After ill health forced Mr. Levine to repeatedly cancel performances and miss two full seasons, he had reluctantly agreed to become music director emeritus. He would continue to oversee the young artist program he had founded and to conduct many of his signature operas, with a gala celebration of the 50th anniversary of his 1971 Met debut on the horizon.
Mr. Levine’s continued role came at considerable cost to the company. In addition to his $400,000 salary, the Met agreed to pay him his customary $27,000 fee for each performance he conducted — $10,000 more than what the Met usually described in public as its top fee.
That arrangement came to an abrupt end in December 2017, after The New York Times published the accounts of four men who said that they had been sexually abused by Mr. Levine as teenagers; Mr. Levine denied the accusations.
Just a good business decision?
The Met’s multimillion-dollar payment to Mr. Levine came before the coronavirus pandemic forced the company to close its theater — leaving many employees, including its orchestra and chorus, furloughed without pay since April. Even when the deal was struck, the Met’s finances were precarious. Now the company is fighting for its survival.
The protests are moving into white residential neighborhoods, where activists demand that people choose a side.
Terrance Moses was watching protesters against police brutality march down his quiet residential street one recent evening when some in the group of a few hundred suddenly stopped and started yelling.
Mr. Moses was initially not sure what the protesters were upset about, but as he got closer, he saw it: His neighbors had an American flag on display.
“It went from a peaceful march, calling out the names, to all of a sudden, bang, ‘How dare you fly the American flag?’” said Mr. Moses, who is Black and runs a nonprofit group in the Portland, Ore., area. “They said take it down. They wouldn’t leave. They said they’re going to come back and burn the house down.”
Nearly four months after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, some protesters against police brutality are taking a more confrontational — and personal — approach. The marches in Portland are increasingly moving to residential and largely white neighborhoods, where demonstrators with bullhorns shout for people to come “out of your house and into the street” and demonstrate their support.
Can investors make money by investing in companies that produce BLM and other social justice signs? And then, once every house in the U.S. has a BLM sign, how will the protesters sort out the true believers from the sham sympathizers who merely place signs as protection?
In dealing with coronaplague, Americans have taken a mechanistic view of the human body. Swab an infected human and you’re guaranteed to capture some virus, which will then be amplified by Kary Mullis‘s magic PCR machine and we’ll have a positive/negative result that is as reliable as if we’d checked the tire pressure on a car.
From “Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, and his colleague Dr Tom Jefferson, a Senior Associate Tutor,” writing in that august journal of science… the Daily Mail:
And increased Covid testing is picking up dead – entirely harmless – fragments of virus as well as genuine infections. So many of the positive results we think we are getting might not be positives at all.
So Kary Mullis’s machine works as advertised, but we don’t know what we should be looking for. Thus our obsessive testing program might end up giving us millions of false positives in addition to tens of millions of false negatives.
Separately, the rest of the article is a lot of fun. American academics, ever-fearful of being canceled and cut off from the river of government cash, would never be able to write anything this harsh.
Today, our bewildered Prime Minister and his platoon of inept advisers might as well be using the planets to guide us through this pandemic, so catastrophic and wildly over-the-top are their decisions.
Why is it that the Government is once again in the grip of doom-mongering scientific modellers who specialise in causing panic and little else?
Yet our PM, and his Dad’s Army of highly paid individuals with little experience of the job at hand, continue to behave as if they are acting on the basis of certainty.
Instead, they move from one poorly designed, rash decision to another, driven by the misguided belief that we are experiencing a ‘second wave’, following Spain’s ‘trajectory’ and just ‘behind the curve’ there.
Our latest study, out yesterday, shows that nearly a third of all Covid-19 deaths recorded in July and August might have actually been the result of other causes –cancer, for example, or road traffic accidents.
It is unfortunate that Mr Johnson is surrounded by mediocre scientific advisers.
It is strange and concerning, that the Government is still relying on mathematical modellers who have a 20-year track record of getting things wrong and have been particularly wrong in the past six months.
And the result is a confused, rudderless Government lost in a swamp of poor statistics and ill-informed recommendations.
But for now the only ‘circuit break’ we need is an end to the current cycle of bad data, bad language and shockingly bad scientific advice.
Cardi B: And also what I want is free Medicare. It’s important to have free [healthcare] because look what is happening right now. Of course, I think we need free college. And I want Black people to stop getting killed and no justice for it. I’m tired of it. I’m sick of it. I just want laws that are fair to Black citizens and that are fair for cops, too. If you kill somebody who doesn’t have a weapon on them, you go to jail. You know what? If I kill somebody, I’ve got to go to jail. You gotta go to jail, too. That’s what I want.
Biden: There’s no reason why we can’t have all of that. Presidents have to take responsibility. I understand one of your favorite presidents is Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt said the American people can take anything if you tell them the truth. Sometimes the truth is hard. But right now, we’re in a position where we have an opportunity to make so much progress. The American public has had the blinders taken off.
Cardi B: I’m always so focused on Medicare and college education, and I never really thought about how important child care is. Nobody is more motivated than a mom. Nobody wants to go hustle out there and get the money for the kid like a mother. [But] how are you supposed to do that when you probably don’t have a babysitter for your kid? Fortunately for me, I have my mom to help take care of my child, but a lot of people, their mom cannot retire and take care of the kids. The mom has to work, too. I feel like this country is so hurt, to the point that this year, a lot of people couldn’t even celebrate July 4th, because not everybody feels like an American. A lot of people feel like [they’re] not even part of America.
Joe Biden: Absolutely. One of the things that I admire about you is that you keep talking about what I call equity—decency, fairness, and treating people with respect. John Lewis, one of the great civil rights leaders, used to say the vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool you have. Look, I’m a lot older than you, to state the obvious. When I was in high school, the civil rights movement was just being started, and along came Bull Connor and his dogs. He thought he was going to drive a wooden stake into the heart of the civil rights movement. But when all those folks saw what was happening in the South—[when] they saw Bull Connor with dogs [attacking] elderly Black women going to church and kids being knocked down with fire hoses—all of a sudden, as Dr. King said, we had the second emancipation. We had the Voting Rights Act and we had the Civil Rights Act. It changed things because people said, “Oh my God, that’s happening.” [Today], the cell phone has changed America. Because we’re at a point where some brave kid can stand there for a total of 8 minutes and 46 seconds and take a of a Black man [being] brutally murdered. And people around the world were saying, “My God. This really happens?” And now they’re demanding change.
What strikes me about the interview is that it seems to be Cardi B, the 27-year-old rapper, who has the concrete policy ideas. The 77-year-old Joe Biden, on the other hand, is mostly silent and/or vague on what he would actually do as president.
Readers: What do you think? Cardi B for President 2028?
Related:
“Nobody wants to go hustle out there and get the money for the kid like a mother. [But] how are you supposed to do that when you probably don’t have a babysitter for your kid?” said Cardi B. Hunter Biden’s plaintiff shows one straightforward way to solve this problem. See “Hunter Biden’s child support is finalized with his stripper baby mama” (Daily Mail, regarding a mom who was smart enough to move to Arkansas, which offers unlimited child support profits, prior to giving birth to a baby conceived in Washington, D.C. (practical child support revenue limited to about $2 million))
The overwhelmingly white unionized public school teachers in our nearly all-white, all-Asian suburb have begun appending, in a red font, the following signature text to every email message…
Lincoln Public Schools are united in standing with those who are calling out ingrained racism and violence toward people of color in our country and calling for acknowledgement of humanity in one another. This is not just an issue for black and brown people, but an issue that impacts all of our futures. We must:
Listen to each other, showing compassion and empathy
Never turn our backs on senseless brutality [ordinary brutality is okay?]
Continue to denounce injustices
Unify our voices to create systemic change
During this painful time, let us work together to be a light to break the darkness that silence can bring. Let us facilitate education, healing, connection, and let us support each other and our communities. Every one of us needs to be part of the solution and we must work together to ensure that there is justice for all.
[Note that relaxing the two-acre zoning minimum so that black and brown people could afford to move into our suburb is not mentioned. And we’re supposed to listen (free), not pay reparations (costly).]
American Great Awakenings have tended to require public confessions of sin. Stand up in front of the congregation, admit that you’re a sinner, and let the healing and forgiveness begin. This was extended to Alcoholics Anonymous. Stand up and admit that you’re an alcoholic. More recently, this has been adapted for the Great Awokening: stand up and admit that you’re a racist.
My Facebook feed is alive with people mourning Ruth Bader Ginsburg, often specifically mentioning that she advocated “equality”. Our government-sponsored broadcasting network describes her as “a champion of gender equality”:
“Justice Kavanaugh made history by bringing on board an all-female law clerk crew. Thanks to his selections, the Court has this Term, for the first time ever, more women than men serving as law clerks,” she said, according to remarks released by the court.
Her remarks come several months after Kavanaugh, who was confirmed to the court last year after a fraught confirmation battle that centered around allegations of sexual misconduct, followed through on a promise he made during the nomination process to appoint an all-female team of law clerks.
(Why is that private employers can be sued by plaintiffs alleging gender discrimination in employment if our top government officials brag about doing this?)
Perhaps RBG could legitimately be described as having been an advocate for 1 out of 50+ possible gender IDs. But why is she is an example of someone who advocated “equality” among people with 50+ gender IDs?
Separately, if Mother-of-7 Amy Coney Barrett is appointed to this demanding job (though apparently it wasn’t too demanding for an unhealthy 87-year-old?), will that stop stay-at-home American helicopter moms-of-1-or-2 from complaining that they are exhausted from doing the most difficult job on the planet?
Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, announced a deal with legislative leaders to increase state taxes on income over $1 million by nearly 2 percentage points, giving New Jersey one of the highest state tax rates on wealthy people in the country. The agreement also includes an annual rebate of as much as $500 for families making less than $150,000.
The good news is that Governor Murphy will be a hero in literature and movies 800 years from now, just like Robin Hood. Murphy is taking from the rich (assuming that they can’t figure out how to escape to Florida, Wyoming, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas, Alaska, et al) and giving to the poor (where “poverty” starts at $150k/year, not a great argument for attracting new residents hoping to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle!). New Jersey is already the third highest tax state (percentage of residents’ income harvested for state and local government).
On the one hand, people are fleeing Manhattan to get extra space, which favors suburban New Jersey. On the other hand, New Jersey is not blessed with a California-style climate that might induce people to pay huge $$. year after year.
(You might reasonably ask “If tax rates are relevant, why didn’t rich people move away some years ago?” It is true that New Jersey has been a high-tax state for a long time. However, until 2018, roughly half of those high taxes were paid by the generous folks in Kansas, Indiana, Texas, Florida, etc. A wealthy New Jersey resident might pay a lot to New Jersey, but could turn around and deduct this payment from his/her/zi/their federal taxable income. So we would expect people today to be a lot more sensitive to state tax rates than they were back in 2017, for example. And the fact that work and social life are now Internet-based should also reduce barriers to moving.)
Readers: What’s a good test to see if this tax hike works as advertised. My theory is that it takes people about three years after a tax law change to get organized and adapt. So we should try to look at New Jersey’s relative fiscal health in 2024. But what do we look at? Unfunded pension and health insurance liabilities for state and local government employees? Right now it is “$151 billion, the worst in the nation”. But if the stock market rises or falls under the able stewardship of President Harris, that might move this number enough to swamp any effect from this tax. How about IRS data? Try to find the percentage of America’s high earners (over $1 million/year in income) who live in New Jersey in 2020 and then in 2024. (example map of money migration produced with these data)
From the glorious days of film… pig racing at the New Jersey State Fair:
And, even before 93 percent peaceful protests…
Related:
“One Top Taxpayer Moved, and New Jersey Shuddered” (NYT, April 2016): the hedge-fund billionaire David Tepper … declared himself a resident of Florida after living for over 20 years in New Jersey. He later moved the official headquarters of his hedge fund, Appaloosa Management, to Miami. … Tax experts say his move to Florida could cost New Jersey — which has a top tax rate of 8.97 percent — hundreds of millions of dollars in lost payments.
