YES, AGATHA “GOT” HUMANS: Agatha Christie and the nature of moral corruption.
Archive for 2021
May 30, 2021
SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Breaching Promises to Miners, Biden Looks Overseas for Electric Vehicle Metals.
SEE, THIS IS WHY MATH AND (REAL) SCIENCE ARE RACIST, SEXIST AND WHITE SUPREMACIST: A New Kind of Denialism.
They cause you to doubt the words of your “betters.”
AND BAD NEWS FOR HUMANS: Surprising sea ice thickness across the Arctic is good news for polar bears.
MOSTLY BECAUSE THEY CAN’T AFFORD FOR THEIR CRIMES TO BE DISCOVERED: A Democratic Mafia Family Dynasty.
Like MacBeth they are in blood steeped so far that to go on is easier than to return.
NO SURPRISE. I MEAN, IT ENCOURAGES RATIONALITY AFTER ALL: Today’s blacklisted American: Classic philosophy and literature banned at Howard University and across academia.
May 29, 2021
WHERE THINGS STAND NOW: Flagship Tulsa Race Massacre commemoration is scrapped after survivors demanded $1 million each to appear and $50 million for reparations fund.
It’s grifting all the way down.
OPEN THREAD: How does it feel to be so wise? To see through eyes that only see what’s real?
SOHRAB AHMARI: Facebook’s lab-leak censors owe The Post, and America, an apology.
Is there something in the California water that makes Silicon Valley’s censorious dweebs so damned shameless?
On Wednesday, Facebook revised its policy of banning posts suggesting the coronavirus was man-made — because the COVID situation is, er, “evolving,” as a spokesman told Politico.
Gee, thanks. The flip-flop comes more than a year after the social-media giant banned a well-reasoned Post opinion column by China scholar Steven Mosher that speculated about a potential lab leak. Will our columnist receive an apology? Of course not. But it’s the American people who should be holding the Menlo Park tyrants to account.
Think about it: If you were Xi Jinping, and you wanted to deploy an information-control operation over the origins of COVID-19, you couldn’t have done better than to just let Facebook, working in conjunction with America’s bottom-feeding “fact-checking” industry, do its thing.
It’s almost like they’re working for the CCP.
SO WHY AREN’T JOURNALISTS COVERING IT? “I Don’t Know Of A Bigger Story In The World” Right Now Than Ivermectin: NYTimes Best-Selling Author.
Yeah, yeah, we know why.
THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK: Washington Square Park ‘drug den’ horrifies Greenwich Village neighbors.
The Panic in Needle Park was a pre-Godfather 1971 film starring Al Pacino. For years during the Giuliani and Bloomberg era, hip New Yorkers cursed the city’s “Disney-fication,” and longed for the bad old days of the 1970s. And thanks to Bill de Blasio, they’re getting their wish, good and hard.
SCIENCE: Mask mandate and use efficacy in state-level COVID-19 containment.
Containment of the COVID-19 pandemic requires evidence-based strategies to reduce transmission. Because COVID-19 can spread via respired droplets, many states have mandated mask use in public settings. Randomized control trials have not clearly demonstrated mask efficacy against respiratory viruses, and observational studies conflict on whether mask use predicts lower infection rates. We hypothesized that statewide mask mandates and mask use are associated with lower COVID-19 case growth rates in the United States.
Methods: We calculated total COVID-19 case growth and mask use for the continental United States with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. We estimated post- mask mandate case growth in non-mandate states using median issuance dates of neighboring states with mandates. Results: Case growth was not significantly different between mandate and non-mandate states at low or high transmission rates, and surges were equivocal. Mask use predicted lower case growth at low, but not high transmission rates. Growth rates were comparable between states in the first and last mask use quintiles adjusted for normalized total cases early in the pandemic and unadjusted after peak Fall-Winter infections. Mask use did not predict Summer 2020 case growth for non-Northeast states or Fall-Winter 2020 growth for all continental states.
Conclusions: Mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level COVID-19 spread during COVID- 19 growth surges. Containment requires future research and implementation of existing efficacious strategies.
Basically: Masks may work, but mask mandates don’t.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Angry ‘woke’ parents and teachers are trying to silence critics of critical race theory.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments: Featuring That XKCD Cartoon Everyone Likes to Quote! Well, everyone who’s an idiot.
“This cartoon is often used to dismiss free speech arguments, but it is wrong: it not only confuses First Amendment law with freedom of speech, it doesn’t even get the First Amendment right.”
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH GWEN STEFANI IS A VOICE OF SANITY. Gwen Stefani Is Right: Cultural Appreciation Is Not Cultural Appropriation.
An obsession with cultural appropriation also reveals the deep unseriousness of self-proclaimed “anti-racists.” The modern left, with its influence in boardrooms and newsrooms and classrooms, takes every opportunity to lecture weary Americans about the enduring evil of whiteness and of white supremacy.
While their racially charged screeds are almost always unfounded, within their rhetoric is a message that threatens to cultivate white pride where it didn’t exist before. By reinforcing the idea that cultural appreciation is cultural appropriation and therefore racist, woke warriors encourage white people to insulate themselves from the cultures and experiences of others and fully embrace tribalism wherein race is a focal point.
“Most critics of cultural appropriation, coming from the far left, also fear the rise of white supremacy,” wrote Julian Adorney here at The Federalist in 2018. “But the best way to combat white supremacy is to encourage people of all races, whites included, to borrow at will from other cultures — as drawing more lines between races and cordoning off the exploration of other cultures is wholly contradictory to the end goal of creating a harmonious, diverse, and pluralist society.”
Americans who take pride in the melting-pot nature of this grand experiment would likely agree with Adorney, as does Stefani. “If we didn’t buy and sell and trade our cultures in, we wouldn’t have so much beauty, you know?” she said. “We learn from each other, we share from each other, we grow from each other. And all these rules are just dividing us more and more.”
Take a tip from Stefani. Don’t let the race-baiters bully you into giving up cultural appreciation.
Considering Stefani made her bones incorporating Jamaican ska and reggae beats and elements of British new wave into her California-based music in the 1990s, why shouldn’t she continue to incorporate elements of other cultures into her sound and stage presentation?
AT HELEN’S PAGE: Heet® Triple Action Pain Relieving Formula from Monticello Drug.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Personal Defense is About Establishing the Right Habits.
THE BIG SECRET BEHIND THE PROPOSED TRIPS WAIVER:
So, this is why a temporary waiver of TRIPS—which would suspend national obligations to enforce IP rights—can’t possibly help countries like India get more vaccines to its citizens. The know-how required to manufacture at scale is owned by the companies like Pfizer and Moderna that are producing doses in record volumes. To effect the demanded “technology transfer,” governments would have to secure the agreement of those companies not just to hand over their entire “cookbook” but also to send qualified scientists and technicians to spend time at the foreign facilities, basically consulting on how to implement the secret processes to produce a safe vaccine. And even if that transfer happened tomorrow, getting to the point of actually manufacturing in volume would take more than a year.
Not only would the TRIPS waiver not produce the results the proponents want, it would likely reduce the current level of international distribution of vaccines, by interfering with access to the limited supplies of required ingredients. In fact, this supply chain disruption was recently cited by none other than the government of India in pushing back against popular demands for a compulsory license on Gilead’s Remdesivir and other COVID-19 treatments, noting that the “main constraint” was not intellectual property rights but preventing competition for scarce “raw materials and other essential inputs.”
Related: Don’t Strip Intellectual-Property Rights from Vaccine-Makers.
DISPATCHES FROM THE “IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT” PARTY: Suddenly, Democrats are offended by Nazi analogies.
Republican Jewish-space-laser kook Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene offered up a nonsensical Holocaust analogy the other day, comparing vaccine passports to yellow stars worn by Jews during the Holocaust. Though Greene has problems grasping historical context, she apparently possesses the ability to induce the entire left wing to pretend they are offended by dumb Nazi analogies.
It’s a quick turnaround. The media spent four years acting like the 2017 inauguration was akin to von Hindenburg handing power to Hitler. What am I saying? They’re still doing it. This very week you can read, for example, a Chris Cillizza piece headlined “A majority of Republicans are living in a fantasy world built around the Big Lie.”
The “Big Lie” — highly popular among Democrats (and Donald Trump) — is, of course, referring to a tactic the Nazis deployed against their political enemies. No one seemed upset when President-elect Joe Biden claimed Ted Cruz was a latter-day Goebbels spreading the “Big Lie.”
If challenging the legitimacy of an election is tantamount to fascistic disinformation, Democrats have been running the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda for the past five years.
Let’s face it: Greene is a rank amateur at playing the Nazi card. We have been drowning in reductio ad Hitlerum.
Curiously, increasingly anti-Semitic socialists looking to expand socialism nationally are offended by analogizes involving National Socialists.