BLUE CITY PRIORITIES: Kendra Black Proposing Utensil, Condiment Opt-In for Takeout, Delivery. “At a Denver City Council committee meeting today, February 11, Black will present a proposal that would require restaurants and delivery apps to ask customers whether they want to opt in to receive single-use items such as forks, straws and condiment packets — even napkins — along with their food.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
February 16, 2021
JOANNE JACOBS: ‘Culturally responsive’ — or indoctrinated?
Originally, CTRL required teachers to “embrace and encourage progressive viewpoints and perspectives,” Will writes. “Progressive” was changed to “inclusive,” under pressure.
“CRTL would require teachers to “assess how their biases . . . affect . . . how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.)’,” he writes.
That constitutes an ideological litmus test, writes Mark Glennon on Wirepoints.
Well, yes.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Here Come the Lunatic Gun-Grabbers.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: When Joe Biden endorsed “commonsense gun law reforms,” what did he really mean?
Answer: The most radical set of eliminations, restrictions, fees, and punishments ever even considered in American history.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Democrats are holding your schools hostage For The Children™
- Fast food workers strike to eliminate their own jobs
- The Pentagon quietly just kind of admits to studying alien materials for decades
Bonus Sanity: Israel and enjoying incredible success with Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
SPOILER ALERT: YOU THERE IN YOUR NICE SUBURB OR QUIET RURAL COMMUNITY ARE ACTUALLY A TERRORIST. Pelosi Pushes Ahead With New Domestic ‘War on Terror.’
BUT IT’S OUTDOORS AND ALMOST EVERYONE IS WEARING MASKS ANYWAY: Italy won’t open its ski slopes due to virus fears.
‘FRAIDY BEAR: Why Russia Is Terrified of SpaceX — and Starlink.
What does Russia have against cheap, fast, reliable internet from space? For one thing, Russian security services object that internet operated by a foreign satellite network would be immune from surveillance under Russia’s System of Operational Search Measures legislation (“SORM”). For another, they suspect that Starlink is part of a U.S. government plot to deploy “predatory, clever, powerful, high-technology … shock and awe … to advance, above all, [American] military interests.”
Yes, seriously.
And yet, there also seems to be an economic motivation to this ban on Starlink and other satellite networks. As Ars points out, “Russia is planning its own satellite Internet constellation, known as ‘Sphere.'” And in contrast to SpaceX’s Starlink, which is a privately funded and privately built communications system, the 600-satellite Sphere constellation will be a project built and run by the Russian state under the aegis of its Roscosmos space agency. And that could be a problem.
Sphere, you see, is rumored to cost $20 billion to build, may not begin launching until 2024, and won’t be completed before 2030. Given the amount of investment required, Russia’s government certainly doesn’t want to pay for the Sphere project only to discover three years from now that all of Sphere’s potential customers have already signed up for Starlink — and that it will never recover its investment.
It seems more likely that Moscow (and Beijing, too) is worried that Starlink users will be able to circumvent state censorship.
Like Glenn, Melissa and I signed up for Starlink last week, and hope they live up to their promise to have it available in the second half of the year. We’ll be trading some of Comcast’s top speeds that we don’t really need, in exchange for slightly lower prices, no data caps (yet?), and — best of all — no more subsidizing Comcast’s basic cable channels they require us to pay for.
THIRD PARTIES RARELY GAIN TRACTION, BUT MAYBE THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT: Support for a Third Party Reaches All-Time High, Making It Likely There Is a New Coalition Forming.
BLUE CITY BLUES: Downtown San Francisco is reeling. More remote work could add to the pain.
Not only have companies realized that employees can be more productive and don’t need to be micromanaged, it allows them to recruit from a wider pool. Offering flexibility is also key to attracting talent, and not doing so puts businesses at a disadvantage, she said.
“Trust has been built. The technology is there to support it,” she said.
“Somebody doesn’t have to sit on the freeway for three hours or on BART for an hour and a half. They can get more work done,” she said.
Not to mention the $3,000-a-month studio apartments above poop-strewn sidewalks.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Get Ready for COVID-19 Variants Panic Porn Perma Mandates. “It behooves the Democrats to keep producing COVID panic porn for the inevitable day when Ol’ Gropes starts tripling up on his public senior moments and is babbling a lot about trouser ferrets and the leprechaun who brings the weed to his tree house. They’re going to need an excuse for keeping the most powerful and visible man in the world out of the public eye.”
REFILL THE SWAMP: Biden’s ethical standards aren’t worth a hill of beans — the ugly truth about ‘Honest Joe.’
Starting with the obvious, Hunter Biden is still in business with the Chinese Communist Party.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted a little over a week ago that the president’s wayward 51-year-old son still owns 10 percent of Chinese equity firm BHR Partners.
So much for Joe’s promise that “no one in my family will . . . have any business relationship with anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or a foreign country. Period. Period. End of story.”
But that was B.E., aka before the election. Everything’s changed now.
Biden watered down his family’s ethics rules immediately after the election to a vague statement about “appropriate distance” from the presidency.
What would be inappropriate? A measly 5%?
February 15, 2021
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Biden Signs Away Trump’s Illegal Immigration Legacy.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Is the pen truly mightier than the sword?
Answer: No, but it is mightier than the wall.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Antifa snows the cops who’s in charge [not a typo]
- Lincoln Project no longer taking Lincolns from stupid people
- There’s nothing so woke as actual racism
Bonus Sanity: Women’s sports for women returns to Mississippi.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
NEVER TOO WOKE: This Is Why You Never EVER Apologize to the Woke Police.
LIFE IS HARD. IT’S EVEN HARDER WHEN YOU’RE STUPID: This guy thought Tessica Brown’s Gorilla Glue story was a hoax, so he created a ‘Gorilla Glue challenge’ and ended up in the ER after gluing a Solo cup to his face.
GIVEN ALL OF ETERNITY, I MIGHT HAVE A CHANCE TO CATCH UP ON MY READING: CRISPR Offers the Potential to Live Forever, But to What End?
THE SESQUICENTENNIAL BOMBER: General Electric Wants To Keep America’s B-52s In The Air Until 2097.
GET RICH QUICK (AND ALSO TEMPORARILY): A crypto kid had a $23,000-a-month condo. Then the feds came. “Federal prosecutors said, the operation was a lie, essentially a Ponzi scheme that stole about $90 million from more than 100 investors to help pay for Qin’s lavish lifestyle and personal investments in such high-risk bets as initial coin offerings. At one point, facing client demands for their money, he variously blamed ‘poor cash flow management’ and ‘loan sharks in China’ for his troubles. Last week, Qin, now 24 and expressing remorse, pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to a single count of securities fraud.”
VIDEO: Students willing to politically discriminate when it comes to dating.
Given the higher birthrates among conservatives, this might just be the best thing, long-term, for the country’s political health.
CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: ‘Bachelor’ Host Chris Harrison Steps Aside Over Accusations Of ‘Perpetuating Racism’ For Speaking Out Against Cancel Culture.
BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: Biden Makes History: First President in 40 Years to Punt on Contacting Israel “Congressional foreign policy leaders slammed Biden’s Netanyahu snub, prompting a flurry of questions for White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who has declined to disclose when or if Biden will call the Israeli leader. Psaki also said on Friday the White House would not list Israel as a U.S. ally when asked about the relationship during her daily press briefing.”
BRUCE CARROLL: UK’s ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ Orders Drawing Anger. “In many cases, according to the Care Quality Commission (CQC), family members were unaware of these orders being placed on their relatives in the nursing homes.”
THE OMINOUS PARALLELS: Decades Before The Civil War, Lincoln Saw An Approaching Storm.
As he looked around him, at both slave states and their northern neighbors, he saw and feared the evil of swelling mobs not merely for their unfortunate victims, but for our national tolerance of their violence and misrule — and the effect this shrugging of shoulders and murmuring of approval or disapproval would have on patriotic and unpatriotic men alike.
The incidents weren’t always seemingly connected by cause. A group of gamblers hanged; a mixed-race murderer burned alive; black men suspected of planning insurrection, and then white men suspected of sympathizing, and then simply out-of-state strangers caught in the middle of swelling hate. But beyond their brutality, the young lawyer feared these mobs were connected for the lawlessness they embodied — and the idle familiarity with which his fellow Americans seemed to accept these incidents.
While the 1830s mobs “hang gamblers, or burn murders,” he cautioned, tomorrow’s mobs would hang and burn the innocent — “and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.”
Read the whole thing.