Author Archive: Stephen Green

HUH: Amazon is struggling to hold on to the pilots who ship your packages. “Amazon’s promise of one-day shipping has led it to increasingly rely on its own air cargo division, Amazon Air. But as the number of shipments pushed through the cargo arm multiplies, the pilots who fly those packages continue to voice that they are overworked and underpaid.”

Sounds like they need more pilots, and in terms of pay and sheer numbers that’s not really an area where anyone should scrimp.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Hung by the Chimney With Care Edition. “I’m going for something a little more lighthearted today and tomorrow (yes, there will be a Christmas Day briefing). Just because I have to read the news all day doesn’t mean everyone has to be miserable.”

AIN’T NO SUNSHINE: Seattle Copes with Darkest Day on Record. “Seattle’s darkest day, that time I almost got fired over a weather forecast, and the threat of the nation being overrun by four million Greta Thunbergs.”

If you aren’t a VIP member, the promo code VODKAPUNDIT is still good for a nice little discount.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for December 23, 2019. “Another debate down (like the ratings), Buttigieg brings all the swells to the crystal wine bar, Bloomberg carpet bombs the airwaves with money, and Tom Steyer is the Cats of candidates.”

Me-OW!

HARSH, BUT FAIR:

If you think of it as Schrodinger’s Impeachment, then it all makes sense, except not really.

MEMORIUM: Technology That Died in 2019.

Among the dead: iTunes for Mac, which will not be missed.

The new Music app which replaced the music part of iTunes is an imperfect improvement, but the TV app is just awful.

LAWRENCE PERSON: Wokeness vs. The Working Class. “The hard left has made it clear that they despise, absolutely despise members of the working class, or even anyone without a college degree. They especially hate that ordinary people resist their Social Justice Warrior ‘wokeness,’ and refuse to let transsexual madness and victimhood identity politics get shoved down their throats. The woke can’t hide their naked contempt for those inbred redneck freaks of JesusLand, even when it costs them elections. And their self-imposed reality bubbles prevent them from realizing just how unpopular and distasteful their attitudes and policies have become to ordinary people.”

SOLIDARITY: Hong Kong Protestors March for Oppressed Uighurs. “The crackdown is aided by what might be the world’s most omnipresent, high-tech surveillance system, which is cruelly ironic when you consider that Xingjiang has long been China’s least-developed region. It’s like the Uighurs went from peasant-farming and goat-herding to something out of Brave New World virtually overnight.”

MICHAEL GOODWIN: Donald Trump’s ‘they’re after you’ tweet says it all.

Critics regard it as fear-mongering, and there is no denying that the president wanted to rally his base, lest it be discouraged by the day’s events.

Yet Trump’s oblique reference to a weaponized and powerful adversary is hardly ­unfounded, with a partisan, flimsy impeachment the latest example. The tweet’s siren call to believers is a shorthand way of saying that impeachment is just a continuation of the endless attacks against us.

Indeed, his presidency effectively begins with a prophecy of those attacks, one that came 17 days before Trump took the oath.

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said on MSNBC.

It was an incredible thing to say in a nation where the people are supposedly sovereign, but soon it would become clear that Schumer knew what he was talking about, which still raises questions.

Indeed.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Eddie Murphy Makes SNL Funny for the First Time In Years. “What struck me while watching Murphy bring hilarious characters like Buckwheat and Velvet Jones back to life was that the wokescolds would probably keep them from ever becoming SNL staples were he starting out on the show today. We just had to endure several days of them rending their garments because Joe Biden once had a stutter and people were wondering what his bizarro imitation of a stuttering kid was at the end of the last debate. The entire character of Buckwheat is built on a speech impediment. Velvet Jones refers to women as ‘Ho’s.”

I’d forgotten all about Velvet Jones. That was a great character.

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT ON SUNDAY: Biden Just Lost the Election.

Biden, for better or for worse, remains the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But in Thursday’s debate, he committed a major sin. He alienated his base — the only group in the party that still backs him. In speaking of economic growth, the moderator asked, “As president, would you be willing to sacrifice some of that growth, even knowing potentially that it could displace thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of blue-collar workers, in the interest of transitioning to that greener economy?'”

Biden answered quickly and boldly: “The answer is yes.”

End of story. There’s your Trump TV advertisement. Even if Biden somehow still wins the nomination, Trump will destroy him with working-class and middle-class voters.

PJMedia VIP members got the scoop on Friday.

COLD WAR II: US Navy Bans TikTok, Citing ‘Cybersecurity Threat.’ “Both the United States Navy and the Army are instructing service members to avoid ByteDance’s TikTok on government-issued smartphones. Lawmakers suggest the popular app poses a threat to national security. ByteDance, however, denies any close relationship with the Chinese government.”

(From Glenn: More adversary technology.)