BEHOLD, MY SHOCKED FACE: Democrat Congress cooks up DACA amnesty in the lame duck session.
Archive for 2022
November 23, 2022
NAH. IT’S ALL ON BRANDON: Biden’s USDA Blames Russia and Putin for Expensive Thanksgiving Dinners.
NOT SLAMMED HARD ENOUGH: Biden Administration Slammed for Signing Away $1 Billion in Climate Reparations.
LOCKDOWNS AREN’T A REASONABLE PUBLIC HEALTH MEASURE: As COVID Cases Surge, China Locks Down Beijing, Shanghai and Other Major Cities.
They are a reasonable crowd control measure.
DEFECTIVE DIVERSITY DOLL CAN’T COPE: Karine Jean-Pierre Flips Out at Reporter for Having the Audacity of Asking Fauci About COVID’s Origins.
November 22, 2022
OPEN THREAD: There are many like it, but this one is yours.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Luxury Fashion Brand “Balenciaga” Is All-In on P3do Marketing.
It’s not just the teddy bears in bondage gear. (Or the teddy bears with black eyes.)
It’s also that the photographer deliberately inserted pages from a Supreme Court case, Ashcroft vs. Free Speech Coalition, in the background. That case is about… child pornography.
Specifically, that case was a victory for child pornography. The case ruled that “virtual child pornography,” child porn that did not use actual children as actors, could not be criminalized.
This afternoon, Balenciaga issued a non-apology apology, which only mentions “unsettling documents,” not the bondage-clad stuffed bears:
ROBERT SPENCER: Letters Reveal What the World Was Like the Day JFK Was Shot.
That day fifty-nine years ago, which went so very differently from what this young man and his wife expected, changed everything in ways that even today aren’t fully understood. The Warren Commission report asserted that the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but there is an entire cottage industry of alternative explanations and lingering suspicions that the CIA and/or FBI were involved. After the Russian collusion hoax and more that we have seen over the last few years (and before that, going all the way back to the Gulf of Tonkin incident that got us into the Vietnam War), that’s a lot more plausible than it used to be, but we may never know for sure.
In any case, there is so much about JFK and his death that is eerily reminiscent of our situation today: the establishment media covering up his Addison’s disease and personal peccadilloes just as zealously as it covers today for Old Joe’s dementia and his crack-addicted, corrupt son; growing suspicions that the government is not leveling with us; and even questions about the veracity of election results (Richard Nixon was sure that the 1960 election had been stolen from him but opted not to contest it).
The world we live in was born in many ways during the JFK era. And just as that young couple of my acquaintance unsuspectingly went to the Trade Mart to see the president while world-changing events were taking place, so today most Americans are still going about their business as usual without realizing how severely the Left and America’s other enemies are threatening our republic and our society today. (That’s the focus of my forthcoming book, The Sumter Gambit: How the Left Is Trying to Foment a Civil War.) But as it soon became horrifying clear what had happened on Nov. 22, 1963 (if not why, or by whom), so also what is happening today will all become obvious eventually.
Flashback: “Trapped In Camelot:” my interview with James Piereson, the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism.
JERRY SEINFELD SLAMS HOLLYWOOD AWARD SHOWS AS ‘HORSE SH*T:’ ‘Is There Anything Stupider?’
“That’s why, you know, all these stupid singing shows and talent shows. We like to try and break people. Is there anything stupider than an award show?” he began.
“We’re gonna compete. These two movies are gonna compete. What do you mean compete? It’s not two horses, you know, it’s two movies. How can you say, we’re gonna say this one is better? You can’t, it’s fake. It’s horse shit,” Seinfeld joked.
Host Dax Shepard joined in, agreeing with Seinfeld and questioning how the movies are evaluated.
“Yeah. One came out like two weeks before Christmas. You’re already in a great mood. You evaluated this movie like — with Christmas cheer. What do we do with that? We gonna factor for that when we evaluate these movies?” Shepard said.
“Yeah. And these stupid people, myself, I’ve been sat there like an idiot at these award shows, and we’re gonna put a camera on ’em and we’re gonna watch ’em win and lose. It’s so completely contrived. There is no real competition,” Seinfeld replied.
“It’s like two tomato sauces competing,” he continued. “You can’t — they’re just different tomato sauce. What do you mean? We’re gonna — best picture. What a stupid phrase. Best actor. Best what? For who? When?
“No, it’s preposterous,” Shepard agreed.
“They’re doing different parts. It’s so stupid,” Seinfeld concluded.
The Academy Awards were originally useful to Hollywood in the late 1920s to add an additional sheen to the business, just as talking pictures began. In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Neal Gabler’s excellent 1989 book, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars:
Actors became the gods and goddesses of the new American religion. And where there are new gods, there must be new idols. So the studio heads began a movie guild with the lofty title of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was [MGM’s Louis B.] Mayer’s brilliant idea [in 1929] to create the Oscars, where the movie moguls could honor themselves by giving each other awards. In this way, they went from being a group of immigrant Jews, to award-winning American producers.
Not to mention, as one biographer quoted Mayer, “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them. […] If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”
WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? San Francisco Election Commissioner’s Term Not Renewed Because He’s White. A deeply disturbing trend in which racism against whites as part of an “equity” agenda is openly embraced.
WE ALL KNEW THIS WAS COMING. BUT SO DID HE. The Empire Strikes Back, at Elon. “The Cyberlaw Podcast leads with the growing legal cost of Elon Musk’s anti-authoritarian takeover of Twitter. Turns out that authority figures have a mean streak, and a lot of weapons, many grounded in law.”
Well, more like “law,” as a system that turns on the mean streaks of authority figures isn’t really lawful at all, but illegitimate.
MCCARTHY CONFIDENT ON SPEAKERSHIP BUT MIGHT NEED DEM VOTES: It’s a far-fetched possibility, but Congress is awash with quiet talk about how House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy may put together the votes to become Speaker of the House.
OF COURSE, PEOPLE WHO PAY FOR SPACE TRIPS NOW AREN’T CLASSED AS “PASSENGERS,” THEY’RE “SPACE PARTICIPANTS” FOR VERY PRECISE LEGAL REASONS: What are your passenger rights in space?
And unlike airlines, space launch companies aren’t transportation carriers, and their customers are rich people who can take care of themselves, and who are purchasing a non-necessity. So I don’t think the airline analogy works.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Don’t Allow Wokism To Ruin Thanksgiving.
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: US Consumers Are Doing Exactly What They Did Just Prior To The Crash Of 2008. “We never seem to learn from our mistakes. Just before the financial markets crashed and the economy plunged into a horrifying recession in 2008, U.S. consumers went on a debt binge of epic proportions. Mortgage debt, auto loan debt and credit card debt all skyrocketed, and so when the economy finally crashed all of a sudden there were millions of Americans drowning in bills that they were unable to pay. Well, now it is happening again. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, during the third quarter of 2022 household debt increased at the fastest pace that we have seen since the first quarter of 2008.”
SCHADENFREUDE OVERLOAD: The delicious fall of Sam Bankman-Fried.
In any case, FTX was big on ESG [Environmental, Social and Governance]. On a video from January this year the company’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried and the vlogger Nas Daily — the first a shyster, the second possibly a naif — claimed that FTX existed only to make money that could then be given away. The two young men are weirdos in different ways — but the main one, Bankman-Fried, looks about fourteen and has a face like a stress ball being scrunched by somebody who’s very stressed indeed.
This pair talk about all of the things that our age values most, claiming as they do that making money to pass on to special causes is much better than merely getting rich and buying a Lamborghini. If you make money and give it away to these causes, they say, that makes you way more happy than spending it on yourself.
With some infelicitous turns of phrase, Daily says various things about Bankman-Fried, which the latter then responds to. “He is funding everything you can think of: global warming” (“It’s one of the biggest problems that we have to tackle together as a world”). “Covid-19 preparedness” (“We have to be ready for the next pandemic”). “Neglected tropical diseases” (“More than a billion people suffer from them — we have to eliminate these diseases”). “And of course animal welfare” (“Animals deserve to live just like we do; it’s also why I’m vegan”).
Putting aside for a moment whether animals deserve to live just like we do, this is a pretty comprehensive catechism of our day. Bankman-Fried might have added something about BLM, but it is possible that the most up-to-date shyster knows to veer ever so slightly away from last season’s ones.
For here we are in the realm of the sort of sanctimonious fraud that our species has known throughout history. The great writers from Chaucer and Boccaccio knew these types. Many classic works of literature feature them. But one of the strangest aspects of human beings is not that we continually throw up such people but that people always fall for them.
Well, not everyone. As The Onion joked in April: Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: COMEDIANS AGAINST COMEDY! Monty Python’s Eric Idle blasts anti-woke comedians, says he loathes conservatives: ‘I hate them intensely.’
Tech journalist Kara Swisher interviewed legendary British comedian Eric Idle on Monday, where he spoke extensively about the state of comedy in his heyday and said he hated conservatives.
Swisher asked, “How do you look at cancel culture today, because now everybody is watched under great scrutiny,” asking if Idle had seen the recent Dave Chappelle’s monologue on “Saturday Night Live.”
“What do you think of the comedians like Dave Chappelle, for example, who’s saying that he’s being subjected to censorship?” she asked.
Idle appeared to disregard Chappelle’s claim that cancel culture is a phenomenon because, “Well where does he say it? On SNL,” later adding, “Well you’re not being that much canceled, are you? If you were in your room complaining I’d have a lot more sympathy.”
Swisher agreed, “Right, so then he doesn’t pay the price, he just says he pays the price.”
Neither commenter mentioned how Chappelle has been ousted by venues and targeted with physical violence for his comedy routines.
Idle offered one example of what does worry him however, saying, “I didn’t like it when Bill Maher complains about the audience for not laughing, they’re telling you they don’t find it funny. You shouldn’t moan about the audience. There’s nothing wrong with the audience. If they don’t laugh at your jokes, there’s something wrong with your joke. And so… I’m not terribly sympathetic to that sort of attitude, to be honest.”
Swisher acknowledged that Chappelle’s humor can be witty, but condemned his commentary on transgender people as creepy, to which Idle agreed, “yeah.”
I’m so old, I can remember a British comedy team where absolutely nothing was an off-limits subject of jokes. But then, as an early writer for America’s answer to Monty Python once said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long, before you become garde.”
HEATHER MAC DONALD: What happened to the crime issue in the midterms?
It turns out that black lives really don’t matter. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, conservatives had relentlessly raised the alarm about the post–George Floyd crime surge: homicides had risen 29 percent in 2020 (the largest increase on record), and they have continued rising since then. Democrats and their media allies responded either that crime was a racist fiction or that, because post-Floyd crime levels nationally were still lower than they were in the early 1990s, there was nothing to see here, folks, move on!
These opposing positions were tantamount to saying that black lives matter or that they don’t. Black Americans have borne the brunt of the increased violence since the George Floyd race riots. Their share of homicide victims went from 53 percent in 2019 (blacks are 13 percent of the national population) to 56 percent in 2020. At least an additional 2,164 black lives were lost in 2020 over the 2019 count, compared with an increase of 950 white and Hispanic homicide victims combined in 2020. Such disparities only worsened in 2021 and 2022. In 2020, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at 20 times the rate of whites in the same age range. In 2021, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at nearly 25 times the rate of whites of the same age.
It’s the only racial disparity that progressives don’t care about.
JEFF GOLDSTEIN: Kings and Queens and Guillotines. “The criminalization of speech is coming. In fact, it’s already here.”
BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation). #CommissionEarned