SNORT GIGGLE:  NY Ethics Panel Orders Andrew Cuomo to Pay Back $5.1 Mil in Book Profits.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: ‘The situation is dire’; Salvation Army facing toy, donation shortage ahead of holidays.

Noncooperation is the response we’re seeing to a lot of wokeness. The leftists used to dream of inspiring a general strike. And now maybe they are.

UPDATE: From the comments: “We’re seeing Irish Democracy break out against the Woke would be rulers.” Like America has never seen it, except maybe during Prohibition which lasted a little more than a decade before being reversed.

Plus, also from the comments, a suggested Salvation Army donation in lieu of cash:

UPDATE: Salvation Army faces enormous toy shortage this year.

OPEN THREAD: You can go with this, and you can go with that. And you can go with us.

A surprising number of people have thought this was Fatboy Slim in the video even though it’s obviously Christopher Walken. Background here. “Not bad for an 84-year-old man.” I talked some years ago with the Mixmag editor who photoshopped Fatboy Slim onto a bodybuilder for the cover, and he said people kept coming up to Norman saying “I had no idea you were so buff” for years after.

Then there’s this gem. And this one.

Plus, “More of an homage than a parody.”

Speaking of which, is “if you walk without rhythm, you won’t attract the worm” a Dune reference?

UPDATE: Weapon of choice.

QUESTIONS ASKED: How bad is the current inflation and when will it abate?

I hate inflation, but there’s something delicious about the fact that this problem, above all others, is responsible for the low esteem in which voters currently hold Joe Biden and his party. Inflation is reality’s “F-you” to a central element of liberal hubris — the view that the government can do whatever the hell it wants by way of spending, energy policy, etc. and suffer no bad economic consequences.

Lyndon Johnson found that out as well, as Amity Shlaes wrote in her 2019 book, Great Society:

But an alarm that had only recently begun to ring told [voters] something was wrong and getting wronger by the day. The Consumer Price Index was rising 3 percent annually, significantly when compared with the old rate, which had hung somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent. The recent economic boom, as Senator Russell Long of Louisiana pointed out, was not always a boom for the “little fellow.” Inflation offset the gains of growth. The purchasing power of weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers had actually gone down in 1966 and 1967.15 Perhaps the money trouble signified not a general shortage but simply that the government had grown too large for itself.

And by 1968, Johnson found, Congress was ready to challenge the Administration on money. There was, said Senator Alan Bible of one of the old gold states, Nevada, a “growing mistrust of currencies, and when such mistrust exists, people of the world will turn to minerals of value, namely gold and silver.” From France, Charles de Gaulle kept up the mockery. In the United States, those away from government work were also frank. One economist in the private sector, a Wall Street forecaster named Alan Greenspan, revived the old, pre-Roosevelt point: a true gold standard was the only thing that could keep a government fiscally honest. Greenspan was a fan and friend of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. In The Objectivist, Rand’s periodical, Greenspan wrote that American overspending wasn’t strength or a wartime phenomenon; it was predictable. A welfare state, which was what the United States had become, always overcommitted. “The welfare statists,” Greenspan said, were always “quick to recognize that if they wished to retain power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e. they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds. . . . Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.” Another expert safely out of reach of Johnson, at the National Bureau of Economic Research, was Arthur Burns. Greenspan was just one economist; Burns, who headed the NBER, was the voice of the entire economics profession, independent and proud. Back in the 1950s, he had warned that “the problems of inflation will return to haunt us.” It had been Burns who back in 1960 had warned the presidential candidate Richard Nixon—correctly, as it turned out—that tight monetary policy at the Fed was slowing growth and could cost Nixon the election. Lately, Burns had been charging that Lyndon Johnson’s brand of prosperity featured serious “perils of inflation.” Burns, like Greenspan, pointed to the costs of the butter, not the guns. To attribute the recent large increases in the budget, and certainly future increases, to the costs of war, Burns said, frankly, was “a misconception.” The anti-poverty programs were the problem—a good share of them, as Burns told the New York Times, were “pure waste.” Precisely because they were outsiders, Greenspan and Burns could speak truth to power. Johnson was trading in the Great Dollar for the Great Society, and it was a lousy trade.

On the appropriate date of April 1^st, the New Yorker asked, “Is Biden Really the Second Coming of FDR and LBJ?”

Add the above passage from Shlaes to the 2015 headline, “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate,” and Biden already seems a shoe-in to be the equal of both men!

SPACE: FAA to end commercial astronaut wings program.

WHAT OUR BRASS DOES INSTEAD OF WIN WARS: Still, it is jarring to hear a Navy Flag Officer, nominated to be the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say that “gender advisors” for combat troops are critical to mission success.

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING IN THE CARTER ERA: Johnson Smith’s Fun Catalog for 1979.

BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Eighteen ‘Offensive’ Words You Can’t Say In Canada. “What are these words? They are as follows: ‘Ghetto; sell someone down the river; blackmail; brainstorm; savage; gypped; pow wow; tribe; spooky; black sheep; blind spot; blindsided; first world problem; spirit animal; tone deaf; lame; grandfathered in; crippled.’ Say what?”

(Classical reference in headline.)

SHARK, JUMPED: See It To Believe It: NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins Sings “Somewhere Past The Pandemic.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS, AND HEY, THAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T WRITE ITSELF, YOU KNOW: ESPN Lies Again: Claims Someone Put Noose in Bubba Wallace’s Stall.

ESPN tweeted out a clip on Tuesday with the caption “Last year, a noose was found in Bubba Wallace’s stall at Talladega Superspeedway” to promote an upcoming E:60 special. That, of course, is a lie.

* * * * * * * *

ESPN even admitted it wasn’t a noose in June 2020, in a report headlined, “FBI says rope had been in Talladega garage since October; Bubba Wallace not victim of hate crime.”

So ESPN lied, hoping its viewers had forgotten about the story’s outcome.

The truth is, ESPN has been lying about stories to frame black people as victims of white people for over a year. Here are just a few incidents:

Read the whole thing.

BACKING DOWN: Amtrak Suspends COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate for Employees: Chief Executive. “Amtrak will revise its vaccine mandate for workers, reverting to its previous requirement that allows employees who are not vaccinated to get tested. Additionally, the rail company no longer expects service cuts in January as previously expected.”

HMM: Rocket Scientists vs Brain Surgeons: Who Do You Think Is Ultimately Smarter?

This has been addressed:

BYRON YORK: About those Jan. 6 texts. “One commentator, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake , grossly mischaracterized what Ingraham had said in an effort to fit the facts into his preferred anti-Fox narrative. But look what actually happened . . . . This is what Ingraham texted to Meadows: ‘Mark, the President needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.'”

Shocking. Plus: “The bottom line is there is much less to the texts story than the critics would have you believe. Of course, don’t look for those critics to admit that. Some of them have been attacking Fox for years and are not going to stop now. Before you accept their spin, take a look at what Ingraham and the others actually said.”

They lied about Trump and they lie about Fox because, well, they lie about everything.

SHOT:

CHASER:

I think we should all call Elizabeth Warren “Senator Karen” from now on.

TOP SELLER: DOCKERS Men’s Classic Fit Easy Khaki Pants. #CommissionEarned

IT’S ALL FINE SO LONG AS THE BIG GUY GETS HIS TEN PERCENT: HARVARD WARNS THAT CHINESE TECH IS RAPIDLY OVERTAKING AMERICAN CAPABILITIES. Back in the 1990s Clinton/Gore era, the Chinese figured out that our ruling class, which believes in nothing more significant than itself, is highly open to subversion and corruption. It’s been working well for them.

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH THE FRENCH ARE A VOICE OF SANITY: France Rejects U.S.-Inspired ‘Wokeism’ on Race and Gender Issues.

THIS IS TRUE IN RURAL TEXAS AS WELL: Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID. Outside the world inhabited by the professional classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over.

UPDATE: People say they’re canceling their subscriptions over The Atlantic’s ‘No One Cares About COVID’ piece. “This phenomenon itself is extremely scary. These people have so much difficulty processing a fact that most of America isn’t worried about something they are, that they lash out. These are the people for whom policy was targeted to in 2020.”

(Updated and bumped.)

HMM: Mercedes Gets Approval For Traffic Jam Pilot, Where Is Tesla?

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF TOLERANCE FOR DIVERSITY: Delivery driver ran over groceries after seeing home’s pro-police sign, officials say.

DISPATCHES FROM THE APOGEE: Victor Davis Hanson in January of 2016 On Hating the West, Inc.:

What explains these hypocritical and incoherent attacks on the West? The answer is important because it reminds us not to take too seriously the agendas of 20-something campus critics of white privilege and those protesting against micro-aggressions and demanding safe spaces and trigger warnings.

No civilization in history has been more leisured, affluent, or self-critical than the contemporary United States and Europe, Westernized Asia, and the British Commonwealth of Nations. Globalization has made former millionaires billionaires and near millionaires multimillionaires; among them are those who run universities, the media, foundations, Wall Street, politics, and the arts, whose influence far outweighs their relative small numbers.

At some point, for the Western elite class, the acquisitive dreams of the past become the banalities of the present, as luxury cars, penthouses, and vacation homes only remind the guilty how blessed they are, whether through inheritance, the power of trillion-dollar investments, or the global market of 6 billion people. For many of our elites, trashing their culture and heritage offers a sort of medieval penance that lets them alleviate guilt without sacrificing privilege. George Soros, Al Gore, and Mark Zuckerberg often are critical of the very engines that powered them to zillionaire status. Billionaire George Lucas calls his additional multibillion-dollar buyout from Disney the work of “white slavers.” Is Lucas, then, our version of an indentured Irish immigrant, or a Balkan peasant sent in chains to Istanbul? The 1 percent hope their loud displeasures will help to square the circle of finding redemption without ceasing to satisfy their material appetites. For some, anti-Westernism is the white lace that adds something to their costly but boring outfit.

The prior month, James Lileks visited an Arizona shopping mall during his Christmas week reprieve from the brutal cold of Minneapolis and responded, “What you see is a miracle. This is the pinnacle of civilization, in its own way:”

I sound like a high schooler criticizing the snobby kids. I get that way in malls. Not in grocery stores, even though I get irritated by food snobs who will only use Madagascar vanilla in their French Toast batter. (Along with cage-free eggs and milk from cows that didn’t take BGH and ate non-gmo clover and were slaughtered with a blade sharpened on diamonds certified to be non-conflict) Grocery stores are a marvel. Daughter accompanied me to Fry’s today — walked! Three miles! Willingly! With her father! Made my day. We had a serious conversation on the way there and an amusing one on the way back. She was impressed by the store, which has everything. And of course I made to make this a Sermon.

What you see is a miracle. This is the pinnacle of civilization, in its own way. No king in the history of mankind had access to riches like this. Look — here. (picks up box of special expensive gourmet crackers) This is someone’s livelihood. Someone got a loan, started a business, hired people, paid someone to design this, because he or she wanted to make a special cracker, and here it is next to all the other special crackers, and this is just the special cracker department in the cheese department. There’s another special cracker section in the cracker aisle. He might fail, he might win, but you can do that here, you can try. And if someone says why do we need so many cracker choices, this is why. Do you want some governing Cracker Bureau to say no, don’t make crackers, make pretzels. But I don’t want to make pretzels. I want to make crackers. Sorry, we have enough crackers. But I have this new taste. SORRY.

Now apply that to everything here! And the other store that has the stuff this one doesn’t! And the other chain that carries a different line of specialty stuff!

Boris Yeltsin had the very same response when he visited a Houston supermarket in 1989; he immediately knew the Soviet Union was dead when he saw its shelves stocked to the brim. Bernie Sanders considered this a bad thing — both the abundant selection of the typical supermarket and the fall of the Soviet Union.* Or as Lindsey Graham joked in October of 2015, Sanders “went to the Soviet Union on his honeymoon,” and never came back.

Look at Yeltsin’s reaction below:

* Flashforward to December of 2021: Richard Blumenthal (D-Saigon) apparently agrees with Sanders: Sen. Richard Blumenthal Helps Conn. Communist Party Celebrate 102nd Anniversary of CPUSA.

VIA A FRIEND:

WHAT I’VE LEARNED RESCUING MY DAUGHTER FROM HER TRANSGENDER FANTASY:

I worked hard to take back the close relationship my daughter and I had once had. I bit my tongue until it bled. I took her anger and only responded with love or walked away when I knew I would respond poorly.

I caught her in vulnerable moments and hugged her or climbed into her bed. I stopped looking at her as though she were the victim of a scheme or a monster.

I let her know that I would never stop fighting for her.  I let her see my posters from the protests I attended.  I peppered her with questions that demonstrated the illogic of the gender ideology. I happened to have funny gender-critical memes on my computer when she walked into my office. Most importantly, I held my ground. I refused to accept her delusion with compassion.

I know that I have to continue to be tenacious as the gender ideology has crept into every facet of life. But for now, I can breathe a sigh of relief.

Read the whole thing.

OUT ON A LIMB: The Biden administration hates you more than China.

After over a month of deliberation, the Biden administration announced last week that they had settled on a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. The decision not to send an official delegation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, was in response to the “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.”

This is a relatively toothless and inoffensive form of protest, but it is welcome that the Biden administration at least acknowledges China’s human rights abuses. What was more concerning was the administration’s response when asked if they would push American companies to pull advertisements from the games.

“What individual companies do is entirely up to them. We’re not going to pressure them one way or another,” commerce secretary Gina Raimondo* said. “So if a company decides — as many companies have — that they want to make a statement against human rights abuses, then that would be great. But we’re not going to be pushing anyone to make that decision.”

This is laughable considering the Biden administration has no problem using the bully pulpit and straight-up government coercion to pressure American companies into doing what it wants domestically.

As a group of Obama retreads, that’s not surprising: The party whose organizing method is “the moral equivalent of war” views American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head. And as the past months have illustrated, they’re far more focused on fighting against American people and industries**, rather than Middle Eastern terrorists or ChiCom despots.

* Commerce Secretary’s Husband Is Top Executive at Tech Firm Funded by Chinese Government. Gina Raimondo has major financial stake in AI firm funded by Chinese venture capital firm.

** “A Democrat is president and inflation is going crazy. This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened. But when it happened last time, we didn’t have social media, so people like Elizabeth Warren didn’t have a forum to explain why the real culprit is… capitalism,” Jim Treacher writes:

“That’s right: Liz Warren is going to beat Big Meat,” Treacher adds. And so is Peppermint Psaki! “Jen Psaki reveals that meat’s gotten so pricey because those sneaky ‘meat conglomerates’ decided to get greedy after Biden took office (video).

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

BREAKING: Cuomo Ordered To Return $5.1 Million Mad Stacks From Book Deal.