NEWS YOU CAN USE: What You May Not Know About Hanukkah.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
December 19, 2022
NEW FINANCIAL WOES FOR GEORGIA’S GOVERNOR: Report: Stacey Abrams Campaign Owes Over $1 Million to Vendors.
GREAT MOMENTS IN ENTITLEMENT: Bucs reporter under fire for grilling Gio Bernard after botched fake punt.
When Marshawn Lynch sat before Super Bowl media so he would not get fined, it spoke to a tenuous relationship between NFL athletes and journalists.
Yes, NFL athletes are usually required to speak to the media, but journalists are expected to respect the boundaries of athletes as well, especially when present in a locker room following a humiliating loss.
So when Bucs running back Giovani Bernard tried to exit the locker room and reconvene with his family, he was stopped by a group of Bucs reporters who wanted him to answer to a costly botched fake punt in the game.
Bucs reporter Jenna Laine shared a video of that interaction, describing the fake punt as “the most pivotal play of the game” (although there were several Bucs penalties that contradict that assertion). Laine also added a note preemptively, as if she knew the video would spark outrage across the sports landscape: “As reporters, it is our job to seek clarity on what happened.”
Although this is true, athletes, journalists and fans disagreed with the manner in which the impromptu interview was conducted, leading Laine to defend herself in Twitter comments.
As reporters lament the lacking opportunity to speak with Bernard all year, Bernard looks flabbergasted by the way media members feel owed an explanation for the fake punt mishap.
With one reporter astonishingly asking,“What have you done for us to talk to you all year?”
“Can I go to my family that I have outside, and… all the sudden, now?” Bernard asks.
“Just don’t say we didn’t talk to you all year,” a reporter responded tersely.
“We just wanted to ask for your perspective on what happened there,” Laine said.
“You were involved in one of the biggest plays of the game,” another reporter chimed in.
Here’s the clip of the exchange:
https://twitter.com/NicoleAuerbach/status/1604913965896589312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1604913965896589312%7Ctwgr%5E638362a16aa2b61ed33839010f0071274422f2cb%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ffansided.com%2F2022%2F12%2F19%2Fbucs-reporter-gio-bernard-punt%2F
To paraphrase the Nazi writer of “Springtime for Hitler” in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, “You are the athlete; I am the journalist. I outrank you!”
THE MAKING OF NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR:
‘The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary’, writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by 25 years in a forced-labour camp.’ That is what it is like to hold this brand new, manuscript edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four in your hands. You feel as if you are doing something you shouldn’t. You get to see Orwell’s own handwriting. His revisions and reworkings. His mind in motion. It is a clandestine and intimate experience, like having a glimpse into Winston Smith’s diary.
Published by SP Books, this is Nineteen Eighty-Four as you’ve never seen it before. It reproduces, in colour facsimile, the 197 surviving pages of Orwell’s manuscript, held by the John Hay Library at Brown University, Rhode Island. We see Orwell’s work in fountain pen and ballpoint (complete with ink blots), as well as 14 typewritten sides. We are even given his doodles and pen tests. Readers will remember how Winston also marvels at the beauty of the paper and binding of a blank book he buys from a junk shop.
Read the whole thing, comrade.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Arctic blast this week brings the coldest Christmas in nearly 40 years for millions.
(Classical reference in headline.)
SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW:
● How it started: “Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded.”
—The New York Times, November 21, 1922.
● How it’s going: New York Times slammed over ‘swastika’ crossword on first day of Hanukkah: ‘Disgusting.’
—The New York Post, today.
(Classical reference in headline.)
‘IF THESE WALLS COULD SING’ OPENS THE DOORS TO ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS.
My review of the new Disney+ documentary, directed by Mary McCartney, now up at Ed Driscoll.com.
EVERGREEN QUESTION: Where’s Matt Drudge? “The Drudge Report reminds me of MTV in the early 2000s, a channel I returned to sheerly out of habit based on its greatness from decades before.”
December 18, 2022
CNN PUNDITS UPSET THEY WEREN’T HANDED TWITTER FILES:
The Twitter files have been a series of reports made by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, detailing the behind-the-scenes conversations at Twitter over several years concerning the company’s efforts towards censorship and information suppression.
The files have shown that previous Twitter leadership, including CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey as well as Vijaya Gadde, former Twitter lead counsel, lied about shadow-banning conservative voices for years. The files have revealed the deliberate efforts to censor stories around Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” and have detailed how Twitter executives, especially former head of Twitter Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, devised a justification to ban the sitting president.
“I think the problem here though is that Elon Musk is effectively serving as a gatekeeper for this information. He is not giving it to newsrooms. He is giving it to handpicked journalists who are then agreeing to the condition or at least one condition of tweeting out the files instead of posting the news stories,” Darcy said.
“That’s not the spirit of free speech,” Lemon replied.
To be fair, free speech has never really been a topic that CNN has cared much about. But as Musk himself tweeted on Friday, “So inspiring to see the newfound love of freedom of speech by the press.”
OUT ON A LIMB: The real cause of California’s homelessness crisis.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, newly inaugurated Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and legislative leaders are pledging decisive action on California’s homelessness crisis, which raises a pithy question: Why did it erupt during a period of strong economic growth?
The reasons often offered include a moderate climate, the availability of generous welfare benefits, mental health and drug abuse. However, a lengthy and meticulously sourced article in the current issue of Atlantic magazine demolishes all of those supposed causes.
Rather, the article argues persuasively, California and other left-leaning states tend to have the nation’s most egregious levels of homelessness because they have made it extraordinarily difficult to build enough housing to meet demands.
Author Jerusalem Demsas contends that the progressive politics of California and other states are “largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue.
“Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups … But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.”
Demsas singles out Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area as examples of how environmentalists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups and left-leaning organizations joined hands to enact a thicket of difficult procedural hurdles that became “veto points” to thwart efforts to build the new housing needed in prosperous “superstar cities.”
It’s “the housing price of liberalism,” as Thomas Sowell dubbed it – and it doesn’t come cheap.
WHY HARRISON FORD’S BEST ROLES ARE NEITHER HAN NOR INDY:
Ford leaned into the idea of blockbuster stardom following the success of Star Wars, banging out two sequels to George Lucas’s space opera, the first two Indiana Jones flicks, and Blade Runner (not a blockbuster, but certainly a movie that aspired toward blockbuster-dom) in the years that followed. Sure, he had bit parts in interesting movies (Apocalypse Now) and bigger parts in worse movies (Hanover Street) during this time, but this was the age of Harrison Ford, Superstar. He wasn’t asked for nuance; he wasn’t being hired to delve deep into his craft. It was pure, brute force charisma.
And then, in 1985, Ford starred in Witness. Directed by the great Australian director Peter Weir and written by Earl W. Wallace and William Kelly, Witness is part thriller, part romance, part culture clash story, and part work of anthropology. Ford plays a homicide detective named John Book who is investigating the murder of an undercover cop. The only witness to the crime is Samuel, a young Amish boy (Lukas Haas). Due to the perpetrators of the crime being other cops, Book, after being wounded in a shootout with one of them, is forced to take refuge in the Amish community cut off from modernity.
And Ford is terrific. The character as written is an archetypical kind of movie cop: mildly schlubby (see how he digs into that hot dog), a bit awkward, at his best when being a cop. Most notably, for me, is how Ford handles Book’s occasional bursts of rage. This was not an emotion he’d been called on to express in previous films, and at the end of Witness, when Ford explodes at the police chief covering up the actions of his officers, he seems truly dangerous, expressing a kind of raw-voiced fury you wouldn’t want to find yourself in front of.
Witness, for which he received his only Academy Award nomination, seemed to have unlocked something in Ford: that he could be both a huge movie star and a serious actor. The Mosquito Coast, his second film with Weir and to my mind his single best performance, followed.
Read the whole thing.
HE’S 79 TODAY, BUT HE DOESN’T LOOK A DAY OVER YODA: 10 Crazy Keith Richards Stories On His Birthday.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Dad Tells Kids Santa Would Prefer Beer And Cigars Over Milk And Cookies This Year.
JEFF DUNETZ IS ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Differences Between Christmas And Hanukkah (With Tongue Firmly In Cheek).
16. Hanukah movies are easier to identify. Christians fight over which movies are Christmas movies. If you ever want to purposely start an argument among Gentiles, walk into a room full of Christians and ask, “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” Oh boy, it will get ugly.
The truth is Die Hard is a Hanukkah movie. Think about it —” Die Hard” is a story about a desperate insurgency against a vastly superior invading force, requiring the near-miraculous marshaling of limited resources. It’s a modern version of the Chanukah story.
So many movie plots occur during the Christmas season. Therefore, there is an excellent chance of disagreement about whether or not a particular film can be considered a Christmas Movie.
But with Hanukah movies, there is no grey area, perhaps because there are so few Hanukah movies besides “Eight Crazy Nights,” “The Hebrew Hammer,” “The Rugrats Hanukkah,” and, of course, “Die Hard.”
CODA. A few weeks ago, Ye (Kanye) West wanted to write a song about the Maccabees. However, one night when Ye was sleeping, the ghost of Judah Maccabee visited him. He admonished Ye for being an anti-Semite and warned West he would be punished if he did the song without first having a bris. I heard the Jew-hating Ye was willing to have the bris but couldn’t find a Mohel willing to do such a tiny job.
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
DON SURBER: We are letting weirdos run things.
The media hailed Sam Brinton as the first transvestite to serve as the deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy.
The rest of us knew bald, mustachioed men in dresses should not be running the government because if they cannot govern themselves, how can they govern others?
And Brinton cannot. As expected, he crashed and burned. He has been charged with stealing women’s luggage at two airports. The Biden administration canned him. If the charges are true, they show a man who is a slave to his impulses. He needs a checkup from the neck up.
But he’s LGBT and therefore exempt in our society from rules and standards.
For example, if a Christian teacher began talking about the Bible and his weekend at a religious retreat to his kindergarten students at a public school, he would be fired so fast, his Bible would spin.
But half the country now believes LGBT teachers have the right to blab about their weekend orgy. A law to ban this kind of talk in Florida faced opposition from Disney.
As Glenn wrote in the New York Post on Tuesday: Biden’s return to ‘normalcy’ brought us crazy instead — like Sam Brinton.
On Friday, Musk responded to a tweet from Ariadna Jacob, who wrote: “I’m not famous and I wasn’t a public figure either when Taylor Lorenz asked for my address, said it wasn’t for publication and then proceeded to dox me in the NYT with the address she had assured me she wasn’t going to publish. The article was shared many x on Twitter.”
Musk responded to the tweet: “Such shameful behavior will not be tolerated going forward.”
While many conservatives typically oppose online censorship, it seemed as though there was a near-unanimous consensus from the right side of the political spectrum that this was not a typical censorship case.
Podcast host Tim Pool tweeted: “Taylor Lorenz finally got suspended for all the awful things she’s done.”
“Banning Taylor Lorenz is the best thing Elon Musk has done for this website,” said digital strategist Caleb Hull.
Elsewhere in lefty freakouts over losing their monopoly on Twitter: Soros-Funded Wikipedia Casts Musk Journo Suspensions as ‘Thursday Night Massacre.’
UPDATE: On the other hand:
NOT SURPRISINGLY, MITTENS WAS ONE OF THEM: Here are the four Republicans who voted against allowing unvaccinated military members who were fired to get their jobs back.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden slings ‘anti-Irish’ words, claims to be Italian in gaffe-ridden speech.
A befuddled President Biden casually maligned the Irish while botching his wife’s family history during a gaffe-filled appearance in Delaware on Friday.
“I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid,” Biden inexplicably said as he greeted 102-year-old World War II veteran Ray Firmani during a town hall on veterans’ benefits in New Castle, Del.
“I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter,” Biden continued. “So, you know, I got a little Italian in me now, you know?”
The audience of military veterans and federal officials received the off-script comments in puzzled silence — but critics on Twitter took comic umbrage at the ethnic slur.
Earlier: Biden Report Card: Joe concedes he’s ‘f***ing old.’
THE COVID HYSTERICS’ BLEAK MIDWINTER:
The ancients had a word for it, winter, and it’s eliciting trembles of horror from the Cassandras over at the New York Times. New Yorkers, the Times recently croaked, “are living not just among the coronavirus and its seemingly endless variants, but a bunch of other viruses too.” This “bunch” includes such baffling ailments as the common cold and the flu. One man interviewed by the Times “has been walking around town with a stuffy nose and a mysterious cough that keeps clattering in his lungs.”
Why any of this would suddenly happen just as the weather is getting cold remains a medical mystery. Yet thankfully the Times has a theory:
Although city officials have been recommending that New Yorkers wear masks in indoor public spaces, few are heeding that call. School attendance remains relatively high too, though it dipped a little recently. Restaurants and coffee shops are busy, and offices show no signs of closing. People are still going out to movies, music venues and cocktail bars.
Cocktail bars. The unmitigated gall of people thinking they can just go to cocktail bars is enough to make you think we don’t deserve Dr. Fauci. Yet surely it’s no surprise that the Times is struggling with this. For everyone else, this is set to be a season of joy and gratitude. Not only is it almost Christmas, it’s the first winter since 2019 when Covid isn’t an issue, and for those of us who caught the Omicron last winter, it couldn’t be more welcome. No canceled holiday parties; no wondering what the eggnog really tastes like. And unlike Europeans, we Americans didn’t foolishly shut down our nuclear plants and gas storage facilities, making us reliant on Russian exports. Heating this year might be expensive but it’s still on and running.
Flashback: Ignoring Them Is the Only Way Out.
December 17, 2022
QUESTION ASKED: How did free speech become a right-wing value?
In early May, I explored the left’s reaction to billionaire Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter and his vow to make it a free speech platform again. Since then, Musk and his vision have repeatedly been portrayed as “right-wing.”
It’s the damndest thing.
Canadian Conservative politician Andrew Scheer picked up on this strange phenomenon back in April, saying that that the corporate media framing free speech as a “right wing value” was just plain weird. As though to drive home the point, Twitch’s Zachary Ryan called Musk a right-winger on Monday. And over the weekend, entrepreneur Samir Tabar had a question for a whiny Robert Reich:
Since when did free speech become a right-wing value? Right around the time that conservatives won the culture war:
ROGER SIMON: Has American Democracy Been a Hallucination for Nearly 60 Years?
Call it a democracy, call it a democratic republic, call it a constitutional republic, call it anything you want—it doesn’t really matter what America is if there is truth to what Tucker Carlson was reporting the other night via a source who had “direct knowledge” of still-hidden documents concerning the Kennedy assassination, implicating the CIA.
If indeed the CIA was in any way involved in the assassination of JFK on Nov. 22, 1963, then anything that has happened in the public sphere in our country since that day has basically been a hallucination created by an intelligence agency far deeper than most of us—certainly me, since I was never much given to conspiracy theories—ever imagined.
The affairs of the day—RNC chief Ronna McDaniel revealed to be a profligate spender on her own luxury travel, not on Republican candidates; Donald Trump releasing self-aggrandizing NFT pseudo-art as a fundraiser (rest in peace, Johannes Vermeer); even Elon Musk’s exposure of the multiple mendacious censoring creeps behind Twitter, although that has an eerie similarity—pale by comparison to CIA involvement and, therefore, massive coverup for decades in the JFK assassination.
That former CIA director Mike Pompeo declined to appear on Carlson’s show to discuss this is not insignificant. We all know about 51 intelligence officials—John Brennan and others who fallaciously claimed two years ago the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. They have to have known otherwise. Now this?
Why are 3 percent of the Warren Commission documents on the assassination still being hidden after those nearly 60 years with all the major players dead, if not to hide something of serious importance from the American public?
It’s time to reconsider Oliver Stone’s “JFK” that, though I admired Oliver’s filmmaking, I originally thought to be a crackpot.
Flashback: “Trapped In Camelot:” my interview with James Piereson, the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism.