JIM TREACHER: Biden Tried to Silence Tucker Carlson on Facebook. “Remember, we wouldn’t know any of this stuff if Elon Musk hadn’t dropped $44 billion to buy Twitter. He opened the floodgates, and now all of this sewage is spilling out. How many other social media companies have been censoring conservatives like this? I assume the answer is: All of them.”
Archive for 2023
January 9, 2023
MAKE’EM PLAY BY THEIR OWN RULES: Father Legally Changes Gender to Help Win Custody of Kids, Triggers Trans Cult.
EVERYTHING IS STUPID, EVEN THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: ChatGPT is enabling script kiddies to write functional malware.
OBJECTIVITY MUST BE DEFEATED. UNC is still “waiving” standardized testing until 2025. Because COVID. Must be the SR-71-X-AE-A10.5 strain I have been hearing about.
BRINK LINDSEY: The Global Fertility Collapse.
Flashback: The Parent Trap.
Related: Montesquieu’s Warning About Our Childlessness.
Also: car seats as contraception: “Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”
Also: How China’s baby bust can help birth a second American Century.
KATIE PORTER READS THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK DURING SPEAKER VOTE:
While the House Republican conference was in turmoil Friday as GOP lawmakers struggled to cobble together enough votes to elect a speaker, California Congresswoman Katie Porter sat quietly on the other side of the aisle reading a book.
Porter, dressed to match the books cover, was reading, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F–k,” making a not-so-subtle statement that captured how many Democrats were feeling after watching Republicans try and fail to elect a House speaker again and again over four days.
The New York Times best-selling self-help book by Mark Manson argues that people need to stop thinking positively and learn to cope with bad situations in order to be happy, albeit in much more profane terms.
I think it’s more a case of Katie Porter held up a copy of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck during the speaker vote for the photo op, because I doubt she’s read it, considering the most important passage in Manson’s book:
The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for those problems. This entitlement plays out in one of two ways:
- I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
- I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
Opposite mindset on the outside, but the same selfish creamy core in the middle. In fact, you will often see entitled people flip back and forth between the two. Either they’re on top of the world or the world is on top of them, depending on the day of the week, or how well they’re doing with their particular addiction at that moment…What most people don’t correctly identify as entitlement are those people who perpetually feel as though they’re inferior and unworthy of the world.
At the very least, she hasn’t internalized those paragraphs yet:
● Rep. Katie Porter used racist language, ‘ridiculed people for reporting sexual harassment,’ ex-staffer claims.
● California Congresswoman Katie Porter Blamed, Punished a Staffer For Allegedly Giving Her COVID-19.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Matt Gaetz, Mad Genius.
FASTER, PLEASE. AND BETTER, PLEASE. FDA approves Alzheimer’s drug seen by experts as big advance, but no miracle.
FLASHBACK TO 2013 (VIA LAUGHINGWOLF): Just one example of how the government could lose a civil conflict.
Were an angry group of disenfranchised citizens to target in a strategic manner the substations leading to a city or geographic area—say, Albany, for example—they could put the area in the dark for as long as it took to bring the substations back online. Were they committed enough, and spread their attacks out over a wide enough area, perhaps mixing in a few tens of dozens of the residential transformers found every few hundred yards along city streets, they could overwhelm the utility companies ability to repair the damage being caused or law enforcement’s ability to stop them. The government could perhaps assign a soldier or cop for every transformer, substation and switch, but they’d run out of men long before they ran out of things they need guarded. Not that the government could even guarantee to actually protect the transformers they were guarding; a residential transformer is a big, stationary target, and the substation transformers and switches and other equipment even bigger targets. Residential transformers are easily “touched” by even a moderately competent deer hunter from hundreds of yards away, perhaps separated by roads, subdivisions, swamps or streams. Substations are a dense area target easily struck from a half-mile or more away.
Meanwhile, the lone wolves and small teams would simply shift to other targets of opportunity left unguarded by an overwhelmed and outmatched government force, of which there are many.
How many days with partial power or no power, how many nights in the dark, would it take before the local economy collapsed in the targeted area?
Read the whole thing.
A FILMLADD VIDEO: No kanYE, Hitler Didn’t Invent Highways!
TRANSGENDER WARS: The 11th Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Western Virginia have both recently issued decisions on transgender issues that are consistent with the law instead of consistent with what fashionable people would like the law to be. And there are a couple of other cases pending in federal court. If there is a cert petition in the 11th Circuit case or an appeal in the Southern District of West Virginia case, the American Civil Rights Project will likely be filing an amicus curiae brief based on the argument contained in Pete Kirsanow and my comment.
FEEL BETTER: Built from Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body. #CommissionEarned
VICTORIA TAFT: More Proof That Nancy Pelosi Was More Responsible for J6 Riot Than Trump. “Even after the one-sided January 6 Committee left Pelosi’s role on the cutting room floor, there’s one inescapable conclusion: If she’d done her job, there would have been no riot, no deaths of Trump supporters, no show trials, and no political prisoners sitting in solitary confinement in a D.C. gulag for two years awaiting trial.”
I’d say she performed exactly the job she set out to.
HMM: Court May Force Hunter Biden To Disclose Buyers of His Pricy Artwork.
An Arkansas court may soon force Hunter Biden to disclose the identities of the buyers of his expensive artwork, information the White House has tried to conceal as it faces accusations of influence peddling.
The recovering crack addict cited “a substantial material change” in his “financial circumstances” in a request to lower his child support payments for four-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, the New York Post reported. That request prompted Navy Joan’s mother, Lunden Roberts, a former exotic dancer at a Washington, D.C., strip club, to formally demand information about Biden’s lucrative art transactions.
“The plaintiff asked for detailed information about the defendant’s works of ‘art’ and the purchasers of the same,” Roberts’s attorney wrote in a Dec. 27 court filing.
Strange that the national press has almost entirely ignored a story involving influence peddling, a stripper, a deadbeat dad, and a President’s own unacknowledged granddaughter.
JOHN NOLTE: Insider Report Says Woke Hollywood Killing Art, Discriminating Against White Men.
Hollywood’s “old boys club is dead,” writes the Free Press. “But a new one—with its own litmus tests and landmines—is rapidly replacing it. ‘This is all going to end in a giant class-action’.”
The outlet spoke to “more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new [woke]dogma.”
“Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer told the Free Press, which would go a long way towards explaining the self-humiliation Stephen King and Rob Reiner engage in daily by way of Twitter.
How do you out-woke the woke? Easy. “Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”
For those who don’t know, “BIPOC” stands for something-something people of color.
Plus:
One showrunner said, “It’s gotten to the point where I won’t give notes on a script any longer to a woman or person of color.” Why? He’s terrified of being accused of racism.
Another showrunner said, “You’re not allowed to pick your staff anymore, and studios won’t let you interview anybody who isn’t a person of color.” He added, “I’m sitting in a room trying to run a show with a collection of people I don’t totally trust.”
The “room” is the writer’s room, which, for obvious reasons, is “supposed to be smart, funny, nasty, a little bawdy, the kind of place where people can make jokes and riff and wonder aloud and vomit out ideas that might become an unforgettable scene.”
Hollywood showrunners wanted more socialism — welcome to East Germany, fellas; enjoy the Stasi!
From the Free Press article:
It is important not to lose sight of the backdrop against which all of the above has happened. On this, pretty much everyone agrees.
Over the past decade, the streaming services have upended old business models and imposed a new ruthlessness on an industry that was already pretty ruthless.
For years, the real money in Hollywood came from the television channels that broadcast reruns and old movies; residuals meant creatives were paid handsomely. But with the rise of Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services, that model collapsed. And the vast majority of creatives had to make do with less.
Now, most people in the industry do not earn enough to support a family of four in Los Angeles. As money has gotten tighter, people have gotten angrier, and things have gotten uglier. “I’d say all that probably expedited the radicalization,” a longtime Hollywood creative said of the shifting marketplace.
As veteran TV producer Rob Long wrote in Commentary last month: The Good Times Lasted a Century.
Today, the worst thing you can do for young people trying to break into show business is encourage them. The number of movies in release has never been smaller, and studios are still trying to figure out the economics of the feature-film business in the age of streaming. They have only recently discovered that spending $100 million on a feature film that goes directly to streaming is a money-loser—but then so are multi-episode series that sit, unwatched, on the servers of Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, you name it.
An ambitious young person chasing a show-business bonanza in 2022 needs to be content working in an environment with no big production deals, much smaller episode fees, and a television “season” that lasts six episodes. A writer on a current multi-season television series may eke out the equivalent of an annual salary in the $75,000 range, which in the late 1990s was what a lot of writers were paid per episode.
Hollywood has been able to right the ship before; Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a story of the film industry reinventing itself twice in the space of a decade. First with a group of Young Turks (Coppola, Scorsese, Altman) supplanting a dissipated old Hollywood guard who spent the 1960s chasing its tail trying to recreate the success of The Sound of Music with a series of musicals that flopped as public tastes changed in the 1960s. Then when the Young Turks spend the next ten years creating a series of dark, European-themed films to mostly medium success, along comes Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to reinvent the B-picture and Republic serials as Hollywood smash hits for suburban audiences.
Who will be person who breaks the woke logjam, and start consistently creating product that doesn’t alienate audiences?
I REMEMBER WHEN HIGHER EDUCATION WAS JUSTIFIED ON THE GROUND THAT IT PROMOTED TOLERANCE AND GOOD CITIZENSHIP: Video: Georgetown student says all Republicans should be ‘put to death.’
JOHN GABRIEL: The Unbearable Lightness of Buttigieg. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has not met a crisis he can’t dodge.
Last July 4 weekend, airlines canceled more than 2,200 flights and delayed another 25,000. Democrats on Capitol Hill demanded reforms, but the Transportation Secretary did nothing.
That brings us to the last two weeks, when Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights, stranding thousands of travelers while their luggage was who knows where. Four days into the mess, Buttigieg wrote a letter. Four days later, Southwest fixed the issue on its own.
“Pete, what would you say you do here?”
This gig won’t ‘pad his resume for President’
Despite positive media treatment, Democrats are increasingly pointing out the unbearable lightness of Buttigieg.
“Nearly six months ago Bernie Sanders and I called for Buttigieg to implement fines and penalties on airlines for cancelling flights,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) posted to Twitter. “Why were these recommendations not followed? This mess with Southwest could have been avoided. We need bold action.”
Hey, he pushed for more electric cars to be purchased to be driven on roads he deems to be racist. Isn’t that enough for one man?
No? Why it’s as if:
THIS IS COLORADO’S JARED POLIS, SETTING THE STAGE FOR A PRESIDENTIAL RUN: NYC, Chicago Mayors Politely Ask Democratic Governor to Stop Busing Asylum Seekers to Their Cities.
Keep an eye on Polis, he’s a slippery one like Gavin Newsom.
IF THE NFL HAD MORE DIVERSITY AMONG ITS PLAYERS THIS WOULDN’T BE A PROBLEM: Professor: Damar Hamlin injury shows how black men ‘disproportionately’ affected by NFL violence.
I think the racial distribution of pro sports teams should reflect society at large. So the NFL would be about 12% black. For “injury equity.”
PRESIDENT KLAIN: Biden’s chief of staff faces fierce backlash for claiming high inflation is no longer a problem. “Ron, the prices are still high, the increase has just slowed because it’s a rolling 12 month calculation. Have you been to a grocery store in the last year?”