ABOUT THAT ‘MAGICAL SKY DADDY:’ Erik Manning explains why calling belief in the Christian God a resort to magical thinking is merely a rhetorical device, not a logical argument. This guy is really good on the white-board, too.
Archive for 2021
June 15, 2021
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Harris vs Biden Over Who Owns the Border Crisis.
Plus:
- At last: An eco-friendly needle-felted packer (???)
- When a presser isn’t a presser
- San Francisco legalizes drive-thru shoplifting
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
Stewart and Colbert’s fellow leftists hardest hit: Just hook it to our veins: @Redsteeze has been working on an incredible collection of ‘libs freaking out over Jon Stewart believing in science.’
TONY KATZ: Ilhan Omar Should Be Expelled. Why Won’t Republicans Loudly Say So? “Republicans need to get their act together, and demand that Congress be a body where this radical bigotry is not tolerated. When a member spews anti-Semitism and compares the United States to Hamas, Republicans need to march into Speaker Pelosi’s office and demand a vote to strip that member of their committees. (No, calling for censure is not enough.)”
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Cop Who Got Fired For TikTok-Trolling LeBron Beats Cancel Culture on Live TV.
FIGHTING CRITICAL RACE THEORY, ONE DOOR AT A TIME. “A vigorous fight in a small Texas city unseated advocates of a pernicious racial theory.”
As a famous man said, get in their face. Punch back twice as hard.
TROLL SO HARD: Putin Asks Reporter If US ‘Assassinated’ Ashli Babbitt. “Babbitt’s family has filed a lawsuit for records from Washington, D.C., that would name the identity of the officer who fatally shot her. The Department of Justice said in April it would not pursue charges against the U.S. Capitol Police officer responsible for her death.”
BREAKING: Biden’s Domestic Terror Agenda Confirms Conservatives’ Worst Fears. “Ironically, the president from the very Democratic Party that swelled with chants of ‘Defund the Police’ last summer pledged to allocate ‘over $77 million’ to “state, local, tribal, and territorial partners to prevent, protect against, and respond to domestic violent extremism.” This Democratic president will increase funding for law enforcement, so long as the police are pushing his New War on Terror.”
MINDS WIDE SHUT: Northwestern University president Morton Schapiro joins literature professor Gary Saul Morson to pen a book about “the growing problem of fundamentalist thinking,” as reviewer George Leef puts it. But have Schapiro and Morson made some fundamentalist thinking mistakes of their own? (My strong impression is that even very smart people are shockingly bad at distinguishing reason from their own articles of – usually secular – faith.)
#JOURNALISM: Columbia professor criticizes Biden Title IX pick over record on university sexual assault investigations.
A medical school professor at Columbia University said President Joe Biden’s appointment of Suzanne Goldberg (right) to lead Title IX efforts at the Department of Education is a mistake.
Raymond Givens, a cardiology and medical professor at the Ivy League University, said that Goldberg did not properly investigate complaints of sexual assault while serving as the university’s Executive Vice President for University Life. Goldberg also taught law and founded the university’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic.
Givens filed complaints with the New York State Attorney General Civil Rights Bureau and the federal Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, where Goldberg is now in charge. . . .
In his complaint, he raised the possibility that the media does not want to report on it because Columbia awards the journalism Pulitzer Prizes. “It has been difficult to gain media coverage, possibly in part because Columbia University awards the Pulitzer Prizes,” Givens said.
Corruption is everywhere, it seems.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Tyler O’Neil: Supreme Court Wants Biden’s View on Harvard’s SHOCKING Bias Against Asians. “The Supreme Court did not take up the case on Monday. Rather, it asked Elizabeth Prelogar, Biden’s acting solicitor general, to weigh in on the case.”
Stacey Lennox: Big Tech’s Pandemic Censorship Is Not Only Political — It’s Dangerous. “At what point will they be held accountable for their politicized censorship of scientific information over the last 18 months?”
Yours Truly: At Least the Foreign Press Is Willing to Tell the Truth About Biden. “But you can be sure that if you want to find any actual Big Media skepticism towards Democrats, you’ll have to look for news reports from countries where there aren’t any.”
SYSTEMIC RACISM: OSU students furious after university reports Black-on-White ‘hate crime.’ The sensitivity to mentioning the race of perpetrators, and the expressed fear that doing so might lead to violence, kind of gives away the game.
SPOILER: IT WON’T BE. The Mediterranean Should Be On Joe Biden’s Mind When He Meets Putin.
There is nothing humanitarian about Putin’s aims in Syria. But as Moscow builds leverage, Biden ends the license for the Delta crescent energy company in northeast Syria, Russian energy companies are poised to gain more control over Syrian oil—and therefore the Kremlin is set to further increase its influence in Syria and therefore the Mediterranean. That Moscow recently deployed nuclear-capable bombers to Syria shows it now has an extra platform it can use as both a tactical tit for tat reaction and on a strategic level as a deterrent to NATO’s southern flank. Biden said that human rights and democracy are a US foreign policy priority. As he meets with Putin, Syria will provide a crucial test of his commitment to this aim.
Nor is Moscow’s messaging limited to Syria. Russia is reportedly preparing to supply Iran with an advanced satellite system–something Russia is now denying–while the two countries signed a visa waiver agreement, To be sure, the two countries discussed simplifying travel requirements at least since last year in what has turned into the best bilateral relationship Russia and Iran have had since Putin’s 2015 Syria intervention. But Iran will also be another topic on the Biden-Putin meeting agenda, and it remains unclear how the Biden team views Russia’s role. It would be a mistake to count on Russia playing a helpful role as Moscow and Tehran remain aligned in their geostrategic goal of pushing the US out of the Middle East, while the Iranian malign regional activity regardless goes far beyond the nuclear file.
Biden will weaken our position in the Middle East at the same time he’s increasing our dependence on Middle East oil.
FIRST BILL MAHER, NOW THIS: The Wuhan lab-leak explanation is “not a conspiracy theory, ” says … Jon Stewart?. “Oh my god, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China, what do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird!”
Plus: “Twitchy reports that lefties on social media are aghast at Stewart for pushing this hypothesis. If so, it’s because Stewart has shoved the Overton window by a significant amount in embracing the lab-leak hypothesis. Over the last few weeks, media outlets have grudgingly reported on it with some fairness after more than a year of denigrating both the hypothesis and anyone discussing it as benighted lunacy. Stewart brings a sense of hipness to the idea, which makes it a lot tougher to pigeonhole anyone else as a kook for demanding an investigation into the origin of COVID-19. Even Ron Johnson.”
HE’LL BE BACK: Netanyahu Blasts Biden on His Way Out of Office. “He compared the Biden administration’s efforts to reenter the Iran nuclear deal to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision not to bomb the train tracks to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1944.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: The Cancel Woke Bullies Are Getting Pushback and It’s a Lot of Fun to Watch. “The good guys have won a few recently, and while I’m not sure that I have the kind of heart that has cockles which can be warmed, but I have rather enjoyed seeing the pinched, constipated woke types getting a finger in their eyes.”
MARK PULLIAM: Christianity Surrenders the Public Square.
THE ANSWER IS “YES”, SHERLOCK: Did anti-Trump bias blind science to evidence for COVID lab-leak theory?
THERE HE GOES AGAIN: White House walks back Biden’s Russia cybercriminal swap comments.
President Joe Biden reportedly gave an impressively off-the-cuff response to a reporter’s question at the G7 summit’s conclusion over the weekend. When asked yesterday about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent offer to swap respective countries’ cybercriminals, Uncle Joe said he was “open” to the idea, stating “if there’s crimes committed against Russia… and the people committing those crimes are being harbored in the United States, I’m committed to holding them accountable.” He also added that he thought Putin’s suggestion was “potentially a good sign and progress” between the two nations.
Learning of what at least sounds like Biden’s tacit approval of extraditing U.S. citizens over to Russia as part of some kind of prisoner swap scenario, the White House quickly entered damage control mode.
Entered? This team hasn’t left damage control mode since they signed on.
A DUBIOUS EXPEDIENCY: HOW RACE PREFERENCES DAMAGE HIGHER EDUCATION: Don’t forget my new book, which is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble (though for reasons I can’t explain it cost more at Barnes and Noble).
The book contains eight essays. The authors are John Ellis, me, my Commission colleague Peter Kirsanow, Heather Mac Donald, Peter Wood, me & Carissa Mulder, Lance Izumi & Rowena Itchon, and my co-editor and USD colleague Maimon Schwarzschild. If you haven’t done so already, please take a look.
MICHAEL WALSH: To Stage the Counter-Counter-Revolution, GOP Must Learn From Lenin.
For too long, conservatives have been on the back foot, constantly reacting to the Left’s ongoing provocations and, mostly fruitlessly, attempting either to resist them or roll them back. From gay marriage to transsexuals in the military—both long thought not only unthinkable but, in the case of the latter, unbelievable—has been but the work of a few years. During the same period, not a single major conservative policy has been enacted, in part because the Republican Party is engaged in defense, when it should be on offense.
The Trump administration managed briefly to roll back via executive order some of the most egregious excesses of the Obama administration, but it failed to finish off Obamacare—thanks, John McCain!—and even its legislative victories, such as tax reform, are in the process of being swiftly negated, thanks to the Democrats’ narrow control of both houses of Congress.
Now, under the “Biden administration”—which is by all accounts being run directly and indirectly from chez Obama in Washington’s tony Kalorama neighborhood—the goal is to bury the Trump administration and make sure such a thing never happens again. (Why do you think Obama, alone among past presidents, broke with tradition and remained, along with his family and his advisors, in D.C. throughout the Trump administration?)
The sentient Democrats wish to make Trump an object lesson in the price of political insubordination, even to the point of trying to jail the former president as well an anathematizing his allies and supporters.
If the 2020 election wasn’t a counter-revolutionary coup, abetted by unconstitutional changes in state election law “justified” by the non-threat of COVID-19 and assiduously promoted by the media, it certainly is beginning to look very much like one. . . .
This is not the place to argue the merits (non-existent, in any case) of the two bogus impeachments. Rather it is to force the GOP to act more like the Leninist/Stalinist Democrats and speak with one voice, in the pursuit of a single objective: winning.
In these fraught times, “comity” is luxury only congenital losers can afford, and the sooner the party purges itself the better off both it and the country will be. As Barry Goldwater famously offered: “a choice, not an echo.” Now’s the time to take him up on it.
This is also no time for a “big tent” party. As the Lenin Democrats have illustrated so vividly since the planned and scripted rise of Barack Obama in 2008, a narrowly configured tent will do the job. Their party is a cozy little snuggery of woke tech oligarch billionaires with a chokehold on their media lackeys and access to more money than ever before in human history; and a seething, resentful, and violent underclass that functions as their “conscience” but more importantly as their street thugs and enforcers while posing as perpetual victims of their ideological opponents as they seek redress for their “legitimate grievances” (shopworn but still potent communist terminology).
That homogeneity has been good enough to win three of the past four presidential elections, and there’s no sign they wish to change, especially now, in the third term of the former Barry Soetero. So ideologically rigid and confident are they that they’ve cheerfully jettisoned their former base, the now-vilified white working class, and have never looked back.
Read the whole things.
YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW EXTENSIVE IS CHINESE PROPAGANDA IN THE U.S.: Capital Research Center’s Sarah Lee puts it into a fact-based context for The American Conservative that ought to be sobering for all of us. Consider this graph:
In Alaska, [Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Foreign Affairs Chief Yang Jiechi told a stunned [newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of State Anthony] Blinken, “Many people in the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.” He was merely echoing what China has already trained many young Americans to think by directly or indirectly funding American nonprofits. Younger Americans had already heard this message on their college campuses and in some cases even earlier, in primary and secondary school. Given the state of political discourse leading up to the 2020 election, there’s evidence to suggest they were dutifully spreading the word as China no doubt intended.”
One of the most important but unheralded consequences of Trump’s attempt to negotiate a new economic relationship with China was the discovery of just how deeply ingrained the CCP’s messaging apparatus had become here in the U.S.
SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS TACTICS EXPLAINED: Peter Boghossian offers a handy reference chart. HT: Thom McKee, The Daily Gouge.
SO NICE OF NEWSOM TO RELEASE HIS POLITICAL PRISONERS: That would be the entire state of California, according to Issues & Insights, which also notes these fascinating datapoints:
“Seven-day moving averages of infection rates peaked at 114 cases per 100,000 in California, but only 82 in Florida and 79 in Texas, states that had far fewer restrictions and mandates, and reopened much earlier than California. Deaths peaked at 1.72 per 100,000 in California, 1.21 in Texas, and 0.86 in Florida.”
Next question: Why are the politicians, public health “experts” and mainstream media buffoons so totally, absolutely determined to get every human being on God’s green earth vaccinated for this particular virus? At the present rate, soon we will be told unborn babies must be vaccinated, too.
Could it be that the virus really was engineered in a lab somewhere and at some point in the near future everybody who got the vaccine will suddenly shut up and stop yammering about things such as individual liberty, the Constitution and political accountability?
Asking for a friend.