VIA A FRIEND: “Justin Trudeau is doing to Canada what Barack Obama did to America: stoke the flames of dissent and cultural attacks on citizens.”
The Chinese prefer us divided and with our institutions weakened and discredited. It’s just a shame we have so many among us who are happy to deliver that result.
FIGHT THE POWER: “You may have noticed a truck in front of the parliament buildings in Ottawa that has a wooden shack on it. It has kind of a Beverly Hillbillies vibe to it. The other day they built a deck on the roof of that shack and installed one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite dishes. They are now livestreaming from the location and there is no way anyone can block them from doing so or shut them down via cell towers. Its totally self contained.”
REX MURPHY: Trudeau’s Monumentally Misguided Emergency Measures Are An Insult to Canadians.
Related: Trudeau accuses Jewish MP of standing with people who wave swastikas and confederate flags.
Prime Minister Zoolander is just not very bright.
OPEN THREAD: I want you to Trip Like I Do.. Oh my God, it’s the best.
FERRARI REINVENTS MANIFEST DESTINY: P.J. O’Rourke Drives Cross-Country in a Ferrari 308GTS.
When we got to Atlanta, the band in the hotel bar was the worst thing we’d ever heard. But it didn’t matter. Nothing could cloud our outlook. Brock Adams and Joe Califano could have sat down at our table. Ralph Nader himself would have been welcome, so infected were we with the spirit of vast superiority to the humdrum concerns of daily life that the Ferrari confers, or something like that. I mean this car does one thing. It makes you happy, really happy.
And the car did one more thing for me. It reaffirmed my belief in America. It may sound strange to say that a $45,000 Italian sports car reaffirmed my belief in America, but, as I said, it’s all part of Western civilization and here we were in America, the apogee of that fine trend in human affairs.
And, after all, what have we been getting civilized for, all these centuries? Why did we fight all those wars, conquer all those nations, take over all that Western Hemisphere? Why, for this! For this perfection of knowledge and craft. For this conquest of the physical elements. For this sense of mastery of man over nature. To be in control of our destinies—and there is no more profound feeling of control over one’s destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast. And if the lowly Italians, the lamest, silliest, least stable of our NATO allies, can build a machine like this, just think what it is that we can do. We can smash the atom. We can cure polio. We can fly to the moon if we like. There is nothing we can’t do. Maybe we don’t happen to build Ferraris, but that’s not because there’s anything wrong with America. We just haven’t turned the full light of our intelligence and ability in that direction. We were, you know, busy elsewhere. We may not have Ferraris, but just think what our Polaris-missile submarines are like. And, if it feels like this in a Ferrari at 130, my God, what can it possibly feel like at Mach 2.5 in an F-15? Ferrari 308s and F-15s—these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?
RIP. Needless to say, read the whole thing. The ending is a hoot, too:
But the story ends on a sad note. The movie that this incredible car traveled all that way to be in will be called Don’t Eat the Snow from Hawaii, so maybe Western civilization hasn’t quite been perfected yet.
That was the title of the pilot episode for Magnum P.I. — so evidently, O’Rourke drove Magnum’s Ferrari across the country before it was shipped to Hawaii.
GREAT MOMENTS IN RADICAL CHIC: BLM Louisville posts $100,000 bail for activist who … tried to assassinate Democratic mayoral candidate. “Everyone deserves a defense and a fair trial, but I … can’t help but think LCBF could be more discerning in deciding which potential beneficiaries of scarce bail funds are most worthy. Posting bail for Brown smacks of a publicity stunt or a reward for his prior leftist political activism more so than an attempt to help a defendant with a strong case maximize his chances of getting off. And ironically, it’s apt to become ammunition against the progressive cause of bail reform. The average person will look at Brown being sprung, I suspect, and conclude that the courts are far too lax in granting pretrial release, not too strict by tying freedom to one’s ability to pay.”
HMM: Bipartisan legislation seeks to reform FCC satellite licensing rules.
Possibly related: EU to Build Satellite Internet System to Rival SpaceX’s Starlink. Who will do the launches?
UNEXPECTEDLY: Seattle’s Nanny-State Soda Tax Backfired Spectacularly (And Hilariously) New Study Shows. “The good people of Seattle responded to a tax on sugary drinks by buying more beer. So, yes, Seattle’s policy may have successfully burdened its residents with a regressive tax and pushed them away from their first choice drinks. But it’s not at all apparent that it actually ‘improved the health of Seattle residents.’ Indeed, alcohol consumption carries a wide range of negative health consequences. And calorie-rich beer can actually contribute to obesity, the very problem this tax was supposed to address.”
MORE LIKE THIS PLEASE: San Francisco Voters Fire Three School Board Members.
One of the most definitive conclusions about the recall is that the “blame Donald Trump” strategy just will not work anymore for embattled Democratic politicians. Yes, it helped Newsom survive his recall last September, but it backfired on McAuliffe and proved to be an exploding cigar in San Francisco. When asked by the Chronicle why she should not be recalled, Collins immediately replied: “People need to follow the money and see that billionaires are coming in and trying to dictate how we should do democracy.” So much for that.
Mayor London Breed will now appoint the three new SFUSD board members to replace the recalled incumbents. Much of the city’s focus is already turning to the next recall election, that of controversial District Attorney Chesa Boudin. There is a palpable feeling that the aggressive, abstract, race-based jargon of progressive elites will no longer suffice in even Democratic places where voters have become motivated to act on the very many governing shortfalls visible to the naked eye.
“I’ve always thought of myself as progressive, but I don’t use that label anymore to describe myself,” [recall co-organizer and SFUSD parent Siva Raj] told me Monday. “Because when I see the people who call themselves progressive, and I especially see the elected leaders calling themselves progressive, they don’t seem to stand for any of the values that I believe what progressive should be. It is not progressive to stand back and do nothing while the most underprivileged kids in our city have struggled and suffered the most….It is not progressive to put your own political career above the interest of the people you’re supposed to serve. That is not progressive. All that I can see is that the movement that perhaps started with a lot of idealists in the ’60s and the ’70s and ’80s, is now filled with opportunists who only care about using progressive language to advance their careers, but have no interest, no desire, to actually solve the real problems that our kids are facing today.”
To be fair, an obsession with racialist identity politics and burning down functioning institutions were hallmarks of the original “Progressives,” but it’s good to see there are limits to what even San Francisco parents will tolerate.
FASTER, PLEASE: Radical Idea Shows Laser Propulsion Could Rapidly Accelerate Trips to Mars. Laser propulsion isn’t actually a new idea, the UT Space Institute was experimenting with it in the ’80s and they weren’t the first.
REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE TOLD IT WAS OKAY TO PUNCH NAZIS? Wall Street Journal: Shutting Down Support for the Truckers: Donors to Canada’s ‘freedom convoy’ are harassed and boycotted.
‘Donor transparency” is a fixation of Democrats such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and others on the left who bemoan the influence of “dark money”—not their own money but others’. Canada is now offering a preview of what that transparency would mean for political speech.
After GoFundMe shut down the crowdfunding effort for Canada’s trucker protests, and before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to freeze, without court orders, bank accounts linked to the protests, supporters turned to a small website called GiveSendGo.
The Christian crowdfunding platform had received more than $8.7 million from individual donors intended for the “freedom convoy” opposing Canada’s vaccine mandates. On Sunday GiveSendGo was hacked and shut down by political opponents, who exposed the names, emails, locations and other personal information of 92,845 donors. Public harassment followed.
On Feb. 5, the owner of Ottawa’s Stella Luna Gelato Café made a $250 donation to the protest. When this became public, callers threatened to throw bricks through her store window. She ordered the shop closed. On Tuesday she recanted her support for the truckers to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.
Twitter users are posting names, jobs and locations of donors—from corporate executives and civil servants to masseuses and taekwondo instructors. One account doing the “doxxing,” itself anonymous, clarifies: “If you disagree with the views of businesses listed here, do the Canadian thing: Do not patronize them, or write a sternly worded letter. That’s it.” Harassment will follow anyway, but even if not, do we need more boycotts? Liberals boycotting right-wing real-estate agents and conservatives boycotting left-wing graphic designers?
Major news outlets in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. are contacting the donors, asking them to justify their contributions. Many donors feel pressure to recant or desist from further financial expression of their views. For many journalists, that is no doubt the goal.
Americans experienced an example of this “donor transparency” some years ago with California’s Proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage. Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was forced to resign after his donation to supporters of the referendum came to light, and he wasn’t the only one. A film-festival president and a restaurant manager also were forced out following boycott campaigns.
Nazis are as Nazis do.
COLOR ME UNIMPRESSED: Senate narrowly confirms Dr. Robert Califf, Biden’s pick to lead FDA. “Most Democrats and six Republicans voted to confirm Califf, President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the agency. The six Republicans were Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Roy Blunt of Missouri and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. . . . Those who opposed Califf in the FDA post expressed concern about his ties in the pharmaceutical industry and worried that he wouldn’t act aggressively enough to battle the opioid crisis.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: UC Berkeley must slash new enrollment by a third unless high court intervenes.
UC Berkeley will have to significantly reduce the number of undergraduate and transfer students it admits for 2022-23 unless it gets the California Supreme Court to intervene in a lower court ruling, the university said Monday.
About 5,100 fewer high school seniors and transfer students will be offered a place at Cal for the next academic year because of an Alameda County Superior Court ruling that ordered UC Berkeley to freeze enrollment at the same level as 2020-21. The 24% drop in offer letters would bring about 6,450 new students to Cal — about 32% fewer than in a typical year.
UC Berkeley applied for a stay of the decision to the California First Court of Appeal, but the court turned down the university’s request on Thursday, Feb. 10. . . .
The drop in student enrollment would also cost Cal about $57 million in revenue, according to UC Berkeley.
The order to cap enrollment at the 2020-21 level of 42,347 as opposed to the current enrollment of 45,057 is the result of a lawsuit filed in June 2019 by a neighborhood group, Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, against UC Berkeley, the Regents of the University of California and others. The city of Berkeley had been party to the lawsuit until it withdrew after signing an $82.6 million letter of agreement in July with the university.
Leftists institutions crippled by leftist organizations using leftist lawfare. Gooder and harder!
I DUNNO, IT LOOKS KINDA LIKE AN OVERSIZED CHEVY VOLT WITH A MERCEDES GRILL PASTED ON: 2023 Mercedes-AMG EQE Revealed, Offers up to 677 HP. I mean, it looks like it’s literally a picture of a grille on the front. And why even have a grille on an electric car? I was expecting more from the stylists.
And I’m not the only one. From the comments: “I swear they made their EV line ugly on purpose so it doesn’t kill their ICE sales. Just horrible.”
IT TOOK HER HALF A WEEK TO COME UP WITH THAT? Hillary Finally Responds to Durham Bombshell, Calls It ‘a Fake Scandal.’
COFFEE — IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Caffeine blocks SREBP2-induced hepatic PCSK9 expression to enhance LDLR-mediated cholesterol clearance. “Evidence suggests that caffeine (CF) reduces cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. However, the mechanism by which this occurs has not yet been uncovered. Here, we investigated the effect of CF on the expression of two bona fide regulators of circulating low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDLc) levels; the proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) and the low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR). Following the observation that CF reduced circulating PCSK9 levels and increased hepatic LDLR expression, additional CF-derived analogs with increased potency for PCSK9 inhibition compared to CF itself were developed. The PCSK9-lowering effect of CF was subsequently confirmed in a cohort of healthy volunteers.”
NONVIOLENT TRUCKERS GET THEIR ACCOUNTS FROZEN BUT THOSE WHO WORK FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT DON’T:
GLENN REYNOLDS, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Arizona lawmakers move to return to paper ballots, hand counts.
Previously: Paper ballots are hack-proof. It’s time to bring them back.
A FISH, A BARREL, AND A SMOKING GUN: Hannity Humiliates Anthony Weiner During Interview.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
