OUT ON A LIMB: Putin ally ‘behind bomb’ that killed Wagner boss.
Archive for 2023
December 23, 2023
REMY: My Favorite Things (TSA Version). New video from Reason TV:
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GOOD BOOK FOR THIS TIME OF YEAR: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. #CommissionEarned
DEAR SANTA – WHY IS CHRISTMAS SO !@%$# EXPENSIVE IN 2023? Biden and his defenders can argue all they want that the economy is in great shape, but the bottom line is the essentials of life cost much more today than they did in 2020. Issues & Insights has the facts, not just an opinion.
CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT: Harvard withholds racial demographics of Class of 2028 early admits: Legal experts said the decision likely was ‘politically motivated.’
Harvard’s racist admissions behavior calls for continuing judicial supervision to assure that there’s no illegal racial discrimination.
GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Teens sue San Francisco after mass arrests at skateboarding event.
On July 8, the date of the 2023 event, San Francisco police and transportation workers set up barricades blocking the steepest parts of the hill but permitted skateboarding to take place as a crowd of around 200 gathered in the afternoon, according to the lawsuit.
Police began making announcements for the crowd to disperse from the park at 7:15 p.m. after the crowd became violent, vandalized several light-rail vehicles, and threw fireworks and smoke bombs at officers, according to a news release. An hour later, officers followed a group of people seen removing barricades and vandalizing a light-rail vehicle and conducted a mass arrest, charging 32 adults and 81 juveniles with inciting a riot, conspiracy and remaining present at an unlawful assembly, according to the release.
The lawsuit alleges that scores of juveniles who were unassociated with the event or attempting to leave, including Carmen, were corralled by police officers and wrongfully arrested in their sweep.
Carmen and another plaintiff who was 13 at the time went to the park to watch the skateboarding and left after hearing a dispersal order but were corralled by police officers on the streets surrounding Dolores Park when they tried to leave, according to the lawsuit. A 17-year-old plaintiff skateboarded at the event, left the park after hearing an order to disperse and was allegedly blocked on a nearby street by officers pointing weapons at him. Another 15-year-old plaintiff was riding a scooter to a friend’s house and passed a street near Dolores Park when police officers stopped her, directed her to turn around and led her back toward the park, where she became trapped between police lines, the lawsuit states.
Lopez, Carmen’s mother, arrived at the block where the group was corralled soon after and was told she could not pick up her daughter, she said. Most of the children were dressed lightly for the sunny daytime event and now looked cold and uncomfortable, she said. Records show the temperature was in the high 50s that night.
“They were sitting there, like, freezing and shivering,” Lopez said. “They were looking all in disbelief.”
Officers detained the group, which mostly contained minors aged 13 to 17, for over three hours on the street and did not provide shelter, blankets or jackets, according to the lawsuit. Members of the group were allegedly handcuffed with zip ties and not permitted to go to the bathroom.
San Francisco in 2023: where massive shoplifting, open-air drug use and defecation in the streets goes unabated, but skateboarders get arrested. If Mike Judge had written such scenes into Idiocracy, his producers would have told him to dial it back a notch or ten, or risk total unbelievability.
Of course, California’s governments did try to warn skateboarders in 2020 that, as Sheldon Cooper would say, they were having fun wrong:
ROGER KIMBALL: The looming Lenin comeback.
As we embark on what is sure to be an eventful year, it is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What I have in mind is not so much Lenin’s butcher’s bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what is somehow even creepier is his model of government.
I was reminded of this in November when Miguel Cardona, Joe Biden’s secretary of education, gave a talk to explain “education department priorities.” Talking up a kinder, friendlier department, he said, “I think it was President Reagan [who] said, ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help.’”
I think that was intended to be reassuring. What Reagan actually said, however, as was pointed out about 10,000 times, was the opposite. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” the Gipper said, “are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
Lenin would have known exactly what Reagan meant — that’s what he liked about government. And if Maximilien Robespierre was a piker by comparison, he had the idea, doing his best to disfigure France in the brief time allotted. An ardent student of that supreme political narcissist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robespierre was always going on about “virtue,” though he conflated the emotion of virtue with what a Marxist might call “really existing” virtue. Above all, Robespierre knew achieving the utopia of his dreams would not be easy or painless, which is why he spoke frankly about “virtue and its emanation, terror.”
Related: Finally, Destruction for Destruction’s Sake. “Lenin loathed Christianity. He loathed traditional Russian society. His animus ventured well beyond a reaction to perceived systemic unfairness toward Russia’s peasantry. Unlike Scrooge, but like a good Marxist, Lenin chose not to exploit existing society but destroy it — or he began the process; Stalin eagerly continued the project. Destruction was a prerequisite to a new, bright communist society, went the rationale. In practice, Russian society became a countrywide gulag. Tens of millions died. The human spirit was trampled. Bleakness was unremitting. Lenin, an unwitting existentialist, and his spawn imposed a horrid meaning on their meaningless world: totalitarianism and the cruel iron boot that came with it. In fact, they chose evil.”
PROF. JACOBSON: VIDEO – Campus Antisemitism Crisis: Cornell, The Ivies, and Beyond. “The way I would term it is we’re not here to talk about October 7th. We’re really here to talk about October 8th and 9th and 10th, and the reactions on campuses that I think shocked a lot of people.”
JIM TREACHER: All I Want for Christmas Is Everybody Stop Being Crazy.
- People are chanting antisemitic slogans in the street, beating up Jews, trashing synagogues. Because a bunch of Jews were slaughtered by crazy terrorists half a world away. It’s crazy.
- The president of Harvard University is a crazy plagiarist, and now the libs are going crazy making excuses for her because she’s not a white dude. They’re so crazy that the more racist they get, the more racism they see in everyone else.
- Taylor Swift is dating some football player, and everybody’s going crazy.
- The guy who played Kang in the Marvel movies went crazy and beat up his girlfriend, so now his career is ruined and he’s going to jail. And nerds are going crazy because the same thing hasn’t happened to Ezra Miller, which is racist or something.
- Even the holidays are no solace. People are refusing to buy Christmas gifts for their kids because it’s somehow killing the planet. And their comrades are blocking traffic and crazy-gluing their various body parts to the street, in the name of whatever crazy cause they care about this week. They’re all crazy.
Perhaps we can arrange a WWI-style Christmas Truce — but of course, as with 1914, the wreckage of the culture war will return after Boxing Day, if not sooner.
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NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Judge Orders Teen Who Allegedly Plotted Terror Attack Against Synagogue To Do ‘Book Report.’
WKYC reported that the Stark County Sheriff’s Office said that its deputies responded to a call in early September regarding a 13-year-old boy who was involved in “concerning conversations” on a social media platform that included numerous threats toward Temple Israel in the city of Canton.
The boy, who was not named due to his age, pleaded “true,” which is the juvenile equivalent of guilty, on Friday to misdemeanor charges of inducing panic and disorderly conduct.
According to court documents, the boy “did create a detailed plan to complete a mass shooting at the Temple Israel on the Discord platform which was reported to law enforcement and required an immediate investigatory response and notification of public individuals and agencies including the school system in which caused significant public alarm within those agencies.”
The report said that Stark County Family Court Judge Jim James suspended a 90-day sentence for the teen at the Multi-County Juvenile Attention Center and instead gave him one year of probation that included the following:
- No unsupervised use of the internet[.]
- Continue to undergo counseling with a licensed therapist[.]
- Read a book about Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, credited with saving over 62,000 Jews during World War II. The teen is then ordered to write a book report to the juvenile probation department.
Stark County Sheriff George Maier said that the county has a “zero-tolerance policy when it comes to threats made against our community.”
Zero-tolerance but zero serious disciplinary action as well. As Stephen Miller tweeted, “Planning a mass shooting of Jews is treated like Bart Simpson opening theme hijinks now.”
NIMBYISM AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION: Why the U.S. steel industry is dying: It’s not because of foreign competition. “So why did this happen? Why did the U.S. go from a steelmaking powerhouse to an also-ran? As usual, there are a bunch of competing explanations — import competition, bad management choices by steel companies, and unions raising wages to uncompetitive levels. But while these were factors, the biggest reason the U.S. steel industry went into terminal decline was that we stopped building things that used lots of steel.”
Deindustrialization began, in general, right after the Nixon “regulatory explosion” that gave us the EPA and OSHA, among many other federal impediments.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: American health plummets after Covid pandemic (Gallup).
The following is from Gallup News Poll.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Obesity and diabetes have both reached record highs*
- Healthy eating habits have worsened substantially since 2019; exercise unchanged
- Other key aspects of physical health have worsened since before pandemic
Key physical health metrics have notably worsened since before the Covid-19 pandemic, including obesity, diabetes and eating habits.
The percentage of U.S. adults whom Gallup classifies as obese has reached an estimated 38.4%, up 6.0 percentage points since 2019 and just shy of the record high of 39.9% measured in 2022.
A new high of 13.6% of respondents say they have been diagnosed by a medical professional with diabetes, up 1.1 points since 2019.
The most recent results, obtained Aug. 30-Sept. 8, 2023, are based on 5,316 U.S. adults surveyed by web as part of the Gallup Panel, a probability-based panel of about 100,000 adults across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
* Unexpectedly! Gender studies professor claims combatting obesity is ‘fatphobic,’ blasts agenda against fatness.
Which is an odd stance for an ideology that sees many of its practitioners stuck in a permanent 2020 mindset. Especially when, as those crazy rightwingers at the AP reported in September of 2020: COVID-19 and obesity: Doctors studying link between excess weight and severe disease.
Alysha Forrest is looking forward to her assignment as the Songlance’s newest lieutenant, particularly when it gets her placed as the liaison to the ship’s water environment crewmembers. Interfacing with the mermaid-like Naysha and the alien Platies who serve as the ship’s navigators is an exhilarating experience, and all the other officers on the crew are eager to welcome her into the fold… all of them, except one. Mike Beringwaite, the overbearing ensign who ruined their leadership retreat years earlier, has somehow made lieutenant too. When a routine problem in the water environment throws them together, Alysha has to decide how willing she is to forgive him for what he did, whether she can work with him again, and most importantly, if she can trust him–with her life. The disaster at the leadership retreat is nothing to the one they have to handle now. If they can…. (Prequel) Alysha’s Fall 1. Second 2. Who is Willing 3. Sword of the Alliance 4. Either Side of the Strand
IF THE ELECTIONS WERE ABOVE BOARD, THE CURRENT JUNTA WOULD ALLOW INVESTIGATIONS. BUT THEY DON’T: 2020 Election Fraud and the Courts.