Roundup
(1) Heather Mac Donald talks about some of the issues she covers in her latest book on equity versus merit, and she certainly doesn’t pull a single punch:
(2) Does anyone on earth think the White House doesn’t know who left the cocaine baggie lying around? Questions from Tom Cotton, in a letter to the head of the Secret Service:
1. Who has access to the White House complex without passing through any security screening? Please provide a complete list of all such individuals.
2. Who has access to the White House complex while subject to lesser security screening requirements than the most complete screening required of individuals accessing the West Wing? Please provide a complete list of all such individuals, along with a description of the lesser screening requirements and the reasons such individuals are not subject to complete screening.
3. The Secret Service’s Annual Report for FY2022 notes that the Secret Service’s Personnel Screening K-9 program screens approximately 10 million “visitors to the exterior of The White House each year.” How many visitors to the interior of the White House are screened by the Secret Service’s K-9s each year? Please provide a description of the circumstances under which the Secret Service chooses not to use K-9 screening for West Wing visitors.
4. In the past five years, how often has the Secret Service encountered illegal drugs at the White House complex? How often were these drugs detected during security screenings, and how often were these drugs encountered inside secure areas?
5. Section 3056A of Title 18, U.S. Code, provides members of the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division with the authority to “make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony.” Illegally possessing cocaine is a crime under federal law. If the Secret Service discovers the identity of the individual who brought illicit cocaine into the White House complex, will they make an arrest under this provision?
6. How often does the Secret Service audit its security procedures for the White House complex and adjust those procedures to correct potential flaws? Please provide details regarding the most recent complete audit, including whether it was conducted by the Secret Service or another entity.
Good luck with ever getting answers.
(3) Right before Hunter Biden got his sweetheart deal from the prosecutors, the entire prosecution team was switched. The earlier team was the one that whistleblowers later reported on.
(4) Ben and Jerry’s wants Mount Rushmore given back to the native Americans. Which ones, though?:
According to West, one reason so much Mexican land was there for the taking during the Mexican-American War was it had been depopulated by constant Native American raiding.
Is it too much for Ben & Jerry’s to spare a thought for the Mexicans killed, captured or dispossessed by merciless Native American warriors?
As for the Lakota, they didn’t take control of territory to the west through gentle persuasion.
They gained control of the Black Hills in the late 18th century by expelling the prior occupants.
The history here doesn’t neatly line up with the Ben & Jerry’s call for “dismantling white supremacy and systems of oppression and ensuring that Indigenous people can again govern the land their communities called home for thousands of years.”
Which indigenous people?
And which lands?
(5) Miranda Devine covers the Gal Luft description of more Biden corruption.
(6) Read today’s column from Ammo Grrrll. You’ll be glad you did.
The notion of so-called “equity” is perhaps the single most insanely stupid of all insanely stupid notions, just as the vaguely-proposed policy of “reparations” (being debated in California and elsewhere, in somewhat different forms) is perhaps the single most insanely stupid of all insanely stupid policy proposals. As for “Cocaine-gate”, this will be solved at the same time as the J6 pipe-bomber, the leak from SCOTUS, the murder of Seth Rich, as well as the “threatening” letters mailed to Jussie Smollett, to mention but a few of the many cases conveniently “mishandled” and “unsolved” by our worthless alphabet agencies, funded in the tens upon tens of billions per annum.
Willie Brown, back when he was Speaker of the CA legislature, introduced a bill that would require the UC to graduate all black students who were admitted. That was years ago and it was rejected. Now, I wonder what would happen.
If leftists aren’t suggesting that land that never belonged to the different Indian tribes be “given back,” they’re blathering about the land we “stole” from Mexico.
At the conclusion of the Mexican-American war, the government of Mexico ceded a large part of what is now the American west to the US government. In return, they were compensated the sum of $15,000,000 (around $521 billion today), which was probably close to fair market value for unimproved, unpopulated land that had no infrastructure on it. If the terms were not to the liking of the Mexican government, they always had the option to continue fighting and risk being forced to take less favorable terms later.
Note that the idea of compensating the loser of a war for lost territories was probably a novel idea at the time. Throughout most of history, the defeated were treated far more harshly.
Re #4: I wonder if Larry McMurtry has come under attack from the woke. I read Lonesome Dove a few years ago and his descriptions of Indian savagery disturbed my sleep for several nights. Atrocities aside, he certainly doesn’t paint the Indians in flattering terms. Nor the whites.
I recommend the book, by the way. I read it somewhat reluctantly, at the urging of a friend, and it was far better than I expected. But be warned if you’re sensitive to portrayals of violence. Not that it’s terribly detailed, just that the bare description of some things was enough to disturb me.
Atrocities aside, he certainly doesn’t paint the Indians in flattering terms. Nor the whites.
==
I took a pass on his travel volume (Roads) after reading a reviewer who offered that McMurty had decayed into a tiresome misanthrope.
I have several thoughts on your roundup today. On the cocaine in the White House, if it was Hunter’s it fits in with my theory about his laptop. He wants to get caught. He wants his life under his Dad’s thumb to stop. Self-sabotage. It may even be connected to being a Catholic. Speaking as one, they can really get their hooks in deep. On equity, can I have equity with Elon Musk and Bill Gates?
On to the Ben & Jerry’s thing. I read that they sold the company to Unilever, a British/Dutch company, for $326 million. They can buy all the land their money will buy and give it to Native Americans. It’s also funny that Unilever is a British and Dutch since the British and Dutch started the land grab from Native Americans.
Between the roundup and the blow in the WH, I just give up. There’s no point in even thinking about the level of corruption in this administration and the Democrats in general. I can’t do a damn thing about, and I’m tired of being continually pummeled with it.
From (6)
Hey, my peeps, remember BOUNDING out of bed? Yeah, me neither.
Hey, I still bound out of bed … followed by a brief but searing burst of pain in two leg joints and my lower back. Pain, embrace it!
Great writing Ammo Grrrll.
Speaking of White House chaos and people potentially going under the bus, check this out.
So the story on the cocaine found in the White House keeps changing. This was very recently put out by NBC News.
NEW: The White House is now claiming the cocaine was found “in a much more secure place … near the Situation Room” and next to “where, for example, the vice president’s vehicle is parked.”
For example??? Poor Kamala.
AndyH
All of the land in the entire world has been “stolen” over and over again. And this was happening in both North and South America by the “indigenous people”, in spades, since long before settlement by Europeans!!
@JFM:On to the Ben & Jerry’s thing. I read that they sold the company to Unilever,
Yeah, over twenty years ago, and they haven’t run anything at Ben & Jerry’s in years, and almost certainly neither of them authored the tweet.
Unilever is of course all in on Leftist social issues. Corporations are not our friends. If you’d like to boycott them have at it, but you’ll be stunned by the number and kinds of things you’ll have to not buy. It will do you no harm to make the effort, you’ll learn a lot.
The Coosuk Abenaki Nation would like to have a conversation with Ben & Jerry’s about the return of the land on which the B&J’s headquarters sits:
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/ben-andjerrys-indigenous-tribe-abenaki/2023/07/07/id/1126317/
Willie Brown, back when he was Speaker of the CA legislature, introduced a bill that would require the UC to graduate all black students who were admitted. That was years ago and it was rejected. Now, I wonder what would happen.
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I was many years ago given by a peripheral faculty member a precis of what happened at the law school at SUNY Buffalo when racial preference schemes were implemented (high failure rates, followed by grade inflation, followed by bar passage rates in the toilet). The last act of the backing and filling was when Arthur Eve of the state Assembly introduced a bill which would have excused any graduate of a law school in New York from passing the bar exam. The legislature wouldn’t chow down on that one.
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One of the vectors regulating race relations in this country has been the tendency of black politicians to confuse indicia of accomplishment with actual accomplishment.
On the cocaine in the White House, if it was Hunter’s it fits in with my theory about his laptop. He wants to get caught. He wants his life under his Dad’s thumb to stop.
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My theory about the laptop and the latest is that he’s addled and undisciplined. He’s not under his father’s thumb. His father is too demented to influence anyone or anything.
==
Note, after being admitted to the bar in 1997, he was given a patronage job in the Clinton Administration having to do with telecommunications policy. After that, he teamed up with his uncle James Biden to run an ‘investment management’ business that looked suspiciously like a money-laundering operation. Surveying his personal conduct from 1992 onward, I’m not seeing much indication that he sought at any time to earn a living in a manner that did not trade on his father’s influence.
Re: Hunter / cocaine
If that is Hunter’s baggie, and he must be Suspect #1 in any sensible investigation, it’s not just an oopsie, it blows up his sweetheart plea deal, which depends on good conduct.
After that it’s a good bet that Hunter goes to prison, all his “business deals” receive renewed scrutiny, all the weird compassion for Hunter and Joe evaporates, more Americans will feel like they’ve been had, the 2024 election becomes a harder sell even with fraud, and the whistleblowers and investigators become much more dangerous.
Biden, Democrats, the Media, Big Tech and the Elites absolutely cannot allow that cocaine to be traced to Hunter, even if it looks as fishy as Epstein’s suicide.
That baggie could unravel everything.
We’ll Never Know.
Two former federal prosecutors on Fox tonight said that they had seen only about 1% of unlawful gun purchasers getting a sweetheart deal like Hunter got. They pointed out that if a perp also had tax evasion along with the gun charge, there was literally zero chance such a perp would get a deal, any deal.
Unfortunately, you won’t see those facts in the MSM. So LIVs will think it’s all SOP that Hunter got a pass. Propaganda, lies, misinformation, and coverups are taking us down. No matter how much the conservative media does tom get the facts out, it isn’t enough to wake people up.
“All of the land in the entire world has been “stolen” over and over again. And this was happening in both North and South America by the “indigenous people”, in spades, since long before settlement by Europeans!!”
The area that we live in in NW MT was owned/controlled by the Salish tribe up through maybe 1830. Then they were pushed west by the Blackfeet, who had been pushed west over the Continental Divide by ultimately the Sioux. We know this because there had been a Canadian fur trading post by where the town is now. The fur traders got along well with the Salish, trading tobacco, etc for meat and pelts. The fur trading post was closed because the Blackfoot didn’t want to trade – just raid.
What was apparently driving this was that the major Plains tribes (Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, etc) got their hands on horses, and later, firearms. This allowed them to follow the buffaloes herds (until those herds were intentionally killed off in order to control those tribes), instead of intercepting the herds in their migrations a couple times a year. And the result of that was a population explosion in esp the Sioux confederation.
Note that this started happening around the time that the United States was founded, and as a result of the Spanish reintroducing horses (that the Indians had earlier killed off for food) into the Southwest. I expect that the Comanche, who so terrorized West Texas and vicinity, grew as powerful for similar reasons. Also note that prior to the reintroduction of horses, the population density in the Great Plains was exceedingly sparse, with 3-4,000 Indians in a tribe “owning” maybe millions of acres. Disparities in population density has long been one of the primary drivers for invasions and conquests. Rarely have we seen such a disparity as was seen in the last half of the 19th Century, on the Great Plains, with farmers, with their families, homesteading 80 or 160 acres (1/4 sq miles).
A square mile is 640 acres, so 160 acres is 0.25 square miles. or 1/4 of a Section (ideally a square mile).
re what TommyJay said (above).
Move along Kamala, gotta make room for Newsom before Joe goes:
The White House is now claiming the cocaine was found “in a much more secure place … near the Situation Room” and next to “where, for example, the vice president’s vehicle is parked.”
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1677017800785682449
On the sad, sad, state of today’s U.S. military
See https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/07/is-the-military-still-interested-in-defending-america/
P.S.
Of course, this is the idea and image that the rotted out, woke infested leadership wants to promote, and the rot may not yet have infested and weakened units at the operational level.
Since “amateurs talk tactics, but professionals talk logistics,” logistics are extremely important–make or break in combat–so if this “person” has been put in this position strictly for their “orientation,” and, in effect, spends a lot of their time waving their little “pride” flags around and on photo ops–taking the place of someone truly competent–that could be a very big problem.
https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/france-under-attack?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Bruce, that’s a pretty interesting synopsis of the north Great Plains developments. I find it quite interesting whenever something about pre-European history of North America comes up. It’s largely because I’ve been becoming conscious of the Native areas around the Great Lakes.
The issue of stolen land is only a thing now because wars of aggressions are no longer acceptable in free nations. You just have to look through history to see that it was perfectly acceptable from early times until just recently.
England, as an example, was conquered several times – by the Romans, by the Anglo Saxons, by the Vikings (twice) and by the Normans. Similar histories of invasion and conquest can be found all over the world. When someone says, “You’re living on stolen land,” just ask them to read some world history.
“A square mile is 640 acres, so 160 acres is 0.25 square miles. or 1/4 of a Section (ideally a square mile).”
Sorry to shift units of measurement like that. My memory is that 80 acres per Homestead was standard, but it was extended to 160 acres in the western Great Plains. That translates to roughly 4 family farms per square mile there, which in turn translates to maybe 20-30 people per square mile. A 10×10 square is 100 sq miles, and could have as many as 3,000 people – almost as many as a smaller Plains and Mountain Indian tribe.
JFM, I had similar thoughts(!) but I’m not sure it’s “self-sabotage”. At least, not exactly.
It looks to me more like “sabotage” pure and simple—as in, “My life sucks and it’s ALL Dear Old Dad’s fault”…or perhaps, “Dear Old Dad has been screwing me royally for a long time now. Time for me to show him a thing or two”…not that the two are mutually exclusive…
(OTOH, it’s entirely possible that Hunter has a Samson Complex—“If I’m going down then I’m going to take the TEMPLE down with me”; which after all the drugs he’s alleged to have enjoyed is entirely possible.)
Alas poor Joe. Owes “favors” to the Ukrainians, and the Chinese, and Putin and the Iranians, and Lord knows whom else…PLUS he has to make sure that Hunter doesn’t upset the apple cart…
Talk about delicate balancing act…
Aaaand the next topic of armchair psychologizing is….
“The notion of so-called “equity” is perhaps the single most insanely stupid of all insanely stupid notions….”
Hey, is “We’re all EQUAL. Now PAY UP!!” all that stupid?
Think about it.
…Um, er, maybe you’re right.
(But what if THEY ask nicely and appeal to our good, humane, empathetic side…
…and then threaten to destroy us and our families if we don’t agree…?
Who’s “THEY”? you ask. Well, the guvmint…and their Friends/Agents/Countrymen…of course!)
Did we ever find out where the baggie was actually found? If it really was in the West Wing, it probably wasn’t Hunter’s? But why so many different versions of where the cocaine was? Was it to make us think that it wasn’t Hunter’s?
“Stolen territory” isn’t really discussed if there’s a chance of it ever being taken back. I believe the ritual acknowledgements of “stolen territory” started in Australia and moved next to Canada, and then to the US. There’s very little chance of native Australian people ever getting Sidney or Melbourne back.