Archive for 2021
June 12, 2021
BORIS IS MILKING THE SOFT POWER DIVIDEND OF THIS MOMENT: Boris Johnson Says G7 Countries Must ‘Build Back Better’ In A ‘Greener,’ ‘More Gender Neutral,’ And More ‘Feminine’ Way.
I’m so old, I can remember when Johnson was still a Tory. How does he square the circle between stock phrases, “more gender neutral,” and more “feminine?” More importantly, how does Boris utter this sort of language after expertly diagramming Churchill’s speeches?
(Classical reference in headline.)
IT’S NOT THE YEARS IT’S THE MILEAGE: Traps, Pitfalls, Ambushes, and Lots of Snakes: ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ Turns 40.
STANDING UP TO RACISM: Judge halts loan forgiveness program for farmers of color after lawsuit alleges it discriminates against white farmers. Probably because it does: “The program pays up to 120% of direct or guaranteed farm loan balances for Black, American Indian, Hispanic, Asian American or Pacific Islander farmers.”
Did anyone else catch the sordid humiliation porn screened on CNN Thursday? The nine-minute clip featured a MILF-cum-dominatrix who works under the name Alisyn Camerota and a promising new adult star called Jeffrey Toobin (onlyfans.com/jeffreytoobin).
It was Toobin’s first appearance on the AVN-award-winning network since his eight-month stint in a dungeon. The little-pig-boy, 61, was locked up after one of his cam-shows went awry at his other employer, a top-shelf skin mag called the New Yorker.
‘It’s been a while,’ Camerota begins. ‘It has been a while indeed,’ Toobin replies with a wry smile. Camerota then ‘recaps’ where Toobin has been for the last few months, as the two giggle to themselves.
* * * * * * * *
The dominatrix has posted the full nine-minute clip to her Twitter profile, with the unassuming caption ‘My interview with @JeffreyToobin.’
Cockburn has a sturdy disposition and an open mind — but even he struggled to witness such depravity on national television. Is retaining a role at CNN really worth such a public and excruciating exposure? Hopefully Mistress Camerota keeps the ball-gag in for Toobin’s next appearance, to save him a few blushes.
Absolutely savage.
DESANTIS CONTINUES TO BE A HOSS: Florida bans teaching of critical race theory.
MICHAEL YON: Hong Kong 612 — this was the day.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: UCLA Confirms BLM Co-founder Who Called to End “Project That’s Called Israel” Will Be Commencement Speaker.
GOOD IDEA, BUT THEY HAVE ENOUGH OF THE WORLD’S LEADERSHIP AND MEDIA ON THE PAYROLL TO PREVENT THIS: Make Communist China Pay for COVID-19.
UPDATE: A friend comments: “They won’t say so but the uniparty globalists’ theory of national security is to effect a corporate merger of the US and China. And from there the world. Literally Orwell.”
BRANDED: Unvaccinated students ‘branded’ at New Hampshire prom.
A New Hampshire high school is facing the heat for “branding” unvaccinated students at the prom.
Exeter High School officials wrote in marker on the hands of students who didn’t have a coronavirus vaccine or didn’t have a second shot. The school said it was for contact tracing, prompting a social-media outcry.
“Students who were unable to provide a vaccination card because they did not have or share a card or had not completed the full vaccination process had a number written on their hand,” read a statement from the high school that outlined safety protocols for the prom.
The event was held outside on school grounds last Friday and students were notified about the contact tracing system via a special website prior to the prom, according to the school.
However, the website doesn’t mention appear to mention the marker system.
Just have them ring a bell and shout out “unclean!” when they approach.
JIM TREACHER: CNN Gives Jeffrey Toobin Another Whack at It — Obviously he’s got some pull.
An unnamed CNN executive told WaPo: “I don’t think that one terrible mistake should define a person or ruin their employment opportunities for life.”
Unfortunately, that generosity of spirit doesn’t extend to anybody outside the CNN bubble. If you’re a random guy who makes a meme of Trump beating up the CNN logo, the network will devote their full resources to tracking you down and threatening to ruin your life.
If you’re an old lady with a Facebook page supporting Trump, CNN will send a “journalist” to stand on your lawn and berate you.
And of course, if you’re a high-school student in a MAGA hat who smirks at a Native American dude in front of the Lincoln Memorial, CNN will make you the villain of their top story for a week. They’ll try to crush you for wearing the wrong slogan.
But if you work for CNN, you can yank your crank during a work Zoom call and they’ll just say, “Ehhhh, big deal. It could happen to anybody!” It’s good to be a Democrat.
Indeed it is. Iowahawk called this week’s happy ending (sorry) for Toobin back in October:
PAY RAISES COMING FOR HILL STAFFERS: Prospects are growing that Congress, or at least the House of Representatives will reverse a decade-long trend and authorize more funds to improve compensation for personal and committee aides.
Conservatives and libertarians who are properly predisposed against any sentence containing the words “government” and “more” should think twice before opposing better pay for Hill aides. The Founders wisely made Congress the “first branch,” with all of the constitutional perogatives needed to win any battle with either of the other two branches.
But Congress under Democrats and Republicans for the past 50 years has steadily ceded its powers, especially in the regulatory fields, to the executive branch and the courts. The result has been more unaccountable bureaucrats and judges.
It will do no good, however, to pull that power back if Congress doesn’t ensure it has sufficient staff to do the tremendous amount of day-to-day work required to do effective oversight. At least voters can toss the rascals in Congress out when they don’t do their jobs properly.
SCIENCE! Did Teachers Union Input at CDC Cross a Line? “One detail not disclosed at the time: The AFT had a hand in crafting the guidelines. On May 1, The New York Post broke the news of emails between the union and the CDC, obtained by the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust, showing that the CDC had consulted with the teachers union, and that two suggestions from the AFT had been incorporated, almost verbatim, into the final document.”
MOST POPULAR READER BOOK SO FAR THIS YEAR: Cry Bullies: Protecting yourself against social muggers and victimhood aggression. You can also view it at Barnes and Noble if you prefer.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BOOK OF JONAH: Cape Cod fisherman OK after whale gulps him down, spits him out.
Michael Packard, on his way out from the hospital just a few hours later, told a local TV reporter he thought that was it for him.
“I realized I’m in a whale’s mouth, and he’s trying to swallow me,” a shaken-sounding Packard told WBZ. “I thought to myself, ‘Hey, this is it. I’m going to die.’”
But happily, his physical recovery seems to be going swimmingly. Medical personnel had suspected he’d broken at least one of his legs, but it appears he escaped even that, his mother said.
“He doesn’t have any broken bones,” she said. “He’s terribly fortunate.”
She said she’d just talked to him on the phone, and they didn’t get too far into what it’s like in a whale’s mouth.
But she did say, “He said he knew it was the end — he absolutely accepted it.”
Humpback don’t actually eat people. Experts say this kind of behavior is essentially unheard of, and likely is just a freak incident — a fluke, if you will. There’s a pretty good chance no one outside of Nineveh-bound biblical figures can match Packard’s story.
Marine mammal expert Peter Corkeron of the New England Aquarium told the Herald that humpback whales are “gulp feeders” who eat by unhinging their mouths and taking big lunges through the water. And when you’re 50 feet long and weigh 30 tons, as humpbacks can, sometimes you don’t really have too much fine control over where you’re headed, he noted.
“They slurp up as much as they can, and then swallow it down,” he said, noting that he’s never heard of a human being scooped up like this. This one was probably looking to snatch up some fish when Packard ended up in just the wrong place at the wrong time.
Corkeron said there’s actually evidence that humpbacks can be “altruistic” toward humans — and the happy ending to this whale tale could be another such case, given that Packard said the whale swam to the surface to spew him out.
And of course, humans can be remarkably altruistic to whales — not least of which, wannabe marine biologists:
THAT’S ALL THEY HAVE NOW: Former NY Times Columnist Rips Paper Over ‘Activist Journalists.’
DEMONIZATION IS WHAT THE LEFT DOES: The Demonization of Benjamin Netanyahu: He’s simply an Israeli patriot, but detractors called him an enemy of peace, even a Republican.
Opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, have worked for more than a quarter-century to tarnish his image in the U.S. and around the world.
In 1996, when Israelis first elected him to put a brake on a dangerous Oslo process, Mr. Netanyahu was depicted as an enemy of peace. For three years, his opponents insisted that if only Israel were rid of Mr. Netanyahu, it could make peace with Yasser Arafat. They were wrong. Ehud Barak defeated Mr. Netanyahu in 1999 and offered Arafat sweeping concessions at Camp David a year later. Instead of peace, Israel got scores of suicide bombings and the worst wave of Palestinian terrorism in its history—the so-called second intifada in which more than 1,000 Israelis were murdered.
That was followed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 decision to withdraw from Gaza. Just as Mr. Netanyahu predicted, Israel’s unilateral concession led only to further aggression. Hamas, a genocidal terror organization committed to Israel’s destruction, took over Gaza and turned it into a base from which thousands of missiles have been fired at Israeli cities.
Mr. Netanyahu returned to the premiership in 2009. The preceding bloody decade should have made it obvious to all that Palestinian leaders didn’t want peace. But Mr. Netanyahu was scapegoated again. Now Mahmoud Abbas was cast as a peacemaker instead of Arafat, who died in 2004. While few Israelis believed such nonsense any longer, many foreign policy makers did, including key officials in the Obama White House.
This time, another element was added to the demonization of Mr. Netanyahu: American partisan politics. Not only was he cast as an enemy of peace; he was accused of being a Republican. His critics portrayed his legitimate opposition to a Democratic president’s dangerous Middle East policies as an illegitimate effort to intervene in American politics. . . .
The demonization of Mr. Netanyahu says more about his critics than about him. He was never an enemy of peace; he understood that his critics were dangerously naive. By rejecting their ideas and following a path of peace through strength, his policies not only brought Israel the safest decade in its history; they also brought peace agreements and normalization with four Arab states.
Mr. Netanyahu is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. He is an Israeli patriot who has opposed the policies of even our greatest friends when he thought those policies endangered Israel.
That’s what they can’t forgive him for.
FROM CELIA HAYES: The Golden Road.
Sixteen year old Fredi Steinmetz longed for adventure and riches. What better way to find both than to follow the Gold Rush from Texas to California, But he didn’t reckon on bandits, and robbers, gold in the riverbanks, murder in the streets of San Francisco and the saloons of Moke Hill, a rich cache under a half-dead pine tree on the North Fork, of Mormons and gold-miners, fugitive Fenians, and the Lotta Crabtree, the Faery Star dancing under a glittering golden rain thrown on stage The wild west was never wilder.