RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/08/the-great-leftist-bully-boy-hope/

The refined and moral Left places itself on a pedestal, above the fray—and as such it has a natural attraction to those in its midst who do not.

By any empirical measure, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has proven utterly disingenuous, and far more so than average politicians. 

Unlike other political mediocrities, his inanities have led to roughly 13,000 unnecessary deaths or more, when he did not fully utilize the federal offer of a hospital ship and makeshift care facilities for COVID-19 patients. Instead, Cuomo sought to make rooms in New York hospitals available largely by transferring or redirecting elderly infected  patients into pristine long-term health-care facilities—and then patently lied about that government-ordered disaster.

Cuomo’s serial sexual harassments and narcissistic violations of the privacy of female aides and acquaintances were serially covered up and contextualized by the leftwing media—most prominently and unethically by his own brother and CNN news anchor, Chris Cuomo. 

The only apparent reasons why Cuomo has not resigned under left-wing pressure are the uncertain ensuing political calculus for Democrats and the embarrassment that Joe Biden—similarly accused by at least eight women of improper touching and unwarranted hugging and squeezing—was photographed violating the private spaces of underage girls, and faced a serious charge of crass sexual assault.

In Orwellian fashion, in the midst of this shipwreck of governance, Cuomo received a book advance package of over $5 million to chronicle his advice on effective leadership. Neither Cuomo nor his publisher could have believed the extravagant advance reflected likely book sales. So the investment was either due to New York echo-chamber, celebrity incestuousness or anticipated quid pro quo influence peddling. And, in fact, Cuomo ended up receiving more than $110 per book sold, instead of the usual $2 to $3 per book under standard royalty arrangements. 

How did Cuomo find time to write a memoir in the midst of running New York, during one of the worst COVID-19 fatality records in the nation (2,791 COVID deaths per million in New York, versus 1,853 in Texas,  1,835 in Florida, , and 1,637 in California)? And why would Cuomo wish even to whitewash such an un-washable and disreputable record?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oregon-proposal-would-redefine-breeding-as-a-sexual-assault-on-animals/

People wrongly think of the animal-rights movement as a more energetic form of animal-welfare advocacy. It is not. Rather, animal-rights activists intend to eventually outlaw all ownership of animals, a project they recognize as multi-generational.

Often, activists mask their actual intentions. But a proposed Oregon constitutional amendment, currently in the petition-signing stage, illustrates the extent of animal-rights radicalism.

The proposed amendment would essentially criminalize many of the practices required to raise and slaughter food animals. First, it would remove current exemptions in the law for “good animal husbandry” practices that protect ranchers and others from being charged with abuse for injuring an animal. From Initiative Petition 13 (the bracketed sections delete current law, my emphasis):

A person commits the crime of animal abuse in the second degree if, except as [otherwise authorized by law] necessary to defend him or herself against an apparent threat of immediate violence, the person intentionally, knowingly or recklessly causes physical injury to an animal. [(2) Any practice of good animal husbandry is not a violation of this section.]

The food industry routinely kills animals by mortally injuring them. Other practices such as castration of steers, also would constitute “injury.” By removing the “good animal husbandry” exemptions — and note, “good” practices do not permit abuse — necessary activities of raising animals for food would seem to be criminalized.

And here’s the real kicker. Breeding animals, other than through animal intercourse, would be considered a sexual offense, akin to bestiality:

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/less-than-0-01-percent-of-vaccinated-americans-developed-severe-covid-breakthrough-case-cdc-says/

According to the latest data released by the CDC, less than 0.01 percent of vaccinated individuals have developed COVID breakthrough infections resulting in serious health complications or death.

As of August 2, more than 164 million people have been fully inoculated against the disease, CDC numbers indicate. Less than 0.001 percent of this population have suffered severe or fatal cases of COVID when they contracted it post-vaccination. Since the vaccine’s distribution, the agency has received reports of 7,525 patients with COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections who were hospitalized or died.

“Vaccine breakthrough cases are expected. COVID-19 vaccines are effective and are a critical tool to bring the pandemic under control. However, no vaccines are 100% effective at preventing illness in vaccinated people. There will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19,” the CDC wrote.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-insufferable-hypocrisy-of-john-kerry/

In February, Icelandic reporter Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson asked the United States climate czar, John Kerry, if he thought flying in a private jet to Reykjavik in 2019 to pick up the Arctic Circle award for climate leadership was environmentally responsible. Kerry had a dispensation, noting that flying was “the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.”

This week, the Daily Mail reported that Kerry had flown in a private jet to Martha’s Vineyard — where he owns an $11 million rambler — for Obama’s 60th birthday bash. A State Department spokesperson denied the story, claiming that “Secretary Kerry lives on Martha’s Vineyard, he did not travel there for a party. He took a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, he did not fly commercial or private.” This statement means nothing. No one is accusing Kerry of flying his plane onto a runway at Obama’s compound. Whatever the case, Kerry’s carbon-spewing private jet is busy. He and his family often fly to Sun Valley (where the family has a house), D.C. (ditto), Los Angeles, and sometimes just between Martha’s Vineyard and Boston (another house) — because the Earth isn’t worth the two-and-a-half-hour drive. You can rent a similar plane for around $15,500 per hour.

I’m not much of a classist, but I get why this kind of sanctimony and hypocrisy fuels populist anger. Hundreds of well-heeled, maskless elites get to dance at Barack Obama’s birthday party while schlubs like you are still yelling into your useless masks just to be heard over the din at a supermarket — even though you’re vaccinated.

Marrying into money has its perks, and Kerry is well within his rights to enjoy the remarkable conveniences the modern world affords him. The problem is — as with Obama’s party — that the same people demand you surrender comforts and freedoms for the communal good.

I’m often told this brand of gotcha is irrelevant: Kerry’s flights are trifling in the big picture. Even if Kerry is a hypocrite, it doesn’t change the fact that climate change threatens our lives. Just today, the U.N. released a report starkly warning that climate change is now “code red for humanity,” and it is our last chance to implement policies and wide-ranging reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. (This is the first last chance to save the planet since 2019’s last chance to save the planet.) And Kerry doesn’t seem very nervous about any of it. If the climate technocrats truly believed that climate change was menacing humanity’s existence, they wouldn’t act the way they do, just as if elites truly believed the Delta variant scaremongering they engage in, they wouldn’t be participating in parties with hundreds of their closest friends.

It’s easy to find politicians saying dumb things. Television news gives them plenty of coverage. Viewers like colorful voices, which are often the most extreme. The resulting Kardashianization of politics doesn’t matter much unless these caricatures tarnish an entire political party, define its public perception, and compromise its chances of passing legislation and winning elections.

That’s the Democrats’ problem with “the Squad,” led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This problem arose again last week when squad member Cori Bush told a national TV audience how eager she is to defund the police. She said nothing to convince anyone who rejects her views. She probably made matters worse with her transparent hypocrisy, defending her right to hire expensive private security guards while advocating less police protection for everyone else.

Rep. Bush hasn’t learned the single most important lesson about being stuck in a hole: Stop digging. The St. Louis Democrat doesn’t dig with shovels, either. She bought an industrial-size excavator and went to work. The hole she’s digging is “defund the police,” and polls show she’s mining for fool’s gold. The defund movement may be popular with some wealthy (white) elites, activists on the extreme left and, at least temporarily, some African Americans in congressional districts like Bush’s, though its popularity even in those precincts will fade as violence continues to rise. Everyone else is already staunchly opposed. They fear, quite reasonably, that defunding will lead to more crime, not only because there will be fewer cops on the beat but because those who remain will limit their active policing because they lack political support.

A new poll, just completed by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and Harris Poll, shows that 75% of respondents want more police and only 25% want less. About the same number, 72%, oppose defunding the police. A slight majority even favors restoring “stop and frisk” policies to “deter gun crime,” something New York did under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg before ending the practice because so many young minority men were being searched.

Pollster Mark Penn, co-leader of the Harvard/Harris survey, now says rising violence is the single most important issue for the 2022 midterms. “Crime is becoming the next crisis in America,” he concluded, “with overwhelming numbers seeing an increase in crime and Americans want stricter, not looser, enforcement of laws.” There’s no question which party has the advantage on that issue. The question for Democrats is: What can they do to recover?

Of course, many voters also want to see police reforms and greater transparency. Both are being put in place across the country. Most of all, Americans want police, prosecutors, and judges to do their respective jobs and protect them from predators. That means the left’s push to slash police funding has become a major electoral liability for mainstream Democrats, both nationally and locally. One sign that the political winds have changed is that two progressive cities, Seattle and Minneapolis, which gutted their police budgets last year, now want to increase them. They are not alone.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/tk-newsletter-on-good-people-and?token=

I reread Lolita this weekend, as I do every few years or so, usually when I’m down or uninspired or feeling like I’ve forgotten why people choose the writing life. I revere the book for a hundred reasons, most having to do with its extraordinarily savage humor, but this time around, affected by depressing thoughts I’ve had reading news of late, I found myself asking a new question: how can I like Humbert Humbert?

Vladimir Nabokov was obsessed with puzzles, tricks, and ploys. All his novels make treasure-hunts out of his effusive wordplay (“We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001”), and his fascination with chess is such an overt theme that one starts to feel the logic of the game everywhere. When protagonist Humbert incautiously dismisses the danger of recording his pedophilic fixations in a diary by saying, “Only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script,” and a short time later comes up with his too-clever-by-half plan to rape the daughter by way of marrying the mother, it hits us like revealed check when Charlotte Haze really does discover, and read, the devastating journal — the twist was sitting there all along. Humbert was a laughably clumsy criminal, but a flawless narrator whose confessional is a succession of such devious gambits and traps, in which he exults in thinking nine moves ahead of his reader-judges. Is conspiring to trick us into sympathy with the unforgivable another of his ruses?

It isn’t. In a story that piles word-games atop word-games — the whole subplot involving Humbert’s Dostoyevskian opposite Clare Quilty is a chess match, in which Humbert loses his queen — the most confounding plot device of all, the question of how we can not only tolerate but become fast friends with the book’s demonic narrator, is no manipulation. Humbert Humbert is nearly a purely evil character, who not only kidnaps and rapes his “darling” twelve year-old Lolita but conspires to have a baby with her and rape that child. His “confession” is nothing of the sort. He’s not retelling his breathless story to expiate guilt, in the Christian sense (the idea would have bored him to neuralgia). That he presents his appeal to the “winged gentlemen” of his cosmic jury as such is another of his chess-ruses, and a particularly disgusting one. He recounts the vilest scenes of his crime spree in such ecstatic slow motion that we realize he’s conned us, like a serial killer who, having led police to his burial ground, pants and grabs at himself with pleasure.