Archive for 2023
May 21, 2023
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): CA “Teacher of the Year” busted for extracurricular activities with a 16 year old.
PEOPLE DON’T LIKE THIS: Biden Title IX transgender sports rule ignites 156K comments: ‘Voices in opposition.’
OPEN THREAD: Hope your weekend was as nice as mine!
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Over 70% of Americans cheat at bachelor, bachelorette parties, survey shows. “Delaware topped the list as the most unfaithful state, with nearly 89% of its residents admitting to cheating on their partners while attending bachelor or bachelorette parties.” To be fair, the definition of “cheating” here is fairly broad, though there’s a breakdown.
STARTING STRENGH: Vitamins and Barbell Training Part 1: The B-Vitamins. “The most important thing to understand about nutritional science is that we don’t really have much of it.”
YES: Is DEI Training Unconstitutional? “It wouldn’t be if it were imposed by a private party, although there might be other problems with it. But can a government entity require its employees to assent to a series of political propositions, and to take what is effectively a loyalty oath? I don’t think so.”
STEVEN HAYWARD: “I don’t know whether it is an overstatement to suggest people with ‘gender dysphoria’ have a mental illness, or whether there is a social contagion at work (like the anorexia epidemic among young women a couple decades ago that ultimately faded out to a large extent), but scenes like this state legislator in Nebraska aren’t reassuring that there’s a rational defense of the trans-phenomenon. . . . This video is about one minute long, but it seems much longer.”
ECHO CHAMBER IS ECHOING: MSNBC Previews DeSantis 2024 By Labeling Him ‘Pro-White Supremacy.’
Knowing the difference between male and female is pretty big issue that is fundamental if society is to function. Not that CNBC’s Steve Liesman saw it that way, “It’s somehow been elevated and I think there was a piece in the Times not too long ago that says, it was basically, kind of invented.”
Liesman is referring to a New York Times piece that argued social conservatives latched onto transgenderism after special interest groups needed a new cause after losing the gay marriage debate, but no conservative needed to be told by a special interest group to oppose the idea that gender is subjective.
Prof. Basil Smikle then turned the conversation towards race, “Right, but that’s why I always say it’s not really about being anti-woke, it’s about being pro-racial hierarchy. That’s what he’s selling and he’s selling it to a very –“
After Liesman interrupted, asking Smikle to explain himself, he continued “It’s leading to the sort of pro-white supremacy, right? It’s like, we want to teach, we want to make sure that our version of history is taught, not your version.”
Nobody on the panel ever provided any evidence that disagreeing with them is somehow white supremacy. Smikle tried, “It’s a very specific type of version—of history that’s being taught in a very specific way. If you look at DeSantis’s battles against the College Board.”
And right on cue:
ROGER KIMBALL: Abandon the Swamp.
Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen.
We already knew that James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Michael Sussmann, Kevin Clinesmith, and all the other characters in and around the Russia Collusion Delusion had fabricated the story of Trump’s supposed connection with Russia out of whole cloth.
We already knew that they had gone out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton.
We knew that there was no predicate for obtaining a FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of many thousands of such warrants), thus opening a back door into the Trump campaign.
We knew that the surveillance apparatus of the regime had been weaponized to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then, when he surprised everyone by winning anyway, to taint his administration and render him radioactive.
What should we make of Durham’s non-revelatory revelations? I think that, wittingly or not, they were just a big exercise in track-covering, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, nothing beyond the sound and fury, anyway.
Read the whole thing.
QUESTION ASKED: Did Jeffrey Epstein Blackmail Bill Gates? “There has long been speculation that Jeffrey Epstein acquired much of his murky fortune and influence through a sophisticated blackmail operation, but there has been no solid evidence reported in support of this theory. Until today.”
HMM: Chevy Silverado EV’s Huge Range Puts Teslas and Ford F-150 Lightning to Shame. “According to the Detroit Free Press, Harvey stated that the 2024 Silverado EV WT will get an EPA-estimated 450 miles on a single charge. That’s an impressive number when you consider the Ford F-150 Lightning’s best of 320 miles, the Rivian R1T’s 314 miles, the GMC Hummer EV pickup’s 329 miles, and the estimated mileage of the upcoming Ram 1500 Rev coming in around 350 miles.”
Of course, those ranges shrink if you’re hauling heavy things. Towing a trailer with an EV pickup might be easy, but it kills range fast.
FAITH AND SCIENCE ARE ENEMIES, RIGHT? That’s what generations of college students have been taught, but, as J. Warner Wallace of Cold-Case Christianity explains today on HillFaith, there’s a bunch of facts that got left out.
READER FAVORITE: Marino’s Men Genuine Leather Dress Belt. #CommissionEarned
I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Target faces backlash for selling products from transgender designer promoting violence, drug use, Satanism.
STANDARDS: Justice Mitchell (Alabama): “The New Bar Exam Puts DEI Over Competence.”
So much of contemporary society — or at least contemporary institutional leadership — does.
LOOKING BACK ON THE SADISM OF THE COVID-19 SHAMING CAMPAIGN:
There’s a scene in videographer Matt Orfalea’s arresting new “Nobody is Safe!” compilation in which Jeff Van Gundy — one of the sharpest basketball announcers alive, and one of my favorites to watch — leans back and says, “I don’t even understand what means, ‘I’m doing my own research.’”
The whole quote, from a preseason Heat-Rockets game Van Gundy called in October of 2021:
What does that look like, you doing your own research? Are you doing studies yourself? Are you in a lab on a nightly basis? What are you doing? I don’t understand what that means, ‘I’m doing my own research.’
How about this: we’ve got really smart people… who’ve already done the research.
Flashback: Ignoring Them Is the Only Way Out.
THE RETURN OF THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY: Biden Says He Has Authority to Invoke 14th Amendment as Debt-Ceiling Negotiations Stumble.
“EMERGENCY AUTHORITY” KINDLES EMERGENCIES: Justice Gorsuch on COVID-19 and Emergency Government.
I’LL TAKE HEADLINES FROM 1995 FOR $500, ALEX: Downtown San Francisco had a good run. Can it recover?
Downtown San Francisco is in distress. Indicators of urban well-being point in the wrong direction: office occupancy, BART ridership and retail foot traffic are down, as is the city’s population. Every week brings news of another high-profile exit: Recent closures include a Whole Foods flagship and Nordstrom, which announced the end of its 35-year run on Market Street due to changes in the “dynamics” of downtown. First Republic Bank, another San Francisco success story, went under after it couldn’t retain its wealthy customers and was sold to JPMorgan Chase. The future of its branches, the familiar green-and-gold presence downtown, is uncertain.
Now barely a day passes without the San Francisco Chronicle or another publication referencing a “doom loop” in the city. There’s a lot of finger-pointing, but no agreement about how to solve the actual issues, including the spiraling homelessness crisis, the unsustainable cost of living or a property crime rate consistently higher than that of similar metropolitan areas. If you see people smiling downtown, they’re probably tourists inside double-decker buses — and even that might be deceptive. Hotel occupancy rates remain significantly below pre-pandemic levels.
Like most people who had a good run for too long, San Francisco didn’t see it coming.
Ahh, but they did see it coming. They simply refused to change course: S.F.’s Homeless Legacy / Two decades of failure.
—The San Francisco Chronicle, September 7th, 2003.
THE GLARING PROBLEM WITH BIDEN’S WHITE-SUPREMACY WARNING:
Let’s put this in more context. Obviously, almost all serious terrorist groups are international in range, and very many are specifically Islamic — the stereotype of the Arab terrorist has been around for decades and didn’t come from nowhere. At present, al-Qaeda, the group responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, has cells worldwide and controls a considerable amount of territory in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is based in those troubled nations where once Eden lay. New player Boko Haram is Nigerian and in practice controls much of the northeast of that rising Motherland power.
Obviously, none of these truly major terror organizations — some of which, in practice, come frighteningly close to being unrecognized nations — qualifies as a U.S. domestic actor. And, speaking frankly, terrorism overall is probably no longer a top-five security threat to the United States — when compared with the rapid rise of China, the opiate and fentanyl epidemic (which killed 110,000 Americans last year), surging crime (murders hit 20,000 annually back in 2020), and so forth.
So, why the national-level focus on the rather niche problem of white supremacy — on 20 deaths per year vs. 20,000? I sincerely think it’s because what some see as white conservative perfidy can safely be targeted in modern America, with little fear of “cancellation” or political backlash, at least from the Left. Since the civil-rights era of the 1960s, working-poor white Yanks have been very much cemented into liberal mythos as an enemy group: the whey-faced, dirty-handed rioters screaming abuse at sainted MLK. And, unlike other groups that may sometimes be unpopular — “hood” black dudes, “slut-walking” feminists, Muslim Islamists, the over-the-top Pride partiers we’ll all see in a month — they form a population that can generally be attacked without significant social risk. They are the Default Villains of the Prevailing Narrative.
At this point in his (p)residency, there are only a few choices Biden has to argue about:
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Biden Spending Cuts Could Lead to Spike in STDs: Democratic voters are statistically more likely to be infected.
BIDEN STANDS UP FOR CHINA: Biden says China’s ‘silly balloon’ derailed open communications with Beijing.
The U.S. had reached an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to maintain open lines of communication with the country, but the spy craft incident earlier this year derailed the effort, President Biden says.
Biden made the statement during a news conference in Hiroshima, Japan, where he was present for talks with other G-7 countries on Sunday. Biden claimed that China’s balloon had temporarily stalled chances for open dialogue between Washington and Beijing. The president did say he maintains hopes to reopen those talks in the near future.
“How will you manage the diplomatic relationship with China?” a reporter asked in the early morning briefing.
“Well, number one, you’re right. We should have an open line [of communications]. With the Bali conference that’s what President Xi and I agreed that we were going to do and meet on,” Biden responded. “And then this silly balloon that was carrying two free cars worth of spy equipment was flying over the United States, and it got shut down and changed in terms of talking to one another.”
Classical reference in headline: