BIDEN’S BUNGLED BUGOUT: American Interpreter Biden Left Behind In Afghanistan: ‘I Don’t Believe In Anybody Anymore.’ “On Monday night, an American citizen who worked as an interpreter for the American military in Afghanistan but was left behind by President Biden told CNN, ‘I don’t believe in anybody anymore.’ She added, ‘I just can’t believe no one told me that this is the last flight.'”
Archive for 2021
August 31, 2021
RIDE THE MICHAEL MOORE RECURSION!
With regards to the so-called “domestic Taliban” Moore was referring to, the filmmaker did not elaborate and wasn’t nearly as blunt as he was earlier this month when he compared Christian conservatives to the Taliban. Moore likened oppressive Islamic law to “how a lot of Southern Baptists want it to be” in America and classifying both Christians and the members of the jihadist organization as “religious nuts.”
—Breitbart.com yesterday.
● Chaser: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win….I oppose the U.N. or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle…the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe — just maybe — God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.”
—Michael Moore, April 14, 2004.
HARD EVIDENCE THAT “CANCEL CULTURE” IN ACADEMIA IS, IN FACT, AS BAD AS YOU THINK. FIRE’s new report found that an alarming 74 percent(!) of the 426 campaigns found that targeted college faculty for their expression resulted in punishment.
Also, in extremely related news, FIRE has launched a Faculty Legal Defense Fund to provide lawyers, at no cost, to public college faculty members targeted for their expression. Know someone like that? Send them our way!
AGGRAVATING THE BABY BUST: Study: Birth rates decline in U.S., western Europe during pandemic. “These declines, related at least partly to the COVID-19 pandemic, are as much as 50% higher than those reported during the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008-09 and comparable to the drops during the 1918-19 flu pandemic, according to the researchers.”
Well, Covid’s much milder than the 1918 flu, but the reaction has been much more extreme.
I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN GRIEVING MOMS WERE THE ULTIMATE MORAL AUTHORITY: ‘America Hates You’: Mom of Marine Killed in Kabul Writes Scathing Message to Joe Biden — and Is Silenced by His Big Tech Buddies.
NEWS I HOPE YOU DON’T NEED TO USE: Mouth-to-mouth bystander CPR is the preferable method for pediatric cardiac arrest, study says.
THEY GOT WOKE: Vice Media Lays Off Writers. “Vice had done some interesting work early on, but had gradually morphed into a hard-left Gawker-lite. Indeed, having either on your resume should be as toxic to future employment prospects as having Gawker itself on there.”
MICHAEL ANTON: Importing Enemies. The demand to resettle Afghan refugees brings the war home.
Related: Biden Admin Told Refugee Organizations To Prepare For Arrival Of Up To 50,000 Afghans Without Visas.
ANGEL EDUARDO: Stop Calling Me ‘White’ For Having the Wrong Opinions.
Chappell described a very dismissive President Biden, who, as he does so often, tried to make the exchange with the grieving mother about him instead of Chappell’s son. She explained that the president didn’t much like what she had to say. And by the looks of it, the White House, which works very closely with Facebook, didn’t much like what she had to say, either.
Silicon Valley’s Big Tech oligarchs stepped in to save their friend from Chappell’s harsh words.
Chappell’s Facebook page was suspended and it looks as if Biden trolls reported several of her Instagram posts, earning her “warnings” from the anti-free speech scolds on several posts that were months old. The Instagram page was reportedly shut down for a period of time “in error.”
The guild protects its own, and thus Chappell won’t be canonized the way by the DNC-MSM that Cindy Sheehan was.
(Until she wasn’t. Flashback: Barack Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost.)
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Sohrab Ahmari on America’s Woke Bacha Bazi. We looked the other way when our allies in Afghanistan molested boys. Pay attention as the sexual revolution seeks to enlist your children here in America.
MATT STOLLER: The War in Afghanistan Is What Happens When McKinsey Types Run Everything. “There is a more basic question at work that keeps coming up, whether it’s the Boeing 737 Max, opioids, Covid mismanagement, or anything else of social importance. Do we have the competence to govern ourselves anymore? There’s also a follow-on question. Will this loss spur genuine reform of our McKinsey-ified elites who failed so spectacularly?”
Will they pay a stiff price for failure? That’s the only way things will change. It’ll be business as usual otherwise. And why not? It’s working out fine for them.
Plus: “And their embarrassment covers up something even more dangerous. None of these tens of thousands of Ivy league encrusted PR savvy highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do anything useful. They can write books on leadership, or do powerpoints, or leak stories, but the hard logistics of actually using resources to achieve something important are foreign to them, masked by unlimited budgets and public relations. It is, as someone told me in 2019 about the consumer goods giant Proctor and Gamble, where ‘very few white-collar workers at P&G really did anything’ except take credit for the work of others.”
That’s a pretty good summary of our ruling class, and now it’s catching up to us, all over. It’s just extra-obvious in military affairs, where visible defeats can happen.
Plus: “Last month, I noted that American soldiers are constantly complaining that bad contracting terms prevent them from fixing and using their own equipment, just as Apple stops consumers from repairing or tinkering with their iPhones. In 2019, Marine Elle Ekman noted that these problems are pervasive in the U.S. military.”
JUST MORE REASONS TO PRINT UP MORE FUNNY MONEY FOR MORE “PROGRESSIVE” CAUSES: Democratic lawmakers want the Federal Reserve to focus on climate change as well as ‘racial and economic justice.’
“WE HAVE AMERICANS THAT GET STRANDED IN COUNTRIES ALL THE TIME:” Pentagon Brushes Off Concern That Americans Are Stranded In Afghanistan.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Middle Easterners Begin Painting Transgender Flag Colors On Doorposts To Avoid Biden Drone Strikes.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Let’s Punish People for Getting Vaccinated.
Plus:
- College students vent their Ls about Biden
- One of our Veeps is missing!
- David Frum is still the worst
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF COVID-19 BREAKTHROUGH INFECTIONS AND DEATHS:
Sadly, people die each year. In 2019, the National Safety Council used data from the National Center for Health Statistics to estimate the odds of various lifetime causes of death, including (among others) heart disease, cancer, pedestrian incidents, and drowning. Heart disease, cancer, and other chronic lower respiratory diseases constituted some of the highest causes of death in 2019 (with odds of 1 in 6, 1 in 7, and 1 in 27, respectively).
There were many other causes of death albeit occurring at much lower frequencies. For example, motor vehicle crashes were associated with a 1 in 103 odds of dying, gun assaults were associated with a 1 in 289 odds of dying, and hornet wasp and bee stings were associated with a 1 in 59,507 odds of dying.
NSC Injury Facts, “Preventable Deaths: Odds of Dying,” https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ (accessed August 4, 2021).
In Chart 4, we compare the odds of a fully vaccinated person dying from COVID-19 to the odds of various other causes of death (as estimated by the National Safety Council).
Read the whole thing.
CHANGE: South Korea passes bill limiting Apple and Google control over app store payments. “The South Korean parliament approved a bill on Tuesday that will ban major app store operators — like Google and Apple — from requiring developers to only use their payment systems to process the sale of digital products and services.”
IDIOCRACY: You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity.
The slow-motion zombies’ assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a fittingly stupid finale to the Trump years, which offered dueling stupidities: Buy one, get one free. The political parties became locked in a four-year drama of hysteria and mutually demeaning abuse. Every buffoonery of the president and his people was answered by an idiocy from the other side, which in its own style was just as sinister and just as clownish.
Cable news provided the Greek chorus. American government and politics became cartoons. The Democrats, all unknowing, played Wile E. Coyote to Mr. Trump’s Road Runner. Twice, the Democrats’ Acme Impeachment Committee rigged up the big bomb (heh heh), lit the fuse and held its ears. Both times, the Road Runner sped away. Beep beep!
“Trump is crazy!” “Trump is Hitler!” “Trump is a Russian agent!” “ Bob Mueller has the goods!” Beep beep!
Stupidity has been in the air for quite some time. And alas, Mr. Trump isn’t going away soon; neither are Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff or Mazie Hirono —each a paragon of the phenomenon.
Stupidity is one of life’s big mysteries, like evil, like love, an ineffable thing. You cannot exactly define it, but you know it when you see it, as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography. It takes many forms. Stupidity is entitled to no moral standing whatever, and yet it sits in a place of honor at the tables of the mighty; it blows in their ears and whispers promises.
Stupidity reappears as a perennial theme of literature and history: King Lear breaking up his kingdom in the first act, or the entirety of World War I, from Sarajevo to Versailles.
In his 2011 book, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism, Theodore Dalrymple explored how the meaning of World War One morphed among European intellectuals from the late 1910s to the 1920s:
At least to the victors, the war did not seem self-evidently senseless, and disillusionment was not immediate. The war memorials to be found everywhere in France are tributes to loss, but not to meaninglessness. The soldiers really did die for France, or so almost everyone supposed; in Britain, my next-door neighbor, who collects coins and medals, showed me some First World War service medals for those who survived the war, with an athletic (and naked) young man upon a horse, wielding a sword as if he were a latter-day St. George about to slay a dragon. One of the medals bore the inscription “The War to Save Civilization.” I doubt that these medals were greeted solely by hollow laughter; for one thing, they would hardly have been preserved so carefully if they had been. And browsing in a bookshop recently, I found a book published in 1918 with the title The Romance of War Inventions. It was an attempt to interest boys in science by explaining how shells, mortars, tanks, and so forth had been developed and how they worked. By the time of its publication, millions had already been killed, and surely no one in Britain could by that time not have known someone who had been killed or at least someone whose child or brother or parent had been killed. It seems to me unlikely that such a publication would have seen the light of day in an atmosphere of generalized cynicism about the war.
“The version of the First World War that is now almost universally accepted as ‘true’ is that of the disillusioned writers, male and female, of the late 1920s and 1930s. The war, according this version, was about nothing at all and was caused by blundering politicians, prolonged by stupid generals and lauded by patriotic fools,” Dalrymple adds.
C.S. Lewis, call your office:
Lewis coined the term “chronological snobbery.” It is defined as the belief that “the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.” If we add, “and therefore wrong and also racist” to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs.
Historian Larry Taunton defines it as “imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.”
There’s plenty of stupidity to go around, both in the present and past, but check your own “chronological snobbery” before dismissing events in the past as nothing but “stupidity.” (And the Dunning-Kruger Effect regarding events of the present.)
YOUR KINDER, GENTLER TALIBAN: Taliban Executes Afghan Folk Singer. “The Taliban executed an Afghan folk singer days after its spokesman warned inhabitants ‘music is forbidden in Islam.’”