EXPLAINER: Why Nothing in Westeros Ever Changes (Besides the Size of the Dragons). “To understand why so little has changed in Westeros, one need only look to our own world. Though many of us have personally witnessed massive change and innovation in our own lifetime, this was the exception, not the rule, in history.”
Archive for 2022
October 17, 2022
COLD WEATHER IS COMING: Crock-Pot 7-Quart Oval Manual Slow Cooker. #CommissionEarned
SHE ONLY WANTED TO DEFUND YOUR POLICE, NOT HER POLICE: Seattle City Council Woman Wants Police Protection After Feces Thrown at Her Condo.
CHANGE: When Harry became Sally: Parents have a right to know. “The key issue is'”whether schools can socially transition students identifying as transgender while concealing it, or related counseling, from parents,’ Rotherham writes. The old guidelines under Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, let teachers decide. The new guidelines, under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin say parents must be informed.”
DON’T WORRY; I’M SURE NOTHING COULD GO WRONG (AGAIN): Boston University creates a new Covid strain that has an 80% kill rate — echoing dangerous experiments feared to have started pandemic.
JILL BIDEN BOOED DURING EAGLES-COWBOYS SHOWDOWN:
There was no brotherly love for first lady Jill Biden from Philadelphia Eagles fans Sunday night.
Biden, who was raised just outside Philadelphia, and doesn’t hide her support for the city’s pro teams, was greeted with boos as she took part in the coin toss prior to the matchup between the Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys.
The first lady was serving as the Eagles’ honorary captain for the game and was also present to promote the Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot initiative.
Jill Biden received the traditional greeting from the Philly Phaithful as she took the field with cancer patients, survivors and their families.
Joe Biden seeks his revenge!
Heh, indeed.™
UPDATE: “Dr. Jill, do no harm.”
(Updated and bumped.)
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Shot: Why does the media never call world leaders ‘far left?’
MSNBC weighed in with a piece likening [Italy’s Giorgia Meloni] to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and other “white feminists” who are part of “crypto-fascistic and white nationalist movements.” The piece claims that Meloni’s election “is absolutely anything but a win for feminism,” but rather “an exemplar of how some white women weaponize gender and use it to oppress other women and minorities.” For its part, CNN published a piece with the headline “Giorgia Meloni claims victory to become Italy’s most far-right prime minister since Mussolini,” describing Meloni as a fascist who was “raising fears for the future of women’s rights in the country.”
Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister who is liberal, threw cold water on the idea that Meloni is a fascist or a demagogue on CNN. “She’s my rival, we will continue to fight each other, but there is not a risk of fascism in Italy,” he said. “It is absolutely fake news.” His comments were largely ignored by American pundits who had already reached their verdict on Meloni.
This pattern of portraying conservative world leaders as far-right extends beyond Europe. The media also despises Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who faces an October 30 run-off against former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Like Meloni, he’s been branded “far-right” by news outlets. By contrast, Lula, who served 18 months in prison on corruption charges that were later vacated, is never branded far-left.
—Spectator World, Friday.
Chaser: Has the media told you about the massive protests happening all over Europe right now? Come watch them here. “If not, why do you think that is? Is this not newsworthy?”
—Not the Bee, today.
No enemies to the left, to coin a phrase.
RED WAVE: Whispers That Colorado Senate Seat Could Go to GOP. “The multimillion-dollar question — with both parties now throwing massive amounts of money at the race — is this: Why does anyone think that a low-polling neophyte Republican has any chance against an entrenched Democrat?”
MICHAEL WALSH: To Save America, Repeal the 17th Amendment. “In trying to solve a problem of ‘special interests,’ rather than the states having two powerful advocates for their interests in Washington, Washington got two powerful advocates of its interests in each of the states, greatly assisting what we now call the Swamp in cementing its control over the nation. The sinister Left, currently fretting about losing ‘our democracy’ remains hell-bent on finishing off republicanism in both its senses; for them, only a government by national plebiscite will do. As any student of early-20th century ‘reform’ knows, the cure for ‘reform’ gone awry was and is always more ‘reform’ rather than a return to first principles.”
Plus: “The Senate is no longer regarded as the equally apportioned voices of the states in the upper house of Congress, but rather a way station for ambitious individual senators eyeing the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH BARACK OBAMA IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Obama warns Democrats against woke extremism.
WHY IS HIGHER ED SUCH A CESSPIT OF DISCRIMINATION AND (CHECKS NOTES) EVIDENCE-DESTRUCTION? Law School Shredding Of Notes To Be Shared With Jury In Law Prof’s Discrimination Lawsuit.
LINCOLN BROWN: Racism Is the ‘Precious’ of the Left. “The one ring to rule us all and the one ring to find us. The one ring to bring us all and in the darkness bind us. Without it, the movement collapses. If it is lost, Mordor falls and its sway over the world evaporates in the sunlight. Without it, the Left loses power that it cannot afford to gamble away. Rather it is to be hoarded, strengthened, and wielded to terrible effect. It is the one ring that controls all others, and it seems almost impossible to defeat, which is why the Left continues to clutch it so tightly and use it for purposes great and small.”
MISSISSIPPI RUNNING LOW: Terrific: Old Man River, he just keep rolling…basically nothing along. Just how much cargo in America moves by barge is woefully underappreciated, and there will be cascading impacts. “At the beginning of the Mid-West harvest, freshly harvested grains, corn and soybeans, etc, are having to be stockpiled under tarps by farmers and shippers because they have nowhere and no way to move them without the barges. . . . You can’t make up that kind of volume with trucking or rail, even if both of those were operating at full capacity like they used to, pre-Biden administration. Rail prices are already spiking.”
I’d be worried, but with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on the job, I’m not worried at all. More like, uh, resigned.
MARK JUDGE: The media dismissed Hunter Biden — while turning my life upside down.
On Friday, former CNN boss Jeff Zucker was confronted by CNN host Michael Smerconish over media bias. Smerconish challenged Zucker for not covering the scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Zucker and Smerconish were also joined by Phil Griffin, the former head of MSNBC.
Zucker said this: “Well, I mean, I think I think we, the question is, we did deal with it. But to the degree that, you know, you would have thought was appropriate, I think the answer is in the final two weeks, you know, it was looked at. We did not know enough about it.” Griffin similarly argued that MSNBC didn’t cover it because Hunter Biden “was never arrested. The Justice Department was looking into it, never reported it until he is the son of a candidate. I don’t think it’s a main story until that happens.”
That’s funny. Because in the fall of 2018, my entire life was turned upside down by the media. CNN and MSNBC were some of the worst offenders.
I was not related to any politician, and I had never been arrested. Yet I was a focal point of hour upon hour upon hour of coverage and speculation when the media, politicians, and opposition researchers, fueled by an absurdly vague accusation of sexual assault against my high school friend Brett Kavanaugh, decided to destroy my life and Brett’s to prevent him from getting on the Supreme Court.
Ronan Farrow, the redoubtable smear artist from the New Yorker, called me in early September 2018 and told me I was in a letter along with Brett, a letter that accused us of taking part in “sexual misconduct” in “the 1980s.” Farrow couldn’t tell me the specific time, the place, or even who the accuser was. Then, on Sept. 16, 2018, Emma Brown of the Washington Post broke the story: A woman named Christine Blasey Ford was accusing Brett of sexual assault. In her email to me that morning, Brown mentioned a woman named Leland Keyser, whom Ford claimed was at a party where Brett assaulted Ford.
However, in her final published story, Brown left Leland Keyser out. She did so because Keyser denied any such party ever took place — and would later tell the FBI that she had been threatened if she didn’t support Ford. Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal noticed the omission.
When Kevin Williamson was hired and then nearly-immediately fired in 2018 by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg after his crybully staffers melted down, Williamson reminded Goldberg that the Atlantic had always welcomed controversial authors, and specifically mentioned the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens. To which Goldberg replied, Godfather-style, “Yes. But Hitchens was in the family. You are not.” Hunter is definitely in the family, whereas Judge (and Kavanaugh) are not.
When you’re in the DNC-MSM’s family, you can get away with anything. Just ask Dan Rather, an unexpected postmodernist, in a May 2001 exchange with Bill O’Reilly that foreshadowed Rather’s downfall three and a half years later:
Does the Big Guy get a cut?
DON’T GET COCKY: GOPerdammerung: Signs of a Seismic National Shift and a Red Tidal Wave. Americans rejected impotence in 1980. Something comparable is afoot this election year.
Upon graduating from college, I applied for, and got, a newswriting internship at influential Washington, D.C. station WTTG’s The 10 O’Clock News. There, even as a young punk, I could recognize the historic importance of the 1980 presidential campaign, although not yet the magnificence of the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan. My focus was on Jimmy Carter, and how two occurrences — one tragic and one comic — seemed to highlight his incompetence.
The worst of these was indirectly caused by Reagan, specifically his incomprehensible — to the Democrats — competitiveness in the race. The Carter team had wanted to run against the unacceptably right-wing — so they thought — Reagan as opposed to the formidably respectable steady hand, George H. Bush. But Reagan consistently hitting Carter for the Iran hostage fiasco resonated with the American people, and certainly me. A July 1980 Harris poll showed Carter losing to Reagan 53 to 26 percent (independent John Anderson had 18 percent). The desperate Carter went against his nature and authorized a military rescue of the hostages. This resulted in eight soldiers dead and a helicopter burning in the desert without combat.
The lesser incident, which took place two months prior, became humorously known as the Attack of the Killer Rabbit. President Carter was alone in a small fishing boat on a Georgia lake when a small white rabbit swam right toward him. Carter tried to repel the beast with a paddle and the rabbit swam away. Pictures of Carter wielding his oar against the non-monster took on ridiculous proportion and made him a mockery at the worst time, even in the then still valid Washington Post.
On November 4, 1980, I was at the Republican National Headquarters helping the WTTG reporter cover election night. It was the most electrifying night of my life. I watched a giant electronic map of the United States go red in 44 states in what seemed like half an hour. Saw the faces in the crowd change from shock to elation amid screams of joy. Looking back, I view the two Carter incidents as omens of the seismic shift in American politics and culture that took place that night. Eight years of a strong, patriotic American comeback followed — accompanied by some of the best films and music ever produced — leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then George Bush came in and mucked it with his “kinder, gentler nation” idiocy. Nonetheless, I see similar signs of change now, and foresee a sharp turn for the better this November 8.
Related: Independent Women Swing Hard Toward GOP Despite Democrats’ Abortion Push.
Republicans made massive gains with independent women in recent weeks as Democrats ramped up their messaging on abortion ahead of the midterm elections.
Forty-nine percent of voters plan to vote for the Republican nominee to represent their House district while 45 percent said they’d back their Democratic opponent, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday. Of particular note was a 32 point swing among independent women toward the GOP. In September’s iteration of the poll, Democrats boasted a 14 point lead among that demographic, but by October, Republicans held an 18 point advantage.
While Democratic officials and progressive commentators had suggested that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade might lessen the expected electoral blow of the midterms, the swing toward the GOP among independent women — the group most heavily targeted by Democratic strategists — suggests that their focus on abortion might be to their own detriment.
Still though, eschew the cockiness. As Glenn advises, “Seriously, if you care about this election, you need to be out volunteering and donating. Commenting on the Internet doesn’t count.”
MEH, THEY’RE LIKE THAT PRETTY MUCH ALL THE TIME: Liberals Will Freak Out When They Learn Who the Most Popular Politician in America Is.
ANDY KESSLER: Stocks can always get cheaper.
Market bottoms form when everyone is negative. The International Monetary Fund says the world economy is headed for “stormy waters.” Ray Dalio, who founded the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, thinks we’ll see five years of “negative or poor real returns.” JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon says stocks could fall another 20%. Is that negative enough? It’s a start, given that few said these words a year ago.
My sense is there is more ugly stuff coming. Eighty percent of hedge funds are down and dumping their losers. Short-term interest rates are heading to 5% or higher, which means stocks will trade at a lower price-earnings multiple. Even worse, quarterly earnings misses are starting, and, like cockroaches, you never see only one.
In the U.K., higher interest rates triggered selloffs of gilts (bonds) by pension funds that had hedged or insured against higher interest rates with liability-driven investing products—think leveraged derivatives. When rates rise, investors get margin calls to put up more collateral, so they sell more bonds, which causes interest rates to rise even higher, triggering more selling. This “doom loop” was halted, at least temporarily, after the Bank of England’s intervention. A previous doom loop involved portfolio insurance, which automatically sold as stocks went down, intensifying the 1987 stock-market crash. And remember the implosion of Archegos that forced selling? That was only last year. We could see many more.
Stay tuned, stay liquid, avoid debt. Which is good advice in general.
Plus: “Currency dislocations in Asia and Russia in 1997 and 1998 crushed markets. It feels similar today. There is more than $13 trillion in foreign dollar-denominated debt that, as the dollar rises, gets more expensive to pay back. And now price controls are being set up to limit the effects of higher energy costs on consumers in the U.K., Germany and elsewhere—another potential doom loop requiring more subsidies if energy costs rise.”
WHY ARE STUDENT TEST SCORES PLUNGING?: Maybe it’s not just covid.
BECAUSE THEY’D BEEN TOLD FOR MONTHS THAT ACTUAL CITY-BURNING RIOTS WERE “MOSTLY PEACEFUL,” MAYBE? Wisconsin Dem candidate confused as to why voters don’t care about January 6. Plus: “Voters in the southwestern Wisconsin district say they are more concerned about daily economic issues than what happened on Jan. 6.”
Also: “What Pfaff doesn’t seem to realize, along with most of the MSM, is that people are keenly aware of the variety of crises currently engulfing the nation and the world. They know what they are paying at the gas pump and the grocery store, assuming they can find what they’re looking for on the shelves. They see the spiraling crime trends tearing apart population centers large and small on the nightly news. They hear the President talking about “Armageddon” and see the ongoing nuclear saber-rattling. And the flood of illegal immigrants caused by Biden’s border crisis is already far too big to ignore. These people seem to be voting based on policy far more than personalities or party affiliation. And that’s really not such a bad thing, is it?”
Well, it’s a bad thing if you’re the party whose policies got us into this mess.
UPDATE: Uh oh. Chris Christie challenges January 6 Committee credibility. It’s a partisan show trial run by dishonest hacks. What credibility?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Independent women now favor the Republicans by 18 percentage points, when last month they favored Democrats by 14 points. “So I’ve got to consider the possibility that the giant 32-point shift in opinion is not in spite of the Democrats’ support for abortion rights but in part because of it.”
Plus, from the comments: “Our ‘science is real’ betters sabotaged an election to install a dementia patient in the presidency. He’s blundered us to the precipice of nuclear war. In general, women feel this emotionally better and in larger numbers than men do. Women with young children are getting a big dose of their childrens’ fear.”
Related:
BORIS BONDAREV: A Diplomat Defects From the Kremlin.
Resigning meant throwing away a twenty-year career as a Russian diplomat and, with it, many of my friendships. But the decision was a long time coming. When I joined the ministry in 2002, it was during a period of relative openness, when we diplomats could work cordially with our counterparts from other countries. Still, it was apparent from my earliest days that Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was deeply flawed. Even then, it discouraged critical thinking, and over the course of my tenure, it became increasingly belligerent. I stayed on anyway, managing the cognitive dissonance by hoping that I could use whatever power I had to moderate my country’s international behavior. But certain events can make a person accept things they didn’t dare to before.
The invasion of Ukraine made it impossible to deny just how brutal and repressive Russia had become. It was an unspeakable act of cruelty, designed to subjugate a neighbor and erase its ethnic identity. It gave Moscow an excuse to crush any domestic opposition. Now, the government is sending thousands upon thousands of drafted men to go kill Ukrainians. The war shows that Russia is no longer just dictatorial and aggressive; it has become a fascist state.
But for me, one of the invasion’s central lessons had to do with something I had witnessed over the preceding two decades: what happens when a government is slowly warped by its own propaganda.
Read the whole thing.
MEGAN FOX: Makeup Giant Ulta Goes Woke Highlighting ‘Trans Girl’ Dylan Mulvaney, Customer Base of Real Women Revolts. “The headline ‘Trans Girls Can Do It All!’ really irked many women who see grown men pretending to be “girls” as a weird sexual fetish that has nothing to do with being female and everything to do with men appropriating femaleness for their own titillation.”