JOEL KOTKIN: The Death of the American City: Rising crime and a pandemic-inspired exodus are powering urban decay. Well, also lousy Democratic governments.
Archive for 2021
March 24, 2021
JUST AS IN BILL CLINTON’S ADMINISTRATION, WITH THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION FEMINISM IS OVER: Becerra Hires Former Hillary Clinton Aide Who Ignored Warnings About Harvey Weinstein.
Flashback:
Wife of Boston Marathon Hero Claims Biden Groped Her.
Flashback: It’s time to talk about former Vice President Joe Biden, the open sexual predator.
Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents:
“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.
“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.
“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”
Plus: Washington Post: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?
Also: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.
Related: Talking Points Memo: Why Does Creepy Uncle Joe Biden Get A Pass From Liberals?
Plus:
And the lefty press would even talk about this stuff, until all of a sudden it wouldn’t.
“ACTION CIVICS”—ONE MORE THREAT TO THE BODY POLITIC: And one more reason to home school your children.
ARE YOU WITH ME DOCTOR WU? ARE YOU REALLY JUST A SHADOW OF THE MAN THAT I ONCE KNEW? A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views On The First Amendment.
If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:
— The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this “cheap speech” era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of “flooding” the Internet with pro-government propaganda.
— As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should “admit defeat” and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. “In some cases,” Wu writes, “this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.” What might that look like? He writes, without irony: “I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.”
So three television networks, a couple of national news magazines, and a handful of newspapers per big city? Exit quote:
That 1950s period is attractive to modern politicians because it was a top-down system. This was the era in which worship of rule by technocratic experts became common, when the wisdom of the “Best and the Brightest” was unchallenged. A yearning to return to those times runs through these new theories about speech, and is prevalent throughout today’s Washington, a city that seems to think everything should be run by people with graduate degrees.
PHRASING! Harris To Go ‘One-On-One’ With Bill Clinton On Empowering Women.
Vice President Kamala Harris is set to go “one-on-one” with former President Bill Clinton this week during an event about “empowering women and girls.” Harris is also reportedly set to speak at a separate event that has ties to an anti-Semite who has praised Louis Farrakhan and refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist.
Politico reporter Christopher Cadelago, who specifically covers the vice president, wrote on Twitter: “Kamala Harris will go one-on-one with Bill Clinton on Friday to talk about the impact of COVID-19 on women, and empowering women and girls in the U.S. and around the world as part of a Clinton Global Initiative event.”
Cadelago included a link to the event, however, Harris’s name did not appear in the schedule lineup. It’s not clear whether Harris’s name was removed following backlash online or if her name was left off.
I’m so old, I can still remember the #metoo movement. Speaking of which: Tara Reade: Why is the media covering Cuomo allegations while erasing mine about Biden?
MARS: NASA announces details of first controlled flight on another planet.
It has found the site for its take-off and landing, as well as confirming that the test will begin in early April, it said during a briefing on the Ingenuity mission. The first flight will happen “no earlier than 8 April”, though that could move forward or back a few days, said Nasa’s Bob Balaram.
Ingenuity will not conduct scientific work during its journey. Instead, it is seen as a test of the technology, in the hope that it can inform future missions and help anticipate scientists’ and engineers’ needs in the future.
Nasa said that it had been scouring the surface of Mars for an “airfield” ahead of the launch, using satellite imagery and pictures taken from Perseverance. Engineers needed to pick somewhere safe both for taking off and landing and flying over, with enough texture for the helicopters’ cameras to pick up.
From the first powered, fixed-wing flight to the first helicopter flight on an alien world in just 118 years — most impressive.
THE NARRATIVE IS SETTLED AND MAY NOT BE DISPUTED WITH MERE FACTS: Catholic high school fires teacher after she disputes cause of George Floyd’s death: No explanation of what policies she violated.
Once the narrative is settled, it can only be changed in response to the needs of the Party.
THE Q LIE: The Power-Grab After January 6th Was the Real Insurrection.
Q Shaman in full face paint and Viking regalia had last been seen at an Arizona climate-change rally, near a sign that declared “the ice caps are melting.”
He claims he was waved into the Capitol and guided through its hallways by security officials. There is video evidence to support his claim. Several Capitol police officers have been suspended.
Perhaps the FBI should be investigating whether Ashli Babbitt was waved in, and if there should be some additional training in federal law enforcement about when it’s okay to kill an unarmed invitee on federal property.
Because, let’s face it, had Amy Schumer and Emily Ratajkowski been gunned down when they breached the Dirksen Hart Senate Office Buildings based on a ridiculous conspiracy theory about Brett Kavanaugh, someone would at least be in trouble.
In truth, when viewed outside its Twitter-enforced orthodoxy, the real scandal of January 6 rises to irony: the federal government failed to protect the Capitol from an unruly crowd that had assembled partly to protest the government’s failure to perform its basic functions capably.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, none stranger, maybe, than the alignment of Trumpists with the left’s last remaining honest intellectuals.
This is what Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Glenn Greenwald wrote recently about the lies being told about insurrection:
“That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.”
The Q Lie is an excuse for politicians to grab power from the people. It is, to borrow an expression, a form of insurrection.
Read the whole thing.
HYPOCRISY: San Francisco School Board Member Refuses to Resign After Anti-Asian Tweets Are Revealed. Cancellation is for the other people.
THINK OF “SOCIAL JUSTICE” AS GENTRY-CLASS BIGOTRY AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG:
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:
March 23, 2021
JUST WAIT UNTIL THEIR AIRPORT DEAL COLLAPSES AT THE END OF THIS MONTH:
DON’T BLAME BIDEN, BLAME THE HANDLERS WHO TELL THIS SHAMBLING HULK WHAT TO SAY:
IT’S OBVIOUS WHAT THEY SHOULD DO, BUT WILL THEY DO IT? Supreme Court to discuss case that could expand Second Amendment rights.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Upstate NY man dies after being ‘intentionally’ set on fire; 2 teens charged with murder. Teens.
RIP: George Segal Dies: Oscar-Nominated Actor and The Goldbergs Star Was 87.
Segal was also a panelist on one of the funniest segments of a talk show: The 1970 episode of The David Susskind Show (which became The Mel Brooks Show for that night) titled “How to Be a Jewish Son—Or, My Son the Success!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHYXGE86gSQ
The proper response comes from Smokey and the Bandit: “Do the letters F.O. mean anything to you?” The truth is, they can tweet and they can yell, but that’s basically all they can do. If you ignore them, they soon move on to something else.
Which is too bad when it’s Cuomo’s deadly incompetence, but it’s nonetheless the case.
SAY ANYTHING: Ilhan Omar Decries Whiteness Of Atlanta Shooter, Then Vilifies Focus On Race Of Boulder Shooter.
Related: I’m sure this is racist or something because reasons, even though it perfectly echoes the response to the Atlanta shootings: All 10 Boulder Colorado Victims Were White. It’s Time To End Anti-White Race Hate.
Also related:
Nowadays, when someone’s lecturing you about racism, it either means that they’re an idiot, or that they think you are.
Our political class is constantly outputting racist garbage.
MOVING AT WARP SPEED: How Trump Got It Right, and Europe Fell Far Behind. “If ever there were a scenario under which the federal government should mobilize on a massive scale, and not pinch pennies, this was it. And if ever there were a time to cut through bureaucratic entanglements in order to hasten the achievement of a desperately urgent goal, this was it. The Trump administration recognized this, and many American lives have undoubtedly been saved as a result of their decisions.”
HE’LL BE FORGOTTEN BY FRIDAY: The Colorado Shooting Suspect Just Destroyed the Left’s Narrative.
OPEN THREAD: Because I like you and want you to be happy.