AT AMAZON, Freeze-Dried Foods from Augason Farms.
Archive for 2024
July 25, 2024
THE PROBLEM WITH POLICING TODAY ISN’T A LACK OF TECHNOLOGY: Ready or not, here come the police drones: Police departments from New York to Arizona are embracing problematic drone surveillance programs.
While Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate, he has governed as one of the most progressive presidents in modern American history. In 2020, Biden sought to distance himself from self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders; after Biden as president pursued massive stimulus and spending programs, Sanders became one of his biggest supporters.
Now that Biden has announced that he will not pursue reelection, the Democratic nomination will likely fall to his vice president, Kamala Harris. While Harris may campaign as a moderate, analysis of her economic record does not support that label.
In her time in the Senate, Harris positioned herself on the far left of a Democratic Party already moving sharply to the left. According to DW-NOMINATE, a measure that compares the votes of senators and representatives and ranks members from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative) Harris was the second-most liberal member of the Senate when she served from 2017 to 2021, behind only Elizabeth Warren. In fact, her overall voting record is more liberal than that of Bernie Sanders. Though it is difficult to compare members across time, Harris’s score (-0.709), which is based largely on economic votes, ranks among the more left-wing in American history.
Harris’s senatorial record differs starkly from that of her boss. While Biden shifted left on entering the White House, he remained a moderate across his nearly four-decade Senate career. His approximate -0.3 DW-NOMINATE score put him close to the middle of his party throughout his time in the upper chamber.
When Harris was in the Senate, she introduced and co-sponsored bills that would have dramatically shifted U.S. policy leftward. In 2019, she unveiled a $10 trillion plan to reduce greenhouse gases to zero by 2045—five years faster than proposed in the uber-progressive Green New Deal. Harris also advocated for an end to fracking, a measure that, had it taken effect, would have stopped about two-thirds of all oil production in the United States.
Why, it’s almost as if she was “the single most left-wing senator” or something, and that’s saying something — at least until it isn’t: Webpage that rated Kamala Harris the ‘most liberal’ senator in 2019 suddenly disappears.
And the perfect candidate for her veep is lobbying hard for the job! Buttigieg Slams Vance for ‘Childless’ Comments.
Evergreen:
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The Fix Is in (Again): Dems Just Can’t Help Cheating. “The DNC seems to have timed the announcement to roughly coincide with Biden’s Oval Office address last night — a midweek tactical equivalent of the infamous Friday Night News Dump.”
I FEEL LIKE MODELS HAVE BEEN DISAPPOINTING IN GENERAL: Nationwide flood models poorly reflect risks to households and properties, study finds.
HE’S RIGHT:
The Noble People have said that they will conquer the West through three means:
1) Through the womb of their women
2) Through Hijra (immigration)
3) By using your miserable freedoms against youThey have f**king told you this for decades and you sit idly and yawn in apathy.… https://t.co/ORseIbDE84
— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) July 25, 2024
GET IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME: Ford keeps having to repair customers’ new cars and trucks. Its profit is plunging and its stock tumbled. “The company did not break out how much extra money it set aside to cover warranty expenses, but said ‘most’ of the $1.2 billion drop in operating income in the quarter came from that increased expense.”
FAIR ENOUGH. WHEN DOES SHE START? Ocasio-Cortez to Musk: ‘Sometimes being quiet’ is ‘good for you.’
Why does so much advice from the left boil down to “shut up?”
STILL A FEW BUGS IN THE SYSTEM: We made a cat drink a beer with Runway’s AI video generator, and it sprouted hands.
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S PALACE GUARD: Washington Post Smears Conservatives For Asking Questions About Timing Of Biden’s Exit.
[The WaPo’s Sarah Ellison gave Federalist CEO Sean Davis] less than an hour to respond to her demands for comment before her article, written in conjunction with [Mariana] Alfaro, went live.
When Davis did respond a few hours after Ellison’s initial comment request, he noted that she and the paper she represents “spread false and dangerous conspiracy theories” on social media and in the publication’s pages about targets of political violence, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Trump.
“Do you feel personally responsible at all for the violence directed at Kavanaugh given your participation in spreading those conspiracy theories?” Davis queried. “Are you concerned that your paper’s false reporting and dissemination of conspiracy theories has encouraged individuals to inflict violence on Trump or his supporters?”
Davis also pointed out that Alfaro “sent me a nearly identical e-mail earlier this week” but “did not acknowledge my response to her.”
“I can’t imagine it’s the policy of your paper to ignore responses you receive only to send new reporters to ask the same question over and over again until you get a quote you can slice and dice to smear your political enemies,” Davis concluded.
Read the whole thing.
THE COUNTRY IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Great. The FBI Is Run by a Conspiracy Theorist.
THAT’S NOT SO GOOD: More Americans with diabetes are using marijuana.
CYBER THREATS: North Korean hacker got hired by US security vendor, immediately loaded malware. “KnowBe4 said it was looking for a software engineer for its internal IT AI team. The firm hired a person who, it turns out, was from North Korea and was ‘using a valid but stolen US-based identity’ and a photo that was “enhanced” by artificial intelligence. There is now an active FBI investigation amid suspicion that the worker is what KnowBe4’s blog post called ‘an Insider Threat/Nation State Actor.'”
SHOW ME A GOVERNMENT THAT’S AFRAID OF THE TRUTH, SILENCING AND WAGING LAWFARE AGAINST ITS POLITICAL OPPONENTS, AND I’LL SHOW YOU A TYRANNY THAT NEEDS TO BE OVERTHROWN:
My boss, Jimmy Lai is 76, diabetic, kept in solitary confinement, & no communication with outside world.
The HK government just delayed Mr. Lai’s testimony until Nov. 20th.
It’s not just Lai’s newspaper they didn’t want you to read, it’s Jimmy Lai they don’t want you to hear. https://t.co/GwnxMX8XO7
— Mark Simon (@MarkSimonHK) July 25, 2024
ROSIE RETURNS:
neets who thought they had freedom with their gig economy life are in shambles right now, and their best option is go build submarines pic.twitter.com/Fy0QBudPNI
— Aaron Slodov (@aphysicist) July 23, 2024
Love the ad, love the return to the trades, love the Rosie allusion, but . . . like the recruiting ads suddenly switching to white guys jumping out of planes, this makes me feel like we’re getting ready for a war.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Corpse-in-Chief Has Got to Go. “The best case is that Biden’s brain is as impaired as we thought but that maybe his physical condition hasn’t declined as rapidly as it appears.”
NOAH ROTHMAN: The Real Reason Harris’s Time as ‘Border Czar’ Is a Political Vulnerability.
Harris’s record is a story both of incompetence and of how little faith her own allies have in her political acumen and capabilities as an executive.
Since Joe Biden announced his intention to withdraw from American public life at the end of his term, the Trump campaign and its Republican allies have focused on their new opponent’s subpar performance handling border security. The GOP’s strategy makes sense. For all the media’s efforts to revise or even erase history, Harris was, in function if not title, the Biden administration’s “border czar.” And yet, the Republican Party’s approach to this messaging campaign has so far been to frame Harris as a fully empowered functionary who nevertheless bungled her charge. In reality, the Biden administration set Harris up to fail, as a way of providing the president cover for his own dismal mishandling of the border.
Well, it wasn’t a “mishandling” from the administration’s point of view, and as Jim Geraghty speculated in June of 2021, Biden dumped so many tasks on Harris as “a passive-aggressive form of revenge for her shivving him in that first Democratic presidential-primary debate.”
One of those tasks being, as the media dubbed her that year, “Biden’s ‘Point Person on Immigration:’”
UPDATE: Huge: Kamala Harris Receives Bipartisan Condemnation For Her Handling of the Border. “In a stunning move on Thursday, the House of Representatives strongly condemned ‘the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border’ in a bipartisan vote. All Republicans supported the resolution, as did six Democrats: Reps. Yadira Caraveo (D-Colo.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Donald Davis (D-N.C.), Jared Golden (D-Maine), Mary Peltola (D-Alaska), and Mari Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.).”
COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP:
A Liberty Bell monument (not the original) was among the federal monuments attacked and vandalized with pro-Hamas messages at the leftist “Day of Rage” yesterday in D.C. pic.twitter.com/b4wLc2D1bh
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) July 25, 2024
The lack of consequences tells you everything you need to know about who is actually running things.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Keurig K-Iced Single Serve Coffee Maker – Brews Hot and Cold. #CommissionEarned
IT’LL NEVER HAPPEN: 10 Questions We Dare the Media to Ask Kamala Harris.
CHANGE? The ‘Iron Lady’ of Venezuela Threatens to Unseat Its Autocrat.
Ms. Machado, 56, the newest leader of Venezuela’s opposition, has struck fear into the hearts of the country’s ruling party. In a matter of months, she has emerged from the political sidelines to build a powerful social movement capable of bringing thousands of people to the streets — and perhaps millions to the ballot box.
She is not the one running for president, but she is the driving force behind the main opposition candidate, a little-known diplomat named Edmundo González.
The mobilization Ms. Machado has catalyzed follows years of political apathy in Venezuela, where the government of President Nicolás Maduro has crushed protests and arrested dissidents, helping to spur an enormous exodus from the country.
An effort backed by the Trump administration to install a young legislator named Juan Guaidó as interim president failed, and last year Mr. Guaidó fled to the United States.
Now, Ms. Machado, a conservative former member of the national assembly once rejected by her own colleagues, has not only corralled Venezuela’s fractious opposition behind her, but has also captivated a broad swath of the electorate with a promise for sweeping government change.
Maduro won’t go quietly, that much is certain.
ONLY IF THEY CAN SUE FOR MALPRACTICE: NYU law school project seeks to obtain rights for non-living entities: trees, rocks, and nature itself.
HMM: Elon Musk pushes back on reports that he’s donating $45M a month to super PAC backing Trump. “‘What’s been reported in the media is simply not true,’ Musk said in an interview with conservative commentator Jordan Peterson. ‘I am not donating $45 million a month to Trump.'”
The money would be nice but don’t be surprised the media got it wrong yet again.