For nearly a month last summer a violent insurrection claimed control of Capitol Hill — in Seattle, that is, not Washington DC. The insurrectionists were leftists who proclaimed the six or so city blocks under their power to be a new state-within-a-state, the ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’, or CHAZ. Multiple shootings, murders and acts of arson took place before police finally restored legal authority on July 1.
This insurrection, and the many other lethal incursions against the rule of law that took place last summer, have not occasioned much soul-searching or anger from progressives and liberals in the commentariat. The contrast with their fury over the riot at the US Capitol on January 6 of this year could not be more striking. Only one person died violently in that shameful episode, and she, Ashli Babbitt, was shot by law enforcement. Yet this time, for reasons that readers will have to deduce for themselves, the police are not being criticized for the use of force against unarmed lawbreakers. Instead, Democrats, and Liz Cheney, are treating this mostly peaceful protest — many thousands protested, a few hundred broke into the Capitol — as the new 9/11. Why?
2020 was supposed to be the American left’s Year Zero, and yet, the events of January 6th, 2021, requires the left to memory hole many of the events of the previous year. The rest of us should not forget.
And there are alternatives—Gab, GETTR, Parler, Tell and Mind, to name a few. None have caught fire in the way Twitter has, but that may be our fault.
Or, maybe we don’t need that means of communication at all. Maybe it’s just too 2010s and should now be dispensed with. I’m happy having my say here at The Epoch Times and enjoy very much reading the comments, which are often extraordinarily good.
Whatever the case, I am publicly calling on Dave Rubin to do something unusual and laudable, to tell Twitter to “stuff it.” They may have locked him out, but he’s not coming back anyway, even if they let him.
Or, to put it another way, since Jack Dorsey might know something of revolutionary history, Dave should be our version of Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) who, during the Spanish Civil War, famously said, “Better to die on your feet, than to live forever on your knees… No pasaran! [They will not pass.]”
Yes, I know Dolores was a communist, but the shoe is on the other proverbial foot these days, and it is the new American communists who, with sites like Twitter leading the way, stand in opposition to “freedom and justice for all.”
No pasaran, indeed.
Abandoning the decentralized Blogosphere for the walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was a huge mistake, particularly for conservatives. Somebody should write a book about the reasons why.
The eleventh-hour bid, which came as thousands of people may soon face the process of being forced from their homes, faltered amid caucus divisions. About a dozen House Democrats opposed the measure and were unwilling to budge, two senior Democratic aides told NBC News.
“Definitely don’t have the votes,” one leadership aide said.
House Speaker Nancy Nancy Pelosi and the sponsor of a measure to extend the ban, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., were at odds Friday over whether to hold a vote and force members to make their positions publicly known.
Waters wanted a vote, which would have allowed progressive activists to blame specific Democratic lawmakers for its failure, while Pelosi didn’t want to expose some of her caucus members to the wrath of the base, according to the second aide.
Ultimately, the effort died when Majority Leader Steny Hoyer tried to pass the measure by unanimous consent — a process that doesn’t require a vote — and a Republican member objected. Congress is now leaving town, with the House not expected back in until Sept. 20.
Related: “[T]he moratorium has left an enormous $21 billion tab in unpaid rent built up. Whenever the order finally expires, crushing bills will come due. They will either bankrupt delinquent renters, leave landlords in the lurch, or, unfortunately, be passed on to taxpayers via a bailout. The longer the eviction moratorium continues, the more this dysfunction magnifies. Of course, that only gives politicians more incentive to expand it into perpetuity to avoid having to face the fallout from their poor policy decisions. The ultimate loser from such cowardice, though, is American taxpayers. Remember that next time you hear the word ‘temporary’ attached to a proposal for a new government program.”
We got some new COVID-19 rules yesterday. They were different than the rules we got the day before that, and I assume they’re different than the rules we’ll get tomorrow.
To recap:
Absolutely do not wear a mask
You must, must, must wear a mask or you’re killing Grandma
Don’t leave the house or you’re killing Grandma
If you can’t avoid leaving the house, stay at least six feet away from any other human being you see or you’re killing Grandma
Wash your hands 20 times a day
Do not touch your face or anything else, ever
Get vaccinated so you don’t have to wear a mask
You have to wear a mask even if you’re vaccinated
When the above rules change, and then change back, and then change back again, shut up about it or you’re a stupid MAGA-head
JOHN PODHORETZ: Bill de Blasio and the Decline of New York City. “This is not the result of COVID. It is the result of a disastrous mayoralty and the ideas, prejudices, and idiocies that have animated it. De Blasio’s legacy as he prepares to leave office is just that: a city in decline.”
Having now read through it, I have the same reaction as Greg Pollowitz: “[W]hat the CDC data on Provincetown actually shows is that even under perfect conditions for a superspreader event, the vaccine works spectacularly well.”
The study tracks a nasty outbreak in P-town over the first two weeks of this month. On July 3, cases in Barnstable County were rock-bottom at zero per 100,000 residents due in large part to the state’s high vaccination rate of 70+ percent partially immunized and 60+ percent fully immunized. Two weeks later, after locals partied on July 4 and attended a series of summer events, cases had exploded to 177 per 100,000 over the previous 14 days. Many of those infections were afflicting fully vaccinated people.
That’s not good news. But is it as terrible as the reporting has cracked it up to be?
Approximately three quarters (346; 74%) of cases occurred in fully vaccinated persons (those who had completed a 2-dose course of mRNA vaccine [Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna] or had received a single dose of Janssen [Johnson & Johnson] vaccine ≥14 days before exposure). Genomic sequencing of specimens from 133 patients identified the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in 119 (89%) and the Delta AY.3 sublineage in one (1%). Overall, 274 (79%) vaccinated patients with breakthrough infection were symptomatic. Among five COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized, four were fully vaccinated; no deaths were reported. Real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) cycle threshold (Ct) values in specimens from 127 vaccinated persons with breakthrough cases were similar to those from 84 persons who were unvaccinated, not fully vaccinated, or whose vaccination status was unknown (median = 22.77 and 21.54, respectively).
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Which brings us to the first wrinkle in the data. How much of the P-town outbreak is due to the circumstances being absolutely ideal for a mass outbreak?
Click to enlarge.
As Byron York tweets, “Not a Trump hotspot. The proper response is not to blame Blue America for outbreak but for those finger-pointing commentators to be a little more circumspect, a little less Trump-obsessed, a little more reasonable. Would be good idea.”
I’m double-vaccinated. The chances of becoming sick enough to be hospitalized are extremely small; the chance of death, none at all. My friend who first texted me is super-fit (as are most of the young torsos who show up that week), but he’s also my age (weirdly enough, he’s the same friend I went to stay with when I first tested HIV-positive in 1993). He endured a nasty week of a fluish bug: the kind of thing that happens without any plague at all. Just part of the inherent risks of being human on a planet that does not belong exclusively to us. . . .
So let it rip. The one silver lining of plagues in the past is that, at some point, they blew themselves out, by creating herd immunity. What we have done with Covid is greatly slow that process down. We did so for good reasons — because it would give us time to get a vaccine, and because a full-scale epidemic would overwhelm the healthcare system. But now that we have several vaccines, and can adjust them from time to time, and the healthcare system is not on the verge of collapse, the logic for lockdowns and masking has completely disappeared. . . .
These viruses challenge the psyche, and the trick, it seems to me, is not to deny their power and danger, but to see past them to the real goal: the living of your life. If you are not careful, this one viral threat can crowd out all other perspectives, distort your judgment of risk, and cause you to be paralyzed by excessive caution and fear. But defeating a virus often does mean living with it. We already do this with the flu. There’s no reason we can’t do it with Covid as well.
I’m vaccinated. I think people should be vaccinated. But this latest moral mania — and make no mistake about it, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” p.r. campaign is the latest in a ceaseless series of such manias, dating back to late 2016 — lays bare everything that’s abhorrent and nonsensical in modern American politics, beginning with the no-longer-disguised aristocratic mien of the Washington consensus.
If you want to convince people to get a vaccine, pretty much the worst way to go about it is a massive blame campaign, delivered by sneering bluenoses who have a richly deserved credibility problem with large chunks of the population, and now insist they’re owed financially besides. . . .
Now this new vaccine debate has been amped to 11. The universal consensus of the “Powerhouse Roundtable” types is that it’s time to start opening the cans of whoop-ass on the vaccine-hesitant, yanking services and civil liberties from those murderous holdouts who are, the president tells us, “killing people.” They do this acting like the public doesn’t remember the messaging from the Biden-Harris campaign last year, which was talked about at the time as being irresponsible precisely because it set a precedent of urging the public to distrust the vaccine.
“Sneering bluenoses who have a richly deserved credibility problem,” indeed. Well said.
It’s also really apparent, as Taibbi notes, how much bipartisan consensus there is among members of the ruling class that people should knuckle under to the ruling class, or suffer.
July 30, 2021
OPEN THREAD: I hope you had the time of your life.
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