Archive for 2024

November 28, 2024

November 27, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Currently marinating two legs of lamb and a turkey, as per usual.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 27th, 2024

AN INCREASINGLY RELEVANT QUESTION, ALAS:

The England we had a special relationship with no longer exists.

Posted at 6:10 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 27th, 2024

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 27th, 2024

WHEN DO THE LEFT BREAK OUT THE E-METERS AND CHECK FOR THETANS? The Left Is Demanding That People Disconnect From Their Suppressive Person (SP) Family Members Again, So You Know This Must Be the Holiday Season.

It’s a standard cult move to demand that people separate from their families. Or from anyone else who might question cult doctrine.

The headline refers specifically to Scientology’s terminology for disowning family members and “Suppressive Persons,” meaning people who try to impede you from growing in the “church.”

That is, a suppressive person is anyone who tells you you’re in a cult. The cult demands you separate from — “disconnect” from, in Scientology lingo — anyone who points out that the cult you’re in is acting a lot like a cult.

Which brings us to this lovely letter from a New York Times reader, written to the Times’ “expert” on ethics.

The basic question: My mother refuses to say who she voted for. My wife and her sister demand I disown my own mother, because the fact that she even leaves open the possibility that I voted for Trump means that she’s an SP. Should I disconnect from her?

His own mother.

His own mother.

This all sounds rather weird, to borrow a word popular during the recent presidential election.

UPDATE: 10 Things Libs Can Still Be Thankful For.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 27th, 2024

JOHN PODHORETZ: Swiss Cheese, the Sot, and the Ceasefire.

Knowing as he does that in two months he will not be facing a senile president and that president’s intellectually deficient secretary of state, his oft-AWOL secretary of defense, his neurasthenic national security adviser, his Hawaii-based vice-drunkident, and his increasingly anti-Israel party, Netanyahu decided to play the long game. He also may find it useful to have the time to regroup and figure out what that long game should be. But there is great risk here. Israel has momentum and is giving that up. But in the end, the battle here isn’t against Hezbollah anyway. It’s against Iran. And the incoming administration gives every indication that, unlike the present feckless crew, it sees Iran clearly as an enemy. The nominee for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, declared that it was time to make America great again…and to make Iran broke again. And he isn’t even one of the leading foreign policy voices. The others—Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth—are even tougher.

And who knows what the nation that came up with the pager attack has up its sleeve? What Joe Biden has done is unspeakable, if he can even be said to have done it. What Netanyahu and his government have done is tactical and strategic. They live to fight another day.

“Now It Makes Sense,” Noah Rothman writes:

Unless you were only rooting for Joe Biden to secure something he could plausibly call a cease-fire so he might burnish an otherwise historically klutzy legacy, there is little here to celebrate. Biden and his allies spent much of this administration sifting through the wreckage his policies produced for something resembling a victory they could tout for the cameras. The goal was only ever to win the news cycle, even at the expense of more salient objectives. Posterity will take a longer view of Biden’s dismal presidency.

Funny, that was Obama’s goal, as well. I hope he’s taking it in stride as his third term concludes so ignominiously.

Posted at 5:16 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 27th, 2024

A BIG WIN FOR SCIENCE: From “Fringe” to Mainstream. Trump’s nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to head NIH is a major victory for science and academic freedom — —and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, as I explain in City Journal. Elite universities annually receive more than $500 million apiece from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, which is one reason that so many academics were afraid to challenge Anthony’s Fauci’s version of “The Science” — they needed his agency’s money.

Under Biden, the NIH used its financial leverage to promote critical-race research and the expansion of DEI bureaucracies. Those priorities are about to change. Assuming the Senate confirms Bhattacharya, one of the few scientists who did challenge Covid orthodoxy, he can use that leverage to promote genuine scientific debate on campus.

Posted at 5:05 pm by John Tierney on Nov 27th, 2024

PRIORITIES:

Seems like an excellent bargain.

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 27th, 2024

JIM GERAGHTY: Harris Campaign Staffers Offer Their Excuses.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation — “assertion” might be a better term — is Plouffe revealing, “Even post-debate, we had ourselves down in the battleground states . . . I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”

From this, some right-of-center folks are arguing that all the public polling — which mostly showed a close race in those swing states, so not wildly far from the final results — was nonsense and an effort to depress Republican turnout. I would just point out that the narrative that Harris was always trailing, and that internal polling always had her behind even during her best news cycles is awfully convenient for anyone who wants to argue the race was always unwinnable. Moments later, Plouffe says, “In the end, it was a jump-ball race. We needed some things to break our way.”

As our Alex Welz reports, O’Malley Dillon disputed the criticism that Harris was avoiding interviews. “Real people heard in some way that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump that I think that was a problem. And then, on top of that, we would do an interview, and . . . the questions were small and process-y.”

This is an absurd reimagining of quite recent history. You and I were there. Mary Katharine Ham looked up the dates: Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris on July 21, and her first interview was with Dana Bash on Aug 29. That’s about six weeks of no interviews!

The second priority of these staffers and anyone else in the current leadership of the Democratic Party is to persuade everyone — including future clients and bosses — that the race was winnable, but Harris herself couldn’t win it.

I suspect that is why the Twitter/X account of the Democratic National Committee released a 30-second snippet of Kamala Harris’s full remarks that makes the vice president appear and sound thoroughly, embarrassingly inebriated. (Note that the full ten-minute video doesn’t make Harris look quite so bad.)

We’ve heard for years that she’s a difficult and dysfunctional boss and that many of her staffers hate her. Now, we have definitive proof. Note that the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee is Jaime Harrison and the current vice chair is . . . Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. That tweet is a primal scream of, “This defeat wasn’t my fault!”

(As I noted last night, besides the sense that you can almost smell the alcohol through the screen and the fear that if you lit a match around Harris she might burst into flame, her chosen message of “don’t let anyone take your power from you” is perhaps less than ideal as a theme during the peaceful transfer of power.)

Of course, there’s another reason the official Democratic Party house organ dropped that tweet last night:

But still there’s always 2028, maybe even 2032, right?! Could Kamala Harris be the next Richard Nixon? I think she’s got the Secret Honor aspect down cold:

UPDATE:

MORE:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 27th, 2024
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