Home » Open thread 6/29/23

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Open thread 6/29/23 — 33 Comments

  1. Throughout the Clinton and Obama years, the standard narrative whenever corruption or incompetence was exposed was to claim that the president had no knowledge and couldn’t be held responsible. We are going to be seeing a lot from that playbook for a while.

    Just a reminder — with Abu Ghraib, W was held responsible by the jackal media for the actions of low level personnel in a military prison on the other side of the world for the unspeakably horrible crime of putting underwear on the heads of terrorists (while terrorists engaged in the truly sickening torture and murder).

    The concept of executive accountability has been made so elastic that it has lost shape permanently. Don’t let the bastards get away with it.

  2. The competing claims over whether Garland made the call on Hunter prosecution don’t matter. The point is that it is impossible for the president’s DOJ to investigate and make prosecutorial decisions about the president and his family.

    The failure to appoint a special counsel means Garland is responsible for what happened. Period. Whether he had actual knowledge or not. His department acted corruptly, and he failed to do what he should have to keep it from happening.

  3. https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/29/the-democrats-definition-of-democracy-is-like-the-marxist-definition-of-peace/

    Excellent piece.

    “If Democrats were as straightforward as their philosophical consigliere, they would define democracy, which they refer to in worshipful tones, as the absence of any challenge to their political power. Given how that party has continually revealed its authoritarian core, there can be no other explanation.

    We’ve argued before that the Democrats don’t want to govern under constitutional limits but instead rule without constraint, which can happen only when their power is unchallengeable. ”

    The evidence cited is considerable.

  4. Seems like the big news so far today is the Supreme Court ruling that university admissions programs that use affirmative action and other race-based admissions criteria are unconstitutional and violate the 14th Amendment. Here’s the summary. This certainly seems like good news for once. But I’ve zero doubt that the Left will attempt to use this to energize their base through mischaracterizations.

  5. Stan, re: “The concept of executive accountability has been made so elastic that it has lost shape permanently. Don’t let the bastards get away with it.”

    Exactly so. A leader can delegate ‘authority’ but not ‘responsibility’.

  6. It’s a sound ruling. Unfortunately, universities are already scheming their resistance. This is why so many schools are no longer using test scores as an admission criterion.

  7. Turning institutions of higher learning into Gresham’s Tragedy of the Commons?
    (Talk about mixed metaphors…)

  8. As our hostess here has so frequently pointed out, a large portion of our country’s current problems comes from the leftist conquest of higher education. DeSantis sees this, and has done quite a bit about it in his home state. Now he’s suing the Education Department, asking a federal judge to block the Education Department’s reliance on private accrediting agencies, which gives these private entities nearly unlimited power over educational institutions.

    https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/06/ron-desantis-goes-for-jugular-of-education-establishment-sues-to-halt-unchecked-power-of-federal-enabled-college-accreditators/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ron-desantis-goes-for-jugular-of-education-establishment-sues-to-halt-unchecked-power-of-federal-enabled-college-accreditators

  9. Re: SCOTUS decision banning race based college admissions

    One must have their head way up their defecatory orifice if they think this decision will prevent race based college admissions.
    Colleges will simply find a different way to make one’s race the deciding factor in the admissions process.

    Speaking of discrimination in college admissions; well qualified, Asian-American students are routinely rejected by top notch colleges. No mystery as to why.

    What is truly astonishing is that the NAACP and democrat black members of Congress (and probably the loud mouth, black carpet-baggers like Sharpton, et. al.) are against school choice.

    In essence, these black “elites” (this includes Obama; and where did his kids go to school??) are telling black school kids and their parents that they MUST go to the worst schools on earth and receive a terrible education. Schools that the black elites would never, ever send their own kids.
    And then folks wonder why blacks need open admissions to get into colleges?
    And what does the black leadership gain by holding this viewpoint?
    Fame, influence and a fat bank account given to them by…….drum roll please….the WHITE liberal progressive elites who employ them in high paying jobs within the media or politics.
    How fantastic.

    It’s interesting to hear black comedians ( Dave Chappell, Chris Rock, et. al.) joke/talk about n*****s and their “culture.” These comedians are just about the only folks that are allowed to publicly point out the cultural rot and social pathologies that exist within the black community. Candace Owens also does not hold back in pointing out the negative attributes of black American culture.

    Recently finished reading the Great Speeches of Frederick Douglass. If he were alive today he would be vilified and condemned by the black “leadership” and white liberal progressives with the same vehemence and disdain displayed in speaking of Clarence Thomas.

  10. Re: SCOTUS and Affirmative Action

    As several have pointed out, this doesn’t prevent college admissions (rife with woke orthodoxy) from waging a covert resistance to maintain AA.

    But of course. Still, it’s an important stake to have hammered into the ground.

    Make the bastids hide what they’re doing. It will leave a stink which will be noticed.

  11. The left immediately is adding to their attacks on Thomas due to the ruling. Can’t have an uppity black leaving the plantation.

  12. JohnTyler – The next move may be to deploy disparate impact analysis against the universites. That is, if the universities are still stealth-discriminating on the basis of race, then their admissions process will have a “disparate impact” on applicants of disfavored races, which should be detectable. Under disparate impact analysis, once it is demonstrated that an action has a disparate impact by race, then that action is considered discrimination, without regard to whether anyone actually discriminated by race.

    When I first learned about disparate impact theory, I thought it was a crazy idea from the 1970’s that was on its way to obsolecence because it was so clearly bonkers. If only! But if we can make an argument that disparate impact theory should be applied to college admissions, I see that as a win-win. If courts accept it, it will root out now-illegal discrimination. If the courts reject it, then disparate impact theory itself is undermined. Win-win.

  13. Turning institutions of higher learning into Gresham’s Tragedy of the Commons?

    Barry Meislin:

    No biggee, but that would be Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.” (I didn’t read “Whole Earth” publications for 30-odd years, and they were odd, for nothing.)

    Hardin’s paradigm was that if there were a resource held in common it would therefore be in the interest of each individual or group to exploit the common resource to the max, which would inevitably lead to the exhaustion of that resource.

    Eureka! Sounds like capitalism and eco-catastrophe to me, Bucky.

    So the Tragedy of the Commons became a dominant metaphor among environmentalists. It’s not entirely wrong, but humans have a way of getting around such things.

    Fast forward to today, I discover that Garrett Hardin has already been canceled:
    ______________________________________

    But here are some inconvenient truths: Hardin was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe. He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist.

    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
    ______________________________________

    Say no more!

  14. The opinion contains this explicit warning to those who will, inevitably, play cute semantic games to keep the racial discrimination regime going under another guise (pp. 39-40):

    “But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.” Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 325 (1867).”

    Shot across bow, fired. You can bet it will be tested; we’ll see how it plays out. In the meantime, I’d like to be a fly on the wall of university legal counsel offices across this fair land today.

    If this doesn’t give red state governors and AGs a gland infusion to start dismantling the DEI Industrial Complex at institutions in their states, nothing will.

  15. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it:

    “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
    ~ Chief Justice John Roberts

  16. “We can’t find an autistic kid who was unvaccinated.”

    Nor can we find one who doesn’t breathe oxygen, doesn’t drink water, or doesn’t put their pants on one leg at a time.

    But before 1963 we did find unvaccinated kids with measles, about 4 million annually, of whom 50,000 were hospitalized and 500 died, year after year.

    Since measles vaccination, there’s only hundreds of measles of cases a year instead of millions, nobody has died since 2015, and the vast majority of these cases are among the unvaccinated exposed to foreigners who have measles.

  17. But before 1963 we did find unvaccinated kids with measles, about 4 million annually, of whom 50,000 were hospitalized and 500 died, year after year.
    ==
    I’m afraid the COVID vaccine is about as effective as a flu shot, if that.

  18. cb; Frederick; Art Deco:

    We can indeed find autistic children who have not been vaccinated.

    The person quoted by Gateway Pundit was talking about the Amish, who are a small and genetically special group not representative of the general population. See this for a discussion of Amish heredity and health.

  19. AI-Generated Books of Nonsense Are All Over Amazon’s Bestseller Lists (https://tinyurl.com/4wax9246).

    Amazon is trying to stop the flood of AI books, but what happens when the AI books are no longer nonsense? What happens when they’re better than the books written by real, flesh-and-blood authors? Will the romance go out of romance novels? Will the fiction go out of science fiction? Will all the readers also become AI bots? What happens when more and more activity becomes a closed AI loop?

  20. I wouldn’t take the SPLC’s word for anything.

    Kate:

    Nor would I. I see it more as a circular firing squad.

    Garrett Hardin may have been cancelled. However, I would argue that the “Tragedy of the Commons” lives on and remains the template for current elite thinking about the environment.

    In my analysis the elite have already triaged most of the human race to save the planet for themselves.

  21. Tucker Carlson is bullish on Gavin Newsom as Biden’s heir-apparent:
    ______________________________

    “I am here Mr. President,” Newsom told Biden at an event that the two did together last week. “I am here as a proud American, as a proud Californian, mesmerized by not just your faith and your devotion to this country and the world we’re trying to build, but by your results, by your action, by your passion, by your Capacity to deliver.”

    I am mesmerized by you, Joe Biden! Imagine saying that as a compliment. You couldn’t do it.

    Few human beings could do it, but Gavin Newsom had no problem at all. Those words rolled right off his forked tongue. He never stopped smiling. So if you’re looking for the leader of the coup, there he is right there.

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/06/29/tucker_carlson_who_will_replace_biden_when_he_drops_out_of_the_2024_race.html
    ______________________________

    There’ll likely be some blood on the carpet, figuratively, before we get there, but that’s sounds about right to me.

  22. I am struck by how much the Democrats seem like the Kremlin since Obama won in 2008.

    And we are all now Kremlinologists trying to figure out Who Is Really Running Things and Who Will Win the Next Power Struggle.

  23. @ huxley > “the Democrats seem like the Kremlin ”
    Why is that so strange, when we know that the Democrat Party has long been infiltrated, co-opted, and taken over by the Left, aka American Communists who went “underground” after they shut down HUAC with their moles still undercover, until their successors felt it was safe to come out in public unmasked (or couldn’t discipline themselves as well as their elders had).

    (h/t Artfldgr many times over)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project

    A young Meredith Gardner then used this material to break into what turned out to be NKVD (and later GRU) traffic by reconstructing the code used to convert text to numbers. Gardner credits Marie Meyer, a linguist with the Signal Intelligence Service with making some of the initial recoveries of the Venona codebook.[22] Samuel Chew and Cecil Phillips also made valuable contributions. On December 20, 1946, Gardner made the first break into the code, revealing the existence of Soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project.[23] Venona messages also indicated that Soviet spies worked in Washington in the State Department, Treasury, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and even the White House. Very slowly, using assorted techniques ranging from traffic analysis to defector information, more of the messages were decrypted.

  24. neo.
    Thanks for the link to Amish and health.

    I checked out Tay-Sachs and find it is disproportionately present in small groups which are or were recently endogamous. Ashkenazi Jews were mentioned.

    There is speculation that one of the properties–possibly for recessive carriers–is increased resistance to tuberculosis. This would be an advantage for urban populations. Heck of a downside.

    There are other conditions in various groups mentioned.

  25. Tay-Sachs featured in an episode of the old Crime Scene Investigations (I write out the whole thing because Auto check won’t let me do the initials). A very tragic flip for the parents.

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