Well, what swine flu isn’t doing this week is apparently less than what it wasn’t doing last week. In other words, it appears to have peaked.
How do we know?
Here we see it’s going down the right side of the bell curve both in terms of deaths and hospitalizations.
And there’s both a massive decline in samples submitted to CDC surveillance labs and a small decline in those testing positive.
College infections have essentially gone flat.
And finally we see from the Australian swine flu data in…
The Free Kareem protest is going on today at 12 pm outside of the Egyptian Cultural and Educational Bureau on New Hampshire just south of Dupont Circle. If you’ll be in the area, please stop by and show your support for Kareem Amer, the blogger who is serving a four-year prison sentence for criticizing the Egyptian government.
Last Sunday’s Packers-Vikings game was a big one. Brett Favre beat his old team on its home turf. If you’re not sick of all the hype, check out my take on what the game means for Packer fans over at The American Spectator Online.
A new Harvard poll, in a ranking of 13 leadership categories, found Congress and the media ranked 11th and 12th respectively. They probably would have been even lower had there been a category for used car salesmen.
In the wake of two new biographies of Ayn Rand, MarginalRevolution’s Alex Tabbarok today reposts and links to some of his and Tyler Cowan’s writings on her 100th birthday in February 2009, and draws attention to her “virtue ethics.” For that same event, CEI’s Fred Smith had an eloquent tribute showing how Rand explored the moral foundations of economic liberty and provided insights into the assault on free enterprise. Here are some excerpts from Smith’s article that are especially relevant in today’s…
From a letter to the editor of the Washington Post:
It is ridiculous that The Post has dedicated so much of the A section the past several weeks to the swine flu outbreak. Being a young “survivor” of the swine flu, I have to say that it was the most anticlimactic experience I have ever had. No deathbed, no fever.
The way the media continue to portray the virus is creating unnecessary panic around the world. Many people infected with the virus don’t…
The recent announcement that the GDP grew in the third quarter at an annualized rate of 3.5 percent was referred to by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner as proof that the economy is finally improving. But a quick glance at history demonstrates that this is not the case.
Between 1934 and 1937—during the heart of the Great Depression—GDP grew at by an average of 9.5 percent annually. In 1934, GDP grew by nearly 11 percent, but it would be six more years…
Okay — it’s almost Halloween, so I should be forgiven for a non-policy posting on the Top Ten Scariest Movies. I’ve picked a sample of top ten listings to check out any unanimity in the selections. Not really, ‘though several films appear on almost every list - Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Halloween (1978). Most of the scariest are horror or sci-fi films, with lots of gore and special effects, but a significant number of the top…
The Obama administration is patting itself on the back for saving the jobs of thousands of educators by doling out stimulus funds earlier in the year.
But should we all cheer just because Ms. Frizzle didn’t get the boot? Teachers, like all professionals, have no right to employment. In the private market people who are good at their jobs are in demand and courted with money. People who are bad either work for less money or have to find a different…
A new look to food labels in Sweden. Food companies and restaurants may be listing the fossil fuel emissions that went into the production of the food. So far, it’s an experiment to test whether people change their buying habits to purchase the supposedly eco-friendlier foods. And it may sweep not just through Sweden but the whole EU.
But the Swedish food police admit that they are some problems in balancing healthy eating with low-carbon-footprint eating. And it doesn’t always work. Their…
Creative destruction is never easy for an economy to digest, especially when the industry involved has an exceptionally loud megaphone to amplify its screaming. In a report released on Monday, former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr. (with co-author Michael Schudson) insists that Americans take “collective responsibility” for fostering journalism and news reporting (saving unprofitable, poorly-managed news outfits). Of course, Downie doesn’t directly ask citizens for money - that would be uncouth. Instead, he suggests that universities and nonprofits, internet…
It’s got a good lede that should have won at least a front-page Metro slot. Instead, buried in Saturday’s Washington Post’s Metro Section amid the obituaries on p. B5 was this startling weather note: On Friday, October 16, 2009, in Washington, DC, the high temperature was the lowest temperature recorded for that date in 138 years! Friday’s high was a low 45 degrees. Here’s the Post:
Something happened in Washington on Friday that had not occurred in 138 years of weather history:…
Updated 10/16/09
Today [Oct. 15, 2009], Rep. Darrell Isa (R-CA), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. James Sensenbrenner, ranking member of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, released a joint minority staff report titled, The Politics of EPA’s Endangerment Finding.
I’ll say more about the report after reading the 146-page document. Key findings include:
EPA prejudged the outcome of its endangerment finding to advance the Obama administration’s policy agenda.
EPA’s effort to control greenhouse gas emissions…
No, you won’t get GI Bill benefits but then again you don’t have to get shot at, either. It’s for my website Fumento.com. But I will also soon be looking to build the Independent Journalism Project website, so help would be appreciated there too. Other than what should be a short learning curve, it’s probably just a three-hour-a-week task for somebody with web skills; but I know less about HTML than about the approximate air velocity of the African swallow.…
“Clean Energy Splits France: It’s Carbon vs. Countryside in Environmental Battle Over Plan for Windmills Near Coastal Shrine.” So reads the Washington Post headline.
But is it?
The article concerns three windmills that some fear will obstruct the view of the awesome Mont St. Michelle Abby on the French coast, which becomes an island at high tides. Yet the article also points out that France is very accepting of nuclear power, which provides about 80% of the nation’s energy needs. Another 10% comes…
Welcome to the second edition of “Weekly Flu Watch,” which relies on data, rather than the apparent media dictum that “One anecdote is worth a thousand statistics.”
As I’ve noted previously, every Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes a new edition of FluView, which tracks all types of flu but currently only swine flu since that’s all that’s out there now. Most figures are from the previous week, though some are newer.
And every week the hysteria-minded media…
“Twenty-one thousand college students are sick,” begins a Fox online news report titled: “H1N1 Picks Up Steam One Week Before Vaccine Becomes Available.” Wow! That’s a lot of sick kids! Tell us more!
But there is nothing more on those 21,000. Lots of talk about people swamping emergency rooms and school closings, yet not a single number regarding actual flu cases in a 765-word article.
What if it began “Flying saucers land on the White House lawn” and no flying saucers were mentioned…
Time magazine informs us
Pandemic diseases have a way of revealing our vulnerabilities in quick order. Already we have been humbled by the virus’s exploitation of our fragmented health-care system, as families without insurance overwhelm emergency rooms, schools flounder without nurses, and people without a sick-leave option choose between going to work with a raging fever or getting fired. At the University of Washington, some 2,000 students have reported having H1N1 symptoms. At Emory University in Atlanta, sick kids are relocated…
American law has moved in a leftward direction over the last 20 years, steadily restricting use of the death penalty and criminal sentencing, and expanding lawsuits against businesses, thanks largely to the Supreme Court.
But to some left-leaning journalists who write about the Supreme Court, none of this has ever happened, and the Supreme Court, which is responsible for many of these liberal changes, remains a conservative boogeyman.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, America’s most famous Supreme Court reporter, writes today that in the Supreme…
While Obama ally ACORN attempts to gag whistleblowers who exposed its role in a recent scandal, the Obama administration is trying to gag critics of its health-care plan, which the Congressional Budget Office says could wipe out many Medicare Advantage programs relied on by the elderly. (”The Obama Administration wants to seriously curtail or end Medicare Advantage.”)
It has issued a gag order to Humana, a health insurer that provides Medicare Advantage services, ordering it not to tell customers about how Obamacare could reduce the availability of…
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