RIP, MRS. PEEL: Diana Rigg, star of The Avengers and Game of Thrones, dead at 82.
Archive for 2020
September 10, 2020
TYLER O’NEIL: Has the Second American Civil War Already Started? “In the years leading up to the Civil War, pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers fought and killed one another in Kansas. With the benefit of hindsight, Americans see ‘Bleeding Kansas’ as a precursor to — if not the very first tremors of — the Civil War. In one sense, the Civil War had a ‘soft opening’ in 1854, before the main event in 1861.”
Read the whole thing.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Middle East peace accord, economic recovery and space travel: There is still good news. “It might sometimes feel as if the news media, with all their depressing and divisive coverage, are waging psychological warfare against their audience. But out in the real world, good things are happening.”
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Trevor Noah’s Improved Gender Reveal Party Is ‘Yes, No, Maybe!’
Insanity Wrap needs to know: What’s the real problem with gender reveal parties?
Answer: DON’T FORCE YOUR PATRIARCHY ON MY BXBY, RACIST!
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
”Change” really means ”more of the same” for all the right people.
Joe Biden loves ice cream, and other weighty election issues.
The benefits of Communism, explained in one handy poster.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
WHAT’S WITH THE LEFTY OBSESSION WITH SHIRTS? After police officer photographed in Hawaiian shirt, Oakland chief dismisses ‘Boogaloo’ ties, says ‘many diverse’ people wear Tommy Bahama:
Upset residents called on Interim Chief Susan Manheimer to investigate her plainclothes officer after a photo taken Saturday showing him wearing a tropical shirt during a West Oakland police raid lit up social media.
In an email sent to one resident on Monday, the chief downplayed the notion that the officer would be part of the boogaloo movement by taking the resident through her recent shopping trip to Macy’s. She included a photo she snapped of a Tommy Bahama display, sending it to the resident along with other reasons why people wear tropical shirts, according to a copy of the email shared with the Bay Area News Group.
The chief also noted that she saw “many racially diverse individuals waiting to purchase” the Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirts.
Flashback: The Woke Mob Declares Hawaiian Shirts a Symbol of ‘White Nationalism.’ As Glenn noted last year during one of the DNC-MSM’s periodic freakouts over “OK” hand gestures, “The 4Chan trollers have scored again. I remember when ’culture jamming’ was a lefty thing, but the lefty culture jammers never scored at this level.”
Better stock up on DVDs of M*A*S*H and the original Magnum P.I., before those Hawaiian-shirt wearing television icons are memory-holed by the left for doubleplus ungood crimethink.
THIS SEEMS LIKE A BRANDING ERROR: The Riot Party: The Left Perfects the Mob Veto.
INSTAPUNDIT: STILL FREE! Google’s latest experimental app lets influencers host paid online events.
ELIMINATIONISM: University to remove World War II murals because they show too many white people. They’re pictures of World War II veterans.
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE. Sheriff: Authorities looking for tiger — no, really — after sighting in Knoxville. Tiger shows up at my house, he’s a rug.
CONRAD BLACK: Democrats Hit Rock Bottom On Election Tactics.
It is indicative of the fact that the Democrats are much less overconfident than they were four years ago that they have unleashed their dirty tricks division a month earlier than they did in 2016 with the completely irrelevant Billy Bush “Access Hollywood” tape of locker room indiscretions by candidate Trump 11 years before.
While it was completely irrelevant to whether Trump was worthy of election in 2016, and was somewhat bizarre as it emanated from the campaign of the spouse of, along with John F. Kennedy, the greatest sexual predator in the history of the White House, it was at least an uncontested recording from many years before of Mr. Trump’s opinion of a celebrity’s opportunities for sexual self-assertion. He did say it.
In this latest incident, many people, including almost everyone who would have been present, have all denied that any such utterance had been made. It is inconceivable that this president would think or say anything of the kind.
But the odium of the incident is magnified by the fact that it was clearly staged in a tight sequence coordinated between the Biden campaign and its most rabid press partisans. As soon as the Atlantic story appeared, an anti-Trump veterans’ organization called VoteVets produced a lengthy follow-up Internet statement that the President was not really any friend of the Armed Forces and veterans should take note of his outrageous comments in Paris and swarm the polls in favor of his opponent.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Comment from a post last week:
The military story is battlefield prep for the Democrats to steal the military votes.
Voter fraud all the way.
Stay tuned for the MSM stories about how Trump’s support from vets is plummeting and Joe’s support from vets is skyrocketing.
Once I would have considered such a claim to be obviously paranoid.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Prof: ‘Nothing wrong with’ murder of Trump supporter from a ‘moral perspective.’
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Middle East peace accord, economic recovery and space travel: There is still good news. “It might sometimes feel as if the news media, with all their depressing and divisive coverage, are waging psychological warfare against their audience. But out in the real world, good things are happening.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump-Hating Media Lying More and More to Keep Low-Info Dems In a Rage. “Author Bob Woodward has crawled out from under his Democratic patron rock with a book he hopes will permanently damage President Trump’s hopes for re-election. He accuses Trump of downplaying the coronavirus threat in the early days of this year. Like the ‘very fine people’ thing, this is based on deliberately misrepresenting something the president said, the context of which is plain to any fourth-grader.”
LIFE AMONG AMERICA’S GREATEST MINDS: So the Association of American Law Schools has an email list for con law profs, which I wasn’t even aware I belonged to. It’s generally low traffic and Outlook sends it to “Clutter” anyway. But recently a kerfuffle broke out over “dignity law” (don’t ask) and the traffic became high and heated enough that a lot of people wanted to unsubscribe. Despite being told that you couldn’t unsubscribe via the list but had to contact AALS separately, dozens (scores? hundreds? it was a lot, anyway) of America’s greatest minds kept emailing “please unsubscribe me” to the entire list. Then when that settled down, someone asserted a majority of those unsubscribing were white — likely true, since America is a majority-white country, and law teaching is a majority-white profession — and dubbed it “white flight.” Now there’s a call to publicize a list of people who unsubscribed, presumably so they can be chided for insufficient wokeness.
SHALL WE HAVE A KING? First posed by John Jay to George Washington, that now-eerily prescient question is repeated by R Street Governance Project Senior Fellow James Wallner in a thoughtful legbranch.org essay on separation of powers, the Covid pandemic and President Donald Trump’s recent directives.
“Jay summed up the straightforward solution to America’s problems to Washington: ‘Let Congress legislate, let others execute, let others judge.’ James Madison noted that the separation of powers was vital to securing freedom and liberty and that as long as the people’s elected representatives preserved it, ‘We have no danger to apprehend,’” Wallner writes.
“Notwithstanding its centrality to the success of the American regime, a recent altercation between President Trump and Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, highlights the extent to which support for the Constitution’s separation-of-powers framework has begun to wane.”
Wallner makes a compelling case in siding with Sasse, who described as “unconstitutional slop” Trump’s directives to defer payroll taxes, continue enhanced benefits for those out of work, offer certain forms of assistance to renters and homeowners, and provide a breather to millions of people with student loans.
My own view is that Congress has itself mainly to blame here, having for decades steadily ceded to executive branch bureaucrats power and authority that erodes legislative authority and energy.
But even today, Congress still has what political theorists Willmoore Kendall and George Carey described as the “ultimate weapons in any showdown with either of the other two branches.” That would be the power to fund or defund anything done by presidents and bureaucrats. But using those weapons requires a certain unity and spirit, which, sadly, hasn’t been seen around Capitol Hill for a long, long time.
FAILED STATE: California Businesses Leave The State By The Thousands.
I STILL LIKE IT FOR SHARING SILLY MEMES AND PET PHOTOS: ‘The Social Dilemma’ on Netflix Will Convince You To Finally Delete Facebook.
DON’T GET COCKY: Many Trump voters staying silent again, duping media and pollsters.
REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Supposedly Reliable Steele Acted ‘Crazy,’ His FBI Handler Says: ‘People’s Ears Were Bleeding.’
But they relied on him for evidence to back an impeachment.
OVERTON WINDOW MOVED: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Regrets Speaking Out on Colin Kaepernick.
DECOUPLING: Huawei is running out of display suppliers as Samsung and LG bail out, report says.
Related: Don’t Rely on Hope; Attack Huawei’s Value Chain.
The Trump Administration’s trade restrictions create a window during which it should mount a coherent high-low strategy that creates viable U.S. competitors before Huawei can recover.
The low end of the strategy would attack Huawei in the 5G radio network market, which is ripe for disruption. Huawei’s tightly integrated radio systems are attractive to network operators but unnecessary given emerging hardware advancements. Like today’s P.C.s, radio networks could be disaggregated as in Open RAN, with various parts being provided by different companies and integrated by a third-party vendor.
But Open RAN will not happen on its own. Moving quickly from open standards to market-ready offerings will require U.S. government demonstrations, such as those being mounted by the Department of Defense, to prove out the approach and spur the establishment of new network integrators. Moreover, investments in microelectronics like those envisioned under the CHIPs Act, American Foundries Act, and DoD Electronics Resurgence Initiative will be required to improve U.S. radio hardware to achieve competitive lifecycle cost and performance with Huawei.
The low end of the strategy may initiate a race to the bottom in 5G radio hardware but would force Huawei to defend its current position and slow improvements in its cloud computing business, where the company is not even a major player in China.
Keep squeezing them until they scream, and then squeeze some more.
Additionally, does anyone seriously believe that this better-late-than-never decoupling would be going on had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, or that it would continue if Joe Biden wins in 2020?
OK, IT’S PROBABLY TIME TO PANIC. Some European maniacs have decided to design a font that automatically censors your speech by replacing politically incorrect words with their approved newspeak, because there’s absolutely no way that could blow up in everyone’s face. You can try it on their website – they even give you “permission” to say naughty things, saying “this one time, it’s OK.” Oh, thank you so much, my liege. Do these people have no self-awareness at all?
Finland, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should!