OPEN THREAD: Happy Saturday.
September 14, 2024
LEO BEATS GEO: United Airlines bumps GEO operators off fleet for Starlink Wi-Fi.
United, which has more routes across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans than any other airline, plans to offer passengers high-speed, low-latency Starlink Wi-Fi for free.
“Everything you can do on the ground, you’ll soon be able to do onboard a United plane at 35,000 feet, just about anywhere in the world,” United CEO Scott Kirby said in a statement.
According to United, supported Starlink services would include live streaming, gaming and the ability to connect multiple devices at once under one user.
On the one hand, yay, progress. On the other hand, I usually don’t even connect to existing aircraft wifi because I enjoy reading my book in peace.
WELL, GOOD: This Drug Shows Potential to Stop Migraines Before They Begin.
I hardly ever get full-blown migraines anymore; if I get anything it’s generally an ocular migraine that goes away on its own after 15 minutes or so. But others aren’t so lucky.
FASTER, PLEASE: NEO Surveyor: NASA’s Next Leap in Asteroid Defense.
NOT JUST AT COLUMBIA: Bill Barr: Mob Rule and Moral Bankruptcy at Columbia.
UPDATE: There is some news in Barr’s post. His law firm is represent two Columbia custodians who were held against their will by the Hamasniks who took over a building last Spring. I hope the firm is suing not just Columbia, not just the students who directly held the custodians, but all of the students involved in the takeover as co-conspirators.
COLOR ME SKEPTICAL: Psychedelic therapy could benefit millions of depressed Americans, study finds.
I DIDN’T KNOW THE DODGE HORNET EXISTED: The slowest selling car in America. “Even with its appealing starting price of $42,530, dealers just can’t get them off their lots quickly enough. According to CarEdge dealer inventory data, the Market Day Supply—or the number of days it would take to sell all the models available based on its current sales rate—of the Dodge Hornet is up to 428 days. Dodge apparently has 14,596 Hornets on dealer lots, but has only moved 1,536 in the last 45 days. As we mentioned, it doesn’t get much better for other Stellantis vehicles, as the Jeep Grand Wagoneer is in the same 428-day supply boat with 2,214 units on lots with only 233 sold in the past 45 days.”
I vaguely considered a Grand Wagoneer when I was buying a new SUV a couple of years ago, but it seemed expensive and clunky to me. I guess I wasn’t alone.
WE NEED A FEDERAL CIVIL RIGHTS LAW PROTECTING SELF-DEFENSE: Blue States Can’t Ban Your Guns So They’ll Punish You For Using Them.
Also gun-rights groups need to target prosecutors who go after people who defend themselves. There should be an automatic outside-funded effort to oust them, and nonstop vilification nationwide of the sort lefties engage in routinely.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Callaway Golf 300 Pro Laser Rangefinder. #CommissionEarned
JANE’S ADDICTION MORPHED INTO THE WWE SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Perry Farrell’s wife Etty Lau breaks her silence to reveal the REAL reason lead singer of Jane’s Addiction punched guitarist Dave Navarro on stage.
Related: “Dave Grohl Proves Rock Ain’t Dead,” Jim Treacher writes. “I know I’m jaded and probably more than a little evil, but I ain’t mad at Dave Grohl. It’s amusing to me. I just hope his new kid is worth giving up half of everything he owns in the divorce. Long live rock & roll!”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The research supports you taking a sick day. The science is settled!
WATCH: The Best Fact-Check of Kamala Harris in History, and You’ll Never Guess How It Ends.
Is this my most clickbaity headline in a long time? Probably. Am I about to deliver on every promise it makes? Absolutely.
The setup happened during the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and the topic centered on the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. When pressed on the matter, Harris tried to pivot by claiming that there is not a single American service member currently serving in a combat zone.
HARRIS: As of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world for the first time this century.
That’s a bold proclamation, but is it true? That’s where this epic fact-check comes in, and be sure to watch the video so you can see the twist at the end. Be warned that while hilarious, there is some salty language used.
This is the greatest fact-check to ever exist. It will never get better than this. Savor it. pic.twitter.com/V6U6q4EF8t
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) September 14, 2024
Exit quote: “Harris doesn’t care about military members. That’s made clear by her choosing to cast them aside for political gain. For her, they are just obstacles on her way to the White House. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a Democrat.”
MATT VESPA: The Left Is Powerless in Stopping the Haitians Eating Pets Story…And It’s Amazing to Watch.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, though in this instance, it’s not a statement regarding some appalling examples of liberal media bias. For the Ohio Haitians ‘eating the pets’ story, it’s pure entertainment, maybe a touch of schadenfreude: the liberal media is being tortured in their attempt to neutralize the story. Contrary to the establishment press, this story hasn’t been debunked. There’s no way within 48-72 hours that authorities can verify dogs and cats are not being eaten by the tens of thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
As for the local birdlife, geese and ducks are being eaten, with police reports to corroborate the allegations. Even a fact check done by local media on that story’s angle hasn’t negated it. If anything, it might have shined a light that this problem has expanded. I’m talking about the viral picture of the migrant holding a dead goose—that was not in Springfield but nearby Columbus.
The inability of the media to suffocate this story alluded to the industry’s appalling lack of trust. No one believes them, no matter how hard they try. It only seems to further entrench people’s belief that Haitian migrants are running wild in Springfield. The consumption of pets needs to be verified, but many corroborating eyewitness accounts exist. Geese and ducks are being taken, driving out of control in the town. It’s led to fatalities.
Christopher Rufo goes in search of: The Cat Eaters of Ohio.
So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described.
Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!”
We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”
We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.
One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.
According to the original witness, whose son was friendly with the neighbors, there was no doubt about what happened last summer. “They was barbecuing the damn cat!” he said. His son’s mother had previously witnessed the family butchering a mammal on the street, but the cats on the barbeque put him in such a state of shock, he felt the need to film it.
To be clear: this single incident does not confirm the particularities of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism.
Related: Trump Promises Mass Deportation of Springfield, Ohio Immigrants If Elected.
And from the Power Line Week in Pictures:
LIGHTNING DEAL: AstroAI Tire Inflator Portable Air Compressor. #CommissionEarned
HEY, SPEAKING OF CRAZY CAT LADIES: Kamala Harris’ new climate director said she is hesitant to have children because of climate change threats.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign hired a new climate director who has frequently said the effects of climate change are part of what’s stopping her from having children.
Camila Thorndike, who previously worked in the Senate managing the climate portfolio of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was given the title of climate engagement director for the Harris for President campaign in September 2024, according to her LinkedIn page.
Prior to joining the Harris campaign, Thorndike said on several occasions that she considers climate change a factor when deciding whether to have kids.
“I was 15 when I first saw the climate ‘hockey stick’ graph. I realized that this skyrocketing arrow of temperature would take place in my lifetime. All of the big milestones of life that I was looking forward to would be in the context of this big global crisis. It led to the question of whether or not to have kids – which is still a big question for me – where I would put down roots, what my family would do,” Thorndike said in 2018 when she was the D.C. campaign director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
Again in November 2019, Thorndike described it as an “ethical question that keeps me up at night.”
“I have always been someone who enjoys children and loves the idea of a family, and that’s why I have wrestled with this, because my logical mind and the facts of the future I can see bearing down on us are not supportive of the life I would want for them,” she told Yahoo News at the time.
Curiously, this doomsday loop has been around since 1970 (1968, if you include Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb into the equation, and you should), and yet somehow, the Final Countdown never quite arrives:
1983. NBC News. We are all going to die by the 1990's because of climate change. 😂 pic.twitter.com/YZvG7cvc89
— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 31, 2023
You should see how the media went out of its way to terrify people during the previous decade (when global cooling was all the rage):
As the late Kathy Shaidle wrote in 2018 on the Blueanon left comparing Trump to Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse.
Eventually, the doomsday mindset started to have a result among the true believers, as I wrote in a post at EdDriscoll.com in 2011 headlined “In Search of the Missing Frisco Families.” San Francisco, on its way to becoming Detroit by the Bay, was concurrently “becoming a child-free zone as youth population declines,” as a headline at the San Francisco Examiner noted in 2011. Three years prior, in an effort to save the planet, the puritans at the San Francisco Chronicle explored how readers could throw “less-is-more birthday parties:”
Forget the twisty straws, Tootsie rolls and Dora the Explorer plates with matching cups, hats and tablecloth. There are signs that more parents would like to.
Anxious about the economy, global warming and our national image as people who would rent a limo for a kid’s party while a polar bear’s ice floe melts, many are toning down the trappings of that classic annual ritual, the blowout birthday party. They are saying no to plastic toys and water bottles, paper plates, gift wrap and new toys. There is even a modest backlash against the goody bag, the sack of candy and plastic knickknacks usually thrust into each sticky hand at the end of parties.
* * *
“There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party,” said Sarah Lane, a founder of Washington state’s Progressive Kid, which has a Web site with suggestions on how to raise kids with good values. “You should see what gets thrown away. It’s disgusting.”
Trust me, there are numerous things more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party in San Francisco.
On the flipside, the Politico warned its readers in April about — I hope you’re sitting down for this! — The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.
This just in: religious people seek to make babies!
UPDATE: In addition to everything else going wrong in the 1970s, Leonard Nimoy spent his timeout as Spock absolutely terrifying the nation:
MATT TAIBBI: Leaders Beyond the Law. In a very real sense, Dick Cheney hasn’t changed sides at all.
THAT’LL RUIN YOUR DAY: Moment freight train smashes into stranded 18-wheeler carrying military howitzer in ‘devastating’ collision.
This is the shocking moment a freight train smashed into a stranded vehicle carrying a military howitzer in South Carolina.
The crash happened at a railroad crossing near Highway 52 in Goose Creek yesterday afternoon.
Debris can be seen flying into the air as the train collides with the 18-wheeled tractor-trailer as it tries to cross the tracks.
The crossing was also destroyed in the crash and the road was closed by police.
Cops from the Goose Creek Police Department said they received a call about the collision at around 12.30pm on Thursday.
Police said the trailer, which was carrying a military vehicle, got struck while driving over the train crossing.
There were no reports of any injuries and the driver refused treatment.
The military vehicle on the trailer has been described as a M109 Paladin Howitzer.
This being 2024, the crash can be observed from multiple angles:
‘ONE FOR THE ROAD:’ Amazon’s Grand Tour Drives Off into the Sunset.
My latest over at EdDriscoll.com, on the last episode of Amazon’s Grand Tour with Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May, as their version of Top Gear finally comes full circle.
STEVE HAYWARD: Republicans for Suicide.
The case of Dick Cheney is even more curious than most never Trumpers because his claim that Trump represents the most serious threat to the Constitution ever raises a question: What is the premise of that hyperbole? Is it that the executive branch has grown too powerful? Well yes—heartily agree. Yet the paradox here is that Trump in his first term kept trying to get Congress to step up and assert its constitutional powers to solve some of our major problems, rather than using executive ukase as Obama and Biden liked to do (and no doubt Harris will too, if she wins). And Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court have struck the most serious blows against executive power, especially in striking down the Chevron Doctrine.
I wonder if Cheney agrees with that decision. If the executive branch is too powerful to be trusted in the hands of Donald Trump, maybe Cheney ought to look in the mirror a bit longer. After all, as both a congressman in the 1980s, and then as vice president, Cheney was one of the leading champions of maximum executive power, and produced serious work in support of the “unitary executive” idea.
In the past, all Republican presidents or presidential candidates were called Hitler by Democratic politicians and their operatives with bylines while they ran or were in office, and then rehabilitated as thoughtful elder statesmen once there was a new Hitler who needed attacking. But now that we have former Republicans endorsing the current Democratic presidential candidate, it places their opponents’ past rhetoric in sharp perspective. Why should we believe their crazy rantings now, knowing that they’ll find astonishing levels of Strange New Respect™ a few years later?
SUPERCUT!
Harris: I'm proud to be endorsed by the Dark Lord himself! pic.twitter.com/ifpLk1W0DJ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 12, 2024
Or as the Hill exclaimed on Tuesday: How the GOP’s Darth Vader turned into Luke Skywalker.
Incidentally, as the Spectator’s “Cockburn” asked in February of 2020: Why do NeverTrumpers think they can run the Democratic party? The arrogance follows wherever they go.
UPDATE: Everything seemingly is spinning out of control!* AP is quick to provide redemption to Cheney:
Meanwhile, from America’s Newspaper of Record:
WHY MALE VOTERS CAN’T STAND KAMALA:
Kamala’s biggest problem is the men. White men. Black men. Young men.
Gen Z has the largest gender gap of any age group with young men supporting Trump by margins similar to those of older men. Black men and Hispanic men have been the hardest minority groups to persuade into the Kamala camp. A New York Times article last month blamed lagging black male support for Kamala on the ‘misogynoir’ that black men were suffering from.
Why is Kamala doing so poorly among men? One hint comes from polling numbers showing that white men went from supporting Trump by 13 points before the DNC convention to 21 points afterward. “Joy”, “brat summer” and all the efforts to brand a presidential campaign like the Barbie movie backfired making Kamala into ‘Barbie’ and Trump into ‘Oppenheimer’.
It’s not just the vibe, climaxing in Oprah’s convention appearance, that’s turning off men, the vibe is a symptom of the real problem not only with the campaign, but the candidate.
Kamala is a lightweight politician running on feelings at a time when men need something more solid. The “joy” theme told votes to turn off their brains, join the party and stop worrying. TikTok dances make a certain kind of voter gush while completely alienating another kind of voter.
Having “brat summer” inflicted on you when you’re cutting back on groceries is salt in the wound. A trivial campaign is insulting to those who are suffering and falling behind on bills.
But TikTok dances are the whole reason why Kamala is here.
Also, every office has a woman like Kamala, cruising on privilege and diversity points.
NOT SHOCKING, BUT DISAPPOINTING (Warning: longish post):
As most IP readers know, although I am not an absolutionist on the First Amendment (nor any of the Bill of Rights) I’ve dedicated my professional life to defending not just the right, but the need for what Justice Brennan called “the breathing space” upon which democracy depends to give all political speech, even that which we may find unfounded or even offensive.
I bring this up because I cannot help but remind people to hold the news media as accountable as they do politicians and policy makers. This leads me to emphasize how critical it is to support — or at least read — news platforms that are dedicated to providing accurate and fair stories, and in a nod to the value of hearing heterodoxy that the First Amendment (and indeed real democracy) needs, cover stories and viewpoints of all stripes.
Free marketplace of ideas, and all that.
Case in point: JustTheNews, a wholly independent and thriving news website has the courage (and business smarts) to present stories that the stenographers in the mainstream media routinely ignore.
They reported today on the fact that there are serious and provable connections between a Soros-funded racial justice organization that supports liberal prosecutors and coordination with the Biden-Harris administration to apply lawfare against former President Trump.
The key issue as a citizen is to get all the facts and make up your own mind. When the media incessantly refuses to dig into questions, [insert motivation here] the public is, in a word, shortchanged.
In my career as a newsroom lawyer, I recall speaking with a reporter in the Bloomberg newsroom about the failure to cover the “Fast and Furious” scandal of the Obama-era.
“What’s that?” the reporter asked me. “I’ve never heard of that.”
Res Ipsa loquitur.
We’ve seen a relevant observation here many times:
So, gentle reader, I implore you to regularly read the “out of the mainstream” news platforms available — and encourage others to do the same.
The Daily Caller, The Daily Signal, PJ Media, among others are not slanted in conservative bias. They simply provide clean, clear and factual news of interest to libertarians and conservatives who are not getting all the facts.
To be sure, the faux-liberals running search engines and other wanna-be censors (those who bellow “We must suppress disinformation to save democracy”) have done their damndest to demonetize and suppress these voices. Frankly, I find the arrogance and dehumanization of such paternalistic policies to be what I call “liberal fascism.”
You don’t have to believe everything you read, but you are better served by reading everything.
***Disclosure: I have provided some of the above listed news platforms with editorial and legal advice, and this posting has not been suggested, sponsored or approved by any of them.***
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Roland Emmerich Is Ready To Shop Lawrence In Arabia.
The filmmaker has long dreamed of playing in the world of the classic 1962 film starring Peter O’Toole, and in the coming weeks, he and Bohemian Rhapsody writer Anthony McCarten will take it out to potential partners. The duo envision this as a three-season prestige series, and McCarten hopes to write the entire first season.
Emmerich calls it “In Arabia,” rather than “of Arabia,” because as he says, “it has a little bit more characters” than the original movie.
In 1983, executives at NBC thought, “Yes! Let’s turn the beloved 1943 movie Casablanca into a TV series. And let’s get David Soul out of Starsky and Hutch to play Rick, the iconic character played by the legendary Humphrey Bogart. It’ll be brilliant!”
It wasn’t. And Roland Emmerich’s TV series version of one of the greatest films ever made will likely be worse.
SOMETIME BETWEEN WHEN I WAS A KID AND THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY, NOOSES WENT FROM EMBLEMS OF THE OLD WEST TO PRESUMPTIVELY RACIST: Maryland noose not ‘racist’ or ‘anti-black’: principal. “This is not the first time during this new school year a rope has turned out to just be a rope.”
