NOW HE’S A MARTYR TO TYRANNY:
Archive for 2022
January 16, 2022
IT’S UNTOLD BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW: The (Too Often) Untold Story: Armed Self-Defense and the Lives Saved Every Year by Gun Owners.
WHAT ARE THE DEEP SEVENS UP TO? Earth’s interior is cooling faster than expected.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Salt Lake Tribune editorial demands governor “deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere:”
Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.
But it may be too late for that, politically and medically.
As Clay Travis tweets in response, “The Salt Lake City newspaper wants the Utah national guard to not allow unvaccinated people to leave their homes. This is mindless, anti-science insanity — omicron is infecting everyone — but these ‘journalists’ are demanding totalitarianism. And they think they’re the good guys.”
TRUST THE HEALTH PROFESSIONALS: Study: Cancer patients given high-dose radiation treatments even near end of life. “Many older cancer patients whose disease has spread to other parts of the body continue to receive high-dose radiation therapy, despite guidelines that recommend against its use under these conditions, an analysis published Friday by JAMA Health Forum found. In the review of data for more than 500,000 radiotherapy doses, or radiation treatments, administered to Medicare beneficiaries, nearly 4% of the patients involved died within 90 days of their last session, the researchers said.”
A UNITER. NOT A DIVIDER! Jon Gabriel: Joe Biden promised to unify us, and he has. Most voters agree that they don’t like him.
Year One of the Biden presidency was a mixed bag. From COVID-19 to Afghanistan to the economy, Joe’s had a rocky start. Still, he’s delivered big on one promise.
In his inaugural address, Biden said, “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.”
Boy, has he delivered. Across dividing lines of age, race and gender, the country is united on one point: Nobody likes Joe Biden.
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
DON’T TRUST CHINA, CHINA IS ASSHOLE: China Denies Expanding Nuclear Arsenal.
Related: Biden team weighs killing Trump’s new nuclear weapons.
Flashback: As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines [in America]
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
You know who didn’t do that? Trump. You know who is doing it now? Biden and the Democrats.
MEDIA MYTH ALERT: WaPo review indulges in myth, claims Bernstein’s ‘work brought down a president.’ As Bob Woodward “once asserted, in an interview with the now-defunct American Journalism Review: ‘To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horse s**t.’”
WHAT A STATEMENT BY THE BUFFALO BILLS: Bills vs. Patriots score: Josh Allen tosses five touchdowns on historic night as Buffalo blows out New England.
The Buffalo Bills have advanced to the divisional round of the NFL playoffs and did so in impressive fashion as they ran the New England Patriots out of Orchard Park, 47-17. This game was a rout essentially from the jump. Josh Allen and the Bills offense marched 70 yards down the field on the opening possession and the quarterback was able to complete a sideline touchdown throw to tight end Dawson Knox to give the Bills the early lead. From there, it was all Buffalo.
The Bills scored on all four of their first half possessions to build up a 24-point lead by halftime, which essentially put the game in cruise control. In the second half, they kept their foot on the gas, adding 20 points to their advantage, which towards the end of the game felt more like a coronation for the bonafide powerhouse in the AFC East for the foreseeable future.
And, err, what a statement by the Bills’ fans: It’s back! Bills fans rekindle old tradition, throw sex toy on the field during game vs. Patriots.
TO BE FAIR, THAT PROMISE WAS ALWAYS A LIE: Biden is dividing the country he promised to unite.
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HARSH, BUT LITERALLY TRUE: Kamala Harris So Disliked Nation Considering Hillary Clinton. At least as far as Democrats are concerned.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Senators Demand Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona Explain Role in Letter That Called Parents Domestic Terrorists.
WHAT ACTUAL RACIST EXTREMISM LOOKS LIKE: Schools group ‘People of Color’ conference: ‘Burn Sh** Down,’ be wary of ‘The White People Way.’
THE ATLANTIC’S NERVOUS BREAKDOWN:
The Atlantic reader who visits the website rather than simply journeying there through social-media links is turned into a doom-scroller, confronted time and again as she journeys down the homepage with headlines like this one: “America Is Running Out of Time.” Note how the title lacks specificity; it doesn’t need specificity, because this is what nearly every article in the Atlantic is about. (A recent feature in the January/February print issue of the magazine was titled, simply, “Are We Doomed?”)
“Bring Back the Nervous Breakdown,” urged a 2021 article. And so Goldberg’s Atlantic has. An astonishingly large number of stories in both the print and online versions of the magazine now focus on the irrational feelings of a very particular and privileged class of people—elite, left-of-center, educated people who ironically believe themselves too sophisticated to be emotionally manipulated like the unwashed Fox-viewing masses they abhor.
Pieces like Ian Bogost’s essay “I’m Starting to Give Up on Post-Pandemic Life” typify the Atlantic’s panic porn—the titillating personal account of a distorted negative emotional experience described lubriciously with no observable larger social purpose. “Even if this strain is less bad than it might have been,” he writes of the Omicron variant, “only dumb luck will have made it so. That’s neither victory nor a sign that the emergency is over.” He then spirals into despair: “The coronavirus was once ‘novel’ because it was new. Now it feels both ancient and eternal. Having endured the emergence of two major strains even since the rollout of vaccines, a difficult thought is planted in my head: What if the pandemic never ends?”
This Eeyore-meets-Nietzsche tone now dominates much of the magazine’s coverage. Alexis Madrigal, the founder of its tracking project, offered a similar example of irrational meltdown in a piece about getting a breakthrough case of COVID at the end of 2021. After attending a wedding, Madrigal was consumed by the idea that he would get sick even though he initially tested negative. He described his response: “I did an intense Peloton workout and it felt fine, though maybe my legs were a little slow. I wasn’t eager to test again; a negative PCR test seemed good enough. But my wife heard me cough—one of only maybe 20 coughs throughout my whole sickness—and said, ‘Couldn’t you take another antigen test?’”
Reader, he got it. Whereupon he became a prisoner of his own irrationality, despite being vaccinated and experiencing only mild illness: “The life disruption—the logistical pain you cause those around you—is now a major part of any bad scenario. As I write this, I’m now 10 days past my first symptoms, but I continue to test positive on antigen tests, and so I have not returned home. I haven’t hugged my kids for 10 days.” (His kids never got sick.)
Madrigal’s conclusion isn’t that he might have overreacted in his risk assessment. He doesn’t even entertain that possibility. Rather, he doubles down on the idea of living in permanent emotional lockdown because of COVID: “Things aren’t likely to change that much for quite some time. Even after however many kids get vaccinated, there will still be breakthrough infections. Other variants could spread. Maybe we’re in this space for another year or two or three.”
It’s not all that surprising a development, given that nearly two years before the COVID lockdowns began, this was the magazine whose staffers got the vapors over editor Jeffrey Goldberg hiring Kevin Williamson. Confronted by the pandemic, a brittle safetyism-raised group of would-be elites, who marinated in an education system where the will to power was derived from victimhood, would naturally turn a publication into content by and for obsessive hypochondriacs.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Universities received billions in COVID relief. Some are still imposing delays, remote instruction.
ICYMI: SCIENCE!
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DO DEMOCRATS KNOW ABOUT SHRINKAGE? White House Report Card: Biden’s shrinking presidency stalling out.