OPEN THREAD: It’s a three-day weekend, baby, so it’s not over yet.
Archive for 2024
September 1, 2024
#JOURNALISM:
He didn’t “die” – he was murdered by the terrorists who have held him since 10/7
Murdered shortly before IDF forces got to him. Rather than surrender, Gazans chose to murder. https://t.co/T3YL74kvim
— Louis vil LeGun 🍌 Notorious T.A.C.O. (@LouisvilleGun) September 1, 2024
MARK JUDGE: Exploding the Left’s ‘Language Virus’ with William S. Burroughs.
In 1986, the unclassifiable countercultural writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) laid out his thoughts about language:
My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus … has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.
In his book William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll, author Casey Rae sums it up this way:
In the Burroughs worldview, language is a mechanism of what the author called Control with a capital C: an insidious force that limits human freedom and potential. Words produce mental triggers that we can sometimes intuit but never entirely comprehend, making us highly susceptible to influence.
The modern left is unabashed about wielding language as a virus—or, really, as a form of control. “Supercut” videos by critics of corporate leftist media, like Tom Eliot, reveal the media figures and politicians repeating the same words and slogans over and over again: President Joe Biden, despite drooling on himself, is “sharp.” Kamala Harris has brought the “Joy, joy, joy” back into politics. Conservatives are “weird.” Abortion is “healthcare.” These word storms rip through the country via television, radio, and social media, infecting hosts from D.C. to California. Millions of people mindlessly repeat them as if they have been infected with some kind of mentally impairing disease. It’s a virus worse than COVID.
As Tom Bethell of the American Spectator, a very non-Burroughs-esque writer, wrote in 1981,“Bees in a hive don’t ‘talk’ to one another, but they do have an effective system of communication, and they all work toward a common goal, different bees performing different functions. ‘There is no need to posit an overarching conspiracy,’ [Joe Sobran of National Review] wrote recently. ‘The world collectivist movement goes forward. None of its constituent parts — Communist, socialist, liberal — runs the whole thing; they don’t even consciously cooperate, for the most part.’ But they manage never to sting one another.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA selects Intuitive Machines for south pole lunar lander mission.
THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS: Kamala Closes an Already Disastrous Week by Trashing Gold Star Families.
On three different occasions, the open border/outlaw private insurance/defund the police/free healthcare for illegal aliens/ban fracking/San Francisco radical stupidly told the world, “My values haven’t changed.” Within hours, the now firing-on-all-cylinders Trump campaign used that statement to launch one devastating meme after another.
Those stupid words will haunt her straight through to November.
Above all, Kamala stepped right into the Trump campaign’s narrative that she cannot handle the pressure of going off-script.
And then, on Saturday afternoon, came the big finale…
Kamala Trashes 13 Gold Star Families
Kamala’s insanely stupid and cruel Saturday afternoon tweet accusing 13 Gold Star families of agreeing to act as props so Trump could politicize the death of their loved one was unquestionably the act of a desperate campaign panicking over internal poll numbers and hoping to change the narrative on the Sunday shows away from her disastrous CNN interview.
In the history of unforced presidential campaign errors, this one’s a doozy…
As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times. It is a solemn place; a place where we come together to honor American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice in service of this nation.
It is not a place for politics.
And…
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 31, 2024
That tweet is the act of a drowning campaign looking for any kind of life preserver.
Kamala has bragged about being the “last one in the room” when the calamitous decision was made to surrender Afghanistan to terrorists before all of our people and billions of dollars in weaponry had been removed. That’s why these 13 men and women died.
Worse still, according to these 13 families, neither Biden nor Kamala has ever reached out in any way to them, not even to offer their condolences. We all know why. These 13 heroes died needlessly due to Biden’s and Kamala’s dreadful judgment and now Kamala wants their inconvenient memory forgotten, memory-holed, and discarded.
As John Hinderaker writes, “If the Democrats were smart, they would avoid like the plague any reference to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was universally, and correctly, seen as a debacle, and the Afghanistan fiasco precipitated a drop in Biden’s approval ratings from which he never recovered. Normal observers see that the current controversy was stirred up by the Democrats in hopes of political gain. The controversy, kept alive by Democrats, mostly serves to remind voters of one of the Biden/Harris administration’s worst failures, and to tie that failure more securely to Kamala Harris. So in my opinion the Democrats’ attacks on Trump for his Arlington visit constitute political malpractice. We can only hope that they keep it up.”
Related:
If the position being taken is that former Presidents can’t tape a video at Arlington, here’s the “Celebrating America” TV special for the Biden-Harris inauguration taped at Arlington and co-produced by the same person who produced the DNC. https://t.co/BmmwYwKS7e pic.twitter.com/l3GZUfRhtu
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) September 1, 2024
UPDATE: Woman Who Got Soldiers Killed Condemns Man Who Comforted Their Families.
Once again, the Babylon Bee is doing straight-up reportage today.
TRUMP: Hamas killed hostages because of ‘complete lack of US strength, leadership.’
Some 12 hours after Israel announced that it retrieved and identified the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel under Rafah in Gaza on Saturday night, former U.S. President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, commented three times on his Truth Social platform, mixing political attacks on his opponents with mourning for the victims.
“The hostage crisis in Israel is only taking place because Comrade Kamala Harris is weak and ineffective and has no idea what she’s doing,” Trump wrote, of the U.S. vice president and Democratic nominee, on Sunday afternoon.
“I look forward to seeing her at the debate! Biden failed, and now he spends his day on the beach, plotting and scheming how to take out his once political opponent, me, who took him out both at the debate, and otherwise,” Trump wrote. He added in all capitalized letters that “the Oct. 7 Israeli crisis would never have happened if I were president.”
Worst. Hitler. Ever.
POUNCING DOWN THE ROAD TO DETROIT: “San Francisco 49ers rookie Ricky Pearsall released from hospital after being shot in attempted robbery,” the L.A. Times reports, adding:
[San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott] said the investigation is ongoing but that the suspect appears to have acted alone. He did not identify the suspect, nor would he confirm that Pearsall’s Rolex was the target of the attempted robbery.
Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins said her office expects to make a charging decision by the middle of next week. Because the suspect is a juvenile, she said, the case, at least initially, will be filed in juvenile court.
The shooting is expected to fuel a narrative that conservative pundits and politicians have hammered in recent years, painting San Francisco as a city overrun with crime and homelessness that they blame on the failure of Democratic leadership.
Evergreen:
WELL, GOOD: Weight Loss Drug Reduces Diabetes Risk by 94 Percent in Clinical Trial. “Tirzepatide, the active ingredient in the popular weight loss drug Zepbound, has been shown to reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in obese or overweight adults with pre-diabetes by a huge 94 percent.”
WELL, THAT’S ONE WAY TO WIN MICHIGAN: Watch Tim Walz’s shocking reaction when asked about Israeli hostages murdered in Gaza.
‘What’s your reaction to the six hostages found in Gaza,’ the unseen journalist asks in the clip, which shows Walz clutching a milkshake as he made rounds during his brief drop-in at the 12-day event.
At that point, a staffer for the politician appears to motion to him that it’s time to leave, leading Walz to announce his departure.
‘All right, thanks everybody!’ he tells the crowd, before walking off to a round of applause.
Joined by his wife, Gwen, and their daughter Hope, the politician was swiftly surrounded by a security detail before being whisked away.
Here’s the video of Walz’s milkshake duck. Why are Harris and Walz so bad at retail politics and speaking extemporaneously?
Reporter: "What's your reaction to the six hostages being found in Gaza?"
Walz: Goodbye
pic.twitter.com/ceIHYU1QMw— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 1, 2024
AS LAWYERS SAY, DON’T ASK A QUESTION IF YOU AREN’T SURE OF THE ANSWER: Billionaire Mark Cuban Asked His Followers If They’d Prefer Their Kids Be Like Trump or Harris — OOPS.
HMM: St. Thomas College of Law Reinstates Fired Tenured Professor, Will Start Termination Hearings. Sounds shady, basing a firing on something that happened as long ago as 2010.
I THINK THE COVID VACCINES ARE AN INCREASINGLY TOUGH SELL: FDA approves Novavax’s updated COVID-19 vaccine.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: CRAFTSMAN 25-Ft Tape Measure with Fraction Marketing. #CommissionEarned
CARTEL GUNMEN EXEMPT, OF COURSE: Bonta-flation: Cali AG Wants to Jack Up Ammo “Background” Check Fee from $1 to $5. So cheesy.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Flat Plug Power Strip, Ultra Thin Extension Cord. #CommissionEarned
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Dusk or Dawn?
American presidential activities have become increasingly important since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ushering in a period of U.S. dominance occasionally referred to as The End of History. The Reagan victory marked a moment when the key battlefield in the struggle to determine the future of humanity shifted from the superpower competition between East and West to the simple control of the institutions of the West, following the collapse of the USSR.
Gone was Che Guevara and Mao’s strategy of surrounding the global cities from the Third World countryside. Back was Gramsci’s plan to infiltrate Western institutions and culture from within. If the enemy walls were impregnable from without, they were vulnerable from within. The left accepted the West would be conquered by coup. To this task they set forth with might and main.
But something happened that Gramsci did not expect. As the march through the institutions progressed, the “progressives” — so confident of their intellectual superiority — did not sweep all before them. Rather they found the resistance stiffening unexpectedly. Unlikely coalitions rooted in the “Working Class” and even among formerly left-wing sympathizers began to multiply. The surprise setbacks of 2016, Trump and Brexit, grew rather than declined, as one might expect of the last-gasp resistance in the inevitable tide of history.
Today the Reagan castle the progressives captured by coup is in shambles. They are in possession of a ruin. The Global World has not only shattered but is breaking out in war. The only answer to inflation is price control. Worse, the political opposition to progressive ideas has become assertive and even respectable. Things have come to a head; that is what makes November 2024 so special.
Read the whole thing.
HE’S NOT TRUSTWORTHY: Minnesota Gun Owners Tee Off on ‘Chameleon’ Tim Walz.
BLEG: CAN WE HELP THE BRAZILIANS WITH VPNS? The New York Times may be weirdly relaxed about Brazil blocking X, many of us are not. We’re talking Brazil, not North Korea or Cuba – 200 million people in our own hemisphere. While Brazil’s cartoonishly villainous “Justice” Moraes has said that even using VPNs to post your cat photos will get you a fine 5 times larger than the average monthly salary of a Brazilian, I suspect Brazilians will give that ruling the respect it deserves.
My question to the Instapundit audience is this: are there any open-source VPN projects someone in the US can join to provide some free VPN bandwidth to beleaguered Brazilians? I have gigabit internet and would be more than happy to throw some bandwidth that way. If you want to make some suggestions in the comments, I will look at them and do a follow-up post with any suggestions that look promising.
IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: 85% of the matter in the universe is missing: But scientists are getting closer to finding it.
BRADLEY THOMPSON: Two Views of Justice in the American Founding.
The Declaration of Independence holds as one of its four self-evident truths that the sole purpose of government is the protection of man’s unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The idea of rights is connected to the broader concept of justice. Likewise, the Preamble to the Constitution says that one of the principal ends of the new federal government is to “establish justice.” To a person, the Founding generation held the protection of private property and the sanctity of contracts as direct derivatives of the rights to life and liberty and therefore as constituent principles of justice. The American Revolution (1764-1783) and the American Founding (1787-1800) were, if nothing else, concerned about justice.
How did the Founding generation understand the nature of justice? More particularly, how did they understand the protection of private property and the sanctity of contracts as manifestations of justice? How did the Founders institutionalize and bring to life the protection of private property and the sanctity of contracts into their founding moment?
These are complex questions, which, despite their obvious importance, have gone largely neglected by scholars of the American Founding period. This essay examines one concrete but important instance of how the Founders built their understanding of justice into the core legal-political institutions of the new nation. What is most interesting about this particular founding moment is that two deepest theoreticians of the American Founding—i.e., Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—disagreed over how to apply their shared understanding of justice to a concrete instance. Hamilton and Madison were the two leading architects and proponents of the new Constitution both in and out of the constitutional convention, and they joined forces to co-author (along with John Jay) the 85 essays of The Federalist, which was the most comprehensive defense of the newly drafted Constitution ever written. But to be in government and to apply the Constitution’s principles to legislation and the governance of the new nation was something altogether different. The task of legislation is complex and fraught with complications and challenges that tore these former intellectual and political comrades-in-arms apart. The consequences of their competing views of justice and contracts (or at least the application of a shared view of justice) would shape the future of the new nation.
Exit quote: “This mostly forgotten episode in American history represented a critical moment in the Founding of the United States. The representatives sitting in the second session of the first Congress were tasked with setting the foundation and determining the standard of justice that would guide the new nation into the nineteenth century and beyond. Put differently, the First Congress was assigned the task of determining the kind of society America would be in the present and future. To that end, the two titans of the American Founding—Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—presented the American people with two different standards of justice, or, at least, two different ways of applying a common concept of justice. The people’s representatives would have to choose which standard or application of justice would define America’s future.”
“Time to move past rueful chuckles about Chicago and Illinois’ corrupt and damaging ways”
What? No rueful chuckles?
This is pathetic and beneath contempt. Why? Because the Tribune has studiously ignored its own institutional support of political corruption. The pretentious and imperious editorial ignored the important stuff like the corruption of President Barack Obama, who connived to unleash the Deep State Intelligence Agencies against conservatives like Donald Trump. And mysterious toilets of Gov. Fat Boy of Illinois. They go after old Irish guys who can’t hurt them, old men in their 80s, while the city of Chicago falls apart. The paper allows the architects of failure—Toni Preckwinkle, Kim Foxx, the CTU’s Stacy Davis Gates and Brandon Johnson—to skate away as the city burns.
As former conservative Illinois gubernatorial candidate Jeanne Ives noted on “X” the Tribune’s corruption series was a joke.
What the editorial ignored was corruption of the newspaper. It ran interference for the legions of Tribune-endorsed Democrat and Republican legislators who supported generations of corruption in Springfield mostly, and Chicago. The newspaper kept Boss Madigan in power through its endorsement of spineless legislators. And it avoided the key fact:
Tribune political editor Rick Pearson has been cheerleader and mascot of the infamous bi-partisan Illinois Combine for decades. And the Tribune knows it.
To not acknowledge Pearson as the Combine’s prized pet is to slap the readers of the Tribune again and again and again. He’s repeatedly been arrested for DUI in Springfield. He was on George Ryan’s infamous favored favorites list. Ryan dipped down and gave Pearson’s wife a job. I objected loudly to him directly. And to the bosses. Still the Tribune kept him on the payroll, damaging the paper’s credibility. If the soon-to-be indicted Combine boss Big Bill Cellini was mentioned, the Combine boys would snicker at the newspaper. Tribune bosses protected him. That’s how they roll. The Tribune knows about Pearson. The editors know. The politicians know. Even left-wing carrion eaters like Erik Zorn and Marxist Tribune union boss Greg Pratt know.
The left was let into the Tribune Tower, metastasized and helped kill a great institution. The editors allowed it to fester. And it became poisonous, toxic.
Evergreen:
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Adult use of cannabis, hallucinogens remain at historically high levels, survey finds.