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Archive for 2020
June 14, 2020
MANNING THE BARRICADES IS FOR THE PLEBES, NOT ELITE JOURNOS:
PUTIN LOOKS TERRIBLE IN THIS PICTURE, ALMOST LIKE HE’S STARTED TO DRINK LIKE A RUSSIAN: Putin says Russia dealing better with virus than US. But sure, whatever you say, Vladimir.
SEEN ON FACEBOOK:
OPEN THREAD: Everywhere I hear the sound of marching charging feet, boy.
STELTER LASHES OUT, TELLS TRUMP LAWYER HER KIDS/GRANDKIDS WILL BE ASHAMED OF HER:
STELTER: You understand that like someday you’re going to regret this, right?
[JENNA] ELLIS: — you for the last three and a half years —
STELTER: Someday you’re going to regret this when your kids –
ELLIS: No, I’m standing up for truth.
STELTER: — and grandkids look back at this and you use slurs and smears —
ELLIS: Oh, now you’re going to the personal attacks.
STELTER: — like fake news to hurt news outlets.
“Oh, now you’re going to the personal attacks. That’s when you know you lost the debate, Brian,” she shot back. “You’re not a journalist, Brian. You’re an activist. That’s the problem. You have an agenda, and your agenda is anti-Trump,” she accurately pointed out.
Unfazed, Stelter continued to talk down to her. “I think in 10 or 20 years if we just sit down and talk about this, you’ll recognize how damaging it was. How damaging it was to use terms like fake news, to attack journalists who are trying to do their jobs,” he lectured.
Well yes, Stelter is indeed a Democratic Party activist with a byline. But as the Daily Caller noted in 2016, “Dem Party Platform Calls For Prosecuting Global Warming Skeptics.” And this looks like awfully skeptical behavior from someone whose network concurrently had CNN scheduled a seven hour climate town hall for 2020 Dem candidates:
If Stelter believes his own rhetoric, someday he and kids will regret all of his binge travel.
ROGER KIMBALL: An Overdraft on White Guilt Will Lead to a Landslide in November.
But what if it doesn’t? Then expect: The coming political whiplash. “A Trump trouncing in 2020 would enable the GOP to coalesce around a less flamboyantly terrible model of leadership for the future of the party and the country. Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Marco Rubio, Tucker Carlson — any of these and possibly many other potential presidential candidates would be nicely set up by a Trump defeat for a strong run in 2024. But that scenario will not only be rendered more likely by Trump getting booted from the White House in November. It will also be advanced by the left overplaying its cards.”
IN 1919, THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES MOCKED HIM FOR THINKING A ROCKET COULD WORK IN OUTER SPACE: On This Day in Space! June 14, 1914: Robert Goddard snags patent for liquid-fueled rocket.
FRANCE IS ONCE AGAIN PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939: French Anti-Racism Protesters Scream ‘Dirty Jews’ At Counter-Protesters. “Ariel Sharon Was Right In 2004 When He Told Jews To Leave France.”
Putting aside his crazy noodle habit, this is the hero America needs pic.twitter.com/ciYtEM1LOe
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) June 14, 2020
As Kevin Williamson wrote in his 2019 book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, “The Bill of Rights ought to be titled ‘A List of Things You Idiots Don’t Get a Vote On, Because They Aren’t Up for Negotiation.’”
LOOK WHO’S PUTTING THE SYSTEM IN “SYSTEMIC RACISM.”
BETTER CALL SAUL: Ahead Of Monday’s DC Police Budget Hearing, A Large Crowd Takes To Mayor Bowser’s House To Protest.
While large swaths of downtown D.C. were closed to vehicular traffic and largely free of the big protests the city has seen over the last two weeks, a livelier scene was to be found on the small residential street in front of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s house on Saturday evening.
That’s where a group of at least 200 people gathered for a protest-turned-party, calling on Bowser to decriminalize sex work and defund the Metropolitan Police Department. They danced in the streets and sashayed along line of police officers standing in front of Bowser’s house, calling out for justice they say they’ve been denied.
“I want her to give a fuck,” said Pontianna Ivan, a trans women, of Bowser. “There’s a lot of things going on and the way she’s going on about things, it’s not showing us that she cares. Our lives matter. Show us our lives matter.”
Protesting at an official’s house is straight out of Saul Alinsky’s playbook. As I wrote in 2013, when anti-war protestors appeared on the doorstep of John and Theresa Kerry’s Beacon Hill townhouse, I wonder if Alinsky’s heirs ever thought the old man’s techniques would boomerang against them?
WHAT WE’RE LEARNING about online learning. “What we’re finding in the research thus far is it’s generally harder to keep students engaged with virtual lessons.”
NEVER GIVE AN ORDER THAT WON’T BE OBEYED: Gov. Cuomo threatens to ‘reverse’ reopening in Manhattan, Hamptons amid rampant social-distancing violations.
How’s it going over? A New Yorker friend comments: “The thousands of people currently marching up 1st avenue aren’t a threat, but a dozen people enjoying a drink are. Got it, you petty little asshole.”
Related: Andrew Cuomo’s Deadly Failures. “The major story of the coronavirus epidemic in New York is how the governor’s policies toward long-term care facilities enabled the virus to run rampant among our most vulnerable population.”
HAPPY FLAG DAY! Today in 1943, the Supreme Court decided West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, which included this famous passage:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
Words to remember, especially in these times.
BRENDAN O’NEILL ON J.K. ROWLING ON FACEBOOK:
I disagree with JK Rowling on a lot. I have never read a single word of a Harry Potter book. But seriously, every institution in the UK could learn something from her refusal to capitulate to the fuming mob who have spent weeks abusing and insulting her and trying to get her cancelled simply because she believes there is such a thing as biological reality. In their tens of thousands people have lined up to denounce her, to call her “pure scum”, to tell her to shut the f**k up. Including the three actors who became famous on the back of the Harry Potter stories — the celeb equivalent of children denouncing their parents in Stalinist Russia. She knows there will be protests if she speaks in public again, she knows some millennials are burning her books, she knows she will be defamed and boycotted for years. And yet she is sticking to her guns. That is so unusual in these yellow-bellied times.
Imagine if every university, corporation, media channel, streaming service, local council and politician did likewise every time noisy agitators called on them to ban something or apologise for something or to sack people for wrongthink. Britain would be a very different, and far better, place.
True.
WELL, THAT MAKES SENSE: Older, more anxious people likely to stockpile toilet paper during pandemic.
RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: When Silicon Valley Goes Dark This Time, There Will Be No Refuge.
Blackouts that hit millions of Californians in 2019 could be doubly calamitous this year with tech giants Google, Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. among the many companies keeping offices closed until the fall or later in response to the global Covid-19 pandemic.
If utilities cut power again, home offices set up during the pandemic could go dark and stay dark for days, and they’ll have no corporate offices to flee to for power. In October 2019, more than 3 million people were affected by a series of rolling blackouts over more than a week as PG&E Corp. and Edison International tried to prevent live wires from sparking wildfires.
Call it a collision of crises. Blackouts could limit California’s push to revive an economy largely paralyzed by stay-at-home orders this spring. The state, utilities and individual companies are all seeking ways to deal with blackouts before a wildfire season forecast to be worse than normal. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., for one, has “long contemplated this type of scenario,” according to spokesman Adam Bauer. . . .
“We’re going to have people sheltered in place and without power,” said Carl Guardino, chief executive officer of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group lobbying organization, which represents many of the region’s biggest companies.
Guardino’s own home lost electricity for 5 days last year, he said. He ended up moving his family into a hotel. he said. Now, though, even that solution is unlikely given the coronavirus shutdowns.
To be sure, many Californians have already turned to back-up power generators. Generac Holdings Inc. saw its sales in the state surge 300%, its chief executive officer told Bloomberg a month after the blackouts. And this spring, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group successfully lobbied state officials to let solar installers return to work months before many other businesses opened. . . .
The utilities, whose use of intentional blackouts last year provoked fierce criticism, are aware of the issue. But they don’t want the number of people working from home to affect their decision to shut off power, if weather conditions demand it.
Goody.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Protesters demand removal of Mahatma Gandhi statue in England.
JUST TELL THEM THAT IT’S OKAY BECAUSE LEFTISM IS A MORE DEADLY PANDEMIC THAN CORONAVIRUS AND WE NEED THIS TO COUNTER IT: Health experts warn of coronavirus risks at Trump’s upcoming rally.
It’s even true. Related:
