LOCKDOWNS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Mark Lurie, associate professor of epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health, March 26, 2020: “If you don’t follow the CDC recommendations, you’re increasing (the chance) that you’re going to get infected and that you’re going to infect other people.” Lurie said that “denialism” is something that’s been seen at the beginning of other epidemics, but the more coronavirus “infiltrates our daily lives, the more people are going to take it more seriously.” “The virus doesn’t care about your party affiliation or you political beliefs.” “If you don’t follow the CDC recommendations, you’re increasing (the chance) that you’re going to get infected and that you’re going to infect other people.”

Same Mark Lurie, today’s New York Times: “Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice.” “But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior.” He said he took his daughter to a protest early in June and felt a chaser of regret in its wake. “We felt afterward that the risk we incurred probably exceeded the entire risk in the previous two months,” he said. “We undid some very hard work, and I don’t see how actions like that can help in battling this epidemic, honestly.”

At least Lurie, unlike some others, kinda sorta acknowledges he’s being a hypocrite, though it would be nice to see an apology to those he accused of putting their political beliefs above public health, because he did exactly that. I don’t know when, if ever, “public health experts” will regain the public’s trust after this debacle.

THE AMERICAN PRAVDA: I had to go to an Australian news source to discover that the driver of the vehicle that sped into BLM protesters in Seattle is an African American. (Apologies if one of my colleagues at Instapundit covered this, I have been away for the holiday weekend.) I have to assume that American media outlets know this, and decided intentionally not to mention it to create the implication that this was a racist murder, rather than a guy driving recklessly on what he thought was an abandoned highway. I increasingly feel like I’m living somewhere akin to the former USSR, in terms of the way the media are dedicated to a particular narrative regardless of the facts. At least unlike in the USSR I can access alternative sources to our equivalent of Pravda.

HOW CONSUMED WITH HATRED DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO ROOT FOR COVID-19?: Krugman-level hatred.

MEDIA FAIL: Trump says the most violent cities are all run by Democrats; Washington Post retorts, “Only 19 of 20, and the 20th is run by an independent, so there.”

CLEARLY: Lawyer: Vermont School Violated Free Speech by Removing Principal Who Criticized BLM.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Surge in L.A. Cases of Coronavirus Attributed to Protests: “It’s ‘highly likely’ that the surge is connected to mass protests that erupted in recent weeks over the death of George Floyd, L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said.”

DID THE MASSIVE RALLIES OF THE PAST FEW WEEKS REALLY HAPPEN: The Washington Post has this story, about foreign bigwigs being astounded by what the article describes as the Trump administration’s inept handling of the coronavirus, and what they see as the U.S. giving up on containing it. I don’t think any of our elites come off especially well in how they have handled the virus, but I do seem to recall this series of events, which is entirely absent from the Post article: (1) Hundreds of thousands of people coming out in the streets with little social distancing in defiance of all previous public health guidance; (2) various mayors and governors who had been among the strictest in fining, denouncing, and generally bullying anyone who defied social distancing guidelines not only not trying to break up these gatherings, not only leaving them alone, but actually (3) attending them, encouraging their attendees, and praising them; (4) various respected public health experts, who had previously been adamant about banning large public gatherings, at best not saying anything (with very few exceptions) and in many cases actually praising the gatherings as a net benefit to public health; (5) leading to even more people coming out on the streets in defiance of all prior public health guidance on social distancing, tens of thousands at a time all over the country; (6) leading to the utter breakdown of obedience by the rest of the population to any distancing guidelines, as many people who had been banned from attending church, funerals, opening their businesses, and so on figured that the people who had been insisting on strict social distancing were frauds and liars.

But since the Washington Post couldn’t find a single foreign observer to comment on such a remarkable chain of events, and since in any event they can’t be blamed on Trump, they must never have happened, must be my imagination.

I ALSO CALLED BIDEN AND WITHDREW MY NAME LAST NIGHT: Amy Klobuchar drops out of Biden VP contention. After all, I had about as much chance as she did at that point.

WE SHOULD REALLY SEPARATE RACE AND STATE, BUT MEANWHILE HERE’S THE STORY OF How People from India Almost Became White.

VERY DANGEROUS RULING, IN EFFECT ALLOWING A PRESIDENT TO LEGISLATE: When President Obama changed immigration law without going through Congress, we were told, “it’s a policy choice allowed by the discretion given the president under the immigration laws to decline, temporarily, to deport ‘dreamers’ until Congress decides what to do. It’s not ‘legislating’ because any future president can just as easily change the policy.” But today, in a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court has made it difficult for such policy choices to be reversed, in large part, it seems, because the policy choice led to regulations that created “reliance interests” among dreamers, requiring the Trump administration to more strongly justify reversing what was supposed to have been a mere policy decision. This is a very bad day for the separation of powers, and with Roberts once again punting, it brings up a truism I’ve noted many times: you don’t make significant, lasting change on the Supreme Court with a 5-4 majority, you need at least 6-3, maybe 7-2.

IT ALWAYS DOES: The Revolution is Eating its Own: Jonathan Chait’s article on progressive intolerance both describes and illustrates the problem.

IT IS IF YOU PRAY AT THE TEMPLE OF WOKENESS: Is Attending a Political Protest More Important than Attending a Funeral?

BURN (ER, FIRE) THE HERETICS!: Demands that Cornell Fire Clinical Law Prof William Jacobson for Criticizing Black Lives Matter Movement.

DEFUND THE LAW SCHOOLS!*

*Which doesn’t mean I actually want to cut funding to the law schools, and especially not to faculty salaries or pensions, which if anything should be increased. Rather, I’d like the government to, under cover of this slogan, spend money on my pet social causes by claiming that it somehow advances law school curricular reform.

THIS SEEMS TO BE A CONSISTENT 2020 THEME: Public Health Experts are Embarrassing Themselves:

In short, the situation we are faced with is that large pubic rallies will almost certainly kill and injure many Americans through Covid spread, and we don’t have the slightest non-speculative idea as to whether the protests will have a positive effect on public health, much less whether any such positive effects will outweigh the health harms from virus spread.

To the extent public health experts claim to be relying on their expertise, rather than faith as political activists or fortune-tellers, there is only one plausible “public health” answer to having large, public protests: based on what we can actually measure and predict, they are a significant net threat to public health.

BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH, HE KINDLY STOPPED BY MY POLITICAL RALLY:

WAIT, WHAT?:

I’m not getting how you “defund the police” without lots of police officers losing their jobs (and thus their eventual pensions) entirely, forget cuts. Is she thinking that they will be retrained as social workers or contact tracers? I’m really baffled here.

BUT THAT WOULD PROVIDE FEWER OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT: Cities Should Take a Hard Look at Police Department Budgets:

Take New York City. In 1990, at the peak of the decades-long crime wave, New York City had 212,458 violent crimes, 932,416 property crimes, and 2,605 murders. At the time, it had a police force consisting of 26,756 uniformed and 9,483 nonuniformed personnel.

In 2018, the last year for which I could find statistics, New York City had 68,495 violent crimes, 281,507 property crimes, and 562 murders. In other words, crime is down dramatically.

Nevertheless, the New York City police force has since grown dramatically, consisting of approximately 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees. Perhaps having more cops on the payroll has contributed to the lower crime rate, though crime rates have fallen nationwide. Even if so, the more than doubling of civilian employees is an especially stark statistic. With far fewer crimes to process, how could New York City possibly need twice as many civilian employees as in 1990?

UPDATE: Some or all of the increase may be the result of merging the transit and housing police into the NYPD. Either way, one bureaucrat for every two cops, with police coverage 24/7 and most of the bureaucracy working 9-5 is an astounding ratio.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE “PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY?”: Remember when we had to listen to the allegedly unanimous opinion of public health experts that nothing, literally NOTHING, was more important that social distancing to prevent the spread of Coronavirus?

I agree that it’s important (regardless of whether the particular incident of excessive use of force by police in question was a product of racism or just routine police brutality). I also think that putting 30% of the public out of work is important, indeed more important, especially given that racism is a persistent issue that will create plenty of protest opportunities, whereas destroying millions of people’s livelihoods was immediate.

Some of my social media friends have been insisting for some time that many of the hardcore lockdown/social distancing advocates were less concerned about public health and more about imposing their own value system against what they considered an unenlightened public, and some subset of those people actually welcomed the lockdown because they prefer people to live on the government dole that to allow “capitalist exploitation.” I’m not, to say the least, a big fan of the political and public health establishment, but I nevertheless thought this was too cynical.

Yet today we see Mayor DeBlasio arguing that protesting racism is more important than being banned from attending religious services indefinitely, and Governor Murphy of New Jersey stating that protests against racism may flout social distancing rules, but he’s going to continue to enforce them against lockdown opponents.

Worse yet, Slate reports that:

Facing a slew of media requests asking about how protests might be a risk for COVID-19 transmission, a group of infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, with input from other colleagues, drafted a collective response. In an open letter published Sunday, they write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”… By Tuesday afternoon, more than 1,000 epidemiologists, doctors, social workers, medical students, and other health experts had signed the letter.

I don’t think anyone who knows me would describe me as at all credulous, but I think I need to get even more cynical.

UPDATE: Just a few days ago, Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, was literally accusing President Trump of “genocide” for not taking stronger measure to contain Covid-19. Today, he signed the “protests against racism are more important than stopping the spread of Covid-19” letter.

HOW THE MEDIA CREATES NARRATIVES: Here is the Washington Post showing that blacks are shot to death by police more than Hispanics who are shot more than whites who are shot much more often than…. “other”. Other is about 43 million people, which would include about 21 million Asian Americans, who I’m guessing have an even lower rate of being shot to death by police than the full “other” category. But if you are trying to frame the narrative as an uncomplicated “cops shoot people of color more than whites” you can’t actually break out “Asians” because that undermines the narrative and means you have to dig a bit beyond the simple formula. So “Other” it is. It would also be helpful, though not to the “narrative,” to compare the percentage of individuals shot by race/ethnicity to arrest rates for violent crime.

MY PROPHETIC SOCIAL MEDIA FRIENDS: Some of my Facebook friends predicted that the shutdowns, by reducing employment esp. among the working poor and creating boredom by shutting people up in their homes would be the tinder for social conflagration. I thought that was unreasonable, but now it’s hard to gainsay.

THE IRONY OF GLENN GREENWALD CRITICIZING OTHERS FOR NOT BEING FAIR AND OPEN-MINDED: I’ll give this much to Glenn Greenwald: he’s smart, and doesn’t desire to play the role of Democratic Party apparatchik. That, and his far-left outlook, makes him a useful source of criticism for those who are apparatchiks. But when, as in Glenn’s link below, he accuses other journalists of not being fair and open-minded? Well, that’s just a lack of self-awareness. Here he is arguing that pro-Israel sentiment in the U.S. is at least as bad for freedom of speech as Islamist terrorists murdering cartoonists. And I discussed here an occasion when he made ridiculous allegations of racism against John McCain. And here are a couple of other occasions in which I called out Greenwald for rather blatant disregard for the truth. Greenwald is all moral outrage, all the time, and attacks anyone who doesn’t share his idiosyncratic priorities, a group that includes mainstream Democrats. Caveat emptor.

NOT JUST NO, HELL NO: Some law professors think that administrative agencies should be encouraged to play a greater role in developing American constitutional law. I discuss the role agencies have played, more or less under the radar, and why giving them even more of a role is a bad idea, in this article.

FILE THIS UNDER “DEMOCRATIC HEROES CAN’T BE RACIST”: The Irony of “The Plot Against America”.

The book and mini-series imagine Pres. Charles Lindbergh dispersing Jews to the hinterlands, but FDR, consistent with how he ultimately treated Japanese-American citizens, was the one who actually favored that.

FLASHBACKS (From Ed):

● New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II.

● Historian: New Evidence Shows Fdr’s Bigotry Derailed Many Holocaust Rescue Plans.

(Updated and bumped.)

“HISTORY” IS INCREASINGLY PROPAGANDA: In 1933, FDR issued a dictatorial executive order banning Americans from owning gold and ordering them to turn their gold in to the Federal Reserve. Violators were subject to jail terms of up to ten years, plus a fine. Here, by contrast, is how a leading historian of FDR and the New Deal portrays it: