Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
August 7, 2022
RIP: Magnum P.I. co-star Roger E. Mosley dead at 83. He portrayed helicopter pilot ‘T.C.’ alongside Tom Selleck.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Jemele Hill Just Can’t Stop Playing The Victim.
Jemele Hill continues to do what Jemele Hill does: blame her failures on everyone else. It’s usually racism, but occasionally it’s misogyny and this week it’s her political leanings.
In a puff piece written by USA Today, Hill claims she failed at ESPN because of the company’s “conservative culture” that didn’t allow her to be herself. The quotes came from an appearance Hill made on former ESPN’er Kenny Mayne’s podcast, “Hey Mayne.”
A “conservative culture” is not why Hill failed at ESPN, as the fisking by a conservative-adjacent former ESPN contributor that follows will demonstrate.
UPDATE: Elsewhere at the former sports-themed cable network: Jalen Rose Thinks ‘Mt. Rushmore’ Is An Offensive Term. “As we learned from the clip, Rose has a history of avoiding using names referring to Indian culture in any way (Redskins, Indians). But this might be his most ridiculous attempt to not harm people’s feelings.”
(Updated and bumped.)
The problems at the border have been created deliberately by the Biden administration. They are not being “offloaded” by border states, which have no special obligation to bear them.
…is beginning to hit home in Washington, as hundreds of undocumented migrants arriving on the governors’ free bus rides each week increasingly tax the capital’s ability to provide emergency food and housing.
Yes, and what do you think the Biden administration’s pro-illegal immigration policies have done to tax the resources of border states like Texas and Arizona?
The Times’s pained reaction to having to share a tiny percentage of the border states’ pain–New York has gotten a handful of bussed illegals, like Washington, D.C.–validates the wisdom of Governors Abbott and Ducey’s policies. If blue voters experience a small taste of the evils caused by illegal immigration, maybe we can finally muster the collective will to enforce our country’s immigration laws.
I’m not sure why the Times is so concerned, when the Northeast Corridor offers a surprising number of housing possibilities for illegal immigrants:
UPDATE: Don Surber: NPR, that was the plan. “America has become a foolish nation. NPR is one reason. It failed to contact any of the Republican governors to find out what their plan was. Instead, NPR just flat-out said they had none. Oh, they had a plan: make those who support the invasion deal with its consequences.”
(Updated and bumped.)
LIZ CHENEY PREPARING FOR INEVITABLE CNN OR MSNBC GIG: Liz Cheney “would find it very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis in 2024.
ROGER KIMBALL: The Grasshopper Elite and Its Enemy. Unfortunately, those loud and troublesome pests, though few, control almost all the levers of political and state police power:
I do not remember when I first noticed these little injections of partisan squid ink, but by now they are ubiquitous in the anti-Trump fraternity. Just one example: in a column Saturday about Donald Trump’s weekend rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the writer claimed Trump “spent much of his speech focusing on his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election” (emphasis added). To the writing teachers out there, let me ask: Would that sentence have been better—less obviously partisan, hence more persuasive—had the word “baseless” been omitted?
Or how about this bit from later on in the piece: “Trump spent much of his speech touting the accomplishments of his term as president . . . and promoting the lie that the 2020 election was ‘rigged and stolen’” (again, emphasis added). What do you think?
Or how about this: Trump was in Wisconsin “ostensibly” to stump for Tim Michels, the person Trump backs for Tuesday’s GOP gubernatorial primary, but he devoted much of his speech “focusing on his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.”
This last sentence offers connoisseurs of cant not one but two morsels to chew on. The first is the deployment of the word “ostensibly,” meaning “apparently so” but “not really.” You might have thought Trump came to Waukesha to help his favored gubernatorial candidate. Really, though, he came to dispense “baseless” claims that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
I do not know whether this spreading linguistic tic is the result of a directive from on high—from editors demanding that their troops insert such adjectival props—or whether it is a more organic phenomenon, a matter of the zeitgeist pushing the adoption of these expressive ornaments and curlicues. It’s a little of both, I suspect. I don’t doubt the influence of management—and the diktats, I’d wager, come from much higher up the political food chain than any publisher’s office. But I suspect that in many, maybe most, cases, it is simply the expression of what the late Joe Sobran identified as “the Hive.” “Liberals laugh at conspiracy theories that assume that because there is a pattern there must be some central control,” Sobran observed; “but the fact that there is no central control doesn’t mean that there is no pattern.”
Read the whole thing.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Report: Naked 80-Year-Old Protests a Biological Male in Her YMCA Shower, Gets Banned for Bigotry.
August 6, 2022
DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Ketchup, mayo ice cream flavors being offered to London consumers.
The Ice Cream Project is made up of a number of non-traditional ice cream flavors. These flavors include several condiments or other food items typically found in a person’s pantry, such as ketchup, mayonnaise and baked beans.
“So this is The Ice Cream Project created by Anya Hindmarsh, so this is all about elevating the everyday flavors,” Hannah Wearne, a retail associate at an ice cream provider, said.
“So we’ve taken British store cupboard classics and turned them into ice creams, so we have flavors like Heinz Baked Beans, mayo, ketchup, we also have Quaker Rolled Oats, PG Tips, all of the fun things that you usually get in your store cupboard,” she continued.
Customers were excited about trying the unusual ice cream flavors.
What, no crunchy frog? No anthrax ripple? In any case, the next edition of Peter Hitchens’ The Abolition of Britain continues to write itself.
TODAY IS THE 77TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DROPPING OF THE BOMB ON HIROSHIMA: The Day the Pilot Who Led the Attack on Pearl Harbor Met the Pilot of the Enola Gay; and 19 Other Wise Voices About Hiroshima.
Related: Bill Whittle: Jon Stewart, War Criminals & The True Story of the Atomic Bombs (Video).
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Here’s what you do if the ATF shows up at your door asking to see your guns.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: New York Health Department says hundreds of people may be infected with polio virus.
HOW IT STARTED:
JIM ACOSTA: What you’re proposing, or what the President is proposing, does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It doesn’t say anything about speaking English or being able to be a computer programmer. Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you’re telling them you have to speak English? Can’t people learn how to speak English when they get here?
STEPHEN MILLER: Well, first of all, right now it’s a requirement that to be naturalized you have to speak English. So the notion that speaking English wouldn’t be a part of immigration would actually be very ahistorical. Secondly, I don’t want to get into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to was added later. It’s not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty. But more fundamentally —
ACOSTA: So, you’re saying that that does not represent what the country has always thought of as immigration coming into this country?
—“The White House’s Stephen Miller Destroys CNN: ‘Cosmopolitan,’ ‘Outrageous,’ ‘Ignorant,’ ‘Biased,’” Scott Whitlock, NewsBusters, August 2nd, 2017.
How it’s going:
Related: NPR reports GOP governors had ‘no plan for what came next’ after busing migrants to DC.
FASTER, PLEASE: This Is What Your United Flight Could Look Like in the Near Future. Production for Boom Supersonic’s Overture passenger jet is set to begin in 2024.
If the only damage done by the Steele dossier had been to inject disinformation into American political discourse, there would only be a medium-level scandal. But Comey and the FBI took the dossier seriously, despite never verifying it. Comey himself, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, personally lobbied — over the objections of CIA analysts — to include allegations from the dossier in a US intelligence assessment of Russia’s influence over the 2016 election. And when Comey briefed congressional leaders and the Justice Department in March 2017, we know from recently declassified FBI talking points, it was claimed that some of the dossier had already been corroborated and that it derived from a Russia-based source, when in fact Danchenko was a US resident at the time. By that point, the FBI had already conducted one interview with Danchenko — and he had begun to walk back some of the dossier’s claims. In other words, Comey presented the Steele dossier as credible information to Congress, just as lower-level agents were learning it was not to be trusted.
Savor the irony. Clinton has claimed that Comey’s October email surprise cast a cloud over her campaign that cost her the election. Meanwhile, Clinton’s agents fed the bureau enough thinly sourced dirt on Trump and Russia to cast doubts over his whole presidency. Comey only let the fog linger over Clinton until November 6, when he announced that a review of Weiner’s laptop revealed nothing incriminating. The miasma over Trump’s presidency lingered for two and a half years, until Mueller announced he had found no evidence of conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. To this day, most Democrats still don’t believe that and ignore how that conspiracy theory was first whispered by their party’s own lawyers and operatives.
Read the whole thing.
TRY NOT TO THINK OF A RECESSION — Biden administration denials are bound to deliver the opposite of the intended message.
Is the U.S. in a recession? New York Mayor Eric Adams seems to think so. Speaking last week to the nonprofit group Project Hospitality, he said: “We’re in a financial crisis like you can never imagine. . . . Wall Street is collapsing. We’re in a recession.” But Mr. Adams’s fellow Democrats in the Biden administration have been furiously denying there’s a recession. When a reporter asked him if they’re wrong, he backtracked: “The president will make a determination on the official title of where we are; that’s the president, and I follow the lead of the president.”
The debate has brought a new notoriety to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, the organization that officially designates recessions. The NBER’s definition is “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months” and taking into account gross domestic product, real income, employment, industrial production and consumer spending. That’s a mouthful, and it can’t compete with the simplicity of “two quarters of declining GDP.” In any case, NBER won’t make a determination for months.
Adding to the danger is that experts think that the expectation of inflation can cause inflation. Does the same psychology apply to recession?
The administration’s communication challenge is twofold. First is the old “don’t think of an elephant” problem. What are you thinking of? Second, saying “This isn’t a recession” only convinces people we’re in a recession. The word “recession” makes a much stronger impression on the listener than the word “isn’t.” This is one of the easiest mistakes to avoid, but it pops up daily.
As always life imitates Monty Python: In “the Amazing Mystico and Janet” sketch, the magician puts up a block of apartments instantly — but the buildings only stay vertical if their tenants believe in them.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: ‘Worst of all options’: Hotel owners blast L.A. City Council proposal to house homeless alongside guests.
JEFF DUNETZ: George Soros Is Aiding Illegals Sneaking Into The US.
These illegal aliens are financially supported here both by U.S. taxpayers and a group of pro-“open borders” non-profits backed by political activists like Hungarian billionaire George Soros and blue chip American companies like American Express, according to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service filings by the Austin Journal.
Soros and American Express are both major donors to the American Immigration Council (AIC), the National Immigration Law Center and Immigration Equality, the group’s 990 filings show.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has partnered with the three groups to help illegal aliens obtain visas to stay in the United States by claiming they have been victims of a crime, which entitles some aliens to special treatment by immigration officials.
DAVID SOLWAY: ‘You’ll Own Nothing’—and Like It. Or Will You?
The much-circulated slogan “You will own nothing, and you will be happy” was coined by Danish MP Ida Auken in 2016 and included in a 2016 essaypublished by the purveyors of the so-called “Great Reset” at the World Economic Forum (WEF) headquartered in Davos, Switzerland. It is, of course, only half true. Nonetheless, the phrase is certainly apt and should be taken seriously. For once the Great Reset has been put in place, we will indeed own nothing except our compelled compliance.
The world’s farmers and cattle raisers, deprived of their livelihoods on the pretext of reducing nitrogenic fertilizers and livestock-produced methane, will own next to nothing. Meat and grain will become increasingly rare and we will be dining on cricket goulash and mealworm mash, an entomorphagic feast. We will be driving distance-limited electric vehicles rented from the local Commissariat and digitally monitored by Cyber Central—assuming we will still be allowed to drive. Overseen by a cadre of empowered financial managers who can “freeze” our assets at any time, we will possess bank accounts and credit ratings, but they will not be really ours.
Read the whole thing.