ARTIFICIAL CREATIONS IMPOSED ON PEOPLE NEVER WORK QUITE RIGHT: Dreaming In Esperanto.
At least made up languages, unlike Marxism, don’t have armies.
Archive for 2023
February 1, 2023
APPARENTLY THE BOSS AND I HIT THE THEME AT THE SAME TIME, FROM DIFFERENT ANGLES: We Can Write It For You Wholesale.
January 31, 2023
OPEN THREAD: Only a few hours left until February.
JOHN PODHORETZ: Biden’s base: Why he won’t end the COVID ‘emergency’ for months.
Here’s the New York Times press release — sorry, “news report”: “Ending the emergency will prompt complex changes in the cost of Covid tests and treatments that Americans are accustomed to getting for free. Any charges they face will vary depending on whether they have private insurance, Medicare coverage, Medicaid coverage or no health insurance. What state they live in could also be a factor.”
Here’s the thing: People don’t need COVID tests and treatments in the way they did before. Know why? Because there’s way less COVID, and what does persist is vastly less dangerous.
This is all disingenuous hogwash anyway. What the Biden people are doing here is trying to provide a soft landing for their government-worker constituents, so many of them toiling from home, who have been the true beneficiaries of the changes in workplace rules since 2020 — not the people for whom they work, namely us.
Or maybe they’re all just trying to figure out what the hell the boss is actually trying to say, since Biden announced out of nowhere Tuesday, “The COVID emergency will end when the Supreme Court ends it.”
I’m not sure whether that statement fills out your “Biden is an idiot” or your “Biden is senile” square on your “There’s Something Wrong With Biden” bingo card, but you can certainly make an argument for either — or both!
Embrace the healing power of Trunalimunumaprzure “and.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: ESA is no longer planning to send astronauts to China’s Tiangong space station.
NEW FRONTIERS IN CENSORSHIP AND PROPAGANDA: ChatGPT by @OpenAI now *expressively prohibits arguments for fossil fuels*. (It used to offer them.) Not only that, it excludes nuclear energy from its counter-suggestions.
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW: The press versus the president, part one.
By July, Trump was poised to become the GOP nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland. On July 18, the first day of the gathering, Josh Rogin, an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece about the party’s platform position on Ukraine under the headline “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine.” The story would turn out to be an overreach. Subsequent investigations found that the original draft of the platform was actually strengthened by adding language on tightening sanctions on Russia for Ukraine-related actions, if warranted, and calling for “additional assistance” for Ukraine. What was rejected was a proposal to supply arms to Ukraine, something the Obama administration hadn’t done.
Rogin’s piece nevertheless caught the attention of other journalists. Within a few days, Paul Krugman, in his Times column, called Trump the “Siberian candidate,” citing the “watering down” of the platform. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, labeled Trump a “de facto agent” of Putin. He cited the Rogin report and a recent interview Trump gave to the Times where he emphasized the importance of NATO members paying their bills and didn’t answer a question on whether nations in arrears could count on American support if Russia attacked them.
But other journalists saw the Rogin piece differently, introducing a level of skepticism that most of the press would ignore. Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and harsh Putin critic, writing in the New York Review of Books that month, said labeling Trump a Putin agent was “deeply flawed.” Gessen, in articles then and a few months later, said the accounts of the platform revisions were “slightly misleading” because sanctions, something the “Russians had hoped to see gone,” remained, while the proposal for lethal aid to Ukraine was, at the time, a step too far for most experts and the Obama administration.
Matt Taibbi, who spent time as a journalist in Russia, also grew uneasy about the Trump-Russia coverage. Eventually, he would compare the media’s performance to its failures during the run-up to the Iraq War. “It was a career-changing moment for me,” he said in an interview. The “more neutral approach” to reporting “went completely out the window once Trump got elected. Saying anything publicly about the story that did not align with the narrative—the repercussions were huge for any of us that did not go there. That is crazy.”
Taibbi, as well as Glenn Greenwald, then at The Intercept, and Aaron Mate, then at The Nation, left their publications and continue to be widely followed, though they are now independent journalists. All were publicly critical of the press’s Trump-Russia narrative. (Taibbi, over the last month, surged back into the spotlight after Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, gave him access to the tech platform’s files.)
At the end of July, the DNC held its nominating convention in Philadelphia. In attendance were legions of journalists, as well as Simpson and Fritsch. On the eve of the events, the hacked emails from the DNC were dumped, angering supporters of Bernie Sanders, who saw confirmation in the messages of their fears that the committee had favored Hillary.
The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had “changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump “was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to unnamed “experts.”
Yes, it’s your regularly scheduled DNC-MSM “we really screwed up coverage of the last Republican president, and we promise never to do it again” article. (Pay no attention to the 2024 battlefield prep we’re already doing: The Washington Post Botches the Florida Classroom-Library Controversy.)
20 YEARS AGO, ON INSTAPUNDIT: IT’S NOT ABOUT THE OOOIIILLL — IT’S ABOUT THE ALIENS!
It is allegedly said that the craft crashed during the Gulf War (1990-1991), or more recently (probably in December 1998). This became some kind of Iraq’s Rosewell. The USA is currently reverse-engineering the Rosewell craft and fears that Saddam’s scientists may become even more successful than Americans in this or that sphere. It was said that these researches may give Iraq a considerable advance and even make it a leading super power.
UFO Roungup’s Arab journalists failed either to confirm or to deny these rumors.
Silly me, I thought it was about the antigravity. I’ll see if I can “roungup” some more news on this subject.
TYLER O’NEIL: Missouri Schools Took Kids to a Drag Show Without Informing Parents. AG Bailey Is Working to Prevent It Happening Again.
“I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children, which includes preventing school officials from taking schoolchildren to drag shows,” Andrew Bailey, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement on the letter, first provided to The Daily Signal. “That’s why I am asking the Missouri School Board Association to call on their members to adopt a resolution pledging to uphold Missouri law on what can be taught regarding human sexuality in schools.”
“My office will use every tool at our disposal to ensure Missouri children are educated, not indoctrinated, and that parents have a say in the process,” Bailey, a Republican, added.
Bailey’s letter points to Missouri state law on human sexuality instruction and states that “adherence to the law is particularly important in the wake of recent events in which Columbia Public Schools took a group of middle school students to an event that featured a drag show performance.”
“Drag shows are inherently sexualized performances,” Bailey argues. “they are an outward expression of a desired sexuality and sexual identity. They are intended to draw attention to human sexuality in a manner that appeals to prurient interests. Drag shows have no educational value and no place in our public schools.”
Much more like this, please.
WELL, THE MORONS IN CHARGE OF THE LAST ONE CERTAINLY DON’T SEEM TO HAVE LEARNED ANYTHING: We Are ‘Dangerously Unprepared’ For Future Pandemics, Experts Warn.
HOW CAN WE HAVE WHITE SUPREMACY IF NOBODY WANTS TO BE WHITE? Everyone wants to check a box that doesn’t say “white.”
I recommend reading David Bernstein’s Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.
I THINK IT’S A GOOD IDEA: The NRC is taking comments on a proposed facility in Oak Ridge to make fuel for new commercial nuclear plants. How to submit a comment:
Visit http://www.regulations.gov and search for Docket ID: NRC-2022-0201
Mail comments, with the subject line: Docket ID NRC-2022-0201, to Office of Administration, Mail Stop: TWFN-A60M, ATTN: Program Management, Announcements and Editing, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001
The deadline is February 14.
READER FAVORITE: Real Leather Bifold Wallet for Men. #CommissionEarned
NO, HE FAILED IN MANY, MANY DIFFERENT WAYS: Internal watchdog warns Fauci’s agency failed in one huge way.
It seems we get new evidence of the malpractice going on at Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) every week at this point. And all of that evidence continues to point to illegal and dangerous gain-of-function research gone awry in the Wuhan lab—research the American people were unknowingly paying for.
The Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just released a new bombshell report that specifically examined three grants the NIH made to the notorious nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance that they were using as a pass-through organization to cover their tracks. EcoHealth was given $8 million between 2014 and 2021, some of which went to the Wuhan lab.
Flashback: Unredacted Documents Reveal Fauci Tried to Shift the Narrative On the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory.
FREDDIE DEBOER: Do You Want Cancel Culture to Exist?
What I find more interesting is that this argument requires the very thing that it laments. That is, in order to make this argument, you need to have figures like Louis CK who escape/survive the consequences of public shaming, but simultaneously to assert that this is a bad thing. The immediate question for someone who expresses this point of view should be, “so you would prefer cancel culture exist, yes?” Because if it did, by their own contention, then Louis CK would not be playing Madison Square Garden, nor would other publicly-shamed individuals escape the consequences. (An implied consequence of this tweet, and arguments like it, is that public shaming should be permanently career-ending, which many people would take as a decent gloss on cancel culture.) And once you’ve established that the argument suggests that cancel culture would be a good thing, we’re free to debate it as a preferred state of affairs if not a current reality – at which point the whole “cancel culture doesn’t exist” complaint becomes moot. By wishing for it you’re making it arguable.
I do think that things like Louis CK getting back some of his career are indicative of a loosening of the strict social culture that flourished in the past half-decade or so.
But as Jim Treacher pointed out yesterday, Louis CK is only able to “get back some of his career” because he can afford to self-fund his relaunch: “When he wins an award because his work is still excellent, everybody gets embarrassed and quickly moves on. The entertainment industry has turned their backs on him, and it’s nobody’s fault but his own. But he can still stand on a stage and say words. All he needs is a microphone, a room, an audience, and someone to record it all. So he just did it himself.3 His comeback4 has been completely self-financed. He pays out of his own pocket to produce all the comedy specials he’s made since his cancellation, and he distributes them himself. He’s the one taking all the risk. And if he starts being bad at comedy, he’s the one who takes a loss.”
MARK JUDGE: All About the Narrative.
Of course, [former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie] spends a lot of time on Watergate, which turned the Post staff into movie stars and the Post from a small local paper to a rich international one. The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein drove Richard Nixon from office, an event that made journalism seem like a sexy and dangerous profession and that filled newsrooms with generations of elite liberals and hard-core leftists.
However, the person who comes off the worst in All About the Story is not Nixon, but Hillary Clinton. Downie’s dislike for Clinton is palpable. When in 1994 the paper began “pursuing significant questions about the relationship the Clintons had with the failed Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan Association in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Bill was governor,” Downie and the first lady had a tense meeting at the White House. Clinton was irritated that the Post was reporting on the federal investigation into the Clintons and their deals in Little Rock, yet she refused to turn over any documents related to the case. Downie would not back down. Clinton then switched the subject to the various women who were claiming to have had affairs with her husband—a kind of preemptive strike against their credibility. (She would also dispatch George Stephanopoulos to have lunch with Downie and try to kill the stories.) After the meeting, Clinton began to spread rumors that Downie was out to get them and that he was jealous of Ben Bradlee. Despite being criticized by other journalists and liberal activists, Downie defends his coverage: “I strongly believe that we did what we should have done in holding the Clintons accountable for their behavior. Even as I write this, I believe that there remain significant unresolved questions about the veracity of both Clintons.”
Well, not everything; its sister magazine Newsweek, then owned by the Post, couldn’t be bothered to break the story on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Or as Mark Steyn wrote in 2018: “It was twenty years ago today/Slick Willie taught the intern to play!”
The drama of January 1998 put certain words and phrases in the public discourse for the next two years, including “impeachment”, “vast right-wing conspiracy”, “the meaning of ‘is’”, and “completion”, which President Clinton was said by Monica in the Starr Report not to reach.
Yes, it was twenty years ago today/Slick Willie taught the intern to play! In a sense, the Clintons have never reached completion — which is why, two decades on, the news is full of Uranium One, Hillary-commissioned dirty dossiers and Huma’s emails — not to mention the exposure of Harvey Weinstein and other Clinton buddies for availing themselves of the same interns-with-benefits approach to the workplace. We may run some old pieces from the Dawning of the Age of Incompletion in the weeks ahead. But, if you’re wondering what we were talking about before Monica, the answer is Paula – who became near totally eclipsed by Miss Lewinsky.
The Age of Incompletion also kicked off the age of new media, beginning with a young man with a DIY Website named Matt Drudge, who published the Lewinsky story that then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek had spiked, because – say it with me:
The bill came due eventually, though — the Post sold Newsweek for a dollar in 2010, only for the Graham family to see its newspaper acquired three years later by Jeff Bezos, reportedly for about the same amount of money he paid for the first three seasons of his Grand Tour car TV series on Amazon Prime.
(As to what’s happened in the last few years to Matt Drudge, that’s an entirely different story, one that appears not to have a satisfactory answer. A year ago, Steve linked to an article headlined, “Matt Drudge confirms he still runs Drudge Report.” As he wrote in response, “Could Have Fooled Me.”
BILL OTIS: The morality of the death penalty.
HMM: Ford Is Slashing Mustang Mach-E Prices For 2023. “The California Route 1 and GT Extended Range models see the largest price reductions by far, with discounts of $5580 and $5900. The Premium Standard Range models in both RWD and AWD also come down a bit in price, with discounts of $3980 and $3690, respectively. All together, the price of a Mach-E averages out to about $4500 below where it stood in 2022.”
IF IT’S USEFUL OR JUST FUN, THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO HAVE IT: Now the Left Is Coming for Your Pickup Trucks, America — and Their ‘Logic’ Couldn’t Be More Ridiculous.
UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: From ‘defund the police’ to ‘reimagining’ policing.
Lacking a race card to play in the police beating death of Tyre Nichols, left-wing Democrats and their media allies have turned their attention not to the local government of Memphis, Tennessee, under a Democratic mayor and Democratic police commissioner, but toward the supposed entire system itself.
They now claim that policing, per se, is a racist institution that must be defunded and abolished. This time around, however, they are not stating this outright. They tried the “defund the police” argument two years ago and found it deeply unpopular. In turn, a new slogan, “reimagining policing,” has replaced the “defund” movement’s particular vernacular of choice. This reflects a pattern on the Left. When an idea is unpopular, it just changes the language and terminology around said idea (see “gender-affirming care,” for example). But the impact is the same.
GOVERNOR ABBOTT APPOINTS A RETIRED BORDER PATROL AGENT AS TEXAS BORDER CZAR:
The activists who advocate for no restrictions on immigration often refer to what Governor Abbott is doing as “stunts.” The White House does it, too. However, Abbott is doing what he can to make the southern border more secure. Texas bears the biggest burden during the Biden border crisis. Governor Abbott has written five letters to Biden with suggestions on how to better secure the border, yet Biden ignores the crisis he created. During their most recent interaction, Abbott handed a letter to Biden on the tarmac at the El Paso airport. It was later reported that Biden didn’t bother to read it. If he had, he would have seen several steps the governor recommends that DHS and the Biden administration do, in simple bullet point form. Abbott said he deliberately made the text concise and simple to read and understand. Still, Biden couldn’t be bothered.
Why would Biden want to change course?
● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”
● Former Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”
● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH GEORGIA: Democrats Do an About-Face on Georgia.
For much of 2021, every major Democrat, including President Biden, denounced the state of Georgia as a racist disgrace when its Republican-controlled state government enacted an election-reform law that they insisted was was a voter-suppression effort and “Jim Crow 2.0.” But 2022 brought record turnout in both the primaries and midterm elections, and the state’s African Americans reported great satisfaction with and trust in their voting experience. Now, Joe Biden wants Georgia to vote early in the presidential-primary process, and just about every major southern Democrat wants Atlanta to host the party’s next national convention. Somehow, in a very short period of time, Georgia went from too racist to host the 2021 Major League Baseball All-Star game to deserving to host the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Since at least 1941, the left has always been able to do a complete 180 at will, since they know the media won’t point out their hypocrisy du jour.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Now More Than Ever: Florida House Speaker Introduces Constitutional Carry Bill.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? These jobs are most likely to be replaced by chatbots like ChatGPT.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I have some thoughts here.