Kayleigh McEnany - A Perfect Description

"A no-nonsense camp counselor in charge of the problem kids".

Poisonous Spin in the Media Every Day. Today Pew Twists Covid-19 Chart.

The chart shouts out that Republican districts have been by far the safest to ride out Covid-19.  The spin says there has been almost no improvement in Republican districts while Democrat districts have been drops in death.  How awful and how typical.  Every day, this is the diet on offer.  Being a consumer is a dangerous occupation.  To get good information, you must be a hunter gatherer who gets out there and finds their own food.

Hong Kong About To Lose Special Status: Once in a Generation Moment

Pompeo announced that Hong Kong can no longer be considered sufficiently autonomous to have special status different from the rest of China.  This is part of his mandatory report to Congress for May 25th of this year. Next move is with congress.

“This decision gives me no pleasure. But sound policy-making requires a recognition of reality,” Mr. Pompeo said in the statement. “It is now clear that China is modeling Hong Kong after itself.”

Tariff exemptions and travel freedoms may shortly be stopped.  China's financial sector has grown immensely so that the calculus of swallowing up Hong Kong but losing special market access may now look okay to the CCP.

This is a generational change, large elements of world politics and commerce are going to re-align but go better or worse is unknown.

Elvis Worked Hard For Those Hits

I remember Elvis for dozens of hit songs. 

What I didn't realize is that he recorded over 700 songs 

to get those couple dozen.  

Top guys get lucky by working hard.

V Shaped Recovery Coming. BC Parks Re-started On-Line Camping Reservations Monday And Promptly Crashed

Unprecedented demand for BC campsite reservations exploded Monday morning as bookings were re-opened.   The government site opened at 7 a.m. and crashed immediately, yet by noon over 35,000 had gotten through, despite redials, shaky site graphics and a ban on out-of-province tourists.

From the Vancouver Sun story

This looks like a V-shaped economic recover, against all the odds.  It matches Kudlow's hopeful prediction of a Great American Comeback in the States  and a top Obama economist's fearful prediction that the United States will see the "best economic data" in its history.

A Sad Day: Twitter Branch Of The Democrat Party Owns Your Vote

Twitter started censoring the President's tweets.  If you don't like mail-in ballots, you won't be allowed to say so.  Democrat Party 1  Democracy 0.
h/t  theconservativetreehouse.com

Twitter along with Google, Facebook and even Wikipedia exercise government power through narrative control.

Apple Charts How We move: Bus is flat, foot and car is back to normal.

This is the chart behind the stories of Americans on the move again.  Cell phone tracking by Apple shows day and night pulses and dramatic changes that outstrip the partial lifting of lockdowns.  But only in private travel.  Public transit is dead and flat.  Governors holding the OFF button down are fighting a losing battle.

A fun read from Katie Hopkins (and acerbic): What I learned from Coronavirus

Before you read the rest for your entertainment, here are highlights:
1.   People overreact.  It's comforting to know that the most fearful in our society will never need to buy toilet paper again.
2.   The massive overreaction has been horrible to watch.  It's disturbing to learn people you thought you could trust are as mad as the rest of the herd.
3.   Too many people enjoy imposing rules on others.  They enjoy telling you how to ride your bike, how far away you have to stand for their safety and how many times you can walk your dog.
4.    No cost is too much to cover a politician's backside.  Think of those zombie hospitals never used.
5.    Spending more time around family is pleasant.

Erasable History: The Wayback Machine is becoming vulnerable to censorship.

The Wayback Machine is the near ultimate digital record of our past.  A new feature allows judgements to be attached to records, labelled "potential disinformation"..   This distortion is where the camel gets its nose under the tent to disrupt a faithful record.   As Faulkner wrote, "The Past isn't dead.  It isn't even past".

"More and more of humanity’s knowledge is accumulated in massive digital repositories. The danger is not only in the outright loss of stored data as a result of technical malfunctions but also in the greater ability to execute historical revisionism and misrepresenting facts to future generations. Wikipedia – a widely consulted online encyclopedia – is already guilty of this. But, now the Wayback Internet archive is trending down this slippery slope with its recently implemented labeling of snapshot results as potential disinformation."

"Elliot Leavy, warns in an article addressing the changes at the Wayback Machine site, “if we continue to censor the past, attaching intent to some but not to others, we will be unable to evaluate anything at all.”

Covid19: People who are in a state of anxiety are blind

From the former Israeli Health Minister:

“This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers & data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind.”
”Mortality due to coronavirus is a fake number. Most people are not dying from coronavirus…The number of infected people is fake, because it depends on the number of tests.. The only real number is the total # of deaths – all causes of death, not just coronavirus.”
“Every winter we get what is called an excess death rate… Coronvavirus comes very fast, but it also goes away very fast. The flu wave is shallow as it takes 3 months to pass.. CV season, we have had an excess mortality which is about 15% larger than the epidemic of regular flu in 2017”
“Compared to that (15%) rise, the draconian measures are of biblical proportions. Hundreds of millions of people are suffering.. More people will die from the measures than from the virus. And the people who die from the measures are the breadwinners.”

Expanded information is posted at thegatewaypundit and is taken from Dr. Andrew Bostom's retweet of Yoram Lass's interview.

Tour Ancient Rome, Almost Alive.

The four minute animated clip of the heart of ancient Rome is stunning.   The wealth and colour and craft on display I think were real.  The video has people riding and walking about but the throngs are missing and clearly some parts of the city were crowded and stinky.  But the showpiece areas were the wonder of the world and would be so today.   Created by New Historia. 

Why are flowers pretty? They ride first class with us and push our buttons.

Playing twenty questions as kids, we were allowed "animal, vegetable or mineral?"   I was superior to humble plants.  They however are more like us than you may think and represent the most recent and innovative development of a billion years evolution.  They are so advanced in fact that they recruit almost every creature in the animal kingdom to help reproduce.  They craft their lures to attract the hairy bee legs that collect pollen, they add hooks to piggy back on mammalian fur,  tobacco and poppies concoct addictive drugs for homo sapiens, sugars and bright colours capture the attention not just of humming birds but of the crown of creation, our very own humble selves.   All that without wings or legs or a cerebrum.

They immodestly decorate their genitals to be sure that highly-evolved brainy creatures stop by to investigate and help make plant sex successful by transporting DNA.  Perfume, nectar and eye-catching colour are popular  lures.  They are attractive because trial and error has found the buttons that move us. An ivory tower philosopher may wonder if beauty is universal.
The garden variety thinker sees that whatever gives an organism a future (life and progeny) is hardwired to create a pleasurable motivating sensation to seek it out.   The flowering plants skillfully take advantage of this, because they are riding in the same first class coach as us, they know us, and are the product of a school of hard knocks in which they learned a thing or two.
The principle is delegate to others what you don't need to do yourself.

Masks Now Have Politics

From Powerline's Hinderaker:

"Increasingly, wearing and not wearing face masks has become a cultural divide. Those who fear COVID-19, or who want to make the point that the virus is the great issue of our lifetimes, or who want to show support for high-handed politicians who have issued shutdown orders that may or may not be legal, wear masks. Those who are skeptical of any of the above propositions, or doubt whether masks do any good, or simply aren’t very afraid of the virus, generally don’t, unless they have to."

I'm with group two, The Deplorables.

Good Home-Cooked Meals Can Wreck Family Life

How can that be?  A good diet helps people grow taller and mature sexually earlier too.  In past centuries raging hormones didn't get an upper hand until a youngster was well into their teens and had been working as an adult, often for their parents.  It was easier for parents to have control.  Youngsters who engage in sex while going to high school will not be ruled readily.  Centrifugal forces that tend to break up the family or at the very least make it hard to govern, will prevail.

The Chess Game, Anguissola 1555
He painted his sisters. The charming
young adult on the left is flat chested.

Over the past century the age at menarche [first menstruation] has fallen in industrialized countries, but that trend has stopped and may even be reversing. The average age at menarche in 1840 was 16.5 years, now it is 13.

In seventeenth century Austria, the well-fed upper classes had children well ahead of the country folk.

According to Shorter's research, by the 17th century — the end of the Renaissance era — the average age of first period had risen to 16. Shorter attributes this to widespread malnutrition in the era; Renaissance girls who were underfed typically went into a state of delayed puberty. He also notes a class divide among the age of first period, quoting an anonymous Austrian author in 1610 who claimed that, "The peasant girls of this Country in general menstruate much later than the daughters of the townsfolk or the aristocracy...The townsfolk have usually born several children before the peasant girls have yet menstruated."

Menarche trending in Norway

It's complicated, however.  There's evidence that before the crowded city times of the industrial revolution, menarche was at an earlier age.  Also, puberty is a larger event over quite a few years and the one can be early while the other may take years to complete.  Lastly, menarche is easier to report about because young men producing viable sperm don't have an easy to detect event.

Be Yourself. Everyone Else Is Already Taken.

Good advice!  It was hard to apply before my hair turned grey, before raising a family and the shocks of running a small business.   "Everyone else is already taken" is inescapably obvious and true.

"When you're young, you think everyone is thinking about you"
"As you get older, you don't care what they think."
"Older still, you realize they weren't thinking about you in the first place".

Government bills stuffed with freeloaders

Nurture your nature

Same genetics, different nurture.
Well-tended petunias don't sprout wings or add cerebellum but their nature responds to their nurture.

Texas (R) & Florida (R) versus California (D) and New York (D):

This chart makes it clear I want to live in Texas or Florida in Wuhan flu times.  I'm safer from the flu, able to dine out, get a haircut, and financially sound to boot.  The Texas governor retweeted the numbers:

President just made a joke about journalists. Queue outrage.

President Trump just finished a White House lawn presser and made a joke.
Asked if he'd attend the SpaceX launch of astronauts next week he said:

I'm thinking of going to the rocket launch next week.
I hope you're all going to join me.
I'd like to put you in the rocket and get rid of you for a while.

And with that and a grin, he ended the media scrum.
Expect headlines that Trump wants to end the free press, that Trump is an tyrannic authoritarian. Don't expect observations about crowding him and rephrasing gotcha questions in hope of hurting his re-election chances.

It must be tough to be Press Corps Karens who can't call the manager to complain.  They are already talking to the manager.

Behind Obama's Puzzling Warning About Flynn

Why did outgoing President Trump make it a priority to warn incoming President Trump against hiring General Flynn to be National Security Advisor?     

Trump told aide Hope Hicks that he was bewildered by the president’s warning. Of all the important things Obama could have discussed with him, the outgoing commander in chief wanted to talk about Michael Flynn.    Obviously, Barack Obama revealed his great hatred for General Flynn to President Trump during their first private meeting.    (snip)
Flynn not only made it clear that he wanted to undo the Iran Deal, he also broadcast his determination to find the documents detailing the secret deals between Obama and Iran, and to publicize them.

Flynn would undo Obama's legacy move and publicize secret deals with Iran.  How cynical is that?