Archive for 2024

December 8, 2024

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH, A FLASHBACK: John Lennon was a secret Republican, former assistant says. “The singer’s former assistant claims in a new documentary that Lennon was a Ronald Reagan fan and a conservative at the time of his death.”

Plus: “I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who’s an old-time communist… He enjoyed really provoking my uncle… Maybe he was being provocative… but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism. . . He was a very different person back in 1979 and ’80 than he’d been when he wrote ‘Imagine.’ By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naivete.”

Well, it was George Harrison who wrote Taxman.

Posted at 11:35 am by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 8th, 2024

HARD TRUTHS FOR GOP FROM CHIP ROY: The Texas Republican reminds GOP colleagues in both chambers of Congress that they were elected to change Washington, D.C., top to bottom. If they don’t, if they continuing merely paying lip service to draining the swamp, then they will soon go the way of the Whigs.

Posted at 8:36 am by Mark Tapscott on Dec 8th, 2024

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY:

Related:

Plus:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 8th, 2024

PRETTY MUCH:

Posted at 8:28 am by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 8th, 2024

MARK JUDGE: Conservatives Can Curate Art for Themselves. “Does Philip Kennicott know what year it is? The Washington Post arts critic just published an essay that seems to have arrived in a time portal from 1986.”

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 8th, 2024

OBAMA WAS A FAILURE. AND HIS INTENTIONS WERE SO BAD THAT IT’S REALLY GOOD THAT HE FAILED.

Posted at 7:54 am by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 8th, 2024

TRUE: The Democrats have become the Party of feminine cruelty. “That a lot of modern left-progressivism is strongly female—even apart from the gender gap in voting—is something many folk have observed. Josh Slocum has drawn attention to how much modern left-progressivism is built around the identifiable archetype of the scold or nag.”

Being a “common scold” who produced disturbance and dissension in a community was a crime at one time.

Related:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 8th, 2024

December 7, 2024

REPORT: Syrian rebels claim Assad regime has fallen after entering Damascus. 

Syrian rebels have declared victory over President Bashar al-Assad’s regime after fighters entered Damascus on Saturday night and the president reportedly fled the country.

Two army officials told Reuters that Assad boarded a plane and left to an unknown destination with rebels closing in on the capital.

Opposition fighters claimed to have liberated the prison of Sednaya, a large military jail on the outskirts of Damascus where the Syrian government detained thousands.

They reported no sign of Assad’s army.

Intense sounds of shooting were heard in the centre of the Damascus, residents reported.

The rebels said on Saturday night that they had gained full control over the key city of Homs after only a day of fighting, leaving Assad’s 24-year rule dangling by a thread.

AP adds: Syrian government appears to have fallen in stunning end to 50-year rule of Assad family.

The Syrian government appeared to have fallen early Sunday in a stunning end to the 50-year rule of the Assad family after a lightning rebel offensive.

The head of a Syrian opposition war monitor said President Bashar Assad had left the country for an undisclosed location, fleeing ahead of insurgents who said they had entered Damascus after a stunning advance across the country.

Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi Jalali said the government was ready to “extend its hand” to the opposition and hand over its functions to a transitional government.

“I am in my house and I have not left, and this is because of my belonging to this country,” Jalili said in a video statement. He said he would go to his office to continue work in the morning and called on Syrian citizens not to deface public property.

He did not address reports that Assad had left the country.

Rami Abdurrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told The Associated Press that Assad took a flight Sunday from Damascus.

State television in Iran, Assad’s main backer in the years of war in Syria, reported that Assad had left the capital. It cited Qatar’s Al Jazeera news network for the information and did not elaborate.

Anna Wintour could not be reached for comment:

 

 

Posted at 11:12 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 7th, 2024

OPEN THREAD: It’s a glamour profession. A blogging obsession.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 7th, 2024

SPACE POLICY IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION:

The incoming Trump administration has offered few statements about its plans for NASA or Defense Department space programs in the two weeks since the election. That includes not announcing an official “agency review team” for NASA, the members of the transition team who come into the agency to learn about its activities and, in some cases, identify problems.

“The job of the teams coming in, first of all, is just to get a sense about where the agencies are,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, who served on the NASA transition team for incoming president George W. Bush. “Part of what you’re trying to do is figure out what are going to be some of the immediate landmines that are going to come up in the first six months. Political people hate surprises.”

An example of that, he noted, was the discovery during the Bush transition that the space station program was $4.8 billion over budget. “So, at 11 o’clock at night, I go over to the OMB team and say, ‘Hi, I’m Scott. I’m from the NASA team. Got a spare $4.8 bil? We’re a little short,’” he recalled during a panel discussion Nov. 12 at the Beyond Earth Symposium in Washington.

A similar landmine may be persistent air leaks in a Russian module of the ISS. At a Nov. 13 meeting of the ISS Advisory Committee, Bob Cabana, the new chair of the committee, noted disagreements between Russian and American officials on the cause and severity of the leaks. “The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the U.S. believes that it’s not safe, but we can’t prove to the Russians’ satisfaction that that’s the case,” Cabana said.

“I certainly believe that NASA is paying a lot of attention to it,” Pace said of those air leaks, “but if I was an incoming transition person, I would want to do my own forensics on that and understand very deeply what was going on because nothing will ratchet to the top of a list faster than anything involving human spaceflight safety.”

Pace said he didn’t see a problem with Musk pursuing Starship launches to Mars. “If you want to put a couple Starships on the surface of Mars, I think that is eminently doable and would be inspiring and interesting,” he said. “I’m not so sure about putting people on those missions because I think a lot of other things would have to happen first.”

Some, though, are worried that this strategy might be done at the expense of the current Artemis lunar exploration campaign.

I’m not so much worried about that as hopeful. Artemis, as it stands now, is mostly a jobs program for contractors, with deadlines being pushed back approximately 12 months every year.

Posted at 9:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 7th, 2024

THE EUROPEAN MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND THE NEXT FOUR YEARS:

It also can’t comprehend that it’s ripping off a 50-year-old National Lampoon cover and hoping no one will notice. Sad!

Or maybe it can’t comprehend that it’s ripping off a beloved 50 year old movie (language warning, needless to say):

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 7th, 2024

ALSO HEZBOLLAH. I’M HEARING THAT ISRAEL IS STRIKING HEZBOLLAH CONVOYS FLEEING TO LEBANON. Iran Bugging Out of Syria.

Posted at 7:54 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 7th, 2024

NOTE TO ALL THE JOURNALISTS WHO ARE CHEERING THE ASSASSINATION OF A HEALTHCARE CEO: Your industry is hated by millions and millions of people too. Just sayin’.

UPDATE:

Posted at 7:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 7th, 2024
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