NIFTY: The US Air Force showed off an A-10 in its new ‘bomb truck’ configuration. “Until now the A-10 was limited to carry only a single weapon on each pylon; by using the BRU-61/A rack, the A-10 will be able to carry four SDBs on each weapon pylon, becoming a ‘bomb truck’ that can release these stand-off weapons to neutralize threats as far as 50 miles in the target area before starting to provide Close Air Support (CAS) to ground troops.”
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH FREE SPEECH:
● Shot:
● Chaser: Angry mom who confronted Adams on toddler mask mandate fired from city job.
—The New York Post, yesterday.
FROM SPACEWEATHER.COM: “New sunspot counts from NOAA confirm that Solar Cycle 25 is racing ahead of the official forecast–and the gap is growing.”
DISNEY: NOW NOT JUST A FIGURATIVE CANCER ON THE LAND. Two Disney-branded hand sanitizers recalled over carcinogen, methanol.
JUST OUT: Aaron Clarey’s The Menu: Life Without the Opposite Sex.#CommissionEarned
THAT’S WHAT GRIFTERS DO: Hunter Biden sought to cash in with oligarchs during first Russian war on Ukraine, records show.
President Joe Biden’s son and his associates targeted Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina — who eventually was sanctioned by the U.S. a few years later in 2018 — for as much as $200 million after helping her get a bank account set up in America, the emails show.
Hunter Biden and his associates even arranged for Baturina and her husband, an ex-Moscow mayor, to meet with then-Vice President Joe Biden at an intimate dinner in Washington in 2015.
At the same time he and his team courted Baturina, Hunter Biden was securing lucrative board positions and consulting deals with Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, a man whose company, Burisma Holdings, the United States and Great Britain wanted investigated for corruption.
The Big Guy was Vice President at the time — did he get his 10%?
VETERAN GOP REPRESENTATIVE FRED UPTON, WHO VOTED TO IMPEACH TRUMP, ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT.
To be fair, Upton’s always been an awfully dim bulb: “Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh cited Upton’s promotion of eco-friendly light bulbs evidence that he shouldn’t take the Energy and Commerce gavel. ‘This would be a tone-deaf disaster if the Republican leadership lets Fred Upton ascend to the chairmanship of the House energy committee,’ Limbaugh said this week. ‘This is exactly the kind of nannyism, statism, what have you, that was voted against and was defeated last week. No Republican complicit in nannyism, statism, can be rewarded this way.’”
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: We Need to Talk About Kamala Harris. “Welcome to Insanity Wrap, your weekly dose of the best of the worst. President Kamala Harris is the new big crazy.”
Plus:
- Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone (it’s the law)
- You can say anything you want in NYC (unless Mayor Adams disagrees)
- Short people got no reason (not to be hypocrites)
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): NYC Health Official Calls White Women ‘Birthing People,’ Black and Hispanic Women ‘Mothers’ — Then It Gets Crazy.
BEST SELLER IN BACK CUSHIONS: ComfiLife Gel Enhanced Seat Cushion – Non-Slip Orthopedic Gel & Memory Foam Coccyx Cushion for Tailbone Pain. #CommissionEarned
BOMBSHELL? Just the News says Durham investigation has turned up a text message that makes clear Michael Sussman wasn’t leveling with the FBI about his clients when he shared the Steele dossier with the agency.
“The existence of the text message between Sussmann and then-FBI General Counsel James Baker was revealed in a court filing late Monday night by Durham’s team. Prosecutors said they intend to show Sussmann gave a false story to the FBI but then told the truth about working on behalf of the Clinton campaign when he later testified to Congress,” JTN’s John Solomon reports.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Secret Service paying over $30K a month for Malibu home to provide security for Hunter Biden.
GRIFT IS EVERYWHERE: Settlement reached with professor who ‘improperly used’ $120K of Philando Castile charity funds.
Former Metro State University and Inver Hills Community College psychology professor Pamela Fergus had raised $200,000 following Castile’s 2016 shooting death by a Minnesota police officer.
According to Alpha News, Fergus began her “Philando Feeds The Children” project as part of an “Introduction to Diversity and Ethics in Psychology” course. She indicated she would “pay off the lunch debts of students at St. Paul Public Schools” with the funds raised. Castile had worked in the St. Paul district.
Last June, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison accused Fergus of “properly” spending only $80,000 of the $200K raised, and using the remainder to line her own pockets. The catalyst for the investigation was a complaint by Castile’s mother.
How bad do you have to be to get Ellison on your case when you’re raising money off a police shooting?
THE RECENT OBERLIN RULING ISN’T GREAT FOR FREE SPEECH. It arguably holds the college responsible for the speech of its student government (see p. 18-21), which will likely incentivize colleges to do even more to control student speech. That said, this may well be a “hard cases make bad law” situation without a lot of precedential value. I mean, good luck convincing a jury that the college does NOT control student speech when administrators are saying stuff like this:
Another example was a text message sent by [Dean of Students Meredith] Raimondo after the student newspaper published a letter from a retired Oberlin professor, which expressed criticism of the college’s “handling of the Gibson matter.” Raimondo sent a text message to another administrator that stated, “F-him. I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.”
It’s easy to see this going another way (with regard to student speech, at least) if Oberlin administrators had been privately saying things like “Man, this student senate resolution might get us in even more hassle with the Gibsons, but we can’t just take it down.”
THE LEFT’S WAR ON WOMEN: Our Government Is Joining Big Tech in Erasing Women.
WASHBURN UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT JERRY FARLEY attacks identity of his students.
Washburn University student Christopher Schenk told Campus Reform that he feels the email sent by his school’s president contradicts the university’s commitment to its “core values.”
“I was disappointed by Dr. Farley’s email, as it painted many students, like myself, as supporters of hate speech and as spreaders of misinformation,” he said. “Hearing this from my university’s president made me feel uncomfortable expressing my opinions and values on campus.”
Additionally, Knowles tweeted on Mar. 30 that Farley “did not cite any evidence for his defamatory claims because none exists.” He also wrote that he’d be willing to discuss any examples of “hate and misinformation” of which Farley believes if he wants to cite them.
To be fair, you’re now guilty of “hate and misinformation” whenever you don’t — enthusiastically! — support the woke agenda.
THAT’S NOT EVEN CLOSE TO HIS PERSONAL BEST: It Took Just Four Days For Biden’s Oil Price Scheme To Go Up In Smoke.
The Brent crude index, the global oil benchmark, increased to $108.07 per barrel Monday morning, surging more than 3.1% overnight. The U.S. WTI index skyrocketed more than 3.4% past $103 per barrel Monday.
“Will the release of barrels from strategic reserves fill a shortfall caused by sanctions and buyer aversion to Russian oil? In a word, no,” Stephen Brennock, an analyst at PVM Oil Associates, told Reuters.
Biden announced Thursday that he ordered the Department of Energy to release a million barrels of oil stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) every day for six months. The following day, the International Energy Agency said its 31 member nations pledged their own separate release of 62.7 million additional barrels of oil.
The US uses about 18 million barrels of oil each day, and every trader knows that at some point we’ll have to refill the SPR.
THE PROBLEM? GOVERNMENT. THE SOLUTION: MORE GOVERNMENT. Like True Commies, the Democrats Create Crime Then Use Crime Stats to Take Our Guns.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Punished For Refusing Exam “Leniency” For Black Students? UCLA Prof. Gordon Klein’s Case is Going to Trial.
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S WILLINGNESS TO F*** THINGS UP: Biden’s plan to cut Navy ships: Handing China victory at sea.
The Biden administration’s 2023 defense budget request falls far short of America’s strategic needs. The administration remains committed to concepts like “Integrated Deterrence,” a notion that the invasion of Ukraine showed to be strategically vacuous. Of equal importance is the budget’s proposed dollar amount, $813 billion: Given inflationary projections of above 7 percent, Biden’s proposed 4 percent increase amounts to a defense spending cut.
More relevant are the individual services’ budgets, which dictate the actual resource distribution between military capabilities. Specifically, the administration’s budget request for the Navy and its ship-retirement plans are cause for real concern. These suggest that the Sea Services have been tied to irrational political-economic and construction timelines that pay insufficient attention to the strategic consequences of their budgetary choices. A shrinking fleet does not simply send the wrong message to our foes in the abstract. In the concrete, the administration’s budgetary plans will diminish American combat power precisely when China is hungrily eyeing Taiwan.
Related? Spy agency sought Hunter Biden laptop back in 2020 to see if family compromised. “What our concern is, is that if there’s compromising information on that hard drive, this is before the election, the president could be compromised to the level of owing either China or or Ukraine something.”
WELL, YES: Kamala Harris unpopular and unqualified: Rasmussen.
Voter questions about President Joe Biden’s mental and physical fitness have done nothing to change continued doubts about his vice president, Kamala Harris.
According to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey, Biden’s No. 2 is seen as both unpopular and unqualified.
After recently stumbling over her words on several topics, Rasmussen found that 54% do not believe the former California senator is qualified to be president. Just 42% do.
And it is notable that 45% see Harris as “not at all qualified” to be president, according to the poll previewed by Secrets.
The rest either aren’t paying attention, or have already had their expectations lowered by Biden.
WELCOME BACK, CARTER:
A joke in 1978 is fiscal policy today pic.twitter.com/WALIgGpHH1
— Nomad Nero (@Adventure_Nero) April 3, 2022
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Elon Musk’s New Majority Stake in Twitter Makes Things Fun Again. “That 9.2% makes Musk Twitter’s largest shareholder now, which is kind of delicious. Yes, it’s a passive stake, which, in theory, means he won’t be influencing the company but this is still a bold move. Musk really doesn’t do anything passively. In fact, he wasted no time stirring things up, tweeting a poll that addressed and poked fun at what is one of the most frequent complaints of all Twitter users.”
STILL POPULAR: QuikClot Advanced Clotting Gauze – 3 x 24 in (2 Strips). #CommissionEarned
HOW’S THAT “ZERO COVID” STRATEGY WORKING OUT FOR YOU? ‘This is inhumane:’ the cost of zero Covid in Shanghai.
Jia Ruiling’s* father has been enduring severe pain since 17 March. He has late-stage stomach cancer, but his hospital refused to treat him because Jia’s neighbourhood was under lockdown as a result of a handful of Covid cases.
“We begged the hospital to accept him again and again,” Jia said. “At some point my father was in so much pain that he wanted to take his life. What can we do? Please, help us let the central government know.”
China’s strict zero-Covid policy means all positive cases have to be hospitalised. But in the last few weeks, as case numbers have risen sharply and 26 million people entered a harsh lockdown, mainland China’s most important financial hub has come to a standstill. Medical resources are overwhelmingly diverted to combat Covid, leaving it difficult for non-Covid patients like Jia’s father to access them.
Luo Ruixiang*, a 39-year-old Chinese worker in the Republic of the Congo, had a similar experience. He flew home in March in the hope of receiving urgent treatment after damaging his left eye.
He landed in Shanghai and informed his quarantine hotel and customs officials of his medical needs, but for more than a week he heard nothing. “I was worried that if I waited until the quarantine was over, I would have already gone blind,” he said.
Desperate, Luo went on to the social media site Weibo to plead for help. Local media soon called him, and medical help was quickly on the way. “Thankfully, the operation is done,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be this complicated, but as a small potato everything is so difficult for me.”
Related: Eerie Drone Footage Shows Deserted Shanghai Downtown As Lockdown Extended.
WHOSE DEVICE IS IT, ANYWAY? Vizio showing ads over live TV is a glimpse of our hellish future.
Technology companies are eager to prove that the products we buy aren’t actually ours — and TV makers have embraced this more than most.
I mean, what other way is there to explain why Vizio has enabled a feature on its TVs that display banner adverts over live shows?
Named ‘Jump Ads,’ the idea is a visual overlay appears during a television spot, which then pushes users towards the series on an app available on Vizio’s devices.
For example, imagine catching the premiere of a new comedy on a TV channel. At the end of this episode a banner appears, encouraging you to visit a streaming service to watch the next entry in the series.
In fact, this is precisely what Fox — the first partner engaging with Vizio’s Jump Ads — is doing. The media giant placed a banner at the end of its new show Welcome to Flatch. This impels viewers to watch additional episodes on the company’s app, which is available on Vizio’s televisions.
Elvis had the right idea.
PROF. ROBERT LEIDER: Sovereign Immunity and Military Federalism.
At oral argument, some Justices and Torres’s attorney, Andrew Tutt, contended that a “plan of the Convention” theory applies because of the exclusivity of federal war powers. During questioning, Justice Kavanaugh emphasized that the Constitution gave the war powers entirely to the federal government. For example, he asked Mr. Tutt, “[H]ow important is the text of Article I, Section 10, which explicitly divests the states of anything on the war powers?” Justice Barrett asked Texas’s Solicitor General Judd Stone, “if the states gave up all of this [i.e., their war powers] . . . does it make sense to think, oh, but they retained sovereign immunity?” She called sovereign immunity “small potatoes when you think about everything else they relinquished in this area.” And on rebuttal, Mr. Tutt argued that “[t]he purpose of sovereign immunity is to protect liberty and the local autonomy of the states . . . . But, in the area of war,” he continued, “it is only by vesting the war powers exclusively in the federal government that liberty can [be] protected in the way that the Constitution intends.”
This theory for abrogating sovereign immunity might have some plausibility if the Framers had actually vested all the war powers in the federal government. But they did not. Quite the contrary, the Framers feared giving any level of government an unchecked monopoly of force, so they divided the war powers between the federal government and the states.
Article I Section 10 does not divest the states of “anything on the war powers.” In fact, it explicitly reserves to them the power to make war when actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will admit of no delay. Perhaps Justice Kavanaugh should reread that text.
I should also note that the militia system meant that states actually had a lot of control over the bulk of the military force available to the federal government. That was the reason why the militia system was largely replaced by the National Guard, after the federal government found itself unable to send militia units to invade Mexico in 1912.
More on that here.
FLASHBACK: At the scene of a fatal car crash, I saw Americans reveal their fundamental decency.
A friend recently came on a terrible accident and had a very similar experience to this one.
TOO CLEVER TREVOR PROJECT: President Joe Biden’s handlers are pushing the trans-gender agenda based in part on a LGBT group’s study that was funded by two makers of drugs used in the transition process, according to The Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross. Didn’t we read somewhere along the way something about conflicts-of-interest and transparency about funders?
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Stacey Lennox: Here’s What Arrogant Globalists Like Klaus Have in Store for the World. “Schwab assumes that approximately five dozen people can build out a framework that will work globally across cultures to accomplish this while meeting in a nation where homosexuality is criminalized and punishable by death. How very inclusive.”
Matt Margolis: Let’s Be Blunt About Identity Politics. “Ketanji Brown Jackson’s inevitable confirmation will not be a high point for our country. Let’s not get distracted by identity politics here. Yes, she is a black woman, but she will neither be the first black person on the court nor the first woman on the court. The glass ceiling for the Supreme Court has long been broken, so let’s not be distracted by Jackson’s race or gender because that’s exactly what Joe Biden wanted.”
Yours Truly: Two ‘Key’ Executives Quit Trump’s Truth Social Media. “There have been reports that Trump was ‘angry’ over the site’s ‘shaky launch,’ and let me tell you: He has every right to be.”
Bonus: Florida Man Friday: the Groin Injury He’ll Never Forget.
KATE STITH IS ONE OF THE FEW PEOPLE AT YALE TO COME OUT OF THIS AFFAIR LOOKING GOOD: Unlike Dean Gerken, Professor Stith Says Law Students’ Disruption Of Speaker At FedSoc Event Violated Yale’s Free Expression Policy.
More here.
THOUGHTS ON LEWIS’ TRILEMMA: Easter is around the corner and that always makes me think of C.S. Lewis’ famous “Lord, Liar or Lunatic” trilemma from his classic apologetical work, “Mere Christianity,” in considering the claims of Jesus. Some Tuesday morning thoughts modestly offered on HillFaith. BTW, if you haven’t read Mere Christianity, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
April 4, 2022
A HARD RAIN’S A COMIN’: Throwing Hunter Biden under the bus won’t be enough to clear Joe.
OPEN THREAD: “I’m Robert Warner, and I’m getting drunk.” “How many people did you get to drink this cocktail in the first night?” “Uh, I think everybody?”
‘CONSERVATIVE’ RADIO STATION CAVES TO WOKE MOB, FIRES HOST:
It is the height of hypocrisy for Cumulus to own a radio station that positions itself as committed to conservative thought and standing up to leftist bullies only to turn that station into a piece of the cancel culture apparatus used to silence conservatives based on ludicrous claims of racism.
As Amber [Athey] concludes in her column, the situation “has destroyed the integrity and reputation of WMAL and Cumulus as hosts of conservative content. We spoke frequently about the dangers of censorship and cancel culture on our program, and yet here they are bowing to the mob,” she adds. “Political commentary is worthless if it can’t be used to speak truth to those in power without fear of professional consequences.”
She’s right. I’ve filled in as a co-host of the old morning drive-time program and was a frequent guest in my previous position as the spokesman of Young America’s Foundation talking about, ironically, the dangers of cancel culture on college campuses. Will I be allowed back on their air after this? Who knows. But standing against cancel culture on college campuses, in larger society, and especially in “conservative” media is far more important than whatever a five minute interview about news of the day would be. If conservatives can’t call out cancel culture within the movement, how can they be taken seriously highlighting it elsewhere?
Amber’s tweet about Kamala Harris’ outfit and her utter lack of effectiveness as Vice President was funny. It was one of a countless number that poked fun at her fashion choice. It was certainly not racist, unless UPS is a racist company for having “What Can Brown Do For You?” as its slogan.
More from Athey herself: I was fired for a joke about Kamala Harris’s outfit. A ‘conservative’ radio station caves to the mob.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: The space arms race keeps accelerating, new reports warn.
RON DESANTIS DROPS INFLATION TRUTH BOMB (Video):
Inflation is hitting American families hard right now. Brutally hard. At least one prominent Republican, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is stepping up with some answers. He just accurately diagnosed the origins of the ongoing price surges—and dropped an inflation truth bomb in a recent speech.
“People should just brace themselves,” the governor warned, “because the inflationary period that we’re in [is] likely to persist for some time.”
“I mean, you cannot print trillions and trillions of dollars, and expect there not to be some effect on the back end. This is basic [economics], even Keynesian [progressive] economics would say that if you spend and print, spend and print, that is going to drive up the cost of everything.”
Having been caught flat-footed during his appearance on Stewart’s show, [Andrew] Sullivan thoroughly dismantled Stewart’s monologue and subsequent attempt at panel moderation in a Substack post.
Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of more than 140 Marshall Plans. As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.” To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.
Stewart then used crude metrics of inequality to argue, Kendi-style, without any evidence, that the only thing that can possibly explain racial inequality today in America is still “white supremacy.” Other factors — concentrated poverty, insanely high rates of crime and violence, acute family breakdown, a teen culture that equates success with whiteness, lack of affordable childcare — went either unmentioned or openly mocked as self-evident expressions of bigotry. He then equated formal legal segregation with voluntary residential segregation, as if Jim Crow were still in force. And he straw-manned the countering argument thus: white America believes that African-Americans are “solely responsible for their community’s struggles.”
I don’t know anyone who believes that. I sure don’t. It’s much more complex than that. And it’s that complexity that some of us are insisting on — and that Stewart wants to dismiss out of hand in favor of his own Manichean moral preening. His final peroration ended thus: “America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.” Note: always. There has been no real progress; white people have never actually listened to a black person; America is irredeemably racist. Those fucking white men, Lincoln and LBJ, never gave a shit.
Rather than responding to Sullivan point-by-point as Sullivan had done to him, Stewart blasted the journalist on Twitter, asking “can we stop with the lazy ‘woke’ sh** anytime someone disagrees with a conservative. F*** man.”
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Union Square billboard calls San Francisco ‘famous the world over for dirt-cheap fentanyl.’
A group of mothers is calling on San Francisco city officials to crack down on people openly dealing and using drugs on city streets with a bold message that went up in Union Square on Monday afternoon.
Mothers Against Drug Deaths paid for a billboard that reads: “Famous the world over for our brains, beauty and now, dirt-cheap fentanyl.”
The message is referring to the opiate that has flooded the city’s street drug marketplace
in recent years, intensifying the peril of addiction and leading to a staggering number of overdose deaths.“It’s dangerous and actually crazy because you can walk down a lot of the city streets and see hundreds of drug dealers out in the open,” said Jacqui Berlinn of Livermore, who co-founded Mothers Against Drug Deaths. “You can literally watch them sell the drugs to an addict… and then watch that addict walk a few steps away and use …holding the foil in their hands, putting the needles in their arms.”
Earlier: Why San Francisco is Nearly the Most Crime-Ridden City in the Us.
San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964. Why are lefty monopoly cities such drug and crime-filled cesspits?
JEFF SPICOLI — SAVED BROOKE SHIELDS FROM DROWNING. BLOWS REWARD MONEY HIRING VAN HALEN TO PLAY HIS BIRTHDAY PARTY: The Real Yacht Rock: Inside the Lavish, Top-Secret World of Private Gigs. One-percenters worldwide are hiring everyone from Beyoncé to Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath to play their homes, parties, or weddings. Experts say the trend is just getting started.
For Jennifer Lopez, a November 2014 performance in Macau wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary. She’d have to sing (here, to a backing track) for 40 minutes, accompanied by six to eight dancers; the contract stipulated she’d be furnished with “first-class” sound and lights. No recording or taping of the performance would be allowed. But no tickets were sold, either. And the payday stood out, too: $1.25 million. To celebrate the birthday of a relative, a wealthy Chinese family flew Lopez to Asia to perform for them, tossing in $500,000 for airfare and hotel for her and her entourage. The opulence didn’t stop there; for the show, the family built a restaurant and a nightclub inside a Grand Hyatt ballroom, with a walkway connecting the two. And all for about 20 people in the audience, less than the number of crew members involved in working on the gig.
For more than 20 years, pop stars of all genres and generations, from Bob Dylan and the Eagles to Alicia Keys and John Legend, have been hired to play corporate events — big-paycheck performances for company employees or clients, often at theaters or arenas. Even during a pandemic, when live performances slowed down, that ecosystem has persisted. Last December, the blockchain-gaming platform Gala Games threw a “Galaverse” multinight private party in San Francisco, where its 500 guests gathered to hear Maroon 5, Alice Cooper, DJ Steve Aoki, a bit of Snoop Dogg, and a stripped-down set by two members of Arcade Fire. The venue included private rooms set up to look like a medieval tavern, a “Dungeons & Dragons” setup with a huge fake dragon, and a quasi Texas dance hall, while in another space, dancers were made up to look like zombies (to tie in with a Walking Dead game).
But alongside the world of corporate parties and retreats, a far more shadowy parallel world has been flourishing: the super-private gig. In that universe, stars in classic rock, hip-hop, and pop have been pulling in sizable fees for playing at weddings, birthday parties, anniversaries, and other personal-life milestones, all for those wealthy enough to afford it. The festivities allow performers to walk away with yacht-loads of cash and make one-percenter hosts feel like insiders and stars themselves. But along with the sizable paydays come sometimes dicey political issues that the artists have to navigate (or, sometimes, ignore).
Buried lede: Rolling Stone discovers pandemic is over.
It’s a thing of beauty.
One second, wokies are resting on their laurels, telling those MAGA dweebs that Twitter is a private company and can set whatever speech limits it wants.
The next second, they’re upset when someone they don’t like buys a huge stake in said private company!
Here’s a wonderful series of screenshots from this thread by journalist Andy Ngô:
Related: Elon Musk Buys 9.2% of Twitter, Becoming Its Largest Shareholder.
Finally, America’s Newspaper of Record reports: Liberals Outraged To Learn 10% Of Twitter Now Owned By African-American.
GREENS HAVE BEEN OPPOSING THAT FOR YEARS: Biden pushes for US mines to ramp up production of EV battery components.
WAS IT OVER WHEN RUPERT MURDOCH BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?! Biden: Rupert Murdoch ‘most dangerous man in the world.’
President Biden reportedly decried Fox News owner and media magnate Rupert Murdoch as the “most dangerous man in the world,” according to new reporting in a forthcoming book by a team of New York Times reporters.
Excerpts from the book “This Will Not Pass,” by journalists Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns obtained by CNN reveal Biden assessed Fox News “as one of the most destructive forces in the United States.”
The book reportedly describes Fox News as a “torrent of anti-Biden programming, stoking skepticism about vaccines and disseminating wild conspiracy theories about the January 6 attack.”
Biden’s alleged comments to Martin and Burns are the first the president has ever made publicly about Murdoch, CNN noted.
Related: Biden Privately Considers Fox News as ‘One of the Most Destructive Forces’ in the Nation, Per Report.
Which is another way of Biden saying that every other news outlet is filled to the brim with his party’s operatives with bylines. As well as:
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend texts: “Haha, the superpower commander in chief who wants nuclear-armed Putin up on war crimes charges thinks news mogul Rupert Murdoch is the most dangerous man in the world. Sure, that makes sense… 2022 sense. (Didn’t take long for 2022 to top 2021 and 2020 … and we’re only one quarter in!)”
Well, the thing you have to remember is that Putin is only dangerous to America. Murdoch is dangerous to something much more important — Democrats’ hold on power.
STACY MCCAIN: “PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) first came to public attention in reference to Vietnam combat veterans. If we are to believe Taylor Lorenz, people saying mean things about her on Twitter is exactly like getting ambushed by the Vietcong, dodging mortar shells and machine-gun fire in the jungle, watching your buddies bleed to death. Mean tweets are the siege of Khe Sanh in the Tet Offensive, in terms of the psychological trauma inflicted on survivors like Taylor Lorenz.”
Read the whole thing.
ICYMI, THAT TWO WEEKS TO SLOW THE SPREAD FINALLY WORKED! Just 2.15% of U.S. hospital beds are now used for COVID-19 patients.
FACTS ABOUT the emerging global food shortage.
BE PREPARED: QuikClot Advanced Clotting Gauze. #CommissionEarned
TO BE FAIR, I’M PRETTY SURE BIDEN DOESN’T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT HE SAID: Does Biden, posing with Mack Trucks, say “I thought I was going to get to drive one of these fuckers today”? “I’d just run into the live event on TikTok, and I was surprised at all the abuse the TikTok users were putting in the live comments.”
Biden isn’t popular with the Tik Tok kids. But why should he be?
GLEICHSCHALTUNG: At Least Big Left Isn’t Telling Us What to Wear … Oh. “The Luddites of the European Commission (EC) have identified another route of attack in their endless war to force the peasants to conform to pre-industrial lifestyles.”
COLORADO: Egregious bill criminalizes clerks checking election accuracy. “This bunker-busting election bomb is aimed at preemptively blowing up any future trouble-makers who, like Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder and Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, have looked into what’s been happening inside the Dominion machines, and are now facing criminal charges for actually doing their jobs. Inquiring minds want to know: is the passage of this unprecedented secretary of state power play setting the stage for the manipulation of the 2022 elections?”
THE NYC HEALTH OFFICIAL “BIRTHING PEOPLE” VS “MOTHERS” DEBACLE.
Morse made a reference to “Black and Puerto Rican mothers,” but followed that up with “non-Hispanic White birthing people.” I suppose we’ll forgive her for capitalizing “white” in the context, even though that falls outside the boundaries of the AP Style Guide on racial capitalization. Some of her followers quickly jumped on her for the implication that Black and Hispanic pregnant women are “mothers” while pregnant white women are not.
Sensing trouble like a watchdog, the city Department of Health responded to a request for comment from the NY Post. They offered a correction and an apology. They said, “we apologize for inadvertently gendering Black and Puerto Rican birthing people.”
No, that’s not a joke. That’s what the DOH spokesperson felt required an apology. They had “inadvertently gendered” Black and Puerto Rican “birthing people.”
Update Newspeak Dictionaries accordingly, comrades.
SPENGLER: Putin Won’t Go, Russia Won’t Collapse–So What Will Biden Do About Ukraine? “U.S. officials can scream all they want about Russian ‘war crimes’ (I don’t know the facts and take no position on whether war crimes were committed or not). I think that Putin is a bad guy and that the Russian invasion was a wicked enterprise. But Putin isn’t going anywhere, Russia isn’t collapsing, and the Russian Army is demolishing Ukraine. What, then, does the Biden Administration do next? Russia outguns us in nuclear weapons (and can deliver them from submarines firing hypersonic cruise missiles underwater). We don’t want a nuclear confrontation with Russia. That’s why I signed this statement calling for de-escalation of the conflict sponsored by Compact Magazine, founded by my friends Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmidtz. Biden, Blinken, Nuland et. al. have led us into a dead-end crisis that threatens to have a horrifying outcome—and maybe even a nuclear fireball. If you think I’m exaggerating, read this Asia Times analysis by editor-in-chief Uwe Parpart and myself. There’s still time to back out of the cul-de-sac. But not a lot.”
HOOKY EPIDEMIC: School’s Out For… Ever in NYC. “Meanwhile, New York teachers are lobbying for additional sick days and ‘true paid family medical leave.'”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: A prune—or six—a day may keep inflammation at bay.
IT’S A SCAM: Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House “Allies and critics alike have questioned where the organization’s money has gone.”
GEORGE LEEF, TO WHOM I OFTEN LINK, HAS A NOVEL OUT. From Bombardier Books: The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale: A Political Fable For Our Time. Check it out; good reviews on Amazon, and I bet he could use more!
NOT MY KIDS: Recovering victims of woke abuse have had enough.
Even non-woke parents, long exposed to propaganda from multiple directions, tend to translate relentless woke messaging into something more benign. For example, the song “Freak Flag” in Shrek the Musical urges kids that society needs to change and embrace how “freaking strange” the show’s heroes are. “Let your freak flag fly. Never take it down, never take it down, raise it way up high!”
This relentless message to children to embrace their inner freak is woven almost ubiquitously in most any new media directed at them. A calculated ambiguity allows for an innocuous interpretation by the average viewer. Maybe little Cindy has a large birthmark on her face and needs this message. Or Johnny has a disability, and this helps him feel less self-conscious. These are fine and good lessons in such contexts.
But over the past year the escalation of radical gender ideology in schools has laid bare what the intent was all along. Your kids are theirs to shape in accord with an ideology that identifies progress with the development of a collectivist mindset and the dismantling of sexual normativity and bodily meaning. You want to be able to be anything? First you must mean nothing.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Michael Walsh writes: ‘There is a Tide in the Affairs of Men.’ “The right man has made his entrance: why compel him to waste four years on the sidelines as Trump’s veep and then be forced to run on Trump’s record in 2028? It makes no sense. On such a full sea are we now afloat. The decline has long since begun. So whom should the GOP nominate in 2024? I think we all know the answer to that. More on him next week.”
CALIFORNIA NEEDS BIG NUCLEAR-POWERED ONES: Mini desalination plants could refresh the parched West.
IT’S NOT THE KIND OF PLACE TO RAISE YOUR KIDS: Mars’ thin atmosphere means quieter sounds, new data shows.
WAS IT OVER WHEN THE GERMANS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR DURING THE ‘EUROPEAN CIVIL WAR?’ New York Times columnist says Ukraine conflict is the first ‘real’ World War our planet has experienced.
In a recent opinion piece, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman claimed that the ongoing war in Ukraine is the first “real” World War.
The column, originally headlined “Ukraine Is the First Real World War,” was highlighted on both The New York Times’ and Friedman’s Twitter accounts Sunday. Both tweets can still be viewed; however, the column has since been given a new headline on the Times’ website.
The article is now headlined, “Putin Had No Clue How Many of Us Would Be Watching.”
Forget it; he’s rolling.
(Classical reference in headline.)
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Spy agency sought Hunter Biden laptop back in 2020 to see if family compromised.
Retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer’s account to Just the News was confirmed by three other people who were approached by Shaffer or the agency or were involved in the approach.
They said the agency’s interest was to analyze the hard drive contents for any evidence or patterns of how foreign adversaries were seeking to compromise prominent Americans or their families.
Shaffer provided details about the approach during an appearance Friday on the Just the News television show on Real America’s Voice.
“A three-letter agency came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve heard that you have access to a copy of the Hunter Biden hard drive. Could we get a copy?'” Shaffer said during the interview. “And I said, like, ‘Do you know what’s on there? I mean, we’re talking about everything from child porn, to, you know, all these these issues regarding the president.’
“And they said, ‘We don’t care. … We want to either confirm or refute it. We want to act factual. We don’t have a political dog in the fight. What our concern is, is that if there’s compromising information on that hard drive, this is before the election, the president could be compromised to the level of owing either China or or Ukraine something. And this is what this three letter agency was concerned about.”
Related: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Did China just take out an NBA player? The case of Enes Kanter Freedom deserves at least as much attention as Colin Kaepernick.
WAS IT OVER WHEN THURGOOD MARSHALL BOMBED PEARL HARBOR? Politico falsely claims that Ketanji Brown Jackson will be ‘first Black Supreme Court Justice.’
To be fair, Politico could have said she was the first female black Supreme Court justice — but that would mean defining what is a woman, and the staff at Politico aren’t biologists.
ANDY PUZDER: Understanding Bidenflation. “Runaway inflation – much more than just gas prices alone – is depleting the savings of hard-working Americans. And we can now say that Biden’s massive government spending – not war in Ukraine or greedy US corporations – is largely responsible for inflation. A new San Francisco Federal Reserve study released this week contains a chart showing that U.S. inflation spiked in early 2021 at almost precisely the same moment that Biden signed his massive $1.9 trillion Covid ‘relief’ bill.”
SAD: The descent of New York. “As New York emerges from its third wave of Covid, an exceptionally creepy atmosphere has developed on the streets and in the subways, where at times conditions appear to have fallen somewhere between post-modern anarchy and medieval misery. In such a setting, statistics seem almost pointless, although it’s impossible not to be aware of the rising murder and assault rates. According to the NYPD, crime in the city in February was 59 percent higher than February last year. Car theft doubled. Rape was up by 35 percent. A Quinnipiac University poll found that New Yorkers are more worried about crime now than any time since 1999.”
DAVID GOLDMAN: Putin Won’t Go, Russia Won’t Collapse–So What Will Biden Do About Ukraine? “Ukraine’s national population of 45 million had fallen to just 33 million by 2020 because half the working-age population left. Another 5 million refugees have fled, and millions more will leave before Russian cannons fall silent. There won’t be enough working-age Ukrainians left to begin reconstruction.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: Yatoshi 5 Knife Set – Pro Kitchen Knife Set. #CommissionEarned
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Harvard Med School professor: White women are ‘birthing people’; blacks, Hispanics are ‘women.’
GIVEN BIDEN’S INCREASING SENESCENCE, MAYBE HE REALLY BELIEVES THIS: Klain Says Biden Doesn’t Believe Hunter Broke Any Laws.
MORE OF THIS, PLEASE: State “anti-woke” law rattles employer diversity programs: are they on the way out?
But labor and employment lawyers and other advisers in the human resources field say the law has created a legal minefield for private and public sector employers. If employees do end up feeling discomfited by the concepts and statements conveyed during training sessions, the new law gives them the right to sue the employer. . . .
Some labor and employment lawyers who represents private sector employers believe the training programs have little or no future in the state.
“Diversity, equity and inclusion training will be a thing of the past in the State of Florida,” said Leonard K. Samuels, a labor and employment and business litigation lawyer for the Berger Singerman firm in Fort Lauderdale.
“It’s risky to do it; it’s a hornet’s nest,” Samuels said. He added that the programs “are at great risk of no longer being part of corporate America or in the state of Florida.”
Since the legislation is “hot off the press,” Samuels said, “companies are all going to do their own analysis of this.”
The key questions: whether the training programs will need to be drastically modified, or scrapped altogether.
Scrapping them would be no loss.
ISW’S DAILY UPDATE: Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.
Ukraine has won the Battle of Kyiv. Russian forces are completing their withdrawal, but not in good order. Ukrainian forces are continuing to clear Kyiv Oblast of isolated Russian troops left behind in the retreat, which some Ukrainian officials describe as “lost orcs.” Russian forces had attempted to conduct an orderly retreat from their positions around Kyiv with designated covering forces supported by artillery and mines to allow the main body to withdraw. The main body of Russian troops has withdrawn from the west bank of the Dnipro and is completing its withdrawal from the east bank, but the retrograde has been sufficiently disorderly that some Russian troops were left behind.
The war is far from over and could still turn Russia’s way if the Russian military can launch a successful operation in eastern Ukraine. The current line of Russian occupation in southern and eastern Ukraine is still a significant gain in Russian-controlled territory since the start of the war. If a ceasefire or peace agreement freezes a line like the current front-line trace, Russia will be able to exert much greater pressure on Ukraine than it did before the invasion and may over time reassemble a more effective invasion force. Ukraine’s victory in the Battle of Kyiv is thus significant but not decisive.
Much more at the link.
IS ANYONE SURPRISED BY THIS? Meta employees call Mark Zuckerberg “the Eye of Sauron” and he likes it.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: How Transgenders Will Bring Down the Lefty Marxists Who Want to Destroy America. “Transgendered people are foolish for thinking the left cares about them. Women fell for the same thing. The Democrats claimed they were all about ‘women’s rights’ but tossed the babes under the bus when new victims, the transgenders, became the flavor of the day. Women now have no choice but to look at a ‘woman’s penis’ in a spa or locker room. Don’t complain, ladies, lest you be punished. Did your daughter get booted off the team or lose a sports scholarship to a dude in pigtails? Suck it up, Sunshine. There is a new victim in town. “
THEY’RE TRYING AGAIN TODAY: NASA calls off critical Artemis 1 moon rocket test over safety concerns.
BAD: Gunmen posing as cops break down Texas man’s door in robbery, video shows. If police didn’t perform no-knock raids, this tactic would be less plausible.
DON’T GET COCKY: GOP Rep. Carl: ‘On the Verge’ of Giving House Republicans the Largest Majority They’ve Had in 100 Years. “And this is Jerry’s opinion — the moms. This is what turned out in Virginia. That’s the reason we keep pointing at Virginia. This is going to happen again.”
THIS COULD BE INTERESTING: Elon Musk Takes 9.2% Stake in Twitter After Hinting at Shake-Up. “Elon Musk has taken a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc. to become the platform’s biggest shareholder, a week after hinting he might shake up the social media industry. . . . Musk, 50, polled his more than 80 million followers on Twitter last month, asking them whether the company adheres to the principles of free speech. After more than 70% said no, he asked whether a new platform was needed and said he was giving serious thought to starting his own.”
TO BE FAIR, HE’S CLUELESS ABOUT EVERYTHING: Biden Is Clueless About Inflation: The president’s $5.8 trillion budget shows he wants more of the same government spending that is already sending prices through the roof.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Soundance Laptop Stand, Aluminum Computer Riser, Ergonomic Laptops Elevator for Desk. #CommissionEarned I got a similar stand a while back and it does help reduce the stress on my hands and neck.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: DeSantis vs Disney Is the Fight America Needs Right Now. “It’s not just that Disney is, sadly, taking the woke route, it’s that the company is so wrong on this issue. The woke plague has been infecting corporate America badly for a couple of years but to see a company that was built on wholesome family fun go all-in on talking to 7-year-olds about sex is really disheartening. It’s also perfectly indicative of why we need to push back harder.”
YES. ALSO, WHAT ACHIEVEMENTS? Axios reporter says Biden’s economic accomplishments are ‘largely irrelevant’ amid high inflation, gas prices.
NOBODY EVER HAS ENOUGH OF EITHER, PARTICULARLY SPARES, AND THIS CAMPAIGN HAS BEEN PARTICULARLY PUNISHING: Is Russia’s Military Running Out Of Equipment And Spare Parts?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Brace yourselves: It looks like the great college exodus may have finally begun! “Colleges across America face a daunting challenge: Their student head count has shrunk more than 5% since 2019, according to a national estimate, as debate over the value of higher education intensified during the public health crisis and economic tumult. That’s an enrollment loss of nearly 1 million students. Some drifted out of college, while others never started. Many colleges are on an urgent quest to keep current students and recover their lost freshmen.”
THE LEFT FUNDS ITSELF WITH YOUR MONEY: A state agency is giving Arkansas taxpayer money to an organization that lobbies against conservative legislation.
IT’S A FULL-TIME JOB: White House Alters Transcript to Clean Up After Yet Another Biden Gaffe.
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