UK Cancer Trust Lists "Bonus Hole" as a PC Term for 'Vagina'

For those of you who thought 'front hole' was insufficiently...oh, I don't even fucking know what. Inclusive or something?

NGAD: Ten Design Features

[Homer drooling gif]

[Too lazy to look up]

Son of Blackbird: A Hypersonic SR-72 in 2025?

This is more like it, 21st-century-wise.

Bottom Line: Trump is Funny

The blue team just cannot acknowledge any of the guy's virtues. His humor just enrages them more. In fact, one of the most repulsive--and well-known--characteristics of the left is its humorlessness. (Consider: how many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?) A lot of his attempts at humor are cringey, of course. But when he's not hamming it up or trying too hard, dude is actually pretty damn funny. 

   I don't know what the hell the author is talking about re: Trump's reaction to the news of Ginsburg's death. I didn't see anything funny about it. Trump's actually a really human guy when he doesn't have his dander up. I though it was moving, actually. As for Tiny Dancer playing in the background--you just gotta go with it.

   Being entertaining is not a qualification for being President--as could go without saying. But it's loosely associated with something important: his willingness to say true things and call bullshit on bullshit when standing up to the freakish sanctimony of the quasi-religious left. These characteristics might not outweigh his very significant faults, of course. But, OTOH, they might contributing to making him the least-bad option, saints preserve us...

Dems Blunted '22's Red Wave With $$, Slackened Absentee Ballot Rules, and Ballot Harvesting

Seems like the red team is always a step behind on this stuff. I thought that even when I was pounding the pavement for the blues:

   This analysis suggests that Republican pundits and strategists who view the 2022 midterms as a referendum on the GOP’s agenda or Trump’s continued influence over the party are mistaken. Republicans’ true weakness was not their messaging strategy or policy platform (although some argue that also could have used work) but their failure to match Democrats’ voter turnout system – an operation which Campbell explicitly compares to “a 21st century incarnation of the machine politics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
   The question now becomes what Republicans will learn from this moving forward.
As Matt Towery, the co-founder and chairman of polling company Insider Advantage reported in a piece for Real Clear Politics late last month, so far the answer seems to be, “not much.”
   “The failure of the GOP to flood nursing homes, bingo halls, and mortuaries (OK, that one is a joke, of a sort) in search of voters willing to cast early ballots remains, as of today, unaddressed,” Towery writes. “They [Republican leaders] must come to understand that in our post-COVID era, the rules for who votes when and where, and under the aegis of ‘voter outreach,’ has changed forever.”
   “Democrats know how to spend buckets of money to advance what could best be termed ‘selective democracy’… The GOP has only months remaining to create armies and methods to match those efforts.” [emphases mine]

Bloomberg: "Supreme Court Ruling Requires New Diversity Efforts"

I incline to disagree--but this isn't crazy.

   My general view is that "diversity" (a complicated idea hidden under one word...and here resulting in an only partially-intelligible sentence) isn't an inherently defective idea. But, like everything the radical left touches, it has been turned into a monster in the service of an insidious form of soft totalitarianism. And the idea that it is a replacement for affirmative action--basically its origin story--gives the lie to the whole enterprise. 

   I remain--in my gut of guts--sympathetic to moderate affirmative action efforts. I even think that taking considerations of "demographic" heterogeneity (aka "diversity") into account could/can be reasonable under some conditions. It's not that the ideas are--IMO--inherently defective. It's, rather, that they have been turned up to 11 by the progressive left--and, unfortunately, liberals, too--in order to achieve tangentially-related political goals. "DEI" is an institutional virus that is destroying academia. Not because there's no reasonable interpretation of "D," "E," and "I," and not because such ideas cannot ever be salutary...but, rather, because the progressive left corrupts everything it touches and, true to form, it's turned DEI into an all-pervasive and ever-metastasizing mechanism for institutional capture and re-engineering.

   So, though I see no alternative to nuking AA and "DEI"--best to take away the weapons of the enemy if possible--the problem is the irrationalist, anti-liberal, prope-Marxist, anti-Western left. Which has already made its intentions clear with respect to the new ruling: it will make every effort to get around it. 

  Remember, it was Powell's comment in Bakke that got us "diversity"...which, IMO has been much more destructive than affirmative action. The Supremes left another--seemingly much narrower--door open in Students for Fair Admissions, with Roberts writing: "Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life." We might look back on this in ten years and think 'Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but...

Supremes Rule Against Affirmative Action in College Admissions

As expected.

The Left Wants You To Be Unhappy

The left hates pizza.
The left hates bacon.
The left hates booze on ice.

Honestly, fuck these people.

The Gleichschaltung Assimilates High School Debate: Whole Debates Can Now Center on Ad Hominem Attacks on Opponents Based on Politically Incorrect Tweets

I posted something years ago about HS and college debate being infected by recent Continental philosophy. Which meant: debaters no longer had to debate the issues, they could just spew mindless Foucaultian, Lacanian, Zizekian, etc. BS. That stuff is mainly--or at least largely--quasi-poetic bullshit. So it basically seemed to wreck the whole enterprise. And, of course, there's a tight relationship between Continental BS and hard-left politics. So now debate has apparently been politically converged as well. 

   Debate's a mixed bag already. I certainly can sharpen the mind. But it also turns inquiry into a contest, thus encouraging debaters to see every discussion as a fight. Good for the mind, bad for the soul is what I usually say. The intellectual training lasted a lifetime in my case, however, and I think I've mostly gotten over the, as it were, spiritual side effects. I think...

   Anyway, both parts 1 and 2 are worth reading. It's a sad tale...but this is the nature of the totalitarian left--it won't tolerate any unassimilated sphere. Totalitarians gotta totalize.

David Cole: Sub-Par Righty Thinkers Implode in Coinci-Densit; or: Enough About the Titan Submersible Already

I quit Twitter, so I didn't know about this. But Cole is right about these kinds of conspiracy theories running rampant on the right. In this case: news of the implosion of the Titan submersible, on its way to the Titanic, was suppressed until IRS testimony on Hunter Biden's business shenanigans. Why? Er...apparently to distract from the testimony or whatever. 

   On some righty sites, that the election was STOLED!!! is basically an axiom. Creepy.

   It's easy to overlook that stuff given that the massive web of crazy left fairy tales and conspiracies has so taken over public discourse. Seems kinda silly to worry about a few conservitards in the depths of the fever swamps chanting "MAGA" at each other... As I say repeatedly: I generally don't hold a movement's lunatic fringe against it, because every faction has one. It's when that fringe becomes the faction's mainstream that I sit up and take notice. But anyway. Whatever its importance, this sub thing prompted me to point and laugh.

"Latest Whistleblower Reports on Bidens are Ultra-Explosive"

Not merely explosive!

   It actually kinda does sound like the walls are closing in(tm) on Biden. 

   This would also explain why the big push to indict Trump--though, regardless of the motive, it rather sounds like he may deserve it this time.

   Whether the accusations against Biden pan out, this has all made it even clearer that the MSM has a double standard. There's long been far more evidence against Biden than there ever was against Trump in Russiagate...yet Russiagate was hysterical front-page news for two years, whereas Laptopgate and its associated shenanigans have been diligently ignored and even suppressed.

   I've been skeptical about the accusations of influence-peddling on the grounds that nobody is stupid enough to do it and then run for President. But it suddenly occurred to me that we're talking about Biden here...

Yglesias: Tim Scott's Wise Words

link   Though BLM is full of it, there are still racial problems in policing. 

Can You Discern Someone's Political Orientation By Looking At The Person's Face?

link

At a rate better than chance, probably. For one thing, if you see that Smith is female, then you can guess she's more likely to be to the left. In the U.S., anyway, blacks are more likely to vote Democrat. I'm sure there are many other true generalizations. Beyond that--say, within sexes and races--dunno. But it wouldn't be the very most surprising thing we'd ever discovered.

"Sensitivity Readers": Informal Censorship

link

The Myth of 97% Scientific Consensus on Anthropogenic Climate Change

link

Update of Pistol Defenses Against Bears 123 Cases, 98% Effective

Jeez, this surprises me.

Even the Europellet was effective. And even .38 special.

Incidentally, it always makes me sad to think about bears being shot.

Musk-Zuck Cage Match? Icy Mike Breaks It Down For You

Icy Mike's a bit irritating, but he's right about basically all this stuff. First, I had not seen footage of Zuckerberg training. It's bullshit. Yeah, he might be able to beat an untrained 52-year-old nerd...but he's not good and he's not actually training. He's rich-dude training. The comparison to the footage of Tom Hardy is, in fact, instructive. (Though training to fight in boxing gloves...don't get me started. In my personal opinion--and I'm an outlier here--learning to fight from behind your gloves...it's not going to serve you well in a real fight.) I also agree--and said so last time--that Musk might just be willful enough to go balls to the wall and train his ass off for, say, six months. Six months of real training would put him way ahead of Zuckerberg, even supposing the latter continues to fake-train for that whole period of time. Anyway:

Musk-Zuckerberg Cage Match?; or: The Grauniad Can Stupid Anything

Hard for me to believe that a 39-year-old who has been training MMA (or maybe BJJ?) hard for 1.5 years would have a lot of trouble with an untrained 52-year-old... Though it does sound like Musk is bigger. And he seems more willful. Anyway, the point is that the Grauniad can fuck anything up. I mean, granted, this is a stupid story. But here's how you can make it even stupider:

Speaking of plans, here’s a challenge for us all. How do we channel all this billionaire competitiveness into more constructive avenues? Right now all this excess money is going into billionaires comparing the size of their space rockets, building mega-yachts and undertaking hardcore training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. How do we get them all to compete to fund public services instead? Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of boasting about who can beat who in a cage fighting match, they all boasted about who’d paid the most tax that year? Now that’s a billionaire brawl I could get behind.

Hard to believe, but it gets even stupider after that... 

Was Trump's 2020 Loss An Inside Job?

It certainly seems that way--FBI, DoJ...

The really astonishing thing is that, even after news of the evidence is made public, the media is able to keep it largely hushed up. This should have been thoroughly vetted and investigated before the election. If Biden's innocent, fine. But we have a helluva lot of evidence that he isn't. There is no excuse for thwarting the investigation.

OTOH, I see no reason to think that Barr would permit such shenanigans.

One thing we know is that there's a lot here we don't know.

Which is why we need an investigation--not another cover-up. Which is what Garland is doing.

Russian Civil War: A Retrospective

Wow, that was fast.

Biden Vindicated?

I have no understanding of Russia, nor the Ukraine war, nor what's happening now with the Wagner group.

   But I've said for awhile now that I tend to agree with the Biden administration's policy of arming Ukraine...basically because I don't see any alternative. Expensive as this is, arming Ukraine is the cheapest way we have to raise the cost on Putin's expansionism. As a friend of mine has put it: we should be willing to fight to the last Ukranian. (Brutal though that attitude is.) 

   Many conservatives took up a view opposing the Biden strategy, seemingly just because, well, that position was an open one, and they can't stand Biden. (Seems to me that this is how a lot of right-left disputes in American politics get going.) Nobody really knows what to do. The Biden position sucks, but seems plausibly to be the least-bad option available. Conservatives loath Biden, so they incline to oppose him at every point. It was never clear what to do in Ukraine anyway...so advocating a hands-off position is not unreasonable. Next thing you know, all the conservatives have suddenly become peaceniks. About Ukraine, anyway. Of course all the blue-teamers who would normally be peaceniks have become war hawks...partially because they think Putin is the devil...but Russia did invade so...

   Anyway: if this ends up meaning the end of Putin...with nobody worse in his place...Biden will be heroified, however little he may have had to do with the strategy. Doesn't make a ton of sense--but doesn't make no sense either. And this is how things go in American politics, whether it makes sense or not.

   Of course I'd hate to see Biden and the blue team get any political mojo out of this. But I'm more interested in seeing Putin deposed. We might get someone worse...but it seems unlikely. (Or seems to seem that way to someone ignorant of Russian politics, anyway.)

Russian Civil War?

Holy crap.

Barton Swaim: "The American Left's Fantastic Threats"

Book bans? Jim Crow redux? A crackdown on gay vacationers? Joe Biden and his party are seeing things.

Right-wingers of a cynical mindset will insist that Mr. Biden and the Democrats are deliberately manufacturing these threats. I’m not sure. I tend to think the impetus is some mixture of short-term opportunism, a post-religious need to find righteous causes, and genuine delusion.
Two years ago in these pages I suggested that modern liberalism had reached a stage at which all of its major goals had long since been accomplished and that today’s liberals, now defensibly called progressives, are on a thus-far ineffectual search for new policy aims. What I didn’t appreciate then was the degree to which this teleological exhaustion impels the political left to perceive threats that aren’t there.
The Trump years were, in one sense, a hallucinatory parade of horribles, a series of existential threats that didn’t exist. Donald Trump’s election itself was a harbinger of authoritarian government or even fascism. More than a few highly credentialed observers were sure they saw brownshirts marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the near future.

Durham Testifies, Yet Collusion Lives

link
   Go check out any progressives cesspool like, well, all of Reddit and most of Twitter, and you'll quickly find them still shrieking about "Russian collusion!" They will simply never give it up. They hung all their hopes on Mueller, but then refused to accept Mueller's findings. Two of my favorite responses to Mueller's testimony were "The Rooskies got to Mueller, too!" and "Not exonerated!"  Oh, then there was "Muh Senate ruportz!"

   I think people on the left have a deep-seated, unshakeable attitude to the effect that the left is good and the right is bad. I suppose there must be an analogous attitude on the right--I'm sure there must be. But I can tell you that, when I was on the blue team despite having my doubts, and despite striving to remain relatively centrist, I definitely had that attitude. Only by shaking it was I ever able to see things at all clearly. It'd be easy to just trade the attitude for it's opposite. I do think that the average conservative is probably a little less loopy than the average lefty, just because a conservative attitude is a little less loopy than a change-y attitude. But when I start idealizing conservatives, I just go spend some time at e.g. Free Republic, and that inclination is slapped right out of me.

   

Turley: There Needs to be a Full Inquiry Into the DOJ's Interference in the Hunter Biden Case

Trump would have been impeached twelve times on this much evidence.

"Trump Prosecutors Struggled Over Motives; Then They Heard The Tape"

Don't forget that WSJ's news coverage (unlike its editorial page) leans left--and this story may reflect that. It doesn't quite add up--or doesn't quite seem to to me. 

Nevertheless, Barr, Turley, and Andy McCarthy seem to agree that Trump has landed himself in genuine hot water this time. 

Democrats at Climate Forum: BAN ALL THE THINGS

Titanic Submersible Drama

Why the hell would you do some crazy shit like this without a rescue vessel on-site?

Not that I think it would do any good.

Alito Launches Preemptive Strike Against ProPublica Hit Piece

Josh Blackman at the V-Con.

Missing Titanic Submersible

RIP all those guys.

...And I Feel Fiine...

So, kids, what will you be doing today - this being the last day of humanity on planet Earth ? pic.twitter.com/EzZjbb0lhB

— Federal Spy Guy (@FederalSpyGuy) June 20, 2023

Do Studies Show Gun Control Works

Juneteenth "National Independence Day"

What was originally a great idea for a national holiday was ruined, to my mind, when they decided to officially name it "Juneteenth National Independence Day"...2.5 weeks before actual Independence Day.

   It makes no sense to call it an "independence day." "Emancipation Day" would have been more accurate. And the "national" bit is just absurd. 

  This is clearly another blue-team shot across the bow against the U.S. and its traditions, an attempt to supersede the Fourth of July. Something like an attempt to create a progressive analog of / substitute for the 4th.

   It would make much more sense to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation. A practical problem is that it was issued January 1st ('63). But a preliminary version was issued September 22nd ('62 I guess?).

   Ok, 6/19 was already an established holiday of sorts among black Americans. So going with that date is fine. But there's simply no excuse for the nonsensical and provocative "national independence day" nonsense--especially given the date.

   "Weaponizing" this holiday is pretty despicable.

Bill Barr: The Truth About The Trump Indictment

Tl;dr: guilty.

Hilary got away with something similar (though she had the good sense to conceal her wrongdoing instead of waving it in DoJ's face). There is a double standard. Maybe that means that Trump should be let off, too...but it doesn't mean that Republicans should support his candidacy.

Very reasonable, as usual.

I respect and trust Barr--a lot.

U.S. Becomes Transgender-Care Outlier as More in Europe Urge Caution

link

Holman Jenkins: Trump Is Only A Co-Star In America's Unreality Show

Exactly.

   And I don't really have to harp on the rest of the story, but I will. Despicable and incredible as are the tales of Russiagate, Laptopgate, etc., they're just what the relatively sane and adult faction of the blue team has been up to. That part of the story doesn't include any of the truly wacko shit that the  purple-haired vanguard is doing. Transanity and gender ideology. The social construction of everything. BLM, depolicing and fevered insistence that there's some kind of genocide-by-cop going on. The near-religion of promoting racial strife. Climate apocalypticism. Lysenkoism generally. Cancel culture. DEI and the destruction of academia. The war against reason, open inquiry and freedom of speech... And on and on.

   Trump's a freakin' mess. That he's the less-bad option if it comes to that is damn near unbelievable.

Abbott Signs Law Eliminating DEI Offices, Employees, Consultants at TX Colleges and Universities

Very good news.

DEI is primarily a mechanism for institutionalizing leftist policies, in violation of the ideal of institutional neutrality. Universities should lose their funding for engaging in such activities. If they're caught doing it on the sly, the state should take back two or three times the amount of money spent, and whoever authorized the expenditure should lose her or his job.

Consequences of COVID and BLM Madness

Lockdowns may well be possible for the increase in suicides among the young. But not the increase in crime, including homicide. That's a consequence of the Ferguson effect (aka "depolicing") and "decarceration." Progressives claim, without evidence, that COVID caused the crime spike. Well, when they deign to admit that there's been a crime spike.

Pence: Concerns About a Second-Term Trump

legit.

National Socialism Bad; International Socialism Good

Discuss

Now Do Education

Funny, that. https://t.co/lQz02ATHsI

— Iain Murray (@ismurray) June 15, 2023

Roisin MicHaux: The Plot to Redefine Conversion Therapy for "Transgenderism"

Transgender ideology is madness.

No DEI Money For Any Federal Agency

DEI must be stopped.

Johns Hopkins: Maybe Women Exist, Maybe They Don't--We're Looking Into It

Science!

Yet More Confirmation of the Lab-Leak Hypothesis: First People Sickened by COVID Were Scientists At the WIV

link

   To repeat myself repeating myself: a lab leak has, with the exception of a few brief windows, always been the lead hypothesis. Those brief windows were opened up mainly by a few concerted efforts to promote the zoonotic hypothesis. I took the first few efforts seriously. But this point, I'm not done exerting compute cycles on outlier hypotheses.

   The opposition to the LLH seems to have been driven largely by some sort of vague, impressionistic considerations of political correctness. For whatever reason, the left did not want LLH to be true. And, as we know, they also didn't want it be called anything that even acknowledged that it first appeared in China. Hence their unhinged attacks on Trump or anyone else who called it what it was: the Wuhan virus, or the China virus. There's a bizarre anti-Russia/pro-China sentiment on the left. It may have to do with the left's continuing love affair with communism--but that doesn't quite ring true to my ear. It may be a reaction to the right's similarly bizarre pro-Russia/anti-China attitude... Dunno which came first. They may have co-evolved.

   At any rate: it's political correctness and the left's control of media and science that has kept the LLH from being acknowledged as probably true. The left has such power that it's able to take any hypothesis and declare it "The Science(tm)", or shove it into the epistemic twilight. It didn't want LLH to be true, so it's been able to maintain the facade that it's not the lead hypothesis. Eventually, the truth usually wins out. But the left's standard tactic is to allow that to happen only gradually, after the storm, when political damage will be minimized. As with, in politics, Laptopgate. 

   (Sidebar: one reason gender ideology is so alarming is that the left has been able to take obvious falsehoods (e.g. some women are male) and turn them into unquestionable, undeniable orthodoxy. This is a huge step beyond it's normal capabilities of spinning unclear cases into orthodoxy or heterodoxy... Hence my great concern with that case.)

Coulter on the Trump Indictment:

Coulter seems to be in line with Turley and Yoo--Trump may finally have managed to torpedo himself:

Last week’s indictment of Donald Trump is the latest example of why liberals really should have read my book, “Resistance Is Futile.” Or Aesop’s fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Either one.
   After years of making insane accusations against Trump, from Russian collusion to indicting him for misdemeanor record-keeping errors in his blackmail payments to a porn star, liberals finally have him dead to rights committing serious felonies. And no one believes them.
   It's your own fault, liberals.
   Much to my surprise, the documents Trump had spirited away to Mar-a-Lago were not cheesy souvenirs appealing to his juvenile sensibility, like Shaquille O’Neal’s shoe or a picture with Kim Kardashian.
  No, the documents he’d stuffed in Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom, bathroom and shower (among other highly secure locations) included information about our nuclear weapons programs, the defense capabilities of the U.S. and other countries, potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation.
   As Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” these were “among the most sensitive secrets the country has.”

And, of course, he taped himself saying that what he did was illegal, and he needed to hide it.

His defense seems to be: "everybody does it." Bill did it. Hillary did it. Joe did it. Even Pence did it. And Bill, of course, repeatedly lied under oath, too. So double standard!:

Any Republican who thought he could get away with doing something illegal because Democrats did it first is too stupid to be our champion, much less the Republican nominee for president.
You want to do something about the double standard, right-wingers? Run someone who enrages the left by winning, not by constantly creating legal messes benefiting no one but himself.

She's right on both counts.

John Yoo on the Trump Indictment

Sounds pretty bad for the Bad Orange Man.

RFK Jr.: Durham Report Changed My Mind About Russiagate, "Makes It Look Like The Entire Thing Was Fake"

This account of Kennedy's coming to his senses does not inspire confidence.

   I appreciate the guy's candor. But his turning point was a conversation with Oliver Stone's podcasting son?

   Everything else about it aside: it's been clear since something like late 2017 that Russigate was fake. Well, it was probably clear from the beginning to people smarter and less immersed in the blue-team groupthink than I was. But I think it was mid-late 2017 when it started to really become clear to me that it was a load of horseshit. 

   I don't know what to say about someone who had to wait until the Durham report came out. The major outlines of the story were already well-known by that point--to those with eyes to see, at any rate.

Happy Birthday President Donald Trump!

The best--believe me, the greatest--birthday. Not for losers. A tremendous, tremendous day for birth. Many, many people know this. The best people. The best day. Any other birthday--total disaster. 

Corruption Case Against Bidens on the Verge of Exploding?

x Doubt

It's difficult for me to believe that anyone could be stupid and greedy enough to run for President if he's already been making out like a bandit as a Senator and/or VP. Of course Dems have a friendly press and largely friendly bureaucracy on their side--and, as we've seen, those are powerful advantages. But why not just retire with riches? Why ascend to the Presidency where the odds of getting busted rise through the roof? I mean, obviously I don't have the political mindset that craves office and power...but I just don't believe it.

Though, hell, the Dems basically got away with Russiagate despite being caught red-handed...so maybe...

Michael Bakesha: A President Chooses What Records to Return or Keep and the National Archives Can't Do Anything About It

Big if true.

Turley: Biden Special Council Robert Hurr Seems to Have Vanished

If I didn't know better, I say there was a double standard afoot.

WSJ: The Self-Destructive Donald Trump

Yep.

RIP Cormac McCarthy 1933-2023

damn

Female Impersonator Exposes Fake (Well, Obvs) Breast at Biden's White House "Pride" Event; American Flag Replaced by "Pride" Flag

Ew.

   The Democrats have absolutely lost their minds about this stuff. 

I gotta lotta very close non-heterosexual friends. I just don't care about people's sexual preferences and predilections (within reason, of course). But "Pride" month is ridiculous. If you add up all the observations, 2/5 of the year and over 1/3 of the alphabet are now allegedly dedicated to acknowledging or "celebrating" some aspect of the ever-growing "LGBTQQIAA2SP+" business. And the "trans" stuff has now eclipsed all the much more important "LGB" parts of the thing. 

   Anyway. It's part for the course that the dude in question would show his "breasts." This is the kind of vulgarity that people object to. Nobody cares what you do in your bedroom. Just stop with the parades featuring assless chaps, k?

   I absolutely think everybody ought to be--or at least try to be--tolerant of reasonable, nonstandard sexual inclinations and actions. Besides, they're generally none of your business. But nobody has an obligation to "celebrate" (God, I hate the PC use of that term) them.

Turley:: Trying Trump: Scandal May Be His Element--But This Time May Be Different

All very reasonable, per usual.

My view of this matter--not that I deserve a view--is similar to my view of many similar matters: it's unbelievable that we have a once-and-possibly-future President who acts in such ways. It's utterly beyond the pale, however, that the blue team has become an even bigger threat to the nation than the crackpot President in question. This politicization of the legal system should send every American--even the anti-Trump ones--to red alert.

Matt Yglesias: Orange Man Bad

Yes in some ways, no in others.

But this is unequivocally false, and only someone with one foot still in the echo chamber could think it:

The central political fact of our era is that Donald Trump is a total piece of shit and scumbag. It long ago became “cringe” to center one’s politics on this point, but it remains fundamentally true.

I mean, yeah, he's somewhat--though not totally--a piece of shit. And he's somewhat--though not totally, a scumbag. But the same can be said for most Presidents of my lifetime. What's absurd is to say that--even if Trump were a total piece of shit and a total scumbag--this would be the "central political fact of our era." (Though he's right to say that centering one's politics on the non-fact in question long ago became cringe...)

   The central political fact of our era, as any even vaguely objective person can see, is the radicalization and crazification of the American political left. And Trump is largely a consequence of that central political fact. There are a lot of people like me out there who would never even have considered voting for the Bad Orange Man if not for the unhinging of the left. In fact, even that unhinging didn't make me consider voting for him--I voted HRC in '16. Rather, the capitulation of the Democrats and the rest of the mainstream left to the radicals was also necessary. If the Dems had kept the radicals at arm's length, I'd likely still be voting blue. 

Suzanne Moore: The Cult of Gender Ideology is Disintigrating

Madness:

   We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.
   They reveal that Green spoke directly to the director Dr Polly Carmichael, had advisory roles on two studies and – most scandalous of all – could refer children for treatment at the clinic even when their own GPs had repeatedly advised against it. The Cass Review, remember, effectively shut down GIDS as it was not fit for purpose.
GIDS was in turmoil and dealing with a new cohort of distressed young women with gender dysphoria; the number of girls jumped 5,000 per cent in a seven-year period. Cass found there were no long-term follow-ups even though nearly every child who was referred for prescribed puberty blockers went on to cross-sex hormones [which are used to transition from biological gender to desired gender].
   Puberty blockers are controversial because we don’t have enough longitudinal studies to really understand their impact, which is why several countries such as Sweden and Norway have stopped them. The NHS site says they are not simply reversible. Research is showing that when distressed teenagers are given therapy, they no longer want to change gender and many accept they are gay. Puberty blockers tend to be the first step on a medical pathway that leads to cross-sex hormones and surgery. The other issue which Green should know well, is that if given too early, genitalia do not develop enough to make satisfactory “new models”. These kids may well lose their fertility and any chance of sexual pleasure.
   There is an infamous Ted Talk and other YouTube videos of Green talking of what happened to her own son. He wanted a Barbie Rapunzel and other girl things. Her husband, she claims, didn’t like this “girly” boy. Later, he was whizzed off to the States at age 12 for puberty blockers and at 14 was out on oestrogen. He spent seven hours on his 16th birthday on an operating table in Thailand in what is euphemistically called “gender-affirming” surgery.
Green explains this meant “basically use[ing] the skin from the penis to create a vagina. And she hadn’t developed through full puberty so, not to put too fine a point on it, there wasn’t much to work with”. That is the work of puberty blockers.
   This operation was done in Thailand as it is illegal to do that to a 16-year-old here. Indeed, it is now illegal in Thailand. If this well-known information is not a red flag, I don’t know what is. Yet this woman was, we now know, given carte blanche to overrule psychiatrists and medics and to push her dubious agenda.

What Hath NIL Wrought?

On the one hand, these girls do absolutely nothing for me personally.

On the other, more general hand, however: they may have hit on a nascent business model that could finally make the WNBA watchable.

On the third hand: note to self: buy popcorn.

Daniel Penny Speaks Out

Why F-15EX Deliveries Have Been Delayed

Manufacturing defect: inaccurately-drilled holes in the forward fuselage where the canopy attaches.

These things happen...but c'mon, Boeing. This seems like something you should get right. I doubt there's even been any change between the E and EX in this respect. But what do I know?

Abigail Shrier is Not Waiting for the Pendulum to Swing Back on Gender Ideology

Little Miss Trouble, at The Truth Fairy.

I get very frustrated in general when people I know insist that Woketarianism will inevitably go into remission. That's what we thought about it when it took over universities in the late '80s. It did go into remission. Then it burst upon the scene again crazier and more powerful than ever. And now the Democrats are writing it into laws and reengineering institutions in accordance with it. It has gained an enormous amount of ground, and consolidated those gains. Instead of lazily assuming that "the pendulum will swing back," you need to be worrying about whether it's even possible to push the crazy back to its original borders even with a massive, directed effort. It may not be possible. Some of its gains may be permanent. The Overton Window may be permanently shifted.

Scott Adams / No One is Above the Law

Saying, “No one is above the law” in 2023 sounds like you don’t have a news source.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 11, 2023

WSJ: "A Destructive Trump Indictment"

As conservatives have been saying for a while now: we now have a two-tiered system of "justice:" one tier for the left / Democrats, and blue-approved groups, and another for...whoever the left doesn't like. Prosecutorial discretion is clearly being misused all across the country--and it seems to be misused in this instance as well. 

   I'm inclined to agree with this:

Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump. But the indictment might make GOP voters less inclined to provide a democratic verdict on his fitness for a second term. Although the political impact is uncertain, Republicans who are tired of Mr. Trump might rally to his side because they see the prosecution as another unfair Democratic plot to derail him.

The first sentence: yes. I tend to incline away from practical arguments like that in the rest of the paragraph. Bit it's probably right. I, too, think it's important to keep Trump out of the White House. But that isn't a legitimate reason for this indictment. Trump, dumbass that he is, gave them a pretext by blabbing about hiding the documents. But there's just not enough difference between this case and the Clinton and Biden cases for it to pass the smell test. (And Clinton covered up her carelessness--and used it as a predicate of a plot to undermine the election of 2016--with Russiagate.)
    And, to be clear: though it's very important to keep Trump out of the White House, it remains much more important to keep the Dems out. Trump's a narcissistic loon. But the whole left side of the spectrum seems to have lost its goddamned mind. Nothing can convince me to vote for the party of relativism, Lysenkoism, tactical redefinition of words, male women, brainwashing and mutilating children, BLM and racialized/politicized prosecution, fiery but mostly peaceful riots, tactical exacerbation of racial strife, open borders, thought-and-language control, COVID hysteria, mask hysteria, vaxx hysteria, climate hysteria...and dishwashers that don't work.

   Help us, Obi Wan DeSantis...you're our only hope.

NO ONE I S SAFE UNTIL EVERYONE IS SAFE, NAZI

GOD, THE SCIENCE, EVERYTHING SAYS YOU ARE WHITE SUPREMACY AND WHATEVER IF YOU DO NOT GET THE 15TH BOOSTER, BIGOT.

NATURAL IMMUNITY DOESNT COUNT BECAUSE WE SAID SO.

DO NOT THINK. DO NOT DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. JUST OBEY.

Just a reminder, bigot.

Ruy Teixeira: The Democrat's Common-Sense Problem

And this doesn't even include some of the flagship lunacies, e.g. some women are male. 

It's excessively euphemistic to call what's happened to the Dems a "common-sense problem."

Teixeira is one of the increasing number of deep blue Dems who refuse to follow the party into the mouth of madness.

The Financial Burden of Illegal Immigration

link

Turley: This is an Extremely Damning Indictment

Turley has generally dismissed anti-Trump legal antics.

It is significant that this one concerns him.

I don't have a position on this. Somebody just do the right thing and let me know what it is.

One has to be skeptical, of course. It's clear that the establishment has come unhinged and will basically try anything to get him--while much more serious allegations against Biden have been squelched for years now. 

And, of course, HRC and Biden and Pence all seem to have done the same thing without repercussions...

But I'm not rooting for any outcome here.

Gavin Newsome Proposed Anti-Firearm 28th Amendment

facepalm

VDH: The Strange Pandemic of White Disparagement

True and obvious.

   This is the core of cultural Marxism / race-Marxism: drop the focus on class and foment race war instead. It's astonishing to me that the left turned so quickly to anti-white racism. It seems to me that genuine progress on racism was made since my youth...but just as a fair degree of sanity was reached, and the racism on the right was pretty thoroughly marginalized, the left eagerly adopted anti-white racism as one of its central principles. It's astonishingly blatant...but the pervasive political correctness of the left makes it unsayable. PC is always some combination of (a) fear of speaking up about the madness of the left, (b) refusal to admit that you see it, and (c) eventually an acquired reflex of not even quite seeing it. There's no doubt that many on the left see the anti-white racism of progressivism, but epistemically recoil from it, as a hand from a hot stove. They fear that even seeing it makes them racist--the worst thing there is, of course. And they fear publicly admitting what they see even more. When such crimethink flashed through their mind, they avert their mental gaze. Better to let themselves be demonized. Better to let the nation be destroyed by the Woketarian cult. Better to see overt anti-white racism become the unofficial (and, increasingly: official) order of the day...than to be thought, even possibly, a racist. By others or themselves. 

   It's astonishing to me how locked into such groupthink so many people are. Even at universities--especially at universities--where thought is reputedly most free, but is, in fact, most unfree. I almost can't stand to be around it anymore. I feel like I'm amongst the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 

   Utter madness.

   

WSJ: Dropping DEI in TX Schools

link

Barr Confirms Raskin Lied About Biden Corruption/Bribery Investigation

link

Personally, I doubt that even Joe Biden is dumb enough to try to run a scam like this and then run for President. 

But it's certainly putting our two-tiered justice system on display.

There's more evidence for Biden influence-peddling (or worse) than there ever was for Russiagate.

25,000 PRIVILEGED WHITE WOMEN TO DEMAND THAT THE GOVERNOR OF CO BAN ALL GUNS

Anything involving Saira Rao is going to be pretty hilarious. And this didn't disappoint.

Well, obviously it did...esp. given that most sources put the actual numbers at a couple hundred to maybe a thousand...

And who exactly thinks that state governors have the power to override the Second Amendment?

"LGBTQ Americans are in a State of EMERGENCY"!!!!111

Somehow this ends up being largely about abortion, which...

   Eh, there's basically no reasoning with the left at this point.

   So a few states are pushing back on demands that everyone would have recognized as insane like five minutes ago. 

   EMERGENCY!!!!111

   Some states are trying to throttle back a bit on the sexual mutilation of children

   JUST LIKE IN THE HANDMAID'S TALE.

   Abortion has about as little to do with this topic as it could possibly have. We're talking about demographics to which abortion is just about as irrelevant as it could be. 

   And, of course, any effort to keep toddlers out of transvestite burlesque shows is LITERALLY HITLER. 

   Progressive parents who insist on taking their kids to drag shows are loony virtue-signalers. The kids are casualties of blue-on-blue fire. But I kinda think the right, having gone to the mat to defend parental authority and autonomy, may have to bite the bullet here. 

   Anyway.

   One of the left's MOs is to manufacture crises.

   And that's what this is.

Do We Have a UFO?

Of course not.

But it would be super-cool...

UW-Madison May Remove Lincoln Statue

Unless the Woketarian cult is stopped, there will be no end to such damnatio memoriae. 

Once again, Trump was right--though this call was an easy one.

Elliot Page Details Terrifying Yet Fictional "Transphobic" Attack Outside LA Hotel

Totally happened.

VMI's Chief DEI Officer Quits Under Pressure From The Spirit of VMI

That's an alumni group, incidentally. I've had friendly dealings with them. Congrats to them on this.

Martin Brown, VA's Chief "Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion" Officer: "DEI is Dead"

Well, sounds like it's maybe 1/3 dead...

CA State Senator Scott Wiener (D - Of Course) Honors Drag Queen in State Capitol

If conservatives had said, even ten years ago, that this is where the Dems were headed, they'd have been shrieked at hysterically...and probably accused of "hate speech" or something...
...but there we are...

Tim Scott With a Response for the Ages

NSFW insult against Scott + his response.

The Myth of the Climate-Change "97%"

If they really cared, they could do this right.

But they don't really care.

What they want is a really high number to prop up climate-change Lysenkoism.

D-Day + 79

 Don't know what to say.

Joyce Vance: "Can We Call it Fascism Yet?"

A view from the other side.

   It seems foolish to me to accuse the right of being Orwellian, especially given the clearly Orwellian nature of the contemporary left... But that doesn't mean I don't worry about Trump and the right. Under normal conditions, I'd be much more concerned about the right than I currently am. Trump, of course, is an inherently alarming component of the contemporary political landscape. There's no denying that. However, he's not the orange demon the left makes him out to be. Or he wasn't until he lost it after the election. The road to hell is paved with comparative judgments, but to my mind Trump is, to a large extent, a kind of weapon against the much greater threat, the genuinely Orwellian left. Though God knows I desperately hope we don't have to put our eggs in that basket. 

   The left is much more reminiscent of Soviet and Chinese communism than Trump is of fascism. Note that the author has to define 'fascist' merely as "hate-fueled bully" to make her charge stick. Trump is an angry dude alright, and rather a bully. Again, he's not nearly as bad as the fantasy Trump of the left's fevered imagination, nor as bad as the left. But he's bad enough. As I keep saying, in a sane world he shouldn't be allowed within a hundred miles of the Oval Office. 

   This is a strange argument, and I don't exactly know how to think about it, but I do think it's predicated on truth: part of the problem is that the left was dedicated to driving Trump over the edge. Russiagate alone is perhaps the greatest political outrage of my life. Of course we can reply that Presidents must have the ability to keep their heads under relentless, unfair attack. Obama did. Nevertheless, the left's madness--and in particular its anti-Trump madness--has played a large role in getting us where we are today. The left told us that Trump was a crazy strongman...and then they worked diligently for years to make that true. So I have limited sympathy when they proclaim Aha, we were right!

   Siding with Trump is a little bit like siding with e.g. Pinochet to oppose the Soviet takeover of the world. Reminiscent of a deal with the devil.

   Almost everyone I know who voted for Trump did so with trepidation. OTOH, it is clear that very many on the left who voted for Biden did so only because he won the primary, and no more radical candidate was available. That comparison is a bit of a cheat, but there it is. There are Trumpian cult-of-personality true-believers. Contrary to what progressives allege, they aren't really part of mainstream discussion. But go check out the comments at e.g. Free Republic (a very righty website) sometime... 

   What a mess.

Man Pretending to be a Woman Threatens Matt Walsh

This is worth a read.

   I'm not sure what counts as a legal threat. But the person in question---one "Sarah Celeste Griffith"--is at the very least sidling as close to threats as he can. I think it is as clear as it could be that Mr. Griffith is mentally unbalanced. As I heard a comedian ask about a different case long ago:  what're you waiting for? Red wine with fish?

   As Brunet notes (basically): conservative grad students, to the extent that such persons exist, can be driven out of the discipline for using a slightly unfashionable word...or merely for letting it be known that he is conservative. Progressive leftists can basically do whatever they want--apparently up to and including death threats (or veiled death threats)...and they'll likely be rewarded.

   Some important, true tweets Brunet links to:

   The right rejects and detests the extremist right. But--worse than Hall claims above--the left not only rewards its radical fringe, it follows it. The American left now basically is the extremist left. The extremist left is the vanguard of the left, and it sets the agenda. Perhaps not up to murder, but definitely up to and including political violence--i.e. terrorism. See: the left's defense of Antifa. (Including, of course, deploying the cloaking device: Antifa doesn't exist!) 

   But the vast network of patronage--that's a really important point that I've rarely or never brought clearly in front of my mind. Angela Davis, accessory to murder, is a leftist hero with a better academic job than most Ph.D.s ever even get an interview for. 

And on and on...

   Mr. Griffith, supposing he is at all competent, will very likely get a (good) academic position. And I'd bet money that Brunet's prediction will come true: the department or university that hires him will have legal trouble in its future. Not for the reason it ought to. But, rather, of the kind Brunet indicates.

Progressives Target Toyota for it's Electric Vehicle Heresy

 ESG in action.

Spectator Interview w/ John Miersheimer: Would Trump Really Pull Out of Ukraine?

Betteridge's Law of Headlines strikes again.

"Transgender" Surgery (i.e. Simulated Sex-Change) Does Not Improve Mental Health; Probably Harms It

There's no surprise here.

More studies needed, of course. But smart money's always been on these conclusions. Rushing people into quasi-voluntary sexual mutilation, largely on the basis of lies about turning them into the opposite sex, is virtually guaranteed to harm them.

Kevin Ryan: "Why Putin Will Use Nuclear Weapons"

bad.

Though I've generally approved of the Biden admin's handling of Ukraine, I've thought that we should be pushing hard for negotiations. This post makes me think that more.

How Sweden Became A Gangster's Paradise

Diversity is our strength, bigot.

Why We Are Far From Recession

Good news.

Elon Makes Matt Walsh's "What is a Woman?" Temporarily Available to Watch for Free

After some hard-left dead-enders at Twitter illicitly banned it.

I think the free window has closed, but it really is worth buying--which I think I'm going to do though I just watched it for free. 

It really is good--although I'd seen many clips, it was better, as a whole, than I'd expected.

Gotta say, it's really surprisingly well done.

Every parent should watch this https://t.co/pIp6UP6vq8

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 2, 2023

Transanity: Sports

You gave them a beachhead when you started using--and continue to use--the word 'transwoman' (or 'trans woman') to mean: a man misrepresenting himself as a woman. You've been fighting a defensive battle ever since. 

   Orwell laid it all out for you. The left is committed to and adept at Newspeak. It's a highly literary (note: not literate) movement. It introduces new words, redefines old words, and the Reaver hordes shriek at anyone who fails to toe the linguistic line. After that, it's  just a matter of persistence, "shaming" and intimidation. 'Trans woman' came along, and they badgered you into using the term. People like me refused. They'd shriek at us. So what? They often fell back to: "It's just a word. Why are you making such a big deal out of it?" And, of course, one of their favorite idiocies: "Why do you care so much?" Once the word was widely used, they shifted to: "Trans women are women." That is, basically:  "Hey, you know that thing we said was just a word? Well it isn't just word. It's an accurate description of reality." And it's largely via this absurdly ridiculous stratagem that they've succeeded. "Women's sports? Well, trans women are women! Why do you think that some women should not be permitted to play women's sports?"

   It's "just a word" until you are badgered into using it. Then it's no longer just a word--it's the crucial term in left's attempt to "socially construct" what passes for "reality" in that sector of the political spectrum.

   

Transanity Destroys Families

A heart-wrenching account.

Rosalynn Carter Diagnosed With Dementia

I am (perhaps inordinately) sad to hear this.

Awful for this news to come on the heels of President Carter beginning hospice care.

I'll always have very fond feelings for the Carters. The first Presidential election I remember with much clarity is that of 1976, the bicentennial.