Archive for 2024

IT’S COME TO THIS: Black day? Guinness runs dry in UK pubs amid online craze.

At her London pub, landlady Kate Davidson has taken to issuing Guinness ration cards, but still the beer has run out amid a UK shortage of Ireland’s national drink.

Bars across Britain, even Irish ones, have reported limited supplies of the black stuff since Guinness owner Diageo announced earlier this month that it was experiencing “exceptional consumer demand”.

“I’m a bit shocked because it’s Christmas,” said Davidson, co-owner of the Old Ivy House, where an empty upside down Guinness glass signalled that its tap had run dry.

“I wouldn’t have expected them to run out at this time of year,” the 42-year-old told AFP at the cosy boozer in the Clerkenwell area of central London.

A number of factors have meant that Diageo has become a victim of its own success.

Earlier this year, Diageo chief executive Debra Crew said Guinness consumption was up 24 percent among women, as the company shifts its marketing strategy to attract new consumers.

So-called “Guinnfluencers” online — including Kim Kardashian, who has posted a photo of herself with the beer on Instagram — have been credited with fuelling the stout’s appeal among Gen Z.

As P.J. O’Rourke famously wrote, “You can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That’s all you need to know about communism.” And now apparently, you can’t get Guiness in England.

THE LEFT’S DEMAND FOR HATE IN AMERICA VASTLY EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY: Racist messages found on Tennessee college campus were ‘fabricated,’ school says.

A Tennessee college revealed that racist messages found written on campus were fabricated by a student in an apparent attempt to make Donald Trump supporters look bad.

Rhodes College confirmed to Fox News Digital that a student had admitted to leaving the messages strewn about campus that were found over Thanksgiving break and were being investigated as a hate crime. Instead, it turned out to be yet another race hoax.

“Thanks to the tireless efforts of our Campus Safety officers and the Memphis Police Department, the investigation into the hate crime that occurred recently on our campus has ended with the identification of the perpetrator and the conclusion this incident was fabricated. This individual has admitted responsibility,” the statement read.

Earlier: The Top Seven Most Ridiculous Hate Crime Hoaxes.

You’re gonna need a much bigger blog.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER:

The guy on the right that Hochul deflected to at the end of the clip looks like he’d rather punch somebody than answer that.

THE SWINGINGEST OHIO FUNERAL HOME SINCE FERRYMAN’S! Columbus funeral home to be first in Ohio to operate with a liquor license.

A north side funeral home could soon serve mourners in a new way: alcohol.

‘Evergreen Funeral Cremation and Reception’ is set to open next year. They applied for a liquor license and could soon be serving people during services.

Owners tell WSYX that this is a unique twist to a celebration of life, and they want to change how people view an average funeral.

The mission is to make the process of a very difficult time a little easier.

“My role in this position is to kind of be a party planner for the dead. Be more of a celebration of life than more of the multi-day traditional services, which cost a lot of money,” Hunter Triplett told WSYX.

Classical reference in headline:

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! White House Biden health cover-up blown wide open in bombshell report: Joe was senile from day one of presidency.

A bombshell report details how President Joe Biden‘s White House hid from the public his rapidly diminishing mental and physical condition for his entire presidency.

Biden’s team hired a vocal coach, put other officials into roles usually occupied by the president and neglected to share with him negative news stories, according to an explosive report in The Wall Street Journal.

This exposes an extensive and thought-out cover-up that included the administration repeatedly gaslighting those who dared to claim the president was no longer the same man who served as vice president.

But Biden’s decline was hard to overlook – especially after Special Counsel Robert Hur last year released a report in the classified documents case depicting a forgetful and frail then-81-year-old.

Hur decided not to charge Biden because he ‘would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’ and ‘it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him.’

The WSJ notes how Biden couldn’t even repeat back to his staff lines they fed him while preparing for his interview with the special counsel.

And staff was worried about the comparison between President Biden and his wife Dr. Jill Biden, who is eight years his junior and held an energetic, packed schedule that only highlighted her husband’s more mild pace.

Charles Cooke adds: Contrast the WSJ Piece on Biden’s Senility with Kamala Harris’s Lies about It.

Look at her. Just look at her. She knew. She was in on it. And yet, despite knowing, and despite being in on it, she said all that. Listen to the righteous indignation she spins up! Listen to her moralistic language! It will never cease to amaze me.

And no, before someone says it, this wasn’t because Biden “deteriorated later on.” The Journal places the start of the decline in 2021. It also confirms that Biden was a mess during the preparations for his meeting with Hur — which apparently took three hours per day for a week:

In the fall of 2023, Biden faced a major test when Hur, the special counsel, wanted to interview him. The president wanted to do it, and his top aides felt that his willingness to sit down with investigators set up a favorable contrast with Trump, who stonewalled the probe into why classified documents appeared at Mar-a-Lago, according to people familiar with the sessions.

The prep sessions took about three hours a day for about a week ahead of the interview, according to a person familiar with the preparation. During these sessions, Biden’s energy levels were up and down. He couldn’t recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him, the person said.

Astonishing.

“Now They Tell Us Joe Biden’s Not Up For This Job,” Generalissimo Duane Patterson writes at Hot Air:

As recent as June, there was only one narrative coming out of the Democratic-abetting Manhattan-Beltway media complex – Joe Biden is fine. He’s better than fine. He’s never been better. All this nonsense being peddling on right-wing sites and talk radio is disinformation. The videos we all saw were not real. They were cheap fakes.

The New York Times on June 21st ran a headline that read, “How Misleading Videos Trail Biden As He Battles Age Doubts.” It parroted the White House line that videos showing Joe Biden addled and disconnected on trips abroad were “cheap fakes.”

Back in July, Drew Holden cataloged a plethora of examples of the media actively working with the Biden administration to hide Biden’s failing mental acuity: The Media Helped Cover Up Biden’s Cognitive Decline. Parroted claims of “cheap fakes” were just the latest in a long series of press deceptions about Biden’s mental shortcomings.

Just this Tuesday, the Democrats’ “Politifact” opinion site used Trump’s “They’re eating the cats” riff as their choice for lie of the year, rather than risk highlighting that they were covering up for Sundown Joe as well:

Still though — assuming he makes it to January, Biden’s husk got four years in office. I was about to end this post with an “Edith Wilson smiles” joke, but actually, she’d be quite jealous — Jill got to be de facto president for twice as long as Edith.

NEO-OTTOMAN ASPIRATIONS: Turkey looks set to play an outsize role in shaping the new Syria after Assad. “In his interview with Al Hadath TV, Fidan said that Turkey has been sending messages from Western and regional countries to the new Syrian leadership in an effort to moderate HTS. The group formed as an affiliate of al-Qaida in 2011. Turkey, the United States and the United Nations Security Council have designated HTS as a terrorist organization. But since defeating Assad, the group has portrayed itself as more moderate and inclusive of other religions and minorities, with encouragement from the Turkish government.”

Does anybody buy that?

FUSION IN TEN YEARS (AGAIN): ‘World’s first’ grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant announced in the US.

If all goes to plan, Virginia will be the site of the world’s first grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant, able to harness this futuristic clean power and generate electricity from it by the early 2030s, according to an announcement Tuesday by the startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

CFS, one of the largest and most-hyped nuclear fusion companies, will make a multibillion-dollar investment into building the facility near Richmond. When operational, the plant will be able to plug into the grid and produce 400 megawatts, enough to power around 150,000 homes, said its CEO Bob Mumgaard.

“This will mark the first time fusion power will be made available in the world at grid scale,” Mumgaard said. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin welcomed the announcement, calling it “an historic moment for Virginia and the world at large.”

The plant would represent a new stage in the quest to commercialize nuclear fusion, the process which powers the stars. But the path toward it is unlikely to be smooth, not least because the technology has not yet been proved viable.

I’d love to see this happen but that last line does give pause.

DON SURBER: X Defeats Congress: In 32 days, Trump returns as president.

Schumer assembled a 1,547-page spend-it-all bill—continuing resolution to use congressional jargon for trillion-dollar slush funding—and scheduled the vote for Friday, the last day on the congressional calendar, giving congressmen the choice between saying yes or being blamed for a government shutdown at Christmastime.

Bwahaha, he cackled.

Elon Musk said we’ll just see about that. He lit up Twitter and fueled the biggest, fastest and most effective backlash since Bud Light.

It’s a battle, not the war, and the political machine is cunning and without scruples. But yeah.

And the GOP needs to just pass a clean continuing resolution and if Democrats kill it, they’ll be the ones shutting down the government. And bills for hurricane relief can stand on their own feet, instead of being bundled into an omnibus bill as hostages.

TO BE FAIR, HE’S INCREASINGLY OBLIVIOUS ABOUT EVERYTHING: Biden oblivious about leaving Trump an economy on the precipice of disaster.

Apparently believing that the more you repeat a lie the truer it becomes, President Biden recently quoted a Time article claiming that “President Trump is receiving the strongest economy in modern history.”

The Time article was little more than a setup designed to position Democrats to take credit for the inevitable Trump economic boom – as I noted on these pages just four days before Biden repeated this audacious claim. Expect similar efforts from the Left as they attempt to rewrite economic history in hopes that our memories are weak enough – and our gullibility strong enough – to overcome economic reality.

The fact is, Biden is handing Trump an economy on the precipice of disaster. Thanks in large part to Biden’s four-year deficit spending spree, the economy is shackled by an incomprehensibly huge $36 trillion in debt and $1 trillion less in Treasury cash on hand. That debt is growing exponentially, with interest alone now consuming over $1.1 trillion annually.

And while Biden has been touting jobs numbers, those estimates keep getting revised down after wildly overoptimistic initial reports. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia just estimated that net job growth in the second quarter of this year was likely negative, meaning employment was falling.

Add in inflation that is once again accelerating by every measure, and you have some understanding of the debt-ridden, inflationary, dumpster-fire economy Trump is actually inheriting.

So, what is Biden talking about?

Nobody knows.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Mike Johnson Finds Out That the New Trump Order Has Taken Effect. “For the last several years, social media has used its political power in a shadowy fashion, carrying out orders from the Democrats all the while swearing that was not the case. Musk has turned X into a megaphone for the vox populi and its power in that regard was on glorious display yesterday.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):