Zeroing in on the sign of woke times:

There’s no more exemplary sign of the death-of-the-news-as-we-once-knew-it than the public unraveling of The New York Times, once perhaps of the most well-respected news organizations on the planet. The newspaper’s series of unfortunate, self-inflicted events, highlighted in a disastrous summer of 2019, led one insider to refer to the publication as “The New Woke Times.” A leaked transcript of a staff meeting following a string of public embarrassments punctuated the point.

Woe.

You need a score card for this game.

There’s so much hypocrisy to go around, we can hardly contain it all.

It was just days ago we wrote about Chicago mayor and “woke” intellectual giant Lori Lightfoot telling Chicago residents to cancel their “traditional” Thanksgiving plans.

Lightfoot told residents to “stay home unless for essential reasons”, to “stop having guests over – including family members” and to “cancel traditional Thanksgiving plans”.

We mocked Lightfoot, noting that her decision came not even a week after she was seen amidst a large crowd on Chicago streets partying on the heels of a Joe Biden Presidential victory.

And it seems like we’re not the only ones who aren’t taking Lightfoot seriously. That list appears to now include Illinois’ own governor, JB Pritzker, who tacitly admitted during a press conference last week he didn’t think much about Lightfoot’s “advisory”.

“Since you live in Chicago, are you going to follow the ‘no travel’ advisory that Mayor Lightfoot put into place at 6AM this morning?” the governor was asked last week.

“I don’t know what that says exactly and I don’t know exactly what my plans will be. But I’ll certainly be happy to share. I think you already know we have a place in Florida, so…” he says, before trailing off.

“We’re not going to address rumors from random blogs online,” someone (probably a staffer), interrupts as Pritzker trails off.

Good. What about what’s said on camera?

The judge left no doubt about his decision.

. . . it’s all up to the Supreme Court now. For now, however, the Trump campaign said that it will seek an expedited appeal to the Third Circuit according to a statement issued by Rudy Giuliani, who said that he hopes that “the Third Circuit will be as gracious as Judge Brann in deciding our appeal one way or the other as expeditiously as possible” rather than “simply trying to run out the clock.”

Get out of PA, on to DC.

Long detailed piece here citing study after study demystifying the lockdown pseudo-solution.

Here are just two paragraphs:

We already know that isolation, unemployment, and other social ills caused by lockdowns affect both physical and mental health. But we also know that lockdowns lead to deaths from untreated medical conditions. Moreover, government health experts in many cases have callously cut off the elderly from all their social and family support. The Associated Press estimates that for “every two COVID-19 victims in long-term care, there is another who died prematurely of other causes.” Many of these deaths are brought on by neglect and isolation caused by state-mandated lockdown policies.

………………

And in 2006, an extensive study in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism reported: “There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods” to slow the spread of influenza. No evidence has been offered for why this might be true of flu, but not true of Covid. Moreover, in a recent report from JPMorgan, Marko Kolanovic concluded that “re-opening did not change the course of the pandemic” and that “While we often hear that lockdowns are driven by scientific models, and that there is an exact relationship between the level of economic activity and the spread of [the] virus—this is not supported by the data.” Overall, evidence backing the lockdown theory has simply failed to materialize.

Enough to make an anarchist out of you. Reminds you of Reagan’s most terrifying” words in the English language, “I’m from the government, I’m here to help.” (Well not an anarchist, of course, but how about a conservative?)

This guy is very good about the hysteria. Blames guess who? Media. Early on, reading the Sun-Times, I called up and canceled our subscription.

Trib has a Sunday front-page story shooting down her immunity WITH NO OPPOSING POINT INCLUDED IN THE STORY. Every day in every way the papers pound it hope with the latest horrors.

It’s like the Hearst papers promoting the Spanish-American war.

Tell it to the teachers’ unions.

Wow.

The bungling of many a lockdown, item 1:

“It’s Now Up to Governors to Slow the Spread,” says a Wall Street Journal article — written by board members of pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Illumina, Johnson and Johnson and Cigna. It encourages states and governors to band together and implement restrictions “focus[ed] on known sources of spread, such as bars and nightclubs.”

Drs. Gottlieb and McClellan’s plea sounds reasonable. After all, ‘the science’ tells us that Covid spreads in confined spaces. Basing policy advice on ‘the science’ would be the sensible thing to do. These spaces — the restaurants, bars and cafes we enjoy — must be closed for our protection.

But there’s just one small problem: ‘the science’ isn’t really there. In fact, the only evidence we have is circumstantial: all we have are data simulations (in other words, predictions), case studies followed up with contact tracing, and… that’s it. Given that Covid has become a worldwide attention magnet for 8 months one would expect a lot more substantial evidence than is available.

Bungling in one of most important states, Item 2:

New Yorkers are still puzzling over a new, state-wide rule that bars, restaurants, and gyms must close at 10 pm to stop the spread of Covid. Was this based on some brand-new evidence that the virus mutates like a gremlin, getting worse at night? You wouldn’t know it from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s announcement, which did not cite any research whatsoever that might justify this policy. The announcement did claim, however, that New York uses “more science than any state in the nation.”

I’ve seen this happen again and again since the start of the pandemic: a new, “science-based” Covid-19 measure is prescribed, but the science in support of it is either vague or missing altogether. Just last week, for example, I was working on a story about the latest research into quarantine procedures. The best data to this point suggests that an eight-day stretch of quarantine, combined with a Covid test, provides the same level of protection as the traditional 14-day quarantine. But then I saw New York state’s new policy: Some people who arrived from out of state are allowed to quarantine for just four days. I asked New York’s Department of Health how they’d come to this decision, and they sent me another statement from Cuomo, in which he said only that he’d “worked with global health experts” on the plan. A formal guidance from the state health department gave no research citations, either, but it did find space to boast about New York’s record of “strict adherence to data-driven, evidence-based protocols.”

Makes a guy (or gal) wonder.

He owes it, she says.

Cullors is a self-described “trained Marxist” who has claimed to be a protégé of Eric Mann, former agitator of the domestic terrorism group Weather Underground.

She’s the real deal, tackling the Chameleon.

Crunch time.