January 17, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE:

Posted at 7:42 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ABOLISH THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, A PARTISAN SLOUGH:

Posted at 7:37 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA:

Posted at 7:29 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHANGE: End the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

If you want to defund them, cutting off federal funding isn’t enough. You need to stop state-run affiliate stations from buying NPR and PBS programming.

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, GOOD: U.K. announces new inquiries into decade-old cases of child sexual grooming after pressure sparked by Elon Musk tweet. “Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced Thursday that there would be a number of new central government-backed local inquiries into years-old allegations of child grooming gangs, weeks after Elon Musk accused British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failings in relation to the handling of the crimes in a series of tweets. The crimes took place a decade ago when Starmer was the country’s top prosecutor.”

Still, it feels a bit like the fox investigating who raided the henhouse.

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Sorry, WAY Wrong Number. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news and this week we have one NSFW former sheriff’s deputy, the worst wrong number to dial, and a mystery woman’s MRI gone horribly wrong.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

COMPLEXITY: Nine Months And GM Can’t Supply A Bumper. “Now, it’s tempting to think this is yet another result of the Flu Manchu supply chain disruption. And it might be. But something else is at play here: The drive to make new cars ‘smarter’ (and thus more expensive). The Lyriq uses ‘multiple ultrasonic sensors located on your front and rear bumpers.’ The more smart components the car has, the more fragile the supply chain and the easier to break.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Stephen Green

BRADLEY THOMPSON: The State of the Union…and What You Can Do About It.

At the highest level of abstraction, the greatest existential threat to the United States is a philosophic virus of the mind. Specifically, the two greatest threats to the United States are nihilism and socialism, which, as actionable ideologies, are working in tandem to destroy Western Civilization.

Socialism is the end, and nihilism is the means.

What do I mean by that? How has our present condition come to be, and how does it work in practice?

In the 1960s, the New Left abandoned Marx’s idea of a convulsive proletarian revolution because the working class was inherently conservative. The new revolutionary strategy was for the intellectual and cultural elite to engage in a long march through America’s cultural institutions. The nihilistic goal was to undermine all the values and virtues of America and Western civilization. America’s cultural Left attacked reason, truth, objectivity, free will, rights, individualism, freedom, constitutionalism, and capitalism.

Since the 1960s, the Cultural Left has successfully infiltrated and commandeered the universities, the K-12 school system, the churches and synagogues, the media, Hollywood, major philanthropic institutions, virtually all professional organizations, social media, corporate America, etc. Things are so bad that the Cultural Left even controls the NFL and ESPN!

This postmodern Left controls virtually every opinion-forming institution in the country today. Even the family has been gutted and transformed. Parents no longer have a right to know, for instance, if the government schools are socially transitioning their children in preparation for the medical transitioning of their children.

Let me sum up our situation in the starkest terms possible: What kind of society sanctions the drugging and mutilation its children?

Let that sink in for a moment!!!

This is the victory of nihilism. Destroy capitalism’s underlying civic culture, and you destroy capitalism. Socialism is what follows.

But the situation is much worse than this because the Left has also captured the Federal and state bureaucracies (as well as NGOs) to affect every aspect of our lives. The result has been the merging of nihilism and socialism with what we call the Deep State, which is an entirely legitimate concept. In fact, I would like to suggest that the Deep State is much deeper and broader than most people realize.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

NARRATOR: THE MARCHES WERE NEVER ABOUT A CEASEFIRE AND WERE ALWAYS ABOUT INTIMIDATING JEWS.

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green