Archive for 2022
February 16, 2022
MORE TO COME: Doxxed Freedom Convoy Donor Forced to Close Her Restaurant After Threats. “Anyone who donated to the Freedom Convoy is now subject to partisan doxxing and potential threats or actual violence.”
ALSO, MENTAL HEALTH AND ATTITUDE: Sex can benefit overall health in senior years.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Nation Prepares To Celebrate 2nd Anniversary Of Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve.
THE HOLY GRAIL: Research on aphrodisiacs is kind of unsatisfying.
JAMES LILEKS ON P.J. O’ROURKE:
I saw a tweet that had a picture of P. J. O’Rourke in the 70s, and smiled, wondering why someone had posted it – and then a flood of oh no tweets. A few said there was no confirmation, no news stories, it was actually someone else, and for a while I thought that was possible. Texted a few people who would know, and had it confirmed. I mean, when it comes from the publicist, it’s real. Unless the publicist is really trying to get the client’s attention. See what I did? You’re trending!
It’s wretched. He was an idol, a GOD when I was reading NatLamp and Rolling Stone, and the idea that I would ever get to know him and hang out would have seemed absurd. Oh right and S. J. Perelman is going to come back to life and pull up in an elegant car with brass appointments, and pick you up, and swing ‘round to get Fran and Woody and you’ll all go to Elaine’s. (That would have been my idea of a humorist conclave on Mt. Olympus back then.)
The last time I saw him, he was in town, and we went outside the hotel where he was speaking and sat down and enjoyed the warm summer Minneapolis night. Clean town, bright lights, a good sane place. We talked about Toledo and other towns of lesser size, about our parents’ generation, about our misspent years and journeys to other notions.
He was a boon companion, as smart as he was funny, and vice versa. I have a bottle of his preferred libation and opened it tonight and toasted his book on the shelf. It sits with the greats. And it puts half of them to shame.
As Kyle Smith writes, “Assuming the smart people are wrong may not work for you every day, but you can definitely fill your tank with it and go. Of Enron, in 2002, O’Rourke wrote, ‘Everyone blames too little regulation for the Enron mess, but maybe the culprit was too much.’ Of how corruption in politics works, he wrote, ‘A chilling characteristic of politicians is that they’re not in it for the money.’ Of Bangladesh, he wrote, in All the Trouble in the World, ‘If overpopulation is something to worry about and if Bangladesh’s degree of crowding constitutes overpopulation, then Fremont [Calif.] should be a worry, too. In fact, with 2,250 people per square mile compared to Bangladesh’s 2,130, Fremont is slightly more worrisome.’”
FASTER, PLEASE: LA Elites Are Turning on D.A. George Gascón.
MAKE AMERICA DEPENDENT AGAIN: As Oil Nears $100, Saudis Snub U.S., Stick to Russian Pact Amid Ukraine Crisis.
Rising oil prices and fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine have created a dilemma for Saudi Arabia: Help the West by pumping more crude to tame the market, or stand by a five-year-old oil alliance that is helping Moscow at the expense of Washington.
For now, the world’s largest crude exporter is sticking with Russia.
President Biden has repeatedly called on Persian Gulf producers to pump more oil to reduce gasoline prices that, for Americans, are about twice as high as they were earlier in the pandemic. Those calls have grown more urgent as oil prices have risen toward $100 a barrel for the first time in nearly eight years, and threaten to go higher amid a Russian troop buildup along the Ukrainian border.
Instead, the Saudis have said they won’t pump more than they agreed to last year as part of a deal between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia, an alliance called OPEC+. That pact allows for production increases of 400,000 barrels a day each month, but it has done little to stem the rise in oil prices, and the Saudis have pumped less than their share, according to the International Energy Agency.
On Wednesday, Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, rose 1.1% to $94.26 a barrel. It has surged over 20% this year.
Joe Biden did that.
DISPATCHES FROM THOSE CRAZY RIGHT-WING PARENTS IN…SAN FRANCISCO? S.F. school board recall: Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga ousted.
“We faced the hardest time of our entire lives as parents and as students in public schools and this Board of Education focused on issues that weren’t about dealing with the immediate crisis of the day, and they didn’t show the leadership that that was necessary and that parents needed to hear, and that kids needed to hear,” said Ronen.
At least a hundred recall backers had gathered in the back room of Manny’s Cafe in the Mission District on Tuesday night.
“This is what happens when you try to rename the schools in the middle of a pandemic!” exclaimed David Thompson a.k.a “Gaybraham” Lincoln, an SFUSD parent dressed in head-to-toe rainbow drag and towering platform shoes, who described his persona as a form of protest. “We wanted to show the diversity of the community behind this recall. I knew they were going to say, ‘Oh isn’t it just a bunch of Republicans?’ and I’m like, do I look like a Republican?”
Within the next few weeks, Mayor London Breed is expected to appoint replacements to finish out the commissioners’ terms, which end in early January 2023. To remain in office, the replacements would have to run in the upcoming November election, but would have an edge as incumbents. The three were the only school board members eligible to be recalled.
“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” Breed said in a statement. “There are many critical decisions in the coming months — addressing a significant budget deficit, hiring a new Superintendent, and navigating our emergence from this pandemic … The school district has a lot of work to do.”
Flashbacks:
● San Francisco to rename Abraham Lincoln High School because ‘black lives didn’t matter to him.’
● Why San Francisco’s School Board Recall May Be One Of 2022’s Most Important Elections. “On February 15, San Francisco’s majority-liberal residents will decide the fate of three far-left school board members who face recall. The outcome of this local election will have national implications, indicating how much Asian Americans, the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the nation, are shifting away from the Democrat Party.”
(Bumped.)
THE RULING CLASS SEEMS AWFULLY NERVOUS ABOUT THE PLEBS: Ottawa police warn ‘Freedom Convoy’ protesters to ‘Leave the area now,’ authorities eye ‘no-go’ zones. Nothing builds confidence and promotes legitimacy like displaying fear.
SKYNET CHUCKLES: The US government is deploying robot dogs to the Mexico border. Seriously?
The military, technological, security and political classes in this country appear united in their desire to make robot dogs part of our future, and we should all be worried.
The latest example came on 1 February, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a press release titled “Robot Dogs Take Another Step Towards Deployment at the Border”. DHS dressed up their statement with the kind of adorable language made to warm the hearts of dog lovers everywhere. “The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is offering US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) a helping hand (or ‘paw’),” read the release. Isn’t that cute? A picture of the “four-legged ground drone” accompanied the release, and the “Automated Ground Surveillance Vehicle”, as it’s called, looked remarkably (and scarily) similar to the monstrous quadrupeds seen in the Black Mirror episode. But let’s not judge based on appearance. The real issue is that we keep rushing to militarized and technological solutions to what ultimately are human and political questions, creating more problems along the way.
These particular robot dogs are made by Ghost Robotics, which claims that its 100lb machine was “bred” to scale “all types of natural terrain including sand, rocks and hills, as well as human-built environments, like stairs”. Each robot dog is outfitted with a bevy of sensors and able to transmit real-time video and information feeds. The devices are not yet in operation on the US-Mexico border, but a testing and evaluation program is under way in El Paso, Texas.
To listen to DHS, it all sounds so utterly charming and so very next-gen – until you realize that what we’re talking about is the further encroachment of government surveillance on our daily lives. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, “people who live along the border are some of the most heavily surveilled people in the United States. A massive amalgamation of federal, state and local law enforcement and national security agencies are flying drones, putting up cameras and just generally attempting to negate civil liberties – capturing the general goings-on of people who live and work in proximity to the border.”
As one Twitter wag suggests, “A new business for the cartels: steal the robot dogs and sell them to the Chinese for reverse engineering.”
THE MEDIA-GOVERNMENT COMPLEX: The Media Lied Repeatedly About Trump Being Spied On, and We’ve Got the Receipts.
HOWIE CARR: Biden inflation a pain at the pump, grocery store.
Every time I shop anywhere and notice that the price has gone up again or the package has shrunk or that what I wanted to buy is no longer in stock, I silently say to myself, “Thanks, Brandon!”
Obviously, I’ve been thanking Brandon a lot lately. On Sunday, before the Super Bowl, I stopped in the supermarket and grabbed a block of one of my favorite cheeses, Jarlsberg Light. It’s a little indulgence. I’m used to paying $6.14 for eight ounces.
Sunday, the half-pound was up to $6.89.
Thanks, Brandon!
So I decided to ask the listeners and texters on my radio show how often they’ve been thanking Dementia Joe Biden — Brandon — for his disastrous economic policies and the rampant inflation and shortages they’ve produced.
And by the way, in case you haven’t left the house recently, you may not have noticed that the government’s official 7.5% inflation rate (the highest since 1982) is nonsense.
How can you have a list of “core” prices that does not include food and fuel? Food and fuel are two necessities that you need to survive — you can’t get any more “core” than food and fuel.
I found a website where a statistician uses the pre-1980 methods of computing inflation. It’s called shadowstats.com. He pegged last month’s actual inflation rate, which includes food and fuel prices, at 15.63%, the highest since June 1947.
Thanks, Brandon! So on my show I opened the lines and within seconds they were jammed.
Melissa in Connecticut: “I spend my weekends looking for cat food. I went to five supermarkets Saturday before I found anything. It’s like going on a treasure hunt.”
A texter from 508 area code corrected her: “Treasure hunt? More like a scavenger hunt you mean.”
Area code 339: “Finally got the dining-room set I ordered in October. If I ordered it now it would cost $800 more.”
Limerick Guy: “I would like to thank Brandon for the fact that I paid $3.45 a gallon for gas today when I paid $1.45 a gallon at Costco in Trump’s final days in office.”
Area code 774: “CVS doesn’t have a prescription I need for tomorrow. I may have to drive to Bedford.”
Susie: “My father died, he left me some money. I could finally afford the car I’d always wanted, a Cadillac, loaded. They had nothing at the dealership! Nothing! They told me maybe they’d have something in a few weeks.”
The Wall Street Journal ran a story Monday about used cars — the average price for one in the U.S. is now $28,500. How’d you like to be a high-school kid trying to buy his first car? Thanks, Brandon!
Area code 978: “My truck was on empty. I threw in $25 & it didn’t even turn off the low-fuel light.”
Bob: “My wife loves those Boston coffee cakes. They’ve always been $4.99. They just went up to $6.99. And that’s at Market Basket, which always has the lowest prices.”
A reader sends this from Leominster Massachusetts:
It’s an “I did this!” instead of an “I did that!” The #Resistance is branching out!
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Don’t Trust Movies Named ‘Munich.’
This anti-Churchill thesis has been embraced by Jeremy Irons, the Oscar-winning British actor who plays Chamberlain. He told Variety: “Churchill was able to write the history of that period afterwards. It’s all very easy to look back at history and see what you want to see. But at the time, I believe Chamberlain followed the right path. He tried to prevent war. He tried to appease Hitler and got an agreement with Hitler that he would go no further. That was a canny thing to do because once Hitler did go further, he was able to say to the country, this man is not to be trusted and we’re going to have to fight him. I think Chamberlain should be praised for his pragmatic behavior. We shouldn’t view the Munich Agreement simply as the appeasement of a weak man who was fooled by Hitler. It’s the wrong way to look at it.”
* * * * * * * *
Chamberlain clearly did believe that he had made peace with Hitler, as did the English elite who cheered him in Parliament when he returned. And we must therefore understand why Churchill saw what so many others missed. The most interesting character in Munich is an aide to Hitler who as a student was enthusiastic about the “new Germany” and then becomes revolted by it. The role is based on Adam von Trott, who later attempted to assassinate Hitler. In the movie, it is the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews that wakes this young man to the danger posed by Hitler. This ironically highlights what is elided in the film. As Andrew Roberts has noted, the Anglo elite refused to fully face up to the horrors of Hitlerism because many of them cared so little for the fate of the Jews of Germany.
There is a reason, Roberts notes, that Churchill saw what his countrymen did not: “Churchill’s philo-Semitism, so rare on the Tory benches, was invaluable in allowing him to see sooner than anyone else the true nature of the Nazi regime.” This, Roberts writes, further highlights what set Churchill apart: “Despite being the son of a chancellor of the Exchequer and the grandson of a duke, he was a contrarian and an outsider. He even refused to subscribe to the clubland anti-Semitism that was a social glue for much of the Respectable Tendency, but instead was an active Zionist. The reason his contemporaries saw him as profoundly perverse is because he truly was.”
Jews therefore have a special stake in seeing that the depiction of Munich and its aftermath are true and correct. This does not mean that a statesman must always prefer war to the alternative; Churchill himself famously opined that “it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.” But one central lesson of Munich—the conference, not the movie—is that it is essential to recognize when evil exists, and it is precisely in this area that Chamberlain failed so profoundly. This year, we mark the 50th anniversary of another morally shameful moment in Munich: when, after the brutal murder of Israel’s athletes by terrorists, the Olympics went on as normal with the international community evincing little concern. We are therefore especially obligated by history to focus on, and celebrate, the heroes in history who understood the motivations of evil men when so few did.
Munich: The Edge of War currently has a 6.9 rating at IMDB, and a 78% audience share at Rotten Tomatoes, so fortunately, viewers have been able to see through the revisionism the filmmakers are attempting.
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Meet The Sex Shop Founder Who Is Grooming Children Through Books In School Libraries. “This type of propagandizing has become standard for the left-wing extremists embedded in our education system. But what makes it all the more astonishing is both the thoroughly unnerving — and previously unreported — history of this book’s author and the institutional support that’s propelled him to notoriety.”
DURHAM INVESTIGATION? WHAT DURHAM INVESTIGATION? Conservative Media: Doing the Job the MSM Refuses to Do.
The New York Times finally covered the story online Monday (for Tuesday’s print edition) and managed to insult the intelligence of its readership in the process.
Charlie Savage, the NYT’s Washington correspondent, was quick to dismiss the bombshell as inconsequential, claiming the narrative from outlets like ours that reported on it is “mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.”
How stupid were we to talk about such a huge story? Apparently very, according to Savage, who appears to justify his own publication’s lack of jumping on the story right away by saying it’s just too complicated for Times readers. Savage explains that stories like this “tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims.”
Read the whole thing.
WELL, YES: America Is Approaching Financial Doomsday.
Most fiscal conservatives are not surprised that the left-wing imbeciles in the White House and the Capitol Building are running up massive quantities of debt and burdening the American taxpayer excessively with the government’s bills. I mean, hell, more than $2.5 trillion was spent on just four acts of Congress by October of 2020. And let’s not forget the Biden administration’s fool’s gold, the bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021, which, apparently, none of the 17 Republican senators who voted for its passage bothered to read. If these sell-outs had bothered to read the contents of the bill, they would find a smorgasbord of pork, like the “Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program,” which was allocated $500 million literally to demolish perfectly good infrastructure and completely redesign the layout of entire communities to make access to them more “equitable.” (This is the whole “racist roads” hogwash.) They would also find that the bill contained an allotment of $7.5 billion for the construction of a network of half a million electric vehicle chargers nationwide, even though, by the Transportation Department’s own admission, electric vehicles accounted for only 2.3% of car sales in 2020, or one-third of China’s E.V. car sales (because the moron in the Oval Office thinks everything is better in China, just ask Hunter).
But no, 17 members of the Senate who were supposed to be fiscally responsible decided to obsequiously bow down to Caesar Biden’s demands.
But then, are they actually fiscally responsible? In the past few years, Republicans have become nearly as fiscally reckless as Democrats. Donald Trump, in just four years, added $8 trillion to the national debt. Barack Obama, who added more to the debt than all of his predecessors combined, added only $9 trillion in eight! And Jeff Van Drew, who made headlines when he switched political parties from Democrat to Republican shortly after he was elected to Congress, and who also happens to be the representative of the district in which I live in New Jersey, voted in favor of the bill in the House — and this man claims to be a fiscal conservative.
We’ve been going broke gradually for a long time. It’s the suddenly that really hurts.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Flashback:
It’s not that the problem isn’t noticed — a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 53% of people view the federal deficit and thus the debt as a serious problem, significantly outweighing other more-discussed issues such as climate change, terrorism or racism.
Right now, yearly deficits are going up, but the debt — essentially the sum of all previous deficits — is skyrocketing. It has done that for a decade, except for a couple of years when it briefly leveled off due to the influence of the Tea Party movement. I’m sorry to say I’ve kind of given up talking about it because nobody seems to care, and I’m afraid the politicians in both parties will kick the can down the road until something really drastic happens.
When the crisis comes — and it will — people on the right need to have a plan to slash government to and beyond the bone, and to implement it quickly and ruthlessly.
HMM: Biden’s National Security Advisor Could Be in Trouble Next. “Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was a senior adviser to Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016 and played a key role in pushing the bogus Trump-Russia collusion narrative, as well the allegations of a secret line of communication between Trump and the Kremlin via Alfa Bank, cited in the latest motion filed by Durham—which also wasn’t true.”
IT’S ALL RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCE NOW ANYWAY: Super Bowl masking double-standard called out one month after researchers find ‘lockdown policies are ill-founded.’ “The controversy comes a month after Johns Hopkins University published a study that found past lockdown protocols had minimal effect on public health.”
STAND FAST, SENATOR: Poll on Joe Biden’s Disastrous State Approval Ratings Shows Why Joe Manchin Holds All the Cards.
The numbers reaffirm why it’s him and not Biden who holds all the cards when it comes to the various stalemates between the two on issues like the filibuster, Build Back Better, and so-called “voting rights” legislation. Manchin is pretty close to “King of the Hill” territory in his state while Biden is floundering and flopping no matter what he does.
They also point to the reason that Manchin has publicly stated that he doesn’t care if Democrats try to primary him. Manchin knows that won’t go well.
All of that said, though an attempt at ousting Manchin through the primary process likely would be unsuccessful for his most vocal Democrat critics, Manchin is likely to face another strong general election fight should he run for re-election in 2024 as a Democrat. Because not only is the state getting redder by the day, but Manchin narrowly won in 2018 over his Republican opponent by 19,000 votes in an election where the Libertarian candidate got 24,000 votes.
Manchin understands that the only way to survive as a Democrat in today’s West Virginia is not to be a Washington Democrat.