FASTER, PLEASE: Hacking Aging with AI.
Archive for 2021
May 30, 2021
I THINK THIS IS PRETTY ROUTINE IN CONGRESS: Breathing Through the Rectum Saves Oxygen-Starved Mice and Pigs.
FIGHT THE POWER: Hundreds Protest Vaccine Passports in London.
ALONG WITH THE REST OF LEFTIST ACADEMIA: Jewish Studies Has an Antisemitism Problem. A lot of donors give money to Jewish Studies programs on campus, thinking that they will help attract faculty and students to their alma mater or local university, and give students an opportunity to explore Judaism and Jewish history. They may even think that the programs will be centers for pro-Jewish activism, the way that Women’s Studies advocate on behalf of feminism, or Black Studies on behalf of black activist causes. None of this is the right way to think about academic departments, which should be devoted to scholarship, but it’s no secret that universities attract philanthropists to Jewish Studies by appealing to specifically Jewish concerns. That bait and switch would be dishonest if academic Jewish Studies departments were doing what they should do, which is focusing on scholarly pursuits. But it’s worse than that, as many of these departments have become headquarters for non-scholarly activism targeting Israel, the Jewish establishment, and Judaism itself.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Moms Learn Lengths a WA School Board Will Go to Silence Complaints On CRT and Masks. You’ll Want to Sit Down for This...
For more than 20 minutes, the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and a board member took turns standing over the woman and lecturing her. Stepanyuk took video of the last eight minutes of the lecture, calmly recited the law and remarking about how she was sorry that these educators hadn’t educated themselves about the mask law.
Here’s how part of that went:
Mom: It’s a public meeting and I’ll stay in the public meeting that I am legally allowed to be in. … I’m good. I can be here.
Superintendent: I believe this is the board’s meeting
Mom: It’s public schools, in a public building, for a public meeting.
Superintendent: Well, sure, but … we have the guidance that we’re going to ask you to follow.
Mom: I own a business and if I say … under my guidance black people are not allowed in the meeting, am I allowed to do that? No, because that’s illegal and I would never do that. And what you’re doing … telling people that I can’t be here because I don’t have a mask on is illegal.
Over and over. Rinse and repeat.
Unable and unwilling to acknowledge that this parent was right, the hectoring continued.
Read the whole thing. It gets worse from there.
Related: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: University Of Miami Faculty Senate Unanimously Condemns Firing Of Dean Tony Varona And Urges His Reinstatement. The absence of any explanation here is odd.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Vandals Painted Racist, Anti-Semitic Graffiti At Black-Owned Business. The Vandals Appear To Be Black. “This is not a typical hoax story in which the alleged victim is actually the perpetrator, but it does show how criminals may use the media’s obsession with finding racism and hate crimes to cover their bad behavior.”
As Roger Kimball wrote when Jussie Smollett’s story broke in 2019, “The less hate there is in the United States, the more hate crimes must be manufactured in order to keep the Fraternal Order of Victims afloat.”
WHY DID CONSTANTINOPLE GET THE WORKS? THAT’S NOBODY’S BUSINESS BUT THE TURKS: Today is the Anniversary of the ‘Last Day of the World,’ the Fall of Constantinople.
DAMAGE CONTROL: Harris honors the fallen after ‘misfire’ Memorial Day tweet.
The Obama-style inclusion of her own photo is a nice touch:
Meanwhile: Ron DeSantis Schools Kamala Harris and Joe Biden on What the ‘Long Weekend’ Is About (Updated).
ROGER SIMON: Critical Race Theory Update: ‘Et Tu, Williamson County?”
But how do seven and eight-year olds react to all this continually downbeat, violent material, emphasizing racial division above all, for hours and days on end?
Reports of growing numbers of children in therapy plus an increasing suicide rate abound, some of it due to COVID as well, but I heard a personal story that affected me particularly deeply.
I was at a recent, surprisingly well-attended “Moms for Liberty” meeting in Franklin at which an immigrant woman from Thailand, married to a Caucasian, spoke.
She read aloud a lengthy, heartfelt letter she wrote to Williamson County School Superintendent Jason Golden about the severe educational and emotional disturbances her mixed-race seven-year old son suffered from attending one of their schools. (To his parent’s consternation, the boy ended up despising his white half.) I quote her, in part:
“The story of Dr. King and his ‘I have a Dream’ speech is beautiful and uplifting. This is the world my child lived in until now. He was color blind. But this curriculum has changed that. It is far more harmful than helpful. It depresses him. It is dark and divisive. It paints a world with only white and black people. It paints a picture of poor black people being attacked by evil white people.”
She continues further on:
“Even more problematic, the teacher would not accept the non-racial, color blind answer from our son to a question she asked. So, the teacher asked again and again, looking for a different (acceptable) answer.”
Years ago, during Soviet times, I visited a Young Communist League Training School in the Crimea. They used a similar method.
The mother concludes:
“We expect 2nd graders to be learning basic educational concepts and not be force fed story after story of racial aggressions and evils committed in the past. This is not how we create a better world for our children. This curriculum only highlights race and creates further division among the new generation. We want our child to be colorblind and value people for who they are and not the color of their skin or for past evils or mistakes that other people made in history.”
Amen to that.
And it’s not just in schools: Vets Battle Critical Race Theory Invasion of Military.
THIS IS GOING WELL: Wake Forest cancels new building name 19 days after canceling old building name. “Long story short, the old building name apparently offended some black students, and the new building name also apparently offended some black students.”
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: CBS News Interview with Climate Scientist Exposes the Whole Ruse. “CBS ‘climate specialist:’ It’s critical the Earth not warm 1.5 degrees Celsius CBS anchor: Why? Climate specialist: Well [because] that’s the number ‘we chose.’”
I hope they think it’s a lucky number, as that was one of FDR’s considerations when setting the price of gold:
Theoretically, Roosevelt’s idea of reflating can be defended. More money might mean more growth.
But the exposure to investors that Morgenthau was getting through the gold purchase project of 1933 was already teaching him something. Investors didn’t like the arbitrariness. It took away their confidence. One day Morgenthau asked FDR why the president had chosen to drive up the price of gold by 21 cents. The president cavalierly said he’d done that because 21 was seven times three, and three was a lucky number. “If anyone ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers etc., I think they would be frightened,” Morgenthau wrote in his diary. And they were: In the second half of 1933 a powerful stock rally flattened.
But 21 was the price “we chose.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Bates College offers housing exclusively for ‘womxn of color.’
A BAILOUT FOR LABOR UNIONS AND THE GENTRY CLASS: Joe Biden’s Imaginary America.
Joe Biden’s ballyhooed “infrastructure” plan, coupled with unprecedented stimulus spending, is cast by the obliging media as being about the middle class but seems oddly detached from how the overwhelming majority of the middle class lives, which is in lower-density, automobile-dependent neighborhoods. This dynamic was intensifying even before the pandemic. But Biden’s plan seems mostly about serving the relatively small sliver of transit-riding apartment dwellers living in denser neighborhoods. Overall, dense residential areas accommodate no more than 10 percent of the nation’s population.
Rather than emulate Roosevelt’s New Deal, as Biden’s handlers insist, the plan renounces much of what drove it. The New Deal, whatever one thinks of it, was about improving the material quality of life for most Americans, such as by spreading the benefits of homeownership to an ever-broader part of the population. In contrast, the Biden plan focuses on permanent redistribution through ever more entitlements and dependency — something Roosevelt opposed. It is likely to reduce our competitiveness by boosting energy and regulatory costs as well as taxes.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the Biden administration’s myopic sense of geography than its transportation priorities. Take urban transit. Biden has proposed a policy that, by some estimates, would allocate $165 billion for public transit (including urban rail — subways, light rail, and commuter rail) against only $115 billion to fix and modernize roads and bridges. Transit, which accounts for about 1 percent of overall urban and rural ground transportation, would receive nearly 60 percent of the money.
Echoing conventional progressive rhetoric, the administration’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, embraces the idea of getting Americans out of their cars and into trains and buses. For at least half a century, this has been a principal public-policy objective — and the results have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Despite the expenditure of more than $2 trillion and the construction of many new rail systems, transit’s share of daily commute trips dropped 44 percent from 1970 to 2019 (8.9 percent to 5.0 percent of the total). Even before COVID, working at home accounted for more commuting nationwide than did transit. Outside New York City, nearly 60 percent more people worked at home than rode transit in 2019, according to the American Community Survey. Transit accounted for less than 2 percent of all urban travel before COVID. The administration nonetheless is thinking about taxing vehicle mileage to pay for infrastructure, something that would be wildly unpopular outside the handful of dense urban cores where transit ridership is high.
They’re waging economic war on the rest of America.
BUT THEIR HASHTAGS WERE PERFECT: Study: Tech Companies That Made Black Lives Matter Pledges Have 20% Fewer Black Employees.
WE’LL SEE MORE OF THESE: Second Thoughts About Voting for Joe Biden.
UPDATE: An Uber-driving friend writes: “Has the Great Beclowning begun? I have people in my car every day of all backgrounds and races who see it for what it is. The foolish yet incredibly complexly structured reaction to the Wuhan flu, plus Fauci hagiography, on the verge of being shattered. What else might it apply to (aside from everything)?”
A Great Wakeup would be nice.
FACT CHECKING THE FACT CHECKER: Glenn Kessler gives Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene four Pinocchios for saying the Nazi Party was a national socialist party.
Flashback: The Nazi Party Platform.
Related: Hitler’s Handouts — Inside the Nazis’ welfare state.
THEY ARE BOUGHT AND OWNED: L A Times Publishes Beijing-Funded Propaganda, Conceals China’s Massive Coal Use & Emissions.
RACE-TALK IN AMERICA IS JUST A WAY FOR ONE GROUP OF WHITE PEOPLE TO GAIN POWER OVER OTHERS: Donald Glover is right — I’m sick of white people canceling things on my behalf: I’m tired of being told to change my views by white people who think they’d make better Black men than me.
YES, VACCINES ARE ONLY ONE WAY TO ACQUIRE IMMUNITY: Johns Hopkins Prof: Half Of Americans Have Natural Immunity; Dismissing It Is ‘Biggest failure Of Medical Leadership.’
Related: Rand Paul: The science proves people with natural immunity should skip COVID vaccines. “To dictate that a person recovered from COVID-19 with natural immunity also submit to a vaccine — without scientific evidence — is nothing more than hubris. If you have no proof that people who acquired natural immunity are getting or transmitting the disease in real numbers, then perhaps you should just be quiet. People are not getting re-infected in large numbers. And that’s not me saying so, that’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quietly admitting that on its website. One thing they also admitted, while at first trying to hide it, was that there are no studies showing that getting the vaccine if you already have natural immunity is of any benefit at all. They can’t show that, because it has not yet been studied. It took my friend Congressman Thomas Massie to make them admit this, by the way. They originally denied their own studies on this.”
Plus: “We know this. Doctors know this. Scientists who design vaccines know this. Vaccines are created to attempt to replicate the immunity we get from having been infected with a disease. I want all the science deniers to read that again. Vaccines are a replacement for natural immunity. They aren’t necessarily better. In fact, natural immunity from measles confers lifelong immunity and the vaccine immunity wanes over a few decades. I choose to follow the science with COVID, rather than submit to fear-mongering.”
Related, from The Lancet:
A study in the UK reported in The Lancet by Victoria Hall and colleagues,8 called the SARS-CoV-2 Immunity and Reinfection Evaluation (SIREN) study, suggests that being seropositive to SARS-CoV-2 through natural infection protects robustly from asymptomatic and symptomatic reinfection. . . . The findings of the authors suggest that infection and the development of an antibody response provides protection similar to or even better than currently used SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Although antibodies induced by SARS-CoV-2 infection are more variable and often lower in titre than antibody responses induced after vaccination, this observation does make sense considering current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines induce systemic immune responses to spike proteins while natural infection also induces mucosal immune responses and immune responses against the many other open reading frames encoded by the approximately 29 900 nucleotides of SARS-CoV-2. The SIREN study adds to a growing number of studies, which demonstrate that infection does protect against reinfection, and probably in an antibody-dependent manner.
In my house, we believe science is real. And Rand Paul’s track record on Covid is vastly better than Fauci’s. Or the CDC’s. (Bumped).
UPDATE: Nature: Had COVID? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime.
OOPS: Bitcoin rival Chia ‘destroyed’ hard disc supply chains, says its boss. “The resulting increase in demand has caused significant price rises for hard discs, especially higher-end models. The share price of hard disc maker Western Digital has increased from $52 at the start of the year to $73, while competitor Seagate is up from $60 to $94 over the same period. Hoffman says he is surprised at the speed at which the hard disc capacity devoted to Chia has grown and admits that this is likely to cause disruptions to the supply chain for some time.”
FRUITS OF LEFTIST RHETORIC: White Americans are beginning to realise that they too belong to a race.
THIS STARTED AS THE TENNESSEE VALLEY INTERSTELLAR WORKSHOP: It is now Interstellar Research Group.
You could do worse than signing up for the conference in the link above. And if you wish to see what it’s about check out the channel.