GOOD LUCK: NASA targeting June 19 for crucial test of Artemis 1 moon rocket.
JEFFREY CARTER: No One Is Talking About This. “I have been looking for some good data on food. Frankly, I have seen my grocery bill go up quite a bit and I am trying to figure out if I should stockpile foodstuffs or not.”
Plus: “I used to trade Lean Hogs, so I watched the food supply stuff relatively closely. I have heard that if you want a slot at the slaughterhouse this year, you are out of luck if you don’t have one. It’s hearsay for me as I don’t have good data on anything but my guess is that livestock farmers are going to really cull their herds this year. It’s just too expensive to feed them. Short term, that might drive meat prices down. Long term, they will skyrocket. If you look at futures prices for lean hogs, that’s what they are telling you.”
BECAUSE THE DEMOCRATS DON’T WANT TO: Why can’t the US stop soaring oil and gas prices?
Related: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
DAVOS: The Left Didn’t Eat the Rich. The Rich Ate the Left. “More importantly, the Left decided that the world was, in fact, for sale. With great corporate greed came great corporate largesse—which meant a reprieve for those willing to pipe down, and cash for those willing to become complicit in corporate globalism.”
BE PREPARED: Augason Farms Emergency Food Supply. #CommissionEarned
I HAD A SECTION ON THIS IN ARMY OF DAVIDS YEARS AGO: Vigilant amateur asteroid hunters keep watch for menacing space rocks.
DEMS ARE ABUSING THEIR MAJORITY IN A DANGEROUSLY DIVISIVE AND UNAMERICAN WAY: Leader McCarthy and Rep. Jim Jordan Address Subpoena from Jan. 6 Select Committee in Blistering Op-Ed. “As the op-ed expressed concerns over, at issue is not just legitimacy but constitutional rights, not helped by the shadowy manner in which the select committee is conducting its affairs.”
“DEMOCRATS BEFORE AND AFTER SEEING POLLS:
Flashback: Obama pollster to Dems: ‘Latinx’ is still not a thing despite your wokest efforts. “This is hardly the first poll to show that “Latinx” is not just a fringe construct but actively annoying to Hispanic voters. Bendixen & Amandi pollster Fernand Amandi wonders why Democrats keep insisting on promoting its usage. . . . The answer is simple — Democrats have invested themselves far more into the faculty lounge and activist donor base than they have with Hispanic voters. This isn’t the only reason why Hispanics are moving to the GOP in the last couple of cycles, but this disconnect certainly doesn’t help matters.”
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Uvalde police response proves need to abolish the police, says MSNBC guest.
During the latest episode of MSNBC’s The Cross Connection with Tiffany Cross on Saturday, leftist police reform activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham claimed the recent Texas school shooting is further proof that America must abolish the police.
Cunningham told Cross she believed that law enforcement’s mistakes during the Uvalde, Texas school shooting – namely, reports that officers waited outside the classroom as the shooter committed his massacre – means policing as it currently stands needs to be gutted.
For the guest commentator, the Uvalde shooting essentially bolstered the Black Lives Matter “defund the police” narrative progressives adopted in the wake of the death of George Floyd in May 2020.
Cunningham stated, “I think, sadly, Uvalde is a terrible and tragic example of just how – not incompetent – but problematic the entire institution is.”
She then combined Black Lives Matter rhetoric with the Uvalde shooting to construct her new anti-police narrative. “If the police kill, taze and maim unarmed people because they fear for their lives and they won’t stop armed people from slaughtering children, then clearly the institution itself is not sound,” she declared.
Fine, let’s go with plan B: Major New Research on School Safety: Schools that Allow Teachers to Carry Guns haven’t seen school shootings during school hours.
WHILE THE TOWN’S SWORN OFFICERS COULDN’T GET THEIR THUMBS OUT: Off Duty BORTAC Agent Drove 40 Miles To Storm the Uvalde School and Take Down the Killer.
BUT THERE IS AN EPIDEMIC OF FEAR. There Is No Epidemic of School Shootings. The media and the White House’s fearmonger-in-chief are spouting deceptive numbers to scare people into believe that mass school shootings are commonplace in America. They’re not. The odds of a child dying in a mass school shooting are about the same as the odds of being struck by lightning or dying in an earthquake. Such numbers, of course, are no consolation to the grieving families in Texas, but neither is the frenzy to manipulate these tragedies for ratings and political gain.
SHOULDA BEEN MORE THAN ALMOST: “There was almost a mutiny”: Uvalde cop says force is furious that they were held back. “Judge for yourself whether People magazine’s source is telling the truth or whether this is self-serving spin to deflect blame now that the Uvalde PD has become a national laughingstock.”
Plus: “You’ve got a ballistic vest. You know what the kids have? Crayons.”
And: “I don’t know how this town and its police force will ever again coexist happily.”
HONESTLY, THAT NUMBER SEEMS LOW TO ME: A quarter of world’s Internet users vulnerable to infrastructure attack.
HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? The escape from New York is accelerating.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: This week a West Virginia woman legally carrying a handgun stopped a mass shooter with an AR-15 dead in his tracks.
AS DO WE ALL: T cells found to require rest and maintenance.
HERE’S HOW WE KNOW GUNS AREN’T THE ROOT CAUSE OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS:
I’m not about to fall into the trap of pretending the past was somehow better simply because it was the past. I recognize that things weren’t necessarily better back then. However, it’s ridiculous to believe that nothing has changed, either.
What was the rare exception back in my day is now an all-too-common occurrence, despite the fact that we had more ready access to firearms at schools back then. It seems that something else has happened, something that has fundamentally changed how people think and act. Clearly, it’s not just the mere presence of guns in American life that’s driving our modern problem. We had guns before we had this sickness.
Lawmakers and activists would do well to try and get to the bottom of this deeper rot, rather than blaming firearms. Then we might actually be able to make a meaningful reduction in these horrific atrocities.
As Christian Adams wrote in 2018: Flashback 30 Years: Guns Were in Schools… and Nothing Happened.
What changed? The mainstreaming of nihilism. Cultural decay. Chemicals. The deliberate destruction of moral backstops in the culture. A lost commonality of shared societal pressures to enforce right and wrong. And above all, simple, pure, evil.
Before you retort that we can’t account for the mentally ill, they existed forever.
Paranoid schizophrenics existed in 1888 and 2018. Mentally ill students weren’t showing up in schools with guns even three decades ago.
So it must be something else.
Those who have been so busy destroying the moral backstops in our culture won’t want to have this conversation. They’ll do what they do — mock the truth.
There was a time in America, before the Snowflakes, when any adult on the block could reprimand a neighborhood kid who was out of line without fear.
Even thirty years ago, the culture still had invisible restraints developed over centuries. Those restraints, those leveling commonalities, were the target of a half-century of attack by the freewheeling counterculture that has now become the dominant replacement culture.
Hollywood made fun of these restraints in films too numerous to list.
The sixties mantra “don’t trust anyone over thirty” has become a billion-dollar industry devoted to the child always being right — a sometimes deeply medicated brat who disrupts the classroom or escapes what used to be resolved with a paddling.
Instead of telling the kid to quit kicking the back of the seat on a plane, we buy seat guards to protect the seat.
If you think it’s bad now, just wait until the generation whose babysitter is an iPhone is in high school. You can hardly walk around Walmart these days without tripping over a toddler in a trance, staring at a screen.
The high school kids who shot rifles in school in 1985 were taught right and wrong. They were taught what to do with their rifle in school, and what not to do. If they got out of line, all the other students and the coach would have come down on them hard. There were no safe spaces, and that was a good thing.
Flash-forward to today: Please don’t judge him, he had his reasons, says mother of Texas school shooter.
As a wise woman once wrote, “It is the fear best expressed in the precept, ‘Judge not, that ye not be judged.’ But that precept, in fact, is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: How Biden Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Inflation.
“Government was making the wrong decisions,” Biden told the Atlantic. “As much as 5 or 6 percentage points on the inflation rate were due to oil. Another 5 percent was due to Vietnam. And so you have 10 or 11 percent on top of the inflation that had accumulated since 1932, as conservatives had predicted, and BAM—everything’s gone.”
If those conditions sound familiar, it’s because they are. Inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years—driven in part by the war in Ukraine, rising oil prices, and an unprecedented amount of federal spending—and it risks completely sinking Biden’s presidency just as they sank Carter’s.
Yet the Biden of the 1970s and the Biden of 2022 might as well be two different people, with the latter challenging economic orthodoxy and alleging that new entitlements and stimulus in the form of Build Back Better will actually bring consumer prices down. As a young, reform-minded senator in the 1970s, Biden introduced bills to slash tens of millions of dollars from what believed were ineffective and useless federal agencies and insisted the only way out of America’s stagflation nightmare was massive spending cuts. His 180-degree change reflects the leftward lurch of a Democratic Party and White House staffed with ideologues (many of whom never lived through the 1970s) able to convince a nearly 80-year-old president that everything he once understood about how the economy worked was completely wrong.
* * * * * * * *
After reviewing then-president Gerald Ford’s budget, Biden expressly attacked the White House for not doing enough to address high gas prices and for its tax hikes on corporations, arguing there were better ways to cool demand. During a Senate hearing in 1974, Biden chastised liberals for forgetting “the vast resources of the ocean and their importance to us … [which] range from lobsters to oil.”
Although Biden called for some tax hikes on the margins, his plan to curb inflation was defined mostly by spending cuts. During his Senate reelection campaign in 1978, Biden took out a full-page advertisement in the News Journal, one of the largest newspapers in his home state of Delaware, to promote his “sunset bill” that would force “a thorough and complete review of federal spending programs every four years … [that] would automatically end a program that wasn’t proved useful or effective.”
“The spiraling costs of inflation are ripping into the fabric of American society,” the ad reads. “We must bring these problems under control and the first place to start is with the cost of government.”
Today of course, spurred on by his far left base, Biden sings a quite different tune, proclaiming that inflation-hawk “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” and leading others to wonder: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
HIGHER SPENDING ON MOST THINGS IN THE U.S. DOESN’T SEEM TO IMPROVE OUTCOMES: Study: Higher spending on cancer care in U.S. doesn’t improve outcomes.
WELL, IT’S MICHELLE GOLDBERG: “Residents of the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, forced to rely on the New York Times to tell them what’s happening out in the provinces, can be forgiven for thinking latter-day Sturmabteilung have taken over vast swaths of America.”
Of course, if Nazis ever did take over America, the staff of the NYT would mostly collaborate with them.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE IN THE MIDDLE OF YET ANOTHER CALIFORNIA DROUGHT: California is about to begin the nation’s largest dam removal project. Here’s what it means for wildlife.
After decades of negotiation, the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history is expected to begin in California’s far north next year.
The first of four aging dams on the Klamath River, the 250-mile waterway that originates in southern Oregon’s towering Cascades and empties along the rugged Northern California coast, is on track to come down in fall 2023. Two others nearby and one across the state line will follow.
The nearly half-billion dollars needed for the joint state, tribal and corporate undertaking has been secured. The demolition plans are drafted. The contractor is in place. Final approval could come by December.
Now, among the last acts of preparation, scientists are trying to make sure the fish and wildlife that are intended to benefit from the emergence of a newly wild river will thrive. While the decision to remove the hydroelectric dams was financial, it was urged — and enabled — by those hoping to see a revival of plants and animals in the Klamath Basin.
The native flora and fauna in the region are bound to prosper as algae-infested reservoirs at the dams are emptied, the flow of the river quickens and cools, and river passage swings wide open.
“At its heart, this is really a fish-restoration project,” said Mike Belchik, senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe, which has long lamented the decline of salmon on its ancestral territory in the basin. “That’s why we’re doing this.”
Flashback to those crazy right-wingers at the Associated Press last year: Years later, California voters still wait on water projects.
In 2014, in the middle of a severe drought that would test California’s complex water storage system like never before, voters told the state to borrow $7.5 billion and use part of it to build projects to stockpile more water.
Seven years later, that drought has come and gone, replaced by an even hotter and drier one that is draining the state’s reservoirs at an alarming rate. But none of the more than half-dozen water storage projects scheduled to receive that money have been built.
The largest project by far is a proposed lake in Northern California, which would be the state’s first new reservoir of significant size in more than 40 years. People have talked about building the Sites Reservoir since the 1950s. But the cost, plus shifting political priorities, stopped it from happening.
Now, a major drought gripping the western United States has put the project back in the spotlight. It’s slated to get $836 million in taxpayer money to help cover it’s $3.9 billion price tag if project officials can meet a deadline by year’s end. The Biden administration recently committed $80 million to the reservoir, the largest appropriation of any water storage scheduled to receive funding next year.
* * * * * * * *
Storage was once the centerpiece of California’s water management strategy, highlighted by a building bonanza in the mid-20th century of a number of dams and reservoirs. But in the more than 40 years since California last opened a major new reservoir, the politics and policy have shifted toward a more environmental focus that has caused tension between urban and rural legislators and the communities they represent.
As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in 2015, Then-Gov. Jerry Brown “and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Losing weight may boost fertility for obese men.
DON’T GET COCKY: Red Tsunami Watch: Cook Political Report Shifts 10 Races Toward the GOP.
ROGER SIMON: Why We Are Praying for John Durham.
We humble citizens, or “normals” as Kurt Schlichter puts it, have been living under a government in which Sussmann—although just another $800-an-hour (from testimony) Beltway lawyer—is a useful symbol. Lying is the way of the Washington Deep State and its most powerful. To them, it’s almost like breathing. Lying for their own benefit and those of their friends are the respirators from which they will never get off.
In March, the New York Post called many of these individuals to account in their editorial “Spies who lie: 51 ‘intelligence’ experts refuse to apologize for discrediting true Hunter Biden story.”
“They are the supposed nonpartisan group of top spies looking out for the best interest of the nation.
“But the 51 former ‘intelligence’ officials who cast doubt on the Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories in a public letter really were just desperate to get Joe Biden elected president. And more than a year later, even after their Deep State sabotage repeatedly has been shown to be a lie, they refuse to own up to how they undermined an election.
“The officials, including CNN pundit and professional fabricator James Clapper—a man who was nearly charged for perjury for lying to Congress—signed a letter saying that the laptop ‘has the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’”
While not directly in Durham’s purview—although who knows, since so much these days is interconnected—this is the kind of thing the special counsel may be calling to America’s, and the world’s, attention.
It’s literally in his hands to steer our ship of state back to the rule of law. If not him, who? Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz walked up to the edge of truth in his report and then did an about-face before making the obvious conclusions, as if concerned that his Deep State card would be revoked.
The legacy media, so many of whom are deeply implicated in these lies themselves (I worked with some of them and can’t even be near them now, let alone talk to them), will do everything they can to hide or obfuscate this information.
It’s our job, every one of us, to disseminate it—factually and with a minimum of rancor—as widely as possible as the truth emerges.
We can also pray for Durham. Another verse from Mahalia won’t hurt.
Earlier: Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now?
STAY COOL FOR SUMMER: Carhartt Men’s Original Fit Short Sleeve Shirt. #CommissionEarned
HELEN WILL BE ON FOX & FRIENDS BETWEEN 7:30 AND 8:00 ET THIS MORNING, talking about kids who kill, an area of special expertise for her.
UPDATE (from Helen) : You can watch the video of the interview here.
You can hear the longer podcast interview here.
HOW THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE SUCKS THEM IN: Students overestimate post-grad earnings by 100 percent, survey finds.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Cargo Freeway Expansion Canceled in L.A. Due to ‘Racist’ Roads.
The cancellation means that the 710 will remain congested, leaving trucks idling on the road longer, creating more pollution than they would if they were able to travel consistently at the optimum, efficient speed between 45 and 65 miles per hour.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
* * * * * * * *
The 710 Freeway is the main artery for the nation’s largest port complex, through which nearly a third of the nation’s imported goods move. Big rigs carrying a crush of goods — as varied as electronics, auto parts and shoes — often clog the road. Activists call it the diesel death zone, but Americans with their appetite for click-shopping, have come to rely on the web of warehouses and deliveries that the port is built around.
The “Americans with their appetite for click-shopping” is a nice sneer by the L.A. Times, doing their damndest to put the best spin on the Biden administration’s supply chain woes, in much the same way they dubbed unemployment during the administration led by Biden’s former boss as “funemployment:” “For the ‘funemployed,’ unemployment is welcome!” — after all, it’s a chance to “Keep rockin’”!
Earlier:
● CNN’s April Ryan asks Pete Buttigieg to address the ‘racism’ built into our roadways.
● Washington Post fact-check admits it was wrong for ‘knee jerked’ defense of Buttigieg’s racist bridge comments.
GOD FORBID A CONSERVATIVE GROUP SHOULD HAVE CONSERVATIVE VIEWS SHARED BY TENS OF MILLIONS OF AMERICANS: Conservative student group loses faculty advisor, club status after pro-life Instagram posts.
IF YOU SUFFER, GAIA WILL BE APPEASED, AND YOUR BETTERS CAN KEEP THEIR PRIVATE JETS: Majority of American Families Have Canceled Vacation Plans Due to Inflation.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
THE BABYLON BEE. TOMORROW’S NEWS TODAY: Parents Begin Disguising School Buildings As The Capitol So Congress Will Spend Billions To Protect Them.
IT’S AN IDEA THAT’S SO CRAZY FOR A STREAMING SERVICE, IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Liz Wolfe of Reason: Netflix Airs Ricky Gervais’ Controversial Standup, Chooses Actual Entertaining Over Woke Pandering.
“Does Netflix even care that Ricky Gervais’s SuperNature is rife with transphobic TERF ideology?” asks Aja Romano this week at Vox. The answer seems to finally be nope; comedy that pokes fun at extremely online trans activists can in fact be both widely amusing and a moneymaker. And Netflix is in the entertainment business, for which both of those components are important. “We program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices,” the company said in a policy update earlier this month. “Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”
Ergo, Romano argues, the company is “just fine inflicting bigoted hateful rhetoric on its subscribers” and “with the subsequent real-world harm that comes from amplifying such views.”
“At this point, Netflix—the comedy division, if not the entire company—is not just passively supporting transphobic creators, but seem to be actively courting a transphobic audience,” adds The A.V. Club‘s Mary Kate Carr. “The platform’s choice to release this special now,” writes Romano, “during a wave of unprecedented anti-trans legislation, is unconscionable.”
These critics are wrong. The company is not “inflicting” hateful rhetoric on its subscribers; one must consensually opt in to watch it. The “real-world harm” argument goes unsubstantiated yet remains the frequent rallying cry used by many leftists to argue for deplatforming. Recall, for example, the newsroom protest by New York Times staffers, who argued en masse that the paper running an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) calling for military action to pacify domestic protests and riots was putting black staffers’ lives in danger.
But does any evidence suggest that, without Gervais releasing comedy specials, Republican legislators would never have had the idea to pass trans bathroom bills? Or that the people who laugh at jokes about how annoying some radical trans activists are on Twitter are the same people who commit violent acts against trans people?
As one of Steven Crowder’s co-bloggers notes regarding another comedian: Bill Burr’s Specific Reason for Refusing to Apologize to Outrage Mobs Proves Why He’s the Best to Do It.
And his reason why shows why he’s one of the best. If he bends a knee to the mob, it makes it harder for all other comedians.
“I refuse to apologize to anyone that’s upset that they heard a joke at a show they weren’t at […] I’m not a believer in the mob mentality, and I’m not going to apologize just because it’s not worth it. Because then all I do is give that strength, then some other comic’s gonna have to deal with it so.”
I watched Gervais’ special earlier this week. I didn’t find the writing to be at Dave Chappelle’s level, but it was very, very funny, with shotgun blasts at everybody. More from Wolfe:
[A joke] doesn’t always land; you may not think masturbation and 9/11 combine for comedic payoff quite as well as Louis C.K. does. But you sure as hell have to give comics space to try, and audiences the opportunity to seek reprieve from the world’s horrors, delivered magnanimously to us by the funny people.
This is exactly what Netflix aims to do and why more than 200 million people pay for it, seemingly against the wishes of the scolds at Vox, who sanctimoniously announced to no one in particular that they’ll “refrain from clapping” for Gervais’ standup. As if anyone had asked!
Or to put it another way:
(Artwork by Jon Gabriel.)
BRAD THOMPSON: Our Killing School. You know what the #1 common factor in school shootings is? Schools.
DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Jury Finds Katherine Magbanua Guilty Of First Degree Murder Of Dan Markel.
WELL: ‘Stunning’ Andrew Giuliani surges to No. 1 in GOP NY gubernatorial primary. “Once considered a long shot in the New York gubernatorial race, former White House official Andrew Giuliani has stealthily surged into the lead for the June 28 GOP primary. New York pollster John Zogby called the emergence of the former New York City mayor’s son in the No. 1 position remarkable and the product of a bruising battle involving Republican competitors Rep. Lee Zeldin, 2014 nominee Rob Astorino, and upstate millionaire Harry Wilson.”
SCHOOL DISCIPLINE POLICY HAS RUN AMOK: The local NAACP and local teachers association recently rallied for stronger school discipline policy from the Baltimore County Public Schools. Local organizations like those are often pretty good on the issue. It’s the inside-the-beltway, haven’t-seen-the inside-of-a-classroom-since-the-Clinton-Administration educrats who tend to do the most damage. See The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Wrong for Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law. Alas, my understanding is that the Biden Administration is abandoning the Trump Administration’s approach and going back the Obama approach.
OUT ON A LIMB: Biden’s energy policy is sending us toward recession.
With the travel-heavy Memorial Day weekend upon us, the fast-rising cost of gasoline is getting a lot of attention.
Last week, gasoline rose above $4 a gallon in all fifty states. That’s the first time that has happened. Some are predicting gas could reach $6 a gallon this summer. If that comes to pass, the average American family could see a major impact on their budgets.
(It might be noted as well, that the price of home heating oil has nearly doubled this year. If that continues, the economic impact next winter, especially in the northeast, where a high percentage of homes are heated by oil, will be considerable.)
The threat of a recession is rising thanks to fuel shortages.
Why has the price of gasoline risen so far so fast? Easy: the Biden administration, driven by the ideological fantasy of a green-energy future, has hampered domestic production and exploration at every turn.
How bad has it gotten? Even CNN has noticed, John Nolte writes: CNN Admits ‘It’s Time to Prepare for a Recession.’
Anyway, the news we’re heading into a recession is old news. The real news here is this…
Biden has so mishandled the economy, so devastated America with his disastrous domestic policies, that not even CNN can pretend it’s not happening or happy-talk past that fact.
But this was inevitable.
Why?
Because this is the inevitable outcome of leftism.
Obamacare exploded our health costs.
Left-wing environmental policies (based on what everyone knows is a hoax) ensure Americans do not have enough energy, water, or food.
Left-wing energy policies, by design, explode the cost of energy.
Left-wing regulations cripple the private sector.
Higher taxes slow the economy.
Profligate spending creates inflation.
Social Justice pours violent criminals into the streets.
Or as Glenn asks in his latest New York Post column, “So does the Biden administration actually want to see middle-class Americans reduced to poverty and privation? Or is it just too stupid to foresee the obvious consequences of its own actions? At this point, I’m not even sure which is worse. But with the midterms coming, no amount of talk about gun control, abortion or other Democratic hot-button issues is going to distract Americans from what’s happening to their pocketbooks. Good.”
RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Los Angeles Times Columnist Can’t Believe Texas Shooter Was Latino.
BECAUSE IT WOULD MAKE US ALL MISERABLE: “Why Not Polygamy?”
GLAD TO SEE THE MLB FINALLY PROTESTING JOE BIDEN: In Wake Of Uvalde Shooting, San Francisco Giants Manager Boycotting National Anthem Until He Feels Better About Direction Of America.
HE’S RIGHT AGAIN:
DEAL OF THE DAY: WORKPRO 16-inch Wide Mouth Tool Bag. #CommissionEarned
WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: Matt Taibbi: Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now? Trial testimony reveals Hillary Clinton personally approved serious election misinformation. Is there an anti-Trump exception to content moderation?
Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. “I discussed it with Hillary,” he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.”
In a country with a functioning media system, this would have been a huge story. Obviously this isn’t Watergate, Hillary Clinton was never president, and Sussmann’s trial doesn’t equate to prosecutions of people like Chuck Colson or Gordon Liddy. But as we’ve slowly been learning for years, a massive fraud was perpetrated on the public with Russiagate, and Mook’s testimony added a substantial piece of the picture, implicating one of the country’s most prominent politicians in one of the more ambitious disinformation campaigns we’ve seen.
There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.
Read the whole thing. As David Frum puts it in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse:
Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.
President DeSantis is going to be doing a lot of housecleaning when he takes office.
WHICH IS WHAT THE REAL STORIES ARE ABOUT: Absolutely unique, just like everyone else.
OUR AWFUL RULING CLASS, ADDICTED TO POWER, BUT NOT GOOD AT IT:
YOU DON’T HAVE TIME FOR ME TO TELL YOU: Just how crazy are these people?
IT WILL ACTUALLY RESULT IN PEOPLE BURNING ANY WOOD THEY CAN REACH: Biden grants Earth ‘climate stability’ through higher gas prices according to 2012 New York Times OpEd – NYT claimed massive increase in gas prices would ‘result in climate stability’.
IT’S LOWER THAN THAT. MOST OF US LIE TO POLLSTERS: Biden’s approval rating sets a new record…
SARGENT MOM DOES GOOD HEADLINES: A Farrago of Fail.
PEOPLE ARE GROWING VEGETABLES AND CHICKENS: Regarding the upcoming food crisis.
And by people I mean me. Well, vegetables. Chickens would require me to not be allergic to feathers.
A SMALL POTATO MIGHT BE WORSE: Kamala Isn’t That Bad, Reporter Insists After Poll.
Look, it depends. Is the potato at least cooked, does it have butter?
THEY ARE WHERE THEY ARE FOR ETHNICITY AND SEX, NOT COMPETENCE: The Unbearable Derp Of AOC.
THE FICUS IS MAKING OIL EXPENSIVE, IS ALL: America’s Pain at the Pump is Due to The ‘Incredible Transition That is Taking Place,’ Biden Admits.
Their sacred writ promises that if you have to pay a lot more for gas, you’ll move to the city, and live in a tiny apartment, and take the bus everywhere. All of you. I mean. You can take the bus out to your farm and…. what?
Yeah. Their sacred writ was written by Occasional Cortex. On the bathroom wall. And I wouldn’t look too closely on what she wrote it with.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT PLANET THIS PERSON IS FROM: Wind and Solar Will Have to Wait.
Sure. Wind and solar won’t work, but trying to revive the 70s lie that we’re running out of oil to give coverage to the heinous behavior of the administration is as much a non-starter as telling us there was no fraud on the 20 elections. Dudes, give it up. We saw it happening, in front of G-d and everybody. Preventing people from drilling from oil and limiting oil transport is not an oil shortage. It’s criminal behavior designed to destroy this country. Next he’s going to say the border just can’t be defended. (Spits.) Where do these pudding heads come from?
WHAT IT IS IS A LOT CLEARER THAN IT USED TO BE: Something’s Happening Here.
THIS IS NOT NEW: Passing the port from left to right at the Science Fiction Writers of America dinner.
They’ve lost the plot. The plot, the characters, the ability to string words, and their minds. But they still got their wokeness to keep them warm.
FORCING YOU TO PROCLAIM AN OPINION IN UNISON WITH OTHERS TO KEEP A JOB: “By refusing to take part in this collective operation”.
Particularly an opinion that has nothing to do with your job. Hey, lefties? Nineteen eighty four? Not an instruction manual!
May 27, 2022
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Hey Look! Proof Former Obama Admin Officials Committed Treason Under Trump. “According to a memo obtained by ACLJ via a FOIA lawsuit, several Obama administration officials held secret meetings with Iran during Trump’s presidency.”
OPEN THREAD: Never been a better time than this.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China targets permanently shadowed regions at lunar south pole. “The Chang’e-7 mission, expected to launch in 2024 or 2025, will consist of multiple spacecraft including an orbiter, relay satellite, lander, rover and ‘mini flying detector.’ Searching for water ice in a permanently shadowed region (PSR) is noted as a major mission objective.”
Send the Moon Marines to Shackleton Crater, stat.
GOOD WOMAN WITH A GUN: West Virginia Police Say Woman With CCW Stopped a Mass Shooting, Saved Lives. “Police say Dennis Butler returned after being lectured about speeding through an apartment complex where kids were playing. He parked his car and began shooting at a graduation party with an AR-15. A woman among the group of 30 to 40 people saw Butler, 37, in his back seat firing on the group. Instead of running, Hazelett said, she engaged the threat, shooting and killing him.”
Outperforming — and outmanning — the entire Uvalde police department.
SOON LUNAR ICE MINING WILL BE A THING, AS GOD AND ROBERT HEINLEIN INTENDED: The Source of Water Ice on The Moon Could Be Traced to a Seemingly Unlikely Source. “There’s water. Lots of water. Bound up in the lunar regolith. Trapped in volcanic glass. Possibly even in sheets of ice on or just below the surface, hiding in craters at the poles that lurk in permanent shadow, where it can’t be sublimated by the heat of the Sun.”
IDIOTS DELIBERATELY MISCONSTRUE WHAT SEN. BILL CASSIDY SAID: Racial disparities in maternal mortality is getting to be one of those issues for which one must robotically repeat the progressive talking points. No further comment is permitted.
ANN ALTHOUSE ON THE UVALDE DEBACLE: “If the police don’t arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.”
BATTY OLD LADY SAYS WHAT? Bette Midler Encourages Armed Protests of NRA Annual Meetings.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: ‘Professional booster’ with 108 arrests shoplifted from same UES store 10 times: NYPD. “A Manhattan Criminal Court judge opted to release Mckelley late Thursday night after she pleaded guilty to one count of petit larceny and three counts of disorderly conduct. The career shoplifter must complete five sessions of a program for recidivist offenders or she’ll risk a 90-jaily sentence, Judge Lumarie Maldonado-Cruz said.”
SLOGANS VS REALITY:
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: I’d Like to Report a Criminal President. “There’s a lesson in this silly little tale: Even guys drunk enough to think El Chapo should be released from prison have enough wits about the to know that Joe Biden belongs there.”
LANDO CALRISSIAN WAS NOT REACHED FOR COMMENT: Lucasfilm prepped Star Wars actress against ‘racist’ blowback for Obi-Wan role. “In her interview with the Independent, the ‘Obi-Wan’ actress tackles diversity issues in the franchise. ‘To me, it’s long overdue. If you’ve got talking droids and aliens, but no people of colour, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s 2022, you know. So we’re just at the beginning of that change. But I think to start that change is better than never having started it.'”
The trailer looked good, no signs of the wokeness infecting everything in the new Disney-fied Star Wars (except for The Mandolorian) universe.
But this report all but guarantees that Obi-Wan is more of the same tripe that older fans have turned our backs on.
#NARRATIVEFAIL: White Supremacists Are NOT The Most Likely Mass Murderers. Shocker, I know.
PENNSYLVANIA: John Fetterman got a defibrillator after his stroke. But doctors say the campaign’s story ‘doesn’t make sense.’ “With Fetterman now the Democratic nominee in one of the most competitive and consequential Senate races in the country, the unanswered questions about his health have left some Democrats anxious — and cardiologists watching from the outside puzzled.”
OH, COME ON! Border Patrol tactical team arrived at Uvalde school shortly after noon — but cops stopped them from going in. “I continue not to understand why a town with its own police force and its own SWAT team hadn’t already neutralized the shooter by the time the immigration agents got there. Reportedly, the agents don’t understand it either. But as bad as it was that Uvalde had to rely on federal officers to handle this, worse is the fact that the feds weren’t allowed to handle it at first.”
Plus: “I almost can’t bring myself to ask this but I have to: Did they hear any children screaming on the other side of the door while they stood there for 48 minutes?”
And: “They must have known that some kids in the room were alive, as a few were on the phone with 911 sporadically: ‘From 12:03 to 12:46, 911 dispatchers received numerous calls from within the classroom, including repeated calls from a child whispering that people were dead and begging: ‘Please send the police now,’ Mr. McCraw said.'”
Remember, the police have no duty to help you. And calling 911 doesn’t work like on the TV shows. I triple-dare the producers of shows like S.W.A.T. to do an episode while they just stand around while kids die. And yet that’s become disturbingly common in America.
Also, buy a gun.
Related: DPS offers timeline, admits on-scene commander got it wrong: ‘It was the wrong decision. Period.’ “Officers did go in and engage the shooter immediately, but after that initial push they stood outside in the hallway from 11:35 am until the door was finally breached at 12:50 pm. That’s 75 minutes during which there were no attempts to breach the door. McGraw then went through a timeline of 911 calls which made the delay seem even worse. A female teacher called at 12:03 pm and told police where the shooter was. Of course based on the earlier timeline, they already knew that. The same teacher called back at 12:10 to advise police there were multiple people dead. At 12:13 and 12:16 she called once again to say there were 8-9 students still alive.”
Plus: “The next question is more clear. Why did they treat this as a barricaded subject when there were children inside the classroom, some of whom were still alive. . . . That’s one hell of a big mistake to make and you do wonder why it took three days for them to admit it.”
READER FAVORITE: Merrell Men’s Moab 2 Vent Hiking Shoes. CommissionEarned
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: Homeland Security Agents Tell of Encounters With Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. “According to sources The Debrief has interviewed, these incidents include encounters with aerial objects that appear to perform maneuvers well beyond the capabilities of conventional aircraft. Some of these events, which were also captured on video, have left a number of veteran pilots and other personnel questioning the nature and origin of these objects.”
FAILURE. MASSIVE, ULTIMATELY-UNCONCEALABLE FAILURE. What’s next for China’s zero COVID policy.
HUMILIATION REQUIRES A SENSE OF SHAME: Sen. Klobuchar Humiliates Herself With Stupid Gun Control Talking Point.
SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: Libs Of TikTok Suspended From Instagram.
Remember, all Libs of TikTok does is share videos by leftists who have not been suspended.
JIM TREACHER: President Biden Must Disarm the Secret Service Immediately. “And that’s where the lie collapses on itself. Nobody is stupid or crazy enough to believe disarming the Secret Service would make the president more safe. Getting rid of his armed security would be tantamount to suicide. If the president of the United States has the right to protect his own life with as many guns as it takes, why don’t the rest of us? Either the United States Constitution applies to all Americans or it doesn’t. Which is it? Hello? Anybody? I just want one lib to answer any of these questions. Tell us why we should be defenseless against attackers, but our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters get to have as many guns as they want.”
LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND GOVERNMENT STATISTICS: No, Inflation Did Not Ease in April and I Have the Receipts.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: IV infusions with lidocaine may relieve chronic migraines.
HIS LOWEST APPROVAL RATE SO FAR: Biden approval falls below every modern president. “Former Presidents Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Gerald Ford had lower average approval ratings at some stage early in their presidencies, but Biden has caught up, and today’s average was the first for which he was below all presidents since Truman, a potentially troubling trend as Democrats ready for the midterm elections.”
Washington exists to protect the nomenklatura’s prerogatives, not the people’s lives, liberty, or property.
ALL WITHIN THE NARRATIVE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE NARRATIVE, NOTHING AGAINST THE NARRATIVE: MLB Ignores Massive Increase in Georgia Vote After Moving All-Star Game Citing ‘Voter Suppression.’
THAT’S A SHAME: The U.S. Army’s Mind-Bending 1,000-Mile Super Gun Is Officially Dead. “SLRC could have struck targets up to 1,150 miles away, much farther than any other cannon ever built.”
WEIRD THAT THERE ARE NO ECO-TERRORISTS WHO TARGET PRIVATE JETS:
PAULA BOLYARD: Timeline Shifts AGAIN in Uvalde School Shooting. “It’s not unusual to see new facts emerge and shifting timelines in the wake of such a horrific attack. The fog of war makes it difficult to piece together a moment-by-moment account of how a situation unfolded. It will likely take weeks or even months before we know how things really transpired. Nevertheless, the information we do have raises questions about the police response to the shooting.”
BIDEN’S WHO PROPOSALS HIT WALL: A buzz saw of opposition hit those 13 amendments proposed by the Biden White House to, according to critics, cede U.S. sovereignty within its borders over public health issues to the World Health Organization (WHO).
DEAL OF THE DAY: STANLEY Portable Power Station Jump Starter. #CommissionEarned
IS A METAVERSE CHURCH A REAL CHURCH? Shane Morris of the Colson Center is no fan of the digital church phenomenon sparked by the Covid Pandemic. After all, avatars can’t share a person’s joy or pain.
IT’S STARLINK: Tracking China’s Hypersonic Missiles – After Moscow, Beijing Threatens To Neutralize America’s ‘Greatest Wartime Asset.’
China must acquire the capability to track, monitor, and, if required, kill all Starlink satellites in orbit around the Earth, reported SCMP, citing a study published last month.
The study states: “A combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation’s operating system.”
SpaceX operates the Starlink satellite constellation system. It currently employs over 2,400 low-earth orbit satellites capable of providing high-speed internet anywhere globally.
The system has been credited with providing the internet to some of the world’s most remote areas. Elon Musk, the CEO, intends to deploy as many as 30,000 satellites over the next decade.
The US Department of Defense has also inked a deal with SpaceX to use the Starlink platform for military purposes. This agreement includes creating sensors for tracking hypersonic missiles, which China already has in its arsenal.
A Great Power nation-state gearing its military towards undoing the work of a privately-held company might be unprecedented.
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