THE DANGERS OF BINGE DRINKING: ‘Holiday Heart’ Is a Serious Medical Issue Triggered by Festive Booze.
Archive for 2024
December 13, 2024
THE FIRST OF TWO SPACEX LAUNCHES TONIGHT WENT WELL:
Falcon 9 completes our 100th droneship landing of the year! pic.twitter.com/O5J25bw1ca
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 13, 2024
The next is scheduled for about half an hour from now.
HMM: Why Hasn’t Trump Said Anything About All the Drones? Weird, No?
UPDATE: You ask, Trump answers. “Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge. I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”
BURIED LEDE: KATIE COURIC ACTUALLY GOT A STORY RIGHT! ‘Smartest Thing They Ever Did:’ Katie Couric, Jessica Tarlov Admit GOP Leaders Sending Migrants North Was Game Changer.
Katie Couric and Jessica Tarlov admit Republicans sending illegals to blue cities worked. Call it the “smartest thing they ever did.”
Correct. The only way to make left-wingers change is to have them suffer the results of their own policies.
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) December 13, 2024
Journalist Katie Couric and Democratic Fox News co-host Jessica Tarlov credited Republican governors for their strategy of transporting illegal immigrants to northern states.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and former Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey in 2022 sent illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. Tarlov, on “Next Question with Katie Couric,” described DeSantis’ decision to relocate migrants to Martha’s Vineyard as remarkably intelligent, while Couric shared that her Florida-based friend believed the move effectively raised awareness about immigration issues.
“On the immigration front, there was a tendency amongst Democrats, and especially Democrats who were discussing the issue, so people who do interviews or are part of the media, to minimize it over the first two and a half years when there were a lot of people coming in here,” Tarlov said. “And I thought that it was a stunt when they started busing migrants … to Martha’s Vineyard. It was the smartest thing they ever did.”
“Well, it’s interesting ’cause I have a friend who lives in Florida, and I said, ‘What did you think of Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott taking some of these immigrants and moving them to northern states?’ And she said, ‘I thought it was great because nobody really was paying attention before that.’ And I do think that this untold story was the strain on social services and communities, particularly along the border, this huge influx of immigrants was having,” Couric responded. “And I think the mainstream media, however you define that these days, kind of ignored that story to its peril.”
Flashback: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
The ghost of Saul Alinsky smiles: “Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. ‘You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.’”
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Stole a Rolls, Made His Own Drive-Thru. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we have the man who really missed the Checkers drive-thru, how not to order sex on the beach, and Virginia Man shoplifting in front of 50 cops.”
READER FAVORITE: Boxing Reflex Ball with Punch Counter App – Improve Hand-Eye Coordination & Reaction Speed. #CommissionEarned
THAT’S OKAY, BIDEN WILL PARDON HIM NEXT: Illegal Chinese National Arrested In California Shipping Weapons And Devices To North Korea.
BEST. CITY NAME. EVER.
SpaceX HQ will now officially be in the city of Starbase, Texas! https://t.co/zpN4t3mJQT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 13, 2024
Please get this done, Judge Treviño.
IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™ — Oh, Geez, Now It’s Happening in Oregon. “We’ve been wondering about those drones in New Jersey, but now Oregon has just said: Hold my IPA.”
READER FAVORITE: Kiehl’s Ultra Facial Cream. #CommissionEarned
OUCH: YouTube TV Raises Price 14%, to $83 per Month, Citing ‘Rising Cost of Content.’
YouTube TV is getting more expensive — outpacing the rate of inflation — with a 14% price increase for the streaming pay-TV package going into effect for new customers immediately.
The cost of a new YouTube TV base plan subscription is increasing from $72.99 to $82.99, starting Dec. 12, 2024, for new users, the company said in a message to customers Thursday. The new price will go into effect Jan. 13, 2025, for most existing users, while those on existing trials and promotional rates “will not be affected.” The increase is “due to the rising cost of content,” according to YouTube.
With the higher fee, YouTube TV has now more than doubled in price in just under five years, from $40/month as of March 2018 to $83/month.
Has the value of the content doubled?
WHY THE ONLINE LEFT IS SIMPING FOR LUIGI MANGIONE:
The details emerging about Mangione would suggest he was no raging leftist. He seems to have been a follower of the centrist podcast bros – those who dispense a mix of self-help, gym tips, nerdy AI chat and anti-wokeness. Perhaps more telling is his glowing review on the Goodreads website of the manifesto of Ted ‘Unabomber’ Kaczynski, who mounted a 17-year domestic-terror campaign, raging against industrial society. ‘You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution’, posted an account bearing Mangione’s name and likeness.
Some speculate that Mangione’s chronic back pain might have radicalised him, even though his incredibly wealthy background would mean it is unlikely he’d been left destitute and untreated. Shell casings found at the scene were marked with the words ‘deny’, ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ – words typically used in health-insurance policy documents, which inspired the title of a 2010 book, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The police say that, when Mangione was arrested, he was in possession of a short ‘manifesto’, declaring that ‘These parasites had it coming’. ‘I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done’, it reportedly says.
In their ‘joy’ and rationalisations, Team Luigi is being accused of mainstreaming revolutionary violence. The truth, I think, is much more pathetic. The frisson some leftists have felt from this killing – not the ordinary folks scarred by a woeful healthcare system, but the well-heeled commentators who no doubt have immaculate coverage – speaks more to a kind of morbid pessimism than to any genuine radicalism.
Those swooning over Mangione are not egging on some grand revolution, they are extracting a vicarious thrill from watching someone lash out, murderously, at ‘the system’. The claim that Thompson’s cold-blooded killing has, at least, generated ‘a conversation’ about healthcare is pretty weak, too. Not least because the main conversations it has generated thus far, across cable news and the internet, are whether or not Taylor Lorenz is a twat, or whether it’s acceptable to celebrate a killing, or whether it’s okay to find the killer sexy (Mangione clearly took on board all that podcast-bro workout advice).
This speaks to what American Marxist Fredrik deBoer, in another context, has described as the ‘fantasy of deliverance through political violence’ on today’s political left, bred of a ‘feeling of grasping at straws’. Having failed to transform the system, leftists fantasise about going to war with it, despite this being obviously doomed to fail in an era when the state is overwhelmingly better armed than the populace and the populace is generally disapproving of political violence.
Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:
JOHN STOSSEL DEBUNKS THE RECYCLING RELIGION IN NEW VIDEO: With an appearance from fellow Insta-co-blogger John Tierney.
Plastic recycling is a “dead-end street."
That quote…unbelievably…is from @Greenpeace.
In my new video, we debunk the recycling religion. pic.twitter.com/loe7F7gS2L
— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) December 12, 2024
COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: ‘Understandable’ Violence and the Left. “Anger is natural. A desire to peacefully bring about change through the democratic process is natural. Wishing murder on civilians because of your own pathological immaturity is not natural.”
It certainly seems to be becoming habitual in some corners.
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.
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.