WELL, COULD THEY HAVE WORSE WAR-LEADERS? Europe Is Losing the Energy War.
UPDATE: It’s worse: In mustard-loving France, shortage of condiment is nothing to sneeze at. Some of it’s weather, but some of it’s EU bureaucrats: “One problem Burgundy producers face is that the European Union has banned an insecticide long used to combat the black flea beetle, a scourge which has decimated harvests in the past.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: “Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas on Sunday urged President Biden to step up enforcement of immigration laws as Republican governors this week ramped up their confrontation with the administration over its border strategy by transporting migrants released from federal custody to Democratic-run cities.”
NO THANKS: This Is Your City On Chinese Construction Standards. “Fires are hardly unknown among American skyscrapers, but usually they occur in older buildings, not ones built this century, as modern construction practices like firewalls and sprinkler systems generally prevent fires from spreading from floor to floor. The Lotus Garden China Telecom building in Changsha was finished in 2000.”
ASSUMING SHE’S CAPABLE OF EMBARRASSMENT: Stacey Abrams’ Embarrassing Weekend.
THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I’D BEEN PROMISED: Lockheed Martin delivers record 300-kW laser weapon to US military.
ROGER KIMBALL: Wish You Weren’t Here.
The outcry was partly amusing, partly malevolent, as Tucker Carlson showed with his customary aplomb. NBC News took to Twitter to quote a “founding member of a foundation which helps refugees” who said that DeSantis sending “asylum seekers” to Martha’s Vineyard is like “me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there.” Trash?
It wasn’t revealed whether this chap (or chapette, as the case may be) was also a student of Heart of Darkness. If so, perhaps he admires Kurtz’s exit line, scrawled at the end of his report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs: “exterminate all the brutes.” In any event, someone at NBC must have understood that analogizing migrants to “trash” did not send quite the right message, so the tweet was quickly deleted (but not before it was picked up and preserved for posterity by several public -spirited commentators).
Anyway, within 40 hours, the National Guard had been summoned. The blinking migrants were pushed onto buses and whisked off to a military establishment, out of sight, out of mind.
Except that they are not out of mind. In a single stroke, Ron DeSantis tore the mask of hypocrisy off the smug faces of the liberal elites who love crowing about the virtues of “diversity” and the evils of “whiteness” just so long as they don’t have to suffer any real-world consequences. “People who make and advocate certain policies,” Tucker Carlson said, “should at some point have to live with those policies.” That was the moral of Ron DeSantis’ bravura performance. God bless him for it.
Indeed:
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Math education prof: 2+2 = 4 ‘trope’ ‘reeks of white supremacy patriarchy.’
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Jeff Bezos’s Rocket Engine Nears Debut, Ending US Reliance on Russia.
Blue Origin predicted in 2014 that its BE-4 engine would be ready by 2017 to launch the new Vulcan rocket built by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of top Pentagon contractors Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. But the Government Accountability Office as recently as June cited “continued technical challenges in developing a US-produced rocket engine.”
Now, the US Space Force is expressing optimism, saying in a statement that “Vulcan launch system development activities continue to make progress” toward a first test launch by December because “ULA and Blue Origin have completed originally planned BE-4 development testing, and have successfully demonstrated full engine performance.”
Maybe Vulcan will launch before SLS does.
THE DIVERSITY DREAM: “Liz Truss, the new Conservative prime minister, announced her cabinet, and for the first time ever, not a single member of the inner circle… is a white man….”
Given how I expect things to go in Britain over the coming year, Britain’s white men may be grateful to avoid the blame. But who am I kidding — they’ll be blamed anyway.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Martha’s Vineyard, Illegal Immigrants, and Liberal Hypocrisy. “If you look closely, the open-borders crowd is comprised largely of politicians who don’t live anywhere near the border. They’ve latched onto a crisis that doesn’t affect them in an effort to seem like they’re true humanitarians. When the crisis does arrive at their pristine doorsteps the response is, ‘Ooh, icky people.’ Democrats love making the case that their principles reside on the highest of moral high grounds. When faced with a choice to be the benevolent world-builders that they fancy themselves to be, however, they invariably prove that they’re elitist, classist snobs.”
IT’S SERIOUSLY TIME TO ABOLISH THE FBI: FBI labeled veterans group “terror organization” despite knowing they weren’t. “It seems increasingly likely that there is a core group of agents inside of the FBI that have grown tired of the overt politicization of the Bureau under the leadership of Christopher Wray and the direction of the Biden administration. Another whistleblower has reportedly come forward and presented information to members of Congress about the abuses taking place inside the FBI. Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio (R) received a complaint from someone inside the agency over the FBI’s designation of American Contingency, a veteran-led group that assists people in the wake of natural disasters, as being ‘facilitators of domestic terror.’ And it was further revealed that the FBI already knew this wasn’t true, having previously investigated the group and found them to be on the up and up.”
NOBODY COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING: Joe Biden Delivers a Mess of a 60 Minutes Interview, Leaves His Handlers Scrambling.
IT’S NOT MISGUIDED, IT’S EVIL: Jeffrey Singer: California’s Misguided Effort to Stifle COVID Scientific Discourse.
Anyway, now that Joe Biden says the crisis is over, any excuse for this sort of effort has vanished.
OLD AND BUSTED: “Anarchy in the U.K.”
The New Hotness? Disturbing: UK arrests multiple protesters for speaking out against the monarchy. “I was arrested today in #Oxford after I voiced my opposition to the proclamation of ‘#CharlesIII‘. Can we be arrested simply for expressing an opinion in public? I was arrested under the Police Bill passed earlier this year. This is an outrageous assault on democracy. #NotMyKing.”
SALENA ZITO: Joe Biden has a Versailles problem. “Last week, President Joe Biden showed what it looks like when the ruling class loses all connection with the realities of the pain and stress of the people it serves.”
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Evidence of Hochul pay-to-play outrage mounts.
TRANSGENDER LOGIC PUZZLES: Last week, I linked to the very brief Title IX comment that Pete Kirsanow and I submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. It outlines why we think the Biden Administration does not have the power to require federally funded schools to assign anatomical boys who identify as girls to the girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms and showers (and vice versa). We believe schools have discretion here.
Since then, I’ve been asked what would happen (under the analysis in our comment) if Congress were to amend Title IX to prohibit discrimination on the basis of both sex and gender identity, but make no other change to the law.
Answer: It would make it illegal to treat anatomical boys who identify as girls differently from other boys. Similarly, it would make it illegal to treat anatomical girls who identify as boys differently from other girls. For bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers, that means it would be illegal to separate transgender students from students with the same sex who are not transgender. That’s the opposite of what transgender activists want.
Title IX has a section that specifically empowers schools to maintain “separate living facilities for the different sexes.” That’s what authorizes schools to have separate bathrooms by sex in the first place. Congress could amend that section to include gender identity as well. That would allow schools the discretion to separate students of the same sex (but different genders) if that’s what it wants to do. But it still wouldn’t give the activists what they want–a requirement that schools assign transgender students to the facilities they identify with.
If Congress wants to require schools to separate students by gender rather than sex for bathrooms, locker rooms and showers, it should have to repeal the part of Title IX that specifically empowers schools, in their discretion, to maintain “separate living facilities for the different sexes.”
Or at least that how our analysis comes out.
GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: New York State will award its first 150 marijuana retail licenses to people penalized in the past for dealing.
IT WOULD MATTER LESS THAT OUR INSTITUTIONS ARE SO INEPT IF THEY WEREN’T SO DOMINEERING: Phony Motion Discovered on Trump Raid Court Docket. “Even the Associated Press acknowledged that the document was ‘a clear fabrication.’ Court records and interviews suggest the filing came from a serial forger at a North Carolina federal prison.”
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