SUDDENLY THAT ‘SANCTUARY CITY’ PITCH TURNS INTO A SCREWBALL: Migrants at NYC’s Floyd Bennett Field are begging for money, food at furious locals’ doorsteps: ‘Invasion’.
Archive for 2023
December 24, 2023
IN FAIRNESS, COMPETENCY WAS NEVER A BIG DEAL IN HIS ADMINISTRATION: Obama secretly pushed Harvard to keep president Claudine Gay despite campus antisemitism, plagiarism controversies: report.
UNCLE JOE DID IT IN THE DINING ROOM WITH THE INK WELL: Biden dined, telephoned, emailed Hunter’s cash cronies.
MIGHT AS WELL – THERE’S NOT GOING TO BE ANY LEGISLATION GETTING PAST THE DEM SENATE AND WHITE HOUSE: GOP to begin impeachment against Mayorkas after latest bad border numbers.
BITE ME – THEIR CURE IS WORSE THAN THEIR BITE: The climate scaremongers: Mosquito Fever.
THE SALE POST ROLLED OVER. EVERYTHING 99C: On Sale.
December 23, 2023
WISDOM FROM THE MOUTHS OF POP CELEBRITIES: Powerline’s John Hinderaker has declared Taylor Swift his “Woman of the Year.” I can’t name a single song by Ms. Swift, but I agree with him that the following paragraph from a profile in the Wall Street Journal is a gem:
“I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things,” she said last year in her New York University commencement address. “Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school. The people who want it the most are the people I now hire to work for my company.”
Repeat it to your children: Effortlessness is a myth. Make sure they understand it while they are still young.
GOOD:
It remains to be seen if they can save their own skins by throwing her to the wolves, but I think it is possible they will try it.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) December 23, 2023
OPEN THREAD: The days are getting longer now.
I BLAME ARMADILLOS AND OTHER INVADERS: Leprosy Is on The Rise in Florida, Scientists Report.
NO WONDER THEY WERE SO CRANKY: Joint Diseases Plagued the Ice Age’s Fierce Predators: Sabertooth Cats and Dire Wolves.
Also that cold weather probably aggravated their rheumatism.
PROBABLY SHOULDN’T HAVE STARTED THAT WAR: Gaza, smashed by Israeli strikes, sees new threat: Disease. After the FA, the FO.
I’M GONNA SAY THAT MAYBE HYPOCHONDRIACS ARE ACTUALLY LESS HEALTHY: Hypochondriacs die earlier than those who worry less about their health—what might explain this paradox?
YOU KEEP USING THAT WORD. I DO NOT THINK IT MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS: Author Claims Argentina Becoming Fascist. Slapped By Those Who Know Definition.
It's that sneaky kind of fascism where the leader keeps reducing his own power. https://t.co/qowU9nhqLe
— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) December 22, 2023
EXCEPT FOR ONE SMALL THING: Hunter Biden is Exactly The Kind of Gun Criminal Joe Biden Has Said He Wants to Find and Prosecute.
READER FAVORITE: DMoose Forearm Exerciser – Hand, Wrist, and Forearm Strengthener. #CommissionEarned
DON’T GET COCKY: “Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign polls vs. Donald Trump are historically bad,” says those crazy VRWC nuts at…Slate?
The passive tone of the article — all this bad news just keeps “unexpectedly” happening to Biden, without any sense of how his administration’s policies are driving his poll numbers lower — makes for fascinating reading from a Kremlinology perspective.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Bloomberg: No One Wants Used EVs, Making New Ones a Tougher Sell Too.
DON SURBER: Merry Christmas, Matt Drudge.
The Daily Mail reported on December 30, 2016, “The founder of Drudge Report got a very unpleasant surprise Thursday night when the popular news aggregation website went down for 90 minutes.
“Matt Drudge wrote on his Twitter account that the website had been targeted with the biggest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) it had ever experienced in its 21 year history, leaving users unable to access content.
“He also stated that the ‘routing and timing’ of the attack was ‘VERY suspicious,’ which then led him to tweet: ‘Is the US government attacking DRUDGE REPORT?’
“Drudge then followed up with another tweet shortly after, writing: ‘Attacking coming from thousands of sources. Of course none of them traceable to Fort Meade. . .’
“The suggestion that the Obama administration might have launched a targeted attack against the website polarized Twitter users, with fans of Drudge Report supporting its founder’s suspicions and detractors responding with disbelief and in some cases outrage at the allegation.
“Shortly before the website went down, it was announced that President Obama had deemed 35 Russian diplomats ‘persona non grata’ following evidence that the country used coordinated hacks to try and influence the presidential election, giving individuals just 72 hours to get out of the country.”
We all know now that the Russian election interference hoax was a cover story for spying by the FBI on Donald Trump at the behest of President Barack Hussein Obama who was bitter that Trump kept bringing up Obama’s false claim in 1991 that he was born in Kenya. When he decided to run for president, Obama changed his story to the more plausible birth in Hawaii where hid mother lived at the time.
The federal government has great power with no ethics or oversight. It brought down the first 49-state president (Reagan tied Nixon in 1984) nearly 50 years ago. Bringing down Matt Drudge would be like swatting a fly.
But that is mere speculation on my part.
As Paula Bolyard wrote last month: A Dirty Little Secret About Drudge.
Many of you will recall that Drudge at first did everything he could to promote Donald Trump. Then something happened, some sort of falling-out that no one ever really got to the bottom of, and Matt Drudge turned on the president. That was in 2019, a year of big changes for Drudge. There were rumors (still unconfirmed) that the site had been sold. Drudge changed its ad provider, and it began to lean more liberal and more favorable toward mainstream media. That same year, PJ Media became part of the Townhall Media family and the links stopped—abruptly. Literally on the day of the sale. Whoever was running Drudge at the time, whether Matt or some minimum-wage intern, apparently had some sort of grudge against Townhall and he/they even dropped us from the blogroll at the bottom of the page. Petty, vindictive, and, if I’m being honest, rather costly to our bottom line.
Now, if you go to the Drudge report you’ll find links to a bunch of left-wing UK sites, and well-funded mainstream media sites like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the New York Post. Good for them, I guess. For whatever reason, Matt Drudge, who was reportedly apolitical and more interested in the success of his site than anyagenda, decided to tank the site. A comparison of Similiar Web (a site that ranks websites based on various metrics) shows that Drudge was listed as #41 in the nation with 164 million visits in October 2018. Currently, the site ranks at #145 with 51 million visits in October 2023. That’s a major, major drop.
I’m not losing any sleep over any of this, and I trust you’re not either.
Not at all, but I’d love to finally get to hear the actual story of what turned Drudge into a zombie Website; a mere shadow of its former greatness. Flashback: Where’s Matt Drudge? “The Drudge Report reminds me of MTV in the early 2000s, a channel I returned to sheerly out of habit based on its greatness from decades before.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN BURYING THE LEDE: Harvard controversy casts spotlight on Penny Pritzker, former Obama official atop university board.
Err, not to mention the Big Man himself:
To some observers, Pritzker’s silence amid the fallout has been particularly glaring because she has long been regarded as a staunch supporter of Israel. The 64-year-old Jewish entrepreneur and philanthropist from Chicago, whose brother, J.B., is the governor of Illinois, was one of Barack Obama’s earliest and most important financial backers, and has been credited with persuading Jewish and pro-Israel donors to support his first presidential campaign, despite skepticism over his approach to Middle East policy.
According to a source familiar with the matter, Obama, a Harvard graduate, had privately lobbied on Gay’s behalf as she faced pressure to resign in the wake of her disastrous appearance before the congressional hearing on antisemitism. “It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader administration stable — including its composition,” the source, who was informed of Obama’s outreach and asked to speak anonymously to discuss a confidential matter, told JI on Tuesday.
That’s quite a marker for Gay to call in. And the Stig has similarly also crashed in on Gay’s behalf: NBC News ‘Disinformation Reporter’ Ben Collins Tells on Himself in Defense of Harvard’s Claudine Gay.
NBC News “reporter” Ben Collins, who we’ve been reliably informed is an expert in disinformation, similarly told on himself when he went after prominent Critical Race Theory critic Christopher Rufo, suggesting that the problem isn’t Claudine Gay but mainstream media outlets that (rightfully) treat Rufo — who was the first to research and document the accusations — as a credible source to be taken seriously:
If you're a mainstream outlet and you're being gamed this easily by a guy who is laying out his playbook days or months in advance, maybe the problem isn't the right-wing grifters.
Maybe the problem is you. pic.twitter.com/R35wFR0EOG
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) December 21, 2023
As Patrick Moynihan said 30 years ago, “[Hannah] Arendt had it right. She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
Finally, America’s Newspaper of Record has discovered yet another questionable bit of writing by Gay:
UPDATE:
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 22, 2023
(Updated and bumped.)
Hello, officer? I just witnessed the murder of @cenkuygur by @DouglasKMurray…yes I’ll hold 💀pic.twitter.com/fUEexOlIlH
— Shaughn_A (@Shaughn_A2) December 22, 2023
Curiously, despite the referee calling the fight, Uygur is still trying to going at it:
Oh Cenk. I gave you so many facts. The problem was you didn’t know any of them. And because you’ve never travelled anywhere and don’t know anything it came as a shock to you. But do go out. There’s a whole world beyond your bedroom. @cenkuygur https://t.co/U5YkUxmkdu
— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) December 22, 2023
Related: The Single Most Important Bit of the Douglas Murray Cenk Uygur Bit. “‘If there was an election tomorrow in the West Bank, Hamas would win.’emphasis mine. Run that through your head for a second.”
HMM: Colon cancer is rising in young Americans. It’s not clear why. I wonder if there’s a viral component.
JOHN PODHORETZ REVIEWS MAESTRO:
[Bradley] Cooper offers a 10-minute example of this performance style two-thirds of the way through the movie, in a self-consciously bravura scene in which [Leonard] Bernstein is shown conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony in a British cathedral. It’s filmed as a “one-er,” as though you are seeing it live in a single take, though you are not. You’re supposed to gasp and wonder at the channeling of this long-dead Great Artist, the merger of Bradley and Lenny into a single phenomenon. But for me, watching Bernstein today conducting at the Ely Cathedral on YouTube and watching Cooper in Maestro, it’s a little hard not to giggle. Both of them look like nothing so much as Bugs Bunny channeling Bernstein’s florid predecessor Leopold Stokowski in the Looney Tunes masterpiece “Long-Haired Hare.” They are human cartoons of over-enthusiasm, trying to make you think what you’re watching or seeing is exciting and demanding your attention and applause. The sequence is meant to portray Bernstein as the embodiment of the American artiste—and as such is the final element in the grand cultural effort that should be known as the Leonard Bernstein Project.
For it very much was a Project, a conscious Project, and a wildly successful one too. As Humphrey Burton details in his extraordinary 1994 biography, the idea that Bernstein should become the great figure in American classical music was literally a plan hatched in part by his friend (and lover) Aaron Copland in the late 1930s, when Bernstein was barely 20 years old.
The plan was for him to be “the great American conductor,” and every aspect of his public actions in the five decades that followed was in service of that aim and the larger goal of establishing America as the cultural master of the world. To that end, he was invited to give highly distinguished lectures at Ivy League universities about his theory of music, which read like gibberish today—he sought to provide a “grammar of music” based on Noam Chomsky’s then-canonical but now-discredited theory of grammar. But he was protected from some of the consequences of his own moderate intellectual gifts by believing in the Right Things as the cultural commissars of the day defined them.
Bernstein was one of the key markers of the moment in time when America took unambiguous control of center stage in the West. He mixed popular culture, middlebrow culture, a now sadly anachronistic hip-Jew culture, glamor, riches, fame, trendy progressive politics, and (at a key moment when his star seemed to be dimming) out-of-the-closet gay culture in a resonant and enduring stew.
He was a remarkable presence in American life, suggestive not only of the country’s wild 20th century ambitions but also of the temptations and corruptions laid out in his path. Like almost everyone else in New York cultural circles, he fell in line when Vietnam-era politics went from liberal to radical, exalting criminality and the enemies of America even as he drank deep the dregs of American liberality and capitalist largesse.
Read the whole thing.