21ST CENTURY DATING: Sex workers are the unlikely beneficiaries of Twitter Blue.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
May 17, 2023
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Wearing Masks Can Cause ‘Substantial’ Harm, Even to Unborn Babies. “My own biases aside, it turns out that wearing masks can cause more harm than merely garnering funny looks from judgmental internet columnists.”
TEXAS: Death Star Update: Preemption Bill Closer To Passage. “Remember the ‘Death Star’ preemption bill designed to prevent left wing local governments from doing amazingly stupid things? Now it’s one step closer to Governor Abbott’s desk.”
For an alternate take, here’s Kurt Schlichter: Let the Blue Cities Die.
The Democrat cities are urine-soaked hellholes that reek of pot where criminals stalk unmolested while the full fury of what is supposed to be the law hangs over the head of any citizen who dares do something about it, and that’s good. The idiots who live there voted for turning their urban landscapes into petri dishes of social pathologies, and they should enjoy the full benefits of their decisions. We normal people should avoid these socialist wastelands and elect legislators to Congress who will starve them of the federal funds that enable their decline. In red states, our legislators should wage warfare on the blue tumors in their midst lest they metastasize outside the city limits. And we should ruthlessly point to them as the future Democrats want, which they are, a vision of a psychotic hobo taking a dump on the sidewalk out in front of your house forever.
Us normal people can’t help the cities and their moron populations because they don’t want to help themselves. We tried compassion. Now let’s try compression. Let’s squeeze them until they pop, like the pimple on America’s rear end that they are.
You can’t save people who don’t want to be saved and you can’t fix stupid.
SAY ANYTHING: Adam Schiff STILL Insists Trump Colluded With Russia Despite Durham Report.
Just because a narrative is completely discredited doesn’t mean it isn’t still useful to those who don’t mind lying and those who enjoy being lied to.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Biden was briefed on Clinton involvement in Trump-Russia hoax.
Special Counsel John Durham on Monday published a 300+ page report on the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, representing the end of a years-long investigation.
Included in the report are the details of a White House briefing on Aug. 3, 2016, during which then-CIA Director John Brennan met with President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Biden, FBI Director James Comey, and other senior administration officials to discuss Russian efforts to interfere in the election.
The report further highlights that Brennan specifically informed the group of then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan to paint Trump as being in league with Moscow.
“According to Brennan’s handwritten notes and his recollections from the meeting, he briefed on relevant intelligence known to date on Russian election interference, including the Clinton Plan intelligence,” Durham wrote. “Specifically, Director Brennan’s declassified handwritten notes reflect that he briefed the meeting’s participants regarding the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.'”
The real collusion to rig the 2016 election was between the Clinton campaign, the Obama White House, and the FBI.
VICTORIA TAFT: It’s Time for Hillary to Pay for What She’s Done to America.
SALENA ZITO: The great underestimation of DeSantis starts to unravel.
The Florida governor began the weekend Friday in Illinois as the keynote speaker at the Lincoln Day Dinner for Peoria and Tazewell counties. The Peoria Journal Star said he drew a crowd of more than 1,100 to the Peoria Civic Center.
Early Saturday morning, DeSantis started his first campaign event in Sioux Center, Iowa, as a guest at Rep. Randy Feenstra’s annual Feenstra Family Picnic, spent time greeting folks at a classic car museum, stopped at a Pizza Ranch, and finished out the day at an unplanned event, standing on a table with his wife at Jethro’s BBQ.
All of DeSantis’s headline events went off without a hitch. In that regard, they were very similar to speeches I attended several weeks ago that he gave in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, and Akron, Ohio, where he was greeted with robust support after delivering speeches that outlined his aspirations for the country, his accomplishments as a governor, and his promise to take on the cultural headwinds in our country.
DeSantis and Trump were scheduled on Saturday to be in Iowa, the state with the first-in-the-country contest for 2024, but Trump’s team canceled the event after the threat of a tornado warning. DeSantis took full advantage of his absence with an impromptu stop in the same area Trump was supposed to be, thus casting shade on the former president, who has spent months maligning DeSantis’s character.
DeSantis certainly shows more discipline than Trump usually does, and he’s scored important legislative victories on forward-looking issues. What he hasn’t done yet is win with voters outside of Florida.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Idiot Congressman Learns This Isn’t the Best Time to Be an FBI Fan Boy. “What made this gathering notable is that the Democrats are still doubling-down pretending that Antifa doesn’t exist but that the FBI’s credibility still does.”
CRISIS BY DESIGN: Border agents released more than 6,400 migrants without court dates before being stopped by court order. “In a sworn declaration, David BeMiller, chief of law enforcement operations for the Border Patrol, said the agency was aware the judge had blocked it from releasing migrants under a new policy known as ‘parole with conditions’ that would allow border agents to release migrants without a court date and without the ability to track them if their facilities became overcrowded.”
NOTHING. NEXT QUESTION? What Happens to the Democrats Who Claimed They Had Evidence of Collusion?
HMM: Putin and Zelensky ‘agree to meet African leaders to discuss peace plan.’
Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky have both agreed to separate meetings with a delegation of African heads of state to discuss a possible plan to end the war in Ukraine, according to South Africa’s president.
Cyril Ramaphosa spoke with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts by phone over the weekend, a spokesperson for his office said. They agreed to host ‘an African leaders’ peace mission’ in Moscow and Kyiv respectively.
The leaders of Zambia, Senegal, Congo, Uganda and Egypt plan to join Mr Ramaphosa on the mission, the president said. He added that Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky gave him the go-ahead to ‘commence the preparations’.
No details were provided on the possible parameters of the talks. Mr Zelensky has previously said he would not consider a peace deal to end the 15-month war until Russian forces withdraw fully from Ukrainian territory.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres was briefed on the African delegation’s planned meetings and ‘welcomed the initiative’, Mr Ramaphosa said.
“Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.”
YOUR UNBIASED MEDIA: ‘We Sale Your Bank’: WaPo Reporter Rewrites Disastrous Fetterman Word Salad as a ‘Quote.’ “Shouldn’t you have a working requirement after we sale [sic] your bank—er, with billions of your bank? Because they see me [sic] pre-preoccupied when then [sic] SNAP, uh, in the requirements for works [sic] for hungry people, but not about protecting the— protecting tax papers [sic] you know, that will bail the matter [sic] whatever does [sic] about a bank to crash it.”
May 16, 2023
STERILIZATION OF MINORS FOR FUN AND PROFIT: How A Left-Wing Activist Group Teamed Up With Big Pharma To Push Radical Gender Ideology on American Hospitals.
By 2022, Rempe said, Children’s National was requiring staffers to use a patient’s preferred pronouns, no questions asked, even as European medical authorities were backing away from that practice, warning that on-demand gender affirmation could entrench dysphoria rather than reduce it, particularly in children. Worried the policy did more harm than good, Rempe asked for an exemption, which the hospital denied. She quit in early 2022.
“I was concerned that I would eventually have to administer puberty blockers and hormones, not just use the pronouns,” Rempe told the Free Beacon. “I kept finding myself in situations I wasn’t comfortable with ethically.”
Since her departure, Rempe has struggled to make sense of what happened to the hospital where she spent 16 years of her professional life. Was there a common thread behind the transgender flag pins, the pronouns, the puberty blockers, and the trainings and policies that enforced the new culture?
As it turns out, there is an outside force pushing hospitals in this direction.
TO BE FAIR, THEY DIDN’T REALLY HAVE ANY ROOM TO GO DOWN: No, CNN Did Not Suffer a Ratings Plunge Because of the Trump Town Hall.
GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: The Death of a Star System.
The Hollywood star system is dead, now. It happened very slowly. It didn’t wink out all at once, like someone throwing a switch. There was no cataclysmic supernova that ended all life on planet Movie Star as we know it. Rather, it happened so gradually that we hardly noticed it was dying at all… until it was gone.
For years I threw around phrases like “there are no movie stars anymore” just like everyobody else. But I never really thought about what that meant until I sat down one night to stream the 2017 remake, sorry the reboot, of FLATLINERS. A movie I had somehow (rolls eyes sarcastically) forgotten to go and see in a theater.
If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother, it’s not very good… just like “updated” versions of WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP and FATAL ATTRACTION, it is very much the reboot no one on Earth was asking for. But the most striking thing about the reboot, for me, was the cast. There isn’t a genuine Movie Star anywhere in it, not even Elliot Page who was, once upon a time, something very much like a movie star… before he transitioned to Elliot and, like Spinal Tap, made his appeal “more selective.”
The choice to become “more selective” has cost Hollywood more than COVID shutdowns ever did.
KAROL MARKOWICZ: Going back to phonics is just the first step to making our schools teach again.
There’s been a national conversation recently on the way schools have taught reading.
For decades, schools dropped phonics-based models in favor of memorization.
This half-baked idea was implemented throughout the country with disastrous results.
Bad ideas sometimes work — until they don’t.
My older two children learned to read easily using this ridiculous memorization method.
But my youngest decided to just memorize all words instead of actually learning to read. This worked remarkably well, and he managed to fool a lot of people in his orbit.
When we realized what was happening, we got him extra help focused on phonics. But how many parents were unable to get their kids similar help?
The situation is even worse in science, as Karol explains in her column.
OH, CANADA: Canada May Ban Fox News from Cable TV for ‘Abusive’ Tucker Carlson Segment.
The specific regulation Egale Canada is accusing Fox News of breaking is section 5(b) of the Television Broadcasting Regulations which prohibits broadcasts of “any abusive comment or abusive pictorial representation that, when taken in context, tends to or is likely to expose an individual or a group or class of individuals to hatred or contempt on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age or mental or physical disability.”
Prohibiting what amounts to hate speech on public television may sound somewhat reasonable, but it opens the door for considerable censorship, as this story illustrates. After all, who gets to define hate speech?
Whatever pressure group holds sway at any given moment, of course.
HOMELESSNESS IS TOO PROFITABLE TO EVER BE “SOLVED”: Austin City Council Wants To Hand Millions In Graft To The Homeless Industrial Complex.
BECAUSE WITHOUT ADULTS GROOMING HELPING, THEY’LL NEVER FIGURE THIS STUFF OUT: WHO Promotes ‘Early Childhood Masturbation’ in Official Sex Ed Guidance.
KREMLINOLOGY WAS ALWAYS MORE ART THAN SCIENCE: Wagner chief offered to give Russian troop locations to Ukraine, leak says.
In late January, with his mercenary forces dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city of Bakhmut, Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer.
Prigozhin said that if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions, which Ukraine could use to attack them. Prigozhin conveyed the proposal to his contacts in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, with whom he has maintained secret communications during the course of the war, according to previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the group-chat platform Discord.
Prigozhin has publicly feuded with Russian military commanders, who he furiously claims have failed to equip and resupply his forces, which have provided vital support to Moscow’s war effort. But he is also an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who might well regard Prigozhin’s offer to trade the lives of Wagner fighters for Russian soldiers as a treasonous betrayal.
The leaked document does not make clear which Russian troop positions Prigozhin offered to disclose.
Nothing seems to have come of this as both sides continue to make winning at Bakhmut their maximum effort.