https://quadrant.org.au/bags-of-wind-at-glasgows-pantomime/
As world leaders, their retinues, activists, renewables rent-seekers, mendicant Third World corruptocrats and jet-setting green hysterics gather to posture and preen for their COP26 media courtiers, we’ll endure hours of news footage and a broad acreage of cookie-cutter prose about the so-called ‘climate crisis’.
Above, GBNews‘ Neil Oliver provides the advance antidote for Glasgow’s green gush of mush.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/31/who-eventually-won-the-cold-war/
Pause for a minute to recall the recent past: Did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unlawfully intervene in the chain of command to reroute decisions of nuclear weapon readiness through himself? Did he really contact his Chinese Communist counterpart to promise him that China would be warned of possible U.S. aggression?
Did the lead medical authority on America’s COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, deny under oath the fact that he routed U.S. aid money, through a third party, to the ground-zero Wuhan virology lab to enhance gain-of-function viral research?
Did Attorney General Merrick Garland sic the FBI on parents complaining about critical race theory—on the concocted accusation from a school board group, in part cooked up with White House staffer help, that the parents were likely “domestic terrorists”?
Did we really spend 22 months and $40 million chasing the “Russian collusion” hoax, a myth ginned up by the left-wing media and its enablers in the FBI and CIA?
Does the public really believe our current ministry of information that the “border is closed”? Or that high gas prices are good? Or that empty shelves reflect strong demand and will result in a more mature public no longer needing to buy superfluous goods?
Or that spiraling inflation is proof of a strong economy? Or that the road to the Kabul airport was open to anyone with a U.S. passport who wished to leave? Or that the accidental U.S. drone killing of a family in Kabul was a “righteous strike”?
Or that Russians and Trump operatives created a fake lost Hunter Biden laptop, as our former intelligence officials implied on the eve of the election?
Since when did the government and the now state media issue such serial lies? When did we begin to resemble our old Cold War enemies—to the delight of our current enemies?
Commissars and Culturalists
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/31/how-the-2020-election-was-rigged/
We are a year overdue for the true story of the 2020 elections. Mollie Hemingway has at last delivered it to us in one tidy volume.
It’s a complex story, which makes for a weighty book. The research is thorough, the writing is evidentiary, the style is clinical—like investigative journalism and social science used to be. The endnotes alone run nearly 100 pages.
Reading Rigged, one isn’t jarred by hyperbole, conjecture, or spin. Hemingway is unequivocal on progressive malice, yet she can be scathing of Republicans, too. She is particularly critical of Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to publicize fraud nationally, thereby undermining prior case-by-case efforts to get particular state courts to recognize particular violations of particular state laws.
She also calls out Republican officials who preferred to help the opposition rather than reveal their own state’s dysfunctions. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office, for instance, secretly recorded a telephone appeal from Trump to expose fraud in Fulton County, then misrepresented Trump to the press as asking for the statewide result to be changed.
Overall, the story reads like a tragedy. One alternates between anger and consternation that bleeding obvious facts were not reported by the mainstream media at the time.
Some evidence of election irregularities broke through mainstream censorship: the strange spikes in votes counted for Biden overnight in counties with unusually strong Democratic Party governance and histories of criminal mishandling of votes (Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Fulton County, for example).
Over subsequent days, a news consumer with time and effort could piece together strange disputes. Official election observers were denied access, or kept so far away they could not see any ballots. They sought emergency court orders, but some courts set hearing dates weeks in the future or simply denied jurisdiction. Even if observers did obtain a court order, election officials claimed not to understand it (as in Philadelphia).
In Georgia, observers were told that counting was being suspended overnight, but a surveillance camera recorded video of four persons pulling boxes of ballots from beneath a cloaked table for unobserved digital entry. Still, Georgia’s officers continued to claim that voting had been suspended overnight. Surely this was a story worthy of investigative reporting? The mainstream media preferred to report all the disputes as conspiracy theories.
Witnesses came forward testifying to ballot harvesting, ballot stuffing, counts for the Democratic Party without ballots, ballots for the Republican Party that disappeared without counting. Nevertheless, the Republican Party could not get most of the media to show up to hear these witnesses, or the courts to admit them.
And so 2020 petered out, with the election still disputed but barely investigated. Most of the evidence, most of the admissions, most of the backtracking, waited until after Biden’s victory was confirmed by Congress in January.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/30/low-characters-in-ludicrous-situations/
Reflecting on the unfolding disaster that is our social and political life in the United States during the consulship of Biden, I cannot help but think of Aristotle’s description of the structure of Greek tragedy. Obviously, the parallels are not exact. For one thing, tragedy as Aristotle understood it was a quick affair, its action over within a single day. Our national tragedy, by contrast, seems to lumber on indefinitely.
Then there is the question of the character of the protagonist. Aristotle’s chap is “a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.” Sound like Joe Biden? Almost, maybe, but not really. Rudy Giuliani was not talking through his hat when he invoked the specter of the “Biden crime family,” as the words “laptop,” “China,” and “10 percent for the big guy” remind us.
There are many other differences between tragedy in Aristotle’s sense and the disaster we are suffering through. Still, when I think about the development Aristotle traces from ἁμαρτία (the tragic flaw) through ἀναγνώρισις (recognition) to περιπέτεια (the sudden reversal of fortune) to καταστροφή, the “catastrophe” that ties up the loose ends and consummates the action, I think “We’re somewhere on that road,” though exactly where is hard to say. Have we achieved the enlightenment of recognition yet? I am not at all sure about that.
Signs of the sudden reversal of fortune are all around us, though evidence of any impending catharsis (κάθαρσις) is exceedingly meager. Why? Perhaps it’s because the emotions through which the purgation is supposed to take place are not yet fully present and accounted for. Aristotle said that the emotions of pity (ἔλεος) and fear (φόβος) are the motors of tragic fulfillment. My sense is that there is plenty of fear abroad. Pity? Not so much. (Although, thinking about it, maybe there is plenty of pity around us, too. “Pity,” Aristotle says in the Rhetoric, “may be defined as a feeling of pain at an apparent evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves . . . and moreover to befall us soon.”)
At the end of the day, though, I wonder whether we’re caught in a tragedy at all. I have no doubt that we are hurtling towards a catastrophe (in the Greek sense) that will be, well, catastrophic (in the modern sense). But Aristotle insists that tragedy is about grave matters and noble characters. Comedy, he says, is about low or mean characters and trades in the ludicrous or ridiculous. Isn’t that where we are now? Have we embarked on a new genre, featuring low characters in ludicrous situations who ultimately come, and bring everyone around them, to a disastrous end? Or perhaps it is not so new, but is just the “dark” or “black” comedy that elite opinion, which likes to smirk but hates happy endings, so loves to wallow in?
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/bidens_weird_weekend_in_rome.html
Biden’s weekend in Rome took on an increasingly surreal quality as the weekend progressed. The weirdness started on Saturday when he arrived with an 85-car entourage to attend a G20 summit that was purportedly focused on “climate change” (or, more likely, focused on using climate change to increase political power), followed by Biden’s marginalized status for the group photo op. By Sunday, Biden missed an important photo op, claimed he was playing elevator games, used a reference to Mussolini while in Rome, may have been a COVID carrier when he met with the Pope, and had an ugly rumor following him.
After almost vanishing from Saturday’s photo op, Biden vanished entirely from Sunday’s photo op at Rome’s famous Trevi fountain. There they all were, tossing coins in the fountain to placate pagan gods (and hoping that Gaia heard their pleas regarding climate change) but, unlike yesterday, when a “Where’s Waldo” style search eventually located Biden, this time he was nowhere to be seen:
The White House offered no excuse (so far as I know) for Biden’s absence.
So, he missed a photo op. That’s a “whatever,” right? Maybe, but how do we explain the other strange stuff?
There’s the footage of Biden introducing Secretary of State Blinken. The first thing you’ll notice is Biden’s barely-there delivery, as if he’s someone who doesn’t speak English and is reading the words phonetically. But what really caught everyone’s attention was that reference to getting the trains to run on time.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/ibram_x_kendi_just_gave_away_the_con.html
Not only did he undermine the theories that have made him famous but he also outed himself as a “transphobe.”
Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) has made a name for himself as an “anti-racist” activist, which is an Orwellian way of saying that his entire career is based upon arguing that America is a systemically racist country and that all White Americans are complicit. However, in a tweet that he swiftly deleted, Kendi effectively acknowledged that power in America lies with racial minorities, not with Whites. Oh, and he’s a transphobe.
Kendi’s breakout best-seller, How To Be An Antiracist, is on every Critical Race Theory reading list, whether in America’s K-12 schools, its colleges (some of which have made it mandatory), its corporations, or the American military. In 2019, Kendi wrote an essay for The Atlantic claiming, as all race hustlers do, that America’s real founding was 1619, when the British brought slaves to America’s shores:
Her name was Angela, one of the first known Africans in British North America.
His name was John, the first known antiblack racist in colonial America.
In 1619, this black woman and white man—what they embody—arrived months apart in 12-year-old Virginia, the first of the 13 British colonies that became the United States. Angela was the original embodiment of enslavement, of survival, of the 400-year African American struggle to survive, to be free of racism. John was the original embodiment of elite white male power, of the democracy of racists, of its 400-year struggle to survive, to be free of anti-racism.
And there you have the whole systemic racism theory in full. Of course, even ardent leftists, if honest, concede that this is all an ahistorical lie.
But we shouldn’t expect more from Kendi, for he’s not the brightest bulb in the box. Watch him struggle to explain what’s constitute racism. It’s embarrassing but also really funny:
Of course, Kendi could have stood there picking his nose and he would have been feted, because he’s saying what leftists long to hear. Dividing America along racial lines is the perfect way to break this country and lead it into the glorious new morning of socialism.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/marxism-witchcraft-and-midnight-burials-bernies-daniel-greenfield/
In the 80s, the Sandinista Marxist terrorists were hotter than pastel suits and shoulder pads.
Sandinista! by The Clash was eating up the music charts and Hollywood celebrities like Ed Asner and Mike Farrell bypassed Cuba for the exciting new socialist nightmare in Nicaragua.
When Marxist butcher Daniel Ortega appeared at a New York Athletic Club reception in 1984, CBS’ Mike Wallace, Michael Douglas, and the entire media showed up to give the terrorist and his accomplices a tongue bath.
“To try to get the guy to bed, and then kill him! Fantastic,” the wife of the MTV president at the reception gushed over a female Sandinista terrorist who had laid a honey trap for a Nicaraguan official. “That’s my dream, to do that to Reagan, George Bush, go right down the line.”
But no one fell in love with the Sandinistas quite as hard as John Kerry who, along with other Democrats, wrote love letters addressing the Marxist terror leader as Dear Commandante.
Shortly after taking office, John Kerry flew to Nicaragua to meet with Ortega and returned bearing Sandinista propaganda.
“These are just poor people, no money, no food, just like Vietnam, and they are just trying to stay alive. They just want peace,” Kerry whined.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/poison-jihad-uk-lawyer-injects-food-items-blood-robert-spencer/
Leoaai Elghareeb, a 37-year-old Muslim in London, was recently charged, according to the UK’s Daily Mail, with “contaminating or interfering with goods with blood at three supermarkets in west London.” Elgareeb must be one of those people the establishment media keeps telling us about, those dirt-poor, woefully ignorant people who turn to jihad out of sheer desperation, right? Wrong. He is a solicitor for a firm known as Opus Legal contractors; legal work generally makes its practitioners affluent, and the Daily Mail tells us that “homes and flats in the area where Mr Elghareeb lives sell for upwards of £1.5m.” (that’s well over two million dollars). So why did he do such a thing? Could it have something to do with his Islamic faith? Of course not! Why, that would be “Islamophobic”!
Elghareeb contaminated food at three London supermarkets: Tesco Express, Little Waitrose and Sainsbury’s Local. According to the Guardian, Elghareeb is “alleged to have entered the Waitrose store at 7.30pm on Wednesday with syringes filled with blood. The prosecutor Jennifer Garland said Elghareeb was accused of using the syringes to ‘inject food items with blood.’” He is also “accused of doing the same in the nearby Sainsbury’s store, as well as throwing eggs, before going on to inject more items in Tesco Express and then being arrested.” No one could be sure of the extent of Elghareeb’s work, and so according to the Daily Mail, “Hammersmith & Fulham Council advised shoppers to throw away anything bought from the three shops.”
Elghareeb, the court was told, was a “man of previous good character.” Sure he was. So what happened? Neither the Daily Mail nor the Guardian would dare mention it, but jihad contamination and poisoning attempts are not new. Earlier this year in India, there were four incidents of Muslims spitting on the food of non-Muslims, one said he’d been doing it for years. Also in India in 2019, Muslims plotted to poison food offered in a Hindu temple that is consumed by at least 40,000 devotees.
Al-Qaeda has long considered the contamination of food as a jihad mass murder tactic. In 2018, a Muslim named Husnain Rashid called on other Muslims to murder four-year-old Prince George and poison supermarket ice cream. That same year, a convert to Islam was sentenced for distributing material calling for jihad and possessing a handbook for poisoning unbelievers. Another owner of that poisoning handbook ultimately plotted instead to attack non-Muslims with a knife. And in 2017, the Islamic State called on Muslims to poison food in Western supermarkets. And it has happened at least twice before in Britain: in 2008, shop owner Saeed Hashmi sold chocolate cake sprinkled with human feces.
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/11/15/cackling-kamala/#slide-1
Observations on a political albatross
Mayday, Code Red, and SOS! As fires bust out everywhere on the Hindenburg of vice presidents, Democrats are sending out dire cries of emergency, not via radio but using their own signaling systems: Politico and Axios and the Washington Post. “How do you solve a problem like Kamala?” the Democrats who demanded a woman of color on the 2020 presidential ticket are asking themselves. Who would have guessed that, as a moss-brained 78-year-old president stumbles around aimlessly through half a dozen crises of his own making, the Halloween screams in the Democratic Party are mostly about the president’s heir apparent?
Kamala Harris is a heartbeat away from becoming the first woman president, the first Asian president, the first woman-of-color president. Big wins all around, right? So why are the Democrats so nervous? They appear to be on the verge of calling in the Henry Wallace treatment and dumping Harris before Joe Biden runs for president again, this time with the election weeks before his 82nd birthday, in 2024. “People think she’s f***ing up, maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent,” one Democratic operative told Axios. White House aides use earthy language like “sh**show” to describe Harris’s “poorly managed” office. It’s “an abusive environment,” a staffer “with direct knowledge” told Politico, adding, “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like sh**.”
What if Biden should decline to run for reelection as an octogenarian? Harris, as his lady in waiting, would almost have to be the party’s designated successor because she is black and female. To replace her, according to the party’s prevailing thought codes and its media enablers, would be racist and sexist. Yet the prospect of riding into battle behind Kamala Harris’s generalship has every Dem in D.C. reaching for the Maalox, if not the Ativan or maybe the hemlock.
Dems including “many current senior administration figures,” says Axios, do not think she could beat any potential foe, from Lord Voldemort to Ernst Stavro Blofeld to Donald Trump. If the options facing the American voter on a future ballot turn out to be “Kamala Harris” and “Literally Anyone Else,” Harris is going to be not just an underdog but a longshot. She’s a lady whose trademark gambit — the deranged cackle, which she Jokerishly emits anytime she can’t answer a question — makes Hillary Clinton seem as lovable as a litter of golden-retriever puppies. Unlike Hillary, Harris does not make people feel sorry for her for having been ritually humiliated in her marriage to an intern-abusing lech. Unlike Hillary, Harris doesn’t make people think “She earned it” or “She paid her dues.” Madam Cankles looks like a redoubtable candidate compared to Madam Cackles.
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2021/10/31/highly-vaccinated-vermont-has-spiking-covid-cases-what-happened-n425959
When the vaccines first began to roll out on a national scale early this year, the state of Vermont was one of the earliest leaders in volunteering to be jabbed. The state quickly established itself as one of the early adopters and is now ranked as the most highly vaccinated in the nation. At this point, the state boasts a rate of just shy of 80% who have received at least one shot, with the majority of the remainder being made up of children who only just became eligible.
There are a variety of reasons they were able to do this, both anecdotal and statistically supportable. First, the state only has a population of 623,000, largely condensed into a few major population centers, so it wasn’t hard to set up pods for everyone. Also, no matter how controversial it may be to say this, Vermont is one of the whitest states in the nation (92.5% white, 1.32% Black, 1.3% Hispanic). Vaccine hesitancy in America has typically been highest among minorities, so they had less of that to contend with. On top of that, they tend to have a fairly socialist population that doesn’t mind having the government tell them what to do. (They keep electing Bernie Sanders to every imaginable office he likes, so what do you expect?)
So with such a high rate of supposedly immunized residents, why are they having a spike in COVID cases? Granted, it’s not much of a spike compared to more densely populated areas. On October 16 they recorded 342 new cases and two deaths. But still, their numbers are trending in the wrong direction as we make our way through autumn. What gives? According to a report this weekend from the Boston Globe, Vermont may be a “victim of its own success.” They rushed to get vaccinated early and now that may be coming back to bite them.
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