Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
February 17, 2022
JULIE BURCHILL GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Why do we miss the ’80s? Because they were the last blast of freedom before our age of eternal wokedom.
COMMIE BLAMING HOARDERS AND WRECKERS AGAIN: Bernie Sanders Pushes Anti-Capitalist Conspiracy Theory About Gas Prices.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: NFL Hires Obama-Era Attorney General Loretta Lynch To Fight Brian Flores’ Discrimination Lawsuit. “In his lawsuit against the NFL, Flores is accusing the organization of pervasive racial bias and has named three teams — the Broncos, Dolphins and New York Giants — as defendants. Now, in quite a twist, it will be Lynch, the first black woman appointed to head the Justice Department, who will be defending Roger Goodell’s shield and those who’ve been accused of racial bias in hiring practices…In his CBS interview [Wednesday], Mr. Flores was asked if ‘clubs have the right to hire the person they think is the best qualified for the job or the person they feel is right for them?’ Mr. Flores responded, ‘They do. That’s very reasonable to me…’ That is exactly what we did.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Nation Prepares To Celebrate 2nd Anniversary Of Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported. Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark.
WORLD WAR III BEGAN WHEN A MAN NAMED ALBERT SHANKER GOT HOLD OF A NUCLEAR WARHEAD: What the COVID-19 Pandemic Reveals About Baby Boomers.
Today, perhaps no leader bears more responsibility for inflicting harm on children than Randi Weingarten, who was born in 1957 and is president of the American Federation of Teachers. In July 2020, Weingarten backed an AFT resolution endorsing local “safety strikes” as a tool to advocate for greater COVID mitigation in the classroom. Weingarten admitted in a radio interview that same month that “there’s no way that you’re going to have full-time school for all the kids and all the teachers the way we used to have it.” She shamelessly added, “Once there’s a vaccine, I hope we can get back to that.”
Now that there is widespread access to the vaccine, which studies show prevents serious illness but is less effective at stopping infection or transmission, Weingarten is refocusing her energy on keeping schoolchildren masked until COVID cases reach zero. Evidence suggests that forcing children to learn while covered in a soggy and contaminated piece of cloth robs them of the ability to read social and verbal cues critical to their development. Children are also not prone to getting seriously sick from COVID.
Exit quote: “While the Baby boomers’ terrible treatment of our nation’s youth stretches back decades, history will not look kindly upon the adults whose demands during the pandemic led to children suffering the most. The Greatest Generation would be disappointed. Let’s hope Generation X has the conviction and strength necessary to lead American children out of a mess they unfairly inherited.”
Related: In Leaked Audio, CDC’s Rochelle Walensky Privately Confirms She Won’t Relax School Mask Guidance.
(Classical reference in headline.)
February 16, 2022
FERRARI REINVENTS MANIFEST DESTINY: P.J. O’Rourke Drives Cross-Country in a Ferrari 308GTS.
When we got to Atlanta, the band in the hotel bar was the worst thing we’d ever heard. But it didn’t matter. Nothing could cloud our outlook. Brock Adams and Joe Califano could have sat down at our table. Ralph Nader himself would have been welcome, so infected were we with the spirit of vast superiority to the humdrum concerns of daily life that the Ferrari confers, or something like that. I mean this car does one thing. It makes you happy, really happy.
And the car did one more thing for me. It reaffirmed my belief in America. It may sound strange to say that a $45,000 Italian sports car reaffirmed my belief in America, but, as I said, it’s all part of Western civilization and here we were in America, the apogee of that fine trend in human affairs.
And, after all, what have we been getting civilized for, all these centuries? Why did we fight all those wars, conquer all those nations, take over all that Western Hemisphere? Why, for this! For this perfection of knowledge and craft. For this conquest of the physical elements. For this sense of mastery of man over nature. To be in control of our destinies—and there is no more profound feeling of control over one’s destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast. And if the lowly Italians, the lamest, silliest, least stable of our NATO allies, can build a machine like this, just think what it is that we can do. We can smash the atom. We can cure polio. We can fly to the moon if we like. There is nothing we can’t do. Maybe we don’t happen to build Ferraris, but that’s not because there’s anything wrong with America. We just haven’t turned the full light of our intelligence and ability in that direction. We were, you know, busy elsewhere. We may not have Ferraris, but just think what our Polaris-missile submarines are like. And, if it feels like this in a Ferrari at 130, my God, what can it possibly feel like at Mach 2.5 in an F-15? Ferrari 308s and F-15s—these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?
RIP. Needless to say, read the whole thing. The ending is a hoot, too:
But the story ends on a sad note. The movie that this incredible car traveled all that way to be in will be called Don’t Eat the Snow from Hawaii, so maybe Western civilization hasn’t quite been perfected yet.
That was the title of the pilot episode for Magnum P.I. — so evidently, O’Rourke drove Magnum’s Ferrari across the country before it was shipped to Hawaii.
GREAT MOMENTS IN RADICAL CHIC: BLM Louisville posts $100,000 bail for activist who … tried to assassinate Democratic mayoral candidate. “Everyone deserves a defense and a fair trial, but I … can’t help but think LCBF could be more discerning in deciding which potential beneficiaries of scarce bail funds are most worthy. Posting bail for Brown smacks of a publicity stunt or a reward for his prior leftist political activism more so than an attempt to help a defendant with a strong case maximize his chances of getting off. And ironically, it’s apt to become ammunition against the progressive cause of bail reform. The average person will look at Brown being sprung, I suspect, and conclude that the courts are far too lax in granting pretrial release, not too strict by tying freedom to one’s ability to pay.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: Seattle’s Nanny-State Soda Tax Backfired Spectacularly (And Hilariously) New Study Shows. “The good people of Seattle responded to a tax on sugary drinks by buying more beer. So, yes, Seattle’s policy may have successfully burdened its residents with a regressive tax and pushed them away from their first choice drinks. But it’s not at all apparent that it actually ‘improved the health of Seattle residents.’ Indeed, alcohol consumption carries a wide range of negative health consequences. And calorie-rich beer can actually contribute to obesity, the very problem this tax was supposed to address.”
MORE LIKE THIS PLEASE: San Francisco Voters Fire Three School Board Members.
One of the most definitive conclusions about the recall is that the “blame Donald Trump” strategy just will not work anymore for embattled Democratic politicians. Yes, it helped Newsom survive his recall last September, but it backfired on McAuliffe and proved to be an exploding cigar in San Francisco. When asked by the Chronicle why she should not be recalled, Collins immediately replied: “People need to follow the money and see that billionaires are coming in and trying to dictate how we should do democracy.” So much for that.
Mayor London Breed will now appoint the three new SFUSD board members to replace the recalled incumbents. Much of the city’s focus is already turning to the next recall election, that of controversial District Attorney Chesa Boudin. There is a palpable feeling that the aggressive, abstract, race-based jargon of progressive elites will no longer suffice in even Democratic places where voters have become motivated to act on the very many governing shortfalls visible to the naked eye.
“I’ve always thought of myself as progressive, but I don’t use that label anymore to describe myself,” [recall co-organizer and SFUSD parent Siva Raj] told me Monday. “Because when I see the people who call themselves progressive, and I especially see the elected leaders calling themselves progressive, they don’t seem to stand for any of the values that I believe what progressive should be. It is not progressive to stand back and do nothing while the most underprivileged kids in our city have struggled and suffered the most….It is not progressive to put your own political career above the interest of the people you’re supposed to serve. That is not progressive. All that I can see is that the movement that perhaps started with a lot of idealists in the ’60s and the ’70s and ’80s, is now filled with opportunists who only care about using progressive language to advance their careers, but have no interest, no desire, to actually solve the real problems that our kids are facing today.”
To be fair, an obsession with racialist identity politics and burning down functioning institutions were hallmarks of the original “Progressives,” but it’s good to see there are limits to what even San Francisco parents will tolerate.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Nation Prepares To Celebrate 2nd Anniversary Of Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve.
JAMES LILEKS ON P.J. O’ROURKE:
I saw a tweet that had a picture of P. J. O’Rourke in the 70s, and smiled, wondering why someone had posted it – and then a flood of oh no tweets. A few said there was no confirmation, no news stories, it was actually someone else, and for a while I thought that was possible. Texted a few people who would know, and had it confirmed. I mean, when it comes from the publicist, it’s real. Unless the publicist is really trying to get the client’s attention. See what I did? You’re trending!
It’s wretched. He was an idol, a GOD when I was reading NatLamp and Rolling Stone, and the idea that I would ever get to know him and hang out would have seemed absurd. Oh right and S. J. Perelman is going to come back to life and pull up in an elegant car with brass appointments, and pick you up, and swing ‘round to get Fran and Woody and you’ll all go to Elaine’s. (That would have been my idea of a humorist conclave on Mt. Olympus back then.)
The last time I saw him, he was in town, and we went outside the hotel where he was speaking and sat down and enjoyed the warm summer Minneapolis night. Clean town, bright lights, a good sane place. We talked about Toledo and other towns of lesser size, about our parents’ generation, about our misspent years and journeys to other notions.
He was a boon companion, as smart as he was funny, and vice versa. I have a bottle of his preferred libation and opened it tonight and toasted his book on the shelf. It sits with the greats. And it puts half of them to shame.
As Kyle Smith writes, “Assuming the smart people are wrong may not work for you every day, but you can definitely fill your tank with it and go. Of Enron, in 2002, O’Rourke wrote, ‘Everyone blames too little regulation for the Enron mess, but maybe the culprit was too much.’ Of how corruption in politics works, he wrote, ‘A chilling characteristic of politicians is that they’re not in it for the money.’ Of Bangladesh, he wrote, in All the Trouble in the World, ‘If overpopulation is something to worry about and if Bangladesh’s degree of crowding constitutes overpopulation, then Fremont [Calif.] should be a worry, too. In fact, with 2,250 people per square mile compared to Bangladesh’s 2,130, Fremont is slightly more worrisome.’”
DISPATCHES FROM THOSE CRAZY RIGHT-WING PARENTS IN…SAN FRANCISCO? S.F. school board recall: Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga ousted.
“We faced the hardest time of our entire lives as parents and as students in public schools and this Board of Education focused on issues that weren’t about dealing with the immediate crisis of the day, and they didn’t show the leadership that that was necessary and that parents needed to hear, and that kids needed to hear,” said Ronen.
At least a hundred recall backers had gathered in the back room of Manny’s Cafe in the Mission District on Tuesday night.
“This is what happens when you try to rename the schools in the middle of a pandemic!” exclaimed David Thompson a.k.a “Gaybraham” Lincoln, an SFUSD parent dressed in head-to-toe rainbow drag and towering platform shoes, who described his persona as a form of protest. “We wanted to show the diversity of the community behind this recall. I knew they were going to say, ‘Oh isn’t it just a bunch of Republicans?’ and I’m like, do I look like a Republican?”
Within the next few weeks, Mayor London Breed is expected to appoint replacements to finish out the commissioners’ terms, which end in early January 2023. To remain in office, the replacements would have to run in the upcoming November election, but would have an edge as incumbents. The three were the only school board members eligible to be recalled.
“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” Breed said in a statement. “There are many critical decisions in the coming months — addressing a significant budget deficit, hiring a new Superintendent, and navigating our emergence from this pandemic … The school district has a lot of work to do.”
Flashbacks:
● San Francisco to rename Abraham Lincoln High School because ‘black lives didn’t matter to him.’
● Why San Francisco’s School Board Recall May Be One Of 2022’s Most Important Elections. “On February 15, San Francisco’s majority-liberal residents will decide the fate of three far-left school board members who face recall. The outcome of this local election will have national implications, indicating how much Asian Americans, the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the nation, are shifting away from the Democrat Party.”
(Bumped.)
SKYNET CHUCKLES: The US government is deploying robot dogs to the Mexico border. Seriously?
The military, technological, security and political classes in this country appear united in their desire to make robot dogs part of our future, and we should all be worried.
The latest example came on 1 February, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a press release titled “Robot Dogs Take Another Step Towards Deployment at the Border”. DHS dressed up their statement with the kind of adorable language made to warm the hearts of dog lovers everywhere. “The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is offering US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) a helping hand (or ‘paw’),” read the release. Isn’t that cute? A picture of the “four-legged ground drone” accompanied the release, and the “Automated Ground Surveillance Vehicle”, as it’s called, looked remarkably (and scarily) similar to the monstrous quadrupeds seen in the Black Mirror episode. But let’s not judge based on appearance. The real issue is that we keep rushing to militarized and technological solutions to what ultimately are human and political questions, creating more problems along the way.
These particular robot dogs are made by Ghost Robotics, which claims that its 100lb machine was “bred” to scale “all types of natural terrain including sand, rocks and hills, as well as human-built environments, like stairs”. Each robot dog is outfitted with a bevy of sensors and able to transmit real-time video and information feeds. The devices are not yet in operation on the US-Mexico border, but a testing and evaluation program is under way in El Paso, Texas.
To listen to DHS, it all sounds so utterly charming and so very next-gen – until you realize that what we’re talking about is the further encroachment of government surveillance on our daily lives. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, “people who live along the border are some of the most heavily surveilled people in the United States. A massive amalgamation of federal, state and local law enforcement and national security agencies are flying drones, putting up cameras and just generally attempting to negate civil liberties – capturing the general goings-on of people who live and work in proximity to the border.”
As one Twitter wag suggests, “A new business for the cartels: steal the robot dogs and sell them to the Chinese for reverse engineering.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Don’t Trust Movies Named ‘Munich.’
This anti-Churchill thesis has been embraced by Jeremy Irons, the Oscar-winning British actor who plays Chamberlain. He told Variety: “Churchill was able to write the history of that period afterwards. It’s all very easy to look back at history and see what you want to see. But at the time, I believe Chamberlain followed the right path. He tried to prevent war. He tried to appease Hitler and got an agreement with Hitler that he would go no further. That was a canny thing to do because once Hitler did go further, he was able to say to the country, this man is not to be trusted and we’re going to have to fight him. I think Chamberlain should be praised for his pragmatic behavior. We shouldn’t view the Munich Agreement simply as the appeasement of a weak man who was fooled by Hitler. It’s the wrong way to look at it.”
* * * * * * * *
Chamberlain clearly did believe that he had made peace with Hitler, as did the English elite who cheered him in Parliament when he returned. And we must therefore understand why Churchill saw what so many others missed. The most interesting character in Munich is an aide to Hitler who as a student was enthusiastic about the “new Germany” and then becomes revolted by it. The role is based on Adam von Trott, who later attempted to assassinate Hitler. In the movie, it is the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews that wakes this young man to the danger posed by Hitler. This ironically highlights what is elided in the film. As Andrew Roberts has noted, the Anglo elite refused to fully face up to the horrors of Hitlerism because many of them cared so little for the fate of the Jews of Germany.
There is a reason, Roberts notes, that Churchill saw what his countrymen did not: “Churchill’s philo-Semitism, so rare on the Tory benches, was invaluable in allowing him to see sooner than anyone else the true nature of the Nazi regime.” This, Roberts writes, further highlights what set Churchill apart: “Despite being the son of a chancellor of the Exchequer and the grandson of a duke, he was a contrarian and an outsider. He even refused to subscribe to the clubland anti-Semitism that was a social glue for much of the Respectable Tendency, but instead was an active Zionist. The reason his contemporaries saw him as profoundly perverse is because he truly was.”
Jews therefore have a special stake in seeing that the depiction of Munich and its aftermath are true and correct. This does not mean that a statesman must always prefer war to the alternative; Churchill himself famously opined that “it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.” But one central lesson of Munich—the conference, not the movie—is that it is essential to recognize when evil exists, and it is precisely in this area that Chamberlain failed so profoundly. This year, we mark the 50th anniversary of another morally shameful moment in Munich: when, after the brutal murder of Israel’s athletes by terrorists, the Olympics went on as normal with the international community evincing little concern. We are therefore especially obligated by history to focus on, and celebrate, the heroes in history who understood the motivations of evil men when so few did.
Munich: The Edge of War currently has a 6.9 rating at IMDB, and a 78% audience share at Rotten Tomatoes, so fortunately, viewers have been able to see through the revisionism the filmmakers are attempting.
#HIMTOO? Chris Cuomo fired after CNN learned of alleged sex attack during office ‘lunch:’ report.
And if you missed it last night: Allison Gollust Has Resigned from CNN Following Warnermedia Probe of Cuomo, Zucker.
February 15, 2022
ALLISON GOLLUST HAS RESIGNED FROM CNN FOLLOWING WARNERMEDIA PROBE OF CUOMO, ZUCKER:
Allison Gollust, the chief marketing officer at CNN, has resigned from the network following a WarnerMedia investigation into “issues associated with Chris Cuomo and former Governor Andrew Cuomo,” according to a memo from Jason Kilar, the company’s CEO.
“Performed by a third-party law firm and led by a former federal judge, the investigation was comprehensive and definitive. It was commissioned in September and concluded this weekend, which now allows me to share additional information with you,” Kilar said. ” Based on interviews of more than 40 individuals and a review of over 100,000 texts and emails, the investigation found violations of Company policies, including CNN’s News Standards and Practices, by Jeff Zucker, Allison Gollust, and Chris Cuomo.”
As The Wrap noted at the start of the month, Gollust, “who had worked with Zucker for decades and rejoined CNN in 2013 as his ‘closest colleague,’ has been identified as the woman with whom Zucker had a ‘consensual relationship’ that he did not disclose to CNN owner AT&T in apparent violation of company policies:”
“Jeff and I have been close friends and professional partners for over 20 years. Recently, our relationship changed during COVID. I regret that we didn’t disclose it at the right time,” Gollust said in a statement on Wednesday. “I’m incredibly proud of my time at CNN, and look forward to continuing the great work we do every day.”
Many media insiders have questioned that the pair’s romance only began in the last two years; Zucker and his wife Caryn Nathanson separated in 2018 and later divorced; Gollust is also divorced from her husband, Tradewell Markets president William Hult. The couple have two children, Olivia and Ava.
In her 2021 memoir “Going There,” Katie Couric recalled how Zucker pressed her to hire Gollust to handle publicity on her short-lived syndicated show “Katie” (2012-14). “I had to wonder why Jeff was angling so hard to bring Allison on board. She and her husband and kids had moved into the apartment right above Jeff and Caryn’s—everyone who heard about their cozy arrangement thought it was super strange,” Couric wrote. “By that point, Caryn (Zucker’s ex-wife) had become a close friend and it made me really uncomfortable.”
According to Zucker himself, Gollust has been his “closest colleague” for two decades now, first at NBCUniversal — where he served as president and chief executive of the company and she was the EVP of corporate communications.
Gollust briefly served as the communications director for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo before rejoining Zucker at CNN shortly after he was named the network’s president in 2013.
As the New York Post reported on February 3rd: Zucker, Gollust’s cozy ties with Andrew Cuomo included coaching him on COVID briefings.
UPDATE: Here we go!
(Updated and bumped.)
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Chinese Media Gloat about PRC Influence on the NBA as Enes Kanter Freedom Is Cut.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Mayor Eric Adams rips press, claims white journalists misrepresent him.
“If you want to acknowledge or not, I have been doing a darn good job and we just can’t live in this alternate reality,” a clearly angered Adams said.
Adams also warned that if the coverage of him doesn’t improve, “I’m just going to come in and do my announcements and bounce.”
Adams repeatedly suggested that race played a factor in news coverage of him, telling an almost all-white group of reporters who were hand-picked by his office and invited to cover the City Hall news conference, “I’m a black man that’s the mayor but my story is being interpreted by people that don’t look like me.”
“How many blacks are on editorial boards? How many blacks determine how these stories are being written?” he said.
“How many Asians? How many East Asians? How many South Asians? Everyone talks about my government being diversified, what’s the diversification in the newsrooms?”
Adams also accused the reporters of “writing through your prisms” before adding: “Diversify your newsrooms so I can look out and see people who look like me.”
The article reads like a scene from Bonfire of the Vanities — it’s good to see the version of the Matrix that Tom Wolfe programmed shortly before his death in 2018 is still running smoothly.
WHERE’S SAMUEL L. JACKSON WHEN YOU NEED HIM? AirAsia flight in Malaysia rerouted after snake found on board plane.
MICHAEL BARONE: Returning to normalcy on school masks.
Are we returning to normalcy?
The word “normalcy,” as history buffs know, was used — but not invented — by our only journalist president, Warren G. Harding, to sum up his 1920 campaign. Normalcy was political shorthand for returning to normal times after a European war, prosecutions of peaceful protesters, sharp inflation and depression, terrorist bombings at home, totalitarian revolutions abroad and a pandemic influenza that killed, proportionately, more than twice as many Americans as COVID-19.
Normalcy was popular, too. Harding won the popular vote 60% to 34%, the largest percentage margin in history. The fighting ended; the economy grew; political protesters were pardoned; revolutionaries slumbered. Harding ushered in a decade of widespread prosperity, technological progress and Republican victories. The appeal of normalcy transcended even the most rigid of party lines.
Normalcy’s appeal is apparent now on the issue of masks in schools. Last week, the Washington Post ran an opinion article by three Massachusetts academic physicians arguing that masks in schools are no longer needed because the few adults at risk can protect themselves.
Masks at school are “an intervention that provides little discernible benefit,” chimed in an Atlantic article by three blue-state professionals. Mandatory masking “should end when coronavirus rates return to pre-Omicron levels,” wrote Brooklyn-based New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.
But there’s a huge group of leftist wine moms who will get a serious case of the vapors if and when that happens: “Jill Filipovic is a progressive writer who’s pro-mask but looking for an off-ramp from having to mask forever. She’s learned the hard way what happens when you share that view with a liberal crowd:”
On the other hand, as Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders used to say as a mantra, think of the children! Watch: The Moment One Elementary School Class Learned Their Mask Mandate Was Ending.
UPDATE: Leader Of California Teachers Union Insists On Masking Children, Attends Rams Game Maskless.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Xi Jinping Criticizes Trudeau’s Heavy-Handed Approach.