GREAT MOMENTS IN CENTRAL PLANNING: Watch: Insane footage shows China blowing up 15 skyscrapers that had sat vacant for nearly a decade.
Flashback: 34 Unforgettable Photos Of China’s Massive, Uninhabited Ghost Cities.
Archive for 2021
September 15, 2021
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA selects five companies for lunar lander studies.
JIM TREACHER: Norm Macdonald, R.I.P.
Norm meant a lot to me, not just for his comedy, but for his sheer willpower. He never bent to anybody who tried to tell him what to do, even when it hurt his career. He didn’t go along to get along. I felt an affinity with him because he made it to a certain level of fame, kinda blew it, and never really reached that pinnacle again. But he just kept going, whether people dug what he was doing or not. He honed and perfected his style of humor until there was no one better, even if most people never saw it. Every once in a while he’d get his own show or something, a sitcom or a talk show or whatever. It never lasted very long, but he didn’t seem to mind too much. He would just keep writing jokes.
My successes have been much more modest than Norm’s were, but I’ve always admired him for refusing to compromise his ideals, refusing to quit.
And now, knowing Norm spent his last decade living with cancer, it’s even more remarkable. He kept his diagnosis a secret for almost 10 years, probably because he just didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him. He was a comic, after all, and comedy relies on surprise. Norm was never one to telegraph a punchline.
Read the whole thing.
THE MASKING OF THE SERVANT CLASS: Ugly COVID Images From the Met Gala Are Now Commonplace.
Much of the attention on Monday night was devoted to the appearance on the red carpet by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). The usual horde of embittered online nay-sayers and envious party-poopers tried implying that there was something incongruous about a socialist politician gleefully participating in the most vulgar tribute to capitalism and social inequality to emerge since the walled-off galas thrown by the French aristocracy at the Palace of Versailles. Some petty, resentful critics even suggested that AOC’s latest star turn somehow illustrated what Shant Mesrobian has disparagingly described as “the Squad’s brand of highly educated, professional-class cultural leftism,” which “now offers elected officials a path to fame and pop culture status that circumvents much of the old, hand-dirtying business of politics,” pursuant to which “elected office itself has become merely a stepping stone to social media celebrity” and “maintaining a social media influencer empire rivals, or even surpasses, the priority of being a successful legislator.”
Fortunately, many of AOC’s most devoted socialist supporters stepped forth with passionate defenses of their leader. As they pointed out, AOC had painted onto the back of her pristine white gown — in perfectly proportioned and tastefully scrolled red ink highlighting the stunning virtues of the designer dress’ silhouette — a leftist phrase, Tax the Rich, that not only assaulted the Biden-supporting liberal celebrities in attendance but made them feel endangered in their own habitat, as if their wealth and privilege were being imperiled not from afar but from one of their own, from within. Far from being what AOC’s dirty and petty critics tried to malign this as being — an attention-seeking, celebrity-building, branding opportunity in which AOC yet again lavished herself in the multi-pronged rewards of the very economic and cultural hierarchies she claims to despise and vows to combat — she was actually engaged in a revolutionary and subversive act, injecting into aristocratic circles a beautifully artistic yet hostile message.
This was not, contrary to the grievances of her small-minded and jealous critics, AOC reveling in one of Louis XVI’s court festivities. Instead, she was storming the Bastille: not with weapons or fire but with the graceful designer elegance of the insurgent Marxist renegade, which made her presence all the more deceptively disruptive. While it may have appeared that Vogue‘s perfectly-coiffed red-carpet correspondents and other Met luminaries were gushing with admiration and awe at her bold fashion statement, they were actually shaking with fear over what AOC had wrought. They were quivering with rage and fear, not swooning with delight as it appeared.
Besides, as AOC herself put it with her trademarked class consciousness, the very fact that she can attend the Met Gala while you cannot is proof of the potency of the left-wing movement she leads. Standing next to Aurora James, the designer of her dress, AOC revealed the underlying clandestine strategy of her subversive attendance: “We really started having a conversation about what it means to be a working class woman of color at the Met … we can’t just play along, but we need to break the fourth wall.”
Related: Watch: Masked Attendants Carry Unmasked AOC’s ‘Tax The Rich’ Dress As She Leaves Met Gala:
😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/nRsyesjgdb
— Samirah (@SameeraKhan) September 14, 2021
This clip should end any remaining working class hero poses from “that humble Tesla-driving architect’s daughter from Westchester County who enjoys parking illegally behind the Jeff Bezos-owned Whole Foodsin D.C.”
Not surprisingly, America’s Newspaper of Record scooped the world — AOC’s dress was in accordance with the prophecy:
UPDATE: Woman of the people: The cost of AOC’s Met Gala shoes could have fed an American family for a month.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Bus Driver Shortage Forcing Philadelphia School District To Look At National Guard, Amazon For Possible Help.
Related: Massachusetts Calls On The National Guard To Mitigate A School Bus Driver Shortage.
North Carolina school districts facing bus driver shortage.
Minnesota school bus drivers say ‘devastating’ driver shortage demands action.
Alachua County suffers school bus driver shortage.
North Texas Students Missing Class Time As State Deals With School Bus Driver Shortage. “In Delaware, one charter school is offering $700 per student for parents who bring the youngsters to campuses themselves.”
GOODER AND HARDER: LA County to Require Proof of Vaccine for Customers and Employees of Bars, Nightclubs, Sporting Events. “With Gavin Newsom having escaped recall, statists in California are emboldened and wasting no time moving forward with their total control, anti-science agenda. The first ghoul to gleefully issue new health orders is, unsurprisingly, Los Angeles County’s Not-a-Doctor Barbara Ferrer.”
I’D FEEL BETTER UNDER AN ADMINISTRATION THAT WASN’T BOUGHT AND PAID FOR BY BEIJING: Richard Fernandez: The Grand Alliance to Contain China. Australia will be building nuclear subs for the first time.
SO 1 IN 3 PEOPLE ARE ANNOYED BY OTHER PEOPLE’S FIDGETING: First In-Depth Study of ‘Misokinesia’ Phenomenon Shows It May Affect 1 in 3 People.
DUCK AND WEAVE: Pentagon dodges questions on Milley phone calls: ‘I can’t speak to specifics.’
Related: They wanted a coup all along. “I am not surprised by the news that the head of the Pentagon, Generalissimo ‘White Rage’ Milley conspired with Red China and fellow officers to block President Donald John Trump. Appalled, yes. Disgusted, yes. Hoping for a sentence of 20 years of hard labor, yes. But surprised? Nope because this is what Washington wanted all along. The American press called for a military coup months before President Trump was elected!”
CLAWING BACK HEALTH CARE: Gov’t moves to go back on rule allowing Medicare to cover ‘breakthrough’ devices.
The federal agency that operates Medicare is officially going back on a rule change it finalized earlier this year under former President Donald Trump that would have allowed the health program to cover the costs of “breakthrough” medical devices.
In January, before President Joe Biden took office, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services moved to implement the rule change as a measure to give American seniors quicker access to “innovative” medical devices.
The rule was part of the agency’s “Unleashing Innovation and Patients Over Paperwork” initiative.
Now they’ve decided to reorient their priorities.
ALL HANDS ON DECK: Serial Groper Al Franken Eyes Political Comeback.
REMEMBER HOW THEY TOLD US WE HAD TO EMULATE CHINA’S LOCKDOWN TACTICS BECAUSE THEY HAD SO SUCCESSFULLY STOPPED THE DISEASE? China imposes local lockdowns as COVID-19 cases surge.
DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: ‘National Magazine of Texas’ Marvels That Hispanic Texans Are Voting Republican.
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Important is a Fast Draw for Personal Defense with a Handgun?
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Biden Vax Mandate In ‘Chaos’: OSHA ‘Underfunded’ And ‘Toothless,’ Employers Worried About ‘Millions Of Dollars’ In Testing Costs.
If the grownups really were in charge, they’d have asked themselves first if a smallish workplace agency was up to the massive task given to it.
PROBABLY, BUT WHO WILL HOLD HER TO ACCOUNT? Did AOC’s Met Gala Stunt Violate Federal Ethics Laws?
#1 IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.
AN ATTACK PIECE ON SPACEX FROM THE LEFTY TEXAS OBSERVER. Was Bezos money behind it? I wouldn’t rule it out.
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Ohio High School Book Prompts Kids to ‘Write a Sex Scene You Wouldn’t Show Your Mom’… Mayor Demands Resignations.
AFGHANISTAN HOSTAGE CRISIS: Family of Navy Vet Wants Biden Official Fired. “If Frerichs’ name doesn’t sound familiar despite months of captivity, maybe that’s because ‘Biden has mentioned Frerichs in public once before in a July speech, but stumbled over his name when doing so.'”
FASTER, PLEASE: Study shows protein that reverses aging of skeletal muscle.