PROFESSIONAL COURTESY: Biden Nominee Helped Free Robber, Accused Sex-Trafficker.
Archive for 2021
September 24, 2021
STICKER OF THE DAY: Beer Only Fridge Refrigerator Decal. (Bumped)
BUT WHICH PARTY WOULD SHE CAUCUS WITH? Sinema Cueing Up To Go Indy. “Absolutely fascinating look at Kyrsten Sinema’s efforts to position herself as an independent in Arizona, possibly formally but definitely in effect. It makes pretty clear she’s not done with politics or angling for a high dollar lobbying gig, as some speculate. She thinks she can be a latter-day McCain and build her political brand on that basis, likely looking for a promotion above the Senate.”
ON THE ONE HAND, I ROLL MY EYES WHEN HOLLYWOOD PEOPLE LECTURE ME ON “RAPE CULTURE:” ‘No Time to Die’ director says Connery’s Bond was ‘basically’ a rapist.
On the other hand, it is part of their core expertise. . . .
BRYAN CAPLAN: Woke is Old. “One of the less charming features of the woke movement is its vocal age prejudice. In conversation, believers have repeatedly appealed to my age and their youth to gain argumentative advantage. I’m tempted, admittedly, to respond in kind. In reality, the young have less insight on political and social issues than their elders. The young themselves agree.”
Hey, it’s the hip, anti-establishment youth who are shouting “Fuck Joe Biden!” at college football games. It’s the young fogeys who are parroting the logans of their elders from 1968.
September 23, 2021
NOW OUT FROM MY FRIEND HIAWATHA BRAY, Power in the Blood. We were talking about this when we had lunch in Boston over the summer.
Also, congrats to his son, a Marine who just completed the Crucible with, as it turns out, a broken leg the entire time.
OPEN THREAD: I got another confession, my friend — I ain’t no fool.
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Scientific American: Why the term ‘JEDI’ is problematic for describing programs that promote justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.
This is stuff that would get a C- and an “oh, come on” comment from a professor even somewhere like Oberlin (I think): “Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe, the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.).”
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UNEXPECTEDLY: Biden, Who Demands People ‘Pay Their Fair Share’ In Taxes, May Owe Up To $500,000 In Back Taxes: Report.
Has Joe Biden ever met Joe Biden? A Joe divided against itself cannot stand!* Flashback: Biden calls paying higher taxes a patriotic act.
* Classical allusion:
GENERATION GRETA: Too Afraid To Live.
I don’t want to say that sense of doom that the young have (re: the Lancet survey) is inappropriate. There can be no doubt that they face tremendous challenges trying to build a life today. We have deprived them of the only real source of hope: the conviction that there is God who orders the universe, and who loves them, and who guarantees that their suffering is not meaningless. To refuse to have children on the principle that it would be wrong to bring them into this world is to surrender hope in the future. It’s an extraordinary thing, given the dismal prospects that most people who have ever lived faced — and yet, they carried on. Not us. We face this global crisis at precisely the time when we in the West, with our global communications reach, have denied ourselves and the world what we all need to endure, even triumph over, adversity.
Hear me clearly: the therapeutic gospel — whether in its left-wing forms (woke Christianity) or right-wing forms (prosperity gospel) is false teaching. If you are in a therapeutic church, now is the time to make plans to leave. If you are not in a church that is teaching you why and how to endure suffering for the truth, then you are not in a church that is preparing you for the world as it is today, and the world very shortly to come.
Here is an instructive clip. It’s about a megachurch pastor whose congregation became “affirming” in 2015. It’s now falling apart. Watch this:
Here’s a link to the longer unedited video, from the pastor, Ryan Meeks. He is no longer a Christian. He calls EastLake “a laboratory for unorthodox and heretical ideas, which was really fun for me.” The mind boggles. This guy is the epitome of West Coast blissed-out egomania. He talks about the decline of his church — the decline he presided over — as a fun thing. He says, “The slippery slope is real,” and explains that he doesn’t mean it in a bad way. If he writes a book one day, he said, he will have a chapter titled, “My Fantastic Ride Down The Slippery Slope.”
My wife and I founded EastLake Church in 2005, just east of Seattle, Washington. I’m so thankful for the container EastLake was for my ongoing transformation. It’s ironic that I started it so regular people could find a place to pursue an authentic spirituality and to explore truth no matter what it cost them or where it led. I had no idea I would end up needing exactly that, myself.
Wait … the church, this community, was a “container” for Ryan Meeks’s “ongoing transformation”?! My God, the ego! He says in the video that he has learned that “there’s a whole Universe of Ryan behind Pastor Ryan.” Golly.
Read the whole thing.
“What is sin?”, a legendary community organizer was asked by a Chicago Sun-Times reporter covering religion-themed topics in 2004. He famously replied, “Being out of alignment with my values.” Or as the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”
IF YOU CAN’T BE SPACEFARING, BE LAWFARING: Court filing outlines Blue Origin’s case against NASA SpaceX lunar lander award.
RALPH THE WONDER LLAMA YIELDS RESULTS: Llama antibodies may fight COVID-19 in humans, researchers say.
IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME WAY TO GET RID OF MOSQUITOES: Researchers detect malaria resistant to key drug in Africa.
Flashback: how we almost won, but lost, the fight to eradicate malaria.
BOOM: Evergrande crashes as China dumps ‘build, build, build’ playbook.
Evergrande is proving to be the first big victim. As the company falters, its undoing raises a fundamental question for the world’s second-largest economy: has China’s property-driven growth model – the global economy’s most powerful locomotive – run out of road?
Yes, says Leland Miller, chief executive of China Beige Book, a consultancy that analyses the economy through proprietary data. “The leadership in Beijing has been more worried about Chinese growth than anyone in the West.
“There is a recognition that the old build, build, build playbook does not work any more and that it is actually getting dangerous. The leadership now appears to be thinking that it can’t wait any longer to change the growth model,” Miller says.
Ting Lu, chief China economist at investment bank Nomura, says he does not expect Evergrande’s woes to trigger an economic collapse. But he believes Beijing’s attempts to transition from one growth model to another could significantly depress annual growth in coming years.
Two thoughts come to mind.
The first is that the post-Tiananmen deal was that mainland Chinese would trade any hopes of political reform in exchange for ever-increasing prosperity.
The second is that authoritarian regimes often look invincible until shortly before they unravel.
Update: More here from Battleswarm Blog.
Not only is Evergrande possibly facing complete liquidation, but word came down that the company might make payments on Chinese-owned debt, but stiff foreign debt holders.
But the word this morning is that the Chinese government is now telling them to avoid default on dollar-denominated bonds. After all, if investors worldwide decided that all Chinese debt was potentially toxic, that would leave connected Chinese communists in a world of hurt.
What’s that old Chinese curse about interesting times?
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Majority Says Biden Isn’t ‘Mentally Sharp’: Poll.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A Generation of American Men Give Up On College.
You can hear the Insta-Wife talk about this here.
NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Why isn’t the media more upset about Antifa’s attacks on journalists?
Ngo isn’t alone in thinking that these attacks on the press are being downplayed. So does Nancy Rommelmann, who as a journalist has written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and has been an author for decades…
She was attacked in the streets, she says, and threatened online, with her photo publicly posted. Rommelmann believes the traditional media are ignoring the street violence for political reasons – they don’t want antifa’s extremism to be seen as discrediting to liberal causes. “I can tell you that 100% of the people that have attacked and continue to attack me, they’re all on the left – all of them. And I consider myself a liberal,” Rommelmann said.
To the extent that traditional news media are forced to cover antifa, Rommelmann says, they do so only when its adherents clash with right-wing protesters, and draw equivalencies with right-wing violence regardless of whether comparisons are warranted. After the assault on Staab last month, Rommelmann began venting on Twitter about why the media refused to acknowledge that “black bloc protesters [those wearing black ski masks and other garments to obscure their identities] in Portland are the MAIN source of violence. Proud Boys and right-wing groups rolled through [just] four times in 2020. Then who tf was committing the violence every night?”
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Eventually some in the media did catch on but the reality of what was happening never quite overtook the conventional wisdom about what was happening. The left-wing politics of most reporters always seemed to lead them to shield Antifa, BLM and other violent left-wing agitators from as much criticism as possible. If some journalists got roughed up in the process, better not to focus attention on that.
As Fredo would say, these guys were the first to arrive on Normandy Beach — you’ve got to cut them some slack when they get aggressive.
In accordance with the prophecy: Border Patrol Loses Horse Privileges, Must Now Bang Two Empty Halves Of Coconuts Together.
WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Hunter Biden boasted of access to White House and China in $2M Libyan deal.
THIS SHOULD BE A BIGGER STORY: After Mandating Masks Outdoors, Oregon’s Active COVID-19 Cases Increased 73 Percent.
2024 PREVIEW? Trump Still Rising. “The latest Rasmussen poll shows that in a hypothetical matchup between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in 2024, Trump would win 51 percent to 41 percent. Independent voters give their support to Trump by a whopping 20 points over Biden.”