Apr
18
2024

Unlike Kamala, He Hasn't Studied the Maps

Sure, that's sort of funny. It's all fun and games, until, as David Harsanyi notes, The World Is Paying A Deadly Price For Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy.

If a belligerent state launched 186 explosive drones, 36 cruise missiles, and 110 surface-to-surface missiles from three fronts against civilian targets within the United States, would Joe Biden call it a “win”?

Would the president tell us that the best thing we can do now is show “restraint”? What if that same terror state’s proxy armies had recently helped murder, rape, and kidnap more than 1,000 American men, women, and children? What if this terror state were trying to obtain nuclear weapons so it could continue to agitate without any consequences?

This is what Joe Biden and the Barack Obama acolytes, Iranian dupes, and Israel antagonists he’s surrounded himself with demand of [the] Jewish State.

And as long as he's making demands: Hands off Haifa, Bibi!

What does it say that I've found Jeff Maurer to be the most honest commentator on this? His streak is kept alive: The Israel/Iran Situation, But With Jokes.

Israel is the worst country in the world according to your niece. Iran is a country whose government has a bold vision for the seventh century. Their simmering conflict has the terrifying potential to pre-empt NBA playoff games. Leaders around the world are concerned that a war could hurt their favorable/unfavorable rating by as much as a point, and also cause a bunch of people to die or whatever. The situation is volatile, and right now, only one thing seems certain: The outcome will be bad for children in Gaza, because everything somehow always is.

The Iranian attack involved more than 300 missiles and drones. Many were low-tech models that took hours to get to Israel, especially the ones that had to layover in Atlanta, and fucking everything lays over in Atlanta. The drones solved the “takes too long to get to Israel” problem by being shot down in other countries or failing in crashes that Boeing executives called “Not our fault for once.” Iran did manage to land one righteous blow against the mortal enemy of Muslims everywhere: Seven year-old Bedouin girls. One was injured by shrapnel. Despite that mighty blow to the Infidel, the Iranian regime may be embarrassed that they failed to inflict casualties that exceed your average Philadelphia Eagles watch party.

A pungent observation:

The [Iranian] government was outraged by the Damascus embassy attack and argued that embassies are sacrosanct, though they implored people not to google “Iranian embassy attack”.

Also of note:

  • I'm old enough to remember… … the outrage when the Dubya Administration was threatening to comb through our phone records and library lending histories. A "chilling intrusion"!

    Well, guess what? Trump's onetime Attorney General noticed that The Securities and Exchange Commission Is Watching You.

    The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database—the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT—that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market. As SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce describes it, by allowing the commission to “watch investors’ every move in real time,” CAT will make it easier to investigate insider trading or market manipulation.

    But as a lawsuit being filed Tuesday in Texas federal court makes clear, CAT crosses a constitutional red line. Accepting this sweeping surveillance would eviscerate fundamental privacy protections. That a few bad apples might engage in misconduct doesn’t justify mass surveillance of everyone’s private affairs.

    The SEC conceived of CAT during the Obama administration. Now, without congressional authorization and under the radar of most Americans, the commission is trying to impose it by executive fiat. CAT will reportedly be the single largest government database targeting the private activities of American citizens.

    The lawsuit-filing good guys: the New Civil Liberties Alliance, identified here as a "conservative think tank". I guess you have to be a conservative these days to stand up for civil liberties.

  • Worst theme park ride ever. George F. WIll says Whee! The nation flies past another trillion-dollar milestone.

    This nation, tobogganing swiftly down a steep slope of fiscal irresponsibility, barely notices a blur of alarming milestones. Last week, we sped past this one: A $1.1 trillion deficit in the first six months of fiscal year 2024 that began Oct. 1 resulted in almost as many dollars spent on debt service ($429 billion) as on defense ($433 billion).

    This, at the most menacing geopolitical moment since 1945, makes one hope that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was radically wrong in saying recently that interest rates could reach 8 percent or more in coming years. If they do, deficits will explode even before the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are exhausted, within 10 years.

    FWIW, gold hit an all-time high of $2,408/oz earlier today. (It's dropped back a bit since, to $2396/oz, as I type.)

  • Pun Salad agrees. The NR editorialists come around to my position: Defund NPR.

    National Public Radio has every right to operate as a left-wing propaganda outlet masquerading as a legitimate news organization. But it is not entitled to pursue this goal with taxpayer money. The latest revelations about the ideological rot at NPR have only made this case stronger.

    Before his resignation on Wednesday, Uri Berliner had worked at NPR for 25 years, most recently as a senior editor. But after being suspended for last week writing a long essay for the Free Press criticizing the organization for its bias, Berliner decided to resign, saying he could no longer work there comfortably.

    In his essay, Berliner argued that while NPR always had “a liberal bent,” in the past, it at least attempted to provide some balance. These days, he wrote, “those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

    Sigh. I remember when, at least, NPR could be funny. (That link is from 2006.

  • AI can do some jobs better. Josh Fruhlinger runs the Comics Curmudgeon blog, in which he appends acerbic commentary to newspaper comic strips. Like yesterday's Blondie:

    Josh did something unusual: he asked ChatGPT to

    Write a description of a three-panel Blondie comic strip on the theme of "there should be an app for loading the dishes!"

    Reader, ChatGPT came up with something much funnier than the allegedly-human-written comic above. Check it out.