“My money was losing 7% every year due to inflation so I decided to invest it in the stock market. Now I’m losing 7% every day.” Not Jerome Powell, Twitter
***
“Here we are with a vaccine that can save you from dying or going to the hospital with Covid, and tens of millions of people refuse to help themselves by taking it. Which goes to prove that no pandemic is deadlier than stupidity.” Bret Stephens NYT
***
“Humorlessness has crept in its petty pace to the right, where it is conducted with North Korean-level solemnity by the bellowing myrmidons of MAGAdom. A sense of humor, much less self-awareness, is not a trait found in cults of personality. If Tucker Carlson has said anything advertently funny, witty or self-knowing from his bully pulpit, I missed it. Maybe you had to be there.”Christopher Buckley PJ. O’Rourke and the Death of Conservative Humor
***
There is no official count of the number of pregnant women who have turned to hospitals and clinics when something goes wrong, only to be denied the medical treatment they need on religious grounds. And it’s not easy to publicize the most intimate details of traumatic experiences in order to prove what should not have to be proved: that pregnancy carries significant risk of complications, and hospitals and medical professionals in a modern society ought to allow best practices, rather than religious dogma, to guide their protocols of care.
Why was a Catholic Hospital Willing to Gamble with my Life by Katherine Stewart NYT
***
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was asked to evacuate Kyiv at the behest of the U.S. government but turned down the offer. An American official tells me Zelenskyy said, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”