VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: JILL BIDEN SHOCKED – Hispanics Are Not Breakfast Tacos. “We need to figure out a way to make all these Hispanics we’re lumping together under ‘Latinx’ feel unique.”
Plus:
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: First Laser Weapon For A Fighter Delivered To The Air Force. “The U.S. Air Force has received a high-energy laser weapon that can be carried by aircraft in podded form. The news came today when Lockheed Martin disclosed that at least one of the weapons, which it developed, has been delivered to the Air Force for test work. This effort falls within the wider framework of still-evolving plans to have laser-armed fighter jets that can engage enemy missiles, and possibly other targets too.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: America’s Cop-Hating Cities Will Soon Face an Ugly Reckoning. “Many of the big ‘defund the police’ cities quickly realized the error of their ways and tried to undo some of the damage they’d done, largely to no avail. It turns out that blaming cops for everything kind of sticks with the cops. It’s a dangerous and difficult profession as it is, why would anyone want to do it in a city run by people who would rather side with criminals?”
HMM: Arizona says you can start teaching before you earn a degree.
Public schools in the state have struggled to fill teaching vacancies for years, he writes. One survey found 26 percent of jobs are not filled by a certified teacher.
Would 19-year-olds be learning to teach on the job? I suspect districts that use the flexibility will be hiring aides as classroom teachers while they move toward a bachelor’s degree. Many districts have programs to help aides, who tend to be “diverse,” become teachers, but it takes a long time for someone working full-time to complete college.
Some Arizona districts are experimenting with team teaching. Arizona State’s Next Education Workforce initiative is working with schools to create teaching teams that combine veterans and novices.
How about pulling in more — many more — private-sector retirees with real-world experience and knowledge?
YAWN: New coronavirus mutant raises concerns in India and beyond. “Scientists say the variant – called BA.2.75 – may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infection. It’s unclear whether it could cause more serious disease than other omicron variants, including the globally prominent BA.5.”
Left unsaid: How many people are actually sick or how badly. They’re trying to scare people with infectious new variants that don’t actually do any harm outside the usual risk groups.
BECAUSE OF COURSE: Thomas Jefferson’s Home Has Been Taken Over by Leftist America-Haters.
UPDATE (From Ed): Other than that, how did you enjoy the play tonight, Mrs. Lincoln?
Flashback: Lincoln’s New Assassins.
Now the mob takes the role of John Wilkes Booth in removing perhaps the greatest of all Lincoln sculptures, the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, located in northeast Washington, D.C. The preeminent Lincoln scholar of our or any other time, Harry V. Jaffa, said many times that this sculpture, originally referred to as the Freedman’s Memorial, rivaled Daniel French’s Lincoln Memorial creation. The statue was dedicated to honor Lincoln on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Yet the furious mob blindly objects that the statue shows a kneeling slave before a standing Lincoln. The mob is even more blinkered in its art appreciation than it is in its historical understanding, as I will show in close-up views of the muscular freedman—no longer a slave!—and other details.
* * * * * * * *
If we don’t believe our own eyes, we have the testimony of Frederick Douglass, who delivered the dedication address, honoring his friend Abraham Lincoln. The escaped slave Douglass is famous for his criticisms of Lincoln’s policies, including what he then regarded as his slowness to accede to plans for using black soldiers. But he also conceded the correctness of Lincoln’s measured policies. Douglass’s speech is among his best, his most complex, for its unsparing, many-sided views of Lincoln: it smashes all clichés about both men. His audience, we should note, included President Grant.
Related: Do we erase black history when we take down statues?
More: Why the Right Foresaw the Statues Coming Down. “When Donald Trump wondered whether it would be ‘George Washington next week’ and ‘Thomas Jefferson the week after,’ he was treated to haughty and dismissive dispatches in the mainstream press explaining why these Founders were more than just their proximity to slavery. These were valuable missives, but Trump wasn’t the right audience. They should have been directed at the activists who have taken their campus-based maximalism with them into the workforce. The failure on the part of polite liberal opinion makers to anticipate this attack on America’s foundations is a failure of imagination and an act of hubris. They assumed they spoke for the mob when it was the mob that spoke for them.”
It’s not surprising that Democrats are toppling statues of Lincoln — but this time, the calls are coming from inside the theater!
(Updated and bumped.)
ENDORSED: At This New Resort in Mexico, Getting Drunk Is Part of the Wellness Program. “Lisa Harper would like you to know that in a post-pandemic, you-only-live-once world, throwing back mezcalitas and cheladas for the purpose of inducing a hangover and then curing it with barbacoa tacos falls squarely within the definition of holistic wellness.”
NEUTRAL IS A BAD PLACE TO GET STUCK WHEN YOU’RE TRYING TO GO UPHILL: White House Report Card: Biden stuck in neutral.
I’M EXPECTING A SYSTEM-SHATTERING KABOOM: Scientists think they know when a rogue star will ruin the Solar System. “These “stellar flybys” are common and play an important role in the long-term evolution of planetary systems. As a result, the long-term stability of the Solar System has been the subject of scientific investigation for centuries. According to a new study by a team of Canadian astrophysicists, residents of the Solar System may rest easy. After conducting a series of simulations, they determined that a star will not pass by and perturb our Solar System for another 100 billion years. Beyond that, the possibilities are somewhat frightening.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Russia’s Hunger Weapon. “But Putin might be trapped by his own actions and therefore unpersuadable. The one obvious flaw in the hunger plan is that famine can also destabilize the Chinese and Russian spheres of influence, as events in Sri Lanka proved.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: China’s lockdowns to contain Omicron snarled the global economy. Lockdowns to contain subvariant BA.5 could be even worse.
ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE KNIVES ARE OUT: Kamala Harris Sure Sounds Nervous When Asked About Running Again as Biden’s Veep. “Interviewed this weekend by Robert Costa on CBS’s Face The Nation, Harris lost her poker face.”
The pro-life side has spent 50 years working on “hearts and minds,” lobbying state government, etc. The other side has spent the same time hectoring, lecturing, and leaning very hard against a poorly constructed Supreme Court decision.
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: What the Self-Appointed Elites Think About You.
COLD WAR II: ‘Doomsday’ Submarine Armed With Nuclear Torpedoes Delivers to Russian Navy.
Project 09852 Belgorod is based on a Russian Oscar-class guided-cruise missile submarine that has been altered to accommodate six 80-foot Poseidon nuclear torpedoes that could be armed with a warhead of up to 100 megatons, USNI News previously reported.
Poseidon, first revealed in 2015, is a nuclear strategic weapon that would have a range of thousands of miles and would “destroy important economic installations of the enemy in coastal areas and cause guaranteed devastating damage to the country’s territory by creating wide areas of radioactive contamination, rendering them unusable for military, economic or other activity for a long time,” according to a translation of a Russian presentation caught on camera by the BBC.
Russians have long complained about the strategic imbalance of American ballistic missile defense systems in Europe. Poseidon and Belgorod were created to mute the U.S. BMD advantage by creating a nuclear weapon that could duck under a U.S. BMD screen.
Let’s hope there’s no earth-shattering kaboom.
SOMEBODY CALL THE FBI… OH, WAIT…:You’ll Never Believe the Contacts on Hunter’s iPhone.
Actually, I can think of two Bidens who might need to lean on the FBI for help.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Jose Alba The Latest Victim In The Democratic Party’s War On Self Defense. “Blog reader Clinton alerted me to the fact that GoFundMe just deleted Alba’s account.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden’s Handlers Really Shouldn’t Let Him Off-Leash Anymore. “Moments like this embarrass the entire country, not just the emotionally stunted idiots who voted for this guy.”
THAT’S CRAZY: Women Who Want Women for Intimate Care are ‘Psychotic.’ “The misogyny and homophobia among the New Queer jackboots has serious consequences. They wouldn’t play nice and just live-and-let-live. So this is where we are — where even intimate care for women and girls is to be dismissed if it causes even a minute of inconvenience to any male claiming to be a woman.”
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