Archive for 2019
September 30, 2019
IF IT WEREN’T FOR FAKE HATE CRIMES, WOULD WE HAVE ANY HATE CRIMES AT ALL? School says Virginia girl’s story about classmates ambushing her, cutting her hair was a hoax.
WELL, IT WOULD EXPLAIN A LOT: Kanye West claims LA is ‘run by Satan.’
AT AMAZON, save in Arts, Crafts, and Sewing.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO FALL IN LOVE, YOU JUST HAVE TO FALL IN LINE: Hillary Clinton Suggests We ‘Get Over’ Joe Biden’s Ceaseless, Creepy Touching.
(Classical reference in headline.)
NEWS YOU CAN USE: You’re Probably Wiping Your Butt Wrong.
REMOTE CONTROL OF A 4,000 POUND CAR. WHAT COULD GO WRONG? People Using Tesla’s New Smart Summon Feature Are Already Running Into Trouble And It’s Hard To Be Shocked.
BLUE STATE BLUES: New York judge dismisses blue state suit over SALT tax deductions.
The rest of the country is done subsidizing the coastal elites’ spendthrift governments.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: This Self-Driving Garbage Can Remembers to Take the Trash to the Curb For You.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Hey Democrats, Impeach This! “On the one hand, it’s bad because this impeachment garbage is bad for the country. The damage it is doing to our institutions – really, that our institutions are doing to themselves in their shameful service of the liberal elite’s power grabs – is incalculable. Remember 10 years ago when we conservatives trusted and respected the FBI and our intelligence community? Good times. Well, that’s over. It will be decades before a woke Republican is stupid enough to trust them again.”
Have you noticed how the people who tell us Trump is crazy and has no respect for American institutions keep acting crazy, and showing no respect for American institutions?
Related: Impeachment? Bring it on. Trump can put the Dems on trial in the Senate.
GREAT MOMENTS IN OPTICS: Antifa Caught on Video Refusing To Let Elderly Couple Cross The Street.
Antifa’s special brand of bullying madness has arrived in full force in Canada. Left-wing thugs can be seen on video chanting, “Nazi scum! Off our streets! Nazi scum! Off our streets!” at an elderly couple trying to do nothing more than use a public crosswalk. As you can see, the woman can apparently get around only with the aid of a walker, yet still poses some kind of threat to Antifa.
The reason for Antifa’s appearance was to “protest” an event at Mohawk College sponsored by Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, and American libertarian political commentator Dave Rubin.
Related: “’Don’t f***ing touch me!’ shrieks the masked young woman, flanked by her masked comrades for intimidation purposes, and while jabbing her finger in the face of an elderly man and preventing his elderly, disabled companion, presumably his wife, from crossing the road.”
Presumably Antifa thought they were keeping Mohawk safe from Hitler and Eva Braun, just back from Argentina.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: NHL’s Hank Williams? Green Day song may be new hockey anthem.
(Classical reference in headline.)
THE NARRATIVE MUST BE DEFENDED AT ALL COSTS: The long knives come out for The Hill’s John Solomon. “Perhaps it is a coincidence, but as the JournoList scandal taught us, progressive journalists do conspire with each other to drive themes in the media. And we know that Solomon’s hard work has done severe damage to the plotters seeing to undo a presidential election.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Best Texas Chili Recipes. It’s currently 93 degrees, so I may wait a few weeks on the chili.
YES: Probe the Effort to Sink Kavanaugh.
In “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh,” Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly report that Leland Keyser —who was unable to corroborate high-school friend Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of youthful sexual misconduct—says she felt pressured by a group of common acquaintances to vouch for it anyway. The book quotes an unnamed male member of the group suggesting in a text message: “Perhaps it makes sense to let everyone in the public know what her condition is”—a remark the reporters describe as reading “like a veiled reference” to Ms. Keyser’s “addictive tendencies.” (The authors quote her as saying she told investigators “my whole history of using.”)
A concerted effort to mislead the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Senate, especially if it involved threats to potential witnesses, could violate several federal criminal statutes, including 18 U.S.C. 1001 (lying to federal officials), 18 U.S.C. 1505 (obstruction of official proceedings) and 18 U.S.C. 1622 (subornation of perjury). Investigating and, if the evidence is sufficient, prosecuting such offenses would deter similar misconduct in the future.
I think that’s a good idea.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS, WELL A PRETTY SAFE BET THIS TIME AROUND:
Shot: Joy Behar Admits, ‘Irrelevant’ If Whistleblower Is a Partisan!
—NewsBusters, today.
Chaser: Behar to Pelosi: Impeach Bush and Cheney!
—NewsBusters, July 28, 2008.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE: The age of LOLitics.
For successful politicians all over the world and those who support them, this is precisely the time to joke around. The jokes are not necessarily ones that your grandmother or liberal arts students would enjoy. Practitioners of LOLitics go all in for toilet humor and the rejection of linguistic norms. The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, for instance, accused a journalist’s wife of having a ‘smelly vagina’ and said that he wanted to eat the livers of terrorists. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro told a female politician she was ‘too ugly’ to be raped. Vladimir Putin claimed that he’d take out criminals ‘while they are on the shitter’. In Italy, Matteo Salvini once compared the speaker of the Italian parliament to a sex doll which needed ‘deflating’. The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, lambasted Jeremy Corbyn for being a ‘great big girl’s blouse’. The collected put-downs of Donald Trump could fill several volumes.
Few of these LOLiticians would be in power without social media. Technology scholars have long argued, as Neil Postman did, that ‘the form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be’. Social media changed what was possible for outsider candidates to achieve in politics. If these figures often appear vitriolic, then that’s because this is what social media is like.
A platform such as Twitter provides a sliced-up reality of contextless moments, grotesque juxtapositions, advertisements, controversies, insults, clips of dogs farting and explosions of emotion masquerading as thought. This never-ending flow of scraps has no visible logic, is bound by no historical context, includes no time for reflection and catharsis. It is both alarmingly stupid and incredibly funny.
In the age of LOLitics, politicians are no longer competing among themselves to get a clever soundbite on the TV news. They are competing against the internet: the entire superabundance of human knowledge available at any time, in any place. To thrive they have to become live entertainers, never breaking the rule that it is better to be hated than to be boring. Boring people don’t trend. Trump does not simply use Twitter all the time; he is actually like Twitter: instinctive, improvisational, perpetually generating memes.
Somebody really needs to write a book on the transformative, and often virus-like nature of social media.
(Classical reference in headline.)
MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME: FBI Says Murder And Violent Crime Both Declined In 2018.