ENABLING THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG: Biden Administration Suspends Rule Protecting Businesses from Banking Discrimination.
CALM DOWN, THEY’RE STEALING AS FAST AS THEY CAN: Biden administration sitting on $1 trillion in unspent COVID-19 relief funds.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Andrew Cuomo Should Be In Prison for His COVID-19 Lies. “It should be noted that while they were lying to the public because President Trump was turning it into a ‘political football,’ Cuomo was using his criminal lack of transparency as a political opportunity. He was regularly appearing on his brother’s CNN show to engage in an uncomfortable incestuous attention whore fest. He was hamming it up at his daily press conferences and lapping up the media attention he was undeservedly receiving.”
WHAT IF TRUMP SUPPORTERS SHUN ANYONE WHO WENT TO HARVARD? Students And Alumni Ask Harvard Law School To Shun Anyone Who Worked For The Trump Administration.
YOU DON’T SAY: Russia Defiant of White House’s Foreign Policy Agenda.
As Biden reduces American energy independence, Moscow will be able to afford that much more mischief — Tehran, too.
READER BOOK PLUG: From J.P. Mac, Death Honk: Nine Tales of the Macabre.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: The French are absolutely right to say ‘no thanks’ to US woke-ism. “Academics disagree, of course. But that’s no more a surprise than seeing manufacturers of synthetic cheese stand up in defense of Velveeta.”
THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS ARE THE KEY TO RESISTANCE: Gov. Ron DeSantis will fight any attempt to restrict travel to and from Florida.
WHEN EZRA KLEIN HAS NOTICED. . . . California Is Making Liberals Squirm: If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else? “California, as the biggest state in the nation, and one where Democrats hold total control of the government, carries a special burden. If progressivism cannot work here, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?”
Once you start looking for this pattern, you see it everywhere. California talks a big game on climate change, but even with billions of dollars in federal funding, it couldn’t build high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The project was choked by pricey consultants, private land negotiations, endless environmental reviews, county governments suing the state government. It has been shrunk to a line connecting the midsize cities of Bakersfield and Merced, and even that is horribly over budget and behind schedule. . . .
The vaccine rollout in California was marred by overly complex eligibility criteria that slowed the pace of vaccinations terribly in the early days. Those regulations were written with good intentions, as California politicians worried over how to balance speed and equity. The result, however, wasn’t fairness, but sluggishness, and California lagged behind the rest of the nation for the first weeks of the effort. Eventually, the state reversed course and simplified eligibility.
When you prize wokeness over results, you get wokeness over results.
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Destroyer.
Ice is back!
And back in trouble.
His mission–sabotage the Cyborg Empire–goes awry when the Cyborgs discover his dimensional gate, and Gior, the obnoxious young woman with the rare talent of being able to manipulate dimensional phenomena, is forced to close that gate moments before the Cyborgs capture her.
Now Ice is not just marooned in enemy territory, he needs to rescue Gior quickly, before they get a control chip into her brain.
NOW? THEY’LL GET WHAT THEY DESERVE: Hollywood Sold Its Soul to China … Now What?
The ridiculous assumption that SOMEHOW China’s market was their for the plucking was always a mirage. As it is for Nike, and all the other brands.
Stupidity should hurt. Heinlein said it was the only capital crime. They get what they deserve.
CHINA SURE IS GETTING WHAT IT PAID FOR: Biden Administration Drops Trump Plan to Track Campus ‘Confucius Institutes’.
WHEN LEFTISTS SCARE THE LEFT, THERE’S TUMBRILS ON THE HORIZON: France sees foreign threat: “out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture”.
WHICH IN TURN ARE CIRCLING AT RELATIVISTIC SPEED: Psaki Circles Back To The School Opening Goalposts.
WHICH IS PRECISELY THE INTENT: New “Gun Trafficking” Bill Could Cripple Legal Firearms Market.
They’ll make us all criminals, because criminals are easier to scared.
THAT IS BECAUSE THEY KNOW WHAT THEY PLAN: Today’s blacklisted American: Disney fires actress for noting the Nazis killed Jews.
And they want to continue believing they’re on the side of angels, despite the horrors they intend.
HYPOCRISY IS WHAT THEY HAVE: Criminal Justice Reform And The Hypocrisy Of The Left.
They’re going to stick with it.
CCP HAS SUCCESSFULLY SCRUBBED ALL EVIDENCE FROM THE WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY: World Health Organization: China’s Denials of a Lab Leak Resolve the Issue for Us.
THE LAWS OF PHYSICS ARE SEXIST. REEEEE! Study: Smaller cars may be why crashes injure women more.
THE NEWS THAT WASN’T FIT TO PRINT: NY Times spikes column that criticized paper’s handling of N-word controversy.
BEHOLD! MY FACE! HOW SHOCKED! Biden administration opens Texas tent city to detain migrants.
Single adult Mexican citizens accounted for more than 37,000 CBP encounters, a 119 percent increase from this time last year, according to the agency.
Amid the surge, a new “soft-sided facility” was established this week by the agency in Donna, Texas, to hold individuals originally staying at the Centralized Processing Center in McAllen, Texas.
The Donna facility is “weatherproof, climate-controlled, and provide[s] ample areas for eating, sleeping, and personal hygiene,” CBP said in a statement Tuesday.
The agency went on to call the Donna location “a considerable upgrade from previous soft-sided facilities,” touting its 160,000 square feet of covered area.
Oh. So, Trump had tent cities but the FICUS (Fraud In Chief of the US) has “soft sided facilities” and they’re a “considerable upgrade” because there’s more of them. Say no more.
Dear media, proctological exams are not — repeat not — supposed to be performed with one’s tongue.
FOR THE AWKWARD MOMENT: Diamond Hands.
YEAH, ABOUT THAT: Baby Yoda Cries.
February 11, 2021
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: The French are absolutely right to say ‘no thanks’ to US woke-ism. “By its fruit the tree is known, and the fruits of woke leftism in the United States have been poisonous.”
WILLFULLY, AND WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT? How a leading anti-Trump group ignored a crisis in its ranks.
And by “crisis,” they mean “serial sex offender.”
Plus, the Lincoln Project explained: “Its founders represent a who’s who of prominent Republican strategists on cable television, including Schmidt and Reed Galen, both former advisers to John McCain; conservative attorney George Conway; former New Hampshire GOP chair Jennifer Horn; Florida-based veteran political ad maker Rick Wilson; and Weaver, who has long advised former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.” And “tens of millions” that went . . . somewhere.
George Conway swears that he knew nothing.
I’M SORRY. IT’S JUST THIS PANDEMIC AND THAT LYING BASTARD TRUMP! Cuomo aide admits they hid nursing home data so feds wouldn’t find out. “The stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because ‘right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,’ according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.”
READ THE COLUMN THE NEW YORK TIMES DIDN’T WANT YOU TO READ: “Last weekend, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece criticizing the rationale behind the forced ouster of Times reporter Donald J. McNeil, but it was never published. Stephens told colleagues the column was killed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Since then, the piece has circulated among Times staffers and others — and it was from one of them, not Stephens himself, that The Post obtained it. We publish his spiked column here in full.”
ALEX PEREZ: Want Hispanic Votes? Loosen Up. “Trump won in Miami because he was just too much fun to resist.”
THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account.
Twitter permanently banned an account on Thursday belonging to Project Veritas, a conservative group founded by controversial activist James O’Keefe.
The decision followed what a Twitter spokesperson described to CNN Business as repeated violations of the platform’s policies prohibiting sharing — or threats of sharing — other people’s private information without consent.
Twitter declined to say what specific tweets may have triggered the enforcement action. But in a post on Project Veritas’s public Telegram channel Thursday afternoon, the group said the suspension occurred after it published a video in which Project Veritas accosted Facebook VP of Integrity at his home.
If that’s the standard at Twitter, then I’m really genuinely curious to see the repercussions of Jack banning CBS and the New York Times in the coming days…
JOSH BLACKMAN & SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: A Reply to the House of Representatives’ Managers’ Reply Memorandum. “We emphasized the phrase, ‘particularly in the context of his prior remarks.’ We suggest the Managers recognize that Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech, by itself, cannot meet the Brandenburg standard. Rather, they need to bring in ‘prior remarks.’ Which remarks, the Managers do not say.”
Plus: “A pro tip for law students: when a citation includes quotes strung out across non-consecutive pages, check if the quotations are taken out of context. The House managers made this precise error.” Was it an “error?” Barrett & Tillman’s discussion of what’s actually quoted is pretty devastating.
THE LIVES OF OTHERS WAS NOT INTENDED AS A JOURNALISTIC HOW-TO GUIDE: “Factually: What will fact-checkers find on Clubhouse?”, asks an article at Poynter.org:
There is a new social media platform trending worldwide. It’s called Clubhouse and it brings together people like Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. For the moment, it seems to be beyond the reach of the broader fact-checking community, but this should change soon.
I joined Clubhouse this week. And it was only possible because I own an iPhone. The hot new network only runs on iOS.
To be accepted, I also had to deploy an invitation code. Downloading the app isn’t enough. To be a Clubhouse user you must know the right people …
As reported by tech websites and popular newspapers, Clubhouse aims to be the most exclusive social media platform ever launched. It offers its users the opportunity to enter different chat rooms (clubs) and share live audio feeds — not text or images — with thousands of other people. Rooms are divided by topic and you can even schedule your participation by scrolling through what discussions will be up in the next hours.
Clubhouse was mentioned in the Sunday Glenn Greenwald article in which he noted that the New York Times’ hall monitor Taylor Lorenz falsely accused Netscape founder Marc Andreessen of using (gasp!) the word “retard:”
Lorenz lied. Andreessen never used that word. And rather than apologize and retract it, she justified her mistake by claiming it was a “male voice” that sounded like his, then locked her Twitter account as though she — rather than the person she falsely maligned — was the victim.
But the details of what happened are revealing. The discussion which Lorenz falsely described took place on a relatively new audio app called “Clubhouse,” an invitation-only platform intended to allow for private, free-ranging group conversations. It has become popular among Silicon Valley executives and various media personalities (I was invited onto the app a few months ago but never attended or participated in any discussions). But as CNBC noted this week, “as the app has grown, people of more diverse backgrounds have begun to join,” and it “has carved out a niche among Black users, who have innovated new ways for using it.” Its free-speech ethos has also made it increasingly popular in China as a means of avoiding repressive online constraints.
These private chats have often been infiltrated by journalists, sometimes by invitation and other times by deceit. These journalists attempt to monitor the discussions and then publish summaries. Often, the “reporting” consists of out-of-context statements designed to make the participants look bigoted, insensitive, or otherwise guilty of bad behavior. In other words, journalists, desperate for content, have flagged Clubhouse as a new frontier for their slimy work as voluntary hall monitors and speech police.
As Twitter use “PoliMath” adds, “The desire to hold discussions in Clubhouse ‘accountable’ is kind of insane It would be like demanding entry to someone’s house for a party and going around butting in on everyone’s conversation to make sure they don’t say something bad.”
Exit quote from the Poynter article: “On Monday, after a rare moment of cross-border dialogue between users from mainland China and others outside the country, Chinese censors moved in. If Xi Jinping’s administration isn’t ignoring Clubhouse, why should fact-checkers? Why should you?”
LEARN TO CODE: Bloomberg News axes 90 as top editor blasts staff.
Classical reference in headline: Appalachian Miners Are Learning to Code.
—Bloomberg News, February 2nd, 2016.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Berkeley Dorms Guarded by Cops Who Only Let Students Out To Eat, Use the Bathroom, or Get a COVID-19 Test.
HE SPOUTS THE PARTY LINE, GRANTING HIM UNLIMITED IMMUNITY: Disney Fired Gina Carano for a Holocaust Post. What About Pedro Pascal?
UNEXPECTEDLY: Hoo boy… Gas is up 18% since Biden took office, but that’s just the beginning.
Related: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Has Buyer’s Remorse After Helping to ‘Fortify’ the Election.
[T]he members of the “conspiracy” — Time‘s characterization, not mine — put pressure on the media and social media to manage what Americans’ were allowed to see and read. They kept the pressure up as the Trump campaign attempted to demonstrate its claims of election irregularities in several states. We would come to find out that in swing states where vote-counting stalled there were significant infusions of cash into Biden-heavy districts. These donations funded a get-out-the-vote initiative through selected election offices that are supposed to be financed by the taxpayer. The Amistad Project currently has lawsuits against the counties that took the funds from the not-for-profit funded by Mark Zuckerberg’s wife.
Yet the U.S. Chamber of Commerce partnered with these progressive groups and somehow expected Biden would not implement those groups’ radical wish list. The proposed energy policies alone should have scared them, but they didn’t. Now, with Biden’s express endorsement of a $15/hour minimum wage, the Chamber has objections.
Or to put it another way:
MARK PULLIAM: NOT-SO-UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES. “The most controversial aspect of President Biden’s Executive Order, or at least the item that has received the greatest attention to date, is the likely impact on women’s sports.”
YOU STAY CLASSY, NANCY: Pelosi Banned GOP Congresswoman’s Military Officer Son From Attending Her Swearing-In.
HOLLYWOOD: And by the way, what does it say about America that something new called “QualityLand” is shunned and they’re bringing back “Beavis and Butt-Head”? “Watching ‘The Sopranos’ in the 1990s, I might have wondered, What would HBO be in the 2020s? If the only fact I had from the future was HBO will be generating new episodes of ‘Beavis and Butt-Head,’ I would have been terrified. What the hell will have happened to America?!”
Possibly related: The Decline of Intelligence in the West. “Recent studies have reported a worrisome decline in IQ scores in Western nations over the last decades, a reversal of the once-hopeful Flynn Effect (named after the late philosopher and psychologist James R. Flynn) which posited a growth in cognitive abilities for much of the 20th Century. Now the Flynn Effect seems to have reversed.”
ALBANY DETERMINED TO FINISH OFF DECADENT BOURGEOIS NEW YORK CITY FOR GOOD: “State lawmakers in Albany, New York are considering imposing a tax on financial transactions. If they go through with it, the iconic New York Stock Exchange might actually leave the Empire State.”
I’D BE MORE IMPRESSED IF THE PREVIOUS RECORD HADN’T BEEN HELD BY A FORD FIESTA: Porsche Taycan claims indoor speed record.
I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Review: Federal .357 Magnum HammerDown Ammunition.
LIVE IN FIVE… FOUR… THREE…: VIP Gold Live Chat with Kruiser, Preston, VodkaPundit.
FLASHBACK: Biden Compared Trump to Goebbels, Used Hitler in a Campaign Ad.
Every Republican for at least the last 20 years has been Literally Hitler™, but Gina Carano makes one on-point reference and she’s canceled.
READER BOOK PLUG: From J.P. Mac, Death Honk: Nine Tales of the Macabre.
UPSTAGED BY STARLINK? Alphabet’s Loon Failed to Bring Internet to the World. What Went Wrong?
BTW, I’ve signed up for Starlink whenever it becomes available in my area. I’ll let you know how things work out.
DISNEY CANCELS THE MANDALORIAN STAR GINA CARANO OVER PROVOCATIVE SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS. If over-the-top statements likening one’s political opponents to Nazis are grounds for firing, Hollywood is in trouble:
Hollywood is chock full of people with quirky political views making dramatic analogies. As Bloomberg‘s Eli Lake pointed out, Sean Penn is an apologist for former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Benicio del Toro dedicated an award to the memory of murderous Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. Nick Cannon praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a repugnant anti-Semite. (ViacomCBS fired Cannon for his remarks, but rehired him after he apologized.)
Carano has occasionally made other controversial comments: She has criticized universal masking and suggested that combating voter fraud should be a major part of the Republican agenda. Disney apparently abandoned plans to give Carano her own show following one such post back in November.
Some conservatives have called for a boycott of Disney following its decision. While I’m not the biggest fan of boycotts, it strikes me as reasonable for conservatives to be upset about this double standard. Why does Disney care more about Carano’s dumb but relatively inconsequential Instagram post than it does about China’s ethnic cleansing of the Uighur Muslims? If the company thinks “denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities” is abhorrent, then perhaps it shouldn’t be working so closely with the Chinese Communist Party, which earned a “special thanks” in the credits of Mulan.
Flashback: Lucasfilm Leftists Join Forces With Communist China:
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Mainstream Media to Trump, ‘I Wish I Could Quit You.’
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Remember when we told you that the MSM could never give up their Trump addiction?
Answer: They’ll try to deny it, they’ll try to stealth edit it, but they just can’t quit him.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Wesley Mouch — er, Joe Biden — has it in for Florida
- New York to NYSE: Drop Dead!
- Gina Carano is going to be just fine
Bonus Sanity: Justice for Warnock? Maybe…
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
REDLINING THE GODWIN METER: Los Angeles Times Review of Andy Ngo’s Antifa Book Compares Him to Nazi Josef Goebbels.
It appears that the Yahoo News White House correspondent, Alexander Nazaryan, has not changed his ground game in at least five years. In 2016 he compared Ted Cruz and his staff to Nazis. He was forced to delete that tweet after being publicly shamed for his over the top comparison but apparently he has not learned his lesson.
Nazaryan’s latest shameful comparison runs along the same lines when he compared journalist Andy Ngo to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in his his latest review of Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Racial Plan to Destroy Democracy.
Not only does Nazaryan compare Ngo to the notorious Nazi, but he also absurdly downplays the dangers posed by Antifa to the extent of not capitalizing the name of that organization in both the text and title of his Los Angeles Times book review on Monday, “Andy Ngo’s new book still pretends antifa’s the real enemy.”
First let us cut to the chase with Nazaryan’s Goebbels comparison:
…Every act of violence by antifa, meanwhile, is described so meticulously and ominously that Herr Goebbels would have been proud.
And while Nazaryan goes over the top with his comparison of Ngo to Goebbels, he also completely underplays the dangers posed by Antifa which he portrays as basically harmless.
As Joe Biden would say, they’re just an “idea.” Speaking of which: Left-wing Atlantic writer bizarrely compares covering Trump to storming Omaha Beach on D-Day.
Left-wing Yahoo “national correspondent” Alexander Nazaryan compared covering the Trump administration to being on Omaha Beach for the D-Day invasion in a piece for The Atlantic on Thursday.
“Covering the administration was thrilling for many journalists, in the way that I imagine storming Omaha Beach must have been for a 20-year-old fresh from the plains of Kansas,” Nazaryan wrote. “He hadn’t signed up for battle, but there he was, liberating France.
I don’t think soldiers storming Omaha Beach had to worry much about airbrushes that day, though:
SHOCKER: New York City subway has dirtier air than neighboring transit systems.
I remember less than a year ago, when Bill de Blasio was encouraging people to ride the subway. “”I’m here on the subway to say to people nothing to fear, go about your lives.”
Related: MIT study: Subways a ‘major disseminator’ of coronavirus in NYC.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot:
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” Biden said while campaigning in Iowa City, Iowa, arguing that China has problems of its own.
—“Biden downplays Chinese economic competition, drawing criticism from Republicans and Sanders,” CNN, May 2nd, 2019.
● Chaser: China is ‘going to eat our lunch’ on infrastructure, Biden says.
—The New York Post, today.
THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING: I believe Trump got much wrong about the First Amendment. As yes, he would often (not without reason) unleash his Master Troll skills on the White House Press corps, who I’ve likened to cats chasing a laser pointer.
That said, for four years we heard a drumbeat from media critics, news organizations and inside-the-bubble DC types about how Trump — and conservatives in general — are a threat to the physical safety of reporters. Remember when heads rolled at The New York Times after they (gasp!) published an Op/Ed written by conservative Senator Tom Cotton that according to Times reporters, “puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger”? Oh yes:
Nikole Hannah-Jones, who recently won a Pulitzer prize for the 1619 Project, which examines the legacy of slavery in America, tweeted: “I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.”
Both Sulzberger and Bennet first defended the decision to run the column. Bennet wrote in an essay that “debating influential ideas openly, rather than letting them go unchallenged, is far more likely to help society reach the right answers.”
But on Thursday evening, the Times reversed itself and said the column had not met editorial standards.
Allow me to do a “whattabout” here. Allegedly sincere and intelligent adults flipped out over “allowing” their readers to see an opinion that — in only the most concatenated and gymnastic logic — could lead to a reporter being harmed.
Yet, when a genuine — not imaginary — physical assault on a journalist happens, there is no hue and cry, not a word from the Committee to Protect Journalists nor their empty-vessel mouthpiece Christiane Amanpour. Not a peep from Jim Acosta or Margaret Sullivan or Brian Stelter. Of course, the reporter (a woman, no less) identifies as a conservative:
Two men were busted for rubbing a dirty diaper on an independent, conservative reporter’s face and attacking her during a Black Lives Matter rally in Madison Square Park last month, according to authorities and police sources.
The New York Post adds that a video clip shows her being hit with an umbrella, spat on, hit with a skateboard, while the crowd says, ‘Don’t protect [her], she’s for Trump.”
Glad the NYPD caught the assailants, but the hypocrisy of the people who claim to care about protecting reporters is disappointing at best. You can bet your bottom dollar that were she a freelancer for NPR or The Daily Koz (same thing, I know, I know) we’d have heard more outrage.
Seems to me that the silence of journalism’s would-be “defenders” is pretty much saying “She deserved it for being a conservative.”
NEWS I HOPE YOU CAN’T USE: Study: MRI-guided ultrasound treats prostate cancer with few side effects.
RELAX. SLOW JOE SAYS THE CHINESE ARE OUR FRIENDS. Uighurs: ‘Credible case’ China carrying out genocide.
Disney was happy to film Mulan practically within sight of the camps, though. “The final credits thank a government security agency in Xinjiang province, where about 1m people – mostly Muslim Uighurs – are thought to be detained.”
REMINDER: OUR OLIGARCHS SEE CHINA AS A MODEL, NOT A WARNING. Big Tech’s Deadly Threat to Democracy.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): NJ substitute teacher, 41, accused of ‘multiple’ sex romps with her teen boy student. “According to NJ.com, New Jersey substitute teacher Kameelah Kareem, 41, faces multiple counts linked to the alleged sexual relationship. . . . She faces counts of second degree sexual assault and second degree endangering the welfare of a child.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Gina Carano Rehired By Disney After She Identifies As An Abusive Male Director.
Why, it’s as if: Gina Carano’s Firing Is the Product of Yet More Calvinball.
COLLUSION: RealClearInvestigations: America’s Spy-Busters Put Secret-Stealing Chinese ‘Grad Students’ Under Microscope. “But this isn’t a simple story of a belligerent power’s intellectual larceny and espionage. It’s a more nuanced problem that the United States largely brought upon itself through its longstanding policy of engagement with China aimed at bringing it into the international fold. One result is a Chinese symbiosis with American universities that includes Chinese financial support for American schools and large subsidies from American taxpayers for both sensitive research and the visiting Chinese nationals who conduct it. . . . What happened after those four arrests was even more revealing about the scope of China’s clandestine presence in the United States: An estimated 1,000 Chinese graduate researchers abruptly fled the country and returned to China – apparently, in the view of American officials, because they had concealed their ties to the Chinese military and were afraid of arrest.”
SNOWFALLS ARE A THING OF A THE PAST: Se7°en. “Take a look at the temperature on Monday: 7°F. Not 37, not 27, but 7°F. That wouldn’t be the coldest Austin day on record, but it would be the coldest this century and the coldest since it hit 4°F in 1989.”
WELL, THAT HARSHES THE “CLIMATE CHANGE” NARRATIVE: Climate change: global warming may have started before industrial revolution, Chinese study says. “Studies of coral reefs in the Paracel Islands suggest that the South China Sea started warming up in 1825, at the start of the industrial revolution, according to a study by Chinese scientists. That was the year the world’s first railway began operating in England and most ocean-going ships still used wind power. Man-made carbon dioxide emissions could not fully explain such an early rise in the warming trend.”
EMBATTLED MASSACHUSETTS CLIMATE OFFICIAL DAVID ISMAY RESIGNS ‘IMMEDIATELY:’
David Ismay, the Baker administration $130,000-a-year climate change undersecretary, has resigned “immediately” citing his incendiary comments.
In a resignation letter he shared with the Herald today, Ismay writes: “It is with great regret that I submit my resignation, effectively immediately, from the position of Undersecretary for Climate Change in the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.”
The resignation letter is addressed to his boss, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Kathleen Theoharides, and is dated Wednesday, Feb. 10.
Ismay heads out the door after a series of questionable comments about forcing homeowners, motorists and fishermen to prepare for hard times as the state pushes for so-called Net Zero emissions in the years to come.
Even Gov. Charlie Baker bristled at Ismay’s rhetoric, saying the undersecretary does not speak for him.
Ismay laded on the hot seat after MassFiscal posted a video of the undersecretary saying the state needs to “break their will” and “turn the screws on” ordinary people to force changes in their consumption of heating fuels and gasoline. Ismay described the ordinary people as the “person across the street” and the “senior on fixed income.”
That didn’t sit well with the governor.
“First of all, no one who works in our administration should ever say or think anything like that — ever,” Baker said late last week. “Secondly, Secretary Theoharides is going to have a conversation with him about that.”
“Santino, never let anyone outside the family know what you are thinking.”
Related: Howie Carr: Charlie Baker’s blundering climate guy shines light on hypocrisy.
JEFF BEZOS CAN AFFORD A LOT OF MOVING TRUCKS: Jeff Bezos would owe $2B a year under proposed Washington wealth tax.
Washington state lawmakers introduced a bill earlier this year that would impose a 1% levy on “extraordinary” intangible financial assets including cash, stocks, publicly traded options, futures contracts, pension funds and bonds, but not income.
“Asking the state’s poorest residents to pay six times more in taxes, as a share of their income, than the state’s highest income households, including some of the wealthiest individuals in the world, is unconscionable,” the proposal said.
Legislators estimate the tax would raise about $2.5 billion in new revenue.
Easy call: It won’t.
NORMAL STUDENT BEHAVIOR IS NOW “RECKLESS” STUDENT BEHAVIOR. If you’re this worried, you should end sports competitions. You’re not doing that because they make the university money. So no high horses, please.
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE MIGHT HAVE TO BE PERMANENTLY RETIRED: Google, Facebook tell SCOTUS it should be harder for you to sue them. “The argument boils down to ‘if you don’t know we messed up, it can’t hurt you’.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Yale prof accuses conservative journalist of slander, quickly backtracks when called out.
EVERYONE IS A CONSERVATIVE ABOUT WHAT THEY KNOW BEST: Amazon Hired Koch-Backed Anti-Union Consultant to Fight Alabama Warehouse Organizing. “The head of the Center for Independent Employees is paid $3,200 per day to thwart what could become Amazon’s first unionized facility in the U.S.”
DECOUPLING: Calls to close CCP-funded Confucius Institutes grow louder. Here’s what’s fueling them. “The national chairmen of the College Democrats and the College Republicans joined in signing the statement.”
“SHUT UP,” THEY EXPLAINED: Twitter confirms Trump’s ban is permanent, even if he runs again in 2024.
Trump tweeted his way to the White House once, and Jack Dorsey and the rest of the antisocial media mafia are for damned sure not going to let that happen again.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Hollywood Sold Its Soul to China … Now What? “China may no longer need U.S. movies to entertain its populace. The L.A. Times reports Chinese-made films dominated the country’s 2020 box office charts. The highest ranking U.S. film, “Tenet,” came in at number 11… it looks like China won’t be saving as many U.S. blockbusters as it had in the past. An already reeling Hollywood will have to find new ways to balance its ledgers as the theater industry tries to come back from the crippling pandemic.”
Get woke, go broke — and do read the whole thing, in which Christian collected years’ worth of Hollywood kowtowing to the CCP in one convenient column.
But then, our ruling class sees China as a model.
BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: Unity on civil war: Both sides see US ‘headed for bloodshed’.
THIS WILL BE AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT IN WHETHER YOU CAN HAVE A POLITICAL PARTY COMPOSED ENTIRELY OF “OFFICIALS” AND CONSULTANTS: Exclusive: Dozens of former Republican officials in talks to form anti-Trump third party. I suppose they can count on some money from lefty billionaires to help fill some pockets, anyway.
Also, the notion that the GOP is “divided” is hogwash. Bush finished in 2009 with an approval of 34%, and that was a bounce from a fall low of 25%. Trump finished with 51%, and a 79% approval rating among Republicans.
I NEVER WORRIED ABOUT COMMUNIST TIME TRAVELERS UNTIL TOMORROW: China Swears It Isn’t Building a Time Machine.
BRING ME THE HEAD OF SIGREDO GARCIA: Inmate Says Convicted Dan Markel Hit Man Claims Prosecutor Coerced Him To Lie On The Stand.
WHAT IF WE HAD AN IMPEACHMENT AND NOBODY CAME? Few expect Trump conviction, even fewer to watch Senate trial.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired. “Ten doses of the Covid-19 vaccine would expire within hours, so a Houston doctor gave it to people with medical conditions, including his wife. What followed was ‘the lowest moment in my life,’ Dr. Hasan Gokal said. . . . Late last month, a judge dismissed the charge as groundless, after which the local district attorney vowed to present the matter to a grand jury.”
As pointed out in the comments, note that this is a Blue Zone, with a Democratic mayor and a Democratic District Attorney. The NYT does not point that out in its outraged discussion.
Plus: “The officials maintained that he had violated protocol and should have returned the remaining doses to the office or thrown them away, the doctor recalled. He also said that one of the officials startled him by questioning the lack of ‘equity’ among those he had vaccinated. ‘Are you suggesting that there were too many Indian names in that group?’ Dr. Gokal said he asked. Exactly, he said he was told.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: In a Just World Democrats Would Pay for Impeachment Lies. “The Democrats want to think they’re on the moral high horse right now. In reality, they’re all mucking about neck-deep in the stable dung. I would like to say that they are embarrassing themselves but none of them have any self awareness, so they can’t be embarrassed.”
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: ‘It’s nonsense:’ Piers Morgan blasts policy replacing ‘breastfeeding’ with ‘chestfeeding’ in transgender-inclusive effort at UK hospital.
CHARLES LIPSON: The Political Logic of the Trump Trial.
Democrats may end up paying a higher political price than they anticipate. The trial won’t only delay Mr. Biden’s program. It will tarnish his image as a “unifier” eager to work across party lines. That identity will be much harder to sustain after Democratic senators vote in lockstep to convict Mr. Trump and push through a mammoth Covid relief bill without any Republican votes.
With all or almost all Democrats supporting Mr. Trump’s conviction, the president will be pressed to declare his position. Whether Mr. Biden speaks out or not, he signaled his position when he refused to dissuade Mrs. Pelosi from transmitting the House’s article of impeachment to the Senate. The speaker wouldn’t have done so over the new president’s opposition.
As the trial unfolds, Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (who has begged off from presiding over the trial) will try to keep a low profile while avoiding any criticism of this party-line effort to denounce and convict Mr. Trump. That tacit approval will be universally applauded by Democrats and their media allies. But it leaves Mr. Biden facing backward, avenging grievances from the Trump years, not forward, advancing his own program. Partisan revenge is hard to reconcile with bipartisan restoration.
Presuming Democrats were ever interested in such a thing, of course.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: If You Thought the 2020 Elections Were Chaotic, Just Wait.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Gene-Editing: China Is Creating a New Master Race.
FROM KAL SPRIGGS: The Fallen Race.
Humanity has fallen.
Earth has become a charnel house, the bones of twelve billion inhabitants moldering in ruined and gutted cities, victims of their own governments. Earth’s remaining colonies are besieged. On two sides, aliens bent on the eradication of humanity continue their unstoppable march, capturing world after world.
Baron Lucius Giovanni, Captain of the War Shrike, finds himself in a position to stand and fight. The son of a renegade officer and a social outcast himself, he nevertheless refuses to give up. Lucius has few resources: a forgotten colony in a backwater of space, his ship and crew, and the rumors of a lost fleet that might hold the key to the survival of the human race. He’ll take on pirates, aliens, and his own treacherous allies in a bid to save humanity.
Lucius will not give up. He will not go quietly into the night. He will stand against humanity’s foes and he will prove that while humanity may have fallen, they will rise once again.
EVEN RATS LIKE PRIVATE WHEELS: Rats love driving tiny cars, even when they don’t get treats.
ONLY A CAT WOULD FIND IT NECESSARY TO SAY “I’M NOT A CAT”: How to use the Zoom cat filter to look like viral feline lawyer.
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