AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Non-Menstruating Partner Wishes Menstruating Partner A Happy Birthing Person’s Day.
Archive for 2021
May 9, 2021
IT’S THE DEMOGRAPHY, STUPID: The great American birth dearth has arrived.
(Classical reference in headline.)
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: UMass Gives Incredible Punishment to Students Not Wearing Masks Outdoors, off Campus. “Wild story. Three UMass-Amherst students were sent packing- losing credits and tuition — for taking a picture outdoors without a mask. Parents are furious and wonder why same rules didn’t apply to hockey players celebrating on campus after nat’l championship.”
If Kosinski “never expect[s]…your own government to lie to you, repeatedly,” then she’s definitely misspelled “Democratic Party operative with byline wrong.”
It’s some ratio on her tweet – perhaps she’s not used to being in the deep water that is Twitter:
A long time reader of Instapundit has a new book out The Material Image: Reconciling Modern Science and Christian Faith.
LEGENDARY EMMY WINNER LOSES PR REP: Cuomo’s communications director resigns.
OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH GEORGIA: Gannett apologizes for stealth-editing Stacey Abrams’s op-ed.
THE 1933 PROJECT: Defounding America.
But, though the traders and Tea Partiers didn’t quite understand it, the federal government long ago had turned from the shield of individual liberty into a vast engine of redistribution. That transformation could occur because the Framers’ Constitution was body-snatched by the doctrine of the “living constitution,” which—as Woodrow Wilson first formulated it—saw the Supreme Court sitting as a permanent Constitutional Convention, making up laws as it went along, heedless of the 1787 scheme’s checks. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal used Wilson’s doctrine as a license to remake America’s economy and society. Once the Supreme Court buckled to FDR’s threat to pack it and started voting his way, the justices allowed an utterly foreign governmental structure to devour the Framers’ republic from within, until it broke out of the shell as something altogether different.
Not that FDR was entirely frank about his transformative enterprise. Where Wilson had dismissed the Framers as obsolete relics in a Darwinian age, Roosevelt claimed to extend their great work even as he undid it. In his second inaugural address of 1937, he hailed the 150th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, which had “created a strong government with powers of united action sufficient then and now to solve problems utterly beyond individual or local solution”—a wildly false characterization. Chastened by America’s near-loss in the Revolution, the Framers sought to create a government strong enough to protect national and individual independence but not so strong that, given mankind’s inherent power-hunger, it could become what they called an “elective despotism.” So they limited that power to such clearly enumerated tasks as raising an army, a navy, and taxes; coining and borrowing money; and regulating foreign and interstate commerce. All other matters they emphatically left to “individual or local solution.”
They certainly didn’t mean to put the whole U.S. economy under federal regulation. But as FDR later admitted, when he took the oath to defend the Constitution just before delivering the 1937 address, he had wanted to shout, “Yes, but it’s the Constitution as I understand it.” The New Deal’s main thrust, after all, was precisely to take total control of the economy, under the ruse of federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
Read the whole thing.
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE — SELECTIVELY: Stanford officially suspends COVID restrictions for… basketball parade?
THE 1939 PROJECT: Moscow’s war on history.
In the wake of Russia’s Victory Day military parade on Sunday, Russian lawmakers plan to ban any comparisons between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The parade marks the 76th anniversary of the end of World War II and, as is traditional, will be held in Red Square.
The bill follows President Vladimir Putin’s orders to prohibit publicly equating the role of the two collaborationist powers during the war. Such moves illustrate that Putin’s expansionist ambitions not only involve the revision of post-Cold War borders but also the rewriting of European history.
The key event in Putin’s restoration mythology is the “Great Patriotic War” that ended in victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. The Kremlin’s historical myths have become state scripture and entail the omission of key events and the whitewashing of Soviet crimes. Histories in Russia remain silent about Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler. The two dictators jointly launched World War Two with the invasion of Poland in September 1939, after signing a nonaggression pact to carve up and incorporate Central-Eastern Europe in their growing empires. Putin has criticized the European parliament and neighboring capitals for condemning the Soviet-Nazi pact.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Of course, Oceania has also been reported to have retconned WWII as well: Was It Over When the Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor During the ‘European Civil War?’
Between Moscow’s war on history, the EU’s war on history, and the New York Times’ war on history, Orwell didn’t know the half of it, when it comes to how malleable history can be.
SNL BRIEFLY BECOMES INTERESTING AGAIN: ‘SNL’: Elon Musk brings mom to monologue, jokes he’s giving her Dogecoin for Mother’s Day. “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”
Monologue! 💫 @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/xeH1EOU79A
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) May 9, 2021
Honestly, this is genius-level undercutting of the villainization he’s been subjected to.
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Hunter Biden May Have His Own Chinese Spy Scandal.
Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” shows he had a “flirty” relationship with his secretary, who worked for a Chinese Communist Party company where he conducted business. The Daily Mail has the details:
After launching his multi-million-dollar joint venture with CEFC, Hunter was assigned a 29-year-old Chinese-American assistant, JiaQi Bao, who quickly struck up a close and intriguing relationship with her Biden boss.
At first, emails show the New York-based Bao diligently scheduled flights, hotels and even doctor’s appointments for the president’s son.
But mysteriously, the young assistant also sent him opposition research to help Joe Biden’s 2020 election bid, urged him to take cash from the joint venture’s accounts as the business collapsed and wrote flirty and personal messages and even ended up with Hunter’s military dog tags in her New York apartment – the same tags he can be seen wearing in home-made porn videos he recorded on his laptop.
After partnering with Chinese oil giant CEFC in the multi-million-dollar deal, Bao was appointed as his secretary and assistant, acting as a go-between for his Chinese business partners, translating documents and performing clerical work for Hunter in the joint venture.
According to Bao’s LinkedIn page, she has worked as an analyst and assistant in finance and private equity in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and New York since 2011.
As CEFC started to collapse, Hunter Biden’s assistant encouraged him to withdraw money from the accounts held by the company. Further, the company’s Secretary General was known as the “spy chief of China.”
Does every man in the Democratic party have his own personal CCP honey trap? Beijing evidently has a whole gang of Fang Fangs to bang Democratic yanks.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: England is on for its Coldest May since Record-Keeping Began back in 1659.
(Classical reference in headline.)
A REDUNDANT PROSECUTION IN MINNESOTA: The federal prosecution of Derek Chauvin was likely undertaken as a hedge against the possibility that he would be acquitted in the state prosecution. That obviously isn’t what happened. But the prosecution apparently will proceed.
What’s jarring to a lot of Americans is that it’s possible to be acquitted of a crime in state court, but still prosecuted in federal court (and vice versa). They think the Constitution protects them against double jeopardy. It doesn’t (or at least that’s how it’s been interpreted for a long time). Back in the day that there weren’t many federal crimes, that may have been tolerable. But these days there’s almost always a federal crime that can be charged, so double jeopardy is almost always possible.
I’ve argued in the past that in the specific and narrow context of the federal hate crimes act that this is unconstitutional. Some federal appellate judges have appeared to be sympathetic to the argument, but it will take the Supreme Court to do anything about it.
Instead of trying to clear the street, the officer just stands there and only gets involved to deal with the driver. While it’s obvious he’s trying to keep things from escalating, that’s no excuse to stand idly by when unlawful behavior is clearly happening.
In response to this video, I’ve seen several BLM supporters claim that the protesters have a right to be armed. That’s true, but pretending anything in that video is legal shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how open carry (or any carry of a firearm) works. One of the things that a firearms instructor will drill into you is that you can not instigate a confrontation and then finish it with a gun while claiming self-defense. In this case, you can’t block traffic, entrap people, and then threaten them with a firearm. You certainly can’t shoot anyone in that situation. Once you instigate a confrontation as the BLM protesters did, the legal hurdles to claim self-defense become massively high.
Further, I want to note that there is no situation in Texas where a protest can legally block a roadway. Even if this protest was originally permitted, it had reached the point of law-breaking by the time the camera started rolling. Police should have moved to clear the road to de-escalate the situation. Instead, nothing was done until motorists started to get into it with protesters. That’s a failure of the police to do their jobs, likely due to restrictions placed on them further up the food chain.
Very likely. Flashback to last year: Police Chief Walks With Protesters in Plano.
ANDY MCCARTHY: The DOJ’s Abusive Indictment of the Police Who Killed George Floyd. Abusiveness seems to be the DOJ’s stock in trade these days.
DEFUND THE MARTHA’S VINEYARD POLICE DEPARTMENT: Michelle Obama: I Fear for My Daughters Every Time They Get in a Car.
THUG POLITICS: Baltimore State’s Attorney files complaint against Fox station for reporting about her. “As we’ve discovered over the past six months or more, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has been making plenty of headlines, none of them very flattering. With the various ‘irregularities’ showing up in her records, there is currently a grand jury investigation into the conduct of her office underway, along with an IRS audit of her and her husband’s tax records. Well, Ms. Mosby has had enough of these meddling reporters and their insinuations. She’s filed a complaint with the FCC over the Baltimore Fox News affiliate, accusing them of… well, I’m honestly not sure what she’s accusing them of. But it involves bias and persecution and, of course, racism.”
Turnabout is fair play. Perhaps someone should file a complaint against her with the Maryland Bar disciplinary counsel.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: States With Active Legislation to Fund Students Instead of Systems.