THE CHICOM TERRORISTS HAVE WON: Charlie Brown ‘Great Pumpkin’ Special Is Not on TV This Halloween — and You Can Thank Apple for That.
Archive for 2020
October 21, 2020
BREAK THEM UP: Chrome won’t clear your Google and YouTube data — even if you tell it to. “Browser retains site data in defiance of privacy settings.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Students demand tuition refunds for classes moved online in flood of COVID class-action suits.
Though the identity of Cleopatra’s mother has never been definitively established, there is no doubt that Cleopatra was regarded as Greek. Egypt today is the most populous Arab country, but there was nothing Arab about it in Cleopatra’s day: The Arab conquest of North Africa occurred six centuries after her death.
The indigenous people of Egypt are the Copts, who still exist as a persecuted minority in their homeland; to the extent that any of Cleopatra’s lineage was native, it was probably Coptic. Her image on contemporaneous coins shows a woman of Mediterranean appearance. “The best evidence is that she was three-quarters Macedonian Greek and one-quarter Egyptian,” writes historian and archaeologist Duane Roller of Ohio State University. Applying today’s labels, Cleopatra would be considered Middle Eastern. Just like Gadot, whose father is a sixth-generation Israeli.
But leave all that aside. Assume for the sake of argument that Cleopatra and Gadot are from two wholly different racial/ethnic categories. Why should that matter?
The notion that dramatic roles must go only to actors who check the same demographic box as the people they portray may line up with progressive identity politics, but it flies in the face of what acting is. Actors pretend. They embody characters and bring them to life.
Great acting doesn’t depend on whether the race, sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, religion, color, or physical condition of actors matches that of the character they are depicting. It depends on whether the actors can surmount such considerations — whether they can make their portrayals so believable, so compelling, that audiences see not the actor, but the character.
Identity politics ruins everything — by design.
ED MORRISSEY: Say, what does this shift in Gallup party identification really mean?
There are actually two shifts in the trends from Gallup’s latest polling on party identification, and both cut against the grain of media narratives of late. A few friends and readers pointed this out to me yesterday and asked what it might mean for the election. At least on the surface, they suggest that the fortunes of Donald Trump and the GOP might not be quite as dire as they appear — and that voter modeling might not have caught up to that.
In the partisan split, Republicans took a surprising lead last month — by one point, granted, but it was a +8 shift in the gap since June. . . .
That is a significant shift — not so much as a gain for Republicans since June (+2), but as a drain of Democrats (-6). That’s outside of a margin-of-error shift, meaning that this looks like a significant decline of Democrats’ standing since Joe Biden’s primary win. What’s more, this took place over a period of time when news was breaking more against Trump and the GOP rather than in their favor. It’s the lowest percentage of Democrats in Gallup’s polling since February of this year, when the party was in the middle of its Biden-Bernie primary fight.
Not coincidentally, it’s also the highest percentage of independents since that time as well (actually 45% in January, when Democrats and Republicans tied at 27%). Gallup also polls independents separately on party leaning, and while the trend there is a little more subtle, it also offers hope that the GOP are picking up a little momentum in the gap:
That’s a tie for the lowest percentage of independents leaning toward the Democrats since April’s even split — when Trump might have been catching the last of a crisis bump in the polls. It matches the split from May, and the Democrats’ 47% in July was matched up against a slightly lower 41% for the GOP. The D+3 gap in September’s data is half of that Gallup found in July and August, and — most importantly — far less than the D+11 in June and D+12 in late May. GOP fortunes among independents have trended up ever since those results, in fact, up six points from that late-May nadir. . . .
Democrats won a landslide in 2008, narrowly re-elected Barack Obama in 2012, and won the House back with a moderate-sized wave in 2018. In all three years, they had a +5 or better advantage over Republicans in the overall partisan split and at least an eight-point advantage in the indie split. Republicans won relatively big in 2014 with less favorable numbers than we see at the moment in Gallup’s partisan-ID polling in either mode.
If these numbers continue to hold up as the election approaches, this looks much more like an electorate ready to re-elect an incumbent and perhaps add seats in Congress for his party than it does to eject him.
Maybe that’s why Democrats are acting scared and talking or rioting in the streets, rather than cruising confidently toward victory.
HE ALREADY HAS A HISTORY OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT: Fired FBI agent Peter Strzok gets hired by Georgetown University.
FUNNY HOW ALL THESE TALKING HEADS WHO LECTURE US ON MORALS AND DECENCY SEEM TO HAVE SLEAZY BACKSTORIES: Who is Casey Greenfield and when did she have a child with Jeffrey Toobin?
Casey Greenfield is an American attorney and Yale Law School graduate who started her own firm, Casey Greenfield PC, in 2015.
The 46-year-old describes herself as a “matrimonial and family lawyer” on her personal Twitter account.
Greenfield made headlines in 2009 after reports claimed she was pregnant – and Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN, was the baby daddy.
Sources told the Daily News back in 2010 that their alleged affair began when the young lawyer fell for Toobin, now 60, when she was in her 20s.
But Toobin was still married to his college sweetheart Amy McIntosh, whom he wed in 1986 and had two children with.
“Jeff and Casey saw each other off and on over the years,” one source told the newspaper.
“She was married to someone else for two years. After her divorce, she started seeing Jeff again. He said he was going to leave his wife for her. But, by then, Casey had begun to distrust him. She suspected he had several other mistresses.” . . .
When Greenfield became pregnant with his child in 2008, Toobin allegedly offered her “money if she’d have an abortion,” the Daily News reported.
He allegedly offered to pay for her to have another child later on through a sperm donor, according to the Daily News.
“When Casey wouldn’t have an abortion, Jeff told her she was going to regret it, that she shouldn’t expect any help from him,” claimed another source.
Decency.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Early Voting Is Why None of the Hunter Biden Stuff Matters. “There are record numbers of people voting early this year. So many ballots have been cast at this point that Joe Biden might be able to murder someone on live television and not have it affect the election.”
JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:
At some point in a pandemic, the suspicion of infection morphs into the presumption of infection. That’s smart if it’s bad and widespread and raging. Hospitals overwhelmed, the sick hacking on every street, clinic corridors jammed with the rheumy victims, cordwood stacked like bodies in the morgue, or something. But this is not that. What’s more, this was never that. It was apparent months ago that this is not that. It’s not mild flu, but it’s not that.
The presumption of infection in a situation where A) it’s not the case, and B) the consequences for infection are statistically nominal, well, this is injurious to society, and every incremental introduction of something that bolsters the accumulated paranoia makes it more difficult to surpass the sense of constant suspicion.
These devices become talismans of safety. You start to distrust places that don’t have them. You resent the suggestion that you submit to them, but you go along — it’s anti-social to do otherwise. It just becomes part of life: standing in front of the device and fitting your shoulders to the contours of the anonymous human shape on the screen.
Read the whole thing.
BUFF OVER THE NORTH SEA: A B-52 somewhere over the North Sea. The bomber is flying a Bomber Task Force Europe mission.
SANCTIONS HAVE SLASHED AYATOLLAH IRAN’S WAR-MAKING CAPACITY:
In 2017, the Trump administration re-imposed economic sanctions with the goals of stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program and penalizing the regime’s malign behavior, such as its vicious oppression of its own people, its waging of proxy wars, its engaging in transnational crime and its seeding violence globally.
U.S. sanctions have the devalued Iran’s currency. StrategyPage.com recently reported that in 2015, one U.S. dollar bought 32,000 Iranian rials (open market rate). In September 2020, 260,000 rials bought a buck. Now it takes 315,000. Note Iranian companies importing food and medicine have a subsidized official exchange rate: 42,000 rials to the dollar.
The regime survived the arms embargo, but 2020 rials don’t buy the guns they did in 2015.
Read the entire essay.
OH: Instagram Refuses to Remove ‘Black Art’ Image Showing Severed Heads of White People. “People may express themselves differently.”
I doubt that would be Instagram’s policy if the roles were reversed.
RISING TO THE CHALLENGE.
THANK THE TEACHERS UNIONS, HEALTH ‘EXPERTS,’ AND THE MSM: For the “Scarred Generation” of kids being held out of the classroom because of Covid. The Guardian looks at the situation in the UK, but there’s every reason to think the same applies here and elsewhere. HT: Dr. Scott Atlas.
SOUTH CAROLINA DEMOCRATIC SENATE DARLING TRAINED TURKISH LOBBYISTS: Well now, how is the Sainted Jaime Harrison going to explain leading training sessions in Istanbul in 2015, teaching such topics as “the five key characteristics of a successful lobbyist”? The Washington Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson is asking the right questions. Will South Carolina voters?
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Biden Adviser, Obamacare Architect, Now Makes Money By Keeping You On Lockdown.
BIDEN PREPARING RINO REWARDS: Citing a Politico report, Daily Caller News Foundation’s Thomas Catenacci reports Joe Biden’s handlers are assessing former Sen. Jeff Flake, former Gov. John Kasich and other Republican Anti-Trumpers for possible cabinet slots. Clearly, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, as well as broad and bipartisan.
THE ANTI-AMERICAN CANDIDATE: WATCH: Unhinged Joe Biden Attacks the Free Press, Democracy Itself.