Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Schumer to Pubs: Please Don't Do to Us What We Were Going to Do to You

That is, gain a small majority and implement de facto one-party rule.
I was expecting: use a politicized DoJ and courts against political opponents...

Daniel McCarthy: The Case for Matt Gates

I don't have an opinion on Gaetz.
He's on the periphery of my awareness.
Even after all these years, I still jump for the left/MSM's character assassination trial balloons, as much as I hate to admit it.
Thus far, it sounds to me like a lot of hearsay. And the left long ago honed their game in this respect.
And they seem to have an endless supply of cultists willing to be the vessels for sexual-assault accusations.
At any rate: I'm not resistant to evidence about Gaetz--not at all. I've got no commitment to him. But we know what the left has become, and we know we can't accept mere rumors of hearsay.
So I'm suspending judgment.
Don't know what else we could reasonably do.
This part of McCarthy's essay really struck a chord with me, inclined as I am to want Washingtons:
There are two ways to look at the corruption that is rife in 21st-century American life. One view is that reform demands a saint to reproach the wicked. While we await a political hero with the character of a second George Washington, we must make do with morality-reinforcing illusions, according to which our most powerful institutions—the federal government, the media, the medical establishment—are also good institutions, while wickedness is a characteristic of lone individuals, especially of those who challenge the norms of our institutions.

The second view is that if we must await an immaculate reformer, reform will never come. So we ought to support even obviously flawed individuals when they take on the necessary work of confronting systemic evils. Those systemic evils aren’t impersonal, of course—they are the product of people who insist that they are upholding what is good even while they do what is bad. The merely human, rather than angelic, reformer has a doubly difficult task: In addition to being assailed for his mortal failings, he is charged with attacking the very decency of our institutions. Hence, the campaign against Trump branded him as a threat to democracy itself, as well as a convicted felon. 

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Vinay Prasad: How Many of RFKj's Ideas are Already Implemented in the Anglosphere/Europe?

And I didn't realize how right he was about COVID.

Sunday, November 17, 2024

"Trump's Push For Ukraine Peace Finds Growing Acceptance In Europe"

Saturday, November 16, 2024

Leana Wen: RFKj's Views on Fluoride Aren't as Crazy as You Might Think

Tulsi Gabbard, ROOSKIE "ASSET"!!!!!!111

Twixxer is absolutely jam-packed with lefties shrieking about Gabbard being a "Russian asset"...a term leftists apparently first learned back during Russiagate, and now it's lodged in their tiny little blue oxygen-and-information-starved brains. I mean, it's downright creepy how everywhere this is, Twixxer-wise. They're screaming it from the big accounts, they're shrieking it from the little accounts. You might think it'd be amusing, but it isn't. It's, well, as I said: creepy.
If you've been hoping that the electoral spanking might have beat some of the crazy off them...well...not so far, it seems.
Here's Greenwald, and I say it's worth a watch:


Ronald Bailey: Can RFK Fix Our Disfunctional Public Health Services?

Conclusion: probably not.

Bhattacharya/Bardosh: RFK Will Disrupt the U.S. Medical Establishment (In a Good Way)

I have a very high opinion of Jay Bhattacharya--though I have no expertise in the areas you'd have to have expertise in to make a genuinely informed judgment about his arguments. But his arguments are generally reasonable, and he clearly has an open mind. And he was clearly right about a lot during the pandemic. I tried to get my department to take the Great Barrington Declaration seriously back in '20. I was shut down quickly by a colleague who responded that it was out of step with mainstream opinion in public health. I'd said my piece, and that was true, so I just agreed with that particular point and let it drop. I still think we should have pushed back on the university's overreactions...but it wouldn't have done any good anyway.
   I don't really have standing to have much of an opinion on RFKj as HHS secretary...but it doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Pushing back against what seem like the excesses of the public health establishment sounds sensible...but bad pushback is, well, bad. As I've said, it does sound to me like the fluoride question should be on the table...but, again, I have no doubt that the calculations have already been done to death. We're not talking about amateurs here. The COVID response still seems to me to have been pretty suboptimal...but I'm not sure we can generalize much from that. And we basically don't pay any attention under normal conditions.
   At any rate, Bhattacharya seems to think that RFK is a plausible candidate. and he knows about 10,000 times more about it than I do.

Friday, November 15, 2024

John Burn-Murdoch: Dems Have Moved Radically Left, Leaving American Voters Behind

Nothing here should surprise anyone who's been paying attention...or who isn't living in the fantasy world of the blue echo chamber. It's very common for progressives to say that Republicans have moved far to the right...basically they always say that, no matter what. But it's absurd. Actually, the Republican party has moved leftward (at least on "social issues"). They're mostly cool homosexuality and even same-sex marriage now. It's the left that has rocketed leftward. Despite Burn-Murdoch's somewhat dismissive discussion of Colin Wright's famous cartoon, Wright is exactly right, and many of us knew what was going on long before that cartoon made its appearance. (It's some measure of how blind the left is to the facts that they like to post an inverted version of the cartoon claiming that they were actually left in the center by the right's rapid move rightward...)
   Look, in the past decade, Democrats have basically absorbed the whole cartload of bullshit that has afflicted the academic left for 40 years--obsession with race, sex (and now "gender"), sexual preference, etc. Imagine, 15 years ago, the Dems announcing that men can be women...women can have penises, men can get pregnant...that everyone has a secret mental quasi-sex, that it's ok to brainwash children with this hogwash and then medically/sexually mutilate them...that everyone gets to choose "their pronouns" and everyone else must not only use them, but must participate in the delusion represented by such nonstandard English usage...
   DEI, CRT, LGBTQIAP2S+#%, UBI and on and on...not to mention climate apocalypticism, a rather independent variety of crazy... The Dems certainly left me behind--and this helped prompt me to become more conservative on other issues, especially economics. But I've hated political correctness since I first encountered it in graduate school. Even before I had begun shifting rightward/centerward, that shit did not fly with me. It was GamerGate, really, that first introduced me to the "SJW"... Even centrist liberal that I then was, I sided 100% with the Sad Puppies and other sane folk. Then came men can be women...use my pronouns, bigot...all whites are racist and the rest of the torrent of crazy.
  Well anyway.

Time to Switch from Fretting About the Dems to Fretting about Trump

I knew it would happen of course. Electing Trump is kind of like jumping off a cliff into a raging river in order to escape a horde of...I dunno...wolves or zombies or DEI apparatchiks or something... 
Best-case scenario, you've jumped out of the fire into the frying pan.
   I hoped we'd have a little more time to lounge around being relieved and watching progressive women melting down into their phones.
   But noooo...
   Trump had to start announcing planned appointments to his cabinet and suchlike.
   Look, I don't know anything about Gaetz. He sounds like a walking train wreck--but, then, there are apparently no limits to how far the MSM will go to smear someone. Some of the stuff I've heard about him...it sounds like the sort of stuff people wouldn't make up... But, as I've said before, post-Russiagate, I don't put anything past the blue team. OTOH, some Pubs have also said some stuff. My hope is that Senate Republicans won't just roll over, but will actually give advice and only prudent consent. Maybe that's hoping for too much.
   Anyway: hearsay has never been very strong evidence, and it seems weaker than ever now. There's a House report on him. I'll wait for that.
   RFKj...well...he concerns me. 
   OTOH, basically as soon as I peeked into stuff about fluoride in the water, I was astonished at how non-obvious the issue seemed. I thought this was an open-and-shut, no controversy, Dr. Strangelove-level, lead-pipe cinch.
   But...that does not actually seem to be the case.
   (He says, knowing nothing about it, and having spent like a half-hour on Bing...)
   We now know we can have only rather limited trust in the pronouncements of the "public health" "community." We're aware, in a way we--or at least I--didn't used to be that they have important biases and blind spots. Profound progressive-left bias being among them. RFKj doesn't seem to be optimal as the tip of the spear on this. But we left optimality behind long ago. You go to war with the generals you've got, not with the ones you wish you had.
   My experience with the fluoride thing reminds me of my experience with the issue of pet neutering. I always just assumed it was an open-and-shut case. But when I got the Bear about five years ago, I started looking into it just to figure out the optimal age at which to do it--not intending to question the wisdom of it. But I was really surprised at how strong the evidence on the other side is. I changed my mind only reluctantly, but ultimately--and provisionally--did so. I decided not to do it. This complicates your life somewhat--e.g. no doggie daycare. And some vets won't see your pooch unless you sign a contract to get him "fixed" (as if he were broken) afterward. I know this b/c the Bear seemed to have cut his foot not all that long ago, and my vet was booked. I contacted another vet, and that's what they told me. I just said "Nope" and that was that. (Turns out that the "blood" he was leaving everywhere was really walnut stains. He was running around in the yard on the walnut husks and tracking that into the bed etc. The brownish stains looked like dried blood. LOL.)
   ...Anyhoo...as with the issue of spaying/neutering, I just assumed that the fluoride case was open-and-shut. And look--I'm sure that FDA has spent tens of thousands of nerd-hours crunching the numbers on this stuff. All I'm saying is what I said: I was surprised that there seemed to be as much room for doubt as there prima facie seems to be.
   As for vaccines: well, we were blatantly lied to about the Deadly Batflu vaccine. Turns out--as I understand it--there was never much reason to believe their flagship claim, that it stopped transmission. And I went to red alert when the irrational pro-vax propaganda was cranked up to eleven...
And I know some very smart and normal people who came to have concerns about vaccines when they had to actually face questions about their own kids and grandkids. One very smart and reasonable friend of mine, when he actually looked into it when it was vaccine time for his own daughter, said to me "it's not as clear as one would like it to be." At the time, I was appalled. Other also smart and reasonable friends had a grandson who had seizures after getting a round of vaccines, and they have tentatively concluded--understanding full well that correlation is only weak evidence of causation--that there's a problem with giving kids so many vaccines at once. Another set of friends--also very smart, though rather peculiar/unorthodox--looked into it hard and ended up changing their minds a couple of times, resulting in some but not all of their kids being vaxxed.
   Me, I don't know.
   My default is still: FDA's conclusions get presumption.
   But I'm not as condescendingly certain about that as I used to be.

   What about Tulsi? I don't know as much about her as I thought. She has said some questionable things--though who hasn't? Twixxer is full of lefties screaming that she's TEH RUZZIANZ AZZETZ!!1111 Now, I try not to let such lunacy push me in the other direction. I do find e.g. her recent comments urging skepticism about the remilitarization of Japan to be...kinda out there...

That's it.
No firm conclusions in any case, really.

Thursday, November 14, 2024

1/6/21 Pipe Bomb Investigation Still Fruitless

Corrupted cell phone data??
If they're trying to spin off conspiracy theories, then...good work.

Hegseth et al.

Worse than Austin?
I do not know.
We don't want to generate sympathy for DEI, CRT and transanity by just flipping everything around. They often seem to have been elevated above warfighting in the woke Pentagon. We can't make stamping them out a higher priority than defense...though high priority it must be.
Anyway.
"Fox News personality" does not inspire confidence.

Not sure this is the right role for Tulsi...but, again, do not know.
The left has gone into RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA!!! and RUSSIAN ASSET!!! mode against her. So that's always amusing.
She did say something weird about Japan the other day.

Anyway.
Disruption good but...let's keep it between the ditches...

Matt Gaetz: Bad Choice

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Ann Bauer: Why I Voted Against the Democrats

Agreed.
Except, of course, I could actually not care less about the Puerto Rico / garbage joke.