LOCKDOWN FALLOUT: Farmers hit with most disruptive price hikes, supply shortages in decades as pandemic slowdowns catch up to Colorado. “International markets were upended by pandemic-related disruptions to supply chains, that in recent decades have become increasingly global and responsive. Boats stuck waiting to be unloaded at California ports have ripple effects that blow back to plants in Asia, on to suppliers in the U.S., and eventually hit small business owners, grocery stores and customers. A winter storm that crippled Texas’ infrastructure in February and a shift to more online shopping have further disrupted supply chains.”
Archive for 2021
September 14, 2021
WASN’T THERE A LIMBAUGH SKIT ABOUT AL GORE DOING SOMETHING LIKE THIS? Researchers potty-train cows to reduce ammonia emissions.
“F*** JOE BIDEN”: ‘Blood on Your Hands’: Idahoans Welcome Biden With Large Protests. “Chants of ‘traitor’ and ‘Joe Biden sucks’ greeted the president, with people irate over his unconstitutional new vaccine mandates for tens of millions of Americans announced late last week.”
2019’s SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC Mocked, Criticized After Wearing ‘Tax The Rich’ Dress To Elitist Met Gala, Branded A ‘Fraud.’
“Individual tickets are reportedly priced at $30,000 a piece, a far cry from when [Vogue editor-in-chief Anna] Wintour first took over the running of the event in 1995 when they were just $1,000,” Newsweek reported. “Then there are the tables, typically bought by brands and fashion houses. These reportedly start at $275,000.”
AOC was widely mocked and criticized online, including by her supporters, for the stunt, including:
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Ej Dickson, senior writer at Rolling Stone, tweeted: “Am I the only one who thinks this is really f***ing stupid[?] 1) The dress is ugly, 2) She’s at a $35k per person event and this isn’t nearly the own she thinks it is. 3) The dress is ugly. I mean I love her but come on this is so dumb. Peak girl boss s**t.”
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Glenn Greenwald, a progressive blogger, tweeted: “Lots of people commenting snidely on the lack of masks and social distancing in this opulent indoor event in the middle of a pandemic but — as was true of Obama’s indoor bash — COVID wasn’t invited to the #MetGala and these are the sophisticated people who aren’t in danger.”
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Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) tweeted: “I’m not even mad at the lack of self awareness or hypocrisy anymore. At this point it’s just hilarious. These people are a giant joke.”
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Donald Trump Jr. tweeted: “What makes @AOC a bigger fraud: The “tax the rich” dress while she’s hanging out with a bunch of wealthy leftwing elites or the lack of masks after spending the past 18 months as one of the biggest authoritarian mask Karens in the country?”
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Stephen Taylor, political commentator, tweeted: “This is such a political miscalculation. It’s quite amazing to be watching it in realtime.”
America’s Newspaper of Record explores the brand-extension possibilities: AOC Now Selling ‘Tax The Rich’ Caviar For Just $10,000 A Can.
Meanwhile, NRO’s Charles Cooke reminds everyone that the Democrats remain the party of the working man. Exit question: Why Did the Staff at the Met Wear Masks, While the Celebrities Went Without?
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Half of Americans Call Jan. 6 Suspects ‘Political Prisoners.’
Plus:
- Introducing “genderfae” and “generfloret” because we’re cruel like that
- “Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wore a ‘tax the rich’ dress *to a tax shelter*”
- See the truly dark side of white supremacy
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
RULING CLASS PRIVILEGE: COVID rules are for serfs, not celebrities: None of the passes given to the elite apply to us plebs.
I think this is the most evocative photo from the Met Gala:
Note Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) festooned with “Equal Rights” as she stands maskless in front of identically-dressed underlings who, unlike the celebrity guests, are all wearing masks. And the underlngs are all in black, down to the masks. At least the Handmaids get to wear red.
YOU WANT TAR AND FEATHERS AND GUILLOTINES? THIS IS HOW YOU GET TAR AND FEATHERS AND GUILLOTINES: Fed-up Sarasota County school board bans criticism of members. “At a meeting last week, Vice Chairwoman Jane Goodwin — standing in for Chairwoman Shirley Brown, who lost control of the meeting — directed police to remove citizens who criticized specific elected officials during the public comment period, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports.”
They can be reached here. Their group photo seems rather Karenish. There’s only one man.
Our political class increasingly seems to think it shouldn’t have to care what voters think. That’s how you turn voters into protesters, rioters, and revolutionaries.
FASTER, PLEASE: A fountain of youth for ageing stem cells in bone marrow.
ANOTHER STICKER FOR YOUR COLLECTION: 3inch Joe Biden Funny Sticker, That’s All Me I Did That Decal. I love that people are applying these at gas pumps across the country as gas prices rise.
TO BE FAIR, HE MAKES A LOT OF THOSE: Joe Biden Just Weakened His Cyber Redline With Russia. That’s A Mistake. “Since cyberspace attack on all US targets was already illegal, the list moves US redlines higher, to allow for more criminal activity, since the list implies *other than these targets,* the United States won’t even consider inflicting unacceptable costs for illegal Russian attack on US territory. Toothless indictments – yes; counter cyberspace attack — no. By not defending them, President Biden and his national security advisors are erasing these international norms and redlines. Under international law, you defend norms and sovereignty by *physically defending them,* not by abandoning them.”
ROGER SIMON: Has the Time Come to Break Up America?
So here I am writing a very tentative, very early, article about how we might achieve this separation, partial or complete, as the case may be, or at least think about it.
Please understand what I have in mind is not a civil war, anything but. Part of my intention is to diminish the violence that’s escalating throughout the nation, dial down the hatred, and certainly to avoid deaths.
It’s a peaceful, gradual, and negotiated separation I wish to explore based on two societies recognizing they have different goals and approaches and deciding to go their separate ways.
In other words, if a serious majority of blue state residents want to be “woke,” teach their children critical race theory, allow them to choose their sex at age eight and so forth, much as I abhor these things, they should have that ability, just as the majority of red state citizens who wish to preserve our constitutional republic for future generations should be able to do that as well.
This division shouldn’t be all that surprising at this point, considering what Jefferson said about a revolution being necessary every few decades. The United States of America has grown into something so large as to be nearly ungovernable, an unwieldy nation of some 330 million, a number far greater than the Founders could have conceived in the late 18th century.
Nevertheless, if states’ rights were honored to the degree those same Founders intended, it’s doubtful we would even be having this discussion.
But they’re not and we are.
As Bertolt Brecht famously wrote, “Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be be simpler, If the government simply dissolved the people And elected another?”
IT’S COME TO THIS: Biden’s Ninth Circuit Nominee — Was Just Unanimously Overturned by the Ninth Circuit.
How exceedingly awful was Koh’s ruling?
“A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (unanimously) reversed a 2019 ruling by a federal judge who found that Qualcomm had abused its monopoly position in wireless chips and overcharged mobile phone makers for its patents….
“The District Court judge, Lucy Koh,…(issued) a 233-page decision that could have forced Qualcomm to renegotiate its licensing contracts with phone makers and license its technology to rival chip makers.
“But the appeals court panel was not persuaded.
“In a 56-page ruling, the judges concluded that Qualcomm had no duty under antitrust law to license its competitors. They also ruled that Qualcomm’s policy of not supplying chips to any handset maker that had not licensed its patents did not work like an illegal surcharge on chips sold by competitors.
“‘Anti-competitive behavior is illegal under federal antitrust law,’ the judges wrote. “Hyper-competitive behavior is not.”
The Ninth Circuit totally obliterated Koh’s ruling — and her alleged legal thinking behind it.
And now Biden has nominated Koh for a promotion — to the Ninth Circuit.
The court that totally obliterated Koh’s ruling — and her alleged legal thinking behind it.
Those Court colleague lunches should be really…interesting.
You only promote Koh — if you’re primarily interested in destroying the judiciary, IP, the economy and the country.
To be fair, based on the past eight months, you could make the argument that that is precisely the Biden administration’s goal.
#REFUNDTHEPOLICE: Austin Hits All-Time Homicide High. “Higher crime rates in Austin are a direct results of a homeless policy that lured more transients to Austin, of police budgets that were cut so more taxpayer money could be diverted to leftwing activists, and of a Soros-backed county DA that has installed a revolving door to put dangerous criminals back on Austin’s streets without prosecuting them.”
TO BE FAIR, SHE’S NEITHER TERRIBLY SMART NOR TALENTED AT POLITICS: Kamala Harris Uses Anti-Vax Messaging to Justify Vaccine Mandates.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Farnsworth’s Classical English Style.
THE ATLANTIC: Are Pandemic Hospitalization Numbers Misleading Us?
The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21.
Just like any other successful virus, COVID-19 is becoming more contagious but less dangerous — unlike Joe Biden’s diktats to “combat” it.
Plus this from Matt Margolis:
There are some drawbacks to the study, however. Patients in the VA system are not representative of the U.S. population, as the VA patient populations tends to be older, with few women and no children. The VA also has a policy to test every patient for COVID, while this is not a policy in all hospitals. The study does show, however, that “the introduction of vaccines strongly correlates with a greater share of COVID hospital patients having mild or asymptomatic disease.”
If anything, using older patients would skew the results towards the studied cases being more serious than the national average. The study’s numbers then might be even more encouraging than they appear at first glance.
BUT THE NARRATIVE! COVID-19 vaccine boosters unnecessary for most, say FDA advisers reportedly resigning over issue.
Unlike our military brass during the lead up to Biden’s bungled bugout from Afghanistan, at least people at FDA are resigning in protest.
COLLUSION: Stanford professors ask DOJ to stop looking for Chinese spies at universities in US. I remember when all the best people were ready to turn America upside down over nonexistent Russian collusion claims.
Of course, to be fair, DOJ is supposed to be finding real spies, not making up fake ones.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Black Mark of a Bachelor’s Degree. “Let’s hire anybody but a college graduate. We’ll teach him what he needs to know for our work. Check out the homeschoolers—they are a really sociable lot.”
That’s just shocking.
NPR KEEPS UP THE PANIC PORN: I Got A ‘Mild’ Breakthrough Case. Here’s What I Wish I’d Known. So this guy’s vaccinated, gets Covid anyway, and is pretty sick. Not deathly ill, but like worst-case-of-flu-ever sick. “My legs and arms ached, my fever crept up to 103 and every few hours of sleep would leave my sheets drenched in sweat. I’d drop into bed exhausted after a quick trip down to the kitchen. To sum it up, I’d put my breakthrough case of COVID-19 right up there with my worst bouts of flu. Even after my fever cleared up, I spent the next few weeks feeling low.”
But hey, it’s a good thing he got vaccinated! “‘You probably would have gotten much sicker if you had not been vaccinated,’ Francesca Torriani, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Diego, explained to me recently.”
Well, maybe. My own case of Covid — unvaccinated — was much, much milder than he described. Never ran much of a fever, didn’t feel especially bad except for a bit of a headache and loss of smell, recovered pretty fast. And what he describes is, I’d say, probably about a 60th or 70th percentile case in terms of severity — remember that nearly half of infections are essentially asymptomatic, and many are more like a cold.
Did the vaccine make his particular case milder than it would have been? Who knows? Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe it reduces your chance of hospitalization, but the “hospitalization” statistic turns out to be far less useful than you might think:
Here’s a non-paywalled report on the study:
A recent nationwide study may lead health ofificials to rethink how to analyze COVID-19 hospitalizations as a pandemic metric, The Atlantic reports.
After examining the electronic records for nearly 50,000 patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 at 100 Veterans Affairs hospitals across the United States between March 2020 and June 2021, researchers found that a significant number of the patients actually had mild or asymptomatic infections. Patients who required supplemental oxygen or registered a blood oxygen level below 94 were considered moderate to severe.
Until mid-January 2021, when the vaccine drive really gained steam and the Delta variant had yet to take hold, 36 percent of patients were considered mild or asymptomatic. But in the next six months, that figure jumped to 48 percent, while an ever greater proportion — 57 percent — of vaccinated patients, who make up a much smaller share of admissions to begin with, had less severe cases.
There are probably a few explanations behind the data, per The Atlantic. Many of the patients may have been admitted to the hospital for an unrelated illness and tested positive upon entrance. Others may have been treated as a preventative measure because of comorbities, and some may simply may have just needed quick, relatively easy treatments before leaving.
Actual study is here. None of this is to say the vaccine is useless, of course, but it’s definitely being oversold in this story.
UPDATE: Coincidentally, the Urban Dictionary’s word of the day is NPR-American.
DANGER IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: ‘Defund police’ Squad members are biggest spenders on private security.