NEW VIDEO FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Californians Move to Texas, Episode 4: The Gun Range.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
November 6, 2022
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Pandemic amnesty: Is it time?
WELL, THEY ALREADY KNOW HOW TO CODE, SO MAYBE THEY’LL SWITCH TO MAKING SOLAR PANELS: Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layoffs This Week.
The layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, according to the people. Meta reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September. Company officials already told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week, the people said.
The planned layoffs would be the first broad headcount reductions to occur in the company’s 18-year history. While smaller on a percentage basis than the cuts at Twitter Inc. this past week, which hit about half of that company’s staff, the number of Meta employees expected to lose their jobs could be the largest to date at a major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech industry retrenchment.
A spokesman for Meta declined to comment, referring The Wall Street Journal to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s recent statement that the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.”
Earlier: Zuckerberg’s Empire Collapses.
GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T HAVE A COMEDIAN HOST THE SHOW — THIS IS SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE! Haters SCREECHING over Dave Chappelle hosting SNL screech MORE when RedSteeze retweets them and LOL.
OUT ON A LIMB: The FBI will not be forgiven after Tuesday.
“Amnesty” comes from the Greek word ἀμνηστία, whose primary meaning is “forgetfulness.” In common parlance, the word carries a suggestion of forgiveness as well. But neither forgetfulness nor forgiveness is on the docket. People are not about to forget what the politicians and their bureaucrats just did to them. And if they do not forget, neither will they forgive.
Nor are they going to forget what the FBI has done and is doing to us. The dawn raids against non-violent political rivals of the regime and pro-life activists, the nationwide dragnets to nab people who protested against the 2020 election, the spying on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, manufacture of forged evidence in order to mobilize the awesome surveillance apparatus of the state against American citizens and undermine Trump’s presidency. The bill of indictment is long and damning. How long? More than a thousand pages in its first iteration, which GOP members of House Judiciary Committee dropped on Friday under the title “FBI Whistleblowers: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the Politicization of the FBI and Justice Department.”
What they indicate is an agency that has gone rogue and should be dismantled. This has been a theme sounding for more than a years now. Roger L. Simon, writing for the Epoch Times, said that the FBI, like ancient Carthage, must be destroyed. Holman Jenkins, writing for the Wall Street Journal, said that the agency had to be abolished. I’ve argued the same case several times, here, for example, and here. In my column for the December Speccie, I suggest that FBI be relocated to Kansas City and have its budget cut by 75 percent. “Then,” I write, “it should be taken apart altogether,” not least because “a national police is probably unconstitutional certainly un-American.”
It’s Roger Kimball, so read the whole thing. But assuming there’s a GOP majority in one or both houses of Congress, will there be anything beyond the usual “failure theater” of previous GOP congresses?
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Biden Regrets That People ‘Twisted’ His Promise to End Coal.
A joke was going around that President Joe Biden visiting Pennsylvania could only help candidate John Fetterman lose. As it turns out, Biden’s trip to California might hurt Democrats with Pennsylvania voters more than appearing in the Keystone State did.
As PJ Media’s Kevin Downey Jr reported yesterday, Biden decided to tell voters that his administration would be shutting down coal plants all across America and transitioning to wind and solar power during an unnecessary trip to California. Last I checked, no one will get beyond the margin of cheating to beat Gavin Newsom.
BIDEN ON COAL:
"We're gonna be shutting these plants down all across America, and having wind and solar." pic.twitter.com/JXIZxDzvsu
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 4, 2022
The White House, the Democrat National Committee, and Chuck Schumer must have all choked on whatever they were eating or drinking when they heard the president’s comments. The Pennsylvania Senate race is neck and neck, with Republican Mehmet Oz closing a 12-point gap in the last six weeks. Democrats are also running a stroke victim who can’t complete a coherent sentence and has admitted auditory processing issues.
Why would the Democrats choke when Biden uttered the above clip? Biden has repeatedly talked about eliminating coal and fossil fuel, and so has every major Democratic presidential candidate in recent years. You don’t get to breakout the Men In Black mind eraser just because there’s the midterms are looming.
REAL CLEAR POLITICS: The Current State of U.S. Political Polling.
The final Monmouth University poll had New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy 11% over GOP challenger Jack Ciattarelli – in a race eventually decided by just under 3 points. Monmouth wasn’t alone: Farleigh Dickinson and Stockton University both had the race at 9% in their final poll, while Rutgers Eagleton had it at 8%.
Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, was candid afterward. “I blew it,” he wrote in a Newark Star-Ledger mea culpa. The Monmouth poll, he added, “did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the governor’s race.”
So why are pollsters getting things so wrong? And which polls – and which races – should Americans keep an eye on in the final week of the 2022 midterms?
Let’s take the first question first. American University professor W. Joseph Campbell invokes Leo Tolstoy’s famous admonition in “Anna Karenina” about families: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In other words, there are many ways to make polling mistakes. Here are seven:
GIGO: In computer science, the acronym stands for “garbage in, garbage out,” a principle that organizations that average polls (RealClearPolitics and 538 are the most prominent) have been contemplating lately. But the same principle applies to individual polls themselves. A basic problem when trying to extrapolate the voting preferences of millions of people based on a sample of some 600 is that the polling sample can turn out to be unrepresentative of the electorate. Too many Democrats, for example, or too few. The challenge has grown exponentially because of modern technology. Cord-cutters, mobile phones, call screening devices, an explosion in the number of polls – all these factors and more have helped produce very low response rates.
Pollsters themselves were the first to recognize the problem, but it’s proven a tricky one to fix. Steve Koczela noted after the 2020 shortcomings that pollsters thought they’d addressed the big problem of 2016, which was underestimating – and therefore undercounting – Trump’s appeal among white voters without college degrees. Yet it happened again four years later.
“We all made our best attempt to solve all of the methodological issues that we identified after 2016,” he said. They apparently didn’t weight their samples enough. Meanwhile, new problems arose, including not detecting Trumpism’s ability to pump up turnout among working-class Hispanics.
Here’s video of Campbell himself appearing on C-SPAN: When Polls Goes Bad: American University Professor Joseph Campbell taught a class on public opinion and election forecasting. He spoke about some of the most significant polling misses in American politics. American University is located in Washington, D.C.
FASTER, PLEASE: The Collapse of Biden’s Woketopia.
Joe Biden and the Democrats have a big problem. It isn’t just that they stand to lose in the midterm elections and maybe the Presidency in 2024. They stand to lose much more than that. They stand to lose everything.
The American people, by now, have had enough. They’re sick of cowards who cannot stand up to the activists who control them. They’re not just sick of them in Washington. They’re sick of them everywhere. They’re sick of being told what they can and can’t say, what they can and can’t think.
In 2020, a New Woke Order exploded on the streets. It looked a lot like the rehearsal at Evergreen and across many college campuses all over the country. It wasn’t all of the Zoomers leading the charge, but the activists have been loud and powerful. They have captured corporate America and nearly every cultural institution in the country. And they’ve captured Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Read the whole thing.
METAPHOR ALERT: The American Flags at Fetterman Event Tell the Tale for Dems’ Election Hopes (Video).
Fetterman has had Joe Biden there in Pennsylvania to campaign, but given how unpopular Joe Biden is, that didn’t help.
So, Fetterman pulled out the Obama card and had him in to help out at an event on Saturday in Pittsburgh.
But there was a seminal moment during the event which was perhaps a metaphor for Fetterman and all the Democrats this cycle.
Fetterman was at the podium, making comments to introduce Obama. He talked about Dr. Oz appearing with President Donald Trump on Saturday; Fetterman claimed that he would be appearing with a “sedition free” president. Watch what happens next.
God intervened in Fetterman “Speech”!
Right after has says “President that is sedition free”. Watch what happens. pic.twitter.com/RAAAnxEzKY
— Redpills TV | Unfolding The Global Conspiracy (@redpilltheworld) November 5, 2022
Also, Fetterman had a very Brandon-esque “Trunalimunumaprzure” moment at the same event: Fetterman says he supports ‘codifying’ Roe v. Wade, but also celebrates its ‘demise:’
IS WATER RACIST? ISN’T EVERYTHING?
Last year California’s State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), explicitly responding to the suddenly discovered legacy of “white supremacy” and “the national and worldwide backlash against racism toward Black people and related Black Lives Matter protests of 2020,” passed a nine-page resolution(accompanied by 47 pages of “reference literature”), headlined “Condemning Racism, Xenophobia, Bigotry, and Racial Injustice and Strengthening Commitment to Racial Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, Access, and Anti-Racism.” One might have thought “inclusion” would have involved mentioning homophobia and Islamophobia, too, except that Black Lives Matter and their supporters get very angry when you mention the importance of any non-black group.
This cliché-ridden piece of predictable performance posturing is a case study of several intertwined traits of progressive governance today. California’s State Water Resources Control Board (and nine regional subordinate water boards) dates back to the 1960s, and was initially charged with monitoring the state’s water with an eye to detecting and remediating pollution from major sources such as industrial production, agricultural runoff, wastewater, and natural sources of unhealthy water. Surface and subsurface water quality is one of the more challenging environmental problems the nation faces because of the wide variety of ways water quality can be degraded, so it is not surprising that water monitors and regulators have a large range of factors to manage, from underground storage tanks to—in California’s case—the effects of specialized industries such as winemaking to, more recently, cannabis cultivation.
But as with all bureaucracies, mission creep and the political imperative of ever larger budgets and staff always leads to inexorable growth of power and reach, even as its primary original mission remains unfulfilled. Naturally the Board now includes “climate change” as one of its primary concerns, and “public outreach” and education—essentially propaganda and self-congratulation—as key functions. It is not surprising that it would jump on the anti-racist bandwagon along with everyone else in Leftist government.
But is California’s water more or less racist than its roads and bridges?
THE BULWARK CONTINUES TO CONSERVE CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: “Other than murder…”
Impressive ratio.
TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: The Coming Storm Over Trans ‘Tuskegee Experiment.’ “The COVID amnesty essay in the Atlantic will be followed soon by a transgender amnesty essay wherein the left says they didn’t know what was coming. Tens of thousands of young women, their bodies ruined, will face despair every time they see themselves in the shower.”
THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CYCLE HAS BEGUN: Trump Engages in Friendly Fire, Goes After Ron DeSantis at Rally. “Donald Trump held a rally in Pennslyvania tonight, but as usual, the candidates running for office were an afterthought. Instead, the former president spent the majority of the time talking about himself. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a Trump rally after all, and to be sure, they can be very entertaining. Unfortunately, instead of some of the good things he said making news, there’s currently just one clip going gangbusters on Saturday night. That would be this one where Trump engaged in friendly fire by taking a very public shot at Ron DeSantis. Trump mocks DeSantis as ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’ at a rally tonight in Pennsylvania. Personally, I’d like to at least get into mid-2023 before this stuff starts, and I don’t understand the play here aside from Trump being fearful DeSantis is going to grow his following with a blowout re-election.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Desanctimonious” is neither funny nor particularly accurate. If Trump’s aiming for a linguistic kill shot, this is enough of a miss that it makes me wonder if he’s off his game.
November 5, 2022
THE RETURN OF “FAKE BUT ACCURATE:” The NYT’s weird DeSantis hit piece.
There’s a video, the New York Times helpfully informs us. Except that it’s not a video of DeSantis, but — I kid you not — it’s a fake video by an unhappy student that was meant to satirize DeSantis:
Another student who requested anonymity because he feared repercussions for his job said Mr. DeSantis’s takes on the Civil War were the subject of so much talk that students made a satirical video about him at the time for the video yearbook.
The video, which was reviewed by The Times, includes a short snippet in which a voice purporting to be Mr. DeSantis is heard saying: “The Civil War was not about slavery! It was about two competing economic systems. One was in the North. …” while a student dozes in class. (A student voiced the role of Mr. DeSantis, because students did not have any actual footage of him, according to a student who helped put it together.)
I’m not sure which is more damning — the fact that the NYT reporter thought that this faked video was worth “reviewing,” or that the editor of the news section decided to keep it in the article. It’s not a recording of DeSantis. We have no idea whether it’s even an accurate recollection of what DeSantis argued, and neither does the Times. It’s a literal example of “fake but accurate.” It would be as if 60 Minutes II had admitted up front that they faked the Killian memos but presented them anyway as evidence of what George W. Bush was really like decades earlier. (As veterans of Rathergate will remember, that ended up being Dan Rather’s fallback position.)
As America’s Newspaper of Record reports: Following Through On Commitment To Address Twitter Disinformation, Elon Suspends New York Times.
(C’mon, do it, Elon!)
ALCOHOL-RELATED DEATHS SURGED AMONG MIDDLE-AGED AMERICAN WOMEN DURING PANDEMIC, STUDY FINDS: “There’s been a lot of talk of amnesty lately for those who got it wrong throughout the pandemic, and we just got yet another reason to say, resoundingly, absolutely not. According to the CDC, alcohol-related deaths soared in the US between 2019 and 2020. In fact the number of these deaths increased by 26%. Historically, that percentage-change year over year has never been greater than 7%.”
MARK JUDGE: Surrender: Or Why I Will Always Love Bono.
So yes, I will always love Bono, and love U2. As an addendum, it’s worth noting that Bono may have politically seen the light himself. In a recent interview he praised capitalism. “I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started,” he said. “I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism.”
Then this: “I didn’t grow up to like the idea that we’ve made heroes out of businesspeople, but if you’re bringing jobs to a community and treating people well, then you are a hero.”
You might say that our two hearts now beat as one.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: In 2006, U2 Abandoned Ireland in the Name of Taxes.
It is not too often that a business moves out of Ireland for tax reasons, but tax policy can move in mysterious ways as seen by U2 leader Bono’s decision that his band can leave behind Ireland. The Irish native has decided to move his business out of the Republic as a result of its changing tax treatment of royalty income, which is typically large for those in the entertainment business. Seeking a lower tax jurisdiction, Bono has found what he is looking for courtesy of the Netherlands[.]
As Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”
(Updated and bumped.)
JOE MANCHIN DISCOVERS JOE BIDEN IS A DEMOCRAT, PROCEEDS TO WHINE INCESSANTLY:
On Friday, with the mid-term election just days away, Joe Biden decided it’d be a great idea to rant about closing down coal plants. As RedState reported, the president proclaimed that “we’re going to be shutting down these plants all across America” in favor of inefficient, unsustainable wind and solar projects.
Naturally, his statement drew a lot of perplexed looks. Why would Biden, even if he believes it, be so stupid as to shout from the rooftops about crushing jobs right before voters in key battleground states head to the polls?
Sen. Joe Manchin, whose state relies heavily on the coal industry, was none too pleased. He ripped Biden in a statement Saturday morning, calling the president’s comments “outrageous and divorced from reality.”
As I read Manchin’s statement, I can’t find anything wrong in it. The senator is correct that Biden’s positions change “depending on the audience and the politics of the day.” He’s also right that the White House’s anti-energy policies will only bring about more “pain” for Americans.
But sometimes you can be right and still be worthy of mockery, and this is one of those times. Joe Manchin is not new to Washington, DC. He’s personally known and served with Joe Biden for decades. Given that, absolutely nothing Biden said in his remarks should come as a shock. In fact, the president has advertised his desire to shut down coal plants for years.
Flashback to 2019: Joe Biden to Coal Miners: Learn to Code!
Indeed it was. In March of 2016, Harold Stassen, Hillary Clinton bragged if elected, ‘We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.’
Then there was Joe’s old boss telling the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”
Is Manchin sure he’s in the right party?
I HAD A FORTRESS ONCE IN PARADISE: Gerard Van Der Leun’s encomium to his brother Tom, who died in November of 2020:
We hauled the box of dynamite back up the lava flow to the foot of “X.” By the time we got there we were both into a shared dream of killing waves of Heil screaming Nazis in World War 2 as we had seen in a hundred movies. I reached into the box and took out a half stick of sodden TNT and heaved it a good thirty feet at the ghost Nazis until it went splat on a boulder.
Tom said, “Isn’t that a little scary?”
“It’s fine,” I said and added (betraying my limited child’s understanding of the nature and potential of Trinitrotoluene), “It’s all wet. It can’t explode.”
Since I was the eldest Tom just nodded his head and threw his half-stick of dynamite even further than mine until it went splat on the stones.
And so we passed a fine afternoon defending “X” from the Wehrmacht zombies until the evening fell and we went home to supper. We’d been dressed in those Levi jeans you bought two sizes too large and washed separately and Western-style Levi denim jackets. We tossed these war-stained togs into the hamper and dressed for dinner. I don’t remember what I thought but I’m sure I was excited that the brothers now had two secrets that the parents would never know; “X” and TNT.
The next day was a school day and, after breakfast, we walked down the short dirt road to the bus stop on the paved road that, over hills and through forests and orchards, would deposit us at Paradise Elementary School and Mr. Roberts’ classroom.
It must have been a bit before noon when there was a knock on the classroom door. It opened and my father walked into the room accompanied by the Paradise Sheriff sporting hat, badge, gun, and the whole tool kit. My father gestured to me and I was whisked off to the Principle’s office where we were soon joined by my brother Tom, my mother, and a deputy sheriff sporting hat, badge, gun, and the whole tool kit.
I wish I had some memory of what my 9-year-old self thought at that moment but I do not. I ascribe this to the fact that under those circumstances, my child’s mind would be nothing but a vast tsunami of unremitting white noise radiating through an ocean of fear.
It would seem that, upon leaving “X” the evening before, my brother Tom had neglected to empty his pockets of one of his half-stick TNT “grenades” that had been polishing off the Nazi zombies all afternoon. No, it would seem that one-half stick was still in the pocket of his jean jacket the next morning when my mother turned them out for the laundry.
Read the whole thing.
GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: Biden slams Republicans ‘rooting for a recession’ after last jobs report before election.
The White House has downplayed concern of a recession on the horizon despite high inflation, slowing labor force participation, and wage growth year-over-year.
On Friday, Biden said that the “comments by Republican leadership sure seem to indicate they are rooting for a recession.”
“As long as I’m president, I’m not going to accept an argument that the problem is that too many Americans are finding good jobs,” Biden said. The president has attempted to draw a contrast with Republicans as polls indicate that key groups of voters are unhappy with the White House’s handling of the economy.
Yet Biden acknowledged rising prices Friday as the country’s “top economic challenge,” vowing “to do what it takes” to bring these down.
“I know that American families are feeling squeezed,” he said.
So Team Brandon will stop endlessly printing money to reduce inflation? As Milton Friedman has said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”
We technically are in a recession, but Biden and many in the DNC-MSM have been holding off on actually calling it that so that they can wait until there’s a GOP majority to blame. But Biden’s crankery is the mirror image version of what Virginia Postrel dubbed in December of 2008, “Depression Lust, and Depression Porn,” when Obama-worshipping Democratic Party operatives with bylines wanted American to get it good and hard, so that Obama could enter into office as the next FDR conquering the Depression. (I know, I know. But that was their mindset.)
The pandemic lockdowns served a similar function for the American left in 2020, but dialed up to 11. Or as Kurt Schlichter wrote in April of 2020: The Democrats Totally Want A Depression.
Democrats are never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, and this Wuhan Flu is a very good crisis indeed if your goal is leftist hegemony. The Trump economy was booming after the near-decade of the Obama doldrums, and people were getting a taste of prosperity. But a happy, prosperous America is something the Democrat dudes can’t abide. All the Democrats had to sell were recycled cries of “RACISM!” and “RUSSIA!” and their standard-bearer was that sinewy weirdo Grandpa Badfinger, who was promising to drag us all back into the nightmare of globalist failure. The future looked grim, which means it actually looked bright for the rest of us.
So, the Chinese coronavirus was a dream come true, a deus ex pangolin that finally, after an endless series of leaks, impeachments, investigations, and media meltdowns, might be the magic bullet that actually takes Trump down.
Am I saying that the Democrats are exploiting the pandemic for their own cheesy advantage? Well, yeah. Everything they are doing is consistent with that. Everything. No, in the abstract, many of them would probably not prefer that tens of thousands of Americans die (I get enough Twitter death wishes to know, from their own filthy mouths, that some absolutely do want us to die), but their attitude seems to be that if life gives you tens of thousands of dead Americans, make political lemonade.
And right on cue from Time magazine in October of 2020: How Joe Biden Is Positioning Himself as a Modern FDR.
Well yes, in one sense: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
THE LAB LEAK DECEPTION: New video from Reason TV.
THAT’S A BOLD STRATEGY FROM BIDEN GOING INTO THE MIDTERMS — AND WINTER: Paging PA Voters: Biden Brags About Ending Industry Critical for Your State. “We’re gonna be shutting these [coal] plants down all across America, and having wind and solar.”
In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”
And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”
Or to put it another way, as Joe’s old boss told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”