LET’S DISCUSS WHAT’S HAPPENING IN RUSSIA: “To put it simply, it’s going full fascist. Authorities launched a propaganda campaign to gain popular support for their invasion of Ukraine and they’re getting lots of it. You can see ‘Z’ on these guys’ clothes. What does it mean?”
Well-illustrated Twitter thread that should be read in full.
YOU’RE DEFINITELY GOING TO NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Is This the Dumbest Claim Jen Psaki Has Ever Made?
IT’S COME TO THIS: New York and Chicago look at “platform doors” to stop subway attacks.
The New York subway began in 1904. As Jazz Shaw writes, “Part of me wonders why nobody thought of this before now. I’ve used the subway in Gotham many times, but I don’t think it ever occurred to me to ask why the rail platforms just suddenly end with an abrupt drop down onto the tracks with no sort of safety barrier in the way. I suppose people just assumed that this is how it’s always been and that must be for a reason…The danger levels have been seriously amplified by the proliferation of mentally unstable homeless people and gang activity. The very idea of randomly shoving someone down into the path of an oncoming train should have always been unthinkable for any sane, rational person. But the percentage of sane, rational people hanging out in the metro systems around our country clearly seems to be decreasing.”
THE KOREANS HAVE IT GOING ON: 2022 Genesis GV70 Review – Redefining the Luxury Standard. Though for all the talk about its fetching appearance it looks pretty much like a Lexus RX clone to me. Which is fine, but hardly earthshaking.
WHAT IS A YUTE? An Oral History of My Cousin Vinny.
HOW IT STARTED: Canceling The Keystone Pipeline And Reducing U.S. Arms Are Biden’s First Two Major Gifts To Russia.
—The Federalist, January 26, 2021.
How it’s going: Biden may travel to Saudi Arabia in quest for oil, report says, as Russia ban remains possibility.
—Fox Business, today.
And if Saudi Arabia doesn’t work out: ‘Just a complete circus:’ Joe Biden fights climate change by considering easing sanctions on oil from Venezuela (no, we still can’t drill here).
As Bryan Dean White tweets, “Joe Biden is frantically searching the globe to see if anyone but Texas might have some spare oil.”
Hard to believe that prior to 2021, “the United States was a net exporter of oil and natural gas. When operating at capacity – which requires the cooperation of the government on a number of fronts – we have more than enough fuel to meet all of our needs. We’re just not doing what needs to be done to get it to all of the places where it’s needed. So yes, Joe Biden has significant (though not complete) control over energy prices.”
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
UPDATE: “Saudi Arabia isn’t having it. Because the left, in another Get Trump operation, attempted to make Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ over the claimed assassination of Qatar spy Jamal Khashoggi…Bin Salman isn’t making it easier on Biden to repair their relations. He appeared to go out of his way to aggravate the White House during an interview with the Atlantic published last week. ‘We don’t have the right to lecture you in America,’ he said. ‘The same goes the other way.’”
Stay tuned.
(Updated and bumped.)
UKRAINE WAR: Russia Pummels Ukrainian Civilian Targets Ahead of Talks.
Continuing campaigns to encircle Ukrainian cities Monday, Russian forces conducted missile and rocket strikes on cities and military targets in the country’s north and south, disrupting plans to evacuate civilians via humanitarian corridors, Ukrainian officials said. Ukrainian forces continued to frustrate Russia with counterattacks and sabotage operations.
Russia’s failure to capture major cities and its mounting loss of aircraft and armored vehicles have increased pressure on Moscow in a campaign that has drawn global condemnation and sanctions.
Ukrainian and Russian negotiators were entering their third round of talks on Monday afternoon in Belarus, according to Mikhail Podolyak, a Ukrainian participant, with progress uncertain after earlier agreements to allow civilians to flee the fighting collapsed.
Even if Putin manages to take Ukraine, how is he ever going to get peace there?
KAROL MARKOWICZ: Why we must demand that leaders who got COVID wrong admit it and apologize.
As COVID restrictions end around the country, and Democratic politicians pretend that something about the science has changed instead of their poll numbers being in the dirt, Americans must first demand: apologies.
Here, I’ll even go first. I spent much of 2020 and 2021 writing again and again arguing for the opening of schools throughout the country. But in March 2020, I was one of the leading voices urging schools to close.
It made no sense to me that my husband had stopped going into the office because of the mysterious new virus but my children continued to go to school. People were dying in large numbers in Italy and I was afraid.
I never imagined that “two weeks to slow the spread” would turn into two years, and counting, of pausing the lives of children to accommodate hypochondriac adults.
I was wrong. I’m sorry.
Now you go.
Related: The Democratic Party’s emerging priority: Save the governors.
The photo of lockdown-obsessed Gretchen Whitmer atop the Politco’s article says everything, but as we saw with the attempt to recall Gavin Newsom, there are plenty of blue state residents with a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome.
NEWS JOE BIDEN CAN USE: These three risk factors may have the biggest impact on dementia cases.
JIM TREACHER: The Russian Jimmy Kimmel Has More Integrity Than the Actual Jimmy Kimmel. But then, who doesn’t?
Also:
Police officers in Moscow today are stopping people, demanding to see their phones, READING THEIR MESSAGES, and refusing to release them if they refuse. This from Kommersant journalist Ana Vasilyeva. https://t.co/E8oBw3XPz1 pic.twitter.com/rxk7AmdzOp
— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) March 6, 2022
As Treacher writes, “Damn. Where do they think they are, Canada?”
MAKE AMERICA FLORIDA: Florida Will Be First State to Recommend Against COVID-19 Vax for Healthy Kids.
STUDENTS MOSTLY HAVE SEX WITH AND DRINK WITH EACH OTHER: Behavior limits COVID-19 spread between university and community, research finds. The dorm crud also generally doesn’t spread far beyond campus, and even the law students usually don’t come down with whatever’s sweeping through the undergrads.
NOT EXACTLY AN ENDORSEMENT OF THE TYPICAL RUSSIAN RIFLEMAN’S TRAINING, MOTIVATION, OR PERFORMANCE: Russia Recruiting Syrians for Urban Combat in Ukraine, U.S. Officials Say.
MICHAEL WALSH: How We Got Here.
The seeds of the conflict in the Ukraine, now the subject of both a shooting war and a ferocious propaganda barrage on both sides—and by “both sides” I mean Russia vs. the West, using Ukraine as its proxy—were sown more than 30 years ago, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union on Boxing Day in 1991. At what seemed almost a single stroke, the goal of American foreign policy for the previous four decades had been achieved. The mother church of Marxism-Leninism had fallen, the Evil Empire destroyed, and the brave new world of “the end of history and the last man” was dawning.
Although Ronald “we win, they lose” Reagan was out of office, this was the Gipper’s triumph. Playing poker against the Soviets’ aging and disillusioned chess masters, Reagan bet the house on the Strategic Defense Initiative—widely opposed and even mocked by the pro-Russian Leftist press, led by the New York Times (who else?), as “Star Wars”—and essentially bankrupted the Kremlin. Unfamiliar with the concept of a bluff, Mikhail Gorbachev turned over his king and walked away from the board.
I vividly recall standing outside in the freezing cold of a mid-February day in Dresden, on the 40th anniversary of the firebombing of the city by British and American bombers in 1945. Standing in front of the newly restored Semper Opera House, Erich Honecker, the East German party boss, gave a stemwinder of a speech, inveighing against the very “Star Wars” (that was the term he used: Sternkriege) the Times was mocking stateside. “I think Star Wars is bullshit,” whispered a German-speaking American colleague of mine, “but it sure has these guys scared.” Within six years, both the German Democratic Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were gone.
Read the whole thing.
THIS IS THE FUTURE OF WEARABLES, IN SOME FORM: Wearable device prototype powered by human movement.
RADICAL CHIC, THE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE YEARS: New Documents Show NBC Promised To Go Easy On Biden Official’s Domestic Terrorism.
New documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust shared exclusively with The Federalist show NBC News sought to downplay a key Biden nominee’s links to domestic terrorism.
As President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Tracy Stone-Manning, faced controversy for her involvement with a 1989 Idaho tree spiking case last summer, NBC’s Josh Lederman sought comment from the Interior Department whether the administration stood by its nominee for the preeminent land agency.
Stone-Manning had been granted immunity in the case when she agreed to testify against her co-conspirators that she had retyped and sent an anonymous letter to the Forest Service for her friend and former roommate, John T. Blount. The letter warned of 500 pounds of “spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length” driven into trees of the Clearwater National Forest targeted for harvest. Such spikes can kill and maim foresters, firefighters, and animals.
“We will not go overboard on it or anything,” Lederman promised Interior Spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz on July 8. “It’s a legitimate story given the position to which she has been nominated. But we will point out that a) she did not participate in spiking trees herself, b) she was not charged, c) this was decades ago when she was in her early 20s, and d) her record is otherwise unblemished.”
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Evergreen:
Flashback: White House ‘working behind the scenes’ with media to get positive coverage.
LABOR PARTICIPATION HAS YET TO RECOVER FROM THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE STIMULUS PAYMENTS: The Flipside of Low Unemployment: 4.7 Million More Jobs Than Job-Seekers.
AT LEAST I’M SAFE FROM THAT: Irregular periods associated with higher risk for liver disease.
COVERING THE IMPORTANT STORIES: Star Trek Fan Launches Petition To Have Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek Designated As Non-Canon.
DON’T GET COCKY (UKRAINE EDITION): Russian invasion is facing ‘total failure’, whistleblower analyst claims. “The whistleblower also claimed the FSB – Russia’s successor to the Soviet Union’s feared KGB – was being blamed for the failure of Moscow’s forces to make significant progress into Ukraine, despite being given no advanced warning of the invasion.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: Russia Cracks Down on the Free Press, Bans ‘False’ Reporting About Ukraine War. “One of the most annoying things during the Trump presidency was mainstream media journalists crying ‘press freedom’ when the former president was mean to them or criticized their coverage. Now, amid Russia’s terrible invasion of Ukraine, we’re seeing what a crackdown on press freedom actually looks like—and it ain’t pretty.”
LIFE IN BIDEN’S POLICE STATE: January 6 Defendant Being Illegally Detained – Locked up More Than 80 Days With No Indictment.
As with Trudeau and the truckers, the establishment wants to send the non-approved protest community a strong message that non-approved protests are not tolerated.
AWOL: Where Is the Russian Air Force? “It makes no sense, as some have argued, to hold the Russian Air Force in reserve, particularly as Vlad Putin’s “short” war prepares to enter its third week of heavy operations.”
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.