• Why the United Nations is a joke, chapter 12,186:
North Korea, Under Sanctions for Developing Nuclear Weapons, Takes Helm of UN Disarmament Body
GENEVA — Dozens of mostly Western countries criticized North Korean “reckless actions” in its weapons programs as its government on Thursday took over the rotating presidency of the U.N.-backed Conference on Disarmament.
But apparently no one in the UN can rouse themselves to kick the Norks out of the chair of the Disarmament Conference. Churchill called the disarmament negotiations of the 1930s “a prolonged and solemn farce.” This is more like slapstick than farce.
• One of the things the Senate gun bill doesn’t do is ban “assault” weapons. I wonder why? Maybe this:
Support for ‘assault weapons’ ban hits all-time low following Uvalde shooting: Poll
New polling shows that support for an “assault weapons” ban in the United States has hit an all-time low despite calls from Democrats to implement a ban following a deadly mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
In a Quinnipiac University poll, conducted last week and published on Tuesday, 50 percent of registered voters support a nationwide ban on semi-automatic long guns compared to 45% who oppose which represents the lowest level of support since February 2013 when Quinnipiac began asking that question.
Take this as a measure of increasingly public distrust of government.
• Remember how we were told that COVID was somehow another badge of “systemic racism” in the United States because minorities were getting hit disproportionately and weren’t getting vaccinated at the same rate as whites? We’ll, we’ve reached the “never mind” stage of that story, as David Leonhardt pointed out in the New York Times a few days ago:
During Covid’s early months in the U.S., the per capita death rate for Black Americans was almost twice as high as the white rate and more than twice as high as the Asian rate. The Latino death rate was in between, substantially lower than the Black rate but still above average. . .
But these large racial gaps in vaccination have not continued — and as a result, neither have the gaps in Covid death rates. Instead, Covid’s racial gaps have narrowed and, more recently, even flipped. Over the past year, the Covid death rate for white Americans has been 14 percent higher than the rate for Black Americans and 72 percent higher than the Latino rate, according to the latest C.D.C. data.
The successful part of the story is the rapid increase in vaccination among Black and Latino Americans since last year. Today, the vaccination rate for both groups is slightly higher than it is for white Americans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s surveys.
Well, that doesn’t fit the narrative. But it’s this remark from Leonhardt that is most telling:
Why haven’t you heard more about the narrowing of Covid’s racial gaps? I think part of the reason is that many experts and journalists feel uncomfortable highlighting shrinking racial gaps in almost any area. They worry that doing so will somehow minimize the problem of racism and the country’s enduring inequities.
File this one away, because it explains a lot about the left these days in many domains. Gotta keeps the left’s Racism Uber Alles narrative going as long as possible, because it’s all the left has got since the January 6 hearings look to be a busted flush.
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