MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: US troops’ rage at their leaders will grow unless there’s deep reform.
September 7, 2021
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: US troops’ rage at their leaders will grow unless there’s deep reform.
WELL, THAT’S GOOD NEWS, EXCEPT TO FEARMONGERS: New Study Shows Breakthrough Infection Risk Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be.
PLAY IT AGAIN, JAMES: Lileks on Casablanca:
The older you get, the more you appreciate the benefits of the censor’s code. In the modern version, Lazlo would say “I know you slept with him when you thought I was dead,” and she says “And I’ll do it again to get the letters. Don’t take it personally.” It would be all out in the open. The inability to say these things led to a scene that makes you wonder how people at the time interpreted it: this wasn’t how people acted, talking around the truth.
But it was how movie people acted. How our better selves might act. If we found ourselves in a movie, set in Casablanca. Wherever, and whenever, that was, or is, or will be.
Read the whole thing.
THE NOT THE BEE YEAR IN PICTURES: Someone Created The Ultimate Picture Thread To Show How Far Society Has Devolved In The Last Year And It Is Beyond Depressing.
To be fair, the last year and a half has been pretty close to the 21st century I was promised in the pre-Star Wars, pre-Atari 1970s.
IT’S A HOSTAGE CRISIS, WHERE THE HOSTAGES ARE KEPT IN AFGHANISTAN BY . . . U.S. THE STATE DEPARTMENT? State Dept. won’t give private rescue flights OK to leave Afghanistan. “The State Department said it will not formally approve the departure of chartered planes from Afghanistan carrying Americans and allies — complicating efforts by private citizens to complete the evacuation of the left-behind, according to an email obtained by Fox News.”
Plus: “Since the American military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan ended Aug. 30, private citizens and nonprofit groups have scrambled to arrange transportation out of Taliban-controlled territory for the dozens of American citizens and estimated thousands of Afghans who assisted US-led NATO forces during the two-decade-long war. White House press secretary Jen Psaki argued last week that the notion that the Biden administration was stopping such initiatives was incorrect.”
Well, Jen Psaki argues a lot of things.
OPEN THREAD: Lean back, relax. Here come the snacks.
ROGER SIMON: America Lives Under Healthcare Fascism.
Attributed to V.I. Lenin is a statement to the effect that the fastest and surest way to communism or socialism—it varies according to the citation—is through the healthcare system.
The statement seems to be apocryphal. I say “seems” because no one appears able to locate it.
But, like so many possibly apocryphal statements (“A republic if you can keep it” and so forth), does anyone doubt its meaning is really true? That’s the reason such remarks continue to haunt us.
Since this is Rosh Hashanah, I will put it the way the old Jewish bubbes (grandmothers) did when I was a child. Apply the proper Yiddish accent: “So long as you’re healthy, it’s the main thing.”
And, to be clear, when I assert we live under healthcare communism, I don’t mean communism the way ye olde Karl Marx dreamed it up. I mean something even worse, more insidious—total state control of our lives, who wins and loses, who profits and who fails, who becomes a billionaire and who a pauper, even who survives… in other words communism as practiced in today’s People’s Republic of China and, increasingly, the United States.
You may not be interested in the gleichschaltung — but the gleichschaltung is interested in you.
KURT SCHLICHTER: The New Rules Bite Libs Right in the Uterus.
You know, there was a time when I might have thought that the Texas legislature’s creative lawmaking that lets random people sue those facilitating abortions was against my principles. But that was before “principles” became nothing more than a cynical codeword designed to tie our hands as the libs pillaged through our society like a bunch of hopped-up Visigoths who just got into Hunter’s secret stash.
The new rule is that you use your power ruthlessly to defeat your opponent. And so, I’m totally comfortable with it. The Dems, not so much – this legislative suppository is shaped like a starfish and it ain’t going in easy.
Read the whole thing.
GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T PRODUCE NEWS HERE — THIS IS CNN! Liberals lash out at CNN for interviewing Caitlyn Jenner during California recall.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Biden Declares Climate Change a Pressing Issue After 48 Years in Government.
“Climate change poses an existential threat,” said Biden, raising his voice. “It’s here, it’s not going to get any better,” he added while insisting “we can stop it from getting worse.” If the Left’s climate agenda isn’t accomplished, Biden threatened, “the storms are gonna get worse and worse and worse.”
For his own record, then-Senator Biden voted against more stringent fuel efficiency standards a handful of times. And Biden’s words Tuesday suggest his time as Vice President in the Obama administration accomplished little to nothing. After all, if American policy could save the planet, wouldn’t eight years of Obama and Biden in the White House — which included negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement — have mitigated damage like that he spent Tuesday surveying?
“We’ve gotta listen to the scientists* and economists,” Biden admonished. “They tell us this is code red.”
“The world is in peril,” Biden claimed, insisting “that’s not hyperbole.”
Among Biden’s recommendations to solve the climate change he lamented is to, “by 2020, make sure all of our electricity is zero emissions,” a deadline we passed nine months ago.
It’s just a stutter.
* QED: President ‘has four years to save Earth.’
Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama’s first administration, he added.
—The Grauniad, January 17th, 2009.
(Classical reference in headline.)
THE HONEYMOON IS OVER:
● Shot: Biden says allies are not questioning US credibility.
—Nikkei Asia, August 21st.
● Chaser: Afghanistan crisis: How Europe’s relationship with Joe Biden turned sour.
—The BBC, September 3rd.
● Hangover: “How Others See Us.”
Boris Johnson has been told to order a “complete overhaul of Whitehall” so that Britain can fill the void of global leadership left by the US.
Tobias Ellwood, the chairman of the defence select committee, said the withdrawal from Afghanistan raised the prospect that terrorism would “once again be allowed to thrive and the limits of UK and western influence exposed”.
The Tory MP noted that with America’s new “isolationist policy,” it was “a dangerous geopolitical turning point”.
He added: “If Britain wants to fill that void – as we should do – it will require a complete overhaul of Whitehall, upgrade of our strategic thinking, our foreign policy output and our ability to lead.”
* * * * * * * *
The Brits are correct that the Biden administration’s incompetence has created a power vacuum, but the idea that they will be the ones to fill it seems much too optimistic.”
—Power Line, today.
EXCUSE ME STEWARDESS, I SPEAK TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Confused Joe Biden Doesn’t Think Tornadoes Are Called Tornadoes Anymore. “While it’s unclear exactly what the President was trying to say, it seems he is confusing a derecho that swept across the city of Nevada, Iowa in August of 2020 with not-tornado tornadoes that struck the states of Nevada and Iowa. Surely, the President knows that Nevada is not in the middle of the country, right? In any case, to clear things up: Tornadoes are still tornadoes and Derechos are still Derechos. Nevada is not in the middle of the country, but Nevada, Iowa is. Predictably, Biden’s gaffe drew a quick reaction from meteorologists and residents in the states Biden mentioned as reporters and members of Congress piled on.”
GET OUT OF YOUR CAR AND CUT OFF YOUR SLAUSON: Tennessee Man Leading Police Chase Severed His Penis. “If he made the dissecting decision amid fleeing the fuzz, it’s unclear how he thought it might have helped. Perhaps he felt the vehicle was sluggish, and he needed to cut weight. Or maybe he was already crafting an insanity plea. Either way, it was an extraordinary feat — especially if the Honda is a stick shift.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
FAUCI ON COLLEGE FOOTBALL FANS PACKING STADIUMS: ‘I Don’t Think it’s Smart.”
The photos also speak louder than experts and anchors on TV. Witnessing college football fans cheer, boo, dance, sing, and whatever else they do is persuasive. It erases some of the fears hesitant fans may still have.
Furthermore, fans across the country, those who feel they are at mild risk, showed that they were over COVID restrictions. COVID isn’t going away, but Americans will gradually realize that they can resume their lives anyway. Some were there a year ago — others won’t get there for another year. That’s up to them and their vulnerability to the virus. Adults can decide when that time is right for them. But based on Week 1 of the college football season, a significant number have reached that point.
Flashback: Ignoring Them Is the Only Way Out.
We can’t eat enough medium-well steaks to get the CDC to stop recommending that we not eat medium-rare, let alone steak tartare. If you ask epidemiologists whether human conversation is safe, their minds call up computer animations of people projectile-vomiting red and blue blocks of “droplets” on each other. If you asked public-health authorities for permission to be born and live a life, there’s no way they could just, you know, approve of that in an unqualified way. You just have to remember that you’ll never be in less danger to yourself or others until dead.
They’re waiting for us — the people. The people began locking down and shutting in and buying masks last February, when public-health officials were telling you that masks were racist and that you should attend Chinese New Year parades to show you weren’t afraid. The people began traveling out more — based on the Google traffic data — before the lockdowns were eased. When does it end? When we end it.
And speaking of college football: It sure looks like ‘F*CK JOE BIDEN’ chants will be a thing this fall at college football games and concerts.
The left chose fundamentally change sports from an atmosphere where everyone was united simply by being part of the home team’s crowd, to yet another political battlezone. As Kurt Schlichter warned them in 2015: Liberals May Regret Their New Rules.
WHY ENROLL IN INSTITUTIONS THAT HATE YOU AND CALL YOU AN OPPRESSOR? A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: The number of men enrolled at two- and four-year colleges has fallen behind women by record levels, in a widening education gap across the U.S.
At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year—3,805,978 to 2,815,810—by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year, according to Common Application, a nonprofit that transmits applications to more than 900 schools. Women make up 49% of the college-age population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.
“Men are falling behind remarkably fast,” said Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, which aims to improve educational opportunities for low-income, first-generation and disabled college students.
American colleges, which are embroiled in debates over racial and gender equality, and working on ways to reduce sexual assault and harassment of women on campus, have yet to reach a consensus on what might slow the retreat of men from higher education. Some schools are quietly trying programs to enroll more men, but there is scant campus support for spending resources to boost male attendance and retention. . . .
In 2008, Mr. Smith proposed a men’s center to help male students succeed. The proposal drew criticism from women who asked, “Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus,” he said.
Funding wasn’t appropriated, he said, and the center was never built.
If campuses treated blacks the way they treat men, it would be called apartheid. And while college looks like it was a good idea in the past, it’s not so clear that college, and the associated debt, is a good idea in the future.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does “Outland” take place within the Alien Universe? I always thought “Outland” was an underrated film.
WOKE NFL CANCELS VICTORY BOYD NATIONAL ANTHEM: Doesn’t matter that the singer/songwriter’s refusal to get the jab is religious belief. The NFL wants its show at Thursday night’s season opener in Tampa Bay to feature somebody singing on the field, no exceptions. Gotta remember those priorities, which don’t appear to include the First Amendment.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: When Robot Eyes Gaze Back at Humans, Something Changes in Our Brain And Behavior.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Educated women increasingly likely to have 1st baby before marriage.
JIM TREACHER: No, Emergency Rooms Aren’t Filling Up with People OD’ing on Horse Paste.
You’d think our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters at Rolling Stone would’ve learned their lesson after propagating that UVA gang-rape hoax back in 2014. That was a story based on the account of one person, and it went through layers of editors and fact-checkers without anybody noticing that the story didn’t add up. Now they’re at it again.2
And, also, in addition to that: You should get vaccinated. If you don’t want to get vaccinated, you should only take drugs prescribed by a doctor. An overwhelming majority of Americans are doing one or the other. There’s not a plague of horse-paste ODs, no matter what Rolling Stone and Rachel Maddow might claim.
A week ago you’d never heard of ivermectin, and a week from now you’ll have forgotten it exists. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: By the time I learn enough about a breaking news story to realize I don’t care, it turns out to be bull$#!+ anyway.
This all started when Joe Rogan got COVID and didn’t die even though he isn’t vaccinated, right? He said his doctor prescribed ivermectin, and then that instantly became “Joe Rogan takes horse medicine.” From there, it was a short trip to “People who probably listen to Joe Rogan are OD’ing on horse drugs.” It doesn’t need to be true, it just needs to make you feel superior to the people you hate.
As Kevin Williamson writes, “These stories don’t get published because nobody knows how to prevent that from happening — these stories get published because nobody cares, because these stories serve the purposes of a particular narrow cultural agenda and flatter the prejudices of a particular narrow set of educated and generally affluent American professionals.”
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Shot: Is Anyone Willing To Call The Top Of The Everything Bubble?
Are there any limits on irrationality? Apparently not. But there are still limits in the real world and central bank liquidity is distorting the real world, not just the imaginary world.
At the grave risk of twisting in the wind as the S&P 500 goes to 5,000, 10,000 and 100,000, let’s call September 2021 the top of the Everything Bubble. Can extremes become too extreme to continue higher? We’re about to find out.
—ZeroHedge, today.
Chaser: Millennials will power a bull market in stocks for decades: Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood.
“So many people ask me, ‘Are we in a bubble?’ We couldn’t be further from it. I do not believe that the average investor understands how productive these next five to 15 years are going to be [for stocks] as these S-curves feed one another and enter exponential growth trajectories that we have never seen before,” Wood said.
—Yahoo Finance, today.
Hangover: Gloomy Americans give Biden low marks on Afghanistan, COVID and economy.
—Liz Peek, Fox News today.
OLD AND BUSTED: #Fightfor15!
The New Hotness? Some Progressives Are Flirting With a $24 to $26 Hourly Minimum Wage.
What could go wrong?
BOOK PLUG: Old pal William Ried has a new novel out called “Backstory“, about a successful professor at an elite Ivy League university who lives in the glowing embrace of the “right kind of people.” Lo and behold, he ends up in a race to re-write his life’s history before an ugly truth is exposed. Once again, good fiction mimics real life.
Ried is an interesting guy, who spent most of his life as a premier intellectual property lawyer, and we worked together at both Willkie Farr and at Bloomberg. Proving that he is, as I’ve always suspected, far smarter than I am, he quit the law racket to do something useful with his time.
Remember to purchase through Amazon on Instapundit so Professor Glenn can continue to live in the sumptuous lifestyle that only Knoxville can provide.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I Will Sleep With You, But I Won’t Sleep Over.
A VIP WARNING FROM THE JEWS FOR GENTILES: Jeff Dunetz of The Lid explains why the next 22 days could be difficult. It involves baseball, too, because the first words of the Bible are “In the big inning …”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Nancy Pelosi Flies To Afghanistan To Lecture Stranded Americans On How Bad January 6 Was.
THE 622 PROJECT: FBI-Most-Wanted Terrorist, NYT Op-Ed Writer Named Taliban’s Interior Minister.
Haqqani attempted to soften the Taliban’s image via a 2020 op-ed in The New York Times in which he claimed that his group was “committed to working with other parties in a consultative manner of genuine respect to agree on a new, inclusive political system.”
“We together will find a way to build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected, and where merit is the basis for equal opportunity,” he wrote.
Earlier: As Brendan O’Neill of Spiked wrote last month, the Taliban are keen consumers of Western media:
This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.
Anyone who thinks the Taliban did not pick up on all of this, on the Potemkin nature not only of the Afghan government but also of Western civilisation itself, is kidding themselves.
The trolling will continue until morale improves — in both nations.
OUT ON A LIMB: You Can’t Trust the Narrative on the Texas Abortion Law.
HMM: Genesis Going All Electric in 2025.
Related (From Ed): No word if the new car will be based on the Phil Collins or Peter Gabriel iteration of Genesis:
YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Rutgers bars unvaccinated students from attending virtual classes.
ROGER KIMBALL: ‘Adults,’ ‘Progress,’ and Disaster. “Historians will look back at the Great Afghan Fumble of 2021 and say it was there and then that the United States took a large public step towards its own diminishment.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: ‘Inexcusable Bureaucratic Red Tape’: Left-wing Senator Excoriates Biden for Delay in Rescuing Americans Behind in Afghanistan.
HIGH NOONAN: Peggy Noonan “doesn’t mention her support for Biden in her September 2020 Wall Street Journal column when the choice was between Biden and Trump. Conrad Black observed that Noonan had gone full metal-jacket for Biden. Black’s column has stood the test of time. Noonan’s is already obsolete. Noonan is a sore subject of long standing with me. She makes my skin crawl…Having turned on George W. Bush, Noonan moved on to support the election of Barack Obama later that year. Noonan all but endorsed Obama in her 2008 column ‘Obama and the runaway train.’ The anti-Bush and pro-Obama columns fit neatly together.”
STILL #1 IN UNITED STATES ATLASES & MAPS: Rand McNally 2022 Road Atlas (United States, Canada, Mexico) (Rand McNally Road Atlas: United States, Canada, Mexico).
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS ON AN EXTENDED SABBATICAL: Mark Zuckerberg may have lied to Congress about who can see WhatsApp messages.
In 2016, WhatsApp announced it was using end-to-end encryption for all communications on its platform, covering everything from messages to file transfers. The use of end-to-end encryption is intended to offer users a level of privacy and security, but it seems that may not be true for the messaging app.
In a report by ProPublica, it is claimed WhatsApp employs more than 1,000 contract workers in Austin, Texas, Dublin, and Singapore, specifically for examining “millions of pieces of users’ content.” The workers “use special Facebook software” to look through messages and content that have been flagged by WhatsApp users, and have been screened by AI systems.
The reviews occur in spite of an assurance that appears in the app before users send messages for the first time, claiming “No one outside of this chat, not even WhatsApp, can read or listen to them.”
In 2018 testimony to the U.S. Senate, Facebook CEO Macrk Zuckerberg claimed “We don’t see any of the content in WhatsApp.”
Don’t use any Facebook services.
TALIBAN ANNOUNCE NEW GOVERNMENT FOR AFGHANISTAN:
The Taliban have announced an interim government in Afghanistan, declaring the country an “Islamic Emirate”.
The new cabinet is made up of senior Taliban figures, some of whom are notorious for attacks on US and Nato forces over the last two decades.
It will be led by Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, one of the movement’s founders, who is on a UN blacklist.
The interior minister is the feared FBI-wanted leader of the Haqqani militant group, Sirajuddin Haqqani.
The Taliban seized control of most of Afghanistan more than three weeks ago, ousting the previous elected leadership.
The announcement of the acting cabinet is a key step in the formation of a Taliban government. The new leadership will face significant challenges, not least stabilising the country’s economy.
No word yet if the Taliban are Keynesians or follow the von Mises–Rothbard school of Austrian economics.
Exit question: Would Biden Veto a Move at UN To Repeal Taliban’s Status as Terrorist Organization?
HE’S A PROTECTED MEMBER OF AMERICA’S NOBLE CLASS: Why Does Fauci Still Have a Job?
THE BIG LIE: Biden’s Withdrawal From Reality. “Don’t be surprised if Biden is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The brazenness is stunning. This is not your typical political spin, it is propaganda. It is the willful effort to corrupt our perception of reality. Say it loud and long enough and people will believe it. If they don’t, get Twitter mobs and cancel culture to silence and punish them. That is increasingly becoming the Democrats’ playbook.”
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Like a Rolling Stone.
The Rolling Stone story got picked apart in about five minutes as soon as it encountered the lightest skepticism. The Duke lacrosse story required a criminal investigation. Lena Dunham’s made-up story fell apart as soon as one curious reporter — in this case, me — spent five minutes on Google and made one telephone call. That wasn’t exactly hardcore investigative journalism, and I don’t write that to be modest: The students I taught at Hillsdale were undergraduates, not professional magazine editors, but they were able to see the problems with Rolling Stone’s reporting and its agenda-driven narrative pretty easily. Which is to say: These stories don’t get published because nobody knows how to prevent that from happening — these stories get published because nobody cares, because these stories serve the purposes of a particular narrow cultural agenda and flatter the prejudices of a particular narrow set of educated and generally affluent American professionals.
Exit quote: “A note to our progressive friends: This is your version of Q-Anon — falling for obvious, ridiculous lies because you want to believe the worst about people you hate.”
Read the whole thing.
TO BE FAIR, THEIR APPEAL IS BECOMING MORE “SELECTIVE:” Why can’t we fire the Blob?
(Classical reference in headline.)
ROBERT SPENCER: Communist China Is Taking Advantage of Biden’s Weakness on the World Stage. “It’s hard not to see China’s new belligerence toward Taiwan as yet another core element of the Biden legacy: When America projects weakness to the world, malign actors take advantage. Nor is this even anything new; the ChiComs began acting aggressively toward Taiwan just days after Old Joe took office.”
THE DAILY MONITOR: “How to identify gas-lighters in your life and stop them.” I love that this Ugandan independent daily newspaper quoted my book:
They will shut you down as soon you start to speak. And you fear to express your opinion unless it agrees with theirs. You are always wondering, “What will they think of this?” You fear them so much you would rather have peace than confront them. Helen Smith, in her book, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters, writes, “Women are verbally more skilled and ready to manipulate others using these verbal skills. Men are not taught how to fight back verbally nor do they often want to; for some time, it is not their nature.”
#NOMEANTWEETS: Goldman Cuts Its US GDP Forecast For The Third Time In The Past Month. “It got so bad that the NY Fed on Friday unexpectedly announced that it was suspending its GDP Nowcast tracker, as the underlying numbers had gotten so bad volatile, the central bank’s economists were ashamed to use them for analysis as the product would have been ugly for the Biden admin.”
QUESTION ASKED: What Did the Capitol Celebrity Cops Do to Roseanne Boyland? “Deplorable Lives Matter, too…After eight months, we finally have an answer to the question of who shot Ashli Babbitt. Next question is—who killed Roseanne Boyland?”
THEY ARE NOT CENSORING THE INTERNET TO PROTECT YOU.
FLEEBAGGERS FOILED: Gov. Greg Abbott signs Texas election integrity bill, SB1, into law.
Flashback: ‘Fleebaggers:’ A History of Democrats Running Away to Deny a Quorum.
BYRON YORK: TWO AWKWARD QUESTIONS ABOUT AFGHAN REFUGEES: “Biden administration officials are proud of their effort to airlift about 118,000 Afghans, plus somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 U.S. citizens, from the Kabul airport in the final days of the president’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. But still unanswered are two key questions. One, who did we leave behind? And two, who did we bring out? The administration would prefer you did not ask those questions.”
RESTORING RESPECT FOR THE OFFICE: College Students Hurl Profanity in Unison at Joe Biden. “A profane three-word chant directed at the president was bellowed during several NCAA football games Saturday, from North Carolina and Virginia to Alabama and Texas.”
FLASHBACK: The Unexpected Return of ‘Duck and Cover.’
SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: YouTube Suppressing Any Mention of Ivermectin. “YouTube is even yanking videos critical of using Ivermectin to treat Flu Manchu.”
Related: Federal government using social-media giants to censor Americans.
GOOD NEWS FOR THOSE OF US WHO SELL LAW DEGREES FOR A LIVING: The Fall 2021 Law School Admissions Season Was One For The Ages: Applicants Were Up 12.6%, With Biggest Increase (66%) Among The 170+ LSAT Band.
NEW DETAILS EMERGE ABOUT CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH AT CHINESE LAB: “Newly released documents provide details of U.S.-funded research on several types of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The Intercept has obtained more than 900 pages of documents detailing the work of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization that used federal money to fund bat coronavirus research at the Chinese laboratory. The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as project updates relating to EcoHealth Alliance’s research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic.”
SO NOW WHO’S GOING TO TELL JOE WHAT TO DO? Jill Biden Is Taking a Break From Being Co-President. Here’s What She’ll Be Doing.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: California Bleeding: More Business Have Already Fled This Year Than All of 2020.
Plus:
- National Archives declares our national archives to be harmful
- Whatever it is Jeb Bush wants you to do, don’t
- Tesla quality control is awful, Tesla fan rejoices anyway
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
WATCHING THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE in slow motion.
THE FALL OF KABUL: A Complete Death of Hope. “The Australians are our friends and they fought with us. They too share our humiliation, but as you can see in the report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation program, 4 Corners – they are also angry at what the USA did. They should be. We all should be.”
But there’s this: Blinken Denies Taliban Holding Americans in Afghanistan ‘Hostage.’ How much confidence does a Blinken denial instill?
THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY IS VOTING FOR THE SAME PARTY AGAIN AND AGAIN WHILE EXPECTING A DIFFERENT RESULT: It Looks Like Biden’s Presidency Will Be as Disastrous for Black America as Obama’s Was.
BEST SELLER IN CAMPING & RV COOKING: The MeatEater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival.
THERE’S NO REASON TO BELIEVE HER ON THIS, BUT THAT SHE FEELS THE NEED TO CLAIM IT IS A BIG TELL: Nikole Hannah-Jones Says Her Privately Funded School Program Won’t Teach Critical Race Theory.
TRUE LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: University guts student newspaper budget to pay for two new Title IX staffers.
ABOUT THOSE CDC ‘GUIDING PRINCIPLES:’ Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium exposes the corrupt links between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the far-Left universe of activists non-profits.
As it happens, CDC all but contracted-out the research and writing of “Health Equity Guiding Principles for Inclusive Communications” to a brace of these activists. How that happened graphically illustrates how the career bureaucrats form a nearly seamless linkage with the activists who are thereby enabled to define and communicate official policy:
“The guide is the latest illustration of how progressive nonprofits capture public health agencies through a kind of technocratic activism, burrowing their ideology into medical language by framing social controversies as settled scientific fact.
“Government officials, like those at the CDC, then cite those activists alongside professional health associations, many of which have gone woke themselves. That boosts the activists’ credibility while undermining the government’s own: The CDC may be insulated from certain kinds of political pressure, but it is hardly immune to the ideological contagion of medical nonprofits.”
Republicans have never quite figured out either the importance of these malignancies of the public policy process or how to bust them up and prevent their reoccurrence, other than perfunctory “Defund the Left” campaigns during the Gingrich era. Some in the Trump White House, notably OMB Director Russell Vought, understood it, so perhaps a second Trump term would see new progress.
CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: Afghan Evacuee Complains About the Quality of Meals He is Getting for Free at Fort Bliss.
FIGHT THE POWER, STICK IT TO THE MAN: FSU Supreme Court reinstates student senate president, acknowledges First Amendment violations.
IN OUR LEADING INSTITUTIONS, EVERYTHING TODAY IS ABOUT MANIPULATION, NOTHING IS ABOUT TRUTH:
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Why in the World Is the Government Disrupting the Distribution of Monoclonal Antibodies Now?
CRACKS IN THE COVERUP: NEW DETAILS EMERGE ABOUT CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH AT CHINESE LAB: More than 900 pages of materials related to US.-funded coronavirus research in China were released following a FOIA lawsuit by The Intercept. “According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, the documents contain critical information about the research done in Wuhan, including about the creation of novel viruses.”
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS, LITTLE ROCK SCANDAL INVOLVING A CHAIR NAMED AFTER BILL CLINTON, GOES ON:
Two UALR law professors who questioned the way an endowed professorship had its title quietly changed to attach the name of William J. Clinton have found their lives and careers significantly altered since a legislative hearing on the name change not long ago.
Professor Tom Sullivan, who earlier this summer sent an open email to the faculty about the Clinton name change, has left the school on his own volition within the past two weeks.
Professor Robert Steinbuch, who publicly questioned the change, has seen both seminar classes he’s taught for nearly 20 years yanked away and canceled, and he’s been reassigned to teach an unfamiliar class vacated by Sullivan’s departure.
Asked about these developments, Bowen Law School Dean Theresa “Terri” Beiner told me in an email exchange that she “cannot comment on personnel matters. Generally, courses are assigned by the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs based on the needs of the law school. Any recent decisions had nothing to do with the Aug. 19th legislative hearing or any events leading up to that hearing.”
Well, OK then, Dean Beiner. Yet these changes sure seem to me like interesting timing.
My understanding of the fallout at Bowen following that state Senate hearing into this months-long flap are as follows:
Steinbuch and Sullivan’s questions and concerns over the change were validated during the hearing.
UALR’s chancellor also interceded to remove Clinton’s name from the endowed professorship based on the valid concerns by these professors. The chair of the Senate’s State Agencies Committee characterized the outcome as a “capitulation” by the Bowen School in a matter that should never have gone as far as it did.Steinbuch said he was denied his seniority to teach the now-open Constitutional Law class where the veteran professor has both professional and personal expertise. “Despite applying to teach this class, I was denied. No Jew or conservative has ever taught this critical course,” he said.
Instead of his traditional seminars featuring free-market components, Steinbuch said the school is mandating he head a course in criminal law that he’s never taught, or even expressed interest in teaching. “Apparently I’m not qualified for the class on our Constitution used by the left for political indoctrination of law students. But I am somehow qualified to teach criminal law in which I have no interest or teaching background?”
Known statewide as a legal champion for transparency and freedom of information in governmental actions, Steinbuch said he believes the school also is forcing him into “an overloaded schedule in the spring because it chose to cancel my regular seminars.”
“The school also refused to split my 114-person class, resulting in an overloaded classroom that concerns me, especially regarding the ongoing spread of covid.” The dean did split another professor’s class, he said.
Understandably perturbed by these developments since he raised the issue of Clinton’s name being quietly attached to the Constitutional Law endowed chair, Steinbuch said he’s informed Sen. Jason Rapert, the chair of the State Agencies Committee, of his treatment and is waiting to see whether the situation necessitates yet another hearing.
Petty retaliation is the common coin of thwarted academic bureaucrats. This should be smoked out. It’s hard to get bureaucrats fired — though deans are more vulnerable than most — but you can make their quality of life suffer, and people don’t become bureaucrats because they relish adversity.
WHOSE TWEET IS IT, ANYWAY? Facebook or Twitter posts can now be quietly modified by the government under new surveillance laws.
A new law gives Australian police unprecedented powers for online surveillance, data interception and altering data. These powers, outlined in the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill, raise concerns over potential misuse, privacy and security.
The bill updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. In essence, it allows law-enforcement agencies or authorities (such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) to modify, add, copy or delete data when investigating serious online crimes.
The Human Rights Law Centre says the bill has insufficient safeguards for free speech and press freedom. Digital Rights Watch calls it a “warrantless surveillance regime” and notes the government ignored the recommendations of a bipartisan parliamentary committee to limit the powers granted by the new law.
It’s Orwellian, is what it is.
DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU’RE AFTER: A Timely Warning: The Push to Reach ‘Covid Zero’ is a Fool’s Errand. If you want budgets and power first and foremost, you’re no fool to go on this errand.
TIM CARNEY: The juvenile ‘It’s horse paste!’ critique of ivermectin.
The Nobel Prize in medicine in 2015 went to two scientists whose experiments on a type of bacteria and subsequent modifications produced a compound that led to “a new class of drugs with extraordinary efficacy against parasitic diseases,” in the words of the Nobel Prize committee.
That compound is ivermectin, which “turned out to be highly effective in both animals and humans against a variety of parasites, including those that cause River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis.” The FDA approved the drug in 1996.
That’s why U.S. doctors wrote more than 100,000 prescriptions a year for ivermectin, which comes in tablets but also in a lotion. In 2020, the FDA approved one ivermectin lotion as an over-the-counter lice treatment.
So why does the major media want you to believe that ivermectin is simply a “horse paste”?
The answer is probably because the media are more interested in scoring cheap points in the game of culture-wars by mocking rednecks and conservatives than they are in informing their readers.
The situation is this: Many people believe that ivermectin is an effective treatment of COVID-19, but the drug is not proven to treat COVID-19 effectively. Nor is it approved by the FDA for that purpose. It’s an anti-parasitic drug, and coronavirus is not a parasite. Although it has been shown to break down the coronavirus in laboratory settings, it has not yet been shown to do so in humans.
Some people apparently have sought ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment and have resorted to buying products for farm animals that contain ivermectin as the active ingredient. This is obviously far more foolish than taking human roundworm treatment for off-label purposes.
So, when a well-known and widely hated podcaster announces he is taking ivermectin, among other drugs, to treat his coronavirus, how does NPR cover it?
Spoiler: Not in the way that people who “believe in science” should. But then, “believe in science” is just another tribal identifier, not, you know, actual belief in science.
Media narrative right now: “The only reason Covid isn’t over is because a bunch of dumb anti-vaxxer Trumpian hicks from rural America refuse to get vaccinated, and instead are taking horse dewormer that they read about on the internet!”
Complex realities of why Covid isn’t over:
1. The vaccines, though effective, are not nearly as effective as they were initially depicted last winter, meaning there are and will continue to be breakthrough cases (albeit fortunately milder).2. Vaccination does lag, but it is not primarily where the media claims. Rather, the biggest gaps in vaccination are in lower income and minority communities (stats here: https://www.kff.org/…/latest-data-on-covid-19…/). The reasons for this lag are complicated, but mainly amount to the transaction costs of access, including the free time needed to get vaccinated. If the media and political class focused their attention on positive messaging and improving access in these communities, they could potentially make a sizable dent in the gap. Instead, they’ve chosen to ridicule and blame it all on a tiny fringe of anti-vaxxers.
3. The horse dewormer thing is at most a side-show that the media has pounced upon because it allows them to ridicule people they don’t like, as we saw yesterday with the fake ivermectin overdose story. It has next to zero bearing on ending the pandemic, and the only response it warrants is caveat emptor.
4. The public health messaging from Fauci et al continues to be atrocious, and is likely doing more harm than good because of all the deserved distrust it has accumulated. Insofar as public health officials have a role in ending this thing, the best thing they could do right now is shut up and contemplate how they destroyed their credibility over the last 18 months. Anything else they say at this point is counterproductive.
5. At the end of the day, Covid is becoming endemic so it will technically never “end.” Instead it will just enter the realm of the common cold. Unfortunately much of society and almost all of the political class continue to treat any Covid case it as if it’s still March 2020, which means absurd overreactions and policy driven by alarmist hype are still the dominant narrative. This will likely remain the case as long as mandatory testing regimes aimed at “discovering” covid among non-symptomatic people in the general public are common.
This will continue so long as it serves the interests of the political class.
BOOK UPDATE: I am still reading parts of Built from Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body and trying to take the advice. The book said if injured to try taking a walk everyday so I have done a daily walk for three days. I cut out the yoga and barre classes this week and went to a manual myofascial release session and focused on a few exercises from the book and am about 90 percent better. Most of my problems are repetitive use injuries from working out and sitting too much. My next step is to get my posture evaluated as the book suggests and hopefully, this will help with the other 10%. (Bumped)
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: History Will Not Be Kind to the Biden Train Wreck Presidency. “Here in the modern media and academic malpractice era, Democrats have much of the havoc they wreak upon America rewritten, especially by historians. I’m getting the feeling that the drooling puppet in the White House might be such an overwhelming disaster that even the left-leaning hacks in academia won’t have the desire or skill to cover for him.”
JIM MEIGS ON Conspiracies All the Way Down: The 9/11 Truther movement was a harbinger of today’s paranoid politics.
Most versions of the idea suggested the real perpetrator was a cabal that included Bush, Cheney, oil companies, military contractors, the Mossad, and other malefactors, all conspiring to launch wars in the Middle East. In the faux-insider jargon that conspiracists love, it was a “false-flag operation.” The notion meshed perfectly with the Howard Zinn view of history in which all evils in the world can be traced back to some original sin involving U.S. policy. (True to form, Zinn offered a supportive blurb for one of the most popular books promoting these 9/11 claims, David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor.) Such theories, avidly discussed on left-wing websites and in the alternative press, rarely surfaced in the American mainstream media. But here was a full-page ad proclaiming these ideas in the New York Times.
The book’s claims sounded doubtful but also fairly easy to confirm or disprove. How hot does jet fuel burn? How big a hole would a Boeing 757 make in a reinforced concrete building? These questions were very much in the Popular Mechanics wheelhouse. Every conspiracy theory ultimately rests on a handful of claims about physical reality. What if we put together a team of reporters and simply fact-checked the most common claims made by 9/11 conspiracy theorists? If the factual assertions were wrong, then the elaborate theories built on them were wrong, too. On the other hand, if there were even a grain of truth in any of these claims, well, what could be more vital to investigate?
We assigned eight reporters to the inquiry. Popular Mechanics executive editor David Dunbar led the project, making sure to keep it focused on technical questions and rigorously non-political. For the next few weeks, our reporters interviewed experts, pored over documents, and talked with eyewitnesses. In every case, they found that the conspiracy advocates’ claims were based on evidence that was inaccurate, misinterpreted, or deliberately falsified. For example, it is true that jet fuel burns at 1,100 degrees Celsius, while steel melts at about 1,500 degrees Celsius. But, as our sources explained, a steel beam can lose half its strength at temperatures as low as 600 degrees. A number of in-depth engineering studies provide detailed accounts of how the impacts of the planes, combined with heat from fires, eventually weakened the structures to the point where collapse was inevitable.
The claim that the hole in the Pentagon wasn’t big enough to have been made by a 757 rested on similarly flawed evidence: the airplane’s wings were simply sheared off by the building’s thick concrete walls. In any event, investigators found wreckage from the fuselage and remains of the passengers, crew, and hijackers deep inside the Pentagon, and they subjected this evidence to forensic examination. (We interviewed some of the people involved in this horrific task.) And so it went. Every conspiracy claim crumbled when subjected to the slightest factual scrutiny. In every case, we found, the theorists clung to slender reeds of misinformation, while scorning mountains of evidence supporting the mainstream view.
Well, Howard Zinn. Plus:
When Popular Mechanics waded into the discussion, some on the mainstream left were bemused. We must have some kind of political agenda. Were we trying to defend the Bush White House? Why would we want to help them? This was the moment I realized journalism was changing. The evenhanded search for truth—rarely achieved in practice—was fading even as a journalistic aspiration. Now every set of facts must serve a political purpose. If it wasn’t helpful to the Left, it must be helpful to the Right. Where journalists once obsessed over the accuracy of facts, now they worried more about their utility. If some piece of information helps the wrong sorts of people, perhaps it’s best left unpublished. Last year, we saw this logic carried to a new extreme, when virtually all major media outlets refused to cover the revelations contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop, or to explore evidence that Covid-19 might have escaped from a Wuhan, China lab.
So, with a few exceptions, the media mostly gave the 9/11 Truthers a pass. That was one factor helping this minor cult become a mass movement.
Once the press becomes a nest of partisan shills instead of an at least somewhat trusted intermediary, conspiracy theories thrive. Or it might be better to say that as conspiracies proliferate, conspiracy theories thrive.
PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT FOR MEN IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS?: It won’t solve the problem any more than it did for black students. (Here’s my take on the issue from a few years back.)
THAT ’70S SHOW: Stagflation rears its ugly head in US payroll data.
As labor becomes scarcer and more expensive, employers stop hiring, either because they can’t find workers or because they can’t afford them. This is a classic symptom of an inflationary cycle.
The average rent on a newly-signed lease is up 12% year-on-year as of August, according to Apartmentlist.com.
Home prices are up 20% year on year, the biggest jump on record, according to the Case-Shiller Index.
Used car prices are up 25%, and new car prices are probably up 10% after dealer discounts have dwindled.
Manufacturing jobs rose by 37,000, driven mainly by a 24,000 jump in automotive jobs.
But the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey of establishments was conducted in the middle of August before major auto companies announced production shutdowns to the global chip shortage.
All we’re missing is a malaise speech from the Oval Office.
ICYMI: Mark Milley, Jen Griffin Interview Goes Pear-shaped. “Apparently, nowhere in Milley’s military education did they cover the First Law of Holes. Mark Milley just keeps digging and digging. And, Jennifer Griffin handed him the shovel in her interview.”
Plus: “A better man would throw his stars on the desk. A better man would stop digging. Mark Milley is not a good man. He has no honor.”
Related: Fire the military and intelligence bigs who bungled Afghanistan — now.
THE BIG LIE: Salena Zito: Our Bargain for Normal is Failing. “Leading into Election Day last year, two of the biggest reasons people gave in interviews for voting for Joe Biden were to sense a return to normal and a little empathy for their struggles.”
The funny thing is, the stuff that the left hated about Trump — an America-first approach to trade and foreign policy, a pushback against wokeism, border controls — is all actually normal stuff. That’s why the left hated it. And Trump had more empathy for the struggles of normal people than the left, which hates normal people, could even pretend to have.
The only thing abnormal about Trump’s presidency was the four-year hysterical shit-fit thrown by the left and the media. That should have been punished, not rewarded. Instead, well, we have this disastrous presidency that unsurprisingly turns out to have been founded on a big lie.
DON SURBER: Maureen Dowd & Peggy Noonan Should Retire. They’re not the only ones.
HE HAS CHOSEN HIS ENEMIES: Biden Seems More Determined to Fight Texas Than the Taliban.
ICYMI: PHILIP MAGNESS: How Activist Academia Destroyed Scholarly Peer Review. “As I learned shortly thereafter, the problems I pointed out about the Mises quotation edits were not unknown to the editors of CEH at the time I brought them to their attention. These issues had, in fact, been flagged over a year prior during the original peer review of Slobodian’s submission to the journal. Despite being aware of the problematic quotations and claims, the editors of CEH decided to accept Slobodian’s article as-is and published it without addressing their own referee’s stated concerns over the same quotation issues. In doing so, the editors of CEH overruled an explicit recommendation to reject Slobodian’s article over its misrepresentation of Mises’s texts.”
September 6, 2021
TO BE FAIR, THE ONLY CREDIT THE STATE DEPARTMENT IS GOING TO GET IS WHAT IT CAN STEAL: American mom and kids successfully rescued from Afghanistan but mission organizer accuses State Dept. of trying to steal the credit.
MARK JUDGE: The Mysticism of the 1980s: Why we’re losing our minds.
I love his reminiscences of DC in that era, as I too hung out at Kramerbooks and the 9:30 Club. In fact, I saw The Rainmakers double-billed with Steve Earle (on his “Guitar Town” tour) for five bucks there in 1986. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Mickey Kaus was there too.
LIFE IN DE BLASIO’S NYC: Carranza’s nepotistic amore is par for the course for corrupt de Blasio regime.
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