Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
May 26, 2022
PARKLAND PART II: Texas Police Lieutenant Says Cops Were Reluctant to Engage Gunman Because ‘They Could’ve Been Shot.’
● Uvalde mom: The feds cuffed me when I begged cops to go in and confront the shooter.
● Texas Police Spox on Live TV Confirmed Cops Went In for Their Own Kids During Uvalde Shooting.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE:
—The New York Post, Monday.
● Chaser: White House Eyes Restarting Idle Refineries.
The Biden administration is reaching out to the oil industry to inquire about restarting shuttered refineries, as the White House scrambles to address record-high gasoline prices that are setting off political alarm bells ahead of the midterm elections.
Members of the National Economic Council and other officials have inquired within the industry about factors that led some refining operations to be curtailed and if plans are underway to restart capacity, a person familiar with the matter said. The person, who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record, added no direct ask to restart operations was made.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The administration’s efforts come as the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline stood at a record $4.60 May 25, just as the summer driving season is set to begin. In California, prices are more than $6 a gallon, according to AAA.
—Bloomberg News, today.
As Glenn asks in his latest New York Post column, “So does the Biden administration actually want to see middle-class Americans reduced to poverty and privation? Or is it just too stupid to foresee the obvious consequences of its own action? At this point, I’m not even sure which is worse. But with the midterms coming, no amount of talk about gun control, abortion or other Democratic hot-button issues is going to distract Americans from what’s happening to their pocketbooks. Good.”
DON’T CONFLATE MASS SHOOTINGS WITH SCHOOL SHOOTINGS: There Have Been 13 Mass School Shootings Since 1966, Not 27 This Year.
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke to the white courtesy phone, please!
FASTER, PLEASE: Chesa Boudin’s soft-on-crime policies will doom him. Although, to paraphrase Whoopi Goldberg, ultimately, it’s not really doom-doom, when Boudin will likely fail upwards: “Boudin’s public glow will not dim with a June 7 defeat. Powerful associates in the US and abroad will help him land on his feet. A high-visibility post in the Department of Justice or State Department could lie ahead. Should San Francisco voters dump Boudin — which now seems almost certain — his political visibility and influence will persist.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Behold: The comprehensive list of all The Babylon Bee prophecies that have come true (so far!).
In accordance with the prophecy.
WE ARE ALL NATIONAL SOCIALISTS NOW: WaPo senior editor reminds us that the AR-15 was ‘invented for Nazi infantrymen’ in the late 1950s.
More details here: The Washington Post Invents A New History For AR-15s.
A 2018 Washington Post article about AR-15s is recirculating today after senior editor Marc Fisher tweeted it out in the wake of the Texas elementary school shooting. In it, he contends that the AR-15 was “[i]nvented for Nazi infantrymen” and “is a descendant of the machine guns Nazi infantrymen used against Soviet forces in World War II.” The piece is brimming with the customary fearmongering, but as I’d written a chapter about the AR-15/M-16 in my cultural history of guns, the claim piqued my curiosity.
In researching the origins of the Armalite company, reading every book and contemporaneous information I could get my hands on, never once do I recall running across any mention of the AR’s inventor Gene Stoner being influenced by “Nazi” firearms, much less basing his famous rifle on a German assault rifle. Armalite, in fact, was the first company to successfully hybridize American technological advances of World War II airplane design, plastics, and alloys, with small arms. So, I’d love to find out which Wikipedia page Fisher pulled this information from.
Comrade Ogilvy used one, but I forget if it was in the Eastasia or Eurasia campaign?
(Classical allusion in headline.)
FINALLY, SAN FRANCISCO BEGINS TO HEAL: San Francisco Unified School District drops the word ‘chief’ from job titles to avoid connotation with Native Americans.
Update Newspeak Dictionaries accordingly, comrades.
OKAY, GROOMERS: It’s Official: Barbie Goes Transgender.
A Hollywood celebrity now has their own Barbie.
On NBC’s TODAY show Wednesday, the morning staple welcomed Laverne Cox, transgender star of Orange is the New Black.
Cox was all dolled up, which might not have been coincidental. Today.com delivers the news:
To celebrate her 50th birthday on May 29, the Emmy-award winning actor and LGBTQ+ activist is honored with a Tribute Collection Barbie. Her doll is dressed in a red ball gown, a silver bodysuit and comes with accessories like high-heeled boots and silver earrings.
TODAY Parents got in on the action:
“It’s been a dream for years to work with Barbie to create my own doll,” Cox said in a statement shared with TODAY Parents. “I can’t wait for fans to find my doll on shelves and have the opportunity to add a Barbie doll modeled after a transgender person to their collection.”
In accordance with the prophecy: Mattel Unveils New Pregnant Ken Doll.
May 25, 2022
DAVOS MORPHED INTO A SPECTRE LAIR SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED:
World Economic Forum shill, Yuval Noah Hariri:
"Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept to legitimize total biometric surveillance. We need to not just monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin”https://t.co/qoPKVGxR7d
— أبو عمّار (@MaajidNawaz) May 21, 2022
JOHN NOLTE: ‘Ricky Gervais: SuperNature’ Review: Gloriously Inappropriate, Perfectly Wrong.
Old people, lesbians, Woketards, transsexuals, the Holocaust, Christians, pro-lifers, Muslims, fat people, female comedians, the Chinese, dwarfs, pedophiles, Eskimos, AIDS… Pow! Crash! Wham! Boom!
The story he tells about a straight man transitioning to a woman, becoming a lesbian, somehow finding a “pretty lesbian,” and realizing the mistake he’s made after strapping on a strap-on, literally, and I mean literally, had me rolling on the floor.
And every time you think he’s going to virtue signal or become a little Chappelle-esque in his defensiveness, he goes right for the throat of the joke:
In real life, of course I support trans rights. I support all human rights, and trans rights are human rights. Live your best life. Use your preferred pronouns. Be the gender that you feel that you are. But meet me halfway, ladies. Lose the cock. That’s all I’m saying.
[…]
I mean, [Boris Johnson] started off by saying women in burkas look like postboxes. Now, it’s not up to Boris Johnson what a Muslim woman wears on her face. It’s up to her husband.
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
THIS WILL END WELL: Colin Kaepernick getting workout with Raiders.
GOV. GREG ABBOTT SHOULD BE THANKING “BETO” O’ROURKE FOR HIS UVALDE STUNT:
And that’s all she wrote for Beto O’Rourke, who is about as Hispanic as I am Chinese. The Irishman did not have much of a chance of defeating Abbott in the first place; this little stunt just sealed his fate. It would be one thing if he held his own press conference or shot a video in which he criticized Abbott and other Republican officials for not doing enough to stop these types of atrocities. Whether one agreed with his arguments is irrelevant – it’s how these types of issues should be handled.
But it’s quite another to disrupt a press conference in which Abbott is explaining to the public how the incident went down as the state is in mourning. The murdered children and two teachers are not even in the ground yet and O’Rourke is using their deaths to score cheap political points. Sure, this stuff plays well for fellow leftists who have no problem exploiting deaths to push for gun control, but for the average Texan, this ain’t it.
For starters, his stunt was probably the most indecent thing he could have done at that moment. He took a tragedy and made it about himself and his campaign. Secondly, he’s doing it to push for further restrictions on firearms, which isn’t exactly a popular sentiment in Texas.
Earlier this year, as the Reload noted, “Beto Backtracks on AR-15 Confiscation: ‘I’m not Interested in Taking Anything From Anyone.’”
Based on his stunt today, apparently O’Rourke has flip-flopped yet again on that previous flip-flop.
Flashback: Revealed: Beto O’Rourke Wrote Fantasy About Murdering Children, Report Says. “In a profile that also documented O’Rourke’s involvement in a hacker group, Reuters reported: ‘it’s unclear whether the United States is ready for a presidential contender who, as a teenager, stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem, wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street, and mused about a society without money.’”
Related: The politicians are supposed to make the Kinsley gaffes — not the press!
Here’s a screen shot of the original tweet:
UPDATE: America Mourns The Slaughter Of Twenty-One Innocents While The Inconsiderate Make It Political.
OUT ON A LIMB: Goldman Sachs pegs recession risk at 35%.
ROGER KIMBALL: Woke is truly going broke.
The Chinese have come up with one of the most penetrating epithets to describe this sickness. In 2010, some clever Chinese coined the term baizuo, which literally means “white left” but really means “sanctimonious liberal dysphoria.” It’s a menu-driven pathology in which, in the words of the political scientist Chenchen Zhang, “hypocritical humanitarians… advocate political correctness just to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority.” A rancid pity is the motor of this enterprise — pity, and an unearned sense of forever unexpiated guilt. “Culpability suits us,” the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner observes, “it provides an alibi for our abdication.”
It’s not all bad news, however. What Elon Musk memorably described as the “mind virus” of wokeness is undeniably a potent and widespread pathogen. But reality counts for something, both the psychological reality that requires periodic respite from fanaticism and the economic reality that, increasingly, collides with the somnolent wokeness of nonstop racial obsessiveness.
The cultural landscape is full of husks — the dead and empty husks of hectoring racialism that, just yesterday, embarrassed the self-appointed commissars of culture but now embarrasses only itself. The streaming service Netflix is one of the latest casualties of the get-woke-go-broke dialectic. Serving up a smorgasbord of politically correct entertainments like Dear White People, it has seen its viewers, and its stock price, disappear.
On the other hand, with its back against the wall, Netflix may have grown a pair: Ricky Gervais Crosses the Line?
First it was Bill Maher, as noted here, thumbing his nose at the wokerati on the issue of transgenderism in his most recent HBO show.
Now it is Ricky Gervais’s turn. He has a new comedy special coming out soon on Netflix, and move over Dave Chappelle! Take in this one-minute excerpt (STRONG language warning, but this has news value):
Notice that the audience loves it. Interesting that the show is called “SuperNature.” Probably just a coincidence.
Recently Netflix sent out a memo to employees whose subtext was clear: if you’re a wokester, you should consider finding employment elsewhere. I wonder if this was sent out anticipating an internal backlash from Netflix employees, as happened with the last Chappelle special. I wonder if there will be a Netflix employee protest outside company HQ?
Keep in mind that Gervais is in every other way a leftist. So when you’re losing Gervais, Maher, etc. . .
So what happens next with Netflix and the streaming industry in general? As Rob Long writes: It’s Going to Be a Messy Year.
ROGER SIMON: To Change the Left, Be Their Psychiatrist.
If you think of these people as victims of that mass formation psychosis, you will realize they aren’t in their right minds. The word psychosis is there for a reason.
I hate to say this, because, as noted above, family and friends are often involved, but think of these people, bluntly, as mental patients.
If you wish to have any success at all in changing them, treat them that way. I know it sounds mean, but there really is no other way.
That means no arguments. Instead, ask them questions kindly about their views. Let them explain them as long as they wish. Don’t interrupt. Let them finish and then ask another question—gently. Don’t go too far. You are the psychoanalyst, ironically, in an era when the field of psychiatry has been almost entirely taken over by the left.
Nevertheless, you can do it. You don’t need a credential. As with many things, that’s meaningless. Be patient. Keep asking those questions. Never argue, just ask. (Do this subtly, of course, so you won’t seem condescending. And resist the temptation—it will be there for sure—to prove you are right.) Let them lead themselves to whatever conclusions they make.
Ultimately, those conclusions may surprise you. After all, the reality of life is largely conservative. It’s mostly common sense. Beneath their years of indoctrination, these are still human beings, dealing with the same daily issues we all do. They have to take out the garbage and drive their kids to school. When they are more comfortable with you, change will … very slowly … begin. Don’t rush!
In some cases, they may even be grateful to you because most liberals and progressives, in my estimation, are depressed. They will welcome the opportunity to talk without judgment.
And remember, people change without us anyway. Joe Biden came into office one of the most popular of all presidents and is already, in about a year and a half, close to the least popular of all time and headed downwards. Few of us—not even pundits (ahem!)—had anything to do with that.
He did it all by himself because, whatever his mental level, he has no common sense.
So gently and kindly ask those questions. It will seem slow but things will move faster because of them. Do it.
As has been said, “You can’t get there by trying, but you won’t get there if you don’t try.”
(No, don’t ask me to explain that. It’s a Zen koan!)
Related: My Biden-Voting Friend Had ‘No Idea’ Things Could Get This Bad. Buckle Up, Buddy, We’re Just Getting Started. “‘How can the most experienced politician in Washington f*** up this badly?’ he asked. That’s when I guffawed. ‘This isn’t a mistake,’ I told him. ‘This is intentional.’”
May 24, 2022
BUT DOES BIDEN ACTUALLY WANT THIS CRISIS SOLVED? Rand Paul Introduces Bill That Would (Actually) Help End the Baby Formula Shortage. “Don’t hold your breath waiting on President Biden or congressional Democrats to get on board with this common-sense legislation, though. For too many of them, it seems like simply allowing the market to work is anathema to their very DNA.”
THE PJM MOTHERSHIP HAS LIVE ELECTION RESULTS: Primaries in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Minnesota.