Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has died at age 84. The news reports all mention "COVID complications," as well as the fact that he was fully vaccinated. What's probably more telling is that he was also being treated for multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells that collapses the immune system. The best vaccine in the world won't help someone whose immune system in kaput.
Who's under the thumb
My old hometown newspaper misses the point of objections to mandates. In this OpEd, it argues that "a ban on mandates is still a mandate." I suppose so, if you want to put it that way, but what's wrong with mandates is not just that they're an exercise of power. There's a big difference between a mandate that ties the hands of a government and one that ties the hands of a citizen. The U.S. Constitution is full of mandates that tie the hands of governments, and thank goodness.
No matter how many COVID mandates Gov. Abbott bans, no individual in Texas is any less free to receive all the vaccines he can get his hands on, provided that the FDA doesn't outlaw them and medical staff don't refuse to administer them. The push for COVID mandates can't be contorted into a blow for freedom or autonomy, unless by "freedom and autonomy" one means the freedom of governments to bully their citizens. If someone is breaking no law, the government shouldn't be able to force him to do anything--and we should be careful what laws we pass.
Employers have more discretion, but even they are limited in some of the ways they're entitled to intrude on their employee's religious and medical decisions. In that arena, though, I'm more inclined, first, to prevent the government from leaning on the employer and, second, to let the employees vote with their feet.
Astonishment on a Ride Through Georgia
I went down to the Stone Mountain Scottish Highland Games this weekend. Friday night was warm, and very little autumn color has occurred there though in other years it is often high color by the weekend of the Stone Games. We camped as always; on Saturday morning a squall blew through hard and fast, and by afternoon the weather was cool and clear.
One of the people around our fire Saturday night was a Canadian singer of Irish traditional music named Michael Kelly. He and I went through a whole host of songs, and to my astonishment he and I knew almost none of the same songs. Wild Rover we both knew, but he had never even heard of Dubliners or Clancy Brothers standards like The Old Orange Flute, or Kelly, the Boy from Killane.
Instead, he knew a whole array of songs I've never heard before. It was akin to discovering that there's a second Bible, or a whole set of Tolkien novels you'd never read.
Looking at his YouTube channel I see that we know a few more of the same songs than we happened to come up with by the fireside, but it's still got a number of songs that may be new to you as they are to me. And of course the echoing joy of will be when he discovers the Clancy Brothers, which a singer of Irish traditional songs will love like finding the first Bible.
Denying Last Rites in the name of Security
There’s just been a complete loss of perspective about what really matters.
Not watching the same movie
A CNN political analyst betrays a strange way of thinking about the decisions voters will face in 2022:
[Voters will] look to Virginia to assess the importance of key issues and talking points. Republicans will gauge how effective their culture war agenda is faring. Should they continue railing against vaccine and mask mandates and criticize the way race is taught in schools? Or should they focus on other concerns like inflation and supply chain disruptions to undercut the President and win elections in 2022?
Democrats on the other hand, will assess their core arguments -- namely that the President is normalizing governance and putting forth effective policies to contain the spread of the pandemic. Will this be enough to win the support of voters in swing districts who are crucial to maintaining control of the House in 2022?This fellow looks at a Republican philosophy of autonomy and personal responsibility and mostly sees a culture war combined with a weird "wailing" about what all right-thinking people obviously acknowledge to be core principles of citizenship: forcing vaccinations and masks on the unwilling while shutting down debate about their efficacy and risks. He apparently believes inflation and supply chain disruptions are more like real issues, but in the hands of Republicans, they become mere tools to "undercut" our rightful leader. On the other hand, when Democrats have ideas, they are "core arguments," even if they consist of patent lunacy, like the notion that the President is doing something we could call "normalizing governance" or pursuing "effective policies," or that responsible parents should keep shoveling their tax dollars into a race-baiting public school curriculum, while letting their daughters be raped in bathrooms by boys in skirts, then jailed for complaining about it.
I suspect the power to manipulate even the squishiest of "I just want everyone to act nice" moderates with the argument that President Biden is normalizing government or pursuing effective policies has sputtered out over the last six months. It may sound like a culture war to CNN, and not the good kind, like keyboard-headbutting acronyms for social justice revolution, but voters in 2022 may have let the current powers that be get on their last nerve.
In the meantime, I hope CNN has its finger on the pulse of the Democrat leadership's preferred path to win voters' hearts and minds, and that the path leads to a flame-out you can see from space.
Speaking of space:
I'm no Democrat, apart from being a Democrat
This is about like saying, "I'm no Communist, but I advocate seizing all the means of production by force." True, it's intellectual lunacy, but that doesn't matter, because Trump.
Put the Whole Government on Vacation
"Permanent Emergency Powers"
Australia has hit upon the winning idea of disqualifying legislators over COVID mandates, "giving Labor a majority in both houses of parliament, allowing them to pass proposed permanent emergency powers."
That's Australia. Here in North Carolina, they're about to disqualify Republican-appointed justices on the state supreme court -- NOT over COVID excuses -- in order to overturn a constitutional amendment requiring Voter ID.
We are getting to the point that there's no pretense, only power plays.
No one wants to hear it
Kurt Schlichter looks forward to a GOP primary battle in 2024. He assumes it may be with Mike Pompeo, whom he likes well enough in a (yawn) way, but he'd prefer Trump if his President in Exile can run the right campaign:
Trump has to work out some kinks in his delivery. As Byron York observed, at a recent rally he had the crowd rocking when he was roasting President * over his myriad failures, from the border to Afghanistan to inflation and beyond. Yet, when Trump started going on and on about 2020 in excruciating detail, the rally got off to a flying stop.
The Closer
We watched and enjoyed "The Closer." It's a little startling to see Netflix show some spine about this.
"People can and should disagree with one another, but canceling speech is not an argument."
An Eldritch Tale
Once upon a time there was a college of wizards who strove for light and knowledge. Unbeknownst to them, however, their most trusted body of elders were swayed by love of wealth and power into the service of ancient, dark gods.
For years the college heard dark rumors of graduate students being exploited, forced to work for poverty wages while taking on massive student loans. They heard about students mortgaging their futures to gamble on being one of ten thousand chosen for a tenure-track job. They watched those students work for free for years, producing journal articles for free in the hope of bolstering their chances at one of those rare jobs.
The tenured wizards watched with dismay, too, as most of their students failed and ended up in adjunct or lecturer positions that held no hope of rising to the security or pay they themselves knew. A scant few managed to obtain positions on the tenure track, but even these lucky few sacrificed years more in unpaid service and free labor producing 'peer-reviewed' scholarship in hopes of finally gaining tenure.
All the while, however great their discomfort, the tenured wizardry let the wicked cabal feast upon the blood of the young and the weak. They kept their own safety around them like a cloak, sorrowing for their students but defending their own gain.
And then one day, it turned out that the blood feasts had brought unspeakable power to the wicked circle at the core of the college. That was the day they proved strong enough to feast upon the tenured, too.
Least This Complaint is Real
Our Lieutenant Governor is a pretty cool guy, but he shares the conservative black community’s idea about trans*\gay stuff. Normally attempts to cancel conservatives are spun sugar, but this guy is definitely clear about his thoughts.
“I’m saying this now, and I’ve been saying it, and I don’t care who likes it: Those issues have no place in a school,” Robinson said at Asbury Baptist Church in Seagrove, N.C. “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality — any of that filth.”
This is much harsher than my own opinion about homosexuality at least, but it is the traditional understanding— indeed it would have been an unexceptional thing for a man to say, even a politician, when I was young. Critics say that it now represents an unacceptable proof of discrimination, even hate speech.
He’s an elected official, so you could say that the voters will decide what is acceptable. One might say instead that political officers ought not to hate or discriminate; but I notice that standard is never applied to those who hate conservatives.
I suppose I care a lot more about his robust defense of gun rights than his opinion of sexual minorities. I can see how a gay man might be alarmed, though.
Straw men
As this Washington Examiner article notes, it's hard enough to reach a compromise when you have some idea what your opponent wants:
A 2018 study asked 2,100 adults to identify what they believed about a wide range of political issues and then asked them to estimate what people in the other political party believed about those same issues.
The study found that centrists and those not interested in politics did much better at estimating what the other party believed than politically involved partisans. But while a person’s level of education made no difference when Republicans estimated what Democrats believe, the more time Democrats spent in school, the worse they did at identifying what Republicans believed. Democrats with a high school degree did worse than those without. Democrats with a college degree did worse than high school graduates. And Democrats with a graduate degree did worst of all.
It seems that the longer liberals stay walled off in communities dominated by their own kind, which is exactly what higher education has become, the worse they are at understanding and empathizing with those who hold other views.Censoring all the unclean thoughts comes with a price.
Report on Post-Vaccination Peri/Myocarditis Side Effect
This is a presentation by a cardiology fellow on the issue of pericarditis (inflammation of the pericardial sack around the heart) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart tissue itself) following COVID-19 vaccination.
I've set it to start when he discusses the wider conclusions and implications. The first roughly 10 minutes are a detailed discussion of two patients who suffered these side effect.
TL; DL (too long; didn't listen):
This side effect is mostly seen in male (76%) patients aged 12-29 (57%). Out of 52 million people vaccinated in that age group, there have been 1,226 reports of this side effect. It's not nothing, but it's pretty rare.
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