ELSEWHERE IN WORLD WAR III COVERAGE: Taiwan reports nine Chinese aircraft in defense zone.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
February 24, 2022
PUTIN: WHY SHOULD CHINA HAVE AN EXCLUSIVE ON MASS BIO-WEAPONS? Ukrainian Officials Warn of Fighting in Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Russian and Ukrainian forces were fighting for control of the Chernobyl exclusion zone on Thursday evening local time, with Ukrainian officials warning that damage to nuclear storage facilities could send “radioactive dust” across Europe.
“Russian occupation forces are trying to seize the” Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Twitter post. “Our defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated….This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe.”
The Chernobyl reactor was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, when the core of the reactor melted down. Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Ministry of the Interior, wrote on Facebook that Russian forces had moved to Chernobyl from Belarus, Ukraine’s northern neighbor.
“National Guard troops responsible for protecting the storage unit for dangerous radioactive waste are putting up fierce resistance,” Herashchenko wrote, in an English translation posted by the New York Times. If an explosion punctures the encasement of the reactor, “radioactive dust could cover the territory of Ukraine, Belarus and the countries of the European Union.”
Possibly not strong enough, according to some reports: Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Captured by Russian Forces.
WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMER, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE GLOBAL WARMING: Not a parody: John Kerry warns of the carbon footprint of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
QUESTION ASKED: Is Putin’s Next Target the Baltic States?
SCHADENFREUDE OVERLOAD: Report: The Chickens Come Home to Roost for Chris Wallace. “My thought bubble on this is: What the hell did Wallace expect? Even absent the Cuomo/Zucker scandals, it wasn’t exactly a big secret how bad things were at CNN, not just from a ratings perspective but a coverage perspective. Between Brian Stelter, Jake Tapper, Don Lemon and others, they’ve been an embarrassment for years, so much so that even reliably left-wing news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post have taken to criticizing some of the decision-making and reporting styles there.”
BUT THEIR PRONOUNS ARE PERFECT: Pentagon worried the ‘Nintendo Generation’ can’t survive boot camp because their bones are weak. “The ‘Nintendo Generation’ soldier skeleton is not toughened by activity prior to arrival, so some of them break more easily.”
ROGER KIMBALL: The Ukraine debacle showcases Joe Biden’s many failures.
Speaking of economic matters, do you remember the good old days when America was energy independent, nay, when it was producing so much energy that it was actually a net exporter? Probably you do. It was was recent as 2020.
Then came the Biden administration. One of their first acts was to shut down the Keystone Pipeline, a major source of energy production, not to mention thousands of jobs in the US. At the same time, they green-lighted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to bring gas from Russia to Germany. In response to Putin’s excellent adventure in Ukraine, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz, suspended certification of the pipeline, but since Germany, having shuttered its nuclear power plants, is heavily dependent on the gas supplied from Russia, it is anyone’s guess how long German resolve will last.
I bring in gas in order to present you with this cheery data point. In 2020, when Donald Trump was president, the price of natural gas was $4.36 per 1,000 cubic feet. In 2021, with Joe Biden presiding, prices more than doubled, averaging $9 per 1,000 cubic feet. Not only does that mean that it costs more to heat your house this winter. It also means means that the US is helping to fund Russia’s military adventurism.
I am not sure that most Americans could locate Ukraine on a map. And the truth is our interest in the region is negligible. It has been important to Hunter Biden’s cash flow, it is true, and it has furnished Joe Biden with an opportunity to display his thuggishness on television, but it is a thoroughly corrupt state that is teetering on the edge of economic collapse. Some cynical commentators think that the media and The Committee are riveted on Ukraine as a way of distracting attention from such things as runaway inflation, the stock market disintegration, and the institution of police tyranny in Canada. Sounds plausible.
In any event, as my friend Roger L. Simon observed, the crisis in Ukraine is entirely on Joe Biden. We’re told that Biden’s approval rating is down to 39 percent. That’s the official number. The real number, I suspect, is in single digits.
Well, Biden still has the blue states to prop him up — oh, wait: Yikes: Just 36% rate Biden’s performance as “good” — in New York.
EVERYONE IS CONSERVATIVE ABOUT WHAT HE KNOWS BEST: USPS Shuns Biden’s EV Dreams With Massive Gasoline-Powered Mail Truck Purchase. “USPS wrote that given its financial condition, ‘the battery-electric option has a significantly higher total cost of ownership than its combustion-engine counterpart.’ USPS under DeJoy appears to be locking in decades of fossil fuel consumption as the president’s ‘Build Back Better’ green plan appears to be faltering. Gasoline mail trucks are more reliable than electric ones, and ownership is cheaper.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
February 23, 2022
OLD AND BUSTED: “The Buck Stops Here.”
The New Hotness? Republicans Pounce! GOP unites around blaming Biden for Ukraine crisis.
ROGER SIMON: CPAC—This Time It’s Serious.
I’ve attended maybe a half-dozen of them over the years, starting around 2006, when I spoke on behalf of the fledgling Pajamas Media (now PJ Media).
For the most part, I have been just another of the media grunts, roaming about, observing the scene that is part social event, part book sales festival, and part opportunity for candidates to show off their speaking skills—an audition, as it were, for whatever office they might aspire to.
Sometimes, it’s the presidency.
It’s pretty much fun, and when Donald Trump is speaking—as he will be this time—he garners more than the usual attention as he always does. It’s standing room only.
But, to be honest, the event doesn’t amount to all that much because it’s a conclave of people who largely agree with each other, applauding each other. At best, you learn a few new things at the margins, maybe make a few new friends or contacts. Nothing wrong with that, but it is what it is.
This time, it’s different. Very different.
The world is aflame—globally and domestically. From Ukraine to Canada to our home front with its open border, drugs, and crime everywhere, runaway inflation, empty food shelves, mandates, masked children, critical race theory, a president who doesn’t seem all there with a vice president whose knowledge of foreign affairs, I believe, is an embarrassment to our country and on and on, there has never, to my knowledge, been a CPAC at a moment remotely like this.
Just as I type this, I am reminded how grave the situation is by something that surfaced only hours ago. A tweet, in response to a supportive tweet for the Ukrainian people from Taiwan’s president, got this reply from the Chinese regime mouthpiece the Global Times:
“Taiwan is eager to grab attention from the Ukraine issue. But there is no dispute over Ukraine’s sovereignty despite disputes on its borders. Taiwan’s sovereignty has never existed. It’s only a matter of time that your secessionist regime will be eradicated.”
Eradicated? Taiwan? The maker of so many of our computer chips. And you thought Ukraine was dicey.
Meanwhile, our own society is more split than in any of our lifetimes. People talk about secession and even civil war.
As I said: CPAC—this time, it’s serious!
As Roger writes, “I hate to seem gloomy because I am by nature an optimist. But I would like to see us all come home from CPAC with genuine thoughts on what to do, not just an autographed copy of someone’s latest conservative book.”
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Awkward: Asked if He Underestimated Putin, Biden Stares Vacantly and Picks His Teeth.
It’s one of the most awkward twenty seconds ever captured on video in a disastrous administration that lurches from one awkward moment to another: when asked “Do you think you may have underestimated Putin?,” Old Joe Biden first continued to stare in the general direction of the question, a slight smirk on his face, expression absolutely unchanged from what it had been before the question was asked. A few seconds later he turned his head to face the camera and, after a few more seconds, grinned sardonically. A few seconds later, he began picking his teeth with his thumbnail, and then grins a bit vacantly before the video mercifully runs out. Amid all the wrong choices, erroneous policies, abject failures, and stupid missteps of this disastrous administration, it was a trivial moment, but it was a telling one.
The pilot light has gone out: Joe Rogan Says He Didn’t Vote for Biden Because He ‘Can’t Talk Right Anymore.’
FREEDOM CONVOY DONORS NAMES PUBLISHED ON GOOGLE MAPS:
Hours after the Google Maps link was posted, the tech giant removed and deleted the post containing all of the pins, citing a violation of the company’s terms of service.
As seen in screenshots of the now-deleted Google Maps post, the pins contained everything from first names and surnames to the comments left by donors, including all of the other particulars that would have identified them as citizens of Ontario.
Following the initial GiveSendGo hack, several journalists attempted to harass people who had donated money to the protest, which was legal at the time. Reporters from Canadian state-media CBC and the Washington Post were among those who solicited comments from donors to ask them why they pitched in.
Related: Um… What? Google Blocks Ads, Labels My Op-Ed on Inflation ‘Dangerous or Derogatory Content.’ “This could be a mistake. But Google has a long and alarming history of blacklisting conservative websites from its search results. And its subsidiary platform, YouTube, commonly demonetizes, restricts, or outright bans right-leaning users. It’s clearly a biased institution, even if subconsciously. More than 90 percent of political donations from Google employees go to Democrats. The company is an echo chamber where left-leaning ideas run unchecked and the few right-leaning employees are sometimes afraid to speak out. There’s almost certainly not some nefarious plot by top Google executives to throttle and ban conservatives en masse. But when you have people who all see the world in a certain way running such an influential platform and making so many subjective decisions, bias is all-but-certain to ensue.”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Recalled San Francisco School Board Member: I Hope the Asians Who Voted Me Out of Office Are Happy They’re Advancing the White Supremacist Cause.
Leftwing writer Lee Fang writes that the left is being given every warning there is that their woke agenda is absolute poison, but they seem intent on ignoring those warning signals:
Lee Fang
@lhfang
Feb 16
It’s easy to look at social media, NGOs or elite media/activists and assume wokeism is somehow popular. But every time it goes to a vote, a tsunami of opposition from regular people. Now from abolishing the police in Minneapolis to recalling the school board in SF.
Lee Fang
@lhfang
Feb 16
No one watches Fox News here. There’s no real right wing influence. The leaders of the recall are nonwhite immigrants. The media will lie nonstop about this but the fact that an overwhelming majority of Democrats recalled San Francisco’s ultra woke school board speaks volumes.
Lee Fang
@lhfangFeb 16
This volunteer says he collected over 12,000 signatures for the successful recall of San Francisco’s school board members. The backlash against woke bullshit in schools is a landslide.
We keep telling them “Life is not Twitter” and they keep answering, “OH YES LIFE IS TWITTER, AND EVEN IF LIFE IS NOT YET TWITTER, IT SHOULD BE MADE TO BE TWITTER.”
Not only isn’t America Twitter, but not even California is Twitter.
Biden is now underwater in the bluest big state — 47% approving, 48% disapproving.
In California.
And Kamala Harris? California is her home state (well… after Canada, I mean), and her approval rating there is… 38%.
* * * * * * * *
How unpopular is “this woke bulls**t”?
Unpopular enough that
The San Francisco Chronicle painted a different picture of the recall backers that gathered Tuesday night to celebrate their victory. One of the backers, David Thompson, who also reportedly goes by the name “Gaybraham” Lincoln, was described as being “dressed in head-to-toe rainbow drag and towering platform shoes.”“This is what happens when you try to rename the schools in the middle of a pandemic,” Thompson said. “We wanted to show the diversity of the community behind his recall. I knew they were going to say, ‘Oh, isn’t it just a bunch of Republicans?’ And I’m like, do I look like a Republican?”
As no one in history has ever said, until now: When you’ve lost Gaybraham Lincoln…
A high-ranking member of one of the largest teachers’ unions in California published a satirical letter Monday mocking parental calls for curriculum transparency, demanding a detailed report of the content and influences children are being exposed to at home.
Owen Jackman, a delegate to the California Teachers’ Union state council and a teacher in Sacramento City Unified School District, wrote a sarcastic Facebook post deriding parent concerns about progressive pedagogy, suggesting that parental rights are equal.
Addressing parents who advocate for their kids at school board meetings as “storm troopers,” Jackman jibed that “I have a reason to be concerned about the appropriateness of what your child is learning outside of school.”
Writing tongue-in-cheek, he requested parents provide a play-by-play of the television shows their kids watch, the social media they use, swear words and racial epithets their kids hear each day, the books being read to them, and activities they will participate in for the remainder of the year.
The teacher also asked for a “thorough description of how the relationships among the adults in your child’s life are displayed in front of your child” as well as “tallies” of the motivational vs. judgmental words said to kids in the household.
Mocking parents’ efforts to uncover the radical race and gender ideology being promoted in classrooms, Jackman warned that instructors would “set up a meeting” with parents who don’t report back.
And finally, From Mary Katharine Ham: The Parents Are Mad: An Explanation (video).
CDC WITHHOLDING COVID DATA FROM PUBLIC:
The CDC has been withholding large portions of COVID-19 data from the public.
The New York Times reports that the CDC has published only “a small sample of the data” because it fears the public would not properly understand the data, that the public is too dumb.
“The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective,” the Times reports.
In other words, if there’s proof that the vaccines against COVID are less effective than promised — as each triple-vaxxed COVID positive individual proves — you don’t deserve to know about it. So don’t ask.
Among the hidden data points are the hospitalization rates broken down by age and vaccination status, in addition to the effectiveness of booster shots. Just the important stuff.
The CDC is simply trying to help the Times in its self-stated goal to “come out with the best version of the truth.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: AOC-Led ‘Squad’ Reveals Latest Strategy Designed to Give Joe Biden Midterm Election Nightmares.
At a time when rank and file Democrats are scrambling to contain the losses that are expected to take place in November, due in part to Biden’s disastrous “leadership” and the GOP playing it smart in the messaging wars by tying vulnerable members to the soft-on-crime far-left wing, it was announced Wednesday by the Working Families Party that Rep. Rashida Tlaib – an original to the “Squad” – would be taking the unusual step of giving a response to Biden’s upcoming State of the Union address:
* * * * * * *
Though the speech won’t air on any of the major TV networks, it will be broadcast on the Working Families Party’s Facebook page, where GOP operatives will no doubt be combing for material to use in upcoming campaign ads.
As Glenn has joked, getting Tlaib and the rest of “the Squad” elected was Roger Stone’s last and greatest political dirty trick.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: US Soccer caves to baseless ‘equal pay’ outrage, settles big with women’s team.
DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: The View Lies About Justice Thomas’s Wife Being ‘Part of the Insurrection.’ “The claim that Ginni was ‘very involved in’ the January 6 riot has been debunked for a while now. Even PolitiFact found the claims ‘false.’ ‘There’s no evidence that Thomas was involved in organizing the events that unfolded on Jan. 6,’ they wrote. ‘She has not been subpoenaed by the House select committee investigating the attack and rumors that she helped organize busing for Trump supporters that day have not been supported.’”
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: These 3 major cruise lines are set to lift mask mandates as COVID cases drop.
Two major cruise lines, Royal Caribbean International and Carnival Cruise Line, have announced plans to ease onboard masking requirements in the coming weeks.
Royal Caribbean plans to drop its indoor mask requirement for fully vaccinated passengers starting Friday. Carnival Cruise Line’s new policy, which will lift mask requirements in most venues, takes effect March 1.
A third cruise line, Norwegian Cruise Line, announced earlier this month that it would let passengers ditch their face masks starting March 1.
Royal Caribbean and Carnival’s updated policies were announced shortly after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its voluntary COVID-19 program for cruise lines. Under the updated guidance, cruise lines that opt into the program can lift masking requirements if 95% of passengers and crew members are fully vaccinated or up to date with their shots.
Sure, that’s what they want you to think, when the real truth is obvious — my article from Thursday shamed Royal Caribbean so badly, they were forced to finally arouse themselves from their torpor: Fear and Loathing on the ‘Oasis of the Seas’: Cruising in the Era of COVID.
THE LONDON TELEGRAPH GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Wuhan lab leak theory ‘accepted as likely behind closed doors at No 10 [Downing Street].’
ROGER SIMON: The Ukraine Crisis Is On Biden.
Does anyone seriously believe that if Donald Trump were still sitting in the Oval Office, as perhaps he should be, Ukraine would be in the jeopardy that it is?
The Ukraine crisis is on Joseph Biden. And I’m not just talking about how he treated that country as his family’s piggy bank, with his son making a fortune off their energy giant Burisma while Joe himself threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor investigating the famously corrupt company.
Unscrupulous and immoral as that was, I’m talking about something even worse. I’m talking about how he made Ukraine a gift to Vladimir Putin.
On Jan. 20, 2020, Biden canceled presidential approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. That was followed by a slew of other actions on energy, eliminating the United States’ newly won energy independence and ability to export its surplus.
With all this, Vladimir might have fainted, if he ever does such a thing, at his good fortune.
It meant Germany, Europe’s powerhouse, as well as many other countries, would be more dependent on Mother Russia for warmth the coming winter (and many more) via the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Biden is now suddenly threatening to cut off that pipeline should Russia invade Ukraine. It’s unclear how he would do it. How long such a threat would last in the cold of a European winter isn’t hard to guess.
Whether his energy policies are the most destructive of his administration is moot. There are so many.
But it does rival the chaotic departure from Afghanistan that left behind billions in modern armaments for the Taliban, an intact Bagram Air Base with one of the longest military runways in the world as easy pickings for the Chinese (their nuclear development facility a mere hour away), plus untold thousands of our citizens and allies stranded in that most primitive of locations, and the women in the hands of some of the most misogynistic people on Earth.
As for Keystone XL, Biden backed up his ruling by similarly withdrawing presidential support this January for the Greek–Israeli pipeline. It would have helped fuel Europe while simultaneously aiding the economy of two supposed U.S. allies. (Let’s not even go into what kind of ally Biden really is to Israel, given his evident desperation to rejoin a renewed Iran nuclear deal. The only thing that may be saving him is the Iranians themselves seem to be uninterested in any kind of deal, just in stalling.)
Biden claimed to be ending support for both pipelines for environmental reasons. Does he really believe that?
Flashbacks:
● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?
● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.
● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”
Exit quote: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”
In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada says freedom is not unlimited and the Ottawa trucker convoy showed an ‘ugly side of freedom.’
You went full Ingsoc, Globe and Mail. Never go full Ingsoc.
(Link safe; goes to the Blaze.)