Archive for 2025

January 27, 2025

THE COUNTRY WAS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS:

Full text:

So, Biden’s staff didn’t double check the ACLU’s list of “nonviolent drug offenders” and gave clemency to a drug lord in Connecticut who murdered an 8 year old boy and his mother to stop them from testifying.

CT Sen. Blumenthal: “someone dropped the ball… This was a really vicious murder that changed our laws.”

Do you get it now, Sen. Blumenthal? Probably not. Perhaps this from Mary Katharine Ham will help: “The president was non-functional and didn’t know what he was signing, and I’m trying to figure out what is a larger scandal than this vacant presidency by committee that went on for years.”

The larger scandal is the politicians like Blumenthal and the legacy media that helped enable the Biden cabal.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 27th, 2025

DAVID THOMPSON: Our Betters Issue Threats.

Behold the latest milestone in fearless resistance:

Because vandalising the cars of random strangers is progressive piety now, the very measure of heroism. Oh, and note the implied conflation of Mexican restaurant and US citizens of Mexican ancestry and illegal, criminal migrant.

I believe there’s a word for that kind of thing.

But it’s all moot anyhow, since Trump’s brief foray into controlled borders is now at an end: Selena Gomez breaks down crying in emotional video while speaking about Trump’s deportation policy.

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 27th, 2025

VIDEO: How Bulletproof Is The Cybertruck? “Spoilers: It seems pretty bulletproof to handgun ammo up the .45 ACP, but once he stepped up to the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle (‘the Cybertruck’s only known natural predator’) and the bigger rifle rounds (including 5.5.6 NATO and even, for grins, a .50 BMG round out of his very own AK-50), it was bulletproof no more.”

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 27th, 2025

NEW FRONTIERS IN FAMILY PLANNING: Biden Admin Quietly Spent $15 Mil To Distribute ‘Contraceptives and Condoms’ in Afghanistan—and Said Doing So Would Take ‘Some Coordination’ With Taliban.

The Biden administration quietly awarded $15 million in taxpayer funds to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to help distribute “oral contraceptives and condoms,” a non-public congressional funding notice reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon shows. In doing so, the administration acknowledged that “some coordination” with the Taliban would be “necessary for programmatic purposes.”

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) earmarked the cash infusion, which has not been previously reported, last July. It transmitted the funds to Afghanistan in August, according to the funding notice and congressional sources familiar with the matter.

The $15 million USAID and its partner groups spent to “procure contraceptives,” including “oral contraceptives and condoms” in the Middle Eastern nation was part of a $100 million package meant to support “basic rights and freedoms” and empower “women and girls” living under Taliban rule. The terrorist organization, the USAID funding notice states, does not allow “young women and girls” to go to school or work in most professional fields.

Well, that’s one way to funnel cash to the Taliban. Couldn’t they just drop off pallets full of cash in a C-130 like the old days?

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 27th, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-OWNS:

A few propositions on the present moment:

  • Someday we’ll look back on this period as we do 1950, with some demagogue saying, “I have in my hand a list of 57 genders and pronouns. . .” (With the due caveat that the first guy was more right than wrong. . .)
  • What prompted this was an amazing self-own by Bruce Bartlett, a once-sound supply-side economist [who served in both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations — Ed] who succumbed somehow to the precursor of Trump Derangement Syndrome—in his case, Bush Derangement Syndrome back in the aughts:

Answer: It isn’t different. Communists in both cases. (Though in fact a lot of the Communists in the federal government by 1950 had been quietly purged by the Truman Administration before Joe McCarthy got on to the issue. Truman had to cover up the extent of Communist penetration of the federal government because it would have been damaging to the Democratic Party in the 1948 election.)

So what’s the problem?

I’d ask if Trump is really going to go full Tailgunner Joe and have Woody Allen cancelled, but his fellow leftists already did that to him years ago.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 27th, 2025

MAHER WILL NEVER TAKE THE RED PILL BUT AT LEAST HE LISTENS TO OTHER VIEWPOINTS:

Exit quote: “The American people said, ‘We’ll take the supposed felon over the woman who is telling us men can get pregnant.'”

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 27th, 2025

I’D LIKE TO REPORT A MURDER: JD Vance Just Killed Margaret Brennan on Live TV.

Granted, I wouldn’t want to go up against Vance in a debate, so getting spanked by Vance is not prima facia evidence that you are low IQ, but Brennan is supposedly the best that the Pravda CBS has to offer, and she comes off looking like an angry idiot. If I were her I would call in sick any time Vance is scheduled to come on her show.

Brennan had many embarrassing moments on yesterday’s show, but by far the worst was her attempt to go for the jugular in the issue of “refugees” Biden has let into the United States. Brennan is passionate about the issue of illegal immigration, and thinks she holds the moral high ground on the issue.

As you can see, the veil of “impartiality” has been lifted. She doesn’t even try to look anything but hostile. Instead she looks angry and ignorant.

You can imagine Ms. Brennan having a nice discussion with Alejandro Mayorkas about genius Joe Biden personally smelling the hair of migrant children out of compassion while discussing the need for cheaper lawn care workers during the previous administration, and she clearly resents Vance’s belief that the American government should be promoting the interest of the plebs born here.

Related: Samuel P. Huntington in November of 2000: “A Nation of Immigrants:” Only a Partial Truth.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth. We have all heard people say, again and again, that all Americans, except possibly the Indians, are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. My colleague at Harvard, Oscar Handlin, began his classic book, The Uprooted, by saying, “the immigrants were American history.” That’s overstating it. Yes, immigrants and immigration have been an important part of the American history. But they are not all American history. There are at least three critical points that need to be made in this connection.

The first is a basic distinction between immigrants and settlers. Immigrants are people who leave one country, one society, and move to another society. But there has to be a recipient society to which the immigrants move. In our case, the recipient society was created by the settlers who came here in the 17th and 18th centuries. They came in groups to create new societies up and down the Atlantic seaboard. They weren’t immigrating to some existing society; indeed, they often did whatever they could do to destroy whatever existed here in the way of Indian society. They were establishing new societies, in some cases for commercial reasons, in more cases for religious reasons. They had an image of what they wanted to create and they came and formed a settlement to try to realize their image. They also had to come together and agree as to how they were going to define their community. The archetypal case of this was the Mayflower Compact.

A fundamental difference thus exists between settlers and immigrants. With immigrants the process of moving is to a much greater extent a personal process involving individuals and families, whereas with settlers there is a much more collective process of a group of people moving and saying, “we’re unhappy where we are for one reason or another, and we want to move elsewhere and form our own society.” The society that the settlers created on the Eastern seaboard was shaped in terms of their values and cultures, among which there were significant differences, as David Hackett Fisher emphasized in his superb book, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. But there are also tremendous similarities, and they basically created a society defined by what I think can be described succinctly as an Anglo-Protestant culture.

It was this society and culture that among other things including economic opportunities here and repression in Europe attracted subsequent generations of immigrants to this country. Some 55 million people left Europe in the century or so from the beginning of the 19th century until the 1920s, with 34 million of them coming to America. They came in considerable measure because they were attracted by what they saw here and by what the settlers created.

As Glenn quoted from Ann Althouse earlier today: “Brennan seemed keyed up from the start. Her desire to get Vance was ludicrously obvious. Meanwhile, Vance was perfectly even-tempered and articulate, prepared for everything she had hoped to flummox him with. Brennan’s style of constant interruption failed to throw him off. It backfired, making him look steady and rational and her look afraid of what he might have to say.”

To get a sense of how well Vance did, we leave you with a photo montage of his interlocutor:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 27th, 2025

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Trump Delivers Hope to Western North Carolina. “Five days of Donald Trump gets more done than four months of the cabal that illegally acted in Joe Biden’s name — if the Army Corps of Engineers’ sudden appearance in devastated western North Carolina is anything to go by.”

Posted at 12:11 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 27th, 2025

CHANGE:

Posted at 11:49 am by Glenn Reynolds on Jan 27th, 2025

DECOUPLING: White House in talks to have Oracle and U.S. investors take over TikTok.

Under the deal now being negotiated by the White House, TikTok’s China-based owner ByteDance would retain a minority stake in the company, but the app’s algorithm, data collection and software updates will be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok’s web infrastructure.

That would effectively mean American investors would own a majority stake in TikTok, but the terms of the deal could change and are still being hammered out.

“The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and provide oversight with what is going on with TikTok,” said the person directly involved in the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deliberations. “ByteDance wouldn’t completely go away, but it would minimize Chinese ownership.”

Developing…

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green on Jan 27th, 2025

‘MURICA:

Sure, it’s a private jet, and, sure, it’s staged. But the vibe is real — and that kind of energy does tend to go viral.

Let’s see if Gulf of America catches on.

Posted at 11:32 am by Stephen Green on Jan 27th, 2025
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