?
Listening to this balderdash, you’d have thought that Clinton had led a saintly life, that she had been constantly set upon by jealous, corrupt inferiors, and that her career had been a spotless series of legislative and diplomatic triumphs. Buying into the notion of Hillary as a lifelong victim of the patriarchy, Stern seemed to be out to make up, in one interview, for every time he’d ever gotten a stripper to remove her top. One illuminating moment came when Stern praised Howard Zinn, the Communist author of A People’s History of the United States, a shoddy work of propaganda that has, alas, become a perennial best-seller and college text. Every Stern fan knows that Howard’s not big on books, so if he’s actually read Zinn’s opus, it’s likely his chief source of information on American history—a scary thought.
It was a stunning listening experience. When Hillary blamed James Comey (along with “the Russians and Wikileaks”) for her election loss, Stern went along with her, even though Comey had done Hillary a service by choosing not to prosecute her for clear violations of the Espionage Act. When she mentioned her emails, Stern didn’t bring up her private server or her destruction of the emails with BleachBit but instead agreed readily with her baffling claim that the emails had been “misinterpret[ed]”; when she criticized Trump’s “trade battles” and tax breaks, said that Trump was in Putin’s “camp,” and accused Trump fans (and not Antifa) of committing acts of violence around the country—and when she even knocked the booming Trump economy—Stern nodded along. He made no mention of Fusion GPS, the Clinton Foundation, her contorted version of the Benghazi episode, her dubious story about coming under fire in Bosnia, or anything else remotely scandalous in her (or her husband’s) past. Both Hillary and Stern took Joe Biden’s side in the Ukraine controversy and agreed that Trump’s famous phone call with the Ukrainian president had amounted to an “abuse of power.”
The entire interview was a case of kowtowing on an epic scale. Howard Stern, who rose to fame, in considerable part, by zapping fraudulent politicians, had now given one of the most sycophantic interviews of all time to a woman regarded by many as the most duplicitous pol of our era. It was a terrible comedown for a guy who’d earned a reputation for fearless honesty.
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. Howard Stern had won the victory over himself. He had learned to loved Big Sister.
THERE’S ALWAYS A WAY: Canadians Crossing Border in Taxis to Avoid Hotel Quarantine for Air Travelers. “Canada’s required, expensive three-day hotel quarantines are only required if you fly in. Taxi and limo services are getting besieged with budget-minded Canadians.”
UGH: Meet the Swiss Billionaire Behind Arabella Advisors’ ‘Dark Money’ Empire. “New York Times reporter Ken Vogel recently revealed the efforts by Swiss billionaire and leftist mega-donor Hansjörg Wyss to purchase the parent company of the Chicago Tribune and other failing newspapers around the country. It’s laudable to see such genuine investigative journalism—especially since it likely led the billionaire to withdraw his $100 million bid. When so many framed Wyss as a liberal white knight bent on saving a venerable American industry, the reality couldn’t have been more different.”
Where are the right-leaning billionaires when there are big-name media outlets practically begging to bought up cheap?
DALLAS INTERNATIONAL GUITAR FESTIVAL RETURNS APRIL 30:
Dallas International Guitar Festival (DIGF) is back at Dallas Market Hall April 30-May 2. The world’s largest and oldest guitar show is excited to emerge from their cocoon after a year-long quarantine caused by the pandemic.
DIGF hours are 12 noon to 7 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday; and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. There is continuous music throughout the festival, with two outdoor stages. Dallas Market Hall at 2200 Stemmons Freeway in Dallas offers ample free parking for those attending the show.
Jimmy Wallace, DIGF producer and owner, said, “In these challenging times we are committed to maintaining a safe and clean environment for our attendees, performers and staff. This year will be a hybrid event with indoor and outdoor activities. Dallas Market Hall will still have a mask mandate in place during the event. Masks, along with social distancing, will be a requirement and help on-site attendees and exhibitors feel more safe and comfortable attending the Dallas International Guitar Festival this year.”
More details here.
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MICHAEL WALSH: With Parties Polarized, Desire for Revenge Calls the Tune.
The people have spoken,” said former New York City mayor Ed Koch after the Democratic mayoral primary of 1989, “and they must be punished.”
The understandably bitter Koch had just been defeated by David Dinkins and was bidding his farewell to politics. And in fact, the people were punished: the one-term Dinkins, who defeated Rudy Giuliani in the general election that year to become the city’s first black mayor, saw crime soar on his impeccably tailored watch, with murders hitting a high of 2,605 the following year.
Four years later, even the Upper West Side had had enough and called the cops, in the form of Giuliani and his police chief, Bill Bratton.
Still, there was a hidden grain of truth in Koch’s famous crack: there is a vindictive element to Democrat electoral politics, especially in the 30 years since Hizzoner left Gracie Mansion. As the parties have polarized, a destructive element has entered our politics, and with malice aforethought. This will not end well.
Call it “punitive liberalism,” for lack of a better term.
AT HELEN’S PAGE: Professor Carol’s book, Why Freshmen Fail: and How to Avoid It. You can also order directly from her page and save 20% plus free shipping with discount code “helenspage.” (Bumped)
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