SURE. THAT’S WHAT POOR CALIFORNIA NEEDS: Radical “Liberated Ethnic Studies” Team Leader/Teachers Union Member Wins CA School Board Seat.
Archive for 2022
December 21, 2022
December 20, 2022
TWITTER FILES: FBI Exerting Power for Power’s Sake.
I THINK WE SHOULD CONSIDER REFUSING TO FILE NOW THAT THE PROMISE OF CONFIDENTIALITY HAS PROVEN WORTHLESS:
UPDATE: From the comments: “They’ve just delegitimized the whole system of income tax reporting. They’ve revealed that the enormous intrusions of the IRS can be made public at their whim, and against whomever they choose. It’s incompatible with any sort of privacy and must be taken down.”
OPEN THREAD: Enjoy!
UNDER PRESSURE: Watch a Lockheed Martin inflatable space habitat explode. “In early December, engineers at Lockheed Martin Space’s Waterton Canyon facility in Colorado took a test habitat developed using its inflatable technology and put the module through what’s called an ultimate burst pressure test, overpressurizing the test article to the point of exploding. A video of the test shows the pressure building until the habitat bursts violently at 285 per square- inch (psi), or more than six times the max operating pressure.”
WHEN TRUST IS SQUANDERED: “Could the Bureau of Labor Statistics be a politicized agency, faking numbers to help the Democratic Party? Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have believed it, but given what we know about the FBI and the CIA, it is easy to believe that the BLS, which I suspect is staffed overwhelmingly by Democrats, may be corruptible.”
Pretty much every institution has been corrupted.
YET ANOTHER “BLESSING OF LIBERTY:” David French: Yes, The Dispatch Takes Money To Help Leftists Keep The Internet Conservatism-Free.
ROGER KIMBALL: The Deep State vs Donald Trump saga is not over.
The great comedy was that the entire charade was the work of state actors that, in various capacities, had actually fabricated the whole story. Hillary Clinton’s team had the idea, paid for the bogus “research,” while willing stooges in the media and intelligence services eagerly embraced the narrative.
As the investigations went on and one dirty actor after the next was exposed, jettisoned, then rewarded with a position at some left-wing media outlet, we thought we were slowly peeling back the onion and that, eventually, we would get to ground zero, the truth about the greatest assault on what Nancy Pelosi taught us to denominate “our democracy” in history.
But no, there was never going to be a ground zero. The point was not to “achieve closure.” It certainly wasn’t to uncover the truth. The point was the process, and the end of the process was, first of all, to destroy Trump and, beyond that, to reassert the Wizard-of-Oz-like prerogatives of the Deep State.
The January 6 Committee, illegally constituted as it was, was a continuation of that work by other means — more or less in the sense that Carl von Clausewitz had in mind when he said that war was “nichts als die Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit der Einmischung anderer Mittel.” Ever since Donald Trump glided down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency, the leviathan has been out to get him.
Biden has called January 6th, the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” which would be big news to residents of Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma City, and lower Manhattan.
ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW: CNN boss Chris Licht slams ‘stunning’ left-wing ‘vitriol’ aimed at him.
CNN boss Chris Licht slammed liberals for criticizing his move to make CNN less partisan, saying it only makes him more confident about his decisions.
“The uninformed vitriol, especially from the left, has been stunning,” Licht, who took over the cable network in May, told The New York Times. “Which proves my point: So much of what passes for news is name-calling, half-truths and desperation.”
Licht was tasked with bringing CNN back to its hard-news roots, to tamp down on anti-Trump, left-leaning punditry, and to cut costs.
He told the Times he thinks of people in the political center as “normal” — but insists appealing to “normal” people doesn’t mean the content should be boring.
“One of the biggest misconceptions about my vision is that I want to be vanilla, that I want to be centrist. That is bulls—,” Licht told the Financial Times in November. “You have to be compelling. You have to have edge.”
Given that it’s CNN, I’d love to know his definition of “centrist.”
UPDATE: So when does Licht actually begin to tone police his network? Jake Tapper Says ‘Kevin McCarthy and His Gang of Flying Monkeys’ Are Why Senate Republicans Support Giant Spending Bill.
ATTILA THE HUN: Not that bad a guy, scientists claim. Actually, the notion that the Hunnic invasions were a response to crop failures, etc. at home is hardly a new one. I was taught that in high school.
BIG FIGHT COMING IN 2023 ON BIDEN’S WOKE BUREAUCRACY: Two obscure bills introduced during the Lame Duck session should not be ignored. Here’s why they aren’t going away any time soon.
THE WAGES OF AWFUL GOVERNMENT: The heartbreak in Uvalde never seems to end. “As if the sight of dozens of fully armed police officers stacked and snugged against the halls of the schoolhouse – peeking safely from around corners, doing nothing as children and teachers called repeatedly for help, cowering as the slaughter goes unanswered – wasn’t enough to engender utter disgust and heartrending sadness. Where damn near every last thing went so horribly, inexcusably, and unnecessarily wrong, and cost so very dearly. . . . Not just a retelling of some of the more gut-wrenching moments of the siege and botched operation, but a detailed analysis of the emergency medical response to the school shooting. Nineteen kiddos and two teachers died, and the emergency services story is another complete and total disaster. . . . Meticulously documented with transcripts, audio, maps and video, the article lays out in detail how emergency responders stumbled from practically the beginning of the siege. The first two ambulances arrived on the scene, but the subsequent influx of law enforcement blocked the streets, as did the vehicles of panicked parents rushing to the school.”
POLL: Nearly Half Say Biden Has Made US Worse.
Just about half — 47% — of likely voters say President Joe Biden has made the country worse during his term, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll.
What exactly are the other 53% smoking?
DAMN NEAR KILLED HIM: Kids’ ward evacuated after pensioner shows up at A&E with World War One bomb up his a*se.
An elderly gentleman who arrived at an Accident and Emergency centre in Toulon, France, sparked a bomb alert after doctors realise the had a First World War artillery shell lodged in his anus.
One member of hospital staff told French news site VAR-Matin that the explosive object was something of a first.
“An apple, a mango or even a can of shaving foam,” they said, “we are used to finding unusual objects inserted where they shouldn’t be. But a shell? Never!”
Once managers at the Sainte-Musse hospital realised what they were dealing with, they organised a partial evacuation of the nearby departments – in particular the children’s ward.
Hospital management confirmed that there had been “an emergency that occurred from 9pm to 11:30pm on Saturday evening that required the intervention of bomb disposal personnel, the evacuation of adult and pediatric emergencies as well as the diversion of incoming emergencies.”
You know you’re not supposed to do that, right?
STANFORD RED-LINES THE WOKE-OMETER: Stanford Hates America: University Seeks To Eliminate The Term ‘American’ Claiming It’s ‘Harmful.’
The whole initiative is asinine, but one word, in particular, stands out among the rest.
According to Stanford University, the word ‘American’ is harmful.
Stanford would rather the term ‘U.S. Citizen’ be used because American typically refers to “people from the United States only, thereby insinuating the U.S. is the most important country in the Americas.”
In other words, Stanford, a university located in the United States, does not believe the United States is the most important country in the Americas.
Stanford not being in the camp of the United States being the best country in the world is no shock at all, but publicly stating the U.S. isn’t even the most important country in the Americas takes things to an entirely different level of wokeness that’s hard to comprehend.
But extremely common in the Bay Area, and in DC; recall Obama’s infamous 2009 statement that “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Routine Writing Is About to Be Free.
I know two kinds of people: those who have been obsessively playing with and discussing ChatGPT and those who have at best a hazy notion that it exists. I’m in the obsessive group, as you already know if you read the Tennyson experiment I posted earlier.
For those in the hazy group, ChatGPT is a system that uses massive amounts of text to create a predictive model that enables it to mimic human writing. The shorthand is that it’s an AI chatbot, or autofill on steroids. You type in a request and it spits out an answer. This CNET column provides a solid backgrounder:
For example, you can ask it encyclopedia questions like, “Explaining Newton’s laws of motion.” You can tell it, “Write me a poem,” and when it does, say, “Now make it more exciting.” You ask it to write a computer program that’ll show you all the different ways you can arrange the letters of a word.
Here’s the catch: ChatGPT doesn’t exactly know anything. It’s an AI that’s trained to recognize patterns in vast swaths of text harvested from the internet, then further trained with human assistance to deliver more useful, better dialog. The answers you get may sound plausible and even authoritative, but they might well be entirely wrong, as OpenAI warns.
Even in its current, relatively primitive form ChatGPT portends both huge productivity increases and major disruptions in any enterprise in which writing matters. Instead of writing boilerplate corporate memos, managers will soon assign them to bots. The run-of-the-mill college grads who get paid to flood my mailbox with press releases and promotional emails should start thinking about careers as nail techs or phlebotomists—something in the physical world. Insight and beauty are still rare, but serviceable prose isn’t.
Well, this is the 21st century you know, to coin an Insta-phrase.
THIS LOOKS FUN: The Ruger SFAR. I’ve been wanting to get an AR-10, but this might fill the role nicely.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The Golden Age of Cocaine Is Happening Right Now.
Of all the ’80s retreads we could be enjoying — peace, prosperity, Hill Street Blues — it had to be this?
BE PREPARED: MNB Pocket hunting knife. #CommissionEarned
AN OFF-ROAD LARGE SUV THAT ALSO GOES ZERO TO SIXTY IN FIVE: 2022 Ford Expedition Timberline First Test: Is It Trail-Ready?