Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
October 19, 2023
NEO: I think that if we had to fight WWII today we would not win.
I believe that, were we to fight a war like WWII today, we would not be able to win. I don’t say that because we lack the weapons or the skills. I say it because I believe that we would fight with our hands voluntarily tied behind our backs. I base that on a few things.
One is the chart that can be found here. I can’t seem to copy it, so you’ll have to follow the link to see it, but it shows the results of a poll that demonstrates enormous generational differences in the answers to the question of whether Israel’s military response to the Hamas attack is fully justified. It goes from 81% agreement from those 65+ to 27% agreement from those who are 18-34 years old.
And then of course there is the woke agenda of so much of today’s military.
Ed Morrissey adds, “All of these are good points, but there’s another more fundamental reason — we can no longer produce war materiel like we did in the 1940s. Our status as the Arsenal of Democracy has been destroyed by the sharp decline in our manufacturing capacity and the lack of a skilled workforce to man it.”
The recent British War Factories series made that abundantly clear – in WWII, America had a massive amount of manufacturing capability, and its assembly lines were too far away from the Axis to attack. Our lesser output today, combined with a president whose brain is guacamole and a cabinet with no one in charge, and its no wonder our enemies are licking their chops.
THIS NARROWS IT DOWN: State Department issues ‘worldwide caution’ alert amid Israel-Hamas war.
MARK FELTON: Last Celebrity WW2 Veterans 2023 (Video).
BURIED LEDE: CNN FINALLY COMMITS ACTUAL JOURNALISM. CNN Puts AOC On The Spot Regarding Calls For Ceasefire.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reminds me of the annual safety videos you’re required to watch and get quizzed on at work.
In other words, if there’s a fire in the building, you’re not going to whip out the policy and read up on what you should do about it – you just get the hell out.
CNN correspondent Abby Phillip halts AOC every time she attempts to dodge providing direct answers with a bunch of fluff, and it’s a beautiful moment.
Phillip: “As all of this kind of kicked off, you and several other of your colleagues, released a statement calling for a ceasefire in the region. But, I wonder, what is Israel supposed to do about Hamas after they murdered, brutalized, abducted over 1,000 of their citizens? Are they supposed to just do nothing?”
Behold the vacuous word salad that results:
Wow.
Really excellent job by @abbydphillip putting AOC on the spot to ezplain her nonsensical and poorly thought out calls for a ceasefire. pic.twitter.com/j2WcBTXSBr
— AG (@AGHamilton29) October 17, 2023
LEFTIST CELEBS SAY THIS QUADRENNIALLY, BUT THEY NEVER, EVER LEAVE: Cher says Trump’s reelection would drive her out of US.
To be fair “out of the US” would be much easier to accomplish than Cher’s promise in 2015:
No word yet if Cher attempted to land on Europa in late 2016 during her Jupiter expedition.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden says Palestinians ‘gotta learn how to shoot straight’ after hospital blast that killed about 500 people.
President Biden told reporters Wednesday that Palestinian terrorists have “gotta learn how to shoot straight” — one day after an explosion outside a hospital in the Gaza Strip.
“I’m not suggesting that Hamas deliberately did it,” the president said at Ramstein Air Base in Germany en route back to Washington after visiting Israel earlier in the day.
“It’s that old thing: Gotta learn how to shoot straight,” Biden went on.
Insert obligatory “imagine the media freakout if Trump had said that” comment here.
The President of the United States says he wants Hamas to learn how to shoot straight. Reflect on that. He wants terrorists to be more accurate when they fire rockets at Israel. His brain belongs at a bingo game eating jello, NOT being the President. pic.twitter.com/0kPzdRLUnN
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) October 18, 2023
October 18, 2023
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Amazon will start testing drones that will drop prescriptions on your doorstep, literally.
Amazon will soon make prescription drugs fall from the sky when the e-commerce giant becomes the latest company to test drone deliveries for medications.
The company said Wednesday that customers in College Station, Texas, can now get prescriptions delivered by a drone within an hour of placing their order.
The drone, programed to fly from a delivery center with a secure pharmacy, will travel to the customer’s address, descend to a height of about four meters — or 13 feet — and drop a padded package.
Amazon says customers will be able to choose from more than 500 medications, a list that includes common treatments for conditions like the flu or pneumonia, but not controlled substances.
Faster, please.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Liberals Replace Star Of David On ‘Coexist’ Sticker With Hamas Paraglider.
Liberals Replace Star Of David On 'Coexist' Sticker With Hamas Paraglider https://t.co/eJh6TUjaGG pic.twitter.com/gpasaA6UaI
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 18, 2023
Don’t give them any ideas, Bee!
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Massive comet three times the size of Mt Everest racing towards Earth after violent space explosion.
DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: Tlaib refuses to apologize for blaming Israel for Gaza hospital blast, attacks Biden.
“The American Jewish community in my district, and all of you here. I just know how much courage it’s taken to speak up. Many of you have been targeted. You’re being gas lit. Some people are losing their jobs. Folks are getting events canceled. Literally, their First Amendment right wiped away for standing up and saying that children deserve to live. It is literally inhumane for my colleagues to allow that to continue and say nothing,” Tlaib said.
Tlaib also slammed President Joe Biden for his support for Israel’s actions since the Hamas terrorist attack.
“To my president, to our president … I want him to know, as a Palestinian American and somebody in Muslim faith, I’m not going to forget this. And I think a lot of people are not going to forget this,” Tlaib said.
And Republicans are pouncing and seizing!
Rep. Ilhan Omar is also facing criticism from Republicans over similar comments Tuesday that Israel is to blame for the hospital explosion that day in Gaza as Israel denies fault. As information about the hospital blast was initially being reported, Tlaib tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, “Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that. @POTUS this is what happens when you refuse to facilitate a ceasefire & help de-escalate. Your war and destruction only approach has opened my eyes and many Palestinian Americans and Muslims Americans like me. We will remember where you stood.”
Evergreen:
MARK JUDGE: Bored With Comparing Trump to Hitler, This Writer Compares Him to … Chairman Mao.
It’s a real shame. I was looking forward to reading Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution by journalist Tania Branigan. China’s Cultural Revolution, roughly 1966-1976, was one of the bloodiest and most insane periods in the history of communism. It was an attempt to try and purge communist China of all Western ideas, from Christianity to capitalism. An estimated two million were killed, and 30 million persecuted and punished. While she’s a liberal journalist for Britain’s Guardian, Branigan is a very sharp writer. She’s a rational adult, — or so I thought. She would clearly describe the horrifying evil of the Cultural Revolution and not fall back on some hysterical comparison of Mao’s genocidal follies with … four years of peace and prosperity under President Donald Trump.
Right? Is that too much to ask?
It is for Rachel Maddow: Rachel Maddow says Trump wants to ‘execute’ those at MSNBC.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said Wednesday that if former President Donald Trump is elected again, he would put the news station on trial and “execute us.”
“He wants to put MSNBC on trial for treason so that he can execute us,” Ms. Maddow said Wednesday on “The View.”
* * * * * * * * *
Ms. Maddow said that Mr. Trump is “basically portraying a future for America … in which we don’t have another election after that,” because he talks about how “the elections are all rigged, that the democratic process can’t be trusted.”
I’m so old, I can remember Naomi Wolf saying the same thing about John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008 at the Huffington Post:
I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future.
Plus ça change…
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Puhleez. If Rachel Maddow actually thought Trump was Chairman Mao, she’d be supporting him 100%.
GET WOKE, GO…: Victoria’s Secret Bet On Megan Rapinoe, Woke Marketing Push Miserably Backfires.
Highlighted in a Fox Business report, Victoria’s Secret got slammed in its revenue projections for 2023, based on a streak of progressive, inclusive marketing.
From hosting bizarre VS runway shows (never thought you’d hear that) to highlighting biological men as female models, Victoria’s Secret quickly lost touch with the clothing empire it built.
Without much of a strategy, Victoria’s Secret went woke and is in danger of going broke.
What was once a mindless store fit to offer gifts for a wife or girlfriend became an ideas dartboard for woke Victoria’s Secret execs to fire at. And it failed.
The Fox Business report stated that Victoria’s Secret intends to ditch its new woke shell and go back to “sexiness.” Which is good news for all.
Indeed.
Victoria’s Secret bet on Megan Rapinoe, trans models and fat chicks to sell lingerie. Turns out it was a total woke disaster, sales collapsed, and now they are going back to hot chicks. https://t.co/GY8d2Blca3
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 18, 2023
Flashback: Leave Supermodels Alone!
The other night, after I’d had a little too much of this world, I decided to bathe in cleansing waters and scour my soul by watching the new E! True Hollywood Story episode on Victoria’s Secret. (Yes, I know. Life is sad.)
Best I can tell, this investigative blockbuster was largely derived from a New York Times story from last year, subtly headlined, “Angels in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret.” The gory particulars of both the article and the E! documentary were enough to curl your hair, not unlike the bouncy locks of former VS model Jill Goodacre (a Victoria’s Secret OG). There were harrowing tales of handsy, lecherous executives, and of models getting ready for Objectification Fest (the once-hallowed Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show) by eating an apple a day with no sides. Ed Razek, the former chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret’s then parent company, L Brands, was so creepy, that he kept company with Jeffrey Epstein, the latter of whom posed as a Victoria’s Secret recruiter. It was all genuinely awful.
But perhaps most unsettling of all, according to the ominous narration, VS didn’t show a commitment to diversity of body types (women, you may have heard, come in all shapes and sizes!), and they continued to “market a standard of beauty that customers found male, stale, and hopelessly out of touch.” (Just imagine a woman so deluded, that she’d try to make herself attractive to a man while performing the sacred fourth-wave feminist rite of buying lingerie.) After hearing this last bit, I sat there in stone silence for what felt like hours, but was probably just a few minutes or so, until E! aired another rerun of The Bradshaw Bunch, in which former NFL great Terry Bradshaw “still stinging from their embarrassing loss last year…..coaches the family for a repeat appearance on Celebrity Family Feud.”
I hurt for my supermodel sisters. I asked a lot of unanswerable questions like, “Why, God, why?” Then I asked one last question, which you’re not supposed to utter in public: “Whatever happened to skinny, beautiful models, and will they be coming back any time soon?”
As Iowahawk likes to say:
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden In Israel: Senile Joe Says He Served in the Senate with His Secretary of State.
BREAKING: Biden announces $100m aid in Gaza.
In a post on his official X handle, the money would support over one million displaced and conflict-affected Palestinians.
“I just announced $100 million for humanitarian assistance in Gaza and the West Bank. This money will support over 1 million displaced and conflict-affected Palestinians. And we will have mechanisms in place so this aid reaches those in need – not Hamas or terrorist groups,” the post read.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend comments: Not bad: From Iron Age massacres and slave raids to a cool $100 million in just 11 days.
JIM TREACHER: The Curious Case of the Hospital That Didn’t Blow Up.
As it turns out, the people who behead babies and lie about it will also lie about other stuff.
Yesterday we got the news that Israel blew up a hospital in Gaza and killed 500 people.
However, there were a few minor, nitpicky problems with the story: 1) The hospital wasn’t blown up, 2) Nowhere near 500 people were killed, and 3) Israel had nothing to do with it.
It didn’t happen the way Hamas claimed it happened. A misfiring Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket hit the hospital. It torched some cars in the parking lot and killed some people, but not 500. That’s awful for the people who were killed, but Israel didn’t kill them.
If any of this is a shock to you, then you must work in the media.
Pallywood strikes again.
Related:
Did the NY Times think we wouldn’t notice? pic.twitter.com/QcTeBsJ2ie
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 17, 2023
MEANWHILE, OVER AT THE GRAUNIAD: Guardian sacks their own cartoonist Steve Bell who had worked at the paper for over 40 years over ‘anti-Semitic’ Benjamin Netanyahu cartoon.
Steve Bell has this cartoon pulled by the Guardian tonight. pic.twitter.com/kUx4IlP9Om
— Political Cartoon (@Cartoon4sale) October 9, 2023
He has insisted it is a reference to a 1960s cartoon by David Levine, who drew US President Lyndon B. Johnson with a Vietnam shaped scar on his torso. The cartoon he submitted last week has the words ‘After David Levine’ written on it above the artist credit.
Writing on Twitter on Monday, October 9, Mr Bell claimed said he had submitted the artwork but it had been ‘spiked again’, before saying it was becoming ‘pretty nigh impossible to draw this subject [Israel] for the Guardian now without being accused of deploying “antisemitic tropes”‘.
He later suggested the cartoon didn’t make sense if it was a reference to the Shakespeare play, given Netanyahu is ‘wearing boxing gloves’.
Tonight a spokesman for the Guardian confirmed the newspaper would not be renewing his contract.
The artist claimed after filing it he received a phone call from the newspaper ‘with the strangely cryptic message “pound of flesh”.
Strange things happen at the Grauniad after a terrorist attack: After the 7/7 London tube bombings by radical Islamists in 2005, the paper ran a column written by a “trainee journalist” who used the word “sassy” in an article full of moral equivalence over the attacks:
Today’s Guardian gives space to Dilpazier Aslam, a “Guardian trainee journalist” who suggests that one shouldn’t be shocked by Thursday’s suicide bombings – such a reaction would be inappropriate because, among other reasons:
“Shocked would be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own.”
Yes, ladies and gentlemen – we bear responsibility for the murderous actions of maniacal members of a religious cult. An apology is certainly called for – the queue forms to the right.
Needless to say, there are other reasons why shock is inappropriate. Mr. Aslam explains:
“Shocked would be to say that we don’t understand how, in the green hills of Yorkshire, a group of men given all the liberties they could have wished for could do this.”
Fortunately for those who still don’t quite follow, Mr. Aslam provides an explanation immediately, in the very next paragraph – which reads, in its entirety:
“The Muslim community is no monolithic whole. Yet there are some common features. Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don’t-rock-the boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We’re much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not.”
Suicide bombing …. sassy!
Aslam was sacked a couple of weeks later, after an intense campaign from both sides of the aisle.
FIVE EYES INTELLIGENCE CHIEFS WARN ON CHINA’S ‘THEFT’ OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY:
The Five Eyes countries’ intelligence chiefs came together on Tuesday to accuse China of intellectual property theft and using artificial intelligence for hacking and spying against the nations, in a rare joint statement by the allies.
The officials from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – known as the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network – made the comments following meetings with private companies in the U.S. innovation hub Silicon Valley.
U.S. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the “unprecedented” joint call was meant to confront the “unprecedented threat” China poses to innovation across the world.
From quantum technology and robotics to biotechnology and artificial intelligence, China was stealing secrets in various sectors, the officials said.
* * * * * * * *
The U.S. has long accused China of intellectual property theft and the issue has been a key sore point in U.S.-China relations. But this is the first time the Five Eyes members have joined publicly to call out China on it.
“The Chinese government is engaged in the most sustained scaled and sophisticated theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” said Mike Burgess, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s director-general.
China stealing intellectual property? I just can’t see it myself: