Archive for 2021
May 26, 2021
1984: A WARNING FOR THE REST OF US; A USER’S GUIDE FOR XI JINPING. Report: China Testing Emotion Detection Software On Uyghur Muslims ‘Like Rats’ In ‘Laboratories.’
BLUE CITY BLUES: Austin City Hall Is Now Occupied by a Tent City With Machete-Wielding ‘Security.’ “As per usual, Mayor Steve Adler, Democrat, is allowing the situation to get out of control. He is allowing what amounts to an ‘autonomous zone’ to occupy Austin city hall by calling it a ‘protest.'”
STILL WAITING TO HEAR WHY PEOPLE WHO HAVE HAD COVID NEED TO BE VACCINATED: Even mild COVID-19 may induce long-lasting antibody response. “Here, we found antibody-producing cells in people 11 months after first symptoms. These cells will live and produce antibodies for the rest of people’s lives. That’s strong evidence for long-lasting immunity.”
WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SO HOSTILE TO GAY DEANS? University Of Miami President Fires Tony Varona After Only Two Years As Dean; Tenured Faculty Protests Decision; Varona’s Lawyer Says He Will Contest Decision.
PRIORITIES: Schools aren’t funding tutors, learning time. “School districts are getting $81 billion from the federal American Rescue Plan: 20 percent is supposed to be spent to help students catch up academically. But most spending plans aren’t focused on learning recovery.”
“For the children” was always a lie.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The return of the lab origin theory. “Why are Biden and the media suddenly open to the former “conspiracy theory” of a lab origin of the coronavirus pandemic. First it was never purely a conspiracy theory. From the beginning many reputable experts urged the possibility be investigated. What may be happening is the tide is turning within the bureaucratic scientific establishment. As we learn more about the virus and the so-called missing link continues to be missing it is becoming increasingly difficult to blithely accept the original MSM assurance.”
Related: Timeline of What Dr. Fauci Has Said About the Wuhan Lab and COVID’s Origins. “Having once dismissed the possibility that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the novel coronavirus as a ‘circular argument,’ his admission this month that the lab could be the starting point prompted criticism.”
Plus: “When Republicans first raised questions about the WIV’s role in the COVID-19 outbreak back in early 2020, the experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, were quick to dismiss them as baseless, unscientific allegations.”
More (From Ed): Biden administration terminated probe into possibility of Wuhan lab leak: report.
UPDATE (From Ed): In Defense of Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield on a Wuhan Lab Leak.
(Updated and bumped.)
PEOPLE OF COLOR ARE VOTING RED WITH THEIR FEET: The Emergence of the Global Heartland.
In the national media, the Heartland represented a region, as the New York Times described it, as ’not far from forsaken,’ a depopulating place where the American dream has come and gone. Others have seen the region as an unreconstructed mecca for intolerance, one that had few immigrants and poor race relations and seems destined to suffer for it. As one professor at Vanderbilt suggested recently, the region was “dying from whiteness” and that its “politics of racial resentment is killing America’s heartland.”
Perhaps it is time to change that narrative. Over the past decade, the Heartland’s share of the foreign-born population has risen from 23.5 percent in 2010 to 31.1 percent in 2019. This shift can be seen in many Heartland communities, some such as Louisville, Columbus and Nashville, have seen their immigrant populations swell more than 40 percent from 2010 to 2019, often helping to reverse generations of demographic decline. They are now growing their foreign-born populations faster than such historic immigrant hubs as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia.
The reasons include many factors also seen in our previous studies on entrepreneurs and millennials: lower costs, economic growth and better access to good schools. Perhaps the most underappreciated may be the spirit of friendliness that has been cited by the vast majority of the people we interviewed. For people who have migrated great distances, and sometimes at personal risk, the reception in the Heartland—sometimes described as a hotbed of nativist and xenophobic attitudes—often instead has been both warm and inspiring.
Also, less crime and fewer riots.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Rep. Greene Made Disgusting Holocaust Comments, But Rep. Clyburn’s Multiple Holocaust References Are Worse.
Flashback: Clyburn says Ilhan Omar’s experience is ‘more personal’ than that of Holocaust survivors’ children.
SANDY’S WAR: AOC Gets Wrecked for Making a Ridiculous Claim About ‘Serving in War.’
During the Capitol riot, the Congresswoman wasn’t in the U.S. Capitol at all, but in the Cannon Office building blocks away. She also publicly berated a police officer for attempting to take her to a safer area.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has claimed she feared the Capitol cop who was sent to evacuate her from her office during the January 6 riot because he looked at her ‘with hostility’ amid accusations she ‘exaggerated’ her experience because she was never actually in the building that was stormed, and after accusing Sen. Ted Cruz of trying to have her ‘murdered’.
On January 6, Dem. Rep. AOC was in her office in the Cannon Office Building — which was evacuated but not breached — when rioters stormed the Capitol Building 0.3 miles away.
“Meow [the Moral Equivalent of War] has many cynical political uses: If every political opponent is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, if every political initiative tantamount to D-Day, then there is much that can be excused in the way of underhandedness, rhetorical excess, demagoguery, and the like. As [Jonah] Goldberg reminds us, war and war alone has been the great champion of socialism, because it provides an emergency pretext for the authoritarian project of reorganizing an organic society in accordance with the necessarily synthetic model decocted from ideology, bias, bigotry, eccentricity, and the self-interest, always unavoidable, of the planners empowered with drawing up the blueprints of this or that brave new world or utopia.”
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Biden Terminated Trump Admin Investigation Into Wuhan Virus Origins.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: What’s worse than the possibility of Communist China getting away with waging undeclared global biological warfare?
Answer: The Biden administration refusing to even look into the possibility.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- This was CNN
- Will the real antisemite please stand up, then sit down and shut up?
- John Cena gets the five-knuckle shuffle
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Cougar rattles neighborhood after breaking into Eastern Washington home. “Ephrata Police said that [the] cougar ended up clawing through a screen door and entered a resident’s house. The homeowners inside quickly tranquilized it, but the cougar continued, running into the kitchen and climbing up the sink to try jumping out the window. They tranquilized the cougar again and it finally went to sleep.”
Personally, I don’t keep tranquilizer darts handy.
NEVER PAY THE DANEGELD: Bose Hit By Ransomware, Refuses To Pay Ransom.
BIG LABOR, THE WOKE LEFT AND HIS FRAUDULENCY: There was a time not that long ago when Big Labor and Big Woke didn’t get along so well because leaders of the former recognized the latter’s policies would destroy jobs in the U.S. But things have changed in a way graphically illustrated by President Joe Biden’s appointments, according to the Capital Research Center’s Michael Watson.
Watson, writing in the Washington Examiner, details the many Big Labor veterans with solid progressive credentials who have been appointed by Biden to major posts in the federal government, most prominently Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh, Celeste Drake in the White House and Alethea Predeoux at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
Watson observes that “the interconnectedness among the Democratic Party, the ‘woke’ social-justice left, and Big Labor explains both the radicalism of the PRO Act and the petty corruption of the Biden administration’s ethics waivers.” The transformation of Big Labor from economic special interest to far-Left ideological zealotry is almost complete. Devout Socialist Walter Reuther would be proud.
GEORGE KORDA ON IMMIGRATION: ‘Every town is now a border town’ says Sen. Bill Hagerty.
The reaction of many Republican Tennessee officials to news that President Joe Biden’s administration is transporting unaccompanied migrant children into and out of Chattanooga is described by an old saying around Tennessee’s Capitol Hill: “If I ain’t up on it, I’m down on it.”
That can happen when elected officials find out that they’re not being kept up on a federal government policy that affects their constituents and communities. A Tennessee senator says current southern border policy means “every town is now a border town.”
It’s a crisis by design.
WE’VE ENTERED SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH MATT YGLESIAS IS A VOICE OF MEDIA SANITY: The media’s lab leak fiasco.
What happened is that Tom Cotton raised this idea in February in his capacity as a China hawk, and then again in March as part of a nonsensical attack on Joe Biden. He got shouted down pretty hard by scientists on Twitter, by formal institutions, and by the media. Then this kind of pachinkoed down into being a politics story where writers and fact-checkers who didn’t cover science at all “knew” that this was a debunked story that right-wingers were pushing for their nefarious ends. I think it’s increasingly clear that this was a huge fiasco for the mainstream press that got way over their skis in terms of discourse-policing, and there is in fact a serious scientific question as to where the virus came from — a question that we will probably never be able to answer because the Chinese government has clearly committed to one viewpoint on this and isn’t going to allow a thorough investigation. . . .
Cotton did one thing that those other sources didn’t do — he speculated a little. At the end of that clip he says “we still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
That is all not only true, but entirely consistent with what mainstream media was reporting at the time. But then things went horribly off the rails. . . .
So now we have leaped from “everyone agrees the Chinese government’s claims were wrong but Cotton is an outlier in claiming they were deliberately wrong” to “Cotton’s views should be associated with conspiracy theories and misinformation,” even though his core factual claim was not particularly different from what anyone was else was saying.
It’s not even that they misunderstood the facts. It’s that they didn’t care.
JUST THINK OF ALL THE PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T GET SHOT: Chicago’s Sees Its Worst Mostly Peaceful Weekend Since 2015.
SHUT UP AND KEEP DIGGING, KID: Has anybody in His Fraudulency’s administration noted the vital importance of cobalt to Electric Vehicles (EVs) that are to replace gasoline-powered cars and trucks?
No? Well maybe they should, according to Issues & Insights, which points out that half of the world’s known Cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo and that children are being used as slaves to extract the resource for Western companies building EVs.
MICHAEL WALSH: Israelis Should Take the Lessons of War to Heart.
Part of fighting is the resolve to get the war over with as quickly and definitively as possible. “If you make war, wage it with energy and severity,” said Napoleon to one of his generals in 1799. “It is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.”
This is a lesson the Israelis should take to heart if their country is to survive. “Never again” is the national motto, and it’s time an increasingly anti-Semitic world remembered that. As for the Americans—tied down for 20 years in perhaps the stupidest war in its history in Afghanistan, a place of no strategic interest to the nation—it’s time for us to recall that weakness is not strength and that guilt about the past is not conducive to a bright future.
When you have difficulty defeating a rabble of goatherds for lack of willpower—and your last total victory came in 1945—it’s time to sack your officer corps, empty out the Pentagon, get women off the front lines, bring back the male-only draft, train warriors and not guidance counselors, and elect an administration who understands the nature—and, more importantly, the purpose—of warfare.
Read the whole thing.
BIDEN APPOINTEE’S RENEWABLES CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: You may never have heard of Richard Glick, President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), an obscure federal agency with significant energy industry power (no pun intended). Biden would probably prefer that your ignorance continue.
But in the interest of advancing public understanding, check out this report by The Washington Free Beacon’s Colin Anderson and Joseph Simonson who did some digging and discovered something important: Glick’s FERC recently approved an off-shore wind farm project half-owned by the U.S. subsidiary of a Spanish firm for which he has lobbied for years.
Now, I’m from out of town and all, but where I come from, that’s spelled C-O-N-F-L-I-C-T-O-F-I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T. But wait, there’s more! Anderson and Simonson note:
“Glick is not the only top environmental official with ties to a green energy company championed by the Biden administration. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm holds up to a $5 million stake in Proterra, an electric bus manufacturer that Biden has promoted on multiple occasions. A slew of Biden’s top donors also have sizable investments in the company, and Proterra recently turned to a pair of Obama administration alums to lobby the White House for funding.
“In addition to Glick, deputy interior secretary nominee Tommy Beaudreau represented Vineyard Wind as a corporate attorney. Under federal ethics rules, Beaudreau is barred from participating in any ‘particular matter’ involving his former clients for two years. The Biden appointee can, however, assert himself into deliberations pertaining to the wind industry as a whole.”
There’s yet more blowing in the wind on this one, so stay tuned.