One factor in the use of the government as a weapon against the Political foes of the left that isn’t discussed is that this is the fruit of the Obama years.
Obama was always a cheap Chicago pol and he used his high position to transform the federal government and the system into the Chicago way where government is used to enrich friends and punish enemies.
Till those Obama types are purged we’re not going to see things change.
In his famous appearance on Phil Donahue’s show Milton Freeman when questioned by Donahue on the excesses of capitalism replied: “just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?” This is a basic principle of life that people tend of act in their own self interest. And since most people aren’t angels particularly in government the best way to create ethical behavior is to make such behavior profitable.
That’s really the secret, if you make the rewards of honorable behavior strong enough then the risks of unethical behavior are not worthwhile.
CBS has suddenly decided that the Hunter Biden laptop stuff is real.
This in my opinion is a definite signal that they have decided than in a possible match with Trump in 2024 Joe Biden in expendable.
The real question is will Biden fight (Jill that is) I don’t think Joe has much fight in him, but he does know where the bodies are.
The moment I heard that Nancy Pelosi was dropping herself from the leadership but staying in congress all I could think of was the movie Casino with Hakeem Jeffries playing the role of Phillip Green. I suspect that the new leadership will not make any move that is not approved by Nancy as she, like Biden knows where the bodies are buried.
Personally I think the only reason for this is to remove Pelosi and a fundraising meme for the GOP.
Finally it’s starting to get cold and the heat has been on in the house. That means that the first oil delivery of the new Biden season is coming for me and a lot of other folks.
I get about 200 gallons per delivery which is going to likely run over $1000 as opposed to the $500-$600 that it would have in the Trump years.
If this doesn’t change the voting patterns of folks in New England nothing will.
While increasingly irrelevant, the mainstream media is still a force to be reckoned with in regard to shaping opinion. Despite paywalls at many newspaper and magazine sites, revenue is down, and layoffs are up. The paywalls of course limit readership, and usually, considering what is produced by the MSM, that’s a good thing.
You probably that FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency firm that is incorporated in Antigua and Barbuda, filed for bankruptcy protection a few days after Election Day.
Oh, Election Day, is that a non-sequitur?
Nope.
The co-founder, and until November 11, the CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was the second-largest contributor to Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Nearly $40 million in SBF funds went to the Dems, most of that money ended up in three Democrat-PACs. Only George Soros, who made his fortune in currency trading, donated more to the Dems during the midterm cycle.
Bankman-Fried, often referred to as SBF, has not been charged with any crimes. Still, there are comparisons being made between SBF and Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff, as well as the collapse of Enron. Bankman-Fried’s successor at FTC, John Ray III, who did the best he could in cleaning up Enron, had this to say about his new employer, “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” Larry Summers, alluded to the Enron debacle too. “The smartest guys in the room. Not just financial error but — certainly from the reports — whiffs of fraud,” the former Treasury secretary under Barack Obama said. “Vast explosion of wealth that nobody quite understands where it comes from.”
And I believe there is a bit of the Fyre Fest hoaxster, Billy McFarland, embedded in Bankman-Fried’s mental DNA.
Notwithstanding Summers remark, there have been few if any screams of anger from prominent Democrats about the FTX ruination. I wonder why. Not!
The mainstream media coverage of Bankman-Fried has largely avoided this word–megadonor. Which is of course how the MSM reflexively labels major Republican campaign contributors such as Ken Griffin, Andy Sabin, Ronald Lauder and so many more. When I entered “megadonor” into the Google News site this morning and their names popped up. Not so much with SBF–and most of those mentions came from conservative-leaning sites such as Fox Business and the Washington Free Beacon. NBC News managed to use the word “megadonor” in an article about SBF–but take a look at the mournful headline that accompanied that story: Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall could deprive Democrats of key donor.
We used to see similar media malpractice–until bloggers and conservative journalists repeatedly called the MSM out on it–with the phrase “mass shooting” only being used when the evil perpetrator was a white male.
You know who else is almost never called a megadonor by the media?
George Soros.
Media bias is like the Hydra, a beast from Greek mythology. There are so many heads that need to be sliced off.
Late October arrived with what I thought would be a pleasant surprise, a new Netflix horror and suspense series, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Del Toro, known for the superb art direction in his films, is an Academy Award winner for directing The Shape of Water, that film contains a controversial scene which we’ll discuss shortly.
There are eight episodes, set either in the early 20th century or the latter part of the century. Oh, for balance, there’s one set around 1950. All but one of them are based on short stories, two of them by del Torro, and two by H.P. Lovecraft, a horror and fantasy writer, the bulk of his work was published in the 1920s and 1930s.
First the good. The acting is superb and not surprisingly, so is the art direction and cinematography. The bad–well, the stories aren’t very good, and in what is becoming common with Netflix, the episodes are too long, each one of Cabinet of Curiosities‘ segments could be trimmed by anywhere from ten to twenty minutes. The episodes run from 38 minutes to slightly more than an hour. And like many Netflix original series, funding doesn’t seem to be an issue. That was not the situation with the low-budget horror movies that I grew up with and enjoyed, such as Vincent Price’s American International Picture films. Netflix needs to focus on the basics of entertainment, not the frills.
Del Toro, just as Rod Serling did with The Twilight Zone, introduces each episode. The titular character of Alfred Hitchcock Presents performed the same duty, and there is a Game of Thrones-style cabinet animation device as the opening credits run. Del Toro doesn’t direct any of the episodes.
But Cabinet of Curiosities, rather than emulating The Twilight Zone, harkens back to Steven Spielberg’s mid-1980s NBC anthology series, Amazing Stories. It should have been called “Stories,” because that heavily hyped series was anything but “amazing.” The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents were rebooted around this time, both fell flat. As the saying goes, if Hollywood ever had an original idea, it would die of loneliness.
I’ll briefly sum up each Cabinet of Curiosities entry, in the order of their release. If you are running out of time with my post, or if you are running out of patience, I have this message. Just two of the eight episodes are worth viewing, “Pickman’s Model” and “The Murmuring.”
Lot 36: Nick Appleton (Tim Blake Nelson) is a bitter Vietnam veteran who is physically and emotionally damaged from that war. This entry is set just as the First Gulf War is breaking out. Appleton, who makes his living by buying abandoned storage units, is a racist who listens to conservative talk radio. The implied message of course is that everyone who listens to what liberals call “right-wing radio” is a bigot. But everyone I know who listens to conservative talkers do so because they are tired of government overreach and they don’t like high taxes, among other things. Appleton purchases a storage unit owned by a Nazi who recently died. Get it? American bigot, Nazi, white supremacy. I’m stupefied that the director of this bit didn’t dye Nelson’s hair bright orange here. “Lot 36” is based on a del Toro short story. I hated this segment.
Graveyard Rats: And this episode is based on what? Okay, the answer to that question is easy. Masson (David Hewlett) is a formerly well-to-do man who is now struggling along as a graverobber in a town known for the macabre, Salem, Massachusetts. There’s plenty of plot build-up here, as is the case with much of Cabinet of Curiosities, but little payoff.
The Autopsy: Minor spoiler alert: Just as with surgeries, autopsies are never solo projects. F. Murray Abraham, who never gives a bad performance, portrays a dying coroner, Dr. Carl Withers, who is investigating a mysterious accident at a Pennsylvania coal mine. Again, the set-up doesn’t match the ending of this episode. Watching the autopsies got me wondering. Why weren’t twenty minutes of this segment sliced off?
There is also an age-restricted YouTube video available here.
The Outside: Set in the late 1970s, as was “The Autopsy,” Stacey (Kate Micucci) is an unattractive and socially awkward bank teller surrounded by pretty but shallow female co-workers. Her hobby is taxidermy. Stacey’s life is altered as she becomes enamored with commercials touting a facial cream; the ads are subtle parodies of the faith healers who were often found on late night television at the time. Some of the facial cream comes to life. There is an erotic scene, an homage to Amphibian Man getting it on with a woman in The Shape of Water, in “The Outside.” I hated this episode too.
Pickman’s Model: Although this offering is extremely disturbing, “Pickman’s Model” worked for me. Will Thurber (Ben Barnes) is a wealthy art student at a Boston area college. All is well for him–until he sees the nightmarish paintings and sketches of Richard Pickman (Crispin Glover). A well-known lesson from the life of Vincent Van Gogh is that the boundaries between creativity and insanity are narrow. Oh, one little correction. Pickman tells Thurber that one of his ancestors was burned at the stake during the Salem Witch Trials. In fact, all of the executed accused witches in Salem were hanged, save one who refused to enter a plea. He was pressed to death.
Dreams in the Witch House: After his twin sister dies, a now-middle-aged Walter Gilman (Rupert Grint) is attempting to reconnect with her by way of spiritualists. There is a kissing scene with Gilman and a witch–she has been burnt to a crisp. Eww. There’s a lot of other weirdness here too. And while for the most part it is visually striking, “Dreams in the Witch House,” plot-wise, is vacant. As with “Pickman’s Model,” this segment is based on an H.P. Lovecraft story.
The Viewing: An eccentric wealthy man, Lionel Lassiter (Peter Weller), invites five seemingly unconnected celebrities to his mansion to view a mysterious object. To place them all on the same mental plane, they snort high-grade cocaine. And while there is a lot of action, it’s impossible to ascertain what it all adds up to. Nothing, is what I think. At nearly an hour in length, there is plenty of time for the scriptwriters to present their message. But they don’t. Perhaps the writers were on drugs when the produced the script. This piece was too boring for me to despise.
The Murmuring: Two married ornithologists, Nancy (Essie Davis) and Edgar Bradley (Andrew Lincoln), are devastated by a tragedy. They travel to a remote Canadian island to study the murmurations, that is, the cloud-like flocks of a wading bird species, the dunlin. But the crumbling old house they are staying in offers them plenty of distractions from their work. As a nature lover, I particularly enjoyed this entry–and I could easily see it fitting in as an episode of the original Twilight Zone. Not so with the other seven segments. “The Murmuring” is the other episode based on a del Toro short story.
Each entry is a stand-alone, you can watch one of them, two of them, or all of them. If you choose the last option–you’ve been warned.
Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is rated TV-MA for violence, disturbing themes, nudity, drug use, vivisection, and gore.
Yesterday Instapundit put a link to Ann Althouse who had a very interesting take on the Paul Pelosi story and how the NYT spun Elon Musk tweet answering Hillary Clinton:
The main thing Musk did there was ding Clinton for throwing out baseless speculation. He was emboldened — just kidding, he seems to have felt emboldened — to swing wildly because he was swinging back at her wild swing. She wielded the hammer of self-serving accusation and he grabbed it and demonstrated how badly you can hurt someone with it.
The article alleges that Mr. Pelosi was drunk and in a fight with a male prostitute.
Oh, my lord, now the vivid allegation is right there in the NYT. It was fit to print. Why?! Because Musk merely pointed at it in a tweet that was — as I read it — designed to tell Hillary Clinton to back off with the political propaganda.
Mr. Musk’s tweet was later deleted, and it was not immediately clear who had deleted it.
But this is a news story. Musk linked to something, then deleted it. I’m inclined to speculate that the reason the NYT is elevating this story is that the drunk-fight-with-a-male-prostitute story is not beyond the pale. It needs to be rendered toxic so no one will pass it around. Don’t dare say it!
An official investigation? Yes, please! This is a serious matter, we’re told. After all, the regime media and Democrats such as Ilhan Omar are out there making charges like “A far-right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.” Heck, Our Democracy is at stake, so the incoming Republican majority must get to the bottom of this alleged act of political violence.
I somehow think the Democrats will be reluctant to help, though Speaker McCarthy should not let any Democrats on the panel in the first place as payback for the 1/6 kangaroo committee. But why not investigate? These are serious charges, albeit from unserious people. Omar, a commie ingrate whose stupidity is exceeded only by her dishonesty, could not resist trying to leverage some cheap advantage from this grody scenario, but she should have passed on strategic if not moral grounds. By trying to place the blame for this on us, she triggered the Streisand Effect just when Democrats least needed to be associated with even more weird nonsense than they are already. Blaming Republicans for what appears to many people to be a sex tryst gone sour guarantees the wrongly accused – us – are going to hammer the Democrats unmercifully about it.
Well there are some obvious questions to be answered. Jim Treacher leads of his piece at Substack with the one most obvious:
The Pelosis are worth somewhere north of $100 million. Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and second in the line of presidential succession. You’re telling me her husband Paul was alone in a house with no security or surveillance cameras? This lunatic David DePape just walked right up to the house and broke in?
In fairness if you told me ten years ago that San Francisco would have “poop maps” I’d have found that pretty unbelievable too.
Those are all interesting takes but the most sensible take on the subject comes from a tweet from Byron York who is the king of sensible takes.
Now that a few days have passed, and with crazy theories/rhetoric flying around, would be good to see SFPD release info in Paul Pelosi attack: 1) 911 call audio; 2) officers' bodycam video; 3) toxicological tests; 4) all reports. Facts are vital to understanding.
This of course is a good idea if you want to establish the actual facts. This is however why Don Surber believes this is unlikely:
I imposed the 24-hour rule on the attack on Paul Pelosi, 82, on Saturday. Today I impose the 24-year rule because we never will learn the truth because San Francisco’s police are not as depicted by Karl Malden and Michael Douglas a half-century ago. The cops put on this case are political operatives whose duty is to shield the truth from the public.
The left says Trump did this and cites social media posts which conveniently portray the assailant as a QAnon fan, et cetera.
None of this adds up. Nobody knows outside a few cops and those who were there. Pray for Paul Pelosi and move on. Forget it, Jake. It’s San Fran town.
Now the truth is charges not withstanding I don’t know what actually happened and neither do any of you but I hereby make this prediction: If the 911 audio, officers body cam video, the Toxicological tests the various reports and the camera footage from the Pelosi house and any surrounding cameras in the neighborhood support the media’s narrative then they will all be released pretty soon.
If they are not then I strongly suspect Don Surber’s 24 year rule will kick in, unless the GOP forces the issue as Mr. Schlichter suggests.
Now when it comes down to it regardless of which narrative if any is correct and whatever the fellow was actually doing at the strangely (particularly given how the left has been insisting that there have been an unrelenting wave of right wing violence over the last year) unprotected Pelosi residence assaulting the old man is wrong and we of course hope for his recovery.
This is a story that is generating a lot of buzz but if you want to know what story SHOULD be all over everyone’s tongue it’s this one also via Insty:
The Biden Administration will lend its weight to Attorney General Maura Healey’s campaign again this week, when Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to hold a get out the vote rally in Boston.
“On Wednesday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris will attend a campaign rally in support of the statewide Massachusetts Democratic ticket. Massachusetts voters have the opportunity to make history by electing the first woman as Governor of Massachusetts with Maura Healey, the first all-women executive office team in the country with Healey and Lieutenant Governor nominee Kim Driscoll, and the first Black woman elected statewide in Massachusetts with Attorney General nominee Andrea Campbell,” the Healey campaign announced Sunday night.
Think about this for a second. It’s the final week of the campaign with critical races to defend the Senate and House for the Democrats and the Democrats find it necessary to send the VP to campaign in friggen Massachusetts to help Maura Healey in a race considered so safe for the left that they don’t even bother to list the 25.5 Democrat spread on the two pols they have listed at RCP.
No wonder the left/media would rather go all in on either the “Right winger attacks Pelosi” or “Right Wingers spread Pelosi conspiracy theory” stuff instead.
