ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE LONG A CHANCE:
https://x.com/TRHLofficial/status/1877359548102516917
Well played.
ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE LONG A CHANCE:
https://x.com/TRHLofficial/status/1877359548102516917
Well played.
JONATHAN TURLEY: RIP, Snail Darter: The Species that Shut Down the Tellico Dam May Not Actually Exist.
The controversy began in 1967 when the Tennessee Valley Authority started constructing a dam on the Little Tennessee River, roughly 20 miles outside Knoxville. Environmentalists and locals opposed the project and, in 1973, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee named David Etnier went snorkeling with his students and found a possible solution. He spotted a small fish and called it a “snail darter” because of its movements and eating habits. He reportedly announced “Here’s a little fish that might save your farm.”
Dr. Zygmunt Plater, an environmental law professor at Boston College, represented the snail darter before the Supreme Court. He did an excellent job and, in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Endangered Species Act prohibits impoundment of the Little Tennessee River by the Tellico Dam” to protect the endangered snail darters.
That was then.
The Times now quotes Thomas Near, the curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum who leads a fish biology lab at the university, that “there is, technically, no snail darter.” Worse yet, it was actually just another member of the eastern population of Percina uranidea, or stargazing darters, which is not considered endangered.
Near and his colleagues have published the results in Current Biology.
In other words, years of litigation and millions of dollars were spent on what was a false claim, and the courts accepted the claims hook, line, and sinker.
As David Frum began the chapter titled “Dam Yankees” of his 2000 book, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), “An early flag of the American Revolution displayed a coiled rattlesnake (and the fierce motto ‘Don’t Tread on Me’) to symbolize the country’s fierce determination to rule itself. Two hundred years later, the animal with the best claim to represent the American character was not the rattler but a small freshwater fish: the snail darter…The fish might not have been much to look at, but it had a sure sense of timing.”
SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Elon Musk has ripped the cloak of deceit off one of Britain’s most disgusting scandals.
This may be hard to comprehend, dear reader, but the people of that enlightened land did not protect their daughters. I’m sorry to say they abandoned them to their fate. Police, whose duty it was to look after the most vulnerable, either arrested the girls, dismissed their pleas for help or left them with their tormentors. For that famously kind and decent land had fallen under a strange enchantment, which was called multiculturalism. It said that, no matter how wicked or cruel the men were to the children, you must never speak of it. The dark spell, and what a powerful spell it was (enough to vanquish justice and compassion), caused any who dared to say that Pakistani Muslim men were targeting white girls to become the bad people. Because all cultures are equal, you see, even ones that don’t believe in equality or which agree that girls who aren’t virgins are whores and deserve to be punished.
And those who struggled against the powerful spell that stifled their countrymen were called racist. And to be racist or bigoted or “far-Right” was to be far more hateful than any hatred inflicted on female children, or so the people of the good and fair country were told by their leaders.
And when the monsters swore at the children whom they were raping, saying, “White slag!” “White c—!” – well, that wasn’t at all racist. Because multiculturalism and the BBC say it cannot be so.
A few brave women (Julie, Ann, Maggie, Sarah) who woke from the enchantment and warned young girls were in danger from British Pakistani men were banished and forced to apologise for being “reckless in my choice of words”. Or they lost their seat in the shadow Cabinet.
And the evil – a vast, suppurating evil such as the land had not known for a thousand years – continued to blight that good and fair country. The authorities colluded to make sure the hatred must never speak its name, and the girls carried their lonely torment within them and their rapists got access to the babies they had impregnated them with. (Oh, yes, they did. So strong was the multicultural enchantment it made people surrender the values they had been born to.)
And the monsters were not banished from the good and fair country, not one of them sent back to countries that were neither good nor fair, in case their human rights were breached.
Then, one day, the richest man in the whole wide world came along and broke the dark spell. Elon had read court transcripts telling what those monsters had done to the female children, and he could not believe such unfathomable depravity had taken root in the good and fair country. Because of his great wealth, Elon could not be intimidated into agreeing that thousands of white girls should have been used as a peace offering to placate the gods of multiculturalism. His righteous wrath shamed the cowardly leaders of the land and in their panic they cried “Misinformation!” But the people were having none of it. For they were awake now and they saw what horrors the brutes had been allowed to get away with. As the wicked enchantment lifted, the malevolent myth of multiculturalism was unmasked, the country slowly but surely recovered its senses and demanded the guilty be found and punished, even unto the highest in the land.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Julie Bindel: I was called racist for exposing the grooming gangs… but this atrocity has still not gone away.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Nancy Pelosi’s Stock Portfolio Crushes the S&P 500 by Nearly 200%.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Adam Carolla’s DEI Firefighter Story Goes Viral. “I graduated North Hollywood High with a 1.7 GPA and could not find a job. I walked to a fire station. I was 19 and living in the garage of my family home and my mom was on welfare and food stamps. I said, ‘Can I get a job as a fireman?’ and they said, ‘No, because you’re not black, Hispanic or a woman and we’ll see you in about seven years.’”
Related (From Ed): If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t miss Carolla’s epic rant on the near-term future of southern California:
Epic Adam Carolla rant from a hotel after the LA wildfires forced to evacuate from his home, where he predicts Hollywood leftists will be so frustrated by the rebuild effort that they will not vote Democrat:
"You guys all voted for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. You all… pic.twitter.com/YhNqBnJJR9— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) January 9, 2025
I’m much more doubtful that the fires will transform southern California into a hotbed of Republicanism than Carolla (see also: Californians’ willingness to go along with indefinite Covid madness), but it will fascinating to watch the repercussions of the fires play out. Including, as Duane Patterson speculated, “in the future, what do you think Democrats in Sacramento think of the land opportunities now that everyone’s been burned out? Do you think they’re going to rush in and permit exact rebuilding promptly when there’s all sorts of acreage now available for low-income, high-density housing?”
HOW IT STARTED:
Today it is precisely the most rational, intellectual, secularized, modernized, updated, relevant religions—all the brave, forward-looking Ethical Culture, Unitarian, and Swedenborgian movements of only yesterday—that are finished, gasping, breathing their last. What the Urban Young People want from religion is a little Hallelujah! … and talking in tongues! … Praise God! Precisely that! In the most prestigious divinity schools today, Catholic. Presbyterian, and Episcopal, the avant-garde movement, the leading edge, is “charismatic Christianity” … featuring talking in tongues, ululation, visions, holy rolling, and other nonrational, even antirational, practices. Some of the most respectable old-line Protestant congregations, in the most placid suburban settings, have begun to split into the Charismatics and the Easter Christians (“All they care about is being seen in church on Easter”). The Easter Christians still usually control the main Sunday-morning service—but the Charismatics take over on Sunday evening and do the holy roll.
This curious development has breathed new life into the existing Fundamentalists, theosophists, and older salvation seekers of all sorts. Ten years ago, if anyone of wealth, power, or renown had publicly “announced for Christ,” people would have looked at him as if his nose had been eaten away by weevils. Today it happens regularly … Harold Hughes resigns from the U.S. Senate to become an evangelist … Jim Irwin, the astronaut, teams up with a Baptist evangelist in an organization called High Flight … singers like Pat Boone and Anita Bryant announce for Jesus … Charles Colson, the former hardballer of the Nixon administration, announces for Jesus, and the man who is likely to be the next president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, announces for Jesus. Oh Jesus People.
—Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York magazine, August 23rd, 1976.
How it’s ending:
TIME FOR ZUCK TO PUT HIS BUCKS WHERE HIS MOUTH IS: Pro-Life Accounts Demand Meta Lift Suspensions After Free Speech Promises.
Several pro-life Facebook users are demanding their accounts be restored after Meta promised this week to support free speech on its platform.
In a letter obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire, the legal counsel for LifeNews and its founder Steven Ertelt, as well as pro-life mother Abby Covington, requested Meta “immediately” restore their disabled accounts.
“If Meta is truly committed to the free-speech principles that it recently announced, it will act swiftly to reinstate Mr. Ertelt’s, LifeNews’s, and Mrs. Covington’s accounts,” reads the letter from their legal team at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
Stay tuned.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: So I Just Discovered Another way California Sucks.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Drinking coffee in the morning cuts risk of premature death, study indicates.
WINNING:
🚨BREAKING: Massive Title 9 victory:
Virginia's suit against the Biden Administration (together w. 5 other states) has resulted in suspension of illegal Title IX rule across the country. This is the 1st clear nationwide injunction against a re-write of decades-old civil rights… pic.twitter.com/nUr1DiJ4N4
— Sarah Parshall Perry (@SarahPPerry) January 9, 2025
More to come…
BIDEN’S CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST: Consumer Credit Card Debt Unexpectedly Plummets At Rate Signaling Deep Recession.
We have repeatedly warned that with their savings – and especially “emergency covid savings” – gone or nearly gone, Biden admin savings data manipulation notwithstanding… US consumers had no choice but to max out their credit cards in order to “extend and pretend” their moment of purchasing greatness, or as we called one month ago, their last hurrah (see In “Last Hurrah”, Credit Card Debt Explodes Higher Despite Record High APRs As Savings Rate Craters), a hurrah that would last very briefly as it was only a matter of months if not weeks before said cards were denied.
Well, it appears that said denial hit much sooner than expected, and according to the Fed’s latest consumer credit data, in November consumer credit across US households tumbled by $7.5 billion to $5.102 trillion, a 1.8% annual rate of contraction and usually something one only sees in the middle of recessions (or worse).
What is remarkable is that as shown on the chart above, while non-revolving debt (i.e. student and auto loans) rose modestly, it was revolving, or credit card debt, that cratered by a whopping $13.8 billion the biggest drop since the covid crash shut down the economy and the prospect of future income for millions of Americans (hence the collapse in spending). In fact, it is safe to say that any and every time revolving credit has collapsed this much, the US was on the cusp of, if not already in a recession.
We’ve been in a jobs recession for years, something the Biden cabal papered over with massive federal spending and data manipulation.
But even multitrillion-dollar deficits and a partisan bureaucracy can paper over only so much.
DISPATCHES FROM THE REICHSTAG:
Former President Barack Obama casually and amiably chats with Adolf Hitler as the latter is set to assume power in 11 days, end American democracy, and impose a white nationalist dictatorship. https://t.co/4tbj46yVk8
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 9, 2025
(Note previous Hitler left of Obama.)
As Byron York asks, “Where did all the fascism talk go?”
UPDATE: Previous Hitler playfully taps God and/or the second coming of FDR on the belly:
The belly tap is remarkable pic.twitter.com/bxj3wEETh2
— Reese Gorman (@reesejgorman) January 9, 2025
HA-HA, NO: Did the Crusades Spoil ‘Five Centuries of Peaceful Coexistence’ With Islam?
This is an excellent podcast from Raymond Ibrahim.
DUANE PATTERSON: Lessons, Painful At Times, Are Only Lessons If They’re Eventually Learned.
The devastation in Southern California is almost beyond measure. A little over half of Pacific Palisades is gone. Most of the seaside parts of Malibu are in ruins. There are now seven active fires in Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties, none of them remotely contained at the writing of this column.
The human toll, which will continue to grow in the days and weeks, is heartbreaking. The property loss and personal effects consumed in the fires are just the beginning for a new batch of Angelino refugees. In the days, weeks, months, and years ahead, there will be ongoing concerns about shelter, and whether they can and will try to rebuild their lives in what once was among the most premium places to live in the world.
When the Santa Anas began blowing in earnest Tuesday morning and word broke out of a fire above the Palisades, I began to pray that the west side of Los Angeles would not end up with the same fate as Lahaina. By early evening, glued to local television reports from Malibu, a second fire in Pasadena and Altadena, and a third raging in Sylmar burning everything in its path, it began to sink in that by Wednesday morning, the landscape of the L.A. Basin would be changed for a very long time to come.
By Wednesday night, a new fire in the middle of the Hollywood Hills began. Sunset Blvd., Coldwater Canyon, Runyon Canyon, and possibly Hollywood Blvd., and any number of famed structures and houses on those roads, are in the destruction path.
Read the whole thing. If you want to get a sense of what California was like in the ’60s and ’70s, when it seemed like a land of endless possibilities, flashback to Jennifer Rubin’s last article for Commentary, in their September 2015 issue, before her performance art career at the Washington Post began: “California, There It Went.”
More than 40 years later, I still remember the bright sun and the palm trees when we got off the plane. California in 1968 was a magical place, a magnet for those seeking new opportunities or to lose an old identity. The Golden State was allowing the rich to get richer and the middle class to live out the American dream in its pristine state. The public schools and expanding state-university system (two separate systems, in fact) were the envy of the nation. The corruption and Mob influence that had paralyzed many eastern and midwestern states and cities were largely absent.
When my parents announced they were uprooting the Glazer family from a cozy suburb of Philadelphia, as 5 million people did from eastern and midwestern towns between 1950 and 1980, the news was met with a mixture of awe (“California…” they would breathlessly whisper) and bewilderment (“But what is there?”). The very act of migrating by plane was itself somewhat grand. In the years before airline deregulation, one dressed up to fly, as if sailing on an ocean liner, and at prices not all that much lower than an ocean voyage’s. And yet those we were leaving behind acted as though we were traveling by caravan, leaving civilization and going into the wilderness.
In a real sense, even in 1968, California was the wilderness. If the cost of air travel was prohibitive for a family of modest means, they usually drove, and from the flatness of the Midwest they found themselves left speechless by the vision of the Rocky Mountains, rugged coastlines, wide beaches, and empty space they knew only from the movies. Like emigrants leaving the old country in the 19th century, they often arrived friendless and unaccustomed to the habits of their new environment. Public transportation was in scarce supply; instead there were gleaming freeways with five lanes on each side. Tie and jacket? More and more restaurants didn’t care. Informality pervaded dress and speech at a time when, back east, adults still commonly addressed acquaintances as Mister and Missus.
In Southern California, the aerospace industry was booming, and middle-class professionals from all over the country flocked to work in and around it. The movie studios had fallen into distress and decay due to the growing popularity of TV (before the blockbuster era of the 1970s drew audiences back out of their living rooms), but if you went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, you might spot the billionaire in a corduroy jacket whose name was above the door escorting Cary Grant around his collection. Every now and then you’d have a Fred Astaire or a James Stewart sighting.
In a very real sense, California in 2025 is the wilderness again, with nature and mankind returning to their feral states, as assembled in this recent Babylon Bee video:
ELIZABETH SCALIA: ‘Shut up,’ they said; British MP’s vote against gangrape inquiry.
I’ve been wondering for a while why, in all of this, we have not heard from the pop stars who can usually be relied upon to comment-with-alacrity about the social or political outrages of the day — or at least the ones they know they can safely shout about and be called “brave.” I mean, where is Bono? I’m a fan, and he’s usually pretty fast with his mouth. Where is he? Where is Elton? Where are Adele? Where is Madonna? Where is Sting? McCartney?
For that matter, where are members of the Royal Family, working or non, hither and yon? They’ve got no thoughts on all this?
I’m not surprised, really. All the “courageous” voices only pipe up when they know the cool kids in the cafeteria will have their backs. Mock insult the churches (and quite justly, says I) for their abuses, their cover-ups, their reluctance to do the right thing? Easy as pie; safe as swaddling clothes. But discuss what the secular side of abuse, coverups and refusal has done?
Crickets.
I had been assured by the purveyors of various lefty causes that silence is complicity.
STUPIDITY AND ANTISEMITISM GO HAND IN HAND: Must be the Jewish space lasers responsible for both.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Where’s the Water, Gavin?
READER FAVORITE:Thermajohn Long Johns Thermal Underwear for Men. #CommissionEarned
COMEDIANS BEGIN TO ADMIT THEY WERE PRESSURED INTO PUSHING THE LEFTWING PROPAGANDA LINE:
Bill Maher appeared on an episode of the “Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade” podcast on Wednesday, where the three comedians got into a discussion about the media’s lack of coverage around Doug Emhoff’s #MeToo accusations, and “Saturday Night Live” ignoring them completely.
The podcasters welcomed Maher and recounted the SNL skit last month where Spade returned to the show to play Hunter Biden, while Carvey portrayed his old character “Church Lady.” Spade expressed surprise that the troubled son of the president hadn’t been lampooned before.
Spade said he “was always curious as to why they never had anyone play Hunter Biden. It was just sort of ripe for the pickings,” adding, “I thought of maybe a hot-tub talk show with guests and girls.”
Maher then flipped the conversation to other missed opportunities by SNL, asking “How about, why didn’t they make fun of Kamala’s husband when he got ‘me-too’d’?,” adding that “it is amazing the way this country is so partisan, including in the media and the entertainment parts of it, that when something happens for your team that’s bad, it’s like, you know, the angel of death just flying over the house on Passover. Like, ‘we don’t see a thing here.’ Because, you know, Doug Emhoff was credibly accused of things that others have been accused of.”
Spade followed up by noting, “Yeah, and that wasn’t plastered everywhere.”
Maher criticized SNL for having Andy Sandberg portray Emhoff as a “funny kind-of dorky Doug” when the allegations against him were “as credible as many other accusations I’ve heard.”
Right from its earliest days, SNL has always pulled its punches — in its first season, the show was absolutely brutal towards Gerald Ford, but when Jimmy Carter replaced him, its comedy became noticeably more apolitical. The result was SNL’s most memorable characters, including the Coneheads, the Blues Brothers, the Nerds, and Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s “Wild and Crazy” Festrunk Brothers. But this was simply because the show’s producers and writers were ‘70s-era liberals and leftists. There wasn’t the intense pressure generated by the denizens of social media to not attack anyone on the left, and the related cancel culture to remind everyone that Siberia awaits those who don’t toe the party line.
PUTINFLATION:
According to media reports, the russian Central Bank is considering the possibility of "freezing" deposits of individuals as an alternative to raising the key rate.
According to insiders, the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, appointed a special commission to assess… pic.twitter.com/IcdXR3Vn9p
— Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 (@jurgen_nauditt) January 8, 2025
Reminds me a bit of FDR’s “bank holiday” and I suspect it would do just as much damage to Russia’s business climate (not to mention consumer sentiment) as FDR did.
GOOD: Couple that threw firebombs at Michael Knowles event sentenced to prison, $50,000 in fines. “Brian DiPippa will spend five years in prison, followed by three years of supervision. Krystal DiPippa “was sentenced to three years of probation and 240 hours of community service to ‘restorative justice’ causes,” the outlet reported. Further, the couple is required to pay $47,284 to a Pitt police officer who suffered a spinal injury during the incident, along with $1,400 to the Pitt Police Department to cover damages to equipment and uniforms.”
Not sure why she got off so much lighter.
ELLA EMHOFF: FASHION’S MIDWIT GIRL.
She may have wept grotesquely on election night—at that sad scene outside Howard University where her stepmother, Kamala Harris, didn’t even bother to show up to her own watch party—but the Brooklyn trust fund tyke and fashion’s toast to sycophancy, Ella Emhoff, is going to be just fine.
In fact, she’s already back on the ’gram, giving vibes, usually in the form of a dirty mirror selfie with her depressing and tasteless apartment as backdrop—a domicile that’s a fitting extension of her own pampered mediocrity.
But, if you’re the child of a famous Democrat, especially the Joy and Coconuts lady, well, the sky’s the limit. Little Emhoff is going to be a famous fashion designer and America’s cultural institutions are on board, no resume required.
(Like that time, in 2011, when Chelsea Clinton said, I think I’ll be a journalist, and NBC News tripped over itself to slam a $600,000 a year contract in front of her. During Clinton’s three years with the network, she produced exactly three reports: one about a diner in New Mexico that helped kids with their homework; another about a gym in Detroit that helped kids work out; a third about poetry class for kids in Arkansas).
Totally by coincidence and sheer talent, in January 2021, the month her stepmom became Vice President, Emhoff was signed to the prestigious IMG modeling agency. She received fawning style section profiles from the likes of CNN, the BBC, and The New York Times.
To be honest, it’s easy to see why…
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Trump’s Message to Xi Jinping: ‘I’m Nuts!’ “Trump, in other words, is his own best attack dog — and there’s nobody holding the leash.”
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