FIGHTING COLLUSION: Cornell community escalates challenges to proposed dual degree program in China.

IT’S AN IDEA SO CRAZY, IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Republicans Plan to Retake the House Using a Key Part of Democrats’ 2018 Playbook. “For Republicans, enlisting military veterans to run for office is a no-brainer. More than two-thirds of all veterans are Republicans. That represents a sizable voting bloc and base of support for any candidate who has had military experience.”

GENERALLY, A BAD IDEA: Should You Carry a Handgun in the Small of Your Back?

HOW IT STARTED: Whitmer to Michigan: Stay Home and Shut Up.

—Debra Saunders, Real Clear Politics, April 19^th, 2020.

How it’s going: Michigan’s Virus Cases Are Out of Control, Putting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in a Bind.

—The New York Times, today.

Perhaps try not locking up COVID-inflicted old people in nursing homes? “Multiple Democratic officials are facing increasing political pressure due to policies that directed nursing homes to take COVID-positive patients — rules that critics claim drove up the rate of deaths among vulnerable populations in care facilities. Chief among those politicians is New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is under fire not only for imposing such a policy on New York State last year but for his administration’s subsequent coverup of the true number of COVID deaths among elderly New Yorkers. Listed at just under 9,000 at the end of January, a full accounting of the state’s care facility death toll since then has brought the number up to over 15,000. Now feeling heat over a similar policy is Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose administration last year also directed nursing homes to accommodate patients who were infected with COVID-19.”

I’m glad though, that the New York Times is focusing on the Michigan resident most impacted by Gov. Whitmer’s disastrous policy choices: Gov. Whitmer.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teachers union chief: Check me out sitting in close quarters with other people indoors.

Here’s an interesting photo, just farted out all casual-like onto Twitter.com last night:

That’s the head of the American Federation of Teachers crowded around a table indoors with some pals. The same person who sent a letter to the CDC not three weeks ago complaining that the agency’s new rule, which allows students to be separated by three feet instead of six feet in class, is based on questionable science and that they should stick with the six-foot guidance. Even though it would mean many thousands of students being forced back into remote learning due to space constraints.

If Weingarten and her colleagues aren’t all vaccinated, what are they doing sitting together indoors grouped much more tightly together than three feet?

Weingarten has had quite a week: “When Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently asked her if she had a specific message for American Jews who have criticized her stance on school openings – which she often lies is a right-wing grievance – she answered like so: ‘American Jews are now part of the ownership class. What I hear when I hear that question is that those who are in the ownership class now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it.’ Weingarten’s rhetoric immediately reminded me of Karl Marx’s anti-Semitic diatribe, ‘On the Jewish Question,’ where the infamous crackpot argued that the ‘secret’ of the Jew is to accumulate wealth for ‘practical need,’ ‘self-interest,’ and ‘huckstering.’”

CDC TIGHTLY FOCUSED ON CORE GOALS DURING PANDEMIC: CDC Director Walensky: ‘Racism Is a Serious Public Health Threat.’

Isn’t racism the real virus, when you don’t think about it?

Well, she might be onto something. Being falsely accused of racism does tend to raise my blood pressure.

If anything bad has happened to you because of COVID-19, the first thing you need to do is look in the mirror. Do you see a white face? Well then, stop complaining. You don’t matter. You didn’t actually think you were a human being, did you?

This is what they call “mission creep.” Racism is the perfect distraction for any government agency, or corporation, or other large group of people who have power and want to hold onto it. Unlike an actual disease, which is what the CDC is supposed to be fighting, the disease of “racism” can be whatever they want it to be. The symptoms are whatever they want them to be. And they don’t need to offer any proof that “racism” is the problem in any particular instance. In fact, asking for proof just shows that the skeptic is a racist!

Here’s how it works:

“COVID-19 is racist.”
“What? That’s insane. Why are my taxes paying you to spew this nonsense?”
“Oh, so you’re denying racism exists, racist?”

In real life, you can tell whether a disease has been cured by measuring the health of the patient. If he’s still sick, the cure isn’t working. If various measurable indicators of health improve, it’s working. The key word there is “measurable.” There are tangible results. But when you deny reality and blame everything on “racism,” you don’t need to worry about all those pesky facts and evidence. Emotions are the only thing that count. If you feel that something is racist, then it’s racist.

Earlier: The suicide of expertise.

“GHOST GUN” RESTRICTIONS ARE A SICK JOKE: While the Biden Administration frets over the supposed problem of “ghost guns” (This heavy-breathing ABA report on how DIY guns are so dangerous is shockingly light on violence actually committed with such guns), for many years gun owners have known that the feds treat the actual felony crime of lying on the background check form as a total joke. To be clear, dealers won’t run the check at all if you check one of the boxes that would make you ineligible, such as “have you been convicted of a felony?” Yet here are the stats from a GAO report on how this was treated in 2017:

Federal “NICS” Instant Background Check Transactions: 8,606,286
Denials: 112,090 (These are not necessarily always correct, and one can appeal, but most of these are because the person is legally ineligible and lied on the form.)
ATF Field Division Investigations: 12,710 (This happens when the local ATF is so concerned about you trying to buy a gun that they actually investigate it.)
United States Attorney’s Offices Prosecutions: 12.

That’s not a typo. In the entire United States of America in all of 2017, the feds prosecuted 12 people TOTAL out of probably more than 100,000 people who illegally tried to buy a gun, committing a felony crime while doing so for which the government already has all of the evidence necessary to convict — with 12,710 of those alarming enough that local ATF agents spent even more time on them.

Here’s a thought: if the government is so concerned about the “epidemic of gun violence,” how about it prosecute 100% of the people who signed a form evidencing their felonious attempt to get a gun (it’s not even a trap; the form itself warns you about this more than once) and see what happens? Instead, we are left to ponder what kind of sick people running our “justice” system see this kind of low-hanging fruit that could easily be used to clean up our streets and say, “eh, who cares?”

DISNEY’S TRAIL OF TRAUMATIZED CHILDREN: Former Disney Channel star Alyson Stoner speaks out about her ‘harrowing’ experience as a child actor: ‘My childhood is officially gone.’

THE GODFATHER: How Saul Alinsky went from Al Capone underling to godfather of political chaos.

Left-wing activists smash windows with bats to protest conservative speakers. They burn property and threaten opponents in public, violently lashing out at individuals for holding conservative views.

It’s 2019, but could be mistaken for 1969. That’s no accident, observers of history say. The roots of disorder go back to a style of agitation and organization made famous half a century ago by left-wing activists. Because it so often worked for the Left, it has become common in mainstream politics today, and has even been copied recently by a few on the Right.

Kenneth Starr, the former federal judge and solicitor general, discussed one of the most notorious cases in which radicalization moved out of the realm of theory into practical, aggressive politics. Addressing the Washington Examiner’s first annual political summit, at Sea Island, Ga., in November, Starr recalled the 1969 college graduation of Hillary Clinton and her affection for the philosophy of community organizer Saul Alinsky, who advocated personal targeting by radical activists in the 1960s and ’70s.

“Progressivism:” where time stands still.

YES: It’s time for the Supreme Court to reexamine qualified immunity on campus.

I don’t even believe in qualified immunity for police officers, but they have the best argument since they have to make split-second life or death decisions. Educrats have no such justification.

RADICAL CHIC: Marxist BLM leader buys $1.4 million home in ritzy LA enclave. “Black Lives Matter, which began as hashtag in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, took in more than $90 million last year and was at the forefront of protests across the country last year after the death of George Floyd in May.”

I’D LIKE TO SEE A REALLY SOLID COMPARISON OF POST-INFECTION NATURAL IMMUNITY VS. VACCINE PROTECTION: Study: Moderna COVID-19 vaccine offers protection for at least 6 months. “The reassuring results follow on similar findings for the other major two-dose vaccine included in the U.S. vaccine rollout, made by Pfizer-BioNTech. Trial results released April 1 by the companies found that their vaccine remains more than 91% effective six months after people get their second dose.”

But I wouldn’t call this small study “really solid” anyway: “The new study tracked 33 participants in the trials that led to the vaccine’s approval. Six months after having received their second vaccine dose, ‘antibody activity remained high in all age groups,’ according to a team led by Nicole Doria-Rose of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.”

Also, I’d like to know about T-cell activity.

YOUTUBE MEMORY HOLES DESANTIS COVID-19 ROUNDTABLE WITH MEDICAL EXPERTS. “This week, YouTube deleted footage of a COVID-19 roundtable discussion between Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and medical experts from Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard. The doctors and medical experts reportedly disputed Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidance that children wear masks in school to stop the spread of COVID-19. Cody McCloud, DeSantis’s press secretary, condemned the move as ‘another blatant example of Big Tech attempting to silence those who disagree with their woke corporate agenda,’ NBC reported…the panel included Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University; Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician, epidemiologist, and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School; Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist and epidemiology professor at Oxford University; and former Trump White House COVID-19 advisor Dr. Scott Atlas.”

GOOD: Stool transplants treat bowel infection by boosting bowel-protecting cells.

BREAKING: Supreme Court Drops Calif. Ban on In-Home Prayer Meetings.

IT’S A COOKBOOK! New dietary guidelines for the US include babies and toddlers for first time.

THE MAGNIFICENT FIASCO OF MIES VAN DER ROHE’S FARNSWORTH HOUSE:

It is an astonishingly beautiful building, as visceral as it is intellectual. The way in which elementary materials and ‘nearly nothing’ have a transcendent effect is profound. It floats, perfect proportions denying material weight. From outside it looks agreeably alien; from inside, its transparency makes landscape captive. And the architect’s attention to the logic of structure and to detail is revelatory. Rivet heads were painstakingly ground off at steel junctions to make visually perfect joints. The frame is made with such fanatical precision that it responds to impacts like a tuning fork. As a whole, the Farnsworth House improves upon nature, which was Voltaire’s definition of art.

Yet it is absurd. Mies insisted on building on the Fox River’s floodplain, the better to enjoy the local woods. He refused thermally efficient double-glazing. Only after protest was Farnsworth allowed a wardrobe; Mies said it was a weekend house and the necessary single dress could be hung out of sight behind the bathroom door. He was adamant that his own furniture designs were used rather than his client’s preferences. Moreover, his architectural training had not included Mechanical & Electrical Services, so he knew nothing of plumbing, heating, air-conditioning, drainage or power supply. Water seepage from above complemented the rising damp caused by the turbulent, intrusive Fox below. The house was an oven in summer and a freezer in winter. Ugly stains soon appeared. When Farnsworth complained about the exiguous fireplace, Mies said: ‘Get smaller logs.’

The original budget had been $10,000.But this ‘functionalist’ architect was notoriously sloppy in business, and the account came to seven times as much. Despite his managerial incompetence, Mies took Farnsworth to court over unpaid fees and won. Her revenge was to fill the house with unsuitable furniture — and eventually to go to live in Italy (where her relationship with the poet Eugenio Montale was another episode of Euro-flavored unrequited love).

Farnsworth House is a magnificent catastrophe, a manifesto of designer arrogance, a maintenance nightmare, an unlivable space where God fought with Satan over the details, especially the boiler and drains. And it is now a national monument, a pilgrimage site for architecture students from all over the world. Widely imitated (by designers whom Nikolaus Pevsner called ‘three blind Mies’), it has never been bettered. In a sense, it couldn’t be.

The house would fare much better when British real estate developer Peter Palumbo bought it from Edith Farnsworth in 1972. He installed furniture that Mies and his Bauhaus-era partner Lilly Reich had designed, and removed the hideous screens from its jutting front podium. But as Mies’ biographer, the late architectural historian Franz Schulze wrote for the program accompanying a 1982 Arts Club of Chicago exhibition focusing on Mies’s interiors:

To dust the furniture or wash the dishes in the Farnsworth House on a hot summer’s day in the steaming Fox River valley with the hermetically sealed windows interrupted by only the smallest ventilating apertures in the rear of the place, is to realize that this is not an environment formed in response to “the demand for realism and functionalism.”

On the other hand, to approach the house, this abstract temple whose white geometry is set in relief against the green woods overlooking the river, then to mount the floating steps to the podium, to study the serenity of the proportions of its steel skeleton and its precision fabrication, to enter a totally glazed interior and hover there, between the space of an ordering mentality and the setting of a limitless nature, the one separated from the other by the immateriality of glass, is to an experience an architecture which has ascended to the realm of the mystical.

if you have any interest in architecture, it’s well worth taking the hour drive out of Chicago to visit the Farnsworth House in person.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Infrastructure Edition.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Three cheers for federalism!

The COVID-19 pandemic was a challenge to our federalist system. The impulse in March 2020 was to have all states respond in the same way to the virus. Of course, in a country with large cities and small cities, sprawling suburbs, small towns, extremely rural areas and everything in between, that made little sense. We quickly corrected it and governors took control of COVID-19 policies for their states.

The results of that have been astonishing. States that had tight lockdowns, such as New York, New Jersey and Michigan, did not see better outcomes than states which loosened their lockdowns early on.

Florida, in particular, has stood out as evidence that lockdowns simply didn’t produce better results. Florida opened their beaches in the spring and Gov. DeSantis moved to lift all restrictions in September. Yet it was closed New York that experienced the worst winter spikes. It’s something we would have never discovered if we followed one prescription for our vast country.

The magic of federalism meant that people could also vote with their feet to choose the COVID response which best suited them. If someone believed that tight lockdowns and double-masking was the way to beat the virus, they were able to go to a state that reflected those values. Anyone looking for a freer path was also able to make their own choice, whether temporarily or permanently.

Even the Today Show accidentally stumbled onto this: The ‘Random Act of Journalism’ The Today Show Did That Blows Apart the COVID Panic Narrative. “Some states with stricter rules are now seeing surges in COVID-19 cases, while many others that rushed to reopen are experiencing sizable drops. The numbers have experts scratching their heads. @SamBrockNBC has the details.”

SONNY BUNCH: Godzilla vs. Kong Reviewed! “Look, like I said, if you want to see a big lizard punch a big monkey, this is the movie for you. King Kong serves as a perfectly capable human surrogate, waking up and scratching his butt while he yawns and stumbles into his morning shower. (This is a thing that actually happens.) Godzilla is fine as a nice bad guy, the sort whose villainy is really just a misunderstanding, you know? Who cares if the two of them kill literally millions of people in Hong Kong? Big monkey and big lizard go punch-punch!”

STANDING UP TO BIGOTRY: White professor files racial discrimination lawsuit, says two black colleagues paid far more.

THIS IS CNN: CNN Op-Ed: Fonts Can Be Racist.

We’re doing everything we can to fight racism, but will it ever be enough?

I hope I delivered those words in a very virtuous font.

But judging by a new CNN op-ed, I may not have.

At least in Fahrenheit 451, the books were burned because of the ideas in them. CNN’s would light up their flamethrowers over their fonts.

THE DEMAND FOR CAMPUS WHITE SUPREMACISTS VASTLY EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY, DRAWING IN INFERIOR SUBSTITUTES: Narrative shattered: ‘KKK,’ ‘White power’ graffiti on campus written by Black student.

As a result of the messages, hundreds of students boycotted class and marched on campus for three consecutive days.

Many chanted “silence is violence!”

Suckers.

LOL, MAX BOOT AS A “CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST.” Pretty much the 13th chime of the clock in that headline: Not only wrong itself, but calling into question everything else from that source. Of course, when the source is the Huffington Post. . . .

REP. NANCY MACE: Vaccine Passports: When Fear Threatens Freedom.

If you’re about protecting people, why not “immunity passports?” People who have had Covid are, it seems, at least as protected as people who have had the vaccine. But nobody talks about that. WHO even changed the definition of “herd immunity” to only include vaccine-derived immunity.

Old:

New:

“I cannot say why, exactly, the WHO did this. Given the events of the past nine or ten months, however, it is reasonable to assume that politics are at play.”