New headlights, to go with all the other new stuff. Brakes, oil, plugs, clutch cables, tires — the bikes are newer than they’ve been in a while. Drawing on his history of supporting school-choice initiatives, he announced an ambitious new effort to give parents billions in federal funds – as much as $10,000 per child -- and allow them to pick the emergency-education method that would best fit their child’s and families’ needs.
“If the schools do not reopen, the funding should go to parents to send their children to [the] public, private, charter, religious or home school of their choice,” Trump told reporters Thursday during a press briefing. “The key word being ‘choice.’ If the school is closed, the money should follow the student so the parents and families are in control of their own decisions.”And if not that, then at least require the schools to go back to their core role as babysitters. The only thing worse than spending $10K a kid for an ideologically corrupt non-education is to fail to get some expensive childcare out of it.
Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and a dogged Trump defender, last week told Fox Business: “The No. 1 question I get, whether I'm in the 4th District of Ohio or traveling around our state or traveling around the country, the No. 1 question I get from people is, they will walk up to me and say, 'when is somebody going to jail?'”
If a neighborhood grocery store refuses to reopen, it may be inconvenient, but families wouldn't be devastated; they could take their money elsewhere. Imagine if you were forced to pay your neighborhood Walmart the same amount of money each week regardless of whether they provided your family with any groceries. The store would have little incentive to reopen in an effective or timely manner.
It sounds absurd. But you have essentially just imagined today's compulsory K–12 school system.
"It would give you a very good indication of the footprint of these buildings and the scale of the structure.
"I suppose that's one of the reasons why this feels so significant, because these are truly monumental structures, they are absolutely huge by the standards of the age.
"These could probably be some of the largest structures built in the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD."
Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.Most likely the sterility is the intent of the drugs; the whole point of a genocide is to get rid of the enemy population, after all. Which also explains the further rather gruesome details about the rapes being accompanied by forced abortions and contraceptions.
Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.
The spike defies easy explanation, experts say, pointing to the toxic mix of issues facing America in 2020: an unemployment rate not seen in a generation, a pandemic that has killed more than 130,000 people, stay-at-home orders, rising anger over police brutality, intense stress, even the weather.... Jerry Ratcliffe, a Temple University criminal justice professor and host of the “Reducing Crime” podcast, put it more bluntly: “Anybody who thinks they can disentangle all of this probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”So actually your experts know exactly what is going on, but for some reason want to describe it as a mysterious tangle rather than a problem with a fairly clear set of solutions. Why might that be? The very next line in the story explains:
President Donald Trump has seized on the violence for political gain, accusing Democrats of being weak and suggesting the crime wave is being driven by recent protests calling for racial justice, police reform and drastic cuts in law enforcement funding.Ah.
Diversity is the value du jour, but is there any diversity of opinion in your life? Poll your pals (you can phrase it as a solicitation for confirmation so no one mistakes you for one of the wrongthinking others) about some of the issues of the day. Isn’t abortion cool? Regular people should not have scary rifles, right? White Fragility was really eye-opening, huh? Anyone in your life likely to answer “No?” Well, lots of people in your country would. If you were shocked and stunned that Tom Cotton suggested letting the 101st Airborne go to town on the rioters, you need to get out more.
But the rigorous intellectual solidarity of your caste might not strike you as a bad thing. After all, your views are manifestly right, and to disagree with them is a moral failing deserving of consignment to the lowest circle of cancellation hell. In fact, some of your kind consider it a moral obligation to cut such reprobates out of your life – begone Mom, and take your “All lives matter” anti-intersectionality cisgendered patriarchal colonialism with you!I wish I could enjoy Schlichter's wish-fulfillment novels more. They're a comeuppance-fest, but he needs a co-writer or something. Compared to him, John Ringo has a feather-light satirical touch.
Does anyone have *any clue* what Trump was rambling about during his insane Mount Rushmore speech (as dark a speech as any American president has ever given)? If someone is trying to tear down statues of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, I haven't heard a d*** thing about it.I'd almost be willing to bet my sister, for example, hasn't heard a d*** thing about it. The cloak of silence is powerful. The Upton Sinclair quotation nails it:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.I notice that Seth Abramson inserted the requisite descriptor "dark," but I hope someone warns him he left out "divisive." That's no way to stay off the tumbrel.
When cancel culture comes for FDR, will the New Deal also be cancelled as well?
Related: Ross Douthat on The Ghost of Woodrow Wilson: Just as “Jefferson’s memorial wasn’t built to celebrate his slaveholding, [Princeton’s] Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs wasn’t named for Wilson to honor him for being a segregationist…the school will remain his school, whatever name gets slapped upon it, so long as it pursues the projects of enlightened progressive administration and global superpowerdom. Obviously there are people, right and left, who would prefer that one or both of those projects be abandoned. But they aren’t likely to be running the renamed school. Instead, it will continue to be run by 21st-century Wilsonians — who will now act as if their worldview sprang from nowhere, that its progenitor did not exist, effectively repudiating their benefactor while accepting his inheritance.”My husband wants to know when we can expect the income tax to go away.
“I sure am glad I live in a free country," said one man in California as he checked his phone to see what the current unilateral mandates by his governor would allow him to do this year....
Guidelines released by governors across the country so far include the following:
Launching fireworks inside
Barbecuing inside
Watching fireworks on YouTube since they're probably illegal in your state anyway
Whispering "God Bless America" so as not to upset your neighbors
Wearing a mask while inside your home to muffle any patriotic songs or statements
Forgoing hamburgers and hot dogs in favor of more sustainable food products like bugs and tofu
Sitting in silence and contemplating how much you hate America
A new study by Pew research says only 1/6 of the protesters are Black. Four out of five are Democrats. This is not the poor working class fighting for a livable wage. It’s an act of performance art staged and underwritten by our nation’s elite, in the tradition of Woodstock or Occupy Wall Street.... This is a generational fight within our ruling elite class. For decades, the elites have taught their children that America is a bad place. It’s an evil country, they say: To be patriotic is to be ignorant about America’s many sins. Be woke, the upper classes bark at their kids! Open your eyes to all that is wrong with the U.S. and its history.But it's almost Independence Day, and I'm not feeling it. I love my country -- not my government, but definitely my country -- and I'm not willing to give it up. I'm willing to run up the black flag, but not quite ready to give up the red, white, and blue one.
America’s elites are scrambling to find ways to show they’re on the side of the oppressed so that they, too, can be considered victims.... One writer put it this way: This is a revolution that comforts the comfortable.
Following the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell for sex abuse charges, the FBI is taking no chances in keeping her safe while she awaits trial. Sparing no expense, the FBI has hired top-notch Italian bodyguard Hiluigi Clintonelli.... Thanks to the particularly glowing reviews from high-profile individuals such as President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, all federal prison security checks were waived for Hiluigi....Do we want to run a death pool on how long this woman lasts in our prisons?
Clintonelli also connected all camera feeds to her personal server to ensure that all recorded video was properly secured.
“We think that what’s going on is it’s the people who are not going to protest are staying away,” said Andrew Friedson, the CU-Denver professor who is one of the paper’s co-authors. “The overall effect for the entire city is more social distancing because people are avoiding the protests.”Well, I'm certainly not going down to any of the protests, so maybe there's something to that.
A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste, whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranks apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.The Indian caste system can be sensibly discussed in terms of 'throughout human history,' since it occupies something like the same scope. Nazi Germany was only around for a few years. The Nazi system wasn't a caste system anyway; it aimed to eliminate even Germans who had less-than-ideal traits (by the lights of the government). As Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism points out, the Nazi system was gearing up to purify Germans through eugenics just as soon as it finished eliminating Jews.
Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.
While Americans celebrate Independence Day with fireworks, barbecues, and merrymaking, Democrats celebrate Dependence Day by staying inside and weeping over all the freedom going on outside. The celebrations conclude with the reading of the Communist Manifesto and the singing of "Imagine".H/t BB, of course. Their news isn't really fake anymore, though, is it?
