Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #944

 

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #942

Covid and the Three Tests of Compliance

Jesus in the wilderness faced three temptations from the Devil himself: material comfort, fame, and power. Needless to say, he declined every temptation and passed all three trials.

So too did the couple seeking to enter the order of virtue in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. They blasted right through the tests of silence, isolation, and fear. In the opera, much celebration ensues.

Fairy tales too are often framed by three chances. The Miller’s daughter is given three chances to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name, for example, and I’m sure you can think of other instances.

The final movement of the 6th “Tragic” Symphony by Gustav Mahler features three hammer blows, the third of which was later removed by the composer for superstitious reasons: the fear that the third signifies death. To this day, audiences wait in anticipation to see if the conductor will motion the percussionist to deploy the third or not. When he does not, the blow is even more conspicuous in its absence.

And here we are in year three of the times after the pandemic response sent our lives and those of billions into extraordinary upheaval. To most of us, it seems like a crazy blur of edicts, propaganda, revelations, fear, confusion, division, and shock, so much so that it is hard to keep the history straight. Indeed, many people just want everything forgotten or at least completely mis-remembered.

Daily, we are bombarded by fake history that we know is wrong. We lived through it. Brownstone has been accumulating all the receipts: the emails, speeches, edits, threats, impositions, demands, and so on. In the face of all this attempted revisionism, it’s hard to keep one’s bearing.

One way to think about these last three years is a succession of compliance tests: how much liberty and good sense are we willing to surrender to the regime and on what terms? The policies seem to be constructed for just that purpose.

As if to fit the model, they came in three great waves: lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates. Let’s examine all three stages and reflect on their demands and terms. It begins to make sense, at least from the point of view of those in control.
Lockdowns

“Thank goodness for the lockdowns; this will end the pandemic.”

The lockdowns hit us hard from mid-March 2020 and onward, imposed as if they were a conventional response to a circulating new pathogen, though they literally had no precedent in history. They were sweeping, closing churches, schools, small and medium-sized businesses, civic clubs like AA, bars and restaurants plus gyms, and even venues that host weddings and funerals. Many states imposed stay-at-home orders. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, while medical services were reserved for only Covid cases and other extreme emergencies while everything else was shut.

All of this was based on the astonishing announcement by the Trump administration: “Governors should close schools in communities that are near areas of community transmission” and “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

At the March 16, 2020, press conference, not one reporter asked a critical question. Even if this was only for two weeks, as was promised, how is any of this compatible with law and the Bill of Rights? How is it that bureaucracies, without any vote of any legislature, can simply “shut down” an entire country? It was completely bizarre, so much so that most people figured that there had to be some legitimate underlying rationale.

Not everyone went along. Some hair salons, bars, and churches remained open but found themselves pilloried by the media. Then the cops arrived, even SWAT teams, closing them by force. The kids had to stay home too, and moms and dads were forced to leave the workforce to care for them at home, splitting their days pretending to work on Zoom calls while their children pretended to be in school on Zoom too. It was a massive crush of technology and everyone had to adapt.

There was nowhere to go and most American towns suddenly looked like ghost towns. President Trump announced that it would surely all be over by Easter but this itself was something of a shock: Easter was more than two weeks away, so his announcement amounted to extension of lockdowns. His advisers Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx seized the moment and successfully talked Trump into another full 30 days of lockdowns.

These weeks were excruciating. Many if not most people knew that there was something very wrong but it was unclear what. We could no longer meet with friends and neighbors to discuss. Plus many people in our online communities seemed to be all in on the lockdowns, fully believing that this was the way to control and eventually stop a pandemic.

And yet there we were, all of us living in this surreal scene, asked to believe the implausible and give up what we loved the most by deference to a handful of people who said that they knew more than we knew. Those who did not do the right thing were considered horrid and unscientific, insufficiently credulous toward our betters.
Masks

“Thank goodness for masks; this will end the lockdowns.”

In these early days, there was no thought put into universal masking. It was never part of our history. There was a moment during the 1918 pandemic that one city tried masks but not only did it not work; it produced a massive political revolt. Not since then had masks for the general population ever been tried. Plenty of countries in the Far East had used masks to filter out smog on bad days but that problem had never been something that affected the US enough to make them a norm.

Plus, in those days, the experts told everyone not to bother with them. The masks should be saved for medical personnel. In any case, they don’t really work to control the spread of viruses like this. They are not the equivalent of using condoms to avoid infection from AIDS. A respiratory virus is something else entirely, and we are a people informed by evidence and science. The evidence was nowhere in...

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #943

 

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #941

Hunter Biden Wanted Office at Think Tank Where President Stashed Classified Docs

Hunter Biden discussed 'confidential' plans with dad's talent agent

Hunter Biden tried to secure an office at his father Joe Biden's think tank, where the president kept classified documents, emails from the first son's abandoned laptop show.

Joe Biden's talent agent, Craig Gering, emailed Hunter Biden in April 2016 to discuss the vice president's plans for the following year, including the establishment of the Penn Biden Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. Gering wrote that the university's D.C. office "will be expanded to house a DC office for VP Biden (and Mike, Hunter, and Steve?)," an apparent reference to future Penn Biden Center officials Michael Carpenter and Steve Ricchetti.

Hunter Biden said he hoped the plan would come to fruition.

"That's the way I would like it to see it shake out," he said in an April 25, 2016, response to Gering. "BUT please keep this very confidential between us because nothing has been set in stone."

It is unclear whether the plan shook out as Hunter Biden hoped it would. But the exchange raises questions in light of growing concerns about the discovery of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center and Biden's home in Wilmington, Del. Biden's lawyers discovered a trove of documents about Iran, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine at the office. Republicans have expressed concerns about Hunter Biden's potential access to the records, both because of his erratic behavior during that time period and his foreign business dealings with Ukraine and China.

Gering, the agent for Joe Biden, did not respond to requests for comment. Biden hired Gering's firm, Creative Artists Agency, after leaving the White House in 2017 to "amplify" his post-White House career. The firm helped Biden secure a book deal and speaking engagements. It also helped Biden with plans for the Penn Biden Center and a think tank at the University of Delaware.

Gering's April 25, 2016, email to Hunter Biden appears to be based on a conversation the two had about his post-government plans. According to Gering, Hunter Biden told him in their "confidential" meetings that plans were to open think tanks at the University of Delaware and Penn Biden Center. Another focus of Biden's post-government plans, according to Gering, was "wealth creation."

While Joe Biden has denied any involvement in his son's business dealings, a former Hunter Biden business partner, Tony Bobulinski, said he met with both Bidens in Los Angeles in early 2017 to discuss a venture with CEFC China Energy.

"Please keep this very confidential between us because nothing has been set in stone and there's still a lot of sensitivity around...

DeSantis Forces College Board To Temper Anti-American Classes, But The War Has Just Begun

The long march through the institutions must meet a long march back to sanity. DeSantis’ battle with College Board is just one of many necessary engagements.

For decades, Democrat and Republican politicians have forced Americans to fund schools, nonprofits, and bureaucracies that undermine our personal well-being and country. Breaking this wicked pattern of political sloth, Gov. Ron DeSantis resisted when College Board applied for Florida public schools to teach its anti-American African-American studies class.

Due to DeSantis’ courageous and principled stand, College Board backed down. The massive curriculum and testing organization last week released a revised version of the grievance studies class’s scope and sequence, which it had formerly kept secret from the very taxpayers funding it. College Board removed most of the overtly Marxist and violence-baiting study materials and added a token “black conservatism” option to its long list of voluntary essay topics.



The course still shamefully lacks any note of, for example, Clarence Thomas, one of the best legal thinkers in world history of any ancestry. It is also still clearly tilted politically left, including by omitting serious study of the deep and wide African-American tradition of Christian worship. Scholar Stanley Kurtz summarizes the changes at National Review:


Nearly every now-omitted topic was filled with socialism, CRT, or some other radical perspective. Originally, an entire topic was devoted to Frantz Fanon’s glorification of violence — and its influence on black radicals in America. That topic is now gone. Another topic one-sidedly excoriated American foreign policy in Haiti. Gone. The unit on black queer studies has also been deleted. DeSantis won that showdown with Governor Pritzker. A topic on ‘Afrocentricity,’ the scholarly legitimacy of which is very much in dispute, is gone. Also gone is a CRT-based unit calling colorblindness racist (in direct violation of Florida law). Units plugging reparations, prison abolition, intersectionality, the socialist platform of the Movement for Black Lives, and the revolutionary meditations of Marxist radical Robin D. G. Kelley, are likewise gone.

It’s a clear political win for DeSantis. His choice to fight advanced his voters’ interests. Indeed, he also advanced national interests, as funding its enemies obviously endangers any nation. (That is axiomatic, but connections that basic apparently need to be made nowadays.) As usual, every single Republican needs to learn from DeSantis’ example that going to political war for your voters is a winning strategy.

Still, it is not in Americans’ interest that, even in a more moderated form, this kind of class be taught anywhere — not in high school, not in colleges. Because it’s fashionable to attack what a conservative did not say, let’s be clear: African-American history is American history and should of course be taught richly, fully, and accurately to every American.

But African-American studies classes are not the same as African-American history classes. They’re about identity politics grievance-mongering, which is really about pushing cultural Marxism, the division of Americans into bitterly divided grievance groups that pave the way for undoing...