WELL, AMANDA MARCOTTE AND THE LONELY “LIFE OF JULIA” KIND OF GO TOGETHER:
Archive for 2023
January 22, 2023
TIME TO CALL OUT THE COWARDS: “One of Stan Evans‘s many great quips was that it was fortunate Republican politicians were pro-life, since they spend so much time in the fetal position.”
NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: Nothing Forgotten, Nothing Learned: The Fall of Singapore (Innocents No More Book 5).
ON MY NEW SUBSTACK, I talk with Larry Correia about guns.
If you like this stuff, consider signing up for a paid subscription. (Bumped).
THE REAL LESSONS OF JANUARY 6:
The January 6th protest was milder than any of the hundreds of Black Lives Matter riots the summer before, and led to no serious destruction of Capitol artifacts. But the Democrats en masse pretended to be horrified. They denounced the protest as an “armed insurrection” and compared it to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and other enemy attacks on the United States which resulted in thousands of deaths.
When it was pointed out that no arms were found on the protesters, the Democrats simply dropped the term “armed” but still referred to the demonstration as an “insurrection” – i.e., treason. They made no effort to explain how one could mount an insurrection without arms. Obviously one can’t. Nonetheless, they accused Trump of inciting the “insurrection” even though no Trump sentence could be twisted enough to substantiate the charge. Democrats condemned him and attempted to prosecute him and even consign him to public oblivion. They passed resolutions seeking to bar him from public office, also saying that no public building or monument should bear his name – not even “a park bench.”
To seal their indictment, they claimed that five Capitol police officers were killed during the protest. The actual number was zero. Two years later, Joe Biden and Hakeem Jeffries were making the same false claim. They even created a poster-boy to support their lie, claiming that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, was killed by a blow to the head from a fire extinguisher wielded by a protester during the January 6th event. In fact, no such incident occurred. Sicknick died on January 7th in his bed at home from natural causes.
Officer Sicknick was actually an ardent Trump supporter. This didn’t prevent the Democrats from staging a Potemkin-style funeral, bestowing the honor on Sicknick’s corpse of lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda while Democrat leaders praised and mourned him as a martyr killed by Trumpian insurrectionists while defending the Capitol.
Only one person was killed on January 6th – Ashli Babbitt – a forty-year-old five-foot tall unarmed woman and 14-year air force veteran. She can be seen on video tape standing among several Capitol Police officers threatening no one, when an outstretched arm holding a firearm is also seen on the same tape taking aim at Ashli and murdering her in cold blood.
The officer who pulled the trigger that ended Ashli Babbitt’s life was Officer Michael Byrd who had a history of mishandling firearms. Nancy Pelosi immediately stepped in and withheld his identity for a month, then quashed any investigation, made him a free man, and gave him a medal for defending the Capitol.
Our country is really run by evil clowns.
THE CONTINUING CRISIS: Testosterone Shortage Puts Trans Men at Risk.
OPEN THREAD: It’s there, it’s there for you, it’s what you want.
DEMOCRATS STILL PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1959: Gianno Caldwell Calls Out Restaurant That Kicked Him Out For Political Views.
Caldwell said he felt the situation resembled the ‘Jim Crow South’
He said conservatives — namely, black conservatives — have a target on their backs.
“This situation reminds me of something that MLK said in 1963, a very simple truth,” Caldwell said. “He said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And what I experienced yesterday, me and some of my neighbors, who I’m just getting to know, was an injustice. It was a grave injustice.”
Now, you can agree or disagree with the Jim Crow thing. Regardless, there’s an obvious double standard at play.
I’m pretty sure Michael Graham wrote Redneck Nation as a warning, not a how-to guide.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Canadian government to establish commercial launch licensing regulations.
DAVID HOROWITZ: The Real January 6th:
According to a report by the Inspector General, Donald Trump offered to provide thousands of national guard troops to protect the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Trump was concerned about the possibility of trouble from fringe elements on the left and right who might see it as an occasion to cause trouble. His offer was rejected by Pelosi and the Democrats who instead provided a grossly under-manned Capitol police force instead. The under-manned force was unable to set up a defensive perimeter around the building; which is why there is extensive video footage showing Capitol police officers escorting demonstrators into the building.
The January 6th protest was milder than any of the hundreds of Black Lives Matter riots the summer before, and led to no serious destruction of Capitol artifacts. But the Democrats en masse pretended to be horrified. They denounced the protest as an “armed insurrection” and compared it to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and other enemy attacks on the United States which resulted in thousands of deaths.
When it was pointed out that no arms were found on the protesters, the Democrats simply dropped the term “armed” but still referred to the demonstration as an “insurrection” – i.e., treason. They made no effort to explain how one could mount an insurrection without arms. Obviously one can’t. Nonetheless, they accused Trump of inciting the “insurrection” even though no Trump sentence could be twisted enough to substantiate the charge. Democrats condemned him and attempted to prosecute him and even consign him to public oblivion. They passed resolutions seeking to bar him from public office, also saying that no public building or monument should bear his name – not even “a park bench.”
Read the whole thing.
WHEN THE LEFT LOSES NPR…: Even NPR admits the pandemic ‘stimulus’ failed.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Yoko Ono Booked To Yodel At Next Year’s WEF Summit.
ROGER SIMON: ‘Friendly Skies’? Interview With an Unvaccinated Pilot Suing United Airlines.
It began in April 2021 when United began to push the vaccines as a strong recommendation to its personnel. (Note: The word “vaccine” will be used here as a convenience, although I am well aware there is much dispute that they are such.) By May of that year, the company reached an agreement with its pilot union not to mandate the vaccines.
Then, in June of that year, however, United offered their pilots—who made $280 an hour—three vacation days, the equivalent of 10 hours’ pay, to take the shots.
The same month, the company said it would require new hires to provide proof of COVID vaccination.
Then, in August, the company became the first major U.S. airline to mandate vaccination, with employees risking termination by October 2021 if they failed to do so.
[Tom] Floyd contends this may have run afoul of federal aviation regulations that require a “pilot in command” to have a statement from their personal physician that they aren’t taking any drugs that would interfere with pilot operation.
They aren’t even allowed to take NyQuil within a certain number of hours before takeoff.
The problem here is that the RNA vaccines are experimental drugs that were given an Emergency Use Authorization by the Food and Drug Administration.
United did give its personnel the option to apply for a religious exemption, which would put them on unpaid leave if granted, although Floyd told me that a great many were turned down. In the case of religious exemptions, he says the company questioned their convictions and went as far as requesting letters from their churches to prove the authenticity of their faith.
According to Pierce’s early draft of the complaint, United CEO Scott Kirby allegedly “sarcastically described employees such as Plaintiffs as ‘all of a sudden deciding ‘I’m really religious’.’”
Floyd, a devout Christian, was denied his exemption and put on “leave without pay.” The action was was tantamount to being fired.
Exit quote: “Floyd pointed out that United’s behavior opens the door for the potential of all kinds of dangerous corporate control over its workers, one example being requiring female employees to get abortions or be terminated. He feels he and the others didn’t have a choice but to file their suit against United and its senior management. It was a moral imperative.”
In October 2020, the Loudmouth film crew followed Sharpton as he celebrated his 65th birthday at a celebrity-packed gala in the New York Public Library. The event was co-chaired by Tanya Lombard, head of Multicultural Engagement and Strategic Alliances at AT&T, graduate of Harvard Business School, member of the Clinton Global Initiative, and self-described “Transformational Change Agent”—an example of how, like Sharpton himself, the so-called racial justice movement has graduated from the streets to the C-Suites.
Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, was among the notable figures who took the stage to laud the guest of honor. “I spent my entire career working in media,” he says. “I always tell people, ‘If you want to understand the media world and how it’s changed, you follow the life of Reverend Al Sharpton.'” Viewers who know anything at all about Al Sharpton or the media world will laugh out loud.
He wasn’t joking.
The late Don Imus would agree with Griffin, which is why Sharpton was soon paid his weekly protection money by MSNBC.
COWBOYS KICKER BRETT MAHER HAS FIRST EXTRA POINT ATTEMPT BLOCKED.
Gov. Abbott is savage:
I swear, I can kick as good as the Dallas Cowboys kicker.
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) January 23, 2023
ROSS DOUTHAT ON OUR AGING WORLD:
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe the defining challenge of the 21st century will be climate change, and those who know that it will be the birth dearth, the population bust, the old age of the world.
That kind of column opener is a hostage to fortune. If I’m wrong, it might be quoted grimly or mockingly in future histories written with New York underwater and Texas uninhabitable.
But it’s important for the weird people more obsessed with demography than climate to keep hammering away, because whatever the true balance of risk between the two, the relative balance is changing. Over the last 15 years, some of the worst-case scenarios for climate change have become less likely than before. At the same time, various forces, the Covid crisis especially, have pushed birthrates lower faster, bringing the old-age era forward rapidly.
The latest evidence is the news from China this week that its population declined for the first time since the Great Leap Forward, over 60 years ago. A tip into decline was long anticipated, but until recently it wasn’t expected to arrive until the 2030s — yet here it is early, with the Chinese birthrate hitting an all-time recorded low in 2022.
But it’s not just China. Also, climate change is mostly bunk, and the demographics is indisputable fact.
PRESIDENT KLAIN’S SUCCESSOR NAMED: Jeff Zients to replace Ron Klain as President Biden’s chief of staff.
Former Obama administration official Jeff Zients is reportedly a likely replacement for Ron Klain as President Biden’s chief of staff.
Politico, citing three unnamed sources, reported Sunday that Zients, a close Biden confidant who ran the White House’s COVID-19 response, is widely expected to step into the role.
Klain, 61, is believed to be stepping down from the job, and has apparently been saying he’s been ready to leave since the 2022 midterms.
Zients, 56, would step in as Biden is marred by scandal over classified documents found at the Biden family’s personal residence. On Saturday, a lawyer for Biden announced federal investigators had found more classified docs — some dating back to Biden’s long Senate tenure.
Wikipedia notes that Zients “served as Counselor to the President and the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator from January 2021 to April 2022.” So how did he do? When Zients announced he was stepping down, Ed Morrissey wrote:
Zients was an odd choice from the start. By appointing Zients to that position and Xavier Becerra to run Health and Human Services, Biden picked two men without any medical background to run his administration’s policies for the worst pandemic in a century. Under their management, COVID-19 policies became even more politicized than before, especially when it came to schools and interventions. That politicization infected even the supposedly hard-science bastion of the CDC, which calculated its guidelines on political lobbying from teachers unions until this day.
How bad was Zients? Last January, lefty Website The American Prospect ran the headline and subhead, “Fire Jeff Zients. Biden’s COVID czar has gone from ‘Mr. Fix-It’ to grim reaper, steering the administration’s pandemic response to catastrophic lows.”
MARK JUDGE: The Night Also Belongs to the Lord.
VIRGINIA POSTREL WRITES ABOUT THE NEGATIVE REACTION TO “SYNTHETIC MEAT.”
This is a story about market-driven progress! Abundance is good!! The anti-Promethean backlash is bad! “Cruelty-free” is tendentious and the Center for Food Safety is the bad guy. Those are all right-of-center tells.
Or they used to be. I was naively stuck in the 20th century.
Back then, when I hung out with ideologues more than I do today, people on the American right liked technological innovation and market competition. They celebrated ingenuity and entrepreneurship. They might predict that a given product would fail or choose not to buy it—that’s the system, after all—but they weren’t affronted by the mere existence of for-profit approaches to social or environmental issues. They weren’t insulted by the idea that technology might alter attitudes by changing costs.
Now, everything is personal and I, who write as a meat eater who likes human ingenuity and technological progress, am read as a woke propagandist.
Well, I too am a meat eater who likes human ingenuity and technological progress. But I can see a couple of problems. One is that “synthetic meat” is a confusing term. It means real meat, grown in a vat instead of in a cow, but it sounds like it might be the non-nutritious “Beyond Meat/Impossible” slop marketed to vegans.
Second, the technocracy is pushing this stuff, and the technocracy is currently in bad odor. There’s a real lack of trust, and once people start to think that the technocracy will do things to them that they don’t like — and often lie about it in the process — the lack of trust spreads from specific subjects to more general matters. Plus, given that most opposition to meat-eating is essentially religious in nature, rejecting it is not exactly a matter of irrationality.
In an ideal world, where we could talk about this sort of thing on its own merits and in a generally good-faith manner — like the world we at least thought we lived in back in the ’90s — things would be different. But we don’t live in that world now.
READER FAVORITE: krosa -10℉ Winter Gloves for Men /Women. #CommissionEarned
THE IRONY OF ALEC BALDWIN’S NRA-HATRED: “Had a single National Rifle Association safety advisor been on the set of Rust (as they are on other movie sets), Halyna Hutchins might be alive right now.”
HOW TO MAKE WAR “WINNING” UPDATE: Keeping Russia Russian.
One little-discussed reason for Putin’s obsession with conquering Ukraine is his desperate need to acquire more ethnic Russians to keep Russia Russian. The 2020 Russian census showed that the percentage of ethnic Russians had declined from 77.78 percent to 71.7 percent since 2010, even though it defined the two million Ukrainians (many ethnic Russians or Tatars) in Crimea as Russians because Putin had unilaterally declared that occupied (since 2014) Crimea was now part of Russia. International law, the UN and most of the world disagreed.
The decline in ethnic Russians is largely because of a low birth rate and a growing number of ethnic Russians leaving Putin’s Russia. Over seven million ethnic Russians have left Russia since Putin took power in 1999…
RELATED: From 2004– Putin’s RUBK dream.