ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Let Them Fight: Steve Schmidt Blasts The Lincoln Project over the tiki torch stunt. “Lincoln Project’s fake-Charlottesville stunt backfired so badly that group co-founder Steve ‘Generational Wealth’ Schmidt is desperately fleeing, hanging his former comrades-in-arms out to dry. Don’t look at me! I have almost nothing to do with those guys!”
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
November 11, 2021
OBAMA ADVISER: Bidenflation is real and it’s spectacular — and directly tied to Biden’s stimulus.
[Larry] Summers predicted that would happen too, although perhaps too subtly for the White House to recognize. Summers had noted that the Biden administration wanted to prioritize social justice in its programs but had left itself no budgetary room for that purpose, thanks to the massive scope of stimulus spending. Not only does Biden lack budgetary capital for that purpose, his massive incompetence has entirely depleted his political capital for that agenda. His job approval hasn’t fallen into the thirties because of a perception that Biden is overly concerned about voter priorities and household issues, after all.
The shift in the media on inflation over the last day or so underscores that risk. For the last few months, the media has been happy to pass along all of the happy talk about “transitory” inflation, scoff at families who stress out over rising food prices, and even paint inflation as a great sign for America’s economy. After yesterday’s CPI numbers hit a 31-year record for inflation and show no sign of slowing down, the fuel for gaslighting has apparently run out, and Biden’s suddenly looking incompetent and lost on the issue that generally matters most to voters — the economy.
And … we told you so.
For many, the pain is immediate: Real Wages Declined 0.5% in October Amid Mounting Inflation.
GREAT MOMENTS IN MORAL EQUIVALENCE: Pentagon Says Climate Change, China ‘Equally Important’ Threats.
November 10, 2021
WINNER OF THE MRC’S “WORST REPORTER IN THE HISTORY OF MAN AWARD:” Bye-Bye Lying Brian! The Worst of the Outgoing MSNBC Anchor’s Career.
JUST DON’T MENTION THE CULTURE WAR: John Cleese ‘blacklists’ himself from Cambridge Union talk because of ‘woke rules’ after students made ‘Stalinist’ list of banned speakers amid row over art historian’s Hitler impression.
Monty Python star John Cleese says he is ‘blacklisting’ himself from a Cambridge Union event after the debating society banned a historian for performing an impression of Adolf Hitler.
The comedian, 82, who famously impersonated the Nazi dictator in a Monty Python sketch, and again in Fawlty Towers, said he is ‘blacklisting’ himself ‘before someone else does’.
His comments come after Keir Bradwell, the student president of the 200-year-old Cambridge Union, emailed members on Monday to inform them he was setting up a list of banned speakers.
The list, dubbed as ‘Stalinist’ by critics, includes Andrew Graham-Dixon — an art historian who offended students with a Nazi impersonation last week.
Taking to Twitter, Cleese, who was due to speak to students on Friday, wrote: ‘I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for doing an impersonation of Hitler.
‘I regret that I did the same on a Monty Python show, so I am blacklisting myself* before someone else does.’
In a follow-up tweet, the comedian, who studied at Cambridge, added: ‘I apologise to anyone at Cambridge who was hoping to talk with me, but perhaps some of you can find a venue where woke rules do not apply.’
At the start of the month, “Terry Gilliam’s Into the Woods cancelled by Old Vic after reports of staff unease,” The BBC reported:
The show was due to run next spring at the prestigious venue, whose artistic director is Matthew Warchus.
Stephen Sondheim, the writer of Into the Woods, was said to have approved the production because he was impressed with Gilliam’s proposed treatment.
But after the show was announced, it is understood some staff expressed concern about Gilliam’s views on issues such as the Me-too movement, diversity and trans rights.Gilliam has previously described the MeToo movement as a “witch hunt”, adding there were many “decent people” who were “getting hammered” as the industry grappled with sexual abuse.
Several allegations were made against the Old Vic’s former artistic director Kevin Spacey as part of the MeToo movement, which began in late 2017.
Last year, Gilliam told The Independent he was “tired of white men being blamed for everything wrong with the world”. In the same interview he said: “When I announce that I’m a black lesbian in transition, people take offence at that. Why?”
He also recently defended the comedian Dave Chappelle, whose most recent comedy special included comments deemed by some to be transphobic.
In August, the Daily Wire reported: ‘Woke Generation Is Rewriting Rules On What Can Be Said:’ Legendary Monty Python Actor To Release Series On Cancel Culture.
Hopefully his fellow Python member will join Cleese to discuss his own story.
As Jordan Peterson, tweeted at the time, “They cancelled Terry Gilliam, folks. Of Monty Python. The funniest group of people in the English speaking world.”
Related: John Cleese morphed into Theodore Dalrymple so slowly, I hardly even noticed.
* And Roger Simon as well.
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
FINALLY: Benetton is Now Offering a Unisex Hijab!
So why would a man wear a hijab? To ward off the advances of other men? To remove a source of temptation from gay Muslims? In a majority-Muslim country, a man who wore a hijab would likely be considered insane. In the woke West in 2021, such a man is making a fashion statement.
Benetton, of course, has no idea of any of this. They just think it’s a cool item of clothing that represents the Left’s favored religion, and since everything is unisex nowadays and men are women and women are men, why not go one step beyond simply marketing a designer hijab, call it unisex, and depict a man wearing it? After all, some men who are transitioning and becoming women may want to adopt this symbol of Islamic womanhood, and now they can do so in style.
Exit quote: “The bitter irony is that in the United States, any male Leftist clown who dons Benetton’s unisex hijab will likely be hailed by his friends and all right-thinking people as ‘courageous.’ They may even believe it. As Masih Alinejad points out, however, real courage lies not in putting on a hijab, but in taking it off.”
EVEN JEFFREY TOOBIN ADMITS, IT SEEMS LIKE KYLE RITTENHOUSE HAS A ‘PLAUSIBLE CASE OF SELF DEFENSE’ “Bottom line, even CNN now seems willing to acknowledge that this trial is not looking like a slam dunk for the prosecution. That’s important because, based on what I’m seeing on Twitter, that message hasn’t gotten out to a lot of people who are firmly convinced Rittenhouse is guilty of murder and that only far-right kooks would suggest otherwise. I think, not unlike the Trayvon Martin case, the media has set up a lot of people for a potentially harsh confrontation with reality. Of course I don’t know how the trial will turn out next week or whenever the jury decides, but it might not be the way a lot of people expect.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: Biden Shocked by Price of Gas During Biden Administration: ‘Did You Ever Think You’d Be Paying This Much?’
“People have a little more breathing room than they did last year, and that’s a good thing. But it also means you’ve got higher demand for goods at the same time we’re facing disruptions in the supplies to make those goods,” he continued. “This is a recipe for delays and for higher prices. And people are feeling it. They’re feeling it.”
He then brought up an example that, generally speaking, politicians have been loathe to mention out loud unless the other guy’s party is the one in power.
“Did you ever think you’d be paying this much for a gallon of gas?” Biden asked. “In some parts of California they’re paying four dollars and fifty cents a gallon!”
Does Biden know at the point in his life that he’s an Obama-era retread? Why would anyone be shocked by skyrocketing gas prices in 2021?
Earlier: Joe Biden’s nominee for the Comptroller of the Currency Saule Omarova on oil, coal and gas industries: ‘We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.’”
And: Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?
Well, it’s a start, as Steven Chu, former President 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.”
Seen in Glen Rose, TX last week:
Related: 3inch Joe Biden Funny Sticker, That’s All Me I Did That Decal. #Commission Earned.
SONGS THAT CHANGED MUSIC: Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall Pt.2” (Video).
Perhaps having a tinge of guilt over his heavy-handed lyrics, Waters would reverse himself, and write from the point of view of a middle-aged British teacher on “The Hero’s Return,” which appeared on Pink Floyd’s next album, 1983’s The Final Cut, the last Floyd album on which Waters was a band member:
Alex McAvoy, the same actor who played the teacher in the movie version of The Wall also appeared in several promo videos for The Final Cut.
KYLE RITTENHOUSE AND AHMAUD ARBERY: a tale of two trials.
So why is the national press attempting to draw race into a trial where race played no part in the fates of Rittenhouse or his victims, yet simultaneously all but ignoring the implications out of Georgia that very well might see justice for a young African American shot dead in the street?
Could their framing be part of an attempt to force the political right to defend Rittenhouse and in doing so reveal the “structural racism” of the country as it exists on that side of the political aisle?
In the end, to our media, justice for Arbery does not matter, because his death is not a blunt instrument with which they can bludgeon their political adversaries.
As Stephen Miller tweeted on Monday, “If Daily Caller & Examiner videographers weren’t on scene to capture footage of the [Rittenhouse] shootings just imagine what the media would be doing. Now ask why those guys aren’t invited on network media shows.”
Which dovetails well with this headline: Dave Portnoy calls out the Washington Post for not allowing him to record his interview with the paper.
Washpo — “Portnoy declined to comment for this story after The Post declined his terms for conducting an interview.”
My terms were let me record interview so you can’t cut and edit. Same thing I offered to let Business Insider do. Weird how nobody but me will accept these terms.
Not so weird when you flashback to something Jill Abramson, former editor of the New York Times, admitted in 2019. “I do not record. I’ve never recorded. I’m a very fast note-taker. When someone kind of says the ‘it’ thing that I have really wanted, I don’t start scribbling right away. I have an almost photographic memory and so I wait a beat or two while they’re onto something else, and then I write down the previous thing they said. Because you don’t want your subject to get nervous about what they just said.”
#IMPEACHRONDESANTIS: Despite Mandates Aplenty, California’s COVID Rate Now Doubles Florida’s.
THE ATLANTIC SNEERS AT TRUCK DRIVER EDWARD DURR’S ABILITY TO GOVERN: “In response, Durr said he could hardly do a worse job than New Jersey’s current leaders: ‘How much worse could I make it?’”
To be fair, given that it’s New Jersey in 2021, that’s setting the bar awfully low.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The article in question is by Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise. But it was a suicide. The thing is, to qualify as an expert, you have to actually be good at something:
It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.
And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty.
In the realm of foreign affairs, which should be of special interest to the people at Foreign Affairs, recent history has been particularly dreadful. Experts failed to foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, failed to deal especially well with that fall when it took place, and then failed to deal with the rise of Islamic terrorism that led to the 9/11 attacks. Post 9/11, experts botched the reconstruction of Iraq, then botched it again with a premature pullout.
On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.
It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.
By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately.
But my favorite example came much more recently, in the form of a New Yorker cartoon showing an airline passenger (seated in Economy, of course) standing up and asking his fellow passengers: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”
In this view, ordinary people are just carried along for the ride, while the country is run by experts with vast experience and credentials. Letting ordinary people take charge would surely result in a disastrous crash. If the pilots are “smug” it’s because they have abilities that ordinary people lack.
This is nice, if you see yourself as one of the pilots, possessed of those special abilities. If you think of yourself as one of the smart people, the ones who should be guiding the airplane of state (we used to talk about the “ship of state,” but hey, this is the 21st century), then the suggestion that the passengers might want to take over the controls is both insulting and frightening.
But, of course, being a member of the governing class doesn’t involve anything like the specialized skills that flying an airplane does. And just as passengers on an airplane actually do get to choose their destination — they’re paying customers, after all — so the voters get to choose things, too. (And if you look at recent history, the “pilots” tend to crash the plane a lot, but then walk away unscathed, unlike those passengers in the back. Peggy Noonan calls these political elites the “protected class” and she’s not far wrong: “The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it.”)
We’re seeing that now with shortages, gas prices, runaway crime in urban areas, and a lot of other “expert” backed policies that have turned out badly. So yeah, maybe give the occasional truck driver a chance. He at least has had a job where if you run things off the road, you wind up in the ditch yourself.
JIM TREACHER: Jimmy Kimmel Knows Why Kamala Harris Is So Unpopular. Can you guess the REAL reason?
Yes, of course you can. And since scolding his potential audience as sexists and racists is rarely a winning move, that’s why Kimmel is “getting beaten in the ratings by Greg Gutfeld. Who is on cable! Get woke and go broke, ABC.”
OLD AND BUSTED: The Marines — We’re Looking for a Few Good Men.
The New Hotness? U.S. Marine Corps is looking to hire a ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advisor’ with a starting salary of $144,128.
The British Army could be the inspiration for their next recruiting drive:
PROBLEM: YouTube reportedly deleting dislikes on Biden Administration YouTube videos.
—The Post Millennial, April 4th.
Solution: YouTube Will Hide Dislike Counts On Videos To Combat Harassment.
—BuzzFeed, today.
INFLATION IS EVERYWHERE: Colleges lower standards, raise GPAs, grad rates.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Washington Post fact-check admits it was wrong for ‘knee jerked’ defense of Buttigieg’s racist bridge comments.
There has been some revisionism and [Robert] Moses’s achievements are now viewed in a better light. In particular, the anecdote about the parkway bridges has been increasingly questioned, along with other details in [Robert] Caro’s book,” Kessler wrote.
One historian told the Post that “Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country” because all parkways had low bridges at the time.
“Caro is wrong,” a separate historian emailed to the Post, noting anyone could access the beach.
Other historians disagree in the polarizing tale, but the Post’s in-house fact-checker feels “The Bottom Line” is that the liberal newspaper shouldn’t have been so quick to defend Buttigieg.
“Obviously this cannot be easily resolved. Caro quotes one of Moses’s top aides as saying the height of the bridges was done for racist reasons, but increasingly that story has been questioned as not credible,” Kessler wrote. “Buttigieg should tailor his remarks to reflect what is historically unimpeachable — and we should be more careful to double-check on the latest views of historians. Even a Pulitzer Prize-winning book is not always the last word on a subject.”
This is a growing trend at the WaPo:
● And of course: Washington Post Issues the ‘Greatest Correction’ Ever. “None other than Donald Trump Jr calls the Washington Post’s ‘Let’s Go Brandon!’ walkback ‘the greatest correction in the history of journalism,’ and who am I to disagree?”
In 2015, a WaPo op-ed asked: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?
Now we know the “unexpected” answer: Gaslight like crazy to help get him into office and keep him propped up in power as long as possible.
INFLATION ROSE TO 6.2% IN OCTOBER, THE HIGHEST ANNUAL RATE IN 30 YEARS.
As Brad Polumbo notes in the Washington Examiner, “Citizens upset over inflation should not look at Congress but at the Federal Reserve, the central bank that controls U.S. currency:”
“While the rate of inflation might differ from year to year due to aggregate supply or demand shocks, the long-run trend rate of inflation is ultimately determined by monetary policy,” economist William J. Luther told me in a recent interview . “The [Federal Reserve] can control inflation.”
To “stimulate” the economy amid the COVID-19 crisis, the Fed engaged in a massive expansion of money supply — basically, it (digitally) printed a bunch of new money. As my Foundation for Economic Education colleague Peter Jacobsen, an economist, has explained , “If more dollars chase the exact same goods, prices will rise.”
* * * * * * * *
Ultimately, rising prices of this magnitude represent a grave problem for millions of families. The temptation will be to blame President Joe Biden, who certainly has played at least some small part in this concerning trend. Yet, we won’t solve this problem until we concentrate our criticism on the real culprit behind our inflation malaise: the Fed and its reckless monetary policy.
In any case, MSNBC assures me this is quite a good thing.
But wait — the worst is yet to come: If You Think Inflation Is Bad Now Just Wait Until The Winter.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Arby’s Teams With Minneapolis Distillery Tattersall For Fry-Flavored Vodka.
WHY SAN FRANCISCO IS NEARLY THE MOST CRIME-RIDDEN CITY IN THE US:
San Francisco’s unacceptable crime track record is implicitly a choice that the city has made, which is all the more surprising when the city spends about $14,000 per San Franciscan per year on government services, about 40 percent higher than New York city’s profligate budget.
One important deficiency is too small of a police force. New York’s police force per resident is nearly twice that of San Francisco, and New York is a much safer city. Another important deficiency is a less-than-productive relationship between the police and the city’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, an extremely progressive prosecutor, who some consider to still have the mindset of his days as an SF public defender. Boudin is notable in that he is the child of a mom and dad convicted for first-degree murder in the killing of two police officers during the robbery of a Brinks truck about 40 years ago.
This didn’t get Boudin and the police off to the best start, and their relationship has gone further south, with Boudin criticizing police for not clearing more crimes. Boudin himself has been widely criticized for failing to prosecute obvious cases, including a person who had been arrested multiple times over the previous year, who had a history of felony convictions, and who ultimately killed two women while driving a stolen car after drinking and using methamphetamine.
Boudin chose not to prosecute, and forwarded the case to the parole department. The charges? Two counts of voluntary manslaughter, possession of a stolen vehicle, leaving the scene of an accident, burglary, driving while under the influence of alcohol and drugs, driving while addicted to drugs, possessing a gun and a large-capacity ammunition magazine, and violating the terms of parole. He had also been arrested just prior to the crash on charges including possession of methamphetamine and car theft.
Boudin defended his decision by indicating that the parole department would have a much better chance at stopping the cycle of crime for these types of individuals: “We evaluated the facts, the strength of the case and the charges, and decided it was more likely that he would be held accountable through parole.”
But even after the killing of the two women, Boudin did not indicate that he made a mistake in not prosecuting the driver. Rather he focused on changing the parole system to ensure that criminals received the “supervision and structure that are needed.” Really? I wonder how this made the families of the two victims killed feel.
Perhaps that explains this headline: Enough signatures verified to vote on recall of SF DA Chesa Boudin, election officials say.
San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964.
MICHAEL WALSH: America Needs an Emergency Plan, Right Away.
The FBI is now investigating the alleged theft of Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary—a document that if genuine offers even more repellent insights into this stunningly dysfunctional family. How this is a federal matter is beyond me, unless the FBI has now become the Biden family’s private police force with a mandate to suppress bad news about the family. And if you don’t believe me, ask Hunter Biden.
Americans, quite properly, sense there’s something “off” about Biden and his crew, which is why his approval ratings continue to crater. But as long as the radical Left holds the media high ground, it’s hard for most people not obsessed by politics to grasp just how malignant these people are. For decades, they’ve made no bones about their desire to replace the United States of the founding with something “progressive.”
They’ve overtly collaborated with the Soviets, infiltrated the civil-rights movement, absorbed the legacy media, corrupted the lawmakers, overpowered academe, seized hold of the education of our children and now, in their moment of triumph, are forcing us to live in a fantasy world of their own psycho-sexual device, while their pet shrinks tell us that we’re the crazy bigots, via the media.
What are you going to do about it?
Read the whole thing.
BUILD BACK BACKWARDS: America’s Ports Need More Robots, but the $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill Won’t Fund Automation.
At most major ports around the world, the cranes that unload shipping containers from boats to trucks are largely automated. That means they can operate around the clock at lower cost and—extra importantly right now—have zero risk of catching COVID-19. One recent study found that cranes at the mostly automated port in Rotterdam, Netherlands, are roughly 80 percent more efficient than cranes at the Port of Oakland, California, where humans still man the controls. In other words, it takes nearly twice as long to unload the same ship in Oakland as it would in Rotterdam.
One of the major hurdles to automation is the expense. It can cost as much as $500 million to install new, fully automated terminals at existing ports, according to the Journal of Commerce, a trade publication. Even if it might make sense to do that in the long run, short-term considerations keep American ports operating at their current, less efficient status quo.
Conveniently, Congress has just passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill—one that includes $17 billion for port infrastructure. Of that $17 billion, about $2.6 billion is specifically earmarked for defraying the cost of upgrading equipment at America’s ports, nominally to reduce air pollution.
If you were a member of Congress looking to spend a bunch of money to immediately and meaningfully upgrade American infrastructure in a way that would help solve the current supply chain logjams, automating ports should be at or near the top of the list. It’s quite literally a no-brainer.
The bad news, however, is buried on page 308 of the 1,600-plus page bill: “The term ‘zero-emission port equipment or technology’ means human-operated equipment or human-maintained technology.”
If only Team Biden had watched the Discovery channel last year during lockdown:
USC PROFESSOR REFUSES TO REMOVE BLUE LIVES MATTER FLAG FROM OFFICE DOOR: ‘Blue lives protect black lives’ “‘We are in an environment where there is a lot of homogenization of ideas, and diversity should include diversity of ideas,’ [Professor James Moore] told The College Fix. ‘This [USC] is supposed to be a safe space for diversity of thought,’ the professor said. ‘We are charging people very good money to teach them to think. I am just trying to deliver.’”