Monday, December 30, 2024
No Plausible Defense
My only point here is that Biden has been exactly like this for years. His incapacity has been obvious to anyone who paid attention.
The pretense that he suffered a precipitous decline in recent months may be absurd, but it is necessary. Without the myth of a late-term decline, the national press, the White House and Congressional Democrats would have no plausible defense to the charge that they sacrificed national security and well-being for partisan advantage.
We Need Industrial Scale Grifter Capture
This is the point--all this talk about addressing climate change is mainly an excuse to rip people off and line the pockets of those who are selling the panic.
No doubt there are millions of people who genuinely believe that CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is a looming disaster, and while I disagree with them I understand their concern. But as a practical matter these people are being defrauded, sold a lie that all this "investment" will get them closer to "Net Zero."
Industrial scale carbon capture is the environmental equivalent of wearing cloth masks--it is symbolic but accomplishes nothing other than funding the cloth mask industry. For the rest of us it just makes our lives worse.
"Strategic Reserve"
This is all sheer fantasy, with one exception: the need for a “strategic reserve” of natural gas, although five percent is no doubt much too low. Why is that “strategic reserve” necessary? Because, no matter how much you spend, there will always be times—frequent times, in fact—when the wind doesn’t blow and the Sun doesn’t shine. So a reliable energy source will always be needed.
The financial numbers currently being bandied about in Great Britain are scarcely more realistic than the fantasy calculations upon which the “green revolution” was launched, years ago. The brutal reality is that no government can subsidize lousy sources of energy like wind and solar enough to make them viable.
If so much wealth were not being destroyed, it would be rather entertaining to see the entire “green” energy enterprise collapse before our eyes.
The Covid Coverup
That is what we used to call evidence. It certainly would be a smoking gun revelation, even to non-intel investigators, if politics were not involved. And yet this, along with Dr. Bannan's work in parallel, didn't just get discounted in this August 2021 presidential briefing but entirely suppressed.
Why? The obvious reason is that Biden didn't want to confront China over its role in creating the virus as well as refusing to cooperate in fighting it. To conclude that China manufactured the virus would prompt the US to cut off any more cooperation with China on medical research, a step that should have been taken well before the pandemic based on the deficiencies already known at WIV. Biden wanted to differentiate his administration from Trump's pugnacious China policies, perhaps in no small part because of Biden Inc interests that Hunter Biden had cultivated in the Obama administration.
Instead of dealing with the obvious, the Biden administration kept insisting on the zoonotic-transfer hypothesis despite a lack of any evidence for it. And then they worked with censorship groups funded in part by the State Department to punish anyone who dissented from that conclusion as "conspiracy theorists" and supposedly dangerous purveyors of "disinformation."
And it worked, too. It has taken three years to start getting the truth, and even then only because voters kicked Biden and Harris out of office. The incoming administration will get a chance to look at the records, and the current custodians know it.
Also, from John Hinderaker:
I am just a rank amateur, but to me it seems highly significant that after more than four years of diligent searching, no one has even found a bat (or any other animal) in the wild that was infected with COVID-19. So the “jump” from a wild bat to humans is entirely hypothetical and, as time goes by, less plausible.
If They Want the War to End, the Savages Can Surrender
Hamas started this war as the governing body of Gaza and with the support of the Gazans on October 7, 2023. They are now losing it, and badly. If they want an end to the war, they can capitulate and ask for terms. If they want a hostages-for-prisoners exchange, they can negotiate that as a separate issue. But after Hamas violated every one of their previous nine cease-fire agreements with Israel -- including the one in place on October 7 before Hamas massacred 1200 Israelis in a single day -- they have very little standing to demand "assurances" on anything from the Israelis.
And in about four weeks, that pressure will end when Trump takes office. He'd prefer to have this deal done before his inauguration so as to eliminate a distraction, but Trump may also be looking for an opportunity to remind the region of what an American "red line" should look like. Hamas is all alone now in providing An Example To Others, if you know what I mean, and Trump will likely waste little time in driving that point home.
Civilizational Breakdown
Heather’s long piece eloquently sets out the case against vigilante assassination, which I guess is a public service. But it is depressing that we have come to the point where we have to explain why murder is a bad thing.
Of course our education system is awful, but when a near-majority of young adults think that murder is A-OK as long as the “right” people are being killed, we are looking at something closer to civilizational breakdown. These people presumably had parents, who evidently taught them nothing. My guess is that a large majority of those who applaud Luigi did not attend Sunday School and do not now attend church or synagogue. Likewise, I’m pretty sure that very few of them were Boy Scouts, or participated in any other activity that might have helped to inculcate even the most rudimentary moral sense.
The Executiveless Branch
I don’t doubt that various people, including the press, conspired, but the fact that Joe Biden was senile was open and obvious. It was obvious even before he became president. He ran a basement campaign in 2020, while Donald Trump, who is nearly as old as Biden, toured the country putting on one massive rally after another. I assume everyone understood the reason for that contrast: Biden wasn’t up to running anything like a normal presidential campaign.
Biden’s disability was obvious throughout his presidency. He couldn’t talk without a teleprompter. On the rare occasions when he wasn’t reading a script, he quickly veered into incoherence or worse. Even with a teleprompter, he couldn’t be trusted. He would read instructions like “Pause” and “Repeat line.” An intelligent fifth-grader would have done better.
Biden fell down (or up) steps. He wandered aimlessly. He was officially on vacation half the time. The fact that his aides protected him from public exposure was obvious. And it’s not as though no one was talking about his evident incapacity. Power Line was one of many, many news sources that repeatedly commented on Biden’s dementia. And videos documenting his pitiful state were ubiquitous.
Vast numbers of people, including every salient Democrat and every relevant reporter, knew that Biden was dysfunctional—knew that he was not up to the standard of a normal adult, let alone a normal president.
What is striking to me is not the conspiracy to cover up his condition, which was hardly more successful than the alleged conspiracy to cover up the fact that smoking is bad for you.
What is striking is how few people on the Left—approximately zero—cared about the fact that we didn’t have a functioning president. Why were Democrats so unconcerned about having a president who was basically a cardboard cutout? Because they don’t really think the president is very important. They were content to have the Executive Branch run by nameless White House aides and by party grandees like Barack Obama. They thought, understandably, that the real power in government lies in the administrative agencies, and that those agencies would carry on perfectly well without a sentient being in the White House.
“Joe Biden” was just a name on the ballot, served up because, as of 2020, he had wide name recognition but not a far-left image. A perfect combination! And one that did not require him to do anything at all, once in office. A vote for Biden was simply a vote for things as they were: a government trending always to the left, with trillions of dollars being dispensed by a benign bureaucracy—the real power in America, the fourth branch that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.
Make Our Culture Great Again
What can we make of these appalling findings? Presumably the 41% who say that cold-blooded murder is A-OK don’t go to church. So they rely for moral instruction on the public schools, which border on complete uselessness, and their parents, assuming they have parents. And on the popular culture, which can fairly be described as depraved.
What we are seeing here is a culture in steep decline. Donald Trump never set out to be a moral leader or exemplar, but maybe he can play a role in restoring sanity to our public discourse.
X Post of the Year
I’m not sure why these chestless fan femboys want to create an environment where violence resolves disputes because they are so personally unsuited to that medium. https://t.co/IXEAn4z4OL
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) December 5, 2024
Via David Strom.
