Archive for 2021
May 28, 2021
“MOST VOTERS” ARE PROBABLY RIGHT: Poll: Most voters think COVID-19 likely came from Chinese lab.
SOCIALISTS MAKE A LOT OF DEMANDS: Book reveals Bernie’s hotel demands.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is a demanding hotel guest whose requirements would make even the most pampered celebrity blush, according to a new book detailing Democratic Party politics.
In an excerpt from “Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump,” author Edward-Isaac Dovere reports that following Sanders’ surprisingly strong 2016 presidential campaign, the democratic socialist’s staffers put together a “Senator Comfort Memo” detailing his specifications for each hotel stay on his travels. The excerpt was first reported by Fox News.
According to Dovere, Sanders preferred suites with bathtubs and a king-size bed “which had to have a down comforter or another blanket in the closet. He preferred that the extra blanket be dark blue, and made of cotton.”
Sanders, 79, required that his room be kept at 60 degrees even if it meant opening a window in winter or manually overriding the hotel’s climate control system. Dovere recounts one incident on a trip to California when a hotel worker tried and failed to get the room to the required coolness. . . . The “comfort memo” also reportedly required that Sanders’ hotel rooms be stocked with green tea with honey, Gatorade and assorted nuts (no word about brown M&Ms).
Usually at others’ expense.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Biden To Hold Event With Ralph Northam, Two Years After Saying He ‘Lost All Moral Authority’ And Should Resign.
The two men have much to discuss, not least of which how good Democrats have it, thanks to the levels of willful amnesia of their operatives with bylines:
Evergreen:
TO BE FAIR, IT’S A BATTLE OF WITS AND INFORMATION: Rand Paul Has Won Every Single Round Against Fauci. “Time has proven Rand Paul had his thumb on the pulse of the science of the virus, and understood the unintended consequences of government interventions better than public health officials.”
Also, unlike Fauci, Paul has practiced medicine in the current millennium.
I WISH IT WERE ME: Who’s an astronaut as private spaceflight picks up speed?
May 27, 2021
I THOUGHT YOU WERE STRIPPED OF ALL RIGHTS WHEN THE VIRAL MOB DECLARED YOU AN UNPERSON: Woman sues ex-employer for racial discrimination after viral Central Park incident. “The lawsuit alleged that Amy Cooper was ‘characterized as a privileged white female ‘Karen’ due to the company’s public statements and alleges that the company did not perform an investigation into the incident, as publicly stated, and did not speak with Christian Cooper or obtain the full 911 calls.”
Flashback from Ed, since this exchange doesn’t appear in the above article: “At this point, Christian performs a self-own for the ages: ‘ME: Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it. HER: What’s that? ME [to the dog]: Come here, puppy!’”
(Updated and bumped)
OPEN THREAD: What are you doing to make things better?
DO NOT TRUST CONTENT FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Times doesn’t even pay attention to its own reporting when it doesn’t suit the narrative, in this case that until this month, recent antisemitic violence was largely a Trump-related phenomenon.
Here is what the Times itself reported in February 2020: “Most of the anti-Semitic incidents in New York have not been perpetrated by jihadists or far-right extremists, but by young African-American men.” In fact, I believe that none of incidents were ultimately traced to “far-right extremists.” The Jersey City and Monsey murders, which were of course covered in the Times, were perpetrated by individuals who had imbibed hateful extremist black nationalist ideologies.
Facts are subservient to the Narrative.
TO BE FAIR, THOSE ARE THE WORDS OF A MAN WITH NO APPEAL: Paul Ryan: Conservatism isn’t going anywhere if it depends on the appeal of one man. “Asked for reaction to news of what Ryan will say in his speech tonight, Jason Miller replied to the NYT: ‘Who is Paul Ryan?'”
NOW OUT FROM INSTA-CO-BLOGGER GAIL HERIOT: A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education. (Bumped).
THE VARIANTS SEEM TO HAVE BEEN OVERSOLD: Meta-analysis shows SARS-CoV-2 variants unlikely to affect T cell responses.
THE DOW-JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE TURNS 125:
The country was still coming out of the deep depression of the mid-1890s, and many on Wall Street feared that William Jennings Bryan might win the presidency that year and ditch the gold standard. By September, the average was down to 28, a drop of 31 percent. But as William McKinley’s prospects improved, the average recovered. It would cross 100 for the first time in 1906.
Before the average, people had no easy way to determine how the market as a whole had acted that day. Wall Streeters were adept at “reading the tape,” but most people had to rely on what journalists told them. Now, they had an objective standard.
The number of stocks in the average increased to 20 during World War I and then to 30 near the end of the twenties. And companies were added and dropped as the American economy evolved from an industrial one to a consumer-driven and then a digital one. But these changes could have strange effects. In 1937, the Dow dropped IBM and added AT&T. Over the next forty years, before IBM went back into the index in 1977, AT&T’s stock price increased 300 percent, while IBM went up 22,000 percent. In other words, had they not made that switch, the Dow-Jones would have recovered its 1929 high and broke through 1,000 many years before it did
* * * * * * * *
But over the long term, the Dow has grown an average of 7.96 percent per year. Had your great grandfather passively invested $1,000 in the Dow stocks in 1896, the investment would have doubled, on average, every nine years until it reached $4,104,000 this year.
To put that another way, no one has made money in the long-term betting against the American economy.
I’m not sure about that last sentence — Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and AOC have made out like bandits by doing just that.
SPRINGTIME FOR CNN AND THE BEEB: We need to talk about those journalists who praised Hitler.
CNN has said it will never work with Raja again. The BBC says it is taking the Tala Halawa tweets ‘very seriously’ and is ‘investigating’. My opposition to cancel culture is such that I don’t think we should prejudge the outcome of the Halawa case. CNN was right to ditch Raja – what serious broadcaster or publication would want to be associated with a journalist who in the here and now is tweeting favourably about the Nazis? But Halawa’s ‘#HitlerWasRight’ tweet was from seven years ago. If she can demonstrate to the BBC that she has changed, perhaps it should give her a second chance.
However, we have got to be crystal clear about how perverse this situation is. Both the BBC and CNN, the self-styled moral consciences of the West’s right-thinking set, had reporters who relatively recently, or very recently, expressed support for Hitler. Just think about that. This should alarm us. It should alert us to how mainstream anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism has become.
What is most striking is the relative lack of fuss and fury these cases have generated. Yes, there has been a lot of commentary, some of it rightly angry. But generally it feels muted. This scandal hasn’t trended in the way one might expect. The cancel-culture mobs of the radical left have been especially schtum. The kind of people who will spend days and days agitating for the sacking of someone who made a joke about ‘trannies’ 20 years ago have been strikingly quiet about mainstream reporters who PRAISED ADOLF HITLER.
Once again we can see the double standard that is always deployed in relation to anti-Jewish hatred. Imagine if it was discovered that a reporter for the Daily Telegraph had tweeted approvingly of a genocide against black people. Or if a writer for the Wall Street Journal was unveiled as a loather of Muslims who fantasised about their removal from the face of the Earth. Do you think that kind of thing would have dropped down the concern-o-meter as speedily as these Hitler tweets have? Of course it wouldn’t. It would be obsessed over for days – weeks. It would be held up as proof of the moral rot at the heart of the right. But when it comes to Jews, it’s always a different story. Nothing to see here. It was only a bit of praise for Adolf Hitler. Move along.
The Corbynization of both the Democratic Party, and Jeremy Corbyn’s party, continues apace.
I REMEMBER WHEN THEY WERE TELLING US TESTOSTERONE MADE COVID WORSE: Low testosterone in men is linked to more severe COVID-19, but we have no idea why.
THEY’RE SELLING SOMETHING: Here’s What You Need to Know (and Dr. Fauci Won’t Tell You) About Herd Immunity.
This is a VIP article. Use promo code CHARLIE for a discount.