AT AMAZON, Shop the Memorial Day Sale. #CommissionEarned
May 20, 2024
HE’S THE HONEST KIND OF CROOK WHO STAYS BOUGHT: Biden’s ’Inflation Reduction Act’ Enriches Commie China.
INFLATION WAS BECAUSE OF GREEDY BUSINESSES BUT NOW THEY AREN’T GREEDY ANYMORE SO THAT’S NICE: Target starts price war with Walmart by slashing the cost of 5,000 popular items.
EMBRACE THE HEALING POWER OF AND: Funny or Sad? Now Biden Says He Was Vice President During the Pandemic.
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirTag. #CommissionEarned
HOW IS STARTED: What the right’s gas stove freakout was really about. “Republicans and conservative pundits have spent the past week nonetheless expressing alarm about the fate of Americans’ ranges and cooktops — in line with previous GOP complaints about real or imagined threats to hamburgers, toilets, air travel, incandescent light bulbs and gasoline-powered cars.”
(It’s almost impossible to believe that Alex Guillen and Ben Lefebvre wrote that with straight faces.)
How it’s going: New research shows gas stove emissions contribute to 19,000 deaths annually. “We certainly don’t want to be alarmist. On the other hand, day after day, year after year, using a stove that the exposure really does build up and does increase the risk of all these respiratory diseases.”
But are the results reproducible?
THAT’S MOSTLY CHANDLER’S DOING: Neural network trained on ‘Friends’ can recognize sarcasm.
DAN MCLAUGHLIN: Let Harrison Butker Be Himself.
The worst response came from the NFL, which insisted on distancing the league from Butker’s opinions. Notably, unlike Colin Kaepernick, Butker did not use the NFL’s property or airtime to spread his opinions; he did so in his free time. There’s already a long and inconsistent record of the NFL and other sports leagues attempting, and failing, to come up with a consistent approach to punishing non-game-related things done by athletes off the field. The league wasn’t nearly this quick in the past to denounce violent crimes committed by its players. Nobody actually believes that it has been, or will in the future be, vigilant about making statements every time a player says or does something politically or socially controversial from the left. The point of this is to send a message that people who believe what Butker believes are apt to face discipline in the workplace for their faith and opinions. (That’s not just private action, either, given that the NFL is an association of franchises, one of which is publicly owned by the government of Green Bay, Wis.) And it is, to boot, a misreading of the NFL’s fan base: Do we really think that pro football fans are overwhelmingly left-leaning on cultural matters?
Plus: “So, let Harrison Butker be himself. His opinions are outgrowths of virtues in short supply today: faith, fidelity to the traditional family, and respect for the different, complementary, and mutually supporting roles played by husbands and wives. These are mostly opinions that were not even controversial until a few decades ago, and it should alarm us to see so little tolerance for their mere expression in the public square.”
Everyone must genuflect to the pieties of the Gentry Class, even though the Gentry Class itself doesn’t really live by them.
The richer you are, in general, the more conservative your life choices are. Most left wingers talk left but live right. They live in gated communities, put kids in private schools, maximize tax avoidance, have stay at home wives, pay attention to what they do not what they say.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 18, 2024
Not one single NFL player has criticized Harrison Butker for what he said. You know why? Because almost all of them agree with him. The gap between what players — and coaches — believe and what the sports media who covers them believes is seismic.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 18, 2024
THIS TIME IT’LL WORK! ADDING ‘BELONGING’ TO FIX DEI. Now it’s DEIB? At this rate it’s going to have as many letters as LGBTQQIAA+ soon.
The Israel-Hamas blowup on campus post October 7 is all the evidence one needs to end the DEI bureaucracies forever. It turned out that the result of spending billions, ruining the lives of dissenters, and warping the purpose of education in an effort to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is campuses that explode with ethnic unrest and violence when a war erupts on the other side of the planet. You had one job, DEI bureaucrats, and you failed in spectacular fashion. For a situation like this, Cromwell put it best: “It is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately … In the name of God, go!“
BRAVE SIR ROBIN BRAVELY TURNED AND FLED: Alarmed Democrats flee Biden’s ailing brand in battleground states.
“If you go out there and do a focus group, the focus groups all say, ‘He’s 200 years old. You got to be kidding me.’ And the worst part about it is for unaffiliated voters or people that haven’t made up their mind, they look at this and say: ‘You have to be kidding us. These are our choices?’ And they indict us for not taking it seriously,” said a Democratic senator who requested anonymity to discuss the alarm sparked by Biden’s weak poll numbers in battleground states.
Polls have shown that 40 percent of registered voters in battleground states were not too satisfied or not at all satisfied with the candidates in the presidential election.
The senator said Democratic colleagues “know this is a problem” but also realize it’s too late to do anything about it and that “this is the ticket we have to get behind and we have to win with this ticket.”
“We’ll see how much gravity we can defy,” the lawmaker said of senators in tough races who are polling better than Biden.
A second Democratic senator when asked about Biden’s poll numbers said that the president’s age is a persistent concern among voters.
“Biden’s showing his age in ways weirdly more than Trump,” said the senator, who noted that Trump, who is 77, is only four years younger than Biden, 81.
“People keep saying, ‘Why didn’t he take a pass he’s just so tired?’” the senator said of constituents who are baffled over Biden’s decision to run for a second term. “That is such a prevalent feeling.”
Even in a story about Biden’s troubles specifically and the Democrats generally, the first third is mostly “BUT TRUMP!” The Hill has to bring its readers over to the truth as gently as possible.
I’d just add that if Trump has maybe lost half a step over the last three years, Biden has been on the decline for much longer — and started with far fewer steps he could afford to lose.
#JOURNALISM:
You see, the mattresses under which the wealthy hide their money have magical money-multiplying properties.
— Neal McCluskey (@NealMcCluskey) May 19, 2024
I’M GLAD HE’S DEAD: Here’s How (and How Not) to Celebrate the Death of the Butcher of Tehran. “Iranian strongman Ebrahim Raisi — aka ‘the butcher of Tehran’ — is dead in a Sunday helicopter crash that his countrymen and women are celebrating, so now would be the perfect time for the New York Times to avoid interviewing the Iranian dissident he tried to have assassinated. Wait, what?”
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Brixham, England, residents forced to boil water after contamination.
WOEING: Boeing Blasted for Prioritizing Racial Quotas Over Performance and Safety. “By tethering itself to DEI benchmarks instead of prioritizing performance and safety, Boeing not only risks the lives of those who fly its aircraft, but also subjects the company and its executives to liability.”
WHEN THE ARTISTS ARE WAY TOO AHEAD OF THE CRITICS: 110 years ago, The Rite of Spring incited a riot in a Paris theater.
It began with a bassoon and ended in a brawl.
One hundred years ago today, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky debuted The Rite of Spring before a packed theater in Paris, with a ballet performance that would go down as one of the most important — and violent — in modern history.
Today, The Rite is widely regarded as a seminal work of modernism — a frenetic, jagged orchestral ballet that boldly rejected the ordered harmonies and comfort of traditional composition. The piece would go on to leave an indelible mark on jazz, minimalism, and other contemporary movements, but to many who saw it on that balmy evening a century ago, it was nothing short of scandalous.
Details surrounding the events of May 29th, 1913 remain hazy. Official records are scarce, and most of what is known is based on eyewitness accounts or newspaper reports. To this day, experts debate over what exactly sparked the incident — was it music or dance? publicity stunt or social warfare? — though most agree on at least one thing: Stravinsky’s grand debut ended in mayhem and chaos.
50 years ago, when Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuted on American television on PBS, many critics had a similar reaction:
THE EXODUS IS HERE: At OpenAI. Some of my friends are convinced that OpenAI has a much more sophisticated unreleased AI that it is using to generate the versions that are being released to the public. If so, why would people bail?
HEATHER MAC DONALD: California’s Looming Crime Catastrophe: Recent legislation makes it easier for felons to claim racial bias—potentially putting them back on the streets in large numbers. This is all by design, of course.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: How the West Was Woke, to the Point of Near Extinction.
ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS THE IDEOLOGY: Watch: Top New York Times reporter caught on hot mic urging reporters NOT to interview prominent Iranian dissident.
Farnaz Fassihi from the New York Times @nytimes was overheard in a Clubhouse room instructing Leili "Make sure Emma doesn't interview the crazy Masih @AlinejadMasih." This isn't the first instance of her urging reporters & journalists to boycott Alinejad. It's time for Fassihi to… pic.twitter.com/qADl4pJTT6
— Mooniter (@Mooniter) May 20, 2024
Erick Erickson adds, “It is extreme important for everyone to understand this. The New York Times UN Bureau Chief and chief Iran reporter was caught on audio urging reporters not to interview one of the most prominent Iranian dissidents.”
Who could have seen this coming? Other than Tom Cotton, James Bennet, Bari Weiss, Tim Scott, Don McNeil, and others censored by America’s former Newspaper of Record. Or as its successor in that department prophesied four years ago:
READER FAVORITE: 5-Minute Core Exercises for Seniors: Daily Routines to Build Balance. #CommissionEarned
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Demonized as contributing to climate change, cattle may actually decrease emissions, research shows.
Dr. Vaughn Holder, research project manager for beef nutrition at Alltech, and Dr. Betsey Boughton, director of agroecology at Archbold, studied the impacts that cattle production has on the ecosystem on a wetlands pasture at Buck Island Ranch, about 150 miles northwest of Miami, Florida. The researchers found that 19%-30% of methane emissions were from the cattle, but the rest was from the wetland soils. If the cows are removed, their research shows, it actually increases the amount of methane the wetland ecosystems give off.
Methane, which is more potent in terms of greenhouse warming than carbon dioxide, lasts only about 12 years. So reducing methane can have a more immediate impact on warming than reducing carbon dioxide.
Cattle emissions, Holder told Just the News, are often thought of like fossil fuel emissions. When we burn fossil fuels, the emissions go into the air. So eliminating a coal-fired power plant, for example, removes an emissions source, which produces a drop in emissions.
Grill burgers tonight in celebration.
BIDENOMICS: Family Wealth Soared Under Trump, Stagnated Under Biden. “We’ve struggled mightily these last three years, and the best most of us have done is tread water.”
FIRE HARRISON BUTKER? K.C. Star Opinion Writer Says Yes. Time to Hire Female Kicker.
Anybody who thinks this controversy is about women’s rights is missing the point. Butker said nothing that would indicate that he opposes women’s empowerment and ability to chase their dreams, whatever they might be.
What offends the left has nothing to do with that; it has everything to do with undermining family values. It is their hatred of the family that is revealed, not their zeal for girl bosses.
It is awfully hilarious though seeing the leftist establishment suddenly and in lockstep remembering how to define “what is a woman,” only two years after Ketanji Brown Jackson’s legendary “I’m not a biologist” meltdown.
