—BuzzFeed News, February 10th, 2014.
Chaser: BuzzFeed to cut 12% of staff, citing possible downturn that could extend ‘well into 2023.’
—MarketWatch, today.
ANALYSIS TRUE. ‘They Failed at Every Juncture.’ The Loudoun County, VA Grand Jury Has Unsealed Its Findings. “The report also states that despite the lack of a cover-up, school board members were deliberately deprived of information about both assaults and had to learn about them through the press.”
THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Body of last Tasmanian tiger found in museum cupboard.
AT AMAZON, shop the Home Gift Guide. #CommissionEarned.
FALLOUT: Supply Disruption From Russia Price Cap Is Here: Tanker Jam Forms Off Turkey. “The cap is imposed by barring Western businesses from insuring, financing or shipping Russian oil unless the price is at or under the cap. The insurance aspect is particularly meddlesome, as maritime insurance is dominated by western firms, most notably Lloyd’s of London.”
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Raphael Warnock: I Support Abortion Because “It’s Exactly What Jesus Would Do.”
GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS: After a Crackdown on a Pain Clinic, a Tragic Double Suicide: After losing access to opioids, many patients can’t live with constant pain.
Government officials accountable, yeah, I know, I crack myself up.
THIS IS LIKE WHEN KRAMER WENT ON STRIKE FROM THE BAGEL PLACE: Nikole Hannah-Jones to join NYT walkout: Despite the fact that the 1619 Project author has not written anything for the paper for over two years.
JUST NBC THE MEMORY HOLE! Pin your yarmulkes back and listen to Al Sharpton bemoan Kanye West’s antisemitism on MSNBC:
As far as we know, Al Sharpton has never expressed anything resembling genuine regret or contrition for his own antisemitism. And yet here he is, talking about Kanye West’s antisemitism. West’s antisemitism is indeed “wrong no matter what” … so why isn’t Sharpton’s?
Related: O Ye of Little Faith: The Anti-Semitism of Kanye West.
Now, as then, anti-Semitism has a function: It translates traditional and retrograde attitudes into a political interpretation with potential for radical social action.
So it was in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where local preachers laid the groundwork and served as apologists for the deadly 1991 riots. For three days, black rioters proclaiming themselves the second coming of Hitler beat up any Jew they could find. In this magazine in November 1979, Dorothy Rabinowitz foresaw the violence, noting that in Crown Heights, “public expression of anti-Semitic sentiment, as a means of conveying political antagonism, seems now to have become normal.” When I spoke to one of the rabble-rousing black reverends in 2021, he still justified his actions with all kinds of grievances, comparing Chabad to the Ku Klux Klan and substantiating his claims with minutiae about political maneuvering and access to government funding. Decades from now, I expect to hear similar figures use the New York Times’ latest distortion—that Hasidic schools steal funds from poor black children—as a justification for some future attack.
Even after a Jew had been murdered in Crown Heights, with dozens beaten and thousands forced into hiding, “civil-rights leaders” such as Al Sharpton continued to fan the flames and suggest that the Lubavitchers had deserved the pogrom they got. Only days before the riot, Sharpton had said, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” He said it in defense of Leonard Jeffries, then the chairman of black studies at City College, who was under fire for blaming Jews for the slave trade, among other wild theories. The black New York radio station WLIB and the Amsterdam News and City Sun papers also rallied to Jeffries’s defense. Not one black lawmaker in Albany signed the condemnation of Jeffries.
In reporting on the 30th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots last year for the Wall Street Journal, I spoke to Brooklyn’s Laurie Cumbo, then majority leader of the New York City Council. Cumbo called the riots “the Crown Heights Uprising,” because “‘riots’ give the impression of [having] no basis.”
So I hope you’ll forgive my cynicism about the response to Kanye West. If West hadn’t first raised the ire of black leaders with his friendly treatment of Donald Trump, we would hear now that he’s speaking from a place of pain. We’d hear that anti-Semitism “is for some black folks a defense against antiblack racism on the part of Jews,” as bell hooks, the pioneering black feminist scholar, wrote in 1992. Adapting James Baldwin, apologists would explain that when West said “Jew,” he really meant “white.” But, as Earl Raab pointed out in COMMENTARY in January 1969, “that is an exact and acute description of political anti-Semitism. ‘The enemy’ becomes the Jew, ‘the man’ becomes the Jew,… who stands symbolically for generic evil.”
Exit quote: “Anti-Semitism from above, in speeches and tracts, has always proceeded in a dialectic with anti-Semitism from below, with rocks and bricks. Kanye West is nuts, and so is the guy who sucker punches a Hasid in Brooklyn. They hear the same noise—and each other.”
NEARLY AS WELL-INFORMED AS THEIR INTENTIONS ARE PEACEFUL: ‘Janes Revenge’ Abortion Zealots Threaten to ‘Shoot Up’ Catholic Newman Center With ‘New AR14 Rifles.’
AND YET THE DELICIOUS-LOOKING PICTURE OF CHILI DOGS ACCOMPANYING THE STORY MAKES ME WANT ONE: Study links eating lots of ultra-processed foods daily with cognitive decline.
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Parent’s Oversight Board Criticizes ‘Cross Check’ Program That Protects VIP Users.
The report offers the most detailed review to date of cross check, which Meta has billed as a quality-control effort to prevent moderation errors on content of heightened public interest. The oversight board took up the issue more than a year ago in the wake of a Wall Street Journal article based on internal documents that showed that cross check was plagued by favoritism, mismanagement and understaffing.
The board’s report doesn’t take issue with the value of a secondary review system for moderating posts from high-profile or sensitive accounts. But the board said the program in practice has put Meta’s business interests over the program’s stated goals of protecting public discourse, and it noted that the highest levels of protection are generally reserved for accounts that might stir up trouble for Meta’s senior leadership.
…
The Journal article last year found that under the cross check program, also known as “XCheck,” some VIP users were “whitelisted,” meaning they were exempted from some or all penalties for violating platform rules. Other accounts were given “remediation windows” in which they could remove violating posts without penalty or received watered-down punishments for misconduct.
Some Facebook users are more equal than others.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Horrified Balenciaga Teddy Bear Can’t Remember Safe Word.
MILES MONROE, CALL YOUR OFFICE! The great Covid and cigarettes cover-up:
I achieved a personal milestone in April 2020 when, for the first time, one of my articles was flagged up as fake news on Facebook. spiked rather invited trouble by giving it the headline ‘Smoke fags, save lives’, but even with a subtler title it would have been enough to alarm Zuckerberg’s minions, since it discussed the growing evidence that smokers were heavily under-represented in Covid-19 wards.
Since back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’, a fake-news flag was something of a badge of honour. And, as with those claims, the ‘disputed’ information in my article has been borne out by the evidence.
After a brief burst of incredulous coverage in the spring of 2020, the media soon lost interest in the hypothesis that smokers are less likely to get Covid-19, but dozens of studies have been quietly published in the past two-and-a-half years which confirm it. I have been listing them on my blog and last week added the hundredth study. It seems a good time to stop. By any reasonable standard, the jury is in.
Of the 100 studies from around the world, 87 of them show a statistically significant reduction in SARS-CoV-2 infection risk among current smokers as compared to non-smokers. Seven of them found no statistically significant association either way. Two of them found mixed results. Four of them found a positive association between smoking and infection, although three of these looked at people with a genetic propensity to smoke rather than at smokers themselves.
The studies used a range of methodologies. Very few of them set out to look at the effect of smoking specifically, but epidemiologists tend to ask people if they smoke as a matter of course and so the association kept popping up. Some of the studies looked at specific outbreaks of Covid-19, such as on a French aircraft carrier. Several of them looked at healthcare workers, such as this one from Germany and this one from Chile. Others looked at groups of hospital patients, such as psychiatric patients in New York or HIV patients in South Africa. A large number of them used seroprevalence surveys to see who had antibodies and, therefore, who had been infected in the past (prior to the vaccines).
Yet another mile marker on the Sleeper diet becoming a reality:
RESPONDING TO ARGUMENTS AGAINST MARS COLONIZATION: “When people who are either disinterested in space colonisation, or actively opposed to it, comment on the prospects of travelling to Mars they often make the same or very similar arguments, unaware that these arguments were either ill-formed to begin with or have already been convincingly refuted.”
THAT’S BEEN THE LEFT’S ENDGAME FOR A VERY LONG TIME: Biden’s DHS Signals It Wants to Criminalize Political Dissent.
VIDEO: Russia’s Failure To Achieve Air Superiority. “One reason not covered: Russia seems to have used up a good portion of its high tech weapons in the opening phases of the war, and western sanctions mean that it can’t easily replace them.”
Once again, if you don’t have the time or inclination to watch a video, Lawrence Person has done a fine job of breaking out the bullet points.
Related: Ukraine Hits Airbase 600 Kilometers Inside Russia. “Ukraine’s ever-increasing range puts a whole lot of Russian infrastructure (military and otherwise) under potential threat.”
NOW COMES THE MORNING-AFTER HEADACHE: Two of the 47 House Republicans who voted for the Respect for Marriage Act in July have now recanted that vote, according to The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson.
“My record shows that I am a long-standing advocate against discrimination of all types. I, however, cannot support any effort that undermines religious liberties by failing to provide legitimate safeguards for faith-based organizations that object based on their deeply-held religious beliefs,” Johnson quotes Rep. Mario Diaz-Belart (R-Fla.) announcing Monday.
The first of the recanters was Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who attributed his original vote to confusion and how Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rushed the bill through to the floor vote.
READER REQUEST: Diguo Belgian/Belgium Family Balance Siphon/Syphon Coffee Maker. #CommissionEarned
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Will Trump really run in 2024? “Usually, Insanity Wrap is about the Left’s big crazy — but this week, maybe I’m the crazy one. But don’t worry, I still have all of the usual lefty nuttiness you’ve come to love and expect.”
- Woke teacher needs to put that clicker where the sun don’t shine
- Antifa is objectively — and violently — anti-women
- Meet Microwave Head Man
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
There is much to ponder in this latest report on the Chinese military. The sources of Chinese future military effectiveness lie less in numbers of missiles or ships than in how they intellectually and organisationally prepare for war. They have long been thinking about weaknesses in Western military systems, and ways they might influence or destroy the West’s military and national security systems.
But just as we possess weakness, so too do the Chinese. Their reforms, as a recent Japanese report makes clear, are not yet complete. And the Russo-Ukraine War has shown fragilities in pre-war assessments about Russian military prowess. These factors need to be kept in mind when reading the report.
Therefore, there is no need for despair in reading about significant improvements in Chinese military capacity in the 2022 Pentagon report. The nations of the West have proven before that they can find and target weaknesses in large authoritarian nations.
Our weakness is that much of our leadership is in the tank for Beijing, or at the very least admires and tries to emulate their authoritarian regime.
INSTITUTIONAL RACISM: Med school ‘stigmatized white people’ during all-day DEI ‘retreat’: report. Some doctors were ‘subjected to seven hours of stereotyping and shaming.’
That’s a violation of federal civil rights laws, and quite possibly state civil rights laws. The accreditors should also hear about this.
YES: Is Expressing Support For Dobbs A Firing Offense In BigLaw?
Rather than just accepting this, attorneys and activists on the right should lobby for regulatory/ethics/tax changes that will make really big law firms much harder to operate. The laws were changed to favor them, and there’s no reason why that should remain the case except for big-firm domination of bar associations. Now that there are no neutral institutions left in our society, it’s important to put pressure on any institution that’s on the other side. That’s what the left does, and it’s what the right will need to do if it wants things to change. But hey, maybe it doesn’t really.
STARLINK: The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty Dang Impressive. “Just because folks in Allan Hills, Antarctica (and my location on Monument Hill) are delighted to have nearly weather-proof, high-speed internet available doesn’t mean that Starlink isn’t without its problems.”
IF WHITE PRIVILEGE IS A THING, WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT TO BE A MINORITY? Professor admits no Native American tribal affiliation after decades of claiming otherwise. I should note, though, that tribal descent is not necessarily the same thing as current tribal affiliation.
MARGOT CLEVELAND: If A Legitimate Free Press Existed, The Twitter Files Wouldn’t.
The projection from these supposed reporters couldn’t have been any more ironic because had there been a widespread outbreak of journalism following the Post’s bombshell coverage of the Biden family scandal, Twitter’s censorship would not have happened — or, if it did, it would not have mattered.
Had journalists from legacy outlets and especially the supposed standard-bearers of journalism, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, approached the story with the seriousness it deserved, it seems unlikely Twitter would have dared censor the story. Or such censorship, had it occurred, would have been futile because journalists would be falling over themselves to report the latest details in a political scandal that suggested the Democrat candidate for president had participated in a pay-to-play enterprise with his son while vice president.
Real journalists would have tracked down and authenticated the laptop materials, as they did a belated two years later. Real journalists would have questioned Bobulinski and reported his collaborating statements. Real journalists would have demanded answers from Joe, Hunter, and James Biden, the president’s brother who also profited from the many deals; they would have sought answers on every detail suggesting corruption discussed in the emails and other materials recovered from the laptop. And real journalists would have pushed intelligence agencies, and the former members of them who signed on to a letter casting the laptop as Russian disinformation, on the basis for that claim.
I’m reminded of what Harry Reid said when he got caught lying about Mitt Romney’s taxes during the 2012 presidential campaign: “It worked, didn’t it?”
EPIC HOLIDAY DEALS are here. #CommissionEarned
SOMEHOW IT’S ABOUT GRAFT OR GRIFT: The absurdity of California’s reparations proposal.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Republicans Need to Avoid a RINO Stampede in 2023. “As soon as Mitch McConnell had secured another stint as Senate Minority Leader, he went into surrender mode, indicating that he was willing to cave to the Dems on some hot-button issues. Whatever conservative inclinations or fortitude McConnell picked up during the Trump years is long gone and he’s back to being Mitch the Useless Squish.”
YET ANOTHER BIDEN CRISIS-BY-DESIGN: Vaccine Mandate Is Hurting Recruiting, Top Marine General Says.
I TRUST CAR SALESMEN MORE: Trust in media at all-time low.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Team Biden is using the IRS to attack the gig economy.
COMING TO TERMS: The COVID lockdowns were all for naught.
How different it feels this time around. Broadcasters are lustily cheering anti-lockdown protesters in China. Members of Congress offer unqualified support. President Joe Biden, although more guarded, is sympathetic.
No Western politician, as far as I can see, is insulting the protesters. They are not dismissed as selfish or sociopathic, nor as dupes of conspiracy theories. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) captured the mood: “To the people of China — we hear you and we stand with you as you fight for your freedom.”
Broadcasters and columnists who spent 2020 calling anti-lockdowners kooks and criminals are now uncomplicatedly applauding their Chinese counterparts. They see ordinary people standing up against an authoritarian government the anti-COVID policies of which were crushing liberty. . . .
Guess which developed country had the lowest excess mortality between 2020 and 2022. Go on, have a guess. That’s right. Sweden, which refused to close shops or schools or to impose a mask mandate, saw cumulative excess deaths rise by 6.8%, the lowest figure in the OECD. By way of comparison, the equivalent figures were 18% in Australia, 24.5% in the U.K., and 54.1% in the U.S.
At this stage, various authoritarians, hypochondriacs and mask fetishists trot out bizarre arguments about Sweden having a low population density, as if Swedes were evenly spaced across their birch forests rather than living mainly in cities comparable to ours. What is striking about this argument is not so much its dishonesty (in March 2020, lockdowners claimed that Sweden faced total catastrophe, not that it might end up with a slightly higher mortality rate than Finland ) as its desperation.
The lockdowns were not for really naught, however. They facilitated an enormous transfer of wealth and political power from the middle- and working-class to big corporations and the professional/managerial class.
ABOUT THAT PALE BLUE DOT: Is it proof Earth — and every one of us — are here by chance or by design? Which one, Carl Sagan, astronomer/scientist, or J. Warner Wallace, cold-case detective/Christian apologist, got it right, based on the evidence?
2024 PREVIEW: Trump Clarifies Statement Misrepresented as a Call to End to U.S. Constitution. “Donald Trump is sometimes his own worst enemy but, as we know from Russiagate, he is also grossly misrepresented in the media.”
MUSK BOOTING CHILD PORN PURVEYORS OFF TWITTER: As expected, the Left is up in arms about Elon Musk exposing the activities of the Democratic censors who formerly controlled Twitter. But guess who else is getting unwanted exposure, thanks to Musk? Child pornography distributors, according to Issues & Insights:
“This is what the left and woke companies are freaking out about? Cybersecurity firm Ghost Data reported over the weekend that Twitter had nearly doubled the number of accounts it is suspending each day that were sharing child pornography.
“’In the past 24 hours, Twitter started to step up its efforts and took down 44,000 suspicious accounts, including over 1,300 profiles that tried to bypass detection using codewords and text in images to communicate. Zero tolerance,” said Ghost Data founder Andrea Stoppa, who has been monitoring this, in a tweet.”
And it turns out that Twitter knew more than a year ago that child pornography being distributed via Tweets was growing “exponentially,” but the company’s investment in resources needed to counter that growth was all but nil. Expect the Left screaming to get louder in the days ahead as Musk continues sweeping the piles of manure out of the stalls.
Transparency is great when it’s applied to the Right, but now we see what the Left actually believes about transparency as it is being applied at Twitter.
THEN THERE’S JENNIFER GRANHOLM: Biden’s energy secretary is lauding her department for awarding $200 million to Microvast Holdings to aid its construction of a new lithium battery factory in Tennessee. Hooray for the emerging American clean-energy industry, Granholm said, promising that the grant and factory will “supercharge the private sector to ensure our clean energy future is American-made.”
But guess what Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon found after a little perfunctory digging?
“While the DOE described Microvast as a ‘majority U.S.-owned company, traded on NASDAQ’ and ‘headquartered in Stafford, Texas,’ financial records show the company operates primarily out of China.
“Microvast itself says the Chinese government ‘exerts substantial influence over the manner in which we must conduct our business activities and may intervene, at any time and with no notice.’ The company was also recently added to a Securities and Exchange Commission watchlist of Chinese companies that are on track to be delisted from NASDAQ for failing to comply with U.S. auditing requirements.”
In other words, Granholm (and, unless he fires her, her boss as well) just plain flat-out lied to America.
HARD TIMES AHEAD FOR ABRAMS: Turns out that somebody has been asleep at the wheel in the compliance department of the foundation founded by twice-failed Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams.
“State laws across the country prohibit charities that have not filed required financial disclosures with the IRS from soliciting donations. But the New Georgia Project, which missed the Nov. 15 deadline to file its Form 990, is still raising money through a nationwide campaign hosted by the online fundraising platform ActBlue,” report the Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr and Joseph Simonson.
“Representatives at the relevant agencies in Tennessee, Mississippi, and North Carolina, where the New Georgia Project’s charity license has expired, told the Free Beacon that the group could face fines ranging from $25 dollars to $25,000 for violating their state’s charity laws. Some of those fines could be issued for each donation the group accepts,” Perhaps Abrams will claim those registrations were stolen.
COLORADO: Denver considers one-time pandemic bonuses. “City employees in Denver might see a one-time, $600 bonus for staying put.”
CONGRATULATIONS TO REP. KHANNA: A Democratic member of Congress laments how Twitter handled the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
THE STUPID PARTY: Will GOP Commit Political Suicide With Bipartisan Amnesty Bill? “Ever since last month’s red trickle election, it seems as if the Republicans are trying to prove to the electorate that they shouldn’t have won big anyway.”
PUSHBACK IS NEEDED IN MANY AREAS: A PLAN TO PUSH BACK AGAINST CHINA’S FISHING PRACTICES.
The Soviet fishing fleet was once a near-permanent fixture on America’s Pacific coast, hauling in an estimated 1.2 million tons of fish until the two sides reached an agreement to limit the Soviet catch in exchange for a relaxation of rules on Soviet port visits. Moscow’s fishing fleet dwindled in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to be replaced by China’s large fleet — and maritime militia — that Beijing now uses to encroach on the sovereignty of its neighbors. The environmental and economic challenges of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing are clearly a threat to the global fish supply, but also represent a more direct and significant threat to national security.
The vast expansion of China’s illegal fishing fleet has made large, capable vessels readily available to its maritime militia, which it uses for coercive influence in contested areas from the Spratly Islands to oil and gas standoffs with Malaysia and Vietnam. More importantly, it represents a clear example of how China refuses to accept the rights of coastal states and their claim on the resources of their economic exclusion zones.
The U.S. Coast Guard is well positioned to work with countries to push back against China’s fishing practices, and to take the lead on this issue.
Somebody should. I think China should have to give up fishing for a decade as partial reparations for Covid.
FROM CELIA HAYES AND JEANE HAYDEN: Luna City 11th Inning Stretch (The Chronicles of Luna City).
#CommissionEarned
![Luna City 11th Inning Stretch (The Chronicles of Luna City) by [Celia Hayes, Jeanne Hayden]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41M9AB88CAL.jpg)
Welcome to Luna City, Karnes County, Texas … Population 2,460, give or take! Chef Richard Astor-Hall has decided to become an American, take on a new job, and marry long-time girlfriend, Kate Heisel. His visiting parents are off on a quest for a vineyard of very special grapes, and Miss Letty tells the story of what happened when an émigré scientist from Russia found a refuge with his family in Luna City during the 1930s. Another chapter in the doings of the most perfect small town in this eleventh outing to the most perfect small town in Texas.
MORE THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE: How Corrupt Is a Corrupt Media?
THERE WAS NEVER A CASE FOR MASS MIGRATION: The Culture Transplant Shatters the Case for Mass Immigration.
Take it from someone who has done it: acculturation is difficult, painful and makes you feel like you’re going insane. Even when you are alone and purposely isolate yourself from your birth language and cultural influences and work like heck at acculturating.
When you’re surrounded by thousands come from the same homeland? It might be impossible. And while race is fairly meaningless, culture means a lot more than you can imagine. And seems to have a life of its own.
Mass immigration is a really bad idea. Unless you desperately want to import the other culture. Looks to the border. And, you know? I’d say no. Hard no.
SOME DAYS I’M LESS OPTIMISTIC THAN OTHERS: Consent and Perception.
WHAT EVEN IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? Today’s blacklisted American: Pernicious anti-white bigotry controls the government in Seattle.
IT’S BEEN GOING ON SINCE OBAMA CARE CAME IN: Who is John Galt, medicine edition? The “Great Resignation” in healthcare. Bonus: Canadian “compassionate care” outrage of the day.
The response of various health service providing institutions is to treat the remaining doctors like rented mules.
IF IT WERE ONLY THIS! That stench from Arizona grows.
WHAT EVEN IS WRONG WITH HER? An English teacher proudly hates the English language.
DO TAKE THEIR WARNING SERIOUSLY, PLEASE.
Note that a friend who knows this better than I says this is par for the course for “transgressive modern art.” From the little I know, I think he’s right. Does that mean all these people are crazed pedophiles and psychopaths? Well, no. But the people in search of the next cool thing pour epater les bourgeois are enabling next level monsters. And rich people enable and collect these because… I don’t know. Do not ask me what is wrong with these people. Words are my profession, but I don’t have words to describe this.
AND ANY KID WHO DOESN’T FIT IN: How the Transgender Industry Targets Victims of Autism.
Every one of my friends — and myself — are convinced we’d have been convinced we were transgender if we were going to school now. It’s a genocide of my people.
AT THIS RATE, MY SHOCKED FACE IS GOING TO BE WORN DOWN TO A FRAZZLE: Scientist With Ties to Wuhan Lab Claims Covid was Genetically Engineered, Leaked From Lab.
BUT NOT NANCY PELOSI? Egyptian Petition Demands British Museum Return the Iconic Rosetta Stone.
I guess they can’t collect every single runaway mummy.
WHAT DO PARENTS EVEN HAVE TO DO WITH EDUCATION, AMIRITE? Biden Education Dept. Dissolves National Parents and Families Engagement Council.
Parents and families: it’s high time we dissolved the Dept of Education.
THE BORDER IS TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL! Karine Jean-Pierre Confirms Biden Won’t Visit the Border During Arizona Trip.
December 5, 2022
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Team Biden is using the IRS to attack the gig economy.
MAYBE THEY HOPE ELON WILL BUY THEM TOO: YouTube Censors Rasmussen Reports – What did they not want you to see?
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: I’m gay, I support gay marriage, and I don’t think the ‘gay rights’ side should win in this Supreme Court case.
On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case called 303 Creative LLC v Elenis. The case centers around Lorie Smith, a Christian who owns a website design business. She wants to expand her business and start designing custom wedding websites, but due to her religious beliefs, is unwilling to create them for same-sex weddings, as she would be forced to do under current Colorado civil rights law. Smith is challenging the Colorado statute on First Amendment grounds, arguing that she has a free speech right (note: the case is not about religious liberty) not to be forced to create messages she disagrees with.
No, she’s not suing because she wants to put a “no-gays allowed” sign in her window. In fact, she has served many LGBTQ clients and offers her general services to all. Smith is simply unwilling to create a custom wedding website, which inherently endorses said wedding, for a ceremony she does not agree with. She says she would seek to make the same refusal to other custom websites that violate her beliefs, including those which denigrate gay people or feature a heterosexual couple in violation of other tenets of her Christian faith.
The state of Colorado, on the other hand, argues that her religion does not grant her an exemption to a neutral civil rights law. The government argues that if Smith is going to offer wedding websites, she must offer them to all.
Related: Justice Gorsuch Leaves CO Solicitor General Stammering During Oral Arguments on Religious Liberty.
For understandable reasons, Gorsuch wasn’t really interested in hearing such obvious nonsense, noting that Jack Phillips had been put through a re-education program for honoring his religious convictions. That left the solicitor general stammering in an attempt to explain how it wasn’t a re-education program even though its purpose was to re-educate.
Listening to that, Gorsuch is pretty obviously going to side with the web designer, and that’s the proper decision given that the basic tenets of religious liberty are at stake here. It’s not hard to judge where Barrett is going to end up either, and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are slam dunks if history is any guide. That really just leaves Justice Kavanaugh as the swing vote because Justice Roberts will do what he always does, which is be a coward who attempts to carve out some unworkable middle ground.
When the Jack Phillips case was decided four years ago, the court chickened out, essentially giving him the win on a technicality that didn’t address the root issue. Unfortunately, the harassment of Phillips and others continues to this day. Hopefully, the Supreme Court is ready to put an end to the insanity with a decisive ruling.
Colorado’s population is 5.81 million. Given that the state apparently has only one cake maker and Website developer, this is seems like a remarkable opportunity for the entrepreneurial-inclined individual.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX rolls out new business line focused on military satellite services.
AT AMAZON, Epic Deals. #CommissionEarned.
ELON MUSK AND MATT TAIBBI HAVE THE PERFECT RESPONSE TO LIBERAL MEDIA’S FURY WITH THE TRUTH. Taibbi “said he was ‘looking forward’ to going through all the ‘PR for the richest man on earth’ tweets, ‘and seeing how many of them have run stories for anonymous sources at the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, and White House.’”
BREAKING: We Now Have the Full Transcript of Fauci’s Deposition in Social-Media Collusion Case.
UPDATE (From Ed): Fauci’s youngest daughter was working at Twitter during this time period:
Fauci and Grady’s youngest daughter is Alison Christine Fauci, who was born in April 1992. She and her sisters attended the private, all-girls National Cathedral School located in Washington, D.C.
After graduating from high school, Alison Fauci relocated to the west coast for college and has continued to live on that side of the country ever since. She attended Stanford University and majored in computer science.
Alison Fauci also competed on the rowing team. According to her profile on Stanford’s website, she competed all four years and racked up titles each year. During her senior season, Fauci was named the Pac-12 Scholar Athlete of the Year, made the Pac-12 All-Academic first team and placed sixth at the NCAA Championships. She also helped Stanford win its first Pac-12 Championship and served as a captain during her senior season.
Alison Fauci graduated from Stanford in 2014 and accepted a job at Twitter. She works as a software engineer and, according to her LinkedIn profile, was focused on developing “ad formats for the Twitter for Android app.” (Her LinkedIn profile has since been made private or deleted).
The above Heavy.com article has a URL with the date of March 2020, but was updated on October 9th of this year.
EVOLUTION IN ACTION: Humans Keep Growing an Extra Artery in Their Arms, And This Is Why.
CALLING PARENTS TERRORISTS KINDA POISONED THE WELL: Department of Education disbands national parents council after parental rights groups sued.
Sure, it’s all fun and games between parents and administrators until parents actually show up at school board meetings and voice concerns over the agendas of the teacher unions that permeate schools. Then those parents speaking out are labeled by the DOJ as domestic terrorists and MUST.BE.SHUT.DOWN! How dare parents ask questions of administrators and expect answers. The funny thing is Secretary Cardona thinking that the PTA was a terrific voice for support. . . .
One thing the pandemic did, though, was to open the eyes of parents about what goes on in schools. Online learning showed the lesson plans and what was being taught in the classroom and parents didn’t like it. The silver lining to the pandemic lockdowns that closed up schools, many for over a year, is that parents are newly invigorated to be active in their children’s lives at school. And, thanks to enthusiastic parents, changes are happening. Look what happened in Virginia – that blue/purple state turned mostly red and elected Glenn Youngkin as governor in 2021 because he tuned in with parents and focused on a message of parental rights.
The same thing happened with Cardona’s National Parents and Families Engagement Council. It was overreach that only went one way so parental groups complained. And, they filed lawsuits. The council was called a Potemkin Village.
To be fair, only because it was.
CREEPY PORN LAWYER UPDATE: Disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti, onetime opponent of Donald Trump, sentenced to 14 years in fraud case.
Disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti was sentenced on Monday to 14 years in federal prison for defrauding his clients and for obstructing IRS efforts to collect payroll taxes from his coffee business.
He was also ordered to pay $7 million in restitution.
The sentence will run consecutively with his combined five-year sentence in New York for stealing from Stormy Daniels and for extorting Nike.
The punishment, imposed by a federal judge in Los Angeles, is a few years shy of what prosecutors sought.
Avenatti pleaded guilty in June to stealing money from clients, including one who is a paraplegic, and one count of obstructing collection of federal payroll taxes from his coffee business.
Avenatti skyrocketed to celebrity status in 2018 alongside Daniels, his then-client and an adult film star, who filed multiple lawsuits — unsuccessfully — against then-President Donald Trump.
For a time, the brash lawyer was a fixture on cable news shows and the topic of flattering magazine pieces.
The above ABC News article omits what was said about Avenatti on an ABC News-produced show: Flashback: Ana Navarro Compares Michael Avenatti To The Holy Spirit On Live TV.
Another flashback: A Look Back At All The Media Praise For Michael Avenatti.
HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GET OLD: Who Will Care for ‘Kinless’ Seniors? Nearly one million Americans have no immediate family members to provide assistance if needed. The number is expected to grow.
Lynne Ingersoll and her cat, Jesse, spent a quiet Thanksgiving Day together in her small bungalow in Blue Island, Ill.
A retired librarian, Ms. Ingersoll never married or had children. At 77, she has outlived her parents, three partners, her two closest friends, five dogs and eight cats.
When her sister died three years ago, Ms. Ingersoll joined the ranks of older Americans considered “kinless”: without partners or spouses, children or siblings. Covid-19 has largely suspended her occasional get-togethers with friends, too. Now, she said, “my social life consists of doctors and store clerks — that’s a joke, but it’s pretty much true.”
Like many older adults, Ms. Ingersoll copes with an array of health problems: kidney disease, asthma, heart disease requiring a pacemaker, arthritis that makes walking difficult even with a cane. She’s managing, but “I can see a time when that’s not going to be true,” she said. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it.”
This is the final chapter of Life of Julia that the Obama campaign left out. The solution offered will probably be some sort of euthanasia program, as is already appearing in Canada.
Related: Singles can snuggle this giant emotional support bear — and it doesn’t snore. “The Loving Bear Puffy is the shape and size of a male human body — but has the head of a teddy bear. Puffy is ‘a very personal product invented by an ordinary woman who is afraid of being alone,’ the company said. The 5-foot, 7-inch oversize plush bear — weighing just 7 pounds — is $160 and ‘replaces the need for the physical presence of a person in various moments and situations of everyday life, especially during long lonely nights.'”
WILL TAR AND FEATHERS BE INVOLVED? New Zealand announces public inquiry into COVID-19 response.
This seems more like a CYA exercise to me.
TIM COOK SEEMS TO HAVE BACKED DOWN PRETTY QUICKLY: Twitter’s Largest Advertiser Returns to Platform, Has Now ‘Fully Resumed’ Spending.
GREAT TABLETOP STEREO: Klipsch Heritage Wireless The One II Tabletop Stereo Walnut. #CommissionEarned Glenn bought this a few months ago and it is extremely easy to set up and use. The sound quality is good for anything from Christmas music to yoga tunes to your favorite songs.
HMM: BMW Expands into Hydrogen Power with Fuel-Cell SUV Based on the X5. “BMW claims the iX5 can accelerate from zero to 62 mph in under seven seconds and has a top speed of 118 mph. It also has an estimated driving range of around 310 miles, although that claim is based on the optimistic European WLTP cycle.”
I drove a GM hydrogen car for Popular Mechanics a few years back. I still have the same reservations about the hydrogen fuel cycle. To wit: “The car advertises itself as petroleum-free, which is true. But—and here’s my problem with hydrogen cars—it’s not really fossil fuel free. Most hydrogen is made by ‘steam reformation’ of natural gas, which is still a fossil fuel. You can also make it out of water, via electrolysis, but unless you’ve got a non-fossil source of electricity the hydrogen is really just functioning as an energy-storage medium, rather than a source of energy. Of course, build lots of nice, clean nuclear plants, or orbiting solar power plants, or whatever, and that problem goes away.”
Maybe the abundance of fracked natural gas changes this calculation a bit, but I’m not sure. But the people pushing hydrogen cars are generally anti-fracking.
NO WONDER DEMOCRATS ARE SO ANGRY AT ELON: Pedophiles Finally Being Kicked Off Of Twitter.
BIDEN DENIES FLORIDA emergency FEMA funds. “What the state was asking for was an expansion of Section 403: Emergency Protective Measures for Sheltering in Home for Recovery Continuation (SHRC) RFI Response. It would turn loose FEMA dollars to help the state pay for temporary home repairs – tarps, roofs, safe utilities, etc – so folks could live safely in their still damaged homes, instead of in communal shelters, or face the prospect of being homeless while desperately looking for somewhere to live. The damage is so widespread, there are no rentals nor enough FEMA trailers/temp shelters to be had.”
Nope. Nothing for you, Florida man. “For all Biden’s bluster about how important the folks here in FL were before the election. . . FEMA has hardly been covering itself in glory from the minute they set their little tents up. What a cluster. They’ve got the government circle jerk down pat.”
Well, FEMA.
READER FAVORITE: MyPillow Premium Bed Pillow 2 Pac. #CommissionEarned
THEY FEAR HUMOR EVERY BIT AS MUCH AS SOVIET APPARATCHIKS DID: Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety claims Babylon Bee, Libs of TikTok make ‘people unsafe in the world.’
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Ohio measles outbreak nearly triples, expected to last “several months.”
YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH AMMO: Army plans ‘dramatic’ ammo production boost as Ukraine drains stocks.
DAVID THOMPSON: An Inexplicable Dislike.
At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities.
The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here.
Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
And then there are the brave warriors inside Twitter: Ex-Twitter Executive: Elon Musk Is Putting Us ‘In Harm’s Way’ By Showing How We Censored Content.
Taibbi tweeted out screenshots showing that company officials were in regular contact with Democrats and censored content that Democrats wanted removed.
“Publicly posting the names and identities of front-line employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” Roth posted on Mastodon.
On the frontline! Whole lot of leftists really leaning hard into the century-old “moral equivalent of war” concept.
BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Canucks Claim Killing Cripples Is Compassionate Care.
If you’re an MSNBC viewer and you don’t know what “euthanize” means: This lady was having trouble getting around the house, so Canada offered to move her into a coffin.
Wow, even Canada’s own government admits that living in the second-worst snowbound communist country on Earth is a fate worse than death.
This sort of medical advice is not only legal in Canada, it’s actually preferred under the country’s Medical Assistance In Dying law, or MAID. Hey, maybe socialized medicine is the way to go after all. I can’t even get my maid to do the windows, let alone a contract killing.
I’m pretty sure Charlton Heston didn’t agree to star in Soylent Green because he thought it would make a great how-to guide for 2022:
(Classical reference in headline.)
OKAY, I TOOK DOWN THE SCHWYZER/FRENCH POST because the comments were just pretty nasty, which I should have foreseen. I mean, I’m no French fan these days because I think he lost it post-Trump, and I’ve never been a Schwyzer fan for obvious reasons, but I thought there was a point there that clearly isn’t getting across. Or maybe I was just wrong. Anyway, I don’t do this often but ugh.
LOSS OF PROFESSIONAL AUTONOMY HAS A PRICE: ‘Great Resignation’ of healthcare professionals affects patient care.
PRIVACY: How Chinese students came up with an ‘invisibility cloak’ that evades security cameras. “The InvisDefense coat can be seen by human eyes but is covered in a pattern that blinds cameras in the day and sends out unusual heat signals at night, according to the team.”
HOUSE DEMOCRAT WHIP KATHERINE CLARK SAYS CHILD WAKES UP WITH NIGHTMARES OVER ‘CLIMATE CHANGE.’
Here’s proof Clark uttered these words on broadcast television, to no pushback:
Incoming House Democrat Whip Katherine Clark: "I remember my middle child waking waking up with nightmares over concern around climate change." pic.twitter.com/Xayp52a20K
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 4, 2022
One of two scenarios is possible:
1) Katherine Clark is lying about her child’s experiences to stoke hysteria around climate change for political gain.
2) She aggressively instilled unjust fear into her child, causing them to lose sleep over a political talking point.
We hope it’s the former for the sake of the child. Sincerely.
Indeed, but door number two is a distinct possibility: Progressives Against Progress. The rise of environmentalism poisoned liberals’ historical optimism. “Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.”
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