VICTORIA TAFT: Washington State Democrats Want Decreased Penalties for Drive-By Shooters Because… Aw, You Guessed. “There’s woke and then there’s just plain stupid. Washington state Democrats are vying to become the best stupid they can be, bless ’em.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
December 30, 2021
COLORADO: Denver, neighboring counties, extend mask mandates. “On Tuesday, Denver, along with Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield and Jefferson counties, announced it is extending these mandates as cases of COVID-19 are rising amid the spread of the new omicron variant.”
But the science! CNN Finally Admits Cloth Masks Don’t Stop COVID (But Nobody Told Biden).
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Donald Trump Is 2021’s Man of the Year. “Another great accomplishment of Trump’s this past year was the way he kept the Democrats obsessed with him. They weren’t going to have much of a game with the babbling fool Biden in office but what little chance they had for success was completely undone by the fact that they couldn’t stop thinking about Donald Trump.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Elon Musk says SpaceX will land humans on Mars within five to 10 years.
A major determining factor in getting humans to Mars is engineering the vehicle that’ll take astronauts there. “Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that’s ever been made,” Musk said. The SpaceX CEO added that the fundamental optimization of Starship is minimizing the cost per ton to orbit and ultimately, the cost per ton to the surface of Mars.
Right now, Musk said, money is the limiting factor. “You couldn’t fly to Mars for a trillion dollars. No amount of money could get you a ticket to Mars,” he said.
Starship is supposed to radically change the affordability part of the equation by eventually creating “the ability to deliver ~100 T of cargo to any planetary surface in the solar system for as little as $50m including refilling tanker flights.”
SAME: The CDC No Longer Considers Me ‘Fully Vaccinated.’ “The CDC doesn’t say this outright, but it’s very clear in their updated guidance on quarantining that they see anyone who hasn’t been boostered as being the same as an unvaccinated person.”
JAW, JAW IS BETTER THAN WAR, WAR: U.S. and Russia Agree to Talks Amid Growing Tensions Over Ukraine. “The threat of a possible invasion of Ukraine is critical leverage for Moscow, and Russian officials say the Jan. 10 talks need to focus on their proposed ‘treaty’ that demands that NATO never offer membership to Ukraine or place its forces or weapons in former Soviet states.”
There’s also this reminder from Andrew Michta at 1945:
If the demands to negotiate have a larger aim it is to divide the alliance. Most importantly, the idea that Russia would need a written treaty guarantee to forestall Ukraine or Georgia’s accession to NATO is absurd. Putin knows that so long as he occupies Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, the countries have no chance of making it into NATO, for a vote to enlarge the alliance would mean in effect a vote to go to war with Russia. Moscow’s demand that the effective status quo be confirmed by treaty is thus nothing short of an attempt to humiliate the West.
Nobody wants to go to war over Ukraine, nor should we. But nobody should underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up, either.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Matt Margolis: Why Did Biden Flip-Flop on Executive Privilege of Trump Documents? “The Biden White House now says that releasing all the Trump administration documents the J6 committee had requested ‘could compromise national security and executive privilege.'” (With the accent on “executive privilege.’)
Athena Thorne: Democrats Build Back Biased Courts With Pseudo-Retirements and Record Appointments. “With their preposterous occupancy of the White House and fragile control of the Senate, Democrats are working hard to undo the Republicans’ progress in the arena of the federal courts.”
Yours Truly: NEW BIG DOG? Arms Sale Fail Shows Chinese Strength in Cold War II. “I’ll always believe that, ultimately, communist regimes are doomed, but right now I must admit that we might be in a situation perhaps nearly as likely to lead to war — but a genuinely more dangerous war — than 1939-41.”
December 29, 2021
CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: The Royal Bank of Canada rejected our mortgage because we’re conservative. “We’ve published recordings of RBC banksters admitting to financial de-platforming. Toronto headquarters stopped our mortgage to purchase a home for freedom-oriented Canadian media, activist, and think tanks.”
IT WAS ABOUT ELIMINATING A STRONG PRESIDENT AND TRYING TO MAKE A WEAK ONE LOOK STRONG: CDC’s Rochelle Walensky just ‘said the quiet part out loud’ and admitted that for Dems, the COVID pandemic has always been about politics.
THEY WON’T BE HELD OFFICIALLY ACCOUNTABLE, BUT PARENTS ARE CERTAINLY TAKING NOTICE: School Closures Only Accomplished Harm; Teachers’ Unions Must Be Held Accountable.
DECOUPLING: China’s rising cost of business is prompting some companies to leave.
China’s personal information protection law, implemented this month, is the latest factor adding to a challenging political environment for businesses operating in the country and altering the cost-benefit analysis. While the untapped business potential of 1.4 billion consumers was once an irresistible draw, this is increasingly changing.
James Zimmerman, a Beijing-based American lawyer, said that the China market had become “less and less palatable for Western companies” because of “reputational risks of operating in an environment with extreme content censorship, and tighter regulatory conditions.”
The trade war brought politics into U.S.-China business to a much greater degree, with Beijing and Washington wielding tariffs and consumer product boycotts in their power struggle. Domestically, Beijing has launched a populist campaign against big business, effectively making the market less profitable for many companies under stricter new regulations.
Previously: China Is Becoming The Soviet Union.
COLLUSION: Why Is the World Still Accepting China’s Dishonest COVID-19 Numbers? “While the numbers in America aren’t totally accurate — folks with positive at-home tests don’t always notify health authorities, and many asymptomatic people are unaware they have the virus — official Chinese statistics are preposterous.”
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Man Becomes Jeopardy’s Top ‘Female’ Earner.
SUSTAINABILITY: U.S. home prices surge 18.4% in October.
FRANK SCHELL: Why China Got Away With It.
China has gotten away with it: businesses and industries destroyed or damaged; massive recession and unemployment; medical systems strained to the point of collapse; countries rent asunder by populism; transport systems in disarray; interruption of children’s education and development; loss of confidence in governments; rising mental illness, anger, and civil disobedience; vulnerability of the elderly and those with underlying conditions; and nearly twice as many American dead than in World War II. The full effects of COVID-19 and its variants are yet to be known.
Whether the COVID pathogen was an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or an act of Nature via infected bats or pangolins matters less than the cover up by the Chinese Politburo — delayed disclosure by months, and the persecution of medical experts who tried to tell the truth. That domestic flights in and out of Wuhan were shut down while international ones were allowed to continue speaks for itself. Did the Chinese Politburo think that China should not be the only country to suffer — and that the catastrophe should be exported and shared?
The world’s reaction to this monstrous act has thus far been relatively mild.
Read the whole, damning thing.
SKYNET BABY STEPS: Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with penny.
Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it “challenged” a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.
The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a “challenge to do”.
“Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs,” the smart speaker said.
Amazon said it fixed the error as soon as the company became aware of it.
Did some prankster at Amazon insert the “challenge” as a joke, or did Alexa come up with this all on its own?
ISN’T THIS BASICALLY HOW AL CAPONE GOT BUSTED? You Won’t Believe What the IRS Says People Must Declare as Income.
JEFF BEZOS SMILES: SpaceX’s Starship is now grounded until MARCH: FAA changes date of its environmental review to February when it was previously set to be completed by Dec 31.
How many friends does Senator Karen have in the FAA?
HOW’S THAT PERMANENT DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY COMING ALONG? The Year the “Great Realignment” Became a Death Spiral for Democrats.
2021 has been the year of the Great Realignment. Rather than a one-off, Donald Trump’s impressive gains with non-white voters have proven the harbinger of a greater shift. Republicans won two heavily Hispanic districts in the Texas State House this past November, one which went Democratic in the presidential race by 14%, the other when Democrat Ryan Guillen switched parties in a district where no Republican had ever won more than 39% of the vote. Democrats have also begun to acknowledge their peril as they have come under fire over their use of the term “Latinx.” In the meantime, they are losing voters at a speed almost unprecedented not just in American but in world history. In 2020, Joe Biden still won Latino voters by a factor of almost 2-1. As recently as this summer, polls showed that advantage falling to a 50-50 split. This fall, as Joe Biden’s polling numbers have descended to the basement, his numbers among Latinos have fallen into the Earth’s core. Recent polls have Latino voters being less supportive of Joe Biden than white voters as a whole.
t is hard to describe the scale of this shift. The last Democrat to win the white vote nationally was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, when he won 62% of white votes overall. Barack Obama in 2008 managed a mere 43%. Joe Biden did only marginally worse in 2020, garnering 42%. Marist College, in their most recent poll, finds Joe Biden around that mark among white voters, with 40% approving and 56% disapproving of his job performance. While underwater, Biden’s numbers among whites are not horrific by historical standards for a Democrat. Obama won reelection with only 39% of the white vote in 2012. But he also won overwhelming margins among non-whites, to the tune of 93% among African Americans, 72% among Latinos, and almost as much among Asians. Joe Biden, by contrast, lacks any sort of cushion. As a whole, nonwhite voters disapprove of Joe Biden by a margin of 52%-44%.
That is not a data entry error or a typographical mistake.
Read the whole thing — and don’t get cocky.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Dems Will Take an Even Harder Run at Destroying America in 2022. “Democrats are more focused on the long game than Republicans, however. Just because they’re down in the dumps at the moment doesn’t mean that they’re taking their eyes off of the various insane leftist prizes that they want.”
TEXAS: Border Wall? “Abbott seemed to talk a lot more about building the border wall than actually getting it done (Texas state bureaucracy may be more efficient than the feds, but it’s still a bureaucracy), but that may finally be changing.”