Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
July 27, 2024
AMONG OTHER THINGS: Athletes can expect high ozone, pollen levels at Paris Olympics.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: South Korean resort island looks to become home to space industry.
WELL, IF IT DOESN’T PEAK BEFORE THE ELECTION WE PROBABLY WON’T HEAR MUCH ABOUT IT: There Are No Good Options Left With Bird Flu. “Even with the spate of farmworker infections, the threat of bird flu to humans is, at the moment, considered low. Researchers are keeping an eye out for two red flags. The bigger one would be the virus’s ability to spread between people. All of the people who have tested positive in the U.S. were infected by exposure to sick cows or poultry, and they have not seemed to pass the virus along to anyone else. Symptoms have generally been mild, including respiratory issues, though several people have developed serious cases of conjunctivitis, or pink eye. (No one in the U.S., or globally, has died from this variant of H5N1.)”
We should hope it’s mild because the abuse of public trust by health authorities under Covid means that there will be much less public cooperation in the future. Of course, since the measures under Covid were mostly destructive and/or ineffective, maybe that’s not a bug, but a feature.
ORWELLIANISM SCIENCE: NIH kicks out scholars critical of gender identity from ‘sex and gender’ event.
DEI CANDIDATE SLAMS DEI OPPONENTS: FLASHBACK: Kamala Harris slammed DEI opponents in Florida speech: ‘You know what they’re up to.’
WELL, THE INSTA-WIFE GAINED ALMOST AN INCH IN HEIGHT AFTER STARTING BARRE AND PILATES: Does Dementia Make You Taller?
OF COURSE SHE DOES: Kamala Harris wants to keep Hamas in power.
Vice President Kamala Harris has made it clear that she wants to protect Hamas in ways that essentially would keep the terrorist organization in power in Gaza and that she will continue President Joe Biden’s policies that embolden and empower terrorists.
Harris offered a condemnation of sorts of Hamas after her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a bit of throat-clearing before she articulated her actual position that Hamas should be allowed to remain in power.
“I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done,” Harris said of a ceasefire, which would allow Hamas to remain in power after the terrorist organization has promised to carry out more massacres like the Oct. 7, 2023, one that started this war.
She then pivoted to shaming Israel. “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” Harris said. “The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”
It is clear what the implications of Harris’s position are.
Well, she needs the support of Dearbornistan in Michigan, and Little Somalia in Minnesota.
WORDS HAVE MEANINGS AND THAT’S WHY THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO BE ABLE TO USE INCONVENIENT ONES: Kamala the Language Cop: Harris Urges End to Terms ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism,’ ‘Illegal Alien.’ ‘Words have meaning,’ Harris told crowd at Islamic Center of Southern California.
LIFE UNDER LIBERAL CONFORMISM:
Liberal groupthink is the most important factor in the general-opinion environment and has been for all my life. But now, because liberal groupthink is subject to sudden eruptive enthusiasms and insanity-inducing reversals, American life proceeds with a sense that the laws of physics don’t really apply. There’s a creepy unsettledness to life in America. And it’s because journalists are lobotomizing themselves in the name of their favorite cause, the Democratic Party.
If you were a faithful believer in what the New York Times says and fell into a coma just one month ago, you went unconscious thinking that Joe Biden’s incapacity was a right-wing psyop inflicted on the gullible by unscrupulous conservatives using deceptively edited videos. One of the reasons you knew you had to believe this is because Kamala Harris is a political joke who has “has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls” and “the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president” since such measures had been taken. That was the party line: Biden’s just fine, Kamala’s terrible. Believing anything else is stupid. Less than four weeks later: Biden’s terrible. Kamala’s amazing! And if you say different, you’re a dummy.
My youth was filled with liberals at least kind of debating things among themselves. They often coalesced and converged on one opinion, but slowly. The liberal blob had predictable instinctive sentiments. You knew which side they were on if a story pitted the goal of preserving nature or art against the depredations of commerce. But there was plenty to debate. I remember dining-room-table discussions about Bill Clinton versus Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown before everyone slowly and individually resolved and reconciled themselves to Clinton’s talent. I remember some liberals slowly embracing the modern Clintonite Democratic Party and others still holding out for a party more like the one Dick Gephardt would have led, with more focus on American jobs and workers. The liberal debate over gay rights seemed like a long one. I knew one or two liberals who still vaguely associated homosexuality with the decadent rich — in their minds, the sons of privileged Republicans and Tories were gay at their prep schools; of what concern was this to liberals? Others came around to the idea of civil unions but reserved marriage to traditional couples, thinking that the conjugal nature of their relationships was distinctive. A few radicals viewed marriage itself as a heteronormative conquest of queer culture. It took time to consolidate opinion in favor of gay marriage as a matter of equality.
Now liberal opinion marches around ostentatiously like a North Korean military parade, performing impossible-seeming about-faces and quick-time maneuvers while holding bayonets up, sharply fixed. Anyone who even accidentally goes against the routine is bound to be impaled.
I’ve watched liberals converge on the opinion that anti-Chinese racism was more dangerous than the coronavirus and that the vaguely libertarian Silicon Valley people who were concerned about it were kind of racist. Then, almost overnight, they converged on the opposite opinion, that the coronavirus was a threat that justified the suspension of normal life indefinitely. Also, they improbably converged on the theory that it was racist to believe that the virus had emerged from a lab in Wuhan that was experimenting with coronaviruses. Somehow, because progressives believed it, it was less racist to believe that it emerged from the folklore-driven superstition and disgusting hygiene practices around Chinese wet markets.
And then, even as religious minorities were being demonized as antisocial sociopaths and killers for gathering — outside, no less — for funerals, liberal opinion instantly switched to the idea that social distancing was no longer mandatory, enormous public demonstrations (and riots) were now mandatory, and so was defunding the police.
Well, this happens when your ruling class is a monoculture.
BUT WILL THEY BE ABLE TO HOLD THE MAYO? Sinaloa Cartel co-founder ‘El Mayo’ taken into US custody.
KNOW YOUR PLACE, PEASANTS! “Look how angry the regime gets when you ask simple questions about what it’s doing.”
And Newsguard is just one of the ruling class’s enforcers.
CHRIS RUFO: J.D. Vance and the Emerging Counter-Elite.
The Vance selection is not a gambit to secure a particular demographic or region—white men are Trump’s base; Ohio is a safe red state—but an effort to cultivate an emerging counter-elite that could make the second Trump administration substantially more effective than the first.
This story is built into J. D. Vance’s biographical arc. He was the all-American kid who rose from humble beginnings to make his way in the world: the Marines; Yale Law; venture capital; a best-selling book. He learned the language of the prestige institutions, cultivated powerful patrons, and quickly climbed the ladder in academia, finance, and business. He had made it.
Then, his story takes a turn. Having entered the ranks of America’s elite, Vance became disillusioned and disenchanted with it, correctly identifying it as a force of hypocrisy and corruption. He defected—first, by parting ways with the respectable conservatism of the Beltway, and then by embracing Donald Trump.
Some have criticized this as a cynical move, but my sense is that it is the opposite. A cynic would have continued to build an elite résumé; Vance sacrificed his respectability within a certain stratum, assumed considerable risk by moving toward Trump, and, in my view, was genuinely convinced that the establishment, both Left and Right, had exhausted itself and had to be opposed.
Now, not only has Vance been selected as a vice-presidential nominee; more significantly, he has charted the path for an emerging new conservative counter-elite.
It’s time.
July 26, 2024
LEON IS GETTING LARGER: Carville Warns Dems: ‘The Ice Pick Cometh.’ “Carville sounds pessimistic because he knows how poor Harris’ political instincts are. How poor are they?, I hear you ask. Harris still has this tweet live in her feed, more than two years after Jesse Smollett got convicted a second time for concocting the ‘hoax’ that Harris called ‘a modern day lynching.’ It’s not just bad political instincts, either — Harris just looks stupid. Someone buy Carville the strongest Southern whiskey available. And take away his ice pick.”
THE NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN:
OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover finds possible signs of ancient Red Planet life.
Flashback: Why I Hope There’s No Life on Mars.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Expert Reveals Vital Survival Tip if You Unexpectedly Fall in Deep Water. “On sudden entry into cold water, our bodies react automatically to heighten our alertness and adrenaline levels due to cold water shock. That makes us gasp, hold our breath and try to swim hard until the point of exhaustion. Overriding that instinct could save your life.”
YOU WANT MORE “REACTIONARY” POLITICS? GIVE PEOPLE A LOT TO REACT AGAINST: Matt Yglesias: More immigration = more anti-immigration politics.
AT AMAZON, Military-Grade MRE Packs.
BIG BRASS ONES:
🚨BREAKING: Donald Trump to go back to Butler, Pennsylvania to hold another rally after the shooting at his last event there pic.twitter.com/Hs8QhBvP5b
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 26, 2024
Related:
🚨 BREAKING: FBI Admits Donald Trump was Shot by a Bullet:
“What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 26, 2024
This after Chris Wray made a fool of himself in front of Congress suggesting otherwise.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: Accused Salman Rushdie Stabber Also Charged with Support for Hezbollah.