SUDDEN DEFENESTRATION SYNDROME STRIKES AGAIN IN RUSSIA: Russian ballet dancer Vladimir Shklyarov, outspoken critic of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, falls 60 feet to his death.
Archive for 2024
November 18, 2024
THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Worm species thought to have disappeared has been appearing in photos of pygmy seahorses all along.
AAUP’S JOAN SCOTT FLOPS ‘RACISM’ ATTACK ON FIRE. In the AAUP bigshot’s hit piece on FIRE in today’s Inside Higher Ed, she writes, “An initial motivating force [in FIRE’s founding] was the endorsement of the right of racist expression on the University of Pennsylvania campus. This is a telling choice of where [FIRE’s] political affiliations lie.”
Prof. Scott needs to pick up a book. The “water buffalo affair” at Penn was so deeply disturbing not just because Penn was punishing speech, “racist” or not, but because it was trying to punish a student for “racist” speech that it knew was not even racist. As the Daily Pennsylvanian wrote in a 10-year retrospective:
[L]legally minded individuals were upset by the fact that a student was charged with harassment for calling someone by a term that had no known racial connotations and were disturbed by what they perceived as the University justice system’s mishandling of the case.
That false accusation of racism in 1993 ultimately became FIRE’s “origin story.” Yet 31 years later, one of the AAUP’s leading lights on “academic freedom” parrots only the lie, now repurposed to falsely accuse FIRE instead of a hapless freshman from Long Island. It’s hard to imagine a better reminder of the need for a principled defense of free speech and due process.
CHOCOLATE RATION INCREASED! Such a Deal:
LIBERAL MATH 🤔
Kathy Hochul announces she’s imposing a new $9/day congestion charge for driving in Manhattan.
She claims the tax would have been $15, thus “saving daily commuters $1500 annually.” 🤡pic.twitter.com/gWQexNJQQ3
— The First (@TheFirstonTV) November 16, 2024
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”
FUNNNY, I DON’T FEEL SAD: The Sad Demise of Nancy Pelosi.
AFTER ANOTHER PEACEFUL REVOLUTION: We Are Living in Interesting Times.
GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER:
The roommate of Laken Riley's killer just testified during his trial that they went to the Roosevelt Hotel together in September 2023 and received a taxpayer funded flight to Georgia.
Your government flew an illegal gang member to Georgia with your money — where he then… pic.twitter.com/7plVTnJhy6
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 18, 2024
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
Get the government out of the way as Milei did, and this can happen in the USA, too. https://t.co/dO5dbkqM6Q
— Tara Servatius (@TaraServatius) November 17, 2024
“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.
UP IN SMOKE: A ‘monstrous problem’ created seven years ago haunts California’s weed industry.
Chris Anderson, the owner of Redwood Roots distribution in Humboldt County, can pinpoint the exact moment California’s small farmers were first betrayed. It was in November 2017, two months before legal sales were to begin, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture released rules that shocked the farming community: The state would allow legal pot farms to grow as large as they want.
“That was a monstrous problem,” Anderson told SFGATE. “That is where the collapse of the marketplace and oversupply came from.”
Keeping legal pot farms small was a key promise made to Northern California’s legacy farmers. Proposition 64, the initiative that legalized cannabis, blocked any farm from growing larger than 1 acre for the first five years of legalization. California’s pioneering pot farmers use small plots of land, and were worried they couldn’t compete against mega farms. They wanted five years to get a running start before large farms were legal, but suddenly that head start was taken away.
It’s still unclear why the state erased the 1-acre cap. Large farming interests in the Salinas Valley and Santa Barbara appear to have lobbied for the effort, according to reporting by Leafly News in 2017. A spokesperson for the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture said they changed the rule based on input from unnamed stakeholders.
The DCC said in a statement to SFGATE that Newsom, who was lieutenant governor in 2017, did not have authority over the decision nor did he endorse the change. But Newsom also declined to argue against it when asked by the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)
Judi Nelson, the owner of Sol Spirit Farm in Trinity County, said she supported the law largely because of the acreage cap, and can still remember Newsom making that promise when he visited Humboldt County.
“Newsom came up and stood there with us and said to our faces there was going to be this 1 acre cap,” Nelson said.
To revise and extend P.J. O’Rourke’s classic quote, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. And you can’t survive as a pot grower in California. That’s all you need to know about communism.
BIDEN REALLY MAKING THE MOST OF HIS 63 DAYS LEFT IN OFFICE: Sweden tells citizens to prepare for WAR: Five million households get pamphlets on how to get their home ready for nuclear armageddon… as Biden is accused of trying to start World War Three.
Sweden is sending out five million pamphlets to residents urging them to prepare for the possibility of war, with instructions on how to stockpile food and even seek shelter during a nuclear attack, as fears grow of a conflict between Russia and NATO.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Stockholm has repeatedly urged Swedes to prepare both mentally and logistically for a possibile conflict, citing the worsening security situation in its vicinity.
The booklet ‘If Crisis or War Comes’, sent out by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), contains information about how to prepare for emergencies such as war, natural disasters, cyber attacks and terrorism.
It is an updated version of a pamphlet that Sweden has issued five times since World War II. However, underlining the seriousness of the potential threat, the pamphlet is twice the size of previous years.
‘An insecure world requires preparedness. The military threat to Sweden has increased and we must prepare for the worst – an armed attack,’ its new introduction states.
In one of the more worrying excerpts, which harks back to advice given by governments during the darkest days of the Cold War, it informs people of the risk of nuclear weapons.
‘The global security situation increases the risks that nuclear weapons could be used. In the event of an attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, take cover in the same way as in an air attack,’ the pamphlet instructs readers.
Related: Biden Allows Ukraine to Strike Russia With Long-Range U.S. Missiles.
When the New York Times refers to “Biden,” who exactly are they talking about as leading the country? Watch: Joe Biden wanders through Amazon rainforest after climate change speech.
The end of Harry and the Hendersons https://t.co/aoPTgHQut9
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) November 17, 2024
THE ADVENTURES OF BEING A DUKE COLLEGE REPUBLICAN. “For the PBS event, we had a Duke media administrator watching the interview. I shared my perspectives as a Republican on campus and the fact that people aren’t willing to engage in difficult conversations. He [the administrator] was whispering to a producer, and he said, ‘Make sure you fact-check everything that he said about Duke.’ I called him out and said, “How are you gonna check my personal experiences as a Republican at Duke University?”
One of the reasons I applied for a job at the then seven-person FIRE back in 2003 was that I worked for Duke’s conservative newspaper. We alone were not allowed to use distribution bins. People routinely threw whole stacks of our paper away, to the extent that distribution routinely involved pulling unread stacks of copies out of the recycle bins for the next few days. Duke and other colleges should know they’re making tomorrow’s free speech radicals today.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: FL CFO Sends Warning Letter to Banks Over Activists Trying to Restrict Financing. “Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis issued a warning to major U.S. banks, criticizing a campaign led by more than 100 activist organizations aiming to restrict financial services to meat and dairy businesses.”
“Activist” organizations need some lessons in accountability.
OLD AND COLD: Who will replace JD Vance in the Senate?
The new hotness: Senator and Vice President of the United States: Could J.D. Vance Hold Both Positions at the Same Time?
MAKE THEM PAY:
Geert Wilders is celebrating today's major victory, announcing that Prime Minister Dick Schoof has confirmed the Public Prosecution Service can now prosecute those responsible for the “Jew Hunt” in Amsterdam as terrorists. This means that upon conviction, these jihadis can be… pic.twitter.com/0hG9M7Zw56
— The Jewish Voice (@TJVNEWS) November 17, 2024
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH JUSTINE BATEMAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: The Case of Justine Bateman—And Why Gen X Broke for Trump.
One of the biggest headlines to come out of the recent election is that Gen X—hardly nationalist or populist—broke for Trump. Broke hard—backing him by 10 points. (Boomers, by contrast, split their vote between Trump and Kamala Harris.) Maybe part of it was that we had grown up in a distinctly unpolitical moment, when there were no wars to protest and no civil rights to champion. There was, about us, an all-pervasive don’t-give-a-shit quality, and it was reflected in our Ray-Bans, our irony, our apathy. Mostly, we wanted to be left alone—by our parents, by the sex ed counselors preaching abstinence, by Nancy Reagan telling us to “Just say no.” We were, for the most part, ideologically committed to nothing.
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, Bateman told me when we spoke last week via Zoom, she never gave politics much thought. It was “like one tiny part of you, one grain of sand on a huge beach.”
She said she started to notice a change in the political climate around 2012. Although she initially felt that Black Lives Matter and #MeToo “were important movements,” she concluded that eventually, “there was an overgrowth of people wanting to be part of it, wanting to qualify, and the qualifications for these particular hashtags became wider and wider, and more diluted.”
In other words, it went too far, became too extreme—especially the #MeToo movement, “with people going, ‘Oh, I want to be part of that, but I don’t know that I qualify,’ and then other women talking you into it, saying, ‘No, you have been sexually assaulted, you just repressed it.’ ”
Then came 2020: the pandemic, George Floyd, the riots, the groupthink—“these people necessitating that I think like them, and policing what people say, and what they tweet, and what they like on a social media post.”
She hated the rise of the progressive mob. It was antithetical to everything she believed in. “The only way you get that kind of momentum behind destroying peoples’ lives is when you have a mob mentality,” Bateman said. “I felt like the fact that Trump won cut the momentum of that mob mentality.”
When I asked Bateman why she had “come out,” as it were, on X, why she’d decided to make herself something of a pariah in uber-progressive Hollywood, she said: “Everyone should be able to live their life the way they want to, without infringing on somebody else’s ability to freely live their life the way they want, and that’s the whole thing. You follow that within a society, and you’re golden—you know what I mean? You can’t fail.”
She didn’t want to say whether she’d voted for Trump. “I’m just not playing that game. I don’t want to participate in that, like, ‘Okay, here we go, we can put you in this box.’ ” Nor did she want to say what her brother, the star of the Emmy-winning series Ozark, thought of his sister coming out of the “political closet.”
Immediately after the election, when hardcore leftists suffering from massive cases of disconfirmed expectancy reverted to performative shrieking into their iPhones, Bateman’s droll Hollywood directorial critiques of their poor lighting, sound and compositions were something to behold: #SocialMediaVideoCritique: Justine Bateman Offers HILARIOUS Film Tips to Melting Down TikTokers.
VICTORIA TAFT: Reality Check for Politico, and Media ‘Scandalized’ by Possible Trump Recess Appointments. “The Wall Street Journal called Trump’s request a ‘scheme’ and ‘anti-constitutional.’ That’s an odd turn of phrase for actions that are explicitly in the constitution under the—wait for it—’The Recess Appointment Clause’ and ‘The Appointments Clause.'”
Yeah, well — the Wall Street Journal ain’t what it used to be.
SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD PICK:
This is what Trump's pick for FCC chair, Brendan Carr, was doing a couple of days ago: https://t.co/vnTYvhC84u
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 18, 2024
TRUMP – A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER: Hilarious! Mourning Joe and Mika Kissed Trump’s Ring at Mar-a-Lago on Friday.
During the run-up to the election, Joe, Mika, and their guests went full Olivier in The World at War to describe the horrors of a potential looming Trump administration:
The hosts frequently aired segments about Trump being an authoritarian threat to democracy and spoke about the election in existential terms.
“This is an increasingly desperate person. An increasingly desperate family, who is preparing for civil war,” Scarborough said of Trump last month. He was responding to the “enemy from within” rhetoric Trump used to describe his political opponents.
On election day, historian Jon Meachem appeared on Morning Joe and suggested Trump would ban historians from writing books if he returns to office and likened him to fascist dictators.
But post-election, and staring into flat-lined ratings, and a potential sale by Comcast, and wouldn’t you know it – suddenly, it’s Orange Man Not-So-Bad:
UPDATE: Manhattan waiter quite angry about his favorite cable channel’s new direction:
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What’s POTUS Packing? “Donald Trump was issued with one of the rarest gun licenses available in the United States: An unrestricted concealed carry handgun permit in New York City, well known for its very restrictive gun laws in comparison with many other parts of the US.”
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Legendary Whitetails Men’s Maplewood Hooded Shirt Jacket. #CommissionEarned
UKRAINE WAR: Biden’s Latest Blunder Is an Invitation, Not an Escalation. “Presidentish Joe Biden on Sunday gave the go-ahead for Ukraine to use U.S.-made missiles against targets inside Russia. France and Great Britain quickly followed suit. That’s a dangerous and wrongheaded decision but not for the reason some of my conservative allies believe.”