A total fruitcake wrapped up in “the sin’ of his sexual lust kills white and asian prostitutes, so ...

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Obama and all our favorite fruitcakes blame it on white supremacy

Mr. Puppet’s handlers sent a message from the White House basement as well,

And De Blasio managed to blame both White Supremacy and Domestic Terrorism at the same time.

Look: if you’re going to shoot up a “massage parlor”, you’re going to hit Asian prostitutes; blame world-wide sex trafficking, not white supremacism. But our Democrats couldn’t wait for the smoke to clear before getting out their talking points. These are garbage people.

Postscript: is it time to revive that wonderful story from the late 80s, early 90s, about the Greenwich cop who was conducting under-the-covers work at the whore house above the Boston Market store on the Post Road in Old Greenwich? He was deeply engaged in his investigation when some punks from the housing project across the border burst in and started robbing the place. Our intrepid officer draped a towel around his waist and emerged into the hallway clutching his towel with one hand and holding his gun and his badge in the other. The punks knocked him down and stole both his badge and his gun and fled.

Every single cop on duty at the time flooded the area, motivated, I was later told, more to recover his badge than his gun, which even then were a dime a dozen in our sister city. I think they eventually got both, but you never heard a peep about the incident in our esteemed local paper — the relationship between the cops and GT’s editor were closer then, I presume, though who knows what great tales they’re hiding now?

You can't get woke enough: last year, its first transvestite, now its first colored fella

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MARCH 17, 1971: IN FIFTY YEARS WE’LL HAVE FLYING CARS!

2021:  Leyna Bloom is first transgender woman of color in Sports Illustrated Swim Issue.

Saw this over at Not the Bee:

Feminism has come full-circle: stage 1 - men are superior to women stage 2 - women are equal to men

stage 3 - women are superior to men

stage 4 - men (pretending to women) are superior to women

Ah, the Guardian. Hindsight isn't always 20/20, but it's always entertaining

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2020: The bureaucracy of the EU will beat the UK and US, every time.

2021, PJ Media: Wonder why the U.S. is reopening while Europe is shutting down?

“Quite the contrast to the US, Israel and the UAE. What happened?  New York Timesoffers a fairly brief and clear-eyed view of the bad decisions made in Europe that led them into bureaucratic paralysis on vaccinations. And unfortunately, the EU is still compounding the bad decisions made early on (via Power Line).

“Why has Europe done so poorly?” David Leonhardt writes, and breaks it down to three reasons: vaccine skepticism, which is far higher in Europe than it is in the US, bureaucracy, and a penny-pinching approach to vaccine development. All of these have an impact, with perhaps the skepticism the least of the EU’s problems at the moment. They don’t have enough vaccines yet to make that the bottleneck. And even the vaccine they do have — AstraZeneca — they won’t use because of a handful of adverse cases involving blood clots.

Even that, though, is an example of the EU’s bureaucracy run amok:

Europe’s main drug regulator still says the benefits outweigh the risks. And Ann Taylor, AstraZeneca’s chief medical officer, has pointed out that the rate of clotting among vaccinated Europeans is lower than “would be expected among the general population.”

Dr. Muge Cevik, a virus expert at the University of St. Andrews, told me yesterday that it was always important to scrutinize vaccines. But, she added, “I would say the benefits of the A.Z. vaccine in preventing Covid, hospitalization and death outweigh the risks of side effects, especially in the middle of the pandemic.”

'‘The real problem in the EU is the unwillingness of the bureaucrats to let pharmaceutical companies do what they do best. Instead of pushing relative pittances into blind purchases of massive amounts of doses, as the US did, to fund the R&D necessary to develop vaccines, the EU’s penny-pinchers attempted in essence to manage it themselves. They wanted to force the pharmas to lower their prices as a primary concern, rather than just get the vaccines first:

While the U.S. and other countries rushed to sign agreements with vaccine makers, the E.U. first tried to make sure all 27 of its member countries agreed on how to approach the negotiations. Europe chose “to prioritize process over speed and to put solidarity between E.U. countries ahead of giving individual governments more room to maneuver,” Jillian Deutsch and Sarah Wheaton write for Politico Europe.

The result was slower regulatory approval of the vaccines and delayed agreements to buy doses, forcing Europe to wait in line behind countries that moved faster.

Europe put a big emphasis on negotiating a low price for vaccine doses. Israeli officials, by contrast, were willing to pay a premium to receive doses quickly. Israel has paid around $25 per Pfizer dose, and the U.S. pays about $20 per dose. The E.U. pays from $15 to $19.

If the EU has 500 million people, and each needs two doses, that a savings of perhaps $6 billion to $10 billion. How much GDP is the EU losing each day of lockdowns? The US, Israel, and UAE understood that calculation right from the very start, and also understood that vaccines were the only way to get out of the lockdowns. The EU stillsees lockdowns as viable strategies, and still are letting bureaucratic concerns get in the way of real cost-benefit analysis, this time with AstraZeneca.

There was plenty to criticize about the US’ early response, especially when it comes to experts opining without evidence and an ongoing lack of reliable and fast tests. The focus on vaccines and letting the market work for us rather than push against it made all the difference, however. We chose the most direct path out of the pandemic — although thanks to the new spike in transmissions in the EU, we might end up having to fight new variants in the future.

One last note, however: we should be thanking Donald Trump and his team for recognizing this as the most propitious path. However, Leonhardt never once mentions Trump, even though it was his administration that made these now-vindicated strategic choices in the first days of the pandemic.”

I encountered this phenomenon just last week

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(Paula Boyard)

(Paula Boyard)

What we’re doing to babies and toddlers in the COVID era is criminal

Paula Boyard:

One of the heartbreaking things about the COVID-19 mask mandates has been babies not getting to see people smiling at them. In a normal world, people coo over babies in restaurants and grocery stores and smile at them when they pass by. Gazing at faces is one of the main ways infants and toddlers learn social cues and interpret the world around them. And while babies in the COVID era get to see their parents’ faces, they’re missing out on the smiles of those outside their immediate household—even their own grandparents, in many cases. There are children who were born this past year who have never had the joy of seeing their grandma smile at them—or seeing them face to face at all, for that matter.

I’ve seen it with my own grandsons, both of whom were born right before the pandemic hit. When we’re out in public with them, masked strangers approach and coo at the babies, but without being able to see anything but the eyes, the babies just stare, searching in vain for expressions that match the words they’re hearing. In a sane world, adults smile at the babies and the babies smile back—these social exchanges are essential to children’s development.

Gauging social expressions of masked individuals is hard enough for adults navigating our bizarre dystopian COVID world. Pre-COVID, I was in the habit of smiling at people and saying hello whenever I passed a stranger in the street or at the grocery store. Now, I don’t even bother acknowledging those I pass. With a mask, I feel like some kind of zombie automaton and the normal social graces don’t seem to be worth the effort anymore. When I try to study the eyes of people I meet, everyone looks either frightened or angry, save for those few blessed with the ability to smize. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

Imagine being 18 months old and all you’ve ever known is a world where everyone is masked. To a toddler, that’s what people look like. No one has mouths or noses and no one ever smiles—they just appear as anxious eyes and face-coverings and muted personalities. How will that affect their development?

A study posted at the NIH website found:

For an infant, this [masking by adults] has the potential for long reaching effects in the early stages of neurobehavioral development. A mask covering the face may affect the infant’s ability to develop facial processing and orientating to or focusing on another person’s face. To re-iterate, newborns prefer looking at faces and clearly have an innate ability to recognise what a face is. Furthermore, newborns can recognise familiar faces, especially ones where a close connection exists, important because newborns are dependent entirely on their parents for survival and need to recognise them. Crucial for this process, is the newborn’s ability to visualise facial expressions. For infants and children to feel safe, there is a heavy dependence on facial expressions as they rely on their parents’ emotional cues via facial expression to regulate their responses towards them or to potentially threatening situations. Karz and Hadani (2020) refer to this as social referencing and if it does not occur, the infant or child feels anxious and unsure of their environment.

….

I’m sick and tired of these mask mandates. I’m forced to wear one in public (thanks, Ohio Gov. DeWine) even though I’ve had covid and still have the antibodies. My mom, who had the vaccine a month ago, is still forced to wear one. First, we were told that we had to flatten the curve. Then we were told to mask up until there was a vaccine. Now we’re being told that even after everyone is vaccinated we’ll probably still have to wear the stupid masks and social distance.

Oh, and if we’re good girls and boys and obey the government, we’ll be allowed to enjoy some social interaction on Independence Day. If someone had told us two years ago that in 2021 America we’d all be a bunch of faceless zombies who must get permission from the government to shop, eat out, or socialize, we’d have scoffed and insisted it could never happen here. Yet here we are. And our children may have to pay the highest price, sacrificing their education and social development for non-science-based government mandates.

As I said in the headline, I had exactly this experience when I was in line at a coffee house behind a (masked, naturally) father holding an, I’d guess, 18-month-old infant. I did what anyone my age would do: I smiled, behind my own mask, and toodled him with my fingers and said something inane, and the poor kid stared at me wide-eyed, clutched his father and then let out a wail. Now, I’ll admit I have a face that should scare young children — it certainly has that effect on mature women — but pre-mask, my mug could still elicit a smile from those too young to know better.

And I miss that, just as I miss the smiles strangers can give each other when our grocery carts almost collide in (now-one-way) aisles, or holding a door for someone. Tiny social interactions that smooth our way through the world.