Thursday, April 30, 2020
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Stay Home - or Protest! - and Read This! A Coronavirus Reading Sampler (April 29, 2020)
We are offering our top 10 selections, probably daily, of the best (most interesting, weirdest) articles and podcasts on COVID-19 and American policy responses.
Overall our reading leads us to think there ARE and SHOULD BE "libertarians in a pandemic," and that indeed non-libertarian policies are what make responses to the pandemic inadequate.
If we were religious we'd wonder if coronavirus were a biblical plague sent to punish the kind of people who are wishing death and disease on peaceful protesters asking for freedom of assembly and the right to earn a living. The hard hit areas do seem to be full of such people, perhaps in part because they were fans of government mass transit, which seems to be a vector for infection.
1) PornHub creates website on how to wash your hands. (WeAreSocialMedia)
3) Hydroxychloroquine death may be homicide. (FreeBeacon)
4) Poorer, unbanked people are having trouble getting coronavirus stimulus checks. (ProPublica)
5) The Supreme Court begins streaming proceedings as a socially distanced alternative to allowing people into its gallery. (reason)
6) Taxpayers filing jointly with immigrant spouses having trouble getting stimulus funds. (Common Dreams)
7) A major strike of delivery people is planned for May 1. (The Intercept)
9) Media ignore New York state's policy that infected nursing home residents. (The Federalist)
10) Who is more foolish, President Trump or the media covering his press conferences? (National Review)
Judge Jim Gray on The Six Groups Who Benefit From Drug Prohibition
Judge Jim Gray, the 2012 Libertarian Party Vice Presidential candidate, has announced that he will pursue the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination at their nominating convention next month.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Stay Home - or Protest! - and Read This! A Coronavirus Reading Sampler (April 28, 2020)
We are offering our top 10 selections, probably daily, of the best (most interesting, weirdest) articles and podcasts on COVID-19 and American policy responses.
Overall our reading leads us to think there ARE and SHOULD BE "libertarians in a pandemic," and that indeed non-libertarian policies are what make responses to the pandemic inadequate.
If we were religious we'd wonder if coronavirus were a biblical plague sent to punish the kind of people who are wishing death and disease on peaceful protesters asking for freedom of assembly and the right to earn a living. The hard hit areas do seem to be full of such people, perhaps in part because they were fans of government mass transit, which seems to be a vector for infection.
1) Governor Cuomo's Department of Health deliberately mandated a policy that infected nursing homes and killed the elderly. (New York Post)
2) Commercial real estate industry leaders praise the federal government's handling of coronavirus (...but do they also get bailed out?) (Commercial Observer)
3) Many, if not most, public school students are truant from tele-teaching. (Education Week)
4) The shutdown is wiping out annual dinners and other fundraising methods for LGBT non-profts. (Vice)
5) More Democrats than Republicans are coronavirus positive. (Forbes)
6) YouTube announces intention to censor any video that is not "substantiated" (by whom?) or that contradicts the World Health Organization. (BBC)
7) The 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic did not require a shutdown. (National Review)
8) Another local data set suggests COVID-19 infection rates are far higher and mortality rates far lower than official models suggested. (reason)
9) States begin re-opening. (Ballotpedia)
10) Government PR has made the population paranoid beyond the facts. (The Spectator)
Mrs. America
A new star-studded — 17 stars, including Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Tracy Ullman, Elizabeth Banks, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Margo Martindale, Niecy Nash, James Marsden — streaming series about Phyllis Schlafly and her successful campaign to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, was released on FX on Hulu this month. As it did in 2017 with its earlier signature (and feminist) series The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu released the first 3 episodes on one day as a 3 part premier.
The series accurately presents Schlafly as a frustrated foreign policy expert who shifts to organizing around women’s issues when she is passed over by other Republicans working on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. However, according to Schlafly’s chief academic biographer, Donald Critchlow, many of the other scenes and vignettes in the series are pure fiction.
Mrs. America was created by Dahvi Waller, who studied history as an undergraduate at Princeton and then worked on several popular, critically acclaimed, and/or award winning TV shows including Desperate Housewives and Mad Men. Waller credits her interest in the project with her childhood family dinners, a kind of pre-SiriusXM Alter family politics where political campaigns replaced sports as the topic of conversation. Her father, Professor Harold Waller, who recently retired from teaching political science at Canada’s McGill University, gave a campus publication a going-away interview where he defined his political commitments as centrist. Ms. Waller is quoted in the Daily Beast on part of her interest in Schlafly: “…I would argue that we need to understand what her appeal was to so many women and why so many women were willing to go to legislatures and bake bread and go to the Republican Convention and fight to take it over to help us do a better job at moving forward… I think if we don’t understand her appeal and how she tapped into anxiety among a fairly large group of women, we won’t really understand how to get through to those women today.” “Us,” “we” and “them” — “those women.” (How did “they” manage to beat Hillary?)
Waller told Esquire she was aiming for complexity and nuance as a way to understand “those women” — but she’s also noted that her “middle way” “centrist” presentation of the women campaigning for and against the Equal Rights Amendment is good publicity for the series as it stirs up more buzz, as both conservatives and feminists complain about how they are portrayed.
She actually achieves more complexity and nuance than I thought this limited series might have before I watched the first three episodes released April 15. But a lot of the “nuance” is just emphasizing how Waller thinks Phyllis Schlafly (played by Blanchett), while being a political tactician of the first order — she figured out how to get women who were busy being full-time mothers to leave home and be political activists — was allegedly also a victim of sexism, including a supposedly handsy and adulterous Congressman Phil Crane (played by Marsden). In Waller’s telling Schlafly is really a more opportunistic Jeanne Kirkpatrick, just a few years too early and a credential or two short, an expert on foreign policy whose fellow Goldwaterites never give her enough credit or attention — or campaign funding — until she makes women’s and family life issues — and organizing and turning out the vote of female “deplorables” — her wheelhouse. The complexity is noticing that there were black people and white racists in American history. Waller’s version of history draws a parallel between Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and other white feminists selling out blacks like Presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, in order to try to gain power in the Democratic Party establishment (feel the Bern!), and Schlafly allegedly overlooking blatant racism from some of the southern (of course) chapter leaders of STOP ERA in order to build a national organization.
Like a lot of FX fare (and premium cable generally) Mrs. America is what Waller describes as “an immersive period drama,” and it derives much of its allure from tapping into nostalgia for the costumes and above all the superior soundtracks of previous decades. The FX hit Pose does this by mining Motown, disco, and Madonna. Mrs. America does it by tapping the R&B, female singer songwriters, and anti-war folk rock of the 60s and 70s.
In Pose though, only one “side” is being presented, that of transgender, transsexual, and gay people, mainly black and Latino, battling the AIDS crisis.
In Mrs. America there are two sides: the feminists, proponents of legalizing abortion and passing the ERA — Bella Abzug (Martindale), Betty Freidan (Ullman), and Gloria Steinem (Byrne) — and the anti-feminists, Phyllis Schlafly and her supporters who believe passing the ERA would mandate that women be conscripted into the military, the ending of dower rights and other rights of married women during a divorce, and the imposition of single sex bathrooms.
The opening credits of Mrs. America feature drawings of cool 70s stereotypes, women and men sporting miniskirts, platform shoes, bell bottom pants, Afros, psychedelic colors. The attractive images of the feminist side.
There is no parallel attractive imagery for the anti-feminist side in the opening credits. And in the episodes there are no loving and beautiful children and families, just kids underfoot making demands and elderly parents living in squalor.
The musical score for Mrs. America is all 60s and 70s music about peace and love. The best of that music.
There is no music for the anti-feminist side whatever that might be (patriotic, liturgical, classical, country western). You wait until episode 3 to get an ironical presentation of Anita Bryant’s 1973 recording of suffragette and abolitionst Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
The introductory scene of Mrs. America is Cate Blanchett in a stars and stripes bikini portraying Schlafly walking on a runway for a fundraiser for her fellow Goldwaterite, the late Illinois GOP Congressman Phil Crane. This is one of many, usually salacious and/or degrading scenes in Mrs. America that Schlafly’s chief biographer says are completely fabricated.
But there is no scene of Gloria Steinem going undercover, as a young eager journalist, as a Playboy bunny.
Congressman Crane is portrayed as handsy with Schlafly. But a young Gary Hart appears in episode 3, portrayed as manipulative and a backstabber, but none of the men interacting with the feminists seem to have any of the issues later to emerge about the Kennedys, Clintons, Weiners, or Joe Biden.
Phyllis Schlafly, with a career as a political organizer, lecturer, and author and the mother of 6 children, is shown submitting, while sweaty and exhausted, after a one day trip to Washington, D.C. and back, to the sexual demands of the husband who supports her financially.
Gloria Steinem has sex with her hot young African American lover in hotel rooms with a minibar and room and maid service.
It’s a pretty show.
But in the structure of the debate inside its own dramatic narrative, it isn’t exactly showing a respect for equality.
Monday, April 27, 2020
Stay Home - or Protest! - and Read This! A Coronavirus Reading Sampler (April 27, 2020)
We are offering our top 10 selections, probably daily, of the best (most interesting, weirdest) articles and podcasts on COVID-19 and American policy responses.
Overall our reading leads us to think there ARE and SHOULD BE "libertarians in a pandemic," and that indeed non-libertarian policies are what make responses to the pandemic inadequate.
If we were religious we'd wonder if coronavirus were a biblical plague sent to punish the kind of people who are wishing death and disease on peaceful protesters asking for freedom of assembly and the right to earn a living. The hard hit areas do seem to be full of such people, perhaps in part because they were fans of government mass transit, which seems to be a vector for infection.
2) High school seniors are planning on skipping or delaying going to college if it means online classes only. (Education Week)
3) Mayors begin defying Governors and re-opening local economies. (Washington Examiner)
4) Shutdowns have had no effect on infection and mortality rates. (Wall Street Journal)
5) Shutdown exacerbates opioid crisis. (New York Post)
6) Mainstream media/tech giants call for censoring internet during pandemic...and after. (Caitlin Johnstone)
7) Facebook will begin "nudging" people who promote or agree with coronavirus stories critical of official government propaganda. (CNBC)
9) The conquest of the United States by the Communist Chinese Party. (American Institute of Economic Research)
10) Recycling industries ask for $1 billion in shutdown bailout. (The Intercept)
Sunday, April 26, 2020
Stay Home - or Protest! - and Read This! A Coronavirus Reading Sampler (April 25-26, 2020 Weekend Edition)
We are offering our top 10 selections, probably daily, of the best (most interesting, weirdest) articles and podcasts on COVID-19 and American policy responses.
Overall our reading leads us to think there ARE and SHOULD BE "libertarians in a pandemic," and that indeed non-libertarian policies are what make responses to the pandemic inadequate.
If we were religious we'd wonder if coronavirus were a biblical plague sent to punish the kind of people who are wishing death and disease on peaceful protesters asking for freedom of assembly and the right to earn a living. The hard hit areas do seem to be full of such people, perhaps in part because they were fans of government mass transit, which seems to be a vector for infection.
1) Urgent care doctors who have collected data from thousands of coronavirus tests call for ending lockdown. (American Institute for Economic Research)
2) Governor Cuomo forced nursing homes to accept coronavirus infected residents; now New York has the highest mortality rates. (NBC News)
3) Many New York residents have already had coronavirus with no symptoms. (Times Union)
4) People without income because of the lockdown plan a rent strike for May; leftist journalists laud them and assume they are not the same people at Re-Open protests. (The Intercept)
5) The lockdown may have tripled suicide rates. (The Hill)
6) The lockdown has flattened not the curve, but the U.S. healthcare economy. (The Federalist)
7) States with no lockdown have no higher rates of infection or mortality than locked down states. (Spiked)
8) Another state caught faking coronavirus statistics. (Daily Wire)
9) The lockdown will accelerate Social Security insolvency. (reason)
10) A lockdown for thee but not for me: a Democratic bundler, a D.C. city councilperson, and a CNN producer have a dinner party in Georgetown. (DCist/WAMU)
Overall our reading leads us to think there ARE and SHOULD BE "libertarians in a pandemic," and that indeed non-libertarian policies are what make responses to the pandemic inadequate.
If we were religious we'd wonder if coronavirus were a biblical plague sent to punish the kind of people who are wishing death and disease on peaceful protesters asking for freedom of assembly and the right to earn a living. The hard hit areas do seem to be full of such people, perhaps in part because they were fans of government mass transit, which seems to be a vector for infection.
1) Urgent care doctors who have collected data from thousands of coronavirus tests call for ending lockdown. (American Institute for Economic Research)
2) Governor Cuomo forced nursing homes to accept coronavirus infected residents; now New York has the highest mortality rates. (NBC News)
3) Many New York residents have already had coronavirus with no symptoms. (Times Union)
4) People without income because of the lockdown plan a rent strike for May; leftist journalists laud them and assume they are not the same people at Re-Open protests. (The Intercept)
5) The lockdown may have tripled suicide rates. (The Hill)
7) States with no lockdown have no higher rates of infection or mortality than locked down states. (Spiked)
9) The lockdown will accelerate Social Security insolvency. (reason)
10) A lockdown for thee but not for me: a Democratic bundler, a D.C. city councilperson, and a CNN producer have a dinner party in Georgetown. (DCist/WAMU)
Dr. Erickson COVID-19 Briefing: Censored?
On the evening of April 27, this video was removed by YouTube, which has announced it will censor coronavirus topics it considers "medically unsubstantiated" or critical of the World Health Organization.
The doctors may be able to repost their description of the statistics they have collected on coronavirus infection and mortality rates on Vimeo or other platforms. The video also exists on YouTube in other locations, both in smaller clips and in a full version.
So it remains unclear what YouTube intended,
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Libertarians Against Pornography
"Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!"
Another famous ginger, libertarian William Weld (no?) seated on stage clapping while President Reagan commends Attorney General Meese on his efforts to outlaw pornography. About midway into the new Netflix documentary Circus of Books.
Circus is itself a curious documentary about one of our last "pandemics," and the morass of bad policies and political spin that left more people dying than should have. The Mason's, a middle class, college educated, heterosexual couple buy a gay bookstore with a large "adults only" section in Los Angeles, and raise three children off the profitable enterprise.
Curiously all their employees and customers begin to die from AIDS, acquired from the the types of Bacchanalian activities celebrated in the books and movies they sell. Just in time to fund their childrens' college tuitions they engage in a little vertical integration, and begin to produce the gay porn films they had previously only sold.
Friday, April 24, 2020
What we saw at the Vulgar, Violent, Anti-Social Re-Open Protests
This...is CNN
Violent protesters attempt to burn down Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's official residence in Richmond.
Racist protesters in Lansing, Michigan beat a Chinese American University of Michigan student for being a carrier of the Wuhan red death virus.
Annapolis Re-Open protesters burn Governor Larry Hogan's official limousine.
Violent protesters attempt to burn down Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's official residence in Richmond.
Racist protesters in Lansing, Michigan beat a Chinese American University of Michigan student for being a carrier of the Wuhan red death virus.
Annapolis Re-Open protesters burn Governor Larry Hogan's official limousine.
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| Republican women follow Trump's medical advice and attempt to cure coronavirus by exposing themselves to sunlight. |
R 
Stay Home - or Protest! - and Read This! A Coronavirus Reading Sampler (April 24, 2020)
of the best (most interesting, weirdest) articles and
podcasts on COVID-19 and American policy responses.
Overall our reading leads us to think there ARE and
SHOULD BE "libertarians in a pandemic," and that
indeed non-libertarian policies are what make
responses to the pandemic inadequate.
SHOULD BE "libertarians in a pandemic," and that
indeed non-libertarian policies are what make
responses to the pandemic inadequate.
wishing death and disease on peaceful protesters, since
they all live in jurisdictions with mass transit,
which seems to be a vector for infection.
2) California violates rights to free speech and assembly on public streets, parks and properties. (DailyWire)
3) Will coronavirus be like the 2003 SARS pandemic? (New Yorker)
4) The political economy of hydroxychloroquine. (Patrick Howley)
5) The same elites who brought you the Iraq War and Russiagate now want to respond to the coronavirus. (The Federalist)
6) How the CDC botched coronavirus testing in the U.S., a country where anyone can go to their local drugstore chain minute clinic and get a TB test. (MIT Technology Review)
7) Why Democrats want to bail out Blue States: the economic lockdown is busting posh, underfunded government pension system. (reason)
8) Falling tax revenues from lockdown may bankrupt big spending states with public sector pension liabilities. (Bloomberg)
10) Is America's judicial system vigorous enough to protect us against encroaching planned-demic Stalinism? (LewRockwell)
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