Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
A Catastrophic Implosion . . . of the Rule of Law
Instead of proper rule of law we are living with that Orwellian alternative, Our Rule of Law™—an arbitrary enforcement of the laws and use of the coercive power of the state.
Like some other commentators, I have in recent years several times quoted a famous exchange from Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Recent developments in the Biden family money laundering scheme, the implosion of a boutique underwater expedition to the Titanic, and a possible coup in Russia prompt me to wheel it out once again. “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’”
It fits the long-running drama over Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell, I think. Miranda Devine broke news of that scandal in the New York Post in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. It languished in the doldrums of official nonrecognition for years as the regime went into overdrive to keep people, especially voters, from paying any attention to it.
Gradually, however, the truth leaked out. First, the authenticity of the laptop was acknowledged. Turns out it was not “Russian disinformation,” as those 51 intelligence experts insisted. Nope, it belonged to Hunter all right. At first, the public was titillated by all the sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll that pervaded that digital trove. Gradually, very gradually, however, the publicly important stuff—the money angle with news of foreign payments apparently to dear-old-dad from various foreigners—began leaking out.
Then suddenly, just this last week, the House Ways and Means Committee began dropping bombs.
Material from an IRS whistleblower—no, two IRS whistleblowers—got fed into the mix and we got such Hunter Biden classics as this WhatsApp message from July 2017 addressed to Henry Zhao, a member of the Chinese Communist Party and, wouldn’t you know it, a business partner of Hunter’s:
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment [the commitment being millions of the crispest] made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight, And, Z, fi [sic] get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.
I enjoyed reading that over the morning coffee while gazing at the accompanying photograph of Hunter all got up in black tie for a big to-do at the White House the other day. That was right after he, miraculously, managed to wangle the plea bargain of the century. He failed to report millions in income, yet the prosecutor agreed to reduce felony charges to misdemeanors and, essentially, to forget about the fact that Hunter lied on his application for a firearm, a felony. Nice work, Hunter!
There are some people who insist that we are still in the he-said she-said phase of this drama. It’s happened before.
Remember, years ago, when FBI lovebirds Lisa Page and Peter Strzok had their little back and forth a few days after the Trump-Russia hoax got started? Page cooed to Strzok: “Trump should go f himself.” Strzok responded, “F Trump.” Two days later, Page texted, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok replied, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” “We” being not just Peter and Lisa but also the FBI. Somehow, that got diluted and interpreted out of relevance, though, and the fact that the premier police power of the country interfered in a presidential election got swept under the proverbial rug.
It might happen this time, too. We have credible allegations galore, not only of Hunter’s lawbreaking, but his father’s. According to the whistleblower testimony that the House Ways and Means Committee just released, the Justice Department tipped off Hunter Biden about a plan to search his storage unit, thus allowing him to clean it out before the feds arrived. The Justice Department also declined to execute a search warrant of Joe Biden’s guest house when Hunter was living there. They hid allegations about foreign bribery from the IRS lawyers overseeing an investigation of Hunter’s finances and lost or “slow walked” other aspects of the government’s investigation into his tangled affairs for some five years.
Preferential treatment? Assuredly not! At least not according to our American Gothic Attorney General Merrick Garland. After this latest spate of revelations dropped into the news cycle and seemed to be getting traction, even in the legacy media, Garland held a press conference in which he said...
Prepare for Disparate Impact
REVIEW: ‘When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives’
In her latest book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, bestselling author Heather Mac Donald skewers the ideology of "disparate impact"—a "once obscure legal theory that is now transforming our world."
According to Mac Donald, disparate impact—in which any negative or disproportionate outcome impacting black Americans is declared to be a "tool of white supremacy"—has been deliberately developed and leveraged as a cultural tool, targeting "the very fundamentals of a fair society."
Today, she argues, meritocracy, fealty to the rule of law, and even respect for our civilizational inheritance stand in the way of achieving so-called racial justice.
Mac Donald describes 2020 as a potentially "pivotal moment in American history," accelerating the notion that racism defines America. This idea, she believes, is tearing the country apart, with any protest rejected by the same "just believe" mandate used by the #MeToo movement.
Not only that, any roadblock to the achievement of "exact racial proportionality"—with the key to disparate impact being the presumption of racial proportionality with no regard for factors such as behavior and ability—is itself evidence of this same systemic racism.
In When Race Trumps Merit, Mac Donald explores three fundamental areas of American life to support her hypothesis that the country is engaging in a fit of "cultural self-cancellation" that is impoverishing the imagination, stunting the capacity for wonder and joy, and stripping the future of everything that gives human life meaning: beauty, sublimity, and wit.
The first two chapters are dedicated to science and medicine, which were hit "like an earthquake" by the "post-George Floyd racial reckoning" unleashed in 2020.
Mac Donald provides the reader with a deep dive into the racialized nature of today’s scientific community, arguing that American elites have simply moved on from failing to close the academic skills gap by deciding to "break up the objective yardsticks that measure it," including dismantling the system of knowledge underpinning modern medicine. "The result," says Mac Donald, "will be a declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress."
Mac Donald then moves on from the world of science and explores the abstract world of culture. Across 10 chapters she explores the pursuit of racial proportionality across classical music, opera, and art.
The problem with this section—compared with the former and latter sections—is that the bulk of the book is dedicated to subjective expressions of art sandwiched on either side by the comparatively objective areas of science and crime. While the critiques of certain artists under the "rise of mediocrity" might highlight the breadth of the blind pursuit of racial proportionality and the erasure of Western culture, it must be said that by placing such significance upon subjective areas of human expression—rather than objective fields of pure meritocracy—Mac Donald is in danger of diluting the strength of her overarching argument.
The third and final section is an emotionally stunning investigation of the effect of disparate impact analysis on the American criminal-justice system, "where every disparity in arrest or incarceration rates is now attributed to racism."
Presenting the decline of New York City into a haven for criminal behavior as an example, Mac Donald argues that two decades of successful efforts to combat crime have been voluntarily cast aside, with the spread of violence and predation erupting as a predictable...
The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1428
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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #2124
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
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