Today's Takes: Tuesday, September 28

Good morning, everyone.

Apologies for our absence yesterday. A sailor discovered a hole in the hull of the ship, and we had to spend the whole morning patching the leak.

In any event, we're back at it this morning.

The new Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, announced with a smile that she will replace unvaccinated health care workers with the National Guard in the coming weeks. It's an odd moment of dissonance in America as 12,000 Haitian refugees get let into the nation with neither vaccination nor a negative COVID-19 test, but the message is clear enough: if you don't do what we say, we will replace you.

It's difficult to sympathize with—muchless respect—the demands of a group of people who ruthlessly mined the university system for profit while enslaving students in debt, shipped millions and millions of jobs overseas and imported cheap labor to fill the rest, oversaw the proliferation of heavily processed foods and disbursement of deadly opioids, and generally, offer no prospect of a good life to its young citizens beyond an admonition that if you eat just a little less meat, you too can lower the temperature of the globe by 1.5ºC.

In fact, to anyone with even a mild amount of verve, a life set against the admonitions of the authorities sounds more fulfilling than one stuck moving from one DMV-like administrative experience to another in order to check off new "requirements" that will then grant you access to the aforementioned debt-laden, meatless future we are all promised.

We understand here at The Pamphleteer that the majority of policymakers in the United States right now are over the age of 60 (the oldest in American history), but some of us are healthy and in the prime of our lives. The founders had an average age of 38 years old. Napoleon, when he first came to power, was in his early-30s (and notably skirted quarantine measures against the Bubonic plauge on his return to France from Egypt). Inventive political activity comes from the youngest and freshest among us just as the most radical discoveries come to physicists when they are in their 20s and rarely afterwards.

It should come as no surprise then, as COVID-19 lingers like a cudgel in the public consciousness, that the old, sclerotic leaders of the nation continue to use the same tricks over and over again to little effect—namely the creation of arbitrary and nonsensical rules that create problems they then must solve. Hochul, beset by the "great ignorance" of the unvaccinated nurses, must embark on a brave, courageous political initiative to excise the ailing hospitals of their presence.

Civilized nations like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have done away entirely with COVID-19 restrictions and suffered none of the government created maladies seen in the United States in addition to significantly less deadly COVID-19 outbreaks. Kathy Hochul's worker shortage "crisis" is of her own creation.

Thanks for reading.

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: The Taliban vowed no revenge. One Afghan family tells a different story (Read)
• New York Times: Pelosi Plans Infrastructure Vote as Safety Net Bill Remains Mired in Rifts (Read)
• Wall Street Journal: Stock Futures Fall as Bond Yields Hit Three-Month High (Read)
• Fox News: Brian Laundrie manhunt: Tipster sends Dog the Bounty Hunter to Florida campground 75 miles from family home (Read)
• CNN: A Capitol Hill reckoning for top US general may again put Trump's political storms on full display (Read)
• NPR: The Purdue Pharma Deal Would Deliver Billions, But Individual Payouts Will Be Small (Read)
• Breitbart: Blackburn: You Can’t Call 1-800-Taliban to Vet Unvetted Afghan Evacuees, Only 3% of Evacuees Were Vetted SIV Holders (Read)
• HuffPost: Republicans Filibuster Bill Averting Government Shutdown, Debt Default (Read)

🏛 From the Hill

• Senate GOP Filibusters Bill to Raise Debt Ceiling in Key Procedural Vote (NRO) To avoid a government shut down, the debt ceiling must be raised by Thursday.
• House approves $1 billion for the Iron Dome as Democrats feud over Israel. (WSJ) The vote fell 420 to 9 in favor. The infamous "squad" voted against the bill with the notable exception of AOC who, after receiving a stern talking to from Nancy Pelosi, switched her vote to a neutral "present". She was visibly distraught following the confrontation. Speak Truth to Power.

🗺 Down on the Border

• U.S. Envoy to Haiti Resigns in Protest of Biden Administration Migrant Policy (WSJ) The border crisis gets an added dimension of political theater. Worth asking how 16,000 Haitians got all the way to Del Rio, Texas without spiking the interest of Mexico until Friday.
• Mayorkas admits 12,000 Haitians released in US — and more could follow (NY Post) Naturally, none of them were vaccinated or tested for COVID-19.

🌦 Climate Faux Pas

When talking about climate change, the solutions are the problem.

• Power Shortages Roil Northeast China (Sixth Tone) The cost of generating coal power has increased so much that operators have to periodically shut down in order to stay solvent. Additionally, Chinese officials have begun to enforce "energy reduction" measures to meet their goal of carbon neutrality by 2060. Presumably, part of this plan is periodically shutting down coal power plants to hack the "carbon math".
• EU rules to force USB-C chargers for all phones (BBC) Most notably, Apple will have to sunset their lightning charger. In Europe 21% of all phones are iPhones. The initiative is designed to cut down on charging cable waste.
• Biden Administration Makes First Major Move to Regulate Greenhouse Gases (NYT) Specifically against HFC which are used in refrigerators and air conditioning units
• SEC Asks Dozens of Companies for More Climate Disclosures (WSJ) Mr. Gensler, SEC Chairman, has asked his staff to write a rule proposal by the end of the year that would make companies’ climate-related risk disclosures consistent, comparable and useful to investors’ decision-making.

🦄 Woke-acracy

• Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (Scientific American) Remember when Scientific American talked about... science? Is this what mandated diversity does to science–reduces it to conversations about equity?
• Jake Gyllenhaal: ‘Women? They’re superior to men’ (The Times) Simp of the week goes to Jake Gyllenhaal. Get well soon, man.
• John Hinckley, Who Shot President Reagan, to Be Granted Unconditional Release (NRO) Reagan wasn't a Democrat, so...
• Pastor returns to porn on OnlyFans, says she’s tired of ‘very judgmental’ church-goers (Penn Live) Huh. Imagine that..

Nashville Politics

• Dr. Fiscus: Amazon confirms account created by unauthorized party used to send dog muzzle (Channel 5) The source of this information is Fiscus herself.

Nashville News

• COVID-19 update: Hospitalization down 23% in two weeks (Post)
• Tennessee Streams Will Play Important Role In Flood Recovery (WPLN)
• Pandemic, mental health continue to fuel rise in health coverage (Main Street)
• Metro Nashville Public Schools has dozens of unfilled jobs. Here's who the district needs to hire. (Tennessean)

Nashville Development

• MetroCenter property on lake sells for $24.5M (Post)
• Work to start on Charlotte Park mixed-use project (Post)
• Images, details released for SoBro tower project (Post)
• Project planned for Edgehill progresses (Post)
• Ford picks Memphis Regional Megasite for $5.6B electric vehicle and battery plant (TNJ)

COVID Gutter

True Americans wear N95s or gas masks with hazmat suits to ensure that exactly 0% of exhaled aerosols enter their surrounding environment and 100% of their fellow citizens remain 100% safe from infection.

True Americans despise numbers that are not full or empty. 100% is better than 80% 100% of the time, regardless of the measurement. The same goes for measurements of absence. 0% is better than 10% 100% of the time, regardless of the measurement.

True Americans do not compromise on this number which is why True Americans either go maskless or don a hazmat suit to shop for groceries. These middling, blue mask clowns with their paltry 10% reduction of exhaled aerosols should be expelled to the outer fringes of society and left to fend for their own food for 7-days and 7-nights until they realize the true beauty of complete absence (0%) and complete abundance (100%).

Headlines

• Norway Official: COVID-19 Can Now Be Compared to the Flu as Country Removes Pandemic Restrictions (Epoch Times)
• C.D.C. Chief Overrules Agency Panel and Recommends Pfizer-BioNTech Boosters for Workers at Risk (NYT) Waffling Walensky tries to right her wrongs.
• Foreigners May Replace Unvaccinated Health Care Workers in New York State: Governor (Epoch Times) Isn't what we do already across every industry? Mask off.
• Does My Mask Protect Me if Nobody Else Is Wearing One? (NYT) Yes, but barely if you're wearing a blue surgical mask.
• New York may tap National Guard to replace unvaccinated healthcare workers (Reuters)

Opinion

• Freedom prevails: COVID data shows ‘public health’ mandates only harm people (Dossier)

Information

• Murders Soared 30 Percent in 2020 in Largest Annual Increase on Record (NRO) Lockdowns plus permissible violent protests lead, unsurprisingly, to a massive amount of violence.

Around the Web

🎥 America the fat and impotent (Read)
🇸🇪 Sweden’s cultural revolution (Read)
☢️ Only nuclear can save us now (Read)

The Chinese Real Estate Market In One Video

Words of Wisdom

"The first step toward recovery is admitting we have a problem. And as C.S. Lewis wrote, the problem in our time is that we ‘make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.’ In other words, we have lost sight of what makes men good yet complain about the consequences of a world without the virtue for which good men are necessary. ‘We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful,’ Lewis concludes. So castrated are we now that we are not even allowed to notice that those most vulnerable to COVID-19 are obese and sedentary. It does not strike us as odd that swinish individuals like CNN’s Brian Stelter should wheezingly comment on public health issues."

From 'America the fat and impotent' by Pedro Gonzalez (Read)

Have a great Tuesday