Loose Ends (46) for a Crazy Week

Has anyone stopped to notice that amidst all the extreme political turmoil of the week, the stock market has leapt sharply to a new record high? It’s almost as though the real economy of the real world isn’t much concerned about the madness in Washington. Or maybe the market is discounting favorably the likelihood of increased gridlock in Washington. Gridlock, as my late mentor M. Stanton Evans liked to say, “is the next best thing to constitutional government.”

Speaking of M. Stanton Evans, he used to like to joke in his dry midwestern drawl that whenever a new political issue popped up, he wanted to know first “what Hollywood actors and rock stars think. I want to know what Bono thinks.” And sometimes life imitates art (or at least comedy):

P.S. I did once many years ago have a one-on-one lunch with the other, sensible Bono: Sonny Bono. This was way back around 1990 or so, just after Sonny had finished up a creditable turn as mayor of Palm Springs, and he was thinking about running against Gray Davis for some statewide office in California. Which naturally led me to suggest that his bumper sticker slogan was obvious: “Better Sonny Than Gray.” He liked it! But he ended up running for Congress instead.

Silicon Valley liberals are all about their moral superiority. So it is fun to see this sentence in a news story about Cupertino (home city of Apple) residents not liking the city’s approval of a new housing development that might actually include—gasp!—affordable housing! Here’s how the San Francisco Chronicle reported it:

But the request to dedicate some of that residential space for affordable housing inflamed Cupertino residents.

“According to the sales pitch, the new housing units would include low-income high-density housing apartments,” said one Cupertino resident at Tuesday night’s meeting. “This would mean that we would have uneducated people living in Cupertino. A lot of other residents and I are concerned that this would make the current residents of Cupertino uncomfortable, and would split our city in half.”

Speaking of liberal idiocy, get a load of this story:

Wealthy L.A. Schools’ Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan’s

The Hollywood Reporter has a great investigation for which it sought the vaccination records of elementary schools all over Los Angeles County. They found that vaccination rates in elite neighborhoods like Santa Monica and Beverly Hills have tanked, and the incidence of whooping cough there has skyrocketed. . .

Parents in these schools are submitting a form called a “personal belief exemption,” which states that they are not vaccinating their kids due to “a diffuse constellation of unproven anxieties, from allergies and asthma to eczema and seizures,” reporter Gary Baum writes.

In some schools, up to 60 to 70 percent of parents have filed these PBEs, indicating a vaccination rate as low as that of Chad or South Sudan. Unlike in Santa Monica, however, parents in South Sudan have trouble getting their children vaccinated because of an ongoing civil war.

And lo, it is these very same L.A. neighborhoods that are experiencing a resurgence of diseases like whooping cough, otherwise known as pertussis. Measles cases have also hit a high in California this year.

The Atlantic quite rightly calls this “vaccine roulette.”

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