It’s Friday, August 5th, 2022…and 43 years and 1 day ago, a beautiful young Pensacola gal made us the luckiest guy in the world.  So here’s to TLJ:

What more can you say about a lady who free-climbed El Cap…

…except, men dig her, chicks wanna be like her!

WE INTERRUPT OUR REGULAR SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING FOR THE LATEST ON AMERICA’S TWO-TIERED JUSTICE SYSTEM, COURTESY OF JESSE WATTERS:

Proving, once again, if it weren’t for double standards, Dimocrats would have no standards whatsoever.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, some thoughts from our physician on Paxlovid, Pfizer’s treatment for the WuFlu.  Biden took it after initially contracting COVID and had a recurrence mere days after taking Paxlovid.  Dr. Faux Chi took it after initially contracting the virus he helped create and also had a recurrence mere days after taking Paxlovid.

Out of 20 patients for who our doctor prescribed Paxlovid, 3 had recurrences of COVID mere days after taking Paxlovid, while 1 out of the other 150 patients who contracted and did NOT take Paxlovid had a recurrence, and that some four weeks later.

Which begs the question why is the MSM not reporting this?!?

As the incomparable Stilton Jarlsberg observed…

“…the cartoon above isn’t that funny since it reminds us that the “vaccines” aren’t, and that as miracle drugs go, Paxlovid is about as impressive as a birthday magician pulling a quarter from behind a 5-year-old’s ear. Although in fairness, the magician once did that trick in the Oval Office and Joe Biden is still regularly checking his ears for more change.“

Next, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson offers some intriguing insight regarding…

I live in one of those neighborhoods where every third house has a political sign of some kind in the yard: Lots of “Beto for Texas” signs advertising the sacrificial victim feckless Democrats are going to offer up to the maw of the Texas GOP machine this time around, scads and oodles of those prim, imbecilic “In This House” signs, that kind of thing. One of my neighbors kept up a big banner reading “Stop Killing Black People” for more than a year, but has now taken it down, so I guess that killing black people doesn’t matter three blocks over anymore, or maybe they got bored and wanted a change of scenery. They have added some nice planters.

I hate them all, of course — all the signs, I mean, not the neighbors.

Partly I hate them because they are such effective advertisements for the ignorance of the general electorate. One neighbor has a very large sign in her yard that demands we “say ‘no’ to demagogues” and blames our political troubles on “donors and special-interest lobbyists” — i.e., the sign criticizes demagoguery and then engages in the classic, textbook technique of American demagoguery, insisting that covert moneyed interests rather than genuine good-faith disagreements about values and priorities are behind our differences. You see that with demagogues targeting the National Rifle Association all the time: claims that So-and-So voted in favor of the Second Amendment because he got money from the NRA. The NRA is, in fact, a trivial player in the world of political money (946th in donations, 268th in lobbying outlays, 275th in outside spending), and the power it has it has because it represents a position that millions of Americans strongly endorse — not the tiny-but-loudmouthed share of Americans on Twitter, but Americans who vote. I am sure my neighbor’s heart is in the right place, but she is the kind of mark who makes demagoguery so effective and profitable.

There were some stereotypical Trump voters down the street until recently — textbook dysfunctional white people of the screaming-confrontations-between-bored-police-and-aging-hookers type — but they are gone, having been priced out of the neighborhood. (The tragedy of gentrification is that it doesn’t happen all at once.) Their Trump banner went with them. The rising tide of gormless lifestyle progressivism has inundated the cities of Texas just as it has the cities of the other states: The Audi People (who used to be the Subaru People before going upscale) and their simpering conformism have come to stay.

The less real diversity there is in the neighborhood, the more the local progressives feel compelled to advertise their bona fides to one another. They are simultaneously lobbying for some street closures that would just happen to have the effect of discouraging the poor brown people on the other side of the socioeconomic Berlin Wall a few blocks south of us from walking the same pristine urban streets as their purported benefactors. The people with the “No Human Is Illegal” signs live in a gated community, even if the gates are invisible and the borders are enforced by mortgage bankers rather than by actual patrolmen.

If you have ever spent any time around anybody who has made a credible run for the U.S. presidency, you will have noticed that there is something wrong with them — even the good ones, even the ones we like. You have to be a little bit cracked to want that job and to put up with the irritation and degradation that seeking high office in the United States entails. Presidential candidates are a rare breed, but there is a similar sickness at work in the lives of the yard-sign people. There is something missing.

As even the most casual observer will understand, in the lives of many Americans who are not particularly happy or well-adjusted, politics has taken the place of religion — and I do not mean God, who can see to His own interests, but religion in the sense of a community with shared values and a shared story about where we have come from, where we are going, and why things are the way they are at this point in the journey. Politics isn’t a very good substitute for religion — setting aside such big questions as truth, there is the fact that politics is an increasingly insular and atomized pursuit that plays out on social media and in narrow, homogeneous social circles composed of people who watch the same television shows and read the same news sources. Religion, in the American practice, at least, remains as a matter of form outwardly directed: We go to church, out into the world, where we are obliged to have real-world, unmediated social encounters with people who may be different from us in some important ways. The church congregations have sorted themselves out to a great extent by now, too: I would be surprised if there were more than ten registered Democrats in the church I attend, and I don’t know of one. But even with that sorting, there is a great deal of real diversity — of experience, of education, of economic condition, of interests, of profession, of origins, etc. — that exists in a church. Churches also understand themselves as communities, and unlike the people you “meet” on social media, the members of your church are people you expect to have continuing, regular, face-to-face interactions with for a long time — and that changes how you interact with them.

But even the churches are in on the yard-sign game at this point: There is a very large church down the road from me, belonging to one of the famous old mainline Protestant denominations, that is festooned in gay-pride rainbows, that goes a little bit overboard with Pride Month decorations, and that makes various splendid proclamations about who is welcome there. Not a word about that Jesus character, of course — the signs are not about transcendent or eternal considerations but parochial social and tribal ones in the profane here and now. “All Are Welcome Here” the sign says, but I’d bet you 30 pieces of the finest silver that they’d crucify Ralph Reed in the churchyard if he showed up on Sunday and gave a sincere account of his religious and political views.

Because the truth about those signs advertising diversity and toleration and open-mindedness is that all of them really say the same thing: “No Trespassing.”

Yeah, “All Are Welcome Here…Except Anyone Having Opinions and/or Feelings Different Than Ours”.  In other words, it’s life once again imitating art:

Moving on, the Morning Jolt suggests…

“On paper, everyone in politics should be focused on the upcoming midterms, not the presidential election two years after that. But the increasingly loud speculation and grumbles of discontent reflect a circumstance that Americans haven’t seen since the late 1960s: a first-term president who could conceivably not run for another term.

Biden could choose not to run because of his age — or, God forbid, his age might make him incapable of performing his duties before then. (The topic is no longer taboo.) Biden doesn’t work a full schedule, and the 2024 campaign won’t allow him to do all his appearances remotely through Zoom and Skype calls, as he did the first time around. A presidential campaign in two years would expose all the flaws and weaknesses that the highly unusual circumstances of the 2020 campaign helped obscure.

If the Democrats nominate Biden again, at this point, he appears likely to be an exceptionally weak candidate. His job-approval rating is at or near record lows. It’s been a long while since Biden consistently led Donald Trump in polling of hypothetical head-to-head matchups. A recent CNN poll found that three-quarters of Democrats want the party to nominate someone besides Biden.

…Biden has reportedly told associates, including Barack Obama, that he intends to run for reelection. The arguments against Biden’s running again — at nearly age 82! — are clear and compelling. But Biden’s ego may not allow him to admit that he’s aged out of the job and that he’s performed poorly in it. He quite literally has been working his whole life to get into the Oval Office. Becoming the first president since Lyndon Johnson to voluntarily not seek another term would represent a de facto admission that he was never well-suited to be president, and was indeed elected because of unusual twists of fate. He was nominated because he wasn’t Bernie Sanders, and he was elected because he wasn’t Donald Trump. The country never really enthusiastically embraced him as the best option; it only settled for him as the least-damaging option.

…We’re seeing something of a collective-action problem — ironic, since the Democrats are the more collectivist of the two parties. Unless something changes soon, Biden’s running for reelection will be a bad idea for the Democrats. (And even if Biden were to somehow win his reelection bid, the country will be stuck in the same mess we’re in now, just with an even older president.)

But Biden is going to run unless someone of stature within the party comes out and declares that the emperor has no clothes.“

Perhaps more importantly, this particular would-be emperor is not only lacking clothes, but any meaningful cognitive ability.

Turning from a would-be emperor with no clothes to a fable cut from whole cloth, in today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment, writing at The Epoch Times, Patricia Adams and Lawrence Solomon relate…

The Big Green Lie Almost Everyone Claims to Believe

“Almost every member of Congress, Democrat or Republican, pays homage to the Big Green Lie. So do all the past and remaining Conservative candidates vying to be prime minister of the UK and every candidate currently vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. So does virtually all of the mainstream press. The Big Green Lie—that carbon dioxide is a pollutant—is so pervasive that even those considered skeptics—including right-wing NGOs and pundits—generally adhere to the orthodoxy, differing not in their stated belief that CO2 is a pollutant but only in how calamitous a pollutant it is.

Because everyone now participates in the CO2-emissions-are-bad lie, the debate over climate policy hasn’t been over whether a CO2 problem exists but over how urgently CO2 needs to be addressed, and how it should be addressed. Do we have eight years left before Armageddon becomes inevitable or decades? Do we get off fossil fuels by building nuclear plants or wind turbines? Should we change our lifestyles to need less of everything? Or should we mitigate this evil—the view of those deemed climate minimalists—by shielding our continents from a rising of the oceans by enclosing them behind sea walls?

With almost everyone across the political spectrum publicly agreeing that curbing CO2 is a good thing, the debate has been between those who want to do good quickly by reaching Net Zero in 2040 and sticks in the mud who want to slow down the doing of a good thing. With discourse careening down rabbit holes, almost everyone gets lost pursuing solutions to Alice-in-Wonderland delusions—and wasting trillions of dollars in the process.

Until the 2000s, when climate change was still called global warming and the mainstream media still noticed that none of the myriad predictions of a climate catastrophe were being borne out—the polar caps weren’t melting, Manhattan wasn’t about to be submerged, malaria wasn’t infecting the northern hemisphere—many exposed man-made climate change as a hoax. The leaked Climategate emails revealed how scientists had conspired to “hide the decline” in temperatures that didn’t conform to their models. The claim that 97 percent of scientists supported the global warming theory was exposed as a fraud, as was the claim that the 4,000 scientists associated with the IPCC endorsed its report—those 4,000 hadn’t endorsed it, and most hadn’t even read it but had merely reviewed parts of the report and often disagreed with what they read.

The claim that the “science was settled” on climate change never withstood scrutiny. Scientists around the world signed a series of petitions to dispute that claim. The 2008 Oregon Petition, spearheaded by a former president of the National Academy of Science and championed by Freeman Dyson, Albert Einstein’s successor at Princeton and one of the world’s most preeminent scientists, was signed by more than 31,000 scientists and experts who agreed that “the proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. …Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

…The fantastical claim that CO2 is a pollutant was cut out of whole cloth. The 2008 statement by the 31,000 experts—that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate” is as true today as it was then, and as it always has been. No scientist anywhere at any time has shown that manmade CO2 emissions—aka nature’s fertilizer—do any harm to anything.“

Why, inquiring minds might ask, would so many people of power be willing to waste untold trillions of dollars and destroy the livelihoods of untold billions of the planet’s people to combat what is effectively a phantom menace?  It’s as Tucker details in this snippet from today’s Tales of The Darkside video, accessible through link #3 immediately below our Quote of the Day at the top of the page…

Here’s the juice: Like the WuFlu lockdowns and mandates, it’s all a gigantic scam.  They’ve got theirs, so they really don’t give a…

…about us, you, the rest of the country, the billions living in grinding poverty throughout the Third World, or anyone or anything else…outside of protecting their positions of power and preserving their personal wealth.

Speaking of inquiring minds, here’s a septet of items guaranteed to pique the interest of those of the Conservative variety:

(1). Adding further to his 2024 credentials, Ron DeSantis announced Thursday he’s suspending Andrew Warren, the rogue Hillsborough County State Attorney who pledged not to enforce a number of state laws, including a 15-week abortion ban and prohibitions on sex changes for minors.  As NRO‘s Dan McLaughlin writes, the good governor is right there’s an executive duty to enforce the law.

(2). NRO tells us ,in a letter responding to a constituent, Democratic New York state senator Kevin Parker dismissed concerns that admitting male inmates into the state’s women’s prisons would endanger vulnerable female residents, dismissively declaring that because the male prisoners supposedly identify as transgender, they “are not men.”  But as Caroline Downey records, they are men, and they most certainly do pose a clear and present danger to vulnerable female inmates.

(3). In what should come as a surprise to no one with the faintest clue…which evidently excludes the majority of West Virginians who continue electing him to office…Joe Manchin is almost exclusively bankrolled by out-of-state donors, with just 1% of individual campaign donations coming from his “home” state.  We’re betting when Joe retires in 2024, it won’t be  in the Mountaineer State.  Anyone wanna take that bet?

(4). The Journal‘s Dan Henninger makes the Conservative case for optimism, noting, “from rampant crime to closed schools, America’s culture is trying to right itself.”  While we share Henninger’s optimism, it’s as guarded as was Churchill’s when he remarked on the occasion of the British victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein, “This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

(5). According to the WSJ, in another display of Sino-subservience, Xi Jinping’s bought-and-paid-for illegitimate President postposed a long-planned, routine test launch of a Minuteman III from Vandenberg Space Force Base so as not to cause his master any further loss of face.

(6). The Journal‘s Kim Strassel urges you to ask yourself why the AARP, a group that claims to represent older Americans, is plumping for a provision in the Inflation Exacerbation Act that will take the greatest toll on seniors.  Follow the money, honey!  Yet another reason we’ll never sign up for any service even remotely connected with AARP.

(7). We’ll take Biden clown car’s latest public-health emergency seriously when they ban buggery.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…

…along with this photo taken of Pelosi’s trip to Taipei from the lovely Shannon:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, as FOX relates a case of arachnophobia gone wild, as a…

Man who tried to kill spider with lighter sparked Utah blaze

“…“Suspect arrested in fire east of Springville. He told law enforcement he was using a lighter to burn a spider. After he was arrested UCSO Deputies found drugs and paraphernalia in his backpack. He is being booked into jail,” the sheriff’s office announced on Twitter.

Police told reporters they were at a loss for what the man’s thought process was…”

Which is pretty much how we’ve felt about every word spoken and each decision made by both Joe and Kommielaa.

Magoo

P.S. We’ve another packed weekend ahead (guests in town for our future daughter-in-law’s wedding shower), so we likely won’t resume transmission before Wednesday.  So ’til then…

Video of the Day

Listen as the White House’s first Black, lesbian, female Socialist mouthpiece characterizes a SCOTUS decision as “unconstitutional”. Yeah, and we’re not in a recession!

Tales of The Darkside

This Tucker segment says it ALL!

On the Lighter Side

There’s lies…d*mned lies…then there’s Joe Manchin! BTW, how does Larry Kudlow find a guy selling his country down the drain for personal gain a “nice guy”?!? Hey, Mao may have killed some 70 million people, but we heard he was a hit at dinner parties.