Archive for 2024

September 29, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Sep 29th, 2024

WHEN SATIRE MEETS REAL-LIFE: Titania McGrath (in reality British satirist Andrew Doyle) writes: Free speech is fascist.

What did Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, Idi Amin and Caligula have in common? That’s right: they were all able to speak.

This quite obviously proves that free speech is a tyrannical concept, one that can lead directly to murder, terrorism, genocide and — worst of all — misgendering.

And so it is a relief to see that one of Keir Starmer’s key priorities as prime minister is to crack down on online speech. Already he has ingenuously granted early release from prison for drug dealers, sex offenders and violent criminals to free up space for bigots who have said nasty things on social media.

The government has repeatedly pointed out that the riots in the UK were directly caused by bad words on the internet. One of those arrested was an elderly retired midwife from Devon, who had accidentally read an inflammatory Facebook post whilst browsing for cupcake recipes. Within ten minutes, she found herself punching Persian toddlers and throwing grenades at a mosque.

For all the endless whingeing of free speech extremists, Starmer appreciates that words must be controlled to ensure that his subjects behave themselves. Surely most reasonable people would rather have their liberties restricted than live in a fascist state?

The next step is to see Elon Musk extradited. It was bad enough that he renamed Twitter as “X”, which is just a swastika with a few bits chopped off. But he has also allowed users to say whatever they like. As a result, wrong opinions are being duplicated at an alarming rate.

The unintentionally satiric John Kerry agrees completely with McGrath: Seth Dillon Breaks Out the Puppets and Crayons to Explain the 1st Amendment to John Kerry.

Posted at 9:15 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 29th, 2024

HURRICANE HELENE DEATH TOLL SURGES TO 64: ‘Looks like a bomb went off.’

The death toll from Hurricane Helene surged to 64 people Saturday evening as the powerful storm caused widespread destruction across the southeast.

Among the dead are three firefighters, a mother and her 1-month-old twins and an 89-year-old woman who was struck by a tree that hit her house.

Eleven of the confirmed deaths came from Florida, including nine people who drowned in their homes in a mandatory evacuation area on the Gulf Coast in Pinellas County, officials said.

The total death toll is only expected to rise as recovery efforts continue — rescuers boosted searches Saturday after the monstrous storm was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone.

Dozens of other municipalities reported deaths, but have not released specifics, citing downed cell towers that have hindered efforts to contact next of kin.

Related:

That’s an easy one: There’s a Democratic president in the White House who is asleep (literally and figuratively) at the wheel, but the DNC-MSM won’t be creating any Katrina-style myths to damage the chances of his would-be successor so close to an election.

UPDATE: Katrina and the myth of superlative reporting.

BUMPED (BY GLENN).

Posted at 8:58 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 29th, 2024

‘WEIRDO:’ Mother Jones Editor Roasted After Claiming Flight Attendant Wishing Her a ‘Blessed’ Day Was Sign of ‘Creeping Christian Nationalism.’

Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery faced endless mockery on social media after she shared a Friday anecdote in which she complained a flight attendant wished her and others a “blessed” evening after a safe flight to San Francisco.

Those who piled on to Jeffery included everyone from far-right activists to CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski to Frank Luntz.

The scorn was near-universal and saw the far-left editor attempt to defend her position numerous times before her anecdote went viral online and she eventually stopped responding.

Related: Alaska Airlines Shows the Way With How They Responded to Fauxfended Magazine Editor’s Woke Rant. “As you can see from the above tweet [at the above link — Ed], ‘AlaskaAir’ is grayed out, meaning the airline most likely used Twitter’s ‘leave the conversation’ function, something the popular social media platform added in 2022 to the delight of many who found themselves tagged in unwanted back and forths and with no way out of them, which led to a clogged and cluttered mentions page.”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 29th, 2024

BIDEN COULD HAVE ORDERED THIS ACTION MONTHS AGO BUT FEARED “ESCALATION” EVEN AFTER ONE HOUTHI ATTACK AFTER ANOTHER:

Posted at 6:10 pm by Stephen Green on Sep 29th, 2024

UNAFRAID, OR AT LEAST UNCOWED:

Posted at 6:09 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Sep 29th, 2024

IT’S COME TO THIS: UK ex-PM Boris Johnson says he planned raid on Dutch factory to get COVID vaccines.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he ordered military chiefs to plan a raid on a Dutch factory in March 2021 to secure 5 million COVID vaccines that the European Union had threatened to bar from being exported to Britain.
Johnson said the deputy chief of Britain’s defence staff at the time, Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers, had told him a raid using small boats to cross the Channel and navigate Dutch canals would be possible – but warned him of diplomatic repercussions.

According to Johnson, Chalmers – who has since retired from the military – told him it would not be possible to carry out the mission undetected and that “if we are detected we will have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing NATO ally”.
“I secretly agreed with what they all thought but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts,” Johnson said in an extract from his memoirs that was published in Saturday’s Daily Mail newspaper.

As the London Spectator notes: Boris Johnson has just proven he was unfit to be prime minister.

For the past five years, I have been in something of a conflict: was Boris Johnson an unconventional but essentially wise prime minister whose ability to see the big picture was more important than his weakness on detail, and whose gift for spreading optimism outweighed his disorganisation? Or was he, as his many detractors have argued, simply not up to the job of leading the country? Fortunately, Johnson has now answered the question himself. Yes, he was stark-ravingly unsuited to being prime minister.

True, he does say that, after calling in military chiefs, he quickly dismissed the idea of launching a military raid on a warehouse in the Netherlands in order to spirit off doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine which he believed were being wrongly withheld from Britain. But the fact that he considered it in the first place should send a shudder through all of us. Did he not immediately think through the consequences of invading a neighbouring democratic and – for the most part – friendly country? It would have atom-bombed a taboo which has been in place in Europe since 1945: that western democracies do not invade each other; they sort out their differences by diplomatic means. Britain’s relations with the EU were already at a low point following the drawn-out Brexit process. A raid on the Netherlands wouldn’t just have poisoned them further; it would have established Britain with a reputation as a rogue state.

As Jason Garshfield wrote in 2022 at the American Conservative:

When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.

This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.

Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.

Yes, but the cocktail parties were brilliant!

In other BoJo news: Boris Johnson struggled not to laugh when Penny Mordaunt [Equalities Minister in Theresa May’s cabinet] said trans rights was ‘most important issue of our times.’

The ex-PM wrote: “At which point Penny began a long disquisition about gender recognition, and the problems of British transsexuals in changing sex.

“I didn’t catch all the details, but it seemed fairly harrowing stuff, and at one point I heard Penny claim: ‘This is the most ­important issue of our times’.

“I didn’t always agree with Phil Hammond, but I happened at that moment to catch his eye and to see that he – like me – was ­struggling to contain his amusement.

“I mean: I could see that this was an issue of huge importance to some people (though surely not that many?) and I could see that it needed to be handled with tact and sensitivity.

“But ‘the most important issue of our times?’ Really?”

To be fair, we know what BoJo’s considers the most important issue of our time. In 2021, the former motoring journalist “spelt out the revolt against modernity that lies at the heart of climate-change alarmism when he used his speech at COP to complain about the invention of the steam engine. That contraption, which gave rise to the Industrial Revolution itself, was a ‘doomsday device’ that started the clock ticking on the eco-calamity we currently face, he madly said. And this is a PM who claims to stand up for British history and British greatness.”

UPDATE: You Don’t Say! Boris Johnson Admits He’s ‘Not Sure’ Coronavirus Lockdowns Actually Worked.

Posted at 4:25 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 29th, 2024

GREAT MOMENTS IN STOCKHOLM SYNDROME: TNR: The Fear That’s Keeping Mitt Romney From Endorsing Harris.

Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who has said he would not vote for Donald Trump, has expressed some reticence about endorsing Trump’s opponent over a particularly grim worry.

The Washington Post reported Friday that Romney has cited concern for his family’s safety as one of the reasons he has not publicly supported Kamala Harris, according to one person familiar with the Utah politician’s thinking.

Harris’s party operatives with bylines compared him to Hitler, said he gave employees cancer, a sexist because he had “binders full of women,”   and that he was needlessly cruel to his dog, in between screaming to him, “What about your gaffes??!!”,  and joking about his “magic underwear.” Her boss shouted that he was a racist who would put black people “back in chains.”

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Sister.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 29th, 2024

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF NEW YORK UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE:

● Is It Time to Torch the Constitution?

—The New Yorker, Monday.

● Fran Lebowitz: ‘Biden Should Dissolve the Supreme Court.’

—Newsmax, yesterday.

● NYC Mayor Adams pleads not guilty to sweeping federal corruption indictment.

—The New York Daily News, Friday.

● Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Journey Ends Exactly Where You Expected It Would. “His urgent cause, according to New York magazine, which just profiled him for the unveiling of his newest book? You guessed it: The elimination of the Jewish state.”

—Jeffrey Blehar, NRO, Tuesday.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 29th, 2024
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