EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: ‘A Giant Can of Worms’: Refugee Afghans Are Walking Off U.S. Bases, No One Knows Where They Are.
Archive for 2021
October 4, 2021
COMMIES GOTTA COMMIE: China tightens political control of internet giants.
The crackdown reflects Xi’s public emphasis on reviving the party’s “original mission” of leading economic and social development, said Steve Tsang, a Chinese politics specialist at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He said it could also help Xi politically if, as expected, he pursues a third five-year term as party leader.
Chinese leaders don’t want to reimpose direct control of the economy but want private sector companies to align with ruling party plans, said Lester Ross, head of the Beijing office of law firm WilmerHale.
“What they are worried about is companies getting too big and too independent of the party,” said Ross.
This is good news — for us.
Tech firms that need to please the Party instead of their customers will fail to innovate.
#JOURNALISM: Camera retracts story about 9/11 reflections of Boulder residents. “The Camera has determined that multiple statements attributed to these sources, including purported direct quotations, were fabricated.”
Plus: “This list does not necessarily constitute every error in the article.”
There’s no disgrace in correcting errors and fabrications, of course, but one wonders how this many — see the rather extensive list at the link — got through.
THE TOP 10 PEOPLE BOOKS HAVE BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT: One list was compiled by a CIA analyst in 1999, the other by a former Los Angeles Police detective in 2020. The same name tops both lists, but there are some surprises in who’s where and how the rankings changed.
UPDATE: For commenters who question the accuracy of the Google search results, I should point out that Wallace notes the results are based on “every country, every publisher, and every kind of author (including self-published).”
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: The Obedient, the Brainless, and the Woking Dead. “If I had worn a t-shirt five years ago that read “All Lives Matter,” I would have taken first place at the Mark Ruffalo ‘Enlightened White Guy’ Contest. Janeane Garofalo would have slept with me (eww) and then made me a tofu sandwich. Today, such a shirt would get me fired for being a bigot.”
IF YOU’RE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, DON’T MISS THIS: On November 3 at 5:30 p.m., Greg Lukianoff, author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), will be delivering a public lecture at the University of San Diego. You’re invited!
(Yes, thanks to a generous donation from Mrs. Joan E. Bowes, the University of San Diego hosts a talk each year from a prominent conservative/libertarian/classical liberal each year. That’s better than some universities.)
TWO TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE IN ONE! Biden administration has ‘two very different attitudes’ to COVID:
Sky News host James Morrow says the Biden administration has “two very different attitudes” to COVID depending on how you choose to enter the country.
While overseas travellers from 33 countries will be permitted entry if they show proof of vaccination and test negative to the virus, Democrats last week voted to block measures which would ensure illegal immigrants were tested.
“Strict rules for people flying into the country legally, but it’s a COVID free-for-all if you stroll in illegally, and it doesn’t make any sense until you realise one thing,” he said.
“The stuff for legitimate travellers flying into LAX or JFK is all window dressing.
Earlier: Are we in a pandemic or not?
DETERRENCE: Russia and China are Already Winning the Nuclear Arms Race.
How did America’s leaders allow the country to become so vulnerable? U.S. leaders began a policy of nuclear disarmament at a pace far exceeding Russia’s following the end of the Cold War, naively believing the existential threat had passed. This exposed the United States to unnecessary and increasingly intolerable risks. By 2016, the U.S. nuclear arsenal had been reduced from 30,000 nuclear weapons to only 1,750 operational warheads. Many of these weapons are deployed on aging delivery systems of increasingly questionable reliability. Today, only 720 of America’s warheads are ready to launch at any given time, of which 50 percent would likely survive a full-scale nuclear first strike. The reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile is also a major concern. Successive administrations have failed to ensure it will function as designed in the event of a crisis.
Over the past decade, the United States has allowed itself to be overtaken by the Sino-Russian alliance in virtually every recognized measure of strategic military power. This includes offensive nuclear weapon systems, national missile defenses, hypersonic weapons, super-EMP weapons, and cyberwarfare capabilities. America has fallen behind its adversaries in terms of their combined economic and industrial manufacturing might, their ability to produce major weapon systems without foreign components, their hardening of critical infrastructures against EMP/cyberattack, their civil defenses, and overall nuclear war survivability.
The Department of Defense estimated in 2017 that the Russian Federation was in the process of building its own nuclear arsenal to total 8,000 deployed warheads, which is over four and a half times more operational nuclear warheads than the United States possesses. Russia has also deployed six strategic nuclear “superweapon” systems of a type the United States does not even possess that are not limited by existing arms control treaties. Former Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer Rebekah Koffler has stated, Putin believes war with the United States is “unavoidable.”
Read the whole thing.
ZOGBY ON BIDEN: Free fall over, but ‘he is stuck.’
Free fall is over for now.
Accidentally?! They promised to go full Al Gore in August: Taliban vow to tackle Climate Change: Terror group sets out its eco credentials (presumably by taking Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages).
You’ll never get the admiration of Grauniad readers like that. Oh wait: Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Fauci’s Pathetic, Low-Rent Mussolini Shtick Has Got to Go. “The person with the biggest vested interest in keeping the drama going is the dictatorial snake oil salesman, Anthony Fauci. The alleged physician is a pathological attention whore who has been turned into the kind of celebrity that only the diseased minds of American leftists could create. Appearing on the Sunday shows has become his crack and he is a full-on addict.”
ROGER KIMBALL: The January 6 Insurrection Hoax.
Notwithstanding all the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, two critical things stand out. The first is that what happened was much more hoax than insurrection. In fact, in my judgment, it wasn’t an insurrection at all.
An “insurrection,” as the dictionary will tell you, is a violent uprising against a government or other established authority. Unlike the violent riots that swept the country in the summer of 2020—riots that caused some $2 billion in property damage and claimed more than 20 lives—the January 6 protest at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. lasted a few hours, caused minimal damage, and the only person directly killed was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol Police officer. It was, as Tucker Carlson said shortly after the event, a political protest that “got out of hand.”
At the rally preceding the events in question, Donald Trump had suggested that people march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically”—these were his exact words—in order to make their voices heard. He did not incite a riot; he stirred up a crowd. Was that, given the circumstances, imprudent? Probably. Was it an effort to overthrow the government? Hardly.
I know this is not the narrative that we have all been instructed to parrot. Indeed, to listen to the establishment media and our political masters, the January 6 protest was a dire threat to the very fabric of our nation: the worst assault on “our democracy” since 9/11, since Pearl Harbor, and even—according to Joe Biden last April—since the Civil War!
Note that phrase “our democracy”: Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and various talking heads have repeated it ad nauseam. But you do not need an advanced degree in hermeneutics to understand that what they mean by “our democracy” is their oligarchy. Similarly, when Pelosi talks about “the people’s house,” she doesn’t mean a house that welcomes riff-raff like you and me.
I just alluded to Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed supporter of Donald Trump who was shot and killed on January 6. Her fate brings me to the second critical thing to understand about the January 6 insurrection hoax. Namely, that it was not a stand-alone event.
On the contrary, what happened that afternoon, and what happened afterwards, is only intelligible when seen as a chapter in the long-running effort to discredit and, ultimately, to dispose of Donald Trump—as well as what Hillary Clinton might call the “deplorable” populist sentiment that brought Trump to power.
In other words, to understand the January 6 insurrection hoax, you also have to understand that other long-running hoax, the Russia collusion hoax.
Read the whole thing.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Do Universities Still Care About Truth?
WEIRD. THEY’RE ACTING MORE LIKE THE LEGISLATION THAT’S SUPPOSED TO SOLVE THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS A MORE GENUINE CRISIS THAN THE CLIMATE CRISIS THEY’RE ALWAYS TELLING US ABOUT: Apple, Amazon and others back groups trying to kill US climate legislation.
WHEN YOU HAVE AN UNQUALIFIED PRESIDENT WITH AN UNQUALIFIED ADMINISTRATION, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS: Complete collapse: Team Biden’s made a mess on every front.
Remember that the entire Democratic establishment — and much of the GOP establishment — was eager to install this guy despite knowing he was utterly unfit, just to get rid of Trump, whose only sin was that he wasn’t part of the establishment.
BUILD BACK BETTER’S UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME FOR ILLEGALS: Joseph Simonson of the Washington Free Beacon went dumpster diving, again, in that $3.5 trillion spending and taxing explosion and look what he found this time. Senate Parliamentarian, are you watching this?
DEMOCRAT TAMMY DUCKWORTH SLAMMED FOR GETTING TAX BREAK ON HER ILLINOIS HOME: “U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a disabled U.S. military veteran, has been criticized by a Chicago newspaper for taking advantage of a tax break that has allowed her to avoid paying property taxes on her Cook County, Illinois, home since 2015.”
IT’S COME TO THIS: Did Leftists Who Stalked and Filmed Sinema in the Bathroom Commit a Crime?
Sinema wasn’t the only (more or less) moderate Dem to be confronted by far left protestors (and whether they know it or not, aficionados of Saul Alinksky’s tactics) over the weekend: Manchin confronted by kayakers in his DC houseboat.
HMM: Remember that ‘Emergency Funding’ the States Needed Last March? Here’s What Happened to It. “Now, an analysis by the Associated Press has found that nearly 7 months after Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, precious little of that $350 billion for state and local governments has been spent.”
ON SUNDAYS I RUN A WRITING CHALLENGE AND PROMO (MOSTLY) INDIE AUTHORS: Writing challenge and Sunday book promo.
WRONG AGAIN, BERNIE: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) regularly claims “the working people of America” want His Fraudulency’s gargantuam $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” spending and tax hike explosion. Bernie should check out Issues & Insight’s latest TIPP survey that found most Independents are in fact opposed to the Biden Blowout.