Deconstructing a Bach cello prelude

 Just because this is awesome.

The version by Inbal Segev is great, too.

The ghost of Christmas past?

Writing for American Thinker, James S. Corum observes that Joe Biden (or his people) have applied analogy ineptly, not least because they don't remember the differences in World War Two events between the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg. 

Biden and his handlers pulled the Nazi card reflexively, as progressives too often do. 

They accused Republicans who questioned election irregularities of touting a big lie. The truth is very nearly a mirror image of what some progressives say it is, and when they don't pull the Hitler card, they just say shut up, as spokespeople for NY governor Andrew Cuomo have hoped in vain that Janice Dean would do. (Deplatforming is what happens to people who don't toe the progressive line, if they have a big enough audience to come to the attention of the nomenkatura).

Here's how Corum put it:

"The Big Lie of 2020 is that it was a clean and honest election. Like the Big Lie of Hamburg raids, the Big Lie will fail. Like Hamburg in 1943, there are simply too many witnesses. There are the videos of election observers being blocked in several cities and videos in Atlanta of observers sent away, and in their absence election workers piling ballots into the counting machines.  There is sworn testimony from hundreds of election workers detailing illegal actions. There are the Dominion machines in Michigan that were set up to create ballot errors which were “adjudicated” (flipped) in favor of Democrats. There is hard documentary evidence of the dead voting by mail, or of (supposedly) living voters receiving and returning their ballots by the postal service within a day. There are thousands of Georgia voters who illegally provided post office box numbers as their place of residence. There is the analysis of highly respected IT experts and statisticians who have spotted statistically implausible vote spikes, unusual local turnout, and voting patterns not seen in previous elections. The evidence presented at state legislative hearings (I watched some on One America News) is thorough, well-documented and plausible.

Joe Biden is beginning his presidency with one of the biggest lies in the history of American politics. On top of the “honest election” lie, he will have to maintain lies about his family’s Chinese and Ukrainian business connections, as well as his involvement in illegal deep state surveillance of political opponents."

James Bovard has written something similar. So has Conrad Black, not linked from this entry but well worth reading even when his essays appear in the otherwise deeply disappointing National Review, towering like sunflowers over the cat box where NeverTrumpers leave their odiferous deposits.

The thing is -- for example -- Antifa isn't actually "anti-fascist." They're just the most vocal of several groups carrying signs that mostly say "hooray for our side," as Buffalo Springfield put it generations ago. They're self-appointed hall monitors in the Temple of Wokism. And despite what Nancy Pelosi claims, the riot in Washington D.C. on January 6 wasn't even remotely an insurrection or an attempted coup.

Why John Roberts fumbled again

We know longer have cause to look down on the corruption of so-called "Banana Republics," because we've become one (I borrowed the image above from The People's Cube, where they're familiar with totalitarian impulses).

E. Donald Elliot in American Spectator Online yesterday:

"The [U.S. Supreme] Court's stated reason for turning down the case brought by Texas against Pennsylvania and other swing states was its ruling that one state has no "judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections." That should go down in history as one of the dumbest things the court has ever said, right up there with 'separate but equal' as a justification for racial segregation or 'three generations of imbeciles is enough' as a justification for mandatory sterilization.

The question was not how Pennsylvania conducted "its" election, as the Court wrongly characterized the issue. The allegations went to the constitutional legitimacy of election procedures in a presidential election in which voters in both Texas and Pennsylvania participated. If one state may illegally manipulate votes in a presidential election, the influence of all the other states that do play by the rules is undermined. The Court was essentially saying that one team has no interest in whether the other team is cheating."

(To see and think about what the Supremes should have but chose not to, see this compendium of evidence for ballot fraud and irregularity as alleged by no less than 923 fact witnesses)

A few medical links

 Because 2020 was that kind of year, and risk assessment is an increasingly forgotten art:

• What is Triple-Negative Breast Cancer?
• What is a Kennedy Terminal Ulcer?
• The medical establishment now frowns on hugging your own kin, which suggests to me that they've made a fetish of physical health and forgotten how much it's entwined with psychological health.
  
  
• Dr. Vladimir Zelenko on treating COVID-19 with Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Zinc. 
• New York City's mayor weaponized the virus against the First Amendment.
• With a few honorable exceptions, policymakers don't really care about older people.
• As former Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) noted to her credit, "continuity of government" doesn't excuse young politicians cutting in line.
• Dr. Anthony Fauci hasn't treated patients since 1968, which is part of the reason why it was a mistake for the Trump administration to let him become the face of federal response to the Wuhan Coronavirus.
• The Great Barrington Declaration deserves more attention than it got.
  
  
• North Carolina's Emergency Management Act has been beaten with a rubber hose.
• "Follow the science" should be axiomatic and noncontroversial, but the Left politicized even that advice to make it ideological (Because caution, not science, drives so much policy, and caution is politically useful for people already in power. And also because the "follow the science" mantra is very curiously not used to justify abortion on demand, lest anyone make too much of sonogram images, for example).
• City Journal looks helpfully at the carbon footprint of new covid-19 vaccines.
• Here's a State Department fact sheet on activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (odds are good that this page will be taken down when Joe Biden is the U.S. president. In that case, see Instapundit)
• Not everything points to "mask up and lock down" as an effective public health strategy.

Bonus quote from Newsweek (14 January 2021): "A new study evaluating COVID-19 responses around the world found that mandatory lockdown orders early in the pandemic did not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures, such as social distancing or travel reduction...The peer reviewed study, which was conducted by a group of Stanford researchers and published in the Wiley Online Library on January 5, analyzed coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020."