Archive for 2021
August 30, 2021
VIDEO: Guess What Joe Biden Does When He Gets a Question About Afghanistan. “Who is telling Biden he isn’t ‘supposed to’ take any questions? Top options include but are not limited to DOCTOR Jill, White House Chief of Staff and Shadow President Ron Klain, and Corn Pop.”
HEATHER MAC DONALD: Playing the Race Card on Larry Elder. Engaging in shameful duplicity regarding crime and policing, the media attempt to portray the California gubernatorial candidate as anti-black. Columnists in the Los Angeles Times say he distorts facts, but they’re the ones making false claims — and ignoring the evidence in their own paper.
Unfortunately for Elder’s critics, the statistics showing vastly disproportionate rates of black crime and victimization come from some of the Left’s favorite sources. CDC data show that in 2015, for example, the homicide victimization rate for blacks aged 10–34 (37.5 per 100,000) was 13 times the rate for whites (2.9 per 100,000). That disparity is undoubtedly much greater now, given the record-breaking increase in homicides since the George Floyd riots—an increase disproportionately affecting blacks.
Those black victims of homicide are not being killed by cops or whites. They are being killed by other blacks. In Los Angeles, blacks this year have committed 46 percent of homicides whose offender is known, even though they are just 9 percent of the Los Angeles population. Whites make up 28 percent of the Los Angeles population but have committed 4 percent of homicides, mostly involving domestic violence. These data, reported by the Los Angeles Times, mean that a black Angeleno is 35 times more likely to commit a homicide than a white Angeleno. Homicide data are the gold standard for crime statistics. Alas for Jeffrey Fagan and the Los Angeles Times’s other experts, the statistical conclusion that blacks are “more inclined toward violent crimes” is indisputable. . . .
Elder’s dismissal of Black Lives Matter claims about systemic police violence is also grounded in fact. Police officers are at greater risk of civilian violence than blacks are at risk of police violence. And a disproportionate source of that danger to cops comes from black criminals.
Read the whole thing.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Own Your Failure, Biden Voters.
OUT ON A LIMB: Progressives have ruined California.
HOUSTON STEPS UP: Mattress Mack prepares to send 30 trucks loaded with relief supplies to region ravaged by Hurricane Ida.
Flashback to four years ago:
Americans are so much better than their ruling class.
TO BE FAIR, IT WAS ALMOST PUDDING CUP TIME: Was Biden looking at his watch during ceremony for Marines killed in Kabul?
IN THE MIDST OF A White House Breakdown.
Related: Kamala Harris’ cackling is Joe Biden’s job security.
THEY LIED AND CHEATED TO GET RID OF TRUMP, AND SHOULD BE HELD FULLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RESULTING DISASTER:
Well done, mainstream media.
You put Biden in the White House.
The man is a total loser, unfit to lead America and the free world.
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) August 29, 2021
Flashback: Time Publishes an Astonishing Story About a ‘Cabal’ and ‘Shadow Campaign’ That Helped Biden Win.
THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Former New York Times Reporter and Lockdown Sceptic Alex Berenson Banned From Twitter.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: The Odds on Biden Ever Getting Anything Right Are Horrible. “What this administration has really succeeded in undoing is America’s credibility on the world stage. In seven months.”
FBI PAID A WHITE SUPREMACIST BEAUCOUP BUCKS: Just the News did a little digging in court records and found the FBI paid a lot of money over a bunch of years to an informant who is/was a publisher of White Supremacists literature. Since the FBI also helped plot the kidnapping of a governor, another such revelation won’t raise that many eyebrows.
FEDS GET A RAISE: Hey, the bureaucrats did such a great job “managing” the Covid crisis from home that His Fraudulency awarded them a nice pay hike, Federal News Network reports.
IF IT WADDLES AND QUACKS LIKE A DUCK: Then odds are, it’s probably a duck. Does the same apply to the universe and the appearance of fine-tuning? Kyle Butt points to the multiple atheist advocates who concede there’s a lot of quacking going on out there.
RIGHT ON CUE, THE PRESIDENT’S MISTAKES ARE OUR FAULT AGAIN. “You can tell a Democrat is president, because we’re starting to see pieces blaming ‘us’ for his mistakes. In The Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, Tom Nichols wrote that ‘Afghanistan Is Your Fault.’ ‘American citizens,’ Nichols suggested, ‘will separate into their usual camps and identify all of the obvious causes and culprits except for one: themselves.’ Today, Max Boot makes the same argument in the Post. ‘Who’s to blame for the deaths of 13 service members in Kabul?’ he asks. Answer: ‘We all are.’”
I shouted out who killed Supreme Court packing, when after all it was you and me.
COLD WAR II: The Chinese Nuclear Breakout and the Biden Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review.
On August 12, 2021, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command Admiral Charles Richard stated, “We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China….The explosive growth in their nuclear and conventional forces can only be what I described as breathtaking.” He added that “…frankly, that word ‘breathtaking’ may not be enough.” Admiral Richard characterized China as a “peer” nuclear competitor and noted that we now face two nuclear “peer” competitors, Russia and China, compared to one during the Cold War.
Admiral Richard was talking about the massive Chinese silo construction program for the large, multiple warhead DF-41 ICBM, generally reported to be able to carry 10 nuclear warheads. He confirmed the earlier reports of two new ICBM fields and that each had about 120 silos for the large Chinese DF-41 ICBM. On August 12, 2021, Bill Gertz wrote in The Washington Times that a third ICBM field had been discovered and that, “Together, the three new missile bases will house 350 to 400 new long-range nuclear missiles, U.S. officials said. If 10 warheads are deployed on the DF-41s, China‘s warhead level will increase to more than 4,000 warheads on its DF-41s alone.”
We’re still trying to figure out how (or even if) we’re going to replace 400 Minuteman III missiles that date back to the early ’70s.
Complicating things, each Minuteman is limited by treaty with Russia to a single warhead. China is under no such restriction.
SALENA ZITO: The Restorative Power of the American People.
Turn on social media, cable news, or the national news networks, and you would be inclined to believe that we loathe those who are different than us. You would also be inclined to believe that everyone who lives outside the urban centers is backward, stupid, and racist.
Turn off social media, get off the interstates, and spend time in the overlooked neighborhoods, projects, and small towns. You will find, for the most part, the exact opposite of those sentiments. You will discover that many who live in the cities, no matter what the color of their skin is, want to find a way out, not because they don’t love their cities but because those who govern them have become so drunk with power, they find living there untenable.
They no longer trust them to make the right choices because every choice is based on their own political power.
Many of the people I listened to were eating at a diner, a place that some journalists look down on with disdain. Going to a diner when traveling, especially as a reporter, is essential. Our job as journalists is to go where people frequent, not to go where you wish they frequented. . . .
My best estimation of where Americans are culturally and politically is that we are much closer to an inside/outside moment in our history and not left/right. We have been so disrupted by our mistrust in school boards, political parties, unions, academia, institutions, and entertainment that it has strained our ties to our traditional cultural curators.
Whether it is in small towns such as Jordan, Kansas, or more cosmopolitan towns such as Bozeman, Montana, or Aspen, Colorado, multiple interviews taught me something new this year; the long-standing relationship between people and government is unsteady, even among the relatively well-off families.
Everywhere you look, our disconnect between the outside and our centers of power is both wide and deep — it is clear this will affect the party in power. What is unclear is if the party out of power can pull itself together and govern as the outsiders people are craving.
Yep. To paraphrase a famous man, never underestimate the GOP’s ability to f*ck things up.
THE SUPREME COURT JUST (FINALLY) STOOD UP FOR PROPERTY RIGHTS AGAINST THE CDC’S LAWLESSNESS.
Like Harvey Weinstein before them, the CDC needs a place to channel its anger over the court’s decision, so it’s decided to give the NRA its full attention: ‘Something has to be done:’ After decades of near-silence from the CDC, the agency’s director is speaking up about gun violence.
BIDEN AND MILLEY HAD ASSURED ME THAT HOPE WAS A PLAN: Senator Sasse: ‘There Was Clearly No Plan’ to Evacuate Americans From Kabul.
SIDWELL FRIENDS, WHERE AMERICA’S RULING CLASS GOES TO LEARN PHYSICS:
Article here.
Flashback: Trump And The Crisis Of The Meritocracy.
A lot of Americans resent the meritocrats’ insulation from what’s happening elsewhere, especially as America’s unfortunate record over the past couple of decades, whether in economics, in politics, or in foreign policy, doesn’t suggest that the “meritocracy” is overflowing with, you know, actual merit.
In the United States, the result has been Trump. In Britain, the result was Brexit. In both cases, the allegedly elite — who are supposed to be cool, considered, and above the vulgar passions of the masses — went more or less crazy. From conspiracy theories (it was the Russians!) to bizarre escape fantasies (A Brexit vote redo! A military coup to oust Trump!) the cognitive elite suddenly didn’t seem especially elite, or for that matter particularly cognitive.
In fact, while America was losing wars abroad and jobs at home, elites seemed focused on things that were, well, faintly ridiculous. As Richard Fernandez tweeted: “The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.” It was fatal: “People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.”
Well, one end of the horse, anyway. Things have, of course, gotten much worse since this was written. And there’s every evidence that our ruling class intends to continue that trend as long as it is allowed to.