MY LATEST FOR THE PJMEDIA MOTHERSHIP: ‘I Take Responsibility’ Celebrities PSA Is the Most Unintentionally Funny Thing Ever. “If celebrities ritualistically debasing themselves for the sake of a progressive cause could save the world, then the two minutes of ‘I Take Responsibility’ you’re about to see could erase all of mankind’s sins and restore us to a state of grace.”
Instead, hilarity ensues.
HMM: Chinese hospitals to tighten security after violent attacks.
Beijing city authorities are requiring tighter security checks at hospitals starting July 1 in response to fatal attacks against hospital staff, according to Chinese state media.
China Daily and other news services report hospitals in the Chinese capital are to set up a system of security checks to protect physicians and nurses who have been the target of assaults by patients or their family members. . . .
A survey on Dingxiang Yuan, an online Chinese platform for health professionals, found that as many as 85 percent of doctors interviewed said they had experienced a violent incident at their workplace. Only 29 percent said their hospitals took sufficient measures.
Hospital workers have been cast as national heroes in China since the outbreak of COVID-19 that began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
Well, something doesn’t compute here.
UPDATE: A Hong Kong reader emails: “BTW there has also been a huge upsurge in attacks against police, bus drivers, taxi drivers, security guards, etc. it has gotten so bad that security barriers and warning signs are popping up all over.”
HOT TAKE ALERT: In defense of CHAZ.
But if the government lifts a finger to disrupt CHAZian life, a leftist martyr narrative will spring into existence. Every time you talk about some left-wing failure, you hear about how it would have been a magnificent success if it had not been for meddling capitalists. Revolutionary Catalonia would still exist today if it were not for et cetera. The moment a police officer slides his big toe into CHAZ, never mind the moment that armed units march into the area, we will begin to hear about the thriving, peaceful, prosperous community it could have been. It will go down as the Paris Commune of our time, if with extra art-making facilities.
Of course, while I think the authorities should leave CHAZ alone that does not mean it has to listen to their demands. The CHAZians are insisting on the ‘de-gentrification’ of Seattle (whatever that means), the abolition of the Seattle Police Department and, most comically, the ‘retrial of all People in Color currently serving a prison sentence for violent crime, by a jury of their peers in their community’. What peers? And why do only ‘People of Color’ deserve retrials?
I suppose it is beside the point to ask. The CHAZians do not have the right to have their ridiculous demands be respected merely by virtue of occupying territory which is not their own. But let them stay there for a while. At the very least we should get an interesting documentary out if it. You thought Fyre Festival was crazy? Baby, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Naturally, the DNC-MSM doesn’t think that CHAZ is newsworthy: Nets Turn Blind Eye to BLM Militantly Taking Over Part of Seattle.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with Chyrons, and the CHAZ media blackout makes perfect sense.
SKYNET SMILES: A new approach to control the stiffness and position of inflatable robots. Though I suppose there would be sexbot applications, too.
NEO: Our very own Red Guards.
What’s happening now in the United States, at an ever-increasing pace, is rule by mob. But it’s a special sort of mob. The internet and social media, especially Twitter, facilitates the process. Its main practitioners are leftists, mostly but not entirely young.
History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, and this movement bears a resemblance to the Maoist Cultural Revolution’s Red Guards.
Read the whole thing.
BATTLESWARM BLOG: Defund The Police And Let Slip The Dogs of Anarchy. “The hard left has gone from crazy to super-mega-crazy in less than two weeks.”
Nah. That was just the mask coming off, and it was never a very convincing mask.
GOOD: CBO Won’t Hide Biden’s Government Takeover of Health Care.
It became a major scandal when Philadelphia-based researcher Rich Weinstein uncovered video of Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, saying: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”
The quote became famous but was widely misunderstood; he was not referring to the penalty vs. tax question on which Chief Justice John Roberts would later uphold the law. The issue was whether the payment for a mandatory government insurance program should be scored as tax revenue – like Social Security or Medicare premiums – or considered private sector payments. This is crucial because a program scored as taxes and spending is transparently a government takeover, with potentially trillions of dollars shifted from the private sector to government.
There’s bad news for Joe Biden’s current plan. As Biden explained: “I’d bring back the individual mandate… and here’s the deal. We’re in a situation where if you provide an option for anybody who in fact wants to buy into Medicare for All, they can buy in.”
It’s hard to see how a mandate paired with a government plan could be scored by CBO as anything but taxes and spending.
The subterfuge tells you all you need to know about the efficacy of the proposal.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Academics nationwide #ShutDownSTEM because science is ‘weaponized against black people.’
When taxpayers get tired of funding this sort of thing — and they’re already starting to — we’ll be told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
LEFT WANTS TO DEFUND THE COPS, BUT NOT THE HEAVILY ARMED FEDS: Issues & Insights wonders why the Left is howling for defunding local cops at the same time they give a free pass to those at such federal agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA). Bet you didn’t know polluters and New England fishermen are such dangerous characters!
I’M PRETTY SURE DE BLASIO’S PLAN FOR DEFUNDING THE POLICE MOSTLY INVOLVES TRANSFERRING THE MONEY TO HIS CRONIES: NY Police Union: ‘We Are Losing the City, We Have No Leadership, No Direction, No Plan.’
ED MORRISSEY: Can The Minneapolis City Council *Actually* Defund The Police? Er… “Actually… no, not really, as the Star Tribune briefly explained yesterday. In fact, they have to fund and staff its police department in accordance with its population by the terms of its city charter.”
BURN (ER, FIRE) THE HERETICS!: Demands that Cornell Fire Clinical Law Prof William Jacobson for Criticizing Black Lives Matter Movement.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM JACOBSON: There’s an effort to get me fired at Cornell for criticizing the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Apparently, no one is allowed to criticize Black Lives Matter because inclusion. The posts in question are here and here. Says Jacobson:
Open inquiry and debate are core features of a vibrant intellectual community. This has been the way Cornell Law School operated for the 12 years I’ve been here, until now. In this toxic political environment in which intellectual diversity and differences of opinion are not tolerated, trying to shut down debate through false accusations of racism seems to be the preferred tactic.
I challenge a representative of those student groups and a faculty member of their choosing to a public debate at the law school regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement, so that I can present my argument and confront the false allegations in real time rather than having to respond to baseless community email blasts. I ask the law school to arrange an in-person live-streamed debate during fall term, or if for some reason the law school does not have in-person instruction, to arrange a ‘virtual’ format.
Throughout my legal and academic career spanning over three decades, there has never been a single instance in which I have been accused of discrimination toward any student, client or colleague. I have always treated my students as individuals, without regard to race, ethnicity or other such factors. I condemn in the strongest terms any insinuation that I am racist, and I greatly resent any attempt to leverage meritless accusations in hopes of causing me reputational harm. While such efforts might succeed in scaring others in a similiar position, I will not be intimidated.
We are living in extraordinarily dangerous times, reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution, in which professors guilty of wrongthink were publicy denounced and fired at the behest of students who insist on absolute ideological orthodoxy. It’s a way of instilling terror in other students, faculty, staff, and society, so that others shut up and don’t voice dissenting views. We are seeing monuments destroyed in Taliban-fashion because they represent an uncomfortable history, movies and TV shows cancelled, and individuals disappeared from employment due to even the slightest deviation from the prevailing political culture.
This is not going to end well unless people of good concience, who support black lives but not the Black Lives Movement as it was founded and currently operates, to speak up and refuse to cower in fear.
If Jacobson is fired for his writings, I plan to ask that the Department of Education investigate Cornell Law School for entertaining a conspiracy to violate his civil rights.
And he has a PayPal donate button at the bottom of this post. I kicked in a hundred bucks.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: She called him a white supremacist. He accused her of doxxing threats. Inside a University of Texas tempest.
Message to Lauren Luveras: If you hear the whistle, that makes you the dog.
I GUESS THEY HAVEN’T TOLD JOE ABOUT THE PANDEMIC YET: Joe Biden says Trump ‘squandered’ the economy, causing recession.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: ANTIFA Deserves a Military Response. “Much of the violence we have seen in the past couple of weeks has been coordinated by the antifa crowd. I’ve been very derisive of what’s been going on but I will say that I do believe that some of the protesters were sincere and didn’t want any violence.”
Antifa members ought to be treated like the secessionists they claim to be.
AMERICA’S “INTELLECTUAL ELITE” IS COMING OUT AS GARBAGE PEOPLE: Paul Krugman, professors seek top economist’s removal from influential job for criticizing Black Lives Matter. “University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers and dozens of other academics are leading a massive effort to have a senior faculty member at the University of Chicago removed from his position at the world’s preeminent economics journal — all because he criticized Black Lives Matter’s push to defund police departments. The attack on a leading academic at the University of Chicago, traditionally a bastion of free speech and no-nonsense conservative economic theory, comes as swarms of left-wing activists have successfully secured numerous firings across the country for viewpoints they deem politically unacceptable.”
People need to start suing over these campaigns, which are basically conspiracies to deprive people of their civil rights. I think there’s money to be made.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
