POWER LINE: The Decline of the West.
Archive for 2021
July 31, 2021
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Bear runs into Tennessee restaurant, then meanders along the sidewalk beside visitors. “At the time, officials with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency had reminded people that Gatlinburg is part of the bears’ natural habitat and roaming area.”
If you shot every bear that crossed the Gatlinburg city limits, within a few years the bears wouldn’t do that anymore. Deer know exactly where they can be hunted, and bears are smarter than deer.
I’M STILL TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHY DEMOCRATS THINK RUINING THEIR OWN STATES is a winning strategy.
Democrats: Well, those are the only ones we can ruin right now.
OPEN THREAD: If you choose not to comment, you still have made a choice.
SPACE JUNK, BETTER PUT UP MY UMBRELLA: Who’s going to fix the space junk problem?
Here’s a piece on space debris that Rob Merges and I wrote some years ago.
WAIT, I THOUGHT THE CHINESE HAD ELIMINATED COVID OVER A YEAR AGO THROUGH THEIR SUPERIOR HEAVY-HANDEDNESS: China outbreak spreads as WHO sounds alarm on Delta.
SO FAR, IT SEEMS THAT THE VACCINE RISKS HAVE BEEN EXAGGERATED: Teen heart risk from COVID-19 far exceeds that of vaccination, study says.
The risks in both cases are quite low. However, the “vaccinate teens so they won’t kill grandma” argument seems invalid based on this: CDC: Vaccinated people spread COVID-19 Delta variant as easily as unvaccinated.
Except that that conclusion doesn’t really follow from the Provincetown experience.
The “knowledge” here seems pretty uncertain, to be delivered in such tones of ringing certainty.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Imagine If They Hadn’t Lied To Us For The Last 18 Months.
BACK IN STOCK: OPR’s Bayrum Shave Soap.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Did a terrorist actually just win an Olympic gold medal? “The Tokyo Olympics may go down in history as the most bizarre Olympics yet. Star athletes quitting, transgender individuals competing against the opposite sex, and now this, a member of a terrorist group bringing home the gold.”
MORE FALLOUT FROM YEAR ZERO HYSTERIA: Man Hit by Toppled Confederate Statue Last Year Suffering From Traumatic Brain Injury. “Even though Green was at the protest, my heart breaks for him and his family. The story also makes me even more angry at the people who fueled this hysteria. At the height of this madness last spring, the magazine ‘Popular Mechanics’ published an article on how to more effectively pull down statues. A professor at John Jay College offered similar advice.”
The odd election of 2020 does not sit well with a great many Americans. They are not in the mood to engage in the equivalent theatrics of Ben Cohen’s mockery of Bush or the pussyhat feminists’ sneers against Trump.
President Biden is, in their view, a hollow figure not even worth mention. Their complaint lies far deeper as they see the purposeful destruction of American values by an elite that bullies and derides them.
What will come of this? How might revolt manifest itself? I hope it will be a successful recapture of key institutions, perhaps beginning with the schools. But the political elite that prefers to scorn the common people for wanting a say in their government is playing an awfully risky game. Despair breeds wrath and that fire, once ignited, will engulf us all.
From Peter Wood, the author of the 2007 book on America’s increasing anger, A Bee in the Mouth, which included (among many other anecdotes) a brilliant interpretation of the legendary scene of Jack Nicholson’s character accosting a waitress in the 1970 film, Five Easy Pieces: Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea “isn’t really a working-class guy. He was born to wealth and was successful as a concert pianist, and his work as an oil rigger is just his personal quest for authenticity. The waitress, however, is the real thing: a woman with few other options trying to make a living at a tough job. So the restaurant scene really offers a privileged elitist who has the freedom to float among whatever social roles he pleases, raging against someone he regards as beneath him because she is so bound to the conventions of her job. She is a resident of the working class; he is merely a truculent visitor. But the movie essentially invites us to see things his way. We, the sophisticated audience, are asked to share in Dupea’s contempt for meaningless conventions, even if we squirm a little at his cruelty to the waitress.”
STANDING UP FOR FREEDOM: Over 200,000 people protest against health pass in France.
NEW ORLEANS MAYOR’S MEDICAL ADVISOR ON COVID: “She added it is also more dangerous than smallpox and polio.”
Science!
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: I’m a Furry. Netflix’s Sexy Beasts Misses the Entire Point of Dressing Up Like an Animal.
No word yet if the author is actually Robert “Beto” O’Rourke.
GET READY FOR THE ‘NO-BUY’ LIST:
When I helped create PayPal in 1999, it was in furtherance of a revolutionary idea. No longer would ordinary people be dependent on large financial institutions to start a business.
Our democratized payment system caught fire and grew exponentially with millions of users who appreciated its ease and simplicity. Traditional banks were too slow and bureaucratic to adapt. Instead, the revolution we spawned two decades ago inspired new startups like Ally, Chime, Square, and Stripe, which have further expanded participation in the financial system.
But now PayPal is turning its back on its original mission. It is now leading the charge to restrict participation by those it deems unworthy.
First, in January, PayPal blocked a Christian crowdfunding site that raised money to bring demonstrators to Washington on January 6. Then, in February, PayPal announced that it was working with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to ban users from the platform. This week the company announced it is partnering with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to investigate and shut down accounts that the ADL considers too extreme.
Why is this a problem? Isn’t it perfectly reasonable to make sure bad actors don’t fund hate through these platforms?
I’m a Jewish American who has special appreciation for the ADL’s historical role as a watchdog against antisemitism. Whether it came from the Aryan Nation or the Nation of Islam, the ADL did admirable work in combatting it. But the ADL has changed. Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the organization has broadened its portfolio from antisemitism (or racism in the SPLC’s case) to cover what it considers to be “hate” or “extremism” in general.
The new ADL opposed the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh because of his “hostility to reproductive freedom.” It partnered with such beacons of philosemitism as Al Sharpton (you read that right) to boycott Facebook for allowing “hate speech on their platform.” It opposed Trump’s executive order banning Critical Race Theory in federal government training. And it called for Fox News to fire Tucker Carlson for his comments on immigration.
Whether one agrees with any of these positions is beside the point. The point is that the ADL, like the SPLC, now weighs in on issues far beyond its original purview.
Related: Target Banning Books from Website.
Given the endless series of political controversies Woke Capital keeps throwing up, it is understandable if most people have forgotten about the entire pitiful episode. Here is a quick refresher: Back in November 2020, Target.com had among its catalog two books that upset Twitter activists: Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier, and The End of Gender by Dr. Debra Soh. A Twitter user complained that books they did not like were being sold, prompting a rapid response from Target. Both books were re