Archive for 2020
October 18, 2020
IF YOU’RE AN AMERICAN IN CHINA, YOU SHOULD LEAVE. IT’S A TINPOT DICTATORSHIP. China warns it may detain US citizens over scholar probes: WSJ. They’re unhappy with the crackdown on their spies. They have more to lose from their isolation than we do. But they’re not actually that bright at this stuff, and they think they hold more cards than they do. Which is sad, but also dangerous. To everyone.
SAN DIEGO USED TO BE CONSERVATIVE: San Diego Unified School District Changes Grading System to “Combat Racism.” This may be the new thing in public education.
(See also racist school disciplinary policy in the name of “anti-racism.”)
The thing to remember is that the vast majority of reporters — and Dave Weigel is certainly in this group — see their role as advancing the power of the Democratic Party in general, and the power of the left wing of the Democratic Party in particular, against all threats and barriers thereto. The pursuit of truth as such isn’t even on their list.
OPEN THREAD: Strengthen the bonds that hold the InstaPundit community together.
AD ASTRA, PER ARDUA: Elon Musk says SpaceX’s 1st Starship trip to Mars could fly in 4 years.
TWITTER IS GARBAGE (CONT’D): ‘Die in a fire’: Twitter employees reveal deep hatred for Trump.
GETTING KIDS OUT OF SCHOOL IS GOOD FOR THEM: Despite pandemic, teens faring better with more sleep and family time: study.
HOWIE CARR: Fear and loathing in the Biden Crime Family.
“I have no response.”
That was Dementia Joe Biden’s response Friday when he was finally asked about the devastating expose of his son Hunter’s emails and so much more.
Those revelations included the crack-addled Hunter whining to one of his daughters that he has to pay 50% of all the cash he collects to “Pop,” and that as part of a shady Chinese deal, the so-called “remuneration package” would include “10 held by H for the Big Guy.”
“I have no response,” the Big Guy told a CBS reporter. “It’s another smear campaign, right up your alley.”
But he didn’t deny it. Biden — or more precisely, his keepers — haven’t disputed the veracity of the Biden Crime Family documents, or that they are from Hunter’s laptop. They were obtained legally, after an “inebriated” Hunter abandoned the computer at a repair shop, according to the New York Post.
Plus:
Actually, in the context of the modern-day Ministry of Truth that the alt-left media has become, the Hunter Biden Agonistes are somewhat amusing.
Consider that he shares a first name with Hunter S. Thompson, the so-called gonzo journalist who was, like Hunter Biden, an alcoholic and a drug addict.
In one of his more famous books, Thompson recounts driving a rented car through the Nevada desert while on drugs.
“And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooning and screeching and diving around the car.”
Forty years later, Hunter Biden was in a rented car (in which he would later leave a crack pipe) out on the same desert at night, stoned out of his own mind.
“A large barn owl flew over the hood of the car and seemed to follow him … He said that he has no idea whether the owl was real or a hallucination.”
It’s funnier when it’s the other Hunter.
POLITICO EUROPE, 2019: The Biden family’s strange business history: Over his decades in office, ‘Middle-Class Joe’s’ family fortunes have closely tracked his political career. “Biden’s image as a straight-shooting man of the people, however, is clouded by the careers of his son and brother, who have lengthy track records of making, or seeking, deals that cash in on his name. Interviews, court records, government filings and news reports reveal that some members of the Biden family have consistently mixed business and politics over nearly half a century, moving from one business to the next as Joe’s stature in Washington grew.”
This was back when Joe was a non-favored primary candidate, so the media could report stuff like this.
DON’T GET COCKY. Gallows Polls: Democrats, Beware the Internals.
ROGER SIMON: Fire Wray If He Doesn’t Turn Over Biden Laptop Info Immediately.
If Christopher Wray does not turn over all information about the laptop alleged to belong to Hunter Biden requested by Senate Homeland Security chair Ron Johnson within twenty-four hours, Wray should be summarily fired by the president and be replaced by an Acting FBI Director who will do the job like Richard Grenell.
That Wray and company have been sitting on this evidence since 2019 is beyond unconscionable.
That they were doing it during an impeachment trial relevant to the details that are on that laptop’s hard drive borders on the criminal, indeed crosses that border morally, if not legally.
The FBI has been living under a cloud for years now because of the demonstrably politically tainted Mueller investigation into Trump-Russia collusion that never existed as well as the related attempt to frame General Michael Flynn. (The 302s that made this clear had to be forced out of the FBI with a metaphorical bunker buster.)
Literally millions of Americans are now regarding—with justification— our premier law enforcement agency as corrupt and politically biased, possibly personally dangerous to them.
This is an untenable situation for a democratic republic going forward—if it wishes to remain either democratic or a republic.
Wray has done nothing to alleviate this. To the contrary, he has continually stonewalled congressional requests as if he were a Soviet apparatchik, not the servant of the American people that he supposedly is.
He seems to want us to believe he is working to preserve his institution, but is actually the doing the reverse—making us all the more suspicious.
Hunkered down and undoubtedly praying for the election of Joe Biden to save his own career, Wray has acted out of extreme selfishness or ideological bias or both.
The Biden Laptop Affair should be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Only it’s not a straw, far from it. Contained in this email exchange and on the hard drive from whence it comes are potential links to corruption the likes of which we have not seen in our country, a degree of cooperation with Communist China that could lead, if unchecked, to massive changes in our lives.
How’s that swamp draining coming along?
STAY AWAY FROM THE BEARS: Virginia woman charged with illegally feeding bear in TikTok video in Gatlinburg.
Idiots were doing this long before social media, but social media haven’t helped.
WOMEN’S MARCH SIGN: “Trump is an unstable penis!”
Halloween came early to the nation’s capital. Thousands of angry women marched in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to protest Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett and President Trump. Some women wore their pink pussy hats and some wore long red capes and white bonnets. Since this march was mostly a protest against ACB, many women wore black robes with white lace collars as Ruth Bader Ginsburg did.
Sounds like a super spreader event, right? No, no. The mitigation measures to battle the coronavirus pandemic only apply to some events and activities, not large protests in American cities. The protesters are magically inoculated from being infected, apparently. Only Trump supporters attending a campaign rally or church members attending a church service infect each other.
Even Thanksgiving dinner with your family and friends is off the table this year, according to Dr. Fauci. Reporters are not interested in following up to find out if protesters spread the virus which leads to the opinions that they do not. Also, there are quarantine restrictions on visitors to Washington, D.C. and those must have been waived for all the out-of-state protesters. The story of a young woman driving up from Florida with her mother and grandmother to attend the Women’s March, an 18-hour car trip, shows that the rules only apply to some people.
Flashback: People trust the media less than Trump on COVID. Here’s why.
BIDEN’S SHOOT IN LEG PROPOSAL: Proof He Doesn’t Understand Or Appreciate Police Work.
Biden is suggesting that instead of aiming for a big stationary target like the criminal’s chest, go for a tiny moving target like the leg. In other words, make it more likely that even a sharpshooting officer misses the target.
Joe, it’s real-life, not a crime drama. A cop doesn’t use the lethal force of shooting a criminal unless it’s needed and justified. The gun is not used as a scare tactic; it’s used as a last resort to save lives. Most police officers go through their whole careers of 20, 30, or more years and never discharge their weapons. But there is always a chance of being confronted by a bad guy with a gun.
To be fair, Kamala’s the cop, not Biden.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: San Diego Unified School District Changes Grading System to ‘Combat Racism.’
According to data presented by the district, under the old grading system, teachers fail minority students more than White students – a lot more.
During the first semester of last year, 30% of all D or F grades were given to English learners. One in four, 25%, of failing marks went to students with disabilities.
By ethnicity, 23% went to Native Americans. Another 23% of failing grades went to Hispanics. And 20% of D or F grades went to Black students.
By comparison, just 7% of failing marks went to White students.
In an effort to change that racial imbalance, the school board voted unanimously this week to make several big changes to its grading system.
Academic grades will now focus on mastery of the material, not a yearly average, which board members say penalizes students who get a slow start, or who struggle at points throughout the year.
Another big change, teachers can no longer consider non-material factors when grading. Things like turning work in on time and classroom behavior will now instead count towards a student’s citizenship grade, not their academic grade.
“I think this reflects a reality that students have described to us and it’s a change that’s a long time coming,” says Barrera.
What could go wrong?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Immediate Action: The Easiest Way to Keep Your Gun Operational.
Here’s an actual paragraph from that article that even I, even knowing what paper it is, still find hard to believe went to print:
Seizing on the symbolic nature of an attack against a high school teacher, and reprising anti-Islamist themes he has lately emphasized, Mr. Macron said the teacher had been “the victim of a terrorist, Islamist attack.”
I think that’s more of a pounce than a seize, but in any case, as Jim Treacher tweeted:
Exit quote: “This interview with a student in his class is in French, but this quote was worth the post: ‘We must continue to learn […] otherwise the terrorists have won.’”
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Boy, 12, dares to speak up for President Trump in class. Teacher asks student why he supports ‘a racist and a pedophile.’ Bad idea. “Once Jackson’s family found out what went down in his class, they fought back. They contacted a First Amendment attorney and asked the school for an apology, WBZ said — and got one. Jackson told WHDH that the teacher later apologized to him in front of the entire class, and he said that helped.”
DAVID SOLWAY: The Despair of Feminism.
What we are witnessing, in Robert Curry’s terms from Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth In A Post-Truth World, is a war on the crucial role common sense plays in our lives, for example, “the denial of plain fact that humans are either male or female,” with all that the genetic binary has implied since the beginning of recorded time. This “plain fact” has been routinely and programmatically denied by feminists and gender mavens, for whom sexual differentiation is “fluid” and a matter of choice or feeling. The real “deniers,” however, are the feminists and their male enablers among us who have rejected what Adams called “the axis of rotation” in the spirit of love, as well as the fixed Archimedean point in biology. As a result, the culture is in disarray and its future, as Kierkegaard saw, is despair.
To borrow Roger Kimball’s title, when does the recovery of culture begin?