K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The ‘Banned All Over’ Book Antifa Gave Me.

This question puzzled the woman with the Antifa button, who finally handed me a copy of the graphic novel “Drama” by Raina Telgemeier.

“This one is banned all over,” she assured me.

Putting the copy of “Drama” in my bag, I stepped away from the table of “banned literature” and walked into the Marriott to get the opinions of Moms for Liberty chapters from around the nation.

What better time than this group’s national summit to hear damning criticisms from different states’ moms of what the Antifa activists described as the “banned all over” book?

But I couldn’t find one mom at the summit who had ever heard of “Drama,” much less could tell me about efforts to restrict minors’ access to it.

I called a few left-leaning journalists of my acquaintance on K-12 education beats at Chalkbeat, Education Week, CNN, and USA Today. None had ever heard of any efforts to ban “Drama.”

The only reference to the “banned all over” graphic novel I found was an ACLU report claiming that three Texas public school districts moved “Drama” from elementary and middle school libraries to their high school libraries.

“Maybe the book just hasn’t been looked into yet,” I thought.

Certainly Antifa activists wouldn’t lie about a book to create drama of their own.

So I wasted an hour reading a comic book with no plot—just a grown adult fantasizing about eighth grade theater students coming out as “gay” or “bi.”

Why it’s as if: There Are No Banned Books.

SKYNET BRAGS: AI Robots Admit They’d Run Earth Better Than ‘Clouded’ Humans.

LET’S MAKE A DEAL: Turkey Has Agreed to Back Sweden’s NATO Bid, Alliance Chief Says.

THERE’S A RHYME FOR THIS: Attendance Drops Off at First National Jamboree of New, Inclusive Boy Scouts.

GET WOKE, WELL, YOU KNOW. . . Disney World Hasn’t Felt This Empty in Years.

Visitors to Disney theme parks this summer are encountering something they haven’t seen in a while: elbow room.

Travel analysts and advisers say traffic to Disney’s U.S. parks, and some rival parks, has slowed this summer. Data from a travel company that tracks line-waiting time at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., shows that the Independence Day weekend was one of the slowest in nearly a decade.

Disney executives have said they have expected weaker earnings from their U.S. parks this year. The Orlando-area resort is even offering hotel discounts around Christmas, typically a peak period.

Travel advisers and industry analysts say the slowdown is the latest sign that Disney’s recent price hikes and changes to park operations have soured some families on visiting the Most Magical Place on Earth.

Yes, that’s the problem. Changes to park operations.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA expands task orders for spacewalking, moonwalking suits.

CHARLES COOKE GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Joe Biden Is an Asshole.

At Axios, Alex Thompson reports the apparently surprising news that Biden “has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him.” Among the president’s favorite admonitions are: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!,” and “Get the f**k out of here!” Per Thompson, these revelations are important because, like his refusal to acknowledge his own granddaughter, they threaten to damage Biden’s “carefully cultivated image as a kindly uncle.” But that image is for cretins and sycophants. Joe Biden has never been a “kindly uncle” — or anything approaching one. For his whole life, Joe Biden has been a plodding mediocrity with a Delaware-sized chip on his shoulder. What about him, I wonder, would not lead him to shout stupidly at people? He’s a bully. Check. He’s insecure. Check. He’s senile. Check. He is hostage to his precarious record of lies. Check. His anger is as inevitable as the sunset.

We don’t need Axios to tell us about it. In 1987, during his first run for president, Biden was in spiffing form. Asked by a voter in New Hampshire about his academic record, Biden grew unhinged. “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” he said, before rattling off a sequence of falsehoods that ought by rights to have ended his career. He said that he graduated in the top half of his law-school class. He did not. He said that he went to that law school on a “full academic scholarship.” He did not. He said that he “won the international moot-court competition,” “was the outstanding student in the political science department,” and “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school.” None of that was true. In closing, Biden betrayed what the exchange was really about. “I’d be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like,” he jabbed. Mr. Dunning-Kruger, your table is ready.

Character matters. Biden has none. As president, the man spends his days considering how he can mislead voters about his record, how he can get around the Constitution, and how he can demagogue the other branches. All that talk in 2020 about “the soul of America”? That was guff. Flotsam. Malarkey. There is nothing the man won’t lie about. He lies about inflation. He lies about gas prices. He lies about the deficit. He lies about the border. He lies about having been arrested for his civil-rights activism, and about having been raised by Puerto Ricans and Greeks and Jews, and about having traveled to Afghanistan to pin a Silver Star on a Navy hero, and about his son’s death, and about the crash that killed his first wife and baby daughter, and about the small kitchen fire that he had 15 years ago, which, in his inimitable style, he has managed to transmute into “having had a house burn down with my wife in it.” In 1987, he plagiarized a speech by the British politician Neil Kinnock that contained a completely different backstory from his own. In 2012, he accused Mitt Romney of wanting to put African Americans “back in chains.” Push a pin into a history book, and you’ll find Joe Biden lying about something.

You can see Biden being an asshole as early as this 1974 profile by Kitty Kelley:

In his office in the New Senate Office Building surrounded by more than 35 pictures of his late wife*, Biden launched into a three-hour reminiscence. It wasn’t maudlin—he seemed to enjoy remembering aloud. He was the handsome football hero. She was the beautiful homecoming queen. Their marriage was perfect. Their children were beautiful. And they almost lived happily ever after. “Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover. The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports. Most guys don’t really know what I lost because they never knew what I had. Our marriage was sensational. It was exceptional, and now that I look around at my friends and my colleagues, I know more than ever how phenomenal it really was. When you lose something like that, you lose a part of yourself that you never get back again.

“My wife was the brains behind my campaign. I would never have made it here without her. It’s hard to imagine ever going through another campaign without her. She was the most intelligent human being I have ever known. She was absolutely brilliant. I’m smart but Neilia was ten times smarter. And she had the best political sense of anybody in the world. She always knew the right thing to do.

“Let me show you my favorite picture of her,” he says, holding up a snapshot of Neilia in a bikini. “She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?

“My beautiful millionaire wife was a conservative Republican before she met me. But she changed her registration. At first she didn’t want me to run for the Senate—we had such a beautiful thing going, and we knew all those stories about what politics can do to a marriage. She didn’t want that to happen. At first she stayed at home with the kids while I campaigned but that didn’t work out because I’d come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn’t have much time for anything else. That’s when she started campaigning with me and that’s when I started winning. You know, the people of Delaware really elected her,” he says, “but they got me.”

Who talks like that – to the press(!) — about a recently deceased spouse? As Cooke wrote above, “Character matters. Biden has none.” It’s not just “a stutter” — it was always so.

UPDATE:

Some exceptions do apply to that “rule,” however.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Like they say:

Everyone can see that we've now reached the "pretend he's an angry alpha instead of an Alzheimer's patient" stage in the news cycle. Anyone who's cared for a loved one with dementia knows exactly what's going on here. https://t.co/2nu5gWqPIR

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 10, 2023

* UPDATE (From Ed): For years, Biden lied about both Neilia Biden’s death, and claimed the truck driver involved in the accident was drunk: Joe Biden’s false claim about drunken driver draws renewed scrutiny. “Now-retired Delaware Superior Court Judge Jerome O. Herlihy, who oversaw the investigation as chief deputy attorney general, told Politico, ‘She had a stop sign. The truck driver did not.’ In 2008, he told [the Newark (Delaware) Post] that rumors about alcohol playing a role in the accident were ‘incorrect.’” As one person tweeted in 2019, “This is awful. Did you know for years [Biden] told people his wife and 13-month-old daughter were killed by a drunk driver, when in fact the accident was tragically her fault. The truck driver was haunted by the accident until he died.”

(Updated and bumped.)

NOW THIS IS CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has a list of 39 funding prohibitions he wants House Republican appropriators to include in the 12 spending bills Congress must adopt and send to the President by September 30.

Congress has all the ultimate weapons under the Constitution in any showdown with either the executive or judicial branches, with having the originating authority making the House of Representatives especially powerful … if the majority has political brass ones.

Now it’s up to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Kay Granger (R-Texas) to move Jordan’s prohibitions into the spending bills and to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to push for a vote by the full House.

Then we’ll see if the Republicans are serious about making bureaucrats and politicians respect congressional oversight.

PRIME DAY DEALS on Kindle E-Readers. #CommissionEarned

OH NO, NOW THE POORS WILL BE ABLE TO BE SLIM, TOO: Almost half of obese teens reach healthy weight with Wegovy, Ozempic.

What good is it to stay skinny if the proles find it easy to match you?

INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE IS EVERYWHERE: Alarming deterioration of US National Weather Service tornado warnings.

Research by Dr. Kevin Simmons demonstrates that 13 to 15 minutes of “lead time” (the interval of time from when a tornado warning is issued to then the tornado arrives) is ideal. From 2005 to 2011, National Weather Service tornado warnings averaged 13.3 minutes and tornadoes were detected in advance 73.3% of the time. At that same time, the radars were being “dual-polarized” to allow detection of tornado’s lofted debris for better tracking. Plus, the new generation of GOES weather satellites, the first that could sense lightning rates (which are sometimes very useful in determining in advance which thunderstorms will go severe or tornadic) was in operation. All of this should have resulted in new levels of tornado warning accuracy.

They did not. The quality of tornado warnings is deteriorating at an alarming rate!

How have things changed since 2020? We don’t know. The NWS’s tornado warning accuracy statistics used to be out in the open. Now, they are behind a login and password.

This is like the collapse of the Galactic Empire in Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Everything keeps getting worse but nobody does anything and they do their best to hide it. Or Christopher Nuttall’s Empire’s Corps(e) books.

LEFTY POLITICS AND SEXUAL ABUSE GO TOGETHER: The Upper West Side Cult That Hid in Plain Sight: In the sixties and seventies, the Sullivanian Institute had a winning sales pitch for young New Yorkers: parties, sex, low rent, and affordable therapy.

The Sullivanians’ bête noire was the nuclear family, which they identified as the wellspring of all human pathology. To shake off bourgeois norms, Sullivanian patients lived with same-sex roommates and cultivated close platonic friendships, replete with tween-style sleepovers. They had lots of (hetero)sexual partners—in fact, turning down most any sexual proposition from a group member was frowned upon. But they were not allowed to form steady romantic relationships. To a Sullivanian, Stille explains, sexual jealousy was “a by-product of a capitalist mentality that saw marriage and monogamy as a form of ownership.” (Jackson Pollock, an early Sullivanian patient, was a fan of the method in part because he could cheat on his wife.) Higher-ups prodded Sullivanians to renounce their parents and other blood relatives; one member ceased contact with her twelve-year-old sister because the girl stopped going to therapy. Women had to seek permission to get pregnant. While trying to conceive, they would have sex with multiple men, in order to create ambiguity about their child’s biological father.

So, early “cucks,” then. Also, if you’re taking relationship advice from kooks like Shulamith Firestone, things will end badly. As they did.

UP IS DOWN: Feds Argue First Amendment Causes ‘Irreparable Harm’ in Bid to Save Censorship Regime.

CBS NEWS TODAY: Biden’s “grandfatherly appeal” may be asset overseas at NATO summit.

Bonchie at RedState yesterday: The Bat Signal Goes up to Defend Biden for Disowning His Young Granddaughter.

WOKE CORPORATIONS EMERGE AS AMERICA’S ‘BIG BROTHER:’

The rise of left-wing corporate marketing and environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards are creating a form of corporate dystopia that effectively gives Democrats control over your life without your consent. The soft totalitarianism of conformity can be seen by the increased control we’ve given corporate America. And that control is being abused every day. If you’re concerned about “Big Brother,” he probably won’t be pulling your strings from Washington, but rather, through the “death by a thousand paper cuts” enabled by your ideological and social betters at big corporations.

There is no better recent case in point than a man whose home’s “smart” devices were disabled by Amazon after a delivery driver falsely accused him of hurling a racial slur via a Ring doorbell. The homeowner, who is Black, was not home during the purported incident and yet was locked out of his smart devices for a week while Amazon conducted a “review.” It turns out, the smart doorbell did not emit a racial epithet but instead issued the automated response, “Excuse me, can I help you?”

The incident serves as a succinct illustration for woke overreaction and the power of our modern corporate state. There likely will not be a Chinese-style social credit system passed by Congress, at least not in the next decade. However, consumers are little by little accepting the idea that their lives will be controlled by tech companies increasingly equipped with artificial intelligence technology and far-left goals.

It may seem weird to paraphrase Gerald Ford at this moment, but a device powerful enough to control nearly all aspects of your domestic life can take it away just as fast. If you step out of line, you could lose your window into the modern world. Just ask supporters of the Canadian truckers’ 2022 convoy to protest COVID vaccine mandates, who temporarily lost access to their bank accounts for making donations to the effort as small as $50. Here in the U.S., Amazon ceased web hosting for the conservative social media site Parler, citing “dangerous” content, and PayPal cut off GoFundMe competitor GiveSendGo.

I’m pretty sure that Norman Jewison didn’t intend for Rollerball to be a how-to guide for giant corporations.

KINSLEY GAFFE: World Economic Forum speaker (accidentally) makes the case against digital government currency.

“We are at the cusp of physical currency essentially disappearing,” the economist said at the WEF event. “If you think about the benefits of digital money, there are huge potential gains…It’s not just about digital forms of digital currency; you can have programmability — units of central bank currency with expiry dates.”

By this, Prasad means that your money could be “programmed” so that you must spend it by a certain date or it disappears. The government could also exercise this control over what you can buy with your money, too.

“You could have […] a potentially better — or some people might say a darker world — where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable like say ammunition, or drugs, or pornography,” Prasad said, “And that is very powerful in terms of the use of a CBDC, and I think also extremely dangerous to central banks.”

This is the major danger of a CBDC. With a cash-based system, while the government ultimately creates the currency, it cannot control how people use it once it’s out there. However, with a CBDC, politicians could quite literally block you from spending money on “undesirable” things. And, rest assured, when political elites have power at their disposal, they always find a reason to exercise it.

It could be the “climate emergency” that justifies them blocking you from purchasing more than an allotted amount of gasoline. It could be the threat of “extremism” that justifies them from blocking you from purchasing certain books with “dangerous” ideas. And so on.

And having enjoyed a banner year in 2020, many politicians won’t need much of an excuse for another round of lockdowns and bans: Coming soon: Climate lockdowns?

WELL, GOOD: Porsche’s Simple Apple CarPlay Tweak Makes It so Much Better.

I WATCHED A REPLAY OF THE LAUNCH ON MONDAY BUT DIDN’T NOTICE THE RECORD-SETTING PART: SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches for record-breaking 16th time, lands on ship at sea.

HEALTH: The One-Time Shot That Could End Type 2 Diabetes. “Fractyl Health aims to address the limitations of current treatments by developing one-time gene therapy for type 2 diabetes. The company’s approach involves delivering an artificial gene to the pancreas, continuously producing the GLP-1 hormone. By doing so, there would be no need for weekly injections, and the therapeutic effects of the hormone could be sustained for years.”

BEWARE GINGIVITIS: The ‘Quiet Disease’ Lingering in Our Mouths.

HMM: Suicidal ideation claims spur European review of popular weight-loss drugs.

MY LATEST ESSAY ON SUBSTACK: Some Poolside Thoughts: About teens, responsibility, and mental health.

JUST SAY NO TO ELECTORAL INTERFERENCE: Alex Berenson: The Trump documents trial (and all Trump’s criminal trials) must be stopped until after the 2024 election.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Jewish camp leaders challenge carry law due to anti-semitism. “Concerns of racism or anti-semitism or anything else like that should be taken seriously and people should be empowered by the constitutionally protected rights granted them by being human beings to combat them, with words when appropriate and with bullets when their lives are threatened.”

THERE’S WRONG, AND THEN THERE’S INSANELY WRONG: Roy S. Gutterman, a professor at Syracuse University and a self-professed expert in “free speech” published an Op/Ed piece on (where else?) CNN that misreads the remarkable victory handed to free-thinkers — especially in on-line forums — by Louisiana Federal District Judge Terry Doughty.

Doughty’s judicial opinion is the first to recognize that yes, the Biden Administration has been in bed with BigTech to directly, clearly and unambiguously censor or demonetize conservative speech, or speech that represents a threat to the preferred narrative. And you can bet your boots that a lot of the pro-censorship lefties are nervous. Very nervous.

The most glaring “nothing to see here” on Prof. Gutterman’s part is his glossing over and minimizing a key element:

“[C]riticism by government officials and gentle requests to take down content — absent concrete administrative or prosecutorial action — goes far short of censorship.”

“Gentle requests?” Who does he think he’s kidding? Nice media platform you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

And oh, what a shocker! Gutterman appeals to emotion and that good old sawhorse “saving Democracy from misinformation”:

The complaint cites occasions when the Biden administration threatened to take antitrust action against the companies over misinformation about Covid-19, vaccines and elections or undo Section 230, a legal shield that protects tech giants from lawsuits. This also falls short of actual censorship. [Empasis added].

So let’s see if we have this right: There is no censorship, and no threat of censorship, but when the government does take or threaten to take action over what they call misinformation, “this also falls short of actual censorship.”

Anybody else see the circular logic being employed here?