DISPATCHES FROM THE “IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT” PARTY: Hypocrisy? Democrats Didn’t Accept 2016 Election. And Tried To Overturn The Trump Presidency.
Archive for 2023
August 2, 2023
THAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU KEEP ALL THE PATIENTS OUT: Early-stage cancer diagnoses decreased sharply in the US during first year of COVID-19 pandemic.
The ban on “elective” procedures was one of the worst things among the many awful things about the medical response to Covid.
ANN ALTHOUSE ON the Trump indictment.
It is an egregious abuse of power to criminally prosecute someone for the purpose of educating the public and generating publicity for your political position.
It is ludicrous to celebrate the use of a trial for the purpose of generating “constant publicity” against a political candidate right after you’ve bemoaned that candidate’s success in convincing people that the charges against him are “politically motivated.” Trump made his argument in the political arena where it belongs. He spoke effectively enough for his cause. If his opponents can’t counter his speech with speech, that’s a terrible concession. It will serve poetic justice if their use of the criminal process only heightens Trump’s argument that the charges against him are politically motivated.
I’m not a Trump supporter. I’m a believer in freedom of speech and the rule of law. I deplore the criminalization of politics.
Hasen proceeds to fret about Trump’s ability to push the trial date beyond Election Day, win the presidency, put his own people in charge, pardon himself, and then “then sic his attorney general on political adversaries with prosecutions not grounded in any evidence.” Yes, that’s a lowly incentive for protecting freedom of speech and the rule of law: You might be able to take out your enemies, but when the tables turn, they are enabled and motivated to come after you. Hasen knows this. He admits it. But he won’t come out and say this prosecution is a terrible mistake.
His friends would ostracize him if he did.
ANDY MCCARTHY: Trump Can’t Win.
To have a chance in the general election, Trump has to make up that support. But from where? Polls consistently show that Democratic opposition to Trump is nearly universal. They also consistently show that his unfavorability with the general public hovers around 60 percent. There is no reason to believe this will change. To the contrary, about 54 percent of voters cast their ballots for someone other than Trump in 2016 and 2020, when he was more popular nationwide than he is now. He couldn’t win in 2020 with 46 (he won by a miracle in 2016 with 46). He is not going to win with less than 46, but there’s no reason to think he would ever sniff 46 again.
As unpopular as Biden is, recent Monmouth University polling had him beating Trump soundly even if there were a third-party “unity” ticket (the one hypothesized was Joe Manchin (D., W.V.) and Jon Huntsman (R., Utah). Maybe this is an outlier (910 registered voters), and maybe the Quinnipiac University poll discussed by CNN, showing Trump currently one point ahead of Biden in the battleground state of Pennsylvania (47–46) is more noteworthy. But I doubt it. Trump has done material damage to Republicans in the Keystone State — in 2022, he did more to get Democrats John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro elected, as senator and governor respectively, than any single political actor, and the GOP lost control of the state house for the first time in a dozen years.
Hence this headline at America’s Newspaper of Record:
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: You Won’t Believe What We’re Spending ONE TRILLION DOLLARS to Buy.
A trillion dollars might not be what it used to be, what with Presidentish Joe Biden spending that much and more on pet projects designed to accomplish little except enrich his favorite interest groups. But it’s still more money than a single person has ever been worth, and it’s even a few times more than even the largest corporation has ever held in cash or other liquid assets. Apple’s outstanding shares might be worth about three trillion dollars, but the company has “only” $207 billion cash on hand.
Elon Musk is the world’s richest man on most days, but you’d still need nearly six of him to rack up a trillion bucks. But even if someday Starlink and SpaceX IPOs made Musk the world’s first trillionaire — something not outside the realm of possibility — Musk would never in a hundred years ever see anything like a trillion dollars in cash.
Still, if you had a trillion dollars — to paraphrase Barenaked Ladies — what do you think you could buy?
Many more trillions at the link.
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Men AND women who are vegetarian face increased risk of hip fracture.
DECOUPLING: China Chip Firms Soar on Report of Advance in Fabrication Tech.
Beijing has pushed its firms for years to develop local technologies in sectors it deems of strategic importance, particularly those that Washington is targeting to contain its rival. Chipmaking gear is regarded as among the weakest links in China’s semiconductor supply chain, an area currently dominated by firms including ASML Holding NV and Tokyo Electron Ltd. The country’s top chipmakers, including Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd., all rely on foreign-made equipment.
ASML is the global leader in lithography machines, and gear that can support 28 nm chips is essential to making silicon for a spectrum of products from electric cars to missiles. The Netherlands, home to ASML, has joined a US-led effort to curb Beijing’s chip ambitions by banning the Dutch supplier from selling advanced chipmaking machines to China.
It’s unclear whether the Shanghai firm can deliver such machines in bulk.
The 28nm process that Shanghai Micro is trying to deliver was state of the art, briefly, in 2011.
KING OF STUFF: Jon Gabriel Interviews Steve Green (Video).
TIMING IS EVERYTHING: Trump Indictments Conveniently Follow Bad News Days for Joe Biden.
IN THE DAYS BEFORE WORLD WAR II, THE SENIOR LEADERSHIP OF JAPAN’S GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY WAS PURGED OF THOSE WHO DID NOT SUPPORT WAR: China Replaces Missile Commander Days After Removing Foreign Minister: Ouster of senior military leader aimed at shoring up loyalty to Xi Jinping, analysts say.
China ousted the commander of its missile force, a move that analysts said was intended to ensure loyalty to leader Xi Jinping in the arm of the military that controls nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at the U.S. and would play a pivotal role in any attempt to seize Taiwan through force.
The removal of Li Yuchao, a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, marked an abrupt end to an unusually short stint in a key military post and comes days after China replaced its foreign minister in another decision shrouded in mystery.
Li, who was appointed commander in January last year, hadn’t been seen in public for several months. His ouster was confirmed at a ceremony a day before China celebrated the 96th anniversary of the founding of the PLA, which falls on Tuesday.
In a Tuesday commentary marking the anniversary, the official PLA Daily newspaper urged all military personnel to uphold Xi’s status as the “core” of the Communist Party leadership, and to persist with efforts to enforce discipline and fight corruption within the armed forces.
Alternatively, Xi is worried about a coup — though the two are not mutually exclusive.
DOUBLETHINK: Joe Biden Wasn’t Involved In Hunter’s Business And It’s Normal That He Was.
The press transitioned from simple bias to Orwellian gaslighting so quickly it was enough to make your head spin.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
https://twitter.com/KevinTober94/status/1686526008210370560
THE KREMLIN’S DONE IT BEFORE: Putin’s Russia Turns To Ethnic Cleansing In Ukraine
Russia has practiced ethnic cleansing for centuries. This involves moving one ethnic group and replacing it with another. Most Western nations now consider this a war crime though it still occurs and often goes unpunished. A current example is the Russian occupation forces in Ukraine who are now trying to ethnically cleanse the remaining Russian-occupied areas after outright failing to pacify the locals, who were remarkably uncooperative and often violently opposed to the Russian occupation. This was made worse by Russian efforts to get local Ukrainians to cooperate in accepting the fact that Russia now considered them Russians, by trying to take away Ukrainian identity documents, including passports, and replace them with Russian documents. That did not work and, worse, many local Ukrainians joined the armed partisans and that included killing Russian-appointed officials. Russia, per its centuries-old ethnic cleansing solution to troublesome minorities, believes the easiest way to get rid of the partisans is to send all the Ukrainians to Russia and replace them with Russians. Russia calls this “filtration” but this is a war crime according to the Geneva Convention. In March 2023: Vladimir Putin was indicted by the ICC (International Criminal Court) for war crimes.
More:
So far no Russian civilians have appeared to replace the Ukrainians kidnapped into Russia. Apparently filtration works both ways and the armed and unarmed Ukrainians are trying to filtrate the Russians out of Ukraine.
Read the entire post.
THE HULL DEFICIT AND DAVIDSON WINDOW OF VULNERABILITY: Time for Beltway Admirals to Think About War 2025, Not Paper Fleet 2045
Part 2 in a series. Here’s a link to Part 1: Confronting China’s Rising Strength on the Seas
Insightful people like Dr. Andrew Marshall thought about communist China’s emerging threat in the 1990s. From Part 1:
In late 1992 I was serving as a strategic war-gaming consultant in the Secretary of Defense’s Office of Net Assessments. Net Assessments director, the great Andrew Marshall, gave his consultants a long-term thought experiment: How could the U.S. fight and win a war for national survival against China circa 2020 or 2025?
The hull deficit is real.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): It’s troubling when bloggers are talking logistics and force structure, while actual generals and admirals are talking pronouns and diversity.
COME SEE THE RACISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: South African Communists Shout ‘Kill the Boer’ During Weekend Rally.
THE ERASURE OF WOMEN: George Korda: Transgender athletes pose a threat to women’s rights in sports.
FOLLOW THE ACTUAL SCIENCE: ‘Caught-Red-Handed’: Scientists Call for Full Retraction of Nature’s Proximal Origin Paper, as Fraud Accusations Mount.
The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate from a laboratory.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February.
Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible, but likely.
“[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.
Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that the virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28, 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.
” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,” Garry said of the lab-leak hypothesis.
“We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said on Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.
They put politics over science while accusing dissenters of being science deniers.
Why? Follow the money: “To complicate matters further, new reporting from The Intercept reveals that Anderson had an $8.9 million grant with NIH pending final approval from Dr. Anthony Fauci when the Proximal Origin paper was submitted.”
IF WHITE SUPREMACY IS A THING, WHY ARE SO MANY PEOPLE CLAIMING TO BE NONWHITE? Three University of Kansas professors now accused of falsely claiming Native American ancestry: Accusers say all three professors are white and have built careers on false claims.
It seems unfair to punish them when Elizabeth Warren got a way scot-free.
WELL, THEY’RE RELIABLE: California Relying on Fossil Fuels Amid Heat Wave.
WE’VE GOTTA PROTECT OUR PHONY BALONEY JOBS: Santa Barbara School Board Protects Lefty Activists’ Grift As Student Scores Keep Sliding. “Freed, the founder of a Santa Barbara nonprofit named ‘AHA!’ (Attitudes, Harmony, and Achievement), was an important conduit for the Santa Barbara school board’s mission of injecting critical race theory and queer theory into the veins of public schools. Under the guise of ‘social-emotional learning,’ Freed would recruit teenagers for her workshops, talk about sex openly with children, invite grown men to talk about sex with children, and flaunt her organization’s life-changing effects to her donors.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Unhinged Dems’ Trumped-Up Trump Witch Hunt Sleazily Rolls Along. “Once more, with feeling: what is happening here is straight-up election interference. The Democrats are getting out in front of it earlier than in any previous election.”
CAROL ROTH: Americans Should Not Have to Rent the American Dream.
In recent years, the balance sheets of young and old alike have been wrecked by inflation, debt and college loans. Home prices have also been driven up by undersupply, government regulation, and even corporate competition.
With that, more Americans are finding their dream isn’t attainable—it is only for rent.
Corporations have been given a huge advantage through government and central bank policy. With this unlevel playing field, these institutional investors drove up the prices in traditional asset classes. When they couldn’t find enough of a return on their investment from the usual sources, Wall Street-backed corporate investors decided to come into the single-family home market.
The New York Times Magazine reported that “from 2007 to 2011, 4.7 million households lost homes to foreclosure, and a million more to short sale. Private-equity firms developed new ways to secure credit, enabling them to leverage their equity and acquire an astonishing number of homes.”
It was an epic transfer of wealth.
Moreover, it consolidated power with big institutions and has impaired the ability of many Americans to gain wealth via home ownership.
While there was no meaningful institutional corporate investment in the housing market prior to 2010, at the end of 2022, more than one in every five homes was purchased from a corporate investor, according to CoreLogic.
Imagine for a moment an America without broad individual home ownership.
Read the whole thing.
JEFFREY CARTER: How Will You Know If Clean Tech Investments Are Successful? Exits; Ringing the Cash Register.
It’s a success if the grifters and their paid-off politicians make money.