THE FIRST OF TWO SPACEX LAUNCHES TONIGHT WENT WELL:
Falcon 9 completes our 100th droneship landing of the year! pic.twitter.com/O5J25bw1ca
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 13, 2024
The next is scheduled for about half an hour from now.
December 13, 2024
HMM: Why Hasn’t Trump Said Anything About All the Drones? Weird, No?
UPDATE: You ask, Trump answers. “Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge. I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”
BURIED LEDE: KATIE COURIC ACTUALLY GOT A STORY RIGHT! ‘Smartest Thing They Ever Did:’ Katie Couric, Jessica Tarlov Admit GOP Leaders Sending Migrants North Was Game Changer.
Katie Couric and Jessica Tarlov admit Republicans sending illegals to blue cities worked. Call it the “smartest thing they ever did.”
Correct. The only way to make left-wingers change is to have them suffer the results of their own policies.
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) December 13, 2024
Journalist Katie Couric and Democratic Fox News co-host Jessica Tarlov credited Republican governors for their strategy of transporting illegal immigrants to northern states.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and former Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey in 2022 sent illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. Tarlov, on “Next Question with Katie Couric,” described DeSantis’ decision to relocate migrants to Martha’s Vineyard as remarkably intelligent, while Couric shared that her Florida-based friend believed the move effectively raised awareness about immigration issues.
“On the immigration front, there was a tendency amongst Democrats, and especially Democrats who were discussing the issue, so people who do interviews or are part of the media, to minimize it over the first two and a half years when there were a lot of people coming in here,” Tarlov said. “And I thought that it was a stunt when they started busing migrants … to Martha’s Vineyard. It was the smartest thing they ever did.”
“Well, it’s interesting ’cause I have a friend who lives in Florida, and I said, ‘What did you think of Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott taking some of these immigrants and moving them to northern states?’ And she said, ‘I thought it was great because nobody really was paying attention before that.’ And I do think that this untold story was the strain on social services and communities, particularly along the border, this huge influx of immigrants was having,” Couric responded. “And I think the mainstream media, however you define that these days, kind of ignored that story to its peril.”
Flashback: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
The ghost of Saul Alinsky smiles: “Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. ‘You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.’”
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Stole a Rolls, Made His Own Drive-Thru. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we have the man who really missed the Checkers drive-thru, how not to order sex on the beach, and Virginia Man shoplifting in front of 50 cops.”
READER FAVORITE: Boxing Reflex Ball with Punch Counter App – Improve Hand-Eye Coordination & Reaction Speed. #CommissionEarned
THAT’S OKAY, BIDEN WILL PARDON HIM NEXT: Illegal Chinese National Arrested In California Shipping Weapons And Devices To North Korea.
BEST. CITY NAME. EVER.
SpaceX HQ will now officially be in the city of Starbase, Texas! https://t.co/zpN4t3mJQT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 13, 2024
Please get this done, Judge Treviño.
IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™ — Oh, Geez, Now It’s Happening in Oregon. “We’ve been wondering about those drones in New Jersey, but now Oregon has just said: Hold my IPA.”
READER FAVORITE: Kiehl’s Ultra Facial Cream. #CommissionEarned
OUCH: YouTube TV Raises Price 14%, to $83 per Month, Citing ‘Rising Cost of Content.’
YouTube TV is getting more expensive — outpacing the rate of inflation — with a 14% price increase for the streaming pay-TV package going into effect for new customers immediately.
The cost of a new YouTube TV base plan subscription is increasing from $72.99 to $82.99, starting Dec. 12, 2024, for new users, the company said in a message to customers Thursday. The new price will go into effect Jan. 13, 2025, for most existing users, while those on existing trials and promotional rates “will not be affected.” The increase is “due to the rising cost of content,” according to YouTube.
With the higher fee, YouTube TV has now more than doubled in price in just under five years, from $40/month as of March 2018 to $83/month.
Has the value of the content doubled?
WHY THE ONLINE LEFT IS SIMPING FOR LUIGI MANGIONE:
The details emerging about Mangione would suggest he was no raging leftist. He seems to have been a follower of the centrist podcast bros – those who dispense a mix of self-help, gym tips, nerdy AI chat and anti-wokeness. Perhaps more telling is his glowing review on the Goodreads website of the manifesto of Ted ‘Unabomber’ Kaczynski, who mounted a 17-year domestic-terror campaign, raging against industrial society. ‘You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution’, posted an account bearing Mangione’s name and likeness.
Some speculate that Mangione’s chronic back pain might have radicalised him, even though his incredibly wealthy background would mean it is unlikely he’d been left destitute and untreated. Shell casings found at the scene were marked with the words ‘deny’, ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ – words typically used in health-insurance policy documents, which inspired the title of a 2010 book, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The police say that, when Mangione was arrested, he was in possession of a short ‘manifesto’, declaring that ‘These parasites had it coming’. ‘I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done’, it reportedly says.
In their ‘joy’ and rationalisations, Team Luigi is being accused of mainstreaming revolutionary violence. The truth, I think, is much more pathetic. The frisson some leftists have felt from this killing – not the ordinary folks scarred by a woeful healthcare system, but the well-heeled commentators who no doubt have immaculate coverage – speaks more to a kind of morbid pessimism than to any genuine radicalism.
Those swooning over Mangione are not egging on some grand revolution, they are extracting a vicarious thrill from watching someone lash out, murderously, at ‘the system’. The claim that Thompson’s cold-blooded killing has, at least, generated ‘a conversation’ about healthcare is pretty weak, too. Not least because the main conversations it has generated thus far, across cable news and the internet, are whether or not Taylor Lorenz is a twat, or whether it’s acceptable to celebrate a killing, or whether it’s okay to find the killer sexy (Mangione clearly took on board all that podcast-bro workout advice).
This speaks to what American Marxist Fredrik deBoer, in another context, has described as the ‘fantasy of deliverance through political violence’ on today’s political left, bred of a ‘feeling of grasping at straws’. Having failed to transform the system, leftists fantasise about going to war with it, despite this being obviously doomed to fail in an era when the state is overwhelmingly better armed than the populace and the populace is generally disapproving of political violence.
Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:
JOHN STOSSEL DEBUNKS THE RECYCLING RELIGION IN NEW VIDEO: With an appearance from fellow Insta-co-blogger John Tierney.
Plastic recycling is a “dead-end street."
That quote…unbelievably…is from @Greenpeace.
In my new video, we debunk the recycling religion. pic.twitter.com/loe7F7gS2L
— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) December 12, 2024
COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: ‘Understandable’ Violence and the Left. “Anger is natural. A desire to peacefully bring about change through the democratic process is natural. Wishing murder on civilians because of your own pathological immaturity is not natural.”
It certainly seems to be becoming habitual in some corners.
I WOULDN’T BE SURPRISED, BUT DICTATORSHIPS ARE OFTEN ABLE TO STUMBLE ALONG WELL PAST THE POINT WHERE THE OUGHT TO COLLAPSE: Putin’s regime may be closer to a Soviet collapse than we think.