It’s Wednesday, July 28th, 2021…and it’s t-minus two days and counting ’til we’re back to Africa. In the meantime, Jim Geraghty just returned from a week-long vacation himself to discover 46* has ushered in…
But a problem you ignore is not a problem that is likely to solve itself.
A president who is elected with a mandate to just not be like his predecessor is a president who wakes up every morning and cruises along on the vibe that his mission is already accomplished. Biden travels around the country and the world giving speeches declaring that “America is back!” and waits for negotiators on Capitol Hill to work out the details of yet another massive spending bill.
Biden insisted that “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist.” You don’t have to look that hard to find worried economists, in part because they thought prices would have stabilized by now.
Biden turns 79 in four months. Today, he’ll be making remarks to commemorate the 31st anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That’s a perfectly fine thing to do, but it is not particularly connected to any of the pressing issues in the country right now. If the administration wants to argue that the pace of the president’s schedule will naturally slow in midsummer, fine. But if the Biden team is wondering why a majority of Americans are pessimistic about the coming year after being much more optimistic just two months ago, perhaps our fellow citizens are realizing (belatedly!) that this White House’s first response to a thorny problem is to insist it isn’t really a problem.
But hey, it’s great weather for ice cream. (Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find a ice-cream-obsessed presidency in a man whose campaign spent $7,724.64 on institutions with “ice cream” in their names during the 2020 campaign.)“
It’s life imitating art, dear friends…
…life imitating art. And just as in Jaws, those who refuse to recognize these problems, let alone fail to enact any meaningful solutions, won’t be the ones suffering the consequences of their cowardly, counterproductive practices and policies.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, in a must-read commentary courtesy of City Journal via Speed, Lee Siegel traces…
“On the day in March that eight people were murdered in a massage parlor in Atlanta, six of them Asian-American, a Cherokee County, Georgia, police captain gave a media briefing after the alleged murderer was caught. He described the suspect’s motivation as follows: “He was pretty much fed up, and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
Indignation erupted. How, people cried, could the police captain attribute the murders to someone merely having a bad day? Having determined that the crime was motivated by anti-Asian hatred, the Internet furies concluded that the captain had spoken callously because of his own anti-Asian bias.
Leave aside that anyone who had seen a police movie could recognize as tough-guy talk the captain’s seemingly casual description of an unspeakable act. And never mind that just a few weeks later, President Biden described the slaughter of eight people in a FedEx facility not as a human tragedy but as a “national embarrassment,” as if it had been a messily disputed election. Consider instead what the policeman’s critics cared about. Imagine that the captain had appeared before the media and had said that he believed that the suspect was motivated by anti-Asian hatred and that this hate was the true virus ravaging us all. Would he have been lauded? Yes. But what if he gave this briefing while the suspect remained at large, giving him time to flee? In reality, the entire Atlanta police department was on the scene almost immediately. The suspect was caught shortly after the shootings, before he could harm anyone else. Even if the police captain had been insensitive, why should this matter more than his and his officers’ actions?
Words are crumbling under the weight of moral one-upmanship. One cannot, for example, call both Hitler and Donald Trump “fascists” without the term losing its meaning. But for four years, an imminent fascist revolution sponsored by the Trump movement was a liberal obsession. (Hard to make a fascist revolution, though, without having the military on your side, and Trump spent four years insulting both the military and the state’s intelligence apparatus.) Nor does the term “systemic racism” mean anything if it describes both the structure of apartheid in South Africa and slavery in the antebellum American South and the circumstances we live in today.Apartheid South Africa was systemically racist. Georgia in 1860 was systemically racist. But the New York suburb where I live—Montclair, New Jersey—has a black mayor who succeeded another black mayor; a black superintendent of schools; a black assistant superintendent of schools; several black school principals; a black deputy chief of police; a self-conscious enclave of wealthy black bankers and black lawyers; and accomplished black residents, from a world-famous jazz bassist to a former head of Homeland Security. Montclair is more racially, socially, and economically diverse than any neighborhood in New York City. Yet cries of Montclair’s systemic racism have now swept the town, as well as its public school curricula.
In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Troilus has a nightmare vision in which language dissolves into “words, words, mere words.” If that world were actually to materialize, he later thinks, then:
right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice resides, Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then every thing includes itself in power. . . .
Today, right and wrong have indeed lost their names, their singular distinctness. Now the disposition of power decides the status of many conflicts or tensions. And in this new world where right and wrong are determined by whoever exerts the greater power—that is, whoever makes the loudest threats to shame and cancel—the emphatic appearance of what is right wields the most power of all.
…The pandemic provided the final touch to the woke revolution in the media. Isolated at home, confined to endless Zoom meetings, journalists, especially Zoomers and millennials, lost all sense of what their standing was among their peers. The last supports of self-esteem fell away.Amour propre—the irrefutable, implacable, unanswerable assertion of superior moral status—became an instrument of professional survival and a technique of mental and emotional balance.
This is the most sinister dimension of the new woke social order. It is not fundamentally rooted in ideology, or even in a hunger for power. Its origins lie deep in the always threatened, ever insatiable, human ego.“
Our editing should give you a flavor for Siegel’s thoughts, but cannot do his commentary justice, thus we urge you to read it in it’s entirety through the link in the headline. It’s well worth your time.
Turning now to our continuing COVID coverage, in the interest of presenting both sides of this incredibly important if largely manufactured issue, courtesy of Balls Cotton, we present The Last Refuge‘s summation of…
“…With the Canadian molecular biologist Alina Chan, he’s finishing a book called “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” to be published in November.
It will likely make its authors unwelcome in China. As Mr. Ridley worked on the book, he says, it became “horribly clear” that Chinese scientists are “not free to explain and reveal everything they’ve been doing with bat viruses.” That information has to be “dug out” by outsiders like him and Ms. Chan. The Chinese authorities, he says, ordered all scientists to send their results relevant to the virus for approval by the government before other scientists or international agencies could vet them: “That is shocking in the aftermath of a lethal pandemic that has killed millions and devastated the world.”
Mr. Ridley notes that the question of Covid’s origin has “mostly been tackled by people outside the mainstream scientific establishment.” People inside not only have been “disappointingly incurious” but have tried to shut down the inquiry “to protect the reputation of science as an institution.” The most obvious reason for this resistance: If Covid leaked from a lab, and especially if it developed there, “science finds itselfin the dock.” (Hence Dr. Faux Chi’s continued denials of the obvious and accusations of others engaging in his very behavior.)
Other factors have been at play as well. Scientists are as sensitive as other elites to charges of racism, which the Communist Party used to evade questions about specifically Chinese practices “such as the trade in wildlife for food or lab experiments on bat coronaviruses in the city of Wuhan.”
Scientists are a global guild, and the Western scientific community has “come to have a close relationship with, and even a reliance on, China.” Scientific journals derive considerable “income and input” from China, and Western universities rely on Chinese students and researchers for tuition revenue and manpower. All that, Mr. Ridley says, “may have to change in the wake of the pandemic.”
In the U.K., he has also noted “a tendency to admire authoritarian China among scientists that surprised some people.” It didn’t surprise Mr. Ridley. “I’ve noticed for years,” he says, “that scientists take a somewhat top-down view of the political world, which is odd if you think about how beautifully bottom-up the evolutionary view of the natural world is.”
He asks: “If you think biological complexity can come about through unplanned emergence and not need an intelligent designer, then why would you think human society needs an ‘intelligent government’?” Science as an institution has “a naive belief that if only scientists were in charge, they would run the world well.” Perhaps that’s what politicians mean when they declare that they “believe in science.” As we’ve seen during the pandemic, science can be a source of power.
…Vaccines have been central to the question of “misinformation” and the White House’s pressure campaign against social media to censor it. Mr. Ridley worries about the opposite problem: that social media “is complicit in enforcing conformity.” It does this “through ‘fact checking,’ mob pile-ons, and direct censorship, now explicitly at the behest of the Biden administration.” He points out that Facebook and Wikipedia long banned any mention of the possibility that the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
“Conformity,” Mr. Ridley says, “is the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it.” Mr. Ridley reserves his bluntest criticism for “science as a profession,” which he says has become “rather off-puttingly arrogant and political, permeated by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.” Increasing numbers of scientists “seem to fall prey to groupthink, and the process of peer-reviewing and publishing allows dogmatic gate-keeping to get in the way of new ideas and open-minded challenge.”
The World Health Organization is a particular offender: “We had a dozen Western scientists go to China in February and team up with a dozen Chinese scientists under the auspices of the WHO.” At a subsequent press conference they pronounced the lab-leak theory “extremely unlikely.” The organization also ignored Taiwanese cries for help with Covid-19 in January 2020. “The Taiwanese said, ‘We’re picking up signs that this is a human-to-human transmission that threatens a major epidemic. Please, will you investigate?’ And the WHO basically said, ‘You’re from Taiwan. We’re not allowed to talk to you.’”
He notes that WHO’s primary task is forestalling pandemics. Yet in 2015 it “put out a statement saying that the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century is climate change. Now that, to me, suggests an organization not focused on the day job.”
In Mr. Ridley’s view, the scientific establishment has always had a tendency “to turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and expelling heretics and blasphemers.” This tendency was previously kept in check by the fragmented nature of the scientific enterprise: Prof. A at one university built his career by saying that Prof. B’s ideas somewhere else were wrong. In the age of social media, however, “the space for heterodoxy is evaporating.” So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution. It’s sure to be a costly divorce.“
Here’s the juice: regardless of how you feel about the vaccine, the unalterable truth remains it’s not what government authorities say, but what they do…
…that sows the seeds of doubt and distrust, as demonstrated by both our open southern border and Miss Information’s determined refusal to answer a simple, logical question:
Next, we offer an octet of intriguing items certain to pique the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). A Minnesota fourth-grade student and her mother expressed concern to their local school board after her class was given an “equity survey” and students were told not to tell her parents about the activity. After all, why would parents want to aware of what their children are being taught.
(2). Since we’re on the subject of America’s system of public miseducation, Jim Geraghty writes, “In case you missed it yesterday, 40 percent of New York City Department of Education employees aren’t vaccinated, which indicates that a lot of the “REOPENING THE SCHOOLS AS PARENTS WISH IS GAMBLING WITH THE LIVES OF TEACHERS” rhetoric over the past year was absolute horse manure.”
(3). In a real shocker, FOX informs us the dealer representing Hunter’s debut as a “professional” artist has longstanding ties to China, stating in 2015 his desire to be the art world’s “lead guy in China.” Lead guy…Big Guy…we get it!
(6). NRO‘s Phil Klein suggests, given the fact Joe Manchin just blew up the rationale for Republicans to cut an infrastructure deal, “Any Republican that votes for the bipartisan charade is greasing the wheels for Democrats to ram through their entire agenda — on climate; expanding Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare; subsidizing college and childcare; and a host of other liberal priorities.” Not to mention, given the fact, as Jim Freeman records at Best of the Web, there’s a trillion…yes, a TRILLION, with a “T”…of COVID cash lying around which has yet to be spent, why are Republicans even talking about allocating more?!?
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Pure Michigan segment, courtesy today of one Jewell Jones and an all-too common occurrence with politicians who know their voters will ignore any excess, as the…
“…State Rep. Jewell Jones, D-Inkster, turned in his new fundraising report ahead of Monday’s 5 p.m. deadline for state officeholders and candidates to submit the records. In a phone interview, Jones described the Pantheion Club, the venue of the meeting, as a “lounge” and said he wasn’t sure if it was a strip club before the phone call became disconnected.
A Twitter account using the name Pantheion Club describes it as “the oldest and most established gentlemens (sic) club in Michigan.”
“We have (to) meet people where they’re at some times…#HOLLA,” Jones said in a text message after the interview. He added that the club had “great lamb chops.”
Jones, a third-term lawmaker, made headlines in recent weeks after he was arrested on April 6 after his black Chevy Tahoe drifted in and out of lanes along Interstate 96 before pulling off the shoulder and into a ditch, according to a Michigan State Police report. He was accused of struggling with troopers after the crash and allegedly told officers that he’d call the governor and that he had oversight of the MSP budget.
His blood alcohol content, according to the police report, was 0.19. The legal driving limit is 0.08…”
Anyone voting for Jewell Jones and his like-minded “soul” mates across the country at every level of government truly get the government they deserve.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Here’s further proof, like Popeye, much of America has had all it can stands, and it can’t stands no more.
Tales of The Darkside
Ya gotta love it when ABC spends barely a minute and a half on the results of its own poll showing confidence in 46* dropping faster than Kommielaa’s panties in Willie Brown’s office.
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