LAPTOP FROM HELL: The Biden Grift & Influence Machine Is Even Worse Than You Thought.
Archive for 2021
November 29, 2021
“CAN HE RESIGN IN LESS THAN 140 CHARACTERS?” Jack Dorsey to step down as Twitter CEO:
Does this mean a new direction for Twitter, especially in its increasingly onerous interventions into debates? Eh, don’t bet on it. Dorsey has institutionalized that approach so much — helped by political pressure to act as a quasi-censor for unpopular opinions — that it’s tough to see any significant change from an organic succession of leadership. To effect the kind of change that would return Twitter or any other social-media platform to a true “free market of ideas” forum, it would either take an outright acquisition or the emergence of a true “free market” competitor of significance. I’d love to be proven wrong, but don’t count on this being anything more than a reshuffling of the politburo at Twitter.
The bannings will continue until morale improves:
● The Morning Briefing: Area Fascist Jack Dorsey Purges James O’Keefe From Twitter.
—Stephen Kruiser, PJ Media, April 16th, 2021.
● Twitter CEO’s Shocking Excuse for Censoring NY Post on Biden While Allowing NYT’s Trump Tax Returns.
—Tyler O’Neil, PJ Media, November 17th, 2020.
● Twitter Admits ‘Error,’ Reinstates Zerohedge After Banning It in Late January for Calling Out China.
—NewsBusters, June 15th, 2020.
UPDATE: Justin Hart notes that “The new CEO of Twitter might have to roll back some old tweets there.”
BLUE CITY BLUES: Our other seasonal surge: porch pirates. “The Mile High City somehow leapfrogged from outside of the top-10 cities for package theft into sole ownership of the top spot to steal the annual crime crown from three-time reigning champion San Francisco. A dubious distinction if ever there was one.”
IS REHAB EVEN AN OPTION? Mark Judge: The Media Have Turned Into Bottomed-Out Drunks.
The implosion of the press over the last several years has been the final act in a story that resembles the stories that recovering addicts tell. . . .
For most of the 20th century, the press was liberal but also skillful and responsible. Communists like Walter Duranty balanced out by better reporters like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Lippmann. Mistakes were made, but there was a code of honor, a core integrity that made it necessary to issue corrections and make every effort to represent people accurately and humanely.
Then came the first drink — Watergate. The 1970s scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office was a great party. The atmosphere in the media and on the left was glamorous, filling writers with a sense of intoxicated invincibility. Read Batya Ungar-Sargon’s new book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. She recounts how journalists went from working-class Joes who covered foreign wars or boxing bouts to elites who attended the Ivy League and congregated at cocktail parties in Georgetown and Manhattan. Being a journalist was suddenly sexy.
For the past 50 years, the press has been trying to replicate the buzz from Watergate. Journalism is no longer a way to convey news from your community to the masses. It’s a means to destroy someone powerful and become a celebrity. Just as an alcoholic will start to cut ethical corners and need more and more booze for less and less effect, reporters post-Watergate became sloppy and even disinterested in facts. There was Stephen Glass, the UVA rape hoax, and New York Times fantasist Jayson Blair. Mistakes and lies became more and more common.
For the media, the arrival of Donald Trump represented the mad final lap in end-stage addiction. That’s where the drug has completely taken over the user’s body and soul. The moments of bliss are harder and harder to capture despite the oceans of booze put to the task. Still, there is no stopping now. Just the idea of impeachment or removal from office was enough to blow through any and all guardrails, like presenting a boozehound a glittering bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. . . .
The Russia dossier, a sordid collection of lies about the president that was created by Hillary Clinton and her bootleggers, was pure backwoods grain alcohol. The kind of stuff that could make you go blind. It didn’t matter. To reporters there was still that sweet, distant memory of Watergate. That first high which cracked open the sky five decades ago. Like Gatsby gazing at the distant green light across the river, there had to be a way to recapture that magic.
Indeed. Of course, even the Watergate reporting is looking kind of dodgy now.
CRISIS BY DESIGN: Gonzales Lays the Border Crisis Blame at Democrats’ Feet. “Rep. Tony Gonzales is a GOP congressman from Texas’ 23rd district. His district covers an astonishingly huge space — roughly a third of the U.S.-Mexico border. So if anybody in Congress is aware of what’s going on at our Southern border, it’s Gonzales.”
BEST SELLER IN HISTORY OF EDUCATION: The Art Of War. #CommissionEarned
SNOWFLAKES, ENABLED BY COWARDS, LIED TO BY THE MEDIA: Levi Strauss and Best Buy offer counseling to employees distressed over Rittenhouse acquittal, including session with ‘racial trauma specialist.’
RULE OF LAW: Leftist Arizona State U. groups demand Kyle Rittenhouse be booted from campus. “This actually might be a bit tough to accomplish given that Rittenhouse — recently acquitted of all charges in the shootings of three people (two of whom were killed) in Kenosha, Wisconsin last summer — is enrolled online.”
CYBER MONDAY DEAL: Save on running shoes.
HMM: Is The Omicron Variant The ‘Midterm Election Variant’? “On Saturday, Jackson suggested that Democrats will use the Omicron variant to push for universal mail-in voting for the 2022 midterm elections and save their party from an electoral bloodbath next year.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Conservative Auburn student met with racial slurs in response to his anti-mandate views.
BULLIES: Taiwan Scrambles Jets after Chinese Air Force Breaches Buffer Zone.
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said 18 fighter jets from mainland China’s air force, along with five H-6 bombers and a refueling aircraft, flew through the defense zone near the southern part of the island. Taiwan scrambled its own air force to respond and deployed missile systems to track the Chinese breach.
The incursion came at the close of a three-day military conference attended by Chinese premier Xi Jinping, where he called for the cultivation of military talent, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.
At the same time as the conference, five U.S. lawmakers conducted a surprise visit to Taiwan and met with President Tsai Ing-wen. The delegation affirmed U.S. support for Taiwan, and comprised Representatives Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.), Nancy Mace (R., S.C.), Mark Takano (D., Calif.), Sara Jacobs (D., Calif.), and Colin Allred (D., Texas).
It’s pretty clear that Beijing’s actual audience wasn’t Taipei.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: It’s Black Friday, ‘70s-Style. “Strawberry prices go up in the fall because the supply is lower; apples are cheap, because they are abundant. Prices of one good relative to another change, and induce us to shop effectively. That’s normal. Inflation is different. Inflation describes all prices and wages going up at the same time, straining supply throughout the economy. That’s the situation right now.”
Plus: “Widespread inflation always comes from people wanting to buy more of everything than the economy can supply. Where did all that demand come from? In its response to the pandemic, the U.S. government created about 2.5 trillion new dollars, and sent checks to people and businesses. It borrowed another $2.5 trillion, and sent more checks to people and businesses. Relative to a $22 trillion economy, and $17 trillion of existing (2020) federal debt, that’s a lot of money. People are now spending this money, the economy can’t keep up, and prices are rising. Milton Friedman once joked that the government could easily create inflation by dropping money from helicopters. That’s pretty much what our government did.”
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
Related: Democrats’ war on suburban women includes inflation-fueling reckless spending.
THE LEFT CAN’T MEME: The DOT’s Twitter Meme Doesn’t Just Offend Comedy — It May Also Be Illegal.
LAW FOLLIES: Koppelman On The Yale And UIC Law School Controversies.
Faculty susceptibility to administrative sanction is at the center of the highly politicized culture wars playing out across universities in the last five years or so. Law schools are no exception. In the last year, Northwestern Law’s Andrew Koppelman has emerged as a sort of monitor of what he sees as flagrant instances of administrative overreach. “Many administrators,” he told me, “are cowards who are pre-disposed to grovel before student demands. The way to make cowards behave appropriately is to give them fears in the other direction.”
Indeed. But I think he’s way too generous with regard to the Yale Law administration, possibly because he’s a Yale alumnus. The Yale administrators, by all accounts, didn’t just make bad judgments. They tried to blackmail people into making false charges, among other crimes.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Hospital Struggles To Treat 18 Waukesha Parade Victims Because Of Vaccine Mandate. “The largest children’s hospital in Wisconsin has been struggling to care for patients in injured in the Waukesha Christmas parade attack on Nov. 21 in large part because of staffing shortages stemming from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, multiple sources say.”
I GIVE BIDEN AN F: White House Report Card: COVID fears and Democrats scared.
EVER HEAR OF MAUREEN COMEY? She’s James Comey’s daughter. And she’s a prosecutor. Prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell. Hmmmm.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: New York’s New Governor Is Andrew Cuomo Without the Groping. “Guv Kathy wants to delay elective surgeries to deal with the problem that isn’t a problem. FYI, one of the main reasons that hospitals have been so busy in recent months is that they’re filled with people who had to delay surgeries last year, not because of ZOMG DELTA, as the MSM would have you believe.”
I’VE READ THIS BOOK. THE REVIEW IS A BIT HARSHER THAN I WOULD HAVE BEEN, BUT BASICALLY FAIR: REVIEW: ‘Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol.’ “Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol should be interesting. After all, it’s about girls and booze, possibly the most interesting combination of all time. But through some kind of reverse alchemy, O’Meara took 25,000 years’ worth of information on women and alcohol and made it boring. . . . Nowhere is O’Meara’s feminist critique more inconsistently applied than in her discussions of actual girly drinks, which she returns to even after dismissing the idea on page two. She bemoans the fact that women are expected to order ‘cloyingly sweet, fizzy drinks,’ but later shows that all the landmark girly drinks she names… were invented by women.”
There’s a fair amount of interesting stuff, but it’s largely spoiled by the big helpings of you-go-girl feminism interspersed with actual man-bashing.