Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
January 24, 2024
TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: The Michelle Obama Factor.
UPDATE: Report: Barack Obama Is Telling Joe Biden to Quit the 2024 Race.
HOW IT STARTED:
At The New Criterion, when we hear the name “Woody Allen,” we think first not of his movies but of an anecdote that Hilton Kramer, our founding editor, liked to tell.
Attending a dinner at the old Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street, Hilton was pleased to find himself seated next to an attractive and agreeable young woman. Woody Allen was also in attendance, but he was on the opposite side of the table facing a large window that looked out upon the street. Of course, the window also looked in upon the diners. Allen announced that he could not abide being seen by anonymous passersby and insisted that he change places with the young lady.
Settling into his new chair, he asked whether Hilton ever felt embarrassed when he met socially artists whom he had criticized in print. “No,” Hilton replied, “Why should I? They are the ones who made the bad art; I just described it.” Allen, Hilton recalled, lapsed into gloomy silence. It was only on his way home that Hilton remembered that he had written a highly critical piece on [1976’s] The Front, a PC movie about the Hollywood blacklist in which Allen acted.
—“Cancel culture comstockery,” the New Criterion, April 2020.
How it’s going: Woody Allen pens new short story for the New Criterion. “Manhattan-based literary magazine the New Criterion has published its first ever piece of fiction in its forty-two-year history. The author may raise an eyebrow: it’s legendary and controversial filmmaker Woody Allen.”
—Cockburn, Spectator World, today.
GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS:
Shot: Trump’s White House Pharmacy Handed Out Drugs Like Candy: Report.
White House pharmacists reportedly distributed uppers and downers like candy to Trump administration officials during his time in office, according to a new report from the Department of Defense Inspector General.
The 80-page document, which was released on Jan. 8, found that “all phases of the White House Medical Unit’s pharmacy operations had severe and systemic problems due to the unit’s reliance on ineffective internal controls to ensure compliance with pharmacy safety standards.”
The investigation, which began in 2018 after the Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) received complaints about improper medical practices within the White House Medical Unit, found a slew of compliance issues and improper safety standards. The medical unit’s operations fall under the jurisdiction of the White House Military Office. The report covers a period between 2009 and 2018, with a majority of its findings coalescing around 2017- 2019, during the height of the Trump administration.
While Trump lived under the White House roof, the pharmacy reportedly kept messy, handwritten records, spent lavishly on brand-name medications, and failed to comply with a slew of federal law and Department of Defense regulations governing the handling, distribution, and disposal of prescription medication.
Through in-person inspections and interviews with over 120 officials, the report concluded “that the White House Medical Unit provided a wide range of health care and pharmaceutical services to ineligible White House staff in violation of Federal law and regulation and DoD policy. Additionally, the White House Medical Unit dispensed prescription medications, including controlled substances, to ineligible White House staff.”
One witness told the DoD OIG that pharmacy staff regularly prepared go-bags of prescription medication to White House staff in advance of overseas trips. “One of our requirements was to go ahead and make packets up for the controlled medications. And those would typically be Ambien or Provigil and typically both,” the witness said. “So we would normally make these packets of Ambien and Provigil, and a lot of times they’d be in like five tablets in a zip‑lock bag. And so traditionally, too, we would hand these out.”
—Rolling Stone, today.
Chaser: Drug Possession: United States Needs to Decriminalize Now.
—Rolling Stone, November 26, 2018.
Hangover:
With every controversy he stirred, Wenner’s sense of himself was expanding. Jann Wenner for president. Given the obstacles, it’s remarkable how seriously the idea was being entertained. Wenner, after all, was a draft dodger with a “concomitant history of psychiatric treatment, suicidal ideation, homosexual and excessive heterosexual promiscuity, and heavy use of illegal drugs.” Nonetheless, Wenner said that in the late 1970s Sidney Harman, the founder of Harman Kardon, the stereo maker and Rolling Stone advertiser, offered to back Wenner if he wanted to run for president of the United States. “He said he would fund me if I wanted to do it,” recalled Wenner. “You never want to say no to people who think that because it enhances your mystery. And it’s true, I did have quite a little political team there—[Dick] Goodwin, Anne Wexler, Hunter, the writers. I could have done it. I could have tried it. I don’t think I could have gone very far.”
“I didn’t have the temperament for it,” Wenner said. “I couldn’t get up at six in the morning and shake hands outside a shoe factory.”
* * * * * * * *
On the twenty-second floor at 745 Fifth Avenue, Rolling Stone’s camera room—a darkroom with a buzzer for entering and a revolving light-trap door—had become a de facto cocaine emporium, run by two employees who doubled as dealers. The room, a version of which had existed in San Francisco, was dubbed “the Capri Lounge” after the bar in the TV comedy Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Wenner was the biggest customer of all, but he also used grams of cocaine as bonuses for employees who pleased him. “The deal was,” said Karen Mullarkey, Annie Leibovitz’s photo editor in the late 1970s, “if I got Annie through a deadline, and everything worked out okay, I would come in and find a bindle, one of those little folding envelopes of coke, on my light box. That was a gift from Jann.”
When Wenner threw parties at Rolling Stone, there were lines to the camera room, which Wenner manned like a velvet rope. “Anybody who came down there to buy drugs from them, they would take a Polaroid,” recalled Wenner. “They would sit around, do a little blow, and they had a whole hall with like four hundred or five hundred Polaroids of all their visitors.” Here was a common image of Jann Wenner in most stories told about him from the late 1970s: curled up in his swivel chair at the round table that Jane bought for him in 1968, snorting a line of coke and swigging straight from an open bottle of Polmos Wódka Wyborowa. This was the preferred cocktail of the jet set: vodka, which took the edge off the cocaine, which prompted more cocaine, which prompted more vodka.
—Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, 2017.
UPDATE: The White House Mystery Drug.
Tucked away under a list of medications in the report on President Obama’s recent physical exam is this intriguing notation: “Jet lag/time zone management, direct physician prescribed program, occasional medication use.” Obama’s doctor, Navy Capt. Jeffrey Kuhlman, didn’t say what drug the president might be taking to fight the mind-numbing effects of crossing too many time zones. But sleep doctors we consulted say one possibility is Provigil, a stimulant that is regularly prescribed to help people fend off excessive sleepiness.
Fans claim you get all the benefits of a triple shot of espresso without the jitters or anxiety that can accompany a massive hit of caffeine.
“If they’re going to give him something to wake him up, Provigil is the way to go,” says Dr. Lisa Shives, medical director of Northshore Sleep Medicine in Evanston, Illinois.
While the White House won’t say what the president is actually taking, Provigil (also known by its generic name modafinil) is an intriguing possibility. The drug has acquired an almost mythic status in recent years as a pill that makes it possible for the user to bypass the all-too-human need for sleep and work 24 or even 36 hours at a stretch. Manufactured by Cephalon, it’s in a class of medications called “wakefulness promoting agents.” Fans claim you get all the benefits of a triple shot of espresso without the jitters or anxiety that can accompany a massive hit of caffeine. It’s reported to be increasingly popular among sleep-deprived cohorts like long-distance truckers, fighter pilots, and students pulling all-nighters—and brought in $1 billion for Cephalon in 2008.
* * * * * * * *
Ambien has had bad press in recent years—and it might be a riskier choice for the president. There have been reports of patients on Ambien sleepwalking and sleep-eating, and even occasional stories about people who drove while on Ambien and didn’t realize they were behind the wheel. When her patients complain of side effects, Shives simply tells them to stop taking the drug. “You do hear reports of some strange and bad behavior but you have to put that in the context of how many millions of people take this drug” without these problems, she says.
Again, we don’t know exactly what the president has taken to fight jet lag. But if these drugs are indeed part of his treatment, it’s easy to see why his doctors might have resorted to medication. Scientists have been studying jet lag for years and they’re just beginning to understand how body rhythms work to help us fall asleep and stay awake at regular times. It’s a very delicate system and you mess with it at your peril. The sleep-wake cycle shifts slowly; you can’t push it around more than an hour or two a day, says Charmane Eastman, director of the Biological Rhythms Research Lab at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “It’s very hard to get it to go faster,” she says.
—The Huff Post, March 4th, 2010.
WOEING: Boeing, not Spirit, may be responsible for blown-off panel on Alaska Airlines flight. “The fuselage panel that flew off an Alaska Airlines plane earlier this month had, according to multiple reports, actually been removed for repair and reinstalled improperly by Boeing workers on the final assembly line in Washington state. If the information gets confirmed by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, it would make Boeing hold the majority of the responsibility for the accident rather than Spirit Aerosystems, which originally installed the panel into the 737 MAX 9 fuselage in Kansas.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN MISSION CREEP:
Shot: ADL Reports Unprecedented Rise in Antisemitic Incidents Post-Oct. 7.
—Anti-Defamation press release, December 11th.
Chaser: ADL Alerts Law Enforcement to Matt Walsh, Chris Rufo, Libs of TikTok.
—The Daily Signal, today.
ADL staffers must be diving for the fainting couches with this news: “Chaya Raichik, founder of Libs of TikTok,” has been appointed to “the Oklahoma State Department of Education Library Media Advisory Committee.” Hopefully there are enough couches for everyone on the left getting vapors: NBC News Publishes Its Hit Piece on ‘Far-Right Influencer’ Chaya Raichik.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: NAACP claims ‘no evidence’ of antisemitism at girls HS basketball game — but it did not speak with players from targeted team.
Related: ‘How Many Kids Have You Killed?’ Biden Heckled at Least 10 Times by Pro-Palestine Protestors.
MSNBC ANCHOR DECRIES CHARACTER PROMOTED BY MSNBC: Maddow: If Trump is Elected, “That’ll Be the End of Politics.”
Rachel @Maddow describing Trump’s dictator-worshiping pitch to voters: “If you pick me, that’ll be the end of politics, and you won’t have to deal with politics anymore. You won’t have to deal with contested elections, you won’t have to deal with contests or divisions when it comes to power, you’ll have a strongman leader and I’ll just do what I want. And won’t that be a lot simpler? That’s what he’s offering. That strongman model is what the Republican base is enthused about.”
Irony, much? The person she and Psaki support is Joe Biden. Biden has acted as a dictator in office and Democrats like Maddow don’t seem to have a problem with that.
As Charles Cooke asked the left in 2016, “Herewith, an under-asked question for our friends on the progressive left: ‘Has Donald Trump’s remarkable rise done anything to change your mind as to the ideal strength of the State?’”
Because the left — before and after Trump — can imagine a state so large, their motto would be best described as “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato,” to coin a phrase.
Flashback: The many times Donald Trump and ‘Morning Joe’ yukked it up.
LEARN TO CODE: They Created This Term to Smear Average Americans. Now It’s Come Back to Haunt Them.
Liberal media outlets are starting to get pinched. While it’s sad when anyone gets fired, these folks were at the forefront of shaming those whose employment they determined was less-than, archaic, or not in keeping with the ways of the new world, whatever that means. In other words, if it required manual labor, the media, Democrats, and the coastal elite viewed it as a state of serfdom. Coal miners were a popular target. Whole communities that dot Appalachia were subjected to what some would call a regional genocide under the Obama presidency. His agenda took a hatchet to coal jobs, and most of these towns seldom recovered.
That’s when the “learn to code” smear was tossed into the mix by liberal reporters to coal miners and other workers who lost their livelihoods. The labor was viewed as inferior if it didn’t require a college education. Even worse, reporters mocked these newly unemployed workers, blaming them for being uneducated. The job retraining programs were a publicity stunt. Even labor unions knew this was a ruse. So, it was delicious revenge to see LA Times employees essentially saying that “learn to code” is heartless and unoriginal amid the layoffs. No, you don’t get to play that game. You created it. Now, sit there like good children, be wrong, and shut up. You lost your job—you don’t have a right to say anything.
Related: Ex CNNer Chris Cillizza Community Noted AND Ratioed After Denying Biden Ever Said This.
Flashback: Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter’s #LearntoCode Purges. As Steve noted in 2019, “Dorsey claims that #LearnToCode is coded language for some kind of threat, when in fact it originated with asshole members of the press who somehow didn’t get purged when they used it against ordinary Americans who had lost their jobs to Obama’s anti-coal regulations.”
And Frank J. Fleming’s irony is going right over the heads of the many Twitter users who would love to use journalistic tools to destroy someone for having different political beliefs:
LOL'ing at all the replies that didn't get it. https://t.co/QFa5OuojuF
— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) January 24, 2024
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Flashback: The Coming ‘Symbolic Analyst’ Meltdown.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Amy Coney Barrett Says Ruling For Open Border Has Nothing To Do With Landscaping Work She Needs Done This Summer.
MICHAEL WALSH: To Save America, Abolish the TSA. “In retrospect, it’s clear that Osama bin Laden emerged the victor of 9/11:”
More than twenty years later, it’s clear to everyone who flies that what we have is not safety, but safety theater — the illusion of safety, conducted by uniformed government employees of last resort whose mission as it has evolved is not to provide the phantasm of “security” but to obstruct, hamper, harass, and hinder Americans as they attempt to go about their lives. “The Transportation Security Administration marked another year of progress,” reads a blurb on their website. You can bet more “progress” will be forthcoming in 2024.
And was this unconscionable violation of the plain language of the Constitution met with the universal opposition, disdain, and outrage that it deserved? Of course not. From 1968 to 1972 there was a spate of airplane hijackings by Cuban radicals; “On to Cuba!” became a punch line on late-night comedy, and the introduction of metal detectors at airports and the presence of sky marshals put an end to it. After 9/11, the appearance of one failed “shoe bomber” has meant your shoes come off forever. And while the new, improved, intrusive TSA might manage to scoop up some weapons in advertently packed in luggage from those parts of the country where guns or knives are part of everyday life, it misses many, many more — up to 70 percent. Possibly it has discouraged a few terrorists from attempting to emulate the late sheikh of Araby, but why bother? After all, why hijack a plane when you can just walk across the undefended, roundheeled southern border, get free transport — no ID necessary! — into the interior and there bide your time?
UPDATE: TSA Agents Confiscate Dana Loesch’s Assault Microphone Stand.
(Updated and bumped.)
WHEN YOU’VE LOST MATT YGLESIAS…: Leftwing hack and Nepo Baby Matthew Yglesias frets that having a media packed stem-to-stern with crusading puritanical progressives isn’t an unmitigated good for the left.
The people who produce the news are primarily young college graduates living in big cities, a demographic that skews way to the left of the electorate. And the audience for this news, though less ideologically skewed than the producers, is still significantly to the left of center.
That dynamic is a powerful force multiplier for platforming and disseminating new left-wing ideas, including ideas that go from edgy to dominant — like “gay couples should be allowed to get married” — as well as ideas that provoke massive backlash the minute they get any purchase — “maybe cities don’t need police departments.” It’s a major structural feature of the media landscape that helps explain why the general policy trajectory over the past generation has been toward the left.
Yglesias adds, “But electorally, it’s a decidedly mixed bag, since the journalists, though clearly on the left ideologically, aren’t partisan propagandists.”
They aren’t? As with gambling in Rick’s Cafe, you’ll be shocked to know there’s gaslighting going on from Matt Yglesias:
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF HOMOPHOBIC TIME TRAVELING HACKERS: MSNBC’s Joy Reid defends underage gay porn for children… but posted homophobic blogs.
(Classical allusion in headline.)
HOW IT STARTED: Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary.
—Michael , the L.A. Times, January 10, 2022.
How it’s going: L.A. Times to lay off at least 115 people in the newsroom.
The Los Angeles Times announced Tuesday that it was laying off at least 115 people — or more than 20% of the newsroom — marking one of the largest workforce reductions in the history of the 142-year-old institution.
The move comes amid projections for another year of heavy losses for the newspaper.
The cuts were necessary because the paper could no longer lose $30 million to $40 million a year without making progress toward building higher readership that would bring in advertising and subscriptions to sustain the organization, the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, said Tuesday.
Drastic changes were needed, he said, including installing new leaders who would focus on strengthening the outlet’s journalism to become indispensable to more readers.
—The L.A. Times, today.
I’m sure the laid off L.A. Times staffers will keep rockin’! as they enjoy their funemployment. It’s a blessing in disguise, after all.
Related: Kids and parents turn to coding to boost college, career prospects.
—The L.A. Times, August 1st, 2014.
UPDATE: More classic headlines: Children apologize to their dying elders for spreading COVID-19 as L.A. County reels.
—The L.A. Times, January 12th, 2021.
And of course: Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.
—The L.A. Times, August 21st, 2021.
THE “IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT” PARTY ON ELECTION DENIALISM:
WATCH: President Biden refers to former Virginia Governer Terry McAuliffe, who lost to Glenn Youngkin in 2021, as "the real governor". pic.twitter.com/7u68tV40cd
— News Bro (@Newzbro) January 23, 2024
UPDATE: Election Denier or Senile Old Man? Biden Refers to Terry McAuliffe as ‘Real Governor’ of Virginia.
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, CITIZENS: U.S., Chinese Researchers Wanted to Engineer Virus Similar to Covid One Year before Pandemic Outbreak, Internal Docs Show.
DISPATCHES FROM THE STONE KNIVES AND BEARSKINS ERA OF COMPUTING: Cray 1978 versus iPhone 2022.
If you want to see a truly amazing trip down 44 years of memory lane, check out this comparison of the 1978 Cray computer, at the time the most powerful computer in the world, and the 2022 iPhone. I won’t bother giving you the specifics because the narrator, Dave Darling, does a very good job.
The Cray had 303 megabytes of storage and weighed a total of 5.5 tons. Compare that to where storage was 20 years previously:
This is a picture of an IBM hard drive being loaded onto an airplane in 1956. According to @HistoricalPics, which tweeted the picture, it’s a 5 megabyte drive, and it weighed more than 2,000 pounds.
iPhones are available one terabyte drives (with rumors last year that two-TB drives were coming). If this is how much computing has advanced in (almost) a half century, where will it be in another 50 years? But will people in the future do more with them than text and surf Pornhub?
MARK JUDGE: The Claudine Gay story isn’t Roots, it’s Shattered Glass.
Roots was the epic 1970s miniseries that traced several generations of black Americans from slavery to modern times. It dramatized the resilience of Africans brought here in chains as they triumphed despite brutal racism.
The Claudine Gay story, on the other hand, is about how elites at one of America’s most respected institutions forfeited honor, integrity, and truth to virtue-signal their holy liberalism.
In fact, the Claudine Gay movie has already been made. It was called Shattered Glass and came out in 2003.
In 1998, New Republic writer Stephen Glass was found guilty of making up many of his pieces. Glass’s fabulism was so blatant and widespread that even his liberal colleagues had to take action — but not until after Glass’s lies had already been published.
In its best scene, the film depicts the moment when editor Charles Lane explodes at reporter Caitlin Avey, who has been defending Glass. Lane, the one honorable person left on staff, has to jackhammer through the liberal groupthink to find Avey’s conscience — and her sense of honor. “He handed us fiction after fiction and we printed them all as fact, just because we found him entertaining,” he says. Then he drops the bomb: “It’s indefensible. Don’t you know that?”
A lot of today’s journalists still don’t know that — or they don’t care.
Just ask former CNN “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter, who failed upward while trying to revive the career of newsreader turned failed propagandist Dan Rather to…teaching wannabe television pundits at Harvard: “The media-to-classroom pipeline will simply strengthen the ideological bubble that led to Stelter’s dismissal from CNN in the first place. Yet what Stelter’s lectures won’t offer is introspection as to how we got to this so-called precipice of democracy. What was the media’s role in leading us here (for instance, the $5 billion in free media given to Donald Trump in 2016 by journalists like Stelter and his former boss)? What plan do they have to correct their course (as opposed to simply slandering 50 percent of the voting public)? At least Stelter will finally be able to acknowledge what anyone who’s watched him has realized instantly: that he was never an honest and objective media reporter.”
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Israel Advocate Noa Tishby Shows Protestors Don’t Know the River or the Sea in “From the river to the sea.”
Making lemonade 🍋 from watermelons 🍉 pic.twitter.com/lM0CvA52q6
— Noa Tishby (@noatishby) January 22, 2024
BUT ITS DEI SCORE WAS PERFECT: ‘Um… Why Is Our Plane’s Wing Missing All Those Screws?’
The passenger took photographs of maintenance people with screwdrivers fiddling around with the panel where the missing hardware was noticed. (You can see the pictures in the linked article.) But then the flight was canceled and everyone was booked on other flights while they pulled the plane back for additional inspection and maintenance.
This incident wasn’t closely related to the Portland mishap. This was a Virgin Atlantic flight, not Alaskan Air. Also, instead of a Boeing 737 Max, this was an Airbus A330, a plane with a fairly solid safety record. Both Virgin and Airbus stressed to reporters that there was “no impact to the safety of last week’s aircraft.” They said that the panel with the missing hardware was “a secondary structure used to improve the aerodynamics of the plane.” They also said that each panel has 119 fasteners and its condition wouldn’t have caused any flight issues.
Okay. Perhaps that’s true. But if the plane didn’t need those “improved aerodynamics,” the engineers wouldn’t have included it. And if they designed it with 119 fasteners, it’s supposed to have 119 fasteners. They wouldn’t have added extra ones just to be decorative. You don’t add any superfluous weight to planes.
Fortunately, Washington, as always, is laser focused on this issue: Biden leads crowd in ‘Happy Birthday’ song for Buttigieg: ‘Pete turned 30 today.’