Archive for 2024

RADICAL CHIC: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s wife reportedly spotted with $32,000 Birkin bag as she went into hiding.

Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar’s wife was reportedly spotted fleeing into a Gaza tunnel with a $32,000 Birkin bag hours before the Oct. 7 massacre, Israeli officials claimed.

Sinwar, 61, and his wife Abu Zamar — holding what appears to be a super lux Hermes bag — can be seen helping their two young sons through the narrow bunker hallway at 10:45 p.m. on Oct. 6, 2023, timestamped footage released by the Israel Defense Forces on Saturday shows.

“While Gaza residents have no money for food, we see many examples of Yahya Sinwar and his wife’s special love for money,” IDF Spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote on X, alongside a screenshot of the woman holding what appeared to be a pricey black leather purse.

“Did Sinwar’s wife enter the tunnel with him on October 6 carrying a Birkin bag estimated to cost around $32,000?!” Adraee wrote.

The Birkin is beloved by celebrities and billionaires — and everyone from the Kardashians to Melania Trump have been spotted out and about with similar black leather handbags.

The bag is worth $32,000, but…:

OUCH: There are writers who try to see something clearly, and then to show it to other people, and there are writers who are…Anne Applebaum.

The prevailing model in American “mainstream” media is to go plow the same row again and again and again, because plowing where everybody else has already plowed is, I don’t know, safe? Consensus journalism, the 9,746th journalist ringing your doorbell to announce that Trump is a lot like Adolf Hitler. Looking wonderfully proud of themselves, like they just shat a cookie. All day, every day, all messages are the same message. Idea for a new movie: Groundhog Minute.

And I’m just done with it. David Brooks, Tom Nichols, William Kristol, and Peggy Noonan have all written the most amazingly refutable piles of nonsense in the last few days, being professionals at the task, and I kept asking out loud if David Brooks hears himself, because every paragraph clashes and refutes all the other paragraphs around it. But no.

Well, that’s journalism today.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: Rachel Levine Must Resign. “The discovery from a lawsuit against the State of Alabama over its ban on the medical sex reassignment of children has left me reeling. It shows a staggering level of bad faith from the transqueer lobby, and, also, from Rachel Levine — the Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS. . . . Most gays have no idea what’s actually going on — by design. The reason GLAAD tries to intimidate reporters on this subject is because they know that the truth would devastate their arguments. They can count on the gay press to be silent. But the MSM rattles them. Levine should resign. She intervened in a medical process for entirely political reasons, putting children at risk, destroying all safeguards for them. So should the heads of every so-called gay group that have pushed and lied about ‘gender-affirming care.’ Marci Bowers (she was replaced on October 1) is another matter. It seems to me that a doctor who privately doubts if her child patients can give meaningful consent and operates on them anyway is not a doctor, but a sociopath.”

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE:  On Account of a Dame.


Welcome to the New Jazz Age!

It’s the Roaring Twenties all over again — well — the 2120’s, that is. Where New York City has reverted to its Jazz Age roots of two centuries before. What’s missing? Prohibition, and gun control. What’s not missing? Tough guys, and the dames who (sometimes) love them. Gin joints. Speakeasies. Dance halls. The Social Register is still a thing, and the Beautiful People litter the society pages of the local hypernews sites.

Enter a typical gumshoe private detective — a member of that high society himself, yet a man who left society long ago for other pursuits. And his latest client, a rich young woman of leisure, who needs her new husband followed.

Throw in the recently-crowned queen of one of Chinatown’s tongs, a beautiful investment wizard from upstate, and a hundred million dollars in assets, and suddenly it’s all on account of a dame.

MEN’S DEEDS LIVE AFTER THEM:   Gone and Done.