THERE SHOULD BE A DOJ INVESTIGATION. HAHA, I CRACK MYSELF UP. Rand Paul Accuses Fauci of Lying to Congress about Gain-of-Function Research Funding.
UPDATE: Democrats Rush to Rescue Fauci After Rand Paul Wrecks Him Again.
Archive for 2021
July 20, 2021
OPEN THREAD: We’ll always be ready, steady, bloggers, steady.
SPACE COMMERCE: Lynk books SpaceX flight for direct-to-cellphone satellites.
IT WAS AN ARMED ANTI-GOVERNMENT INSURRECTION — BY FEDERAL OFFICERS! DEA agent charged with carrying badge and gun at Capitol riot. “An off-duty special agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency carried his government-issued firearm while attending the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to court documents unsealed Tuesday. Prosecutors say he posed for pictures while flashing his DEA badge and climbed onto the Peace Monument to film himself as he delivered a ‘monologue.'”
People took selfies and posed for pictures because they thought they weren’t doing anything wrong. They figured as Americans they had a right to protest, and they knew their behavior was much milder than what had been praised all summer. They just didn’t realize that the rules for them were different, because they thought they still lived in America.
FORGET THE DEMOCRATIC HATERS — BEZOS FLIGHT REPRESENTS INNOVATION, BRILLIANT FUTURE:
Sixty years ago, John F. Kennedy called it “the New Frontier.” Now the new frontier is being explored not only by governments but by wealthy explorers — people willing to put their fortunes (and, incidentally, their lives) on the line to expand the borders of human possibility.
The manned missions of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the more recent unmanned excursions to Mars and the discoveries of the Hubble telescope, have had the glorious effect of inspiring wealthy entrepreneurs like Bezos who are driven by an overwhelmingly optimistic sense of the transformative potential of human technological achievement.
The changes in human destiny these trips portend are astonishing.
And how was Bezos greeted by the cognoscenti? With dripping scorn and contempt, of course.
Here’s a headline on Rolling Stone’s website: “Jeff Bezos Uses Money to Spew Emissions Directly Into Upper Atmosphere During Space Trip.”
Rolling Stone, you say?
[Jann] Wenner’s Gulfstream II jet seated ten people and featured a dining table, four overstuffed couches, and a foldout bed. It cost $6 million. Wenner loved it so much he put the factory-issued model in his office on Fifth Avenue and dreamed of ways to take his Rolling Stone salon of celebrities and suitors to the air. “Then it became ‘What can we do to fly this thing? Where can we go? How can I take it in the air?’ ” recalled Wenner. “I would just circle over LaGuardia to have lunch.”
* * * * * * * *
[Wenner’s attorney Ben] Needell put the plane under a business subsidiary called Straight Arrow Transportation to write it off as a business expense, but Wenner said it was “90 percent personal.”
—Joe Hagan in the 2016 biography, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine.
NEWS FROM 1950: Shock therapy safe, effective for tough-to-treat depression.
WHERE WE ARE TODAY:
Nice try, but the calls are coming from inside the house:
● AOC rocks Black Panthers shirt, touts group’s free food program.
● AOC chief of staff criticized for wearing shirt touting Nazi collaborator:
GUESS I NEED TO GO DONATE TO JIM KLONARIS FOR KNOXVILLE CITY COUNCIL:
I mean, anybody who can inspire this much hyperbole must be worth supporting. Okay, also I know him from the gym and he’s a good guy.
DAVID BROOKS’ IDENTITY CRISIS:
This self-congratulatory interpretation of America’s recent past has long found favor not only among newspaper columnists, but also with politicians campaigning for high office, our current president not least among them. It is our national equivalent of sacred scripture—a secular version of the salvation history in which Christians profess to believe.
Alas, Brooks continues, “Then came Iraq and Afghanistan and America lost faith in itself and its global role.” The audacity of that sentence—equivalent perhaps to “Then came bin Laden and the Towers fell”—brought me up short. In the blink of an eye, context disappears as Brooks skirts past the question of how and why the United States enmeshed itself in two unwinnable wars. He chooses instead to focus on America losing its faith.
Pursuant to its global role, Brooks contends that until Iraq and Afghanistan “came,” the United States had shared with others “vital ideals” that define the American way of life. Those ideals include “democracy and capitalism,” of course: so far, so good. But Brooks’s inventory of operative ideals does not stop there. Also included are “feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice.” All of these together, Brooks writes, come “intertwined in a progressive package that puts individual dignity at the center.”
Credit Brooks with accurately describing the contents of that “progressive package,” particularly its present-day preoccupation with race, gender, and sexuality. Yet the conservative that Brooks once professed to be would have balked at the reference to “individual dignity.” In a progressive context, individual dignity is a euphemism. It is a leftwing equivalent of “free enterprise,” a term employed by some right-wingers to provide a moral gloss to policies that exalt market values over human values.
As a practical matter, today’s progressives have no intention of contenting themselves with mere dignity. They aim to redistribute power in ways that will play to their own preferences on matters related to race, gender, sexuality and a host of other issues. No surprise there: Politics ain’t beanbag.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards incredibly sharp trouser creases.
I JUST GOT MY GAMES, hope you will order yours.
UPDATE: The Virtue Signal game is still in stock but the Deplorables game says it is now out. So if you want the Virtue Signal game, order now before it runs out. (Bumped)
TAMARA KEEL EDUCATES THE IGNORANT:
TRANSPARENCY FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Virginia Dem, who touts transparency, bans tracker from recording public event.
TURNING CARBON CREDITS AND GREEN GIVEAWAYS INTO BITCOIN: Is it crazy, or are you crazy not to do it? (You also get all-you-can-eat beef.) A rare plan to help normies benefit from these absurd subsidies.
NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop.
Conservatives have always hated NPR, but in the last year I hear more and more politically progressive people, in the media, talking about the station as a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish. A brief list of just a few recent NPR reports:
Read the whole thing.
NOT MUCH: Pulitzer-Winning Art Critic Reveals What Hunter Biden’s Paintings Are Really Worth. “To me, Biden seems a bit of a dabbler.”
THE MYTH OF PERVASIVE MISOGYNY.
Many feminists and progressives argue that the West is plagued by pervasive misogyny. In fact, this claim is made with such frequency, and is so rarely challenged, that it has become part of the Left’s catechism of victimhood, repeated by rote without a second thought. The only real question is how powerful and pernicious the misogyny is. Real-world data, however, suggest a different narrative, complicated by the fact that men have worse outcomes in many domains. For example, they are much more likely to be incarcerated, to be shot by the police, to be a victim of violent crime, to be homeless, to commit suicide, and to die on the job or in combat than women. Furthermore, they have a shorter life expectancy and are less likely to be college educated than women. Although these (and similar) data can be reconciled with the pervasive misogyny theory, they should at least give pause to the open-minded. The best data from contemporary social science tell a rather different story and suggest that the very persistence of the pervasive misogyny narrative is itself a manifestation of the opposite: society is largely biased in favor of women.
Indeed.
TRANSPARENCY! White House hasn’t disclosed past breakthrough COVID-19 cases. “The White House has not disclosed past breakthrough cases of COVID-19 among fully vaccinated staff members, although none of the cases have occurred among commissioned officers, White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed during Tuesday’s press briefing.”
CHANGE (IT BACK): Police Refunding Petition Makes Ballot To Fight Austin Crime Surge.
AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: Texas Democrats may have infected Pelosi and White House aides, dimming prospects for Biden meeting.
Related: Super Spreader Texas Democrats Get a Pass from Psaki.
MORE DANGEROUS THAN THREE HOURS OF LARPING IN A SHAMAN HAT: COVID: 35 Texas Democrats Endanger Democracy With Superspreader Attack.
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IT’S ONLY CASHING IN WHEN BAD PEOPLE DO IT: AOC Struggles to Explain How Cashing in on Her ‘Tax the Rich’ Merch Isn’t Capitalism or Something.