SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: Berkeley co-op Person of Color Theme House bans white guests from common spaces.
Archive for 2022
August 16, 2022
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (CRIMEA EDITION): Moscow admits sabotage caused blast at military depot in Crimea this morning.
NO CONFLICTS OF INTEREST HERE: Can you guess which Squad member was expanding her rental property inventory at the same time she was pushing for federal landlord subsidies?
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: So… What Caliber Rosary Are You Packing? “Full disclosure: I have two rosaries on my desk and they just happen to be on a shelf with some knives and a handgun. That was purely a coincidence but thanks to the paste-eater at The Atlantic, I might start playing it up and give his tiny mind another Roman Catholic prayer warrior to be afraid of because he’s an emotionally weak blithering idiot.”
FROM MY COLLEAGUE BRAD AREHEART: The Top 100 Law Reviews: A Reference Guide Based on Historical USNWR Data.
RAUNCHY, BUT NOT WRONG: ‘Ask your kids’: Kari Lake says Trump and DeSantis have ‘BDE’.
FASTER, PLEASE: The Covid Reckoning Is Coming.
If Republicans retake the House next year, they should dedicate themselves to a full accounting of where this money went. Much of it did not find its way to the people who needed it. This spring, the Labor Department estimated that “at least” $163 billion in “overpayments” went to both legitimate recipients of unemployment benefits and fraudsters. The Paycheck Protection Act, which provided forgivable loans to businesses adversely affected by the pandemic, was described by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz as an “invitation” to defraud the government. “What didn’t happen was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time,” he said. That program has disbursed roughly $800 billion, about half of which has been forgiven.
And that’s just the unintended misuse of pandemic-related relief. What about the intended squandering of this taxpayer-funded largess? The Republican Study Committee’s review of where some of these funds were supposed to go is just as enraging as the abuse of those funds: “tree equity work,” environmental justice “boot camps,” “safe smoking kits,” and syringes for using illicit narcotics, refurbishing a minor-league baseball stadium in New York, upping the prize money at Arizona horse-racing tracks, and providing public-school staff with instruction in “high-need topics” like “implicit bias” training and “restorative practices.” As a Department of Education document averred, the pandemic was a perfect time to engineer a “culture shift” in America’s schools.
This investigative work is only one element of a comprehensive retrospective on the pandemic. Americans should confront the impulses that led governments to close houses of worship, abrogate the rights of property owners, and draft private enterprise into the work of law enforcement in what were patently obvious violations of the Constitution. There should be hearings into the conduct of teachers’ unions and into school boards in the major metropolitan areas that clung to school closures long after the terrible consequences for young people’s mental health and educational advancementwere known. And what connection was there between the engineered breakdown of society and the eruption of social tensions culminating in some of the costliest rioting the country has ever seen?
The public health apparatus’s reluctance, throughout this miserable event, to meet the public where it lives has become a cliché. They won’t budge, and the country is moving on without them. But moving on is impossible in the absence of a thorough reckoning. The Covid pandemic already seems unlikely to be “forgotten” by history like the outbreak of Spanish Influenza a century ago. Unlike our forebears, we marinate in our trauma. It’s incumbent on this generation to establish for posterity what went wrong over the last two and a half years, if only so that we will never do this again.
Indeed. Much more like this, please: The Elite Panic of 2022.
THAT’S NOT FUNNY! Hysterical Reinhart Meme Goes Viral After Twitter Ban.
THE PRESS DOESN’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS BECAUSE IT’S BAD FOR DEMOCRATS: ‘A Nation in Anguish’: One Year After Biden’s Disastrous Withdrawal From Afghanistan.
YES, AND ALTHOUGH THEY PRIDE THEMSELVES ON THEIR INTELLECT THEY AREN’T ESPECIALLY BRIGHT OR KNOWLEDGEABLE: “Highly educated metropolitan elites have become something of a self-enclosed Brahmin class.”
Plus: “Why was the trigger pulled on the search? Wasn’t it about a fear that Trump’s 2024 momentum was getting out of control? They just misjudged how people would react to the Mar-a-Lago raid. Now, I suppose they need to try to say, the raid was entirely nonpolitical, just following normal procedure, without any thought for whether it would increase Trump’s power, which, unfortunately, it did.”
Unexpectedly!
Also: “Brooks is still holding out hope of containing the Trump monster. The man must be put in a cage! It’s the only way. But it’s this overreach that puts you and your highly educated metropolitan elites in an ever-worse position to do the one thing that you need to do: Be better than him and win the contest!”
Hypothesis: They’re not trying to be better than him because they know they can’t.
And: “No honorable way but we absolutely need to make sure that the enemy is defeated? If Trump wafted those 2 ideas, the self-enclosed Brahmin class would be accusing him of fomenting insurrection.”
They seem to want a civil war, given how hard they’re working at provoking one.
Plus, from the comments: “And this is the miscalculation that the Feds made in this ridiculous stunt. Many people who have mocked Trump supporters for believing he has been wrongfully pursued by the ‘Deep State’ for the past six years (initial crime was beating HRC), are starting to think, ‘Hey, they may have a point there’.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: New Congressional Report: U.S.-Trained Afghan Special Forces Forced to Flee to Iran: They could divulge sensitive U.S. military training and intelligence to Tehran, a U.S. lawmaker warns.
Related: One Year Later, Afghanistan Is a Land of Shrugs and Sadness.
Greatest unforced military/diplomatic error in U.S. history.
GODSPEED: NASA fast-tracks Artemis I Moon rocket launch. “NASA announced today that the engineers and technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida completed the final testing and checkouts of the Artemis I Moon rocket, making the new rollout date as soon as 9 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, August 16 ahead of the targeted August 29 launch.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: Seat Cushion Pillow for Office Chair. #CommissionEarned
INTERESTING POLIO FACTS:
The Salk vaccine, generally known as the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), developed first and used exclusively in the US since 2000, is incredibly effective (99%+) at preventing paralytic poliomyelitis but does not convey mucosal immunity, and therefore does little to reduce transmission of the poliovirus. . . .
The live attenuated Oral Polio Vaccine, developed by Dr. Albert Sabin, is cheap, easy (taken as a few drops of liquid by mouth), and remarkably effective both at preventing infection in the gut as well as severe neurological disease, but has an Achilles heel: it can mutate back into a virulent form of polio!
So when you blame the “unvaccinated” for the spread of polio, you’re wrong. One vaccine doesn’t stop the spread, the other does — except when it causes the spread.
Plus: “We really don’t know how long the immunity from polio vaccination lasts.”
That’s encouraging. I had both kinds of vaccine as a kid, and have always assumed lifetime immunity. Maybe not!
NOTHING NEW IN MATERIALISTS’ BASHING INTELLIGENT DESIGN: It turns out those who insist material processes alone account for the universe have been ripping for more than two millennia those who suggest a designer behind design, according to Dr. John West of the Discovery Institute. In other words, the debate was hot and heavy long before the Scientific Revolution.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Matt Margolis: We’ve Seen This Kind of Denial From the White House Before. “You know, the President and the White House learned about this FBI search from public reports. We learned, just like the American public did yesterday, and we did not have advance notice of this activity.”
Athena Thorne: European ‘Hunger Stones’ Blow Up Key Climate Narrative. “When you see me, cry.”
Yours Truly: It’s Official: Biden Trashed the Economy. “The Empire State Manufacturing Index just collapsed to the third lowest level ever measured.”
FROM DAVID CARRICO: The Blood Is the Life. #CommissionEarned
Chaim Caan was just out for a night of fun, blowing off some steam the way a young man will. After the better part of a year spent in COVID lockdowns, he was ready to let his hair down at a night club. But the fascinating young woman who he encountered that night left him with something to remember her by: she turned Chaim into a vampire.
Soon, Chaim finds himself thrust into a weird underground world of mysticism and enchantment as he navigates life as the newly undead, trying to reconcile his beliefs as an Orthodox Jew with the new reality that has been thrust upon him.
He is forced to deal with a lot of change: to his body, to his mind, to his perceptions, to his relationships, and even to his world. He finds himself in parts of the world he had never dreamed of being in, and he finds himself doing things that he had never envisioned being a part of his life.
And if he can come to terms with these changes, this mild-mannered young man might just find himself a hero.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Shrinking of Higher Ed.
Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic, raising alarms that the enrollment emergency projected to arrive a few years from now is already here.
High-school seniors uninterested in studying online chose to defer. Working parents strained by the demands of full-time pandemic child care put their studies on hold. International students couldn’t get visas. Those in majors with hands-on practicums or lab work found they couldn’t register for courses required for their degrees.
It’s not coming back as expected, either.
NEW BOOK: Science in an Age of Unreason.
THE RACISTS SELF-IDENTIFY: Today’s blacklisted American: White teachers blacklisted by union contract in Minnesota.
LEAVE IT TO THE PROS? SCREW THAT – THIS IS AMERICA: High school football players hailed as heroes for saving woman trapped in car crash.
THE PEOPLE KNOW. THEY KNOW WHO THE ENEMY IS: Biden Administration’s Successful War on American Energy Industry.