Archive for 2020
November 14, 2020
SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Study: Respiratory failure in COVID-19 usually not driven by cytokine storm.
HIS FRAUDULENCY’S ILLEGITIMATE ELECTION: Media’s hiding of Hunter Biden scandal robbed Trump of clear win: Poll. “Enough of Joe Biden’s voters would have switched their selection had they known about his son Hunter’s money scandal, enough to give President Trump a clear victory. In a new survey, 4.6% of Biden’s voters said they would not have selected him had they been aware of his son’s China money affair. . . . The story was not covered much in non-conservative media, and Twitter and other social media platforms banned many of the reports on their sites.”
MISSING FROM THIS STORY: THE WORDS “MOSTLY PEACEFUL.” Trump supporters clash with counter protesters as ‘Million MAGA March’ turns violent.
WELL, NO POINT TRYING NOW: Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions may not stop global warming.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Air Force Wants To Arm Stealth Jets With Laser Cannons By 2025.
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Baby Yoda Canceled Amid Accusations of Genocide.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. That also turns out to be true of the tiny.
Baby Yoda, who one year ago today cozied into the hearts of Star Wars fans with his bottomless eyes, fuzzy head, and adorable cooing, has invoked genuine social media wrath for last week’s episode of The Mandalorian, in which the mystical infant remorselessly snacked on the eggs of an endangered galactic species.
Whether this is serious or silly depends, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would put it, on “a certain point of view.”
The “good guys” in the Star Wars universe tend to be absolute killing machines: Luke Skywalker Sure Did Kill A Lot Of People.
CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE: Congressional Research Service: The Electoral College: A 2020 Presidential Election Timeline.
THE HALLMARK OF THE TRUMP ERA HAS BEEN THE UNMASKING OF “NEUTRAL,” “EXPERT,” “NONPARTISAN” PEOPLE AND INSTITUTIONS AS SHAMEFUL POLITICAL HACKS: When scientific journals take sides during an election, the public’s trust in science takes a hit.
IT WAS ALWAYS OBVIOUS: MSNBC’s exodus to work for Joe Biden shows it’s been shilling for him all along.
SCHADENFREUDE FEVER: Nancy Pelosi’s Horrible Year.
It started with her botched handling of the articles of impeachment against President Trump. Making the fatal error of reading the comments — in this case Twitter and various left-wing pundits — Pelosi convinced herself after the House impeached Trump in late December that she had leverage and embarked on the delusional gambit of withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate to force Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to establish the parameters of Trump’s trial first.
The land resounded with cries of “You go girl!” and “Slay kween!” from her cheerleaders in the media. Another bold stroke from a political master, they insisted. Once a committed opponent of impeachment, Pelosi had now seized control of the process. The ball was in her court. Unless McConnell agreed to her demands for witnesses and documents during the trial, Pelosi wouldn’t serve it. There was nothing he could do.
As it turned out, McConnell was perfectly content doing just that. (He’s not known as the Turtle for nothing.) He insisted to all who would listen that he’d prefer never getting the articles at all. He didn’t want them, his caucus didn’t want them; Pelosi could keep that lump of coal as long as she liked. As for her demand that he release the resolution for organizing Trump’s trial before she sent them over, the senior senator from Kentucky was adamant that the House would run the Senate over his dead body.
In early January, three weeks after approving the articles of impeachment, Pelosi relented and dispatched them to the Senate. Her vaunted leverage had not budged McConnell an inch. In the end, it was the San Francisco Democrat who got nothing and had to like it.
It started with impeachment; the fourth quarter begins with this own-goal: Progressives slam Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream stunt in election postmortem.
Progressive groups conducting a postmortem on the 2020 race slammed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week, saying her “showing off” of her flashy freezer full of ice cream was an “unforced error” that eroded Democrats’ majority in the House.
“The economy was voters’ top concern in this election,” read the letter penned on Wednesday.
“When Democratic leaders make unforced errors like showing off two sub-zero freezers full of ice cream on national television or cozy up with Wall Street executives and corporate lobbyists while Trump tells voters we are the party of the swamp, it is not surprising that we lose,” it continued.
The letter referred to a now-infamous exchange in which Pelosi (D-Calif.) flashed her $24,000 Sub-Zero freezers stuffed with $13 ice creams in an interview with James Corden at the peak of the pandemic.
Progressive groups New Deal Strategies, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement and Data for Progress unloaded on Democratic leadership, whom they accused of being out of touch, and predicted Republicans would recapture the House in 2022.
Or as the New York Post’s front page yesterday summed up Pelosi’s terrible, no good, horrible, very bad year:
IN THE MAIL: From Evan Sayet, THE WOKE SUPREMACY: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto.
ROGER SIMON: Pfizer, Biden and the Birth of ‘Socialism with American Characteristics.”
One of the more disturbing events of our disturbing times was the revelation Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla informed the Biden campaign of the success of his company’s COVID-19 vaccine before the current president and his administration.
In fact, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he learned about the breakthrough from media reports—this although President Trump and his people gave significant support, financial and otherwise, via Operation Warp Speed, to Bourla’s company, something the Pfizer CEO tried to deny.
Now that Trump has signed the executive order he promised making the vaccine free for all, the company stands to make a killing at taxpayer expense.
But Bourla himself had already done that. He sold $5.6 million of shares on the day of the announcement when Pfizer stock rose 8 percent. A watchdog group is calling on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate.
What we are witnessing is the infiltration of the Chinese system into America. We can call it “Socialism with American Characteristics,” our own version of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”
(Actually both are a masquerade for government-structured oligarchic capitalism—more on that later.)
We would likely see much more of this, perhaps a complete takeover by this approach, in a Biden-Harris administration.
QED: Joe Biden transition official wrote op-ed advocating free speech restrictions.
RED DAWN: Biden HUD secretary frontrunner Karen Bass praised top communist as her ‘mentor.’ She previously praised deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
STANDING UP TO BIGOTRY: Meet the Smith College employee whistleblower exposing anti-white racism.
IT’S A BIG PART OF THE POPULACE THAT THE POLITICAL CLASS SUPPRESSED FOR YEARS, BUT NO MORE: Why Trump’s Supporters Are Here For Good.
Some of the snoots living in Blue America sneer that the inhabitants of Red America are ignorant, living in a fantasyland. But in many ways, Red America understands Blue America better than Blue America understands Red America. It doesn’t have much choice: The news media, the entertainment business, technology and social media, and the commanding heights of big business live in Blue America and largely share Blue America’s biases, assumptions and points of view. Some of them are at least a little aware of their ignorance — Dean Baquet, the editor of The New York Times, confessed in 2016: “We don’t get religion. We don’t get the role of religion in people’s lives.” He might have added guns, farming, and much else to the list of things his staff doesn’t get.
But Blue America sees Red America only in dribs and drabs: When J. D. Vance’s excellent “Hillbilly Elegy” was first published in 2016, the reaction to that book in progressive intellectual circles put me in mind of the death of Tejano singer Selena in 1995: Selena had 100 percent name recognition in 10 percent of the country and 0.00 percent name recognition among the other 90 percent, where people were perplexed by the intense outpouring of grief at her murder. They were seeing the tip of a cultural iceberg.
Urban progressives who were surprised by the Trump phenomenon and shocked by QAnon are the same ones who are made anxious and repulsed by things that are commonplace in the rest of the country, from the customs of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches to gun culture in the South and Southwest. . . .
Blue America is feeling triumphant at the moment. But vanquishing Donald Trump is not quite the achievement they think it is, because Trump has always been much more a symptom of our Great Divide than a cause of it. That may not be obvious to an intellectual class that knows more about the Uyghurs than it does about Southwestern Oklahoma, but those who are interested in understanding the other America rather than merely sneering at it have a lot of homework to do.
The media keep promising to cover this stuff better, but they don’t because they don’t actually want to. Though to be fair, Blue America doesn’t seem to be feeling all that triumphant. In fact, they don’t seem much happier than before the election.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Biden Set to Reverse Most Education Reforms Put in Place by Trump-DeVos.
THAT’S BECAUSE IT IS: MIT mandates diversity training; one student calls it ‘indoctrination.’
QUESTION ASKED: Why would Biden grant the press access now?
Biden faced little to no pressure to say what his broad agenda would be as President on hot-button issues such as court packing. He willfully told the media he would not even entertain questions about it, and for several weeks our national media nodded along and accepted his non-answers. Biden was able to glide into the White House while watching the national media and Trump slap-fight each other. He will be happy to keep gliding as President. But how long will the media play along?
Since they’re by and large Democratic Party activists with bylines, from four to eight years, or until the next time there’s a Republican in the White House.