Archive for 2020

SEEN ON FACEBOOK, AND IT’S TRUE:

UPDATE: Also seen on Facebook:

FOREIGN COLLUSION AND DIRTY MONEY: How Treasury Dept. tracked overseas cash pocketed by Hunter Biden. “Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden flatly denied at Tuesday night’s debate that his lawyer son took huge sums of money from corrupt oligarchs and Chinese communists during his vice presidency, but Treasury Department reports show that Hunter Biden did receive the money. . . . Hunter Biden received a single wire transfer of $3.5 million from Elena Baturina. The Senate report said she became a billionaire through illegal construction contracts awarded by her husband, since deceased.”

IT’S COME TO THIS: “We’ve officially reached the stage of 2020 where Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth are required to wear masks while broadcasting the Eagles-49ers game in Santa Clara, California. ‘The officials have compelled us to wear masks during the game. And so that is the story,’ Al Michaels said during the Sunday Night Football opening. ‘I’m Al Michaels, you are?’ Michaels asked Collinsworth. ‘I don’t know who I am,’ Collinsworth shot back while shaking his head. It’s unclear who the officials are that Michaels is referencing, but it was someone far enough up the COVID police ladder to get Al and Cris into a mask. We’ll stay on this to see if anyone will step forward to claim responsibility.”

OPEN THREAD: Make this one special.

NICE GESTURE:

May his recovery continue.

HOW MANY LIVING AMERICANS ARE FORMER POWS? As of 2018, according to the Government Attic, there were _____.

CHILD REGICIDE AND JACOBIN: 

You may not have heard of the magazine Jacobin. It’s an intellectual magazine of the democratic socialist left — not the liberal left, but the democratic socialist left. It was founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara, a radical college student born and raised in suburban New York. From a 2016 Vox profile of him:

Jacobin has in the past five years become the leading intellectual voice of the American left, the most vibrant and relevant socialist publication in a very long time. And in 2016 it’s bigger than ever, thanks to Bernie Sanders, who’s making his millions of supporters curious about what democratic socialism actually means. That’s an opportunity that Jacobin is seizing to great effect, even if Sanders isn’t far enough left for their taste.

The Sanders campaign “could begin to legitimate the word ‘socialist,’ and spark a conversation around it, even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough,” Sunkara wrote earlier this year.

More:

Jacobin, which turned 5 this year, is perhaps the most relevant and important publication of the American political left today. Unlike more academic journals, it is always timely, globally oriented, and topically eclectic.

Eclectic:

More eclecticism here:

I wonder if Sunkara watches The Lives of Others, roots for the Stasi, and (spoiler alert), thinks the ending in which the Berlin Wall falls was a serious bummer? But as the Biden Riots remind us, Sunkara isn’t the only American leftist with a mindset towards revolution these day. Zack Ford is the press secretary at Alliance for Justice, which as Discover the Networks notes, “Systematically opposes Republican judicial nominees as ‘right-wing extremists,’ ‘ultraconservatives,’ or racists and sexists,” and “helped derail President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court. Immediately after Bork’s nomination, AFJ sent messages to the editorial offices of every newspaper in the United States, urging the Senate to reject:”

As Caroline Glick writes in “Democrats and the Politics of Projection,”  “if you want to understand who the Democrats are and what they are doing, all you need to do is look at what they are accusing Trump and his colleagues of being and of doing.”

FACTS V. NARRATIVE: Learning from Breonna Taylor. There are lessons, but they’re not what you’ve been hearing.

MORE EVIDENCE AGAINST LOCKDOWNS: Explaining Sweden’s Covid Cases. The mortality rate in Sweden, while lower than in the U.S. and Britain, has been higher than in neighboring Nordic countries, which critics claimed was proof that it should have emulated their lockdown policies. But a new analysis points to another explanation: Sweden had far more vulnerable elderly people (“dry tinder,” as researchers call it) than its neighbors because its previous two flu seasons had been milder than theirs. “My results,” Jonas Herby concludes, “illustrate that plain coincidences may be important when understanding the COVID-19-death toll in a country compared to national lockdown policies.” His conclusions jibe with a previous analysis of Sweden and its neighbors.