HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The latest example of ‘white privilege’: Eating French food.
JIM TREACHER: Donald Rumsfeld, R.I.P. He goes now into the great known-unknown. “Far too many people don’t know what they don’t know. If you’re not smart enough to get this, you’re one of those people. I’m pretty sure Rummy would also be amused by all the outright communists who are rejoicing today at his death. He wouldn’t want it any other way.”
ANYTHING FREE IS WORTH WHAT YOU PAY FOR IT: More Than 10,000 Canadians Died Waiting For Their ‘Free’ Healthcare.
SEEN AT HELEN’S PAGE: The perfect film for this 4th of July weekend: Sons Of Liberty.
PROGRESS: SpaceX Almost Ready to Move Super Heavy Booster to the Launch Pad.’
The 215-foot rocket dubbed Booster 3 recently reached full height, with construction taking a mere six weeks, according to Teslarati.
SpaceX is getting ever closer to its first orbital Starship launch — and the Super Heavy booster is just as much part of that plan as the spacecraft itself. If recent progress is anything to go by, the first Starship could be entering orbit before the end of the year.
Booster 3, however, isn’t destined to fly to orbit. In a Wednesday tweet, Musk noted that “Booster 3 will be used for ground tests. We’re changing much of design from 3 to 4.”
Build, test, learn, iterate… and quickly.
BUGGING OUT OF AFGHANISTAN: U.S. pulls out of Bagram Airfield without notice. “It shouldn’t be too surprising that we left in the dead of night without coordinating our exit with the locals. While American officials have traditionally hated to admit it, our Afghan allies in both the local government and the military are rife with spies and saboteurs who coordinate with the Taliban against us. If we had coordinated our exit with them, the Taliban might have been ready to launch an attack on the departing forces. Still, this likely won’t be going down in the history books as one of our proudest moments.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: California Is Dumb Enough to Keep Gavin Newsom Around. “It would be great if California could get rid of the tyrant Newsom but that wouldn’t guarantee an improvement. As I wrote in March, California has a neverending parade of horrible Democrats. You get rid of one, another who is almost always worse shows up as a replacement. The leftist rot is complete there.”
WELL, BIDEN’S AMERICA IS A BANANA REPUBLIC: Cy Vance’s Trump case is straight from a banana republic — punish your political enemies. “Corporations almost never get criminally prosecuted for this sort of thing, but Vance wanted the name ‘Trump’ in his indictment. You can bet that he would have indicted The Donald if he had the goods. The feds — who’ve been auditing Trump’s taxes forever — haven’t filed charges.”
Related: Trump Organization indictments are a travesty of justice. “Vance acquired years of Trump Organization tax records, yet all he’s found is an alleged failure to pay proper taxes on corporate perks like cars, tuition and apartments. Any other company and it’s a civil suit, an audit, perhaps a hefty fine. If Vance had any evidence suggesting serious fraud (as press leaks long suggested), he’d have included them already. . . . All that Vance & Co. really have is partisan hate, not evidence.”
Related: Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is A Crime.
UNDER A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT, THIS WOULD BE NEWS TO AMERICAN MEDIA, TOO: Thousands of migrant children detained in Texas in appalling conditions – BBC News.
THE SUICIDE OF EXPERTISE, CONT’D: Canadian official admits ban on in-person gatherings is to prevent spread of ‘false information. “‘The information’ being shared during in-person gatherings ‘itself if listened to creates risk to the public,’ claimed stammering Nova Scotia chief medical doctor Robert Strang, necessitating ‘a need to manage that misinformation campaign’ by restricting socializing.”
Tar. Feathers. It’s like it was always about control, not public health. Even I was insufficiently cynical.
U.S. ENVOY KERRY SAYS WORLD NEEDS A ‘WARTIME MENTALITY’ OVER CLIMATE.
If we’re going by Kerry’s own “wartime mentality,” does this mean that he’s ready to surrender now, toss his medals over the Capitol Hill Fence, and call it a day?
In any case, find another metaphor: William James’ “moral equivalent of war” speech was well over a century ago; the first “Earth Day” over 50 years ago — both surely qualify as quagmires by the old Winter Solder’s standards.
LESS THAN PRIME: 2 delivery companies in Oregon reportedly stopped working for Amazon, their only client, alleging ‘intolerable’ conduct and unsafe working conditions.
The companies sent a letter to Amazon accusing the e-commerce giant of “intolerable, unconscionable, unsafe, and most importantly, unlawful” conduct in the past two years, according to Vice. Together, the delivery companies employ roughly 150 drivers and make more than 20,000 Amazon deliveries in the Portland area on average every day, The Oregonian reports.
The companies said Amazon nixed delivery routes and changed rules without notifying them, according to Vice. The letter, obtained by Vice says that, because drivers commit to routes ahead of time, Last Mile and Triton are still on the hook for wages even if Amazon cuts routes at the last minute due to low inventory or warehouse staffing.
In the letter, the companies also accused Amazon of accessing drivers’ personal information, reducing reimbursements, firing drivers without giving the companies a say in the matter, and allocating deliveries unevenly among workers. Because deliveries weren’t evenly divided, some workers ended up needing to drive faster, potentially endangering other drivers or pedestrians, and work 12-hour shifts, even though Amazon only reimburses them for 10-hour shifts, according to Vice.
More to come, I’m sure.
BYRON YORK: Biden’s politicized Justice Department.
The Democratic Party’s number-one priority is to pass a voting “reform” bill that would federalize elections under rules favorable to Democratic candidates. It’s more important than infrastructure, or massive new social spending, or anything else, which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer gave their election bill the designation H.R.1 in the House and S.1 in the Senate.
The House passed H.R. 1 in a nearly straight party-line vote on March 3. (All Republicans voted against it and all Democrats, with the single exception of Representative Bennie Thompson, voted for it.) The problem for Democrats is that there is no chance S. 1 will pass in the Senate, where Democrats do not hold a majority of seats. To pass S.1, Democrats would first have to eliminate the filibuster, and then muster all of their 50 senators to vote for the bill against 50 Republicans, and then call in Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie. The short version: Not gonna happen.
That is where Attorney General Merrick Garland comes in. On June 11, Garland gathered the employees of the Justice Department to deliver a speech promising that the Department will intervene in election procedures around the country, to do at least some of the work that Democrats are failing to accomplish on Capitol Hill.
Remember when they told us he was a moderate centrist?
Related: Former Justice Department Lawyer Testifies to Voting Section’s History of Abusing Its Authority. “At a hearing Tuesday intended to build support for HR 4, Maureen Riordan did the exact opposite. A career attorney who served in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department for more than two decades, she testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the long history of abuses she witnessed while working at the department.”
“RIDICULOUS CASE:” JUROR CRITICIZES DOJ FOR CHARGING SCIENTIST WITH HIDING TIES TO CHINA.
“I walked in assuming the government had some reason to be there, assuming that they were coming at it with honesty and integrity,” she told The Intercept in the first interview given by a juror in the case, United States v. Anming Hu. “I assumed the best for them.” . . .
Chandler, who was known only as Juror 44 in the case, was aware of none of that background going into the trial. She considered herself patriotic and had thought very little about China. But after six days of hearing witnesses and arguments, she came to agree with the critics.
“It was the most ridiculous case,” she said. About the FBI, she added: “If this is who is protecting America, we’ve got problems.”
The FBI isn’t interested in protecting America, just the people who run America.
Flashback: Trial reveals federal agents falsely accused a UT professor born in China of spying.
And this was an ordinary case, not a politically charged one. And it gets worse.
SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Time Magazine: How to fix the “air conditioning problem.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Ban A/C for DC!
SUMMER READING: I am reading Charles Murray’s new book Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. It is a short easy read and is chock full of information that challenges the woke narrative:
Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.
You can also get it at Barnes & Noble here. (Bumped)
STACEY LENNOX: Atlanta’s ‘Marxist Land Grab’ Is a Preview of Joe Biden’s Nefarious Plans for the Suburbs. “ Investment firms really can’t lose. If the Biden administration is successful, or if cities like Atlanta voluntarily adopt these rules, as Minneapolis and the entire state of Oregon already have, it is a win. Investment firms can carve up single-family properties and add additional units of varying sizes and shapes to them. Depending on local rules, the new housing will be sold or rented. In cases where an entire development is purchased, as it was outside Houston, investment firms can knock them down, build high-density apartment buildings, and create an endless income stream. If the Biden plan fails, they still have long-term investment rental properties.”
Read the whole thing.
WELL, THAT WILL HELP: Former Harvey Weinstein Adviser Defends Kamala Harris From Charges of Staff Abuse.
WHY DOES JOE BIDEN HATE IMMIGRANTS? Thousands of migrant children detained in Texas in appalling conditions – BBC News.
BIDEN MUST HAVE FORGOTTEN TO PUT THOSE ON HIS LIST: Russia-linked hackers targeting hundreds of U.S. and European entities, new advisory warns.
Flashback from March: Biden admin planning retaliatory cyber attacks against Russia within 3 weeks. “The retaliatory actions include clandestine cyber actions on Russian networks intended to send a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian military and intelligence, but not by the wider public, officials told the New York Times on Sunday.”
Message: Unsent.
MAYBE IT NEVER ACTUALLY WAS EXCEPT WITH THE SMALL, NEUROTIC MINORITY THAT DOMINATES DEMOCRATIC PARTY POLITICS. Seattle mayor’s race suggests ‘defund the police’ is no longer a winning message.
BIDEN’S COSTLY WHITE HOUSE PAYROLL: Open the Books dug into the data and found His Fraudulency has a bigger, more expensive White House payroll than any previous chief executive.
IT’S A CHINESE SPY PLATFORM: All of TikTok’s data is available to its Chinese parent company (and thus to the CCP).
WHY THE SPLIT IN THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION IS INEVITABLE: America’s largest Protestant denomination is in a woke crisis and odds are it will not survive. I explain why in my latest PJ Media column.
THIS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL WE STOP ALLOWING IT TO: Jordan Peterson: The activists are now stalking the hard scientists.
THE (TRUTHFUL) ANSWER TO THE 1619 PROJECT!
FROM ROBERT ZIMMERMAN: Conscious Choice: The Origins of Slavery in America and Why it Matters Today and for Our Future in Outer Space.
Robert Zubrin: “Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.”
The human race is about to go to the stars. Big rockets are being built, and nations and private citizens worldwide are planning the first permanent settlements in space.
When we get there, will we know what to do to make those first colonies just and prosperous places for all humans?
Conscious Choice answers this question, by telling a riveting and accurate history of the first century of British settlement in North America. That was when those settlers were building their own new colonies, and had to decide whether to include slaves from Africa.
In New England slavery was vigorously rejected. The Puritans wanted nothing to do with this institution, desiring instead to form a society of free religious families, a society that became the foundation of the United States of American, dedicated to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
In Virginia however slavery was gladly embraced, resulting in a corrupt social order built on power, rule, and oppression.
Why the New England citizens were able to reject slavery, and Virginians were not, is the story that Conscious Choice tells, a story with direct implications for all human societies, whether they are here on Earth or on the farflung planets across the universe.
THEY COME FROM ANOTHER UNIVERSE: ‘Forever Purge’ Follows Far-Left’s Fear of White Supremacy, Ignores Antifa,
DUDE, LEAVE COLORADO: Singing the Cakeshop Blues — Again.
I know, I know, but it’s time. Yes, it’s gutting me too. But it’s time. Once the commies are in you have to give it a generation.
I REALIZED THIS YEARS AGO: Trump must be extremely clean if this is all the NY prosecutors came up with.
When they had to bring out a stripper to accuse him of nothing much.
Seriously. I didn’t even know it was possible to do business in the city and be that clean. The man is a choir boy.
YOU’RE NOT BLACKLISTED YET? WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE? Today’s blacklisted American: Rappers have song banned by Spotify & SoundCloud for criticizing BLM, government lockdowns, and the modern perverse sexual movement.
I was blacklisted before it was cool!
IT IS TIME THE ADULTS CAME HOME AND TOLD THE PAINFUL TRUTHS: Video: Vietnamese-American state legislator schools a smug, smirking leftist about communism.
GLORIOUS BEAR FLAG PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC HAS SET BACK: Supreme Court Strikes Down California Policy Forcing Disclosure Of Non-Profit Donors To State Regulators.
AS BETTER PEOPLE THAN US SAID, WE MUST HANG TOGETHER OR WE WILL SURELY HANG SEPARATELY: Rhode Island Mom Involved In Critical Race Public Records Fight And Targeted By NEA Gets High-Powered Legal Help.
SHE MIGHT NOT BE COMPLETELY WRONG: Chicago Mayor Lightfoot Thinks ‘About 99%’ of Criticism Aimed at Her is Due to Racism and Sexism.
I mean have you seen her pictures? I don’t know what the heck is under the human suit, but you know, I prefer humans to lizard-beings. As for sex…. I don’t know what sex lizards are. Nor do I want to know.
WAIT, FICTION WRITERS GET TENURE LIKE THAT? Nikole Hannah-Jones Gets Tenure at U of N Carolina.
AND FROM WHAT I HEARD NEVER HAS: Cackling Kamala: Her Staff Doesn’t Like Her Either.
Let’s face it, the last person who liked her was Willy Brown, and only because she couldn’t talk.
SOUNDS LIKE MOM NEEDS THORAZINE: Mom Wants Kids To See Kink At Pride Parade.
THE STASI JUST KEEPS GETTING MORE AND MORE FUN: Facebook Debuts “Extremist Content” Warning.
July 1, 2021
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Our bossy society is completely losing sight of the value of risky behavior.
NONSENSE, JOE BIDEN SAYS THE CHINESE ARE OUR FRIENDS:
WEIRDLY PREDICTABLE:
Related: “Indian Point Energy Center (I.P.E.C.) was a three-unit nuclear power plant station located in Buchanan, New York, just south of Peekskill. It sits on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 36 miles (58 km) north of Midtown Manhattan. The facility has permanently ceased power operations as of April 30, 2021.”
Flashback — April 28, 2021: Get ready for blackouts after Cuomo foolishly killed the Indian Point plant.
IT WASN’T ME, THE COUCH JUST MAKES THAT NOISE WHEN YOU SIT DOWN: Mars methane mystery may be starting to clear up.
MARK JUDGE: What ‘The Nation’ Got Right (and Wrong) about Me, Brett Kavanaugh, and God. “The American Stasi wanted me, someone whose high school drinking had progressed into alcoholism before I cleaned up in 1990, to give them something on Brett. Anything, really. They were giving me an entire ten year span to do it. Surely the glamorous and hard-partying Reagan era could provide something, somewhere, somehow to bring Brett down. All I had to do was point and shoot. The media would even help me ‘be a hero.'”
PROBABLY ALL THE HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TAKING FOR COVID: China reported free of malaria for the first time since 1940s.
But hey, congrats to Xi for getting China’s public health status back to where it was before the communists took over.
CHANGE: Supreme Court Foils Democrats’ Attack on Conservative Nonprofits. “It was generally assumed that Harris wanted to know the identities of donors to conservative organizations so that they could be harassed by various California agencies, or so that their identities could be leaked in order for them to be ‘canceled’ by left-wing activists.”
I DOUBT MELANIA IS LOSING SLEEP OVER THIS, BUT …: Why Did Vogue Call Jill Biden a “Goddess in Stilettos”? Even the Jerusalem Post feels obliged to ask that question.
HISTORY: The Flight of The Last B-36 Peacemaker. “No B-36 ever dropped a single bomb on an enemy target.” Well, as the Strategic Air Command says, “peace is our profession.” They called it Peacemaker. I always knew why.
DAVID LAT: All About Amy (Chua), The Law Professor We Can’t Stop Talking About. If all the other facts were the same, but she were a lefty married to a woman, Yale would have acted totally differently.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Every New Republican Is the Most Evil* Republican Ever.
When you have to try to intimidate and gag your opponents, you aren’t winning. You are losing. And it might work for a while, but in the long-term you are only putting off your inevitable ejection from power. And ticking off their enemy – us – in the process.
Oh, we’ll have our vengeance.
The next victorious Republican – one will come even if we detour back to another squish for a cycle or so – will be ruthless. He will understand that the enemy is serious about holding on to power and that means holding us by our throats. He will understand that to win means to take the fight to them, to ignore the whining and howling and to impose fair election laws, free us to carry weapons, ban the cancer that is CRT, and do all the other things Democrats fear. And he will do it without the baggage and the mean tweets that let the left shift the argument from “Conservative Policy Good” to “Orange Man Bad.”
He will not care about earning their favor. He will care about payback. He will be woke, conservative woke, and for the first time in a long time, Democrats will be right about something, for they shall fear him.
On the plus side though, the DNC-MSM’s rehabilitation of Trump in order to bash the next GOP presidential candidate will be hilarious to watch.
* Every Republican president or presidential candidate is the next Hitler — even Calvin Coolidge, who served before the Nazis came to power.
CHECKBOOK JOURNALISM: Why Are Michael Bloomberg’s Anti-Gun ‘Journalists’ Writing for USA TODAY?
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Former Justice Department Lawyer Testifies to Voting Section’s History of Abusing Its Authority. “At a hearing Tuesday intended to build support for HR 4, Maureen Riordan did the exact opposite. A career attorney who served in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department for more than two decades, she testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the long history of abuses she witnessed while working at the department.”
ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE: Biden mentions ‘good’ side of Florida condo collapse during site visit.
TODAY AT 3:30PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ Live Chat with Kruiser, Preston, VodkaPundit.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Twitter Suspends NY Times’ Columnist’s Account After He Denounces Equity as ‘Racism.’
[Bret] Stephens’ Twitter account now says merely, “Account suspended. Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules.”
Stephens previously wrote a devastating critique of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning undertaking to date America’s founding from the importation of the first African slaves. Stephens noted the comprehensive scholarly rejection of Hannah-Jones’ assertions before calling the undertaking a “thesis in search of evidence.”
In February, Stephens penned a column objecting to the way longtime New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. “resigned” after public backlash that he had said the n-word while chaperoning his daughter’s field trip — to ask about the context in which it was used. The New York Times ultimately refused to print Stephens’ column, which was published by the New York Post.
Twitter did not immediately respond to inquiries about the reason for the suspension.
Also suspended during the past 24 hours or so, the popular “Journalists Posting Their Ls” Twitter account:
The bannings will continue until morale improves. Flashback: CEO Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter’s #LearntoCode Purges.
UPDATE: “A previous version of this article erroneously claimed that Twitter suspended New York Times columnist Brett Stephens after he denounced equity as racism. Stephens voluntarily deactivated his Twitter account in 2019. The original claim has been removed; the article and its headline have been revised.”
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT THE CRIME WAVE WAS A GOP FABRICATION: Just three Northern Colorado jails hold over 100 murder suspects; ‘never numbers like this.’
ROGER KIMBALL: The embarrassing and pathetic Vogue profile of Dr. Jill Biden, EdD.
The really interesting thing is to compare this cover story of Dr Jill with the cover story that Vogue ran of the last FLOTUS, Melania Trump.
Ha, ha, ha. Just kidding. There was no cover story of Melania in Vogue or, as far as I know, any other major women’s magazine, during her time as first lady. Melania, a former model, is elegant and, to continue to speak plainly, gorgeous. She does not have an advanced degree in education from the University of Delaware, it’s true. She has not written a dissertation on ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs’ as has Dr Jill Biden, EdD. But she is what the Bidens claim to admire. A polyglot immigrant who has made good and has contributed much to American society. Somehow, though, she didn’t pass muster with the arbiters of taste in the realm of American fashion. Clearly, they prefer their mutton dressed as lamb just so long as politics of the sheep are the right — which is to say, the left — politics.
Vogue’s profile of Dr Jill Biden, EdD, would be embarrassing if it were not simply pathetic.
No, that is not correct. It is embarrassing as well as pathetic but also utterly predictable and depressing to boot. Welcome to the world of American sycophancy. It’s working overtime to make a laughing stock of us all.
To be fair though, it’s useful to readers for the palace guard media to identify itself as such.
WELL, THIS BUILDS CONFIDENCE: IBM’s 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. “When chaos serves the State, the State will encourage chaos.”
ASK SPIRO AGNEW: Why Is the Buttoned-Up Biden White House Leaking Dirt on Kamala?
AT HELEN’S PAGE: A couple of new books up: Year of the Sheep: A Novel of the Highland Clearances and The Riddle of Penncroft Farm (Great Episodes).
TO BE FAIR, THE CRIMINALS WON’T PAY UP: San Jose To Tax Law-Abiding Gun Owners For The Actions Of Criminals.
ICONIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE FAILS TO DISCLOSE CCP FUNDING IN LATEST PRINT EDITION: Time magazine has taken more than $700,000 from China Daily for sponsored content.
Henry Luce, the son of Presbyterian missionaries to China, who created Time magazine in 1923, and who sided with Chiang Kai-shek during China’s communist revolution, just rolled over many times in his grave.
WHY ARE GAY BARS SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM AND BIGOTRY? “Like many Asian-American men, Miller was disappointed by gay bars and the bigotry he eventually found in those self-ascribed temples of acceptance.”
HOW’S THAT “WELCOME WAGON” PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Californians are fueling Austin’s housing frenzy: ‘We’ve never seen migration like this.’
I hope they know what they’re in for: In addition to the feral hogs and the “neanderthal” order by Gov. Abbott to stop enforcing mask orders, ‘Douche’ father-of-seven sales exec who moved his family from California to Texas then BACK again is blasted for complaining about Austin’s ‘rude locals, bland culture, oppressive heat and Yelp’s bad food choices’ in scathing Op-Ed. “Alder described Texas with its lower income taxes as a ‘conservative dystopia’ and said he felt cramped – even though his house was twice the size.”
HMM: University Of Miami Appoints Acting Law School Dean; Faculty Demands Investigation Into Firing Of Tony Varona. Neither the university, nor Varona himself, has been very forthcoming about what was going on here.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Virginia Gov Candidate Unveils Plan To Stop Standards-Lowering, Ideology In Schools.
TWO BIG SUPREME COURT DECISIONS: “First up was Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee concerning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Alito wrote for the Court’s conservatives, concluding that Arizona’s laws prohibiting ballot harvesting and limiting out-of-precinct voting did not violate the VRA and that these provisions were not enacted with a discriminatory purpose. The implication of this decision is that Section 2 claims against state voting laws must be based upon disparate treatment claims, and the evidence of disparate impact on minority groups is insufficient. Justice Gorsuch wrote a brief concurrence joined by Justice Thomas. Justice Kagan dissented on behalf of the Court’s liberals. The final opinion of the term came in Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the Court, concluding that California’s donor disclosure requirement is facially invalid because it burdens donors’ First Amendment rights and is not narrowly tailored to an important government interest.”
I SEE HIM MORE AS MEPHISTOPHELES: Xi Jinping’s Faustian moment.
YET ANOTHER INSTITUTION SEIZED BY A CABAL OF ITS ENEMIES: Tolkien Society Goes Woke, ‘Finds’ Transgenderism, ‘Antiracism,’ and Queer-ness in The Lord of The Rings.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: ‘Flippin Gigantic’ Biden Mexico Deal Revealed.
Plus:
- Karen explains racism to self-made black man
- Lefties gaslighting crime wave away
- JAMA concludes masks are basically child abuse
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
THAT ’70S SHOW: The Looming Stagflationary Debt Crisis.
In April, I warned that today’s extremely loose monetary and fiscal policies, when combined with a number of negative supply shocks, could result in 1970s-style stagflation (high inflation alongside a recession). In fact, the risk today is even bigger than it was then.
After all, debt ratios in advanced economies and most emerging markets were much lower in the 1970s, which is why stagflation has not been associated with debt crises historically. If anything, unexpected inflation in the 1970s wiped out the real value of nominal debts at fixed rates, thus reducing many advanced economies’ public-debt burdens.
Conversely, during the 2007-08 financial crisis, high debt ratios (private and public) caused a severe debt crisis – as housing bubbles burst – but the ensuing recession led to low inflation, if not outright deflation. Owing to the credit crunch, there was a macro shock to aggregate demand, whereas the risks today are on the supply side.
We are thus left with the worst of both the stagflationary 1970s and the 2007-10 period.
Obama’s third term, Carter’s second.
SAY ANYTHING: Biden’s Energy Sec. Suggests Climate Change Caused Florida Building Collapse. “Granholm’s suggestion that the condo collapse is due to climate is utterly ridiculous. There is no reason to believe that anything other than faulty construction and/or failed maintenance is the proximate cause.”
JIMMY LAI’S STORY AND WHAT’S AT STAKE IN HONG KONG: Christopher Bedford of The Federalist has a compelling read on the life of the Hong Kong billionaire/publisher jailed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). How many of us have the grace-bought fortitude to endure what this man — and millions of other Catholic and Protestant Christians in China — are enduring?
AT HELEN’S PAGE: Terry R. Lacy’s new book Savannah 1.0: The Quest for Love. It is already the #1 New Release in Artificial Intelligence & Semantics.
SHE’S DOING HARM: Ilhan Omar Knows What She’s Doing. “Omar, as the kids say, is owning her truth. Her tap dance follows a pattern that is by now well established, in which the justice-seeking congresswoman makes nakedly prejudicial remarks, pretends to walk them back in the face of muted criticism from her colleagues, characterizes the criticism itself as Islamophobic, and proceeds to reoffend.”
CAMPUS “JUSTICE.” University rebuked for expelling accused student after his accuser had to be told she was sexually assaulted. “The University of Denver has an inferable history of anti-male bias in its investigation of sexual misconduct cases, the 10th Circuit Court found in its remanding of a lawsuit back to the district court. The university, by contrast, argued that it is not biased for or against males or females as such, but that its sexual assault investigation and judicial process may just be tilted against the accused — thus using a sex-neutral classification to avoid liability under Title IX sex discrimination law.”
Weird that colleges are having increasing trouble recruiting male students. And really, when that’s your best defense. . . .
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Bryan Preston: From the National Archives to the Alamo, Is There Any Stopping the Woke Campaign to Destroy Our History? “The arguments the wokesters make are at once historically inaccurate — wildly so, in many cases — dishonest, and tedious. They often fail to stand up to even the most basic logic or fact tests. They are simple-minded to the point of being childish.”
Kevin Downey Jr: Another Democrat Caught Working for the Chinese, and He Wants Your Vote. “Now we’ve learned that Matthew Putorti, the Democrat challenger to Republican lawmaker Elise Stefanik, has some pretty serious ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
Yours Truly: San Francisco Residents Hate the Things They Keep Voting For. “When I see that a whopping 70% of San Franciscans believe that “the quality of life in the city has declined” in the last year, I’m here to remind them: For many — most? — residents, it was never that good to begin with.”
HOW ABOUT A COURSE ON ABOLISHING HIGHER EDUCATION? Bard College course: ‘Abolishing Prisons and the Police.’
It’s part of the school’s eponymous “Hate Studies Initiative.”
THE ONLY LIVES THAT MATTER ARE THE ONES THAT FURTHER THE NARRATIVE: Unarmed Hunter Brittain Was Killed By Police But Unfortunately For His Family, He’s White.
WITH GOOD REASON: Law profs fault vague, empty ABA ‘diversity’ proposal. “So what is ABA accreditation about? Appearances. Accreditation is about looking woke. And to that end, the ABA wields its accreditation power as a virtue-signaling manifesto. Too many times, for too many years, I have seen law schools pursue feel-good social agendas, with ABA imprimatur, and it’s students, ironically often students of color, who pay the price for the reality that the agenda is mere facade.”
So long as the woke white people feel better about themselves, it’s worth it.
WATCH: Democrat Mocks Threat From Communism; Vietnamese Survivor Fires Back.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Back in the good old days, communism wasn’t a threat because of heroic figures like this kid:
But times have changed.
I REMEMBER WHEN EVEN SUGGESTING THIS SORT OF THING WAS TREATED AS CRAZED CONSPIRACY THEORY: Wuhan lab researcher linked to military scientists, NBC News finds.
2022 PREVIEW: Vulnerable Democrat Kurt Schrader Says ‘No One’ is Trying to Defund the Police, Despite the Push from Inside His Own Party. “Schrader, who said “no one” is trying to defund the police, also voted in March to ‘defund the police.’ Schrader voted to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021, with the majority of House Democrats, on an almost party-line vote of 220-212. The Act was described by Republicans as a plan that would engage in ‘defunding the police.'”
ADDRESSING HIGHER ED’S DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Gov. DeSantis and the need for viewpoint diversity in higher education.
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill to protect against indoctrination in the state’s colleges and universities. The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, requires Florida’s public colleges and universities to conduct an annual survey measuring “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on their campuses. The law’s goal is to assess “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented” and how free students, faculty, and staff feel “to express their beliefs and viewpoints.”
The Florida law does not specify what will be done with the survey results, but Gov. DeSantis suggested that budget cuts could result if universities and colleges are found to be “indoctrinating” students. “It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said. “Unfortunately, now the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments.” . . .
The problem DeSantis has identified is not unique to Florida — Indiana’s Republican governor signed a similar bill last month — and it traces directly to the political biases of the processes by which faculty are hired. Many of the same colleges and universities that tout tenure as a way to encourage free thought censor it by not allowing conservative and libertarian faculty candidates who think freely to get in the door.
I once suggested on the ConLawProf group email list that law schools need to hire more conservative and libertarian candidates (with “more” meaning, at a minimum, at least one). The reaction? One law professor posted that I was “nuts” to suggest such a thing. Libertarian law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz quipped at a Federalist Society conference on intellectual diversity in the legal academy that his leftist colleagues at Georgetown felt that three conservatives on a law faculty of 120 was “plenty — and perhaps even one or two too many.”
Anecdotes aside, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren has published detailed statistical surveys that document that Republicans and Christians are the groups most under-represented in the law professoriate. If the small handful of right-leaning and Christian law schools is excluded from the dataset, the problem is actually worse. Additional studies demonstrate that lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty extends campus-wide. For example, according to research conducted last year by the National Association of Scholars, Democratic professors outnumber their Republican colleagues by a ratio of 8.5 to 1 on top college campuses.
“Research since World War II has consistently found overwhelmingly left-oriented political attitudes and ideological self-identification among college and university faculty” the report notes. The report also found that the most drastic differences in the ratio were among professors of English, at 26.8 to 1, sociology, at 27 to 1, and anthropology, 42.2 to 1. Less “subjective” majors such as mathematics (5.5 to 1), chemistry (4.6 to 1), and economics (3 to 1) were less politically biased.
Not surprisingly, DeSantis’ critics are throwing fits.
If you don’t care about this, then you’re just using “diversity” as a code for “racial preferences.” But higher education is a major part of the left’s apparat, and they won’t let it go without a fight.
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