Modern Monetary Theory Lives On

link

The Texas Activist Putting the Ten Commandments Back in the Classroom

Not good.

But ridiculously minor compared to the left's insanity...e.g. brainwashing children to think they are--in some unverifiable, mystical way--the opposite sex.

Someday the balance of crazy will probably shift back to the right...and this is the kind of thing we can expect. But they've got a long way to go before they're competitive in that respect.

Did Trump Suggest Using the Military Against the Bond Market?

No.

I mean...maybe...but of course the media and the left (but I repeat myself) have twisted his words for a decade. They love to mock his inarticulateness and incoherence, but they ignore that when they find a way to make it seem like he said something truly insane. Then they treat him as if he's a paragon of clarity.

   Though, TBF: he's capable of saying almost anything...and possibly even meaning it.

   But the first node in the flow chart for translating Trump into people-speak looks something like this:

Is it clear what he was saying?

...and, of course, the answer is generally: NO.

   What the hell he was saying here?

   It's more likely that he was just talking about completely different types of interventions. That's certainly more likely than that he thinks there's a way to militarily attack the bond market...

   Though, with Trump, ya never really know.

WSJ: Trump's Iran Credibility Problem

Iran?

Nothing really special about Iran in this respect...

The dude has done enormous...borderline incalculable...good...but Jesus Christ I'm sick to death of his bullshit.

I kinda think he'll win this out of sheer cussedness...or at least that's how I'd bet if I absolutely had to...

But what a freakin' trainwreck.

WSJ: Our $40 Trillion Nightmare

Please don't make me think about this:

There are no easy solutions, because the causes of the debt are not what political demagogues claim. Despite recent tax cuts, federal revenue as a share of GDP is at approximately the same level as it has been for the past 75 years. Defense spending is also not to blame, as it constitutes a historically small and shrinking percentage of the economy.
The real driver of national debt is ever-increasing social spending, particularly on entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — whose growth is attributable to an aging population and mounting health-care expenses. Because these programs run on autopilot and are overwhelmingly popular, lawmakers of both parties have no incentive to touch them before it’s too late.
There are still several ways to reform entitlements by restraining their cost growth and reducing benefits for the highest earners. But the choices get worse the longer we wait, just as they are far more difficult now than they were years ago.
The first thing Congress has to do is quit throwing fuel on the fire with even more unpaid-for spending. Republicans, especially, must relearn their commitment to fiscal responsibility, since Democrats never had one to begin with. Then, lawmakers will need to level with voters about the cold, hard trade-offs they face.

Though look: Clinton was the last President to balance the budget... And Gore would have very likely done the same--starting with not invading Iraq for no goddamned reason whatsoever...  Two-and-a-half $trillion-with-a-T right there... Which may not sound like so much from our current predicament...but, ya know...a trillion here, a trillion there...

WSJ: Nathan Cofnas: "The controversial academic who ignited the Jason Arday furor"...by speaking unspeakable truths

Nathan Cofnas is a pariah mainly because he speaks obvious but politically incorrect truths--commonsense propositions that are also confirmed by science but that are inconsistent with leftist ideology. Foremost among them: races are real. They are natural, biological kinds. In biology, races are such kinds that fall below the level of subspecies.

   The politically correct view--which pervades the left and academia (but I repeat myself) is that races are magical things that somehow are both fictional/fabricated and the Very Most Important Things In The World... The most important things about "social constructs" for the left is that they can be fictive when you want them to be and real when you want them to be... This is the twilight realm of the "social construct." I've discussed the conceptual trainwreck of "social construction" over and over...so I won't address it here...

   At any rate, the PC/Woketarian cult has deemed it racist to even believe that races are biological kinds/categories...although that races are such kinds is something believed by everyone else everywhere else everywhen else...something which any objective assessment of the scientific evidence supports...but, y'know...bad...

   The left has had an adversarial relationship to genetics since Lysenko and the USSR's opposition to "Mendelianism." The academic left has basically averted its gaze since the beginnings of the mapping of the human genome. Humans, you see, are blank slates upon which culture inscribes its "narrative"...

   In fact, the entire universe is a blank slate--the original and most (in)famous version of social constructionism being "reality is socially constructed"...

   At any rate, Cofnas might possibly have squeaked by as a purely theoretical race realist (a view that becomes "scientific racism" in PC Newspeak)...but he dares to take the findings of the cognitive science of intelligence seriously, too...and to apply it to DEI... Some unpleasant conclusions follow--which Cofnas admits are unpleasant. The difference between Cofnas and the PC left is that, when the evidence diverges from leftist ideology, as it so often does, Cofnas follows the evidence. Unfortunately, without DEI or affirmative action or something similar, Cofnas reckons that blacks would make up something like 0.7% of Harvard faculty. That sucks. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

   Incidentally, not that it should be relevant: Cofnas thinks that we might ought to have some kind of affirmative action quotas in order to maintain confidence in academia by "under"represented races...

   In fact, his view (last I heard him express it, anyway) is similar to mine: we may need some form of "affirmative action"...but, if so, it should take the form of straightforward quotas...rather than an all-encompassing prop for leftist ideology like DEI. Quotas are straightforward and don't constitute a catspaw for the unmaking ("reimagining") of the institution.

   Anyway...Cofnas also blew the whistle on Jason Arday. And so now he's getting fired again.

   Of course: he was right. Arday's plagiarism and lies were obvious and off the scale. Others--e.g. the Times Education Supplement--had already caught Arday out. But some scumbag law firm lawfared them into submission and they didn't publish. Other black scholars also claim to have known Arday was dirty. His students say he was shit in the classroom, basically just holding forth extemporaneously on racism every class.

   Cofnas was 100% right. His evidence is ironclad.

   But, still, he's a racist...because reasons...

   The rector of Ghent University who is the point person on trying to oust Cofnas is herself a lefty lunatic. She's former head of the Belgian Greens. She wrote her rector's acceptance speech with AI. Truth-tellers like Cofnas are anathema to such people.

   Academia today is--to a great extent anyway--revolting.

Incidentally:

Note that the left is now trying to do the same thing to sex and "gender" that it did to race: muddy up the biology and claim that the categories in question are actually social.

The left is the greatest threat to academia of my lifetime.

Trump's Korea Follies

JESUS CHRIST TRUMP IS A FUCKING IDIOT

Nathan Cofnas Suspended by Plagiarist Far Left Rector of Ghent U. (Petra De Sutter) for Breaking the Jason Arday Story

Utter fucking bullshit, obviously.

Cofnas deserves a medal.

De Sutter used AI to write her first address as rector. That address included several fabricated quotes (AI "hallucinations").

The left's view is: it's ok for leftists to plagiarize, and non-leftists are evil if they expose the plagiarism.

Cultists.

Bjorn Lomborg at PragerU: Where Have All The Climate Alarmists Gone?

Universities Threaten Disciplinary Action Against Students Who Refuse to Use "Transgender" Newspeak

That is, if they use the actual name of a "transgender," or refer to that person using the correct pronouns.

"Trans" Newspeak calls these things "deadnaming" and "misgendering."

Eric Boehm: "I played a game simulating the outcome of the '28 election--here's how it went"

What a nightmare.

I'm still rooting for some kind of moderate health crisis to get Trump out of office.

Unfortunately, he seems healthy as a horse.

It's a long shot...but more likely than Trump suddenly becoming reasonable.

Although I see the left--which is playing the long game, and devoted to thought-control and its "Long March Through the Institutions"--as the greater threat, I think a spasm of violence and overt theft of the Presidency as more likely to come from the right.

"Why 'Woke 1' Failed Seems So Obvious Now"

These people are still cracked.

"Woke 1," you see, was land acknowledgements, nuking Thanksgiving, and spelling 'folks' folx...

Ha ha that was crazy!

Except it was all right...that is, correct...politically correct...it was just annoying and didn't go anywhere...the U.S. is still a genocidal shithole...but we can't do anything about it..

   Not mentioned by the author: gender ideology (women have penises, men have babies, brainwashing and sexually mutilating children, insane men in women's restrooms, locker rooms, sports, shelters, prisons...), critical race theory and its penumbra of lunacy (all whites are racist by definition, it is impossible for non-whites to be racist by definition, the U.S. is made of racism ("systemic," "structural," "institutional"...and, of course, definitional...) open borders + no enforcement of immigration laws once illegals are inside our borders, abolish ICE, etc., "depolicing," "decarceration," and "equity" in charging and conviction, yielding a racialized, two-tier "justice" system, rampant "cancellation," crushing of free speech, politicization of everything, DEI, DEI, DEI (preferential hiring, mandatory indoctrination sessions for everyone, etc.), "social constructionism" about everything, the politicization of all our institutions including academia, Lysenkoism, i.e. the subordination of science to leftist lunacy...and, in fact, the subordination of everything to leftist lunacy....just for starters.

   As Chris Bray has said, this is an attempt to effect some kind of reset without really admitting error...and without abandoning any of the most insane ideas and principles of the Cult.

"U.S. Universities are Sliding into Decline"

link

I thought I was reading something from a decent source...but about 1/3 of the way through I realized it was pretty much crap...and realized it was from the Washington Monthly...

   It doesn't address the most important problems with academia--politicization, vocationalization, and lack of rigor. Cost is a big problem--though if universities actually delivered what they promise--or suggest that they're promising--it wouldn't be. If universities really did transform students for the better, they might be worth the cost. But they probably don't and they're probably not.

   Universities are eaten up with Woketarianism--which is the approximate intellectual and moral equivalent of Scientology. Grade inflation is rampant--largely because [a] student evaluations of instructors are rampant, easier grades mean easier eval scores, and hiring and promotion largely depend on such scores; and [b] high grades mean happy students, and happy students mean less work for the instructor. A colleague who went to grad school at Harvard told me that there giving 'A's was a conscious strategy among grad students--to some extent to get good evals, but mostly so that time didn't have to be wasted on grading. No student questions an 'A'...

   As for universities getting less federal funding: well, stop with the DEI and Woketarian indoctrination. Fact is, universities value those things more even than they value federal $$...which, lemme tell you, they value a lot.

   As for faculty looking to move to other countries: a lot of that is probably because they're leftists, and looking for lefty cred for pretending to flee from Trump. Lemme know if there's ever an actual wave of faculty emigration.

   But, then, I didn't sleep and I'm cranky.

Luther Ray Abel: The President is an Idiot

Ugh.

This is more and more difficult to deny.

I've had trouble reconciling his apparent stupidity with the fact that he's been right about so many things--and he's been right about many of them for a long, long time...

Maybe there's just no reconciling them.

Though it may be that he just can't stand to be opposed.

I dunno, man.

But I'm just sick to death of the guy.

Given one political wish, I might well use it to swap out Trump for Rubio.

David Strom: No, Jason Arday was Not Hounded to Death

link

   As many (including me) have already said: to the extent that anyone but Arday is responsible for his death, it was the academic left and its DEI madness. Basically, the rules were suspended for him. He was credentialed and promoted far beyond his abilities because he was black. Oh, sorry: "Black." When it was discovered that he was a fraud, this was--eventually--widely reported. I'm sorry Arday killed himself. But he knew he was a fraud, and that he had no sound response to the evidence. Arday was put in this absurd position by leftist people, principles and policies that lower standards for blacks and other preferred minorities. In Arday's case, standards were basically thrown out the window. The left prefers: non-whites over whites, women over men, non-heterosexuals and other such people over heterosexuals. Demography is more important to them than merit. In fact, it's common on the academic left to claim that the very idea of merit is racist. Well, of course, everything is racist according to them.

   Matt Walsh makes a point in the post that many have made. It's an old point, and it's right...though I myself tend to avoid it: according to the principles of the left, only white men are really human. Humanity goes along with freedom and responsibility. But women and non-whites (except Jews!) tend to not be held responsible, hence are not really considered free. (It's a bit more complicated than that. White women are given preferred treatment over white men...but black men are preferred over white women... Black women are the best, of course... So freedom and responsibility are suspended selectively.) I avoid this point because--though correct--in a way it's saying: you're hurting blacks! But the left has to learn that not every reason must reduce to something about the welfare of blacks (or other preferred demographic groups). You might conceivably get them to concede the specific point via that argument...but it won't touch their fundamental confusions. They need to learn that blacks are not more important than whites, women are not more important than men, and non-heterosexuals (etc.) are not more important than heterosexuals. Blacks can be wrong. Whites can be right. Etc.

Fleccas: DSA "Women" Call for the Destruction of America

Tyler Austin Harper: Why I Quit the Tenure Track: The Insufferable Hypocrisy of Elite Academia [A Must-Read]

This dude is my new hero.

The Second Amendment Could Protect Owning Cannons, Heavily-Armed Ships

Now we're goddamn talkin'!

Alex Berenson on Jason Arday

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Colin Wright: How Many Girls on Testosterone is Too Many?

I was explaining to a progressive friend once that the number of unarmed black men per year killed by police was not in the tens of thousands, as many in her faction believed, but closer to 10. Her response: "one is too many"...

   There should be a name for this fallacy. The "one is too many" fallacy? Not exactly snappy?

   One is regrettable--but for almost any major type of phenomenon, it isn't "too many." Not in the sense that it's too many to continue doing things the way we are doing them, anyway. Unfortunately, almost now matter how rational and effective a way of doing things is, if you do it enough, some people will die from it. Some people die from exercising every year. That's regrettable. But it isn't "too many." Not too many for us to continue exercising, anyway... If we stopped doing everything that caused more than zero deaths, that would be the end of not only civilization, but human beings.

   However, we're not talking one case here.

   Rather: in Oregon, 1 out of 240 girls with health insurance is on testosterone.

   That, you see, is way too many.

   I'd say that 1 in 10,000 might possibly be defensible...but that's just based on...well, nothing, really. That's just the number I'd choose if I had to pick on out of thin air.

   And, of course, since I think this psychotic gender lunacy is the utterest bullshit...I guess I kinda do think one is too many in this case...

Brittany Berstein: How "Gender Transitions" for Minors Became a Lucrative Business

To the tune of about $120 million...

I guess I'm naive, but I've always been skeptical of the claim that medical transanity was about money. It seems to me that these people are true believers--they are passionately, ideologically, quasi-religiously devoted to this web of lunatic ideas.

There's No Such Thing as "Woke 2.0"

Just because the left declares something doesn't make it so.

And, of course: they have strategic reasons for declaring it.

My guess:

They want to basically declare by fiat that there's a sane version of Woketarianism...

...and that that's what they're advocating now.

So, see: they're not responsible for any of that crazy shit from the last decade...

....but they're not abandoning it, either...

Remember: Woketarianism is just political correctness + 35 years of extra crazy. It's more grounded in critical theory than in postmodernism. And it adds transanity to its obsession with non- and anti-heterosexuality. The PC holy trinity was race, sex, and class. The Woketarian trinity is race, "gender," and...I dunno, something else. Can't currently remember my own ranting points.

Hey, remember "dark woke"?

That was fun for like two weeks.

It was woke + cursing.

I'm trying to get "wokemaxxing" to catch on.

I don't really know what it would be...just sounds like regular woke (i.e. crazymaxxing) to me...

Longtime Dem Council and Strategist Julian Epstein: Why the Democrat Party has Gone to Hell: Postmodern Liberalism

Jason Arday Found Dead; "Unexpected but Not Suspicious"

link

I'm sorry for the guy.

I'm sure his loony lefty defenders will try to, as they say, "weaponize" this against his critics, and sane people generally.

But the fact is: he was not in any way qualified for the Cambridge position. And none of this would have happened if the DEI cult had not elevated him to a position that he could not possibly have maintained for long. An even minimally competent and objective mentor...or friend...or colleague...would have told him long ago that he was on a crash trajectory...

In a very real way, Jason Arday is dead because of his race. He wasn't really a scholar to the people who elevated him beyond the limits of his abilities. He wasn't really a person. He was just black. That's all they cared about.

Chris Bray on "Woke 1" / "Woke 2.0" Shenanigans

link

So I've warned many times that we thought we beat political correctness--i.e. Woke 0--back in the '90s...but, of course, we were wrong. It just retreated into universities until it had brainwashed enough students to then burst forth again ca. 2014, even crazier than it was before. But PC Phase 1 / Woke 0 had been mostly limited to campus...PC2 / "Woke 1" nearly took over the Western world...

   I've wondered here many times what the left's strategy would be for denying that they ever thought that women had penises--and that they had sexually mutilated children on the basis of gender pseudoscience... I still don't know what they'll do. Currently, they seem to be committed to just continuing to insist that the view is true, hoping that they'll be able to fend off the day of reckoning. They seem to think they can still win this--continuing to pretend that 2+2=5 forever...

   But I'm not sure I ever wondered how they would address this problem with Woketarianism generally.

   Well, they've launched a trial balloon. It looks like this:

Oh, woopsie! Ha ha ha! All that woke stuff was really just "woke 1"! So funny! Like those clothes we were wearing back in the '90s! Soooo embarrassing!...

   As Bray says, basically, the aim is to pretend that was all just a funny phase that didn't really do anything bad...and to suggest without saying it that there's a better version of Woketarianism that's serious and to be taken seriously and that can't be criticized for being, ya know, in-fucking-sane...

   PC/Woketarianism isn't dead. It's currently losing...but unless we continue to crush the life out of it, it'll just go on the offensive again. The "Woke 2.0" bullshit makes that clear--as if it wasn't before.

   And even if we eliminate all its gains--which is unlikely--it's just going to do what it did before--retreat into universities, fester, hone its lunatic rhetorical tricks, and emerge again (perhaps crazier than ever, perhaps in some more moderate guise) a few years hence.

   Also note that AOC only admits that the "rhetoric" of "woke 1" was defective. She doesn't admit that they were wrong about anything substantive...

Trump Orders Navy to Go Back to Steam Catapults

facepalm

Well, after a decade of the left insisting that Trump is literally Hitler...finally, an actual Hitlerian act: micromanaging military technology as if he actually knew something about it.

I disagree with Mark Kelly a lot--but this pretty much sums it up:

“I’ve launched off the front of aircraft carriers hundreds of times, have a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, and am a test pilot, and even I wouldn’t suggest to the Navy how to engineer specific systems on its ships,” ...

And, look: I'm no expert, but seems to me that glitches are basically expected in new systems. You put up with them so that you find out how to eliminate them in future versions of the system.

Oh, wait--I forgot about the "Trump-class battleships"...so there's another, earlier example...

[To be perfectly clear: I'm not saying that Trump is wrong about catapults...I'm saying that he doesn't know enough to make the decision.]

"Protestors" Receive Decades-Long Sentences for ICE Facility "Clash"

Et tu, WSJ?

More accurate title:

Antifa Terrorists Receive Decades-Long Sentences in ICE Facility Attack

A quote, corrected:

Brissette said Morris and her his family were devastated by the 50-year sentence she he received for rioting and providing material support to terrorists, among other charges, and planned to appeal the decision.

Mr. Morris is a man pretending to be a woman.

I expect the rest of the MSM to distort its stories in order to kowtow to leftist Lysenkoism...but I expect better from WSJ...

Anonymous: How Working at a Los Angeles Homeless Shelter Drove Me Away From The Far Left

I've run into quite a few stories like this.

My current view is basically: scrap all such blue-team social programs.

It's a sledgehammer approach...but it's better than funneling our tax dollars to the leftist-industrial complex.

As I said with the Iraq war: better to put the money in a big pile and burn it.

Access Granted: Flying the 5EX Eagle

TFP: Former DSA Organizer Explains How Radical the DSA and the Rest of the Left Are

Yeah, I was just starting to write this post while I was still watching the video. He was saying that the DSA has a two-tiered structure, with radicals setting the agenda and running the show, and a far-less-radical majority that either doesn't realize or refuses to admit that the radicals run the show...

I was yelling at the screen: "That's the whole left! Not just the DSA!"

But almost immediately, Altman started making just that point--I could have just waited.

As Altman says--and I've said for years--that's the Democrat base now.

Jimmy Carter on the Need to Show ID to Vote

It's the same story over and over and over again: the left has moved farther and farther from reasonable centrism in my lifetime, rocketing off the edge of sanity over the course of the last decade or so. As others have said: conversations with progressives now consist largely in them pretending not to understand things that everyone understands. Thus we find ourselves trying to explain to them that women don't have penises, men can't have babies, children should not be indoctrinated with fetishistic sexual perversions, the USA is not composed entirely of racism, not all whites are racist, some nonwhites are racist, nations need borders, speech is not violence, words have meanings and you can't simply change them at will, some things are true and others are false...and on and on and on...:

Jimmy Carter in 2005 on voter ID: "It will not restrict people from voting."

He even described Voter ID as “a move forward in getting more people to vote."

Republicans need to share this video far and wide. Voter ID was bipartisan then. It should be bipartisan now. pic.twitter.com/szZarfscjw

— Jenn Pellegrino 🇺🇸 (@JennPellegrino) August 6, 2026

Aaron Brown: Oft-Cited Lancet USAID Study; the Math Doesn't Add Up

First locally-acquired case of Dengue fever in VA

link

First NBA Player Declares for the WNBA

Girl, get some. https://t.co/zNuINnOlHV

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) August 7, 2026

Strassel: Can Democrats Resist Socialism?

Well, they couldn't resist Woketarianism...which is far crazier than socialism...so...I'm not optimistic...

   I've long predicted that the Dems will revert to sanity...any day now!...any week!...

   Shows what the hell I know.

Strassel:

For more than a decade, the Democratic Party has been stuck in a reactive anti-Trump loop, made worse by its unwillingness to offend its extreme leftist base. So instead of offering a full-throated defense of traditional Democratic ideals and criticizing socialism, they sit silent as the left pulls the party ever further.

Yeah, well, the problem is that extreme leftist base.

   It's already absorbed most of the insane woke agenda. What's a little more crazy on top of it? Socialism is nuts...but about 1/10th as nuts as Woketarianism. Once you get your faction to believe--or pretend to believe--the women have penises...just about everything else is sane by comparison...

   The smart play for the Dems is probably to squash the DSA insurgents and proclaim a return to sanity and centrism...and hope people fall for it. That is: hope that you've moved the Overton Window enough that people fall for it...

   Of course we have to work to make sure that shit does. not. work.

   Going insane, then pretending to be sane again because you kicked some very-slightly-more-crazy people out of your party...no way, dude.

   The best thing that can happen to the Dems--and for the country--is for them to get absolutely crushed in '28. I don't see what else stands any chance of slapping sense back into them.

Sean Davis: Hard Truth About the Sanctuary Movement

Madness

Brian T. Allen on the Woke Smithsonian

I would normally have dived into this story and wasted days of my life on it...but for some reason I haven't. I haven't even read the report--though I've skimmed bits.

It's really, really bad.

This is just one of the many awful characteristics of the woke left--it's tendency to take over organizations and institutions and turn them to its nefarious purposes. It's a totalitarian worldview that sees all other things and all other human activities as subordinate to it--ergo to be subordinated.

NRO: Cambridge has itself to blame for the Jason Arday debacle

Obviously.

Incidentally, I'm not sure that he was protected directly because of his race. When you become beloved of the academic Brahmin class...well, you're in, man. You're in. Academic superstars and those with connections...there just seem to be different rules for such people. Being a young, black allegedly disabled superstar in an extremely lefty discipline--those all helped him gain the favor of the establishment...but he might possibly have been able to pull off something similar even if he were white. If, say, he claimed to be "trans" or something...

   But there's no doubt that he race was a huge factor.

   Note also that he wasn't fired--he quit.

   Though, TBF, he seems to have quit because he was finally going to be investigated--so that's something.

Corruption Watch: Trump's Latest Graft: early access to "truth social" posts for $100k/month

Unfuckingbelievable.

I really do wish the guy would experience a health crisis just bad enough to force him to resign (as if he ever would). Not only is he an embarrassment to the nation, but his antics are the only hope the increasingly nutty Democrats have.

   It's astonishing that he thinks this is permissible...but even more astonishing that none of the (generally very competent) people around him can dissuade him.

   As I've said before: I understand why he's raking in as much cash as possible. (Note: he didn't do that his first term--he lost a lot of money then.) He knows that the left will come after him and his family when he leaves office. So will some on the right, actually. Anyway: I kind of understand it.

   But Jesus Christ, there are limits...

Jenine Pirro, the Reflecting Pool, and Trump's Denial of Reality...But Don't Forget the Left is Worse...

link

So exactly what was going on with the reflecting pool I don't know. Sounds like this guy peeled off a strip that was already separating from the bottom of the pool. Trump claims there are other cases on video that are more clearly instances of vandalism.

   On the one hand, Trump is notoriously full of shit, and everyone knows it--with the exception of some hard-core Trumpistas. Much of what he says is true and important...but much of the time he just says what he wants to be true, no matter how obviously false it might be. A lot of this is close on a continuum with standard political bullshitting. E.g. he represented the country as crashing and burning under Biden (pretty true...but exaggerated), and now says we're in a golden age... Well, we're better off (bracketing the Iran war...about which...who knows?). Anyway, we can't trust Trump about things like the reflecting pool--and anyone who doesn't know that is just not paying attention. This is exactly the kind of thing he can't seem to resist bullshitting about.

   OTOH, vandalizing this Trump project is something the left is willing to and capable of doing. There was a lot of loose (?) chatter on lefty social media about using box cutters and whatnot to wreck it. Even if the thing was already peeling, why did what's-his-name reach in and tear the strip off? Not a crime, perhaps...but also not a perfectly innocuous reaction.

   My guess--just a guess--is that this is mostly Trumpian bullshitting. But who knows?

   Anyway: Trump's credentials as a liar and a bullshitter are well-established. (Acknowledging, again, that he often speaks important truths that the left wants to suppress.)

   However...

   It's eminently worth noting that the left remains far, far worse--whatever comfort that might provide to Mr. Trump's devotees...

   Note that this story (well, it's CNN...so...par for the course...) trots out the same old tale that the left recycles ever time this issue comes up:

His method of deciding what is true and requiring everyone to accommodate him emerged as a signature trait only hours into his first presidency. Fuming over unflattering comparisons between his inaugural crowd and Obama’s first swearing-in, he sent then-press secretary Sean Spicer into the briefing room to deliver a bizarre statement. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said.
At the time, it seemed absurd. But it was an important moment. Spicer was the the [sic] first Trump official to choose between observable reality and his boss’s false version. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway coined a presidency-defining soundbite for the ages when referring to the president’s “alternative facts.”

[1] What Spicer and Conway clearly meant (as context made extremely clear at the time) was that the Trump administration was looking at other facts--or, more accurately, other evidence--about crowd size. There are, in fact, apparently a couple of different ways to estimate crowd size. The Park Service does it one way (almost certainly the best way...this is something they do all the time) but there are others.

   The most important point here is that the 'alternative facts' claim was in no way some assertion of alethic relativism nor anything like it. It's--epistemically, at least--innocuous.

   The fact that the left always appeals to this same bogus story shows how little they have to work with on this front.

   [2] Really probably [1']...and just for the record: yeah, the Trumpistas were bullshitting. The best methods had already been used. Even the other methods, IIRC, indicated that Obama's crowd had been bigger. They really had nothing. The fact that Trump was so obsessed about this stupid measure was a bad sign...but, again: not relativism. I was extremely anti-Trump at the time, and I said the same thing then. This is the leftist media bullshitting while (in this case rightly) accusing Trump of bullshitting... This is very much like the left's Very Fine People hoax--it's just lies and wishful thinking resulting in twisting the other side's words.

   [3] The left, however is eaten up with insane views about truth, facts, knowledge, justification, objectivity, and all sorts of related ideas. It's flirted with a radioactive mishmash of relativism, skepticism, subjectivism and nihilism for as long as I can remember. From Lysenko to political correctness to multiculturalism to Woketarianism. Lefties love talking about "my truth" (an ambiguous phrase with an innocuous interpretation and a stupid one), and to pretend that your sex-or-gender (another loony pseudo-concept) is whatever you think it is... The journalistic establishment--far to the left, but in no way out of step with mainstream progressivism--published a big report two years ago titled "Beyond Objectivity"...guess what it was about? Every time I've raised the issue of institutional neutrality at my university--save for one single time--some other faculty-member (usually not from my department) has objected that objectivity and/or neutrality aren't possible... The left has flirted with relativism and other types of philosophical lunacy at least since the '30s...what the hell do you think Orwell was on about???

   And, again: few people believe Trump's bullshitting--and even fewer people that matter. 

   OTOH, the left's insane views end up becoming orthodoxy in our most important institutions...

   None of this is to defend Trump--who's a goddamned train wreck in this respect, and who deserves no defense.

   It's just an attempt to put things into perspective--FWTW.

   This is what a mess we're in: Donald Trump is NOT the biggest enemy of the truth on the contemporary American political stage...not by a long shot.

   Not to put too fine a point on it: that's a desperate situation indeed.

IDs for government groceries...but not for voting

You really can't make this shit up.

Rich Lowry: Yes, the DSA has a communism problem

link

Again, I'm not entirely sure why this is a problem from the perspective of the Dems... They've already embraced cultural Marxist lunacy--for a decade now.

But it is good that they've finally found a line they are hesitant to cross.

As I keep saying, once you're ok with women have penises, seems to me that all bets are off. At that point you've already gone beyond War is peace and the rest of the Orwellian trinity.

Anyway.

The Pubs are still well-positioned to blow it--all because of Trump.

Hell, I'd consider voting for a sane/centrist Dem for the House just to get some kind of constraints on the Bull-In-The-China-Shop-In-Chief... (Probably not for the Senate, though.) But we've got a very good Pub Congresscritter--so I probably won't.

Trump has done a great job in so many different ways...but he's just such a damn train wreck.

Hey, is that war on or off today?

I can never keep track...

Jason Arday also lied about an affiliation with OSU

I'd have been thrown out of my mediocre academic job and I'd be flipping burgers by now if I'd done 1/10th the stuff this guy has done.

Yet he's still at Cambridge...

Wonder why?

Noah Rothman: "Autonomous Zones" are Back

In case I haven't mentioned it, the left is insane.

They're trying hard to manufacture another George Floyd incident.

This one was close: a career criminal commits another crime, and is busted by the cops. He resists arrest...but, sadly, Ruiz pulled a big-ass knife on the cops and stabbed one of them. So, though he did end up dead (useful) there was also the stabby part (very not useful).

Nevertheless, Madison--always up for some moonbat stupid--now had an "autonomous zone"...complete with port-a-crappers that may have been provided by the city.

The left is emphasizing race at every turn, e.g. like so:

"Ruiz (who was black or Hispanic" (actually: he seems to have, in at least one place, "identified as" white...(very, very NOT USEFUL)...

The cop "who is white"...etc.

The cult us fighting hard to drag the country down into its swamp of insanity.

Really, Bitch? AJW on Shoe0nHead on "Woke 2.0"

In the words of Shoe: really bitch?

Contra AJW: SJWism/Woketarianism was actually political correctness 2.0...which folks older than me tell me was itself really The New Left 2.0...:

Jeez Suey Park...I'd forgotten about that loony chick. LOL "I'm not going to enact the labor to educate  you..." That's gold, baby...GOLD. That should go into the leftard hall of fame.

Wesley J. Smith: Woke Newspeak Watch: DON'T CALL IT 'THE CIVIL WAR', BIGOT REEEEEEEEEE

LOL these people are so fucking tedious.

   Some dude at NYT, Anthony Cartwright Conwright shoots for progressive fame by doing what they do best: making up new words and phrases that (overtly or covertly) advance their fucked-up worldview...

See, 'the Civil War' is--he declares--SUPER-DUPER UN-PC! It decenters or whatever the somethingorother...it should be called 'the Slaveholder's Rebellion'...because...reasons...

   As tedious and exhausting as Trump is, the left continues to be so very much worse...

   And I say again: never, ever, ever adopt their neologisms and pseudo-technical vocabulary. It always aims to distort information, undermine communication, and advance their twisted worldview.

   'The Civil War' it is, and 'The Civil War' it will remain.

   (Though I like to hear lefties squeal when we refer to it as 'The War Between the States'...let alone 'The recent unpleasantness'...)

   Slavery was a dark chapter in American history...but basically only because, in that respect, we were not ahead of the rest of the world. Contrary to the picture the left likes to paint, slavery in America was not some unique evil, but a late episode in a complex, ancient institution. 'Ancient' obviously doesn't mean good...but it's nuts to expect a nation to leap completely out of history, rather than to slowly advance.

   At any rate, when I was a kid everyone with more than two braincells to rub together recognized slavery and the Civil War as a blot on the national soul, and a great but necessary tragedy, respectively. They've always hung like dark clouds over the nation. The insane left now wants to rip the wounds open and exaggerate their awfulness for political purposes--which include ripping the nation apart, the radical left's most cherished goal...

War's Off Again...No, wait...

I am so fucking sick of Trump I can't even express it adequately.

Dad Saves America: Mia Hughes on the conspiracy behind the trans rights movement

There seem to have been several factors, but people who are familiar with the way that the activist-industrial complex works have long argued that it was largely prompted by Obergefell: nobody really thought that same-sex marriage would be legalized nationwide anytime soon. When it suddenly was...well...what's the massive network of activist organizations, NGOs, grant-writers, DEI "educators," and "gender" "scholars" supposed to do? Pack up shop and find real jobs? LOL no way! They quickly spun up and even more radical cause--a truly insane one this time, that was unlikely to win quickly...and the grants and donations and wasted tax $$ keep rolling in...:

I have no doubt that this was a factor...but these people are true believers, not merely grifters...

"News"day: Some lefty propaganda pretending that Spain's absurd immigration policies didn't contribute to the invasion of Ceuta

This is such facepalmerific bullshit.

   The leftard socialist government granting amnesty to half a million illegal aliens had nothing to do with it! It was, uh...social media posts about amnesty and open borders...which...somehow had nothing to do with...y'know...amnesty and open borders...

   Also: contrary to right-wing propaganda, none of these 60k fighting-age (and raping-age) males will end up in the rest of Europe! Because Italy and some other countries have "passed some measures"...

   It's amazing the shit the mainstream media expects its readers to believe.

   This invasion was caused in roughly the same way the Biden invasion was caused: the government clearly signaled that it was cool with it. People considering trying to enter illegally got the message. Some via social media...which itself got the message from the government... Though the Biden admin was, of course, more advanced than Spain--it had an app illegals could use to be flown into the country...

Jean-Louis de Lolm vs. "Transgender" Pseudoscience: Parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman

link

The point was that Parliament is too powerful, of course, with making a woman a man / making a man a woman being obvious impossibilities.

   Of course there's no real need to formulate arguments against trans pseudoscience, since, per Hitchins' Razor, what has been asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence--and no reasons of any non-zero degree of strength have ever been given in support of the view. But, just because it's gratifying to kick the shit out of Lysenkoist pseudoscience:

The pro-trans left has never seriously tried to say where transgenderism came from. There certainly was no new empirical discovery that suddenly, scientifically revealed that some men are women etc.--though they sometimes try to suggest that by (falsely) claiming that some men have "female brains." Of course that's false--though, biology being filled with fuzzy lines, I'll bet that male and female brains lie on a continuum, with some brains being hard to classify. I wrote fairly extensively on this back when transgenderism was fresh, rather than stale. What might be somewhat interesting--though no more than that--would be a paradigmatically female brain in a paradigmatically male body--before hormone treatments or any such thing. Even that--though there are no such cases I've ever heard of--wouldn't really help their cause...since, even granting everything they want...that would be a male with a female or female-like brain. It would not make the person female. Furthermore, even stating this view undermines another, completely different version of transgenderism: that being a man or a woman has nothing at all to do with biology. That version of the view doesn't care about brains--or any other feature of biology.

   Certainly there were no discoveries in, say, the Harvard Women's and Gender Studies department... They don't make empirical discoveries in such places. They don't have, say, gender accelerators that smash genders together at half the speed of light, smashing them into genderons and whatnot... like Hey, we just discovered that masculinity is composed of 10 types of gender subparticles... 

No.

Such departments don't make empirical discoveries.

   We know there are no even vaguely plausible arguments for any of the many different views that get smooshed together in transgenderism...so that's out.

   Leftists sometimes suggest that transgenders have always been around and everyone has always known this--known, e.g., that man and woman are "genders" rather than species/sex/maturity kinds. This is probably my favorite origin story for transgenderism: it's always been around, and everyone always knew it. This is basically another massive leftist conspiracy theory, on the order of "the patriarchy"...but even bigger... This is the most delusional origin story...because it requires convincing the entire population, who never even heard of such a thing until 2014...that they always knew it... And that their parents knew it...and their grandparents knew it...and their great-great-grandparents knew it...all the way back...forever and ever.... But no books mention it, no dictionaries are consistent with it...nothing...

   And this is where the de Lolm quote becomes relevant: if everyone always knew it, then no one would use such a thing as an example of an impossibility. If everybody always knew that men can become women and women men, de Lolm certainly wouldn't have used to as a paradigmatic impossibility... The only reason that history isn't packed to the gills with people denying that men can become women is because it's so goddamned obvious. Unless you want to describe an absolute impossibility, you wouldn't even mention such a thing...

   So much for the laughably stupid "we've always known" version of the view...

   But we've already put more serious thought into this than all the Women's Studies departments in all the universities in the whole USA...when we really ought to just stick to Hitchens' Razor...