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...