ROBERT SPENCER: Biden’s Handlers Think They Have a NATO Ally in Erdogan. But Erdogan Has Other Ideas. “To celebrate Erdogan’s victory, his followers gathered in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia mosque and screamed ‘Allahu akbar,’ which does not mean ‘God is great,’ as the Western establishment media routinely claims, but rather, ‘Allah is greater,’ that is, greater than your god. It is a declaration of supremacy with immense implications.”
Archive for 2023
May 29, 2023
THESE STORIES ARE USUALLY FAKE: The Infamous Vincent Chin Murder in 1982 Didn’t Happen the Way it’s Often Portrayed. “As for the violence, Chin threw the first punch in the bar. When they were all kicked out of the club, he yelled to the white men in the parking lot, ‘Come on you chickenshits, let’s fight some more.'”
SPACE: James Webb telescope discovers gargantuan geyser on Saturn’s moon, blasting water hundreds of miles into space. “Analysis revealed that the jets contained methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia — organic molecules containing chemical building blocks necessary for the development of life. It’s even possible that some of these gases were produced by life itself, burping out methane deep beneath the surface of Enceladus, an international team of researchers posited in research published last year in The Planetary Science Journal.”
Remarkably, however, Crawford H. “Chet” Taylor is entirely a figment of ChatGPT’s imagination. Tony Vanhuisen wrote:
Crawford H. “Chet” Taylor was never Governor of South Dakota and, in fact, I can find no evidence of such a person, at all. I will credit ChatGPT, though, that Governor Taylor is a plausible-sounding fictional governor.
The 14th Governor of South Dakota was not Chet Taylor (who again, doesn’t exist) but Tom Berry. Taylor is said to have served from 1949 to 1951; in fact, that would coincide with the second gubernatorial term of George T. Mickelson.
AI even produced a fake portrait of the fake governor:
AI is so good, it even gave “Chet” a second pocket square!
DEAL OF THE DAY: COOFANDY Men’s Cotton Linen Henley Shirt Long Sleeve. #CommissionEarned
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The Smart People Are Working on Worsening the Nursing Shortage.
JEFF GOLDSTEIN: The White Face of Black Supremacy. “On Instagram, this middle-aged warrior for Social Justice has 330 thousand followers. Twitter? Mr McWhorter — who can safely be described as white as a debutante’s taint — has over half a million followers, to whom he offers such wisdom as this. . . . I bring all this up as a backdrop to my final words on the ‘CitiBike Karen’ affair. The facts, to the extent they continue to matter, are not in dispute — especially if what we are after is an accurate presentation of how to contextualize the 90-second viral video that threatened to ruin the life of Sarah Comrie, a white physician’s assistant, whom the left set about to turn into an objective correlative of white ‘Karenicity,’ of female whiteness weaponized as a means to consciously control and subjugate black men. . . . McWhorter was and continues to be one of the driving forces of this narrative, having recently appeared on TYT to once again bemoan the racism of Ms Comrie and the dangers she posed to black men as a direct result of her whiteness. Responding to Guest Host Sharon Reed’s leading prompts, McWhorter claims that he ‘never cared about a stolen bike’ (he did), but instead, that what he saw that ‘alarmed’ him was Ms Comrie’s response to having the bike she rented taken away from her by black teens, which response — calling out for help while they were trying to take her property — put their lives in jeopardy. Comrie’s life, conversely, was never threatened, nor does she have any right to even perceive it as such; after all, as a pregnant white woman surrounded by several black teenagers cursing at her and laying hands on her bike, to believe herself unsafe is merely proof of her implicit biases and her latent racism. She has nothing to fear from black teens throwing f-bombs her way; whereas they had every right to fear for their lives. Because black on white crime in New York is simply not a thing, whereas a white woman calling for help — and here McWhorter invokes Emmett Till — leads to instantaneous lynchings of black youth in 21st century New York City, the contemporary urban equivalent of 1950’s Selma, Alabama, or Jessup County, Mississippi, circa 1964. I mean, do you even sociology, bro?”
Plus: “To hear McWhorter tell it — and again, this hipster doofus reaches over 6 million people through his various social media presences, which is why this matters — the viral video led not to the vilification of Ms Comrie, but rather to a ‘narrative’ and a ‘press push’ that ‘vilified’ the black teenager whose name has still not been released, whose job has never been threatened, whose family has never received deaths, and whom local media, as well as a host of national outlets, didn’t immediately label a racist and a thief, nor demonize for his skin color.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Return of Good and Evil, Part 1.
And here’s Part 2. “Of the two attributes of intelligence, it is value-setting not problem-solving that may prove the most critical one of all.”
THEY ABSOLUTELY SHOULD: Portugal considers banning Huawei from national 5G networks.
HOW OUR COLLEGE LEADERS CULL THE HERD: “Every so often, one of our college leaders blurts out the truth about their feelings and beliefs. In their public pronouncements, they always try to appear reasonable, when they’re actually intolerant and belligerent. That’s exactly what happened at Bakersfield College (BC) in California.”
IT’S HER UNOFFICIAL REELECTION KICKOFF: Gov. Hobbs Vetoes Election Integrity Reforms in Arizona.
HMM: Russia and China’s BRICS economic alliance will fail at countering the West.
Many of the countries now proposing the bric have common interests, not least a dislike of U.S. hegemony. But while the enemy of my enemy may be my friend, a successful BRICS needs more than that. It needs genuine aims, rules and commitment. No amount of backslapping and fist-pumping will change that.
India sees China as a strategic rival. It is aggressively positioning itself as a palatable alternative to China for manufacturing. Meanwhile, the skirmishes between India and China on the Tibetan plateau have turned more deadly. If China is promoting a BRICS concept as cover for Chinese hegemony, India is determined to use that same organization to block Chinese influence. Saudi Arabia and Iran feel the same way about each other.
South Africa is rapidly becoming a failed state. Its power crisis threatens value-added exports. How can the country possibly lead any alliance? Mexico? Every Mexican company I talk to tells me how it is expanding in the United States.
Brazil’s President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently lamented, “Every night, I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar.”
Simple answer: Brazilian mining giant Vale SA can sell iron ore to China in Chinese yuan, or renminbi (RMB), all it wants, but what would it do with those RMB afterwards? Vale’s debts are all in U.S. dollars. The heavy construction equipment the company uses is often built by Caterpillar Inc. or Japan’s Komatsu Ltd., so Vale needs dollars and yen to buy it. RMB is valueless for Vale’s operations in Sudbury or Sulawesi (part of Indonesia).
Meanwhile, China has bought considerable influence outside of BRICS via its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which invests in more than 150 countries. Why would China give that influence away to others via BRICS?
I’ll take our problems over theirs any day.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Memory-Holing of COVID False Narratives Picks Up Steam. “Tyrannical garden gnome and alleged physician Anthony Fauci repeatedly insists that he didn’t want anything shut down. Randi Weingarten — the most evil woman in America — swears that she and the cauldron-stirring teachers’ union she runs never tried to keep schools closed.”
JOSH HAMMER: The Case for Ron DeSantis.
REMEMBER, THE “A” IN “AI” STANDS FOR “ARTIFICIAL”: A lawyer used ChatGPT for legal filing. The chatbot cited nonexistent cases it just made up.
CHUCK’S GETTING OLD AND LOSING IT: Huh? Chuck Schumer Slams ‘MAGA Supreme Court’ After A Unanimous Decision.
A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Texas High School Postpones Graduation When Only 5 Students Meet Graduation Requirements.
Michael and Chantell Sackett’s ordeal reveals how rule by an unfettered administrative state can cause significant cost and hardship. For 16 years the couple has been battling the bureaucracy to build a home. The Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers claim their dry property is a wetland subject to federal regulation.
The Clean Water Act (CWA) authorizes EPA to regulate only “navigable waters” in interstate commerce. Yet the EPA said the Sacketts’ property was connected to a wetland some 30 feet away, which was connected to a ditch that connected to a nonnavigable creek that connected to a lake. Follow that?
Americans anywhere in the country could have their backyard declared a wetland, but they wouldn’t know it until the EPA swoops in and threatens enormous penalties for pouring herbicide on weeds. EPA advises landowners to solicit the Army Corps’ opinion before doing anything with their property. But 75% of the time the Corps claims jurisdiction.
Does federal jurisdiction really “encompass any backyard that is soggy enough for some minimum period of time?” Justice Samuel Alito asks in the majority opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. “How about ditches, swimming pools, and puddles?”
A majority in Rapanos (2006) couldn’t agree on how to limit EPA’s authority over wetlands. Four Justices said the Clean Water Act’s scope extended to “only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water” such as oceans, rivers and lakes, and wetlands that were directly adjacent and “indistinguishable” from those waters.
Keep pushing back on the administrative power grabs.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s mysterious space plane released an unidentified ‘object’ in orbit, US intelligence reveals. “Experts think the Chinese space plane is likely similar to the Boeing X-37B, a U.S. space plane that debuted in 2010. Kevin Pollpeter, a research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, told Nature.com that the reveal of X-37B sparked concern within the Chinese government over the craft’s military potential. It’s possible that this spurred the country’s space program, which is closely tied to its military, to start developing its own version.”
