Trump: Idiot. DEI is Very Bad...There's No Evidence It Contributed to the DCA Collision/Crash

Idiot.

Why is he incapable of keeping his big, fat, stupid mouth shut about such stuff?

WSJ: "The Spending Freeze Panic"

Why do I ever listen to the hysteriacs?

No Survivors of DCA CRJ700 - H-60 Collision/Crash

.

The Most Consequential Week in Presidential History?

Well, arguably, in my lifetime anyway.

E.g. The week preceding 9 August 1945, in which Truman dropped the bomb and decided to drop a second one...I'm gonna say that was more consequential.

But, anyway.

Let's hope it turns out to be good consequential...

WSJ: Why RFKj is Dangerous to Public Health

One reason, anyway.

I hope RFK gets the Trump treatment. That is, I hope there's a falling-out, and Trump gives him the heave-ho. He was important for winning the election--or, rather, Trump couldn't afford not to shoot for his voters. I haven't seen much reason to believe he actually has any idea what he's talking about. He seems like a kook--but what do I know?

Except for fluoride--he seems to have a point about fluoride.

It's clearer and clearer to me that I have basically no idea WTF is going on.

Jesse Singal: You Can't Pseudoscience Your Way Out of a Genuine Trans Rights Debate

It's unbelievable how not-very-well-educated, not-very-smart, and not-at-all-intellectually-honest our "elites" have turned out to be.

They leapt onto the cultish bandwagon of gender ideology as soon as the tweenage girls on Tumblr began shrieking and crying about it, and they've deployed their meagre intellectual gifts at full power to defend it for a decade. They've emitted a fog of sophistry that is fully capable of baffling...maybe even a majority of people.

This whole thing is a testament to the power of cultish dumbassery.

WHO'S GOING TO PICK YOUR COTTON, BIGOT???????

Sorry, I meant: WHO'S GOING TO PICK YOUR PRODUCE AND CUT YOUR GRASS AND CLEAN YOUR TOILETS, BIGOT????????

So...JQ and I cut the grass and clean the toilets...sorry, we're not nobility like the readers of the New York Times, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, and New York magazine...

As for picking our produce: here's the thing: somebody will do it.

Are the blues all mad because they'll have to pay what produce is worth?

They'd rather see the USA disappear than cut their own grass.

Apparently, anyway.

They seem really pissed that they won't have as many cheap gardeners, cheap nannies, cheap pool boys...or cheap Mexicans in general.

They looooove the cheap Mexicans...

Me, I'd rather have a country and a civilization and pay a little more for my drywallers, thanks.

Though...them Mexicans...they are hell on wheels with the drywall.

They deserve to get paid more, in my experience...

Where do these people get off thinking it's ok to give up on border security so that they can hire people at below market value?

But the most amazing thing is that they think those kinds of points count as good arguments...

White House to "Push Out" Federal Workers Through Buyout Offer

The WSJ's newsroom seems about as left-leaning as that of the Times or the Post.

That's the actual title on the story.

A buyout offer is pushing people out.

Anyway--I have no idea what's going on. No idea whether this is good or bad...and neither do you.

But, then: I don't understand the status quo--and neither do you.

Even if this is the right thing to do--and I have no idea whether it is--there's going to be pain and chaos.

Federal Assistance Freeze Chaos--Allegedly

Dunno what's going on.

This doesn't sound good.

But it seems that our only two options are (1) maintain the bloated, seemingly irrational and unsustainable status quo...or (2) this.

Whelp...this it is, then...

Actual Justice Warrior: Progressive Propaganda About Illegal Alien Arrest and Deportation is Getting Worse

As I said quite some time ago, the leftist media's first line of defense is going to be crying women and children videos.

To summarize: No, we cannot have laws because if you punish someone who violates those laws, their womenfolk and kids might cry.

AJW is on it:

Now...women are not entitled to be protected from predatory men, of course--at least not from predatory foreign men, nor from predatory men in dresses...

But they are entitled not to be sad, so that they don't cry.

I wish that Democrats and greedy corporate Republicans hadn't basically lured these people here by tacitly telling them they could stay. I wish we could take in all the good people in the world. I'd have even gone for amnesty--before Biden flung the doors open--if we could trade it for actual immigration-law enforcement in the future. But that's just not the world we live in. We can't have a country without borders. We can't have borders without enforcement. And we know the left will not hold up its end of any such bargain. They'll just do what they've done before--take the amnesty...but the immigration enforcement will never come.

We're talking about the existence of the nation here.

Unless you are willing to let evil triumph in the world, sometimes you just have to harden your heart against crying women.

Sayeth Emerson:

...truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it,--else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. ... Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;--though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked Dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Some Jackass at the Grauniad: Trump Can't Reverse America's Decline

Jesus, if you can make it through the blathering of this insufferable shithead you've got more patience than I do.

Why do I even click on Grauniad links?

Morbid curiosity, that's why.

Jeffrey Blehar: Good Trump, Bad Trump

...It's All Trump.

Right on the money, IMO.

As usual, he's doing a lot of hard things right, and a lot of easy things wrong.

Barton Swaim: Why Climate-Change Ideology is Dying

I am inclined to agree with all of this, and I've said it a lot.

So I'm just repeating myself.

Obviously I'm a mere layperson.

When I was pretty solidly on the center-left / Democrat side, I thought I couldn't do any better than tentatively accept the scientific consensus.

That's a reasonable position, and the position many people hold.

Once I started understanding the conservative heterodoxy on a lot of positions better, I slowly ended up changing my view.

What I slowly came to believe was:

[1] We're not even sure what the consensus of experts IS. The few studies alleging to discover the consensus are terrible. The 97% consensus business is BS. The Cook study is BS. There may still be a significant consensus, but it's not 97%.

[2] My view is now that (a) there's been some warming, (b) we contributed something, (c) we ought to start trying to lower carbon emissions. It's not a catastrophe, it's a problem. As Lomborg argues, it's not in the top-ten problems we face. It may not be in the top 50. Which doesn't mean it isn't a problem. 

[3] But panic--especially bogus panic--makes for bad policy. What we see now is a familiar pattern: the left sowing panic in order to achieve pre-existing and often unrelated ends. Community gardens might be swell...but they're not going to do anything about climate change. Socialism is definitely not going to help.

[4] Natural gas and nuclear. That's what we need to emphasize now.

[5] Cheap energy is more important to human well-being than climate change.

Anyway.

I've also said that I agree with Swaim about the climate hysteriacs--they don't even believe their own BS. That's a reason for us not to believe it. Not a powerful one--but not a weightless one.

The average American has concluded that he's spend about $10/month to combat climate change.

This may be a wisdom-of-crowds type case...

Oh and:

People like Roger Pielke Jr., Judith Curry and Bjorn Lomborg are who I look to for information on this now.

The Honest Broker

Climate, Etc.

"Dems Must Respond to Trump With Bold Initiatives"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

CIA Finally Acknowledges that the Lab-Leak Hypothesis is Most Likely

They acknowledge this isn't based on any new evidence.

LLH is and has always been the most likely hypothesis about COVID origins.

Regardless of whether the virus was tampered with or not, odds are it escaped from the WIV.

Columbian President Immediately Backs Down, Agrees to Accept Deported Illegals

I'm astounded.

Trump is kicking ass and taking names.

This is a veritable tsunami of winning.

Woke WSJ "News" Coverage: "Trump Draws Bright Line Between Sexes; Headaches Are Ahead"

Tl;dr: Trump's effort to undo Democrats' gender-ideological madness will not be seamlessly simple and entirely uncontroversial.

   What an idiotic "news" item.

   As many have noted, WSJ's editorial page clearly leans right. But its newsroom seems as blue-biased as any other.

   Imagine going back 15 years and showing the electorate this story:

One of President Trump’s first-day executive orders proclaimed that “women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” It sounds simple, but translating it into action across a vast federal bureaucracy won’t be.
As social norms around gender have grown more fluid in recent years, the federal government in a variety of settings has moved to accommodate those who don’t identify with their sex at birth. People applying for travel documents or Social Security cards and filing employment discrimination claims can check off an X instead of male or female.

Translation: Democrats' injection of postpostmodern pseudoscientific lunacy into government has implemented certain idiotic policies that will now have to be undone. The blue team and its hysterical foot soldiers are going to make untangling this as difficult as possible.

   First, though: stop using the term 'gender'; the correct term is 'sex.' There is, basically, no such thing as "gender" as opposed to sex. Yes, for years I pointed out that there used to be such a distinction. Back in the day, 'gender' was used to refer to the distinction between masculinity and femininity, which are behavioral types. (And, of course, there's a genuine range of positions in between, with androgyny being the middlemost segment of the range.) But since then, it's come to be used by the left to mean a large number of different things, many of those definitions being loaded with gender ideology, others flat-out logically defective (e.g. circular). The genders--when the term was meaningful--clearly were NOT man and woman. They were masculine and feminine. Sliding from the latter meaning to the former was part of the central gender ideological sophistry of pretending that man and woman are not biological kinds. Then, of course, we got a woman is anyone who thinks s/he's a woman... An outright circular definition--which can, then, be rejected outright. If S thinks S is a woman, what is it that S thinks S is? The correct answer: an adult female human... The gender ideological answer...well...they have none. It's like defining 'zorg' as any picture of a zorg. What are zorgs pictures of? Why, zorgs of course...which are...uh...what again? Circular definitions fail to ground out. I.e. fail.

   Anyway, now I would only use the term 'gender' if I knew it was going to score points against the left in some way. I'm done with niceties. I'm inclined to think that we should wage terminological war against them until they're beaten back and we've re-established the status quo ante. Another terminological suggestion I floated long ago: start using 'transwoman' to mean woman pretending to be a man, instead of man pretending to be a woman. That makes a lot more sense, and it is likely to infuriate and flummox them.

   It's basically time to go scorched earth on this insanity.

Trump EOing an End to Birthright Citizenship Seems About Like Biden Declaring the ERA an Amendment

That's not how it works...that's not how any of this works...

I would like birthright citizenship to be withheld from anchor babies and the children of birth tourists. Or, rather: I'd like to think of some way to stop this madness, and I can't think of a better way.

   But I doubt the EO is going to do it.

   But maybe!

   I guess this'll go up to the Supremes.

   Might as well try.

As for the ERA: I used to think it was fine but superfluous--everything it would do is already done by 5th/14th Amendment due process.

   But...not a lawyer over here.

   But now we know that the left is committed to basically pretending that sex means "gender"...and "gender" means...everything and nothing at all. So the ERA is likely to give us drag queen kindergarten teachers and pediatricians. So nope. Screw that.

Justin Jackson, Theo and Ray-Ray Discuss the Heels' Struggles

LOL@ the freelance bit:

I'd almost repressed J-Wit's 3 in the Final Eight...

Hegseth Confirmed, JDV Breaks Tie

I'm reading Hegseth's book. We certainly agree about how pernicious Woketarianism is.

Dunno whether he's a good nominee in other respects.

Fingers crossed.

I kind of wanted him to be confirmed largely because I simply don't believe the hysterical sex arguments anymore. IMO the Dems just now have a long bench of crazy cat ladies who are willing to come out of the woodwork when all else fails and go all Christine Blasey Ford on somebody's ass.

Now, she was an obvious crazy liar...

Similarly "E." Jean Carroll...

I do not deny that sexual harassment and assault are real things, and I think ever such perpetrator needs a right good ass-kicking--plus hefty financial penalties paid to the victim, plus possible jail time...

However.

It has become undeniable that sexual assault is something about which many women lie.

Contrary to feminist line, very many such accusations are false.

In my experience in academia, there are basically two kinds of cases:

1. Cases in which prominent guys get away with serial harassment scot-free despite the fact that everybody either knows or should have known that it's going on

2. Cases in which innocent guys are falsely accused by women who are malicious and/or crazy.

But anyway.

Crazy accusations of sexual assault are not just another arrow in the left's quiver, alongside accusations of racism/fascism/Nazism/"transphobia"/etc.

The left has a whole pantheon of sins, and they see them everywhere among their opponents. And even when they don't see them, they think that making such accusations for political gain is perfectly permissible--maybe even obligatory.

If you're going to cross the left, you're going to be accused of such stuff.

Do not give in.

So: despite the fact that I don't know how well Hegseth is qualified: good.

We've got to make these insane tactics completely ineffective by basically going all-out to win every time they're deployed.

STUDY SHOWS RADICAL RIGHT POPULISTS FUELING MISINFORMATION PANDEMIC

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Reddit flushed itself down the crapper long ago, but it's become almost a parody of itself since the election.

This is the kind of thing r/"science" is full of now.

Imagine thinking that it's the right that's currently the primary source of political misinformation...

It annoys me to not be able to bring myself to leave it at that...but...yes, of course, the right does it's share of this crap. There's no denying that. But they're pikers in this respect compared to the now-quite-insane left. And the metamadness is part of their problem. Not only has the left gone batshit, it--as is, perhaps, usual--thinks the other guys are the problem. Who could possibly deny that women do not have penises?????

I got permabanned, incidentally. My crime? In a post on footage of the October 7 Hamas mass-murders in Israel, there was a small bit where one of the terrorists killed a dog. I commented, and I quote: "I'd shoot them for killing the dog, even aside from everything else."

BANT

Defending mass-murdering left-friendly terrorists on Reddit: cool.

Saying you'd shoot such terrorists: BANNABLE OFFENSE

Caleb Wilson to Carolina

whew.

Mad Mandy Marcotte: TRUMP...DEI...MERIT...*WHITE MEN*...REEEEEEEEEEEE

I have to say, I do take joy in seeing Marcotte driven to new heights of hysteria.

I'll just quote one awesome paragraph:

That is but one example in an infinity of ways that Republicans reject real knowledge and skills, believing that authority and power should be doled out instead to white men whose only skill set is supporting a right-wing agenda. Decades of climate science are routinely dismissed by MAGA blowhards, who prefer to put their trust in Fox News pundits chuckling about how it still snows in the winter. Evolutionary biology has been repeatedly proven true for nearly two centuries, without which all the medical innovations on which even Republicans depend would not have been developed. But MAGA would prefer to believe self-styled preachers who claim that Noah's ark was real and that Adam and Eve had pet dinosaurs. Economics, law, environmental science, nutrition, sociology, psychology: No field is safe from having experts spat upon by MAGA, which prefers the opinions of white male know-nothings.

 tl;dr: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Jeez, she might even genuinely believe this stuff... She's the kind of lefty that seems to have genuinely driven herself insane...

LOL "AN INFINITY OF WAYS"!!!!!!1111oneoneoneoneoneone

VDH: The Addicted, Petty and Hysterical Left

Exactly right.

Possibly the Greatest 3 Days of any Presidency of My Lifetime

As you know, I'm ambivalent about Trump...

But I can't think of another 3-day stretch of any Presidency of my lifetime that kicked more ass than this one.

We'd all read this was coming...but damn...

The EOs against politically correct lunacy--DEI, transanity, etc. Declaring an emergency at the border, rounding up the hoards of criminal aliens the Biden administration released into the country, reinstating Remain in Mexico, trying to suspend birthright citizenship*--and more! Withdrawing form the Paris climate nonsense and rejecting EV mandates...

    Now, I don't understand all these issues well, obviously. Inevitably, there will be errors and suboptimalities. But, overall, this is a massive, historic, tectonic shift back toward the center. Back to sanity.

   Despite my misgivings about Trump himself, and despite my recognition that I lack anything like full understanding here...I approve. Enthusiastically.

[Birthright citizenship being perhaps the most opaque to me. I think it's a disaster currently--but the Constitution is the Constitution. I vaguely understand some of the legal arguments, and I hope there's a way to block birth tourism and anchor babies...at least I approve of the effort.]

A Real Pic From Inauguration Day

Michael Solon: Johnson Should Propose a Funding Bill Ending Every Democrat-Supported Malady at Once

link

You Don't Hate The Media Enough

Burn in hell, commie swine.

ICE Captures and Deports Violent Illegals + Collaterals From Sanctuary Cities

Many of these shitbags are rapists.

Don't miss the Haitian gangster saying "Fuck Trump. Biden forever, bro. Thanks Obama for everything you've done for me."

Sounds like most of these guys can take off and fail to land, for all I care.

Trump was clearly the right option.

MAGA.

Elon's "Nazi Salute"

Jesus, these people.

You'd think they might have learned something by getting their asses handed to them by a Z0MG SO FELON!!!111ononeone

Well, these things take time.

I still think they'll take the lesson to at least some extent.

Incidentally, this sort of batshit bullshit is mixed up with the postmodern roots of the politically correct left, and, specifically, the "death of the author" and extreme reader-response views. That's part of the theoretical underpinning for this aspect of their moonbattery.

So:

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT ELON MEANT NOR HOW THIS WOULD BE INTERPRETED BY AN OBJECTIVE INTERPRETER WHAT MATTERS IS THAT WE INTERPRETED IT AS A HITLER SALUTE!!!!!111ONE

And, of course, since "everything is political," and political commitments can and should guide all thoughts and actions--including interpretations--they have no problem with allowing their hysterical cultish ideology to guide/determine their interpretation.

There's no clear difference to them between:

(a) Actually interpreting the gesture that way because they're fucking nuts

and

(b) Pretending to do so as a political weapon.

I say again:

This is a persistent puzzle about the words and actions of the PC left:

Are they really that crazy, or are they pretending to be for political purposes?

And the answer is usually:

THAT'S EXACTLY THE KIND OF BINARY WE WANT TO DECONSTRUCT, BIGOT!!!!1111one

In fact, in this case, they're sort of right. Most of them seem to exist in a superposition of states, half crazy and half lying.

Yoo and Shu: Biden's Pardons Are Much Worse Than Trump's

I haven't heard the case for the other perspective on this comparative question...but Yoo always makes a strong case.

I don't know much about the trials, sentences, and pre-trail imprisonment of the Capitol rioters, but I've read a lot of stuff making plausible arguments that unfair treatment is rampant.

Largely, apparently, because D.C. is so absurdly blue, ergo the judges and juries are, too.

And compared to the BLM/Antifa rioters who were heroified...well...there's clearly a case there.

However, I'm generally not wild about the idea of going easy on people who attacked the Capitol and USCP.

And Biden's pardons were--prima facie--just jaw-droppingly awful.

So being less bad than those is a pretty low bar to clear.

But anyway, no matter how bad Trump and the Pubs are, these days the Dems always seem to outdo them.

Trump's Magnificent Blow Against DEI

link

Wolfgang Munchau: Why Europe Fears Free Speech; A War of Repression is Underway

There but for the grace of the First Amendment go we.

Kat Grant: What is a Woman

facepalm

Pretty much all the relevant fallacies packed into about a page.

Lysenkoism Watch: Scientific Inquiry About Race and Genetics is "Abhorrent Science"

Jeremy Carl at Aporia

The paper.

The left has lost its collective mind.

Trump's Capitol Riot Pardons vs. The Rule of Law

Don't even get me started.

The Gulf of Trump

No half measures I say.

Go straight at it: rename it The Gulf of Trump

Or: Trump!: The Gulf

Or maybe just: TRUMP

It's morning in Trumpmerica...

Sry: Trumpmerica(tm)

Trump Yanks Security Clearence from "51 Former Intelligence Officials" Who Lied About Hunter's Laptop

Excellent.

Rich Lowry: The Gave Trump the Center and He Took It

100%

Trump Pardons Nearly All 1,500 Capitol Rioters

Some of these people were treated extremely unjustly.

And it's likely that many more didn't receive fair trials in D.C.

But I find it very difficult to believe that 1500 of them deserved pardons.

Biden's Last Minute Pardons

As JQ just said to me: imagine Trump had pardoned members of his family, Giuliani, Bannon, et al...

The MSM would have gone into orbit.

Buckle Up

Here we goooooooo...

Annex Mars! Cold Fusion! Time-Travel Back to 1867...

...and add Greenland to the Alaska Purchase!

 Defeat Sauron!

Dogfight the UFOs!

Splash them mofos!

Carpet bomb the dinosaurs!

Taking Back the Panama Canal

facepalm x 10000

LOLOLOLOLOL "Gulf of America"

facepalm

Also, honestly, 'Denali' is a much cooler name.

Free Speech! Only Two Genders! No DEI! Reinstate Military Vax Objectors!

Ok, now he's rollin'.

Inauguration: Trump's Address

Oof.

He needs to throttle back a bit on the betrayal stuff et. al.

I mean, Biden and Harris are sitting right there dude...

You can make your point without basically calling the former POTUS and VPOTUS traitors.

Overall, he's doing a good job--if you can overlook that other stuff.

The Die is Cast

Ryan Bangert: Will VA General Assembly Open the Floodgates to Radical Gender Ideology

This seems like a stretch to me--but it does conform to a now-common Democrat strategy. I favor legal status for same-sex unions (though I'm currently inclined to think it's unclear to what degree such unions are marriages).

   One problem with declaring that "any two adults" can marry is that this, strictly speaking, opens the door to polygamous marriage. If ANY two adults can marry, then already-married adults can marry--i.e. marry others. Or, more precisely: if A is married to B, B would also be able to marry C. So you have to have some kind of clause ruling that out. We ordinarily take claims like "any two adults can marry" to tacitly rule out such cases. But they don't, strictly speaking, do so.

   Anyway, I do favor same-sex unions of some kind, and I tend to be ok with calling them marriages even though I don't think that issue is 100% clear. Normally I wouldn't worry about expansionist readings of the law leveraging it for gender-ideological purposes...but we can't really put such things past the blue team these days.

Trump to Sign 200+ Executive Orders Today

Errrgh...I still don't feel so good...

I either agree with or am at least vaguely sympathetic to all these...but I'm also averse to fast political change...

Some of these are really just rescinding radical changes the other guys made...but not all:

BREAKING: Donald Trump to sign 200+ executive orders tomorrow.

Per FOX and Eric Daugherty, they include:
- Declare emergency at the border + issue proclamation closing the border
- Designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations
- Remain in Mexico, Catch and Release will be…

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) January 19, 2025

Trump is Now at the White House

Errrgh I don't feel so good...

I can't believe these were our options.

If I were religious, I'd be praying right about now.

Tech Billionaire Mark Pincus's Redpill Moment: Discovering that Trump Did Not Call Nazis "Very Fine People"

His realization was years later, but Charlottesville was a turning point for me, too, as it was happening. 

Trump made an excellent statement after the riot, and I said so here. I still had comments at the time*, and many long-time commenters freaked out, making really bad arguments against Trump's statement. That was also about the time I started losing virtually all readers--which was too bad, but it's not like I'm doing this for money or anything...

   Then, of course, came Trump's public statement and the left's initiation of the "very fine people" hoax...which many lefties believe to this day, which lies both Biden and Harris repeated in debates, and which constituted another inflection point in my mind.

   It was immediately obvious that they were lying...but the left clings to the lie. The formerly-respectable Snopes just finally admitted it was a lie last year--I'm not sure any other "fact-"checking sites have done so.

   More important to me, though, was the fact that the First Amendment rights of the Unite the Right protestors were violated. They had a right to assemble, and this was violated by violent leftist quasi-Antifa rioters. They were attacked for their political views, including with a "homemade flamethrower" (a can of paint, lit on fire). (Burning paint guy was later the subject of a fawning personal-interest story in the MSM, but I don't remember where.) Nobody in the media mentioned that the UtR protestors were in the right and the leftist "counterprotestors" were unequivocally in the wrong.

   In fact, that's basically all Trump should have said: the assembly was legal and, in fact, Constitutionally protected; the violent attempt to shut it down was not. (Here I'm not speaking of the tiki-torch march across UVA Grounds the night before.)

   Anyway.

*Speaking of comments, I've said this before: I stopped posting or even looking at them when I decided to shut this blog down...probably not that long after the Charlottesville riot... But then I just never got around to it...

I started  Substack quite some time ago...but never got around to posting to it...

Trump Memecoin: And So It Begins...

We have--at least for the time being--escaped the clutches of unhinged Orwellian progressivism...by leaping into cartoonish, comedic Trumpworld, filled with Trump Bibles (Trumpbles?), Trump debate trading cards (including a genuine piece of the very suit he wore to pw0nz0r FJB, and now Trump and Melania memecoins...which have...apparently...already crashed...

This is the stupidest timeline.

Happy (?) Inauguration Day

Well, here we are.

Could be worse...

Trump Day 1 EO: Sexual Dimorphism Is Real; Women are Adult Female Humans

A position I've been insisting on here since I first heard it challenged about a decade ago.

But, then, humanity has insisted on basically this position since time immemorial...so...I've got nothing like priority here...

   Imagine what kinds of EOs the Republican will have to sign after the next Democratic Administration...up is toward the sky and down is toward the ground. Day is when it's usually light and night is when it's usually dark. Winter is the colder season and summer is the warmer one. Dogs are not trees. Triangles have three sides...

Carolina 71 - Stanford 72

Tough year.

J.D. Vance on the ERA and Biden Doing Fake Shit

Hey Joe if we’re doing fake shit on the way out can you declare Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame?

See you in two days! https://t.co/a2mNoma1vV

— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 19, 2025

Israel Ceasefire/Hostage-Exchange: Whose Responsibility? Good/Bad?

On the face of it, I guess good. 

Criticism: Israel basically gives up. Some but not all hostages supposed to be released. 500 Hamas terrorists released in exchange. Hamas survives.

So far as American Presidents go: who's responsible?

Biden says he is, but I can't believe anyone outside the blue-team echo chamber believes that. Trump threatened Hamas, and now a day before he's inaugurated, suddenly they're up for a prisoner exchange.

But, if the deal is bad--see above--then it's still on Trump.

Of course Biden IS frantically scrambling to create the impression of a (non-terrible) legacy. So I guess this might be mostly or significantly on him. 

It's probably dumb to put too much weight on our guesses from outside.

But my guess is: mostly on Trump (Well, mostly on the Israelis...but I mean so far as USA influence goes). Not a great deal, but maybe ok. The Israeli government seems to think it's good enough to take. I guess that's the best evidence we have.

Also, I expect Hamas to break the agreement. Then Israel can go back to doing what it was doing.

But I'm just spitballin' here.

I'm pretty clueless about this.

Salena Zito: "My Decade With Donald Trump"

This accords with much about my own (obviously) from-a-distance take on the guy.

It's too bad that a man with so many virtues and strengths is burdened by so many vices and profound weaknesses.

Lysenkoism Watch: NEJM Paper: Free "Sex-Change" Surgery (etc.) For Prisoners

There is nothing I can say about this that would make its abject insanity any more vivid than it already is.

Well, I guess I could remind you that "gender" has nothing whatsoever to do with biology...except then of course it has everything to do with it, and biology must be mangled to accord with this secret semi-sex soul everyone has from fetus-hood...

I've seen some crazy pseudoscientific bullshit in my life, but nothing compares to the abject idiocy of gender ideology.

You could teach a whole critical thinking or low-grade philosophy course on this nonsense, just patiently shredding all the layers of idiocy.

Biden Governed as an Extreme Progressive

Toldja so.

"Harris Was Set to Crush Women's Vote; What Went Wrong?"

 link

Every week or so I come across a new piece that could be titled "The Contemporary Left in a Nutshell."

My summary of this one:

Harris said she would give out ponies! And there was this poll that said she was going to win women big! So for the life of me I can't figure out how she lost.

My favorite bit is probably the bit where the author can't figure out how 1/4 of people who said that abortion was the issue they cared about most voted for Trump...

A real head-scratcher, that. 

I Don't Really Understand This Story

At first it sounds like these two guys hazarded some kind of superhuman caving to rescue these miners. Then it turns out--as I understand it--that the miners simply refused to leave in order to avoid arrest...

Am I getting this straight?

So...South African jails are so bad that they elected to remain in a mine, without light "for weeks or months", eating "cockroaches and human flesh"...in order to avoid arrest?

Seems to me this just doesn't add up...

Globally, The Left Is More Unpopular Than Any Time Since The Cold War

link

And the obvious explanation: the left is crazier than at least at any time since it was basically a toady for Soviet totalitarianism...

Mittens Was Right About Self-Deportation; It's Accelerating As Trump's Return Looms

Good.

And, of course, what they should have said is: illegal immigrants.

Of course the MSM relentlessly tries to blur the distinction, hoping that the dogmatic or inattentive will think, even just a little, that it's legal immigrants who are leaving.

Dan McLaughlin: Biden's Constitutional Vandalism / Re: the ERA

link

Mazie Hirono, Our Dumbest Senator

This is disgusting.

I wish someone would ask her, in response, whether she's ever sexually molested anyone.

Merely being asked such a question, in the absence of any evidence that one has done such a thing, is an affront. And probably an intentional one.

The ERA/"28th Amendment" Is Not Part of the Constitution; It Has Not Been Ratified

Biden has lost it

and/or

He's just flailing wildly for a legacy on the way out the door.

The Archivist--in accordance with rulings by OLC--has already declared that she will not certify.

Biden's bizarre assertion, as I understand it, has no legal weight in this matter.

Ronald W. (Not M.) Dworkin: A Very American Madness

link

Note: not Ronald M. Dworkin, the legal philosopher.

(Must kinda suck to always have people pointing out that you're not the famous guy with your name.)

I found this very interesting, though I'm not sure what to make of it.

The point is basically that crazy, extreme political fads are common in America, but we're also able to withstand them.

Quoting:

From one direction, the threat that appears to come from individual progressives actually comes from impersonal forces of change, such as demographics, technology, and capitalism... [The rest of this para seems pretty weak to me.] 

From the other direction, as this essay suggests, the threat that appears to come from radical progressivism often has its roots in longstanding American craziness. What conservatives face is not some monster never before seen, nor some alien creature with mysterious powers, but a homegrown absurdity—an old wine poured into new bottles. That absurdity must be resisted and opposed in many cases, of course, but not with feelings of fear, surprise, or panic. The threat is too familiar to evoke such feelings. If anything, the threat should be resisted with a sigh (we’ve seen all this before), with a sense of humour (our craziness is a comic disease), and a shake of the head.

O.k, that could be. The madness that seized the American left over the last decade doesn't seem to be something we can/should just shrug off...

Anyway, I found the essay worth reading.

Biden Commutes Nearly 2,500 More Sentences in Final Days of His Presidency

I have little idea whether this is good or bad.

Of course, generally disagreeing with Biden and the contemporary Dems, it's easy to see this as:

(a) More Dem soft-on-crime lunacy.

(b) A post hoc attempt at damage control re: the Hunter pardon, by making it look like part of a principled "decarceral" orientation.

But, for all I know, many/most/all these people deserve clemency.

I do doubt it, however.

Here's a pretty safe prediction: this will cause a bump in crime.

Some people will die because of it.

Many of these people will re-offend.

Apparently there just aren't all that many people in prison for nonviolent drug offences--or so I've read. People who are nominally in for such offenses have generally accepted plea deals to avoid more serious charges.

The bottom line is that progressives/liberals/Democrats really do tend to be soft on crime. This is part of their bizarre selective empathy, their blindness to the plight of ordinary people. Their bleeding hearts bleed for the poor criminal wasting away behind bars...but not for the innocent victim. Waves of illegal aliens surging across the border, causing chaos? Oh, the poor dears! The ordinary Americans along the border whose lives are thrown into chaos, whose towns are flooded, whose jobs are taken? Why, fuck 'em. Now, send those illegals to Froofybunkport, MA, and suddenly it's an outrage! Suddenly the plight to which the blues were blind becomes obvious and intolerable. It's a bizarre kind of selfishness on the left. Virtue-signaling is more important than the plight of their countrymen...but not more important than their own comfort.

Or something like that.

This is the kind of thing that--somewhat independent of the left's adoption of Woketarian madness--has made me move toward the center-right. This sort of bleeding-heart nonsense...sometimes it's right...but generally it's stupid. Not just wrong. Stupid. It's dopey and weepy and childish. There should be a heavy burden of proof on it. If it sounds like bleeding-heart bullshit, it probably is. Go ahead and check it--make sure it isn't an exception. Sometimes it will be. But generally not.

This hunch can be checked in this case:

(i) Go through and see how many of these "nonviolent" drug offenders really are nonviolent.

(ii) Check in 5, 10, 15 years to see how many have reoffended.

Reeve T. Bull: Trump Should Adopt the Virginia Regulatory Model

I'm the farthest thing from an expert on such stuff, but it accords with my current general attitudes and hunches about government.

James Taranto: "Fact-Checkers" Become Rent-Seekers

link

Or as I've put it: the Washington Post "Fact-"Checker is just more Washington Post.

The WaPo's biases and the WaPo Fact-Checker's biases are basically the same.

And:

In Ye Olden Days, Dems and Pubs just called each other liars.

In Ye Now-en Days, Pubs call Dems liars...Dems create whole new institutions--academic departments, new branches of the MSM, novel bureaucratic institutions--to issue official proclamations that Pubs have been The Science(tm)-tifically proven to be liars.

And now, it seems, our new disinformation-industrial complex has ruled that this description of the disinformation-industrial complex is disinformational.

A thing is: we already know how to distinguish pretty well between (to focus on the media) reporting and opinion. But one of the main problems with the MSM is that its coverage of areas of American political and cultural disagreement is so obviously infused with leftist opinion. Think of, e.g., how rapidly--nay, even eagerly--MSM reporting (or "reporting") became infused with gender ideology. Not just mentioning it, but accepting it. Presupposing it.

Wikipedia is another example. It claims "NPOV," but leftist doctrines clearly rule the roost there. Consider e.g. just the fact that the gender ideological idea that "deadnaming" is out. Whole Wikipedia entries often fail to mention the fact that the person in question is "trans" at all. This is part of the radical doctrine that, basically, if someone doesn't want their former name or that part of their history disclosed, we--even our truth-seeking institutions--must comply. In such cases Wikipedia generally doesn't just report on the facts, reporting on past names and "genders"...it just pretends that there was no such name, and was no such past. But, of course: only in the super-special case of "gender"...it is not a generalizable principle.

In this respect, Wikipedia is the perfect Orwellian institution.

Democrats[*] Push to Lower Voting Age to 16

To repeat myself:

I generally don't hold a faction's lunatic fringe against it.

All factions have them.

But the problem with the contemporary Dems is that the fringe has become the center.

And/or: the fringe now sets the agenda, and the center is afraid to stand up to it.

I expect most Dems will oppose this.

But the Democrats have radicalized.

Therefore they have become very, very dangerous.

This is the kind of idea that I fear they'll just keep pushing, knowing that some day, under some particular conditions, they'll win.

And then they'll never lose again.

Because progressivism is a view for children.

And, hey: they think that children are capable of choosing to be chemically castrated and sexually mutilated...so why shouldn't they be able to vote?

Equity demands it!

Some of them also think that noncitizens should be able to vote--and noncitizen voting is already a thing in some local elections (e.g. in Maryland, I think.)

And, of course, some on the left argue that everyone in the entire world should be able to vote in American elections, on the grounds that America's actions affect everyone...

Leftism is basically what you'd get if you took wasted 2:00 a.m. dorm arguments among sophomore liberal arts majors seriously.

[* SOME Democrats. I think this is clear above, but I just used the title of the linked piece without it really registering that it was (or could be) misleading.]

Michael Oren: The Hostage Deal is the Price of Israel's Failures

No idea whether any of this is right.

Biden's Farewell Address

Sad.

Nicole Russell: Goodbye and Good Riddance to Joe Biden

I predicted Biden would be a bad President, but I underestimated how bad he would actually be. I don't think this is a great roundup--I'd add a lot of other things...but I'd also make it a little less contemptuous. I don't blame Biden as much as I blame the people around him.

   I consider the 2020 election to have been a semi-disaster for the country. It brought out the worst in Trump, which brought on the Capitol riot and ensconced the loony stolen election dogma in a huge swath of the right. And, of course, it stuck us with the godawful Biden administration.

   And since there's never been a thorough investigation, we don't really know to what extent Democrat shenanigans contributed to the outcome. Not outright fraud, as Trump ridiculously claims, but, rather, the leveraging of COVID hysteria to facilitate illicit judicial rewriting of election laws in e.g. WI and PA.

   Needless to say, four years from now we may well be saying good riddance to Trump. One way or another, we'll probably breathe a sigh of relief and look forward to a less...exciting...new administration. He's a gamble. We can say with certainty that he'll do some good things and some bad things. We can basically just hope that the former outweigh the latter. But merely replacing the train wreck of the Biden administration is a step in the right direction. 

What Caused the CA Wildfires--Climate Change or DEI?

A pretty standard view in philosophy (and in this case, philosophy seems pretty sane to me) is that a given effect is usually brought about by a complex of causal factors. Why did the tree fall? Well, the strong wind last night blew it down. But also: it was overgrown on one side, its roots were shallow, the ground was wet from frequent rain... It's sometimes said that the cause of any given effect is the total state of the universe prior to that effect's occurrence...but, well, things do get a bit wacky at that point. And we certainly should not go there outside the seminar room. That's woo-woo philosophy shit.

   Normally, when we ask about the cause of e, we are asking for the most salient causal factor.

   Salience, of course, can be a complicated and unclear thing.

   Anyhoo...

   Something sparked the fire. We don't know what. Fireworks. An arsonist. A downed power line. A lightning strike. That's what we'd normally count as the (or "the"?) cause of the fires. But what caused them to spread out of control? Well, there's the background condition of a semi-arid environment. We can count that as a cause, but sometimes don't. There's the Santa Annas, needless to say. And apparently inordinately strong ones. Why couldn't the fires be stopped? A slightly different question... Low water supplies, it seems? What caused that? Sometimes we can find bad decisions by administrators--or general incompetence. DEI does promote incompetence...and an emphasis on DEI (rather than the relevant task at hand) generally decreases institutional effectiveness.

   Higher temperatures can also count as a causal factor--though usually not the most salient one. Some kind of spark started the thing--but high temperatures make it easier to spread because it's easier to hit the combustion point.

   Anyway, both DEI and climate change may play some role in the fires spreading. We can find out about the former by examining the priorities and decisions of the relevant officials. But unless we find something like a memo saying Damn the reservoir levels, spend that money on drag queen story hour, I kinda doubt that DEI was one of the really crucial causal factors. Despite my loathing of DEI.

   As for climate change: the IPCC itself says that we can't attribute any adverse weather events to it except, maybe, heat waves. So that's largely out. (The IPCC says a lot of things. But Roger Pielke jr. shows that this is their most considered position on the matter.)

   What's going on here is common. Something bad happens and all parties jump to blame it on their villain of choice. (Which, of course, doesn't mean they're wrong...)

   My $0.02, FWIW.

Ilya Shapiro: Lawless II: Critical Theory Returns With a Vengeance

link

Turley: How Jack Smith Destroyed His Own Case Against Trump

Written before the report was released, however.

Smith Says Trump Would Have Been Convicted for Efforts to Overturn 2020 Election

Big if true.

But after seeing Trump actually and repeatedly convicted of utterly absurd charges, I'm not buying it.

I haven't read the report, and, being not a lawyer, I don't have the tools to evaluate it myself anyway.

I'll wait to see what e.g. Turley and Andrew McCarthy have to say about it.

My position is still: even after all the blue-team propaganda is cleared away, Trump's behavior after the election was nuts. And nuts in about the way you'd predict from him. In a better world, we wouldn't even have to consider him again as a Presidential candidate.

In the actual world, however, we have to think about the future more than the past. He can't run again, so we don't really have to worry about a repeat of '20.

In the actual world we had to ask: which future is likely to be better: a future with a Republican-controlled government with Trump at the center of it, or a future with a Democrat-controlled government with Harris at the center of it?

About the answer to this question, reasonable people can disagree.

However, for reasons I've repeated articulated, I think the Trump/Pub option beat the Harris/Dem option. And honestly I don't think it was all that close.

But, then, look at how often I've been wrong about that kind of thing...

Everything Is Racist

It's basically official now--even not being racist is racist:

IMPORTANT THREAD 🧵👇

Brave social justice activists such as myself are working tirelessly to expose *all* the racist elements within our society.

Sometimes it is difficult to keep up, so I thought it would be helpful to curate a comprehensive list...

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) July 9, 2020

Max Bauchus: Jimmy Carter Was An Honest, Honorable Leader--And An Even Better Man

Agreed.

NYPo: Redacted Russiagate docs show the feds are STILL lying about Trump and their putsch attemp

link

If you really want to resist the evidence, it's often possible to just drag your feet / dig in your heels. We all know how it's done. Not only do we see in others, we all do it ourselves sometimes. I don't like conclusion C. So I exaggerate the strength of the evidence against C. I minimize the evidence for C. I pick through the evidence for any small reason for doubting C. All I really have to do is keep from outright admitting that C is false. Eventually more objective reasoners will realize that arguing with me is futile. They realize C is basically proven. They move on. But I don't have to admit error. And I can assert not-C from time to time, as the spirit moves me. If I'm stubborn and dishonest enough, I can keep the dispute rhetorically (though not rationally) alive...maybe forever.

   The right did this with WMDs. Not forever, but until nobody cared anymore. At one point breathless unconfirmed reports of single buried bits of chemical ordnance were being trumpeted as proof that Saddam did, indeed, have WMDs--as if we had invaded because we suspected that there was a stray chlorine gas artillery shell forgotten somewhere in the Iraqi desert. But now...well, at this point they might as well just let the dispute fade away. And they have. They fought to a rhetorical standstill until losing didn't matter anymore. Had they admitted--or stopped denying--that there were no WMDs while the argument was still hot, they would have paid a significant price. But, to quote the philosopher, what difference, at this point, does it make?

Former SACEUR Says USA Acquiring Greenland "Not Crazy" (Despite Misleading NRO Title)

James Stavridis, former SACEUR, says it's not crazy for the U.S. to look into acquiring Greenland--and it would have important benefits. Contrary to the NRO title, he doesn't seem to approve of annexation.

   Too bad we're already stuck in a typical Trumpian vortex: a good idea poorly stated and surrounded by dumbassery. If the guy could just state his ideas and then shut up, he and we would be a lot better off. To some extent the media provokes such stuff--because they hate him and know they can. Just badger him, suggesting he wants to do something crazy...until his natural contrarianism is provoked, and he refuses to prostrate himself with qualifications and apologies. Or until he even says, basically: Yeah, maybe I DO mean that; what of it? It's more important for the media to get Trump to say something stupid than it is to do what's good for the country. So here we are.

   This is not to excuse Trump's dumbassery. Dealing with a hostile, irrational media is part of the job description for any Republican. He's actually good at some of it. But this Maybe we'll steal Greenland bullshit is an unforced error to say the least. This is exactly the kind of thing a President can't say. And, of course, exactly the thing people like me knew we'd have to deal with by voting for the guy.

   As I often say to a friend of mine: we were about to get torn to shreds by a pack of hungry wolves...so we jumped off a cliff into a raging river. We knew it was a gamble, and we understood the position we were putting ourselves in. Too bad those were our only options...

Margi Conklin: Facebook's "Fact-Checkers" Changed How I See Tech--and Free Speech--Forever

link

Fetterman: Greenland Conversation is Reasonable

Boy, Fetterman has turned out to be a win for the country. He's a reasonable guy who doesn't hasn't acquired any of the D.C. diseases yet. God, we could have had "Dr. Oz" instead...

   Anyway, I don't know anything about this, really, but it does seem that the conversation about Greenland is worth having. I presume the deal won't work out--and, of course, any talk of taking it militarily is utterly insane--but let's have a discussion about legally acquiring it.

   For one thing, given our current deficit/debt situation, this doesn't seem like the right time.

   But maybe.

[Note: any half-assed opinion I have about this is probably based on the fact that the Russians take Greenland and use it as a bomber base in Red Storm Rising...]

Is Elon Musk Right About the F-35?

I started writing a long thing about this when it happened, but never finished it.

Of course I'm just a fighter groupie. I read a lot of informal stuff about weapons systems, but I don't have any expertise. So the best I can really do is give you the impressions of someone who is slightly more informed about the topic than you probably are.

   My view, FWIW (not much) is:

   Musk is making a mistake that we run into every now and then in such discussions. He's basically arguing:

We're building current technology. But that's dumb because there is an emerging technology that's better.

   But, to paraphrase the much maligned (including by me) Donald Rumsfeld: you got to war with the technology you have, not with the technology you want or wish you had at a later time.

   I see--and, again: not an expert--no way whatsoever to get by without manned fighters for the foreseeable future. Musk might as well argue: Why are we using all these cannons when lasers are better. Well, even in 20 years or whatever when lasers really come into their own, we'll still be using cannons for many purposes. I'd bet my house on it.

   And as for drone swarms: well, I'm not even sure those are on the horizon for air combat. The emerging technology emphasizes big, high-tech (ergo high-cost) drones like the Loyal Wingman / Ghost Bat, Lonshot and Gunslinger. That is, big Loyal-Wingman-type AI drones that will fly alongside and be directed by pilots in manned fighters. Or like Longshot, a drone that carries and fires its own air-to-air missiles, or Gunslinger, a DARPA-level missile armed with cannons.

   Good luck getting low-cost drones up to 50k' at mach 2 to challenge Su-35s...or even MiG 29s...

   Musk also complains that the F-35 is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. That's a different objection, and I think there's some truth in it.

   But do remember that just about every major new weapons system is declared a catastrophic failure at first. Well, maybe not the F-15. I'll bet there were even some panicky articles about the Abrams. People lost their minds about the "death trap" Bradley IFV--wrongly. Now it's a badass. I've come to think that Pentagon weapons development goes like this: it aims to get plausible weapons systems online, knowing that they'll be so-so at first. They give themselves something they can turn into a badass weapon--they don't expect it to be a badass system on day 1.

   I'm no big fan of Fat Amy. She's not going to inspire the kind of adulation that, say, the Raptor inspires among people like me. We're still suck in WWII and Star Wars--we want to see turning dogfights. We want to hear Too close for missiles--going in for guns. But that basically doesn't happen anymore. All engagements are BVR. Fat Amy is no Corvette ZR-1. It's more like a...I dunno...semi-self-driving Tesla with all the latest networked bells and whistles.

   Seems to me that the picture that's emerging is one where we have a lot of different kinds of air-to-air weapons, from networked stealth (better: low-observable) fighters leading the way and directing the attack, through souped-up 4.5-gen F-15EX missile trucks and stealthier F-16s doing Wild Weasel SEAD missions, Loyal-Wingman-type drones, and whatever the NGAD and FA-XX turn out to be...which might be B21s spamming the battlespace with AMRAAMs and RIM-174s...all working together. And, for the foreseeable future, our fleet of 4th-gen fighters--F-15s, F-16s, F-18s--doing the bulk of the work.

   As they say, the F-35 is more like a quarterback, seeing all the battlespace, directing everything else. Not as cool, fast, quick, athletic as the wide receivers...but even more important.

   Something like that, I guess.

   Musk is a smart guy taking snap shots on X-Twitter. He's smart and informed and generally worth taking seriously. Kinda like Trump. But--also kinda like Trump--he's wrong a lot.

   And, seems to me, he's wrong about this.

ReasonTV / Aaron Brown, Wrong Number: Did CA's Minimum Wage Hike Really Create Jobs?

No surprise here: probably not. It seems to have made things better for higher-wage low-wage workers and worse for lower-wage low-wage workers and unskilled workers trying to break into the job market. Transcript available under the video at YouTube:

Carolina 63 - State 61

J-Wash with the dunk and the block!

State Game

Well...it's a game.

Trump's Bullshit "Felony" Conviction Takes Away His Second-Amendment Rights

Lopez. 

Let me remind you:

McCarthy: The Rape Jihad is Unmentionable Because It's Doctrinal

I don't know anything about this.

Other than that it's rather obvious that suppression of the Muslim rape-gang story is just more political correctness.

As McCarthy basically notes, the PCs/woketarians/prope-Marxists and the Islamicists are basically allies against Western liberalism.

Zuckerberg: Biden Admin Would "Scream and Curse" on Phone Demanding Censorship

link

If you still think the red team is worse...well...you're wrong.

Vox Conversation with Matt Yglesias: "Have the Past 10 Years of Dem Politics Been a Disaster?"

The answer seems obvious to me.

   But the title isn't very descriptive of the discussion.

   I have a pretty high opinion of Yglesias. He certainly knows a hundred times more about boring policy shit like zoning than I do. And that stuff is important.

   My general disagreement with him remains the same as it's been for a couple of years now: he's one of those guys like Jesse Singal who just can't wrest the blue-tinged spectacles off'n his face. He sort of knows he should. He just can't. I'm glad people like him are trying to move the Dems back from the edge/fringe...but, fundamentally, he still thinks they're generally right. This is basically the position I was in back in the paleo-PC era ca. 1990...and right on through up until 2016. I very explicitly thought to myself: The fact that the PCs/SJWs are insane doesn't mean that I should give up liberalism...or the Democrats. 

   Well... fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again...as the philosopher says.

   My general attitude now is that conservatives are, in the main, less dangerous than the mixture of liberalism and progressivism we find on the left. This is twice in my life now that the American left has fallen for / fallen in behind the insane Orwellian PC left. I may be a slow learner...but I'm not that slow.

   A few thoughts:

• Of course this doesn't mean that the red team is all Jefferson and rainbows. Those jackasses are fully capable of the big league stupid.
• I continue to think that reports of Woketarianism's death are greatly exaggerated. The Deep Academy will never let it die. It's not even driven out of the real world yet. It remains a great danger to the nation, even if it's on the run in some ways and some sectors.
• Trump is fully capable of f*cking things up to such a degree that he revives the worst of the loony left. Even if he doesn't, the media will be working overtime for at least the next five years to make it seem that way.

Anyway. In general, good for Yglesias. But, as emerges a couple of times in the discussion, he doesn't quite understand the inherently bad core of progressivism. Tweaks won't fix the thing, IMO.

George Soros, Anti-Communist?

Eh...well...seems unclear to me. Even if he is anticommunist, he seems to promote leftist causes that aren't all that far off from it.

I can't believe that Karl Popper, his mentor, would approve.

Most Underreported Biden Story: It's the Corruption, Stupid

link

The double standard under which the red and blue teams operate: Trump is repeatedly investigated and often convicted on bullshit charges...Biden practically takes bribes on the White House lawn with impunity.

Don't forget that Trump's first impeachment was basically for investigating Biden's corruption...about which he was right.

So: Biden takes bribes...Trump investigates...Trump is impeached...Biden walks away Scot free...

WSJ: "Trump's Bully Pulpit Diplomacy"

[1] This editorial seems rather too positive to me.

[2] Blue media, of course, has spun all this to sound even worse than it is.

[3] When TR said he had a "bully pulpit," he meant he had a great pulpit, an excellent platform from which to air his ideas, a powerful persuasive position...as in "my pulpit--it is bully! Bully for my platform!" He didn't mean that it was a pulpit from which to bully people. It had nothing to do with bullying, i.e. threatening, intimidating or pushing people around, what we think of when we hear the word 'bully.' Unfortunately, Trump acts as if that's exactly what it means. (The media also seems to use the term in this way...but that doesn't really matter here. This one isn't their fault.)

[4] Intuitively, I'd think you'd go about something like this--thinking mostly of the Greenland suggestion--in almost the opposite way: quietly approach Denmark, reveal lukewarm interest, see whether they might be interested, blah blah blah.

[5] However, Trump knows about ten thousand times more about making deals than I do. Lifetime, I'm probably down a couple of thousand dollars on such interactions. He's ahead by billions. So...no contest there. He's an actual expert.

[6] But when you're the world's sole superpower (hyperpower?), you have to tread lightly to avoid seeming like an asshole and getting unnecessarily crossways with other nations. If you're really interested in Greenland, why give Denmark an additional reason to say no? Why turn this into a public stare-down that they can easily win by simply refusing to sell us their land? And, on top of that, setting things up so that they might feel and appear cowardly for agreeing to the deal? Again, just seems like exactly the wrong approach. Everybody knows we're the baddest dude on the block...i.e., to mess up the metaphor again, and to put way too fine a point on it: the planet. Why turn that advantage into a disadvantage by beating our chest and acting like an asshole?

[7] The reference to the use of military force is just psycho. At first he said explicitly that that was out...but then we saw a familiar pattern reemerge: the media kept badgering him and asking the question in different ways until he basically said Fuck you, yea, maybe that too.

[8] And as for Canada: trolling the loathsome Trudeau is one thing. But don't demean Canada generally. It's like picking on your little brother.

Wikipedia Watch: Compare the Entries on (a) 2020 BLM/Antifa Riots and (b) 1/6/21 Capitol Riot

One was a "cultural reckoning" re: "systemic racism"...the other was a "self-coup" and "terrorism."

Wikipedia is a massive piece of shit when it comes to any topic that touches on the obsessions of the American political and cultural left.

It may be even worse that the laughable "Rational"Wiki.

Trollin' Trollin' Trollin'...Trump on Taking Over Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal

Don't get me wrong...this kind of shit is why he shouldn't be President...

And theoretically I don't think it's funny.

Theoretically...

But I have to say, I do, in actual fact, enjoy how easy it is for him to provoke hysteria in the media.

Note also that they're still pretending that there were guns at the Capitol Riot.

To be clear: there weren't.

Or, to be more precise: the number of guns at the riot was so laughably small that it rounds down to zero.

Q: BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ZIP TIES REEEEEEEEE?????

Q2: AND THE FART SPRAY???

A: Shut up, commie.

You cannot get that many rednecks together with fewer guns than that...The amazing thing is how few there were. But the left and the media thinks that there being, like, a revolver and half or whatever is enough for an insurrection. [1] [2]

Still tho.

The lulz absolutely do not justify this sort of bad behavior, Mr. President...er...Elect...!

I disapprove!

[1] tm

[2] REEEEEEEEE

New Newspeak Just Dropped: "Body-Feeding"

Apparently there are men--or pseudo-women if you prefer--who can induce some sort of nipular excretions with estrogen...and they are dead-set on pretending that this is breast milk.

Anyway, apparently "body-feeding" is the newspeak term for it.

ew:

Trump Wants to Rename Gulf of Mexico 'Gulf of America'

facepalm

Aaron Mate: FBI is Still Hiding Details of Russiagate, Newly-Released Documents Show

Not exactly a surprise.

Justin Trudeau: Good Riddance

What a cringetastic joke.

What the hell, Canada?

How on Earth did this take so long?

VDH: "Conspiracies Too Awful to Imagine?;" The Massive Blue-Team Conspiracy Against Trump

A fair summary, IMO.

Political Correctness and the UK's Massive Pakistani Rape-Gang Horror

I haven't discussed this for a long, long time, but it's back in the news:

What made these horrors even worse – and in some cases what made them possible – was the calculated indifference of officialdom. Across England, local politicians and cops were initially loath to dig into the gangs, lest they stir up ‘sensitive community issues’. They knew very well that gangs of men from Pakistani backgrounds were preying on white girls from the dirt-poor parts of town, but they held back because they didn’t want to be seen as ‘targeting [a] minority group’. In town after town, ‘race relations’ were elevated above the safety and dignity of working-class girls. Protecting the ideology of multiculturalism was seen as more important than protecting girls from rape. The girls were sacrificed to ideology, their humiliation treated as a small price to pay for upholding the edicts of political correctness.

Now Labour officials in the Home Office are refusing to begin an inquiry.

   This is political correctness: maintaining the illusion that "multiculturalism" is an unalloyed good. Of course "multiculturalism" itself is one of those bits of Newspeak used to advance leftist radicalism. Like "diversity" and the rest, it's a happy-sounding term used to give cover to the leftist dream/project of destroying the West. Put so starkly, it sounds crazy--unless you're actually paying attention.

   My rule of thumb: don't pay attention to the happy-sounding words.

   Pay attention to the actual policies implemented under the happy-sounding words.

   Or just mentally replace e.g. "multiculturalism" with "rape gangs and the destruction of Western civilization."

   As Starmer has admitted, the UK has been conducting a "one-nation experiment in open borders."

   As per usual, one of the really striking things about all this is that it wasn't a close call. It's not like these are reasonable policies. They're policies than anyone should be able to see are catastrophic. And many of us have been pointing this out all along.

Robert Knight: Here's How Democrats and the Media Used and Abused the January 6th "Insurrection"

I already linked to this from the Grauniad post, but here it is again.

   Again, my view (FWIW which isn't much) is basically that this sort of take is much more accurate than that of the other piece. But it still means that the riot was a f***ing disgrace, it put the worst tendencies of the brainless right front and center, and it still shows that Trump's behavior didn't meet minimal standards of Presidential-ness.

   The far-ish right's view of the riot is instructive, I think. It's basically: It wasn't that bad in fact it was totally justified but it wasn't really us it was Antifa or the Feds or somebody.

   Their first choice is: We didn't do it.

   But if that doesn't work: Totally justified!

The Grauniad on the Alleged January 6th Insurrection/Coup

This Grauniad woman is an idiot. [WARNING: GRAUNIAD LINK! NOT ACTUAL NEWS SOURCE!]

   I don't know her name, but I recognize her picture, and that's enough.

   Really, if you want to maintain your objectivity about this, such as it may be, that isn't the kind of thing you need to be reading. Find something less...like that is.

   My view on it hasn't changed a lot in the last couple of years. First error: to think that everything fits into neat, dichotomous categories in the actual world. So: determinately either coup or not, insurrection or not.

   The Capitol riot was somewhat like a coup or insurrection...but not very much like one.

   But it was way, way, way too far in that direction.

   The left is hysterical and dishonest about this...like everything else. But they're not completely wrong.

   Of course if there were a real coup--a coup coup--in the USA, you'd know it.

   For one thing, there would have been weapons.

   Real Weapons.

   Not zip dies and fart spray or whatever they found.

   We are, after all, the most heavily-armed society in the world--and those weapons are concentrated on the right.

   What it was was a demonstration that got way, way out of hand.

   That's not to make excuses.

   It did get out of hand--again way, way, way out of hand.

   Though it wasn't "The Deadliest Day," it was appalling. After it, I regretted having voted for Trump, and said I wouldn't do so again.

   But here we are.

   The left continued to get crazier--which a priori I would have thought impossible--and I eventually decided that I had to think more about the future than the past.

   But, anyway.

   I don't have anything particularly interesting to say about this. All I can really say is: you're better off not reading rags like the Guardian, especially on topics like this.

   Here's the much more sober take from the other side.

Booze and Cancer

Well that's just great.

Terrorism by Radical Islamists Show that...the Real Threat is Generic Extremism...Except Really the Right...

I'm strawmanning in the title...but not by much...

IMO we can't believe such stuff because the FBI is part of a network of left-leaning think tanks, academicians, and groups like the ADL that are known to spin things so as to be more in line with their preferred view of things. We know that they took the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting by Omar Mateen and spun it leftward; instead of admitting that Mateen was an Islamist extremist, they turned it into an anti-gay shooting. Can't have people thinking it was a Muslim! Really, it was an anti-gay bigot! That's the real problem here! But that simply wasn't true.

   I'm not claiming to know that the FBI (etc.) is wrong. That would be dumb. I'm just pointing out the rather obvious fact that we can't trust them.

   The linked piece doesn't quite go like this...but...I'm going to say it anyway:

   Hey, you know that crazy Muslim with the ISIS flag who killed all those people in NOLA? Well, that was just one kind of extremism!! And the worst kind of extremism is right-wing extremism!

   I'd Just like to get the facts and get them straight. Or at least: straighter.

Cringetastic Biden Admin Double Feature

I posted the first one a couple of days ago...the second one is less bizarre but way, way more cringe:

Carolina 74 - Notre Dame 73

Nail-biter.

Not so sure that was a foul at the end, but I'll take it.

Maskmania II: Electric Boogaloo

wh...what?

This Is UNBELIEVABLY Creepy

The White House just posted this weird, dark "move forward" video on their YouTube channel showing tons of people in masks while saying things like "the time to trust."

These people are stupid and evil. Their agenda couldn't be any more obvious... pic.twitter.com/WaHtGMDyNk

— Gain of Fauci (@DschlopesIsBack) January 2, 2025

Hayden Ludwig: Trump, E-Verify and Self-Deportation

Yes to all of this.

This problem isn't just due to the Dems. The Pubs have done their part, too:

Yet many blue states go out of their way to discourage E-Verify’s use. California bars private employers from using E-Verify before making a job offer. Illinois penalizes companies that “misuse” the E-Verify system, discouraging them from using the program at all. And in 2021, Colorado Democrats actually repealed the use of E-Verify for state contractors on a party-line vote, calling it a “barrier to certain public opportunities.”
That America hasn’t already mandated this policy everywhere explains a lot about the state of our immigration system. For decades, establishment Republican squishes conspired with far-left Democrats to turn our country into a playground for the world’s poor and privileged alike – so long as those policies lined the right pockets.
In 2010, for instance, the Chamber of Commerce sued to block Arizona’s E-Verify mandate, later losing in the U.S. Supreme Court. (The Chamber now says it supports the measure.)
California Democrat Zoe Lofgren spelled it out in 2018: Mandating E-Verify “would be highly disruptive to restaurants, hotels, and other industries” reliant on illegal labor.
Opening the floodgates to tens of millions of noncitizens, legal or otherwise, proved one of the Beltway’s favorite bipartisan schemes. Corporate “conservatives” got cheap, imported labor; wily “progressives” got future welfare state voters. We the People got the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in American history: over 15%, higher than the mass immigration period of the late 1800s – and steadily rising since the Reagan amnesty mistake 38 years ago.
Cynical Washington elites sold our nation’s culture, jobs, and dignity away and smeared their critics as racist for complaining. For years, that grift worked – until Donald Trump sparked a revival in American self-confidence.

Derangement Watch: Kevin Roose, "How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis"

This really is a masterpiece of the genre.

   Obviously he isn't wrong about the stolen election hoax, nor about QAnon.

   What's astonishing is the one-sidedness of the thing--the abject obliviousness to the far greater madness on the left. No mention of gender pseudoscience, race pseudoscience, Lysenkoism generally, Russiagate, Laptopgate, TDS, the ideological capture of our formerly-truth-seeking institutions...all the madness I'm always ranting about. As nutty as the right can be, its current nuttiness pales in comparison to the derangement of the progressive left.

  It's like reading an essay by a Scientologist complaining about a couple of dopey doctrines of the Methodists or something.

  And then there're the proposed solutions!:

[1] The appointment of a "Reality Czar"

[2] “We have to destroy the institutional systemic racism that creates this environment. We have to provide jobs. We have to have access to mental health care and education.”

   (Even the author acknowledges that [1] "sounds a little dystopian...")

   So the solution is: more left-wing totalitarianism! More institutionalized political correctness and thought/speech restrictions--and, of course, addressing the phantom menace of "systemic racism"!!!

   The very idea that the left, the elites and the government could be trusted as gatekeepers of reality...Jesus Christ, you might as well turn the keys over to Trofim Lysenko himself.

   This reminds me of a post I saw the other day--I kinda think it was by the guy who runs Politifact...asserting that one of the biggest lies of the year was that the Biden admin's "Disinformation Governance Board" was a threat to free speech.

   The mind, it reels...