‘DEEP’ THOUGHT FROM ADAMS: Send New Yorkers to campaign for Beto in Texas. “Just try to imagine the way Texans will receive door-knockers who deliver a message like: ‘Hello, I’m from New York City, and I’d like to tell you how Mayor Eric Adams thinks you should vote.’ It would come across as ‘Youse hicks betta vote for Beto, if you know what’s good for ya.’ A bless your heart might be the kindest reaction they get, followed by gales of laughter.”
Archive for 2022
August 10, 2022
CAN’T ANYBODY THERE PLAY THIS GAME? The White House Response to the Mar-a-Lago Raid Was a Disaster.
IN MY AREA IT’S A LOT MORE THAN THAT: More than 40% of U.S. adults have returned to ‘pre-COVID-19 normal,’ survey says.
STICKER SHOCK: “Significant Material Cost Increases”: Ford Hikes Prices Of EV Truck By Up To $7,000. “F-150 Lightning’s new MSRP is now between $47,000 to $97,000, up from approximately $40,000 to $92,000 — prices exclude destination/delivery fee plus government fees and taxes, any finance charges, any dealer processing charge, any electronic filing charge, and any emission testing charge.”
Previously: Tow No! The Ford F-150 Lightning Struggled in Our Towing Test. “In MotorTrend testing, an F-150 Lightning Platinum saddled with a camper that nearly maxed out its 8,500-pound towing capacity couldn’t even cover 100 miles. Range improved when we hooked up a significantly lighter trailer, but not by as much as you might expect.”
A minimum of $47k (plus taxes and fees) for a truck with limited tow range.
That’s one severely uneconomical virtue signal.
OUR FRIENDS, THE MULLAHS: DOJ indictment shows Iran plotted to kill John Bolton while Biden, EU negotiated for renewed JCPOA.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: If You’re STILL Voting Blue, You Get the Tyranny You Deserve. “Tyranny doesn’t just show up one day and say, ‘I’m here to take your liberties away.’ It comes in steps, and the raid on Trump’s home is a big, big step in a long line of them.”
REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: How the FBI Undercounts Armed Citizen Responders to Mass Killers — and Media Play Along.
The show follows Pratt’s character, Navy SEAL commander James Reece, who is determined to find out who killed his platoon and get revenge.
While critics were not pleased with the production, many fans immediately came to Pratt’s rescue, with the audience score on the review site coming in as 94% “fresh.”
In a brazen move, the “Wanted” star took to his Instagram story, sharing a report that suggested the actor defied “woke critics.”
In a follow-up post, Pratt shared a picture of the infamous Dr. Evil from the “Austin Powers” films, referencing the enormous amount of people who had streamed his show on Prime Video that had clearly disregarded any negative commentary.
It’d be nicer just to let the work — and its success – speak for itself, but the Left murdered niceties.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Glorious Inflation News, Comrades! You’re Getting Poorer Slightly Less Quickly. “I haven’t seen this big a celebration since our most recent battlefield victory over Eastasia, with whom Oceania has always been at war. Unless we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.”
Update: Biden, reading from a script, claimed 0% inflation last month. Gaslit video at the link.
DEAL OF THE DAY: HP Pavilion x360 Convertible 14-inch Laptop. #CommissionEarned
HMM: Russian Airbase In Crimea Goes Boom. “Russian military assets blowing up in Ukraine isn’t news, especially now that they’ve fielded HIMARS. What is news is these strikes are a good 200 kilometers from the front line.”
CANCEL CULTURE COMES FOR..METALLICA? Some Stranger Things Fans Are Now Trying to Cancel Metallica, Twitter Reacts.
However it’s described, in her video, Trueblood presses Metallica about their past actions caught on photo or video, including when members such as former bassist Jason Newsted appeared to do Nazi salutes onstage. She also shows footage where Metallica seemed to make fun of the death of Kurt Cobain after the Nirvana singer’s 1994 suicide. (One includes Megadeth‘s Dave Mustaine, but he was already out of Metallica at the time.)
Trueblood further claims Metallica singer James Hetfield kept Ice-T‘s Body Count off a 1992 Metallica tour with Guns N’ Roses due to the hip-hop artist’s race. She includes a classic MTV News clip suggesting the source of the rumor as Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose.
Naturally, Metallica fans on Twitter reacted in droves to Trueblood’s video. One tweet summarized, “The fact metallica welcomed and defended all the new fans that came from the stranger things fandom and they’ve gone and THROWN IT BACK IN THEIR FACES…”
But another seemed to counter in support of Trueblood’s take, saying, “Metallica fans proving they’re racist lmao.” Yet another replied to the drama, “Search Metallica cancelled… all about racism etc.” See more Twitter reactions down under the video.
As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018, “Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is.”
The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.
What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.
And as a result, we live in the dumbest timeline imaginable.
THEY DON’T LOOK LIKE “THIS IS MAGA COUNTRY” TYPES: DA mulls charges against teens arrested for attack on Chinese UW-Madison student.
THAT’S BECAUSE HIS WINS ARE AMERICA’S LOSSES: As Democrats Celebrate Biden ‘Wins,’ More Blue House Seats Become Competitive.
#RESISTANCE WORKS: UChicago drops booster mandate after saga of COVID regulations, protests.
HHS TRANS-GENDERING GUIDELINES IGNORED FDA WARNING: President Ronald Reagan oft quipped that the government’s left hand often doesn’t know what its far-left hand is doing. Liberty Unyielding’s Hans Bader used the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to uncover a contemporary illustration of this enduring reality.
Seems the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Population Affairs (OPA) ignored warnings issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the very real health dangers of using puberty blockers in children.
As Bader points out, “the FDA recently added a warning to the puberty blockers used by transgender children undergoing gender transitions. The warning was added after the FDA identified ‘a serious potential side effect’ that can ’cause cause a dangerous surge of spinal fluid pressure in the brain,’ as well as ‘headaches, nausea, double vision, and even permanent vision loss.’”
But hey, parents, not to worry, the ideological fanatics running HHS and the OPA know better about these things than the experts at FDA, so go right ahead and fill your kids with those puberty blockers.
A little aspirin ought to stop their whining and crying about those headaches, nausea, double vision and stumbling into furniture, tripping over the dog and walking into traffic. After all, as Reagan also said, they are from the government and they are here to help us.
HMM: China graft probes stem from anger over failed chip plans.
The investigations have sent shockwaves through a semiconductor industry long accustomed to top-level support. Xi Jinping’s government had allocated more than $100 billion to build up a domestic semiconductor sector so the country could break its dependence on the West. A key area of scrutiny is the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund — known within the industry as Big Fund — which had become Beijing’s primary vehicle for doling out capital to the country’s chipmakers.
The nation’s top anti-graft agency announced investigations into three more executives who helped manage the Big Fund’s assets on Tuesday, adding it was dispatching a team to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The same regulator was already investigating the minister, Xiao Yaqing — making him the most senior sitting cabinet member to face a disciplinary probe in almost four years.
“If you’re going to be putting tens of billions of dollars in an industry, regardless of whether it’s a high technology one or just like building trains and airports, you’re going to have illicit dealings going on,” said Jordan Schneider, a senior analyst at Rhodium Group and host of the China Talk podcast.
Previously: ‘Japan Inc.’ and Other Tales of Industrial Policy Apocalypse. “Perhaps most notable in this regard was the Japanese government’s own admission that the MITI model had not worked as well as planned. A 2000 report by the Policy Research Institute within Japan’s Ministry of Finance concluded that ‘the Japanese model was not the source of Japanese competitiveness but the cause of our failure.’ MITI was renamed the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry at about the same time, and its mission shifted more toward market-oriented reforms.”
Yesterday: Biden Signs CHIPS Act Into Law, Sending $53B to US Chipmakers.
But this time it’ll work for sure.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dear Dems—Trump 2024 Is Gonna Be Super LIT. “All of this is being driven by the Democrats’ obsession with using the J6 fauxsurrection to keep Trump off of the ballot in 2024. They know that they could resurrect FDR and Trump is still going to waltz back into the White House. He’s the monster under all of their beds. As I’ve written before, he’s not only living rent-free in their heads, he’s building condos and inviting his friends.”
HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN! Inflation “only” 8.5% in July. Yay! All credit to the sage in the White House!
Wait, what?
Even with the lower-than-expected numbers, inflation pressures remained strong.
The jump in the food index put the 12-month increase to 10.9%, the fastest pace since May 1979. Even with the monthly drop in the energy index, electricity prices rose 1.6% and were up 15.2% from a year ago. The energy index rose 32.9% from a year ago. . . . Shelter costs, which make up about one-third of the CPI weighting, continued to rise and are up 5.7% from a year ago.
Well, uh, it’s still great news because . . . economists expected 8.7%!
Plus: “While inflation has been accelerating, gross domestic product declined for the first two quarters of 2022. The combination of slow growth and rising prices is associated with stagflation, while the two straight quarters of negative GDP meets a widely held definition of recession.”
UPDATE: July CPI report: Inflation dips to 8.5%, flat month-on-month — but why? “This is still the fifth straight month that overall CPI inflation has remained above 8%. Core CPI has been above 5% for ten straight months, and is flattening out around 6% over the last three months. Those are not good signs, especially when considering that all of these reports are compounding on high inflation rates from a year ago. . . . And on top of that, inflation’s persisting into what looks like a looming recession, if it has not yet arrived.”
But it’s all good news in the press, and will remain so until November.
LEFTY POLLSTER FINDS LEFTY THEMES DON’T WORK WITH VOTERS: This is intriguing – the Winning Jobs Narrative Project surveyed 60,000 voters in 17 states and discovered this:
“‘Making villains of corporations’ and embracing ‘culture war topics like abortion’ are ineffective strategies for Democrats. Liberals would attract more voters, in fact, if they sounded like conservatives — talking about ‘respect for work’ and placing ‘government in a supporting rather than primary role,'” reports Washington Free Beacon’s Robert Schmad.
TOP. MEN. FBI ‘Scoured’ Melania’s Wardrobe at Mar-A-Lago Looking for… Classified Shoes?
Sounds like a fishing expedition launched out of desperation. But maybe Manolo is an unindicted coconspirator or something.
Then again, since the first director of the FBI was widely reputed to be a cross-dresser, maybe their interest was more . . . personal.
TRUMP 2024, DESANTIS 2028/32: If Merrick Garland doesn’t give a solid, fast reason for raiding Trump’s home, he’s probably just re-elected him.