GET WOKE, GO BROKE– PART DEUX: I never blame someone for having a really stupid idea. I do blame a room full of executives who say “Yeah! Let’s do it!”

Without further ado, I present to you the latest and greatest attempt to monetize “social justice” and its invariable meltdown: “CBS Backtracks On ‘The Activist’ After A Backlash, Including From One Of Its Hosts.” My favorite part:

“Besides the fact that there will be millions of dollars spent on hair, makeup, travel, celebrity hosts and judges, production, distribution that could have gone to the activists and organizations that will be featured, this is deeply dangerous,” said Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an anti-police-violence activist whose organization, Campaign Zero, has helped shape police-reform efforts around the U.S., speaking on MSNBC.”

My second favorite part:

“This extends a societal belief about what a good activist looks like: someone who is ready for prime time, someone who fits a particular archetype and is great on social media and is perfectly marketable,” Cunningham said.”

I’D PREFER SOME DISCONTINUITY, TO BE HONEST. WHAT WE HAVE NOW ISN’T WORKING VERY WELL. Advocates calling for fresh look at continuity of government.

I suspect that the end result here would be formalizing and legitimizing the Deep State.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Democratic Socialism is Just Socialism.

THE AMERICA THAT WORKS: SpaceX Inspiration4 crew circles the Earth on mission’s first full day.

FLASHBACK: Electric Heroes.

GRAND JURY INDICTS DEMOCRAT LAWYER MICHAEL SUSSMANN; ACCUSED OF LYING TO FBI IN RUSSIA PROBE.

BOMBSHELL: FBI Scandal Over Sexually Abused Gymnasts Rises to Criminal Level, Says Inspector General.

Flashback: FBI Is Stonewalling Congressional Oversight On Hunter Biden.

VDH: ‘Science,’ They Said.

We saw just that in early June 2020 when over 1,200 “health care professionals” signed a petition demanding exemptions from mandatory lockdowns and quarantines for Black Lives Matter protestors marching en masse. And they concocted medical excuses such as “vital to the national public health,” to insist that violating quarantines was less unhealthy than not pouring into the streets

Why did both candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris warn the American people on the eve of the vaccination rollouts that a Trump Administration inoculation could be unsafe—thereby at the very outset undermining confidence in mass vaccinations?

Why was the medical community largely silent about such dangerous sabotaging of a new vaccination, but months later became vociferous in warning the public that any prior doubts about the safety of these Operation Warp Speed vaccinations were scientifically misplaced? Was there a medical breakthrough on January 20, 2020 to alter their consensus?

When a Yale-licensed psychiatrist tele-diagnosed the former president of the United States in absentia as mentally ill and in need of an intervention, did medical professionals object to such a perversion of science and medical ethics?

If such pop diagnoses are the new Ivy-League medical norm, will they insist that Joe Biden take and pass the Montreal Cognitive Assessment in the fashion of Donald Trump? Or do the medical findings of competency depend on ideology?

Yes, of course. Read the whole thing.

NEW PLAN WOULD PUSH TOP TAX RATE TO ALMOST 60 PERCENT IN THESE 4 STATES:

“For New Yorkers earning more than $5 million, the combined city, state and federal tax rate would skyrocket to 61.2% under the House plan,” Fox Business reports. “The combined rate in California, meanwhile, would spike to 59.7%, while the wealthiest individuals living in New Jersey could pay a rate as high as 57.2%. In Hawaii, the combined marginal rate would be an estimated 57.4%.”

That’s right: High-earning residents of these states could end up paying nearly 60 percent tax rates on their income earned above a certain level. That’s an obscene and fundamentally unfair level of taxation. But such punitive levels of taxation are also highly impractical and certain to have adverse economic consequences.

Voters in these blue states knew what would happen when they punched the card for Biden: Biden calls paying higher taxes a patriotic act.

And this was uttered by a 2008-era pre-trunalimunumaprzure Biden.

NOT ME, BUT SOME PEOPLE: Did the pandemic give you ‘cave syndrome’? Therapists now have a name for our post-quarantine social anxiety.

FREDDIE DEBOER: The Original Matrix is Pretty Bad — and that doesn’t really seem contrarian to me.

The Oracle when she said that Morpheus was going to die, and Neo saved him, so we have free will! But Morpheus says she told him exactly what he needed to hear, suggesting she manipulated him and he had no agency. But then isn’t Agent Smith right? I am le confuse. Also, I know the movie cares about these questions because Morpheus literally says “Do you believe in fate?” to Neo, which is part of its larger habit of just telling you what’s on its mind. That would just be clumsy, except that (again) it doesn’t know what’s on its mind, not really, so the tic is even more obvious. Do you believe in fate, movie? Wachowskis? I sat through like 7 hours of this stuff and never found out.

But then a rack of guns comes out from nowhere, and it goes whooooosh!

Look, I want to like all of this more than I do. I too just want to lay back and enjoy a bravura and kitschy triumph of aesthetics that articulates several different kinds of pre-millennium tension. I want to enjoy the guns and the Czech raver clothes and the (pre-Crouching Tiger) balletic martial arts. But for whatever reason it just never congeals; the style is too ridiculous and the substance is too confused. Perhaps what colors this for me is that there’s another 90s movie that I think pulls off the aesthetics and the action The Matrix is going for, with precisely the goofy spirit people say they like and without the go-nowhere brain teasers – Blade. The Blade trilogy, which started a year earlier, pulls off the ridiculous(ly cool) black leather and shades look with more panache than The Matrix, and it did so without posing existential riddles it didn’t want to solve or crawling too far up its own ass. And watching Blade today is a pleasure because, in contrast with the previously-mentioned Fast franchise, the movie doesn’t constantly let you know that it’s winking along with you. It premiered before this awful Age of Knowingness, and so did The Matrix, which in hindsight I think is the thing I like the most about it.

Oh well. At least “I know kung fu” is cool.

But the song “Kung Fu Fighting” was dubbed evil racist hate speech a decade ago: Mark Steyn Wishes He Were As Funky As Those Funky Chinamen From That Funky Chinatown.

HONEYMOON IS OVER: Biden Continues Sinking in Approval Polls.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Republican senator demands National Archives stop putting warning labels on founding documents.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study: Couples in supportive marriages have better mental, physical health.

HOT, HOT, HOT!:  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has released its report on racial disparities in maternal mortality.  The report claims, among other things, that (1) mothers today are 50% more likely to die in childbirth than their mothers were a generation ago; (2) racism is a root cause.  My dissent shows why neither claim is makes sense. 

Maternal mortality is a fashionable topic on the Left.  Here in San Diego County, there was recently a billboard/poster campaign to alert African-American mothers that they were more likely than white mothers to die in child birth “because of racism.”  Go figure.

COMPLY OR DIE: Biden Administration Blocking Flu Manchu Monoclonal Antibody Supplies To Red States?

TIME MAGAZINE’S AIRHEADS OF THE YEAR:

Time contends that the prince and former actress, who specialize in the cringe-inducing regurgitation of every trendy puerile progressive societal grievance they hear, “not only prompted deep re-appraisals of British society and the monarchy’s place within it, but have also catalyzed essential conversations on topics from mental health to misinformation.” This might come as a surprise to Time editors, but the British have been re-appraising the monarchy’s role for quite some time! Ask Robert Fitzwalter or Johnny Rotten. Of course, Time is in the business of selling magazines — just as People and Us are. There’s nothing at all wrong with it. But there’s no reason anyone should take the publication seriously anymore. As Walter Kirn notes, Time is alive in name, but its “original, defining mission — grounding the American mind in a moderate, shared reality — is dead.”

To be fair, Time’s “original defining mission” died in the late 1960s.

QED: Time Magazine Takes Chinese Cash To Promote Controversial Drone Business. Iconic mag fails to properly disclose $700k from China.

Henry Luce, the son of Presbyterian missionaries to China, who created Time magazine in 1923, and who sided with Chiang Kai-shek during China’s communist revolution, has rolled over many times in his grave learning this news.

BIDENFLATION: Grocery prices to rise another 3% before the end of year, Kroger warns with cost of beef already up 14% and pork 12% since December.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY UNDER THE NEW BIDEN-HARRIS FOREIGN POLICY: Situation in Indo-Pacific ‘deteriorating,’ says Australian defense minister.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Clint Eastwood on Politics: It’s Complicated.

LIVE AT 3:30PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ Introduces the Seat of Uncomfortable Ecstasy.

Hot takes, cold drinks, special surprise guest.

THIS IS TRUE ONLY FOR CERTAIN SETS OF “WE”: There’s A Hostage Crisis in Afghanistan, and We’re Not Talking About It. “The Taliban is blocking flights, and the United States, the world’s number one superpower, has done everything they think they can. This sounds like a hostage crisis.”

Related: Afghanistan Hostage Crisis: Family of Navy Vet Wants Biden Official Fired.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Migrant encounters over 200,000 again in August, as border surge continues. “The 208,887 migrant encounters mark a 317% increase over last August.”

FASTER, PLEASE:

● Denmark Says Move Over Sweden as Government Lifts All COVID Restrictions—Because of High Vaccination Rate?

● 33 districts in India’s Uttar Pradesh are now Covid-free: State govt.