IT’S ALL FUN AND GAMES TILL THE ECONOMY COLLAPSES: Paying for Biden’s Dreams.
Archive for 2021
October 5, 2021
IT’S BEEN GOING ON FOR DECADES: The War Against the Middle Class.
October 4, 2021
HAHA, NOW I’M WAITING FOR TWITTER TO BE HACKED: In Major Disaster For Humanity, Facebook Comes Back Online.
Related: Hackers Warn That If Demands Aren’t Met They Will Reactivate Facebook.
THINK TWICE BEFORE BOLTING TO THE EV FUTURE: Looks like General Motors officials may well be second-guessing their wokey decision to invest billions of dollars in developing Electric Vehicles.
There are more than 143,000 Chevy Bolt EVs on the road, but GM recently put out a bulletin advising owners of certain, uh, precautions they are strongly encouraged to take, according to Ronald Stein, writing for the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT):
- Not to park your Chevy Bolt within 50 feet of other vehicles in case it catches fire.
- Highly recommends that Bolt EV owners not to park within 50 feet of anything you care about.
- Recommends parking on the top floor or on an open-air deck and park 50 feet or more away from another vehicle.
- Requests Bolt EV owners to not leave their vehicle charging unattended, even if they are using a charging station in a parking deck.
The information Stein provides about the GM warning is his opening illustration of a whole passel of problems EV enthusiasts, global warming alarmists and environmental radicals don’t want people who buy cars and trucks to know about.
POST-PANDEMIC REPORT, NYC EDITION: So I’ve heard a lot about what’s going on in NYC, and hadn’t been there since before the pandemic. Visited this weekend and looked around. It’s a mixed bag.
Generally speaking, things are pretty open. Masking in restaurants is optional, and in my observation nobody was doing it at the places we went to, which ranged from super-expensive to dirt-cheap. (Staff was masked everywhere, of course, as masking requirements apply most strictly to the servant class). You saw surprisingly few people on the streets or in Central Park (I’d say less than 1%) who were masked outdoors. They were almost exclusively Asians who by dress and mannerisms appeared to be foreign.
Subway riders, however, were extensively masked, as required by NY Transit rules. There were, however, mask-resisters:
I visited Carmine’s, scene of a BLM-activating incident, but it appeared to be pretty busy. I noted that the hostess desk, and apparently a bouncer, were all black, possibly not a coincidence.
I would say that restaurants were not empty, but not as full as I would have expected on a beautiful fall weekend. Over 50% probably, but nowhere close to full, even in peak brunch hours. I don’t know if that’s people avoiding the vaccine mandate (which in my experience was pretty laxly enforced) or just people out of the habit of going out, probably some of both. I don’t envy NYC restaurateurs right now.
Outdoor dining is everywhere.
One striking thing is that everyone was super-nice, from waitstaff, to people in shops and stores, to just folks we talked to on the street. I got the feeling that folks are trying really hard. The same was true even at the Newark Airport (!) and from the cabin crews on our flights. I think it’s an instinctive response by people to the nastiness that’s out there on social media and just plain media.
In front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the kiosk sellers was pushing Curtis Sliwa for mayor, and loudly encouraging everyone to vote.
But it’s hard for a lot of people. We were picked up from the airport and taken back by a Dominican friend we’ve known for years, who told us that his community has been hit hard by the loss of service jobs and tourism. You see a lot of people on the streets and in Central Park, he said, but they’re mostly daytrippers from New Jersey, and they don’t spend much money compared to the real tourists. His daughter starts at the Police Academy soon. He hopes the anti-police hate will have faded by the time she hits the streets, and he had a more nuanced view of the interrelationship between police behaving badly, which he witnesses sometimes, and the consequences of underpolicing, which he’s witnessing all the time now, than one gets from most pundits.
I think there’s hope for the Big Apple, particularly once they get rid of De Blasio. I just hope they’ll be smart enough never to elect someone like De Blasio again, but I have my doubts.
Taxis and Ubers, by the way, are much more expensive than pre-Covid. And drinks in bars and restaurants, too. I don’t know if the latter is a Covid thing or just owners trying to boost their margins on items people will pay a lot for, but I’m suspecting the latter. Also, many stores and boutiques are short on merchandise due to supply chain issues. Actual groceries and restaurant food are pricier than before, but not nearly so much as booze.
Despite the food prices, people on the streets, the subways, and in Central Park seemed on average a bit fatter. Plenty of people weren’t fat, but overall I’d say the median has shifted about 10 pounds to the right.
DON’T BE A SEAL, BE A LION: Americans Are the Witless Seals, Fauci and Biden Have the Clubs. Though to be honest, you can’t use “witless” as a contrast to Biden because, well, Biden.
OPEN THREAD: AC/DC plays George Benson.
HORRENDOUS: U.S. General Allegedly Abandoned Allies in Afghanistan for Souvenirs. “Donahue allegedly booted 50–100 American allies off the cargo plane so he could load a Taliban souvenir — an ‘inoperable Taliban-owned Toyota Hilux with a fully operational Russian ZU-23 anti-aircraft auto cannon mounted in the bed’ — to bring home. Not only did this violate standing orders against taking so-called war trophies, but those left behind have been or likely will be killed by the Taliban due to Donahue’s actions.”
IT WAS NEVER GOING TO STOP WITH THE LEFT ONLY BULLYING REPUBLICANS:
—NewsBusters, May 11th, 2020.
● Chaser:
● Hangover: Words, Guns Blamed In Gabrielle Giffords Shooting.
Sarah Palin’s now-infamous crosshairs map took much of the early blame for inciting shooter Jared Loughner‘s deranged rampage, but critics are also calling out right-wing rhetoric. Writing in the Guardian, Jessica Valenti criticizes the “man up” language of recent political debates, and its adoption by female politicians (she’s one of many to mention Sharron Angle’s threat that disgruntled citizens would turn to “second amendment remedies”). Valenti writes,
In a country that sees masculinity – especially violent masculinity – as the ideal, it’s no wonder that this type of language resonates. But it’s a sad state of affairs when women in politics have to resort to using the same gendered stereotypes that kept all women out of public service for so long.
Paul Krugman, too, sees “eliminationist rhetoric” as the source of an increase in threats against American politicians — and, eventually, an impetus for unhinged people to make good on those threats.
—Jezebel.com, January 11th, 2011.
As non-Trump aide Stephen Miller writes: Kyrsten Sinema’s harassers shouldn’t get a pass from Biden. “Last week, Rolling Stone magazine published a piece calling on West Virginia senator Joe Manchin to avoid the end of all life on Earth as we know it by voting for Joe Biden’s spending package. If you subscribe to that kind of hysteria, then a few harsh words directed in a bathroom are pretty tepid. It’s why the Steve Scalise shooting was out of the news in a weekend. That’s the problem with Biden’s failure to fully condemn this behavior. This weekend, it’s invading the privacy of a female senator, while the media chuckles under their breaths. Next weekend, it’s a deranged supporter who believes a couple of senators are responsible for Ragnarok. Allowing this kind of conduct to proliferate, we have been told for four years, will lead to more escalation and violence. Biden blew it, and Sen. Sinema’s colleagues should be ashamed of themselves.”
UPDATE: We Asked a Therapist How the Hell Lawmakers Still Traumatized by The Insurrection Are Supposed to Do Their Jobs. “One of our basic human needs in order to function and in order to perform is feeling safe. It’s a very trying position where she isn’t feeling safe and she feels that there’s a risk she’ll be harmed.”
—Jezebel, January 22nd. (Via Tim Young.)
More:
POLITICAL REPRESSION, STRAIGHT UP:
Remember when they told us that Garland was a moderate? Instead he’s a willing enforcer for a police state.
Meanwhile, smart parents will be pulling their kids from public schools, and electing people who will cut their budgets, or eliminate them outright.
SO BASICALLY THE NPR DEMOGRAPHIC, THEN:
ROGER KIMBALL: The Cost and Irritation of Abandoning Common Sense in Dealing With COVID.
Back in the 1980s, Fauci was a superspreader of the myth that an important vector for the transmission of HIV was heterosexual intercourse.
For the last couple of years, he has been terrifying the public with tales from the crypt about the virus he helped develop with American taxpayer money for “gain of function” research in a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan.
The fact that this Bela Lugosi of the medical establishment is also a publicity addict who can’t pass a television camera without primping and dispensing contradictory but depressing dicta makes him a public nuisance.
You see his baneful influence everywhere.
In our former newspaper of record, for example, The New York Times.
On Oct. 1, the Times ran one of its long emetic specials on COVID, the Delta Diaries.
Deploying their signature mixture of nauseating human interest pabulum and tendentious statistics, they paid homage to the CCP virus for giving them something to write about now that Donald Trump is, for the time being, off the menu.
According to the Times, the fact that the deaths of 700,000 people in the United States have been attributed to the virus means that it is now officially more deadly than the Spanish ’flu epidemic of 1918, which killed about 675,000 people in the United States.
Remember the old saw about “lies, damned lies, and statistics”?
The Times specializes in that wheeze.
The CCP Virus can be serious, no doubt about it. But it represents a significant threat to a tiny part of the population, mostly the elderly, especially those with certain co-morbidities like diabetes and obesity.
The Spanish ’flu, by contrast, cut a wide swathe through the young and healthy.
The so-called Delta variant seems to be more infectious but less virulent than the original.
It has affected some younger people, much to the delight of the Times and other members of Fauci fan club.
But the Times story is just the Gray-Lady version of a domestic-strife story like those in the sensationalistic rags you see in the supermarket checkout line. “Betts and Andy on the Rocks: What Really Happened On Their Honeymoon.”
As Noah Rothman of Commentary writes, there are “Diminishing Returns on the Cult of Fauci:”
Fauci has since clarified his comments to suggest that he didn’t say what he said. “I will be spending Christmas with my family,” the doctor confessed. “I encourage people, particularly the vaccinated people who are protected, to have a good, normal Christmas with your family.” This walk-back suggests that the administration Fauci serves understands his level of risk intolerance is sapping him and the White House of credibility.
Dr. Fauci’s tenuous grasp of elementary political realities has become impossible to ignore. Millions of Americans have acquainted themselves with a new status quo in which pre-vaccine mitigation measures like masking and social distancing are reserved primarily for the unvaccinated. Mass gatherings are no longer forbidden—they’re not even uncommon. Third booster shots are being administered to older Americans because an American administration must serve the American public before it concerns itself with the long-term interests of the globe. And no bureaucracy ever conceived has been able to stop Americans from getting sick.
A first-term administration has one prime political directive: Convince voters that they are better off today than they were during the previous presidency. Rising rates of inflation have robbed Joe Biden of confidence in his ability to steward the economy. The historic debacle his administration engineered in Afghanistan has led to deteriorating faith in Biden’s capabilities as a commander-in-chief. And now, Biden faces a “trust deficit” when it comes to combating the disease. If the public face of the administration’s public health program continues to view basic human nature and tangible political imperatives as abstractions that can be safely disregarded, the administration’s precarious position will only get worse.
And they’re stuck with him — and alas, so are we. On Wednesday, Hugh Hewitt asked Fauci, “Is there a point where you will say I do more harm than good because people don’t listen to me anymore and step aside?” To which Fauci replied, “No, absolutely, unequivocally no, Hugh.”
As the Washington Post noted last year in an article headlined, “Trump says he might fire Fauci. Technically, he can’t,” “Technically, the president of the United States cannot directly fire Fauci, let’s say by a tweet, mainly because he is not a political appointee. As a career federal employee and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, Fauci is protected by federal civil service regulations that shield him from being fired or demoted for political reasons. Fauci could be removed, but it would imply a complicated process layered with civil service protections that require the government agency to provide evidence that there is a just cause for dismissal, including failure to follow orders or misconduct.”
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: One in three young women suffered depression over the summer.
FACEBOOK LEARNS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO GET SHUT OUT OF FACEBOOK: Facebook Is Having a Very, VERY Bad Day (Cue World’s Tiniest Violin).
UPDATE (From Ed): This Facebook outage is huge — It’s their worst since 2008, when they only had 80M users! And speaking of getting shut out of Facebook, “Was just on the phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors,” Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times tweeted earlier today.
Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: Hackers Warn That If Demands Aren’t Met They Will Reactivate Facebook.
UPDATE (From Ed, 5:55 PM EDT): It was too good to last — Facebook is currently back online.
(Updated and bumped.)
DO NOT TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOLE: China’s PCR Test Orders Soared Months Before First Reported COVID Case.
The report casts further doubt on China’s official line about the origins of the virus, a topic that has fueled tensions between Beijing and Washington.
PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, tests are used to detect the presence of a particular genetic sequence in a sample, and they have applications beyond COVID-19 testing. But the report alleges the unusual uptick likely signals awareness of a new disease spreading in and around Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province.
Orders doubled from universities, jumped fivefold from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and surged tenfold from animal testing bureaus. Purchases from hospitals declined by more than 10%.
Monthly procurement data shows a spike in orders in May, especially from CDC buyers and the People’s Liberation Army.
“We believe the increased spending in May suggests this as the earliest start date for possible infection,” the report said.
Earlier: Where the Covid Origin Inquiry Goes Now.
CRISES BY DESIGN: Someone Orchestrated the Border Crisis.
That doesn’t mean there are no answers. The answers exist. Todd Bensman of CIS did what virtually no member of the media has done—excepting one Los Angeles Times reporter I’m aware of—and crossed into Ciudad Acuña to talk to directly to the migrants on the Mexican side. What he found was surprising, and shocking. The Haitians reported that they, longtime residents of Mexico, were abruptly released by Mexican authorities to proceed north and cross into the United States in mid-September. The reason given: a gift in celebration of Mexican Independence Day. So they did—by the thousands.
Someone orchestrated this.
Who? To what end? These are questions a press corps competent to its putative purpose might pursue. These are questions to which a government genuinely concerned with the welfare and sovereignty of the United States might demand answers—and accountability. Neither media nor the federal government will do anything like that. We are left to ask it ourselves, and we start with the understanding that if Bensman’s account is accurate, then the Haitian incursion and encampment, stupendous and alarming as it is, is not the real crisis. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s a crisis in full, but it’s a crisis covering for something else.
It’s a feint.
Biden and President Klain don’t view their border policies as any sort of error:
● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”
● Former Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”
● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: School boards group asks Biden to consider labeling opponents ‘domestic terrorists.’
The National School Boards Association has asked President Biden to look into slapping a “domestic terrorist” label on “angry” parents and community members who speak their minds at board meetings.
“America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat,” the group says in its letter to the president. “[As] acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
This kind of statement is a much worse act of violence than criticism aimed at school boards. One more argument for abolishing public schools.
GREAT MOMENTS IN ALTERNATIVE RELIGIONS: Symphony About Climate Change to Headline Maine Festival.
JIM TREACHER: If You Film Yourself Screaming at a Politician in a Public Toilet, You Are Insane. Jiggle the handle on your brain.
Related: Watch: Biden says activists harassing Sen. Sinema in a restroom isn’t appropriate but is ‘part of the process’ and ‘happens to everybody.’ “Back in Jan, Biden told staffers that he would ‘fire you on the spot’ if you didn’t treat others with respect. When asked about the tactics of activists harassing Sen. Sinema in bathroom he very softly criticized and downplayed as ‘part of the process.’”
Meanwhile, “[Jen] Psaki refuses to say that the White House condemns the activists who chased/filmed Sen. Sinema in a bathroom.”
More: In addition to harassing Sinema in the restroom, “Last night they gathered outside Sinema’s home and continued to harass her there.”
To sum up:
WHEN NARRATIVES FAIL: Virus surge hits New England despite high vaccination rates.