YES. NEXT QUESTION? Will Biden Continue Down the Path of the Democratic Party’s Lunatic Wing?
Archive for 2021
September 10, 2021
DON’T TRUST BIG TECH: California Bar to Attorneys: Disable Alexa When Working From Home.
September 9, 2021
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Masks are here to stay as long as libs need to shame their political enemies.
FROM THE THE-WORSE-IT-GETS-THE-BETTER PERSPECTIVE: Oh Noes, Don’t Throw Me in The Briar Patch Mr. Biden.
The White House claims that 80 million Americans are unvaccinated, and we are now the enemy of the state. OK, whatever. When you get all done with the teeth gnashing part, I’m still unvaxxed. And if I’m no longer permitted to engage in a social construct that I have been studiously avoiding for the past few decades, well, meh…. a’right then, punish me by barring me from living life amid the Federal Moonbats. The federal compliance and enforcement part of the mandated worker vaccination will be fun to watch.
I have serious doubts that only 80 million Americans are unvaccinated, but fair enough; if that’s your number, okay then. However, consider this…. Assuming we are the minority group, the non-vaxxed crew breaks down into two broad segments: (1) The extremely well-educated who carry commonsense and are in a social strata where they remain quiet about it; and (2) The skeptical productive class of similarly disposed commonsense blue-collar workers who are the backbone of American productivity.
The comfortable existence for the rest of “polite society” is dependent on the scruffneck working class, the dirty fingernail folk who know what Lava soap feels like, and the industrious service sector workforce who fulfill the needs of those who hold out their pinky fingers when they drink from a glass.
If this non-vaccinated ‘minority group’ stops fulfilling the needs of the vaccinated ‘betters’, guess what happens?
Well, stay tuned. It won’t be fun for anyone. Plus: “Chin up folks, this announcement by Joe Biden is a Hail Mary reflecting just how desperate they are.”
WELL, SURE.
Democrats always hate Americans who won’t bend the knee more than foreigners who want Americans dead.
Plus, from the comments: “Delta spike appears to be fizzling. So Biden demands mass vaxxing right away, so he can claim his plan broke a spike that appears to be fizzling on its own.”
We are ruled by hacks, opportunists, and incompetents.
RELAX ABOUT THE PUSH FOR VACCINE MANDATES. The Supreme Court said more than a hundred years ago in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that vaccine mandates are constitutional. Indeed, vaccine mandates might even improve your liberty. The idea that such rules could set a dangerous precedent is simply paranoid. As one of America’s most famous jurists once pointed out,
The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Oh.
Well, crap.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The Horrific Outcomes of the Jacobson Case You’re Using to Justify Biden’s Vaccine Mandates.
Plus: The Irrepressible Myth of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. “During the COVID-19 outbreak, Jacobson v. Massachusetts became the fountainhead for pandemic jurisprudence. Courts relied on this 1905 precedent to resolve disputes about religious freedom, abortion, gun rights, voting rights, the right to travel, and many other contexts. But Justice John Marshall Harlan’s decision was very narrow. It upheld the state’s power to impose a nominal fine on an unvaccinated person. No more, no less. Yet, judges now follow a variant of Jacobson that is far removed from the Lochner era decision.”
“MOST RELEVANT,” INDEED:
OPEN THREAD: Consenting to blow your mind.
I’M NOT SAYING THAT IT’S ALIENS, BUT IT’S ALIENS: Strange, repeating radio signal near the center of the Milky Way has scientists stumped.
2022 NOT LOOKING GOOD FOR DEMS: Polls, Biden approval tanking and solid candidate recruitment point to a solid GOP year. But don’t get cocky just yet.
TRUMP REACHES OUT TO THE FAMILIES OF MARINES KILLED IN AFGHANISTAN: “It was just very cordial, very understanding. He was awesome. He was just talking about the finest of the finest. He said he heard and saw everything that we had said, and he offered his condolences several times, and how sorry he was.”
Plus: “I’m blogging this mainly because it’s positive coverage for Trump that is appearing in The Washington Post. I read The Washington Post every day, and I find it blogworthy that The Washington Post would treat Trump this well. Maybe it’s just pure empathy for the Gold Star father, and I should just stop there, but I read on. . . . WaPo is monitoring the 2024 election, and this connection with the Gold Star families shows Trump making a politically powerful move that Democrats should not ignore. . . . Imagine Trump at that funeral and then Chappell’s “Lions” driving across the country — some sort of caravan? — to demand Biden’s resignation.”
WORTH YOUR TIME: The History of the Americans Podcast, from Jack “Tigerhawk” Henneman.
COMPARE TO THE WASHINGTON POST’S MONTHS-LONG “MACACA” FRENZY: Media ignore racial attack on Larry Elder because he’s a black Republican.
When the press talks about racism, it’s always a scam. This is just more proof.
FLASHBACK: Taking Sarah Palin’s Ideas Seriously. “Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.” That’s why it was so important to thoroughly demonize her right up front.
Ten years ago, today.
JOEL KOTKIN: The Fading Family.
Margaret Mead once said, “no matter how many communes anyone invents, the family always creeps back.” But today’s trajectory is not promising. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, family formation and birth rates were declining throughout much of the world, not just in most of the West and East Asia, but also in parts of South American and the Middle East.
The ongoing pandemic appears to be driving birth rates globally down even further, and the longer it lasts, the greater possibility that familial implosion will get far worse, and perhaps intractable. Brookings predicts that COVID will result in 300,000 to 500,000 fewer U.S. births in 2021. Marriage rates have dropped significantly to 35 year lows.
It’s been a half century since Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) prophesied a surge of population that would foster Malthusian mass starvation, which echoed the premise of lurid book called Famine 1975! Ehrlich and his acolytes urged extreme measures to stave off disaster, including adding sterilant into the water supply. Similar conclusions were drawn four years later in the corporate-sponsored Club of Rome report, which embraced an agenda of austerity and retrenchment to stave off population-driven mass starvation and social chaos.
These predictions turned out to be vastly exaggerated, with a rapid decline in global hunger. The anticipated population explosion is morphing into something more like an implosion, with much of the world now facing population stagnation, and even contraction. As birth rates have dropped, the only thing holding up population figures in many places is longer lifespans, though recent data suggests these may be getting shorter again .
These trends can be felt in the United States, where the birthrate is sinking. U.S. population growth among the cohort aged between 16 and 64 has dropped from 20 percent in the 1980s to less than 5 percent in the last decade. This is particularly bad for the future of an economy dependent on new workers and consumers.
This demographic transition is even more marked in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and much of Europe, where finding younger workers is becoming a major problem for employers and could result in higher costs or increased movement of jobs to more fecund countries. As the employment base shrinks, some countries, such as Germany, have raised taxes on the existing labor force to pay for the swelling ranks of retirees.
Similar patterns can be seen in China.
In retrospect, Ehrlich’s book was probably a big psyop against China, but while it produced the crippling one-child policy there, it also produced a lot of collateral damage.
Meanwhile, as James Taranto noted in “The Roe Effect,” the effects are not felt equally throughout society, with groups favoring reproduction gaining an advantage. The future, as they say, belongs to those who are born:
It is a statement of fact, not a moral judgment, to observe that every pregnancy aborted today results in one fewer eligible voter 18 years from now. More than 40 million legal abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973, and these are not randomly distributed across the population. Black women, for example, have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women, whose abortion ratio in turn is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Since blacks vote Democratic in far greater proportions than Hispanics, and whites are more Republican than Hispanics or blacks, ethnic disparities in abortion ratios would be sufficient to give the GOP a significant boost–surely enough to account for George W. Bush’s razor-thin Florida victory in 2000.
The Roe effect, however, refers specifically to the nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion. It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents’ values. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party–that is, Republican–than they otherwise would have.
And the religious would, on average, increase their share of the population compared to the non-religious.
Answer: When the black candidate is a Republican, and the protester is a progressive. Had the affiliations been the other way around in this encounter caught on video, the media would have feasted on it for weeks, and reporters would have demanded answers for it from every GOP candidate for office.
However, since it happened to my friend and Salem Radio colleague Larry Elder while walking through progressive Los Angeles, the media instead reported it as a “hostile confrontation.” Watch the video and judge for yourselves. The egg attack comes from the right side of the screen:
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Now imagine if this had happened to a black Democrat touring a suburban district or the Central Valley. Would ABC and the LA Times retreat to passive voice in that instance? Would the New York Times bury it in the 14th paragraph of an election round-up? Nonsense. It would be headline news in every national news outlet, and people would be screaming at prosecutors to charge the woman with a hate crime.
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Ed Morrissey concludes, “Addendum: Well put:”
THIS MAY BE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL NATIONAL ANTHEM RENDITION EVER: But fans attending and tuning into tonight’s NFL season opening game between the Super Bowl Champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Dallas Cowboys won’t get to hear it.
Victory Boyd, the songwriter/singer, declines to get the Covid vaccine, for religious and medical reasons. So, after agreeing to pay her $20,000 plus expenses for the appearance, the NFL refused her request for an accommodation. Why? Because the NFL insists the national anthem be sung on the field.
THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Paleontologists find massive half-billion-year-old fossil species in Canadian Rockies.
BLOWBACK: Top Biden Officials Backed the 2014 Bergdahl Deal. Now, the Terrorists Released Are Taking the Reins in Afghanistan. “Blinken and Psaki said prisoners posed no threat.”
Previously: McCain’s 2014 attack on ‘dangerous’ Tony Blinken reemerges amid Afghan exit chaos.