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?
Archive for 2023
December 23, 2023
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.
OUT ON A LIMB: Putin ally ‘behind bomb’ that killed Wagner boss.
REMY: My Favorite Things (TSA Version). New video from Reason TV:
AT AMAZON, shop Today’s Deals.
GOOD BOOK FOR THIS TIME OF YEAR: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. #CommissionEarned
DEAR SANTA – WHY IS CHRISTMAS SO !@%$# EXPENSIVE IN 2023? Biden and his defenders can argue all they want that the economy is in great shape, but the bottom line is the essentials of life cost much more today than they did in 2020. Issues & Insights has the facts, not just an opinion.
CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT: Harvard withholds racial demographics of Class of 2028 early admits: Legal experts said the decision likely was ‘politically motivated.’
Harvard’s racist admissions behavior calls for continuing judicial supervision to assure that there’s no illegal racial discrimination.
GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Teens sue San Francisco after mass arrests at skateboarding event.
On July 8, the date of the 2023 event, San Francisco police and transportation workers set up barricades blocking the steepest parts of the hill but permitted skateboarding to take place as a crowd of around 200 gathered in the afternoon, according to the lawsuit.
Police began making announcements for the crowd to disperse from the park at 7:15 p.m. after the crowd became violent, vandalized several light-rail vehicles, and threw fireworks and smoke bombs at officers, according to a news release. An hour later, officers followed a group of people seen removing barricades and vandalizing a light-rail vehicle and conducted a mass arrest, charging 32 adults and 81 juveniles with inciting a riot, conspiracy and remaining present at an unlawful assembly, according to the release.
The lawsuit alleges that scores of juveniles who were unassociated with the event or attempting to leave, including Carmen, were corralled by police officers and wrongfully arrested in their sweep.
Carmen and another plaintiff who was 13 at the time went to the park to watch the skateboarding and left after hearing a dispersal order but were corralled by police officers on the streets surrounding Dolores Park when they tried to leave, according to the lawsuit. A 17-year-old plaintiff skateboarded at the event, left the park after hearing an order to disperse and was allegedly blocked on a nearby street by officers pointing weapons at him. Another 15-year-old plaintiff was riding a scooter to a friend’s house and passed a street near Dolores Park when police officers stopped her, directed her to turn around and led her back toward the park, where she became trapped between police lines, the lawsuit states.
Lopez, Carmen’s mother, arrived at the block where the group was corralled soon after and was told she could not pick up her daughter, she said. Most of the children were dressed lightly for the sunny daytime event and now looked cold and uncomfortable, she said. Records show the temperature was in the high 50s that night.
“They were sitting there, like, freezing and shivering,” Lopez said. “They were looking all in disbelief.”
Officers detained the group, which mostly contained minors aged 13 to 17, for over three hours on the street and did not provide shelter, blankets or jackets, according to the lawsuit. Members of the group were allegedly handcuffed with zip ties and not permitted to go to the bathroom.
San Francisco in 2023: where massive shoplifting, open-air drug use and defecation in the streets goes unabated, but skateboarders get arrested. If Mike Judge had written such scenes into Idiocracy, his producers would have told him to dial it back a notch or ten, or risk total unbelievability.
Of course, California’s governments did try to warn skateboarders in 2020 that, as Sheldon Cooper would say, they were having fun wrong:
ROGER KIMBALL: The looming Lenin comeback.
As we embark on what is sure to be an eventful year, it is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What I have in mind is not so much Lenin’s butcher’s bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what is somehow even creepier is his model of government.
I was reminded of this in November when Miguel Cardona, Joe Biden’s secretary of education, gave a talk to explain “education department priorities.” Talking up a kinder, friendlier department, he said, “I think it was President Reagan [who] said, ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help.’”
I think that was intended to be reassuring. What Reagan actually said, however, as was pointed out about 10,000 times, was the opposite. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” the Gipper said, “are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
Lenin would have known exactly what Reagan meant — that’s what he liked about government. And if Maximilien Robespierre was a piker by comparison, he had the idea, doing his best to disfigure France in the brief time allotted. An ardent student of that supreme political narcissist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robespierre was always going on about “virtue,” though he conflated the emotion of virtue with what a Marxist might call “really existing” virtue. Above all, Robespierre knew achieving the utopia of his dreams would not be easy or painless, which is why he spoke frankly about “virtue and its emanation, terror.”
Related: Finally, Destruction for Destruction’s Sake. “Lenin loathed Christianity. He loathed traditional Russian society. His animus ventured well beyond a reaction to perceived systemic unfairness toward Russia’s peasantry. Unlike Scrooge, but like a good Marxist, Lenin chose not to exploit existing society but destroy it — or he began the process; Stalin eagerly continued the project. Destruction was a prerequisite to a new, bright communist society, went the rationale. In practice, Russian society became a countrywide gulag. Tens of millions died. The human spirit was trampled. Bleakness was unremitting. Lenin, an unwitting existentialist, and his spawn imposed a horrid meaning on their meaningless world: totalitarianism and the cruel iron boot that came with it. In fact, they chose evil.”
PROF. JACOBSON: VIDEO – Campus Antisemitism Crisis: Cornell, The Ivies, and Beyond. “The way I would term it is we’re not here to talk about October 7th. We’re really here to talk about October 8th and 9th and 10th, and the reactions on campuses that I think shocked a lot of people.”
JIM TREACHER: All I Want for Christmas Is Everybody Stop Being Crazy.
- People are chanting antisemitic slogans in the street, beating up Jews, trashing synagogues. Because a bunch of Jews were slaughtered by crazy terrorists half a world away. It’s crazy.
- The president of Harvard University is a crazy plagiarist, and now the libs are going crazy making excuses for her because she’s not a white dude. They’re so crazy that the more racist they get, the more racism they see in everyone else.
- Taylor Swift is dating some football player, and everybody’s going crazy.
- The guy who played Kang in the Marvel movies went crazy and beat up his girlfriend, so now his career is ruined and he’s going to jail. And nerds are going crazy because the same thing hasn’t happened to Ezra Miller, which is racist or something.
- Even the holidays are no solace. People are refusing to buy Christmas gifts for their kids because it’s somehow killing the planet. And their comrades are blocking traffic and crazy-gluing their various body parts to the street, in the name of whatever crazy cause they care about this week. They’re all crazy.
Perhaps we can arrange a WWI-style Christmas Truce — but of course, as with 1914, the wreckage of the culture war will return after Boxing Day, if not sooner.