UPDATE: In a brilliant display of modesty, Cheney not-so-subtly compares herself to Lincoln:
Liz Cheney: "Abraham Lincoln was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all…” pic.twitter.com/3bIFVv2Ch0
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 17, 2022
(Which makes sense, since the Lincoln Project could be a future destination.)
ABOUT TIME: Germany: Finally Facing Energy Reality.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, CHAIRMAN XI: China is facing a real estate bust.
WALTER DURANTY: THE NEXT GENERATION. NYT Cuts Ties With Reporter Who Called For ‘Killing,’ ‘Burning’ Jews ‘Like What Hitler Did.’
The New York Times has cut ties with a fixer in the Gaza Strip after his Facebook posts calling Jews “the children of dogs” and expressing support for the late Nazi tyrant Adolf Hitler resurfaced.
Fady Hanona has worked with multiple major news outlets to aid their reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hanona was listed as a contributor in six of the NYT’s eight stories written on the latest conflagration between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terror group in the Gaza Strip.
The NYT apparently ended its relationship with Hanona on Friday, according to The Times Of Israel. The fixer has a history of making anti-Semitic statements, and the media watchdog Honest Reporting uncovered a slew of Hanona’s Facebook posts in which he called for “killing” and “burning” Jews “like Hitler did,” according to translations of the posts preserved by Honest Reporting. The date of the post is unclear.
I hear the local AP office might be hiring, if Hanona is looking for his next gig…
THE DEMOCRATS’ ‘INFLATION REDUCTION ACT’* BETRAYS THE PEOPLE PROGRESSIVES CLAIM TO CARE ABOUT:
President Biden signed the “Inflation Reduction Act” into law on Tuesday, a behemoth tax-and-spending plan ostensibly intended to reduce inflation, grow the economy, and address climate change. Progressive Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are already celebrating this major political victory. But if they were honest with themselves, progressives would admit that while it might be a political success, the actual details of this legislation betray the working-class people they claim to care about.
First and foremost, experts almost unanimously agree that the “Inflation Reduction Act” does absolutely nothing to reduce inflation. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the legislation will have a “negligible” impact on inflation in 2022, and by 2023, “inflation would probably be between 0.1 percentage point lower and 0.1 percentage point higher under the bill.”
In the same vein, an analysis from the Wharton School of Business warns that the behemoth spending bill would have an impact on inflation that’s “statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
Even Sanders himself admitted that this bill will “have a minimal impact on inflation,” although he nonetheless voted for it.
Curiously transformed by the media, even before it passed as, “Democrats’ Climate and Health Bill.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission will carry 2 water-seeking cubesats.
A CHOICE, NOT AN ECHO: Greg Gutfeld and Stephen Colbert Late-Night Battle Reaches Its Apex.
Gutfeld described his competitors thusly when commenting on the launch of his new show in March 2021: “They’re as bland as string cheese and not nearly as appetizing. It’s the same jokes, the same assumptions, probably the same writers, all reading the same columns from the same hacks in the New York Times.”
The just-canceled Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, which aired on TBS, took that late-night mandate to the extreme, stating outright that its purpose was to “educate” and “empower” viewers with its liberal activism.
Bee’s most famous line from the show, “Ivanka Trump is a feckless c**t,” didn’t come off as empowering, so she was forced to apologize for it. But she still made time to set aside many a segment to lecture on the importance of a “woman’s right to choose.” After the Supreme Court declined to end Texas’ law empowering citizens to sue those who provided abortions, she said, “This was just the latest partisan abuse of the court’s shadow docket.”
Gutfeld’s show sounds quite different. Everything is over the top and absurd. He has no loyalty or special affinity for anyone; everyone is subject to being mocked and satirized. This is especially so because, as a libertarian, he doesn’t fit comfortably into either major political party. And his libertarianism allows him to look at the world with plenty of cynicism.
In response to the news last week of the cancellation of Bee’s show, he said: “As you know, TBS canceled the late-night show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Actually, I’ll bet Kat’s salary you didn’t know. But if you saw it, you’d wonder: if that’s Samantha Bee, I’d hate to see Samantha C, D, or F.”
He continued: “Its ratings were pretty bad but slightly higher than my colonoscopy and that’s only because I do my own. Oh, it’s easy. All you need is a flashlight, a rib spreader, and the flexibility of Gabby Douglas.”
In a world where the every other late-night talk show is, as Stephen Miller likes to say, “group therapy for liberals,” it helps to offer a product that actually satirizes everyone.
IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE A SITH LORD FOR 15 MINUTES: NBC Now: Donald Trump Is Darth Vader! NBC in 2011: Dick Cheney Is Vader!
THE ONION: Dick Cheney Launches Last-Minute Invasion Of Wyoming To Bolster Daughter’s Reelection.
We’ll find out soon enough how successful it was: Live Results: Primaries in Wyoming, ‘Top Four’ Primaries in Alaska.
I’VE BEEN BLOGGING ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS: Scientists Gave Young Mice The Blood of Old Mice. Then Things Got Weird.
In a new experiment, young mice briefly experienced signs of old age when scientists infused them with the blood of older mice. A similar aging effect occurred when human cells were immersed in the plasma of older individuals.
The young mice – aged three months and all male – were given a blood transfusion from an older mouse, aged 22-24 months. The younger mice were then tested for muscle strength to see whether the old blood created the effect of tissue aging.
Compared to a control group (young mice who received a blood transfusion from another young mouse), the mice that received blood from an old mouse had “decreased maximal twitch force and significantly shorter rates of force development and relaxation during contractions”, the researchers reported.
The mice were tested for their physical endurance on a treadmill at baseline and seven days after the blood infusion. (Mice that refused to run were stimulated by a puff of air that kept them running until they were exhausted.)
Mice that received old blood became fatigued faster and ran a shorter distance on the treadmill than the control group.
These mice also had biomarkers for kidney damage and evidence of liver aging.
When older mice were given younger blood in this experiment, lipids and fibrosis and fatigue declined and muscle endurance increased.
It appears that the problem has more to do with toxic products of aging in old blood than with some youth elixir in the young blood: “The researchers hypothesized that cells from older mice were releasing a ‘senescence-associated secretory phenotype’ (SASP) that promoted aging, like muscle weakness, loss of endurance, and tissue damage.”
HMM: CDC changes guidance after dog contracts monkeypox from owners. “In this case, a 4-year-old Italian greyhound developed lesions and tested positive for monkeypox 12 days after its owners first showed symptoms. The owners are two male partners who live together but were not sexually exclusive. They routinely allowed their pooch to snooze in their bed. The couple began having symptoms of monkeypox a few days after sleeping with other partners. Both men said once their symptoms started they’d been careful to prevent their dog from coming into contact with other people or pets, CBS News reported.”
LIVE RESULTS: Primaries in Wyoming, ‘Top Four’ Primaries in Alaska.
THEY’RE EASY TO SPOT — THE ONES WITH THE CLEANING SOLUTION TASTE BETTER: 5,760 cases of Capri Sun have been recalled after being contaminated with cleaning solution.
OUT ON A LIMB: Bruce Springsteen does not care about you.
Many jilted Bruce Springsteen fans were still fuming Thursday morning, and for good cause. As some of The Boss’s 2023 U.S. concert dates went on sale Wednesday, prospective buyers were met with massive sticker shock — floor seats skyrocketing to more than $4,000 each retail, due to Ticketmaster’s “Official Platinum” dynamic pricing model, which allows costs to fluctuate based on supply and demand.
After my story reporting the unruly price hikes published Wednesday, I received dozens of emails from irate fans, most of whom repeated the same sentiment: Springsteen, the artist who has defined his career by singing about working-class and disenfranchised Americans, has forgotten his fans. They mirrored the notes I was sent in 2017, when “Springsteen on Broadway” tickets climbed to $850 each for orchestra seats.
As Christian Toto adds, “Springsteen’s devotion to the Democrats is part of the problem. New polling shows that middle class voters are switching to the GOP as progressive policies pummel Joe and Jane Sixpack. The rock legend, who campaigned hard for President Joe Biden, indirectly brought hardship to countless Americans facing soaring gas prices and shocking inflation rates. That’s a political miscalculation, but an apology would be nice.”
Obviously, that’s not going to happen, but whenever a candidate Bruce backs gets into the Oval Office, hard economic times aren’t far behind.
AS WITH OBAMA, THE PROBLEM ISN’T THAT SHE’S BLACK, BUT THAT SHE’S TERRIBLE: “I would never, ever say that I regret supporting the first Black woman vice president, ever. But the disappointment is real.”
But, as with Obama, her blackness caused people to overlook her terribleness until it was too late.
TDS REIGNS SUPREME: Trump is still scrambling the minds of the elites.
One of Trump’s greatest gifts has always been his ability to make his political enemies match him flaw for flaw in a race to the bottom. But Trump has never mattered as much as who he is supposed to speak for – an abandoned and demoralised multiracial working class, whose communities and families have been destroyed by the elites of both parties, and is viewed by those same elites with nothing but smug condescension.
To many of those people, there is something inevitable about the FBI targeting Trump over what might turn out to be a red herring. Because they can imagine that happening to them – not for having access to classified documents, but for holding the wrong kinds of views in the eyes of the liberal media elites, who sneer at them day in and day out.
Instead of trying to understand these people – who were once the Democrats’ base – liberal elites choose to mock and dehumanise them. As Obama adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted last week as the raid became public news: ‘The strangest thing about this epoch of American history will always be that tens of millions of grown-ups decided to form a cult-like devotion to, of all available people, Donald Trump.’
Apparently, for the left, the working class traded in clinging to their guns, Bibles and bigotries for clinging to Trump. How childish it was of these alleged grown-ups to have voted for someone who promised to overhaul NAFTA – and then did so. Who promised to stem illegal immigration – then did so. Who promised to get unemployment down – and then did.
So often, when you scratch at the pundit class’s claims to ‘expertise’, this is what you’ll find lurking just beneath the surface: a smirking condescension towards those with different views and different interests. And yet those very same grown-up experts are the ones who believed in the ‘pee tape’.
Related: The Elite Panic of 2022. “What terrifies elites is the loss of their cultural monopoly in the face of a foretold political disaster. They fear diversity of any kind, with good cause: to the extent that the public enjoys a variety of choices in cultural products, elite control will be proportionately diluted. Our cultural monolith, never popular, is today pounded by crosscurrents that undermine its solidity. Alongside the vast progressive choir, quieter voices—conservative, libertarian, religious, none-of-the-above—could soon arise, leaving our culture more fractured, more divided, and more representative of the nation as a whole. If that were to occur, sullen elites will point to 2022’s springtime of discontent, and remark, with typical vehemence, that their panic was fully justified.”
JOHN NOLTE: Kamala’s Husband’s Motorcade Caught Blocking Handicap Spots.
As someone who needs a handicap spot for my wife, it is beyond frustrating to see people parked in those spots who don’t need them. It’s not the close proximity to the store as much as the extra space needed to set up the walker or wheelchair. That’s what makes those spaces so necessary. And although we have all the necessary credentials, I don’t use that space unless we need it. We park in a normal spot if my wife isn’t exiting the car. Of course, when alone, I never use it—which is illegal anyway.
It’s the arrogance and hypocrisy of these people that’s so galling. Democrats seem to believe that if they profess to care about something, they can abuse it. Democrats claim to care about racial minorities, and yet Democrats are openly racist. Democrats claim to care about women’s rights, and yet they are openly sexist. Democrats claim to care about the handicapped, unless it might inconvenience their jaunt into Whole Foods.
Or to put it another way: ‘Grab [That Leftist] Privilege And Ride It Home, Cowboy!’: Harris Faulkner Blows Up After 2nd Gentleman Blocks Handicapped Parking.
FASTER? PLEASE! American Airlines’ Overture Order Boosts Boom Supersonic Backlog. “American Airlines has announced plans to acquire up to 60 Boom Supersonic Overture airliners, overtaking United Airlines as the biggest customer yet for the in-development Mach 1.7 transport.”
OUT SOON: The Elephant in the Room: Donald Trump and the Future of the Republican Party. I have a chapter titled “Donald Trump and America’s New Class War.”
John Hinderaker of Powerline was a contributor, too.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Wake Up! 2022 Is More Important Than 2020, and I Don’t Just Mean the Elections. “There aren’t any lefty riots taking place at the moment, but my Spidey sense tells me something way more sinister is afoot.”
READER FAVORITE: SHARPAL 191H Pocket Kitchen Chef Knife Scissors Sharpener. #CommissionEarned
KEEP LOADING UP THOSE BUSES AND SENDING THEM NORTH: NYC moving migrants into famed luxury Times Square hotel. “Mayor Eric Adams plans to convert the Row NYC — formerly known as the Milford Plaza and located in pricey tourist-packed Times Square — into an intake center and shelter for as many as 600 migrant families amid the city’s spiraling homelessness crisis, three sources familiar with the matter said.”
“Spiraling homeless crisis.”
GOOD. NOW BUILD MORE. California to consider keeping last nuclear plant open.
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: A Response to Professor Kevin Jon Heller’s “Norway Murders Freya the Walrus.” “I suppose there is another possibility. Heller’s blog post is not indicative of prejudice. And, it is not an attempt to persuade. Rather, it is an attempt at self-identification to other members of the Elect. Heller is identifying himself to other similarly minded people as one who deeply cares; he has his heart and mind in the right place. Moreover, he wants other similar thinking individuals to know he is one of them. That would be why his relying on unsupported stereotypes is OK—because he is not trying to change future policy and he is not really trying to persuade those thinking differently from what he thinks. That might be the explanation. But it is not a good approach for an academic to take.”
It is, however, a very common approach.
UPDATE: From the comments: “Ultimately power is all liberals can value, because it’s the only thing that can force changes that other people don’t want.”
And the point isn’t forcing change. It’s forcing change that other people don’t want. Making people do things they don’t want to do is the only source of joy the left has.
I BLAME RENAISSANCE S.U.V.s: The European Climate Megadrought – Which Happened 482 Years Ago.
YOU GET MORE OF WHAT YOU SUBSIDIZE: City gives $150K to start Safe Parking program for Denverites living in their vehicles.
HOW IT STARTED: Joe Biden: I’m going to ‘shut down the virus’, not the US.
—The Grauniad, October 23, 2020.
How it’s going: First lady Dr. Jill Biden tests positive for Covid-19.
—CNN, today.
TRUST THE SCIENCE, APPEASE THE GODS! Pelosi: Biden-Manchin climate bill will appease ‘angry’ Earth: ‘Mother Earth gets angry from time to time, & this legislation will help us address all of that.’
How about we throw a few congressional leaders into a volcano just to be safe.
GENTLEMEN, START YOUR CHEVY SUBURBANS! Climate Change May Finally Reveal Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and Other Cryptids.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Methamphetamine use propels drug overdoses in rural America, study finds.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: As DC Plans to Ban 40% of Black Teens From School, Mayor Rejects DC COVID-19 Vaccine Numbers. “In response to a question from The Daily Signal about how 40% of black school aged children were unvaccinated, Bowser responded, ‘I don’t think that that number is correct. We have a substantially few fewer number of kids that we have to engage with vaccination.'”
“Engage with vaccination” is the new “mandate.” Update your Newspeak dictionaries accordingly.
GOODER AND HARDER, NYC: Rents for One-Bedroom Apartments in Manhattan Hit a Record High of $5,100 in July. Here’s Why.
I ASSUME THAT’S ENOUGH TIME TO SCAN WHATEVER THEY WANT: DOJ Admits FBI Over-Collected Trump Docs, Will Give Back Passports and Privileged Docs in the ‘Next Two Weeks.’
SAVE YOUR EYES WHILE DRIVING: Rand McNally 2023 Large Scale Road Atlas. #CommissionEarned
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: A Constitutional Crisis Is Just What Merrick Garland Ordered. “Merrick Garland’s ‘runaway train’ creating a constitutional crisis — just to stop Trump — is the big crazy on Insanity Wrap.”
Plus:
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
THE FLASH STAR EZRA MILLER SEEKING TREATMENT FOR ‘COMPLEX MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES:’
“The Flash” star Ezra Miller says they are seeking treatment for “complex mental health issues.”
In a statement provided to Variety by a representative of the actor, Miller broke their silence about the troubling behavior that they have exhibited in recent years, which has led to a series of legal issues and assault and abuse allegations. Miller also apologized for their actions.
“Having recently gone through a time of intense crisis, I now understand that I am suffering complex mental health issues and have begun ongoing treatment,” Miller says. “I want to apologize to everyone that I have alarmed and upset with my past behavior. I am committed to doing the necessary work to get back to a healthy, safe and productive stage in my life.”
He’s not the only one with “complex mental heath issues,” as can be spotted by the many instances of “they” and “their” in the above Variety article. As Jim Treacher asked last month: Why Should I Use Ezra Miller’s Preferred Pronouns?
RICH LOWRY: Merrick Garland looks set to indict Trump — despite his glaring conflict of interest.
It’d be one thing if Trump had shot someone on Fifth Avenue — a clean, no-doubt crime that wouldn’t require any novel theories or difficult-to-probe contentions about his state of mind to prosecute.
In contrast, Trump’s Jan. 6 offenses involve alleged crimes like obstructing Congress or defrauding the United States that are going to involve tricky questions about his motives and where the legitimate exercise of his powers ends and the supposed criminality begins.
Needless to say, the country is not prepared to adjudicate such questions in a calm, high-minded manner. It will be the O.J. Simpson trial meets the Hiss-Chambers case, with a presidential race not in the background but very much in the foreground.
The fact of the matter is that while Trump’s moral blameworthiness for Jan. 6 is not in doubt, his legal culpability is. It’s easy to write an op-ed or say on cable TV that Trump incited an insurrection. As a legal matter, though, Trump didn’t come close to crossing the line to incitement, which has very specific and high standards under law.
Even his infamous Georgia phone call looks different on the close reading it would get as part of any court case — by the end of the call, his lawyers were only asking that the secretary of state’s office tell them why their count of suspected fraudulent votes was off.
In an environment of ever-spiraling political conflict, it’s difficult for anyone to exercise forbearance — to realize the most emotionally satisfying course isn’t necessarily the correct one and to be constrained by the public interest, even if that enrages his or her own side.
Merrick Garland can still err on the side of statesmanship. He looks set, though, to choose the abyss.
Related: Trump deserves the Hillary treatment. The FBI has once again put the country in a no-win situation.
More: The Payback for Mar-a-Lago Will Be Brutal. What went around [last] Monday will come around hard for the Democrats when Republicans control the Justice Department and FBI.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Contrary to Rich Lowry, I don’t think that Trump is even morally responsible for January 6, which I also think has been wildly overblown, especially against the 2020 background of government-sanctioned riots in cities across the country.
OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED PROTECTION RACKET: BLM-Themed Groups Are Still Getting Paid Not to Burn Madison, Wisconsin.
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: Berkeley co-op Person of Color Theme House bans white guests from common spaces.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (CRIMEA EDITION): Moscow admits sabotage caused blast at military depot in Crimea this morning.
NO CONFLICTS OF INTEREST HERE: Can you guess which Squad member was expanding her rental property inventory at the same time she was pushing for federal landlord subsidies?
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: So… What Caliber Rosary Are You Packing? “Full disclosure: I have two rosaries on my desk and they just happen to be on a shelf with some knives and a handgun. That was purely a coincidence but thanks to the paste-eater at The Atlantic, I might start playing it up and give his tiny mind another Roman Catholic prayer warrior to be afraid of because he’s an emotionally weak blithering idiot.”
FROM MY COLLEAGUE BRAD AREHEART: The Top 100 Law Reviews: A Reference Guide Based on Historical USNWR Data.
RAUNCHY, BUT NOT WRONG: ‘Ask your kids’: Kari Lake says Trump and DeSantis have ‘BDE’.
FASTER, PLEASE: The Covid Reckoning Is Coming.
If Republicans retake the House next year, they should dedicate themselves to a full accounting of where this money went. Much of it did not find its way to the people who needed it. This spring, the Labor Department estimated that “at least” $163 billion in “overpayments” went to both legitimate recipients of unemployment benefits and fraudsters. The Paycheck Protection Act, which provided forgivable loans to businesses adversely affected by the pandemic, was described by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz as an “invitation” to defraud the government. “What didn’t happen was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time,” he said. That program has disbursed roughly $800 billion, about half of which has been forgiven.
And that’s just the unintended misuse of pandemic-related relief. What about the intended squandering of this taxpayer-funded largess? The Republican Study Committee’s review of where some of these funds were supposed to go is just as enraging as the abuse of those funds: “tree equity work,” environmental justice “boot camps,” “safe smoking kits,” and syringes for using illicit narcotics, refurbishing a minor-league baseball stadium in New York, upping the prize money at Arizona horse-racing tracks, and providing public-school staff with instruction in “high-need topics” like “implicit bias” training and “restorative practices.” As a Department of Education document averred, the pandemic was a perfect time to engineer a “culture shift” in America’s schools.
This investigative work is only one element of a comprehensive retrospective on the pandemic. Americans should confront the impulses that led governments to close houses of worship, abrogate the rights of property owners, and draft private enterprise into the work of law enforcement in what were patently obvious violations of the Constitution. There should be hearings into the conduct of teachers’ unions and into school boards in the major metropolitan areas that clung to school closures long after the terrible consequences for young people’s mental health and educational advancementwere known. And what connection was there between the engineered breakdown of society and the eruption of social tensions culminating in some of the costliest rioting the country has ever seen?
The public health apparatus’s reluctance, throughout this miserable event, to meet the public where it lives has become a cliché. They won’t budge, and the country is moving on without them. But moving on is impossible in the absence of a thorough reckoning. The Covid pandemic already seems unlikely to be “forgotten” by history like the outbreak of Spanish Influenza a century ago. Unlike our forebears, we marinate in our trauma. It’s incumbent on this generation to establish for posterity what went wrong over the last two and a half years, if only so that we will never do this again.
Indeed. Much more like this, please: The Elite Panic of 2022.
THAT’S NOT FUNNY! Hysterical Reinhart Meme Goes Viral After Twitter Ban.
THE PRESS DOESN’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS BECAUSE IT’S BAD FOR DEMOCRATS: ‘A Nation in Anguish’: One Year After Biden’s Disastrous Withdrawal From Afghanistan.
YES, AND ALTHOUGH THEY PRIDE THEMSELVES ON THEIR INTELLECT THEY AREN’T ESPECIALLY BRIGHT OR KNOWLEDGEABLE: “Highly educated metropolitan elites have become something of a self-enclosed Brahmin class.”
Plus: “Why was the trigger pulled on the search? Wasn’t it about a fear that Trump’s 2024 momentum was getting out of control? They just misjudged how people would react to the Mar-a-Lago raid. Now, I suppose they need to try to say, the raid was entirely nonpolitical, just following normal procedure, without any thought for whether it would increase Trump’s power, which, unfortunately, it did.”
Unexpectedly!
Also: “Brooks is still holding out hope of containing the Trump monster. The man must be put in a cage! It’s the only way. But it’s this overreach that puts you and your highly educated metropolitan elites in an ever-worse position to do the one thing that you need to do: Be better than him and win the contest!”
Hypothesis: They’re not trying to be better than him because they know they can’t.
And: “No honorable way but we absolutely need to make sure that the enemy is defeated? If Trump wafted those 2 ideas, the self-enclosed Brahmin class would be accusing him of fomenting insurrection.”
They seem to want a civil war, given how hard they’re working at provoking one.
Plus, from the comments: “And this is the miscalculation that the Feds made in this ridiculous stunt. Many people who have mocked Trump supporters for believing he has been wrongfully pursued by the ‘Deep State’ for the past six years (initial crime was beating HRC), are starting to think, ‘Hey, they may have a point there’.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: New Congressional Report: U.S.-Trained Afghan Special Forces Forced to Flee to Iran: They could divulge sensitive U.S. military training and intelligence to Tehran, a U.S. lawmaker warns.
Related: One Year Later, Afghanistan Is a Land of Shrugs and Sadness.
Greatest unforced military/diplomatic error in U.S. history.
GODSPEED: NASA fast-tracks Artemis I Moon rocket launch. “NASA announced today that the engineers and technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida completed the final testing and checkouts of the Artemis I Moon rocket, making the new rollout date as soon as 9 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, August 16 ahead of the targeted August 29 launch.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: Seat Cushion Pillow for Office Chair. #CommissionEarned
INTERESTING POLIO FACTS:
The Salk vaccine, generally known as the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), developed first and used exclusively in the US since 2000, is incredibly effective (99%+) at preventing paralytic poliomyelitis but does not convey mucosal immunity, and therefore does little to reduce transmission of the poliovirus. . . .
The live attenuated Oral Polio Vaccine, developed by Dr. Albert Sabin, is cheap, easy (taken as a few drops of liquid by mouth), and remarkably effective both at preventing infection in the gut as well as severe neurological disease, but has an Achilles heel: it can mutate back into a virulent form of polio!
So when you blame the “unvaccinated” for the spread of polio, you’re wrong. One vaccine doesn’t stop the spread, the other does — except when it causes the spread.
Plus: “We really don’t know how long the immunity from polio vaccination lasts.”
That’s encouraging. I had both kinds of vaccine as a kid, and have always assumed lifetime immunity. Maybe not!
NOTHING NEW IN MATERIALISTS’ BASHING INTELLIGENT DESIGN: It turns out those who insist material processes alone account for the universe have been ripping for more than two millennia those who suggest a designer behind design, according to Dr. John West of the Discovery Institute. In other words, the debate was hot and heavy long before the Scientific Revolution.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Matt Margolis: We’ve Seen This Kind of Denial From the White House Before. “You know, the President and the White House learned about this FBI search from public reports. We learned, just like the American public did yesterday, and we did not have advance notice of this activity.”
Athena Thorne: European ‘Hunger Stones’ Blow Up Key Climate Narrative. “When you see me, cry.”
Yours Truly: It’s Official: Biden Trashed the Economy. “The Empire State Manufacturing Index just collapsed to the third lowest level ever measured.”
FROM DAVID CARRICO: The Blood Is the Life. #CommissionEarned
Chaim Caan was just out for a night of fun, blowing off some steam the way a young man will. After the better part of a year spent in COVID lockdowns, he was ready to let his hair down at a night club. But the fascinating young woman who he encountered that night left him with something to remember her by: she turned Chaim into a vampire.
Soon, Chaim finds himself thrust into a weird underground world of mysticism and enchantment as he navigates life as the newly undead, trying to reconcile his beliefs as an Orthodox Jew with the new reality that has been thrust upon him.
He is forced to deal with a lot of change: to his body, to his mind, to his perceptions, to his relationships, and even to his world. He finds himself in parts of the world he had never dreamed of being in, and he finds himself doing things that he had never envisioned being a part of his life.
And if he can come to terms with these changes, this mild-mannered young man might just find himself a hero.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Shrinking of Higher Ed.
Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic, raising alarms that the enrollment emergency projected to arrive a few years from now is already here.
High-school seniors uninterested in studying online chose to defer. Working parents strained by the demands of full-time pandemic child care put their studies on hold. International students couldn’t get visas. Those in majors with hands-on practicums or lab work found they couldn’t register for courses required for their degrees.
It’s not coming back as expected, either.
NEW BOOK: Science in an Age of Unreason.
THE RACISTS SELF-IDENTIFY: Today’s blacklisted American: White teachers blacklisted by union contract in Minnesota.
LEAVE IT TO THE PROS? SCREW THAT – THIS IS AMERICA: High school football players hailed as heroes for saving woman trapped in car crash.
THE PEOPLE KNOW. THEY KNOW WHO THE ENEMY IS: Biden Administration’s Successful War on American Energy Industry.
I’VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE. I’M UNIMPRESSED (AND HAVING TROUBLE WORKING): Trump: FBI “Stole” My Passports During Mar-a-Lago Raid.
PELOSI MIGHT BE A DAUGHTER OF THE EARTH. MY MOTHER WAS BETTER THAN DIRT: Pelosi: Inflation Reduction Act Will Appease “Mother Earth”.
AND HIDE THEIR OWN PETTY TYRANNY AND INVINCIBLE STUPIDITY: Feds Oppose Unsealing Affidavit Used To Obtain Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant, To Protect Ongoing Investigation and “National Security”.
THIS IS HOW AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT ACTS: Trump: America ‘is in a Very Dangerous Position’ and the ‘Temperature has to be Brought Down’.
IT WON’T. WE’RE NOT CHINESE PEASANTS. IT’S TOO MUCH INFORMATION TO PROCESS: Let’s hope this isn’t our surveillance future.
YES. AND I HAVE A NOVEL TO FINISH: Has Biden Crossed the Rubicon?
Writing as society comes apart over your head seems…. interesting. They should be careful. Caesar was a Populist leader. They ain’t.
WELL! IF YOU’RE CATHOLIC, REMEMBER THEY ALWAYS TELL YOU WHAT THEY’RE AFRAID OF: The Atlantic Attacks the ‘Militaristic’ Rosary.
Didn’t your granny tell you it was powerful? Make tomorrow a knee day!
APPARENTLY THEY COULDN’T SEE THE CONSEQUENCES OF DEMANDING WE BELIEVE ALL WOMEN: New research: #MeToo movement hurt female productivity.
Because you know what? I’m a woman, and I wouldn’t trust half of the hysterics claiming they’ve been abused within three meters of me, let alone in the same meeting room. Once we got to #metoo accusations that boiled down to “he oppressed me with his male gaze” sane men were going to shut the door on any woman, to avoid getting put over the barrel. Only idiots, hysterics and Marxists (BIRM) couldn’t see that coming.
YEAH, IT’S ALL NONSENSE, BS AND SOCIALISM: Green No Deal.
THEY THINK THEY’LL HAVE IT SO SEWN UP NO ONE ELSE WILL EVER GET A LOOK IN: The Fifth Law.
THE HILL TO DIE ON IS RED WHITE AND BLUE, AND WE’RE PLAYING FOR THE WHOLE USA: The Hill to Die On.
IT IS INDEED A PATTERN OF VIOLENCE, BUT NOT AMERICAN: Finally, Rushdie.
#JOURNALISM: Trump Accused of Lying Over FBI-Seized Passports, Then He Dropped the Receipts. “So let me get this straight. The FBI did indeed seize Trump’s passports, which seems incredibly improper given what was legally allowed to be taken by the warrant, and that’s somehow his fault? A passport is not something you just accidentally grab, thinking it’s a presidential record. It’s the kind of thing that an agent purposely took and knew exactly what they were taking. Yet, the big gotcha here is that Trump was wrong about the expiration date on one of the passports. It’s absurd. The big story here is that the FBI took the passports in the first place. It is not that Trump shared an email that ended up embarrassing the bureau’s leadership, who were apparently content to keep lying about the matter via leaks until the former president exposed them. Now, the mainstream media wants to pretend like the seizure was just an honest mistake that shouldn’t be held against the FBI. Yeah, that’s not how any of this works.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:
THE LID: One Year After Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle.
One year ago this week, buoyed by President Joe Biden’s feckless surrender, totalitarian thugs known as the Taliban — an evil group that protected perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks — swept into Afghanistan’s capital following the collapse of the country’s government.
Even isolationists and anti-military zealots in the West remember the horrifying images that followed, most notably Afghans falling from cargo planes and an infant being tossed over razor wire.
This never should have happened. And it effectively ended Biden’s presidency just seven months in.
Following the Aug. 26 murder of 13 U.S. servicemen in Kabul by an Islamist suicide bomber, I wrote, “The attack that killed 13 Americans and at least 100 in Kabul on Thursday does not spell “the end” of the Biden presidency, but it’s absolutely a moral and political catastrophe for the 46th president.”
While Biden, who’s enjoying another oceanside vacation, claims Americans agreed with his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, he had over 50% approval on Aug. 19 last year, then dropped 20 points once people saw the horrific images. He’s never recovered.
If only there was a visual metaphor for Biden’s dramatic poll drop. If only.
OLD AND BUSTED: “Men Can Have Periods, Too!”
The New Hotness? Women in Scotland outraged as country’s first ever Period Poverty tsar is announced as a MAN.
The decision to appoint a man as Scotland’s first ever so-called ‘period dignity officer’ has prompted outrage, on the same day the flagship law offering free period products to all in need of them was launched.
Dundee man and former personal trainer Jason Grant is the newly appointed period dignity officer for the Tay region – who has the task of promoting access to free sanitary products across schools and colleges – where he will also discuss issues around the menopause.
It follows the Scottish Government’s introduction of the Period Products Act, which means councils and education providers are now legally obliged to offer out tampons and pads for free in a response to a period poverty campaign.
We live in truly the stupidest timeline imaginable.
THAT’S NOT CREEPY AT ALL: Amazon studio plans lighthearted show of Ring surveillance footage.
Viral videos captured by doorbell cameras have been hot for a while now. You can catch them on late-night talk shows, the r/CaughtOnRing subreddit, and on millions of TikTok users’ For You page. Amazon’s media properties, perhaps sensing an opportunity to capitalize and soften Ring’s image, are sallying forth with an officially branded offering.
Ring Nation will feature “neighbors saving neighbors, marriage proposals, military reunions and silly animals,” Deadline writes. But Ring Nation might be aiming even higher, according to Ring founder Jamie Siminoff—to something approaching a salve for our deeply divided nation.
“Bringing the new community together is core to our mission at Ring, and Ring Nation gives friends and family a fun new way to enjoy time with one another,” Siminoff told Deadline. “We’re so excited to have Wanda Sykes join Ring Nation to share people’s memorable moments with viewers.”
Ring sharing its owners’ moments with other viewers has been a contentious issue. The surveillance company recently admitted giving police access to Ring recordings without user consent for “emergency” requests. Ring partnered with more than 600 law enforcement agencies to encourage Ring installations in communities and ease police access to footage. Ring has since made it easier to opt out of police requests.
I do not trust the Internet of things, to coin an Insta-phrase.
BRENDAN O’NEILL: From Rushdie to Rowling — how identity politics turned violent.
It felt grimly fitting that JK Rowling was subjected to yet another death threat in the wake of the sickening attack on Salman Rushdie. For Rowling is Rushdie to the woke set. With her gender-critical views, she disgusts the preachers of correct thought as much as Rushdie disgusted the clerics of Iran. To the woke ayatollahs of the trans movement and its noisy allies in the media, Rowling is a blasphemer, an utterer of profanity, an apostate of PC. They threaten her with death, as Islamists did with Rushdie. They burn her books, as mobs did with The Satanic Verses. They dream of silencing her, as Iran dreamt of silencing Salman. It isn’t only regressive religious elders who issue fatwas against dissenting writers these days.
‘Don’t worry you are next’, a man tweeted at Rowling when she expressed horror over the stabbing of Rushdie. In this instance the vile intimidator of Ms Rowling seems to be someone with Islamist leanings. That makes a change. Normally the people who threaten Rowling with death – or assault, or rape – are adherents to the cult of transgender rather than the cult of radical Islam. In July a tweeter with the trans flag in his bio posted Rowling’s family address alongside an image of a bomb-making handbook. Another expressed his desire to ‘kill TERFs’ and said to Rowling: ‘I hope you fit in a hearse, bitch.’ Social-media sites overflow with deranged fantasies about Rowling dying a violent death. Seeing someone say to Rowling ‘Bitch I’m gonna kill you’ has become shockingly normal in the 2020s. Probably as normal as it was to hear hardline Muslims say ‘Rushdie must die’ as they chatted after prayers in Tehran back in the day.
The Ayatollah Khomeini’s famous quote that “There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious,” is the mantra of the far left as well: THAT’S NOT FUNNY! Hysterical Reinhart Meme Goes Viral After Twitter Ban.
(Artwork by Jon Gabriel.)
GO OUTSIDE, PROGRESSIVE WRITERS: In which Charles C.W. Cooke asks the (likely rhetorical) question, “Do America’s progressive writers know anybody who isn’t . . . a lunatic?”
Do America’s progressive writers know anybody who isn’t . . . a lunatic? I ask this because, in the course of my morning reading, I came across two widely shared pieces that, had they been presented to mixed company at the pitch stage, would ineluctably have yielded raised eyebrows, widespread confusion, and, eventually, a friendly “are you feeling all right?”
The first contribution is from the Atlantic. It’s called “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol,” and it claims that those shadowy, ever-present “Christian nationalists” have started combining sacramental beads and “gun culture.” To underscore the idea, its artwork is in the form of an animated gif that replaces a Rosary’s beads with bullet holes. This claim is typical of the whole:
Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.
The conclusion:
The “battle beads” culture of spiritual warfare permits radical-traditional Catholics literally to demonize their political opponents and regard the use of armed force against them as sanctified. The sacramental rosary isn’t just a spiritual weapon but one that comes with physical ammunition.
As an example of the “I saw a few weird things online and fed them into my paranoia” genre, it’s an instant classic. As a reflection of real life in America, it is a disaster. I would say that the author needs to stop trawling the Internet and go out and meet some actual American Catholics, but, having looked him up, I learned that he lives in Canada. That, at least, provides him with an excuse. I’m not sure what the Atlantic‘s is.
The Atlantic has changed the headlines and artwork multiple times:
BRUCE BAWER: Diving Into a Pool of PC.
Some people are foolish enough to take their political cues from show-business celebrities like Bette Midler, Rob Reiner, and Cher. Not me. I listen to athletes. So when I heard that 28-year-old British diver Tom Daley had made a documentary about the current status of human rights in certain former British colonies, I sought it out at once.
Just in case you didn’t know, Daley won a gold medal at the 2020 Olympics. He’s also come in first at the Commonwealth Games no fewer than four times. The premise of his documentary, Illegal to Be Me, is that, as this year’s Commonwealth Games approached (they were held in Birmingham between July 28 and Aug. 8), he began to think about the fact that, in 35 of the 56 countries competing in the games, it’s illegal to be gay. In three of those countries, homosexuality is punishable by death.
In some of Nigeria’s northern states, he informs us, the penalty for homosexuality is death by stoning. He doesn’t explain why this is the case in the north but not the south. Want to guess?
Daley says that since he himself is gay — he came out in 2013 — and has competed all over the Commonwealth, these statistics give him a queasy feeling. He’s won medals in some of those 35 anti-gay countries: How, he asks, should he feel about those medals? The anti-gay laws also pique his historical curiosity — where did all this hatred come from? — and make him want to “get the sporting world to try to change things.”
His tentative goal, he tells us at the outset of the documentary — which aired on BBC One on Aug. 9 — is to persuade Commonwealth Games officials to deny countries with anti-gay laws the right to host the Commonwealth Games. But he realizes that this stratagem may be misguided. “I still have so much to learn,” he admits. So he travels to a couple of the anti-gay Commonwealth countries to “meet some queer athletes,” see how they live, and bounce his ideas off them.
First up is Pakistan…
Ellipses mine. It’s the BBC, so I think you can see where this is going, but read the whole thing, nonetheless. If Netflix teamed up Daley with Colin Kaepernick to host a series, the level of wokeness and blinkered PC-thinking would likely implode the universe.
Speaking of the latter athlete turned woke activist: Adam Schefter Shoots Down Kaepernick to the Cleveland Browns Rumor: NFL World Reacts.
I think the author may have misspelled “yawns” at the end of that headline.
FASTER, PLEASE: Newly Discovered Molecule Fights Off Over 300 Kinds of Drug-Resistant Bacteria. “The molecule is called fabimycin, and further down the line it could be used to fight off some of the most stubborn infections that humans can get. The new potential treatment targets gram-negative bacteria, a group of hard-to-kill pathogens that are commonly behind infections of the urinary tract, lungs, and even the bloodstream.”
GOODER AND HARDER, L.A.: Los Angeles County DA George Gascon recall petition found ‘insufficient’ to qualify for ballot.
A petition to recall Gascon had nearly 200,000 signatures out of more than 715,000 invalidated.
