MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Dalai Lama regrets asking boy to ‘suck my tongue.’
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
April 10, 2023
April 9, 2023
I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: Three New Star Wars Movies Announced, Including Return of Daisy Ridley’s Rey 15 Years After The Rise of Skywalker.
Daisy Ridley is set to reprise her role as Rey in the next Star Wars film, which will serve as a follow-up to 2019’s polarizing The Rise of Skywalker.
As reported by Variety, the surprising reveal was made Friday at Star Wars Celebration in London. The untitled film will detail Rey raising up a new generation of Jedi. Ridley led the franchise’s sequel trilogy—2015’s The Force Awakens, 2017’s The Last Jedi, and Rise in ’19—and her comeback is set 15 years later.
Lucasfilm’s return to the big screen will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, marking the first time a Star Wars movie will be helmed by a woman and person of color. Obaid-Chinoy recently helmed a pair of episodes for the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel. Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders, will pen the script.
Hasn’t Kathleen Kennedy driven this once-beloved franchise sufficiently into the ground yet?
UPDATE: Not surprisingly, the Critical Drinker has some thoughts on Rey’s return:
(Updated and bumped.)
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Disaster On Mandalorian Set As Lizzo Eats Baby Yoda.
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE: Years After ‘Screw Your Freedom’ Statement, Arnold Schwarzenegger Issues Public Apology: “I’m Sorry for Saying Those Words.”
Per the Twitter update, the 75-year-old icon took a moment to acknowledge his fans’ acceptance and expressed his gratitude. That’s not all.
He even apologized for blurting out “Scr*w your freedom” in an interview two years ago. He tweeted, “I’m sorry for saying those words. I try to be relentlessly positive, but sometimes my mouth gets ahead of me. I should have communicated better.”
Why is Arnold apologizing for his Kinsley gaffe? Schwarzenegger’s 2021 statement is entirely consistent with his worldview, long before Covid: How Climate Activist Arnold Schwarzenegger Became Box Office Poison.
Some images are hard to shake, like a floppy-haired Hugh Grant begging for forgiveness on The Tonight Show after getting caught with a prostitute.
Similarly, close your eyes and you’ll see Schwarzenegger flaunting his fame sans guilt.
Remember the pictures of him puffing on massive cigars and driving around in a gas-guzzling Hummers? Few stars enjoyed the spoils of success quite like Schwarzenegger.
These days, he’s singing from the eco-choir. He even supports suing oil companies for hurting the planet. This week Schwarzenegger embraced the radical left’s climate change sage.
Or as Jim Treacher wrote in 2021, “An Austrian loudmouth who scoffs at freedom and demands compliance with the government’s dictates… Why do I feel like I’ve heard this story before?”
Not to mention, “Screw your freedom” neatly encapsulates Arnold’s disastrous two terms as a RINO governor of California:
GREAT MOMENTS IN INVESTING: JP Morgan Chase CEO calls for more government seizure of private property. “JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in his annual shareholder letter Tuesday that the government may need to seize private property to advance clean energy initiatives.”
TOP 10 COOLEST T-TOP CARS EVER: The usual suspects are here, the ’68 Vette, and the Smokey and the Bandit black Firebird, but amongst them is the Suzuki X-90, one of the ugliest cars ever made:
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Scientists At Budweiser Attempt To Discover How Many Beers It Would Take For Dylan Mulvaney To Pass As A Woman.
Even Steve’s liver would buckle under the pressure of that much alcohol.
Earlier: Beverage Pretending To Be Beer Features Man Pretending To Be Woman.
JON GABRIEL: Hecklers at Trump’s arraignment have a lesson for us all.
Back in the real world, things aren’t going well.
Inflation continues and recession is likely. We’re $31 trillion in debt. Military threats are rising from China, Russia and other hostile powers.
Only 19% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going. At least we can still yell at strangers about politicians who don’t even know we exist.
Let’s face it: few leaders in D.C. want to put in the work to fix our problems.
No one wants to calm the waters. The political class is content with ratcheting up the divisions until it all breaks apart. This isn’t some grand conspiracy; modern politicians are too incompetent to launch one.
Instead, they’re hyperfocused on winning today’s news cycle and the next election. A few bold visionaries look all the way to the election after that, but little thought is given to the long-term implications for the country.
They want us to keep yelling at each other. It’s a luxury we can’t afford.
Exit quote: “It’s more obvious than ever that no one is coming to save you. No candidate, no party, no movement. You need to save yourself.”
KURT SCHLICHTER: The Only Way to Restore the Norms Is to Finish Them Off.
For a long time, we had a norm about trying not to prosecute political opponents even when we could. You beat them at the ballot box. But then they got more brazen, and there was no ambiguity about their crimes. They were actual crimes, and they rubbed them in our face. The Felonia Milhouse von Pantsuit toilet server stuff struck a nerve because so many of us knew what a big deal treating classified materials like her husband treated interns is (or was) – if we had done that, we’d be charged and in some fed pen converting large rocks to tiny ones. But she did not get charged. That looming doofus James Comey invented a new legal requirement for the statute that never existed before and never would exist if it was us. And there’s the First Crackhead buying a gun when he’s a drug addict – again, you know that if we lied on a Form 4473 the AFT would be SWATing us in our cribs. They took the sensible norm of reluctance and mocked us with it.
So, let’s not do that anymore. Let’s not bend over backwards to avoid charging our political enemies with their crimes. And if we have to be creative about the crimes and create novel new theories to ensnare our opponents, so be it. Alvin Bragg was creative. That’s the New Rule. Let’s see how they like being served up a dose of that kind of legal suppository.
“BUT THE RULE OF LAW!!!!”
Yeah, what rule of law is that?
Read the whole thing.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California’s Attacks on Big Oil Will Only Drive More People Out of the State.
California does indeed have the highest gasoline prices in the nation. Those prices have fallen quite a bit in recent months to $4.82 a gallon. That’s still $1.38 a gallon higher than the national average—and $1.70 a gallon higher than in Texas. Oil companies are national operations, so a normal person might wonder why those companies are so much greedier in California than they are elsewhere.
The answer isn’t hard to find. For starters, California has the highest gas taxes in the nation. (We also get the least bang for our buck given the state of our freeways, but that’s a separate issue.) Those higher taxes instantly make our gasoline 48 cents a gallon higher than in Texas. There’s still a pricing gap, but despite officials’ blathering about a “mystery gas surcharge” here in California, it’s not a mystery at all.
“California’s tough environmental rules mandate that gasoline sold within the state be produced according to strict formulas that reduce pollution,” per a Los Angeles Times analysis. “But the gas is more expensive and difficult to produce than dirtier fuel sold elsewhere. Few refineries outside the state are equipped to produce it.” The report adds the number of California refineries is plummeting and our state has no interstate pipelines, thus forcing us to rely on costlier forms of transportation.
In January of 2022, Snopes ran the headline: Yes, U-Haul Ran Out of Trucks for People Moving Out of California.
I’d expect to see a repeat, but where will they get the gas to power them?
BUT REMEMBER, IT’S TRUMP WHO’S SHATTERED OUR NORMS AND INSTITUTIONS: Biden, Schumer Aren’t Happy About a Texas Judge Blocking the Abortion Pill.
U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled in favor of pro-life medical groups challenging the FDA’s approval of the drug. He ruled that “both the initial approval of the pills in 2000 as well as more recent FDA decisions allowing them to be prescribed via telemedicine, sent by mail and dispensed at retail pharmacies, are unlawful,” according to the report.
In another interesting development, a federal judge in Washington State handed down a contradictory order on Friday preventing the FDA from prohibiting access to the drug in the “dozen blue states that brought the lawsuit,” Politico reported.
Democratic politicians railed against the Texas judge’s decision, and some intimated that it is part of the Republican Party’s effort to outlaw abortion nationwide. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said as much during a press call on Saturday, in which he referred to the ruling as “awful, extreme and unprecedented.”
“Let’s be clear — this is about the Republicans’ goal of a nationwide abortion ban,” he said, according to The Hill.
President Joe Biden also chimed in, saying that “the lawsuit, and this ruling, is another unprecedented step in taking away basic freedoms from women and putting their health at risk.”
“It is the next big step toward the national ban on abortion that Republican elected officials have vowed to make law in America,” Biden added, echoing Schumer’s claims.
Happy Easter from the man whom NBC describes as “America’s most prominent Catholic!”
Related: ‘No president is above the law’ Dems urge Biden to ignore judge’s abortion pill ruling. “Sen. Ron Wyden is asking President Biden to ignore the judge’s ruling:”
Past performance is no guarantee of future results:
Why is Wyden suggesting that the president should threaten the foundations of our republic?
More: AOC channels Andrew Jackson on abortion pill: ‘Ignore this ruling.’
“I believe that the Biden Administration should ignore this ruling,” AOC told an incredulous Anderson Cooper on CNN late Friday,
“The interesting thing, when it comes to a ruling, is that it relies on enforcement,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“It is up to the Biden administration to enforce, to choose, whether or not to enforce such a ruling,” she added — echoing President Andrew Jackson, another defiant Democrat.
Jackson’s notorious refusal to enforce the Supreme Court’s 1832 recognition of the Cherokee Nation’s independence led to the horrors of the Trail of Tears when 15,000 Cherokee were forcibly driven from their ancestral homeland in Georgia.
“The justices themselves … are undermining their own enforcement,” the Queens congresswoman charged, by issuing decisions that leftists like herself disdain.
On Friday, District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee from Texas, ordered the FDA to halt its 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, a widely used abortion medication. The order was stayed pending an appeal.
AOC has also done a 180 on this topic as well, of course:
April 8, 2023
RIP: Farewell to Craig Breedlove, America’s King of Speed. “He was our earthbound Neil Armstrong. Craig Breedlove took giant leaps for us into the ethereal unknown on the salt flats of Bonneville, strapping inside handmade rockets that emerged from his mind, making history as the first human to fire past the 400-mph mark on land. Eclipsing 500 mph was next. And then it was flirting with the sound barrier as hurtling past 600 mph was achieved by this son of Southern California. Born in 1937 in Los Angeles, Breedlove—Land Speed Record racing’s biggest and most enduring star—died this week at the age of 86, bringing an end to one of the sport’s most celebrated chapters.”
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH MINNEAPOLIS: George Floyd riots rewritten as “2020 fires.”
“The 2020 fires.”
I wonder how long it took them to come up with that. After all, describing the multiple-day terrorization of a city by mobs, the burning down, vandalization, and utter destruction of local businesses. The violence and terror.
It’s hard to find a nice way to describe a building being gutted by fire without SOME reference to the events which, literally, sparked it.
But they did. They found a way.
It was “the 2020 fires.” As if Mrs. O’Leary’s cow just happened to bump over a kerosene lamp and “poof,” up went Minneapolis.
Clever.
It’s a fiery but mostly peaceful memory holing.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Gone With the Wind Publisher Slaps 2022 Editions With ‘Trigger Warning.’
HBO pulled the movie adaptation of the Civil War movie in 2020 after the death of George Floyd.
The Telegraph published the warning in the book:
“Gone with the Wind is a novel which includes problematic elements including the romanticisation of a shocking era in our history and the horrors of slavery.
“The novel includes the representation of unacceptable practices, racist and stereotypical depictions and troubling themes, characterisation, language and imagery.
“The text of this book remains true to the original in every way and is reflective of the language and period in which it was originally written.
“We want to alert readers that there may be hurtful or indeed harmful phrases and terminology that were prevalent at the time this novel was written and which are true to the context of the historical setting of this novel.
“Pan Macmillan believes changing the text to reflect today’s world would undermine the authenticity of the original, so has chosen to leave the text in its entirety.
“This does not, however, constitute an endorsement of the characterisation, content or language used.”
To be fair though, the publisher adding a trigger warning preamble is definitely the lesser of two evils, compared to having “sensitivity readers” going full Winston Smith on dead authors.
‘NO TOLERANCE FOR LAWBREAKERS’ — THE LIE OF SAN FRANCISCO AND NYC:
On Tuesday morning, the 43-year old founder of Cash App lay dying on a residential street in San Francisco. Bob Lee had been stabbed repeatedly.
Passersby ignored his pleas for help and drove on.
Police called arrived too late.
So the father of two bled out on the streets of Nancy Pelosi’s former district and was dead by the time police arrived.
Lee had recently left SF to move back to Miami because he felt that San Francisco was “deteriorating.”
When I heard about this I immediately wondered what the local District Attorney had to say.
Brooke Jenkins turned out to have a faster response time than the emergency services, jumping onto social media and other platforms to extend “sympathies” to the family of Mr. Lee and writing, “We do not tolerate these horrific acts of violence in San Francisco.”
It immediately put me in mind of the pronouncements of another DA and other officials a day earlier here in New York.
Because on Monday, ahead of the arraignment of Donald Trump, Mayor Adams and Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell had made their own public pronouncements to the people of New York.
Like DA Bragg, they talked as though Donald Trump and his supporters were the major threat to the life of New Yorkers. They told us to take the subway but otherwise try to go about our daily business while the media and political circus was in town.
But the standout comment was from Sewell who warned Trump supporters, “Violence and destruction are not part of legitimate lawful expression, and it will never be tolerated in our city.”
While Chicago may still be “MAGA Country,” for everyone else: People U-Hauling out of NY, California — heading to Texas, Florida: study.
WAPO’S “TECHNOLOGY COLUMNIST” NEVER FAILS: ‘Is That True?’: Washington Post Reporter Questions TikTok’s Link to CCP.
Washington Post technology columnist Taylor Lorenz, the self-described “most online reporter that you can find” said Thursday in a discussion hosted by the libertarian magazine Reason that she doesn’t know where TikTok is headquartered or that a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member holds an executive position with the tech company’s parent, ByteDance.
“I actually don’t know where TikTok is based,” she said. “Umm. The CEO was in Singapore. Umm. So he’s there and then it’s [sic] the U.S. it’s sort of run regionally around the world.”
The former New York Times reporter also questioned whether it was “true” that a CCP official serves in a senior position at ByteDance. “Is that true? Is that true? Is that true?” Lorenz said. (Zhang Fuping, who serves as ByteDance’s editor in chief, is a Chinese Community Party secretary.)
To be fair, it can be difficult for the elderly to learn new technologies.
It’s true that all communities experience drug overdoses or deaths and inflation puts pressure on all households while the dollar weakens and prices rise. But particularly when it comes to crime, America’s cities have taken a far more radical downward turn than the suburban and rural areas such as the one my wife and I are blessed to live in. The county where we live recorded only one murder in all of 2022. You would be hard-pressed to find a single day last year when nobody was killed in Baltimore or Chicago.
The current situation in America’s urban centers is not sustainable. And for some reason, nearly all of the larger cities are controlled by liberal Democrats who impose the insane policies that allow this mayhem to flourish. Even Austin, in the heart of the red state of Texas, has a municipal government that is hiring wolves to guard the henhouse. And the recent election in Chicago suggests that there is no path back from the brink for many of our formerly-great cities. You simply cannot help those who refuse to help themselves.
As NRO’s Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2010 wrote in 2010 when the failed city of Detroit was making headlines and photo spreads thanks to its Hiroshima-like bombed out landscape, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”
SECOND LOOK AT VIETNAM: DID WE HAVE IT WON?
In the fifty years since the Paris Peace Accords ended our military involvement in Vietnam, a consensus has long been locked in place about America’s war in southeast Asia. The effort to defend democratic(-ish) South Vietnam was an imperialist folly and an immoral war of choice using the Vietnamese as proxies. We never had a chance to win the war, and efforts to do so only strengthened our enemies.
But is that what actually happened? I sat down for a lengthy conversation with Mark Moyar, the William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College and author of Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968. In the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast, we discuss how the narrative of futility formed during the war and dominated the discussion for decades afterward.
“Almost none of it is right,” Moyar declares, “and that’s why I’ve spent so much time writing Vietnam books.” The American veterans of the war as well as the people of former South Vietnam deserve an honest accounting of what actually happened, not the all-too-easy gloss that we walked away from a war we couldn’t win. In fact, Moyar argues based on new access to Vietnamese records, we largely had the war won by the time Richard Nixon got elected — and slowly let it slip away from us.
Well, slowly, and then suddenly, to paraphrase Hemingway on bankruptcy. The so-called “Watergate Congress” of Democrats elected in 1974 pulled the plug on funding for our defense of South Vietnam the following year. But prior to their election, as Lewis Sorley quoted counter-insurgency expert Sir. Robert Thompson in his 1999 book, A Better War:
Having failed to achieve their aims militarily, the North Vietnamese turned their attention to the Paris Peace Talks. They were extraordinarily fortunate to be dealing with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, two opportunists of the worst sort, who were willing to negotiate a deal which left the North with troops in South Vietnam. When President Thieu balked at this and threatened to scuttle the talks, the North backed off of the whole deal and Nixon ordered the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi. For eleven days, waves of B-52’s, each carrying 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs, pummeled the North. For perhaps the only time during the entire War, the North was subjected to total war, and they were forced to return to the negotiating table. Sorley cites Sir Robert Thompson’s assessment that:
In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area, you had won the war. It was over.
At that point, the Viet Cong had been destroyed, we had definitely won the insurgency phase of the War. Additionally, the North had been defeated in the initial phase of conventional warfare, and had finally had the War brought home to them in a significant way. Though the overall War was certainly not over, it was sitting there, just waiting to be won.
Or lost, depending upon who was in charge in DC:
Related: Joe Biden Comes Full Circle:
During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.
According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.
But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.
Found via Fred Bauer, who notes, “Biden has never made any secret of his tremendous admiration for McGovern, whom he views as a transformational and inspirational figure.” Which brings us to 2021:
HOW THE DEEP STATE TOOK DOWN NIXON:
Since the publication of Secret Agenda, books such as Len Colodny’s and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup (1991), James Rosen’s The Strong Man (2008), and Geoff Shepard’s The Real Watergate Scandal (2015) and The Nixon Conspiracy (2021) have drawn on declassified documents and unsealed judicial and congressional hearings to help us better understand what really happened. Although these authors disagree about many details, they agree that Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him. And while scholars shy away from endorsing some of the more dramatic claims that have been made over the years, the best of them understand Watergate not in terms of the conventional narrative, but as an institutional “conflict” in which Nixon was the most important casualty. Nixon had to go—not because of a bungled break-in, but because he challenged the national-security state.
Thanks to the revelations concerning Felt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in Nixon’s downfall is better understood. The Central Intelligence Agency’s role, however, remains mysterious. It was only one of several US intelligence agencies spying on Nixon and his officials, but Langley’s role in Watergate set it apart. As Hougan shows, it infiltrated and sabotaged “The Plumbers,” the covert unit responsible for the Watergate burglaries, run by several figures in Nixon’s re-election campaign committee with connections to the White House. It was the CIA that set in motion the events that forced Nixon from the presidency.
The CIA, the military, and other agencies spied on the White House because Nixon the president acted differently than Nixon the politician. As congressman, senator, and vice president, Nixon was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior. While this position earned him the ire of media and academic elites, especially when he exposed the treason of their darling Alger Hiss, anti-Communism was at the time a fairly conventional position within military and intelligence circles. In backing Nixon in 1968, his supporters in the military and intelligence communities thought they were getting a hawk who would stop trying to micromanage the Vietnam War and national security from the White House.
Nixon had other ideas.
Read the whole thing.
April 6, 2023
MATT TAIBBI: Eat Me, MSNBC.
If it sounds like my beef with MSNBC is personal, by now it is. Take the Twitter Files. When first presented with the opportunity to do that story, my first reaction was to be extremely excited, as any reporter would be, including anyone at MSNBC. In the next second however I was terrified, because I care about my job, and knew there would be a million eyes on this thing and a long way down if I got anything wrong. If you’ve ever wondered why I look 100 years old at 53 it’s because I embrace this part of the process. Audiences have a right to demand reporters lie awake nights in panic, and every good one I’ve ever met does.
But people who used to be my friends at MSNBC embraced a different model, leading to one of the biggest train wrecks in the history of our business. Now they have the stones to point at me with this “What happened to you?” routine. It’s rare that the following words are justified on every level, but really, MSNBC: Fuck you.
C’mon Matt, tell us how you really feel.