Archive for 2022
September 19, 2022
SPOILER: HARDLY ANYONE WILL WATCH. Lincoln Project’s World-Class Grifters Get Their Own Showtime Docuseries. Here’s What You Can Expect.
COLLAPSE: Inside Ireland’s stunning rebuke of Catholicism. I’m sure this will go well for them. It has to be said, though, that the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland brought this on itself.
Plus, this harsh response in the comments: “Land of saints and scholars, who preserved the faith and learning through the Dark Ages. Who are you now, Post-Catholic Ireland? World’s best drunks? Is it all about the craic? The boorish likes of Conor McGregor, Mick Conlan, and Sinead O’Connor are your public faces these days. Well done. Your Jansenist Catholic Church, apparently a mile wide and only an inch deep as it turned out, was made up of Irish people. They weren’t an alien force dropped on you from outside. Your church was Irish in character.”
I take the point, though I never heard that Ireland was a hotbed of Jansenism. But I may be mistaken; I’m not a religious scholar, just the kid of one.
UPDATE: John McCormack writes:
Yes, Jansenists had a huge influence on the RC Church in Ireland, historically.
During those centuries when Catholics could not be educated formally in Ireland, they had to leave the British Isles to do so.
By historical accident, it was the Jansenists the Irish first encountered on the other side of the Channel and who left a deep imprint on the those expatriates.
Interesting.
GREAT MOMENTS IN PHONING IT IN: JD Vance tears into ‘shameless fraud’ Tim Ryan for attending a WEDDING on Saturday night — after Democrat repeatedly attacked him for holding a rally with Trump during an Ohio football game. “A Vance campaign spokesman told DailyMail.com, ‘Tim Ryan has not only spent the last two weeks childishly attacking JD Vance for missing the very Ohio State game that he himself knew he was going to miss, he even had his staff live tweet commentary of the game from his twitter account to deceptively cover up the fact that he wasn’t watching.'”
MARK HEMINGWAY: If Martha’s Vineyard Tried To Prove It Cares About Immigrants, It Failed Miserably. “When Republican governors send 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, it’s a humanitarian crisis. When 51 migrants who were encouraged to cross the border by Democrats die in the back of a truck, well, that’s a statistic.”
Plus:
In September of 2014, I found myself in a town hall meeting in Lexington, Nebraska — population 10,000. It’s a meat-packing town about three hours west of Omaha, and not what one would call a wealthy town. I was there on a campaign stop with Sen. Ben Sasse, and the people of Lexington were very concerned with one issue in particular: what to do about the 11 Central American kids the federal government had dropped off unannounced in Lexington the month prior, just before the start of school. There had been a rapid influx of unaccompanied minors crossing the border that summer, and the Obama administration just relocated many of them around the country in towns such as Lexington.
It bears repeating that these were children that needed taking care of. Whatever social services you think are needed to take care of regular migrants, this was a much bigger and more expensive issue for the town. Self-sufficiency wasn’t just a matter of finding them work — these kids had to be clothed, fed, educated, and generally looked after for years.
The townspeople were alternately irate about being put into this situation and genuinely concerned for the kids’ welfare, given the town’s limited resources. After listening to the townspeople plead for help, we got on the campaign bus and drove to the next stop. For all I know, those migrant kids are still in Lexington, and the community of Lexington is hardly unique. Hundreds, if not thousands, of American towns have had to rise to meet challenges as a result of the federal refugee resettlement.
Perhaps you can start to see why I was unimpressed with the residents of Martha’s Vineyard for harboring 50 migrants for two days before sending in the military to herd them off. And yet, because the DeSantis stunt — and there are valid objections to flinging migrants hither and yon to make a point — exposed a great deal of hypocrisy among Democrats, there is a campaign afoot to portray Martha’s Vineyard as a model of compassion for the way they treated these immigrants.
In my wildest dreams, I could not have made up CNN’s headline that was this unintentionally parodic and unflattering: “‘They enriched us.’ Migrants’ 44-hour visit leaves indelible mark on Martha’s Vineyard.”
Or take this gauzy Washington Post profile of a Bolivian immigrant-turned-Martha’s Vineyard real estate agent — please. (In case you’re wondering, the average home price on the island is over $1 million, so the commissions are decent.) The woman took a day or so off to help the migrants and gather supplies for them. Which is, I confess, admirable behavior. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the ongoing volunteer work being done in border towns such as El Paso, Del Rio, and Yuma, which likely see 50 or more new migrants every hour. And yet, those volunteers get little flattering national press coverage, let alone something as tone deaf as this.
Well, El Paso, Del Rio, and Yuma are Red State areas full of uncouth characters, whereas The Vineyard is very much Our Kind Dear.
I would be embarrassed to conduct an interview with the president that was as lame as Scott Pelley’s lovefest with President Biden on 60 Minutes last night. The Biden administration accorded Pelley a substantial amount of time to chat with Biden and Pelley returned the favor with a variety of softballs and dropped balls as well as his own apologetics — to no one’s surprise, of course, but still. It was an embarrassment.
CBS has posted the transcript here. NewsBusters covers the Biden segments in “State-Run TV: 60 Minutes Drools Over Biden in Syrupy Interview.”
The lack of follow-up questions was one striking feature of the interview. You’d almost think that Pelley himself doesn’t follow the news. He appears to be somewhat less knowledgeable than the average voter.
And not for the first time: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in his Favor.
—Instapundit, April 2nd, 2017.
Related: “As Biden told us, the proof is in the pudding. Unfortunately for America, that pudding is between his ears,” Jim Treacher writes, adding, “This is why Biden doesn’t give many interviews. Every time he speaks into a microphone is worse than the last. He’s writing the Republicans’ ads for them:”
Tonight, Biden said those who think he is unfit for office should just “watch” him.
Let’s roll the tape. pic.twitter.com/ktrTtpHrLa
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 19, 2022
BE PREPARED: Smith & Wesson Tactical Pen. #CommissionEarned
THE TRUTH ABOUT FETTERMAN’S CRIMINAL AIDES: Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman has claimed the two aides he hired after they were released from prison due to murder sentences were actually innocent. Hans Bader has the facts.
JOHN NOLTE: Woke Gestapo at HBO Max Erase Cigarettes from Iconic Movie Posters.
This is not only censorship; it’s an unnecessary from of censorship and, therefore, a grotesque act of virtue signaling and moral exhibitionism. There’s no reason HBO Max had to go to the extremes of photoshopping to protect the world from the evils of tobacco use. All HBO had to do was choose the McCabe poster without the cigar. Like, say, this one. If no poster exists that meets your lofty moral standards, you don’t need a poster for the streaming menu. Instead, you can use an unoffending still from the movie.
Believe it or not, America was once a country where the following took place…
A mere 16 years ago, a video store chain called CleanFlicks purchased copies of movies and removed stuff like the sex, violence, and vulgar language. So all CleanFlicks did was edit copies it legally owned. Once that was one, those censored copies were rented to Mormon customers who would not have watched the unedited versions.
Hollywood sued CleanFlicks right out of business.
Well, look at Hollywood now: censoring, disappearing, and purging its own art. Hollywood used to ridicule the Moral Majority, to decry McCarthyism and censorship. Now the industry is either so scared or so warped and broken; they’re doing all these un-American things to their very own product.
This isn’t all that new a development. In 2003, the BBC reported, “United States poster companies have airbrushed the classic Beatles Abbey Road album cover to remove a cigarette from Paul McCartney’s hand. The move was made without the permission of either McCartney or Apple Records, which owns the rights to the image.” But expect such airbrushing to accelerate in today’s PC-obsessed overculture.
WELL, GOOD, I GUESS: Progress on Exercise-Mimicking Pill.
NURSING HOME FORCED TO DO DAMAGE CONTROL: Joe Biden Delivers a Mess of a 60 Minutes Interview, Leaves His Handlers Scrambling.
THAT MAY PAY OFF FOR HIM, GIVEN SOCIETAL PREJUDICES: A man borrowed $75,000 for leg-lengthening surgery to make him 3 inches taller, report says.
There does, in fact, appear to be a height wage premium for men, and of course there are other benefits to height. Women in general are less attracted to short men.
MICHAEL WALSH: Virtue Über Alles.
Europe is in the middle of an energy crisis. Uncertainty over the flow of natural gas owing to Russia’s war in Ukraine has caused a spike in prices. The price of natural gas has soared to as much as $500 per barrel of oil equivalent, 10 times the normal average, fueling fears of winter shortages and cold homes.
Key commodities have already been affected. Fertilizer production, which requires large inputs of natural gas, is being shut down due to high prices. Manufacturers are hoarding glass in anticipation of future shortages. Climate change has made the situation worse, as a historic drought is drying up Europe’s rivers and cutting into hydroelectric capacity. The rising cost of energy has driven a spike in inflation in the United Kingdom, while Germany has suffered the worst inflation since the 1970s energy crisis.
What happened? The quote above from Foreign Policy partially explains how they got here (and, if things continue, the U.S. will not be far behind), but the real reason is: prosperity, combined with virtue-signaling neo-Luddism. The dreadful toll of death and destruction of the war, combined with the success of European reconstruction under the Marshall Plan, which saved the devastated economies of western Europe, left Europe with two debilitating by-products: the rise of pacifism as an anti-nationalist force and the abjuration of war as a means of foreign policy; and a false sense of economic security, under which they were free to chase their own chimeras of “soft power” and “progressive” living without any heed to reality.
The Europeans should have learned from their own history, but of course they never do. The Oxford Union’s “King and Country” debate of 1933, a fateful year in European history, turned out to be one of the high points of British pacifism. Having been bled dry by the Somme and other horrific battles in World War I, and also having lost the cream of their manhood in the process, the Union passed the motion that “this House would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country.” Winston Churchill who never saw a war he didn’t want to fight, knew that war with Hitler was unavoidable, and was aghast at the surviving, whinging chaff of England’s crop, the sons of the cowards, conscientious objectors, and those otherwise unfit to serve. Six years later, however, they were doing exactly that.
WHEN LEFTIES MAKE FUN OF TRAILER PARKS THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT RACISM: Racist tornados and other liberal absurdities.
GOODER AND HARDER, FUN CITY: That NYC psycho who smashed up a McD’s and threatened a bunch of people with an axe? Yeah, he was released without bail.
At grocery stores, there are three main options for self-checkout systems.
One is an app, like the one Wegmans used, in which shoppers scan items as they go through a store. There are also self-checkout lanes, near the traditional registers that are staffed by store workers, in which shoppers scan and bag their purchases. An employee usually stands near these lanes to help with any complications.
A third was spearheaded by Amazon at its brick-and-mortar Amazon Go stores: Shoppers put items into their carts, and their accounts are automatically charged upon leaving without having to stop at a register. This approach relies on technology such as sensors and cameras that detect when an item is removed from a shelf and placed into a customer’s cart.
Self-checkout systems were developed to help speed up grocery shopping, said Ray Wimer, a professor of retail management at Syracuse University. He said he had noticed the systems improve in efficiency over the past two decades.
Self-checkout systems were developed to lower labor costs by offloading work from employees to customers. It’s all Shadow Work.
THE NEW YORK TIMES LOVES R. CRUMB THE REBEL, until he rebels against the wrong things. “Wait a minute now. You’re revealing the conversation that you went all the way to France to have but not telling us much about his ideas. You want to use him, but you don’t want his actual opinions to break through. I would like to have a conversation with him about what he thinks about what the NYT did with the access he gave.”