OPEN THREAD: Nothing’s Feeling New. Everything is useless, everything is stupid, everybody’s clueless.
Archive for 2022
June 6, 2022
IT’S COME TO THIS: Common Sense? CBS Urges U.S. Adopt Japan’s Occupation-Era Gun Control.
On Monday’s CBS Mornings, the network continued their series globetrotting for gun control laws. This time they left Europe and jetted over to Japan where senior foreign correspondent (and friend to the Iranian regime) Elizabeth Palmer touted their oppressive system where a citizen could wait a year or longer to get a gun license as authorities prod their lives and a gun shop owners need to get permission to buy ammo. All imposed on them during the post-WWII occupation.
* * * * * * * *
Palmer was absolutely giddy to note that the reason Japan had such strict gun control laws was because of the United States. “And how’s this for ironic? Japan owes its strict gun laws to America,” she mocked. “When the U.S. occupied Japan after World War II it disarmed the country.”
She even threw in a soundbite from an old documentary where the narrator proclaimed: “To the scrap heap went the guns.” Palmer conveniently omitted the part where the U.S. also banned Japan from having a military.
“Americans shaped the legislation that took firearms out of the hands of civilians, and to this day, that means getting hurt or killed by a gun in Japan is an extremely long shot,” she jabbed as she wrapped up the report.
Palmer is essentially praising the American confiscation of firearms for there to be a smoother occupation and pacification of a citizenry, the exact opposite of what the founders intended. And given the fact that the Democratic Roosevelt administration put Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, perhaps looking to that era for guidance is ill-advised.
As Glenn has written, “our elites are now promoting the kind of history one would impose on a conquered nation, to break its people’s spirit.” But they’ve rarely made the connection so obvious until now.
WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Biden White House neglects to mention anniversary of D-Day, second year in a row. Former presidents have acknowledged D-Day in some capacity during their first year in office.
With the 78th anniversary of D-Day nearly over, President Biden has so far failed to issue a statement on the historic day that was widely regarded as a decisive turning point during World War II.
The snub marked the second year in a row the Biden White House failed to issue any kind of statement on the anniversary.
The nearest military-related tweeted on the president’s Twitter feed includes a shout-out to Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman to serve as Commandant of the Coast Guard, and the first woman to lead any branch of the Armed Forces.
Not sure what happened last year, but perhaps this December WaPo article gives President Klain an excuse for this year’s snub: Washington Post Discovers World War II-Era Survey, Cancels the Greatest Generation.
Fox News noted, however, that there seemed to be an ulterior motive in the presentation of this “uncensored” material. “Critics took to social media to blast The Post’s framing of the surveys, with some questioning the desire to view people in the 1940s through a 21st-century lens, and others suggesting that there was now an ongoing effort to cancel the grandparents of some Americans.” Nick Timothy, a columnist for the UK’s Telegraph, tweeted: “Next you’ll be telling me William Wilberforce wasn’t in the Parliamentary LGBTQ society, and Gandhi didn’t support Black Lives Matter. Historical figures lived with different social and moral norms. This is not news, or a novel academic discovery.”
Indeed. It is noteworthy also that the Post saw fit to highlight, out of 65,000 pages of surveys, racist and sexist remarks, rather than material that might have provided insight into the challenges that the men who won World War II faced and the difficulties they overcame. The Post’s article, and apparently the entire Virginia Tech project, if its focus is reflected accurately in the article, is akin to the pulling down of statues that has become a fad all over the country. The Left wants Americans to be ashamed of our history. Washington? Jefferson? Not statesmen, not men of courage, not key framers of the most successful republic and freest society the world has ever known, but just racist slaveowners, to be repudiated and abhorred, not respected or celebrated. Lincoln? He didn’t free the slaves; that’s the “white savior complex.” He, too, must be rejected as a racist, paternalist white supremacist. The Greatest Generation? Yes, they fought and won World War II and came home and made the United States the greatest power on earth, but you see, they did not hold woke attitudes.
In accordance with the prophesy:
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 plenty of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” as well. “It is defined as the belief that ‘the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.’ If we add, ‘and therefore wrong and also racist’ to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs. Historian Larry Taunton defines it as ‘imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.’”
IT’S COME TO THIS: NFL team appoints first openly transgender cheerleader.
Charlotte-based NFL team the Carolina Panthers have added a male cheerleader who identifies as a female to its roster of cheerleaders.
In an announcement this week through Instagram, Justine Simone Lindsay, who identifies as transgender, stated “you are looking at the newest member of the Carolina Panthers TopCats cheerleader’s as the first Transgender female.” [sic] would like to thank the beautiful and talented dancers who supported me along the way, alumni, TopCats family, and friends for your love and support. I would not have gotten to this moment in my life if it wasn’t for the support,” wrote Lindsay. “Also to my beautiful coach [Chandalae Lanouette] you are a special being that I truly cherish thank you taking that leap of faith on me to be apart of your legacy and so many others.”
“This is a moment I will never forget and I cannot wait to show you all what this girl has to bring,” the cheerleader added. “Thank you [TopCats] a dream come true.”
For the past few seasons, the Panthers’ record has been 7-9, 5-11, 5-11, 5-12. I’m glad they’ve sorted out their football team’s myriad problems so that they can now focus on the important issues.
CNN: RISING GAS PRICES ARE BAD NEWS FOR DEMOCRATS.
CNN had two of their reporters on air for a segment on rising gas prices today and the news from both of them was bad news for Democrats. First up was senior data reporter Harry Enten who talked about how gas prices might impact the midterms.
“This year is off the charts, right? It’s ridiculously high, the growth rate right now,” Enten said. He continued, “I’ve done this a few times on air and each time the now number goes up, up and up and up.” He was referring to this graphic seen above which shows the current surge in gas prices is higher than in previous midterm cycles.
Enten said the correlation to bad news for the incumbent party wasn’t perfect but in this case the gas prices are part of a “larger economic context” all of which boils down to Americans being “really not happy at this point.” Enten went on to point out that the economy was far and away the top issue. Other issues like gun control and abortion don’t even come close.
Next up was reporter Matt Egan who was doing a stand-up from a gas station in New York. “Unfortunately, probably no relief is coming and people are not happy about it,” Egan said. “At this gas station in Manhattan gas is now selling for $6 a gallon,” he said.
Just a few days ago, Ed [Morrissey] noted that analysts were predicting regular gas could hit $5 a gallon by June 17. But according to AAA, the national average is up 25 cents in the past week to $4.86. Now Tom Kloza, the energy analyst who tracks prices for AAA, says $5 a gallon gas could happen as soon as this weekend.
Of course CNN reporters are surprised by this development, because it was actually predicted by a debate televised on CNN in 2019, which even they didn’t bother to watch: In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”
And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”
Or as Glenn asked last week in his New York Post column, “So does the Biden administration actually want to see middle-class Americans reduced to poverty and privation? Or is it just too stupid to foresee the obvious consequences of its own actions? At this point, I’m not even sure which is worse. But with the midterms coming, no amount of talk about gun control, abortion or other Democratic hot-button issues is going to distract Americans from what’s happening to their pocketbooks. Good.”
Flashbacks:
● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?
● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.
● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”
Exit quote: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”
In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
Speaking of the Obama era, this 2012 CNN headline is a classic: Opinion: America, quit whining about gas.
Fuel is a drug the U.S. has long since needed weaning off. Admittedly Americans have to cover greater distances than Europeans. But you don’t need a glorified double bed powered by a throbbing great V8 to do that. A sensibly-sized car with a two-liter turbo will do the job just as comfortably.
And with developing nations such as China, Brazil and India demanding ever more fuel, the planet can’t put up with anyone’s penchant for gas-guzzling monsters any more.
But if the European experience is anything to go by, the $4 gallon isn’t going to alter driving habits dramatically. America needs petrol prices to double if people are to permanently park up their 15mpg pick-up trucks. Maybe then it’ll elicit a bit of sympathy from over here.
Curiously, with midterms looming, DNC-CNN isn’t running similar pieces this year.
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
UPDATE: Father on MSNBC Summarizes How Bad Democrats Are Getting Shellacked in November With One Perfect Sentence. “One administration had cheaper gas and this administration has more expensive gas.”
Why aren’t American voters appreciating Biden’s self-declared “incredible transition?!” Biden praises high gas prices as part of ‘incredible transition’ of the US economy away from fossil fuels.
(Updated and bumped.)
EX-MEDIA MATTERS EMPLOYEE: THERE WAS A SEXUAL PREDATOR CREEPING AROUND THAT OFFICE.
Does every lefty outlet employ sexual predators? I thought the Lincoln Project was peak creepiness, having a co-founder who was very inappropriate with young men. Then, the endless stories of teachers being totally weird with their students. I’m not talking high school. I’m talking pre-teens, even kindergartners. I don’t need to go into details about that. To make matters worse, we have school districts, like the one in Loudoun County, Virginia, who pretty much covered up a sexual assault because the perpetrator was reportedly gender-fluid. It’s a dumpster fire. Now, the Left’s main media bias watchdog, Media Matters, is facing an allegation that they employed a sexual predator. It was made by a now-ex-employee.
Why is the left such a cesspit of abuse?
WELCOME BACK, CARTER! White House worried about Jimmy Carter parallels to Biden presidency as approval rating remains low: report.
The Biden White House is reportedly worried that the parallels to former President Jimmy Carter’s presidency are going to stick as gas prices and inflation continue to increase and the president’s approval rating remains low.
Politico reported on Sunday that President Biden and his aides were feeling defeated by their efforts to counteract the many challenges the Biden administration currently faces.
“Morale inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is plummeting amid growing fears that the parallels to Jimmy Carter, another first-term Democrat plagued by soaring prices and a foreign policy morass, will stick,” Politico’s Jonathan Lemire wrote.
The White House’s plan is to get Biden out on the road to talk about his progress, and they hope to pile on their attacks against the GOP and paint the party as too extreme, highlighting the issues of gun control and abortion.
Biden is reportedly very frustrated that his approval rating has dipped below former President Donald Trump’s, who Biden believes is the “worst president.”
The report says that the president “erupted” over not being kept up to speed about the baby formula shortage. The president reportedly went against his staffer’s advice when he declared the news of the shortage reached him.
So when does Biden do something about his staff? When Does Joe Biden Start Firing People?
Biden could put a stop to the public walkbacks immediately by firing one or more people for publicly contradicting him. There are two overlapping reasons why he hasn’t done that: He isn’t willing to stand up to his own staff, and at some level, he grasps that they keep walking back things that he should never have said in the first place. If you have spent much time around elderly men with declining faculties, you will recognize the all-too-common pattern of lashing out because they need help for things they could once do themselves, rather than being thankful for the help.
Earlier: “I see the contrast coming into view. Joe Biden is making Jimmy Carter look like a good president.”
Was this the moment when everything went pear-shaped?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I paid $5.19 for gasoline today. In Knoxville where it’s usually cheap.
I’VE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR A LONG TIME: We Can’t Keep Getting The Same Formula in COVID-19 Booster Shots, Says Immunologist. “Current booster shots are simply additional doses of the vaccines based on the outbreak SARS-CoV-2 virus strain that has long been extinct. The coronavirus variants have changed a lot from the original virus, which doesn’t bode well for continued vaccine efficacy.”
THIS SEX DOUBLE STANDARD AT THE POST SEEMS LIKE A STRAIGHTFORWARD TITLE VII VIOLATION:
As they say, it’s not hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy, and as a white male Weigel is down there at the bottom.
Of course, Dave helped make this world.
UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald:
One should prefer any job to being imprisoned inside a newsroom where older editors are petrified and terrorized by the prospect of bad faith bigotry/misogyny accusations being weaponized at any moment by unwell, vindictive millennials, and thus constantly indulge their neuroses.
The reason this matters is because the people at these media corporations who constantly reveal themselves to be deranged sociopathic freaks and neurotics — as is happening now at the WPost — are the ones demanding the right to declare Truth and Falsity and censor in its name…. There’s no such thing as satiating the bloodlust of woke sociopaths who live to destroy people to compensate for their own lack of self-esteem and purpose.
Not content with @daveweigel ‘s suspension, they now want punishment for Post reporter @jdelreal for the crime of objecting. Jose Del Real is the only Mexican-American on the Post’s national desk and an openly gay man to boot. Obviously, in a sane world, none of that should matter, but this would be the key fact if they wanted to defend rather than destroy him. They suspend their own rules at will.
It’s a mixture of “a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum.”
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE, WHO NEEDS FRIENDS?:
NEWS FROM THE JUBILEE: Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Trooping. “I’d called in half a dozen favours… not one of which had come back to me with any good news but no matter, off I went—through the maze of security and crowds the likes of which London has never seen. I had, on my phone, pictures of my recent meeting with Prince Charles, my Davos award, my Paris Match cover photo, and for added measure… older photos of me on the British Equestrian Team. Of course I didn’t imagine I’d use these photos to gain entry but I’d used positive visualisation techniques to prepare for this day, and well… they couldn’t hurt. It also didn’t hurt that I looked like a million bucks. Mummy had turned up with this hat before I looked for the dress. We’d sort of reverse-engineered the ensemble but it worked, as did my plan.”
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Would You Believe San Francisco’s Too Right-Wing?
“In some sense, there are two San Franciscos,” New York Magazine’s Ross Barkan stipulates. There is the city you know and have known for decades, which has incubated a political culture well to the left of nearly any other major American metropolitan area. But there is another San Francisco, he adds; a city that is profoundly conventional and even a little right-wing.
“Modern San Francisco, unlike New York, does not rest on the legacy of a social-democratic state forged with New Deal largesse,” Barkan continues. “From 1912 to 1963, only Republicans governed San Francisco, and they were largely backers of big business who could occasionally draw support from organized labor.” The city, therefore, lacks a deeply rooted working-class population that could ballast progressive politicians at the polls. Likewise, San Francisco’s “black population is declining,” robbing the city of an African-American political establishment. And while Silicon Valley casts a progressive gloss over the city, the members of this wealthy caste resent the “visible poverty” and squalor that has become a feature of their daily life.
You might not expect a city that hasn’t elected a Republican to the mayoralty for a half-century—a city that leans Democratic to the tune of 38 points and has sent Nancy Pelosi to Congress every two years since Ronald Reagan was in the White House—to be a hotbed of conservative thought. And yet, the city’s current mayor, London Breed, “exists somewhere on an ideological spectrum to the right of Bill de Blasio,” and even she has left Boudin for dead. It’s hardly a feat to position yourself to the right of a one-time socialist who raised money for the Sandinistas and honeymooned in Communist Cuba, but you have to take your Bay Area right-wingers as they come. In fact, Breed backed the movement to defund police departments and went so far as to cut $120 million from her city’s law-enforcement budget when that was the faddish thing to do. She only saw the light when crime rates in her city exploded, and the law-abiding public went on a recall frenzy.
Barkan notes that Boudin is cut from the same cloth as other progressive prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner and St. Louis’s Wesley Bell. Indeed, that is the problem.
As New York Times owner Tom Cotton wrote in December: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
KYLE SMITH: From Watergate to whinegate: The Washington Post is a hot mess.
The Washington Post, June 1972: Two dogged reporters patiently dig into the details of a strange burglary at Democratic Party headquarters, diligently assemble facts, cultivate sources and put together a package of revelations that will lead to the first presidential resignation in history.
The Washington Post, exactly half a century later: Two Mean Girl basket cases spend an entire weekend crazily lurching around spitting inane accusations at their colleagues for microaggressing them. The more people laugh, the louder they cry, “I’m being endangered!”
How institutions change. The 145-year-old paper was once personified by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: “Woodstein.” This weekend the WaPo’s reputation was effectively redefined by MezRenz: Felicia Sonmez and Taylor Lorenz, each of whom brought shame on the paper over nothing.
The proximate cause of this spastic overreaction was a joke, retweeted by WaPo reporter Dave Weigel, that suggested all women are either bisexual or bipolar. This kind of “Bitches be craaaaazy!” joke died out in the ’80s, and Weigel shouldn’t have retweeted it, but Sonmez clearly was trying to get Weigel fired or severely punished when she re-tweeted Weigel’s retweet with a sarcastic note that it was “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!” Weigel was already being corrected internally, so there was no need to take this public on Twitter, and he shortly deleted and apologized. That should have been the end of it.
And the hits just keep on coming! The Washington Post suspends reporter David Weigel over sexist retweet.
As Saagar Enjeti tweets, “Just so we’re all clear: Taylor Lorenz can literally lie and violate basic standards and gets no punishment. Felicia can leak her bosses emails, violate company policy and harass her coworkers and is good to go. Dave Weigel shitposts and he’s suspended w/o pay for a month.”
WELL, PILING ON COMPARED TO THE FELLATING THEY WERE DOING BEFORE, BUT TO A DEMOCRAT IT PROBABLY FEELS BRUTAL: Biden’s press office plagued by negative coverage, messaging gaffes as media signals ‘honeymoon is over.’
The White House has been plagued in recent weeks with negative reports about President Biden’s press office coinciding with a series of messaging gaffes, and mainstream news organizations typically friendly to Biden have taken notice.
“It has been most interesting to see the establishment media try to adjust its coverage of the Biden administration. Mainstream media helped run cover for Biden in the 2020 campaign and for the early months of his administration,” DePauw University journalism professor Jeffrey McCall told Fox News Digital.
“But the media narrative that Biden was a unifier and that any national problems were just Trump leftovers just had to disintegrate in the face of cold reality,” McCall said. “Even the left-of-center media have had to grudgingly acknowledge that the Biden administration is struggling.”
If by “struggling” you mean “failing miserably,” then yes.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Lockdowns Were A Failure.
WELL, OF COURSE: Survey: Delivery Drivers Admit They’re Judging You.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Biden Caught Telling Gross Lie About Gun Manufacturers in Latest Speech.
IS THE NEW YORK TIMES A LIBERAL NEWSPAPER? OF COURSE IT IS: Former New York Times Reporter Denies in New Book That Hugo Chávez Was a Socialist.
(Classical reference in headline.)
WHO ON EARTH COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS? Seattle Implodes After Defunding The Police.
PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE: Developing A Smooth Concealed Carry Draw.
HELP NOT WANTED: Sen. Chris Murphy urges Biden to not get involved in bipartisan gun talks. “Mr. Biden nearly upended those negotiations last week with a prime-time address to the nation in which he called for, among other things, universal background checks and a ban on military-style semi-automatic rifles or ‘assault weapons.’ Such proposals have thwarted Congress for nearly two decades.”
I remember when the Complicit Media sold candidate Biden as the “moderate” who could “get things done” with both sides on the Hill.
On the other hand, Biden inadvertently stomping gun control legislation to death would be the best thing to happen to it.
READER FAVORITE: Nisaku Hori-Hori Weeding & Digging Knife. #CommissionEarned