Archive for 2021
February 17, 2021
LET THE PARENT REVOLT BEGIN: David Catron at The American Spectator sees a revolt coming from parents who are sick and tired of hearing from teachers about why they can’t come back to work due to Covid.
My view is the long-extended sickout justified by Covid fears is the best thing to happen to American education in decades because it finally exposed the teachers unions for the frauds they are. And home-schooling has gotten a huge boost. So when do Republicans in Congress start talking up an opt-out on education taxes for parents whose kids do not attend public schools?
ANOTHER HIDDEN COST OF SUBSIDIES: TPPF’s Chuck DeVore on Reasons Behind The Texas Blackouts. “In the last 4-5 years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today. We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar.”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Biden’s Rough Start With the World: This has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record.
It hasn’t been the most promising start. Less than a month into Joe Biden’s presidency, and his administration is already engaged in spats with China, Russia and Iran. It is also discovering that U.S. allies are not quite as happy with Mr. Biden’s Feb. 4 announcement that “America is back” as many Democrats might have hoped.
In Asia the administration’s Myanmar policy—imposing sanctions that signal displeasure without materially affecting the army’s ability to rule—has attracted little enthusiasm. On Feb 15, India’s foreign minister hailed Indo-Japanese cooperation on regional infrastructure projects that link Myanmar with its neighbors, a not-so-subtle signal that India intends to go on cooperating with Myanmar no matter what Washington wants. Simultaneously, the large portion of the Indian press that supports the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is aflame with resentment that Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, Meena Harris, seems to be siding with protesters against BJP policies.
European leaders are also dismissive of American moralism. French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the importation of U.S.-academic and cultural wokeness as a threat to the French way of life, while pragmatists on the Continent are pushing to strengthen economic relations with Russia and China—virtually ignoring the Biden administration’s efforts to raise the pressure on human-rights abusers in Moscow and Beijing. With the U.S. trade representative’s recent announcement that Trump-era retaliatory tariffs on European wine, cheese and food imports aren’t going away soon, this has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record.
In the Middle East, Iran is showing no eagerness to ease the administration’s path back into the 2015 nuclear deal. And both Israel and the conservative Arab states resent the American shift in that direction.
You know how you can tell that Trump’s diplomacy was highly successful? The press almost never covered it.
POLITIFACT DEBUNKS THE STORY THAT PRESIDENT BIDEN PLANNED THE WINTER STORM AS ‘AN ATTACK ON TEXAS.’
To paraphrase Johnny Carson, “I didn’t even know he was Jewish.”
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Public university hosts workshop for whites only — and ‘other practitioners’ of racial bias.
GLENN GREENWALD: The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot.
Over and over, no evidence has emerged for the most melodramatic media claims — torn out Panic Buttons and plots to kill Vice President Mike Pence or Mitt Romney. What we know for certain, as The Washington Post noted this week, is that “Despite warnings of violent plots around Inauguration Day, only a smattering of right-wing protesters appeared at the nation’s statehouses.” That does not sound like an ongoing insurrection, to put it mildly.
All this matters because it inherently matters if the media is recklessly circulating falsehoods about the most inflammatory and significant news stories. As was true for their series of Russiagate debacles, even if each “mistake” standing alone can be dismissed as relatively insignificant or understandable, when they pile up — always in the same narrative direction — people rightly conclude the propaganda is deliberate and trust in journalism erodes further.
But in this case, this matters for reasons far more significant than corporate media’s attempt to salvage the last vestiges of their credibility. Washington, D.C. remains indefinitely militarized. The establishment wings of both parties are still exploiting the emotions surrounding the Capitol breach to justify a new domestic War on Terror. The FBI is on the prowl for dissidents on the right and the left, and online censorship in the name of combatting domestic terrorism continues to rise.
One can — and should — condemn the January 6 riot without inflating the threat it posed. And one can — and should — insist on both factual accuracy and sober restraint without standing accused of sympathy for the rioters.
Read the whole thing.
MRS. GRUNDY WITH A BADGE: Memo to California COVID Cops: When Crushing the Dreams of a Brewery Owner, Don’t Do a ‘Happy Dance.’
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Baylor students want Christian lecturer fired after she questioned Biden’s transgender policies.
I mean, you’re not allowed to disagree with the President. Anymore.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Biden Won’t Rule Out Using Executive Orders To Crackdown On Second Amendment Rights. “The revelation was made during a White House press conference on Tuesday in response to a statement that Biden put out last week calling for banning semi-automatic firearms in addition to other gun control measures.”
Previously: Here Come the Lunatic Gun-Grabbers.
PELOSI LEARNS TO LOVE THOSE ‘STORM TROOPERS:’ The razor-wire barrier, military vehicles blocking streets and National Guardsmen manning checkpoints are going to remain in place at least until the Fall, Tristan Justice of The Federalist notes.
So, remember last summer when Antifa and Black Lives Matter were burning down cities, assaulting a federal courthouse, destroying police precinct headquarters and beating Trump supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital?
That was when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi accused National Guardsmen dispatched to protect the courthouse in Portland, Oregon, of acting like “storm troopers.”
But that was then and everything changed on January 6. Now, the Capitol looks like an armed camp. Madama Speaker will only give up those guardsmen when, to paraphrase Charleton Heston, they are pried from her cold, dead fingers (speaking metaphorically, of course).
HORSERACE: Ron DeSantis Gets 2024 ‘Tier One’ Designation From Party Insiders. “Balancing Floridians’ needs during the pandemic and effectively defending his decisions has Politico saying DeSantis is creating chatter within the Republican Party regarding his political future. At age 42, with a young family, he has plenty of time to decide which direction to take his career. But there is still plenty of chatter about 2024.”
DISPATCHES FROM PORTLANDIA: Portland’s So ‘Woke’ That Even the Snow Plows Bow to ‘Equity.’
I asked the Portland Bureau of Transportation why KATU-TV reported that Portland’s snow plows were being sidelined, not because of safety issues or getting the city moving and the economy going, but because of issues of “equity.”
“We don’t plow the side streets for a couple of reasons. One is a capacity reason; we don’t have the number of plows that we would need to do that. And then many of those side streets are, are too narrow for our plows, those are big machines. Especially when cars a lined up on both sides of the street parking,” John Brady with PBOT said.
John Brady, the communications director at PBOT, says if they only plowed streets they could fit, there would be an equity issue.
HMM: State Dept Refuses to Explain Iran Envoy’s Talks with China.
Malley’s diplomatic talks with China come as the Biden administration is pressing Iran to end its revamped nuclear work, which includes stockpiling highly enriched uranium, the primary fuel for a nuclear weapon. China is still party to the 2015 accord and has a vested interest in seeing the United States rejoin the agreement. It is a primary ally of the Iranian regime and has supported the rollback of a United Nations arms ban on Tehran, which would permit the Communist Party and nations like Russia to sell Iran billions in advanced arms.
Malley’s overtures to China on the Iran portfolio appear to be at odds with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s repeated promises to not pursue diplomacy with Tehran until it rolls back its nuclear work and proves it is in compliance with the restrictions placed on its program as part of the agreement. The State Department’s silence on Malley’s meeting could be an indication the Biden administration’s public statements on the deal are at odds with its private diplomacy on the matter.
Who’s in charge of Joe Biden’s foreign policy, anyway?
IF THE GOP WERE SMART (YEAH, I KNOW) THEY’D BE ALL IN ON THIS ISSUE: Democrats would delay school COVID-19 spending, threatening reopening.
And schools don’t need “spending” to reopen. They need to tell teachers that if they don’t show up they’ll be replaced.
JIM TREACHER: ‘Central Park Karen’ Amy Cooper Gets Charges Dropped After Anti-Racist ‘Psychoeducation’ Sessions.
And now I find myself wondering what “psychoeducation” entails. Was it some sort of A Clockwork Orange thing? Did they prop her eyelids open and make her watch Martin on BET until she found it funny? Did they show her pictures of black people and then give her an electric shock every time she lunged for her phone to dial 911?
Seriously, though, it sounds like they think her real crime wasn’t making a false police report, but being a racist. If so, how are a few “psychoeducation” sessions going to change that?
Should this incident follow Amy Cooper around for the rest of her life? Should she be dogged by something stupid she did while walking her actual dog? Hasn’t she learned her lesson after being shamed by the entire world?
Christian Cooper has forgiven her, saying “she’s already paid a steep price.” He’s gotten over it. He found enough grace in his heart to forgive her. Why can’t you?
Just kidding. It’s 2021, and forgiveness is for the weak. If you catch somebody being racist, you must hound them until the day they die. If you don’t, that means you’re a racist too. The same goes for sexism, ageism, transphobism, and every other -ism. And so on, and so on, until the whole world is just one big witch hunt.
And it’s not over yet for Amy Cooper: ‘Central Park Karen’ Amy Cooper set to tell her ‘story’ this week.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: DeSantis ’24 Just To Break the COVID Panic Porn Tyrants. “DeSantis continues to make all of the right people angry, which as you know is a favorite criterion of mine for judging our elected officials. DeSantis has been flying in the face of the liberal hypocrisy orthodoxy regarding whether schools should be open or not. Lib politicians are, of course, utterly beholden to the demands of teachers’ unions, who have been lobbying hard to get paid, get vaccinated, and not return to work.”
ON DRAMATICALLY RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE: Here’s a passage from a 1990 article by historian James C. Cobb about the effect of the extension of the federal minimum wage to agricultural workers in 1967. The article is specifically about the effect in the Mississippi Delta area:
Another crucial reason for reduced agricultural employment in the Delta was the $1 per hour minimum wage law that went into effect on February 1, 1967. Social scientists and planners had seen such a law as the key to freeing black farm workers from the archaic system of credit and paternalism that had throttled them since the end of the nineteenth century. At first glance, a mandated wage of $1 per hour might seem a blessing to workers accustomed to receiving $3.50 for a twelve-hour day. Those who advocated the minimum wage law had presumed that planters would maintain employment at pre-1967 levels. Instead, the new law jerked the slack out of a system that was not yet fully mechanized and modernized. A year after the law took effect, a planter explained:
“Hell, last year was the first time we really found out what labor efficiency could mean. We knew we couldn’t use any more casual labor because of the minimum wage, and now we’re finding out we don’t need as much specialized labor either…”
One estimate suggested that the new law put twenty-five thousand able-bodied hands in the Delta out of jobs …. The elderly and partially disabled who were unable to move were thrown into far more desperate situations than when they had clung to bare subsistence as occasional field hands who could usually count on thirty days work in June and July chopping cotton and pulling weeds at $3.50 per day. … The wife of a day worker found the new law no blessing: “That dollar an hour ain’t worth nothing. It would have been better if it had been 50 cents a day if you work every day.” Although planters continued to allow elderly or totally destitute blacks to remain in their shacks rent fee, when such dwellings became vacant, planters put a torch to them.
Yes, I know this is obvious: Minimum wage laws put people out of their jobs. But it looks like a lot of people are going to have to learn the hard way soon.
PRICING TEENAGERS OUT OF WORK: Here’s What $15 Minimum Wage Would Mean for This Frozen Yogurt Shop Owner.
WE HAVE INVESTIGATED OURSELVES AND FOUND OURSELVES INNOCENT: Senior Partners at Firm Hired to ‘Review’ Lincoln Project Scandal Have Donated Thousands to Group.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE!
Shot: Biden Falsely Claims: ‘We Didn’t Have’ A Vaccine ‘When We Came Into Office.’
—The Daily Wire, yesterday.
Chaser: Biden gets COVID-19 vaccine, says ‘nothing to worry about.’
—AP, December 21st, 2020.
Hangover: During the same interview:
The D.T.s: “Biden said during a CNN town hall on Tuesday that former military and former police officers were fueling the ‘growth of white supremacy.’”
SOME THOUGHTS ON MUSIC AND MIND: I know, I know, it sounds like I’m off in the clouds, again. Still, I dare you to spend a couple of undistracted hours listening to Mark Knopfler, Phil Coulter and Braveheart’s “End Credits,” as I was wonderfully able to do last night.
Then just try to tell me it didn’t set you to thinking about God, who, let us never forget, is the author of all our rights and liberties, according to the preamble of Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration. Knopfler, by the way, just might be the best guitarist/songwriter ever.