Archive for 2024

December 16, 2024

December 15, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 15th, 2024

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOMS:

UPDATE: I mean, I did say earth-shattering kabooms.

Posted at 9:28 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 15th, 2024

LEFTIES: TWITTER SUCKS BECAUSE THERE’S NO MODERATION CONTROLLING VIOLENT NUTS. WE’RE GOING TO BLUESKY!

LEFTIES ON BLUESKY:

Posted at 9:26 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 15th, 2024

SOME PARTS OF THE 21ST CENTURY ARE TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED:

Posted at 9:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 15th, 2024

WATCH: Jill Biden Got Humiliated by a Bunch of Kids, And It Was Awesome.

One could argue that the 2024 election sent the message that Americans have had enough of woke, politically correct nonsense.

This was on full display recently when Jill Biden, during her appearance at the White House’s annual Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots campaign, faced an unexpected rebuke from the most unlikely critics: children.

As the lame duck first lady addressed the audience, she offered the typical leftist-friendly, seasonally generic and “inclusive” greeting of “Happy Holidays.”

But the kids in the crowd weren’t having it. Several shouted back, “Happy Christmas!” and “Merry Christmas,” making it clear they weren’t about to let the holiday’s traditional greeting be swept under the rug.

Forced to respond, Biden corrected herself, saying, “Happy Christmas, yes.”

For someone used to carefully scripted events, it must have been a humbling moment. Being publicly corrected is awkward enough, but when it comes from children—and on something as simple and traditional as saying “Merry Christmas”—it’s hard not to see it as a real blow to your pride. The kids’ reaction wasn’t rude or disrespectful; it was honest, and it reflected the kind of unapologetic pride in tradition that so many Americans feel.

While it’s easy to be full of schadenfreude watching the above clip, I do have a bit of sadness seeing any Trump 2024 voter being humiliated, especially during the holidays Christmas season.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 15th, 2024

DAVID MARCUS: Drone debacle perfect end to Biden’s ‘You don’t need to know’ presidency.

Up in the air. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the Biden administration’s final bit of credibility on fire in the form of giant mysterious drones over New Jersey.

As President Joe Biden limps away from one of the worst presidencies in American history, these unidentified flying objects, whatever they are, serve as a reminder that the general attitude of this White House towards the American people has been, “you don’t need to know that.”

We didn’t need to know that the president of the United States was suffering severe mental decline, we didn’t need to know that he was actually open to pardoning his son Hunter while swearing he never would.

Even back in 2021, when breakthrough COVID cases among the vaccinated that weren’t supposed to exist were popping up all over Washington DC, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked then Press Secretary Jen Psaki how many had been detected at the White House.

“Why do you need that information?” was her incredible reply.

In other words, you don’t need to know.

For four years now, it has been the Biden administration and the Biden administration alone that has deigned to decide what Americans do and do not need to know, and even in the case of the former, half the time these people just seem to be lying.

Setting aside Sundown Joe’s role as John Gill, the Chinese spy balloon debacle absolutely destroyed any credibility his staffers might have had when it comes to playing it straight with the nation over our enemies spying on us. As Steve wrote last year: Confirmed: That Chinese Spy Balloon Made Fools of the Biden Administration.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 15th, 2024

SO MUCH HATE AND BIGOTRY ON THE LEFT:

Related:

Posted at 8:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 15th, 2024

JEFF DUNETZ: The Partition Vote: When The UN Acted As An Agent Of G-D.

Seventy-seven years ago, on the 16th of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar (annually November 29 on the secular). By a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, the United Nations passed Resolution 181, approving the partitioning of British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states (back then, Jews living in the Holy Land were called Palestinians).

It was the Zionist dream. After 1,900 years of prayer, the Jewish nation, the indigenous people of the Holy Land, could again have a sovereign state in its eternal homeland.

Despite what you might have heard, there was never an Arab state called Palestine. The Arabic tradition grew with the establishment of Islam in the early 7th century, approximately 500 years after the Jewish State of Judea was destroyed.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 15th, 2024

RADICAL CHIC — THE BOY BAND ERA: The deranged lusting after the ‘hot assassin.’

The widespread fawning over Luigi Mangione, the man charged with the murder of US healthcare boss Brian Thompson, is as bizarre as it is nauseating. You would have thought that we were beyond victim-blaming by now. But no, a consensus has emerged from ‘progressives’ that Thompson ‘had it coming’, and that his alleged killer can be excused for his apparently good motives. Worse still, he can even be indulged on account of his good looks.

The latter response has been the most deranged aspect of this episode. Just when you thought our society couldn’t become more superficial, witness how this ‘hot assassin’ has been lusted over by legions of pervy half-wits. In other circumstances, the actions of a lone nut armed with a gun and violent fantasies would have had progressive Americans in paroxysms of moral panic, usually about gun laws or the threat posed by the far right. But no. It’s different this time, it seems. This killer meant well, we’re told. And aren’t his looks just to die for, too?

Some have sought to dress up their fawning as politically motivated. The former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz seemingly spoke for many when she said her initial reaction to Thompson’s death was one of ‘joy’. Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian spoke of Thompson as ‘the face of an unfair system.’

* * * * * * * *

In recent days, it has emerged that Mangione is no left-wing radical, but instead seems to be enamoured of America’s lunatic fringe and its icons. ‘He was a violent individual’, he once wrote of the Unabomber, a terrorist who murdered three people and injured 23 others with nail bombs. ‘While these actions tend to be characterised as those of a crazy Luddite, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary’, Mangione added.

Speaking of the Unabomber, perhaps to calm its more bloodthirsty leftist readers, the New York Times has an opinion column titled: The Unabomber’s Influence Is Deeper and More Dangerous Than We Know.

Plenty of young people are alienated from both sides of the political spectrum, and trying to create their own patchwork philosophies. They’ve seen little meaningful reform from either political party in their lifetime, get their information from a wide range of sources of varying reliability and take pride in forming their own opinions.

So what do you say to a young person who has come to admire Mr. Kaczynski? I share many of the same frustrations over the state of the world as those of the college students I teach — how we are bound up in and complicit in horrors across the globe without a viable political alternative to chart a new way forward. How do we maintain our humanity in an inhumane system, where people die unnecessarily every hour on the streets of the richest country in the world?

I did give an answer to the teacher’s question, the best one I could. I told him to tell his students that Mr. Kaczynski was cruel, that he tortured dogs and took pleasure in imagining the suffering of others; to read not only his manifesto, which he polished for public consumption, but also his diaries. There they would see what kind of man he was. I told him that the Unabomber’s philosophy was taken from thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, who never killed anyone, and urged him to teach his students about their work.

I hope my words reached them. And I hope they understood that what Mr. Kaczynski represents is not a new way forward or an answer to the injustices of the modern world, but another turn of the wheel of violence that brought us here.

Finally, Justine Bateman spots the dog that didn’t bark in the wake of Mangione’s coldblooded assassination of an insurance CEO:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 15th, 2024

“FLY WITH ME, LESBIAN SEAGULL!” A Very Merry Tom Wolfe Christmas. In the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Wolfe writes:

My younger self would be appalled by the person I’ve become around the holidays. Gone are the tasteful decorations of my youth—the popcorn garlands, homemade ornaments on Popsicle sticks and a stitched Mark Twain doll in place of a Christmas star at the top of the tree.

Now my house is filled with fluorescent red and green bulbs, Paw Patrol-themed sirens and foot-long candy canes covered in tinsel.

My embrace of Christmas maximalism is fairly recent, but I now see that the seeds of this aesthetic were first planted in 1996, when my father saw the classic holiday film “Beavis & Butt-Head Do America.” My dad, Tom Wolfe, an otherwise polite Richmond gentleman, spent the next six months singing at the top of his lungs, “Fly with me, lesbian seagull!” At 16 I was only just noticing my father’s taste for the absurd.

Although my dad was always proper and impeccably dressed, I grew to see how much he enjoyed the occasional silly flourish. Every July 4 since I was a toddler, he’d attend our town’s parade in his usual summer outfit of a white linen Oxford shirt, white linen suit and white boat shoes, but with a red, white and blue tie—an ensemble that already turned heads. Then, as we stood among the crowds waiting for the procession to begin, he’d press a button that made his tie loudly sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The shock on everyone’s faces sent him into paroxysms of laughter.

Our holiday decorations may have been elegant, but dad always injected some quirkiness. On Christmas mornings, he’d come downstairs in beige slacks and a sweater, then pull up his pant leg to reveal bright green socks with red Christmas trees. After a breakfast of pancakes and bacon—the one day a year he allowed himself this indulgence—he’d cackle at the stocking-stuffer toys that screamed at the press of a button, “Shut up!” or “Whaddaya think you’re doing?!” An unexpected connoisseur of singing pop-up greeting cards, he may have laughed harder at their robotic lyrics than at anything else all year.

After he died in 2018, Christmas got quieter. Gone were the sounds of his wrapping gifts until 4 a.m., his feet shuffling up and down the steps from the tree to his study, where he wrote our names on cards in colorful calligraphy. Gone was his Christmas greeting, “Good morning, Breakfast Clubbers!” He was so hard to shop for that I couldn’t help buying that first year something that I knew he would’ve liked: a set of salt and pepper shakers shaped like white shoes.

Despite his penchant for white suits and faux-spats and the humor throughout his writing, it’s tough to picture Wolfe acting so goofy in person, based on the courtly southern gentleman persona he developed when speaking and doing interviews. Certainly, this side of him doesn’t really come across in the otherwise must-see recent Netflix documentary, Radical Wolfe, and would have been a welcome addition.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 15th, 2024
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