Sixteen days
/
14 Bradbury Place, Riverside, $3 million, reports a contract. Note that it sold, new, for $3..4 in 2004, but it’s also worth noting that it would sell at $3.195 from September 2017 - December 2018.
Pending on the Peninsula
/
29 Field Point Drive, a Sally Maloney listing and priced at $5.995, is already pending after 7 days.
The girl had the same listing back in 2006-2009 and snagged the buyer for it then, who is her client now. That Sally!
This particular annuity may have ended, however, because this time John McAtee found the buyer. No surprise there, because the house was built in 1925, and John does love old houses.
Gideon on the Greenwich YMCA
/
Gid and Jonathan Wilcox
Gideon’s radio show on WGCH (available via Alexa, if you have her in your house) starts now. It’s about real estate, but today he’s also taking on the Y, with its hidden cameras recording members and catching them committing “improper mask-wearing”. Gid’s quitting the place, which will make him just about the last male in town to do so.
It's not a race war, it's a war for the soul of our country
/
The President, the Vice President, our ambassador to the UN all say that America was founded on racism and is still built around it.
I don’t remember the past summer of love riots as “unifying”, but never matters; the Democrats are on a roll, from throwing our southern border wide open, to adding a 51st state to add two more Democrats to the Senate, to eliminating self-employment, to destroying our energy supply, to forcing people into cars that will restrict travel to 200 miles, to imposing mandatory curriculums that indoctrinate children to hate their country, to, etc. etc.
You might wonder why any young man would join the military and risk his life to defend a country he’s been taught to despise but that, too, is part of the plan.
Columbia was once a respected institution — once
/
she’ll be masked, come september
Allah Pundit at Hot Air:
“People who warn about a “forever pandemic” usually strike me as alarmist. Yeah, scientists like Fauci are overly cautious but even Fauci has a benchmark for relaxing pandemic restrictions of 10,000 cases per day or fewer nationally. (Whether that benchmark is attainable is another matter.) No one’s arguing for keeping masks and social distancing in place after we reach herd immunity. And certainly no one would be arguing for keeping them in place if the vaccine were mandatory for all Americans.
Why, it’d be insane to insist on restrictions in a population where everyone was immunized.
But what if I told you that there *are* populations, albeit small ones, where those are the rules?
Columbia University will require students and staffers to get COVID-19 vaccinations to return to school in the fall.
“On the strong recommendation of our public health colleagues, who have advised us so ably throughout this process, President Bollinger and the Columbia University COVID Task Force have decided to make the COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for all students who are present on campus, starting this fall,” read an email to students and staff…
Students will still be required to observe social distancing and face covering requirements after receiving the vaccine.
…. As of today, wearing a face covering over the nose and mouth is required at all times while on university property. Building capacity is set at 50 percent to facilitate social distancing and “[s]ocial/physical distancing guidance requires, when feasible, maintaining 6 feet of separation in combination with proper use of face coverings.”
In other words, the standard pandemic precautions we’ve all been told to practice for the past 13 months remain in effect alongside mandatory immunizations. Why?
…Out of 84 million vaccinated people, just .007 percent or so have had confirmed cases of COVID. The total undergraduate and graduate population of Columbia in 2020 was 31,455. If the rate calculated by the CDC were to hold true for Columbia’s student body, we’d expect a grand total of two infections once everyone has been vaccinated. And given that students are typically young adults, odds would be very high that those infections would be nonthreatening.
…. My guess is that it’s not really about protecting the vulnerable at all but about tribal signaling. People who Believe In Science take maximum precautions at all times, even when their risk of infection has been reduced as close to zero as it could plausibly get. We’ll see if Columbia lightens up before September arrives. I’m not optimistic.”
The NYT to Princeton: 129 white males accepted out of 1,900 admitted ? Hold our beer.
/
Of the Times’ 37 interns (out of 3,000 applicants) one is a white male, 4 are colored males, 27 are women of various shades. Their mugshots are here. (Matching names with faces, I’d guess there are four white females). According to this article, the WSJ is no better.
I get it, and if I were black, I’d say “you had your place on top of the pile for centuries, honkie, now it’s our turn”. But if I had children still young enough to counsel, I’d tell them to forget about any kind of career in academia or Fortune 500 corporations, and develop entrepreneurial skills, because otherwise they’ll be denied employment at worst or held back at best.
The hope for a color-blind, equal-opportunity society is gone.
Let the little children suffer
/
John Tierney on facemasks and torturing children
I’m hoping that John will forgive me for reprinting his essay in its entirety, because we’re email pen pals, and I did send his kid a copy of Dr. Seuss’s “Thidwick the Big Hearted Moose” some years ago — the only anti-socialist tract that old commie ever wrote. Remember, John? : )
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul,” Nelson Mandela famously said, “than the way in which it treats its children.” By that standard, our society now has the soul of an abusive parent. The pandemic has turned American adults, or at least the ones who make the rules, into selfish neurotics who have been punishing innocent children for over a year—and still can’t restrain themselves.
When the pandemic began, the lack of knowledge about Covid-19 justified this behavior. That excuse has vanished. It became clear long ago that the virus is less dangerous to children than the flu, and that keeping schools open poses minimal risk of spreading infections. Yet despite this evidence—and despite the widespread availability of vaccines to teachers and other adults—many schools have yet to reopen full-time, and others are still making students as miserable as possible.
Schools have canceled many sports and other extracurricular activities, isolated students in Plexiglas cells, and forced them to wear masks in classrooms and on playgrounds. Social distancing and masks hinder learning while harming children emotionally, socially, and physically, all for no purpose other than providing false comfort to adults who ought to know better.
The rationale for forcing anyone to wear a mask is questionable, as my colleague Connor Harris has meticulously demonstrated. Wearing masks might provide some protection for some high-risk adults in crowded indoor settings, but the evidence is mixed, and masks can be not just uncomfortable but harmful. Some adults may judge the trade-offs worthwhile for themselves, but for children it’s all pain and no gain.
The mask mandates are especially cruel to young children. Adults are supposed to ease their fears, to reassure them that monsters aren’t hiding under the bed. Instead, we’re frightening them into believing they’re being stalked by invisible menaces lurking in the air. A year of mask-wearing will scar some of them psychologically—and maybe physically, too, according to a team of Italian professors of plastic surgery, who warn that the prolonged pressure from the elastic straps could leave young children with permanently protruding ears. By hiding teachers’ lips and muffling their speech, mask-wearing makes it harder for young children to develop linguistic skills and prevents children with hearing impairments from lip reading. Unable to rely on facial cues, teachers and students of all ages are more likely to misinterpret one other, a particularly acute problem for children on the autism spectrum. How are children supposed to develop social skills when they can’t see one another’s faces, sit together, or play together?
Researchers from the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany have catalogued other problems. They established an online registry for parents to report on the side effects of mask-wearing. Among the nearly 18,000 parents who chose to respond (not a random sample, obviously), more than half reported that the masks were giving their children headaches and making it difficult for them to concentrate. More than one-third cited other side effects: increased reluctance to go to school, unhappiness, malaise, impaired learning, drowsiness, and fatigue. After considering those reports as well as testimony from other researchers, a court in Weimar, Germany, recently ruled in favor of a parent arguing that her children’s basic rights were being violated by the mandates for masks and social distancing at her children’s two schools. The court ordered the schools to end the mandates, declaring that they damaged the “mental, physical and spiritual well-being” of students while failing to offer “any discernible benefit for the children themselves or for third parties.”
Masks can be breeding grounds for infections from bacteria, mold and fungi,which is why the Centers for Disease Control recommends that a cloth mask should be washed with soap and water “whenever it gets dirty or at least daily.” The CDC also advises washing your hands any time you take off the mask, and then washing your hands again after you put it back on. Pretending that children (or adults, for that matter) are dutifully taking all these precautions is absurd, yet the CDC nonetheless recommends that everyone older than two should wear masks both indoors and outdoors.
The CDC’s policy placates the leaders of teachers’ unions but flouts the guidanceissued jointly by UNICEF and the World Health Organization: “Children aged 5 years and under should not be required to wear masks. This is based on the safety and overall interest of the child and the capacity to appropriately use a mask with minimal assistance.” The groups also advise against masks for older children when physically active: “Children should not wear a mask when playing sports or doing physical activities, such as running, jumping or playing on the playground, so that it doesn’t compromise their breathing.” For children aged six to 11, masks are recommended in classrooms only if the school is in a locality with “widespread transmission,” and then only after consulting with parents and weighing the potential impact on “learning and psychosocial development.”
Since UNICEF and WHO issued that guidance in August, the evidence emerging from schools shows that masks and most other restrictions are unnecessary for children of any age. Swedish economists at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala conducted the most rigorous and comprehensive study. During last spring’s outbreak, Sweden in effect undertook a nationwide controlled experiment by switching its senior high schools to online instruction while keeping younger students in classrooms with few Covid restrictions. Class sizes for the younger students were not reduced, and students who had been in contact with an infected person were allowed to stay in school (instead of being quarantined at home, as the CDC in the United States recommends). Neither teachers nor students were encouraged to wear masks—in fact, health authorities discouraged the wearing of masks, and few Swedes of any age wore them last year.
None of the children who kept going to school died of Covid, and there was little effect on the adults in their lives. The Swedish researchers, who had access to the health records of the entire population, analyzed the rates of Covid infections and medical treatments among hundreds of thousands of teachers and parents. To minimize confounding variables, the economists compared two groups of parents with similarly aged children: those with ninth-graders who kept going to school and those with tenth-graders who stayed home. There was no difference in their risk of serious Covid disease. The parents whose children kept going to school were slightly more likely to test positive for Covid, but no more likely to be treated or hospitalized for it, than were the parents whose children stayed home.
The unmasked teachers in classrooms at the junior high schools were more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than were the online teachers, but the difference was hardly catastrophic: 0.09 percent, meaning there was less than one additional severe case for every 1,000 classroom teachers. That extra risk might warrant some precautions, such as excusing older teachers from classroom duties if they haven’t been vaccinated, but it doesn’t justify closing schools or forcing children to wear masks.
Workers in less crucial professions have been taking greater risks throughout the pandemic. Another team of Swedish researchers, led by Jonas F. Ludvigsson of the Karolinksa Institute, put the danger in perspective by comparing the occupations of people with severe cases of Covid during the outbreak in Sweden last spring. Among the country’s roughly 100,000 schoolteachers, 20 received intensive-care treatment for Covid. Even after the researchers excluded health-care workers from the comparison, they found that teachers’ risk of winding up in the ICU last spring was less than half the risk for the rest of the workforce.
Now that the pandemic has eased and so many people have developed immunity either from vaccination or infection, the risk to teachers in America and most other places is even lower. For the teachers who clamored to reach the front of the line for vaccines, the risk of teaching in a room of unmasked students is essentially nil. It’s clear from the Swedish economists’ study that the risk to the students’ parents is also essentially nil. There is no excuse for closing any school, particularly now that we know the effect on learning: researchers have foundthat children studying remotely make little or no academic progress, and that the “learning loss” is most pronounced among those from disadvantaged homes. Yet teachers, parents, public-health officials, and journalists persist in ignoring these facts—and the lasting damage that their irrational fears are doing to the most vulnerable members of society.
So far, adult fearmongering has probably fooled most children into believing that school closures, social distancing, and masks are necessary precautions. But eventually, when the hysteria abets and the facts emerge, they will realize that their year of studying miserably served no more rational purpose than our ancestors’ child sacrifices to the gods. As Oscar Wilde said, “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” This generation will have much to forgive.
John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal, a contributing science columnist for the New York Times, and coauthor of The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.
With the state mandated catch and release law in effect, how will this help?
/
5th Avenue and 21st street
Admitting defeat, De Blasio orders 80 cops back on anti-crime patrol
Mayor Bill de Blasio finally realized that defunding the police didn’t work out as he hoped — and has now ordered the NYPD to make Midtown Manhattan safe again so workers will come back after more than a year of pandemic lockdowns.
At least 80 uniformed officers and supervisors are expected to flood the area within the next two weeks after being redeployed from around the city to combat violent vagrants and other safety issues, sources familiar with the plan told The Post.
An NYPD deputy inspector will be in charge of the newly created “Business Improvement Unit,” which will be based out of the Midtown South Precinct, sources said.
The plan didn’t originate from the NYPD but was developed in response to a series of recent meetings the mayor held at City Hall with his staff and police brass, sources said.
It followed months of pleading by business leaders and others for the mayor to crack down on criminals and vagrants running amok around Penn Station and elsewhere.
As an example of the long-festering problem, a Vornado Realty maintenance worker said there’s “a whole crew” of vagrants who lie on the sidewalk near 34th Street and Eighth Avenue “every morning.”
“The people come out of the stations shocked. You can see in their faces, they can’t believe what they see,” the workers said.
“I am finding vomit, feces, needles. There is no one here controlling them.”
Recently, the situation has raised concerns that it will keep people who’ve been working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic from returning to their offices.
“They are afraid for their safety walking from the train to work, and they are afraid to ride the train,” one source said.
The situation developed after de Blasio and the City Council agreed to slash $1 billion from the NYPD budget in response to demands by anti-cop activists who maintained an “Occupy City Hall” encampment for a month last summer.
As a result of the cuts, the NYPD disbanded its 86-member Homeless Outreach Unit.
Under the NYPD’s plan, the redeployed cops will be assigned to foot posts across Midtown and accompany workers from the Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection when they go out into the field, sources said.
“The mayor and the local politicians didn’t want the police to deal with the homeless and peddlers but now that their plan failed miserably, the mayor is asking the police to help clean up the mess they created,” a Manhattan cop said.
Paul Dimino, third-generation owner of the Sea Breeze Fish Market on Ninth Avenue, called de Blasio “an idiot.”
“Defund the police in New York City, it’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” he said.
“We’re telling homeless drug addicts, ‘Come here, we’ll take care of you and you can do whatever the f–k you want.’ It’s stupid.”
Dimino, 46, said that before the pandemic, “it was all tourists here, little restaurants, the neighborhood was getting nicer.”
“Now, I wouldn’t advise anyone to come here. It’s dangerous as hell!” he said.
But there’s no point to this, except as theater, because New York Democrats abolished bail this past January, and criminals are now just removed from the scene of their crime, run through a booking process and immediately released back on the street. Couple that with a refusal to prosecute gun law violators and drug dealers, and the streets of New York will continue to look like those in the worst of the Lindsay and David Dinkens eras. Then again, this is what New Yorkers vote for, time and t again, so screw ‘em.
Insane. The world is insane
/
Welcome to bedlam
Abbott: This is a person who's been imbibing the media's lies about COVID for the last year straight, oblivious to the fact that her kids have an insanely higher chance of serious health problems due to breathing in Lysol than anything associated with the Rona.