ALMOST LIKE A PUDDLE: Kamala’s Latest Deep Thoughts.
GREY GOOSE PELOSI ALWAYS WAS: Nancy Pelosi, Unhinged.
WHEN EVERYTHING IS A NEW 9-11 NOTHING IS: WaPo: Overturning Roe Is A 9/11-Style Attack.
May 15, 2022
PRONOUN POLICE GO AFTER MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS: I got called the “Hairy It” (a play on my surname) in elementary school even though “it” was not my pronoun of choice. That was before Title IX, so I wasn’t able to turn it into a federal case. Instead, I had to come up with similar epithets for my rowdy playmates … which, upon reflection, was kind of fun.
CORPORATE WOKEISM: Dropbox advertises that it intends to violate Title VII.
JOHN McGINNIS: “Lawyers for Radical Change.“
OPEN THREAD: I’m digging your scene.
A Satellite with A View: Timelapse of Earth rising over the Moon.
THE LEFT CREATED ‘GREAT REPLACEMENT THEORY:’ Hans Bader describes the history of the “Great Replacement Theory” the Left has been peddling for decades. That’s the idea that immigration and the passing of the Boomer generation are bringing a new non-white majority to power in American politics. And no, Tucker Carlson is not the originator of GRT, contrary to a chorus of the prevaricating suspects on CNN and MSNBC.
QUESTION ASKED: Are you sure you want to call the Roe protests “the summer of rage?”
Thus far we haven’t seen any serious incidents of violence associated with these protests, so keep your fingers crossed. But when you start inflaming your followers by tossing around words like “rage” and “outrage,” don’t act surprised if some of them start taking your advice to heart. The very first BLM marches in 2020 actually were “mostly peaceful” and the media happily picked up the phrase. But then they insisted on continuing to use it even as the demonstrations quickly devolved into riots, with federal buildings and police stations being set ablaze, mass looting destroying retail areas, and law enforcement officers being assaulted.
Yes, that was the “summer of love.” And now we’re being warned to prepare for the “summer of rage.” Some liberal activists aren’t waiting for anyone else to issue marching orders, by the way. At Yale University, liberals are demanding “unrelenting daily confrontation.” And the subject in question on any given day doesn’t really matter. They simply want any of their fellow students or faculty members who express any sort of conservative opinions to be physically driven from the public square. (Free Beacon)
Members of the law school’s conservative Federalist Society, first year law student Shyamala Ramakrishna said in an Instagram post, are “conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about.” Why, she asked, are they still “coming to our parties” and “laughing in the library” without “unrelenting daily confrontation?”
Some of her classmates were less moderate.
“It’s not time for ‘reform,’” first-year law student Leah Fessler, a onetime New York Times freelancer, wrote on Instagram. “Democratic Institutions won’t save us.” It is unclear how Fessler will apply that view as a legal intern this summer for federal judge Lewis Liman. Judge Liman did not respond to a request for comment.
While it might fit on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt, “democratic institutions won’t save us” isn’t really a very good message, particularly if you’re in the process of seeking a law degree. Also, even if you believe that unsavory maxim, please enlighten us as to what the alternative to democratic institutions might be? I hope I’m wrong, but the only thing that springs to mind is mob rule. Is that where you think this is all heading?
Err, yes? As Jon Gabriel tweets, “Gonna be tough to top 2020’s Summer of Rage, but let’s see what you got.”
Read the whole thing — the last paragraph is a hoot.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California regulator rejects desalination plant despite historic drought.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Midler, Colbert, Kimmel and More: The ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ Celebrities.
“TRY BREASTFEEEDING! It’s free and available on demand,” [Bette Midler] Tweeted, ignoring the countless women who struggle to breastfeed for often heartbreaking reasons. Surely a 70-something woman has met a few moms in her life who shared their motherhood struggles.
The Biden administration claims it’s been working on the problem for some time, apparently with little or no net results. Tell that to the mothers scrambling to find formula for their infants.
That collective suffering doesn’t bother Midler. Why?
It might negatively impact President Joe Biden specifically and Democrats as a whole. So Midler pushed their concerns aside to land some cheap partisan points.
Let them eat cake.
* * * * * * *
And Colbert championed another “cake” closeup earlier this year following more gas price hike headlines.
“Today, the average gas price in America hit an all-time record high of over $4 per gallon. Okay, that stings, but a clear conscience is worth a buck or two … I’m willing to pay. I’m willing to pay $4 a gallon. Hell, I’ll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla.”
Mary Antoinette would be proud, assuming you believe the historical myth.
Colbert morphed into Paris Hilton so slowly, I hardly even noticed:
JEFF JACOBY: “Who’s Afraid of Liberal Media Bias?” (I’m not half as confident as he is that liberal media bias has been overcome.)
ON THIS DAY IN 1940: Two brothers named McDonald–Richard and Maurice–opened the first McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, California. Ray Kroc, then a milkshake mixer salesman, became involved in 1954 and purchased the company in 1961 for $2.7 million.
I WAS THERE IN DALLAS FOR THIS: Justice Thomas talks about the leak … and much more.
QUELLE HORREUR! “Our Daughter Lied to Us and Went to a Pro-Life Rally. I seriously thought she was a feminist.” A Slate reader emails their “Care and Feeding” column on Friday for advice:
Yesterday, my 17-year-old daughter, a junior in high school, told us she was going to her boyfriend’s house. It turns out she lied.
I only found out because today, I casually mentioned Roe v. Wade may be overturned, and she replied, “I can’t wait. So many innocent lives will be spared.” We got into an argument in which she ended up confessing her actual whereabouts—she went to a “pro-life” rally with her boyfriend.
We’ve grounded her and taken away her phone for going behind our backs, but she’s showing no remorse. I just can’t believe it. This is the girl who dressed up as Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Halloween when she was 10. She’s heading to law school in a couple years. I seriously thought she was pro-choice and a feminist. I’ve been taking her to rallies and protests since she was a baby. We’ve been educating her about safe sex and consent. We donate to Planned Parenthood every year for Christmas. I’m fine with her disagreeing with us on other topics, but I had an abortion years ago. We live in a conservative state. I don’t want her right to choose to be taken away.
And I’m furious at her for going behind our backs. I’m suspicious of her boyfriend—I know he’s a conservative-leaning Christian and I don’t want to have raised a daughter who votes for whomever her boyfriend does. How do I convince her being pro-life isn’t helping her in the long run?
— Just Trying to Raise a Feminist
In a 2007 article by Norman Podhoretz, he quoted a Commentary staffer who said at a (very early) anti-Vietnam War protest in 1960, “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”
It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience and whispered to me: “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”
The memory of this quip brought back to life some sense of how unpromising the future had then appeared to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would have dreamed that these young people, and the generation about to descend from them politically and culturally, would within the blink of a historical eye come to be hailed by many members of the very “Establishment” they were trying to topple as (in the representative words of Prof. Archibald Cox of Harvard Law School) “the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known.”
More incredible yet, in a mere decade the ideas and attitudes of the new movement, cleaned up but essentially unchanged, would turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out.
And now that the American left has had decades of being the once-dreaded ”Establishment,” they seem shocked when their kids rebel to the other side, as teenagers universally are wont to do.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Vabogu Monocular Telescope. #CommissionEarned
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Wisconsin middle schoolers accused of sexual harassment for using wrong gender pronouns.
BUT THE YEAR IS STILL YOUNG: Dana Milbank Writes the Most Morally Atrocious Column of 2022.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists tried to murder me and destroyed my office. They killed 3,000 of my fellow Americans. A decent human being would be respectful of the dead and the traumatized from that event in drawing comparisons of domestic political controversies to 9/11.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post is not a decent human being. He is a moral monster, and he advertised that in today’s column, entitled “Roe’s impending reversal is a 9/11 attack on America’s social fabric”: “Assuming little changes from the draft, overturning Roe would be a shock to our way of life, the social equivalent of the 9/11 attacks (which shattered our sense of physical security) or the crash of 2008 (which undid our sense of financial security).”
Evergreen flashback: That Dana Milbank column is even dumber than you think.
ONE-TERM BIDEN: Democrats Already Trying to Position Themselves for 2024.
Have you noticed that Elizabeth Warren keeps putting herself in front of every new current thing? When Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter was the hot story, she put herself front and center, then did the same thing with abortion.
Do you think this is a coincidence, or is it more likely that Warren is trying to remind Democrat voters that she is standing by, ready to jump in when they drop Biden?
It’s not just Warren who’s doing this. Bernie Sanders has recently said that he is prepared to run again.
In the past, being primaried hasn’t ended well for sitting presidents:
If Biden is “primaried” in 2024, it would likely be “the kiss of death” to his presidency based on trends, according to historian David Pietrusza.
Pietrusza named William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Lyndon Johnson and Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Gerald Ford and Reagan in 1976, Jimmy Carter and Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1980, and George H.W. Bush and former Republican aide Pat Buchanan in 1992 as examples.
“It’s not so much the fact of a primary but the circumstances of who and when,” Pietrusza said. “Right now, of course, Joe Biden is not a good ‘who,’ and 2024 is not a good ‘when.'”
For Paleologos, the Carter comparison drew the most parallels, but it could also be distinguished given today’s political partisanship.
“Keep in mind that back then there were more persuadables,” he said. “That’s what makes it a serious topic of conversation. You’ve got more people in that pool of left of center than there were in the 1970s, and that’s a bigger pool of people saying there might be a better alternative than the current president.”
Biden’s appearance alongside Rep. Abigail Spanberger in Culpeper, Virginia, last week raised eyebrows after she admitted she is “going to have a hard time getting reelected.” Spanberger secured a second term in 2020 with only a 1.8 point margin of victory.
Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel described Biden as being a “burden” to Democrats like Spanberger.
“From forcing masks on school children and skyrocketing grocery and gas prices, Biden has shown he doesn’t care,” she said.
It’s as if Biden himself “governs like a man who knows he’s not running again.”
FASTER, PLEASE: The Badly Needed EastMed Pipeline Awaits Approval.
“Financial and political support by the EU can facilitate the final investment decision-making process by the private entities that are considering their participation in the project,” Michalis Mathioulakis, an energy expert at the ELIAMEP think tank, said recently, adding that the significant rise in natural gas prices in Europe favors the economic viability of the pipeline.
It was all the more surprising, therefore, when in January, the United States, in a complete policy reversal, unofficially communicated to Israel, Greece and Cyprus that it no longer supported the pipeline. Then, on April 6, US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland made it even clearer that the US was officially killing off the EastMed project. As the final feasibility report on the project is still underway, the US decision seemed to come out of the blue.
During a visit to Greece, Nuland said in an interview with the newspaper Kathimerini:
“We don’t need to wait for 10 years and spend billions of dollars on this stuff. We need to move the gas now, And we need to use gas today as a transition to a greener future. Ten years from now we don’t want a pipeline. Ten years from now we want to be green. So we’ve got to use LNG [liquefied natural gas] and we’ve got to use electricity connections that we can do more quickly.”
Nuland’s comments came across as remarkably tone-deaf at a time when the US has actively been seeking to lower oil prices worldwide by appealing to dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia to increase oil production and even courting Venezuela. If anything, oil is even less “green” than natural gas, and the projected time during which the EastMed pipeline can be built is probably not ten years, but significantly less. Furthermore, natural gas is likely to be relevant for decades to come. It is, to say the least, highly unlikely that there will be enough renewable energy to cover European energy needs within the next decade. Fossil fuels will most likely still be needed for the foreseeable future to manufacture those electric cars and fly those airplanes. The greatest beneficiaries of the US and the West closing down their energy industries will be Russia, Iran and other countries set to make a windfall selling their fossil fuels.
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
LINCOLN PROJECT FOUNDER MELTS DOWN, PART 348913:
The latest drama began over the weekend amid news that Meghan McCain’s book Bad Republican hadn’t even managed to sell 300 copies. Schmidt joined in the Twitter pile-on, accusing McCain of “14 years of abuse and attacks” and being a “raging, screaming, crying” baby on the 2008 campaign trail. “The tantrums were beyond anything I have ever witnessed from any other human being,” Schmidt said.
Given that rumors have long swirled about McCain’s difficult behavior when she was a co-host on The View, Cockburn isn’t dismissing this accusation out of hand. But Schmidt then turned his fire on a once-unthinkable target: John McCain, a man he’d long claimed to admire. Schmidt claimed that McCain had privately admitted that he’d had an affair with a Washington lobbyist named Vicki Iseman, an allegation that surfaced in 2008 but that both McCain and Iseman denied.
Schmidt also said McCain was scared of his own veep nominee, Sarah Palin. “The bravest man that I had ever met turned out to be terrified of the creature that he had created,” Schmidt lamented. He then let out a wail of agony and tore at his shirt with his own fingernails.
Cockburn notes that if there’s a messier bitch in all of Washington, then he has yet to emerge.
More details of Schmidt’s lengthy Twitter bender at Fox News: Steve Schmidt unloads on NY Times, NY Mag, AP, claims reporting on Lincoln Project will be ‘discredited.’
Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt guaranteed that stories from multiple mainstream media outlets outlining dysfunction and scandal at his organization would be “discredited” on Thursday.
“By the time the sun sets on the West Coast of the United States of America the below stories will all be discredited. I will be asking @nytimes, @NYMag @AP for FULL-THROATED CORRECTIONS,” he tweeted.
Schmidt, who says he no longer has involvement with the disgraced PAC known as much for its anti-Trump exploits as its myriad of scandals and public fiascos, assailed the New York Times (“21 Men Accuse Lincoln Project Co-Founder of Online Harassment”), New York Magazine (“The Predator in the Lincoln Project”), and the Associated Press (“How a leading anti-Trump group ignored a crisis in its ranks”) over their stories in 2021 about fellow co-founder John Weaver’s online harassment of young, gay men.
* * * * * * * * *
As of Friday afternoon, no corrections or addendums to the stories Schmidt targeted have been added. Spokespersons for the New York Times and AP didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Vox Media, which owns New York Magazine, backed up its report.
“We stand by this story; we have not been made aware of anything requiring a correction,” Vox Media spokesperson Laura Coates told Fox News Digital.
Schmidt’s online rage over the stories is the latest odd turn in the saga of the Lincoln Project, which raised nearly $90 million in 2020 but was later consumed by Weaver’s scandal, as well as reports of financial self-dealing, bitter in-fighting, a toxic work environment, and calls by even its own former members to shut down.
It remains in operation today, but it’s viewed warily even by some Democrats. For instance, Democratic Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan’s campaign recently urged it not to assist in his race against Republican J.D. Vance.
And finally, a question asked and answered: Who was ever dumb enough to make Steve Schmidt famous?
The media’s janitor, that’s who:
UPDATE: Former John McCain Campaign Manager Steve Schmidt Says He Didn’t Vote for Him. “He also told us something he’s never revealed before: his disillusionment with McCain was so deep by the end of the 2008 campaign that he didn’t think McCain should be in the White House. ‘The only conceivable conclusion that you could get to after watching his conduct in this campaign was that he’s completely unfit to be president,’ Schmidt told us. ‘Truth is, I didn’t vote for him either.’ He left the presidential line on his 2008 ballot blank.”
(Updated and bumped.)
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA: Cornish pub will not change name despite letter from Vogue owner.
In a cease-and-desist letter, Condé Nast’s chief operating officer, Sabine Vandenbroucke, argued that the company was the proprietor of the Vogue mark, not only for the magazine first published in 1916 but for “other goods and services offered to the public by our company”.
At first the pub’s landlords, Rachel and Mark Graham, were surprised. But it did not take long for their shock to dissolve to humour. “If someone had obviously taken the time to look us up, it wouldn’t have taken five minutes to say: ‘Oh, there’s a place called Vogue,’” said Rachel, 49, who is not a reader of the magazine.
The letter, dated 1 March, said: “We are concerned that the name which you are using is going to cause problems because as far as the general public is concerned a connection between your business and ours is likely to be inferred.”
The Star Inn has been in the small village of Vogue, near St Day, for hundreds of years, Mark wrote in response – in which his answer to the request was a “categorical no”.
The magazine’s letter was “hilariously funny”, he wrote. He believes it was sent in confusion after the couple changed their trading status to a limited company.
He added: “I presume that at the time when you chose the name Vogue in the capitalised version you didn’t seek permission from the villagers of the real Vogue. I also presume that Madonna did not seek your permission to use the word Vogue (again the capitalised version) for her 1990s song of the same name.”
I wonder if Anna Wintour tossed the lawyers into the piranha tank upon hearing their failure, a la Blofeld dealing with bungling SPECTRE agents in the James Bond movies?
GREAT MOMENTS IN CUSTOMER SERVICE: Craving Persecution. Or, The Minefield Of Modern Progressive Manners:
THERE’S A ZUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE: Inside the Collapse of CNN+, The News Channel’s ‘Apollo Mission:’ Hundreds of staffers were drawn to the streaming venture, positioned as network’s future; $5.99-a-month service lasted one month.
For the more than 400 workers involved, it’s also the story of the dashed hopes of those caught up in a startup’s woes. CNN+’s rise and fall speaks to the risks people are willing to take to be on the ground floor of something big, especially in a legacy media industry that is searching for a future-proof business model.
Interviews with more than a dozen people involved in CNN+ describe a culture where excitement over what one top producer described as CNN’s “Apollo Mission”—a reference to the program that successfully landed the first humans on the moon—gave way to the realization that failure was arriving swiftly and mercilessly. Many employees of the streaming service started in the past six months or even just a few weeks before the service launched. Several said they left stable jobs or freelancing gigs.
It’s a ridiculous analogy: Apollo was built on sound engineering principles throughout — the numbers to make CNN+ feasible simply weren’t ever there:
Now, help me with the math. CNN, a network whose most popular show pulls in around one million viewers a night, was going to convince two million people to pay for supplemental programming — and 15 million people to do so within four years?
To put that in perspective, per Charles Cooke, NFL Sunday Ticket has two million subscribers. Granted, Sunday Ticket costs much, much more than a CNN+ subscription does, but the NFL fan base is much, much, much larger and more enthusiastic than CNN’s. And still: “Only” two million subscribe. So where did CNN get its target numbers from?
Care to guess how many viewers per day CNN+ is actually averaging lately? According to sources who spoke to CNBC, it’s … just 10,000.
As Daniel Greenfield of Frontpage Mag predicted in December:
CNN is far behind FOX News and MSNBC in the ratings. It averages around half a million viewers in prime time and it recently hit a 7-year low in the demo.
So it was the perfect time for Chris Wallace to leave FOX News for CNN+.
Some might have thought that Wallace was leaving to fill Chris Cuomo’s slot at CNN. No such luck, though without Cuomo the failing news network’s ratings have crashed to new lows.
But crashing to new lows is the default story at CNN.
CNN Airport, its captive audience operation, shut down earlier this year. And CNN isn’t far behind. CNN+ is the network’s bet that enough people will pay 6 bucks a month to watch it.
CNN’s effort to launch CNN+, a paid streaming service, at a time when its core ratings are crashing is confusing observers who wonder why the news network thinks people will pay for CNN when they won’t even watch it for free.
CNN President Jeff Zucker billed CNN+ as being for “CNN superfans, news junkies and fans of quality non-fiction programming.”
The existence of CNN superfans is as improbable as Bigfoot and UFOs. No one has ever spotted a CNN superfan in the wild and not even the most exotic zoos have them in stock.
Once Jeff Zucker was resigned/was pushed out in early February, the clock was ticking on CNN+. I wonder how Chris Wallace enjoyed his role as a would-be Apollo astronaut?
(Updated and bumped.)
REPORT: Here’s What the Buffalo Shooter’s Alleged Manifesto Actually Says.
Others have tried to link the shooter in a more general way to right-wing politics. For example, the so-called conservative S.E. Cupp of CNN tried to blame “right-wing extremism” for the shooting.
But here’s what the manifesto says about the shooter’s politics:
Did you always hold these views?
When I was 12 I was deep into communist ideology, talk to anyone from my old highschool and ask about me and you will hear that. From age 15 to 18 however, I consistently moved farther to the right. On the political compass I fall in the mild-moderate authoritarian left category, and I would prefer to be called a populist.
So, the shooter describes himself as “authoritarian left-wing,” but the left and S.E. Cupp are trying to blame “right-wing extremism.” Okay?
* * * * * * *
Later in the manifest, the shooter insists, “I would prefer to call myself a populist. But you can call me an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist if you want, I wouldn’t disagree with you.” He also repeatedly attacks capitalists, and rejected the conservative label because, he wrote, “conservativism is corporatism in disguise, I want no part of it.”
But let’s not pretend that, assuming the manifesto is legitimate, the rhetoric espoused in its pages means the shooter cannot be legitimately aligned with either major political party or political movement. While I would argue that the views expressed in the manifesto echo rhetoric of radical leftism, the manifesto is full of nonsense and garbage that is at times inconsistent. The people who were quick to exploit the situation to attack Fox News and conservatives were wrong and should be ashamed of themselves.
NICK GILLESPIE: Billionaire Michael Saylor Believes in Bitcoin More Than Ever. The recent price slide hasn’t deterred the CEO whose bitcoin holdings dwarf Tesla’s.
BEFORE THE BABYLON BEE: Orwell’s Humor. The British writer confronted totalitarianism with determination but also with wit and irony.
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: A Record Number of Drug-Related Deaths. According to new CDC numbers, the death toll rose 15 percent last year after jumping 30 percent in 2020.
POPULAR WITH READERS: Thomas Bates Nylon Belt. #CommissionEarned
OLD AND BUSTED: Biden calls for unity and healing after Electoral College certifies his victory.
—CNBC, December 14th, 2020.
The New Hotness? If You’re Reading This, Karine Jean-Pierre Probably Hates You. Here’s Why.
—Robert Spencer, PJ Media, yesterday.
Fukunaga has been accused of sexual harassment and ‘grooming’ by three young actresses.
The 44-year-old, who directed Daniel Craig‘s final outing as 007 in No Time to Die, allegedly left one woman so traumatised that she was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The allegations come after Mr Fukunaga posted a story on his Instagram page declaring his support for women’s rights in light of a leaked document revealing that the US Supreme Court is about to overturn Roe v Wade, a ruling which legalised abortion in America.
He wrote: ‘The Supreme Court is about to push us one step closer to war with ourselves… by legitimizing a war against women’s rights.’*
One of his accusers is actress and professional skateboarder Rachelle Vinberg, 23, who says she met Mr Fukunaga when he directed her in a commercial the day after she turned 18 and became of legal age. The pair began a consensual sexual relationship which ended when she was 21.
Ms Vinberg accused him of grooming and abusing her, writing on Instagram: ‘So he posted this today. And it p****s me off cause he literally doesn’t care about women. He only traumatizes them. I spent years being scared of him. Man’s a groomer and has been doing this for years. Beware women.’
She claimed Mr Fukunaga told her their relationship, which was ‘completely fully intimate’, had to be kept secret and that he introduced her as his cousin, niece or sister when they were in public.
Ms Vinberg, who posted pictures of herself with the director, said: ‘I tried to reach out to him in the past about how he made me feel and he’s never taken accountability, he’s basically brushed me off.’
She said the experience left her so traumatised she remains in therapy and has been diagnosed with PTSD. Two other women, twins Hannah and Cailin Loesch, met him on the set of Netflix’s 2018 drama Maniac when they were 20, and say they had a three-year ‘hot-and-cold relationship’ with him.
* Flashback to John Nolte last year: ‘No Time to Die’ Director Smears Sean Connery’s Bond as Rapist.
Cary Fukunaga, director of the upcoming 007 feature No Time to Die, is running around smearing Sean Connery’s James Bond as a rapist.
“Is it Thunderball or Goldfinger where, like, basically Sean Connery’s character rapes a woman?” Fukunaga rhetorically asked the far-left Hollywood Reporter during an interview. “She’s like ‘No, no, no,’ and he’s like, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ That wouldn’t fly today.”
Well, of course, it wouldn’t fly today, you goddamn simpleton. But the only reason it wouldn’t fly today is because we now live in a world where everything is rape. Look at a woman wrong; it’s rape. Some woman later regrets her life choices; it’s rape. Micro-aggressions are rape. Everything is rape except when Joe Biden is credibly accused of rape.
* * * * * * * *
You know, it’s not even the sexless prudishness that bothers me as much as it’s fascist assholes like Fukanaga deliberately looking to terrify artists to behave within his fascist boundaries. And that he does so by smearing art is especially galling. And that’s what Thunderball is, it’s art, and in this briefest of brief subplots, it is art with a legitimate, complicated, and fascinating message.
And I say that as someone who doesn’t even agree with the message. Sexual liberation has only unfurled the horrors of abortion, STDs, and unwed mothers. Oh, and I also don’t believe people should have sex at work.
But because I’m not a goddamn simpleton like Fukanaga, I can also see beyond the text to the subtext. I can see that the overall message here is not just about jumping in bed with a relative stranger. It is also about questioning authority and not allowing others to control your behavior.
That’s a very good message, even if you disagree with the vehicle delivering it.
These people are not only uptight squares; they’re full-fledged morons.
Or perhaps, they’re employing a bit of misdirection in the hopes you won’t investigate their alleged role in industry that’s been called “a sex-grooming gang.”
OUT TODAY FROM BENEDICT BECKELD: Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations.
BILL MAHER SLAMS BIDEN’S ‘DISINFORMATION GOVERNANCE BOARD:’ “Maher pointed out the inevitable way such an expansion of power will eventually be used against liberals and progressives. ‘Who do you think is going to be the Truth Czar in 2025?’ he asked, implying that it may very well be a Republican appointee if the GOP wins the White House.”
As Glenn wrote last year when Democrats stripped Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments, “Just as when Harry Reid got rid of the filibuster, they think the worm will never turn.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: WORKPRO Garden Tool Bag. #CommissionEarned
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: India, second-largest wheat producer, bans exports amid food supply concerns.
THE LAST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD QUALIFIED TO SPEAK ABOUT “FIXING” JOURNALISM: First, note that in the UK they refer to on-air talent as “presenters,” not “journalists.” Good for them. In the US, we have had bimbos and mimbos like Diane Sawyer (ABC) and Stone Phillips (NBC) not only crow about being “journalists” but lecture others about how to do it. Never mind that (and I can’t disclose it for professional reasons) many of these “TV journalists” when sued for libel have signed affidavits and in deposition admitted that “they don’t research or write” and they essentially “just read what’s put in front of me.”
Even Rachel Maddow has pleaded in court and under oath that she was not presenting “facts” but instead “opinion.” Said the 9th Cir. in affirming dismissal of a libel case brought by One America News:
“[T]he MSNBC host’s statement that the far-right network was “paid Russian propaganda” was “an obvious exaggeration,” rather than an asserted fact.”
Oh, “an exaggeration. ” Never mind then. And these are the hypocrites who complain about Tucker Carlson’s passionate Op/Ed work as “disinformation? (Never mind that Carlson doesn’t make “facts” up out of thin air, more often than not has a provably solid basis for his “opinion.”)
So lets have look across the pond to see what our British cousins are saying to “fix” Journalism. Well, The Press Gazette, a pretty good publication covering all matters media in the UK noted that:
“BBC News presenter Ros Atkins has said that change in the news industry is a “necessity” if it wants to survive because “news is not a given in people’s lives” anymore.”
Atkins’ list of things to fix sound like the kind of self-serving well-paid-for psychobabble that passes for analysis of journalism in today’s graduate schools. To be fair, some of Atkin’s “suggestions” are in fact what I teach as primary elements in learning and doing journalism, such as identifying problems in the public interest and providing evidence clearly. If you need a “presenter” to tell you that mass media needs to do a better job at those things, I’d suggest that the education and training of young journalists is severely messed up.
But what I find most objectionable is the reliance on buzzwords that inculcate a culture of self-promotion rather than public service:
“The fourth thing on my list is making sure your work has a digital and social dimension. This might seem obvious, but it’s worth reiterating. If we’re spending money on journalism that has no digital dimension, we should ask hard questions about whether that is money well spent. And then if we’re making digital content, then we have a plan for how this will be shared by people,” he went on.”
His final comment is the dreariest example of gibberish so acceptable in journalism schools:
“The next thing I will say… is how are you going to tell a story… we can see the digital revolution as a distribution revolution, a different way of getting things to people but actually it’s a storytelling revolution,” Atkins said. “We’re living in an age of extreme creativity and in news, we need to match that. We should look far and wide for storytelling inspiration.”
I don’t even know what that means. And coming from the state-sponsored scandal factory that is the BBC, I find it more than a little, um, unself-aware that any of these clowns have the gumption to lecture anyone else.
I’m an old, I guess.
May 14, 2022
OPEN THREAD: Pump Up the Volume.
IT’S COME TO THIS: MSNBC Condemns ‘Talk About The Constitution’ In SCOTUS Draft Opinion.
Because the Supreme Court has “court” in its name, most people understand that it is an institution tasked with addressing legal issues, but MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and The New Yorker’s Sheelah Kolhatkar are not most people. On Velshi’s Saturday show, they condemned the Court for “talking about the Constitution” and “the right to life” while ignoring economic statistics.
* * * * * * * *
Kolhatkar then condemned the draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, “You know, they spend 98 pages of their draft opinion talking about the Constitution, they talk about conception, and the right to life but there’s almost nothing about what this will look like in society other than a very cursory throwaway line about how there is widespread access to childcare, contraception, and paid family leave.”
After condemning the Court for doing its job and putting life before money, Kolhatkar added, “And, of course, those, as we know, are simply false assertions.”
It’s the return of The Raj Koothrappali Approach to Constitutional Law! As Glenn noted in 2013, “Here’s the problem with public officials — because that’s really [Louis Michael Seidman’s] audience — deciding to ignore the Constitution: If you’re the president, if you’re a member of Congress, if you are a TSA agent, the only reason why somebody should listen to what you say, instead of horsewhipping you out of town for your impertinence, is because you exercise power via the Constitution. If the Constitution doesn’t count, you don’t have any legitimate power. You’re a thief, a brigand, an officious busybody, somebody who should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail for trying to exercise power you don’t possess. So if we’re going to start ignoring the Constitution, I’m fine with that. The first part I’m going to start ignoring is the part that says, I have to do whatever they say.”
JACK DUNPHY: Dave Chappelle and the Death of Free Speech.
[L.A. D.A George] Gascón is currently facing a recall campaign, and his refusal to file felony charges against Lee has stoked outrage among his detractors, whose number now includes podcaster Joe Rogan. Rogan took to Instagram to lament Gascón’s decision. “When you see that a person commits a clear crime,” says Rogan’s post, “and does it to one of the most loved performers alive, and does it in a very high profile public setting, and it gets captured on video, and you don’t charge that person for what they obviously did, it’s the kind of thing that makes people lose faith in law enforcement.”
Perhaps so, but loath as I am to defend Gascón, his rejection of felony charges in the Chappelle matter is entirely reasonable and indeed the only ethical choice. It may be true that Chappelle is, as Rogan describes him, one of the most beloved performers, and it is indisputably true that the Hollywood Bowl is a high-profile public setting, but neither of these factors weighs in the determination of the appropriate charge against Lee. He was arrested and booked under a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, but sober examination of the incident reveals his conduct did not match the elements of this crime under California law.
Yes, at the time Lee rushed the stage and assaulted Chappelle, he is said to have possessed a deadly weapon, to wit, a replica handgun built into which was a folding knife, but it was in a bag Lee carried and was never wielded at Chappelle or any of the men who pursued and subdued Lee backstage. Further, Chappelle was uninjured and continued his performance when the commotion settled. Not even the most aggressive, law-and-order prosecutor would file a felony charge given this set of facts.
Though Chappelle soldiered on and appeared unfazed, as his fans have come to expect, in his quiet moments since that day he surely must have wondered, as we all must have, what might have happened had Lee been more determined to cause him harm. Lee somehow carried his weapon through the Hollywood Bowl’s security measures, then to the foot of the stage and finally onto the stage itself. Lee easily could have inflicted a mortal wound on Chappelle with such a weapon. And consider that if a replica handgun passed through security with such apparent ease, what would have prevented Lee from bringing a real one?
Returning now to our aspiring comedian, what assurance does he have that one of his jokes will not ignite in some member of his audience a violent impulse similar to that which stirred within Isaiah Lee? If Dave Chappelle, with all his handlers and security team, can be attacked in front of 17,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl, what chance does an unknown have at the local comedy club should some lunatic try to take him out?
Read the whole thing.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: AP: GOP’s new midterm attack: Blaming Biden for formula shortage.
Republicans aiming to retake control of Congress have already sharpened a message centering around blaming Democrats for high inflation, expensive gas, migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and violent crime in some cities.
But GOP leaders landed on an issue this week that it hopes could prove even more potent: tying President Joe Biden to a shortage in baby formula.
Parents are suddenly running into bare supermarket and pharmacy shelves in part because of ongoing supply disruptions and a recent safety recall. But in an election year that was already shaping up to be rocky for Democrats, Republicans sense that the shortage could prove to be an especially tangible way to argue that Biden is incapable of quickly solving problems confronting the U.S.
“This is not a Third World country,” said GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the chair of the House Republican conference. “This should never happen in the United States of America.”
The administration has sometimes been slow in responding to sudden political threats, perhaps most notably when signs of inflation began to surface last year. The White House appears determined not to repeat that mistake, announcing on Friday that formula maker Abbott Laboratories committed to give rebates through August for a food stamp-like program that helps women, infants and children called WIC.
Biden insisted there’s “nothing more urgent we’re working on” than addressing the shortage.
Asked if his administration had responded as quickly as it should have, Biden said, ”If we’d been better mind readers, I guess we could’ve. But we moved as quickly as the problem became apparent.”
But the defense by the White House illustrates how finger-pointing at the Biden administration has already spread far and wide among Republicans in Washington, on television and on social media. It’s a new issue for the GOP to hammer at and a way to address families at a time when Democrats believe outrage over the U.S. Supreme Court possibly ending the right to an abortion could galvanize women and other key voters, and thwart or at least lessen a Republican wave in November.
As Hot Air’s Allahpundit notes (but curiously, the other AP doesn’t): “America doesn’t need a mind-reader as president. It needs a Wall Street Journal reader. Per Jim Geraghty, the Journal had a story about the formula shortage back on … January 12.”
Did anyone in the White House read it at the time?
How many times is this administration going to find itself surprised by supply-chain issues? They dropped nearly $2 trillion last year on COVID relief amid a supply crunch, then were stunned that the whole country being flush with cash while goods are scarce might cause prices to rise. Now they’re figuring out that when a major baby-formula manufacturing plant got shut down three months ago at a moment when formula was already hard to find, a serious shortage might result.
Is seeing one move ahead on the chessboard too much to ask?
Ed pointed out on Twitter that the Washington Post and the Journal were running stories about stores rationing baby formula fully a month ago. What has the crack Biden economic team been doing about it since then?
Why bother attempting to solve problems, when you know the DNC-MSM has your back, as AP proved yesterday?
(Classical reference in headline.)
WENDY MURPHY: Democrats weak as court signals reversal on Roe.
Not a single person at the 2017 Women’s March said a word about the Equal Rights Amendment, which would establish women’s basic legal equality under the Constitution for the first time in history.
ERA advocacy groups asked for time to speak, so they could explain how the ERA would ensure that all laws are enforced fully and equally on behalf of women, but the people in charge said no. The huge crowd that gathered to talk about women’s suffering would learn nothing about the fact that the primary cause of that suffering is women’s second-class citizenship.
Telling women they should rally in our nation’s capital “as women” but only if they talk about everybody else’s problems is like telling Black Lives Matter they can have a protest, but not talk only about racism. Or telling the Anti-Defamation League that when they host a public gathering, they cannot focus on anti-Semitism.
No group fighting for basic human rights wants to be told they must water down their message.
By forbidding speakers to talk about the ERA Women’s March revealed itself not as an advocacy group for women but as a proxy for the Democratic Party, which would be fine if the Democrats actually cared about establishing women’s full legal equality, but they don’t.
If they did, the Biden administration would not currently be blocking the ERA and preventing it from being added to the Constitution. The ERA should already be in the Constitution because it became law when the last necessary state ratified it in January 2020, but the Trump administration blocked it.
Women then voted for Biden in droves assuming he would unblock it, but he refused. Yes, the ERA has a purported deadline that expired years ago, but many scholars agree the deadline is invalid, which liberated Biden to use his executive authority to validate it — yet he refused.
Biden is not only blocking the ERA today, he is also fighting against it in DC federal court. The DC court’s ruling is expected any day, and most believe the court will rule against the ERA, in part because the Biden administration is fighting against it.
The Democrats will be delighted if, when the ruling comes down, women are so focused on abortion they don’t notice how Biden helped kill a far more important law.
To be fair, a month and a half ago, Biden’s Supreme Court nominee couldn’t actually provide a definition of the word “woman,” or her opinion of when life begins.
“THE 80’S CALLED AND THEY WANT THEIR FOREIGN POLICY BACK”: Oh how they laughed at the zinger from then-President With The Greatest Trouser Crease Ever. He assured us even back then that “the cold war has been over for more than 20 years.”
But look at the world now.
My close friend and former teammate at Bloomberg News, Rob Urban, is something of an Eastern Europe specialist, and in the early days of Bloomberg Urban helped build many important bureaus, from Moscow to Prague to Warsaw. His piece, published a few months ago speaks the wisdom of the witness:
“The strongman image was especially effective after Yeltsin, who walked slowly and stiffly because of a bad back, and was frequently intoxicated. When he had run for re-election in 1996, I remember footage of him riding a snowmobile on vacation and it really looked like he was strapped to the machine, just a body flopping around. Then came Putin, bare-chested, on horseback.”
Nobody I’m aware of in the political media have asked Obama if he regrets that “joke” or “insult” (depending on your point of view). But anyone who uses idiotic phrases like “the Putin Price Hike” to explain away our own flaccid economic policies knows literally nothing, and are likely to believe that Putin magically sprang up upon the election of Donald Trump. They are dead wrong.
** Note that you have to register to read the entire Independent article, but’s free.
WHEN YOU JUST KNOW YOUR OPINIONS ARE TRUE, WHY ALLOW DISSENT? How Disagreement Became ‘Disinformation.’ Barton Swaim explains in the WSJ how academics and journalists went from abhorring censorship to loving the new Disinformation Czarina (and revering authoritarians like Anthony Fauci). The Daily Skeptic offers a non-paywalled excerpt.
MADE IN THE USA: Thomas Bates Trekker Web Belt. #CommissionEarned
THE PANIC PANDEMIC: The Failure of Mask Mandates, Public Health and Central Planning. Ian Miller, the data analyst who has charted the futility of Covid policies in Unmasked (he destroys the case for mask mandates in one graph), chats with me on his podcast about Fauci, Hayek, The Power of Bad, and the corruption of public health.
ALL YOU NEED IS CASH: An Open Letter to Paul McCartney Regarding Ticket Prices.
Let’s, Paul, for the sake of argument, say I want my parents to, you know, actually see you, so I buy three seats in section C129. Those seats are $450. Each. And, as Ticketmaster reminds me, “+ fees.”
I can’t surprise my parents with tickets to see Sir Paul freakin’ McCartney only for them to sit halfway to LAX. That’s like giving a child a toy without batteries. A $600 toy, mind you.
That $600 doesn’t include parking. I’ve yet to visit SoFi Stadium, but let’s pretend parking is $20. We both know it’s not $20, but let’s pretend. That’s $620. My parents don’t drink alcohol, so I’m definitely saving money on beers, but — and I know you don’t live here — have you any idea of current gas prices? You probably don’t because if I wrote “The Long and Winding Road” I wouldn’t know gas prices, either. Paul, gas is expensive. Like, so expensive that I’m writing to you and wasting space by talking about gas.
Conservatively, if I bought the cheapest tickets, I would be looking at $700 to take my parents to your show and sit far enough away that we will not be able to see you. To be frank, Paul, that sucks. I don’t want to spend that kind of money to stare at the big screens that I am sure will be on stage. Certainly, you’ve heard of YouTube. My parents and I can get the same experience tomorrow morning for much less money.
Paul, serious question: What the f*ck?
Did you actually think the Beatles were serious when they sang “All You Need Is Love?”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: As Parents Resisted Transgender Push, Teacher Suggested Sending in Child Services.
The more she thought about the whole ordeal, the more Lee realized she had to do something.
First, she contacted Chambers, the woman who Lee says “groomed” her daughter and who also sometimes works as a substitute teacher for the district. “Her response was alarming,” Lee said. “It was delusional. She doubled down on her actions.”
Next, she contacted the principal, who seemed empathetic but confirmed that secret GSA meetings with children were an intentional part of creating a “safe space” at school.
There are more than two dozen self-proclaimed LGBT children in the small middle school, according to social media posts by SPLASH. And the district is determined that they be “affirmed” without parental involvement, Lee said.
After all that, Lee spoke out at a school board meeting and contacted all its members by email. None responded. When she was finally able to sit down with two of them, they both “supported everything that transpired and refused to address any of my concerns.”
Finally, exasperated and realizing her first call would have been to the police if this had occurred on a playground or any other setting, Lee contacted the sheriff’s office.
While law enforcement was deeply sympathetic to her plight, and urged her to speak out loudly, there was nothing they could do from a legal perspective, Lee said.
District officials, meanwhile, saw nothing wrong with what had occurred, she said. Indeed, some expressed shock that a parent would be upset over the incident.
As Lee fought back, school officials were working on their next move.
Among other tactics, documents and communications obtained by The Epoch Times revealed a discussion about the possibility of reporting the parents to child-welfare authorities.
Thumbs up from the management of Comcast and MSNBC:
BRING BACK THE GAS LINES: Price Controls?! Democrats look to resurrect a completely discredited economic policy.
WE PREFERRED CHARLATANS LIKE FAUCI: The Public Health Prophet We Did Not Heed. The late Donald Henderson, a giant in the field of epidemiology who directed the successful international effort to eradicate smallpox, published a landmark paper in 2006 warning against just about everything that Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx inflicted on America during the pandemic.
This paper reviewed what was known about the effectiveness and practical feasibility of a range of actions that might be taken in attempts to lessen the number of cases and deaths resulting from a respiratory virus pandemic. This included a review of proposed biosecurity measures, later utilized for the first time during covid, such as “large scale or home quarantine of people believed to have been exposed, travel restrictions, prohibitions of social gatherings, school closures, maintaining personal distance, and the use of masks”.
Even assuming a case fatality rate (CFR) of 2.5%, roughly equal to the 1918 Spanish flu but far higher than the CFR for Covid, Henderson and his colleagues nevertheless concluded that these mitigation measures would do far more harm than good.
They found the most helpful strategy would be isolating symptomatic individuals (but not those who had merely been exposed) at home or in the hospital, a strategy that had long been part of traditional public health. They also cautioned against reliance on computer modeling to predict the effects of novel interventions, warning that, “No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures.” Furthermore, “If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second- and third-order effects could be devastating socially and economically.”
Read the whole thing, which includes a copy of Henderson’s paper.
THANKS, BIDEN: Gavin Newsom is Exploiting Your Federal Tax Dollars to Fund More Abortions in California. “California, for its part, got a whopping $42.3 billion bailout from Biden’s corrupt legislation. The Democrats funneled them this money even though California was already running a budget surplus, not in some dire revenue crisis. Now, Newsom and co. are flush in cash at our expense. And, of course, they’re using that surplus to fund abortions, which means that federal taxpayers are also, directly or indirectly, subsidizing California abortions. Thanks, Biden.”
CRISES BY DESIGN: Biden admin cancels massive oil and gas lease sale amid record-high gas prices.
The Biden administration canceled one of the most high-profile oil and gas lease sales pending before the Department of the Interior Wednesday, as Americans face record-high prices at the pump, according to AAA.
The DOI halted the potential to drill for oil in over 1 million acres in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, along with two lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. The move comes as Biden has taken a few actions to combat high gas prices, despite his administration’s generally hostile approach to the oil industry.
“Due to lack of industry interest in leasing in the area, the Department will not move forward with the proposed Cook Inlet OCS oil and gas lease sale 258,” a DOI spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement Thursday.
“The Department also will not move forward with lease sales 259 and 261 in the Gulf of Mexico region, as a result of delays due to factors including conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales,” the spokesperson added.
The spokesperson also told FOX Business that “there are 10.9 million acres of offshore federal waters already under lease to industry,” and “of those, the industry is not producing on more than three-quarters (75.7% or 8.26 million acres).”
Federal law requires DOI to stick to a five-year leasing plan for auctioning offshore leases. The department had until the end fo the current five-year plan – due to expire on June 30 – to complete the sales.
A source familiar with the Cook Inlet lease confirmed to FOX Business that the DOI received no comments indicating specific company interest in leasing during the scoping period.
Within his first week in office, President Biden signed an executive order temporarily suspending new oil and gas leases on federal lands. The administration resumed the new leasing last month following court challenges against the ban. The administration is appealing a ruling in which Judge James Cain, a Trump appointee, struck down the ban.
Earlier: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
Seen in Cleburne, TX, last night:
JIM TREACHER: Biden Lies About the Vaccine He Took on Live TV.
“I think the [Trump] administration deserves some credit, getting this off the ground with Operation Warp Speed.”
Biden told the truth for once, so of course now he has to take it back.
Now, if this dishonest White House had said the vaccine wasn’t widely available, that would be arguable. I didn’t get mine until April 2021. But saying there was no vaccine available at all is a damn lie and they know it.
It’s such a huge lie that even their own stenographers are balking at it:
Exit quote: “I sure am glad I didn’t vote for him or tell anybody else to vote for him. Never Trump doesn’t mean Never Think.”
IT’S QUIET HERE: Time to liven things up. I have noticed around Tennessee where we live, there are even more MGTOW (men going their own way). Today I saw a man driving his truck with “Going John Galt” around the license plate, another guy running his own house washing business and many other guys becoming entrepreneurs because of the crazy housing market. All these men are leaving the world of bosses and discrimination. People wonder where all the workers are because there are few at the restaurants and stores but the gig economy or self-employed businesses are everywhere–the gig economy makes up around 36% of the workforce now. At least when you are self-employed, you can trust your employer not to screw with you and treat you poorly for being male. Anyone else notice an uptick in men working for themselves?
DEAL OF THE DAY: Valano Men’s Long Sleeve Shirts UPF 50+ Sun Protection. #CommissionEarned
THE LAST SALEM WITCH TRIAL: On this date in 1878 (yes, that’s 1878, not 1678), the last witch trial opened in Salem, Massachusetts. Sort of.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Dual Dash Cam with Built-in GPS. #CommissionEarned
I THINK THEY’RE AFRAID WOKE-ISM IS CONTAGIOUS: Researchers offer alarming reason ‘why aliens have never visited Earth’.
I PRAY NOT. THIS COULD GET VERY BAD: Are the COVID vaccines killing people over time? The data suggests yes.
BURN IT TO THE GROUND, THEN SALT THE GROUND: Pedophile apologist hired by Johns Hopkins child abuse center.
THEY HATE US, THEY REALLY HATE US: Joe Biden Versus We the People.
OKAY, OKAY, I CONCEDE, THIS IS A BETTER NAME THAN FICUS (FRAUD IN CHIEF OF THE US): POTATUS Speaks, A Nation Groans.
THE OPPOSITE IS MORE LIKELY TO BE TRUE: Is Killing Babies Necessary for Labor Rights and Good for the Economy?
THE TRUTH IS RUSSIA THREATENS EVERYONE: Ukraine: Moscow Threatens Finland Over NATO, Russia Supposedly Lost Battalion in Failed River Crossing.
Red Tsar Vlad is most seriously displeased.
IT’S ALSO HARMFUL TO CALL TODDLERS IN ADULT BODIES ADULTS: Pro-Choice Caucus: It’s ‘Harmful’ to Call Abortion a ‘Choice’.
IT WILL BE HUNDREDS. WITH DUBIOUS SARTORIAL CHOICES: Climate Crazy Intensifies as Extinction Rebellion Vows to Send ‘Millions of People on to the Streets’.
Normal human eyes most affected.
NOT EQUAL UNDER THE LAW: BLM Privilege: Federal Prosecutors Seek Lenient Sentences for Molotov Cocktail Lawyers.
May 13, 2022
OPEN THREAD: That’s Not My Name.
WEIRD HOW THE OIL COMPANIES STOPPED BEING GREEDY ON JANUARY 20, 2017 AND THEN STARTED BEING GREEDY AGAIN ON JANUARY 20, 2021: Democrats Just Lost Another Inflation Talking Point. “Polls show that no one was buying the blame-Putin strategy, so Biden and the Democrats are now accusing oil companies of price gouging.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: Wireless Earbuds, Bluetooth. #CommissonEarned
TIM COOK’S WAR ON THE WORKINGMAN: Apple circulating anti-union talking points to retail store managers.
SECOND LOOK AT THE UK? Why I May Move To Great Britain: They Protect Bald Men.
BOMB CANADA — THE CASE FOR WAR: Canadian kindergartners given masturbation homework assignment. “According to Libs of TikTok’s Substack, 4-year-olds at Alert Bay, British Columbia, were given a homework assignment discussing where and when to masturbate.The incident happened at the T’lisalagi’lakw School which is part of First Nation territory. School officials are said to be investigating the matter which was reportedly undertaken by one particular teacher and wasn’t indicative of the overall curriculum.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
VICTORIA TAFT: West Coast, Messed Coast™ Report – Lyin’ and Hidin’ Edition. “In this Friday the 13th edition, I lead off with the discovery of a mound of documents proving the existence of MK-Ultra-like experiments on Washington state prisoners some 50 years ago. But the question is why current COVID-19 dictator Jay Inslee suppressed them in 2021. Let’s see if you come up with the right answer.”
On a cold winter night in 1986, I met my father and the writer C.D.B Bryan at the Irish Connection, a bar in the basement of a building on DeSales Street in Washington, D.C. I was a student at Catholic University who had just published his first article as a professional, a piece on preventing animal cruelty for The Progressive. My father was the Senior Associate Editor of National Geographic magazine. C.D.B. Bryan was the popular author of Friendly Fire, a book about Vietnam. He had been hired by National Geographic to write the book National Geographic: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery, which would be published in 1987.
My father had invited me to meet Bryan because he knew I had developed a fascination with Vietnam during a high school history class. He also knew that as a young journalist I would be enthralled to meet such an accomplished writer as Bryan who had written for the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Book Review. Over pints of Guinness, we three talked about various things—music, literature, sports, what it was like to write a massive history of National Geographic. Bryan expressed delight that I had just professionally published my first article, but added a quip: “The Progressive is a great place to start. I don’t know if you’d want your daughter dating a writer from there, but still.”
We discussed Friendly Fire, Bryan’s book that told the tragic story of Michael Mullen, an American soldier who had been killed by friendly fire in Vietnam. Friendly Fire revealed the lies the government had told about the nature of Mullen’s death. It explored in moving detail how Mullen’s parents, especially his mother Peg, went from staunch patriots to anti-war activists. “He was very proud of the fact that he exposed the friendly fire issue, and the fact that the government was lying to people who were as very patriotic as the Mullens were,” Mairi Bryan, C.D.B.’s wife, said after his death in 2009. “Of all of his works, Friendly Fire was the one of which he was most proud.”
It’s been more than thirty-five years since the night I had Guinness with my father and Bryan. Today, National Geographic reflects an obsession with race, gender, and “equity,” dedicating covers to slavery, feminism, transgender ideology, and Black Lives Matter. In 2017, the magazine ran a special issue on “The Gender Revolution,” parroting the catechism of the transgender faith, with all the logical inconsistencies that go along with it. It’s no surprise that the Western world has gone native into wokeism. Yet because it’s so personal, National Geographic‘s surrender is particularly painful.
As self-help author Mark Manson wrote in his 2019 book, Everything is F*cked, A Book About Hope (and Manson, like the rest of us, had no idea what was right around the corner):
Ideological religions are difficult to start, but they are far more common than spiritual religions. All you have to do is find some reasonable-sounding explanation for why everything is fucked and then extrapolate that across wide populations in a way that gives people some hope, and voilà! You have yourself an ideological religion. If you’ve been alive for more than twenty years, surely you’ve seen this happen a few times by now. In my lifetime alone there have been movements in favor of LGBTQ rights, stem cell research, and decriminalizing drug use. In fact, a lot of what everyone is losing their shit about today is the fact that traditionalist, nationalist, and populist ideologies are winning political power across much of the world, and these ideologies are seeking to dismantle much of the work accomplished by the neoliberal, globalist, feminist, and environmentalist ideologies of the late twentieth century.
Hence the moral panic within the leftist overculture of the last five years, which went into maximum overdrive in mid-2020, and as a result destroyed not only the readers’ trust of publications such as National Geographic that were once perceived as politically neutral, but trust in the public health profession as well:
“ULTRA-MAGA” TOOK SIX MONTHS? I’d do it in six minutes for half the price!
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: ‘Concerned’ students bringing more weapons to NYC schools, Chancellor Banks says. “Even in our schools that have not had — up until now — any significant issues, they’re expressing all kinds of anxiety because there are issues happening outside of the schools.”
OF COURSE SHE DOES: Biden’s Disinformation Czar Has a Diabolical Plan for Twitter.
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS STUCK LIKE THAT: Florida, Texas students excelled while students in Democratic lock-down states lost academic ground.
A new study has found that although “high-poverty schools” suffered large losses in achievement by switching to remote learning during the coronavirus lockdowns, districts that remained largely in-person lost relatively little ground.
The report, titled “The consequences of remote and hybrid instruction during the pandemic,” was published by a team of researchers from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, a nonprofit research and educational services provider.
According to Harvard professor and education economist Thomas Kane, “Where schools remained in-person, gaps did not widen. Where schools shifted to remote learning, gaps widened sharply. Shifting to remote instruction was like turning a switch on a critical piece of our social infrastructure that we had taken for granted.”
In states like Florida and Texas, this is vindicating news after critics blasted the states’ Republican leadership for dismissing federal pandemic guidelines and returning to in-person learning much earlier than Democratic-led states.
Those that had the least lost the most while being awarded pittances in the form of “stimulus” checks.
Leftism in full bloom.
TURNING JAPANESE, I THINK I’M TURNING JAPANESE, I REALLY THINK SO: You can rent a ‘bunk bed pod’ in the Bay Area with 13 people for $800 a month.
The housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area has gotten so bad that one startup is now offering renters the chance to live in a “bunk bed pod” with 13 other people for just $800 a month.
Brownstone Shared Housing posted an ad for anyone looking to live in Palo Alto, the birthplace of Silicon Valley and the home of Stanford University.
Tenants are given the opportunity to shack up in a house with 13 other people. They sleep in a “bunk bed pod” while sharing two bathrooms.
The pods are “fully equipped” with electrical outlets, shelves for books, a rack from which one can hang clothes and laundry, hooks to hang plants and other decorations, and black curtains at the end of each pod for privacy.
Normally, the three-bedroom home would house a single family.
The startup is also advertising “co-living” spaces in another home — this one in Bakersfield. The home offers a pod for $500 a month alongside five other residents.
It’s not all that surprising to see the concept of the Japanese “capsule hotel” finally arrive in California. Look at these sweet Silicon Valley digs!
MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Netflix Fires Major Warning Shot At Its Woke Employees With New ‘Culture Memo.’
Variety reports that the change in Netflix’s company culture appears to be in large part due to the backlash the streaming service faced from woke employees last year over its Dave Chappelle special, which the employees claimed was transphobic.
The updated Netflix Culture memo includes a new section called “Artistic Expression” that states that it will not “censor specific artists or voices” even if employees consider the content “harmful.”
“If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you,” the memo states, later adding that employees may be required to work on projects that they “perceive to be harmful” and that if they have a hard time accepting their work assignment, they might want to consider working somewhere else.
“Entertaining the world is an amazing opportunity and also a challenge because viewers have very different tastes and points of view. So we offer a wide variety of TV shows and movies, some of which can be provocative,” the new section reads, later adding, “we support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with” and that “we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.”
Netflix reportedly fired the leader of a trans organization within the company last October who allegedly organized a walkout to protest the company backing Chappelle over his special “The Closer.”
The Verge reported:
The employee was terminated on suspicion of leaking metrics to the press related to the Dave Chappelle special. Those metrics — about how much Netflix paid for The Closer and how many people it reached — subsequently ended up in a report on Bloomberg. While the employee had shared the metrics internally, they spoke out against the leaks to colleagues, worried they might hurt the walkout movement.
The leaking of internal data is highly unusual at Netflix. While the company prides itself on transparency, employees are told that the culture can only thrive when Netflix data remains internal.
Speaking of Netflix, Sonny Bunch writes: Traipsing Through the Vaster Wasteland. On Netflix, HBO Max, and thirst in the desert.
When you put a bunch of people in charge of making shows who don’t know how to make shows, you run into trouble. This is at least part of the reason why Netflix itself is in crisis, having lost three-quarters of its market cap and leaving creators unsure of its ability to do the only thing it was good for, namely shoveling money into the pockets of filmmakers in exchange for them churning out stuff they couldn’t get made elsewhere. Netflix’s biggest draw—its endless maw of “content”—is now its biggest liability. Sure, the food sucked, but the portions were sizable. Because no one ever said no.
Consider Anatomy of a Scandal, which I, unfortunately, spent last week watching. It’s the sort of program into which Netflix has poured untold millions, a mere portion of the $17 billion the service spent on programming in 2021 and a similar sum spent the year before. The six-episode miniseries was co-created by David E. Kelley of L.A. Law and Ally McBeal fame. It has stars in Sienna Miller (American Sniper, Layer Cake) and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) whom the algorithm has undoubtedly pinpointed as audience favorites. It is based on a relatively popular book of the same name. It has “social relevance” in the sense that it is about #MeToo.
And it is utterly implausible and silly, each episode ending on a cliffhanger that’s so stupid the director of the episodes had to radically upend the style of the show we’d been watching—veering from vaguely realistic to surreal—in order to really hit home just how shocking it all is. As my wife and I joked when the first episode closed with James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend) literally being blown off his feet by an invisible force after he was told that what had heretofore been a mere infidelity scandal was mutating into a rape charge, it was like something out of The Matrix.
But The Matrix requires far fewer cognitive leaps, far less suspension of disbelief. Anatomy of a Scandal requires us to believe that a political official would not only be charged with rape as the result of a workplace dalliance but that the case against him would be randomly assigned to be prosecuted by a woman he assaulted decades prior who has since changed her name and also that neither the man charged nor his wife (Miller) would recognize this barrister despite having gone to college with her years before. And this is, believe it or not, the smallest leap of faith we’re asked to take.
* * * * * * * *
Obviously no network falls on the failures of a single show. But Anatomy of a Scandal isn’t a single failure and, as Richard Rushfield noted in the Ankler, even the Hollywood trades that have benefited from Netflix’s advertising spending are starting to stick the shivs in. A headline like “Mike Myers’ ‘The Pentaverate’ Is Just the Latest Example of Netflix’s Blank-Check Bloat: TV Review” in Variety would’ve been unthinkable just a few months ago. Now the narrative has shifted. Netflix makes a lot of shit, emphasis on both the lot and the shit, and people are finally starting to call them out on it.
All of a sudden, Netflix has turned from the awards-season darling and the great hope of the post-theatrical future to just another spigot pouring out dumb money into Hollywood. “Agents tell me that while of course their clients will take Netflix’s money, who wouldn’t, that the effect on their clients’ careers from Netflix projects is nil,” Rushfield writes. “‘There is no bump,’ one agent friend told me. Apple and then HBO have replaced Netflix as the place to take your project if you want the best chance of it being seen and noticed.”
Which, along with Netflix’ stock closing down a whopping 35 percent last month, helps to explain the above memo from its management to its crybully employees.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Same Old, Same Old: Career Criminal, Low Bail, and Another Mass Shooting in Chicago.
HYPOCRISY, THY NAME IS PSAKI: All those protestors, bombers, shooters and bullies we thought were far-Left radicals were actually “Arlington Republicans,” according to the former White House press secretary.
DC SCHOOLS SPEND MORE PER PUPIL: At $31,843, the District of Columbia Public School (DCPS) system spends more tax dollars per student than any of the 50 states. And yet, as Hans Bader notes, student performance on standardized national tests trails all 50 of the states.
And we continue to allow these charlatans to run public schools across America why?
The VodkaWife™’s employer wanted her back at the office starting this month. Her previous employer, that is.
MARY KATHARINE HAM: Democrats’ support for school closings comes back to bite.
Returning teachers and administrators certainly faced risks. They worried for their students, themselves and their own families. But as the school year progressed, the high costs of virtual school led some public-health officials to change their tune on the risk calculus, suggesting that in the time of vaccines and other mitigations, “teachers need to accept, as other essential workers have, that returning to school will entail some risk.”
Often, Democratic politicians, health and school officials, and teachers unions in some of America’s bluest cities and suburbs aligned perfectly in a mission to keep school doors closed for so long. In these places, in-person instruction was deemed nonessential by the very people who claim to fight for public-school education.
The high academic and social costs of remote learning and closed schools are now indisputable, but there was also a political cost. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia capitalized on it by appealing to frustrated parents in 2021. He won an underdog race in this increasingly blue battleground state, the first statewide win for the GOP in more than a decade, on the strength of improved suburban performance combined with rural base turnout.
His opponent former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s defining gaffe — “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” — solidified his party’s image as aligned with school boards and teachers unions, as did his decision to have American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten stump for him at the close of the race.
After that loss, and a squeaker for Democrats in a New Jersey governor’s race animated by many of the same issues, the landscape changed. The American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that for the 2021-22 school year, the risks of closing schools outweighed opening them — even in the face of more contagious variants like Delta and Omicron. But the political damage remains for Democrats, who had become the face of school-closure policy.
In addition to the damage done to kids by losing in-class learning, the switchover to Zoom also allowed parents to finally see much more of what their kids were being taught. As did accounts such as Libs of TikTok, which curated the craziest of what leftist teachers were voluntarily uploading to the Internet, resulting in headlines such as this: Left-Wing Teachers Ditch Teaching To Indoctrinate Kids About Sex Against Parents’ Will.
Related: Add Homeschooling To List Of Things The Left Says Is Racist.
Right on cue, to deflect from the myriad woes of state-run education.
I find that my own arguments do indeed go over less well when I start out by saying “First of all, you unavoidably suck because of who you are.”
HARRISON BERGERON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Rhode Island parents enraged at school board for removing honors classes in ‘equity obsession.’
KYLE SMITH: Goodbye, Jen Psaki — no one condescends quite like you.
Ordinarily, White House press secretaries try not to look like they’re getting so rattled by rude questions that they stoop to insulting the reporters, but Psaki said Fox News’ Peter Doocy sounds like a “stupid son of a bitch” in the course of throwing in an absurd and evidence-free suggestion that Doocy is a ventriloquist’s dummy for higher-ups.
“We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue,” her boss famously intoned at his inauguration, but the Return to Civility (™) went out the window the minute Psaki discovered the existence of exactly one White House reporter asking questions more challenging than, “Why are you guys so awesome?”
White House flacks don’t usually keep working for the administration after they’ve accepted a job offer from a partisan news outlet, but Psaki did that.
Nor do they generally cheerlead for criminals, but even though Psaki is smart enough to know that intimidating judges by mobbing their houses is illegal, when asked whether her fellow Democrats should continue menacing the homes of Supreme Court justices, her answer was a green light: “There’s a lot of passion, there’s a lot of fear.”
The Democratic mob’s effort to influence the upcoming Dobbs decision that might overturn Roe v. Wade by swarming the homes of duly appointed Supreme Court justices is so revolting that even ultra-liberal Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said it was “reprehensible.” Thanks to Psaki, voters now have excellent reason to disregard last year’s awful Jan. 6 riots as merely the analogue to what Democrats are doing to try to interfere with the business of the Supreme Court.
It’s hilarious that, as Psaki turns her back on the podium and tries her luck at being an MSNBC star, Clueless Joe’s approval ratings just hit a record low of 34%, according to a Civiqs poll this week, and she acts as though progressivism is winning big-time.
Perhaps in tribute to Psaki, the White House comms shop sent out quite a tweet last night: White House tweet about what wasn’t available when Biden took office quickly debunked using previous WH tweet; Updated:
CAN DOGECOIN FIX TWITTER’S BOT PROBLEM? Newly relevant since, as Stephen reports, Musk says his purchase is held up over Twitter’s claim that it’s less than 5% bots. I am enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies, but boy is the bot problem more easily solvable for 99% of people:
- Make it so everyone can pay $1 a month via credit card with a name for a blue check verification (instead of it being some weird pseudo-endorsement granted by our unseen overlords).
- Make it so users can choose to see only blue checks if they want, or blue checks and things they retweet. Or both, whatever.
- Twitter gets millions in revenue, people are spared bots if they choose, and anonymous speech is still fine and available for folks who might want it (like Libs of TikTok) and who offer interesting material. Any blue checks lying about who they are are committing credit card fraud.
Or some variety of that, anyway. Practically every legitimate political problem with social media is solved if you let users choose their filters rather than leave it to companies to choose what you can I can see. The political problem this does not solve is silencing your opponents “disinformation,” which is why nobody seems to want to suggest this most obvious of solutions.
WELCOME BACK, CARTER! Democrats Wants to Give Biden Power to Impose Price Controls on Gas.
Such a move would surely bring shortages, as Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey notes.
Price controls do not eliminate “price gouging.” They artificially cap prices to a point where producers and retailers can’t profit off of their work. Production inevitably falls off, which then requires sharp rationing of shortage resources, as we also saw in the 1970s. I still recall the odd/even pump days based on your license plate and 5-gallon limits per visit, as well as the 2-hour waits to get to the pump at all, hopefully before the station ran out of gasoline.
Fortunately it’s pure grandstanding, as the legislation will be dead on arrival in the Senate.
Otherwise, I hope this ends better than the last time around:
DEAL OF THE DAY: Musment Charcoal Grill. #CommissionEarned
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