YALE LAW SCHOOL NEEDS A COMPLETE LEADERSHIP CHANGE: Yale Law School’s Bullying, Coercive Diversity Leaders.
DON’T TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOLE: China’s Claim That Its Fractional Orbital Bombardment System Was A Spaceplane Test Doesn’t Add Up. “Experts and observers have now raised questions about where there may be some degree of overlap in Chinese reusable spaceplane projects and this reported orbital bombardment system. This would hardly be the first instance of an ostensibly civilian or commercial aerospace project in China having links to the country’s military and potentially being a dual-use research and development effort. At the same time, China has openly fielded and continues to develop actual hypersonic glide vehicle weapons.”
THE MOST RELUCTANT CONVERT: New film opens November 3 about C.S. Lewis. Here’s the trailer.
DON’T GET COCKY: Democrats Are Increasingly Freaking Out About 2022
THE OTHERS AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION: Nearly Two-Thirds Rate Joe Biden Negatively on Economy.
CRISIS BY DESIGN: Biden secretly flying underage migrants into NY in dead of night.
Planeloads of underage migrants are being flown secretly into suburban New York in an effort by President Biden’s administration to quietly resettle them across the region, The Post has learned.
The charter flights originate in Texas, where the ongoing border crisis has overwhelmed local immigration officials, and have been underway since at least August, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Last week, The Post saw two planes land at the Westchester County Airport, where most of the passengers who got off appeared to be children and teens, with a small portion appearing to be men in their 20s.
Westchester County cops stood by as the passengers — whose flights arrived at 10:49 p.m. Wednesday and 9:52 p.m. Friday — got off and piled into buses.
Flying illegal alien children and young men around the country under cover of night must be part of Biden’s return to normalcy.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Colin Powell and the Crisis of the Boomer Elite.
Powell became a reliably Democrat-voting Republican, the kind CNN would wheel out every election cycle to explain how actual Republicans are terrible. He was beloved in Washington as one of the wisemen because of this; it certainly helped wash off some of the stink of being caught up in the mustard gas fraud. Grimly, at the end, his passing exemplified the worst of the people he thought were the best and enjoyed being one of, with focus on his race and his taking of the vaxx sacrament and a soft-pedaling of his flaws.
Like many luminaries of the Boomer establishment, Powell provided a certain gravity and dignity to an elite rapidly filling up with young, woke, unaccomplished hacks. Though he was firmly on the side of the woke pronoun people by the end, he was not one of them. He picked up a rifle; they picked a gender. Powell was a serious man who found himself allied with unserious people.
Read the whole thing.
Earlier: CNN Editor Chris Cillizza’s Cringe Hot Take On Colin Powell’s Passing Goes Over Like a Lead Balloon.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Biden Report Card: Another bad week over sinking polls and forgotten public.
SAN FRANCISCO CLOSES IN-N-OUT BURGER AFTER DEFYING CITY’S VACCINE RULE: “‘We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government. It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers,’ wrote [In-N-Out Burger’s Chief Legal and Business Officer, Arnie Wensinger].”
Earlier: NYC Restaurateurs: Business Down 40 to 60 Percent Due to Vaccine Mandate.
NICE FOR FALL: Let’s Go Brandon Conservative Anti Liberal US Flag Pullover Hoodie. #CommsionEarned (Bumped)
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ and the Indomitable Conservative American Spirit. “Hey, if you have to suffer through the tyrannical rain of a faculty-challenged president who is trying to abrogate as many of your freedoms as he can, all the while burying you under an inflation problem that’s about to turn Domino’s pizza into a luxury item, a sense of humor really helps.”
STACY MCCAIN: Democrats Desperate In Virginia.
Let’s be clear about just who Glenn Youngkin actually is — a Richmond native who attended Rice University on a basketball scholarship (he’s 6-7), majored in engineering and management, and later got an MBA from Harvard. He spent 25 years with the Carlyle Group investment firm. If he is, or ever was, an extremist, nobody has discovered any evidence of this. Youngkin is Mister Clean, a calm and level-headed businessman without scandals in his past, and this is why the only way the McAuliffe campaign can try to attack him is by playing the “Orange Man Bad” card.
It should not be necessary for McAuliffe to attack Youngkin at all. A former governor, McAuliffe has near-100% name recognition in Virginia, while Youngkin is a little-known political newcomer. Virginia has been trending “blue” for the past 15 years; Hillary won Virginia 50%-44% in 2016, and Biden won the state by a 10-point margin last year.
Terry McAuliffe would have been cruising toward a November landslide, were it not for the disastrous failure of Joe Biden’s presidency. Since early August, Biden’s job-approval number in the RCP average has dropped about 7 points, while disapproval has risen by 9 points. Biden has been “underwater” in the polls for six weeks and, now that Americans are increasingly concerned abourt shortages of basic consumer goods because of the supply-chain issue, there is little hope of recovery.
There are real policy issues in Virginia — particularly the controversy surrounding Critical Race Theory, which McAuliffe has bungled — but the toxic cloud looming over the gubernatorial campaign is the stench of Biden’s failure, as even McAuliffe himself acknowledges.
Let’s go, Brandon! But don’t get cocky. If you care about this race, you should be donating and volunteering. Commenting on Internet sites, even this one, doesn’t count.
‘SELF-SERVING GARBAGE.’ Wildfire experts escalate fight over saving California forests:
But Chad Hanson, an influential environmentalist with a Ph.D. from UC Davis, looked at the Caldor Fire and drew a different conclusion: Forest thinning didn’t work. In fact, it probably made things worse, by removing shade and exposing more of the woods to the ravages of climate change. A thinner forest meant less of a natural “windbreak” that could have slowed the fire’s progress.
“This is not stopping fires, because they’re mostly driven by weather and climate,” Hanson said. “You can’t fight the wind with a chainsaw.”
Hanson, who runs an organization called the John Muir Project, is a published author who’s often featured in news stories on fire and forestry issues. He’s also spent decades pursuing lawsuits against the U.S. Forest Service over plans to cut down trees to reduce fire dangers. His efforts have sometimes prompted delays in thinning projects and even forced the government to leave more of the woods untouched.
“We go to court to stand up for science,” Hanson said.
But over the past few years, as California has endured record-breaking wildfires, a legion of fire scientists is delivering a blunt message to Hanson and other environmentalists who oppose forest thinning: Get out of the way.
In an extraordinary series of articles published in scientific journals, fire scientists are attacking Hanson’s and his allies’ claims that the woods need to be left alone. These scientists say the activists are misleading the public and bogging down vital work needed to protect wildlife, communities and make California’s forests more resilient to wildfire.
Read the whole thing.
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S ABILITY TO F*** THINGS UP: How bad does a supply chain crisis have to be for Dunkin Donuts to be out of Donuts?
LET’S GO BRANDON: Under the Taliban, families in debt are selling off their children.
CNN EDITOR CHRIS CILLIZZA’S CRINGE HOT TAKE ON COLIN POWELL’S PASSING GOES OVER LIKE A LEAD BALLOON:
In most cases my view on the passing of public figures is to, out of respect, let the grieving process roll through for the family for a while before I start assessing their legacy in a public forum. Obviously, others believe differently, which is fine. But one hot take given today in the aftermath of the announcement of Powell’s death rubbed people all kinds of the wrong way, and it came courtesy of CNN’s editor-at-large Chris Cillizza, who readers of his site well know is legendary for the hot takes he often gives that go over about as well as a lead balloon, not to mention his infamous and hilarious declaration in 2016 that read: “Let me say for the billionth time: Reporters don’t root for a side. Period.”
In a piece published this morning at CNN and which he shared on Twitter, Cillizza’s hot take on Powell, which he expounded on in his article, was to – get this – point out that “The Colin Powell Republican no longer exists in the Republican Party.”
* * * * * * * *
Cillizza’s take was not received well by many people who responded to him in kind, wondering why he chose to give a take that was obvious to everyone and went without saying:
Or as Mike Cernovich tweeted on Monday:
Considering there’s a whole army of pundits in DC and NYC who profess to be Republicans but never vote for Republicans, I wonder if Cillizza is subtweeting a shot at Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol, or his staffers at the Bulwark?
October 18, 2021
OPEN THREAD: I hope this night will last forever.
DISPATCHES FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Oberlin’s Women and Trans collective disturbed to find ‘cisgenger men’ installing new radiators.
IT’S COME TO THIS: ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Is the #1 Hip Hop Song in the U.S.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE: Water vapor detected on Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa.
QUESTIONS EVERYONE SHOULD BE ASKING:
QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: I’m vegan, so am I exempt from a vaccine mandate?
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Trump Right to Oppose Transgender Restrooms Loudon County School Rape Shows.
THIS SHOULD HAPPEN NATIONWIDE: Pennsylvania school board quits over ‘domestic terrorist’ charge.
The Pennsylvania School Boards Association severed ties with the National School Boards Association over a letter comparing parents’ behavior at school board meetings to “domestic terrorism or hate crimes.”
The Pennsylvania association wrote in an internal memorandum that “the final straw” in the organization’s decision to leave the association was a letter sent to President Joe Biden in September “suggesting that some parents should be considered domestic terrorists,” the Daily Wire reported.
“The Governing Board of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association has voted unanimously to cancel the PSBA’s longstanding membership in the National School Board’s Association,” the memo reportedly said.
You should call your local school board, ask them if they belong to NSBA, and demand that they quit if they do.
LEAVE THE KIDS ALONE: Instagram Alarm. Contrary to the claims of the Facebook “whistleblower,” the company’s internal research doesn’t prove that Instagram is toxic to teens. She has been lionized by mainstream journalists and politicians eager for an excuse to further censor online discourse — and determined to ignore the rigorous scientific evidence contradicting her claims, as I explain at City Journal. The current furor is the latest example of the Fredric Wertham effect, named after the instigator of the great comic-book scare in the 1950s.
FIRE’S GIFT TO THE DIVERSITY POLICE: Since they love pre-written apology notes, Yale administrators should sign ours.
SENATE NEWS: Club for Growth Alabama U.S. Senate poll: Brooks 55%, Britt 12%, Blanchard 5%, Taylor 5%. “According to the survey conducted October 12-14 on the organization’s behalf by WPA Intelligence, a sample of 506 likely GOP voters overwhelmingly support Brooks in Alabama’s Republican U.S. Senate primary. Brooks, who was endorsed by Club for Growth earlier this year, has a 43-point lead over Britt, according to WPA. GOP U.S. Senate hopefuls Jessica Taylor and Lynda Blanchard came in tied at 5% each, with 23% undecided.”
DON’T GET COCKY:Democrats Desperate in Virginia.
JIM TREACHER ON THE LATEST HALLOWEEN SEQUEL: Halloween Kills… My Buzz!
THIS IS CNN: Delusional Brian Stelter Rejects Bari Weiss’ Claim Media Censor Certain Stories. Weiss told Stelter, “When we’re not able to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad. When in the name of progress, young school children, as young as kindergarten, are being separated in public schools because of their race, and that is called progress rather than segregation, the world has gone mad.”
That sure hits close to home for CNN. The “fiery, but mostly peaceful” riot defenders were too cowardly to even defend their own crew when they were attacked by left-wing mobs. And Hunter Biden’s laptop? No one in the media wanted to touch that story: CNN least of all. But Stelter did rave over Hunter’s memoir, along with beg the media to spend less time on President Biden’s colossal failures and more time playing up his agenda. But he’s not partisan, he’s pro-truth.
Stelter feigned confusion. “Who’s the people stopping the conversation?” he asked, puzzled. Weiss suggested, “People let work at networks, frankly, like the one I’m speaking on right now who try and claim that you know, it was — it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory. It was, I mean, let’s just pick an example.”
The CNN host pretended he had no idea what Weiss was talking about. “[Y]ou say — you say we’re not allowed to talk about these things. But they’re all over the internet.” He added, “I can Google them and I can find them everywhere. I’ve heard about every story you mentioned.”
Ironically, Stelter just made Weiss’s case for her. CNN knows about Hunter Biden’s laptop, for instance, they just don’t want to report on it. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why. He confirmed that with his next sentence: “So, I’m just suggesting, of course, people are allowed to cover whatever they want to cover.”
As with CNN’s “reporting” on Joe Rogan, the gaslighting will continue until morale improves. Lyndsey Fifield of the Daily Signal tweets that Stelter’s “insistence that nobody is stopping people from speaking freely when he’s talking to a woman who lost her job because she spoke freely is pretty galling.”
THE COMPETITION JUST LAPPED US. NOW WHAT? Psaki On Communist China Obtaining Advanced, Nuclear-Capable Weapons Tech: ‘We Welcome Stiff Competition.’
#RESIST: ESPN Tries to Mandate Vaccine on Allison Williams Despite ‘Advanced Maternal Age,’ She Quits. “I know a little something about this, having once spent nine months on pins and needles.”
This one is just for our PJMedia/Townhall VIP members, so if you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.
CHINA’S RICHELIEU: The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning. The friend who sends this writes: “The Chinese leadership is so much smarter and more serious than ours it makes me sick.”
Well, the Chinese have their own problems and vulnerabilities, but it’s true that our leadership sees its future as essentially distinct from America’s, while the Chinese leadership sees its future as bound up with China’s.
VIDEO: State Trooper Quits Over Vaccine Mandate with Defiant Message Over the Police Radio. “Jay Inslee can kiss my ass.”
Related: California Police Officer Chants “Let’s Go Brandon.”
SILENT DISGRACE: Where is the national media on abandoned Americans?
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their bias-by-omission makes perfect sense.
Evergreen:
ROGER SIMON: Trump 2.0 Doesn’t Need Social Media.
On Hannity the other night, Sean ended his interview by gently asking the former president if we could expect any changes with Trump 2.0. 45, as he usually does, avoided that question. Somewhere along the line, probably in childhood, Trump had instilled in him the half-truth that granting mistakes was fatal to the self. (Often, it’s the reverse.)
Still, he has taken of late to admitting he made errors at first choosing his cabinet and other key positions. He was a businessman unschooled in the ways of the Deep State. By copping to this mistake, he is showing he is unlikely to make it the next time around. Indeed, he has already shown this. Going from Rex Tillerson to Mike Pompeo, arguably the best secretary of state in some time, is quite an improvement.
Regarding the out-of-control tech giants, assuming he returns to power with a solid Republican congress, Trump should lead the way in breaking them up, either by renewed anti-trust legislation or by finding some other way to turn the likes of Google and Facebook into public utilities in the manner of AT&T.
Suing them is the equivalent of giving a parking ticket to a man in a Lamborghini.
Flashback: Fasten Your Seat Belt: Trump Files Motion Asking Judge to Force Twitter to Restore His Account.
TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND ALL THAT STUFF: DC Comics to Give Superman a New ‘Woke’ Slogan.
UM: “Love is a roller coaster… You can’t take your purse on the ride, you wind up strapped in upside down and someone throws up, and all you’re left with is a souvenir photo of you with your hands up, screaming.”
NOW OUT: Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. #Commissionearned
THE REGULATORY STATE: ‘Sprinklegate’ sinks a U.K. bakery’s top sellers after topping is found to be illegal.
He says the decision is a huge deal for his business and also “very f***ing annoying.”
Customers often ask for raspberry glazed donut cookies or a “Birthday Bruce” (a towering slab of 12-layer chocolate cake), Myers said. Both of them prominently feature the outlawed sprinkles.
The doughnut cookies, Myers added, “are not only our best-selling cookie, but they’re utterly sensational.” But for now, they’re off the menu.
“It is HIGHLY unlikely that we will find any legal sprinkles that we will use as a replacement,” Myers wrote. “British sprinkles just aren’t the same, they’re totally s*** and I hate them.”
He added: “I am extremely passionate about sprinkles.”
The State is extremely passionate about saving people from trace amounts of Red No. 3.
I’M SENSING A TREND WITH THIS ADMINISTRATION: Biden Appoints US Maritime Administrator With Zero Shipping Experience During Worst Shipping Crisis In Decades.
The FAA is headed by a pilot, NASA is headed by an astronaut, the US Marine Corps is headed by a Marine but for the fourth time in a row, and during the worst shipping crisis of the century, the US Department of Transportation, has appointed someone to the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) who is not a captain and has no commercial shipping experience.
Yesterday afternoon, President Biden announced his intention to nominate Rear Admiral Ann Phillips, US Navy (Retired), as the next US Maritime Administrator, a position that has been vacant since Rear Admiral Mark Buzby stepped down following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January.
Phillips is a highly decorated Navy leader with a long list of accomplishments and is highly respected by everyone gCaptain has interviewed. She was head of the Navy’s Climate Change Task Force and is a highly sought after consultant on climate security issues. She holds an MBA. She was chairman of a local government Sea Level Rise Preparedness and Resilience project. She once captained a Navy warship. The appointment looks great on paper except for one kinda big problem. This is not a warship position. It’s a commercial shipping appointment and she has zero experience aboard any commercial ships. She does not even have experience leading navy military sealift ships.
It’s par for the course with this administration. As Karol Markowicz noted yesterday, Pete Buttigieg “was always going to be a lightweight transportation chief. He got the job as a reward for dropping out of the presidential race and throwing his support to Joe Biden — and also because he said he likes trains, having gotten engaged at a train station. My 5-year-old likes trains, too. Yet just because he can say ‘Choo choo!’ with enthusiasm doesn’t mean he can oversee the country’s transportation system. When the country is having supply-chain problems, the transportation secretary’s skills and experience, let alone availability, become rather, uh, indispensable.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley is far more obsessed with critical race theory than the debacle in Afghanistan.
As Cheryl Chumley wrote at the beginning of the month in the Washington Times, “The new comptroller of the currency selected by President Joe Biden is fresh off the Marxist bus, having graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 and since, spoken in glowing terms about communism.”
This is some crew that President Klain is assembling:
● Senate Confirms Radical Eco-Terrorist as Chief of the Bureau of Land Management.
● Kamala Harris doing damage control after encouraging student who accused Israel of genocide.
Tanden eventually withdrew her OMB nomination, but: Neera Tanden lands in the White House, after all. “The White House confirmed on Friday that Biden had appointed Tanden to be a senior adviser. She will start on Monday. The move came two months after the veteran Democratic policy adviser, known for her combative Twitter feed and in-your-face politics, withdrew her bid to become Biden’s budget director — Biden’s first, and, to this point, only failed nominee and one of his few political setbacks thus far.”
Flashback: The Mark of Klain. “[A]ll in all, things have worked out pretty darn well for Ron Klain. For America? Not so much.”
THUMB ON THE SCALE: As Joe Biden Drowns, Some Pollsters Are Trying to Pull Him Up.
DON BOUDREAUX: Supporting Phil Magness’s Defense of Jim Buchanan.
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): McAuliffe Agrees Public Schools Should Not Tell Parents If Their Child Is ‘Gender Fluid.’ “If it’s your child, Terry McAuliffe doesn’t think you should know about their struggle. He would force schools to hide a student’s new name and pronouns from parents. He even supports policies where schools use the child’s birth name with parents but a different name at school.”
OH, CANADA: Canada Bans Public Employees from Using ‘Let’s Go Brandon.’ “Canadians might prefer to know who would be foolish enough to sign their own name to such a liberty-snuffing document, while they gather together their tar and feathers.”
NOW OUT: Steven Pinker’s book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. #CommissionsEarned
KAROL MARKOWICZ: The incredible, disappearing — incompetent — Team Biden.
As Americans start to worry about stocking their cupboards and buying Christmas presents, Biden goes more than a week refusing to take any questions. Sorry, but this is unacceptable, no matter who’s president.
Maybe we should’ve known: After all, Biden hid in his basement for much of his presidential campaign, and his aides routinely called early “lids,” telling the press the candidate would be unavailable for the day.
But he wasn’t president then; now he is.
Nor are those of his surrogates not on paternity leave offering more reassurance. Last week, Biden chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted a tone-deaf reference to the supply-chain issues as “high-class problems.” Really? It sure doesn’t feel that high class when people are worrying about getting staples for their home. We all remember the toilet-paper shortages during the pandemic last year; did that feel “high class”?
Asked if holiday gifts would arrive on time, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was positively arrogant: “We’re not the Postal Service,” she huffed.
“High class” is the rating the people who created this mess — but won’t fix it and have no empathy for those suffering from it — give themselves.
THE VISIBLE HAND: The Distorted Market for Woke Capitalism.
The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, was no fan of the merchants of his time. He regarded them as among the most responsible for how “the mercantile system,” as Smith called it, accorded legal privileges to politically connected producers over the interests of consumers. Nor did Milton Friedman have a particularly sympathetic view of the business leaders of late-twentieth-century America. “The two greatest enemies of free enterprise in the United States,” he wrote, “have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals and, on the other hand, the business corporations of this country.”
Whenever I inform students of Smith and Friedman’s unflattering opinions of the business community, they are invariably shocked. But their eyes start opening when I point out that large established businesses don’t actually like competition, aren’t wildly excited about other people’s new ideas and products threatening “their” market share, and are quite happy to hop into bed with complaisant legislators to use state power to make life difficult for new and potential competitors. At this point, students begin realizing that to be pro-market is not the same as being pro-business. The two are at odds in some very important ways.
This is one way of understanding the phenomenon of “woke capitalism,” and it features in Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. For if there is anything that characterizes woke capitalism, it is the desire—like the mercantilists of old—to exclude (ironically, in the name of tolerance, diversity, equality, etc.) particular individuals and groups from “their” markets and corporate America in general. In the case of woke capitalists, the excluded is anyone who doesn’t embrace all the usual progressive orthodoxies or who won’t play the woke game to go along to get along.
Plus: “At the nexus of all this is a curious combination: a neo-mercantilist approach to realizing profit alongside a conviction that the business of business somehow involves resolving as many of the world’s political, social, and cultural problems as possible. This reflects deep misunderstanding—if not corruption—of the role of business vis-à-vis other groups’ responsibilities in society.”
Fascinating piece, well worth your time.
LET’S GO BRANDON: Can you hear the people snark?
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Tillman on Biden, DOJ, and the Media.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES: Let’s Go Brandon Conservative US Flag Gift T-Shirt is now a top seller in Boys’ Novelty T-shirts. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: ‘Escalating Into A Firing War’: Texas Gov. Abbott Says ‘Aggressive’ Mexican Cartels Shooting At National Guard.
“Everyone saw what happened in Del Rio with regard to the Haitians that came in there,” the governor continued, as he said the current “hottest point” along the Texas border is “in Roma … and that’s the area where the cartels on the Mexican side of the border are shooting at the National Guard on the Texas side of the border. And so what Texas is having to do, we’re having to step up and guard multiple points across the entire border.”
The governor said the situation cannot compare to October 2020. “Listen, a year ago, of course, was still during the Trump administration and the Trump administration had put in place all the policies that led it to the greatest reduction in cross-border crossings,” he said, adding that “now, we’re seeing the highest number of cross-border crossings and it’s all because of the catastrophic open border policies by the Biden administration and we’re seeing more and more people come in.”
Democratic Laredo, Texas, Mayor Pete Saenz said in September that border security was effective under Trump.
Who had “Possible Shooting War with Mexico” on their “Don’t Underestimate Joe’s Ability to F*** Things Up” bingo card?
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: What If They Gave a Mandate and No Law Enforcement Came? “Tyrants need enforcers and the enforcers are not amused.”
FLASHBACK: Will your ballot be safe? Computer experts sound warnings on America’s voting machines.
Things mainstream media could report on, before it became forbidden to do so.
GOOD. TANTRUMS SHOULDN’T BE INDULGED: Netflix fired the employee who organized a walkout in solidarity with trans workers. “We have let go of an employee for sharing confidential, commercially sensitive information outside the company. We understand this employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company.”
ICYMI: Ace on the Dispatch vs. Bulwark wars.
Plus: “The Bulwark going to War with the Dispatch is the undercard paywall-per-view for Pre-School Fight Club.”
EXPLAIN THIS – THE MIRACLE OF MATHEMATICS: Geometry in the eighth grade was the last mathematics course in which I made at least a C. No surprise there as word guys tend not to be math whizzes. Then there is philosopher William Lane Craig who sees the (un)reasonableness of mathematics as huge evidence for God. (I’m just praying the entrance test at the Pearly Gates isn’t a math exam!)
WHY CHINA IS BIG WINNER ON INFRASTRUCTURE BILL: Capital Research Center’s Hayden Ludwig digs into Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and finds $148 billion worth of reasons why China, which by the way produces twice as much Greenhouse Gas Emissions as the U.S., is the biggest winner.
More:
Wife of Boston Marathon Hero Claims Biden Groped Her.
Flashback: It’s time to talk about former Vice President Joe Biden, the open sexual predator.
Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents:
“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.
“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.
“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”
Plus: Washington Post: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?
Also: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.
Related: Talking Points Memo: Why Does Creepy Uncle Joe Biden Get A Pass From Liberals?
Plus:
And the lefty press would even talk about this stuff, until all of a sudden it wouldn’t.
Exit question: Which sold out faster: Toilet paper during the pandemic, or #MeToo when Biden was nominated?
PATRICK HENRY IS SPINNING IN HIS GRAVE: Hans Bader on Liberty Unyielding reports that a Fairfax County woman obtained documents through Virginia’s freedom of information process about the local school board’s spending on legal fees. Another Fairfax County woman published the documents after deleting confidential information.
Now a state judge has upheld the school board’s demand that the information be removed from the Internet and the documents returned to officials.
“This was a flagrant, obvious violation of Supreme Court rulings declaring that such court orders against speech are unconstitutional ‘prior restraints’ that violate the First Amendment,” Bader writes of the judge’s order.
“The Supreme Court has long made clear that people can’t be prevented from publishing information given to them by the government, even when the government gave them that information by mistake, and even when the information is highly private in nature. (See, e.g., Florida Star v. B.J.F. (1989)).
“As of today, the ACLU has not said one word about this highly-publicized instance of censorship, which has been widely discussed in the media in the last couple weeks, such as at Fox News, on TV, and in print publications.”
The saddest part of it is that nobody should be surprised by the Woke ACLU’s silence.
UPDATE: This post has been corrected from my original to make clear the ACLU filing was in the adjoining Loudoun County where parents are challenging use of woke pronouns in the school system, not the Fairfax case in which the judge sided with the school district and against the public’s right to know. The ACLU’s silence concerns the Fairfax case. For the record, Henry continues spinning.
GOP AGS TO SUE BIDEN ON VAX MANDATE: The White House is expected this week to release its official directive to private businesses to enforce Covid vaccination mandates on employees. The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reports Republican state attorneys general plan to sue.
SENILITY TEST FOR AGING OFFICIALS? Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a gastroenterologist, told Axios on HBO that top government officials in all three branches should be required to submit to an annual cognitive test. But how long before taking such a test becomes old hat?
MORE EVIDENCE BIDEN IS DIVIDING AMERICA: It’s in the latest Issues & Insights/TIPP Survey and the results point to divisions unlike anything seen since 1960s. About the only thing the respondents agreed on in fact is the U.S. is profoundly divided under His Fraudulency:
“A majority of groups agree America is divided, whether it’s White (73 percent say we’re divided) or Black/Hispanic (59 percent), Male (63 percent) or Female (72 percent), Democrat (55 percent) or Republican (80 percent) or Independent (75 percent), young (68 percent of 18-24 year olds) or old (83 percent of those over 65). “
October 17, 2021
OPEN THREAD: I’m just here for the party.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Virginia Parents Announce ‘Not a Domestic Terrorist’ March in Washington.
REALITY GIVES TATER COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: Bari Weiss Confronts Brian Stelter Over CNN’s Covid Lab Leak Theory Coverage in Tense Debate.
Stelter picked up on Weiss’ argument that the media is not “allowed” to pursue these topics, so he asked her “Who are the people stopping the conversation?”
That’s when Weiss called out CNN on Stelter’s show:
“People that work at networks like, frankly, like the one I’m speaking on right now,” she answered, “who try and claim that it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory.”
“But who said that at CNN?” Stelter countered. “When you say ‘allowed,’ I think it’s provocative thing to say. You say we’re not ‘allowed’ to talk about these things, but they’re all over the internet. I can Google them, find them everywhere, I’ve heard about every story you mentioned. Of course people are allowed to cover whatever you want to cover.”
Weiss retorted that it is “delusional” for the media to not acknowledge “an increasing number of subjects that have been deemed third rail by the mainstream institutions.”
Not least of which, CNN: CNN’s Smerconish complains of COVID lab leak theory ‘politics,’ despite network dismissing it for months. CNN published report in March of virologist saying lab leak theory was out of a ‘comic book.’
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A SMALLER BLOG: The incredible, disappearing — incompetent — Team Biden.
Buttigieg was always going to be a lightweight transportation chief. He got the job as a reward for dropping out of the presidential race and throwing his support to Joe Biden — and also because he said he likes trains, having gotten engaged at a train station.
My 5-year-old likes trains, too. Yet just because he can say “Choo choo!” with enthusiasm doesn’t mean he can oversee the country’s transportation system. When the country is having supply-chain problems, the transportation secretary’s skills and experience, let alone availability, become rather, uh, indispensable.
Buttigieg can take a two-month paternity leave, but the guy who runs the pizza shop down the block can’t just disappear for two months without putting someone else in charge. Someone has to make the calzone.
The public didn’t even learn about Buttigieg’s break at the start, but only after transportation-related problems exploded around us. Who’s running the shop? Anyone?
This is all in keeping with the way a distracted, carefree, ideological Biden administration has operated the whole time. In September, the president took a weekend beach trip as the disaster on our southern border blew up and 14,000 Haitian migrants camped out under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. As the US pullout from Afghanistan turned into an unmitigated disaster, the president disappeared — surfacing later to claim it was an enormous “success.”
Now, as Americans start to worry about stocking their cupboards and buying Christmas presents, Biden goes more than a week refusing to take any questions. Sorry, but this is unacceptable, no matter who’s president.
It’s Karol Markowicz, so read the whole thing.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
NO: Does Covid Cause Significant Brain Harm? Maxim Lott takes a deep dive into research on “long Covid.” He concludes that it’s real but has been, as usual, badly exaggerated by the media, and notes that the long-term effects may not be much worse than the long-term effects from the ordinary flu.
STEVEN PINKER: Rationality Saves Lives. Reason’s Nick Gillespie interviews the unwoke Harvard professor.
VENICE-ZUELA: Squalor By the Seaside. Homelessness and RV fires have overrun Venice Beach, California.
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY: Ciao, Alitalia. The previously untold (and hilarious) 500-year history of the “pope’s airline,” starting with Leonard da Vinci’s prototype of the Airbus A321. (Unfortunately for Pope Julius II — and for Alitalia’s on-time performance record — it was built of marble.)
PETE BUTTIGIEG’S HIGH-CLASS PROBLEMS:
Twenty years ago, American politicians sold globalization to their voters by promising that Brazil would become like us. Today, we are becoming like Brazil: a low-trust society with apparently insurmountable differences of class and race, in which the rich live in private spaces defended by a militarized police force, and politics has deteriorated into a theatrical.
At best.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: New York Times Faults Jeopardy Host Mayim Bialik for Pro-Israel Stance.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Instead Of Kryptonite, New LGBTQ+ Superman Will Be Crippled By Anyone Using Wrong Pronouns.
Fortunately though, Superman has Al Gore and Greta Thunberg on his side these days: Superman’s Next Big Fight Is Against Climate Change.
Wouldn’t it be easier for DC to stop printing comics and shut down its server farm instead? As Jim Treacher asks, “How many trees have died over the last 80 years to publish magazines about a guy in his underwear punching aliens and robots and bald guys?“
MATT TAIBBI: Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State.
On The Young Turks the other night, during a segment called — this is not a joke — “RebelHQ,” commentator Ben Carollo extolled the virtues of the CIA.
* * * * * * * *
Carollo looks like he’s about six, and I say that fully conceding jealousy over his full head of hair. It’s relevant only because he’s representative of a generation of young, left-leaning intellectuals who grew up in the Trump years believing the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other such agencies to be trusted, straight-and-narrow defenders of democratic “norms.” These credulous kids with piercings and chin-beards who think the secret services are on their side are the fruits of one of the great P.R. campaigns of our time.
Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when The Nation asked Edward Snowden about it, he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”
The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year declared illegal.
As Obama’s Middle East “advisor” Ben Rhodes famously said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
More Taibbi:
When Trump arrived, it almost immediately became obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started saying they believed in it.
QED:
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● Shot: Why is Pete Buttigieg still the Secretary of Transportation?
—Karen Townsend, Hot Air, yesterday.
● Chaser: The Buck Stops With No One After Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle.
—Matt Lewis, the Daily Beast, August 19th.
● Hangover: Kamala Harris’ team tries to distance her from fraught situation at the border.
—CNN, June 1st.
● The D.T.s: Who knew that governing was so ‘complicated?’
What does America have to show for having this elite braintrust in the White House? For one, gas prices, inflation and illegal immigration are all sky-high. Plus we have a supply chain crisis on both coasts. Last week, when discussing the gridlock at the ports, President Biden spoke for under six minutes before wandering off the stage as reporters shouted questions at the back of his head, a gesture which has come to characterize his presidency to date.
The truth is that even if Joe were allowed to take questions, he would not have any answers for us. And his team isn’t any better.
—Grace Curley, Spectator World, today.
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Rat-borne disease of ‘high risk’ to homeless identified in Boston.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Blue-check investigative journo says if Sen. Joe Manchin isn’t stopped, climate destruction is ensured:
By the late 1960s, as Fred Siegel wrote in “Progressives Against Progress” at City Journal a few years ago, “Crankery, in short, became respectable:”
In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.
Back in the early 1970s, it was overpopulation that was about to destroy the Earth. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich, who has been involved in all three waves, warned that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” on our crowded planet. He predicted mass starvation and called for compulsory sterilization to curb population growth, even comparing unplanned births with cancer: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.” An advocate of abortion on demand, Ehrlich wanted to ban photos of large, happy families from newspapers and magazines, and he called for new, heavy taxes on baby carriages and the like. He proposed a federal Department of Population and Environment that would regulate both procreation and the economy. But the population bomb, fear of which peaked during Richard Nixon’s presidency, never detonated. Population in much of the world actually declined in the 1970s, and the green revolution, based on biologically modified foods, produced a sharp increase in crop productivity.
“Progressivism” — where time stands still:
(Classical reference in headline.)
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DOWN: Deaths from tuberculosis rose in 2020, for the first time in a decade, the W.H.O. says.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Where Did the Phrase “Hubba Hubba” Come From?
DISPATCHES FROM THE IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT PARTY: Eco-Nazis Storm Federal Building And The Left Isn’t Crying This Time.
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