OPEN THREAD: Here you go.

SPACE: NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover snaps scenic selfie at ‘Mont Mercou’ (photo).

IS IT A CONSPIRACY THEORY WHEN THEY TELL YOU WHAT THEY’RE DOING ON CNN?

Well, this is wild. pic.twitter.com/TO2mWgufN1

— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) April 1, 2021

Oops:

Their messaging really stinks.

HMM: COVID vaccination earlier in pregnancy leads to better antibody transfer to baby.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! Capitol Attacker Identified, and the Left Won’t Like This. “Sources tell Fox News that the suspect’s name is Noah Green, 25, who is from Indiana but has ties to Virginia. According to a source in law enforcement, Green identifies himself as a Nation of Islam supporter, and he may have recently lost his job.”

More at the link.

JIM MEIGS IS NOT A BILL NELSON FAN: Will Senator “Ballast” Drag NASA Down? Joe Biden’s pick to lead NASA has a long history of supporting boondoggles and opposing innovation.

“CLEARLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL:” Vermont: Special Vaccine Access If You’re of the Right Racial Group.

TOOLS: New method uses device cameras to measure pulse, breathing rate and could help telehealth. “A University of Washington-led team has developed a method that uses the camera on a person’s smartphone or computer to take their pulse and respiration signal from a real-time video of their face. The researchers presented this state-of-the-art system in December at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY IN THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S “RETURN TO NORMALCY:” Army Combat Fitness Disaster: Units Refusing to Take Test, Medics Bailing.

You can see the test requirements here. I’m 60 and I could pass this test except maybe for the timed two-mile run: I sprint, I don’t run any distance, and I have no idea how long it would take me to run two miles. But did I mention I’m 60?

SOON WE WILL SEE PEOPLE ARGUING THAT CONSENT AND RAPE ARE SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED: The Politics of Bad Sex: A new book argues that current standards of affirmative consent place too much emphasis on knowing what we want.

Some schools have trained students, as part of orientation, to seek and settle for nothing less than “enthusiastic” agreement to sex. Even under an affirmative-consent regime’s valorization of clarity, “yes” doesn’t always mean “yes.”

The jury is still out on whether our experiment with affirmative consent will reduce rape, prove useful for distinguishing sex from sexual assault, or lead to less experience of sexual violation. But what may well emerge is a recognition that the clearest practices of “yes” and “no” do little to untangle a deep difficulty that makes consent seem promising yet wide of the mark: the altogether human experience of not knowing in the first place what is wanted or unwanted, desired or undesired.

Affirmative consent — much more a requirement that it be “enthusiastic” — is a requirement crafted to serve the needs of university bureaucrats, not actual humans. Those 1990s rape counselors were right to laugh at it.

CHANGE: Car Buyers Flocked to Dealers in First Quarter after a Tough 2020.

WHY IS THE MLB PUNISHING A DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY* CITY? MLB Moving All-Star Game from Atlanta over New Georgia Voting Law.

* So much so that Atlanta’s last Republican mayor left office in 1879.

UPDATE: From America’s Newspaper of Record: Actors Vow To Boycott Georgia And Only Film In The Xinjiang Region Of China.

MORE: Tom Cotton calls out MLB for punishing Georgia over voting law while partnering with communist China.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE IN 3..2..1: Suspect who smashed into barrier at US Capitol identified: reports.

The driver who killed a US Capitol cop before he was gunned down by police is a Nation of Islam devotee from Indiana, according to reports and his social media.

Noah Green, 25, who may have been living in Virginia, described himself as a “Follower of Farrakhan” on his Facebook page, in reference to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Related:

MSNBC’s Jesse Rodriguez is reporting it’s Green as well.

Flashback: Twitter bans Trump, but Iranian ayatollah, Louis Farrakhan, Chinese propagandists still active.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Great Defense Loads for the 9 mm. Of course, the main virtue of a better load is that your aim can be a little bit worse. Pretty much any bullet will do the job if you hit a vital spot squarely.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Woke and Weak CEOs: They’re denouncing Georgia’s election law, but have they read it?

The public debate on Georgia’s new voting law has become a stew of falsehood, propaganda and panic. Part of the blame lies with the partisan distortion of Democrats, part with their media echoes, and now part with CEOs of major companies who are uninformed at best or cowardly at worst.

Start with President Biden, the great unifier, who on Wednesday to ESPN called the law “ Jim Crow on steroids,” while saying he’d “strongly support” moving the Major League Baseball all-star game out of Atlanta. He’s picking up the smear about Georgia from Stacey Abrams, who still hasn’t accepted that she lost the race for Peach State Governor in 2018.

“You’re going to close a polling place at 5 o’clock, when working people just get off?” he said to ESPN. “This is all about keeping working folks, and ordinary folks that I grew up with, from being able to vote.” Mr. Biden either doesn’t know what’s in the Georgia bill or he is lying about it. We’d like to believe it’s the former, but that gets harder to credit as his falsehoods multiply.

On Election Day in Georgia, anyone in line by 7 p.m. gets a ballot. The new law requires an extra Saturday of voting, while specifying early voting hours: The minimum is 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., but counties may run 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. In metro areas, “you might not notice a change,” explains Georgia Public Broadcasting. Elsewhere, “you will have an extra weekend day, and your weekday early voting hours will likely be longer.”

Then there are the big companies racing out PR statements of condemnation, though what’s often most conspicuous is their vagueness. The voting law “is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values,” said the airline’s CEO, Ed Bastian. He groveled that he’d had “time to now fully understand all that is in the bill.”

What a clumsy emergency landing. Last week Mr. Bastian said that “concerns remain” about the law, while he explained—accurately—that it “expands weekend voting, codifies Sunday voting and protects a voter’s ability to cast an absentee ballot without providing a reason.” He added: “For the first time, drop boxes have also been authorized for all counties statewide.”

What changed in the interim? Could it be that he has bowed to the woke mob, as the path of least political and commercial resistance? Why not stay silent if you don’t know what you’re talking about or can’t stand the heat?

Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the bill, rightly called foul: “Today’s statement by Delta CEO Ed Bastian stands in stark contrast to our conversations with the company, ignores the content of the new law, and unfortunately continues to spread the same false attacks.”

My compromise: We won’t require more ID, or longer lines, than Delta does for its flights . . . .

BREAKING: Capitol Police Officer and Suspect Dead Following Knife Incident.

ALBERTO DE LA CRUZ: Video of the Day: Maria Werlau on mass murderer and Cuba’s ‘Butcher of La Cabaña,’ Che Guevara.

I’M NOT SAYING THAT DOING THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT ANTHONY FAUCI RECOMMENDS IS ALWAYS THE BEST COURSE, BUT IT’S THE WAY TO BET: U.S. Falls Behind Britain.

In both countries, the number of daily deaths peaked in January—3,352 on Jan. 12 in the U.S. and 1,248 on Jan. 23 in the U.K. Since then, the U.S. count has declined 72%—which sounds impressive until you put it up against Britain’s 96%. U.K. deaths now average 47 a day. The U.S. figure, 938, is 20 times as high in a country less than five times as populous.

Many public-health experts thought the U.S. should take the “one dose is better than none” approach, including Ashish Jha of Brown University, Robert Wachter of the University of California and Christopher Gill of Boston University. Even Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, a member of President Biden’s Covid task force known for speaking his mind, suggested delaying second doses. “We could get more of our over-65 age group vaccinated,” he told the Star Tribune. “I think the data will support that actually is a very effective way to go.”

But Anthony Fauci publicly disagreed. On one occasion, Dr. Fauci warned of “the danger” that could come from focusing on the first dose. And at a Feb. 19 White House briefing Dr. Fauci played down a single-dose study from Israel. White House senior adviser Andy Slavitt chimed in, telling reporters, “We’re not going to be persuaded by one study that happens to grab headlines.”

The Israeli study demonstrated that the first Pfizer dose was 85% effective at two to four weeks. But it isn’t the only study. Moderna’s phase 3 trial included 2,000 people who received only a single injection of either a placebo or the vaccine. In that group, the efficacy of the single vaccine dose was 80% to 90%. A Feb. 17 New England Journal of Medicine letter notes that first doses of Pfizer and Moderna had an extraordinary 92% effectiveness at three to four weeks. The authors concluded: “A scarce supply of vaccine could be maximized by deferring second doses until all priority group members are offered at least one dose.” I agree. Why use half the nation’s vaccine supply to boost immunity by 3% to 15% in the short-term when we could give lifelines to more vulnerable Americans during a vaccine shortage?

But this week, in response to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showing a first-dose efficacy of 80% at two to four weeks, Dr. Fauci said that it isn’t known whether the protection drops “off a cliff after two weeks or three weeks.” That doesn’t happen with other vaccines. Why dismiss data and real-world U.K. experience with an untested hypothesis?

“Follow the science” except when it means follow a hunch.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Telemedicine Will Be Great After Covid, Too: Pandemic-fueled innovations like remote consultation and licensing reform are good for doctors, patients and public health.

Telemedicine is also a convenient way to offer after-hours care, particularly when there’s a time-zone difference. And that suggests another potential positive legacy of the pandemic: loosened regulations to let licensed medical professionals cross state lines. . . .

Almost half of U.S. states have laws allowing out-of-state health-care practitioners to work during emergencies. Others used executive actions to enable medical practitioners from elsewhere to help out during the pandemic. But why limit such waivers to emergencies? It’s not as though human health is different in Arizona and Missouri. State-by-state license requirements serve mostly to limit competition. (The same might be said for limits on internationally trained medical personnel.)

Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia already belong to a compact that allows licensed nurses to practice in any of the member states. Telemedicine services that, for example, provide after-hours triage are able to cover most of the country by hiring nurses who live in compact states.

When Covid-19 hit, compact members found it much easier to keep their hospitals staffed. New Jersey, which had just joined the group, sped up implementation to let out-of-state nurses pitch in as Covid cases soared.

Also allowing Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants to practice independently. Lots of dumb laws and regulations were suspended for the pandemic, and they should not be renewed.

INSUFFICIENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT: Return the Highway Trust Fund to its Original Users-Pay/Users-Benefit Principle. Virtually all of the so-called shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund is due to Congress spending money on non-highway programs.

THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP, FOR DEVELOPING MULTIPLE VACCINES A YEAR FASTER THAN EXPERTS THOUGHT POSSIBLE: Moderna Vax Limits Eased.

The FDA will allow 11 doses to be taken from standard Moderna vaccine vials and authorized a new vial with 15 doses.

Also, Moderna said the vaccine can now be kept 24 hours at room temperature after thawing, and doses remain good 12 hours after vials are opened.

We might not even need that AstraZeneca vaccine, according to Anthony Fauci, MD.

I don’t think we even need Anthony Fauci, MD.

Related: Trial: Pfizer COVID Vax Effective Against South African Variant.

WELL, GOOD: Researcher develops successful Zika virus vaccine in preclinical studies.

IN OTHER SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE, BOYS WHO SPEND NO TIME ONLINE NEVER CYBERBULLY: Boys who spend lots of time online more likely to cyberbully.

What would we do without science?

THIS IS FINE: China’s State Propaganda Group Boasts Control Over Western Think Tanks, ‘Election Integrity’ Groups, And Even Joe Biden’s National Security Team. “A 2017 report effectively claims – on the CCP’s behalf – that CNN host Fareed Zakaria, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook Oversight Board member Helle Thorning-Schmidt, NeverTrump philanthropist Pierre Omidyar and many others ‘co-operate’ with the CCP and its goals.”

Commies boast about a lot of things that just aren’t so, but this one is worth a look.