KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Hillary Clinton Reminds Us That She’s America’s Worst Drunk and a Psychopath. “She’s got the crazy eyes going again in the video. It never ceases to amaze me that Democrats don’t see that. Or maybe they do and they’re afraid of her. Whenever I see her I can almost hear screams coming from her basement.”
Archive for 2022
October 26, 2022
CALIFORNIA THWARTED: California’s attempt to prevent the federal government from contracting with private companies to build and staff immigration detention centers failed in court.
(A few years ago, when the Commission on Civil Rights was inspecting an immigration detention facility run by a private company, my progressive colleagues were very surprised to find out that the place was actually pretty nice. It was hilarious … maybe the most fun I ever had on the Commission. For some reason progressives think that, because these private companies are “for profit,” they are scary. They don’t seem to realize that prison guards and their unions are “for profit,” too. At some point, we all are. I don’t know very many people who would continue to do their job if they weren’t being paid.)
CHINA: Markets Are Finally Grasping That China Is A Marxist State.
In China, stocks slumped, and Hong Kong stocks collapsed the most following a CCP Congress since 1994: the US Nasdaq Golden Dragon market went up in a puff of smoke. “Stocks are disconnected to fundamentals,” as Bloomberg quotes somebody who did not see this coming on Friday. But which fundamentals? The Congress spoke about income and wealth distribution, and hammered home Common Prosperity. Either said optimist didn’t see this outcome, or didn’t think it mattered; in either case, why should anyone listen to them? CNY has dipped past 7.30 after a weak fixing, and CNH past 7.33, even as the PBOC has adjusted regulations to allow firms to borrow more from overseas. Remember the “wild” forecast CNY would ultimately sit north of 8?
Yet what happened yesterday is not going to “Truss up” China’s leadership and force a change of policy direction. Read Politburo member Wang Huning: his core belief is that markets exist only to serve a greater state goal, rather than getting to choose the head of state to serve their goals.
Is he a Communist or a Democrat? Or is that a difference these days without distinction?
EVEN RICHARD NIXON HAS GOT SOUL:
The 1972 Democratic convention, held in Miami Beach of all places—headquarters of Jackie Gleason, where the hotel lobbies were chilled to 60 degrees so that ladies could wear their furs—looked like the disgruntled celebratory dirty flowering of 1960s youthcult. The New York and California delegations, which Mayor Daley had kept to the back of the auditorium in 1968, were now front and center, and full of colorfully attired freaks.
McGovernites welcomed the flavor burst of radicalism. They desired the greening of America, so we could all be hipped to what the kids were up to, whether it was dropping acid, burning draft cards or making pipe bombs. Nixon’s people were the silent majority, who wanted to keep politics in its place, not sprawled all over their daily lives. The silent majority still exists in our PC age. Harangued, guilt-tripped, and policed for microaggressions, they want the media and academic-elite diversocrats out of their hair.
The McGovern forces stumbled over the issue of people’s moral choices, which Nixon voters acknowledged but which they often ignored. Nixon talked about law and order, not out of resentment but rather loyalty to the ethics that most people shared. Killing cops was bad, the Nixonites said (in 1971, 129 police officers were murdered, the highest number anyone could remember). McGovern’s superleftist fans blamed something called oppression, not criminals with guns.
Finally, there was busing, a doomed policy that McGovern defended to the hilt, in robotic fashion, as the unpleasant but necessary payback for a history of racial injustice. Busing used white and Black kids as pawns instead of working to better African American schools, which had been decimated by the widespread elimination of tracking and gifted programs in the 1960s. Most people saw busing as an injustice the government was doing to their child, rather than a serious effort to achieve racial equality. Once again, the silent majority was following a commonsense moral feeling, but the McGovernite left tarred them as mere racists. To be sure, there were racists among the anti-busing forces, but that didn’t make busing a wise or just policy.
Read the whole article, which is terrific. To get a sense of how far to the left the Democratic Party has shifted in America, as Power Line’s Steve Hayward wrote in his 2012 obit, while McGovern was dubbed by his enemies as turning his party into one that supports “amnesty, acid, and abortion:”
But on the last issue—abortion—we can see how radical the Democratic Party has become since. McGovern’s position at the beginning of the campaign was that abortion was a matter that should be left to state legislatures (which is the default Republican position today), and although he resisted attempts at including a pro-abortion plank in the Democratic platform in 1972, he gradually conceded to the pro-abortion views of insurgent feminists. (Muskie and Humphrey, it is worth adding, both opposed abortion. “I am not for it,” said Humphrey. “It compromises the sanctity of life,” said Muskie. The Rev. Jesse Jackson had an even tougher opinion at that time, describing abortion “as too nice a word for something cold, like murder.”) While McGovern conceded under pressure from feminists, he wouldn’t embrace abortion-on-demand. There must be regulating legislation, McGovern thought: “You can’t just let anybody walk in and request an abortion.”
As for Nixon, a big government-loving liberal Republican, he has had an increasing amount of strange new respect from leftists in recent decades — including the late Roger Ebert, and Timesmen such as Paul Krugman and the late Tom Wicker.
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? KU Law school says ADF discussion of the First Amendment is ‘hate speech.’
Last week the University of Kansas student chapter of the Federalist Society invited Jordan Lorence, the senior counsel and director of strategic engagement at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), to speak to KU Law students about the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
Before he had even spoken, non-profit media outlet the Lawrence Times published a story with a KU Law student breathlessly labeling a speech that was yet to be given as “Hate Speech.” Then KU Law Associate Dean Dean for Academic and Student Affairs Leah Terranova fired off an email to the entire staff and student body of the law school likewise decrying the talk as “hate speech” 90 minutes before the start of Lorence’s talk.
Writing for the Faculty/Staff Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) Committee, Terranova stated that the “legal positions of the ADF — particularly as they relate to the rights, freedoms, and humanity of the LGBTQ+ community and its individual members — do not align with the values of the law school. ADF has taken legal positions designed to criminalize homosexuality, demonize trans people, and degrade the civil rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community. As such, the interests and activities of ADF are antithetical to the inclusion and belonging we strive to achieve on our campus.”
“It is incredibly concerning that the dean of a prominent law school, which should be training future lawyers to persuade others through logic and legal principles, is instead actively working to suppress free expression on campus,” Lorence said in an email statement. “This is contrary to everything a law school should be teaching. We must restore a culture of free speech and civil discourse at KU and other law schools, or the future of the legal profession will remain in dire straits.”
ADF categorically denies the KU Law School allegations, mostly raised by the now widely-discredited Southern Poverty Law Center. Shortly after SPLC co-founder Morris Dees resigned amid numerous employee reports of “a systemic culture of racism and sexism within its workplace,” former employee Bob Moser stated that for he and other employees, it “was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.”
Much more at the link.
THE DESCENT OF MARK ZUCKERBERG:
Mark Zuckerberg is in a lot of trouble. He has turned away from the slog of running Facebook to focus almost entirely on his ‘metaverse’, a vision of the internet where people enter interactive virtual spaces using virtual reality (VR) headsets. He has pledged investment of at least $10 billion a year for a decade, and investors have been told that profits will be lower for the next decade as a result. He saw the digital future once. Can he repeat the trick?
Right now, it seems not. His company’s stock price has more than halved, wiping $600 billion off its market value. Shareholders are worried. Meta is to cut expenses by at least 10 per cent in the coming months, in part through redundancies. More cuts are expected.
Last week’s Meta conference – held in the metaverse, aptly enough – failed to change the mood. The announcements of a $1,499 VR headset and the dramatic introduction of legs for metaverse avatars did little to convince the markets this really is the future: Meta’s share price is down almost 25 per cent just in the past month. Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has shrunk by more than $76 billion this year so far.
There’s an obvious problem with Zuckerberg’s vision: who wants to wear a clunky virtual reality headset, watching outdated graphics that induce nausea? In a world where most of us use the internet via our mobile phones, can this really be the future? The figures suggest not: Meta expected 500,000 active monthly users on its VR platform, Horizon Worlds (which is accessed by VR headsets), by the end of this year; the current figure is fewer than 200,000. Leaked internal documents show that most of those who visit Horizon tend not to return after the first month. Meta staff themselves are reportedly unsure of the product: ‘The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?’ wrote Meta’s metaverse vice-president Vishal Shah in a memo last month.
The iPad was inspired by a prop in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The flip phone by the Star Trek communicator. But apparently the world isn’t ready to move into a clunky impersonation of Star Trek’s holodecks just yet.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Suspect in NYC ‘knockout-game’ subway attack held on $20K bail: ‘Why am I in trouble?’
100 YEARS AGO, Warren Harding gave an address on racial equality in Birmingham, Alabama.
Related: This Presidential Speech on Race Shocked the Nation…in 1921: Ninety-five years ago today, Warren G. Harding traveled deep into the heart of Klan country and delivered a sermon on civil rights that was decades ahead of its time. Coming after the deeply racist and segregationist Woodrow Wilson, Harding was an underappreciated figure. But the press didn’t like him because he was a Republican.
THEN VOTE HER OUT: Even NY Dems Say Hochul Dropped Ball on Crime. “Another Democrat said that Hochul caved to the radical wing of the party by retreating on rolling back New York’s controversial bail reform law.”
BEEGE WELBORN: Welcome to another in my continuing series of “TERRIFIC GOP CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATES YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T HEARD ABOUT.” This one is George Logan, favored to win in CT-05.
DEAL OF THE DAY: NOBLEWELL Ergonomic Office Chair. #CommissionEarned
LIBS OF TIKTOK: I tried the Left’s new social media platform and was banned in 20 minutes.
As if Twitter wasn’t biased towards the Left enough, the Left has their own new alternative to Twitter and Facebook: Tribel Social.
According to Tribel’s Twitter bio, the platform is “an innovative Twitter/Facebook alternative that’s free of hate, fake news & bots.” In other words, a platform to shield the fragile Left from the pain caused by their cognitive dissonance.
I came across a tweet from October 17th claiming the platform doesn’t “…censor any posts. [The] algorithms simply filter out fake news, bigotry, and hostility” and I thought this was a great opportunity to put their claim to the test.
I opened an account and posted a few messages, the first reading “Men cannot get pregnant.” Others included “men cannot become women and women cannot become men,” and “Joe Biden sniffs little girls.” Immediately, the Ministry of Truth went into overdrive. Tribel users began reporting and even misgendering me!
In less than 20 minutes, my account was suspended and I was banned from the platform. Tribel posted statements categorizing me as “racist,” “transphobic” and bigoted.
At least they gave the platform an appropriate name.
PUTTIN’ ON THE RITZ! PA Senate Debate an Utter Disaster for Fetterman.
I watched the entire debate, and I have to admit that I sometimes felt bad for Fetterman. I’m sure he expected to have bounced back from the stroke quicker and stronger than he has, but Tuesday night’s debate performance merely demonstrated just how far he has to go in his recovery. Without a doubt, Pennsylvania voters, and indeed the nation, saw firsthand that he is not capable of being a U.S. senator.
A condition of the debate was the allowance of a closed-captioning system to accommodate Fetterman’s cognitive impairments. The moderators were transparent about the system, but the system couldn’t help Fetterman articulate his positions clearly—at all.
From the beginning, it was clear that this was going to be a rough night for Fetterman, who opened up the debate by announcing, “Hi, goodnight, everybody.”
It got worse from there.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Letting John Fetterman debate was political malpractice:
This has been backed up more recently by the complicit leftist media, which dogpiled NBC News reporter Dasha Burns for daring to suggest that Fetterman had difficulty with questions and struggled to understand small talk in her recent interview. Rebecca Traister of New York magazine, Kara Swisher of a million podcasts, Molly Jong-Fast of someone-who’s-wasting-their-money: they all claimed that Fetterman was fine, just fine, and maybe it was Burns who had problems with small talk. They all now look like useful idiots — and there’s no defense for this level of partisan spin. The man can barely function, and everyone with eyes can see it.
For Republicans and Dr. Oz, the race had been trending in their direction even prior to this debate — but rather than right the ship, the choice by Fetterman’s team to force their candidate out on stage is political malpractice that will in all likelihood doom their effort.
ARE WE ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT THIS AGAIN? MUST MEAN THE DEMOCRATS EXPECT TO LOSE AN ELECTION. The Vulnerabilities of our Voting Machines, and How to Secure Them.
ABOUT TIME: Pushback: Nationwide group fights university blacklisting of those who refuse COVID shots.
FIRST THE SANE RESPONSE TO WU-FLU NOW THIS. THERE IS VIKING IN THE OLD GAL STILL: How Dare They?
HE’S 80. LET HIM DO AS HE WILL: Hobby Lobby founder David Green giving away company because he ‘chose God’.
A FULL LIST OF THINGS SHE “CANNOT BELIEVE” EXCEEDS THE CAPACITY OF THIS BLOG: Pelosi: I ‘cannot believe anybody would vote for’ GOP in midterms.
Possibility the capacity of the internet.