EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: My Baby Needs Formula, And I’m Getting Scared She Won’t Have It.

According to analysis from Datasembly, 40 percent of top-selling baby formula products were out of stock at retailers across the United States as of April 24. That’s up from 11 percent in November of 2021. Six states — Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota — hit shortages of more than 50 percent. Why is this happening?

Aside from one manufacturing plant being shut downsince mid-February, the only other answer seems to be infamous supply chain issues. The Biden administration and other officials have been largely silent about the formula shortage. Finally, on Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki addressed the issue, claiming it is a “priority for the FDA.”

But she did not explain why it is happening, why producing enough formula to feed the nation’s babies isn’t a top priority, or provide any sort of timeline for when parents can expect shelves to be fully restocked with their infants’ sustenance. The only thing she did do is possibly scare moms and dads further by saying, “I don’t believe there’s a national stockpile of baby formula.”

Gee, you’d think a devoted family man like Pete Buttigieg would be laser-focused on the supply chain aspect of the shortage.

Related: Lengthy Twitter thread from Helena Bottemiller Evich of the Politico on “the infant formula shortage situation, which feels like a slow-moving train wreck. First, retail stock has been rocky for months. It was already bad over the holidays, then a big recall + plant shutdown in Feb. made it worse… ‘If this doesn’t get fixed soon, I don’t know how my son will survive,’ said Phoebe Carter, whose 5-year old son John — a nature-lover and ‘paleontologist in training’ — has a severe form of Eosinophilic Esophagitis, a rare digestive and immune system disease. ‘If, God forbid, a family member of President Joe Biden or Jeff Bezos or someone influential had one of these diseases, this crisis wouldn’t have made it to Day Two,’ Carter said.”

Finally, the New York Times spots Republicans seizing(!) on the issue: A Baby Formula Shortage Leaves Desperate Parents Searching for Food.

Republicans have seized on the widening anxiety among parents to blame President Biden, arguing that the administration has not done enough to ramp up production. On Tuesday, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, asserting that federal officials have been too slow to respond.

The F.D.A., which is leading the federal response, said officials were working with Abbott Nutrition, the company involved in the recall, to restart production at its plant in Sturgis, Mich. The agency said it had been meeting regularly with various infant formula manufacturers to increase production capacity and urging retailers to consider placing sales limits on infant formula products.

As Jim Treacher likes to say:

UPDATE: Biden’s Incoming Press Secretary Laughs When Asked Who is Handling Baby Formula Crisis.

MORE: How the Federal Government is Making the Baby Formula Shortage Way Worse. “Free trade isn’t just good for consumers and a boon for economic growth. Having free trade leads to diversified supply lines, which breed resilience. Meanwhile, relying on just crony, protected domestic producers or one single foreign supplier breeds a dangerous reliance. ‘America’s demand for baby formula has outpaced domestic supply. It’s exactly the type of situation where imports would help alleviate the domestic supply crunch and make American markets more resilient,’ Reason’s Eric Boehm explained. ‘Unfortunately, American trade policy is doing exactly the opposite right now.’”

(Updated and bumped.)

ZE’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Democrats’ National Abortion Bill Replaces Word ‘Woman’ With ‘Person.’

Democrats’ latest abortion bill does not include the words “woman,” “women,” or “female.” Instead, the bill uses the word “person” to refer to those who bear and give birth to children.

Unlike during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings in March, there seemed to be a surfeit of biologists last week. Why have they all suddenly gone into hiding once again?

UNEXPECTEDLY: Senate Democrats Fail to Advance Sweeping Abortion Bill.

The procedural vote to invoke cloture and advance the Women’s Health Protection Act failed in a 49-to-51 vote. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer chose to hold the vote despite the near certainty that Democrats would fail to meet the 60-vote threshold needed to break a Republican filibuster and advance the measure.

The largely symbolic vote came after a leaked majority draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revealed that the Supreme Court could be poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, returning the question of abortion to the states.

“A vote on this legislation is not an abstract exercise. This is as urgent and real as it gets. We’ll vote to protect a women’s right to choose,” Schumer said last week, according to The Hill.

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) similarly told NPR on Tuesday that it’s “really important to have this vote to show where everyone stands.”

And now we know: “The most important thing about this vote is that we’ve got 49 Democrats on record supporting abortion up until birth. Remember that this November,” Kevin Downey, Jr. writes at the PJM mothership. The exception is Joe Manchin, who “came out against the measure ahead of the vote on Tuesday, saying the Women’s Health Protection Act is ‘not Roe v. Wade codification, it’s an expansion’ of abortion.”

JEFFREY CARTER: Unexpectedly — Expect The Financial Press to Protect Biden Like They Did Obama.

Today, the market is trading lower but not significantly lower……yet. The Wall Street Journal is spinning the number. “Inflation Edged Down…” is their headline. The rest of it is, “To 8.3%”.

Are you getting an 8.5% raise this year to cover it? Walk in, ask your boss for an 8.5% raise today and see what they say. You know, to beat inflation. Better yet, raise prices by that to your customers and see what they do.

This is the first decline in 8 months. Inflation was running at 8.5%. Believe me, the average American outside the Beltway isn’t going to be crowing about seeing inflation temper by .2%. It’s like moving a gallon of gas down from $5.50/gallon to $5.48/gallon. Just so you know, inflation is still at a 40-year high.

* * * * * * * *

Inflation isn’t about Russia, Ukraine, or anything like that. It’s about the government spending period and the lack of supply. Biden totally destroyed the supply curve in the oil industry. Yes, he did that.

Meanwhile, Americans are getting poorer by the day.

Expect the financial press to do all they can to protect Biden by spinning numbers and the news. They always did it for the Golden Boy Obama. Virtually every miss of a financial growth number was led by the word “Unexpectedly” followed by a spun description of it.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their obfuscations “unexpectedly” all make perfect sense.

Evergreen:

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: The Taylor Lorenz ‘Lizard Person’ Scandal, Explained.

Now it all makes sense!

WE DON’T NEED NO FLAMING SPARKY CARS: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

(Classical reference in headline.)

GOODER, AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California targets loud exhausts in newest environment regulation.

The state legislature has approved a five-year pilot program targeting loud exhausts from vehicles with new tools to assist police in ferreting out offenders, Autoweek reported.

“Illegally loud exhaust harms our bodies, can be deafening if you are walking or cycling on the street, and wakes people up from their sleep,” read the Assembly bill analysis. “While vehicle exhaust noise is limited to 95 decibels, there are no universal means to monitor and enforce this law.”

Californians love their car culture, and the sunny, open road is a magnet for drivers of both cars and motorcycles to enhance the sounds of their engines.

“Vehicle owners can easily buy and install new exhaust systems or make other modifications to their vehicle that will change the level of sound,” the analysis read.

When we lived in California, one neighbor’s kids had an early 1990s Mercedes sedan whose trunk bed was lined with two massive subwoofers, which could level whole city blocks with a single bass note. Will the California nanny state go after those, next?

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Move Over, Iron Man — Real Jet-Suited Heroes May Soon Respond to Our Emergencies.

Compliments of inventor Richard Browning, the 3-D printed Gravity Industries Jet Suit consists of two small turbines fastened to each arm as well as a larger one on the user’s back. In a test run captured on video, the developer climbed more than 2,000 feet over a 1.2-mile distance in around three minutes and forty seconds.

Witness the miracle:

From the above video’s information section:

The Gravity #JetSuit uses over 1000bhp of Jet Engine power combined with natural human balance to deliver the most intense and enthralling spectacle, often likened to the real-life Iron Man. …

The Gravity Team, based in the UK, have delivered over 100 flight & Speaking events across 30 countries including 5 TED talks.

“The team and I are delivering on the vision to build Gravity into a world class aeronautical engineering business, challenge perceived boundaries in human aviation, and inspire a generation to dare ask ‘what if…”

As relayed by the Post, Richard touted the technology’s benefits:

“If you think about the cost of a paramedic helicopter and all the crew involved and the maintenance and everything, actually this is a fraction of that.”

Very, very cool, but I hope Lucas Electric didn’t do the circuitry…

ULTRA-MAGA! Ultra-MAGA takes Washington by storm.

The Ultra-MAGA label — they’ll take it!

Those who President Biden branded derisively “Ultra-MAGA” on Tuesday were quick to embrace it and warn Democrats that waging war on the Trump agenda was tantamount to waging war on the American dream.

“I’m proud to be an Ultra-MAGA,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida Republican. ”The president’s remarks signify a true shift. He’s moving away from an indictment of President Trump specifically to now trying to indict an entire political movement that they fear.”

Fans of former President Donald Trump have long rallied under the banner of MAGA, an acronym for the Trump campaign slogan Make America Great Again.

But Ultra-MAGA is something new in America’s political lexicon. It sprung not from Mr. Trump or his followers, but from the Biden White House to characterize a threat that Democrats perceive as more dangerous than the original MAGA movement.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted that Mr. Biden came up with it himself.

Only if the Adrenochrome was really flowing that day.

(I keed, I keed — if Psaki said it, of course Biden didn’t invent the term.)

FIGHT THE POWER: Rapper Dom Kennedy Launches 2nd Amendment Lawsuit Against Los Angeles.

THE COLE-DEBOER DUET:

David Cole (that one) is rightly frustrated with his fellow right-wingers for throwing what’s sure to be an epic electoral victory over abortion:

And that’s where I get nervous. Real nervous. If a couple of imbecilic statements about abortion can wreck two Senate campaigns (in red states, no less) when abortion was still safeguarded by Roe, imagine the damage once Roe’s gone and abortion criminalization is actually on the table.

If Roe’s overturned in June, getting from there to November with minimal losses will depend on the retard wing of the GOP not making idiotic statements about abortion and rape. Basically, the future of the country will depend on the stupidest people in D.C. not acting stupid.

Read the whole thing.

RIP: Nerve and Vision — Remembering Midge Decter.

A skilled writer, editor, and political activist, Midge Decter was a key figure in the movement of neoconservative, anti-Communist liberals away from the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s.

Born in St. Paul in 1927, Decter attended multiple universities—the University of Minnesota, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and New York University—but did not receive a degree from any of them. In 1950, she began working at Commentary, then a liberal magazine published under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee. She left shortly afterward but returned in 1953, remaining for three more years, after which she left again for other professional pursuits. Even after that second departure, though, she never really left: she wrote 69 pieces for Commentary over 55 years. She also married Norman Podhoretz, who would become the magazine’s editor, and one of their children, John, would later become editor as well, as he remains today.

Commentary was part of Decter’s family, but it was also a key magazine of The Family, a collection of mostly Jewish New York liberal anti-Communist intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s. Decter and Podhoretz were important figures in this group, and their apartment became a hub of activity and social events. In 1964, they hosted a party for Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the recently assassinated president. (Philip Roth referred to her as “the shiksa.”) Former attorney general William Barr’s father was in the Family milieu as well, and Barr recalled in his recent memoir attending “birthday parties at the home of power couple Norman Podhoretz, editor in chief of Commentary magazine, and Midge Decter, a prominent journalist and author.” Decter also wrote for magazines like Harper’s, where she served as executive editor from 1969 to 1971.

It was a charmed life, or so it seemed. But things changed in the 1960s with the growth of the New Left. This Left, with its rejection of tradition and authority, made her uncomfortable. As she wrote in Commentary in 1982, “The refusal to be bound by rules, any rules, turned children against their elders, impelled them to don rags and roam the country simulating poverty, destroy their brains with drugs, burn books, and rage against the very idea of responsibility, social, intellectual, or personal.”

She was also a staunch anti-Communist. As she would write, Commentary’s “true animating passion was a deep hatred for Communism in any and all of its manifestations.” She felt that the Democratic Party of the 1970s was wavering on that principle. Unlike many of her fellow neoconservatives, she had never had a Marxist phase. “The only grand posturing of my teens,” she once recalled, “had been a declared intention to die on the barricades in Palestine.” To her, the George McGovern Democrats of the early 1970s no longer upheld the liberal anti-Communist banner she held dear.

While it’s lost its paragraph formatting after the Weekly Standard collapsed and its archives were folded into the Washington Examiner, this 2001 review by Andrew Ferguson of Decter’s then-recent book An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War illustrates her perception:

She is pitiless, for example, in her treatment of the earnest and conspicuously virtuous Stanley Kramer, who had meant to show the world the horrors of nuclear war when he made his high-minded film “On the Beach” (1959). In fact, she notes (as no one else did at the time), the movie is perversely rosy–a pretty picture from which the real horrors raised by the prospect of atomic Armageddon are squeamishly excluded. “Kramer has fallen victim to the most insidious seduction of our time–the seduction of the apocalypse,” she writes. “What he has given us is a fantasy in which all problems are solved by a single explosion.”

Three years later, she goes further, daring to criticize the uncriticizable “Dr. Strangelove,” a movie prized then and now by the verbal class for what was taken to be its bravery and anarchism. Midge Decter instead saw a funny movie limited by a timid devotion to “conventional political piety.” Look closer, she said: Beyond its excellent jokes and masterly technique, the movie is “strangely polite in its choice of enemies”–the right-wing general, the ex-Nazi nuclear scientist, the overzealous nuclear strategist, and so on. “No liberals are ridiculed in this ‘anarchic’ movie,” she writes. “To have poked as much fun at the inadequacy of pacifist thought in the face of the nuclear danger as it does at the absurdity of strategic thought would have involved the movie in a complexity–and an anarchism of spirit–quite beyond its basic intentions. And Kubrick in that case would probably not have been extolled for his courage by everyone from Robert Brustein in the New York Review of Books to the editorialists of Life. Everyone, after all, is against psychotic generals and Nazis.”

We’re grown used nowadays to seeing right-wing critiques of the conventionally left-wing politics of Hollywood movies, so it’s difficult to convey how extraordinary this criticism must have seemed in 1964, certainly in a magazine like Commentary, then a flagship for highbrow Democrats and liberals generally (and edited, as it happened, by Midge Decter’s husband Norman Podhoretz). But notice that her beef with Kubrick isn’t ideological; it’s artistic, or better, a matter of artistic character: A gifted moviemaker, he chose to sacrifice complexity and a deeper humor for an easy laugh and public acclaim. He passed up a chance to convey genuine anarchy (as the Marx Brothers dangerously did, she points out, in “Duck Soup”) so his movie would be safer and easier to take–and maybe also so it would be praised by an arbiter of elevated taste like Robert Brustein, dean of Yale Drama School, in a brainy fashion magazine like the New York Review of Books.

GETTING PRAISED in the New York Review is, at some time or another, the craving of every person who lives in New York and writes for a living, but one of the delights in reading her first book is watching Midge Decter get over it. Her essays show no evidence of status-seeking, bum-bussing, or any of the other fretful tics that wiggle through the work of people who so ambitiously call themselves “public intellectuals” (emphasis on the public). As the era progresses and she watches the new counterculture consume a genuine culture of taste and merit, consume it and render it trivial and silly, her stuff takes on a tone of exasperation that would later, in her most famous book, “Liberal Parents, Radical Children,” boil down into anger. But here it has an edge of wonderment to it: What is all this crap? Herself a liberal, she’s beginning to think that maybe the problem is with liberalism itself, and with liberals.

Exit quote: “In a review of a book of speeches released not long after his death, she is admiring of Adlai Stevenson–some early crushes you never get over–but scornful of his followers: ‘What they sought from him first and foremost was a public token of their superiority to their less educated countrymen.’ By the dawn of the 1970s, much of liberalism had degenerated into an affectation, a pose, a matter not of conviction but of style.”

Little has changed in that department in the decades since, except that the left’s desire to strike poses has accelerated exponentially in the “Woke” era.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF MALIGNANT NARCISSISM, ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, AND THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS BAD P.R.: James Cromwell superglues hand to Starbucks counter in PETA protest.

James Cromwell took a dramatic stand for PETA Tuesday morning by supergluing his hand to a Starbucks counter in protest of the coffee chain’s up-charge for vegan milks.

Appearing on a Facebook livestream, the “Succession” star, 82, rattled off facts about the cons of producing dairy milk from cows as he remained stuck to the Midtown Manhattan shop’s counter alongside other PETA members.

Despite advocating for inclusivity, Starbucks “still discriminates against those who can’t have dairy” by making customers “pay more” for vegan options such as almond milk and oat milk, Cromwell claimed.

“My friends at PETA and I are calling on Starbucks to stop punishing kind and environmentally conscious customers for choosing plant milks,” the “L.A. Confidential” star and longtime vegan said in a statement.

“We all have a stake in the life-and-death matter of the climate catastrophe, and Starbucks should do its part by ending its vegan up-charge.”

While we “all have a stake in the life-and-death matter of the climate catastrophe,” curiously, according to IMDB, Cromwell is appearing or producing multiple films in various stages of production this year.

Flashback: Bill Maher: Liberals Are the Fun Suckers Now. “Look, here’s my libertarian side: I don’t really care about any of partying, drugs, and consenting adults doing whatever. Yet, Maher noticed something odd happening between the parties with this story. They’ve switched roles. The GOP is doing having fun, while the Democrats are acting like the Public Morals Bureau. As Maher noted, which is true, conservatives were the ones whose backsides were clenched so tight that you could grind diamonds to dust. Maher’s build-up rips the 1980s conservative establishment but it actually tees him up to go after the woke Left, who he says are millennials who embodied all the bad characteristics Southern Baptist. The Left is the ones for speech codes, blacklists, and cancel culture now. They’re the ‘fun-suckers.’”

THE VIEW OF THE WORLD FROM PINCH AVENUE: The New York Times’ Editorial Board Is Apparently Extremely Stupid.

Over the weekend, the New York Times’ editorial board submitted this paragraph for public consumption:

Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t. The laws would be a mishmash, and interracial couples would suffer, legally consigned to second-class status depending on where they lived.

The people who wrote these words are stupid — yes, stupid — and they should all be unsurpassingly ashamed of themselves.

* * * * * * * *

There isn’t even a racial gap [according to a 2021 Gallup Poll]:

Today, the three percentage points that separate approval [of interracial marriage] among White (93%) and Non-White adults (96%) is within the poll’s margin of error.

From where, exactly, does the New York Times’ editorial board believe that the impetus would come for “some states” to ban interracial marriage? And who would send the signals from on high? Would Mitch McConnell, the husband of of Elaine Chao, who was born in Taiwan? Would Justice Clarence Thomas, the formerly segregated black man who is married to Ginni Thomas, who is white? Perhaps JD Vance and Usha Chilukuri are gearing up for the role?

Sometimes, I wonder if the editors of the New York Times have actually been to the United States. Now, I must conclude that they have not.

The Times really does want to live up to all of the stereotypes about the New York left’s myopia regarding the rest of America famously satirized in Saul Steinberg’s classic “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” cover, don’t they?

And given the Times’ role as the house organ of the Democratic Party, as the subhead of Dana Loesch’s 2016 book noted: You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To.

MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: Biden Press Secretary Caught in Two More Big Lies on Inflation.

Today’s a day that ends in y, so White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is gaslighting the public again. This time, President Biden’s top spokesperson was attempting to explain away surging 8.5% inflation—a major political liability for this administration—when she made the dishonest mishaps.

“Depending which data you look at, two-thirds to 70% of inflation data is the result of energy prices,” Psaki claimed during a Monday briefing. “A large part of that is the result of… President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the impact on the global energy markets.”

This part of Psaki’s speech is just straight-up false.

For one thing, inflation remains at 6.5% even when gas prices are factored out entirely. So, the 70% number she keeps parroting is simply not accurate. And while Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine has indeed disrupted global energy markets and led to higher gas prices over the last few months, gas prices were already rising over the last year—and inflation more broadly began all the way back in May 2021.

The press secretary went on to conclude that because today’s inflation is supposedly driven by Putin’s invasion, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted it a year ago.”

This is the most ridiculous part of Psaki’s entire remarks.

Meanwhile, the Big Guy, whose party controls all three branches of the Federal Government, is blaming the out-of-power party for inflation: Biden calls inflation his top domestic priority, blaming Republicans for lacking a plan.

President Joe Biden sought Tuesday to ease fears over inflation, arguing that tackling rising prices is his top domestic priority and accusing Republicans of having no plan to offer Americans relief.

“They don’t want to solve inflation by lowering your costs,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “They want to solve it by raising your taxes and lowering your income.”

Yes, modern-day Republicans are notorious middle class tax-raisers. But I’m so old, I can remember a pre-Trunalimunumaprzure Biden declaring to his supporters that paying higher taxes is “patriotic.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

CHANGE: Top Navy Admiral Quietly Removes ‘Woke’ Books From CNO Reading List.

The US Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Mike Gilday released an update to the CNO Professional Reading Program. Gone from the list are socially progressive books that ignited conservative anger last year. Books like Ibram X. Kendi bestseller How to Be an Antiracist and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

The CNO-Professional Reading Program consists of 12 books and is a mix of writing genres including fiction, non-fiction, military, strategy, management, and technology, among others.

“A learning mindset is essential to accelerating our warfighting advantage,” said Gilday. “A Navy that learns, adapts, and improves the fastest will be the most successful. Knowledge sharing is essential to creating a learning culture.”

Last year Gilday received praise from Democrats and scorn from several Republicans for choosing books that leaned into the question of race in America.

“If you want to understand a country’s military, take a look at what its officer corps is reading,” said Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “So with that in mind, what are American military officers reading these days? Well, let’s see, a sub-literate pamphlet on how the United States is a disgusting immoral country that must be changed immediately and forever.”

“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people,” Milton Friedman once said. “The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

It appears that the education reforms spearheaded by Governors Youngkin and DeSantis are putting pressure on a New York Times-approved bureaucrat like Gilday — the wrong man at the wrong time — to attempt to do the right thing.

‘PEOPLE TOOK SO MANY DRUGS, THEY FORGOT THEY PLAYED ON IT:’ Stars on Exile on Main St, the Rolling Stones’ sprawling masterpiece.

In 1971, facing tax problems and an uncertain future, the Rolling Stones decamped to Villa Nellcôte on the Côte d’Azur, where they partied with various celebrities, musicians, girlfriends, wives, kids, animals, drug-dealers and hangers-on for several hedonistic months. Recording in the damp, labyrinthine basement with a mobile studio parked outside and musicians seemingly turning up at random, they somehow produced Exile on Main St, a rough-hewn, sprawling, eclectic, 18-song double album that is widely regarded as their creative peak. Here, as it turns 50, stars salute its enduring greatness.

‘Among the grit and dirt, there’s a Rimbaud-like romance’
—Chris Robinson, the Black Crowes

We were American hardcore punk kids, but when we discovered Exile we called it the Bible. In our infancy, we wanted to capture that magic and mystery. It’s English guys looking at American blues, country rock, soul and gospel through their own aesthetic of drugs, satin shirts and sparkly shoes. The Stones had the guts to remove themselves from society and live outside the law, but among the grit and dirt, the overdoses and arrests, there’s a romanticism that goes back to Baudelaire and Rimbaud. We recently covered Rocks Off. I love its romantic decadence: “I was making love this time with a dancer friend of mine. / I couldn’t seem to stay in step, but she comes every time that she pirouettes on me.” It’s a holy relic, so playing it felt like walking with John the Baptist.

Photographs and more details of the Villa Nellcôte here: Then & Now: The Rolling Stones’ French Villa of Debauchery.

LUFTHANSA PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939: Passengers say Lufthansa threw all visible Jews off NYC-Budapest flight because some weren’t wearing masks. A Lufthansa airline supervisor said on video that it was “the Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems.”

A group of Orthodox Jews are demanding an apology from Lufthansa airlines after they were expelled from a flight from New York to Budapest last Tuesday.

The travelers say all of the identifiably Orthodox Jews were prevented from boarding a connecting flight in Frankfurt, Germany because a group of passengers had allegedly not complied with the German national carrier’s mask regulations on the first leg of the flight.

In a video taken by a passenger, a Lufthansa supervisor is seen saying that “everyone has to pay for a couple,” adding, “It’s Jews coming from JFK. Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems.”

The video, first reported and shared by the discount travel website Dan’s Deals, was posted to YouTube and Instagram where it sparked angry comparisons to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

The video, blurred because it is illegal to record someone without their consent in Germany, was taken down for violating YouTube and Instagram’s hate speech policies. It is still available on Twitter.

More at the New York Post: Over 100 NYC Orthodox Jews get kicked off German flight over mask dispute.

This appears to be the clip referenced above:

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot: Chicago Mayor Blames Other States With ‘No Gun Control’ for City’s Increasing Violence.

—Newsweek, July 26th, 2020.

Chaser:

I’m sure the Pink Pistols appreciate this unintended, but well-deserved endorsement!

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EURASIA: For the first two years of World War II, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies; Hitler and Stalin secretly planned and jointly began the war that inflicted such horror and destruction.

There is no denying that a vast number of Soviet citizens lost their lives in World War II. Without the Russian people’s appalling suffering and sacrifice, the Allies might not have triumphed in the end.

But there is also no denying that Moscow was Nazi Germany’s partner in unleashing the war, the deadliest in human history, in the first place. Victory Day is a good opportunity to review the record of Russian culpability in plunging the world into war — a record the Kremlin’s propagandists have been trying to obscure for decades.

World War II is commonly said to have started on Sept. 1, 1939 , when German forces invaded Poland. But it would perhaps be more accurate to date the start of the war nine days earlier. On Aug. 23, 1939, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a treaty of non-aggression, whereby their governments agreed to conquer and divide Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. It was under the terms of this pact that the Nazi Wehrmacht moved into western Poland on Sept. 1 and Josef Stalin’s Red Army invaded Poland from the east 16 days later.

Read the whole thing.

(Classical reference in headline.)

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: CNN’s Jarrett: Screw ‘Civility,’ Protests Outside Justices’ Homes Are Fine.

On this morning’s New Day, CNN reporter Laura Jarrett, daughter of former top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, supported pro-abortion protests outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court Justices. She claimed that a conversation about civility “misses the mark.”

Substitute host John Avlon actually tried to frame the conversation around where the line should be drawn when it comes to protests, but Jarrett would have none of it.

“I think for a lot of people, a conversation about civility feels like it misses the mark when constitutional [sic—Ed] rights that you believe that you had for over 50 years are about to be overturned.”

“The Justices have security,” she sniffed. This sounds similar to her mother Valerie Jarrett saluting the “energy” of protests that erupted in Ferguson back in 2014 after Michael Brown was shot after reaching inside a car window for a cop’s gun. They were focusing on the “post-Ferguson anger.”

Related: Based on this headline at The Hill, they’re down for plenty of Alinsky-approved home protests as well: Abortion battle moves to homes of Supreme Court justices.

As Glenn wrote last year when Democrats stripped Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments, “Just as when Harry Reid got rid of the filibuster, they think the worm will never turn.”

#HIMTOO? Three young women have accused James Bond director Cary Fukunaga of sexual misconduct and “grooming” after his “women’s rights” post on Instagram.

Flashback: Kyle Smith in 2018: Hollywood is a sex-grooming gang.

MICHAEL WALSH: In the Ukraine Proxy War, What Price Victory?

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? The Password for Hunter Biden’s Laptop From Hell Is…What You’d Expect. “‘My password is f–ked up. Don’t be offended!’ he said, before announcing that it was ‘analf–k69’ or something to that extent. His inebriated condition made it difficult to understand is speech. My eyes widened a bit, and I told him that maybe it would be best if he tried to log in himself. Big yikes. But also, what did we expect Hunter Biden’s password to be? As the computer repair store owner continues explaining in the excerpt, the laptop password was only the first hint that the laptop would become much more than a usual file recovery job for John Paul Mac Isaac.”

ROGER SIMON: I Am a Soviet Writer Now.

Long may The Epoch Times—and those few others like it—thrive. And thank you so much to the readers who keep them alive!

Nevertheless, this is all starting to remind me of the Soviet Union that I visited twice on cultural exchanges during the early glasnost (in the late ’80s). In fact, the America of today has for some time.

I remember visiting two apartment buildings that were named Screenwriter I and II. They housed favored writers, screenwriters or not, and were sought after because, I was told, they contained the best medical clinics in Moscow on the ground floor.

In the Soviet Union, decent medical care was only available to party officials and others—scientists and cultural workers—who played along.

Writers who didn’t had to find other access. The greatest writing of Soviet times was the clandestine samizdat (literally “self-publishing” in Russian), those who obviously had the courage to buck a vicious system—the Solzhenitsyns, the Mandelstams, and so forth. Financial remuneration, not to mention the best medical care, was not for them.

Of course, we are building our own more open-minded structures, some in publishing, others in film. They all have good intentions. But for the most part, we are only allowed to preach to the choir. We are kept off in a corner, segregated.

Somehow this must be overcome. We must be able to reach the masses because we are the masses, not them.

What is going on in our country today is a full-on attack on free speech under a duplicitous, fascistic facade of making sure the public is correctly informed, that there is no “misinformation” (the big lie word of our times).

So when I say I’m a Soviet writer now, I hope you know I mean those great writers who wrote samizdat in opposition to a totalitarian state. I have nowhere near their courage. I have nowhere near their depth. But I identify with them because my country is on the verge of being turned into theirs.

As Glenn Greenwald tweeted last month, April 14th “was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it. Even if Musk doesn’t buy Twitter, never forget what [Thursday] revealed.”