TRUMP ALMOST UN-RUINED THE COUNTRY AND THEY’RE EAGER TO UNDO HIS WORK: Biden’s ‘Rescue Plan’ Will Sic the IRS on Anyone Who Earns $600 in the Gig Economy: What does this have to do with the pandemic? Nothing.
Archive for 2021
March 14, 2021
UNEXPECTEDLY: Portland Mayor Cuts Police Budget, Crime Rises, Begs For More Police.
As Tammy Bruce asks, “Like all leftists these people are adults who refuse to see the obvious horrible impact of their policies because they’re stuck in a grotesque dreamland of blame and victimhood. Will Democrats ever reject this madness?”
UPDATE: Michael Totten on Leaving Portland.
THE MEDIA — INCLUDING SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES — PLAYED A MAJOR ROLE IN THIS. THINK OF THEM AS TOBACCO COMPANIES FOR THE MIND: Pandemic stress has people in U.S. gaining weight, drinking more.
PENTAGON MAY REVERSE GENDER-NEUTRAL PHYSICAL FITNESS TEST FOR US ARMY SOLDIERS. A new test has been scoring men and women on the same basis — but more than half of women are failing.
The US Army is considering a reversal of its new gender-neutral physical test to instead include different evaluation categories for men and women.
Research showed that the Army Combat Fitness Test [ACFT], which is the same for male and female soldiers, was leading to lower results for women with a knock-on effect for promotions.
An early Pentagon study showed that women were failing the ACFT at a rate of 65 per cent, while only 10 percent of men did.
Congress has halted implementation of the new test and the Army has launched an independent review into whether it is fair.
In the ACFT there are six events – the maximum deadlift, a standing power throw, hand-release push-ups, a sprint, drag and carry, leg tuck, and a two-mile run.
To pass the test those taking it must score at least 360 points out of a possible 600, and those who achieve higher scores are more likely to be promoted.
However, average sores for women so far are said to have been 100 points lower.
Congress has now declared that the test in its current form should not be a factor in deciding whether someone gets promoted.
As David Frum wrote in his 2000 book, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse):
Unlike the racial divide, the sexual divide corresponded to something deep and real about men and women. “Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature,” the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone audaciously argued in 1970. And questioning nature was exactly what the new civil rights law of disparate impact did.
Americans over a certain age are often surprised to see diminutive women patrolling their city’s meanest streets. The policemen of their childhood were tall, commanding figures. Have the cops shrunk? Well, yes. In March 1973, the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration issued an order forbidding any local police department that received federal funds (that is, all of them) to maintain minimum height requirements—the rules disqualified too many women. In 1977, the Supreme Court seconded LEAA by striking down Alabama’s minimum height requirement as a violation of the 1964 act. The federal government lived up to its own principles. In 1971 it waived size and strength requirements for its own police forces. In 1977, New York City acceded to a judicial order and permitted women to apply for fire-fighting jobs. None of the applicants passed the department’s strength test so the judge ordered the strength test made easier until sufficient numbers of women could pass.
Well, better dead than rude, right?
THE NEW VICTIMHOOD LOOKS AN AWFUL LOT LIKE THE OLD VICTIMIZER: The Poor Boston Marathon Bomber Is Suffering, and He Wants Justice.
ROGER KIMBALL: Maternity Flight Suits and Other Admonitions.
Just about the first thing Lloyd Austin did after being confirmed as Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense was to issue a service-wide order mandating a one-day “stand down” within sixty days to “address extremism within the nation’s armed forces.” “What extremism?” you might be asking, and you would be right to ask.
No matter what Lloyd Austin or the media tells you, the trouble with the U.S. Armed Forces is not political extremism but the enervating rust of political correctness. As Victor Davis Hanson has shown, the upper echelons of the U.S. military were purged by Barack Obama. If they are politicized today, it is firmly in the direction of the woke ideology of identity politics.
Thus we have the commander-in-chief, Joe Biden, speak about the “intensity of purpose” that will be devoted to “designing body armor that fits women properly, tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating maternity flight suits, updating requirements for their hairstyles.” This was not a joke—or, rather, it was not said in jest.
Perhaps the Biden means to prepare the distaff side for a different sort of Battle of the Bulge. True, he would be modestly more reassuring about the U.S. military if he could remember the name of his defense secretary or the name of the building where he works. “I want to thank the—former general . . . the guy who runs that outfit over there.” Oh, dear.
Meanwhile, the Army is about to revise its standards for physical performance downwards so that women will be able to compete more effectively with men. Once upon a time, the Army’s slogan was “Be All That You Can Be.” Today, it might as well read “Be Whatever You Want.” Among the avalanche of executive diktats signed by Joe Biden in his first weeks in office is a directive approving sex reassignment surgery for active duty personnel.
Presumably, it’s only a matter of time before America’s military takes its cue from England and starts running recruitment posters along these lines:
Somehow though, “The Marines: We’re Looking for a Few Sensitive Snowflakes” just doesn’t have a great ring to it — unless your name is Xi Jinping.
I’VE NOTICED THIS MYSELF: The Biggest COVID-19 Vaccine Skeptics? Frontline Health Care Workers.
Is that because Americans are rubes who don’t “believe in science?” Nope. “Outside the United States, frontline workers are likewise skeptical. On March 2, Reuters reported that at most half of the nursing staff in Switzerland’s medical sector, only 30 percent of the staff at Germany’s BeneVit Group care-home operator, and about half of the health workers in French care homes were willing to be vaccinated. . . . The Wall Street Journal reports that, to avoid getting vaccinated, half of the health professionals scheduled in the German state of Saarland failed to show up for their appointment.”
As I keep saying, trust is the public-health community’s greatest asset, and they’ve shat all over that trust in the past year.
ROGER SIMON: All Red States Must Join Gov. DeSantis to Restrain Big Tech.
By now every person awake, as opposed to “woke,” knows the dangers of Big Tech.
Through algorithmic manipulation, de-platforming and other noxious off-shoots of the tyrannical cancel culture these companies are changing history, reversing freedoms hard won since the Magna Carta, while having an unconscious numbing effect on our brains that eventually would render us a race of drones.
Something has to be done.
The federal government seems to be able to do no more than hold hearings. Those that might actually want to do something, like Sens. Hawley and Blackburn, are thwarted by the Democrats who, though they pay lip service to privacy concerns, have no real interest in biting the hand that both feeds and promotes them. (It also feeds lots of Republicans.)
The solution, as it does for most things these days, resides with the states, if they can ignore or reject those munificent campaign contributions.
The first steps, as they frequently are these days, have been taken by Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
In mid-February, the governor announced “The Transparency in Technology Act” to “check the growing power and influence of Big Tech,” whom he accused of looking more like “Big Brother with each passing day.”
The proposed legislation “includes protections from capricious changes to platform terms of service, requires platforms to tell users why their accounts are suspended or terminated, and requires that algorithmic bias on behalf of a candidate be disclosed as a campaign finance contribution.”
That could add up, depending on how you compute it. Moreover, de-platforming a political candidate, in his legislation, would cost the companies $100,000 a day (lunch money for these guys, but still…)
Also, Floridians could opt out of content algorithms altogether in the proposal. (Imagine—they’d have to make up their minds themselves about what was important… without any help from @jack.)
Makes sense, doesn’t it? But why should this only be for Floridians? Why not all of us, at least most of us?
All Red States should be working on similar legislation NOW. (Excuse the faux pas of using upper case but they should have started long ago.)
They should follow the lead of Gov. DeSantis, use his legislation as a template, refine it, add to it, communicate with each other about it, come up with even better versions (quickly, please) but, most of all, enact them. Do it.
Trump won more than half of the fifty states in 2020, even if you don’t include Georgia, Arizona and several others that remain iffy.
That’s a lot of states open to enacting similar legislation if their leadership could get it together. But why wait for them? Everyone should be on top of their local politicians to move forward with this.
Faster, please.
WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? Where’s Joe? Democratic Congressman Wonders Why Biden Hasn’t Visited Border Yet.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, INSTITUTIONAL HATE EDITION (CONT’D): College defends its ‘White Citizenship as Terrorism’ event.
MOTHER OF GOD: Tom Cotton Absolutely Takes Biden Nominee Apart During Hearing.
That was the confirmation hearing of Vanita Gupta, a far-left radical being appointed to one of the top spots at the DOJ.
Some of her views have included the decriminalization of all drugs. She’s also a big fan of illegal immigration and open borders, as you’d expect. But it was her views on race that really got her into hot water with Sen. Tom Cotton, who spent his time at the hearing absolutely taking Gupta apart.
You may need to sit down — and grab a cigarette — after this.
For those that can’t watch the video, here’s a general summary of how things went:
The man owns the New York Times — of course he knows how to conduct a hard-hitting interview.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, INSTITUTIONALLY-SUPPORTED HATE EDITION: NCSU mandatory diversity training includes ‘whitesplaining,’ ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘hate speech’ lessons.
IT’S SORT OF SATIRE, BUT NOT FOR LONG AT THIS RATE: Powerful: Military To Allow Troops To Replace Camo With Colors Of Their Gender Identity Flag.
LIKELY NO, BUT HE DIDN’T HELP MATTERS: Is WA Gov. Jay Inslee Single-handedly Responsible for America’s COVID Outbreak?
What’s amazing is Inslee and his team at DOH saw the outbreak at Life Care and still asked nursing homes to take in COVID-positive patients. The Seattle Times says these decisions contributed to roughly half of the state’s 5,000 coronavirus-related deaths to the nursing home policy because “nearly 200 nursing homes” had “at least one outbreak.” Some had multiple outbreaks. Very few long-term care facilities in the state have gone without any COVID infections. But in King County, where Seattle is located, “455 people connected to nursing homes have died, account for a third of the county’s total deaths.”
While New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) deserves scrutiny, especially because he oversees the largest metropolitan city in America – NYC – scrutiny also needs to be given to Gov. Jay Inslee. Washingtonians deserve to know just how deep this runs. Americans deserve to know how this outbreak impacted the rest of the nation, especially since Life Care was where this all started for the United States. And Inslee needs to be held personally accountable for every single one of these deaths.
As John Nolte noted at the start of the month, the DNC-MSM dogpile over Cuomo’s (very real) #metoo problems were really an excuse for the media to attack him over his COVID debacle, but protect other Democratic governors. “Why is America’s corrupt media not at all interested in some 15,000 dead senior citizens while they tar and feather Cuomo over the allegations he made [at the time of Nolte’s article] three left-wing women uncomfortable? The answer is obvious…Four other Democrat governors issued the same sociopathic nursing home order as Cuomo. Four other Democrats ordered infected coronavirus patients be admitted into nursing home facilities where 1) the most vulnerable live, and 2) they’re not set up to handle an infectious virus.”
BYRON YORK: Keep Your Eye on the Things That Matter. “The fact is, the Biden administration, despite its tenuous holds on the House and Senate, is working to make far-reaching changes to American life. Two of the biggest — and two that could combine to create a crisis — are the COVID relief bill, which the president will sign into law tomorrow, and immigration. They are two key parts of a progressive agenda that Democrats have hoped to pass for many years.”
THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN. AND NOW THEY MUST BE PUNISHED: New Yorkers Must Be Punished: A Modest Proposal.
Don’t the New Yorkers who fled deserve a reward from those who selfishly did not, for having reduced the city’s population and made the disease harder to spread? New York has had one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world; in New York City, things have been even worse. Maybe things would have been nigh-apocalyptic had the city population not thinned. In fact, maybe the leavers deserve a kind of party for their contribution to the city’s health, if not remuneration from those who stayed.
On the other hand, we learned later in the pandemic that New York City itself seeded coronavirus to the rest of the country. Maybe the rest of the country should hit up the famously wealthy urban center for some coronavirus reparations? It seems only fair.
Of course, the smart thing to have done would have been not to confine everyone to his apartment in New York City, but to confine New York City to itself. Yes, that’s right: a citywide quarantine, the placing of a Simpsons Movie–esque dome over the city right around this time last year (preferably after I fled coronavirus-free, thank you very much). That would have had a much greater effect in mitigating the spread of coronavirus than anything Governor Andrew Cuomo did.
I’m actually kind of surprised that Mayor Bane didn’t try it.
(Classical reference, inspired by earlier, funnier New York mayor, in headline.)
WHY DOES THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HATE OUR TROOPS? US Troops in Germany Face Vaccination Delays: Biden admin had planned to vaccinate Guantanamo Bay inmates before soldiers.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Abuse and Power. Andrew Cuomo’s governorship has been defined by cruelty that disguised chronic mismanagement. Why was that celebrated for so long?
—New York magazine, Friday.
—The Daily Caller, Wednesday.
And note this mile marker along the way: Exclusive: New York Admits Knowingly Undercounting Nursing Home Deaths After Quietly Changing Reporting Rules.
—The Daily Caller, May 15th, 2020.
Because this anti-Cuomo reporting began in conservative media, and because Cuomo was still useful as a foil against both Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the narrative had to be maintained at least through the election. In late November, far left Nation magazine ran the headline, “The Collapse of the Cuomosexual,” and once Biden was inaugurated, Cuomo was no longer useful to the DNC or its media.
But what memories we’ve had along the way:
What’s been the nicest thing about self-quarantining? Getting to know @NYGovCuomo and all his goodness. I decided to put my thoughts on paper. You can read it on @voguemagazine. pic.twitter.com/c3gqta9UIh
— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) March 31, 2020
THEY WENT ALONG WILLINGLY: Matt Taibbi: The Sovietization of the American Press.
SPREADING MISINFORMATION: NY Times Spread Fake News that East Coast Beaches Would Be ‘Gone’ by 2020.
IT’S COME TO THIS: The US Marines attack Tucker Carlson, critics, forced to walk back comments with apologies.
The US military has done more to discredit itself by attacking Fox News’ Tucker Carlson than twenty years of military failures in the Middle East.
Earlier this week, Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson took the hatchet to the military by criticizing their virtue signaling with the introduction of a jumpsuit for expectant mothers (sorry, “pregnant people”) in the military, pointing out that it would be foolhardy to send pregnant women into the front lines. He also questioned Biden’s update of military grooming standards to be “feminine.”
In his remarks, Carlson pointed out how the Chinese military had been gearing up for the “masculine” expansion of its naval fleet, an initiative Chinese media outlets proudly reported.
In response, US Space Command’s Senior Enlisted Leader, Marine Corps Mastery Gunnery Sgt. Scott Stalker responded in an angry video condemning Tucker Carlson for his remarks, pointing out through a strawman argument that women were a valuable element of the US military — a point that Carlson himself never opposed in his remarks about the military.
Furthermore, the Department of Defense issued a BuzzFeed-like statement as an official press release, ‘smiting’ the conservative host.
Chesty Puller and Lee Ermey left the barracks a long time ago.
Related: “Say what you will about the left, but you can’t deny they’re completionists. When those guys commit to reorienting an institution they show up, roll up their sleeves, and they take care of their business.”
But as Jim Treacher (who formerly worked for Carlson) adds, “If Tucker wanted to prove that today’s armed forces need a priority check, he couldn’t have written a better script than this. The military isn’t supposed to be publicly haranguing American citizens for criticizing them.”
POINTS AND FIGURES: Setting the bar low. “Listening to younger people than me posit theories of wealth. There are common themes that I hear.”
Plus: “My biggest worry in the US is that the opportunity to build wealth is dropping. It’s not dropping due to anything except terrible public policy. Covid lockdown policy ensured that we saw the largest transfer of wealth from small business to big business we have ever seen. But, it’s not just a dumb policy like lockdown.”