Archive for 2021
April 29, 2021
April 28, 2021
REVEALED PREFERENCES: Bar owner who called for LeBron James to be expelled from NBA says he’s ‘never been busier.’
Well, he’s a hard-working American. LeBron is a Chinese tool.
SENATOR TIM SCOTT: “Our best future will not come from Washington schemes or Socialist dreams.”
ROGER KIMBALL: The mendacity of Joe Biden’s address to Congress: Biden is here to bring us MAPA: ‘Make America Poor Again.’ “The word ‘jobs’ occurred nearly 50 times in tonight’s address. But here’s an embarrassing fact. Donald Trump’s economic policies led to the lowest general unemployment in decades. They led to the lowest minority unemployment in our history. They also led to a robust rise in wages at the lower end of the scale. Joe did not mention any of that. Instead it was all Bernie Sanders-esque class warfare: raise taxes, eat the rich, take control of — well, everything.”
They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.
Plus: “I thought at first that the few dozen people in the Capitol were wearing face masks. I didn’t consider the possibility that they were air-sickness bags.”
UPDATE: A friend comments: “Drop the ‘united’ shtick. You’re the most divisive president of my lifetime.”
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Have you read a less sincere “apology” than that uttered by Madison WI public schools for its discussion groups segregated by race like some Mississippi Burning bus station?
Related: Race and the Coming Liberal Crackup. “The idea that white skin automatically confers ‘privilege’ in America is a strange concept to millions of working-class whites who have endured generations of poverty while missing out on the benefits of the past 50 years of affirmative action programs.”
OPEN THREAD: Posting it early tonight, to make up for last night.
NEW FRONTIERS IN AVIATION: Mars helicopter Ingenuity spots Perseverance rover from the air (photo).
VIA A FRIEND:
OR MOVE. OR GET A BETTER MAYOR. Bob McManus: Learn to live with filth, disorder and crime in de Blasio’s NYC.
HELEN TRIES IT: I just got Bill and Teresa Peschel’s book Career Indie Author: Tell Your Stories and Build a Business That Will Last a Lifetime in the mail and started reading right away. It is a very straightforward and easy read if you want to write and self-publish a first book (or fifth) and understand quickly how to set up a business plan (it’s one page!), pay your taxes and even advertise your work. There is even a good section on how to make up a mailing list that came in handy for Helen’s page. If you are an aspiring writer or a seasoned one, check out the book, it’s informative and worth your time. (Bumped)
GENDER IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT: Teenage girls at double football-related concussion risk of boys.
WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMER, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE RACISM:
The other day, I got into a little spat with Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, because she peddled to CBS the idea that modern policing has a “direct lineage” to slave patrols because, “in certain parts of the country,” slave patrols were deputized to catch slaves. She’s right about that—to a point. And we’ll return to that point in a second.
But in the course of our spat, she said that “no one has ever argued that global policing or policing as an idea was invented in the American South.” This was a strange thing for her to say, because she actually claimed to have read my column on this subject, which begins:
“Policing itself started out as slave patrols. We know that,” Rep. James Clyburn declared in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier.
As I noted, Clyburn was hardly alone. But here’s a more recent example, from last Sunday’s This Week. Angela Rye, the former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, said (emphasis mine):
The Columbus Police Department isn’t about one bad apple. It’s about an entire department. So we have to talk about qualified immunity without fighting with buzzwords, but really talking about how we solve for a system that by design from its inception was designed to capture and return and enslave people back to their masters. If we can’t uproot what was intended, we will forever have this problem, and we have to be willing to have honest discourse.
I particularly love the “honest discourse” shoutout.
Let me type this slowly so everyone can understand: The Columbus Division of Police, established in 1816, was not founded as a slave patrol. Ohio was not a slave state. In 1841, it passed a law that runaway slaves were automatically free once they made it to Ohio. Similarly, the Minneapolis Police Department, founded two years after the end of the Civil War, wasn’t built upon slave patrolling and has no “lineage”—direct or tangential—to slave patrolling.
The police officer who shot a black teen about to plunge a knife into another black teen was not in any way connected to slave patrolling. Derek Chauvin was not living down to the legacy of slave patrolling. Even Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison conceded to 60 Minutes this week that prosecutors couldn’t find any evidence that Chauvin was racist or that his crime was racially motivated. If you know anything about Ellison, you’ll know he wanted to find such evidence.
Even the connection to slave patrolling in southern cities is, at best, literary. Does anyone actually believe that Rodney Bryant, the chief of police in Atlanta, sees himself as part of some great unbroken chain in the long tradition of slave patrolling? Of course not. And not just because Bryant is black, or because cops are not trained and educated in slave patrol tactics, but also because slavery has been illegal in the United States for 158 years, three months, and 27 days.
(This goes for Houston, Charlotte, El Paso, Nashville, Memphis, Raleigh, Lexington, Kentucky; most of the big cities in Virginia, Baton Rouge, and Tulsa—just some of the cities with black police chiefs.)
Modern policing—or even policing qua policing—owes far less to slave patrolling than NASA owes to Hitler’s rocket program. And yet no one talks about the troubling Nazi roots of modern space exploration, or asks Elon Musk if he’s exorcised the ghost of Werner Von Braun from SpaceX.
I have seen this slave patrol thing brought up countless times in interviews, and not once have I seen an interviewer say, “Really?” never mind, “What the hell are you talking about?” It’s as batty as any conspiracy theory, and it’s a deliberate attempt to heap innuendo on policing in lieu of making an intelligent argument.
And that’s what frustrates me to no end. It’s the job of journalists to call out B.S. when it’s being thrown in their faces.
That assumes that journalists actually know anything about the history of policing — or know anything at all, in some cases. When Ben Rhodes famously said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing,” like most of the “reporters” he fed stories to, he didn’t know the half of it.
SPACE LAWFARE FAILS: FCC approves SpaceX’s satellite modification despite competitor objections.
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED. YOU DON’T WANT TO BE ANTI-SCIENCE, DO YOU? Young children at low risk for COVID-19 at school, study finds.
NY POST REPORTER RESIGNS AFTER RETRACTION OF KAMALA HARRIS BOOK STORY. “The NY Post was forced to edit its article and issue an editor’s note noting that ‘the original version of this article said migrant kids were getting Harris’ book in a welcome kit, but has been updated to note that only one known copy of the book was given to a child.’”
We’re adding the above as an update to our post linking to the story.
UNEXPECTEDLY: ‘Socialist’ Seattle City Councilmembers Are Now Worth Millions, New Financial Disclosures Show.
Flashback: “In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: ‘But what if the communists come back?’”
THE DAM BURSTS: NY Times: Cuomo aides hid nursing home deaths for months.
Flashbacks:
● Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now.
—The New York Times, March 16th, 2020.
● “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”
—Cuomo on January 29th.
POSSIBLY BECAUSE OUR POLITICAL CLASS HAS SPENT THE LAST FEW YEARS FOMENTING RIOTS AND DISREGARDING BASIC PUBLIC SAFETY: WaPo/ABC poll: Enthusiasm drops for gun-control legislation — but why? “So why has there been such a loss of enthusiasm for gun control? We’d know better if the WaPo/ABC polling units committed to proper interval polling on public opinion, but it’s likely due to the Democratic embrace of ‘abolish/defund the police’ sloganeering and a sharp rise in crime, especially violent crime, over the past year. If we’re abolishing or rolling back police departments, then self-defense becomes even more crucial as crime rises. Democrats are trying to argue two entirely contradictory points at the same time — that only cops should have guns, and that we shouldn’t have cops.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Barnard College instructor discusses blowing up and gassing whites in coming race war.
According to The Post Millennial, on the CBC show “q,” Ben Philippe was asked about a segment in his book “Sure, I’ll be your Black Friend” which describes “detonating” white people while nearby air vents spew out noxious gas.
“When this race war hits its crescendo, I’ll gather you all into a beautifully decorated room under the pretense of unity,” Philippe said. “I’ll give a speech to civility and all the good times we share; I’ll smile as we raise glasses to your good, white health, while the detonator blinks under the table, knowing the exits are locked and the air vents filled with gas.”
Phillippe, who teaches English and film studies at Barnard, told “q” guest host Talia Schlanger the section in the book describing these actions originally was much longer, but his editor whittled it down.
“I guess I was wrestling with the question that, isn’t the end result of that, all-out warfare? Like, ‘Game of Thrones’-style warfare? and what does that look like? And I lived in that sort of stray thought for a few pages. And it was disturbing to write, too. Because I’m not a violent person, I love all my white friends,” Philippe said.
Schlanger told her guest that, as a Jewish person whose “grandparents survived the Holocaust,” she was speechless upon hearing the passage. Remarkably, she then apologized to Philippe: “I wanted to say to you that I’m so sorry that your experience of the world made you feel that way.”
There’s audio of that exchange in a tweet embedded at the link at the College Fix. Their post ends with a link to the full interview, which now 404s; Andy Ngo tweets that the CBC has since removed their interview with Phillippe.
The annual cost to attend Barnard is “$55,781 per year ($27,890.50 per semester),” according to Barnard’s Website. Choose wisely, parents.
REST IN PEACE: Michael Collins, NASA astronaut, pilot for 1969 moon landing, dies at 90. I knew him back in the ’80s and he gave me some good advice on my first book. He was a very nice, very smart guy.
I highly recommend his Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys.
PJ MEDIA VIP WRAP: Bryan Preston on How to Defeat Today’s Woke Puritans. “If and when they’re defeated they’ll be compared to the Puritans of old, and will not come off well in the comparison.”
Plus Matt Margolis: PolitiFact’s ‘Fact Check’ of Ted Cruz on Court-Packing Is 100 Percent WRONG. “Neither of those situations were examples of court-packing, which is what Cruz was talking about here.”
And Yours Truly: The Journolist Is Already Spinning the Speech Joe Biden Hasn’t Given. “While Biden was never a terrific orator, it wasn’t until recent months that his attempts at drama consist of nothing better than barking out a few words loudly and angrily before going back to his now-familiar overly-moist mush-mouth style.”
If you’ve been thinking about becoming a supporter, don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT promo code.
OMG, WHAT IS THIS?
I almost couldn’t make it thru the whole video clip pic.twitter.com/tuDzguUKPh
— nicoco✿ (@PetiteNicoco) April 28, 2021
But wait, there’s more:
Such a waste of a kinda hot girl
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) April 28, 2021
Can it get worse than this? Oh, hell yes:
We are so fucked pic.twitter.com/NKlP5oV1ck
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) April 26, 2021