Roundup
Sometimes the best way to deal with rapidly incoming news is the roundup. So here goes:
(1) Biden gives a speech – on COVID:
President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that his administration will require that nursing home staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.
The threat of the withdrawal of federal funds is the way the feds get their foot in the door of ordering things they would otherwise have no power to order.
[ADDENDUM: After his speech on COVID and with no mention whatsoever of Afghanistan, Biden turned his back on reporters’ shouted questions and exited the room. Reports are that he’s now going to Delaware. Speculation abounds about his condition.]
(2) This is horrific:
Day and night families – often with tiny children – have risked their lives, ducking past gunfire at the gates of the civilian side of the airport; passing aggressive Taliban fighters, who occasionally beat and harass them.
In the night, the paratroopers blockaded the road with cars and razor wire.
A senior officer told me they had no choice because the situation was out of control, but said the blockade will live with some of his soldiers for the rest of their lives.
“It was terrible, women were throwing their babies over the razor wire, asking the soldiers to take them, some got caught in the wire,” he told me…
[A woman trying to get out] explained they were living in Herat but escaped to Kabul. Her uncle was part of the Taliban.
She said: “They want to obligate us into forced marriage. I am a doctor and my sister was working with women’s rights, she studied, and my mother is a teacher, my mother was a teacher…”
More at the link.
(3) China may position itself to exploit Afghanistan’s rare earth minerals.
(4)
A top U.S. diplomat said on Wednesday the United States expects the Taliban to allow Afghans who wish to leave Afghanistan to depart safely, following reports that the group now in control of the country was blocking airport access.
That’s an interesting “expectation.” I have thought that it’s at least possible that the Taliban might allow the Americans in Afghanistan to leave with little or no violence, if only because it suits the Taliban’s purposes if they are gone and because it might draw too much criticism if they harm them. But the Afghans who have helped those Americans? It seems risible to me to “expect” any such thing.
Who was it who said this? Why, none other than Wendy Sherman, who apparently is currently Deputy Secretary of State. More:
“We have seen reports that the Taliban, contrary to their public statements and their commitments to our government, are blocking Afghans who wish to leave the country from reaching the airport,” Sherman said.
U.S. officials were engaging directly with the Taliban “to make clear that we expect them to allow all American citizens, all third-country nationals, and all Afghans who wish to leave to do so safely and without harassment,” she said.
This exit has been in the works for many months, and they had plenty of opportunity to organize it, but apparently were too callous, too hubristic, too stupid, too destructive, too compromised, too weak – take your pick – to do so.
You may not remember Sherman, but I do, because I wrote a long post about her back in 2015. At the time, she was the chief negotiator of Obama’s Iran deal and had been one of the negotiators for Bill Clinton’s ill-fated North Korea deal. And what a resume she had, even before that (for example, head of the DC office of the Dukakis presidential campaign) . This woman has gone from debacle to debacle and on to higher posts.
(5) And then there’s this:
Joe Biden’s State Department moved to cancel a critical State Department program aimed at providing swift and safe evacuations of Americans out of crisis zones just months prior to the fall of Kabul, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.
The “Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau” – which was designed to handle medical, diplomatic, and logistical support concerning Americans overseas was paused by Anthony Blinken’s State Department earlier this year. Notification was officially signed just months before the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan.
I’ll stop here for now.
We have loads and loads of wonderful Jewish American conservatives, and even some wonderful Jewish Americans who identify as liberals (e.g., Alan Dershowitz).
The ilk of Wendy Sherman make me want to puke.
Absolute insanity in WA this afternoon. Mask mandates everywhere including lots of outdoor areas again, teachers must get vaccination or be fired and ineligible for unemployment, businesses now going to be required to enforce mask mandate by decree of this idiot governor.
The comments are broke down here by Seattle talk show host Jason Rantz.
https://twitter.com/jasonrantz/with_replies
Seattle is by some rankings the most vaccinated major city in the country and the state is in the top ten nationally.
They get further authoritarian with there vaccine mandates while at the same time acting as if the vaccines don’t work.
This idiot governor once said no more masks if 70% get vaccinated we are past that by a bit and now this.
At this point the only response needs to be massive civil disobedience by businesses, citizens, unions everyone.
Item 2. A circumstance where any words come up far too short. “Horrific.” In the literal sense of the word. A complete horror. I cannot imagine what those poor souls are enduring.
Regarding 4, Bill O’Reilly recently reported that Donald Trump called him Saturday(?) evening. He (DJT) was furious and stated that when he was President he had personally spoken with Taliban leaders and made it very clear that if terms of the withdrawal were not honored he (DJT as CinC) would send forces back in and wipe them out. Trump was furious that later negotiations Biden’s administration made appear to have removed that fear from the Taliban.
Out of an unfathomable desperation, mothers throwing babies over fencing topped with razor wire?
Anyone who is not appalled by this is unfit for American citizenship, if not for membership in the human race.
Masking in Michigan, banks back to masking while the Post Office now doesn’t either customers or employees.
Griffin —
But cases are way up and the hospitals are at capacity because they’re having staff shortages!
(Maybe they shouldn’t have closed all the hospitals to non-Covid stuff last year so the hospitals had to fire everyone. Just a thought.)
And it’s so incoherent — if the vaccines are so necessary, why make the vaccinated mask? If the vaccines don’t work, why make us all do the stuff that didn’t work last year?
And BTW, cases and hospitalizations are way up, but the fatality rate hasn’t budged for months. Which means to anyone not completely innumerate* that the deadliness of the virus, variants included, is way DOWN.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard
[insert long string of profanity here]
(* Oh. Right. There’s the problem.)
I wonder what is going on with Arizona? A serious finding of electoral fraud could set off a cascade of popular anger. At this point, it feels like the people of America need to put the fear of God into the DemoCrime Party!
Bryan Lovely,
Yes, the fact that after all this time they are so shady with the reasons why hospitalizations may (or may not) be full. How many are ‘with’ Covid? Who knows. How do these levels differ from the past? Who knows. And most importantly why have they not made preparations with massive surge capacity after 18 months of this stuff?
But, whatever, the 19 year old working in a Dairy Queen in Colfax is now required by Jay Inslee to enforce his mask mandate.
And remember fatality rates only count when they are high. They cite deaths first unless they are low, then down the ladder to hospitalizations and if they aren’t high enough they revert to ‘cases, cases, cases’.
And if the absolute idiocy of Jay Inslee’s decrees is not obvious enough they don’t go into effect until next Monday. The Seahawks play there first game in Seattle with fans in 2 years on Saturday night. No mask mandate for that but apparently the game the next week it will apply.
SCIENCE!!
An interesting article about Biden in the Atlantic.
“What the Biden foreign-policy record shows, I think, is a man who behaves as if he knows much more than he does, who has far too much confidence in his own judgment in the face of contrary advice from experts. (My hunch is he’s overcompensating for an intellectual inferiority complex, which has manifested itself in his history of plagiarism, lying about his academic achievements, and other embellishments.)”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/biden-afghanistan-record/619799/
Yep.
IIRC, during at least the 90s and the 00s, the Sunday talk shows all had Biden on as the great Democratic Party foreign policy guru. That might have something to do with his belief in rightness of his own judgement in foreign policy.
Ambassador Alina
https://twitter.com/USAmbKuwait/status/1427724430411763720?s=20
Re: the mess in Afghanistan (among other things);
rest assured that the vast majority of those who voted for Bidet and that imbecile Harris, have no regrets about voting for them. And they will do so again if given the chance.
Progressivism / socialism is a religion in every sense of the word; it is an unshakable belief system. It is immune to facts and reality.
Well… a quick look at Ambassador Alina suggests that she’s a Fit and Proper Swamp Dweller: Brookings, CIA, USAID, and there’s more. But really I’m just repeating myself.
If she couldn’t pull strings to make some evacuation machinery work, nobody could.
Here in Delaware there have been 114,000 cases. 144 hospitalization and only 3 deaths. This is what has people in a panic.. Stupid
John Tyler:
Doesn’t have to be the vast majority. Just a significant enough number to win (and to overcome whatever fraud is attempted).
Not that I’m saying that number of changed minds actually will happen. But that’s what’s necessary.
I think if the Democrats had a decent replacement, Joe would be out of there in no time out all. But they don’t have a decent replacement.
They will never replace Biden unless he has some major health episode like a stroke and even then I’m not sure they will. There are too many people getting unbelievable power that would lose that immediately under Harris who may be an idiot and horrible but she is mentally competent to make her own policy decisions.
I mean they have got this far with a memory care patient as candidate/president why not keep going.
They will never replace Biden unless he has some major health episode like a stroke and even then I’m not sure they will.
Griffin:
Agreed. They will, I suspect, put more safeguards in so Biden can’t make big decisions like the Afghan Bug-Out without getting more supervision from others, however feckless but somewhat more competent.
It looks to me like the military people shrugged and said, He’s the President. How bad could it get? Anyone for drinks by the pool?
(Nah, it’ll be fine.)
There are more masks in Arizona but I assume they are Democrats as Tucson is Democrat city. Having no kids under 21, I do not know the state of the schools. but I can hope. Home schooling and vouchers should come out of this hysteria much stronger. Biden is a pitiful creature.
The incompetence on display from Biden and his team is breathtaking.
6.5 minute video about the Afghan National Army:
https://gab.com/honkbreath/posts/106778566035238206
steve walsh:
It is truly stunning, isn’t it? We already knew they were extraordinarily incompetent, self-serving, stupid, destructive, mendacious, what have you. But it’s hard to keep up with the extremes that they’ve shown.
There just aren’t words to truly describe the nightmare that is unfolding in Afghanistan. The terror that will be unleashed is one the world has seen before – by the same cohort – and the “elites” in the West are allowing them to be unleashed again.
If Biden is out and Harris goes in, the Progressives’ agenda is pretty much dead as there is no VP to break the tie. This also holds for getting Senate approval of a new VP. OTOH, Harris would have excellent job security due to the possibility of a “President Pelosi.”
Couple of notes: The mush heads vote to make themselves feel good about themselves. To change due to facts, facts which were apparent prior to the election and which they should have attended to would make them feel bad about themselves. So….forget it.
Wondering how to express myself. Big fonts. Barracks-level profanity. I don’t want to break things; I’m in my own house. Scream.
They closed the evac planning office…… They closed the evac planning office. They closed the evac planning office. To what end? Budget? Hubris. “I’ll show you, Trump.”
Anybody know why? Anybody ask them?
Was there any work product left over?
Well, as my father always said, timing is important. Like to know the interval between Milley’s last mention of white rage and the start of the skedaddle. Week? Less? Should be fodder for some creative editing of footage.
I suspect it would make for a good audience in various day rooms–if they still have those, as opposed to the troops” own electronics.
Would he find that embarrassing? Be humiliated out of active duty before he can be….promoted? I don’t think you can get further than he did, but maybe a Medal of Freedom or something. Extend his tour. A bonus from Xi?
Hell, if Mattis can be on the Theranos board, the sky’s the limit for Milley.
From time to time, I think of my old OCS class, back in 69. Could we have managed….. Yeah. Name it. We’d have managed it better than expectations.
WTF happened?
Romney and Murkowski and Collins and probably others would fold in heartbeat to approve a new vice president so that is a pipe dream.
Muh norms and all…
Another reason to loathe Zuckerberg, Dorsey, et al.: “What I think has not been considered enough is the degree to which WhatsApp DMs were a strategic blind spot for the United States. . . . The Taliban are thus free, and have been free for a number of years, to take their fight not to American soldiers (where they always lose) but directly to the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, all using free-to-use American internet infrastructure like Facebook and Twitter (where they have now won).
WhatsApp is an American product. It can be switched off by its parent, Facebook, Inc, at any time and for any reason. The fact that the Taliban were able to use it at all, quite apart from the fact that they continue to use it to coordinate their activities even now as American citizens’ lives are imperiled by the Taliban advance which is being coordinated on that app, suggests that U.S. military intelligence never bothered to monitor Taliban numbers and never bothered to ask Facebook to ban them.
They probably still haven’t even asked Facebook to do this, judging from the fact that the Taliban continues to use the app with impunity. . . . The fact that the Taliban is using US-based servers to run its terror state and nobody in the Biden Administration has thought to disconnect it, even as U.S. forces retreat in disarray, is a strategic blunder on par with Pearl Harbor.”
Examples of the Taliban’s use of the app at the link:
https://prestonbyrne.com/2021/08/15/did-america-just-lose-afghanistan-because-of-whatsapp/
Griffin:
“And if the absolute idiocy of Jay Inslee’s decrees is not obvious enough they don’t go into effect until next Monday.”
NOT an emergency until Monday! God, how stupid.
I thought at first I’d do my grocery shopping on Friday for like a month, but now I think I may do it Monday and not wear a mask in protest.
I remember during the height of the previous mandate when I would go to Walmart or Freddy’s there would be one or two people each time not wearing masks and no one said a word.
Worth a try!
Richard Aubrey —
Would he [Milley] find that embarrassing? Be humiliated out of active duty before he can be….promoted?
Secretary of Defense
Bryan. Thanks. I missed that possibility. Still, the footage would follow him, if this were a just world.
Biden gives a speech – on COVID:
Look over here, not there. I caught only the preview of the speech. My take is that Biden and Fauci are now the pitchmen for Pfizer products, like Billy Mays used to be for OxiClean or Orange Glo. Let’s get all of the gullible people injected a third time, and then we will announce that Pfizer has developed a new version of vaccine that is specifically tailored to alpha, delta, gamma, and lambda. Quick, get a fourth shot. Uh oh, we forgot to test the new vax.
I was out in large crowds this last weekend, and in deep blue California virtually no one was wearing a mask. Now they were motorsports crowds. Maybe that’s the difference. I got some free cake without a fork and actually licked my fingers. Gasp. I’ll see if I pass the 6 day incubation period OK.
_____
Yesterday Neo posted a comprehensive list. Here are two on the list.
How much was purposefully desiring the destruction of America and the West?
How much was about money and what they stand to earn from China or elsewhere? In other words, simple corruption?
Richard A. states, “They closed the evac planning office.”
I know we hate to go there, but this is beginning to look like anarchy and intentional destruction. Why else would they close the evac planning office?
Steve Walsh said:
“The incompetence on display from Biden and his team is breathtaking.”
We may be encountering the inflection point where the slope down steepens. Or to quote from one of my favorite show of old. “The avalanche has already started, it’s too late for the pebbles to vote.”
The ridiculousness of these mandates just never end. Honestly the only way to have them make sense is that they know the vaccines don’t work but they have gone all in on them and can’t go back.
Now today they recommend the booster pending FDA approval which apparently hasn’t even been studied. Some studies are apparently showing the efficacy of the vaccines at about four months so I guess people need like three boosters a year. Screw all them people in Africa Becky in data processing who hasn’t left her apartment in 18 months needs her fourth booster shot.
The way the Anglo Saxon west has responded to this has been the most stunning thing I have seen in my life.
It’s a race to the bottom currently being led by AU and NZ but the US is getting warmed up again to make a run.
For a virus with a 99.8% (at least) survival rate.
@TommyJay:
“Wendy Sherman? Read the sections on Early Life and Education and the next one on Early Career. What could go wrong?”
Good Man. You’ve given me an excuse to re-use this clip one more time before I retire it for a while:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz8RjPAD2Jk
In my younger days I thought ‘Central Casting’ was a generic term. Imagine my surprise when I belatedly discovered that it’s actually the name of the dominant company in the extras trade.
On a totally and literally unrelated subject, I just *love* this statue despite all my Confederate sympathies. If you’re going to do a job, do it good and proper.
https://www.centralparknyc.org/locations/william-tecumseh-sherman
(Just noticed the foliage his horse is trampling down. Off to see if can research out the symbology if any. Don’t imagine it’s just there for decoration.)
And Grant, too, must be rolling in his sarcophagus.
roy in nipono:
I don’t know how old you are, but if you know your history, during the Nixon administration the following happened: Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s VP, had to resign because of graft. Then a new VP was appointed (Ford) and then Watergate happened, Nixon stepped down, and Ford became president. Then Nelson Rockefeller was appointed as Ford’s VP. So my guess is that if Biden is removed and Harris becomes president, a new VP will be appointed (a Democrat) and will be able to break ties.
neo,
I think the theory goes that the senate has to approve the new VP and if it’s 50-50 like now and Harris is now President then if all the R’s vote no they can’t install a new VP.
The British are making tremendous efforts on the ground to get people out.
They are getting NO help from the American forces.
A lot of things are going to fracture here. A lot of alliances. A lot of trust.
All because they believed the lies they told themselves about DJT, the lies they told and retold, and blasted to the highest decibel levels in their cluster-echo-chamber around the globe.
Believed. And WANTED to believe.
And still want to believe.
As for Wendy Sherman, she’s a bad joke. A very pitiful and, for some reason, longstanding joke.
The only reason to read what she has to say is to discover her latest stupidity. And fraudulence.
@Griffin:
“The way the Anglo Saxon west has responded to this has been the most stunning thing I have seen in my life.
It’s a race to the bottom currently being led by AU and NZ but the US is getting warmed up again to make a run.”
Re Australian Covid Government Policies and Madness:
I read somewhere a few days ago that multinational firms have historically done test marketing in Australia first before launching campaigns in the USA. At least until recently they have seen Australia as a near enough and good enough less risky (much smaller market size) proxy for US Consumer Behaviour.
Not sure that AU and US behaviours are as well-correlated when it comes to attacks on personal freedoms. But jury still out.
One big difference between USA and Australia is that 97% of population in Australia lives in 5 big cities plus (say) another ~10 regional ~100K-ish max pop cities including Darwin. Easier to corral everyone.
Griffin,
If that’s the theory, it’s not a well thought out one. Is there any doubt, any doubt that dear Senator Romney would vote for whomever President Harris nominated in the interest of ‘unity’? Collins and Murkowski too, most likely.
Ackler,
Yep, muh norms!
Zaphod,
I have never been to Australia but from what I’ve always seen on TV and movies (I know) they did seem very much like Americans but as messed up as we have been the last 18 months we have never gone as far as them or NZ (one case lock the country down).
You might be right about the urban centric population dispersion. If you pretended the US was only NY, LA, CHI, SF, HOU there would a totally different look to things culturally.
@Griffin:
Australian Karens are lighting quick to adopt, discard, or reject trends. Fastest in the Anglosphere, I’m pretty certain. (Slow as slugs cf. Japanese or Chinese… but they’re just too culturally different to be any use in relevant market comparisons or predictions). So can cycle trials faster, too. And, pace someone who just called me an Incel in another thread, Women demonstrably control 70-80% of consumer spending.
Karen-driven Sentiment probably not where you want to be when faced with pandemic-driven decision making which needs to balance risk and freedoms.
Why Australian Men may well have become more supine than American Men is separate topic.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
I fear this is going to be a dark, dark Winter if the people don’t wake up soon and massively resist the mask and vaccine mandates. They have ceded way to much ground for the Democrats to stop now. The pushback comes soon, or never.
@Yancey Ward
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”
On the plus side, Friend Om is full of passionate intensity.
🙂
This is amazing. What they are doing to children is a crime against humanity.
Pure evil.
https://twitter.com/kylamb8/status/1428214902246752257
Griffin,
And of course my FB feed is full of people blaming the unvaccinated for the new mask mandate imposition.
First, I thought masks were supposed to be easy. Just wear a mask, what’s your problem? /s
Second, if vaccination works, why do the vaccinated have to wear masks? If vaccines don’t work, why does everyone have to get vaccinated?
Clearly, what’s most important is that the peasants just. Aren’t. Obeying. Orders. They must be punished.
Bryan,
It’s like talking to a wall.
If masks work why did cases explode last winter? Why are they going through the roof in Hawaii right now that has had a mask mandate for 486 days?
The vaccines are the all timer though because their actions say they don’t work yet they are mandating them.
It’s also possible the virus is finally coming for Oregon and Washington that have really escaped relatively lightly but as we have seen world wide the virus is gonna virus no matter how virtuous a people thinks they are.
I would bet that this mask mandate in WA will be here until next spring because we are too close to fall now. Absolute non compliance is the only power we have.
Apparently a large number of Afghan refugees will be settled in Seattle and Tacoma. Let’s hope that Sea-Tac wasn’t the “next stop” where they were going to do the vetting to make sure they’re all legit.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/afghan-refugees-be-resettled-seattle-tacoma/NVLC36TUMVAAVL5UIWRSBIVVV4/
@Bryan Lovely:
Plonk ‘em all down at the Lakes in Kent. Needs livening up.
Just another reason why Eastern Oregon—and perhaps E. Washington State, as well—may soon be Western Idaho?
“Idaho health board nominee: We’re ignoring real science on COVID treatment
“Pathologist, Idaho district health board appointee Dr. Ryan Cole says ‘We have treatments – and we are ruining the health of a generation.’ ”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/312037
And my gosh, these “surprises” just keep popping up.
Amazing!
I mean, who knew the Google had anything against DJT?
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/top-google-engineer-abandons-company-reveals-big-tech-rewrote-algos-target-trump
And from the “So what?” files, the Honorable Ilhan Omar…again!
(Though, to clarify, does one really care that a member of the U.S. House or Representatives is a felon? Or that said Congressperson is a terrorist sympathizer who just happens to be “…a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where she serves as the Vice Chair of the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations and the Subcommittee on International Development, International Organizations and Global Corporate Social Impact. She also serves on the House Education and Labor Committee, where she is a member of the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development and the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections”?
https://omar.house.gov/about/committees-and-caucuses
Really care?
To be sure, this felon and terrorist supporter just happens to be an amazing person:
“…She is the Whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Vice Chair of Medicare For All Caucus. She is a member of the LGBT Equality Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, Women’s Caucus, Pro-Choice Caucus, Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, Diabetes Caucus, CBC Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health, Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, Black Maternal Health Caucus, New Americans Caucus, Quiet Skies Caucus, Refugee Caucus, United for Climate and Environmental Justice Congressional Task Force, Unexploded Ordance/Demining Caucus, Public Works and Infrastructure Caucus, Bike Caucus, Black Jewish Caucus, Friends of Norway Caucus, Friends of Sweden Caucus, Hockey Caucus, International Workers Rights Caucus, Labor and Working Families Caucus, Mississippi River Caucus, Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, the Career and Technical Education Caucus, Armenian Caucus, Mental Health Caucus, Hunger Caucus, Voting Rights Caucus, Homelessness Caucus, Small Business Caucus, International Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Caucus, Defense Spending Reduction Caucus, Friends of a Free, Stable and Democratic Syria Caucus, the Future of Transportation Caucus, Congressional Labor Caucus, and the ALS Caucus.”
Amazing! Where does she find the time? (No wonder she’s being protected by the Higher-Ups!…)
Also in her impressive portfolio: Superb at siphoning off campaign contributions and breaking up marriages!!
And from the “Rocky-Mountain-High” files, we have (another surprise!):
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/sixteen-million-mystery-ballots-demonstrate-the-need-for-vote-integrity-efforts
Internet meme making the rounds–
Afghan citizen: “This is the worst day of my life”
Taliban fighter: “Correction. This is the worst day of your life SO FAR.”
Don’t know much about the Author. Worth a read as you won’t be getting this analysis from the NYT or Fox:
https://www.unz.com/pescobar/how-russia-china-are-stage-managing-the-taliban/
We all know kind of (we think) what happened. But where is the puck heading?
You know, looking back at the betrayal of South Vietnam in 1975, and the dems’ remarks afterwards, fast forwarding to today. Maybe the dems love treachery and actively seek opportunities.
Seems pretty parsimonious to me.
I recently had a conversation with an Australian friend who is appalled by the actions of NSW and the government at large. He said the USA is bat sh%! crazy, but Australia is worst. After this past week, no one can top the US’s stupidity, incompetence and pure destruction of confidence among its citizens. It is stunning how bad the current administration is.
Mask mandates everywhere including lots of outdoor areas again
A mandate in an outdoor area has no justification at all. Mass noncompliance in all venues would be appropriate, because this is clearly not driven by considerations of public health.
I fear this is going to be a dark, dark Winter if the people don’t wake up soon and massively resist the mask and vaccine mandates. They have ceded way to much ground for the Democrats to stop now. The pushback comes soon, or never.
Police officers know how to slack off, especially in venues where the morale of the force has been wrecked by awful local politicians; the public won’t be the only ones resisting.
Hat Tip Kim du Toit’s blog:
https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2021/08/16/farewell-to-bourgeois-kings/
“The managerial class increasingly appears as a sort of funhouse mirror inversion of the doomed russian nobility of the late tsarist era; they no longer know how to run a country and only seem to parasitize on the body politic while giving almost nothing of value in return. In tsarist Russia, the nobility proved increasingly incapable of winning Russia’s wars or running its ministries, making their legitimating narratives proclaiming them to possess some natural-born right and capacity for rulership increasingly impossible to believe in. In modern America, it is the meritocrats who now openly lack any merit or ability to rule, quickly undermining the ability of the average person to believe in the very foundational claims behind the managerial order. And by what right does the collective of non-divine kings rule? To borrow from Schmitt: by the same right as the collective of stupid and ignorant technocrats. In other words, by virtue of simply not having been replaced yet. Nothing more.”
https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2021/08/16/farewell-to-bourgeois-kings/
One of the best essays on goverment. WOW.
I think Dr. T. Sowell will be impressed.
Frankly I do not think that Joe Bidet and his Obama-commie retread puppet masters are at all embarrassed or even upset in the slightest about the disaster in Afghanistan or at the US/Mex border.
I think they really could not care less.
Their ideology demands that the USA be humbled, be insulted, be diminished, be struck down, be put “in its place.”
After all, their mindset is that the USA is the root of all problems on planet earth since, what? 1650 or thereabouts.
They literally hate everything about the USA and in particular, the average white American citizen.
Their policies are simply a manifestation of all of this.
What really concerns them, IMHO, is how to “manage” the PR of the ongoing situation and lay all the blame on Trump or on other “unforeseen” events.
They trot out, in the best traditions of Joseph Goebbels – and more recently, Bagdad Bob – their main Minister of Propaganda- Jen Psaki – to fill in the sycophantic, fawning media about how well all is going. The media cannot bend over far enough, in their own minds, to support Bidet et. al.
I await her stating that Joe Bidet, last weekend, ran a marathon in 2 hours flat, setting a new world record. Got to keep up with Kim Jong Un, you know.
Just read that ALMOST one in 10 Bidet voters regret their vote. Put another way, MORE than 9 in 10 Bidet voters do no regret their vote.
With an electorate like this, the USA – as presently configured – is not long for the world.
Lastly, maybe someone can help me out here: how can a sitting President, via a stroke of a pen, overturn existing law??
Specifically, I mean the mess at the border.
Do we not have laws prohibiting the events we see there?
Why hasn’t a filing been placed with the SCOTUS to overturn Bidet’s decision??
Does anybody have an answer to this??
Neo, I suspect I am chronologically senior to you – I missed seeing the Eagle landing as I was mid-Pacific Ocean, en route to WestPac at the time.
I may be becoming senile, but I seem to remember a bit more comity in Congress (if not in the streets) in those days. Remember George Wallace’s “Ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats”?
Ford & Rockefeller (and even Nixon) were more centrist at that time. I strongly doubt anyone proposed for VP now will be even remotely “centrist” (heck, Biden ran as a “centrist,” Judge Garland was supposed to be a “moderate” and we see what’s happened there). As others pointed out above, some of the RINOs (who already expect stiff primary challenges, should they run again) will no doubt cross over. I’m somewhat surprised that one or two of them haven’t pulled a Jeffords or Spector and jumped party for personal political gain.
I think the Democrats wouldn’t put AOC in only due to her age (as if they care what the Constitution says).
Someone theorizes: cases rising in the South because summer is hot. People are indoors with A/C.
As fall arrives cases will rise in the North. People will go indoors, turn on the heat and breathe the same air.
Let’s watch if this pans out or if lower vaxx rates are the reason.
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=395272
While we’re at it, whoever is financing the NeverTrump die hards at National Review has told them it’s now permissible to write about Biden’s cognitive decay.
roy in nipomo:
I agree that both parties were more moderate then and more alike, although I disagree with Wallace – there was far more than a dime’s difference, even back then.
I certainly agree it would be hard to find and approve a VP replacement these days.
Zaphod: ust noticed the foliage his horse is trampling down. Off to see if can research out the symbology if any. Don’t imagine it’s just there for decoration.)
From Battle hymn of the Republic: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”
I think the theory goes that the senate has to approve the new VP and if it’s 50-50 like now and Harris is now President then if all the R’s vote no they can’t install a new VP.
If Biden is placed on leave through the 25th Amendment, Harris is the VP acting as president, not the President. I think she’d still be eligible to preside over the Senate as needed. Jonathan Turley is the one to address this question.
Regarding Australia and Australians,
I’ve only worked in Sydney, but the locals seemed much more like Brits than Americans, to me. Especially Londoners. Sydney is quite diverse.
The scenery and climate reminded me of San Diego, but the people and architecture were European. But Sydney is almost certainly the most cosmopolitan city there. Could be like Texas, where the Texans don’t consider Dallas part of the state.
Art Deco:
I don’t know for sure, but I think it depends whether the removal is permanent – in which case she becomes president – or temporary, in which case she is an acting president. Also, even if she were only designated temporary acting president, I think she would temporarily lose her tie-breaking VP duties.
‘There’s nothing quite like being ordered to do something absurd and being helpless against it’
I have been struggling to explain why all this mask garbage bothers me so much and I finally found a quote that perfectly encapsulates my feeling.
This is from this article at the Federalist.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/19/im-not-going-to-wear-a-mask-in-a-county-where-no-one-is-dying-of-covid/
Neo, in the ’60s & ’70s, the (expressed) goals of both parties were pretty similar for the Country. The methods to achieve them were the primary difference (as you remember, swaying the center into voting one way or the other was the goal during the elections – narrow Overton Window). Going a little too far from that middle was certain defeat (e.g. Goldwater, McGovern).
We can no longer say their goals are similar and it is now a very wide Overton Window (and at the risk of overextending the metaphor, not just one window, but two of them with a blank wall in-between).
There still are some RINOs (i.e. Liberal Republicans) and a very few DINOs (i.e. Conservative Democrats), but they are more celebrated by the other side for causing chaos to their opponents than valued for their contributions to the body politic.
roy in nipomo:
Oh, I agree with that. But the point I was trying to make was that, even back then, the two parties were not the same and did not make the same decisions. However, they certainly were united on some basic things, and that’s no longer true.