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Archive for 2021
May 24, 2021
HMM: Pedestrian Deaths Ballooned Against Miles Driven Last Year. “While the data is preliminary, the association estimated there were 6,721 pedestrian deaths in 2020. It’s a 4.8 percent increase over 2019 and not all that impressive until you realize most people basically gave up their normal driving routine during lockdowns. According to the GHSA, adjusting for miles driven actually results in an annual increase of 21 percent.”
DON’T LET THE MEDIA GET AWAY WITH U-TURNING ON THE LAB LEAK THEORY — or Dr. Fauci:
Almost instantaneously, respectable media voices have switched from writing off the lab leak theory to believing that is somewhere closer to probable than possible. How does that happen?
A group of 18 scientists, including one who worked in the Wuhan lab, penned a letter to Science magazine stating the lab leak theory needed to be investigated further.
Then Donald McNeil Jr, the former New York Times science writer wrote an extensive explanation of gain-of-function research (the scientific manipulation of proteins in a virus to make it more susceptible for human transmission) and why that it’s possible that this research was being conducted at the Wuhan lab.
Shortly after that post, the dominos began to fall. Just this weekend, Anthony Fauci himself, who has long derided the lab leak theory, changed his tune as well, saying that he’s not confident that the virus did not escape a lab.
Ever since WWII, the left sure loves to pivot on a dime — knowing few in the upper class-media will call them on it:
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Unconscious Reprogramming: The Deepest Form of War. “After the Second World War, the fight for the unconscious continued unabated for the Germans, at least in the Soviet Zone, through de-Nazification ironically carried out by the NKVD. To a surprising extent, the secret history of the 20th century is one of the struggles for the subconscious minds of populations. Far from being a paranoid fantasy, unconscious reprogramming constitutes the deepest form of war. ”
Read the whole thing.
FIGHT THE POWER: Ron DeSantis Signs Bill Cracking Down On Big Tech: ‘These Platforms Have Become Our Public Square.’ “Big Tech is prohibited from de-platforming Floridian political candidates. The Florida Election Commission will impose fines of $250,000 per day on any social media company that de-platforms any candidate for statewide office, and $25,000 per day for de-platforming candidates for non-statewide offices. Any Floridian can block any candidate they don’t want to hear from, and that is a right that belongs to each citizen — it’s not for Big Tech companies to decide.”
AH, BUT I WAS SO MUCH OLDER THEN, I’M YOUNGER THAN THAT NOW. Bob Dylan at 80: Dylan Refused to Be the Voice of a Generation.
THIS SOUNDS LIKE AN ORIGIN STORY: A Dead Man Was Cremated in Arizona Without Anyone Knowing He Was Radioactive.
IT’S A CROSS I HAVE TO BEAR: Get ready for Critical Looks Theory — the idea that attractive people “benefit from a violent system of lookism!”
TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: Under Biden, Is the Military Focused More on Winning Kinetic Wars or Culture Wars?
DID SOMEBODY PUT THE GOVERNMENT IN CHARGE OF IT? A looming shortage of. . . sand.
OUT ON A LIMB: Trump Remains the Key to Republican Election Victories. “Here’s the deal: Trumpism isn’t a set of specific policies, but a willingness to fight, a refusal to accept the terms of political debate set by the Democrats and the media, and a realignment of the party toward blue-collar workers. Liz Cheney rejected all of this innovation. She wanted to fight her own party. She wanted to assist Democrats and the media in smearing all Republicans with the January 6 Capitol riot—a move that Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is resisting in refusing to go along with the House bill to establish a commission to investigate it.”
OREGON UPDATE: Vaccine passports are white supremacist. “According to Black Lives Matter and other civil-rights groups, it does not matter that this gap in immunization is not intended. It does not matter that the men and women managing the vaccine program and distribution, or administering it to the public, do not discriminate at the vaccine sites by the race of persons who come for the shots.”
EVENTS, DEAR BOY, EVENTS: Best predictor of arrest rates? The ‘birth lottery of history.’
YOU SPELLED “LOCKDOWN” WRONG: Pandemic has fueled eating disorder surge in teens, adults.
TALKING POINTS ISSUED: New progressive talking point after NYC attacks: We condemn anti-semitism — and Islamophobia. “The ‘anti-semitism and Islamophobia’ formulation is the left-wing equivalent of some righties dismissing the slogan ‘black lives matter’ by saying ‘all lives matter’… The best we’re going to get from the woke brigades on that is ‘anti-semitism and Islamophobia are both wrong.’ Take it or leave it.”
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ERASED: University Illinois-Chicago Removes John Marshall From The Name Of Its Law School. Upside: A chance to name it for a donor.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Biden’s Radical Agenda Might Just Be DOA.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: What’s better than reading a CNN progressive tacitly admit that Biden can’t get much of anything through the Senate?
Answer: Reading it with your feet up and a cocktail.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- “Death to Jews” is Twitter policy, apparently
- Masks are the new awareness ribbons
- Mostly peaceful protesting expanded to include coolers full of poop
Bonus Sanity: For only the third time ever, it’s right there in the headline.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
ROGER KIMBALL: Reporting on War on Israel Shaped by Old Narrative About the West.
Perhaps the greatest part of “The Chatham House Version” is its title essay—“the most devastating polemic,” Pryce-Jones observes, “since the Second World War.”
“The Chatham House Version” is the name [Elie] Kedourie gives to a sensibility, a moral orientation, “a whole intellectual style.”
Kedourie took the phrase from Chatham House, the home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs off St. James’s park in London.
It was there that, for some thirty years, the historian Arnold Toynbee presided as Director of Studies.
And it was from Chatham House that Toynbee promulgated his sentimental effort to enlist history in an effort “to save mankind.”
It was, Kedourie shows in unsparing detail, an increasingly anti-Western effort.
It was also, as the years went by, increasingly anti-Semitic.
The West, Toynbee concludes in the last volume of “A Study of History,” “is a perpetual aggressor”—blundering, brutal, arrogant.
“I trace the west’s arrogance,” Toynbee wrote, “back to the Jewish notion of a ‘Chosen people.’”
It is a doctrine that, though dressed up in the impressive language of academic history, was “essentially simple and familiar.”
And, Kedourie might have added, perennially popular.
Behind it one hears “the shrill and clamant voice of English radicalism, thrilling with self-accusatory and joyful lamentation. Nostra culpa, Nostra maxima culpa: we have invaded, we have conquered, we have dominated, we have exploited.”
Many pages of “The Chatham House Version” could have been written yesterday.
The book’s relevance to the current situation is twofold.
First, it reminds us of an unpleasant history we have chosen to forget, and without which contemporary events in the Middle East are unintelligible.
It also serves as a salutary warning.
The French philosopher Jean-François Revel astringently summed up this aspect of Kedourie’s message when he observed that “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.”
The Chatham House version encourages that orgy of self-recrimination. Elie Kedourie shows us how culpable is that indulgence in misplaced guilt.
And from there, it’s but a short drive to the modern Corbynization of socialist politics: AOC’s and Her ‘Squad’s’ Love Fest With Hamas Gives the Head of Simon Wiesenthal Center a Shocking Case of Deja Vu.
SATIRE… OR IS IT? Transcript of Cuomo Brothers Strategy Session.
NY POST: COLUMBIA PREP STUDENTS AND PARENTS REEL AFTER CLASS ON ‘PORN LITERACY.’ Even in today’s world, you have to read it to believe it. Sprung on parents and students without warning. Here’s a student quote:
“We were all so shocked and mortified,” the girl told The Post. “We were all like, ‘Why are they doing this? Why do they think it’s OK?’
“We were supposed to answer questions about the porn stuff in the Zoom chat but we were all side-chatting in group chats and tons of kids thought it was so dumb that they sent the link to their friends all over the city and they were all logging on with the password.”
I’m not going to post the details, because it’s pretty graphic. Also, it sounds like it was a miserable failure. Parents should not be required to put up with this. But the head of the school sounds pretty chillaxed about the whole deal:
“It was unfortunate that we did not better inform ourselves of the speaker’s specific content in advance,” [school head William M.] Donohue continued. “In this case, the speaker did not align with our unique CGPS mission and for this, I apologize… Going forward we will certainly learn from this experience.”
And you thought, in our overheated social media environment, that understatement was dead.
OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH BILL GATES: NY Times changes entire narrative on Bill Gates.
‘JUST GET OFF:’ Incessant kindergarten questions halted school bus hijack, driver says. “A man who hijacked a school bus became so annoyed by the children on the vehicle asking him questions that he ordered them all off and drove away on his own, according to the bus driver.”