Archive for 2021

LAW & ORDER: GOP.

Kevin McCarthy Pressures Pelosi to Punish Maxine Waters for ‘Inciting Violence’ in Minnesota.

Rashida Tlaib: ‘No More Policing… It Can’t Be Reformed.’

You have to wonder if Waters and Tlaib are secretly GOP plants working to help them in the midterms, but in any case, the GOP’s messaging in 2022 should contain a strong dose of this:

UPDATE: Welcome to Medellín, Minn., Where Elected Officials and Cops Are Afraid of BLM and Antifa Race ‘Cartels.’

GARBAGE SCIENCE: Microaggressions, Questionable Science, And Free Speech. “It is clear that, at this point, nobody—neither diversity [administrators], academics, or journalists—should take currently propagated lists of microaggressions as representative of anything meaningful.”

PROGRESS: Starlink Internet service could be ‘fully mobile’ by the end of the year.

Becoming fully mobile would mean the Internet service could follow customers to different addresses and be used in moving vehicles. Musk also said this week that Starlink could exit beta as early as the summer. So far, Starlink has more than 10,000 people signed up for its beta that launched last October.

During the beta, customers can’t move the hardware from address to address. The beta service only works at one home address. Details on the future of Starlink came when Musk replied to someone on Twitter who asked when they would be able to put the dish on an RV or tiny home or take it between addresses.

Musk replied Starlink would be fully mobile later this year, allowing it to be moved anywhere or used on an RV or truck in motion. He also noted that SpaceX needs a “few more satellite launches” to achieve complete coverage and the system also needs some software upgrades.

Faster, please.

VIRTUE SIGNALING SHOULD BE EXPENSIVE — INSTEAD OF WALKING OUT OF CLASS, THEY SHOULD HAVE TO WRITE A 3,000 WORD ESSAY: HS students stage walkout to protest racist Instagram threats … which turn out to be a hoax.

If you’re not willing to sacrifice to make a statement, you’re just a poser. And days off from school aren’t a sacrifice. And the school system won’t answer questions about the race of the hoaxer, which is pretty much an answer in itself.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Who Killed Ashli Babbitt? “Is it too much to ask to know the name of the federal government employee who, on our behalf, shot an unarmed veteran who was, at worst, trespassing in a public building? Apparently, it is, since no one in our glorious, licensed, and neutered regime media seems to want to tell us. They know. They all know. They just don’t want you to know.”

SCARS: Nobody ever leaves North Korea.

Next month, they may mark a milestone in their assimilation. Ji-Hyun Park, who runs education programmes for defectors in New Malden, is standing to be a Conservative councillor in her home seat of Moorside in Bury, Manchester. If successful, she would be the first person from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to be elected as a politician in the UK.

“When I arrived, many people welcomed us and they gave to us a lot of opportunities and happiness,” the 52-year-old tells UnHerd. “I wanted to pay back to them. I also know that in the UK, there live many voiceless people and also many immigrant women, who have hard times in society. I want to listen to their voice and solve their problems.”

Why Tory? “My life was lived in a socialist dictatorship country,” explains Park, who had to escape twice.

The surest way to cure someone of any affection for socialism to to have them live under it.

MY CAT ASKED ME, “WHY ARE THERE SO MANY VIRTUE-SIGNALING MORONS QUOTING THEIR KIDS ON TWITTER?”

Why indeed, Princess Purrs-a-lot, why indeed?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: The United States Should Soon Reach Fauci Immunity. “Our idiot president is often seen wearing two masks even though he’s immune now. If Fauci has his way, we will be wearing masks until we’re all too old to care.”

“HERE I STAND. I CAN DO NO OTHER”: Yesterday was the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s dramatic refusal to recant his “heresies” at the Diet of Worms. His words—“Here I stand. I can do no other”—are perhaps the Protestant Reformation’s most riveting.

Alas, it’s possible they were never actually uttered. They don’t appear in the contemporary records of the event. But, to me, that seems beside the point.  Luther gets full credit either way:  He lived the words.

The “Diet” was a heresy trial of sorts, called in the free imperial city of Worms by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Months earlier Pope Leo X had issued the Exsurge Domine (“Arise, O Lord”), a papal bull that condemned the many “errors” of Luther’s 95 Theses. The Diet was called to enforce Leo’s bull.

Luther refused to be intimidated. He did, however, apologize for the harshness of some of his words. Like many 16th century Germans, Luther had a penchant for the scatological. His writings were sprinkled with references to farts, excrement, and the bodily parts that produce them. That can make his writing seem less than inspiring to modern readers. (And, yes, he had an assortment of other prejudices that wouldn’t go over well today… it was another time and place.) On the other hand, his concern over corruption in the Roman Catholic Church was both sincere and important. No fair-minded person could disagree with him completely.

By standing by his beliefs, Luther was putting his life on the line. In theory, Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, had secured from the Emperor a guarantee of safe passage for Luther both coming and going from the Diet. Yet Luther knew the same promise had been made to Jan Hus a century earlier under similar circumstances. Hus had been nevertheless burned at the stake as a heretic.

In May, the Emperor issued the Edict of Worms: “[W]e forbid anyone from this time forward to dare, either by words or by deeds, to receive, defend, sustain, or favor the said Martin Luther. On the contrary, we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic ….” Luther had to be hidden away for a time.

Twenty-first century America is certainly a different time and place. We have our own issues. Mercifully, being a dissenter doesn’t require the same kind of courage it did in the 16th century.

On the things that matter, here we stand, fellow Instapundit readers. There’s not much excuse for failing to speak up.

YEP: Salena Zito: Trump didn’t form a populist coalition. He was the result of one.

By 2016, the voters who were to become Trump’s base already knew who they were. Trump was the only one of 17 Republicans and five Democrats who stood out to this group of politically homeless voters. He knew how to tap the aspirations they were looking for from a presidential candidate.

Second, many people who have left their support for Trump visible to others have not left those flags or signs up because they think the election was stolen. It’s not a testament to their undying support for one man; they’ve left them up because it is their only way to show the political class that they are not going away. . . . Cultural curators in the media, corporations, and the so-called social justice warriors just can’t dislodge themselves from their narrow idea that if you voted for Trump or any other Republican, you are part of this thing that needs to become extinct. These voters are telling you through their signs that that is not going to happen.

Related: Why are Democrats so scared of Donald Trump when they just defeated him? “In a nation returning to ‘normalcy,’ does Congress cower behind armed troops and 12-foot fences? Does a party securely in control try to enlist tech firms and media to snuff out voices of opposition? In a normal America, does a defeated presidential incumbent pose such a threat to the party in power that he must be impeached after leaving office, to ensure he doesn’t win back the White House in four years?”

Plus: It’s Time for the Deplorables to Become the Unconquerables. “Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general who administered a crushing defeat to Napoleon, did so by realizing that as long as he kept his army intact, he didn’t have to win flashy victories. And he eventually ground Napoleon’s forces down to a nub. Likewise, so long as the ­Deplorables don’t give up in their opposition, they can’t really be ­defeated. By staying motivated, the Deplorables can become the Unconquerables.”

FLASHBACK: Hillary Clinton’s cash for access diplomacy. “Given that it’s been obvious for a while that Hillary was trying to keep her emails out of the public eye, the question has been what she was trying to hide. The answer, at least in part, appears to be her practice of selling access to her in her official capacity via donations to her ‘nonprofit’ foundation.”

Just a reminder of how things were — and, no doubt, are again.

DAMAGED GOODS: Dr. Fauci Does Damage Control on Sunday Show Circuit After Getting Torched by Jim Jordan. “Sunday’s first media appearance is pretty astounding, given that Dr. Fauci did not sit with Chris Wallace on Fox this morning. CNN’s Dana Bash cited a poll and remarked on Republican vaccine hesitancy and how frustrating it must be for Fauci. So frustrating, apparently, that he didn’t appear on the news network most of them watch. Basically, he answers that Republicans are working against their preferred outcome and should get vaccinated if they want restrictions lifted. Maybe he is unaware that the restrictions are lifted in many red states, and they are doing just fine.”

Fauci has been actively discouraging people from getting vaccinated.

FROM KAL SPRIGGS:  Valor’s Child.

Jiden’s parents barely scrape out a living on the dry, dusty world of Century. Jiden wants more for herself and she is ready to step into a bright future, one which may lead her far from the frontier world of her birth. She has no dreams of following in the footsteps of her military family’s heritage, no desire to live a life of hardship.

She’s just got one obstacle in the path to her dreams: five months of military school. She’ll be away from her friends, subjected to long hours and a crushing work load. She’ll learn to shoot, to fight… and how to kill.
Jiden will need every skill she’s learned, because her family’s enemies have put her in their sights. She’s going to have to rise to the challenges in order to survive. She soon learns that her dreams might not be as good as she imagined. With her life on the line, Jiden will need to fall back on the skills she learned and prove that she’s a child of valor.