Archive for 2022
January 21, 2022
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Great Faculty Disengagement: Faculty members aren’t leaving in droves, but they are increasingly pulling away. Call it “Operation Retire In Place.”
MY NAME [WAS] BRUCE: Even Caitlyn Jenner Wants to Protect Women’s Sports From Trans Wokeism.
NOW OUT: Hollowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation. #CommissionEarned
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: Do The COVID Shots Work Against Omicron? “The Danish study results shown in the graph found the Pfizer and Moderna shots provide some protection for a couple months, followed by a higher risk of infection than no shots at all.”
I haven’t bothered with the boosters. I’d rather get omicron, instead.
MORE OF A CHASM THAN A DISCONNECT, SOMETHING COLLEGE IS SUPPOSED TO NARROW NOT WIDEN: Wharton Students Reveal the Disconnect Between Elite College Kids and Reality.
BIDEN, INC. REMAINS A PARTLY-OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF THE CCP: Americans Deserve Answers on Hunter Biden’s Beijing-Backed Cobalt Mine Deal.
THAT’S DIFFERENT, BECAUSE SHUT UP: Biden Is Not Alone. Democrats Have Been Delegitimizing Elections for Years.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Biden acts much more like Putin’s puppet than Trump ever did.
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS: (CONT’D): Kent State Professor Doesn’t Think Violent Rapes in School Bathrooms Are a ‘Safety Issue.’
ECUADOR: An Entire Country Switched to Bitcoin and Now Its Economy Is Floundering.
The country’s president Nayib Bukele made waves last year when he announced that the nation would accept the token for use at stores and banks. The self-described “CEO of El Salvador” even announced plans to build a “Bitcoin City“ to turn the country into “the financial center of the world.”
However, it turns out that forcing your nation’s banks and stores to accept a currency large swaths of the population are unfamiliar with and don’t trust is a good way to tank your economy.
Government’s mucking around with the currency never ends well, although in this case the bad end came with impressive speed.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Meat Loaf Is Dead and Howard Stern Is Now Your Grandmother. “I wasn’t a radio guy but there was a time in the early ’90s when I set my alarm to listen to Howard Stern. He was that good. He was crass. He was insightful. Most importantly — for me — he was funny. He was also beyond edgy. Now he’s a bitchy, housecoat-wearing granny.”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Virginia Teachers Threaten To Bully Maskless Children.
BUILD BACK BUTTIGIEG: Emirates Airline president: The 5G snafu is the biggest screwup I’ve witnessed in my career.
PRIVACY: IRS Will Require Facial Recognition Scans to Access Your Taxes Online. “You will have to submit sensitive government documents, your Social Security number, credit history, and a face scan to ID.me, a third-party company.”
THEY SOW THE WIND, AND WILL REAP THE WHIRLWIND: Glenn Greenwald: Congress’s 1/6 Committee Claims Absolute Power as it Investigates Citizens With No Judicial Limits: The Committee plotted with JPMorgan and its lawyer, former Obama AG Loretta Lynch, to obtain a citizen’s financial records with no possibility of judicial review.
This abuse of power is not merely abstract. The Congressional 1/6 Committee has been secretly obtaining private information about American citizens en masse: telephone records, email logs, internet and browsing history, and banking transactions. And it has done so without any limitations or safeguards: no judicial oversight, no need for warrants, no legal limitations of any kind.
Indeed, the committee has been purposely attempting to prevent citizens who are the targets of their investigative orders to have any opportunity to contest the legality of this behavior in court.
If you do that, you just encourage extralegal responses.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: NPR ‘Founding Mother’ Unloads on Public Editor Over SCOTUS Story: ‘She’s Not Clarifying Anything!’
A spokesperson for NPR told The Daily Beast late Thursday that “we stand behind Nina Totenberg’s reporting.” The NPR offical added: “The public editor is independent and does not speak for NPR.”
McBride, for her part, told the Daily Beast on Thursday night that she stood by her recommendation, and that she does “think NPR should clarify the language in the story.”
But in her own telephone conversation with the Beast, Totenberg — a towering presence at NPR who has been there since 1975 — responded to McBride, the justices, and general criticism of her story.
“A non-denial denial from two of them doesn’t work,” Totenberg said, referring to the statement from Sotomayor and Gorsuch. As to Roberts, she said, “the other just refuses to accept the fact that I did not say that he requested that people do anything, but in some form did.”
“I have got nothing to say, except that I am sticking by my reporting,” Totenberg said while eating dinner. “I think it is absolutely valid.”
As Ed Morrissey wrote on yesterday:
It sounds suspiciously like NPR and Totenberg needed material for a narrative more than an accurate look at the inner workings of the court, especially as it chews on highly controversial topics like Roe v Wade and vaccine/test mandates.
And this last bit from [Robert Barnes of the Washington Post] more or less seals Totenberg’s fate on this report:
On the bench Wednesday, all of the justices again were masked, although a few took their face coverings off for brief periods. Sotomayor again participated remotely.
D’oh! So much for the NPR narrative.
Totenberg sounds like she’s entered into Dan Rather’s ”If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story” territory.
STACEY LENNOX: Joe Biden Accidentally Framed the Democrats’ Biggest Challenge in 2022. “Whoever decided a marathon press conference that ran past the president’s bedtime was a good idea should be fired.”