Well, you know, they want targeted political violence aimed at their enemies.
Archive for 2022
June 20, 2022
SPACE: “Has nobody at NASA read the space policy?”
If you want it done on time hire SpaceX. If you want to maximize pork and graft, go with SLS. Guess which they’re doing.
HISTORY’S GREATEST MONSTER: Elon Musk Lays Off LGBTQ Employees At Tesla During Pride Month?!?!!?
In sharp contrast: Pride Month: Here’s How the Navy Is Training Sailors on Proper Gender Pronouns.
With Putin in Ukraine and the CCP looking at swallowing up Taiwan, I’m really glad the US Navy is focusing on the important issues right now.
SADLY BELIEVABLE TODAY:
@babylonbee Spelling Bee Contestant Asks The Definition Of “Woman” #woman #comedy #funny #satire #sketch #ItsGreatOutdoors ♬ original sound – Profile
IT’S A RIDDLE, WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY, INSIDE AN ENIGMA: California Democrats to investigate cause of high gas prices.
With California drivers paying more than $6 for a gallon of gas and state officials deadlocked for months over how to provide relief, lawmakers in the state Assembly on Monday announced they would investigate oil companies they say are “abusing a historic situation to suck profits from Californians’ wallets.”
Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announced a bipartisan committee to investigate gas price gouging, with plans to question oil companies, regulators and economists to find out why California’s gas prices are consistently the highest in the country.
California’s gas prices are currently the highest in the U.S., with the average price per gallon at $6.40 on Monday compared to the national average of $4.98.
“We have put ourselves in a situation because of our addiction to the gas-powered engine. Yet that is no excuse for the actions of those who pin California drivers down with a foot on our necks and a hand in our pockets,” Rendon said.
So Rendon will be blocking this, right? California gas tax rising July 1; GOP slams Newsom over lack of relief.
Evergreen:
ASHLEY BIDEN’S DIARY REVEALS JOE BIDEN MAY BE CREEPIER THAN WE THOUGHT:
Tucker Carlson opened his Friday show with a segment on Ashley Biden’s diary. The part of the diary discussed revealed that Joe Biden is creepier than we thought.
Ashley Biden is Joe Biden’s daughter. She inadvertently left her diary under the bed at a halfway house, and the lady who found the diary, Aimee Harris, sold the diary to the media. It was not stolen. But now, some of the revelations from the Daily Mail, which has a copy of the diary, are damning…and reveal definitively that Joe Biden should not be the President of the United States. An investigation should be warranted, but nothing is likely to happen. The Bidens are a protected family.
As with the Hunter story, the diary contents began to leak out when National File got a copy of the diary and exposed it under the title of “Biden Daughter’s Diary Details ‘Not Appropriate’ Showers With Joe As Child.”
Flashback: Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents, Book Claims.
MEANWHILE, IN FRANCE: Macron loses majority, long and painful crisis to come. “The biggest heaping of blame must fall on President Emmanuel Macron. He helped to throw away a comfortable lead in parliamentary seat projections by dithering for four weeks over his new government and prime minister. He allowed his centrist alliance to conduct a limp and leaderless campaign. Macron’s party are known as marcheurs (walkers). To win an election you need to run, not walk. Some insiders suggest that this was a deliberate strategy to “de-dramatise” the election and preserve the momentum from Macron’s re-election.. Others hint that Macron has been uncharacteristically lacking in ideas and energy since his presidential triumph in April, as if two years of back-to-back crises had sapped him mentally and physically.”
Marine Le Pen’s party, meanwhile, is up to 89 seats.
Related: ‘Unprecedented situation’ – Macron loses majority in French parliament. “The Macron government has also lost several big names, as ministers including Health minister Brigitte Bourguignon and Environment minister Amélie de Montchalin lost their seats.”
MEANWHILE, IN GERMANY: Germany’s Die Linke (Left) party is in crisis.
Born in 2005 from the merger of an East-German left faction and a smaller West-German one, Die Linke’s support skyrocketed to 12 percent of the vote in 2009’s elections to the Bundestag, a level of support the party maintained for nearly a decade—to the alarm of the political establishment. More recently, however, the party’s electoral support and labor-union base have shrunk. In last year’s elections, Die Linke garnered less than 5 percent of ballots and lost nearly half its seats—its worst result ever. Its share of the union vote slid to 6 percent, down from 17 percent in 2009.
Until recently, Sahra Wagenknecht was one of Die Linke’s most prominent members. Catapulted to the Bundestag in 2009, she was a deputy leader of the party from 2010 to 2014. In the Bundestag, she served as parliamentary co-chairwoman of her party from 2015 to 2019 and as leader of the opposition (against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition) until 2017.
Wagenknecht announced her resignation as parliamentary leader in November 2019, citing burnout. Yet many believe her decision was at least partly motivated by the party becoming increasingly captured by the kind of “progressive neoliberalism” (to borrow Nancy Fraser’s term) that seems to have infected, to one degree or another, all Western left-wing parties, precipitating their decline.
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It’s no wonder, she argues, that “the left today no longer stands for justice in the eyes of many people, but above all for self-righteousness.” The instinctive repulsion many ordinary people feel for the left nowadays is, of course, one of the main reasons for its electoral decline. However, the truth is even more uncomfortable, Wagenknecht suggests: Lower-middle working classes today tend to overwhelmingly vote for right-wing figures and parties, such as France’s Marine Le Pen and Law and Justice in Poland, because the latter tend to offer more redistributive and pro-labor—that is, more “left-wing”—economic platforms than nominally left parties.
To reverse this decline, Wagenknecht makes the case for what she calls “left conservatism”: a left that returns to its original mission of improving the lives of the working and middle classes but also understands that doing so means rejecting globalism—turning, instead, to the democratic nation-state as the only terrain on which it is possible to collectively challenge capitalism. Such a left appreciates that states should take care of the well-being of their own citizens, especially the most underprivileged, before they can for newcomers from far-flung places. Such a left, finally, recognizes people’s need for “recognition, belonging, and community.”
So a more nationalist-oriented socialism for Germany, then. What could possibly go wrong?
AS I’VE NOTED BEFORE, OUR SENSES PROVIDE A LOT MORE USEFUL INFORMATION THAN WE ACTUALLY USE: Humans Can Learn to ‘Echolocate’ in Just 10 Weeks, Experiment Shows.
THEY WANT YOU TO LEAD A MORE CONSTRAINED LIFE: High fossil fuel prices are good for the planet—here’s how to keep it that way.
Related: “So those high prices for gasoline and the long, chaotic lines and canceled flights at the airports are not a bug, they’re the lynchpin of the whole scheme, which is itself part and parcel of the entire Great Reset project (about which much more tomorrow; watch this space). In order for the Lords of Davos to control you they must first curtail and control your freedom of movement, and what better way to do that than to make the price of oil prohibitively expensive? First your cars stop moving, then the trucks that deliver almost everything of value, including food, to the stores. An inability to move freely and without government oversight will vanish as computers take over your automobiles and which, when they are fully electric, can be disabled at will. As they like to say: You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy. What better metaphor, then, for the parlous state of our national affairs than the sight of Biden on his keister after toppling off his bike over the weekend.”
HOW TRAUMA BECAME A POLITICAL TOOL: The left’s new battleground is the psyche.
A culture that once avoided talk of mental health is now openly celebrating people who speak candidly about their psychic wounds—even or especially when they are the type of people who are known to us all because they perform labors that seem somewhat superhuman. When Olympic gymnast Simone Biles abruptly withdrew from several events at the 2021 Tokyo games, she cited the ongoing suffering she has experienced as a victim of sexual abuse. Nearly all the stories about her decision praised Biles for taking a mental-health break, even though it likely cost the Olympic team gold medals. Likewise, when the number-two ranked women’s tennis player, Naomi Osaka, withdrew from both Wimbledon and the French Open, claiming mental-health challenges, she was lionized for speaking out.
The word that is used to describe their pain is “trauma,” classically defined as a lingering and haunted response to a terrible experience such as assault, natural disaster, serious accident, or some other deeply disturbing event.
Experts praised both Biles and Osaka for putting “emotional wellness” ahead of everything else, but rather than acknowledge that athletes like them are the exception—since they had chosen to take on the mental and physical challenges that elite competition poses—experts used their experiences to argue that similar kinds of trauma were pervasive and growing. Trauma “has nefarious and wide-spread tentacles,” Margo Lindauer, associate clinical professor at Northeastern University, told one news outlet. “The impacts of trauma are ongoing and unexpected and can rear up in all sorts of different ways.”
Today, trauma diagnoses have moved far beyond the realm of individual clinical expertise to take on outsize significance as an explanation for a broad array of social, cultural, and political problems. A popular book about trauma, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 150 weeks. In it, the author explores the physiological and neurological impact of trauma on patients who had been clinically diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and he claims that therapies such as mindfulness yoga, art, and dance are effective in treating them.
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Today, trauma diagnoses have moved far beyond the realm of individual clinical expertise to take on outsize significance as an explanation for a broad array of social, cultural, and political problems. A popular book about trauma, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 150 weeks. In it, the author explores the physiological and neurological impact of trauma on patients who had been clinically diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and he claims that therapies such as mindfulness yoga, art, and dance are effective in treating them.
And speaking of Lorenz, she’s had quite a Sunday: Dad who barely survived COVID makes Taylor Lorenz look like even more of a jacka*s for shaming Matt Yglesias for ‘joking’ about catching COVID.
As Twitchy readers know, Taylor Lorenz went after Matt Yglesias for making light of his catching COVID because apparently when someone catches it they CAN NOT JOKE ABOUT IT because God forbid anyone cope with humor. We’re not entirely sure what bug crawled up her backside years ago but whatever it was, yikes.
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She went on to shame an actual COVID survivor, and not just any survivor but someone who was in a coma and has experienced life-changing effects from the virus she doesn’t want anyone joking about. User @Real_Life_Dad shared his experience with Lorenz perhaps in the hope that she’d figure out it’s ok to keep your sense of humor about well, any and everything. It’s how some of us actually get through the worst of times.
Ahem.
Lorenz replied with an all-time showstopper:
“Lateral ableism” — followed by a lateral mike drop:
To be fair, that’s setting the bar awfully low.
LONG TRAIN OF DISASTERS: Can you guess to which institution the following words refer to? ” … failed to achieve a more-inclusive government, to reduce urban poverty and inequality, and to dismantle racism.” And no, it’s not simply Big Government. It’s Big Government and Big Philanthropy.
Michael Hartmann, writing in Philanthropy Daily and Director of Capital Research Center’s Capital-Giving program, is the author of those words as he is describing Prof. Claire Dunning’s forthcoming Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State.
“Decision-making about government grant-making to nonprofits, Dunning basically believes, has not included a wide-enough group of those who contributed to the pool of funds out of which it was drawn.
“In fact, she thinks, government-nonprofit partnerships were and are so popular in large part because they furthered the interests of an elite, or sets of elites, that benefited — and in some cases outright profited — from the problems they’re supposed to have helped solve,” Hartmann writes.
Don’t expect to see Dunning’s book praised by the NYT. Guess we could say “government of, by and for the elites,” no?
FASTER, PLEASE: Single brain scan can diagnose Alzheimer’s disease.
A RULING CLASS THAT HATES THE COUNTRY IT RULES IS A BAD THING: Elite NYC private schools are teaching kids that American society must be destroyed.
I GUESS MAJOR CORPORATIONS AND STATES LIKE CALIFORNIA WILL BOYCOTT THEM NOW, RIGHT? Japan court says ban on same-sex marriage constitutional.
MORE NIH ROT EXPOSED: The Inspector-General at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reports that 69 percent of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) grantees it surveyed fail to report links of researchers to foreign countries and companies.
Adam Andrjeweski, the guy behind Open the Books, who blew the lid off the secret NIH royalty payments, told the Epoch Times earlier today that more sunlight is essential to root such corruption out of The Swamp:
“The concern here is about foreign threats to the integrity and security of U.S. biomedical research. Without reporting compliance, there is no way of knowing the sheer scale of foreign corruption,” he said.
“Furthermore, it’s an open invitation for bad actors to hop on the $31 billion NIH grant-making gravy-train. Without good reporting and data, there’s no way to know just how much U.S. intellectual property is at risk of being stolen.”
By the way, if you aren’t familiar with Open the Books, you should be if you care about recovering our constitutional republic because the group is doing tremendous work to promote transparency and accountability of government at all levels.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Biden says decision on gas tax holiday may come this week.
President Joe Biden said Monday that he’s considering a federal holiday on the gasoline tax, possibly saving U.S. consumers as much as 18.4 cents a gallon.
“Yes, I’m considering it,” Biden told reporters after taking a walk along the beach near his vacation home in Delaware. “I hope to have a decision based on the data — I’m looking for by the end of the week.”
The administration is increasingly looking for ways to spare the public from higher prices at the pump, which began to climb last year and surged after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Gas prices nationwide are averaging just under $5 a gallon, according to AAA.
Why would he do that? Biden calls paying higher taxes a patriotic act.
● Treasury Sec. Yellen says only way to fix energy crisis is to ‘move to renewables.’
● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?
● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep have called for higher gas taxes.
“We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
UPDATE: Then-candidate Obama, on his way to becoming Biden’s boss for eight years, derided Hillary’s gas tax holiday ‘gimmick’ in 2008.
(Updated and bumped.)
HE’S A CAUTIONARY EXAMPLE IN HIMSELF: Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf Makes a Great Case Against Red Flag Laws. “The absolute ignorance of our justice system and its operations it would take to genuinely post this and to think it makes a good point is jaw-dropping. It’s ironic, too, because proponents of red flag laws say that they’re only going to be used in extreme cases, like when someone is publicly threatening to shoot up a school, for example. But this graphic actually proves the opposite—it all starts over ‘photos of guns’ and ‘cryptic messages,’ neither of which are illegal or even necessarily concerning.”
MADE IN THE USA: Dango Dapper Bifold EDC Wallet. #CommissionEarned
A NICE SCOTTISH MAN GAVE ME THE FORMULA FOR TRANSPARENT ALUMINUM ALREADY: The race to produce green steel.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Typical U.S. Asking Rent Surpassed $2,000 for First Time in May. “The median monthly asking rent in the U.S. surpassed $2,000 for the first time in May, rising 15% year over year to a record high of $2,002. That’s on par with April’s annual increase of 15%, but a slowdown from March’s 17% gain.”
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Los Angeles County somehow looks at reinstating mask mandates.