Archive for 2021
May 7, 2021
More: April’s expected hiring boom goes bust as nonfarm payroll gain falls well short of estimates.
But hey, this is 2021. The press will do it for him without even being asked.
UPDATE: Joe Biden: Economy Killer.
DECIVILIZATION: Cost of Colorado’s forced wolf introduction already rising; a ‘circular self-destruction formula.’ “According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, after the 1994 forced wolf introduction to Yellowstone National Park, through 2012, elk herds decreased by more than 80%. Most of the natural dispersion of wolves in the west since 1994 centers on the Yellowstone packs. As wolf populations increase and prey species decrease wolves migrate in search of better prey opportunities and open range for the new packs.”
“SHUT UP,” THEY EXPLAINED. That Was Quick: Twitter Bans Trump’s New Account.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Caitlyn Jenner’s punchy anti-Newsom ad is a preview of a big challenge for Dems.
PEOPLE HAVE GOTTEN ‘INSTITUTIONALIZED’ BY COVID:
In the film The Shawshank Redemption, an elderly character named Brooks gets released after 50 years in prison. Instead of celebrating his release, however, he is tentative — and shortly after experiencing the freedom of the outside world, he hangs himself.
“These walls are funny,” Morgan Freeman’s character Red explains to his fellow prisoners as they process the news. “First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s ‘institutionalized.’”
As the vaccine has brought the promise of liberation from a year of masks, lockdowns, canceled travel plans, and forgone family visits, there is a contingent of Americans who are simply not prepared to move on. They have somehow gotten used to the restrictions and are wary of returning to their pre-COVID-19 lives. In short, they’ve become “institutionalized.”
Related: Is it time to reopen everything? “But at some point, whether now or in two weeks or in a month, we all arrive at the place [Kyle] Smith is. We’ll have given everyone a meaningful chance to get vaccinated. If they haven’t taken that chance, that’s their choice. Society can’t cater to the willingly unvaccinated forever.” However, “Mark my words, within the next few months the therapy industry is going to start rolling out ‘re-entry counselors’ to help those nervous but well-heeled lefties feel comfortable going out to eat again.”
RE-REGULATION: Biden repeals Trump-era rule on gig workers.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Gretchen Whitmer Tries to Reclaim ‘Worst Governor in America’ Crown. “Last year at this time, I thought that Whitmer was the worst of the bunch. It was partially because I have so many relatives in Michigan and was hearing the tales of woe from there so often. What really grated me about Whitmer though was the fact that she was even more smug than Newsom while flexing her totalitarian muscle, which is quite an achievement.”
HE KEEPS USING THAT WORD: Cuomo Claims Deadly Directive Was “Smart”. “From New York Health Commissioner Howard Zucker’s dodging a simple question to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s extended paranoid response to whether he would testify about New York’s COVID nursing home deaths scandals in the U.S. Congress.”
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Straight Out of Atlas Shrugged: Biden Will Waive Patents on Vaccines, Enraging Big Pharma.
Straight Out of Prayers for the Assassin: ‘One Mosque Is Erected Every 15 Days in France, While One Christian Building Is Destroyed At the Same Pace.’
Straight Out of Brazil: Think America’s COVID Bureaucracy Is Bad? Check Out What’s Happening in France.
THOMAS LIPSCOMB: Simon & Schuster’s Good Sense on Pence. There’s literally no reason to let woke underlings run your company. Or your country.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Caitlyn Jenner’s punchy anti-Newsom ad is a preview of a big challenge for Dems.
May 6, 2021
SPACE JUNK: BETTER PUT UP MY UMBRELLA: Watch out, New York? Russian space agency posts map of where Chinese rocket booster might crash.
EZRA LEVANT: HELP: PayPal is trying to shut down Rebel News!
HEATHER MAC DONALD: Diversity Over Discovery. Biden’s war on merit puts America’s scientific edge at risk. “His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator.”
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science,” as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion. Her nomination requires Senate confirmation; if Berhe will not commit to hiring and grantmaking on the basis of scientific expertise alone, irrespective of race and sex, senators should vote her appointment down.
Previously, this office was typically headed by a physicist with managerial experience in a major physics lab. But then, none of her predecessors could boast of co-authoring an article titled, “A critical feminist approach to transforming workplace climate in the geosciences through community engagement and partnerships with societies.”
ROGER SIMON: We Live in the Era of the New Conformists.
In his latest piece, the estimable Victor Davis Hanson asks the rhetorical question “Are Americans Becoming Sovietized?”
Without a doubt. And a key reason behind this, I have been thinking for a long time, is that the left and the semi-left, progressives and liberals, masses of them in our country from the corporate world to the media to the academy to entertainment, are the New Conformists.
Well, not completely new, but conformists beyond doubt. Hardly ever an original thought among them.
They are like the “Triplets” song from Vincente Minelli’s classical musical “The Band Wagon.” (“We do everything alike, we look alike, we dress alike. We walk alike, we talk alike.”)
With this mindset, becoming “Sovietized” scarcely takes an effort. You don’t have to learn a word of Russian beyond “nyet.”
Back in the Fifties, conservatives were accused of being the “organization men” or the “men in the grey flannel suit,” but these days it’s the other way around.
No one is more predictable, more conformist, than the so-called “woke.”
In his compelling new book—“Curiosity: And Its Twelve Rules for Life”—my friend law professor F.H. Buckley, under the heading “Don’t Be a Conformist,” warns us of where conformity can lead:
“Italian novelist Alberto Moravia tried to explain why so many of his countrymen became Fascists under Mussolini. It was because of their desire to fit in, to seem normal, to follow the crowd. He called the novel ‘The Conformist’.”
Sound familiar?
Related: The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?
It is one thing to compete with China. I firmly believe we need to do that in every domain, from artificial intelligence to COVID vaccines. But the minute we start copying China, we are on the path to perdition.
Consider the way many western countries mistakenly concluded last year that strict Chinese-style lockdowns were the right way to cope with COVID, not realizing that no free society could possibly tolerate restrictions as draconian as the ones imposed all over China from late January last year, which relied on the vast network of Communist party members in every neighborhood to police citizens’ behavior. Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College epidemiologist, who was influential in the UK’s decision to lock down, has been quite open about his inspiration. ‘If China had not done it, the year would have been very different,’ he admitted in an interview in December. ‘“It’s a communist one-party state,” we said. “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe,” we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.’
In his 1976 article, “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America,” Tom Wolfe wrote:
The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to concentration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had immediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.
Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!
Why are we surprised that the socialists running the increasingly corporatist business world take their cues from — and overlook the myriad horrors of — socialism done by today’s experts?
OPEN THREAD: Enjoy!
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Shot:
Chaser: Scientists Claim to Spot Fungus Growing on Mars in NASA Rover Photos. “Fungi thrive in radiation intense environments.”
The researchers did caveat their findings, pointing out that “similarities in morphology are not proof of life,” and that “we cannot completely rule out minerals, weathering, and unknown geological forces that are unique to Mars and unknown and alien to Earth.”
But it’s a wild conclusion nonetheless. The researchers’ peers will likely go over the paper with a fine-toothed comb, and likely shred the results — it’s not every day that researchers are willing to stick out their necks and claim to have found evidence of life on Mars.
Well, stay tuned.
SPACE JUNK: China’s huge rocket booster falling from space highlights orbital debris problem.
Related: Here’s a piece that Rob Merges and I wrote on space debris a while back.