URLs du Jour

2021-11-17

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  • What would Bastiat say? He would know exactly what's going on here, as reported by the WSJ editorialists: Ganging Up on Moderna.

    Barack Obama captured the view of modern progressives with his famous line about successful businesses: “You didn’t build that.” Now Democrats are claiming that Moderna didn’t invent its enormously successful Covid vaccine—the National Institutes of Health (NIH) did.

    Several media outlets reported last week that Moderna is refusing to give NIH researchers credit for patents that were supposedly key to its Covid vaccine. The charge is that Moderna is profiting from government innovation. This misinformation is being used to promote the narrative that drug makers owe their success to the government.

    Click through (it is allegedly a free link) for the sad story.

    In related news: got my Moderna booster on Sunday. (I am solidly in the "65+" age group.) I wasn't worth 2¢ for most of Monday, due to "flu-like symptoms". But was OK again on Tuesday. Relax, libertarians, I'm pro-vaccine, but anti-mandate. And anti-government bullying of a company that has saved, is probably saving, and will save, millions of lives.


  • Climb off your partisan ledges. Kevin D. Williamson tells you the story, so you can knock off your whining: Gerrymandering Is Normal.

    When I was young and ignorant, I had the same dumb opinion about gerrymandering as almost everybody else does: I was shocked by it. The process was politicized, and I was scandalized. As a veteran state legislator in Texas explained it to me, redistricting isn’t politicized — it is political per se, “the most political thing a legislature does,” as he put it. It does not have to be politicized because it is political by nature, and to “depoliticize” it, as some self-serving Democrats and a few callow idealists suggest, would be to change its nature and its character. The Democrats who lecture us about the will of the people would, in this matter, deprive the people’s elected representatives of one of their natural powers.

    The gerrymander — like the filibuster, the earmark, the debt ceiling, and other procedural instruments of power — is something that people complain about only when it is being used against them. The Democrats were perfectly happy with gerrymandering for the better part of 200 years, understanding it to be an utterly normal part of the political process. They began to object to it when Republicans got good at it. And, in a refreshing bit of candor, their argument against partisan redistricting is that Republicans are too good at it.

    As previously noted, the GOP redistricting proposal in New Hampshire puts me in the state's Second Congressional District, and most say that would make it (more) safely Democratic. Which might cause a few more moans from me in the future.


  • What's wrong with Yale Law? First they try to bully a student into apologizing for wording a party invitation in a way some disliked. Now, as reported in the Yale Daily News: Two students sue Yale Law administrators for alleged retaliation in Amy Chua case.

    Two unnamed Yale Law School students filed a complaint Monday against three Law School administrators and the University for allegedly “blackball[ing]” them from job opportunities after they refused to endorse a statement in the ongoing investigation against law professor Amy Chua.

    The students, referred to as Jane and John Doe throughout the lawsuit, are suing the University and Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken, Law School Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove and Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Yaseen Eldik on the grounds of breach of contract, intentional interference with prospective business relationships and defamation, among others. The complaint — a copy of which was obtained by the News — was filed in the United States District Court of Connecticut. The plaintiffs requested punitive damages of at least $75,000 and compensatory damages of at least $75,000, among other monetary rewards.

    “Two Yale Law School deans, along with Yale Law School’s Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, worked together in an attempt to blackball two students of color from job opportunities as retaliation for refusing to lie to support the University’s investigation into a professor of color,” the complaint reads.

    Amy Chua is the kinda famous "Tiger Mom" from a few years back. I wonder how much professional jealousy was involved in the "investigation" into her..


  • Gee, that's too bad. Eric Boehm reports at Reason: Kamala Harris Was Unpopular Before She Became Vice President. Nothing Seems To Have Changed. Some news outlets have reported animosity between Biden camps and Harris camps, with both sides leaking their grievances.

    The palace intrigue should hardly be surprising. Pretty much all presidents and vice presidents have rocky moments in their relationships. Given the results of this month's elections in Virginia and elsewhere, coupled with ongoing economic inflation and polls showing Republicans gaining a huge lead in the early phases of next year's midterms, Democrats' fuses are understandably growing short. Like a baseball team mired in a losing streak, the White House needs someone to blame for the recent run of misfortune and the finger-pointing in the clubhouse is now spilling into the media.

    Harris' biggest problem, however, isn't that some anonymous staffers in the White House are snarking about her to reporters. It's that polls show the vice president to be deeply unpopular with voters—even less popular than Biden, whose approval numbers have been underwater since August. A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll found just 28 percent of voters approve of Harris. As Politico notes, even famously despised former Vice President Dick Cheney never saw his approval ratings tumble so low.

    But Eric only hints at…


  • Kamala's real problem, which is… Kyle Smith points out the obvious: Kamala Harris is a very weird person. OK, most politicians seem to be several sigma off the mean on some personality traits, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But.

    When Kamala Harris considers movie titles that make people think of her, she probably goes straight to “Wonder Woman.” I have news for her: Every time she opens her mouth, people are wondering, “What Planet Are You From?”

    It’s pretty clear everyone in the White House hates her and is blame-leaking to every reporter around in hopes of emerging from this explosion in the stink-bomb factory without carrying any failure fragrance.

    All politicians blather, but Harrisblather is like an air salad with vapor croutons and nullity dressing. She went all the way to France to offer insights like, “We must together. Work together. To see where we are. Where we are headed, where we are going and our vision for where we should be. But also see it as a moment to, yes. Together, address the challenges and to work on the opportunities that are presented by this moment.”

    And, yes, the inappropriate grating cackle is mentioned.


  • I guess it's dunk on the Democrats day. The Washington Free Beacon does a fact check on one of the "Squad" members. No, another one: Ferguson Police Say They Have No Idea What Cori Bush Is Talking About

    Local police said they have no records that corroborate "Squad" member Cori Bush's claim that "white supremacists" shot at protesters in Ferguson, Mo., following the death of Michael Brown.

    Bush, a Democratic Missouri congresswoman and defund-the-police activist, on Monday said, "When we marched in Ferguson, white supremacists would hide behind a hill near where Michael Brown Jr. was murdered and shoot at us," adding the alleged shooters "never faced consequences." According to Ferguson police chief Frank McCall, however, there is no record of such an incident.

    "Not that I'm aware of," McCall, the city's fourth black police chief, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Bush, who did not return a request for comment, defended her claim, with her campaign telling the Post-Dispatch, "While on the frontlines of the Ferguson Uprising, Congresswoman Bush and other activists were shot at by white supremacist vigilantes."

    I note the Wikipedia entry for Marjorie Taylor Greene calls her a "far-right conspiracy theorist". True enough, but doesn't Cori Bush deserve equal treatment?


Last Modified 2024-01-19 5:54 PM EDT