Archive for 2024

TRUE.

WELL, YES: We’re Now in Full Goat Rodeo Mode in the NYC Trump Trial. “How many catastrophic yet entertaining courtroom fails can one team of prosecutors suffer before the judge calls a halt to this goat rodeo? It’s time to dismiss this case against Donald Trump after Friday’s testimony. But don’t get your hopes up. The bulldogger of this rodeo is the judge.”

OMG: WHO WANTS TO TELL THEM? The Times and WaPo all crowed about their Pulitzers today. Fine, whatev. But this caught my eye:

“The Washington Post shared the prize for national reporting for “Terror on Repeat,” an examination of the AR-15 rifle, a widely available weapon commonly used in deadly mass killings that is capable of firing hundreds of bullets in rapid succession.”

“Hundreds”? Srsly?

I can’t even begin to claim to be a firearms expert, but to my knowledge, even with a 30 round magazine, the first 30 seconds, 30 rounds. Then the magazine runs empty. I’ve heard of drums that have larger capacity, but notice the weasel words: “in rapid succession.”

What’s “rapid”? I mean, heck, in its day the Winchester ’76 fired in “rapid succession.”

OPEN THREAD: It’s time.

PREPARE FOR MASS HYSTERIA AND EXILE!

Every four years we hear Alec Baldwin, Babs Streisand, Michael Moore and other flaky leftists say they will leave the country if a Republican wins the presidency, and one of these days they may actually mean it, though I doubt it. I recall my mentor Stan Evans joking that “I voted for George W. Bush because Alec Baldwin said he’d leave the country. Which just goes to show that pragmatism doesn’t work.”

Anyway, this Tweet thread from a former hive-mind journalist Michelle Kosinski is just too delicious not to celebrate:

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with a few couples, friends of friends, all American. All were well-educated and successful in careers. They seemed great! On the surface. For like an hour. But slowly, over a few drinks, they began to let slip their true MAGA natures….

One of the couples each attended top ivy league colleges. But now that it was university time for their own kids, they were adamantly NOT letting them apply to any ivies. And were weird about explaining why. Though the kids were double legacies. Okayyy… moving on…

The next crew suddenly busted out with air quotes when mentioning climate change. Again, these are otherwise smart people. Not scientists, clearly. But educated. And the dude took seething umbrage when my friend mentioned the damage Trump had done and vowed to continue to do.

They’d be having the same reaction if it were Dubya, McCain, or Romney running. Which of course is a big reason they’re having their TDS freakout.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Dems use the legal system to target the right — yet give the left a pass.

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

This philosophy, announced by Brazilian President Getulio Vargas in the 1940s, is no longer just the favored approach of Latin American strongmen. It has become the openly practiced strategy of today’s Democratic machine.

Read the whole thing.

THE PEOPLE SETTING AMERICA ON FIRE:

Scratch a pro-Palestinian radical organization, and you are likely to find Tides’ involvement somewhere.

These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall, while recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.

“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”

The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag. On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Timesurged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.

These groups, Shideler says, typically operate in a decentralized manner, using successful tactics drawn from decades of anarchist organizing and spread through left-wing activist networks via word-of-mouth, as well as through formal trainings by professionals such as Fithian or the nonprofit “movement incubator” Momentum Strategies. “If you look at Fithian,” he says, “she has consulted with hundreds of groups on how to do these things: how to organize, how to protest, how to make sure your people don’t go to jail, how to help them once they’re in jail.” There is no one decision-maker; rather, decentralized “affinity” groups work together toward a shared goal, coordinating out in the open via social media and Google Docs. This can create an impression of centralized planning. Shideler cites the matching tents that have cropped up on a number of campuses, prompting speculation that some shadowy entity is buying them en masse. “People keep pointing out, They all have the same tent!,” he says. “Well, yeah, it’s because the organizers told them to buy a tent, and sent around a Google Doc with a link to that specific tent on Amazon. So they all went out and bought the same tent.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Sounds like something out of a Kurt Schlichter novel.

NOT A BIG FAN OF STERN 2.0: Howard Stern Fumes Over Criticism He Went Too Easy On Joe Biden.

Howard Stern does not appreciate critics questioning the integrity of his recent interview with Joe Biden.

On Monday, Stern responded to YouTuber David Pakman who suggested the White House planted some of the questions he asked the president.

Pakman specifically wondered if the White House told Stern to ask Biden about a new policy that forces airlines to offer immediate refunds rather than credits for canceled flights.

“Here’s what happened. When Joe Biden came in, the day before [producer] John Hein and I were talking about some of the accomplishments that we admire that have gone on in the past four years, and John says to me, ‘Hey, Howard, did you hear what Joe Biden did with the airlines?'” Stern said.

“If they were scripting the questions, wouldn’t that have been a lot different?” interjected co-host Robin Quivers.

Sadly, given Howard’s current role as fluffer to superstar lefties, probably not.

BLESS HER HEART: Maxine Waters Alleges Trump Is Training Militias or Something.

You have to hand it to Donald Trump.

Man is like the Kwisatz Haderach from Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel “Dune” when it comes to leftists, except they are the ones alleging he can kill with a word.

In the latest case of Trump Derangement Syndrome worth laughing at, Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) went on MSNBC’s “Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart” to engage in the usual hysteria about Trump being a dictator who won’t  respect the Constitution upon returning to the White House without a hint of irony.

Rep. Waters mentioned the already-debunked “bloodbath” comment from March, when Trump’s words about auto imports got twisted into Trump calling for actual bloodshed if he lost the 2024 election. She talked about how she is looking to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and President Joe Biden’s handlers “to tell us what they are going to do to protect this country against violence if he loses.”

Great moments in projection:

Rep. Maxine Waters Jokes About Threatening Trump Supporters ‘All The Time.’

Maxine Waters: ‘Americans should be out in the streets screaming’ for Trump’s head.

Democrat Maxine Waters Makes Public Call For Harassment & Violence Against Members of Trump Administration.

HMM. New Study Links Complex Jobs to Reduced Risk of Dementia. “The findings highlight the importance of cognitive stimulation during midlife for maintaining cognitive function in old age.”

It’s also possible, of course, that people with higher cognitive function take these jobs to begin with, giving them more margin for decline in their old age.

DIAGNOSING AORTIC ANEURYSM RISK with a thumb test.

THE RIGHT ONE:

#JOURNALISM: A friend from Cambridge writes: “The reporting on the MIT protesters is fascinating. Boston Globe claims hundreds of attendees and dozens of counter protesters. I was there at the time…maybe 40 people and a speaker calling out, ‘where’s the energy??'”

UPDATE: MIT President Says MIT Is Finally Shutting Down Anti-Israel Encampment.

OPEN CARRY: You decide.

COLORADO: Mountain lion hunting ban working its way towards Colorado’s 2024 ballot.

If it makes the ballot and passes, Initiative #91 would bar what the measure refers to as the “trophy hunting” of mountain lions—along with bobcats or lynx–in Colorado. The measure has been approved for circulation and the group “Cats Aren’t Trophies” had already raised nearly $220,000 by the Jan. 16 campaign finance filing date. The next filing is due May 6. The group also registered with the Secretary of Sate as a licensed petition entity on April 11, meaning they can pay people directly for signature gathering. Proponents must gather more than 126,000 valid signatures from registered voters by August to make the ballot.

Trophy hunting is generally considered as the hunting of wild animals just for sport and not for food, but Initiative 91 broadly defines the practice as the “intentional killing, wounding, pursing or entrapping of a mountain lion, bobcat or lynx.”

Trophy hunting is banned in most places in the US unless there is a temporary need to balance out a population. In Colorado, the hunting of mountain lions (as well as bobcats and lynx), which runs yearly from November to March (with additional hunting in April if needed) is already prohibited unless the meat of the animal is harvested for consumption.

If it makes the ballot, I suspect it will pass.

WOW: CRIPSR gene editing leads to improvements in vision for people with inherited blindness, clinical trial shows. “While more research is needed to determine who may benefit most, we consider the early results promising. To hear from several participants how thrilled they were that they could finally see the food on their plates –that is a big deal. These were individuals who could not read any lines on an eye chart and who had no treatment options, which is the unfortunate reality for most people with inherited retinal disorders.”