Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:

Every Republican president is Hitler, until the next Hitler comes along, and the former Hitler is transformed into a wizened elder statesman to attack the current Hitler.

GOODER AND HARDER, LA: Will Los Angeles Be the Latest City to Elect a Democratic Socialist Mayor? Karen Bass Gets a Challenger.

Who would have thunk it? We now have two democratic socialists who have won their mayoral races in major American cities – Zohran Mamdani in New York City, of course, and inexperienced Katie Wilson in Seattle. Both cities have already suffered greatly at the hands of “progressive” politicians, and the only question here is how much lower they can sink.

Could Los Angeles be the next to throw their city into the hands of radical leftists? You could argue that they already have with Mayor Karen Bass and their radical city council and county Board of Supervisors, but what if they took it a step further?

Now they’ll get their chance, as community organizer Rae Huang is tossing her hat into the ring to challenge Bass, a Democrat who was in Ghana – despite warnings of dangerous fire conditions – when the massive January blazes that wiped out huge swaths of the city broke out. Since then, little rebuilding has been accomplished under her tenure.

This is something of a lateral move for citizens with a 213 area code: Surprise! Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is a life-long rabid supporter of communism and the Cuban dictatorship.

A VIVID PORTRAIT OF A TORRID AFFAIR BETWEEN TWO LUNATICS:

The New York Times recently published a complimentary profile of Olivia Nuzzi, the former political correspondent for New York magazine who had a “digital affair” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is currently the Secretary for Health and Human Services. Nuzzi has a new book coming out, American Canto, telling her version of the story.

I can hear it now; “I don’t care about Nuzzi.”

You don’t have to care much about Nuzzi herself, although this sordid mess does give us further illumination into the character of the man who currently runs the HHS Department, and who therefore has a major say in how the roughly one quarter of the federal budget managed by HHS is directed. Even by the already-low standards of the Kennedy family, there’s something skin-crawling about Nuzzi’s insistence that she only fell in love with RFK Jr. after he first said “I love you” . . . several times.

Did I mention she is 39 years younger than he is?

It is also less-than-reassuring to hear Nuzzi claim Kennedy told her that he “still uses psychedelics, and even smoked dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a powerful drug on which people are known to have what feel like near-death experiences.”

DMT is illegal, and “has no approved medical use in the United States” according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. DMT is one of the key ingredients of ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogen which should only be consumed in extreme emergencies, such as becoming the quarterback of the New York Jets.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Bombshell docs reveal alleged Chinese mole Linda Sun ‘forged’ Hochul’s signature on gushing invites to Henan dignitaries: feds.

Alleged Chinese mole Linda Sun brazenly forged then-Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature in glowing missives sent to dignitaries from the Henan province, according to the feds and documents presented at her bombshell trial.

Jurors in Brooklyn federal court were shown copies of letters purportedly sent by Hochul on March 26, 2018, inviting a six-member delegation from the province in central China to a meeting with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

But the letters bore clearly forged versions of Hochul’s signature — that featured “overly loopy” handwriting, her former chief of staff Jeff Lewis testified.

“From my experience, this is not how she would sign her name,” Lewis told jurors last week.

“The ‘K’ is different than it typically would be,” he said. “I don’t have another word for it, but there seems to be an overly loopy or bubbled nature to the handwriting.”

The letters suggested that members of the delegation could expect discussions about “promoting greater investment, trade cooperation and tourism opportunities” with the Empire State, court records show.

Prosecutors say that Sun, who served as Cuomo’s director of Asian-American affairs, forged the governor’s then-No. 2 Hochul’s signature several times that year in an attempt to curry favor with Chinese officials.

Related: “Authorities seized more than $130,000 in cash in a safety deposit box leased by the mother of Linda Sun, the former gubernatorial aide from Long Island who is accused of illegally influencing New York State on behalf of China, an FBI agent testified on Monday in federal court in Brooklyn.”

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA:

As Adam Carolla noted earlier this year, “San Francisco’s done this and LA’s done this; once you essentially look the other way for homeless or junkies or illegals or criminals or whatever that is, and you shine a spotlight on taxpayers with over-regulation and over-permitting, trying to manage every grain of your life versus illegals go do whatever you want or homeless, go shoot up wherever you want, or sleep wherever you want then you’ve lost it. LA’s there, San Francisco’s there. Look if you’re not a taxpayer, and you don’t have a checking account, whatever city you’re in they’re not going to be nearly as interested in you, as they are in the people who have a checking account and pay can be compliant. The people who are compliant are paying them. So, it’s like, okay, who do you make money on?”

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION SUDDENLY GETTING COLD FEET: No, Don’t Release the Epstein Files.

All of a sudden, it seems like everyone is calling for the release of the Epstein files. The MAGA movement is angry at President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi for not coming through for them and delivering the cabal of rich pedophiles who benefited from relationships with Epstein.

Democrats and other Trump opponents, smelling blood in the water, have joined the calls for transparency on the theory that they might hoist Trump and his attorney general on their own conspiracy-packed petard.

Allow me a moment’s dissent: Have you all lost your minds?

Should the FBI and the Justice Department release willy-nilly their investigative files into a major child-exploitation and human trafficking case involving a large number of victims—given that truly vile conduct directed at them, and an untold number of witnesses who may be wholly innocent of wrongdoing, is likely to be unleashed?

The question answers itself.

For one thing, at least some of the information in the so-called Epstein files is likely grand jury information—that is, information protected by Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure—or otherwise protected by court seals. It is illegal to release this material. It’s not a choice the attorney general gets to make: Should I dump all this information into the public domain? She can’t. She shouldn’t. And if she does, she should go to jail.

Attorney General Bondi should resign if she was lying when she declared that she had Epstein’s client list on her desk—something the FBI now says does not exist. If she simply misspoke, she did so recklessly and stupidly and should probably resign anyway. But the solution is not a data dump of material, much of which is properly protected by federal law.

Even among the materials that are not protected by court seals, the Epstein files necessarily contain a wide range of information about victims. Are people seriously calling for this material to be dumped into the public’s hands?

Flashback to Julie Kelly in 2020: Brookings Institution: A Key Collusion Collaborator.

Related: Matt Tiabbi asks, “Do we want to know how the world really works, or is it too disgusting to countenance?” The Epstein Circus Will Shatter Our Last Delusions:

Release all of the Epstein Files” was a siren call for the MSNOW set as recently as this weekend, but now that Trump has issued a statement calling for House Republicans to vote for their release because “we have nothing to hide,” everything is in play. The House Oversight Committee already started the avalanche with a series of releases that over the weekend had me answering TextEdit prompts like, “Are you sure you want to open 897 files?”

If you’re a Democrat, you’ve already seen the Trump lowlights: a 2011 email from Epstein saying of former Mar-a-Lago spa attendant Virginia Giuffre, “VICTIM spent hours at my house with him,” and this 2019 note to author Michael Wolff: “Of course [Trump] knew about the girls.” There are mitigating docs with both issues (Giuffre, another suicide from earlier this year, wrote Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier” in a posthumously published memoir). Still, Pam Bondi’s Epstein files pirouette earlier this year never made sense and has been driving intramural MAGA turmoil since, with Marjorie Taylor Greene now railing against the idea that “rich, powerful people should be protected.” For an administration that’s done well sending roaches scurrying in the FBI, CIA, and DHS via Russiagate and Covid investigations, Epstein stands out as an unforced error. If it’s not dirt on Trump himself, and administration sources insist it isn’t, what’s the holdup?

Democratic Party hysteria over this issue is obviously absurd because “all of the Epstein files” could have been released over the last four years. There must be reasons why the last administration didn’t take that step, and there should be scandal in MAGA-world if those reasons overlap at all with the Trump administration’s. Between Epstein’s own hysterical rants about Trump in the newly released documents (he sounds like Kathy Griffin in some of the emails) and the blue party’s seeming entanglement with Epstein from the Clintons to Larry Summers to Reid Hoffman, it’s hard to imagine where that overlap might be, unless it involves major corporate names and/or overseas relationships. Some of that is suggested in [Dem Virgin Islands delegate Stacey Plaskett’s] story.

Faster, please.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: NY Times: Is Hollywood’s Movie Star Era Over? Welcome to the party, pals.

The article’s title pulls no punches: “25 Movies, Many Stars, 0 Hits: Hollywood Falls to New Lows.”

The story itself doesn’t, either.

Theaters in the United States and Canada collected $445 million across all titles in October, the lowest total on record, after adjusting for inflation and excluding 2020, when the pandemic darkened screens.

For context, October ticket sales in 2019 totaled an adjusted $1 billion, according to Comscore.

Why? How much time do you have? It’s easy to point to the obvious causes:

  • The rise of streaming competition
  • The shrinking window for films hitting VOD platforms
  • The rise of consequential video game titles
  • Social media
  • Shrinking attention spans in Gen Z
  • The pandemic fallout

And the ones media outlets won’t go near.

  • Stars made themselves toxic to half the country with their political views
  • Stars are, for the most part, over-exposed
  • The movies just aren’t very good, in toto
  • The Woke Mind Virus still infects the industry
  • Hollywood has lost touch with the common man

The blame game follows the classic improv guidebook: “Yes, and …” No one cause is to blame. Combine them all, and you’ve got a serious problem.

And we haven’t mentioned the letters “A” and “I” yet. Gulp.

The arrival of the holiday season means that a trio of big-budget sequels, the follow-ups to Wicked, Avatar and Zootopia, will help goose Hollywood’s box office somewhat as the year concludes, but even there, as Christian writes, “Those sequels will cushion the blow for a reeling industry. None of the three is driven by star power. That’s no accident.” Hollywood churning through product mostly shot in the last year of the Biden administration, largely bereft of movie stars, has made for a lousy year at the movie theater:

ARDIENTE PERO MAYORMENTE PACÍFICA! AP: Thousands protest crime and corruption in Mexico City as ‘Gen Z’ protests gain momentum.

Several thousand people took to the streets of Mexico City on Saturday to protest crime, corruption and impunity in a demonstration organized by members of Generation Z, but which ended with strong backing from older supporters of opposition parties.

The demonstration was mostly peaceful but ended with some young people clashing with the police. Protesters attacked police with stones, fireworks, sticks and chains, grabbing police shields and other equipment.

Mostly peaceful:

HISTORY DOESN’T REPEAT, BUT IT OFTEN RHYMES: Oxford Union: Israel greater threat to stability than Iran.

The Oxford Union voted overwhelmingly that “Israel is a greater threat to regional stability than Iran” in a debate on Thursday last week.

A large majority of 265-113 voted yes to the motion, which was debated first by two panels of speakers. For the proposition were Lincoln College’s Alex Webster, Jessica Rowe, former Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, and former Iranian culture minister Ata’ollah Mohajerani.

For the opposition were Hillel Neuer, international human rights lawyer and executive director of the UN Watch; Dominick Chilcott, Middle East specialist and former British ambassador to Turkey and Iran; St. John’s history student Katie Pannick, and St. Hugh’s history Master’s student William Rome.

Webster opened the proposition by saying that Israel was a larger threat to regional stability, as it holds more sway with global powers. “They get all of the guns but none of the consequences,” he added. Pannick responded by saying that Iran is “capable of systemic disruption” and also drew on the danger associated with its nuclear missile program.

This isn’t the first time that Oxford has chosen to root for the bad guys, of course:

On a cold February evening in 1933, the students of the Oxford Union debated and passed the motion “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” The debate, which took place a week or so after Hitler was named chancellor of Germany, became an international sensation.

The students’ pacifism and lack of patriotism was viewed as emblematic of the degeneracy of an ungrateful and self-indulgent young intellectual elite. Winston Churchill called the vote “abject, squalid, shameless,” and “nauseating.”

The Oxford Union debate was not simply an academic exercise. At the time, many observers claimed it reinforced the view in Germany that the English were soft.

Alfred Zimmern, professor of international relations at Oxford, wrote to the former Oxford Union president who organized the debate: “I hope you do penance every night and every morning for that ill starred Resolution. … If the Germans have to be knocked out a second time it will be partly your fault.” Churchill would later write that as a result of the “ever shameful” motion, “in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations.”

As Michael Walsh wrote a few years ago:

The Europeans should have learned from their own history, but of course they never do. The Oxford Union’s “King and Country” debate of 1933, a fateful year in European history, turned out to be one of the high points of British pacifism. Having been bled dry by the Somme and other horrific battles in World War I, and also having lost the cream of their manhood in the process, the Union passed the motion that “this House would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country.” Winston Churchill who never saw a war he didn’t want to fight, knew that war with Hitler was unavoidable, and was aghast at the surviving, whinging chaff of England’s crop, the sons of the cowards, conscientious objectors, and those otherwise unfit to serve. Six years later, however, they were doing exactly that.

Plus ça change.

WATCH THE TRAILER FOR THE RESTORED AND EXPANDED BEATLES ANTHOLOGY DOCUSERIES:

The Beatles Anthology was a landmark multimedia history of the Beatles that included the original eight-episode documentary, a four-volume set of double albums, and a book. It was first premiered in November 1995, and the documentary contained new interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison along with archival interviews with John Lennon. The newly restored version will expand the eight episodes into nine, with Oliver Murray directing the final one. The previous eight were directed by Geoff Wonfor, Bob Smeaton, and Matt Longfellow.

To expand the doc, previously unreleased footage of the then-surviving Beatles putting together Anthology will be included. Footage restoration and sound mixing was overseen by Apple Corps and done by the technicians at Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post in Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson had previously restored and directed The Beatles: Get Back.

Disney+ will premiere the docuseries in batches of three episodes for three days straight. The first trio of episodes will drop on Nov. 26, with episodes four through six out on Nov. 27, and the final three out on Nov. 28. Anthology rounds out a slate of Beatles films and series that are available on Disney+, including Get Back, Let It Be, and Beatles ’64.

The trailer looks great; the interviews shot on film in the early-to-mid ‘90s of the then-three surviving Beatles have been blown up to widescreen 16X9 proportions, as have some of the film elements of their past projects. It looks like material shot for television, such as John Lennon’s 1970s interviews, have been kept in their original 4X3 format, which seems wise. I’ll be curious to see how much heretofore unseen footage is in the new last episode:

HAVING SOLVED ALL OF ITS OTHER PROBLEMS, ENGLAND FINALLY TAKES ON THE BIG ONE: U.K. Government Identifies Climate Change as Significant Threat to Mental Health, Recommends Yoga as a Fix.

The United Kingdom Health Security Agency released a report identifying anxiety about climate change as a significant driver of mental-health problems among young people. But instead of counseling politicians and activists to tone down their rhetoric, the report casts climate alarmism as a reasonable response to real-world conditions and prescribes solutions like yoga and so-called climate cafes to help alleviate the stress.

The “Climate change and mental health: thematic assessment,” released last week, describes climate change as “one of the most significant threats to health security and societal wellbeing.”

The authors go on to describe the novel mental health disorders, complete with formal names, that have emerged in young people in response to that dire reality.

“An awareness of climate and environmental change can also lead to emotional or psychological responses, such as eco-anxiety, a term used to describe the distress and worry caused by the threat of climate change, and solastalgia, which refers to the distress experienced as a result of environmental change (including climate change) negatively impacting on someone’s home or sense of place.”

There of course, very different factors besides “climate change” causing Brits to feel that something is negatively impacting their homes and sense of place, but “unexpectedly,” Labour won’t dare respond to them: Brits on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

As well as the immigration crisis playing out before our eyes, the economy is on its knees. Having pushed back the date of the autumn budget as long as humanly possible, praying to find a few extra billion from somewhere, chancellor Rachel Reeves will be opening her red box of doom in a couple of weeks. She’s spent months, as Labour MP Clive Lewis has put it, ‘rolling the pitch to see what the public, the media and the City find acceptable’.

Now the moment of truth is upon us. We are stone broke. Busted. Skint. Out of cash, out of confidence and out of credibility. Budgets are always painful, but this one might just tip us over the edge. Working people at all income levels are being squeezed until the pips squeak, and the budget promises only more pain.

Labour appears to be doing everything in its power to turn what was a national depression when it entered office into a mental breakdown. From freezing pensioners to suicidal farmers, the riots sparked by the Southport murders to accidentally releasing sex offenders who should not be in the country anyway, this government does nothing but lurch from one crisis to the next. That’s without mentioning Labour’s schizophrenic stance on transgender rights, its incoherence on the Gaza conflict, its assault on free speech and the entrenchment of two-tier policing. Even Labour die-hards are in despair. It’s anyone’s guess who will crack up first, the people or their so-called prime minister.

With the UK in this state, you can’t blame Keir Starmer for not wanting to be here. It was reported that he’s travelled abroad on 40 occasions since he took power just over a year ago, and has six more foreign trips in the diary before Christmas. It’s almost as if he doesn’t like the place. With the lowest popularity ratings of any prime minister since polls began, keeping a low profile might be one of the few wise decisions he’s made since moving into No10.

As Julia Gorin wrote 20 years ago in the Christian Science Monitor, “It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming – at least that’s what some would have us believe:”

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.

As with the Biden administration, having no answer for illegal immigration other than importing more illegal immigrants, and attacking those who point out this strategy (QED: Britain’s flag wars), Labour has decided they’d rather issue press releases obsessing over global warming and yoga. Good luck Old Blighty, you’re going to need it.

KASH PATEL DROPS COVID ORIGIN BOMBSHELL:

Patel reminded Beck that the team briefed Trump based on the intelligence they had. Trump listened, weighed the facts, and acted. Then the usual suspects stepped in: “Then enter Fauci and the media. ‘No, no, no. The Chinese would never do this. It’s not about… No, no, it didn’t come from that.’ Then the wet bat thing came out and some other goofy whatever.”

We all remember what went down. Fauci played the patronizing scientist. The legacy media enforced the talking points. Big Tech censored any dissent. The establishment insisted the virus emerged from some Wuhan wet market and treated anyone who questioned that tale like a threat to democracy.

Patel then pointed out the bombshell that dropped just weeks ago. According to him, former CIA Director Gina Haspel “authorized six case officers and intelligence analysts to be paid off so that they would change their assessment on COVID originations.”

Read the whole thing.

STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT:

Morello knows he can wear a t-shirt that says “Destroy American Fascism” safe in the knowledge that no harm will come to him or his estimated 40 million dollar net worth. He also knows that wouldn’t be the case if someone was attacking his heroes: Tom Morello Defends Fidel Castro: ‘Huge Hero Throughout the Third World.’

Rolling Stone, November 27th, 2016.

Obligatory: Every GOP president since Coolidge has been called a Nazi or fascist by the left.

GAZPACHO POLICE FIRE UP THE SPACE LASERS: Trump Lowers the Boom on MTG: Sometimes, You’ve Gotta Police the Crazies.

If she wasn’t “sincerely” motivated by crass personal ambition, she might’ve been tempted by the bright lights of mainstream media acceptance. [Marjorie Taylor Greene] certainly wouldn’t be the first “committed conservative” to go native in the D.C. jungle. It’s surprisingly easy, too: All you’ve gotta do is plunge a dagger in the backs of your friends and colleagues, and whammo, you’re in the club.

And besides, it’s good for an ambitious gal such as Marjorie to keep her options open: You never know when a guest-hosting gig will open on “The View.”

But whereas MTG will do whatever’s good for MTG, President Trump’s focus must be bigger than the ego of any one congresswoman. One hopes that his Truth Social post will serve as a shot across the bow, dissuading other Me-Firsters who’ve been masquerading as America-Firsters.

Still though, it’s been quite a ride for MTG recently, as she maps out her future on The View or MSNBC MS NOW.

UPDATE: MTG also auditioning for CNN? ‘I’m Sorry:’ Marjorie Taylor Greene Apologizes When Confronted By CNN’s Dana Bash About Political Rhetoric.

She’s also going back to the future by looking for “a new way forward:”

UPDATE (6:20 PM): I’m not sure if this counts as MTG flunking her CNN audition:

It wouldn’t be the first time that CNN promoted a white nationalist: Jake Tapper slammed for giving white nationalist Richard Spencer airtime during his program.

THE CURIOUS LIMITS OF AIRSTRIP ONE’S SURVEILLANCE STATE:

Recent research estimated there were nearly one million private and publicly-owned CCTV cameras in London alone. That’s one camera for every 10 people, or 1,500 cameras per square mile. Walk between the tube stop and the office, stop by a coffee shop, or go out and get your lunch, and it’s estimated that your image may be captured hundreds of times. Outside China, the UK has become one of the most watched countries per capita on earth.

Despite the proliferation of cameras, the UK authorities are certainly willing to look away from their monitor screens from time to time:

Details of the above image here: Kidlington fly-tipping: Criminals dump mountain of waste in field.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Let’s Be Alone And Unhappy.

I paraphrase, of course. Though not, I think, wildly:

Researchers at Stanford have finally given a name to something many women have been dealing with for years. It’s called mankeeping. And it’s helping explain why so many women are stepping away from dating altogether.

Yes, from the pages of Vice, it’s a men-are-the-problem-and-therefore-unnecessary article. Because we haven’t had one of those in weeks.

Mankeeping describes the emotional labour women end up doing in heterosexual relationships.

Lesbian relationships being entirely free of aggravation and disappointment, you see. With rates of failure and divorce twice that of heterosexuals, more than double that of gay male couples, and with high rates of alcoholism and spousal abuse. What one might infer from that, I leave to others.

[Mankeeping] goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress.

And,

Interpreting his moods.

At which point, readers may wish to share their favourite joke about female indirectness and the two dozen possible meanings of the words “I’m fine” when uttered by a woman, depending on the precise intonation and the current alignment of the planets.

Readers may also note the replacement of a once common but now seemingly unfashionable grievance – ‘Men don’t express their feelings’ – with one of a much more modish kind – ‘Men are expressing their feelings and it’s exhausting and unfair.’

As Timothy P. Carney concluded in August at the Washington Examiner, when the Gray Lady had learned a new word, “Unpaid emotional labor is intolerable for the modern feminist. It’s also known as loving one another, which sounds a little too much like the stuff Jesus used to talk about. Jesus, marriage, commitment? That’s the patriarchy, after all.”

THOSE ARE ROOKIE NUMBERS. MAMDANI WILL REALLY GET THEM PUMPED UP: Commercial foreclosures on the rise in New York City.

Commercial foreclosures are up in New York City, according to a new report.

Through the third quarter, lenders have initiated foreclosures on 61 commercial properties in New York City, according to data from PropertyShark. At this point in 2024, 55 new foreclosures had been filed.

The rise in foreclosures comes after a short-lived dip. The total number of new cases in New York City decreased from 90 new filings in 2023 to 72 in 2024.

In Q3, New York City saw 21 new commercial foreclosures, a PropertyShark report found.

Brooklyn has seen more foreclosures than the rest of New York City’s boroughs combined, according to the report. Properties in

Brooklyn accounted for 12 of the 21 foreclosure cases this past quarter. Of the 223 commercial foreclosures initiated since 2023, 155 of those cases were filed in Brooklyn, including 41 filings this year thus far.

On the West Coast, the San Jose Mercury News reports: Oakland office building is foreclosed in fresh sign of market maladies.

A growing number of commercial properties, including office buildings, hotels and residential towers in Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville, are undergoing financial stress to one degree or another in a difficult real estate market.

In some instances, the properties have suffered loan defaults that have led to foreclosures. In other instances, the commercial real estate sites have suffered a steep decline in value.

But ultimately, I’m sure it will all be fine: Fannie Mae is removing minimum credit score requirements. “This shift impacts first-time homebuyers, credit-invisible buyers, and realtors helping clients navigate mortgage requirements. And yes,  it could open the doors to homeownership for thousands of people who previously couldn’t qualify.”

All the new homeowners will balance out the commercial real estate foreclosures, right? Right?!

SURPRISE! Here’s Where Your Taxes to Help ‘Homeless People’ Actually Go.

Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and L.A. all bought into the plan and the money flowed. In 2016, many states, including California, went with “housing first” models — throwing out sobriety requirements to get better — and it’s now worse than ever.

These activists have created a kind of fraudulent nobility that comes with cooping up addicts in apartments and calling it “housing justice.”

Worse, decriminalizing drugs and setting up “safe” places to shoot up drugs gave birth to homeless tourism.

California, Oregon, Hawaii, and New York have attracted 40% (and probably more) of all “homeless” addicts.

Discovery Institute and the Capital Research Center have released their dual report on how extremist groups have used homeless funding for their own political aims. It’s called “INFILTRATED: The Ideological Capture of Homeless Advocacy.

“Using financial data, legal records, and original research, the report uncovers a vast network of homelessness advocates that spend billions in taxpayer dollars and philanthropic grants on everything but obvious solutions,” the report states.  Indeed, the obvious issues leading to homelessness, namely drug addictions and mental health problems, aren’t addressed in the massive expenditures by these organizations and, in effect, worsen the homeless problem even more.

In December of 2009, SF Weekly had this classic Fox Butterfield-esque line: “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.”

In 2023, CNN joined in on the fun: California has spent billions to fight homelessness. The problem has gotten worse.

Also that year, Fox News neatly summed up the Bay Area’s woes: Gavin Newsom’s 10-year plan to end San Francisco homelessness marks 20-year anniversary.

Of course, the problem isn’t exclusive to the west coast. In 2017 the New York Post similarly reported: Why homelessness gets worse as de Blasio doubles spending.

I’M PRETTY SURE THE BARBARIANS ARE ALREADY HERE. Niall Ferguson: If humans stop reading, barbarians will live among us again.

If we gradually cease to base our social and political organisation on the written word, it follows that there will be three consequences.

First, we shall quickly be cut off from the heritage of all the great civilisations, as books are the principal repository of past thought. Books are the principal way a civilised person learns about the distinction between noble and ignoble conduct, for example. This means that the next generation will have a significantly larger proportion of outright barbarians than any in the past century.

Second, we shall revert to the preliterary conflation of present and past, history and myth, individual and collective. The essence of the conspiracy theory is that it preys on the illiterate mind.

Third, we shall quickly lose the ability to think analytically, because the crucial way our civilisation has been transmitted from generation to generation is through the great writers, from whom we learn how to structure an argument so that it is clearly intelligible to others.

Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 offered a vision of a bookless, authoritarian future. But the more I think about where we’re going, the more I realise that the loss of literacy will amount to going back in time rather than forward.

It’s easy to blame the smartphone, which has radically transformed how millions receive information. (The death of the Internet forum is but one of many examples.) But it should share the blame with other powerful forces. Flashback: How Journalists Became Fahrenheit 451–Style ‘Firemen.’ “Not too long ago, ambitious journalists, local and national, prided themselves on gathering information, and their editors prided themselves on publishing it. About 50 or so years ago, however, progressives started to seize control of universities, J-schools included, and newsrooms shifted leftwards with each new graduating class. By 2016, even major newsrooms had become firehouses. Their goal was not to report information but to manage it.”

As Ray Bradbury wrote in the introduction to the 50th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”

UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs on “Kindergarteners with Chromebooks.”

UK GOVERNMENT ‘WITHHOLDING DATA THAT MAY LINK COVID JAB TO EXCESS DEATHS:’

The public health watchdog has been accused of a “cover-up” after refusing to publish data that could link the Covid vaccine to excess deaths.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) argued that releasing the data would lead to the “distress or anger” of bereaved relatives if a link were to be discovered.

Public health officials also argued that publishing the data risked damaging the well-being and mental health of the families and friends of people who died.
Last year, a cross-party group expressed alarm about “growing public and professional concerns” over the UK’s rates of excess deaths since 2020.

In a letter to UKHSA and Department for Health, the MPs and peers said that potentially critical data – which map the date of people’s Covid vaccine doses to the date of their deaths – had been released to pharmaceutical companies but not put into the public domain. The public health watchdog has been accused of a “cover-up” after refusing to publish data that could link the Covid vaccine to excess deaths.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) argued that releasing the data would lead to the “distress or anger” of bereaved relatives if a link were to be discovered.

Public health officials also argued that publishing the data risked damaging the well-being and mental health of the families and friends of people who died.
Last year, a cross-party group expressed alarm about “growing public and professional concerns” over the UK’s rates of excess deaths since 2020.

In a letter to UKHSA and Department for Health, the MPs and peers said that potentially critical data – which map the date of people’s Covid vaccine doses to the date of their deaths – had been released to pharmaceutical companies but not put into the public domain.

Why, it’s as if:

ROGER KIMBALL: Doctored Footage Fallout: Trump vs. the BBC.

In the doctored clip, Trump is shown saying, “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be with you, and we’ll fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.” A leaked internal report on BBC bias noted that the doctored clip made Trump “ ‘say’ things [he] never actually said by splicing together footage from the start of his speech with something he said nearly an hour later.”

The BBC’s perfidy did not end with mangling the words Trump spoke. The program also featured scenes of angry, flag-waving men marching towards the Capitol, apparently spurred on by Trump’s pugilistic rhetoric. As that leaked report notes, this “created the impression Trump’s supporters had taken up his ‘call to arms.’” Unfortunately for that narrative, the footage was shot before Trump had even started speaking.

The New York Times was correct in describing this incident as “one of the worst crises in [the BBC’s] 103-year history.”  It is also correct that it takes place against the background of a larger concern with “progressive” bias at the BBC. The government-licensed organization is supposed to be independent and nonpartisan. In fact, it has been a reliable purveyor of left-wing attitudes and talking points at least since the 1970s. Pick the topic: the war in Gaza, climate change, the debate over so-called “transgender” ideology, immigration, “Islamophobia,” or anything having to do with Donald Trump.  You have only to name the subject and the players to know what line the BBC will be pushing.

And the Beeb goes on: White House fury at Trump ‘monster’ jibe in showpiece BBC lecture: US President ‘dubbed a fascist’ during flagship speech commissioned by broadcaster.

The row between the BBC and Donald Trump has escalated further after it was revealed the broadcaster commissioned a fierce critic of the US President to deliver its flagship annual lectures.

Dutch author Rutger Bregman used the high-profile events to draw parallels between Trump’s America and the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

In one talk, entitled A Time Of Monsters and due to air next week, he likened Mr Trump, Nigel Farage and tech billionaires such as Elon Musk to fascists, according to one audience member. He is said to have used the term ‘a bit fashy’ to describe them.

The BBC’s decision to invite Mr Bregman – who has previously described opposition to Mr Trump in the US as a fight between ‘good and evil’ – to deliver the showpiece Reith lectures will fuel ongoing accusations that the corporation has an institutional left-wing bias.

The White House tonight branded Mr Bregman ‘a rabid anti-Trump individual’.

So, so, “fashy:” The Speed At Which Federal Judges Are Waging Lawfare To Stop The Trump Administration is Jaw-Dropping.

ATTENTION HALLMARK, YOUR NEXT CHRISTMAS MOVIE AWAITS: