Archive for 2024
September 16, 2024
COFFEE, IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Coffee grounds could prevent Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
TODAY’S MY 50TH BIRTHDAY: I’ve been at FIRE for almost half my life, and it’s been so incredible to see our little team grow to become the nation’s premier free speech defender! We’re fighting for free speech in the courtroom, the classroom, and in the culture.
- Our team has grown to 115 *incredible* free speech defenders.
- We are nearing ONE MILLION followers on social media and email.
- We have 30 active litigation cases.
- We have secured eight grassroots victories in communities across the country.
- We have helped build 35 alumni organizations to defend free speech on campuses.
- We have had 4 model bills passed in states across the country this year alone.
- We have released the largest report on college free speech EVER!
- We have successfully reformed 31 anti-free speech college policies this year alone.
FIRE has come a long way, but there is still more work to do.
That’s where you come in. Please consider donating to FIRE and join the Free Speech Movement.
Consider it a birthday present to me ;)
IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO REDUCE CRIME: Gun Controllers Knew the Assault Weapons Ban Failed in 2004 and They Know It Now.
HEH:
— EducatëdHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) September 16, 2024
Keep laughing. It drives them as crazy as they’re trying to drive us.
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned
ARE YOU TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING YET? Score Another Win for Free Speech (and Another Scalp for Elon Musk).
SOMETIMES THAT FEELS LIKE A DIFFERENCE WITHOUT DISTINCTION: It’s a school, not a mental-health clinic. “Students with real mental disorders, who need quality care, may be lost in the shuffle.”
PRESIDENT BIDEN SAYS ‘THANK GOD’ TRUMP IS OK AFTER ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT:
President Biden departing the White House commented on the second assassination attempt made on Donald Trump.
Before departing on Marine One, Biden said ‘thank god the president is ok.’
He also said the one thing he wants to make clear is ‘the Secret Service needs more help’ and he thinks ‘Congress should respond to their needs.’
The buck never stops with Sundown Joe, despite the fact, as Jeffrey Blehar writes at the Corner: Everybody Is Terrified of Where This Is Headed and Nobody Will Say It.
I won’t get into the vulgar politics of it all yet — though it would be patrician folly to pretend they’re irrelevant (hey, imagine how Volodymyr Zelensky feels this morning) — because I care far more about the bottom line: This is now the second time in the late stages of this campaign that someone has tried to murder Trump. Give him presidential level Secret Service coverage, now. Screw the regulations. Joe Biden loves giving unlawful executive orders to spend a ton of money — I know this because he forgave $20,000 of my student loans without me even wanting him to — so break the damn bank if you must. Change the rules on the fly, and let someone file a lawsuit if they have to.
But you don’t want a dead presidential candidate on your hands. And if what Richard Blumenthal recently said about the as-yet-unrevealed systemic collapse of the Secret Service is true? (“I think the American people are going to be shocked, astonished and appalled by what we will report to them about the failures by the Secret Service in this assassination attempt on the former President.”) Then you have no idea how deeply any subsequent attack is going to shake the foundation of our entire civil society if it comes to pass. It clearly can now. Get him more coverage, today.
The fact that Joe (or whoever is actually running the country at the moment) is slow-walking this, just as he (they?) slow-walked extra protection for RFK Jr. speaks volumes about what the administration actually thinks about Trump, despite all of the “thank God he’s ok” rhetoric:
VILE: NBC, ABC Tie Second Trump Assassination Attempt to ‘Rhetoric’, and ‘Dogs and Cats.’
NBC’s Lester Holt goes a step further, directly tying the failed shooting attempt to Springfield:
LESTER HOLT: Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. This weekend, there were new bomb threats in that town. Our Maggie Vespa is in Columbus, Ohio with more.
MAGGIE VESPA: Lester, simply put: Springfield, Ohio has been inundated by threats. over the last several days, closing government buildings, schools, hospitals. Today, effectively closing a local university campus after administrators said someone threatened a mass shooting targeting Haitians. This in light of, officials say, a false online conspiracy theory alleging Haitian immigrants in that city are eating people’s pets.
NBC and the Regime Media waste no time in imputing the shooting to “rhetoric” and attempting to blame Trump for the latest, albeit failed, attempt on his life. Once the shooter’s motives become clear, how soon before the Regime Media retract? If they ever do at all?
I wouldn’t hold my breath. Incidentally, NBC cared so little about this latest assassination attempt on Trump that, as Scott Johnson writes, “I learned of the second attempt on Trump’s life yesterday afternoon while watching the 49ers/Vikings game on television and scrolling through X. We have apparently become so habituated to the Trump assassination scenarios that NBC did not see fit to interrupt the proceedings with a breaking news alert. Insofar as the possible murder of Trump is concerned, complacency seems to be the order of the day.”
One assumes that Holt would have been in full mock-Cronkite mode had Routh succeeded, albeit with plenty of references to Trump’s rhetoric. (But with none regarding Biden and Harris’s.)
SHARKS GOTTA SWIM, BATS GOTTA FLY: Here’s Why the Media Will Memory-Hole the Latest Trump Assassination Attempt.
SCIENCE MARCHES ON: Meet the winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes.
BASICALLY, YEAH:
So you’re telling me a sympathetic New York Times interview subject tried to murder Donald Trump today https://t.co/laKphqetML
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) September 16, 2024
Related: “Wind them up and keep winding until something snaps, no conspiracy required.“
JAMES LILEKS: Username: Mattress / PW: Under.
The budget program I chose was slick and attractive. Step one: It needed to know how much lucre I had in the bank, of course, so it could warn me that I was running on fumes when I put down the card for a big-ticket item like a TV or a pound of lean ground beef. It asked for my bank password and account numbers.
I stared at the window on the screen, the cursor blinking expectantly in the text field.
I closed the program, uninstalled it, zero’d out my hard drive, removed the hard drive, smashed with a hammer, ran it through a bandsaw a few times, then buried the pieces in six locations ten miles apart.
Then I changed my bank passwords from 123456 to 1234567. Can’t be too safe.
Yes, I am so paranoid about banking account numbers and passwords that the mere act of asking for them made me back out.
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
THE MODERN STYLE OF PARENTING IS DESIGNED TO ADDRESS THE ANXIETY OF UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE WOMEN: “The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also… not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past.”
HIS MOTIVE MAY NEVER BE KNOWN:
The fact that he tried to assassinate Trump might be their first clue.
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) September 16, 2024
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON — BOTH INDOCTRINATED BY THE DEMOCRAT-MEDIA COMPLEX: Son of Would-Be Trump Assassin Says Father ‘Hates Trump Like Every Reasonable Person Does.’
SOUNDS LIKE ANOTHER GRANDMA THERAPY MAKING A COMEBACK: Saltwater drops in nose might shorten kids’ colds.
GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: How Streaming Killed Quality: The Death of Hype.
Once upon a time, the entire process of going to the movies on a Friday night was an exercise in hype that began the very moment we walked up to the box office. Above our heads were long lightboards displaying all the movies playing at the threater along with showtimes. Those showtimes in blinking red were already sold-out, and so the first emotion we experienced upon arrival at the theater was FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Your pace across the parking lot quickened alongside your anxiety as you scanned the showtimes for one that was still available.
But the truth was that once you got out of the house and actually went to the theater, there was very little chance that you would go home without seeing a movie. And so if your first choice was sold out, often you went to your second or third choice instead. In this way, the hype machine for the biggest releases wound up boosting the fortunes of every other movie released during roughly the same time period. You might have been planning to see “Jurassic Park”, but wound up seeing “Cliffhanger” or “Striking Distance” instead. Back in the day, this phenomenon was what allowed studios to release more than one big movie every summer weekend without worrying if they would make their money back, and it helped to create an all-around robust and profitable movie business as the rising tide lifted everyone’s boats.
And the hype continued long after you bought your ticket. Before the rise of internet pre-sales and assigned seating, we’d wait in lines for the most popular releases. At the appropriate time, we would sprint for the first-come first-served best seats in the house. The dramatic lowering of the lights, the raising of the curtain and the eardrum-rattling Dolby Sound System ad were critical moments of theatricality too. It was all a part of a hype machine that helped make a night out at the movies feel special.
Come to think of it, the only lines I never minded standing in were for the opening night — or better yet, a sneak preview showing — of a yuge movie.
MARK STEYN: They Want Him Dead.
My own line on failed assassinations is that of the IRA taunting Mrs Thatcher after the Brighton bombing: You have to be lucky every time; we only have to be lucky once.
In the last two months, Trump has been lucky twice. There are another two months to go: can he be lucky thrice? Four times?
If I were Trump I wouldn’t want these guys anywhere near me – the official government protection, that is. The law-&-order types on the right have been ballyhooing the quick thinking of one individual agent on the ground – which is fine and dandy, but conveniently absolves the “bureaucracy” of its failure to provide sufficient protection, even after he’s already been shot and an American citizen has died. Trump is one of the comparatively few presidents who has taken a bullet for his country, which is more than even Tim Walz can claim, but nobody who matters is interested. The court eunuchs at ABC News couldn’t be bothered with a question on this summer’s near-assassination, but they did make room for a question about the rental practices of Donald Trump’s father over half-a-century ago.
As for this latest incident, the wife of the Hero of Impeachment One and sister-in-law of a Virginia congressional candidate sums up the general attitude of the Dems:
No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.
— Rachel Vindman 🇺🇸🦅🌻 (@natsechobbyist) September 15, 2024
As Hugh Hewitt responded, “The family of Corey Comperatore would like a word with Rachel Vindman.”
In the old days, I would have cited Ian Fleming in Goldfinger:
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.
But I think my longtime Rush colleague Diana Allocco is closer to the mark:
This is like the plane flying into the second tower. The situation is suddenly totally clear. We are under attack.
— Diana Allocco (@dianamee) September 15, 2024
Just so. When I heard that an airplane had hit the north tower, I spent the next fifteen minutes going about as usual on the assumption that some twin-prop had had an accident. Then the radio announced that another ‘plane had hit the south tower. The Secret Service failures in Florida are as crude and obvious as they were in Pennsylvania which means that, in the words of my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver, this is happening because they want it to happen. They want Trump to die, and they are willing to create the necessary conditions.
At the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney asks, “Will the Left drop their awful ‘stochastic terrorism’ talk now?”
Well, no, not just yet:
Crazy how they act like Trump is the incumbent and not one media outlet calls them out on it.
— GrandeBeto (@GrandeBeto2) September 16, 2024
MARK JUDGE IS SOLICITING DONATIONS FOR HIS NEXT BOOK: Winter Surfing and My Next Book: a 1980s Cultural History. InstaPundit readers were very generous in supporting his last book. I’ve donated.
YEP. Via a friend.
