POLITICS: Latest Update on Fetterman’s Health Raises a Key Question. “So, can we now question Sen. John Fetterman’s health (D-PA)? An NBC News reporter tried to raise a warning when she felt the then-Democratic candidate struggled with small talk. This remark was considered an ‘ableist’ smear—it wasn’t. Fetterman nearly died in 2022 during the primary season, suffering a severe stroke that brought evident impairments concerning mental cognition. And yet, he won the race, beating Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz. It didn’t take long for him to be hospitalized after feeling light-headed during his party’s retreat in Washington.”
Archive for 2023
February 12, 2023
CHIEFS ARE CHAMPS! Kansas City Chiefs win Super Bowl 57 thriller over Philadelphia Eagles in Arizona.
The Chiefs have taken a 38-35 lead on the Eagles with a 27-yard field goal by Harrison Butker with eight seconds left in the game.
The kick capped a 12-play 66-yard drive that took 5:07 off the clock.
On a 3rd-and-8 from the Philadelphia 15, James Bradberry was called for defensive holding after an incomplete pass from Patrick Mahomes, giving the Chiefs a new set of downs.
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record predicted: Super Bowl Refs Hold Pregame Meeting To Decide Which Team Will Win.
UPDATE: Patrick Mahomes named Super Bowl MVP after rallying Chiefs.
OPEN THREAD: Hey, it’s not Monday yet.
I’M NOT SAYING IT’S ALIENS, BUT: How Bad Is It? Biden Team Issuing ‘Private Assurances’ It’s Not Aliens.
Evergreen:
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend comments: “The movies lied about all those force screens and stuff. Turns out a Sidewinder is like a magic death ray to the ETs.”
Well, you know, maybe the aliens are like the Europeans when they first visited Africa: Superior in transportation, but no more than mildly superior (and sometimes inferior) in combat, which is why they bought slaves from Africans instead of capturing them themselves.
ANNOUNCERS IN THE THIRD QUARTER DISCUSSING HOW BAD THE FIELD IS AT THE SUPER BOWL: The grass at Super Bowl LVII has been years in the making. “Be warned: When you’re watching Super Bowl LVII on Sunday, you might get the urge to take out your driver for a few swings. That’s because the grass that the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefswill play on inside State Farm Stadium will be the same turf on which you’d play 18.”
SPACE TRUCKIN’: Plasmos unveils Space Truck. “In the Flatbed configuration, the Space Truck can accommodate one 400-kilogram satellite. In the Musketeer configuration, the Space Truck has room for four 75-kilogram satellites and a six-kilogram payload that could remain in space or return to Earth. For on-orbit servicing, Plasmos plans to offer the AAA Truck with robotic arms, satellite refueling and spacecraft maintenance gear.”
Classical reference in headline.
DISPATCHES FROM THE NO FUN LEAGUE: How the NFL tried to use the Super Bowl to assault free speech.
A Phoenix city ordinance, likely lobbied for by the league, would have required local property owners to get the NFL’s approval for any advertisement they wanted to put up on properties in the downtown area. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the city dubbed this nearly two square mile area a “clean zone” and would’ve required business owners to get permits to display “posters, flyers, banners, pennants, flags, window paintings and even balloons” from January 15 to February 19. As a condition of that permit, they’d need to get permission from the NFL or Arizona’s Super Bowl Host Committee.
The idea was to give the NFL the ability to more closely control advertising in the area while tourism spikes for the event. For example, they could block anyone from displaying Coke ads, since the league formally partners with Pepsi.
FIRE blasted this measure as a “dystopian rule that violates the First Amendment.” Maricopa County Judge Bradley Astrowsky evidently agrees. He just heard a case brought by a local business owner who challenged the ordinance and said, “The city of Phoenix is letting the NFL decide what I can and cannot say on my own property. That’s not right.”
After hearing the case, the judge struck down the city’s ordinance on February 2 and called it “an unconstitutional delegation of government power” to a private entity.
The NFL has been going out of its way since 2016 to make even the most ardent football fan despise it.
“EXPERT:” Expert testifies that a single round from an AR-15 can sever the upper body from the lower body.
That’s nothing. I have some specialty AR15 rounds that actually travel back in time and kill your grandfather so that you’re never born at all. They’re a bit pricey, but worth it.
2021 FLASHBACK: Adversary Drones Are Spying On The U.S. And The Pentagon Acts Like They’re UFOs. “The U.S. military seems aloof to the fact that it’s being toyed with by a terrestrial adversary and key capabilities may be compromised as a result.”
It does seem that way.
IF YOU’D SUGGESTED THIS TWO YEARS AGO YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN MARKED AS A SPREADER OF MISINFORMATION AND PROBABLY A CONSPIRACY THEORIST: Extracts from two wild plants inhibit COVID-19 virus, study finds.
Okay, probably not these, but almost.
QUESTION ASKED: America Forgot the 1918 Flu. Will We Also Forget Covid?
The poor and immigrants—like my grandparents’ families—were hit hardest. So it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that some of my family got sick, or watched a neighbor or schoolmate get sick or die? But I don’t know for sure. Despite having spent thousands of collective hours with my grandfather and grandmother, with my uncles Gabriel and Sidney and Henry (and the other Henry), my aunts Nettie and Ruth and Ann, and numerous others—not to mention their spouses, all Philadelphians—I never heard any of them mention the Spanish flu. Not once.
That absence has me wondering how Americans will remember Covid-19 once it is finally behind us, or when it has become a manageable nuisance. Right now, it’s hard to imagine it will be regarded as anything less than a generation-defining phenomenon, like the antiwar protests of the late 1960s, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s or the attacks of 9/11. But I think it’s just as likely that it will disappear from our consciousness, as the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 did.
The Spanish flu was deadlier than Covid-19 and was more likely to kill those in the prime of life, yet it has been largely obliterated from historical memory. As Alfred W. Crosby noted in his 1989 book “America’s Forgotten Pandemic,” the Spanish flu was omitted from all the great midcentury American history textbooks, including volumes by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and C. Vann Woodward—all men who had lived through the pandemic.
The one major textbook that Crosby could find that mentioned the pandemic, Thomas A. Bailey’s “The American Pageant” (1956), gave it one sentence and, Crosby says, “understates the total number of deaths due to it by at least one half.” Today, a U.S. history student is still unlikely to learn about the 1918-19 pandemic. The latest, 17th edition of “The American Pageant,” by David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, mentions the pandemic on two pages.
Popular culture did at least as poor a job in commemorating it. The Spanish flu killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide, the equivalent, as a percentage of the population, of 200 million people today. Yet there is no great film about the Spanish flu pandemic, and the literature is sparse. Katherine Ann Porter’s novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1939) and William Maxwell’s novel “They Came Like Swallows” (1937) offer the principal treatments by major writers. Then there is John O’Hara’s short story “The Doctor’s Son,” which ran in The New Yorker in 1935, and Willa Cather’s minor 1922 novel, “One of Ours.”
At the time, people remarked upon this gap in the literature. “Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill.” But she was lamenting the general inattention to illness in literature, which she attributes to the fact that fiction writers concern themselves with affairs of the mind rather than the ordeals of the body. The flu pandemic was less than a decade in the past, yet it did not seem to loom larger in her mind than typhoid or any other malady.
Nobody seems to have a good answer for why the extraordinary, worldwide die-off of 1918-19 imprinted so little on our collective imagination. “The whole issue of how quickly it was forgotten is one that historians have not really grappled with,” said Naomi Rogers, who teaches the history of science at Yale. John Barry concurred: “No satisfactory explanation,” he wrote to me in an email, when I asked about this forgetfulness. “No research that I know of” on its causes, he added.
It seems less likely we’ll forget Covid, given our current obsession with social media, and ubiquitous smart phones documenting everything. Including this classic flip/flop from America’s healthcare professionals in the spring of 2020, which began the next phase of that annus horribilis, the summer of “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots and looting. But given the left’s vaunted ability to pivot on dime on any topic, who knows?
UPDATE: A vintage post from Neo on the tsunami and the forgetting.
(Updated and bumped.)
AND NOW THERE ARE FOUR: U.S. Military Shoots Down Unidentified Airborne Object over Michigan. “The U.S. military on Sunday shot down an unidentified airborne object over Michigan, marking the fourth such incident in a string that began with the Chinese spy balloon shot down off the South Carolina coast last weekend.”
UPDATE: F-16 Shoots Down “Octagonal Object” Over Lake Huron (Updated).
HOW COLLEGE ADMISSIONS ACTUALLY WORKS. Prove him wrong! (Protip: You can’t.)
AND NOW THERE ARE THREE: US military shoots down high-altitude object near Lake Huron on Sunday.
The US military shot down another high-altitude object near Lake Huron on Sunday afternoon, according to a US official and a congressional source briefed on the matter.
A second US official said the takedown of the unidentified object was “at the direction” of President Joe Biden.
The operation marks the third day in a row that an unidentified object was shot down over North American airspace. An unidentified object was shot down over northern Canada on Saturday. On Friday, an unidentified object was shot down in Alaska airspace by a US F-22.
And last weekend, a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon was taken down by F-22s off the coast of South Carolina.
Is this something new, or have these things been flying overhead for a while and we’re just all of a sudden hearing about it? It’s certainly the case that whatever is going on behind the scenes, our public response looks confused and weak. Probably because it is confused and weak.
I HAVE COMPLETE CONFIDENCE THAT THIS WILL BE HANDLED SAFELY AND EFFECTIVELY: Astrophysicists propose cooling Earth by using Moon dust as ‘sunscreen.’
YES, NEXT QUESTION: Knives out edition: Is it Fetterman’s turn under the bus?
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD, AS A FAMOUS MAN ONCE SAID: Reworking of AP African American Studies courses is a triumph over radicalism.
OUCH:
I am so honored to have so many protesters — made up of nasty women who watch the view and their “low-T” husbands — here in Idaho!
Privilege of a lifetime. pic.twitter.com/fSASd1L8MM
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 12, 2023
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation) Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned
JOEL KOTKIN: The retreat from globalism: People don’t want to be squelched by big business or big government.
It is a dynamic eerily similar to 100 years ago, when war, pandemic and economic insecurity brought national tensions to the surface. Yet today’s undoubted turn against globalism need not herald a return to the dark days of aggressive nationalism. Instead, we are seeing the rise of a new community-based and self-governing model of localism.
This new localism counteracts some of the worst aspects of globalism – homogeneity, deindustrialisation and ever-growing class divides – while eschewing the authoritarian tendencies often associated with nationalistic fervour. It essentially seeks to replace, where possible, mass institutions and production with local entrepreneurship and competition.
This approach has demonstrated remarkable appeal. The promising evolution of technologies like remote work and 3D printing is already creating opportunities to enhance local economies. In the US, strong majorities trust local governments, compared to the more than half who lack trust in Washington, notes Gallup. Big companies, banks and media receive low marks from the public, but small businesses continue to enjoy widespread support across party lines.
This is not merely an American phenomenon. In France there have been consistent protests against globalisation for decades. Poland and the rest of eastern Europe, recovering from decades of central control and imperial edicts from Moscow, have also favoured localism. There is also pushback against federal encroachment in Canada, while the UK’s turn against globalism was best exemplified by its withdrawal from the EU.
The movement against globalism constitutes an alternative to increasingly intrusive government: such as in Europe, where the unelected EU bureaucracy seeks ever-expanding powers, and in North America and Australia, where national bureaucracies work to undermine traditionally vibrant local communities. It also has strong connections to populism, particularly in Europe. Its base, small business, tends to tilt to the right in most countries, including the US.
Yet the new localism is not fundamentally a question of left vs right. It is about sustaining local economies and self-governing institutions. According to Kevin Albertson, professor of economics at Manchester University, in politics today it often seems that the only choice on offer is between ‘big state or big business’. Faced with this unenviable dilemma, he argues, the ‘only viable alternative’ is localism – that is, ‘small state and small business’.
Essentially, localism looks to humanise the economy. Whereas global or national conglomerates respond largely to capital flows, local businesses rely heavily on networks of customers and suppliers.
Read the whole thing.
13TH CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: What medieval attitudes tell us about our evolving views of sex.