ONE HAND WASHES THE OTHER: Biden to let Trump’s H1-B visa ban expire in win for tech companies.
Easy call: Those wage gains enjoyed by the bottom 50% under Trump before the unnecessary COVID recession was engineered? Yeah, they’re over.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
April 1, 2021
STACEY LENNOX: Dems Are Not as United Behind Federalizing Elections With HR-1 as They Would Have You Believe. “ Manchin is not the only one with objections. According to The New York Times, other Democrats spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid pressure from activist groups. Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus are concerned independent redistricting commissions required in the bill will break up their majority-minority districts. Pretty telling. Some in the Democrat establishment worry that public financing of elections could energize more far-left primary challengers like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).”
COOL. NOW DO PEOPLE: Scientists develop new drug that can regenerate lost TEETH in mice and ferrets.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: LOL Words Don’t Mean Anything and Everything Is Racist Now. “I’m convinced that America’s dumbest bartender doesn’t know the meanings of half of the words she uses. Fortunately for her, the people who vote for her are even dumber than she is. All she has to do is steal somebody’s Word of the Day calendar and she can dazzle them with nonsensical things like it’s not a surge because they’re not insurgents. I wouldn’t be shocked to find that they toddler-proof the electrical outlets in her office.”
ELON MUSK IS ALREADY DOING THIS AND WITHOUT ADDING ANYTHING TO THE DEBT OR INCREASING TAXES: Biden plans to connect every American to broadband in new infrastructure package. “ The long-awaited infrastructure and jobs package contains funding for broadband expansion, semiconductor manufacturing, and slew of other interests like public transportation and helping consumers purchase electric vehicles. On a call with reporters Tuesday, an administration official said that the package would be paid for by changes to the corporate tax rate.”
Spoiler: No, it won’t be.
March 31, 2021
OH: Yahoo Story on Florida COVID Study Misrepresented Key Finding, Study’s Author Says.
“Florida is undercounting the number of people who died from COVID-19 by thousands of cases, casting new doubt on claims that Gov. Ron DeSantis navigated the coronavirus pandemic successfully,” begins the fear-mongering story, published by Yahoo national correspondent Alexander Nazaryan on Tuesday.
The story was built around a study published this month in the American Journal of Public Health, which analyzed Florida’s “excess deaths” during the COVID-19 pandemic — or the difference between the actual number of deaths in the state and what was expected, after accounting for registered COVID deaths.
The study — which found that Florida, after accounting for COVID deaths, had 4,924 excess deaths from March to September 2020 — reported that “the impact of COVID-19 on mortality is significantly greater than the official COVID-19 data suggest.”
Yahoo incorrectly framed the nearly 5,000 deaths as COVID mortalities that the state has let slip through the cracks.
“In the case of Florida, the researchers say, 4,924 excess deaths should have been counted as resulting from COVID-19 but for the most part were ruled as having been caused by something else, thus lowering Florida’s coronavirus fatality count,” the article reads. The story led Drudge Report on Tuesday with the caption “RESEARCH FINDS 5,000 MORE DEAD,” and was prominently shared by Florida Democrats Charlie Crist and Nikki Fried.
But Moosa Tatar, the lead author of the study featured by Yahoo, said the story’s framing of his analysis was incorrect, and he does not yet know how many of the excess deaths are attributable to COVID.
Listen, if we’re going to let facts stand in the way of perfectly reasonable panicmongering, then eventually people are going to stop being needlessly afraid.
Related (From Ed): COVID Panic Peddlers Get Clobbered by Their Own Boomerang in Pushing Doom and Gloom Narrative.
I DON’T CARE FOR THE CONTENT OF THAT TEACHER’S CHARACTER: Teacher Bullies Student for His Colorblind Attitude Toward Race.
WARP FACTOR… POINT NINE-NINE-NINE? New Warp Drive Model Requires No ‘Exotic Matter,’ Scientists Say We Can Build It. “Unlike the Alcubierre and White designs, the APL team’s proposal requires no exotic matter to power the vehicle, but there is one catch. According to the researchers, the physical nature of the new design means it is constrained by Newtonian physics. In short, while their drive concept is indeed designed to transport humans across the galaxy and needs no exotic matter to fuel its journey, it is not capable of breaking the speed of light.”
That’s a bummer.
UPDATE YOUR NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: Everything is racist, including not being racist, as Merriam-Webster expands the definition of the word ‘color-blind.’
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): CNN Claims ‘Biological Sex’ Is a Disputed Term: ‘No Consensus Criteria for Assigning Sex at Birth.’
CRISIS BY DESIGN: Media Finally Allowed To Tour Joe Biden’s Cages for Immigrant Kids, and Everything Is Awful.
Related (From Ed): AOC breaks silence on border to vent outrage at … the word “surge?”
That Newspeak Dictionary doesn’t shrink itself, you know.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And It’s All Your Fault).
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Is literally everything bad due to climate change?
Answer: Yes, literally everything — and climate change is literally America’s fault.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- From “broken windows fallacy” to “broken windows fat profits”
- Watch as a progressive race-baiter is hoist with her own canard, so to speak
- Hunter Biden is the pot calling the orange black
Bonus Sanity: Americans have had it up to here with cancel culture.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: China Perfidy Update For March 31, 2021. “Death, taxes, and China’s communist government doing the world dirty are three unchanging verities in the modern world. Here’s a roundup of their recent misdeeds.”
Lots to chew on in this one.
READINESS: U.S. nuclear weapons are aging quickly. With few spare parts, how long can they last?
When hundreds of land-based nuclear armed ballistic missiles were first lowered into underground cement silos spread across the vast cornfields here in 1970, the weapons were only intended to last a decade before a newer system came in.
Fifty years later, these missiles — called the Minuteman III — are still on alert, manned by members of the U.S. Air Force in teams of two who spend 24 hours straight below ground in front of analog terminals from the 1980s, decoding messages and running tests on the missiles’ systems to check if they could still launch if needed.
But it’s not the age of weapons or the decades-old technology that troubles their operators. It’s that the original manufacturers who supplied the gears, tubes and other materials to fix those systems are long gone.
Related: Did Barack Obama Invite a Nuclear Confrontation with Russia?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): To be honest, I feel safer with the out of date analog gear than I would with modern digital stuff.
COLD WAR II: Iran and China sign 25-year cooperation agreement.
The agreement is said to have been in the works since Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Iran in 2016, also agreeing to increase bilateral trade more than 10-fold to $600bn in the next decade.
No details of the agreement have yet to be officially published, but it is expected to be a sweeping “strategic accord” that includes significant Chinese investments in Iran’s key sectors such as energy and infrastructure, in addition to military cooperation.
It comes as both Iran and China are under different levels of sanctions imposed by the US.
For now, anyway.
Barely more than two months in and the Biden Administration seems to thrill on just how badly they can run our faces in their awfulness.
MORE FROM THE PEOPLE BIDEN IS DESPERATE TO NEGOTIATE WITH: Iran ‘obsessively’ carrying out executions, say rights activists.
TRUMP HAD THEM ON THE ROPES: GOP Blasts ‘Outrageous’ Biden Admin Offer to Roll Back Iran Sanctions.
As Iran continues to balk at U.S. proposals for direct negotiations on a deal, the Biden administration is becoming desperate. American officials are now said to be offering Iran immediate relief from tough economic sanctions in exchange for commitments to scale back portions of its nuclear program and halt enriching uranium to levels needed for a weapon, according to Politico. That proposal, Republican foreign policy leaders told the Washington Free Beacon, breaks multiple promises from Secretary of State Antony Blinken to not lift sanctions until Tehran agrees to sit down with the United States and other world powers. Republicans also are learning of the proposal via media reports, highlighting the administration’s continued efforts to conceal its diplomatic pursuits from critics in Congress.
Iran also quickly slapped down the Biden administration’s offer, which is said to include a promise to remove sanctions if Tehran stops enriching uranium to the 20-percent threshold, according to Tuesday reports in the country’s state-controlled press. Iranian leaders maintain that they will not agree to any negotiations until America unwinds all of its sanctions on the country and returns to full compliance with the original 2015 deal, which former president Donald Trump abandoned in 2018.
The Mullahs said “Jump!” and Biden asked, “How high?”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Teachers’ Unions Are Heading for the Ninth Circle of Hell. “Apparently, it’s only American children who are going to give teachers the Wuhan Bat Flu and the randos who illegally cross the border are granted some sort of magical immunity by the Fauci Fairy.”