Archive for 2023
May 14, 2023
OUR ENTIRE JOURNALISTIC CLASS NEEDS TO GROW UP AND DO ITS JOB: All shook up: CNN CEO tells media reporter Oliver Darcy to quit sniveling about Trump.
Related: Here Are More Details About CNN’s CEO Berating His Media Reporter Over Trump Coverage.
ALL THE GOP CANDIDATES SHOULD DO THIS: Ron DeSantis tweets support and fundraising link for Daniel Penny.
Related: Roger Kimball:
“Because he can.”
That’s the answer one has to give to those who ask how Alvin Bragg, a local district attorney in office by the slimmest of margins—and then only because of a huge subsidy from the anti-American billionaire George Soros—can get away with antics like indicting Donald Trump, a former (and, possibly, future) president of the United States, and, now, with charging former Marine Daniel Penny with manslaughter because he (along with at least two others) intervened to stop Jordan Neely from attacking fellow passengers on a New York subway.
Because he can. As a friend remarked when digesting the spectacle of Penny being led away in handcuffs, totalitarian movements often start slowly, almost timidly, but as they gain power, they become more brazen. After a certain point, they do outrageous things just to intimidate the public and demonstrate their power.
Bragg shouldn’t be able to show his face in New York without being shouted down for being pro-crime.
YES, BUT HE WAS A WHITE GUY: Former NYC First Lady Told Residents To ‘Physically Intervene’ To Stop Street Harassment. “Two years ago, the wife of New York City’s then-mayor told residents to stand up for fellow residents to stop street harassment, including by ‘physically intervening’ – an act for which Marine Daniel Penny was taken into custody for on Friday.”
GOODER AND HARDER: Mail Delivery Halted for an Entire Zip Code in Seattle. “Some south Seattle residents are claiming a significant ‘mail fail’ is occurring as the United States Postal Service (USPS) has halted mail delivery due to a rise in recent vandalism and theft. A sign at a nearby U.S. Postal Service office in Columbia City is telling residents in the ‘98118’ zip code to pick up their mail in person at an annex office, located at 5920 Martin Luther King Jr Way South.”
Plus: “Property crime has been on the rise in the Seattle area, in the Northwest, and kind of across the country — and mail theft is unfortunately one of those areas that have been targeted significantly with that uptick in crime.”
OPEN THREAD: Take it away!
UPDATE: Oops, this was posted early but since people are commenting already I’ll just leave it up. Today can be a twofer.
ROUTINE, BUT NEVER REALLY BORING: SpaceX launches 56 new Starlink satellites into orbit and lands rocket at sea.
GREAT MOMENTS IN TOLERANCE FOR A DIVERSITY OF IDEAS: Video shows liberals heckle, violently storm out of comedy show after comedian makes Dylan Mulvaney jokes: ‘F*** you, transphobe!’
During [Chrissie] Mayr’s comedy set, the comedian delved into the hot-button topic of Dylan Mulvaney – the TikTok star of the controversial “Days of Girlhood” series and center figure of the Bud Light debacle.
Mayr mocked Mulvaney for identifying as a female, yet never committing to undergoing gender reassignment surgery despite declaring to be a girl for more than a year. When Mayr questioned Mulvaney for not getting a sex change operation, someone in the audience shouted: “Because he’s a man!”
An irritated woman disagreed and then yelled, “No. She’s a woman!”
Mayr reacted by saying, “Uh oh, uh oh, we have one of those.”
Mayr then lampooned the heckler with a misdirection joke, “No, it’s all good. We can all have different beliefs, it’s okay. Some of us can believe in reality and some of us can’t. This is America, we should have different beliefs, it’s all good.”
The woman and her friends were outraged and stormed out of the comedy show. One of the women shrieked while exiting, “F*** you, transphobe!”
The crowd applauded that the offended liberal women were leaving the show.
Mayr claimed that the women violently stormed out of the venue, knocking over her merchandise table. She also said that the women “went straight to management to complain.”
Mayr came to the conclusion, “This is the conflict when it comes to comedy and Leftists. It’s just not compatible.”
Why, it’s as if all comedy is conservative or something.
I REMEMBER WHEN PUBLISHING HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP INFO RAISED “SERIOUS QUESTIONS OF JOURNALISTIC ETHICS:” Freak-A-Leak: Journalists Outraged After Politico Abortion Scoop Snubbed for Pulitzer.
LATERAL MOVE: Ex-AOC aide Justine Medina now New York Communist party boss.
IT’S AS IF OUR NATION IS RUN BY PEOPLE WHO WANT TO DESTROY IT: A week after FERC warns about a “looming catastrophic reliability failure” the new EPA rules might kill the grid.
THE GREAT LEFT-WING DISINFORMATION OPERATION AGAINST THE SUPREME COURT:
It is incumbent upon sober elected officials, and the American people at large, to reject this obtuse, sprawling Democratic media disinformation operation. The operation, for all its pompous bluster and ginned-up faux hysteria, has one goal and one goal only: to delegitimize the U.S. Supreme Court, and to pave the way for ruinous policies that would irreparably damage, and ultimately destroy, that venerable institution.
In the year 2023, the Left has nearly completed its century-plus-long “march through the institutions”: The forces of wokeism and civilizational arson are now firmly ensconced in the corridors of power in Fortune 500 boardrooms, K-12 public school classrooms, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, academia and myriad other traditional centers of American cultural clout.
The last remaining bulwark for the Right, and for the forces of civilizational sanity more broadly, is the political arena: Republicans currently occupy 26 out of the 50 governor mansions, and have 22 state-level “trifectas” of consolidated gubernatorial/state legislative control (compared with only 17 for Democrats).
At the federal level, Republicans retain a slim majority in the House of Representatives, and, most important, conservatives control the Supreme Court. In 2022, moreover, the Court had an impressively conservative term, most prominently including its ruling to devolve to the democratic process all regulation of the Left’s favored pagan sacrament, abortion.
Read the whole thing.
WELL, THEY’RE NOT WRONG: Democrats’ nightmare – blacks see racism in attacks on Clarence Thomas.
AI AND INFORMED CONSENT: Boilerplate is not informed consent.
May 13, 2023
OPEN THREAD: It’s Saturday night.
THE WHITE HOUSE SAID PUT THE THING IN THE BLUE ROOM: Rock that punched hole in New Jersey house confirmed to be 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite.
PREVENTING ALZHEIMER’S WITH MENTHOL?
WE’VE DISCUSSED THIS BEFORE: Blood May Hold the Key to Reversing Aging. “First, the team used a heterochronic parabiosis mouse model, in which the blood vessels of a young mouse were connected to an older mouse, so they shared blood circulation. While the older mouse slowed its pace of aging when connected, the younger mouse aged more quickly. ‘When we separate them and remove the old circulation,’ White said, ‘the young mouse is able to reverse that accelerated aging and go back to its chronological age.'”
ADVICE TO THE NEWS MEDIA THAT WON’T BE FOLLOWED:
Here’s my radical idea: Give up on attacking Trump, the person, and engage with the substance of his policy arguments. Act as if he’s a completely ordinary politician — pose as if you felt neutrality toward him personally — and engage with the ideas.
You really do need to take him seriously. He’s presumptively the Republican nominee, and he’s got an even chance of getting re-elected to the presidency. You can freak out about that, but you’ve been freaking about about him for 8 years, and it hasn’t fazed him. His supporters tune you out.
Reset. Be normal, and treat him as if he were normal. Give up on trying not to “normalize” him. Forefront the substantive issues, treat all the candidates equally, and let us see how each of them holds up to a thorough grilling.
They’re literally not capable of that. They don’t even understand it, really.
But of course, they can’t be neutral toward Trump unless they’re also neutral toward Biden. And they don’t dare do that. Even with them — more or less literally, Weekend At Bernie’s style — carrying him, Biden’s tanking in the polls. If they treated him neutrally, he’d be in the single digits.
Related: “Biden admin officials forced reporters to submit pre-written questions.” It didn’t take much force. Most are happy to help, and the rest are at least willing to.
WELL, VEGANS: ‘Sick and Upset’ Vegan Brutally Mocked After Sending Threatening Letter to Neighbor.
There are plenty of perfectly nice vegans, but the aggressive and self-righteous ones deserve all the mockery they get.
UNEXPECTEDLY: The Harm Caused by Masks.
Evidence continues to mount that mask mandates were perhaps the worst public-health intervention in modern American history. While concluding that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” in preventing the spread of viruses, a recent Cochrane review also emphasized that “more attention should be paid to describing and quantifying the harms” that may come from wearing masks. A new study from Germany does just that, and it suggests that the excess carbon dioxide breathed in by mask-wearers may have substantial ill-effects on their health—and, in the case of pregnant women, their unborn children’s.
Mask-wearers breathe in greater amounts of air that should have been expelled from their bodies and released out into the open. “[A] significant rise in carbon dioxide occurring while wearing a mask is scientifically proven in many studies,” write the German authors. “Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2,” they observe, while chronic exposure at CO2 levels of 0.3 percent is “toxic.” How much CO2 do mask-wearers breathe in? The authors write that “masks bear a possible chronic exposure to low level carbon dioxide of 1.41–3.2% CO2 of the inhaled air in reliable human experiments.”
In other words, while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels.
As fellow Insta-co-blogger John Tierney wrote late in February: The Real Science on Masks: They Make No Difference.
HOT TIME IN THE CITY: Black Chicagoan got something to say about migrants.
Chicago residents are told that 250 illegals are coming to their neighborhood
This is how they reacted: pic.twitter.com/YDRIBhqCxg
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 11, 2023
So much so that the editorial board of the Chicago Sun Times was horrified enough to write a chiding, nanny-voiced, fainting couch op-ed comparing the black South Shore residents to?
TRUMP MAGA types. Scout’s honor – they did.
South Shore residents angry about migrant shelter would make MAGA proud
…No Chicagoan, no matter what part of town they live in, can forget that, even as the city struggles to find shelter for the influx of migrants being sent here by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has no qualms about using human beings as political pawns.
We as residents have to be better than that. But some in South Shore were not last week, when they shamefully emulated Abbott’s wanton callousness in protesting the planned use of a shuttered school to house migrants.
“We don’t care.” “We don’t want them here.” “Send them back.” “Close the border.” Those were among the ugly jeers that dominated the meeting at South Shore International College Prep, as the Sun-Times’ Emmanuel Camarillo reported.
What a pathetic and embarrassing display of NIMBYism, sounding much like an ugly “America First” rally for Donald Trump. One man even held a sign that read “Build the wall 2024.” That image alone is certain to put a smug smile on the faces of many MAGA types.
Boy, they can’t resist trotting out the tired MAGA as the worst insult ever. Pretentious fools. The black residents of South Shore are now MAGA racists, just like that. That “build the wall” sign must have really gotten under their skin and you know these are fellows who probably have 10 foot fences and/or security guards at their homes.
Well, we’ve known Chicago is MAGA Country since early 2019. In any case, as America’s Newspaper of Record notes: Poll: Most Democrats In Favor Of Welcoming Immigrants Into Someone Else’s Neighborhood.
MARK JUDGE: The American Stasi and the war on the Supreme Court.
In their comprehensive book The Stasi: Myth and Reality, scholars Mike Dennis and Norman Laporte examine the two systems of justice in Germany, made up of the “normative” and “prerogative” states.
The normative state was the outwardly appearing system of constitutional law. The prerogative state was the reality — a vast and corrupt bureaucracy filled with spies and jackboots and political actors who could toss people into jail for any reason. A woman named Ines Meichsner was sentenced to 10 months for “gross annoyance” because she was involved in the peace movement. Another peace activist, Uwe Kroker, was arrested for “gross rowdiness” for painting a peace sign on his door.
Dennis and Lapoerte observe: “According to state socialist theory, ‘bourgeoisie’ law and the concept of the separation of powers served to protect the hegemony of a sham democracy like that of Western Germany, whereas ‘socialist legality’ was an expression of the will of the working class and its Marxist-Leninist party in alliance with the farmers, the intelligentsia, and other working people.”
The American Left is trying to set up its own prerogative state even as they attempt to dismantle the normative state. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said during a recent interview that the courts have undermined their own legitimacy and that they do not have the power to enforce their own decisions. She then urged President Joe Biden to flat-out ignore the courts.
Read the whole thing.