Archive for 2023
February 26, 2023
DESPERATELY CLINGING TO THEIR TYRANNICAL AUTHORITY: Los Angeles Times Bitterly Clings to Mask Mandates and Decries “Covid Deniers”.
LET’S CALL IT WHAT IT IS: DIE: Biden is trying to enshrine “equity” more deeply as a national policy.
It won’t work. It will just break everything.
SOME LOSSES ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS: Gerard Vanderleun’s obituary: on loss and memory.
February 25, 2023
MIKE PENCE IS ARGUING THAT HE’S A LEGISLATIVE OFFICIAL, AND HENCE NOT SUBJECT TO THE J6 SPECIAL PROSECUTOR, and over at my Substack I argue that he’s not crazy to do so. As longtime InstaPundit readers may remember, I’ve written before on the Vice President’s character as a legislative official.
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OPEN THREAD: Fill the room with your intelligence.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: New Chinese commercial spaceport to host first launch next year.
MAGNETIC NAVIGATION IN FRUIT FLIES, and in people? “In animals that navigate, this mechanism has presumably been adapted to underpin this behaviour, but the underlying physiochemical properties of CRY-dependent magnetosensitivity appear to be shared across navigating and non-navigating animals.”
THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS: Higher Education Reform in Florida: Some of the proposals pose real threats to free inquiry.
DO TELL: Michelle Goldberg: My knee-jerk progressive reaction to teen depression was wrong and conservatives might be right. “Goldberg argues that the evidence for a connection between social media and teen mental health problems is pretty strong.”
CHART: What A Baby Bust Looks Like.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Copper Knee Brace for Knee Pain Relief. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)
READER FAVORITE: RAK Magnetic Wristband for Holding Screws. #CommissionEarned
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks.
SPACE: Tennessee company gets multibillion-dollar NASA contract for Kennedy Space Center operations. “Jacobs Technologies Inc., based in Tullahoma, Tenn., previously fulfilled a $1.37 billion Test and Operations Support Contract for NASA that it was awarded in 2012. Under the TOSC contract, Jacobs provided similar services along with servicing and testing flight hardware.”
Tullahoma is the home of the University of Tennessee Space Institute.
BLUE COLLARS’ BREEDING ADVANTAGE: Heavy labor may boost men’s fertility. “Men who have physically demanding jobs and regularly lift heavy objects at work also have higher sperm counts and testosterone levels. A new study that is part of broader effort to explore how exposure to environmental chemicals and lifestyle choices affect reproductive health found the link.”
BE PREPARED: Powerful Tactical Flashlights. #CommissionEarned
DON SURBER: The National Divorce Has Begun.
THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: A Grand Time Edition.
NEW VIDEO FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Alien Confused After Being Taken To Our Leader President Biden.
BREAKING NEWS FROM 1919: What Happened to Liberalism?
For a quarter of a millennium liberalism as a theory and as a political movement has been dedicated to the cause of social and political freedom and the pursuit of happiness as a material end. Liberalism continues to pursue those ends, but differently understood and by different means. The result is the diminution of freedom and of happiness in all Western liberal societies. The world that classical liberalism made, neoliberalism and now progressive liberalism are presently unmaking in the name of liberalism.
None of the countries that comprise the Anglosphere—including Great Britain, the United States and Canada, Australia, and others—is as happy a place as it was before liberalism in its updated form went to work on it. But the U.S. is, by almost every standard, the least happy and the most neurotic of them all.
The fact is confirmed by the angry and frequently crazed political polarization here; the racial tensions and the riots; the looting and destruction that American liberals are willing to tolerate and even to excuse; the intellectual chaos and mental and moral confusion produced by “woke” colleges, universities, and the public schools, then promoted in the media; the new liberal biology (comparable to the old Soviet biology) according to which a man can become a woman and give birth to a child and which purposefully complicates the formation of sexual identity among the young.
As Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses:
Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. “The word liberalism,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, “was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.” The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.
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The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. “Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,” Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, “and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.” Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of “organic” pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.
That future harmony sure is taking its time finally arriving. When do we finally get to see the omelette?