Kung Flu's hidden blessing: 1/2 of nation's liberal arts colleges expected to close. Here's one that should head the list

Slave owners John Emory and Patrick Henry

Virginia college moving to remove wasp as its mascot because it might offend those who dislike White Anglo-Saxon Protestants

 Emory & Henry College in Virginia has announced to students the school will re-examine its wasp mascot. Why? The bug may appear “exclusive” to students who are not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or “WASPs.”

While a public outcry over racism continues around the nation, the college is already concerned that its two historical namesakes — Methodist Episcopal Church bishop John Emory and founding father Patrick Henry — were slave holders. The school mascot has also come under scrutiny.

“Conversations must examine how Emory & Henry’s past has contributed to current and ongoing systemic oppression,” said Dr. John Wells, president of Emory & Henry College, according to the email obtained by Young America’s Foundation.

Get woke, go broke. Next will come the demand to remove the founders’ statues from campus, then to change the school’s name entirely (how about “Yale”?), then oblivion. Emory and Henry College, founded in 1836, is on borrowed time and unlikely to make it to its bicentennial.

Which is a good thing, because why would anyone entrust his money or his child to the care of spineless idiots like Dr. John Wells?

The trivialization of the BLM movement is now complete

The Little Mermaid statue defaced.

I understand that this is probably the work of just a couple of squarehead drunken youts, but like the similar attack on a bronze elk in Portland, it destroys whatever legitimacy the anti-confederacy howlers might once have enjoyed. We’ve gone from Stonewall Jackson to Lincoln to Gandhi to harmless animals to, now, imaginary little girl/fish combos. If everyone, even everything, is racist, then what’s the point? Everyone might just as well go home.

It can't build planes that fly, its quality control has gone to shit, but Boeing's got its laser-like focus on what truly matters.

Bang Dang Woke comes in for landing

Boeing fires its Communications officer for a 33-year-old article questioning the wisdom of allowing women in combat.

The gentleman in question wrote the article in 1987 while serving as a combat pilot, and was fired after a single employee found it and complained.

What Boeing can’t seem to find is the construction debris it’s leaving in its planes:

Boeing has “a severe situation” in an assembly-line culture that allowed tools and parts to be left inside tankers delivered to the U.S. Air Force, the service’s acquisition chief said Wednesday.

Will Roper recently met with executives at Boeing’s plant in Everett, Washington, where the company builds commercial widebody aircraft — and the KC-46 tanker, a version of the 767 jetliner.

“I left concerned,” Roper said Wednesday after speaking at a McAleese & Associates/Credit Suisse conference in Washington. “I also left thinking Boeing understands they’ve got a severe situation that’s going to take top-level engagement from their company. They are committed to doing that.”

The day also saw the U.S. government become the last major country to ground the 737 Max, Boeing’s popular narrowbody commercial jetliner, after crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The 737 Max is assembled about 40 miles south of Everett at a factory in Renton, Washington.

Boeing was supposed to get its first KC-46 in 2017, but design and software problems delayed the first delivery until January. After receiving a handful of the tankers, the Air Force began finding tools and parts inside some of the planes, prompting the service to suspend deliveries. The items are known as foreign object debris, or FOD.

Speaking truth to power

Portland: Antifa brownshirts set elk statue afire.

A 120-year-old statue of an elk has been removed from downtown Portland after protesters lit a fire that damaged its base Wednesday night.

The statue, which sits atop the David P. Thompson Fountain, has been the target of graffiti and fires during the weeks of protests against systemic racism, police brutality and the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

On the eve of celebrating Indepence Day, a day to honor real men of courage and wisdom and willingness to die for the principle that no man belonged to the state, mental midgets roam the land, sprayinhg paint and burning down animal sculptures to express their moral superiority over Thomas Jefferson and those of us who are grateful for the blessings they bestowed.

The law of entropy at work.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing that isn't somehow founded on and tainted by racism

Even, according to ABC News, visiting national parks. Of course, it was Teddy Roosevelt who created the first of them and we know what a racist he was, so maybe ABC has a point.

Yeah, we could go camping, but we gotta wait for our reparation marshmallows to get here

Given the boom in sales here, I'm not surprised

Manhattan home sales prices dropped 18% in past quarter. Prices and volume, raising the question of who’s buying our houses? I’ll speculate that it’s a combination of people who can afford to own two houses, for a while, and those who’ve been lucky enough to find a buyer, albeit at a lower price than hoped for.

Manhattan Home Sales Fall Most on Record in Locked-Down Quarter

(Bloomberg) -- Manhattan home sales plunged the most on record in the second quarter, while New York was shut down to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Purchases of co-ops and condos in the borough tumbled 54% from a year earlier to 1,357, according to a report Thursday by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. It was the biggest annual decline since the firms started keeping the data in 1990.

Pending sales (asking price in parenthesis)

9 Ridgeview Avenue ($4.695 million). Readers who haven’t blocked their memory of that era may recall that this was a failed spec project, begun in 2008, abandoned in 2009 or so, and after foreclosure sold to these owners in 2013 for $2.5. They finished it, lived in it and now are about to have sold it, and good for them. Excellent location for mid-country

14 Winthrop

14 Winthrop Drive, Riverside, new construction ($4.195 million)

325 Taconic

325 Taconic Road ($3.250 million).

76 Cognewaugh

76 Cognewaugh Road ($1.625 million). I mentioned this house when it came on in April; very nice inside with updated baths, new kitchen, mechanicals, etc., on a good piece of property on lower — read convenient — Cognewaugh. It was in move-in condition and went to contract in one month. And that, in turn, allowed these owners to move out. See how it’s done?

You don't threaten the King and his minions

Publius has sent along this link to a Zero Hedge article on establishment Republicans creating a super PAC to defeat Trump. Theirs is just one part of the plan; the Republicans were always about maintaining their rich, lucrative alliance with the Democrats, which explains their fury at anyone: Trump, the Tea Party, Rand Paul, anyone who threatens their hegenomy.

Another example: Never Trumpers’ “Lincoln Project” seeks to turn the government over to the Democrats. Focusing on defeating four specific Republican senators including Maine’s Sue Collins, an almost-pure RHINO whose only sin was giving a principled speech in favor of Kavanaugh. And try to contain your surprise: they’re lining their pockets with the proceeds.

And from the truly clueless, “you’ll like me, you’ll really like me” Sally Fields division of the GOP, this:

Three Republicans: Cornyn, TX; Langford, OK; and Johnson, WI are introducing legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday and cancel Columbus Day. Presumably, Christmas is next on the cancel list, to be replaced by Kwanza.

The Juneteenth panderers are just a distraction; the real point is that the Washington establishment is a monolith, comprised of both political parties, the media, the intelligence services* and the courts, and that same establishment will stop at nothing to quash the ephemeral rebellion that has flared up oh so briefly.

Happy Independence Day.

*Schumer’s warning to Trump: ”the Intelligence community has six ways from Sunday at getting back on you”.

Buyers still appearing

5 Verona Drive, Riverside, sat on the market from July 2019, priced at $2.650 and going nowhere, until late May, when a buyer showed up. It closed yesterday at $2.625.

If there was ever any apolitical, neutral 'science" involved in the COVID response, it disappeared long ago.

From the “experts” claiming that mass BLM protests aren’t dangerous while Trump rallies and church services are, to Cuomo’s ordering that contact tracers specifically not ask interviewees about their participation in those same protests, to the media’s quick switch from hysterical coverage of hospitalization and death rates to hysterical coverage of new cases after death rates and hospitalizations have remained stable even as expanded testing revealed millions of asymptomatic cases, this entire charade has been tainted with political agenda from start, beginning with the predictions of 22 million deaths in the United States if the country wasn’t locked down.

I pointed out an example of this on Tuesday, writing about the minuscule rate of infection among CT’s prisoners tested for COVID — 832 out of 9,504, and the near-zero deaths of those testing positive: 2.

Today our local rag’s parent got around to the subject and inadvertently exposed exactly what’s going on here:

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, many believed the virus would sweep through prisons in the state leaving behind a trail of avoidable death and destruction.

But just seven individuals of the more than 12,000 who were incarcerated at the beginning of the pandemic have died from the virus. And mass testing of offenders completed by the Department of Correction this week revealed that while 12 percent of the population has contracted the virus, most of those infections have been asymptomatic.

Of the 832 who tested positive [out of 9,504 tested - Ed] during the mass testing, just two showed symptoms.

So how did the state contain the virus, avoid hospitalizations and mostly avoid death in a congregate setting like prisons?

In the view of one epidemiologist: they got lucky.

“Either they did something right or they got very lucky,” said Dr. Robert Heimer, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine who has studied the potential for outbreak in the prison system since the onset of the virus. “The 800 positive and limited number of deaths, those two statistics seem irreconcilable unless they were very lucky ... I wish I had a compelling and logical reason for these results.”

And here’s the kicker:

Heimer, who worked with several advocacy groups that urged the state early in the pandemic to release as many incarcerated individuals as possible, said he and other public health experts advised the Lamont administration to release as many of the “at risk for COVID and low risk for criminality as they could,” something Lamont declined to do.

It’s all about advocacy and pushing each scientist’s personal agenda. By the time this panic subsides the COVID experts will have been exposed as the frauds they are, just like their colleagues in the global warming business. I hold out little hope that the public will notice, and remember.

UPDATE: The WSJ editorialized on this subject this morning

Political leaders and health officials have often invoked “science” to justify decisions manifestly guided by their personal preferences. That costs them credibility. Restoring public confidence will require acknowledging their role in politicizing the pandemic, yielding to accommodations and sensible alternatives in the areas of greatest controversy, and focusing on the widely supported goal of not overwhelming hospitals, rather than less meaningful metrics such as increases in Covid-19 cases.