Archive for 2021
July 25, 2021
QUESTION ASKED: Is the Honeymoon Over? Biden’s Approval Rating Slips to 50 Percent.
Kamala’s polling even worse numbers: “The polls have not been kind to Vice President Kamala Harris of late, with the Real Clear Average of surveys now putting her at an under-water favorability of 44.3 percent — notably lower than her unfavorability of 46.3 percent.”
BUT HE DOESN’T WANT TO BECAUSE HE WORKS FOR THEM: Here’s all the proof Biden needs to conclude Covid-19 was leaked from a lab.
Biden administration officials are suddenly everywhere in the news, warning that the origins of the COVID-19 virus may remain shrouded in mystery for all time.
This curious effort to lower expectations comes as our spy agencies are halfway through the 90-day review that Joe Biden loudly and publicly “ordered” them to conduct back on May 26.
May 26 was, as it happens, the very same day we learned that, a few weeks earlier, Biden had secretly canceled an investigation launched by the Trump administration into exactly the same question.
Damage control? You may draw your own conclusions.
Oh, I have. And my conclusion is that Biden doesn’t want to find out because he works for the Chinese.
ARE YOU A NON-CONFORMIST? “Conformist societies aren’t tolerant.”
Related: It’s easy to be socialist in a free society. It’s impossible to be free in a socialist society.
Also: “A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”
I REMEMBER WHEN “EPISTEMIC CLOSURE” WAS SUPPOSED TO BE BAD: WaPo columnist lives in a partisan bubble and he likes it.
July 24, 2021
BUT THEY OPPOSED TRUMP BECAUSE “DECENCY.” The Lincoln Project celebrates intrusive rudeness.
Of course, by “decency” what they always meant was “grift.” Then there’s the tolerated sexual predation.
Plus:
None of this is new. For years the left has encouraged its side to harass conservatives. Whether it’s Obama telling supporters to “get in their faces,” or Maxine Waters telling progressives to harass Trump admin officials, or the violence of Antifa and BLM in the streets. And they can get away with it because if any conservative responds as would be appropriate- a punch in the mouth- there’s a progressive DA ready and willing to pursue all charges for the maximum penalties. All this is amplified by social media, which allows these nutjobs to become progressive heroes and get their fifteen minutes of fame.
Click, click, click goes the ratchet, and conservatives continue to buy more guns…
Well, understanding that actions have consequences isn’t what the left does.
RIP: Jackie Mason Dies: Rabbi Who Later Rose To Fame As A Comedian, Actor & Author Was 93.
As a comedian, Mason released albums including I Am the Greatest Comedian in the World, Only Nobody Knows It Yet! and I Want to Leave You With the Words of a Great Comedian. Mason was also well known for writing and performing in plays and one-man shows including The World According to Me, which earned him a Special Tony Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, an ACE Award, an Emmy and a Grammy nomination.
Mason appeared in TV series including The Simpsons, featuring on the film side in titles such as The Stoolie (1972), Steve Martin’s The Jerk (1979) and Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I.
He and Myron Cohen were perfectly cast as the voices of the robot tailors in Woody Allen’s Sleeper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV2N4KSh3x4
OPEN THREAD: Green grass and high tides forever.
THE PUBLIC ISN’T ACTUALLY BUYING WHAT THE PEOPLE RUNNING THINGS ARE SELLING: ‘Today Show’ Ratings Crater to 30-Year Low.
JAMES LILEKS FISKS an ignorant socialist.
And I just recently shared his famous Olive Garden screed with my daughter.
MICHAEL WALSH: The FBI is made of snitches, often trapping Americans into committing crimes.
UPDATE: FBI Delenda Est-But No Cato or Scipio Are In Sight.
After all, the FBI had advanced warnings about the Pulse nightclub shooter, the Parkland HS shooter, the Fort Hood shooter, and the San Bernardino shooters. Yet they all blazed away unmolested by our vigilant Federal dicks. (I also wonder about the Las Vegas shooter, whom the FBI cannot even figure out ex post. Or supposedly can’t. Maybe their ex post befuddlement is an attempt to conceal ex ante knowledge.)” . . .
The FBI operates as the elite’s political police. Not the president’s–as demonstrated by its concerted campaign to get Trump. The elite’s/oligarchy’s/ruling class’/administrative state’s political police.
(The FBI also shanked Nixon, BTW. Cf. Mark Felt.)
What is the FBI good at? Setting up mouth breathers to commit crimes, whom it can then arrest and then claim with great fanfare to have protected us from. If you look at most of the high profile terrorism cases the FBI prosecuted post-911, they were low-IQ losers cajoled by FBI informants (operating, of course, at the direction or at least strong suggestion of FBI agents) into committing crimes.
Most recently, the hair-on-fire claims about the allegedly dastardly plot to assassinate Wretched Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, appear to be less than a real threat than another prêt-à-porter FBI setup, with 12–12!–FBI informants/provocateurs outnumbering the actual dim bulb alleged conspirators.
But this is just one part of the bill of particulars against the FBI. It has also proved shockingly inept (to give it the benefit of the doubt) or complicit in some horrible crimes.
For example, in addition to the terrorism fails mentioned above, it let serial sex offender Larry Nasser operate with impunity for years. Its response to the revelations by the DOJ IG? Not even a “whoops, my bad.” It had copious information on Jeffrey Epstein whom it also allowed to continue his romps for years. (Given Bill Clinton’s and others’ involvement with Epstein, this may have been part of its political police function.) And just recently, FBI agent David Harris was arrested by Louisiana authorities–n.b. state authorities, not the FBI itself–for a sickening trail of child sexual abuse.
Again, in each case: incompetent, or complicit?
In the Nasser case (and others) an FBI agent lied when being questioned. If you or I lie when the FBI questions us–hard Federal time. They lie? No biggie!
Indeed.
I GOT MY GAMES last week, hope you will order yours.
The Virtue Signal game is still in stock but the Deplorables game is now out. So if you want the Virtue Signal game, order now before it runs out.
LIKE ALL WOKE CULTURE, IT’S BEEN FOISTED ON US BY A BULLYING MINORITY WITH MEDIA ASSISTANCE: The End of “Cancel Culture”? Young Americans may return us to a culture of compassion and forgiveness.
Overall, cancel culture is quite unpopular among all cohorts, with each generation viewing it more negatively than positively. Millennials appeared to be most supportive of cancel culture: 19 percent said they had a positive view of it, while 22 percent were neutral, 36 percent were opposed to it, and 22 percent said they had no opinion.
Perhaps surprisingly, given its progressive leanings and similar social and political beliefs to the millennial generation, Gen Z was the cohort most opposed to cancel culture: 55 percent said they had a negative view of cancel culture, 8 percent were supportive of it, 18 percent were neutral, and 19 percent had no opinion. Moreover, it’s the youngest cohort within Gen Z—currently ages 13 to 16—who are most opposed to cancel culture, with 59 percent having a negative view of it. That number falls to 48 percent for the oldest cohort within Gen Z—ages 21 through 24.
Morning Consult didn’t offer any theories about why this sizable split may exist between and within the generations. One possible explanation is that hypersensitivity may simply be a fad that is starting to burn itself out.
We can hope.
AN INTERVIEW WITH MATT RIDLEY: How Science Lost The Public’s Trust.
“Science” has become a political catchword. “I believe in science,” Joe Biden tweeted six days before he was elected president. “ Donald Trump doesn’t. It’s that simple, folks.”
But what does it mean to believe in science? The British science writer Matt Ridley draws a pointed distinction between “science as a philosophy” and “science as an institution.” The former grows out of the Enlightenment, which Mr. Ridley defines as “the primacy of rational and objective reasoning.” The latter, like all human institutions, is erratic, prone to falling well short of its stated principles. Mr. Ridley says the Covid pandemic has “thrown into sharp relief the disconnect between science as a philosophy and science as an institution.” . . .
Vaccines have been central to the question of “misinformation” and the White House’s pressure campaign against social media to censor it. Mr. Ridley worries about the opposite problem: that social media “is complicit in enforcing conformity.” It does this “through ‘fact checking,’ mob pile-ons, and direct censorship, now explicitly at the behest of the Biden administration.” He points out that Facebook and Wikipedia long banned any mention of the possibility that the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
“Conformity,” Mr. Ridley says, “is the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it.” Mr. Ridley reserves his bluntest criticism for “science as a profession,” which he says has become “rather off-puttingly arrogant and political, permeated by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.” Increasing numbers of scientists “seem to fall prey to groupthink, and the process of peer-reviewing and publishing allows dogmatic gate-keeping to get in the way of new ideas and open-minded challenge.”
The World Health Organization is a particular offender: “We had a dozen Western scientists go to China in February and team up with a dozen Chinese scientists under the auspices of the WHO.” At a subsequent press conference they pronounced the lab-leak theory “extremely unlikely.” The organization also ignored Taiwanese cries for help with Covid-19 in January 2020. “The Taiwanese said, ‘We’re picking up signs that this is a human-to-human transmission that threatens a major epidemic. Please, will you investigate?’ And the WHO basically said, ‘You’re from Taiwan. We’re not allowed to talk to you.’ ”
He notes that WHO’s primary task is forestalling pandemics. Yet in 2015 it “put out a statement saying that the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century is climate change. Now that, to me, suggests an organization not focused on the day job.”
In Mr. Ridley’s view, the scientific establishment has always had a tendency “to turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and expelling heretics and blasphemers.” This tendency was previously kept in check by the fragmented nature of the scientific enterprise: Prof. A at one university built his career by saying that Prof. B’s ideas somewhere else were wrong. In the age of social media, however, “the space for heterodoxy is evaporating.” So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution. It’s sure to be a costly divorce.
Everything run by the global ruling class becomes church-like, except, oddly, actual churches.
Plus:
Mr. Ridley notes that the question of Covid’s origin has “mostly been tackled by people outside the mainstream scientific establishment.” People inside not only have been “disappointingly incurious” but have tried to shut down the inquiry “to protect the reputation of science as an institution.” The most obvious reason for this resistance: If Covid leaked from a lab, and especially if it developed there, “science finds itself in the dock.”
Other factors have been at play as well. Scientists are as sensitive as other elites to charges of racism, which the Communist Party used to evade questions about specifically Chinese practices “such as the trade in wildlife for food or lab experiments on bat coronaviruses in the city of Wuhan.”
Scientists are a global guild, and the Western scientific community has “come to have a close relationship with, and even a reliance on, China.”
The Chinese must be astounded at how easy it has been to suborn our institutions.
AT HELEN’S PAGE: Fun gifts for kids at MomentToMemorybyMel or how about some Alpaca socks for yourself?
BRING ME MY WARP DRIVE: Electromagnetism is a property of the spacetime itself, study finds.
SUPERSREADER EVENT FINALLY BURNING ITSELF OUT: Texas Democrats unravel — “I’m just pissed off” that Biden won’t meet with them.
GREAT MOMENTS IN TROLLING: The racist Cleveland Guardians baseball team must be renamed.
This country is experiencing a long overdue racial reckoning — and the city of Cleveland and Major League Baseball have failed another major test. The new name for the professional baseball franchise in Cleveland — Guardians — must go. As several states work to remove imperialistic statues of cis white men, the city of Cleveland has reached into its racist past to honor them. This is not the progress that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been dreaming of.
The new mascot, for the team that will henceforth only be referenced as the ‘Cleveland Baseball Team’, is supposedly a reference to four giant stone statues that ‘guard’ the Hope Memorial Bridge just outside the city’s stadium. Hope Memorial Bridge was named after comedian and long-dead old white man, Bob Hope, who made problematic sexist and homophobic jokes over the course of his career. The statues loom over the stadium. They also loom over any progress that is expected to be made in the wake of the George Floyd murder a year ago.
Read the whole troll.
VISIONS OF THE ANOINTED: Thomas Sowell vs. “The Anointed Charlie Rose” — Shares personal stories on Clarence Thomas & Milton Friedman (video).
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 3 Essential Tips for Personal Defense.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF COVID ONE YEAR AGO AND SOMEONE SET UP US THE BOMB: Black Lives Matter protests may have slowed overall spread of coronavirus in Denver and other cities, new study finds.