Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

PLEASE CLAP: Biden stumbles through sad excuse of a St. Patrick’s Day speech, tells crowd when to clap.

At one point, Biden even demanded those in attendance clap after praising Ireland for sharing U.S. values such as support of Ukraine and a stand against Russia’s “aggression” toward its neighbor.

“We celebrate the bonds of our friendship today connecting millions of Irish Americans and American people,” Biden said. “We celebrate the friendship between the two nations — one that has shaped our past, strengthened our present and inspires our future.”

“Ireland now is one of the top ten investors in the United States economy,” Biden said. “And our countries stand proudly for liberty and against tyranny. We stand together and oppose Russia’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine. You can clap for that, please.”

It’s Jeb!Mentum all over again!

ZONE OF DISINTEREST: Seth Mandel: Glazer’s Partners Refute Glazer.

It is immensely important that Danny Cohen, the executive producer of The Zone of Interest, has publicly repudiated the director Jonathan Glazer’s atrocious Holocaust statement at the Oscars.

In his speech, Glazer was at once self-loathing toward and obsessed with his own Jewishness. Upon accepting the Academy Award for his film and its portrayal of the Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss’s life next to a concentration camp, Glazer seemed express deep shame for his heritage while blaming Judaism for Palestinian suffering, and took the extraordinary step (for a director of a Holocaust movie!) of equating the Jews of today with Höss’s fellow Nazis of yesterday.

In his public comments on Glazer’s moral misconduct, Cohen made three separate points, all of which are significant for their own reasons.

First, and most obvious, was his repudiation of Glazer’s statement. “I just fundamentally disagree with Jonathan on this,” he told podcast hosts Jonathan Freedland and Yonit Levi. “The war and the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization which continues to hold and abuse the hostages, which doesn’t use its tunnels to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza but uses it to hide themselves and allow Palestinians to die. I think the war is tragic and awful and the loss of civilian life is awful, but I blame Hamas for that.”

That is well said and correct in every particular. The relevance of Judaism to the current conflict is entirely contained in the fact that it was Hamas’s motivation to murder and torture and rape and kidnap men, women, children and the elderly. The war happened because there are monsters walking the earth who seek to eradicate Jews, and the war continues because those monsters refuse to stop trying.

As Ben Shapiro wrote last week on “Jonathan Glazer’s Evil Oscars Display:”

In reality, Glazer is the villain of his own film. In “Zone of Interest,” there are no Jews: all we can hear of them is their screams from beyond the wall. Otherwise, they are nameless, faceless victims. And those are precisely the kinds of Jews Glazer likes. He’s happy to use their corpses to win Oscars, even as he attacks the live Jews defending themselves from the ideological descendants of the Nazis, Hamas.

All of which makes sense. After all, as author Dara Horn has pointed out, people love dead Jews. It’s the live ones who are so problematic for people like Jonathan Glazer. The live ones have the unfortunate habit of fighting back and making life uncomfortable for doctrinaire left-wingers who want to be accepted in their morally benighted social circles.

Seth Mandel concluded, “We can only hope Cohen is right that Glazer’s stunt will fade in the public’s mind far sooner than will the movie’s ability to impart on a new generation the horrific reality of the Holocaust.”

But does it really? As Sonny Bunch wrote of the film in January:

I find The Zone of Interest somewhat flummoxing. Glazer has undoubtedly made a masterpiece of not-showing…I can’t help but wonder what the one-in-five young Americans who think the Holocaust was exaggerated will make of the very act of not-showing. I can’t help but wonder what the teachers who have noted a rise in antisemitic humor and students ironically praising Hitler as based will respond to it. Or how such a film will be received in a period of soaring antisemitism. Assuming knowledge that either isn’t there or has been warped by the vicissitudes of the online swamp alters the cinematic calculus in ways that I am not entirely sure how to grapple with.

Glazer was fine with audiences hearing in the background of his movie what Hannah Arendt dubbed “the banality of evil.” Actually showing it on the big screen? Obviously not, except in the most abstract form possible, alas.

BERNIE SANDERS UNVEILS HIS LATEST INSANE IDEA:

Back in reality, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Any economic change has significant trade-offs, and you can’t get around them just by writing legislation that says everything has to work out great for everyone.

For one, this change would constitute an enormous increase in costs for many employers and businesses. And it’s just basic economics that when businesses’ costs go up, they have to raise their prices. Workers aren’t actually going to be better off if everything they consume gets more expensive.

Regardless, while the federal government could try to prohibit employers from reducing current workers’ wages in light of this legislation, that wouldn’t really work. After all, employers will still presumably be free to offer lower wages for all new hires.

More essentially, a worker’s real wage is not the number on his or her paycheck but what it can buy for the worker. And the government can mandate that the worker’s pay not be cut on paper, but it can’t stop prices from rising and his or her real wage from effectively falling.

Milton Friedman, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings, smile.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What happened to America’s capital?

Muriel Bowser is a woman with a plan. In late February the mayor of the District of Columbia unveiled a $400 million, five-year economic development strategy to revitalize the capital’s downtown.

* * * * * * * *

Bowser has drafted these desperate measures in a belated response to the desperate times. As the forty-two-page report concedes early on, “once a bustling employment center, Downtown DC has faced an outflow of office workers in response to remote and telework trends.” Doubtless the pandemic and resulting rise of remote work have played a role in the deterioration. Government employees have been particularly reluctant to return to the office five days a week — and given that they’d have to spend eight hours a day with other government employees, it’s hard to blame them. The knock-on effect is that the consultants and lobbyists hoping to influence or cajole the government don’t feel the need to return to the office either. Countless business meetings and happy hours have been reduced to Zoom calls and emails.

But there’s a more significant reason why DC workers don’t want to go downtown — and the word merits just a single mention in Bowser’s report: crime. Violent crime was up 39 percent last year in the city, with the murder rate rising to heights not seen since the mid-1990s. Why would you drive in to the office when your car could be hijacked in broad daylight by a perpetrator who won’t face consequences? Safer to stay in Virginia or Maryland.

It is deeply unfashionable in the left wing of the Democratic Party to acknowledge that urban crime has become a problem in the last four years — “public safety” is Bowser’s preferred phrase, and she’s ringfenced $31.5 million for it over the next five years. But if any of that money is intended for actually hiring more police officers, her report does not indicate it.

Life is rough for the few cops who still work for the Metropolitan Police Department — they have left the force by the hundreds, putting the department headcount at a half-century low.

Unexpectedly:

ROGER KIMBALL: The Birth and Rapid Death of a Mendacious Anti-Trump Meme.

“Now, if I don’t get elected,” President Trump said, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it.”

So budding hermeneuts, what do you think?

Was President Trump instigating violence?

Or was he talking metaphorically about the fate of the U.S. car industry should the invasion of Chinese cars made in Mexico be allowed to proceed?

Take your time.

I think Sen. J. D. Vance (R-Ohio) was right.

“Donald Trump said that a bloodbath would happen to the American auto industry if Biden kept on promoting Chinese made EVs,” Mr. Vance wrote.

“He of course is 100 percent correct. All other reporting about his ‘bloodbath’ comment is complete propaganda. The media should be ashamed.”

Should be but won’t be.

Those who are shameless are not ashamed.

What we are watching, as one commentator observed, is the effort to create a new anti-Trump meme right now.

“We are witnessing the invention of the ‘bloodbath’ hoax in real-time,” the blogger known as “End Wokeness” wrote. “Unfortunately for them, we have 𝕏.”

Indeed:

The result, as the DNC-MSM would say, is a bloodbath!

Fox News’ Joe Concha answers Politico’s question:

IT’S A BLOODBATH!

15 DAYS TO SLOW THE SPREAD: Four years ago, Las Vegas’ casinos shut down for 78 days. The fallout was brutal.

Four years ago few believed that Las Vegas’ casinos would be forced to close to minimize the impact of the COVID-19 virus that was rampaging worldwide.

But they did. And the fallout was brutal.

About a month after casinos in Macao were closed for 15 days to slow COVID’s spread, then-Gov. Steve Sisolak on March 17, 2020 ordered all casinos as well as restaurants, bars and other nonessential businesses in the state to close for 30 days.

The key phrase above is “then-Gov. Steve Sisolak:” COVID Lockdown Helps Bounce Democratic Governor in Nevada.

TRUMP PLATFORMED FAUCI AND SHUT AMERICA DOWN FOUR YEARS AGO THIS WEEK:

Though Donald Trump and his supporters do not want to admit it, this week, [four] years ago, American kids were forced out of schools and into their homes. The President of the United States had chosen to give Tony Fauci a big platform and advocated shutting everything down.

On Donald Trump’s last day in office, instead of pardoning the people who’d stormed into the Capitol on January 6th, he was giving a presidential commendation to Fauci.

That’s the actual history. Here’s the video of Trump, Fauci, and Deborah Birx laughing it up as they shut down America.

Flashback: Dr. Birx Praises Herself While Revealing Ignorance, Treachery, and Deceit.

HUSHED LIMBAUGH:

How did this nation ever get to the point where a man once considered nothing more than a tacky, loud, nouveau-riche liberal NYC real estate mogul/celebrity, with an orange complexion and a crazy pompadour/combover, would be transmogrified into the ultimate scapegoat for the failings, crimes, and corruption that have plagued our government and society since at least the end of the Second World War; the locus and symbol of the most unbridled hatred by the very same global elite that, in point of fact, are guilty of those sins and that he once perhaps was a part of? If I had to venture a guess, I’d say in nearly the same manner as “just some guy in golf pants” (as he once described how the elites tagged him) who at one time happened to have the largest sustained radio audience in history.

Last week marked the third anniversary of Rush Limbaugh passing away after a yearlong battle with terminal lung cancer. In a career that spanned nearly a third of a century, Limbaugh become far and away the most listened-to talk radio host in broadcast history. The conventional wisdom, which is something that Limbaugh defied on a daily basis, was that he had some sort of Svengali-like appeal over masses of mostly white, male, Bible-thumping bumpkins from flyover country by telling them what to think. In point of fact, it was just the opposite. Limbaugh’s success was being able to articulate what a vast swathe of the nation felt—a well-founded angst about the direction of the country especially since the beginning of the Clinton years and for sure with everything in the wake of the 9/11/01 attacks.

“There couldn’t have been a Donald Trump without a Rush Limbaugh to pave the way.”

He, more than any other political and cultural leader, held both a moral high ground and most crucially a bully pulpit that gave voice to a true silent majority. In examining the life and times of Limbaugh, as well as the gigantic sword of Damocles above Donald Trump’s head, and collectively whatever is left of the United States as we knew or imagined it, a bit of reflection on how we got here, or to coin a phrase, how we—or at least I—got “woke” to the world as it is, is in order.

Read the whole thing.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: America’s Political Realignment Is Real.

The latest example: AEI researcher Nate Moore investigated Trump’s growing favorability rating and found that the former president is more popular now than at any point since he left office. The source of this newfound popularity is minority voters. “While his support has ticked up among white and black Americans,” Moore wrote this week in The Liberal Patriot, “the share of Hispanic Americans who have a favorable view of Trump has doubled over the last year from around 20 percent to 40 percent.”

John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times, analyzed election surveys going back to the 1950s. He found that the Democrats’ advantage among nonwhite voters is at its lowest point since JFK was president. Black and Hispanic voters are matching their party preferences with their ideological preferences. Fewer self-identified conservative nonwhites vote Democratic for communal reasons.

“The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned,” writes Burn-Murdoch, “but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party.” That has made Trump’s GOP more diverse, more non-college, and more conservative.

Realignment proceeds in stages. Non-college-educated white voters were the first to abandon the Democrats, beginning in the late 1960s. Nixon’s “hardhats” and the Reagan Democrats disliked their former party’s positions on crime, busing, inflation, Vietnam, and the counterculture.

In the second stage, college-educated white voters in the suburbs began drifting away from the GOP in the 1990s. President Bill Clinton’s soccer moms couldn’t vote for Republican candidates affiliated with the Religious Right and the NRA. By 1998, journalist David Brooks was visiting well-heeled suburbs such as Winnetka, Ill., and finding that the rich Republicans were turning into Democrats.

Trump’s election in 2016 marked the onset of the third stage. College-educated white voters left the GOP in droves, but the Republican Party remained competitive because Trump drew in large numbers of non-college-educated white voters spread throughout the country. The white working class felt a gut connection to Trump, who also began picking up support among Hispanic voters and black men—despite the media narrative that he and MAGA are racist.

Biden’s presidency has catalyzed the educational realignment. Though “Joe from Scranton” presents himself as a champion of the working class, his spending, energy, and environmental policies have worsened living standards by contributing to rising prices and interest rates. The crisis on the southern border alarms voters concerned about security, civic disorder, and the rule of law. The world has become more dangerous, with Russia invading Ukraine, Iranian proxies wreaking havoc in the Middle East, and China and North Korea testing American willpower. State collapse in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela, and Haiti fuels migration and unrest. Biden will turn 82 in November. He doesn’t look up to the job.

As Glenn wrote in the New York Post in September: Here’s how Republicans can get minority voters to abandon the Democrats.

I propose that Republicans, or GOP-aligned groups, start an education and outreach program aimed at those immigrants, explaining to them what Democrats actually support.

It should include pictures of teenage girls whose breasts have been removed as they transition to being male, with their mothers standing proudly by them (these pictures are already out there on social media, circulated by the pro-transition crowd).

It should include Democratic officials’ own words about removing police from urban neighborhoods and letting social workers deal with violent crime.

And it should include environmentalists’ vows to get rid of air conditioning, automobiles, cheap electricity and inexpensive housing — you know, the kinds of things immigrants come to America to get.

Automobiles, you say? Biden Campaign, Establishment Media Attack Trump with Fake Interpretation of ‘Bloodbath’ Comments in Ohio Rally.

WATCHING THE SAUSAGE BEING MADE: ‘Hoax-Making in Progress:’ You Know Biden/Media Are Panicking With Latest Fake Story Pushed About Trump. “Other useful idiots, like Bill Kristol, jumped aboard, spreading this absurd lie, saying that you had a “moral and civic obligation to vote against him (he later edited his tweet to remove the video). ABC, CBS, Yahoo, and NBC then all jumped aboard the propaganda train. Here’s a sample — the only one in there that was honest in the title was The Daily Beast.”

FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: The gyms and fitness chains closed during the coronavirus pandemic — and what some are offering instead.

There’s nothing like a good workout to combat coronavirus-related anxieties — but are trips to the gym safe amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic?

While there’s no need to throw down the dumbbell for good, some gyms are closing as a precautionary measure during the ongoing outbreak. Read on for a list of national chains and fitness studios that have shut their doors (for the time being) to fight the spread of the virus.

Most of the gyms announced “two week” closures, which in reality, often went on for months. 24-Hour Fitness, since reopened, declared bankruptcy on June 15th, 2020.

MEGYN KELLY: Don Lemon “Behaved Like An A**hole Who Was Not Grateful To Elon Musk For Resurrecting His Career.”

I will give it to Bill O’Reilly. I saw a clip with him this morning saying, don’t interview your boss. That is the lesson that came out of this hot mess of exchange between Don and Elon… Don Lemon behaved like an a**hole who was not grateful to Elon Musk for resurrecting his career. And O’Reilly’s, right. It’s very hard for Don Lemon to both be a good journalist and be a good employee. The man’s paying your salary so you do owe him a level of respect and discretion. And at the same time you want to show us in your first interview back how hard hitting you are and those two goals are not aligned. So I don’t blame Elon for being mad at the way he was treated…Even though of course, Don Lemon through spokesperson who is the same woman Jeff Zucker was having an affair with, Allison Gollust, is threatening to sue. All our old favorites are involved in this one, fellas!

Show some gratitude! Ask him about how amazing X is doing and how it’s thriving notwithstanding all the doomsday predictions, and whatever happened to loser Threads over on Facebook. Elon was having a moment but not in Don’s life and in his world, even though he just got this great opportunity. Oh my god…”You’re dangerous, you foment racism, you’re a druggie who’s running all these big companies, and I want to see your prescription.” And he doesn’t understand why Elon is like, “It’s over!”

Lemon couldn’t resist the urge. It’s his character.

Related: Don Lemon demanded Tesla Cybertruck, $5M advance, equity in X before Elon Musk canned him: sources.

HOW IT STARTED: Apple CEO Tim Cook: Learn to code, it’s more important than English as a second language.

—CNBC, October 12th, 2017.

How it’s going: Laid-off techies face ‘sense of impending doom’ with job cuts at highest since dot-com crash.

—CNBC, Friday.

Related: Silicon Valley Opens Its Wallet for Joe Biden. A Wired analysis finds roughly 95 percent of contributions by employees of six big tech firms have gone to Trump’s Democratic challenger.

Wired.com, October 6th, 2020.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: British countryside can evoke ‘dark nationalist’ feelings in paintings, warns museum.

The Fitzwilliam Museum has suggested that paintings of the British countryside evoke dark “nationalist feelings”.

The museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, has undertaken an overhaul of its displays, in a move that its director insisted was not “woke”.

Luke Syson said last week: “I would love to think that there’s a way of telling these larger, more inclusive histories that doesn’t feel as if it requires a push-back from those who try to suggest that any interest at all in [this work is] what would now be called ‘woke’.”

The new signage states that pictures of “rolling English hills” can stir feelings of “pride towards a homeland”.

“Or, Landscape Paintings Now Deemed Problematic, Racist,” David Thompson adds:

Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.

The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour.” And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative.” Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.

It’s England, so how long before the spray paint and scimitar crowd has its way with the now double-plus ungood crimethink imagery?

Exit quote:

JIM TREACHER FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: Watch: Chinese Government Encourages Italians to Fight Coronavirus Racism by Hugging Strangers.

Titled “Italian residents hug Chinese people to encourage them in coronavirus fight,” the brief video shows a handsome, casually dressed young Chinese man standing in a busy pedestrian area in Florence. He’s blindfolded and wearing a surgical mask, next to a handwritten sign reading the following in Italian and Chinese: “I am not a virus. I am a human being. Free me from prejudice.” Then, as stirring electronic music swells, passersby hug him and touch his face to remove his blindfold and mask.

So much for “social distancing.”

This was released on February 4, 2020. Six weeks later, Italy now has more active coronavirus cases than anywhere else in the world, and the entire country has completely shut down.

Again, this video was released by the Chinese government. Someone who’s far more paranoid and conspiratorially minded than I am might wonder why the ChiComs stifled information about a viral outbreak within their own borders, silencing doctors and others who tried to warn the outside world, while at the same time releasing treacly, upbeat propaganda videos encouraging Europeans to come into direct physical contact with random Chinese people or else they’re racists.

Related: The American media is in a Chinese finger-trap. Outlets shilling for the PRC fully deserve to be dubbed ‘enemies of the people.’

NEWS FROM THE NEAR FUTURE: Putin Wins Election in a Landslide!

Voting in the Russian presidential election began this morning and will end Sunday. At that point, Putin’s victory will be announced and he will start his 5th term as president. The vote tally doesn’t really matter. It will be whatever the Kremlin decides it should be. Having killed off his only two real opponents in the past year, Navalny and Prigozhin, he probably feels like he earned it.

The presidential vote in Russia, which began Friday and lasts through Sunday, features the trappings of a horse race but is more of a predetermined, Soviet-style referendum.

President Vladimir V. Putin, 71, will undoubtedly win a fifth term, with none of the three other candidates who are permitted on the ballot presenting a real challenge. The main opposition figure who worked to spoil the vote, Aleksei A. Navalny, a harsh critic of Mr. Putin and the Ukraine war, died in an Arctic prison last month…

Two candidates opposed to the war were disqualified. A veteran politician, Boris Nadezhdin, alarmed the Putin administration when tens of thousands of people across Russia lined up to sign petitions required for him to run. The Kremlin invalidated enough signatures to bar him.

No word yet if the western media will be a bit more skeptical of Putin’s victory than they were another, err, champion of democracy: Saddam Hussein. Nets, Especially ABC & NBC, Deliver Upbeat View of Iraqi Election.

JAMES LILEKS: Like Olden Times.

Seen on Twitter-X the other day: “How did people get airplane tickets before the internet? Did you call the airline and they mailed you the tickets physically?” The author’s bio said she was a neuroscientist. Apparently there’s a difference between knowing how the brain works and using it.

Well, miss, lemme tell you. We’d crank up the crystal radio set and see if we could raise anyone down at the aerodrome. “Hello, Hank? You got a seat on the midnight pond-jumper there? Put me down for one.” They’d mail you a key, and you used it to open the plane door. In those days, you know, you could smoke on a plane. In fact it was mandatory. Couldn’t take off unless everyone’d lit up. There were no in-flight movies, but the back of the seat had a pamphlet glued to it, and it described something funny Charlie Chaplin did. For dinner they had a pig on a spit, and they’d roll it down the aisles and carve off a piece.

Okay, I’m kidding. It went like this. You went to the travel agency, which was an office with posters of places you’d never go, and you’d ask —

Ick, seriously, like, talk to people?

Yes. You would tell them where you wished to go, and they would call you up later and give you options. You would write a check, put it in an envelope, affix a stamp — am I going too fast for you here? — and a few days later a ticket would arrive in the mail. Then you would get on the plane and be skyjacked to Cuba. Simpler times, and by gum, we liked it.

You see tweets like the neuroscientist’s all the time from the young and the baffled, the generation who grew up with the internet all around them like a benevolent god who asked nothing of them except watching five seconds of an ad before the video starts.

When you like drove from one state to another state, how did you know where to go??? Were there like signs or things?

Well, you know that word, “maps,” below the icon on your phone that calls up a strange abstraction of lines? We had actual maps. You’d unfold a map, refold it into a rectangle, and then follow a line to the end of the rectangle.

Unlike today, where the vast majority of today’s hit songs are but a few clicks away, the music world of the past would be utterly terrifying to the Gen-Z world:

OLD AND BUSTED: Keynes Versus Hayek.

The New Hotness? Milton Friedman Versus Jimmy Page! Guitar World readers get a crash course in the basic laws of economics: “The higher end the guitar, the more robust the demand is:” Why are guitars getting more expensive? We spoke to the world’s biggest guitar companies to find out.

Why have prices risen so much?

Let’s start with the background. Economics 101 teaches us that when supply is low and demand is high, then prices will rise. The past few years have offered a perfect storm in this sense.

The pandemic throttled supply chains around the world (as workers isolated and manufacturing slowed), while at the same time governments handed-out stimulus checks (ie, free money) to large swathes of the population.

Those who were fortunate enough to have the basics covered started looking for other ways to keep occupied during lockdown. As such, during Covid, the guitar industry enjoyed its biggest sales boom since The Beatles first invaded these shores. People had spare time and spare cash, retailers couldn’t supply guitars fast enough – and, as such, prices started to slowly creep up.

That was just the start, though. As the world moved out of the pandemic, other shocks have hit global supply chains and, in turn, the guitar industry.

Like most manufacturing in the 21st century, guitar firms are dependent on a complex network of suppliers based all over the world. Even a handmade US instrument needs electrical components, plastics and tone woods – and most of these will come from foreign suppliers.

In a recent conversation, Fender’s Justin Norvell related to GW the issues the firm had faced just procuring tubes for its amp builds at the time.

“During the supply chain [crisis], it would be like the factory could make tubes,” explains Norvell.

“But the glass comes from Germany, and they couldn’t get the glass. And then that goes back up the tree, to [issues sourcing] the silicon that makes the glass. It was really problematic, because there could be one small thing that was preventing us from getting anything.”

Fender’s tube supply is, we’re told, “pretty dialed” at this point, but it’s a neat illustration of the nightmare scenario that faced all manufacturers.

Fast-forward to 2024 and war in Ukraine and the Middle East, crumbling relations with China, increasing piracy on the world’s oceans (as the US pulls back on the world stage) and all manner of other fun-things-that-you-don’t-want-to-read-about-on-Guitar-World – continue to affect global manufacturing/shipping costs.

The guitar industry has some sizeable players – from Fender and Gibson, to PRS, Yamaha and Ibanez – but they are all at the mercy of these global forces.

Milton Friedman and Leonard E. Read smile:

And at the other end of the financial spectrum:

Scooping off the cream

Of course, the effects of inflation have not been felt equally across society, or the guitar industry.

Talk to an economist (oh OK, don’t) and they’ll tell you that luxury goods sales remain weirdly stable during tough economic periods. This seems counterintuitive at first – why would we keep buying luxuries when we have less spare cash in our pockets?

It is because the wealthy are not so exposed to the effects of inflation. Take a look at the slew of record-breaking prices at the Mark Knopfler guitar auction last month and you’ll see the vintage and high-end guitar sales sector remains in good health.

“In terms of the really huge-dollar, vintage stuff, still trading hands, you have to realise the people who play in that market are really not hit by the price of milk and eggs,” Gibson’s Director of Brand Experience – and vintage guitar expert – Mark Agnesi, told us last year.

“I’m sure Ferrari is not having any trouble with new releases sitting on the lot for a while, and Rolex doesn’t have any problems – you still can’t get one of those. It’s a different market, with different players.”

Fender’s CEO Andy Mooney also made a similar point to us in 2023: “We still get very high demand for Custom Shop guitars,” said the Fender chief. “Generally, in some ways, it’s almost as if the higher the end of the guitar, the more robust the demand is.”

This explains the raft of ultra-pricey, limited-edition models that have rolled out since the pandemic. To us average Joes, it might seem a little wild when the likes of Gibson launches the $20k Murphy Lab Aged With Brazilian Rosewood Les Pauls, Martin drops its $50k anniversary build, or another Bitcoin guitar or Manson debuts a $17,500 Matt Bellamy-inspired mirror mask model, but these products are designed to cream the market – to charge top dollar from those that can afford it.

Including Gibson’s latest reissue: 50 hand-signed clones of Jimmy Page’s iconic doubleneck EDS-1275 for $50k each, modeled after the six and 12-string twin-necked electric guitar he used throughout the 1970s to play songs such as “Stairway to Heaven,” “The Song Remains the Same,” and “The Rain Song” on stage:

Plenty of “Blues Lawyers” and “Blues Doctors” will likely snap this run up fast.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Elite Heaven or Real Hell on Earth?

The horrific murder of Laken Riley by a repeated felony offender and illegal alien Jose Ibarra, 26, a Venezuelan citizen, was preventable — had federal immigration laws simply been enforced by the Biden administration.

When called out in his recent State of the Union address, President Joe Biden referenced the deceased Riley. But Biden misidentified her as “Lincoln Riley” –the USC football coach!

Biden only accurately noted that she “was killed by an ‘illegal.'”

True — but almost immediately the left was infuriated over Biden’s accurate use of the supposedly insensitive “illegal” for the murderer Ibarra.

Biden soon apologized for correctly identifying her killer as an illegal alien — but not for misidentifying the victim.

He left the callous impression that he was more upset about offending his open-borders base than about the savage beating of a young 22-year-old American nursing student.

Biden’s woke open-borders agenda supersedes any worry over the subsequent mounting number of Americans who have fallen victim to foreign gangs and criminals. He seems oblivious to the nearly 100,000 Americans who die from fentanyl imported across open borders.

* * * * * * * *

At Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, a United plane simply taxied off the runway and got stuck in the grass. Another United flight from San Francisco lost a wheel while taking off!

Yet another United flight from Houston to Florida was forced to make an emergency landing after one of its engines caught fire. At about the same time, a United flight bound for San Francisco from Hawaii experienced an engine failure in mid-flight.

Dozens were injured on a Boeing jet during a Chilean airline flight from Australia to New Zealand due to what officials called “a technical event during the flight which caused a strong movement.”

Anytime ideology and dogma trump merit, logic, and safety, the result is predictably scary and dangerous.

America needs to recalibrate its priorities to protect the lives and aspirations of all its citizens, regardless of their race and gender.

If our elites do not stop playing god and mandating their visions of heaven on earth, then they will surely ensure hell for us all.

To coin a phrase, don’t immanentize the eschaton.