A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A BEE NEEDS A BICYCLE: California Environmentalists: Bees Are Now Fish. New video from Reason TV:
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
July 19, 2022
NEWS YOU CAN USE: More Airlines Are Losing Luggage. AirTags and Tile Trackers Can Help.
GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS: Sir Oswald Mosley, A Story.
After the War, he sought to return to political life, but found little support, including when he stood for Parliament on separate occasions. In his last political race in 1966, to represent a district in London, he received 4.6% of the vote. He was an early supporter of a strong centralized European government. He saw it an opportunity for his corporate state: economic direction by “experts”, concentration of decision-making, a hedge against democracy—much as the European Union has become. He died in 1980.
What to make of all this?
Much has been written of Mosley, a good deal centered on the theme of “lost promise”. It is said that Mosley would have been prime minister if only he had not been impatient in 1931 and resigned from the Labour Government; if only he had waited his turn; if only he had not succumbed to the attractions of fascism. “Mosley created the British Union of Fascists as a vehicle for his economic vision of Britain as a Keynesian economic state”, writes Rubin. “After a period of initial popularity, his movement eventually became a haven for lunatic anti-Semites and fringe members of society. As Mosley became lost within the monster he created, frequent public violence at his group’s rallies made him a national pariah.”
All true to an extent. Yet, the early Mosley of the left and the Mosley of [the British Union of Fascists] have much in common, the core weaknesses in their policies the same. Both believed in government by “experts” and administrators, and replacing the pluralism of the market and entrepreneurial economy with a corporatist directorate. Both held a distrust of democracy, despite their professed populism. These beliefs continue to be are present in globalization debates—though today they are held mainly by the proponents of globalization, rather than its critics.
It’s not all that surprising that “the early Mosley of the left and the Mosley of BUF have much in common.” Mosley himself said in 1968, “I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics.”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: America’s Public Schools Are Breaking. The failings of our government school system were put on full display during COVID as schools shut down and the classroom moved to Zoom.
MAKE FUNEMPLOYMENT GREAT AGAIN! New York Times Magazine Interview Whines Over America’s ‘Rabid’ ‘Obsession’ with Economic Growth.
(Classical reference in headline.)
OLD AND BUSTED: “Let’s Go Brandon!”
The new hotness? “When in Delaware, don’t miss a visit to historic Brandon Falls:” The Internet Trolls Biden By Marking Spot Where He Fell Off Bike On Google Maps.
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S ABILITY TO F*** THINGS UP: Biden Went to Saudi Arabia to Mend Fences With the Nation, Which He Once Vowed to Make “Pariahs.” He Finished By Calling Them Liars.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Shocking Photo Shows Hunter Biden Fully Clothed Not Smoking Crack.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: The Babylon Bee interviews John Cleese (video).
INSANITY WRAP UPDATE: Last month at the PJM Mothership, Steve spotted this item: This Is Not a Sane World, Exhibit #1,000,006.
Wye Hill Kitchen & Brewing — which bills itself as “righteously good chef-driven bar food” — is the restaurant that canceled Moms 4 Liberty’s reservation.
I’m guessing they’re getting some blowback because Wye Hill’s Twitter account has been locked down.
But the worst part is “Katherine 4 Justice” and the smug superiority she feels for her despicable actions.
Wye Hill Twitter’s account is still locked down, but yesterday, North Carolina blogger A.P. Dillion spotted a much better outcome for Moms4Liberty:
GREAT MOMENTS IN PROGRESS:
Shot: Richard Porter, Top Gear/The Grand Tour script editor on shooting the pilot episode for the BBC’s rebooted Top Gear in 2002:
A BBC safety person said it was dangerous to have cars with petrol in the tanks inside a building under hot studio lights. We successfully argued that heat doesn’t normally make cars explode, otherwise an Arizona summer would look like the set of a Michael Bay film. Also, it seemed that the most dangerous thing to do with petrol was to siphon it out of cars and leave it lying around in cans at the back of the building, just near the place where people went to smoke.
—From Porter’s 2015 history of Top Gear, And On That Bombshell.
Chaser: Recent Surge in Car-Fire Recalls Frustrates Drivers:
Sean Nemeth, the owner of a plug-in hybrid Chrysler Pacifica, was perplexed when earlier this year he received a rather surprising recall notice, advising him to park his vehicle outside and away from structures.
The notice informed him that his particular model is at risk of catching fire—even while stationary and turned off—and the cause is still unknown.
“What am I supposed to do with it then?” said Mr. Nemeth, recalling his reaction at the time. He eventually decided to park it across the street from his house in a low-traffic cul-de-sac.
His predicament has become more commonplace in recent years with the expansion of electric-vehicle sales and more car companies confronting incidents of parked cars suddenly bursting into flames, including those involving more-traditional gas-engine models such as the Ford Expedition.
As a precaution, auto makers are issuing “park outside” orders that instruct drivers to park in the open air and away from houses and structures that could be potentially damaged if a fire were to occur. In many cases, the remedy isn’t immediately available, leaving drivers to figure out what to do with the vehicle in the interim—sometimes for months.
At least 31 recall campaigns covering 3.3 million vehicles have been launched with park-outside orders in the past decade, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The majority of those—18 campaigns, or about 60%—occurred within the past two years, NHTSA’s data show.
“It’s unusual to see several ‘park outside’ recalls in a row,” said William Wallace, associate director of safety policy at the nonprofit advocacy organization Consumer Reports. “But if there’s a fire risk, this is exactly the kind of guidance that people should get until a fix is available.”
The rise in these incidents is in part caused by problems that have emerged with some new batteries as the auto industry’s reliance on a still-maturing supply for the technology has grown, according to vehicle-safety advocates.
—The Wall Street Journal, Monday.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Progressive public school teacher in a blue state: Things are as bad as you’ve heard.
He goes on to describe a couple of meetings where equity concerns were described in very blunt terms. For instance:
I once attended another meeting – lots of meetings when you’re a teacher! – where we were working to approve a new weekly schedule for students. When I said I was concerned that it would require leaving some sections of the curriculum untaught, a colleague said that might actually be a good thing, because most of our students are white and their test scores dropping slightly would help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state. Again, to clarify: I don’t mean my colleague had a a more nuanced approach to testing that a dishonest interlocutor could twist to sound like that. I mean my colleague literally spoke those words. (To be fair, one other teacher did speak up and challenge them this time, albeit very politely.)
Now, do those two anecdotes, no matter how explicitly I describe them, sound like something out of James Lindsay’s fever dreams? Yes! Are these things that did, in fact, happen? Also yes!
He concludes that the left has accidentally stumbled into a set of beliefs so crazy that to describe them accurately sounds like something made up, only they aren’t made up. He concludes, “I can’t keep pretending these ridiculous DEI schemes aren’t hurting the children we owe so much to. They are. It’s happening, right now.”
So instead of championing better performance from black students, his goal is to lower “help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state” by lowering the test scores of whites? It’s like the left is “the Culture of Repudiation,” or something.
QUESTION ASKED: What Can’t the Newspapers Put on Page One?
Way back in the 20th century, we learned in journalism classes that a news story assembles the facts in order of what’s most important to the public. But in this century, national newspapers too often assemble their information to pack a liberal wallop, and bury the information that, well – doesn’t serve the public, by their most compassionate “social justice” lights.
The July 14 USA Today provided a glaring example with all three of its front-page stories. At the top left was this headline: “Arrest made in rape of Ohio girl: 10-year-old got abortion in Indiana after Roe reversal.”
The story of a young girl crossing state lines for an abortion “quickly went viral,” the paper said. Her travel to Indiana “led to international attention and became a flashpoint in the national furor over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Reporters Bethany Bruner, Monroe Trombly, and Tony Cook added “Gerson Fuentes, 27, whose last address was an apartment in Columbus,” was arrested “after police said he confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions.” But nowhere in this article was there any focus on his immigration status.
A source at Immigration and Customs Enforcement told Fox News that “Fuentes is a Guatemalan national in the country illegally and that ICE has placed a detainer” on him. In the Columbus Dispatch, these same three reporters noted Fuentes “is believed to be undocumented,” but McPaper left that snippet on the proverbial cutting-room floor.
That doesn’t need “international attention.”
Read the whole thing.
Perhaps too many in the public now think of the media as as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, to coin an Insta-phrase.
Evergreen:
(Updated and bumped.)
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Despite the odds and the obstacles, we push to move forward, that we are guided by what we see, that can be, unburdened by what has been.”
—Kamala Harris Quotes As Motivational Posters, Part 2, The Federalist, Wednesday.
JIM TREACHER: Libs Seethe After Good Guy with Gun Stops Bad Guy with Gun. It never happens, and also it’s bad that it happened. “It would be better if nobody committed murder at all, of course. But when someone stops a murderer before he can kill again, here’s the proper response: Thank you.”
HUNTER BIDEN AND THE CORRUPTION OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA:
Big Tech has played a role in trying to dampen down public interest in the latest Hunter leaks. Initially, anyone who searched on Google for terms such as ‘Hunter Biden crack’ would be greeted with a message saying: ‘It looks like these results are changing quickly.’ They were then invited to search for further information in ‘a few hours or days’. ‘Come back later’, Google’s automated response instructed. Apparently this was because the info about Hunter could not be verified, yet I don’t recall receiving similar messages when I Googled ‘Trump Russian prostitutes’ a few years back. This isn’t the first time Big Tech has helped to throw water on the flames of a Biden controversy. When the New York Post first reported on Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’ in late 2020, shortly before the presidential election, there was ‘aggressive moderation’ on social media. It wasn’t ‘moderation’, of course – it was classic political censorship, with the oligarchs of Silicon Valley preventing Facebook and Twitter users from sharing the New York Post’s story on the basis that it was possibly false information. These unaccountable billionaires even prevented the Post, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the US, from accessing its own Twitter account. It was a grotesque assault on press freedom designed to protect the Democratic elites from scrutiny. A true low point in woke corporatists’ disdain for free public discussion and for democracy itself.
As for the media, most of them turned a blind eye to the original laptop story. ‘We don’t waste our time on stories that are not really stories’, said NPR. Even now, following further revelations of questionable behaviour in the Biden camp, the media are mild at best, silent at worst, in their response. Rumours about Trump were enough to send the liberal media into a frenzy; truths about the Bidens cause them to feel nothing at all. This is how politicised mainstream journalism has become. It now clearly conceives of itself, not as the pursuer of truth, wherever that might lead, but as the defender of the professional managerial elites against the questions and concerns of the populist throng. This is why the Hunter Biden story matters. Not because one sad, unsettled man took some drugs and hired some prostitutes – we can forgive that – but because the media establishment has made it clear to the world that it is more interested in protecting power from truth than speaking truth to power.
Hence this well-deserved Gallup poll: Media Confidence Ratings at Record Lows.
TWO NY GOVS IN ONE!
—The New York Governor’s office, November 4th, 2021.
● Chaser: Hochul flies on NY’s dime as everyone struggles to fill gas tanks.
While New Yorkers are reeling from sky-high gas prices that force them to choose between driving to work, a trip to the store or a family vacation, Gov. Kathy Hochul has been hitching rides on their dime and avoiding traffic altogether by flying to most places.
The governor hit the friendly skies, either on a state helicopter or airplane, a whopping 140 times in the first seven months since she took office last August — with costs to taxpayers estimated at upwards of $170,000, records reviewed by The Post show.
“The governor’s personal frequent-flyer program is immune to things like rising gas prices, cancellations, delays and lost luggage,” Assembly Minority Leader William Barclay (R-Oswego) told The Post.
—The New York Post, today.
I’d be more willing to believe global warming is a crisis, when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.
NERVOUS MEDIA WARNS THE WOKESTERS: They’ve seen the polls and know disaster is coming.
When [Khiara Bridges, a law professor at UC Berkeley] was then pressed by Senator Josh Hawley to clarify whether she meant women, she retreated to one of the woke’s favorite lines of defense by declaring that Hawley’s line of questioning was “transphobic” and “it opens up trans people to violence.”
On Twitter, the progressive left promptly called it a win for Bridges. Yet then something unexpected happened. Several more moderate journalists sounded the warning that the hearing did not go the way their woke colleagues thought it did.
Megan McArdle at the Washington Post was the first to sound the alarm, writing, “Unlike a Rorschach test, however, this one has a right answer, and the progressives have it wrong. Moreover, the fact that they can’t see just how badly this exchange went for their side shows what a big mistake it was to let academia and media institutions turn into left-wing monocultures.” This went over on Twitter about as well as expected.
CNN host and analyst Fareed Zakaria then warned at the Washington Post that the Democratic Party was heading for ruin by obsessing over things like pronouns. Zakaria said that instead, “Democrats need to become the party of building things.” He’s right, but in the insular world of Twitter, it didn’t matter. The Post changed the headline of the piece, caving to an outraged hoard of wokesters, which in turn, kind of proved Zakaria’s point.
Democrats are facing a bloodbath in the November midterms, yet these warnings seem to be falling on deaf ears. That’s true even with polling staring them in the face. Per Axios, more Hispanics and minorities are drifting away from the Democratic Party, while more educated white and coastal elites are embracing the new campus hegemony. 2022 and 2024 could thus become elections at least in part about basic human biology.
Read the whole thing (and don’t get cocky).