Via Zerohedge, where there’s more: All of which does make one wonder if HumanEvents’ Ash Staub had a point last week when he questioned: if one were to consider the upward transfer of wealth and market share to Big Business since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, one would think such economic changes were intended.
Follow The
“That is exactly the kind of discrimination the First Amendment forbids.”
How Donald Trump saved Thanksgiving
What Would We Do Without Experts?
As I like to say;
A few years back, you might remember, we were subjected to one of those navel-gazing D.C. polemics lamenting the “death of expertise.” Know-nothing proles had been showing less than appropriate reverence for the expert class — even though it continues to get so much wrong. In reality, it’s been more a “suicide of expertise.”
When allegedly erudite social scientists with big platforms make hyper-partisan arguments from positions of authority — “Hey, sociologist here . . .” — they do their already untrustworthy disciplines no favors. It’s not just that a Nobel Prize–winning economist such as Paul Krugman has adopted the malicious rhetoric of shrieking activists; it’s that his partisan-fueled predictions are so often and exhaustively wrong that he’s probably set back trust in economics by decades. (So maybe Twitter isn’t all bad?) Same goes for constitutional scholars such as Laurence Tribe. Once respected on both sides of the ideological divide, he is now sometimes barely distinguishable from @notmypresident6758we9a, the account that is raging deep in your feed late on a Saturday night.
“easy for a rich white man to say.”
Over a lifetime of scholarship and public engagement, economist Thomas Sowell has illuminated controversial topics such as race, poverty, and culture
Black Intellectual Roundtable
Excellent discussion, and not at all what you might expect.
On Jordan Peterson & The Hidden Epidemic
Speak For Yourself
.@MarcellusWiley breaks down why the NBA’s plan to paint ‘Black Lives Matter’ on courts is a bad idea. pic.twitter.com/EoCJNf7ho1
— Speak For Yourself (@SFY) June 30, 2020
Pleasing Your Enemies Does Not Turn Them Into Friends
Step one is to understand the nature of the fight. It’s not one of right and wrong, though that’s how they like to disguise it. It is one of power. Give them nothing. Concede nothing. Stop trying to be reasonable with people who think a reasonable compromise is just impoverishing and disenfranchising you instead of stashing you in a gulag or worse.
Not Showing Up To Riot Is A Failed Conservative Policy
I was once told if we’re not careful, 2 percent of the passionate will control 98 percent of the indifferent 100 percent of the time.
The more I’ve thought about this phrase, the more I believe it. There is now a small group of passionate people working hard to destroy our American way of life. Treason and treachery are rampant and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals who uphold our laws are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history. These passionate 2 percent appear to be winning.
Despite there being countless good people trying to come to grips with everything else on their plates, our silent majority (the indifferent) can no longer be silent.
Color, Communism, And Common Sense
More Pavilions At Pride Month
Things That Didn’t End Racism
Khmer Noir
Victor Davis Hanson: How Cultural Revolutions Die — or Not
Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century
On the anniversary of Chernobyl.
Some of you know I have written a book that many people find controversial. It is called State of Fear, and I want to tell you how I came to write it. Because up until five years ago, I had very conventional ideas about the environment and the success of the environmental movement.
The book really began in 1998, when I set out to write a novel about a global disaster. In the course of my preparation, I rather casually reviewed what had happened in Chernobyl, since that was the worst manmade disaster in recent times that I knew about.
What I discovered stunned me. Chernobyl was a tragic event, but nothing remotely close to the global catastrophe I imagined. About 50 people had died in Chernobyl, roughly the number of Americans that die every day in traffic accidents. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but it was a setback for me. You can’t write a novel about a global disaster in which only 50 people die.
Undaunted, I began to research other kinds of disasters that might fulfill my novelistic requirements. That’s when I began to realize how big our planet really is, and how resilient its systems seem to be. Even though I wanted to create a fictional catastrophe of global proportions, I found it hard to come up with a credible example. In the end, I set the book aside, and wrote Prey instead.
But the shock that I had experienced reverberated within me for a while. Because what I had been led to believe about Chernobyl was not merely wrong—it was astonishingly wrong. Let’s review the data.
Truckers are saying “fuck the log rules, I’m hauling”
Truckers are saying “fuck the log rules, I’m hauling” and they’re getting supplies to the stores. People are stocking the shelves all night and letting old people shop first. Folks are buying meals for truckers, who (obviously) can’t go through the drive-ups. Asking ’em what they want, then buying it for them.
Carnival Cruise Line has told Trump “We can match those big Navy Hospital ships with some fully staffed cruise ships”.
GM and Ford have said “hold our cars and watch this — we can make ventilators where we were just making car parts, starting next week” — by re-engineering seat ventilators which their engineers hacked together for a new purpose. In under a week.
In a project with which I’m loosely associated, a very-effective agricultural disease-control agent was re-purposed and re-labeled specifically for Corona-virus control by the FDA and EPA in under ten days, from initial request to distribution.
Restaurants and schools have said, “we’ve got kitchens and staff; we can feed the poor kids who used have school lunch.”
NBA basketball players have said, “Hold our basketballs while we write checks to pay the arena staff.”
Construction companies are saying, “Here are some high-end masks for medical staff and doctors”.
Distilleries are making sanitizer out of distilling “heads and tails” which are normally discarded. Nasty shit to drink, but effective sanitizer.
People are tipping grocery check-out clerks and thanking them for taking the risk.
Local, state, and county governments are taking control of everything the feds cannot do. Some are doing it wrong, but for the first time in decades … they’re doing it. Federalism is re-emerging, and the smallest unit of government is the individual and the family. This, too, is re-emerging after decades of dormancy.
As Japanese Admiral Isokuru Yamamoto said, after Pearl Harbor … “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
I sense this has just happened. We have a wonderful country, the greatest single force for good in all human history. We have closed our borders, with good reason, yet we have top medical people now assisting North Korea in their response to the virus.
Many things have been re-set, and will never be the same.
By microbiological accident, we are living in profoundly transformative historical times.
Via Instapundit.
Develop Or Perish
“That much I can promise you. You won’t like us when we’re angry.”
The Reign Of The Prosecutors
Voters don’t decide anything. The lawyers do. Politicians are irrelevant. The only people who count in Israel today are the unelected attorneys who run the country.
Not just Israel.
Attorney General William P. Barr at the Federalist Society
Richard Fernandez: I don’t know enough law to meaningfully comment on Barr’s argument, but its breadth and mere existence are every bit as provocative as knocking the hat off the pole. This is the dread moment that may pass unnoticed–or otherwise.
Full transcript here and a good Twitter summary by Josh Blackman.
Through the scorched earth, no holds barred war of resistance, the left is shredding rule of law and undermining rule of law.
— Josh Blackman (@JoshMBlackman) November 15, 2019
The Werewolf Extinction
Part II: How the World to the Dark Tower Came