WASHINGTON POST HITS AVANT-GARDE ARTIST FOR VACCINE DISSENT:

Even people who have never heard of Evan Parker and wouldn’t care for his music should note the ominous precedent that was embedded within the Washington Post’s review of his latest album, Descension (Out of Our Constrictions) with the Natural Information Society, a group of far-out jazzmen from Chicago. The Post’s popular music (a category in which the master saxophonist defiantly does not belong) critic, Chris Richards, was full of praise for “the tenacious British saxophonist Evan Parker,” and said that the album “felt responsive, propulsive and alive.” However: “Parker is 77, musically collegial, but a covid-19 denier.”

Richards went on to note with unconcealed lemming outrage that “in an interview published in April,” Parker “described the pandemic as ‘a sham’ designed to ‘harvest DNA and sell vaccines.’ Just like that, his remarks threatened to make his deeply empathetic new music make no sense at all.”

Wait a minute here. This is not vocal music. Neither Evan Parker nor anyone else says a word on the album, either about the COVID hysteria or anything else. Yet the Washington Post would have us believe that Parker’s COVID and vaccine skepticism “threatened” — threatened! — to render his new music meaningless.

This is pure Maoism: if your political views are not aligned with those of the elites, then everything you do is tainted and worthless. Like virtually all avant-garde artists, Parker has been reliably socialist up to now, but the Left doesn’t give out lifetime achievement awards. Chris Richards loves the music and waxes poetic about it: “this new album that Parker has made with Natural Information Society sounds like life, as if the band’s signature groove might be a growing, changing, living, breathing thing.” Parker’s astonishing technique is “inherently dazzling.” But Richards can’t let go of the fact that Parker is also a dissenter from everything he thinks is good and true: “So how could someone this attentive on the bandstand, this empathetic in song, this worldly in his playing come to the conclusion that a decimating global pandemic isn’t real? It baffles and burns.”

Richards also includes a veiled warning: “It’ll be a shame if Parker’s denialism ultimately fouls this band’s great art.” How could it, unless smarmy little fascists such as Chris Richards work to get Parker canceled and discredited because he has dared to enunciate politically unacceptable opinions? Parker’s music has nothing whatsoever to do with his politics: I myself have been entranced with it and fascinated by it for decades despite the fact that Parker has always been a man of the Left.

It’s the same playbook the Post ran on (the infinitely better known) Eric Clapton last year. “It’ll be a shame if Parker’s denialism ultimately fouls this band’s great art” sounds a bit too close to the rhetoric of Monty Python’s resident Mafioso characters Dino and Luigi Vercotti: “Nice career you have. Shame if something were to happen to it.”

WELCOME BACK, CARTER! Deutsche Bank is the first big bank to forecast a US recession.

Although Deutsche Bank cautioned there is “considerable uncertainty” around the exact timing and size of the downturn, it’s now calling for the US economy to shrink during the final quarter of next year and the first quarter of 2024, “consistent with a recession during that time.”

The good news is Deutsche Bank is not forecasting a deep and painful recession like the past two downturns.

Rather, the bank expects a “mild recession,” with unemployment peaking above 5% in 2024. That would still translate to considerable layoffs. During the Great Recession unemployment peaked at far higher levels of 14.7% in 2020 and 10% in 2009.

This coming recession would allow inflation to get back towards the Fed’s target by the end of 2024, Deutsche Bank said.

“With the unemployment rate receding only slowly following the peak, inflation should continue to moderate, falling to the Fed’s 2% objective in 2025,” Deutsche Bank said.

Hey, fair is fair — whoever is running against Biden (or his replacement) in 2024 gets to call that “the worst economy in fifty years!”, don’t they?

Related: Recession Definition: What Is A Recession?

DEMOCRAT SENATOR EXPLOITS SACRAMENTO SHOOTING TO PUSH ABSURD GUN CONTROL ARGUMENTS: “In the statement included with the tweet, Feinstein acknowledged that there’s a lot we still don’t know. The investigation, as of this writing, is still ongoing. That lack of knowledge, however, doesn’t dissuade the long-time senator from calling for universal background checks, magazine restrictions, assault weapon bans, and a ban on so-called ghost guns. Almost all of which already exist in California… as Feinstein should be well aware. I mean, she represents the state—and has since 1992!”

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Hunter’s Grand Jury Asks “Who Is The Big Guy?”

VETERAN GOP REPRESENTATIVE FRED UPTON, WHO VOTED TO IMPEACH TRUMP, ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT.

To be fair, Upton’s always been an awfully dim bulb: “Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh cited Upton’s promotion of eco-friendly light bulbs evidence that he shouldn’t take the Energy and Commerce gavel. ‘This would be a tone-deaf disaster if the Republican leadership lets Fred Upton ascend to the chairmanship of the House energy committee,’ Limbaugh said this week. ‘This is exactly the kind of nannyism, statism, what have you, that was voted against and was defeated last week. No Republican complicit in nannyism, statism, can be rewarded this way.’”

WELCOME BACK, CARTER:

A joke in 1978 is fiscal policy today pic.twitter.com/WALIgGpHH1

— Supports Single Mothers Nero (@Adventure_Nero) April 3, 2022

HOW’S THAT “ZERO COVID” STRATEGY WORKING OUT FOR YOU? ‘This is inhumane:’ the cost of zero Covid in Shanghai.

Jia Ruiling’s* father has been enduring severe pain since 17 March. He has late-stage stomach cancer, but his hospital refused to treat him because Jia’s neighbourhood was under lockdown as a result of a handful of Covid cases.

“We begged the hospital to accept him again and again,” Jia said. “At some point my father was in so much pain that he wanted to take his life. What can we do? Please, help us let the central government know.”

China’s strict zero-Covid policy means all positive cases have to be hospitalised. But in the last few weeks, as case numbers have risen sharply and 26 million people entered a harsh lockdown, mainland China’s most important financial hub has come to a standstill. Medical resources are overwhelmingly diverted to combat Covid, leaving it difficult for non-Covid patients like Jia’s father to access them.

Luo Ruixiang*, a 39-year-old Chinese worker in the Republic of the Congo, had a similar experience. He flew home in March in the hope of receiving urgent treatment after damaging his left eye.

He landed in Shanghai and informed his quarantine hotel and customs officials of his medical needs, but for more than a week he heard nothing. “I was worried that if I waited until the quarantine was over, I would have already gone blind,” he said.

Desperate, Luo went on to the social media site Weibo to plead for help. Local media soon called him, and medical help was quickly on the way. “Thankfully, the operation is done,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be this complicated, but as a small potato everything is so difficult for me.”

Related: Eerie Drone Footage Shows Deserted Shanghai Downtown As Lockdown Extended.

‘CONSERVATIVE’ RADIO STATION CAVES TO WOKE MOB, FIRES HOST:

It is the height of hypocrisy for Cumulus to own a radio station that positions itself as committed to conservative thought and standing up to leftist bullies only to turn that station into a piece of the cancel culture apparatus used to silence conservatives based on ludicrous claims of racism.

As Amber [Athey] concludes in her column, the situation “has destroyed the integrity and reputation of WMAL and Cumulus as hosts of conservative content. We spoke frequently about the dangers of censorship and cancel culture on our program, and yet here they are bowing to the mob,” she adds. “Political commentary is worthless if it can’t be used to speak truth to those in power without fear of professional consequences.”

She’s right. I’ve filled in as a co-host of the old morning drive-time program and was a frequent guest in my previous position as the spokesman of Young America’s Foundation talking about, ironically, the dangers of cancel culture on college campuses. Will I be allowed back on their air after this? Who knows. But standing against cancel culture on college campuses, in larger society, and especially in “conservative” media is far more important than whatever a five minute interview about news of the day would be. If conservatives can’t call out cancel culture within the movement, how can they be taken seriously highlighting it elsewhere?

Amber’s tweet about Kamala Harris’ outfit and her utter lack of effectiveness as Vice President was funny. It was one of a countless number that poked fun at her fashion choice. It was certainly not racist, unless UPS is a racist company for having “What Can Brown Do For You?” as its slogan.

More from Athey herself: I was fired for a joke about Kamala Harris’s outfit. A ‘conservative’ radio station caves to the mob.

RON DESANTIS DROPS INFLATION TRUTH BOMB (Video):

Inflation is hitting American families hard right now. Brutally hard. At least one prominent Republican, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is stepping up with some answers. He just accurately diagnosed the origins of the ongoing price surges—and dropped an inflation truth bomb in a recent speech.

“People should just brace themselves,” the governor warned, “because the inflationary period that we’re in [is] likely to persist for some time.”

“I mean, you cannot print trillions and trillions of dollars, and expect there not to be some effect on the back end. This is basic [economics], even Keynesian [progressive] economics would say that if you spend and print, spend and print, that is going to drive up the cost of everything.”

Related: Don’t pretend that high prices and American suffering are a ‘bug’ for the establishment — it’s a historic feature.

JON STEWART’S SAD DECLINE:

Having been caught flat-footed during his appearance on Stewart’s show, [Andrew] Sullivan thoroughly dismantled Stewart’s monologue and subsequent attempt at panel moderation in a Substack post.

Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of more than 140 Marshall Plans. As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.” To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.

Stewart then used crude metrics of inequality to argue, Kendi-style, without any evidence, that the only thing that can possibly explain racial inequality today in America is still “white supremacy.” Other factors — concentrated poverty, insanely high rates of crime and violence, acute family breakdown, a teen culture that equates success with whiteness, lack of affordable childcare — went either unmentioned or openly mocked as self-evident expressions of bigotry. He then equated formal legal segregation with voluntary residential segregation, as if Jim Crow were still in force. And he straw-manned the countering argument thus: white America believes that African-Americans are “solely responsible for their community’s struggles.”

I don’t know anyone who believes that. I sure don’t. It’s much more complex than that. And it’s that complexity that some of us are insisting on — and that Stewart wants to dismiss out of hand in favor of his own Manichean moral preening. His final peroration ended thus: “America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.” Note: always. There has been no real progress; white people have never actually listened to a black person; America is irredeemably racist. Those fucking white men, Lincoln and LBJ, never gave a shit.

Rather than responding to Sullivan point-by-point as Sullivan had done to him, Stewart blasted the journalist on Twitter, asking “can we stop with the lazy ‘woke’ sh** anytime someone disagrees with a conservative. F*** man.”

Clown nose on, clown nose off.

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Union Square billboard calls San Francisco ‘famous the world over for dirt-cheap fentanyl.’

A group of mothers is calling on San Francisco city officials to crack down on people openly dealing and using drugs on city streets with a bold message that went up in Union Square on Monday afternoon.

Mothers Against Drug Deaths paid for a billboard that reads: “Famous the world over for our brains, beauty and now, dirt-cheap fentanyl.”

The message is referring to the opiate that has flooded the city’s street drug marketplace
in recent years, intensifying the peril of addiction and leading to a staggering number of overdose deaths.

“It’s dangerous and actually crazy because you can walk down a lot of the city streets and see hundreds of drug dealers out in the open,” said Jacqui Berlinn of Livermore, who co-founded Mothers Against Drug Deaths. “You can literally watch them sell the drugs to an addict… and then watch that addict walk a few steps away and use …holding the foil in their hands, putting the needles in their arms.”

Earlier: Why San Francisco is Nearly the Most Crime-Ridden City in the Us.

San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964. Why are lefty monopoly cities such drug and crime-filled cesspits?

JEFF SPICOLI — SAVED BROOKE SHIELDS FROM DROWNING. BLOWS REWARD MONEY HIRING VAN HALEN TO PLAY HIS BIRTHDAY PARTY: The Real Yacht Rock: Inside the Lavish, Top-Secret World of Private Gigs. One-percenters worldwide are hiring everyone from Beyoncé to Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath to play their homes, parties, or weddings. Experts say the trend is just getting started.

For Jennifer Lopez, a November 2014 performance in Macau wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary. She’d have to sing (here, to a backing track) for 40 minutes, accompanied by six to eight dancers; the contract stipulated she’d be furnished with “first-class” sound and lights. No recording or taping of the performance would be allowed. But no tickets were sold, either. And the payday stood out, too: $1.25 million. To celebrate the birthday of a relative, a wealthy Chinese family flew Lopez to Asia to perform for them, tossing in $500,000 for airfare and hotel for her and her entourage. The opulence didn’t stop there; for the show, the family built a restaurant and a nightclub inside a Grand Hyatt ballroom, with a walkway connecting the two. And all for about 20 people in the audience, less than the number of crew members involved in working on the gig.

For more than 20 years, pop stars of all genres and generations, from Bob Dylan and the Eagles to Alicia Keys and John Legend, have been hired to play corporate events — big-paycheck performances for company employees or clients, often at theaters or arenas. Even during a pandemic, when live performances slowed down, that ecosystem has persisted. Last December, the blockchain-gaming platform Gala Games threw a “Galaverse” multinight private party in San Francisco, where its 500 guests gathered to hear Maroon 5, Alice Cooper, DJ Steve Aoki, a bit of Snoop Dogg, and a stripped-down set by two members of Arcade Fire. The venue included private rooms set up to look like a medieval tavern, a “Dungeons & Dragons” setup with a huge fake dragon, and a quasi Texas dance hall, while in another space, dancers were made up to look like zombies (to tie in with a Walking Dead game).

But alongside the world of corporate parties and retreats, a far more shadowy parallel world has been flourishing: the super-private gig. In that universe, stars in classic rock, hip-hop, and pop have been pulling in sizable fees for playing at weddings, birthday parties, anniversaries, and other personal-life milestones, all for those wealthy enough to afford it. The festivities allow performers to walk away with yacht-loads of cash and make one-percenter hosts feel like insiders and stars themselves. But along with the sizable paydays come sometimes dicey political issues that the artists have to navigate (or, sometimes, ignore).

Buried lede: Rolling Stone discovers pandemic is over.

LOOK AT ALL THE WOKE TWITTER EMPLOYEES THAT WERE TRIGGERED BY ELON MUSK BECOMING THE COMPANY’S LARGEST SHAREHOLDER:

It’s a thing of beauty.

One second, wokies are resting on their laurels, telling those MAGA dweebs that Twitter is a private company and can set whatever speech limits it wants.

The next second, they’re upset when someone they don’t like buys a huge stake in said private company!

Here’s a wonderful series of screenshots from this thread by journalist Andy Ngô:

Related: Elon Musk Buys 9.2% of Twitter, Becoming Its Largest Shareholder.

Finally, America’s Newspaper of Record reports: Liberals Outraged To Learn 10% Of Twitter Now Owned By African-American.

BREAKING: Republican Turncoats Announce They’ll Vote to Confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson.

WAS IT OVER WHEN RUPERT MURDOCH BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?! Biden: Rupert Murdoch ‘most dangerous man in the world.’

President Biden reportedly decried Fox News owner and media magnate Rupert Murdoch as the “most dangerous man in the world,” according to new reporting in a forthcoming book by a team of New York Times reporters.

Excerpts from the book “This Will Not Pass,” by journalists Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns obtained by CNN reveal Biden assessed Fox News “as one of the most destructive forces in the United States.”

The book reportedly describes Fox News as a “torrent of anti-Biden programming, stoking skepticism about vaccines and disseminating wild conspiracy theories about the January 6 attack.”

Biden’s alleged comments to Martin and Burns are the first the president has ever made publicly about Murdoch, CNN noted.

Related: Biden Privately Considers Fox News as ‘One of the Most Destructive Forces’ in the Nation, Per Report.

Which is another way of Biden saying that every other news outlet is filled to the brim with his party’s operatives with bylines. As well as:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend texts: “Haha, the superpower commander in chief who wants nuclear-armed Putin up on war crimes charges thinks news mogul Rupert Murdoch is the most dangerous man in the world. Sure, that makes sense… 2022 sense. (Didn’t take long for 2022 to top 2021 and 2020 … and we’re only one quarter in!)”

Well, the thing you have to remember is that Putin is only dangerous to America. Murdoch is dangerous to something much more important — Democrats’ hold on power.

STACY MCCAIN: “PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) first came to public attention in reference to Vietnam combat veterans. If we are to believe Taylor Lorenz, people saying mean things about her on Twitter is exactly like getting ambushed by the Vietcong, dodging mortar shells and machine-gun fire in the jungle, watching your buddies bleed to death. Mean tweets are the siege of Khe Sanh in the Tet Offensive, in terms of the psychological trauma inflicted on survivors like Taylor Lorenz.”

Read the whole thing.

THE NYC HEALTH OFFICIAL “BIRTHING PEOPLE” VS “MOTHERS” DEBACLE.

Morse made a reference to “Black and Puerto Rican mothers,” but followed that up with “non-Hispanic White birthing people.” I suppose we’ll forgive her for capitalizing “white” in the context, even though that falls outside the boundaries of the AP Style Guide on racial capitalization. Some of her followers quickly jumped on her for the implication that Black and Hispanic pregnant women are “mothers” while pregnant white women are not.

Sensing trouble like a watchdog, the city Department of Health responded to a request for comment from the NY Post. They offered a correction and an apology. They said, “we apologize for inadvertently gendering Black and Puerto Rican birthing people.”

No, that’s not a joke. That’s what the DOH spokesperson felt required an apology. They had “inadvertently gendered” Black and Puerto Rican “birthing people.”

Update Newspeak Dictionaries accordingly, comrades.

SPENGLER: Putin Won’t Go, Russia Won’t Collapse–So What Will Biden Do About Ukraine? “U.S. officials can scream all they want about Russian ‘war crimes’ (I don’t know the facts and take no position on whether war crimes were committed or not). I think that Putin is a bad guy and that the Russian invasion was a wicked enterprise. But Putin isn’t going anywhere, Russia isn’t collapsing, and the Russian Army is demolishing Ukraine. What, then, does the Biden Administration do next? Russia outguns us in nuclear weapons (and can deliver them from submarines firing hypersonic cruise missiles underwater). We don’t want a nuclear confrontation with Russia. That’s why I signed this statement calling for de-escalation of the conflict sponsored by Compact Magazine, founded by my friends Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmidtz. Biden, Blinken, Nuland et. al. have led us into a dead-end crisis that threatens to have a horrifying outcome—and maybe even a nuclear fireball. If you think I’m exaggerating, read this Asia Times analysis by editor-in-chief Uwe Parpart and myself. There’s still time to back out of the cul-de-sac. But not a lot.”

NOT MY KIDS: Recovering victims of woke abuse have had enough.

Even non-woke parents, long exposed to propaganda from multiple directions, tend to translate relentless woke messaging into something more benign. For example, the song “Freak Flag” in Shrek the Musical urges kids that society needs to change and embrace how “freaking strange” the show’s heroes are. “Let your freak flag fly. Never take it down, never take it down, raise it way up high!”

This relentless message to children to embrace their inner freak is woven almost ubiquitously in most any new media directed at them. A calculated ambiguity allows for an innocuous interpretation by the average viewer. Maybe little Cindy has a large birthmark on her face and needs this message. Or Johnny has a disability, and this helps him feel less self-conscious. These are fine and good lessons in such contexts.

But over the past year the escalation of radical gender ideology in schools has laid bare what the intent was all along. Your kids are theirs to shape in accord with an ideology that identifies progress with the development of a collectivist mindset and the dismantling of sexual normativity and bodily meaning. You want to be able to be anything? First you must mean nothing.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Michael Walsh writes: ‘There is a Tide in the Affairs of Men.’ “The right man has made his entrance: why compel him to waste four years on the sidelines as Trump’s veep and then be forced to run on Trump’s record in 2028? It makes no sense. On such a full sea are we now afloat. The decline has long since begun. So whom should the GOP nominate in 2024? I think we all know the answer to that. More on him next week.”

WAS IT OVER WHEN THE GERMANS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR DURING THE ‘EUROPEAN CIVIL WAR?’ New York Times columnist says Ukraine conflict is the first ‘real’ World War our planet has experienced.

In a recent opinion piece, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman claimed that the ongoing war in Ukraine is the first “real” World War.

The column, originally headlined “Ukraine Is the First Real World War,” was highlighted on both The New York Times’ and Friedman’s Twitter accounts Sunday. Both tweets can still be viewed; however, the column has since been given a new headline on the Times’ website.

The article is now headlined, “Putin Had No Clue How Many of Us Would Be Watching.”

Forget it; he’s rolling.

(Classical reference in headline.)

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Did China just take out an NBA player? The case of Enes Kanter Freedom deserves at least as much attention as Colin Kaepernick.

WAS IT OVER WHEN THURGOOD MARSHALL BOMBED PEARL HARBOR? Politico falsely claims that Ketanji Brown Jackson will be ‘first Black Supreme Court Justice.’

To be fair, Politico could have said she was the first female black Supreme Court justice — but that would mean defining what is a woman, and the staff at Politico aren’t biologists.

EU, MSM HARDEST HIT: Hungary’s Viktor Orban scores crushing victory as Ukraine war solidifies support.

Background here: All Eyes on Hungary at This Hour (Updated Throughout Today).

Flashback: Viktor Orbán is winning his culture war.

PEPPERMINT PSAKI’S SUBSTITUTE: Which Leftist Will Replace Jen Psaki As Press Secretary?

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: UCLA’s race and equity officer who wished death upon Clarence Thomas once admitted to staging a race hoax.