Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
October 22, 2024
WELL, NOT WHEN MUCH OF OUR GOVERNING CLASS IS ON THE CHINESE PAYROLL: A Larger Navy is Not in the Cards. “Should the Great Pacific War come in the next decade—which I believe has a better than even chance—we will either have to decide to pass on the fight and resign ourselves to decline, or fund the fight that will find ourselves as bankrupt as the British Empire was in 1945, with a decline to follow. These debt levels simply are not economically, culturally, or morally sustainable.”
DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Only 8% of faculty will vote for Trump: survey.
IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’RE PRAYING GRANDMAS: FBI urged to investigate Columbia student group for allegedly endorsing violence.
OUR AGE IN A NUTSHELL:
Who would have guessed that you'd wake up one day and find that all the conspiracy theories have turned out to be true.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) October 20, 2024
CHARLIE MARTIN NEEDS HELP: I’ve donated $500.
THE NEXT U.S. PRESIDENT MUST TREAT CENSORSHIP AS A TRADE BARRIER AND RESPOND WITH TARIFFS: Race to the Censorship Bottom.
AMY WAX UPDATE: Suspended Penn Law Professor Says She Has No Regrets. They used a lot of adjectives to describe what she said about their affirmative action programs, but I don’t remember them actually showing that it was incorrect.
DON’T GET COCKY, KIDS: Roger Kimball: Why Kamala Harris will lose: There will be no Covid to save Democrats this time. Nor will there be an ‘October surprise’ damaging enough to neutralize Trump.
When you look back on the 2024 presidential election and try to understand why it was that Kamala Harris lost, there are a few things to remember. The first is that the two most important issues for American voters were the border and the cost of living.
By “the border” I do not just mean the incomplete physical barrier along our southern frontier. That structure is merely the objective correlative of a policy that has its roots in such lofty ideas as sovereignty, the meaning of citizenship and national identity.
After her coronation as the Democratic candidate in late July, Harris began to squirm and prevaricate about her appointment by Joe Biden as the “border czar.” But we have the phrase in black and white in the record of the appointment. Indeed, looking after the border was one of her main responsibilities. She failed miserably.
Millions — literally millions — of illegal immigrants poured into the country during the Biden-Harris regime. Many thousands of those millions are dangerous criminals. As I write, in late September, data from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement has revealed that, of the nearly 7.5 million people who have been slated for removal but have not been detained by ICE, 425,431 are convicted criminals and 222,141 have pending criminal charges.
Of those, 62,231 have been convicted of assault, 14,301 have been convicted of burglary, 56,533 have drug convictions, 13,099 have been convicted of homicide, and 15,811 have sexual assault convictions.
Meanwhile, Senator Josh Hawley, in a 2022 confirmation hearing with the proposed director of the TSA, asked him about the fact that the TSA accepts an arrest warrant or a detention order as a valid form of identification for illegal immigrants seeking to travel by air. Think about that the next time you are palpated by an excited TSA agent. . . .
It is not close. Donald Trump will crush Harris-Walz in November. The voter rolls are not pristine, but they are much cleaner now than they were in 2020.
I suppose that another sniper’s bullet might put an end to Trump’s part in the campaign before November 5. But even that would guarantee that Harris-Walz would lose by an even bigger margin than they would have otherwise. As I have observed elsewhere, in 2016 Trump was allowed to take office but never really allowed to take power. Nevertheless, he presided over an astonishingly successful term, marred only by the advent of Covid.
There will be no Covid to save Democrats this time. Nor will there be an “October surprise” damaging enough to neutralize Donald Trump. The public knows him too well to be shocked by another Stormy Daniels or Russia collusion fantasy. Surrounded by serious and talented people like J.D. Vance, his running mate, RFK Jr., who abandoned his own campaign to support Trump, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk and other business leaders, Donald Trump’s campaign will be like Patton’s Third Army racing across France in 1944.
Well, then, don’t run out of gas.
GOOD WAY TO ATTRACT BLUE-COLLAR MALE VOTERS: Kamala Harris’s Far-Left ‘Climate Engagement Director’ Accuses Oil and Gas Workers of Committing ‘Ecoterrorism,’ Weaponizing ‘White Supremacy’ and ‘Toxic Patriarchy.’
WHY NOT, NOBODY CARES WHAT BIDEN SAYS ANYMORE: Did Arab Nations Give Israel a Green Light to Attack Iranian Regime?
THAT’S TYPICAL: Ilya Shapiro: With SCOTUS, the Statistics Belie the Vibe: The Left laments a political Supreme Court, but it’s the liberal justices who vote in lockstep. “For the moment, the Left is only convincing itself. The Court’s approval rating is now higher than it was before it overturned Roe v. Wade, though the partisan gap has never been greater. Moreover, at a time of historically low institutional trust, the judiciary enjoys more public confidence than any other part of the federal government and significantly more than the media organizations that amplify most attacks against it.”
To be fair, nowadays people trust gas station sushi more than they trust those media organizations.
THE GIFT THAT KEEPS GIVING: I gathered all the 🔥 memes about Trump and McDonald’s because America needs this.
Meanwhile, a friend writes: “What was great is how decent he is to people off the cuff. One of the people in the drive through line thanked him for looking out for ordinary people and he said you’re not ordinary. Kamala couldn’t fucking script that if she and Hollywood tried.”
Plus: “Saw a clip of Kamala saying yes she worked at McDonald’s and then she shit on them for a McDonald’s job not supporting a family.”
Related: Harsh, but not unfair.
PLAUSIBLE:
Sixth Woman Added To Cast Of 'The View' https://t.co/zOGYzZDrPc pic.twitter.com/h7557tHIFG
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 21, 2024
Related: Smart Targeting: Tim Walz Targets ‘Male’ Voters in Gabfest with Liberal Ladies of ‘The View.’
October 21, 2024
WHAT DID COMMUNISTS USE BEFORE CANDLES? ELECTRICITY! Cuba’s Government Struggles to Restore Power After Nationwide Blackout: Electricity outages have paralyzed an already-crippled economy, leading to shortages of everything from cash to running water; ‘it’s just like a war economy.’
Millions of Cubans have been without electricity for days as the government struggled to restore nationwide power service after a massive blackout plunged the country into darkness on Friday. Then Hurricane Oscar hit the eastern tip of the island on Sunday.
The collapse of Cuba’s aging power grid has paralyzed an already-crippled economy, with rolling outages affecting everything from running water to the operation of banks, ATMs or debit-card terminals, sparking severe shortages of cash and halting distribution of basic goods and services such as drinking water, residents say.
Millions of Cuban households are seeing their food spoil because of a lack of refrigeration, and people can’t use air conditioning, fans or electric stoves on the tropical island. Cooking gas is also scarce.
In some impoverished districts of the capital Havana, residents are resorting to cooking with coal or firewood on streets and sidewalks. Driving is risky because traffic lights don’t work, residents say. Public transport has also been severely affected because of fuel shortages.
“It’s just like a war economy,” said Clemente Morgado, an Havana resident whose house was without electricity for more than 30 hours. Elsewhere in the city people have gone more than two days without power. At night, many of them have been banging pots in protest, residents say.
The government on Friday declared a state of emergency and halted all nonvital services. It ordered the closure of schools and universities, bars and nightclubs and nonessential workplaces. Hospitals and food-processing centers were permitted to operate, while most state workers were sent home. Authorities required the setup of worker brigades to protect government facilities and prevent looting.
Worker brigades. I might be a tad worried about them if I were in charge there.
OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.
HAHA: Put it under a hospital and Israel can’t bomb it, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take it out by other means.
IDF just went It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on Lebanon and told everyone where Hezbollah's millions of dollars in cash and gold are hidden. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/rdr0O0yvUv
— The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome (@TheMossadIL) October 21, 2024
“There are hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold inside the bunker right now.”
PRESERVING DEMOCRACY, I GUESS:
🚨 Kamala is SICK & EVIL
This is disturbing
Meet the real Kamala pic.twitter.com/V71qLIk0ff
— Terrence K. Williams (@w_terrence) October 21, 2024
JOHN HINDERAKER: News from an Alternative Universe.
WILL THE HPV VACCINE PUT AN END TO THIS TREND? Throat Cancer Is Becoming an Epidemic, And Oral Sex May Be Why. The absolute risk is still comparatively low. “Behavioral trends studies show that oral sex is very prevalent in some countries. In a study that my colleagues and I conducted in almost 1,000 people having tonsillectomy for non-cancer reasons in the UK, 80 percent of adults reported practicing oral sex at some point in their lives. Yet, mercifully, only a small number of those people develop oropharyngeal cancer. Why that is, is not clear. The prevailing theory is that most of us catch HPV infections and are able to clear them completely. However, a small number of people are not able to get rid of the infection, maybe due to a defect in a particular aspect of their immune system.”
THIS ACCOUNTS FOR THE SUFFERING INVOLVED IN A “MAN COLD.” Men and Women Use Different Pain Relief Pathways, New Study Shows.