I WOULDN’T BE SURPRISED, BUT DICTATORSHIPS ARE OFTEN ABLE TO STUMBLE ALONG WELL PAST THE POINT WHERE THEY OUGHT TO COLLAPSE: Putin’s regime may be closer to a Soviet collapse than we think.
Archive for 2024
December 13, 2024
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: The sun may spit out giant solar flares more often than we thought: A survey of more than 56,000 sun-like stars reveals that “superflares” that could play havoc with electronics on Earth may happen every 100 to 200 years and the last big one to hit us was in 1859.
“BLUEGOISIE.” Heh.
The Bluegeoisie can never come back to the center.
Everyone is now fully aware of how contemptuous, how bereft of common sense, how dishonest and incompetent they are. It won't work.
They can never build "their own Joe Rogan." The notion is ridiculous–not just because it…
— Clifton Duncan (@cliftonaduncan) December 4, 2024
SYRIA GOES OUT OF THE FRYING PAN…
Female judges now excluded from courts in Syria.
The first step taken by Syria's new justice minister, Shadi Alwaisi, is to decree that female judges will be banned from courts that are now reserved exclusively for men. All pending cases handled by women will have to be… pic.twitter.com/D0VAZxmcGn
— Daniel Pawłowski (@pavvlovvsky13) December 12, 2024
…and into the sharia fire.
SHE AND MITCH MCCONNELL SHOULD JUST RETIRE: Nancy Pelosi hospitalized after she ‘sustained an injury’ from fall on official trip to Luxembourg.
JOHN NOLTE: Lesley Stahl, Van Jones ‘Extremely Worried’ About Death of Corporate Media Influence.
“I’m extremely worried about the press. I despair. I worry greatly. We’re at the point where if [sic] the POTUS is going to say ‘Legacy media is dead.’ I’m very dark about it.”
Eat it, sweetheart.
If the knowledge that Lesley Stahl is despairing and in a dark place does not make you want to stand up and cheer, you must be a feminist.
You see, throughout the 2024 campaign, the corporate media were Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. They didn’t know they were dead. Being ignorant of their own death, they played all their usual games assuming it would drag Kamala Harris — Celebrity Obama 2.0 — over the finish line. Stahl’s own 60 Minutes went so far as to dishonestly edit Kamala’s interview to make her sound smart. Van Jones’ own CNN raged on and on about Trump’s “Nazi rally” at Madison Square Garden and spread the hoax about Trump calling for Liz Cheney’s execution. Then…
The “too big to rig” results came in on Election Night and it finally hit them: We’re dead. No one believes us anymore. Our influence is gone. We can’t rig elections anymore with our lies and hoaxes. Despair! Despair! Despair!
Donald Trump visiting podcast after podcast, doing Joe Rogan, sitting down for a handful of Breitbart News interviews, is as big a sea change in politics as when John F. Kennedy embraced television in 1960. Radio was declared dead. TV was king.
Well, now, the legacy media is dead and alternative media is king.
But there is one important difference between 1960 and 2025, and that’s this: The 1960 switch was based on technology, the difference in what radio and TV offered. The 2025 switch is based on the legacy media’s credibility implosion, in other words…
Click over for a massive (and very likely incomplete) list of hoaxes “reported” by the DNC-MSM over the past decade. As Tim Graham writes at NewsBusters: Journalists Deserve All the Angst That Trump’s Win Brings.
Longtime CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl engaged in conversation at the 92nd Street Y in New York City with columnist Peggy Noonan, and they both agreed the legacy media are “fraying” – for 20 years, Noonan insisted.
“I’m extremely worried about the press,” Stahl said, as she dragged out her usual story about Trump and press criticism. “I once asked Donald Trump why do you keep pounding on the press? This was right after he won, in 2016….It’s kinda boring, you say the same thing over and over, and you won! It’s time to drop it!”
This is a bizarre demand, since no one in the press announced, “well, Trump won, so it’s kind of boring to keep criticizing him, saying the same thing over and over.”
Stahl said she asked why he would do it, and Trump replied: “I do it, and I repeat it, because the more I do that, the less people are going to believe you when you say negative things about me….And it’s happened!” The media’s public trust ratings are the worst they’ve ever been in the television era.
This alleged Trump comment did not air on CBS, although Stahl drags out the anecdote like it’s nefarious. It’s the exact opposite of the Stahl shtick — if I attack Trump, and I repeat it, it means the more I do it, the less people are going to believe Trump when he attacks the press. But he’s won that battle.
“I despair, seriously. I worry greatly,” Stahl said. “We’re at a point where if the President of the United States is going to say ‘Legacy media is dead’…It is, kind of, sort of hobbling right now. And I don’t know how it recovers. I’m very dark about it.”
Noonan made the mistake of associating an unpopular press with the end of freedom of the press, which is not the same thing. The First Amendment doesn’t automatically grant sainthood to the press. You’re allowed to think the press has performed terribly without ending the First Amendment. That’s freedom of speech.
Noonan didn’t push back on Stahl. She could ask if CBS and 60 Minutes ever did anything wrong that undermined trust in the media. Dan Rather offered the nation phony documents about George W. Bush on 60 Minutes II.
Lesley Stahl is infamous among Republicans for lecturing Trump in 2020 that you could not report on the Hunter Biden laptop because it could not be verified. CBS reporter Catherine Herridge verified the laptop in 2022, and she’s no longer at CBS.
RedState’s Nick Arama adds: Megyn Kelly Completely Wrecks Lesley Stahl After Her Whining About Legacy Media Dying.
Megyn Kelly explains to Leslie Stahl (of CBS 60 Minutes) how they can recover their credibility.
— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) December 13, 2024
“Should we go over them?” she continued. Then she proceeded to completely wreck Stahl.
“Like maybe don’t say the laptop can’t be verified when it can,” she said, referring to Stahl’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop. How are you a journalist if you don’t want to follow up on that story?
“And then when your own organization verifies it, come out and do a mea culpa and admit you embarrassed yourself.”
Maybe don’t stealth edit the presidential candidate interview with ’60 Minutes’ — your flagship program that you’re an anchor of — without telling us, and then when it becomes a controversy, refuse to release the transcript because you’re more interested in running cover for the Dems than you are in honest reporting.
“60 Minutes” edited the interview that they did with Kamala Harris, reducing her word salad response. And frankly we don’t know what else they may have edited since they refused to release a transcript or the full video of the interview. Which tends to make you think they might be hiding even more nonsense.
Maybe don’t host a vice-presidential debate where you fact-check only one side. And then when your fact-check gets fact-checked by the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican side, you cut his mic.
Just a few thoughts off the top of my head what you can do about it.
Now, that’s a complete evisceration if ever there was one. That’s reality, and Stahl should listen.
But she won’t because that might actually require putting aside their bias and doing a little self-examination.
Since they’re absolutely incapable of self-examination, they’d be far better off in admitting their biases — the idea of an “objective” media is a fossil left over from the earliest days of three radio and later TV networks. Now there is an unending firehose of media to choose from. No wonder voters chose the media that they thought best reflected their interests — and equally important, didn’t condescend to them.
SEXY, SEXY HOMO SAPIENS: Neanderthal-human interbreeding lasted 7,000 years, new study reveals.
PLANETS I PROMISED, PLANETS YOU GET. LOTS AND LOTS OF PLANETS [VIP]:Sky Candy and the Planets: It’s Complicated.
VDH: The evaporation of the Obama mystique.
Former President Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Joe Biden nomination — and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years.
As such he and his coterie proved the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history.
Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere.
Obama and fellow Democratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard left but likely sure-loser candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.
The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia.
Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration. Or as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term — “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in.”
The Obamaites then got their wish for four years of enacted hard-left directives that they could only have dreamed of while in actual power.
But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation —hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/Woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare, and weaponization of the government.
And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything — the presidency, the House, and the Senate.
An inert Biden is departing office with a 36 percent favorability rating in a recent Emerson poll. His Democratic nominee replacement, losing presidential candidate Vice President Harris, also has virtually vacated her office with 40 days left of her tenure.
Failed candidate Harris has been roundly faulted by staffers and donors for blowing through some $2 billion in assorted 2024 campaign money.
How bad was her campaign? At least one leftist Website is asking:
WHEN TRUST IS FORFEITED: CDC: Only 37% of U.S. kids have gotten flu shots.
VIDEO: Diversity != Strength. “The ritual cliche invoked by the social justice left is that ‘diversity is strength.’ But as the Irish mother in the video notes, importing waves of unassimilated foreigners into local communities doesn’t strengthen them at all.”
GET IN SHAPE: New Balance Men’s 608 V5 Casual Comfort Cross Trainer. #CommissionEarned
IT’S INHERENT: DEI Still Has An Anti-Semitism Problem.
NEVER CHANGE, ATLANTIC: Political Violence Is Kinda Mainstream, Ackshully.
HEH: Strange New Respect.
Strange new respect, or just political brown-nosing? Is there any difference between the two?
For the past two-plus years, ever since he raised the potential purchase of Twitter, the Left has demonized Elon Musk nearly non-stop. That hit a fever pitch almost two years ago to the day when Musk began to release the Twitter Files and exposed government censorship on social media and Big Tech platforms, and only increased when Musk began supporting Donald Trump. The Left has painted him as All That Is Wrong in Politics and Culture for two solid years.
How has that worked out for them? Badly enough that they’re now trying to kiss and make up, Politico reports today. And where that kiss is aimed, you can probably guess.
Heh.
KAMALA HARRIS IS FOR THEY/THEM. PRESIDENT TRUMP IS FOR YOU:
Flashback to 2017, when the elite leftists at the New Yorker were angry after voters chose a different direction for the country rather than four more years of leftist elitism:
That cartoon looked particularly silly after 2020, as “the smug pilots” were all over the place in response to Covid, to the point of flitting back and forth between not recommending masks, demanding everyone be masked up at all times, and then locking down the entire country — except if you’re peacefully looting and tearing down statues.*
And flashback to last month, and Axios’ Jim Vandehei having an aneurysm over Elon Musk telling Twitter users “You are the media now!” Axios CEO Beclowns Himself Defending Journalisming.
The best part of this sanctimonious rant is when he uses Qatari-funded Al Jazeera as an exemplar of a media outlet that does real truth-seeking reporting without fear or favor. https://t.co/AIeOH5Ga9W
— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) November 25, 2024
It didn’t help his case very much that his Website’s product soon afterwards was this piece, rivaling Woodward and Bernstein stalking Richard Nixon, or Edward R. Murrow reporting in London during the blitz: Why “fart walks” after meals are good for you, experts say.
Democrats long for about 1965, when LBJ believed he could “run the country” through a series of bureaucracies in DC Mies van der Rohe office blocks and the media consisted of three TV networks, news wire services, and a handful of newspapers per big city. But that world doesn’t exist anymore.
* Ultimate Irony: Neil de Grasse Tyson Told CNN Yesterday That You Should Only Trust ‘Experts.’
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: ‘Multilevel classes’ aren’t equitable or excellent, say teachers.
Mixing high-achieving, average and low-achieving students in the same class was a noble experiment, writes Ryan Normandin, a high school math and physics teacher in Newton, Massachusetts. But it’s not working in math, science and foreign language classes. Everyone learns less, he writes. The students who need the most support are doing the worst.
Tracking isn’t perfect, he writes. It can be hard for students to move up a level. Students tend to segregate by achievement and by race and ethnicity: Black, Hispanic and low-income students disproportionately take lower-level classes.
Multilevel classes in English and history had some success, writes Normandin. Students opted in. Teachers got support. Then administrators expanded the model to math, science and world languages, subjects that build on previous learning.
After three years, nearly all teachers at Newton South High, where he chairs the Faculty Council, say the model is failing students and exhausting teachers.
The only people who seem truly surprised by outcomes like this one are the experts.
BIDENFLATION:
🚨 INFLATION IS BACK UP 🚨
Wonder why?
The Fed has worked to quietly pump another $650 billion newly created dollars into the market over the last year.
This artificially gave the economy a buzz before the election, but now comes the inflation hangover.
As the money supply… pic.twitter.com/EzYuswALvL
— Richard A. Stern (@RichAStern) December 13, 2024
Plus this gem from Peter St. Onge in response: “The more the Fed prints, the greedier the grocers get.”
Flashback: Joe Biden, Milton Friedman, and the Tyranny of Tiny Minds.
Of all the stupid, petty, bigoted things Presidentish Biden ever sputtered, none bothers me so much as “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”
In April of last year, when Biden’s $5 trillion “Build Back Better” scheme was first percolating in the dark, shriveled mass that was once his frontal lobe, the then-candidate told POLITICO he wanted “a new stimulus ‘a hell of a lot bigger’ than $2 trillion.”
“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” a reportedly “fiery” Biden told POLITICO’s Michael Grunwald.
It wasn’t Biden’s first run-in with the libertarian-leaning, Nobel Prize-winning economist.
That was 2021. Biden spent his entire term butting heads with the late Friedman — and losing.
Blame it on the grocers, kulaks, hoarders, or the Jews, but in the end, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”
IT MIGHT BE THE ONLY CARD THEY HAVE LEFT TO PLAY: Iran’s Next Move Is Playing the Nuclear Card.
PAYBACK: Top Russian Cruise Missile Engineer Gunned Down Near Moscow.
Mikhail Shatsky was found dead in the Kuzminki forest park in the suburb of Kotelniki southeast of Moscow this week.
Shatsky was deputy chief of design and head of software at the Moscow Experimental Design Bureau Mars, which develops automatic control and navigation systems for satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. Mars is part of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom.
Exiled opposition journalist Alexander Nevzorov, who first broke the news of the assassination, said Shatsky also oversaw upgrades of Kh-59 missiles into the low-flying subsonic Kh-69 versions.
The upgrades must be going well enough or Putin might have had him thrown out a window.
THE LAMPS ARE GOING OUT ALL OVER EUROPE, WE SHALL NOT SEE THEM LIT AGAIN IN OUR LIFETIME: Britain to axe up to 1.5m lampposts — see how it would look.
Around 1.5 million of Britain’s 7.2 million lampposts could be removed to save money and reduce carbon emissions and replaced with lighting that will make it safer for pedestrians.
Under existing rules, there is no requirement to light pavements for pedestrians. They are only lit because light spills over from lampposts, which were principally installed to make it safer for motorists.
But today’s cars have such effective headlights that lampposts, which are generally 10m tall on A-roads and 6m tall on residential roads, are not necessary in many parts of Britain.Lampposts will remain in place in many locations where they are necessary, such as in cities where CCTV cameras rely on good lighting.
The first ones scheduled to be removed are in Hayton, a small Yorkshire village on the A1079 road between York and Hull. Starting in December, 30 street lights on each side of the main road are to be switched off and later removed. Around 300 more will be switched off and removed on a 19-mile (30km) stretch of the road.
AMY WAX, MEANWHILE, WAS SUSPENDED FOR TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT THEIR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PROGRAM: Socialist University of Pennsylvania prof apologizes for praising CEO-killer suspect, school condemns her post. There will be no disciplinary action this time.
WHY IS ACADEMIA SUCH A HOTBED OF RACISM AND BIGOTRY? Fifty-One Discriminatory Scholarships At University of Rhode Island Challenged By Equal Protection Project.