Archive for 2024

October 5, 2024

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Scott Jennings Torches CNN Colleagues Calling for ‘Political Restraint’ Over Hurricane Response.

JENNINGS: I lived through Hurricane Katrina in the Bush White House, as I know you lived through it Anderson, covering it, and I don’t recall any restraint by Democrats or the national media coming after George W. Bush and FEMA and every other thing. It was immediately politicized, and, you know, I mean, I well remember it. It’s seared into my brain.

And so now, all these people are out here saying, “We can’t politicize this, we can’t criticize this,” you know, nothing can be said about Biden and Harris here or FEMA or anything else, and I just think, if a Republican were in the White House, and a Republican president were at the beach, and the vice president were raising money with celebrities, I guarantee you somebody would be mad about it.

As Bonchie of Red State adds, “There will be no ‘political restraint’ regarding hurricane responses after what Democrats did to George W. Bush. The Biden administration has made several mistakes that deserve to be called out before voters head to the polls in November. Perhaps one day, Democrats will learn not to set precedents that come back to bite them. Until then it’s game on.”

Flashback: They Shoot Helicopters, Don’t They?

On September 1, 72 hours after Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, the Associated Press news wire flashed a nightmare of a story: “Katrina Evacuation Halted Amid Gunfire…Shots Are Fired at Military Helicopter.”

* * * * * * * *

Like many early horror stories about ultra-violent New Orleans natives, whether in their home city or in far-flung temporary shelters, the A.P. article turned out to be false. Evacuation from the city of New Orleans was never “halted,” according to officials from the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Louisiana National Guard. The only helicopter airlifts stopped were those by a single private company, Acadian Ambulance, from a single location: the Superdome. And Acadian officials, who had one of the only functional communications systems in all of New Orleans during those first days, were taking every opportunity to lobby for a massive military response.

* * * * * * * *

But the basic premise of the article that introduced the New Orleans helicopter sniper to a global audience was dead wrong, just like so many other widely disseminated Katrina nightmares. No 7-year-old rape victim with a slit throat was ever found, even though the atrocity was reported in scores of newspapers. The Convention Center freezer was not stacked with 30 or 40 dead bodies, nor was the Superdome a live-in morgue. (An estimated 10 people died inside the two buildings combined, and only one was slain, according to the best data from National Guard officials at press time.)

Tales of rapes, carjackings, and gang violence by Katrina refugees quickly circulated in such evacuee centers as Baton Rouge, Houston, and Leesville, Louisiana–and were almost as quickly debunked.

From a journalistic point of view, the root causes of the bogus reports were largely the same: The communication breakdown without and especially within New Orleans created an information vacuum in which wild oral rumor thrived. Reporters failed to exercise enough skepticism in passing along secondhand testimony from victims (who often just parroted what they picked up from the rumor mill), and they were far too eager to broadcast as fact apocalyptic statements from government officials–such as Mayor Ray Nagin’s prediction of 10,000 Katrina-related deaths (there were less than 900 in New Orleans at press time) and Police Superintendent Edwin Compass’ reference on The Oprah Winfrey Show to “little babies getting raped”–without factoring in discounts for incompetence and ulterior motives.

Such demagoguery produced results, as Bryan Preston wrote in November of 2006 at Hot Air. “What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses?… The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05? Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history:”

There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.

Years later, then-DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile would later confess at CNN, “Bush came through on Katrina,” but as a wise future mayor would advise his fellow Democrats in the fall of 2008, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2024

CALL ME, DUDE:

Related: Feckless Mayor Pete Gets Caught Flat-Footed When Elon Says ‘Call Me, Dude.’

Posted at 2:40 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Oct 5th, 2024

WELL, HE DOES SPEAK ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE, SO NOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE:

Really looking forward to Hollywood creating a digital recreation of Laurence Harvey to play Walz at the movies:

Run away very quickly if Kamala asks you to play a little solitaire!

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Who Should We Punish for the Fake Science Poisoning our Children’s Futures?

Last October, we reported two women in their early 20s were arrested in London for throwing soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” painting during a protest against fossil fuels.

They both are now looking at over two years of jail time.

Phoebe Plummer, 23, and Anna Holland, 22, from the protest group Just Stop Oil were imprisoned for two years, and 20 months, respectively, according to PA Media.

These are the latest in a string of prison sentences handed to climate activists in the UK for engaging in disruptive protests against the use of fossil fuels. Two relatively new, controversial laws have boosted the powers of police and courts to crack down on protests that are disruptive, even when they are peaceful.

The sentences appeared to do little to deter Just Stop Oil: Hours after they were handed down, three more Just Stop Oil activists threw soup over two other Van Gogh paintings of sunflowers in the Poets and Lovers exhibition at the National Gallery, the same venue the 2022 protests was staged, according to the group.

Those years those girls are going to lose are essential. They are the years to complete an education or gain important work experience for a career. That is the time to make life-long connections and perhaps meet a future spouse. It is also the age at which many women are starting their families.

Because of climate hysteria driven by agenda-driven pseudoscience and pushed by a media that silences critics and ignores counter-evidence, progressive educators are enabled to push this dogma. Cult-like-leaders arise to encourage young people to ruin their futures to protect an Earth that is not in jeopardy from its carbon dioxide levels.

In his recent Substack, Glenn Reynolds asks a question I think should be pondered and answered: Should we criminalize scientific fraud?

As Reynolds notes, the issue is complex. Determining what real science fraud is versus typos and misinterpreting data can be difficult. However, as it relates to climatology, massaging data to produce temperature spikes and ignoring urban heat island effects to support the green energy agenda should have consequences. And, as we have seen with COVID-19, poor science used to promote disastrous rules and regulations isn’t confined to climate.

Reynolds reviewed a wide array of potential options to prevent science fraud. Based on his analysis, perhaps the best place to focus is “revising incentive structures.”

We’ve had a media and intellectual class that have spent well over half a century preaching that doomsday was just a few years away, with no thought given to what this would do to the mental health of kids who grew up being fed eco-apocalypse fables in the 1970s, now frightening their own kids. Which means this image will eventually become reality a decade or two from now:

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2024

HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Hollywood’s big boom has gone bust.

For over a decade, business was booming in Hollywood, with studios battling to catch up to new companies like Netflix and Hulu. But the good times ground to a halt in May 2023, when Hollywood’s writers went on strike.

The strikes lasted multiple months and marked the first time since the 1960s that both writers and actors joined forces – effectively shutting down Hollywood production. But rather than roaring back, in the one year since the strikes ended, production has fizzled.

Projects have been cancelled and production was cut across the city as jobs have dried up, with layoffs at many studios – most recently at Paramount. It had a second round of layoffs this week, as the storied movie company moves to cut 15% of its workforce ahead of a merger with the production company Skydance.

Unemployment in film and TV in the United States was at 12.5% in August, but many think those numbers are actually much higher, because many film workers either do not file for unemployment benefits because they’re not eligible or they’ve exhausted those benefits after months of not working.

As a whole, the number of US productions during the second quarter of 2024 was down about 40% compared to the same period in 2022. Globally, there was a 20% decline over that period, according to ProdPro, which tracks TV and film productions.

That means fewer new movies and binge-worthy shows for us.

But experts say the streaming boom wasn’t sustainable. And studios are trying to figure out how to be profitable in a new world when people don’t pay for cable TV funded by commercials.

“The air has come out of the content bubble,” says Matthew Belloni, the founder of Puck News, which covers the entertainment industry. “Crisis is a good word. I try not to be alarmist, but crisis is what people are feeling.”

As Rob Long in the July/August issue of Commentary: Streaming and Screaming.

I’ve heard the same calculation from writers, directors, even people in talent management: cutbacks, tight belts, more people fighting over fewer opportunities, all signals to get out of the business while there’s still some money in the bank to start over, in some other place, in some other business.

“The interesting thing about battlefield medicine,” a U.S. Army medic who served in Iraq and Afghanistan told me recently, “is that the screaming is always the loudest well after the limb has been removed.”

That makes sense, of course. People tend to make the most noise when it’s too late—when the amputation is complete, when the parent is dead and buried, when the cultural change has taken root, when the next generation has taken over, when you wrote an unspecified number of Mr. Ed’s but haven’t had a meeting in years.

The screaming is always the loudest, in other words, when all hope is lost and whatever you’re screaming about is already permanent.

Which brings us to the entertainment industry in the summer of 2024, where the screaming is just getting started.

I’d do the usual “learn to code” jokes here, but a Hollywood that’s more interested in coding streaming platforms rather than making watchable product is exactly how they’ve wound up in their current predicament. (And as everyone warned them in 2023, maybe going on strike shortly after emerging from a pandemic was not a wise move by an industry that should have been doing everything it could to get butts back into movie theater seats.)

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2024

A PUPPET WITH HER STRINGS CUT: Watch Kamala Harris FREEZE and FALTER When Her Teleprompter Malfunctions.

And just like that, an old friend checks in to tell us he’s still part of the Democrats’ inner circle:

 

 

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2024

CAN’T THEY JUST PAGE HIM? Potential successor to Hezbollah leader Nasrallah has been out of contact following Israeli airstrike.

The potential successor to slain Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has been out of contact since Friday, a Lebanese security source said on Saturday, after an Israeli airstrike that is reported to have targeted him.

In its campaign against the Iran-backed Lebanese group, Israel carried out a large strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs late on Thursday that Axios cited three Israeli officials as saying targeted Hashem Safieddine in an underground bunker.

The Lebanese security source and two other Lebanese security sources said that ongoing Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburb – known as Dahiyeh – since Friday have kept rescue workers from scouring the site of the attack.

Assuming Safieddine has assumed room temperature, the headlines on his obit from the DNC-MSM will be following this pattern:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2024

CHANGE: HAVE WE PASSED PEAK OBESITY?

Posted at 12:11 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Oct 5th, 2024

WELL, GOOD:

Posted at 10:13 am by Glenn Reynolds on Oct 5th, 2024

ON THE GROUND:

Posted at 9:43 am by Glenn Reynolds on Oct 5th, 2024

INCOMPETENCE, OR MALICE?

Related: Hurricane Helene and the Lost Mandate of Heaven.

The default assumption many people hold now is that the regime is composed of criminals, of enemies. It is difficult not to feel this way. It is, indeed, almost foolish not to.

So when the regime fumble’s the response to a disaster, many will assume that it did so deliberately.

Maybe it did, and maybe it didn’t; that so many assume this to be so is the significant fact.

This is a government which has lost the mandate of heaven. It is no longer fit to rule.

There’s a third theme, though, which is in the long run the most significant.

While the state dithered, schemed, bumped into itself, and got in the way, the self-organizing networks of civil society responded immediately, seamlessly, and nimbly. Civilian helicopters were the first to take to the air; relief supplies were collected and distributed by spontaneously organized rescue missions that got to work right away, without waiting for permission, authorization, or orders. . . .

Given what we’ve seen in North Carolina, and elsewhere, how much government do we really need?

And I think many of us know without being told that the answer is: a whole lot less than what we have now.

Flashback: Amerian Dunkirk. “People at Ground Zero, the Manhattan Waterfront, nearby New Jersey, Staten Island and Brooklyn waterfronts, and crews on the numerous vessels repeatedly used the phrases “just amazing,” “everyone cooperated, and “just doing what it took” to describe maritime community responses. Individuals stepped up and took charge of specific functions, and captains and crews from other companies took their direction. . . . Private maritime operators kept their vessels onsite and available until Friday, Day Four, when federal authorities took over.”

“Day Four, when federal authorities took over.”

Posted at 8:58 am by Glenn Reynolds on Oct 5th, 2024
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