Archive for 2023

JULIE BURCHILL: The privileged ignorance of Daniel Radcliffe.

It was King Lear who said, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child’. I always think of it whenever I see the latest nasty little jibe at JK Rowling from one of the mediocre actors whom her novels shot to stardom. Now Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe has opined – more in sorrow than in anger, no doubt, with a caring, sharing smile on those sensitive lips – that adults concerned about children changing gender are ‘condescending’. More specifically, he ‘affirmed’ the beliefs of six trans and nonbinary children at a discussion organised by LGBTQ charity The Trevor Project this week, saying: ‘There are people who also have a slightly condescending, but well-meaning attitude of “People are young… and it is a huge decision”.’ According to Radcliffe, ‘We can trust kids to tell us who they are’.

Commenting on the difference between his childhood and the childhoods of da kidz he was gettin’ down wiv, Radcliffe said: ‘I always knew I was a boy because that was a thing I grew up knowing.’ Or perhaps this was because you were part of the last generation to grow up in an age when girly boys and boyish girls weren’t carted off to have any potential gayness transed away? What a loss to The Brains Trust this man is.

It sounds lovely to say ‘listen to kids’. And no one wants to say that ‘children should be seen and not heard’. (Of course not – it’s gender-critical women, the people who want single-sex spaces and single-sex sports, who should be seen and not heard, silly!) But there’s a reason that children don’t have the same rights as adults – why they can’t get a tattoo, have sex, get married, buy alcohol, fight / die for their country or drive a car. It’s because they don’t know who they are or what they’re doing yet.

Read the whole thing.

WEIGHT LOSS IN OLD AGE IS NOT GOOD: Significant association found between all-cause mortality and weight loss in the elderly. “Using men with stable weight as a control, men with a 5% to 10% weight loss had a 33% higher risk of all-cause mortality, and those with more than a 10% decrease in body weight had a 289% higher risk. Compared to women with stable weight, women with a 5% to 10% weight loss had a 26% higher risk of all-cause mortality, and those with more than a 10% decrease in body weight had a 114% higher risk. . . . There was no significant association between weight gain and increases in waist circumference and all-cause mortality. The researchers state it is likely that weight loss is an early indicator of the presence of various life-shortening diseases.”

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why the US Kept Trying to Land Oversized Cargo Planes on Aircraft Carriers at Sea (Video).

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS: Ten Years After the Boston Marathon Bombing, No One Dares Discuss Why It Happened.

Various media retrospectives don’t even attempt to discuss the bombers’ motive. The Washington Post came closest on Thursday when it did the common perpetrator-to-victim shift, claiming that bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev “may have felt victimized because he was Muslim.” Also on Thursday, NBC Boston told a heartwarming love story of a firefighter and a woman he aided that day, but remained mum about why the bombing happened. On Friday, MassLive published a lengthy piece about the lessons that have been learned from the bombing, but apparently, none of those lessons have anything to do with why the bombing happened in the first place. ABC News focused on the psychological scars of some of the survivors but said nary a word about what might have led anyone to want to inflict such scars.

This willful ignorance began on the very day of the bombings.

Narrative uber alles.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: ‘A Voice of Truth:’ Kamala Harris Praises Unrepentant Anti-Semite Al Sharpton.

What happened? Vice President Kamala Harris praised one of America’s most prominent anti-Semites during a speech in New York on Friday.

It was Al Sharpton, wasn’t it? Correct. Al Sharpton, the notorious race hustler best known for instigating the Crown Heights riots—one of the worst outbursts of anti-Semitic violence in American history that inspired slogans such as “Let’s get the Jew!” and “Hitler didn’t finish the job.”

What’d she say? “Rev, I love you [maniacal laughter],” Harris said at the National Action Network convention in Manhattan. “No matter where you are, you are always a voice of truth speaking about the importance of justice for all people. You are part of the conscience of our country.”

Why’d she say it? Sharpton has successfully reinvented himself as a “respectable” “mainstream” race hustler—who hosts his own show on MSNBC—and is one of the most influential figures within the Democratic Party and media establishment.

Nice Axios parody by the Washington Free Beacon, by the way.

POST-COVID SCHOOL DISCIPLINE PROBLEMS:  Some states are adopting reforms that will give teachers and principals the authority to suspend disruptive students.  That’s good news.  School discipline is an area that had been too long left to progressives.  They made a giant mess of it.

HOW DID A LOW RANKING AIR GUARDSMAN GET ACCESS TO SUPER SECRET DOCUMENTS? A THEORY: Former CIA Officer Larry Johnson: This Is A Controlled Leak To Prepare The Public For “Crash Landing” Of U.S. Foreign Policy. “This is a coordinated media strategy, this is a disinformation campaign. The documents are real. I’m not saying the documents are fabrications, they are not. But this cover story that’s been manufactured to explain how these documents came to be produced, it just falls apart.”

CONSUMER SPENDING FLAGS: This week in Bidenomics: Shoppers run out of gas. “Retail sales dropped by 1% from February to March, a sharper decline than economists expected. That was the second drop in a row and the fourth decline in the last five months.”

LIGHTNING DEAL: MLVOC Travel Pillow. #CommissionEarned

DEM MEGADONOR SECRETLY FUNDS RAPE LAWSUIT AGAINST DONALD TRUMP: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has secretly paid E. Jean Carroll’s legal bills since 2020. “Carroll’s lawsuit could also be clouded by Hoffman’s affiliation with [Jeffrey] Epstein, whom he hosted in 2015 at a fundraising dinner for MIT Media Lab. The tech titan later apologized for ‘helping to repair’ Epstein’s image.”