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Robert “Beto” O’Rourke—remember him?—appeared on Bill Maher’s comedy show Friday night, and accused Big Retail—”the Walmarts, the Amazons, the Krogers of the world” of price gouging. But it is O’Rourke’s explanation that earns him an entire feature display in the Museum of Leftist Stupidity:
“They were jacking prices in the middle of inflation and blaming it on the economy.”
Imagine! Raising prices during inflation! Who ever heard of such a thing? I’m sure his solution will be government price controls, because when you are this dumb, it is too much to expect even a minimal grasp of economics.
Here it is in all it’s full glory:
Bill Maher is convinced Biden is going to lose the 2024 election because of food inflation.
Beto O'Rourke's spin:
"The FTC just yesterday released a report and said they're price gouging. These are the Walmarts, the Amazons, the Krogers of the world. They were jacking prices in… pic.twitter.com/kM31tDJTSC— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 23, 2024
“My guest is Christine Blasey Ford,” said NPR’s Terry Gross on her March 19 “Fresh Air” show. “She testified at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing that he sexually assaulted her.” Blasey Ford has a new book, One Way Back, and in the lengthy interview the author explains:
I did retraumatize myself, having to go back through everything and relive it. And I tried to write a book a couple of years after the testimony and just really wasn’t able to engage in the material. And when I looked at what I had written, I didn’t think it was something that would be very useful anyway. So I abandoned that project for a while and then took it back up once I felt a lot better five years later.
I expected a little bit of pushback in the hearing. And the hearing itself wasn’t particularly difficult. I mean, it was the difficulty that I expected it to be. Some of the questions towards the end started to get sort of off topic and confusing, but, other than that, I actually left the room feeling like I did a good enough job and I would be OK, and I would go back to California, and we would figure out our hotel life and move forward.
And the main thing is I just didn’t want to be on TV. That was my biggest fear at the time – was I don’t want to be – I was picturing the 1991 hearing and thinking, there’s just no way I could…
Well, I guess the main regret is that I didn’t know that that was the only time I would ever speak to them. I thought, well, of course they’re going to have follow-up questions and want to know more details and maybe look at the therapy records or talk to the friends or talk to people. I just didn’t think that was, you know, the only opportunity to speak.
I was definitely grieving – not over the outcome. The outcome is something I had to detach from before I even testified, that the outcome is going to be whatever it is. But the process was so difficult, especially with the DARVO [Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim Offender] and the smear attacks. I had a really difficult time with the social media comments and the memes and all of that. It was very hard to get through.
And so on, in classic style. Based on Blasey Ford’s testimony in 2018, people have a right to wonder what her 911 call might have been like.
This long piece in the London Times describes the efforts of some British Muslims to prohibit blasphemy, either through legal action or through mob violence:
Britain faces an alarming rise in intimidation and threats of violence against those perceived to have insulted Islam, a new report will warn.
Protests condemning acts of apparent blasphemy have become more frequent and radicalised, according to independent research commissioned by the government’s counterextremism chief.
The report, seen by The Times, exposes links between activists at the forefront of recent protests in the UK and an extremist Islamist political party in Pakistan whose members have regularly called for blasphemers to be beheaded.
It has been a long time since anyone was beheaded in Britain on religious grounds.
Robin Simcox, the government’s counterextremism tsar, commissioned the research after three blasphemy flashpoints in the UK: the 2021 protests against a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who received death threats and is still in hiding…
Still in hiding, three years later–a teacher in West Yorkshire.
…after showing pupils a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed; Birmingham protests the following year over the screening of the film The Lady in Heaven, which depicted Mohammed’s daughter; and last year’s controversy in Wakefield, also in West Yorkshire, after a copy of the Quran was slightly damaged at a high school.
Some of the anti-blasphemy initiative is coming from Pakistan:
It described as “most alarming” the emergence of a UK wing of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a political party that was temporarily banned there because of violent rallies and its support for mob executions of perceived blasphemers. British mosques have hosted speakers who are supportive of TLP and each of the protests in Batley, Wakefield and Birmingham involved activists with links.
The report warned that such rhetoric “has the potential to radicalise their audience around the issue of blasphemy” and that this in turn “may increase the likelihood of sectarian violence and terrorism in the UK”.
The report stresses that most UK-based blasphemy activists have rejected violence and condemn terrorist acts such as the 2015 shooting attack in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine, in which 17 people died.
However, it says many are calling for stricter laws in the UK against blasphemy and seek to criminalise insults against Islam, which they present as part of a wider war on the faith by so-called enemies of Islam in the West.
Britain has admitted large numbers of Muslims from Commonwealth countries, and they now constitute a substantial political bloc. In recent months, they have repeatedly taken over large swaths of the city of London with kill-the-Jews rallies. While British authorities deplore these demonstrations, they seem to have been cowed by the implicit threat of violence that they manifest.
Don’t believe the headlines that Mitch McConnell is really stepping down. He’s going to replicate himself as an AI robot. Just keep in mind the lifespan of turtles, and you’ll know I’m right. And the crash of Google’s Gemini AI is a distraction—it’s just another CIA-Taylor Swift psy-op.
Want:
Headlines of the week:
A rather unexpected combination.
I really thought this is how the computer age would unfold.
I think I’ll pass on this ski resort. . .
Captain Kirk at the DEI review board.
And finally. . . Tulsi Gabbard:
Social media alerts me to the fact that today would be Sir Roger Scruton’s 80th birthday. Sadly, Sir Roger passed away from cancer in 2020. I got to know Sir Roger fairly well in his last decade, and had several splendid exhilarating dinners with him and his lovely wife Sophie over very expensive bottles of fine Bordeaux (among his 50-plus superb books was, after all, I Drink, Therefore I Am—highly recommended), conversing and sometimes having extensive but very friendly arguments. Roger didn’t like Leo Strauss, for example, and I cross-examined him closely on this subject one leisurely evening. Wish I had run a tape. Anyway, nearby is the last time I got to see Roger in person.
As it happened, I had been working on a long essay “The Greatest Living Conservative” at the time of his death. I lost heart after the premise became obsolete, and I shall someday try to revise and complete it. But here are a couple excerpts from the draft:
In the introduction to The Meaning of Conservatism, Scruton writes that “Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims, formulae, or aims. Its essence is inarticulate, and its expression, when compelled, skeptical.”
Why “inarticulate”? Because, has he explains elsewhere, the liberal has the easy job in the modern world. The liberal points at the imperfections and defects of existing institutions or the existing social order, strikes a pose of indignation, and huffs that surely something better is required, usually with the attitude that the something better is simply a matter of will. The conservative faces the tougher challenge of understanding and explaining the often subtle reasons why existing institutions, no matter how imperfect, work better than speculative alternatives.
This kind of conservatism is criticized, sometimes with good reason, as being stand-patism.
I’m reminded of what might be called Hallmark Greeting Card conservatism, though it traces back to Pascal: “The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know.” The more modern version was offered by Wittgenstein: “There are things that can be known, but not said.”
Or, as Roger put it more succinctly elsewhere in his reflections on the profundity of the common law: “English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.”
From that one sentence entire dissertations could follow.
Postscript—another fragment from my unfinished essay:
Roger Scruton has written more books than I have read, including, beyond philosophy, books on food and wine, art, beauty, sport, architecture, music, and sex; environmentalism, theology, a novel, and a memoir, and, very recently, even a self-help book, How to Be a Conservative. Although I’m tempted to say that if I haven’t figured out how to be a conservative by now, it’s probably too late for a book to help me. To paraphrase an old Woody Allen joke, if Roger was American instead of British, I fear he might have written The Seven Habits of a Highly Effective Conservative. (The original joke: Kant: The Categorical Imperative, and Six Ways to Make It Work for You!) (Though I did notice on Amazon that you can get a Roger Scruton iPhone case.)
Though if asked where to start with Roger’s body of work, I typically recommend his memoir Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life. Having myself reached the galloping years of middle age, I can say that if your regrets are only gentle, you’re doing pretty well. But his chapter “How I Became a Conservative” is a good introduction to the four-way intersection of Roger’s philosophical, political, cultural, and aesthetic thought.
Okay, this is officially the funniest thing on the internet right now: “Tucker Carlson” explaining the real story of Lord of the Rings. (There are a bunch more of these on YouTube, like this one. YMMV.)
As promised,
Here’s an AI Tucker Carlson narrating The Lord of the Rings@MiddleearthMixr @TuckerCarlson pic.twitter.com/eiXtR0m2qz
— Dr. Maverick Alexander (@MaverickDarby) February 25, 2024
As mentioned in a previous item, Philip Haney, author of See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, had a sequel in the works, but turned up dead by gunshot in Amador County, California, in early 2020. Dr. Katherine Raven, who has performed more than 5000 forensic autopsies, signed off on a “homicide autopsy.”
Two years later, under a sheriff who graduated from the FBI academy, a deputy with no apparent medical training listed “apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound” as the cause of death.
The FBI held on to Haney’s computer, thumb drives, and “whistleblower documents.” The DHS accused Haney of harboring “contraband” and violating five federal laws. The signs point to a faked suicide, hardly a new tactic. As Sidney Hook recalled in Out of Step, Soviet defector Gen. Walter Krivitsky was “suicided” in a Washington hotel room by Stalin’s NKVD, forerunner to the KGB.
Danish diplomat Povl Bang-Jensen refused to reveal names of Hungarian patriots who testified to the UN about Soviet atrocities during the 1956 invasion. In 1959, after going missing for two days, Bang-Jensen was found dead in a New York park, shot through the right temple. The scene looked staged but the case was officially declared a suicide. See Betrayal at the UN, by DeWitt Copp and Marshal Peck.
In 1993, White House official Vincent Foster turned up dead in Fort Marcy Park. The death was ruled a suicide but the scene left plenty to ponder, especially as the Clinton White House senior staff behaved in highly suspicious ways after Foster’s death (removing—and likely destroying—files from his office, etc.) See The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, by Christopher Ruddy.
Communist assassins also killed by staging fake car accidents. That was the fate of Soviet actor Solomon Mikhoels, artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater and chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II. By this time, Stalin had revived traditional Russian anti-Semitism, branding Jews “rootless cosmpolitans.”
Nobel laureate Albert Camus, author of The Plague and other books, opposed the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was on record that Communism equals murder. In The Death of Camus, Giovanni Catelli compiles evidence that Camus was the victim of a fake car accident set up by the KGB. The ultimate trick, as Whittaker Chambers explained in Witness, was to make the assassination look like a natural death. That is a distinct possibility in several cases, to be explored at length in future.
The death of Philip Haney, meanwhile, shows what can happen to those who expose Islamic terrorists and their enablers in the US government. That raises issues for those who expose the FBI as the government’s secret police and KGB. When booting up a computer or tablet, see if “FBI Van,” or “FBI Surveillance Van,” show up in other networks in your neighborhood, then suddenly disappear.
Watch for persons unknown offering to send materials to your residence. Take note of strangers who suddenly engage you in conversation and just before leaving ask where you live. Apprise colleagues, friends and loved ones of these realities. Most important, never stop calling out those who attack the God-given freedoms of the people.
Vaunce News 