IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? Some Texans use 2021 Ford F-150 hybrid pickup trucks to power homes amid winter storm.
Archive for 2021
February 19, 2021
‘GOD’S CRIME SCENE’ ZOOMINAR RETURNS: HillFaith’s first offering of the 8-session, once-a-week-for-an-hour course by Cold-Case Christianity’s J. Warner Wallace and led by yours truly has three sessions left, and people are still trying to enroll. So starting March 30, we’re doing it again. It’s free, it will challenge your thinking and it’s great fellowship, too.
UPDATE: Well, that was quick! All 12 available slots are filled for the course beginning on March 30. There will be a third round of it, most likely beginning in late May, so if you are interested, send your info and get on the waiting list now.
SOUNDS LIKE A TRAGEDY WAITING TO HAPPEN: Private land ownership is a beautiful dream gone badly wrong. It’s time to reinstate the forgotten ideal of the commons.
COUNSELOR TROI MORPHED INTO JAMES “HURRICANE” WOLCOTT SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Actress Marina Sirtis doesn’t want you to get her wrong but she thinks Texas deserves to suffer because they vote for Republicans.
IS THAT SOCIETY’S GREATEST NEED? Deans: Students Must Be Given Vaccine Priority So Colleges And Law Schools Can Reopen In The Fall.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: We’ll Achieve Herd Immunity By April, Report Claims.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: What if the pandemic was nearly over and everybody pretended not to notice?
Answer: That’s less of a “What if?” and more of an “Exactly what’s going on.”
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Star Trek star learns not to mess with Texas
- Yet another example of the new anti-racism looking an awful lot like the old racism
- The Junior Anti-Sex League is real and Orwell is not happy about it
Bonus Sanity: Red State, Blue State, Good State, Bad State.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
GEORGE LEEF: How the College Board Mangles the Teaching of History.
MORE OF WHAT JOE BIDEN DISMISSED AS ‘DIFFERENT NORMS’: Guards Gang Rape Religious Minorities In China’s Concentration Camps, Former Detainees Allege.
The silence from leftwing feminists is beyond deafening.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
NOT IN THE PUBLIC DEBATE IT’S NOT: The Texas Power Grid Failure is More Complicated than Green v. Carbon.
SO CAN WE FINALLY END OUR YEAR-LONG TWO-WEEK CURVE-FLATTENING? We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April: Covid cases have dropped 77% in six weeks. Experts should level with the public about the good news.
Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?
In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.
Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.
There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.
Antibody studies almost certainly underestimate natural immunity. Antibody testing doesn’t capture antigen-specific T-cells, which develop “memory” once they are activated by the virus. Survivors of the 1918 Spanish flu were found in 2008—90 years later—to have memory cells still able to produce neutralizing antibodies.
Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute found that the percentage of people mounting a T-cell response after mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 infection consistently exceeded the percentage with detectable antibodies. T-cell immunity was even present in people who were exposed to infected family members but never developed symptoms. . . .
Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth. As we encourage everyone to get a vaccine, we also need to reopen schools and society to limit the damage of closures and prolonged isolation. Contingency planning for an open economy by April can deliver hope to those in despair and to those who have made large personal sacrifices.
Public health attracts far too many people with a zest for manipulation.
NEVER DOUBLE DOWN ON STUPID: No, AOC, the Green New Deal Is NOT the Solution to Texas Blackouts.
REFILL THE SWAMP: Biden Muscles Out Chicago Prosecutor Hot on the Heels of Powerful Dems.
President Joe Biden is forcing Chicago’s top federal prosecutor to resign amid ongoing criminal probes of powerful Illinois Democrats and their associates.
U.S. attorney John Lausch is prosecuting close confidants of Democrat boss Mike Madigan, an ally of former president Barack Obama who resigned from the state legislature Thursday after a decades-long reign in Springfield. Lausch’s office will also prosecute Chicago alderman Edward Burke (D.), an influential figure accused of strong-arming businesses into retaining his law firm.
Lausch’s abrupt removal has drawn bipartisan criticism from Illinois lawmakers who say he should be allowed to finish his work or depart on a longer timeline to ensure an orderly transition.
When the corruption is so bad that even Illinois Democrats want the investigation to continue…
FROM THE MAN WHO BROUGHT YOU MICROSOFT ‘BOB’: Bill Gates says cryptocurrency is one innovation the world could do without.
NOPE. We need national summer school to help kids recover from learning lost in COVID pandemic.
A friend writes: “Speaking as a parent who had to drastically reduce his own work hours (and earnings) to substitute-teach for free all year while the school system sat largely unused and teachers and administrators still drew a salary funded by the reduced earnings of families statewide; i’m sure I speak for many parents when I say: they can shove this summer school idea up their nonessential asses.”
Public schools have gone a long way to convince parents that they’re (1) nonessential, and (2) composed of and run by people who have contempt for parents and taxpayers. This is a huge opportunity for Republicans. If they’re smart, that is.
AN OFFERING OF SQUIRRELS: The legacy media is losing its ability to present plausible distractions from news stories it doesn’t want to cover.
If Cuomo didn’t offer a future presidential prospect, he would surely be someone to throw under the bus. He’s a gubernatorial Biden — a shameless clown devoid of credibility or competence who represents everything regular Americans despise about the political class. Cuomo is the very picture of our coastal elites: his success owes almost completely to the name he inherited from his father Vito, er, Mario Cuomo and his membership in the ruling-class club. Cuomo spouts all of the pieties of the managerial elite, and he’s mastered the art of faking sincerity when he does so. His abject corruption and incompetence in office is easy to paper over — the Cuomos have run so much of New York’s middle class out of the state there are no longer enough of them to ever vote a Democrat out of office, and therefore their party has perfected at the state level the Weaponized Governmental Failure that’s usually reserved for Democrat machines in the cities.
And of course, brother Fredo — sorry, Chris — hosts a show on CNN when he’s not engaged in pugilism with less-than-adoring viewers or faking a COVID quarantine. CNN’s management actually thinks it’s cute to have Fredo interviewing Sonny on its air despite the breathtaking affront to journalistic integrity that represents. That occasional moment of on-air fraternal bliss suddenly lost its luster when the G-Men began covering the set.
These things don’t really require a squirrel. Just a stone face and a shut yap when the public sees them and asks a question that rhymes with “Cut the duck?”
But when the G-Men show up and the background music begins to signal that Sonny is approaching the proverbial toll-booth, now it’s time for a squirrel.
Appropriately, quite a significant hullaballoo recently broke out over a Texas politician’s Mexican vacation.
Exit quote: “None of this is complicated, and certainly none of it is new. Nor are the squirrels going back into the trees anytime soon, because it won’t be long before the Democrats and their compliant minions in the news media and pop culture recognize the urgency of air cover for all kinds of coming disasters.”
Related: Cruz Cancun trip gets four times more airtime than Cuomo nursing home cover-up. Squirrel!
EMBARRASSMENT REQUIRES A SENSE OF SHAME: Cuomo Revelations Should Embarrass Media.
JOSH BLACKMAN & SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: If Donald Trump is Convicted of Violating 18 U.S.C. § 2383, Will He Be Disqualified From Serving As President? “We’ve written that the phrase ‘office . . . under the United States’ refers to appointed positions in the Executive and Judicial Branches, and also includes appointed positions in the Legislative Branch. This phrase does not extend to elected federal positions, i.e., the President, Vice President, and members of Congress. . . . Congress can add statutory qualifications for appointed positions. In other words, Congress can add statutory qualifications to the positions it creates (i.e., appointed federal positions), but Congress cannot add qualifications to positions created by the Constitution (i.e., elected federal positions).”
“Our position here was not created in the wake of January 6, 2021. In 2016, Tillman publicized a similar analysis in regard to a hypothetical conviction of Secretary Clinton under 18 U.S.C. § 2071, the Federal Records Act.”