Archive for 2023

YOU KNOW WHAT? WE SHOULD TAKE THESE REBARBARIZER-WANNABES AND DUMP THEM NAKED IN THE AMAZON FOR THREE MONTHS:   Study Claims People Need to Battle Climate Change by…Drinking Less Coffee.

If they survive they can lecture us on their infatuation with “nature” and their desire to get rid of anything that makes life worth living. For now they need to be zipping lip. Particularly before I’ve had my morning coffee.

MORE SHOOTINGS: BREAKING: 7 Chinese Workers Killed in Two Related Shootings in Northern California.

It must be those MAGA racists. #StopAsianHate! Wait, what? “The suspect, who has been identified as 67-year-old Half Moon Bay resident Zhao Chunli, was apprehended without incident after police discovered him in his vehicle in the nearby parking lot of the sheriff’s office substation. Police say he was in possession of a semi-automatic handgun when he was taken into custody.”

Never mind. Just a local crime story. Spike it.

WISDOM IS LEARNING THAT YOU CAN’T MAKE WOKE CRITICS HAPPY:

@blairwalnuts

♬ original sound – Blair walnuts

Which is okay, because to be honest, they all deserve to be even more miserable than they make themselves.

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

JOEL KOTKIN: How the Californian dream became a nightmare.

Once a beacon of upward mobility, California’s tech-dominated economy has now become what analyst Antonio García Martínez describes as ‘feudalism with better marketing’. California has the fourth-highest GINI inequality index out of American states, and has experienced a sizeable expansion of inequality since 2010, according to American Community Survey data. Despite California’s fanatical commitment to ‘anti-racist’ affirmative action and racial preferences, African-Americans and Latinosperform poorly in terms of income and homeownership in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, with the latter among the most segregated places in the US. The gap between California’s fantastically rich elite and the struggling masses illustrates the emptiness of the elites’ supposedly ‘progressive’ values.

California’s embrace of green ideology has been particularly destructive to the economy. Technology companies have been key backers of California’s unproven and costly climate-centred policies, which are the most expensive in the US. While such policies are less directly damaging to digital companies, they have proven devastating to California’s other industries, notably to manufacturing, logistics and agriculture. California, the ultimate advanced industrial power in the late 20th century, has haemorrhaged industrial jobs in the 21st. Its severe underperformance compared with rivals extends to construction, professional and business services, and increasingly even tech.

Speaking of the impact of green ideology: Why California’s rainstorm ‘disaster’ is a blessing.

California is having an unusually wet year. This is a good thing. Both the central valley’s agricultural complex and the state’s 40 million-plus residential population rely on the brief winter rainy season and spring melting of the Sierra snowpack for fresh, pure water. Foothill reservoirs from Shasta to Tehachapi are refilling, cleaning, and flushing. California’s natural and built water system statewide is recharging groundwater after three dry years. Indeed, for lack of diversionary channels and storage expansion, at the moment good water is now being released from dams and headed for the Pacific Ocean.

What might seem to be rainstorm hell to headline writers is providing temporary relief from age-old water shortages. California’s weather cycles of dry and flooding are well documented. The American West has been dealing with this arid state of affairs since pioneer days. Much of arable and buildable southern California is flood plain. Flood control statewide and channelization of the Los Angeles river system were major initiatives of the mid-20th century, along with expansion of the Sierra storage system.

And yet, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in 2015, Then-Gov. Jerry Brown “and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people.”

AT THE VERY APOGEE OF PROJECTION: Former FBI counterintel official arrested for violating sanctions on Russian oligarch.

Last September, I called this allegation “too bad to check.” Now we can call it “too bad to ignore.” The FBI agent who helped kickstart Operation Crossfire Hurricane and created more than two years of panic over Russia collusion has been arrested today for … wait for it

President DeSantis is going to have clean house from top to bottom when he takes office: Deep State, Deep Trouble — America’s woke generals and the Military-Industrial Complex must be purged to save the nation.

QUESTION ASKED: If Ron Klain’s gone, who’s in charge of the Biden administration?

While Klain was in power, the Biden administration was effectively governed by Twitter’s most frequent posters and the tropes pushed by the journalists among them, such as the false accusations that border agents were whipping migrants on horseback. The White House foregrounded gender equity and DEI initiatives thanks to Twitterbrain, even if those things didn’t do much to lower the price of groceries.

Impressively, the Biden administration has  managed to be way more online than the previous one, with Klain acting as a media feedback loop. Klain fed White House talking points to journalists. Journalists repeated White House talking points. Klain retweeted journalists repeating White House talking points. Achievement unlocked!

Other than attempting to please its party operatives with bylines and the leftist Twitter mob, is anybody in charge of this remarkably dysfunctional White House?

20 YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: “TODAY IS THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF DANNY PEARL’S KIDNAPPING: His mistake? He believed the assurances of Islamic radicals. He thought they wanted a dialogue, but all they really wanted was to kill an American, and a Jew.”

ADDS YEARS TO YOUR LIFE, AND LIFE TO YOUR YEARS! Viagra Linked to Much Lower Risk of Death in Men, But Questions Remain. This applies to other PDE5 inhibitors too, like Cialis. “The men in the study who had been taking a PDE-5i were found to be 39 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease than those who had no record of a prescription. They were also 25 percent less likely to die from any cause, and 13 percent less likely to have a cardiac event, such as a heart attack or stroke.”

HISTORY SHOWS AGAIN AND AGAIN HOW NATURE POINTS UP THE FOLLY OF MAN: “It was a beautiful tree, it really was, but I kind of have a difficult feeling about it right now.”

Should the city have planted all these trees? Did it make sense at the time and now the wonderful “salvation” has been ruined by climate change or were all these trees always vulnerable to toppling with an unlucky combination of dryness and rain?

I’m trying to understand the use of the word “salvation” in the headline. It doesn’t appear in the text of the article. Why are trees “salvation”? If the natural environment of a place is “treeless vistas,” why not embrace treeless vistas? If the trees fall, they are falling not to nature but to human folly.

Oh no, there goes Sacramento, oh no Treezilla. Yeah.