WELL, IT’S REVERSING ITSELF NOW: 12,000 Years of Human Burials Reveal The Steady Rise of Lead Pollution.
Archive for 2021
August 22, 2021
RESENTMENT OF AN OVERWEENING EDUCATED CLASS, EVEN AMONG CHINESE IMMIGRANTS: “They think that because they speak better English, that they graduated from Ivy League schools, that they are better than us.”
To be fair, the Ivy League schools teach all their graduates that they’re better than everyone else.
PENTAGON ENLISTS COMMERCIAL AIRLINES FOR AFGHANISTAN EVACS; CRITICS CALL A POLITICAL STUNT: “Civil Reserve Air Fleet is just for headlines and Biden knows it. Plenty of mil aircraft. Commercial airliners don’t even have midair refuel capability. Slows down and endangers operations just for clicks.”
ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II: Italian student, 22, who tattooed Covid certificate barcode on ARM becomes TikTok star after scanning into McDonald’s.
The pass gives proof of coronavirus status — that you are vaccinated, have recovered from the virus, or tested negative in the last 48 hours.
It has been required in Italy since August 6 to get into cinemas, museums and indoor sports venues or to eat indoors at restaurants.
Colonnetta, from the southern city of Reggio Calabria, told Corriere della Calabria newspaper: “It’s certainly something original, I like to be different.”
It’s been done before in Europe kid, trust me.
DOMINIC GREEN: Biden Must Go.
If Trump had confused his Vice President with a ‘general’ or fumbled with his cue cards because he couldn’t match a scripted question to a scripted answer, as Biden did at his press conference on Thursday; or shown the bizarre callousness and failure of short-term memory in his ‘That was four days ago, five days ago!’ outburst; or spontaneously abandoned the policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan in an interview with ABC, as Biden did with George Stephanopoulos on Thursday, the psychiatrists would be lining up outside the cable stations to explain why the 25th Amendment needed to be deployed now.
It’s that simple. The buck really does stop with the President. The world has always seen Biden’s incapacity, and now the American people can see it too. He carries direct responsibility for a disaster so undeniable that even a partisan media can no longer deny it. He can neither speak truthfully nor accurately. Not so much the emperor with no clothes, as Lear’s fool on the heath, naked and shivering as the kingdom comes to the ‘great confusion’.
His successor isn’t exactly a step up, however: Kamala Harris Finally Speaks on Afghanistan but She Really Shouldn’t Have.
This administration is in the midst of a full-blown implosion. Harris isn’t helping by being late to the party and acting as she’s been working the war-room when she clearly hasn’t. People are tired of the facade.
Well, she may be working Neera Tanden’s moral equivalent of the war room, designed to keep “President Biden’s big infrastructure push on track. Even amid the fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the frantic, last-minute military operation to rescue thousands of Americans and vulnerable Afghans, the White House has maintained its overarching focus on the domestic matters it has prioritized for the last eight months.” As with Obama, the Biden administration views American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head.
ICYMI: Trump at Saturday’s rally, on woke generals.
“You know what ‘woke’ means? It means you’re a loser. Everything woke turns to shit.”
ROGER KIMBALL: The Rotten Edifice Revealed: In Afghanistan, the technocratic legitimacy of our administrative masters is being exploded.
Incompetence there has been aplenty, and its display is both depressing and ubiquitous. It turns out that the technocratic elite to which we have entrusted our lives, not to mention the lives of the Afghans, is technically maladroit and incapable of effective governance. Our preposterous and “woke” Secretary of Defense epitomized the incapacity a few days ago when he admitted that the United States does not have the “capability to go out and collect large numbers of people.” Hello?
But incompetence is only a surface presentation of a much deeper malady, which revolves around the question of legitimacy.
I mean this in the deepest sense. It’s not just a matter of whether certain rules have been followed in putting various people in office or securing their government sinecures.
That’s one sort, perhaps an essential but ultimately superficial sort, of legitimacy.
What is happening here is something much deeper, more existential, if you will.
What just happened—what is happening still—in Afghanistan is an unfolding horror for the Afghan people.
For the United States, it is a rude snatching away of the curtain of legitimacy.
That curtain concealed a rotting edifice.
Many people have known this for some time. Some are only now, suddenly, aware or half aware of it.
Two people in the latter category are Kamala Harris, vice president of the United States, and Antony Blinken, secretary of state. They were the two most interesting people to watch during Joe Biden’s remarks on Friday. Sporting identical black masks, they stood behind the president, Blinken on his left, Harris on his right. Both clasped their hands nervously in front. The masks accentuated their eyes, which told a tale of confusion, incomprehension, and terror. “What is happening here? What is Joe saying? What does it all mean?” . . .
In the United States, sovereignty has been under pressure for many decades, at least since the Progressive era. I have written about this on many occasions, perhaps most fully in “The Imperative of Freedom,” my contribution to Vox Populi: The Perils and Promises of Populism, and my introduction to Who Rules: Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. The Constitution vests sovereignty in “We the People” and all legislative power in our duly elected representatives in Congress. But many forces have been eating away at that arrangement. Philip Hamburger, in The Administrative Threat, shows how the abandonment of legislative responsibility by Congress, and its subsequent occupation by the alphabet soup of governmental administrative agencies, decisively undermined the idea of sovereignty envisioned by the founders.
One of the most disturbing aspects of Hamburger’s analysis is the historical connection he exposes between the expansion of the franchise in the early 20th century and the growth of administrative, that is to say, extra-legal, power. For the people in charge, equality of voting rights was one thing. They could live with that. But the tendency of newly enfranchised groups—the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” of yore—to reject progressive initiatives was something else again. As Woodrow Wilson noted sadly, “The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.” What to do?
The solution was to shift real power out of elected bodies and into the hands of the right sort of people, enlightened people, progressive people, people, that is to say, like Woodrow Wilson.
How’s that working out?
LESSONS FROM MOTHER NATURE: Study shows tiger sharks ‘didn’t even flinch’ during a hurricane, while other sharks fled. “Tiger sharks appear to hunker down and weather a hurricane as if nothing happened, while other less-brave sharks evacuate shallow waters, according to a recent study. . . . ‘We suspect tiger sharks were probably taking advantage of all the new scavenging opportunities from dead animals that were churned up in the storm.'”
SMOD IS GETTING SERIOUS COMPETITION IN 2024: Noted in Passing: The words of the prophets are written on the bumper stickers….
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: James Madison University labels ‘heteroromantic’ Christian men ‘oppressor group.’
Sounds like they’ve created a hostile educational environment to me.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: ‘We Don’t Have The Capacity To Collect Large Numbers Of People’, Says Administration With Thousands Of Kids In Cages.
‘THE CHOSEN’ CROWD-FUNDED HIT CONTINUES: It’s already the most successful-ever crowd-funded streaming TV series and now “The Chosen” is preparing its third season. This clip on HillFaith is from the series’ first season and is about the healing of the leper.
Interesting Note: “Game of Thrones” had a budget of about $1 billion for its eight season run. Dallas Jenkins, the creator of “The Chosen” project, estimates the series can tell the entire story of Jesus in seven seasons at one-tenth the cost of “Thrones.” This series is top-notch acting, scripting, dialogue, the works.
DON SURBER: They Seem to Want Joe to Go. “No one in the media seems to be defending Biden. Even stranger, no one seems to be blaming Trump. I believe they want Biden out.”
TRUMP BLASTS BIDEN OVER ‘TOTAL SURRENDER’ IN AFGHANISTAN AT MASSIVE ALABAMA RALLY.
Exit quote: “‘Do you think that General Patton was woke? I don’t think so. He was the exact opposite,’ Trump said. He pivoted to lambast notorious woke figure General Mark A. Milley who has defended the divisive teaching of critical race theory to military members. ‘You know what woke means? It means you’re a loser,’ Trump jabbed, adding: Everything woke turns to sh*t.”
And our enemies know it:
AS CENTRAL ASIA GOES: So goes the future, according to Claire Berlinski, who notes about the vast region stretching across the middle of Asia that:
“Only 20 percent of the population in Central Asia is old enough to remember the fall of the Soviet Empire. The young have no memory of the Soviets; their sense of identity is drawn from legends of earlier kingdoms and the fabled history of such places as Samarkand and Bukhara. The region’s governments have deliberately cultivated this sensibility in an effort to reclaim their history from Russia and the Soviet Union.
“The US and Europe have neglected the region. Some French and German companies have invested in Uzbekistan’s mining resources, but their investments pale compared to the massive scope of China’s in recent years. The US and Europe have simply not built an enhanced military presence, nor have they created economic incentives sufficient to build a lasting relationship with the region. In his recent summit with Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin made it clear that he would not tolerate new US bases in Central Asia.”
One need not agree with a neo-con/globalist agenda in order to recognize that the West, including the U.S., cannot afford to ignore developments in Central Asia, in particular those that point to the region’s potential contributions to the gathering strength of Russia, China and Iran.
SO LAST NIGHT I WATCHED TRUMP’S RALLY IN ALABAMA. Trump spoke extemporaneously as usual for over an hour, was organized, forceful, and on point. The contrast with Biden is overwhelming.
WHEN YOU’VE LOST BRITISH LABOR: Just the News reports that former Prime Minister Tony Blair is calling His Fraudulency’s bungled Afghan withdrawal “imbecilic.” Said the former leader of Britain’s Labor Party: “The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours.”
AS IN THE OBAMA ERA, THE BRITISH MEDIA ARE MORE OBJECTIVE ABOUT THE PRESIDENT THAN AMERICA’S PALACE GUARD DNC-MSM: Biden was always unfit to be president but his Left-wing media cheerleaders didn’t dare admit it.
The world appears to have woken up to an important truth this week: which is that Joe Biden is a truly terrible president. It is a shame that it took America gifting Afghanistan back to the Taliban for so many people to realise this.
To be charitable, there were perhaps two reasons why this had not become more obvious before. The first is that Joe Biden is not Donald Trump and for a lot of the planet that seems to be recommendation enough to occupy the Oval Office. A break from the Trump show appealed to an awful lot of people.
But the second reason why too few realised what the world was going to get from a Biden presidency is that the US media simply didn’t ask the questions it needed to ask. Before the election a near entirety of the American media gave up covering it and simply campaigned for the Democrat nominee.
To be fair, that’s what they do during every election cycle…
…Only to admit after their latest crush is out of office, that, to quote Eric “Otter” Stratton, “you f***ed up — you trusted us!”
Last week, our Charlie Cooke spotlighted an MSNBC commentator insisting Florida governor Ron DeSantis is “more dangerous than Trump” and accurately dissected how Democrats talk about Republican officials in and out of office.
This is simply how Democrats begin to talk about Republican candidates whom they believe are capable of winning a national election. When such candidates reach office, they’re Hitler. When they’ve left office, they’re bad, but not as bad as the ones in office. And when they’re dead, they’re the sort of Republicans whom the living ones should be more like — yes, even if, when they were alive, they, too, were deemed to be Hitler.
There’s an inverse relationship with Democratic party lawmakers. The more time that passes since a particular Democrat was in elected office, the easier it gets for his fellow Democrats to acknowledge glaring flaws that they previously ignored or downplayed. Six years after Ted Kennedy died, it was safe to make a movie about Chappaquiddick – and lay out the facts that Kennedy left a young woman to drown. In 2017, nearly 17 years after Bill Clinton left office and when it was clear his wife would not become president someday, Matt Yglesias and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand could safely acknowledge that Clinton’s affair with an intern should have forced his resignation.
Somehow though, I doubt there will be even that level of delayed introspection for our current crop of Democratic Party operatives with bylines, when Biden (one way or another) finally leaves offices.
Afghan national Gholan Ruhani maintained his innocence after coalition forces captured him alongside a drug-trafficking militia commander and tossed him in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ruhani, represented by white shoe lawyer Rebecca Dick, said he was “a simple shopkeeper who helped Americans.”
Not quite. Days ago, Al Jazeera news captured Ruhani with fellow Taliban militants in the presidential palace in Kabul, as they announced the formation of an Islamic emirate. Ruhani, who cradled a machine gun, recited from the Quran and spoke of his time at Guantanamo.
Dick, then a top-flight attorney at Dechert LLP, represented Ruhani and advocated for his repatriation to Afghanistan. She said in a 2008 interview that her clients were not extremists.
“None expresses any interest in harming the U.S.,” she said. “Most affirmatively express support for the Karzai government; the others simply do not want to think about or discuss politics.”
Her statements were squarely at odds with Defense Departments assessments, which were vindicated by Ruhani’s role in the collapse of the Ghani government. Government reports connected Ruhani to the Taliban’s intelligence outfit, highlighted his familial ties to senior Taliban leaders, and correctly anticipated that he would join terrorist groups if released.
Now retired, Dick represented Ruhani and seven other Guantanamo detainees from Dechert’s Washington offices.
Lots of top-shelf firms represented accused terrorists because “everyone deserves a defense.” On the other hand, firms representing Donald Trump were terrorized into dropping him by social media mobs.