Archive for 2020
September 12, 2020
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Biden Says We Need a President Who Tells the Truth? Then Here Are 8 Big Whoppers That Disqualify Him.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why there is no such thing as a healthy diet that works for everyone.
SUPER GAFFE-O-MATIC ’76: A Bad Day for the Biden Campaign.
If only the Democratic nominee could have remained cosseted in friendly media’s comforting embrace until November, but there are voters beyond the base to reach. And as the Biden campaign has begun to emerge from its cocoon and engage with more adversarial reporters, the results suggest this campaign and its candidate are more flatfooted than their image-makers would have you believe.
The first sign of distress came from the Fox News Channel. On Thursday, Biden campaign national press secretary TJ Ducklo sat down with anchor Brett Baier to discuss policy and respond to the Trump campaign’s criticisms. But the dyspeptic performance Ducklo turned in suggests the Biden campaign has bathed in soft coverage for so long that its political muscles have atrophied.
If Ducklo conveyed anything to Fox’s audience throughout his seven-minute appearance, it was his intention to avoid answering questions—none of which were particularly difficult.
Related: NYT: Here’s how Biden might already be blowing the 2020 election.
And this brings us back to the point about 2016. Hillary Clinton had a huuuge money advantage and the good fortune of running against a candidate who was easy to personally dislike. She blew those advantages by running a national-messaging campaign rather than doing the retail politicking necessary to generate turnout. Even then, Clinton had at least some parity, as Trump also disdained that kind of GOTV effort, preferring to do rallies to stoke enthusiasm and then use targeted ads to replace the ground game.
This time around, though, Trump and the RNC are investing heavily in that kind of retail politicking, while Biden isn’t investing at all in a ground game. He’s doing nothing but national messaging and occasional bungee visits to places where polling indicates trouble — which is why he’s heading to Minnesota next week, a state he should easily be carrying. If Russonello is correct about Biden’s strength in the suburbs, this state shouldn’t even be on Biden’s limited radar — and yet he’s breaking his bubble to appear here instead of, say, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, or Arizona.
Russonello’s right that Biden and Democrats should worry. He just is a little off on how much they should worry, and why it matters — and not just in the presidential election.
And one last item on Ducklo’s train wreck interview: No, Biden Didn’t Support Trump’s China Travel Ban. Biden spox falsely claims Biden favored travel restrictions.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: CNN’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week.
EVOLUTION IN ACTION: TikTok ‘Benadryl Challenge’ has killed at least one teen.
I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Transsexual Satanist Anarchist Is GOP Nominee for Cheshire County Sheriff. “New Hampshire’s first trans, anarchist, Satanic candidate for county sheriff says she’s not getting a lot of support from the Republican Party. “‘I can’t imagine they’re happy about this,’ said Aria DiMezzo. DiMezzo, who is running as a Republican with the campaign slogan ‘F*** the Police,’ said Friday she hasn’t had any help or support for the county or state GOP. DiMezzo won the Republican nomination for Cheshire County Sheriff Tuesday night running unopposed in the primary. She’ll now square off with popular incumbent Democrat Eli Rivera, who is running for his fifth term.”
More from Jazz Shaw at sister site Hot Air: “As it turns out, it appears that DiMezzo might not even be a Republican, but only ran as one because of the challenges associated with getting a Libertarian on the ticket. He didn’t attend any of the party meetings or candidate events, despite having been invited by the chairwoman. It’s not even clear if DiMezzo did any actual campaigning aside from social media and a couple of internet radio appearances.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: ‘Are we supposed to kneel?’ NFL tweets out giant American flag for 9/11. “Suddenly they care about the flag:”
YOU GOT THIS ADVICE ON INSTAPUNDIT 6 MONTHS AGO: Dr. Fauci says he takes vitamin D and C supplements and that they can lessen ‘your susceptibility to infection.’ I’d add zinc, too, which Fauci doesn’t mention. And maybe quercetin.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Rise Of ‘Technosexuals’ — 14% Of Men Are Aroused By Amazon Alexa.
Presumably they’re all cyber-slut-shaming Siri for her daring affair with Raj Koothrappali.
THAT SEEMS ABOUT RIGHT: Chinese alumni compare USC to Mao for removing professor over Chinese word that sounds like n-word.
A news organization that tracks the Chinese social network Weibo reported that the American controversy puzzled Chinese users.
“On Weibo, netizens had little sympathy for the students feeling offended over the Chinese words. Many called them ‘ignorant’ or ‘uncultured’ for mistaking the Chinese words for a racial slur,” according to What’s on Weibo. Some accused the offended USC students of “discriminating against the Chinese language” or ranking English higher than Chinese for no reason.
UCLA’s Volokh criticized USC leaders for failing to teach students that “they should not be upset by such accidents of language,” and for implying that “Chinese speakers should watch what they say, not just in examples but in ordinary conversation that could be overheard.”
Forcing faculty to avoid certain Mandarin words would be “oddly Anglocentric” and offensive to Mandarin speakers, Volokh wrote in a sample letter that he said Garrett should have written.
Volokh and the Chinese alumni are right, the USC administration is laughably, cravenly, humiliatingly wrong.
SADLY, LARRY TRIBE HAS BECOME THE JOE BIDEN OF ACADEME: Harvard prof uses 9/11 to blame Trump for COVID deaths.
In mid-2019 the U.S. Navy established an Aggressor Squadron (AGGRON) to provide submarine and ship crews with better information about their ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) capabilities versus potential opponents. This is mainly for submarine crews as AGGRON is part of the UWDC (Undersea Warfighting Development Center). The United States has the largest submarine force in the world with 54 SSN (nuclear attack subs) and 14 SSBNs (ballistic missile carrying subs). The rest of the world has about 450 submarines, most of them non-nuclear and all trained and equipped to try and deal with American subs.
The latest StrategyPage SUBMARINES update.
IF PROPOSITION 16 PASSES, CALIFORNIA’S FUTURE MAY LOOK LIKE THIS: If you think that universities that engage in race-preferential admissions simply put a gentle thumb on the scale in favor of targeted minority members, here are some statistics that may surprise you:
In 1995, before the ban on race-preferential admissions, the level of preference at UC-Berkeley was very high. Here are the median math SAT scores for enrollees by race/ethnicity:
510 (blacks)
560 (Hispanics)
710 (Asians)
690 (whites)
Here are the median verbal SAT scores for enrollees by race/ethnicity:
450 (blacks)
480 (Hispanics)
590 (Asians)
600 (whites)
Here are the median high school GPAs for enrollees by race/ethnicity:
3.42 (blacks)
3.75 (Hispanics)
4.00 (Asians)
4.00 (whites)
These figures come from a report by the Center for Equal Opportunity. CEO has been prying this information out of colleges and universities for decades, but it’s only this past week that Dr. Althea Nagai has put some of the data from several schools into one summary report.
AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES IOWAHAWK: ‘Pro-science’ Pelosi Gives Anti-science Explanation For West Coast Fires.
‘I believe in science’ Nancy Pelosi offered a rather anti-science explanation for the wildfires in California during an MSNBC appearance on Thursday.
“Mother earth is angry,” she said. “She’s telling us, whether she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is … the climate crisis is real and has an impact.”
“Top Scientists Warn: Sea Gods Angry,” Iowahawk wrote in 2004. “While most empirical evidence supports the theory of wrathful whale-tail slappings, some scientists are exploring alternative hypotheses for the weekend tsunami. Ecobiologist Jane Geary of UC Santa Cruz points to mounting evidence that the ocean spirit-world may have been driven to gastrointestinal rage by gas-guzzling SUVs. ‘Thunder-wagon make smoke cloud of greenhouse gas,’ explained Geary. ‘hungry Tai-Waku eat smoke from thunder-wagon, pass giant wind with mighty fury.’”
SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “Charges of Imperialism would be more supportable if America regarded the world as a prize to be won rather than a nuisance to be tolerated.”
NOBODY LIKES LYING, SANCTIMONIOUS HYPOCRITES: Most hated: The ‘swamp’ and professional sports.
When the boos rained down on to Arrowhead Stadium at Thursday’s NFL season opener as members of the Kansas City Chiefs locked arms for a “Moment of Unity,” it was the latest sign that some fans want teams to play sports, not politics.
And now, Gallup has confirmed that the nation is upset with the sports industry’s embrace of hot-button political issues.
In its latest industry ratings, sports has gone from Rah! to nah.
“The sports industry now has a negative image, on balance, among Americans as a whole, with 30% viewing it positively and 40% negatively, for a -10 net-positive score. This contrasts with the +20 net positive image it enjoyed in 2019, when 45% viewed it positively and 25% negatively,” said Gallup.
Get woke, go broke.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: UW-Madison Doctoral Student Reveals Her Own Racial Fraud.
Historian Jessica Krug, who last week admitted to being white and faking being Black for her entire career, resigned from her associate professorship at George Washington University, effective immediately, the institution announced Wednesday.
But on the heels of her scandal comes another confession of racial fraud from a scholar. This time it’s a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison — where Krug got her own Ph.D.
The graduate student in question is CV Vitolo-Haddad, a Ph.D. candidate in journalism and mass communication. They (Vitolo-Haddad’s preferred pronoun) were outed last week via an anonymous post on Medium and subsequently wrote two posts of their own on the platform.
Earlier: Binaries For Me, Spectrums For Thee.
At some point in the future people will look back at how the left made two contradictory arguments at the same time. When it comes to sexual identity, the word has gone forth to oppose “artificial” categories, “false binaries,” etc. People can define themselves sexually without any regard to medical science, never mind tradition or political or cultural orthodoxy. I’ve lost count of how many genders there are now. Just last week, CNN was so scared of using the word “women” it tweeted that “Individuals with a cervix are now recommended to start cervical cancers screening at 25 …”
Meanwhile, when it comes to race, it’s all about new artificial categories and enforced binaries. White people who pretend they’re black are committing theft. Heck, white people who cook non-white food or pay homage to non-white art forms are committing theft. Cultural appropriation is evil. But gender appropriation is something to be celebrated. Biological males can collect all the women’s track and field awards and that’s fine. But don’t you dare wear dreadlocks if you’re not black?
That’s just weird. But these are weird times.
No word yet if Vitolo-Haddad went to the Gap after her struggle session-style confessionals: