DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Big Cat Attacks Boy, 4, on Hiking Trail: SDFD.
Related: Loving Monsters.
Archive for 2019
May 29, 2019
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: America Has Become a Place Where Spoiled Children Paying $60,000 Tuition Consider Themselves ‘Victims.’
OUR GREATEST LIVING EX-PRESIDENT: Jenna Bush Hager says ex-president father broke her Nirvana CD.
HECKLER’S VETO: Washington DC Theater Cancels ‘FBI Lovebirds,’ Citing ‘Violent Threats.’
The Mead Theatre in D.C. opened its creative arms for Phelim McAleer’s latest project.
Those arms abruptly closed today.
The play, “FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers,” casts Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson as FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The production’s dialogue comes straight from the pair’s texts, which revealed both their romantic affair as well as plans to battle Donald Trump’s rise to the Oval Office.
The team behind the project just announced the theater canceled its contract to host the performance in an email alert. The theater cited “threats of violence” for why it reversed course on the production, according to “FBI Lovebirds” email.
Why is the left such a cesspit of violence?
SUZANNE VENKER: Taylor Swift just proved my point about feminism’s harm on millennials.
Taylor Swift just proved my point. My last post was about feminism’s harmful influence on millennials; and less than 24 hours later, a friend sent me this USA Today article that highlights an interview Taylor Swift gave on a promotional tour in which a German reporter asks Swift if she has children or family on her mind since she turns 30 this year.
A quick caveat: I feel compelled to write that this question shouldn’t be asked of any woman, as it’s no one’s business but hers. However, such probing questions by the media are inevitable at that level of fame. Swift is entitled to dodge the question, which she did. But her reason for not answering it speaks volumes: “I really do not think men are asked that question when they turn 30, so I’m not going to answer that now.”
Here’s a newsflash for Swift and other young women who didn’t get the memo: No one asks men that same question because men don’t have a biological clock. Women do.
I know you’ve grown up believing since the day you were born that men and women are, or should be, sexual equals and should thus be treated as identical beings. But sexual equality is a bogus mission (which you will see in time if you ever do have children, for it is then that sex differences become glaringly obvious) because it’s inextricably tethered to a progressive political movement that has no basis in reality.
Indeed it is.
DON’T GET COCKY: Why Joe Biden can’t win.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: NBC Polling Data Shows Sanders Voters Are ‘Low Information’ And Sanders Voters AREN’T Happy.
OUT ON A LIMB: Mueller Investigation Concludes Hillary Clinton Was Actually Just A Terrible Candidate.
“I mean, she lost to Donald Trump, for Pete’s sake,” he added, shaking his head.
Investigators showed that Clinton’s extreme lack of charisma or likability, her awful public policy record, her constant disparagement of millions of Americans she disagreed with, and her terrible campaign strategies resulted in her defeat.
“The only collusion we found was between Hillary Clinton and her campaign to be really unlikable,” Mueller continued. “And while she really is repulsive to so many Americans, that’s unfortunately not a crime, so I can’t charge her with anything. Ugh.”
Note to Snopes: It’s the Babylon Bee, so it’s satire — or is it?
THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS OWN: John Cleese faces online backlash after claiming London isn’t ‘an English city any more.’ Cleese tweeted:
In 2017, Cleese admitted to being pro-Brexit: “I don’t want to be run by a bunch of European bureaucrats.”
Monty Python was the culmination of the British left’s satire revolution of the 1960s. As Peter Hitchens wrote in his brilliant 1998 book, The Abolition of Britain, combined, these works were a cultural sea change in England:
Beyond the Fringe, Forty Years On and TW3 created a tradition of ‘anti-establishment’ comedy which continued long after its roots were forgotten. There may still have been an ‘establishment ‘of snobbery, church, monarchy, clubland and old-school-tie links in 1961.There was no such thing ten years later, but it suited the comics and all reformers to pretend that there was and to continue to attack this mythical thing. After all, if there were no snobbery, no crusty old aristocrats and cobwebbed judges, what was the moral justification for all this change, change which benefited the reformers personally by making them rich, famous and influential?
* * * * * * *
It also made the middle class, especially the educated and well-off middle class, despise themselves and feel a sort of shame for their supposedly elitist prejudices, based upon injustice and undermined by their failure to defend the nation from its enemies in the era of appeasement. Thanks to this, in another paradox, they have often felt unable to defend things within Britain which they value and which help to keep them in existence, from the grammar schools to good manners. They are ashamed of being higher up the scale, though for most middle-class people this is more a matter of merit than birth, and nothing to be ashamed of at all.
Cleese’s reference today that “Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more,” is a callback to an interview he gave in 2011:
Cleese also spoke about the shift in British attitudes away from a “middle-class culture” and the emergence of a “yob culture”.
He said: “There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture. Now it’s a yob culture. The values are so strange.”
He added that he preferred living in Bath to London because the capital no longer felt “English”.
“London is no longer an English city which is why I love Bath,” he said. “That’s how they sold it for the Olympics, not as the capital of England but as the cosmopolitan city. I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.”
More recently, Cleese has said he’s relocating the Caribbean island of Nevis. It’s interesting that Cleese fled first London, and then England itself. After WWII, the British left worked very hard to transform the people of England, taking Bertold Brecht’s famous line, “Would it not be easier…for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” to heart. As with other members of Python, Cleese is discovering the hard way that the revolution, for which they were arguably the most visible part of the spearhead, eventually devours its own.
(Hat tip, Kathy Shaidle.)
Watching a group of lefties calling someone they once worshipped as a comedy god a “racist” is painful to watch, and is a reminder of the corrosive nature of social media. If only somebody had a new book out, devoted to that very topic…
(Updated and bumped.)
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt called Grassley’s remark an “anti-Semitic smear,” elaborating, “The notion that George Soros is stirring up artificial protest is one of the biggest anti-Semitic tropes in the world today. A public official can’t claim it’s an innocent observation about someone who happens to be Jewish.” And in a piece for The Daily Beast titled, “There’s Been a George Soros for Every Era of Anti-Semitic Panic,” Spencer Ackerman declared “We may one day look back on this era as the Soros Age of anti-Semitism.”
But as a matter of simple factual accuracy, the assertion by Trump and other conservatives that Soros had “paid” individuals who protested the Kavanaugh appointment was true. No, he had not signed personal checks to the protesters. But that objection is pure semantics. Soros has, through his philanthropic organs, donated substantial sums of money to the groups that organized the anti-Kavanaugh demonstrations, including the one which staged the most high-profile of them all: the live-televised elevator confrontation. And according to an analysis undertaken by former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Q. Nomani, “At least 20 of the largest groups” involved in the protests “have been Open Society grantees.”
If the substantive content of Trump’s claim could be faulted for anything, it should not be for supposedly coded anti-Semitism, but rather the cynical attempt to delegitimize protest itself as unrepresentative of popular sentiment. Trump has established a dichotomy in the minds of his supporters whereby those who oppose his policies are not fellow Americans but members of a “mob” in cahoots with “the fake news media” and other traitorous malefactors. That said, it is far from irrelevant that many or even some of the protesters, who were attempting to override the constitutional process of representative democracy through pressure techniques, were professional political activists deriving part of their salary from George Soros’ largesse.
Read the whole thing.
TAMARA KEEL: Get a Grip: Stock Choices for Your Handguns.
SOUNDS LIKE CLINICS SHOULD BE DISPENSING DRUGS DIRECTLY: Just over half of teen girls diagnosed with STIs in ERs fill prescriptions. “Many teen girls who get infected with gonorrhea and chlamydia aren’t taking antibiotics to treat them, even though nearly half of sexually transmitted infection diagnoses come from that age group. Only 54.1 percent of young women who received a diagnosis for a sexually transmitted infection in the emergency department had prescriptions filled for antimicrobial therapy to treat the condition, according to a research letter published Tuesday in JAMA Pediatrics.”
INSUFFICIENT EXERCISE AND VITAMIN D: Bone density loss symptoms appearing in younger patients.
IMPEACHMENT FOR, AND CONVICTION OF, TREASON, BRIBERY, OR ORANGE MAN BAD: The Case to Impeach Trump for Bigotry.
Although most Democratic leaders and most House Democrats continue to resist calls for impeachment, more and more prominent Democrats, out of frustration with the Administration’s refusal to coöperate with the House’s investigators, are inching away from the Party line—either in support of impeachment on its own merits or in support of beginning impeachment hearings as a legal strategy to sustain subpoena requests.
In both cases, the Mueller report’s description of ten actions by President Trump that may have constituted obstruction of justice is central to their argument. But there are other arguments for impeaching Trump—ones that Democrats, even those most critical of the President’s conduct in office, are curiously reluctant to make.
“I think the strongest case is his bigotry and policy,” Green [not me! -Steve] told me in a recent conversation. “We shouldn’t allow a bigot to continue to hold the highest office in the land. We hear people daily on television who call him a racist, a bigot, who say he’s unfit—people in his own party have said he’s unfit to be the President. And the people of this country gave Democrats an overwhelming majority.”
Well, if people are saying stuff and calling names…
Maxine Waters turned into a cross between the John Birch Society and the Moral Majority so slowly, I hardly even noticed.
HAVE I MENTIONED THAT I HAVE A NEW BOOK OUT? Don’t just sit there, buy a copy. And maybe one for your local library.
INTERNET OF SPIES: Newly Released Amazon Patent Shows Just How Much Creepier Alexa Can Get.
JOHN KASS: Why have Democrats lost their curiosity over the Trump-Russia story?
Sunshine is conspiracy? Transparency in federal investigations is “un-American?” Ridiculous. An idiotic parrot chewing on its own toes and demanding crackers has more sense. And just who weaponized law enforcement Mr. Schiff?
I am not saying any crime occurred, nor that any conspiracy was hatched and then flown like a raptor to take Trump down. It smells, yes, but we don’t know. Let’s allow sunshine and find out. Isn’t anyone curious?
Barr has assigned John. H. Durham, a respected career prosecutor and U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to find out. Also investigating is Michael Horowitz, inspector general of the Department of Justice. They’re pulling the threads of how all this started, with the FISA warrant application and who knew what about the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. He was the author of the Steele dossier, was on the Clinton political payroll and used Russian contacts to put a political case together against Trump, which was then leaked to the media.
Already there is indication that some players have begun pointing fingers at each other in panic, just like a few sweaty Chicago aldermen I know.
In Washington, on Trump, did they do things by the book?
There was that weird Jan. 20, 2017, email that Susan Rice wrote to herself. It reportedly documented a Jan. 5 meeting between then President Barack Obama, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, then FBI director James Comey and Vice President Joe Biden in which the Steele dossier was discussed.
In her strange email to herself, Rice noted that Obama said everything should be done “by the book.”
By the book, really? Who talks like that? Someone covering their behinds?
Yes.