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Archive for 2022
August 20, 2022
AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Exploding meteor startles Utah.
WHY THE HOSTILITY, IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’RE USING IT ANYWAY: The Left: Down With the Constitution.
RULES FOR CONSERVATIVE RADICALS: Clever Billboards Pointing Out the Democrats’ Radical Excesses Pose Questions Republicans Must Answer.
One of the most interesting phenomena in politics at the current moment is how the left wing of the Democrat Party reacts when the Right points out what it is doing. First, the Right notices. Then Democrats tell us that it isn’t happening. When someone from the Right proves it is happening, the Left asks why we care.
To capitalize on this little dance, a group named Citizens for Sanity is placing billboards and ads all over the country pointing out the worst excesses of the radical Left.
The initial billboard slogans point to some of the worst ideas on the radical Left:
- “Protect Pregnant Men from Climate Discrimination.”
- “Open the jails. Open the borders. Close the schools. Vote progressive in November.”
- “Violent criminals deserve our compassion and respect. This fall, stand strong for progressive values.”
The group also launched a six-figure ad campaign addressing the controversy over boys playing girls in sports leagues if they identify as female.
Much more like this please.
(Classical reference in headline.)
CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: Bulwark columnist gives a heads up about a couple of people wearing ‘1776’ hats.
President Donald Trump actually packed a lot into the final year of his term. He did what he could to root out critical race theory-based training from federal agencies (something President Joe Biden immediately reversed) and announced the “1776 Project,” a direct challenge to the “1619 Project” that had worked its way from the New York Times into the history curriculum of a lot of school districts. Trump wanted children to be proud of their country and proposed an alternative curriculum to do just that.
Bulwark columnist Amanda Carpenter spotted conservative columnist Ken Blackwell wearing a “1776” hat next to Brooke Rollins, and Carpenter broke out the red flags:
I so old, I can remember when Bill Kristol edited a magazine that actually celebrated America’s founding instead of believing it’s a dog whistle.
I DON’T WANT TO GO TO CHELSEA: Fancy Manhattan Neighborhood Now ‘24-hour Drug and Sex Den.’
In today’s edition of You Get What You Vote For, Manhattan’s once trendy and chic Chelsea neighborhood is now a 24/7 cesspool of drugs, sex, vagrants, and crime per this report from the Daily Mail:
Manhattan’s trendy Chelsea neighborhood has become a ’24-hour drug and sex den’ according to some of its residents, as vagrants deal and use drugs in sight of a nearby school.
Parents told Fox 5 that their children have become exposed to nudity, sex acts and drug use while business owners deal with constant break-ins. Some said they are begging city officials and the police department to do something.
The new criminal activity is centered on West 21st Street between 8th and 9th avenues by P.S. 011 William T. Harris.
Why would anyone choose to live like this?
And yes, it is a choice.
New York does not have to be like this.
In fact, before New Yorkers decided to “own the cons” by voting Democrat, New York was not like this. Under Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York City was one of the safest, cleanest, and best-run cities — not only in the country but in the world.
But trendy New Yorkers didn’t like being safe, and were nostalgic for New York’s pissoir-like 1970s:
In contrast, New York has improved immensely since the period depicted in the original 1974 Death Wish. Naturally, New York’s bourgeois-bohemians, as David Brooks would call them, would welcome a chance to return to the hell of Manhattan in the ‘70s, as Daniel Henninger noted in a 2005 Wall Street Journal article:
The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the ’70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.” Laurie Anderson, a well-known New York artist and performer, admits the ’70s were considered “the dark ages” but “there was great music and everyone was broke.”
* * * * * * *
New York is famous for many things, and the reason the whole world knows this is because New York is a city of artists and writers. Though genius may find its muse anywhere, the Times’ commentators are correctly saying that most artists need to have personal flint chipping at social steel to spark the furnace within. But could it be that New York’s great weakness–beyond the public employee unions, beyond the economic obtuseness–is that its leadership elites are fatally enthralled by a reputation for creative fecundity that has been conjured and kept afloat by the city’s artists and writers? At the center of this New York myth is the belief that everyone here is clever, and so “anything is possible.”
But it isn’t. Everyone here isn’t clever.
Over eight years in the 1970s, New York lost more than a half-million private-sector jobs, according to E.J. McMahon and Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose essential travel guide to these years and their aftermath may be found in the current Winter issue of the Public Interest. During the 1970s the real New York nightmare wasn’t lived in the SoHo funkytown, but in the funkless outer boroughs.
Many of the city’s most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls. Hell has always seized over-developed imaginations. But what attractions hath hell for average Joes who can’t cop a “life” in SoHo or Williamsburg? Then as now, they just took hell’s hits in the neck, or left. In economic terms, much of creative Manhattan simply “free-rides” on the backs of the workers whose tax payments constrain the bankruptcy sheriff.
As Kyle Smith wrote this month, today he and fellow New Yorkers “grouse about soda bans and Citi Bikes. Twenty years ago, we worried about being mugged or murdered. Electing a Democrat who demonizes the police would ignore the luxury provided by two decades of safety.”
Meanwhile, in midtown Manhattan: SPAM goes on lockdown due to inflation in NYC.
JAMES LILEKS, CALL YOUR OFFICE: “Taco Puffs takes everything that you love about tacos and packages them for even easier sharing!”
FAREWELL BRIAN STELTER…FOR NOW:
One of cable news infotainment’s most shameless hosts is out of a job. On Thursday CNN canceled the Sunday morning show Reliable Sources and released its host Brian Stelter.
The media’s janitor, as I’ve come to call him, is unemployed for now, but don’t expect it to last. The New York Times has had a media columnist opening since Ben Smith left in January — and that’s where Stelter made his name.
I hate to burst the bubble of those celebrating the departure of one of the most dishonest figures in the national media, but Stelter, for some reason or another, is highly respected in the industry. His CNN newsletter is one of the highest circulated among journalists, whom Stelter worked to shield from controversy from atop his perch on the wall at CNN.
It’s been quite a run for the media’s janitor: Bye-Bye, Brian.
At this point it’s almost cliché to say so, but what Stelter meant when he used words like “misinformation” was right-wing. For all the Reliable Sources anchor’s garment-rending about declining trust in the media, he spent a disproportionate amount of time covering for his industry’s egregiously biased, activist behavior over the course of the past few years. He defended his colleague Chris Cuomo’s unethical role as an adviser to his brother, the disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. He regularly offered up his show as a platform for Biden officials to repeat White House propaganda. On Jussie Smollett, he argued: “We may never know what happened.” And he himself regularly engaged in “misinformation,” including championing the fraudulent “Steele dossier” narrative. (When new details about the dossier’s fraudulent nature emerged, Stelter protested: “I’m a media reporter, and I’m not a Steele dossier reporter.”)
Stelter also served as the mainstream media’s attack dog when right-leaning outlets published stories that were inconvenient for Democrats. As Isaac Schorr and Brittany Bernstein pointed out, for example, Stelter went to the mat to discredit the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop:
Instead of praising the Post for its work, Stelter responded to the story by running a segment called “How the latest anti-Biden narrative was manufactured,” in which he attacked the Post for its reporting, called it part of the “right-wing media machine,” and asserted that the story didn’t “add up.” One year later, precisely none of the Post’s reporting has been debunked and much of it has been confirmed.
Related: Brian Stelter Torched After Being Ousted By CNN: ‘Contemptible, Vapid, And Unbearably Smug.’
New CNN chief Chris Licht reportedly informed Stelter of the decision to cancel his show, “Reliable Sources,” yesterday. Licht started to evaluate the hyper-partisan “talent” at the network shortly after he joined CNN as he aimed to dial down the extreme partisanship that has plagued the network in recent years.
News of Stelter’s ouster from the network sparked a wide range of comments mocking him, with many saying that he had a toxic impact on the news industry.
“Brian Stelter was the most contemptible, vapid, and unbearably smug news-tv character of the past two decades. Good riddance,” Washington Examiner columnist Harry Khachatrian wrote on Twitter. “His departure has ameliorated cable news.”
“Everyone’s dunking on Brian Stelter since his show got canceled, but I honestly feel really bad for his fan,” conservative political commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said.
And he bravely outed himself yesterday!
(Updated and bumped.)
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is modern environmentalism a pagan religion?
The great Rush Limbaugh used to say that “the modern environmentalists worship the created, not the creator.” I was reminded of that after listening to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once President Joe Biden signed the fiscally unconscionable $750 billion tax-and-spend Inflation Reduction Act, which gives another $300 billion to the climate change-industrial complex.
Pelosi (D-CA) claimed the wind, solar, and electric subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act would placate an “angry” planet. “Mother Earth gets angry from time to time, and this legislation will help us address all of that,” the speaker said.
This is a highly revealing statement. Do Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues really believe that spending $300 billion on Tesla subsidies (with batteries made in China), windmills (made in China), and solar panels (made in China) is going to save the planet, stop the rise of the oceans, and lower the global temperature?
This is the same gang in Congress that can’t stop the daily drive-by shootings in our cities, can’t secure the U.S.-Mexico border, can’t come anywhere near balancing the budget, and can’t provide the resources our military needs for our national security.
Even if this additional $300 billion were to work as planned, the Wall Street Journal reports that the impact on global temperatures in the coming decades would be to lower them by 0.001%. So, instead of the global temperature being an average of 59 degrees Fahrenheit, it will be 58.999 degrees. Thank God! We are saved from Armageddon.
But as Pelosi’s quote makes clear, this is about symbolism. It is about ruining the economy as a sacrifice to Mother Earth. Marc Morano, the journalist who runs the Climate Depot website, asks: “Will human sacrifices be next to appease the ‘angry’ Earth gods? Actually, this bill will create human sacrifice by imposing even more suffering from energy deprivation, supply chain issues, good shortages, inflation, debt, and bad science.”
As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)
JONATHAN TURLEY ON LARRY TRIBE’S “SLAM DUNK” CASE AGAINST TRUMP. “Tribe sees no reason to wait for proof.”
Poor Larry. He hasn’t been right since 2016.
Plus: “Tribe has, of course, never lacked confidence that his lengthening list of crimes have been proven ‘without any doubt, beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt.’ He is not alone in such hair-triggered analysis. It has been the signature of much of the legal analysis in the last six years. Yet, it would be useful. . . just once . . . if only for appearances . . . to start with the release of actual evidence before discussing slam dunk convictions.”
DAVID SOLWAY: The Great Reset: Testing, Testing…
It is disturbing to note that the greater portion of the public do not seem to be aware of the vast ideological movement for social transformation called the Great Reset. Those who are at least partially informed consider it merely another conspiracy theory. Some among the so-called elite—the media, the academy, the political stratum—consider the Great Reset as a rational and benevolent response to the specter of overpopulation and the threat of populist uprisings. Others among the patrician class, doubtless a majority, are engaged in promoting what they know to be a concerted attempt to destabilize and supplant the long-established order of ideally democratic governance that has slowly and incrementally characterized the liberal societies of the West, dating from the Magna Carta (1215) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the approximate present.
We should make no mistake about this. The revolutionary project, whether denominated as the New World Order, the U.N.’s Agenda 2030, or the Davos-centered Great Reset—different terms for essentially the same impetus—under the influential leadership of Klaus Schwab is apocalyptic in its aims. It envisages a world in which the middle-class will have been expunged, the global census markedly winnowed, and a China-like social credit system introduced in which citizens will be under constant digital surveillance determining what they are allowed to possess, rent, use or spend.
Read the whole thing.
BE PREPARED: Kidde Smoke & Carbon Monoxide Detector. #CommissionEarned
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: After Seeing The Jump In Trump’s Poll Numbers, Biden Orders FBI To Raid His House Too.
IMPORTANT NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Does ‘vabbing’ work? The truth about vaginal pheromones. “It might just be more of a placebo effect.”
BYRON YORK: Biden is still dragging his party down.
In the Senate, Democrats do have some reason for optimism about keeping their 50-50 tie, which, with the Democratic vice president, gives them operational control. Former President Donald Trump has pushed weak candidates in a few key races, Georgia and Pennsylvania foremost among them, who might end up costing Republicans their chance to win control of the Senate. There has been much discussion about Trump’s clout in GOP primaries, but of course, the final test is whether his candidates actually get elected.
The problem is, the House still looks bad for Democrats. And perhaps the biggest reason is this: A president’s job approval rating is a critical indicator, perhaps the best single indicator, of how well his party will do in midterm elections for the House. And Biden’s job approval rating is still low and unlikely to rise out of the danger zone in the next 2 1/2 months.
Don’t get cocky.
SURF CENTRAL: Wave created by Tonga volcano eruption reached 90 meters—nine times taller than 2011 Japan tsunami. “An international research team says the eruption should serve as a wake-up call for international groups looking to protect people from similar events in future, claiming that detection and monitoring systems for volcano-based tsunamis are ’30 years behind’ comparable tools used to detect earthquake-based events.”