CRISES BY DESIGN: Biden’s war on fossil fuels has strengthened Putin and weakened America.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
February 26, 2022
February 25, 2022
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Rand Paul Will Force Senate Vote to Repeal Federal Travel Mask Mandate.
OIL PRICES BREAK $100 AMID RUSSIAN INVASION: “Oil prices broke above $100 a barrel for the first time since 2014, stock markets slumped globally and the rouble hit a record low on Thursday after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine.”
In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”
And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”
Flashbacks:
● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?
● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.
● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”
Exit quote: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”
In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I paid $4.09 for gas today, which is extremely high for Knoxville. It was $3.69 just a few days ago, which was also unusually high for Knoxville.
EVERGREEN: New Sino-Russian Pact Threatens U.S.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
RON DESANTIS RACKS UP QUITE THE BIPARTISAN ENDORSEMENT: ‘Pinnacle of hypocrisy has been achieved!’ Guess where the Dem Governors Assn. is having a meeting.
GALLUP ON RUSSIA: Most Americans realize the 80s called — and Biden didn’t answer. “Looks like we’ve achieved nearly a full consensus on Mitt Romney’s vindication — even before Russia invaded Ukraine. A Gallup poll conduced between February 1-17 shows anger rising rapidly toward Russia, across all political denominations. It had already gotten bad shortly after Barack Obama’s 2012 bon mot to Romney that ‘the 80s called and they want their foreign policy back,’ but Vladimir Putin’s aggression has turned it into a consensus even before the first shot was fired.”
OUT ON A LIMB: Putin was playing Biden all along.
CHANGE: Target lifts mask requirement for employees and shoppers. “Mega retailer Target announced Wednesday that it would rescind its mask mandate that applied to both employees and shoppers, joining a growing number of stores scaling back their masking rules.”
According to Business Insider last month, the analytics firm Numerator “found that Target’s typical shopper is a white suburban mother between 35 and 44 years old. She typically has some college or a 4-year degree education with a household income of $80,000.” Evidently, Target’s no longer worried that she’s going to get the vapors in 2022 over her fellow shoppers or the local store clerks walking about without a mask.
BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Peggy Noonan: Where Putin Goes From Here. The war is uncharted territory. We don’t know how far he plans to go, but he isn’t stopping soon.
CTRL-F “Biden” brings up zero results in Noonan’s column, appropriately enough.
ZELENSKY TO PUTIN: I’m no Nazi — I’m Jewish. “Putin’s address and justification wasn’t meant for Western ears. It was aimed at Russians and ethnic-Russian Ukrainians with long memories and long grudges from World War II. In the run-up to World War II, Ukraine — which at the time did not include as much ethnic-Russian territory — had suffered through the Holodomor, a deliberate genocidal famine imposed by Joseph Stalin. The Soviet leader wanted to suppress the kulaks, but more importantly the western-leaning Ukrainians that chafed at the Soviet occupation. Estimates of casualties from the imposed famine of 1932-33 runs as high as 3.9 million. By June 1933, 28,000 people were dying each day, while the Soviets expropriated millions of tons of Ukrainian wheat. As a result, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in his surprise war of June 1941, ethnic Ukrainians rallied around the Germans as liberators — but only at first. Rather than take advantage of the Ukrainian hatred for the Soviets, the Nazis imposed the same racial policies in Ukraine that they imposed on other Slavs in eastern Europe. Still, some collaboration took place among ethnic Ukrainians, and that has not been forgotten among Russians.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN PRIORITIES: Joy Behar Frets Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Will Harm Her Vacation Plans.
Behar then voiced her concern about how it could force her to further put off a dream trip to Italy:
You know, you just plan a trip. You want to go there, want to go to Italy for four years, and I haven’t been able to make it because of the pandemic, and now this. You know, it’s, like, what’s going to happen there too?
A few moments later, Behar became unhinged and suggested that “people on the right in this country are on Putin’s side[.]” She built off of that and wondered if they were being paid off, asking, “What are they making a lot of money over there?”
Dear Mister President Vladimir Putin… pic.twitter.com/LbDFBHVWJf
— AnnaLynne McCord (@IAMannalynnemcc) February 24, 2022
As Iowahawk tweets, “If somehow Putin is arrested and convicted of war crimes, let’s put this on continuous loop in his prison cell,” adding, “Gotta say this is some heretofore undiscovered region of the hot-crazy matrix.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Biden extends the national pandemic emergency first declared in March 2020.
—The New York Times, Saturday.
● White House overhauling COVID strategy as nation moves out of pandemic crisis.
—ABC, today.
● CDC to update masking guidance as soon as Friday. “The new metrics would allow less masking for most of the U.S. population, and would suggest universal masking only in places being hit hardest by the virus.”
—Axios, today.
Old and busted: follow the science. The new hotness? Provide triage to sinking poll numbers, and have some talking points for the Sunday talk shows that don’t involve Ukraine.
NORTH CAROLINA’S DEM. GOVERNOR VETOES BILL THAT WOULD END MASK REQUIREMENTS AT SCHOOLS: “The veto comes a week after [Gov. Roy] Cooper encouraged school systems and local governments to remove mask mandates.”
COLD WAR II: Putin is Lucky to Have a Friend in Chinese President Xi Jinping. “It’s always good to know that your friend has your back in a fight. The Chinese government issued a statement on Thursday blaming the conflict in Ukraine on the United States and NATO while piously asking Putin to respect the sovereignty and national borders of Ukraine. The Chinese then went ahead and purchased several billion dollars of wheat from Moscow and approved a multi-billion dollar purchase of Russian gas. China, which has very little in the way of gas and oil reserves, appears poised to blunt NATO sanctions on the Russian oil and gas industries by purchasing all they can handle. And Putin’s friends in Beijing will no doubt find a way to evade the sanctions on Russia’s banks to keep the economy above water.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Biden Warns Russia That If They Don’t Stop He Will Deploy Deadly Trans Admiral.
Apparently Brandon has learned nothing from his Afghanistan debacle:
Related: “These are not serious people:” Check out all the Woke Cultists’ reactions to the Ukraine invasion.
WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Secret Service says it can’t find Hunter Biden travel records for 2010, 2011, or 2013.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Can’t find.” LOL. Sure.
NO NEED TO RUSH INTO ANYTHING: Biden: Wait Another Month or So to See if Sanctions Are Working. “It’s not clear that President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian armed forces have another month. Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting over control of Antonov Airfield, just 15 minutes from Kyiv. The Ukrainians are trying to hold off the Russians at Hostomel airport outside Kyiv. The Russian forces are attempting to secure Kyiv as quickly as possible – and if the Russians get control of those airfields, they can fly in a lot more reinforcements.”
H.D. MILLER: Yelp Must Die!
Yet, complaining about yelpers says nothing of the fact that, in half of America, the Red Lobster is Yelp’s highest-rated restaurant. Nor does it say anything about the fact that Yelp, like the Japanese Yakuza, has essentially been guilty of extorting money from restaurants. Those are just two of the many crimes of Yelp.
Ultimately, however, the biggest problem is that Yelp overly democratizes criticism. It take a minor art, restaurant criticism, and turns it into a free-for-all of worthless opinion. Instead of sipping a civilized cocktail, you’re drinking swill from a firehose.
Writing good criticism, even restaurant criticism, isn’t something anyone can do. Not many people can write well, and most who do, don’t have the critical sense or sufficient taste to be good at criticism. Worse, we live in a moment when intelligent criticism, as a skill, has collapsed across the board. Almost no one seems to know anything about music, books, art, architecture, or movies. The premium for knowledge is at an all-time low. The market for criticism has gone bankrupt, and sites like Yelp helped it get there by flooding the internet with cheap shite.
Yes, for all I know, there may be great critics on Yelp, writing brilliant reviews at this very moment, but I’ll never find them because the signal-to-noise ratio is so terrible. As far as I can see, the tag “Elite Yelper” should be a scarlet letter.
Sadly, restaurant criticism is virtually dead as an art form. It was never particularly robust, but it’s next to useless now. Yelp detroyed it. And we, in turn, must now destroy Yelp.
Yelp must die.
Read the whole thing.