Archive for 2020
August 9, 2020
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Educator worried parents will find out what he’s actually teaching their kids in virtual school locks down (but we grabbed the thread).
Why, it’s as if the left believes that your children are not your own.
Related: Here’s the Left’s End Game: Feminist Theorist Wants to Use COVID-19 to ‘Abolish the Family.’
MY LATEST FOR THE PJMEDIA MOTHERSHIP: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Myth of American Institutional Racism.
With the 75 anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings this week, the Progressive 2020 Hindsight Crowd is out in force, questioning or even condemning President Harry Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb.
Segregation in our WWII military remains a stain on our national honor. In practical terms, it was also a detriment to our warfighting capability in a total war requiring full national effort.
But it was Truman who would soon desegregate the military. It was also Truman who spared countless white, yellow, brown, and black lives in August of 1945.
Let me show you how Truman’s decision to tear the heart out of two Japanese cities was a profoundly necessary and moral decision.
This one is a deep dive into the last days of WWII, and it just for our VIP supporters.
If you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.
AS BEN RHODES SAID, THE AVERAGE POLITICAL REPORTER IS 27 YEARS OLD AND KNOWS NOTHING:
In fact, before issuing the DACA order, Obama even explicitly said he lacked authority to do anything like that.
SUPER GAFFE-O-MATIC ’76: Roger Kimball: Joe Biden doesn’t make gaffes. He is a gaffe.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 6 Great Double-Stack Compact Handguns.
BUT PEACEFUL PROTESTS ARE STILL FINE: University Of Georgia Says Students Should ‘Consider Wearing A Mask During Sex’: Report.
Detective Frank Drebin, call your precinct!
CORONAVIRUS TREATMENTS: Regeneron’s Monoclonal Antibody Cocktail in Primates.
STACY MCCAIN TAKES A MUSICAL INTERLUDE:
This fascinates me, because (a) how does someone so young discover an old Buddy Holly song? and (b) the arrangement is so simple. Besides her ukulele, the only instrumentation is a Takamine guitar and a Suzuki Omnichord, a 1980s-era electronic autoharp. New models sell for about $270, but the instrument is scarcely more sophisticated than many children’s toys you could buy for around $100 nowadays. The audio mix was done with Garageband software, and the video was recorded on her iPhone, edited with VideoLeap software. Even the microphone — a Shure 545S Series 2 Unidyne III — is rather cheap, less than $100 on Amazon.
My friend John Hoge worked as a recording engineer in Nashville back in the day, and can tell you what it would have cost to book studio time in the era of analog tape recording. Circa 1981, when I was chasing the rock-and-roll dream, the cheapest 8-track studio in Atlanta charged $25 an hour, at a time when minimum wage was $3.35 an hour. In other words, you’d have to work an 8-hour day at minimum wage to earn enough for one hour in the studio, and a full week’s wages wouldn’t pay for an eight-hour session. By the late 1980s, you could buy a 4-track cassette recorder for about $450 — about two-days’ pay, at minimum wage — but the audio quality was low (e.g., tape hiss) and it wasn’t until the late 1990s, by which time I’d outgrown my rock-and-roll dream, that home digital recording equipment became something affordable to the masses.
Young people, in addition to their lack of knowledge of classic Buddy Holly tunes, generally have no idea how cheap technology has revolutionized so many things that we now take for granted.
Well, yes. That’s a topic I explored last week at Ed Driscoll.com: ‘Recording in Progress:’ Newly Arrived Documentary Explores the Changing World of the Recording Studio.
SO THE BIBLE SAYS, AND IT STILL IS NEWS: 6,600-year-old gravesites in Poland suggest wealth gap existed earlier than thought.
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE: “‘The Chinese, what they said is, China would prefer Joe Biden,’ [Pelosi told CNN’s State of the Union]. ‘Whether they do, that’s their conclusion that they would prefer Joe Biden.’”
It’s a rare moment when New York Times owner Tom Cotton and President Trump agree with Ms. Pelosi: Tom Cotton: Joe Biden Is China’s Choice for President.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: New Mexico man in his 20s dies of septicemic plague. “On July 27 a Santa Fe County man in his 60s was diagnosed with bubonic plague. . . . There are three forms of plague, with symptoms varying depending on how the person was exposed to the bacterium, according to the Centers for Disease Control.” The story doesn’t tell you — because they’ve laid off all the editors, I guess — but the three forms are bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic, in ascending order of lethality. Pneumonic is the most contagious and the only one where human-to-human transmission is at all likely.
Related: Treatment of Plague. Time to start stockpiling streptomycin and tetracycline?
Also: China bubonic plague spreads: Beijing orders second lockdown after new horror death. “Panic has swept across China’s Inner Mongolia province after a second bubonic plague lockdown was enforced, two days after the first, as whole villages are sealed off.”
STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT:
Shot: Joe Biden gets behind the wheel of a Corvette Stingray and lets it rip.
—The New York Daily News, August 5th.
Chaser: Biden Promises To Outlaw Gas-Powered Cars If Elected President.
—Issues & Insights, July 16th.
To paraphrase Joe’s former boss, if you like your car, you can keep your car.
FLASHBACK: ‘You’re Not Supposed to Betray Your Race’: The Challenge Faced by Black Women Accusing Black Men. “When Meredith Watson decided to publicly accuse Virginia’s lieutenant governor of raping her, she knew she would face a backlash — most women who accuse powerful men of sexual assault do. But she also feared that as a black woman, she would face added scrutiny because the prominent politician she named, Justin E. Fairfax, was African-American, too.”
Also, he was a Democrat, and for all the #MeToo posturing the press and the political establishment closed ranks to protect him. So it turns out she should have kept her mouth shut. Know your place, peasants!
THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED: Trump supporters rally: Hundreds of MAGA fans march in Beverly Hills urging liberals to ‘walk away’, crowd in California blasts Gov. Newsom for not reopening the state and pro-police demonstrators gather in Austin.
Judging from the photos, there’s more racial diversity than a Black Lives Matter rally.
CARS VANDALIZED, BUT LOT OWNER IS ANGRY WITH OAKLAND POLICE RESPONSE:
A used car lot owner in East Oakland tells KTVU his business has been targeted repeatedly by criminals. They’ve stolen from him and vandalized cars.
Abdul Alatuali, owner of Mission Bay Auto Sales says at 6:30 Thursday morning, surveillance video shows a man vandalizing five cars on his lot on International Boulevard with spray paint.
He’s angry and frustrated by the response from Oakland police.
Alatuali estimates the damage at more than $11,000.
He called 911 to report the crime and was told by the dispatcher that he needs to file an online police report.
“No, I don’t go online. Why I’m paying taxes-for what? ” says Alatuali.
Related: Defunding the police: Oakland, Berkeley could be test cases for Bay Area, nation.
IT DOESN’T MATTER, THERE’S SOME KIND OF WEIRD BLUE-STATE DEATH WISH GOING ON: NYC will die if we don’t allow indoor dining in Midtown ASAP.
Related: There’s no masking Mayor Bill de Blasio’s apathy for NYC.
CANCEL FLANNERY O’CONNOR? WHY STOP THERE? “If you’re going to Mao up the canon, don’t half-ass it. Really get in there. Don’t rest until every last one of your heroes who ever thought a single thought on the wrong side of history is not only dead—but forgotten. And don’t delay: time is short, justice is impatient, and you have a lot of reading to do. Or you could, you know, get therapy.”
Read the whole thing, which is quite a list of authors who could go down the memory hole at any time. But when does Marx get cancelled for his stone cold racism?
MOSTLY PEACEFUL ARSONISTS: After Burning Police Union, Portland Rioters Threaten Nearby House: ‘We’re Gonna Burn Your Building Down.’
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Posh Maryland private academy to hold blacks-only social justice event.