QUESTION ASKED: Can you afford AOC’s ‘Tax the Rich’ sweater? quote: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
I’m not sure if Sandy’s War counts as a “great cause,” however.
Archive for 2021
July 20, 2021
NEWS I HOPE YOU CAN’T USE: Armed Defense From Your Vehicle. Note that cars are poor cover — really they’re more like concealment.
Related: Pistols and car doors. Also: Rifles and car doors. Even engines and wheels are so-so.
Bottom line: “You do NOT want to be in the passenger compartment of a vehicle when someone opens up on it with a firearm.”
DOMINIC GREEN: Joe Biden’s digital serfs.
If Donald Trump had said he’d use extra-legal leverage over Big Tech, most of the media would be crying ‘fascism’. Brian Stelter would decry an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. Jeffrey Toobin would bang one out about bypassing Congress and the law. Minor academics would op-ed in the New York Times about the classically fascist ‘collusion’ between government and big business. Some of the more literate ones might even reach for that line attributed to Mussolini: ‘Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power’.
Fortunately for us all, it’s a Democratic administration that’s launching this repressive end-run around the law. This is progress, so the castor oil is for your own good. Really, what we’re seeing isn’t progress at all. It’s merely change, and it reflects the decay of the American agora as surely as a Visigoth riding into the forum at Rome. We all know it, and we all know that the price for saying it is rising.
Read the whole thing.
WELL, SHE’S RIGHT: Super Spreaders: Pelosi’s Office Blames Texas Dems for COVID Outbreak.
AT HELEN’S PAGE: M. Fletcher Reynolds’s The Basics of Copyright.
RAND PAUL ACCUSES FAUCI OF LYING TO CONGRESS ABOUT GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH FUNDING.
Earlier: The Suicide of Expertise.
UPDATE: America’s Newspaper of Record continues to be spot-on: Debate Erupts Between Trusted Medical Doctor And Dr. Fauci.
(Updated and bumped.)
EFREM ZIMBALIST JR. LEFT THE HOOVER BUILDING A LONG TIME AGO: FBI agent in Gretchen Whitmer kidnap case arrested following domestic incident.
UPDATE: Watching the Watchmen: “An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”
(Updated and bumped.)
BRIAN DUNN: Woke Lips Sink Ships. “Victory in the Cold War was sudden. And in the aftermath, the Navy surface warfare elements forgot that their core task is to control the seas and not merely exploit control of the seas.”
TO BE FAIR, THIS IS THE NEWSPAPER THAT DECLARED “WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW” WHEN OBAMA CAME TO POWER: WaPo Writer Says the Quiet Part Out Loud: Democrats Agree With Cuba Socialism.
CENSORSHIP: White House Mum on Scope of Push to Squelch COVID Misinformation. Much of the “misinformation” that has circulated over the past 18 months has emanated from the authorities themselves.
A MERITOCRACY WITHOUT MEASUREMENTS: Eleven Organizations Call On U.S. News To Drop SATs|ACTs From College Rankings Methodology.
ROGER KIMBALL: The FBI Has Lost The Plot: Who gave the Feds access to Twitter?
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous. Consider the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That once-respected institution has been busy wiping (or, more to the point, not wiping) egg off its face at least since the moist tenure of James ‘higher loyalty’ Comey. For those wondering why it is that Comey is cashing fat royalty checks instead of stamping out license plates at Club Fed, the answer is part of my story. There is the Elect, of whom James Comey numbers himself, and there are the Serfs, among whose number, Dear Reader, you probably belong.
But I am getting ahead of myself. James Comey was plenty ridiculous, as were his jesters and factota, the love birds Lisa Page and Peter ‘Dracula’ Strzok, Andrew McCabe and the rest of that unlovely Brady Bunch. But now we’re in a new era. And just last month the Bureau (as its aficionados affectionately denominate that pustulant if well-armed enemy of liberty) went full Stasi.
Pro tip: never go full Stasi, not in the United States, not if you want people to take you seriously and (the bottom line) not if you want Congress to keep funding you. (To those who say: ‘When it comes to being ridiculous, what about Congress?’ I contemplate Adam Schiff and Jerry ‘the Waddler’ Nadler and grant the point.)
Who gave the FBI access to Twitter? On July 11, the agency emitted a Tweet that they must have picked up from East Germany circa 1960 or maybe from the pages of George Orwell: ‘Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. Visit blah, blah, blah to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the #FBI. #NatSec.’
Love the hashtags. Underneath this little invitation to family harmony and collegiality was a three-panel drawing showing a featureless red, male figure (red, get it?) at an airport, in front of a computer, and out on a street gesturing and surrounded by three or four other male figures. The drawing communicates menace, unnamed but palpable, and the text communicates a ham-handed and possibly unconstitutional — certainly, un-American — intrusiveness into people’s private affairs.
That tweet went viral and was the occasion of much outrage but also much mirth. Here they were asking family members and coworkers to snitch on one another by sending tips to #FBI and #NatSec. It’s the mirth that the G-Men have to worry about as they strap on the shoulder holsters and prepare to mount a dawn raid on someone who voted for Donald Trump.
But what do you suppose that chap was gesturing towards in the third panel, the one that shows him out on the street with his pals? I like to think he was gesturing towards a giant Lego set. Back in June, it transpires, the FBI raided the Pennsylvania home of one Robert Morss, an army vet and sometime social studies teacher. Among the incriminating evidence recovered was a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag and — I quote from the charging document — a ‘fully constructed Capitol Lego set’.
Morss was arrested, and still languishes in jail, because he showed up at the Capitol on January 6. (Whether, as Assistant US Attorney Melissa Jackson claimed in her detention memo, it is ‘difficult to fathom a more serious danger to the community’ than Robert Morss is perhaps open to cavil. I have quite a few candidates.)
But what about that ‘fully constructed Capitol Lego set’? At some point, the FBI released an addendum to its initial bulletin about Morss. ‘Please note that after a review of the photographs from the search, there appears to have been a miscommunication [!] and that the statement appears to be inaccurate.’ It turns out the model wasn’t ‘fully constructed’ after all. It was still in its box.
The internet had a merry day or two with the Lego Set Threat. The Babylon Bee, that national treasure, even had a story about the FBI mounting an assault on Legoland, which probably does have a ‘fully constructed’ model of the Capitol or other important landmarks.
Two points in conclusion. The FBI has rendered itself ridiculous. It has jumped the shark and it turns out the shark is only a mechanical, maybe a Lego, model. We have granted them unprecedented power, we have lavished money and other resources upon them, in order that they might find and neutralize the bad guys. They miss a lot of them — remember 9/11? — but they itch to perform the tricks they’ve been trained to do. I believe it was the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz who first described the ‘vacuum effect’ among animals taken out of their natural habitat. A terrier confined to a city apartment, for example, will be found ‘digging’ in imaginary dirt on the carpet in order to ‘bury’ an imaginary bone. A dirt-less, boneless life is not to be borne, so the bow-wow practices its instinctual behavior in make-believe.
The FBI is similarly domesticated. Its number is increasingly part of the shapeless swamp that controls our lives. Its actions are, seen from afar, often ridiculous. But that does not mean they are not also malevolent. That’s an important point: that the ridiculous often easily cohabits with the vile. Hence the dawn raids, the summary incarcerations, the identification of people they disagree with as ‘domestic extremists’, ‘terrorists’, etc.
Which brings me back to that distinction between the Elites and the Serfs. The Elites have a virtual monopoly on the levers of power — in Joe Biden’s memorable phrase, they have the F-15s and the nuclear weapons. The Elites have yet to absorb the old protest slogan, ‘We are many, they are few’. Maybe they never will. But the Serfs will. What then?
Indeed. The fecklessness of our ruling class would be hilarious were it not so dangerous.
THIS SHOULD BE AN ALTERNATIVE TO VACCINATION, SINCE KIDS BASICALLY NEVER GET REALLY SICK FROM COVID: Study: Any COVID-19 infection in children leaves strong antibody levels.
EFREM ZIMBALIST JR. LEFT THE HOOVER BUILDING A LONG TIME AGO: The FBI has lost the plot. “Pro tip: never go full Stasi, not in the United States, not if you want people to take you seriously and (the bottom line) not if you want Congress to keep funding you. (To those who say: ‘When it comes to being ridiculous, what about Congress?’ I contemplate Adam Schiff and Jerry ‘the Waddler’ Nadler and grant the point.)”
EMPOWERING OUR DESTROYERS: Did Biden pull anti-missile systems from Middle East as a concession to Iran? “Without much fanfare, the United States pulled a number of anti-missile systems from several Middle East countries over the past month. The decision barely caused a ripple in news, but some members of Congress certainly noticed. The Patriot anti-missile systems were pulled from locations in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait. They were all systems installed during the Trump administration, intended to act as a deterrent to Iran and defend our allies in the region.”
VACCINATION — WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? AAP: Students, staff should wear masks in schools — regardless of vaccination status.
GOOD TO KNOW, I LIKE THEIR COFFEE: Black Rifle Coffee Did NOT Go Woke; Founder Responds to Misinformation.
AT HELEN’S PAGE: You can get signed copies of Kurt Schlichter’s new book The Split.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Coffee won’t upset your heartbeat, and might even calm it. “In fact, results indicate that every additional cup of coffee a person drinks daily might lower their risk of arrhythmia by about 3% on average, according to the study published July 19 in JAMA Internal Medicine.”