You have a solid point there

If the North Carolina teachers' union feels it can't go back to work, who am I to urge them?  It's time to find an alternative, maybe something private, perhaps voucher funded.  Something involving a lot of home-schooling and parent choice, with more safety and free time for the unionized teachers.

Fund students, not schools:

If a neighborhood grocery store refuses to reopen, it may be inconvenient, but families wouldn't be devastated; they could take their money elsewhere. Imagine if you were forced to pay your neighborhood Walmart the same amount of money each week regardless of whether they provided your family with any groceries. The store would have little incentive to reopen in an effective or timely manner.

It sounds absurd. But you have essentially just imagined today's compulsory K–12 school system.

Let Portland go, too.

Never give in, never, never, never.

If Winston Churchill were campaigning today, his rhetoric would be called divisive.



"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning."

Saudi Archaeology Breakthrough

Living in the footsteps of forgotten Arab kings.

Irish Archaeology Breakthrough

Massive religious structures in County Armagh:

"It would give you a very good indication of the footprint of these buildings and the scale of the structure.

"I suppose that's one of the reasons why this feels so significant, because these are truly monumental structures, they are absolutely huge by the standards of the age.

"These could probably be some of the largest structures built in the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD."

Explicit Racism

Want to lay off police as part of defunding their department, but unsatisfied at the degree of virtue signalling this accomplishes? Violate Federal laws by explicitly discriminating on the basis of race!

The police chief is a little taken aback by the suggestion.

UPDATE: Portland too.

Contemporary Slavery

It's not chattel slavery, but there is increasing interest in just how much forced labor is going on -- including with major corporations.

Being woke won't help you.



That whole bit about 'having kids is the worst thing you can do' shows this isn't even a right-wing attack on the woke; it's a left-wing, abortion-and-contraceptives attack. It's woke hitting woke.

UPDATE: An escapee from the Chinese gulags speaks.

Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.

Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.

Most likely the sterility is the intent of the drugs; the whole point of a genocide is to get rid of the enemy population, after all. Which also explains the further rather gruesome details about the rapes being accompanied by forced abortions and contraceptions.

Ymar’s Post

Friday.

NY vs. Sweden

In a way their models seem similar:  accept extra death up front, in return for getting though the epidemic faster.  Sweden, of course, merely 'accepted' the risks; NY actively encouraged death via its nursing home policy.

The graph at the link shows that, in fact, the models didn't work out the same way at all.  They did both get to near-zero death rates, though.

Local Wokeness

California repeals law against discriminating on the basis of sex, race, and similar things in order to begin actively discriminating.

Seattle approves massive tax on high earners.

Asheville passes reparations for slavery for black residents, though in fact Asheville had almost nothing to do with slavery and was a tiny mountain community largely uninvolved in the Civil War.

Ymar’s Post

Wednesday.

"Please Wait While Your Experience Loads"

So sayth the DOT tax website, not taking into account that long waiting to pay my taxes is in fact part of the experience.

So, the Battle Scenes in "Arms and White Samite" Were Pretty Accurate It Seems

Archeological evidence of medieval battle victims shows the sorts of injuries resulting from the application of medieval arms in the hands of men trained to use them, and unsurprisingly, it's pretty gruesome- and quite effective.

One thing that surprised me in this is some of the seemingly valuable articles that were buried with the dead, either out of an unwillingness to go through the gore to retrieve them, or respect for the dead, or perhaps something else.  At any rate, it's clear to me that Grim did his homework to make the battle scenes in his tale as realistic as possible, as evidenced by the dig in Gotland near Visby, and some other locations, and what was retrieved there.

Ymar’s Post

For Monday.

I have a better idea

Lucianne reports that the Los Angeles teacher's union wants to hold up re-opening the schools until charter schools and police forces are de-funded.  I say let's keep the police and the charter schools, add vouchers, and let the public school do whatever they want.

Another Sweden Orthodoxy

Previously it was “Sweden admits it was wrong.”  Now it’s “don’t call their zero death rate a success.”

The invaluable Mike K

A fellow named Mike K comments at a lot of sites I frequent, including The New Neo and Maggie's Farm.  He also has a blog, A Brief History, and published a terrific memoir of his days in active medical practice, War Stories:  50 Years in Medicine.  He's in his 80s now and, although I keep hoping he'll write another book, perhaps his blog is the best I can reasonably hope for.  Still, his mother lived from 1898 to 2001, declining, he says, only in her last six months, so it's too soon to count him out.  How I wish he would commit more of his memories to print.

I've just picked up an audio version of a book he recommended, My Brother Ron, about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.  The recommendation occurs in his obituary for the author, which describes some of Mike K's own experience with psychotic patients during his residency.

No shock to me

What is a shock is how clueless professional opinionizing are about how regular people react to riots and looting.

Good on Malawi

A determined populace, an honorable military, and a constitutional system peacefully overturn a crooked election in a poor African nation that usually flies under the radar.

How Embarrassing

Thief crashes stolen car into another stolen car.

COVID Rx news

I'm not sure what happened to all those promised chloroquine double-blind trials.  Lately I mostly read arguments from doctors on the front lines that they're liking the results of using chloroquine rather early in a case, though they're unsure whether it's helpful when delayed until symptoms are severe.  Unfortunately, this may not mean much except that a patient sample consisting of people who aren't yet very sick are going to do pretty well for the most part no matter what treatment they get, because only a small minority of patients draw the black bean and get horrifically sick.  You really need careful studies to tease out slight gains in the rate of patients who avoid getting much more ill depending on whether they receive a particular early treatment.  This is how we get widespread stories that melatonin, vitamin C, zinc, etc., are working great, because lots of people took them and didn't die.  Nevertheless, I'd still ask my doctor for immediate chloroquine and a Z-pack if I tested positive or showed symptoms, and would cheerfully take the treatment if he prescribed it, because it shows promise of helping and seems to have an awfully small downside.

Meanwhile, there's perhaps a little good news for the much smaller subset of patients who did draw the black bean and are now seriously ill:  Remdesivir appears to help quite a bit, though it's definitely no magic cure.  Unfortunately the recent good-news study was conducted by Remdesivir's manufacturer, so we have to take it with a grain of salt.