Scattershooting while wondering where I can find evenhanded factual reporting in modern journalism…

FALL COLLEGE FOOTBALL and the PANDEMIC: Some conferences have cancelled college football for fall 2020 as of this writing, while others have decided to forge onward? What’s the right answer? We don’t know yet. It’s all a grand experiment. At the administrative level, what we’re seeing here is a struggle between angling for sports revenue by deciding to play (SEC, Big 12-3, ACC) and CYA-driven liability fear of losing money to lawsuits (Big 10+3, Pac-12, lower divisions). The common denominator for both sides? Money. Not health, money. Health for them simply is a PR topic to satiate the concerned masses.

There is no easy answer on the health side. This disease is going to infect ~90% of Americans before we’re done, regardless, based on epidemiology research at Gilead. That will include roughly that proportion of college athletes. Get it now or get it later? While I lean “get it later” to give science more time to come up with more-effective treatments and at least partially effective vaccines, the demographic playing college sports is the second least-vulnerable (behind children). Trevor Lawrence of Clemson has argued, intelligently and persuasively, that team discipline and oversight in that atmosphere can minimize spread compared to the athletes being willy-nilly in the populace at home. Yet we we know (from experience as well as the news every given fall) college students want to gather and party, which will spread this crap. In short, this really is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Which side you choose is based largely on which form of damnation you prefer.

KAMALA HARRIS VP CANDIDACY: I do admittedly find it amusing that the not-so-far Bernie left already is going after Kamala hard for being a “cop” (i.e., prosecutor). You can see this all over Twitter. And they are asking one quite valid question: why, after attacking Biden for praising segregationists and working with segregationist Senate colleagues like Herman Talmadge and James Eastland, and (rightly, IMO) making statements against his propensity to sniff/fondle women, does she sign on to being his VP? In this sense I do agree with Bernie “Progressive camp” (which really is the left’s mainstream anymore). Of course, she wasn’t a very effective nor evenhanded nor competent prosecutor (below), so perhaps the Bernie leftists who oppose her for “being a cop” don’t have a lot to worry about there — though they are on the mark when it comes to Biden’s (and by extension now, her) presence in the corporatist, Clintonian, military/industrial complex wing of the party. Even though I disagree with the “Bernie” crowd on so many things, at least I can understand them better than the so-called “moderate” Ds, because of their clearer positions and stronger ideological consistency. [I say “so-called” because today’s mainstream D party is so far left on many socioeconomic issues in particular that it would be utterly unrecognizable to the party of Truman and John Kennedy, who by today’s standards, were Tea Party: strong-military, lower-tax advocating, socially conservative Democrats.]

There’s a lot to unpack with this pick, but for kicks, I’d like to start here. During her 13 years as D.A. then attorney general, she failed to prosecute even one case of priest sexual abuse, though during that same period at least 50 major cities had brought charges against priests. Why? That requires explanation and investigation that a fawning, emotionally beholden leftist media will fail to provide. Wait and see if you do not believe me.

According to Peter Schweitzer’s investigation, “Harris had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations, but the money still came in large, unprecedented sums. Lawyer Joseph Russoniello represented the church on a wide variety of issues, including the handling of the church abuse scandal. He served on the Catholic Church’s National Review Board (NRB) of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The purpose of the NRB was to review Catholic Church abuse cases. Russoniello was also a partner in the San Francisco law firm Cooley Godward. Russoniello donated the maximum amount by law to her campaign, $1,250, and his law firm added another $2,250. He also sat on Harris’s advisory council when she was San Francisco district attorney. Another law firm, Bingham McCutcheon, which handled legal matters for the archdiocese concerning Catholic Charities, donated $2,825, the maximum allowed. Curiously, Bingham McCutcheon had only donated to two other candidates running for office in San Francisco before, for a total of $650. As with Russoniello, their support was unusual. … board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign.”

Follow the money if you want explanations for why politicians do otherwise inexplicable things.

LEFTIST WEAPONIZING of DUNNING-KRUGER: This Dunning-Kruger effect is real. We all have seen or experienced some aspect of it. One of those I’ve seen is that the Left has been weaponizing the concept for a few years now to squash any dissent from its own “I know everything” status. I see it often from certain (not all!) climatologists, most radical social-agenda activists, and those especially on the “Christian Left” who try to sledgehammer their own cherry-picked, sanctimonious, wordly (as opposed to Biblical) version of “empathy” down others’ throats — a very ironic thing, eh?