Archive for 2021
August 18, 2021
JIM TREACHER: Vaccinated People Are Shrugging Off COVID-19, Which Should Be Good News. But good news doesn’t sell:
Remember when everybody freaked out about Lindsey Graham getting COVID-19? It was just two weeks ago. The libs were all high-fiving each other, cheering for him to die. It just reaffirmed their belief that those dirty Republicans deserve illness and death, and they’re all anti-vaxxers, and other such nonsense. But Graham didn’t die, because he’s vaccinated. By the time the news broke, he said he was already feeling better. And within a day or two, everybody had forgotten about it. I wrote a whole thing about it, and I barely even remember it. Just a blip. Barely newsworthy.
Rush Limbaugh called these liberal hysterics “the drive-by media,” because they just spray a bunch of crap at their target and then speed off to the next one. They don’t care about the consequences of their actions. They don’t listen to the people they leave behind. They achieve nothing, learn nothing, and amount to nothing, and they get paid for it. Why would they want to change?
And Greg Abbott is their next target. Read the whole thing.
WHEN YOU’VE LOST CHUCK TODD…: Leftists Fume After Chuck Todd Criticizes … Joe Biden.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: “Who will ever trust the US again?”
PROGRESS IN AVIATION: NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter completes 12th Mars flight. I especially like that it carries a small piece of cloth from the Wright Brothers’ plane onboard.
THAT’LL SHOW ‘EM: Biden Admin’s Response to Taliban Violence Is a ‘Strongly Worded’ Letter. “The Biden administration just went full Karen. Thomas-Greenfield would have asked to speak with the manager, but that’s the United States. Or was. Perhaps someone in Beijing will answer the emails that Jen Psaki ignored on autoresponse.”
ARE THE VACCINES UNDERPERFORMING? Reports: Biden administration to recommend COVID-19 booster after 8 months.
JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:
A lot of aged-like-milk tweets trotted out to bedevil our betters this last week. This one stood out.
How is this not colonialism? How is this not the apogee of cultural imperialism?
If we’ve learned anything from WWI — you know, Woke War One, which we’ve been fighting for the last few years — it’s that colonialism is one of the fundamental sins of the West, and it’s predicated on racism. The White Man’s Burden, and all that. It is wrong, wrong, wrong to impose our standards on another culture.
Read the whole thing.
SHOCKING DISCOVERIES FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Traumatic death of loved one carries more intense grief, study says.
KINDER, GENTLER TALIBAN MURDER WOMAN IN THE STREETS FOR NOT WEARING A BURKA.
Still though, probably not enough to get them banned from Twitter: Twitter Says Taliban Spokesman Will be Allowed to Remain if He Doesn’t Get Too Violent.
VACCINE PASSPORTS AS 21st Century Slave Passes:
MILLEY, SECDEF LLOYD AUSTIN, AND A BUNCH MORE: Ex-SEAL who killed bin Laden blasts Biden, calls on Gen. Milley to resign.
BIDEN’S AFGHANISTAN DISASTER DIDN’T HAVE TO HAPPEN: Joke Biden — a wretched, murderous joke. Read the whole thing.
(Bumped.)
OUR ABANDONED ALLIES DON’T TRUST US ANYMORE:
Now, this is a harsh lesson for all of us and if we are not careful it could be a very, very difficult lesson for our allies. And it doesn’t need to be. We can set out a vision, a clear articulated vision, for reinvigorating a European-Nato partnership, to make sure we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader, but that we can work together with Japan and Australia, with France and Germany, with partners large and small, and make sure we hold the line together.
More here.
WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? FBI Knew Of Hunter’s Missing Laptop By December 2019.
AFGHANISTAN: Yet another failure of the Expert Class.
I suspect we are currently witnessing the catastrophic end of this metaphysical power of legitimacy that has shielded the managerial ruling class for decades. Anyone even briefly familiar with the historical record knows just how much of a Pandora’s box such a loss of legitimacy represents. The signs have obviously been multiplying over many years, but it is only now that the picture is becoming clear to everyone. When Michael Gove said ”I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” in a debate about the merits of Brexit, he probably traced the contours of something much bigger than anyone really knew at the time. Back then, the acute phase of the delegitimization of the managerial class was only just beginning. Now, with Afghanistan, it is impossible to miss.
It is not just that the elite class is incompetent – even kings could be incompetent without undermining belief in monarchy as a system – it is that they are so grossly, spectacularly incompetent that they walk around among us as living rebuttals of meritocracy itself. It is that their application of managerial logic to whatever field they get their grubby mitts on – from homelessness in California to industrial policy to running a war – makes that thing ten times more expensive and a hundred times more dysfunctional. To make the situation worse, the current elites seem almost serene in their willful destruction of the very fields they rely on for legitimacy. . . .
The managerial class increasingly appears as a sort of funhouse mirror inversion of the doomed russian nobility of the late tsarist era; they no longer know how to run a country and only seem to parasitize on the body politic while giving almost nothing of value in return. In tsarist Russia, the nobility proved increasingly incapable of winning Russia’s wars or running its ministries, making their legitimating narratives proclaiming them to possess some natural-born right and capacity for rulership increasingly impossible to believe in. In modern America, it is the meritocrats who now openly lack any merit or ability to rule, quickly undermining the ability of the average person to believe in the very foundational claims behind the managerial order.
Yes. I don’t know this author, but this essay seems to be circulating all over today. And it does capsulize our problem pretty well.
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.
MSNBC ANCHORS: THE EARLY YEARS. What Local News Reported: A Video Record Of Al Sharpton-Fueled Crown Heights Pogrom.
BUT THE LEFT LAPS IT UP ANYWAY: Taliban Guarantees Women’s Rights ‘Within the Limits of Islam.’ That’s Not Reassuring.