Archive for 2021

THE FBI PERFORMS ITS ESSENTIAL FUNCTION AGAIN:

WHEN TECH LORDS COVER FOR PEDOPHILES AND THEIR EMPLOYERS:

Plus:

UPDATE: A friend texts: “CNN: Child Nookie Network.”

Plus:

WHEN THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T CARE ABOUT INFLATION UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE: It’s Cold in Turkey.

Turkey is run by a madman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Like a Chicago Democratic Machine politician, he is consumed with one thing, power. He was first elected in 2014. . . .

When I saw Turkey’s real inflation rate, I was happy that the US dodged a bullet today. Build Back Better, along with lots of other policies being proposed by the radical Democratic Socialist Party in the US are inflationary. They also take away freedom.

Remember, inside every Democrat is a totalitarian dying to get out. Don’t believe me? Read what they are proposing in left wing NY State. Quarantine camps anyone? I remember when we called them concentration camps or gulags.

Milton Friedman warned people.

READER BOOK PLUG: Savannah 1.0. Recommended by Charlie Martin.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX vs. The World. “SpaceX is launching not only more often than any other company, it’s beating every country but China.”

LOSING IT: The White House’s extraordinary, furious statement about Joe Manchin. “Psaki also accused Manchin of not representing his constituents well, a claim that bristles Manchin, who often says he’s the only Democrat who could get elected in West Virginia these days. Without him, Republicans would have the majority.”

Well, maybe Manchin should switch parties.

#JOURNALISM:

Tater’s gonna Tater.

AFTER HELEN’S HEART SURGERY A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO THEY DIDN’T GIVE HER ANYTHING: Opioid painkillers may not be needed for weeks after heart surgery. They told her to take ibuprofen when she got home. And they didn’t even put her out entirely for it. Granted they were just replacing her defibrillator, it wasn’t bypass surgery or anything, but still.

DISPATCHES FROM THE WORST MICHELIN STARRED RESTAURANT, EVER:

There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it’s so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement. The sort of meal where everyone involved was definitely trying to do something; it’s just not entirely clear what.

I’m not talking about a meal that’s poorly cooked, or a server who might be planning your murder—that sort of thing happens in the fat lump of the bell curve of bad. Instead, I’m talking about the long tail stuff – the sort of meals that make you feel as though the fabric of reality is unraveling. The ones that cause you to reassess the fundamentals of capitalism, and whether or not you’re living in a simulation in which someone failed to properly program this particular restaurant. The ones where you just know somebody’s going to lift a metal dome off a tray and reveal a single blue or red pill.

I’m talking about those meals.

At some point, the only way to regard that sort of experience—without going mad—is as some sort of community improv theater. You sit in the audience, shouting suggestions like, “A restaurant!” and “Eating something that resembles food” and “The exchange of money for goods, and in this instance the goods are a goddamn meal!” All of these suggestion go completely ignored.

That is how I’ve come to regard our dinner at Bros, [Lecce, southern Italy’s] only Michelin-starred restaurant, as a means of preserving what’s left of my sanity. It wasn’t dinner. It was just dinner theater.

No, scratch that. Because dinner was not involved. I mean—dinner played a role, the same way Godot played a role in Beckett’s eponymous play. The entire evening was about it, and guess what? IT NEVER SHOWED.

Definitely read the whole thing, which is a riot.

UPDATE: A chef responded to a bad review with pictures of horses. Now it’s sparked a debate about food and art.

“Every meal that comes out of the kitchen at Bros is for a paying customer. It is for someone who has a minimum expectation of what a meal should be.”

If food is a type of art, she continued, “it is one that cannot exist without taking into account the relationship between the artist (the chef) and the consumer of their art (the client)”.

“Cooking, if done properly, is inherently an empathetic act. It’s an act of love.

Will the restaurant respond to her response to their response?

Who knows! But rest assured, my boss will probably ask me to write about it.

Begun, the food wars have.

(Updated and bumped.)

COLLUSION: Confronted by investigators, Harvard scientist admits to payments from Chinese university, video shows. “Prosecutors have told jurors it wasn’t a crime for Lieber to accept money from the university or the Thousand Talents program, created by the Chinese government to recruit high-level scientists, but it was illegal for him to hide his financial arrangement from the US Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, which funded much of his research at Harvard. He is charged with making false statements to the government, filing false tax returns, and failing to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.”

Of course, given the FBI’s record in cases like this — see Anming Hu at the University of Tennessee — reasonable people could be suspicious of the case. Sadly, it’s entirely possible both that the Chinese have purchased enormous infuence, and that the FBI is willing to cut corners and outright like to try to make a case.

I BLAME RON DESANTIS: “New infections in New York City have tripled over the last month. The seven-day average of new cases reported on Sunday was 5,731, a number de Blasio called ‘really shocking.’ New York state has broken records for new infections for the last three days, reporting 22,478 new cases on Sunday.”

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Lib TV News Ignores Sen. Blumenthal Attending Communist Party Event.

On Friday, senator stolen valor a.k.a. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal (CT) apologized and pleaded ignorance when it was exposed that he attended an event affiliated with the Communist Party USA the previous weekend. The entire story came and went last week without so much as a second of airtime from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, or MSNBC.

* * * * * * * *

Maybe Blumenthal would have known they were Communists had they made overt appeals for people to join their party. Oh, wait…

At the event, an organizer hit many of the Democratic Party’s talking points as he was pitching the Communist Party. “We invite you to join the Communist Party in this epic time as we make good trouble to uproot systemic racism, retool the war economy, tax the rich, address climate change, secure voting rights and create a new socialist system that puts people, peace and planet before profits,” Ben McManus proclaimed.

And another presenter said the quite part out loud and boasted about how socialism was the vehicle towards their political ends. “There’s more and more people talking now about socialism in this country as it becomes more and more clear that capitalism is not going to work for our future,” she said.

Remember that the next time a member of the liberal media claims socialism and communism are Republican boogiemen used to gin up fear.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the lack of television coverage makes perfect sense.

Evergreen: