Archive for 2021
September 12, 2021
OPEN THREAD: Our motto is, we take you everywhere, but get you nowhere.
PRIORITIES: VP Kamala Harris wants more diversity in the National Space Council’s industry advisory group. “Harris believes that excitement about space ventures can help promote STEM education, said Parikh. She also is interested in how space technology can be applied to combat climate change.”
A POLITE WAY OF SAYING “NUTRITIONAL DEBACLE:” Meatless Meat Is a Mixed Bag: The health implications of plant-based alternatives go beyond individual nutrition.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Scientists Probe Whether Uranium Cubes in US Lab Were Produced by Nazis.
WHEN TRENDY LEFTIST STUFF FAILS, WHICH (SPOILER ALERT) IS ALWAYS: How Sri Lanka’s overnight flip to total organic farming has led to an economic disaster.
BYRON YORK: George W. Bush’s dreadful 9/11 speech.
Bush did not explicitly say so, but he appeared to be referencing Jan. 6. And he used the rhetorical trick of denying that there was “cultural overlap” between the 9/11 terrorists and the Jan. 6 rioters before outlining areas of such overlap. They were similar in their “disdain for pluralism,” Bush said, their “disregard for human life,” and their “determination to defile national symbols.” In these, Bush argued, not only was there cultural overlap between the two groups — they actually came from “the same foul spirit.”
With that, Bush joined a group of commentators, mostly but not entirely on the left, who maintain that 9/11 and 1/6 are similar. And they do so in the face of the obvious, enormous differences between the two. The Sept. 11 attacks killed roughly 3,000 people, brought down New York’s tallest skyscrapers, destroyed part of the Pentagon, crashed four passenger jetliners, resulted in two wars, and changed U.S. foreign policy for decades. The Jan. 6 riot led to the natural-causes death of one Capitol Police officer, the shooting death of one rioter at the hands of police, the “acute amphetamine intoxication” death of another rioter, and the natural-causes deaths of two more. Had the 9/11 attackers survived, they would have been charged with mass murder. Most of the Jan. 6 rioters have been charged with “Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building.” Parts of the Capitol were ransacked, but not seriously enough that Congress could not meet and finish its election certification work on the night of the riot. The riot was appalling, and the participants deserve punishment, but it was simply nothing like Sept. 11. To visualize the difference, imagine that on the night of the 9/11 attacks, there was a convention that went on as scheduled at the World Trade Center.
The bottom line: There is simply no comparison in scale, act, motivation, or anything else between Sept. 11 and Jan. 6. And yet now, a former president suggests that those two enormously dissimilar events were actually similar, both coming from “the same foul spirit.”
Related: Stark Contrasts: RealClearInvestigations’ Jan. 6-BLM Side-by-Side Comparison.
More: From America’s Newspaper of Record: Guy Who Started Two Wars Calls For Civility.
DAVID MARCUS: Newsom, Dems all about racism until Larry Elder is attacked.
Related: This is CNN — and the L.A. Times: L.A. Times Columnist Jean Guerrero Says Larry Elder Is Pushing ‘White Supremacist Worldview’ and Poses ‘Real Threat to Communities of Color.’
During the segment, neither Guerrero nor Stelter made any mention of last week’s incident where Elder was holding a political event when a woman wearing a gorilla mask attacked his campaign staff and tried to throw an egg at him. Elder responded to the incident by saying that if he were a Democrat, the assault would’ve drawn a lot more media coverage and condemned as an example of “systemic racism.”
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their silence makes sense.
Evergreen:
UPDATE: No Matter Who Wins California Recall, The Los Angeles Times Is the Loser.
Keep rockin’!
GERARD VAN DER LEUN: The Wind in the Heights.
The last two jets into New York airspace that morning would be the last for weeks to come. In New York, you become so used to the sound of jets overhead in New York that you don’t really hear them. What you did hear on that day was the silence of their absence. When the sound of jets came back later that afternoon it was not the sound of passenger jets but of F-16 fighters, and we were glad to hear them.
But in that mid-morning, all we could see and think about were the souls trapped in the twin torches about a quarter of a mile away from us on the other side of the East River.
At a certain point in that timeless time, you noticed that specks were arcing out from the sides of the buildings from just above or just below or just within the part that was in flames. Looking again you saw that the specks were people leaping from the building and plunging down the sides to disappear behind the shorter buildings that ringed the towers. You tried to imagine what must have been going on in the offices and rooms of that building that made leaping from 100 floors or more above the ground the “better” option, but you didn’t have that kind of space left in your imagination. And so you looked on and watched them leap and distantly, silently fall, locked within that morning that had no time, in which all of what you had known, believed, and trusted in came, at once and forever, to a sudden frozen halt.
And then the first tower came down.
We’ve all seen, most of us on television, what happened next. We’ve all seen the dropping of the top floors into the smoke and then the shuddering impact and then the rolling and immense cloud of ash that exploded up the island of Manhattan overtaking thousands running north and laying thick slabs of ash over everything in its wake. The tape was played and replayed until, by order or consensus, it stopped being played. World Trade Center and north up the island — center stage in death’s carnival on that day.
Read the whole thing.
BIDEN CAN’T STAND PROSPERITY — For ordinary Americans, that is:
When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of the United Kingdom, the labor unions fought harder than any other entity to prevent her from removing the socialist yoke from the necks of the workers. The most powerful weapon they used against her was a group of labor laws very much like the PRO Act. The Brits had long since opted for socialism and it damaged their economy so badly that the voters desperately turned to Thatcher. She became their first female prime minister and saved them from becoming a third world country by repealing the kind of closed shop laws the PRO Act would impose on Americans and instituting the secret ballot in union elections.
During Thatcher’s tenure as Britain’s prime minister, as Heritage Foundation historian Lee Edwards points out, “Productivity grew faster than in any other industrial economy . . . Inflation fell from a high of 27 percent in 1975 to 2.5 percent in 1986. From 1981 to 1989, under a Conservative government, real GDP growth averaged 3.2 percent.” Yet President Biden and the Democrats want to transform our economy into the kind of dumpster fire that Thatcher inherited when she took office. Why? She put it thus in the Buckley interview: “The one thing about left-wing politicians is that they’re always fanatical, they never let go. It’s their religion.” And Biden is a devout member of the congregation.
As then-President Trump presciently predicted during his acceptance speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, “Biden is a Trojan horse for socialism.” His handlers carefully constructed a wooden candidate who looked like a moderate, but turned out to be a delivery vehicle for dangerous leftist policies once he had been dragged into the Oval Office. As long as Biden is president and the Democrats control Congress, Americans will be forced to live with increasingly radical restrictions on their individual and economic freedoms while inflation voraciously devours their hard-earned prosperity.
In his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses, Fred Siegel wrote, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s.‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class.’”
The Anointed understand that it’s for their own good, of course.
HANNAH COX: When I Think of 9/11, I Think of Boats Instead of Planes.
We all know the stories of the heroic first responders who rushed into the burning towers, of the Americans who gave their lives to take down Flight 93, of the businessmen who, surrounded by flames from jet fuel, ran up to clear other floors.
But few know the story of how citizens with boats organized themselves to get 500,000 people to safety that morning. Hundreds of vessels—sailboats, fishing boats, cargo ships, even dinner boats— worked for over nine hours that day, answering a call from the US Coast Guard to come to New York Harbor and aid the evacuation. These citizen volunteers largely organized themselves and carried out one of the most successful maritime evacuations in history.
To give a better understanding of the scale of this operation, remember that 338,000 soldiers were evacuated at Dunkirk over nine days. These untrained Americans surpassed that number by over 160,000 in only nine hours.
Hannah’s too young to have read my 2002 column on this,
People at Ground Zero, the Manhattan Waterfront, nearby New Jersey, Staten Island and Brooklyn waterfronts, and crews on the numerous vessels repeatedly used the phrases “just amazing,” “everyone cooperated,” and “just doing what it took” to describe maritime community responses. Individuals stepped up and took charge of specific functions, and captains and crews from other companies took their direction. . . . Private maritime operators kept their vessels onsite and available until Friday, Day Four, when federal authorities took over.
“Day Four, when federal authorities took over.”
YES, BUT THEY’RE LOYAL ESTABLISHMENT SOLDIERS NOW: The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics.
THIS IS CNN: CNN’s Leana Wen: The Unvaccinated Should Not Be Allowed To Leave Their Homes.
To be fair, not allowing people to leave their homes in peace is completely on-brand for the network:
AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Focusing policing on violent crime instead of revenue generation.
GIVEN THE NATURE OF CALIFORNIA POLITICS, IT WOULD BE SHOCKING IF THERE WASN’T A NEWSOM/HARVEY WEINSTEIN CONNECTION: Rose McGowan to join Larry Elder amid Harvey Weinstein-related allegation against Newsom’s wife.
FASTER, PLEASE: Delta is Dying.
Despite media claims that “We Can’t Turn the Corner on Covid,” the numbers of Covid-19 cases, new hospitalizations, and deaths nationwide peaked and started to decline around the beginning of September. The combination of this milestone, new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing widespread levels of vaccination and natural immunity, and improved availability of treatments suggests that, outside of isolated pockets, Covid-19 is likely to become a diminishing health risk in the United States.
Curious then, that the Biden administration decided to deploy “The ol’ divide-and-conquer technique” at precisely this moment.
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record notes: CDC Says A New COVID Variant May Be Needed To Effectively Bury Afghanistan News.
I LOVE THIS: Elon Musk drives through loophole by launching Tesla on tribal land. “New Mexico has laws on the books that prohibit car makers from selling directly to customers without going through third-party dealerships. The law has prevented Tesla from establishing an official presence in the state over the years. But now Tesla has found a way around that. The electric car maker partnered with the first nation of Nambé Pueblo to open its first facility inside a defunct casino on tribal land north of Santa Fe, where the state law does not apply.”
THEY’RE NOT GOOD PEOPLE WHO JUST CARE TOO MUCH. THEY’RE AWFUL PEOPLE.
Well, if they do as badly against the American right as they’ve done against Muslim extremists, Alex Jones will be occupying the White House soon.
BIDEN NOT SO HAPPY ABOUT THE F*CK JOE BIDEN SIGNS.
ROGER KIMBALL: A Failure of Memory and Nerve.
I write on the 20th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, D.C. No matter where you turn, it seems, the message is the same, a combination of injunction and protestation: “Never forget,” “We remember,” the sentiment invariably bolstered with reminiscences of loss and heroism.
The loss and the heroism are real, no doubt, but I am afraid that admonitions about remembering seem mostly manufactured. How could they not? Clearly, we have not remembered, and no amount of barking by the president of the United States about what an “extraordinary success” his shameful scuttle out of Afghanistan was can change that.
If we truly remembered, we would not have allowed four top Taliban terrorists, released by Barack Obama from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the traitorous Bowe Bergdahl, to assume top positions in the newly formed Taliban government. If we truly remembered, we would not have left hundreds of Americans behind in Afghanistan, ready-made hostages for the new regime.
We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the enlightened, “woke” perspective that has laid waste to the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military?
Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity.” Writing in The Spectator, the columnist known as “Cockburn” captures the fatuousness of the program. “Do-gooders,” he notes, “established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance,’ so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.’” I wonder if among the “attitudes” discussed were the penchant of certain Afghan men to stone women to death for adultery? “Under the U.S.’s guidance,” Cockburn continues, “Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house—higher than the actual figure in America!”
We also did our best to educate Afghans on the glories of modern art, and yet, somehow, they rejected the West’s irony and moral relativism. Unexpectedly!
BUT OPIOIDS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE BAD NOW, RIGHT? People of color less likely to receive opioids for lower back pain, study finds.
That said, the minuscule percentage differences here don’t sound as if they’re very significant. “While nearly 12% of White patients were given a prescription opioid pain reliever, these options were offered to people of color less than 11% of the time.”