Archive for 2020
July 6, 2020
I DON’T KNOW BOTS BUT I KNOW WHAT I LIKE: This Hotel Has a Robot Named Rosé That Will Deliver Wine to Your Room Without Human Contact.
WELL, GOOD: America is rapidly pulling troops from Afghanistan. “It was only in 2001 that American forces toppled the Taliban regime, when the mullahs who led the movement refused to hand over Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. But nearly two-thirds of the population is less than 25 years old, and so has little or no memory of the Taliban’s rule. They are having to brush up on their history, however, as they contemplate the prospect of the Taliban returning to power in some form. The American troops that have propped up the Afghan government and held the Taliban at bay for the past 19 years are on their way out.”
If Kabul can’t make it after nearly 20 years of American blood and treasure, they never will and were never going to.
SOMEONE ASK FULBRIGHT’S PROTEGE BILL CLINTON FOR COMMENT: U of Arkansas petition aims to bring down Fulbright statue.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump’s Mt. Rushmore Speech Is What We’ve All Been Waiting For.
LOCKDOWNS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Mark Lurie, associate professor of epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health, March 26, 2020: “If you don’t follow the CDC recommendations, you’re increasing (the chance) that you’re going to get infected and that you’re going to infect other people.” Lurie said that “denialism” is something that’s been seen at the beginning of other epidemics, but the more coronavirus “infiltrates our daily lives, the more people are going to take it more seriously.” “The virus doesn’t care about your party affiliation or you political beliefs.” “If you don’t follow the CDC recommendations, you’re increasing (the chance) that you’re going to get infected and that you’re going to infect other people.”
Same Mark Lurie, today’s New York Times: “Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice.” “But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior.” He said he took his daughter to a protest early in June and felt a chaser of regret in its wake. “We felt afterward that the risk we incurred probably exceeded the entire risk in the previous two months,” he said. “We undid some very hard work, and I don’t see how actions like that can help in battling this epidemic, honestly.”
At least Lurie, unlike some others, kinda sorta acknowledges he’s being a hypocrite, though it would be nice to see an apology to those he accused of putting their political beliefs above public health, because he did exactly that. I don’t know when, if ever, “public health experts” will regain the public’s trust after this debacle.
DECOUPLING: Boris Johnson now has ‘sound reasons’ to keep Huawei out of UK 5G.
Sir John Sawers said new US sanctions imposed on the company meant that allowing Huawei to expand its grip on the UK telecoms market posed security risks that did not apply when the government announced a compromise solution in January giving it up to 35% of the market.
Sawers spoke out following reports – not denied by the government – that the National Cyber Security Centre has also concluded that the balance of risk has changed, and that Huawei must be excluded from 5G.
The decision, which is expected to be confirmed by the national security council within the next fortnight and announced in a statement to parliament before the summer recess, will be warmly welcomed by many Conservative MPs, 38 of whom rebelled in a vote on this issue in March.
In an article for the FT, Sawers said the original decision to allow Huawei a partial role in building 5G was a “reasonable balance” but that was no longer the case because of the sanctions, which would stop the firm using technology reliant on American intellectual property.
The security risks of relying on Huawei — a Communist front corporation — were always real. Trump’s sanctions just gave Britain the little extra impetus they needed to make the right decision.
SHOW OF STRENGTH: U.S. sends carriers to South China Sea during Chinese drills.
YAWN. Going to National Parks Is Racist, Declares ABC News. When everything is racist, nothing is racist.
THE CHINESE RECOGNIZE THIS: America’s cultural revolution is just like Mao’s: To many who survived the crackdown in China, events in the US are frighteningly familiar.
And like the Cultural Revolution, this purports to come from the bottom but is really organized from the top.
HIS OFFER IS GENUINE, BUT HE KNOWS THE MAYORS WILL REFUSE THE HELP AND THEN HAVE TO OWN THEIR PROBLEMS: Trump offers to help NYC, Chicago with rising spike in shootings.
A LITTLE LATE: ‘It’s Over’: Atlanta Mayor Says Protesters Should Clear Out After 8-Year-Old Girl Shot And Killed. Shot and killed by ‘protesters.’
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: A Government of Aliens: How the Public Guardians Betrayed the Public Trust.
The Epstein scandal was one many recent events that suggested the custodians had betrayed their stewardship. If culture is the mind of a civilization, no society can long survive the corruption of it’s own legacy and symbols. The photo of Ghislaine Maxwell and Kevin Spacey seated on the thrones of England as guests of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton respectively seemed to do just that.
The barbarians were at the altars. Some would argue the discovery of cultural aliens in high places came about only because of the Woke exposed them. But as Michael James Coudrey pointed out, many high status sex offenders were prosecuted during the current un-Woke administration and the exposure of so many villains may have less to do with the relative morality of bureaucrats than the breakup of the defensive box formation the elites formerly sheltered in.
Like characters in a science fiction movie who discover special glasses that show the aliens among them, the public sees them now. The same insights that fueled the populist rebellion also weakened the mutually protective networks that prevented their previous detection. When the old boy system failed it did with such suddenness that many tycoons, media personalities, politicians from both parties, artists, academicians and even royalty were taken by surprise.
For much of the public the shock was no less. To many it seemed as if it were already too late. The game was afoot not only in high places but among gangs in the street. The old verities were condemned as supremacism. Criticism was now violence while physical destruction like arson was to be indulged as mere damage to property. Worst of all there was nothing to appeal to. God had been banished, symbols and statues pulled down till there was one remaining yardstick left to invoke: the inappropriate. That only survived because it meant nothing and was therefore harmless.
For a while the mantra “trust the science” was pressed into service as an expedient. But as Reason pointed out that too collapsed under abuse and political mistrust.
The ruling class’s pigeons are coming home to roost.
DO BLACK LIVES MATTER TO BLACK LIVES MATTER?
If Black Lives Matter was true to its name, there would be as much global outrage over the death of eight year old Secoriea Turner, gunned down by anti-police protesters in Atlanta Sunday night, as there was for George Floyd.
According to local authorities, Turner was out with her mother and a friend when they tried to park near a burnt out fast food restaurant where Rayshard Brooks was killed in a scuffle with police last month – and which has been occupied by demonstrators ever since.
Police say a group of demonstrators who had been blocking the site confronted the family.
“At some point, someone in that group opened fire on the vehicle, striking it multiple times and striking the child who was inside. The driver then drove to Atlanta Medical Center for help”, but it was too late for little Secoriea, officials said.
It’s only the latest outrage to occur in the past several weeks of civil unrest that have seen legitimate grievances over police brutality and the killing of George Floyd be hijacked by Black Lives Matter, a group with a more radical agendas than simply reforming law enforcement and fighting police brutality. . . .
After New York City disbanded an elite NYPD anti-crime unit, shootings rose in the last two weeks of June by 205 per cent – and gunshot injuries likewise increased by 238 per cent over the same period the previous year.
And many if not most of the victims have been African-American.
As Hazel Thomas, whose 35 year old son Jomo Glasgow was murdered outside a party in Brooklyn told the New York Post, “I feel like we are giving the streets back to criminals”.
Or as Secoriea Turner’s tearful father, Secoriya Williamson, told local media in Atlanta, “They say black lives matter … but you killed your own this time. You killed a child. She didn’t do nothing to nobody.”
Of course, there won’t be any BLM protest marches held in honour of Jomo, little Secoriea, or any of the other innocents of any race slain in the ensuing crime wave.
Nope. It’s not in the interest of the powers that be.
Related: When Black lives matter to Democrats, and when they don’t.
THE WUHAN CORONAVIRUS AND NEANDERTHAL GENES: “A stretch of DNA linked to Covid-19 was passed down from Neanderthals 60,000 years ago, according to a new study. Scientists don’t yet know why this particular segment increases the risk of severe illness from the coronavirus.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: U.S. manufacturing activity hits 14-month high.
OH, DRY UP: Tammy Duckworth: We should listen to the argument for tearing down statues of George Washington. “Amazingly, Duckworth not only botches the response by saying she’s willing to entertain the idea of canceling the Founding Fathers, she goes on to hint that maybe it’s time to give Mt. Rushmore back to Native Americans. Bash didn’t even ask about that!”
UPDATE: Wait Until 2020 Tammy Duckworth Hears What 2015 Tammy Duckworth Thought About Mount Rushmore.
