HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? The American Dream is on Life Support in the Bay Area:

A year ago I was smirking at the people moving out of the Bay Area. I thought these were fairweather citizens, silly for moving to political train-wrecks like Texas or Florida.

Twelve months on, my wife and I find ourselves packing our life into boxes. Not to run towards a place where we feel greater love, but just to leave. The pendulum has swung hard in the last twelve months.

I didn’t think this change in my mindset would happen, or so quickly. I wanted to share the journey, in part because I’ve been in both camps at various points, and I hope those on most parts of the spectrum will consider this a reasonable, balanced perspective.

RIP: John Madden, beloved NFL coach and broadcaster, dies at 85.

AT THE APEX OF THE PIVOT:

As Greenwald writes in his follow-up tweet, “That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they’d politicize their expertise when convenient. Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests.”

Flashbacks:

● After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.

● NJ governor admits COVID-19 double standard, says recent protests are different from business owners’ complaints.

● De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.

● NPR: Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.

● ‘Did I miss the memo?’: Hospital workers in full PPE applaud George Floyd protesters as they march past.

THE MAKING OF THE BEATLES’ LET IT BE AND PETER JACKSON’S GET BACK:

The project began in Fall 1968, when The Beatles announced to fans that they would play three concerts at London’s Roundhouse, a 1700 capacity venue, in October or November, even before the November 22 release of The Beatles. In late October, Paul McCartney reached out to American-born director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, to ask his help in turning that event into a television special of some kind. Lindsay-Hogg had spent several years directing Associated-Rediffusion TV’s Ready Steady Go! weekly pop music program. The Beatles had hired him in 1966 to film promotional films for their single, “Paperback Writer”/”Rain,” and again, in early September ’68, promo videos for their first Apple single, “Hey Jude”/”Revolution,” at Twickenham Film Studios, in front of an invited audience of 150-200.

Not long after filming the latter, the director moved into The Rolling Stones’ offices on Maddox Street. “I’d already been talking to Mick Jagger about a television special The Stones wanted to do,” he says. Meanwhile, Paul invited him to meet with the four Fabs at Apple, at 3 Saville Row – a four minute walk from The Stones’ office. “When we were doing the promo for ‘Hey Jude,’ between each take, there was about a 10 to 12 minute gap, and, without knowing what else to do, they just started to play some of the go-to songs of the time, old Tamla Motown, etc. And Paul noted at the meeting, ‘You know, we had a good time playing to the audience that day. So we’ve been thinking we could do a television special. Do you want to direct it for us?’ I wasn’t gonna say no to that one.” At further meetings, McCartney suggested shooting documentary footage of them rehearsing for the concert, for, perhaps a half hour teaser TV special to air a week before the show. “No one had ever seen The Beatles rehearsing.”

This is the most detailed article yet I’ve come across on how the intertwined Let It and Get Back projects were produced. There’s a look back at the 16mm film and eight-track recording techniques of 1969. And then how Peter Jackson’s team employed the digital video restoration the had previously used on They Shall Not Grow Old. Plus the cutting edge Machine Audio Learning (abbreviated to MAL, a name inspired by the Beatles’ faithful roadie) was developed to restore and remix the audio, much of which was originally in mono.

MICHAEL WALSH: How the New York Times Abuses the ‘Public’s Right to Know.’

But why was the FBI acting like the Bidens’ private Praetorian Guard in the first place? No one alleges that Ashley Biden’s diary was stolen, and even if it was, so what? A lost diary, even one belonging to yet another troubled Biden offspring, is not a federal case. And in any event, Project Veritas never published the contents of the diary. The FBI investigation was concerned with “how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election.”

As it turns out, the diary was simply left behind in Florida by a “rehabbing” Ashley, where it was found by a third party and offered around to various outlets.

So, on the one hand, the Times is trying to use its (transient?) victory in the Pentagon Papers case to justify publishing legally protected correspondence concerning, among other things, O’Keefe’s lawsuit against the Times as well as the legal boundaries of his “undercover” methods of collecting information. At the same time, it was acting as an agent of the Democrat-controlled U.S. government in collecting and publishing dirt on a rival and political opponent to smear and destroy him.

A final irony is that Times holds freedom of the press to an absolute, Mosaic standard while at the same time attacking freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, not to mention the entire Second Amendment, and supporting imaginary “hate speech” laws that clearly abrogate freedom of the press itself.

In other words, the “public’s right to know”—which by the way is nowhere to be found in the constitution—for me, but not for thee. The old Times motto was “all the news that’s fit to print.” Now it’s, “l’etat c’est moi.”

Read the whole thing.

MEDIA MYTH ALERT: Taking stock: Top mythbusting posts of 2021.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: ‘Humiliating:’ 2004 Grauniad Report Peddling Climate Doom By 2020 Frozen Out.

The eco-extremists at the liberal Guardian should realize by now that the internet is forever. The outlet freaked out over 17 years ago about a frosty future thanks to a ridiculously inaccurate Pentagon prediction.

The Guardian published a report in 2004 sounding the alarm bells over a “secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs” and obtained by sister newspaper The Observer. Here was the harrowing message, according to The Guardian: “[M]ajor European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.”

It’s now 2021, and major European cities are still intact and a Reuters report this year flushes The Guardian’s frets about a little ice age in Britain down the toilet. Reuters trumpeted: “Britain’s climate getting warmer, sunnier and wetter – Met Office.” Travel website Touropia has an updated report headlined, “25 Best Cities to Visit in Europe.” Even the waterway-dominated Venice, Italy is No. 17 on the list. Ouch.

You have to give the Grauniad points for keeping at it though:

● Shot: Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days.

—Headline, the Grauniad, November 12^th.

● Chaser: President ‘has four years to save Earth.’

—Headline, the Grauniad, January 17^th, 2009.

Still though, I’m keeping all the lights on; if only to do my part: ‘Promise?’ Illustrated warning of what Washington, DC might look like if climate change isn’t addressed backfires:

(Classical reference in headline.)

JENNIFER RUBIN, S.E. CUPP, YOUR MOMENT IS NOW! The View is Struggling to Find a New Republican Host.

Since the days of Richard Nixon, you can make a very good living in the DNC-MSM media bubble by being a prominent Republican who never votes for Republicans.

BLAINE GABBERT COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT AND LAUGHTER: Has Colin Kaepernick Lost His ‘Halo?’

Mr. Kaepernick balked at requests from Change Co. executives that he sit for an appearance with George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” and declined to participate in interviews as part of the rollout, according to an internal document.

This makes sense. Who would want to do live television interviews after helping to launch such a destructive movement? Mr. Kaepernick began his protests in 2016 while a member of the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League. In August of that year, Mr. Kaepermick told the NFL: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color… There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Mr. Kaepernick became perhaps the country’s most prominent advocate for abolishing police forces. Tragically, politicians who then sought to reduce policing have presided over historic levels of bodies in the street.

In San Francisco where Mr. Kaepernick’s movement became famous and where homicides have been on the rise, even radical politicians are now trying to combat the lawlessness they once enabled.

Speaking of which: How Defund the Police backfired.

So anti-police protests take a toll. In 2014, a white police officer in Ferguson killed an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, causing demonstrations across the US. Afterwards, the police chief in nearby St Louis noted that, “the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment.” In 2015, the US Department of Justice asked one of the country’s leading criminologists, Richard Rosenfeld, to investigate whether homicides had risen after the incident. At first, Rosenfeld was sceptical, noting that homicides in St. Louis had started to rise before then. But after looking at the evidence, he changed his mind. “The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” he wrote in his 2016 report. Rosenfeld had found a 17% rise in homicide in the nation’s largest cities, between 2014 and 2015.

Rosenfeld told me, when I interviewed him, that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had contributed to the homicide increase. “When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust,” noted Rosenfeld, “they are less likely to obey the law.” And BLM protestors fail to recognise that the people who suffer most, when the police can’t do their jobs, are black Americans, who are more likely to be victims of violent crime. They are seven to eight times more likely to be homicide victims than white Americans.

But progressives have gone one step further, by undermining the idea that police actually have any power to reduce crime. “Law enforcement is not going to prevent the violence,” claimed Philip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a few weeks ago. In 2020, then–vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted, “America has confused having safe communities with having more cops on the street. It’s time to change that.”

Researchers find that negative publicity about the police has a powerful impact on police officers. Little wonder, then, that in 2020, at least two dozen police chiefs or senior officers resigned, retired, or took disability leave in America’s 50 biggest cities. 3,700 beat officers left. Today there are fewer police officers per capita in America than at any time since 1992.

What liberals ignore is that there is good quantitative evidence that more policing can reduce crime. They argue that the police don’t actually prevent crime, they just punish people after the fact. But in 2009, President Obama’s stimulus package offered a billion dollars in grants to struggling American cities, to fund the police; cities qualifying for the grant increased policing by 3.2% and experienced a 3.5% decline in crime.

And there’s another inconvenient truth that liberals ignore: the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Working a 13-hour, rather than 10-hour, shift means cops are far more likely to experience public complaints against them, while back-to-back shifts quadruple the likelihood.

Still, progressives are busy gaslighting the public about their efforts to defund the police. A progressive columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote, “while there is continuing debate about what is driving the violent crime increases … we know for a fact that defund had nothing to do with it. Because defund never actually happened.” This is patently untrue. After the Black Lives Matter protests, more than 20 big cities reduced police budgets by at least $870 million. The LAPD’s budget was slashed by $150 million in July, for instance. It’s just that homicides rose so quickly that most cities reversed their defunding budgets. “From New York City to Los Angeles,” noted the Associated Press at the end of last month, “in cities that had some of the largest Black Lives Matter protests … police departments are seeing their finances partially restored in response to rising homicides, an officer exodus, and political pressures.”

Hence the Oceania-style pivot this year, as a form of triage with the midterms looming large:

● Frisco mayor: By golly, what this city needs is “aggressive” policing instead of “bull****.”

● Councilwoman wants to offer $50K for officers to work in Oakland.

● Spike of Homicides Causes Oakland Mayor to Reverse Course on Diverting Funds From Police.

● ‘Defund the police’ movement is now dead in Oakland.

● White Progressives Shocked to Learn Black and Latino Voters Don’t Share Their Radical ‘defund the Police’ Views.

DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN 2022: Massive New Bird Flu Outbreak Could Be 2022’s Deadly Pandemic.

Israel’s National Security Council has assumed control of a massive bird flu outbreak in the Galilee, which scientists warn could become a “mass disaster” for humans.

Over half a billion migrating birds pass through the area every year, heading for warm African winters or balmy European summers, making this a catastrophic location for a major bird flu outbreak—right at the nexus of global avian travel.

The virus can be deadly if it infects people. The World Health Organization says more than half of the confirmed 863 human cases it has tracked since 2003 proved fatal. Most strains or variants of avian flu, H5N1, are relatively difficult to transmit to people.

Yossi Leshem, one of Israel’s most renowned ornithologists, told The Daily Beast, however, that it is the ability of these viruses to mutate into new strains that poses such a threat, as we have seen with the coronavirus.

“There could be a mutation that also infects people and turns into a mass disaster,” said Leshem, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University and director of the International Center for the Study of Bird Migration at Latrun.

So far, at least 5,400 wild cranes have died infected with the new H5N1 avian flu, which Israeli authorities fear could expand into a global emergency.

I don’t know what happens next, but I do know that the Daily Beast is eager to keep the lockdowns and the spirit of 2020 going for as long as possible.

(Classical reference in headline.)

DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN 2022: The (Crappy) Year We Just Lived Through.

(Classical reference in headline.)

GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: VP Kamala Harris says she does not ‘ever wanna be in a bubble when it comes to being … in touch with what people need.’

AIRBRUSH ALERT: CBS Edits Out Own Reporter Slamming School Closures Causing Mental Health Crisis.

Longtime CBS reporter and chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford went viral on Sunday and Monday on social media following comments, meant to air on Sunday’s Face the Nation, that slammed our elected officials and public health experts for “the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children” and the subsequent mental health crisis. However, CBS News kept her comments out of the actual show.

Instead, CBS relegated Crawford’s stinging rebuke — which took place during the show’s year-end reporters roundtable — to Face the Nation’s Facebook and Twitter pages, a CBSNews.com transcript, and a YouTube video of the full roundtable.

In the full video, Brennan pivoted away from hopes of congressional Democrats advancing their agenda to asking: “Well, I want to get to underreported stories as well, Jan?”

Crawford responded without hesitation that it was something “my kids hear me rant about…every day, so I might as well tell you guys.”

“It’s the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children. By far the least serious risk for serious illness,” she began, adding that “a healthy teenager has a one in a million chance of getting, and dying from COVID, which is way lower than, you know, dying in a car wreck on a road trip.”

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the memory holing makes perfect sense.

Evergreen:

DEVELOPING: Aircraft explodes into flames after smashing into San Diego neighborhood. “A plane has dramatically exploded into flames after crashing into a busy residential neighbourhood. The crash is thought to have happened when the aircraft, a Learjet 35, hit a power line and smashed onto a road in San Diego, California. Images on social media appear to show the lights of the plane in the night sky as it falls to the ground and violently explodes.”

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Woman Alleges She Was Groped — Virtually — Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s “Meta” Virtual World.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Now he tells us: There’s no federal solution to COVID, says Biden.

A few days ago the Washington Free Beacon honored his campaign pledge to “shut down the virus” as its Lie of the Year for 2021.

After this clip, they might make it the Lie of the Decade.

It takes a lot to turn a Democrat into a federalist but a raging pandemic that’s defied all attempts by a Democratic-controlled federal government to bring it to heel might do it.

2024’s campaign ads write themselves:

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: In Push For Diversity, Military Canine Units To Give Equal Opportunities To Chihuahuas.

To be fair though, as one Twitter wag noted, “That might actually work, every single chihuahua I’ve ever met has been meaner than every single German shepherd I’ve ever met.“

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: What The Media Didn’t Tell You About Bishop Desmond Tutu.

CAMERA.org quoted: Harvard University Law School Prof. Emeritus Alan Dershowitz about Tutu:

“is no mere anti-Zionist …. He has minimized the suffering of those killed in the Holocaust. He has attacked the ‘Jewish’— not Israeli — lobby as too ‘powerful’ …. He has invoked classic antisemitic stereotypes … about Jewish ‘arrogance,’ ‘power’ and money …. [A]nd has accused ‘the Jews’ of causing many of the world’s problems” (“Bishop Tutu Is No Saint When it Comes to Jews,” Dec. 20, 2010, The Gatestone Institute). Tutu, impervious to facts, also has denied that Israel is a civilized democracy and unsuccessfully urged the Capetown Opera not to perform there.

How can Tutu,  a vocal defender of human rights, a fighter for the oppressed, winner of the Nobel Peace prize in 1984 when it still had meaning, be accused of being an anti-Semitic bigot?  By reading his own words.

Tutu has made some alarming statements about the Holocaust.  He has publicly complained about what he calls “the Jewish monopoly of the Holocaust.” (Jerusalem Post, July 26, 1985) Sorry Bishop, but Jews do own the copyright.  We paid for it with more than Six Million lives, one and a half million of those were little children.” Tut also asserted that “the gas chambers” made for “a neater death” than did apartheid.

Read the whole thing.

SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME BECOMES FIRST MOVIE TO HIT $1 BILLION SINCE PANDEMIC:

The film has become the first movie to surpass the $1 billion mark since the latest Star Wars film “The Rise of Skywalker” was released in December 2019. Nearly all indoor theaters in the U.S. and many theaters worldwide shut down for months starting in March 2020.

“No Way Home” reportedly hit $260 million in the U.S. alone in its opening weekend, according to Sony. The strong opening made it the second-highest opening weekend nationwide, according to Deadline. The opening weekend was also noted as the second-best opening weekend in history globally behind one of Marvel’s top Avengers films.

The remarkable success of the film during the rise in COVID-19 numbers nationwide has surprised many in the film industry.

“With Covid-impacted domestic earnings and China’s growing disinterest in Hollywood flicks, there was cause to wonder if Rise of Skywalker would be Hollywood’s last $1 billion grosser at least until Avatar 2. That Spider-Man: No Way Home has zoomed past the milestone in just over two weeks without China is the very definition of hope,” Forbes reported.

“It’s impressive that ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ managed to blow past $1 billion in ticket sales worldwide given the rapidly spreading omicron variant of COVID-19. But, so far, coronavirus concerns have done little to slow Peter Parker’s prowess; the film is still playing to many sold-out screenings nationwide,” Variety added.

Some have argued “No Way Home” has found success in part by avoiding strong progressive political messages that have divided audiences.

Well, yes. I saw it in a three-quarters full theater in Dallas on Christmas day. As a movie, the ghost of David Lean isn’t losing too much sleep over it. But as a two and a half hour love letter to Marvel fans, it’s terrific, non-woke fun: Spider-Man: No Way Home Review: A Woke-Free Blast of Fan Service and Fun.

KWANZAA: A Fake Holiday With A Racist Goal, Created By A Criminal Madman.

Perhaps Kwanzaa is observed because this part of the Kwanzaa story is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media.

When he invented the holiday, Karenga said his goal was to “give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”

Why would an African American of Christian faith want to dissociate from their religion on Christmas or a Jew of color want to ignore the joy of a family lighting their Chanukiah (Menorah) sing-song and eating jelly donuts?

This holiday raised by some to the level of Christmas by wokeism has a purpose totally antithetical to Christmas. While Christmas is meant to unify, Kwanzaa is meant to divide and isolate Black Americans from the rest of the people who practice their same faith.

Related: College Republicans tweeted out wishes for a “happy Kwanza” and got absolutely destroyed for it.

More: Kamala Harris Touts ‘Seven Principles’ of Marxist-Rooted Kwanzaa. “Vice President Kamala Harris celebrated the beginning of Kwanzaa Sunday night, an underlying Marxist holiday created by black nationalists, by praising one of the ‘seven principles’ of Kwanzaa, which happen to coincide with the seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army.”

I’m pretty sure Tom Wolfe didn’t write Radical Chic as a how-to guide.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Why, yes he did:

‘The way I look at CNN now is so different than the way I looked at CNN 15, 20 years ago. I used to look at them as ‘this is how I get the news.’ This is unbiased, professional news,’ Rogan explained.

‘They’re going to tell me what’s happening in Pakistan and, you know, what’s happening in Mogadishu. These are the real journalists that are telling you the news.’

He continued: ‘Now I look at them, I go, “You f***ing propagandists, the right-arm of Pfizer. What are you doing?”‘

— “Joe Rogan slams CNN as ‘f****** propagandists’ as star host Chris Cuomo is fired over sexual harassment claims and Don Lemon ‘texted Jussie Smollet to tell him Chicago cops didn’t believe he was the victim of a homophobic attack,’” the London Daily Mail, December 7th.

Related: The Last Days of CNN.

CNN is far behind FOX News and MSNBC in the ratings. It averages around half a million viewers in prime time and it recently hit a 7-year low in the demo.

So it was the perfect time for Chris Wallace to leave FOX News for CNN+.

Some might have thought that Wallace was leaving to fill Chris Cuomo’s slot at CNN. No such luck, though without Cuomo the failing news network’s ratings have crashed to new lows.

But crashing to new lows is the default story at CNN.

CNN Airport, its captive audience operation, shut down earlier this year. And CNN isn’t far behind. CNN+ is the network’s bet that enough people will pay 6 bucks a month to watch it.

CNN’s effort to launch CNN+, a paid streaming service, at a time when its core ratings are crashing is confusing observers who wonder why the news network thinks people will pay for CNN when they won’t even watch it for free.

CNN President Jeff Zucker billed CNN+ as being for “CNN superfans, news junkies and fans of quality non-fiction programming.”

The existence of CNN superfans is as improbable as Bigfoot and UFOs. No one has ever spotted a CNN superfan in the wild and not even the most exotic zoos have them in stock.

I hope the Zuckerbucks — and all that come with it — were worth it for Wallace to jump ship.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Nikole Hannah-Jones Says She Doesn’t Understand Why ‘Parents Should Decide What’s Being Taught’ in Schools.

Flashback: Glenn Youngkin Defeated Terry McAuliffe Because Democrats Betrayed Parents.

OLD AND BUSTED: “Never Again.”

The New Hotness? Just NBC the Whitewashing: MSNBC senior producer’s tweet about China human rights abuses gets ‘allegedly’ trending.

RIP: Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Who Helped End Apartheid, Dies at 90.

BURIED LEDE: NBC NEWS SHOCKED THAT AN NBC PRODUCT HAS GONE VIRAL. NBC News Calls ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ A ‘Right-Wing Slur.’  “On October 2, an NBC sports reporter interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama after Brown scored his first career NASCAR Xfinity Series win stated in a video that the crowd was chanting ‘Let’s go, Brandon!’ when in reality they were chanting ‘F*** Joe Biden,’ The Daily Wire reported.”

Oh, how NBC sports reporter Kelli Stavast must be hated at the office these days.