Page Text: All is proceeding as I have foreseen. Including the effort to limit homeschooling when it starts to threaten the graft.
Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds
Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll
FEAR: Gatekeepers Very Afraid That Elon Musk Will Remove the Gates From Twitter.
“I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter,” wrote Max Boot, columnist for The (Jeff Bezos–owned) Washington Post, on Twitter. “He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”
Boot is a longtime apocalyptic troll—past lowlights include declaring that “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump,” and advocating the Federal Communications Commission go after Fox News to forestall “the plot against America.” But his anxiety about allegedly unfettered free speech is revealingly common in media, academia, Silicon Valley, and the government. . . .
Musk, love him or hate him, makes for an odd authoritarian. An immigrant who built a fortune on clean-energy companies, an entrepreneur who (along with competitors) showed what nongovernmental industry can accomplish in space, the pot-smoking former Saturday Night Live host has shown zero interest in running for public office or recruiting jack-booted thugs to enforce his preferences. And yet it’s not just silly lefties like Robert Reich comparing the guy to actual evildoers.
It’s silly people in general.
Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds
PUTIN’S PUPPET: Lee Smith: Biden and Putin Are in Business Together, Thanks to the Iran Deal .
Sure, Biden talked tough about imposing sanctions on Russia and called out Putin for his fiendish actions, but the Russians knew that his words were as hollow as Obama’s meaningless sanctions over Crimea. And the Russians gleefully rubbed Biden’s nose in it. Lavrov boasted publicly that the United States had provided written guarantees that sanctions imposed over Ukraine would have no effect on Russia’s nuclear cooperation with Iran. In other words, the cash influx that the JCPOA promised Putin would be unaffected by whatever happened in Ukraine. No matter how many Ukrainians Putin murdered, Biden was going to make the man he called a war criminal even richer. Half a million dead Syrians could testify that America would keep its word.
When the Iran deal is formalized, Iran will be a Russian nuclear client. Russia’s state-controlled Rosatom energy firm and at least four of its major subsidiaries will receive sanctions waivers to finish nuclear projects in Iran worth more than $10 billion. Iran will also be buying weapons from Moscow worth billions of dollars more. By relieving sanctions on Iranian banks, the restored JCPOA provides Putin with financial channels invulnerable to U.S. financial measures.
Read the whole thing.
Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll
THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’VE NEVER BEEN ON A FARM: Survey: Kids think farm animals deserve same treatment as pets. And they’re exposed to a lot of anthromorphic tales.
Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds
UPDATE: Longtime reader Bill Rudersdorf writes:
I’ve been closely monitoring the Texas Department of Health and Human Services, a reliable data source, during the pandemic.
On the 14th, they quietly noted that they would stop posting daily COVID-19 data. It’s a reasonable choice. In the past two weeks, the (confirmed) death data fell from low, to extremely low, to difficult to detect – in Harris County (~Houston, 3+ million) way fewer than one COVID death out of 80 or so expected deaths per day.
Likewise Texas overall. The last “wave” from the most recent variant maybe killed a dozen of so in Houston, maybe.
We’re past done. Nothing to clean up but the politics. And Texas is doing better than most on that.
Indeed.
Posted at 12:54 pm by Glenn Reynolds
Posted at 12:44 pm by Ed Driscoll
BLINDED ME WITH VIOLENCE: How the Left Fosters ‘Hate Crime’ Then Plays the Victim. “I haven’t seen anyone else mention this, but subway shooter Frank James’s decision to shoot up a train in Sunset Park, Brooklyn likely wasn’t random. Check out the racial background of the neighborhood. . . . Until recently, you could see shooter Frank James spewing his black supremacy and hatred, but YouTube has now removed his channel. For those who didn’t see the videos, they were brimming with racial loathing for Asian, Hispanic, and white people. You can see here that many of Frank James’s victims are Asian. For a “crazy” guy, he seems to have known what he was doing.”
Also: “The problem is this: Frank James sees himself — and all black people — as victims. In one of his now-deleted videos, James tells other black folks that white people hate them, and that black people will be exterminated like the Jews were in Europe. This, despite the fact that America is bending over backward to keep black people out of jail.”
Not to mention ensuring that black people are represented in TV commercials to a wildly disproportionate degree. Not exactly eliminationist.
Plus: “Black supremacist Darryl Brooks also sees black people as victims of racism; he’s the guy who was so enraged that he ran over 62 white people in Waukesha, WI. Then there’s Noah Green, who killed a Capitol cop. What did Brooks and Green have in common? A sincere belief that whitey is out to get them. Where did they hear that?”
Posted at 12:21 pm by Glenn Reynolds
Once we were all Americans, who could dine together regardless of political differences. The left found that intolerable.
Posted at 12:19 pm by Glenn Reynolds
Flashback: My 2002 interview with Les: The Many Lives of Les Paul .
Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll
Posted at 12:01 pm by Gail Heriot
Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll
WITH CHEAP MISSILES PROLIFERATING, IT’S TIME FOR CHEAP ANTIMISSILE DEFENSES: Israel Successfully Tests New Laser Missile Defense System.
Posted at 11:27 am by Glenn Reynolds
Posted at 11:02 am by Helen Smith
IT’S ONLY HATE SPEECH IF IT’S AIMED AT MUHAMMAD: Ahead of Easter, students mock Jesus, joke his semen provides ‘everlasting life.’
I remember when higher education was promoted as fostering tolerance and understanding.
Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds
THE PROGRESSIVE CARTEL: Who enforces the “progressive cartel?” Put differently, who makes sure that all progressives toe the line on issues like transgender locker rooms, etc.? These things don’t happen by magic. Michael Lind writes:
Who decides what is and is not permissible for American progressives to think or discuss or support? The answer is the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and other donor foundations, an increasing number of which are funded by fortunes rooted in Silicon Valley. It is this donor elite, bound together by a set of common class prejudices and economic interests, on which most progressive media, think tanks, and advocacy groups depend for funding.
Lind isn’t a big fan of what he calls “Conservatism, Inc.” either. He’s not entirely wrong. But my experience has been we’re not (yet) in the same league with our progressive brethren on this.
Posted at 10:24 am by Gail Heriot
JIM TREACHER: Musk Triggers Mass Journophrenia . Journos love free speech unless it’s yours. “If the journos had their way, you never would’ve known anything about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop full of incriminating evidence of his ongoing criminal conspiracy with his father. Because having that information might make you vote the wrong way. And that’s fascism! Stop bringing up facts that make Democrats look bad, you Nazi.”
Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll
Posted at 10:00 am by Glenn Reynolds
THE FORMS MUST BE OBEYED: “Part of the Left’s outrage at Trump was his refusal to speak in hieratic language.* He’s spent his life buying and selling politicians, negotiating with construction unions, bureaucrats, and The Boys.”
Plus: “Those people who got so mad at Trump for lying — in Mamet’s view, what really made them mad was that he did not lie. Consider that. It’s the language he eschewed — the ‘hieratic language’ — that’s full of lies.” Well, yes. That’s the language of politicians, media, and HR bureaucrats. It’s designed to facilitate — if not actually require — lies.
Posted at 9:18 am by Glenn Reynolds