URLs du Jour

2020-10-02

  • Numerous sites have the news this morn, but we'll link to Patterico's Pontifications: Trump Tests Positive for COVID-19. Because he provides a context tweet from ABC:

    And other numerous schadenfreudelicacies. I'm pretty sure that's not admirable, but it does seem to be accurate.

    Any way: get well soon, Mr. President (and Melania, and Hope). Thanks for your efforts. I'm sure they were well-meaning.


  • Another bit of eye candy, my sample ballot for November, straight from the New Hampshire Secretary of State.

    [Rollinsford 2020 Ballot Page 1] [Rollinsford 2020 Ballot Page 2]

    As I think I've mentioned before, my algorithm is pretty simple:

    • Don't vote in races with unopposed candidates;
    • Vote Libertarian if possible;
    • Otherwise vote Republican.

    I can add special cases if the Republican turns out to be a puppy-eater) But unless something like that turns up, it appears to be a 15-second operation in the voting booth for me.


  • The Federalist adds another reason, if you needed more, why you shouldn't trust Google. It reports on the Daily Caller story: Google Hides Our Article Even If You Search For It By Name. (Appears to be legit as I type.)

    Editor-in-Chief Geoffrey Ingersoll on Thursday showed Google hid a Daily Caller article about the World Health Organization’s abortion advocacy in its search results. Searches of the article’s exact title placed it on pages that statistically nearly no one ever clicks on, while articles that present pro-abortion perspectives come up first instead.

    The article in question is here. It begins:

    Abortion is considered an essential service during the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization said in a statement Saturday.

    The WHO said in its statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation that “services related to reproductive health are considered to be part of essential services during the COVID-19 outbreak.”

    Orwellian on a couple levels. (1) Memory-holing the Daily Caller; (2) billing abortion as "reproductive health" is right up there with the 1984 Official Party Slogans

    WAR IS PEACE

    FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

    IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH


  • So this was big news a few days ago. Now seems like a few weeks ago. KDW on Donald Trump & Tax Laws.

    This leads us, inevitably, to the case of Potemkin billionaire Donald J. Trump, who refused to release his personal income-tax information but couldn’t keep the New York Times from getting into it and merrily writing it up. The story the Times tells comports with my longstanding impression of Trump, who, as I have been arguing since he first got into the 2016 presidential race, was much more successful as a reality-television grotesque than as a real-estate developer. As one critic acidly put it: “He thinks he’s Conrad Hilton, but he’s Paris Hilton.” But it is worth keeping in mind that the tax provision under which Trump was able to carry back (as opposed to carry forward) some extraordinary losses and thus claim a huge tax refund was not some arcane tax scheme — it was part of the Obama administration’s stimulus package.

    Does anybody remember who was in charge of that? Take your time — I’ll wait.

    From NPR: “Joe Biden was instrumental in getting the 2009 recovery act through Congress, then supervised the stimulus for the Obama administration.” Call it a handout to the rich if you like — because it surely was that — but maybe take a little note of whose hand was doing the handing out.

    Good luck on that narrative breaking through.


  • It's billed as Andrew Stiles satire at the Free Beacon, but is it really? New York Times Puts Non-White Lives In Danger.

    The New York Times is being criticized for publishing a lengthy op-ed defending the Chinese government's authoritarian crackdown in Hong Kong. Under the headline, "Hong Kong Is China, Like It or Not," the Times granted valuable journalistic space to Chinese politician Regina Ip to denounce pro-democracy protesters for "stirring up chaos and disaffection toward our motherland," and defending government-led efforts to postpone elections.

    A Washington Free Beacon analysis of the newspaper's decision to publish the controversial opinion piece determined that the New York Times was putting the lives of people of color at risk by effectively endorsing an authoritarian regime that considers pro-democracy advocacy to be a form of domestic terrorism. The dangerous op-ed also threatens the lives of professional journalists attempting to report on the situation in Hong Kong, and empowers a regime that views the media as the enemy of the people.

    The comparison between this and the imbroglio over Senator Tom Cotton's op-ed in June is (a) obvious and (b) deeply unflattering to the New York Times. Which seems to be run these days by the ghost of Walter Duranty.


  • And Cafe Hayek's proprietor reports on the latest example of Expert Failure to Know.

    Phil Magness reports on a new paper co-authored by Anthony Fauci, M.D. In this paper, Dr. Fauci and his co-author (Dr. David Morens) write:

    It is a useful ‘‘thought experiment’’ to note that until recent decades and centuries, many deadly pandemic diseases either did not exist or were not significant problems. Cholera, for example, was not known in the West until the late 1700s and became pandemic only because of human crowding and international travel, which allowed new access of the bacteria in regional Asian ecosystems to the unsanitary water and sewer systems that characterized cities throughout the Western world. This realization leads us to suspect that some, and probably very many, of the living improvements achieved over recent centuries come at a high cost that we pay in deadly disease emergences. Since we cannot return to ancient times, can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction? These are questions to be answered by all societies and their leaders, philosophers, builders, and thinkers and those involved in appreciating and influencing the environmental determinants of human health.

    Is Dr. Fauci unaware of the enormous increase, over the past 250 or so years, in life expectancy? Is he unaware that a disproportionate share of this improvement was reaped by poor people? (Dr. Fauci should spend some time on this site.)

    Phil Magness's Facebook post, linked above, says this is "sufficient to call this guy's competence as a scientist into question."


Last Modified 2024-02-02 4:54 AM EDT