May 4, 2025

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: How it started:

How it’s going: Dave Portnoy vows to ‘come for throats’ over vile antisemitic act at his Philadelphia Barstool bar.

In a heated rant posted to his account on X, Barstool Sports founder and president Dave Portnoy called out patrons at one of his company’s branded bars for an anti-Semitic sign that was held up in Philadelphia.

An enraged Portnoy posted an ‘Emergency Press Conference’ video on Sunday after being informed that a light-up sign at the Barstool bar that said ‘F*** the Jews’ was spotted by his fans.

The Massachusetts native says he has been tracking down those responsible and promised to ‘come for throats’ over the despicable display.

Portnoy said he was getting ready to attend an event over the weekend when his phone started ‘blowing up’ over the sign spotted at the Barstool Sansom Street located in Philadelphia’s Center City neighborhood.

‘Usually a great bar. You know, bottle service, people buy drinks, you get a sign. There was a sign yesterday that said, “F*** the Jews”,’ Portnoy said.

‘I’ve been shaking. I’ve been so mad for the last two hours. Like I instantly got on, this is why the Emergency Press Conference is late, because I was so over the top.’

Language alert:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 212

FREDDIE DEBOER: The Indoor Plumbing Test. What can AI enable you to do that you couldn’t already do by other means?

Plumbing – bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering – goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon. There were pretty sophisticated sewer systems in Victorian London, the White House got running water in the Jackson administration, and as usual major metropolitan areas in rich countries were ahead of the game generally. But it wasn’t until the 1920s or so that indoor plumbing became a true mass phenomenon, again only in wealthy countries, and it was perfectly common for a soldier coming home from World War II in 1945 to be coming home to a house with a well and an outhouse. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes had indoor plumbing, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period where most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And, as cool as NASA and launching satellites and orbiting the Earth and traveling to the Moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.

So when I read people putting the iPhone as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, I have to imagine that they’re big fans of shitting in their yard. Because if faced with a choice, they’ve indicated that they’d choose their smartphone over their toilet! And that’s quite a choice. It might be worth doing a little reality check in that regard by spending a month without one and then a month without the other. So you see how life feels without your smart phone for 30 days, and then you see what it’s like to not be able to access indoor plumbing for 30 days. You have to piss and shit outside. You have to walk to a well, if you can find one, to get (hopefully clean) water, and then you have to heat it up on your stove if you want it hot. You can’t shower, and taking a bath would be a remarkably laborious process that still left you with tepid water. And this isn’t just a question of comfort but a question of essential hygiene, by which I mean medically-relevant hygine – cholera, typhoid, gastrointestinal worms, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and many more diseases were massively harder to avoid before mass indoor plumbing. I don’t know you, personally, but I feel considerable confidence in suggesting that your desire to avoid those diseases is greater than your attachment to Instagram.

That’s the shitting in the yard test, or the indoor plumbing test, for those who prefer to avoid vulgarity. The test requires you to compare the hype about a particular tech product up against the actual brick-and-mortar changes wrought in the great period of human advancement that began sometime in the late 19th century and ended sometime in the late 20th; the modern flush toilet is just a particularly relevant example. Is Zoom really a bigger part of your life than food refrigeration, a technology that has saved untold millions of lives over the decades by dramatically reducing deaths from foodborne illness? Is cloud storage really a bigger deal than infant vaccines, which save six lives a minute? Does Android Auto really rate when compared to the airbag? You can call these questions obtuse, and some do, but they are natural and necessary things to think about in an era of obsession with artificial intelligence. (By which people mean LLM/neural net-based artificial intelligence, which is a whole other thing.) When you say that AI is the most important invention in human history, you’re making some really, really powerful claims. And yes, you have to then justify saying that AI is more important than, for example, the transistor, self-negating claims that deny the importance of technologies that make large language models possible. But you also have to justify saying that AI is more important than, like, the bowl. By which I mean, bowls. To put food in. To eat out of. Try and spend the rest of your life without ever using another food container and get back to me about whether ChatGPT is more important. Food containers are inventions!

In his 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, James Pethokoukis explored the massive economic boost the benefits of the Industrial Revolution brought in the first half of the 20th century:

In late October 2012, a storm surge from Hurricane Sandy knocked out power in New York City for several days, deluged the subway system and most of the road tunnels leading into Manhattan, and disrupted voice and data communication as flooding damaged a key switching facility in lower Manhattan. For a brief stretch, the financial capital of the world wasn’t New York City, as the New York Stock Exchange had to close for two consecutive days. As Robert Gordon writes in The Rise and Fall of American Growth:

Sandy pushed many of its victims back to the nineteenth century. Residents of New York City below Thirty-Fourth Street learned what it was like to lose the elevators that routinely had carried them to and from their apartments.… Anyone who had no power also lost such modern inventions as electric lighting, air-conditioning and fans to ventilate dwelling spaces, and refrigerators and freezers to keep food from spoiling. Many residents had no heat, no hot food, and even no running water. Those living in New Jersey were often unable to find gasoline needed for commuting because gas station pumps could not function without electricity. Moreover, communication was shut off after batteries were drained on laptops and mobile phones.

For a brief time, New Yorkers didn’t have access to the great inventions that made what Gordon has termed the special century of rapid economic and productivity growth from the 1870s to early 1970s. Three of the most important emerged within three months in 1879: the electric light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and radio, Gordon points out. These were fundamental “general purpose technologies” (GPTs) that spun off scores of inventions that made the modern world New Yorkers currently enjoy. (“What great births you have witnessed,” wrote Mark Twain to Walt Whitman on the latter’s seventieth birthday, referring to those and other mechanical marvels of the age.) And, crucially, of all those Sandy-created deprivations, the one probably most tolerable was the dodgy wireless service. While we all love the ability to stay in touch with everyone and everything at all times, it still probably places well behind the lack of hot food, water, a heated home, and mobility (well, for most of us who aren’t Twitter addicts, at least).

This difference between losing the marvels of the latter part of the Industrial Revolution (or Second Industrial Revolution) and losing those of the Information Technology and Communications Revolution (or Third Industrial Revolution) helps illustrate the nature of the slowdown that began with the Great Downshift. Those special century inventions changed life in such a profound and unrepeatable way and across so many dimensions of our lives, Gordon argues, that it’s hard to imagine living without them. And while these inventions had a massive impact on American life, their effect on productivity had been exhausted by the early 1970s. And the one-off nature of them means they can’t be repeated. Only once can you bring indoor plumbing to a country or cover it in concrete highways or move from an economy powered by horses to one driven by horsepower. Progress after 1970 certainly continued, but it was focused more narrowly on entertainment, communication, and information technology—important advances, but none that created a second Up Wing golden age of the sort imagined during the 1960s. At least not yet. They were significant enough to create a productivity blip in the late 1990s and early 2000s that has since faded. “[The] invention of the Internet, web browsers, search engines, and e-commerce created a fundamental change in business practices and procedures that was reflected in a… temporary, rather than a permanent, upswing in the pace of progress,” Gordon writes. His skepticism about the IT Revolution is the empirical conclusion that is referenced by the “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” meme.

“Only once can you bring indoor plumbing to a country or cover it in concrete highways or move from an economy powered by horses to one driven by horsepower.” Indeed.™

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 201

DAVID MARCUS: Yep, it’s Fetterman’s brain that triggered the Left’s hit piece.

In 2022, when John Fetterman had a stroke while he was running for his Senate seat, the Democrats and their media allies were insistent that to even question his fitness to serve was ableist and unacceptable.

My, how times have changed.

This week, New York magazine, as reliable a Democrat organ as there is, ran a scathing hit piece on Fetterman in which current and former staffers all but suggest that not only should he not be Pennsylvania’s senior senator, he belongs in an assisted living facility.

The piece has no “gotcha” moment that would make any fair person say that Fetterman needs to step aside – you know, the kind former President Biden provided daily. Rather, it is a collection of anecdotes about him snapping at staff, or withdrawing into himself, perhaps not taking his medication. Try as they might, the folks at New York magazine constructed a molehill, not a mountain.

But why, one wonders, two years after waiving away similar behavior is a liberal news outlet suddenly parading the senator’s alleged diminished capacities? What changed?

Well, the article itself gives us a big hint with this line, “The endless fights over Israel, which saw Fetterman draw further into himself, coincided with setbacks in his recovery regimen.”

You don’t say.

Allow me to humbly suggest that this is not, in fact, a coincidence. Fetterman’s strong support of Israel, America’s ally, and his other recent moderate positions have placed a giant target on the back of his hoodie sweatshirt.

Also: Dem Senator’s Camera-Thirsty Wife Does Her Husband Dirty. “According to the outlet, Gisele visited her husband’s senate office in November 2023, weeks after Hamas attacked Israel, and got into a heated debate about the burgeoning war and her husband’s support for the Israeli state. Gisele also went behind her husband’s back, reportedly texting staffers in the wake of their fight on multiple occasions.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 118

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: How to respond to ‘May the fourth be with you.’

In a universe where Wookiees roar, lightsabers hum, and the Force flows, there exists a day that unites fans across star systems: May the 4th. But why this date? It’s not just a random alignment of celestial bodies; it’s a playful pun. You see, “May the fourth” sounds eerily similar to the iconic phrase: “May the Force be with you.” So, whether you’re a Jedi Knight, a Sith Lord, or just a casual admirer of droids and starships, let’s explore the origins of this cosmic holiday and discover how to respond when someone greets you with those magical words.

Or, you could “Take Five,” and decide to be a grownup about the topic:

 

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 155

JEFF DUNETZ: The Democrats Who Call Trump Nazi And The Reporters Who Don’t Confront Them.

What is it with those Trump-hating politicians? If they disagree with a Trump policy, say so and explain why. Why do they insist on cheapening the memory of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, those who survived the Holocaust torture, and the Jews who mourn the victims’ pain every day? In the rare cases when a Republican makes a similar disgusting statement, the media would be all over them like cheese on pizza. But when a Democrat spews that hatred, there’s nothing but crickets.

It used to be a basic rule of American politics never to speak of the Holocaust or any of its related terms, such as Nazis or Hitler, for political warfare. But that doesn’t matter anymore.

Anyone who says Trump, his supporters, or other Republicans is Hitler or a Nazi doesn’t care about minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust. Any reporter who doesn’t challenge that disgusting statement is just as bad.

QED: NY Times: ‘Chilling Parallels’ Between Third Reich and Trump’s Second Term.

David Segal, a feature writer for the New York Times, interviewed German-born novelist Daniel Kehlmann, who “sees chilling parallels between what happened [under Hitler] and what has unfolded since Trump’s second inauguration.”

The “Republican president = Hitler” smear has been a tired and offensive liberal trope since the Reagan Administration, unworthy of appearing in a once-prestigious newspaper. The Times headline writer wasn’t subtle:

In a Nazi-Era Filmmaker’s Compromises, a Novelist Finds Reasons to Fear

Daniel Kehlmann wrote ‘The Director’ only to realize how loudly the moral quandaries faced by G.W. Pabst would resonate today.

* * * * * * * *

At the end, Kehlmann cited his own paranoia to prove himself right that American had become a dangerously intolerant place under Trump.

“Immediately I’m thinking, can it be bad for me to say something like this to The New York Times? Which, I think, proves my point.”

How so? What’s going to happen to you? As Tom Wolfe in “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America” about a panel he was on at Princeton in 1965 when LBJ was in the White House and the topic began to focus on – see if this rings a bell – “the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck.”

I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called ‘The New Life Out There’ for New York magazine. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history.

* * * * * * * * *

Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was [Günter] Grass, speaking in English.

“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Most recently: German Intelligence Officially Designates AfD an ‘Extremist Organization’ That Threatens Democracy.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 80

MATT VESPA: JD Vance Absolutely Wrecked an Anti-Trump Commentator Over This Trump White House Post.

Vance responded and drove over Kristol with a tank:

As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen.

Kristol was one of the leading voices supporting the Iraq War when neoconservatives dominated the foreign policy thinking of the GOP, which led to a $1 trillion disaster in Iraq, a brutalization of the GOP in the 2006 midterms, and a humbling moment that exposed the limits of American power vis-à-vis importing the American Revolution into the Middle East.

Other reactions were either laughably inauthentic, eye-roll-worthy, or outright hypocritical.

* * * * * * * *

Liberal America and the media called Obama the Second Coming. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer mocked the sacrament of communion.

Spare us the lectures, libs. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Even in 2025, typing “Obama halo photos” into Google Image Search brings up these vintage results; wire service photographers absolutely loved framing Obama in front of his campaign’s logo in 2008 and the presidential seal in 2012 to create the symbolism of a halo:

In 2008, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist anointed Obama as “the Lightworker:”

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

* * * * * * * *

But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it’s not even about Obama, per se. There’s a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that’s been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama’s candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically draw to him. It’s exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.

The following year, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas declared Obama Is ‘Sort of God:’

 Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: “I think the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world.”

At the beginning of 2013, Thomas doubled down on this theme:

Branching out a bit in the interim, in 2010, a Newsweek cover declared Obama “God of All Things:”Newsweek Depiction of Obama as Lord Shiva Upsets Some Indian-Americans:

Newsweek’s depiction of President Obama on its latest cover has irked some Indian Americans who, fresh off Obama’s visit to the world’s largest democracy, are not happy with the image of the U.S. president as the Hindu deity, Lord Shiva.

The Newsweek cover shows Obama with several arms carrying policy issues while balancing on one leg. The headline reads: “God of All Things” with a subtitle, “Why the Modern Presidency May be too Much for One Person to Handle.”

Shiva, who is one of three pre-eminent gods in the Hindu religion along with Brahma and Vishnu, is considered the destroyer of the world, which must end, metaphorically speaking, in order to be reborn as a more universalistic place. However, the god’s purpose is not to foretell an apocalyptic ending.

Of course, for many on the left, the post-Obama years have been “Apocalypse Now,” to coin a phrase.

More here: Obama Lackey Tries Outraging MAGA With Obama Pope Pic and It Does Not Go the Way He Planned … At All.

UPDATE: Kamala Harris posed for pics, celebrated San Francisco Pride with Catholic-mocking drag queen from Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 158

ROLLING BACK THE ESTABLISHMENT EVERYWHERE: How One Family Aims to Break Liberals’ Corporate Voting Power. “Roughly 400 miles from Wall Street in a small town in Pennsylvania’s Rust Belt, Jerry Bowyer, his wife and five of their children have been working around a dining room table, sifting through corporate data on hot-button issues such as abortion, DEI and climate change. Their goal: Shift more power to conservative investors at company annual meetings. And, with the 2025 proxy season kicking into gear this month, there are signs that the Bowyers are winning some converts. . . . What’s at stake may seem nerdy and arcane, but it’s nonetheless important in helping set corporate priorities. US securities law requires publicly traded companies to have an annual meeting to allow shareholders to pass muster on their business. Thousands of fund managers cast billions of votes on behalf of millions of investors on issues ranging from what executives get paid to resolutions that seek additional environmental and societal-related disclosures. Conservative-leaning groups like the Bowyer’s want to match the sway that progressives have historically had. Currently, resolutions opposing diversity, equity and inclusion programs struggle to attract more than 2% support from shareholders.”

Posted at 12:02 pm by Glenn Reynolds 16

METAPHOR ALERT:

Posted at 8:38 am by Glenn Reynolds 120

WELL, THEY PROVIDED LOTS OF REASONS TO DISTRUST THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MEDIA: Alex Berenson: Did Covid lockdowns and school closures swing young people sharply right? Two new polls offer powerful evidence the answer is yes.

“Childhood is achingly brief, and they stole time from these kids, and they stole experiences.”

They — the Donald Trump-hating Democratic blob that includes the public health establishment, teachers’ unions, academia, and the media — sure did.

And for evil, self-interested reasons that have become very obvious.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 107

RAZIB KHAN: Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago. “A plain reading of this result is that modern humans are a synthetic population, and our functions and features are a melange. Most of our biological processes derive from the same lineage that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans. But, a minority of our heritage is a holdover from some very different and alien population that was notably distinct from the Eurasian hominins likely demographically dominant within Africa (population A). That exotic population, labeled B here, seems to have bequeathed our lineage much more of its cognitive function, and perhaps crucially earned us our self-chosen sobriquet Homo sapiens.”

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds 99