May 11, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN PRIORITIES: Senator Chris Murphy’s Stammering Symphony: A Masterclass in Evasion on Transgender Athletes in Sports.

Let’s break this down, shall we? First off, Murphy starts strong with, ‘I don’t have any fear of transgender athletes participating in sports.’ Oh, bravo, Chris. Very brave. Very progressive. But then Douthat, bless his heart, throws a curveball: ‘If you had a daughter competing against a biological male, would you find it unfair?’

And here’s where the fun begins. Murphy, in a stroke of genius, responds with, “I don’t have girls’. Wait, what? Is that supposed to be an answer?

Douthat, not one to let a good dodge slide, presses further: ‘Have some empathy for those of us who do. So would you find it unfair?’ And Murphy, ever the wordsmith, counters with, ‘I’ve talked to lots of parents of girls in Connecticut who do not think it’s unfair … I think everybody can come to their own conclusion.’ Sure, Chris. Because nothing says ’empathy’ like dismissing the concerns of parents who actually have skin in the game.

Contrast with: Democratic senator reveals ‘people we care about most’ are ‘undocumented Americans’ in US.

Exit question:

Posted at 6:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 125

BOMBSHELL BODY CAM FOOTAGE HAS HOUSE DEMOCRATS FACING POTENTIAL ARREST FOR ASSAULT:

A trio of New Jersey Democrats in the U.S. House may soon find themselves in handcuffs after their so-called “oversight visit” to an ICE detention center that got very insurrection-y on Friday. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the incident—which reportedly involved physical altercations with federal agents—could lead to arrests.

Representatives LaMonica McIver, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Rob Menendez, accompanied by Newark’s far-left Mayor Ras Baraka, allegedly stormed the Delaney Hall Detention Center unannounced. Baraka was arrested on the spot and charged with trespassing. Things escalated quickly, with DHS officials confirming that at least one ICE agent was assaulted during the confrontation—an incident that was captured on body cam footage.

So much for respecting the rule of law.

In response, JD Vance tweeted:

Meanwhile, much airbrushing of 2021-2024 tweets is likely going on: Dem Sen. Brian Schatz Trips Over Some Old Tweets While Getting Triggered by Possible Arrests of Dems.

 

Posted at 4:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 104

FASTER, PLEASE: Why Regime Change in Iran Is Becoming Inevitable. “Iran’s growing internal unrest and external failures present a strategic opportunity for the United States and its allies. The West should begin planning for a future without the Islamic Republic.  The Islamic Republic’s foundational pillars—religious legitimacy, economic governance, and regional power—are in collapse. Though the regime still holds coercive control through its security forces, it has lost its societal foundation. Regime change in Iran is no longer a distant hope—it is an increasingly likely outcome. The question for Western leaders is not if it will happen, but how to help shape a peaceful, stable, and democratic transition.”

Posted at 2:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 162

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS:

Here’s the Journal article: Trump Wants a New Air Force One So Badly He’s Refurbishing a Qatari Plane.

Posted at 1:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 193

ROGER KIMBALL: The Power in a Papal Name.

When, to the surprise of many, the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost got the nod from the College of Cardinals, the white smoke had not yet dissipated before the world was atwitter about the name the first American Pope had chosen: Leo.

What did it mean? I canvassed several knowledgeable friends about our new Pope. The responses ranged from cautious optimism all the way to avid enthusiasm. “All early signs are very positive,” quoth one pal who worked in the Vatican for Pope Benedict. “I think he will be a great pope.”

Given the source, I take that as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 196

May 10, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Some say that it’s illegal in 17 States, and that it’s recently begun releasing pop records under the pseudonym of Lady Gaga. All we know, is it’s called the Open Thread!

Posted at 9:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 2559

THE GAZA FAMINE MYTH:

“Gaza Is Starving,” a headline in The New Yorker declared in early January 2024, pushing a harrowing narrative that took hold during the first six months of the war. In March, The Washington Post asked: “Is Gaza Heading Into Famine?” A headline in the Post the next day answered: “Israel’s War on Hamas Brings Famine to Gaza.”

In April 2024, Samantha Power, director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for the Biden administration, became the first senior U.S. official to declare that famine in Gaza had begun. She cited a report published by an independent, United Nations–affiliated monitoring system, called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Global Initiative (IPC).

First developed in 2004 with backing from the UN, the IPC has become the global gold standard for food security analysis. Using a data-driven, evidence-based, five-phase scale that ticks up as food supplies run low, the IPC is designed to shield the humanitarian goal of having enough to eat from the political pressures of war. Today, a famine is declared only when the IPC’s data about a region shows that at least 20 percent of households have run out of food, at least 30 percent of children are acutely malnourished, and two people out of every 10,000 are dying each day from starvation.

In 20 years, just four famines have been confirmed by the IPC: Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and Sudan in 2024. A confirmed famine in Gaza, as Power told Congress was happening, would have been a historic catastrophe and the first to occur outside continental Africa. Power’s statement bolstered claims that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war, and that the U.S. government was therefore complicit in an alleged war crime.

But there were serious problems with Power’s sensational testimony. Foremost among them: The IPC never declared a famine in Gaza. The report she cited was a projection of possible outcomes, not a conclusive finding. The next month, USAID issued its own analysis alleging that famine was underway, an indictment so serious that it required confirmation from an independent board of global experts known as the Famine Review Committee (FRC).

The FRC, which functions as the IPC’s final authority and quality control check, rebuked the USAID analysis, calling its conclusions insupportable. The failures were stunning.

Private sector food deliveries, such as trucks contracted to commercial warehouses, were left out of the agency’s estimates of the total food supply in north Gaza. As a result, as much as 82 percent of the “daily kilocalorie requirement” in northern Gaza last April wasn’t counted. In the same month, USAID’s famine monitor also left out 940 metric tons (2 million pounds) of flour, sugar, salt, and yeast donated by the UN to bakeries in north Gaza, enough to make about 1,400 metric tons (3 million pounds) of bread.

When asked about erasing the bakery donations, USAID’s internal famine-monitoring network justified the decision on the grounds that bread from those bakeries had been sold rather than given away for free.

It was never in doubt that the Israel-Hamas war brought immense human suffering to Gaza, including from food shortages. But USAID depicted a world that had little in common with reality.

North Gaza actually had 10 times more food last April than USAID had claimed. These findings should have been big news. As aid shipments increased, a famine had been averted.

Related: “Another for the ‘now it can be told’ file: ‘More than 60 service members were injured as a part of former President Joe Biden’s floating aid pier in Gaza, a Pentagon Inspector General report published on Tuesday said, a number significantly higher than had been previously disclosed.'”

Posted at 9:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 175

OLD AND BUSTED: Stanley Kubrick Faked the Moon Landing Footage.

The New Hotness? Congresswoman at Protest Tells CNN ICE Has Manufactured Bodycam Footage.

Our apologies that this video clip is so long — over seven minutes — but it’s worth sitting through to the end. Rep. Bonnie Coleman, who says she tried to shield Newark Mayor Ras Baraka from any harm from ICE agents at a protest Friday, tells her side of the story to CNN … and remarkably, her version of events from her perspective is that nobody did anything wrong but ICE. They were on public property, and “how ridiculous does that sound” that a 200-pound ICE agent with a gun on his arm is being pushed around by a mayor or members of Congress.

We’re not sure who the CNN host is, but she describes the bodycam video to Coleman and sees just what Coleman saw. It’s not what any unbiased person saw. Coleman connects ICE’s lies to the lies of President Donald Trump, who can’t breathe without lying, who has ICE snatching people off the street for simply living their lives — going to work, dropping their kids off at school, going to the grocery store.

Again, we can’t expect anyone to sit through this whole segment, but jump ahead to 6:30 when Coleman says that any footage disputing her claims is “manufactured.”

I’m sure this was also faked by Industrial Light & Magic:

UPDATE: “Meet who the New Jersey lawmakers are fighting for:” DHS Provides Rap Sheets on Suspected Criminal Illegals New Jersey Democrats Are Defending.

 

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 143

WHEN FAFO ENTERS THE FO STAGE: Bet She’s Spitting Mad NOW: Psycho Leftist Who Hocked a Loogie on Ed Martin Has Been Arrested.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 174

JOHN CLEESE SUGGESTS ‘SUSPENDING’ TRUMP CHIEF OF STAFF STEPHEN MILLER – ‘PREFERABLY BY THE NECK:’

John Cleese lashed out at White House chief of staff Stephen Miller after the latter said habeas corpus could be suspended for migrants in federal custody. In a post shared on X Saturday, the actor and comedian suggested “we actively think about suspending” Miller – “preferably by the neck.”

“I see Stephen Miller says he is actively thinking about suspending ‘habeas corpus’,” the actor wrote in full. “As this has been the keystone of the Rule of Law for centuries, I’d like to suggest that we actively think about suspending Stephen Miller… Preferably by the neck.”

It eventually became an ex-tweet, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir
invisible, but not of course before it was screen-capped:

Earlier: The Lincoln Project and Great Moments in Brand Recognition.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 170

JOANNE JACOBS: ‘Focus on me’ is bad advice: Gen Z is most ‘aware’ of mental health, least happy.

May is Mental Health Awareness month, a “progressive vanity project” that encourages people to medicalize the challenges of everyday life, writes Carolyn D. Gorman, a Manhattan Institute policy analyst, on Unherd. “Focus on me” is one of the slogans. Meanwhile, we’re neglecting the seriously mentally ill.

The “DSM” — the mental health field’s diagnostic tool — used to be about “100 pages, listing around 100 diagnoses, she writes. “It’s now “10 times longer and clinically classifies everything from jetlag to bad premenstrual syndrome.”

“Let’s talk about Me!” was one of the leitmotifs of Tom Wolfe’s epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”

The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with … “Let’s talk about Me.” They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize—but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It’s exhilarating!—to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me.

Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff’s slogan—“If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!”—seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope (antanaclasis) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of “If I’ve only one life” challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name—they are simply lived by. In this case: man’s age-old belief in serial immortality.

The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide “a better future” for their children … the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle … the man who devotes his life to some struggle for “his people” that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime … people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills … and, for that matter, most women upon becoming pregnant for the first time … are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children … or in their people, their race, their community—for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally worshiped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has been to defy what seems like a law of Nature. Hence the wicked feeling—the excitement!—of “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a ———!” Fill in the blank, if you dare.

And now many dare it!

Whatever Gen-Z’s hatred of the Baby Boomers, they’ve certainly continued their predecessors’ trend of off-the-chart levels of narcissism.

Posted at 8:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 71

SOVIET PSYCHIATRY IS ALIVE AND WELL IN THE DNC-MSM: John Fetterman: Sluggish Schizophrenic?

Ever since October 7, 2023, and the grotesque terror attacks on Israel by Hamas, Fetterman has courted controversy again. His adamantly pro-Israel and anti-Hamas stance is rather atypical in today’s Democratic Party, and it has rendered him unwelcome among a great many on the political left. He has been roundly and repeatedly condemned for his steadfast loyalty to and support for Israel. And now, in true totalitarian fashion, the left, including his fellow Democrats and the mainstream media, has decided that he really is unfit for office, not because of his stroke, but because he has dared to engage in “wrongthink.”

In the last week, the senator has been the subject of no less than four hit pieces by left-leaning media, all questioning his mental health. It all started with a piece in New York Magazine, which cited current and former staffers who profess to be “worried” about him: “Staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported.” Interestingly—and tellingly—those who have “diagnosed” Fetterman are not his actual doctors and have no basis on which to render medical opinions. Moreover, the tales of his mental meltdowns are told almost entirely by anonymous sources, who, in many cases, didn’t even witness the alleged events. The AP, for example, attacked Fetterman’s well-being the other day, based on the reports of “one person who was briefed on what occurred” and “a second person who was briefed separately on the meeting.”

It is hardly fair to compare John Fetterman to Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Bukovsky. They truly suffered for their dissent. At the same time, it is perfectly fair to compare Fetterman’s accusers to theirs. They are all petty totalitarians who are unable to tolerate disagreement and who are not above stooping to any means necessary to discredit their enemies.

Flashback: How the Soviets used their own twisted version of psychiatry to suppress political dissent.

Posted at 5:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 61

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Treating the Audience Like Adults.

(Warning: this essay contains movie spoilers for both “Conclave” and “Judgment at Nuremberg”)

Growing into adulthood requires many things of us, and one of those things is that when debating politics or morality, we have a grownup’s obligation to engage with the opposition’s best arguments, rather than the arguments we wish they were making.

Once upon a time, dramatic movies made for adult audiences seemed to understand this rule of growing older and wiser. Filmmakers of the past often challenged their audiences with difficult morally complicated stories that could easily have been made simpler through pure black-and-white political demagoguery. Resisting the temptation to make the lazy demagogic argument, it seems to me, was an indication that Hollywood once trusted its audience in ways that its modern counterpart rarely seems willing to do anymore.

In the world of modern messaging where the most important thing seems to be that audiences come away from a film having learned the appropriate lesson, most movies these days do not leave it to their audience to appreciate nuance, and they certainly don’t trust their audience to make the correct moral judgment when presented with villains who, while they may be wrong or even evil, have a point.

What got me thinking about this was a recent weekend of movie watching which included my first viewing of “Conclave” (2024) juxtaposed with my annual re-watch of “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).

Read the whole thing.

Related: Rick McGinnis: Holy Mess: Anthony Quinn in The Shoes of the Fisherman.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 103