DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE AND 21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:

Biden says Republicans like Trump are “the kind of guys you’d like to smack in the ass.” LOL WHAT 🤣🤣🤣
pic.twitter.com/zu3n56BKIH

— Tiffany Fong (@TiffanyFong_) November 2, 2024

Related: “Does Joe Biden even want Kamala Harris to win? It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

MARGARET ATWOOD MAKES SURPRISE ENDORSEMENT OF TRUMP!

ROGER KIMBALL: Donald Trump is going to win the election, and liberals are already deranged by it.

They say that truth is the first casualty of war. Maybe it is. It is certainly the first casualty of Democratic press coverage of Donald Trump when he is running for president.

“Trump escalates violent rhetoric, calling for Liz Cheney to be shot.”

Gosh. Did he really? No, he didn’t. But CNN wants you to think so, and they are happy to wheel out frantic NeverTrumpers like Jonah Goldberg to fulminate against the Bad Orange Man for threatening Cheney, one of the former president’s most outspoken critics.
The trouble is, the full clip of Trump’s appearance with Tucker Carlson shows beyond cavil that he was warning that Liz Cheney, like her father, is a war hawk who would happily send “10,000 troops” to fight and die for a pointless war.

The investor and recent convert to Trump Bill Ackman has assembled an inventory of distortions the media has spread about Trump.

Read the whole thing.

TEN YEARS GONE: 1972: CBS News’ Walter Cronkite Warns of Coming Ice Age (Video).

Flash-forward a decade:

1982. CBS News with Dan Rather details the catastrophes soon to be caused by climate change. 😂

Hopefully you don’t live in Florida, it could disappear any day now. pic.twitter.com/H6zarlCJDH

— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 31, 2024

MISTER WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE MOSES AGAIN: The Red Sea Is Now So Dangerous Even NATO Warships Are Avoiding It.

The Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest and most strategically vital waterways, has become so hazardous that even the German Navy is steering clear. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius’s decision to redirect the frigate Baden-Württemberg and support vessel Frankfurt am Main around the Cape of Good Hope on their return from an Indo-Pacific deployment speaks volumes. The Red Sea is now deemed too perilous, underscoring just how ineffective current U.S. and EU naval protections are in this region.

For months, the U.S. and EU have stationed forces to secure the Red Sea’s shipping lanes. Yet, Houthi rebels, equipped and backed by Iran, continue to harass and attack vessels under the guise of “solidarity” with Palestinian forces in Gaza. Reports reveal Houthi attacks extending into the Indian Ocean and even the Mediterranean, a spread that demonstrates their increased capability and adaptability. The EU’s mission Aspides commander warned of escalating danger but lacked the ships and resources needed to respond adequately. The United States Navy continues to send warships through the Red Sea, but its mission to protect merchant ships—Operation Prosperity Guardian—is considered a failure by several naval experts we interviewed and has significantly diminished in scope and size. As a result, even many US-flagged commercial vessels – which the US Navy is obligated by law to protect – are opting to divert their routes around Africa.

Exit question: “If the 3rd-tier HOUTHIS, who have NO NAVY, can prevent a NATO naval vessel from transiting the Red Sea, what does it say about NATO’s naval survivability in a sea war vs. Iran, Russia, China, or all three?”

OUT ON A LIMB: Gladiator II is “total Hollywood bullsh*t”, says top historian.

A feature by The Hollywood Reporter published today (October 30) makes a bid to separate the historical accuracies of the upcoming epic from its wilder sequences – like the use of sharks in a flooded Colosseum, which had already garnered praise (and disbelief) from viewers upon its reveal in the film’s trailer.

Dr. Shadi Bartsch, a classics professor at the University of Chicago – and author of several books about ancient Rome – called it “total Hollywood bullsh*t.”

“I don’t think Romans knew what a shark was,” she said, although adding that naval battles were held in the arena.

On the use of rhinos in the Colosseum, Bartsch notes that a poem was once written in 80 A.D. “about a rhinoceros tossing a bull up to the sky”, although not of the same breed as the one in the film, which is directed by Ridley Scott. There’s also no evidence that gladiators rode rhinos, she clarified.

Another Gladiator II scene shows a Roman noble sipping tea in a cafe while reading the newspaper – which, as The Hollywood Reporter noted, would be an anachronism as the printing press would not be invented until 1,200 years later.

“They did have daily news — Acta Diuma — but it was carved and placed at certain locations,” Bartsch added. “You had to go to it, you couldn’t hold it at a cafe. Also, they didn’t have cafes!”

I eagerly await Scott’s sequels to Krakatoa: East of Java and One Million Years B.C.

AGAINST THE CORPORATE MEDIA: Michael Walsh’s New Anthology Explores How Badly the MSM Has Fallen.

My latest, over at EdDriscoll.com.

DON’T GET COCKY: Mark Halperin Drops Some Damning News on Harris’ Chances in Critical Swing States.

SUBCONTRACTING OUR MINDS:

Our paltry diet of screen-based entertainment helps us realize that the acceptance of AI has been coming for a while. Long ago, we expected our national officeholders to be men and women who had read deeply and reflected more than most on our lives together and what might enhance them. Some time ago we got used to our office holders paying speechwriters, press secretaries, and ghostwriters. More recently, we got used to their reading off of teleprompters. And soon we will accept their wearing earphones and glasses with text written into them. Gazing toward the day after tomorrow, we espy the transhumanist dream of fusing human and machine, which would have us listening to a speaker’s “neural upload.”

It’s all part of automation, and of automation we have become grateful. When shown a platoon of workers with shovels digging a canal by a man who was proud of the high employment this provided, Milton Friedman famously asked why the men weren’t instead equipped with only spoons. It was a memorable quip; automation, be it with the “earth-moving machines” for which Hobbes pleaded, or with printers and QR readers, has indeed produced great efficiencies. These things deliver the goods and services that free up our time and resources.

But to what end? Back-breaking and lung-blackening tasks were taken up under the lash of necessity, and so were gladly given over to machines when they could be, thanks to human ingenuity and modern science. Those who performed them often did so with the hope that their children wouldn’t have to. But what of activities that cultivate the mind and enrich the soul? Can we, should we, not pause before we give these, too, over to machines? What of what we still call the “fine arts”—painting, sculpture, architecture, design, music composition and performance, poetry—arts that are distinctively human and that ennoble or beautify our lives? Was the leisure to engage in these arts not the very reason we sought, through technology, to overcome material necessities?

And what of those fine arts that go beyond this and offer us compelling insights into the human condition: storytelling, novel writing, play writing, short story writing, essay writing? What, finally, of philosophizing? Do we want machines doing for us what is distinctively human, reducing us, by their alleged convenience, to puppets, hollowed-out shells of human beings, mannequins of mediocrity, ersatz versions of a once exalted form of being? Do we really want to farm out to machines our capacity to think, to invent, to discover and rediscover? Are we prepared to allow the organs of our intellectual and spiritual lives to waste away while we drink the dreck that calls itself the product of intelligence?

We are crossing a threshold. Should we not pause to consider whether the house is habitable?

It’s thought-provoking and rather scary stuff; tell your iPhone 16 to read the whole thing:

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST DUBYA: Liz Cheney urges George W. Bush to make presidential endorsement.

WHY IS THE KAMALA-WALZ CAMPAIGN SUCH A CESSPIT OF HOMOPHOBIA? Progressive Privilege: Walz Calls Elon Musk ‘That Gay Guy.’

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The liberal media’s distortion of Trump’s Liz Cheney comments exposes how panicked they are.

So now Donald Trump wants to kill Liz Cheney? Worse, he wants to drag her before a firing squad. Is there no end to this man’s wickedness?

The Lefty web and progressive media are awash with anguished commentary on Trump’s latest dream of violence. “Trump fantasises about guns pointed at Liz Cheney’s face”, pants an irate Rolling Stone. Trump has “told a crowd” that “Liz Cheney should have guns ‘trained on her face’”, yelps Vanity Fair. He wants “nine barrels shooting” at her, cries Politico.

There’s only one problem with this vision of Trump as such a lunatic liability that he fancies hauling poor Liz Cheney off for execution – it is completely untrue. It is undiluted poppycock.

What Trump actually did was criticise Cheney’s pro-militarist streak. In a sit-down chat with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, he laid into her “war hawk” tendencies. And he wondered out loud – in his usual, unfiltered language – how she would feel about war if she was in the thick of one herself.

John Nolte adds: Bill Maher Rips Media for Liz Cheney Firing Squad Hoax: ‘Just Don’t Lie to Me.’

Left-wing comedian Bill Maher tore into the corporate media during his Real Time Overtime segment for lying about Donald Trump calling for Liz Cheney to be executed.

“I woke up to the headline ‘Donald Trump had called for a firing squad for Liz Cheney,’ said Maher, adding, “and this is what I really don’t like about the media — No, he didn’t.”

Maher goes on to explain what Trump clearly said. “He’s criticizing her for being a war hawk. I mean she is Dick Cheney’s daughter.” Maher then read Trump’s full and unambiguous quote. Here it is:

Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington, in a nice building saying, “Oh, gee, well, let’s send — let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.”

“Just to be clear,” Maher continued, “this is exactly what hippies always said. This is exactly what peaceniks always said. [Trump is saying], ‘You know what, it’s very easy to sit in your building and send young men to die.’”

He then said to the media, “Just don’t lie to me. I don’t like Donald Trump. Don’t lie to me and tell me he wants her in front of a firing squad. He was saying something that … again, sounds like what hippies used to say.”

Dan McLaughlin flashes back to his blog writing from 20 years ago to note that that sort of hippy talk dominated the Democrats’ presidential bids during 2004 campaign season:

When you hear Democrats hit the fainting couch over Trump making a dumb chickenhawk argument, recall that their party RAN AN ENTIRE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN on that theme in 2004 https://t.co/JaLIOmeyrO

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 2, 2024

UPDATE: Here’s A List Of Every Garbage Journalist Who Lied About Trump’s Liz Cheney Chickenhawk Comments.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Garbage Time Edition.

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Why Los Angeles Is Becoming a Production Graveyard.

The production downturn has forced some industry insiders to reconcile with the impact of the most recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA deals, which structure yearly minimum raises to match inflation.

Preston Garrett, managing director of production company Rakish, is advocating for a moratorium on increases to crews and the temporary lowering of minimums until more work returns. “What matters more, keeping pace with what’s deemed to be fair inflation or sustainable crew rates that keep people working?” Garrett asks. “If we make the market more competitive, more work will come.”

On Monday, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra warned that the deals made with major labor unions are suppressing domestic production. “The contract terms are forcing productions out of the U.S. now,” he said at MIPCOM in Cannes.

“There’s a very significant difference in California, which has been the hardest hit [and] just hasn’t responded to what’s going on in the world of incentives,” Vinciquerra noted. “The cost of doing business in California is so high that it’s very difficult to price out a film.”

In a statement, SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said Vinciquerra is peddling a “false narrative.” He added, “Threatening the offshoring of American jobs is a cynical attempt to manipulate workers while masking the industry’s own business failures.”

Other Hollywood vets lament that L.A. is simply no longer a film-friendly hub. It’s not any one thing, it’s death by a thousand cuts. Another example: The rising cost of shooting permits. Last year, FilmLA rolled out rate hikes on a slew of fees. While some of the increases were tied to inflation, others represented markups of roughly 8 to 17 percent. Among the service pricing changes were additional limitations imposed by the guidelines that have aggravated location budgets. A permit that used to accommodate up to 10 locations over 14 consecutive days now allows for only five locations over seven days.

Jason McCauley, a location manager for Joker: Folie à Deux, which was partially filmed in L.A., says he’s seen permitting fees double in some cases. “It’s not the deciding factor, but those costs on top of what it otherwise costs to film here become expensive,” he adds. “It’s not just the permits; it’s labor, fuel, parking.”

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 you can’t make movies and TV shows in 2024 Los Angeles, which is all you need to know about the state’s continuing descent into socialism.

Incidentally, note how libertarian all of the Kamala voters in Hollywood sound when it’s time to jumpstart their industry. But then as Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”

AS A LEGENDARY COMMUNITY ORGANIZER ADVISES, GET IN THEIR FACES AND PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD:

HOLY SHT! @kleavittnh absolutely destroyed this ABC host to oblivion 🔥🔥🔥

She will crying herself to sleep later 😂

Best clip of the day 👏🏼pic.twitter.com/hKZ6oqC4b6

— Sara Rose 🇺🇸🌹 (@saras76) November 1, 2024

REV. WRIGHT, THE NEXT GENERATION: Meet Kamala Harris’s spiritual mentor: The radical pastor who suggested America was to blame for 9/11.

The man whose spiritual tutelage the presidential hopeful craves is a civil rights leader tutored by Martin Luther King with a history of controversial comments that are a potential source of embarrassment for Ms Harris as the race nears its conclusion.

Dr [Amos C.] Brown outraged senior Democrats after the 9/11 attacks, when he appeared to blame the US for the terrorist atrocity that claimed the lives of almost 3,000 victims while speaking at a memorial service.

“America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?”, local media reported him asking in September 2001, just days after the two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

“America, America. What did you do – either intentionally or unintentionally – in the world order, in Central America, in Africa where bombs are still blasting?”

Nancy Pelosi, the California congresswoman, was reported to have been left in tears and pushed back on the remarks when it was her time to speak.

“The act of terrorism on September 11 put those people outside the order of civilised behaviour, and we will not take responsibility for that,” said Ms Pelosi, who would go on to become speaker of the House Representatives.

Two other senior Democrats, the late California senator Dianne Feinstein and former California governor Gray Davis, walked out during his remarks.

Paul Holm, the partner of Mark Bingham, who died while trying to storm the cockpit of a third plane hijacked by terrorists, was overheard saying: “This was supposed to be a memorial service.”

Ms Harris had been associated with Dr Brown for years by this point, having been introduced to him by Willie Brown, the mayor of San Francisco and her former boyfriend, in the 1990s.

Exit quote: “‘Pastor, I called because I want you to pray for me, Doug [Emhoff], this country,’ she told Amos C Brown, calling him shortly after he finished conducting a service at San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church. Joe Biden had just dropped out of the contest after his disastrous debate performance, endorsing Ms Harris as his successor.”

JUST NBC THE GASLIGHTING!

WHITE SUPREMACY, YOU’RE REALLY DOING IT WRONG: Martin Luther King’s Niece Blasts Mark Cuban, Endorses Trump.

TWIRLING, TWIRLING, TWIRLING TOWARDS FREEDOM!

Kamala: "Understand the difference here, moving forward. Moving forward, understand the difference here. What we are looking at is a difference in this election. Let's move forward and see where we are."

pic.twitter.com/4Zdbrp8gGw

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 1, 2024

Classical reference in headline:

FINALLY, ST. GRETA HAS SPOKEN:

From earlier this year: The age of glorifying Greta Thunberg is over.

Greta Thunberg spent her weekend in France supporting two environmental campaigns. On Sunday she appeared at a rally in Bordeaux against an oil drilling project; twenty-four hours earlier the twenty-one-year-old Swede was further east, adding her voice to those activists opposed to the construction of a new stretch of motorway between Toulouse and Castres. “We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project and this madness,” said Thunberg in English, her now familiar keffiyeh around her neck.

Some French media described Thunberg as an “anti-global warming icon” and the “figurehead in the fight to protect the planet.” She might have been once.

Now, however, in her ubiquitous keffiyeh, appearing to chant “Crush Zionism” or endorsing slogans such as “Palestine will be free” she has become — perhaps unwittingly — the figurehead for what conservative commentators in France call “the green alliance.”

Three years ago Jean Messiha, the spokesman for Éric Zemmour during his 2022 presidential campaign, wrote of this strange coalition between Islamists and ecologists: “They share one color: green. But not only that. They also share a totalitarian approach to society.”

Plus ça change: the original European environmentalists who had a strange coalition with Islamists were awfully totalitarian as well.

And note Greta’s ghostwriter’s language: “Fill the streets, block, organize, occupy.” As Jon Gabriel wrote in June about America’s never-ending protests: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”

JIM GERAGHTY: Oh, Sure, Now the Harris Campaign Needs Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

Hey, remember when CNN headlines were declaring, “Walz could help Harris shore up the ‘blue wall’ on the way to the White House”?

Is he?

I’ll take this ad as a quiet admission that when it comes to winning Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, Shapiro is a far more useful asset than Walz. And as we approach Election Day, it becomes increasingly clear that Walz, self-described “knucklehead,’’ doesn’t bring as much to the table as Democrats believed in those heady days of summer. As noted yesterday, polling indicates Harris is on pace to win Minnesota by a slightly narrower margin than Joe Biden won the state in 2020. Never mind helping Harris in the critical blue-wall states; there’s not much evidence that Walz has helped her at all in his home state.

(Despite the protests from Eric Holder, it is clear that the vetting process he ran for Harris, digging into the background of her running mate options, was nowhere near thorough enough.)

You could see it in the online discourse and the Saturday Night Live sketch – Democrats were disappointed with Walz’s performance in the debate with J.D. Vance. He doesn’t know what a venture capitalist does, he thinks the First Amendment doesn’t cover hate speech, he goes rogue and declares America has to get rid of the Electoral College… Walz isn’t a strength you can put front and center in campaign ads, he’s a liability you try to hide until Election Day.

The guy who was supposed to be this big help with rural and blue-collar Americans is giving his closing message on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the friendliest of urban metropolitan venues. Walz is campaigning in downtown Detroit today, and then Flint and Traverse City.

Let’s face it though, as a Certified Minnesota Football Genius, the man is the second coming of Bud Grant: ‘Coach’ Tim Walz Has Another Football Lingo Issue, Coach and Sen. Tommy Tuberville Helps Out.

Hey, anybody who “can run a mean pick-6” can call it anything he wants!

Fortunately, America’s Newspeak of Dictionary speaks jive Walz:

Far more serious than Walz’s football malapropisms is what his mouthpiece is saying: Tim Walz ‘Says’ He Wants to Destroy America. “Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz ‘says’ he wants to destroy America — not expressly; nonetheless with perfect clarity. Walz’s mouthpiece and education guru, Brian Lozenski, actually did say it expressly. In the embedded video, Lozenski, whom Walz appointed to craft an “ethnic studies” curriculum for Minnesota children, calls for the overthrow of the United States. (Ethnic Studies, despite its harmless sounding name, is founded on Critical Race Theory and, like CRT, is aimed at overthrowing America.)”

Incidentally, unlike Trump and Vance, why hasn’t Walz gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast?

But why would anyone think that Walz is “too weird?”

THE BROOKS BROTHERS RIOT, THE NEXT GENERATION:

Does Brooks Brothers or Paul Stuart make the really authentic Proud Boys neckties?

(Classical reference in headline.)

IT’S COME TO THIS:

Todd writes, “the campaign to convince the world that all media should be assumed to be biased politically unless proved otherwise.” Well, yes. As long as the journalist discloses where his bias lies, this isn’t a problem. Or as Sean Davis wrote in 2015: Sorry, Chuck Todd, But Reporters Are Not The Referees Of Politics.

And that fact is exactly why Chuck Todd so desperately wants to be viewed as a referee, rather than an observer who just happens to have a camera in front of him and a media operation behind him. He wants you to think he’s the one calling balls and strikes. He wants you to think he’s the expert on the rules. He wants to be the one to tell you what’s out of bounds and what isn’t. And the reason he wants that is because he, like so many other reporters (he is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only political reporter to have significant ties to the Democratic Party), has skin in the game.

Todd worked for the presidential campaign of former Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. His wife is a long-time Democratic campaign consultant. They very clearly have skin in the game. Major League Baseball would never hire a George Steinbrenner staffer to stand behind the plate for a Yankees game against the Red Sox. It would be absurd to suggest that an arrangement like that would be appropriate. Fans would be outraged. But Todd would have you believe that this would not just be totally kosher, but totally normal.

In the interest of full disclosure, I also have a political background. I was a congressional staffer for several Republicans. I worked on a Republican presidential campaign. There are two big differences between Todd and me, though: 1) I am completely up-front about my biases, my background, and my ideological and political preferences, and 2) I am under no delusion that I’m a neutral arbiter. When I make assertions, I do my absolute best to back them up with verifiable evidence. And I certainly do not make any claims that I’ve been bestowed (by whom, Chuck Todd never makes clear) with some sort of official role in determining who is following The Rules™ and who isn’t.

See how easy that is?

Note also that Todd is writing in the Atlantic, which after the Kevin Williamson debacle in 2018, has quite neatly identified its collective ideology.

GREAT MOMENTS IN INADVERTENT SELF-IDENTIFICATION: Massachusetts man arrested for allegedly painting swastika on Trump campaign sign.

A Cohasset man has been arrested for allegedly painting a swastika onto a Trump campaign sign sitting along a public road in town.

The defaced sign is the property of Kevin O’Donnell, the 77-year-old co-chair of the Republican Town Committee and a longstanding supporter of former President Donald Trump.

Police arrested 74-year-old Frederic Laidlaw, who was in Quincy district court on Thursday for arraignment on a felony charge of “defacement of property,” Cohasset Police Chief William Quigley said in a statement.

“Cohasset police allege that Laidlaw entered onto private property and painted a swastika on a political sign on Wednesday October 30th,” Quigley wrote.

O’Donnell told the Herald that the sign — which cost him about $200 — for the last three elections has been on land he owns next to busy Route 3A, with no previous problems.

He also said that he has to wonder if the person who decided to deface it even realizes the imagery they are conjuring when they use a symbol most closely associated with the Nazi government of Germany.

“It’s shocking, absolutely shocking,” he said. “Do they understand how many people died because of that ideology?”

Friend of Israel and proponent of less wars; Trump is the Worst. Hitler. Ever.

JIM TREACHER: Friday Pre-Election Grab Bag.

I haven’t seen Israel much in the news lately, probably because they’re winning the war they didn’t start. Journalists, and their fellow Democrats, really don’t like it when the Jews succeed.

Antisemitism in America is in full flourish after the October 7 attack. Just look at this crap:

If a Muslim got kicked out of a Jewish deli anywhere in America, it would be national news. But a Jew getting kicked out of a Muslim cafe for wearing a Star of David? The journos don’t care. They don’t consider it antisemitism unless it’s wearing a MAGA hat.

Meanwhile, an illegal alien Muslim terrorist just shot a Jew in Chicago while screaming “Allahu Akbar,” and public schoolteachers in Los Angeles are openly plotting to turn kids against Israel without getting fired.

Democrats still can’t shut up about what happened in Charlottesville seven years ago, yet all the antisemitism in 2024 is coming from their side.

It’s Charlottesvilles all the way down in Kamala and Joe’s America: