THAT’S NOT HOW THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSED BUT IT’S STILL A DECENT-SIZED PROTEST: Russia is hit by huge civil protest in support of anti-Ukraine war activist as 10,000 take to the streets and clash with riot police: Putin speechwriter warns ‘This is how the Soviet Union collapsed.’
Archive for 2024
January 17, 2024
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD GETS TOO CLEVER BY HALF: The Babylon Bee joked about Vivek running Trump’s 7-Eleven and it started a flamethrower war on the internet so let me explain it to you.
Trump Promises Vivek An Administration Position Running The White House 7-Eleven https://t.co/1cYOX4IWUx pic.twitter.com/SojL5OZDAj
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 16, 2024
Joe Biden could not reached for comment:
Couldn't do that in the Biden administration, Vivek speaks English too fluently.
"You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."
– Joe Bidenpic.twitter.com/nccNdQBJKZ— BarleyPop (@MikePilbean) January 16, 2024
NOTE THE NEW MADRID IN THE CENTER OF THE COUNTRY: New map shows where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur in US.
JAMES MIEGS: The Likely Lab Leak and the Covid Cassandra.
I thought I was done with writing about Covid-19. But Covid-19 isn’t done with me—or with any of us.
I’m writing this precisely four years after Chinese health officials first announced the emergence of a mysterious new form of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan. “No obvious human-to-human transmission has been observed,” the officials added in that December 30, 2019, release. (Already, the Chinese were lying.) Today, Covid cases are ticking up for the umpteenth time. And documents keep coming to light that expose how American officials and scientists similarly suppressed unsettling facts about the pandemic’s origins.
While the death rate from each new wave of Covid keeps dropping, the disturbing revelations about our public health leaders keep getting worse. In December 2023, a new disclosure revealed how leading U.S. virus experts lobbied to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research at the substandard Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. The latest leak provides yet more evidence that the pandemic likely emerged from a lab experiment gone awry, and that U.S. scientists actively covered up their possible role in that world-historical catastrophe.
After both the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 9/11 attacks, bipartisan commissions were convened to investigate the disasters. Covid has killed more than a million Americans and has cost our economy at least $14 trillion. And yet we see no great urgency to investigate the pandemic’s murky origins or prevent a recurrence. Republicans in Congress continue to hold productive hearings. But, according to the New York Times, the Biden administration is “privately resisting” pressure to create a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic. The press has largely moved on. And the public health officials most deeply involved in the debacle—including Anthony Fauci and his National Institutes of Health (NIH) colleague Francis Collins—continue to tap-dance around the truth, even after leaving their posts.
It’s as if “just about everything has been corrupted by the left” or something.
IT’S A CROWDED FIELD BUT I LIKE THIS GUY’S CHANCES: Is Rep. Dan Goldman the Most Aggressively Wrong Idiot on Capitol Hill?
JONATHAN S. TOBIN: Jews Waking Up To Hollywood’s Antisemitism Should Try To Destroy DEI, Not Join Its Ranks.
While Hollywood rallied around the Black Lives Matter movement, relatively few celebrities have willingly braved the intersectional left’s abuse to speak up in defense of Israel — even after the slaughter, torture, and rape of Jews that took place on Oct. 7. The assumption among the fashionable left is that Jews “control” Hollywood and that they are a powerful group that must be humbled and cast aside to make way for diverse representations of approved minorities.
A similar dynamic involved efforts of Jewish groups to get a law imposing an ethnic requirement in California to include Jews in classes that are steeped in antisemitism. The problem with the curricula is the DEI mandate, not whether it includes some non-approved minorities like Jews.
Those actors and Jewish donors who foolishly hope they can get Harvard to stop encouraging antisemitism without eliminating DEI mandates fail to understand that it isn’t just linked to antisemitism. It’s a threat to the survival of America.
Read the whole thing.
MARK JUDGE: The ‘toxic’ media of the early 2000s hasn’t changed, but its targets have.
The new book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Tabloid 2000s is a fantastic piece of cultural analysis. Written by British journalist Sarah Ditum, it explores the digital revolution of the early 21st century and how it intersected with feminism, celebrity, and tabloid journalism — to the detriment of young women.
The thesis of Toxic is simple enough: In the late 1990s, the kind of privacy once enjoyed by the famous evaporated with the arrival of the internet. The coverage of women such as Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Aaliyah, and Janet Jackson was not only intrusive but vicious, violent, and unprecedented.
After roughly a decade, the power shifted back to celebrities’ favor with the rise of social media, which allowed celebrities to be their own public relations firms and direct their fans to counterattack the press. This new position of power, however, has flaws, namely letting celebrities avoid hard questions and the immolation of anyone who questions #MeToo or the new feminist orthodoxy.
* * * * * * * *
As Ditum concedes, the correction to the “Upskirt Decade” has had its own problems. Notably, innocent people have been destroyed by false accusations — and banning a song like “Blurred Lines” is never the answer.
It is also just a fact that the same irresponsible, strafing media is still at work. It’s just shifted its attention to politics. “These moments did not signify justice, exactly,” Ditum writes of the new witch hunts, where the press napalms anybody they don’t like, “but they did represent a change: the snark, spite, and violation that had been part of the acceptable treatment of celebrities (particularly women) were no longer to be tolerated.”
I’m not sure that it’s any better if the snark, spite, and violation are now happening to people who aren’t famous.
CNN, which spent the Trump years doxxing any random individual who disagreed with their leftist worldview, doesn’t mind, though.
SPOILER: IT’S NOT PARTICULARLY LARGE OR CAPABLE. Harvard and Sundance Share the Same Brain: 8 things the elite institutions have in common.
ED MORRISSEY: DoJ: Hunter’s Laptop Is Real, Spectacular, and So Was the Cocaine on His Holster.
Related: Joe Biden donors made up most of Hunter’s art sales, witness says.
More: “We are therefore confronted with the same mystery that bedevils us with the White House cocaine: Who put Hunter Biden’s cocaine into the carrying pouch of Hunter Biden’s illegally-purchased gun?! We may never know the answer, vows the FBI,” Ace of Spades adds.
EVERYTHING. NEXT QUESTION? China Is Tinkering With a Mutant COVID-19 Strain. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Colorado Democrats Push for Controversial $3,000 Cash Payments to Ex-Cons. “If passed, Senate Bill 12 would make Colorado the first state to codify such a program into law. However, it is important to question the effectiveness and sustainability of this approach. While State Senator Coleman argues that the current $100 and a bus ticket provided to released individuals are insufficient, it is questionable whether a large cash payment is the solution.”
Or, Denver could cut out the middleman and pay the $3,000 directly to local drug dealers.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, “SMART DIPLOMACY” EDITION:
How it started: How it's going: pic.twitter.com/4EHZ6N3p39
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 16, 2024
THEY CAN’T EVEN MAKE THINGS WORK FOR THE APPARATCHIKS ANYMORE: Woah: Blinken’s 737 Breaks Down after Davos. “The incident happened when Antony Blinken flew from Davos on helicopters and boarded the modified Boeing 737. He was then informed that the aircraft had been deemed unsafe to fly as an oxygen leak detected previously could not be remedied.”
ANDY MCCARTHY: The Democrats’ 2024 Plan Is Still Working to Perfection.
The media–Democrat complex is dying to run against Trump — so much so that press outlets couldn’t contain themselves last night, announcing that he’d romped to victory while caucusing was still under way and before many Iowans had voted. Democrats want Trump to be the nominee, which requires convincing skeptical Republicans that he is a juggernaut who can roll over Biden. Hence the early victory projections last night that touted Trump potentially getting over 70 percent of the vote. At this point in the game, Democrats want you to believe Trump could annihilate Biden. Are they unnerved by Biden’s astonishingly low poll numbers? Sure they are — but that’s all the more reason to double down on inducing Republicans to nominate the one guy they’re confident he can beat, the guy he’s beaten before by laying low and letting Trump beat himself.
In reality, when the dust settled, Trump got about 51 percent in Iowa. That would be a huge margin in a normal primary, in which a broad field was making first impressions on voters. But this isn’t a normal primary. It’s, in effect, an incumbent primary in which everyone knows exactly what to expect if Trump were president again. Based on last night’s result, 49 percent of Republicans don’t want that. Some significant percentage of them will never vote for Trump under any circumstances. They’re not getting to know the options; they’re against the option they know quite well.
Mind you, Democrats have barely jumped into the election-messaging fray at this point. They haven’t yet begun the barrage of billions of dollars in negative campaign advertising they are going to start running at Trump once the GOP nomination is sewn up (which it may already be).
The biggest factor in Trump’s early clinching is the Democrats’ lawfare. Phil Klein explained this well a few weeks back. Before the first indictment, Ron DeSantis was within striking distance. Once the indictments began, the base rallied to Trump and he blew the field away. As Phil notes, even DeSantis now concedes that the indictments “distorted the primary.”
And if all else fails, expect plenty of lawfare after the election as well: Advocacy groups preparing litigation in case of Trump reelection.
STAY WARM: Thermajohn Long Johns Thermal Underwear for Men Fleece Lined. #CommissionEarned
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Calif. Appellate Court Rules That the Homeless Can Sleep on the Sidewalks.
TO BE FAIR, WHO COULD HAVE EXPECTED COLD WEATHER IN CHICAGO? Tesla owners run into battery charging trouble in Chicago’s bitter cold.
Related: Electric vehicle drivers find charging ports not working in extreme cold weather.
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Chinese Lab Mapped Covid-19 Virus Two Weeks before Sharing Information Globally, Documents Reveal.
WHEN CIVIL NORMS COLLAPSE: Underwear and socks are the latest items to be locked up in shoplifting crackdown – as Walmart and Target both take action on theft of undies. “Locking up items can lead to frustrating waits of up to 40 minutes for shoppers to get their hands on basic groceries like toothpaste, baby formula and vitamins as retailers lock up products to combat soaring crime.”
THE DEMO BOMB: Chinese Women Are Voting Against Communism With Their Uteri.
IT ISN’T EASY TO SUCKER A RECON PLANE: Ukrainian Crews Set A Complex Missile Trap For Russia’s Best Radar Plane.
Exactly how the Ukrainians shot down the four-engine A-50 with its top-mounted radar is unclear, but analyst Tom Cooper—who has written many books about Soviet and Russian warplanes—has a theory.
Ukrainian radar and missile crews lured the Russian crews into a trap.
If Cooper’s theory is correct, the Ukrainians set the trap on Saturday, when Ukrainian air force jets—presumably Sukhoi Su-24 bombers—struck Russian air force installations across the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. “A number of radars were knocked out,” Cooper reported.
The Saturday strikes, the latest in a long campaign of Ukrainian raids on Russian defenses in Crimea, suppressed the Russians’ ground-based radar coverage, leaving the surviving missile batteries on the peninsula partially blind—especially to the north, where the terrain could mask incoming Ukrainian planes, drones and missiles.
So Russian commanders did the obvious, but stupid, thing. They ordered one of their few remaining A-50U radar planes, which normally fly far to the south over the Sea of Azov, to push farther north in order to extend radar coverage over most of Crimea.
Clever, if true.
WILL FREE SPEECH IN LAW SCHOOL BE SAVED BY (CHECKS NOTES) WAIT, IT’S THE ABA? The answer is, just possibly, yes.
At some point, the odds were that some part of academia would wake up and smell the whole place burning down. If it passes, chalk one up for us lawyers, I guess!