May 10, 2024

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: Paxton Sues NGO For Aiding Illegal Alien Invasion. “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took time out from his busy schedule of suing the Biden Administration to sue an NGO aiding the Biden Administration’s illegal alien invasion.”

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

MOST HILL AIDES BACK TERM LIMITS: Are you as shocked as I am by this?

Posted at 4:50 pm by Mark Tapscott

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Bit Off More Cop Than He Could Chew. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news and this week we have Florida Man’s Hannibal Lecter impersonation, the world’s most brazen shoplifter, and the lamest police chase in Texas history.”

Posted at 4:22 pm by Stephen Green

NEO: Biden’s betrayal: “But for Michigan?”

I have long said that although it’s very clear that Joe Biden is very cognitively challenged compared to just a few years ago, he still has plenty of agency and his brain is not so far gone that he’s unaware. Plus, he was Obama’s VP from 2009 to 2017, in full possession of whatever were his native faculties, and he did Obama’s bidding on this and on just about every other topic.

So this is not some recent thing nor is it the result of his age-related cognitive problems. It’s a result of who he is: a corrupt and ambitious viper – or weasel, if you prefer – who would sell out anyone for a dime or for career advancement.

Which brings us to a famous exchange from A Man For All Seasons. No, it’s not the one I often post here, about “cutting down” the laws. It’s this one:

That’s where I got the idea for the title of this post. Biden has betrayed Israel, the Jews, the US, the West, and Congress to win the presidency (he thinks) by winning the votes of the Muslims in Michigan who would dearly love to see Israel and the Jews destroyed, and the US and the West in their current forms as well.

Past performance is no guarantee of future Trunalimunumaprzure:

UPDATE: Biden 2006: Civilian Deaths Are No Reason to Demand Israel Stop Defending Itself From ‘Cowards’ Hiding Among Them. “If nothing else, pick this up at the 2:45-ish mark and watch Joe Biden then absolutely demolish the current version of Joe Biden when it comes to fighting terrorists. It’s the exact opposite of his position regarding Rafah and Hamas. Also, note how much more coherent Biden was in 2006, and compare it to his speech these days. This ain’t a ‘stutter,’ folks. It’s creeping senility.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TO BE FAIR, THE TWO VANDALS ARE OLD ENOUGH TO BE AMONG THE ORIGINAL SIGNERS: Just Stop Oil Tries to Destroy Magna Carta.

The Just Stop Oil tactic of attacking priceless works of art and other artifacts is an attempt to duplicate the Taliban campaign to erase non-Muslim culture in Afghanistan. It is a tactic of cultural terrorists and, in my view, should be treated in exactly the same manner.

* * * * * * * *

Two protesters, aged 85 and 82, cracked the glass case surrounding the royal charter at the British Library in central London on Friday morning.

The library holds two of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta, with the others at Lincoln Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral.

Flashback: Beyond the Culture of Repudiation:

As a modern conservative, [the late Roger] Scruton defends a form of democracy unknown to Aristotle. Following David Hume and Edmund Burke, however, he opposes the idea that the “political order is founded on a contract.” For Scruton, the state of nature is a chimera—an invention of modern political philosophers who had forgotten the debt and gratitude owed to our predecessors. The fictitious state of nature—so central to philosophical liberalism—obscures the fact that membership in a community, with its requisite duties and obligations, is a precondition for meaningful freedom. “Absolute freedom”—doing whatever one wants—is always an invitation to anarchy or tyranny. In the modern world, the nation is the political form that guarantees membership and self-government.

In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984’s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.

And from 2019, VDH: Waging War Against The Dead. “Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Mohammed. The West prides itself on the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: “Think Different.”

The new hotness? Apple downplays the value of human achievement.

Then the press begins to lower as a Sonny and Cher song plays. A piano is smashed and splattered with paint buckets. An arcade machine, a drawing figure, record player, trumpet, vintage film and stock cameras are destroyed. A Greek bust is smashed, and eventually the press, drooling with several different colors of paint, closes completely. When it lifts up, the new iPad rests in the middle with a voiceover bragging about how thin it is.

As several people noted on X, the ad was a direct inverse of the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad and representative of the destruction of physical media and the culture that made America. One poster on X wrote, “Apple’s new ‘Crush’ ad (let’s call it ‘2024’) is a visual & metaphorical bookend to the 1984 ad. 1984: Monochrome, conformist, industrial world exploded by colorful, vibrant human 2024: Colorful, vibrant humanity is crushed by monochrome, conformist, industrial press.”

Wall Street Journal tech reporter Katie Deighton noted, “This ad perfectly encapsulates the insight that people think technology is killing everything we ever found joy in. And then presents that as a good thing.”

In 2014, the Huffington Post noted, “Everything From This 1991 Radio Shack Ad You Can Now Do With Your Phone.”     But the iPhone and iPad were touted as great value for money because they combined all of those products into one sleek handheld device, not that they literally pulverized their predecessors into a fine paste.

Or as James Lileks writes: “We know the experience of tapping a picture of a keyboard to get a note: it isn’t real. We know the experience of striking an actual key, the way it yields but has its own presence that reacts to dynamics, the way the note comes from a soundboard of wood hewn from a tree instead of a tiny speaker. Painters know how committing a brush to a canvas is commitment you may or may not fulfill, but how noodling on glass on one of an infinite set of virtual canvases is underscored by the knowledge that nothing need be finished, and anything can be abandoned without cost. It’s like an ad that shows the press crushing the family Fido, and ends with an iPad that shows a video of the dog.”

UPDATE: Apple apologizes for ad that crushes the sum total of human artistic endeavor.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THEY HAD NO BUSINESS JUMPING IN THE FIRST TIME: Corporate America Is Sitting Out the Trump-Biden Rematch. “Some CEOs are privately drawing up plans to tell employees not to expect comments on political matters in all-hands sessions. Others are reconsidering common election initiatives, such as get-out-the-vote drives, fearing those could be viewed in the current moment as partisan. A number of companies are also taking a harder line on workplace activism after long tolerating dissent.”

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green