TO BE FAIR, THE REAL REASON THEY LOST IS THEIR FRAUD MACHINE WASN’T AS OVERWHELMING AS IN 2020. WORK ON THE GROUND HELPED: Bill Maher Delivers One of the Most Devastating Attacks Against the Left Yet.
Archive for 2024
November 17, 2024
November 16, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Happy Saturday!
CHANGE: FAA moves forward with committee to review launch licensing regulations.
We have a much more dynamic industry now, not one based on launching 50-year-old rocket designs over and over.
AN EMPLOYEE OF JEFF BEZOS HAS SOME CALM AND RATIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE PRESIDENT-ELECT:
As Mark Steyn once wrote, regarding a 2006 blogpost by the late Kathy Shaidle:
When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that’s one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:
“I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don’t think I could still live here. I’m not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?”
Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.
And over to you, Jen.
SOON, BEING SKINNY WON’T HAVE SNOB APPEAL: Weight Loss Breakthrough: Scientists Discover Natural Compound That Suppresses Appetite.
STANDING UP TO BIGOTRY:
They're attacking Pete Hegseth for having a Christian motto tattooed on his arm. This is disgusting anti-Christian bigotry from the AP, and the entire organization should be ashamed of itself. https://t.co/tQxuD3RPlx
— JD Vance (@JDVance) November 15, 2024
WOMEN WITH AI BOYFRIENDS, SEX TOYS, ETC.: Stunning and brave and a sign men need to raise their game. Men with AI girlfriends, sex toys, etc.: Losers! Can’t get a real woman, you stupid incel? Honestly, this article isn’t as bad as most.
ONLY FOUR? WHY DOES MICHELIN HATE TEXAS? Four BBQ joints in Texas awarded coveted Michelin stars.
AND THEY DESERVE IT: Salena Zito: Cultural Curators Face Reckoning for Mocking Middle America.
Walking out of the Allegheny County Republican election night event at a local luxury hotel, the young men waiting to valet my car got into a discussion with me about the just-announced election results.
All four men were in their 30s. Two were white, one was Black and the other Hispanic. As I traditionally do, I asked them how they voted, and they all answered with President-elect Donald Trump.
The conservative populist coalition was always right in front of reporters and experts in working-class neighborhoods, suburbs and cities. If only they had not treated those voters as either racists, fascists, misogynists, garbage, stupid or outliers to their narrative of what Americans should look like.
These voters were directly observable. I saw them, heard them and reported that welders, cosmetologists, barbers and mechanics, as well as doctors, lawyers, engineers and architects of all shapes, sizes and colors, would be voting for their communities to thrive and for prosperity, safety and more money in their pocketbooks.
These voters were much more concerned that they would be able not to go into debt if their “check engine” lights went on in their cars than if there was access to abortion. They were more concerned that the school districts in their communities had enough funding, weren’t overcrowded and were serving the future’s potential than if fossil fuels were causing the climate to burn. They were more concerned about the cost of butter than the insane notion that Trump is a fascist.
They grew weary of the national news’ doomsaying or inaccurate reporting. Their pro-Trump votes should provide a reckoning to the industry that lost the trust of a large majority of voters.
Not enough of one yet.
TATTOO YOU: Hegseth Once Flagged as ‘Insider Threat’ Over Christian Tattoo.
Pete Hegseth, who was picked this week by President-elect Donald Trump to be defense secretary, was once flagged by a fellow service member as an “insider threat” over a tattoo of a Christian motto that has been co-opted by white supremacy groups.
Retired Master Sgt. DeRicko Gaither, who was serving as the D.C. Army National Guard’s physical security manager and on its anti-terrorism force protection team in January 2021, shared with The Associated Press an email he sent on Jan. 14, 2021, warning Army brass of Hegseth’s “Deus Vult” tattoo on his inner arm, calling it “disturbing.”
“Deus vult” is a Latin phrase meaning “God wills it.” It was a rallying cry for Christian crusaders in the 11th century.
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance accused the AP of “anti-Christian bigotry.”
“They’re attacking Pete Hegseth for having a Christian motto tattooed on his arm,” Vance said in a post on X Friday. “This is disgusting anti-Christian bigotry from the AP, and the entire organization should be ashamed of itself.”
Naturally, leftists on social media went all-in, once AP flashed the batsignal:
Wasn’t there a variation of this story in 2018? Yes there was: As Michelle Malkin wrote back then: Weapons of Mass Manipulation — The New Yorker’s fact-checker failed to check her own bias and smeared a military hero.
Impressively, [Talia] Lavin speaks four languages (Russian, Hebrew, Ukrainian, and English). Her abdication of ethical reporting standards, however, raises fundamental questions not only about her competence but also about her integrity — not to mention the New Yorker‘s journalistic judgment.
With a single tweet, the New Yorker‘s professional fact-checker smeared Justin Gaertner, a combat-wounded war veteran and computer forensic analyst for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Lavin, the professional fact-checker, rushed to judgment. She abused her platform. Amid the national media hysteria over President Donald Trump’s border-enforcement policies, Lavin derided a photo of Gaertner shared by ICE, which had spotlighted his work rescuing abused children. Scrutinizing his tattoos, she claimed an image on his left elbow was an Iron Cross — a symbol of valor commonly and erroneously linked to Nazis.
The meme spread like social-media tuberculosis: Look! The jackboots at ICE who hate children and families employ a real-life white supremacist.
Only it wasn’t an Iron Cross. It was a Maltese Cross, the symbol of double amputee Gaertner’s platoon in Afghanistan, Titan 2. He lost both legs during an IED-clearing mission and earned the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with Combat Valor and the Purple Heart before joining ICE to combat online child exploitation.
Lavin has had quite a wild ride since:
She resigned from her position [at the New Yorker] in 2018 after mistakenly comparing a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer’s tattoo to an Iron Cross.[10] ICE released a statement via Twitter that the officer’s tattoo is a Titan 2 platoon symbol, accompanied by the Spartan Creed.[11] Lavin had deleted the original tweet before the agency’s statement.[12] In 2018, she was hired as researcher on far-right extremism by Media Matters for America.[13] Within “several months”, she was no longer with Media Matters for America, and was hired at New York University where she was scheduled to teach an undergraduate course in the Fall semester called “Reporting on the Far Right”.[14] The course was canceled by May 30, 2019 when only two people signed up for the course. The Wrap reported her faculty bio had been deleted “around April 20, 2019”.[15]
Still though, she appears to have landed on her feet. Perhaps anticipating Trump’s win last week, Lavin released
Hachette, as Oscar Wilde said in another context, can resist anything except temptation. Just so long as a book does not attract the ire of the politically correct establishment, the firm is all for publishing “challenging” books. (Item: Commandant of Auschwitz, a memoir by Rudolf Hoess, is published by Hachette.) But trespass on that PC orthodoxy and watch the capitulation, leavened by moralistic hand-wringing, begin. As Groucho Marx is supposed to have said, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”
As with Trump’s first term, expect leftists to find many more imaginary Nazis to be under the bed in the coming four years.
MORE: Mark Judge: Vanity Fair, Which Made Me an 80s Brat Packer, Slimes Pete Hegseth.
IT’S SATIRE, BUT IS IT REALLY?
Ok, this is fcking funny 🤣 pic.twitter.com/7QlMaViHBR
— Dr. Clown, PhD (@DrClownPhD) November 15, 2024
THE STIG HITS SPEED BUMP: Judge Blocks The Onion Bid for Alex Jones’s InfoWars to Review Bankruptcy Auction.
READER FAVORITE: Alpha Grillers Instant Read Meat Thermometer for Cooking. #CommissionEarned
VDH ON DJT:
Trump, His Disrupters, and a Chance to Return to Normalcy?
Many of Trump first-round picks share some common themes.
One, many, who were in the past victimized by government bullies and cowardly bureaucratic grandees, or proved sharp critics of the administrative state, are…
— Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) November 16, 2024
ROLL OVER THEM AND LEAVE TREADMARKS: Gun Control Orgs Brace for the Fight Over Concealed Carry Reciprocity.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: HENCKELS Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set with Block. #CommissionEarned
ED MORRISSEY: Netflix Loses In Technical Knock-Out.
If you tried to watch it, and you weren’t able to, because of technical chaos and buffering standstills with the Netflix stream—instead of writing an angry letter to the clearly overburdened IT department, you might want to thank them for sparing your eyeballs, and perhaps, your soul.
As for the rest of us: what were we thinking? Actually, I know what we were thinking: this seems like a terrible idea—58-year-old Mike Tyson entering the ring against a beefy 27-year-old social media imp. Surely I have better things to do with my time.
And yet there we were, watching at an uncommon hour, as many millions surely did, as if history hasn’t repeatedly shown that well-intentioned humans are often capable of making the same, regrettable decision.
Of course they are. They also tune in to watch the Dallas Cowboys at AT&T Stadium in Arlington Texas, the venue for this fight. At least those games have some promise of drama, though. Tyson hasn’t fought in nineteen years prior to last night, which is still more recent than the Cowboys’ last division-round playoff win (1995). What did anyone expect from a fight between a 27-year-old current champion and a long-retired has-been?
A lot, apparently. Enough people tuned into the stream to knock it out, which is more than either boxer could do in the ring. The New York Times reports that “tens of thousands of Netflix users” complained about the stream, but that was just those on Twitter/X. Did anyone see the fight without interruption?
* * * * * * * * *
This lack of infrastructure investment for an event as heavily promoted as this is inexcusable. Netflix shelled out tens of millions for what turned out to be Dancing With the Boxing Stars and did nothing to ensure its subscribers could watch the routines. Will those viewers trust Netflix to provide a stable streaming experience for their next live event after this? Will they trust Netflix to provide a stable streaming experience for any service after this, or start looking for that from their competition?
Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football presentations have seemed much more viewable this year in terms of picture quality. At times last season, they could look like a TV signal being beamed in from the Soviet Union or East Germany. But clearly, the technology for streaming platforms to cover live events is very different and much more complex than that required to host lots of old movies on a server farm.
HIPPIES WITH PYRAMIDS: Study confirms Egyptians drank hallucinogenic cocktails in ancient rituals.
DEI, NOT PHARMA RFK JR’S BIGGEST HHS OBSTACLE: Yes, PHARMA and the public health establishment built by Fauci/NIH are already aiming fusillades at JFK Jr, but, once he’s confirmed and in the Secretary’s office at HHS, the still-growing DEI monster will be waiting for him. Check out my latest PJMedia column.
POST ELECTION, THE NEW YORKER’S DAVID REMNICK IS STILL FLUCKING THE “TRUMP IS A CRYPTO-NAZI” CHICKEN: It Can Happen Here.
The news of Trump’s reëlection did not come with the same shock as his first victory did. Joe Biden, for all his virtues and legislative achievements, was a conspicuously unpopular President. At least fifty-five per cent of voters in the major swing states disapproved of his performance in office. And, by the time Biden came to terms with age and finally stepped aside, Harris, despite all her energy and appealing intelligence, had precious little time to run a campaign that could reasonably outdistance both that dissatisfaction and her opponent. Trapped between her loyalty to Biden and the need to separate herself from him, she played it safe and depended on the electorate’s ability to distinguish between her manifest decency and the dark chaos represented by Trump.
Despite her thrashing of Trump in their one debate, and his campaigning at times as a disturbed man wandering from one rally to the next, the prospects of Harris winning were never more than episodically encouraging. When her aides were asked how they were feeling about the race, they would say, “Nauseously optimistic.” In the end, Trump seems not only to have won the popular vote and all seven battleground states but to have made inroads with Latino and Black men wide enough to shatter the Democratic Party’s long-standing and highly complacent understanding of its demographic advantages.
How you interpret and prioritize the cascade of reasons for Trump’s reëlection is a kind of Rorschach test. It will require a long reckoning before anyone can conclude which of the leading factors—economic anxiety, cultural politics, racism, misogyny, Biden’s decline, Harris’s late start—was determinative. In no way did Trump win a mandate as commanding as, say, Ronald Reagan’s victories over Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and Walter Mondale, in 1984, but, according to an early analysis by the Times, more than ninety per cent of the counties in the country appear to have shifted toward him since the last election. Both major political parties are broken. The Republicans, having given themselves over to a cultish obedience to an authoritarian, are morally broken. The Democrats, having failed to respond convincingly to the economic troubles of working people, are politically broken.
Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that this is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are. Rueful musings like Obama’s in 2016—What if we were wrong?—hardly did the job then and will not suffice now. With self-critical rigor and modesty, the Democrats need to assess how to regain the inclusive kind of coalition that F.D.R. built in the teeth of the Depression or that Robert Kennedy (the father, not the unfortunate son) sought in 1968.
Note Remnick’s title, with its callbacks to both Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, and perhaps unintentionally but ironically, Joe Conason’s 2007 book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. Jonah Goldberg mentioned Conason’s book in passing in 2007’s Liberal Fascism, on the way to discussing the legacy of Lewis’s in depth:
“It can’t happen here.”
Any discussion of American fascism must get around this mossiest of political clichés. Most often used by leftists, it is typically also used sarcastically, as in: “George Bush is a crypto-Nazi racist stooge of the big corporations pursuing imperialist wars on the Third World to please his oil-soaked paymasters, but—yeah, right—‘it can’t happen here’” (though Joe Conason in typically humorless fashion has titled his latest book It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush).
The phrase, of course, comes from Sinclair Lewis’s propagandistic novel of 1935. It Can’t Happen Here tells the story of a fascist takeover of America, and it is, by general agreement, a terrible read, full of cartoonish characters, purple prose, and long canned speeches reminiscent of Soviet theater. But it wasn’t seen that way when it was released. The New Yorker, for example, hailed it as “one of the most important books ever produced in this country…It is so crucial, so passionate, so honest, so vital that only dogmatists, schismatics, and reactionaries will care to pick flaws in it.”
The hero of the dystopian tale is the Vermont newspaperman Doremus Jessup, who describes himself as an “indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal.” The villain, Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, is a charismatic blowhard—modeled on Senator Huey Long—who is elected president in 1936. The plot is complicated, with fascist factions staging coups against an already fascist government, but the basic gist should be very appealing to liberals. A good Vermont liberal (a very different thing, however, from a Howard Dean liberal today), Jessup stages an underground insurrection, loses, flees to Canada, and is about to launch a big counterattack when the book ends.
The title derives from a prediction made by Jessup shortly before the fateful election. Jessup warns a friend that a Windrip victory will bring a “real Fascist dictatorship.”
“Nonsense! Nonsense!” replies his friend. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen…[I]t just can’t happen here in America.”
“The hell it can’t,” Jessup replies. And he is soon proven right.
The phrase and the phobia captured by It Can’t Happen Here have been with us ever since. Most recently, Philip Roth’s Plot Against America offered a better-written version of a similar scenario in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. But Roth’s was just the latest in a long line of books and films that have played on this theme. Hollywood has been particularly keen on the idea that we must be eternally vigilant about the fascist beast lurking in the swamps of the political right.
Peter J. Hasson of the Washington Free Beacon tweeted on Wednesday, “People forget how truly insane 2017 was.” Including when leftists thought that the answers to their woes could be found in George Orwell’s 1984, which they bought en masse that year, but apparently never bothered to read, given their embrace, two years later, of AOC’s apocalyptic environmental ravings, out of which spawned her totalitarian Green Nude Deal proposals.
Followed of course in 2020, by Dr. Fauci’s actual totalitarian shuttering of the economy in March, which the left loved so much that Dr. Fauci action figures and bobblehead dolls can still be found on Amazon. At least they loved it until the spring, when Oceania declared it had never been at war with East Peoria, and decided large gatherings were perfectly fine, as long as they were happening in the name of “social justice.” Or as the Ministry of Truth NPR declared at the beginning of June: “Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. ‘White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,’ they wrote.”
It can happen here – and it did. (Just ask Shelley Luther.)
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF DYSTOPIAN SCIENCE FICTION AND CRANKY POST-ELECTION LEFTY JOURNALISTS: Human composting offers an environmentally friendly alternative to burial and cremation. Here’s how it works.
—CBS News today.
Still though, points for timing:
WATCH THE PRESS BLAME TRUMP FOR THIS: NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Lab cuts 325 jobs after 500 in early round.