IS THE TEACHER’S UNION SURE THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT? NYC mom enraged teacher played rap videos during Zoom economics class.
The more parents see what teachers have been up the less chance kids will return to the schools. Ever.
March 7, 2021
A GOFUNDME CAMPAIGN to support Mark Judge’s work on his book. I donated. We have to support people that the left tries to destroy. God knows, the left takes care of its own.
UPDATE: Some people didn’t want to donate via GoFundMe. I get that, so I asked him if he had a Paypal account or a mailbox where people could send checks. Paypal is [email protected]
Mailbox is Mark Judge, 3220 N St. NW #175, Washington, D.C. 20007. Paypal is better if you can do that as he’s out of DC for a while. (Bumped).
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: ‘Real Housewives’ attorney Tom Girardi used cash and clout to forge powerful political connections. “When Joe Biden came to Los Angeles to raise money for his presidential campaign, Tom Girardi filled a dining room at the Jonathan Club with wealthy attorneys. . . . The 2019 breakfast fundraiser at the private downtown club was in many ways the end of an era. By the time Biden was elected last fall, Girardi’s life and legal empire were unraveling. His wealth, once estimated north of $250 million, has vanished and with it his reputation as one of the nation’s most connected and respected lawyers. With Girardi facing bankruptcy, divorce and a criminal investigation, his days as a political insider and power broker appear over. For decades, though, politicians were happy to take his money and put up with his requests for something in return. Along with his family and employees, Girardi contributed more than $7.3 million to candidates.”
SWITZERLAND APPROVES BURQA BAN. “The proposal was put forward by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) which campaigned with slogans such as ‘Stop extremism’. A leading Swiss Islamic group said it was ‘a dark day’ for Muslims. . . . It is not the first time Islam has figured in a Swiss referendum. In 2009 citizens went against government advice and voted to ban the building of minarets – a proposal also put forward by the SVP which said minarets were a sign of Islamisation.”
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST: Merrick Garland Doesn’t Seem To Know Much About Anything During Questioning. “These answers conflict with statements Garland made in February, suggesting that there were changes to gun control policy that Biden could make unilaterally without the need for new legislation from Congress. But now he’s saying that he really doesn’t know what, if any limits there are to the President’s powers in that regard. Just as a reminder, this guy has been on the bench on one of the most influential appeals courts in the country for decades and he came very close to making it onto the Supreme Court. And he hasn’t given any thought to the Second Amendment?”
He just doesn’t want us to know what he thinks about it. And because of that, we do know.
SPACE: Lawmakers ask Biden administration to keep oversight committees in the loop on space activities. “Reps. Frank Lucas and Brian Babin, who oversee civil and commercial space, expressed concerns about the administration’s push for international regulation of space activities.”
GIVEN THE PERFORMANCE OF THE MODELS SO FAR IN THIS PANDEMIC, I’M UNIMPRESSED: Mathematical model of SARS-CoV-2 UK variant suggests it could be 43–90% more transmissible.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, AND “DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS:” Michael Moore says no to vaccines for Texans, then the woke crowd came for him.
SIRI, WHAT HAPPENS AFTER “DEFUND THE POLICE?” Portland Can Relax. The ‘Enhanced Community Safety Team’ Is On The Job.
MORE THOUGHTS ON Politics and Class in America.
GEORGE KORDA: Here’s a suggestion for city leaders about police departments.
I remember some years ago when I talked to Zenobia Dobson, mother of Zaevion, her complaint was that you never see police in that neighborhood until after something happens, not that police were the source of the problems.
More on Zaevion here.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teachers unions are systemically racist. Here’s why:
Don’t get mad at me for saying it; I don’t make the rules of woke terminology. But under the sweeping definition of “systemic racism” the liberal Left has embraced, teachers unions’ incessant fight to keep schools closed most certainly qualifies.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson defines systemic racism as “systems and structures that have procedures or processes that disadvantages African Americans.” A writer at liberal news outlet Vox said systemic racism is a term “used to talk about all of the policies and practices entrenched in established institutions that harm certain racial groups and help others.”
More broadly, professor Ibram X. Kendi, a celebrated left-wing thinker, argued that racism exists wherever racial disparities do: “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.”
Conservatives don’t and shouldn’t necessarily accept this definition. But it’s entirely fair to hold liberal groups — teachers unions donate huge sums almost exclusively to Democrats — to their own standards. So, let’s apply this definition of “systemic racism” to the teachers unions’ fight to avoid opening schools and maintain failed “distance learning” schemes.
Read the whole thing.
TALENT RETURNED TO GOD: Rush Limbaugh’s Death Certificate Lists Occupation as ‘Greatest Radio Host of All Time.’
(Classical reference in headline.)
WHICH IS A BAD INCENTIVE STRUCTURE: Politicians Turn Problems Into Power.
WITH HER TRACK RECORD, WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Ric Grenell to Newsmax TV: ‘President Susan Rice’ in Charge.
MICHAEL WALSH: On the Left, an Era of Fascist Magical Thinking.
The constant push for fascism from our corrupt, lickspittle media, such as the Los Angeles Times cited above, only exacerbates the situation. Without the media-driven madness surrounding the Wuhan flu, few ever would have noticed it. Without the airy-fairy theory of “global warming,” most sane people would have gone about their lives completely unaffected by the madness of others.
And, really, who would buy an electric car, except as a virtue-signalling status symbol? Only at gunpoint, I suspect.
Read the whole thing.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. There is no measurement at our disposal and no level of gaslighting that will change the fact that Cuomo-led New York was an utter failure. “By any standard, the New York tristate area’s numbers are the worst in the country. By most measures, the numbers are some of the worst in the world. As the New York Times noted in May, New York City seeded the wave of outbreaks across the nation. Some of the carnage was likely unavoidable, but we can attribute the high number of nursing-home deaths, at the very least, to Cuomo’s ineptitude. Yet, even as his state was failing to meet its most serious challenge since 9/11 — it wasn’t until May 6 that cleaners began disinfecting the subway system, for example — Cuomo was busy taking softball questions on national cable news from his obsequious brother, Chris.”
OLD AND BUSTED: Q-Anon.
The New Hotness? Blue-Anon!
Click to enlarge.
UPDATE: …And it’s gone. PJM’s alum Deb Heine notes the words that the Urban Dictionary does allow:
(Updated and bumped.)
OLD-FASHIONED BUT STILL EFFECTIVE: Stoeger Coach Gun: Top-Selling Side-By-Side in 2020.
REALLY? GOING ALL-IN FOR TRANS RIGHTS DIDN’T WIN THEM OVER? NY Times: Democrats Have A Problem Appealing To Latino Men.
IT WOULD BE BETTER IF YOU COULD TRUST THEM: COVID’s Unlikely Offspring: The Rise of Smartwatch as Illness Detector.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to products for preventing HIV from anal sex.
AT THIS POINT WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? We aren’t supposed to care anymore about how the FBI ginned up the conspiracy theory about Donald Trump and “Russian collusion.” The damage is done, and there are thousands of people who unthinkingly take as a given that Trump was a Putin puppet. They’re impossible to talk to. I’m reminded of the old saying about never trying to teach a pig to sing. (It wastes your time and annoys the pig).
That said, exclusive reporting by John Solomon shows more than a few troubling dynamics that Congress, the mainstream media, and the FBI have yet to fix. (I suppose it’s not in their interest to do so).
The report by JustTheNews is a well-reported story of how the FBI tried to play reporters, how reporters tried to play the FBI, and how the result was inaccurate stories that helped create an incorrect narrative:
“The bureau had recently terminated its primary informant in the Russia probe Christopher Steele for leaking, and several of its leads about Russia-Trump collusion were falling apart. And inaccurate stories about the two biggest scandals in Washington were cropping up everywhere, even when FBI officials tried to work with reporters.
“Yes, the headline is REALLY misleading,” then-FBI deputy counsel Lisa Page wrote a colleague in a text message concerning a New York Times article that day. The text message didn’t further identify the article but made clear the article was the result of a bureau overture to reporters that backfired.”
Why does any of this matter now? For several reasons: erroneous reporting is now branded “disinformation” and has become a newsroom commodity, with some papers even assigning reporters to a “disinformation” beat. And “disinformation” has become a buzzword that Big Tech uses to squash speech they don’t like.
Moreover and most importantly, is that the current administration (as do most prospective “nanny states”) seems to be using whatever crisis, event, accident or political incident to increase its power. Glenn Greenwald has written recently about how government uses incorrect or just false intelligence (dare I say “disinformation”?) to expand its grip:
Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless.
So what difference does it make at this point? Because it’s about the unethical dynamics of a leak-happy FBI choosing to spill information not in the public interest (I’m all for genuine whistleblowers) but instead leaking in the interest of their own political agenda. I’m not particularly offended by reporters “cozying up” to sources: it’s what they do. Where it goes wrong is when those reporters help propel a narrative based on false statements provided by the self-interested leakers.
So at this point it matters because the word “disinformation” is a tool used to suppress civil liberties. IMHO, they violated Carter Page‘s rights, and probably Roger Stone’s and others as well. Even the far-left Brennan Center for Justice has issued papers about how problematic the use (or abuse) of the FISA Court can be. The result?
“Under today’s foreign intelligence surveillance system, the government’s ability to collect information about ordinary Americans’ lives has increased exponentially while judicial oversight has been reduced to near-nothingness. Nothing less than a fundamental overhaul of the type proposed here is needed to restore the system to its constitutional moorings.”
So, at this point, what difference does it make? The difference is you’re next.
FASTER, PLEASE: Rapid 3D printing method moves toward 3D-printed organs.
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, BOOK BURNERS WERE NEVER THE GOOD GUYS: Do Liberals* Care if Books Disappear?
* “Progressives.”
AD ASTRA: SCIENTISTS SHOCKED AT WATER AND ORGANIC MATERIAL FOUND ON ASTEROID FOR THE FIRST TIME. “The organic matter that has been heated indicates that the asteroid had been heated to over 600 degrees celcius in the past. The presence of unheated organic matter very close to it, means that the in fall of primitive organics arrived on the surface of Itokawa after the asteroid had cooled down.”
All the necessities of life can be found in space. Some assembly required.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The Voyager Station Space Hotel Plans to Open for Business in 2026. It looks like Space Station V from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Chesley Bonestell’s classic 1952 rendering of a space station, but early reservations won’t come cheap: “A three-a-half-day trip to the hotel is expected to cost whopping $5 million. Of course, as the Post points out, that’s still dramatically cheaper than the $55 million it costs a private citizen to journey to the International Space Station.”
HOWIE CARR ON COVID DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Coronavirus has the Karens and Biden voters cowering.
Covid Derangement Syndrome — it’s real, and there was a massive outbreak of it this week.
Three states announced they were ending the absurd yearlong “mask mandates,” and the left’s collective head exploded in outrage.
The reason is because this isn’t about public health anymore, or even politics, if it ever was. COVID is now the state religion, and the decisions by these GOP governors aren’t seen as a policy dispute, they’re considered heresy.
Only an infidel or an apostate denies that there is a … mild seasonal virus out there. Half the population cowers in abject terror — afflicted with CDS.
In New England, the leading prophet of the new faith is Gov. Charlie Baker. On Wednesday, in his daily sermon to the faithful, Tall Deval outlined the significance of the Mask in his strange cult:
“I think the mask mandate has been an important element in both encouraging behavior but also in sending a message about the importance of recognizing and understanding that COVID is still very much with us.”
He sounds like earlier generations of clergymen railing against the devil’s unending temptations, doesn’t he? But his real “message” is — we’re in charge, and you will do what you’re told.
It used to be said, if you want to send a message, call Western Union. Now you just tell people they’re going to be afflicted with prolonged suffering and a gooey death if they don’t obey your orders, no matter how preposterous.
And half the population — the feeble-minded, the Biden voters, the Karens — will instantly comply.
QED, someone who bills herself as a “Syndicated op-ed columnist @washingtonpost, commentator @cnn, special correspondent @newshour” admitting that she’s incapable of doing her job as a fact and opinion gathering journalist:
She better get used to mask burning parties eventually going nationwide in the coming year as more and more people are vaccinated.
PASS THE JUCHE ON THE LEFTHAND SIDE. Here’s the Washington Post coming through with some North-Korea-state-media-level Biden worship:
ROGER KIMBALL: Peak Cancel Culture? Don’t Bet on It:
Elsewhere last week, I offered a few thoughts about how to cancel cancel culture, with specific reference to President Trump’s vigorous CPAC speech, which took place under the banner “America Uncanceled.” My basic idea was that to challenge cancel culture effectively, one had to have the temerity to stand up to it (“Just Say No,” as Nancy Reagan put it when faced with a different pathology).
Since then, YouTube, a Google (“We Do Evil”) subsidiary upped the stakes a notch by refusing to carry President Trump’s speech because he called into question the fairness of the 2020 presidential election. I guess YouTube won’t be featuring me either, because I continue to believe that the election (as President Trump put it) was “rigged” (here’s how) and therefore illegitimate. Perhaps that belief, or at least my stating it outright, qualifies me as a potential Domestic Terrorist™ or Biden-My-Time Domestic Extremist™. We’ll see. I’ll let you know if Christopher Wray calls to chat about it.
Just a few days ago, in what may seem to be a sillier expression of cancel culture, the world learned that Dr. Seuss Enterprises had decided to stop selling six beloved books by the author of The Cat In the Hat because they contain portrayals of various ethnic groups that are “hurtful and wrong.” This really is, as the Princeton linguist Joshua Katz put it, “beyond madness.”
But the seeming arbitrariness of the interdiction is part of the point. It is, as they say, a feature, not a bug, for the aspiring totalitarians seeking to police what we can read and say and publish. Lenin once said that Communism meant “keeping track of everything.” We don’t call it “totalitarianism” for nothing. What they seek is total control of every aspect of our lives. Last week it was a book by Ryan Anderson and a speech by Donald Trump. This week it is some books by Dr. Seuss.
But the week wasn’t over yet — we’re at an interesting inflection point in the culture when a columnist employed by the New York Times wakes up and decides log into Twitter with the goal of cancelling Warner Brothers cartoon characters:
FIGHT THE POWER, STICK IT TO THE MAN: UCF hit with free speech lawsuit over its bias response team, speech code.
BEN RHODES’ BUDDIES SURE ARE NICE PEOPLE: Iran jails Jewish-Iranian for 10 years for living in Israel.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: STUDY: Academics systemically hostile toward conservatives.
JOE BIDEN, FRIEND OF THE WORKING CLASS: Nothing says ‘America is back’ like taking someone’s job away.
Related: America’s elites are waging class war on workers and small biz.
DON SURBER: Sidney Poitier: Enemy of the People. “The problem with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? is it stars Sidney Poitier. He’s too white.”
Back in the early ’90s, ABC did a — really good — docudrama on the Brown case called Separate But Equal. It closely tracks Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice, an oral history of the case done while the major figures were still alive. My old lawprof and mentor Charles Black (who wrote the brief with Thurgood Marshall in the case) was still alive then, and we talked about it on the phone after we’d watched it. Charlie’s comment: “They got Sidney Poitier to play Thurgood, and then they got some S.O.B. that looked just like me.” I show the film in class sometimes, as its treatment of the legal issues is shockingly good for a movie, much less a TV movie.
The DVD is $59.99 on Amazon, which is a lot more than I remember. I wonder if that’s in anticipation of Poitier being cancelled as insufficiently black. It would be hilarious, except that mass hysteria on the part of people running all our major institutions isn’t actually funny. “Liberals now make the same argument the Ku Klux Klan did in denying the civil war was about slavery. Demoting Poitier to Stepin Fetchit status should serve as a warning not just to Will Smith and Obama, but to all black people. You may not be next, but you are on the list.”
UPDATE: And the price keeps rising! I think when I bought it a few years ago it was $14.99. (Bumped).
AFTER PLAYING CARMELA IN THE SOPRANOS, IT’S GREAT TO SEE EDIE FALCO FINALLY PLAYING A HARDENED CRIMINAL: Hillary Clinton Will Be Played By Edie Falco In Impeachment: American Crime Story.
Might as well dust off this 2016 Photoshop:
DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Katherine Magbanua May Be Retried In The Fall For Dan Markel’s Murder.
“DO YOU WANT TO BE FOUND IN CONTEMPT OF THE REGIME?” “WHY NO, I WAS TRYING TO CONCEAL IT.” A Verdict Makes History in Cuba by Rejecting ‘Contempt’ as a Crime. “In its eagerness to cover up a totalitarian system with a veneer of the rule of law, the Cuban regime has flooded the set of laws that govern the country with ones that punish the slightest dissent. The logic is simple: the Government creates laws that shield it against any threat, including a simple phrase such as “Patria y Vida” (Homeland and Life). Contempt, as a crime, violates even the simplest forms of the freedom of expression, such as criticism. The sweeping purview of said law, as with others found in the PC, is only possible thanks to a deliberate ambiguity in its wording.”
Sounds increasingly familiar. Plus: “In Cuba, precedent is not considered a source of law. Therefore, the sentence handed down by the Municipal People’s Court of Santiago de Cuba will not serve for judges to act in the same way in similar cases. Nevertheless, the decision issued in Dairon Duque de Estrada’s case does mark a shift in the interpretation of the law that can be invoked by lawyers in subsequent cases. Moreover, the fact that several judges agreed to reject the crime of contempt as it has been wielded by the regime ruptures the judicial coherence with which dissent is criminalized in Cuba. This, on a symbolic level, represents a great victory for those fighting for the right to freedom of expression on the island.”
MARK JUDGE: I Knew the Name of the Dragon.
With each passing hour, the rope was tightening … not around me, but around the conspirators. They asked for extensions to testify, they made excuses, they launched attacks through the media. They scrubbed [Christine Blasey] Ford’s internet history and tried to use my high school yearbook against me and Brett while memory-holing Ford’s salacious history and own yearbook. They protested, they yelled, they asked for an FBI investigation.
They claimed Ford, a lifelong and enthusiastic traveler to remote locations, was afraid to fly. They couldn’t produce any of the evidence they had cited, not even notes from Ford’s therapist. This had nothing to do with assault or parties or yearbook slang. It was, as Senator Lindsey Graham put it, “a bunch of garbage.” Graham also knew the dragon’s name.
After more than a week, Ford’s Leviathan grew truly malevolent and reckless. On September 24, 2018 – my birthday – I got a very sinister phone message from a California number. A reptilian voice on the other end told me I was about to be messed with (the caller used more colorful language), and then abruptly shifted to a slightly softer tone: “Hey, give me a call. We’ll work something out.” This was flat-out extortion, witness-tampering, Mafia-style strong-arming. The voice, both menacing and solicitous, was just as I imagined the sound of the voice of the dragon Yevaud in A Wizard of Earthsea. I could almost smell the smoke coming from the nostrils.
Call you back? I don’t think so.
I know your true name.
Read the whole thing.
“WE FEEL USED AND BETRAYED.” Yeah, who could have seen that coming, “Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden?” Sheesh. I’ll bet you don’t even get an ambassadorship to Malta out of it, either.
GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T VACCINATE OLD PEOPLE HERE, THIS IS A PANDEMIC! Ron DeSantis and Larry Hogan are vaccinating old people; Democrats and the media are angry about it.
I DON’T LIKE BOSTON DYNAMICS’ AESTHETIC: Boston Dynamics Robots Dance to ‘The Humans Are Dead.’
What’s a home worth?
It’s a tough question, and it’s one that Vicki Baker found herself trying to answer the hard way after a SWAT team mutilated her house in McKinney, Texas, during a standoff with a fugitive who had barricaded himself inside.
“For two days, I couldn’t quit crying,” Baker says. “The tear gas was everywhere. It was on the walls. It was on the floors. It was on the furniture. It was everywhere.”
Prior to the SWAT showdown, Baker’s daughter, Deanna, gave officers a key to the home, as well as a garage doorInstitute for Justice opener and the back gate code. Agents took a different route. They smashed six windows. Instead of using the code, they maneuvered a BearCat armored vehicle through her fencing. Instead of using the clicker, they detonated explosives to blow off the garage entryway. And instead of using the key, they drove right on through her front door.
“It was after the insurance company told me there was no coverage that I really fell apart,” Baker adds. The company furnished a clause that protects them from liability in cases where the government is at fault for the damage. The city demurred: There would be no coverage. She was not a victim, according to the state.
“I’ve lost everything,” Baker says. “I’ve lost my chance to sell my house. I’ve lost my chance to retire without fear of how I’m going to make my regular bills.”
Tar, feathers, and a lawsuit. The latter is coming: Former McKinney resident suing city for damages after her home was ‘destroyed’ in a SWAT raid.
AS I MENTIONED IN THE NEW SCHOOL, EARLY AMERICANS WERE EXTREMELY LITERATE: The Myth that Americans Were Poorly Educated before Mass Government Schooling: Early America had widespread literacy and a vibrant culture of learning.
TWO MORE FORMER AIDES PUBLICLY ACCUSE CUOMO OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT.
Related: The short answer is chutzpah: “Charlotte Bennett, who has accused Cuomo of sexually harassing her, claims she overheard Cuomo’s office director Stephanie Benton complaining about having to take the training for the governor. If true, I think it’s pretty funny. And telling. Many men who have taken sex harassment training must probably wished they could have delegated that duty. Few would have thought of delegating it to a woman.”
AND CHRISTOPHER WRAY HAS PROVEN HIMSELF TO BE A DISHONEST POLITICAL HACK:
March 6, 2021
THE MAN IN THE MEDIA MASK: Tracking the Course of Joe Biden. “The Biden administration can be subjected to two empirical tests by any observer: first whether there will there be a new outbreak of war in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) owing to the repudiation of the Abraham Accords and second, will it endorse restrictions on the exercise of the First and Second Amendments?”
Yes, and yes.
EXPLAINING THINGS TO CHARLES BLOW, who generally needs the help.
Plus: “Never noticed Pepe LePew behaved like a Democrat pol before.”
SO A MAJOR CHANGE HAD A MINOR IMPACT. States that allowed indoor dining saw 3% rise in COVID-19 deaths, CDC finds. That’s margin-of-error stuff even on a well-designed study.
I KNOW HOW I’M GUESSING: Online dating: Super effective, or just… superficial? “People’s reason for swiping right is based primarily on attractiveness and the race of a potential partner, and that decisions are often made in less than a second.”
DON’T LOOK TOO CLOSELY, THE DEEP SEVENS MIGHT NOT LIKE IT: Scientists Detect Signs of a Hidden Structure Inside Earth’s Core.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE FOR THE 21st CENTURY: I can’t believe this is not satire. But this is not satire. They’re really doing this. “Yes, this a real product. Yeah. It’s a ridiculous-looking Groucho-style air filter you wear over your schnoz all day long. So that the air you breathe in through your nose is cleaner and less virus-y. Because nowadays everything is trying to kill you, remember?”
The above link goes to Not the Bee — because in 2021, even the Babylon Bee’s satire can’t keep up with how crazy reality has become.
REVIEW: Walther PDP Handgun in 9 mm.
SCIENTISTS EXPECTING AN EARTHSHATTERING KABOOM: South-West Iceland’s Been Hit by 17,000 Earthquakes This Week. It May Be About to Erupt.
TIME MAGAZINE, ONE YEAR AGO: Health Experts Are Telling Healthy People Not to Wear Face Masks for Coronavirus. So Why Are So Many Doing It?
THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION: Humans evolved to use water much more efficiently than apes.
JOE BIDEN’S UGLY BETRAYAL OF THE IRANIAN PEOPLE:
In the short time since taking office, Biden has already snubbed Iranian dissidents who courageously wrote to him from inside Iran, some writing from prison, urging him to maintain sanctions and other pressures on the regime and to provide support and solidarity for their democratic struggle. Instead, their message was received as an inconvenience by a White House national security team staffed with some of the regime’s leading U.S.-based apologists. The administration then quickly provided other sweeteners to the regime, including the lifting of sanctions on their proxy in Yemen, the lifting of restrictions on its arms buying and selling, the lifting of U.S. opposition to an IMF loan, and the neutering of a pro-freedom public diplomacy initiative from the State Department, which went overnight from being a popular source of information on the regime’s repression and corruption to the butt of jokes among Iranian democracy activists. The initiative‘s Persian-language Twitter account has had a steep drop in followers since the U.S. election because of its canceling of real-time statements about the regime’s human rights abuses in favor of promotion of the Biden team’s appeasement measures. When angry Iranians on Twitter pushed the State Department into taking a stand about the regime’s torture and killing of Behnam Mahjoubi, it only raised their ire by saying he was “mistreated.”
Biden’s decided U-turn away from maximum pressure on the regime to a posture of maximum accommodation has been accompanied by silence about the regime’s escalation of its war against its own people, and anyone else who is unfortunate enough to fall within its reach. Biden’s policy of appeasement has been accompanied by large increases in the number of executions and deaths in custody of political prisoners, the taking of foreign hostages for ransom, and threats to kill dual nationals like Swedish Iranian researcher Ahmadreza Djalali. The new administration has, in effect, taken every opportunity to demonstrate to Iran’s thuggish theocracy that it will give in, even signaling that the regime’s holding of American hostages will not be an impediment to negotiations on the nuclear program.
The results of this policy of accommodation are clear. Khamenei has not hesitated to respond by intensifying belligerence by the Islamic Republic’s proxies, who shell American troops in Iraq. America’s other leading adversaries, particularly China and Russia, are also taking note; they do not expect to be confronted for their aggressions and can more easily plot to fill the vacuum left by the United States in the Middle East.
Earlier: ecological Terrorism: Iran Behind Major Oil Spill Off Israel’s Coast.
THIS SOUNDS PRETTY GOOD: Recipe: Creamy French Mustard Chicken.
THE GRAUNIAD, ONE YEAR AGO TODAY: Why I’m taking the coronavirus hype with a pinch of salt.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB. MSNBC’s Joy Reid: Conservatives would trade tax cuts to ‘openly say the n-word.’
BOB ZUBRIN: A Method for Creating Enormous Space Telescopes.
LIKE MY GRANDFATHER SAID, SMOG MEANS JOBS: Air pollution fell sharply during lockdown.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden: ‘Indian-Descent Americans Are Taking Over the Country.’ “Can you even imagine if the previous president had said this out loud into a microphone? You’d have to peel Brian Stelter off the ceiling. Hell, last week Biden blurted out what sounded a lot like the N-word, and all the libs pretended it never happened because they just don’t want to deal with it.”
NANCY ROMMELMANN: Kids and Cowards: What Really Happened to Donald McNeil at the New York Times.
I don’t know who leaked the information (neither does McNeil). But the why seems easier to fathom: It’s one way to get ahead these days, a shortcut whereby you can chop down someone’s 45-year career in a few days, killing their reputation while burnishing your own as someone who’s fighting the unassailable good fight. And in 2021, that fight is combatting racism. Drop that blood in the water and watch it spread.
* * * * * * * *
The repercussions were swift. As Baquet kept repeating, “Donald, you’ve lost the newsroom.”
“Let me give you an alternative view of ‘who’s lost the newsroom,” McNeil countered. “If you fire me over this, you’re going to lose everybody over age 40 at the paper, all the grown-ups.”
“We’re not firing you,” Baquet said. “We’re asking you to consider resigning.”
It was the exact same abdication of leadership Baquet has become famous for. What kind of executive editor allows the newsroom—indeed, the most activist subset of the newsroom—to lead him?
Yeah, who does Baquet think he is, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic?
BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Liberals melt down on Twitter over video of Sen. Sinema’s thumbs-down vote against the minimum wage hike.
If you haven’t seen it yet (it broke Twitter yesterday), do not miss the clip of her thumbs down/curtsy gesture on the Senate floor.
(Classical reference in headline.)
YES. DO. Stop Saying We Can’t Go Back to Normal After Vaccines.
Some people don’t want to go back to normal.
NEANDERTHAL THINKING: U.S. Optimism About COVID-19 Situation Reaches New High, Gallup poll finds.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Covid deaths high in countries with more overweight people, says report.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? You’re Not Trans. You’re Just Weird:
Editor’s note: This hypothetically open letter was originally posted by its anonymous author on Medium and was rapidly removed as “hate speech.” We found it to be a refreshing dose of honesty, a charming and relatable open letter from one parent to other parents (not to the child, obviously!) about dealing with a challenging and dangerous moment in raising children, especially “weird” adolescents who search for their identities harder than others and risk making life-damaging mistakes in a way never before possible. We are reposting it here on New Discourses with the permission of the author.
by Donna M.
My dear, sweet, son,
I’ve got to break it to you: you’re not trans, you’re just weird.
This seems like a cruel thing to point out right now. Clearly, you are struggling and feeling pretty awful about things. I can see that you are in a rough patch, and one of the first rules of parenting is to not pile on. The world is pretty heavy on your shoulders. You’re fifteen. There’s a pandemic going on. But here I come anyway. I’m about to throw more on you.
When you were two – a happy, chubby, little tyke in pull-ups, you watched the world with wary eyes behind the thumb in your mouth. You leapt with joy in the rhythm of the toddle music classes. You chattered and shared stories about your stuffed animals. You loved your little sister. Enjoyed cookies and finger painting. That was all pretty normal.
But you also started to count to one thousand on our walks. And you started to call out the store names as we drove around. And you preferred reading books rather than playing with the other two-year-olds at preschool. And you hated sitting in the circle when instructed. And you hated the feel of blue jeans. And you threw big tantrums when you lost any kind of game. In other words, you started to show signs that you were… weird.
The grandparents were the first to notice. They said gentle things like “You oughta keep an eye on that one,” and sent us links to Wall Street Journal articles about child prodigies. And then the other parents in the play groups started to comment; “He’s pretty intense, huh?” And the teachers were on to it pretty quickly. They started to use fancy terms like “asynchronous development.”
Read the whole thing.
BIDEN’S RECKLESS IMMIGRATION TALK ISN’T JUST BAD FOR AMERICA, it lures immigrants into deadly danger. Michael Yon: Deadly Funnel: The Darien Gap. “There is no road at all connecting Panama and Colombia, thus the infamous Darien area is called the Gap. Or the Darien Gap. Reminds me of the Desert of Death in Afghanistan, only this is mountains, jungle, and murderers. And so, they must go on foot for roughly 4O miles and six days. . . . The osmotic human pressure has dramatically increased since January. The Biden administration established a Green Zone in D.C., unfurled a welcome-to-hell carpet across our Southern border, and now people are flooding through Darien. Communist Guerrillas and drug smugglers, along with naked tribesmen, fill the Darien. Even the Armies stay clear.”
Way back before InstaPundit was a thing, Peter Morgan and I argued that the “Ethics Establishment” was essentially corrupt, and nothing has happened since then to suggest we were wrong.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Baltimore Student Who Failed All But Three Classes In Four Years Was Ranked In Top Half Of His Class.
Baltimore’s last Republican mayor left office in 1967.
HEY, IT’S NOT ABOUT INCLUDING POOR PEOPLE. Northeastern hires first-ever ‘chief inclusion officer’…while hiking tuition 3.7 percent.
(HOW REFRESHING.) Biden Press Secretary: Trump Admin Doesn’t Deserve Credit for COVID Vaccine Rollout.
It’s hard to determine which has been more infuriating: Biden, Harris, and other Democrats deliberately undermining the vaccine last year by telling people it could be unsafe if “rushed through because of politics,” Democrats conveniently flip-flopping on that position after the election, or the Biden administration delivering slaps to the faces of Operation Warp Speed members who worked their fannies off to help make what was said to be impossible happen before the end of the year.
Biden can try and cover himself in glory all he wants on how the vaccine rollout has gone so far, but the facts are what they are. No amount of posturing and “circling back” on the issue from Psaki or any other spinmeister in this administration is going to change that.
In other news regarding the Circle Back Girl: Jen Psaki Tries to Explain Joe Biden’s ‘Neanderthal’ Insult, and People Feel the Unity.
(Classical reference in headline.)
GOODER AND HARDER: Walgreens shutters 10 stores in San Francisco as residents point to rampant shoplifting. “Under California law, theft under $950 is considered a misdemeanor, but many prosecutors throughout the state have opted to free those charged with the offense under certain conditions rather than holding them in jail for the maximum sentence of six months.”
Related: California Is Lost, Getting Rid of Newsom Won’t Save It.
WHY AREN’T PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THE NEW JORDAN PETERSON BOOK?
Well, some people are.
SHOULD HAVE DONE IT YEARS AGO: NRA move to Texas cheered by Cruz, Jordan, and Pompeo.
DAVID BERNSTEIN: Is non-Orthodox American Judaism doomed?
THE NEW BORDER CHAOS: A crisis of Biden’s own making.
Trump had a number of false starts at the border, but, by the end, had created an entirely reasonable system based on his lawful authorities to impose order at the border. There is no good reason to rip up much of this arrangement, though that’s exactly what Biden has done.
During the pandemic, Trump turned around illegal crossers at the border on public-health grounds. Biden has created an exception for unaccompanied minors, which is an obvious incentive for families to send children under age 18.
Under Trump, the Migration Protection Protocols, also known as Remain in Mexico, ended the practice of letting Central American migrants into the US while their asylum claims were adjudicated.
This was crucial because, under the old arrangement, asylum seekers were allowed in while their claims were considered. Even if the claims were ultimately rejected, as the vast majority of them were, the migrants overwhelmingly ended up staying anyway. This was a huge magnet to migrants — get to the border and claim asylum and you’re in the United States, very likely to stay.
Related: Dana Loesch explores The Rage Hypocrisy Over Texas’s Reopening:
Either the pandemic is a concern terrifying enough to close businesses forever; rob a year of life from children; set schools back a year; enforce policies that cause drug and alcohol abuse rates, anxiety percentages, suicide, and abuse to skyrocket; terrifying enough to hysterically invoke rhetoric like “They literally want to sacrifice the lives of our fellow Texans” — or it’s not.
O’Rourke and other Democrats haven’t expressed any hysteria over releasing often untested and/or coronavirus-positive illegal entrants and asylum-seekers into the country. In fact, they haven’t said a word.
I thought they were concerned about the pandemic and the lives affected?
Speaking of which: Biden administration tells facilities for migrant children to reopen to pre-pandemic levels.
IT’S ONLY A PANDEMIC CRISIS WHEN THEY WANT IT TO BE A PANDEMIC CRISIS: “Extraordinary circumstance”: Feds to reopen border shelters for child migrants — at full capacity, despite COVID.
SHOCKER: USA Today: Support for BLM has fallen and support for police has risen. “But perhaps the most interesting finding in this survey is that support for BLM has dropped more among Black Americans than white Americans. Similarly, trust in police has gone up slightly more among Black Americans than among whites.”
It was a made up line, for domestic political purposes. If there were a real insurrection, they’d deny it.
Plus: “(Two FBI operatives have since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a ‘suspect’ who may have engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But nothing still is known; Sicknick’s mother claims he died of a stroke while his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump mob savagely bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.)”
So I figure the “intelligence” about new “uprisings” on January 20, March 4, March 20, etc. is just people spreading rumors to make the authorities look stupid. If so, it’s working!
BOOK BANNING IN AN AGE OF AMAZON:
Last week, Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, vanished from “the world’s largest bookstore.” The hardbacks, the paperbacks—even the used copies of When Harry Became Sally sold by third-party sellers through Amazon—poof, gone. When questioned by Anderson’s publisher, Amazon lamely pointed to a new policy that permits it to bar “inappropriate and offensive” works and also “hate speech.” It never bothered to offer proof or explain how Anderson’s book ran afoul of these guidelines; it apparently didn’t think it needed to.
The New York Post’s editorial board attempted to explain why Amazon targeted this particular three-year old book: Anderson’s “scholarly analysis of transgenderism . . . questions politically correct sacred cows.” But there are plenty of other politically-incorrect volumes sold on Amazon, including Anderson’s 2012 book, What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense—a conservative objection to gay marriage. I suspect What is Marriage’s home on Amazon.com will remain undisturbed—not for lack of controversy, but for lack of relevance.And here we get to the key difference between the two books: The legality of gay marriage has been settled in America. Whatever people’s private feelings about gay marriage, its legality in America is beyond dispute, and its acceptance by American society, widespread. Opposing it is a dead issue, a loser.
And as Amazon well knows, no book is likely to change that.But transitioning minors—that’s another story. For all the sloganeering about how the sanctity of affirmation-based treatment is settled practice, it isn’t. Leading psychotherapists have challenged “affirmative care” and its abuses have been acknowledged in open court. J.K. Rowling’s well-publicized alarm at the spike in transgender identification among teen girls, followed by the publication of my book, encouraged a widespread backlash against the idea that it is wrong or repressive to question the protocols governing the medical transition of minors.
One week after Black History Month concluded, it’s…really something to see “Item Under Review” and “not currently available for purchase” on Amazon’s page for the Kindle edition of Thomas Sowell’s classic 1996 book, The Vision of the Anointed:
Click to enlarge.
Related: We didn’t start this culture war. The woke left rages against increasingly bizarre things, and then calls everyone else crazy. “All this, and in the service of what? A new woke orthodoxy whose authoritarianism is matched only by its stupidity. If you genuinely think that building a better society starts with rebranding the kids’ toys, you have no business calling anyone else crazy. The left’s embrace of wokeness has made it look utterly ridiculous to the very people it should be representing. Nothing will be gained from this censorious, divisive movement. But a hell of a lot could be lost. Those of us on the anti-woke side of politics, which extends far beyond the lazy right-wing caricature, did not start this culture war. But we do need to win it.”
OUR GARBAGE ELITES ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF YET ANOTHER WAVE OF MASS HYSTERIA: Gone With the Wind, Breakfast at Tiffany’s among TCM’s nearly 2 dozen ‘problematic’ films.
It’s easier to succumb to mass hysteria when you’re garbage people performing for other garbage people, unrelieved by much in the way of intellect or values.
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