DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF “OKAY, GROOMERS,” AND UPDATES TO THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Scotland briefly rebrands pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons.”
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
January 1, 2023
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: People Can Now Carry Guns Without A License In Half Of America’s States.
DON SURBER: The year of the fascists. In 2022, we learned the government runs social media.
“Former gymnastics champion, Jennifer Sey, had a dream: to one day be CEO of Levis. And, in fact, she was on a trajectory to achieve exactly that until she did something rare in Corporate America today: she acted like a leader. After all, to be a true leader you must be willing to say what is unpopular and throughout the pandemic that’s exactly what Sey did. She objected on social media to what she believed were harmful policies directed towards children during the pandemic…When higher-ups told her to quiet down in exchange for staying on track for the CEO position, Sey refused. By neglecting to stand down, she no doubt lost incalculable financial incentives and priceless future Fortune 500 C-suite opportunities.”
* * * * * * * *
Sey continues to speak out. The revelations of the FBI, CIA and other government agencies pressuring social media companies to censor critics awakened her inner patriot. She wrote, “When private company leadership carries out the will of the government, with or without being explicitly asked to do so, we no longer live in a free country. Ask questions about lockdowns? Not only will you be censored, you may be out of a job.
“Democrats shriek fascist! at anyone challenging the edicts of the Party — anti-lockdown protesters, the unvaccinated, Trump supporters. Meanwhile, corporations are doing the bidding of Democratic Party elites as they ruthlessly censor and sideline dissenters. In fact, this is what real fascism looks like.”
A lot of people in Silicon Valley need to be asking themselves, “Are we the baddies?”
NEWS YOU CAN USE FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: 10 Biggest Adjustments Fleeing Californians Have To Make In Their New States.
JON GABRIEL: Why you should never say someone is ‘on the right side of history.’
‘Right side of history’ means the side that won
To flesh this out, I’ll concoct a pair of 20th century Russians.
In 1910, Dmitri was a conscientious church deacon who fully supported Czar Nicholas II. Was Deacon Dmitri on the “right side of history?” Sure … at least until 1917, when Nicholas was forced to abdicate and was later shot. I suppose the deacon was on the wrong side of history from then on.
His brother Ivan joined the Bolsheviks in 1910, so surely was on the right side of history – at least once the revolution was secured. He soon became an officer in the Cheka, was given a roomy Moscow apartment and enjoyed the perks of party membership. Dmitri ended up in the Gulag; Ivan grew fat and happy.
During Stalin’s terror, Ivan watched nearly half of his friends – loyal Bolsheviks all – purged via the bullet or the labor camp. He gently raised concerns to an NKVD comrade, who turned him in. All of a sudden, Ivan was back on the wrong side of history despite never changing his views.
Pampered Ivan didn’t survive long but Dmitri did. After his release and internal exile, he remained loyal to the church and prayed for Ivan’s soul and the end of communism. At the ripe old age of 101, he saw the USSR collapse.
Looks like Dmitri was on the right side of history after all!
MACHETE ATTACK ON COPS NEAR TIMES SQUARE INVESTIGATED AS POSSIBLE TERROR INCIDENT: SOURCES. “Sewell said the man dealt two of the officers blows to the head, giving an 8-year veteran a head laceration and a recent police academy graduate a skull fracture. All three NYPD members were taken to Bellevue Hospital and were expected to survive. At least one officer fired upon the suspect, striking him in the shoulder. Police sources said the alleged attacker’s injuries are also non-life-threatening. A preliminary review shows the man has no previous arrests but he was known to federal and local law enforcement because of previous online postings, the sources added. Law enforcement officials said they are looking into whether the man who allegedly attacked the officers had previously posted what they called jihadist writings online and traveled to New York City to target police.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Susan Sarandon Slams Pete Buttigieg amid Airline Disaster: ‘Being Smart Doesn’t Necessarily Make You Practical.’
Actress Susan Sarandon expressed contempt for President Joe Biden’s U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg over his failure to address the travel disaster that transpired over the holidays.
“I guess being smart doesn’t necessarily make you practical,” Sarandon tweeted of Buttigieg on Wednesday.
The Thelma & Louise star was responding to a tweet by journalist David Sirota, who wrote, “Documents show that before this week’s travel disaster, state officials of both parties warned @SecretaryPete about the mess, begging him to crack down.”
Sirota added that Buttigieg “responded by going on national TV to insist travel ‘is going to get better by the holidays.’”
Three months ago, the Transportation Secretary told late-night comedian James Corden that airline travel would improve by the holiday season.
Buttigieg has reportedly ignored state attorneys general’s repeated requests to protect customers and hold airlines accountable for canceling flights in the months leading up to the ongoing holiday travel fiasco.
How badly has the Biden’s transportation secretary screwed up on the job? This badly:
WORST ARTICLE OF THE YEAR: Dead Last at The Bulwark.
The end of the year is often time for “best of the year” and “worst of the year” lists, but most “best of” lists are merely catalogues of one’s preferences and favorite moments, which is fine.
But it’s another case with “worst of the year” lists, and by far the worst article of the year appearing in a supposedly conservative media outlet is Jonathan Last’s October article in The Bulwark, “Roger Scruton and the Fascists Who Love Him.” I had this article on my read-to-comment-later pile when it came out, but then I went away on my long European excursion and fell behind on the pile.
I have tried to maintain cordial relations with my old Weekly Standard friends who have gone on to their successor media outlets, especially The Bulwark. I’ve even placed an article or two there. I have acknowledged the reasonable case at the core of The Bulwark’s outlook that Donald Trump and the broader populist current he galvanized have exerted some negative forces in the Republican Party, though my own balance sheet concludes that Trump was much more sinned-against than sinning, and think the populist turn among conservatives is long overdue and largely healthy. (By the way, someone who thought this a long time ago was . . . Irving Kristol. See below.*)
But it became clear a while ago now that the “Never Trump” disposition has become fanatical to the point that Bulwarkers and others in the same camp have gone nuts, throwing every conservative principle over the side simply because Trump embraced them. But Last—tempting to call him “the Last Man”—really scraped bottom with his clubfooted treatment of Scruton. Much of Last’s article consists of classic “ventriloquist journalism,” citing in a faux-questioning way an article by Alan Elrod (I’ve never heard of him either) in Arc Digital, most of which doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response.
Exit quote:
December 31, 2022
#HIMTOO? Woman sues Steven Tyler, alleging child sex assault in 1970s.
A woman who has previously said Steven Tyler had an illicit sexual relationship with her when she was a teenager is now suing the Aerosmith frontman for sexual assault, sexual battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The lawsuit brought by Julia Misley was filed Tuesday under a 2019 California law that gave adult victims of childhood sexual assault a three-year window to file lawsuits for decades-old instances of assault. Saturday is the deadline to file such claims.
The 65-year-old Misley, formerly known as Julia Holcomb, said in a statement that she wanted to seize “a new opportunity to take legal action against those that abused me in my youth.” The Associated Press does not name victims of sexual assault unless they publicly identify themselves.
While the lawsuit doesn’t name Tyler, Misley identified him by name in the statement, issued through the law firm Jeff Anderson & Associates. She has also recounted her experiences with Tyler in prior interviews, and Tyler discussed a relationship with a teenage girl in two books, published in 2011 and 1997. The acknowledgements section of his memoir “Does The Noise In My Head Bother You?” thanks a “Julia Halcomb,” which Misley has said is a reference to her.
Representatives for Tyler did not immediately return requests for comment Friday. Rolling Stone first reported the lawsuit.
Flashbacks:
● The sexual predators everyone still worships.
● #MeToo feminists may not realize it, but their other target is sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
● Hugh Hefner, Gangsta Rap & the Emerging Moral Majority: “Slowly, however, the elite of our culture seem to be drifting toward a new, far-more jaundiced and suspicious view of popular culture from the 1960s to the 1990s.”
BIDEN’S ISLAND ESCAPE SHOWS HIS DISCONNECT:
Someone should have told Joe Biden that vacationing in St. Croix was not a good idea.
He could have chosen better.
And leaving the country at this time was bad optics.
The president, seeking warmer climes, appeared to have abandoned the country in the wake of a historic blizzard that buried the U.S., killed scores of people, caused massive blackouts, and stranded thousands of holiday travelers at airports across the country.
Some 37 people were killed in the Buffalo area, the airport was shut down and thousands were left without power there and elsewhere across the nation. Biden grinned and sent prayers.
While he was aboard Air Force One flying above the country, untold thousands of other Americans were stuck at airports across the country as flights were delayed or canceled due to the harsh weather and Southwest Airlines incompetence.
But the bitter cold weather that swept across the nation did not deter hordes of illegal immigrants from crossing the southern border into the country under Biden’s cruel and criminal open border policy.
Immigrant families, turned away at overcrowded shelters in El Paso, were forced to sleep in the streets under freezing conditions.
“Come to America and sleep in the streets,” seems to be Biden’s message to immigrants from around the world.
But you can’t be too harsh on Biden. He is old and feeble, and he needs the sun to warm his bones.
But the optics of him ignoring domestic programs while vacationing in St. Croix, one of the U.S Virgin Islands, sent the wrong message, especially as fellow Americans struggled with frigid weather and skyrocketing home energy bills.
What optics? Biden knows his Democratic party operatives with bylines aren’t going to give him the Ted Cruz treatment, so this story will be forgotten by the next news cycle, if not sooner.
MARK JUDGE: Shredding away the COVID insanity.
Forget Jan. 6. The worst day in recent American history came on May 2020, when the city of Los Angeles filled the skateboarding park at Venice Beach with sand. The move was a deterrent done in the name of preventing the spread of COVID. A month later, and without permission, the skaters dug out the park and started riding again.
For those of us who are skateboarders, the closing of the park was a dark day. We seem to intuitively know what has since been proven: joyful exercise in fresh air and sunlight is a natural preventative to illness, including COVID. We knew better than the buzzkill bureaucrats.
Now, science has caught up with the skaters. A new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that “a regular exercise routine may significantly lower the chances of being hospitalized or even dying from COVID-19.”
Why, it’s as if: Ignoring Them Is the Only Way Out.
THE CRITICAL DRINKER REFLECTS…2022 EDITION (Video):
The following was quite prescient. It’s from Senator Frank Church himself on August 17, 1975, when he appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press:
In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. (…) Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left: such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. (…)
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
We are either teetering on the edge of that abyss or we have already fallen into it.
I’ll take the latter option: Are FBI And CIA Agents ‘Sheep Dipped’ At Twitter And Other Tech Companies?
FROM AN INSTA-READER: “I can just about guarantee the Chicago scanner stream will be better than anything CNN does tonight:”
Our Mission
The purpose of CrimeIsDown.com is to provide police scanner listeners in the Chicago area an easy way to lookup information quickly pertaining to what they hear. Journalists use the site to quickly know what neighborhood and police district an incident is happening in. Scanner enthusiasts use the site to find out what radio zone they should listen to. Average citizens use the site to find out what crime is happening around them and to tune in live.
We hope to let people decide for themselves whether or not crime is down, based on independent statistics and listening to breaking news.
Why the name “CrimeIsDown”?
The name CrimeIsDown comes from a hashtag of the same name that was popular starting in 2013 among those in the #ChicagoScanner community. City leadership often said how crime was down, but that seemed to conflict with the number of shootings. In 2014, Chicago Magazine had published a story about how Chicago Police was reclassifying crimes to make crime stats appear lower than they really were.
I’m sure Mayor Lightfoot is ever-vigilant in her efforts to clean up the streets of Chicago!
DEMOCRACY UNDER SIEGE? Parsing the New York Times’ obsession with alarmism:
The impending collapse of democracy—that’s not small beer. So imagine the alarm of New York Times subscribers when, on October 3, an essay titled “Democracy Challenged” appeared in the newspaper with the subhead, “Representative government faces its most serious threats in decades.”
If the New York Times wishes to limit gun ownership in America, articles like this can hardly be said to help. Before leaving the house the day the article was published, I opened our front door as slowly as I could, motioned to the family to stay in place until I had peered up both ends of the street, and then instructed everyone to walk behind me as we all moved as noiselessly as possible toward the sidewalk and our several destinations. “Do what you can to save representative democracy in America!” my wife whispered to the kids as they set off for school.
I am joking, of course. The piece, written by Joseph Kahn, the paper’s new executive editor, appeared in what the Times calls “The Morning Newsletter.” Though this morning’s item concerned the country’s worst nightmare, it was only four paragraphs long. And it was hard to fathom. The subhead’s reference to the most serious “threats” to “representative government” “in decades” was perplexing, since any real threat to democracy would be deadly and single, not one among several competing threats. And there was no threat to American democracy decades ago, unless Kahn was referring to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which were threats of a whole different order than what he went on to claim were the perils faced by American democracy now.
To be fair, the Gray Lady is far from alone in its paranoid style:
● Worst of 2022: The GOP Will End Democracy Award.
● An MSNBC “Debate”: Is GOP “Neo-Fascist,” “Proto-Fascist” or “Semi-Fascist?”
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the rest of us are asking the same question about MSNBC:
“DUDE, THIS LADY HAD WAY TOO MUCH TIME ON HER HANDS:” A San Francisco biker had a meltdown over an ambulance that was parked in the bike lane and it’s now one of my favorite videos on the internet.
San Francisco bicycle rider has a hysterical episode over an ambulance in a bike lane. There are many such cases.https://t.co/V7lq1aCl0d
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) December 30, 2022
“John works hard. Which means that he can afford to drive a car. That means he gets home to his family, safely. Work harder. Get a car:”
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Media Myth Alert is Taking stock: Top mythbusting posts of 2022.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Use These Five Easy Tricks to Identify the Marxist in the Room.
OUT ON A LIMB: Fauci Leaves a Broken Agency for His Successor.
After 54 years at the NIH, tomorrow marks Dr. Anthony Fauci‘s last day in office as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). While many were angered by his changing and conflicting recommendations, I am not. They are mere symptoms of a much larger and deeper problem. Dr. Fauci’s agency failed to promptly fund key research during the pandemic. That research would have abruptly ended many of the COVID controversies that divided our country.
In a study of NIH funding published in The BMJ, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I found that in the first year of the pandemic, it took the NIH an average of five months to give money to researchers after they were awarded a COVID grant. This should be unacceptable during a health emergency.
Consider the question of how COVID spread—was it airborne or spread on surfaces? (Remember all those people wiping down their groceries?) It lingered as an open question without good research for months, as Fauci spent hundreds of hours on television opining on the matter. Finally, on August 17, 2021—a year and a half after COVID lockdowns began—Dr. Fauci’s agency released results of a study showing the disease was airborne. Thanks for that. The announcement on the NIAID website, titled “NIH Hamster Study Evaluates Airborne and Fomite Transmission of SARS-CoV-2” came 18 months too late.
Imagine if, in February 2020, Dr. Fauci had marshaled his $6 billion budget, vast laboratory facilities, and teams of experts to conduct a definitive lab experiment to establish that COVID was airborne. On this question and many others throughout the pandemic, our problem was not that the science changed—it’s that it wasn’t done.
If “Dr. Fauci’s agency failed to promptly fund key research during the pandemic,” that may possibly be due to his funding the key research that enabled the pandemic: Letter confirms Wuhan lab’s COVID-19 leak was funded by US taxpayers.
December 29, 2022
JEFF DUNETZ: Will China Reinfect The World? Will Biden React Correctly This Time?
If you’ve been following the news, you know that China has been amid a surge of Covid that has infected at least 248 million people. They’ve drastically locked down and done everything they can to the detriment of their own economy to stop the disease. But experts are concerned that China’s latest move could literally reinfect the world: they lifted their restrictions on international travel yet again as of January 8, (Even though the surge in coronavirus cases continues.)
The Biden administration will impose testing requirements for any travelers from China after calling Trump “xenophobic” for imposing restrictions on China residents visiting the U.S.
But where will President Joe end up? Will he be the pre-election Joe trying to divide the country or the COVID despot he became?
Flashback:
When President @RealDonaldTrump announced the China travel restrictions, Joe Biden criticized them as “hysterical xenophobia.”
Now that experts agree they saved lives, Biden's rewriting history and pretending he supported them all along.
Our new digital ad looks at the facts. pic.twitter.com/TQgQPi9S1Q
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 1, 2020
ROGER SIMON: How to Be Happy in 2023—Make Saving the Republic Your New Year’s Resolution.
The way to succeed isn’t complicated if you remember that you too are media. You have a voice. You can and should pass information to people as much and as often as you can. You don’t have to have a podcast or your own Substack. Person-to-person contact is often better and more effective. Most of our country doesn’t realize what’s happening to them. Explain it. Change will come from this.
But in doing so, be as kind and generous as you can, though it can be difficult at times. Choose your interlocutor carefully. Remember these people have been brainwashed for a considerable amount of time. Some are prepared to hear things, others not. Also, choose your subject matter carefully. Some people are just beginning to seem willing to discuss COVID-19, bias in our educational system, the open border, and now gender issues, less so election integrity. That will come. It’s all about patience.
One way to approach people is to ask them questions politely, rather than to confront them with a direct argument. Let them think things through for themselves, rather than create intransigence. If you get a positive result, ask yet another question, but resist the temptation to go too far. You don’t want the snail to go back into its shell. When they are by themselves, they will have something to think about.
More importantly, resist the suggestion that some have made to employ a conservative version of the deceitful techniques of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radical.” Do so and you will start to resemble Alinsky yourself. You don’t want that. The truth is on our side. Be honest and always be a soldier for good.
I know I’m sounding a little prescriptive here. But I feel incredibly lucky to have this growing forum through which to express my opinions, and I want others to know they have a role to play that’s in many ways equal or superior.
I also want to remind myself of how to behave because I’m as tempted as any to get into counter-productive arguments with those I have no chance of convincing. In fact, I have more than a few times.
Exit quote: “These last few years have been filled with much doom and gloom and, as Edward Ring has written eloquently on American Greatness, it’s time for a resurgence of optimism. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy employed by the globalists to engineer a future that none of us should want.”
STUDY: DEM-RUN CHICAGO 3X MORE DANGEROUS THAN AFGHAN COMBAT ZONE, AND IT GETS WORSE.
In Chicago, applying the same criteria found that “Chicago’s most dangerous zip code faced a risk of firearm-related death over 3x the risk of combat death in Afghanistan, and nearly 4x the risks of Iraq.”
“The death risks were also greater than combat for the 10% most violent zip codes in the city,” del Pozo reported.
This insane level of violence has led many Chicago residents to refer to the city as “Chiraq.”
Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.
TYLER O’NEIL: Rachel Levine Targets Transgender Heresy for Big Tech Suppression.
“There is substantial misinformation about gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals,” he said. “We are in this nation facing an onslaught of anti-LGBTQI+ actions at the state levels across the United States, and they are dangerous to the public health. They target and politicize evidence-based treatments that should be considered the standard of care and actually aim to criminalize, criminalize medical providers, including physicians providing care to their patients.”
“The positive value of gender-affirming care for youth and adults is not in scientific or medical dispute,” Levine claimed. “So, we all need to work together to get our voices out in the front line, we need to get our voices in the public eye, and we know how effective our medical community can be talking to communities, whether it’s at town halls, schools, conversations with others, and we need to use our clinicians’ voice to collectively advocate for our tech companies to create a healthier, cleaner information environment.”
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to The Daily Signal‘s request for comment on how Levine responds to criticism and whether he stands by his call for censorship.
Rather than explaining the kind of medical interventions Levine supports, he used the euphemism “gender-affirming care.” This term refers to various attempts to make a biologically male body resemble the body of a female or vice versa, in the pursuit of a nebulous “gender identity” that often—although not always—corresponds to the gender opposite that of a person’s biological sex.
Related: Rachel Levine must explain ‘misinformation’ over ‘gender-affirming care.’ “Levine is using semantics and hyperbole to effectively control and shutdown the debate around quite graphic and irreversible treatments for minors, just as the progressive left has done with abortion. We as the taxpaying public must support these procedures. We must even pay for them; however, we must never speak of what is actually involved (surgery and irreversible hormone treatments) with them because people will die, or something. Levine must be held accountable — in front of Congress, on the record — and answer how exactly and specifically the American public is being ‘misinformed’ about physical and mental medical treatments of minors who believe they are non-binary. What does transition involve, exactly? Levine needs to be specific. How are irreversible hormone and puberty treatments being mischaracterized? Does Levine believe in top or bottom surgery for minors, and are medical centers that perform such procedures misinforming the public writ large about what those surgeries involve (such as the removal of premature breasts or genitals) and how the human body functions afterwards?”