Archive for 2024
June 13, 2024
IF WE WERE A COUNTRY WITH A REAL GOVERNMENT*, OUR STATE DEPARTMENT WOULD GET AMERICANS OUT OF TROUBLE: 2 Knights of Columbus rescue 143 from Haiti’s turbulent capital.
*As opposed to a fraudulently installed Junta of conspirators who hate us and everything we stand for.
BUT WE DIDN’T HANG THEM, SO THEY WILL KEEP TRYING TO DO IT AGAIN: This insanity should never have happened.
BTW, Tilting at Windmills is having a sale for instapundit readers.
I DON’T KNOW IF THE FBI CAN BE REFORMED: A tale of two FBIs.
YEAH, I’M SURPRISED THE OBAMA LICKSPITTLE IS BIASED. SHOCKED! George Stephanopoulos Rips the Mask Off, Gives CNN Advice on How to ‘Get’ Trump in the Debate.
SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED. BEHOLD MY SHOCKED FACE: Tajikistan Nationals With Ties to ISIS Arrested in Multiple Cities.
LOOK, I UNDERSTAND WANTING TO BE SEEN. I UNDERSTAND WANTING TO FEEL NORMAL. I UNDERSTAND WANTING TO BE ACCEPTED, BUT THE WAY TO DO THAT IS TO JUST BE NORMAL AND NOT ASHAMED. THE ENDLESS DEMANDS FOR MARCHING BANDS AND ACCLAMATION GET TIRING: The Rainbow Limit – A Personal Rant.
It doesn’t help.
RIDICULOUS HARASSMENT: Petty Tyranny: New Jersey Looking Into Revoking Trump Golf Courses’ Liquor Licenses.
June 12, 2024
JEWS HAVE BEEN THROWN UNDER THE BUS BY DEMOCRATS IN THE INTEREST OF GETTING VOTES FROM THE HATE-FILLED MUSLIMS THE DEMOCRATS IMPORTED: Protesters are harassing Jews every day in NYC, when will pols protect them?
Earlier this week, a protest in front of the Nova Music Festival Exhibition on Wall Street, which commemorates those slaughtered at a music festival in Israel during the October 7 attacks, waved Hezbollah and Hamas flags and a “Long live October 7th” banner, lit flares and chanted “long live the intifada.”
On Tuesday, a mob took over a New York City subway car and chanted, in a call and repeat fashion, “Raise your hands if you’re a Zionist. This is your chance to get out.”
Two nights ago, the homes of Brooklyn Museum’s director Anne Pasternak and several of the museum’s Jewish board members, were defaced with fake blood and a sign that accused Pasternak of being a “White-Supremacist Zionist.”
I’ve been writing in these pages about the growing antisemitism in New York for years.
But this is the worst it has ever been. It’s no longer random attacks, that could be blamed on the mentally unwell.
Nope. And it won’t stop until there are — severe — consequences.
Related:
NEW: In leaked text messages obtained by the Free Beacon, top Columbia administrators—including the dean of the college—mocked and dismissed concerns about anti-Semitism on campus and even used vomit emojis to refer to a Columbia rabbi’s op-ed.
Scoop w/@elianayjohnson.🧵 pic.twitter.com/BXC4fBQPHO
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) June 13, 2024
Full article: Columbia Administrators Fire Off Hostile and Dismissive Text Messages, Vomit Emojis During Alumni Reunion Panel on Jewish Life. “Throughout the panel, which unfolded over nearly two hours, Chang-Kim was on her phone texting her colleagues about the proceedings—and they were replying to her in turn. As the panelists offered frank appraisals of the climate Jewish students have faced, Columbia’s top officials responded with mockery and vitriol, dismissing claims of anti-Semitism and suggesting, in Patashnick’s words, that Jewish figures on campus were exploiting the moment for ‘fundraising potential.’ The text messages, which were captured by an audience member sitting behind Chang-Kim who photographed the vice dean tapping away on her phone, also used vomit emojis to describe an op-ed about anti-Semitism by Columbia’s campus rabbi.”
OPEN THREAD: It’s everything they say, the end of a perfect day.
SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE ONE OF THOSE DAYS: The “BREAKING NEWS!!!” ISS Emergency That Wasn’t
TOO BAD THEY DIDN’T HAVE PREHISTORIC SUVs: An interstellar cloud may have caused an ice age on Earth. Here’s how.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Passenger Pulled Off Of Plane For Having Too Much To Drink Offers Cops Sex To Avoid Arrest.
Officers were called to the airport about a flight attendant who had been assaulted by a passenger. When they boarded the plane, they found a woman who appeared to be intoxicated. She had been moved to the front of the plane and was slumped over in her mom’s lap with zip-tie handcuffs on.
Officers were able to get her off of the plane with the use of a wheelchair. Her mom admitted that her daughter had several drinks throughout the day. She had a couple of shots before boarding and was packing several mini-bottles of booze on the plane.
While the woman’s mom was being interviewed, she was busy going from being upset with the officers to flirting with them. She apologized, threatened to fight them, then said, “So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to make out with you.”
From there, the woman gets a lot more graphic. She seems to think that offering up some services to the officers is going to help her avoid the inevitable trip to jail.
Stories like this are why we can’t have nice things: Oh God, What If Congress Bans Drinking on Airplanes?
As anyone who has traveled by plane in the last decade can attest, one of the few—perhaps only—things that make modern commercial flying tolerable is a strong onboard libation. For those lucky enough to travel internationally, the booze is sometimes even free. But could this last vestige of mile-high sanity be snatched from us like a water bottle at an airport security checkpoint?
While they would have been amazed at the concept of man-made flight, the Founding Fathers would not approve: How drunk were the Founding Fathers? Revolutionary-era Americans could drink you under the table.
Well, maybe not Steve. But they could definitely give the rest of us a run for our money.
WELL, GOOD: A New Biological Pathway: Major Cause of Inflammatory Bowel Disease Discovered. “Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute identified a key biological pathway in IBD involving the ETS2 protein, which can be targeted with already available MEK inhibitor drugs to potentially reduce disease symptoms.”
CHANGE: What Is ‘Ozempic Face’, And Why Is It So Controversial? “It’s known that when significant body weight is rapidly lost, excess skin around the temples, cheeks, eye, jawline, and mouth can sag and wrinkle. Depending on an individual’s diet and hydration, their skin can appear duller, dryer and more wrinkled as body fat drops. What’s more, the use of GLP-1 agonists – regardless of fat loss – can also cause changes to the size of a person’s lips, cheeks and chin. Studies show that patients who experience massive weight loss in general are more likely to look several years older in the face than those who don’t.”
Yes, everyone I’ve known over 50 who has lost a lot of poundage has looked funny for a while. The skin needs time to catch up.
SO I FINALLY FINISHED J.N. CHANEY & JONATHAN BRAZEES’ Sentenced to War series. Good future Space Marines style military SF, though at 15 books, it’s an awful lot thereof. But it came to a satisfactory conclusion. Plenty of page-turning entertainment!
I took a break in the middle to read Blood-Warm Waters, the latest in Scott Cook’s WWII submarine series. Good reading, though I doubt that Admiral Yamamoto spent much time thinking about any particular U.S. sub as he went about his business. Also good page-turning entertainment, if not quite in P.T. Deutermann territory.
READER FAVORITE: ECG Portable Heart Rate Monitor – Capture Heart ECG Metrics. #CommissionEarned
JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:
I was reading stories today about the protest in Lafayette square, and the spray-painting of the statues.
It doesn’t even merit discussing, really. It’s the norm. Right? The reason they don’t go to jail for defacing the statuary at Lafayette Square is because the authorities, however you define them here, don’t want them arrested. We’re not even talking about shoving them in the Paddy Wagon (sorry, insensitive) and taking them down to cool it in the clink for a while before getting a lecture and a tut-tut finger-wagging admonition. At this point you wish they’d get at least that.
Oh, it’s a manpower issue. Oh, the Park Police were outmanned. They didn’t want to escalate. You know full well that if literal actual brownshirts showed up wearing double Xs from the Chaplin movie there would be a National Conversation about this, right? But we’ve had the national conversation, in 2020, and it consisted of “affronts to statuary are revered expressions of justified anger over injustice, and the conversation is now over.”
The other story that twins nicely: the kids arrested for peeling out on a pride flag painted on a street. As this LBGTQEtc site notes, “The scooter gang could serve up to five years in jail under the new law.”
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
Man Arrested For Urinating On New Pride Urinals https://t.co/7YxOP8SGRK pic.twitter.com/L1knQppWCb
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 12, 2024
It’s allegely satire.
CALLED TO COURT FOR EXPOSING THE TRUTH: New hearing ordered over more leaked writings from Covenant School shooter: The Tennessee Star and its editor-in-chief could be held in contempt of court. “It comes after the judge in the case, I’Ashea Myles, warned against further leaks, threatening contempt of court for anyone who did it again. However, Judge Myles was unaware of the supposed leak, until WSMV4 Investigates’ Stacey Cameron called the court asking for a reaction to the leak, wanting to know if she was considering holding the Star or anyone else in contempt.”
Journalists didn’t used to try to gin up prosecutions of journalists for reporting the news.
The Supreme Court ruled in Bartnicki v. Vopper that journalists can’t be punished for publishing even illegally obtained material so long as they’re not the ones who illegally obtained it. I don’t see contempt of court applying any differently.
THIS JUST IN: The Economist Took a Close Look at the NYT’s Bestseller List and Found What Conservatives Long Suspected.
Books that are not bestsellers have it worse, according to The Economist. A book that ranks in the bottom five of Publishers Weekly rankings will on average place five spots lower on the Times’ list, the analysis concluded.
Michael Knowles, a conservative commentator, is author of the 2021 book “Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.”
In its first week, it sold 17,587 copies — good for first place on Publishers Weekly’s list. The book recorded robust sales in the weeks that followed.
Nonetheless, it failed to crack the Times’ bestseller list.
“The New York Times has a view of an acceptable kind of conservative,” Knowles told The Economist.
Ari Fleischer, who was White House press secretary during the George W. Bush administration, is author of the 2022 book “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias.”
The book reached as high as number six on Publishers Weekly’s list of bestselling non-fiction works in the summer of 2022.
But the book was nowhere to be found on the Times’ list.
“It’s bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustrating,” Fleischer told The Economist.
Back in the summer of 2008, the New York Sun reported: Encounter Books Crosses Times Off Mailing List.
Encounter Books, the conservative publishing house run by Roger Kimball, will no longer send review copies to the New York Times. In an amusing and much-discussed item posted to the company’s Encounter Intelligence Web log, Mr. Kimball explained that the Times has “studiously” ignored almost all of his titles, and so if it plans to review any in the future, it will have to buy them like any other reader.
In a phone interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Kimball said he doesn’t think his decision will jeopardize the financial health of his company; if anything, it might serve as a “wake-up call” to Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus, whom Mr. Kimball describes as a “moderate left-wing opportunist” responsible for perpetuating the “travesty” that has become of a once justly celebrated organ of cultural criticism. The Times is now a clearinghouse of “press releases emanating from the p.c. seats of established opinion” and “metrosexual lifestyle stuff,” Mr. Kimball said. (Mr. Tanenhaus did not return The Sun’s phone call for comment.)
When he was named the editor of the Times Book Review in 2004, many believed that Mr. Tanenhaus would be sympathetic to the intellectual right, Mr. Kimball noted, citing Mr. Tanenhaus’s well-received biography of Whittaker Chambers. And yet, throughout his tenure as the head of the Sunday books section, Mr. Kimball charged, Mr. Tanenhaus has assigned those few conservative books the paper has covered to reviewers who seem to have their own axes to grind, and who appear to have little interest in giving the books an objective reading.
* * * * * * * * *
Others books that sold well but which were conspicuously absent from the Times’ bestseller list include “A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America,” by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and “American Playbook: A Guide to Winning Back the Country from the Democrats,” by commentator Clay Travis.
As I wrote in 2015, after the Times’ memory holed Ted Cruz’s book, despite first week sales that would put him at number three on their list, “In early 2009, at the peak of the left’s ‘We Are Socialists Now’ shiny Obama unicorn fever, Tanenhaus, then still editor of the Times’ book review section, infamously published a thin screed titled The Death of Conservatism. About five minutes later, the Tea Party emerged, and by the end of 2010, thanks in large part to the all-Democrat Obamacare bill, the GOP recaptured the House, in 2014 the Senate, and currently 31 states have Republican governors and the GOP controls numerous state legislatures.”
Based on the Gray Lady’s performance in 2020, Tanenhaus would likely seem far too fair and balanced for the current iteration of the newspaper.
EAT WELL EVEN IF YOU EAT LESS: Guidelines outline nutrition requirements for those on Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: 24 Hour Fitness says BLM, Pride flags are approved ‘symbols of expression’ but American flags are only for designated holidays.
OLD AND BUSTED: Racist Roads.
The New Hotness? Buttigieg Takes Veiled Shot At Samuel Alito’s Wife By Smearing Patriotic Flag As ‘Insurrectionist Symbology.’
So “insurrectionist” that until late last month, these crazy MAGA-hat wearing far right maniacs were flying it: San Francisco stops flying “Appeal to Heaven” flag that landed Justice Alito in hot water.
Evergreen:
MARK JUDGE: The Crisis at the WaPo Has a Remedy.
The Devil’s Triangle was not reviewed in The Washington Post. I was not contacted for a profile, even though the Post had spent 2018 hunting me down, going through my high school yearbook, and cross-examining everyone I ever dated. Finally, Kathleen Parker had enough. Yet even after her rebuke to her own colleagues, The Washington Post would not touch my book,
I relive all of this because the Post has just published a massive deep dive in its new leadership and its continual financial woes. Without getting into the deep weeds of the story here are the basics: the Post has new British leadership because owner Jeff Bezos is tired of burning through $100 million a year to prop up left-wing propaganda that nobody reads. The Post staff are not happy about the new editors.
This is the same staff that hunted me like an animal and now crud [sic—Ed] as if my revelatory, damning book does not exist.
Would Woodward and Bernstein ignore The Devil’s Triangle? They would not. If would be unthinkable to them.
Do I want to sell books? Of course. Do I tend to relive the trauma of 2018 to the point where friends are telling me to move on? I do. I also have survived after an ordeal that kills most people via a GoFundMe. I take all the criticism and try to honestly reflect on it.
That’s the second benchmark I’ve seen laid down for measuring if there will be any actual change at the WaPo. This was the first:
The obvious litmus test is the decision about Taylor Lorenz. If they are serious, the new management will immediately let her go; if they are not, they will find an excuse to keep her on.
Either way, it's a great test case. We will see if losing half your audience and $77… https://t.co/z6EvAuJJ2Q
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 3, 2024
I’d love to be wrong, but I’m doubtful either will happen.
UPDATE: Inmates are running the newsroom asylums.
Perhaps it simply is a case of foreign British editors coming into American newsrooms without the perspective of race and gender narratives. Both Will Lewis of the Washington Post and Emma Tucker of the Wall Street Journal are of British origin (through no fault of their own); perhaps they were hired specifically to quash these petulant rebellions within their own establishments, obsessed with race-based coverage of every newsworthy event under the sun.
One thing remains, however, that until that day comes, these newsrooms will still be run like liberal arts college campuses. There might even be a few tent encampments in the main lobby of the buildings. If the worst thing Tucker and Lewis are accused of is being out of touch with what their inmates demand, then perhaps the answer is not to cater, cave and apologize. Perhaps the answer is to stand firm — and tell them no.
As Kurt Schlichter tweeted in 2018 when the crybully staffers at the Atlantic melted down when Kevin Williamson was hired and Jeffrey Goldberg demonstrated that the inmates were running his asylum, too:
Thus foreshadowing “The Atlantic’s Nervous Breakdown,” and the nervous breakdown of much of the rest of the MSM.