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(a) Ah, the Great Realignment… which I’ve been blogging about (e.g., here and guestblogging at Sarah Hoyt’s place) since 2016. John Hinderaker says he wouldn;t have taken this seriously ten years ago, then goes on to quote Matt Taibbi: (paywalled; YouTube podcast version below):

The realignment of major parties away from blue against red and toward a rich versus poor dynamic is America’s most undercovered political story.
***
There are now so many taboo subjects in American politics that even data journalists, whose job it is to give us the cold hard facts, are forced to communicate in allusions and metaphors, because what’s happening can’t be discussed.

American politics has long been a careful truce, in which natural economic tensions were obscured by an elegantly phony two-party structure that kept urban and rural poor separate, nurtured a politically unadventurous middle class, and tended to needs of the mega-rich no matter who won. That system is in collapse. Voters are abandoning traditional blue-red political identities and realigning according to more explosive divisions based on education and income. …

The only reason polls are 43-43 (or perhaps slightly in Biden’s disfavor) is because the other actor is Donald Trump. If Democrats should be panicking because they’re not trouncing an opponent whose biggest campaign events have been arraignments, it’s just as bad for Trump that he polls even with a man who’s a threat to walk into a propellor or carry a child into a forest every time he walks outside. Still, the abject horror Trump inspires in the Georgetown set may be his greatest political asset, and a reason the realignment seems to be proceeding even with him around.

Screen cap from the whole video [fair use under Article 27b of the Israeli copyright law]:

John adds this cynical tweet from one of his daughters:

(b) SSC’s correspondent-at-large “Debbie” shares this item about the horrific Maui fires (she used to live there) and the utter fustercluck that appears to have been the official response:

https://www.kitv.com/news/lahaina/in-deadly-maui-wildfires-communication-failed-chaos-overtook-lahaina-along-with-the-flames/article_9f9c94a5-4945-56a9-92df-99ddabec825b.html

“Debbie” comments:

– The island has sirens but didn’t activate them, which people expected to have happened if things got worse 

– Cryptic communication from Maui country Facebook post written about fire speed without clear action items was released shortly before the town was burnt 

– While fire started burning Lahaina a Maui county FB post told people to shelter in place 

– Officials guided people towards the civic center which was where the fire was erupting at the time, some people followed others refused

– 4 hours after the burning Maui country wrote a Twitter post about sheltering in place (despite the smoke) due to road closures, to which people reminded them that Lahaina hasn’t had cell service for most of the day

– No communication outside of Facebook and Twitter was provided

Helpful action items: Jumping towards the water, having a waterproof bag to keep phone safe for flashlights

Remember the late lamented Ronald Reagan saying: “The two most terrifying sentences in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help!”

Also: the more incompetent governments gets at their real core functions (defense, combating serious crime, emergency response), the more they engage in virtue signaling, busybodying, and social engineering as “displacement” in the Freudian sense (which I discuss at some length here and here).

Via Brian Chai at the Western Journal and Fox News, an environmental managements specialist from U. of Hawaii, Manoa with the priceless name Clay Trauernicht [*] [Google Scholar profile] posted a thread of X (formerly Twitter) tweets  about how he predicted the deadly Maui wildfires years ago. Here is the ThreadReaderApp unroll:

Still, blaming this on weather and climate is misleading. Hawai’i’s fire problem is due to the vast areas of unmanaged, nonnative grasslands from decades of declining agriculture. 

These savannas now cover about a million acres across the main Hawaiian Islands, mostly the legacy of land clearing for plantation agriculture and ranching in the late 1800s/early 1900s 

The transformation to savanna makes the landscape way more sensitive to bad ‘fire weather’ – hot, dry, windy conditions. It also means we get huge buildups of fuels during rainy periods. 

Agriculture declines also mean less help for firefighters – less maintenance of roads, irrigation and water storage and even fewer people with knowledge of the land 

So the burden Hawai’i’s current fire problem places on emergency responders, the impacts on farms and ecosystems, the losses our community’s experiencing right now – its mostly from benign neglect 

This is maddening but also good news – Hawaii’s fire problem could be far, far more manageable with adequate support, planning, and resources for fuel reduction projects, agricultural land use, and restoration and reforestation around communities and the foot of our forests. 

Western Journal also adds that, lest we think “Trauernicht sounded is some sort of reactionary, opportunistically using the disaster to make a point, the man’s been sounding the alarm since at least 2019, when he penned a letter to the editor in The Maui News about far less devastating fires”

The letter is quite long, as such letters go, but good reading. https://www.mauinews.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/2019/02/maui-has-the-know-how-to-deal-with-wildfire-risk/

[*] “Trauer nicht” = “do not mourn” in German. LIke the band Depeche Mode in their song “Blasphemous Rumours”, I have often wondered if G-d has a sick sense of humor and I will see Him laughing when I finally get to meet Him.

THEY KNEW BETTER:  The Fire in Maui and the Lesson of Greece.

HAHA: New Hampshire Libertarians Offer to Buy Back Cops’ Guns With Gift Cards, Donuts.

YOUR OCCASIONAL REMINDER THAT COMMIES LIE ABOUT ANYTHING AND CONCEAL WHAT THEY CAN’T GET AWAY WITH LYING ABOUT:

As China announces that it will no longer be publishing youth unemployment data (because the rate is very high lol), a reminder that they have been steadily publishing fewer and fewer economic indicators in recent years as the data has become less rosy https://t.co/tdMDWhPeOA pic.twitter.com/ZuE6p6ZZAP

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) August 15, 2023

Xi wants Communist controls and capitalist returns. I guess we’ll see if he can pull it off but the indicators are mostly bad.

Normally, I would dismiss alien stories as distractions, but this alien drama currently happening in Peru caught my attention.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: “The former head of counterintelligence for the F.B.I. in New York pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday to a single reduced charge of conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and laundering payments from a prominent Russian oligarch.”

So a guy pushing the Trump Russian collusion story was colluding with the Russians. Why am I not surprised?

THIS DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE: “White flight” is a myth. Everyone flew.

FAIL, BRITANNIA: Why US tech giants are threatening to quit the UK.

Their “tipping point” is UK regulation – and it’s coming at them thick and fast.

The Online Safety Bill is due to pass in the autumn. Aimed at protecting children, it lays down strict rules around policing social media content, with high financial penalties and prison time for individual tech execs if the firms fail to comply.

One clause that has proved particularly controversial is a proposal that encrypted messages, which includes those sent on WhatsApp, can be read and handed over to law enforcement by the platforms they are sent on, if there is deemed to be a national security or child protection risk.

The NSPCC children’s charity has described encrypted messaging apps as the “front line” of where child abuse images are shared, but it is also seen as an essential security tool for activists, journalists and politicians.

Britain wants unlimited ability to read people’s private communications and, given what local police already do with public communications, tech firms would be right to quit the UK.

Below is my column in The Hill on the appointment of David Weiss as special counsel. Despite my enthusiastic support at this nomination, I have come to view Attorney General Merrick Garland as a failure as Attorney General. This decision captures why I have lost faith in his leadership — and why his department is at one of the lowest levels of public trust.

Here is the column:

Roughly 100 years ago, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson admitted that, as a player for the Chicago White Sox, he and seven other teammates had intentionally lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in 1919. When a kid stopped him outside of the grand jury room and asked “It ain’t true, is it, Joe?” Jackson responded “Yes, kid, I’m afraid it is.”

This is not a case of history repeating itself. After being confronted by allegations of a fixed investigation, Attorney General Merrick Garland just sent Shoeless Joe back into the game.

The appointment of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss as the new special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden left many with the same disbelief as that kid in Chicago. This is, after all, the same Weiss who headed an investigation that was trashed by whistleblowers, who alleged that his investigation had been fixed from the outset.

It is the same Weiss who ran an investigation in which agents were allegedly prevented from asking about Joe Biden, obstructed in their efforts to pursue questions and compromised by tip offs to the Biden team on planned searches.

It is also the same Weiss who reportedly allowed the statute of limitations to run out on Hunter’s major tax offenses, even though he had the option to extend it.

It is the same Weiss who did not indict on major tax felonies and cut a plea deal that brushed aside a felony gun charge.

It is the same Weiss who inked a widely panned “sweetheart” deal that caused a federal judge to balk and trash a sweeping immunity grant — language that even the prosecutor admitted he had never previously seen in a plea deal.

That is why many asked Garland to “say it ain’t so.”

The Weiss appointment definitively established Garland as a failure as attorney general. As someone who initially praised Garland’s appointment, I now see that he has repeatedly shown he lacks the strength and leadership to rise to these moments.

This is why the Justice Department is now less trusted by the public than it was under his predecessor, Bill Barr. During Barr’s tenure, Pew found that 54 percent of the public viewed the department favorably, and 70 percent had a favorable view of the FBI. Under Garland, the department’s favorability had declined to 49 percent as of March, before many of the recent failures. The FBI’s favorability has fallen by 18 points to just 52 percent.

Garland’s failure of leadership has undermined key cases. A Harvard-Harris poll this summer showed that 55 percent of the public view the Trump indictment as “politically motivated,” and 56 percent believe that it constitutes election interference.

Garland continues to do little to reverse that public perception, other than repeatedly refer to the motto of the Department. He offered the same mantra for years as some of us called for a special counsel appointment to investigate Biden corruption. The case for such an appointment has long been unassailable, but Garland refused to make the appointment, allowing years to pass with underlying crimes.

The immediate effect of this belated appointment will be to insulate Weiss and the Department from Congress as it prepares to interview Weiss and members of his team.

Yet if that was truly his purpose in doing this, Garland might have been too clever by half. First, since Garland did not appoint someone from outside of the Department (as envisioned under Section 600.3).

Of course, Garland could insist that, although this appointment from inside the Justice Department violates the statute, Special Counsel John Durham was also selected from the department’s ranks. Yet that does not excuse the appointment of a prosecutor who has been accused of conflicts of interest and false statements — the very antithesis of a special counsel who is supposed to have “a reputation for integrity and impartial decision-making.”

Second, there is the failure to expand Weiss’s mandate. Garland described that mandate as focusing again on Hunter Biden, and the Justice Department refused to respond to questions on the possible inclusion of his father in the investigation.

This was another opportunity to recognize the widespread distrust over the department and expressly allow the special counsel to include the corruption allegations involving both Hunter and the president. That would have supported calls for the House to delay further investigations.

As it stands, Garland has virtually ensured that Congress will pursue an impeachment inquiry as the only body seriously investigating the scandal.

The use of impeachment authority is the only effective way to overcome the roadblocks that the Justice Department is likely to throw up after this new appointment. Impeachment can work as constitutional Kryptonite. No court could seriously question the right and duty of Congress to get to the bottom of corruption allegations against the president without delay. Although Weiss can refuse to answer questions, Congress can use its impeachment authority to demand answers from fact witnesses, including Biden family members.

None of this means that Hunter Biden will be protected by Weiss from additional charges. He will likely pursue long dormant charges, such as Hunter’s being an unregistered foreign agent. He could also pursue felonies on the crimes detailed in the now-defunct plea bargain. In other words, he could show all of the aggression that was lacking in his prior work.

The public, however, doesn’t seem to be buying the special counsel spin. The result is reinforcing rather than resolving the lack of trust in the Justice Department.

It could not be worse for the Justice Department as an institution. “Shoeless Joe” Weiss is back in the game, long after the public has left in disgust.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. 

THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT: Too much ‘trauma’ talk encourages fragility. “I was wrong about trigger warnings, writes Jill Filipovic in The Atlantic. Writing for a feminist blog in 2008, she thought warning readers about topics such as sexual assault might be helpful and could do no harm. Now, she sees the harm, especially to teenage girls who’ve embraced fragility.”

“IT’S A GAG ORDER”: California Threatens Researcher Who Testified That Pandemic Closures Hurt Poor Kids. “Thomas Dee, who has studied academic outcomes for 11 years at Stanford, submitted testimony last month in support of the families’ claims in a 2020 lawsuit that the state harmed vulnerable children when they shut down classrooms and effectively stalled instruction. Within days, the California Department of Education sent him a letter claiming that because he works with taxpayer-funded data from the agency, he could not criticize the state in court.”

Proxy temperature records calibrated to closely align with current instrumental temperatures undermine the current “global boiling” narrative when extended to the 18th century.

Per a new study, maximum latewood density (MXD) tree-ring data have been observed to strongly correlate (r=0.77) with the modern (1959-2016) maximum (July-Aug.) instrumental temperature record (Li et al., 2023). In other words, MXD series from centuries-old trees can reliably record the warmest temperatures of the year when investigating the correspondence to measured thermometer temperatures.

So it may be surprising to learn that when assessing the 1720-2018 temperatures by extending MXD data over the last 3 centuries, a non-warming (cooling) trend since 1900 emerges in the data from northwestern China, including a ~1°C warmer 1920s-’30s.

The authors point out that these trends (“none of these MXD series showed a warming trend in the last century”) have been observed in several other regions of the world, including eastern Asia, southern Europe, and northwestern Africa.

Image Source: Li et al., 2023

Both the instrumental (1900-2015) and proxy (1765-2002) temperature records closely agree that the Tierra del Fuego forested region – located at the southernmost tip of South America – has been cooling (net) since 1900 (instrumentals and proxies) and 1765 (proxies), respectively (Matskovsky et al., 2023).

Image Source: Matskovsky et al., 2023

In 2007 the IPCC relied upon a WWF claim that said, due to warming, the Himalayan glaciers would very likely melt or “disappear” by 2035 (or sooner).

But a new study reconstructing 1733-2020 Nepal-Himalaya temperatures indicates there has been no net warming here in 288 years.

Image Source: Gaire et al., 2023

Another new study indicates the southeastern Tibetan Plateau was as-warm or warmer than recent decades in the 1870s and 1930s-’40s. Also, the warming and cooling oscillations over the last few hundred years correlate well with the naturally-varying AMO.

Image Source: Li and Li, 2023

Finally, a 1733-2010 minimum temperature reconstruction for south-central China reveals an oscillating trajectory, with no net warming throughout the nearly three centuries (Li et al., 2023). A recent warming trend is evident in the data, but only if the record begins in 1960, a particularly cold period of years.

Image Source: Li et al., 2023

The disclosure of a subpoena of Twitter by Special Counsel Jack Smith was surprising in a number of respects, including the hefty $350,000 fine imposed by U.S. District Court Beryl Howell (left) for a three-day delay as the company sought to address the demand. However, the two most surprising, and concerning, elements were that the subpoena was secret and Howell justified it, in part, on Trump being a flight risk. Neither seems warranted in this case even assuming that the subpoena was in other respects warranted.

Special counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed and obtained a search warrant related to former President Trump’s account on Twitter, now X. However, he also sought the information with a nondisclosure order that prohibited X from disclosing the existence or contents of the search warrant to Trump or anyone else. However, Trump already knew he was under investigation, so why was there a need for nondisclosure?

The court found that Trump might change his course of conduct but that seems unlikely. If anything Trump has been most consistent in his social media practices. Indeed, while some of us have criticized him for his posting, he has remained entirely undeterred.

The lower court stated that “The district court found that there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that disclosing the warrant to former President Trump ‘would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation’ by giving him ‘an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates.'”

It is not clear how Trump would destroy the evidence in possession of Twitter, particularly after the company is informed that it must preserve and disclose the meta data.

Then there was the added rational that was tucked into footnote 2 of the D.C. Circuit opinion: Trump might flee.

Judge Howell actually agreed that the former President was a flight risk.

Process that for a second. Trump has 24/7 security. So Howell agreed that he might shake his sizable security detail, evade them, and go on the lam. He is one of the most recognized figures in the world. He would have to go to Mars to live incognito.

It is facially absurd. Trump has been sued and criminally charged across the country. He has never made a break for it. Where would he go? Cuba?

The finding of a flight risk undermines the credibility of the court’s order. This is not to question the ability to force the release of the information. However, the need for secrecy is far from evident. Rather it succeeded in preventing any challenge.

Here is the D.C. Circuit opinion: Trump-Twitter Opinion

COWABUNGA, HUNGA-TONGA: “The Hunga-Tonga eruption is rapidly becoming the lab leak of climate science.”

Well this is a fishing tale for the history books.

DO TELL: Jack Goldsmith: The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences.

The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor. Exaggeration and truth-shading in the facilitation of self-serving legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington. Going forward, these practices will likely be disputed in the language of, and amid demands for, special counsels, indictments and grand juries…. Watergate deluded us into thinking that independent counsels of various stripes could vindicate the rule of law and bring national closure in response to abuses by senior officials in office. Every relevant experience since then — from the discredited independent counsel era (1978-99) through the controversial and unsatisfactory Mueller investigation — proves otherwise. And national dissensus is more corrosive today than in the 1990s, and worse even than when Mr. Mueller was at work….”

The message of the Trump prosecution is Thou Shall Not Challenge The Establishment. If you do, the rules and conventions go out the window and they do whatever dirty things they can to you. And the usual promoters of “decency,” “civility,” and “rule of law” will back them out of class interest and tribal loyalty.

Does this mean that our government — and media/academic establishment, but I repeat myself — is deeply, perhaps hopelessly corrupt and fundamentally illegitimate? Yeah, probably.

And if only there had been some sort of warning about the downsides of this sort of lawfare.

GOODER AND HARDER SAN FRAN: Shocka! San Francisco woman crying on TikTok about how dangerous her city is voted for it (screenshot).

This woman comes from a social class were nobody was ever forced to suffer the consequences of their actions and choices. Now reality is quite literally spitting in her face and the only thing she can do is complain about the lack of police or bystanders willing to help her.… https://t.co/sxSlR2MPFn

— Carolina Lion (@CarolinaLion2) August 7, 2023

OABAMA’S UNFETTERED THIRD TERM: Power companies ask Biden to end war on fossil fuel plants as EPA comment deadline looms. “Electricity providers recently spoke out against the Biden administration’s attack on the fossil fuel industry, specifically power plants, warning that the speed at which officials are pursuing a “green energy transition” risks significant energy shortage.”

Previously: Obama: ‘Under my Plan … Electricity Rates Would Necessarily Skyrocket.’

AFTERMATH OF THE ANNUS HORRIBILIS: Does Trump’s Shutdown Decision Disqualify a Future Presidency?

Let’s be brutally clear. Hoover’s well-intended but wrongheaded [Smoot-Hawley] policy caused the Great Depression, and we know how that all went. Equally true, Trump’s well-intended but wrongheaded policy caused untold pain, suffering, and misery, not to mention bankruptcies, foreclosures, suicides, and premature deaths. It also wiped out a crucial block of irreplaceable time for in-person instruction for tens of millions of American kids, the full ramifications of which we’ll not sustain for about a decade.

Trump has disqualified himself from ever being elected president again simply by virtue of that single, solitary decision while in office. And this I believe in the marrow of my bones.

Flashback: Trump was apoplectic when Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp reopened his state in late April of 2020.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Remember that Biden Dinner That Joe Biden Never Attended? Well, he did.

“The Bidens are the best at doing exactly what Chairman wants.” That WhatsApp message to a Chinese business associate was the perfect epitaph for the entire Biden corruption scandal. Part of the brilliance of the Biden influence peddling operation was to invest the media in the denial of any scandal. That is no more evident than the much discussed 2015 dinner of President Joe Biden with his son’s foreign associates. The alleged dinner demolished Joe Biden’s long denials of any knowledge of his son’s dealings. Accordingly, the Biden campaign denied he ever attended and the media happily dismissed the account. Well, the dinner meeting reportedly occurred, he attended, and, as usual, most of the media has not fully informed their readers or viewers.  Indeed, even though Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates was central to this denial, most of the media cannot be bothered with such trivialities.

In 2020, the New York Post reported that Hunter introduced then-Vice President Biden to a top executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, which was giving him more than $50,000 per month.

The Biden team and its media allies went into full crisis mode. Andrew Bates, who was still with the communication team of Biden’s 2020 campaign, assured the public that it was false. Politico reported that he had “reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time, and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” It also reported that Biden’s campaign was “punching back” on the Post’s story as false. Biden associate, Michael Carpenter, denounced it as part of “a Russian disinformation operation” and added “I’m very comfortable saying that.” You will recall that they said the same thing about the Hunter Biden laptop before the election … which the media also unquestioningly accepted.

Related: Burgum Angers Stephanopoulos by Refusing to Discuss Trump, Brings Up Hunter Instead.

The Tablet (the American Jewish magazine, not the eponymous Jesuit periodical) has a long and riveting interview — really more a discussion — between David Samuels and 0bama biographer David Garrow, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King, “Bearing The Cross”.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama

A few nuggets:

• 0bama’s speechwriters were only allowed to consult the speeches of Abraham Lincoln — not only because he admired Lincoln’s language [with good reason, of course], but because that was the only president whom he saw on the same shelf as himself.
• 0bamacare was introduced purely in response to the Hillary campaign. It ended up benefiting the medical insurance industry and pretty much nobody else, but had to be marketed as a victory because “everything with 0bama has been a victory”
• about the obsessive pursuit of an Iran deal [still continuing]: “I talked to the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, who was defense minister when the Iran deal was moving toward completion. And I asked him, “Well, what do you think is motivating this? “ And he said, “Well, Barack Obama’s not a normal politician. He is this strange combination of a college professor and a person who has ideas about his place in history. He decided that this deal was going to be the reason Barack Obama was going to be on Mount Rushmore. And that’s the reason that they could never let go.” 
• since the Civil War, every ex-president[*] has left Washington, DC. 0bama, despite well-publicized residences on Hawaii and at Martha’s Vineyard, etc. still has a house in DC and lives there most of the time, despite the excuse that a daughter wanted to finish high school where she had started long ago having become irrelevant.
• The reason? My paraphrase: forget “the Biden administration”: it’s the unofficial third term of 0bama in every respect. In fact, 0bama had openly fantasized back in 2015 2020about dictating policy from his basement in his sweats, while somebody else was the figurehead — because “he loved the work” [UPDATE: video here (via Instapundit)

FLASHBACK

Barack Obama in November 2020: "If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman [to be POTUS], and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines… pic.twitter.com/Tp6iUCXshF

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 3, 2023

• Both Samuels and Garrow had high hopes of the 0bama presidency: Garrow now thinks his real legacy will be regarded negatively, with Syria and the Russian annexation of Crimea as the two most signature failures
• Sheila Miyoshi Jager, 0bama’s ex-girlfriend (now a well-known professor of international relations at Oberlin College), did not break up with 0bama over his “self-identifying as a black man” but following an explosive row over antisemitism (and 0bama’s refusing to condemn the “Nation of Islam” variety of same). This was highly personal for Jager, whose Dutch grandparents were awarded the title of Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem for hiding Jewish children.
• about the mutual dislike between 0bama and Netanyahu: the one thing they have in common is being clinical narcissists
• and this was the biggest difference with his previous bio subject, MLK. [Okay, this reads a bit too much psychologia be-grush to me.] 0bama “grew up deeply wounded by being abandoned by both father and then mother” (he was effectively raised by his grandparents), while MLK grew up in a loving family cocoon.
• As a result, leaving aside the salacious details of MLK’s behavior with women as detailed in the bio, where it came to policy there was only one MLK. Nor did MLK ever think he was irreplaceable; he himself expressed confidence that if he weren’t there [anymore], somebody else would step up to the plate. In the case of 0bama, there is a manufactured “false self” [**] and then there’s the real 0bama.
• Here we get into “Hillbuzz” territory: another ex-girlfriend turned over copies of all the love letters she had gotten from 0bama, but redacted one paragraph saying “it’s about homosexuality”. Later she sold the original letters to the Emory University archives to raise some money for medical expenses. Garrow sent down a researcher to find the original, and sure enough: the original had him talking about his desires to have s3x with men. [Mrs. Arbel’s immediate response: “Oh, thatexplains Michelle!”]
• Needless to say: I an infinitely more concerned with the [past and present] 0bama regime’s b*ggering of America and of its allies than with any nonorthogenital desires he might have confided about decades ago.
• “He has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution. I think that’s obvious. And I don’t think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant. I’ve sometimes said to people that I think Barack is actually just as insecure as Trump, but in ways that are not readily perceived by the vast majority of people. I think that’s probably my most basic takeaway. […] But it does go back to Dreams being a work of fiction, that the absence of an actual personal story makes him need to compose one.
• Samuels: [I]t struck me in your telling that in fact, the place where he finds a home is not in community organizing. It’s in foundation-land, the place where foundations, foundation executives, very rich people, and politics meet. […] if Obama is the first U.S. president from the periphery of empire, he’s also the first president from the billionaire-foundation-NGO complex, which makes him the perfect mediating figure between the progressive part of the party, the billionaires, and the security state.

Read the whole thing — it’s long but rewarding, with lots to chew on.

ADDENDUM: Elizabeth Stauffer at Powerline: “Unlike the Trump, indictments, the case against Biden is straightforward“.

ADDENDUM 2 (via Instapundit): here’s video of 0bama saying

[*] The only exception, according to the article, was Woodrow Wilson, incapacitated by a stroke

[**] Garrow doesn’t use the term — well known to anybody who has ever had the extremely dubious pleasure of dealing with clinical narcissists — but his description amounts to exactly that.

THEN THEY CAME FOR YOUR CAR: You may have seen the announcement a few days ago from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that it is upping the mandatory fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks to as high as 58 mpg by 2032. It’s for the environment, right?

“These draconian measures in the name of ‘efficiency’ would effectively make electric vehicles mandatory in this country by forcefully limiting Americans’ options. In the name of fighting climate change, the Biden administration is seeking to bend the American people to their will through government coercion. They don’t trust us to make our own choices, and so have decided to make our choices for us,” observes the American Accountability Foundation (AFA).

In fact, secret emails obtained and made public by AFA, reveal that NHTSA administrator Ann Carlson has long been convinced nothing less than complete abandonment of fossil fuels can save the Earth. Raising fuel economy standards to unreachable levels is a clear path to accomplishing that mythical goal.

Does Joe know that will mean no more driving his Corvette?

DISSENT IN POST-COVID CHINA: As China’s economy sputters, expressions of dissent proliferate.

New memos obtained by Congress Congress show White House wanted the public to see Wall Street Journal and New York Times stories instead of those from The Daily Wire and Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren.

IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? For better skin, try lifting weights. “People’s skin grew ‘more youthful at a cellular level’ after they began exercising, said Satoshi Fujita, an exercise scientist at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan, who oversaw the new study. The most pronounced effects occurred when people lifted weights.”

For better results, try lifting heavier than the 1kg mini dumbbells in the picture.

FOLLOW THE ACTUAL SCIENCE: ‘Caught-Red-Handed’: Scientists Call for Full Retraction of Nature’s Proximal Origin Paper, as Fraud Accusations Mount.

The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate from a laboratory.

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February.

Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible, but likely.

“[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.

Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that the virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28, 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.

” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,” Garry said of the lab-leak hypothesis.

“We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said on Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.

They put politics over science while accusing dissenters of being science deniers.

Why? Follow the money: “To complicate matters further, new reporting from The Intercept reveals that Anderson had an $8.9 million grant with NIH pending final approval from Dr. Anthony Fauci when the Proximal Origin paper was submitted.”

The New York Times reported on an advanced spy tool being purchased in the US and the FBI investigated it. Turns out it was the FBI behind it the whole time.

BLUE CITY BLUES: Portland’s Multnomah County lost $1 BILLION from 2020-2021, as high earners left city amid riots, pandemic.

According to an analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service by The Oregonian from income tax returns filed in 2020 and 2021, Multnomah County lost a net 14,257 tax filers and their dependents, many of whom were high earners who could do jobs remotely, resulting in a net income loss of over $1 billion.

The outlet reported that the average income of those who left in 2020, the most recent year available, was 14 percent higher than those who moved the previous year, yet the average income of those who remained in or moved to the county declined during the same time frame.

The golden geese are deciding to leave before they can be gutted.

Previously: The Five States Sending the Most High Earners to Florida All Have This One Thing in Common.