Masks are useless, and so are lockdowns and low percentage occupancies.

Texas Has Fewer COVID Cases Than Michigan—Despite Nearly 20M More People and No Restrictions

Despite what [Al] Franken and many other critics predicted, Texas didn’t see an explosion in COVID cases. Instead, the Lone Star state saw cases reach a record low. Indeed, in the month since Franken mocked the announcement, daily cases in Texas fell from 6,834 to 2,078. That’s a 70 percent drop.

Meanwhile, Franken’s home state of Minnesota has experienced the opposite trajectory.

Open Indianapolis up.  Open it all the way up.  You’re only prolonging the pain and suffering.

But you’re a Democrat, so that figures; it’s what you do.

By the numbers, this “pandemic” hasn’t been any worse than an everyday seasonal flu.

So go fuck yourself and your worthless “but it’s for the people!” attitude.  You little bitch.  Only the city of Indianapolis would actually vote you into a position where you could fuck things up.  We were smart enough not to elect you governor, at least.

The people should rise up and run you out of town on a rail.  But by and large, the Indianapolis citizenry isn’t smart enough to understand how you’ve suckered them for the past year.

Fuck you, Mayor Hogsett.  Die in a fucking fire.  Along with the City-County Council.

Instapundit points to an article on SD Governor Kristi Noem’s EOs following her veto of the legislature’s bill that would ban men from playing women’s sports.  (Let’s call a spade a spade; “transgender” is a bullshit term and we all know it.)

After failed negotiations between South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem and the state’s House lawmakers, the governor issued two executive orders Monday designed to limit participation on women’s and girls’ school sports teams to people assigned female at birth.

Earlier this month, state lawmakers passed a bill restricting transgender athletes from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. After signaling support — even excitement — for the bill, Noem declined to sign it over concerns the law would not survive legal challenges. Instead, she asked lawmakers to revise the legislation’s language. Major conservative backlash ensued and on Monday, South Dakota lawmakers failed to come to an agreement.

“Only girls should play girls’ sports,” Noem tweeted Monday evening. “Given the legislature’s failure to accept my proposed revisions to HB 1217, I am immediately signing two executive orders to address this issue: one to protect fairness in K-12 athletics, and another to do so in college athletics.”

Neither of the governor’s orders mention transgender athletes specifically but Mark Miller, the governor’s general counsel, says because legislators did not approve Noem’s changes to the bill, she issued the orders as a temporary fix.

(My emphasis.)

I wondered about this from the start. It sounds to me like Gov. Noem recognized there were problems with the bill that would make it hard to defend if challenged in court, tried to work those problems out with the legislature, and when the legislature balked, she vetoed. Now she has two EOs out that more or less deal with the issue and all but guarantee the NCAA won’t penalize the state (which it could do with impunity, since SD is small potatoes in the NCAA’s grand criminal* scheme).

The commenters at Instapundit are mostly full of shit, which is a shame because they don’t want to admit they were wrong about Kristi Noem. Calling her a flip-flopper is just an insult. (Comparing her to Nikki Haley is grounds to be challenged to a duel.) The first two paragraphs of the linked article ought to put paid to that, but it seems the right is rapidly becoming as rabid as the commies over ideological purity. (I mean, how many times did Trump piss you off, and you still identify as Trump supporters? He pissed me off plenty, but I still voted for his re-election.)

If you’re still pissed off at Kristi Noem over this, you need to think about WHY she vetoed the bill. Sometimes a bad bill is just a bad bill. We’ve grown so used to the idea of the veto power being used negatively, it seems we no longer recognize when the veto power is used positively.

________________
*For what it’s worth, I hate the NCAA with a passion, and have ever since the late Myles Brand, may he rot in hell where he belongs, took it over.

…still refusing to get the vaccine, even though just about anyone and their dog can get it now.

Also refusing to wear a mask unless I simply can’t avoid it.  Like going into the post office to get my mail.

On the other hand, given what I do refuse to do before I go into the post office, I figure it’s a wash.

I see the IRS has extended the personal filing deadline to May 17.

Why? I could understand extending it last year, but not this year. What’s the point? Who is served? Is this just an admission by the IRS that most of the people who got a stimulus check are going to spend it to pay their taxes, so they need a little extra time to get the money into their accounts?

Just more fuckery. What really should have been done was a personal income tax holiday so nobody had to worry about paying the feds anything to begin with. But God forbid we should go a year or two without feeding the Doomsday Machine known as the federal government.  To wit, I give you the following:

“Jim, it was huge! It had a maw–”

“A maw? Did you see its paw?”

I just was going through boxes that have accumulated over the years and found all my dad’s Pogo stuff. Dad was an unreconstructed Walt Kelly fan, and remained so even after he (Dad) discovered the Democratic Party had left him, and started voting Republican in 1972 because he considered McGovern a fucking communist (which of course, McGovern was and remained to the end of his days).

Specifically I came upon “The Jack Acid Society Black Book”, which Kelly intended as a jab at “right wing societies”, by which of course he meant the John Birch Society and other similar patriotic and anti-Communist, if perhaps perceived as somewhat nutcase, organizations of the day. Kelly, of course, was an unreconstructed jackass Democrat, and he began his introduction to the book thusly:

“All of the right-wing societies which might be confused with the Jack Acid Society are understandably as nervous as a troop of elephants trying to walk on water. They claim to be apprehensive of the far left, the left, and even the middle, but they also keep a sharp eye on each other.”

The book itself is imbued of many jack-boot jackasseries attributed (naturally) to the right wing, but I think it is simply a very early example of the projection we now see on the Left — which must attribute all of its destructive behavior to the right, lest the peepul see through its canards and prevarications and turn on it to destroy it utterly, root and branch.

Thus this book, seemingly quite popular among the American Left in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s who got their cheap yuks out of it, is little more than part of the reaction to what the Left labeled as McCarthyism (and thus, evil) at that time. I’m sure Kelly made a bundle off of it at a buck a copy, back when a dollar was still worth a dollar and the Democrats hadn’t run our country into a mountain of debt.

But I can’t help but think at this far remove, sixty-plus years later, that what Kelly really needed to do was look in the fucking mirror before he wrote. Unfortunately, like so many leftists of his day and ours, he was so smart and self-assured, he went all the way back around the spectrum to “stupid”.

I’d burn the damn books but they’re probably worth something.

Several other states, too.

All 100% open (or close to it), all mask-mandate-free.

Well, Governor Holcomb?

It’s your fucking move.  Time to give up your petty dictatorship over the lives of others.

Or be impeached.

Or both, because you don’t belong in any seat of public trust anywhere.  You’re lucky you can’t run for another term, buddy.  You’d be pulverized in the primary.

Here’s an op-ed in the WSJ (hopefully no paywall thanks to archive.is) in which a Johns Hopkins professor gives his opinion that we’ll have herd immunity by April.

Personally I think we’re already there, but I’ll accept April 1 as “Ally Ally In Free” Day.

As I said on MeWe, though:

The dirty little secret is that we probably had herd immunity last August or September. What’s being marked down as WuFlu now is probably just plain old flu or pneumonia, and in the “mild” cases, probably just the common cold and allergies from being cooped up indoors with all the indoor contaminants our sealed-up modern homes trap.

WHO has already quietly noted that the PCR tests with iterations over 35 are flawed. The person who invented PCR testing (and got a Nobel for it) is on record as stating PCR is not a diagnostic tool. Yet it’s being used that way, and most PCR testing is being done with 40 or more iterations. You’re not finding live virions that way, you’re finding bits and pieces of dead viral material and calling it a “case” to inflate the WuFlu numbers.

Stop allowing the government to lock you down. They can’t arrest everyone. Open the churches, open the theatres, open the schools, tell government to go lock itself down.

Tell them to take their masks and their social distancing and shove them.

And IMPEACH HOLCOMB!