FASTER, PLEASE: Corruption Case Against the Bidens is on the Verge of Exploding.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
June 13, 2023
RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Yep, The Christian Terrorist In France Is A Muslim After All.
WOODROW THE TERRIBLE, WARREN THE GOOD:
There are many reasons to disparage what passes for expertise and judgment among presidential historians, but there is none better than their longstanding tendency to rate Woodrow Wilson as a near-great president and Warren Harding as among the worst. By any sensible estimation, Wilson was the ultimate bottom-feeder of American presidents, while Harding swam peaceably, albeit somewhat confusedly, around the middle depths of the pond. But, historians tend to favor leaders with expansive agendas during dramatic times over those with modest goals in calmer times.
In recent years, Wilson’s off-the-charts racism has begun to take him down a notch or two in public estimation, and there have been occasional suggestions that Harding be upgraded a bit. But there’s a long way to go to right the record on these two. Here are some comparisons, informed by my own biases.
Reminder: “Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship.”
FINALLY: Topless trans guests reveal systemic inequality at the White House.
Conservative commentator Dana Loesch was quick to attack [Rose] Montoya. “This is the White House, not a hookers-n-blow photo from Hunter’s laptop, it was the Pride party on the White House lawn two days ago hosted by Joe,” Loesch tweeted. “They also didn’t hang the American flag right according to code.”
The White House criticized Montoya’s conduct. “This behavior is inappropriate and disrespectful for any event at the White House,” a spokesperson told the Messenger. “It is not reflective of the event we hosted to celebrate LGBTQI+ families or the other hundreds of guests who were in attendance… Individuals in the video will not be invited to future events.”
In a video she posted Monday night, Montoya defended her topless antics, saying that she was not trying to be vulgar but simply living in joy. Montoya also claimed it is legal to go topless in the District of Columbia and that she is a supporter of the free the nipple movement. “Why is my chest now deemed illegal when I show it off, however before I came out as trans, it was not,” she asked?
Cockburn has to agree with Montoya on this one. How is it fine for a trans man to expose his nipples at the White House lawn, yet a trans woman must cup them in her hands? Clearly we are still years from true equality.
Heh, indeed.™ Montoya went under the bus after embarrassing the Biden White House — and for giving the game away:
GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALISM: Maryland Dem grovels after saying Muslim kids against LGBTQ+ lessons aligned with ‘White supremacists.’
GLEICHSCHALTUNG: Call of Duty joins the LGBT mob’s cancel crusade.
Not even video games are safe from the all-encompassing and increasingly unhinged culture war over LGBT issues. Recently, a streamer and gaming personality known as “Nickmercs” faced widespread backlash online and even had his merchandise deleted from Call of Duty in response to some seemingly innocuous comments about LGBT-related issues.
Here’s what went down.
Earlier this month, violence erupted between activists on opposing sides of a controversy over a Glendale, California, school board and its decision to embrace Pride Month celebrations. Another prominent gaming personality, “Puckett,” commented on this news on Twitter and said, “Americans are in a sad place right now. Let people love who they love and live your own life.”
Nickmercs replied to Puckett’s tweet and said, “They should leave little children alone. That’s the real issue.”
That’s it. That’s all he said. For this supposedly egregious remark, Nickmercs was pilloried on social media and condemned by countless gaming industry media outlets. Here’s a sample of headlines that show how it was portrayed:
“Call of Duty removes Nickmercs skin following streamer’s anti-LGBTQ tweet” — Polygon
“Call of Duty removes streamer’s skin after homophobic comments” — the Verge
“Call Of Duty Removes Nickmercs DLC Over Anti-LGBTQ Tweet” — Gamespot
You will be made to care.
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: AI Imagines a Leonard Cohen-Dr. Dre Collaboration. Would You Listen?
GOODER AND HARDER SAN FRAN: Former Levis Exec Jennifer Sey: Why San Francisco is on the brink of losing its unique culture (video).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_jyOZnuzk4
Flashback: The High Price of Being Right About Covid.
CABIN FEVER: The Unabomber worshipped and rebelled against the false god of technology.
During his second year at Harvard, Professor Henry Murray recruited the eager teen for a psychology experiment. The 3-year-long ordeal, designed to measure reaction to psychological torture, was part of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. It was, in Murray’s own words, “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive.” Harvard dorm mates recall Kaczynski rocking while doing his homework. He made no friends and didn’t earn particularly high grades.
Harvard alumnus, and fellow lapsed academic, Alston Chase compellingly argued that it was at Harvard where the future Unabomber was made. In the post-World War II years, the Ivy League school adopted the General Education Curriculum that replaced moral education with positivist teachings that comforted students in the knowledge that science is a liberating force that will eventually yield a full understanding of nature. The optimist outlook was only challenged by a post-Hiroshima distrust of technology which Kaczynski eventually adopted. On top of it, the victimhood of the Murray experiment crystallized the grudges of his awkward childhood.
After Harvard, Kaczynski went on to graduate school at Ann Arbor, and then a professorship at Berkeley. Having developed a fantasy of living as a revolutionary agitator, the young mathematician, who took no part in the late sixties riotous Berkeley culture, quit his job and bought a cabin in the Montana wilderness.
Although there is ample evidence of him expressing interest in women, Kaczynski had few dates in his life. On rare occasions when he wasn’t rebuked, he sabotaged the relationship. As a teen, he broke up with a girl over her religious devotion, something that Kaczynski, being brought up by politically progressive lapsed Catholics, found exasperating. Or, as his brother David Kaczynski speculated, he fled an emotional connection.
Based in Montana, the former academic attended an Earth First summit, sabotaged logging equipment, and, in 1978, launched a campaign of terror. In the best tradition of sixties radicalism, he sent 16 bombs in 18 years, murdering three people and injuring 23. His first victims were acquaintances from Northwestern University, guilty of being insufficiently awed by the angry white man’s insights in sociology, and airlines which, in the bomber’s opinion, polluted the Earth. The FBI nicknamed him the “Unabomber”—universities and airline bomber. He later expanded his terror operations to the logging, computer, and advertising industries.
Kaczynski paused the bombings in 1987 after a woman spotted him planting a device, enabling the FBI to produce the iconic Unabomber sketch, sporting a hoodie and aviator sunglasses. The terrorist felt exposed at the time but resumed his campaign in 1993, inspired by al-Qaeda’s first World Trade Center bombing.
In 1995, Kaczynski offered to halt the violence if the New York Times and the Washington Post would publish his 35,000 word essay Industrial Society and Its Future. The work that became popularly known as The Unabomber Manifesto was run as a special supplement to the Post and immediately received accolades in the mainstream media.
The Manifesto asserted that industrialization has been a disaster to humanity, turning humanity into slaves who fill their days with meaningless “surrogate” activities. Because a peaceful return to nature was impossible, Kaczynski called to destabilize society, with the goal of fomenting a worldwide anti-industrial revolution.
To be fair, Kaczynski was far from being alone among his fellow anti-progress “Progressives,” though few took it to his extremes. Or as a quiz from the early days of the Web asked, “Who said this, Al Gore or Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a., the Unabomber? Take your time . . .”
IRS: 332,000 TAXPAYERS LEFT CALIFORNIA IN ONE YEAR. A new documentary exposes the real reasons behind the mass exodus that’s costing California $29.1 billion dollars.
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reported in 2021: Gavin Newsom Named U-Haul Salesperson Of The Year.
WAIT, I THOUGHT PRONOUNS NEEDED TO BE RESPECTED: Tech exec fired for listing ‘Assigned By God’ as his preferred pronouns sues former employer: Report.
ELLIOT PAGE GROOMED AND SEXUALLY ABUSED BY TWO MEN AND WOMAN AS A TEEN:
The actor, 36, came out as homosexual in February 2014 before his gender transition in December 2020, and said he was groomed by a director at the start of his career before being targeted by other abusers around 2005 when he made a film called ‘Hard Candy ‘ – ironically about a 14-year-old female vigilante’s trapping and torture of a man whom she suspects of being a sexual predator.
Elliot, formerly known as Ellen Page, told The Guardian the director who groomed him took him to dinner, stroked his thigh under the table and told him: “You have to make the move, I can’t.”
Just before he turned 18, Elliot said he was also targeted by members of the ‘Hard Candy’ production team.
He said in his newly released memoir ‘Pageboy’ about one apparently funny and kind man who drove him home before he forced himself on the actor: “His voice sweet, his hands on my shoulders, he guided me to the bedroom.
“I went stiff. Unsure what to do as he stood tall and removed his glasses. He laid me down on the bed.”
Elliot was told by the man he wanted to perform a sex act on the actor, which he said left him feeling numb.
He added in his autobiography: “I froze. After it was over, he tried to stay in the bed with me. I had thawed marginally and told him he couldn’t, to get out.”
Why, it’s as if: Hollywood Is a Sex-Grooming Gang.
BYRON YORK: Courage, Pride, and the Biden White House. “What was going on? Shouldn’t there be some sort of internal balance in a White House so that the president of the U.S. does not heap more praise on the attendees of a ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Pride Month’ gathering than on the Americans who stormed the beaches at Normandy? Shouldn’t there be some sort of governor who keeps the hyperbole machine from running out of control? Shouldn’t there be some sense of proportion?”
And the US military wonders why it has a recruiting problem.
GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Westfield giving up S.F. mall in wake of Nordstrom closure, plunging sales and foot traffic.
Westfield is giving up its namesake San Francisco mall in the wake of Nordstrom’s planned closure, surrendering the city’s biggest shopping center to its lender after foot traffic and sales plunged during the pandemic.
The company stopped making payments on a $558 million loan, and Westfield and its partner, Brookfield Properties, started the process of transferring control of the mall at 865 Market St. this month.
“For more than 20 years, Westfield has proudly and successfully operated San Francisco Centre, investing significantly over that time in the vitality of the property. Given the challenging operating conditions in downtown San Francisco, which have led to declines in sales, occupancy and foot traffic, we have made the difficult decision to begin the process to transfer management of the shopping center to our lender to allow them to appoint a receiver to operate the property going forward,” the company said.
Nordstrom, which occupies 312,000 square feet in the mall, is closing in August after 35 years when its lease expires. The mall — which includes 1.2 million square feet of retail space and 300,000 square feet of offices — will be only 55% leased after Nordstrom’s departure, far below other U.S. Westfield malls that are, on average, 93% leased.
* * * * * * * *
Westfield’s pullout piles on to the economic turmoil battering the area around Powell Street. Park Hotels & Resorts stopped payments on a $725 million mortgage tied to the nearby Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 hotels, two of the largest in the city, and plans to surrender them as well. Next to Westfield mall, Old Navy is also closing in a few weeks, and the April fatal shooting of Banko Brown by a Walgreens security guard on the same block underscored the crime and public safety challenges in the area.
Last month, Westfield blamed “unsafe conditions” and “lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity” in part for Nordstrom’s departure from the mall.
Exit question: Vacant skyscrapers, empty trains: can San Francisco once again reinvent itself?
Detroit could not be reached for comment.
GEN. MICHAEL FLYNN: Barack Obama’s True Legacy. The seeds of the catastrophe now befalling our nation.
Several weeks after the highly questionable 2020 presidential election appeared to put his vice president, Joe Biden, on the path to the White House, Barack Obama told late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert that he would like to have a third term by proxy: “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front-man or front-woman and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.”
Early on in Joe Biden’s calamitous presidency, it became clear that Biden was indeed someone’s proxy, and that someone was likely Barack Hussein Obama. Even if Barack Obama is not actually directing Biden’s actions from his basement, the Biden administration established itself immediately as the instrument for the resumption of the Obama agenda.
Read the whole thing.
WHEEL OF FORTUNE HOST PAT SAJAK, 76, RETIRING: ‘It’s been a wonderful ride.’ “Well, the time has come. I’ve decided that our 41st season, which begins in September, will be my last.”
Far from the dismissive tone Mediaite has taken with respect to the Twitter show, Axios says, “The contract battle between Fox and its former top host — who was taken off the air in April, after the network’s historic Dominion settlement — has mighty repercussions for the conservative media ecosystem.”
“With ‘Tucker on Twitter,’ Carlson and his growing production team are working to elevate Elon Musk’s social media site as a news platform,” the outlet stated, adding that his first two episodes “drew a combined 169 million views.”
As it is continuing to pay Carlson, Fox News is arguing that, at least through December 31, 2024, his content must remain exclusive to the cable network, even if it refuses to air it, as per Carlson’s contract.
Carlson, on the other hand, maintains that he has a First Amendment right to post on Twitter, and is accusing Fox of material breaches of his contract.
Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, along with Bryan Freedman, represents Carlson and said Fox is guilty of ignoring “its shareholder obligations.”
“Fox News continues to ignore the interests of its viewers, not to mention its shareholder obligations,” Dhillon said in a statement to Axios.
Chadwick Moore, Carlson’s biographer, “was on OAN recently and said that the non-compete portion of his contract did not consider Twitter a competitor. And since Twitter didn’t hire him, he’s not an employee.”