Posts Tagged ‘Nikole Hannah-Jones’

LinkSwarm for September 10, 2021

Friday, September 10th, 2021

Yesterday Joe Biden launched a sneak attack on American freedom, and tomorrow is the 20 year anniversary of 9/11. Still working on the Afghan piece. Plus more Australian madness.

  • Biden won’t be making a live 9/11 anniversary address. Of course he won’t. The people actually running the Biden White House are terrified anytime Slow Joe goes out live…
  • Biden wants to mandate all employers to force their employees to take a Flu Manchu vaccine, on pain of termination, enforced by OSHA.
  • But: Biden is excluding postal workers from this mandate. If the unvaccinated are such an existential threat to the republic (spoiler: they’re not), then why exempt the one class of federal employee whose members are out among the general public touching their mail eight hours a day? The answer, of course, is that they have a powerful union.
  • Australia goes insane:

    At the start of the pandemic, Australia determined to squeeze out COVID with lockdowns and travel restrictions and, as an island nation, had considerable success. It was the last of the G-20 countries to hit 1,000 total COVID deaths.

    But this created an unrealistic expectation that Australia could have “COVID zero” as a goal for the duration, and use targeted restrictions and surveillance (“circuit-breakers”) to maintain it.

    As the pandemic has dragged on, this has become completely untenable and done violence to liberty and common sense in a great English-speaking nation.

    Lockdowns have cut a swath through the norms and conventions of an advanced Western democracy, from the suspension of a state-level parliament to the banning of protests to military enforcement of the COVID rules.

    With the Delta surge, more than half of Australians are locked down, often in response to a tiny number of cases.

    ustralian authorities don’t fool around. State premiers have vast powers, and use them. In Melbourne, located in the state of Victoria, a curfew is in place, and limits apply to people leaving their homes. There are hefty fines for noncompliance.

    The spirit of the lockdowns was perfectly captured a few months ago by the chief health officer of the state of New South Wales who warned, “Whilst it is in human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately this is not the time to do that.”

    Ah yes, the public-health threat of over-chattiness.

    The Australian news media might as well be an arm of the public-health bureaucracy, producing stilted and hysterical reports about lockdown violators worthy of some dystopian future.

    The state of South Australia has developed an app to enforce home quarantines. As a news report explains, “the app will contact people at random asking them to provide proof of their location within 15 minutes.” If they fail to do so, the health department will notify the police, who will send officers to check on the possible malefactor.

    Unrestricted travel is a hallmark of a free society, but Australians can barely leave the country. Travel has been cut off between states, creating an arbitrary patchwork of states trying to isolate themselves from COVID cases elsewhere.

    Tens of thousands of Australians have been trapped overseas, unable to come back home because of monthly limits on returning Australians.

    All of this economic and social disruption and coercion hasn’t been enough to stamp out the Delta variant, which is outrunning the government controls.

    Australian prime minister Scott Morrison finally admitted the obvious the other day: “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country.”

  • And Australia’s lockdown has failed:

  • But it’s not enough just to snatch away Australian’s freedom, they’re also seizing booze from locked-down Aussies. “In New South Wales — a southeastern state encompassing Sydney — alcohol deliveries to apartments under COVID-19 lockdown are being confiscated if booze volume exceeds limits mandated by the Ministry of Health.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Did you notice that Iran tried to kidnap an Iranian exile in Brooklyn a couple of months back?
  • Democrats love to talk about the threat of Republican “dark money,” but Democrats received $1.8 billion in dark money from labor unions in 2020.
  • “Remember the women at the L.A. spa who claimed a dude exposed himself and it was dismissed as a “transphobic hoax”? Yeah, charges have now been filed against the man, who is a registered sex offender.”
  • UNC Journalism Dean Worried ‘Diversity of Thought’ Would Interfere with Social Justice ahead of Nikole Hannah-Jones Appointment. Understand that our political, educational and journalistic elites value social justice above all other values and act accordingly.
  • Peter Boghossian: “My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit. The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced.”

    Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.

    I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.

    I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.

    But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

    Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.

  • “Top CDC Official Steps Down Weeks After Emails Surface Showing Collusion With Teachers Union.”
  • Priorities unaddressed in the recently completed Texas special session. There’s another one coming down the pike soon…
  • Chinese junk bond panic. You never know when all that smoke and mirrors are going to come crashing down…
  • Samsung is edging closer to building a $17 billion semiconductor fabrication plant in Taylor in Williamson County.
  • Goodbye to Omar and Leonard.
  • “Cannabis Use Doubles Risk of Heart Attack in Young Adults.”
  • Woman to Biden: “You ain’t my pimp!”

  • Florida man plays stupid games, wins stupid prizes. Despite some poor situational awareness by deputies. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Que es mas macho!
  • How one foil-wrapped home survived the Caldor fire. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Here’s a man doing extensive testing of locking pliers. The best brand turned out to be the Malco Eagle Grip, which is both the most expensive pair of pliers, as well as the only brand made in America.
  • Heh:

  • Celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Slowdive’s Just For A Day.
  • I smiled:

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for June 26, 2020

    Friday, June 26th, 2020

    Super-busy week for me, and I’m throwing out links to things like unrest in Seattle because they’re more than a week old.

  • Appeals court to judge attempt to drag Michael Flynn case on: which part of “dismiss this case” was unclear, you idiot?
  • “Nearly 300,000 New Jobs in May Indicate Texas Unemployment in Recovery.” Let’s hope so.
  • She seems nice: “Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead essayist on New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, wrote a letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer stating that ‘the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.'” (Hat tip: Sean Davis.)
  • Tampa police drawn into ambush involving hundreds of people. This is the left today
  • Theoretical phsyicist Dr. Stephen Hsu forced to resign VP position after bogus accusations of sexism and racism:

    “The attacks attempt to depict me as a racist and sexist, using short video clips out of context, and also by misrepresenting the content of some of my blog posts. A cursory inspection reveals bad faith in their presentation,” Hsu posted on June 12. “The accusations are entirely false — I am neither racist or sexist.”

    “The Twitter mobs want to suppress scientific work that they find objectionable. What is really at stake: academic freedom, open discussion of important ideas, scientific inquiry. All are imperiled and all must be defended.”

  • “‘Tolerant’ Liberals Target Black Republican Tim Scott with Threats and Racist Voicemails.” (Hat tip: John Richardson.)
  • America’s first black billionaire doesn’t think much of Social Justice:

    Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the first black billionaire, mocked Cancel Culture and the “borderline anarchists” who topple statues and monuments, claiming that black people “laugh” at the white people engaging in such violence. Even when white liberals topple a Confederate statue, Johnson insisted, “black people don’t give a damn.”

    “Look, the people who are basically tearing down statues, trying to make a statement are basically borderline anarchists, the way I look at it,” Johnson told Fox News on Wednesday. “They really have no agenda other than the idea we’re going to topple a statue.”

    The first black billionaire, who has called for $14 trillion in reparations payments to descendants of slavery, argued that vandalism and attacks on statues do not help the black community.

    “It’s not going to give a kid whose parents can’t afford college money to go to college. It’s not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it’s not going to take people off welfare or food stamps,” Johnson insisted.

    He insisted that the rioters tearing down statues “have the mistaken assumption that black people are sitting around cheering for them saying, ‘Oh, my God, look at these white people. They’re doing something so important to us. They’re taking down the statue of a Civil War general who fought for the South.’”

    “You know, black people, in my opinion, black people laugh at white people who do this the same way we laugh at white people who say we got to take off the TV shows,” Johnson added. He said these attempts to purge American culture of supposedly offensive monuments and media are “tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on a racial Titanic.”

    “It absolutely means nothing,” the BET founder insisted.

    “White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a damn,” he quipped.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Know who else isn’t impressed with Social Justice Warriors? Muhammad Ali’s son.

    “Don’t bust up s**t, don’t trash the place,” Ali Jr. told the Post. “You can peacefully protest. My father would have said, ‘They ain’t nothing but devils.’ My father said, ‘all lives matter.'”

    With regard to the Black Lives Matter movement specifically, Ali Jr. said he believes BLM is “racist” — and his father would have, too.

    “I think it’s racist,” he said. “It’s not just black lives matter, white lives matter, Chinese lives matter, all lives matter, everybody’s life matters. God loves everyone — he never singled anyone out. Killing is wrong no matter who it is.”

    “It’s pitting black people against everyone else. It starts racial things to happen; I hate that,” he added of the BLM movement.

  • “Chinese Communist Party Snared in a Multidimensional War“:

    Communist China has decided it must crush Hong Kong because it knows the city presents an information-streaming ethnic, geographic, political and ideological alternative to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian police state.

    The CCP police state promises China’s citizens prosperity’s material goodies — cellphones, electric cars — in exchange for silently accepting communist dictates no matter how harsh and malign. Hong Kong, however, is not a promise. It is an existing democratic example of 21st-century Chinese prosperity.

    Why add “information streaming”? Despite the best efforts of the CCP’s censors, cyberbullies, digital surveillance brigades and police threats, what happens in Hong Kong doesn’t stay in Hong Kong. Information about Hong Kong’s political, economic, social and cultural vitality manages to spread throughout mainland China.

    The Chinese people also know Beijing lied about the COVID-19/Wuhan virus. The virus originated in China. Only former Obama administration media flacks argue otherwise. The CCP may have tried, but it failed to control human-to-human stories of mourning families. In February and March, the Chinese people knew why demand for funeral urns had spiked in the Hubei province.

    The preceding four paragraphs sketch the domestic political threat the CCP confronts. Tiananmen Square proves the CCP sees this threat as a war.

    The CCP cannot answer this question: How long can the prosperous tyranny continue to survive trading smartphones and quality American pork for political subservience by the roughly 400 million people in China’s quasi-middle class?

    Snip.

    Recent economic news suggests China is teetering. A China-EU investment and trade deal has snagged. Bloomberg reported defaults “in all sectors” of China’s offshore bond market have exceeded $4 billion, double that during the same period of 2019. First-quarter 2020 percentage profits, capital expenditures and retail sales may be the lowest since the 1990s.

    Big Picture: The goodie-producing economic engine that braces the CCP’s domestic political strategy needs international markets. China’s domestic economy can’t sustain it.

    CCP international aggression magnifies the vulnerabilities. Recent vile aggression abounds.

  • Plus there’s that possible war with India, where China is building up troops on the border.
  • “54 Scientists Given NIH Grants Fired for Failure to Disclose Foreign Ties.” Most to China.
  • Wuhan coronavirus deaths have fallen dramatically since April. A downward trend that continued after the lockdown was lifted. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Moreover: “Least Restrictive States Have Lower CCP Virus Death Rates; Most-Closed States Have Highest.”

    States with the least restrictions on their citizens’ movements and businesses due to the CCP Virus pandemic have the lowest death rates on average from the disease that prompted a national lockdown beginning in mid-March, according to a new study.

    Conversely, the most restrictive states show higher death rates on average from the disease known as COVID-19 caused by the CCP virus and originating in late 2019 in China.

  • You know all that “Wuhan Coronavirus is overwhelming Houston hospitals!” panic? Yeah, not so much. (Hat tip: Aaron Glenn.)
  • More on the subject:

  • Democratic Party lawsuit to reinstate straight ticket voting in Texas fails.
  • Due to the unrest in downtown Seattle, a billion dollar investment company is picking up and moving to Phoenix.
  • Tesla actually seems to be serious about its move to Texas:

    Tesla is said to be in negotiation with Travis County, Texas, home to the state capital, Austin, for property tax abatements on what is said to be up to a $25 billion investment bringing up to 30,000 jobs to the region. Since Texas collects most of its taxes through property taxes, abatements are often offered as an incentive for industry to locate in the state and can be worth millions.

    The proposed Tesla gigafactory in Austin would build the company’s new Cybertruck electric pickup and serve as a second site to build the Model Y SUV.

  • “Truck Drivers Say They Won’t Deliver To Cities with Defunded Police Departments.” Enjoy your Social Justice with a side order of starvation.
  • Sean Parnell is running against Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Conor Lamb. I like the cut of his jib:

  • I’d never heard of Wirecard before last week, but evidently CEO Markus Braun resigned over some massive financial shenanigans that involved missing billions.
  • A few writers you’ve never heard of: “How dare J. K. Rowling question the sacred trans movement by saying there are two sexes! You must drop her immediately and send your staff for ‘reeducation!'” Literary agency: “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! That’s funny! There’s the door!”
  • Humans battle to reclaim Thai town from violent, sex-mad monkeys.
  • Monica Stephens of Steve Jackson Games, RIP.
  • “‘I Think We’ve Found All The Institutions Founded By Racists And We Can Just Stop Looking For Them Now,’ Says Planned Parenthood Spokesperson Nervously.”
  • “Modern-Day Good Samaritan Sees Injured Man On Side Of Road, Angrily Tweets About Republicans.”
  • This one is Evergreen: “Nation’s Liberals Devastated After Learning Hate Crime Didn’t Actually Happen.”
  • I just put out a new book catalog. Drop me a line if you want a copy.
  • Ooopsie!

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    Posted in Austin, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »