WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? NFL announces international market partnerships: Rams in China, Buccaneers in Germany, Dolphins in Spain.

To paraphrase Glenn from earlier this month, the WTA has more balls than the NFL — and the NBA: Peng Shuai: WTA suspends tournaments in China over concerns for tennis player.

UPDATE: NFL map endorses CCP’s claim that Taiwan is part of China.

(Updated and bumped.)

BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: New York Times columnist implores Biden not to run for reelection: ‘Alarmingly incoherent.’

Times columnist Bret Stephens on Tuesday implored President Biden to not seek reelection in 2024 and announce his intentions as soon as possible so potential Democratic contenders could begin making preparations to replace him.

In a piece headlined, “Biden Should Not Run Again — and He Should Say He Won’t,” Stephens, a conservative* and strong critic of Donald Trump, argued that Biden’s age, as well as his seemingly “uneven” cognitive state, needed to be candidly discussed because it wasn’t healthy for him, his office, the Democratic Party, or the country to remain in limbo about what to do if he decides not to run.

Stephens also argued it would be “liberating” for Biden’s presidency if he announced he wouldn’t run, and that it would energize a currently “listless” Democratic Party.

Flashback: “No question, I’d vote Biden-Warren. If the republic could survive Henry Wallace and Spiro Agnew as vice president, we should be OK with Warren. And yes, I realize that, more than in most campaigns, the vice-presidential spot really matters this time around.”

—Bret Stephens, Facebook, June 9th, 2020.

* ‘Repeal the Second Amendment,’ Bret Stephens writes, noting that “I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.”

FINALLY: Two major airline CEOs question the need for masks on planes.

JOHN PODHORETZ: Build Back Better’s freeze puts the bow on Biden’s very bad year.

The last time Washington gave off these particular vibes — an out-of-control economy with top-down policy solutions that only made things worse and a depressed and withdrawn foreign policy that only emboldened our adversaries — I had a full Jewfro atop my head and was watching “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island” at home on Saturday nights because I couldn’t get a date to go to the disco with me.

I’m getting old, is what I’m saying, and “West Side Story” isn’t the only convincing remake I’ve seen. All this hearkens directly back to 1979-1981, the late Carter years and the peculiar emotional combination of confusion, powerlessness and rage that seemed to emanate from the liberal ruling class when its off-the-shelf answers to pressing questions just didn’t assure anyone that they knew what they were doing.

Biden’s championing of a bill initially designed to spend $6 trillion ate up his party’s legislative attention for nearly six months. Build Back Better declined in size but never ascended in approval, no matter the propagandistic efforts to claim its provisions were popular — just so long as nobody was asked how much the provisions they liked would actually cost.

It doesn’t really matter why Biden went down this stupid path. It doesn’t matter whether he had an idea about solidifying his party’s progressive base in the way Donald Trump solidified his party’s conservative base. Or maybe it was because third-rate newsmagazine historians and bestselling pop biography toadies came to the White House sucking their “PBS NewsHour” thumbs and swelling his head with comparisons to FDR and LBJ and whatever other three-initialed liberal gods they might have invoked to cloud what little reason Biden might have left.

However, Build Back Better’s freeze is a bit of battlefield prep for the midterms:

THIS IS CNN: Nevada mother arrested last year for pimping out her underaged daughter to CNN producer.

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Nancy Pelosi Says She Has No Idea Why Violent Crime Has Spiked and I Have Thoughts. “She knows. They all know. But they’re loath to admit it. Because if they did they’d have to take responsibility for their own culpability in fostering an anti-police atmosphere that has emboldened violent criminals in big cities all across the country to do what they do. In the process, scores of people have been victimized, some violently so and others, tragically, were killed as a result.”

Flashback to last year: Then-Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf: Nancy Pelosi’s ‘stormtrooper’ comment on fed agents is ‘absurd,’ ‘dangerous.’

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Please enjoy this supercut of Joe Biden repeatedly saying a word that does not exist in the English language. “Fact check Joe Biden: ‘expodentially’ isn’t a word.”

Malarky! It’s in the Urban Dictionary, after all:

ROGER SIMON: Good News: Parents Reluctant to Give COVID Shot to Their Kids.

Dr. Robert S. Malone, has advised against giving the vaccines to anyone under 65—5 to 11 is a long way from that—because it is a new medical technique and we do not know enough yet about its long-range side effects.

One of those, of special importance to the young, is what the vaccines may ultimately do to their ability to procreate.

No wonder a fair number of parents are reluctant.

Many of these same parents may have taken the shot themselves, either out of choice or because they were forced to by their employers. But they drew the line at their kids.

This has a telling similarity to the controversies surrounding our educational system where parents (especially the moms) are protesting the pervasive and rapidly-expanding bias exemplified by critical race theory.

There too, it was and is about the kids.

The left—in its alacrity to adopt what Mark Levin calls “American Marxism” and I would term, more cynically, “The Communism of the Rich”—has evidently gone too far by taking aim at the children.

This reluctance to vaccinate kids is good news (for now), but we are still very much in the midst of a struggle. The Biden administration has limitless funds and when their propagandistic government commercials appear seemingly every fifteen minutes on Fox and Newsmax, you know it is far from over. It’s only just begun.

Further, in some states and locales these vaccines may be administered without parental permission, a “happy accident,” so to speak. (“Oh, gee, we didn’t realize…”). Beware.

This is a battle for the hearts and minds of America, even more than during the Vietnam War when we first heard that expression. Then the communism, for the most part, was outside. This time it is inside.

As Bethany Mandel writes, “There’s some part of all Americans that understands that we are living in some sort of absurd simulation. Kids in schools are masked all day, often in ineffective and dirty cloth masks, while adults are shoulder to shoulder in bars, restaurants and sporting events. Where I live in Montgomery County, kids are still playing outdoor soccer in masks, and our county executive is hinting at what is essentially permanent masking requirements, as are already in place in Oregon. But like in Oregon, the politicians passing such regulations aren’t scared enough of Covid to follow the rules they’ve imposed upon us all. In the last month alone, four members of the Montgomery County Council have been spotted at indoor public events where masks were removed (I documented it here on Twitter).”

WHO DOESN’T LIKE DOGS? Islamic Republic of Iran considers nationwide ban on ‘unclean, un-Islamic’ dogs.

RIDICULE IS MAN’S MOST POTENT WEAPON: Adam Carolla mocks the Covid tyrants.

There’s some part of all Americans that understands that we are living in some sort of absurd simulation. Kids in schools are masked all day, often in ineffective and dirty cloth masks, while adults are shoulder to shoulder in bars, restaurants and sporting events. Where I live in Montgomery County, kids are still playing outdoor soccer in masks, and our county executive is hinting at what is essentially permanent masking requirements, as are already in place in Oregon.

But like in Oregon, the politicians passing such regulations aren’t scared enough of Covid to follow the rules they’ve imposed upon us all. In the last month alone, four members of the Montgomery County Council have been spotted at indoor public events where masks were removed (I documented it here on Twitter).

We should be able to point and laugh at this absurdity: kids in preschools and daycares are required to be masked, but at a legislative breakfast in the ballroom of a large local chain hotel, all of the adults could remove their masks because there was food in front of them. What would it take to unmask toddlers here? Maybe we can convince them to hold their sippy cups and an animal cracker all day; because we know that food and drink somehow neutralizes the airborne virus.

I’m joking, of course, but this is all a joke. None of it makes sense. We should all be openly mocking the ridiculous world we’ve been forced to live in by hypocritical bureaucrats attending networking events and parties unmasked while lecturing us about how dangerous this virus is. It’s nice to see Carolla doing so. Here’s hoping he starts a trend and inspires other so-called comedians to take aim as well.

Jay Leno is one of his guests — I’m sure he enjoys performing in front of an audience again:

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Twitter to Penalize Users Who Claim Vaccinated People Can Spread Covid-19.

That could mean rather a lot of bannings: CDC report shows vaccinated people can spread COVID-19.

UPDATE: Airbrush alert:

(Updated and bumped.)

BUSTED: Adam Schiff Caught Doctoring J6 Text Messages Between Republicans.

JEN PSAKI WANTS TO BEAT BIG MEAT! “Anyway, as I was explaining: If we have Big Tobacco and Big Oil and Big Tech and all these other Big Industries that are supposedly so evil, this particular conglomerate must be called Big Meat. And the WH press secretary wants to defeat it. So that’s why I say: Jen Psaki wants to beat Big Meat. Why, what did you think I meant?” Jim Treacher asks innocently…

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Forget Kamala Harris’ likability, she’s can’t even do her job. “Anyone daring to suggest the obvious, that Harris is not good at her job, is met with insults. In November, Jimmy Kimmel said Harris’ low approval ratings were due to sexism and racism. It’s a layer of protection around an inadequate leader if pointing out her flaws is not allowed. But Democratic voters had made the same call in 2020 and Harris was forced to drop out of the presidential race before the Iowa caucuses. Maybe they knew first what we all know now.”

QED: ‘How do I know it’s actually working?’ Kamala Harris really inspires confidence in her ability to fulfill new role as Biden’s electric vehicle ambassador.

‘SENATOR KAREN:’ ELON MUSK JUST DESTROYED ELIZABETH WARREN. “As for the implication that he’s a fraud, Musk simply replied, ‘Stop projecting!’ with a link to a Fox News article detailing Elizabeth Warren’s long history of falsely claiming to be a Native American. Suffice it to say that Warren’s antipathy for Musk has no valid justification. He pays all the taxes he legally owes, and it’s highly misleading to look exclusively at income taxes when so much of his wealth and earnings come from capital gains and other alternative streams. Regardless of how much Musk pays in taxes, he has made massive advancements in space exploration and paved an electric vehicle revolution that will do exponentially more to help the United States reduce carbon emissions than Warren’s virtue-signaling ever will. Elizabeth Warren should never have picked a fight with Elon Musk. He absolutely destroyed Sen. Karen and reminded the world she is the real fraud and freeloader.”

“DEFUND IN HASTE, REPENT AT LEISURE:” Frisco mayor: By golly, what this city needs is “aggressive” policing instead of “bull****.”  “In a July 31, 2020, statement, Breed said that she was seeking to divert more than $100 million from the San Francisco Police Department to social justice programs.”

San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964.

QUESTIONS ASKED: How bad is the current inflation and when will it abate?

I hate inflation, but there’s something delicious about the fact that this problem, above all others, is responsible for the low esteem in which voters currently hold Joe Biden and his party. Inflation is reality’s “F-you” to a central element of liberal hubris — the view that the government can do whatever the hell it wants by way of spending, energy policy, etc. and suffer no bad economic consequences.

Lyndon Johnson found that out as well, as Amity Shlaes wrote in her 2019 book, Great Society:

But an alarm that had only recently begun to ring told [voters] something was wrong and getting wronger by the day. The Consumer Price Index was rising 3 percent annually, significantly when compared with the old rate, which had hung somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent. The recent economic boom, as Senator Russell Long of Louisiana pointed out, was not always a boom for the “little fellow.” Inflation offset the gains of growth. The purchasing power of weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers had actually gone down in 1966 and 1967.15 Perhaps the money trouble signified not a general shortage but simply that the government had grown too large for itself.

And by 1968, Johnson found, Congress was ready to challenge the Administration on money. There was, said Senator Alan Bible of one of the old gold states, Nevada, a “growing mistrust of currencies, and when such mistrust exists, people of the world will turn to minerals of value, namely gold and silver.” From France, Charles de Gaulle kept up the mockery. In the United States, those away from government work were also frank. One economist in the private sector, a Wall Street forecaster named Alan Greenspan, revived the old, pre-Roosevelt point: a true gold standard was the only thing that could keep a government fiscally honest. Greenspan was a fan and friend of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. In The Objectivist, Rand’s periodical, Greenspan wrote that American overspending wasn’t strength or a wartime phenomenon; it was predictable. A welfare state, which was what the United States had become, always overcommitted. “The welfare statists,” Greenspan said, were always “quick to recognize that if they wished to retain power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e. they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds. . . . Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.” Another expert safely out of reach of Johnson, at the National Bureau of Economic Research, was Arthur Burns. Greenspan was just one economist; Burns, who headed the NBER, was the voice of the entire economics profession, independent and proud. Back in the 1950s, he had warned that “the problems of inflation will return to haunt us.” It had been Burns who back in 1960 had warned the presidential candidate Richard Nixon—correctly, as it turned out—that tight monetary policy at the Fed was slowing growth and could cost Nixon the election. Lately, Burns had been charging that Lyndon Johnson’s brand of prosperity featured serious “perils of inflation.” Burns, like Greenspan, pointed to the costs of the butter, not the guns. To attribute the recent large increases in the budget, and certainly future increases, to the costs of war, Burns said, frankly, was “a misconception.” The anti-poverty programs were the problem—a good share of them, as Burns told the New York Times, were “pure waste.” Precisely because they were outsiders, Greenspan and Burns could speak truth to power. Johnson was trading in the Great Dollar for the Great Society, and it was a lousy trade.

On the appropriate date of April 1^st, the New Yorker asked, “Is Biden Really the Second Coming of FDR and LBJ?”

Add the above passage from Shlaes to the 2015 headline, “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate,” and Biden already seems a shoe-in to be the equal of both men!

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING IN THE CARTER ERA: Johnson Smith’s Fun Catalog for 1979.

BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Eighteen ‘Offensive’ Words You Can’t Say In Canada. “What are these words? They are as follows: ‘Ghetto; sell someone down the river; blackmail; brainstorm; savage; gypped; pow wow; tribe; spooky; black sheep; blind spot; blindsided; first world problem; spirit animal; tone deaf; lame; grandfathered in; crippled.’ Say what?”

(Classical reference in headline.)

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS, AND HEY, THAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T WRITE ITSELF, YOU KNOW: ESPN Lies Again: Claims Someone Put Noose in Bubba Wallace’s Stall.

ESPN tweeted out a clip on Tuesday with the caption “Last year, a noose was found in Bubba Wallace’s stall at Talladega Superspeedway” to promote an upcoming E:60 special. That, of course, is a lie.

* * * * * * * *

ESPN even admitted it wasn’t a noose in June 2020, in a report headlined, “FBI says rope had been in Talladega garage since October; Bubba Wallace not victim of hate crime.”

So ESPN lied, hoping its viewers had forgotten about the story’s outcome.

The truth is, ESPN has been lying about stories to frame black people as victims of white people for over a year. Here are just a few incidents:

Read the whole thing.

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH THE FRENCH ARE A VOICE OF SANITY: France Rejects U.S.-Inspired ‘Wokeism’ on Race and Gender Issues.

THIS IS TRUE IN RURAL TEXAS AS WELL: Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID. Outside the world inhabited by the professional classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over.

UPDATE: People say they’re canceling their subscriptions over The Atlantic’s ‘No One Cares About COVID’ piece. “This phenomenon itself is extremely scary. These people have so much difficulty processing a fact that most of America isn’t worried about something they are, that they lash out. These are the people for whom policy was targeted to in 2020.”

(Updated and bumped.)

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF TOLERANCE FOR DIVERSITY: Delivery driver ran over groceries after seeing home’s pro-police sign, officials say.

DISPATCHES FROM THE APOGEE: Victor Davis Hanson in January of 2016 On Hating the West, Inc.:

What explains these hypocritical and incoherent attacks on the West? The answer is important because it reminds us not to take too seriously the agendas of 20-something campus critics of white privilege and those protesting against micro-aggressions and demanding safe spaces and trigger warnings.

No civilization in history has been more leisured, affluent, or self-critical than the contemporary United States and Europe, Westernized Asia, and the British Commonwealth of Nations. Globalization has made former millionaires billionaires and near millionaires multimillionaires; among them are those who run universities, the media, foundations, Wall Street, politics, and the arts, whose influence far outweighs their relative small numbers.

At some point, for the Western elite class, the acquisitive dreams of the past become the banalities of the present, as luxury cars, penthouses, and vacation homes only remind the guilty how blessed they are, whether through inheritance, the power of trillion-dollar investments, or the global market of 6 billion people. For many of our elites, trashing their culture and heritage offers a sort of medieval penance that lets them alleviate guilt without sacrificing privilege. George Soros, Al Gore, and Mark Zuckerberg often are critical of the very engines that powered them to zillionaire status. Billionaire George Lucas calls his additional multibillion-dollar buyout from Disney the work of “white slavers.” Is Lucas, then, our version of an indentured Irish immigrant, or a Balkan peasant sent in chains to Istanbul? The 1 percent hope their loud displeasures will help to square the circle of finding redemption without ceasing to satisfy their material appetites. For some, anti-Westernism is the white lace that adds something to their costly but boring outfit.

The prior month, James Lileks visited an Arizona shopping mall during his Christmas week reprieve from the brutal cold of Minneapolis and responded, “What you see is a miracle. This is the pinnacle of civilization, in its own way:”

I sound like a high schooler criticizing the snobby kids. I get that way in malls. Not in grocery stores, even though I get irritated by food snobs who will only use Madagascar vanilla in their French Toast batter. (Along with cage-free eggs and milk from cows that didn’t take BGH and ate non-gmo clover and were slaughtered with a blade sharpened on diamonds certified to be non-conflict) Grocery stores are a marvel. Daughter accompanied me to Fry’s today — walked! Three miles! Willingly! With her father! Made my day. We had a serious conversation on the way there and an amusing one on the way back. She was impressed by the store, which has everything. And of course I made to make this a Sermon.

What you see is a miracle. This is the pinnacle of civilization, in its own way. No king in the history of mankind had access to riches like this. Look — here. (picks up box of special expensive gourmet crackers) This is someone’s livelihood. Someone got a loan, started a business, hired people, paid someone to design this, because he or she wanted to make a special cracker, and here it is next to all the other special crackers, and this is just the special cracker department in the cheese department. There’s another special cracker section in the cracker aisle. He might fail, he might win, but you can do that here, you can try. And if someone says why do we need so many cracker choices, this is why. Do you want some governing Cracker Bureau to say no, don’t make crackers, make pretzels. But I don’t want to make pretzels. I want to make crackers. Sorry, we have enough crackers. But I have this new taste. SORRY.

Now apply that to everything here! And the other store that has the stuff this one doesn’t! And the other chain that carries a different line of specialty stuff!

Boris Yeltsin had the very same response when he visited a Houston supermarket in 1989; he immediately knew the Soviet Union was dead when he saw its shelves stocked to the brim. Bernie Sanders considered this a bad thing — both the abundant selection of the typical supermarket and the fall of the Soviet Union.* Or as Lindsey Graham joked in October of 2015, Sanders “went to the Soviet Union on his honeymoon,” and never came back.

Look at Yeltsin’s reaction below:

* Flashforward to December of 2021: Richard Blumenthal (D-Saigon) apparently agrees with Sanders: Sen. Richard Blumenthal Helps Conn. Communist Party Celebrate 102nd Anniversary of CPUSA.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED RESCUING MY DAUGHTER FROM HER TRANSGENDER FANTASY:

I worked hard to take back the close relationship my daughter and I had once had. I bit my tongue until it bled. I took her anger and only responded with love or walked away when I knew I would respond poorly.

I caught her in vulnerable moments and hugged her or climbed into her bed. I stopped looking at her as though she were the victim of a scheme or a monster.

I let her know that I would never stop fighting for her.  I let her see my posters from the protests I attended.  I peppered her with questions that demonstrated the illogic of the gender ideology. I happened to have funny gender-critical memes on my computer when she walked into my office. Most importantly, I held my ground. I refused to accept her delusion with compassion.

I know that I have to continue to be tenacious as the gender ideology has crept into every facet of life. But for now, I can breathe a sigh of relief.

Read the whole thing.