THERE’S NOWHERE TO RUN, THERE’S NOWHERE TO HIDE FROM WHAT’S IN YOUR MIND: It’s a Ghetto.
Geri Soriano made this video using old film-school video of her classmate Lorna Donley, best known as a proto-punk bassist in Chicago.
Archive for 2021
August 22, 2021
OPEN THREAD: What Time Is Love?
I’VE ALWAYS FAVORED LASERS MYSELF, BUT WHATEVER WORKS: A microwave-powered rocket? Drone project suggests it may be possible.
NO CONSEQUENCES MUST MEAN THEY’RE DOING WHAT THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO: President Biden isn’t inclined to fire any senior national security officials over the chaos in Kabul. Well, not “unless the situation drastically deteriorates or there’s significant loss of American life.”
I don’t think this will go well. And note this: “Dismissing national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin or CIA Director William Burns would be tantamount to admitting a mistake.”
Guys, everyone knows you made a mistake.
BACK AFTER A NINE-YEAR HIATUS: The Stromata Blog. Hey, abandon social media and return to the blogosphere.
Latest post: Where the Incompetence Lies. “If President Biden had been comatose for the past two weeks, there’s no reason to believe that the American response to the crisis in Afghanistan would have been better or, indeed, much different. The incompetence lay in the team that the President assembled or, more accurately, that was assembled for him. To the extent that a different Democratic President might have had a different team, it would have been a matter of different faces on the same ideas. The ultimate source of feeble protection of American national interests is feeble attachment to the America that actually is, as opposed to the America that anti-Americans wish to substitute for it.”
No country can flourish while being ruled by people who don’t like it.
VIDEO: Hollywood stars tell Joe Biden to go fuck himself over Afghanistan. “Shhhh… I know people.. I’m just goin’ with it.”
A VACCINE ALTERNATIVE:
The drug, made from a combination of two antibodies, was initially developed as a treatment for those who had already been exposed to the disease.
A new trial of 5,197 participants who had not been exposed showed a 77-percent reduced risk of developing symptomatic disease, with no severe cases recorded, Astra said in a statement. . . .
The data show that one dose could “quickly and effectively prevent symptomatic COVID-19”, said Myron Levin, principal trial investigator.
“With these exciting results, AZD7442 could be an important tool in our arsenal to help people who may need more than a vaccine to return to their normal lives.”
It is hoped that the drug could be used alongside vaccines for those who need more protection, affording up to 12 months of defence.
Participants in the trial were adults who were poor responders or intolerant to vaccines, or who had increased risk of infection because of their locations or circumstances.
Well, good.
A FRIEND WITH A LOT OF MILITARY EXPERIENCE WRITES:
A couple of thoughts about Kabul. Because we haven’t seen suicide bombers at the airport or an American hostage crisis, it’s because we are on the Taliban’s timeline. No rush. The humiliation of the United States is proceeding apace.
Do they actually control ISIS elements? Maybe. Maybe not. Wild card.
US forces have taken a hit for staying behind walls while the British and French go into the city to bring their people out.
The British and French go in at the pleasure of the Taliban, who I suspect are not that interested in them at this time. Except to the extent they may serve as bait to draw in US forces.
If US forces did go into Kabul at anything less than brigade strength, it could be Mogadishu. Even at brigade strength, the Taliban will be calling the shots. Shutting off streets. Making use of American hostages and human shields.
This doesn’t excuse the Americans. Just underscores how grievously the high command and the commander in chief bollixed this. They created this vulnerability by granting the upper hand quite predictably to the Taliban.
In any case, this thing is only just beginning, and could become a lot uglier.
I think you popped the line, “Party like it’s 1842.”Yeah. Don’t think the Taliban don’t know their history and that they are not intent on securing an even better place in it.
I hope I’m wrong, but I think the cost of blundering by President Biden, Gen. Milley etal has yet to be fully reckoned.
Sadly, I agree.
REALITIES: “Nobody wants to talk about it openly, but Dianne Feinstein is 88 years old.”
Plus, from the comments: “Well…the Chinese are done with Feinstein. They got from her what they needed. The US is done with her. California is done with her. Seriously, this is a woman who is hanging onto life by hanging onto her job.”
Also: “I always thought Biden would give his senility away completely and irrevocably at some point but I never thought he’d take others down with him. But by him being exposed on an issue, I now think he’ll decredibilize everyone in his generation who supported him. He can’t work out what to do and neither can they. If they’d had real journalism to contend with they’d have made slight changes all along or gradually faded away as it got too difficult. But they’ve been allowed to coast. They are not at all ready to explain why General Miley stood the military down and engaged it with CRT discussions in the exact months when it should have been planning the evacuation of Americans and allies from Afghanistan. Living in the past, this group can’t explain why US intelligence was sure there was a Capitol ‘insurrection’ and completely sure there would not be a Taliban insurrection. They can’t explain what’s happening or what’s coming next.”
Aricept only gets you so far. And corrupt gerontocracies, which is a pretty good description of the Democratic Party, don’t deal well with unforeseen events.
FRUITS OF MEDIA PANIC-MONGERING: Survey: 20% of U.S. adults would avoid emergency care due to pandemic.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Video shows hordes of maskless people at Pelosi fundraiser.
Mask-pushing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was apparently caught addressing an outdoor crowd of mask-less Democratic big wigs in COVID-19-riddled Napa Valley over the weekend, according to video and tweets.
A clip of the close-quartered fund-raiser was posted on Facebook by Democratic Party donor and winemaker Kathryn Walt Hall — and promptly blasted out on Twitter.
The footage appeared to show dozens of unmasked people seated elbow to elbow at long luncheon tables as Pelosi gave a speech and masked waiters ambled between the listeners.
“All the servants fully masked,” tweeted journalist Glenn Greenwald. “The almost-entirely old, white, rich crowd of DCCC donors free to go maskless as they’re served.”
According to the CDC, Napa County in California is a coronavirus hot spot, garnering the designation of “high” for its current level of transmission. “High” is the most worrisome designation.
More here: With Infamous “Wine Cave” Donor Help, Pelosi Greases the Palms of 9 Democrats and the West Coast Elites:
What struck me was all the very white, very fossilized faces in the bunch. Always amazes me that people who try to force equity and inclusion on everyone else are never very equitable or inclusive themselves. If I had had enough money to fork over for one of these tickets, I wonder how welcome they would be towards my presence? Where are Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, for God’s sake? Napa is not far from Garza’s hood in Oakland—they couldn’t have popped her an invitation?
This event is apparently an annual thing for Cruella Pelosi, where she fills the coffers for the DCCC, and also fattens up the lambs for the slaughter. According to Breitbart, the nine Democrats who oppose the bloated 3.5 trillion infrastructure bill were invited to come, so Cruella could work her magic on them in order to get that bill passed.
After Obama’s “fat Elvis” blowout birthday party earlier this month, Jim Treacher wrote: Democrats Don’t Need Masks Because They’re Better Than You.
The virus knows. It knows what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and it only punishes people who don’t read The Atlantic or listen to NPR. If you can recite a MyPillow ad from memory, you need to wear a mask when you’re told to wear a mask. But if you can pick Lin-Manuel Miranda out of a lineup, you don’t have anything to worry about. That’s how COVID-19 works. That’s just the settled science.
But then this happened: At least 63 people on Martha’s Vineyard have tested positive for Covid-19 since Barack Obama’s maskless 60th birthday bash — the most cases on the island since April.
Hopefully Pelosi’s gathering of the “Wine Cave” Dems won’t have equally disastrous results.
Related: An interactive map from Heritage.org: COVID Hypocrisy: Policymakers Breaking Their Own Rules.
It was last updated on the 10th; presumably, this will be updated with Pelosi’s latest French Laundry (or in Marie Antoinette Pelosi’s case, French money laundering)-style insincerity.
VIA A FRIEND:
WHY EUROPEAN CRITICISM OF THE US AFGHANISTAN PULLOUT IS SO REFRESHING:
It’s nice to hear from countries that on occasion bother to return the favor when their leaders humiliate them in front of the world. But then the guilt sets in and you remember that we went and did the Brits dirty yet again. Not only did we fail to communicate our Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden apparently took a good 36 hours to return a call from British prime minister Boris Johnson. News of this promptly cued up a montage set to David Guetta’s ‘Without You’ of all the other times Biden has left a jilted Boris sitting by the phone, starting with just after his inauguration, when he decided to ring the hot girl from Canada first.
The Special Relationship’s Mugsy can’t seem to stop accidentally blowing up its Rocky. Yet so far as Europe writ large goes, the problem cuts both ways. If the Europeans want to check our power — rather than just complain about it — they need to show that they can. And it’s here that we arrive back at Nato. Because it is wrong to say the alliance is just America. The alliance is also Turkey, which fields the second-largest military in the bloc. Most of the European members don’t even meet the 2 percent of GDP they’re supposed to be spending on defense. In Germany, it’s a paltry 1.3 percent.
It isn’t that Europeans are wrong to gainsay America’s control-alt-delete foreign policy. They are sometimes wrong, as with Libya in 2011, but then they’re also sometimes right, as France and Germany were over Iraq in 2003. Personally I’m a committed multilateralist. I don’t like to so much as go to the grocery store without a Brit, a Frenchman and a German in tow, if only so I can flaunt America’s cultural superiority by way of Double Chocolate Fudge Pop Tarts. Nationalism or internationalism? Both, please. Having good friends is in our national interest.
But then those pals, if they want to have equal say, need to start helping out more with our collective defense burden. Looking at you, Germany, which is where our troops ought to come home from next, 75 years after World War Two ended. Because he who detonates the most MOABs gets to call the shots, as Sun Tzu once put it. And right now, the American whim is to be sick of wars we can never seem to win.
Flashback: Biden Freezes Trump’s Withdrawal of 12,000 Troops From Germany.
But hey, no mean tweets!
ROGER KIMBALL: The Rotten Edifice Revealed.
Kyeyune thinks that the “epoch of the liberal technocrat is now over,” that the “bell has well and truly tolled for mankind’s belief in their ability to do anything else than enrich themselves and ruin things for everyone else.” Maybe so. Yes, inertia is a powerful force. The institutions we’ve been living with are likely to persist, more or less hollowed out, for some time. And what might replace that technocratic dream is a question that admits of markedly different answers, many unpalatable. (How many speak English? A troubling question, that.)
Francis Fukuyama was, I believe, about as wrong as it is possible for a pop political philosopher to be when he predicted the “end of history” and the efflorescence of liberal democracy everywhere and forever.
Of course, Fukuyama is a Hegelian, which at least partly explains his silliness. What is happening now in Afghanistan, and in America because of Afghanistan, is another in a long line of counterexamples to Fukuyama’s thesis. It may, however, turn out to be a more fundamental challenge than anyone could have foreseen even a few weeks ago. For that, we have the bumbling, mentally incontinent Joe Biden to thank, he and his clown car of self-absorbed spiritually adipose bureaucrats who prance about in a cloud of self-importance, shedding disaster like dandruff.
Read the whole thing.
HOWIE CARR: Biden voters — are you tired of losing yet?
Hey, Joe Biden voters, are you happy now?
Your boy Dementia Joe owns it all now — the catastrophe in Kabul, open borders, rampant inflation, skyrocketing urban crime, the destruction of American energy independence, endless nonsensical lockdowns over a mild virus that is killing almost no one, not to mention so many public misstatements by the doddering old clown that his own cabinet secretaries have to correct his insane lies even before he shuffles off to Marine One for the flight back to his weekend assisted-living facility in Delaware.
But no more mean tweets, right? And that’s all that matters, isn’t it?
Orange Man Bad used to ask, “Are you tired of winning yet?”
Dementia Joe, if he could still speak in coherent sentences, might sputter, “Are you tired of losing yet?”
After he was installed as president, Dementia Joe’s caregivers said of their Deep State foreign policy: America is Back. Surely they meant to say, “America is on its Back.”
Or maybe, America is Back on its Back, because this is a greater calamity than Barack Obama leading from behind — way behind. This is Jimmy Carter’s presidency on steroids, only worse, because at least Carter was trying, however ineptly, to do the right thing.
Dementia Joe, not so much.
Carter and Obama must be thrilled that Joe is lifting their reputations up a few notches by setting the bar so low.
WELL, DAVID BROOKS. David Brooks Reproaches Elites, Recycles Cliches About the People.
To grasp the left’s rage and the right’s embitterment, it is useful to keep in mind a major asymmetry that marks the nation’s long-standing culture wars: The right tends to know the left better than the left knows the right.
Notwithstanding the occasional risible protestation, progressives dominate the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley, the K-12 education establishment, and the universities. This means that progressive ideas, progressive sentiments, and progressive tastes pervade the culture. Denizens of red America need only turn on the TV, watch Hollywood movies, listen to popular music, follow major league sports, or send their kids to public schools and most any college or university in the country to encounter progressives’ flattering self-portraits and their airbrushed depictions of the progressive spirit in action. In contrast, residents of blue America generally only know of red America through the condescending lens of progressive reporting, opining, and imagining. . . .
Brooks deserves considerable credit for refining his analysis of blue America. In “How the Bobos Broke America,” posted online at The Atlantic earlier this month, he parted company with the elite media’s standard view that the country’s polarized politics is rooted primarily in red America’s implacable racism, sexism, and nativism. Rather, he explained, blue America’s conquest of the commanding heights of culture and the contempt it rains down on red America below have destabilized the nation. . . .
Despite these admirable insights into where the progressive elites — and his analysis of progressive elites — went astray, Brooks remains attached to progressives’ soothing sense of moral superiority. Although he provides no evidence, he sees “a lot of truth” in the belief that the people’s inveterate racism and aversion to change exacerbate their reaction to elite arrogance and overreach. Given his apprecation of his flawed track record over the last two decades — and his empirically backed observation that progressive elites have become among the most parochial and politically intolerant of Americans — one might have expected Brooks to examine the partisan interests served by casually accusing the non-elites of clinging to their racism.
There’s no one more racist than a progressive wokie.
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: QR codes have replaced restaurant menus. Industry experts say it isn’t a fad.
TALIBAN UNLEASHED BADRI 313, THEIR SPECIAL FORCES UNIT ON KABUL:
The unit that the Taliban has put in charge of the Afghan capital of Kabul is Badri 313, their special forces battalion.
Badri 313 is not a ragtag bunch of goat farmers like much of the Taliban regulars. According to media reports, they are a lethal special forces unit with the gear and expertise to go with it. US military weapons, night goggles, tactical vests, helmets…it’s all there. Now we know how the Taliban offensive took over the country so quickly.
Well, also this: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
WhatsApp is an American product. It can be switched off by its parent, Facebook, Inc, at any time and for any reason. The fact that the Taliban were able to use it at all, quite apart from the fact that they continue to use it to coordinate their activities even now as American citizens’ lives are imperiled by the Taliban advance which is being coordinated on that app, suggests that U.S. military intelligence never bothered to monitor Taliban numbers and never bothered to ask Facebook to ban them. They probably still haven’t even asked Facebook to do this, judging from the fact that the Taliban continues to use the app with impunity. This might explain why Afghanistan collapsed as quickly as it did.
* * * * * * * *
There can and should be recriminations for what happened here. It is not solely the Biden Administration’s fault; the military should have been considering how to decapitate Taliban communications for years, which it clearly has not done. The fact that the Taliban is using US-based servers to run its terror state and nobody in the Biden Administration has thought to disconnect it, even as U.S. forces retreat in disarray, is a strategic blunder on par with Pearl Harbor.
That article went up last Sunday, August 15th. It wasn’t until Friday that news broke that: Taliban websites and WhatsApp groups suddenly go dark.
SHOOT A HOG, SAVE THE PLANET. Also, bacon.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: As US Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World’s STEM Leader.
Howell Raines, who famously said in a classic Freudian slip from 2001, that the New York Times’ hiring campaign “has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse,” could not be reached for comment.
Update (From Charlie): Ed linked to a Newsalert story about a Quillette story. Here’s the original article: As US Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World’s STEM Leader.
As many of you know, I do a lot of tutoring at Wyzant. I’ve observed that my students fall broadly into two groups: white students hoping I can keep them from falling, and students “of color” trying to get As.
Spoiler: There is no such thing as “global equity.”
Somebody just remembered the Alamo.
On Monday, after a lower court struck down Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on mask mandates, the Texas Supreme Court overturned the ruling in favor of Abbott, showing the more polite members of his party that you can indeed fight back against bureaucratic overreach, and win.
Abbott isn’t exactly a cowboy here; he’s following in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s boot-clad footsteps, the latter of whom recently banned vaccine mandates on cruise ships, with a flurry of lawsuits following 100 yards behind trying to catch up. Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s governor, banned vaccine passports in the state as early as April. With the trail to shut down Covid-19-related overreach now sufficiently blazed, it’s time for the rest of the red states’ governors to step up to the plate.
Even if only to prevent an eternal, Groundhog Day-esque repetition of 2020, states like Arizona, Georgia, and Tennessee should come out strong against the returning Covid-19 mania as more blue states eye the prospect of yet another lockdown.
In other Texas-related Covid news: Abbott tests negative for COVID-19 four days after positive test. “‘I am told that my infection was brief and mild because of the vaccination I received,’ Abbott said in a video he posted on Twitter. ‘So, I encourage others who have not yet received the vaccination to consider getting one.’”