ONE YEAR AGO TODAY AT BLOOMBERG: Coronavirus Vaccine in 18 Months? Experts Urge Reality Check.
Archive for 2021
March 30, 2021
WE APOLOGIZE AGAIN FOR THE FAULT IN THE SUBTITLES. THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR SACKING THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE JUST BEEN SACKED HAVE BEEN SACKED: “The newly hired head of diversity and inclusion at US Special Operations Command has been reassigned as the military conducts an investigation of his controversial social media posts, military spokesmen said Monday, including one that appeared to compare former President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.”
“Appeared:”
P.D. MANGAN: Longevity Hacks: A Short Guide to Long, Healthy Life.
Before I discuss how to slow aging, let me get one common objection out of the way. The objection goes like this: “I don’t want to be old and frail longer. I saw how my [insert relative here] spent his/her last years, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Let me die when it’s my time.”
The answer to that objection is that we’re not talking about more years in a nursing home. We want more years of healthy, interesting, and exuberant life, and that’s what the science of anti-aging can deliver.
That’s because most chronic diseases are strongly linked to aging. From heart disease to cancer to Alzheimer’s to frailty, most chronic diseases hit older people. If aging can be slowed, then these chronic diseases can be either eliminated or pushed back much closer to the end of someone’s life.
Slowing aging means more years of healthy life, more years of youth.
As my then-90 year old grandmother said as I headed off to the gym: “Getting in shape for your old age, are you? You’d better!”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. DeSantis Continues To Crush It. “The bloom is fully off the rose when it comes to South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who vetoed her state’s bill banning men from competing in women’s sports despite having promised to sign it. But fellow red state governor Ron DeSantis, a hero for his early lifting of the counterproductive lockdowns that crippled the economies of other states, continues to crush it.”
CHANGE: Georgia Legislature Passes Bill to Make Cocktails To-Go Permanent.
Related: Wisconsin Governor Makes Cocktails To-Go Permanent.
A lot of laws were suspended during the pandemic. Most of them should stay that way.
I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Nike Sues Over Those Satan Shoes, and Lil Nas X Wins in the End. “If you approach the appalling story of the Satan Shoes from the point of view that there is no such thing as bad publicity, it all makes sense.”
To be fair, given Nike’s efforts at attempting to cancel the Betsy Ross flag, and, as Deadspin noted in a headline last year, “Nike would very much like to keep its slave labor, thank you,” it’s good to see that even they have limits when it comes to bad PR.
45OFFICE: President Trump Launches New Website.
CRAFT DISTILLING’S NEXT BIG THING: Direct-to-Consumer Sales.
ROGER SIMON: DeSantis Points the Way to a New Federalism.
On Monday, the Florida governor announced he would take an emergency executive action against vaccine passports, explaining it this way:
“It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society.”
DeSantis has actually been leading the way against such passports for some time.
Meanwhile New York and the federal government are going in the opposite direction, working to launch the passports. New York is already experimenting with an Excelsior Pass for cellphones. The Biden administration is apparently cooperating with private industry in devising and actualizing their manufacture or similar for the entire country.
There’s something eerily similar in this to the Soviet internal passport, although it is yet more ominous because connected to the internet. It only takes a flick of the algorithm to add all sorts of restrictions or morph the passport into, almost inevitably over time, an American version of the “social credit” system already in use by the Chinese Communist Party.
(Sneaking off to Cancun without the second vaccine—four demerits. Disobeying the latest edict from Dr. Fauci—nine demerits. Driving a non-electric Harley—fourteen demerits. Attending an unlicensed school—sixty demerits. Reading books banned by Amazon—mortgage application denied.)
But this is only one of many escalating reasons for this New Federalism.
On multiple levels from election integrity to education to infrastructure the current federal administration is working in diametric opposition to the wishes of the citizens of a majority of the states.
I’MMA JUST LEAVE THIS HERE: A Facebook pal sent me this. I have no idea who is behind it, but it’s just…brilliant:
The red pill at the end is a nice touch.
*Update* Some folks have clued me in that the fellow is named Mark Dice.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Is Kamala Harris the Worst Person in the World? (Maybe!)
Insanity Wrap needs to know: What’s so funny about parents needing to endure a year of public school closures just to teach them the real value of public school teachers who still won’t go back to work?
Answer: Beats us. You’ll have to ask Kamala Harris.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Republicans pounce on “children,” but not in a Jeffrey Epstein way
- Obama 2.0? We should be so lucky
- And introducing Dr. Eugene Gu as The Underminer
Bonus Sanity: Texas followed the science better than the “follow the science” people ever followed any science.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
DO NOT TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOLE: Nobody believes China — Except the World Health Organization and the US media.
The World Health Organization now says the virus ‘most likely came from animals.’ But everybody knows that the WHO is heavily influenced by China, and China is not a reliable source. Everybody, that is, except large and important sections of the US media.
Before the WHO’s latest report, Feng Zijian, the deputy director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed the virus spread after a bat infected a human — or the virus initially went from bat to another animal or mammal species, which then jumped to humans or that shipments of frozen food from Europe or even the United States spread the virus throughout the province of Wuhan. It’s always the West’s fault, the way Beijing tells it.
The other possibility is the one that China, their allies in the WHO and even in the American media are quickest to denounce — that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is called a conspiracy theory. But the former CDC director, Robert Redfield told 60 Minutes this weekend that the scenario of a lab leak is the one he believes. Members of the intelligence community including US senators and the former secretary of state have stated the same. CBS News and the New York Times were quick to denounce Redfield this weekend. He worked for the Trump administration and therefore his expertise is not credible.
China itself, capitalizing on the murders in Atlanta and the media narratives that have sprung up from it, has gone as far as to even suggest the lab leak theory is racist. Indeed, any acknowledgement of China’s role in kickstarting this global pandemic is hateful and therefore problematic — or is it problematic and therefore hateful?
Read the whole thing. Note that the US media feel obligated to pretend to believe China both to prop up President* Biden and their parent companies’ own financial interests in China.
I KNOW I KEEP TRYING TO: Did The New York Times Forget Hillary Clinton Exists?
NO, BUT WHEN HAS THAT EVER MATTERED? George Korda: Is it fair to blame Donald Trump for the vaccine reluctance of some Americans? “In their rush to discredit pretty much everything said by Trump, experts appear to have done a disservice to the cause of widespread vaccination. . . . Americans were given repeated ‘expert’ commentary that a vaccine couldn’t, wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be approved for use more quickly. We know that there are ethnic groups, medical professionals, and political partisans, among others, who are vaccine-wary. To what degree the constant drumbeat of skepticism about the vaccine confirmed the apprehensions of those now choosing to not be vaccinated, is a valid question.”
The “experts” have a poor record.
HMM: Citing lack of an FAA inspector, SpaceX waives off Starship launch.
As part of the agreement reached by SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration—which provides permitting for commercial launches—a federal observer must be on-site for test flights of the Starship vehicle.
For some reason, perhaps a weather-related travel delay or perhaps something else, an inspector was not available for Monday’s launch attempt. “FAA inspector unable to reach Starbase in time for launch today. Postponed to no earlier than tomorrow,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted on Monday.
Purposeful foot-dragging, or just one of those things?
FLASHBACK: Peter Collier on The Sixties at 40.
Because it is still so unassimilated—“a cadaver,” soixante-huitard André Glucksmann recently said, from which people of all political points of view break off chunks at will—the Sixties continues to shadow our politics like a mean dog. John Kerry got bit when he cluelessly decided to “report for duty” in 2004. More recently the Sixties lunged at Barack Obama in the person of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, negrifying him when he wanted to be post-racial and ideologizing him when he wanted to be post-partisan, and ending abruptly his attempt to hope-a-dope an electorate desperate to believe.
If Wright’s rancid ideas about Amerikkka, right out of the Sixties Black Power play book, were not burden enough, Obama also had to account for Billy Ayers, who helped found Weatherman out of SDS after a series of carcinomic political cell divisions had gorked that organization. This nihilistic group, which took its name from Bob Dylan’s line “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows,” inspired some opposition from the ancien régime of the New Left (one of whose members famously said, “No, and you don’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are”). But in constantly “upping the ante,” Weatherman expressed the temper of the time. And no one in the group better embodied the era’s penny-ante Neitzscheanism than Ayers himself. (“Guilty as hell, free as a bird, America’s a great country” was how he summarized his life in the Sixties and after in a talk with me and David Horowitz not long after emerging from the terrorist underground and heading toward the tenure track at the University of Illinois.)
There is justice in Obama’s plaintive objection that he was, after all, in knee pants in the years when Weatherman was on its little bombing spree. All he knew about Ayers was the conventional wisdom about all such unreconstructed “activists” from the Sixties: that they are solid progressives with social consciences who, like the candidate himself, believe in change. Indeed, given the way the era is portrayed by Professor Parini and all the others, why should Obama have thought anything else?
Hillary Clinton was also blindsided by the Sixties, although in a slightly more roundabout way. The hit came from Obama-supporter Tom Hayden, who as the New Left’s acknowledged Everyman, was uniquely qualified to pronounce the anathema. After Hillary’s victory in Pennsylvania, Hayden reminded readers of The Nation of her own “roots in the Sixties”—how she had chaired a Yale Law school movement against the Vietnam war; joined the defense of Bobby Seale during his New Haven murder trial in 1970; and, after law school, spent her summer vacation in the Bay Area working in the fellow-traveling law firm of Robert Treuhaft, which specialized in defending Black Panthers during their war against the cops. Then, having finished this little exercise in Sixties red-baiting, Hayden stipulated that these causes she had once espoused were, of course, “noble,” and charged that she had betrayed her former self by dissing a man, the Rev. Wright, “who represents the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days.”
Staining her with the Sixties and then rubbing in that stain by accusing her of betraying the Sixties: it was one of those sinuous intellectual maneuvers that shows why Irving Howe once said of Hayden that he gave opportunism a bad name.
Read the whole thing. 12 years later after the above article was written, examples abound at how the sixties continues to impact American politics:
BIG TECH AND BIG GOVERNMENT GO TO BED TOGETHER, AND THE OFFSPRING IS TYRANNY: Big Tech defenders dominate the country’s top group of antitrust lawyers. “Current and former members say the American Bar Association’s antitrust section is overrun with lawyers who have represented Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple.”
SHOCKER: Campus diversity program accused of having toxic environment. Apparently, it’s a bastion of white supremacy. I say abolish it just to be safe, then.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Joe Biden Wants Some States to Pause Reopening While He’s Leaving the Border Wide Open.