IF YOU’RE WOKE, YOU SHOULD SEND YOUR KIDS TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE: Dallas ‘racial equity’ group demands white parents not send their kids to Ivy League schools.
Archive for 2021
July 25, 2021
It’s hard to know exactly when Australia’s pandemic response crossed the line from tragedy into farce. But future historians could do worse than pinpoint the moment when Sydney’s chief health supremo told the city’s residents to stop being friendly to one another when they ventured out to buy essentials, lest they get themselves and others killed.
“Whilst it is in human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately this is not the time to do that . . . don’t start up a conversation,” scolded Kerry Chant, the endlessly tut-tutting chief health officer of New South Wales, at a news conference last week. “We want to make sure as we go about our daily lives that we do not come into contact with anyone who could pose a risk.”
Never mind that you can’t even go near a shop without a mask, she said. Masks aren’t foolproof and this is, in her words, “no time for complacency.” A simple g’day, in other words, could be deadly.
Happily, most of us who live in Sydney ignored the warning. Supermarket checkout staff remained as chatty as ever behind their masks after Dr. Chant handed down her edict. My local butcher was more than glad for the chance to tell me how things were “a bit slow,” but added that she “can’t complain.”
Given this level of official hysteria, an outsider might imagine that Australia is a Covid charnel house. In fact, all of Australia is recording around 150 coronavirus cases a day. The current outbreak of 2,000 or so cases total over the past month has been associated with eight deaths so far, almost all of them people over 70.
This in a nation that records, on average, about 460 deaths a day from all causes. Cancer kills nearly 50,000 Australians a year. Shark attacks killed eight in 2020.
A good 18 months into the pandemic, the nation is still trapped in April 2020. Adelaide and Melbourne are hoping to come out of lockdown in some form this week; Sydney, the economic engine room of Australia, is likely to remain under restriction through at least August.
Australians need permission from the federal government to leave the country—applications succeed about half the time—and Australia’s states throw up their borders against one another at the slightest hint of trouble. Residents of Sydney may leave their homes only if it is “essential,” and not stray more than six miles when they do.
This is before discussing the economic fallout from the latest lockdowns. Billions will be spent by government or lost by businesses as a result. A restaurant-industry representative told me last week that many chefs and waiters are leaving for greener pastures. Many iconic restaurants will likely never reopen.
So how did Australia become a hermit kingdom? Geography plays a large part. By mistaking their good luck for brilliance in being able to pull up the drawbridge to the world at the start of the pandemic, Australians quickly became trapped in an “elimination” mindset that is now officially referred to as Covid Zero.
Politics, too, conspired to create this outcome. Labor state premiers (the equivalent of U.S. governors) quickly learned to play Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s center-right government like a fiddle, forcing the commonwealth to bail states out for the economic wreckage created every time they locked down their cities or shut their borders.
Elected officials have allowed their judgment to be replaced by that of the new priestly class of health mandarins like Dr. Chant, on whose edicts the country hangs. Hiding behind the “health advice” of such officials has become the national sport of Australia’s politicians. Earlier this year federal health secretary Brendan Murphy declared that vaccine distribution was “not a race,” which became a mantra picked up by the prime minister to justify an initially cautious rollout. As a result, only around 15% of the nation has been fully vaccinated.
Don’t trust the experts. They aren’t trustworthy, and they aren’t actually very expert.
HEH:
OPEN THREAD: You know, people can’t use you if you’re useless.
SPACE LAWFARE: Court denies Viasat attempt to halt Starlink launches pending legal action.
Viasat has a vastly inferior product — everyone I know who uses it hates it — and realistically its only hope is to somehow shut down the competition. But it’s good that the courts aren’t cooperating.
NEWS FROM MY NECK OF THE WOODS, from Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs:
WEIRD INDEED: The Weird Case of a Man 3 Doctors Declared Dead Who Woke Up Just Before His Autopsy. “The prisoner, then-29-year-old Gonzalo Montoya Jiménez, was found unresponsive in his cell during a morning roll call on 7 January 2018 and had been transferred to a hospital mortuary in a body bag when pathologists heard something strange. Snoring. Coming from inside the bag.”
DEMAND NORMALCY: Thousands protest lockdown in Sydney, several arrested.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Protecting your liver with coffee.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: FBI Discovers Building Full Of Dangerous Extremists Organizing Acts Of Terror Across Country.
BROKEN RECORD: Brian Stelter Puts On Carl Bernstein to Call Trump a Domestic War Criminal.
Related:
Flashbacks:
● The Five Times Carl Bernstein Bellowed ‘Worse than Watergate!’ at Trump.
● Carl Bernstein: Bush [43] More “Disastrous” Than Nixon.
● “The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein, 1992.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Exclusive poll finds Detroit residents far more worried about public safety than police reform.
Hence the recent Oceania-style pivot, as a form of triage as the midterms loom large.
VIA A FRIEND:
Today, on the political left, we’re making up new norms all the time: calling people “Latinx,” announcing our pronouns, capitalizing “Black.” A year or two ago, none of us had ever heard of “deadnaming.” Today it’s the digital equivalent of pissing on someone’s grave. You can already see which norms are in the process of cohering today, in real time: erasing any metaphorical references to physical or mental disabilities (“lame,” “crazy,” etc.) from our vocabularies; acknowledging “stolen lands” before every meeting; recognizing people’s declared mental disorders as identity markers conferring upon them special accommodations and sympathies; narrowing our definition of consent to sex to exclude adults who are significantly younger than their partners, or who are employed in a less powerful position within the same industry, or who belong to an identity category purportedly lower on the power continuum.
Every time someone is compelled to apologize for violating such a norm, that norm is soldered more firmly into the structure of our collective consciousness as an accepted part of the new moral order. A year ago, almost nobody capitalized “black” in reference to “Black people.” Today, it’s part of the style guide of most major news outlets. In a year, you’ll probably be called a racist if you don’t do it in your personal communications. Each one of those steps was and will be accompanied by countless call-outs and apologies.
Exit quote: “The path we’re tumbling down is slippery and steep, and we’ve already picked up momentum. There’s only one way to break our fall. Fortunately, it’s easy and straightforward: Stop apologizing.” Read the whole thing.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: $3 Million Government Study Finds Link Between Excessive Drinking and Aggressive Nightclub Behavior.
Like Miss Anne Elk’s theory about dinosaurs, this one really hits the nail on the head. (Yes, I know it’s from three years ago).
DEAR DIARY:
● Shot:
● Chaser: Beto O’Rourke group gives $600,000 to Texas House Democrats’ stay in Washington, D.C.
—The Texas Tribune, Thursday.
● Hangover: Texas Democrats unravel — “I’m just pissed off” that Biden won’t meet with them.
—Hot Air, yesterday.
DON’T TREAD ON ME ADJUSTABLE SNAKE RING: No_system, a Helen’s Page Advertiser has a new item out. At $8.95, I might just order a few for gifts.
UPDATE: Now sold out but I am told more are being made.
AT HELEN’S PAGE: Karl K. Gallagher’s Storm Between the Stars: Book 1 in the Fall of the Censor.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED AND THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Film Flam: The University Film Studies Con.
Tuition did not cover the cost of making a student film. Unable to afford it, Stoteraux switched to writing and entered a script in the program’s screenplay contest. The faculty judges rejected it in the first round. Stoteraux later sold the script through a production assistant he randomly met without any help from the school. Two credits short of his master’s degree, he asked Columbia if he could complete the program while working in LA. The university disdainfully refused — until his career took off, when it invited him to speak to the current class, offering to help him attain his degree. The program chair had him fly to New York for a meeting.
The conclusion of Stoteraux’s story gives away the whole shell game. “So I spent a fortune on a last-minute flight in order to hear his proposal,” he tweeted. “But instead of telling me what I need to do to satisfy the requirements to get my degree, the Chair began pitching me his idea for a TV pilot. In excruciating scene-by-scene detail. I nodded along, waiting to get back to the terms of me getting my degree. But to my horror … I slowly begin to realize this IS the deal … if I wanted my degree, I needed to help him sell his tv pilot. Yep, the Chair of Columbia’s prestigious graduate film program tried to shake me down in order to jump-start his own stalled out career.”
That could be the most valuable lesson to be learned from one’s film school experience — and it’s free.
Read the whole thing.
THE NOBLE PRIMITIVE: Last Meal of History’s Most Famous ‘Bog Body’ Hints at Human Sacrifice.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: The World Has Had It With China Flu Lockdowns: Protests Rock Cities All Over the Globe.
“MAY.” Meeting Paris Agreement emissions reduction target may generate 8M jobs.
The “green jobs” promise has so far been BS. Though to be fair, under President Trump the U.S. both expanded payrolls and slashed carbon emissions.
California is home to nearly 40 million people and the supply of water does not always meet demand, particularly in times of drought. A recent newspaper article offered the solution of snitching on one’s neighbors.
On July 9, the Sacramento Bee published an article headlined, “Is your neighbor wasting water? Snitching on them may ease California drought, study says.” According to the report, “ratting out one’s neighbors could help relieve some of the pressure from California’s current drought.”
* * * * * * * *
The study supports the idea of “participatory surveillance” and cites the Chinese research article “Social ties and citizen-initiated contacts: the case of China’s local one-stop government,” written by Youlang Zhang, assistant professor in public administration at China’s Renmin University, and Xufeng Zhu, professor of public policy and management at China’s Tsinghua University. The article examines why some citizens are “more likely to initiate contact with the government than others.”
Orwell didn’t write 1984 as a how-to guide. As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.