Utopia, you are standing in it!

Glenn Loury, a professor of economics at Brown University, is well known to us as an African-American intellectual who, though a centrist with liberal tendencies (he might contest that position), dares to question the received wisdom of critical race theory. In this he’s sympatico with Columbia’s John McWhorter, and the pair often do discussions on bloggingheads.tv’s “The Glenn Show.”

Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a profile of Loury, and though it’s probably paywalled for most of you (click screenshot to see), judicious inquiry will yield a copy. It details his personal/political history from a young liberal on Chicago’s South Side to a college-age conservative who voted for Reagan, and then to his embrace of Christianity and return toward the Left by reading people like Murray, Herrsntein and Dinesh D’Souza.  I didn’t know Loury was religious (and I’m not that keen on it, since…

UnHerd interviews a Swedish medical researcher and practicing physician about what things are like there now. It seems the epidemic is winding down there now. Let me start up with Worldometers:

And a Swedish journalist fisks the NYT’s article about the Swedish response, which isn’t isnt quite the horror show the NYT is making it out to be. Also, it “didn’t do nothing” — it just relied more on persuasion and voluntary recommendations rather than mandates. (Good luck with THAT when dealing with Belgians, Israelis, or New Yorkers ;))
Maybe Sweden spared itself a 2nd wave by not locking down so tight in the 1st wave? 

(2) Dr. Seheult on inhaled steroids:

(3) I’ve mentioned earlier speculation that past TB vaccination with the BCG (bacille Calmette-Guérin) vaccine may impart a degree of protection against COVID19. Now a story affirming this got published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy…

Haley Zaremba writes at oilprice Will Trump’s Proposed ESG Regulation Help Big Oil? Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The ESG Push to Gamble Pension Funds on Climate Concerns

Instead of joining the financial revolution geared toward environmental, social, and governance (ESG) that many experts believe is coming down the pike (with or without the cooperation of the United States) the Trump administration has actively fought against this likely inevitability. A new proposed regulation from the United States Department of Labor would explicitly bar the department from taking ESG into consideration in decision making concerning U.S. employer-provided pension funds. Ostensibly, this move is because the government doesn’t believe that the nation’s pension fund managers are doing a good job, but many critics see this as a blatant attempt to redirect investment dollars towards fossil fuels, which are increasingly falling out of favor with investors.

[Note: The author’s bias shows…

HuffPo, one of the biggest exponents of “cancel culture”, now has published one of its longest articles claiming that such a culture doesn’t exist. The piece is a long and unconvincing response to the letter published last week in Harper’s (and four other international venues). That letter was simply a call for open debate, and “cancel culture” (CC) was defined implicitly in the piece. I’ll reproduce just a small section of that letter, and I’ve put the characteristics of “cancel culture” in bold. Note that the letter calls out these characteristics on both the Right and on the Left, though the signers, mostly Leftists, concentrate on their own end of the political spectrum:

. . . .The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into…