FRONTIERS OF FLIGHT: “An aeroplane full of passengers, out of control at 17,000 feet, with the captain stuck outside the aircraft.”
INCOMPETENCE: Police command structure crumbled fast during Capitol riot. “As the rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, many of the police officers had to decide on their own how to fight them off. There was no direction. No plan. And no top leadership.”
With major cities all over the country wracked by riots for the past 8 months, and with a disputed election, it didn’t occur to anyone to plan for something like this? The Capitol Police are one of the largest and best-funded police forces in the nation. They are not, however, the best-run.
BLACK GOLD. TEXAS TEA. Researchers trace geologic origins of Gulf of Mexico ‘super basin’ success. “The Gulf of Mexico holds huge untapped offshore oil deposits that could help power the U.S. for decades. The energy super basin’s longevity, whose giant offshore fields have reliably supplied consumers with oil and gas since the 1960s, is the result of a remarkable geologic past—a story that began 200 million years ago among the fragments of Pangea, when a narrow, shallow seaway grew into an ocean basin, while around it mountains rose then eroded away.”
GOING AFTER JOBS AND ENERGY INDEPENDENCE FROM DAY ONE: Biden indicates plans to cancel Keystone XL pipeline permit on 1st day in office, sources confirm.
SO WHERE IS EVERYBODY? The Most Common Stars in Our Galaxy May Be More Habitable Than We Thought.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Why Joe Manchin Is Never Going to Switch Parties.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Why does everyone keep thinking Sen. Joe Manchin will switch parties?
Answer: We’re not sure, but he might make a better Republican than five or six current GOP members.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Facebook says conservative YouTubers can draw bigger audiences than CNN (and must be stopped)
- It puts the mask upon its skin or else it gets the hose again
- Transperson sues to enter women’s weightlifting competition and we don’t wonder how this will end
Bonus Sanity: You’ll wish you’d said what Anna James Zeigler said.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
MOST AMERICANS REMAIN UN-WOKE: Poll: Many in U.S. don’t see link between racism, health outcomes.
THE SOCIAL MEDIA UPHEAVAL: “Oh boy, I made the mistake of using Twitter for something other than telling dumb jokes and got a glimpse into the minds of normies and it was scary.”
Well, to the extent that Twitter users represent normality.
THAT SEEMS ABOUT RIGHT: Voters Support Trump’s Decision Not to Attend Biden Inauguration, Expect Peaceful Transition.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Far-Right Extremist Suggests Treating People Of All Races Equally.
INSIDE THE LEFT’S ‘HOGWARTS FOR DIGITAL WIZARDRY:’ Capital Research Center’s (CRC) Hayden Ludwig does a deep dive on the Center for Technology and Civic Life, the far-Left voter registration colossus. The result is a detailed description of what may be the most effective GOTV ever and why 2020 may have been merely the first act of a long-running play.
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: On Regulating Big Tech. Donald Boudreaux critiques Richard Epstein’s argument for using common law to force Big Tech to respect the First Amendment. Boudreaux says market competition is still the best way to protect the First Amendment.
COLLUSION: The doctor who denied COVID-19 was leaked from a lab had this major bias.
US Right to Know, an investigative public health nonprofit group, decided to look into the matter further. Through a public records request, they were able to obtain emails that show The Lancet statement was organized by employees of EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has close ties with the Wuhan lab.
How close? So close that EcoHealth Alliance has received millions of dollars of US taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This is the same kind of research that I have long suspected escaped to cause COVID-19.
The drafter of The Lancet statement was none other than the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak. Which means that the very statement that, for many months, shut down open debate on the possible laboratory origin of the China Virus, was actually the product of an organization that was collaborating with the Wuhan lab in the genetic engineering of coronaviruses.
I wish this shocked me, but it doesn’t.
AND WHAT RACE GRIFTERS WON’T ADMIT: What Martin Luther King and Others Wrought.
What is most remarkable about the American civil rights movement, perhaps, is how little bloodshed took place, despite the passions that it raised. The Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, lists the names of only 41 people martyred in the cause of equal rights between 1954 and 1968.
That is an astounding fact. Never in human history has so deep a national divide involving racial, religious, or ethnic groups been healed so quickly and at such a low cost in lives. For comparison, as many as 2 million people died in the violence that accompanied the transformation of the British Raj into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India in 1947.
But the Left, stuck in the past, and always looking to belittle the United States and its accomplishments, insists that the country remains “systemically racist.”
Today’s “anti-racism” movement is one more demonstration of the March of Dimes Syndrome, named after the institution that did not go out of business after its mission (conquering polio) was achieved. It found new diseases to combat. For the Al Sharptons of the world, acknowledging progress against racism would be a career killer, so to stay in business they must ignore facts and foment new hatred.
IT’S AS IF ALL THE MEDIA “INSURRECTION” HYPE IS JUST SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING: Trump approval rating relatively unchanged in wake of Capitol rioting: NBC News poll.
Note that in this poll, Trump’s approval is just one point below Biden’s, even though the press has been calling him Literally Hitler over the Capitol invasion, and the House has voted to impeach. (Bumped).
UPDATE YOUR NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES APPROPRIATELY: NYU Prof Attributes Black Trump Support to ‘Multiracial Whiteness.’
JOANNE JACOBS: If the private schools can open… “The longer public schools remain closed, the more parents will look for alternatives. Private school may be affordable, if the alternative is paying for child care. Or mothers will quit their jobs to homeschool their children. If the public system is losing the allegiance of parents in Berkeley, it will not regain their support easily.”
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Everything You Need to Know About Kamala’s Niece, Resistance Grifter Meena Harris.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Public school teacher forces third graders to acknowledge their privilege. I’m beginning to think that the past 50 years or so of letting our children be educated by th enemies of our civilization may have been a mistake.
WHAT DOES THE SEVENTY-FOUR MILLION PROJECT LOOK LIKE? There are over 74 million of us who voted for Trump and who are looking for ways to not only get through the next 4 (or more) years but actually thrive. In 2013 after the election, I started a new project called Helen’s page that connected those of us who are liberty-loving conservatives or libertarians with each other to sell products, meet up or crowd source. Although Helen’s page is no longer up, here is a description of the site (note the link no longer goes to the page):
A lot of people on this site and others that I talked to after the election were feeling isolated. So I made a place for them to meet each other. Helen’s Page is a place where people can come to find and help other liberty-minded people across the country—from selling your undiscovered screenplay or advertising your local bakery right down to finding an accountant, electrician, or other professional who shares your love of liberty. I believe it is imperative that those who make up the nearly 48% of the country who believe in equal opportunity and individual success help each other. Find products and services from people who see the world the way you do.
Here’s an example of how it works. You are a libertarian/conservative with a book to sell. Come over and tell readers about it on Helen’s Page in the “Book” section. The more of us who sign up, the more exposure that book will have. Publishers of libertarian or conservative books are also welcome to post.
The site did well, but was extremely expensive to operate because the web developer we hired wasn’t really up to the job. But we’re thinking of relaunching something like this. My question for you readers is this: What would you like to see in a relaunched Helen’s Page or something like it that connects us socially and economically? And any suggestions on how to set it up safely and economically? Answer in the comments.
BUT WILL TWITTER SUSPEND THEM FOR PROMOTING VIOLENCE? Two Texas A&M Professors Wish Death on Republicans.
THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT TO MAKE IT: Don’t Let the Capitol Riot Become a 9/11-Style Excuse for Authoritarianism.
Notice that our ruling class is offering none of the “why do they hate us?” rhetoric that followed 9/11, though. They know perfectly well why.
IMPEACHMENT: Dershowitz: Impeaching Trump After Presidency Is ‘Plainly Unconstitutional,’ Senate Shouldn’t Accept. “It will be unconstitutional, but that probably won’t bother the senators.” To be fair, it seldom does.
Note: If you are 22, you have lived through 3/4 of all the presidential impeachments in American history. If you are 1 year old, you have lived through half of them.
ICYMI: An Open Letter To Sen. Joe Manchin: It’s Time To Change Parties.. He’s probably afraid he’ll be assassinated if he does. His character, at the very least.
NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER: Parler’s website back online with a message from its CEO.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Frightening Question—Who Will Be Running Biden’s Brain? “One thing that shouldn’t be overlooked is the influence of Barack Obama. With the Biden administration being little more than Obama 2.0, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that President Momjeans could be crafting policy from afar.”
ANTITRUST QUESTION OF THE YEAR: Why was Parler censored by a cabal of its competitors?
I’ve been a big fan of Medium, although I’ve learned quickly there are certain “publications” — essentially sub-blogs — that it’s best to avoid. Today I saw a piece published two days ago, The Moderation War Is Coming to Spotify, Substack, and Clubhouse, that addressed how Parler was censored and destroyed by Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon, and then warned that Parler won’t be the last.
The given reason, of course, was people were saying violent things on Parler and all the biens pissants are, of course, shocked, shocked that this was “permitted.”
It might be different if the double standard weren’t so glaring. As Amazon was canceling Parler’s hosting — in apparent violation of their contract — they were selling “Kill All Republicans” tee-shirts, and it turns out that while Twitter and Facebook were canceling Parler, the actual mob was coordinating on Twitter and Facebook.
It’s a conspiracy in restraint of trade, straight up.
Plus: “It’s worth noting that Amazon deplatformed Parler after members of Congress demanded it. That makes it a real First Amendment violation as well as a violation of the right to free speech which the First Amendment exists to protect. So somehow competitors are being shut down in a coordinated fashion by effective monopolies with governmental support.”
Related: Parler CEO and family in hiding after receiving death threats. All in the name of fighting “violence” and “hate.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Maybe the Deplorables Are Today’s People of Color. “Back in 1988 Bill Moyers was recalling Lyndon Johnson explaining how to keep whites poor by encouraging them to look down on ‘colored men’. . . Today, as Rana Dasgupta argues in Harper’s, the Western middle class including those with gender studies and critical theory degrees — especially them — are the new unemployables, made redundant by cheap Chinese and robotic labor. The only way to make the destitute Woke feel good about themselves is to let them look down on the Deplorables.”
I’m reminded of what Kenneth Anderson said about the Occupy movement:
In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits – the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.
The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. For the upper tier, since 1990, it has come through its ability to take the benefits of generations of US social investment in education and sell that expertise across global markets – leveraging expertise and access to capital and technological markets in the 1990s to places in Asia and the former communist world in desperate need of it. As Lasch said, the revolt and flight of the elites, to marketize themselves globally as free agents – to take the social capital derived over many generations by American society, and to go live in the jet stream and extract returns on a global scale for that expertise. But that expertise is now largely commodified – to paraphrase David Swenson on financial engineering, that kind of universal expertise is commodified, cheaply available, and no longer commands much premium. As those returns have come under pressure, the Global New Class has come home, looking to command premiums through privileged access to the public-private divide – access most visible at the moment as virtuous new technology projects that turn out to be mere crony capitalism.
The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem – they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.
The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class – the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school – has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program – John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”
Indeed. Plus, just a reminder: In America, class war is disguised as cultural warfare, and cultural warfare is usually cloaked in talk of race.
Related: A New Class Problem.
PRICE FIXING: New lawsuit accuses Amazon of e-book price fixing. “The lawsuit filed by law firm Hagens Berman in a federal district court in New York, alleges that the publishers pay high commissions and other costs to Amazon, which in turn increases the retail price of e-books sold on the platform. Due to the deal between Amazon and the publishers— HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan — the Amazon price is the price the publishers charge other retailers as well, preventing other sellers from offering the e-books at lower prices, according to the lawsuit.”
THE ELECTIONS WERE SO FRAUD-FREE THAT MEMBERS OF CONGRESS AREN’T EVEN ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE: Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene.
ANTITRUST: Facebook and Google allegedly cut a deal that reduced ad competition. “It hurts their chances of surviving antitrust cases.”
THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT SERIOUS: The House and Senate are making unforced errors in laying the groundwork for an impeachment trial. “The House’s slow process has weakened its own rhetorical framing of the need for impeachment.”
FLASHBACK: Trump and the State of Nato.
MICHAEL BARONE: The left now just wants to silence conservatives — all of them. “It threatens to be the most effective speech suppression here since Democratic postmasters in the antebellum South deep-sixed anti-slavery material.”
The left always tries to silence — and criminalize — its opposition.
They have to do this because their ideas are too stupid and self-serving to withstand honest criticism.
UPDATE: Related:
HMM: Protests, Armed Or Otherwise. “Boycott the inauguration. Don’t acknowledge it, don’t view it, don’t listen to it, ignore it. Make the ratings tank. It is the most powerful thing we can do. That includes not protesting it, which sends several messages while preventing anything but a staged incident that could be used to further cement their power and erode our remaining freedoms.”
NO, THE ALAMO IS NOT A SYMBOL OF ‘WHITENESS:’ Do not miss Bryan Preston’s superb deconstruction of the claims that those famous 13 days at the Alamo were not a “tactically significant battle” and that the siege was later turned into a racist symbol. In case you wonder why I care, and deeply, about this issue, it’s because I was born an Okie of Texas blood and am immensely proud of both.
NEWS FROM THE AMERICA THAT WORKS: SpaceX Hopes to Launch And Land Starship No. 9 This Week.
POINTS AND FIGURES: Social Media and Taking Risk. “Social media has bigger ramifications than just changing societal norms for the worse. It limits risk-taking. It limits innovation. It eliminates the will to discover and try. Social media makes everything public.”
MLK WOULD BE REPULSED BY CRT: Honest celebration of the man requires recognition of the truths he proclaimed, including the one that black and white Americans “cannot walk alone.”
And that means also recognizing, as retired Vanderbilt Professor Carol Swain explains, that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a poison. So today would be a good day to give King’s “I Have a Dream” speech a good, close reading.
January 17, 2021
KURT SCHLICHTER: Refuse to Be Silenced.
Parler’s gone for now, the victim of a conspiracy to silence, but it will return. The fascists can try, but they can’t shut us up forever. Truth flows like water around obstacles. The Twitbookgram decided to start playing whack-a-prole to bonk unapproved ideas on the noggin and pretty soon too many heads will be popping up out of too many new holes. They will pop up on Gab, or Clouthub, or Dave Rubin’s Locals.com. People will find a way to be heard.
Once you leave their personal domains, the tech overlords become…irrelevant, and powerless.
Now, they can conspire, collaborate, and likely violate antitrust laws, though it is hilarious to assume that a Biden* DoJ will find anything out of sorts about that. The Democrat Party, and far too many Fredocon hacks in the GOP, are bought and paid for. They are happy to auction themselves off in a bidding war between Silicon Valley and Beijing. And there are a few remaining Muh Free Enterprisers who confuse capitalism and monopoly corporatism, and who are happy to surrender their sovereignty if their twisted principles so demand. But there is only so much the silicon villains can do. Eventually, some enterprising entrepreneur in Latvia is going to have a server farm no one in Cupertino can switch off.
They are shooting their wad, as far as the corporate tech censorship goes. It’s a hassle right now, but we will not be gagged. . . . Free speech, now and forever. No compromise, no exceptions, no excuses. It’s not enough to favor free speech – you must be affirmatively anti-censorship!
Read the whole thing.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. China’s, Not Sweden’s Or Denmark’s, Is The Government Democrats Want. To be fair, the governments of Sweden and Denmark are largely non-corrupt, so why would the Democrats want to emulate them?
YOU CAN TELL WHO’S ON THE PAYROLL, OR AT LEAST ON THE TEAM: Why Doesn’t Twitter Ban the Chinese Government for Their Lies About Forced Labor?
Our tech oligarchs admire the Chinese, want to make America more like China, and cover for their allies and the other big corporations who do business with them.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Portland ‘defund police’ activists have vandalized city commissioner’s home 7 times in 3 months.
NOT SO SURE CONSUMERS WILL BE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT MORE BIG-TECH “MONITORING.” My Doctor the Car? Future Cars Might Monitor Drivers’ Health and Wellbeing.
IT’S COME TO THIS: More U.S. Military Troops Needed To Install Joe Biden Than We Have in Afghanistan.
Related: Biden builds the wall! A 12-Foot Wall Is Going Up Around The Capitol To Protect Joe Biden And That’s Weird Because I’ve Been Repeatedly Told By Dems Like Joe Biden That Walls Are Immoral.
More: Federal prisons locked down ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Last link found via Kenny Webster, who asks, “I’m sorry, the federal prisons weren’t locked down before the inauguration? Did they use an honor system with the prisoners or something?”
WE’RE PUTTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER: Biden Is Already Rewarding Failure.
AFP reported Saturday that Biden has appointed Wendy Sherman, whose chief claim to fame is negotiating the notorious Iran nuclear deal, to be deputy secretary of state. It’s a classic example of failing up.
Biden said of Sherman and anti-Russia career diplomat Victoria Nuland, whom he named undersecretary for political affairs, that they “have secured some of the most defining national security and diplomatic achievements in recent memory. I am confident that they will use their diplomatic experience and skill to restore America’s global and moral leadership. America is back.”
And file this under “#Unity:” Bracing for the “flurry” of Biden’s day one executive orders.
BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. North Vancouver councillor says pickup truck is ‘glorification of violence’, ‘petro masculinity.’
Has he ever been to Texas? That pickup would be considered a subcompact here. Great response from Jesse Kelly, by the way:
Flashbacks: Boston Globe opinion columnist Renee Graham in October:
“The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”, Ace of Spades’ John Ekdahl asked on Twitter at the beginning of 2017. As Sean Davis of the Federalist noted in his article on that seemingly innocuous tweet, “Watch A Bunch Of Journalists Freak Out After Being Asked If They Know Anybody Who Drives A Truck.”
And from an MSM journalist this past August: “Sales of mega-pickups, which have basically been deliberately designed to intimidate and kill pedestrians, are booming.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
SINCE THE ELECTION, THINGS HAVEN’T EXACTLY GOTTEN MORE NORMAL SO FAR: Joe Biden’s presidency could make America normal again.
Flashback: Sorry, there will be no return to normalcy under Joe Biden.
Related: Welcome to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s new abnormal.
FLORIDA FAN: Former NYS Dem Party head gets vaccinated — in Florida.
SOMEHOW, IT’S TWITTER’S COMPETITION THAT GETS DEPLATFORMED: Why Was Parler Censored by Its Competitors?
OUT: CAMPERS. IN: GLAMPERS. 2021 Mercedes-Benz Metris Weekender: Four-Wheeled Escapism.
VIETNAM WAR ‘NAPALM GIRL’ PHOTOGRAPHER DEFIES BACKLASH RISK AND ACCEPTS AWARD AT WHITE HOUSE; is assaulted following night. AP photographer Nick Ut and Trump “had met before, in Los Angeles, before Trump was elected president. Ut recalled in his essay that Trump ‘loved my picture of Vietnam. He said to me: ‘Nick, your picture changed the world.’”
There are plenty of myths surrounding that iconic photo; read the whole thing.
FLORIDA MAN FINDING STRANGE NEW RESPECT FOR OREGON MAN: Police say Oregon man who stole a car with a child in the backseat came back and ‘lectured’ the mom about parenting.
SLS UNDERPERFORMS: NASA’s moon rocket roars to life during shortened test-firing. There’s nothing wrong with a test that “fails,” of course. That’s how you learn. But SLS has been a series of failures, and the learning isn’t obvious.
UPDATE: A friend emails: “That static fire was the first time in the program that something finished ahead of schedule.”
CHANGE: New therapeutic approaches for SARS-CoV-2. Ivermectin looks promising, and a lot of doctors seem to be prescribing it already.
THE GEEK IN PICTURES: PRE-CRASH EDITION.
As David P. Goldman, aka “Spengler” wrote yesterday at PJM: Bidenomics Will Bankrupt Us.
LISTS, PURGES, AND CRIMINALIZING OPPOSITION ARE THE LEFT’S HALLMARKS: The left’s ‘urge to purge’ response to the Capitol assault.
COLLUSION: Another University Professor Charged In China Ties, Grant Fraud. “I’m not sure how many more of these we need to see before we realize that we’ve got a very serious China problem on our hands and it has nothing to do with their military (or at least not much) or their control of the global supply chain, though that’s a disaster of its own. China has been stocking up our country with spies and shoveling technological secrets out by the bucketload. Some of their biggest bases of operation are found in our universities, where their money allows them to get their hooks into American liberals who are very hungry for that sweet, sweet, Chinese cash cow.”
This time it’s at MIT.
AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES THE EARLIER, FUNNIER SEASONS OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: Episode 2: Barbarians at the Oval.
The White House became a strange ghost town in the days after the election. Trump’s schedule — already unstructured — became more so. It was impossible to shift his focus from his grievances about the election to important policy matters. In conversations in the Oval Office, Trump would occasionally slip and seem to acknowledge he lost, saying, “Can you believe I lost to that fucking guy? That fucking corpse?”
Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis in SNL’s 1988 parody of the second Bush-Dukakis debate: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!”
MARK STEYN: Shaidle Among the Stars.
A week ago today, I had the sad duty of announcing the death of our irreplaceable movie columnist Kathy Shaidle. Kathy wrote everything from poetry to The Weekly World News‘s “Ed Anger” column and was a piercingly clear-headed thinker on almost any subject, as you can see in our video compilation of her appearances on The Mark Steyn Show. I hope you’ll also read Laura Rosen Cohen’s touching remembrance of our never-to-be-forgotten friend.
Last Saturday in this space, I rounded up a few autobiographical asides from Kathy’s movie columns, little glimpses of her life and her world. But of course that’s not why someone writes about film: You do it because you have something to say about the picture, the writing, the direction, the stars… So what follows are a few of my favorite Shaidle insights on some of the players who caught her beady eye.
Read the whole thing.
BUT I WAS TOLD THAT THE WUHAN CORONAVIRUS WAS SPREADING SO WIDELY BECAUSE PEOPLE WEREN’T TAKING PROPER PRECAUTIONS: COVID-19 protection measures likely limiting flu spread.
BETTY WHITE TURNS 99 SUNDAY: She’s no ‘egomaniac,’ COVID-19 is ‘afraid’ of her.
Damn straight it is. But if by chance Covid does kill her, it’s time to go full Linebacker II on Beijing.
BUT IT WAS IGNORED, OR CHEERED ON, BY THE PEOPLE WHO ARE NOW SCREAMING “INSURRECTION:” Flashback: Violence flares in Washington during Trump inauguration. “Black-clad activists among hundreds of demonstrators protesting Donald Trump’s swearing-in on Friday clashed with police a few blocks from the White House, in an outburst of violence rare for an inauguration. . . . In the violence, knots of activists in black clothes and masks threw rocks and bottles at officers wearing riot gear, who responded with volleys of tear gas and stun grenades as a helicopter hovered low overhead.”
MEMORY-HOLED IN 3…2…1: FBI arrest Florida ‘hardcore leftist’ who plotted armed attack on pro-Trump protesters at state Capitol.
Earlier:
● NY Dem Accused of ‘Strangling Wife’ Turns Himself In to Authorities. State senator Luis Sepúlveda is close ally to Bernie Sanders, Bill de Blasio.
Related: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.
LIKE CLOCKWORK: On Bill Maher Show, Katie Couric Says Romney ‘Seems Like Nelson Mandela At This Point.’
Which seems like an awfully strange comparison for a completely objective journalist who is no way a Democratic Party operative with a byline to make, considering that President Elect Biden assured me that he was going to put black people “back in chains” in 2012.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN: The Making of a Misogynist.
The misogynist of my title, as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary, c’est moi. I became America’s most notable one on Saturday morning, December 12, upon the release of an 800-or-so-word op-ed I wrote in the Wall Street Journal published under the title “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not If You Need an M.D.” I had written the piece to get what I thought a minor pet peeve off my chest: the affectation of the president-elect’s wife in calling herself, and insisting that everyone else refer to her as, “Dr. Jill Biden.” She is not a physician; rather, she was awarded a degree by a graduate school of education. What I thought was a fairly light bit of prose whose intentions were chiefly comic set off a forest fire of anger toward, abuse of, and outright hatred for its author. It proves you can be a naïf even at the age of 83.
Nearly 5,000 readers wrote online to the Wall Street Journal to argue about my op-ed. My name “trended,” as they say, number one on Twitter. The New York Times published a full-blown article about it, as did the Guardian in England. My local (that is, Chicago) press and television channels ran stories about it. It was discussed on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, and on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, where Mrs. Biden deplored “the tone” and said, “One of the things I love most is my doctorate…. I worked so hard for it.” Meanwhile, the English Department at Northwestern University, where I taught for 30 years, flushed me down Orwell’s memory hole by taking my name off its website and sending out an online message disassociating itself from my “noxious” and “misogynistic” views.
Read the whole thing.
LET IT BE: Jailed music producer Phil Spector dies at 81. “In 2009, he was convicted of the 2003 murder of Hollywood actress Lana Clarkson. His death was confirmed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.”
Spector produced the last album the Beatles issued as a group, 1970’s Let It Be (though Abbey Road, their true swan song, was recorded after the Let It Be sessions of early 1969), after being given the master tapes by John Lennon. As longtime Beatles producer George Martin drolly commented to EMI’s management when he wasn’t given a credit on Let It Be, “I produced the original, and what you should do is have a credit saying ‘Produced by George Martin, over-produced by Phil Spector.’”
UPDATE: Five Artists Reportedly Held at Gunpoint by Phil Spector.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Bugatti Veyron Basic Maintenance Can Cost Upwards of $50,000 a Year.
The upside is pretty amazing though:
REST ASSURED, HE WILL BE IGNORED: Former Democratic Leader Tom Daschle Warns Against Trump Impeachment.
DETROIT REPORTER TRIES TO EXPOSE LIONS COACHING CANDIDATE, GETS EXPOSED HIMSELF:
Now, as you guys know, OutKick doesn’t believe in outing people to play gotcha and have them fired over tweets. Nobody should be firing Alter or trying to prevent Campbell from getting a job. The human resource executives can sit this one out.
It would just be nice if Alter acknowledged his own past in his report on Campbell. All it would take is a brief passage at the bottom of the story where Alter says, “On more than one occasion, I have used ‘fag’ on social media.”
That’s it. Just be fair and balanced, Marlowe.
“I apologize for the unacceptable tweets from my past. There is no excuse for the language I used and I’m embarrassed. I do not condone that language. I’m sorry to anyone I have offended and deeply regret my actions,” Marlowe tweeted Friday night.
Now we need to hear from Marlowe on if he thinks Campbell should be disqualified from the Lions job. Go ahead Marlowe, say it.
It gets worse from there.
Flashbacks:
BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS: Trump receives Morocco’s highest award for Middle East work. “The United States in the last five months helped broker deals between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. The agreements are aimed at normalizing relations and opening economic ties.”
FIGHT THE POWER: Columbia law professor uses anti-male bias lawsuit to roll back the administrative state. This is Phil Hamburger’s New Civil Liberties Alliance, on whose board I serve.
RIOTS IN THE AGE OF MORAL NARCISSISM: Selfie-Snapping Capitol Hill Rioters Leave FBI a Trail of Over 140,000 Images.
And won’t have Kamala Harris to bail them out this time around, unlike Minneapolis rioters.
(Classical reference in headline.)
CAMPUS HATE: Prof: ‘All’ Republicans are ‘guilty’ of Capitol attack; should be ‘forced to shut the hell up.’
To be fair, this is the left’s message right now. They’re very big on forcing people to shut up.
I CERTAINLY HOPE SO: A new crop of Texas-led lawsuits awaits Joe Biden’s White House.
HMMMM: Ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones ‘turning herself in’ to face new charge.
In a series of tweets Saturday, Jones alleged the state failed to connect her to a message sent on the state’s emergency management system last year calling on civil servants to blow the whistle on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ COVID-19 pandemic response. That had been the basis for a search warrant executed by armed FDLE agents of Jones’ home on Dec. 7 where they seized phones, computers and memory drives.
“The state has issued a warrant for my arrest – even though the ‘crime’ is not related to the warrant,” Jones tweeted Saturday, referring to the December search warrant.
“To protect my family from continued police violence, and to show that I’m ready to fight whatever they throw at me, I’m turning myself into police in Florida Sunday night. The Governor will not win his war on science and free speech. He will not silence those who speak out,” she tweeted.
Flashbacks: From last month: Florida Police Raid Home Of Fired State Covid-19 Data Scientist Rebekah Jones.
About ten officers with guns drawn raided her home in Tallahassee at around 8:30 a.m., Jones told CNN, as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement worked to execute a search warrant as part of an investigation into whether the data scientist accessed a state government messaging system without authorization to encourage employees to speak out about coronavirus deaths, according to an affidavit obtained by the network.
“It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead,” the November 10 message said, according to the affidavit. “You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”
* * * * * * * *
She said officers also “pointed a gun six inches from my face” and took all of her “hardware and tech” including her computers, phone and flash drives that she says contained “proof that (state officials) were lying in January about things like internal reports and notices from the CDC” and “evidence of illegal activities by the state.” She said that she accessed those reports legally and some had been sent to her by other people after she was removed from her position.
Rick Swearingen, the law enforcement department’s commissioner, said in a statement that “at no time were weapons pointed at anyone in the home.”
And from May: Rebekah Jones’ firing is the COVID clickbait the media dreams of – but it’s all fake.
Jones also has an extensive criminal history in Leon County, where she’s been arrested and charged with three felonies, including one for robbery, and a handful of misdemeanor cases including “sexual cyberstalking,” a case where she created a website and used it to sexually harass her ex-boyfriend. The website has been taken down, but images from the case exist in Leon County court records.
Most of the charges filed against her came after she was hired by the Department of Health, so they would not have turned up in any background check.
The bottom line: Rebekah Jones was fired for performance issues, not for “refusing to manipulate data.” And her extensive criminal history, which predates her employment in Florida, lends credence to the DeSantis administration that she was just a troublesome employee who is now disgruntled and trying to get media attention about her firing. The easiest way to get media attention right now is to claim a Republican elected official is involved in a conspiracy to cover up COVID-19 data detrimental to reopening the state economy.
The media outlets listed above will not issue retractions. They will double down on the idea that DeSantis’s administration is withholding / manipulating / deleting / altering data. That, too is totally false. But mark these words, the embarrassment of touting Rebekah Jones as their coronavirus martyr will quickly fade into the mainstream media memory hole.
But hey, good enough to be named Forbes’ 2020 ‘Tech Person of the Year.’
JOSH HAMMER: Trump’s Parting Shot To China Should Be Full U.S. Recognition of Taiwan.
President Donald Trump’s two greatest foreign policy accomplishments both involve departures from outmoded paradigms that had, for decades, enraptured bipartisan neoliberal elites: unprecedented Arab-Israeli rapprochement in the Middle East and an assertive China containment strategy in the Asia-Pacific. On the former front, Trump boldly departed from the misbegotten “inside-out” conflict resolution approach, which elevated to the forefront the need for Israeli capitulation to Palestinian-Arab intransigence; on the latter front, Trump became the first president since Richard Nixon’s famous 1972 trip to China to openly call into question our relationship with that ascendant, hegemonic Communist regime.
The key difference is that, as Trump prepares to ride off into the sunset, progress on the latter is likely at greater risk of a prompt post-inauguration reversal from his Democratic successor. The physical moving of the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one of the Trump administration’s myriad displays of staunch friendship with the Jewish state, is unlikely to be undone. Nor would any sane politician seek to nix the Abraham Accords, the series of landmark peace deals between Israel and Islamic nations that the administration helped negotiate. But pugnacious China-skeptical rhetoric, hardline opposition to Huawei’s emergent 5G telecommunications network and harsh tariffs on Chinese imports are the sort of moves that would be all too easy for a longtime China dove, such as Joe Biden, to quickly reverse.
In order to help box in his successor and secure the continuity of our long-overdue recalibration with our preeminent 21st-century geopolitical threat, there is one farewell action above all that would stick in the craw of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and redound to America’s substantive benefit. Trump ought to formally recognize Taiwan (also known as the Republic of China) as an independent state, distinct from the Beijing-based regime—and he must do so, with all the diplomatic accoutrements such a formal recognition entails, posthaste.
Read the whole thing.
WOKE GOVERNMENT IS WHAT THEY GIVE YOU WHEN THEY CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO GIVE YOU GOOD GOVERNMENT: Poll shows New Yorkers want their new mayor to fix NYC — not spout ‘wokeness.’
BUT THAT’S ONE OF BIDEN’S STRONGEST VOTING BLOCS! Prisons locked down ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration.
OVER TWO YEARS OF BATTLING TO GET RECOGNITION: Westchester teen wins battle to start conservative school club.
And a note to Alexandria Occasional Cortex: Honeychild, you have your work cut out for you. Apparently nowadays “white supremacists” come in all colors. Or perhaps they’re just sentience-supremacists. In which case it sucks to be you.
I AM AS I SWORE TO BE, A DEFENDER OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES: Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em.
And these Marxian totalitarians can gaze lovingly on my middle fingers. Behold! A matched pair.
SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED! Another professor arrested for hiding ties to China.
Oh, deary me. My stars and garters.
WELL, OF COURSE THEY DO: Twitter Allows Chinese Propaganda to Remain.
Apropos nothing, btw, so I was re-reading Heinlein’s The Sixth Column the other day…..
WELL, OF COURSE: Pelosi Proves Again She Wants To Wear The Crown.
Would-be socialist and communist systems, like any oligarchy, are a continuous, internal battle for the top stop. The top spot is the only one in which you are relatively (very relatively for anyone who spent a long period of years watching the May Day parades on TV) safe for any time at all. They all want the top spot. And will do anything to get it.
OH, THE POCKETBOOK WAS PART OF IT: HuffPo: Trump Supporters’ Main Problem Was Never The Economy.
But I take the point. The peons should not have the money for even small luxuries. Also note “the insurrectionists wore costumes.”
Dear Lord. The future historians, if there are future historians, will laugh themselves sick over this nonsense.
Dear left, no matter how many papier mache puppets you deployed in the service of your causes, you were never serious revolutionaries. You were privileged, elite common or garden variety idiots putting on a show of outrage and revolution for your peers.
And the people in “costumes” at the capitol were just …. people letting steam off. Not serious insurrectionists or revolutionaries of any kind. The greatest danger for Pelosi was catching buffalo lice or something.
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