INCITEMENT & INSURRECTION: As Maxine Waters Calls for Riots in the Streets to Continue, Minnesota National Guardsmen Shot At.
Archive for 2021
April 18, 2021
IT’S ONLY AN “INSURRECTION” IF THE NARRATIVE REQUIRES IT TO BE:
OPEN THREAD: History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
REST IN PEACE, COUSIN ITT: Actor Felix Silla, famously known for his role as Cousin Itt on ‘The Addams Family,’ dies at 84.
NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: The Death of Hope. I’m partway into it, and as always he never fails to entertain.
I WASN’T EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Hidden magma pools pose eruption risks that we can’t yet detect.
SHOCKING ADVICE FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Heart patients advised to move more to avoid heart attacks and strokes.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Georgetown’s Cultural Revolution.
The silence to my mind is telling. It speaks of the lack of resources within progressive thinking that could be drawn upon to resist the trend that has bedeviled American academia over the past few years. The academy is a different place today than it was only a year ago and was different a year ago than it was five years before. Terror and dread fill academic workers, professors, and staff alike, and it is everywhere. Neither the call for distinguishing between unconscious bias and structural racism; nor for dismantling “merit” so that “minorities” succeed, seem able to do the work the authors of these emails want them to do. They fail to deliver responses of the kind, “Let’s just talk about this. Maybe the problem is overdetermined and is not reducible to ‘unconscious bias.’” What they beget instead is a combination of dread and virtuous self-congratulation. These two sentiments, dread married to virtue, constitute to my mind the affective embodiment of progressive ideology prevalent among white liberals as developed in its most privileged space: academia. They are typical. They are two faces of the same coin: flip and you see dread, flip again and you see virtue.
This is what dead or dying institutions look like. In this context, “woke” politics is the bear shirt cult, the ghost dance movement, of academia. It’s what anthropologists call a “revitalization movement,” the last convulsions of a dying culture. The chief characteristic of revitalization movements is that they always fail. Which doesn’t mean that they aren’t dangerous on the way down: Nazism was a revitalization movement, too.
MORE STATES SHOULD DO THIS: Joshua Silverstein, Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock is an old pal from my law school class of NYU ’96, and might be the best example of a truly “classical” liberal, at the heart of which shares many values with genuine conservatism and thoughtful libertarianism. At the heart of his opinion piece in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is simply that government is not a supreme power answerable to no-one. The foundation for ending sovereign immunity begins with this simple proposition:
“Sovereign immunity is a holdover from the era when most countries were monarchies. The legal basis for sovereign immunity was as follows: Because the monarch created the courts, the monarch is superior to the courts. And thus the monarch is not subject to the jurisdiction of the courts.”
This makes complete sense to me as a person who believes in smaller and less intrusive government. Silverstein continues:
“There is a fundamental principle of American law that provides that no person should be a judge in his or her own case. But that is exactly what happens when a person sues the state of Arkansas for money under current law: The Legislature itself ultimately decides if the injured person is entitled to monetary relief from the state.
That is inconsistent with the notion of due process that underlies our justice system. Sovereign immunity thus makes it far harder for citizens to enforce their fundamental legal rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.”
This is pretty hard to argue against.
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH? HELL, YOU CAN’T EVEN UNDERSTAND THE TRUTH: Media Should Tell the Truth About Herd Immunity.
This is a VIP piece because frankly Facebook and Twitter are suppressing any real discussions of herd immunity. If you haven’t already. you can get a small discount with the promo code CHARLIE.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Child vaccination rates declined during COVID-19 pandemic.
HOW CAN YOU LEAVE A “MESS” ON SOMETHING THAT’S BASICALLY A PILE OF DIRTY GRAVEL? NASA spacecraft leaves mess after grabbing asteroid samples. Anyway, the photos don’t live up to the headline.
POINTS AND FIGURES: Dispatches from the Covid Frontlines.
On Wednesday, April 7 I went to Red Rock Casino here in Las Vegas and got a free Johnson and Johnson Covid 19 vaccine. It was nice of the casino to do that. The process was orderly and organized. My wife found out about it on Twitter and because my doctor at Mayo recommended I get the vaccine, I went.
Of course days after I got the shot a few people around the country were getting blood clots and they have stopped giving people the JnJ vaccine. When I looked at the numbers, it was so small given the entire sample size I wasn’t worried. Also, almost all of the people getting clots were women and I have identified as a male since the day I was born. I guess I could be a “cis-lesbian-female” if I understand the new terminology correctly. The Dead Sea Scrolls are easier to decipher but I digress.
I checked out of the hospital today.
On April 14, I started running high fevers up to 105. I could get them down with Tylenol, Advil, and cold baths. Because of what happened to me in January, I take a drug that is an immune suppressant. My genetics have kept my white blood cell count low all of my life but now it is exceptionally low. We were sorting through some old papers from the 90s and my WBC count was low then. My counts are so low they are in that “four standard deviations away from the mean range”-or outside the “normal distribution” for those that truly understand statistics.
I was poked and prodded in the hospital. I was fed a constant stream of antibiotics. I was tested for Covid 19 again and was negative. My eighth victory against Covid. They drew lots of blood and tested it. So far, I have no other bacterial or viral infections percolating in my bloodstream. I was CT Scanned and Lung X-Rayed, “Hey, your lungs look great!”. I was Ultrasounded to check for clots. No clots.
The only conclusion is that my body had a very adverse reaction to the vaccine.
Read the whole thing.
CUBA’S RAÚL CASTRO RETIRES AS HEAD OF COMMUNIST PARTY, MARKING AN END OF AN ERA:
Raúl Castro said he is stepping down as chief of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party, leaving behind a demoralized country running on little but post-revolutionary fumes as it struggles with growing food shortages and rising discontent.
Mr. Castro’s retirement announcement Friday, which came during a four-day party congress in the capital of Havana, marks a generational change as the old guard that took power with his older brother Fidel Castro in 1959 gives way to a younger generation of bureaucrats. The 89-year-old is expected to be replaced by his handpicked successor, President Miguel Díaz-Canel, a longtime party apparatchik.
In his speech, Mr. Castro effusively praised Mr. Díaz-Canel, saying he had built a good team. Nevertheless, he said in retirement he would remain with a “ foot in a stirrup ready to defend socialism.”
Mr. Díaz-Canel, a burly, white haired 60-year-old, takes over at a particularly tough time, with Cuba’s economy facing its biggest crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The Covid-19 pandemic has largely shut down the country’s vital tourism industry, causing the economy to contract 11% last year, according to the government.
Why would the CCP stick it so badly to their fellow true believers?
THE WHO INTERVIEW: Pete Townshend on Band’s Future, Sell Out Album.
The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper at the beginning of the Who Sell Out era. Did that inspire you at all? They framed their songs around the Sgt. Pepper idea and you framed yours around a pirate radio station.
No, no. Come on. The Beatles copied us! Paul McCartney came up to me at the Bag O’Nails [music club], which we mention in the album artwork. He was always very, very sweet to me. I should say that first. But he said to me that he really loved our mini-opera, which was called “A Quick One, While He’s Away.” That was on the album that preceded The Who Sell Out. And he told me they were thinking about doing similar things.
I think anybody that was even a little bit art school back then, a little bit adventurous — and, of course, the Beatles were encouraged to experiment to the max in the studio — would have thought about doing something which was a concept.
In this case, of course, it wasn’t a concept. [Laughs] It wasn’t a concept until the day that we walked in to get photographed in tubs of baked beans. It was only at that photo session that we learned that the name of the album was going to be The Who Sell Out, which is a brilliant title, of course.
Plus:
It felt to me like I needed a rest. And so I re-arranged the universe, brought in this thing called Covid-19 and then a year off! [Laughs]
I was relieved, in a sense, that I didn’t have to tour. I would have done an OK job, I’m sure. But I felt like I needed a break, but I think everyone else did, too. You know, if rock & roll had a model, it would probably be AC/DC or ZZ Top.
My best story about ZZ Top, which has been confirmed by them, [is] that they once did so many shows in year that their family made them come home for Thanksgiving because they had missed four Thanksgivings in a row. When they got there, they didn’t know where they lived. They booked into a Holiday Inn.
If you’re a fan of The Who, read the whole thing.
PROTECTION FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE: NY Times wants to defund the police — except the one in its lobby. “Scratch an advocate who favors defunding the police and you usually find someone with private armed security. In this case, a company such as The Times writes a check to the NYPD, which pays the officer, minus an administrative fee, to provide protection in full police regalia.”
Times owner Tom Cotton could not be reached for comment.
MAXINE MELTDOWN: Maxine Waters tells Minnesota BLM protesters ‘to get more confrontational’ one day after violent anti-police clashes erupted across US.
Considering the national media presence of Waters and “the Squad,” it makes for quite a contrast with January’s story involving GOP madness:
Related: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.
ANOTHER SHOOTING, ANOTHER FAKE NARRATIVE: A Recipe for More Tragedy. The media’s rush to judgment on the Adam Toledo shooting in Chicago will come with a high cost. Rafael Mangual’s frame-by-frame analysis of the video footage shows what’s wrong with the story being spun by the media and politicians.