Aug
18
2020

URLs du Jour

2020-08-18

  • Hey, kids! Remember "Security Theater"? 363,000 Google hits, and a helpful Wikipedia entry is right on top of them.

    Security theater is the practice of investing in countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to achieve it.

    Clayton Cramer invites us to think about "Public Health Theater" in a similar way.

    COVID-19 is a real public health crisis, but requiring masks at home while teleconferencing (Wisconsin) or in uncrowded open air (Illinois) are both public health theater.

    As I type, Googling "Public Health Theater" gives only 38,400 hits.

    A large fraction of people who were, and are, properly skeptical of security theater seem to be totally buying into public health theater.

  • And (hey, kids) what time is it? At National Review, Cathy Ruse and Tony Perkins say it's time to Rethink Public Education.

    What’s that popping sound? Could it be a million figurative lightbulbs clicking on above public-school parents’ heads?

    The vast majority of American families send their children to public schools. Only 11 percent of children attend private schools, and fewer than 5 percent are homeschooled. And as one school board after another gives the no go signal for the coming school year, families are being thrown into crisis. And yet, the great American entrepreneurial spirit is awakening as parents are forced to rethink education for their children. And that is to the benefit of children and the nation.

    Cathy and Tony are from the Family Research Council, which is a "hate group" according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Which, in turn, inspired a lunatic to pop into FRC's DC headquarters with a rifle, aiming to kill "as many employees as possible".

    Maybe the SPLC should designate itself as a hate group.

  • At the Federalist, Mollie Hemingway took on the unenviable task of reading the New York Times: NYT Manipulates FBI Lawyer's Guilty Plea To Hide Real Spygate News.

    A New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his role perpetrating the Russia collusion hoax was tasked with framing the news that a former top FBI lawyer was to plead guilty to deliberately fabricating evidence against a Donald Trump campaign affiliate targeted in the Russia probe. The resulting article is a case study in how to write propaganda.

    Adam Goldman broke, and cushioned, the news that former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was to plead guilty to fabricating evidence in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application to spy on Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page.

    Perhaps Adam Goldman is aiming for the Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Integrity?

  • At the NYPost, Rich Lowry considers The left’s lunatic ‘postal’ conspiracy theory. This time it's about the Postal "Service".

    At this rate, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy will be lucky if he isn’t arrested and tried for treason before a people’s tribunal.

    DeJoy has quickly replaced Vladimir Putin as the man that progressive opinion will hold responsible if Trump wins a second term in November.

    According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, DeJoy is a “complicit crony” aiding Trump’s effort to sabotage American democracy. She believes the two have hatched a plot to delay mail-in voting and disenfranchise countless Americans prior to the election.

    Debunking ensues. At Inside Sources, Michael Graham notes that our state's senior Senator has bought into the theory:

    Shaheen tweeted out a news story about the Manchester mail processing center shutting down 20 percent of its mail sorting machines, with the ominous warning: “This is unacceptable. The admin’s attempt to sabotage the USPS is hurting our veterans and seniors who rely on the mail to get prescription drugs delivered.”

    “@USPS is the only federal agency mentioned in the Constitution,” Shaheen insisted in another tweet. “More Americans than ever are relying on mail to conduct business, get prescription drugs & exercise their right to vote. We cannot — & will not — let President Trump dismantle the Postal Service. #DontMessWithUSPS,” Shaheen warned.

    “Dismantle the Postal Service?” That claim has as much factual basis as GOP warnings that Democrats intend to “defund the police.”

    I wish Trump wanted to dismantle USPS. But I'm just a cranky libertarian.

    I'm about as radical as this WaPo editorial from 2009.

    Europe's increasingly privatized mail services offer exciting examples of postal possibilities in the 21st century. They are leaner and greener than the U.S. service because they work with, not against, the Internet. Switzerland's Swiss Post, for example, employs green technology, providing customers with secure, address-linked online mailboxes where they can view scanned images of their mail and decide whether to virtually "open" it, discard it or have it physically mailed to them. This system has greatly increased efficiency, promoted recycling and decreased junk mail.

    But I was informed that all those countries were socialist.

  • Instapundit asks: Have you noticed how the left moves seamlessly from one batshit conspiracy theory to another, while calling the right paranoid?. And links to a PJMedia story by Rick Moran, sample:

    That dastardly Donald Trump is at it again. He is either the evilest man ever to hold the office of president or the dumbest. He is either a Machiavellian genius manipulating the media and his hypnotized followers or a bumbling know-nothing idiot.

    Trump is being accused of sabotaging the November elections because he won’t give the postal unions and incompetent managers in the postal service $25 billion to play with. The money will stave off catastrophe for about a year at the rate the USPS is burning through cash. Without that money, we’re informed by those in the know, thousands — no, tens of thousands — no, millions of voters who wait until the last minute to mail in an absentee ballot might not have their votes counted because, well, Trump.

    This conspiracy theory will only last as long as it's useful.