STATE IS A JOKE, JUST NOT A FUNNY ONE: No Joke: State Department Cranky About Taliban’s Lack of Diversity.
THIS IS WHY THEY RELY ON SUBVERSION AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AS OPPOSED TO OPEN MILITARY CONFLICT: China Can’t Feed Itself. “In short – China is desperately short of crucial grains and oilseeds needed for domestic human and animal consumption. Understand, food security is not an unknown issue in China. So too is it widely known that CCP media organs and official ministries routinely lie about a range of food-related issues, from grain and oilseed production to hog population and slaughter figures. The CCP even went so far as to engineer the collapse and takeover of Swiss agriculture and chemical conglomerate Syngenta several years ago to short-path China’s rise to being a tier one agriculture research powerhouse alongside the United States, Japan, and the European Union. . . . Despite China’s rosy claims about its 2020 production, its year-long buying binge for available global inventory of grains and oilseeds indicates significant flooding-related production woes in several major agricultural reasons in the Yangtze River and Amur River basins. 2021 is shaping up to be potentially as bad. Notably, the critical crop-producing province of Heilongjiang (16% of China’s total corn production, and 40% for soybeans) is showing significant excess moisture stress during the critical corn development stages between pre-tassel and silking, with excess moisture also being a major factor in yield drag for soybeans during seed-fill. The general time period for both crops to reach these reproductive stages are July through end of August.”
Plus: “Adding all of this up, we see that China has an astoundingly large quantity of protein to produce and import for its population. Taken together with the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s fears of social upheaval due to food insecurity (and the stain upon the party from the Great Leap Forward), the impetus for much of China’s belligerence in global fishing and crackdowns on commodities trading become clear. Broadly speaking, the confluence of supply side and logistics disruptions has formed into a perfect storm, where China cannot as readily meet its current food demand through production, trade, acquiring foreign food manufacturers, and even illegal activities such as illicit fishing. Which begs the question – what can we extrapolate from this information to better-predict China’s behaviors in the coming months, the US’ responses, and the impact to global stability?”
It doesn’t beg the question, it raises the question. But yeah, it’s a good question.
CHICKS DIG BAD BOYS (CONT’D): Women sending killer dad Chris Watts ‘racy’ letters. “Watts isn’t the only criminal to receive such letters. Frequent love letters have also been written to killers Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez (who ended up marrying one of his admirers).”
WHEN ROBERT REICH SOMEHOW THINKS HE’S OWNED THE CONS:
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: CDC Says A New COVID Variant May Be Needed To Effectively Bury Afghanistan News.
WE KNOW WHY: As for Bill Clinton… why isn’t he the villain (at long last)?
Plus: “It will always be fake feminism — 20 years ago and now and beyond — until Bill Clinton is held to account.”
Is there a feminism that isn’t fake? 20+ years says no.
OPEN THREAD: I don’t look for big laughs, I’ll settle for intelligent nods.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Admits Someone Pulls His Strings: ‘I’m Supposed to Stop and Walk Out of the Room.’
Earlier: “When Biden gives public remarks, some White House staffers will either mute him or turn off his remarks, according to White House officials. It’s not that they’re indifferent to what their boss has to say. Indeed, their livelihoods are directly invested in it. Rather, they’re filled with anxiety that he’s going to take questions from the press and veer off the West Wing’s carefully orchestrated messaging.”
BOMB CANADA, THE CASE FOR WAR: Book burning at Ontario francophone schools as ‘gesture of reconciliation’ denounced.
A book burning held by an Ontario francophone school board as an act of reconciliation with Indigenous people has received sharp condemnation from Canadian political leaders and the board itself now says it regrets its symbolic gesture.
The “flame purification” ceremony, first reported by Radio Canada, was held in 2019 by the Conseil scolaire catholique Providence, which oversees elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario. Some 30 books, the national broadcaster reported, were burned for “educational purposes” and then the ashes were used as fertilizer to plant a tree.
We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security,” says a video prepared for students about the book burning, Radio Canada reported.
In total, more than 4,700 books were removed from library shelves at 30 schools across the school board, and they have since been destroyed or are in the process of being recycled, Radio Canada reported.
The Conseil scolaire catholique Providence needs to ask themselves, “Are we the baddies?”
https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU
(Classical reference in headline.)
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Astronomers hunting asteroids with radar surpass 1,000th space rock detection.
CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Don’t Be Evil.
Technology giant Google has launched an “antiracism” initiative that presents speakers and materials claiming that America is a “system of white supremacy” and that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”
I have obtained a trove of whistleblower documents from inside Google that reveal the company’s extensive racial-reeducation program, based on the core tenets of critical race theory—including “intersectionality,” “white privilege,” and “systemic racism.” In a foundational training module called “Allyship in Action,” Google’s head of systemic allyship Randy Reyes and a team of consultants from The Ladipo Group train employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, and then rank themselves on a hierarchy of “power [and] privilege.” The trainers then instruct the employees to “manage [their] reactions to privilege”—which are likely to include feelings of “embarrassment, shame, fear, [and] anger”—through “body movement,” “deep breathing,” “accessing [their] ‘happy place,’” and “cry[ing].”
The program presents a series of video conversations promoting the idea that the United States was founded on white supremacy. In one video, Google’s former global lead for diversity strategy, Kamau Bobb—who was later reassigned to a non-diversity-related role at the company after being exposed for writing that Jews have “an insatiable appetite for war and killing”—discussed America’s founding with 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones. Jones claimed that “the first Africans being sold on the White Lion [slave ship in 1619] is more foundational to the American story” than “the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock.” She claimed that she led the New York Times’s 1619 Project—a revisionist historical account of the American founding—to verify her “lifelong theory” that everything in the modern-day United States can be traced back to slavery. “If you name anything in America, I can relate it back to slavery,” Jones said in the video. At the end of the conversation, Jones concluded that all white Americans benefit from the system of white supremacy. “If you’re white in this country, then you have to understand that whether you personally are racist or not, whether you personally engage in racist behavior or not, you are the beneficiary of a 350-year system of white supremacy and racial hierarchy,” she said.
Read the whole thing.
Related: “In the past week, Google has sent me an alert about a ‘government-backed attack’ against my email system and Twitter has unverified my account—just as I began my investigative reporting on critical race theory in Big Tech. Strange timing, to say the least,” Rufo tweets.
THE L.A. TIMES KEEPS ROCKIN’! “A woman in a gorilla mask riding a bicycle threw the small white object past [Larry] Elder’s head, as seen in a video posted on Twitter by Spectrum News reporter Kate Cagle. Moments later, the woman took a swing at a man who appeared to be part of Elder’s team. The man was hit by at least one other heckler just before Elder was escorted into the Suburban.”
As Peter Hasson of Fox News tweets, “Someone in a *gorilla mask* threw an egg at the guy seeking to be California’s first Black governor.” Naturally, in response, the editors at the L.A. Times chose this headline to obfuscate that detail: “Larry Elder cuts short Venice homeless encampment tour after hostile reception.”
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and burying this story with a dull headline makes perfect sense.
Evergreen:
(Classical reference in headline.)
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION TELLS FORMER TRUMP OFFICIALS TO RESIGN FROM MILITARY ACADEMY BOARDS:
Former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Michael Wynne, retired Gen. John Keane, Meaghan Mobbs, David Urban, Heidi Stirrup, retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, and John Coale were also asked to submit their resignations.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the suspension of all military academy oversight boards in February while they conducted a review following a flurry of last-second appointments by the previous administration.
Vought, in response to the letter, said, “No. It’s a three year term,” while Mobbs said in a statement , “Frankly, I find this whole act unconscionable and not all in the spirit by which this Administration promised to govern. President Biden ran on a supposed platform of unity but his actions speak directly to the contrary. Apparently, unity is only for those who conform.”
“When I joined the Board under the Trump Administration, there were holdovers from the Obama Administration,” she added. “They were not terminated but instead served alongside Trump appointees. This mix of perspective, experience, and belief systems ensured there was diversity — a value the Democratic party purports to hold above all else.”
Meanwhile, “Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, who is currently member of the Board of Visitors to the United States Air Force Academy, received from Biden’s office one of those resignation demands. Conway had a different suggestion:”
“Jonathan Hiler, a Navy academy alumnus who served as director of legislative affairs for Vice President Mike Pence, [also] said he was ‘not resigning:'”
This sounds like a classic case of what came to be known as “stray voltage” during the Obama administration. As Glenn wrote in a 2015 USA Today column:
Because when people are talking about gun control, they’re not talking about Obama’s many failures, ranging from the failures of vetting and counterterrorism that may have led to the San Bernardino attacks themselves, to Obama’s foreign policy debacles in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to how the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign against Boko Haram accomplished nothing, to how Putin is running wild in Eastern Europe, to Obama’s plans to import more poorly-vetted refugees from Muslim countries that foment terror or the still-anemic economy that has left far too many Americans unemployed or underemployed despite years of “recovery.”
* * * * * * * *
This approach — basically, trolling the public — is a variation on a tactic that Obama advisor David Plouffe calls ”stray voltage,” about which CBS’s John Dickerson commented, “The tactic represents one more step in the embrace of cynicism that has characterized President Obama’s journey in office.”
Getting stories involving loads of former Trump officials is certainly one way to distract the media for a few days during yet another dreadful news cycle for team Biden.
LOCKDOWN CASUALTIES, I SUSPECT: COVID doesn’t account for troubling trend of unexplained US deaths. “Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, deaths attributed to many other health conditions have spiked in the U.S.: Alzheimer’s, heart disease, cancer and diabetes, for example, have killed far more Americans than would be expected in a pre-pandemic year.”
I’m pretty sure we’re going to find that the pandemic response killed more people than the pandemic did. That would look bad, though, so the obvious solution — hinted at in this article — is just to call deaths from pandemic responses Covid deaths too. Problem solved!
ANALYSIS: TRUE. American Education Is Rotten from Top to Bottom.
“ORANGE HANGOVER:” CNN Spent Most of the Summer Below One Million Viewers.
While Fox News and MSNBC miss Trump and the topics he generated, neither network is soulless in his absence. MSNBC is still the whiskey to the mainstream media’s coverage, mirroring their talking points more animatedly. Fox News is the alternative to ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, and social media.
Meanwhile, CNN now has no identity. Who is CNN right now? Their hosts and executives haven’t told us — they don’t know. For the first quarter of Biden’s reign, CNN focused its attention on Tucker Carlson. Carlson is the biggest star in cable news, by a lot. However, he’s not a politician — his impact is minimal compared to elected officials. So, of course, CNN’s Tucker-focused programming failed quickly and badly.
Going all-in with joyless megalomania means quite a crash when your opponent leaves office, as the post-Clinton American Spectator found out the hard way 20 years ago.
YES, I KNOW. IT WAS A RIDICULOUS CLAIM. EVEN THE WASHINGTON POST KNEW IT: “Education Department Claim about Student Misconduct Rates Was Wrong.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE GREEN NUDE EEL: Biden’s $3.5 Trillion ‘Infrastructure’ Plan Includes Massive Attacks on U.S. Energy Producers.
Not surprisingly, the party whose organizing method is “the moral equivalent of war” views American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head. And as the past month has illustrated, they’re far more focused on fighting against American people and industries, rather than Middle Eastern terrorists.
POLL: Biden below water in seven key congressional districts.
But Biden is the next FDR and LBJ: Amity Shlaes on Biden As the New FDR: It’s the same old bad deal for jobs.
Not until World War II did joblessness finally begin to subside, in good measure because of military mobilization — important, but not the same as peacetime employment.
As often discussed, errors in monetary policy contributed to the misfortune that was the 1930s. The cause of the duration of the Depression, though, was Washington’s persistent intervention. The chief economist at Chase, Benjamin Anderson, noted that after failing by playing God, the government chose not to retire but simply “to play God more vigorously.”
The first lesson of this sorry account is that an arbitrary national economic campaign from atop generates damaging uncertainty in the economy. However charmingly it reverberates, the very phrase “bold persistent experimentation” stifles growth.
The second point is that what helps the union hurts the worker. President Biden’s proposal to end “Right to Work,” if it becomes law, will dramatically stifle employment.
Flashback: FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.
And as William Voegeli wrote in his review of Shlaes’ 2019 book, Great Society: A New History:
The Great Society was predicated on the opposite conviction: America had become an “Affluent Society” (the title of John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 bestseller), whose irrepressible growth meant that worries about finite resources could no longer excuse tolerating remediable social problems (There was no such thing as an irremediable social problem.) Treating America’s new prosperity as permanent and inexhaustible, the Great Society proceeded to kill the goose laying the golden eggs, setting in motion what Shlaes calls an “economic tragedy.” Neither the inflation of the 1970s nor the transformation of America’s industrial heartland into its Rust Belt was inevitable, she argues. Both were direct, foreseeable consequences of short-sighted choices: demanding that monetary policy accommodate irresponsible fiscal policy, and labor and management agreeing to enrich one another by fleecing customers and shareholders ever more brazenly.
Don’t worry though, Biden can handle it — just ask him:
“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Biden told Politico last year. “When did Milton Friedman die and become king?” Biden asked in 2019. The truth is that Friedman, who died in 2006, has held little sway over either Democrats or Republicans for almost two decades. But Biden wants to mark the definitive end of Friedman and the “neoliberal” economics he espoused by unleashing a tsunami of dollars into the global economy and inundating Americans with new entitlements.
I’m sure things will turn out differently this time around.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “And colleges think young white men don’t notice this?”
IT WASN’T AN ERROR IT WAS ELECTION INTERFERENCE: Twitter Reinstates J.D. Vance’s Campaign Account After “Error.”
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