Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
May 30, 2023
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: With All Other Companies Going Woke, Conservatives Make Last Stand At Texas Buc-ee’s.
I was at the Fort Worth Buc-ee’s two week ago, and it looked remarkably unwoke. No word yet if there will be rainbow Beaver Nuggets for Pride month, though.
AOC INADVERTENTLY ADMITS YOU CAN’T DISTINGUISH HER OWN WRITING FROM A PARODY ACCOUNT: AOC upset over parody press account cracking up conservative social media.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Why Taylor Swift is the new Grateful Dead—and what it means for the future of live entertainment.
After seeing the scene, with thousands of fans setting up camp outside the arena to take in the show, it struck me that there are a number of striking similarities between Swift’s brand and that of one of my favorite bands, The Grateful Dead, including their struggles with ticket scalpers, which could lead to big changes in the future of the live-entertainment business and how it is structured.
On the surface, the two bands couldn’t be more different. Swift is a gifted artist who performs very personal songs for legions of young female fans in a series of highly choreographed set pieces with dazzling outfits; while the Dead, for most of their career, were a bunch of grizzled old, bearded guys who were perfectly content playing songs about cowboys, hustlers, and murdering men, dressed in T-shirts and jeans and barely moving on stage.
But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find some surprising similarities. Artistically, in their early years, both the Dead and Swift drew on similar musical roots in country and bluegrass but then evolved and wove other strains into their musical tapestries, including folk, blues, pop, and psychedelia. Both artists are not only musical innovators, but also singer-songwriters who despite covering vastly different territory are lyrical geniuses who have developed a canon of classic songs. While Swift writes or co-writes all her songs, the Dead wrote by small committee with most of their ditties penned by Jerry Garcia and lyricist extraordinaire Robert Hunter.
Both grew over time into incredibly successful commercial acts with cult followings. Believe it or not, after the Dead released their hit album In the Dark in 1987 and grew their fanbase, they were actually the highest-grossing musical act for two years in the early 1990s. Swift continues to top the album charts, and her latest Eras Tour with its 44-songs setlist, is expected to smash current records and be the highest-grossing tour of all time.
I saw a Taylor Swift sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside my head said, “Don’t look back, you can never look back.”
DEMOCRATS GAG CONGRESSWOMEN IN KINKY NEW BILLBOARDS: Who knew that the ‘D’ in ‘BDSM’ was for ‘Democrat?’
Democrats are rolling out a novel strategy heading into 2024: kinky ads featuring Republicans.
Cockburn, whose stance is pro-kink and anti-shame, came across new billboards that House Democrats are launching against Congresswomen Jen Kiggans and Michelle Steel. The two trailblazing women are depicted gagged, next to a bare-faced Donald Trump. The ads argue that the women were silent when former President Trump said he wanted to defund federal law enforcement.
Kiggans won her seat in 2022, two years after Trump left the White House, while Steel won hers in 2020, so overlapped with him for all of two weeks. The ads suggest that the main strategy Democrats have to retake the House is rehashing the anti-Trump messaging that was effective… when Trump was actually president. But hey, Democrats have been using the same campaign tactics for almost a decade now — why change it up?
Why is the Democratic Party such a cesspit of misogyny?
DAVID THOMPSON: New Niche Indignation.
You see, if friends come over for a pleasant evening and they don’t immediately consider you a potential mugger of women, or rapist of women, this is oppressive, “invalidating,” and “transphobic.” Such that it feels like “a punch in the gut.” It’s perhaps not the most obvious basis for invoking the unfairness of the world and one’s own endless suffering, but hey. In this competition, contrivance equals bonus points.
Quite what the author’s partner makes of this news – that in order to avoid being “transphobic,” she must consider her transgender lover a potential rapist – is, alas, not divulged.
The Weimar Republic called, and said that 2023 might want to slow down a bit and look for the brake pedal on its way to the apocalypse.
As Jim Treacher likes to say:
May 29, 2023
FAUCI AND BIRX WERE ESSENTIALLY BOND SUPER-VILLAINS:
Flashback: Dr. Birx Praises Herself While Revealing Ignorance, Treachery, and Deceit.
THE MICROPHONE IS ALWAYS HOT: ‘They Got Their Heads Up Their A**:’ Umpire Caught On Hot Mic Slamming Miami Marlins While Officiating Them.
Recently, MLB installed a rule where umpires now have to wear a mic so the league can listen in on what the officials are talking about on the field.
Surely, it’s giving Major League Baseball (MLB) results, but it’s also giving hilarious content to us baseball fans. Take Sunday’s game between the Miami Marlins and Los Angeles Angels, for example, when one umpire was caught on a hot mic talking trash about a challenge issued from the Marlins.
The Fish challenged a call that was made at home plate, which forced the game to come to a halt so the umpires could take a look at the play. But this wasn’t your normal review — rather, an ump was heard slamming Miami in a hot mic moment that has to be an instant classic.
And here’s the kicker: The Marlins ended up winning the challenge, proving the umpire was hilariously wrong.
Classical reference — and excellent advice — in the headline:
😂😂🤣 And it was a successful challenge for the @Marlins 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/CWjiCsIynZ
— Andrew Powell (@AndrewPow3ll) May 28, 2023
2023: A FORD PINTO ODYSSEY: A-B InBev distributor abandoning Bud Light brand in TN.
YOU HATE TO SEE IT: The Associated Press Is Having a Horrible Holiday Weekend.
Once again we get an altered headline from the source. Originally, we were told how “A poem by Amanda Gorman that was written for President Joe Biden’s inauguration was banned by a Florida school after one parent’s complaint.” Then, after scorn and mockery, the AP gave the new headline and adjusted text: “Amanda Gorman’s poem for Biden’s inauguration barred for younger children by Florida school.”
While notably different, this is still highly inaccurate, and here is why: The school moved the books from an elementary section of the library and shelved them in the middle school section. They are still in the library, and any student can still access the books. No works have been banned.
Making this all the worse for the AP is that to make these claims they had to ignore the original article from the Miami Herald that detailed this. Oh — also needing to be ignored was the text in their own article defying its headline.
The poem and books are still available in the media center for middle school-aged children, Ana Rhodes, a spokesperson for the Miami-Dade school district, said in a statement.
This has been an amazing string of malaprops on the matter in just a few days. To see this all originating from the same source is rather remarkable.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and all of AP’s one-sided mistakes make perfect sense.
THE LITTLE MERMAID: What the Media Isn’t Telling You About the Film’s Box Office Performance.
From the moment the public learned Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid would race-swap the title character Ariel, the film has been the subject of both controversy and excessive praise. Disney’s live-action remakes have consistently adjusted the original material to appeal to current sensibilities and to make casting less white and the content more woke. Naturally, Disney purists who cherish the classic 1989 animated film and wanted a more faithful adaptation of the story were a bit perturbed. While there’s no doubt that Halle Bailey, the actress playing Ariel, is extremely talented, it was a puzzling move for a story based on a fairy tale by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen.
Still, it gave the media exactly what it wanted: a pretext to accuse right-wing viewers of racism. Disney, meanwhile, saw dollar signs as its woke audience would be clamoring to prove just how anti-racist they are and flock to the theaters to see this movie.
Well, the movie itself clearly isn’t great. Despite the race-swapping and the woke tweaks to the content, professional critics didn’t gush over the film as you would have expected. As of this writing, the film has a 67% rating from critics tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score is 95%, but those reviews appear to be filtered and may not accurately reflect the views of all those who have reviewed the movie on the site.
One audience member who saw the film and wasn’t too enthused with the finished product was the Critical Drinker. And he’s got some (unfiltered) thoughts on the myriad of things that went wrong:
RIP: Ed Ames, star of TV series ‘Daniel Boone,’ dies at 95.
In the 1960s, Ames shifted careers and began persuing acting. His first starring role was an off-Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible.’
However, on television, Ames was likely best known for his role as Mingo, the Oxford-educated Native American in the 1960s adventure series “Daniel Boone” that starred Fess Parker as the famous frontiersman.
Due to his role in “Daniel Boone,” Ames became skilled at throwing a tomahawk, which led the actor to one of his most memorable moments of his career during a hilarious appearance on ‘The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson’ on April 27, 1965.
While on the show, Carson asked Ames to demonstrate his skills by throwing a tomahawk at a target of a cowboy outlined on a wooden panel.
Ames’ throw landed directly in the groin of the wooden cowboy, which caused the studio audience burst into laughter.
It’s a classic moment, which Carson repeated every year in his anniversary show:
As James Lileks asked in 2005, after Carson had passed away, “Ed fargin’ Ames throwing the tomahawk – was it funny because he planted it the yarbles, or because it resembled homo erectus? Both?”
BETO O’ROURKE COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Rolling Stone tries to paint Ron DeSantis as evil for “bringing the ax down on furries,” makes huge campaign contribution instead.
SOHRAB AHMARI: Do Androids Dream of Terrible Streets?
“Techno-capitalism and urban dilapidation … seemed to go hand-in-hand.”
As the Marxist geographer Mike Davis, who died last year at age 76, noted, Starr’s offhand remark attested to Blade Runner’s enduring status as the “star of sci-fi dystopias.” The film has become a sort of visual shorthand for a set of persistent American anxieties about biotechnology, corporate misrule, and multiculturalism, projected from the California dream factory onto the rest of the country (and the world). For Davis, it was significant that the dream factory, Hollywood, was located nearby other key Golden State industries, not least computing and biotech, whose business was to slingshot our species into Dickian dystopia.
Yet Davis wasn’t very impressed by Blade Runner as a piece of urban futurism. While boasting whiz-bang effects (by ’80s standards), the movie presented a retread of a much older old, and racially tinged, picture of the future as Manhattan-style “giganticism”: teeming masses of culturally mixed and confused human drones huddling under massive pyramids of steel and glass.
That picture no doubt appealed to the likes of Starr as they sought to place the sole blame for the political-economic dislocations and contradictions of California at the feet of “multiculturalism.” Lamenting the loss of WASP primacy was a lot easier than facing up to the de-industrialization and middle-class destruction wrought by the neoliberal revolution launched by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
For Davis, the Kevin Starr/Blade Runner vision of Los Angeles (as yellow-peril giganticism) missed something still more crucial: the fact that the advances in technology hatched in California sat next to a “great unbroken chain of aging bungalows, stucco apartments, and ranch style homes”—all decaying as the city entered the third millennium. Techno-capitalism and urban dilapidation, sentient machines and lousy bus lines, seemed to go hand-in-hand.
I don’t think Reagan and Thatcher had much to do with the poor state of Silicon Valley’s infrastructure, where 21st century technology is being birthed alongside an ill-maintained power grid, telephone lines, and roads seemingly little changed since the late 1940s through the mid-1960s.
Remarkably, however, Crawford H. “Chet” Taylor is entirely a figment of ChatGPT’s imagination. Tony Vanhuisen wrote:
Crawford H. “Chet” Taylor was never Governor of South Dakota and, in fact, I can find no evidence of such a person, at all. I will credit ChatGPT, though, that Governor Taylor is a plausible-sounding fictional governor.
The 14th Governor of South Dakota was not Chet Taylor (who again, doesn’t exist) but Tom Berry. Taylor is said to have served from 1949 to 1951; in fact, that would coincide with the second gubernatorial term of George T. Mickelson.
AI even produced a fake portrait of the fake governor:
AI is so good, it even gave “Chet” a second pocket square!
May 28, 2023
GOODER AND HARDER: Every Company Leaving California: 2020-2023.
RIP:
In a just world Claudia Rosett would have had several Pulitzers…for her eye-witness accounts of Tiananmen Massacre, for reporting on USSR’s demise as WSJ‘s Moscow bureau chief, etc. She was also a wonderful friend for over 40 years. Swift passage to the greatest story of all. pic.twitter.com/6ILJBLC7of
— David Asman (@DavidAsmanfox) May 28, 2023