Today's Takes: Friday, September 10

The Pamphleteer -

Government is a lot like the weather. It's sunny when you're tired and rains when you plan a picnic. Try as you might, you cannot ignore the weather. It is persistent and ever-present. Small talk revolves around the weather and how nice it will be this weekend. We build up defenses against the weather, of course, but it's always there asserting itself against our best wishes. We stay inside when it rains. We crank up the A/C when it's hot. The weather dictates how we behave. We react to it.

Politics, like the weather, is impossible to ignore. Try as you might, the political always asserts itself. Awareness of the persistence of the political colored the founding father's views of what a just government looked like. Well aware of the tendency of government to grow and subsume everything that stands apart from it, they sought to create a nation wherein the powers of government were limited. As noted by the famed French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, America is unique in its relationship to the concept of freedom.

You can probably guess where I'm going with this. Joe Biden's lazy, low energy declaration that 80 million American citizens are the greatest threat to America rang harshly against the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. A time when the same people Joe Biden chose to demonize yesterday were inflamed with righteous anger and filled with patriotic pride. Many of these men chose to enlist and fight for the values that American leaders have held up as sacrosanct since the founding of the nation. Joe Biden shattered that illusion.

Like a man who comes home and beats the dog to let out his frustration, the regime seems bent on creating a new enemy with a face after a failed foray in the Middle East without stopping to think that maybe people don't want half-ass liberalism. This enemy is one we can all focus our anger towards: the unvaccinated. Let's not talk about the "science" because this isn't about "science". Biden's language that "our patience is wearing thin" echoes (almost exactly) the language used in Nazi Germany to express animus towards the Jews.

The Biden administration, and nearly of Washington D.C., is inhabited by cowards. Anyone who buys into the "new enemy" is simply a robot receiving a software upgrade. The government is not the weather. The existence of a tyrannical government is not a prerequisite for life. We have God, the Sun, and the Seasons to thank for that. Government is an entity you grant consent to. We'll be gladly withdrawing ours.

Artifacts of 9/11

  • George W. Bush’s bullhorn speech still echoes, ‘I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you’ (YouTube)
  • World Trade Center 'surfer' struggles to comprehend his survival 20 years later (Yahoo)
  • How 9/11 changed air travel: more security, less privacy (AP)
  • 9/10,11, and 12 (National Populist)

Headlines

📰 Today's Front Pages

A quick look at this morning's front pages so you know what you're supposed to be mad about.

  • Reuters: Spread of 'Delta' COVID-19 knocks wind out of UK economy in July (Read)
  • New York Times: Biden’s New Vaccine Push Is a Fight for the U.S. Economy (Read)
  • Wall Street Journal: Biden Boosts Vaccine Requirements for Large Employers, Federal Workers to Combat Covid-19 (Read)
  • Fox News: WH’s Klain panned for retweeting post on ‘ultimate work-around’ for federal vaccine requirement (Read)
  • CNN: Biden's six-step Covid plan, explained (Read)
  • NPR: How To Talk About 9/11 With A New Generation Of Kids (Read)
  • Breitbart: Joe Biden Orders Vaccine Mandates: ‘This Is Not About Freedom or Personal Choice’ (Read)
  • HuffPost: Biden Expands Vaccine Push With Mandates For Private Sector (Read)

🏛 On the Hill

  • Democrats Jockey Over Healthcare, Taxes in $3.5 Trillion Package (WSJ)

💸 Money Moves

  • For Allbirds, Warby Parker, Other Fall IPOs, Greed Is Out. Do-Gooding Is In. (WSJ) "We're not just here to sell you marked up goods, we're here to dismantle the societal structures that lead you to us in the first place." Cash is out. Feel goods are in.
  • Democrats’ Split Deepens Over Powell Fed Reappointment (WSJ)

🌦 Climate Faux Pas

  • From 4% to 45%: Energy Department Lays Out Ambitious Blueprint for Solar Power (NYT) So much for green energy producing American jobs. China produces nearly 80% of solar panels using a combination of slave labor, government subsidies, and coal power to ensure that no other nation can produce cheaper panels.

🍯 The Land of Soy Milk & Anti-Depressants

  • Gender-neutral toy sections (CalMatters) AB 1084 would require large department stores that sell kids’ products to maintain a gender-neutral section of toys and child care items. Stores that do not comply would face a light penalty: a fine of up to $250 for first offenses, and a fine of up to $500 for second offenses.
  • LAPD officers told to collect social media data on every civilian they stop (Guardian) "Your Twitter handle is vapeking42069?" "That is correct officer."

🩸 On the Bleeding Edge

  • iRobot’s newest Roomba uses AI to avoid dog poop (Verge) This will not work. We’re just not there yet

🦄 Woke-acracy

  • With Robert E. Lee's Statue Gone, Virginia Reveals Some New Plans For Its Pedestal (NPR) Bear with me, this isn't satire. Virginia removed an 1887 time capsule from the pedestal and replaced it with a new time capsule containing a photo of a Black ballerina taken by a local Richmond photographer in front of the statue, Kente cloth worn at the 400th commemoration of 1619, a "Black Lives Matter" sticker, "Stop Asian Hate" fliers, an LGBTQ pride pin, and an expired vial of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine.
  • Lil Nas X’s evil gay Satanic agenda, explained (Vox) Wasn't aware there was an agenda. What does he want from our children?
  • Don’t Be Evil (City Journal) More of this junk: a Google employee program claims that America is a “system of white supremacy” and that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”

Bookfest!

By Jerod Hollyfield

Though likely buried by the news that Joe Biden’s executive orders turned V for Vendetta into a documentary last Thursday, Nashville’s arts community held a pandemic pity party so asinine it should make anyone with a Humanities degree wish their university had Nordstom’s return policy. As recently as Monday,  Humanities Tennessee had planned to return The Southern Festival of Books to Legislative Plaza on October 9-10, but it ultimately announced the shift of its 33rd edition online due to rising delta variant concerns. In a year when every surrounding county held full-scare fairs, the Nashville Film Festival is returning to a live format, and concerts at Ascend Amphitheater have resumed with a vaxx-card free grace period until October, the decision seems quite scientifically unsound.

However, before Humanities Tennessee had a chance to elaborate, The Scene’s culture editor,  Erica Ciccarone, published a half-baked tantrum not out of place on a mid-aughts Goth’s LiveJournal. In “Thanks to the Unvaccinated, the Southern Festival of Books Will Go Virtual After All,” she laments the festival’s retreat to an online format for the greater good, spending more time telling her audience that she always buys her fest books locally than engaging with any scientific evidence that her accusatory clickbait headline suggests. She does, however, mention her friend’s inability to get an elective surgery on her windpipe that will allow her to walk her dog again, an anecdote that apparently passes for reportage these days at Nashville’s weekly freebie.

Both Humanities Tennessee and Ciccarone could have checked their STEM bias before grandstanding, but even a cursory Google search seems too triggering for the defenders of arts and culture against death merchant Bill Lee. As peer-reviewed work published in Nature last month indicates, the vaccinated can still catch and transmit COVID; they just tend to have more mild cases. Even countries with high vaccination rates like Israel have seen the same spike as everywhere else in the world, findings that make  Ciccarone’s diatribe even more off base. More germane to the decision to hold an event in Legislative Plaza is the consensus that the threat of transmission at outdoor events has remained low the entire pandemic, especially true in the case of an author meet and greet with a line half as long as the one for funnel cakes at the Putnam County Fair on a Tuesday.  But who needs evidence when you can remix a tired The Simpsons line with Ciccarone’s panache?

In the end, Humanities Tennessee’s adherence to pseudoscience has more to do with the festival’s target demographic remaining too paralyzed by COVID fear to do anything more taxing than take photos of maskless folks at Target. At The Pamphleteer, we back our snideness with data. Which leads us to the burning question Ciccarone’s piece evokes: How many of those SFOB signed copies that she’s accumulated over the years and spends the article endlessly crowing about has she actually read?

Original Essays

📏 Megan Podsiedlik checks in with Noble's Beer Hall & Kitchen to see how they weathered the pandemic and the challenges they face (Read)

In case you missed it

  • Tell Them Phil Valentine Said, “Hey” by Jerod Hollyfield (Read)
  • Total Recall: California’s September election by Jerod Hollyfield (Read)
  • Entourage's Last Stand by Jerod Hollyfield (Read)
  • 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' and the Evergreen Ills of American Politics by Jerod Hollyfield (Read)

Nashville Politics

  • Cooper asks lawmakers not to split Nashville in redistricting (Post) "Cooper asked the mostly Republican members of a new state House select redistricting committee to keep Tennessee 5th Congressional District more or less as it is in the face of the possibility that Republicans in the state legislature could seek to break Nashville up into several majority-GOP districts."

Nashville News

  • Testbed for traffic management and automated vehicle technologies (I-24 Motion) A six-mile stretch of I-24 will be studied to determine how traffic flow affects individual vehicle behavior. Something about self-driving cars. *Checks watch* which should be here... any day now.
  • Thanks to the Unvaccinated, the Southern Festival of Books Will Go Virtual After All (Scene) Following this trajectory, such lamentations are soon to be "Thanks to the Triple Jabbed..."
  • Nashville Symphony puts new COVID protocols in place (Channel 5) The center now has a mask mandate in place with essentially no exceptions. This includes age, medical or religious reasons and vaccination status. Audience members also need to be fully vaccinated or have a negative COVID-19 test within 48 hours of the performance. If you have neither, free on-site rapid tests will be available. The tests will be available through November 24.
  • Titans will not require masks or proof of vaccination this season at Nissan Stadium (Channel 5)

Nashville Development

  • Rooftop deck eyed for Lower Broadway building (Post)
  • TailGate Brewery location set for BNA (Post)
  • South Nashville office building sells for $3.35M (Post)
  • Local convenience retailer acquires Alabama peer (Post)
  • Construction begins on $95 million Hilton hotel project at Nashville International Airport (Biz Journal)
  • Amazon's latest hiring spree includes 600-plus openings at Nashville Yards tower downtown (Biz Journal)

COVID Gutter

🦠 End the Case Count

Headlines

  • United Airlines Staff With Vaccine Exemptions Told They’ll Be Placed on Unpaid Leave (Epoch Times) If this isn't blatant discrimination, I don't know what is.
  • Australian public health chief says Covid contact tracing is part of 'New World Order' (Independent) We are allowed to say mean things about Australians because they are white, right?
  • Have you got ‘superhuman immunity’? (Telegraph) And before you ask, no. Superhuman immunity has nothing to do with your actual health. Pfizer's got a product to shill. Can we blame them?
  • The new 99%: These are the people who are getting serious cases of COVID-19 (NY Post) A favorite misleading bit of information trotted out every time there is pressure to vaccinate. The article says that since January 1, when less than one hundreth of a percent of the population was vaccinated and in the midst of the largest case spike in the short history of the pandemic, 99% of hospitalizations have been among the unvaccinated. Why do media outlets continue to deliberately misrepresent the extremity of the "pandemic of the unvaccinated"?
  • Covid-19 Policies Ignite Battle at UT Austin (WSJ) Public university’s efforts to comply with Texas ban on mask and vaccine mandates fuel outcry from faculty and others.
  • Patton Oswalt cancels shows in Florida, Utah after venues fail to comply with his Covid requests (NBC) Florida dodged a bullet.
  • Welcome to Denmark, where Covid is 'over' (Telegraph)

Information

  • A study of vaccination in Qatar reveals efficacy against infection rapidly wanes after it peeks 4 weeks later (medRxiv) After 20-24 weeks, efficacy wanes to zero meaning that double-jabbed hamsters are just as likely to get and spread the virus as unjabbed hamsters.
  • Teenage boys more at risk from vaccines than Covid (Telegraph) Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19, a major study has found.

One Good Read

🏆 Life is one big status game (Read)

Best Bond Movies

🧳 The Telegraph ranks the Top 25 James Bond movies of all-time ahead of the new No Time To Die (Read)

Words of Wisdom

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

Have a great weekend!