Related: The Coming Covid Apocalypse. “Something is going to break this weekend and it is not going to be pretty. LA County health officialdom has no credibility left to lose, so if they try to actually enforce anything the most likely outcome will be more than simply ignoring it. I dare them to go into a pub and start writing tickets when the crowd is three beers into the game. Or imagine you are an usher in the stadium, charged by some official, and you have to ask someone to leave because they finished their popcorn ten minutes ago and their mask is still down. That’ll make for interesting television between the plays. For certain they are going to look extremely foolish on global television.”
FLASHBACK: Prince Performs “Purple Rain” During Downpour during the Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show (video).
Exit quote from Bruce Rodgers, the halftime show’s production designer:
The morning of the game, I opened the curtains in my hotel room, and I was like, “Oh my god, it was like a scene from Moby Dick.” It was, like, the winds were blowing, the palm trees, and the rain was one of those Miami rainstorms that just would not relent.
We’re in this truck, sitting behind Don Mischer [the halftime show’s producer]. And I remember Don said, um, “Put me on the phone with Prince.” Don says, “Now, I want you know it’s raining,” and Prince [was] like, “Yes, it’s raining.” [Don continued] “And are you okay?” And Prince is like, “Can you make it rain harder?”
…but check back with them in a month and they might be speaking differently.
For now, one glance at this result from YouGov will show you why Joe Biden was scrupulously noncommittal when asked by Lester Holt a few days ago whether it’s time for mask mandates to go away. Democratic politicians know they need to roll back restrictions as we transition to endemic COVID. They learned the hard way in Virginia what can happen at the polls when they drag their feet on getting back to normal.
But their base really, really doesn’t want to.
* * * * * * * *
Having spent two years convincing themselves that maximum COVID precautions at all times is the ne plus ultra of civic virtue, Democrats will now have to somehow accept that abandoning that view doesn’t amount to sinking into right-wing vice. Essentially, they’ll need to be deprogrammed. Biden and his party’s establishment have less than nine months to do it.
The genesis of the commercial did not begin with the computer company. The advertising firm Chiat/Day had a germ of an idea; with the year 1984 looming, they wanted to cut a commercial that personified George Orwell’s novel of the same name/year. The issue was they did not have a client for their idea, but unlike the monolithic agencies in New York, Chiat/Day was headquartered in Los Angeles and as a result of that proximity to the studio system, they were used to pitching and auditions.
The agency was rebuffed by a number of companies, but their idea in search of a product was seen as a perfect fit by Apple head Steve Jobs. For one, he had a new product that would be unrolled in January of the coming year – the MacIntosh personal computer. Another fit for his company was that the biggest competitor in the computing sector was IBM, a market leader so big there was not any competition. Jobs viewed the company as the nefarious Big Brother, and his emerging alternate system could be positioned as the rebellious force.
Jobs wanted a big splash for his new computer, and so, a budget became no problem. Pegged at an already eye-widening budget for its time, the initial outlay of $750,000 swelled to $900,000, and it makes sense that this would be a one-minute production to rival Hollywood standards. Considering the dystopian nature of the material, a motion picture director was tabbed for the shoot. Ridley Scott had recently released his future-noir sci-fi thriller “Blade Runner,” and was hired to deliver the message of an iconoclastic product. His vision was clear and distinct, as we see the storyboards from the conception are very close to the finished product.
* * * * * * * *
The entire Apple corporate board hated the commercial. One member called for the Chiat/Day agency to be fired, and the board decided not to run the commercial during the Super Bowl, telling the ad team to sell off their time slots. A full minute had been purchased in the game’s third quarter, and a second slot for an edited, 30-second version was to run late in the game. But the agency’s CEO Jay Chiat took a defiant position.
Read the whole thing. 15 years ago there was the coda to the 1984 ad — the callback that Obama’s operatives produced, which was the first salvo to torpedo Hillary’s 2008 presidential bid:
Of course, as now know, both Hillary and Obama read Orwell’s book as a how-to guide:
RUSSIA COULD HIT U.S. CHIP INDUSTRY, WHITE HOUSE WARNS: “The White House is warning the chip industry to diversify its supply chain in case Russia retaliates against threatened U.S. export curbs by blocking access to key materials, people familiar with the matter said. The potential for retaliation has garnered more attention in recent days after Techcet, a market research group, published a report on Feb. 1 highlighting the reliance of many semiconductor manufacturers on Russian and Ukrainian-sourced materials like neon, palladium and others. According to Techcet estimates, over 90% of U.S. semiconductor-grade neon supplies come from Ukraine, while 35% of U.S. palladium is sourced from Russia.”
Remember ‘Defund the Police’? It was the slogan du jour of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was being hollered on every street during the protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota cop Derek Chauvin. In those riotous days in the summer of 2020, everyone seemed to be waving a placard or wearing a t-shirt demanding defunding. The entire in-crowd posted those three words on their social-media accounts. Even here in the UK, where cops aren’t armed and where the police-funding model is very different to America’s, the right-on lined up behind the vague, strange call for police forces to be starved of funds. A headline in the impeccably middle-class Guardian declared: ‘The answer to police violence is not “reform”. It’s defunding.’
Yet now, ‘Defund the Police’ seems to be a fast fading idea. You don’t hear it very much anymore. It might linger among the white antifa oafs who stomp around in cities like Portland and among well-to-do radical students on quiet, handsome campuses in the UK where there’s very rarely any need to call the cops. But on the streets, in politics, in the press, ‘Defund’ seems to have fizzled out. The old woke roar is barely a whimper now. And it isn’t hard to see why. This slogan has proven lethal. It has been an unmitigated disaster in numerous US cities. The cutting of cops’ budgets did not give rise to the new dawn of flowery peace and racial justice that the virtue-signalling defunders fantasised it would. On the contrary, it helped to stoke violent crime, further destabilise city life, and make life even harder for poor black and brown communities in particular. The lesson here is clear: wokeness kills.
The idea of ‘Defund the Police’ has been around for a couple of decades. But it exploded into public view following the killing of Floyd in May 2020. It’s a simple-sounding proposition: you take public money away from police departments that are too often heavy-handed and racially prejudiced and plough it instead into fairer non-policing forms of ‘public safety’, like mental healthcare, youth services, improvements to housing, and so on. And hey presto, there’ll be fewer trigger-happy cops on the streets and more happy citizens no longer tussling with mental problems and crappy living conditions. The reality, of course, as could have been predicted by anyone who doesn’t live in a gated community and get all their news from the New York Times, has been rather different.
Democrats, panicking over their crumbling chances to maintain control of the House or Senate after the midterm elections in November, are casting about desperately for a way to alter the dynamic of the campaign and give themselves hope for a miracle.
he most recent generic congressional poll has Republicans up by six points — a number that would turn the midterms into a slaughterhouse for Democrats. And with Biden’s favorability equally underwater, Democrats know they have to do something in a hurry if they’re going to turn in a respectable midterm showing, much less maintain control of Congress.
With the State of the Union speech coming up on March 1, a growing number of Democrats are pointing to that date to begin the turnaround. They are urging President Biden to consider the bold move of lifting all mandates and restrictions that are within his power to do so.
“Not since the collapse of the Hindenburg Line in 1918 have such bitterly held positions been abandoned so quickly,” as the BattleSwarm blog noted recently.
According to the media, the Canadian truckers, and their imitators around the globe, are protesting COVID vaccine mandates. That’s only part of their complaint. They don’t like the government ordering them to inject substances into their bodies that have not been shown to be safe (or effective), made by drug companies that are protected from liability for years.
But the standoff is more basic. It is like the standoff between the American colonists and the British authorities in the late 1760s and early 1770s. That standoff turned on the question “Who rules?” So, ultimately, does the conflict between the established regimes and the truckers and other protestors. Legitimacy does not proceed from the barrel of a gun, although Western “democracies” everywhere seem to have ignored the lessons of history. Consider this scene from Paris, where the police just savagely beat a protestor. Juliette Kayyem, a CNN contributor, Harvard professor (of course it would be Harvard) and Obama’s former assistant secretary of homeland security for intergovernmental affairs, suggested on Twitter that Canadian police should “slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers” of the protesting truckers. (As one internet wit observed, it would be amusing to watch what would happen should she manage to slash a 100-psi steel-belted tire on an 18-wheel rig.)
There are several ironies regarding the Canadian chapter of this uprising against the self-appointed elites who wish to rule us. For one thing, although Canadian officialdom is bemoaning the fact that the truckers had, in effect, closed the U.S.-Canada border, Trudeau had essentially sealed the border between the two countries for more than a year. The Babylon Bee captured this side of the situation brilliantly with a story headlined “Trudeau Demands Protesters Stop Shutting Down City So That He Can Shut Down City.”
Consider one of big businesses’ oft ignored crimes against society; the soulless art frequently featured in their ads, often derisively referred to as corporate flat art, corporate Memphis, or even Big Tech Art. It’s everywhere, from The New York Times to Facebook to the popular dating app Hinge. It’s visible in The New Yorker, YouTube, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and a litany of other organizations and companies.
When I queued up music and sat down to write this, I was bombarded with an ugly array of gangly armed flat people telling me that Google Fi is a “phone plan that can.” I’m even personally haunted by the specter of flat art whenever I enter my university’s gym.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc2RJwC1e7U
This unsettling ubiquity has given rise to a subreddit that’s dubbed it “globohomo art,” an abbreviation of “global homogenization.” Commenters condemn it as a style “mostly used by large companies and sociopolitical organizations that push for a globalized and homogenized society devoid of social and cultural identity.” While its widespread use and sheer ugliness has opened it to criticism and mockery, it’s struck a chord not simply for what it looks like, but for what it represents.
Last year, in one of his weekly “Wednesday Review of Modern Thought” segments at the Bleat, James Lileks was succinct in describing this form of corporate art: “It’s every big editorial page / feature page / magazine illustration. I noted this style a while ago, and was instantly annoyed by it. It’s Colorforms Totalitarianism.”
Authorities in New Zealand have been playing Barry Manilow’s greatest hits in an attempt to dislodge protesters camped outside the parliament building.
Songs by the US singer are being played on a 15-minute loop, along with the Spanish dance tune, Macarena.
The demonstrators, who are angry at Covid-19 vaccine mandates, responded by playing songs such as Twisted Sister’s We’re Not Gonna Take It.
Part of the reason this wisdom hasn’t been applied to the coaching world is due to absurd racial quota systems like the “Rooney Rule” in the NFL, which forces teams to interview at least one black candidate for any major coaching or executive vacancy.
The absurdity of this practice can be illustrated by simply applying it to NFL roster vacancies. Imagine if every NFL team were forced to invite a white cornerback into training camp every season. No NFL team has started a white cornerback since Jason Sehorn in 2002. A white cornerback who fulfilled a team’s obligation under a “Sehorn Rule” would feel insecure and teammates would feel resentful, even if the player was qualified for the position and seriously considered for the job.
This is not a defense of the NFL. The league brought this upon themselves when they jumped in bed with the social justice radicals after the Kaepernick saga and doubled down after the George Floyd/BLM riots. They deserve this lawsuit and everything that’s coming to them.
The rest of America would do well to abandon the obsession with racial optics and skin-deep assessments of our fellow countrymen, or we’re heading toward the all-out racial conflict that the radical left seems obsessed with fomenting.
By former New England Patriot Jake Bequette, Read the whole thing.
Trudeau is the fascist willing to destroy innocent people’s livelihoods to enforce immoral laws.
Trudeau is the gangster ready to commit violence rather than admit he is wrong.
If you want to know why Trudeau has been forced into hiding and why he serially melts down into a puddle of fecklessness in public, it’s because he is wrong. It’s that simple. He has no moral ground to stand on, which is why he’s attempted to manufacture it with lies about “racists” and “swastikas.” But in this ongoing civil rights standoff, everyone knows the bottom-line question is this…
How far is Trudeau willing to go to enforce a mandate for a vaccine that doesn’t even stop the spread of the coronavirus? How much violence is he willing to commit? How many livelihoods is he willing to annihilate for a vaccine that doesn’t even stop you from catching the virus?
Not that the success of the vaccine matters. Even if the vaccine did eradicate the virus, his stance would be just as immoral, but now that we know the vaccine does not stop the transmission, his stand looks especially foolish.
Like George Wallace and his fellow Democrat Bull Connor and all the Democrats who created and enforced Jim Crow, Trudeau is a bully checkmated by his own immoral choices.
Related: Freelance Journalist Did the One Thing the Liberal Media Has Failed to Do Regarding Canada’s Freedom Truckers. “If the elites ventured out and spoke with these people, it would take all of 10 minutes to see that this is a peaceful protest—and maybe there are points aplenty about how Canada’s COVID policy is a disaster. The same goes for the United States. The folks telling these people’s stories can be found on Substack. Rupa Subramanya, a freelance writer, had a lengthy post about the freedom truckers. She spoke to some 100 truckers, maybe more, and found that a) they’re not Nazis, b) they have legitimate reasons to be against the vaccination policy, and c) they’re not going anywhere.”
To be fair, not all the economic news is bad for President Biden.
For example, we did recently see very high levels of economic growth in 2021. However, that’s likely more of a “bounce back” from the massive pandemic dip in 2020 than a reflection of true growth from sound economic policy.
Similarly, the unemployment rate has ticked down to just 4%, which isn’t bad at all. Yet this only counts those seeking work. The Democrats’ massive welfare spending and continued closure of schools have led to millions of Americans dropping out of the labor force entirely, a key problem not captured by the decent-seeming unemployment rate.
Add this context to surging inflation and declining real wages and whatever spin the president has put on this economy quickly falls apart. Nonetheless, the president keeps insisting that “the Biden economic plan is working.”
Selfridges is to offer sex therapy and drug-free “psychedelic trips” in the luxury department store’s latest gambit to tempt shoppers back into stores.
From 28 February, the retailer, which has outlets in Manchester, Birmingham and London, will offer the headline-grabbing services as part of its Superself event, which it claims “takes visitors on a journey of uplifting self-discovery and nurturing self-care”.
The therapy sessions are being provided in partnership with The Stack World, a women-focused online media outlet that was spun out of the Beautystack beauty marketplace founded by the former stylist Sharmadean Reid.
The 45-minute £150 “sex life reboot” is being led by Dr Karen Gurney, a clinical psychologist and psycho-sexologist who promises “to evaluate and reset a couple’s or an individual’s sex life through a Sex Life MOT”. Other options include a £50 confidence coaching session or £99 “creative breakthrough” meeting with a hypnotherapist.
On the one hand, this is pretty much the 21st century I was promised as a kid, but on the other, I’m pretty sure Blade Runner and Logan’s Run were meant to be warnings, not how-to guides.
The radio show is called The Left vs. The Right. I guess Sliwa is “the right”? Well, it’s about time Weiner got to co-host a show. I always thought he and Eliot Spitzer should team up. C’mon, wouldn’t you tune in for Weiner/Spitzer?
“I am not going back into public life, I am doing a radio show with a friend of mine,” he exclusively tells Page Six. He added, “It’s not a conscious decision,” before joking to us, “I have a face for radio, but I don’t know if I have a place in radio as a career. Sometimes it is what it is.”
I gotta admit, I’m Weiner-curious. I’ll be listening to WABC online tomorrow to hear what he has to say. Everybody deserves a 22nd chance!
It’s a mark of how badly Bill de Blasio ran Manhattan into the ground, that it’s possible to make a pretty good case that Carlos Danger, aligned as he was with the (comparatively) moderate Clinton wing of the Democrat party, would have been a far better (read: less destructive) mayor, had not, err, things came to a head in 2013.
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