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.
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!”
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.
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”.
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.
Breaking: A member of the British radical group Palestine Action has destroyed a historic painting of Lord Balfour at Trinity College in @Cambridge_Uni. pic.twitter.com/BUco8VU7va
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Danielle Lalonders is an associate narrative designer for Cliffhanger Games, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, a gigantic video game company with nearly 13,000 global employees taking in over $7 billion in revenue per year.
According to her own website, Lalonders is working on a video game version of Black Panther, the Marvel movie about a specifically black superhero living in an ethno-state.
As it turns out, Lalonders has allegedly made a series of comments about whether or not white people can experience racism and even said she would prefer not to work with white people.
During a 2021 video conference for the Game Devs of Color Expo, a YouTube page dedicated to the celebration of game developers based on the color of their skin, Lalonders commented on the team she worked with for another project.
“But who is your team?” Lalonders read along with a slideshow. “All people of color. We have no white people on our team. I did that because I wanted to create a safe environment,” she explained.
“I know the best way for the environment to be safe is to be around people who are just like me, and I’m not saying that white people in the industry are creating unsafe environments. I’m not saying that. That is not what I’m saying. I am saying that sometimes, it is hard to work with white people because they think that something may [be] okay, but it was really a microaggression, and no one wants to deal with that while you’re trying to make a game that they love.”
I’m sure that Lalonders is creating an environment that’s both separate, and yet entirely equal from other teams at Electronic Arts. Something like that has never been tried in America, I’m sure!
NBC NEWS: “Conservatives are OUT OF LINE suggesting there are Haitian cannibals!!”
NBC NEWS (same article: “There are…um, gangs that are eating people, including The Cannibal Army. But it is unacceptable for those on the right to notice!” https://t.co/bgrBZHitv8pic.twitter.com/0Sr0eWpqjl
— Brad Slager – Scrubbing Down In a Bloodbath (@MartiniShark) March 14, 2024
Amazing — NBC must have just gotten back from Lake Pahoe: “May I take this opportunity of emphasizing that there is no cannibalism in the British Navy, absolutely none. And when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount!”
No word yet the level of cannibalism in “the Port-Au-Prince Of America” just yet, but I’m sure that story is still developing.
[Band of Brothers, The Pacific and Masters of the Air are all] epic productions. Masters of the Air had a $250 million budget. And yet, there’s a single scene from the series finale that I can describe without giving anything away, and that almost any leader in any context should consider.
It comes as one of the main characters begins to believe he might actually survive the war and make it home to his wife and child. Neither he nor his colleagues has any qualms about killing Nazis, but he does worry about what it might have done to his psyche.
“It reminds me of this quote I read in college from Nietzsche,” the character, Major Harry Crosby, says. “He said, ‘Whoever fights monsters should take care not to become a monster himself. Because if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes right back at you.’ ”
While the based-on-real-life characters in Masters of the Air were battling real-life monsters (again: Nazis), I think this quote also applies in less-dire circumstances.
Consider the technology business leader who ultimately winds up a virtual slave to his or her devices.
Or else, the CEO who is committed to shareholder value but gets so focused on the short-term that they neglect things that make a business grow over the long run.
Or, just to show that I can see myself in this: Imagine a writer who values the written word and who then finds himself staying up late crafting an article after watching a TV show.
Honestly, it might turn out to be the most important lesson in leadership. Don’t let the thing you set out to control wind up controlling you.
Look, I’m going to be a critic here for a minute. I think Masters of the Air is the Return of the Jedi of this three-series series; it’s definitely worth watching if you’re into this kind of thing, but it’s not as good as the two before it.
Which is a fair point. As I said previously, too many episodes of Masters of the Air felt like the old 1960s TV series 12 O’Clock High, but with ILM-produced digital special effects instead of grainy black and white newsreel footage. But time may change how the new series is perceived. Band of Brothers and The Pacific were recently added to the Netflix roster, and for those tuning in to those series for the first time, they can now identify many of the actors from the big screen and TV roles they went on to do. Look, there’s Ron Livingston from Office Space! There’s David Schwimmer from Friends! There’s Tom Hardy from The Dark Knight Rises! There’s Rami Malek from Bohemian Rhapsody and Die Another Day! 20 years from now, after the young Masters of the Air cast go on to make their share of hit movies, that may change dramatically how new viewers appreciate the series.
But for those who watched the last episode Thursday night or yesterday, I don’t think I’m giving away a major spoiler to note that one of the operations featured near the end of the episode was the subject of a Mark Felton video from the fall of 2020 on using the Americans’ B-17s as “food bombers.” (Which neatly answers the Nietzsche quote above about “not becoming a monster himself.”) As Felton wrote on his video’s YouTube page, “By 1945, the German-occupied Western Netherlands was starving. Concluding a secret truce with the Nazi leader of the Netherlands, the Allies undertook dangerous behind-the-lines missions to feed 3 million people. This is the story of [Operations] Manna, Chowhound and Faust:”
I was not the only public health scientist speaking out against school closures and other unscientific countermeasures. Scott Atlas, an especially brave voice, used scientific articles and facts to challenge the public health advisors in the Trump White House, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and Covid coordinator Deborah Birx, but to little avail. When 98 of his Stanford faculty colleagues unjustly attacked Atlas in an open letter that did not provide a single example of where he was wrong, I wrote a response in the student-run Stanford Daily to defend him. I ended the letter by pointing out that:
Among experts on infectious disease outbreaks, many of us have long advocated for an age-targeted strategy, and I would be delighted to debate this with any of the 98 signatories. Supporters include Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University, the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist. Assuming no bias against women scientists of color, I urge Stanford faculty and students to read her thoughts.
None of the 98 signatories accepted my offer to debate. Instead, someone at Stanford sent complaints to my superiors at Harvard, who were not thrilled with me.
I had no inclination to back down. Together with Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for age-based focused protection instead of universal lockdowns, with specific suggestions for how better to protect the elderly, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives.
With the Great Barrington Declaration, the silencing was broken. While it is easy to dismiss individual scientists, it was impossible to ignore three senior infectious-disease epidemiologists from three leading universities. The declaration made clear that no scientific consensus existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified—and even grew slanderous. Collins, a lab scientist with limited public-health experience who controls most of the nation’s medical research budget, called us “fringe epidemiologists” and asked his colleagues to orchestrate a “devastating published takedown.” Some at Harvard obliged.
A prominent Harvard epidemiologist publicly called the declaration “an extreme fringe view,” equating it with exorcism to expel demons. A member of Harvard’s Center for Health and Human Rights, who had argued for school closures, accused me of “trolling” and having “idiosyncratic politics,” falsely alleging that I was “enticed . . . with Koch money,” “cultivated by right-wing think tanks,” and “won’t debate anyone.” (A concern for those less privileged does not automatically make you right-wing!) Others at Harvard worried about my “scientifically inaccurate” and “potentially dangerous position,” while “grappling with the protections offered by academic freedom.”
Though powerful scientists, politicians, and the media vigorously denounced it, the Great Barrington Declaration gathered almost a million signatures, including tens of thousands from scientists and health-care professionals. We were less alone than we had thought.
Even from Harvard, I received more positive than negative feedback. Among many others, support came from a former chair of the Department of Epidemiology—a former dean, a top surgeon, and an autism expert, who saw firsthand the devastating collateral damage that lockdowns inflicted on her patients. While some of the support I received was public, most was behind the scenes from faculty unwilling to speak publicly.
The US has held secret talks with Iran this year in a bid to convince Tehran to use its influence over Yemen’s Houthi movement to end attacks on ships in the Red Sea, according to US and Iranian officials.
The indirect negotiations, during which Washington also raised concerns about Iran’s expanding nuclear programme, took place in Oman in January and were the first between the foes in 10 months, the officials said.
The US delegation was led by the White House’s Middle East adviser Brett McGurk and its Iran envoy Abram Paley. Iranian deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani, who is also Tehran’s top nuclear negotiator, represented the Islamic republic.
Omani officials shuttled between the Iranian and American representatives so they did not speak directly, the officials said.
The talks underline how the Biden administration is using diplomatic channels with its foe, alongside military deterrents, in a bid to de-escalate a wave of regional hostilities involving Iranian-backed militant groups that was triggered by the Israel-Hamas war.
The city of Toronto has a car theft problem, and it doesn’t sound like police have much of a clue as to how to combat it. In a recent safety meeting, one officer even gave advice that basically boiled down to: If thieves come knocking to steal your car, just let ’em have it.
As reported by blogTO, Toronto Police Service Constable Marco Ricciardi said, “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your [key] fobs at your front door because they’re breaking into your home to steal your car. They don’t want anything else.”
On the one hand, I totally understand the very rational, self-preserving stance of not risking life or injury over what is, at the end of the day, an insured, inanimate object. It is, however, the sort of advice you’d expect from a well-meaning parent or spouse. Hearing it come out of the mouths of the very people whose taxpayer-funded, gun-toting job it is to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the first place, however, is arguably less OK and frankly kind of crazy.
Outkick the Coverage’s Joe Kinsey asks the question we’re all thinking reading the above: “Can’t you just shoot home invaders in Canada to end the threat?”
Hahahahahaha. Let’s go back to 2023 and the case of Ali Mian, a 22-year-old who watched a scumbag break into his home and attack his mother. Mian shot one of the lowlifes.
The Canadian government arrested Mian on a second-degree murder charge that was eventually dropped by the government, but not before the man had to deal with the fiancial and emotion toll from such a case.
Obviously, making this broad observation is not necessarily an endorsement of Trump or the GOP, and there are probably some finer policy points where you can plausibly disagree. But on just about every issue that has dominated the public discourse post-Trump, the pro-Democrat establishment either staked out a fringe position or was proven wrong by subsequent events. It’s hard to even know where to begin.
On Covid, it’s abundantly clear that red states that refused mass shutdowns and excessive regulations didn’t see any worse health outcomes — and the damage from the shutdowns and Covid mandates is still lasting. The idea that our strained health care system was laying off people for refusing to take a “vaccine” that we now know doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus has been a disaster, to say nothing of our strained military, in the middle of a massive recruiting crisis, forcibly ejecting thousands over vaccine mandates.
Then there’s the fact that Covid killed off 200,000 businesses in just the first year. How many businesses could have been saved with more reasonable Covid regulations? Then there was the distrust sewn with the public through all of the coronavirus propaganda and social media censorship. Your posts could be banned from Facebook for even speculating that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an outcome that the government now acknowledges is more likely than not.
The worst outcome, however, might have been the Biden administration irresponsibly outsourcing its Covid policy on schools to the teachers unions, who fought to keep schools closed for more than a year in some places, followed by an insistence on ineffective and difficult-to-enforce mask mandates on children. Even left-wing publications now openly acknowledge Covid school closures were unnecessary and disastrous for America’s kids, but by the time they found the courage to say what was abundantly obvious to the rest of us, the damage was done.
The bottom line is that the Covid response fundamentally eroded trust between citizens and the government like no other issue in generations, and Democrat lawmakers were pretty clearly on, as they like to say, “the wrong side of history.”
Of course, the school closures issue was just emblematic of the long-running decline of American education, which is almost wholly a result of teachers unions. Their enormous donations to Democrats effectively serve as protection money, and for decades, this unholy alliance effectively made even the most basic education reforms impossible.
Post-Covid, however, Americans who were forced to see what their kids were learning via remote schooling have largely woken up to the fact that education has been politicized beyond repair. In just the last three years, West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana have all passed school-choice legislation, and more states such as Texas are likely to enact it soon. The good news is homeschooling is skyrocketing in popularity, and private and religious schools are popping up everywhere.
Read the whole thing, including Hemingway’s conclusion that “Abortion is almost the sole issue where things are complicated for the right, and we probably shouldn’t underestimate the Republican Party’s ability to lose winnable elections,” so don’t get cocky, to coin an Insta-phrase. On the other hand, if he’s looking for a campaign theme, perhaps Trump should borrow from Kingsley Amis’ suggestion that Robert Conquest’s history of the Soviet Union deserved to be retitled, “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”
And on the gripping hand, Jim Treacher writes: “If you’re stressed out about the election, now that it’s too late for either party* to pick an acceptable candidate, you just need to relax. My friend Jarvis has the right idea:”
As Treacher concludes, “It’s a win/win. No matter what happens, I will be swimming in schadenfreude. So I got that goin’ for me.”
The federal government issued new guidelines Monday for Americans on how to combat the coronavirus pandemic, titled “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” The 15 days are seen as a trial period for the new recommendations and add to previous guidance about practicing good hygiene, staying home if sick and following state and local authorities.
Fauci and Birx’s glee during the announcement is something to behold:
Remember when everybody had to stop going to school and start living inside their houses? Newscasters started broadcasting from home and everything? All that weird stuff?
And, oh yeah, they broke the economy like snapping a dry twig over their knee.
The problem with splitting the baby is that the baby dies. That seems to be what happened here in McAfee’s attempt to be Solomonic. If he wanted Fani Willis to remain in charge of the case, he needed to exonerate her from all of these issues. Instead, he admitted what everyone could see on live television, and then refused to act on it.
That sets up an appeal, of course, based on the factual record that McAfee established in this order. And one has to wonder whether that is McAfee’s intent — to punt this to the state appellate court rather than risk the ire of Fulton County voters by disqualifying Willis. Declare her guilty, fail to act, and let the next set of judges with more political insulation deal with the issue themselves. Or maybe even more quickly, letting the Georgia State Bar and the Attorney General deal with the “odor of mendacity” and pre-empt the whole issue by suspending Willis’ law license.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “obstacle to peace” in a Thursday floor speech and called on Israelis to hold a new election to replace the Netanyahu government amid the ongoing war with Hamas.
“Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel,” Schumer said in a 40-minute speech on the Senate floor, suggesting Israel should elect a new leader who can deal with the threat of Hamas.
Schumer’s call for an Israeli election comes as President Joe Biden and other Democrats are becoming increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu over the rising civilian deaths in Gaza and his refusal to agree to a cease-fire deal with Hamas, which would include the establishment of an official Palestinian state. The Israeli leader again rejected the possibility of a two-state solution earlier this week, saying his nation wouldn’t support the proposition after the brutal October 7 attack.
I’m so old, I can remember when Schumer claimed to be against foreign interference in another country’s elections:
This is CNN — Lemon leaving the comfort zone of CNN for a taste of alternate media, only to go back to the network temporarily after reality intrudes feels like a repeat of Sanjay Gupta going on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2021:
Rogan asked, “Does it bother you the news network you work for out and out lied? Just outright lied about me taking horse dewormer?” Gupta responded, “They shouldn’t have said that.”
The very next day, Gupta appeared on Lemon’s CNN show and the two resumed bashing Rogan, pretending that Gupta’s admission to Rogan never happened. As for Musk:
Don Lemon wanted special treatment by demanding minimum payments. That’s more than what any other creator on this platform is getting: it wouldn’t be fair to any other creator if he got his wishes. https://t.co/FiY24qAT2e
Neil Young is placing his music back on Spotify a little over two years after pulling it due to misinformation about vaccines on The Joe Rogan Experience…
“My decision comes as other music services, Apple, Amazon, Qobuz, Tidal, all high res, have started serving the same disinformation podcast I had opposed at Spotify,” Young wrote to fans on The Neil Young Archives. “Because I cannot leave all those services like I did Spotify, because my music would have no streaming outlet to music lovers at all, I have returned.”
Are music lovers really looking for Neil Young’s music, though? Is that really what a music lover is?
Well, now we know where Young’s principles end: the same place as everybody else’s. He’s every bit as greedy as the people he hates.
It’s pretty funny that Rolling Stone started out as a place to find some far-out tunes when you were tripping balls with your old lady, and now they’ve been reduced to scolding people about vaccines. At least they’re consistently pro-drug, I guess?
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