☕️ ROGUE MANHOLES ☙ Wednesday, January 3, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Three days in, and the counter-revolution is already winning: buh bye Claudine Gay; more bad news for Sen. Menendez (D); earthquakes challenge climate change; more folks disbelieve Biden; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! In today’s roundup, it’s already been a terrible, no-good year for liberalism, and we are just a few days in: Harvard’s woke President takes a long walk off a short commencement platform; new bribery allegations arise against embattled democrat Senator Menendez; small earthquakes also shake the USA in bad news for climate change; figures for Biden election integrity going the wrong way for democrats; and China’s new Handmaid’s Tale problem.

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖 First I’d like to send out a special ‘thank you’ to the many C&Cers who sent me and the office team gifts this season. We were overwhelmed. There are too many people to dare to individually thank, for fear of inevitably leaving someone out. I would like to make two special public thanks: the first to the Sister who lives under a vow of poverty who mailed us a gift card (that someone had given her) along with a lovely note. I often think of her — I’m constantly amazed at who the blog has reached — and hope she’s continuing to enjoy C&C.

Second, the staff and I greatly enjoyed this wonderful caricature sent in from readers Ken and Denise Henley, which I’ll use as today’s post cover.

Thanks again, everyone!  Now, on to today’s post.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 The Associated Press published an angry article yesterday with a Republicans Pounce!-style headline: “Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.”

It can only be a weapon against ‘colleges’ if they plagiarized somebody. Just saying.

Now that she got her Christmas bonus, Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, no pun intended, resigned yesterday in a long, rambling, resentful, single-spaced, two-page letter that was immediately published to the entire Internets, probably before it even got to HR.  (I can’t believe you even thought this, but for your information they checked: Claudine did NOT copy any of her resignation letter from former Penn President Liz McGill’s letter. Happy now?)

Ms. Gay (if that’s her real name), survived an initial barrage calling for her resignation over her atrociously smug performance at her Congressional testimony last month. Controversy arose after the top educator smugly refused to agree that genocidally calling for jews to be wiped off the face of the Middle East violated Harvard’s so-called speech policy, a tautly-enforced policy that can get a student expelled for accidentally calling the University’s president Mister Gay, for just one example, and don’t even ask what happens if you whisper “what is a woman” anywhere on Harvard’s campus.

They drag you into the Skull & Bones club’s back room and nobody ever sees you again, that’s what.

Anyway, Claudine somehow survived the worst that the Anti-Defamation League could dish out, and the shady Harvard Corporation’s anonymous board issued a rock-solid plebiscite of support, or whatever they call it. But then two influencers got involved: Harvard alum, Pershing Capital CEO, billionaire, and major donor Bill Ackman, and even more triggering for the Left, “conservative activist” Christopher Rufo piled on.

Both men claimed to have whistleblower information proving Claudine was a chronic plagiarist, which apparently is just what you don’t want to be if you’re president of a major Ivy League University.

Well, after millions of people started looking over her writings, it turned out that Claudine might have possibly borrowed a phrase or two from other academics and could have forgotten to mention it, from time to time. It started with her PhD dissertation. And it apparently continued through pretty much everything the so-called academic ever wrote, which in her defense is not very much, certainly not when compared to previous non-black Harvard presidents.

For instance, Claudine is the only Harvard president in history who’s never written a book. So? Books are overrated. And books are racist. Who cares.

You probably think I’m planning a victory lap since, in C&C’s December 10th roundup, I correctly predicted this would happen. “Gay’s a goner,” I said. “Claudine Gay will be gone soon,” I said. Fortunately, no one took the bet, because what would I do with Bud Lite stock shares?

But sorry to disappoint you: no, I am NOT taking a victory lap. How could you even think that? I’m not gloating. I’m taking Claudine’s side on this thing. I mean, this is clearly racism. There is no way it wasn’t racism! It proves beyond a doubt that the Ku Klux Klan is alive and riding the hills of America every single night. Literally riding; they’re riding, all over the place.

And, as she pointed out in her letter, Claudine’s coerced cancellation proves that the entire system is organized against black women of color, especially extra-black women of color sporting short-cropped hair, an austere, sexually ambiguous appearance, and wearing fat-framed Malcolm X glasses. Which all proves their essential blackness.

So you can easily see: This wasn’t just racism. It was systematic racism, which is literally one billion trillion times worse than regular racism.

Now, lots of dumb conservatives argue, hey, the first of the three Ivy League presidents to be hounded from office was Liz McGill of Penn State, and she is white. No, she’s not. She’s not white. She’s obviously black like Claudine. See? Black:

But let us not quibble over specifics. What’s done is done. America has proven herself irredeemably racist again in firing — for no reason — an under-qualified diversity hire who never did her own work. Instead of arguing, let’s focus on the future. Claudine needs a new job at Harvard. I’m thinking maybe something in ethics? Or, maybe she could be an editor at one of the school’s academic journals? Or how about being a career counselor?

And then there was one. An ominous article appeared in Business Insider yesterday, headlined:

As to MIT President Sally Kornbluth, well, she’s black too! It’s more racism! Racists!

Okay, okay, maybe Sally isn’t one hundred percent black. I’m not saying that she is or isn’t. But for the sake of argument, let’s say Sally is an American Indian just like U.S. Senator Liz “Pocahontas” Warren. Whichever, black, white, or Indian, Sally is intersectional, since she also claims to be Jewish, so it’s impossible for her to be anti-semitic.

I suppose they’re checking Sally’s articles now too.

It’s all such a shame, but the worst effect of Claudine’s untimely resignation is how unfortunately it hurts the whole movement toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. Just consider the unhappy statistics so far:

• The first black female president of Harvard has now resigned as a serial plagiarist after the shortest tenure in the school’s history.

• The first black female Supreme Court Justice does not know what a woman is.

• The first black female Vice-President can’t stop laughing like a hyena — I think it might be Tourette’s Syndrome — and she ‘enjoys’ the lowest approval rating of any Vice-President in American history, and that includes VP Spiro Agnew, who resigned in disgrace in 1973 after being convicted of bribery and tax evasion.

I’m just saying it doesn’t look too good for DEI. Maybe things would look better if they were allowed to choose some conservative ladies of color. It’s almost like it’s not really about diversity at all, but is really just about marxism.

Never mind, I’m talking crazy again.

🔥 More trouble for democrats. ABC News ran a difficult story yesterday headlined, “Sen. Bob Menendez facing even more allegations in new superseding indictment.” The Democrat Senator, already under indictment for bribery involving Egyptians, got some more bad news yesterday when his indictment was expanded to add sordid new allegations about Bob’s ‘relationship’ with Qatar.

Bob Menendez was popular in the Middle East. The expanded indictment alleges salacious details about Bob’s friendship with some Qatari agents who texted him offering gifts like luxury watches (worth up to $24K) and Grand Prix tickets. "How about one of these?”, a Qatari agent texted Menendez, along with photos of gem-encrusted high-end watches.

It was like his own personal shopping channel.

The Qatari agents also texted Bob about official Senate activities, nothing particular, just things like a Senate Resolution supporting Qatar. So, all in all, the new allegations don’t look too good. Quid pro quo, Bob.

Bob’s trial is set for May 6th. Defiantly, Bob says he’s not resigning, and they can’t make him. That’s exactly what Claudine Gay said for a while, too.

🔥 Yesterday we covered the Japanese earthquake and mentioned its coincidental proximity to the near-record solar flares. It turns out that America experienced coast-to-coast earthquakes as well, just smaller ones. But they were still dramatic.

On the East Coast, ABC-7 New York ran a story yesterday headlined, “1.7 magnitude earthquake jolts residents awake in Roosevelt Island, Queens.” While no property was damaged by the small shaker, there were loud booms, power outages, and a shocking tsunami of exploding manhole covers:

Media reports described the Manhattan earthquake as rare.

Washington DC was also hit by a small but sort of terrifying 2.3 magnitude, middle-of-the-night quake, as reported by local WTOP News in an article headlined, “Geologist explains the ‘very scary’ earthquake felt by Maryland, DC residents.” Residents who noticed reported hearing sonic booms and feeling disquieting house movement around 1am.

On the West Coast, closer to the edge of a tectonic plate, parts of California were shaken a little bit harder, as reported by the UK Independent in yesterday’s article headlined, “Earthquake shakes California with 4.1 magnitude tremor on New Year’s Day.” The quake occurred just offshore near Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Japan, Manhattan, DC, California. It almost makes you think the whole world was affected by something that can cause earthquakes, which could not possibly be carbon dioxide or cow farts. Well, it would take a truly earth-flattening level of flatulence, which we’d probably notice. So I doubt it.

Weird!

📉  Uh-oh — there was even more bad news for democrats. The Guardian ran a depressed report yesterday headlined, “More than a third of US adults say Biden’s 2020 victory was not legitimate.” And even worse — it’s going the wrong way. The WaPo did its absolute best to minimize and obfuscate the news, confusingly inverting how it was phrased into the negative, reporting that “fewer people say Biden’s election was legitimate.” In other words, put more plainly: more people in all groups think Biden’s 2020 election was NOT LEGITIMATE:

As you can see in the chart, in 2023 more people answered that Biden was “not legitimately elected” than they did in 2021 — including democrats. Overall, confidence in Biden’s election fell from 69% to 62%, with Republicans being the most skeptical, as you could imagine. I would also assume that they made every possible adjustment to the poll figures.

Still, the WaPo gets credit for admitting the truth, which should have been the article’s headline, later down in the article:

I guess those overproduced January 6th Committee hearings didn’t help convince people the election was legit, after all. For some reason.

I don’t know. Maybe the trend of people disbelieving Biden is legitimate has something to do with headlines like this one from the New York Times yesterday:

The opinion that ruled for True the Vote was over 140 pages long.  And it was more bad news for democrats, because it created some case law precedent about what “election interference” is NOT.

🔥 Things aren’t going so well down at the central planning office. The Wall Street Journal ran a long-form, magazine-style story yesterday headlined, “China Is Pressing Women to Have More Babies. Many Are Saying No.” The sub-headline explained, “The population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to around half a billion by 2100—and women are being blamed.”

Women blamed? How about blaming the central planners?

The Journal included a handy chart showing that modern communists have been even more successful at decimating China’s population than was Chairman Mao in his wildest, most murderous, rice-wine-induced excesses of the Great Famine:

I’m old enough to remember both when China first imposed its draconian ‘one-child’ policy in 1980 and also when it lifted the policy thirty-five years later in 2015. Now, almost nine years later, apparently the country’s population is for all purposes stuck in irreversible decline. Chinese communists did too good a job of portraying childbearing as patriarchal oppression of empowered womanhood, and now many Chinese women are just over it:

When Beijing said it would abolish the one-child policy in 2015, officials expected a baby boom. Instead, they got a baby bust. (Chinese) women are increasingly reluctant to marry and have children, accelerating the population decline. 

“Having had one child, I think I’ve done my duty,” Feng said. A second child, she said, would be too expensive. She said she tells relatives, “I can have another kid as long as you give me 300,000 yuan,” or around $41,000.

Molly Chen, 28 years old, said the demands of caring for aging relatives and her job as an exhibition designer in Shenzhen leave no room for kids or a husband. All she wants to do in her free moments is read or scroll through pet videos.

The Chinese communists used coercion to enforce childlessness, and they may have overshot the mark a little. Now they are faced with the unpleasant prospect of coercing women to bear children, which is much harder than stopping them in the first place. (In America, we don’t use coercion, we deploy bizarre CIA mind-games like confusing kids about their genders and offering them free, irreversible sterilization surgeries to help their identities conform to biological reality, or the other way around. Whichever.)

One surprising outcome of the baby bust was that China cracked down on abortions and even contraception:

There has been a tightening of licenses for clinics offering medical procedures to block pregnancies. In 1991, the height of the one-child policy, 6 million tubal ligations and 2 million vasectomies were performed. In 2020, there were 190,000 tubal ligations and 2,600 vasectomies.

(Abortions) have fallen by more than a third—from more than 14 million in 1991 to just under 9 million in 2020. China has since stopped releasing data on vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions.

In spite of all this, nobody has cared invoke the awful specter of The Handmaid’s Tale yet against President Xi. But as this story suggests, a dystopian Handmaid’s Tale society is much more likely to arise in a communist hellhole like China than in a free democracy. The ‘one-child’ policy was originally promoted by Chinese communists as ending patriarchal and discriminatory treatment of women under historic Confucianism. Now, the communist party and President Xi are stressing Confucian values like familial duties.

Don’t have babies! Wait, do have babies. I’ve said it before: if it weren’t for double standards, communists would have no standards at all.

If there’s a better illustration of the perils of central planning than China’s horrible population implosion problem, I don’t know what it could be. Ironically, women vote for marxist policies in the greatest numbers, but women always suffer the worst whenever marxists hold power. According to the articles, China’s Politburo includes no women in its top ranks.

China’s population demographic problems run deep. Optimistically, these problems may temper the country’s more aggressive military ambitions. In any event, the failure of one-child is another black eye for the Left.

Overall, 2024 is starting out very well for sane conservatism.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! C&C shall return tomorrow morning with another delicious roundup.

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