KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Might Pay to Watch ‘English Optional’ Joe Biden Debate Anyone. “Right now, I can think of few things more politically entertaining than seeing Biden, RFK Jr., and Marianne Williamson on a debate stage. Biden can tell a story about riding a manatee to the planet Neptune and frolicking with a jodhpurs-clad Cesar Romero while Williamson casts a spell by slathering an otter in essential oils and yodeling in Gaelic.”
Archive for 2023
May 23, 2023
#JOURNALISM: WaPo Reporter Asked Tim Scott If He Is Still A Virgin.
Seems kinda problematic for a white reporter to ask a black man if he can keep his sex drive under control. (Bumped).
JOANNE JACOBS: SATs are out. Published ‘research’ is in, but it’s pay to play.
Test scores are out. Everyone’s got an A average. The “community service” trip to Mexico and the start-your-own-charity gambit are ho-hum.
Ambitious parents are paying to get a published “research” project on their teenagers’ college applications, report Daniel Golden and Kunal Purohit for ProPublica and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
High-priced college counselors link high schoolers to services that provide online mentors to guide the work and sites to publish it.
“A new industry is extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential,” they write. “At least 20 online research programs for high schoolers have sprung up in the U.S. and abroad in recent years, along with a bevy of journals that publish the work.”
Weird how the SATs were abandoned in the name of fairness, but it’s the rich benefitting.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Report: ‘The Little Mermaid’ Pre-Ticket Sales Showing Worst Performing Disney Release This Year In China.
How can they miss it, with reviews like this? “What’s on-screen too often feels like wan, second-rate imitation, and the few differences seem motivated less by a spirit of imagination than one of joyless anxiety.”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: US Senators Are Being Issued Satellite Phones in Preparation for a ‘Disruptive Event’. “Gibson said the phones are a security backstop in the case of an emergency that ‘takes out communications’ in part of America. Federal funding will pay for the satellite airtime needed to utilize the phone devices.”
A friend comments, “It’s either a good idea, or foreshadowing.”
DON SURBER: Ending the Lies. “Expect more lies because there are no consequences.”
REPLACE HIM WITH A REPUBLICAN. HE’S A GHOST FROM WEST VIRGINIA’S PAST. Joe Manchin Says He’s a Climate Moderate. He Just Voted To Confirm Radical Energy Nominee Who Wants To Kill the Coal Industry. David Crane says air travel and meat consumption may have to be curtailed to fight climate change.
No matter what the crisis of the moment, the left’s solution is always to make ordinary people’s lives worse.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Leather Travel Duffle Bag. #CommissionEarned
CAROL ROTH: Joe Biden learned nothing from overseeing the last US debt downgrade.
In the summer of 2011, an ugly economic event that had never happened in the United States’ history came to pass: The sovereign debt of the United States received an official credit downgrade. Standard & Poor’s cut the debt rating from the crème-de-la-crème AAA rating down to AA+, due to concerns over growing debts and deficits.
Who was the vice president when this historic credit downgrade came about? None other than our current president, Joe Biden himself.
You would think that stern and unprecedented warning would have been a learning moment. At the time, the U.S. public debt stood at around 95% of GDP and was less than $15 trillion in the aggregate. If the U.S.’s fiscal standing was a concern then, Biden might realize the dire situation the U.S. is in today with public debt sitting at 125% or so of the GDP and rapidly approaching $32 trillion in total.
The Biden cabal isn’t in Washington to learn or lead or anything like that, but to raid the Treasury for everything they can.
NOW GET RID OF ALL THE OTHER DEI HEADS: Uber’s head of DEI on leave after hosting a talk titled ‘Don’t Call Me Karen.’
There are lessons to be learned from this story though I doubt anyone at Uber is learning them. Like lots of other companies who wanted to display how equitable they were after the murder of George Floyd, Uber held a series of employee meetings under the banner “Moving Forward.” These were intended to be tough conversations about race guided by the company’s head of diversity, Bo Young Lee, who has been with the company since 2018.
Lee scheduled a pair of meetings titled “Don’t Call Me Karen” which were intended to let employees hear about “the American white woman’s experience.” As the title suggests, one of the things discussed was the “Karen” label and how that could make it difficult for some women. Minority employees on staff didn’t like that. It suggested that white women had problem too and could even be victims of unfair assumptions based on stereotypes.
How about “we don’t care who you are, or about your ‘experience,’ just do your damn jobs?” An approach so crazy it just might work.
JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Dystopian ‘Silo’ gives a glimpse of a degrowth world.
PAULA BOLYARD: The Danger to Canada (and How It Differs from the Danger to the U.S.).
The danger to Canada, writes industrial technologist and army veteran Tex Leugner in The Cochrane Eagle, transcends the state-and-media entente that works to prepare the public for the assumption of elite authority predicated on an ideological agenda. The danger, rather, is delved in the almost insuperable task of “restor[ing] the necessary common sense and good judgment to a lazy, unthinking electorate” prone to electing corrupt, unpatriotic leaders, “a citizenry capable of entrusting an incompetent man with the job of Prime Minister” and refusing to rectify or even acknowledge the blunder: “The danger to Canada is the people in it.”
Election results confirm, Leugner continues, “that more and more Canadians are moving in the direction of socialism with every generation, most of whom no longer have any morality, sense of self reliance, personal responsibility, independent thinking and a willingness to continue the culture of hard-working self-respect that built this magnificent country in the first place.” His conclusion hits hard. “Canada is no longer the country I was once so proud to serve as a soldier. In fact, it is no longer my country.” Many former servicemen, some of whom have become personal friends, agree wholeheartedly. They regret their service, risking life and limb for a country that has neither use nor respect for them, particularly under a Liberal administration.
Read the whole thing.
PYRRHIC VICTORY: Joel Kotkin: Women have won the ‘war between the sexes,’ but at what cost?
Even Vox is wondering why women have gotten everything they said they wanted, but are still unhappy. Their explanation, of course, is that men still aren’t doing enough to make women happy. But it’s interesting that they’ve noticed the problem.
My hypothesis: What we’ve been told that “women” want is in fact what a relatively small percentage of women — 20% at most — who tend to be neurotic and anxious, and largely incapable of sustained happiness anyway, say they want. But even to the extent that’s true, their needs aren’t really those of most women whose interests fall closer to the norms.
May 22, 2023
L.A. DODGERS TO CATHOLICS: DROP DEAD. Dodgers Re-Invite Anti-Catholic Drag Group To Pride Night, Issue Apology To LGBTQ+ Community Despite Letter From Marco Rubio.
After “much thoughtful feedback from Los Angeles’ diverse communities” the Dodgers have decided to re-invite the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to its 10th annual LGBTQ+ Pride Night. They also issued an apology to the drag group, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and their friends and families.
As Mark Hemingway tweets, “You will have your faith profaned and mocked in front of thousands and you’ll be called a bigot if you object.“
OPEN THREAD: Why? Because I like you.
POTEMKIN ENVIRONMENTALISM: California Dumps Nearly Half of Its Hazardous Waste out of State.
California is revealing new information to the public that shows that the eco-friendly state is dumping tons of toxic waste in other states every year.
Since 2010, California has dumped nearly half of its hazardous waste out of state—mostly in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada—according to the state’s latest figures (pdf). Thirteen more states also have received California’s toxic waste but in much lower quantities.
In the past 13 years, the state has dumped 3.7 million tons of hazardous waste in Utah, more than 2.9 million tons in Arizona, and nearly 2.3 million tons in Nevada.
An investigation published by CalMatters in January found that one of the biggest out-of-state toxic waste dumpers was the state’s own Department of Toxic Substances Control.
The reason is that neighboring states don’t have as many environmental regulations for dumping hazardous waste, and it costs less.
There’s a pleasing circularity to California leftists using other states as their dumping grounds, since they also use the much more functional other states to help keep the lights on: California’s Potemkin Environmentalism.
A dirty secret about California’s energy economy is that it imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for the shortfall caused by having too few power plants. Up to 20 percent of the state’s power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana, and another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State, and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. “California practices a sort of energy colonialism,” says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.–area investment group. “They rely on western states to supply them with power generation they are unwilling to build for themselves”—and leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution.
And California’s garbage, as well.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! How’s That Again, Joe? Biden Again Demonstrates His Abject Unfitness to Be President.
President Biden rambles unintelligibly for 40 seconds… pic.twitter.com/eaMZB0OQzo
— The First (@TheFirstonTV) May 21, 2023
Apparently it’s tough for his White House handlers to get John Gill’s adrenochrome dosage just right when he’s on a road trip.
NO BUCKS, NO BUCK ROGERS: NASA seeks to shore up congressional support for Artemis. It’s expensive and unsustainable. The NASA folks might actually prefer having Congress cancel it to having to operate the vehicle at $4 billion a launch.
DISPATCHES FROM ABC’S NEWS DIVISION: Whoopi Goldberg’s Latest Stupidity: Racist Attack On Tim Scott.
Karen Johnson, AKA Whoopi Goldberg, has added to her long list of mean, stupid statements. The View commentator, who believes she is the director of morality for the African American community, used Tim Scott’s announcement that he’s running for President to attack Scott and Justice Thomas. Goldberg said that Scott had “Clarence Thomas syndrome.”
Clarence Thomas syndrome happens when a commentator who can’t spell cat if you spot her the C and the A attacks a brilliant jurist who has been on the Supreme Court for 32 years. Why the attack? He is a black guy who doesn’t believe in the liberal agenda.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post scribe resurfaces a question he asked Scott in 2012: Reporter Recalls Asking Tim Scott If He’s a Virgin as Senator Announces 2024 Bid.
IT’S COME TO THIS: John Cleese is forced to cut famous Life of Brian scene about men having babies from his new West End show.
Cleese told an audience at his one-man show last week that when the scene (co-written with the late Graham Chapman) was performed at a read-through for the new show in New York last year, doubts emerged. ‘At the end, I said to the American actors: ‘What do you think?’ And they said: ‘We love the script, but you can’t do that stuff about Loretta nowadays.’
‘So here you have something there’s never been a complaint about in 40 years, that I’ve heard of, and now all of a sudden we can’t do it because it’ll offend people. What is one supposed to make of that? But I think there were a lot of things that were actually, in some strange way, predictive of what was actually going to happen later.’
In 1979, Malcolm Muggeridge had a meltdown over The Life of Brian. In 2022, it was the trans-obsessives. After reading Andrew Sullivan’s Friday Substack column, “The Queers Versus The Homosexuals,” I’m not at all surprised.
But then as Toby Young wrote in the London Spectator in 2019, about the debate between Cleese, Michael Palin, Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark, “The irony of Life of Brian is that by lampooning Christian beliefs for perfectly honourable reasons, the makers of the film contributed to the demise of the church’s authority and that, in turn, created a vacuum that has been filled by far more egregious examples of the closed mindset they objected to. The Pythons didn’t realise it 40 years ago, but the muscular Christianity that had been drummed into them at their private schools and which they hated with a kind of life-defining passion was acting as a bulwark against less organised forms of irrationality. They couldn’t imagine anything more suffocating or tedious than that ‘vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’; but they were wrong.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN LOGIC: MSNBC Guest: I Just Went to Florida for Spring Break Even Though It’s a ‘Terrorist State.’
MSNBC guest says Florida is about to be a “terrorist state” for black people and lesbians. These people are legit insane: pic.twitter.com/JKNwX8kCYh
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 22, 2023
Democrat strategist Aisha C. Mills: “I think it was extremely clever and I really appreciate the NAACP’s guidance on this issue. You know, I just took my family to spring break in Florida recently. And I think about all of the folks who travel there for sun and joy and peace and restoration. And to be reminded that actually this is getting to the point where Florida is about to be a terrorist state to many of us here in America. Certainly, as a lesbian, as a black woman, I don’t want to have anything to do with the place. And I think about all the other people who don’t want to travel there either. So, I think it was very clever on behalf of the NAACP, I thank them for issuing this broad guidance. And really, what it does is it turns a remarkable, I think, lens, on the United States and highlights how bigotry and bias and ignorance do as much harm as we accuse other countries of doing to people that they suppress.”
Related: TV Journalists Cheer NAACP’s Absurd ‘Travel Advisory’ Dinging DeSantis.
More: NAACP President Ignores Stats On Florida When Confronted By CNN Host.
BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY: Parasites Thrive in The US, Despite What Many Americans Think.
I NEED TO BRUSH UP MY SPANISH, THE ANGLOSPHERE HAS GONE CRAZY: Two Women Are Told They’ve Broken the Law by Criticizing Male Attempting to Breastfeed a Child: Report.
HAPPY 20TH BIRTHDAY to the Streisand Effect.