UPDATE: “The closest thing to a smoking gun in the full Senate report is the evidence that researchers affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology began working on a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, before almost anyone else in the world had heard of the virus[.]”
It all started on Thursday, when Carpe Donktum tweeted: “As a 3rd grade teacher, I often talk about Jesus with my students, they are so excited to hear about my faith. They point to the cross on [the] wall and ask me about the resurrection. Some have gotten baptized in the sink, as long as they don’t tell their parents. It’s our secret.” This tweet now has 3.7 million views. It was an obvious send-up of primary school teachers who push transgenderism on their students and keep it all secret from their parents, and just in case anyone didn’t get it, Donktum drove the point home in a series of follow-up tweets.
As a 3rd grade teacher, I often talk about Jesus with my students, they are so excited to hear about my faith. They point to the cross on wall and ask me about the resurrection.
Some have gotten baptized in the sink, as long as they don’t tell their parents. It’s our secret.
Many didn’t get the sarcasm and took Carpe Donktum’s claims with the utmost seriousness. One down-the-line Leftist activist with “#WearAMask, #Vaccinate, #MyBodyMyChoice” in her Twitter biotweeted: “Holy crap! This teacher is baptizing kids in her classroom sink, ‘as long as they don’t tell their parents’!” Another fumed at Carpe: “Shut up you lying turd. Separation of church and state exists because of people like you who brainwash and abuse children. You shouldn’t have your job and you should lose your children if you have any.” Others tagged the ACLU, trying to get Carpe fired from his alleged job, and far-Left Star Trek actor George Takei, trying to make Carpe the focus of a more general cancellation.
I’m not surprised that the religious left can’t see itself in the mirror. As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)
Sometimes, revolutions begin in unexpected places.
One such example came on Friday night at Bill Maher’s TV studio in Los Angeles where I was appearing on his “Real Time” show alongside rising Democratic star Rep. Katie Porter — the woman who wants to replace Dianne Feinstein as senator for California.
I said that for someone who identified as a gay man until last year to be sporting a women’s sports bra, despite having no breasts, as “they” pranced around like a clueless non-athlete, mimicking how a misogynist would scornfully depict a woman doing sport, struck me as a slap in the face to actual women.
And to my surprise, given how liberal Maher’s audience tends to be, my comments were met with loud applause.
The New York Times story did not say what its editors and their flying monkeys thought it said.
The headline said, “A Tiny Number of Shoplifters Commit Thousands of New York City Thefts.”
OK, you don’t need a J-school degree to figure out the message sent. Not everyone in NYC is boosting $4,500 Louis Vuitton purses. It is just a few people. Whew. What a relief to know this.
The subheadline said, “Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in the city last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Businesses say they have little defense.”
You see? The looting is by just a few people.
The story said, “Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness; the police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.”
You see? They are just crazy or on drugs.
That was the message NYT meant to send.
The story, however, is you can rob stores dozens of times and get away with it. My question is why don’t more people in NYC just rob stores blind every day? I mean, come on people. If 327 people can get caught 6,000 times and get away with it, what is stopping 8 million people from looting Tiffany’s every morning and Macy’s every afternoon.
New York’s looters are also largely above the law, as well: Andy Ngo: Who funds Antifa protests? We all do. “Last year, New York City agreed to pay tens of thousands to [National Lawyers Guild] members arrested in the Bronx in June 2020…The second most-asked question I’m asked is if mass far-left riots will erupt again. I can’t predict when but the answer is yes. The systems that provide legal, social and financial incentives to far-left extremists, no matter how violent they are, have become better funded following 2020.”
The FBI and federal prosecutors announced Monday the arrests of two New York residents who allegedly ran an undisclosed Chinese government police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.
Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping have each been charged with conspiring to act as agents of China’s government, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for that office, said China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) “has repeatedly and flagrantly violated our nation’s sovereignty, including by opening and operating a police station in the middle of New York City.”
“Two miles from our office, just across the Brooklyn Bridge, this nondescript office building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in Lower Manhattan has a dark secret. Until several months ago, an entire floor of this building hosted an undeclared police station of the Chinese National Police,” Peace said. “Now, just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing. It would be unthinkable.”
Tucker Carlson, the Fox News television host and provocateur, has a new documentary coming out, and its central question is whether the United States should liberate Canada from tyranny, as it attempted to do in Libya and Iraq.
The rest of the book describes the sad decline in the culture of the Bureau. [Author, the former FBI agent Thomas Baker] traces it to 9/11.
The Director at that time was Robert Mueller who years later supervised the investigation of Donald Trump for allegations of colluding with the Russians – allegations that were ultimately shown to be as groundless as they were explosive. He and his counterpart at the CIA were summoned to the White House to brief President George W. Bush days after the 9/11 attack.
Mueller explained to the President what the Bureau was doing to identify the perpetrators – exactly what the Bureau was supposed to do. Frustrated with Mueller and understandably still upset by the horrific terrorism, Bush snapped that he just wanted to make sure it didn‘t happen again.
The CIA Director then told Bush what his agency was doing to make sure it didn’t.
Mueller left humiliated. His take-away was that the Bureau needed to shift focus toward intelligence-gathering even if it meant sacrificing resources for law enforcement. The Bureau became less cops and more spies.
Mueller’s successor was the notorious James Comey, whom Baker calls a “charlatan” whose tenure as Director was a “disaster” for the Bureau. Baker is indisputably right, even if you consider only the Bureau’s reputation.
She served on that committee until early March. Then finally, after six weeks away recovering from shingles, her California colleague, Rep. Ro Khanna, publicly called for her resignation. Democrats like Khanna had grown weary — between Feinstein and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the party’s judicial agenda had been stalled since the top of March.
Hours after Khanna’s tweet, she asked to be temporarily replaced in her duties on the essential committee. Democrats are eager to comply.
But are Republicans so eager? They shouldn’t be. There’s zero reason — zero — that Republicans should cooperate with Schumer and the president on their judicial agenda, either tactically, politically, or even morally.
Republicans have the power, too: Committee assignments are decided at the beginning of the session, either by unanimous consent or, if contested, by the vote of at least 60 senators. Democrats certainly hope they can just brush this through under the former, but what reason does Sen. Josh Hawley, or maybe Sen. Mike Lee, or Sen. J.D. Vance have to let that one pass them by?
Then if one senator says no, the whole thing’s got to come to a vote, and while people like Sen. Mitt Romney might be happy to fill benches with left-wing judges in the name of “decency” or some other principle long ago extinguished by left-wing activists, getting nine other Republicans to join him might prove more difficult.
That’s absolutely true. So how quickly will the GOP cave?
I like both DeSantis and Trump, but the numbers are the numbers. Granted, DeSantis has not yet announced he’s running, and that could scramble to board considerably, but it could scramble it either way. The Florida governor’s interview with Piers Morgan was not impressive. He will have to come across a lot stronger and with more stature if he’s going to defeat Trump.
As far as why Trump is polling better against than Biden now as opposed to 2020, the reasons should be obvious. Biden is an unpopular incumbent who can no longer hide in his basement. Biden is president now, and his every appearance is a reminder of how dumb, frail, and dishonest he is.
What’s more, he’s doing a terrible job: energy prices, inflation, open border, war fever in Ukraine, mutilating children to appease his transvestite base…
Something else that could scramble the board are all the tripwires Democrats and the corporate media have in place for Donald Trump. More indictments from fascist Democrat prosecutors in states like Georgia are likely.
The potential of a trial in New York early next year followed by a guilty verdict from a rigged jury… Who knows how the public will react?
Ultimately Trump’s fate will not be decided by a Soros-backed prosecutor in New York, or one in Georgia, or by Jack Smith, who is attempting to build and obstruction case against Trump. The point here is not to “serve justice” but to prolong and publicize, and thereby block out any other candidate that may pose a stronger opponent to the current President.
Trump’s fate will be decided by GOP primary voters. They can choose to rally around Trump and ride him into the general election, with the backing of the Democrats and the media, or they can finally decide the drama and the chaos are all too much, and turn the page.
Trump’s fate, and the fate of 2024, is ultimately only up to them. It just depends on how much they love or hate the show the media is putting on for them, once again.
Last month, Ed Morrissey wrote, “As one of my colleagues put it on Twitter, you might personally like Trump and think he got the shaft in 2020. But do you want to spend a general election campaign talking about payoffs to Stormy Daniels and ‘stop the steal’ efforts in Fulton County? Especially if a viable and proven alternative is at hand? That’s why DeSantis is running, and why he always was going to run in this cycle.”
Harvey Weinstein and then-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton arriving to the New York premiere of ‘Finding Neverland’ at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York on October 25, 2004. Brooklyn, New York. (Rex Features via AP Images.)
“I told you — my plan is to run again,” he said. You have to know that there’s likely all kinds of lobbying going on behind the scenes to get him to back off. If they think they can go four more years like this, they’re delusional. Heck, I’m not even sure he can finish his term before his deterioration becomes too much for them to cover up anymore.
But in a final shot for one last embarrassing moment, before he left Ireland, he spoke about what he discovered about his family when looking at the genealogical records, and he managed to insult his Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in the bargain.
He said he learned “some interesting things” — “but, look, we all came from somewhere, unlike my Secretary of Interior, but, uh anyway…”
How nice that he can do genealogical research on his family on our time and dime. Most Americans are trying to figure out how to pay for gas and stretch their income to meet all of their expenses. Meanwhile, this guy — who is supposed to be serving us — is using our money to entertain himself.
But I think the thing that stood out there was how he seemed to be dissing his Interior Secretary. She didn’t come from anywhere? What does that even mean? Did she drop out of the sky? Was she born out of the mouth of the volcano like Pele, the Hawaiian goddess? Maybe she just sprouted up from the ground or popped out of the head of a unicorn.
You have to speak “Biden-ese” to know what he’s saying there. He’s making a left-handed reference to the fact that she’s Native American. But Joe, that’s “somewhere.”
The road to our current impasse began with the “anti-art” movement of Dadaism. For with Dada, the brash energy of the avant-garde was short-circuited, flipped on its head. Dada did not seek to provide yet another fresh answer to the question, “What’s new?” On the contrary, Dada sought to subvert the entire context in which the question gained urgency. That the extreme strategies of Dada, too, were quickly incorporated as part of the metabolism of art.
From this perspective, Dada, and every subsequent innovation, by definition, appears as a variation on an already defined theme: an anti-theme, really, whose very negativity provides a foil for the ceaseless play of novelty. But in fact, the incorporation of Dada into the fabric of the avant-garde did have consequences. For one thing, Dada altered the tenor of the avant-garde. Dada might seek to occupy extreme points, but it did so out of a systematic contrariness: it had no ambition “to attain for an hour that crest of the wave in a tossing sea,” as the French critic Albert Thibaudet put it, because it had given up on the whole idea of art as a spiritual quest. Indeed, Dada was an art form that had given up on art.
Consider: in 1914, Marcel Duchamp dusted off a commercial bottle rack and offered it, tongue firmly in cheek, to the public as art. The public (at least the taste-making part of it) swooned with delighted outrage. In 1917, Duchamp upped the ante. He scrawled the name “R. Mutt” on a urinal, baptized it “Fountain,” and said (in effect) “How about it?” What a delicious scandal ensued. How original! How innovative! But also how destructive of the essential protocols and metabolism of art.
But not, it soon became clear, as destructive as Duchamp had wished. “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously some years later, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” Oh, dear.
Duchamp had wished not to extend but to subvert, to destroy, the whole category of art and aesthetic delectation. Instead, his antics polluted and trivialized it. How much of contemporary art is essentially tired repetition of gestures inaugurated by Duchamp and his immediate successors? Damien Hirst? Been there. Tracy Emin? Ditto. Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger? Ditto, ditto. As the sage of Ecclesiastes put it, there is nothing new under the sun.
Duchamp made it as far as Afghanistan though, where we tried to convince the locals of why they should buy in to the superiority of an enlightened modern Western culture that even our elites don’t take very seriously:
Questions about who and what Sentient monitors are equally persistent and also nearly unanswerable, but there are a few clues about where the program may or may not be peeking. Spy satellites, like the ones used by the NRO [the National Reconnaissance Office], are primarily meant to focus on the world beyond the United States’ borders. And unlike its fellow intelligence agencies — including the NSA and CIA — the NRO hasn’t really been caught up in major domestic-spying scandals. Its biggest recent public upset was probably about the mission patch for the launch of its NROL-39 satellite: it depicts a giant yellow octopus mouth-suctioned to Earth — to North America, actually. Tentacles encircle the planet. The words “NOTHING IS BEYOND OUR REACH” smile in an arc below the cephalopod.
Despite the patch’s sentiment, there are some places where the NRO and Sentient are generally not supposed to reach. In heaven as on Earth, laws protect American citizens from unreasonable search and seizure by their government. “Under the existing statutory regime, Sentient-driven reconnaissance should not be taking place within the US,” says Aftergood. “If it were, that would of course immediately raise privacy and civil liberties concerns, and a whole set of related questions about how that collected information was being used and stored and so on. But right now it shouldn’t be collected in the first place.”
Via Richard Fernandez, who tweets, “The Ukraine 2023 spring offensive will be the first large scale test of space dominance’s effect on ground ops. The US has clear superiority in space assets vs Russia. It will also reveal how effective downstream systems have become.”
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