OUT: LISTEN TO THE DOCTORS AND SCIENTISTS! In: Why is a Social Worker Dictating COVID-19 Policy for the Country’s Largest County? “Yes, this is the real-life version of ‘I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.'”
Archive for 2020
May 17, 2020
ILLEGAL FUN, UNDER THE SUN: People flock to NYC-area bars, beaches as ‘quarantine fatigue’ intensifies.
OPEN THREAD: Use tact, poise, and reason.
CHINA’S COVERUP CONTINUES: Officials in Northeastern China Sacked as Locals Describe Escalating Virus Outbreak. “It shows that the CCP superiors don’t trust that Party leaders in Shulan can control the outbreak.”
Plus: “People are crazily shopping for food and medicines… Prices have increased dramatically.”
IT’S HARD TO SEE HIM, KNOWING WHAT HE’LL LOOK LIKE AFTER THE DELTA RAYS ARE FINISHED WITH HIM: Captain Pike of ‘Star Trek’ gets spin-off series with Spock and Number One. I don’t mind looking at Number One though.
POOR BOYS AND PILGRIMS WITH FAMILIES, AND WE ARE GOING TO GRACELAND: Elvis Presley’s Graceland Set to Reopen This Week.
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO WITHHOLD DIVIDENDS: AOC owes $2,000 in unpaid taxes from failed business venture.
AT AMAZON, save in Blu Ray and DVD.
Plus, deals in CDs and Vinyl.
CHARLIE BAKER’S CORONAVIRUS STRATEGY: Fiddle, make Massachusetts wait.
Clueless Democrats want Gov. Charlie Baker to keep the state’s economy shuttered and they will probably get most of their wish granted when Baker unveils his coronavirus reopening plan Monday.
Don’t expect much out of Baker — he’s made clear he wants no part of a quick restart.
And Baker has purposely made any details of his plans secret, giving businesses like restaurants no head start on how they might plan to open their doors again. The confusion and consternation caused by Baker’s super-cautious reticence has made predicting what might happen a guessing game.
A half-dozen Democratic legislators petitioned the Republican governor last week to extend the state’s stay-at-home advisory past May 18. The Republican governor is more in line with them than the thousands of business owners clamoring for a reopening.
As foreseen by America’s Newspaper of Record: Governor Unveils Innovative 37-Step Plan To Reopen State Over The Next 10 Years.
One of the ways the Coronavirus kills is by stimulating an overreaction of a patient’s own immune system. “Diseases such as covid-19 and influenza can be fatal due to an overreaction of the body’s immune system called a cytokine storm.”
This metaphor can also describe how society can harm itself when measures taken to control a disease do more harm than good. Perhaps the most forceful and controversial reaction to the Coronavirus epidemic has been the lockdown, which believe it or not, did not exist in the American context as a bureaucratic concept before 2006.
Though, to be fair, we did have mass closings in 1918. But read the whole thing.
In the course of World War II, while the British went short of much else, they nursed an almost unlimited wealth of dud military commanders. As Antony Beevor observes in The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II, his masterly account of what became the Arnhem fiasco, even among a throng of duffers Lieutenant General Frederick “Boy” Browning, the husband of the novelist Daphne du Maurier and the commander of the operation, stands proud as a model of conceit, insensitivity, and incompetence.
Browning was a forty-seven-year-old Guardsman who had seen no action since World War I. After the cancellation of a succession of airborne assaults since D-Day, their objectives overrun by the ground advance, he had become desperate to lead his corps in battle before the apparently imminent German capitulation. Browning cannot be blamed for Montgomery’s initial folly, or for the failure of communications that overtook the First Airborne in Holland, or for the sluggishness of the advance of Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s XXX Corps toward Arnhem along a single Dutch road, its surrounding countryside too waterlogged for armor.
He must be held responsible, however, for not saying at the outset that the plan was unworkable. (Beevor doubts that he ever spoke of the “bridge too far” attributed to him by Cornelius Ryan in his 1974 book of that title on the operation.) When the Sixth Airborne’s outstanding commander Major General Richard Gale told Browning that he would have resigned rather than execute such a crazy scheme, the Guardsman merely requested that Gale not broadcast his skepticism, lest he lower morale among those committed to it. Browning failed miserably to grip the battle once it started, confirming American commanders in their disdain and indeed disgust toward him. He poured good money after bad by sustaining the operation long after it had obviously failed. He then scapegoated everybody else in sight for his own blunders.
Beevor’s great coup in writing this account, the first by a major writer since Ryan, was to trawl the Irish-American war correspondent’s archive in the Alden Library at Ohio University. Ryan was supported in his 1970–1974 research by a small army of interviewers funded by Reader’s Digest (those were the days!). He was able to use only a fraction of the transcripts they amassed from meetings with hundreds of British, American, and German veterans. While Beevor’s narrative follows a familiar path, it is thus illuminated by a host of hitherto unpublished anecdotes and quotations, together with the fruits of his own labors in Dutch archives. The outcome is a much more comprehensive and reliable account than that produced by Ryan, not least because when the latter’s work appeared, the “Ultra secret” of Allied code-breaking triumphs had not been revealed to the world.
Beevor enjoys a further advantage: almost all the veterans of the First Airborne are now dead. Thus it is no longer necessary in Britain to try to sustain the myth that it was an elite formation, all of whose men fought like tigers; some did, but others ran away. When John Keegan avowed this disagreeable reality in print back in 1994, the former commander of the Fourth Airborne Brigade at Arnhem, the formidable pocket-sized General Sir John Hackett, sprang at the historian’s throat. A severely mauled Keegan observed to me at the time that he would never write about Arnhem again as long as Hackett was alive. It was unacceptable to Hackett’s generation to face uncomfortable truths about its own battlefield limitations. And media sentimentality always swings behind supposed “war heroes” at the expense of scholarly critics.
Related: History Buffs: What the film of A Bridge Too Far got right – and wrong (video). When the film was being written and shot in the mid-1970s, many of the officers involved were still alive and were solicited for their advice on dialogue and acting. Occasionally, they were even listened to:
ROGER KIMBALL: With Pandemic, Societal Hallucination Yields Real Misery.
The time is not far off when we will wake from this societal hallucination. We will then wonder why we were prevailed upon to commit collective suicide because of a disease that affected mostly the elderly and infirm and whose lethality was that of a bad flu. To the enraged question “Who did this to us?” the sad but truthful answer will be, “We did it to ourselves.”
Read the whole thing.
NOW THAT JOE BIDEN HAS FINISHED OFF #METOO, BUBBA IS BACK! Bill Clinton is alive and well and speaking again.
And with Biden’s camp employing Chris “Waitress Sandwich” Dodd to help in the female veep selection process, the gang’s all here!
Here’s the online petition opposing the California Legislature’s ACA-5. Currently, Proposition 209 prohibits the state from considering race or sex in deciding who gets a job, who gets into the most selective state universities, or who gets a public contract. If passed, ACA-5 will put the repeal of that provision on the ballot in November. Please sign if you can (if you haven’t done so already).
BLUE STATE TESLA OWNERS MUST BE GNASHING THEIR TEETH RIGHT NOW:
As Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Earlier: Elon Musk: Politicians ‘who stole our liberty’ should be ‘tarred, feathered & thrown out of town!’
Of course, like the 1940s era General Motors that handed out copies of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom before morphing into Government Motors, Musk will remain a corporatist, but it’s a start. Welcome to the party pal, as legendary police officer John McClane once exuberantly shouted during a time of crisis.
IDEALLY ONE YOU CAN DO DURING A LOCKDOWN: Make Your Own Job. The promise of entrepreneurship education.
THIS WAS ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE, AND ANY PUBLIC HEALTH PLANNER WHO DIDN’T TAKE IT INTO ACCOUNT IS A FAILURE: People flock to NYC-area bars, beaches as ‘quarantine fatigue’ intensifies.
NOW AND AFTER THE PANDEMIC IS OVER: The smart way for cash-strapped cities to save money and protect workers: Stop recycling. Howard Husock calculates that New York City could save nearly $200 million annually by scrapping its recycling program and sending stuff straight to the landfill. And it would spare trash collectors and other workers from the risk of handling recyclables with Covid-19 and other pathogens. If Bill di Blasio and other mayors want their pleas for federal aid to be taken seriously, they need to show they’re serious about eliminating waste.
DEATHS ARE A LAGGING INDICATOR, SO THIS IS GOOD NEWS: South Carolina Reports No New Coronavirus Deaths. “On Sunday, DHEC reported 276 new cases, bringing the state’s total to 8,661. DHEC also reported zero deaths, keeping the death toll to 380. It’s the first time no deaths occurred in the state since March 20, according to DHEC’s website.”
