Archive for 2022
February 24, 2022
KURT SCHLICHTER: Trudeau’s Canadian Fascism Is a Bigger Threat to America Than Putin.
True.
HMM: Report finds many heart tests, treatments are unnecessary. Helen’s experience is that stress tests are mostly worthless, but that echocardiograms find stuff that everything else misses.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Biden extends the national pandemic emergency first declared in March 2020.
—The New York Times, Saturday.
● White House overhauling COVID strategy as nation moves out of pandemic crisis.
—ABC, today.
● CDC to update masking guidance as soon as Friday. “The new metrics would allow less masking for most of the U.S. population, and would suggest universal masking only in places being hit hardest by the virus.”
—Axios, today.
Old and busted: follow the science. The new hotness? Provide triage to sinking poll numbers, and have some talking points for the Sunday talk shows that don’t involve Ukraine.
EXPLAINING DURHAM: Quick and Dirty Durham Explainer
This is the long explainer I’ve been promising, finally finished. It’s VIP (FIGHTBACK for a 25 percent discount, or CHARLIE for a 5 percent discount that pays me a little royalty. Yeah, hard decision, I know.) for the next week, but here’s the short form:
In paragraphs 2 through 7, under the heading FACTUAL BACKGROUND, Durham details important points about the indictment that show Sussman working with Rodney Joffe and his firm Neustar, who passed information to researchers under a DARPA contract at Georgia Tech and coordinated an effort to build up a falsified case for investigating Trump’s connections to Russia. This also involved the Clinton campaign, and the Clinton campaign’s general counsel — a familiar name, Marc Elias. This data was, to put it gently, massaged in order to make an incriminating case against Trump that fed into the Clinton campaign’s other efforts, like the “dossier,” and thus into the fraudulent FISA warrants and more intelligence operations against the Trump campaign.
You can see why this caused a lot of agitation on the Democrats’ side: Durham is laying out a case that Perkins Coie, through Sussman and with the active participation of Mark Elias, purposefully manufactured evidence against Trump that factored into the four-year investigation into “Russian collusion”.
I DUNNO, MIDDLE SEAT IN BASIC ECONOMY MIGHT HAVE SENT HIM SLASHING AND STABBING: Marcus Aurelius in the Middle Seat: Air Travel as an Opportunity for Stoicism. “In the Dulles International Airport terminal, things fell apart. Customs took much longer than expected. Then my connecting flight to Charlotte, N.C., the last of the day, was canceled. Still on London time, I was tired, cranky and decidedly un-Stoic. I wasn’t coming home from a long military deployment. I’d never even had to put my back into what I do for a living. It was simply business travel and the inconvenience of an overnight delay. As tests for practicing Stoics go, this wasn’t a hard one.”
NORTH CAROLINA’S DEM. GOVERNOR VETOES BILL THAT WOULD END MASK REQUIREMENTS AT SCHOOLS: “The veto comes a week after [Gov. Roy] Cooper encouraged school systems and local governments to remove mask mandates.”
A FRIEND WRITES: “GOP judo move: Propose to take a huge number of Ukrainian refugees, maybe up to a million. Eastern Europeans overwhelmingly vote right wing. Would force the Democrats to oppose on purely political purposes. I am actually hoping we get past partisanship in foreign policy, but I have an inherently sneaky brain and it needs an outlet….”
COLD WAR II: Putin is Lucky to Have a Friend in Chinese President Xi Jinping. “It’s always good to know that your friend has your back in a fight. The Chinese government issued a statement on Thursday blaming the conflict in Ukraine on the United States and NATO while piously asking Putin to respect the sovereignty and national borders of Ukraine. The Chinese then went ahead and purchased several billion dollars of wheat from Moscow and approved a multi-billion dollar purchase of Russian gas. China, which has very little in the way of gas and oil reserves, appears poised to blunt NATO sanctions on the Russian oil and gas industries by purchasing all they can handle. And Putin’s friends in Beijing will no doubt find a way to evade the sanctions on Russia’s banks to keep the economy above water.”
NOBODY’S PERFECT: Lucid Is Recalling 203 of Its $169,000 Air EVs. “It’s news to us that Lucid has already made that many cars, let alone that many with potentially faulty front strut dampers.”
UKRAINE: Fuck it, we’re going nuclear. “Ukraine intends to develop its own nuclear weapons, and it is not an empty bravado. Ukraine indeed has Soviet nuclear technologies and delivery systems for such weapons, including aviation and Tochka-U tactical missiles, developed back in the Soviet; their range is over 100 km, but they will develop even longer-range ones, it is only a matter of time. There is groundwork from Soviet era.”
That’s Zelensky himself talking. Now this commentary:
Is it empty bravado? I don’t know. But we know this: For years, leaders around the world in Japan, Germany, South Korea, even Taiwan—have asked themselves this question: Which is safer? If we build the Bomb, we will enter an arms race that encourages our adversaries to obliterate us in a first strike. But if instead we shelter under the American nuclear umbrella, the Americans may not have our back. The NPT has held, more or less, because countries with the technical ability and resources to build the Bomb have considered this question and concluded that on balance, it’s best to trust us.
This is what we really mean when we talk about the “international order” and the “rules-based security system.” (It’s a damned shame we don’t speak of it plainly, because high school intellects the world around will always pipe up, “What international order?” “What rules-based security system?” They are always pleased with themselves; they always think it a clever thing to say.)
The balance is very fine. France, Israel, India, and Pakistan all considered the matter closely and concluded that however often Americans declared our fealty to the rules-based international order, when push came to shove, we’d forget we’d ever heard of them.
Fair? Unfair? Our record is mixed.
If we allow Ukraine to be gobbled up, in pieces or in whole, it may not change the world. But conversations in defence ministries the world around will surely take this into account. No one wants to be invaded by a bigger, stronger, rapacious neighbor.
There are only two solutions to the problem of a bigger, stronger, rapacious neighbor: a big, strong ally, or Shiva, destroyer of worlds.
The miserable, needless human tragedy engulfing Ukraine matters in its own right. It should matter to any sentient human even if American national security interests weren’t at play. But American national security interests—the security of the whole “rules based international order”—are very much at play, and Putin proposes to destroy that order, which will, ultimately, destroy everything.
Yes, well, this is what happens when the Pax Americana breaks down. And it breaks down when America is weak, and under Biden America isn’t just weak, it’s chosen to be weak.
The real question is, did Ukraine hold any back when it “disarmed?” What would you do?
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Biden Warns Russia That If They Don’t Stop He Will Deploy Deadly Trans Admiral.
Apparently Brandon has learned nothing from his Afghanistan debacle:
Related: “These are not serious people:” Check out all the Woke Cultists’ reactions to the Ukraine invasion.
WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Secret Service says it can’t find Hunter Biden travel records for 2010, 2011, or 2013.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Can’t find.” LOL. Sure.
NO NEED TO RUSH INTO ANYTHING: Biden: Wait Another Month or So to See if Sanctions Are Working. “It’s not clear that President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian armed forces have another month. Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting over control of Antonov Airfield, just 15 minutes from Kyiv. The Ukrainians are trying to hold off the Russians at Hostomel airport outside Kyiv. The Russian forces are attempting to secure Kyiv as quickly as possible – and if the Russians get control of those airfields, they can fly in a lot more reinforcements.”
LAW ENFORCEMENT WITHOUT THE MIDDLEMAN: ‘It’s Locked and Loaded’: A Veteran Mom Explains the Facts of Life To Thug On I-10 in New Orleans. “An attacker in New Orleans discovered he’d committed an error in the victim selection process when he tried to force his way into a car driven by a woman with her toddler in the back seat. Instead of robbing or carjacking her, the thug fled empty-handed as the woman, a long-time Air Force veteran, pulled a gun, ready to provide some ballistic dissuasion.”
COMMISSAR VLAD’S WAR: Last night Glenn linked to two columns I’ve written this month focusing on Ukraine. I’m bumping them and adding a third column — from November 2004.
From February 23: Putin Escalates His Creeping War In Ukraine
From February 16: The Strategic Costs of Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian Corruption. If you haven’t read the 2016 State Dept emails John Solomon uncovered earlier this year, check it out.
Finally, from November 30, 2004: Ukraine and the Russian Wish to Return to Super-Power Status
StrategyPage’s motto is “the news as history.” Is this a case of the news as prehistory?
GET IN SHAPE: New Balance Men’s 608 V5 Casual Comfort Cross Trainer. #CommissionEarned
H.D. MILLER: Yelp Must Die!
Yet, complaining about yelpers says nothing of the fact that, in half of America, the Red Lobster is Yelp’s highest-rated restaurant. Nor does it say anything about the fact that Yelp, like the Japanese Yakuza, has essentially been guilty of extorting money from restaurants. Those are just two of the many crimes of Yelp.
Ultimately, however, the biggest problem is that Yelp overly democratizes criticism. It take a minor art, restaurant criticism, and turns it into a free-for-all of worthless opinion. Instead of sipping a civilized cocktail, you’re drinking swill from a firehose.
Writing good criticism, even restaurant criticism, isn’t something anyone can do. Not many people can write well, and most who do, don’t have the critical sense or sufficient taste to be good at criticism. Worse, we live in a moment when intelligent criticism, as a skill, has collapsed across the board. Almost no one seems to know anything about music, books, art, architecture, or movies. The premium for knowledge is at an all-time low. The market for criticism has gone bankrupt, and sites like Yelp helped it get there by flooding the internet with cheap shite.
Yes, for all I know, there may be great critics on Yelp, writing brilliant reviews at this very moment, but I’ll never find them because the signal-to-noise ratio is so terrible. As far as I can see, the tag “Elite Yelper” should be a scarlet letter.
Sadly, restaurant criticism is virtually dead as an art form. It was never particularly robust, but it’s next to useless now. Yelp detroyed it. And we, in turn, must now destroy Yelp.
Yelp must die.
Read the whole thing.
“THESE ARE NOT SERIOUS PEOPLE”: Check out all the Woke Cultists’ reactions to the Ukraine invasion.
NEXT STEP: VOICE RECOGNITION THAT WILL LET IT ARGUE WITH BACKSEAT DRIVERS. AT LAST, A SELF-DRIVING CAR THAT CAN EXPLAIN ITSELF.
ELSEWHERE IN WORLD WAR III COVERAGE: Taiwan reports nine Chinese aircraft in defense zone.