More Details From Hamas's Inhuman 10/7 Attack

Monsters

The Return of COVID Mask Fetishism

Of the left, I now always imagine Sauron retreating to Mordor, building its strength, waiting until its time has come to reemerge and destroy...

Good news: Masking has returned to hospitals and clinics in several counties in Illinois, Wisconsin, California, Massachusetts, Delaware, Washington, Indiana and New York.

Thanks to all the tireless organizers making progress happen. Keep going! https://t.co/rGGLfXhDkz pic.twitter.com/1gE7cl6niB

— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) December 30, 2023

"Progress"

They keep using that word...I don't think it means what they think it means... 

Greg Gansky on the "Would You Rather Have a Dead Son or a Live Daughter" Transgender Trope

A madness--a cultish secular religion--has affected our "elites."

And transanity is merely one aspect of it.

To the extent that populism is a reaction against elites, and given the abject lunacy afflicting said "elites," how can any sane person find the recent rise of populism puzzling? Ordinary people believe things like "girls are female." Our "elites" emit clouds of brainless jargon in denial. Ordinary people believe that we should have and enforce a border. Our "elites"...well, emit clouds of brainless jargon in denial of this, too. And this pattern is repeated with issue after issue...

   The argument in question in the post is one of the left's most despicable ones: let us sexually mutilate your children. If you refuse--or even so much as argue against us--children might kill themselves. Unstated conclusion: and you will be responsible. Their blood will be on your hands...

   Madness.

   Abject madness.

   We are not engaged in an ordinary political disagreement. We face a faction that has been possessed by a kind of insanity that requires and encourages outright rejection of plain facts and obvious moral positions. 

   If sociology and social psychology were worth a damn--and if those disciplines hadn't been possessed by the same ideas--they'd be investigating the nature and origin of this mass hysteria.

The SPLC's New Enemy: Biology

As with the ACLU, transanity has taken over the SPLC. Of course the latter started going off the rails some time ago. ACLU seemed to me to have remained pretty much on task until 2020 when the whole left went irrevocably off the rails. That, incidentally, seems to have been the doing mainly of one person, one "Chase Strangio." But that's just an impressionistic take from the outside. What's undeniable is that ACLU has jettisoned the "CL" part of its brief in favor of a general progressive-left orientation. A very bad trade, obviously.

NYT: Hamas's Mass Rape, Torture and Mutilation of Israeli Women on 10/7

Monsters.

Barr: Trump Committed "Grave Wrongdoing" in January 6th Case

Barr is probably the guy I trust most about Trump, and this interview is damning--though we've heard most of his points before. I basically think Barr is right on all the major points--including that Trump's policies were generally good, that he speaks plainly (or at least straightforwardly...) about things other people in DC (especially Dems) won't speak plainly about, and that that Dems launched an unprecedented?,)  unpatriotic, rabid campaign to thwart him and torpedo his Presidency.

   In short: if not for Trump's character flaws and his actions after the election, we would face a fairly clear choice. 

   The pre-election TDS of people I know and respect--not to mention everybody else on the left--still astonishes me. Of course they could argue that they saw the real Trump, hence always had a generally justified view of him. But that doesn't seem to me to comport with the facts. OTOH, when your view is more-or-less true in the end...that's pretty important. It's a little like the outcome of an experiment. You still may not believe the theory...but there it is... 

   And, needless to say, the left's anti-Trump hysteria blinded them to his strengths. And it helped blind them to the abject madness that has taken over the left.

   Unfortunately, in the end, we'll probably end up having to decide between Trump and a non-rogue Democrat. A rogue Dem--e.g. a Manchin--would be a different kettle of fish. But we know that's not going to happen. It's Trump the post-election lunatic vs. some--who cares which?--advocate for the Dems' utterly unhinged platform. As I've made clear, I still think it's one bad apple--a very big, and, now, though not previously, very bad apple--vs. a whole barrel of mostly rotted ones. On that side, it's not so much the apples as the barrel. That is to say--and maybe I'm just bad with metaphors--but the ideology that has taken over the Dems is abjectly cracked. Though I trust Barr and tend to agree that the Smith indictment is very serious business, it's also important to recognize that the other side has brought a flood of lunatic lawsuits against Trump, from the Bragg case to E. Jean Carroll. And that's kind of the situation in a nutshell. Whom do we support? The unfit jackass running for President, or the vast, powerful, smart, almost-unimaginably influential, corrupt, organized, institutionalized, radical, open conspiracy against him that is willing to saturate the nation with propaganda and turn the justice system against its political enemies?...just for starters...

   Oh, and: that is using all its powers to protect its by-now-rather-obviously criminal front-man...an octogenarian in obvious decline, incidentally...

   We are so ****ed I can't even believe it.

Peter J. Wallison: Against Immunity for Trump

This is the sort of argument that non-lawyers--and non-experts-in-the-area-lawyers--can't really assess even when the whole thing is laid out for them. And this is obviously a pretty condensed presentation. But it sounds prima facie plausible to me, FWIW.

Can Taylor Swift Save Biden?

   You can't avoid knowing what Ms. Swift looks like--her face is everywhere. I'm sure I must have heard her music in a store or an elevator somewhere, but, if so, I didn't know it was her. I can't name a single song. (Well, actually, I guess I can now, as I take it those are some of her song titles in quotes in the final, cutesy paragraph of that post.) I don't even know what she sounds like. I'm generally ten years, at least, behind the musical curve, so there's nothing unusual about this. And most--but not all--pop music is revolting IMO. (Full disclosure: of the pop music I do like, there's some really, really, really bad shit in there. There's no disputing that.)

Hey you kids get off'n my lawn [shakes fist]...

   Anyhoo, I generally know who Swift is--I basically know her as that blandly good-looking blonde girl--and I see that the point of the post is to encourage a (seemingly) brainless pop icon (maybe she's smart, I dunno...I've already told you everything I know about her, which is nothing) to encourage brainless teen+ girl voters to help brainless grandpa Biden across the finish line.

   Because Trump is mean.

   Perfect. This would be a perfect way for the Dems to win. 

   That's who you are now, Dems. The party of lunatic radical irrationalists, smug, soulless elites...and brainless pop (music, movie) stars. 

    None of that means Trump isn't a thermonuclear jackass. But nothing could possible repulse me more than that tripartite combination described above.

    (Well...insurrection could...if there'd been an insurrection...)

    Grumble.

    Well, that's enough internet for today... I'm going to hang out with my dogs and get ready for our delayed Xmas celebration when JQ's fam gets here. Real life is way better than the radioactive dump of shitty ideas that is the political interwebs.

My Lead UFO/UAP Hypothesis

4Chan

Merry Christmas / Bona Saturnalia

To you Philosoraptor dead-enders out there.

Shellenberger Confirms Evidence for UFO/UAP Recovery?

I still don't believe it, but Shellenberger is a serious guy, and it's obviously not impossible:

Your Blue Future: Carbon Passports: Time to Limit How Often We Can Travel Abroad

And, of course, there's no reason to add 'abroad'... If the argument works at all, then it works for all travel involving fossil fuels...

   Needless to say, the article is predicated on the standard array of falsehoods about wildfires, extreme weather events, etc. And it includes some cutting-edge rhetoric about global "boiling." 

   But the important point: this is what the left wants.

   For you anyway.

   I predict that they will get waivers for crucial events like sociology conferences and, needless to say, global warming pow wows.

The Woke "Scholarship" Chronicles: "Barbie Should Expand Her Range of Medical and Scientific Professions"

The stupid, it burns.

Gender Lysenkoism

"The Secret Life of Gender Clinicians."

Madness.

Jacob Sullum, Reason: Was the Capitol Riot an "Insurrection," and Did Trump "Engage in" It?

"Iffy," says Sullum.

   I basically agree with everything he says, other than the claim that the rioters were armed. A very few were, but you can't make the general claim on that basis.

   I agree that Trump could justifiably have been found guilty in the second impeachment...but he wasn't.

   Everything else even aside, leave it to Trump to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. If he would have acted like a minimally rational human being after he lost, he'd be on his way to a landslide victory in '24.

Not that he deserves it.

Georgia Election Shenanigans: Stonewalling Complaint SEB 2023-025

I don't think the election was stolen (though I do think you can reasonably call it "rigged"...or at least say that there was a concerted blue-team effort to rig it). But I remain concerned about it. Here's one such thing:

State Election Board member: 4,081 false mail-in votes for Biden found in Fulton Co. in hand recount

“If one were to calculate the same error rate in 100% review of that same county, there would be over 12,000 votes given to a candidate in error”

GA was decided by 11,779 votes pic.twitter.com/VAkkCf6hVR

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) December 21, 2023

A post on the matter here. 

Trump vs. The Deep State+

...or whatever you call this mass, delusional operation against the rest of the USA by the "elites"... It's not just bureaucrats. It's academia, the media, K-12, publishing... You know the story.

   This mass, sweeping, more-or-less-right-out-in-the-open conspiracy--collusion between powerful elites and crackpot radicals--is sending the country off the rails. It has created the Myth of Orange Hitler. And it is deploying all its dark arts against him, including lawfare, one of its greatest and most depraved weapons. 

   Thing is...Trump, for all his strengths (and he does have several), is such a revolting dumbass shitbird that he makes it all seem like it might just be reasonable. After all, what's it sensible to do to keep a Hitler--orange, red, purple, green, whatever--from getting his hands on the levers of power? Trump didn't incite imminent lawless action on January 6th 2021. But he clearly laid the groundwork for it with his lunatic talk of Venezuelan satellites beaming votes to voting machines...or whatever the hell it was. If you tell people their country is being stolen...well, again: what's it reasonable to do to stop that? Surely a little breaking and entering at the Capitol is in-bounds...

  A pox on both...well, you see where I'm going with this...

Turley: The Grifter Defense--Dems Embrace Influence-Peddling...With a Twist...

While progressive foot soldiers continue to insist that there is no evidence whatsoever of Biden influence-peddling, Dems on the front lines realize that dog won't hunt. They still chant that mantra, but they're also falling back to a series of prepared positions. The newest one is roughly: sure, they were peddling influence...but they never held up their end of the bargain! They were grifters, but they never did what they were paid to do.

   And the MSM is their toady.

   For two years, the nothingburger of Russiagate was all we heard about. When their hand-picked investigator turned up nothing...they simply refused to accept it, and many continue, to this day, to insist that there was Russian collusion. Real, actual, almost-impossible-to-deny evidence of Biden corruption has been silenced, dismissed, denied, and finessed away for three years now. The almost-exactly-opposite treatment of these two scandals tells you much of what you need to know about our ideologically-captured news media. It's Democrat talking-points disguised as journalism.

   Trump is a crook a priori--evidence is irrelevant. Biden, on the other hand, is a lovable, avuncular goofball--except when he's laughably represented as "Dark Brandon"...then, y'know, he's an edgy quasi-anti-hero, feigning incompetence while fighting for Justice(tm). Anyhoo, what's not to love? Evidence, again, be damned.

   Behold the dangers of The Narrative(tm)... Shit rots your mind, yo.

Plagiarism is A-OK...If You're the President of Harvard...and a DEI Hire

Apparently she gets to go back and put quotation marks around the "duplicative language" in her dissertation.

   At what point do the absurd consequences of this general view become so apparent that even the true believers have to give it up?

   Answer: probably never.

   A perhaps more important question: at what point do they become so patently absurd that the center-leftists who enable it by their silence and complicity have to stop doing so?

   Paleo-PC lost its power when that happened. 

   And, once it becomes unfashionable, many of the true believers will tacitly give it up as well.

   Which is not to say that it will be defeated forever. I expect it will never just go away. It'll merely retreat into academic Mirkwood, the land of obfuscation and fantastical foolishness of the humanities and qualitative social sciences, building its power, biding its time.

   Oh: and, of course, expecting Gay to abide by the ordinary standards of scholarship is racist...but you knew that.

NYT: Democrats Seek to Save Democracy by Defeating Trump Undemocratically

O, wad some Pow'r the giftie gi us

To see oursels and ithers see us!

link

The Left Suddenly Like Free Speech Again, or: Universities and "From the River to the Sea"

Well, I'm glad that the left has suddenly decided that it cares about free speech...

   And, as I've said, "From the river to the sea" is clearly protected speech. Even "kill the Jews" is protected speech. It's not directed to deciding or promoting imminent lawless action (see: Brandenburg). Rather, it's, at most, advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time (see: Hess). 

   So, yeah, the right is now approaching advocacy of--or outright advocating--unconstitutional restrictions of speech. 

   In their defense:

(a) To some extent they are just criticizing university's inconsistency. There's no way that "women are female" and "all lives matter" can be deemed harassment (etc.), when quasi-calls for genocide aren't. 

(b) "From the river to the sea" is plausibly a veiled call for genocide. So the case against it is much, much stronger than the case against "women are female."

  Also, I hear second-hand (from friends whose son is at Yale) that a lot worse is going on / being said there. FWTW.

   Anyway, bottom line: conservatives are right to push the inconsistency point. They're also within their rights to encourage private universities to discourage e.g. "From the river to the sea." But blah blah blah.

   Also: there's a significant difference between (i) an individual professor or student saying e.g. "women are female" in a paper or talk or lecture or discussion and (ii) a mob screaming "From the river to the sea"...

   Anyway: I'm in no way sympathetic to suppression of speech, in case that last bit might suggest otherwise. And anyone who doesn't think that the right is capable of restricting free speech has a short memory (or has lived a short life).

Democrats' *Imprison/Disqualify Trump* Strategy for 2024

Alright, hearing about the CO decision to keep Trump off the ballots made me pretty mad. But I've had a chance to calm down now. Some scattered thoughts:

• Of course, gotta read the decision. Perhaps it's right, though I doubt it. Turley doubts it, too. 
• The general Democrat strategy of shotgun lawfare is revolting in the extreme, and in itself constitutes an argument for smaller government and fewer laws. What the Dems are demonstrating, basically, is that there are enough laws to take someone--perhaps anyone--down if they face a sufficiently cracked and monomaniacal opposition.

• The Capitol riot was not an "insurrection." It was a lot of things, including a national disgrace. But it was neither an insurrection nor a rebellion.
• But it was a bit insurrectiony. Whatever it was, it was way over the line. In a sane world, I'd never even consider voting for a person who had anything to do with causing it.
• Believing that the Capitol riot was an insurrection is (false, but) not crazy. It may be one of the contemporary left's least crazy ideas...
• If you think that someone fomented insurrection against the United States, it's rational to do a whole lotta things to keep him from gaining the Presidency. 
• Trump did not directly incite the riot.
• Trump did provoke it. If you (falsely) tell people that their democracy is being stolen, you make it rational for them to do things like the Capitol riot--and worse.

But in the end, what matters right now is the legal question: did the CO supreme court rule correctly?

That's a legal question about which I don't really deserve an opinion.

CO Supremes Disqualify Trump

This is utter madness.

Trump is stone cold sane by comparison.

Well, at least I don't have to torture myself about whom to vote for--after this, it's damn near certain I'll vote for Trump again. 

"Judith Butler" Explains Gender Performativity

Right here.

Income Data by Ethnic Group in the USA Disconfirms "Structural Racism" Dogma

Lauren Smith: Caitlyn Jenner Is Right: "Transwomen" Are Not Women

Imagine traveling back to the dim past of the 20th century and telling people that this would be one of the great controversies of 21st-century America: can men be women?

   Jenner seems like a straight shooter.

   I'll just say for the thousandth time: I am astonished how easy it has been to convince about 1/3 of Americans to believe the rough equivalent of black is white and down is up.

   Good on Jenner for being willing to say that the sky is blue...but I am under the impression that this is not a particularly unusual view about those who consider themselves "trans." Today's Official Holy Dogma of the left--"transwomen are women"--is just one view of the matter, and not a view held by all who consider themselves to be in that group, even. Though, of course, that some people who consider themselves transgendered are willing to speak the truth also doesn't matter much. It's an obvious truth that anyone unblinded by progressive hysteria can see. Say it. Don't say it. Still true.

   I will say that my view of human rationality is more pessimistic than it's ever been before, however.

RIP Eric Montross

Gosh, this really hit me hard, out of the blue.

I knew he was fighting cancer.

RIP to a great Tar Heel.

I'm Insulated from the Worst of Academic Madness

My morning reading reminds me of something I often take for granted: that I'm damn lucky. My job is not an academic job that graduate students dream of--it's certainly not the one I dreamed of. But I really am lucky, for one thing, in that our president is committed to freedom of speech and academic freedom--our provost does not seem to be, but our president is. More importantly, my colleagues--my immediate departmental colleagues, that is--are smart, sane and reasonable. Sure, they're a little kooky in some ways, but, overall, they're an unusually level-headed bunch. They're also pretty tolerant of my antics. I certainly don't agree with everyone about everything, but it's very rare for me to think that one of my colleagues (here I mean: my departmental colleagues) is being flat-out unreasonable. (Though it does happen.) There are a lot of departments out there such that, were I in them, it would be war without end. 

   Although my grad school department was overall pretty reasonable, we did have a nutty pro-PC faction (led mostly by born-again feminists). I did like them as people, and they were right about a few things. But they had been infected by the woke mind-virus (though the 'woke' jargon had yet to be invented.)

  Well anyway.

L Z Granderson: Have Colleges Lost Their Way? Yes, But Don't Blame Wokeness

Yes, blame wokeness--or, rather, liberal/progressive/leftist bias more generally. There is other blame to go around. But let's not get concerned about that until the mind-virus of Woketarianism is stamped out--or at least driven into whatever the analog of Mirkwood is...

   I'm not sure what the point of the DeVos story is. Betsy DeVos was a very good Secretary of Education. I don't care much about whether her father withheld money from Grand Valley State U. to prevent them from offering benefits to same-sex "partners." I'm inclined to think that they probably should offer some such thing. You can disagree without being crazy. Now that same-sex marriage is available, this controversy is, presumably, over. So I'm not sure why this issue was raised. 

   The essay is pretty much a piece of crap. The problem with the responses by the three university presidents has little to do with them "putting institutions ahead of ideals." The problem, rather, is that, at universities where students and faculty can find themselves crossways with codes of conduct for saying, e.g., "women are female" or "all lives matter," it seems to be permissible for mobs to chant pro-Palestinian slogans that more-or-less mean "kill the Jews." The problem is hypocrisy. 

   None of this is to say that woke madness is he only problem universities face.

   So far as I can tell, "From the river to the sea" is protected speech. So I don't see any problem on public university campuses. As for private institutions--well, they can, in some sense, do what they want. But what they want...but what they do seems clearly biased/inconsistent--not to mention at odds with the very ideals of the university.

I, Too, Was Wrong About Fetterman

link

I already thought he had to be better than "Doctor Oz," the tv personality Trump saddled the Pubs with...though it would probably be better for the nation if Trump hadn't handed the Senate to the Dems...

But I basically agree with everything in the piece. I assumed the guy was a stiff. Of course, I heard a bunch of anti-Fetterman propaganda from the red team. And I'd see a bunch of embarrassing pro-Fetterman propaganda from the blues.

Ed Kilgore: Impeachment Inquiry is about Placating the MAGA Base

You almost can't make this shit up:

n December 13, the U.S. House narrowly approved a formal “impeachment inquiry” aimed at Joe Biden on a strict party-line vote. It is universally understood that Republicans do not and may never have the votes to actually impeach Biden. Even if they did, he would easily survive a trial in the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required for conviction barring some weird, lurid revelation far beyond the scope of anything presently being alleged.
So by definition, this “inquiry” is at best an authorization of a fishing expedition for evidence of misconduct that doesn’t seem to exist at the moment.

Let's see that on instant replay:

Democrats will not vote to convict Biden even if he's guilty

Therefore:

There is no evidence that Biden is guilty

The mind, it reels... 

Turley: Eric Swalwell and the Politics of Contempt

The facts seem to have no effect on Democrats anymore. Now it's not clear whether the law will have any effect on them, either.

   Internet Dems (and some Congress critters) have been asserting that public depositions are obviously more transparent, so the Pubs had committed some kind of self-own by seeking a closed one. I didn't know why that was wrong, but concluded that probably, as usual, there was more complexity afoot than could be gleaned from just reflecting briefly on the words 'open' and 'closed.' 

   The foot soldiers of the blue team are still out in force expressing astonishment that an inquiry could go forward when there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Biden is guilty! 

Remember how they used to claim that Russiagate was a slam dunk, and that there was no possible explanation for the known facts other than that Trump was in cahoots with Putin? 

Good times.

Why You Suck at Harai Goshi

Guilty...though I suck at Harai Goshi by any measure you care to apply.

Most "Trans" Kids Turn Out to be Gay; or: Psychology and Medicine Will Believe Even Patent Absurdities If the Left Tells Them To

These points have been made many times--though apparently not enough.

   I'd summarize the case like so: trans ideology is false and, in fact, incoherent. That should be enough for any scientist--and any rational person--to reject it. But wait! There's more! TI is also brainwashing and sexually mutilating children. Surely that should be sufficient for it to be rejected...right? Even if you don't care about truth, you might care about kids...mightn't you? As it turns out: no. Postmodern progressives are even willing to sacrifice children on the alter of their ideology. The sex-obsessed left seems to think that a completely nonorgasmic, nonreproductive life is a small price to pay for genderological correctness. But wait! What about actual genders--i.e. masculinity and femininity? Especially as paired with the sexes. They hate that! They're all about the feminine men and masculine girls. But transanity basically says there are no such atypical sex/gender pairings! Butch females are really males; feminine males are really girls! Surely they'll count that as a reductio...right? Negative, Ghost Rider. Somehow they're ok with that. Really? OK, but what about the gay? They love the gay! The gay is maybe the greatest thing in the world to the left! The gay is love! The gay is life! The gay is fabulous! Transanity seems to be mainly mutilating gay kids--kids who would, in due course, realize that they were not "born in the wrong body"...they're just gay. And that's ok. Now, even if progressives don't care about truth, and even if they don't care about sexually mutilating children and yadda yadda yadda...by their own lights, they have to care about gays...right? right???

   Well, of course, not so far. The left is The Upside Down. Nothing makes any sense over there. Absolutely everything points against trans ideology...except for trans ideology. If any political doctrine ever was obviously false, it's that doctrine...and yet, so powerful is the groupthink on the left, so impenetrable their echo chamber, that they are still viciously protecting that absurd and destructive dogma. First the interests of women and now those of homosexuals (in the broad sense) must be sacrificed to the made-up interests of a made-up group based almost entirely in a fantastical leftist ideology thought up last Tuesday in the women's studies department...

   It's all so utterly mad that it's almost impossible to believe. 

   One often wonders: how did slavery survive? How were people so crazy as to convince themselves that it was ok? Well, crazy as slavery was, this is crazier. And yet it not only survives, it has become an article of pious faith on the left. It is now their flagship issue, and they are pushing it farther and farther into the fabric of American life. They are having it codified in law. They are trying to make it possible to prosecute even relatively minor deviations from its precepts. To question any jot or tittle is to open yourself up for an attack by the social media Reavers...

   But it's not just activist loons who believe this stuff...it's the entire disciplines of psychology and medicine. (Not to say every individual psychologist or doctor, of course.) And that's where this all becomes so profoundly insane that I almost don't know what to say about it anymore. I certainly didn't see this coming. It's probably the capture of scientific...or at least semi-scientific...disciplines that's the craziest part of this whole crazy story...

   Well, enough of this for now.

SCOTUS Does NOT "Uphold" Illinois "Assault Weapon" Ban

It did, unfortunately, refuse to block it.

Great headline, Axios.

I'm confident The Supremes will strike it down...supposing Clarence Thomas's health holds up...

(SCOTUS--another reason it's crucial to defeat the Dems in '24.)

Just as the left has taken over the government and all our crucial institutions, of course they would like to degrade our ability to resist government tyranny. Make no mistake about it, progressives aim at establishing a tyrannical leftist state. Three or four years ago I derided such claims. But no more. That is the endpoint of their current trajectory.

Charles Cooke: Why a Formal Impeachment Inquiry is Now Necessary

Basically, because the media is backing up the Dems, and has decided to simply ignore and deny. There is very strong evidence of (Joe) Biden wrongdoing, but the press, like the Dems, has opted for simply ignoring it or outright denying it. Why, there's just no evidence!

   It's always difficult to figure out whether the left is delusional or lying...they're usually in some superposition of states as between the two...

   My favorite is the breathless new lefty meme: behold the moving grandeur of a father's love...

   It's all exactly the opposite of Russiagate. There we had an absurd accusation supported by laughable "evidence"...but it required years and millions to investigate. And the media spoke as if Trump had been proven guilty from the start. And when the thing was proven false, and proven to be a Democrat dirty trick, the left and the media turned their heads and refused to believe. 

   In this case, the evidence is clear and strong, the left and the media simply ignore it and insist it doesn't exist. The Twitter left insists it's an outrage! How can Republicans call for an investigation of a theory for which there is no evidence whatsoever???

  They're really unbelievable, the horrors of a one-party state.

   Cooke thinks that Biden might be innocent. Yes, it's technically possible. But, even before we get the results of the formal inquiry, it's clear that that is very, very unlikely.

"Why Israel Won't Stop Fighting Despite the Mounting Losses"

Imagine, of WWII: Why Britain won't stop fighting despite the mounting losses...

The Girls Who Caught Tourette's From TikTok; or: Transgenderism is Mass Hysteria

link

   Girls and young women are, by far, most susceptible to mass psychogenic/sociogenic illness--i.e. mass hysteria. This is the likely cause of witchcraft panic of 17th-century Massachusetts and the late-20th-century wave of anorexia across the U.S. 

   It's very clear that transgenderism is mostly mass psycho/sociogenic illness--especially among girls and young women. Though in this case, it is supported by the elites and elite institutions controlled by the progressive left. Boys seem to have different motives for proclaiming themselves "trans" (and "nonbinary," etc.) But the pattern of contagion/propagation of young women make it clear that it's mass hysteria / social contagion

   The case of "catching" Tourette's is just another instance of this general phenomenon:

A consensus has emerged among neurologists that social media has played a pivotal role in the outbreak, with some researchers referring to the surge in cases as the "TikTok Tics." Many of their patients reported that prior to the sudden onset of tics, they had been watching and sharing videos of social influencers claiming to be suffering from Tourette's. During the pandemic, videos of people with Tourette's, or claiming to be experiencing the condition, have gained an enormous following on social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. London-based psychiatrist Dr. Isobel Heyman has been at the coalface of the surge and reports that many of her patients appear to “gain peer support, recognition and a sense of belonging” from being exposed to social influencers claiming to have Tourette's. She is convinced that the tics are being reinforced and maintained by the online attention that those exhibiting the tics are receiving (Heyman et al., 2021).

Ukraine: My Current Half-Assed Guess

Current half-assed opinion/guess: a ceasefire is the least worst way forward (?).

   I guess conservatives were right again--they've been railing against this since nearly the beginning. I was and am skeptical of many of their reasons...but I now think that, ultimately, their preferred policy has turned out to be--or at least seem--right: get out.

   I can't agree with either the "fight to the last Ukrainian" position (though I was tempted by it for awhile. In the end, it's just too brutal.), nor the quasi-pro-Russian position on the right. I think we had to support Ukraine for awhile in order to raise the cost to Putin/Russia to intolerable levels. But, in the end, we can't afford any more $$, and Ukraine can't afford any more people. We raised the cost. Russia will think three times before trying such a thing again. But once Ukraine let Russia dig in, the thing was probably over. In fact, I'm not sure why, given all their years to prepare, Ukraine doesn't seem to have constructed the kinds of defensive lines that the Russians seemed to throw up in a few weeks or months...

   JMO.

Mark R. Weaver: By Modern Standards, Biden Should Be Impeached

This makes me nervous whenever it comes around: an impeachable offense is whatever the House says is an impeachable offense. That just isn't true in the most important sense, even if it's true in some sense or other.

   Here's where we are: the currently-available evidence strongly indicates that Biden is a crook.

   So: an inquiry is needed.

   If it were left up to me, I'd go straight for impeachment. The evidence is so strong that, intuitively, layperson that I am, I'd think a trial is warranted.

   Many Democrats are running around claiming "THERE IS NO EVIDENCE...NOT A SHRED!!!111." That's some indistinguishable combination of ignorance and unhinged partisanship. I don't know how much to blame them--they've got a huge MSM propaganda machine telling them what they want to hear...

   But, in fact, and contrary to what I argued for months: Biden is probably a crook.

   Now:

    [A] An investigation might show that our current evidence is misleading, and the Bidens aren't crooks.

    and:

    [B] Joe Biden's criminality--or crookery--might not constitute a high crime or misdemeanor. I am not a lawyer. I don't know.

    But there simply can be no reasonable doubt about this proposition: an investigation is justified--in fact, mandatory.

   And: we've got far, far better reason to impeach Biden than there was to impeach Trump the first time and perhaps even the second time.

The Bulwark, or; TDS Weekly

Jeez those people are nuts.

David Atkins: Conservatives Have Lost the Culture War

Could very well be right.

The argument, clarified and abbreviated: 

   The left controls the culture. The left is stupid. So the culture is stupid. (Of course 'the culture' here means: pop culture...) The young 'uns are also stupid. And easily manipulated. And the people who shape pop culture cater to and manipulate them. So conservatives are and will lose the war.

   Sounds about right.

   There's a lot of hysteria in there about Elon Musk, too. But Taylor Swift = the left vs. Elon Musk = the right seems pretty solid. All we've got is arguments. They've got breezy, pseudo-profound slogans like "love is love" and shit. 

   So, yeah. 

   We're probably going to lose.

COP28 Nations Agree foe First Time to Transition Away from Fossil Fuels

link

Sure, ok. What do I know? As long as it's gradual enough, fine I guess. If I had to predict, I'd predict that we'll make some progress toward the goal, then, as we do, global warming hysteria will cool off, and by 2050 we'll be about where we'd have been without the apocalyptic hysteria. It'd be great to have better, cleaner sources of energy. I'm only opposed to pouring unfathomable sums of money into utopian projects for stupid reasons...

Democrat Delusions about Biden Impeachment

LOOOOL

   I mean this is absolutely unhinged.

   Looks like they are taking the now-well-worn progressive path of simply outright denying inconvenient facts and evidence.

Elizabeth Warren Wants to Take Your Guns

link

Loury and McWhorter Finally See The Light (or: Darkness) Re: George Floyd and Derek Chauven

I really respect and like these guys (not that I know them personally), so (a) it's been interesting watching them move along the same trajectory I've been on, a couple of years behind me, and (b) it's an opportunity to be a little proud of myself about being ahead of a couple of such smart dudes. Given that, professionally speaking, I'm nowhere near their respective leagues, I'm happy to have some grounds for pride in their general vicinity.

Fred Fleitz: The Liberal Media's Desperate New "Trump Will be a Dictator" Narrative

I wish I could be as confident as Felitz that a second Trump term will be a model of reason and restraint. But I do agree with his other main points:

• Trump's first term was a lot better than the Biden administration.
• The new hypothetical Orange Hitler push is just blue-team propaganda.
• The left is actually, really, actively more dictatorial than hypothetical Orange Hitler would be.

The left is actually using the courts against its political enemies--most notably, Trump, it's already taken over all our institutions, and is pushing far-left madness onto them. It's actively pushing speech controls and thought-policing, in violation of the Constitution. 

   In short: I don't want Trump the man to be President. But I want a President that will implement Trumpian policies. And: I will vote for just about anybody who will work to stop the wokification of the nation.

The TX Abortion Case

I lean libertarianish about abortion, so I tend to disagree with TX-type laws. But it's not at all clear to me that such laws are unreasonable. If I were king, I'd likely approve the abortion in question. But the case isn't a perfectly clear one...so far as I understand from the like two stories I've read about it...

Turley: With Hunter's Indictment, Democrats Face a Moment of Maddening Truth

link

   Remember, I was skeptical of these charges for a long time. Now, there is simply no denying that an inquiry is warranted--clearly, undeniably warranted. 

   An impeachment itself is basically an inquiry. So an impeachment inquiry is an inquiry into whether a more formal inquiry should be held. There is simply no even vaguely plausible reason for blocking such an inquiry--other than partisan politics, of course.

   In fact, I think basically what I think Turley thinks: the handwriting's on the wall. There's just not a lot of room for rational doubt about the matter. The Bidens were running a massive influence-peddling operation. I'd bet a very large sum of money on that. It really is just as plain as it could be. There's certainly a lot more evidence for this claim than there ever was for the Trump-Russia "collusion" claims. 

   So I've done a 180 on this one, in response to the evidence.

   The current favorite line on the left seems to be "There's just no evidence!" This shows how deep in the echo chamber many Dems are. Only the ignorant and the cultish can deny that there is any evidence for Biden corruption. Not only is there some evidence, there's a long shit-ton of evidence. The connections between the dots basically draw themselves at this point. 

   Dunno what the Dems will do. I can certainly see them all toeing the line and refusing to investigate. That will be good enough for the true believers--good enough to quell the pangs of cognitive dissonance in those who desperately want to believe.

Taibbi: "Anti-Disinformation" is a Partisan Con

link

As I tried to explain to three journalism profs who gave a talk on the subject to students last year. This is the way things work at universities. Talks are given, classes are taught, "student affairs" events are held. Some of them overtly push the leftist worldview. Most, however, just presuppose it or keep it thinly concealed just barely to the side or in the background. In this talk, for example, the election fraud conspiracy figured prominently, as did a few other left-friendly/right-unfriendly examples. When it came to the token right-friendly/left-unfriendly example, it was really about vaccine skepticism generally...so a fringe left view, not a central one...and a view that is now strongly associated with the right as well because of COVID. They also offered advice like: go to the Washington Post Fact-Checker. After the talk, I told them what I thought about the "disinformation" biz, and I politely suggested that their talk had a clear left lean. I said that I thought it was clear that the Washington Post leans left...and that the Washington Post "fact-"checker was basically just more Washington Post. I went to the site and searched for Trump, and showed them that the first page of the search results was composed almost exclusively of rulings against Trump statements about Russiagate...basically all of which he'd turned out to be right about. I got some weak concessions after ten minutes of arguing. But without me there, there'd have been no pushback. And even with me there, it was difficult to extract concessions, and it happened only after the students were gone. 

   Though I will say that the thing was less overtly biased--far less--than I'd predicted. And that's important.

Rising: Rav Arora: Feds Paid MSM to Push COVID Vax

Jay Nordlinger: Defending Israel, Jews, and the Truth

Some of the central claims here strike me as true. Something I already believed: most of the pro-Palestine protests are made up of ignorant kids.

Something I haven't thought about enough: many of us--even those who seem to appreciate the brutality of the 10/7 attack--probably don't really appreciate how horrible it really was. Hamas, of course, is proud of its brutality, and wants it all seen. Israel, being the actually civilized party to the dispute, does not want it widely seen. I haven't made any effort to see any more of the footage than I've already seen--which was mostly just gunfight footage. I don't want to see the footage of torture, rape and murder. Though I probably ought to. 

At any rate, someone like me probably doesn't really understand the enormity of what happened on 10/7.

Helen Lewis: The Left Can't Afford To Go Mad (If Trump Wins Again)

Too late, Helen.

Another in The Atlantic's on-going series "If Trump Wins," or "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE."

   Even when someone on the left manages to sort of more-or-less face the facts...she can't really face them full on. The left had gone insane before Trump won--though, yes, he did seem to loosen their last screw. And he was not a bad President--he was actually a pretty good one. Certainly better than Biden, as the majority seems to have realized. Hitler Trump was a product of the left's fevered collective imagination. So, in a way, they drove themselves around the bend. Or around the last bit of it anyway.

Elizabeth Weiss: Academic Conferences are a Scam

There's some truth in this. 

Though I expect it's largely a function of the fact that academia is something of a scam. And some disciplines contain substantial bullshit. And some of that bullshit is political bullshit. I'd expect e.g. sociology and education conferences to be worse, mainly because those disciplines are worse. I'd expect physics and math to be better, etc.

JMO

Julian Zelizer: Seven Reasons a Second Trump Term Would be Dangerous

Another installment in the left's full-court Trump Will Be a Dictator, Part Deux press. 

   They've been saying this stuff since Trump came down the escalator. This newest phase seemed to start with that piece I posted recently (can't remember the title or author) that argued that the media has been insufficiently hysterical in its anti-Trumpery. This sort of thing has become basically SOP on the left. In addition to their freelance propagandizing, we often get coordinated talking points, and hear almost exactly the same thing from different left-leaning outlets.

   As I see it:

(a) It's clear that the left has come unhinged--and clear that it is particularly unhinged with respect to Trump.

(b) They were decisively proven wrong by Trump's first term

(c) Up until he lost the election of '20, at which point he completely lost his shit, and more or less became who they said he was all along.

   This leaves us--or me, anyway--in an even more precarious position than in '20. In that election, I think it was pretty clear that Trump represented the lesser evil. But Trump stabbed us all in the back (OMG HE USED A METAPHOR THE NAZIS USED!!!!!111). He showed that, for all their TDS, the blue team got something importantly right about Trump that I (and other reluctant Trump voters) got wrong: he really was unwilling to give up power when he lost. He did not do what many blue-teamers said he would do--basically declare martial law and proclaim himself dictator for life. But I don't care about that. What he did do was bad enough: repeatedly assert crazy theories about mass outright voter fraud. Thus he (a) impugned our elections and (b) turned the mass fraud hypothess into an article of faith for many conservatives. It really has become a kind of axiom for many on the right.

   Now another election looms, and our position is even worse. We now know Trump to be worse than we knew him to be in '20. (I'll leave open the question of whether the blue team had the relevant knowledge. We could say that Trump revealed himself to be the man the left knew him to be all along. Or we could say that, finally, Trump happened to live up (or down) to the hysterical rantings of the left.) The left is also worse. Not only have they come even more unhinged, but they themselves are doing the things Trump has been warning us about. It's now clear that there is something like the deep state, and it is willing to promote mass propaganda against anyone who challenges it. And, crucially, it is willing to use lawfare to defeat such a person. Cross the progressive elite establishment profoundly enough, it will use even the courts, going so far as to try to put you in jail for life, on the basis of whatever absurd charges it can scrape up.

   From my own perspective, burbling cauldron of concerns that I am, it worries me that so many (smart, reasonable) people I know think that the choice is obvious. They basically think that Trump is Orange Hitler, and basically think that the Democrats are just fine. I understand thinking that this is a gut-wrenching choice, but that Trump is the greater evil. I think that is perfectly reasonable and possibly true. I might easily slide over a little bit and end up there. I also, of course, understand the mirror-image position: gut-wrenching choice + Trump is the lesser evil. I suppose I'm basically still there, so obviously I think it's a reasonable position. I absolutely do not understand abject horror at Trump + few concerns (or sanguinity) about the left. (Of course I also don't understand those on the right who think Trump is the greatest thing since sliced bread.) 

   And now we basically know that Biden is a crook--roughly the kind of crook Trump was accused of being. And the media is covering up for him. And Trump was impeached basically for inquiring into Biden's criminal--or quasi-criminal--activities. The left has built itself an echo chamber--partially made out of an ideologically-captured media. This alone should concern us all greatly...

...But that's it for now.

Batflu 2: Apoplectic Boogaloo?

I say we just wait until it's too late to stop travel from China, then call Trump a racist, then deny that it came from China, then call Trump a racist for saying that it came from China, then lock down the whole country devastating the economy and setting kids' education back years, then blame Trump for it all, then have some prime-time interviews with Fauci, then blame the new illness for mass illegal immigration, inflation, and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then call Trump a racist.

[Almost forgot: use the new bug to rationalize ignoring and rewriting election laws and spewing out mail-in ballots to everyone, everywhere, in November...]

Martin Gurri: "Why All This Trump Hysteria?" or: Trump Is No Authoritarian

link

I find the age argument interesting (Gurri: no authoritarian has seized control when older than middle aged).

   Since you want to hear it over and over again, my basic view is:

• Trump is way over the line, and has no business being President.
• The American left is delusional about Trump; he's nowhere near as bad as they think.
• Trump sure sounds like he could collapse into authoritarianism, but that's not how he governed. 
• The Alliance of Evil between the insane radical left and quasi-liberal elites is a far greater threat.
• Trump has their number--at least to a great extent--and will combat them.
• Any plausible Democrat candidate will advance their agenda.
• In fact, Trump was a surprisingly good President.

Like Greenwald, I have been reduced to slack-jawed incredulity by the Alliance of Evil's accusations that Trump will use to courts to prosecute his enemies in a second term. The complete lack of self-awareness of these people...it...I...what can one even say...?

   You might say: Trump went to war against the quasi-liberal elites last time, and got his ass kicked. He is still getting his ass kicked nearly four years later. Yes, but IMO the big difference is: Trump recognizes them as the enemy (speaking in political terms--they are Americans after all), Biden does not. Trump will fight them, Biden is one of them--well, not one of them...but a tool of them. Now Trump realizes that it really is him or them. If he doesn't move the ball significantly downfield against them, he will never know another moment of peace, and may well end his life in prison. Worse, the Alliance of Evil will go after his family as well.

   I could be wrong, of course.

Glenn Greenwald: Elites' All-Out Panic Over Trump's Skyrocketing Support or: Orange Man Hitler

This is really great. I've been ridiculing the sudden, coordinated outpouring of Trump = Hitler = End Of America pieces on the left. Greenwald catalogs them, and adds some background and insights. This is really worth watching, IMO. Greenwald is clearly convinced that the globalist liberal elites are a greater threat and more authoritarian than Trump. I sometimes worry that I'm underestimating Trump's capacity for authoritarianism...but, other than that, I agree:

Sasha Stone: Desantis/Newsome Debate: Newsome Won, or: You Can't Beat Charisma...or Can You?

link

I still haven't watched the debate. The clips I've seen show DeSantis manhandling Newsome--but YouTube is probably not showing me a random selection of clips. And I'm not neutral. The poop map alone was devastating. And Newsome's most often-repeated alleged zinger ("neither one of us will be his party's nominee") just wasn't very good. DeSantis, though, came out of the blocks so hard that he seemed a little nasty. 

   Also, I'm not normally that affected by charisma...Barack Obama notwithstanding, perhaps to my shame...

   But what about the claim that charisma always wins (which Stone makes, but about a zillion others make as well)? 

   I dunno.

   So I looked back to elections since '76. I started there because I didn't know how to rate Nixon-Humphrey (though Nixon was so anti-charismatic, I'd guess HH was better. So therels that.). Anyhoo... that's where I started. Carter had a big charisma advantage over Ford, and won. Keep moving forward, and I'd say: every winning candidate since 1976 has at least tied his opponent's charisma level...until 2020. Some were ties, of course, like Bush '41-Dukakis. But in no case did the clearly less-charismatic candidate win until Biden beat Trump.

   So...there's that, for whatever it's worth.

   Of course, to quote John Hammond in Jurassic Park (there speaking of Norman Malcolm), Trump suffers from a deplorable excess of personality... Also, I'd say that it was an extremely atypical election, in which the Democrats pulled out all the stops to rig the game against their most hated rival of my lifetime. So perhaps those things matter. I don't know.

Jeffrey Goldberg: A Warning or; Orange Man Bad

I don't know what the funniest part about this is. The part about Trump finally being officially categorized as a fascist by an in-house Expert(tm) at The Atlantic? The part about The Atlantic being a non-partisan publication? Hard to pick, really.

   Maybe just the very idea of an "If Trump Wins" series at that publication. There's gonna be a whole lotta concentration camps and dictatorial power grabs in that series, Cotton... Tsunamis of "transkid" suicides, white supremacist hoardes in the streets--Old Testament; real wrath of God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies...rivers and seas boiling...forty years of darkness...earthquakes, volcanoes...the dead rising from the grave...human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together...mass hysteria!

   None of which is to say that I want to see Trump as President. 

   Just that TDS is a helluva drug.

Frank Miele: The Potemkin Presidency of Joe Biden

A take clearly from the right--but one with which I basically agree.

As I said long before the election of '20: Biden isn't an extreme progressive, but there's not enough of him left to oppose the extreme progressives that we knew would inevitably populate his administration. The madness now pervades the blue team.

   It's hard to pick the biggest outrage. I might say it's the (depending on how you count it) nearly $2 trillion spent in the service of climate pseudoscience, disguised as "inflation reduction" and "infrastructure" spending. But there's a strong case to be made that it's throwing the gates of the country open to the flood of illegals--four trillion or so to date.

   Though I suppose it's really probably the general, across-the-board promotion of Woketarian madness from the Department of Education to the military. How many more childrent have been brainwashed with (trans)gender ideology and sexually mutilated under Biden than would have been under a Republican President pushing back against the dogma? Hm. Wait. The answer is: I don't know. But more, obviously.

   But once we get started on this, where do we stop? The maniacal pursuit of even the most inconsequential participants in the Capitol Riot. The characterization of political opponents, including parents pushing back against gender ideology, as "white supremacists" and "terrorists." The on-going efforts to create a global Ministry of Truth to combat "disinformation"--i.e. wrongthink...

   Really hard to pick.

Robert Kagan: "A Trump Dictatorship is Increasingly Inevitable; We Should Stop Pretending"

[eyeroll]

Kagan probably didn't write his own headline, so I'll refrain from nit-picking about what "increasingly inevitable" could mean.

   To paraphrase Tom Wolfe: The dark night of fascism is always descending on the Republican party, and yet lands only among the Democrats.

    To be clear, I don't want Trump to be President again. I also rather doubt he can win, though that's a different matter.

   But we've heard all this before. Trump is literally Hitler. He will declare himself dictator for life, send his enemies to concentration camps--and/or just execute them. He will use the administration, the military--and, somehow, the courts--to solidify his iron grip on power. etc. etc. etc.

   We were told he would do all that the first time. Instead, he governed more like a devout federalist than either Obama or Biden. His administration was hamstrung by a coalition of Democrats from the media to the military--and, yes, in administrative deep state. 

   And, perhaps most importantly, it is the Democrats who are actually doing much of what they speculate that Trump will do--undermining free speech, deploying the administration, the courts and the media against their political opponents, and undermining democracy by rigging the process against Republicans (e.g. by using courts to rewrite election laws, deploying lawfare against Trump, indiscriminately spewing mail-in ballots (the least-secure form of voting by every measure), and selectively pouring billions of dollars into allegedly neutral GOTV efforts in Democratic strongholds)). 

   The Democrats are actually moving us further and further toward a cliff. And this is before we even discuss their implementation of the woke worldview in schools, universities, corporations and the administration. Spreading the pseudoscientific CRT lie that the USA is inveterately racist, brainwashing and sexually mutilating children, and all the rest.

   Trump--who, again, has, IMO, no business even being in any serious discussion of Presidential candidates--is a font of lunatic tweets. He talks a big game...and a crazy one. But he has a record of governance that indicates that it's all talk. (Such crazytalk is itself disqualifying in my book, to be clear.) Democrats, of course, distort everything he says to make it even crazier than it is...but, worse: the whole time they are actually doing things (and trying to do even more) that actually accomplish left-wing analogs of the things that the hyperbolic Trump of their fevered imaginations merely talks about.

   Trump talks about prosecuting his enemies; the Democrats are actually prosecuting theirs. The left shrieked at the sky when crowds at Trump rallies chanted "lock her up." The Democrats are actually using lawfare in a serious effort to lock up Trump. Four years on, the Democratic DoJ is still hunting down and arresting people who were near the Capitol during the January 6th riots. Participants in violent terroristic BLM/Antifa riots went almost entirely unprosecuted. 

   Blah blah blah.

   Same old story.

   Consider just one slice of this mess: the Biden influence-peddling operation and the first Trump impeachment. There is now very strong evidence that Biden was part of a large influence-peddling operation that raked in at least tens (and perhaps hundreds) of millions of dollars for himself and his family--and from very unsavory international sources. There is simply no denying that very strong evidence points clearly to this conclusion. We don't (yet) have proof. But we have more than enough evidence to open a formal investigation. Democrats--many of whom still refuse to acknowledge that the Russiagate allegations were disproven--insist that "there is no evidence" of Biden wrongdoing. They live in a fantasy world in which Orange Man bad is a fundamental axiom, and, apparently, no evidence short of conclusive proof is ever enough against Democrats...and without conclusive proof already in hand, it is impermissible to investigate. Even more alarmingly, the mainstream media is fully on-board with this coverup (so, perhaps, ordinary Democrats can be excused for believing this fantasy). Perhaps most astonishing of all this is that Trump was impeached for inquiring into the Biden influence-peddling operation in Ukraine. The mind reels...

   The bitterest irony of all this is that many of Trump's more extravagant claims are being confirmed right before our eyes. The elite Democrat-progressive machine is bringing all its guns to bear against the madman who, among his other ravings, has spoken forbidden truths about the greater--or greatest?--threat to the nation. Like most other then-Democrats, I derided Trump's talk of the deep state. But now there can be no doubt that, whatever details he may have gotten wrong, he was mainly right. We derided his suspicions about Biden influence-peddling in Ukraine and China. But he was very probably right. "Fake news" was ridiculed (though not so much by me). Now not only has the phrase proven itself insightful, but the elite machine has absorbed it, tarted it up as "disinformation," and simply turned the idea into another of its mechanism for spreading, yes, fake news...and crushing its political opponents. "Build the wall" was derided as racist--but as soon as Biden took office we saw why physical border barriers are crucial: without them, we are even more at the mercy of the left, which aims not only to protect, but to expand, mass illegal immigration. 

   Kagan's screed is of a type with which we should, by now, be familiar: Ignore the fact that the left is rapidly and systematically wrecking the country. And ignore the fact that Trump has been right about the most of it. Focus instead on his wildest and most intemperate tweets, and on our feverish fantasies about his Hitlerian plans for the future.

   To repeat: Trump should never be anywhere near the Oval Office. But he is far less dangerous than the Democrats and the progressive left. 

   I'll add: the crazy on the right is currently focused mainly in one person, whereas the crazy on the left pervades the faction. And the faction pervades our institutions. If we could replace Trump, the most pressing problem on the right would be solved. There is no such solution on the left. There is no plausible Democrat candidate that would re-hinge the Dems. Joe Manchin is not going to get the nomination. And, even if he were President, the madness on the blue team now runs too deep.

   As I've said: I fear Trump because I fear that he might possibly do some of the things he talks about. I fear the left because I know they will continue to do the things they are already doing.

Dems Aim to Strip Names from Ballots...in the Name of Democracy...

link

   For four years they insisted that the fact that Trump won the election undermined ("our") democracy. Now they're seeking to defend (our!) democracy via lawfare that aims to strip all viable candidates other than Biden from ballots.

   It's IMO perverse to emphasize democracy over republicanism and liberal constitutionalism. It's bizarre that the Democrats so often do so. But even more bizarre that they themselves are the greatest threat to (our!!!) democracy. Voting for unapproved candidates is antidemocratic, you see...

   The Republican party is a clown show, per usual. But the Dems really have careened off the rails.

The Title IX Assault on Hillsdale College

Your blue future.

   The progressive left is totalitarian. 

   There must be no institution that stands against it.

   All must bend the knee.

   The family, religion, private civic organizations, private universities...

   Guess I'd better donate to Hillsdale, whatever our disagreements.

"Trump": I Will Make America Great Again for Young People

Boilerplate campaign bloviating.

   I hate this kind of crap, even when I generally agree with the substantive claims. But you know the shtick: spin everything as hard as possible against your opponent. I ended up just skimming most of it.

   But I agree that the Biden administration has been a...well...not a disaster, perhaps... Certainly nothing like, say, Bush '43. But it's been very bad. And Biden's had incalculable advantages over Trump--no COVID and a slavishly devoted media spin machine, to name just two. Trump was a much better President. There's basically no comparison. But Trump seems to have lost it after the '20 election. Not that he had much of it to begin with. OTOH, of course, The very fact that he was and is so very right about the deep state etc., and that it is now using lawfare to keep him off the ballot, destroy him financially and put him in prison...that in and of itself constitutes substantial reason to side with him against the state... 

   Trump's a loose cannon. The progressive elite establishment that rules the country and has turned its powers to destroying him is a whole battery of well-manned cannons, aimed not only at Trump, but at you and me, and at the republic itself. Or near enough to it. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

   Trying to say anything accurate and true at this level of abstraction is virtually impossible. For somebody like me anyway.

   I pretty much assume I'm wrong about most of it.

DeSantis v. Newsome

Tried to watch it on YouTube, but it would only give me leftists live-vlogging the thing. My God those people are insufferable...and delusional. I navigated away. What I saw was hard to evaluate. DeSantis came out of the blocks pretty obnoxious(ly?), but facts are facts, and Newsome's CA is a wreck. Newsome responded in a way that seemed rhetorically pretty effective--given that DeSantis had him dead to rights. Though, needless to say, I'm not neutral.

   Newsome is a sleazeball of cosmic proportions, IMO. Though DeSantis has been drifting into right-wing censorship and similar nuttiness. I don't see any way to deny that FL has been trending generally to the good, CA to the bad. It's horrifying to think that half the country might want to nationalize the catastrophic trajectory of California...but everything is crazy, so who knows? Newsome is the American Trudeau. Horrifying.

   The poop map alone should probably put an end on this discussion.

   But, given my lack of neutrality, and my inability to evaluate rhetorical effectiveness, I won't have anything valuable to say about this anyway.

Frank Bruni: TRUMP WILL INVADE POLAND AND DO A FASCISM; or: TDS Is A Helluva Drug

Well, there's this again.

   And again I'll say: Trump is, in terms of demeanor and other important characterological properties, way, way, way over the line. 

   If the other major party had not come completely unhinged, there'd be no discussion to be had.

   But here we are.