DOUBLE-SECRET JIGGERY POKERY: DOJ Keeps Plan Secret for Biden’s Election Executive Order. “The Biden Justice Department continues to claim presidential privilege to block release of its strategic plan to turn out the vote, although at least two other federal agencies have made their plans public. In defending a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, the Justice Department is keeping under wraps its plans to implement President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order, under which most federal agencies are required to develop a strategic plan for increasing voter participation in elections.”
Archive for 2024
March 16, 2024
BEHOLD THE POWER OF RACISM! (Is there anything it can’t do?): The National Electrical Grid is teetering on collapse. The shift away from full-time available power (like fossil fuels, LNG, etc.) to so-called “green” sources has deeply impacted reliability.
Hey, guess what? Solar farms don’t work at night! Who knew?
Also, as more whale-killing off-shore wind farms are planned, the Biden administration forgot to plan for the thousands of miles of transmission lines that will be needed. And in a perfect example of leftist autophagy, there is considerable opposition from enviro-groups who will tie up the construction of wind farms and transmission lines in court for decades. Snail darters and sacred tribal land, you know.
But Representative Cori Bush (D-Crazyland) has it all figured out. It’s not the science, cost or technology that puts our energy grid at risk: it’s racism!
JustTheNews reporting that Bush said recently that:
“We also cannot ignore the actions of domestic extremists, including white nationalists and white supremacist who have violently attacked electrical grids, to stoke chaos and fear,” Bush said. She did not cite any examples of white nationalists being accused, let alone held responsible, for attacks on the grid […] Bush pointed to two incidents, including a 2022 attack on two substations that left 45,000 people without power, resulting in the death of a woman who relied on an oxygen tank. That case has resulted in no arrests, and so the identities, races, and motives of the person or persons who carried out the attack are still unknown.“ (Emphasis added).
But wait, there’s more! Bush continued: “She also claimed that impacts of increasing extreme weather from climate change was another factor impacting the nation’s grid reliability.”
White supremacists combined with “climate change.” Wow! That’s better than Jews with weather machines and space lasers. Although that’s probably next…
DISPATCHES FROM FUN CITY THE ‘PORT-AU-PRINCE OF AMERICA!’ ‘Who The F*** Has Ever Said That?’ Eric Adams Calls NYC ‘Port-Au-Prince Of America:’
What is Adams trying to say about deteriorating conditions in Manhattan post-Giuliani and Bloomberg?
● Haiti’s crime rate more than doubles in a year.
—CNN, April 26, 2023.
● Gangs tighten grip as Haiti spirals to collapse.
—The BBC, Thursday.
● Why did the internet suddenly become convinced Haiti is filled with cannibal gangs?
—The Daily Dot, Wednesday.
How bad is it in Manhattan these days?! Snake Plisskin, call your office!
DEAL OF THE DAY: Apple AirPods (2nd Generation) Wireless Ear Buds. #CommissionEarned
I AM VINDICATED: Three years ago, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on maternal mortality that claimed, among other absurdities, that maternal mortality rates had worsened in the United States over the last 30 years, quoting with approval a witness who said the rates were up a whopping 50% in just a generation (as well as other alarming, but obviously incorrect statistics).
I wrote a dissent and pointed out that, in reality, this so-called “increase” was almost certainly an artifact of a significant change in the way deaths were classified. This change had been phased in over a number of years. It required the deaths of women who had been recently pregnant to be looked at more closely to see if the pregnancy might have been a contributing factor.
A new study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology shows that I was right. It was obvious. But obvious things that don’t fit the Commission’s narrative get ignored.
The more interesting (and true!) story here is how maternal deaths are down 99% since about 1900. Thanks go to Alexander Fleming (penicillin), Vincent du Vigneaud (oxytocin), researchers at Merck & Co. (methyldopa), and other physicians and researchers who have furthered our knowledge over the course of almost 125 years. May that progress ever continue.
Woke stuff is mostly popular with neurotic white people and the grifters who feed off of them.
Flashback: Dems are losing the multiracial working class on basic lifestyle issues.
MARK HEMINGWAY: 2024 Is Shaping Up To Be The ‘We Were Right About Everything’ Election.
Obviously, making this broad observation is not necessarily an endorsement of Trump or the GOP, and there are probably some finer policy points where you can plausibly disagree. But on just about every issue that has dominated the public discourse post-Trump, the pro-Democrat establishment either staked out a fringe position or was proven wrong by subsequent events. It’s hard to even know where to begin.
On Covid, it’s abundantly clear that red states that refused mass shutdowns and excessive regulations didn’t see any worse health outcomes — and the damage from the shutdowns and Covid mandates is still lasting. The idea that our strained health care system was laying off people for refusing to take a “vaccine” that we now know doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus has been a disaster, to say nothing of our strained military, in the middle of a massive recruiting crisis, forcibly ejecting thousands over vaccine mandates.
Then there’s the fact that Covid killed off 200,000 businesses in just the first year. How many businesses could have been saved with more reasonable Covid regulations? Then there was the distrust sewn with the public through all of the coronavirus propaganda and social media censorship. Your posts could be banned from Facebook for even speculating that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an outcome that the government now acknowledges is more likely than not.
The worst outcome, however, might have been the Biden administration irresponsibly outsourcing its Covid policy on schools to the teachers unions, who fought to keep schools closed for more than a year in some places, followed by an insistence on ineffective and difficult-to-enforce mask mandates on children. Even left-wing publications now openly acknowledge Covid school closures were unnecessary and disastrous for America’s kids, but by the time they found the courage to say what was abundantly obvious to the rest of us, the damage was done.
The bottom line is that the Covid response fundamentally eroded trust between citizens and the government like no other issue in generations, and Democrat lawmakers were pretty clearly on, as they like to say, “the wrong side of history.”
Of course, the school closures issue was just emblematic of the long-running decline of American education, which is almost wholly a result of teachers unions. Their enormous donations to Democrats effectively serve as protection money, and for decades, this unholy alliance effectively made even the most basic education reforms impossible.
Post-Covid, however, Americans who were forced to see what their kids were learning via remote schooling have largely woken up to the fact that education has been politicized beyond repair. In just the last three years, West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana have all passed school-choice legislation, and more states such as Texas are likely to enact it soon. The good news is homeschooling is skyrocketing in popularity, and private and religious schools are popping up everywhere.
Read the whole thing, including Hemingway’s conclusion that “Abortion is almost the sole issue where things are complicated for the right, and we probably shouldn’t underestimate the Republican Party’s ability to lose winnable elections,” so don’t get cocky, to coin an Insta-phrase. On the other hand, if he’s looking for a campaign theme, perhaps Trump should borrow from Kingsley Amis’ suggestion that Robert Conquest’s history of the Soviet Union deserved to be retitled, “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”
(Though he’d have to be awfully sotto voce about his role in the Covid lockdowns and then freaking out over red states opening up first, of course.)
And on the gripping hand, Jim Treacher writes: “If you’re stressed out about the election, now that it’s too late for either party* to pick an acceptable candidate, you just need to relax. My friend Jarvis has the right idea:”
As Treacher concludes, “It’s a win/win. No matter what happens, I will be swimming in schadenfreude. So I got that goin’ for me.”
*Bob Torricelli smiles.
FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”
The federal government issued new guidelines Monday for Americans on how to combat the coronavirus pandemic, titled “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” The 15 days are seen as a trial period for the new recommendations and add to previous guidance about practicing good hygiene, staying home if sick and following state and local authorities.
Fauci and Birx’s glee during the announcement is something to behold:
Remember when everybody had to stop going to school and start living inside their houses? Newscasters started broadcasting from home and everything? All that weird stuff?
And, oh yeah, they broke the economy like snapping a dry twig over their knee.
These people. https://t.co/d9CsJ55TsD
— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) March 17, 2023
MATT TAIBBI: Why the TikTok Ban is So Dangerous: Did they tell you the part about giving the president sweeping new powers?
The unfortunate situation we’re in is that I think that TikTok is a dangerous information weapon from a hostile power, but I trust our own rulers only slightly more than the CCP.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The New Campus Fanaticism: Exclusion, Scapegoating, and Extremism are Taking Over. “A striking characteristic of this wave of protests: Those most affected by them are other students and faculty on campus, who often seem to be their intended targets. . . . Campuses have a fanaticism problem. Facing it effectively requires leaders to recognize that similar forces are at work today as during earlier episodes of violent activism. A policy of complacency and appeasement has not diminished radicals’ appetite for confrontation or their desire to rewrite the rules.”
Appeasement never does.
THE MEASURE OF A MIND: The challenge here is that the mind can’t be measured, at least physically, which leads to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” Starting today on HillFaith, Inspiring Philosophy’s Michael Jones does the deep dive into this problem in part one of a five-part video series (each part is 15 to 25 minutes long and well worth the time invested).
I’ve never done this here on Instapundit before but the origin and nature of the human mind and consciousness is at the root of the most fundamental issues that separate Left and Right. Additionally, Jones gives due credit to materialists and non-materialists alike in his presentation, and I am confident there are legions of both with valuable insights to share here in the comments. Keep it spirited and civil, please.
March 15, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.
FASTER, PLEASE: Get ready: SpaceX’s Starships are coming. We could see a half-dozen flights of the giant silver rocket this year alone. “Starship’s first crewed moon landing for NASA is scheduled to take place in September 2026, on the agency’s Artemis 3 mission. Getting Starship up and running in time to meet that deadline will require a lot of work — and SpaceX has rolled up its sleeves. The company has already built four more Starships at its Starbase facility in South Texas, which hosted today’s launch.”
WERE THEY ANALYZING JOE BIDEN SPEECHES FROM A DECADE AGO? Scientists Identify Speech Trait That Foreshadows Cognitive Decline.
HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT: Warners Chief Diversity Officer: We’ll Make Dissenters to DEI Miserable Enough to Leave. “He doesn’t specify that he wants white men to self-deport, but, come on, they’re the people getting screwed by DEI, so they’re the ones most likely to oppose it.”
His name is Asif Sadiq and he seems like a lawsuit ready to happen. Employers’ Talking “About Race—Any Race—With a Constant Drumbeat of Essentialist, Deterministic, and Negative Language” Risks Racial Harassment Liability.
BE PREPARED: Survival Gear and Equipment 12 in 1. #CommissionEarned
BIG BROTHER TARGETS GUN OWNERS: House Committee Investigates Government’s Spying on Those Who Exercise Second Amendment Rights.
FOR BETTER OR WORSE: Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Rising office vacancies reflect the new reality.
BREAKING: McAfee Splits the Fani Baby? “Profiles in Courage, it ain’t,” Ed Morrissey writes:
Curtis Houck sums it up nicely:
So, if I have this right, Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee decided to pull a James Comey, Robert Mueller, and Robert Hur:
Write a ruling saying Fani Willis and Nathan Wade are guilty as hell, have no ethics, and aren't good role models….BUT Fani can stay
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 15, 2024
The problem with splitting the baby is that the baby dies. That seems to be what happened here in McAfee’s attempt to be Solomonic. If he wanted Fani Willis to remain in charge of the case, he needed to exonerate her from all of these issues. Instead, he admitted what everyone could see on live television, and then refused to act on it.
That sets up an appeal, of course, based on the factual record that McAfee established in this order. And one has to wonder whether that is McAfee’s intent — to punt this to the state appellate court rather than risk the ire of Fulton County voters by disqualifying Willis. Declare her guilty, fail to act, and let the next set of judges with more political insulation deal with the issue themselves. Or maybe even more quickly, letting the Georgia State Bar and the Attorney General deal with the “odor of mendacity” and pre-empt the whole issue by suspending Willis’ law license.
Like I said … Profiles in Courage this ain’t.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade Withdraws from Trump Case in Response to Judge’s Ultimatum.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. After Thursday’s flight, Starship is already the most revolutionary rocket ever built.
The moment of true amazement came about 45 minutes into the flight, as Starship descended an altitude of 100 km and began entering a thicker atmosphere. For a couple of minutes, we were treated to unprecedented views of atmospheric heating acting on a spacecraft. It’s one thing to know about the perils of plasma and compression as a spacecraft falls back to Earth at 27,000 km/hour into thickening air. It’s another thing to see it.
Let’s step back for just a moment to realize how these unprecedented views were possible.
Starlink terminals on the ship were sending signals to satellites in low-Earth orbit, which then sent them back to Earth. This is not a new idea. For the last 40 years, NASA has used a small constellation of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites to communicate with spacecraft, beginning with the Space Shuttle. Starship was able to communicate with these satellites upon its reentry, but it was only at a low data rate, and it dropped out as the plasma thickened. The Starlink connection remained longer and is what enabled the stunning video of reentry.
Impressive.
WHEN BUREAUCRATS STRIKE: After third successful test flight, FAA grounds Starship for “mishap” investigation. Iterative testing is not a mishap. “Starship will remain grounded until the FAA concludes its investigation and awards a fresh launch license. . . . The regulator said it would be involved in every step of the process. It will need to approve SpaceX’s final report, including any corrective actions the company intends to take, before a license can be reissued.”