UM:
84-year-old Nancy Pelosi stumbles over her words to declare that Donald Trump’s “brain is deteriorating” & that he is experiencing “cognitive degeneration.” 🤣 pic.twitter.com/ZuqXtVnArJ
— Tiffany Fong (@TiffanyFong_) November 3, 2024
Archive for 2024
November 3, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chinese launch startup Cosmoleap secures funding for rocket featuring chopstick recovery system. “The company also plans a 126-meter-long rocket, capable of carrying 100 tons to the same orbit when expended, or 36 tons when reused. The first launch is targeted for around 2030.”
FEEL THE JOY:
It's the people that Make America Great 🇺🇸 Unity 2024 pic.twitter.com/26YxgpBbFA
— Nicole Shanahan (@NicoleShanahan) November 3, 2024
FREUDIAN SLIP OF THE DAY:
“Kamala did what Kamala always does. She put her head down and went to work.” – Doug Emhoff
One of the greatest unintentional admissions of all time 🤣 pic.twitter.com/au7Smr1FaG
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 3, 2024
IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T THOUGHT ABOUT THE ROMAN EMPIRE TODAY: We Finally Know Why Ancient Roman Concrete Was Able to Last Thousands of Years.
TRUMP’S CLOSING AD:
Awesome ☺️🇺🇸
pic.twitter.com/GPasat8wEh— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) November 2, 2024
THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: UCLA Chemists Shatter 100-Year-Old Chemistry Rule – Textbooks Need a Rewrite.
IT ALL COMES DOWN TO TURNOUT: Young Men Could Boost Trump to Victory—if They Show Up. “Young men vote at far lower rates than many other demographic groups. They are more likely than older generations and their female peers to be disconnected from politics, and they are increasingly disillusioned with the country’s institutions, according to researchers and election analysts.”
Well, not without reason. Plus:
In interviews with dozens of young men around the country in recent months, some said they don’t see a place for themselves in today’s Democratic Party. Others said they are drawn to Trump’s politically incorrect approach. Many said they were focused foremost on their finances—with several arguing that Trump would do more to benefit their stock portfolios. Others said they appreciated the former president’s pledge to crack down on illegal immigration.
Luke Meihack, 25, a high school physical education teacher in the Milwaukee suburbs, said he didn’t used to be a Trump supporter, but changed his mind during Joe Biden’s presidency, and said many men his age are moving in the same direction.
“It’s mostly guys. Guys are more big into Trump,” he said. “He’s a guy that speaks in a way that demands respect, and that appeals to a lot of guys.”
Not all of his peers are planning to vote, he said. “I’m still in a group chat with a bunch of my guys from high school. There’s maybe like eight or nine of them, and like two or three of them have said they’re not voting,” he said. “Some of them say, ‘I don’t care either way.’ ”
Meihack, who listened to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s interview with Rogan while driving to the Trump rally on Friday, said he follows political news through social-media platforms including X and podcasts aired by the Daily Wire, a media company co-founded by the political commentator Ben Shapiro.
Anecdotally, I hear a lot of stories of women who used to be anti-Trump saying they’re voting for him this time. We’ll see if that amounts to anything.
HUMANS WEREN’T BUILT FOR THIS: Prolonged sitting can sabotage health, even if you’re young and exercise. “Young adults tend to think they are impervious to the impacts of aging. They figure, ‘My metabolism is great, I don’t have to worry until I’m in my 50s or 60s.'”
HEH:
Three reasons to go vote:
Harambe
Fred
Peanut pic.twitter.com/0OuiBQzTSM— Jim Arkham (@JimArkham) November 3, 2024
It does seem like everything went south starting when they shot Harambe. . . .
READER FAVORITE: Queen Size Mattresses,10 Inch Memory Foam Hybrid. #CommissionEarned
HINT: THIS CANDIDATE GREW UP IN A MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY: Who’s the Fascist? The presidential candidates’ records contradict the media narrative. My latest in City Journal.
FULL MINNESOTA JACKET:
No, this is not a video from a war-torn country in the Middle East.
This is the aftermath of the Minneapolis Riots after Governor Tim Walz allowed it to burn four consecutive nights.
Kamala Harris bailed out the violent rioters.
This is their legacy.
Vote accordingly. pic.twitter.com/UzlRYo1yKs
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) November 2, 2024
Related: In Case of a Trump Win — Democrat Governors Are Preparing for Violence.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: India plans lunar sample mission for 2028.
ROGER KIMBALL: State of Play, November 3, 2024.
Historians have often noted the tendency of generals to embark on a new war with assumptions more pertinent to the last one. This is what the enemy did last time; ergo, he’ll do something similar this time. That worked for us last time; ergo we should do it again. Fighting the last war is always a dangerous temptation.
The conduct of political warfare is not unlike the conduct of the wars that deploy armies rather than candidates, navies rather than the media, aircraft rather than pollsters. There is always the temptation to think that the assumptions and tactics of the last war are relevant to the current campaign.
This is especially the case, I believe, in the 2024 presidential race. The principals are the same: Donald Trump vs. what Vivek Ramaswamy has dubbed “the System.” The Dems changed out their primary avatar in July, shoehorning in Kamala Harris, where Joe Biden had been standing. But that maneuver, though profoundly anti-democratic, was merely a cosmetic expedient. The public face of the campaign was changed. The organizing soul remained the same.
In essence, the Dems are waging the same campaign now that they waged in 2016, in 2020, and beyond. Counting once again on their huge advantages in money (almost 3 to 1) and near total control of the media, they believe—or at least have acted as if they believe—that they can play the same game this time and win. They have not yet noticed—or at least have not yet effectively recalibrated their campaign to account for the fact—that many things “on the ground” have changed radically.
The Dems are fighting the last war. Trump is not.
Well, we’ll find out on Tuesday. (Or maybe some time later in the week. Hopefully.)
DECK CHAIRS REARRANGED: Oakland Residents Prepare to Oust Mayor as City Spirals Out of Control.
Sheng Thao insisted she knows the fear her fellow Oaklanders experience in the troubled Bay Area city where crime remains stubbornly high and a consistent concern.
“I’ve had my car broken into, and I too felt angry. I’ve had my house broken into while my son was home, and I too felt scared,” the embattled mayor said.
Speaking in the Oakland City Council chamber in mid October for her state of the city address, the 39-year-old mayor said the safety of Oakland residents is “the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning. And it’s the only thing on my mind when I fall asleep at night.”
“I want to say very clearly that community safety remains and is my top priority,” she said.
Thao is now advocating for increasing the number of police officers on the streets, investing in crime-fighting technology, and creating a more responsive 911 system.
“It’s time,” she said, “to get serious about cleaning up our streets.”
True enough. But time may be quickly running out for Thao, a far-left progressive who just a few years back supported slashing the police budget, reimagining what policing should look like, and investing in unarmed “violence interrupters” and other public-safety alternatives.
Less than two years into her first four-year term, Thao is facing a flood of criticism over her leadership. On Tuesday, she could be the first mayor of The Town to be recalled if a simple majority of voters agrees to oust her. Polls indicate that is likely.
Thao’s opponents allege that she is dishonest and incompetent, and that she is responsible for accelerating the city’s decline.
“Oakland is already burning under her watch. It’s a city on fire,” Gail Harbin, the recall spokeswoman, told National Review. She said that if Thao continues to lead the city for another two years, “we won’t have anything left.”
Oakland’s last Republican mayor left office in July of 1977.
A year ago, Longo moved to rural New York to open the P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary, which currently houses 300 rescue animals.
Their bucolic coexistence was shattered when on October 30th Longo’s house was raided by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. Armed agents showed up with a warrant they’d obtained after receiving an anonymous complaint. They held Longo and his German wife outside for five hours. While their home was ransacked in a search for their illicit animals, his wife was interrogated about her immigration status, because everyone knows German women are a big illegal immigration problem, Germans being infamously bad at following rules and keeping their paperwork in order.
Plus: “The director of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, under whose watch this farcical tyranny unfolded, is apparently named Karen, which is just a bit too on the nose.”
And:
The obvious line to take on this is that the government can’t seem to prevent illegal migrants from pouring across our various borders (indeed, it subsidizes them), while it will go all hands on deck to assassinate an illegal squirrel and his raccoon friend, but this is just anarchotyranny for you. This story isn’t really about the prefix of that portmanteau. It’s about the suffix.
We live in a society in which a vengeful busybody on the other side of the country can anonymously harness the implacable machinery of the state to ruin the lives of people they’ve never met, who are generally powerless to do anything to obtain satisfaction from the faceless bullies hiding within. . . .
No one believes that Peanut’s death made the world any safer, including the anonymous stool pigeon that sicced the NYDEC on him, or the mouth-breathing toughs sent by the NYDEC.
Peanut’s death was about power. The state’s goons got to rip apart someone’s house and snuff out the lives of helpless cute animals, which made them feel powerful, and the snitch got to snicker from the sidelines, which made her feel powerful.
Safety is just the excuse. It is a very effective excuse, one that the managerial state and its cultists and clients in the general population adore, because it morally disarms all opposition to their tyranny.
This is why the Peanut story resonates, and why The Atlantic, naturally, sides with the squirrel-killers.
MARTIN GURRI: The Endarkenment.
Asked whether she could provide a definition of the word “woman,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, Supreme Court nominee, magna cum laude at Harvard and graduate of Harvard Law, seemed perplexed: “I’m not a biologist,” she observed. Yet we are told by Jeremi Carswell, a specialist in the field, that children know perfectly well which of many genders they wish to grow up to be “from the moment that they have any ability to express themselves.”
During the 2020 pandemic, because of safety concerns, San Francisco took draconian measures to keep adults apart and children out of school, even as it promoted and protected the use of dangerous drugs by a large homeless population. That year, 257 San Franciscans died from the virus, while the number of overdose deaths climbed to 697.
In May 2024, former president Donald Trump was convicted in a Manhattan courtroom of a crime most Americans would be hard-pressed to describe. Three months earlier, a special prosecutor found that Joe Biden had mishandled classified documents but refused to bring charges because the sitting president of the United States was “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
These recent episodes are symptoms of a mass decline in America into unreason—bordering, at times, on a psychotic breakdown. Strange fantasies have overwhelmed reality: it’s an age of delusion, impossible longings, and ritual self-mutilation. The causes are many and complex, but the syndrome deserves a name. I’m going to call it the “Endarkenment” because it rises, like an accusing specter, out of the corpse of the fallen Enlightenment.
The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future. It’s the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, wielders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It’s the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.
The Endarkenment is experienced collectively as the disintegration of institutions, a traumatic fracturing of social life, and the seemingly ceaseless perpetuation of political conflict. But it is also experienced at the personal level in the form of heightened anxiety, depression, drug addiction, “deaths of despair,” and a loss of interest in family and procreation—even in sex.
The chaos has infected every level of contemporary society. For many, its perfect avatar is Trump—a man who selects his facts out of his fantasy life. Trump is a worthy representative, but I prefer outgoing president Biden because the light has literally gone out in his eyes and in much of his mind. Though the most powerful man on earth, decider between peace and war, he is unable to complete a coherent sentence. At the fateful June presidential debate, he made Trump sound like Pericles by comparison.
Biden is a stumbler in the dark. He, or those acting on his behalf, assembled an administration of aging retreads, cliché spouters, identity maniacs, cross-dressers, and vulgar Marxists, who, from Afghanistan to the Mexican border, failed at every task they set for themselves. With Biden and his enablers, progressive politics surrendered unconditionally to the Endarkenment.
And woe betide the person who rebels against the damage being committed:
● SJSU Suspends Coach Who Spoke Out About Transgender Player Blaire Fleming.
● George Mason U. disciplines law students who objected to tampons in men’s restrooms.