…against the transgender craze:
I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
There will be a lot more of this sort of thing before the 2024 campaign is through:
For reasons that make sense to no one but his most ardent supporters, Donald Trump has decided to engage in a ridiculous smear campaign against Ron DeSantis. That culminated on Tuesday in the former president twice sharing a picture and post accusing the Florida governor of being a groomer and ephebophile.
RedState reported on that, noting that the picture in question has never even been confirmed to be DeSantis and was first revealed years ago by a far-left propaganda outlet. Assuming the picture is real, though, it would have been from a party for graduating seniors that DeSantis chaperoned when he was a teacher in his early 20s.
Former students have said that he did chaperone parties on campus while teaching (this was a boarding school with on-campus housing). None of them have accused him of anything but normal behavior, and if the scandal here is underage drinking in the 1990s, please hang on a moment while I laugh out loud.
I think the attacks do “make sense,” though. Trump knows DeSantis is his strongest rival, and Trump is using techniques from the playbook that helped get him the nomination in 2016. So far, DeSantis isn’t responding on that low level; he keeps pointing to his strong accomplishments as governor instead. I think that’s a wise move.
This fight has the potential to further split the already-split party in 2024, especially if Trump doesn’t win the nomination and decides to run as an independent.
Stephen Green (Vodkapundit) reported on it in real time, so I didn’t have to:
It’s over.
That was bad.
Structurally… well, I can’t critique the structure because there wasn’t one. His speechwriter was an infinite number of monkeys with limited access to ChatGPT.
The delivery? He gets worse each year, and he was never good at this stuff. He shouted, whispered, slurred, spoke too quickly most of the time, and stumbled, even when he slowed down sometimes to Glacier Speed.
In terms of substance, it was apparently a list of things Biden wants to spend money on. Your money.
This speech is an unlistenable, endless litany of odd demands combined with fantastical falsehoods.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 8, 2023
Why anyone would voluntarily watch the speech is a puzzlement to me. For the right, it’s a painful reminded of Joe’s awfulness. For the left, they support him no matter what. So again: why bother to watch?
If you want to read lots of reactions in real time, there’s Ace’s comment thread.
And here’s a post at LI about the rebuttal by Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Sounds like it was a good one, as these things go.
Sam Smith went Satanic at the Grammys.
But that’s probably not going to shock most people’s actual Grammy and Grampy:
I regret to inform you that singing in a devil costume may not have the intended shock value on your grandpa, who was tripping balls while watching Ozzy bite the head off a live bat and Mick Jagger ride a 60 foot long inflatable dick 50 years ago
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 6, 2023
A confession: I missed those two Boomer highlights.
Actually, though, the Ozzy-bat-biting incident wasn’t even during the 60s, it was in 1982. And it was an accident.
Yes, an accident. Sort of, anyway:
Osbourne had been on the road for well over a year when he arrived in Des Moines for the infamous show. During that time, he developed a ritual where he’d pummel the audience with raw meat and they’d chuck back whatever insane things they could sneak into the venues.
“I always liked old movies that used to have these custard-pie fights,” Osbourne explained in the documentary The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne. “It gave me this idea to throw, instead of pie, bits of meat and animal parts into the audience. I thought it was hilarious. [They’d throw back] sheep testicles, live snakes, dead rats, all kinds of things. Someone once threw a live frog onto onstage. It was the biggest frog I’d ever seen, and it landed on its back.”
That night in Des Moines, someone threw a live bat. “I thought it was a rubber bat,” Osbourne said. “I picked it up, put it in my mouth, crunched down, bit into it, being the clown that I am.”
As blood filled his mouth and people in the crowd looked on with horror, he realized he’d made a horrible mistake. “Bats are the biggest carriers of rabies in the world,” he said. “And I had to go to the hospital afterwards and they started giving me rabies shots. I had one one each rear and I had to have that every night.”
And here I thought you could only get rabies from a bat bite. Apparently you also can get it from biting a bat, but I don’t think the latter situation comes up all that often.
I keep getting Weimar Republic vibes.
Not a bad idea, but how sad that it’s come to this:
Jumbo, a Netherlands-based grocery chain has decided to use the checkout aisle as a means to help the elderly stay incorporated into the community. The over 700-store chain introduced Kletskassa in 2019. The word translates to “chat checkout,” a special lane for customers who are not in a rush and want to have a conversation with their cashier.
Then again, I sometimes joke that about 50% of my social life these days consists of excursions to the supermarket. During the COVID lockdowns of yesteryear, it was 100%.
I remember that, back then, they also had old people hours, usually at something like 6 AM or 7 AM. Not my hours of operation at all. Where has it been decreed that older people are all early-birds?
I’m certainly not going to.
But here’s a thread to discuss it.
(1) The Biden administration does an Emily Litella on “Trump ignored Chinese balloons too.” The change:
The Washington Free Beacon‘s Chuck Ross revealed that the Pentagon wouldn’t name the official who provided misleading information about three supposed Chinese spy balloons during President Donald Trump’s administration.
The senior official said on Saturday:
PRC [People’s Republic of China] government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time. We spoke directly with Chinese officials through multiple channels, but rather than address their intrusion into our airspace, the PRC put out an explanation that lacked any credibility.
The media and Democrats ate it up. During his administration, Trump and his former officials, including John Bolton, denied knowledge of Chinese spy balloons.
Officials in the Pentagon changed their story on Sunday, but honestly, they made it worse. They told the media the balloons were discovered after Trump left office.
(2) Speaking of the Chinese balloon, it was about the size of a 20-story building.
(3) The Grammys happened, and as usual in recent years I know very few of the contenders. And yet, in the interests of keeping my finger on the pulse of the decline of Western civilization, I’m featuring the fashions this year – the men’s fashions, for a change. An interesting mix with a few relatively classic looks, many sparkles, and just about everything in-between. One guy seems to have a Bobby Kennedy campaign button on his jacket.
(4) Speaking of cultural decline, I haven’t written much about the sad degeneration of the Disney brand, but Ace has been following it for ages. The latest is that the company is fighting a proxy takeover.
(5) Seems like Kamala Harris may be toast:
Of all the similar reports that have come out since Harris first assumed the role in 2021, Monday’s New York Times article is the bleakest. The authors of the piece — who say they spoke to “dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation” — walked away from their reporting with this conclusion: Many believe Harris has not risen to the challenge of establishing herself as the future leader of the party.
That hardly qualifies as “news.” Then again, the fact that the Times is saying it might be the news.
To me, this is just a gimmick and has little to nothing to do with dance. It’s not even pretty. But it’s quite an impressive feat nonetheless:
Of course.
Last night I came across this talk by John McWhorter, a voice of reason on the topic of the old racism versus the new:
I’m still out west, staying in an airbnb. Last night I was trying to relax – fat chance! – and watched some TV I thought might be soothing. It was the first episode in the Netflix series “Our Planet.” What beautiful photography! Absolutely stunning stuff, and all the better because there’s one of those really big HD screens here.
But the program pushed on the “we’re ruining the planet” message so very very hard. In fact, if you go to that website I just linked, you’ll see it’s one of the main messages of the series. I had been thinking it would be a good thing to watch with my very young grandchildren, until I realized that it would probably frighten them a lot. No need to rush that; they’ll get enough of it when they start attending school. The educational system is heavily engaged in frightening young children and influencing them politically in every possible way, indoctrinating them in the tenets of leftist thought.
I wouldn’t mind if it was a balanced, fact-based point of view that they were given. But “Our Planet” had the familiar stuff about how all the arctic ice will melt, complete with visuals of polar bears that are supposedly highly theatened. It doesn’t take much research to discover the exaggerations there. For example, from 2016, quite a few years before the series was made:
This year, as every year, there has been much excitement in the media about ‘catastrophic’ melting of Arctic sea-ice, run-away melting, tipping points, death spirals and “ice-free” summers…
Claims of ‘ice-free’ conditions at some time in the summer have been bandied about for years in various forms but as the reality sinks in that it’s not as bad as some had claimed, the dates when this is expected happen have often been pushed out beyond the life expectancy of those making the claims.
The meaning of “ice-free” has also been the subject of some serious goal-post relocation efforts, we are now told that ‘ice-free’ does not actually mean free of ice, it means there will be less than one million square km of ice left.
This special branch of mathematics is apparently based on the axiom that zero = 10 6
The problem with this obsessive focusing on one single data point out of 365, is that there is a lot of short term, weather driven variability that can affect the exact timing and size of the minimum in ice coverage. Since the main interest ( outside maritime navigational requirements ) is the hope to find some indications of long term changes in climate, this is not a very instructive way to use the detailed data available.
It’s too long to summarize, so please read the whole thing.
More articles that are interesting and not too lengthy: this as well as this. I long ago fastened on Judith Curry’s site as the best and most reliable source for climate information. She has impeccable credentials and no political bone to pick, which is more than I can say for most people on either side.