Archive for April, 2021
8th April 2021
Victor Davis Hanson.
Ed Bastian made $17 million in 2019 as chief executive officer of Delta Air Lines, Georgia’s largest employer. Bastian just blasted Georgia’s new voting law. He thinks it is racist to require the same sort of ID to vote that Delta requires for its passengers to check in.
Yet most Americans believe voting is a more sacred act than flying Delta and, moreover, may have noticed that Delta has partnerships with systemically racist China. Also, a recent Associated Press poll showed that 72% of Americans favor requiring photo ID to vote.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on The Woke Revolution Is Powered by the Elites
8th April 2021
John Hinderaker at PowerLine.
One of the dumbest of all the anti-Trump conventions was the “without evidence” trope. This was a single-use smear, analogous to an old-fashioned Derringer. The Democratic Party press fired it once, and we will never see it again. Certainly not while a Democrat is in the White House.
The concept was stupid, since politicians say things all the time for which they do not, at that moment, provide “evidence.” Over the last four years, it was even worse than that, since Democratic Party news outlets like the Washington Post ritually repeated the “without evidence” claim even though such evidence had been provided, often in copious detail, but not in the same sentence.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Thank You, Donald!
7th April 2021
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“Government must be a powerful force for good in the lives of Americans,” White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese announced on March 29. This is the core principle of President Joe Biden’s promise to “change the paradigm” with his $3 trillion stimulus package which seeks to pour vast amounts of tax dollars into dozens of government programs that have dismally failed in the past. But thanks to Biden’s election, the federal government has suddenly become far more competent than ever before.
To have confidence in the American Jobs Plan, it is not enough to believe that additional spending is needed for repairing bridges, paving roads, or boosting child care. Instead, one must believe that the damning revelations from all the inspectors general and Government Accountability Office reports in recent decades are null and void. A vast increase in outlays will achieve miraculous results because there is no resemblance between federal agencies commanded by Biden appointees and the same agencies in the past half century. The notion that “government must be a powerful force for good” is premised on the notion that Biden himself is such an inexorable “force for good” that history no longer applies inside the Beltway.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Joe Biden’s No Boondoggle Left Behind Plan
7th April 2021
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President Joe Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to oversee the administration’s response to the crisis at the border 15 days ago, but she has not yet made a visit.
Harris was appointed March 24, and as of April 7 had not announced any plans to visit the southern border. When a reporter mentioned that Harris hadn’t visited the border and asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki if Harris was still working on addressing the crisis, Psaki said that the vice president had stopped for a snack “like many Americans.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on It’s Been 15 Days Since Biden Put Kamala Harris In Charge Of The Border. She Has Yet To Make A Visit
7th April 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
7th April 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
7th April 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
7th April 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
7th April 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
7th April 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
7th April 2021
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The Georgia lawmaker who was arrested after knocking on the door of the governor’s office as he made televised comments in support of the sweeping, controversial new election law he’d just signed will not be charged, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
Rep. Park Cannon, an Atlanta Democrat, was arrested March 25 and charged with obstruction of law enforcement and disruption of the General Assembly. She was released from jail later that evening.
“While some of Representative Cannon’s colleagues and the police officers involved may have found her behavior annoying, such sentiment does not justify a presentment to a grand jury of the allegations in the arrest warrants or any other felony charges,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in an emailed statement.
And so she’ll keep doing it , and doing it, and doing it, until she actually gets charged with something.
This is why we see so many violent protests — the protesters, even when they are arrested, are held for a while and then sent on their way. So they internalize the belief that breaking the law for political purposes is free. And they’ll continue to do it.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Georgia Lawmaker Won’t Face Charges for Voting Bill Protest
7th April 2021
A review.
In the 2019 British general election, the Labour Party was eviscerated, losing 60 seats and handing the Conservative Party a massive 80-seat majority. The most dramatic repudiation came in the Midlands and the North, where seats that had never voted Conservative fell to the Tories. It was an electoral catastrophe, and Paul Embery’s book Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class is intended to provide an autopsy and an analysis of the Left’s deeper ideological and cultural errors.
Embery comes from within the left-conservative, Blue Labour tradition of Tory Socialists like John Ruskin—a left-wing form of post-liberal politics that leans left on economics and right on culture. Cultural distinction without exclusion; relationality over autonomy; community self-help over government centralisation. In clean, clear prose over 200 pages, he mourns the destruction of his party as a serious political force, and sets out what he thinks it must do if it is to be able to fight again effectively.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class by Paul Embery
7th April 2021
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Naomi Hasegawa’s family sells toasted mochi out of a small, cedar-timbered shop next to a rambling old shrine in Kyoto. The family started the business to provide refreshments to weary travelers coming from across Japan to pray for pandemic relief — in the year 1000.
Now, more than a millennium later, a new disease has devastated the economy in the ancient capital, as its once reliable stream of tourists has evaporated. But Ms. Hasegawa is not concerned about her enterprise’s finances.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on This Japanese Shop Is 1,020 Years Old.
7th April 2021
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Numerically, the fine-structure constant, denoted by the Greek letter ? (alpha), comes very close to the ratio 1/137. It commonly appears in formulas governing light and matter. “It’s like in architecture, there’s the golden ratio,” said Eric Cornell, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “In the physics of low-energy matter — atoms, molecules, chemistry, biology — there’s always a ratio” of bigger things to smaller things, he said. “Those ratios tend to be powers of the fine-structure constant.”
The constant is everywhere because it characterizes the strength of the electromagnetic force affecting charged particles such as electrons and protons. “In our everyday world, everything is either gravity or electromagnetism. And that’s why alpha is so important,” said Holger Müller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Because 1/137 is small, electromagnetism is weak; as a consequence, charged particles form airy atoms whose electrons orbit at a distance and easily hop away, enabling chemical bonds. On the other hand, the constant is also just big enough: Physicists have argued that if it were something like 1/138, stars would not be able to create carbon, and life as we know it wouldn’t exist.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Physicists Nail Down the ‘Magic Number’ That Shapes the Universe
7th April 2021
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One of the dominant themes of the last few years is that nothing makes sense. Donald Trump is president, QAnon has mainstreamed fringe conspiracy theories, and hundreds of thousands are dead from a pandemic and climate change while many Americans do not believe that the pandemic or climate change are deadly. It’s incomprehensible.
I am here to tell you that the reason so much of the world seems incomprehensible is that it is incomprehensible. From social media to the global economy to supply chains, our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand
7th April 2021
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Tell the truth: I’ll bet you didn’t even know that there was a ‘protein folding problem’.
UPDATE: Protein folding: Much more intricate than we thought
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on What Is the “Protein Folding Problem”? A Brief Explanation
7th April 2021
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Until recently, Antoine Ricardou was, in no way, a cheesemaker. An architect and co-founder of the branding and design firm Be-poles, Ricardou spent his days jetting between the firm’s Paris and New York City offices, overseeing projects for such clients as Eleven Madison Park in Manhattan and Les Roches Rouges on the Côte d’Azur.
…
Then, this past March—well, you know what happened this past March. So, the 47-year-old, along with his wife and their three children, left a pandemic-stricken Paris for the relative isolation of France’s Haute-Savoie region, where the family owns an early-1800s chalet. Ricardou, who chuckles at the word “chalet,” is quick to dispel any notions of grandeur: “It’s simple and traditional, and did not have heat or hot water when we bought it last year.”
CHEEEEEEESE!
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on When Specialty Cheesemaking Becomes a Quarantine Pastime
7th April 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Climate Change, Housing, Schools: Here’s Where Much Of Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Will Be Spent
7th April 2021
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Nothing says “anti-fascist” like taking George Soros’ money to work with people-traffickers and bring illegal immigrants across the Mediterranean to Europe.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Fighting Fascism Through Mass Immigration
7th April 2021
ZMan peers behind the curtain.
When you stop and think about it, the way in which politics and the media are presented in movies and television is a masterful bit of propaganda. On the one hand, it fully acknowledges the corruption of all democratic politics. The people in the system are always bad people. On the other hand, the bad guys always lose to the good guys, the voters, so it is proof that the system works. In other words, political corruption is turned into proof that the system works. That is some real 4-D chess.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Who Is Behind This?
7th April 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
7th April 2021
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And why not? Corporate taxes aren’t paid by corporations but merely passed on to their customers. And they’re taxed only on ‘profits’ which Bezos has carefully arranged Amazon to have little of.
Of course, it’s too much to expect dimwist like ‘journalists’ and politicians either to understand such things or to be able to explain them to others. So we get simpleton government.
UPDATE: Jeff Bezos supports US tax rise after not paying it for two years – and paying tiny amount in 2019
UPDATE: Amazon, Which Routinely Avoids Taxes, Supports Biden’s Corporate Tax Rate Hike And why not? It’s not as if Amazon is going to pay any of it. And if they can raise taxes on their smaller competitors, who do need to make a (taxable) profit, they’re good with that.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Jeff Bezos Comes Out in Support Oo Increased Corporate Taxes
7th April 2021
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It doesn’t take a particularly impressive imagination to predict how the liberal media would cover one of Donald Trump’s sons if he had a major crack and alcohol addiction. Stories would begin with the notion that Trump was a terrible father, obviously too self-absorbed and absent to raise his children right.
CNN would certainly strike that pose. But on Sunday’s Reliable Sources, host Brian Stelter was deeply impressed with the “extraordinary” and “breathtaking” Hunter Biden memoir. Stelter gleefully promoted every tabloidish Trump-trashing book — from Omarosa to Scaramucci — but he’s doing the exact opposite now.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Hunter Biden, Media-Pampered (Scam) Artist
7th April 2021
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A proposed maglev line between Washington and Baltimore will disrupt 1,000 acres of “parks, recreational facilities and wetlands,” according to a recently released draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the project. That’s a lot of land considering that all but nine miles of the project would be underground. While 180 acres are for a maintenance facility, the remaining acres represent a right-of-way that is an average of 750 feet wide.
This potential disruption has raised the ire of the local chapter of the Audubon Society, which is opposing the plan. As the Antiplanner recently noted, such land disruptions will be an issue for all high-speed rail lines, and in that analysis I was clearly being conservative in assuming a mere 80-foot right-of-way. By contrast, airlines don’t need any right-of-way once they leave the airports.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 1 Comment »
7th April 2021
The Guardian.
Demands by parents to remove books from library shelves addressing racism soared in the US in 2020, the American Library Association has revealed.
An annual list that is regularly dominated by titles covering LGBTQ+ issues, the ALA’s Top 10 most challenged books contains a number of anti-racism titles for the first time in 2020. Although the list was topped for the third year running by Alex Gino’s George, the story of a fourth-grade transgender girl, Ibram X Kendi and Jason Reynolds’ Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, a history of racism for children and teens, was the year’s second most challenged title. In their complaints, parents claimed that Stamped contained “selective storytelling incidents” and “does not encompass racism against all people”, said the ALA.
In response, Kendi, a historian of race, said that he was proud of the work he and Reynolds had done on the book, and “not at all surprised” to hear it made the Top 10.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Sharp rise in parents seeking to ban anti-racist books in US schools
6th April 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
6th April 2021
Mea Culpa: Oregon’s Largest Newspaper Admits Defunding Police Was A Terrible Idea As Homicides Skyrocket
Senate Parliamentarian Sets Dangerous Precedent, Grants Schumer Permission For Second Reconciliation Vote
Spending Free For All: Paid Family And Medical Leave Is Infrastructure According To House Democrats
MLB All-Star Game Reportedly Moved To Colorado, A State With Voter ID Laws Similar To Georgia But it’s a safely Blue state, so that’s all right then.
In The Name Of Social Justice, MLB Moved All-Star Game From Mostly Black City To Mostly White City
Leaked Docs Show UK Government Has Planned For Vaccine Passports All Along
Portland, Oregon Police to City: We Quit
The IMF And World Bank, Who Pay No Taxes, Are About To Talk About Tax Hikes And Inequality
CBS WHORES Out for Crony Capitalism, Backs Biden Billions to Electric Cars in ‘Infrastructure’
North Las Vegas Mayor, Lifelong Democrat, Switches Parties, Citing ‘Socialist Takeover’ In Nevada
Biden Administration Told Senator To ‘Delete The Pictures’ From Border Visit
Key Democratic Vendors Still Doing Business with Lincoln Project After Sex Scandal
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
6th April 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
6th April 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
6th April 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
6th April 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
6th April 2021
Steven Hayward at PowerLine.
If you have a Wall Street Journal subscription, don’t miss today’s Gerard Baker column, “The C-Suite Converts to the New Political Religion.” If you don’t have a subscription, here’s the key part:
The modern secularists who deride the hagridden mysticism of traditional religion are now the most devoted congregants in the First Church of Antiracism. Penitents line up to be shriven for their white privilege, bending the knee before the altar of justice and equity. They present pendants of the martyred St. George of Minneapolis for blessing from Hollywood prelates and Ivy League divines, solemnly chanting canticles from the Black Lives Matter breviary.
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today’s Theological Heresies on Race and Climate
6th April 2021
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Dr. Eleanor Adams made multiple trips to the homes of various Cuomo family members, including Cuomo’s brother CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s Hamptons home and his mother, Matilda Cuomo’s personal residence, according to the Post.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Doctor Who Helped Cuomo Family Jump the Line for COVID-19 Tests Worked for Health Commissioner’s State Funded Nonprofit
6th April 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
6th April 2021
ZMan waxes philosophica.
In his essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Ever since it has been a useful dismissal of the pedant, but it is also a useful way of understanding American politics. One side in the political fight spends all of its time fussing about inconsistencies of the other side, while the winning side is happy to dismiss their own hypocrisies. As Emerson understood, it is the latter who always has the edge over the former.
It is the Right, of course, that spends all of its time fussing about inconsistencies on the Left, while the Left just wins every fight. The American Left, unlike the European Left, grew out of that peculiar form of American Christianity that has informed its worldview since the 19th century. Filled with self-righteous fury over the inequity of the world, the righteous are free to do as they please to right the wrongs of the world. Even their own past statements are no impediment to them.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Truth Versus Justice
6th April 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
6th April 2021
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Father P.J. Hughes is the parish priest of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Mullahoran, a township in rural County Cavan, Ireland. He recently earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first Irish priest for centuries to find himself on the wrong side of the law for saying Mass in public.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Palm Sunday in Ireland
6th April 2021
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Elections have consequences, and one consequence of the 2020 election will be a return to the foreign policy of the Obama era that seeks to punish Israel, isolate the Arabs, elevate Iran as a regional power, and assure friend and foe alike that tough talk from American leaders is just that: talk.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The March to Appeasement
6th April 2021
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A life-sized likeness of the Swedish climate-rescue maiden Greta Thunberg is coming to the University of Winchester in England. Despite severe economic hardship, a bronze simulacrum of Greta the Great that cost about $31,000 (£24,000) will be erected in front of the “climate-smart” West Downs Centre at the University.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | 1 Comment »
6th April 2021
John Hinderaker at PowerLine.
Wokery burst onto the scene much like covid or, more appropriately, the Black Death. Or World War II. Has so much stupidity been promulgated so quickly and so broadly at any time in human history? Maybe not. Previous stupid phenomena like the witchcraft scare and phrenology took longer to take root.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Short History of Wokery
6th April 2021
John Hinderaker at PowerLine.
It is remarkable that, nearly 17 years after Rathergate, 60 Minutes still exists and apparently has an audience. 60 Minutes has never been truthful or reliable. Not long before Rathergate, we wrote about another instance of blatant misuse of documents by that program to support a false narrative. It hasn’t gotten any better since then.
Last night, 60 Minutes contributed to the Democratic Party’s smear campaign against Governor Ron DeSantis by airing a heavily edited exchange between CBS “reporter” Sharyn Alfonsi and DeSantis. Alfonsi accused DeSantis of rewarding Publix, a contributor to his campaign, by giving Publix a role in covid vaccine distribution in Florida. DeSantis thoroughly rebutted Alfonsi’s accusation, so 60 Minutes simply deleted almost everything he said to make it look as though he had no real answer to Alfonsi.
Watched it once back in the day. Wasn’t impressed.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Why Does 60 Minutes Still Exist?
5th April 2021
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A candidate in the special election for Texas’ 6th Congressional District filed a defamation lawsuit on Monday against a local newspaper.
Sery Kim, an official in both the Donald Trump and George W. Bush administrations, filed a lawsuit against the Texas Tribune over its characterization of comments she made at a March 31 candidate forum as “racist.” Kim, a Republican, is running to replace Republican Rep. Ron Wright, who died on Feb. 7 after battles with lung cancer and COVID-19.
The Texas Tribune is the Texas equivalent of The Guardian in Britain, a dependably left-wing publication that does it’s best attempting to turn Texas into California.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on House Candidate Takes Aim at Newspaper for Calling Her Comments ‘Racist,’ Requests $10 Million in Damages
5th April 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
5th April 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
5th April 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in The Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
5th April 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
5th April 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
5th April 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
5th April 2021
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Portland Public Schools’ Board of Education delayed a vote to approve an evergreen mascot over concerns that the symbol is connected to lynching and could be misperceived as “a tree of death.”
Students and faculty at Ida B. Wells-Barnett High School overwhelmingly selected an evergreen tree to replace its former Trojans mascot in a recent survey. Board director Michelle DePass delayed the board’s approval vote on the mascot over concerns that evergreens could evoke ties to lynchings, the Portland Tribune reported.
Uh, guys? Nobody was ever lynched from an evergreen tree. The branches aren’t strong enough.
You’d think that somebody in Portland would know that.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on Portland Activists Say Evergreen Is a ‘Tree of Death’
5th April 2021
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A recent poll made public Monday reveals that Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is facing a significant threat from a new Republican challenger.
The new Cygnal poll shows Murkowski trailing Republican Commissioner of Administration Kelly Tshibaka by 15 points in the 2022 all-party Alaska Senate primary. The poll found Murkowski to have just a 33% favorability rating among all Alaskans, compared to 63% unfavorable.
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving RINO.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on New Poll Spells Big Trouble For Lisa Murkowski