A TREATMENT FOR COVID DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Understanding the Covid Odds. If you know someone still cowering from Covid but still capable of rational thought, try sending them this article. It notes that among nearly 700,000 healthy Americans under 65 who were vaccinated and monitored last year, precisely zero had a severe case of Covid. Among those of any age with fewer than three chronic conditions, the odds of dying were 150,000-to-1. Those are roughly the same odds that in the course of a year you’ll die in a fire, or perish by falling down stairs. You’re more likely over over the course of your lifetime to die in an earthquake or be killed by lightning. And the Covid risk to children is even lower whether or not they’ve been vaccinated.
Archive for 2022
February 6, 2022
I DON’T KNOW, BUT YOU CAN BE SURE THEY HAVEN’T THOUGHT IT THROUGH, BECAUSE THEY’RE MORONS:
UPDATE: From the comments: “The state preference for BLM riots over the truckers just goes to show that the BLM and antifa riots of 2020 were government policy. State sponsored violence.”
OPEN THREAD: Let’s go and see the stars, the Milky Way, or even Mars.
SPACE: Rocket Lab expands Colorado facilities, prepares for busy launch year. “ASI is one of three companies Rocket Lab acquired last fall after it completed its merger with a special purpose acquisition company and became publicly traded. In November it bought Planetary Systems Corporation, which produces satellite dispensers and separation systems. In December it purchased SolAero, a manufacturer of aerospace structures and space solar power products. . . . Rocket Lab is best known for its Electron small launch vehicle. The first Electron launch of the year is scheduled for no earlier than Feb. 14, carrying a pair of BlackSky imaging satellites as part of a contract arranged through Spaceflight.”
STAY PREPARED: Augason Farms Breakfast and Dinner Variety Pail Emergency Food Supply Everyday Meals 4 Gallon Pail. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)
CORONAVIRUS PROTECTION VIA CORONAVIRUS INFECTION: A coronavirus variant once helped the global pork industry. Could one protect us? A killer pig virus vanished when a tamer mutant evolved—a provocative, but not perfect, parallel with Omicron.
FLASHBACK: The Unexpected Return of Duck and Cover.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
MAKE THEM PAY: Why Colleges Don’t Care About Free Speech: It’s incentives more than ideology, and there’s a simple fix.
Regardless of Mr. Treanor’s political views, he has every reason to do this. University administrators get no reward for upholding abstract principles. Their incentive is to quell on-campus outrage and bad press as quickly as possible. Success is widely praised, but there is no punishment for failing to uphold the university’s commitment to free speech.
The solution is to create an incentive for schools to protect open inquiry—the fear of lawsuits. First, universities should add a “safe harbor” provision to their speech policies stating: “The university will summarily dismiss any allegation that an individual or group has violated a university policy if the allegation is based solely on the individual’s or group’s expression of religious, philosophical, literary, artistic, political, or scientific viewpoints.” This language would be contractually binding. Second, free-speech advocates should organize pro bono legal groups to sue schools that violate the safe-harbor provision. This would make it affordable for suppressed parties to bring suits over the violation of their contractual rights.
University counsel, whose primary job is to protect the institution from being sued, would then have incentive to curb administrators’ behavior. They might require that allegations of harassment be reviewed by a member of the counsel’s office who knows how to distinguish complaints about speech from genuine harassment. They almost certainly would revise the university’s antiharassment training to stress that students and faculty shouldn’t file complaints based solely on the content of the viewpoint being expressed. These and other steps they might take would give universities’ abstract commitments to freedom of speech some real bite.
In the absence of damage awards, university administrators won’t act against their own interests merely to uphold an abstract commitment to free speech. The threat of such awards would make universities like Georgetown put their money where their mouths are.
A federal civil rights statute, allowing civil suits by injured parties in which one remedy is removal of a university’s tax-exempt status in cases of political discrimination, would help.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Professor calls police on student with disabilities and her service dog.
Cost of attending George Washington University: $80,486 per year.
FLASHBACK: These women are the men their mothers divorced. I suspect they’re mostly Mask Karens now.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN: It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Boris in the Wrong.
How wrong this particular wrong is—well, that’s a matter of dispute. What Boris Johnson did was to impose a series of tough anti-Covid regulations on his fellow-citizens—staying at home, wearing masks, social distancing, not going to marriages, funerals, or the deathbeds of dying loved ones—while ignoring the same regulations himself when he attended parties in Number Ten Downing Street (his official home as well as an office) where “alcohol was served.”
On top of that, the truth had to be prised out of Boris’s possession by a series of damning tweets, Downing Street memos, Fleet Street scoops, and eventually an official report by a senior civil servant, Sue Gray, who made strong criticisms of the behavior of Downing Street staff but whose report had to be heavily redacted until the police determine whether any of them, including Boris, will be charged with the criminal offense of drinking in company during a pandemic.
It’s clear from all this that Boris broke the rules he was imposing on everyone else. For most of the last few weeks, his denials of this made matters worse when they gradually disintegrated under the weight of evidence. His popularity—which two years ago was enormous when he won a landslide election, fell ill, and then emerged from hospital having almost died from Covid—collapsed in recent days to below sea level. He faced demands from all sides, including Tory M.P.s and ordinary party members, that he should resign in disgrace. Many of his critics as the week ended were still hopeful that Boris would feel the policeman’s hand on his collar when they checked the evidence and found an armory of smoking guns.
Plus a look at “Tory” Boris’ very Brandon-esque energy policy.
Read the whole thing.
LIKELY INCITED BY JUSTIN TRUDEAU’S HATE SPEECH: Canadian man plows through Freedom Truckers protest, criminally charged. Trudeau identified the peaceful protesters as bigots, homophobes, racists and transphobes. It’s not surprising that some nut would listen to him, especially given that Canadian media amplified the message endlessly.
BIDEN’S COVID FAILURE: US death toll from COVID-19 hits 900,000, sped by omicron.
WELL, IN THE MODERN WORLD, IT’S LESS USEFUL AND MORE LIKELY TO BE ANNOYING: People’s sense of smell may be declining, study suggests. And some of it is just mental filtering. Most people’s sense of smell is much better than they think. Richard Feynman used to have a parlor trick where he’d have someone take a book off a shelf and put it back. Most people could tell which book by smelling the shelf, and which person by smelling hands.
Most people can see and hear a lot more than they realize too. Modern society encourages filtering this data.
DAVID BROOKS IS PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1919!
Flashback to a century ago, when attacks on individuality were all the rage among collectivist-obsessed “Progressives:”
[Woodrow] Wilson was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. “[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many,” declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams.
“New forms of association must be created,” explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896. “Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life.” Elsewhere, Rauschenbusch put it more simply: “Individualism means tyranny.”
Or as Mies van der Rohe, the last director of Weimar Germany’s socialist-oriented Bauhaus design school said in 1924:
The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us. The decisive achievements in all fields are impersonal and their authors are for the most part unknown. They are part of the trend of our time toward anonymity. Our engineering structures are examples. Gigantic dams, great industrial installations and huge bridges are built as a matter of course, with no designer’s name attached to them. They point to the technology of the future.
Curiously, Mies would have no problem building for wealthy individuals who wished to commission his work — not to mention having his name firmly associated with his designs — after he fled the Weimar Republic’s much more punitive successors for America.
Exit question:
Some of its shakier proponents fell in love with fine trouser creases over substance. As did others who knew better, but hated missing out on all the best cocktail parties on both ends of the Northeast Corridor. Not to mention, the green room at MSNBC.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’ll believe Brooks’s “end of individualism” schtick when he gives up his NYT byline and replaces his name with “Staff Writer.”
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO SMUGGLED OUT OF THE TRUCKISTAN HELLSCAPE:
Trudeau’s words versus the reality. Brilliant video!pic.twitter.com/J1mIBqfeHs
— Truckistani Sunqueen (@sunqueentrg) February 3, 2022
Related: David Solway on Terry Fox and the Truckers: “It is hard to miss the irony of an avowedly socialist prime minister cynically abusing the class of working people whom he presumably represents and on whom the nation depends for its survival, accusing them of racism and of stealing food from the homeless. It is equally hard not to see that the truckers are the avatars of Terry Fox. A majority of Canadians now approve of their mission. The truckers are on the way to becoming national heroes. As Chris Queen at PJM writes, ‘what started as a convoy within one sector of the Canadian economy is turning into a national movement advocating for freedom. It’s enough to warm your heart, even in the cold Canadian winter.’”
GOOD TO SEE THAT BARRY IS STILL TAKING GLOBAL WARMING SERIOUSLY:
Shot: Hawaii’s beaches are disappearing due to climate change.
—ABC News, October 31st.
—The London Daily Mail, yesterday.
As Amy Curtis asks on Twitter, “This is the second waterfront property he’s bought. Why would anyone who thinks the oceans are going to rise from climate change soon do this?”
Well to be fair, Obama himself admitted that global warming ended on June 4th, 2008:
UPDATE: “Add Barack Obama to the list of elite Dems who don’t wear masks in public despite telling everyone else to wear one…Did he learn nothing from his maskless birthday party on Martha’s Vineyard? Apparently not[.]”
DON’T START NONE, WON’T BE NONE: North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet.
THIS IS CNN: The CNN Sex Party Comes To An End.
Under Jeff Zucker, it was pretty clear the fraternization rules were viewed more as suggestions. Quite a few CNN employees sleeping together (see: Dana Bash and John King) or pleasuring themselves on video chats with no consequences (see, actually don’t see, Jeffery Toobin). With 2 former producers being linked to pedophilia and one current anchor being sued for allegedly shoving his hands down the pants of a man, CNN is like a sex club from hell.
The end of the orgy isn’t what upset CNN staff, it was something even worse…for people with no scruples or talent – they are terrified that their next boss might want some accountability.
One thing Zucker did, either because he was fooling around with his deputy and recognized he couldn’t or because he just sucked at his job, was allowed for any and all standards of journalism and ethics to disappear.
Exit quote by Don Lemon: “…Thank you Jeff Zucker for everything you did for everyone at this network and for what you did to the entire country — for the entire country.”
LAYERS OF SYMBOLISM HERE: Health Icon, Maskless Stacey Abrams with Masked Children in Georgia (Photo).
Flashback: The Masking of the Servant Class: Ugly COVID Images From the Met Gala Are Now Commonplace.