And I don’t even like cats. But this is cute and very soothing:
That business the cat is doing with its front paws before it lies down is called “kneading.” Why do they do it? This is supposedly why, and it’s as good an explanation as any, although the cats aren’t telling:
And they don’t like it one little bit.
Two can play at the “pen and phone” game, says Trump, who is tired of the Democrats holding out for their leftist wish list before they will help Americans suffering during lockdowns. And so he decided it was time for some executive orders such as these:
1. Create a payroll tax holiday for Americans earning less than $100,000 annually. The executive order will be retroactive to August 1 and end on December 31, putting more money in employees’ pockets.
2. Continue enhanced unemployment benefits at $400 per week, which is $200 less than the Democrats were demanding, which Trump alleges (probably correctly) makes going back to work more attractive.
3. Extend the eviction moratorium on federal subsidized housing.
4. Suspend student loan payments.
Democrats can sue, of course. But remember DACA, and how that went? Obama couldn’t do it, but then he did. And ultimately, the courts not only upheld his right to do so, but stopped Trump from undoing it. And the Democrats cheered.
Funny thing, they’re not cheering now, because this puts them in a bind. Not only does it demonstrate their flagrant hypocrisy – which has been amply demonstrated before, and their supporters don’t care – but it makes them out to be the meanies standing in the way of Americans getting relief. And the election is in three months.
Between a rock and a hard place:
Look, I get it. I’d be lying if I said I thought that this end run was kosher. But neither was DACA and look what happened when Trump exercised his absolute legal authority to end it. With America’s cities going up in flames and Bolshevik Revolution 2: BLM/Antifa Boogaloo a red nether hair’s breadth from wiping us out for good, should we be sticklers for following rules that the other side never does?
Or perhaps I’m over analyzing this whole thing. As I said, from a political standpoint, it was brilliance. Trump read Alinsky’s damn book and played this perfectly. Look at what the Democrats are being forced to do – oppose a program giving money to average citizens who are hurting because of Democrat-imposed lockdowns and shutdowns. Cutting off the people from Uncle Sugar does not go down well with the public, especially less than 90 days from an election.
I have often thought that one mistake Democrats make is to believe their own propaganda, in this case their continual assertion that Trump is stupid. It’s fine for them to tell the peons that, but do Pelosi and company believe it? After all this time, they really shouldn’t. But he’s smart in a way they continually fail to anticipate.
Of course, I don’t make a similar mistake and think that they are actually dumb. Sometimes they make dumb moves (as does Trump at times). But the Democrats and the left didn’t get where they are by being dumb in the tactical sense much of the time. However, they are dumb if they think Trump is dumb, if you know what I mean.
One of the reasons Democrats can afford to be dumb more often than Republicans can, though, is that the Democrats have all the institutions – and especially the press – fully on their side. That advantage can make up for a lot of dumbness.
There’s only a slight and completely unconvincing pretense of protest this time. This was about opportunistic criminality [emphasis mine]:
Hundreds of looters and vandals descended on downtown Chicago early Monday following a police shooting on the city’s South Side, smashing the windows of dozens of businesses and making off with merchandise, cash machines and anything else they could carry, police said.
Hours earlier, police shot a man after he opened fire on officers Sunday afternoon — an incident that apparently prompted a social media post urging looters to converge on the business district, Police Superintendent David Brown told a news conference.
Some 400 additional officers were dispatched to the area after the department spotted the post…13 officers were injured, including one who was struck in the head with a bottle…
Notice that there isn’t even a hint that this was an innocent man shot by the police. It doesn’t matter to the rioters/looters/anarchists anymore – as if it ever did. Note also that social media is an effective way to quickly organize looting as a group activity. In addition, note that the looters assembled not in their own neighborhoods, but where the pickings were best. And additionally, note that the same social media that allowed the looters to organize also gave warning to police (those who are still funded, anyway) on where to go to arrest the looters.
Oh, and ABC – whose article that is – actually straight up calls the looters and vandals “looters and vandals.” Why? Well, because the Democrat/leftist powers-that-be in the city of Chicago were unequivocally saying pretty much the same thing, so ABC had permission:
Mayor Lori Lightfoot agreed that the melee had nothing to do with a protest. “This was straight-up felony criminal conduct,” she said. “This was an assault on our city.”
Social media was also used to fake an additional motive, making it up out of the whole cloth:
Further ratcheting up the tensions in the city was a video that circulated on Facebook hours before the looting that falsely claimed that Chicago police had shot and killed a 15-year-old boy. Posted at 6:30 p.m. Sunday, the video shows upset residents confronting officers near the scene where officers shot and wounded an adult suspect who they said had fired at them that day. By Monday morning, it had been watched nearly 100,000 times.
I thought Facebook was suppressing fake claims – or is that just for doctors opining about the advantages of hydroxychloroquine?
The ABC article also quotes David Brown, Chicago’s police superintendent, as saying this:
Witnesses to the looting described a scene that bore a striking resemblance to the unrest that unfolded when protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis devolved into chaos. Brown suggested that the lenient treatment of people arrested then played a role in what happened Monday.
“Not many of those cases were prosecuted to the full extent,” he said. “These looters, these thieves, these criminals being emboldened by (the lack of) consequences … emboldened to do more.”
At the same news conference, Lightfoot addressed the looters directly, telling them that police had collected a lot of surveillance video and other evidence that will be used to arrest and prosecute as many as possible.
“We saw you, and we will come after you,” she warned.
I haven’t followed Chicago quite as closely as other cities, but my impression is that authorities there haven’t been quite as lenient on rioters as in places like Portland and Seattle, even prior to this. Still, this seems like a shift to even more of a focus on law-on-order – not just on Lightfoot’s part, but in terms of media coverage.
Has the left finally gotten word that anarchy and lawlessness, plus calls to defund police, don’t make a great combination as far as the majority of the American people are concerned? So, time to change tune?
From commenter “Artfldgr”, concerning the post-Floyd rioting:
Let me explain how this is DESIGNED – and I believe with outside help from other states think tanks… ie. experts who have had decades of experience in this are designing and informing and training the INSURGENTS and REVOLUTIONARIES, telling them what to do and what not to do within…
The protests are very well thought out, even to their request. The core of this is that their request is something that cant be granted. ie. the removal of police. You remove the police, and they will not go quietly into that good night they will go bat crap crazy and the full revolution is on… but if you don’t, they have a never-ending excuse to keep doing this endlessly… which is the point of asking or requesting something that cant be granted.
Its tactical… its not about the actual validity of any request, but about how the request appears such, so that useful idiots join and provide cover and more. Without the larger idiot crowd, the insurgents would be rounded up in an hour, charged and over. So all this has a point and purpose tactically and has been well thought out and planned as in a think tank. Umbrellas are against pepper spray and the ability to see if a weapon is drawn, or other things. The weapons are limited in such a way so that the whole of it isn’t shut down as it would be if four protestors drew hand guns and shot at police from behind umbrellas…. (for a place in which guns are easily available, and crossbows, and wrist rocket sling shots are even easier to get… the rioters are policing their own to prevent those from appearing!!)
The idea here is NOT to achieve the stated goal, but to wear the opposition down, demoralize, and to create what Stalin referred to as ‘normalization”… which is really acclimation…
I agree that these demonstrations are planned, and their participants have been trained. The cities chosen are obviously leftist ones, because a city run by the right would shut them down immediately. If there’s a will, there’s a way. In a leftist city there’s no such will.
Portland in particular is a leftist city, and one that’s been the Antifa headquarters (at least, the visible one) of the US for several years. Therefore it’s tailor-made for the approach described above. Some of the targeted cities have started to defund the police, but have pulled back or delayed, for obvious reasons. The bulk of the citizenry of even a deep blue city will miss the police when they’re gone.
A former prosecutor has his say. His view accords pretty much with mine, but I think such a viewpoint is almost inevitable for anyone who looks at the transcript and combines it with the full video, and keeps an open mind.
I don’t see the basic narrative changing, however. For most people, the propaganda wins out.
I’m talking about the “trash” folder on the blog. I don’t usually check it because it’s ordinarily full of spam. But every now and then it traps quite a few real comments. That’s been happening now for a couple of weeks, but I just discovered it. So, if your comments suddenly start disappearing, please let me know.
The algorithm that makes the decision seems to have a dislike for anything by Solzhenitsyn. It always dislikes comments with a lot of links, but that’s always been the case.
[Hat tip: commenter “Molly Brown.”]
In this article from about a year ago, David Gelernter expresses doubts about Darwin’s theory of how species originate. He’s hardly the only one. It’s been a puzzlement for a long time, the sticking point in what Gelernter calls a “beautiful” theory. He’s not too keen on intelligent design, either.
I’ve followed the Darwin question somewhat over the years, and discussions get very technical very quickly. Therefore I don’t have much of an opinion, except this one:
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
[NOTE: If the name “Gelernter” seems familiar to you, one reason may be that he was one of the Unibomber’s victims. Gelernter survived, minus a right hand and with a damaged right eye. Gelernter is also a political conservative. Interesting guy.]
According to [Dr. Bhattacharya’s] assessment, a vaccine is an open-ended question. None of the other coronaviruses that infect humans have one and there is no guarantee this one will.
Technically true but also somewhat misleading.
Because COVID is related to the coronaviruses causing SARS and MERS, it’s often pointed out that we never developed a vaccine for either, despite efforts. But there were differences in those diseases compared to COVID which hampered the vaccine efforts:
In the case of MERS, it is likely that the vaccine development was delayed because of the scarcity of suitable and cost-effective small animal models during pre-clinical experimentation. In addition, it is probable that a vaccine has not been delivered because of the low interest in investing in a vaccine for a disease that has produced relatively low and geographically centralized cases (compared with other more global and persistent infectious diseases such as influenza, HIV and tuberculosis). This last factor might have also contributed to the lack of a vaccine for SARS, in the sense that it was considered pointless to continue investing in a vaccine for a disease whose cases ceased to be reported in 2004.
In other words, for SARS and MERS the creation of a vaccine ceased being of commercial interest rather quickly. Vaccine development is expensive, and if there’s no economic incentive there’s no motive to go forward to the end point of an actual working vaccine.
The article I just quoted was published in late April, when the COVID pandemic was probably at its height. It goes on to mention several things that were learned in the course of the initial quest for SARS and MERS vaccines, things that will help in the quest for a COVID vaccine.
Another argument I often see made against the development of a COVID vaccine is that the common cold is a coronavirus and we have no vaccine against the common cold. However, the common cold is not primarily a coronavirus, although it certainly can be. Common colds are more often caused by rhinoviruses, and a wide variety of viruses are implicated. Here’s some information about that:
Vaccines target a specific virus or pathogen. One difficulty with developing a vaccine for the common cold is there are at least 200 different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, including rhinovirus, coronavirus, adenoviruses, and parainfluenza.
Rhinovirus makes up about 75% of colds. Still, there are more than 150 strains of it circulating at the same time.
At this time, there is currently no way for one vaccine to protect against all possible strains that can cause the common cold…
However, colds are self-limiting, meaning they go away on their own typically within about a week. Although they are a nuisance and affect everyone, they generally don’t cause serious problems for people that impact their lives long-term.
That may not change your desire for a common cold vaccine, but more than public demand must be considered when weighing vaccine development decisions.
Vaccine research is costly and takes a long time, so those dollars and hours are often allocated to creating vaccines and medications to treat and prevent illnesses that have a more serious impact on people’s lives and health.
So that’s the story – too many viruses would have to be covered by the vaccine, and common colds are mainly considered an annoyance factor compared to more deadly illnesses – although colds do cause a lot of misery.
COVID, on the other hand, still is prevalent enough and deadly enough to justify the search for a vaccine. Of course, there’s no guarantee that an effective and safe one will be developed, but I’ve not seen anything that convinces me it’s especially unlikely. What I have seen are a number of articles damping down expectations. Here’s a typical one.
So yes, there may be glitches along the way. And yes, a vaccine may not confer complete immunity against COVID. And yes, there may be logistical problems with the vaccine’s distribution. But I think one is likely to be developed, and I think it’s likely to improve the situation.
Never let it be said that the state of New Hampshire is behind the times. For example:
…[NH] House Bill 1182…makes it legal to register a flying car—or, as the ‘Shire deems it, a “roadable aircraft”—in the Granite State. Which wasn’t the case before, no matter what your cousin Denny did with his Chevelle on that wicked whoop on the road to Laconia. Like he told you, the flying’s easy. It’s the landing that’s the hard part…
There are so many choices in the flying-car market these days, it’s hard to decide which one to buy. Like, there’s Terrafugia, and Samson Sky, and that Dutch one. We’d say just get whichever flying car is different from your neighbors’, because you don’t want to see yourself coming and going at the local municipal airport.
That’s where you’ll need to take off and land, because the supposedly cool New Hampshire congresspeople are real sticks in the mud about using I-95 as a runway—although, we can all agree, flying your car up to 5000 feet would be a great way to avoid the Hampton tolls.
On the road, though, the vehicles must obey the usual rules. And the governor has signed the bill into law, so the way is cleared for these things to really – take off.
I’ve written about Coleman Hughes before. He’s a young man with a good mind, and I often agree with about 97% of what he has to say (he has an antipathy to Trump, however, which I’ve written about here).
Hughes is a changer of sorts, from left to libertarian, which makes him somewhat conservative at present. Here’s his explanation of his political change, which for obvious reasons I find of particular interest:
Here’s the whole thing. Worth a watch if you have a bit more time:
I don’t think so, though.
He says they all think alike.
Well, at least he didn’t say they all look alike.
Here’s the quote: “Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things.” And then, when his campaign aides tried to say he didn’t quite mean it that way, he repeated it: “Now when I mean full diversity [of the Latino community], unlike African American community, many other communities, you’re from everywhere.”
Of course, there’s some truth to the statement not in the ethnic sense but in the political sense. Black people vote almost entirely as a bloc for Democrats (often 90% and above), and Hispanics have slightly more variable voting habits (about 2/3 voting for Democrats ordinarily).
Word must have gotten to Biden – or more likely to his handlers – that the MSM firewall that protects him from having the public learn what a doofus he is has been breached. So he – and his handlers – had to issue a correction that was called a clarification:
Earlier today, I made some comments about diversity in the African American and Latino communities that I want to clarify. In no way did I mean to suggest the African American community is a monolith—not by identity, not on issues, not at all.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 7, 2020
In other words, “I said the opposite of what I meant.”