Archive for 2021
March 6, 2021
BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Liberals melt down on Twitter over video of Sen. Sinema’s thumbs-down vote against the minimum wage hike.
If you haven’t seen it yet (it broke Twitter yesterday), do not miss the clip of her thumbs down/curtsy gesture on the Senate floor.
(Classical reference in headline.)
YES. DO. Stop Saying We Can’t Go Back to Normal After Vaccines.
Some people don’t want to go back to normal.
NEANDERTHAL THINKING: U.S. Optimism About COVID-19 Situation Reaches New High, Gallup poll finds.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Covid deaths high in countries with more overweight people, says report.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? You’re Not Trans. You’re Just Weird:
Editor’s note: This hypothetically open letter was originally posted by its anonymous author on Medium and was rapidly removed as “hate speech.” We found it to be a refreshing dose of honesty, a charming and relatable open letter from one parent to other parents (not to the child, obviously!) about dealing with a challenging and dangerous moment in raising children, especially “weird” adolescents who search for their identities harder than others and risk making life-damaging mistakes in a way never before possible. We are reposting it here on New Discourses with the permission of the author.
by Donna M.
My dear, sweet, son,
I’ve got to break it to you: you’re not trans, you’re just weird.
This seems like a cruel thing to point out right now. Clearly, you are struggling and feeling pretty awful about things. I can see that you are in a rough patch, and one of the first rules of parenting is to not pile on. The world is pretty heavy on your shoulders. You’re fifteen. There’s a pandemic going on. But here I come anyway. I’m about to throw more on you.
When you were two – a happy, chubby, little tyke in pull-ups, you watched the world with wary eyes behind the thumb in your mouth. You leapt with joy in the rhythm of the toddle music classes. You chattered and shared stories about your stuffed animals. You loved your little sister. Enjoyed cookies and finger painting. That was all pretty normal.
But you also started to count to one thousand on our walks. And you started to call out the store names as we drove around. And you preferred reading books rather than playing with the other two-year-olds at preschool. And you hated sitting in the circle when instructed. And you hated the feel of blue jeans. And you threw big tantrums when you lost any kind of game. In other words, you started to show signs that you were… weird.
The grandparents were the first to notice. They said gentle things like “You oughta keep an eye on that one,” and sent us links to Wall Street Journal articles about child prodigies. And then the other parents in the play groups started to comment; “He’s pretty intense, huh?” And the teachers were on to it pretty quickly. They started to use fancy terms like “asynchronous development.”
Read the whole thing.
BIDEN’S RECKLESS IMMIGRATION TALK ISN’T JUST BAD FOR AMERICA, it lures immigrants into deadly danger. Michael Yon: Deadly Funnel: The Darien Gap. “There is no road at all connecting Panama and Colombia, thus the infamous Darien area is called the Gap. Or the Darien Gap. Reminds me of the Desert of Death in Afghanistan, only this is mountains, jungle, and murderers. And so, they must go on foot for roughly 4O miles and six days. . . . The osmotic human pressure has dramatically increased since January. The Biden administration established a Green Zone in D.C., unfurled a welcome-to-hell carpet across our Southern border, and now people are flooding through Darien. Communist Guerrillas and drug smugglers, along with naked tribesmen, fill the Darien. Even the Armies stay clear.”
Way back before InstaPundit was a thing, Peter Morgan and I argued that the “Ethics Establishment” was essentially corrupt, and nothing has happened since then to suggest we were wrong.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Baltimore Student Who Failed All But Three Classes In Four Years Was Ranked In Top Half Of His Class.
Baltimore’s last Republican mayor left office in 1967.
HEY, IT’S NOT ABOUT INCLUDING POOR PEOPLE. Northeastern hires first-ever ‘chief inclusion officer’…while hiking tuition 3.7 percent.
(HOW REFRESHING.) Biden Press Secretary: Trump Admin Doesn’t Deserve Credit for COVID Vaccine Rollout.
It’s hard to determine which has been more infuriating: Biden, Harris, and other Democrats deliberately undermining the vaccine last year by telling people it could be unsafe if “rushed through because of politics,” Democrats conveniently flip-flopping on that position after the election, or the Biden administration delivering slaps to the faces of Operation Warp Speed members who worked their fannies off to help make what was said to be impossible happen before the end of the year.
Biden can try and cover himself in glory all he wants on how the vaccine rollout has gone so far, but the facts are what they are. No amount of posturing and “circling back” on the issue from Psaki or any other spinmeister in this administration is going to change that.
In other news regarding the Circle Back Girl: Jen Psaki Tries to Explain Joe Biden’s ‘Neanderthal’ Insult, and People Feel the Unity.
(Classical reference in headline.)
GOODER AND HARDER: Walgreens shutters 10 stores in San Francisco as residents point to rampant shoplifting. “Under California law, theft under $950 is considered a misdemeanor, but many prosecutors throughout the state have opted to free those charged with the offense under certain conditions rather than holding them in jail for the maximum sentence of six months.”
Related: California Is Lost, Getting Rid of Newsom Won’t Save It.
WHY AREN’T PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THE NEW JORDAN PETERSON BOOK?
Well, some people are.
SHOULD HAVE DONE IT YEARS AGO: NRA move to Texas cheered by Cruz, Jordan, and Pompeo.
DAVID BERNSTEIN: Is non-Orthodox American Judaism doomed?
OUCH:
MICHAEL YON EMAILS: “Am in Colombia by Panama border. Edge of Darien Gap. Tons of migrants coming north. I’ve been talking with them and making many photos/videos.”
Stay tuned.
THE NEW BORDER CHAOS: A crisis of Biden’s own making.
Trump had a number of false starts at the border, but, by the end, had created an entirely reasonable system based on his lawful authorities to impose order at the border. There is no good reason to rip up much of this arrangement, though that’s exactly what Biden has done.
During the pandemic, Trump turned around illegal crossers at the border on public-health grounds. Biden has created an exception for unaccompanied minors, which is an obvious incentive for families to send children under age 18.
Under Trump, the Migration Protection Protocols, also known as Remain in Mexico, ended the practice of letting Central American migrants into the US while their asylum claims were adjudicated.
This was crucial because, under the old arrangement, asylum seekers were allowed in while their claims were considered. Even if the claims were ultimately rejected, as the vast majority of them were, the migrants overwhelmingly ended up staying anyway. This was a huge magnet to migrants — get to the border and claim asylum and you’re in the United States, very likely to stay.
Related: Dana Loesch explores The Rage Hypocrisy Over Texas’s Reopening:
Either the pandemic is a concern terrifying enough to close businesses forever; rob a year of life from children; set schools back a year; enforce policies that cause drug and alcohol abuse rates, anxiety percentages, suicide, and abuse to skyrocket; terrifying enough to hysterically invoke rhetoric like “They literally want to sacrifice the lives of our fellow Texans” — or it’s not.
O’Rourke and other Democrats haven’t expressed any hysteria over releasing often untested and/or coronavirus-positive illegal entrants and asylum-seekers into the country. In fact, they haven’t said a word.
I thought they were concerned about the pandemic and the lives affected?
Speaking of which: Biden administration tells facilities for migrant children to reopen to pre-pandemic levels.
IT’S ONLY A PANDEMIC CRISIS WHEN THEY WANT IT TO BE A PANDEMIC CRISIS: “Extraordinary circumstance”: Feds to reopen border shelters for child migrants — at full capacity, despite COVID.
SHOCKER: USA Today: Support for BLM has fallen and support for police has risen. “But perhaps the most interesting finding in this survey is that support for BLM has dropped more among Black Americans than white Americans. Similarly, trust in police has gone up slightly more among Black Americans than among whites.”
It was a made up line, for domestic political purposes. If there were a real insurrection, they’d deny it.
Plus: “(Two FBI operatives have since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a ‘suspect’ who may have engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But nothing still is known; Sicknick’s mother claims he died of a stroke while his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump mob savagely bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.)”
So I figure the “intelligence” about new “uprisings” on January 20, March 4, March 20, etc. is just people spreading rumors to make the authorities look stupid. If so, it’s working!
BOOK BANNING IN AN AGE OF AMAZON:
Last week, Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, vanished from “the world’s largest bookstore.” The hardbacks, the paperbacks—even the used copies of When Harry Became Sally sold by third-party sellers through Amazon—poof, gone. When questioned by Anderson’s publisher, Amazon lamely pointed to a new policy that permits it to bar “inappropriate and offensive” works and also “hate speech.” It never bothered to offer proof or explain how Anderson’s book ran afoul of these guidelines; it apparently didn’t think it needed to.
The New York Post’s editorial board attempted to explain why Amazon targeted this particular three-year old book: Anderson’s “scholarly analysis of transgenderism . . . questions politically correct sacred cows.” But there are plenty of other politically-incorrect volumes sold on Amazon, including Anderson’s 2012 book, What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense—a conservative objection to gay marriage. I suspect What is Marriage’s home on Amazon.com will remain undisturbed—not for lack of controversy, but for lack of relevance.And here we get to the key difference between the two books: The legality of gay marriage has been settled in America. Whatever people’s private feelings about gay marriage, its legality in America is beyond dispute, and its acceptance by American society, widespread. Opposing it is a dead issue, a loser.
And as Amazon well knows, no book is likely to change that.But transitioning minors—that’s another story. For all the sloganeering about how the sanctity of affirmation-based treatment is settled practice, it isn’t. Leading psychotherapists have challenged “affirmative care” and its abuses have been acknowledged in open court. J.K. Rowling’s well-publicized alarm at the spike in transgender identification among teen girls, followed by the publication of my book, encouraged a widespread backlash against the idea that it is wrong or repressive to question the protocols governing the medical transition of minors.
One week after Black History Month concluded, it’s…really something to see “Item Under Review” and “not currently available for purchase” on Amazon’s page for the Kindle edition of Thomas Sowell’s classic 1996 book, The Vision of the Anointed:
Related: We didn’t start this culture war. The woke left rages against increasingly bizarre things, and then calls everyone else crazy. “All this, and in the service of what? A new woke orthodoxy whose authoritarianism is matched only by its stupidity. If you genuinely think that building a better society starts with rebranding the kids’ toys, you have no business calling anyone else crazy. The left’s embrace of wokeness has made it look utterly ridiculous to the very people it should be representing. Nothing will be gained from this censorious, divisive movement. But a hell of a lot could be lost. Those of us on the anti-woke side of politics, which extends far beyond the lazy right-wing caricature, did not start this culture war. But we do need to win it.”
OUR GARBAGE ELITES ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF YET ANOTHER WAVE OF MASS HYSTERIA: Gone With the Wind, Breakfast at Tiffany’s among TCM’s nearly 2 dozen ‘problematic’ films.
It’s easier to succumb to mass hysteria when you’re garbage people performing for other garbage people, unrelieved by much in the way of intellect or values.
WAR ON THE WORKING CLASS: Democrats Just Snuck a $1 billion tax hike on workers into their Covid bill.
FROM DAVE FREER: TOM.
Tom is a cat in trouble. The worst possible kind of trouble: he’s been turned into a human. Transformed by an irascible old magician in need of a famulus — a servant and an assistant, Tom is as good at being a servant as a cat ever is. The assistant part is more to Tom’s taste: he rather fancies impressing the girl cats and terrorizing the other toms by transforming himself into a tiger. But the world of magic, a vanished and cursed princess, and a haunted skull, and a demon in the chamber-pot, to say nothing of conspiring wizards and the wickedest witch in the west, all seem to be out to kill Tom. He is a cat coming to terms with being a boy, dealing with all this. He has a raven and a cheese as… sort of allies.
And of course there is the princess.
If you were looking for ‘War and Peace’ this is the wrong book for you. It’s a light-hearted and gently satirical fantasy, full of terrible puns and… cats.