CHANGE: Princeton Adds ‘Diversity’ Options to Its Vendor Search Portal. “The new options allow staff to search for businesses based on race or other criteria like women ownership, veteran ownership, and (of course) LGBT ownership.”
Archive for 2022
August 11, 2022
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Democrats Have Arrested, Prosecuted, And Raided Their Enemies. There’s Only One Way To Make Them Stop. “They’ve arrested their enemies, revived obscure rules as pretexts for partisan attacks, and raided their opponents’ homes, and they won’t be sorry until they’ve felt the same pain.”
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! UC San Diego hosts segregated orientation: Families of white students have been prohibited from participating in numerous college welcome programs at UCSD during the Fall 2022 welcome week.
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THE WALLS WERE REALLY CLOSING IN THIS TIME: Trump Stymies NY Prosecutor Who Vowed to ‘Get Him.’
TO BE FAIR, NONE OF THIS STUFF IS ABOUT ACTUALLY HELPING MINORITY STUDENTS: Massive DEI efforts have not increased grad rates for students of color: study.
EVERYBODY HATES KAREN: Jacinda Ardern unravelling as New Zealand PM’s popularity tanks. “Ardern has been in damage control after her controversial handling of the pandemic has led to large-scale protests across the country as Kiwis severely impacted by government policies left struggling to make ends meet in the resulting cost of living crisis.”
NO WORD ON IF IT’S MADE IN CHINA, BUT I HAVE MY SUSPICIONS: Diabetes Drug Januvia Contaminated with Carcinogen. “The FDA said that it allows 37 nanograms per day of nitrosamine in a drug, but to avoid any shortages of the diabetes medications, it is allowing up to 246.7 nanograms daily. The agency did maintain that cancer risk with the allowable increase is minimal. . . . Januvia is the third best-selling drug for Merck, followed by Janumet, with revenues of $3.3 billion and nearly $2 billion, respectively, in 2021 for the company, Bloomberg said.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Democrats Keep Throwing Their Hail Mary Passes Wildly Out of Bounds. “It would appear that Americans who don’t live in the coastal media bubbles aren’t too keen on going full Soviet just yet.”
BIDEN MAY HAVE JUST LOST THE RADICAL DEM BASE: What, no guns for weed smokers? And if, as DOJ told a court, using medical marijuana impairs the user’s “judgment, cognition, and physical coordination,” why is it being legalized around the country, anyway?
APPARENTLY THIS IS NECESSARY: WHO asks people not to attack monkeys over monkeypox.
CELEBRITIES EMBARK ON A UKRAINE SAFARI:
It’s almost as though there are two wars happening at once: one on social media, where guerrilla clips from the front lines show bodies, shelling, and damage to homes, and one playing out in the pages of Vogue magazine.
This week, it was revealed that Oscar-winning actress Jessica Chastain had visited with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The photo was posted to his official Telegram account and was taken from his presidential palace. There were also several shots of Chastain seated at a table with Zelensky having a discussion of some sort.
Chastain is only the latest celebrity du jour to hold court with Zelensky, who has taken on a celebrity status of his own in American media culture. He was asked to appear at the Oscars and did appear at the Grammys via video message. Last month, actor Sean Penn took a meeting with Zelensky. In June, actor Ben Stiller met with Zelensky in the presidential palace. In May, on Zelensky’s invitation, U2 gave a 40-minute performance in a Kyiv metro station. Angelina Jolie, a UN-designated humanitarian, visited as well. Last month, Zelensky and his wife Olena posed for a much heralded photo spread in Vogue for famed photographer Annie Leibovitz. The spread drew head scratches and some backlash on social media for what was deemed misguided priorities.
I don’t fault Zelensky for taking high-profile meetings with international celebrities. He’s doing what he can using a star-hungry media to keep the atrocities in his country at the forefront of people’s minds. I do, however, question what kind of military strategy and diplomatic expertise the guy from Zoolander and the chick from Zero Dark Thirty can offer.
Perhaps Sean Penn can grab his shotgun and commandeer a platoon. More and more these visits look like publicity safari photo-ops to be kept on mantles as keepsakes. The logistics and planning of flying a millionaire celebrity into a war zone for a photo-op can’t be easy, nor can it be cheap and accommodating. It’s not like booking an Airbnb. I don’t think Zelensky himself is arranging these high-profile meetings, but one can’t help but wonder what kind of attention is being pulled away from caring for Ukrainian refugees and keeping the Russians at bay.
Putin has decided to get into the act as well: Russia sent Steven Seagal to occupied Ukraine to spread propaganda, part of his role as a Kremlin spokesman.
MEANWHILE, THEY WANT TO REPLACE BEAT COPS WITH SOCIAL WORKERS: IRS seeks armed accountants ready for ‘deadly force.’
FED UP WITH REPEATED BREAK-INS AND CRIME, BAY AREA LAUNDROMAT OWNERS MOVE OUT OF CA:
Fed up, and moving out. After dealing with repeated break-ins, theft, vandalism, and more, one family of longtime Bay Area business owners have had enough. They’ve decided to move their entire family picked up, and moved to Alabama.
What plays out at Derek Drake’s Lake Merritt laundromat these days is so outrageous and frequent it almost feels like a heist movie.
“Three out of past four nights people have tried to get into my laundromat. Out of four nights… that’s crazy!” exclaims Derek via Zoom.
Derek and his family, have owned laundromats in the East Bay for decades. Derek explained how his father, Raiders legend Art Thoms said to him “my teammates laughed at me when I started buying laundromats 45 years ago.”
But it wasn’t until this past year when the frequency of break-ins and crime seems to have exploded.
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Derek’s family isn’t alone. California’s population fell by more than 180,000 in 2020 and has declined two years in a row. While the numbers of people who left the state are still a tiny percentage of the total population, Derek says many of his friends have plans to leave too, citing similar difficulties.
2020, you say? Not a National Model — A National Warning. “As Gavin Newsom runs absurd ads inviting Floridians and Texans to come to California for its ‘freedom,’ his bravado is undermined by an inconvenient fact: For the first time in state history, California has begun to shrink. People have been fleeing Newsom’s business lockdowns, school closures, high taxes, and other policies.”
HOUSE DEMS CHOOSE HIRING 87K IRS AGENTS OVER 20K BORDER AGENTS: Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) offered an amendment yesterday in the House Rules Committee to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that will be voted on Friday in the lower chamber.
Budd offered the Dems a stark choice – You can either vote to double the IRS workforce so it can do millions more audits of American families, or you can vote to begin restoring the security of the U.S. border with Mexico.
The Dems unanimously voted for an IRS that will be, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence “swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” I report the sad, but utterly predictable, details for The Epoch Times.
THIS SEEMS POLITICAL: FCC Cancels Starlink Funding for Rural Broadband Program. “Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr issued his own statement after the announcement — saying he did not know about the FCC’s decision until the press release — disagreeing with the decision.”
BANANA REPUBLIC UPDATE: The FBI raid may be a hinge point in American history. Don’t want people to hate, fear, and distrust their government? Don’t be horrible, lawless, and dishonest.
FIDUCIARY? WHAT’S THAT? Republican AGs Allege BlackRock Violating Law With Woke Investing. “A coalition of 19 Republican attorneys general says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink prioritizes left-wing political initiatives over shareholder returns and is jeopardizing the retirement of middle class workers with pensions. Fink’s embrace of environmental, social, and governance investment policies, known as ESG, potentially runs afoul of several laws, the AGs charge in a letter sent to Fink.”
Hey, what’s the good of having control over other people’s money if you can’t use it to further your own goals?
DEAL OF THE DAY: Vabogu 12×42 Binoculars for Adults. #CommissionEarned
REPUBLICAN POUNCES! Trump seizes on FBI search to fuel backlash. “A day after the FBI search of his Florida resort, it was as if Trump had never been away, as he reapplied his grip on the national psyche by orchestrating a fierce backlash against the bureau, the Justice Department and the Biden White House, which has said it had no advance warning of the FBI activity.”
CNN’s Stephen Collinson is in truly turgid form today.
HOW NOT TO TALK TO THE PUBLIC ABOUT MONKEYPOX:
I would like to share a piece of a recent interview I heard on OPB (Our NPR affiliate). The guest is a senior adviser with the Oregon Health Authority, the state agency that was also in charge of most policy decisions for Covid-19. Here is the exchange between Jenn Chávez (OPB host) and Dr. Tim Menza (OHA adviser) that left me a bit puzzled.
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Menza did eventually get around to talking about gay men, sort of, when prompted by his interviewer (who, of course, went directly to the issue of “stigma” before anyone devoted any time to the question of whether gay men need any particular information about risk reduction):
Chávez: Right now my understanding is that many of the cases in Oregon have been found in cisgender men who have sex with men. And I’m wondering how you are approaching public health messaging around this — resisting stigmatization and shame and blame while also still targeting those most at risk right now with resources.
Menza: It’s quite the challenge. What we’ve been trying to do as best as we can is stick with what we know. In the United States, we know that people assigned male at birth who have sex with men and people assigned female at birth, including at least one pregnant person, have been affected by hMPXV in Oregon. We know that cisgender men and nonbinary people are affected by hMPXV. While most identify as gay or queer and report close contact with people assigned male at birth, we have cases that also identify as straight and bisexual and report close contact with people assigned female at birth. (emphasis added)
It is simple enough to say that monkeypox is spreading especially among men who have sex with men. If you also say that there is elevated risk for trans and nonbinary people who have sex with men, you’ve covered the whole universe of elevated sexual risk for monkeypox in a clear and understandable way. Instead, Menza starts by talking about, for some reason, “people assigned male at birth who have sex with men and people assigned female at birth” — that is, to a first approximation, gay men plus women, which is not anywhere close to an accurate description of the high-risk group.
It is unacceptable, if you have Dr. Menza’s job, to speak in woke word salads like this. Menza is speaking on a broadcast news program. It is his job to communicate in clear terms to the broad public. And few members of the public describe themselves as “assigned male at birth” or even think of their sex as something that was “assigned.” This is woke jargon, and it’s unsuitable for a news interview.
The Newspeak Dictionary has nothing on Dr. Menza!
LIFE IN THE BANANA REPUBLIC: Here’s how the rule of law applied to a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to forgery. “Former senior FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to forgery in getting that FISA warrant against Carter Page so the FBI could spy on the Trump organization. Clinesmith faced a harsh penalty — his law license was suspended. But that was then, and this is now. Clinesmith has been restored to “good standing” and has his license to practice law back.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Poll: Americans less optimistic about COVID situation.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Kevin Downey Jr: Shouldn’t We Be Asking if Serial Election Loser Hillary Had a Role in All This Mar-a-Lago Nonsense? “Notice the airbrushing on her face. Clearly, her server wasn’t the only thing to get an acid bath.”
Matt Margolis: Never Forget: These 20 Republicans Voted to Confirm Merrick Garland. “Garland didn’t need any Republican support to get confirmed, yet 20 ignored the warning signs and gave him their seal of approval—including Chuck Grassley, who was shocked by Garland’s refusal to commit to protecting the Durham investigation.”
Yours Truly: Meet the 5 Lefties Condemning the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid. “Maybe the most surprising was disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. He was last seen inappropriately touching underlings while conspiring with since-fired CNN host Chris Cuomo on how to avoid press scrutiny.”