A FAILURE THEY’RE DOING THEIR BEST TO MEMORY-HOLE: Pandemic school closures, 4 years later. “Cooper and Cohen relied heavily on CDC guidance, as did the Toolkit, yet that guidance would come into question a little under two years when a Congressional committee found the CDC had allowed the American Federation of Teachers to rewrite key portions of school reopening guidance that had kept most schools closed. In some cases, the CDC had used AFT’s suggestions nearly verbatim.”

Every institution has been corrupted.

CHANGE? NCAA Wants to Ban ‘Prop Bets’ on College Games. “NCAA president Charlie Baker says that he is looking into a ban on prop bets, those bets on specific elements of a game rather than the outcome of the game itself, in college athletics. Thirty-eight states already prohibit prop bets in college sports, but Baker wants to extend those bans to all 50 states.”

FEDS DEMAND MORE TELEWORK: Let’s see now, federal workers who are mostly working at home anyway showed up recently at their Boston office to demand even more days to work at home. So why do they think they are most effective protesting at their office, but most effective for the taxpayers working at home?

PERESTROIKA? China’s Xi Seeks to Soothe Anxieties of American CEOs.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping, facing a slowing economy and a sharp fall in foreign investment, sought to reassure American chief executives that China’s economy hasn’t peaked and that the country is working to improve its business environment.

In a meeting with a group of more than a dozen U.S. business leaders and scholars on Wednesday, Xi also said the two countries should do more to overcome their differences and increase interactions, according to state broadcaster China Central Television.

The gathering in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing included the heads of two chip makers, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon and Broadcom’s Hock Tan. Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, insurer Chubb’s Evan Greenberg and FedEx’s Raj Subramaniam also attended, according to readouts and footage from CCTV.

But: “The official readout of Xi’s comments didn’t include any references to the security concerns that foreign business groups had previously raised, including a series of office raids and staff detentions that rattled the foreign business community.”

STILL POETS AMONG US: An Easter special reprint in HillFaith. Besides being a skilled poet, Susan Gates, Ph.D, is the author of “Days of Slaughter: Inside Freddie Mac and Why It Could Happen Again.” She knows, she was there on the inside as it happened.

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION TRIES TO FURTHER BALKANIZE AMERICANS: OMB has decided to make America’s arbitrary racial classifications even more arbitrary by turning the multi-racial Hispanic ethnic classification into a racial one, and to add a new and entirely incoherent Middle East and North Africa racial classification (which will include Israeli and Mizrahi Jews, Turks, Persians, Arabs, Chaldeans, Kurds, Berbers and more; in fact, given the choice between white and MENA, as a Jew with close ancestral and familial ties to Israel, and no ties to Europe for over a hundred years, I’m going with white AND MENA, as will many Ashkenazi Jews. It’s totally, as I noted, incoherent).

Someone needs to sue to stop these changes. The first is meant to retard Hispanic assimilation by making them into a permanent racial class. The second is meant to settle the question as to whether Arab and Iranian Americans, historically considered white in the US, are really, as leftist activist groups want, “people of color” who can glom on to whatever benefits that status has.

If a lawsuit doesn’t work, a new Trump administration, which already rejected such proposals last time, should reverse them. And the goal should be to eventually largely eliminate government collection of data by race, as it’s often stupid and counter-productive, as, for example, with rules requiring medical researchers to use American racial classifications in their research that have no scientific basis.

Here’s the comment I submitted to OMB opposing turning Hispanic into a racial classification. And here’s the comment I submitted re the MENA classification.

MICHAEL WALSH: What’s Good For General Bullmoose. “Gerald M. Levin, who died last week at the age of 84, will be little noted nor long remembered by the American public, yet his name should live in corporate infamy. As the man who destroyed Time Inc. via a unique combination of ambition, pomposity, luck, greed, unctuousness, and stupidity, Levin is one of the great villains of 20th-century American and journalistic history and a now-deceased exemplar for everything that’s wrong with big business, Wall Street, and the grubby managerial class that controls the lives of millions of people. Look on his Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Don’t mince words, Michael. Say what you really mean here.

Plus: “As John Cassidy wrote in his 2013 post-mortem of the ongoing wreckage in The New Yorker: ‘About the only ones who consistently benefitted from Time Inc.’s transformation into part of a multimedia conglomerate were the bankers and lawyers who put the deals together.’ Not to mention the execs who profited from it. If you’re looking for a point when it all went wrong with the American economy, the murder of Time Inc. at the hands of Levin & Co. is a good place to start.”

Our nation is run by people who live by Rhett Butler’s observation that there’s as much money to be made in tearing down a civilization as in building one up.