Archive for 2023

OPEN THREAD: Say what you mean, mean what you say.

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: 1984 Is Now as Britain Outlaws Thinking the Wrong Thoughts.

According to the Herald, the new law criminalizes “any form of ‘influence’ outside of all abortion facilities, including silent prayer.” Offenders will be fined £100 ($118) the first time they are arrested for wrongthink; if court proceedings are deemed necessary, the fines could increase to £1,000 ($1,183). Amid the debate over this measure, a Conservative MP, Andrew Lewer, injected a note of sanity: “Police shouldn’t be asking ‘What are you thinking about?’” Indeed. And what if the person praying denies the offense? The World Economic Forum has been touting brain implants, and it’s easy to see how handy they’ll be for British police: the bobbies (do they still call these sinister Orwellian figures “bobbies”?) will simply be able to consult a readout of your thoughts, and if prayer shows up, you’ll have to pony up.

In 2018, when British cops were threatening social media critics after the NHS banished 23-month-old Alfie Evans to the Spartan hillside, British ex-pat Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted, “Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out to me that police in the U.K. spend all their time on Twitter threatening people with jail time for frivolous things, and now I can’t stop seeing it.”

As a wise woman once wrote, “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them.”

 

ROGER KIMBALL: Tucker Carlson bulldozes the January 6 ‘insurrection’ narrative.

Tucker Carlson showed how the anti-Trump battalions had lied about January 6. Liz Cheney and her Kangaroo Court lied about what happened. So did Nancy Pelosi and the regime media.

Jacob Chansley, the behorned and painted veteran who became the face of the protest because of his outlandish getup, was not a violent insurrectionist. He was a mannerly protestor who prayed publicly in the Capitol and was politely escorted through its halls by several Capitol police officers. Why, many people will wonder, has he been sentenced to five years in jail? Schumer and the media charged that Carlson “sanitized” what happened that day by “cherry-picking” the video. But it was clear to anyone who watched Carlson’s presentation that it was the J6 Committee that did the cherry-picking.

Back in September 2021, I gave a talk on what I called “the January 6 insurrection hoax.” The anti-Trump lobby did not like what I had to say. It is delicious to be vindicated so publicly.

A hurt dog barks. I expect to be surrounded by a lot of howling as the public digests what Carlson aired. It’s going to be an effervescent election season.

As a result of Chuck Schumer’s meltdown, last night, “Fox News had more total and 25 to 54 year old demo viewers than MSNBC, CNN, Newsmax & NewsNation combined.”

RISKY RETAIL BUSINESS:

Retailers have a few options for rolling with the changes. They can, like Nike, hire their own off-duty cops while the on-duty ones are still hobbled. They can accept the deputization of Mayor Adams and enact theft-prevention measures on their own. (And it sure will be interesting to see what happens if shop owners actually start demanding that New York shoppers take off their masks.) They can do what most big chain stores have done and lock up hundreds of items behind plexiglass. But according to Axios, “locked cases can cause sales to drop 15% to 25%,” driving away customers who don’t want to deal with the inconvenience of wrangling a store assistant to unlock the shelf and hover impatiently while you decide on a shampoo. Or they can do what Walmart did in Portland: accept some degree of loss until it’s no longer worth it and then close shop.

As Glenn wrote during 2020’s “Defund the Police” moral panic among the left, the end result will be, “a lot of vigilante justice. And what are people gonna do about it? Call the cops? Remember, in the end the police aren’t there to protect the public from criminals, they’re there to protect criminals from the public. Communities dealt with crime long before police were invented, usually in rather harsh and low-due-process ways. The bargain was, let the police handle it instead. No police, no bargain.” QED:

Very rarely do you see anyone actively stop, or even try to stop, some of these shoplifters.

However, one mystery woman in Portland has quickly gathered a reputation as a shoplifter’s worst nightmare. At this time, it’s still a mystery what her name is or what craft store she worked at, but her TikTok alias goes under the handle “bworrrd” but lists her name as “B Word.”

Her TikTok has only three videos uploaded, but each of them has sailed past one million views, including her first one which has a whopping 8.7 million. In each of them, the hero woman is seen stopping shoplifting women and commanding them to drop their stolen items, sometimes forcefully if need be.

The first video shows a pink-haired woman being confronted for stuffing her canvas bag full of stolen items. Initially, she agrees to give the items back but it’s clear that she’s intent on walking out with most of the items. “B Word” isn’t having it and forcefully grabs the bag. During the scuffle, a woman threatens to call the police on “B Word” to which she replies “call them right now.”

Ace of Spades adds that “For some reason her TikTok account has been suspended. I’ll bet you they’re claiming that her videos ‘glorify violence against marginalized groups.’ You know — filthy disgusting thieves. I could only find this copy of one her videos:”

IT’S A CONSERVATIVE PART OF CALIFORNIA: Gavin Newsom’s Incompetent Response to Blizzard Emergency Has a Growing Body Count. “Residents have started a Change.org petition to ask Newsom to request a federal disaster declaration, and Republican Rep. Jay Olbernolte, who represents the area, has been pushing Newsom to do the same since Friday. Newsom has ignored those requests as of the time of publication.”

MATT MARGOLIS: The Wuhan Flu Can’t Keep Me Down. “After I had managed to go roughly three years without officially contracting it, the Wuhan flu finally caught up to me. It was probably inevitable, as I suspect everyone will be exposed to it and catch in eventually.”

Get well soon.

MARK JUDGE: Conservative Coverage of the Arts is an Embarrassment.

The political coverage in the Times is pure Marxism. The opinion section of the edition I recently picked up features angry academics and activists defending the censorship of Roald Dahl, blasting the 1776 founding of America, and saying that Ron DeSantis is trying to shut down free speech. Boilerplate socialist nonsense. This is the same Times that tried to kill me in 2018. Criminals and opposition researchers tried to take out my high school friend Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated for the Supreme Court. Their plan involved using extortion and witness-tampering to make me, a former drunk with a colorful last, the nominee and therefore take down Brett. It didn’t work and the right people are in jail. The Times reporters who participated are considered a disgrace.

Still, I couldn’t give up Sunday’s Times. One time shortly after the 2018 hurricane a friend saw me leaving the store with one tucked under my arm and stopped me. “Wait, the Times?” he said. “Are those the totalitarian assholes that tried to kill you?” They are. Seeing such communist propaganda so close to the arts sections brought to mind a line from the great film The Sweet Smell of Success—“I don’t like you, you’re like a cookie with arsenic.”

Read the whole thing.

GIVEN THAT THE U.S. HAS NO RESERVES OF PETROLEUM TO SPEAK OF, THIS IS SMART: Why the US military plans to start making its own jet fuel. Traditional jet fuel is a petroleum product that comes from the ground, but it can also be created synthetically. Here’s how.

Oh, wait, that was Nazi Germany that didn’t have the reserves. We have craptons — maybe even metric craptons — of oil. Now if you can actually synthesize jet fuel at remote bases that might be worth doing, but we’ve never had trouble transporting fuel to where we need it.