Archive for 2021
June 4, 2021
THE POLICE ARE DEFUNDED AND SOROS-SPONSORED D.A. CHESA BOUDIN WON’T CHARGE: Shocking video shows teen set woman’s hair on fire on San Francisco bus.
THE LOCAL AMERICAN LEGION HAS SOME ‘SPLAINING TO DO: Vet’s mic cut off as he spoke of role freed slaves played in Memorial Day origins.
HE’S RIGHT, YOU KNOW? Compulsory Charity Isn’t Charity.
THOSE ANCESTORS ARE DEAD, SWEETHEART – JUSTICE IS NO LONGER OURS TO DELIVER THEM: California task force holds first meeting to study reparations for slave descendants.
June 3, 2021
PREDICTION: IT WILL BE AT LEAST 10 YEARS. Study: COVID-19 risk for reinfection low 10 months after first infection.
OPEN THREAD: Just tell them “I forgot!”
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Yale’s move to rig board elections reveals the bankruptcy of US elites. “As the pandemic especially underscored, the people who run our institutions look with disdain at those they are supposed to serve. They think that they’re so much smarter and better than everyone else, which entitles them to have their way, without interference from the unwashed masses. (Yale, apparently, regards even its own graduates as unwashed.)”
Plus: “Our elites’ eagerness to escape accountability reveals a bitter truth.”
Flashback: The Fall of the American Establishment and Its Consequences.
OUT ON A LIMB: No, Ellie Kemper Is Not a ‘KKK Queen.’
Once somebody decides to go after you on social media, there’s nothing you can do to defend yourself. Defying the mob is framed in the press as “doubling down,” and groveling for forgiveness just emboldens your tormentors. Kafka was an amateur, man.
There’s an entire media ecosystem devoted to whipping up these fake outrages for clicks. Why go after Ellie Kemper? Why not go after Ellie Kemper. Or you, or me, or anybody. We can be cancelled at any moment, for any reason or no reason at all.
If you’ve got enough money, all you can do is hide out until the mob moves on to another target. But if you can’t afford to just disappear for days or weeks or months… shrug emoji!
That trending topic description about Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar was simply wrong. As CNN noted later in a fact-check, “Salazar did not take credit for any part of the American Rescue Plan.”
Hand-selected. Curated. False.
“We aim to uphold high standards of accuracy, impartiality and fairness in our curation,” Twitter says of their various curation efforts, to include the contextualized and mysteriously monitored trending topics.
In practice, the impartiality is rare, the fairness is rarer, and the accuracy, which should be as close to 100% as possible, can seem like an afterthought.
It is not me or Josh Hawley or Elizabeth Warren or anyone else that put Twitter in the business of deciding to allow certain racism to remain on the platform, certain presidents to not remain, or certain presidential offspring to be protected to the point of suspending entire newspapers. It’s not any of us who told Twitter they should decide what is and is not scientifically sound information about Covid, or to decide what is and is not the best takeaway from thousands of tweets accusing an actor of being a “KKK Queen.”
Twitter decided to do that. It seems like expecting them to live up to the standards they set forth for this task they set themselves to isn’t so very much to expect.
As Treacher writes, “This sort of crap generates traffic for Twitter, which is why they amplify it. They know there’s a mob with torches and pitchforks at the ready, just waiting to be pointed toward the next victim. And Jack Dorsey sits on his billions and watches what he’s done. With great power comes great irresponsibility.”
ONE BIZARRE DETAIL FROM BIDEN’S $6+ TRILLION BUDGET PROPOSAL WAS JUST EXPOSED:
As reported by the Journal, Biden’s budget projects that growth will surge to 5.2 percent in 2021 and 4.3 percent in 2022. Those numbers are strong. But then, by the White House’s own admission, growth will fall to 2.2 percent in 2023 and slump to around 1.9 percent for the rest of the decade. These levels are bleak, not the roaring revival Biden has promised.
“The White House is essentially conceding that all of its unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus really is living for today with little regard for the future,” the Journal’s editorial board writes. “It implicitly concedes that the growth it spurs now will have to be paid back later in the form of higher taxes or tighter monetary policy, which might reduce growth. This is the definition of a ‘sugar high.’”
“This contrasts with genuinely pro-growth policies, which seek to create the circumstances for long-term prosperity,” they conclude. “They create better permanent incentives to work and invest.”
Those are awfully anemic numbers for what could be the presidential run of Kamala Harris. If indeed, she’ll even be running: The Abuse of Kamala Harris.
Harris’s visibility on issues that Democrats believe are central concerns for the communities of color on whom they depend for electoral successes is no accident. But setting the vice president up for failure after failure at the expense of her viability within the Democratic Party would seem to trade short-term gain for long-term misfortune. That is, if Harris really is the heir apparent that so many presume her to be.
But then economic growth and stability don’t seem high on the list of goals for the current president –cough — Ron Klain –cough –: As Biden fights US fuel production, American workers and consumers will suffer.
Of course, it’s not like Biden himself believed in a strong stable economy, even when (more of) his gears were working: Milton Friedman’s Revenge.
BEN SMITH BENSMITHS HIMSELF: New York Times’ Ben Smith finds it ‘really amazing’ how the media mostly looked away from the lab-leak theory.
As the Urban Dictionary noted in 2012:
Evergreen:
UNEXPECTED BACKBONE: Biden Orders Ban on 59 Chinese Defense and Tech Firms.
Flashback: Will Joe Biden take on our alarming China problem?
But maybe Biden is under pressure: Trump Says Fauci Exposed, China Should Pay $10 Trillion in Damages.
WATCH THE LEFTIES PIVOT TO “It’s Trump’s fault that Fauci was so awful, it was on his watch!”
FLASHBACK: CDC Study: Use of Firearms for Self-Defense is ‘Important Crime Deterrent.’ Hey, they have to get something right occasionally.
BAH, BIG DEAL. WE’RE MAKING ADVANCES IN CRITICAL RACE THEORY. China edges closer to fusion power.
NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: No Peace Beyond The Line.
ROGER SIMON: For Many of America’s Elites, China and Communism Have Already Won.
So many parts of our society are guilty of this it’s almost impossible to enumerate.
But we could start with the corporate world that is turning toward “wokeness” in droves—not that their CEOs are giving up a penny of their $15m plus salaries or have stopped profiting as much as possible from the despotic CCP.
In reality, that hypocrisy is the point for these globalists.
Globalism, as I wrote in an earlier piece, is in reality China-ism. That’s how it works.
A perfect example is giant Apple whose most recent quarterly China revenue came in at a record-breaking $21 billion+. At the same time we got all sorts of “social justicey” talk from CEO Tim Cook.
What Cook is doing, cashing in big on one side while mouthing “liberal” pieties on the other, suits the Chinese communists perfectly well, essentially enabling them. Apple then becomes a linchpin of American communism much in the way Huawei is a linchpin of Chinese communism. (Not inconsequentially, Apple’s top five executives, including Cook, earned a total of almost exactly $120 million in 2020, up 13 percent during the pandemic.)
Almost our entire corporate world is trotting eagerly behind, the majority acting in the same manner. And now, scariest of all, the military has gone “woke.” Who benefits from that?
The Bill of Rights, “liberty and justice for all,” what we knew to be America or, for that matter, any truths “we h[e]ld to be self-evident” are being left in the dust in this alacrity to exploit the Chinese market.
At least when Nixon and Kissinger went to meet with Mao and Chou, they had excuses—that they could triangulate with the USSR and that, possibly, opening up Communist China might induce them to be like us. That was proven wrong, and then some, when China joined the World Trade Association.
With what we now know about concentration camps holding a million or Uighurs, not to mention the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Robert Harris’s thinly disguised version of detente with the Soviet Union and China in Fatherland was more spot-on than he could have possibly imagined in 1992.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: FDA: Don’t eat cicadas if you have seafood allergies.
THE AMERICA THAT WORKS: SpaceX launches new solar arrays to space station, nails rocket landing at sea.
