Archive for 2021

ROGER SIMON: Abandon Ship! Time for Conservatives to Leave California.

Do not pass GO! Do not collect $200. Just get out and be grateful. You really are getting out of jail free.

California and Californians are beyond repair. If they couldn’t vote Newsom out after all that has happened and after the obvious condition of the state almost everywhere you go, except perhaps the French Laundry, it will never happen. Stop kidding yourself.

And you’ll be surprised there are a lot of good places to eat outside the state at less than a fifth of the freight of that over-priced Napa Valley redoubt.

If you have a house to sell, you can have one twice that size outside California.

I’m not gloating here, just because I got out myself over three years ago. Actually, it makes me sad. I may never see Yosemite, Big Sur, or a single Joshua tree again. But so what? C’est la vie. There are wonders all over the world.

And starting over in a new location has a lot to recommend it. It makes you younger and expands the mind, like learning to use a computer mouse with the opposite hand.

Larry Elder, a fantastic man with a great talent and a wonderful sense of humor, is also more than welcome to come, if he should be, most justifiably in his case, fed up with California.

But to my fellow conservatives and libertarians, if you do come, please remember why you left. Some are concerned here in Tennessee, and I assume in other red states, that you might, I’m sure inadvertently, bring some of your blue state values with you.

How’s that Welcome Wagon program coming along?

NICKI MINAJ CAUSES THE ESTABLISHMENT TO GO DEFCON ONE:

If you are the kind of person who would choose to not get a vaccine to protect against a virus that has killed more than 4.6 million people around the world, because you heard that Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend in Trinidad had his testicles swell up, there’s really not much that can be done to save you. Your ability to discern a trustworthy source of information is fatally flawed. You should not get your health advice from hip-hop stars who have no idea who you are, just as you should not take your personal-hygiene tips from Steve Jobs, you should not get your tax advice from Wesley Snipes, you should not take marital advice from O. J. Simpson, and you should not ask Armie Hammer to cater your next party. Nicki Minaj may have the best of intentions, but she is not a doctor and no, wearing a nurse’s outfit in a music video does not count.

Jim Treacher adds: “Well, who you gonna trust: some doctor, or the unfortunate friend of Nicki Minaj’s Trinidadian cousin? I don’t know what else the White House is supposed to do here, but it definitively busts the Democrats’ myth that vaccine hesitancy is the fault of Donald Trump, or his voters, or white supremacy, or whichever boogeyman the libs come up with next. People are hesitant about vaccines for a lot of reasons, not always good reasons, but it’s not necessarily political.”

HMMM: Signs point to Milley’s exit. “Baseball fans know the score. When the general manager says he’s behind the manager 100%, that means the manager has two weeks left. Biden just said, ‘I have great confidence in General Milley.’ Look for Milley to soon decide to spend more time with his family.”

SPACE RACE SNUB: NASA Adds Insult to Jeff Bezos’ Injury with Puny Blue Origin Contract. “Imagine what Bezos and his billionaire ego must feel like now that NASA has announced Blue Origin’s consolation prize? A puny $26 million to develop a lunar lander concept that might, someday, possibly lead to building an actual landing system.”

HE SHOULD NOT MERELY BE FIRED, HE SHOULD BE COURT-MARTIALED. Gen. Milley must go for subverting civilian control of the military. “The most grimly amusing thing about these reports is that they come after four years of tedious self-aggrandizing lectures from journalists and liberal politicians about the sacredness of our ‘norms.'”

Related: Was it treason? The general vs. the president. Telling an adversary you’ll warn them if we attack is at least a promise to commit treason under the circumstances.

The funny thing is, it was presumably meant to reassure the Chinese, but they certainly wouldn’t believe such a promise, which they might make, but would never honor, themselves.

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I read this book every few years and it still resonates in today’s world.

CAYMAN’S EXTENDED SHUTDOWN HAS FAILED TO STOP THE DISEASE, BUT HAS COST THOUSANDS OF JOBS: Cayman’s tourism leaders condemn delay in reopening.

Tourism business leaders have condemned government’s decision to delay the reopening of the border, claiming it is not based on scientific evidence and threatens the livelihoods of thousands of Caymanians.

The Cayman Islands Tourism Association released a statement Wednesday expressing dismay at the “indefinite pause in the reopening plan and continued closure of the borders”.

It recommends measures such as vaccine mandates, rapid testing and contact tracing, which it claims would be more effective and sustainable means of controlling the threat of the coronavirus.

CITA argues that COVID-19 is already in the community and that Cayman, like the rest of the world, must learn to live with it and manage those risks.

Related: To Defeat Delta Variant, Experts Recommend Doing All The Things That Didn’t Work The First Time.

PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

Kevin Downey Jr: Despite Despotic Measures, COVID Deaths Much Higher One Year Later. “It might be time for our elected leaders to admit what is becoming obvious: They have no idea what they are doing when it comes to COVID. The lockdown appears to have been unnecessary, even devastating.”

Matt Margolis: Why Did the California Recall Fail? “In November 2020, President Trump received over six million votes in California, while only just under 3.3 million voters voted to remove Newsom. Had every person who voted for Trump voted to recall Newsom, Larry Elder would have been elected governor of California on Tuesday.”

Yours Truly: This Is the Real Tragedy of Imaginary Genders. “How is a person supposed to become intimate — I mean emotionally intimate — when their entire identity is wrapped up in imaginary buzzwords and takes genuine offense at anyone who doesn’t somehow ‘get’ them?”

FOUR-STAR TREASON: Mark Milley Finally Gives His Denial but Ends up Telling on Himself. “Here’s the thing with denials. It’s typically useful when giving one to actually deny the activity you are being accused of. Instead of Milley doing that in this statement, we see a flurry of qualifiers and weasel language that mirror Jennifer Griffin’s Pentagon stenography.”