COLORADO: Jefferson County parks & rec district to take up concealed carry ban as gun rights fight goes local. “A large special district in Jefferson County may be among the first entities in Colorado to test the limits of a new law allowing local governments to enact gun control laws within their jurisdiction.”
Archive for 2021
July 14, 2021
JIM TREACHER: Never Mind, Immigrants Are Bad Now. “Come to think of it, when is AOC going to comment on what’s going on in Cuba? I’d like to hear her theory about why all those people want to escape that socialist paradise. Why are they trying to escape to America, the country she finds so awful? Well, if you care about immigration, you’ll have to wait for another Republican to get elected president. That’s the only time journalists and other Democrats pretend to give a damn about it.”
THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Boston Pride committee acknowledges its systemic racism and disbands over QTBIPOC criticism. “It is clear to us that our community needs and wants change without the involvement of Boston Pride. We have heard the concerns of the QTBIPOC community and others. We care too much to stand in the way.”
WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Inflation Just Hit a 13-Year High. Here’s Why You Should Care.
4CHAN SCORES AGAIN: Families Sue Universal Studios For $30K After Character Made ‘OK’ Hand Gesture In Photo Op.
Two families are suing Universal Studios for over $30,000 because a “Despicable Me” actor made the “OK” hand gesture in photos with their five and six-year-old biracial daughters. It’s a “civil rights lawsuit,” because the families viewed the “OK” symbol as a representation of “white-power” and “racism.”
During separate photo occasions, an actor dressed up as Gru from “Despicable Me” flashed the “OK” symbol. The Anti-Defamation League says “[this] symbol in most contexts is entirely innocuous and harmless,” but can sometimes become “a sincere expression of white supremacy.” The ADL emphasizes that, given the common nature of the symbol, “particular care must be taken not to jump to conclusions about the intent behind someone who has used [it].”
The young girls’ families nonetheless seem to have jumped to quick conclusions. The mother of the six-year-old girl, Tiffany Zinger, said, “[“Gru”] put his hand on her as if he was just doing it regularly, and as I was looking at the camera, he started to put the universal white supremacist hate sign on her shoulder.”
Funny, that’s not what Snopes told me last year: Snopes: Trump Campaign Falsely Suggests Biden Promoted ‘White Power’ Symbol.
In reality, Biden used the hand gesture to illustrate his assertion that massive corporations and U.S. President Donald Trump himself have in the past paid “zero” in taxes.
So evidently, using the “Okay” hand gesture to indicate zero is not racist, but using the “Okay” hand gesture to indicate, err, “Okay” is?
As Glenn noted in December of 2019 when Rolling Stone got the vapors because someone at the Army-Navy game flashed the OK sign, “The 4Chan trollers have scored again. I remember when ’culture jamming’ was a lefty thing, but the lefty culture jammers never scored at this level.”
HE’S TOO KIND: The Establishment Democratic Media Complex Is Utter Garbage. “Conservative had long known of the media’s leftwing bias, and the open Obama adulation pretty much disabused any conservatives of the notion that the press was a neutral reporter of truth. The difference is that the Trump years showed the media wasn’t even bothering to try to hide that bias anymore, and were caught nakedly, blatantly manufacturing fake news to support their narrative.”
Related: US ranks last among 46 countries in trust in media, Reuters Institute report finds. “Just 29% of people surveyed in the U.S. said they trust the news.”
Not even American lefties believe what the media tells them.
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH COVID-19:
● Shot: Thousands Take to Streets of Cuba to Protest Economic Crisis, Pandemic.
—Democracy Now, Monday.
● Chaser: How Cuba Beat the Pandemic: From Developing New Vaccines to Sending Doctors Overseas to Help Others.
—Democracy Now, April 9th.
Via Michael Moynihan, who tweets, “They must be angry that they beat the pandemic.”
SKYNET SMILES GETS HUNGRY AGAIN IN AN HOUR: Dextrous Robotics Wants To Move Boxes With Chopsticks.
DID YOU SEE BIDEN’S GAS CAN IN PHILLY? Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told reporters earlier today His Fraudulency (my phrase, not his) “poured gasoline” on the divisive national debate on election reform.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: I’m A Middle School Teacher And See How Critical Race Curriculum Is Creating Racial Hostility In School.
Missing from our curriculum during the 2020/ 21 school year was the diversity, perspective, truth, and rigor that previously were taught. Previously vetted books were removed from our classroom and sent to recycling. Gone was the diverse collection of American and World Literature: House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin Go Tell It On The Mountain, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, essays by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., poetry by Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, Anne Frank, Night, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, Macbeth, Walt Whitman, The Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible , Holocaust studies, world genocide, world art, universal themes, universal characters and any book or short story from the literary cannon.
What saddened me most was that I would not be teaching the Holocaust any longer. The Holocaust unit included one of the following: either Anne Frank, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, and depending on reading level, Elie Weisel’s Night When I asked the school reading coach where all the Holocaust books were, she said “we do not teach the Holocaust because kids can’t relate to the story.” What? Kids can’t relate to genocide, hate, discrimination, and prejudice? Yes children can relate to these universal themes, we all can. Children would never learn about the evils of hatred during the Second World War? Why? What was it about the truth and perspective that seemed to escape us during the 2020/21 school year? Exactly why was all this great literature removed from our curriculum?
Earlier: My road to cancellation — Stanford professor and CEO Joel Peterson’s take.
Soon, a Black Lives Matter advocate asked, of all things, whether I would stand for the American flag. To provide context for my decision, I shared a story. As a toddler, I’d seen my mother take a call from the Department of Defense announcing that her fighter-pilot brother had been killed. Honoring her grief, I’d chosen to stand for the flag under which my only uncle had offered the ultimate sacrifice. The student’s response was presented as an irrefutable argument; my choice was “racist.”
Furthermore, in this woke new world, my professional experience was no longer relevant because of the race and gender I’d been assigned at birth. Despite having created tens of thousands of jobs, promoted women and minorities, and coached scores of entrepreneurs, I was deemed an “oppressor” in the catechism of “wokeism.” Furthermore, the penance for being raised in a “systemically racist” society — founded on millennia of Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian antecedents, no less — was submission, and, if resisted, cancellation.
The reason behind such tyranny came into focus for me when Condolezza Rice, former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, told me she’d shared with her students that the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (9/11’s architect) had felt like “having Erwin Rommel under lock and key.” The blank looks on the faces of her very bright students revealed that they had never heard of WWII’s famous Desert Fox.
Until then, I’d traced the enmity to activists like Jackson and Hannah-Jones. Now, I could see that it also stemmed from students having swapped an education for indoctrination. Those enlisted as social justice warriors had avoided the lessons of history, missed out on refining skills that might have allowed them to judge assertions and denied themselves the insights required to make wise trade-offs.
As the Washington Post reported in 2018, “Holocaust study: Two-thirds of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is.” Which allows the Corbynization of the Democratic Party to continue apace.
READ THE WHOLE THING: The ‘COVID Collaborative’: More Proof Our Smug Ruling Class Is Real.
UNEXPECTEDLY: The Atlantic thrived through Trump and the pandemic. The future is harder.
The Atlantic needs to make $50 million in annual subscription revenue in order to break even, according to Thompson. Hitting that target has become more complicated since Trump left the White House and the pandemic let up. New subscribers are coming in at about a quarter of the rate they did last year (10,000 a month, on average), and the magazine faces challenges keeping some of its existing audience, which may have less of a need for The Atlantic’s journalism in a post-Trump, post-Covid world.
“We did four years of business last year,” Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, said in an interview. “One of the core challenges is, how do we keep all those new subscribers?”
That is a challenge being felt throughout the news* industry. For the last six years, Trump’s chaotic candidacy and presidency provided a life raft for this industry, as did the pandemic. Cable news networks saw a surge in viewership while publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post enjoyed strong subscriber growth. But with Trump out of office and the pandemic in retreat, both television news viewership and digital and print readership are in decline — resuming a multidecade slide for the news business.
* Read: Democratic Party operatives with bylines. 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.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: New device harvests power from sweaty fingertips.
STEPHEN MOORE: OPEC and Big Oil’s New Best Friend, Joe Biden.
The price of oil surged to $75 a barrel the other day under President Joe Biden’s green energy policies. The price was as low as $35 a barrel under former President Donald Trump because he believed in American energy dominance (“Drill, baby, drill”). So, more oil meant lower prices at the pump. It was effectively a massive, multibillion-dollar tax cut for lower- and middle-income earners of tens of billions of dollars a year.
But now, with the exploding demand for energy as the world economy reopens, the self-defeating Biden policy is to curtail oil drilling here at home, which is often done by the smaller and independent “wildcat” drillers. Instead, this administration enriches the major oil companies such as Exxon and Chevron with existing wells that are suddenly more profitable to drill. This is why the gas price at the pump is $3.29 a gallon nationally and above $5 a gallon in California.
Earlier: Biden to waive sanctions on Putin crony leading Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
And just like that, Biden* discovers an energy pipeline he supports.
Flashback: So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
* Yes, I know I spelled President Ron Klain incorrectly.
“STUDENTS WORE ‘WHITE LIVES MATTER’ SHIRTS. THEIR SCHOOL WON’T TALK ABOUT IT.” Vice News tries whipping up a cancel culture mob against some random teens in rural Pennsylvania. “[T]he school allegedly hasn’t addressed the students’ behavior in any meaningful way.” It sent them home, which is already unlawful under Tinker unless the shirts caused a disturbance, and they have graduated. Who knows what actually happened here (not Vice, that’s for sure), but we can’t have a society where simply wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt is legally fine but a White Lives Matter t-shirt is not.
NOW AVAILABLE: Don’t Tread on Me Earrings.
THIS IS CNN: ‘White picket fences are overrated, and so are nuclear families.’
To boldly go where MSNBC has gone before:
BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: Capitol Police Using Army Surveillance Tech To Monitor Americans And ‘Identify Emerging Threats.’