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Archive for 2022
April 23, 2022
DEMOCRACY DIES IN DOXXING — and the WaPo is so proud of its attack on Libs of TikTok (and hoping you’ll pay no attention to the collateral damage they’ve also done) that they’re promoting the article on Twitter:
But note what’s missing from the article: Dear Taylor Lorenz, Brian Stelter, and the Rest of the Press—why not show the videos? “I find it very interesting that Taylor Lorenz can write that entire piece, make sure everyone knows the LibsofTikTok account owner is an Ortodox Jew, and never once bother to actually show or link to the actual videos. The Washington Post will show videos of Chinese protestors, but not the videos of the people on TikTok we’re all talking about.”
Meanwhile: WaPo Releases Statement Filled With Lies in Aftermath of Taylor Lorenz’s ‘Libs of TikTok’ Doxxing.
Fortunately for the owner of the Libs of TickTok account, she’s getting the last laugh on the WaPo: “I don’t think anything better sums up the commitment to incompetence of modern ‘journalism’ than the Washington Post trying to bring down a Twitter account by hypocritically doxxing the owner, then seeing that account add 300,000 followers in 2+ days Just a complete masterpiece. Their follower count as it stands now is 939,700. I anticipate they’ll hit over a million this weekend.”
WORST SOUNDBITE SO FAR: Fauci’s worst soundbite of the pandemic.
GOT WOKE…Disney Shares Are Cratering While They War With DeSantis; It Has Lost 31.5% Over the Year.
Disney stock fell 2.79% on Friday, according to Google Finance. Company stock has fallen 31.25% in the past 6 months and trades for $118.27 per share as of press time.Disney stock prices dropped 5% on Wednesday, dropped further on Thursday, and have dropped 2.79% more so far today.
Granted, stock prices overall have fallen
500nearly 1000 points today thanks to the America Is Back, Baby NeverTrump-endorsed fake president in the White House, but still: Not a good performance for Disney. Not what its shareholders are looking for.
And note this:
As Ace of Spades asks, “Has corporate America started to get the message that it is no longer a cost-free move to always side with the exotic flora of the extreme left? And that maybe just staying out of politics and making business the business of business is the better path?”
TO BE FAIR, THE ENTIRE ANTI-GUN POSITION IS BASED ON LIES: Anti-Gun Politicians Lie About Violent Crime Because Telling the Truth Is Politically Costly.
April 22, 2022
THE BIDEN YEARS, AN EPITAPH:
THERE IS UKRAINIAN INSIGNIA. “To be fair I’d trust two guys that burnt a million quid rather than two guys that hid a million quid.” The book is 2023. “What the Fuck is going on?” “Dude, it’s a situation, deal with it!”
HE’S RIGHT, YOU KNOW:
OPEN THREAD: They called me up in Tennessee… Fishin’ in the rivers of life.
Also, casting Tammy Wynette was genius. These guys were my role models back when I was doing electronic music. Not so much musically, as I didn’t have the vocal talent on call, or the musical talent, to play in their space, but in terms of attitude.
Plus, from the comments: “There’s a mobile Indian takeaway out of a converted ice cream van here in Sheffield. On the side is written ‘They’re justified and they’re Asian and they drive an ice cream van.'”
IT DIDN’T “FIND ITSELF” IN A CULTURE WAR, IT INSERTED ITSELF: How Disney found itself in the middle of a culture war.
And really, “Disney doesn’t like conflict”? Then why did it stir conflict up? The answer is, it didn’t expect any resistance.
EUGENE VOLOKH: Tentative Thoughts on the Florida Repeal of Disney’s Special Government District. He discusses the First Amendment argument, but notes this:
But here’s a twist: What Florida is planning to withdraw from Disney is essentially a form of government power that Disney had been specially granted—Disney’s ability to effectively run this special district (as I understand it does), with the legal authority this entails under state law. And if we follow the employment analogy, officials exercising political power are generally not protected from retaliation by other political figures, at least when the retaliation consists of benefits conferred by the other political figures in the first place.
If, for instance, a committee chairman switches parties (or otherwise offends party leadership with his political positions), he could be stripped of the powers that his colleagues have given him, even if a low-level government employee can’t be. Likewise if a state cabinet member who has been chosen by a governor council is removed from office by the governor (assuming state law allows such removals) based on the cabinet member’s political speech. I take it that when a city council appoints a mayor or a city manager, it can (if state law so allows) remove that official as well, including based on the official’s speech or other political activity.
To be sure, Disney isn’t exactly a political official. (I agree that corporations have First Amendment rights, but that doesn’t mean they can be elected to office.) But the Legislature had in effect given it a particular form of political power, which it now seeks to withdraw. That strikes me as a potentially relevant analogy.
Interesting point.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chinese reusable rocket startup secures new funding round.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden’s Earth Day Remarks Show Just How Much He Is Deteriorating.
“At the, at the, the, uh…. big meeting we had in Europe.” He can’t even remember the name of the meeting he went to a couple of months ago. You know, the thing.
Then there are the “economic cubs” in the West.
I think he was trying to say “economic hubs” there but slurred his words, so it ran together. But, it’s always quite the adventure trying to interpret Joe Biden. One has to feel sorry for his sign language interpreter, when he has one working — that must be quite the challenge.
But guess what Biden promised? He’s going to make sure they “completely… start the process” to make sure that “every vehicle” in the military is “climate-friendly.”
This may be one of his dumbest comments yet. Does he even know what a military is supposed to be about? That you should be concentrated on ensuring that it can kill people and break things — as necessary to protect America. Is he going to ensure that we only have to go to war in places where they have charging stations for our electric tanks? Will the tank clean up the area after it takes out a building? You see how ridiculous it all is. The fact that seems to be a priority for him is madness. But he’s going to spend “billions” to get it done.
Related: Biden made a 5,000-mile Earth Day round trip in AF1 to announce ‘climate friendly’ US military (and more WTF moments). “Finally, the president who took an Earth Day flight on Air Force One from DC to Seattle and back wants us to know that he’s not driving his Corvette very much for environmental reasons: ‘I have a ’68 Corvette that does nothing but pollute the air, but I don’t drive very much.’ You can’t make this stuff up.”
IT’S EARTH DAY. AGAIN. CONTAIN YOUR EXCITEMENT:
Even the left finds the day more than a little glum just now though that’s because the world hasn’t ended yet. Remember—end-of-the-world doomsday scenarios make environmentalists happy, so when the end of the world fails to arrive on schedule, they get the sads.
Like The New Republic, which asks this week:
Remember When Earth Day Used to Be Cool?
A person could be forgiven for being cynical about Earth Day in 2022. Even ExxonMobil celebrates the holiday. . . ExxonMobil doing Earth Day is a lot like arms and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin co-opting International Women’s Day—a holiday which began as a protest of capitalism and war. . .
Many contemporary defenders of the planet despise Earth Day. In fact, at this point the hatred is an annual ritual, observed with headlines like “I’m an Environmental Scientist and I Hate Earth Day,” “I’m an Environmental Journalist and I Hate Earth Day,” and “I’m an Environmentalist and I Hate Earth Day.”
The author’s answer? More “mass protest.” Cue Greta Thunberg.
ExxonMobil “celebrating” “Earth Day” is a classic example of big business learning in the 1990s “that it’s pretty easy being green,” as Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason wrote in 2006:
Ask Bob Langert about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and he starts to chuckle. “When we meet the regulators, it’s kind of nice,” says the senior director for social responsibility at the McDonald’s Corporation. “We just got an award from the EPA. When we see the regulators, we always hope it’s because they’re giving us an award.”
* * * * * * * *
The idea of the rich corporate villain gleefully dirtying Mother Earth is powerful and appealing. Children of the 1980s encountered this supervillain in comics, movies, public awareness videos, and science textbooks. Times were good for mandatory recycling, for mandatory emissions reductions, for anything mandatory aimed at restraining corporate polluters.
But in the late ’90s, something peculiar started happening. The men in suits were still middle-aged, round, and white. They were still just as concerned with profit and golf. Very few of them sported tie-dyed attire, aside from the occasional whimsical Jerry Garcia tie. But the men in suits started caring. Or at least acting like they cared. Which, if you ask a spotted owl, is the same thing.
So environmental activists across the nation bought their own ties and started dealing with corporations as almost-equal partners in planet saving. Businesses in turn learned that it’s pretty easy being green.
All the way up to Obama’s crony corporatism and beyond.
Related: Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of [2022].
52 years on, to paraphrase the late Kathy Shaidle on Trump as Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse:
Flashbacks:
- “Earth Day” Turns 50. Half a century later, a look back at the forecasters who got the future wrong—and one who got it right.
- “Earth Day” Founder And Notorious “Unicorn Killer” Ira Einhorn Has Died In Prison At Age 79.
- On the eve of 2011’s “Earth Day,” NBC stumbled into this headline and subhead to describe Einhorn: Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend. Ira Einhorn preached against Vietnam War and violence, but had dark side.
LARGEST EXPLOSION SO FAR: It’s Official: Tonga’s Volcano Was The Largest Explosive Eruption of The 21st Century.
WHAT TRUMP AND COVID REVEALED:
Many Americans resisted from the beginning the government’s heavy-handed response to the virus. Now that the extent of the hysteria, and the damage from the overreaction, are becoming clearer, Americans are feeling betrayed, confused, and angry. The COVID response imposed by the “experts” has reinvigorated the radical questioning of our elite’s political authority and legitimacy that animated the election of Donald Trump. That crisis of legitimacy shows no signs of abating as we approach the 2022 midterm elections.
Trump’s explicit criticism of the leadership of both parties—as well as his challenge to the ruling class—helps explain his broad working-class appeal. His criticism resonated with that part of the electorate that thought America faced a crisis of economic, political, and moral decline. On the other hand, those who opposed Trump denied the seriousness of the crisis and saw Donald Trump himself as the greatest danger.
For more than a century, America’s intellectual class and political elites have joined forces to defend a specific kind of expertise or technical rationality as the basis of their authority over the direction of society and the lives of American citizens. This expert authority lays claim to specialized scientific knowledge, and confidence in a fixed, irreversible historical progress. Continuous human progress is assumed by these elites to be determined by a rational process, and this process culminates in and authorizes the rule of technical experts. This view is radically different from the American founders’ commonsense understanding of moral and political reality.
Trump opposed the intellectual orthodoxy promoted by the ruling class. He advocated change that is not understood in terms of inevitable progress or technical knowledge. He challenged the presumptions of the experts and their promises not on the basis of a future good, but the good of the past, a specifically American past. He wanted to make America great again.
Trump’s failures as well as successes found their source in his stated attempt to transform the moral and political landscape of the national government. His agenda depended on finding a ground of public authority outside of the Washington establishment. He found it in the people. He believed the electorate to be the only sovereign authority capable of establishing political legitimacy. Trump’s success would have required the formation and perpetuation of a new majority consensus, based not on historical progress or technical expertise, but on the consent of the governed, the source of all the “just powers of government.”
The principle of constitutional democracy or republican government depends on the people being sovereign.
Yes. Read the whole thing.
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.
MARK JUDGE: Art Without Tradition is Dead.
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