HAVE THEY CHECKED THE FRENCH LAUNDRY? Californians Left Wondering As Rumors Swirl Over the Whereabouts of Gavin Newsom.
Archive for 2021
November 9, 2021
THE FIRST MESSAGE CAME OUT AS “LET’S GO, BRANDON!” Brain Implant Translates Paralyzed Man’s Thoughts Into Text With 94% Accuracy.
YOUR GRANDMOTHER WAS RIGHT. GO OUTSIDE AND GET SOME FRESH AIR AND SUNSHINE! Study finds that sitting more is linked to increased feelings of depression, anxiety.
As Nassim Taleb says, your grandmother is more likely to be right about most stuff than experts on TV.
DAVID CATRON: The Kamikaze Party. “The Democrats respond to last week’s defeat with a series of futile suicide missions.”
Such ominous data, combined with last Tuesday’s rebuke by the voters, signal that the Democrats are in real trouble and members of the party are sounding the alarm. The New York Times quotes Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) thus: “We were so willing to take seriously a global pandemic, but we’re not willing to say, ‘Yeah, inflation is a problem, and supply chain is a problem, and we don’t have enough workers in our work force.’” Yet party leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) aren’t listening. She still intends to push passage of the Build Back Better (BBB) social spending and climate bill that only 34 percent of the voters favor, according to the latest Emerson poll.
Pelosi, President Biden and other prominent Democrats have made it clear since last Tuesday’s debacle that they believe it was caused by their failure to pass this fiscally irresponsible legislation. As the editors of the New Hampshire Union Leader put it, “Biden, Nancy Pelosi and company were convinced that gifting the people with billions and billions of dollars of their own money and massive debt would have bought enough votes to push their gubernatorial candidate to victory.” But the Emerson poll is by no means the only poll that says precisely the opposite. An ABC News-Ipsos poll released two days before Election Day found that the majority of voters were not sold on BBB.
Read the whole thing.
BETHANY MANDEL: Big Bird shouldn’t flap into my family’s COVID vaccination decisions.
Just as “Sesame Street” isn’t content with allowing parents the freedom to guide their children’s own moral compass, so too are they uncomfortable with the idea of parents making individual risk assessments for their children’s health and safety. There is a moral absolutism necessary to be part of the left, which is where “Sesame Street’s” writers appear to fall. The messaging on COVID-19 vaccination has become yet another absolutist position.
Big Bird’s tweet doesn’t exist just on Twitter. It’s part of a larger campaign from the series to “educate” parents on the vaccine.
It’s part of a pressure campaign being waged on children to then push their parents into vaccinating them. Parents from around the country have reached out to me privately and publicly about how their kids’ teachers and schools are trying to influence this family medical decision.
The institutional left, including Politico, Comcast, and Nation magazine, has been saying for years that “your kids are not your own,” and then wonders why they just got their clocks cleaned in Virginia. And wondering why it could likely happen again next year: Progressives: ‘Parental Rights’ is a Dog Whistle, CRT Doesn’t Exist in Schools, and Stop Saying ‘Woke.’
Related: We must also face the grave threat of the members of Biden’s public relations corps merging together, to form the Pangaea of vaccine advocates:
JONATHAN GARTHWAITE: America Is Hanging on by a Thread. “Republicans won the Virginia governor’s race by only 66,000 votes when over 3.2 million were cast. Joe Biden got his monstrous “infrastructure” boondoggle spending bill passed because 13 weak Republicans in the House and 19 in the Senate caved and voted for it. One… maybe two senators stand in the way of the second, even more disastrous multi-trillion-dollar spending bill that D.C. liberals want to decimate us with. Everywhere I look, it seems like America is hanging on by the slimmest of margins. If liberty-loving Americans don’t band together, it’ll be lost. Lost for our kids, our grandchildren, and generations to come. Our great-grandchildren won’t even know what America really stood for if we don’t stop this gang in control right now.”
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? New findings show ancient comet likely responsible for glass-covered desert.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading. “The changes [Alhambra, CA High School English teacher Joshua] Moreno embraced are part of a growing trend in which educators are moving away from traditional point-driven grading systems, aiming to close large academic gaps among racial, ethnic and economic groups. The trend was accelerated by the pandemic and school closures that caused troubling increases in Ds and Fs across the country and by calls to examine the role of institutionalized racism in schools in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.”
That’s quite a pivot, considering what we saw last week in Virginia: Voters Are Revolting Against ‘Woke’ Education.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Senior Prof Tells Penn: I’ll Retire When You Agree To Hire A Tenure-Track Replacement. “A mass retirement by senior professors wouldn’t derail the adjunctification train; if anything, it would speed the train up. But suppose, instead, that we actually put our bodies in front of it? If we all said we’d stay put unless we were replaced by full-timers, our institutions would be forced to hire tenure-track professors instead of starving itinerants. I realize that all of this will be a lot easier for fabulously rich private universities — like my own — than it will be for many public institutions, which are struggling with declining enrollments and budgets.”
Universities complain about capitalism exploiting workers, but they are among the most exploitative employers in the country, and it’s mostly because of the truly massive shift to low-paid, short-contract workers in the classroom.
TO BE FAIR, THE FDA DOESN’T EXIST FOR THE BENEFIT OF PATIENTS: Again and again, the FDA fails American patients. “Last week, the United Kingdom approved a new antiviral pill (molnupiravir). Studies show the drug reduces the risk of hospitalization and death among high-risk COVID patients by half. U.S. taxpayers funded molnupiravir’s development. Yet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration isn’t even meeting to consider approval until Nov. 30. Molnupiravir is the latest example of the FDA denying patients their most important health care right — the right to make their own health decisions — by prohibiting them from getting drugs that have received approval in other advanced countries.”
BUT AT LEAST THEY BANNED STRAWS: Pandemic has led to 8.4M tons of excess plastic waste, researchers estimate.
BUCKING THE TREND AND STARTING FROM SCRATCH: The University of Austin. My advice to the people putting this together: Beware bureaucracy, and consultants.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Nearly a Dozen Medical Schools Undergo an ‘Antiracist Transformation.’
OUT: FOLLOW THE TRUTH. IN: FOLLOW THE NARRATIVE. Scientists: don’t feed the doubt machine.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Prof Canceled for Not Having the Real Feelz About Fake Hate.
Plus:
- COVID cultism comes to Christmas
- America’s celebrities, the Left’s sockpuppets
- UFC fans can’t get enough of Brandon
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
THE SCHIZOPHRENIC JOE BIDEN:
● The Double Irony Of Asking OPEC To Increase Oil Production.
● Biden May Tap Strategic Petroleum Reserve Amid Rising Fuel Prices.
Hard to believe that a year ago, “the United States was a net exporter of oil and natural gas. When operating at capacity – which requires the cooperation of the government on a number of fronts – we have more than enough fuel to meet all of our needs. We’re just not doing what needs to be done to get it to all of the places where it’s needed. So yes, Joe Biden has significant (though not complete) control over energy prices.”
WELL, THAT IS ITS JOB: The Constitution Just Keeps Frustrating Obama and the Dems. “It takes some nuclear-powered audacity for Barack Obama, of all people, to whine about unilateral governance. The only reason Donald Trump was able to ‘unilaterally’ withdraw from any international agreement was that the previous president had enlisted the nation in said agreement without the consent of Congress. The Paris Accord is allegedly the most critical international agreement ever forged by mankind, and yet it wasn’t quite important enough to be subjected to genuine national debate or the checks and balances of American government.”
IT WOULD BE LOWER IF PEOPLE KNEW MORE ABOUT HER: Kamala Harris’s approval rating falls to 28%, a historic low for any modern vice president. Interesting to see Yahoo! News headlining this though.
SCIENCE!! Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published. “Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers.”
JUST OUT: The Well-Loved House: Creating Homes with Color, Comfort, and Drama. #CommissionEarned