OPEN THREAD: So go.
Archive for 2023
April 16, 2023
FLASHBACK: Draft Women? Why Not?
GET IN SHAPE: Yes4All Vinyl Coated Kettlebell Set of Weights. #CommissionEarned
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Report: California Prius Drivers Stuck Waiting Months for New Catalytic Converters After Theft.
THE FALL OF THE FBI TAKES JAMES COMEY TO TASK, AND MORE:
The rest of the book describes the sad decline in the culture of the Bureau. [Author, the former FBI agent Thomas Baker] traces it to 9/11.
The Director at that time was Robert Mueller who years later supervised the investigation of Donald Trump for allegations of colluding with the Russians – allegations that were ultimately shown to be as groundless as they were explosive. He and his counterpart at the CIA were summoned to the White House to brief President George W. Bush days after the 9/11 attack.
Mueller explained to the President what the Bureau was doing to identify the perpetrators – exactly what the Bureau was supposed to do. Frustrated with Mueller and understandably still upset by the horrific terrorism, Bush snapped that he just wanted to make sure it didn‘t happen again.
The CIA Director then told Bush what his agency was doing to make sure it didn’t.
Mueller left humiliated. His take-away was that the Bureau needed to shift focus toward intelligence-gathering even if it meant sacrificing resources for law enforcement. The Bureau became less cops and more spies.
Mueller’s successor was the notorious James Comey, whom Baker calls a “charlatan” whose tenure as Director was a “disaster” for the Bureau. Baker is indisputably right, even if you consider only the Bureau’s reputation.
Read the whole thing.
PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: There Is Zero Reason For Republicans To Cooperate With Dianne Feinstein’s Request.
She served on that committee until early March. Then finally, after six weeks away recovering from shingles, her California colleague, Rep. Ro Khanna, publicly called for her resignation. Democrats like Khanna had grown weary — between Feinstein and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the party’s judicial agenda had been stalled since the top of March.
Hours after Khanna’s tweet, she asked to be temporarily replaced in her duties on the essential committee. Democrats are eager to comply.
But are Republicans so eager? They shouldn’t be. There’s zero reason — zero — that Republicans should cooperate with Schumer and the president on their judicial agenda, either tactically, politically, or even morally.
Republicans have the power, too: Committee assignments are decided at the beginning of the session, either by unanimous consent or, if contested, by the vote of at least 60 senators. Democrats certainly hope they can just brush this through under the former, but what reason does Sen. Josh Hawley, or maybe Sen. Mike Lee, or Sen. J.D. Vance have to let that one pass them by?
Then if one senator says no, the whole thing’s got to come to a vote, and while people like Sen. Mitt Romney might be happy to fill benches with left-wing judges in the name of “decency” or some other principle long ago extinguished by left-wing activists, getting nine other Republicans to join him might prove more difficult.
That’s absolutely true. So how quickly will the GOP cave?
UPDATE: America’s Newspaper of Record: Feinstein Steps Away From Judiciary Committee To Head Toward Bright Light.
(Updated and bumped.)
JOHN NOLTE: Trump Edges into National Lead Against Biden Post-Indictment.
I like both DeSantis and Trump, but the numbers are the numbers. Granted, DeSantis has not yet announced he’s running, and that could scramble to board considerably, but it could scramble it either way. The Florida governor’s interview with Piers Morgan was not impressive. He will have to come across a lot stronger and with more stature if he’s going to defeat Trump.
As far as why Trump is polling better against than Biden now as opposed to 2020, the reasons should be obvious. Biden is an unpopular incumbent who can no longer hide in his basement. Biden is president now, and his every appearance is a reminder of how dumb, frail, and dishonest he is.
What’s more, he’s doing a terrible job: energy prices, inflation, open border, war fever in Ukraine, mutilating children to appease his transvestite base…
Something else that could scramble the board are all the tripwires Democrats and the corporate media have in place for Donald Trump. More indictments from fascist Democrat prosecutors in states like Georgia are likely.
The potential of a trial in New York early next year followed by a guilty verdict from a rigged jury… Who knows how the public will react?
We have a long, long way to go.
Earlier: Trump’s Trial is About Winning in 2024. It’s On GOP Voters if They Fall for the Dems’ Ploy:
Ultimately Trump’s fate will not be decided by a Soros-backed prosecutor in New York, or one in Georgia, or by Jack Smith, who is attempting to build and obstruction case against Trump. The point here is not to “serve justice” but to prolong and publicize, and thereby block out any other candidate that may pose a stronger opponent to the current President.
Trump’s fate will be decided by GOP primary voters. They can choose to rally around Trump and ride him into the general election, with the backing of the Democrats and the media, or they can finally decide the drama and the chaos are all too much, and turn the page.
Trump’s fate, and the fate of 2024, is ultimately only up to them. It just depends on how much they love or hate the show the media is putting on for them, once again.
Last month, Ed Morrissey wrote, “As one of my colleagues put it on Twitter, you might personally like Trump and think he got the shaft in 2020. But do you want to spend a general election campaign talking about payoffs to Stormy Daniels and ‘stop the steal’ efforts in Fulton County? Especially if a viable and proven alternative is at hand? That’s why DeSantis is running, and why he always was going to run in this cycle.”
KIDS THESE DAYS: Less dire but perhaps more likely to trouble teachers: What are the political predilections of the mind of a chess player?
We do not want logical deduction, forward planning, and orderly minds from our youth. Well, some people don’t, anyway.
HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: A Resurfaced Clip Of Aubrey Plaza Recalling The Time A Director Instructed Her To Masturbate On Camera Has Left People Seriously Disturbed. “The camera was mounted on the ceiling, I was in my underwear and a Clinton t-shirt, and there were a bunch of old men smoking — the crew guys. And then I went and touched myself.”
A Clinton t-shirt, eh?
It’s like the city’s chief industry operates as a sex grooming gang or something.
ROADS ARE BEING RACIST AGAIN, AND MAYER PETE IS ON IT!
Pete Buttigieg tells Al Sharpton that minorities are more likely to die in car crashes for a variety of reasons including:
"The way roads are designed and built." https://t.co/9ADW5IFFti
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) April 16, 2023
To be fair, not everybody has access to the same level of transportation that Buttigieg enjoys: Climate Be Damned! Inspector General Investigating Buttigieg’s Private Jet-Setting Life.
Flashback: Train Wreck: All the Transportation Scandals on Pete Buttigieg’s Watch. (So far.)
READER FAVORITE: 7.5ft Outdoor Solar Market Table Patio Umbrella for Deck, Pool w/Tilt. #CommmisionEarned
WRETCHED EXCESS: A Ford Explorer Raptor version? Not that there’s anything wrong with wretched excess.
A NEW ESSAY, OVER AT MY SUBSTACK: Meet your new, lovable AI Buddy: Maybe instead of superhuman intelligence, we should fear superhuman cuteness.
SKYNET SMILES: CMU Taught a Robot Dog to Walk a Balance Beam.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: California Governor Gavin Newsom Touts Freedom at Inauguration.
—Bloomberg, January 6th.
You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means: California Church that Defied Mask Mandate Must Pay $1.2 Million in Fines.
—Rick Moran, PJ Media, today.
IT’S NOT BEING MISSED, IT’S BEING IGNORED: We’re missing a major mental health crisis: Teen boys are struggling, too. “Being male is the biggest risk factor for suicide, yet that fact isn’t widely known.”
I don’t think the problem here is stereotypes or traditional boyhood. Traditional boyhood was associated with far fewer mental health problems than today’s version. Just like traditional girlhood. And yet people talk about boys suppressing their emotions, etc. as if this was 1958.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Returns From Vacation Overseas, Leaves on Another Vacation, and Insults His Interior Sec.
“I told you — my plan is to run again,” he said. You have to know that there’s likely all kinds of lobbying going on behind the scenes to get him to back off. If they think they can go four more years like this, they’re delusional. Heck, I’m not even sure he can finish his term before his deterioration becomes too much for them to cover up anymore.
But in a final shot for one last embarrassing moment, before he left Ireland, he spoke about what he discovered about his family when looking at the genealogical records, and he managed to insult his Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in the bargain.
He said he learned “some interesting things” — “but, look, we all came from somewhere, unlike my Secretary of Interior, but, uh anyway…”
How nice that he can do genealogical research on his family on our time and dime. Most Americans are trying to figure out how to pay for gas and stretch their income to meet all of their expenses. Meanwhile, this guy — who is supposed to be serving us — is using our money to entertain himself.
But I think the thing that stood out there was how he seemed to be dissing his Interior Secretary. She didn’t come from anywhere? What does that even mean? Did she drop out of the sky? Was she born out of the mouth of the volcano like Pele, the Hawaiian goddess? Maybe she just sprouted up from the ground or popped out of the head of a unicorn.
You have to speak “Biden-ese” to know what he’s saying there. He’s making a left-handed reference to the fact that she’s Native American. But Joe, that’s “somewhere.”
Why is Joe Biden such a cesspit of racism?
HMM: Common Diuretic Pauses Atherosclerosis in CKD, T2D. I wonder if it will have the same effect on patients without those conditions?
ROGER KIMBALL: We Can’t Have Nice Things.
The road to our current impasse began with the “anti-art” movement of Dadaism. For with Dada, the brash energy of the avant-garde was short-circuited, flipped on its head. Dada did not seek to provide yet another fresh answer to the question, “What’s new?” On the contrary, Dada sought to subvert the entire context in which the question gained urgency. That the extreme strategies of Dada, too, were quickly incorporated as part of the metabolism of art.
From this perspective, Dada, and every subsequent innovation, by definition, appears as a variation on an already defined theme: an anti-theme, really, whose very negativity provides a foil for the ceaseless play of novelty. But in fact, the incorporation of Dada into the fabric of the avant-garde did have consequences. For one thing, Dada altered the tenor of the avant-garde. Dada might seek to occupy extreme points, but it did so out of a systematic contrariness: it had no ambition “to attain for an hour that crest of the wave in a tossing sea,” as the French critic Albert Thibaudet put it, because it had given up on the whole idea of art as a spiritual quest. Indeed, Dada was an art form that had given up on art.
Consider: in 1914, Marcel Duchamp dusted off a commercial bottle rack and offered it, tongue firmly in cheek, to the public as art. The public (at least the taste-making part of it) swooned with delighted outrage. In 1917, Duchamp upped the ante. He scrawled the name “R. Mutt” on a urinal, baptized it “Fountain,” and said (in effect) “How about it?” What a delicious scandal ensued. How original! How innovative! But also how destructive of the essential protocols and metabolism of art.
But not, it soon became clear, as destructive as Duchamp had wished. “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously some years later, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” Oh, dear.
Duchamp had wished not to extend but to subvert, to destroy, the whole category of art and aesthetic delectation. Instead, his antics polluted and trivialized it. How much of contemporary art is essentially tired repetition of gestures inaugurated by Duchamp and his immediate successors? Damien Hirst? Been there. Tracy Emin? Ditto. Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger? Ditto, ditto. As the sage of Ecclesiastes put it, there is nothing new under the sun.
Duchamp made it as far as Afghanistan though, where we tried to convince the locals of why they should buy in to the superiority of an enlightened modern Western culture that even our elites don’t take very seriously: