Archive for 2024

June 15, 2024

BIDEN’S BRIDGE TO NOWHERE: Gaza Pier Gets Moved, But Will Anyone Use It Ever Again?

Periodic reminder the Gaza Pier is a stunt designed to buy votes in Michigan and to undermine Israel by boosting the narrative of a humanitarian crisis. It’s costing hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars and endangering the lives of US servicemembers. There’s not even a coherent defense of it. On the merits the Pier is unnecessary for getting aid into Gaza, because more than enough comes in through land, and would be ineffective even if it was necessary, because it’s a dumb way to move aid. The whole thing is just brazenly an electoral and geopolitical performance act.

Breitbart News got a hold of a video from the pier itself moving in the “rough seas.”

Morgan Murphy wrote in the Dailly Caller at the end of last month that the pier has a definite “Welcome Back, Carter!” feel to it: Joe Biden’s Gaza Pier Washed Away — Along With $320 Million In Taxpayer Dollars

This week President Joe Biden’s pier in Gaza washed away, and along with it, $320 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars.

That a temporary pier built in the open ocean broke up in a storm should not shock anyone who has ever looked at the sea or watched the Weather Channel. Sailors since the days of the Phoenician trireme have used the expression, “any port in a storm.” For that reason, most piers are built in ports, anchorages and harbors.

President Biden’s pier disaster is not unlike President Jimmy Carter’s “Operation Eagle Claw,” the botched attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages in the final months of his presidency. I would say let’s hope this latest military bungle is Biden’s final Jimmy Carter moment, but that’s unfair to the president from Plains, Georgia. President Carter deservedly had higher approval ratings than Biden at this point in his presidency.

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record suggested at the time:

Posted at 4:39 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2024

BEHOLD THE MONSTER YOU CREATED:

Let us also not forget that you supported the Occupy takeovers of yester-decade. You supported the state rotunda takeovers by unionized thugs. You supported the BLM riots. You supported the CHAZ in Seattle and similar secessionist movements in other cities. You supported the attacks on churches and pregnancy centers after the Dobbs ruling. You supported the Stalinist show trial against Brett Kavanaugh, as well as the mob that tried to storm the Supreme Court to prevent his swearing-in.

You supported the attack by James Hodgkinson against Republican congressmen playing baseball. You supported the attack on Rand Paul by his neighbor. You supported the campus attacks against conservative speakers and activists. You supported every random street attack against anyone wearing a MAGA hat.

You supported every act of violence, censorship, social coercion, government repression, and outright insurrection so long as it was seen as beneficial to advancing your agenda and, more importantly, as long as it never affected you personally. These shock troops are disciples of the secular religion that you — yes, you, traditional liberals — have propagated for decades. With your winks and nods, you have taught them that trampling other people’s rights in pursuit of your cause du jour is both permissible and preferable.

And the entire time, you told us that “this is what democracy looks like.”

You are who Lenin accurately referred to as “useful idiots.” But I’m not so sure that you still support what democracy “looks like,” now that it “looks like” it has reached your front yard. When they scream that they want to burn the entire country to the ground, they mean exactly that. The monster that you constructed, animated, fed, riled up, and let roam free to dispatch your political enemies is now peering through your bay window, staring at you with a ravenous look in its eyes that evinces neither “solidary” nor “inclusion” with you.

Frankenstein’s monster always comes home to his castle.

Like the New York Times deigning to report on Rev. Wright on September 24th 2008 and Hunter’s laptop in 2022, the Gray Lady’s Nicholas Kristof is finally noting that there might be an aura of a penumbra of an issue with his fellow leftists’ governing style: What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?

Why does Democratic Party governance seem less effective on the West Coast than on the East Coast?

Sometimes I wonder if the West is less serious about policy than the East and less focused on relying on the most rigorous evidence. There’s some evidence for that. But I’m not sure, for it’s also true that West Coast states have managed to innovate exceptionally well in some domains. Oregon pioneered “death with dignity” through physician-assisted suicide and led the way to vote by mail, an important step for democracy. California has some of the smartest gun safety laws in America, championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. As a result, California has a firearms death rate 40 percent below the national average.

So my take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.

I ran for governor in Oregon two years ago (I was ousted from the ballot by Oregon’s then-secretary of state, who said I didn’t meet the residency requirement). While running, I’d meet groups of liberal donors in Portland, as the city’s problems cast a shadow over all of us; we’d all be wondering nervously if our catalytic converters were in the process of being stolen. The undercurrent in such a liberal gathering would be the failures of Republicans — but Portland was one mess we couldn’t blame on Republicans, because there simply aren’t many Republicans in Portland. This was our liberal mess.

Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.

For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.

“The inability of progressives, particularly in the Portland metro area, to deal with the nitty-gritty of governing and to get something done is just staggering,” Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat who has been representing and championing Portland for more than half a century, told me. “People are much more interested in ideology than in actual results.”

Of course, leftists have been doing an excellent job running Manhattan into the ground since 2014. As Karol Markowicz asks in the New York Post: Protesters are harassing Jews every day in NYC, when will pols protect them?

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2024

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN! Stephen Moore: Biden Housing Scheme Could Ignite Another 2008 Mortgage Crisis.

Politicians in Washington have very short memories, so they repeat the same mistakes over and over.

It was only 17 years ago that the “subprime” mortgage crisis torpedoed the economy and sent the financial markets into the biggest tailspin since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans lost their jobs. One of the matches that lit that bonfire was Freddie Mac and its cousin, Fannie Mae, offering generous, taxpayer-guaranteed mortgage insurance to risky borrowers on loans with low down payments.

It all blew up in the faces of the taxpayers even though the Washington experts said the chances of these mortgages going bust and taxpayers taking a loss was less than one in a thousand.

The biggest taxpayer bailouts went not to the Wall Street banks and investment companies but to Fannie and Freddie.

Here we go again. The latest scheme by the Biden administration is to encourage families to borrow more money by using the equity in their home as collateral. Home equity loans are often very risky. If prices fall, home equity can become negative. There is nearly $18 trillion in home equity, and it’s one of the largest sources of savings and ownership for American families.

Now the Biden administration wants to encourage Americans to borrow even more at a time when credit card and auto debts are at an all-time high. If homes fall in value, families could slip underwater and default — just like during the subprime crisis.

As The Wall Street Journal points out, the other “likely losers” from this scam “would be taxpayers.” The evidence is indisputable from 2008 that the mortgages that ended in default were low-down-payment and low-equity loans.

Of course, if Biden times it right, it blows up early after his re-election, and the press will do their best to bury the result (and/or break out their FDR metaphors and “Depression Lust”). Or it blows up during the second Trump administration, and the press will assign him the blame.

Plus a related “Unexpectedly:” Consumer sentiment unexpectedly falls to lowest level in months.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2024

WEIMER ON WEIMAR: Germany is descending into chaos – and it will take the rest of the eurozone down with it.

It is now little more than a “developing country”. Its stock market is a “junk shop” selling old tat. And its reputation as a place to do business has “never been so bad’. In the middle of the UK’s dismal election campaign, it would be easy to imagine that Britain was the country under discussion.

But Theodor Weimer, the head of the once mighty Deutsche Börse, was describing his native Germany. And he was absolutely right. After a series of catastrophic policy mistakes by centrist leaders, there is no way back for Germany – and its decline is only going to accelerate from here.

In a speech to Bavarian business leaders delivered back in April, but only made public when it was posted on YouTube this week, Weimer certainly didn’t mince his words. A country that prided itself on its efficiency, that saw itself as the engine of Europe and boasted of its formidable export machine was, as he put it, slipping to third world status.

The coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz was, he argued, a “catastrophe”, Germany was “economically on the way to becoming a developing country” and “one thing is clear: our reputation in the world has never been so bad”.

No, it was much worse before — as Glenn has insta-quipped, “We have the worst political class in our history. The Germans, at least, can say that’s not true for them. . . .”

Speaking of which, as seen in the Power Line Week in Pictures:

(Via Small Dead Animals, under the well-deserved headline, “Schadenfreude.”)

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2024

ANALYSIS: ABSOLUTELY TRUE. America Thrives at the Interstate Exit. Buc-ee’s is about as pure a distillation of American capitalism as there has ever been.

Every manner of commercial snack known to man is sold at Buc-ee’s, from Funyuns to Snickers bars. But that isn’t significant.

What is significant is the Beaver Nuggets, perhaps the world’s best caramel corn sold in embarrassingly large bags. Or the more than 20 different flavors of beef jerky, available in delicatessen-style displays along the back wall (the Mesquite Peppered jerky and the Cherry Maple jerky were the two I fell in love with).

But the Buc-ee’s brisket tacos might just be the greatest convenience-store food ever invented.

All of the employees smile, hustle, and joke with the customers. There’s a Black Friday rush atmosphere to the place, and yet there is no line at the checkout counters, every single one of which is manned by a cashier who works efficiently and enthusiastically — and for a reason: Buc-ee’s pays their employees exceptionally well. A sign at the gas pumps advertises $18-an-hour wages for the lowest positions, up to $200,000 per year or more for a store manager.

It’s a capitalistic shangri-la. No better shrine to productive, happy prosperity has ever graced our beautiful planet. It’s a place that utterly trumps, somewhat hilariously so, all of the grifting and griping of the American Left.

There are no social problems at Buc-ee’s. Beef jerky knows no race, and brisket tacos know no gender. Beaver nuggets and fried pecans have no politics. And if you believe any of this harms the planet, we laugh at your derangement.

Greta Thunberg might just be fed to the beaver if she were ever to complain about a Buc-ee’s.

It might sound stupid to say it: this is about as close to heaven as roadside commerce can get.

Flashback: Episode Five of the Babylon Bee’s series from 2022, on a California couple moving to Texas, where Steve and Timpani discover that you can immanentize the eschaton:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2024

DON’T SUGARCOAT IT FORBES, TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL: The Acolyte Episode 3 Review: One Of The Most Disappointing Star Wars Episodes Ever Made.

I have no words.

I do have a theory, however. Imposters have taken over Star Wars (and lots of other popular genre properties, from The Witcher to True Detective). Maybe they’re fans, maybe they’re not but they’re certainly masquerading as good storytellers. And they think they know best, making whatever changes they see fit to “make it their own”.

As Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin wrote recently:

Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.” It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it. “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own.

They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.

Amen, brother.

I’d say that Star Wars deserves better stewards, but George Lucas didn’t do a very good job of that himself in the later years. In fact, The Acolyte keeps reminding me of the prequel trilogy in all the worst ways.

The Critical Drinker adds that with episode three, “I’m Done And So Is Star Wars:”

The Acolyte represents their ultimate vision for this franchise. It’s the perfect distillation of everything Disney and the so-called creatives that Lucasfilm want to inject into George Lucas’s vision and they’re not going to stop. Kathleen Kennedy recently bemoaned all the criticism that she and women like Leslye Headland have taken for their creative decisions, because the predominantly male fan base just can’t seem to recognize their genius.

Well, congratulations Kathy! Because that seems to be a problem that you’ve gradually solved with every new show and movie that you’ve produced: If there’s no fans left at all, then there’s no toxic male fans left either, genius! So in that respect at least I guess you’ve kind of won by default. Congratulations — Star Wars is all yours now, and this here is your prize: an empire of dust, a franchise in ruins, and really I hope it was all worth it. I hope it was worth the billions of dollars you’ve blown on failed projects over the years. I hope it was worth provoking the contempt, and finally the apathy of millions of Star Wars fans that have just chosen to walk away. I hope it was worth it to have a legacy of absolute failure.

Near the end of Julie Salamon’s brilliant 1991 book, The Devil’s Candy, Brian DePalma and others involved in the stillborn movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s epochal 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, begin to realize that they’ve produced a dog, and no amount PR hype or post-production massaging in the editing bay is going to save them once the film is released to the general public:

It was common practice for Hollywood studios to hold a special preview just for “the community” shortly before a movie opened. These “industry screenings” were frequently followed by a party and had the appearance of a gala. A giant searchlight outside the theater sent flashes into the sky, and paparazzi would wait outside in hopes of spotting a major celebrity, or a minor one. How well the evening would pay off for the paparazzi depended on the buzz preceding a picture – the early word-of-mouth. If the word was good, there would be plenty of high-level studio executives, major dealmakers, and stars to choose from. However, when the buzz was bad, the “industry” was suddenly populated by secretaries, junior agents, and minor actors – people who’d been handed invitations by their bosses, and people who were happy to be invited anywhere at all.

* * * * * * * *

Two days before the party it had hit De Palma for the first time: he might have directed a disaster.

Exit question: Do those who assembled The Acolyte have similar feelings, or as the quote above from George R.R. Martin implies, do they blame the public for not understanding the breadth of their sheer genius and talent?

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2024

VDH: The Left Knows Leftism Doesn’t Work.

All of the left’s once-grandiose ideas of packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, admitting two new states to win four more liberal senators, and destroying the Electoral College have little public support and will go nowhere. Corporations like Disney, Target, and Anheuser-Busch have all begun backtracking on their money-losing, market-share-eroding woke/DEI agendas.

Universities are terrified that their endowment income is either static or in decline, given a rising drop-off in public and alumni giving. They know their race-based, non-meritocratic admissions and hiring are increasingly destroying their brand names. To accommodate their new non-meritocratic student bodies, they have variously inflated their grades to the point of parody, watered down work requirements, or introduced gut courses—and as a result, they are quickly losing their once-coveted prestige. Some campuses are already reinstating the SAT and ACT requirements that were thrown out in 2020-21 in the hysteria that followed the death of George Floyd. Harvard and Stanford aren’t boasting that the erasure of the SAT created a more competitive student body and raised standards to new levels.

The twin ideas of foreign-funded Middle-Eastern-studies centers and of admitting tens of thousands of affluent, full-tuition-paying Middle-Eastern students led to institutionalized anti-Semitism on campus and eliminationist rhetoric right out the old Klan playbook. The appeasement by university presidencies only whets the appetites of those who unlawfully occupy, vandalize, deface, and disrupt. Their pro-terrorist chants and emblems are bleeding the universities of billions of dollars in lost donations.

In short, the policies that the left has given us over the last years—hyperinflation, spiking staple and gas prices, racial and tribal chauvinism, dangerous streets, an emasculated and politicized military, and wars abroad—did not work, and are now being masked to retain power, put on hold, or even reversed.

Way back during the 2004 election, Ann Coulter quipped that “both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.”

In January of 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle’s editors were smart enough (in a Machiavellian sense) to protect Obama when, as a candidate, in order to get to Hillary’s left, he openly proposed bankrupting coal plants. They understood their role as Democratic party activists with bylines meant burying Obama’s Kinsley-style gaffe rather than making it the lead headline on the front page.

But Obama opened the floodgates, and their hatred of Trump gave the left the excuse to really let their freak flags fly during the last eight years. (No wonder they’re hoping we forget the events of 2020.) During the 2020 election cycle, Biden’s handlers simultaneously tried to pose him as the last moderate left in the Democratic party, while allowing him to openly boast of the chaos his administration would cause to energy and immigration if he were elected.

Once that reality ensued, as with the election results in Europe last week, the American left know that the clock may be running down on their current obsessions – but it’s a very long way back these days if they want to rhetorically pivot to the center once again.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2024

WHY ARE LEFTIST MONOPOLIES SUCH CESSPITS OF ANTISEMITISM? The anti-Semitism row rocking Hollywood.

Fast-forward almost three years and the museum’s attempt to repair things has, if anything, made it worse. The exhibition, in a small, dimly-lit corner on the third floor, opened last month and its framing has fuelled accusations of anti-Semitism at a time of heightened sensitivity.

Jack Warner is described as “brash and irreverent” and a “womaniser” who was “frugal” when he built his studio with his brothers; Harry Cohn, the co-founder of Columbia Pictures, is labelled a “tyrant and predator” who “modelled his office after Italian dictator Benito Mussolini”; Carl Laemmle of Universal is noted for his “nepotism”.

Al Jolson, the Lithuanian-born actor, starred in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, which was notable for being the first major release to have sound synchronised with its pictures. Yet along with this brief description, the museum makes a point of the film’s use of blackface, which made it guilty of “perpetuating a century-long tradition in the United States that caricatures and dehumanises black people”.

Thus began yet another culture war in Tinseltown. Los Angeles magazine says that the exhibition “relegated Hollywood’s Jewish founders to the ghetto” and this week a group of more than 300 Hollywood luminaries – including Friends star David Schwimmer, TV writer Amy Sherman-Palladino and Lawrence Bender, Quentin Tarantino’s producer — circulated an open letter under the banner of United Jewish Writers to criticise the use of anti-Semitic tropes.

“Using the words ‘tyrant’, ‘oppressive’, ‘womaniser’, ‘predator’, ‘offensive’, ‘racial oppression’, ‘nepotism’, and ‘prejudices’, it is the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate,” the letter reads. “While we acknowledge the value in confronting Hollywood’s problematic past, the despicable double standard of the Jewish Founders exhibit, blaming only the Jews for that problematic past, is unacceptable and, whether intentional or not, anti-Semitic.” The group also urged the museum to honour the Jewish men “with the same respect and enthusiasm granted to those celebrated throughout the rest of the museum”.

* * * * * * * * *

Neal Gabler, the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, said: “You have to understand that Hollywood in its very inception was formed out of a fear that its founders – and those who maintained the industry – would be identified as Jews.”

In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Gabler’s excellent 1989 book,  the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the American public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars.

Today, thanks to the hangover from the covid lockdowns, and a by-and-large unwatchable product produced by Hollywood, that number is far lower. It’s an industry that apparently despises its founding fathers — but then, the left, driven by what Roger Scruton called “the culture of repudiation,” hates the real founding fathers as well. And as we’ve seen, even before the riots of 2020, controlling how the past is viewed is a huge part of the “Woke” project on both coasts.

Or to put it another way:

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2024
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