THE NORTH CAROLINA ELECTIONS BORN NEEDS AN ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT: North Carolina Elections Board Claims it Has Power to Bar Rep. Madison Cawthorn From Running Over January 6th.
Unfortunately the flailing, dying dinosaur that’s leftist ideology hasn’t figured it out yet. Probably because it takes so long to reach its brain which is, of course, the size of a walnut.
EZRA LEVANT: Secret Recording: Ontario Premier Doug Ford will announce tomorrow he’s ‘pulling these passports.’
We’ll know soon enough.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Polling gets Democrats to finally begin their COVID retreat. “In the words of blogger Lawrence Person, ‘Not since the collapse of the Hindenburg Line in 1918 have such bitterly held positions been abandoned so quickly.'”
Plus: “Is there anything more pathetic than the way the West’s ruling class labels anyone who opposes it as racist, sexist, Islamophobic, transphobic, etc.? Literally every single time.”
UPDATE: From the comments: “The noteworthy thing about the collapse of the Hindenburg line was that nobody in Germany knew about it because that news was censored in the German press. So most Germans thought they didn’t lose the war and were ‘stabbed in the back’.” Well, that sounds familiar.
ILLEGAL DOMESTIC SPYING: THROW THEM IN JAIL. Senators: CIA has secret program that collects American data. No excuses, just consequences that will deter others in the future.
SPACE: Elon Musk says SpaceX will launch its Starship mega-rocket to orbit for the first time this year.
At SpaceX’s rocket-development facilities in Boca Chica, Texas, on Thursday, Musk stood in front of a jet-black Starship, fully stacked atop the 23-story Super Heavy booster that’s meant to heave it into orbit. Dwarfed by the towering launch system, Musk told an assembled crowd that the rocket will soon be ready to roar into Earth’s orbit for the first time.
“I feel, at this point, highly confident that we’ll get to orbit this year,” Musk said. . . .
Musk gave his launch prediction during the first Starship-update presentation that he has shared since 2019. In that update more than two years ago, Musk presented his larger vision for the launch system and its Mars-populating mission.
SpaceX has made significant progress since then. After a series of six-mile-high test flights, which ended in Starship exploding, the rocket finally soared into the skies on May 5, plummeted back to Earth, and refired its engines, just in time to flip upright and gently lower itself to the Boca Chica landing pad.
The biggest problems are regulatory.
THE OLYMPICS ARE SO BAD IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ISN’T RUNNING THEM: Russian doping controversy leaves credibility of Olympics ‘teetering on the edge.’
But to be fair, the entire global managerial class is looking pretty bad.
KURT SCHLICHTER: The GOP Must Adopt a ‘No Prisoners’ Agenda for 2023.
We are going to crush the Democrats in 2022, and there will be a temptation to sigh and wipe our brow and think it’s all over, but instead of relaxing in 2023 the GOP needs to attack. Think Attila the Hun charging at the head of his horde. Think George Patton leading the Third Army. Think Brian Stelter, who is a potato, when he sees a buffet. We need to crush their dreams and make them howl in the run-up to 2024, when we will retake the presidency and put a sharpened stake through the shriveled heart of the leftist monster.
We will have power soon. We must use it. . . .
Let’s understand – because many of us don’t – that there are limitations on what we can do in 2023 and 2024 because we will not control the executive branch. Grandpa Badfinger, if he is not driven to resign by his masters in the wake of the inevitable 2022 electoral bloodbath, has only one bad choice among many worse ones – to double down and fight the strong GOP majorities for two miserable years as our enemies around the world rack up even more humiliating wins over an America hobbled by liberals who hate it and the bungling Boltonian hawk bros who think America should invade pretty much everywhere.
What can a party with a firm grasp on the legislative branch but not on the executive branch do? This is especially pertinent since the filibuster will remain in effect, something the Democrats will be thanking Manchin and Sinema for come Inauguration Day 2025. We can still do five vital things. We can investigate, push the brakes, refuse to confirm, punish enemies, and impeach. Do these things break the norms, because that’s what the Dems and their media minions will say? No, they are the norms. They are the new rules the Democrats played by; we’re just going to show that they actually played themselves.
Read the whole thing.
OPEN THREAD: Life’s for us to enjoy, woman/man, girl and boy.
AT BARI WEISS’S: What the Truckers Want: I’ve spoken to 100 of the protestors gathered in the Canadian capital. What’s happening is far bigger than the vaccine mandates.
I live in downtown Ottawa, within view of Parliament Hill, and have spent the past 10 days or so bundled up and walking around the protests. I have spoken to close to 100 protesters, truckers and other folks, and not one of them sounded like an insurrectionist, white supremacist, racist or misogynist.
They sound like Ivan, 46, who emigrated, with his wife, Tatiana, from Ukraine to build a new life in New Brunswick, in eastern Canada. “We came to Canada to be free—not slaves,” he said. “We lived under communism, and, in Canada, we’re now fighting for our freedom.” (Like so many truckers, Ivan refused to share his last name.)
B.J. Dichter, a spokesman for the Freedom Convoy, is vaccinated, and he estimates that many—maybe most—of the truckers at the protest are, too. “I’m Jewish. I have family in mass graves in Europe. And apparently I’m a white supremacist,” he told me on Wednesday. . . . So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma. . . .
The convoy is spearheaded by truckers, but its message of opposition to life under government control has brought onto the icy streets countless, once-voiceless people declaring that they are done being ignored. That the elites—the people who have Zoomed their way through the pandemic—had better start paying attention to the fentanyl overdoses, the suicides, the crime, the despair. Or else.
Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.” . . .
A lot of the truckers who had driven in from Vancouver and Winnipeg and Quebec City expressed this same uncertainty. It was getting really expensive to get by: rent, utilities, groceries, everything. Almost everyone who was poor or even middle-class was mired in debt. They told me that they expected this sort of wealth gap in America, but not in Canada.
The divide that already existed between the haves and have-nots largely mapped onto the new chasm between those who supported the mandates and those who did not. And that was creating this huge, weird fracturing everywhere.
The Establishment has lost the benefit of the doubt. Now, it is the doubt.
MATT TAIBBI: Justin Trudeau’s Ceauşescu Moment.
Ceaușescu’s balcony will forever be a symbol of elite cluelessness. Even in the face of the gravest danger, a certain kind of ruler will never be able to see the last salvo coming, if doing so requires any self-examination. The neoliberal political establishment in most of the Western world, the subject of repeat populist revolts of rising intensity in recent years, seems to suffer from the same disability.
There may be no real-world comparison between a blood-soaked monster like Ceaușescu and a bumbling ball-scratcher like Joe Biden, or an honorarium-gobbling technocrat like Hillary Clinton, or a Handsome Dan investment banker like Emmanuel Macron, or an effete pseudo-intellectual like Justin Trudeau. Still, the ongoing inability of these leaders to see the math of populist uprisings absolutely recalls that infamous scene in Bucharest. From Brexit to the election of Donald Trump to, now, the descent of thousands of Canadian truckers upon the capital city of Ottawa to confront Trudeau, a consistent theme has been the refusal to admit — not even to us, but to themselves — the numerical truth of what they’re dealing with.
Trudeau is becoming the ultimate example. Truckers last month began protesting a January 22nd rule that required the production of vaccine passports before crossing the U.S.-Canadian border. Canadian truckers are reportedly 90% vaccinated, above the country’s 78% total, a key detail that’s been brazenly ignored by media in both countries determined to depict these more as “anti-vax” than “anti-mandate” protests (which seem to be about many things at once, but that’s another story). When an angry convoy descended upon the capital, Trudeau dismissed them in a soliloquy that can only be described as inspired political arson:
The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians…who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to ensure our rights, our freedoms, our values as a country.
A near-exact repeat of the “basket of deplorables” episode, Trudeau’s imperious description of “unacceptable” views instantly became a rallying cry, with people across the country lining the streets to cheer truckers while self-identifying as the “small fringe minority.” Everyone from high school kids to farmers and teachers and random marchers carrying jerrycans of fuel joined in as Trudeau’s own words were used to massively accelerate his troubles.
As Michael Walsh wrote on Monday, also referencing Ceaușescu: “For when the preference cascade begins, punks, tyrants and dictators need to watch their backs as the real workers of the world unite. I spent the years between 1985 and 1991 shuttling in and out of East Germany and the Soviet Union, was in Berlin as the Wall was being torn down, and departed from Moscow just before the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of ’91. (The Soviet Union folded four months later.) I stood on Fisherman’s Bastion in Budapest with Hungarian friends in late 1989, looking east over the Danube, as they expressed their fears of an imminent invasion from Romanian troops. Hope was in the air — the Wall had just fallen — but uncertainty still ruled. Would the useless George H.W. Bush administration come to their aid? Or, once again, would the fascist-communist tanks roll? Instead, a miracle happened: the people, united, were not to be defeated.”
Another snow belt socialist tyrant may soon have to deal with the preference cascade: Gretchen Whitmer Hits the Panic Button Over the Canadian Trucker Bridge Shutdowns.
MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF PLANETS: Possible 3rd planet spotted around Proxima Centauri, the sun’s nearest neighbor star.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Have your Trader Joe’s and eat it too: Nikole Hannah Jones criticizes Rev. Al for admitting shoplifting is out of hand.
And that brings us to Morning Joe which talked about the Hamburglar story yesterday morning. As you’ll see, even Rev. Al Sharpton thinks things have gotten out of hand. “There are those, including me, who are concerned about overloading the system and the jails with petty crime,” Sharpton said. He continued, “But at the same time you cannot have a culture where people are just— at random— just robbing and stealing and it’s out of control and it’s put on the covers of newspapers which only encourages others to do it.”
For saying something fairly obvious about the need to bring down petty crime when it is up more than 23%, Nikole Hannah Jones lashed out at Sharpton and accused him of legitimizing “the carceral state.”
A couple of obvious points here. First, it may be a given on the left that putting people in prison for crimes caught on camera is illegitimate but I think if you look around you’ll find that’s increasingly a minority view. Most people think this brazen theft is outrageous.
Second, what alternative is Hannah Jones proposing to make people stop boosting merchandise? She doesn’t say. We’re right back to the foolishness of the defund the police movement, i.e. demanding cities tear down the existing system without any real plan for what comes next. And no, I’m not talking about specific programs like body cameras for police or sending out special teams to respond to mental health situations. Those ideas never required defunding the police. I’m talking about people who wanted funding cut and wanted to abolish prisons as well without any explanation of how to deal with either serious crime (shootings and murder) or low-level but persistent crime (shoplifting). There’s no plan, just a vague belief that it will all work out in the end. Except it isn’t working out as a review of recent violent crime and robbery figures will show.
* * * * * * * *
One guy stealing 10 steaks isn’t national news, but thousands of guys just like him stealing millions from retailers in cities on both coasts is a national story which deserves some national attention. Anyone who says the problem should be ignored is just asking for more of the same. That’s not smart, it’s not ethical and it’s not sustainable. The stores will close and then the same progressives winking at shoplifting will move on to whining about “food deserts.” But it turns out you can’t have your Trader Joe’s and eat it too. Until someone has a better idea, putting the army of petty thieves in jail should be an option.
Nicole Hannah-Jones’ job here is simple: convince the management of the New York Times to remove the security guard(s) in the lobby of the Times’ building on Eighth Avenue, and then she can lecture the rest of us on urban crime and police policies.
WHY IS BRANDON WHITE-SPLAINING TO AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN JOURNALIST? Biden Downplays Question From NBC’s Lester Holt About Inflation: ‘You’re Being A Wise Guy.’
President Joe Biden lashed out during an interview with NBC News host Lester Holt on Thursday after Holt asked Biden about the ongoing problem of inflation that Americans are facing.
“I think it was back in July, you said inflation was going to be temporary,” Holt said. “I think a lot of Americans are wondering what your definition of temporary is.”
“Well, you’re being a wise guy with me a little bit, and I understand that’s your job,” Biden responded. “But look, at the time, what happened was the, uh, let’s look at the reasons for the inflation. And the reason for the inflation is the supply chains were cut off, meaning that the products, for example, automobiles, the lack of computer chips to be able to build those automobiles so they could function, they need those computer chips, they were not available.”
“So, what happens?” Biden added. “When the number of cars were reduced, the new cars reduced, it made up at one point one-third the cost of inflation because the price of automobiles were up.”
Holt’s question to Biden comes as new inflation numbers were released on Thursday that showed that inflation has skyrocketed to its fastest pace in four decades.
Also from the same interview with Holt, a classic Biden Trunalimunumaprzure moment:
Biden: "And there is no way we were ever going to unite Ukraine…I mean excuse me Iraq…Afghanistan." pic.twitter.com/QfZ67Hyp45
— Tommy Pigott (@TommyPigott) February 11, 2022
Even before Biden’s brain decomposed into tapioca, he’s had a notoriously punitive relationship with journalists, despite most of them being his party’s operatives with bylines:
● Joe Biden Snaps at Another Female Reporter.
● Biden Snaps At Reporter For Asking About Bombshell New York Post Reports, Does Not Deny.
● President Wise Guy: “Joe Biden is playing hard to get. He’s involved in an unrequited love affair: The media adore him, but he hates them.”
● ‘Classy:’ Joe Biden Snaps At Reporter After Being Asked About Hunter’s Paternity Test.
● Bullying Biden Yells at Fox’s Doocy: ‘Ask the Right Questions!’
● Biden Accused of Sexism After Remarks to Female Moderator.
● Biden Explodes When Confronted On Lying About Charlottesville. Video Proves Biden Wrong.
And these classics from the Obama era:
● VP Biden’s Office Apologizes For Locking Reporter In Storage Closet During Fundraiser.
● Vengeance: Biden’s Office Seeks Investigation Into Unfriendly Journalist.
And of course, ground zero, from 1988: Why Joe Biden’s First Campaign for President Collapsed After Just 3 Months.
HUDSON, OHIO MAYOR SAYS ICE FISHING COULD LEAD TO PROSTITUTION:
At a city council meeting earlier this week the council president mentioned that some residents requested permission to ice fish on Hudson Springs Lake, which is illegal. The council discussed the issue for a while, worrying that an ice fisher might fall through the ice. Then the cerebrally challenged Mayor opened his mouth.
“If you open this up to ice fishing, while on the surface it sounds good, then what happens next year?” Shubert asked. “Does someone come back and say ‘I want an ice shanty on Hudson Springs Park, for X amount of time?’ And then if you then allow ice fishing with shanties, then that leads to another problem: prostitution. And now you’ve got the police chief and the police department involved.”
See what I mean? This guy has issues.
Don’t even get him started on what playing pool can lead to:
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: John Nolte: Fascist Law and Order: SVU Showrunner Regrets Not Blacklisting the Unvaccinated.
More anti-science hate from left-wing Hollywood as a Law & Order: SVU showrunner regrets not blacklisting the unvaccinated.
In two tweets loaded with misinformation, showrunner Warren Leight writes, “To my sadness we are still offering parts to actors only to learn they STILL aren’t vaccinated… Our community has to look out for each other,” he adds, “especially when working unmasked in close quarters. The stream of misinformation is toxic.”
“The vast majority here are also vaccinated, he added in a follow-up tweet, “but I’ve been surprised that even some older members of our community have chosen to play Russian Roulette with Covid.”
The only thing Leight wrote that is not misinformation is “the stream of misinformation is toxic.”
Yes — yes, it is, and this showrunner’s tweets are a perfect example of that toxic stream of misinformation.
While the Law & Order franchises have filmed in the New York since the early 1990s, Leight effectively works in Hollywood — an industry rife with anti-vaxxers: Change: Oscars won’t require proof of vaccination to attend this year’s show. “The ugly truth, THR theorizes, is that the Academy is kowtowing to celebrity egos with this policy, something that very much would be in keeping with industry culture. There are likely anti-vaxxers among the nominees and presenters and the Oscars doesn’t want to risk having them boycott the event given the pitiful ratings the show has drawn in recent years. They want maximum star power. Result: No vaccines required…Rest assured, though, that all of the ushers, production crew, and other wage slaves at the Oscars will be triple-vaxxed, masked, and tested. VIPs are famously immune from COVID, after all, but the hoi polloi remain at perpetual risk.”
OUT: ONLY A MORON WOULD TAKE OTC DRUGS FOR COVID. IN: A Common Over-The-Counter Drug Could Treat Long COVID, Case Study Reports. “The near-complete recoveries of both patients are remarkable, but they are not the first stories of their kind.”
Long one of the world’s most vicious dictators, Ceaușescu’s most recent plan for winning over the heartland was forcing half the country’s villagers to destroy their own homes — with pick-axes and hammers, if they couldn’t afford a bulldozer — and packing them into project apartments in new “agro-industrial towns,” for a “better future.” Despite this, and his long history of murder, terror, and spying, Ceaușescu to the end did not grasp that his unpopularity had an organic character. He was convinced ethnically Hungarian “terrorists” were behind the latest trouble.
After reaching the balcony of Bucharest’s Central Committee building to give a speech that December day, he’s genuinely surprised when the crowd turns on him. When he tells them to be quiet, he’s befuddled by their refusal, saying, “What, you can’t hear?” Elena jumps in and yells, “Silence!”, to which Ceaușescu, hilariously, replies, “Shut up!” The crowd listens to neither of them. . . .
Ceaușescu’s balcony will forever be a symbol of elite cluelessness. Even in the face of the gravest danger, a certain kind of ruler will never be able to see the last salvo coming, if doing so requires any self-examination. The neoliberal political establishment in most of the Western world, the subject of repeat populist revolts of rising intensity in recent years, seems to suffer from the same disability.
There may be no real-world comparison between a blood-soaked monster like Ceaușescu and a bumbling ball-scratcher like Joe Biden, or an honorarium-gobbling technocrat like Hillary Clinton, or a Handsome Dan investment banker like Emmanuel Macron, or an effete pseudo-intellectual like Justin Trudeau. Still, the ongoing inability of these leaders to see the math of populist uprisings absolutely recalls that infamous scene in Bucharest. From Brexit to the election of Donald Trump to, now, the descent of thousands of Canadian truckers upon the capital city of Ottawa to confront Trudeau, a consistent theme has been the refusal to admit — not even to us, but to themselves — the numerical truth of what they’re dealing with.
Trudeau is becoming the ultimate example. Truckers last month began protesting a January 22nd rule that required the production of vaccine passports before crossing the U.S.-Canadian border. Canadian truckers are reportedly 90% vaccinated, above the country’s 78% total, a key detail that’s been brazenly ignored by media in both countries determined to depict these more as “anti-vax” than “anti-mandate” protests (which seem to be about many things at once, but that’s another story). When an angry convoy descended upon the capital, Trudeau dismissed them in a soliloquy that can only be described as inspired political arson:
The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians…who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to ensure our rights, our freedoms, our values as a country.
A near-exact repeat of the “basket of deplorables” episode, Trudeau’s imperious description of “unacceptable” views instantly became a rallying cry, with people across the country lining the streets to cheer truckers while self-identifying as the “small fringe minority.” Everyone from high school kids to farmers and teachers and random marchers carrying jerrycans of fuel joined in as Trudeau’s own words were used to massively accelerate his troubles. Trudeau fled the city, removing his family to what aides called a “secret location” for “security reasons,” a politically disastrous move denounced by just about everyone with a microphone or a Twitter account, including members of his own party.
Our ruling class is incompetent and clueless, but they can’t help but put down those over whom they rule.
THE CRISIS OF THE CRISIS: Is Covid Politics the Real Emergency?
In some ways, our current intellectual panorama now looks like the inverse of the mid-2000s, with the right avidly critiquing the state of exception and the left largely demanding acquiescence to it.
Even beyond partisan motives, this reversal is not surprising. The notion of the state of exception also has an ideologically eclectic pedigree, and this is not the first time it has been handed back and forth between the right and the left. Its elaboration begins, as noted above, with Carl Schmitt, an anti-liberal legal theorist who later became a card-carrying Nazi. But one of Schmitt’s key interlocutors during the 1920s and 1930s was the Jewish mystic and Marxist critical theorist Walter Benjamin, who offered his own elaboration of the state of exception.
It’s worth recalling that, unlike Agamben and his recent disciples right and left, neither Schmitt nor Benjamin framed the state of exception primarily as a danger. On the contrary, both were, in their way, advocates of the state of exception. For Schmitt, a state must be able to step outside the bounds of the law in order to maintain the law. Suspending the law, in other words, is necessary to the law’s survival. Benjamin, for his part, argued that it is the task of communist revolutionaries “to bring about a real state of emergency.” This “real” emergency would supersede the ongoing state of exception by which the capitalist order has preserved its dominance — a state of exception that, in the modern era, has become the rule.
I say, build back normal.
WATCH IT LIVE AT THE LINK AT 8 PM EASTERN: Watching Elon Musk’s update on Starship tonight.
I THINK WE’LL SEE MORE LAWSUITS LIKE THIS IN THE FUTURE: Lawsuit Based on Online Enemy’s Attempt to Induce Breaches of Contract Can Proceed. “Note that trying to induce people to breach binding contracts with a specific person would probably be constitutionally unprotected, as solicitation of illegal (though not criminal) behavior, though the caselaw isn’t clear on that. And of course hacking into people’s online accounts is illegal and constitutionally unprotected, so inducements of breach of contract that stemmed in part from such hacking would be even more likely to be unprotected.”
GOV. SISOLAK (D) ANNOUNCES END TO NEVADA’S STATE MASK MANDATE. “The governor said masks no longer would be required in public spaces, but ‘there are locations where you may still be asked to wear a mask.’ Sisolak said the federal mask mandates remain in place in airports, on plans and on public transportation. Sisolak said masks no longer would be required at schools, but stressed that school districts needed to work with local health officials to have plan for outbreaks.”
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