NOW OUT FROM ANDY NGO: Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.
My copy came today.
February 2, 2021
DISPATCHES FROM THE LOWER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Secretary of Ethnic Studies. President Biden’s choice to lead the Education Department has a thin record—except in one trailblazing area.
‘THEIR GOAL IS TO DESTROY EVERYONE:’ Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape.
First-hand accounts from inside the internment camps are rare, but several former detainees and a guard have told the BBC they experienced or saw evidence of an organised system of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture.
Tursunay Ziawudun, who fled Xinjiang after her release and is now in the US, said women were removed from the cells “every night” and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men.
Ziawudun has spoken to the media before, but only from Kazakhstan, where she “lived in constant fear of being sent back to China”, she said. She said she believed that if she revealed the extent of the sexual abuse she had experienced and seen, and was returned to Xinjiang, she would be punished more harshly than before. And she was ashamed, she said.
It is impossible to verify Ziawudun’s account completely because of the severe restrictions China places on reporters in the country, but travel documents and immigration records she provided to the BBC corroborate the timeline of her story. Her descriptions of the camp in Xinyuan county – known in Uighur as Kunes county – match satellite imagery analysed by the BBC, and her descriptions of daily life inside the camp, as well as the nature and methods of the abuse, correspond with other accounts from former detainees.
Flashback to Tom Cotton, last year: Joe Biden Is China’s Choice for President.
DISPATCHES FROM GOYA’S DECEMBER EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH: AOC’s body politics.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is no stranger to attention. The second-term congresswoman was the second most talked-about politician in 2019, just behind then-President Donald Trump. AOC loves to frequently jump on livestream videos to talk directly to her fans and voters, whether while she’s making macaroni, building furniture, or playing a wildly popular multiplayer game. It was during one of these Instagram livestreams on Monday night that she committed perhaps her gravest sin yet as a politician.
AOC, who has somehow not yet dried the well of public sympathy for the January 6 storming of the Capitol, linked the experience to an alleged sexual assault she suffered in the past:
‘The reason I’m getting emotional in this moment is because these folks who tell us to move on, that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what’s happened, or even telling us to apologize — these are the same tactics of abusers. And I’m a survivor of sexual assault and I haven’t told many people that in my life, but when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other.’
This is gross manipulation, and AOC should be ashamed. Not for sharing that she was sexually assaulted — I have no way of knowing whether or not her story is true and, ultimately, it’s irrelevant to the issue of the storming of the Capitol. The real story here is that AOC used her alleged trauma as a cudgel against her political opponents. She has weaponized her alleged experience to silence anyone who criticizes her and even went so far as to compare them to the person or people who abused her. This type of behavior cheapens sexual assault.
Meanwhile, Jim Treacher demands that: The Capitol Police Must Investigate the Officer Who Allegedly Threatened AOC.
During the riot at the Capitol Building on January 6, a Capitol Police officer named Brian Sicknick was murdered. His killer remains at large. Dozens of other officers were injured, some seriously. One officer, Eugene Goodman, led rioters away from Mike Pence as they chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Two other officers have subsequently committed suicide. The Capitol Police put their bodies on the line that day, and without them the riot would’ve been even worse. But more importantly, one of those officers really scared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and she told the world about it last night on Instagram Live.
But leave it to America’s Newspaper of Record to blow the lid off this story: AOC Claims Two Men In MAGA Hats Threw Economics Textbooks At Her.
Now it all makes sense.
“GAIN OF FUNCTION” RESEARCH IS TERRIBLE AND SHOULD BE BANNED: US officials revisit rules for disclosing risky disease experiments: An expert panel is considering how much to reveal about a largely secret review process of ‘gain-of-function’ research.
Of course, a counterargument is that the U.S. ban just drove research — even research funded by the U.S. — overseas to Wuhan, where standards were slipshod.
Back in October 2014, the US government had placed a federal moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research – altering natural pathogens to make them more deadly and infectious – as a result of rising fears about a possible pandemic caused by an accidental or deliberate release of these genetically engineered monster germs.
This was in part due to lab accidents at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in July 2014 that raised questions about biosafety at US high-containment labs.
At that time, the CDC had closed two labs and halted some biological shipments in the wake of several incidents in which highly pathogenic microbes were mishandled by US government laboratories: an accidental shipment of live anthrax, the discovery of forgotten live smallpox samples and a newly revealed incident in which a dangerous influenza strain was accidentally shipped from the CDC to another lab.
A CDC internal report described how scientists failed to follow proper procedures to ensure samples were inactivated before they left the lab, and also found “multiple other problems” with operating procedures in the anthrax lab.
As such in October 2014, because of public health concerns, the US government banned all federal funding on efforts to weaponize three viruses – influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
In the face of a moratorium in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci – the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and currently the leading doctor in the US Coronavirus Task Force – outsourced in 2015 the GOF research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving US government funding.
The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.
Worth remembering Fauci’s role here, which has gotten little attention.
THE NARRATIVE IS ALWAYS “SHUT UP!”
OLD AND BUSTED: #Fightfor$15.
The New Hotness? #Fightfor$18! And with the same predictable results: Local Kroger Stores Close as California ‘Hero Pay’ Ordinance Backfires.
ON THIS DAY IN 1925: Balto and his fellow sled dogs saved the day in Nome, Alaska by delivering life-saving serum during a diphtheria outbreak. In total, about 20 human “mushers” and about 150 sled dogs participated in this heroic, 674-mile, mid-winter relay.
LAW TEACHING IN THE TIME OF THE COVID VACCINE.
SHE’S FRAGILE: AOC Uses #MeToo Claim to Silence Political Opponents.
LEARNING PROCESS: SpaceX flies, crashes Starship moon rocket again. “The rocket, named SN9, ascended to a height of more than 6 miles and performed a flip manuever. But after it descended, its engines appeared to ignite improperly, according to live video SpaceX provided.”
BEZOS OUT AT AMAZON. To be “executive chair.” Wow. Hopefully this is to concentrate on spaceflight!
TESTED: 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E. “Elon Musk’s influence is all over the Mach-E.”
DIFFERENCE WITHOUT DISTINCTION: Oregon 1st state to decriminalize possession of hard drugs.
DON’T BET ON THIS LEADING TONIGHT’S NEWS: BREAKING: Trump Eviscerates Democrats’ Impeachment Charges.
VITAMIN D UPDATE: Working outdoors linked to lower risk of breast cancer among older women.
Outdoor workers are exposed to more sunlight, boosting their levels of vitamin D, which may protect against the disease, say the researchers.
Vitamin D has a well recognised role in maintaining bone and musculoskeletal health, but it may have other roles, including helping to ward off infection and cancer.
The primary source of vitamin D is UVB sunlight. However, concerns about skin cancer risk and the increasing use of computers for both work and leisure have decreased the amount of time people spend outdoors.
The rising incidence of breast cancer over the last half of the 20th century has given rise to the suggestion that this might be linked to vitamin D deficiency.
Fresh air and sunshine. Your grandmother was right.
JOANNE JACOBS: Don’t care much about history.
Families for San Francisco‘s report links to the renaming committee’s Zoom meetings and its spreadsheet with citations from Wikipedia. Here are “case studies” of some of the decisions.
It’s filled with “embarrassing, avoidable and credibility-destroying errors” based on cutting, pasting and then misinterpreting from dubious sources, writes Eskenazi.
Based on a Top-10 list from the History Channel website, the committee condemned Paul Revere for fighting against the Penobscot Indians. In fact, he fought the British (not very well) at Penobscot Bay, named after the Indians, who were not involved.
“Educators.”
GAMESTOP AND WALLSTREETBETS ARE A MOST ILLUMINATING DEBUT OF THE BIDEN ERA: 66% of Voters Believe Insiders Manipulate Stock Market.
Related: The New Americans.
Here, in other words, was Occupy Wall Street in action, but maybe a hundred times more effective: ordinary people protesting against the financialization of the U.S. economy by taking collective action to squeeze the short-sellers, saving companies they cared about and saving thousands of jobs belonging to the people who work at those companies, while forcing the suits to disgorge some part of the money they were making by treating the market like a giant video game and squeezing the life out of companies for profit. Give the money back to the people! And hats off to them boyz and girlz willing to show their faith in collective action by putting their measly day-trading accounts on the line. What a perfectly American act. What a demonstration of collective solidarity in action at a time of increasing social atomization and economic suffering, in the dead of winter, in the middle of a pandemic—why, I could just go on and on and on. …
Not everyone saw it this way of course. There were the terrified hedge funders, including the rare few who actually despise the pump-and-dump approach to markets, and the government, which could imagine itself appeasing the mob by tossing the hedge funders to the sharks—not that old-fashioned hedging has been all that lucrative lately, with markets that are increasingly run by AI. Then there were the Upper West Side and Lower East Side lefties, who don’t know what to make of the internet exactly—except for the fact that Donald Trump lives there, and memes are racist. So if a bunch of day-trading weirdos on a Reddit thread doesn’t sound enough like “collective action” for your tastes, let me try and break it down for you, Susan. I too have noticed the absence of appropriate placards depicting Native Peoples and Chicano pride, the red banners with Karl Marx’s face printed on them or slogans in Spanish that recall the ancient glories of the fight against Franco during the Spanish Civil War, though being proudly “of the left,” I would also note the absence of other left things like putting working Americans first and freedom from state censorship and surveillance from what passes now for leftist discourse. So maybe we should agree that it’s confusing times all around, and leave the whole troubled and, let’s face it, at this point in history hopelessly debased and idiotic question of “the left” aside for now, and focus again on the main point.
One of the perennially frustrating things about “the people,” in their collective incarnation and also as individuals here in America, is that they are middle class at heart, which means that they tend to express themselves through things like buying stocks through free online trading accounts rather than by marching in the streets with banners and placards like they do in Venezuela and Cuba. They are also poorly educated about the revolutionary fashions of 75 and 100 years ago, and as a result tend to show little awareness of the slogans of the past, like “no pasaran!” Some people, and by some people I mean me, might see in this failure to endlessly repeat slogans from the past a good thing, given the reality of the past, which is fine enough as a closet for kids playing dress-up, but is not a very suitable guide for anyone interested in the American future.
Well worth a read, although it does get a few things wrong, including: Is Jen Psaki’s Brother a Portfolio Manager at Citadel? Based “on all available familial information I can find about Jen Psaki, she has no brother, much less one named Jeff or Jeffrey. She only has two sisters.”
THANKS, BUT NO: Ford says ‘millions’ of its vehicles will run on Google’s Android starting in 2023.
Flashback: Hotel Googlefornia. “Jason Evangelho reports what happens when your smartphone, computer laptop, and tablet are denied access to ‘Google’s 8,699,648 (!) IP addresses,’ and the results weren’t pretty.”
Cars, too.
WELL, WHEN YOU KEEP BRINGING UP TUSKEGEE IT’S BAD MARKETING: CDC: Black people make up just 5% of those vaccinated against COVID-19. A D.C. friend was telling me last week that even in the mostly-black wards, the vaccination lines are mostly white women.
Flashback: “Although women tend to love the notion of government control more than men do, it is women who will be told they’ll have to cut back. On treatments. And years. You know we’ve been taking more than our share.”
NO. ALL THE BEST PEOPLE TELL ME IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:
Not to be confused with Graetz, a much higher-level tax approach.
SAYING THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD: Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”
FRANCIS TURNER PRESENTS: A host your own server blogging platform. “Micronetia is a system for people to create their own standalone blog, website or other internet connected resource that is hosted by them so that it can’t be arbitrarily deleted because some part of BigTech decided that either the content or its creator needed to be cancelled.”
AT THIS POINT I’M READY TO ABOLISH FOOTBALL ANYWAY: Half of college football concussions sustained in preseason.
2021 IS THE BABYLON BEE’S WORLD; WE’RE JUST LIVING IN IT:
● Stacey Abrams Gets Nominated for a Nobel Prize for Destroying Confidence in Elections.
● Black Lives Matter movement nominated for Nobel peace prize.
● Scientists have taught spinach to send emails and it could warn us about climate change.
● AOC Claimed She Had a Near Death Experience at the Capitol, but the Real Story Is Mind-Blowing.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: YGBKM: Acronyms are a tool of white supremacy, says San Francisco school board.
IF YOU TAX IT, THEY WILL GO: Taxes driving wealth out of Massachusetts and into Florida, New Hampshire: report.
Wealthy residents and businesses are leaving the state at a troubling rate — an exodus that could grow now that working remotely is gaining widespread acceptance, a new Pioneer Institute report states.
Massachusetts has seen a net loss of $20 billion to other states, especially New Hampshire and Florida where taxes are much lower, the report warns.
“COVID has dramatically accelerated working from home and that’s bad news for the state,” said Pioneer Institute Research Director Greg Sullivan, who co-authored the report on “Do the Wealthy Migrate from High-Tax States?”
The Pioneer report found wealthy residents have been packing up and moving out of state over the last 25 years, taking with them much-needed taxable income. . . .
That news hits as Massachusetts’ Democratic lawmakers have proposed a hike in taxes on the rich to bolster funding for education and transit. Another vote, Sullivan says, is expected to come up again this spring.
He warns the post-pandemic economy will see companies be more mobile and searching for the best deals they can — all while employees could be free to choose where they want to live also.
My Welcome Wagon Project is underway.
I ADMIT I DID NOT SEE THIS ONE COMING: Scientists have taught spinach to send emails and it could warn us about climate change.
DEEP THROAT HAS LEFT THE PARKING GARAGE: RIP Hal Holbrook, famed Mark Twain and Deep Throat actor, dead at 95.
All the President’s Men is a great movie, but it is a movie, not a history lesson:
● Mark Steyn’s article on Mark Felt, the real “Deep Throat.”
● “‘Deep Throat’ never advised [Bob] Woodward to ‘follow the money.’”
● Woodward’s latest Trump book prompts myth-telling about Watergate. “‘[T]o explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic journalist,’ I wrote, ‘is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth’ — one that even Woodward has disputed. He told an interviewer in 2004: ‘To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.’”
● “The sale of the Woodward-Bernstein papers to the University of Texas in 2003, and the 2005 death of Mark Felt, the former FBI official whom Woodward has identified as Deep Throat, have led researchers to ever larger doubts about the accuracy of Woodward’s reporting on Watergate, and particularly his account of his relationship with his much-heralded, and often inaccurate, Watergate source.”
IN A WORD, POLITICS: The Real Reason Why Joe Biden Rejected the GOP COVID-19 Relief Bill.
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS TAKING A WELL-DESERVED REST: Democrats Who Resisted Reopening Schools Took Thousands From Teacher Unions.
FALSIFIABLE PREDICTIONS ARE THE ESSENCE OF SCIENCE: Faculty union predicted in-person learning would lead to deaths, but won’t say if it actually did. From this I think we can take that it didn’t.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Desperate Biden Administration Tried to Get White House Press Briefing Questions in Advance.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Could there be actual reporting going on inside the White House Press Briefing Room?
Answer: We’ll get back to you on that one — we need to sit down for a minute.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- The CDC found yet another way to be both stupid and annoying
- John McAfee has become America’s Voice of Sanity. John. McAfee.
- Of all the Bill Murray movies to get trapped in…
Bonus Sanity: CNN gets what it voted for, good and hard.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: Sephora Cancels Conservatives? Seriously? This Is Where We Are? “And why in the holy hell is FREAKING MAKEUP AND SKINCARE POLITICAL?!?!”
Welcome to the Gleichschaltung, comrade.
WELL, THERE’S LESS AND LESS REASON TO STAY ON: Elon Musk is “off Twitter for a while.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC prof: Zionism has ‘politically toxified our schools.’
CLARIFICATION: ACTUAL FEMALE ATHLETE. Female athlete speaks out against new Biden executive order on gender identity.
During an interview with Ainsley Earhardt on Fox & Friends, Kenyon appeared with her lawyer Christiana Holcomb to discuss how her past competitions against “biological males” were both “frustrating and “unmotivating.”
Holcomb explained that Biden’s executive order sends a message to her client and other female athletes that they “don’t matter to this administration.”
She added that federal law is “very clear” about having separate sporting sections for women to ensure that they can be “champions” and maintain a “fair” and “level playing field.”
The feelings of a tiny-but-vocal minority trump women’s rights and federal law because feelings.
TWO YEARS AGO: Va. Gov. Northam’s yearbook pic of men in blackface, Klan robe spurs calls for his resignation. Those quickly vanished — at least, those from Democrats — when it was realized that between his resignation, and his Lt. Governor’s rape accusations, Virginia might end up with a Republican governor. All principles were immediately thrown out the window in the name of power.
SO I REMEMBER WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE AGAINST MCCARTHYISM, BUT WHY, EXACTLY? Jimmy Kimmel Sparks Anger For Calling Reddit Investors ‘Russian Disruptors.’
EVERYTHING IS RACIST: Biden administration cites climate change as a ‘racial justice issue.’
EVERYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH US IS A NAZI WHO SHOULD BE BANNED. ALSO, THEY’RE DIVIDING THE COUNTRY! Liberal Media Scream: New high in CNN bias, blames GOP for ‘Divided America.’
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Maybe ‘Peace’ Means Something Completely Different In Norway. “Black Lives Matter is an anti-law enforcement domestic terrorist organization and nothing more. You know that. I know that. Something seems to have gotten lost in the translation to Norwegian, however.”
JOHN MCWHORTER: More on what modern “antiracism” does to schools, or could not — and some insight on the Kendi thing.
Kendi, though, reads for isolated words and single sentences rather than argument, for flavor rather than content. It is one more demonstration among many of his lack of familiarity with what people with doctorates, as well as people who write for the public and present themselves as thinkers, are expected to do.
It is of a piece with the fact that his “scholarship” is not based on sustained, original research utilizing close reasoning and being tempered through rigorous evaluation by peers over years’ time. Too, I am unaware of a single instance of Kendi actually taking a deep breath and defending one of his ideas, as opposed to batting away criticism as somehow inappropriate.
This does not, contrary to popular belief, mean that he is a megalomaniac or a huckster. However, it does mean that he is in way over his head. He strikes me as a deer caught in the headlights, and I don’t blame him for trying to make the best of that regardless. There is a certain mystique in his name, upon which we might consider that he was born Henry Rogers. Henry had no idea this fame was coming, and he’s doing his best.
But — if it turns out that the deer in those headlights is a mean deer, and is going to say such gratuitously nasty things about me on a regular basis, I feel comfortable levelling some honesty about him. (I had Henry’s number a couple years ago, but was holding my tongue as late as this review last summer. But once he started slandering me I decided to speak out.) . . .
Ibram Kendi is someone who, in the role of social scientist, proposes a “Department of Antiracism,” in neglect of a little something called the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Kendi’s insight on education, untethered to any engagement with pedagogical or psychometric theory, is that we should evaluate students on the basis of their “desire to know” rather than anything they actually do. This is a person whose most ready counsel to the public about interracial adoption is that white adopters might still be racists even if they don’t think they are.
Kendi is a professor who, in the guise of being trained in intellectual inquiry, bristles at real questions. He dismisses them as either racism or as frustrated responses to envy, as if he bears not proposal but truth. His ideas are couched in simple oppositions mired somewhere between catechism and fable, of a sort alien to what intellectual engagement in the modern world consists of, utterly foreign to exchange among conference academics or even Zooming literati. And on that, let us remember that he is also someone who, into the twenty-first century, was walking around thinking of whites as “devils” à la Minister Farrakhan.
Here’s the rub: The people who sit drinking all of this in and calling it deep wouldn’t let it pass for a minute if he were white.
That’s absolutely true.
IN LOCAL NEWS: Newspaper firm launches class action suit versus Google, Facebook over ad revenue.
Despite Google recently announcing it would pay $1 billion to news publishers, a newspaper company has filed what it says is the first antitrust suit against Google and Facebook over digital advertising. HD Media, which publishes seven newspapers, accuses the two companies of entering into a secret agreement.
According to Editor & Publisher Magazine, the suit specifies that this secret agreement, codenamed “Jedi Blue,” manipulated online advertising auctions. It also claims that Google’s monopolization of the digital advertising market is threatening local newspapers across the US.
“The freedom of the press is not at stake,” the suit reportedly says. “The press itself is at stake.”
Someday you’ll be free to read whatever portions of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times that Google permits.
VOTERS SEE WHAT’S GOING ON: Voters See Less Tolerance for Political Differences. “President Biden promised to unify the country, but voters say Americans are becoming more intolerant of political disagreement. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 77% of Likely U.S. Voters say Americans less tolerant of each other’s political opinions than they were in the past.”
BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY ARE: Now Democrats Are Talking About Packing the Lower Courts.
THE RIGHTS FOR THESE BOOKS HAVE REVERTED: So I’ll be bringing them out (again) and writing more in the series.
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Draw One In The Dark.
Something or someone is killing shape shifters in the small mountain town of Goldport, Colorado.
Kyrie Smith, a server at a local diner, is the last person to solve the mystery. Except of course for the fact that she changes into a panther and that her co-worker, Tom Ormson, who changes into a dragon, thinks he might have killed someone.
Add in a policeman who shape-shifts into a lion, a father who is suffering from remorse about how he raised his son, and a triad of dragon shape shifters on the trail of a magical object known as The Pearl of Heaven and the adventure is bound to get very exciting indeed.
Solving the crime is difficult enough, but so is — for our characters — trusting someone with secrets long-held.
ROGER KIMBALL: Biden and the Greengrocer.
One of the strangest aspects of America’s new cup o’Joe is the idea that the installation of Bidenharris in the White House represents a “return of normality” in the metabolism of the nation’s political affairs.
You see this meme—a less charitable person might call it a “canard”—being belched up everywhere from The Swamp.
No memo went out. The instruction was silently communicated in some mysterious way akin to the signals that direct the flight of flocks of birds.
Masses of them pivot and and strike out in the same direction. No order was given, but one was certainly obeyed.
So it is with the response to Bidenharris.
It’s taken for granted on the TV shows and in the chatter of respectable pundits. Opinion journals of the Right-left as well as the Left proclaim it in tones of buttoned-down seriousness and relief.
One organ of the respectable Right assures its readers that the day-to-day activities of Bidenharris is “a professional operation going about its business, not the reality-television show we’ve been privy to for the last four years.”
If you look closely, you can see the words “Thank God for that!” floating up off the page.
Hark: The new administration’s “announced nominees for cabinet positions and selections for White House staff are notable largely for their experience and competence.”
I’d like to you say that last bit aloud and then conjure the image of John Kerry, Janet “$800K” Yellen, Xavier Becerra, Pete Buttigieg, and Marcia Fudge. Can you do it without giggling? “Experience and competence” forsooth!
And there’s more. “Biden’s actions represent a natural harnessing of the authority of the presidency,” we read. The ancient one “is not promising to shake-up Washington; he’s explicitly promising he will calm it down.”
Right. “Calm it down.” That’s why there is that hastily erected twelve-foot wall, topped with razor wire, surrounding the Capitol.
Any bets on whether that is made a permanent feature of what Nancy Pelosi, with her usual botox rictus, called “the People’s House.” (No, not you, silly: she meant her kind of people.)
And how about those thousands of armed troops in the nation’s Capital? . . .
Anyone harboring “Trumpist” inclinations is suspect, hence the widespread calls for “deprogramming” his supporters, who are routinely said to be “marching towards sedition.”
Is that a “return to normality”? Do you feel calmer?
Plus:
This is where Václav Havel’s greengrocer comes in. In “The Power of the Powerless,” a famous essay about the day-to-day operation of totalitarianism from the late 1970s, Havel talks about an ordinary greengrocer who obediently agrees to display a placard with the slogan “Workers of the World, Unite!” in his shop window.
He does this without much thought. What if the powers that be had asked him to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient”? Then, says Havel, “embarrassed and ashamed,” he would have objected.
“To overcome this complication,” Havel explains, “his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction.”
“It must allow the greengrocer to say, ‘What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?’”
You see how it works: “the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.”
Bidenharris turns Washington into an armed camp. He populates his administration with ideological apparatchiks and affirmative-action non entities and repeats the word “unity.”
Bidenharris also starts prosecuting political opponents. He governs by diktat, issuing more executive orders in a week than other administrations had done in a year. With the stroke of a pen, he shutters the Keystone pipeline and put tens of thousands of people out of work.
He also utters the word “unity” and proclaimed “tolerance” in his inaugural address, the “best” inaugural address that squeaky Chris Wallace had heard in his entire life. Normal?
Havel warned about what happens to recalcitrant greengrocers who do not get with the program. All of a sudden, “he will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. . . . His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him.”
And here’s the rub. “Most of those who apply these sanctions . . . will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans.”
“Conditions.” That’s a synonym for the swampy “normality” that Bidenharris is returning us to and that we are supposed to celebrate.
The people carrying out this restitution think that if they censor something then it no longer exists.
They think that if they call ordinary citizens “domestics terrorists” they can win an ideological battle.
There are somewhere between 74 and 75 million people who are on the cusp of proving them wrong.
I am daily amazed at the eager abandonment of what even the most partisan among our political leadership used to regard as good sense and good citizenship.
OH, COME ON, YOU NEED THE LAUGH: Not that Robin Hood. The one who stole from the taxes rich and gave to the poor.
IT’S STUPID OUT THERE. TAKE THIS: Glorious Meme Commissary of Proletariat.
IT’S A MYSTERY: Vaccine skepticism lurks in town famous for syphilis study.
Gee, I can’t imagine why people in Tuskegee, Alabama wouldn’t trust a government vaccine.
SOME OF US REMEMBER THE RHYME: Reducing An Occupied Country.
IT SEEMS TO BE CAUSING AMNESIA: The So-Called Climate “Health Emergency”.
Some of us remember when we were all going to freeze, and the solution was socialism. Warming. Cooling. The solution is always socialism. One starts to suspect that its a solution in search of a problem.
I SUSPECT MOST OF THEM ARE IMAGINARY: Did most Biden voters really not see it coming?
THEY REALLY DON’T WANT US TO ESCAPE: Environmentalists cheer FAA blocking of Starship test flight.
OR PERHAPS THE WALL: Intersectionality Has Hit The Stop Sign.
I LIKE HIS 3) ITEM: COVID19 update, Groundhog Day edition: various ICYMI items.
SHOW TRIALS: Jason Miller Discusses Next Week Impeachment Trial with David Asman.
Along with military occupation of the capital are the best way to show you believe you own legitimately. Totally.
THE LEFT PROJECTS LIKE AN IMAX: Projection.
YEAH, BECAUSE IT’S AMERICA LAST: DOJ Investigating Elon Musk For Not Hiring Foreign Applicant.
February 1, 2021
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
If Trump’s so washed up, why are Democrats still so afraid of him?
Plus: “The Democrats’ case against Marjorie Greene largely consists of the claim that she is a conspiracy theorist. Fine. If we are going to expel representatives who promoted conspiracy theories, let’s start with the Democrats who propounded the insane conspiracy theory that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 presidential election. Once all of those Democrats have been expelled or deprived of their committee assignments–that covers pretty much all Democrats, including the House leadership–we can take up the question of whether Marjorie Greene promoted unfounded conspiracy theories.”
Endorsed!
POINTS AND FIGURES: Your Regulator Overseers. “If you wonder why hearings become hyper-political and devolve into soundbite attacks, the above is why. There isn’t a lot of real world experience in the halls of Congress.”
NOT THE BEE: Stacey Abrams nominated for Nobel Peace Prize.
REALLY GLAD WE HAVE GROWNUPS IN CHARGE ONCE AGAIN WHO AREN’T OBSESSED WITH TWITTER: Rent Free: Jen Psaki Gets Snarky After ‘Circle Back’ Video Goes Viral.
COOL CLOCK, AHMED: ‘Palestinians’ Want London to Give Back ‘Big Ben.’
There was never a “Palestinian” nation or a people. There were influential clans, like the Husseini clan, whose members included Hitler’s Mufti and Yasser Arafat, who are not, despite their myths, descended from the Caananites let alone the Philistines, but came over from Egypt. Even after spending a generation trying to wipe out the indigenous Jewish population, when the revolution came and Israel won its independence, they were not driven out in a ‘Nakba’.
They left ahead of their invading Islamic armies that they expected to wipe out the Jewish population. And when that didn’t happen, they claimed to be an exiled “Palestinian” people.
Now their descendants recalling family legends have built up a story of a glorious Islamic clock that was stolen by the infidels and passed off as Big Ben. One day they’ll reclaim Big Ben and stick it on the Jaffa Gate again and take over all of Jerusalem. Meanwhile the Israelis have been caring for the remaining Ottoman clocks. The entire set, including the banished Jaffa Gate clock, have shown up on Israeli postage stamps. The Ottoman plaques with their praises of Allah have been left alone though other plaques praising G-d were sometimes added.
Exit quote: “When your entire history is fake, you can believe anything.”
MARILYN MANSON DROPPED BY LABEL, TV SHOW AFTER EVAN RACHEL WOOD ABUSE ALLEGATIONS.
As Jim Treacher asks, “Remember #MeToo?” If You Believe Marilyn Manson Accuser Evan Rachel Wood, Why Don’t You Believe Tara Reade?
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST:
Shot:
I remember watching my first Winter Olympics in 1980. We were on a family ski trip at Copper Mountain in Colorado, where my brother and I skied the first powder run of our lives. It was on a gentle slope just off one of the main trails. We wiggled down the hill in chaotic rapture then skied the run again and again. The snow was soft and the turns effortless. You don’t have to be a skier to feel nostalgia for those whitewashed days — or to see the writing on the wall.
—“The End of Snow?”, the New York Times, February 7th, 2014.
(Classical reference in headline.)
WELL, DEPENDS ON WHAT THEY PLAY: Music may help patients recover more quickly after surgery.
BRENDAN O’NEILL: The People Were Right: The EU’s unhinged behaviour in the vaccines crisis vindicates the 17.4million. “We told you. We told you the European Union was not some hippyish, internationalist outfit but rather was a self-interested protectionist bloc. We told you it was a sclerotic bureaucracy whose centralisation of power made it more and more difficult for member states to behave as democratic nations and to respond sensitively and speedily to the needs of their own people. We told you the EU didn’t really give a damn about the Good Friday Agreement and was only using it as a weapon with which to beat Brexit Britain. We told you the EU was exploiting Ireland, cynically marshalling its concerns over a ‘hard border’ to try to further demonise Brexit, and that before long it would forget all about its concern for Ireland and relegate it once again to the status of a neo-colony. We told you all of this. And we were right.”
CANCEL CULTURE CENSORS THE EPOCH TIMES, AGAIN: Youtube has demonetized The Epoch Times’ channel. Censorship, once started, has a way of consuming everything even remotely threatening to the censors.
BUSES ARE SUPERSPREADER VEHICLES: New Flyer launches North America’s first Level 4 autonomous transit bus.
THE LOS ANGELES UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT’S WEB SITE: You may want to take a look at this. Really.
NOW OUT FROM TODD HENDERSON: State of Shock. I very much enjoyed the first book in this series. This is #2.
The Kindle version is here.
BIDEN’S IMMIGRATION POLICY IS ‘RELEASE, PROTECT, REWARD:’ That’s the view of former Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan, who tells The Epoch Times’ Charlotte Culbertson:
“That’s release, protect, reward. That’s an open border. You might as well put billboards in the Central American countries saying ‘Come to the United States, our borders are open.’ There’s an interview of a migrant himself who said, ‘Biden has given us 100 days to get to the U.S. border.'”
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY AND K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: “I mean in no way to overstate the parallels. Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel.”
—“Ingrid Seyer-Ochi is a former UC Berkeley and Mills College professor, ex-Oakland Unified School District principal and current San Francisco Unified School District high school teacher,” writing in a San Francisco Chronicle article today headlined: S.F. high school students get a lesson in subtle white privilege.
I’VE BEEN SEEING A LOT OF BODY ARMOR ADS ALL OVER THE INTERNET. ARE THEY TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING? Which Type of Body Armor is Right for You?
THAT’S THE GOAL: Dodge Warns Regulations Are Threatening to Kill the V-8.
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