RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: NASHVILLE SCHOOL BOARD CHAIR ENJOYED ST. LUCIA BEFORE CLOSING SCHOOLS.

Parents of students in the Metro Nashville Public Schools system have hit their breaking point after Friday’s decision to continue virtual learning after MLK Day. The school system has been closed to in-person learning for pre-K through fourth grade classes since Thanksgiving. Middle school and high school students haven’t been in a classroom since COVID closures began in the spring of 2020.

Add it all up and you have frustrated parents who have made school board chair Christiane Buggs enemy No. 1. In response, Buggs went on a tweet bender where she told the story of her retired father serving as a paraprofessional inside a Nashville school and coming down with COVID.

“I’ve been so anxious because my dad caught COVID in one of our buildings,” Buggs wrote November 24. “Thought we were going to lose him for about a week. So the rumors that schools aren’t a place for spread: FALSE! But we’re going virtual and working to better support all families.”

“So yes, I am school board chair which means I am a community leader who must place the well being of others ahead of my own. I am also a daughter who doesn’t want a single other person to experience what I or my family experienced.”

“One life lost is one too many,” Buggs added.

However, sixteen days before this tweet storm, Buggs enjoyed a “reset” vacation to St. Lucia after the busy election season. On election night, she even hosted a party at Willie B’s Kitchen, a Nashville bar and restaurant.

“St.Lucia was a perfect place to reset. Reconnect with every bit of this Black Girl Magic. Ready for the battles ahead!” Buggs wrote on Instagram.

Five days after Buggs went on a Twitter bender over her father’s battle with COVID and telling residents the schools would close because “one life lost is too many,” Dr. Anthony Fauci went on ABC’s This Week and said, “The default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school or to get them back to school.”

So much for following the science. Also, isn’t “Black Girl Magic” kinda racist?

FRONTIERS OF FLIGHT: “An aeroplane full of passengers, out of control at 17,000 feet, with the captain stuck outside the aircraft.”

INCOMPETENCE: Police command structure crumbled fast during Capitol riot. “As the rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, many of the police officers had to decide on their own how to fight them off. There was no direction. No plan. And no top leadership.”

With major cities all over the country wracked by riots for the past 8 months, and with a disputed election, it didn’t occur to anyone to plan for something like this? The Capitol Police are one of the largest and best-funded police forces in the nation. They are not, however, the best-run.

FLASHBACK: Political Amnesia: Look at All the Democrats Who Boycotted Trump’s Inauguration.

BLACK GOLD. TEXAS TEA. Researchers trace geologic origins of Gulf of Mexico ‘super basin’ success. “The Gulf of Mexico holds huge untapped offshore oil deposits that could help power the U.S. for decades. The energy super basin’s longevity, whose giant offshore fields have reliably supplied consumers with oil and gas since the 1960s, is the result of a remarkable geologic past—a story that began 200 million years ago among the fragments of Pangea, when a narrow, shallow seaway grew into an ocean basin, while around it mountains rose then eroded away.”

GOING AFTER JOBS AND ENERGY INDEPENDENCE FROM DAY ONE: Biden indicates plans to cancel Keystone XL pipeline permit on 1st day in office, sources confirm.

SO WHERE IS EVERYBODY? The Most Common Stars in Our Galaxy May Be More Habitable Than We Thought.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Why Joe Manchin Is Never Going to Switch Parties.

Insanity Wrap needs to know: Why does everyone keep thinking Sen. Joe Manchin will switch parties?

Answer: We’re not sure, but he might make a better Republican than five or six current GOP members.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

• Facebook says conservative YouTubers can draw bigger audiences than CNN (and must be stopped)
• It puts the mask upon its skin or else it gets the hose again
• Transperson sues to enter women’s weightlifting competition and we don’t wonder how this will end

Bonus Sanity: You’ll wish you’d said what Anna James Zeigler said.

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

MOST AMERICANS REMAIN UN-WOKE: Poll: Many in U.S. don’t see link between racism, health outcomes.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA UPHEAVAL: “Oh boy, I made the mistake of using Twitter for something other than telling dumb jokes and got a glimpse into the minds of normies and it was scary.”

Well, to the extent that Twitter users represent normality.

THAT SEEMS ABOUT RIGHT: Voters Support Trump’s Decision Not to Attend Biden Inauguration, Expect Peaceful Transition.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Far-Right Extremist Suggests Treating People Of All Races Equally.

INSIDE THE LEFT’S ‘HOGWARTS FOR DIGITAL WIZARDRY:’ Capital Research Center’s (CRC) Hayden Ludwig does a deep dive on the Center for Technology and Civic Life, the far-Left voter registration colossus. The result is a detailed description of what may be the most effective GOTV ever and why 2020 may have been merely the first act of a long-running play.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: On Regulating Big Tech. Donald Boudreaux critiques Richard Epstein’s argument for using common law to force Big Tech to respect the First Amendment. Boudreaux says market competition is still the best way to protect the First Amendment.

COLLUSION: The doctor who denied COVID-19 was leaked from a lab had this major bias.

US Right to Know, an investigative public health nonprofit group, decided to look into the matter further. Through a public records request, they were able to obtain emails that show The Lancet statement was organized by employees of EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has close ties with the Wuhan lab.

How close? So close that EcoHealth Alliance has received millions of dollars of US taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This is the same kind of research that I have long suspected escaped to cause COVID-19.

The drafter of The Lancet statement was none other than the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak. Which means that the very statement that, for many months, shut down open debate on the possible laboratory origin of the China Virus, was actually the product of an organization that was collaborating with the Wuhan lab in the genetic engineering of coronaviruses.

I wish this shocked me, but it doesn’t.

AND WHAT RACE GRIFTERS WON’T ADMIT:  What Martin Luther King and Others Wrought.

What is most remarkable about the American civil rights movement, perhaps, is how little bloodshed took place, despite the passions that it raised. The Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, lists the names of only 41 people martyred in the cause of equal rights between 1954 and 1968.

That is an astounding fact. Never in human history has so deep a national divide involving racial, religious, or ethnic groups been healed so quickly and at such a low cost in lives. For comparison, as many as 2 million people died in the violence that accompanied the transformation of the British Raj into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India in 1947.

But the Left, stuck in the past, and always looking to belittle the United States and its accomplishments, insists that the country remains “systemically racist.”

Today’s “anti-racism” movement is one more demonstration of the March of Dimes Syndrome, named after the institution that did not go out of business after its mission (conquering polio) was achieved. It found new diseases to combat. For the Al Sharptons of the world, acknowledging progress against racism would be a career killer, so to stay in business they must ignore facts and foment new hatred.

IT’S AS IF ALL THE MEDIA “INSURRECTION” HYPE IS JUST SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING: Trump approval rating relatively unchanged in wake of Capitol rioting: NBC News poll.

Note that in this poll, Trump’s approval is just one point below Biden’s, even though the press has been calling him Literally Hitler over the Capitol invasion, and the House has voted to impeach. (Bumped).

UPDATE YOUR NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES APPROPRIATELY: NYU Prof Attributes Black Trump Support to ‘Multiracial Whiteness.’

JOANNE JACOBS: If the private schools can open… “The longer public schools remain closed, the more parents will look for alternatives. Private school may be affordable, if the alternative is paying for child care. Or mothers will quit their jobs to homeschool their children. If the public system is losing the allegiance of parents in Berkeley, it will not regain their support easily.”

ROGER SIMON: ‘Hell, No, We Won’t Go!’—to the Inauguration.

Sorry to recapitulate my column of the other day—“Suppose They Held an Inauguration and Nobody Came?”—but recent events have made it even more necessary.

On the level of opéra bouffe farce, leading those events was a panic set off in the Capitol Jan. 18 that turned out to have been caused by a small fire at a homeless encampment outside a Whole Foods.

What more perfect symbolic image for America 2021!

How could Congress have missed it when they had as their speaker one of the great resident experts on the subject, Ms. Pelosi, whose own district probably has more homeless per capita than anywhere in the nation?

But this is only one small reason we should ignore the inauguration or, as we used to say in the sixties, “Hell, no, we won’t go!”

When I say ignore, I mean totally shut the event out. Pay no attention to it. Do not watch it or listen to it. Not a single word.

Pretend it’s not happening and do almost anything else. It’s a work day anyway. Do your work. And if you’re retired, read a book. Brush up on your Shakespeare.

When images appear, let them show no one there but thousands of National Guard troops—put there as a charade in the first place—with bored expressions on their faces, wondering when they will finally be able to go home and watch football reruns.

Resist the temptation to view the tedious rehashes of the banal speeches that will appear that night. You won’t have missed a thing.

When the ratings are published, let them be lower than an infomercial for the latest egg slicer.

This, of course, means no demonstrations of any kind, not in Washington and not in the state capitals.

Do not be like those gulled nincompoops that allowed themselves to be led by Antifa and BLM into the Capitol, only to become the subject of endless propaganda.

In other words, if you’re tempted, grow up. Remember the old saw: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Instead, if you’re still on Twitter, make it the day you got off. Stop being a collaborator.

But most of all, remember this: Stay calm because you have the real power.

You are the ones who do most of the work. You are the ones who can shut the country down.

Who is ultimately more necessary to our survival—a trucker who brings food to market or a Beltway lawyer? …

We can, at the right moment, shut things down—or, interestingly, keep them open only for those that agree with us, those who support freedom.

How would that be for turning the tables? It would be as if Parler shut down Twitter. Or Whole Foods were only open to conservatives. (It was started by a libertarian, by the way.)

Okay, not that. We could shut things down for the cause of liberty for all, for everyone.

And, unlike the use of force, such a shut down would be justified, considering what has happened to the citizenry of our COVID-ridden culture the last few years.

I cannot say definitively the election was stolen, but no one can say definitively that it was not. Not even remotely. The plethora of evidence was not faintly investigated.

The politicians and the courts, with very few exceptions, were too frightened, too conformist, to do their jobs.

On top of that, the current fascistic (what other word fits?) assaults on freedom of speech are destroying whatever uniqueness this country had.

Even Angela Merkel was alarmed at the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter.

Nevertheless, this is not yet the time to demonstrate or show force in the streets. It is the time to organize and cement our means of communication (a revivified Parler and others).

Stop complaining and start planning. Events will show the way soon enough.

And remember this too: A few years ago, Andrew Klavan made a prescient video explaining how the left treats us entitled “Shut Up.” If we play our cards right, we can return the favor—and then some.

Let them have their swearing-in, behind 12-foot-high razor wire and protected by 25,000 troops they themselves don’t really trust. They can pretend it’s normal, and legitimate. But nobody’s fooled.

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Everything You Need to Know About Kamala’s Niece, Resistance Grifter Meena Harris.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Public school teacher forces third graders to acknowledge their privilege. I’m beginning to think that the past 50 years or so of letting our children be educated by th enemies of our civilization may have been a mistake.

FEATURE, NOT A BUG: House Democrats’ Deja Vu Tax Agenda for ‘Equity’ Would Hurt (Not Help) Economic Opportunity.

WHAT DOES THE SEVENTY-FOUR MILLION PROJECT LOOK LIKE? There are over 74 million of us who voted for Trump and who are looking for ways to not only get through the next 4 (or more) years but actually thrive. In 2013 after the election, I started a new project called Helen’s page that connected those of us who are liberty-loving conservatives or libertarians with each other to sell products, meet up or crowd source. Although Helen’s page is no longer up, here is a description of the site (note the link no longer goes to the page):

A lot of people on this site and others that I talked to after the election were feeling isolated. So I made a place for them to meet each other. Helen’s Page is a place where people can come to find and help other liberty-minded people across the country—from selling your undiscovered screenplay or advertising your local bakery right down to finding an accountant, electrician, or other professional who shares your love of liberty. I believe it is imperative that those who make up the nearly 48% of the country who believe in equal opportunity and individual success help each other. Find products and services from people who see the world the way you do.

Here’s an example of how it works. You are a libertarian/conservative with a book to sell. Come over and tell readers about it on Helen’s Page in the “Book” section. The more of us who sign up, the more exposure that book will have. Publishers of libertarian or conservative books are also welcome to post.

The site did well, but was extremely expensive to operate because the web developer we hired wasn’t really up to the job. But we’re thinking of relaunching something like this. My question for you readers is this: What would you like to see in a relaunched Helen’s Page or something like it that connects us socially and economically? And any suggestions on how to set it up safely and economically? Answer in the comments.

BUT WILL TWITTER SUSPEND THEM FOR PROMOTING VIOLENCE? Two Texas A&M Professors Wish Death on Republicans.