Read it.

Former White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted in a congressional deposition last week that the federal government’s COVID guidance for six-feet social distancing was not based on scientific evidence, stating under oath “it sort of just appeared.” Fauci’s testimony came during the second day of his closed-door deposition before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, and echoed a similar comment made by former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

“The six feet rule was arbitrary in and of itself,” Dr. Gottlieb said during a September 2021 appearance on “Face the Nation” while discussing COVID guidance. “Nobody knows where it came from. The six feet is a perfect example of sort of the lack of rigor of how CDC made recommendations.”

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Desperate for members and knowing the importance of getting in on the ground floor, the Association of Flight Attendants-Communication Workers of America (AFA-CWA) saw an opportunity with startup airline Avelo.

The AFA-CWA recruited flight attendants to its cause almost before the airline got off the ground.

The union filed an application for an election when the company was in its infancy and there were only 14 eligible voters. At the time of the election, there were nearly 100 flight attendants, but through a loophole in the law, only the original 14 were allowed to vote, and of them, eight voted for the union.

Since then, the company has continued to grow. Now, Avelo Airlines’ 200-plus flight attendants are saddled up with a union voted in by eight people. Think of that: More than 200 people have been forced into an affiliation with an entity that only eight of them embraced.

And there’s still no contract. The AFA-CWA may claim to be adept at contract negotiations, but nearly two years have already passed with no end in sight to negotiations.

Look for … the Union label….

Matt Continetti.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken sat for an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday. It was not reassuring.

…

War rages. What most interests Tom Friedman, however, are the chances for a Palestinian state. He says it’s the key to peace in the Middle East—a position from which he has not wavered, despite all evidence to the contrary, for more than 20 years. Antony Blinken is more than happy to indulge in this delusion.

Read it.

My local Home Depot now locks up a great many things. I don’t have time to ring a bell and cool my heels – so I walk out and purchase online instead.

The net result is that prices will soar at these stores (just to pay for the staff, and reduced demand from impatient shoppers). And Amazon (and equivalents) will soon be the only ways to purchase the stuff people steal from stores.

Read it.

The use of tunnels in wars is not new. Seeking advantages by using either natural or man-made spaces underground is as ancient as warfare itself—from stories of tunnels being used to win massive battles in the bible to underground spaces becoming key factors to urban battles, like Mariupol and Bakhmut, in the ongoing war in Ukraine. Modern nations including the United States, China, and North Korea invest billions in deep-buried military bunkers and tunnel complexes. But what Israel has faced in Gaza represents a unique first in war—namely, a case in which tunnels form one of two pillars, along with time, of a combatant’s political-military strategy.

Before the Israel-Hamas war, both the presence of Hamas tunnel networks and their growth over the years were very well known. The network was referred to as Gaza’s “Metro” or “lower Gaza.” The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and scholars estimated before the war that there were three hundred miles of tunnels ranging from fifteen feet to over two hundred feet below the surface. The estimates were wrong.

After three months of close combat and discovering over 1,500 tunnel shafts and underground passages, the IDF has learned enough to require the estimates to be revised. Israeli forces have unearthed massive invasion tunnels two and a half miles long, underground manufacturing plants, luxury tunnels with painted walls, tile floors, ceiling fans, and air conditioning, and a complex, layered, labyrinth underneath all areas of Gaza. The new estimates say the network may include between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels, with close to 5,700 separate shafts descending into hell.

Read it.

Gun violence in 6 out of the 8 largest Ohio cities dropped significantly after Ohio legalized permit-free carry of guns across the entire state in 2022.

Read it.

Illinois is adding tens of thousands of people to its population total, and California is getting misplaced sailors on an aircraft carrier put in the right location, after successfully asking for a review of their 2020 census figures.

New York City also appears to have gotten an additional 1,090 people added to its population total recently after asking the Census Bureau to double-check the city’s numbers from the head count of every U.S. resident, city officials said.

The once-a-decade census produces population figures that help determine political power and the annual distribution of $2.8 trillion in federal funding. The Census Bureau has two programs giving governments opportunities to have their population totals reviewed and adjusted if need be. Nearly 200 requests for reviews were filed by tribal, local and state governments for the 2020 census.

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Parliament isn’t too far from the Port of Dover, but it feels as though it’s on another planet. While Tory ‘rebels’ again laid down their knives on Wednesday to back a bill designed to deter illegal migration, around 200 people crossed the English Channel in small boats in challenging conditions.

Rishi Sunak’s Safety of Rwanda Bill passed comfortably in the House of Commons last night, with just 11 Tory MPs voting against, despite many more complaining that it is nowhere near tough enough. The bill, which will now be sent to the House of Lords for further scrutiny, is designed to overturn legal objections to sending illegal migrants to Rwanda for processing by declaring the African nation “safe.” The government succeeded in fighting down amendments which would have made it more difficult for future deportations to be blocked in the courts.

This is a definite victory for the prime minister and should stave off talk on the need for new Tory leadership, for now. But it is unlikely to have any real impact on the continuing Channel crisis, which Migration Watch UK Chairman Alp Mehmet, told The European Conservative will carry on regardless.

Read it.

No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend.

Many names did get changed as immigrants settled into their new American lives, but those changes were made several years after arrival and were done by choice of someone in the family. The belief persists, however, that the changes were done at the entry point and that the immigrants were unwilling participants in the modifications. Sophisticated family history researchers have long rolled their collective eyes at the “Ellis Island name change” idea. In genealogy blogs and online publications, they wearily repeat the correction—names were not changed at Ellis Island; immigrants changed their own names, usually during the citizenship process. But the belief persists, perhaps because people need to explain surname changes in a way that satisfies them (thinking that their immigrant ancestors made the changes themselves apparently does not do so).

The explanation for this is pretty obvious when you think about it. Just as today, people bought tickets and their names were written on the tickets:

Read it.

What could go wrong?

I certainly hope so.

Read it.

I didnt’ see any mention of it, but I’m sure the resolution calls for a free pony for every child in Gaza as well.

Newsbusters.

On MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight, viewers were subjected to several painful minutes of self-indulgent whining over the purchase of The Baltimore Sun by David Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcasting Group. Media don’t especially appreciate losing control of an outlet.

Vox.

At least as long as human beings have lived in large, close groups, respiratory viruses have been present — sometimes an annoyance, sometimes a catastrophe. Though we’ve managed to create vaccines and drugs to blunt their effects, the viruses endure.

But there is a group of people who think we do not need to live this way. These scientists, activists, and entrepreneurs believe we’re going to look back on this era, one of commonly endured airborne infections, as a case of antiquarian barbarism, a bunch of needless suffering that we accepted because we didn’t know any better. They believe that we have the technology now, and will have even better technology soon, that could end respiratory infections for good, the way that disinfecting our drinking water with chlorine helped end typhoid as a major cause of death in the US.

The technology is called germicidal ultraviolet light (GUV), and in particular, a relatively novel kind of ultraviolet light often denoted as “far-UV.” “We have so much data suggesting that this is far and away the most impactful technology, when it comes to protecting people from infectious disease, that exists today,” says Kevin Esvelt, a professor and biologist at MIT who has championed the idea.

Read it.

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry lashed out at a reporter who asked him about his “carbon footprint” at the World Economic Forum’s Davos conference on Tuesday.

Read it.

The federal government asked financial institutions to rummage through customer data if terms such as “MAGA” or “TRUMP” were used in transactions, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed Wednesday.

Read it.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed an order requiring Texas to move a floating barrier on the Rio Grande that drew backlash from Mexico – the latest development in legal battles between the Biden administration and Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

The Spectator.

A lot of people dream of having what is known as “screw you” money. In my observation, this is not simply in order to be able to live in a castle or own Ferraris or Van Dycks, or whatever is your wont. It is in order to be able to say those fine, demotic words to whomever you like.

It should be noted that most people dream of saying the words to someone who is perceived to be above them: someone to whom they might once have been subservient in some way. A boss, for instance.

Yet one of the strangest things about the mega-rich is that they do not actually say “screw you” when they ought to. A couple of years ago, I was being interviewed in front of an audience made up of the world’s mega-rich and I asked them: “What is the point of having ‘screw you’ money if you never say ‘screw you?’”

Read it.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prepared to alert state and local officials to an emerging connection between heart inflammation and COVID-19 vaccines, but ultimately did not send the alert, according to a new document obtained by The Epoch Times.

I would encourage him to do so. Sauce for the goose….l

Read it.

“Courtesy cards,” are cards given out by the NYC police union (and presumably elsewhere) to friends and family who use them to get easy treatment if they are pulled over by a cop. I was stunned when I first wrote about these cards in 2018. I thought this was common only in tinpot dictatorships and flailing states. The cards even come in levels, gold, silver and bronze!

Democrats didn’t invent modern political corruption, but they are certainly perfecting it.

Read it.

Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) was a Hungarian-born philosopher, a professor at Brooklyn College, a friend of Russell Kirk, and the author of more than forty books, including Politics and the State: The Catholic View, originally published in 1980 by Franciscan Herald Press. In 2018, that work was reissued by Cluny in the edition under review herein: an affordable softcover volume titled The Church and the State, published with ecclesiastical permission and with the subtitle The Catholic Tradition as an Integral Element of Western Political Thought. The work is divided into a brief preface, an expansive introduction, and five chapters.

The preface begins by identifying a philosophical circumstance peculiar to American political thought. Molnar argues that Americans are reliant upon manifest pragmatism to determine the range of their political theory, as a consequence of their scepticism regarding such theories. Consequently, in America, there is a widespread acceptance (or quasi-acceptance) of only four conservative approaches to political theory: one derived from interpretations of The Federalist, one based upon the theories of Leo Strauss, one based upon the theories of Eric Voegelin, and a half-respectable, somewhat un-American one in the form of Marxism. The last of these, Molnar observes, “in spite of the popularity of its advocates in some academic circles, has not entered the mainstream of American political thought”—a statement that still rings true today, albeit less certainly than when it was originally published in 1980, now that congress finds itself beleaguered by a squad of far-left Marxists.

The problem with ‘conservatism’ is that it isn’t really an ‘-ism’, i.e. an ideology that strives for a certain end-state, like progressivism or Marxism. As Russell Kirk famously pointed out, ‘conservatism’ is actually anti-ideology, in that it reflexively opposes ideological movements of any kind.

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The commanding officer of the USS Georgia sub’s blue crew — Capt. Geoffry Patterson — was relieved by Rear Adm. Thomas Buchanan, the commander of Submarine Group 10, “due to a loss of confidence in his ability to command,” the Navy said.

Patterson appears to be the first Navy commander to be removed from command this year.

Suggesting that we can look forward to others?

The USS Georgia is homeported at King’s Bay, Georgia. According to data from the Camden County Sheriff’s Office, where King’s Bay is located, Patterson was arrested in the early hours of Jan. 9 on charges including driving under the influence and improper lane change.

ZMan intrudes some reality.

The false dilemma is an informal fallacy which is based on the false premise that there are only two options in a particular situation. The fallacy is not in the logic, as with other fallacies, but in the premise. It is a useful rhetorical trick, so it turns up in political debates and propaganda. “We must do X or Y will happen” with Y being something everyone assumes to be bad. The idea is to limit the choices to one that is preferred and one that no one would willingly choose.

It is such a highly effective rhetorical strategy that what we call conservatism rests on a foundation of false choices. No matter what the left proposes, the right opposes by offering an option that is doomed to fail versus what the left proposes. A good example was the homosexual marriage debate. The left proposed redefining marriage to mean sharing rent and a bed. Instead of rejecting this out of hand, the right proposes civil unions, thus leaving us with two degenerate options.

We are seeing this again with the war over the antiwhite pogroms labeled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is not an accident that the acronym DEI could easily be DIE, as the people behind this do not hide their intensions. When they say they want to eliminate whiteness, there is only one way this can happen. If one were to call for eliminating Jewishness, you get compared to Hitler. Therefore, logic dictates that when they say they want to eliminate whiteness, they mean white people.

One of the very shopworn tools in the proglodyte toolbox is the rhetorical trick of “So….”, as Scott Adams is constantly pointing out. If you say X, they say “So then you want Y?” which is not even in the same ballpark as X. Every attempt at clarification is met with a reiteration of “So then you want Y?”, as if you weren’t even in the conversation.

Read it.

The US military spends about $10 billion on small-arms ammunition annually. The most common caliber ammunition used by the US military is the 5.56x45mm NATO Standard round. On average, an American soldier carries around 210 rounds of ammunition for their primary weapon, which is usually an M-16 or M-4 automatic rifle. U.S. military depots store an estimated 15 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition. The Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky is the largest US military ammunition storage facility.

Small arms ammunition typically remains in storage for up to 20 years. The US military uses a variety of small-arms ammunition in combat, including 5.56mm, 7.62mm, and .50 caliber rounds. The US military replenishes its ammunition stockpiles on a regular basis, based on usage and demand. New military ammunition undergoes extensive testing and evaluation to ensure reliability, accuracy, and performance.

Read it.

In a following video, a young “French” woman gives her followers a crash course on how to game the French welfare system in order to make as much money as possible without ever having to work.

There’s no indication of the young lady’s ethnicity, and with her burka and hoodie it’s hard to determine much about her appearance. She speaks rapid, clipped French, which may help a native French-speaker identify her background. I can usually understand at least a little bit of a French-language video, but in this one I was lucky to pick out one word in ten, even with the French text right there on the screen.

So I’m betting she’s a culture-enricher, eager to milk the kuffar for everything she can get.

Muslims consider what we would see as welfare fraud to be their ‘jizya‘ right under shari’a law.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

Contrary to allegations leveled by a Democrat Congress member and the Biden administration, the Texas Military Department (TMD) asserted on Jan. 14 that the bodies of one adult woman and two children had already been recovered from the river by Mexican authorities before Border Patrol agents requested access to a fenced-off 2.5-mile stretch of the southern border in Eagle Pass on Jan. 12.

TMD, which runs the National Guard, provided additional details about the incident in an updated statement on Jan. 14, once again calling the allegations “wholly inaccurate.”

“At the time that Border Patrol requested access, the drownings had occurred, Mexican authorities were recovering the bodies, and Border Patrol expressed these facts to the TMD personnel on site,” the TMD stated on Jan. 14.

Democrats lie. It’s what they do. (And they complain about Trump?)

Read it.

There are no civilians in Gaza.

Read it.

My foray into the workforce was a minimum-wage job making pizzas and washing dishes at Pizza Hut.

The money I earned supported my spending as a new driver and taught me how to budget and save for the future. And the experience I gained—everything from teamwork to customer service to safety standards—has stuck with me throughout my career.

If I were growing up in California today, though, that same job opportunity probably wouldn’t exist.

As a 16-year-old without experience, I couldn’t produce $20 per hour of value for Pizza Hut—or probably any company. But $20 per hour is where Assembly Bill 1228 in California sets the bar for fast-food workers. After factoring in mandatory employment taxes, that comes out to more than $48,000 per year for a full-time employee.

Read it.

When Congress voted to spend hundreds of billions to switch electricity production to solar and wind, it forgot something: transmission lines. New ones will be needed going to the locations of the new power sources, but nobody bothered to figure out who will pay for it or how much it will cost.

When has Congress ever cared “how much it will cost”?

Congressmen Sean Casten (D-IL) and Mike Levin (D-CA) introduced a bill last month to fix their omission, largely at your expense. The bill has already picked up 76 co-sponsors, including eight from Illinois.

Read it.

If it ain’t broke, break it.

That’s Joe Biden’s guiding principle. He took President Donald Trump’s much-tighter southern border and ripped it as wide open as a gutted trout’s belly.

Biden turned Trump’s energy independence into begging Iran and Venezuela to pump more oil. And Biden devolved Trump’s peace in the Middle East into a five-front Arab war on Israel, even as the ayatollahs’ Houthi pals ignited the Red Sea with anti-ship missiles and anti-American drones.

And for his next trick, Biden wants to impersonate a Latin autocrat.

We are living through Atlas Shrugged. I’m sure Ayn Rand would be pleased, if there were a God and an afterlife.

Read it.

Eight months after anonymously blowing the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital’s transgender program, a surgeon has gone public with a tale of relentless persecution by the Biden administration.

Dr. Eithan Haim would have preferred to remain anonymous, but he said the Biden administration’s “blatant attempt at political intimidation” forced him to go public, after a federal criminal investigation buried him and his wife in $250,000 of legal fees without ever filing charges.

“We spent the entirety of our retirement, investments, savings, and almost all of our disposable income to pay the legal bills to keep the case alive,” Haim explained. “Although we have given this case all we have, there simply isn’t enough to keep up with the hundreds of thousands we currently owe in legal bills or the potential million[s] it would cost to fight this case through trial.”

Read it.

The White House hosted its first information session for President Joe Biden’s “American Climate Corps” program on Thursday to tout the program and solicit feedback from prospective participants.

Ali Zaidi, the White House national climate adviser, joined Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and other White House officials to preview the American Climate Corps, a de facto green jobs training program that is expected to begin churning out cohorts this summer.

The government officials marketed the program as a key tool to push sweeping societal action to counter climate change, while civilians logged on to the virtual information session made suggestions and asked a range of questions about the program and the shape it will take

A good start to the day consists of taking a nap. After breakfast, of course.

I remember, when I was in the Navy, getting together with my colleagues to discuss what we were going to do for the day. We called it “Quarters for Muster”.

The Register.

And it couldn’t happen to a … nicer group of people.

Read it.

As a result of this history as well as current events, I was asked by a member of my congregation to sit outside during services that Saturday. I, of course, said yes. So that morning, myself and another member showed up before services, got a couple of chairs, and placed ourselves outside the main doors of the Synagogue.

We were, again of course, both armed, though his wife asked us not to bring rifles. We complied, but next time we may have a couple of ARs staged at the door, just in case.

…

During services, a member came outside to check on us and see if we needed anything. Right before he went back inside, he asked if we had whistles or some other type of noisemaker to alert those attending services if there was trouble outside.

My fellow sentry and I exchanged a knowing glance and assured him that A) we did, in fact, have noisemakers, and B) they would certainly be loud enough to be heard inside if we needed to use them.

We found out later he was completely unaware of the types of noisemakers we were carrying. After he left, we shared some good natured banter about “noisemakers.”

ZMan examines the tea leaves.

These sorts of rodents scurry around every presidential primary, but we have some unusual vermin this time. Nikki Haley is running as a standard issue regime Democrat in the Republican primary. The base assumptions of her campaign are that Trump will be removed from the ticket and the party is ready to throw in the towel and merge with the Democrats like you see in most Democrat states. In those states, the Republicans run lighter versions of the Democrats in statewide elections.

What she hoped for in Iowa was a clear second place finish. This would have knocked DeSantis out of the race. She would then be the sole anti-Trump option for the next few months, establishing herself as the logical alternative for when the party removes Trump from the ballot. Instead, she came in third place, with her support coming mostly from Democrats crossing over to vote for the most virulent anti-Trump option. She was close enough to DeSantis, however, to stay in the race.

…

Through the media, we can see that the regime has determined that Haley is a good replacement for Biden, even if she is in the wrong party. In a way, they are trying to engineer the primary into a version of Hillary versus Trump in 2016. This may be why Haley is running around praising Hillary Clinton. This is the narrative framing that the regime is conjuring, so Haley is leaning into it. After all, from her perspective, the real nominating process is in Washington.

Read it.

The Nation magazine’s Palestinian correspondent is being investigated by the London Metropolitan Police after saying “we must normalize massacres as the status quo” during an anti-Israel demonstration last weekend.

Mohammed El-Kurd, who is described as the Nation‘s “first-ever Palestine Correspondent” on the left-wing magazine’s website, also denounced the existence of Israel and said “we must root [Zionism] out of the world” in his speech at the London rally.

The Metropolitan Police said it was “aware of the remarks” and was “assessing the matter and as part of that assessment will be seeking to speak to the individual concerned.” The U.K. has strict laws relating to discriminatory speech and incitement to violence.

Heated car seats are a cornerstone of civilization.

BBC.

It’s a common sight at many retail stores: a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk, doing their best to remain patient as a lone store worker attends to multiple malfunctioning machines. The frustration mounts while a dozen darkened, roped-off and cashier-less tills sit in the background.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn’t living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it’s worth.

That’s in addition to people such as myself who object to them on principle.

ZMan adds some needed focus.

The basis of all human societies is reciprocal obligations. Social contract theory rests on this assumption. Monarchy rests on a collection of reciprocal vertical relationships that bind the king to the lowest peasant. The social club assumes the members will be loyal to the club and its members. In return, the members get benefits from the club and fellow members exclusive to them. A club that has no duties to the members is not a club, but a random collection of strangers.

This is the central defect of conservatism. When the people we call the left claim society has some new moral duty, conservatives never challenge the moral duty, but instead fall into a form of bourgeois anarchism. Terrified of challenging the left on moral grounds, they instead argue that society has no duties at all. In the case of the mega-corp screwing its employees, they say the company has no duties to them. Conservatism is always an answer to a question no one asked.

Read it.

Like other “sanctuary cities,” New York has learned that being a refuge for illegal immigrants is a bad thing if they actually show up. So New York is buying them airplane tickets to go elsewhere.

Read it.

In this era of hoaxes, euphemisms, obfuscation, and lies, I once again offer the following as a public service.

• *Ableism: the unfounded and bigoted belief that people who are capable of doing a certain job should be hired over those who are not.

Read it.

A key reason that Yemen’s Houthis are unlikely to halt their attacks on Red Sea shipping as well as Western warships parked there is because immense pressure on the global transit waterway can be kept up, while it costs little to persist with such launches.

Many of the Houthis drones which are capable of reaching vessels far off the Yemeni coast have been estimated at not more than $20,000. Some of them are as low as a few thousand dollars to build. They can easily be intercepted by US and UK coalition warships, but at an immense cost for these Western militaries.

I don’t do surveys.

Read it.

Americans were stunned on Sunday afternoon after Fox News reported the Federal Aviation Administration, overseen by Mayor Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Transporation Department, rolled out a new “Diversity and Inclusion” program to hire people with “severe intellectual disability” and “psychiatric disability” (among various other disabilities), just days after the latest mid-air near-disaster involving a Boeing 737 Max heightened the public’s attention to the potentially deadly impact of woke Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in the skies.

I will not set foot on board an airplane until sanity returns.

Not holding my breath….

Read it.

For those who are not doctors, which happens to be most of us, we depend on those few who have dedicated years of their lives to the scientific and medical fields to help inform us so we can make good decisions about our own health. Heading into the pandemic, a public largely jaded toward media and the government still placed high trust in their doctors. That trust has largely been betrayed during the Covid-19 pandemic years. CDC and FDA consultant Dr. Paul Offit’s response to concerns that the mRNA Covid shots may not be safe is an example of that betrayal.

Wall Street Journal.

Businesses are often sued for selling allegedly faulty products that aren’t actually defective. Last week a California appeals court ruled that businesses can also be sued for failing to develop a product. Behold California’s new tort standard: You should have built that.

Some 24,000 patients have sued Gilead Sciences in California state court for failing to introduce an allegedly safer version of an HIV drug. The Food and Drug Administration in 2001 approved a life-saving HIV medication by Gilead. The plaintiffs don’t argue that the drug is defective or lacked adequate warnings.

They claim that Gilead should have launched sooner an alternative HIV treatment that carries fewer bone and kidney side effects. They say Gilead delayed developing the new drug to maximize profits from its other HIV medication. Gilead disputes these claims and says it wasn’t clear from its early studies that the new drug would be safer or more effective.

My Torts Professor at Indiana, realizing that nobody was up for serious work on a Friday, would devote that day’s class to discussing the most recent bozo ruling by the California Supreme Court. Every week there was something new.

UPDATE: Crazyfornia Gets Crazier