If you publish a list of The World’s Greatest Cities, you need to ensure that your #1 pick doesn’t cause howls of incredulous laughter, coupled with snorts of irritation and open-jawed astonishment. Here’s Time Out’s list:
When did they take this survey — in 1965? Certainly, it was pre-WuFlu, except:
Good grief.
If you’re going to make a list of places to visit, try this one instead. It’s pretty much as full of shit as the first one, though.
Longtime Friend Mrs. Sorenson sends me this disturbing news via email (subject as above):
A mural designed as a tribute to shop staff who worked through the pandemic has been criticised because it “screams welcome to our white town”.
Driffield Town Council said the artwork depicted well-known personalities who worked at independent businesses.
However, some residents took to social media to point out it failed to represent anyone with disabilities or from ethnic minority backgrounds.
And yes, the mural’s personnel (actual people in the village) are whiter than my kitchen cupboards.
However, Mrs. Sor also points out the following (with supporting stats) with respect to the village’s population:
But hey… let’s not let awful stats ‘n stuff get in the way of Wokism, right?
All this might have made a difference to me, were it not for the fact that other than the occasional Victor Davis Hanson piece, I haven’t read anything in National Review for nearly ten years.
Audio recordings obtained by Wired reveal that Google cooperates with and funds a range of establishment conservatives in D.C. that help it fend off scrutiny and oversight from politicians. The organizations named in Wired’s report are the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the Cato Institute.
…
It looks like conservative mag National Review was taking Google cash too. To suppress conservative speech on social media. Was this something that @NRO donors & contributors knew was taking place?
I had to laugh that the once-amusing and now-hysterical Jonah Goldberg sat in the heart of all this.
But Emerald’s best shot comes near the end:
In any culture war, Rich Lowry and the gang have always been the first to stand athwart history, crying: “We surrender first!” They’ve been so weak and defeatist during the Trump years that a year’s subscription to the magazine could be marketed as an estrogen supplement.
And the proof of our disillusionment with this bunch of pantywaists lies in NatRev‘s financial statement and vanishing subscriber list.
And an aside: as usual, I am so far behind the curve that it appears as flat as the horizon, because I’d never heard of Emerald Robinson before the above link from Insty (thankee, Squire). Here she is:
…and here’s something she did.
SGT Cindy Bronson has a message for her fellow Americans in case martial law is declared: “Understand that if active duty military actually get deployed within the United States, that weapon is not just going to be pointed at other people, other countries, it’s pointed at you.”
…and here’s what I’ll be pointing at you:
Anyway, challenge accepted.
At Breitbart News, Paul Bois talks about whether the foul Taliban will be able to use all the weaponry and materiel left behind by our incompetent military.
Frankly, that’s not the point. Nobody cares if the Turbans can use the stuff, what’s really worth discussing is why the military didn’t destroy all of it before they left?
I mean, we’re all chuckling ho ho ho as we watch videos of the Taliban trying to fly a chopper and not being able to get it off the ground; what’s not so funny is that the Iranians, Chinese and all the other assholes of the world are probably lining up to buy it all so that they can hack into the high-tech stuff, where that knowledge can be used against us in the future.
It is a monumental fuck-up, and every senior officer who allowed the equipment to be just left behind without destroying it should be court-martialed. Ditto their superiors who made no provision for doing so in their evacuation orders. But they were probably too busy making plans for Covid vaccinations of the troops and scheduling CRT lectures to bother, is my guess.
I have to quit now because blood pressure.
As the Year Of The Biden Shitshow rumbles on, I find myself in the curious situation of caring deeply about people getting shafted in, for example, Afghanistan, and not caring a shit about it all.
The reason for my glee is that I think the country is realizing — finally — that the Left has no clue. No clue about how to govern, about how to manage foreign policy, about formulating any kind of social policy that isn’t a rehash of failed socialist dogma not only of the past but of the recent past, and absolutely no clue about how to fight and win a war.
As a single individual, there’s pretty much nothing I can do about any of it, really. Al I can do is to chronicle and comment on the depths of scorn with which one can describe their flailing and ineffectual attempts to manage… well, everything.
Over the weekend, I read this article by Erik at No Paseran! in which he states:
[T]he members of the Biden administration, like the drama queens in all Democrat administrations, knows that the true enemies of America, of the planet, and of all mankind are not the Taliban, the Islamists, the Chinese, the Russians, the Soviets, the communists, etc, etc, etc.
The top pressing issue is to turn the United States government and the United States military against those whom all leftists, both in America and abroad, know are America’s, are humanity’s, true enemy — the Republicans, i.e, the American people who still believe in the country, in the flag, and in the Constitution. Also known as fascists, as Nazis, as Adolf Hitlers, and — to this administration — as “insurrectionists” and as “domestic terrorists.”
Of course, we conservatives have known about this forever — the principal weapon of the Left is to dehumanize and demonize their political opposition — so Erik’s comment is accurate indeed.
But for the first time in a long time I feel okay about it. And that’s because I just know that the Left is going to fuck that up just as badly as they’ve managed the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
(In passing, I see that the Biden Bunch have banned imports of Russian-made ammo and -firearms for a year. It’s a little late for that, assholes. Just about everyone who wants an AK-47, AK-74 or Dragunov already has one; there are shitloads of said guns still in people’s houses all over the U.S., and ditto for the various Russkie ammo calibers. The guys at Prvi Partizan, to name but one ammo manufacturer, must be ramping up production and hiring extra shifts.)
If what Erik says is prophetic, i.e. that after pulling us back from all “foreign entanglements”, the Democrat Administration and even the Democrat part of Congress will be devoting all their attention to suppressing conservative America, I’m just laughing.
Their attempts to jigger voting procedures in their favor have stalled or failed, and let us not forget they have to do it all before most of them get tossed out in the mid-term elections of 2022 (15 months, and counting down).
The other thing that makes me gleeful is that even if these assholes are successful in suppressing their domestic political opposition (unlikely), the Great Reset they’re always talking about is not going to turn out quite the way they expected. But by now, the Left should be quite used to the concept of unforeseen outcomes — the word “unexpectedly” is by now very familiar to them.
Bring it on, fuckwits.