HE LOST (HALF THE AUDIENCE) ON JEOPARDY, BABY: Wannabe Jeopardy! Host Ken Jennings Is A Brett Kavanaugh Rape Truther Who Hates Republicans.
Archive for 2020
December 31, 2020
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Why Are Reporters Covering for Hilaria Baldwin’s Epic Con? “The Identity Politics mob is suddenly standing down. Here’s the real reason why.”
‘TIS THE SEASON: Arkansas doctor wipes away cancer patients’ bills totaling $650,000.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: 2020 Rated Worst Year Ever, Provided You Never Lived At Any Other Time In History.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Oregon Mayor Leads the Charge to Open Businesses on Jan 1, Despite Lockdowns.
THAT’LL PLAY WELL: New US dietary guidelines: No candy, cake for kids under 2.
OLD AND BUSTED: Tax the Rich.
The New Hotness? Tax the poor! Thursday is the last day before new Oregon tobacco tax hikes cigarette prices $2 per pack.
As Reason magazine notes, “Cigarette taxes hurt the poor. Cigarette taxes are extremely regressive. The poor pay a larger chunk of their income to the tax than the wealthy. This is further exacerbated by the fact that low-income, low-education and minority populations all smoke more than high-income, high-education and white populations, and by a good bit. Nearly a third of people below the poverty line smoke, while only 18% of those at or above the poverty line do. A tax on cigarettes is therefore paid mostly by society’s poorest individuals.”
OH, YEAH? JUST WATCH HIM DO IT WITH A BIG ASSIST FROM THE PRESS: Warnock Can’t Dismiss ‘Traumatizing and Disturbing’ Camp Abuse Story.
BECAUSE IT’S ESSENTIALLY TOTALITARIAN: Why cancel culture can target anyone. “The end game of cancel culture isn’t just to humiliate and punish the offender but to intimidate and ultimately silence any dissenting voices including those calling for some measure of mercy.”
THE RETROACTIVE ENDORSEMENT OF BARACK OBAMA WAS THE POINT OF NO RETURN, ASSUMING THERE HAD EVER BEEN ONE: 2020 Is The Year NeverTrump Finally Admitted They’re NeverRepublican.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What Will Historians Make of Our Annus Horribilis?
Yet amid the death, destruction and dissension, history will show that America did not fall apart.
In remarkable fashion, researchers created a viable and safe COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year — a feat earlier described as impossible by experts.
The nation went into recession but avoided the forecasted depression. This was partly because America in early 2020 was booming by historical standards, and partly because the Trump administration and Congress quickly infused some $4 trillion of liquidity into the inert economy.
For all the charges and counter-charges of voter fraud and Trump being a sore loser, President-elect Joe Biden will eventually take office. And Donald Trump will leave it.
No one disputes that the 2020 campaign and election were abnormal. Whether they were unfair or illegitimate will likely be readjudicated in the 2022 midterm and 2024 presidential elections. By then, the people will have had time to digest the bizarre events of the annus horribilis — and with their votes make the necessary compensations.
For all of America’s troubles, the world abroad was worse. China eerily bragged that it reacted best to its own virus — even as its global popularity crashed. Europe did little better in combatting the pandemic and saw its economy in even worse shape.
More importantly, as the year ended, there was a patch of blue sky amid the storm clouds.
The Middle East may be on the verge of a historic recalibrated peace. The world is now pushing back against Chinese mercantilism. The southern border is mostly secure. The flood of illegal immigration has ebbed to a trickle. The strategies that sparked a three-year economic boom need only be reapplied in 2021.
Amid death and destruction, perhaps one day historians will conclude that what could not kill off America in 2020 only made it stronger.
As coronavirus vaccines roll out, it will be fascinating to watch which crises the Biden administration manufactures, to generate the left’s all-important moral equivalent of war mindset.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: California Tumbles Into the Sea.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Are you ready for the Great Tech Worker Reverse Migration out of California?
Answer: You’d better be, because it sure looks like it’s coming.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Portland police forced to dial 911 for assistance
- FDA makes distillers pay up for helping out
- Andrew Cuomo graciously allows a few thousand Bills fans to attend playoff game, takes a seat for himself
Bonus Sanity: Sorry, couldn’t find any today.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
IN THE MAIL: Battles that Changed History.
TYLER O’NEIL: 5 Great Trump Victories in 2020. “Trump achieved five great victories in 2020, opposing abortion, standing up for America, fast-tracking vaccines, peace in the Middle East, and more.”
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Boycotts, bans, and burn books: 8 outrageous incidents of Ivy League leftism in 2020.
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: NPR on ‘Toxic Individualism:’ Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns.
Partying like it’s 1919, when attacks on individuality were all the rage among collectivist-obsessed “Progressives:”
[Woodrow] Wilson was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. “[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many,” declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams.
“New forms of association must be created,” explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896. “Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life.” Elsewhere, Rauschenbusch put it more simply: “Individualism means tyranny.”
Or as Mies van der Rohe, the last director of Weimar Germany’s socialist-oriented Bauhaus design school said in 1924:
The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us. The decisive achievements in all fields are impersonal and their authors are for the most part unknown. They are part of the trend of our time toward anonymity. Our engineering structures are examples. Gigantic dams, great industrial installations and huge bridges are built as a matter of course, with no designer’s name attached to them. They point to the technology of the future.
Curiously, Mies would have no problem building for wealthy individuals who wished to commission his work — not to mention having his name firmly associated with his designs — after he fled the Weimar Republic’s much more punitive successors for America.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Los Angeles Locked Down, Covid Came Anyway. The city’s crisis contradicts the simple narrative that outbreaks are punishment for red-state recklessness. “Los Angeles has endured nine months of a shutdown more extreme than most of the country’s — or the world’s. In the beginning, the city even closed the parks. You still can’t enter the Venice Beach boardwalk except to pick up takeout food. No walks, bike rides or fishing on the pier.”
How’s that workin’ for you?
WOW, EVEN AFTER HE DELETED HIS CRAZY TWEET, KURT EICHENWALD’S FEED IS STILL A BOILING STEW OF CRAZY.
Here’s the one he deleted:
But the whole thing is just crazy. Sadly, not atypical of our media class today.
AT AMAZON, Iron Gym Total Upper Body Workout Bar.
